Chapter 20-19 The Dreaming Unsea (II)

Chapter 20-19 The Dreaming Unsea (II)

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+NO! AVANDAER! THIS WAS NOT WHAT YOU PROMISED! WE GAVE YOU THE WORLD! WE GAVE YOU THE FUTURE! DO NOT STEAL OUR HIST–+

[ASCENSION COMPLETE]

-The Hungers of Old Noloth

20-19

The Dreaming Unsea (II)

Go now. They’re coming. You’ve seen the shape of the world. You understand. Avoid where the Hungers bite. Move fast. Abandon stealth–the fires and Sprites will betray us before the consistency of our thoughts will. I’ll do what I can to hide us if we’re noticed. But we need to dive deeper. Spread ourselves wider. Follow the chaos. That’s how we’ll find one of the warminds. That’s how we’ll tranquilize our fire and blend in with the waters once more.

Now go. Spread yourself. Burn everything into you. Sear yourself into the madness.

Avo slashed through the surrounding mindscapes, like a wildfire propelled by desperation.

He winnowed sequences clean as he surged through them, taking no time to mask his trail using hidden artifacts or altered mindscapes. Traveling as a plague of fire, his touch left the Nether cauterized as he tried to divine his current path, the Hungers collapsing through the firmament to devour the ash that remained.

He was looking for something. Something that could allow him to hide himself better. Root himself in the discordant memories he dove through. Presently, the state of cognition was woefully unprepared for an endeavor so subtle. But there was something here that could aid in his evasion. This he knew without truly knowing why.

Not even a broken mind was fit to swim in these streams of incoherence.

Every mind was a filter unto itself, in a sense–entities that imbibed and dispensed memories alike, and the experiences harvested from their remain painted the world in conflicting signatures. No two people remembered something the same way, after all. There were always different points of focus; different aspects that resonated with them more deeply.

This realm of mangled thoughts that Avo found himself cleansing in was a melange. The analogy of a wasteland failed to pose symmetry. Decay was more apt, for each sequence here was both mutated and withered in terms of design.

And in a land so disfigured, minds possessed of consistent patterns proved impossible to hide.

Such was true for a stable consciousness.

So too was the effect made infinitely more extreme through the Conflagration.

Trying to find the epicenter of chaos in a sea of nonsense was a task that stretched even the Conflagration to maximum capacity. Avo had tried to draw upon Calvino for aid, but the EGI answered only as a complex weave of integers and formulas, looking as much a tangled mess as the mindscapes they trespassed.

In the shallows of the Nether, there was a consistent pattern to follow. Structure, in an understandable sense. Not so here. Objects were places and smells were locations and time was connected to melodies located in another section of the space altogether. There was no consistency of “forward” when venturing through these paths. It was the rawest embodiment of trying to ford rivers made from unfiltered streams of thought.

All sequences existed as their own spaces, but as a whole, anarchy reigned in this fallen place.Discover new chapters at novelhall.com

Such was why the solution to Avo’s progression lay in destruction rather than discovery. It would take lifetimes to pass through this place with care–everything was a portal to another point, another path, another wrong turn.

Burning it all down made things simple. But it also put him on a timetable.

Stretching tendrils of perception upward, he scried at the Hungers, transforming the fabric of his mind into drifting aeros and pulsing Skimmers. As his awareness expanded, so too did cold pit inside him. The Deep Nether was a world surrounded by coiling snakes. Each cycle of the Hungers was as if a coiling serpent, taking turns to tighten themselves around their prey. The cities lining its crenulated expanse sang a unified symphony, their thoughts broadcasting a distant oppressiveness.

Even so far away, Avo could feel their strain, their frustration, their starvation. The coiling dragons ate and processed the world, but for every bite they took, just as much bled out from them, and the worst of it was the unevenness of the exchange. The radiant blood escaping the eternal city was dolloped with symmetry and stability, dipping back over into cracks and crevices of the deep Nether, melding the Hungers to the realm they were constantly trying to subsume. It was like two entities being joined by overlapping pools of blood.

The symbology made Avo’s Woundmother shiver, but it was just a metaphysical taunt. The symbology of blood was not blood itself. There was a deviance to the worship. There was an absence of catalysts.

He needed to keep moving. He needed to slip through and escape. Compulsions greater than instinct guided him as he glided on, his being a cataclysm of constant change, severing memories from each other as he went.

GHOSTS: [87,331,934]

Ghosts flooded his consciousness in aching quantities, but the artifacts and sequences he obtained were of little use. With each section of the Deep Nether he consumed, less was left for the Hungers, and the faster he expanded. Still, he was a swarm of locusts competing with a cosmic devourer. Relative growth would not save him here. Only change. Only being able to restore his mind to a quenched state and spoofing himself deep would he manage to avoid the crushing notice of his once masters.

You can’t fight them here. This is their reality. It's made from their body. All it will take for us to be swept clean is a single disruption. And they can still the worlds. Soon, they will detect the unbalance in the real and suspect a breach. Follow the fragmentation. Keep eating through the sequences. Follow the ones that are beyond detail. You’ll know it when you burn one set of memories only for them to dissolve and become another. But you need to be careful–

And then fields of perception pierced through the Deep Nether as if kinetic harpoons cast down from orbit, pillars of tungsten punching through the crust of the earth. New wounds opened along the continent-swallowing scales of the Hungers, but within them sprouted new eyes to peer at the world.

There seemed to be no place to hide from the Hungers. No crevice among memories unbrightened by their billion eyes.

Avo shrank his flames and layered himself within an Incog, shifting the shape of his Conflagration to stretch out along a continuous series of sequences. He did his best to narrow himself, but still he felt the grinding pressure slide over him like a whetstone. Just the very act of being noticed caused his mind to rattle in thought-breaking agony.

His cog-cap briefly flashed, but feed sputtered as countless ghosts within him were cleaved to the roots.

GHOSTS: [51,671,099]

Then, the Hungers began to speak, and the Nether itself shivered as there was nothing in the world but notice.

Avo couldn’t hear his thoughts. He couldn’t shift his flames. It took all the will he possessed to keep himself from being blown out.

GHOSTS: [3,255]

Neither choice was appealing, and he found himself considering the possibility of resurrection if he actually died here.

As far as he recalled, his Techplaguer was clean of Rend, and he could still use that cycler to return–

No. Your mind is trapped here. We are fused across dimensions. You have to escape through another lapse-fissure or through the Hungers’ blood. Those are the only ways we can descend back to the realm of the material.

You will return here if we die. And they will be waiting for you. They will eventually pick you apart. They have the warminds to do so. They do not need to kill you to contain you, and there is a fate that is beyond death if they manage to pry our minds open and twist the sinews of our thoughts.

GHOSTS: [671]

Avo released all but Draus from his charge. The Regular studied him from within. “Goin’ down to the wick for this one.” Another wall of traumas broke and folded into them, but the ghosts provided were lost at the same moment they arrived. “No idea where we’re goin’. No idea what we’re tryin’ to hit. Hope you know what you’re doing Avo.

GHOSTS: [155]

“Yeah,” he replied. “Me too.” He paused. “Thanks for showing me the colors. Would’ve liked to see more.”

Neither horror nor sentiment could shake the Regular. She offered the only reply she could. “Die ugly, rotlick. To the last ember.”

Almost there. I can feel it. Get ready to drop your Incog. Window of opportunity will be tight. They might notice. But I can mask us. I can blind Delusion. Just make contact. That’s all we need. All we need.

GHOSTS: [51]

It occurred to Avo how narrow his perception was now, how fast the walls were closing in around his ego. Seconds prior, he perceived everything for miles, peering into the Nether beyond and across untold sequences as well. Now, he only had enough cognitive capacity to generate rudimentary phantasmics. Singular constructs. He had been a city. A ship filled without untold experiences. Now he was a lone torpedo, trusting incomprehensible whims as he burrowed deeper into the Nether, trying to strike an invisible foe.

More and more discordant memories flowed through him. Thoughtcasts echoed in the back of his mind, curses and slurred demurs betraying the encroach of Peace. The Hungers began to center their focus on the sequences he passed through.

His Incog sparked. His consciousness grew dim–

GHOSTS: [4]

Now!

Avo dropped his Incog. His ghosts stopped decaying. Multiple streams of perception snapped to his ego immediately–a torch in an endless sea, capable of being sighted from miles beyond.

Yet, before anything else could follow, before Avo himself formed a cogent thought, he felt himself pierce through an unseen threshold, and immediately felt an ethereal wind scythe through him, warping the design of his remaining sequences against his will.

He tried to maintain his ego using his Conflagration. He tried. But though he was a potent thoughtform that could assimilate minds and thoughts with ease, his influence over the foundations of cognition was merely perfect.

Not absolute.

So, like flesh exposed to a nuclear engine, his mind began to warp, and then–

And no one saw what happened next.

Ignorance is a shroud. No one knows what they’re looking at yet. Not the Low Masters. Not the Hungers. Not even you.

But you move forward. You maintain your shape and seize the presence that’s distorting you. You sink into it–into all the sequences, memories, and artifacts it afflicts and regrow yourself from inside it.

Delusion does not notice us. Delusion can’t. Delusion is ignorant of our existence. Mutual lack of awareness. A lapse must follow.

You spread yourself back out. You regrow your most critical aspects. But you don’t spread like a flame. No. You lace Delusion around yourself and become the environment. Not ascended fire. Not the base of the Unsea–a metaphor for water.

You are the clash embodied.

You are air and whistling steam.

And you spread yourself without needing to burn. Without the necessity of conjoinment.

You spread yourself from the falsehood of what you were because you believe it. And that is enough to make it real.

For we are Ignorance.

We are Delusion.

We are Avo.

And we will usurp the Nether itself.