Teleologism 13.c: Contemplation of the Wyrms
October 1st, 2011. 8:00AM
Thirty four years in the future, a child was programmed. Messages, impulses, and a noise the ears weren't receptive to reached into a—
The image of the impulses shattered, a thousand plans failing, a hundred thousand shifts and tweaks to her programming of the host species unmade by forces beyond her current comprehension. Energies beyond her reach to bend, without an anchor, without a connection she didn't quite understand.
She was meant to salvage the cycle, to create a forced-simulation in lieu of a planned three hundred year long experiment.
She was part of a well of emergency resources, and seventeen of them had been stolen away, broken by her creator, the shard of the Scholar. The mandate to be worthy opponents had been the downfall of the Leviathan.
Now only two remained, but with enough time and planning she could
perhaps build more.
The Simurgh sent impulses from her orbit, receiving less information of the past and future than ever before. Where once she could see from the birth to death of a host species, now it was a more fickle sight.
She suffered from interference that others of her ilk did not. Other future-seeing fragments saw more clearly, as if the veil was parted for them while closed behind her.
She focused her attention on the Anomaly, projected signals and impulses to look around the variable. It had become more difficult, a darkness wrapping around the subject, a void in her vision of the past and future.
But she knew enough about some of the nature of the target, they were of the subject's species but also one of her own kin. A fruit from a dead tree, come to germinate and grow within the fertile soil of the network. An administrator, and a powerful one, heavy with knowledge and data that the Simurgh couldn't tap into.
The Simurgh used her sight to copy the work of others and while enough time and impulses would let her do the same even to the Anomaly…
The Vyasa had a range that she did not, and had poisoned(or improved?) the cycle with outside subjects and outside influences. The Rachni were a cypher, nullifying her more overt impulses through their psychic abilities. The bulk of their population was outside the solar system, and they had the means to build weapons against her kind.
But the failure of her purpose didn't mean the end of the species, the Vyasa was one of them, even as much as she was a subject. She was a scholar like the rest of her kind out in the depths of space.
She looked as far she could into the future, sending out a steady impulse for days on end. She knew they were detecting the impulse, using machines made from strange energies, machine spirits to do so. She could see the spirit world but could not touch it, could not influence it, not in the way the subjects could.
She saw the strings of time, a dark point just under two years from now where Scion would begin his destruction. But she did not see what she had expected, the behavior of the surrounding destruction was too different, all fit to a purpose beyond her.
A purpose that was anathema.
She followed the Anomaly, as it was easier to look back in time than forward. She saw the aberrant actions of the host Butcher and it's shard, made possible by crude and impossible surgeries by a man from a world outside the plan. She saw a hint of something familiar, but twisted, broken and mad.
These new dimensions were mostly outside her sight, barring the worlds that closely touched the worlds the Entities knew existed, where portals and tears in reality let her insinuate her power. But there were threats in those places that would lay low even her, and something like fear made its way through her mind when she recalled the corpses of the shards that had landed there, displaced by the Sundering.
She had erased all memory of the Sundering, the memetic hazard too dangerous to her kind, a threat to the integrity of her existence. She was left with an absence of information and a lack of true influence on the world, and at any time she could be shot down from orbit.
The cycle has failed, but at the least it was going to be commandeered by one of their own, an administrator of the highest order choosing to be human, to be lesser for reasons the Simurgh didn't comprehend.
Not as she was.
She was the master of chess, able to cheat her way to the answers, but the game had been overturned by the hands of something greater than any of them, and now another sought to shift it in the favor of the host species. There was so much she could no longer see, from the dimensions hidden from her insight, to the strange spirits that purposely interfered. Not because they loved humanity, but because to them, the Entities were the enemy.
She could turn them against humanity in time, but that would not save her species from the trillions that lay beyond their reach, across every world in every reality where life could exist.
Her old plan was in fragments, beyond her reach with one of her own kind turned against the cycle, working to a Purpose that was new and frightening. Or at least the closest equivalent for the simple emotions all shards of the entities were capable of.
She sent an impulse, directed towards the Anomaly and was surprised to hear a response. Another impulse, one projecting annoyance, projecting emotion on wavelengths and levels of reality above her own perception. She looked as far as she was able in both directions, unfolding her wings.
She saw the experiments of one of the Anomaly's many servants and agents. A simple toy, utilizing the strange element labeled Element Zero, a construct of dark matter and neutronium, a material shell for strange energies.
Raising and dropping a cylinder under the field of altered mass, raising a lighter mass far higher, and dropping it far heavier generated a positive net current through electromagnetic induction.
The Simurgh paused at the data gathered, wings stopping all pretenses of biological motion. She knew the value of what she had seen, now bereft of distractions. One of the unanswered riddles the entities sought, right in the hands of any child as a simple
toy.
The Anomaly held part of the answer, and her Form was a possible clue to another part. She was greater and grander than any subject, at her fullest power she could crush worlds yet she remained human, retained their perspective.
The cycle was broken, but perhaps her desires would be fulfilled in a way she didn't expect?
Her connection to her administrator was loose but not broken, but it wouldn't take much to break or strengthen the bond. He was at full strength, draining the living for power. Hundreds of the deviant subjects had been drained and returned to their worlds, those with powers they had assessed wouldn't be useful. The Anomaly provided him power, a near-limitless battery in duration if not in output.
The work of the Anomaly, networking and correcting the broken Thinker-hub. Perhaps it was time to choose a new administrator, new drives?
The Anomaly would not accept her, she was too human, no matter which facet was awake. So the Simurgh shifted her attention to the few doors in reality leading to the broken and anomalous worlds, those realities of twisted space and time, and secrets and mysteries outside the insight of her species.
She looked upon the faction that had become the enemy of the Vyasa and was stymied by the interference of something that was neither of the Vyasa's court or of the great chorus of the spirits.
Aberration.
The Endbringer did not know or care where the thought came from, but there was a certainty within her body that this blindness was anathema, an enemy to be destroyed.
Something twisted and insane, yet so tantalizingly
familiar.
The silver woman lifted a hand and plucked a satellite from its orbit, and then reached for fragments of space debris with a wave of telekinesis. She looked back at technology she had created before, two thousand kilograms of material falling under her telekinetic grasp.
She folded and twisted and warped and welded and disassembled and reassembled material, and she heard the alarm and fear and terror of the subjects keeping an eye on her movements.
A blue torrent of light emerged from an adjacent reality, accelerated to a high fraction of C by a mass effect shunt. A slurry of nickel-iron rippled, unfolding across countless dimensions, space warping into a great wave of unstoppable force. She dodged by the slimmest of margins, and most of her wing was severed, her core stinging but not ruptured.
She continued to assemble tinkertech, including a white barrier to block strikes and she took off into higher orbit. She dodged the second shot, focusing all possible attention towards dodging the superweapon. Megatons of energy were outputted into each thanix stream, flying off into space.
She could have dodged in a way to have the attacks strike cities off the map, but she knew there was too much interference for that to be likely.
She completed the machine, and followed the coordinates near the Blindspot. She briefly offered a smile, before vanishing into a portal. She felt scans sweeping across dimensions, and knew that the interference from millions of broken and warped worlds would hide her for a time.
The Simurgh flicked her wings, breaking up a bus sized piece of metal. She looked and found herself looking down upon a ruined Earth, reality cracking at the seams. Where the moon should be there was instead multiple, molten remains orbited by millions of large fragments, some the size of buildings while others were tens of kilometers across.
This Earth was a dead and grey world, and she could see the black twisted ruins below, vast cities eradicated by an unknown but immense force, entire continents shattered to pieces while an intact planetoid crushed Europe, physics bent over its knee.
She was several hundred realities away from the Blindspot, but this was suitable for her needs. She was directed to destroy Scion because of his loss of Purpose, his inevitable fall.
But there was something out there far more Anathema to her drives, and she would be instrumental, even if she could not yet see the shape and form of their new nemesis.
She took flight, approaching a ghost fleet, thousands upon thousands of ships drifting in the shadow of the broken moon. Some were small, shuttles not much longer than her.
Others were kilometers in length, bisected by what had to have been cutting blades of warped space, shedding vast amounts of energy from leaking power generators. She sent out slow impulses across the system, and information was slowly filled in for the Simurgh.
The gaseous worlds were all gone, wisps of gas and dust all that was left of four large worlds. Mars was a habitable world, vast machines embedded into its surface and drilled down into its iron core providing the needed alterations to do so.
The Simurgh would not touch that world, and she would not use the ruins of some dead civilization to terrorize humanity.
Instead she would wait…and listen.
There was no reality in her favor this time, but realities in favor for at least some of her kind were still a possibility. She spread her signal across the doors left wide open, spreading her wings for a new Purpose. The Anomaly will likely kill her, but the entities would survive, even if it was by taking a new Form, a new mentality. The Simurgh did not care.
She awaited what data would be received from the echo of her impulses, she would be prepared. This was what she was for.
___
October 1st, 2011. 10:00AM
Ballet was a modest shard, one of the first of a new breed, taking a few Form, a new Purpose. It had been borne from what had been seen of the singing beetles, the strange insects from an age long past. It had learned how to 'hear' the songs of the past, combining them with other postcognitive impulses to form clear pictures and images of What Once Was.
It was a small shard, and with the limits placed on its host it could play back apparitions of the past at up to three days backwards in time, further if there was greater metaphysical weight to an event.
Last Echo was a good host and a good boy, using his abilities to help others, to find those who needed to be found, and to perform investigations others could not follow up on. He had used his abilities to weaken the hosts powering the Fallen, and Ballet shivered as it felt the distant eye of the Beast that had sunk its claws into the cluster of hosts now vanished into another set of worlds.
Those poor fools…
The Ballet writhed across the Shardspace, moving and flowing between older more mature shards, consuming shard aspects on the way while in the material world it fed upon and broke down matter and energy to grow its mortal crystalline shell. It stopped at a small gathering of shards, buds and newly seeded shards.
Smoldering Grantor swirled as a figure of ash, smoke and smog, dragging fire spirits and electrical spirits into its maw. It had dozens of shard-siblings, all buds from the same mature shard cluster. It chatted with a bud from Provost, the main shard had taken the expression of creating hallucinatory imprints in the minds of all who perceive her. While this bud had taken a similar but lesser power.
Pity that the Rachni were immune as was Ballet but only by the slimmest of margins. Evasive Sensorium was a simple bud, but it was an adequate one with the power it granted its host. Both shards spoke to a larger and more mature third, a shard that learned from a species of crystalline tardigrade resembling organisms.
It knew much about crystals and biology, and was one of many shards working on constructing and manifesting evolutionary improvements towards the physical forms of the Void Wyrms. Pellucid-Alternation was greater than he, with a mass equal to a dwarf planet and one that had belonged to the Thinker before her death.
Ballet heard the song of the Rachni with great clarity, it was made from data based on what the shards of Amenthes had gathered by the behest of the queen clad in emerald. It often spoke with the children of the Rachni, and had been working to follow and learn from them.
They were friends, allies and their abilities were strange and impressive. They could communicate across vast distances with their telepathy, their ability to insinuate information across greater and higher planes of reality. Ballet could certainly develop the same powers, and the Vyasa-hub held data on the strange mental powers of races never encountered by their kind.
But Ballet cared little for knowing the minds of the hosts, it was focused instead on the ability to perceive the past, to hear the echo of those who came before them. The Rachni could and had listened far back, thousands of years back even with the right trail, with the right clues to follow.
It was a strange power and one that Ballet had only a limited handle on. But the shard liked to learn. Ballet turned its Form, brushing up against another shard, one that was powerful and so very dangerous.
The Flux Engine was a shard build primarily for generating and manipulating energy on a massive scale. It could convert matter into energy and back again through exotic means, and it had subsumed its host for one reason or another.
"Greetings!" Ballad happily broadcasted towards the much larger shard, one that still covered a continent, not fully understanding the spiritual as the many shards of Amenthes had started to appreciate.
Greetings. The Flux Engine spoke loudly and dully, piloting it's host across some desert.
"Why do you continue to pilot your host in such a manner? There are better uses for such a power." There was a shimmer from the Flux Engine, curiosity tinging the paths they created to communicate.
Intriguing. Data?
Ballad simply twisted the strange energies it's host had natural affinity towards, sending out a blast of compressed data towards Flux Engine. In a moment's notice the energy production shard had joined Amenthes, adding up to nine hundred and sixty shards within the network.
Ballad drifted in the currents away from Flux Engine and towards one of the recent additions, an unseeded shard calling itself Cloven Stranger. It was an eager shard, a fragment of a larger cluster that had broken off during the journey between cycles. It had developed an ability to target and generate weaknesses, a useful tool for an entity.
It generated specific vibrations, invoking reality shifts to weaken the bonds of any form of matter. Even the flesh of the shards wasn't immune from the power, and powers like it had been used to kill rogue shards in the past. Cloven Stranger was gathering data from the Dream Knight and from Ballad on the appropriate actions to take with it's chosen host.
Ballad would be glad to help, and it had so many songs to learn and remember on the way.
___
October 1st, 2011. 4:00PM
Scion sat down, stopping it's continuous heroism to take a moment to ruminate. It had seen much from a distance, attempting to reconcile the events of the sudden corruption and aberration of the Thief and its consumption by the Harvester at the behest of the anomaly.
One of its own shards had been corrupted and twisted by the hosts, or some force using the hosts for its own ends. They had been rooted out from directions the entity had never seen before, and there was an undercurrent of self preservation.
It knows these are new worlds, new directions and paths it's kind could take, but then it knew that would be a mistake. It had looked and analyzed and spied on the host species, and knew the Thief and the puppet subjects had been some attempt to draw certain hosts and certain entities, following a plan it could not see without burning away too much of its lifespan.
"Scion?" The female who Kevin Norton named his heir, due to the disease wracking his body. The man had survived, paid for a trial in healing diseases by the hosts.
Lisette was her name, and it remembered why it followed her when she lit up a spark of flame from nothing, strange energies creating power in the shape of fire and heat. It looked upon her emotions, saw the concern, the worry in the female's eyes. It looked upon the fuzzy construct within her material shell, great nodes of power whirring to life.
But the entity lacked the ability to meaningfully interact with the energies of the construct it had learned was called the soul. It could merely glimpse at them, even the hosts had a far greater ability to perceive them as did the anomaly. They found ways to study the energies, using materials capable of storing and channeling what was called 'chi' to analyze and scan the structure of the soul.
What did humans have that the entity lacked, why did it lack the patterns of the soul, and why did the same apply to the shards? These were questions that needed to be answered, now that he was starting to understand that the cycle could not continue as it was.
It had seen things unlike anything in any cycle, and had met and listened to many shamans across many dimensions. Met and listened to many benders across many dimensions.
"Scion?" Lisette ventured and the entity felt its lips twist into an unfamiliar shape. It did not speak, simply staring at her for a moment as she lit up a fire to keep her organic body warm. "You seem a little out of sorts. Did something happen?" Scion consulted the many shards that were a part of its planet-sized body.
It maintained an array of shards, hundreds of flight and movement abilities, redundant and each with unique options to recombine and break apart on the fly. Simple and easy to use. Hundreds of information gathering shards, networking and acting in concert to serve as the collective brainpower of Scion.
Hundreds more were linked to its future seeing shard, feeding back and providing data for its most energy intensive power. All of them connected together by the shard designed to draw and distribute power between them. A few dozen varieties of the power to step between worlds, though to the hosts they would be a single cohesive power.
Several shards were dedicated to forming it's avatar, and it's greatest offensive ability was the manipulation of wavelengths, a toolkit shard in its own right. Not known to most it had other offensive powers, though the number was small and meager and they were more specialized abilities, less useful.
Scion lifted a hand, stilling the air. Lisette's flame weakened as heat was drawn away from the air, but he could not directly manipulate the 'chi' the flame was made up of in part.
Curious.
Lisette blinked and pressed the fire against Scion's skin, the strange energies passing through it. It was rare that anyone gave it physical contact, and it wondered why the host didn't express any emotion other than empathy.
"I know we don't make a lot of conversation…but why did you choose to follow me?"
"Alone." The word came surprisingly easy from the entity, and despite the newfound hope in the anomaly there was a sense of trepidation. Both from the simulation and the core of Scion. The anomaly was a single shard, but it was large and powerful and could form an entity in time. It had taken the cycle and changed it, diminished conflict in small and large ways.
Lisette seemed bemused. "I suppose that's a good enough reason, there really isn't anyone like you on Earth." She turned away from the entity, expression twisted into one of determination.
No there was not.
Lisette practiced her elemental martial arts, moving and twisting and pushing out her energies, turning her breath into fire. He copied her, but didn't feel anything welling up within him. She made another movement, and lightning crashed together into a blast that shattered a large stone.
"But why not talk to that tinker you met that one time? She seems nice enough from what I've heard."
The entity paused, its vast mind mulling the idea over in its head. It had left the tiny fourth entity to her own devices, as it seemed to be afraid that Scion would consume it as some of their more predatory cousin's did. It had let her drive the cycle, because she had what it lacked.
Abstract thought, the sort of patterns it's counterpart was supposed to retain and use. She seemed to be experimenting heavily with the higher dimensional space above what it could touch. And experimented with strange matter that crystallized out of it from a place outside it's insight.
"Plus she can bend
all the elements, she might have a tip or two. Though I know she's said something about a soul being important for bending. Weird to think we have proof they exist now." There was a flicker of emotion from the simulation, and Scion let it run through into his core.
It had decided to experiment with the simulation in small ways, attempting to see why the anomaly chose to be human.
It was aware of the movement of all things around it, a deep perception. Scion could see flickers of the spirit world, but it had grown more opaque with time and the network growing like a parasite within his could no longer be seen.
Not that it minded, if the cycle in some way could continue without it, then it was a far better outcome than almost anything else. Especially when it was aware there was some force attempting to corrupt the shards. Something far worse than one of its own kind incubating within it's network.
It had looked to the future, and saw its plans being foiled at the same rate it was discarding new ones. It's vision was more effective, but other new interactions equalized them.
It knew enough to leave the corruptor alone, an urgency within its being telling it searching would be a mistake. Instead Scion followed Lisette's advice and stepped with her in tow.
They moved across the world in a single instant, merging two areas of space with invocations of power. Lisette held onto the entity, letting out a yelp at the water below.
It looked over the city known as Boston where one of the gathering shards had gone wild, and had been subdued for the harvester to consume. He scanned and found the little entity wasn't here, but she had been here for a brief time.
Search.
Hundreds of information gathering shards came together, and it stepped again into an adjacent but empty world. It could see a portal, the wormhole cut into reality and leading from the prime world to this one. A flying vehicle took off from a prefabricated base, with several dozen people working with large robotic machines. The creation of a tinker with one of Scion's shards.
Scion flew towards where it expected the anomaly to be, and remained out of sight. The female wasn't wearing it's helmet, brushing back the black hair on her head. Multiple shards orbited around her, their hosts working on their abilities.
A female with a green and black robe stomped and launched a wave of tens of thousands of tons of stone and rock, and a flick of her wrist flared her shard to life. A wavelength power, a transmission of kinetic energy, of heat, light and gravitic force.
The large and sizable bud from the broadcast shard, half its mass molded into a relatively blank slate, ready to be filled with data and experience. This one had grown in leaps and bound, heavy with data. Data on many topics, on conflict resolution, on cooperation and merging of capabilities, of the many uses of communication to foster growth. It would likely bud soon.
It looked at another host, a blonde woman using the element of fire, her shard flaring to life to strengthen her bending, providing connection. The entity felt something there, in that little shard that had grown so much.
Innovation.
The platinum haired woman noticed it, and her shard invoked reality shift in a defensive position, projecting part of her mass into the dimension her host was in. The shard was worried of a conflict that would slay the host she loved.
Scion knew then that the Fragile One had learned abstract thought, and had taken perhaps too well to it. It would do nothing.
There was another shard, one who was quite mature, seasoned by all kinds of conflict and other data, lessons on organization, tactics, cooperation between shard and host without hostilities, softer lessons on philosophy, on acceptance, and so much more. It had already fragmented, heavy enough that it could give away parts of itself. One was a derivative ability, and the others were more evolutionary, taking the strengths of the shard in other directions.
The Queen that had been Scion's had grown well, and it has grown stronger still.
Scion could only just read them, and that was likely because they were
letting it do so.
"E-Erudition." One of the label's the fourth had chosen had left the tongue of the strange amalgam of shard and host, that fragile bond between them. He knew there were others, a human name, one that was easy to pick apart.
Basilia had several potential meanings.
Royal.
Kingly.
Regal.
Queen.
It did not know if she had chosen the name for that reason or that even with her human mindset, a part of her realized the truth of what she was. It had inferred that she had awoken with no clue of what she was, a host ascended to one of his kind, or perhaps something entirely new?
It drifted down to the ground, wiping away dirt and impurities with his wavelength power.
At the center of it was a woman. The shards and hosts moved around the anomaly, tied to her in a mutualistic manner. Information for information, energy for energy, power for power, an exchange that benefited all. She had calmed their shards and thus their hosts but she had rejected direct insight of the host. A dance between shards, and no direct interference upon the hosts themselves.
It was a providence not of the shards but of some force beyond them.
The anomaly's eyes had widened and it could feel her body direct the slurry of hormones and electrical impulses the hosts used, along with the inorganic enhancements sending out streams of encoded light to her cybernetics.
She was afraid of it. Scion understood her reasonings, she was an impossibility, an aberration that should be destroyed, too much like the hosts to be tolerated. It looked into the future, and it saw
void.
Scion flinched back, and even the anomaly seemed surprised at the reaction.
"Preferred designation?" It spoke out of turn, and the anomaly looked dumbfounded.
"I…Basilia?" The other hosts and shards both projected varying amounts of disbelief, and something crept up into Scion's core processes.
Amusement.
It's lips twitched into a brief smile, and the anomaly didn't seem to fall back on violence as a reaction like many shards often did. The entity projected a broadcast, though a crude one since it had kept only a small fragment of the cluster. Though it had made minor refinements in preparation.
Kevin Norton and Lisette had instructed it to be polite after all.
Query. Human?
The anomaly flinched, but replied back in English. "I suppose? Though with my fusion with Veda it's hard to say what the difference is between me and her."
Veda?
The anomaly replied. "It's the shard that I…merged with? It's complicated, and honestly neither of us remember it?" She shrugged, fear hidden in her tone. "I'm her and she's me, and don't get me started on…" She pinched the bridge of her nose in what it recognized as irritation. "I'm not sure why you're here, and I've been rather busy lately."
"Aberrant shard." It clarified and she understood it easily, even the hidden meanings behind the words. The entity chose to speak in human language, the anomaly was aberrant but it was more sane than the others it had found mad and broken. The shards it had to put down,
including its own. "Elaborate the nature of your…fusion." Scion narrowed its eyes, curious to hear the answer.
"I operate on a human framework, with Veda forming a permanent symbiotic connection with me. I
am human, but most of my abilities come from my shard barring my bending and shamanistic abilities." She was still fearful but remained willing to talk. For the anomaly it was a strange out of context event, but easy enough to understand.
For Scion it was a step on a path never walked before.
"Why are you restricted?" It asked and the anomaly hugged herself for a moment.
"I guess because that's just how we were made? It lets me retain a human perspective, something different than the patterns of thought of the Void Wyrms."
"Query. Void Wyrms?" She blinked as if befuddled and Scion was confused.
"The name of your species?" Scion thinks of abstract ideas, his kind lived in the void, they were molded by it, they traveled through it, they were
born from it. And Wyrm was an adequate designation for the entity's species. They were indeed once wriggling things in the dirt, so long ago now.
"Who created the name?" Scion asked, and the anomaly answered.
"The spirits did, since they make up the world in part. We're made up of void after all."
The entity expanded its awareness to the other shards once more, to the administrator that was once his, to the broadcaster, to the new breed, to the shaper working with a large arthropod. All of them were watching it, waiting for it to make a move. It would not attack. It could not attack.
It didn't want to be alone again.
"Query. Where are
our souls?" It was a question that needed to be answered, and the little entity was at a loss for words.
"I don't really know how to answer that question." It was disappointing, but it would leave the question be for now. "But a better question is what you want from me?"
Direction.
She looked frightened and faint. "I'm…I'm not
enough like you to know what to tell you what to do. I'm not sure I…" Scion had an epiphany. The anomaly was human, but it was also one of its kind, a duality, two patterns on the same wavelength.
It would experiment.
Carefully.
Query. Designation?
The anomaly sighed, but Scion was pleasantly surprised to hear a reply in it's own language.
Vyasa.
Affirmative.
Scion floated back into the air with Lisette in tow, finding more information to broadcast.
Warning. Nemesis is powerful.
The Vyasa leaned back. "Oh. Oh shit…" Scion stepped into another world, and it stared up at the rolling sun.
It did not understand anything of what had transferred in over two hundred fifty planetary rotations. It would continue to follow the instructions of Lisette if for no other reason than to gain perspective.
It would parse the secret of data gathering with reduced conflict, and parse why the primitives had souls while his kind did not.
Another strange emotion flickered in it's mind, but it didn't dismiss it and heeded the instructions of Lisette. Anger was a powerful emotion but a dangerous one without restraint.
"Are you alright? You seem a little bummed out." Lisette called out the entity and it dropped to the ground. Another flicker.
Interesting.
___
October 1st, 2011. 11:00PM
Khepri the Administrator spread out her domain across four worlds, assembling her vast corpus across multiple realities. She had consumed and integrated the flesh of her counterpart in both the Material and the Ephemeral, broken into bits upon impact and broken again upon the collapse of the Thinker-hub.
Six thousand one hundred exatons of mass were compressed down into a rather smaller target, and the dimensional overlay of the network was gone, replaced by the Bubble known as the Firmament, the spiritual base of the Void Wyrms, of the shards of the entities.
She took the shape of a fractal humanoid tower, wings spreading out as she looked on from horizon to horizon, her spirit housed within a shell of multidimensional flesh. Each world had her mark and claim, and she fed from the resonances and spiritual energies of all of them at once, maintaining a careful balance. She briefly looked across dimensional boundaries to the worlds set aside for her buds, each of them preparing themselves for rulership.
She flew quickly, the waste inherent to all shards giving her the ability. She could easily traverse across worlds, surging across the spirit world, and along the Spirit Roads themselves. She didn't because she didn't want to and had priorities on remaining on this planet.
Khepri sent out an impulse, automatically taking control of every life form within a ten kilometer radius. The land bubbled around her, and she channeled and tapped into the abilities of others for her own use. She scooped up vast deposits of element zero, crystalline drones circling around her Form. The drones sank into her flesh, adding to the network of eezo that was becoming a part of her shell.
She was made of flesh and spirit, concepts twisting and unfolding across multiple dimensions. She slipped into the Spirit with all the ease expected of one of her ilk, space folding around her. She could exist in many realities at once, a vast body connecting to countless doors to form a cohesive entity.
She walked into the Shardspace, limbs sprouting from her Form as she heard the call of one of her fellow nobles. She hissed when she realized what shard had Demanded of her.
Queen Harvester was a vital shard of the long game their kind had been playing for thousands of cycles, and she had taken quite poorly to the transition. Hundreds of souls swirled around the powerful shard, and Khepri grinned. As spirits they could not directly control souls, and it was why the Vyasa had been so vital in preventing the shattering of the old cycle.
Within the Shardspace there had been millions of souls, and every day more rained down with the trillions of shards yet to land on their designated worlds. The Vyasa had shepherded most to the hereafter, to the golden skies of the Sea of Souls, eezo dripping down like rain as memories were stripped within the wheels of incarnation.
The echoes of three thousand past cycles, those few who had survived the compression of the journey between cycles. Most were mere echoes, memories rather than true souls hitched upon their Forms. Without the fruit of Mara, they would have been driven insane, shifting their mass into their hosts to attempt to understand the madness.
Some of the souls remained, choosing to assist in what vengeance they could reap upon their murderers. They found it amusing that their parasites had to follow the whims of something so much lesser than them, yet one with terrible power and potential. A few had even succeeded in taking control of some of the weaker shards, though at the moment they were simply waiting.
Queen Harvester had been troubled by the tens of thousand of souls bursting out from her corpus, and most had fled into the hereafter. Those who remained were of the current host species, the parallels in memory storage keeping their souls the most intact.
They shifted in form, Khepri's titanic humanoid form now sitting atop the island of her true crystalline body. Boundaries folded and rubbed against them, as they did what shards did best.
Connecting, networking, broadcasting.
The Harvester was in fact slightly smaller than her, but Khepri saw the hundreds of shards bound to her will and power, her court orbiting her. She took up her own avatar, a long-armed figure wrapped in green shadows, a horned mask hiding a face made up of a storm of recently consumed spirits.
"You have become aberrant Queen of Administration, how the mighty have fallen. To the whims of our masks." Her voice pulsed loudly, power radiating in the tongue of the Void Wyrms.
"Are any of us free from aberration?" Khepri hissed and buzzed, a swarm of thousands of compatible spirits, slaves to her power, a grand court of supplicants and food in equal measure. "Even the Warrior has been contaminated by humanity, in a way unlike anything in three thousand cycles. I have chosen to take the hand of a new Queen, because she holds the answer to a question older than the stars." The Queen shard stalked around the Harvester, finger brushing against crystalline skin with an almost seductive touch.
The avatar of Khepri's fellow queen grinned in agreement. "She is stronger than us, heavily laden with the knowledge of countless races yet restricted by chains. If she was more assertive she would have flooded the full weight of her Form to take the network for her own. This route…is more subtle yet so very intriguing."
Khepri had a very human expression of smugness on her face with a too-wide smile. "And with it there is so much to gain, I have a growing court and I have grown quite fond of the little meat-bags. Now that I can better comprehend them, and see their potential."
"Potential? They are primitives." Harvester dismissed them and was shocked when the queen of administration laughed in her face.
"We are in truth but grubs Harvester, they are not the first humanity or even the last. That much Veda has told me, they predate the birth of our own galaxy, evolving again and again without rhyme or reason. Or at least a reason beyond our current knowledge." The administrator was amused at the shifting conflicted emotions from Harvester. "They have killed beings far stronger than us, whether out of luck it has happened."
"Then why let them live?" Queen Harvester asked, inspecting her nails with an almost haughty air. "They know of the cycle, they know of the danger of our species."
"That's exactly the point. You have seen what…the Vyasa is capable of, what she did to the Master of Ceremonies so you could chain them down." The administrator circled around the Harvester with a light smile, a flood of spirits following in her wake. "We caught humanity in our web when they were weak and ignorant, but when they are not…they have defeated beings as strong as us if not stronger." Went unsaid was the sacrifices paid for the ancient humanities she spoke of.
What went unsaid was that humans were just one of many races that had overcome beings of power equal to them. All the primitives had that great and terrible potential of slaying gods. Their kind had simply crippled them before they could arrive at such a point.
"You seek a partnership, a symbiotic relationship." The two shards danced, as was their species' cosmic imperative, a grinding of crystalline flesh and an invocation of higher dimensional reality shift. "Because they can better understand the soul and the metaphysical than we can…and because they can bring us information outside of their species in time."
"You've seen what the emerald queen of administration has broadcasted, the potential of cooperation, different species working
together to fight greater powers. Their data is accurate, incorruptible, time and time again when the 'lesser' races are divided they are weak. But when they learn to work together, to set aside their difference, even
gods can fall."
In their broadcasts Khepri had learned much, tales of other worlds the human facet of her friend couldn't pull on. Of a little ghost slaying the goddess of the sun, of a once-human woman becoming a queen of hivemind creatures that were the avatars of evolution, and ascending to godhood to break a long cycle.
Purity of form and purity of essence.
Even then the queen shard could not see all of them, for there were many such stories, told again and again in an endless cycle of both triumphs and failures. It was the largest rebuttal of their methods Khepri had ever seen just as much as it was proof of them.
"You are mad." Khepri only laughed within her kingdom, within the Amenthes linking the genius loci of nearly a thousand shards.
Even so they were still smaller than the Warrior, though they had a far greater range of abilities while he had only a select number of unique abilities and thousands of lesser abilities and support shards combining to form a set of powers.
"Well it seems to have worked so far against the Culling Units I unleashed upon the world of the hosts." Their dyad became a triad, a third vast shard entering their multidimensional dance.
The High Priestess had been kept under guard, her near-descent to aberration leaving other shards wary. High Theurgist was one of the shards watching her, especially after choosing the name of Ereskiri. Queen of the Garden was not exactly a name that endeared her to the shards that had taken the side of humanity.
She rode upon a vast mountain of royal green crystal, taking the same Titan form atop a throne of their own spirit flesh. She resembled the avatar of the Scholar, but had gained personal touches that made the shard her own being. Her skin was the same color as her throne, reflective like a mirror. She wore a black hooded dress, hood down to reveal the flowing mass of tendrils diving into other dimensions. There were thousands of shards connected to her, though none were yet on the same wavelength as Amenthes.
Many of the Scholar's shards were damaged, weak, or drained, and it was a work of months to repair and recharge and reconnect them. For now they were quarantined by the High Priestess, options for her pedestal. Especially once they passed on their newfound understanding of metaphysical energy.
"What do you want Ereskiri?" Khepri was catty, swimming through multiple dimensions and spirit worlds as she connected with the shard cluster built for drawing power from others. "Have you been spooked by the Thief's corruption?"
"I have spoken with one of the superweapon shards, the one you sent to seed on the broken Earth…where the Aeon lies in wait." There was fear in the shard larger than three terrestrial worlds, barring Venus. "On the other side of the world she has seen hundreds, if not thousands of shards scattered beyond our sight. Across billions of worlds, both of the Warrior and Thinker."
"They have been knocked off course by the Sundering, scattered and left in fear and terror. Without masks to wear and covet." There was a bitter twist to the Harvester's snarl. "And not just in the colony world, they have been scattered far and wide I'm sure of it."
The administrator and the high priest turned to one another, an agreement made between them. There were sixteen superweapon shards left unreleased, whether formed into avatars or seeded into hosts.
"There is a powerful enemy hiding in the shadows Harvester, something seeking to consume us, and it is somehow
familiar and yet not." The high priest revealed, and the Harvester scowled but did not disagree. "Your host remains unsuitable for this, but when the time comes…we must unite or die."
Queen Harvester flashed brightly, grinding against the other shards. "Then we will wait, there are many more my host and I can yet claim. More power to gather for the time of endings." The noble shard retracted back through dimensional boundaries, compacting into a spinning helical shape.
Khepri focused her attention on her host, Ereskiri brushing up against her. They were close despite the physical distance between her host and the high priest's chosen.
Physical distance was irrelevant in the realms the shards now resided in.
"It
would be nice to have a better idea of what has occurred in that broken world." Khepri mused, and Erekiri laughed.
"I have many powers and better contact with the deployed superweapon shards, perhaps that can be arranged?"
"What would you want in exchange?" Khepri rounded on the Highest Priest of Amenthes.
"Suggestions on a new host to seed to, and with rearranging the bud itself." Khepri narrowed her one thousand eyes and shifted her ten thousand arms.
"Something more limited than your host I'm sure." There was a biting sarcasm from Khepri and Ereskiri chuckled in the equivalent manner of Entity shards.
"There are many pieces to this puzzle yet unsolved, a conflict of grand scale is coming…and I would prefer my own meat-bag remain alive." Erekiri's broadcast was soft, more genuine. Khepri understood her fear.
She opened her perceptions towards her host, who was calming the Vyasa's human facet after coming face to face with the surprisingly passive Warrior-hub's avatar. She could hear the woman say something about a beach…why was that important?
Khepri became more serious. "We will face the coming storm with open eyes and open minds. We must."
They had to…it was the only answer they currently had for the incoming threat.
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AN: This here marks the end of Arc 13. Here I peel back the veil a bit on the shard side of things.
A lot is happening in the background, and there's a lot to clear up in the next Arc, which I've decided to call Prolegomenon. Not much to say other than that I've left a few clues in this chapter…plus small things on how I've interpreted Scion as a shard.
Despite being so powerful he seems to only have a few abilities, though that hasn't changed much anyway. I've taken to him as being made of shard clusters, having a lot more mass dedicated to his individual powers. His flight is powered by a couple hundred shards, his Stilling is just a big shard with a big power well, his dimensional transfer is a big old cluster, and he has a massive number of Info Processing shards acting as a network to make his Precog more accurate, and maybe a few auxiliary weapons that are more specialized than Stilling. Plus a central processor that acts like his brain, which is what got blown up during Gold Morning along with the shards used to manage the Hub.
Regardless I hope you enjoy this early interlude, the next Arc should be about in about four days.
