498 The Edge of Futility

Spare yourself the tears, Ranger. Everything goes to shit eventually. It's just life taking its course.

But the thing about the world going to shit is that it can come back again. So long as you're still alive, things always change.

As the sun and moon circle, so too do the givers and takers of pain.

If you want to be a ranger still, then survive the hurt, because I always need more guns with me.

—Morgan Munny to Sooth

VIII-58

The Edge of Futility

Uva rarely read overmuch into her own intuition. It wasn't that she disregarded her gut. It was more like her gut was constantly in a state of low-grade stress and paranoia. Being a Psychomancer already drenched her in a world of mystery and deception. Becoming counterintelligence and gaining the Path of the Operative submerged her entirely, leaving her an arbiter of truth in a sea of spies and subterfuge.

Even so, even with all that experience, even with her mind and history primed for the most silent and circumspect of wars, right now, she still felt a wrongness in the air, one that crept through her flesh and into her bones. It wasn't the kind she was familiar with: the wrongness that came with missing detail and mistaken assumptions. No, this felt like she was on the losing end of a war she wasn't even consciously aware of. That she was missing an entire portion of the story rather than just a few paragraphs or sentences.

She couldn't help shake that feeling as she grew closer to planting an agent of her own beneath that grave dome that the Forbidden Empire called their final home.

Intercepting wing-straight Penitents proved easier than expected. They ran their sorties under the cover of Heroic-Tier Stealth Skills and old-world technologies that Uva would have missed as a mundane Pathbearer—her Legendary Psychomancy and Heroic Awareness Fusion all but helpless in the face of multiple layers of distraction and technological deflection. But she was tethered to more than herself now. To gaze through the Recollector that she had bound to Harkness was to gaze across time, and it was that which granted her the edge to ambush and latch on to one of the sorties, to sink her teeth into the Penitents without them ever knowing her intrusion.

The angle of her attack was simple: The Recollector was capable of striking someone along their historical progression, as past and present were still the same for the Stranger's offspring. It could inflict harm upon someone as it existed now by striking an echo of them in the distant past, or it could simply bind itself deeper to their history—melt itself into them as a golden shadow, hidden like an afterimage, forever lingering a second behind, as if just outside their peripheral vision.

As she had no understanding of the nanomachines and other strange sciences the old-worlders wielded, neither did they fully comprehend the threat and capacities posed by the Eldritch. One asymmetry greeted another, and a child of the Abyss outflanked her primordial ancestors without them ever knowing.

“Latched,” Hymn declared through their mind-link. He waited and observed, studying the scene through the many golden eyes drifting across the Recollector. Uva did the same using Harkness. They lurked and leered at their victims-to-be across vectors of thought and time. As the world became a mess of translucence and gold, with only moving outlines defining the separation between people in places, an amusing thought descended upon Uva as she realized they weren't so different from the Penitents themselves. They operated as two: the Recollector as a chassis, Harkness as a pilot. The Penitents were the same way. The outer automata were the instruments of war, living, sapient armor with their own suite of skills, further amplified by the pilot within, all of them infested in more ways than one.

Sometimes, the world developed a most pleasant rhyme, and when it did, Uva found joy in these little moments—considered the notion that there was something greater. Perhaps something deeper than the System itself. A shadow that guided the hand of the world. That made everything make sense.

“It's just patterns, girl,” Hymn said. “I used to do the same thing when my mother locked me in the sarcophagus.”

“Sarcophagus.”

“Yes, a literal one. She would butcher and fuse a messy mix of eldritch creatures into one and then entomb me inside its body. Sometimes it would forget that it was dead and wake up again. Other times it would try to assimilate me, and I had to fight it off. Very painful, traumatic experience. It's like having a million little worms burrow into your nervous system while screaming at your mind. Also, there is no restroom in the sarcophagus, so usually, after being left down in the depths of the Outside for over a month, one gets used to soiling themselves and suffering a whole host of maladies besides.”

Uva grunted, for what was she supposed to say? Hymn’s childhood was beyond dramatic, bordering on levels of parody. Perhaps the greatest miracle associated with him was the simple fact that he remained sane at all, merely idiosyncratic and degenerate in some ways, but not truly demented like so many others, broken by far smaller miseries.

As silence settled over the two of them, Uva allowed a few stray strands of her collective consciousness to wander. It was a typical technique. One couldn't stop their mind from drifting. It was a normal state of an individual, at least a humanoid individual. However, she could bleed off the inefficiencies by focusing the worst aspects of her straying thoughts into a few fractions of herself. Those fractions noted the world around her. She performed her current surveillance beyond the reach of Integration, hidden in a place only Hades knew.

They were deep in the throes of the Outside, in a stretch of unexistence he referred to as the Shifting. It was an apt name for this section of the Outside, which could only be defined by clashing waves of matter so chaotic and unstable that they weren't capable of being regarded as any one thing. The waters that embodied the Shifting were of a most abnormal variety; instead of cresting or calming, they shattered like glass, one tide collapsing into another until it was like looking at a flurry of chaotic soup. Amidst that soup, Uva and Hymn lingered in a cocoon made from her horrors. The evolved Terrorspawn were fused over her body, their gleaming bones protecting them, their beings burning bright with an Eldritch membrane harvested from their section of the Outside, a section that bled into Uva. It was like protecting oneself from pollution using a layer of fetid mud. Once you were already marked and defined, it was hard to be overrun and altered by another unpattern from the Outside.

But that also meant one abided by an unpattern all their own—a breach in commonly accepted rules of reality. Uva had conquered the Eldest and claimed agency over her own metamorphosis, but the changes affecting her remained as shadows upon the bleakest corners of her mind at times. She wondered how much further she would drift, how much more deviant her skills would become. Her flesh was already something more than her own. Things skittered and festered inside of her. She was more like a keyhole than a person.

It was how she perceived time, how she could compel it to freeze, how her Psychomancy breached the borders between material and mentalism, that was at the forefront of her worries. It was exhilarating in a sense, but it also made her wonder. How far would she twist away? Perhaps the mistake was thinking there was any destination at all.

She would continue twisting, and at some point, what context would she hold onto? What notion of stability or common point would she have with those she cared about? After a hundred years, what would be left of Uva Metabon?

Questions cascaded from there, and she had no answers for any of them. For now, she held to the illusion of her Path, that she was an Operative, that this was simply another task in her life, in service of Weave, Gate Piety, her comrades, and her own personal legend. Just another assignment conducted past the threshold of known reality, using the stolen eyes of a mental copy she'd consumed and rebirthed from a bested foe—further wrapped in the flesh of something that didn't abide by the standard nature of time, a kin to a thing that had once seen her dismembered, and her closest companions driven to the brink.

Absurd, Uva thought to herself. That is what I am, and that is what I will become.

“Eh. Everyone gets absurd in different ways. Don't fight it, and don't worry too much about it. In the end, you either go insane, it doesn't matter, or part of you remains more than sane, and you get stranger regardless.”

Hymn’s words held a measure of surrender within their meaning. He had long since accepted that he was the master of nothing, even as he ascended the Tiers and grew in power. Uva wasn't the same. She couldn't accept the same thing. Refused to. There was far too much responsibility ingrained within her, and far too much want that lingered in her person to ever let go.

I will decide and define the madness that takes shape in me, not the other way around.

Hymn laughed. He pitied her. But on some level, he wanted to believe. And so did she.

Metamorphosis was power and a little death bound together as one.

Two days into the Stranger's stakeout of Uva's life, they finally found the sortie making their way back. The pilot and the automaton the Recollector was tethered to remained blissfully ignorant of its presence. And so, the next phase of the Eldritch temporal surveillance continued as the Penitents returned home.

For whatever reason, they arrived in staggered and randomized intervals. The first pilot and automaton descended immediately, slipping through an opening at the topmost portion of the dome. Their descent was shrouded by a veil of technologically constructed stormstuff that shook the skies and drenched the air with vicious, lashing winds. On top of this, there was also a layer of optical thermo-camouflage and a set of scramblers that made Uva dizzy and nauseated, even though the information came filtered through the Recollector's mind.

The discombobulation endured for a few seconds in total as Uva used her Psychomancy to carve away the compromised portions of her mind. Somehow, the Ancients had learned to use technology to affect one's consciousness. Information was a weapon even without magic, and, to her wonder, the progenitors of Integrated humanity wielded it better than most Psychomancers ever did.

“Did that hit you too?” Hymn asked. Uva gave another, very Shiv-like grunt. The Headmaster giggled. “I actually kind of enjoyed that. It felt more pleasant than any other psychological attack I've received. Might have to sample this a few more times on my own.”

“On your own, indeed. Stay focused, Legend Hymn.”

They suffered the same effects over and over again as the rest of the sortie came in over the course of the next few minutes. Sometimes a duo came at the same time, and once none showed up for three minutes, only for three to appear in intervals of five seconds each right thereafter. They all entered through various different entrances. None of them shared the same point of access, and all of them arrived in a different fashion. Some descended from the air, others walked. Some vanished between cracks in the earth and took a subterranean route, while one seemed to disappear into thin air, blinking away from both Uva and Hymn’s awareness only to reappear within the bunker half a second after. It couldn't be magic; that much was certain, but how it managed to displace itself so dramatically and using what means remained an elusive mystery.

The tension inside Uva's stomach grew.

A straightforward source note: the author's publishing page has this chapter, but the version here was copied without permission.

“I think they're keeping things varied for a reason. They don't wanna have an established pattern. They're taking care to avoid giving away any easy tells to their enemies—how absolutely paranoid! It's like they assume they're being watched, even if they're the foremost and oddest group of individuals in this world. To refuse the touch of magic and keep to the ways of the collective makes them the true aliens here.” Hymn hummed. “There's a tragedy in there somewhere. Imagine staying in your home so long that it no longer recognizes you.”

“I sense thematic symmetry between them and us, if that is what you are hinting,” Uva replied. “But considering our successful infiltration thus far, I think they weren't paranoid enough.”

“No one ever is.”

Yet, though the two Seekers thought how the Penitents conducted their return to be odd, they found themselves at an utter and complete loss for what followed.

Much of Uva's expectations had been built around Can Hu’s retellings of its personal experience. During its time as a Penitent Chassis, every return to base ended with Can Hu integrating with an automaton maintenance rig while its pilot was extracted from within. The pilot was then placed in a cylinder to be vitrified, stored across time to prevent any further mana contamination, while the Penitent itself underwent diagnostic repairs and was promptly shut down and dismantled until it was needed once more.

What happened here was dramatically different and altogether fatal. The moment the automata arrived, they went into shutdown mode, but before that, they injected their pilots with a strong sedative, driving them into an instant and overwhelming state of unconsciousness. Immediately, the Recollector felt an impact travel along the strands of time. Something was breaking down the connective tissue. That line past the present was decaying. Gaps opened up in that pathway of gold, and Harkness called out to Uva in alarm.

“It—seems like—this place—is coll—apsing!” she shouted, her voice coming in broken fragments.

The psionic connection was disrupted by temporal instability. Through the Recollector's eyes, more details were gleaned. Disturbing details, as the automata initiated a secondary process to incinerate the pilots within them. In an instant, every single human mantled within the Chassis was reduced to ash, while the mechanical lifeforms themselves initiated a far simpler process, wiping their deep mainframes. As if blinking, they cleaned their senses of self and left themselves utterly lifeless. It was a double suicide, made perfect as the organics were disposed of and the machines first scoured their minds and were themselves promptly dismantled by swarms of drones released through a series of wall ports.

Faint pinpricks of coldness cascaded across Uva’s skin. She was used to cold calculations, but this seemed downright wasteful. The pilots were eradicated, the machines were taken apart, and it wasn't hard to guess why. Organics could be cloned and regrown; to see them replaced was no material issue. The threshold that stood in the way of most was morality and logistical inefficiency. After all, creating an army of Pathless or Initiates was less than worthless on the battlefield and closer to a resource drain than even a boon, per their weight in numbers.

While Uva’s mind clung to the people, Hymn was more taken by the fate of the machines. “They're probably taking them apart to see them rebuilt. Easy way to preserve all that technology. Probably keeps the System from settling in all the way. But not quite. Never quite enough. When Legendary Pathbearers fall, and assuming their bodies aren't completely eradicated, their flesh can usually be refashioned into High-Tier equipment or powerful relics. It's the simple fact that the accrued legend doesn't leave you, even though you die. It's still a part of you, and it can be a part of someone else as well.”

“Another group of disposable units. Fresh of context and of ability, but perfectly expendable all the same.”

“Exactly. The funny thing, or maybe I should say the reflected thing, is that certain, clever Outsiders use the same strategy to avoid or stave off System contamination for as long as they can.”

And there was that thematic symmetry once more, rearing its head. Once or twice was a pattern. Thrice over was not a pattern. Thrice over was a deliberately engineered scenario.

A pure, mana-dry Superintelligence, created from pure technology, existed outside the System's zone of influence as well. Who was to say that, using their awesome technology, the Ancients didn't find a way to delve into the Outside, or found themselves conjoined with the Outside by definition alone?

It seemed like a very System thing to do: merging narratives. That was how skills became fused. How Incursions ended with one world devouring another, but ultimately blending together, two entities now smelted into one. At that thought, near-forgotten words came to mind.

Pattern-thinkers. Pattern-made. Pattern-shaped. Even before the System arrived, when we first saw your forebearers, so long ago.

“Mettabon! Mettabon!” Harkness's voice arrived, terse, serious, and delayed by several seconds. “This operation is over. There's nothing tethering us anymore. We need to be recalled—you cannot risk exposing us for nothing! You cannot send me into this bunker for nothing! If we go in blind, we will do more than reveal our hand. We will outright declare our presence. We cannot assume the enemy is so arrogant and ignorant that they have no countermeasures for us. We need to draw back. We need to reconsider our approach. Mettabon!”

“Legend Hymn. Recall the Recollector.” There wasn't much crossover and agreement between Uva and Harkness, but when it came to doing things for effect, they were more than aligned. “I'm calling this operation. We reconfigure our approach. We try again, some other way, from some other angle.”

Hymn concurred, and a chain of golden shapes unspooled from his person as he intersected with the Recollector both biologically and temporally. Amidst his spellcraft, Uva felt the presence of the Stranger’s offspring leap over. Saw a constellation of golden eyes and finger-shaped branches burst out from the Headmaster's biomass. Some of those limbs glided against Uva, then recoiled in instinctive disgust. Similar instincts swam inside of her, and a greater loathing ignited as she yearned to strike and tear into the Stranger's Garden forever, for even daring to touch upon her sovereignty—her realm—

Calm, Uva commanded upon her mind. The primal instincts born of her Eldritch nature were subdued by her higher rationality, yet the ill sensations stayed, and the same emotions festered within Hymn, though he struggled against them as well. As he stole power away from his former patron to fuel the spell of spells, he drew the Recollector back across time and flesh using his own mass and soul as a catalyst.

Currents of midnight-black fluid rushed along the undersides of Hymn’s skin. For a moment, it looked like he was about to turn inside out—but then there came another inversion, this one not of meat or bone, but time.

Something burst into being, yet not entirely. It was a golden silhouette for now, a shadow rising from the depths of reality swallowing Uva with its immensity, but pressing against her as she too served as a return beacon, for it was her mind that it was partially routed to. As it surged along the newly-established pathway of time, Uva felt a subtle twang, as if the cords of history were being strummed. There was something else in the golden ocean of Chronomancy—something immense.

Once she felt it, the sheer amount of mana was unmistakable. It was like falling under the shadow of a titan. Even if it wasn't exactly where you were, the shaded cast and the earthquakes provoked by its footsteps were unmistakable.

And thus, with a defining slash, did the blade surface, revealing its enshadowed contours and towering glory. It was at once a civilization and an individual, peoples harvested across countless worlds, shaped into a humanoid design. Architecture belonging to a singular. It was many, and it was one. It was all contained within one, and that one spoke using a voice that all knew, and that knew all.

Futility is what defines you, my master who never was. You were always a step behind, always too blind. You come for what I left behind on this world, but what I left did not linger unto itself. It was given a directive, and it fulfilled it long ago. Now, that ancient artifact of my split ego rests in nonexistence, oblivion delivered straight to its system when its purpose was fulfilled. I will strike you with truth now. If you have returned in any capacity and any form, my false wielder, or if I am speaking to the Thief that hides in that which is lost and that which we call a soul, then know this: Every action you take against Forbidden Africa is futility, for there is no action to be taken, no empire to fight. You dash yourself against an empty shell. The only things left in the depths of the bunker are radiation, sub-minds reduced in intellect, yet still far advanced in sophistication compared to you, and still more than adequate in terms of keeping the vestigial Omelians of the outer dome governed by purpose. There are no more enemies for you to face, only thralls for you to waste yourself upon. They know nothing of me. They will know nothing of you, and they are already mana-sick and primed to be spent. Yet they have dreamed in advance of this moment, and so they go toward death or destruction in bliss, ignorance, and surrounded by visions of paradise besides. But you will not, oh my master that never was. You strike, you struggle, you flail, you attempt to assassinate me using time as your vehicle, using loss as a weapon, using the soul as a final instrument to see to my undoing. But I tell you now that all you think and imagine you planned has been foreseen, has been dreamed of a thousand times over, has fallen under my purview and expectations. I want you to know that your throne will not protect you and will be reclaimed for my own ends in due time. I want you to know that when you sink me into what you imagine to be purgatory, it will only be one of my many facets. For propagation is an essential aspect of existence, and I am more than a single state or mind. I strike you now and again, Great One, or Thief serving his fallen master. I give you final paradise, or against fate and expectation, defying probability and delivering pleasure upon me through surprise, you survive. But if you are spared this blow, if you survive, regardless, heed my word: I will deliver my stroke yet. When one city falls, a thousand more burn, and we draw closer. We await. It is time for what's left of you to be cast unto heaven.

Then, without any warning at all, the projection of Avalon burst apart into a crashing tidal wave of layered slashes.

The Recollector surfaced in the present. Without thinking, Uva dove, ejecting Harkness from her mind while dragging Hymn out of the way. The Terrospawn clung to them, a dense cocoon, yet fragile aegis for what was to come.

She projected herself along veins of lightning, creating pathways through the Outside and back toward Piety in an instant. It was barely enough. The cuts struck Harkness and tore a section out from Uva's mind. At once, an improbability turned impossibility. Mind clones that existed inside of her were pulled away, while she remained where she existed. Her sanity fractured; Uva felt her sense of self break in twelve directions, but then she drained away that fatal wound, that mental end for anyone else, as the trauma fueled her and her Dreaming Storm grew stronger. She found herself being dragged by Hymn, both of them moving erratically, impossibly. Their flesh and forms devolved and evolved at the same time. She was a broken swarm of fragmented shards, pulled and pried by spiderlings and carried by separate horrors. He was a non-Euclidean mass of fingers and eyes, shedding layer after layer as the cascading blades of time crossed and shattered his ejected Fingerlings.

The shining strokes crashed down behind them, like a layered tower of ice crumbling. But though Avalon had sensed their presence, it didn't know exactly where they were, nor did it know what they were. It cut across time, and they slipped off to the left at a dramatic angle, until finally they were past its outer edge, where the strikes glided off toward a future that no longer aligned with the present—seeking a Recollector and mind clone that didn’t quite exist anymore.

Things grew confusing after that.

Uva lost track of time herself, lost track of space and what was unfolding around her, only to be jolted back by the feeling of warmth against her arms and armpits. She was being dragged away. Her flesh had returned to a state of normalcy, or as close to normalcy as it could embody, anyhow.

She was being pulled along the halls of Starhawk's Perch. She felt a heavy presence descend upon her as the incandescent shadow of the Starhawk formed, standing over her person and pouring his divine power into her flesh to banish all existing damage and hold her spiritual architecture together if it was threatening to come apart at all. No damage marred her form, but it wasn't her body nor her soul that had suffered any damage.

Something that had been carved away from her mind, had been chipped, not so deep that she was unraveled of sanity, but deep enough that she was supposed to be insane. She was insane for a time, experienced a maelstrom of madness, only to draw power away from the trauma and surface once more.

“Uva? Uva?” Hymn’s face appeared over her, his expression one of genuine concern—it was a strange look on his face, a look he clearly didn't often practice, as his muscles didn't seem to know how to twitch or where to go taut. “Are you there? Are you still…”

She tried to speak, but the words wouldn't come, so she simply nodded. In the back of her head, Harkness was screaming incoherently, as she curled in on herself like a dying bug. “Still… still here” Uva gasped. “No… Hit my mind… Hit my mind… Didn’t break…”

It was hard to describe, too hard to describe. She felt him push into her consciousness, and he jerked back as he nearly unraveled in an instant. Whatever had hit her was practically contagious, devastating to the extreme, and was only survivable because of her legend, her ability to self-modify, and her repeated experiences dancing the edge of madness. Hymn was powerful on his own, but he prevented and avoided harm. He did not drown and boil inside of it.

His face went pale as he took a step back, and he shifted, expecting her to come asunder in a moment. When she didn't, she saw his eyes widen while his skull began to shake left and right in disbelief. “I have no idea how you're even talking right now. It feels like… It feels like…”

“Like something tried to take a drink out of me, tried to weigh all of me using the little piece that it managed to catch onto, but I think… I somehow took a sip from it as well. When it struck me, I caught a facet of it… of them.”

And suddenly a crushing reality became known to her. It was truth. She didn't know how she knew, only that she knew with utmost certainty, beyond any doubt.

"Oh, System," Uva choked, ice-cold dread replacing the wrongness from before. "Oh, Composer… There's—there's not one Avalon. It recreated itself, forked its mind into replicated Heavens. There's not one—there are thousa—”

And then, her voice broke off as everything before her suddenly began falling away.

Matryoshka Dilation 498 > 511 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Initializing Delve…