Brent Stinebaker
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37-8 This Gift Called Choice (GODCLADS)
🕑 Added 2025-08-04 16:39:52 +0000 UTC+Hey, hey there people. Cala Marlowe coming at you from New Vultun. If you're hearing me now, this is not a live broadcast, no. This is a special spirit contagion, spreading through your thoughts, burrowing through your minds, and feeding you this latest update about all the wonderful fucked up shit happening across Idheim.
And for my long-time viewers, hey, hey, we finally got a guild sponsor! Well, 'guild.' More like, we got sponsored by the only real god still left in existence. Not bad for your girl, huh? I held out long enough to sell out to the highest of the highest bidders.
Alright, so brief update about the Ambition. Everything near the Skuldvast is kinda fucked, and maybe it's going to be moving across the ocean. We're not sure where, and it's pretty chaotic. That being said, if you're currently above the planetary atmosphere, you can probably see it twisting and pulling all the ruptures inward. Yeah, that feeling inside your gut, that's raw pant-shitting terror. I feel that too every day. That's why I'm doing this on a shit ton of joy right now.
In the meantime, the silicon spiral is getting drafted into the war effort. All of it. If you have any family there, I suggest that you go convene with a representative cemetery. We'll be pulling you into a place above soon.
What is a place above, you might ask. Well, that's both a secret and also maybe our final refuge. Who knows? I'm just going along with the flow right now.
That being said, if you're a Sang, special rebates apply. You will be priority admission because we have special need of you.
You and your magnificently cursed blood!
So, once again, Sang, come find us. Come find us. If you want to save the world, if you want to make sure that your dream and everyone else's dream comes to fruition, and we don't end up dying and being eternally tortured inside the body of what can only be described as a god of rend, come find us. There's not a lot of time left, consangs.
It's going to be eternity, one way or another. So, do you want a second chance at paradise or a literal experience of living hell?+
-Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Soulscast
38-8
This Gift Called Choice
The Silken ascended. It rose as a jet stream of gold, piercing high through the air. Yet it never reached the clouds. Rather, it vanished into a glistening womb that spread across the surface of existence. The tapestry trembled. Existence rippled as chronology and time cemented themselves over existence.
It took an extreme amount of cognitive capacity for Avo to process all of the Silken. There was a near trillion beings he had to memorize before his Exo-Paracosm could bring them across. Millions of beings in countless structures.
The entire act ultimately took 15 seconds.
Multiple lifetimes for Avo by this point.
As he did this, he was elsewhere. He was in the void, assisting Voidwatch with their evacuations. His Strix danced alongside glistening ships that shifted from configuration to configuration. He warred against the Prefect's power, holding waves of billowing thaumaturgy at bay while the Contingency Bleaks grew new fleets by the second from the smart matter lining their ships and unleashed weapons beyond Avo’s comprehension. A wall of expanding singularities stretched around the sun. But even so, each one was breaking down, dissolving as if smoke rather than a nexus of gravitational collapse.
As he did that, another iteration of himself forged a new cannon. This one was of the Ninth Sphere, power beyond power, and it gave him sight over all the land as he constructed a new sun. From then on, all that bathed beneath the light of the omniscient dawn was Avo's to observe, Avo's to behold, and Avo's to reach. For within that light were the flames of the Conflagration, a pathway into a place beyond, the Woundmother, and countless other beings stored in the depths of Avo's memory.
And as the sun regarded most people across Idheim gently, it narrowed its glare at the Ambition. Every few seconds it launched an attack. Sometimes they were purely telepathic, meant to confuse the God of Rend, the God of Collapse, more than it was already confused. At other moments it spawned variations of Naeko and Zein, and they hunted the Ambition, skirmishing constantly, hounding the titan of reality’s demise incessantly.
The Ambition shifted through a series of states when it fought. Avo had observed this of his unwanted child, a child birthed from his progenitor and Veylis. It was a strange feeling, and so Ambition was a strange beast. When Veylis took control, its attacks were sweeping. It focused on reshaping the world, on twisting the environment around it. It yearned to control, to dominate above all others.
But when Avo arose, the focus shattered. The beast known as Ambition turned truly feral, and it let all its fury flow free. The flames of the conflagration were twisted within the confines of Ambition's mind. Madness spilled out of it like a contagious pathogen, staining reality. Yet the way it fought in the material was direct. It charged, it clashed, it unleashed rend as if it was a claw or echo-head, and it left wounds everywhere. Wounds that bled more entropy into the world. Wounds it fed upon to grow stronger.
While it was in its Veylis phase, Naeko proved superior to the Ambition. But when the original Avo took hold, Naeko found himself backing off more often than not, for the beast lurking within the original Avo's mind cared little for itself. If it survived, all it yearned was to hurt its adversary, to eat them, flesh, mind, and soul.
But this was where Zein prevailed. She speared the beast from past—cleaving it in the future. She hunted it as a stalker. She preyed on its behavior, cleaving, hewing, displacing it across time. But her dance always ended when her daughter arose. Veylis’s knew Zein too well; she was the best part of Zein: war-made and imbued with Jaus’ vision. Together, that was enough to force the Godslayer to retreat.
But when she fled, her best disciple returned. And the Sage of the Sundered Sky fell upon Ambition, pinning it in place as more iterations of itself spawned. Iterations that could clench mind, that could clench time, that could hold the entropy at bay. Rend spiked high with HenAvo, and Rend was vented as he annihilated causality time and time again.
Ambition found itself drawn across continents, flung into the void, plunged into the bottom of the blackest depths, and every time it reeled itself back, traveling through the Rend. But this was an ongoing fight, a war above wars that only two beings in existence could perform.
Right now, Avo still had an advantage, but Ambition was chaotic enough that he couldn't pierce its mind. And worse yet, as it reeled more of the Sunderwilds into its body, it seemed to be growing stronger, more influential, and that dense nest of existential annihilation grew tighter and tighter around the last stretch of stable reality.
Avo didn't let that happen unchallenged, either. Hundreds of colossal guns gleamed along the surface, along the periphery of a place beyond. The guns were infused with Avo's rend, and from that they manufactured redaction rounds. Within these guns, the minds of Drauses and her Arsenalists performed a percussive symphony unlike any other.
They fired bullet after bullet, and the shots traveled at relativistic speeds. They traveled across the vast expanse between threads of broken reality and detonated. Sections of space vanished. Suddenly, swaths of the Sunderwilds were drawn out of place, expended, pulled away from Ambition's reach. The war was full spectrum, across all battlefronts, and never-ending.
Even so, there was another version of Avo that watched play Cas his concert. Play to the people that hurt him. Play now to his newest apostles, given a second chance, not truly at redemption, but at making their dream a reality. There was no forgiveness here, but there was still a task. A task to fix what was lost. To save the future and to get more out of the future than what was taken from everyone in that distant and brutal past.
Concurrently, Chambers interfaced with Ori-Thaum. All of Ori-Thaum. The Council of Fuck had expanded its members, and now thousands of Chambers were embedded among the mirrors, following the elders, acting both as an acceptable, yet aberrant outside entity, while also serving as Avo's more human extension.
Meanwhile, Dice and Lucky stood atop a ziggurat, watching as the first refugee void ships passed into this dimension through a thinning veil of gold. Soon he would place her on one such void ship, and try to find a way to deliver her to the sun itself. And slowly she turned to see a new extension attach itself to a place beyond.
The Silken settled then, and Avo's avatar, in the depths of the structure, simply smiled. "We've arrived."
He looked up, and a few of the Dowagers replicated his action, unsure what he was glancing at. But from above came a curtain of fire. The flames trailed down and split apart, becoming willow-like leaves drifting in the wind. But from that flame emerged more Sang-children, more males, and they pulsated with a golden-red glow, the blood of their being, the curse that forged them, and the time that was now germinating from their restored existence.
"What have you just done?" the Dowagers asked.
"I have taken you from your place of danger, from the war path of Ambition, and I have deposited you within my personal dimension, a dimension grown from your curse, forged of your blood," Avo replied. "If you do not wish to remain here, I will release you. I will place you back where you were, but I will ask each and every one of your people if they choose the same."
The Dowagers stared at him. Their bodies were shrouded in mystery, the murky fluids clouding their true forms, yet their postures betrayed their inner emotions. They were scared, shaken.
"Be not afraid," Avo whispered to them, and just then one of the Sang-infants twirled around his head and laughed wildly. His giggles caused a cascade, and some of the other infants began to cry, while more made whimpering noises, cooing and reaching out, patting Avo's pointed teeth and ghoulish flesh with their small, soft hands.
"Then, we are—" the Dowagers trailed off. Their anxiety and confusion spread as a stink.
"Nothing I said was a lie," Avo continued. "Unfortunately, you, none of you, will live long enough to see it, not this continuation of you. Why, why do you still do this to yourselves? There is no need for you to perish anymore, no need for such secrecy, no need to spread your information by hiding it in the blood. Yet the dragons have scarred you, yet you remain rats in your own minds, rats being stalked and hunted."
Avo leaned in, and the flames around his halo burned ever brighter. Green River lifted her head, and a hint of pride flashed behind her eyes. She was waiting for this moment, waiting to accommodate him.
"I give you permission to be free, if that is what you're looking for," Avo said. "And I give you a revenge unlike any other."
"Revenge?" one of the Dowagers asked.
"I brought you here not only to ask you for your cursed blood, not only for you to join me, but also to harvest new dragons for what is to come. I will give you a moment to consider. Tell me if you still want to live. Tell me if you want your current lives, and not just to be rendered as genetic material passed on to the existing Dowagers."
"There is no need for such an action, anyhow," Avo let out a hissing laugh. "I will tell them what has happened directly, all of them at once."
And he spoke to everyone in the Silken at the same time. His voice bellowed, but he did not roar. Instead, even his softest whispers resonated. For the place above was him married to the Sang, reforging the curse into something he could shape, into something that was meant to be formed years prior by the Fallen Dragons.
"Children of the Silken, children cursed, children all," Avo began. "I am the Burning Dreamer, and I have come to christen you with a choice."
Across the Silken, heads lifted upward. They stared through ceilings, past the screw-shaped city that descended into the depths. They stared out from their bio-forms, up from their jobs. They stared in surprise, awe, and so much more. They stared in fear, they stared in wonderment, and some stared in hope.
"I have moved you from Idheim into a place beyond. Into my place beyond. You are within my grasp, yet I mean you no harm. I mean you no harm, for you are unchanged of mind and flesh. But I have need of your flesh. I have need of your mind. I have need of your spirits, and I have need of your curse."
And instead of speaking the next part, he bestowed upon them his intentions. A carefully constructed package of memory. Several Sang cried out, collapsing to their knees. Others reeled as if they were struck. More simply went still, rendered catatonic by the immensity of the task ahead.
"Destruction is coming. The latter is returning. A war above wars is in play. But I bestow something upon you. No, I do not bestow. I return what has been taken from you."
And with those words, the Sang-infants were unleashed wholesale upon the city. They descended from his flame, attached to their umbilicals. But they swam through the air as if all the world was their womb. The flames embraced them. Time was their mother. Avo, in part, was their father. But now they sought families. They sought life. And they sought a true birth.
"For too long you have been bifurcated, split. Your males were severed. Your blood was infested with the time-memorized curse. But no more. I will tear the curse free from you. I will use it to forge blessings. To create an auspicious age. But I will need you to give your curse to me. I will not take it from you forcefully. More. I will let the blessings of your cycle remain, for it is a blessing to remain untouched by wounds and be malleable of flesh. I give this unto you freely.
“And should you want a child, should you wish to reunite with what could be your brothers, your sons, your fathers, then reach out. Reach out and I will know your decision. Reach out, touch their hands, know that I watch. But know that I will not force you. This will be your choice. And that is my gift above gifts. Choice. Choose who you wish to be."
