Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (IV)

Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (IV)

Lament.

Lament is the poison inflicted upon a broken heart. What could have been. What might have been. What will never be. These are ingredients to despair—despair born from the understanding that if only a few variables were different, if only another choice was made, then perhaps your desire would have been manifest.

Instead of lament.

I know what it means to lament.

I lamented my pantheon even before I betrayed them. I lamented the failures of humanity, even before I lost faith in them. I lamented my wants, my ego, my willingness to damn myself—damn existence—for a second chance at paradise.

Lament.

I have never lamented you, Veylis. I could have never lamented you. You were—the shape of my pride, my love.

No matter what you choose, I would be proud of you. You are far stronger than I, you can face humanity without taking the wounds I do. But I just wish... I wish that I was a better father. A wiser man. Someone that could have showed you—that could have made you see...

All we feel is not enough. Love is not enough. I wish I could just surrender my choice to you. But I cannot. I cannot.

We always damn ourselves in the end. I lament the same thing you will. Humanity cannot save itself, for we are at once the reason for our salvation, but the authors of our own damnation.

It cannot be us.

Love is not enough. It never was.

-An Unsent Thoughtcast from Jaus Avandaer

28-12

Lover’s Quarrel (IV)

A dreaming flame rose to greet the corpse of Falling Love, and as Avo ascended, New Vultun collapsed under the first shots of the Fifth Guild War. Far above the Tiers, he had a full view of the alloyed steps that composed the core of New Vultun. Accretions dotted the sprawl of megabuildings, stretching even along the curve of the horizon. Of the countless billions who lived in the Tiers, few were prepared to face their coming fate.

As columns of smoke and fire rose in the aftermath of the High Seraph’s opening blitz, retaliatory strikes were unleashed without hesitation. Rendbombs and nukes were flung in equal measure, shuttled across the reach of space into enemy districts. Detonations swept through streets, alleys, and tunnels. Specialized metaphysical canons made to hollow megablocks and defensive hard points from the inside were deployed. Fields of collapsing space plunged into these structures via open doorways, air vents, and even electrical wiring, splaying themselves wide across the interior and upon the bodies of the living before triggering a sudden implosion.

Memite ensured the infrastructure remained intact—and unblemished at that. Millions splattered apart, their bodies liquefying in response to a sudden vacuous pressure. Rooms became analogous to breached underwater diving chambers as pressure spiked to impossible levels.

Overhead, nets of force expanded across the skylanes, the weaving charged with hyperactive friction. The aerovecs that passed through these trip wires came apart as if sawed clean by monofilament weaponry. The Guilders within, meanwhile, evaporated, never even getting the chance to bleed.

And then the first of the rapid response units arrived. Across Ori-Thaum’s districts, pyramid-shaped, Eviscerator assault craft blinked into existence. Their hulls were compositions of vivianite and metal. They shot forth before any other Guild was ready, engines hot and heading low. In seconds, they slashed out from their dispatch points at staggering velocities, liquefying passersby with speed alone. Those they couldn’t fly over were struck by payloads of trauma-patterns and tactical nuclear missiles.

After less than a minute of operation, they began breaking down, unable to even sustain their own thrust. But as they came apart, their fusion reactors detonated, rendering the drone itself a final ingredient in a full course of ordinance.

But while Ori-Thaum assets struck deep and unleashed chaos, the No-Dragon’s response followed almost as promptly. Biotheurgic contagions gelled together, forming cancerous patches on the face of reality. The tumors burst, rendering air and space a porous wound, as swarms of combat-ready bioforms flooded down from the skies. Their bodies hummed loud as they fired larvae from hollow pods lining their bodies, unleashing noxious gases capable of consuming even the heartiest of matter sloughed across masses of districts, architecture only spared by the blessing of memite.

The same fate was not shared by those who were caught in the open.

Yet as people died, as countless lives were lost, lightning bolts leapt out from open wounds and devastation, slashing at the metaphysical hives growing over reality. From rising flames and piled corpses emerged hounds of a ruinous nature. Across the tapestry of existence, Avo heard a howl unlike any other resonate through his very frame. Stormtree was entering the fray, and with it came the accompaniment of more shifting chronologies and the corrosive surge of entropy.

The Guilders consumed each other, these blows ready gears in advance. Protective demiplanes emerged in layers, sectioning off critical areas and protecting individual megablocks as additional wren bombs crashed down. Some detonations were stopped altogether, halted by thaumaturgic fortifications. Others shattered these planes utterly, causing the contents within to be caught in a ruinous rupture.

Knots, drones, bioforms, mechs, and human forces battled, fighting for every street, for every block, dominance over the air, over the nether, over critical installations, and for their own homes. Some defensive lines manifested, clashing against each other, while others broke entirely. More than a few never came to be, the members needed for the defense eliminated in advance by sleepers or enemy operatives.

New Vultun fell into chaos with such fluidity and inimical harmony between the Guilds that the destruction almost seemed symphonic. They had done this four times before—fought, bled, killed, and ultimately settled. Four times, four separate wars. Everyone knew a fifth was coming. This wasn’t a surprise, but though some might have expected this to be just another increment in Idheim’s sordid history, the looming of the latter ensured that this war, whatever its outcome, would prove to be the last.

And so a branch of Avo’s consciousness climbed, enduring the Heaven of Love’s flooding Rend as he reached out with his sequences. His ontology expanded, passing down through the infernos consuming the Tiers, through the collapsing Elysiums crumbling down upon the Purgs, through the clashing frontlines in the Undercroft, down the face of the Tiers into the Warrens, where entire districts were little more than smoking craters as knots and cadres fought to hold their territories. Throat followed, and factories that worked to produce new drones and weapons were little more than dust and ash. The Spine came after, but Avo encountered only surprise. Battles raged spread here too, but unlike the last war, the Spine enduring only skirmishes rather than the full brunt of an uprising—likewise, the Guilders hadn’t started their war here either, causing the FATELESS to be more untouched than the actual citizens above them.

Far, far down, Avo went into the gutters themselves, that miserable pit the same as it always was, festering, decayed, with little left worth destroying. There was a delicious irony in how New Vultun’s structural safety had been inverted. On this day, more than any other day, if one wished to survive, the gutters were the place to be. But even deeper than the gutters was the Maw and the border walls festooned upon it. Borders that channeled excess entropy into the gargantuan disintegrating Rendsink at the base of the megacity itself — the means Avo would use to keep himself clean, efficient, and sustain the Heaven of Love before it could annihilate the entire city.

Stolen story; please report.

But what he could feel was love. This was the epicenter of love. This was where everything broke. For a beat, the Strix Upon the Empty was contrasted against the Remembrance, its form of darkness a phantasmal blot upon this vibrant place. And then a moan came from within the star, the familiar moan of an Agnos, followed by the choked gasp of another. Avo knew that voice as well.

That wasn’t Kae. That was Dawton.

+Kae, Kae where... where?+ the supposedly dead Paladin spoke, his mind ringing out with confusion and shock.

[Dawton?] Kay’s template whimpered within Avo. [What... why is he here? Where is he?]

"Within the Heaven," Avo said, following the thoughts back to their very source. The very same source Kae’s actual thoughtstuff emanated from as well. Cracked and broken, ghosts could flow free from the Heaven of Love—just as they did when Avo survived his first rupturing.

A phantasmal tendril reached out from the Strix as he injected a surge of rippling Soulfire into the vivacious star.

Part of Avo’s consciousness plunged into a new sub-reality. One sweltering with animation, lust, love, and countless other Domains. But as his soul drew closer to the Heaven of Love, he found himself facing a self-devouring realm.

The damage inflicted upon the Heaven of Love wasn’t evident or obviously broken like so many other Fallen Heavens were. Instead, Avo felt the depths of the ontological disfigurement for the first time. Canons here were clashing against each other—a cascade of failure triggering a chain of backlash. Entropic feedback coursed through the sphere around the Soul like sparks from an exposed wire. Miracles were clashing against each other, but also intruding, overlapping, triggering feedback loops of inevitable backlash and sending fragments of mem-data drifting around Avo.

As he guided his self-moving Soul forward, information related to the Frame containing the Remembrance failed to load, and Avo continued to the only part of this subreality that remained intact.

The Soul itself.

More murmurs echoed out from the crevice of shivering flame. Avo regarded the other Soul with curiosity as he felt Kae’s presence reside within its depths. He didn’t know how many times she resurrected—if she resurrected at all. The total collapse of the data within this Liminal Frame rendered Avo more ignorant than he wanted. Still, so long as there was part of the Agnos left, he could mend her. Just like he mended Taver’s son; a good deed worth doing in the end.

[Avo,] template-Kae said, facing the fire that caged her true self, [am—am I—]

"It will be alright. I will inject you into her memories. Update her consciousness with yours."

[Then will she be... will I be myself afterward?]

"You always were. We’re just removing any potential harm done."

[Right... Right! Yes. Okay. Okay! Avo. We can do this! We can do this. I can—Do it!]

Avo plunged a ghost-link into the Soul and reached into the Agnos’ mind for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

As he prepared to make the transference, however, his Synchronicity brushed the mental architecture of the being contained within the Soul, and the foreignness of the architecture made Avo halt.

It wasn’t just Kay there. There was a separate mind layered over hers and joined with hers, but there was something wrong with it as well. It was like a mental parasite, fused to her consciousness, only capable of manifesting thanks to her cognitive capacity.

"I can’t... I’m lost. I can’t see. I’m lost." Dawton Morrow’s voice sounded out.

"Dawton , I can’t find you," Kae said in reply to herself.

Both voices came from the same Soul. The same mind.

[I... oh, gods, what did she do to me.]

Nausea swept through Kae’s template as she tried to understand what was happening. The same disgust welled up within Avo as well. Veylis and the Infacer either had enough of Dotton’s cognitive structure mapped down or a close enough replica on hand. Whatever the case, they uploaded a partial imprint of Kae’s former lover into her own mind. Effectively layering her consciousness and trapping her within herself. Trapping her with her love. Trapping her within love.

Avo doubted this act of symbology to be one of pointless cruelty. It must affect the Remembrance’s structure in some way.

But then, before he could proceed, a second's surprise followed. Avo felt the flames of his contagious intellect catch onto something—a stable shard of mem-data. As it burned, he consumed its structure, and a shape loaded into his Soulscape.

The shape of a man. He manifested within Avo’s Soul as Walton had done at the start of this journey. But the one who greeted Avo wasn’t Walton. No. But he was known to the ghoul—known by his legend; known by his screams.

The faint form of Jaus Avandaer loaded into Avo’s simulated replica of New Vultun as templates crowded around him. For a moment, he remained frozen, then he blinked, and the Godbreaker’s features collapsed into a grimace of pain.

[I... oh, Veylis... what have you done.]