Brent Stinebaker
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34-10 Chosen of the Burning Dream (II)
🕑 Added 2025-02-27 18:40:08 +0000 UTCAttention to all No-Dragon citizens. This is Dowager Brilliant Orchard speaking—Head of the Exo-Substance Council and acting First Sister of all the active political bureaus and the Branch of Exalted Warfare. I declare that a new alliance is being formed thanks to recent actions demonstrated on the part of the Symmetry.
We are embarking on an unprecedented era of peace and cooperation. For all units still engaged in combat, I implore you to lay down your arms and seek the nearest source of Conflagration and… allow it to claim you.
I understand how this sounds, but it is for the good of our future—all our futures. Everything is going to change.
More will be revealed to you once you enter the Burning Dream.
-Dowager Brilliant Orchard
34-10
Chosen of the Burning Dream (II)
—[Avo, The Hidden Flame]—
The scene was oh so amusing—Draus’s perpetual frown deepening as she glared at Shotin, her mind reeling at his cheered arrogance. And Shotin, so wonderfully full of himself, had reverted to who he was after all the trauma and grief.
Avo wondered just how malleable the Seeker would be if his niece was returned to life—well, copied into a new sheathe. He wasn’t about to let Kare sit out this war anyway. That was part of the issue with being mortal, even as a Godclad; a random occurrence, a freak event like being shifted during the Embracement, could see one dead even as it happened. Her own fate had been a wretched one—she hadn’t even had a chance to fight for her life. She was just cleaved clean through while the Rend in her ran high.
More importantly, she couldn’t try again or learn from the experience. Existence was, quite simply, poorly optimized for continual human experience.
“No, seriously, where’s the second?” Shotin asked, still surging with bravado.
“He’s talking about you, dumbshit?” Draus muttered. The Seeker froze and slowly swiveled its head.
“What? What the fuck are you talking about, Reg?”
“About you two,” Avo said, his voice as smooth as a serpent gliding through the undertow. “Draus is my means of offense. But we also need a method of defense as well?”
“What? S-second. You… I’m… Under a R-Reg…” A little bile climbed up Shotin’s throat as he struggled not to throw up. “Second!” His voice turned shrill.
Avo was unshaken. “Yes, after all, who held back Lorea Greatling for all those months? Who kept a critical Sovereignty from falling time and time again? Who was strong enough to resist their inner torment and hold to their duty?”
Shotin looked on, swallowing hard as disbelief, insult, pain, and pride welled up inside him. “I just, you know, I think I should be… I’m not a good fucking leader, but second?”
“Yeah, I don’t know if I want this one either,” Draus growled, waving her gun at him. Shotin ducked aside.
“Don’t flag me with that shit, you sow.”
“See here?” Draus sighed. “My second can’t be a pussy afraid of guns.”
“Afraid?” Defiance flashed behind Shotin’s eyes. He straightened his back and balled his fists. “You think I’m afraid of you? Of that thing you’re holding?”
Draus fixed him with a measured stare. Then grinned.
He took a step toward her.
She cracked her neck. “Yeah, come on. Let’s see it, pretty boy.”
“Oh, you’ll see it, you ugly cuntless—”
Avo laughed and pulled them apart with hands constructed from awakened fire. “Shotin, you are a good defensive operative. You have insight over your adversaries, and you are an active individual—never passive. Always trying to discover. You would have found me eventually, and that is something to be commended. Very good insight. Also flawed. Not a great leader because you’re selfish. You refuse to listen to authority. You don’t like anyone telling you what to do. You have that perpetual need to dominate. Which makes a good dialect unit between you and Draus.”
“Fuck you,” Draus said, firing her gun at the flames. “I knew you were doing this shit to annoy me.”
“Yeah, fuck you, Avo,” Shotin snarled, smacking the fiery hands aside. “Not your godsdamned toy to—”
“Kare also needs someone she can trust. Coming back to life might be traumatic. Could use some guidance.”
The fight went out of the Seeker, but his eye twitched. “You… you half-strand.”
“Don’t really mind how you two regard yourselves. But these are the roles I conceptualized for you. Can evolve. Go beyond that. But you have… preferences. Places where you flourish. And places where you can make each other better. Merge minds. Or learn of other possibilities. But this is the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?” Draus asked.
“Training,” And with a thought, Avo simulated a brand-new battlefield around them. The Seeker and Regular now stood across from each other at the heart of an intersection. Ruined blocks dense with interconnected bridges, overturned aeros, and enough alleyways and hidden angles of attack to make an urban warfare specialist consider pre-emptive suicide revealed themselves. “Many things you two can learn from each other. And I can learn from you. And more. And more. It is our Soulscape now. Our experience now. Everything is of the individual–and the collective. Parallel design.”
Shotin looked around, taking in his surroundings. His mind turned slowly, as if he was scanning for places to fortify—locations where he wanted to hold. Contrarily, Draus’s minds was already considering how she could storm half of these structures and take the district for herself.
What a wonderful interplay on display already.
“Wait, if we’re all going to be learning from each other, evolving using each other or whatever messed up post-cognitive shit you’re trying to do… why the fuck did you call me second? That doesn’t make me second at all. That makes me also-first. At least!”
The Regular fixed Shotin with an unimpressed glare as he ranted. “Hey, is the whining contagious? Because… well, Highflame might’ve taken my cunt as you said, but I don’t wanna be growin’ no unwanted pussy on me.”
The Seeker went still, stopped ranting at Avo, turned to Draus, and then exhaled. “He planned this. He planned this for whatever fucked up reason only he can understand. He’s trying to get us to fight—maybe because it just might amuse him, but you know what? Let’s do it. Because I think I really, really don’t like you, Re—”
Draus fired her gun at him. Shotin barely jerked out of the way. Her projectile crossed through a nearby aerovec’s windshield and re-emerged from her floating shard—right back at Shotin. A second before it struck his skull, he flared his Heaven of Speed. The spatial-kinetic round missed again as Shotin snapped upward, and began summoning his Parallelist.
But a swath of vitrification spread through the district. Glass began to tremble and shatter, summoned by a God of Reflections. Behind every gleaming surface emerged a gun, and Draus receded into her Manifold Paracosmos.
“You’re about to learn why you lost the last war again, Reg.” Shotin declared, his voice echoing as layered demi planes crashed through the flame-wrought firmament.
Below, a constellation of shards rose up to meet the falling skies. “And you’re about to learn how godsdamned lucky you were the Greatling was after you instead of me.”
A clash of space-on-space ensued, and Avo felt a slight spike in his required cog-cap. Ah, but it was good for his cadre to enjoy themselves. This was conducive to learning. More importantly, this was important for his education as well.
Good synthetic data was hard to come.
“I’m going to leave you two alone for a few moments. Get acclimated. Need to talk with Chambers about something.” Neither of them replied. Instead, a paradox shuddered within his Soulscape, and both Draus and Shotin continued their clash with their Heaven of Guns and Heaven of Speed respectively.
As entire blocks were torn from their foundations and launched as missiles via Vector Mines against unceasing streams of firepower, Avo began seeding the district with some of his Beloved. He ingrained in a mixed combat templates, and left them there for Draus and Shotin to discover. The “pawns’ would be joining the fight alongside the Regular and the Seeker as well, and it wouldn’t take long to gauge their effectiveness.
In the meantime, Avo wished to exploit his massive positional advantage to the maximum extent, and he required Chambers for that.
After all, there were few other Heavens capable of reaching into the Substance to deliver a few constructs or to extract some people.
Or one person in particular.
[Three-Eye’s return has been accelerated,] template-Zein frowned. [Do make sure that you don’t lose him. He is really quite the competent warrior. That, and losing him will also banish a heartwarming little reunion between you and your “father.”]
Right. Walton’s node. Avo felt a shudder of… something ineffable rising within him. He wasn’t sure if he was excited, nervous, or just fascinated. Above all, he wanted perspective, and Defiance had insights that eluded so many across this entire war. But beyond that, Avo wanted means to access and depart from the Substance at will, while keeping his enemies contained. Which means using his temporal dimension as an instantaneous bridge.
This requires temporal anchors—Sang ontologies and more dragons in other words.
Thankfully, Avo had a novel means of deploying more Sang.
Traverse the memories that composed his Soulscape, he arrived in a new realm molded from time, matter, blood, and Soulfire. This section of Avo’s being was sealed in an enclosed space, beyond the access of most templates or external entities. At its center was a massive pulsating column dotted with quivering organs. They resembled translucent lumps which, when viewed together, seemed as if juicy pustules hanging from a strange fruit. Within each of these organs were newborns.
Human newborns: Sang males.
These poor babes, originally fated for death, now had a new purpose and a new stay of execution.
The curse still festered deep within them, and though Avo had influence over Akusanade, fully untangling the sickness from their beings will take more research and time. Such would be one of Avo’s future projects, but right now, these doomed infants could serve him still…
[Attuning ontological stability,] Kae said, directing Avo’s Soulfire to keep their humors in balance. The Woundmother worked alongside the Agnos’ template, using their power over biology to keep these infants alive. It took a constant effort for the Heaven of Blood to contend with their constant hemorrhaging, but with their new-blessed influence over time, the Woundmother warred against the Dragon-Plague along the patterns of chronology and biology. [And… secure!]
A burst of Soulfire rushed out from another of the cursed sons. A weak mewing cry sounded thereafter. The scene was then cast into the minds of Green River, Brilliant Orchard, Elegant-Moon, Glorious Song, and every other Sang within the temporal dimension.
The Stormsparrow’s chorus sang in the background, chanting the words “A Time of Change, A Time of Change, Stillborn Claims the Unborn, Reborn from the Flames” over and over again.
Green River was wordless.
Glorious Song was openly weeping.
Brilliant Moon was recovering from a sudden fainting episode.
[And like that, all that wasn’t… was again,] Elegant-Moon sighed inside Avo. The template of the Sang Godclad lifted her arms in a gesture of praise and prayer. [The final days have come. The flame delivers.]
And her words were echoed by the chorus, by all the other Sang Avo held within his protection.
“THE FLAME DELIVERS.”
The only true outsider granted insight was one Aedon Chambers, who witnessed the scene with a confused expression and twitching Bonds. “Sweet. So. Why are you showing me this, Avo? It’s pretty good. You’re, uh, saving the Sang boys. Which is pretty nova. But—”
“We’re going to seed them in the new ghouls,” Avo answered.
Chambers became confusion incarnate. “Huh? What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
A tendril of flame reached out through the Stormsparrow in the real, slithered across kilometers to finally touch Vator. A second thereafter, the Greatling’s ego forked, and a version of him materialized just beside Chambers in the Soulscape.
“Well,” Vator blinked, looking at his hands. Bits of him came together with sparks of fading brightness. “What is this.”
“Going to need your help in a moment,” Avo said. “We made the Beloved together. But I want to have you witness something… Want you to see what will become of your creations.”
Vator looked up, and finally noticed the many Sang infants festooned in the vastness before him. “What am I—” Avo fed him the requisite context, and the Instrument shuddered with an all-consuming thrill. “Truly? You are mending the plague? And the dragon! Their biologies! I must be a part of this! I must—”
“You will,” Avo purred in reply. “Need your expertise. But first. Need something else.”
The Greatling opened and closed his mouth several times before calling for his Heaven. “Portrait!”
His Heaven hatched free from his flesh, and Avo felt the God of Biology sweep its gaze not at the infants, but at the Woundmother. “What is that atrocity doing to the people… the Children. They do not belong to… to…”
“We can fix the people,” Vator said excitedly. “This will be a thing of restoration. The project baffles me. It will take more than just my mastery. Oh, I can hardly wait.”
“Going to have to. Need you right now. Need to use you as a conduit for Chambers.”
“What?” Vator said. He flinched back as he just noticed the Lovebringer looming beside him. Chambers waved a few magenta strings at the Instrument. “Oh, dear. I didn’t—why is he here?”
A note of confusion—and slight fear—lingered in Vator’s voice.
Avo moved to the part he’d been long waiting for. “I need him to reach the Beloved through you. Going to evolve them again. Going to implant the infant Sang males inside them. Like a seed.”
Vator’s mouth formed a perfect-o and he nodded. “Go on…”
“I need to create bridges. But I also want to discover one thing: Can I make them infectious. Can I evolve both the Sang and the ghouls at the same time for use against Highflame. To our benefit. For an army unlike any other. But also… need to reach into Substance. And bring my father into the fold. Alongside Three-Eye.”
Vator continued to nod. “Yes. Wait. You have a father? And… Three-Eye? As Frederick Three-Eye?”
“Yes. He was originally supposed to be the user of the Stillborn.”
“Ah,” Vator breathed. “Well. It might be hard to believe me when I say this, but I really prefer you over him.”
“Oh? You have history.”
“I wouldn’t call it anything that dignified.”
***
—[Frederick Three-Eye]—
Fucking Zein.
Frederick should have seen this. He really should have.
The entire plan hinged on Defiance being quiet enough for her not to notice, but as with all things in life, someone else had to fuck it up. Not Frederick. He did his job perfectly. Down to the last detail. But hells, when you lived in a world of stupid assholes, the sky rained shit and even the cleanest half-strand learned to wear brown.
And now, Frederick found himself falling through some bullshit golden tunnel of nothingness until Zein called him back. Or dumped him in whatever future she desired.
+This is part of the reason I chose you,+ Defiance said casually. +She would not remove you so easily. She might kill many others, but you are formidable. And you have the potential to—+
“I know, priest. I’ve heard this speech a thousand times already. Literally. If you give it again, I’m going to start committing recreational suicide again. I’m still not sure why I let you talk me into this.”
+Your mother only lives because of my intervention.+
“I was being rhetorical.”
+You sounded petulant instead. It’s hard to tell with you sometimes.+
“Defiance. I’m going to shove my finger through my third eye, and then hook my brain matter until I die again. To avoid this messiness, please stop talking or reminding me of my failures. Thank yo—”
A tremor passed through the golden stream of bullshit. Frederick looked around. “What was that?”
+Time. Time running out. For us. Or for Zein.+
A low, dog-like growl sounded from Frederick. “Well. Least we’ll be leaving this place soon. Fucking Zein.”
Comments
Brent Stinebaker
There's one more with Three-Eye... But there's more to things than that.
Ggamer
Hold on, there's a node of Defiance still around? I thought they had all been destroyed?
Deathly_God
Man, I was listening to, "All The Ways I Could Die" by Arrows in Action as I was reading this chapter. It fit oddly well. What a coincidence.
