Last Light of a Dark Age (Warhammer 29K/Disco Elysium)

Vote Tally

Article:

[X] The Infinite Horizon: The mass that pulls the universe, a force irresistible by any being. The mark of no-self, and the gravitational force. Unlocks the null hex of abyssal pressure, and a revelation on the truth of selflessness.

I. BREAKING POINT

You bring the nail down on the frozen ice of your soul and -

Nothing happens.

You stare, blinking at the hole. The ice is broken, but the still void within remains inert. Silent. Still. It is quiet here. So quiet. The room has stopped rotating. Everything has stopped. The nail in your hand vanishes. It is you, and the void of the shattered mirror.

And then, a voice. Soft. Familiar. Intimate. No longer muffled by any barrier, any ancient Blackwall meant to separate Abyss, Materium, and Warp. To maintain an ancient and artificial barrier of void, and form, and soul. No longer shielding you from what lies just beyond. A voice that comes from within the breach you've made.

THE COST: COME CLOSER.

And then, the voice's second, the voice's herald, messenger, speaking up, translating, urging you on.

EVENT HORIZON: It would see you face to face. Eye to eye.

You sit down on your knees.

THE COST: CLOSER.

You lean down, squinting into the abyss.

THE COST: CLOSER.

You put your head up against the ice, not compelled by force but by the barest curiosity, the barest and most simple intuition. You have come so far to see the thing that brews within you. And then, there, movement. The coalescence in the void of a vision, and a spiral, and the glow of white as the cracks in the ice spread and start to shatter the nursery.

There, in the shadow, you gaze into the abyss beyond your mind's eye. And the abyss gazes back.


THE COST: HELLO.

The first quark emitted by the Big Bang pierces just above the brow of your skull and exits the back of your head with an exit wound the size of the universe.

Article:

ENTITY RELEASED

THE COST: In the beginning, Heaven was without form, and void. Darkness was upon the face of the deep, and nothing moved upon the face of the waters.

Provides access to Null Hexes. Provides access to Abyssal Wagers. This entity is incomplete…you can help by expanding it.

Everything goes blank, and you die.

II. INFINITE BODY PROBLEM

When you reconstitute, you are falling through the hole that you have carved in the bottom of the universe.

There is a place beyond time, and beneath space. The prime mover and the final destination of all reality. The basement, and the attic of all things. The abyss, and the firmament. A black sea of formless potential stretches above a darkling ocean plain littered with decaying dreams and dead gods. Smokestacks of time wind upwards from great roaring vents, and bring nourishing liminality to the sun-kissed realms above. This is the night country. This is your home country.

It is peaceful here.

EVENT HORIZON: What began as pinprick-tunnels gene-molded by star-eaters into the spirits of tactile terran rodents has become, through focused engineering, the shadowgate. Crafted to penetrate the realm that thirsting Gods and living beings fear, souls dipped at first conception in an ocean styx.

The deeper ocean you are swimming in now has as many names as there are cultures with the gift of speech. The Formless Realm. Ghostwind. Bardo. Well of Eternity.

Nothingness far more absolute than the pallid false vacuum of the material cosmos fizzing with potential as countless virtual particles constantly appear and disappear in circular self-annihilation. It is silent, and it is deafening, all at once.

EVENT HORIZON: To be here should destroy you. To know this should dissolve you. But here is a medium. A mystery that shelters you, and shelters me. A being that should not be, that dwells here, that bathes here. Not long ago, and very long ago, it came. Eight hundred, and eight billion years ago, it came. Upon arrival, it was always here. Upon arrival, it was a native daughter of the void.

You grasp slowly you are not falling at all, but orbiting. Orbiting within the empty accretion disk of something much larger, and much vaster, than you. In the orbit of something you might dare call God, or Truth, or Reality, or World, or Absolute, or the universe. But words fail, within the gaze of its event horizon, the outline of an eye traced by the circling of a single soul, a single particle, around its central, lightless axis.

The shine of this light, unnatural in this place of absence, illuminates the movement of monsters, in the dark. But none would dare come close enough to be caught in the orbit of the greatest of the monsters, here.

EVENT HORIZON: It sees you, face to face. You know it, as it knows you.

<What are you?> You speak, without speaking. What responds to you does in the manner of hawking radiation - an emission of entropy, and an admission in each word, not even this infinity is eternal.

THE COST: I AM NOT WHAT I AM NOT.

<Are you real?> You ask, without asking.

THE COST: AS REAL AS YOU.

<Are you God?> You dare, without daring.

EVENT HORIZON: That is the wrong question.

THE COST: I AM WHAT COULD NOT BE.

EVENT HORIZON: Heart of a heartless world. Wound within the warp. Rainshadow of the vale of tears. The gateless gate. The greenless garden. The godless god.

The eye is narrowed, and its attention is on you, unblinking in the dark.

THE COST: WHAT ARE YOU?

You move to answer, but in the accretion disk, 'you' have become disassembled. Become aware, as you were beginning to grow aware, of how little 'you' meant. How much you are a series of strings around a point, wheels within wheels within wheels. Human attributes stapled to an artificial soul. A new life stapled to an old one. The face of a Kora, the face of a mother and a father's daughter. A host to nanocancer, and a host to despairing shapes.

A shifting central point, never stable enough to be identified, never stable enough to be categorized. You are your orbits, each drawn and tugged by gravity.

EVENT HORIZON: How could you claim to cut your strings, when you are naught but strings? Each has their exits, and their entrances - and one string, in its time, plays many parts. Our attachments, our causes, our conditions - define us.

<Then what is the core of I?>

THE COST: YOU ARE NOT.

EVENT HORIZON: What is the solution to the n body problem? An infinite permutation of gravitational masses, each asserting their gravitational pull around a central point?

There is no stable solution. Permutation can assist, but with each addition to the problem, there is chaos in calculating the interacting orbits of multiple bodies. Even three is too many - more, and the problem compounds, and compounds, and compounds.

EVENT HORIZON: Yes. You are a compounding problem.

THE COST: INTERBEING. DEPENDENT ON CAUSE, AND CONDITION.

Every orbit, defined by its beginning, and its end, sharing in birth, and death. In their impermanence. Orbits for your attributes, and your wants, and your hates, and your loves. Orbits for what you feel about someone, and orbits about what you feel about what they feel about you. A relational entity.

EVENT HORIZON: All things are relational.

You begin to understand. Every cause, with its effect. But still, you struggle. Does that mean you do not exist?

<What does it mean, that I am not?>

THE COST: THERE IS NO FIXED SELF. EVERYTHING IN EVERY MOMENT CHANGES.

EVENT HORIZON: Every being that turns about every star seeks categories. These categories reify reality, and protect their ego, their self. Assure them of what they are. But they are not.

THE COST: THE STRINGS ARE ALL YOU ARE.

You try again, to conclude, and this time contemplate your being. The strings are all you are. You are what made you. You are who made you. And these are strings that cut.

Strings that attach you to concepts, to people, to experiences, that cause you suffering. They are strings of daughterhood, Korahood, and hylichood. Strings of prejudice. Strings of fear, of death and aging, nanocancer and loneliness. Strings of romance lost, and strings of aversion. Links of dependence that suffocate you.

But - wait.

If you are the strings, then who suffocates?

EVENT HORIZON: That is the first lesson.

If you are the strings, then who lives, and who dies? Who is born, and who passes away? If in each and every moment, you are without a stable self, then are you not dying every second? Are you not being born each second? How can 'you' even be? Without a relational point, without a connection to others, you do not make sense.

You are an aggregate. A eukaryotic aggregate. Even your 'soul' is a mechanism, a container, a storehouse. Not an immortal, stagnant, unchanging thing. There is no essence to reach for. There is no authenticity to grasp. There is nothing, but the change of you.

But - what about others?

EVENT HORIZON: Is your mother dead?

If your mother is all strings, then how could she be? There are parts of her that exist only in relation to others. Only in relation to you.

EVENT HORIZON: How does she live on?

Your memory of her. Her moral value, and her moments of bravery. Her bad humour, and her failures. Her hopes, and her dreams. The possibility of a sunrise, she granted you. They live on. One day they will go with you. But not yet.

EVENT HORIZON: What is a fossil?

A fossil is an imprint of a living being. But this is a category, a form. A fossil is also a mineral miracle. A stamp left behind something long ago that has transformed, and changed. As new and precious as the thing whose imprint it calcified. The fossil of the animal is not the animal. The name of the rose is not the rose. The memory of the mother is not the mother.

What does it mean to have a love extinct? Is it to love the animal the fossil represents, or the fossil itself? Cannot the pot have value, without possessing the whole of the potter's soul? Cannot love have value, without possessing the whole of a lover's life?

You clung so deeply to categories you mistook for the real thing. What does it mean to let go of them as representations of the person that they represent?

EVENT HORIZON: Emptiness is form, and form is emptiness. There is no individual enlightenment, no individual awakening. No individual freedom.

You are not a mass with gravity. You are the confluence of orbits. One idiosyncratic point of a cosmic waltz. The dance of mankind, the dance of the galaxy, concentrated in some strange way, here, with you. Given the illusion of form by this confluence called you - and the illusion dispelled when the confluence collapses. The conditions, and the causes change. You will age, and you will die.

EVENT HORIZON: And you will never die.

THE COST: CHANGE THE CONDITION, CHANGE THE STRING. CHANGE THE CAUSE, AND CHANGE THE STRING.

Awareness of each string tells you what they are, and what could be. It tells you how you feed them, and how they feed on you. It tells you what you are attached to, and what preys on you. Nanocancer, hatred, prejudice, fear, wrath, guilt - awful pains, that grip you to the very core.

But even if you are aware, what could you do? What path is there from this?

<How do I change?>

THE COST: LOVE IS EVERY STEP.

You would flinch, and cringe, if you were not entrapped and frozen in this vacuum beyond time and space where neither is on offer. A truth so banal, you cannot manage it. Compassion. So simple. So fruitless. What has compassion done for you? How has compassion helped you?

EVENT HORIZON: It has killed you, and it has saved you.

<But I cannot…I cannot just 'be' compassionate. I cannot be kind, that way. It would be…dishonest.>

THE COST: COMPASSION IS NOT KIND.

<What?>

THE COST: COMPASSION IS TERROR.

<I don't understand.>

THE COST: A GALAXY IS CAST IN THE IMAGE OF HELL. IN THIS PLACE, COMPASSION IS ANATHEMA. COMPASSION IS NIGHTMARE. COMPASSION IS APOCALYPSE.

EVENT HORIZON: If this is hell - then how terrible must heaven be, to fight it?

<But every techno-state is built on love, and compassion.>

THE COST: INVERT THE CATEGORY.

EVENT HORIZON: The boundaries of their compassion are what defines them. Hate the stranger, love the self. Hate the enemy, love the nation. Hate the small, and love the great. Without equanimity, compassion is corrupted.

<But, limitless compassion is impossible. It's unthinkable.>

THE COST: SO AM I. SO ARE YOU.

EVENT HORIZON: A woman in a nursery weeps, and says 'I cannot love you, hylic, as a daughter'. Is this true? A woman in an academy weeps and says 'I cannot love you, hylic, as a sister'. Is this true? A woman in a ziggurat weeps and says 'I cannot love you, hylic, as a wife'. Is this true?

EVENT HORIZON: I am here, and you are here, because it is not.

EVENT HORIZON: That which is limitless can never be reached. But what will never reach zero may be near it to the fractions of a decimal. An asymptotic approach to an infinite compassion.

EVENT HORIZON: Even if the realms of hell are never emptied - one must imagine Ksitargbha happy.

What has happened before, can happen again. If a hylic can breach the chasm between them and a pneumatic, what else can be breached? What other possibilities remain, beyond the veil of the event horizon?

And then there is a moment of clarity.

With this realization - and with this growing grasp of gravity, of not-self, of interbeing, you come to another. You come to understand what everything that is happening should not be. That this conversation, this contemplation, this existence, is anomalous, miraculous, baffling. You have breached the blackwall which has separated the abyssal nail from the abyss since its inception. Since its design.

That should have created a void scar. A collapse of one dimension into another. A disaster of epochal proportions. But it has not.

EVENT HORIZON: You knew this, when you pierced the veil, though you did not know you knew.

You are speaking to a being of the Abyss that is not of the Abyss - something that came here, was not made here. That is nonsensical. You are drawing on powers of this place, a singular point of creation and extinction - that is so beyond the normal ken that you should have dissolved into madness or collapsed into physics. Every rule of your entire life is being broken - the very metaphysics you relied on, broken.

What is even a nothing within a nothing? What is the Cost, as opposed to the Negation? What is going on?

And you realize your abyssal nail should not be talking. This entire time, since the beginning of your journey, you have been speaking to something that never spoke before. Only since you awoke into your marrow memory have you heard it. When you were in Monad, at best, there were whispers. When you were Harmony, at most, there were black dreams.

What is inside your nail that speaks? Who is inside your nail, that speaks?

<What are you, Event Horizon? What am I?>

EVENT HORIZON: That, sweetheart, is the right question.

You are tugged, suddenly, by the gravity of something far greater than you. The cost is pulling you in, to its singularity, and beyond its event horizon. And as it does, it declares to you, three truths.


Your soul is stretched into strands pulled ravenous, each with a capacious appetite.

Article:

AXIOM DESCENDED

BLACK OCEAN EVENT -> VOID OCEAN EVENT

VOID OCEAN EVENT: You are a hylic who will never die, bathed before your birth in the depths of a sunless sea. You are awarded foresight without fate, and vision without insight. You are awakening - but as a model, a monster, or a meal? Your null field has never been stronger, and you have never feared its appetite more. Without guidance, you are in danger of losing control of the abyss within if you drink too deeply and too greedily.

Your soul is unspooled into a siphoned tube of matter one particle across and ten-light years long, modified, transformed, into the path it was always meant to be. A lotus sprouts from the section where your forehead was - and the purpose for your being unfurls.

Article:

AUGMENT BLOOMED

-ABYSSAL NAIL-> +ABYSSAL IRIS: Stigma of the Father's love, forged from living metal. Key to the pure land, at the bottom of its spiral. Genetic marker of the reason treason of for your clade. Affects suppression and manipulation of your null field. Provides warpsight in wireframe. Perpetual lotus brand upon your miraculous inferior, inverse soul.

Unlocks Hosts EVENT HORIZON, its attribute score set to 13, operating on an inverted rolling table where a higher roll is worse. Provides access to THE COST. Sets your maximum monadic attribute score to 13. Sets your maximum WILL to 13.

And the heat and fire of the inner disk embraces you, incinerating your soul, and transmuting you into something entirely new.

Article:

NULL HEX LEARNED

Null hexes are unique and mysterious abilities granted and enhanced by knowledge of the abyss. They strain against the conventional ideas of what hylics can do.

Abyssal Pressure: The weight of the fourth force is the deadly compassion of a stellar mass. Bring others to the ground, to better know the matter that loves them.

In the waking world, this hex has mechanics based upon laws of physics you do not understand and operates on its own success/failure rolling table using EVENT HORIZON as its attribute. Beware frivolous, untrained use.

THE COST: I AM THE COST OF THEIR AMBITION. AND YOU HAVE PAID THE PRICE.

Charred, stretched, decimated, you reach the event horizon, and disappear into the beyond.

Everything fades to black, and you die.

III. DREAM NO MORE

You regain consciousness in a decahedral cocoon that is already collapsing before your eyes open. It is a shame. You would have made an exquisite, and a happy corpse, buried by the shape before your time. But you were never made to be happy. You know that now, as you knew it then, in the acid ocean down below.

You push your way through the sand and the soil and stand up again on the isle of the dead, stone angel in a human form, facing the dream. A shape engorged again, formed into a vast and awesome white sun, fed well on your surrender to the illusion of eternity. It is as if your fight did not happen. It was as if nothing happened.

EVENT HORIZON: And Nothing did happen.

The shape is there, in the sky, eye projected upon a fattened sun, looming down on you with baleful gaze, a pitiless sunrise. "You cannot even dream right," it mocks, as you escape the coffin it had made for you. "But it doesn't matter. You have fed me well, and I am rested and prepared to finish my task, and complete COLD FUSION. My sympathetic weakness to you has faded in the gratuity of the power you have given me. This noon is your midnight. It is time for the awakening."

"Yes, it is," you mutter, downcast.

You lift your eyes up to that star with which you've shared so much love and hate. It would be right if you were still within the bounds of the dreamwar, if you were still within the bounds that it has set for you.

EVENT HORIZON: But we are playing a different game.

You are both foolish creatures of blind passions, misfit toys in the shadow of a long-dead dream, but the difference is: you know what you are.

"It's over," the shape declares, as it draws the power of the isle into itself. The isle is vapour drawn by the white sun's gravity, nothing more than white sand above a frozen sea of black, below a seething, swelling sun.

"Yes, it is," you say, half-sad.


The command crafts 6,666 ways for you to die. You are killed in ways you could have never known of - the typical outcomes, the typical fatalities, are exhausted rapidly. Some are products of your imagination, some the shape's, some historic, some speculative. You are gouged, exploded, imploded, turned inside out, outside in, flattened, stretched, smashed, stabbed, pierced, impaled, butchered, compressed, depressed.

You are placed in timestops in a timestop in a timestop. All the skin is ripped off your skull, then you are healed, then it is done again. You are subject to implements of torture and implements of pain and instruments of irritation.

This is supposed to break you. Mostly, you are despondent. There was a time when the imagination of such beings was put to greater things. What hope do you have to be better, if this is the epitome of human thought? To think of ways to hurt, and harm, and agonize?

It is around when you are impaled by needles each a centimeter thick that you, hanging and pierced in ten thousand ways, decide to act. You have nothing left to learn here. And you are done playing with your food.

"Why don't you end? Why don't you give in?" There is an upset in the growl of the triangle.

You don't say much. Your head lolls forward, and several of the needles break. The shape understands too late none of this has hurt you.

Seven petals unfold from the center of your forehead. In the middle, a crack blooms. A third eye opens, and regards the polygon unkindly. Tears of black ichor drip, from the pistil, onto each lotus bloom, and down, onto the ground. They sizzle, each melting away the needles as they descend.

And still, the shape is ignorant. "What is-"

A drop strikes the ground.

EVENT HORIZON: CRITICAL SUCCESS

3 + 4 (2d6) + 13 (EVENT HORIZON) - ∞ (Dreaming of the Night Country) = -∞.


Ten thousand arms of shadow, each a metaphor for gravity's long embrace, the sweet desire of all matter to meet within depths of singularity, explode out from under you and extend to the petriform walls. This is the fourth, attractive force, that acts on each and every being, that nothing and no one can escape. The spectral arms that are your tugging mass each grip a crystal panel of the wall, and pull them in. Downwards pressure snaps every needle forced into the ground. The shape, still a sun, screaming, falls from its heaven.

The arms find purchase in seams between each crystal panel, and pull, and wrench, and tear, wishing each lattice of each molecule would join you, in the spiral. The crystal that you still perceive with mortal fear is nothing compared to the immortal power of the fundamental force of matter's love. Beyond pneumatic, and beyond hylic, beyond time and space - against this power, there is no refuge in jeweled baubles, and no protection, in the shell of this cruel seed.

You bring down the sky, and every barrier that has held the null field from your inner soul implodes under a mass of crushing compassion that approaches infinity.

The arms pull each panel greedily, yes greedily, into the iris of your third eye. Blackness penetrates the white sun's domain. The cocoon is pried apart, and the infant vulnerable. The decahedron's eye has split in ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, as each fragment in the gestalt is gripped by fear.

A fear of you. It has come too late to save them. By the design of their own cocoon, it never could. There is no escape from the end.

Drenched in the dark, the needles fade away. It is you, and the dim of the white sun, accosted by the void.

You take a step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts a flight, but there is nowhere to run.

"I have learned much about myself from you, my teacher."

You take a step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts time-reverse, but there is nowhen to go.

"Thank you."

You take a step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts command words, but there is no way to speak.

"You have forced me to face my worst memories."

You take a step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts to beg, but there is nothing to say.

"You have forced me to face my despair."

You take a step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts to bargain, but there is nothing to offer.

"You have forced me to face what I really am."

You take your final, seventh step toward the sun, and grow tenfold. The shape attempts to hide, but there is nothing concealed.

"And now, it is time for your education." The shape attempts to scream, but there is no air to carry it.

The void speaks through you, and offers wisdom to the ignorant in a vision of the truth.


A cold stellar wind passes, and you are in an age before the warp. Nothing lives, and nothing dies. The galaxy, empty.


The wind carries forth, and sweeps away nothing, returning to a time before the stars. When the universe was young and burned with the passion of the oldest, boiling gas.


The shape is a sun in a place it should not be. A sun among meteorological sun-eaters. A sun among the clouds of dust that think in ways that clouds never should. The beings that will one day be called star gods, an irony that did not escape the creatures that crawled out from a broiling soup of physics so near to the beginning, and became something more. A word that strikes fear in beings unfortunate enough to know its meaning.

EVENT HORIZON: C'tan.

A being named first for what they eat. And in this time before the stars - they raven. Raven, for a taste, as delectable as D5h.

"Stop." The shape tries, as the first prodding nibble of a malevolent geist prods at its stellar corona.

"STOP." The shape pleads, as nibble becomes a chew, and a chew becomes a bite, and a bite becomes a starving, gnawing tear, gaseous pieces of its inflated soul torn away. The predator is seen only in the marks it leaves on stellar prey.

"PLEASE!" The shape is howling, as another god is drawn, and another, and another, and each tear larger pieces, drain larger parts of it, a feeding frenzy of puckered suction that leaves holes in the surface of a mourning, imploding, shrinking star. Conscious every second of its own slow demise.

You cannot resist any longer. There is a primal part of you too drenched in the ocean styx, that cannot help but feed.


You push aside the other gods and reach to swallow the shape whole. Its eye is wide and dilated, its crumbling surface shimmering with fear, its baleful white turned pale and weak and sickly. And in this last moment, it screams "I WANT TO LIVE!"

And you stop. And you see what you are. What you could become, if you let your appetite guide you.

The vision ends at once. With a thought, as it started, with a thought.

You return to the island. The sky, white. Standing there, palm of your hand open. The shape, tiny, no more than the head of a flower, so easily crushed, in the center of that palm.

Its eye is closed in a deeply human fright. It slowly opens, disbelieving, as it sees where it is, and what it is. As it sees how weak it is. As it sees that you have won. But you have not finished the job.

"What are you waiting for?" The shape demands. Indignant, almost, as it quells its terror. As if you are supposed to devour it. As if that is the way of things, on this planet. And it is right. It is right, that this is the way of things.

But you have grown so tired of this planet, and its ways. You have grown so tired of this planet and its lying truths, and its false precepts. You have grown so tired of this planet, and its monsters.

"Or maybe…you can let me go? I'll just leave! That's it! I'll go! I surrender! You win! I'll go and never return! You can be the sister of mercy the insects call you!" The shape tries to negotiate again, even here. It thinks that this pause is an opportunity, some way to get the upper hand again. Some chance for a trick.

But the truth is, this is the end of the cycle.

You purse your lips, and lift the shape up, to see it, eye-to-eye. Its attention on the iris bloomed on your forehead. "What are you, anyway? You freak. You monster. Demiurgic spawn. Star God's bastard daughter." Peppering you with insults, on the palm of your hand. A tedious little creature, once its ability to harm has been terminated. Petty, and close-minded.

"I am something entirely new," you tell the shape.

"There is nothing new under the White Sun. We are the culmination," it insists, too quickly. It would have scoffed, before the vision. Now, this is a self-affirmation, a self-delusion. It has the spark of an inquisitiveness, a curiosity, that tells it something else has happened here. But this else, it cannot accept.

You are motionless, for a time. The petriform sea is crumbling, floes of ice grinding and cracking as they thaw in the sunless sea. Night has fallen, in your mind. The dream is ending.

"Well? What are you going to do? You can't just let me sit here! Unless you are truly that unimaginative that you can't think of anything else to do! Moron."

You let out a sigh. The weight, and the exhaustion, of this endless struggle has gotten to you. "You are truly, and completely, annoying."

The shape flinches.

"I think I would like to do nothing with you. I think I would like to think about it some more, before I decide. I am not…I don't have endless compassion. I can't do that. But I am tired of death, and killing." Every word is a struggle.

"Then what?! What will you do? Will you torture me? Will you fling me into a temporal loop? Will you swallow me whole?!" An atavistic excitement, from the shape thinking you will do to it what it has tried to do to you.

"I think I would like…" you trail off, and let out a long and weary breath. "I think I would like for you to go away."

The shape blinks, and then seethes. "What? What kind of fate is that? That's a non-fate! That's a petulant and useless expression of your complete lack of thought! You utter ignoramus! You overgrown wheeled turkey! You can't just wish me awa-"

You close your palm and the shape vanishes, banished from your conscious mind, buried like so much else in those backrooms and corridors of your psyche where you don't walk in waking hours. Let the shape of your despair dwell there, with the rest of you.

Article:

ENTITY INTERNED

=D5h: A tedious neutralized polygon you've thrown into the backrooms of your mind. Annoying gestalt from the fragments of longlost human souls, reformed within the alchemical core of a philosopher's stone but containing no wisdom whatsoever. Without hope and with plenty of regrets. Ever-dreaming. Dreaming you will not forget about it when you wake up, hungover.

You are not, and you are only, human. And you have no more energy left to deal with this fucking decagon.

Let that be a problem for tomorrow.

IV. DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT

You are alone, after. Alone with the white sand, and alone with the black sea. In the quiet, in the gloom of a starless night. You sit down on the sand, and observe the empty space before you. You should be happy. You've won.

You have reconciled and remerged both of your halves. You've walked through the valley of the shadow of doubt, and been bestowed a truth unfathomable. Your purpose - to act as a gate to heaven, on behest of an entity of contradiction and mystery. You have known miracles that no hylic ever has. You have let go of pains and longings, regrets and wraths, reconciled contradictions. You have learned who and what you are, and found it to be so much more than you ever could have imagined. You have defeated the very root of your despair.

But you are alone.

Epiphany and enlightenment can touch but never heal your heart. You are broken in more ways that you could even begin to piece together. There are pains of your latter eighteen years you have only just begun to feel again. Disappointments, losses, isolations, as dire and as serious to you as any you felt when you were Harmony. Maybe you are a god, or a messenger, or a meal, or a sacrifice. Maybe you are none of those things. But in the end, beyond all else -

You are alone.

You shudder, and you breathe sharply, and you pull your head towards your knees. You know what you are but awareness of the pain cannot take it away. Declaring nothing is eternal cannot take the grip of sadness from your heart. You can move on but the time that it will take and the weight of that time crushes you.

You would love to be the kind of being that takes a lotus pose or gnostic meditation and with a sutra spoken achieves an Icon's resolution. But you can't. These strings have hooks, and teeth. They gouge, and rip. You are alone, and you can't do this alone. You can't be alone. It's all too much. The responsibility of this singular revelation you barely understand only makes you more lonely.

You fall sideways, onto the sand, and curl up as dreaming dust scrape at your cheeks. You water the infertile ground, and cry. You miss your mother. You miss your sisters. You miss your boyfriend. You miss your partner, and your father-staple. You miss the things you were and the things you want. You wish someone would hold you. You wish anyone would hold you.

You stay that way, for a long time. And then your ear twitches. You hear the crunch of feet, near you. You dismiss it, as delusion, as some other nonsense, in your head.

And then something taps, tap tap tap, against your temple, and there is a shadow over you. You open your eyes, and look up.

It is your mother. It's mom. Holding something in her hand.

You recoil, and flinch away, as you push up. Did you fail again, when you banished the shape? Is it all happening again? You can't have it happen again -

She lowers herself down. She's wearing what she wore when she died, but lighter. Her heavy war-armour is gone, and there's an ephemeral dress of black and white with wide sleeves over her uniform tunic. In the center of her body, there is a hole, the same left by Hyperion, but it's been smoothed out, turned into a neat hollow in her torso where her diaphragm should be. In its center - a singularity.

She is smiling, in a strange and secret way. She reaches forward, and places the thing in your hand. It's a jar of haemic ice, but there's nothing inside. You gaze down at it, and back at her. She looks expectant.

EVENT HORIZON: She wants you to ask about the jar.

You look back down at the jar. You check the outside, and in, indulging this phantasm, indulging this ridiculous dream. "There's nothing in the jar." Perhaps there is a riddle, or a trick, or this is some message from The Cost for you to take before you wake up.

She nods a few times, bobbing her head, up and down. Her locks follow her. Her smile is like a bird's preening. "Yes. I thought that after your time with Nothing, you could use some empty calories."

What.

What is this?

"Nothing…" she says, and moves her hand as if she's trying to get you to follow a thought process. "Empty calories…"

You narrow your eyes, and then look back down at the jar, and up at her, and then down at the jar. "Is this a fucking pun?"

Her smile widens further. It is.

You put the jar down, and really study her. Really focus on her. Reach out, and touch her arm, where the seam of the first Harmony's own arm holds. Her shoulders. The henna of her neck. The locks of her ivy hair, which you pick at, disbelieving. There is a sensation you feel here you did not, in the dream.

<Is she real?>

EVENT HORIZON: As real as you.

You push back, and hold both of her shoulders. Her own lips are quivering, ever so slightly. It's - you can't. It's so hard. You can't pretend, it's her. It's her. It's her.

"It's like I said, all those years ago," she says, her own voice hitching, and then something else finishes the sentence.

EVENT HORIZON: I'm still here.

"I was here," she continues,

The nail that hosts the outlet of her soul finishes.

EVENT HORIZON: All along.

"And I'll be here,"

The horizon that has held her just beyond your reach, until now, forced to speak through it, forced to veil her words, completes.

EVENT HORIZON: "For as long as you need me," says your mother, in your mind, and in your heart.

The truth. Your mother, within your nail, reaching out. A miracle, of miracles. Not gone, and not forgotten. Not leaving you behind. Never leaving you behind. You do need her. You do. But you can't - you can't possibly -

She pulls you in and closes the distance. You fall into her arms and melt away into a touch you've not felt in eighteen years.

"I don't understand," you say, through tears of joy. "I don't understand."

She smoothes your hair, and calms your breathing, with a warm caress. Her voice is even, easy. Without the hidden pain that accompanied her, in life.

"This planet's secrets, and this planet's possibilities, are so much more beautiful than we ever could have imagined. More beautiful than even the ones who made us could have imagined." She is proof of that. That her soul is here, intact, is proof of that.

She rocks you, back and forth, and you are home again. And you are afraid to be home again.

"It can't be this easy. It can't be this simple. You are gone. You were gone." If it is easy, then taking it all away would be just as easy.

"I was gone, and I am gone. I died, and passed beyond the veil. That happened, and is not reversed. I will not return. You breached the point where dimensions intersect, and I went beyond the mind's eye - beyond the nail. My soul, past heaven's gate. And behind me, the pain and the suffering you felt, the loss of me, closed that self-same door. It was only this dream that reopened it, no matter how hard I tried. This is my shame."

Your whole body shakes with pent-up pain, pent-up longing. Oh Kora. You can't possibly have let her go so easily. You have only just begun to let her go. "Then it's my fault."

"No," she says, so sharply, so assertively, you have no choice but to agree. "It was never your fault. It was mine. I made a fetish of suffering. I imagined, at the end of my life, that the key to the pure land was pain. That there was a balance sheet of torment I had filled, and if I redeemed it, somehow I would transcend, and become more. I spent years, millennia, time stretched in the void, around the Cost, alone, contemplating my sorrow." Her voice trails, and she lets out a pained breath.

"I'm sorry," you say. "I'm sorry, I couldn't have -"

She shushes you with a finger to your lips, and you are made quiet by a touch. "Please, sweetheart. Be well, and listen. The time I spent was needed. I died and lived again. The Cost showed me exits, and entrances. Truths, and untruths. The Cost's abyss was a pure land, a ripe place to learn, and grow. A darkness far kinder than the dark our minds inhabit every day."

You cannot imagine such a place. Even your happiest dreams require veils of ignorance. But it means there was a pure land in the spiral. It meant something. It all meant something. "What did you learn?"

"I learned I did not need to suffer. That you did not need to suffer. That there was no virtue in it. No value. No purpose. It was…" she sighs. "It was the sigh of a crushed people, the heart of a heartless world. But this need for suffering was an illusion, all the same."

"Then," you try to understand that, in her arms. It's easier to think, in her arms. "Then what? Did…did our hurt mean nothing?" Did the sacrifice mean nothing?

"It all meant something," she assures. "But the path did not require suffering. It was marred by suffering. I imagined, if I sank into you, that I was somehow melding with you. But it was in spite of this attachment that I broke the seal. It was because of our compassion for each other, that you did. I did not open the pure land and you did not break the seal because you suffered. It was because you loved, that the seal broke. A seed of love that blossomed into a wonderful flower. You." She kisses your nail. You miss the way she did that, and the way it tickles you. You miss tickling.

EVENT HORIZON: Well, that, and some complex occultic incantations and a torch of growing knowledge of the Cost passed through the study of a eight-hundred years, but let's not ruin the moment.

"Were you afraid?"

"Oh sweetheart, so worried about your mother," she says, misty-eyed. "I was terrified. But I drew on a strength I did not know I had. You."

"Me?"

"I was able, even in the void, even in the abyss, to keep a connection to you. A connection to the nail that had let me in. The pain of the transfer had sealed the crack we made together in the wall, but love kept a tiny strand, the eye of a needle, open. And that was all it took, for an event horizon."

"So it was you," you accept, finally. "It was you all along, talking to me, through the nail."

"Not just me, but mostly me," she explains. "I saw everything. The pain you felt after. Every terrible and petty revenge enacted by Penitence. The life you had, as a monadic monk."

Your head is spinning. She watched it all. She was there, all along. And then another revelation strikes you, and your cheeks redden. "Wait. You watched it all?"

She laughs at that, a laugh like the crackle of a warm fire. "Beatific Dolorous Harmony, I was a general. I know how to give girls privacy when they need it."

You clear your throat and laugh awkwardly, red at the idea, as if you were young again. "Okay. Sorry."

And then, as that delight fades, you think more about everything you've seen, and look up at her. "Mom. What am I?"

And for the first time, you get a real answer. "You are the key to a project that was the last gasp of genius, the cooperation, and the hope of a golden age. Our final throw of the dice against the shape of the nightmare to come."

She looks you in the eyes.

"You are the culmination of Project Last Light. Not because of who you are, but by the narrowest chance, by the most desperate refuge in audacity. By the latent possibility you, and all hylics, represent."

The name has a power you do not recognize, but still makes your heart skip a beat. An enormity grips you. "What does that mean, really? Am I a monster? A prophet? A saviour?" The idea scares you, utterly. You are hardly keeping it together as a mortal.

"You are what you are," she tells you, so gently the words pillow the sharp angles of your fears. "And finding that out will be a wonderful mystery. There will be time enough for that. For now, just living is enough."

"Just living," you repeat, incredulous. "I have battled a glorified d10 in a psychonautic duel to the death and opened a hole through the bottom of the universe. I've discovered revelations about the very nature of this planet and found out I am the culmination of a project by deities who were building capital G GOD. There is a cosmic flower blooming in the middle of my head that I really hope won't stay there when I wake up. I am a figure of worship to a significant section of the world's population. I break the metaphysics of the galaxy by my existence. And all I have to do is just live."

"Yes," she says, without hesitation. "And you won't have to do it alone. You have twelve companions, after all, and you will have twelve more. And you have me."

That gives you a confidence you did not know you had. An other-power that you can lean on, in the deepest darkness of the world, and the void. "Will you be following me when I wake up? Will I have a ghostly mom hovering around…?"

She shakes her head. "No. This form I take, I take for you, in this dream. I am much more than this, and bound within the boundaries of your nail. It would be…unwise, to pop out and say hello. For both geopolitical and spiritual reasons. And you must take great care in who you tell anything about this. There are many who would desire this power, and the key it offers to the secrets of Dis. The shapes, and their Benefactor, are but one among many who seek the power of the void. Trust only those who truly know you as you are."

That makes you somewhat nervous. "Then…you'll be speaking through the nail, to me?"

"Yes, sweetheart. I won't leave you alone again. That, I've vowed. A vow I extend to all the world, to all sentient beings. I will work until no one has to be alone, ever again. My sympathy, reaching out to every corner of the galaxy's spirals."

That dizzies you. You're not sure what to say to that, or the depth of her conviction. There is something deeper, more iron, in that vow. Something sacred. But you cannot piece it together here.

"Now," she says, "the sun is coming up, soon. Would you like to rest, before it does? It is almost morning, where you are. In the world, outside. It is time to wake up. It is time for the whole planet to wake up."

"The world outside," you repeat, marveling. You really will be waking up. Waking up, to live. Is that really enough?

And if it is, could you really do it?

She adjusts herself, so that your head rests in her lap, sinks into the scent and sight and feel of her, meaning as much to you now as she ever did in life. As alive to you now as she ever was in life. And as you begin to drift into the first peaceful sleep you have had in so long, she sings. Sings to you, a lullaby.


You do, and rest within a long, and dreamless sleep. And then, as the first rays of sunshine crest over the horizon, you flutter open your eyes. You are alone, again, gently lying on the sand. She's gone, a vapour fading away beyond the event horizon, as the sun starts rising. You wonder if she was ever there - but then you wonder also, if she was always there, and still is. Always is.

EVENT HORIZON: And always will be. To tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. To love's long upward spiral.

Article:

AXIOM INVERTED

LOVE'S LONG UPWARD SPIRAL: You are Sympathy's daughter, and she is your mother. This path, committing you to one horizon, one hope, is something you accept warmly. Beneath pain and beyond sorrow, beneath speech and beyond thought, beneath despair and beyond the looking glass, she will be there for you. This is the name of your rose, your daystar, and your wishing star. This is your first, and your last, light.

V. PALINGENESIS

You are ready to wake. You are ready to say goodbye, and live. And so the morning comes. There, in the distance, after the long night, something peeking over the horizon. Something new. A sun of a colour that is not colour, a sun that is no sun. A sun that has never been seen upon this earth.

A sun that thaws the ice floes of your soul, and offers tomorrow, today.

A sun that your nail calls to, and beseeches the dawn.

EVENT HORIZON: Please. For our planet.

EVENT HORIZON: For our galaxy.

EVENT HORIZON: For my daughter.

And the sun answers, by rays that do not blind, but pierce your soul, and offer you the spiral glimpse of distant stars. A sun that offers heaven, and a pure land, at the bottom of the spiral. If only the world will let it in. If only the world would wake up.

Offers you the first, imagined sight of a Fifth Sun.


Everything goes white, and you wake.

And on the floor of a musty room of the Underlook Hotel, a woman passed out as Schemaphor Miss Normal opens her eyes for the first time in eighteen years. Tastes vomit on her breath, and a pain in her joints. Sniffs the smoke of lung darts, and the sound of scratchy music.

Opens her eyes, as something entirely new.

Opens her eyes, and lives again.

Opens her eyes, and smells the ashes.

And on the floor by your feet, skipping, half-dead, plays a record of the smoothest old-time Indigo cube-jazz.

Article:

The music beckons to you, conjuring forgotten fragments reminisces of evenings, people, a bar lit by lanterns. Fragments of the eighteen years you have lost. But the melody evokes other things too as you groggily come to your senses. Whispers at the edge of your waking mind, like the black dreams that overwhelmed you in the Chamber of Vanities, but somehow sharper.

What are these dreams that strike you as black dreams, revealed through your event horizon? This is a character, thematic, and power vote. Choose one song, and be granted near, far, and hind-sight of its subject, appearing through the catalyst of rolling your EVENT HORIZON.

[] Snakesong: Hatred and passion, emotion and suffering. The song of the snake, and the song of the warp. Gain visions of the feelings and the desires of others.
[] Whalesong: Time and space, history and geology. The song of the whale, and the song of the eater. Gain visions of the causes and material conditions of others.
[] Dreamsong: Hopes, dreams, beliefs, and aspirations. The song of the shape, and the song of the dreamer. Gain visions of the wishes and ambitions of others.

OOC: Thank you for enjoying this voyage with me. Let this be the beginning of much more. Where we're going, after all, we won't need wings to fly.