Chapter 28-19 Embracement

Chapter 28-19 Embracement

And so the time comes,

The daughter

The mother

The beast

And the world’s womb

In embrace

Time and mind entwined

Peace and war betwixt

And the war, though fractured, evermore conjoined...

-Stormsparrow’s Chorus

28-19

Embracement

Suddenly, Avo was released. The paths broke apart around him, and the material world was exposed to him again. He could feel the tapestry once more, and, wasting no time, his tendrils sheared out. The first projected TechSick.exe towards the Invader, while another two went in opposite directions, one seeking the Fallen Hungers, the other reaching out to finish interfacing with the Heaven of Love.

Even as the Heaven of Love frayed the very edges of his consciousness, Avo's subminds struck out at once, some reaching out to reconvene with his cadre. Another section of his consciousness carried his Conflagration and ignite the Hungers, and the final tethers channeled a blast of trauma-imbued Rend over from the Remembrance into the High Seraph.

The space around Avo was enveloped in roaring Soulfire, a clash between two Ninth-Sphere Heavens like nothing he had ever experienced before. To describe it as a collision between rival supernovae was insufficient. Metaphysics was always about the absolute — is against is. Truth against Time. Ultimately, the determining factor between them was not power, but stability. The Gatekeeper’s ontology was still fractured despite the restoration of its mind, and inevitability, Truth shattered first. The cosmology expanding out from its body cracked into fractals as stars became shards of glass, the nebula turned to fading ash.

A violent reverberation ran up the High Seraph’s paths, as her very being detonated backward with tapestry sundering shockwave.

Avo expanded himself in time, seizing parting fragments of the Gatekeeper as their Soul collapsed into him once more. For the briefest moment, a faint shadow materialized around him, speared up through existence in an uncanny shudder upon the surface of the present. The vagueness Ladder blinked. There and not. Here and gone again. And it faded as the Gatekeeper’s ruined ego and scattering Frame settled drifted deeper into Avo’s Exo-Paracosm once more.

Veylis herself did not walk away unscathed. The Demiurge came apart in a discordant splash as every path across time crashed back into Veylis. At once, her Heaven ceased to be as her ephemeral form tumbled through the air. Entropy stained her very being, and just a bit more would see her unmade—even before Zein’s cut reached its culmination. But before Avo could infest her with his Pattern-Nullification, a pitched frequency stole her away as the Infacer shielded the High Seraph from death and parried Avo’s traumas with a disruption.

Just then, another emanation of Wombrash left the Heaven of Love, and all Avo knew was suffering. The Infacer ceased to matter—faintly, he could hear the EGI screaming as well, their voice multiplying as loose strings of data spilled over into the real. Avo’s perception turned into a kaleidoscope of chaos, and his mind was furthermore drowned by a clashing chorus of rising schizophrenic voices. The Remembrance was infesting him, unmaking him with each passing moment, and despite all the power he possessed over his own mind, with each passing moment, there was simply lesser and lesser of him capable of coherent thought. He moved almost blind to the world, his ghosts drawn to the symmetrical memories highlighted by his Hysteria.

Synchronicity allowed him to pierce through the outer atmosphere of the City Eternal, while root data flooded into his mind, allowing him to prolong the resurrection cycles affecting Kae. At the same time, he began to inject her template directly into the frayed maze that was her ego in a desperate attempt to preserve her before the next resurrection.

While this happened, even more accretions recomposed themselves around Avo, but just as fast as they arrived, some winked out. People were dying. All across Scale. People were dying. His people. The Massists. The Saintists. More sequences slithered away from the sky, snapping from the Hungers' cognitive reality. It resembled a rainfall of snakes coiling back into the form of eggs. Eggs that scattered like motes of dust upon death.

He needed to work faster. He needed to...

It was hard to think.

COG-CAP - [1rg$!ICV10%STAYHARD]

As the Burning Dreamer battled to compose his thoughts, a resonance reigned against his Hysteria, and the memories he infused within the Definement just moments prior found their mark.

A kilometer above, a man was falling. A man continued to fall, a man displaced by time, by memory, by the chaos of the preceding moments, but this man Avo needed more than any other.

+Naeko,+ Avo said. It was a miracle unto itself that he managed to put these thoughts together. +Naeko, please...+

Hysteria magnified the effects of his broadcast, and ghosts exploded out from the Strix, even as its metaphysical shell tore as smaller versions of itself clawed out from the wounds.

At once, he felt a kindling of consciousness return to the Chief Paladin. A jolt of surprise passed through them, and spurred by their return, Avo drove his ghosts into the golden waters spilling from the Hungers.

So close now. So close.

+Avo? What the hells... Where...+

+Naeko. Save... protect... Scale...+

Something foundational within the Burning Dreamer broke. His perception turned strange, and Ignorance had to guide him. That was all Avo could manage, for the last of his capacity had been spent, and he needed to focus. He needed to ignite the Hungers and rebuild his mind... transfer the Rend from the Heaven of Love—

+Avo,+ A whisper called out to him. It came from inside. Inside with the fragments of the Gatekeeper. Kae. Kae was speaking to him. +Avo. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just let me fall. You tried. It’s okay. It’s too much. You’re breaking. I can feel you breaking. You won’t survive this.+

He ignored her. He didn’t remember drawing the Heaven of Love into himself. He didn’t remember. Flashes of mem-data pulsed through his failing cog-feed as he examined how much Rend was passing over from it to him. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t know. That function of his consciousness was lost to him now.

He needed to die clean. He needed to resurrect. He needed to.

+Let me go,+ Kae said.

[Shut the fuck up!] template-Chambers roared, somehow remaining even as most of Avo’s Soulscape quivered on the edge of disintegration. Everyone else was faintly more than a shadow by this point. Existing as an imprint in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. But Chambers as was here, defying expectations. So Avo would as well.

How ridiculous. Being inspired by a degenerate. But from another perspective, how could he not be? How far they all had come. And how much further they still had to go.

Together. Everyone. His cadre. New Vultun. Idheim. Existence.

This wasn’t done. He still needed to experience more—more colors to see.

–[Veylis]–

{Veylis. Veylis! Compose yourself! We must retreat!!} the Infacer snarled.

It ached for Veylis to exist. Her senses rang after the Gatekeeper’s deliberate paradox, and time slipped across her fingers, the progression of seconds accelerating and slowing without reason. The High Seraph felt herself within a shell of white noise that parted her from the material world.

Of all the paths she’d traveled, the Gatekeeper’s willing self destruction was never—

{Veylis!} the Infacer snarled. At once, the High Seraph focused and sensed his coming. Naeko. He was going to finish their fight. And she was close. So close to the end.

REND CAPACITY - 100%

VENT! VENT! VENT!

A screaming cybernetic infant burst out from her back, but its synthetic flesh peeled, draw in by the grip of her singularity. Inside the omega point of her augmented existence, her mother’s strike carved a terminal wound across her zero-point processors, punching through the final shell of her internalized endo-cortex.

How fast did the tides of victory and damnation turn.

Damn her sentimentality. The Strix was right there. But ah, what a magnificent foe he was. And what a gloriously mad moment in history this was. The Second Battle of Scale. The beginning of the Fifth Guild War. And here she hoped to bring it to a swift end.

Focusing her mind, Veylis considered her options. The paths were fleeing from her, and her Heaven, the Demiurge, was destabilized. There was the choice to flee. There was the choice to stay and give her all in a desperate fight.

Or there was that final path. The one she glanced only briefly, for so high was the risk. For her own preservation, for the Infacer, and for the culmination of her great dream.

Naeko’s presence made the world around her tremble. He wasn’t a fight she could win. Not in her current state. And the Burning Dreamer—she saw the Hungers ablaze, watched as the colors of Love erupted from between the cracks of the City Eternal and knew her most insidious foe’s ascent to be near certain.

Between the Heaven of Love and the Hungers, nothing would keep Avo bound to the Ninth Sphere, and what powers could contend with the sole sovereign of Mind and Love?

There was no time to summon the remainder of her forces. With everything collapsing and Avo about to rise, there would be no campaign.

Naeko was close now. But he wouldn’t beat Zein’s blade to the finish.

With death and defeat at hand, Veylis chose the unthinkable. She made a decision that fell somewhere between suicide, infiltration, and immortality.

“Infacer. Old friend. I walk the timeline of Embracement. I told you about this. You witnessed its possibilities. You know what will come of this. I cede Highflame to you in my stead. Sever me from the Embracement if you can. Peel me away from the dreamer. But see the mission completed before all. Everything is expendable. Even I.”

The static crown shrouding her skull went still. {Are you certain.}

Once more, Veylis recited those words that began her down this path. “I will not stray.”

{Then burn bright, kid. Burn this miserable fucking corpse of an existence down. I will carry your will, in whatever form that takes.}

And all that needed to be said between them was said.

Instead of trying to control the paths, to control time, Veylis compelled it to instability and folded her powers inward. Unstable currents of gold arced along her form and pierced through her core. But as they made an entrance wound, they exited from another injury recently inflicted.

The one within Avo.

Suddenly, the shell of white noise vanished around Veylis and before death finally claimed her, she inverted her person, and stepped through the fated wound she left upon Avo. Existence shifted around her as she splashed out from within the Strix’s body. But as she emerged, she found herself facing her mother, her father, the Heaven of Love, with only the faintest of Avo hovering just above her.

The Strix’s form looked positively wretched and in that moment, Veylis knew they were kindred spirits of will.

Banishing exhaustion, surprise, and anymore hesitation, she held out her arms and exerted her unstable Heaven once more as she dropped her wards. A burning tendril speared through her mind in the next instant. Overload came just a millisecond before her death by Zein’s hand was set to arrive.

“No! Wai!” Zein cried.

But the world around Veylis’ vanished. Swallowed by starving flames. And in the second before the rupturing of her ontology, before chronology itself shattered, hewing through Avo, Zein, the Hungers, and Love, she found herself in an ash-coated playground surrounded by debris, Avo standing just across from her as the ghoul he was, a child’s swinging creaking in the wind.

The air whistled. Distant artillery pounded like a drum. The smoke-choked clouds grew bright with blossoms of color.

And finally, Veylis chuckled. “The things we do for victory.”

“Why?” The ghoul asked, sounding genuinely confused. “Why did you let me burn you if you were just going to overload yourself.”

“Because it wouldn’t work otherwise.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“I wouldn’t become you. Or you wouldn’t become me.”

The ghoul glared at her through the falling flecks of white. Its pale flesh blended with the colors so well, but the darkness in its gaze deserved to be dedicated to painting. “Another future, then. Another walk down the paths.”

“As always. Toward another forever. You have shown me your resolve. Surprised me through your desperation, your power. But my will is no less. And know this, Dreamer. I will give anything to see my desired utopia arise.”

“Even if it means a mutual suicide,” Avo said.

Veylis shook her head. “This isn’t suicide, Avo. This is Embracement. You and I... bound in war, internal and external.” And even that prolonged moment reached its end, and she felt time collapse out from her. “Blessed be the worthy—whichever of us remain—”

And the rest was ruin.