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37. Human Drama
🕑 Added 2024-05-30 08:14:56 +0000 UTCI breathed out the crisp, clean air of the highest mountain of Yuggoth, where the atmosphere was thinned out to near-nothingness. It was so cold that frost formed all over my purplish-grey skin, notably on my hair, horns, and pointed ears.
Well, the 'my' needed to be put into perspective. It wasn't my body. This might be a 'living' body of the highest quality wraithbone and specifically grown organic component and coagulated psychic energy held together by two of the Keys of the Flask as foci for my essence. But it wasn't my body, strictly speaking, even if there were parts of it. I had some left in my Vault since they made excellent materials for almost everything during the war.
It was my second Avatar; the first wasn't destroyed or anything, but it was currently being updated with the spurt in bonesingers and other Aeldari oriented to the fields of crafts coming in.
The main grammatical error in the passage is the incorrect use of a semicolon in the phrase, "It wasn't the only one being done; Lileath, Kurnous, Isha, and Cegorach were being shaped to their image, but they needed a fragment of their essence, of what they were and represented to be completed."
It wasn't the only one being done, as Lileath, Kurnous, Isha, and Cegorach were having Avatars shaped to their image, but they needed a fragment of their essence, of what they were and represented, to be complete
Yes, Lileath and Kurnous, those two, while absent from our little family meetings due to a lack of talented and compatible enough worshipers, still were on the same page as Isha and Cegorach and fully committed to not denying that they were going to be murderfucked out of existence if they didn't act.
Anyways.
In my case, it was my rings; for them, it won't be so simple. The worship toward them would massively help, but it needed something more… tangible, like a part of them. It was a big hurdle, considering they were trapped. But there were solutions left from the war, ancient blessed artifacts, some older than me, with enough power to create an Avatar by recycling them.
At this instant, we didn't have any significant potency besides trinkets and little family heirlooms, most of which were only parts or re-used artifacts and, as such, not the best they could be.
The good ones were either in the Celestian Enclave, deep in the vault of the Crone Worlds at the heart of the Aeldari Empire, or deep into the personal collection of a particular Necron Overlord, the one most hated enemy of Orikan. An easy thing to know for all is that parts of their power were in those artifacts, and for us, you can't lose awareness of a part of yourself.
There should be far, far more of them. Not even the last battle in the Celestian Enclave destroyed them all with the ludicrous amount we pumped out. Even of mine, I was liberal in my gifts, but alas, Khaine passed by and destroyed my things, and the rest was on the Aeldari and the hatred born from the first and second partially failed genocides.
We weren't liked, viscerally hated even, and that was putting it lightly. The festering decadence aside, it wasn't as if the chism didn't have valid reasons to exist. But it did, and now we had to deal with the headaches that were the consequences of it.
I predicted Khaine's reaction to my 'betrayal' to be strong, and I failed my estimation that it would have been this strong. It wasn't the time for regret, however.
"At least he is kept in seclusion… for now. I fear he wouldn't hesitate to murder one of them. And there is Asuryan's behavior." I sighed mentally, willing one of the golden rings around my horns as I fiddled with my dainty fingers, a far cry from my powerful talons. The fact my current body was humanoid didn't help; at least my tail was still here if I willed it.
But to Asuryan… He wasn't in a good state of mind. That was how Isha put it, but Cegorach was less subtle sugarcoating. It was despair, denial, and depression mixed with arrogance on a level mortals couldn't comprehend. With Vaul in a state of mind that wasn't mainly any better and finally Khaine in a rut of rage above that of its secondary personification in the Warp…
It was bad.
Our family, the Pantheon, wasn't in a good position besides the incoming disaster. It was going to explode, to split apart before that, and in a way that would be violent.
And at this moment, it only depended on what Morai-Heg wanted, and as manipulative, cold, and calculating as she might be, I feared emotion would win, and she wasn't going to be on our side with her Consort. Or it might be the right choice with her immense farsight. You can never tell.
How much I hated to be in the dark on this matter, the irony not lost on this blessing and curse inherent to me.
"What a hurdle." I sighed. The incoming future would be exciting, but I wouldn't stand by. Throwing the ring I had been playing with in front of me, it exploded in size, and a nebulous portal materialized.
Jumping through it without hesitation, I reappeared on a plain of flat grey and white with a dark sky only adorned by a miniature ball of plasma in the far distance and a nostalgic blue planet.
Those were the Sun and Earth, and I was on the Moon in none other than the Solar System. With that Avatar, I could teleport again. The freedom was euphoric, but it was a bastardized version at best. The Solar System and the surrounding space were entirely usable for me to move freely.
It wasn't for any arbitrary reason; it was thanks to the Golden Gate built on Venus with the subsequent colony to monitor the Solar System.
Speaking of that, there was more such as a defense mechanism I put into existence during the war to avoid it being mere collateral damage like thousands of others. They were such fragile little things, and one shift would create a cataclysmic chain reaction.
Here, it also warded the place of the Aeldari Empire by staying hidden and the corruption of the Warp by filtering all that was unwanted, creating an artificial Sea of Souls with the Labyrinthine Dimension as a buffer.
It also blocked quite a few other things, making it so that Humanity would have believed itself alone in the great void of space until I deemed them ready to explore the stars beyond the few star systems surrounding them, and the Khrave would have been their first alien encounter.
Some easter eggs were hidden in the stars with a sprinkling of a few skewered information that would have messed with their understanding of Realspace, such as how old it is.
Of course, this plan was utterly jeopardized, but some point remained, notably the creation of a Guardian, a project that had yet to bear fruit but soon will. And it would be more than a Guardian; I needed someone I could trust for my great escape. It wouldn't be a creature enslaved to my will, but a deal shall be respected.
With a snap of my fingers, the Avatar's body glowed and was replaced by the figure of an athletic young adult human male loosely dressed in a pair of puffy pants with a very light brown skin complexion. Kicking a physically enhanced peddle, the ground split in half for five kilometers, and the hill at the end exploded in a rocky shower of dust and pebbles.
"The illusion spell holds adequately enough," I said, my voice muted in the ultra-thin atmosphere. Then I snapped my finger, and, with a single word, space shattered like glass, and I found myself atop a flat roof of high-quality calcite stone enchanted to clean and repair itself.
Below me was a vast city stretching as far as the mortal eyes could see. It was made of rounded roofs of many colors and patterns with large walking areas and gardens where hundreds of thousands of humans mingled, unaware of the greater world.
In the center of it all was a massive ziggurat with murals of many-limbed horned creatures holding golden rings while golden symbols adorned the whole. Floating in at equal distances were massive monoliths connected by threads of light, creating an embroidery-like five-pointed star across the megalopolis.
But the most eye-catching feature came from the cusp of its high, not in the form of the blooming crystalline flower but in a gigantic scintillating beam of energy shot into the firmament where it began its metamorphosis into an immaculate bubble-shaped shield encapsulating the entire city and subsequent peninsula.
This was the Timir Stambhah, the Pillar of Shambhala, otherwise known as the Mystical Capital of Enlightenment, Magic, Beauty, and much more grandeur title, or more simply as the City of Ever-Dusk for the magical barrier created such a peculiar atmosphere only broken at the beginning and end of the day and night cycle.
And on this eventful day, it will all collapse, not by my 'divine wrath' or an attack from an overwhelming. No, it would be something… something so mortal and pointless as the inheritance of a position of power between sons and daughters.
And I will not stop it beyond the massacre of civilians. Of course, I was not cruel to innocent bystanders, particularly when those were my followers, psyker or not. Pointlessly letting them die and suffer was precisely that: pointless.
This was a family feud between Inanna, the first human to have been graced by me, and her progeny. Quite the saddening turn of events after only seven centuries of existence, so young and naïve, agelessness alas didn't signify perpetuity of existence or wisdom. After all, she had sold her soul to me out of her own will even after the terms and conditions explained to their last-minute details.
But as much as what was unfolding was a grave tragedy, it wasn't objectively negative regarding consequences to me. I care little for structure as long as the self-replenishing engine keeps going and the promise of souls in exchange for the sweet taste of psychic power is respected. Binding entities together for them to meet was one of my specialties, the accord at the beginning most important.
The souls in the point above were only mortals having signed the deal and no one else. I didn't care about random souls; they would only do the opposite of helping.
I wished to create legends that would echo across Humanity in its entirety. It was part of a spell work of complexity rarely seen before, and it was delicate. It's also why I chose this species to do it on; the environment needed to be life-giving, not of my direct making, yet monitored and controlled with a tie to me.
On those parameters, I took Earth as prime cradle material, my 'humanness' from long ages ago only an added factor as it granted an ease to work on them close to unparalleled. At the core of my existence, a shred of my initial state of existence remained.
Jumping from building to building, I waved at the dumbfounded crowd below while guards began to notice and follow me. Alas, never would they reach as I placed my palm on Timir Stambhah's outer wall and was absorbed by it.
Returning to a material state, I gazed at the ongoing dogfight between four siblings that any other human would think of as Gods: two sisters, Nahua and Dahut, and two brothers, Atlan and Shinar. All flaring with psychic power while flesh and blood were ripped apart and regrown all over their body as they lawlessly tried and failed to murder one another through hundreds of means, the runes of the city keeping them alive.
Or, more accurately, the Mother of Psyker as she held sway over Shambhala, but she wasn't of the mind to stop any of her children. Emotions guided her on a grim path as she sacrificed all but what she was due to give me to keep them alive. She constantly healed and revived them, hoping they would stop this madness.
She didn't want to fight them or see the fight unfold. Foolish, but that was the desperate action of a grieving mother. And me stopping this was not her wish, not that I would have; I wasn't a family consultant, and I won't impose my will on them.
Yet someone was missing from the play, the third brother and the one who didn't partake in the pact, and I wrapped myself in his room without his notice.
"You won't intervene, Allonius?" I inquired, mortifying the appearance-wise thirty-year-old man dressed in a golden and yellow rapidly scribbling on parchment with an enchanted feather. The last part flung to the side, making a mess of the writing.
Spinning on himself, he bellowed with barely restrained aggression, "S̶̖̈H̷̔͌AT̸̠̽̈́T̴͌E̶̢͗R̵!"
Sadly for him, his words in Anoqeyån were like using rain to harm an ocean, pointless to the extreme, and I batted my imitation of the Song of Creation with my pinky, turning half of the room into crystalline shards no matter what material they were.
"Impressive pronunciation." I praised him earnestly, neutralizing two other words of shattering, and at the same time, I delicately picked up one of the patisseries and magically made it vanish in my mouth. Quite good, the chef shall be blessed after.
Anoqeyån was a powerful tool, and with it, reality could be bent, and being a psyker was not a requirement. Still, not anyone could use it, for it required a ludicrous amount of training and an exceptional mind. In addition, it was, at best of times, a suicidal endeavor. If a mistake were made, it would have dire consequences on the user, ranging from broken bones to the unmaking of oneself.
Well, if it was used in such a 'uniquely barbaric way,' a practice beside a scant few eccentric Khrave and now Aeldari was essentially inexistent. It was a magical language by nature, and it was best to use it as intended for magic. It was a potent gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless to use it like the man here.
It was why a human barely a few centuries old using Anoqeyån in such a way was extremely impressive.
Though he was severely limited in his vocabulary and slow in his spelling, it didn't diminish his value. The same was true for the wounds he got due to errors that were only healed thanks to his mother.
"Won't you stop this? Expecting a different result through an identical methodology is insanity given form!" I exclaimed in exasperation, turning his word into a warm breeze, and it titled him over, but he stopped nonetheless. My little telekinetic holds his frame of minor help. Diplomacy was always successful, with a bit of power thrown in the mix.
"Who, no, what are you? What do you want from me?" He demanded, and I cocked my head at the insolence and laughable arrogance, a front of lies hiding his existential dread oozing from his soul I could taste.
"There is no point in giving the knowledge you already possess…" I trailed off in a dark chuckle, horns flashing through my disguise for a moment, "As for what do I want from you, my dear young Oll?"
"I want you to accept this gift of perpetuality." I enunciated to the confusedly distressed man as on my left palm a dark pentacle materialized, and faster than his optic nerves could send their message to his brain, my palm hit the exposed part of his chest, his heart, and atop of it, a snake of dark scale biting its tail while coiling into an eight was carved on his flesh.
And nothing happened beyond this, physically, that is, but that Ollanius would only understand later as, while not a soul bound, his place was essential. An individual like him would be a catalyst for my spell—an unknowing aid to grow and connect the runes.
He would stew the pot.
It was also a little consolation present for how deadly deathless life would be from then on. Why punish him for sins he didn't commit? And if death he wants, I'm all ears; it's not a curse I put on him contrary to its aesthetic.
And with that, I smiled charmingly and winked before flying through a golden ring with the basket of snacks appearing above the psychic shield of the city. Then, I began to prevent the massacre of around a third of the worldwide human population.
Comments
Thomas Dey
Interesting. I can’t wait to see how things unfold!
