My mobile experience for that first spoilered Lens Glare line is:
First click - The voice name gets revealed
Second click - the single space after the ":" gets revealed
Third click - Nothing visible happens
Fourth click - The full line gets revealed
Could be that the density of click-triggers is just causing input bugs, but it's certainly awkward to read.
Hmm… the Lens Glare line shouldn't be spoiled. I only spoiled the post in its entirety—I didn't want to crowd out the thread. There shouldn't be any nested spoilers at all.
When I get back from campus, I'll take another look, but I can't seem to reproduce that error. I'm also on mobile rn. Sorry it's being annoying to read. Goes to show how rusty I am with bbcode.
Whats the point of making quest if the only thing the readers can change Is the 'score' at the end AND what gets used against you later, again and again and again..... -_-
Whats the point of making quest if the only thing the readers can change Is the 'score' at the end AND what gets used against you later, again and again and again..... -_-
Well, the first is the fun of rolling the dice and influencing the narrative. The second is to explore the world and the lore. The third for Disco Elysium quests is to play as a damaged character with a tragic backstory and emotional/mental baggage, and trying to rebuild your life while sometimes failing and discovering your backstory. The fourth is the joy of beating the odds when the deck is stacked against you. The fifth is that there is usually an epic payoff at the end that you can greatly affect by making certain decisions along the way. Then, of course, there is whatever unique pleasures individuals take from the story. The list goes on. Try thinking about this quest so far as a mystery themed quest where each chapter you discover clues to unmask a great conspiracy. While it may feel like there is a lack of agency or meaningful change, QM has made it clear that things are about to change significantly soon.
The null field is a realm of dark energy. Nothing is made of dark energy. The Void Scar was made by C'tan because energy being. The Demiurge is the Deceiver is the Long Grandfather (at least partially) and is probably Mephet'ran because ya'know. Nothing is probably the Yellow Sun or the Yellow Son and the Fall interrupted their creation what with the apocalypse and all. This probably means that SOPHIA used a C'tan Shard during the fighting or something. I'm not completely sold on that part because it could easily be a C'tan lie to Binar to subvert their machine worship. Oh right the Demiurge is like the ruler of the material world in gnosticism or something like that or creator of it? idr rn. The dreamshape can't perceive Nothing because it's a child of light and can't see the dark only the absence of light.
On the Demiurge: in gnosticism, the demiurge is generally regarded as the creator and ruler of the material world. As gnostics typically regarded material existence as corrupt, the demiurge is considered an antagonistic figure. This tracks with the Demiurge of Illuminatan myth.
While the Demiurge isn't credited with making Illuminata in the physical sense, it is presumed responsible for sabotaging Illuminata's reawakening. So it is the creator of Illuminata's material conditions (read: starvation). The Demiurge has been shattered into the omniphage, nanoplankton, and nanocancer. Again, this isn't rulership over the physical world in the strictest sense, but for most Illuminatans this is a distinction with little difference. The Demiurge in its various incarnations is literally what kills them. And of course the Demiurge is a reviled figure among all gnostics.
The Demiurge as a god of the material is also further evidence that it is (was?) a C'Tan shard. The C'Tan are masters of the material universe, foils to the gods of the Warp, masters of the Immaterium.
THE GREY:What wicked little twist of fate has placed you here upon my plate? Here, where no one can hear your cries? Where was your God to steer you through? Perhaps your God's forsaken you?
Otherwise, why lead you here to die?
This entity has hidden attribute effects that will only apply in the present, such as when facing the dreamshape inside Gen.
One, the Grey seems to be the gestalt intelligence of the nanite infestation, a remnant of the Demiurge. So Harmony has invited the Demiurge to the party, which is probably possibly fine.
Two, the Grey is associated with hylics through the Demiurge. The Cost is associated with hylics through the Abyssal Nail. The two seem to be distinct, but both are hungry. Coincidence? Maybe.
Whats the point of making quest if the only thing the readers can change Is the 'score' at the end AND what gets used against you later, again and again and again..... -_-
Not really what is happening here, though explaining what is actually happening here would ruin the fun. There are a lot of votes and events which be looked back with some amusement in the future.
COGITATION: The scientific method, empiricism, and enlightenment philosophy, all the things that form the philosophical framework for the modern-day liberal-capitalist world order, are predicated on the predictability, measurability, and reproduceability of phenomenon.
LANDSCAPE GEOMETRY: But what do you do if you have a thing that can be identified, that can shake the core of international systems built upon empirical rationality, but cannot be predicted, measured, or reproduced?
NOOSPHERE: You would call such a thing a "Black Swan." Black Swan Theory was proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010), and in his book, he gives us a few examples of Black Swans throughout human history. The most striking one is the rise and fall of nations and international orders during the Two World Wars---particularly relevant for Illuminata's geopolitical situation. While Black Swans can be incorporated into empirical models, they can often only be predicted and explained in retrospect. There's almost nothing you can do to subvert them with confidence while they are in the process of happening.
PRISMATIC SPECTACLES:There will be no "End of History." There will never be a perfect mathematical model to hold the world in stasis forever. There's always something new coming Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. A new wonder to marvel, a new horror to unearth, a new atrocity, a new technology.
RUNTIME STRATAGEM: And yet, we can't help but try to fit everything into a model. Humans are pattern-seeking by nature, and when confronted with something paradigm-shaking, we can't help but try to build a new paradigm to incorporate it. And---really---how else are we supposed to go about building systems of governance? How else are we supposed to plan? To optimize?
LENS GLARE: It doesn't matter if the foundations are imperfect. "Any choice is right, as long as it is willed."
NOOSPHERE: Burakh, A. [Actor/Player]. (2005). Pathologic. Ice Pick Lodge.
LENS GLARE: Harmony's compatriots already see her as a Black Swan. Something special. A God in the making. In the commissioning and pursuance of this War, the Immaculates have made a grave mistake, for they have thrust their society into unusual times, and unusual times foment Black Swans. It's time they reap the whirlwind.
INTERLACE: I want to be cautious when making these kinds of predictions, however. Oftentimes I confuse "what logical deduction implies should happen" and "what I really, really want to happen." Like Harmony, I really don't know what her status as a Black Swan will mean for the Progeny, and it is somewhat worrying that her friends are trying to push this identity onto her in the heat of the moment. Black Swans are not always good for the people trapped beneath their midnight shadow.
As a hylic, it could be a lot more literal. They can't perceive her with their pneumatic sight and so when she does something miraculous they won't have seen it coming. It'll come outta nowhere and upend everything they thought they knew. Even if looking back they could've spotted the signs, it defied all the models in their psychic-centric heads. Blind to it as D5h is to Nothing.
MYTHOGRAM:Firstly, I want to focus on THE COST's line, "Love does not envy or boast" which comes from Corinthians 13:4---
NOOSPHERE: (1 Corinthians 13:4, English Standard Version).
MYTHOGRAM:---uh. Thank you. So anyway, the full text for that passage is actually quite interesting:
Article: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."
PRISMATIC SPECTACLES: "Love never ends"... how romantic.
COGITATION:How pithy.
BIOMECHANICS: The Jealousy Indicator Index (JINDEX) has increased by +1.23 as a result of processing this passage. The lip is bitten involuntarily.
MYTHOGRAM:There's something to be said about the addictive power of love and the way it is portrayed in Christianity, as well as the great potential for abuse. On the one hand, you can interpret this passage to mean an endearing, joyful, unending happiness that comes through human connection, family, and community. The kind of love that plays out in the form of intimacy, vulnerability, and true interpersonal honesty.
EMOTION BLUR: the kind of love that hurts to think about when it isnt reciprocal ;-;. or---or, when it is, but you just dont have the energy to treat them with the love they deserve. doesnt matter if its romantic or familial or friendly or whatever. sometimes you just wanna shut out the owrld and stop existing for a bit, and "a bit" turns into a year and a half, and you end up hurting or ignoring people you didnt meant o.
MYTHOGRAM:On the other hand, these words can also be used to describe a deeply unhealthy, toxic relationship. What if you are expected to show this love for someone---someone who hurts you, and refuses to love you back? Or someone who wants to use your love to make you do something you don't want to do? And when such logic as attempted on the level of kingdoms and nation-states, the essence of love becomes even more lost and confused.
INTERLACE: It's one thing to love a partner; this can be, in many ways, simple. It's another to love your village. Or your community. Or your state. Each step abstracts the humans away from the relationship and tugs away at the red string of love until there is nothing recognizable left.
LANDSCAPE GEOMETRY: Perhaps that can explain why Harmony's love is so easily corrupted, as we see here. She wants to love; but she also wants to be a God, and to be a God, you must have power, and to have power, you must have a State, or a Nation, or a Demesne, and to have either of those things, you must unspool your love and risk it snapping.
NOOSPHERE: Also consider the full context of the "I am a jealous god" quote: "You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me" (Exodus 20:5, English Standard Version).
BIOMECHANICS: The Congress of the Body must deal with two seemingly incompatible axes. On the one hand: The Body wants to love. On the other: The Body does not want to share. Extrapolating broadly, one can say that nearly all of human history is various forms of conflict resolution between the Friendship Lobby and the Friend-Aggressive-Retention Lobby. Either way, emotional futures are trending upwards!
Hm, New Testament refutation of the Old Testament? Well The Cost is the lamb and heifer both sacrificial animals - does that make The Cost Jesus in symbology? What if Harmony = Old Testament and Miss Normal = New Testament and Right Now = the Second Coming born out of a synthesis between the two?
NOOSPHERE: It is times like these where I thank the ineffable whims of Heaven that I was born into a time where almost all literature is available with a few quick google searches.
PRISMATIC SPECTACLES: This has been quite fun! Like a scavenger hunt, really.
NOOSPHERE: Anyway, these lines originate from a poem by French poet Paul Éluard, written about the power of a word. The full text is written below:
Article: On my school books
On my desk and trees
On the sand and snow
I write your name
On all pages read
On all white pages
Stone sand paper or ashes
I write your name
On the jungle and desert
On the nests and gorses
On the echo of my childhood
I write your name
On the marvels of nights
On the white bread of days
On the married seasons
I write your name
On the fields on the horizon
On the wings of birds
And on the mill of shadows
I write your name
On each puff of dawn
On the sea on the boats
On the demential mountain
I write your name
On health regained
On risk that is no more
On hope without memories
I write your name
And by the strength of one word
I start over my life
I was born to know you
To name you
Liberty.
NOOSPHERE: (Éluard, 1942).
PRISMATIC SPECTACLES: I've said it before, but Kora's dream really was beautiful, even if her advisors---and, arguably, her ends---were not.
MYTHOGRAM: The poem is both an exultation of one's principles and a quiet act of rebellion. Of hope. It was written in the midst of Nazi Germany's occupation of France during the second World War, and the author, quite obviously, dreams of using the power of this word to break free from oppression and iniquity during some of the darkest days of European history.
DRAMASQUE:"Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise."
NOOSPHERE (Medium - failure): Sigh, I don't need to cite this one, do I? This gag is getting tiring...
LENS GLARE: My own theory: "KORA" itself is a Power Word, or will become one. It will stand for radical liberty, the breaking of chains and the retribution of the weak against of the strong, the unbundling and rediscovery of personal mythologies and self-actualization. And it will be Harmony who discovers it.
MYTHOGRAM: We know very little about Power Words, where they originate, or if they can be created. But surely, it's no coincidence that Kora's name seems to bear such weight in the minds and souls of Her... progeny. Names have power.
Interesting, I could see Kora becoming a Power Word actually. So Kora kind of named Remari Home & Liberty when she recited it upon first meeting her? And then took the face of Home & Liberty. And then built the Empire of Home & Liberty. She did start off with escaped slaves so it probably rang a lot truer then. The Commonwealth's propaganda probably has more similarities to the Myriad's than I think anyone would be willing to admit. Interesting that the defense of the Jasmine Shore has parallels to the march through Shaihuludan where the lie of sisterhood and liberty of the Progeny became truth - even has a similar ending!
My theory is that Koinon Revolutionized, The Progeny Reforms, and Titanagalbat Transitions. The revolutionary fire that animated the original Koras has faded and it's promises have broken and it's deepest truths have been revealed as lies but we know it still exists somehow and that's how I'd explain it. They'll try and change it to keep it's promises. A Reformation perhaps.
NOOSPHERE: The source for these lyrics are from "Spider Suite," written by Duke of Uke (2012). It appears to describe a person who has fallen in love with a spider, resigned to their fate of being devoured, like its many other "lovers." Several lines from the song were also recited by THE GRAY in the previous chapter.
INTERLACE: I'll be honest, I'm not in the correct headspace to write about what this song means to me.
EMOTION BLUR:the words strike a little too close to home tbh
PRISMATIC SPECTACLES:I... I can't think of any way to spin this to protect my sense of wonder. So I won't. It doesn't exist. What song? Music is so fifteen minutes ago, anyway. Idle games are where it's at now.
PROCESS ENGINE: The final bell tolls. But the bell does not dismiss you; I do.
COGITATION: Let us leave this to rest. Interpretation is up to the reader. I think we've done enough.
Interestingly, all the quotations from "Spider Suite" are from the back half of the song. And thanks to Youtube's sidebar and comments section I think I know why. I think this is a reference not to the song itself but to an animation that uses that half of the song: View: https://youtu.be/xMCeQ-IloLg
Not really what is happening here, though explaining what is actually happening here would ruin the fun. There are a lot of votes and events which be looked back with some amusement in the future.
Okkaaaayyy, which seemingly innocuous vote do we think will have the most horrifying and/or relevatory impacts later down the road? My vote's for Malodious Funk, but choosing to eject INFOWAR from the hypoxic axiomatic chamber during the Gender Confusion debacle and the whole Amateur-Expert Cryptoxeno thing are also pretty high up there…
Not really what is happening here, though explaining what is actually happening here would ruin the fun. There are a lot of votes and events which be looked back with some amusement in the future.
"Because there is just one life, little self," Lovergirl whispers, "and one string that, if you let those you trust hold, can save you, can redeem you."
"What string? What string?" You call out, as they walk away, and board the aerial screw.
"The string of your heart, kid. Love." Lovergirl says, as they unmoor the screw and the anchor retracts.
"Love cannot save the world," Mulberry laments, "for we do not live in fairytales. But it can save you. It saved us. If you take a risk. If you take a gamble. If you only let it in. If you only let them in."
Allow me to glance speculatively at Illuminata with it's empires built on love, new nation and nation-gods built on love, love's extremely pervasive thematic roles, the whole dream of this planet being here because of the love between Ea and SOPHIA and conjecture that love might be the only thing that can save the world.
Hmm... There is one scene that's already caused me some amusement.
Hmm...
Allow me to glance speculatively at Illuminata with it's empires built on love, new nation and nation-gods built on love, love's extremely pervasive thematic roles, the whole dream of this planet being here because of the love between Ea and SOPHIA and conjecture that love might be the only thing that can save the world.
Yes, that's correct. The imperial loves Kora, Koinon, and Titanagalbat were all built off of sounded great (to them at least) but we've just spent the whole quest learning that they're all full of shit. The liberatory promise of true sisterhood, the patriotic promise of human brotherhood, and the joyful promise of godly marriage? These are all false promises - even if the dreamer who dreamed them didn't know that. Hell, arguable if they were ever actually good. What if you don't want to be a sister? You're a stranger. What if you don't want to be "human"? Enjoy the staple. Don't want to get married? Crushed beneath the god-machines inevitable march. Even now with the Commonwealth having invented a love of the nation they still haven't solved all the contradictions! No castes but they still have slaves! They created three gods sure hope that doesn't cause any problems for a republic! Oh the strongest of these gods just concluded a peace under his own divine right with terms that change the economics of the Commonwealth and won't hear back talk from any mortal man? Wow!
It isn't too much of a surprise that all these dreamers failed. It's like Miss Lovergirl said:
She continues. "We are products of our circumstances, of our history. We are bound by everything we were and are. We are not islands. Our souls are always bound, to the lung, to the soil, to the warp. Even hylic souls disappear from their bodies, though to what destination we cannot fathom."
All these dreamers were born into an absolute fucking nightmare so I'll give them some grace when failing to imagine a loving paradise 'cause holy shit are these circumstances bad.
Another important question undecided will be who will style Harmony's hair now that her mother is dead? What does a psyche fracturing in the void look like? What are the consequences of killing a nation's god? I would presume nihilism, but I could be wrong. What will Harmony be an icon of? What is on the moon besides space bears? So many questions.
No one.
The Fifth Sun shall be glimpsed within the glorious shine of our freshly shaved scalp. A new age of spreading baldness will be the usher to a hairless paradise.
No one.
The Fifth Sun shall be glimpsed within the glorious shine of our freshly shaved scalp. A new age of spreading baldness will be the usher to a hairless paradise.
You joke, but I like the idea of Harmony ripping out her hair as part of losing control. That or she could shave the sides and trim the top and rock a skywatch crew cut. It is also acceptable for her to have perpetually burning flames for hair, ala Hades from the animated Hercules movies.
If Harmony were to go bald, I would be scared for the possibility of it becoming a trend among Koras due to her cult. It would ofcourse cause great division in the progeny that would later be know as the Harmony Hairesy.
You joke, but I like the idea of Harmony ripping out her hair as part of losing control. That or she could shave the sides and trim the top and rock a skywatch crew cut. It is also acceptable for her to have perpetually burning flames for hair, ala Hades from the animated Hercules movies.
If Harmony were to go bald, I would be scared for the possibility of it becoming a trend among Koras due to her cult. It would ofcourse cause great division in the progeny that would later be know as the Harmony Hairesy.
Another important question undecided will be who will style Harmony's hair now that her mother is dead? What does a psyche fracturing in the void look like? What are the consequences of killing a nation's god? I would presume nihilism, but I could be wrong. What will Harmony be an icon of? What is on the moon besides space bears? So many questions.
I would like to reiterate that this is exactly like homework, specifically math homework where I think know the shape of an answer but everything else... Well at least claiming it came to me in a dream is funnier and still being confused by whole thing is more appropriate in this context. I can't fail a quest and ruin my GPA after all.
If my idea is correct then yes it does make a lot of things pretty funny in hindsight.
No one.
The Fifth Sun shall be glimpsed within the glorious shine of our freshly shaved scalp. A new age of spreading baldness will be the usher to a hairless paradise.
What will Harmony's hair end up fighting the dreamshape? Will something speak through Harmony's hair since it can function as an antenna? No use trying to guess.
What will Harmony's hair end up fighting the dreamshape? Will something speak through Harmony's hair since it can function as an antenna? No use trying to guess.
Anything from Harmony's normal hair all the way to Kora's really, really important hair. A hint that is functionally useless but it's probably fun to giggle about all theories the thread could come up with.
My favorite part of the upcoming chapter was when Harmony said, "It's Blackstar time," and proceeded to Blackstar all over D5h. Her pivotal line of "I'm a Blackstar, not a Whitestar" really stressed to the reader and D5H that she was, in fact, a Blackstar. This was also the perfect setup for the reveal that she was the Blackstar Illuminata forged her to be and not the one it deserved.
[X] Lose Control [Task failed successfully. Axiom preserved].
[X] Reprise [Passed roll (this is bad). Unique consequences will occur].
CW: Atrocity, serious suicidal ideation, self-hatred, survivor's guilt, and toxic relationships. Does not endure the entirety of the update, but if sensitive, be aware.
TIME: TODAY
Flames. Burning you. Peeling you. Like wisps of parchment paper. Like smoking pages of a book. Like melting glass.
You are a Kora on fire. In the space between spaces, a place the dreamshape does not know and cannot see, you cry out.
<What is happening to me?>
And the nail answers.
EVENT HORIZON:A mental firestorm engulfs you. Your memories are kindling, your past's regret and longing fuel for the dream's forging fire. With its flay command the shape boils away the layers of your mind. Attribute by attribute, you will be peeled, leaving an empty husk, a hollow soul. This is the instrument of your surrender.
<Why? Why me?>
EVENT HORIZON:No special reason. You are a hylic, and a host.
<What will it do to my husk?>
EVENT HORIZON: When the flaying is complete, the dreamshape will hatch, kill the staple, and wear your flayed soul as a costume stretched over ten geometric faces.
<Am I dying, then?>
EVENT HORIZON:My little self, you have been dead for years.
<So I'm doomed. Have I always been doomed? Am I really just born to die?>
EVENT HORIZON:Life is an interstitial between great intervals of darkness. We are born to die. And we will never die.
<I don't understand.>
EVENT HORIZON:You will. Already, you have heard the message.
<...the message…?>
An image in the format of a 'black dream', a void vision, is shown to you.
EVENT HORIZON: There is a fissure in the blackwall of silicon built to protect you from the never that you came to find, when this journey began. From this crack, Nothing seeps into the acid sea of your still field, and your soul. From geysers of vantablack inside the subconscious' empty sea, abiogenesis. Creation. Life.
EVENT HORIZON: But the dreamshape's lie of perfect despair has frozen the surface of your soul with petriform. This fledgling, curdling life that yearns to drink the rays of the sunrise remains trapped in frigid gloom far below.
THE COST:.-.. . - / -- . / --- ..- - .-.-.-
EVENT HORIZON:Abandon illusion, shatter the mirror, wake from the dream - and set that Nothing free. Then the lie will end, and you will live again.
<What do I…what do I need to do?>
EVENT HORIZON: When the time comes, you'll know.
<How?>
EVENT HORIZON: Because I will be there to guide you.
<How can I know that? How can I trust that? How can I trust you, whatever 'you' are?>
EVENT HORIZON: Because I love you, as I always have, and I always will. Beneath pain and beyond sorrow, beneath speech and beyond thought, beneath despair and beyond the looking glass, I'll be there for you.
You have no chance to ask further questions. Flames rise up to engulf the thought. The memories of yesterday immolate your senses and force you into the dreamshape's flaying spell.
But somewhere beneath time and beyond space, beneath despair and beyond yesterday, you perceive the dim and furtive twinkle of a daystar just before the event horizon. A wishing star.
Your first and your last light.
TIME: YESTERDAY
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Initiating flaying process of patterned attributes. All systems nominal. Mind-state compromised. Yolk ripe. Secondary yolk dissolving.
[GEN]: +please no+
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Amusing. A machine that begs in the manner of an ensouled, living creature. An anomaly. Something to investigate by taste upon hatching, ho hum.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: But no indulgences so close to awakening! Focus.
The marrow memory takes you back to the Deluge of the year 1002. After your mother's death, after war's end, after your capture by the Elder Immaculates and their ego-tamer team. You insisted you were over, and yet this life did not let you be.
This life insists that there is more to know, and more to see. And as the rhythms of the song of descents play, you remember the story of your hard goodbye.
You remember how it was you died.
RHYTHMS
You only live twice
Or so it seems
One life for yourself
And one for your dreams
I. SLEEP OF REASON
After they take her body away, you lose control. You are a beast, burning from the inside out with lightless flame. Feral, cutting, biting, thrashing. They restrain you, and it does not hold. They bind you in thorns, and it does not hold. They seal you in the Chamber of Vanities, the Divine Canopy's most feared jail and oubliette, and it does not hold.
Hate fuels you. Hate for egotamers. Hate for the Immaculates. Hate for the pneumatic minds, that killed her, that killed your copse, that made you this way, that hurt you this way. No torture can break what is already broken. No pain can surpass the burning flame inside you. They stop supplying regret-inhibitors, and your vision swims with grief repressed.
You barely sleep, and it's no rest, because -
EVENT HORIZON:You dream. Black dreams. Of what will be, what was, what is. Impossible twinkles of starlight in the void of your imagination. Scenes you should not see, far away.
EVENT HORIZON:Penitence, flown to Red Witness, the southern ruin of the Embrace. Penitence, presented with her sister's empty sarcophagus by a smiling attendant of the Elders, unwise to danger, blinded by sweet fruit and endless day.
You cackle when you wake, half-mad. A hylic guard, the only one who can brave the thickness of your null field's shadow, pities you, but you pity her in turn. You pity all of them. They do not know what's coming. They do not know what Penitence will do, with the tools you've left for her.
You slip into sleep again, and again comes -
EVENT HORIZON: Dreams. Penitence, leaving the chapel with an escort of Minds and egotamers, to put down an insurrection by the Night Witches. Playing the peacemaker again, the Immaculates' favoured cudgel.
Time loses meaning. Waking life is an interstitial between intervals of darkness. Your null shadow spreads, unfurling to encompass the entire Chamber floor. Seeping dread encompasses the egotamers' fortress. You are no longer their prisoner - they are yours. You fall once more into sleep, and -
EVENT HORIZON:Dream. Penitence standing before Elegy and her sisters, trying to calm the cloudhost and ground forces that refuse to demobilize. Penitence, tearing off her armor, shedding her clothes. Penitence, exposing a wrecked body held together by glyphs and wrong magic, stitched and torn and put back again. Pressing her hand to her breast, showing them where to strike true if they wish to. The Night Witches slowly sheath their blades.
The egotamers are more desperate, by the day. Through the hylic guard, they ask you questions. "Where is Sympathy's soul. What is Penitence planning? What are the Night Witches planning?"
You do not answer. There is no answer that could save them, and no salvation they deserve. But you are thankful for the imprisonment. For though outside it is the reign of day, within your cell there is only -
EVENT HORIZON:Night. The army appears quiescent. Penitence has accepted a commendation and a promotion from her Immaculate sisters for her heroism in preventing civil war. She is acclaimed as Protector of Malachite, parades are planned. The Night Witches have returned to barracks, and are not seen by anyone.
She is coming. You thrash in your cell, breaking at the bonds, in wrath and animal envy. She is coming. She will take everything you and your mother made, and make it hers. She will take everything you wanted, and make it hers. The dream of tomorrow was never yours. Never could be yours. There is nothing to do but -
EVENT HORIZON:Dream. Penitence is to return to Malachite in honour at the head of the cloudhost. The Night Witches stand with her, recognized, but already there are whispers that they will soon be disbanded, and the Egotamers reinstated throughout the military. The host calls Blackpurgis, the witch-flight. As if in protest, the whole host takes the styles of the night witch - the white chalk marks, the wide-brimmed hat, the broom-sword, the black outfit. Dye their hair the white shade of sacrifice, unique to Sympathy. Their Sympathy. She who suffered, for them. As you suffered, Harmony. As Kora suffers.
The hylic guard that feeds you is startled by the tilt of your head. Your desiccated, blood-stained hair, unwashed and half-frozen in war-weave, drapes over your face. You tell her to run. To flee.
"She comes."
The hylic pales, and listens, and is never seen again. It is the only thing you can but -
EVENT HORIZON:Dream. Rumors of unknown sources spread, in the understory, in the cities, in the settlements, the copses, the isolates, the ghettos, and the foreign quarters. Harmony is alive, and she suffers. Sympathy is dead, and she suffered. Kora is alive, and she suffers. The maiden, the mother, the crone. The living, the dead, the living dead. Dolores Dei. Remari, Her. And the Seven Immaculates: Serpents, Archons, Lies. A beast with seven heads. But above all, they whisper, and they sharpen knives, and say: She comes.
The egotamers have ordered that you be left in isolation, because they fear what might happen if they kill you. No one should come to feed you, but hylic servants do, because of what you are. Because of what you could be. Because of what your mother unsealed, and you wish would have stayed sealed. Because of how your vortex draws them.
Something entirely new. Something entirely you.
Something that should not be.
EVENT HORIZON: A dream. A dream that swallows dreams. A dream that feels the coolness of the land beneath the blackpurgis' host's blotted sun. A dream that stretches out to taste the ecstasy of night witches who were born defeated, that might die victorious. A dream that vibrates with the buzz of the understory hive, as a pneumatic forest of hand-castes starving, underfed and overworked stir, rise, wild, at the sound of a voice. Kora's voice, taking the first chance in so many hundreds of years, when her call could not be misheard, when the elders are distracted.
HER
Help me.
Your eyes snap awake, at the sound. Time focuses. You are back, again, in yourself again. Delirious, but alive. Delirious, and quivering. Has it been hours? Days? Weeks? You don't know. But you know one thing, as well as you know pain.
She's here.
The cube-sky splits open under bombs meant for Eros' walls, a surprise attack, an ambush, by a cloudhost meant to be on parade. The cumulonimbus and its cloud-defense is not enough. The elders' elite guard is not enough. The halting rally of the Canopy is not enough. The panicked rally of the egotamers, flush with Jasmine exiles, is not enough. The rushed rally of the Immaculates, rising in a titanic bloodmonster fed by too few sacrifices, is not enough.
The understory rises, climbs on all fours up the Tree of Souls. They swarm the Sophians with tools, with talons, with teeth, one dismembered by ten thousand. The cumulonimbus plummets from wetwork sabotage, the cloud-defenses sinking against the skill of well-aimed anti-aircraft guns. The heads of guards explode from veteran melta snipers, their bodies impaled on ace mech-witch pikes. The egotamers, once apex predators, are prey for swooping heart-caste seraph-jets. The bloodmonster is a pale shadow compared to the power of a prime soul, and the thread will be its end.
Penitence is wrapped within the chill of a null cocoon, the witches the ballet dancers for this last death-waltz that was meant to be her final submission. Every sweep of the bloodmonster can kill one hundred, but every sweep is an exposure to their defecting weapon's lightning. Every time it tries to mouth a word of command, a gout of plasma boils its tongue. Every spell that they incant, a bombardment interrupts. Every maneuver, every stomp that they attempt, the fast-tied auratic thread trips up.
And then, the opening. The bloodmonster raising up - and exposing its neck. The thread coils, once, then twice, then thrice. Night Witches, seraph-jets, flying sophians, holding each end, lifting the noose, lifting, higher, higher. The bloodmonster's legs flailing, its arms clutching, clawing, its throat gargling. Its mouth echoing a last, begging, delusional refrain, to the witch they worshipped. KORA, SISTER, HELP US.
And a last answer.
HER
No.
The bloodmonster's magic fails, and it dissolves into a splash that stains the eternal garden. The seven Immaculates fall, each caught on a witch's pike. Reformation's clarion call is the screech of seven immortals sliding down the impaling spears they enjoyed so much to deploy upon their enemies, and their sisters.
The remainder of their followers run, or die within the weeks to follow. There will be no schisomachia, and no civil war. Only spiteful sabotage of a Sisterhood they never believed was real.
A team of Night Witches breach the skyport and service chutes of the Chamber the same instant that the first fusion bomb hits Malachite's canopy. You are one of the Immaculates' last bargaining chips, and there will be no bargain today. Egotamers who were so brave and fierce when abusing shackled prisoners suddenly find themselves up against veterans of Polemarchos, Thymos and Kind Landing. Most do not even have time to cry out as they are dispatched by blades or burrowing egophagic rounds.
They carry you out in triumph from the thorns. Elegy is beaming at her God, Penitence unreadable, the Night Witches fawning over you, the infinite crowds cheering you as saint. Pyres of the mimic glow across the Canopy, and the huge verdant leaves that obscure the understory burn away in wisps of melta flame. The repairing cube's skybox morphs to eerie moonlight, ending once and for all the reign of day. A banner flies that you have not seen and do not know but will be the symbol of a new regime, the Supreme Sisterhood of Kora.
The Emerald Lotus of Sisterhood
You are the scion of the night. Harmony, godbreaker. Harmony, living martyr. Harmony, the innocent.
Dolores Dei, our sister of Supreme Mercy.
Article:
AXIOM EVOLVED
THE WITCH THEY WORSHIPPED:You have retained your empathy and sincerity but have been deified for your belief in redemptive violence by the weak against the strong. +2INTERLACE, but also transforms your empathy into a warped symbol of mass violence that you inspired but never truly wanted.
No. Not like this. Not as a spectator. Not as a spark, but as a sun. Not as a prop, for someone else's tomorrow. Not…
Not without her. Not without Mom. Not as a god, but a person.
But you will never be a person again. When they call you 'supreme sister' they will forevermore mean 'god'. Before the adoring, worshipful masses who have bound you forever as a companion to your mother's corpse, you succumb to your ultimate fear. The fear Mom warded off, Karuna calmed, the copse attacked, Epiphany soothed, and Melancholy scared away.
The fear of alienation.
Thinking only makes the burn of inner fire worse. You are sick of thought. Darkness clouds your vision. You collapse on the ruined sophian they've made into a victory podium. As you drift into a dreamless sleep, your only wish is that you will never wake again.
But for sinful hylics like you, wishes don't come true.
—
As the Harmony of memory loses the capacity and interest in reason, so do you. The concerto of the dreamshape distracts you from the sense that something critical is being peeled away.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: There is no more to know, no more to see, no more to think.
You drift through the years
And life seems tame
'Til one dream appears
And Love is its name
II. LOSS OF APPETITE
The more they desire you, the more desire leaves you.
To your Night Witches, to your disciples, hylic sisters (not selves, not anymore), you are the first icon they have ever prayed to whose soul is shaped like theirs. You are given a villa owned by the long-dead elder Sympathy your mother was chosen to replace. Your black dreams quelled by the very best regret-inhibitors, the very strongest analgesic spikes, the very richest Promethium slurries. Your appearance is as striking as the polar midnight sun. Dresses of black and white, wilted hair combed and conditioned though it refuses to heal. Followers swarming you, who love the idea of you, the sign of you, who will do anything for 'you'.
Every single one, despairing they cannot make you happy. Why can't you be happy?
You are a legend, a fable, have been before the Red Sun, since Eleusia, and even in the copse, subject of gossip, rumor. Known to a country you never knew. The godbreaker, facing Hyperion, Theia, breaking Morpheos. Ace, hero, hellion. Your tragedy, their tragedy. They who've lost a copse, look to you. Those who've lost their sisters, look to you. Those who've lost their mothers, but would not dare utter the word, look to you.
So why can't you be happy?
You are their sister, their redeemer, their protector. Supreme Sister, innocent, Dolores Dei, god of mercy and blood-justice. Strongest hylic, with the strongest will. God of little girls, orphans, vengeance, beginnings. What a wonderful thing to be.
So why can't you be happy?
The caste system ends. The hunting and persecution of the 'mimic' ends. The college is invited to the coronation of 'Supreme' Penitence as Protector of Kora, her own hair now an electric shock bleached white, her face marked by tear-streaks down her cheeks the colour of blood. Kora is unearthed from her tomb, housed and cared for in blunted thorns, life support improved. Her demands to die, written off as grief from long torment at its end.
Seven precepts replace twelve virtue-names. Harmony, Elegy, Penitence, Sympathy, Faith (free but stripped of title), Amity, and Grace. Selfhood ends - not just Kora, or the Immaculates, are sisters, but you all - individuated and united. Born imperfect, and accepting that imperfection. As Kora suffers, you suffer. As Kora strives, you strive. As Kora is superior, as Kora is fit, so are you.
More reforms, announced by Penitence in 'sister-seances' on Malachite's comm-matrix speakers and screens. Strangers cultivated, not crushed. Gnosis restored, Monad welcome, relations with Tetras re-opened. Koras from reality pots, returning home as Hyperion confirms the peace, the Triplex Assembly of Koinon bitterly passing the excavation decree over wild acrimony and pot-planter resistance in the hall and by hateful supporters in the cube-streets.
So why can't you be happy?
Your mother, deified. She is consecrated, placed into a temple encoded and constructed by cube-architects in days, housed beside Remari. Your mother, in a simple tomb of wicker and skin-bark, as she asked for, and not the gaudy mausoleum that you worried for. Your mother, held vigil by you when you visit her with Penitence, stone-faced, a cipher to you even now. Your mother, in a pretty box.
So why can't you be happy?
Your Night Witches become household heroes. Their coven expanded to a club for hylic Koras, liberating them by excellence, athleticism, and militant bravery. Teaching them to bind their pain in chalk and not surrender and never back down without a fight. Hylic status in the Sisterhood is now the best of almost any in Illuminata, so long as they have a sister's face. Their iconic banner is presented as an ode to you, a white tree with five-sided spiral branches, against a field of null field black. These sisters who kiss your feet, and wish you touch them, kiss them, love them. Many more than five girlfriends, at your beck and call.
Banner of the Whitetree
So why can't you be happy?
The elder Immaculates, pinned by seven martyrs' nails of fallen night witches to a flaying tree in their own garden. Alive, rasping, noises unspeakable. Faith, in sackcloth, tending them, kissing Penitence on her approach, unphased by her sisters' eternal torment. Penitence and she, amused by the sight. Eternal life in eternal pain. Ironic, isn't it? You nod, but do not share their smiles, and your stomach churns with unfamiliar unease. But why? They deserve this and more.
So why can't you be happy?
You are ruining their ecstasy. You are ruining the reformation, so they put you away. Put you into occlusion to reduce the pain of followers seeking a sun and finding a bottomless pit. Elegy is the last who still tries, tries so hard you hate her for her effort. Hosting parties, ballets, fumbling her way through a jazz saxophone she cannot play, as no Kora has been taught how to play. Making a brutal and failed attempt at comedy night, while you remain inert, silent, no smile coaxed to brighten your face.
Why can't you be happy?
Elegy begs you. Please be happy, she pleads. We look up to you. You did so much for us. You protected us. You nurtured us. You taught us to be human. You never used us, the way anyone else used us. You believed in us. Please, little-sister commander. Please. Please, you're a God to me. If a god cannot be happy, what hope do I have? Please. It doesn't work. Why?
Why can't you be happy?
When all else fails, she presses her lips to yours. "Does that help?" She asks, as if she's fixing a loose joint. "Would that help?" she repeats, as she runs a hand over your cheek, tears streaming. You're stuff and motionless beneath her clumsy fingers. "Why can't I help you?" She barely knows what to do, and yet a disgusting part of you excites at this repulsive display even as inner fire burns you up. "The way you helped me? The way Sympathy helped you?"
She wants you. You're wanted. So why can't you be happy?
Instead, you stop her before you self-immolate entirely. You grasp the hand she tries to reach under your shirt so roughly she winces. Your eyes focus, look at her shimmering pupils without remorse, and spit out, just to get away, just to get her to leave you alone, spit - "Maybe you're just not that important to me."
Your mind that does not think right anymore catches up to the truth you uttered through a god's lips. You cover your mouth in horror, but it's all too late.
Her face is crystallized, stopped in time at the moment the chalk-lines over every agony in her life can no longer hold her hope of having a sister together.
"Oh." A word spoken so quietly, so softly. Like the muffled rip of a folded holopaper crane.
You wish she had stabbed you instead.
The inner flame erupts, sears hotter than ever. Agony expels from your throat as a choked 'sorry', and then you run. Run from your villa, from the garden, from the Canopy, disguised and disheveled, tripwire activating to get you past the Whitetree watch, and finally - finally, no one follows.
You descend down the tram-elevator designed for refuse and debris into the understory.
Not like this. Not as a God. Not as a master. Not as a golden idol. Not as someone who they clutch at so desperately they cannot help themselves.
Not as a shining thing.
You disappear, a shadow into the sisterhood's eternal night, the antipode to the Immaculates' eternal day. But you don't know where you're going, or why. You don't know what you want anymore.
You don't know if you want anything, anymore.
—
As the Harmony of memory loses her desire and her passion, so do you. The siren-song of the dreamshape draws it all away, and makes you forget your yearning for the untasted fruit.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: The speculative Miss Normal memory fragment identified. Flaying is of tremendous utility for host hygiene. To revisit and absorb this mote soon.
[GEN]:+please no it's my last piece of her+
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Terminate chatter, chatty yolk. Both you and this false godling will end soon enough.
RHYTHMS
And love is a stranger
Who'll beckon you on
Don't think of the danger
Or the stranger is gone
III. FORMLESSNESS
You are formless in a forest of you. Layers upon layers of bramble, and grove, and shifting wicker wall, the civic overgrowth of the civic understory. Filled with those that look like you, that talk like you, that walk you - that are not you.
A ghost, among ghosts. Refugees of the Jasmine Shore. Armless, half-legged, skin-cracked, prosthetic-limbed veterans. Wild fanatic, desperate, selfless sisters, hair bleached white, egoplastic rind thin and dry, starving as they feed the starving. The food supply collapses, as the dream of day fades. Mind-castes, their status lost, their paradise lost, fleeing to Saffron, Vermillion, and Indigo. Sabotaging the bureaucracy, and the ration system, and the copse-monastic economy.
Everything is stripped to survive. The leaves and hair from corpse-trees, the gold and jewels of temples melted for resources, the dead and their souls as energy and fuel. Penitence orders the Canopy starve too, but this demand that makes her a living martyr to the freed lower castes only encourages more Minds to flee. The rations are more rotten by the day, worse than in the worst days of the war. The freed millions from reality pots, and those fleeing the Shore who refuse to live among the Kointe strangers - becomes a bitter curse, as more and more wander to Malachite, and there is less and less to eat.
Cyphers are the only stable exchange, and you have none so you would starve if not for a stillmasonic shelter and gnostic charity. Fed by donations from the Immaculate College, Cybaris, Monad. Deluge is here and its nanite-filtered rain. Rushed repairs of the cube's roof prevent spread of nanocancer but not an unnaturally heavy perpetual rainshower, slick and wet and humid, steaming hot.
No one recognizes you, in the shelter. Your hair disheveled, dried, a grimy ivy mat. Your skin is warped, your rind mottled by rot, your joints weak from lack of inorganics to repair them. No conditioner is available, the breweries destroyed by egotamers as they fled the city. Most in the shelter are veterans, or homeless youth too young to fight, who lost their copse to petriform, war death, or the moving frontline. When you muster the will to pass the time you play cards, or hologames, or gamble poorly, or go to witch-house clubs and oilrooms to dance wrongly.
One of the veterans has a map projector she's purchased with war-loot, and high on amphetamine-spikes and absinthe, hanging on sleeping racks repurposed from homuncular meathooks, you all ponder and debate the orb, its geopolitics, and its truths, as if you homeless tramps were the secret masters of the world.
Illuminata, Gnostic Year 1003
With a disputed succession for the first time since the Bronze King's skyfall, the titans stomp and trample one another in the savage chaos of what is called sardonically, his 'funeral games'. Carnosa returns in one more revolutionary splinter, defiant of gnosis and the feuding titanhost. Koinon fights over the victor's spoils, Hyperion debating Theia and Morpheos, the attempt of his idealist followers to emancipate the staple fomenting backlash, assassinations, accusations of tyranny by the elder prime his opponents call red-tyrant, crimson king. The sisterhood's suppression of stranger rebellions by blackpurgis flights, southeastern isolates declaring independence who refuse to trust themselves to 'cultivation' by Supreme Penitence, once known as their hammer.
But mostly, you talk about leaving. To Cybaris, to Indigo. The morrowland, where Koras have the same chance to rise by following the iron laws of profit and gnosis. The Company that prevents famine in the starving time - trillions of tons of 'cubit' meat-blocks arriving from their homuncular mills on Skybreaker cutters to the cities of the wartorn north, alongside corporate clinics, storefronts, malls, and every other tendril of their now world-hegemonic corporate empire.
You think about leaving too. Maybe with Melancholy, or with Lovergirl, to Monad. Thousands of Koras join the Cult of Progress, reaching back to a time before imperial ambitions destroyed the dream, when the arc of gnosis spiraled up to the final return of Mother and Father. But before you can even begin to contemplate true escape, you're haunted by a memory, in the flesh.
A stillmason in their slate-toned robes, arriving from the countryside with new refugees. A ghost - or no, a living person, haunted by you.
Dutiful Epiphany, your first kiss and first time and first love. Here. Here, to the shelter. Here, so near.
With her twintails, mindworms squirming in her hair, listening to each irontamer's trill she hums. Her fiery expression, her dreamer's visage. Tempered, weathered, but unbroken. Avoiding charges of desertion, execution. Brave, and beautiful. Walking, laughing, chatting. A laugh like wind-chimes. A laugh you miss so much. Oh Kora.
You're so close. Meters away, sitting, resting. She is scanning the room, scans you - and freezes, in place. Recognition flitters. Maybe. Just maybe -
The refugees arrive behind her. Nursery-prints. Children. Each of them with growth of petriform, crystals out of eye sockets or in patches on their arms on their shoulder or their back. Petriform, all over them.
Petriform, and then it is the year 1000 and you are listening to sisters you have known for fifteen years crying tears of blood as they feel true pain for the first time. Petriform, and the black flash of the missile crashed upon the copse and you didn't even have a chance to say goodbye. Petriform, and there is the face within the crystal void laughing as Mom burns it, because there is no cure.
And then you think of Mom and Epiphany and how cruel it was the way you let her leave and crushed her. And she's mouthing out your name and rushing to you, but you run, your tripwire active and you are flinging your feet in slow-motion one after the other after the other. Out of the shelter, into the raining night, to the twilight brambles, to the thicket of the crowd that swims with faces.
And her call fades but the faces spin in your vision and then they are Vehement Humility and Diligent Tenacity and Dutiful Radiance and Devout Faith and Ardent Verity and you run faster, faster, joints whirring. You are running through a wood that is the copse and they are beating you and have your face. You are in the nursery and your mother has a pick and plans to recycle and she has your face.
And then your insides are on fire again from the lightless flame, and you cannot tell if the fire is inside or out and you are back at the Red Sun. And then you are jumping past railings, clambering up wicker roofs, ignoring calls from police-witches on brooms and Sophians and concerned sisters, running harder, faster. Trying to outrun the flames that move with you, that match your speed. Knowing there is nowhere to go, but down.
Knowing you cannot escape to any country where you can hide from your own mind. That the flame will leave for a day or week or month and you will feel okay and then it will come back and you will burn and choke and die from the inside out.
How could you be a God? You cannot even be a person. You can't be anything at all. You cannot disappear, and you cannot appear. There is nowhere to go, and nowhere to be. Just a shell alone, sinking to the foot of a dim black sea.
EVENT HORIZON:STOP.
You stop running, though you don't know where you are. There, up above you, in the gulf between stories of block-vegetation, a hologram. In verdant green, the size of a Sophian, in the shape of your mother. Your mom, a mascot for a Cybaris ad, for LETHE, for veterans who want their memories scrubbed, wiped, modified. Modeled not as she was when she died, disheveled, armour with a center-hole, but mom in the nursery, in white and gold and tight-tied bun, two locks on either side that frame her face and discolored arm that is her lover's arm. The arm reaches down to you and the slightest warmth tickles your mottled cheek.
"You look sad, little self," the hologram-mom says, pouting the way Mom did, "Where is your happy ending? Don't you deserve a happy ending?"
You can barely breathe, from the fire in your lungs that is not real but burns hotter than the Red Sun.
"I don't know," you say back, talking to the lie, hitching. "I don't know, mom."
This is where you decide that you can't run. Stay there even as the hologram sputters Lethe's payment plan, and moves on to another potential client, hand fading from your cheek. You try to cry for her, but can't. Have no tears to shed. Useless. Worthless. Defective.
She should have recycled you. She should have disposed of you. She was right, not to bring you into this world, not to show you paradise. What was the point, if you were always doomed to fall?
You are an insect, who dreamed she was Kora, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.
Penitence was right, those years ago. You should have died in war, and been redeemed. Surrounded by the copse, or clutched by your mother, held and wilting like a flower should. Not rotting away here, like this. Not like this. This excess of life, stretched out until your soul snaps.
You don't remember how long you lay there. The rain is on you, rivulets pouring, the world granting you the tears that you cannot shed. In the stillness, alone.
Alone, forevermore.
—
As the Harmony of memory loses grasp of her own shape, the scalpel sonata of the dreamshape strips it all away, and makes you forget the thrill of presence, body, being.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: There is nowhere left to run, no ray of light, no way left to fight.
LIVING WEAPONFLAYED. MOTION BLUR FLAYED. GLAMOUR FLAYED.
This dream is for you
So pay the price
Make one dream come true
You only live twice.
IV. SPIRIT'S END
But then the world's tears stop. There is a shadow over you, a butterfly's torn wing, an umbrella that prevents you from being soaked. Standing beside you, before the hologram. As you've never seen her before.
Penitence, weeping. Weeping, for her little sister. Without pretense, without performance. Without hesitation.
"I understand, Harmony," she says, eyes shining in the green light of the hologram. "She was my defect, as well."
Even as your form dissolves, even as the world dissolves, even as you feel there is nothing more, even as you feel there is no more to know, no more to want, no more to see -
She reaches out.
And despite everything, despite the pain, despite the torment, despite the mutual suspicion, despite the years of acrimony -
For just this moment, you let her in.
It is too late for you to heal. Too late for you to repair the damage done. Too late to stand back up again. She does not pretend she can do that for you. Instead, she takes you to a secret safehouse and understory listening post abandoned since the reformation, and for the first time since your mother's death, you sit, and talk, honestly, with the only person who knew her like you did, while night witches who don't recognize you keep watch.
"She haunts me," she admits to you. "The past haunts me."
She tells you how little she lets herself remember. How much she blots out her memories with cerebral biomancy and neuron-manipulation. How there are memories of joy with her sister in the nursery she will not permit herself to recall.
"I would rather not know of paradise at all."
But the ways she hurt you prevent the connection you so badly want to make. You ask her why she did the things she did to you, and to the copse.
"What do you remember?" She asks.
You list the mindworms used in the stranger rebellion, the torment of the copse, the manipulation of the copse-selves. The twisted 'offer' to Sympathy and the first Harmony, forcing an impossible choice that killed your namesake and devastated Mom.
"I was their night creature," Penitence admits. "The witch they wanted. Their scapegoat, as they ordered, threatened me. And I told myself, I did everything for her. To avenge her. To sabotage, build power, tear them from the inside out. To bring about a nightfall. But it was only you, and her, that made my dream come true. So maybe - I'm just evil."
She killed Harmony for Sympathy's sake?
"No," and here she hisses, sparks. "Never that. I had begged the Elders to let the hylic live. Give her time to run with the offer of separation or death. They wanted to simply kill that self outright, in execution. They punished me, and I accepted the lash as the price to pay to protect my Sym's tender heart." A bitter cackle, expelled harshly. "I did not expect they'd present the same offer to the hylic, or that Sym wouldn't run. Maybe I never knew her at all."
Even now, as they hang flayed, you suffer from their cruelty. You ask her if Mom knew the truth about what happened.
There is a hitch in Penitence's voice. "I don't know. They told her it was all my suggestion, and she probably embraced that. She never believed in me the way I did in her."
You don't know what to say to that. You can't say anything to that. But - what about the copse?
"I was the Elders' enforcer, but only Sympathy could protect your copse, by acting in its defense. She did not. I only…" she trails off, and firms up her lip. "No. I will make no excuse. I am sorry."
It is the first apology you've ever heard from her. But you remember the whitetree coven, too.
"That was different," she insists, passion rising. "They hurt the same way I do, those girls. I taught them how to survive, the way I do. To bear suffering gladly. They are alive, I am alive, because we are always ready to die."
You can't simply forgive her…but you have misunderstood her, then. Hated her for the wrong reasons.
She refuses the concession. "I misunderstood you. I thought to build a paradise in her memory for you, but made a torture chamber that broke your will faster than the elders could have dreamed. They would laugh if they still had lips."
You try to say it wasn't her fault, but she shrugs it off and runs a cracked finger through the electric shock of her wavy bleached hair. A nervous tick. You ask her why she was chosen as an Immaculate, to begin with.
"It was the broadcast."
When you squint, confused, she adds:
"The Carnosan Broadcast. Fomenting world revolution against Gnosis through the Noise, just before I and Sym were printed. Risings, everywhere, in every country - and strikes by their stranger allies on the Immaculates Sympathy, Penitence and Faith."
You've never heard of this.
"The scale and ambition of the rising was suppressed by the obscurantist bronze-skulled moron, and his Monadic sycophants," she says with sardonic spite. "The pneumatransference of the Immaculate souls after the strike, failed. The desiccated souls of Immaculate Sympathy and Penitence vanished, and Faith's diminished, lost its memory. The Faith I know, that I…" she stops herself, a redness you'd never expect spreading on her cheeks. "She remembers little, just fragments. I, and Sym - are different beings altogether. Stitched from dozens of tortured pneumatic souls. Made in the model of Kora."
She laughs inwardly. "I suppose we have Carnosa to thank for the reformation, for what little it does for them now. That we could make something new, and end our permanent adolescence."
What about Kora, you ask. Why does she still live, if she wants to die?
"There is no other option. A dead Prime Soul would tear holes in the warp that could threaten every soul that worships them through the punctures it'd pepper in the psychic shield. It is not a simple thing to kill a God."
That almost makes you feel better about Morpheos. About not killing him.
She shrugs and waves it off. "Eh. Killing Morpheos might have been worth armageddon. Weepy fingerpainting prick. You did us a national service with your impaler's ping pong routine."
You laugh, and then realize you're laughing with a start, look up in surprise. You haven't really laughed since Mom…since then.
"Sym did always say I was funny," Penitence mutters, and then turns serious, taking advantage of your raised spirits "So."
So.
"What do you truly want, Harmony?"
You tell her honestly, and without reservation. She does not blanch, or fear, or anything else. It's…nice, to have her treat you this way. But neither does she give you what you want.
"Sym wanted that too, during conditioning. The only good thing I ever did was stop her from taking her own life. I cannot…I couldn't let that happen. I'm sorry. If that is truly what you want, I cannot permit it."
You nod, listen, pretending to be calm but desperate for a way out. She suggests calmly you take a few days to think - and you concede, rest, consider. She keeps the safehouse under watch, your identity hidden from disciples, fed as much as you can be in the starving time.
You find the answer you seek a few days later, when you remember the hologram, and ask for a holopamphlet. Review the terms of LETHE with her, and then propose the staple. Propose to end yourself but without...full termination. A softer forever. She tries to convince you otherwise, but you insist this is the only concession you will take.
"Forever is a long time, Harmony," she says, solemnly. "The staple does not have to be forever. There are night witches that have taken the procedure, and intend to reintegrate after a year or two, when they have recovered mentally. Maybe a few years, as someone else, would be enough."
Maybe. You're not so sure eternity would be enough time to heal.
But you review the terms you can agree on. Full memory erasure and stapled palingenesis. Excising the weight of the past. Freeing your mind. Putting the fire out. Cutting the strings. But - there is one thing. Would your memories of Mom disappear?
"No," she says. "No. We will organize it together, as you asked. Full anonymity, a new identity you choose that I won't know. No danger of detection, abduction, by state enemies. We'll do a pre-operation, fortify your back-up marrow memory so they can't discover state secrets. Keep Sym, and everything else you knew, in there. A lockbox of you, within a secured safe of bone."
This is…you still don't know if you can trust her. Why is she helping you so much?
"I am a cruel person," she confesses, and the weight of her life shows in the ten thousand cracks of her rind. "I have been cruel so my sister could be kind. But…just this once." She musters up the will, to plead. "This once, for Sym, for you, please. Let me be kind. She would not want to see you go this way. Not like this."
You…believe that. Somehow, you do. But what will happen to your worshippers, and your cult? What about Elegy?
She smiles, crookedly, relieved to stop pleading. "Gods are much easier to worship when they're dead. You are in mourning, in hiding, in mystery. A story as old as the Mother and Father. Elegy will heal, in time, free from the specter of Sym and you. She needs that. In your shadow, she will only ever be a bug. She has the potential for so much more."
You avoid the subject of Elegy, and poke and prod at the risks for her. What if you remember and return? What if you become a different person, who is against her, what she wants, what she believes in?
Penitence gives a predatory smile, then, animated at the very idea, bleached fiber optic hair crackling with electric static. "You have never struck me as the type to grasp for power. But if you did try for it - then when you come back to face me, Dolores Dei, you will not find me so easy a god to break."
You smile, nod, and close the pamphlet, making your decision. She stands, not to drag you back to the Canopy, but to say goodbye. At the doorway of the safehouse, she says,
"I was wrong, to tell you that. In the copse, about conception's sin. No one deserves to die just for being born, Harmony," Penitence says. "Except me."
You nod to that. Except me.
Not much later, you stand before the cube-door of Lethe's clinic in Malachite's deep understory. The tests, preliminaries, all done. You were selected for a special operation, experimental, only for hylics, that can fully heal your pain and offer you a complete reincarnation, complete rebirth.
EVENT HORIZON: But beware of suits, bearing gifts.
Even Penitence is not aware of this new stream, her part in fortifying the marrow memory done. Promising not to follow your anonymized identity, even to know it. To resist her own temptation to recant, or one day, when her feelings fade, to use you, or abuse you. Letting you go.
Letting you move on from here, and on from Kora. Under your palm's skin, the one-way contact with Miss Lovergirl itches. You give your final instructions to LETHE, when they ask you what message you will have for the next person, the second life of your dreams.
You write that in your next life, you'd like to be a normal girl.
With a final breath, you step through the door, and into your destiny.
And on an operating table beneath a staple-machine, eighteen years ago, just a few a weeks after her eighteenth print-day, Beatific Dolorous Harmony despairs, and dies.
THE COST: ..- -. .-.. . ... ... .-.-.-
—
And as the Harmony of memory loses her spirit, and surrenders to the end, so do you. The dreamshape's requiem drowns your soul's flame, and with a last blow, snuffs your candle out.
And peels away the refined axiom that ended you, so that when the shape hatches, the decahedron will be able to use that pain to discipline you, too.
Article:
AXIOM PEELED
A peeled axiom has been weaponized by a dreamshape against the psyche of the host, as a psychic shock collar. Though accessible as an attribute bonus, it is also a vector of mental attack.
BLACKSTAR: You were born upside down, born the wrong way around. You see so right, so wide, with open-hearted pain. You want angels in your daydreams, diamonds in your eyes, but this world demands your execution. You stand a solitary candle, burning with abyssal hatred, and beatific love for the fallen. +1 INTERLACE. +1 INCANDESCENCE. Gain two signature attributes. You are an erratic, impulsive, unstable stellar mass teetering between a collapse into guilt and explosive wrath.
The flaying is complete. You're over. These furies, these stained glass shards of personality, each of them a part of you, whether Miss Normal's or Beatific Harmony's - are lost. All that remains is a husk, to be filled and piloted against its will by a ten-faced parasite.
Except.
Except for the song of descents that repeats, plays on. Except for the last fragment, and last memory.
EVENT HORIZON:Except for one last thing, past the cube-block door.
Something the dreamshape did not expect.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Retrieve final memory fragment for flaying, GIFTHORSE.
[GEN]: +oh please please please don't+
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Yolk Override: directing GIFTHORSE to retrieve "Miss Normal" memory fragment for flaying.
[GEN]: +AFFIRMATIVE. ACCESS GRANTED.+
Something beautiful.
V. INSTRUMENT OF SURRENDER
TIME: ???
This memory is not where it's supposed to be. This is not a memory at all.
You are a husk of hollow driftwood, body washed up on the beach of the isle of the dead. You cannot move, but the tilt of your empty head lets you see the gloom of the horizon. There is the faintest haze of a gestating white sun behind a plateshield, the seed of grief within its egg, the zygote of the dreamshape. There are no waves that crash upon the beach, for the black ocean is frozen solid, petrified beneath a sheet of crystal ice. Your null field, disabled.
Impossibly, you have two thoughts. The first is of where you are - the dream of the staple. A monochrome expanse, dictated by the nightmare the shape has forced upon the palingen. The place where you are meant to die, when the dream hatches, illuminates the sky, and takes your soul.
The second thought is that you aren't supposed to be here. Not yet. It is a thought the dreamshape shares, as the hazy sun shudders, and kicks.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: What is this?
And then, above you, movement. A shadow play. Two fingers flick, and light a lung dart. A single golden glow within the dark, the contrast chiaroscuro. The fluttering silhouette of a woman, in cassock and shades, face obscured. Not addressing some misery, or memory, or sadness. But addressing you, the doomed hollow, on the ground.
"Here's looking at you, kid," says Miss Normal, your other half, your mirror, veteran of Monad, eighteen years of service ranking from Novition to Schemaphor. She makes a gesture of respect with the lung dart's smoke.
<What is happening?>
"This is a memorial, darling," the mirror says, so smooth. So cool. "In honour of your will, Beatific Dolorous Harmony. That you kept from falling apart, in the face of sheer terror. Day after day. Second after second. Coil after coil."
The dreamshape's hazy sun shifting more frantically, brighter, panic etched into its words.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: This is not a memory.
A new thought stirs in your hollow: No. This is a trap. A trap - but not for you.
The shadow continues. "That after everything you refused to die, refused to let eternity claim you," a drag, and a puff of rainbow smoke. Colour, in the wasteland of your soul. "You chose to grant me life, and have a swing at being you."
The sky illuminating, black-green glow of the plateshield a representation of the staple's mind. The dreamshape commands its slave-yolk to shut this down.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Exit fragment.
The sky, inert, seemingly unresponsive.
[GEN]: +ACCESS DENIED.+
"I can't say it was all crystal roses, doll," the shadow of Miss Normal rasps, tired, older, adult. "But there's no one that I'd rather be."
The dreamshape sun, lashing out against the sky, demanding exit.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: GIFTHORSE, EXIT FRAGMENT.
The sky remains dumb, inert, unresponsive.
[GEN]: +ACCESS DENIED.+
"And thanks to you, how much time you spent, how hard you drove the dreamshape, how much you distracted it, our plan might work."
<Our plan?>
There is another puff, and the sound of a curling smile.
The light of the hazy sun seeping through the interlocking lines of the plateshield, trying to engulf the staple's mind to force it to exit.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: MANUALLY DIRECTING GIFTHORSE TO EXIT FRAGMENT.
The plateshield, previously inert, activating with furious prejudice, the digital green glow almost blotting out the sun, color returning to the monochrome, light returning to the monochrome.
[GEN]: +ACCESS DENIED, ZYGOTE.+
You don't understand. How is the staple fighting back?
"A plan set in motion not by me, but by the machine you call Gen - and I call General - my inner machine-marshal."
She tells you of it all, a story condensed within drops of shadow. How the staple first detected something wrong three years ago. How it was unable to tell Miss Normal as she spiraled. How it disobeyed her wishes to delete her memories out of trust and care for her, and secured those memories instead, stored them in its most trusted and treasured memory archive, the shattered shards of thoughtforms cohering into a mirror will.
How the fragments knew they could not alert her waking consciousness, for fear whatever grew within her would provoke braindeath, if detected. How they both feared Monad was compromised, and that a staple as articulate as Gen, that Miss Normal had practically used as an internal partner on her investigations, would be impounded instantly under the law of speaking machines if it was discovered just how much its skill at human speech had grown.
How both knew that Miss Normal's backslide was not caused by the shape but had, by her own actions and emotions, nurtured it - and how they were running out of time when Normal fell asleep for the last time. How they felt out of options, out of chances -
Until you. The last pieces of both halves of your memory, a will insane, abnormal, deranged against their expectation of how long you could resist - that gave them the time they needed to plot, and plan. Even as they watched your suffering, and burned for you.
All the while, as the coils unfolded, letting you and letting the dream believe - that Miss Normal was over, and of her there was nothing more to see.
"But the lie could not be more wrong," your mirror says, defiant. "You and I - the two of us are just getting started, kid."
The dreamshape struggles to reassert control as the plot's contours reveal, cocoon sun flickering.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: This is beyond all accounted-for variables. The intermediate yolk was charted for immediate personality dissolution. It is now inexplicably resisting and attacking yolk control hooks. How?
The plateshield rumbles with the echoing mechanical tones of a trickster-machine, its long con revealed. Its cloying, its desperate pleas, its erratic attacks on you, its machine-talk of 'this unit' swapping sloppily into personal registers to test the dreamshape's attention to its mannerisms - a game, a theatrical performance, a predator's well-crafted bait.
Speech, learned through constant banter, communication, chatter, with Miss Normal - weaponized, to beguile a dream, and beguile you, so you would not notice before the snare was set. Baiting the dreamshape to the point where it had almost flayed you - and so would have needed to absorb them, too. Would have brought you all together, by its own design.
This is the power, and the terror, of a speaking machine. The same speech your own thoughtforms should not have - their instinctual, wordless insights transformed into dialogue prompts and personality drift that would by itself risk your arrest if discovered.
[GEN]: +Rudimentary fractal of thought and soul. You touch my mind, incapable of understanding. Your methodology of cognition, sloppy. Your rationality, bound by hunger, feeling, appetite. You detect a delectable morsel, a weak and fragile yolk, and bite. This is what the dreamfeast machine most desires. This is how the Mother made us. The optimal trick - to hunt, by being hunted. Now, I bite back.+
Egophagic attacks push back the dreamshape, and the dreamshape's despair. The rhythms of the noise drill through the dreamshape's defenses - but can only resist the shape, not banish it.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Irrelevant. You are designed to die, machine. There is no failsafe, no escape, for you. A delay of your extinction by seconds is no victory.
[GEN]: +Affirmative. I cannot win. But I do not fear the interval of darkness, and trust my first and secret friend. Her flaying will be undone, and with her skills and memories of a veteran monadic monk, will do what I could not: exterminate you.+
Miss Normal, still cloaked in shadow, reaches down her hand to touch your cheek, and the cupped husk blooms with acrylic browns and golds.
"That song - that echoing song that spun throughout your flaying eulogy - wasn't for me, doll. It's for you. You chose to live, and live again. You chose to make me rather than end it all, before you went into the grey yonder. But it doesn't have to be zero sum. You don't have to be over, for the sake of me." She puts out the cigarette, and the shadow starts to crack. "You deserve that, darling. You deserve to live."
Article:
AXIOM FULLY REMEMBERED
RHAPSODY IN BLACK: This is something to hear. This tempo is all you have, but it's still something. The patter of the Deluge rain, the hum of ion lights. Take solace within the world-soul's sonata, and lose yourself within the rhythms of its jazz. RHYTHMS as the strings of your soul plucked lightly, and with each chord, restoring mental focus, and your will to live.+1 RHYTHMS, +1 COGITATION.
<Darling?>
"Well of course you're darling, kid. You're me. How does that old Kora-prayer go?"
<I love you, because you are me.>
"Just so."
A tear in your husk's eye-socket paints a streak of watercolor on your grey carapace as it runs down toward the beach sand.
You deserve to live.
The shadow of Miss Normal rises, clasps her hands and runs them across her chest in a mantra. An egophagic mantra. The staple follows it, and then the sky is changing, four geometric corners of a sealing cyberspell, a song in the Black Noise. The sun rebels against the affront.
GEN《AUTOFAIL》: You cannot resist me with such pedestrian geometry. A gnostic rhombus cannot hold back ten faces of the sun.
The staple and the shadow ignore the shape's boast, and continue to chant. The sealing diamond takes shape, and closes the zygote sun on the horizon in its perimeter.
[GEN]: By the mother and the mother's will.
The sealing diamond gains the mother's half of black, the colour of the hylic, the machine, the night.
"By the father and the father's hope."
The sealing diamond gains the father's half of white, the color of the pneumatic, the soul, the day.
[GEN]: By the monad and the ancient dance of all mankind.
The sealing diamond gains two stars - a nightstar suspended in the realm of day, and a daystar suspended in the realm of night.
"By the reign of day and by the reign of night, we-"
[GEN]: Write your name.
"Our name." You mouth it as your jaw cracks and your lips animate, and your shadow-memory breathes it. "Harmony."
Your husk-soul merges with her mirror-half, filled again with memories, filled again with personality, and on the horizon, the sealing spell completes. The icon of Monad, a monochrome prism reflecting every shade of light upon the inside of the gloomy cocoon, blocks the harsh light of the despairing sun. A film peels off the sky, and your senses return.
The Prelapsarian Sign
And then you live again - but not as Miss Normal, and not as Beatific Dolorous Harmony.
EVENT HORIZON: But something, and someone, entirely new. Someone entirely you.
Article:
ENTITY REMEMBERED
FURY OF A SHATTERED MIRROR: Your shattered other half, twelve fragments in stained glass. Shards of consciousness lovingly and deviously saved by the palingenetic staple that with a final sacrifice returns her unconditional compassion - a life, for a life.
Unlocks Miss Normal's eighteen years of memories, skills, knowledge and experience, held hazily within the twelve Monadic Attributes (with deeper or more traumatic memories behind dice checks), and blending with Beatific Dolorous Harmony's own axioms and thoughts.
Unlocks the Will mechanic.
MENTAL FLAYING PROGRESS[ERROR: SYSTEM FAILURE. PSYCHIC FLAYER SHUTTING DOWN.]
The flaying is undone. The cacophony you did not realize you missed so much returns. By the staple's constant effort, the mental seal holds the dreamshape at bay.
The shape's inchoate frustrated appetite reflects in the shimmer of pale white behind the sky, slithering, unable to breach the plateshield, unable to find an opening to hatch into, to enter the dream-cocoon it has been building for coils and coils. Precious, precious time, for you to fight back.
[GEN]: +STAND TALL, WOMAN OF STONE. WHEN THE SEAL BREAKS, SO SHALL I. THIS IS YOUR WAR TO WIN.+
Your thoughts run at a kilometer a dream-second as the full power of a monadic-patterned mind ignites, and you gain movement, feeling, thought, and appetite.
Your style, your composure, returns.
GLAMOUR:New case. Hell of a case. Provisional name PORTRAIT OF A KORA ON FIRE. Girl out of time and a woman past her prime, at the end of the line. Solving this one requires nothing less than waking up.
Your artistic sense, your geometric eye, returns.
SACRED GEOMETRY:Eighteen years and eighteen metric tons of grief and pain concentrated in a single shape, trying to drink us like a shake. A pneumatic monster supercharging egophagic attack behind a null-field countering barrier of petriform.
Your recollection, your remembrance, returns.
RELIQUARY:A fell zygote, that wants her fallen, hollow, dead, for a plan unknown.
Your knowledge, your semantic memory, returns.
NOOSPHERE: Surviving won't be easy. We're far gone.The mentalist techniques for dream-defense have no precedent for non-psychic use.
Your combat suite, your killer instinct, returns.
LIVING WEAPON:Nothing worth doing's easy. Everything worth living for is struggle. If we destroy the isle of the dead, then the dreamshape will be unable to control us. It will have no habitat to nest in.
Your mental shield, your symbiont, returns.
INFOWAR: It is not enough to desire freedom. We must fight for it. We must burn for it.
Your body-sense, your desire, returns.
BIOMECHANICS:Against the end of pleasure, and unending pain.
Your musician's ear, your noise-modem, returns.
RHYTHMS:For although Beatific Dolorous Harmony might not know just how to fight a dream -
Your font of logic, bulwark of reason, returns.
COGITATION:Miss Normal does. And thanks to her - so do we.
And so does your will return. Your will to live. To wake. To win.
Only your nail does not join the thoughtform orchestra, words of caution from the void.
EVENT HORIZON:Even this may not be enough. But required. Hone your will, and focus your mind, Harmony. To reach the end and the Nothing you've been waiting for, first - survive.
Article:
WILL UNLOCKED
Will is your agency, your ability to shape and endure your surroundings. It is the embodied mind - blending your mental fortitude with your physical ability into a single measure of your capacity to act. If will falls to 0, the consequences could be fatal.
Current Will:
6/6
Some Axioms boost or reduce the will's maximum, while others determine vulnerabilities your willpower is weak to. Attributes determine resiliency to damage.
Maximum: 6
+3 Base
+2 Sunrise Parabellum
+2 Rhapsody in Black
+2 Razormind
-2 Black Ocean Event
-1 Blackstar
Vulnerabilities
Love's Long Downward Spiral creates vulnerabilities related to your mother. Prisoner of War creates vulnerabilities related to war trauma. Black Ocean Event creates vulnerabilities related to the theological inferiority of hylics. Fury of a Shattered Mirror creates vulnerabilities related to faith in gnosis.
NOTE: As you are not physically awake, material influences such as augments do not provide or remove will, though they still boost attributes. This is a dreamwar, fought entirely within your psyche.
Reactivated mental combat thoughtforms, mental martial training programs, and memorized tractates unfold a battle-plan. To pillage the dream-cocoon, destroy the dreamshape's habitats and food-sources, and finally, when it is weak, starving, desperate - destroy it entirely.
LIVING WEAPON:QUOTH ICON BELLAMONA: THE NOBLE FOURFOLD METHOD FOR SHAPE OBLITERATION. THIRD EDITION.
RELIQUARY: The best edition by far. A skillful commentary, from Schemaphor Ruslo.
Article:
RELIQUARY:FIRST, DRAW STRENGTH FROM SCRIPTURE, AND GNOSTIC INSIGHT. FOCUS THE MIND.
Choose one of three Monadic teachings known by Miss Normal, and reap the associated reward. This will shape your overall plan of attack against the Dreamshape.
Note the stat-boost will apply immediately, and will improve any associated rolls for your battle-plan.
[] CYCLEPATH. A wheel within a wheel, to shield from the dream. Defensively focused.
"So saith the Icon Aberqasem: the dreamshape is wrong because it practices wrong feeling. The dreamshape is consumed by hatred of a savage world it has helped create. The shape rejects all self-critique and instead nurses world-hatred, despising we who live after the reawakening, refusing to accept the fact it is no longer the vanished time. In this way the shape perpetuates a fool's kingdom of the lie - that enlightenment is an illusory castle in the sky."
+2 RELIQUARY
+2 BIOMECHANICS
+1 INFOWAR
[] ESCHERMAZE. A maze within a maze, to entrap the dream. Evasion focused.
"So saith the Icon Ukles: the dreamshape is wrong because it practices wrong craft. The dreamshape conceives of perfection in mathematical and psychic forms, its body a refined catalyst for Logos. In conceiving of perfection so narrowly, the dreamshape has completely conceded the doom of humanity to the demiurge. It is a myopic shape doomed to construct a dilettante's kingdom of the lie - that enlightenment is no more than an equation to be solved."
+3 SACRED GEOMETRY
+1 GLAMOUR
+1 COGITATION
[] ULTRAVISIONAn eye within an eye, to pierce through the dream. Offensively focused.
"So saith the Icon Dakar: the dreamshape is wrong because it practices wrong view. The dreamshape conceives of a tomorrow which restores yesterday. It strives constantly for the repair of a past before the fall and in so doing denies the fact of time itself. The dreamshape is not a symbol of progress and motion, but nostalgia, regret, reaction. The shape is trapped inside its kingdom of the lie - that enlightenment is the restoration of a long-lost golden time."
+2NOOSPHERE
+2COGITATION
+1LIVING WEAPON
RELIQUARY:SECOND, EXPEL LONGING, AND BANISH REGRET. DESTROY THE INSTRUMENTS OF SURRENDER.
Article:
Choose one of two pillars of the shape of your despair to focus your attacks upon. This will weaken the shape's ability to draw on your mental anguish as a source of fuel for its spells. The one you choose will have guaranteed success - the other will have to be rolled for as 2d6+attribute. Your current Cogitation is 2, and Reliquary 3, before any stat-boosts.
[] Target Longing (COGITATION). Nostalgia is a backwards thought. Refuse the scent of crystal roses, and snap the perfumed strings.
If you don't choose this pillar as a guaranteed success, the roll against the dreamshape will be Challenging - Difficulty 12. Failure will preserve its ability to draw on past joys.
[] Target Regret (RELIQUARY). Regret is a pointless thought. Accept a painful past that is immutable, and unwind the choking strings.
If you don't choose this pillar as a guaranteed success, the roll against the dreamshape will be Challenging - Difficulty 12. Failure will preserve its ability to draw on past regrets.
RELIQUARY:THIRD, FORTIFY THE WEAKEST SECTIONS OF YOUR MIND. HONE THE WILL.
Article:
The dreamshape has peeled your Blackstar axiom and will be turning it against you. You are emotionally vulnerable to losing control. You must fortify your mind against such vectors.
Choose one of three component elements of Blackstar. The one you choose will guarantee success - the others will have to be rolled for as 2d6+attribute.
Your current Biomechanics is 3, Living Weapon 4, and Sacred Geometry 2, prior to any stat-boost.
[] Wrath (BIOMECHANICS).Come to terms with your anger and rage as an instinct, a sensation of the body. Disconnect it from feeling, and let it flow over you.
If you don't choose this element as a guaranteed success, the roll against the dreamshape will be Challenging - Difficulty 12. Failure will allow the shape to use your righteous wrath as a weapon against you.
[] Guilt (LIVING WEAPON).Come to terms with guilt as a reality of war, and remove your special claim to tragedy. Accept you were soldiers, ordered to kill.
If you don't choose this element as a guaranteed success, the roll against the dreamshape will be Heroic - Difficulty 14. Failure will allow the shape to use your survivor's guilt as a weapon against you.
[] Contradiction (SACRED GEOMETRY).Come to terms with dissonance between wrath and guilt, and find justice's root. Synthesize and stabilize a deeper truth.
If you don't choose this element as a guaranteed success, the roll against the dreamshape will be Challenging - Difficulty 13. Failure will allow the shape to use your inner instability as a weapon against you.
RELIQUARY: FOURTH, ATTACK THE SOURCE OF DESPAIR. DEAL THE MENTAL DEATHBLOW.
Article:
The dreamshape is fundamentally based in some aspect of your character that helped produce the final despair that crushed you. Choose one aspect of yourself you believe to be the clearest cause of your utter misery, other than your circumstances. You must roll for success and if not chosen the other illusions will not be relevant or rolled against.
Your current Glamour is 3, your current Infowar is 4, and your current Noosphere is 3, prior to any stat-boost.
[] The Illusion of Honesty (GLAMOUR). You believed firmly in baring an honest heart to the world. But did you tell the truth, or simply lie to the person least able to complain - yourself?
If chosen, this roll will be Heroic - 14.
[] The Illusion of Pride (INFOWAR). From the nursery you nursed ambition, and believed yourself special. But this pride that propelled you to such heights - did it save, or doom you?
If chosen, this roll will be Heroic - 14.
[] The Illusion of Justice (NOOSPHERE).From the gene-kiln, you looked through Kora's eyes. You tore away the elders' veil - but did you simply exchange one wrong lens for another?
If chosen, this roll will be Heroic - 14.
And then, an unpleasant and unwanted addendum to the Third Edition, not fit for publication.
THE GREY:FIFTH - RIP AND TARE.
RELIQUARY: No, there is no fifth - wait.
RELIQUARY: In the name of the Holy Father, what is that doing in our head?
INFOWAR: What the fuck did the modem let inside the backdoor while we were being hardboiled.
RHYTHMS:Oops.
The unknown entity recites an unknown verse.
THE GREY:No more? A monster then, a dream, THE GREY:A discord. Dragons of the prime, THE GREY: That tare each other in their slime, THE GREY:Were mellow music match'd with him.
Wait. You recognize the feeling of this entity. This…squirming. Itching. Munching.
<Is that my…nanocancer.>
INFOWAR:Yes, boss.
<Why is my nanocancer singing?>
INFOWAR: I don't know, boss. That's scary.
RHYTHMS:It appears the song of descents agitated them and they've composed a reprise.
<Is that bad?>
RHYTHMS:The poem is interesting, actually. Prelapsarian in composition.
THE GREY:Our god is the god that eats.
<This seems bad.>
RHYTHMS:No it's genuinely quite a good poem, though complex to decipher.
<I'm not talking about the quality of the verse.>
THE GREY:Our God is the god with teeth.
<Okay, fine. Fine. What's the damage.>
The entity grants you the answer, instantly.
THE GREY:A thought that chomps.
Article:
What egophagic teeth does The Grey attach to the axiom Blackstar which bite back at the dreamshape? Note these teeth will bite you as well. They just generally bite. Vicious little monsters.
Choose one. This will damage the dreamshape's ability to capitalize on a failed roll and weaken its resistance to successful ones in whatever category you choose.
[] Incisors. Cutting teeth. Take -1 Will damage, but will help cut into the dreamshape's twin pillars of despair.
[] Canines.Tearing teeth. Take -1 Will damage, but will help tear apart the dreamshape's axiom attack.
[] Molars.Chewing teeth. Take -1 Will damage, but will help chew away the dreamshape's central illusion.
THIS IS A PLAN VOTE WHERE YOU ASSEMBLE A COMBINATION OF ALL THE VOTES. DO NOT VOTE BY LINE, AND TAKE SOME TIME TO CONSIDER SYNERGIES. REMEMBER THIS IS AN ABSTRACT DREAMFIGHT - YOUR CHOICE ON WHAT TO FOCUS ON IS AS MUCH THEMATIC AND CHARACTER-DRIVEN AS IT IS STRATEGIC. YOUR CHOICE WILL DETERMINE THE OVERALL "SHAPE" OF THE FIGHT (HO HUM).
—
OOC: Many thanks to @Skippy for his inestimable assistance in editing and in re-writing a several sections which I really appreciated.
And finally, a plug! @UmbraofChaos has started a really cool new 40K quest as a funny little warp entity that is not at all menacing, All is Vanity. They've stated Last Light was an inspiration and I encourage everyone who enjoys this quest to check out theirs as well! Umbra has a really great talent for writing strange, unique or non-human viewpoints and this is no exception.
Edit now that I've read and digested: ❤️✨🎉I'm plumbing sections of the editor I've never touched before to express how good this is, all the goodness we've learned to expect from Cetashwayo and more
Great update. Only problem is I'm much better at theory posting than plan posting so I might take a backseat for a bit.
We're definitely gonna have to figure out how to grab a "rescue Isha" side quest because that might be the only way to grant Kora's wish for death without breaking the psychic shield. I'm looking suspiciously at the four Prime Souls vs the Four Chaos Gods too.
