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Empyrean [Elden Ring/Destiny]

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37. Simulated Reality
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    • Many thanks to @BinaryApotheosis for betareading and fact-checking.

    -x-x-x-

    Simulated Reality

    -x-x-x-​

    "Father? Art thou… well?"

    "Ah, my son. I am… well enough, I think. My body feels no sickness, weakness, or pain. My disturbance is but a thing of the mind."

    "A thing of the mind?"

    "Aye. Ever since the Zamorian Moctucar fell, I have been… sick at heart. I am a warrior, Godwyn. And it feeleth as though I have run out of wars to fight."

    -x-x-x-​

    "So you could say we have some unanswered questions," I finish, leaning back against the Daybreak's cockpit from where I'm perched on her nose.

    "Sounds like it," Thermidor agrees. "I'm curious about these Outer Gods. How do they fit into the conflict between the Traveler and the Witness? There's no way they just missed it, is there?"

    "I can't imagine that," I agree. "That's been going on for, what, billions of years?"

    "Probably," Winchester says. "Although the strongest evidence we have is the Dreadnought. Which you know my thoughts on."

    "Yes, yes," Pluvius says impatiently. "The fact that the Dreadnought had experienced billions of years of subjective weathering doesn't necessarily mean that billions of years of real-time passed. You've mentioned. Again, Occam's Razor."

    "I just don't buy that it took the Hive, with Ascendant Plane warp tech and weaponized celestial bodies, billions of years to hit the amount of space we saw on the starcharts Savathûn gave us," Winchester says. "We know Oryx fought the Vex, and time can flow differently in the Ascendant Plane anyway. Isn't it more likely—"

    "Back on track," Thermidor interrupts. "This 'Frenzied Flame' entity sounds like it's taken a particular interest in you."

    "Is it not possible that its interest in Barrett is entirely contingent on its interest in me?" Melina asks him.

    "Possible," Thermidor allows. "But I don't think it's all that likely. It's not like it's been talking to your other friends, right? Rogier and Trinovar?"

    "True enough."

    "It knows about Guardians," I say. "Probably skimmed that from my mind during my visions."

    "You ever think we're too casual about having godlike paracausal beings rummaging around in our skulls?" Thermidor asks.

    "Probably."

    "Yes," Pluvius declares with a small shudder. "Ansible's almost ready, by the way. Although we should try to conserve power."

    "Great," Thermidor says, standing up. "We'll send off a quick message to Crow, and then you two can go back to rendezvous with your team while I keep watch over the Daybreak."

    "I don't like leaving you alone out here," I say. "Not when we know there's Vex around, and especially not when we don't know what they're up to."

    "Hate to break it to you, Barrett, but we've got three people here if you don't count the Ghosts," Thermidor says. "And two places to go. Would you rather leave me—with half my arsenal and Light for days—on my own with my ship, or would you rather send Melina off on her own to talk to your teammates?"

    "I mean, when you put it like that…" I cross my arms. "Fine. That ansible up?"

    "Yup," says Pluvius. "Patching you both into a channel… now."

    "Thermidor, Pluvius!" Crow's voice echoes in my aural receptors. It suddenly occurs to me, now that I've gone a couple months without hearing him, that I haven't thought about it as Uldren's voice in a very long time. "I lost the Daybreak's telemetry a few hours ago. Are you all right?"

    "Hey, Crow," Thermidor says, speaking into thin air. "We're alive. And, good news, we found Barrett!"

    "Hey there," I say. "Sorry for falling out of contact, had an unfortunate encounter with orbital debris."

    "Orbital—what did you do?"

    "There was a big tree," I protest. "I had to give it a look."

    "A big—"

    "Bad news," Thermidor cuts in, "The Daybreak's crashed and the Finite Samsara went down a ways north of me. I've lost radio with Parvati, although we had enough time to coordinate where she was going to try and put down. Pluvius is working on repairs, but power's going to be limited for a while. We've gotta be brief."

    "Got it," Crow says, all business once again. "What do you need? Just an evac, or something with more firepower?"

    "This world seems to be the hub of a Vex simulation," Thermidor says. "They shot me and Parvati down. We're going to need a fleet that can fend them off, I think."

    "Okay. Any idea of their numbers?"

    "No," Thermidor says. "They're staying invisible inside the sim—we think they're experimenting on, or at least observing, the locals. There's humans here, by the way. Not sure how or when they got here, still investigating."

    "Good to know," Crow says. "I'll contact the Empress and Misraakskel, see if anyone can spare a fleet."

    "Great," I say. "Thanks, Crow. Sorry about all this."

    "You can apologize by actually reporting the systems you're visiting from now on," Crow says, but I can hear the grin in his voice. "I want daily ansible check-ins, Thermidor, all right? For as long as you have the power. We won't talk long, but I want to know ASAP if things have gone to hell."

    "Sure," Thermidor says. "Parvati hasn't contacted you yet, then?"

    "Nope," Crow says. "I'll let you know next time we talk if she does. Be brave, Guardians."

    "Will do," I say. As the channel goes down, I turn back to Thermidor. "Still weird to hear him say that."

    Thermidor snorts. "You should get moving," he says. "Got a long ride ahead of you."

    "Yeah, yeah." I reach out and clasp his hand. "You take care of yourself, you hear?"

    "Same to you, old-timer," he says with a grin. "Go. I'm no Saint-14, but I can hold off some Vex for a while, if they show."

    -x-x-x-​

    "Ho there, Barrett, Lady Melina!" Trinovar raises his red-gauntleted hand as we approach the camp in the hollow below Fort Haight. The late afternoon sun glints off his armor, making it glow like a bonfire. "I expected ye to return with Barrett's vessel."

    "She's gone missing," I report.

    "Missing?" Trinovar asks blankly. "Who could steal your vessel? Surely none in the Lands Between have the knowledge to repair thy star-ship?"

    "No idea," I say. "Fortunately, it's no longer the only ship on-planet. You saw that falling star this morning?"

    "Aye. I wondered if that had aught to do with thee."

    "It did. A friend and teammate of mine came looking for me. His ship was shot down and crashed in Lake Agheel."

    "They say a dragon roosteth there," says Trinovar.

    "It did," I say. "Past tense."

    "Ha!" He chuckles. "Fine and well. Then I gather he remaineth with his vessel to see that it should not vanish as thine did."

    "Just about."

    To be clear, I'm not happy about losing the Lonestar. I'm not ranting or raving about it, but I'm pissed off. The Lonestar's been with me since, oh, well before Thermidor was first rezzed. A decade at least. She's carried me out of more than a few scrapes. I want to know who stole her, what they did with her, and who I have to tear to pieces to get her back.

    But there are bigger problems. Namely, the fact that this entire planet is possibly a Vex research installation. I'm not too worried about the people I've met being anything other than real—nice thing about being paracausal, the fact that they can interact with me normally is proof enough that they're not just Vex constructs—but I am worried about the implications of the world at large.

    How much of what I've seen has been carefully tailored to me? How much of what I've experienced has been manufactured? The dreams I've been having, the visions, the things I've pieced together about this world's history. How much of it is true?

    Most of it, I hope. Trinovar remembers the golden star falling and transforming the Erdtree. The Vex are bad at modifying people's memories. They can rewrite history, in some ways, but those ways are limited. A single Vex frame can retroactively rewrite its history to seemingly teleport, but that's the thing—they're teleporting. What they aren't doing is rewriting the experience of everyone else who also saw the history where they weren't in that other position. Osiris spent subjective millennia studying that—studying how the Vex can rewrite history without rewriting the lived experience of people who lived through that history.

    I was never a Vex scholar. My interests are much more in the Light and the Darkness, and the way a person's mental state resonates with different aspects of those fundamental paracausal forces. But from what I understood of Osiris' explanations, the Vex don't time travel in the strictest possible sense. If they did, they would have already destroyed us. They could have simply written us out of existence. But they can't—not outside the Vault of Glass, anyway.

    They can change history, but only in very limited ways. 'The Vex see time itself as a quantum object,' is how Osiris explained it. 'Or, more correctly, they see themselves as a quantum object observed through the double-slit of the present moment. They can rewrite the past, because the past is not being observed in the present. But the only thing they are capable of changing is their own place within the superposition. They can change their own history. They cannot change ours.'

    The Vex rewrote themselves into the history of Venus and Mercury when Golden Age archaeologists started exploring. They did the same on Neptune when the Neomuni were first building their city. But they couldn't change Rasputin's decision to flag Neptune as a possible bunker for humans to wait out the Collapse, which he wouldn't have done if the Vex had been established on Neptune when he went searching for strongholds. The only conclusion is that the Vex weren't there when he went looking. And the Vex had been there for centuries when the Neomuni found them. Both statements are true. The only contradiction is if you assume that the past is the same from every frame of reference, which Osiris argues it isn't.

    Hopefully, he's right. Because if he is, then the Vex can't use their time travel to modify people's memories. And that would mean that things people tell me about the past are historical fact, rather than more Vex fabrication. But the meaning of those events is fundamentally in question. Was the star a real object, or an artifact of the simulation? Is the Erdtree a real megaflora, or a Vex construct?

    I know the Scarlet Rot and the Death Blight are paracausal. I know this because Lumina cured them, albeit only partly in Millicent's case, and I know from Asher Mir that Vex conversion can't be cured that way. That should be comforting. It isn't. It's terrifying.

    Because I know, or strongly suspect, that the Vex are studying paracausality on this world. It begs the question—how far have they gotten?

    If the Vex have actually hit a breakthrough of some kind, have managed to turn this simulation into a place where they can model paracausality in the same way that the Vault of Glass allowed them to control other people's history? It's entirely possible none of us are ever getting off this world. That's just me being realistic. It's been something we Guardians have generally known for a while—the Vex are incredibly powerful, but have a crippling weakness in the form of their paracausality blindspot. If they've managed to get rid of that blindspot…

    Well. It's bad.

    Fortunately, I doubt they have. There's something like half a dozen Outer Gods on this world, and I haven't seen any obvious indicators that any of them are under the direct control of the Vex. Hell, the Vex haven't even started turning this planet into a machine world, which suggests to me that they're still in the observation stage of their experiments. I can't help but think it'd be damn obvious if they had gotten to the point where they could stand on even footing with paracausality and paracausal beings.

    "Thou saidst that thy companion's vessel was 'shot down,'" Trinovar says. "What could do such a thing, in these lands? Was he struck by a passing star as it fell?"

    "No," I say. "Worse. Some of my old enemies are apparently here, in the Lands Between and in the sky above it." I'm not really sure how to explain Vex simulation tech in a way that someone who doesn't even have the word digital in their vernacular will understand. "It seems they've placed a sort of… illusion over the entire world. It's unclear as of now how much of the world is natural, and how much they created."

    Trinovar leans back. "I fear I do not understand. Surely thou canst not mean what I think thou meanest."

    "It means," I say grimly, "that I'm officially questioning everything. Everything except people, because I'm pretty sure I'd be able to tell if they were illusions. And obvious magic, which the Vex shouldn't be able to imitate. Anything else? Fair game."

    "You think we are living in an illusion?" Melina asks quietly. "I was not certain if that was how I should interpret your discussion with Sir Thermidor."

    "Sir Therm—" I snort. "Oh, man, you should call him Lord Thermidor when we see him next. I'd pay to see his face."

    "Is he a Lord, then?" she asks.

    "Technically. I think Saladin inducted him as an Iron Lord, anyway. Not completely sure, but it'd be funny either way." I shake my head. "But—yes, that's the implication. This whole world is surrounded, as far as Thermidor could tell, by a simulated reality maintained by the Vex. We have no way of knowing how long that's been true, or how much control they can exert over the reality within the simulation. The only things I'm confident about are that the people we interact with are real, and that they can't do magic without outside help. But that's all I'm sure about."

    "Then we must be wary," Trinovar says slowly. "And… perhaps we should endeavor to keep our party together."

    "Yeah," I say. "We don't have a timeline for when Blaidd was supposed to be done in Nokron, do we?"

    "He thought to take anywhere between two days to two weeks," Melina says. "We are well past the earlier estimate, but have not yet passed the later."

    "Then maybe we should go after him," I say. "Chester—how we doing on power ammo?"

    "Topped up and good to go," says my Ghost, appearing over my shoulder.

    "I do not know if Torrent can manage the treacherous terrain within the crater," Melina says quietly, looking over at the giant sinkhole.

    "Mm. True," I agree.

    "Perhaps Lady Melina and I could take up Sir Kenneth Haight's offer of hospitality," Trinovar says, "and thou couldst descend in search of Blaidd and his party?"

    "You just suggested we stick together," I point out.

    "And I maintain that we ought to do so," Trinovar says. "But we three are not all of our party—and Rogier and the others have no warning of the threat thou hast uncovered. If all this is true, then thy old enemies may seek to destroy thine allies before they can benefit from thy knowledge and abilities. We must warn them. But mine own duty is to guard the Lady, and Torrent cannot descend into the depths. That leaveth only thee."

    It's a good argument. "You trust Haight?" I ask.

    "I trust him better than I do the wilds," says Trinovar. "And should he seek to betray us, I trust that he hath no warriors who could do harm to Lady Melina while I protect her."

    "'Tis not a poor plan," Melina says. "and It is true that perhaps we should seek to reunite with Blaidd as quickly as possible, especially since Thermidor is alone while we are here. Go, Barrett. Help our friends. Trinovar and I will be safe until you return."

    "I don't like how much we're splitting up," I say quietly, reaching up and resting my hand on Torrent's neck.

    She places her hand over mine. It fuzzes away into blue mist where we touch. "Then you had best be quick," she says with a small smile. "The sooner you find Rogier and the others, the sooner we shall be reunited."

    "Yeah." I sigh and pull my hand away. "Okay. I'll come and find the two of you at Fort Haight when I'm done. If I can't find them in… let's say three days, I'll come back up alone."

    "We shall look to see you then," Trinovar says. "In three days, and no more."

    I nod to him. "Be careful," I say. "Both of you."

    "You as well, Barrett," Melina says. "I do not know what you will find in the Eternal City. They were sealed long ago. I do not know how dangerous it might be."

    "I'll be fine," I say. "I might not be Eris Morn, but I know how to survive in the pit. Go. I'll see you both soon."

    We part ways—them headed up the hill, me down towards the chasm. I look down into the dark, seeing masonry exposed deep beneath the surface.

    "She'll be all right," Winchester says quietly. "Don't worry too much."

    "I'm trying not to," I say softly.. "Damn it all, Winchester. Vex. You remember how I was after the Vault. After we found out what happened to Kabr and his team." I'd had nightmares for weeks, interspersed with my old Crypt-visions. Dreams about a fireteam I'd never had that had been erased from my own history, or about being one of those other three Guardians—the ones besides Pahanin, Praedyth, and Kabr, the ones who had been erased from time so utterly and completely that even the tiny fragments that were left of those three couldn't remember them.

    "Yeah." Winchester's voice is soft. "Yeah, I know. But you're right, Barrett. The people you've met are too comfortable with you and with paracausality to be Vex constructs. The magic in the Lands Between is too obviously paracausal to be an artifact of the sim. Yeah, there's a lot we have to start to question. But not everything. Hold on to that, okay, bud?"

    "Okay." I take a deep breath. "Thanks."

    "Any time."

    I jump into the pit.

    -x-x-x-​

    As I announced on Monday's Of Many Colors chapter, I'm a bit burned out on writing after something like two years of moderately reliable weekly uploads. As such, I'm taking a brief hiatus for the last couple weeks of 2023. I intend to return at the beginning of January.
     
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    • A lovely update of a lovely fic. You've more than earned your rest (not that it needs to be earned at all). Relax, decompress, and have a wonderful Christmas/New Year! ^.^
     
    38. Molten Silver, Molten Gold
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    • Many thanks to @BinaryApotheosis for betareading and fact-checking.

    -x-x-x-

    Molten Silver, Molten Gold

    -x-x-x-​

    "What is this place?"

    "Used to be called New Delhi, before the Collapse. Or possibly just Delhi. The records I've been able to gather disagree."

    "The… Collapse?"

    "That's what people have taken to calling it, from what I hear from the other Ghosts. Used to be, this city was one of the most populous in the world. Now look at it."

    "It smells of rot. Decay."

    "Yes. Several million corpses a few months into open-air degradation will do that. I don't know what the Darkness did here, specifically, but I do know most of the city died, and the survivors had more important things to worry about than giving the bodies funeral rites."

    "And this… Collapse. It affected more than just this city?"

    "Parvati… humanity was spread across the entire solar system a couple years ago. It affected everywhere."

    -x-x-x-​

    After a careful double-jump, I land lightly on a flagstone floor. The darkness has grown too quickly to be completely natural—I can look up and still see the last embers of sunset painting the star-studded sky, but down here I can barely see the edges of the shattered platform I'm standing on.

    Winchester appears over my shoulder, lighting up his eye. The spotlight follows my gaze as I look around. This was once a floor, clearly, long since buried. But as I look over the edge, I can see the broken remains of another floor. And then another, below that.

    I descend. The meteorite must have broken into an underground river or reservoir fairly close to the surface, because a waterfall is roaring as it descends into the darkness. It's the only sound besides the tapping of my boots on stone.

    Then, finally, I see something new. An opening—maybe something that was once a doorway—leading out of this long, dark descent and into something more like a room. The waterfall continues rushing past me into the gloom. It reminds me of the Hellmouth, that pit—I have no idea how deep it goes, or what might be lurking at the bottom. Hopefully I can get Rogier and the others out faster than Eris managed to escape the depths of the moon.

    I enter the room. It's a tiny bit less dark in here, but I can't figure out what the source of the incredibly dim light might be, yet. The floor is broken here, too, and I can see down below a few more levels. I drop down—one, two, three floors—and then I find my light source.

    There are two torches on the bottom level. They're lying on the ground as if whoever was carrying them dropped them in a hurry. Both are still burning with a ghostly white flame. It's not a natural fire, and it's not Hive Soulfire, either.

    "Never seen anything like this," I murmur to Winchester as I kneel beside one of them. Even that, barely above a whisper, seems to echo around this silent place.

    "Yeah," he agrees, just as quietly—and the sound, again, is thunderous down here. "You think it's some kind of long-lasting flame? Maybe that's why it's still burning who knows how long after it was left here."

    "No," I say grimly. "I don't think it's been abandoned that long. Look." I point at something I'd caught a glimpse of on the edge of Chester's light as we descended. He directs the beam over, and it lights up a massive brazier on a stone pedestal—a brazier filled with cold, dark ash.

    "Huh." Winchester's flaps rotate. "Why would this still be lit, if those are out?"

    "Because this was abandoned more recently?"

    "Yeah, but why? Whoever left this clearly needed light, so why wouldn't they use those braziers?"

    "Maybe they didn't have enough fuel?" I suggest. "Takes a lot of wood to light up something like that properly."

    "Maybe—" Winchester pauses, then turns his gaze back on the torch. "I don't think that thing is burning wood."

    I glance back at it. The torch is made of metal, with the head consisting of a miniature brazier which keeps the fuel inside with a sort of very loose mesh. I can't tell exactly what's inside, not by just looking.

    "Give it a scan?" I suggest.

    "Already on it," Winchester says. "The fire is cold."

    "Cold?" I reach out gingerly and brush my hand into it. It is cold—not just room-temperature, but cold. I have to pull my hand back quickly as the fire burns like a Europan glacier. "Huh. Paracausal, then, obviously."

    "Yeah…" Winchester says. "I'm… give me a sec, bud."

    I glance at him. "What's wrong?"

    "Having to do scans I haven't done in decades," Chester says, still staring down at the torch. "Real specific stuff. Genetic analysis."

    "Genetic…?" I look down at the torch. Suddenly, the cold, white fire seems even more ominous.

    "Genetic," Winchester confirms. He doesn't turn to face me—doesn't want to blind me with his flashlight—but he does look away from the torch, flaps twitching. "Human bones."

    I suck in a breath. "Bone ain't easy to burn," I say.

    "No," he agrees. "Definitely paracausal, and I've never seen anything quite like it. But do me a favor and don't pick it up, would you?"

    "Sure," I say. It's not a hard request to grant—I don't like the idea of using a torch that's burning magic fire with human bones as fuel, especially when we don't know how the magic making it run works. But I still ask, "Why, specifically?"

    "Because even though I ain't seen anything quite like it, it reminds me a little of dark ether."

    My hand—the one I just touched that fire with—clenches into a fist. "That's not good."

    "No," Chester agrees.

    Dark ether is a weird substance. We still don't know exactly how it works, how it's made, or how to get rid of it. The stuff lingers, a corrosive miasma wearing out the fabric of reality. It's even toxic to the integrity of Ascendant demiplanes, like throne worlds. From what we've pieced together, it was first created when Riven used a wish to resurrect a dead Eliksni, and her Taken corruption blended with the ether still in his system. No one is sure—not even Silver—if that blending was deliberate on her part.

    Either way, that Eliksni came back changed. The Anthem Anatheme is powerful, but it has trouble interfering with death. His name was Fikrul, and we called him the Fanatic. As far as we know, he was the first of the Scorn, who ended up being some of the Witnesses main footsoldiers by the end, right alongside the Taken and Hive.

    "Do I need to worry about reality breaking down?" I ask.

    "Seems more stable than dark ether there, at least," he says. "But it's heavily dark-polar. Maybe even more than dark ether. Using one of these might be a cognitohazard."

    Darkness is metaphysical. It works on the levels of the mind and the soul, in the same way that Light is physical and operates on the level of forces and reactions. Things that the darkness has touched tend to affect people who interact with them too much. "Got it," I say. "Leave the scary cursed torch on the ground. Can do. How long will it keep burning?"

    "Longer than a normal torch," says Winchester. "But not forever. It was dropped here… a few days ago, a couple weeks at most."

    "Might've happened when Blaidd and the others came through here," I say. "Maybe they fought whoever was using it?"

    "Maybe," Winchester says. "If so… let's hope they didn't pick up some of these for themselves."

    "Yeah." I stand up. There's another doorway on the other side of the room, and I can see a dim light, like starlight on a new moon night, coming through it. "Let's go."

    I pass through the doorway. On the other side is a city.

    Stone buildings rise from uncertain depths to scrape the roof of the massive cavern. The architecture looks almost Gothic, like some of the manors that are still intact on the outskirts of the EDZ back on Earth. I've emerged standing on the gable of a stone-shingled roof, and I immediately pick out a path along the rooftops of a few nearby buildings that I can follow to get down into the city proper. Between the towers, I can see the rest of the massive cavern, and the ghostly lights suspended in the air near its ceiling like stars.

    No. This isn't a cavern. This is an underworld.

    "That's new," murmurs Winchester.

    "Welcome to Asphodel," I whisper back.

    Then a silvery projectile comes sailing towards my head. I barely duck out of the way in time. In less than a second, there's a sniper rifle on my back. Then it's in my hands, and I'm aiming down the scope.

    There's a silver blob on one of the rooftops. Actually, there are several. And most of them seem to be manifesting javelins out of the substance of their bodies, aiming straight at me.

    "Shit," I say, and dive to the side. A dozen silver spears thud into the wall behind me, shattering the stone and sending chipped fragments flying with an explosive boom.

    Winchester has vanished into my backpack—the floating stars provide enough light for me to see, albeit dimly.

    I take aim and fire my rifle. The crack is deafening in the silence. One of the blobs explodes, sending silver liquid flying in a hundred droplets, and what's left of it melts into an inert puddle on the roof. Then I have to dodge again as the rest of them launch more spears at me.

    They're organized, Winchester observes over our private channel. They're shooting as a firing line.

    I noticed!     I take aim, and fire on another blob. It explodes. Then I dodge again. This cycle goes on two, three more times.

    Then something changes. As I dodge, I vaguely register that fewer spears are impacting the wall this time. I don't have time to really think through the implications or count the number of spears—I just assume it's because I've taken out a few of them by now. I bring my gun up and look down the scope, just in time to see the other half of the javelins heading straight for me. I don't have time to dodge.

    I die quickly.

    -x-x-x-​

    A hand stands upright, like that of a buried giant, its wrist hidden beneath the soil. Its skin is gnarled, grey-brown bark. Its fingers move slightly, swaying as if in a breeze. It is framed against the brilliant white of the moon, rising from behind the horizon.

    A golden light descends like a bolt of lightning. It spears down, slicing between the ring and middle fingers of the giant hand. The hand writhes, as if in agony, as it splits down the middle. On the left, the thumb, index, and middle fingers splay out, as though trying to grasp at something. On the right, the pinky and ring fingers twitch erratically for a moment, and then fall still.

    The change starts from the fingertips, as though molten gold is being poured down on the Two Fingers. Their bark changes, going from gnarled brown to brilliant gold. Slowly, they stiffen and rise, until they are perfectly upright, like soldiers standing at attention, or like golden pillars holding up the sky.

    The three other fingers continue to writhe. Then the thumb catches fire. It spreads across what remains of the palm, engulfing the index and middle fingers in turn. The fire is a sickly yellow, and seems almost viscous, burning unnaturally slowly, with strange dark pits in the shadows between tongues of flame. The Three Fingers clench into half a fist.

    I suddenly become aware of my own body, watching all of this framed against the full moon—which has turned the same brilliant gold as the two fingers on the left. On an instinct, I turn around.

    There is a second moon in the sky, half risen on the opposite horizon. Its outline is pale white. But it is filled in, not with light, but with a darkness so deep that it seems to suck in the light of its silhouette. I have the indelible sense that the Dark Moon is watching me closely.

    -x-x-x-​

    I gasp for air as Winchester calls me back. No time to think about that vision now—I roll to my feet, take aim, and fire again. A blob explodes, and several of the others fire. I can see the rest taking aim—waiting for me to dodge again so they can take me out as I come up again.

    So I change my approach. I palm a smoke bomb as I dodge, squeezing it in my palm to pop it, fading to invisibility halfway through my roll. I take an extra somersault, dodging the second volley by the skin of my teeth, but also sending myself right over the edge of the gabled roof.

    I jump in midair off a platform of manifested Light, catching myself on a different roof. Then I start sprinting forward, taking the roofs two at a time like giant steps. I realize, in some corner of my mind, that the part of my brain that goes into overdrive in a hard Crucible match has kicked back into gear—get to a different sightline, attack their flanks, use heavy weapons to take out multiple at once if possible.

    Most of the blobs aren't clustered. They're on different roofs, spread across a couple dozen different buildings of different heights. But there are a couple places where two or three group up. Chester, I say silently. Ascendancy.

    I feel the weight of the rocket launcher land on my back. I holster my sniper rifle and pull it out. In midair, I take aim, hold to allow the automated target lock to kick in, and fire. As I pull the trigger, my invisibility breaks, and the rocket blasts forward.

    Three blobs of silver scatter into molten droplets. Osteo! I think to Winchester as I holster the launcher. By the time my hands are free, Osteo Striga is already in its place on my lower back. I pull it out and start firing.

    I keep moving, never staying on the ground or at one angle from them long enough for them to get a bead on me. The blobs start firing at will, peppering me with an irregular stream of their spears. A few of them actually hit, but my shields handle those individual shots a lot better than the dozen at once that killed me.

    It takes a few minutes of frenzied activity before the last of the blobs atop this cluster of buildings goes down. I land beside the dribbling blob left by one of them, breathing heavily, my gel-tissue lungs expanding and contracting rapidly as the air powers the hydraulic heart pumping Clarified radiolaria through my veins.

    Nice shooting, bud, Winchester says.

    "Thanks," I say aloud. "Had another vision."

    Any answers?

    "No," I say. "But I think I'm starting to close in on the right questions."

    -x-x-x-​

    Welcome back. I still don't have much of a backlog of prewritten chapters the way I'd like, but that's fine. I'm feeling much better. Thank you all for the messages of support.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Oof, smart blobs are no fun. Wonder if our intrepid hero will get flattened by one of the big balls, or if he'll just introduce it to a Golden Gun first?
     
    aledeth said:
    Oof, smart blobs are no fun. Wonder if our intrepid hero will get flattened by one of the big balls, or if he'll just introduce it to a Golden Gun first?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    It'll be even worse if he lets it roll at him all slow like for even a few seconds because you may not know this, but if given a few seconds at normal speed and a straight away the balls will go from 50 to 135 in an instant and flatten you before you can even react.
     
    Lithos Maitreya said:
    A hand stands upright, like that of a buried giant, its wrist hidden beneath the soil. Its skin is gnarled, grey-brown bark. Its fingers move slightly, swaying as if in a breeze. It is framed against the brilliant white of the moon, rising from behind the horizon.

    A golden light descends like a bolt of lightning. It spears down, slicing between the ring and middle fingers of the giant hand. The hand writhes, as if in agony, as it splits down the middle. On the left, the thumb, index, and middle fingers splay out, as though trying to grasp at something. On the right, the pinky and ring fingers twitch erratically for a moment, and then fall still.

    The change starts from the fingertips, as though molten gold is being poured down on the Two Fingers. Their bark changes, going from gnarled brown to brilliant gold. Slowly, they stiffen and rise, until they are perfectly upright, like soldiers standing at attention, or like golden pillars holding up the sky.

    The three other fingers continue to writhe. Then the thumb catches fire. It spreads across what remains of the palm, engulfing the index and middle fingers in turn. The fire is a sickly yellow, and seems almost viscous, burning unnaturally slowly, with strange dark pits in the shadows between tongues of flame. The Three Fingers clench into half a fist.

    I suddenly become aware of my own body, watching all of this framed against the full moon—which has turned the same brilliant gold as the two fingers on the left. On an instinct, I turn around.

    There is a second moon in the sky, half risen on the opposite horizon. Its outline is pale white. But it is filled in, not with light, but with a darkness so deep that it seems to suck in the light of its silhouette. I have the indelible sense that the Dark Moon is watching me closely.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    ...Huh. I never figured out which fingers the Two Fingers were, but... yeah, that tracks.
    I wonder if that hand is from the Fell God? Struck down by Grace, some of its 'power' stripped away, and the Frenzied Flame is the remnants gone mad?

    Second Best Girl keeping an eye on Best Girl's "friend" is nice. Menacing, but nice.
     
    Last edited:
    I am surprised that Leaden Moon reads as Darkness to our guardian, given how it's primary characteristic in ER is complete apathy. Mayhaps it is just in comparascent to Light coded Golden Order?
     
    39. Nikolai
  • Threadmarks
    • Many thanks to @BinaryApotheosis for betareading and fact-checking.

    -x-x-x-

    Nikolai

    -x-x-x-​

    "Father? Thou calledst for me?"

    "Ah, Godwyn, my son. Thy mother hath given me another task."

    "Thou seemest pleased."

    "I am most pleased. I am to take the army south and seize Stormveil Castle for the glory of the Erdtree. Tell me, my son—wilt thou accompany me, as one of my generals? Or wouldst thou rather remain here with thy studies?"

    "My studies can follow me—books and scrolls can be moved. I am honored to accept this commission, Father."

    -x-x-x-​

    I follow the rooftops for about half an hour, looking for a way into the buildings. The tower I used to get down is separated from most of the city for some reason—I have no way of guessing why—but most of the city is a much denser jungle of interconnected rooftops. Eventually, though, I find my way into one of the buildings and start descending.

    "How the hell are we supposed to find the others in all this?" I ask Winchester as I look down from the windowsill. The building looks like some kind of church, by the altar on the ground floor and the pews facing it. The window opens onto a landing overlooking the main sanctum. My voice echoes in the quiet. "They could be anywhere."

    Just keep your ears open? he suggests. We could probably hear them across half the city. Even those slimeballs barely made any noise.

    "I guess," I agree. I jump onto the landing, then vault over the low fence and drop to the ground level. My feet land with a splash. It takes me a second to figure out why.

    The entire floor of the church is covered with silver ooze. The same substance as the puddles left behind by those things on the roofs. None of it is moving.

    "What the hell happened here?" I whisper, looking around.

    No idea. Be careful, bud.

    "Don't need to tell me twice." I start a slow circuit of the room, walking along past the pews and up onto the pulpit, then around behind the altar.

    Then I stop, staring.

    There's a body leaning against the altar. Mercifully, it's not one of my friends. The figure is dressed in some kind of white and silver vestments. Behind their veiled vestments, I see the skin around their eyes.

    They look like an Awoken. And there are three silver javelins buried in their torso.

    I start walking over. About halfway to the corpse, I realize I was wrong. The blood that's congealed and dried around the wounds is silvery-grey—not the same as the stuff coating the floor, but similar—rather than the red I'd expect in an Awoken.

    I kneel beside the body. Dark eyes stare sightlessly past me, hands slack on a pair of heavy maces. "Winchester," I say. "You still got that genetic scan cued up?"

    "Yep," he says, appearing beside me and starting to examine the body. "Gimme a bit."

    While he's working on that, I start looking between all those veils for anything identifying. I'm not expecting to find dog-tags or anything, but even some religious iconography would be helpful at this point.

    I manage to find something after a fair bit of searching, just because of all the layers of silk the body is shrouded in. Under all of them, nestled between their breasts, is an amulet. I pull it out and stare at it for a long moment.

    The amulet is circular. Its edge is silver, but the interior is all polished black onyx, dark as pitch.

    "The Dark Moon," I murmur softly.

    "Hm?" Winchester asks.

    "I saw this in my vision," I say. "I think…" I trail off, staring at the amulet for a moment before I tug the chain upward and close my fist around the medallion. "I think it might be the Outer God—or a symbol of the Outer God—sending me these visions. Some of them, at least."

    "Huh." Winchester looks away from the body, turning to face me, flaps rotating. "Okay. This person had human ancestry, I think. But I suspect genetic tampering."

    "Tampering? How so?"

    "They were cold-blooded. Not sure how the hell they managed to survive down here, without sunlight to help with temperature regulation. But unless you think cold-bloodedness could convergently evolve in a neohuman subspecies when lizards diverged from their ancestry a couple hundred million years ago, yeah, I think genetic engineering is likely."

    "Vex, you think?"

    "Couldn't say," Winchester says. "It's not their usual MO. Why would the Vex care about human genetics? They want to exterminate all of us anyway. But, at the same time, who the hell else could it be?"

    "We know Sword-Logic made it to this world," I point out. "Could've been the Hive. Or the Alabaster and Onyx Lords, we don't know how advanced their tech was when they got here."

    "It's not Hive MO either, for the same reasons." He shifts his flaps in something like a shrug. "Could've been the rock guys, I guess. Or maybe they did it to themselves somehow, or another local group did it—we haven't seen even a fraction of the ways this world has used paracausality in its history. Wouldn't be the craziest thing we've seen paracausal powers do to biological life."

    "True." I reach out with two fingers and close the corpse's eyes, then stand up. "So, I guess they were fighting those silver blobs down here? Maybe a day or two ago, given how dry the blood's gotten?"

    "Less," Winchester says. "Cold-blooded, remember? It'd congeal faster, I think. Yesterday, I'd guess. At the earliest."

    My fist clenches around the Dark Moon amulet. "Right around when Thermidor and Parvati got past the Vex blockade, then. Think it's related?"

    "Could be." Winchester looks around. "I don't think this silver goo has any radiolaria in it, though."

    "Wouldn't have to," I say. "They could just be simulated. Hell, this corpse could be simulated. This could all be a deliberately-placed red herring."

    "Could be," Winchester allows. "What do you want to do? Just ignore it?"

    "Not sure. I—"

    A rattling shriek comes from the church's main doorway. It's a terrible, wretched sound, like something straight out of the Hive tunnels. I spin around to see a few really ugly fellas charging me.

    They're maybe four feet high, with pasty white skin that's stained red with blood around the eyes and mouth, in the folds between their protruding ribs, and at their extremities. They're naked, but there's no identifiable sexual organs on them. A couple of them carry metal torches burning with cold, white fire. Some are carrying spears and red shields with a sigil of an upside-down hawk painted on them in black. Others are struggling with massive slabs of metal—full-size tower shields, bigger than they are. They stare at me with bulging eyes—in some cases only one, with raw red sockets to accompany them—wide enough that the pupils are pinpricks in a lake of bloodshot white.

    Those pupils are glowing with golden fire.

    "Igneous," I say to Winchester as he vanishes. The familiar weight of my hand cannon appears at my hip.

    I pull it out and take aim—and before I've fired a single shot, the creatures dive for cover. The ones with the big tower shields bunker behind them, while those without hide behind them or duck behind the pews. They scatter to the outer edges of the room, unnaturally coordinated, ducking out of cover with perfect timing as they slowly approach me, dashing from row to row of pews. I take out three with my Igneous Hammer, missing and hitting a pew only once, but these guys are more organized than any fireteam of Guardians I've ever fought in the Crucible.

    In fact, there's only one group I've ever fought that moved with this level of organization.

    "Ascendancy," I say, holstering my hand cannon.

    The rocket blasts into the middle of the room, blasting the creatures hunkering behind the towershields into a momentary hurricane of stringy gore before the wreckage of them settles in the middle of the room. I'm already loading another rocket before the red finishes hitting the ground. I send that one towards the pews to my right, blowing them to smithereens and doing the same to the things hiding behind them.

    But by the time I turn around to face my left flank, the things are already close enough to me that I can't safely hit them with a rocket. I sidestep a spear, sending a weighted, red-hot knife into the single bulbous eye of the one holding it. I pull out Igneous again with my other hand, blasting another in the dome with a Solar-charged round. I whip the gun around, cracking one of them in the curve of its skull with a pistol whip, before firing again at the one behind it.

    I hear footsteps behind me—there must have been one hiding in cover outside the blast radius on my right flank. Can't deal with that now—one swipes at me with a rusty sword, then follows up with a swing of that glacier-cold torch. I dodge both, then put an Igneous Hammer round in its solar plexus. A spear catches my shield—not breaking it, not yet, but I can't take more than a few hits before it does—and I punish the one holding it with another Igneous round.

    Igneous Hammer has a nine-round cylinder. One shot left.

    I roll to the side, crack off the final shot into the one that was trying to sneak up behind me, then reload. I'm fast with reloading a hand cannon—every self-respecting Hunter that hangs out in the Crucible is—but even the brief half-second it takes me is enough for them to close the distance. I deflect one spear with my left hand while shooting with my right, but a sword manages to catch me in the back. I kick the one holding it, sending it staggering, and fire off two more shots. One misses—go for center of mass, you idiot, not headshots at this range!—but the other finds its mark.

    I take another hit. My shield is still holding, but another good hit will break it. These things do as much damage as any Eliksni Wretch's shock glaive, I swear. More than most.

    But their numbers are dwindling. The only problem now is that I'm surrounded with the five that are left. I make a sweeping motion with my left hand, plowing one of them into another, while firing a round into a third. The bullet caves in its ribcage—center of mass works fine for these things—and I roll forward past it, escaping the encirclement. Then I spin around again, cracking off three shots and taking out three of the remaining creatures.

    The last one has reached me by the time I have, and is already mid-swing before I can take aim. Then its head caves in—not because of anything I did, but because of the heavy ball of metal that smacks into it out of nowhere.

    As the creature falls, I follow the metal sphere with my eyes as it darts erratically through the air, pulled by a thin strand of metal that twines and flexes like string—before solidifying into the long handle of a mace in the hand of a man cloaked in white and silver, standing in a formerly-hidden doorway on the side of the pulpit.

    We stare at each other for a long moment. Then—"Inside," he snaps, gesturing at the passage behind him. "Quickly!"

    I don't question him. I just sprint forward, reloading and then holstering my gun as I go. As soon as I get past him, he tugs down on a lever, and the wall slides across to cover the opening, leaving us in darkness.

    But only for a moment. A lantern lights up beside me—with ordinary fire, for once—illuminating the gray skin around the man's dark eyes as he stares at me.

    "I know not who or what thou art," he says. "But thou didst battle against the Hawks, and on this day that is enough to mark thee mine ally."

    "Good to know," I say, leaning back against the wall as I catch my breath. "Do they know about this tunnel?"

    "Aye," he says. "But they have no way of opening it from that side—only an inducted Nightmaiden can do so."

    "They don't have any explosives?"

    "None that could breach this gate," he says. "Not yet, at least." He sighs, clipping his twin maces at his sides. "But, then, this hath already been a day of terrible, sudden change."

    "So this is new?" I ask.

    "Indeed. The Fallen Hawks descended into the Eternal City centuries ago—by the Nox's counting, at least, which may no longer be entirely accurate—and they have never behaved thus before. And at the same time, our Silver Tears have all risen in rebellion for no discernible cause."

    "And all of this happened in the past day?"

    "Aye. More or less—we have no way of checking our timepieces against the sun and moon, down here." He considers me. "We are safe for now. I am Nikolai, Nightcleric of Nokron. I heard the sound and fury of thy weapons and came to investigate. Who art thou? What art thou?"

    "Name's Barrett-12," I say. "Call me Barrett. I'm a lot of things you've never heard of, but people who look like me are called Exominds or Exos. And I might have some idea what's causing all the problems today."

    He considers me. "Then thou shouldst come with me, Sir Barrett," he says. "Lady Katerina will wish to speak with thee."
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Fun fun fun. Love to see groups that you never really interact with in-game outside of killing them get some spotlight.
     
    It's things like this that really make me appreciate any Soulsborne story; in-game, you can't really have these conversations and interactions with the world, not to this level of depth, and you do such a good job bringing everything to life :D
     
    40. The Nox
  • Threadmarks
    • Many thanks to @BinaryApotheosis for betareading and fact-checking.

    -x-x-x-

    The Nox

    -x-x-x-​

    "What was that?"

    "Sounded like weapons fire of some kind. Might be those four-armed scavengers."

    "Four-armed scavengers?"

    "Yeah. Aliens. They landed on Earth just a couple months ago. I think they've already set up staging areas in parts of the outer system. I've met a couple of Ghosts who had closer encounters with them. I don't think anyone's settled on what to call them yet."

    "Who would they be shooting at?"

    "If we're lucky? Each other. If we're not? Survivors."

    "We have to investigate. We have to help."

    -x-x-x-​

    I follow Nikolai down the tunnel. The lantern swings in his grip as we descend even further underground, first down a flight of stairs and then along a corridor that seems as though it was smoothly carved out of the rock without any irregularities or adornments. There's a whole network of tunnels down here, going in every direction, and every path looks exactly like every other—but somehow Nikolai knows exactly which turns to take to get to our destination.

    Eventually, we come to a set of heavy metal doors. Nikolai reaches out and just barely touches them, and lines of silvery light spiderweb out from where his fingers brush the iron. The pattern flashes briefly, then vanishes before I can make out any details. The doors grind slowly open.

    Two figures are standing just inside, sickle-shaped swords out and already trained on us. They're dressed in veils similar to Nikolai's, but instead of his hooded cowl they're wearing strange, almost spherical helmets paneled with brilliantly reflective mirrors. They don't strike when they see us, but they don't lower the weapons, either.

    "Brother Nikolai," says one, gesturing at someone off to the side. That person emerges, wearing another of those helmets and carrying two more. He offers one to Nikolai, and the other to me.

    "Put on the mirrorhelm, Barrett," Nikolai tells me as he lowers his cowl before putting his own on.

    I shrug and remove my hat to do so. Winchester transmats the wide-brimmed cap away as I secure the mirrorhelm. It's a bit big on me—which is to be expected, if it's a one-size-fits-all type of thing. Sound echoes oddly within it, bouncing around my ears like I'm at the bottom of a very narrow canyon.

    "Good," says the guard, lowering his sword. "Welcome back, Brother." He nods at me. "Who is this?"

    "Barrett-12," I say. "Call me Barrett. Nikolai helped me out of a tussle with some anemic-looking pasty white fellas."

    "Several of the Fallen Hawks attacked him in the western chapel," Nikolai elaborates. "Given that there hath been no sighting of the Silver Tears and the Hawks fighting one another, I intervened. He claimeth to have answers as to what hath caused the frenzy amongst the Tears and the Hawks."

    "Possible answers," I clarify. It's not like I know that the Silver Tears and Fallen Hawks going berserk has something to do with the Vex failing to stop Thermidor and Parvati from reaching the surface. It just seems like a hell of a coincidence that both things happened within hours of each other.

    "And who art thou, to have these answers?" demands the other guard, who's been silent until now. "Art thou another explorer from the surface, come to plunder what little we have built of our prison?"

    "Enough, Lysander," says the first guard. "'Tis not for thee to demand answers, but for the Nightmaidens." He gives Nikolai a nod. "Take him further in, but see that he doth not remove the mirrorhelm."

    "Of course," Nikolai says. "Come, Barrett."

    I follow him past the guards, who shut the door behind us. The room we enter is massive, stretching farther than I can make out in all directions, with pillars at regular intervals holding up the twenty-foot ceiling. There are torches bolted to those pillars, and several more lanterns like Nikolai's moving between them, but it's still dim down here. I'm tempted to ask Winchester for a light, but it's probably not a good idea in the middle of all these people that I'm not sure I can trust.

    We walk for a good few minutes in that big hall. Eventually a structure looms out of the dark, like one of those pillars got expanded to be a few dozen feet wide. There's a door at the base of the giant pillar, which Nikolai opens with another soft touch and a flicker of threads of silvery light.

    The room inside is actually well lit, with several torches along the walls and a roaring firepit in the center of the room. Eight stone chairs are set in a circle around the pit, casting a starburst of long shadows along the floor of the room. Only two of them are filled, both with vaguely feminine figures wrapped in dark robes with white veils over them. Their mirrorhelms glint like budget disco balls in the firelight.

    "—a way through, eventually," one of them is saying as we enter. "We must—" She stops, looking towards the door as we step inside. "Who cometh?"

    "Brother Nikolai, Lady Themis," says Nikolai, bowing. "I had no idea thou hadst reached the Sanctuary. It doth my heart glad to see it."

    "'Twas a narrow escape," says Lady Themis. "But so have been all escapes this day."

    "Nikolai," says the other woman. Her voice is slightly deeper and seems somehow older, although age hasn't roughened it. "Thou returnest earlier than thou wert expected—and with a guest not clad in the robes of the Nox. Who is this?"

    "This is Barrett, Lady Katerina," says Nikolai. "I found him doing battle with the Fallen Hawks. He claimeth to have insight into the cause of their frenzy."

    "Indeed?" Lady Katerina's hidden eyes turn on me. I can almost feel the weight of her gaze. "Then thou'rt from the surface, I gather? Like the wolf-shadow who descended several days hence?"

    "You saw Blaidd?" I ask.

    "Is that the beast's name?" she asks. "I did not see it, no, but its passage was reported to me. What cause the shadow of one of the usurped Empyreans might have to wander Nokron, I could not say. Several noble monks and swordstresses did battle with it, but were unable to stay its passage."

    "You fought him?" I ask. "Why? Is it just because he's, what, an Empyrean's shadow?"

    "Is that not reason enough?" Katerina asks, leaning forward slightly in her seat to study me. "Of course, thou'rt from the surface. To thee, the Greater Will is a beloved protector, and Empyreans are its natural servants, rather than usurped jewels in the crown of the world."

    "I'm not a huge fan of the Greater Will myself," I admit. "But from what I've gathered, nor is Blaidd or his mistress. I don't know all the details of their plan, but I didn't get the feeling they were big on the Golden Order."

    "Perhaps the shadow's mistress intendeth rebellion," says Katerina dismissively. "But if she intendeth for her shadow to aid her in this, she shall be sorely disappointed. It is a construct, built to the service of the Will, nothing more. It shall not be the agent of any attempt to supplant it." She shakes her head. "But what of thee? Thou claimest to be also in rebellion against the Will."

    "Rebellion implies I was ever loyal," I say. "I only landed in the Lands Between a couple of months ago. My ship crashed not too far from here, on the surface."

    "Thy ship? Didst thou come from the Land of Reeds, then?."

    "Nope. From offworld. Spaceship."

    She stares at me for a long moment. "Thou claimest to have descended from the stars themselves?"

    "Uh, yeah." I roll my shoulders. "I talked to an Alabaster Lord not too long ago, named Uvyxes. Apparently me and my fireteam aren't the first to come here from above."

    "The first in a terribly long time, however," says Katerina slowly. "But why should we believe thee? It seemeth rather too convenient, that an agent of the Stars should come to deliver us in this hour of our greatest need."

    "Well, it's sort of the other way around," I admit. "I think my fireteam might have caused your problems accidentally."

    "How so?"

    I explain the situation—how two of my fireteam came to the planet looking for me and ran afoul of a Vex blockade hiding over the planet, and how everything on this planet appears to be contained within a Vex-controlled augmented reality. "So if these Hawks and Silver Tears aren't really sapient people in their own right, it's possible the Vex have control over them through the simulation."

    Once I finish, Katerina leans back, watching me. "This is unsettling," she says after a minute. "We had assumed that the Greater Will had become dissatisfied with our imprisonment and had decided to exterminate us entirely. Yet thou claimest it is these 'Vex' which now assail us."

    "It's just a guess," I say.

    "And yet," Katerina says. "The eyes of the Hawks glow even now with the golden Grace of the Will. Didst thou not see the same?"

    "…I did," I say slowly.

    "Then what?" she asks. "Am I meant to infer that the Greater Will is in league with these Vex? Or that they are its servants? Perhaps the Will simply respondeth to the attack on the Vex as an encroachment upon its territory, though it hath no direct alliance with them."

    "Could be any of those," I say. "Or something else entirely. I don't claim to know for sure what's going on. All I know is that Thermidor and Parvati identified the Vex blockade, got past it, and then less than a day later I come down here and find y'all under siege. It feels like too much to be a coincidence."

    "We are in agreement," says Katerina. "Thy tale is too specific, too outlandish, to be a deliberate deception. What purpose would it serve? But it as yet provideth no clear answers, and no cause for us to act. Thou hast not even made any request."

    "I don't really need anything from you," I say. "I came down here looking for Blaidd and my other friends. As far as I'm concerned, as long as I can get out of these catacombs, I'm happy. But as to what you should do for yourselves, I think there's a pretty clear course of action to follow from here."

    "And that course is?"

    "We need to get your people out of here."

    She is silent for a long moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nikolai's head whip around to stare at me. "Knowest thou what thou suggestest?" Katerina asks. "The Nox have not emerged from the Eternal Cities in force in millennia. Not since the Gloam-Eyed Queen was immolated and the old Gods were supplanted."

    "You're not going to survive that long down here," I point out. "I don't know exactly what you do for food and energy, but I'm assuming you can't do it effectively in this bunker. And that's assuming they don't find a way to break through the secret passages."

    "Which they shall," Lady Themis says suddenly, speaking for the first time since I started my story. "Thou knowest this, Sister. Whether it be the Greater Will or these Vex which inflameth the Hawks and our own Tears, they shall not be satisfied to drive us into the Sanctuary. They seek our extinction, and if we do not act, they shall have it."

    "And if we try to reach the surface, we shall be cut down before we reach the well," Katerina counters. "And even if we survive that road, the servants of the Will shall fall upon us the moment we reach the sunlight. It is folly."

    "I can help," I offer. "I'm sure Blaidd and the others would be willing, too. I don't know exactly what Blaidd was looking for, down here—his boss wants to rebel against the Greater Will and the Two Fingers, so maybe something to do with that? If we can help him find whatever that is, I'm sure he'll be willing to help you get out of here."

    "It is an Empyrean's shadow," Katerina points out. "The Greater Will shall not suffer it to disobey."

    "Blaidd's been helping Ranni for centuries, from what I've gathered," I say. "And I don't get the feeling her rebellion is a new thing."

    "Then the Will is biding its time," says Katerina impatiently. "It does not mean that one of its baleful shadows can be trusted."

    "Sister," says Themis. "We could perhaps modify a mirrorhelm for the creature?"

    "That would more likely kill the beast than set it free."

    "Sorry," I say, reaching up to touch the helmet on my head. "Why would a mirrorhelm kill Blaidd?"

    "The mirrorhelms are designed to keep our minds safe from the intrusion of Outer Gods," Katerina says. "The Greater Will included. But the shadows which the Greater Will doth dispatch to its usurped Empyreans are its servants first, and independent beings in their own right only distantly second, if at all. They are animated by it, granted life and mind by its Grace. Such an automaton is unlikely to survive separation from the God which created it."

    For obvious reasons, I take exception to the idea that an automaton can't be a person in their own right. "I don't think Blaidd would want to be enslaved to the Greater Will, if that's really something it can do."

    "What the shadow desireth hath no import. It is the Greater Will. By its nature, it considereth all other wills lesser."

    "Then let's modify that helm," I suggest. "If the Greater Will tries to control Blaidd, we'll put it on him. I haven't known him long, but I'm pretty sure he'd rather die than be enslaved."

    She considers me for a long moment. "It is a great risk," she says. "We have not the resources to arm every Nox with a modified mirrorhelm, and even if we could, many Nox would not be able to match the monstrous strength of an Empyrean's shadow. How many Nox will die before you are able to stop the creature? Nay, Barrett. I shall not trust the lives of my people to a creature I know, beyond all doubt, will betray us to our enemy."

    I grimace. "I guess I can't fault that logic. I originally came down here to get Blaidd and his team—warn them about the Vex, just in case they did something exactly like what has been happening with the Hawks and the Silver Tears. I still need to do that. But I can come back down after and try to help?"

    She considers me for a long moment. "We Nox can hold out for some time here," she says. "Many are dead already, and no haste can serve them now. Those which survive shall endure some weeks before our stores of glintstone and foodstuffs run dry."

    "Assuming the Hawks and Tears do not break down our doors and slaughter us all," says Themis dryly.

    "Aye," says Katerina quietly. "Assuming that." She meets my gaze, eyes glittering darkly in the holes of her mirrorhelm. "I suspect I know what your shadow sought in Nokron. A dagger, crafted for the hand of the Gloam-Eyed Queen herself long ago—the Fingerslayer Blade. It is a sacred weapon, imbued with sorcery and empowered to slay even the mightiest servants of the Outer Gods—Empyreans and the Fingers themselves. Thou shalt find it, if the shadow hath not already, in Night's Sacred Grounds, in the northwest part of the city."

    "I appreciate it," I say.

    "I ask two things in return," she says. "The first is this—thou must not allow the shadow to take possession of the Blade. Deliver it directly into the hands of the rebel Empyrean it serveth—or, better yet, strike down the Greater Will's Fingers thyself."

    "I understand." I hope she isn't right about Blaidd. But if she is, and this weapon is as important as it sounds to the process of rebelling against the Greater Will and the Two Fingers? Yeah, I wouldn't want it falling into Blaidd's hands in that case either.

    "Second," Katerina says. "I beg your aid. Slaughter all the Tears and Hawks thou seest as though passest through Nokron. Perhaps thou shalt thin their numbers enough that we might make an attempt at escape. And if thou hast the opportunity, and allies thou canst trust whose natures are not beholden to the Greater Will, thy return to aid us further would be more than welcome."

    "I'll do what I can," I promise. "You sure you don't want to try and escape now? It's a lot of trust you're extending me—I could just skip town and leave you down here."

    "I have not the luxury now of doubting every possible ally," says Katerina softly. "I have so few left. Of those few who do not openly serve the Greater Will, most are in thrall to it in one way or another. And fewer still of those who might potentially work alongside the Nox shall ever descend into the Eternal Cities. Fewer still shall survive the Tears and the Hawks. Thou hast reached us. 'Tis more than I could look for in any potential ally. Had I the resources I would offer assistance to thee, but I have not. So I can only hope that, if I give thee what meager aid I can, thou shalt remember our plight once thine own duties are completed."

    "I will," I say. "I promise. I won't abandon you people down here."

    -x-x-x-​

    I'm going to be traveling all of next week, and generally a lot of the next month. As a result, there will be no update next week. I'll do my best to write ahead so I can update for the rest of the month, though.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Ya, was hilarious when I read the mirrorhelm description and figured out wtf Iji was wearing. It's a very From Soft Item.
    I really do hope they somehow manage to save Blaidd, he deserves it. At least he might be able to die fully free :/
     
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    No new chapter tomorrow either, I'm afraid. It's been a bad mental health week. I'll be fine—I'm doing better today and I'm flying out to visit family tomorrow, which will help—but I haven't been able to focus on anything much this week. Except Palworld. I have perhaps given too much focus to Palworld.
     
    I'm on a roll with my writing. Unfortunately, that roll is currently localized to Of Many Colors drafting, partly because I haven't had access to Elden Ring for research all week. So there won't be an update tomorrow, but I would put good money down that this is going to be the last week off for a while. Once I get home I'm going to try and get at least as far ahead on Empyrean as I've gotten on Of Many Colors, but I want to use this momentum while I have it.
     
    41. Gold and Red
  • Threadmarks
    • Many thanks to @BinaryApotheosis for betareading and fact-checking.

    -x-x-x-

    Gold and Red

    -x-x-x-​

    "My son. How fares thine encampment?"

    "Well enough, Father. The Stormhawk King hath several times attempted to cast my soldiers down into the chasm, but the anchoring mechanisms have held thus far."

    "Very good! Mine own forces have lost some to the great winds, but we have now pressed beyond the outer wall and have some shelter. Wilt thou be ready to prosecute an assault on the morrow?"

    "I shall, Father. Give the word and my men shall leap to obey."

    -x-x-x-​

    I crouch on the roof of a building, the false stars glimmering above me. "Night's Sacred Grounds?" I murmur, looking down into the square below.

    "Looks promising," Winchester says, hovering over my shoulder. "That shrine in the middle, there—it's too small to be a proper place of worship, but it would make a good reliquary."

    The place is lousy with silver tears. They glide around on the ground, leaving no residue behind on the cracked flagstones. There's got to be more than a hundred of the damn things down there—but I notice they give that shrine a wide berth.

    "No sign of Blaidd and the others," I observe.

    "No," Winchester agrees. "You think we should look for them first?"

    "I—"

    Something changes. Suddenly, all of the silver tears are drifting in one specific direction, moving with the unified purpose of a swarm. They're headed northward, into a narrow alleyway.

    "What's going on?" I ask.

    "No idea," Winchester says. "They're responding to something. Might be our friends."

    "Let's give it a look."

    Winchester slips into my backpack, and I drop down from the roof, cloaking myself in Void as I fall. My feet hit the ground almost soundlessly, and I start jogging north, past the shrine and the horde of balls of shiny goo.

    As I reach the mouth of the alley, a splash of silver fluid sprays past me. Instinct honed from decades of fighting the Vex has me dodging out of the way. When I look to see the source of the spray, I see a long katana rising from the puddle left behind by one of the tears. Yura raises his weapon, then swings it in a wide arc, cutting down four tears all at once.

    Winchester, I say silently. Have we got a heavy grenade launcher?

    Got your Cataphract,     he replies. Without even having to ask, I feel the heavy weapon appear on my back.

    Thanks, I say, pulling it out. The Cataphract GL3 is a custom-issue variant of one of the best grenade launchers from Omolon—the Wendigo GL3. The Wendigo accompanied the team on a few big missions against House Dusk and, later, House Salvation. Arc explosives tear through most Eliksni shielding.

    The Cataphract, though, was commissioned by Saint-14 a couple years later as a prize for a few seasons of the Trials of Osiris. It's similar enough to the Wendigo, albeit a little more customizable, but with one major change—its projectiles, manufactured on Neptune with Neomuni tech and access to the Veil, are charged not with Arc, but with Strand.

    I jump into the air, up and backward, just as my cloak dissipates. Yura lets out a startled exclamation. "Barrett—!"

    "Stand back!" I interrupt. To his credit, he doesn't hesitate, backpedaling as fast as his heavy armor will allow. I take aim. "Clear!"

    I fire three grenades around the entrance to the alley before the first one has even detonated. They go up in a triplet of percussive blasts of green light, sending silver fluid flying everywhere.

    I double jump to change direction, then hit the ground at the mouth of the alley, facing Yura, my feet splashing in a rapidly spreading puddle of silver fluid. "Hey," I say. "What's up? Where's everyone else?"

    Yura stares at me for a long moment, though I can't make out much of his expression behind the slots in his hat beyond his wide eyes. But whatever questions he wants to ask, he decides to put them on hold. "Alexander should be drawing the tears' attention to the south at any moment," he says. "Rogier is to slip into the shrine and retrieve the Fingerslayer Blade. Blaidd and Millicent are recovering on the cliffs overlooking the city to the north."

    "Recovering from what?"

    "Later," Yura says, lunging past me to thrust the point of his katana through a tear which was sneaking up on me. "Suffice to say that, so far as we can tell, neither is in grave danger at the moment. Blaidd was unwilling to leave Nokron until he had retrieved the artifact for his mistress, so we volunteered to fetch it so we could all leave."

    "Fair enough," I say, launching another grenade to blast a half dozen tears in a cluster together. "How's Rogier going to sneak in?"

    "He has been practicing with some form of invisibility," Yura says. "Though his is not so profound as yours. I'd no way of detecting you were there."

    "I should go back him up, then. You got this here?"

    "For now. Go."

    I nod at him, then drop a smoke bomb and vanish from sight again. I run past the swarm of tears, skidding around the corner and coming face to face with an archway into a small hollow in the shrine.

    Rogier is there—visible, though that might be just because he's using the range-sensitive invisibility I saw in Sellia. He's also surrounded by four silver tears, which are stabbing at him with solidified spikes as he dodges and tries to shoot glowing darts of blue energy at them when he can.

    I pull Igneous Hammer out of its holster at my hip and empty the cylinder as fast as I can. Each tear takes a couple shots to destroy, but I manage.

    "Barrett!" Rogier exclaims. "What are you—"

    "Talk later!" I snap. "Grab the relic!"

    He nods and ducks into the alcove. There's a chest inside, and as I provide covering fire, I see out of the corner of my eye as Rogier opens it and pulls something small out and tucks it away. "I have it!" he calls to me.

    "Great!" I say. "Come on, let's get out of here! Winchester, I need the Striga!"

    I surround us with a miasma of toxic green mist as we cut a path through the horde. The Striga's poisonous haze doesn't harm me or my allies, fortunately. I guess the gun understands that I'm not going to keep using a gun that gets my friends killed as easily as my enemies.

    Rogier and I meet up with Yura at the alley. "What now?" I ask him, still firing on the tears, my feet splashing in the lake of silver I'm scattering all over Night's Sacred Grounds.

    "Rogier, signal Alexander," Yura orders behind me. A moment later, a bolt of blue light, like a signal flare, shoots up over our heads, flying above the rooftops. "We need to get to the ladder, quickly. Barrett, follow us."

    "You got it."

    I walk backwards, keeping one eye on the two green dots on my HUD so that I can keep pace with them as I keep firing Osteo Striga into the swarm, filling the air with poison. The gun is hot under my hands, shaking with what feels psychically like delight as much as with the recoil.

    "Ah! My friends, have you—Barrett!?" I hear Alexander's voice behind me.

    "Up the ladder!" Yura orders. "We can speak once we are safe!"

    I spin around at the sight of red on my radar, firing on the group of tears which had been chasing Alexander. As I do, I see Yura scrambling up a long rope ladder descending to the ground from dozens of feet up a sheer rock face. A moment later, Rogier follows, and then Alexander.

    "Barrett!" the Warrior Jar calls down once he's several rungs up. "Come, quickly!"

    "I'll catch up!" I shout back, still holding down the Striga's trigger. The Fallen Hawks have started joining the silver tears, now, flickering gold in their eyes as they charge me. The tears themselves are slow, but the Hawks are faster, and there are just so many of them. Periodically, I glance up at the ladder.

    Once Alexander has cleared the halfway point, I make my move. I stop firing and close my eyes. It's hard to reach for Strand when I'm not in the right headspace, and need doesn't actually make it easier. So I have to go still for a moment, letting the Hawks get closer and closer.

    But just before they reach me, I feel the connection click into place. The Darkness surges up, reaching up through me and down all my ties to the world. I reach up a hand and throw out a grappling hook. I sail upwards just as a Hawk stabs at the air where I'd been standing. I go flying past the three on the ladder and land on the roof across from them. Then I aim down and keep firing.

    A few minutes later, I use another grapple to join the others atop the cliff. Yura cuts the ladder, and it tumbles down to the street. And then things go quiet.

    "Well," I sigh, slinging the Striga onto my back. "That was a mess. You got the thing, Rogier?"

    He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a wicked-looking dagger. It's curved, forged of a deep black metal, and I can feel the Darkness radiating off it. "The Fingerslayer Blade," he says, staring at it with something like awe, and something else like dread.

    "Blaidd will be pleased," Yura says. "Hopefully."

    "Hopefully?" I ask. There's a sinking feeling in my synthetic gut. "What's happened to him and Millicent?"

    Yura heaves a sigh. "I cannot pretend to understand in any detail," he says. "But Blaidd is… conflicted."

    "The Greater Will appears to have tugged at his leash," says Rogier grimly. "He attacked us as we approached Night's Sacred Grounds."

    "Guess Katerina was right," I murmur.

    "Katerina?" Alexander asks. "Who is that?"

    "A Nox I met in the city," I say. "They've all gone to ground since the silver tears and Fallen Hawks went berserk. I'm guessing that happened at the same time as Blaidd did. The Greater Will is reacting."

    "But to what?" Rogier asks. "Do you know?"

    "I have a guess," I say grimly. "A couple of my fireteam arrived in the Lands Between around the same time as all this started. They fought a fleet of Vex just outside the atmosphere. I don't know how the Vex connect to the Greater Will, but I'm certain now that there is a connection."

    "Blast," Yura says in his grim, rasping voice. "But—at least we have more of your fellows to help us, now. Where are they?"

    "They got separated," I say. "And someone stole my ship, so Thermidor is staying with his. It crashed in Lake Agheel. Our other teammate, Parvati, went down near Leyndell. No idea what she's up to now, but I'm sure she'll be working on the same problems as we are. But what happened to Millicent?"

    "Ah…" Rogier hesitates. "That is difficult to explain. It would be easier to show you."

    -x-x-x-​

    They've set up a few tents around a Site of Grace overlooking Nokron. One of the tents is a little larger than the others, and stands a little apart. Rogier gestures me in that direction as we get close. "They're both inside," he says. "They've both requested we don't stay too long in their presence, just in case. But you, of all people, should be safe."

    "That's not ominous at all," I tell him.

    He gives me a mirthless smile. "Indeed."

    I duck inside the tent. Immediately, my olfactory sensors pick up the unmistakable scent of decay. Rot.

    Millicent looks up at me from where she's kneeling beside Blaidd's prone form. One of her eyes is gold. The other is vivid scarlet. Pustules of the Scarlet Rot are growing from the stump of her severed arm. Her other arm is held out, and Blaidd's teeth are buried in it. He looks at me sidelong with dark eyes that flicker periodically with sparks of gold.

    "Barrett," Millicent says, and despite everything, despite the Rot wracking her body and the wolf-man biting through her arm and the red eye boring a hole into me, she sounds painfully, wonderfully relieved. "Oh, Barrett, you found us."
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • Vivid scarlet eye, I can only hope that's not Vex. It's not described as glowing, but it's still the first thing to come to mind.
     
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