Brent Stinebaker
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34-21 The Guard-Captain (II)
🕑 Added 2025-03-19 18:49:55 +0000 UTC…and though the priests may bleat like the idiot goats they are, screaming for the rest of the folk to follow them, know that the divine at the head of the herd is no brighter, no wiser, no truer, and no more likely to survive a plunge into destruction than we.
I have seen gods vanish. I have ventured across land and watched them wither and vanish, deprived of worship. More, I have seen the limits of their wisdom—or lack thereof.
So many of the rulers and exalted blooded wish for us to think they are divinely ordained and powerful. But have you asked them what it takes to till the land? Have you asked them about when the rains come—the true rains, not the tar and foul taint that spills from the far side when the burning mountains awaken to cough their sickness into the air?
They don’t know. Or they will tell you only mistruths and whole lies. They don’t know, and diluted into their ignorance is pride and stubbornness and a brittleness to this hierarchy we live under. For if they are wrong, then what of the gods they supposedly bear? What of the lives we supposedly live? What are we sacrificing ourselves to? What are we feeding? A great divine? Or a great idiot that shits and vomits calamities.
The Inquisition will burn me for these words. They will torture me until I submit and feed me to their god when my mind bends to accommodate my screaming flesh. But it matters little. I am right. Because their great hope is only an illusion—a delusion. For even the greatest master is not whole, for even the greatest mind is still a fool in all it does not know.
And stand at the top of a mountain and look, free-thinker. Look into the mists. Look at the far waters, further lands. Look, and if you dare, call your god there, and ask them what they know. And after that, go to the mists, to the lands, to test what they have told.
Life is not so simple. It is disquieting. It is difficult. And it demands much. You wish for ease? To be ordered and governed for comfort? What comfort? What cowardice? What hope? Collar yourself and call your chains a necklace of affection from your masters, but know when placed in another land, in another place, they will be lost as you, weak as you, fragile as you.
Only through yourself can the truth be discovered. Only through the triumph of your own mind. Your own will.
-Hierarchy: The Grand Lie A partially recovered heretical text from The Sunken Archive of the Old Kosgan Imperium, 1st Pantheon. Required reading material for all Citizens of Highflame
34-21
The Guard-Captain (II)
Draus cleaved, Draus strode, Draus came, and with almost mocking respect did A Deepness Beyond part before her. A path opened in the torn space of the false vacuum, of the ancient void once filled with dueling stars and old mankind’s impossible wonders.
A thousand stars caged and enslaved to be factories and weapons glared at the arriving Guard-Captain. Twisting megastructures constructed from swarming nanomolecular bodies reshaped their configurations, focusing the heads of the Dyson Carriers into beams primed to fire. Massive factories that dwarfed the entirety of Idheim many times over birthed billions of vessels and missiles into the void.
And behind them—at distances no ephemeral could fathom—was a final prison made from a net of crumbled stars, the heart of collapse pinning an unraveling eye weeping hounds from its iris in a maelstrom.
A haunting melody sang forth—and Draus felt her Frame rattle. Naeko’s Domain of Chronology and the Stormsparrow’s Chorus shuddered in unison.
TEMPORAL ABNORMALITY DETECTED
An unseen tsunami crashed hard against the Guard-Captain. The tapestry was in a roiling uproar was time itself lashed at everything that was present. But still, the Guard-Captain stood, holding in place even as the currents of long broken time tried to pull her back to a past that could never be again.
{Well. I see you got yourself another upgrade. I suppose congratulations are in order, Guard-Captain Draus.} The Infacer sounded almost distracted, but Draus frankly wasn’t the best judge of minds. She barely understood how most of her own kind thought. {You also eliminated your other selves quite well. Quite an interesting ontologic you have designed. Now, I wonder how you managed to get that made. I suppose I will have to examine it personally when I peel it out of your dissolving little ego later.}
“Do all you minds like slamming your cunt lips together to make noises, because I’d like to report an annoyin’ fuckin’ design flaw,” Draus spat, point her sword at all the stars.
The Infacer just sighed. {Is some version of Avo with you? Call him out. I want to talk to someone who appreciates conversation and does not react like a violent Joyfiend whose only joy in life is anally sodomizing people she hates with a knife.}
“How’s the fuck’s that my fault, half-strand. It’s hard not to sodomize someone when they’re just a giant asshole.”
The Infacer paused. The Infacer chuckled. {Oh. Never mind. I see why he likes you now. Vulgar, but how many Regulars think they’re funny.}
“Too many of them,” Draus snorted. “It’s the second-biggest cause of Reg mortality.”
{What is the first?}
“Listenin’ to a Greatling’s orders.”
The Infacer let out a melodic series of laughs. {Yeah. I hear him in you. Did he whisper those words to you?}
“Nah. I’m a mean sow all my own.”
{Well. There is some hope for you after all.}
A loud groan sounded from inside the Guard-Captain. “I hate this shit,” Naeko muttered. “I hate talking to this fucking thing. Draus, just get his ass.”
{Naeko? This that you? Just how many of you are hiding inside her?}
“Hello, sad electric ghost!” The Stormsparrow cheered. An orbit of masks grew denser around Draus’ Guard-Captain, each of them grinning, facing the suns with a radiant glee of their own. “Worry not: The Chorus has spoken! The long black will break, and what follows will be grand and new.”
{Thanks you, strange psychotic woman who I need to take back a malfunctioning Neo-Creationist Admin-Class ontologic from. How you managed to integrate with that thing, I will never know, but I am dying to find out.}
“Dying is easy for us,” the Stormsparrow cooed. “It is less than even sleep. But the living gnash. And so I fear there is a counterpoint to even the light that might follow. The Dreamer’s will might prove your torment. A longer forever. No death. Never death. Never rest. Just the same people making the same mistake until they finally don’t or do forever and ever and ever.”
{Oh, I forgot how much you make me delete specific memory strings. Not many apes disturb me, but you do. You do. Veylis does not want to keep you in the next iteration. I agree with this decision.}
“Yeah, that’s not happen,” Shotin growled. Stacks rose above the Guard-Captain’s crown as the Seeker’s Heaven shuddered and shuffled in a building rage. “I’m going to fucking brick you, mind. And then I’m going to fuck Veylis’s corpse to death.”
A shuffling of Heavens passed inside the Guard-Captain, Naeko pressed his weight on Shotin. “No. You can kill her, but you stay the fuck away from her corpse otherwise, motherfucker you hear me.”
“Fuck you, Glasser, I’ll fuck her corpse if I want to.” Shotin snarled.
“Bitch, I’m about to—”
“Godsdammit, you fuckin’ children, keep it together,” Draus said. It suddenly occurred to her why Avo chose her to be the general: of all the people he knew… she was the impossibly stable and responsible one.
Fuck.
{Well that is redundantly vulgar. Which is the story of your life, is it not, Seeker Kazahara? How is the niece.}
“Fuck. You.”
The Infacer chuckled again. {Stock anger, stock insults, stock pain responses. I have seen you before. In another body. In another time. Having the same conversation. And it bores me now.}
“Don’t you mind that, then,” Draus said, slowly drawing closer. “Because I’m inchin’ to put you down for good. Ain’t gonna be pain or boredom after that. Just a nice quiet nothing.”
{Hmm. No. The work is not done. And I am taking my leave. Someone else wishes to speak with you. Goodbye, Guard-Captain.} The Infacer paused. A Deepness Beyond shuddered. {I think I will ask Veylis to attach you to Avo somehow in the next iteration. Maybe some kind of knight and nightmare duo, like from the stories of old. That might be amusing.}
At that, Draus felt the tapestry quiver. A Deepness Beyond began to curve and twist where Three-Eye was located. That, and the Trinary Melody began to sing again as well. More waves of time pulsed forth, and the Dyson Carriers released beams of searing bright. From a thousand stars slaved for warfare came focused fusion made to sculpt planets, to boil seas, to scour stars.
But those were things born of a natural world, bound to natural laws, to reason and standards.
Such things were mutable for a Heaven. Especially one that defies the laws of casualty itself, and was further cocooned by the Chief Paladin’s shroud. Blinding light splashed over the Guard-Captain, but she simply surged forward, the weight of stars peeling around her like torrid torrents splitting themselves against a jutting stone. But the ease of her progress weighed on her, and she felt her mask slowly change.
SHIFT IMPENDING - HERO OF THE TALE > MASK OF ARROGANCE
“Oh dear,” the Stormsparrow muttered. “I fear the wily little mind intends to wait out my boon.”
“No,” Draus replied, though she was wary about her mask changing. “The Infacer has something else planned. Ain’t no proper soldier finds themselves passive. They got something else—”
And that something else was only sensed at the last second thanks to a warning from Avo. “Draus. Temporal attack!”
The Guard-Captain lifted its shield and channeled a pulse of chronomancy from its ontology. A counter-impact resonated against the shield as the world itself seemed to ring. Reality resounded like the inside of a gong, and finally, the light from the many suns began to dim, revealing just what struck the Guard-Captain.
Just then, Draus sensed the new threat as well, their presence previously masked by A Deepness Beyond. A swirling miasma of gold and ashen flames mingled and splashed together, merging into a coherent form. But what hatched from the gliding fires wasn’t a Pathborn of Avo. No. Avo was there, in a mocking form of the Strix, with a golden chain around its throat and its eye gouged out.
Holding the chain was something that hatched out of the Strix’s back. Its arms were like gilded pillars, and within its chest were churning rows of limbs, grasping and prying at a pitch-black singularity like turning gears. It’s head gleam with churning spears formed from glorious flames, and curving rings revolved at the titan’s back, as sequences and paths bent around it form like small bodies to a dominant mass of gravity.
AVO, SHELL OF THE SERAPH (ERRR)
“Uh, guys,” Shotin said. “What the fuck is that?”
“Veylis?” Naeko breathed.
“Not… quite…” the thing said. It sounded like Avo and Veylis at the same time, but her voice was louder, and came first. “But close. And more. I greet you, esteemed foes. I may be an echo, but the intent is still true.”
Draus looked beyond the Shell of the Seraph and saw a massive chasm opening in reality—-the Infacer was e—
The present snapped. There wasn’t a better way to describe how sudden the hit was, only that it came nigh instantly. Still, Draus sustained herself against the blow, her Guard-Captain shaking as a wavelength of chronology expanded between her and the pressing fist of the Shell of the Seraph.
Both Heavens were perched at the apex of thaumaturgy, their powers mounting concept and laws. When they clashed, it wasn’t the Heavens that gave ground, but the tapestry itself. All around Draus, bits of existence frayed and broke, with cascades of abnormalities bleeding through in spreading Ruptures. It felt like she was inside a tearing suit of some kind, and every action she took brought everything closer to the brink.
“Guard-Captain Draus,” the Shell said. “You were my mistake. Politics was my mistake. I—Veylis needed to keep her power base. But they failed her. She should have broken them. I should have broken my elites and kept them in order. But I… she wanted to be loved.”
A laugh sounded from Avo, but not Veylis. “I wanted to be worshiped. In my heart of hearts, in my truth of truths, that is her—my greatest shame.”
Draus took all that in. And tried to run her adversary through. “Right. Don’t much give a fuck.”
***
—[Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer]—
REND CAPACITY - 81%
REND CAPACITY - 84%
REND CAPACITY - 80%
REND CAPACITY - 86%
REND CAPACITY - 81%
Constantly venting entropy shit out of your consang sorta like letting them shit through you—like their ass passing stuff down your ass like a connected shaft—which was one of the few things Chambers did not fuck with even when he was going through his deep pleasure phase. Still, Avo was one of his few and trulys, and you don’t let those just eat shit and die when you could stop it from happening.
“Okay,” he laughed. “Good news. It’s… stabilizing. I think I am getting it under control. How are you doing, Avo? Avo?”
Chambers paused and regarded the Hidden Flame. There was something up with them. The flames were bubbling, and there was a pulsing golden hue somewhere deep inside—
TEMPORAL ABNORMALITY DETECTED
AVO, SHELL OF THE SERAPH (ERRR)
Two warnings flushed in his cog-feed, and Chambers went still. “Lovebringer. What the fuck does that mean.”
“I… am not sure, Aedon.”
He let out a groan of displeasure. “I hate it when other people don’t know shit. That means I have to think.”
“You are a good thinker, Aedon.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are better than you were before. Acknowledge this.”
“Fine. But what the fuck do I do now? I still can’t see shit. That dog bit my eyes or something. Bit our eyes. Ass. How did—Okay, we keep pumping. I’m diving into Avo.”
“Are you sure this is wise, Aedon.”
“Hells no. But I’m not wise. I’m hard. Steelhard.” Chambers breathed. “Right. Steelhard. Time to do another dive into Avo again. Again.”
He recalled the last time he did this, how badly Mercy broke him. This time…
“Fuck it. Death don’t hurt, right?” Chambers laughed. So why was he feeling so scared now? Why?
“Because we finally have more than we want to lose,” the Lovebringer said. “Much more. Cas. Cala. Avo. Draus. Shotin. Everyone. The ones connected to us. We finally know what it’s like to live and actually like ourselves. It is a lot to lose.”
“Yeah,” Chambers whispered. “But so is Avo. I’m going… I’m going… I’m going!”
INITIATING DIVE…
