Godclads

It begins with a society feeding a story to a Soul while accompanied by a sacrifice. From the ephemeral confines of baseline reality, history–like a gestalt of collective memory or a single aligned instance between cultures and communities–waters the flickering seed of mythology.

And from there sprouts the beginnings of the pantheons.

Again, I look back at history and I feel my chest clench. So much lost. I understand why but the pain remains.

People are banned from knowing the exact names of cities and places because of their connections to their former gods. People are banned from knowing personal and communal histories because that’s what was used to nourish the growth of a Heaven.

History feeding into communities that became civilizations that developed cultures that developed mythology and miracles and the mysticism of thaumaturgy.

Godsfall wasn’t just a victory. It was also a tragedy. Because even though Jaus broke our chains, it took a pound of flesh with it. We had to seal part of ourselves away. Make ourselves blind and deaf and ignorant of those that came before.

Sometimes, when I read about the first-hand accounts of people who escaped from the breeding and sacrificing farms, I find myself glad I was born a child of this enlightened age.

But above all the horror, there was a line to the past severed, and with them a clear image of our own growth.

That, more than anything, remains the greatest absence among what was lost.

-What Was Lost by Revo I’Kurita

13-3

Eclipse Phase

Stepping inside the silenced Woundshaper was like treading into a world of dreams. Halted high above the clouds, both Godclad and Agnos studied the splash of a small city expanding in a crimson spill gushed outward in all directions. Even from on high, they could see the small figures digging channels for the blood to flow, directing and connecting haemokinetic lattices as new structures budded from lakes of quivering crimson.

There was a dreamlike quality to the tiny patch of civilization. Something almost infantile in its dimensions. The entire kingdom was barely greater than fifty square miles, and all around it, titanic spore-coated trees sprawled outward like fallen leviathans. Where rivers of blood gushed forth from the bastion of society, nature clashed as the wild and winding flora engulfed the city.

Brambles as thick as mountains but as high as hills whorled high to encase even the sky above, branches dying and growing at a constant pace. Starlight pierced through collapsing bark and spilling fungi in intermittent instances, flashing and fading between the seconds. The land itself was riven with cracks and crevices. Between the parted earth, Avo glimpsed sight into another ecosystem–one containing the vague shape of Scaarthian-sized creatures bearing twelve legs and coated in human-like skin.

But theirs was a presentation that lacked detail like an artifact bereft of the necessary mem-data to attain full detail.

In fact, as he skimmed the breadth of the Heaven’s inner world, he glimpsed a strange phosphorescent filter that coated the world around him, yet waned the further out he stared.

Beyond, in the horizon, mile-wide trunks clasped together in the distance and the simulation loaded no more.

Comparatively, the blood-made city burned brilliantly with impossible detail. Detail that Avo could see with nigh-omniscient clarity even from afar. Detail that found a central focus in a single tower at its heart.

One that he was more than familiar with. One that was layered in its translucence selves.

The Woundshaper, and all its prior iterations. From its beginning as the Sangeist to the atmosphere-igniting Heaven he built it to be.

Around it stood people in a vast and wide circle. People offering their prayers and necessary sacrifices. People slitting their own throats and wrists, bleeding into the waist-high pool they stood in.

The first, bottommost, concentricity around the Sangeist stood twenty people. Twenty Scaarthians gaunt of build and wearing ragged furs. Avo studied them and remembered the lore the Woundshaper shared with him. These were not the matriarchs in the lore–not the huntresses of yore, but they were fitting substitutes; people he killed that could play a similar role.

The above them, the blood inverted up a waterfall, and for the next circle, Avo found over a hundred gathered. A hundred dressed in dyed cloths and sporting haemokinetic constructs in their armor. The sigil denoting the Domain of Blood was scarred atop their bald scalps, and he found himself wondering if it was humanity that determined the symbology of the Heavens, of if it were to be the other way around.

Another level up and there were a thousand. From these thousand flowed capes and coats of crimson mist that sparked with electricity, and he recognized more than a few of them. Little Vicious stood next to Rantula, and their faces were twisted in exultation as they opened their veins time and time again. Crude sparks of stormstuff flowed through their wounds, and as they died, their veins exhaled hissing entropy that was swallowed back into the crimson tide rushing past their knees.

For every one of them that splashed down into the blood, another arose from the pool, resurrected and ready to offer themselves again.

From over a thousand lips came chants and cheers, words charged with joy and mania hurled as tithes toward the tower at the center of everything.

“Praise be!”

“Praise be!”

“Saathwu be bountiful!”

“Seethran is great! Seethran is all!”

“Praise the GODDESS OF BLOOD AND METAL! Praise be her bounty. Praise be her new apotheosis!”

The maddened chanting cycled endlessly, and between the volume of the exclamations, Avo could hear chitterings and murmurs passed between the sacrifices. The words left them, but they never looked at each other. They never truly spoke.

Instead, they recited stories from one to another, propagating new tales from each, the resurrected coming back into the world already hearing the lore of their new existence.

“We’re in the Skuldvast,” Kae said, ending her silence in a sudden flow of speech. “Paleheart, to be exact. Look at the flora around us. See how the woods are trying to close in, but won’t touch the blood. ” Her gaze drifted across the surrounding landscape and she frowned in a certain direction. “Strange. It doesn’t go any further. But the surroundings being simulated at all means it must remember something of its history…”

Her attention turned to the sacrifices and her frown softened into curiosity. “There,” she said, pointing at a fold of soft emanation passing through the air. Avo noticed and found himself looking at what seemed to be dissolving seams from a lattice-thin material. Light refracted from its curves, but in seconds it vanished from sight again. “Those are the Imitators. There in the air here. They're in your fire as well.”

“You said they're like cells,” Avo replied. “Seems more like organized strings of dust to me.”

“I suppose, but they’re connecting everything here. All the people repeating the same myths to build on your Heavens…” She trailed off. “Look at the architecture.” He did and found them shield-shaped–not unlike those in Nu-Scarrowbur.

They were also repeating. Down to the last bit of minute detail. Each block beyond that also suffered the same symptoms. The same guard tower manifested thirty-two times across thirty-two places. The mini-nuke he consumed started appearing in place of urns outside the four great mansions that flanked the tower. Tungsten and glass and vivianite were applied randomly to more and more structures as he looked away from the core.

“You want to know how I’m sure the Imitators are in you?” Kae asked. “Because this isn’t how a human learns their mythos–or even tells their own myths to each other. This is how a conjoined memory-sharing symbiotic intellect approaches mythology. Everyone just agrees. Everyone reiterates their stories without fail.”

Considering her words, he judged the flaws and mistakes in the city again. “Why the repetition?”

“Because it’s guessing–it doesn’t know so it’s filling in the gaps with the information it was already provided. All this place is a phantom memory. Phantom history. A generalized guess. Come on. Let’s take a look at the other one.”

She ascended through his reaching strings of radiance and returned to the central boundaries of his Frame.

RESURRECTION - 41%

They entered the Galeslither the same way but found the metaphor of its history most differently expressed.

The first things to catch Avo’s notice were the drifting communities built upon the backs of what looked to be bulbous, green-scaled whales with six manta-shaped wings and fire hissing free from curving gills spread along their ribs. They sailed above the ash-choked winds in pods of four and along the curve of the horizon behind them, four columns of sight-searing brightness cleaved into the atmosphere.

The shine they bore resembled the flash of a fusion burner in more ways than one.

“Oh, floaters!” Kae said. “Natural floaters. A shame that Omnitech decided to modify the ones that survived the Godsfall. It would’ve been nice to–ah! Look! Another fold in the light! The Imitators are in here too. Everywhere inside Frame…”

Avo found himself more drawn to how the people were kneeling atop their nomadic homes bolted onto the back of said floaters. Dome-shaped and hewn from wind-resistant material, folk that dwelled upon the backs of the airborne leviathans were closer to sailors than anything else.

Some managed the scales widening into glinting sails while others pointed at atlases of wind. Along the backs of their homes were crates filled with trade goods and an undeployed net made to snatch birds.

The bioforms themselves seemed to sing as they basked in the light, finding succor from starlight.

As each figure completed their designed tasks, they loudly proclaimed their offerings to the skies before taking to the edge of their homes.

And leaping.

Upward they fell, up into the boundless empty above, and through it all, the winds circled and a streak of lightning sheared the horizon, just as the Galeslither dove into shape. As it snatched the sacrifices delivered upon its homestead, it swallowed some between rifts of raging wind and drank away others through the fluid shadows cast by its wake.

The sail festooned upon the floaters filled and the nomads accelerated. Ahead, Avo found another pod with twice the number. Yet, they progressed over the same patch of the earth below, crossing over the same ravines, all while the same fiery spires cut up into the firmament behind.

Besides the increased number of sacrifices cast upward into the sky, the darkness seemed to cling around them, shadows riding forward in tandem with the altered Galeslither.

And with each body returned onto their living airships, Avo thought he saw the wind chimes pulse and lag, momentum-frozen even as they passed.

“Patchworks,” Avo said. “Bad sequences. No coherence to these memories. Like dumping a bunch of assets in and blending.”

Kae responded with a small note of agreement. “Yes. But that’s because the Guilds don’t want you to know how to build a Heaven. You still have all the Elder Mythos that your father left you, right?”

This piqued Avo’s interest. “Yes. Why?”

“Have you tried reading it? They contain many different memories–very interesting recollections that I’m not sure where–I frankly don’t know where he got some of the sequences from. The Guilds have restrictions on these memories and it looks like managed to steal some direct sources. We need to take a dive through them when you have a chance.”

“We?” Avo asked.

“Yes. We. I’m going to teach you. All of you. You’re going to learn how to make new Heavens.”

And with those words, Avo felt as excited as she did. “Isn’t there an oath against this?”

“There’s an oath against Agnos and attachments. There’s also another oath against harming an Agnos without just cause. There’s a lot of oaths, Avo. And to borrow a phrase from Draus, ‘shit didn’t matter.’”

Kae’s voice was too soft to manage the husk of Draus’ drawl, but the attitude was all there.

“Wait, do you have another Domain right now? Something for the Galeslither or the Woundshaper? Do the Woundshaper. I think I can help you do something…”

“Something?”

She shot through him without giving him a proper answer.

An instant later, he found himself infusing the last remaining Domain of Blood into his still-unfurled Woundshaper.

Instead of merely dissolving into the sigil of its structure, another iteration of the Sangeist manifested as it passed through the confines of the Heaven’s paracosm.

It was like another realm–another instance of the initial world he saw overlapping with the one already simulated inside the Woundshaper.

For the Sangeist, the only things offered form were the tower and the sacrifices. Only the blood flowed here–the miracles of matter remained absent with the expenditure of the domain. Blank-faced entities drifted like shades in an diminished world, their vessels unoccupied vehicles open to be mantled by the echoes of the dead.

Then, something unseen snaked into its boundaries.

The change came so subtly Avo almost missed it. Like a shift in the light, a thin film of phosphorous-like gauze spilled through the new Heaven, and from it, the transparent outlines of other structures began to arise.

As the two yet separate Heavens overlapped each other, Avo watched as the smaller ontologic developed flickering contours to perfectly slot over the environment of the Woundshaper.

He guessed this to be the Imitators in function – they were priming a new environment for perfect adaption, filling in the emptiness with ghost-like symmetry in anticipation of full integration.

“They can read patterns,” Avo said.

“They make patterns,” Kae elaborated. “They can also make a lot more miracles than just that. Let’s see. Tell it… no, let’s try something more interesting. Hubris. That’s supposed to be a cornerstone of a canon–a…an agreed-upon impossibility or point of paradox in scripture.”

Avo liked the sound of this. “Want me to have it remove the mass limit?”

The Agnos recoiled, aghast at the suggestion. “Oh, Jaus. No. No! Never do that.”

Curious response. “Why?”

“Because it’s a rooting aspect of a Heaven. The inconsistency allows it to stay anchored and overwrite baseline reality instead of remaining perpetually sealed in its own subreality. Look–imagine this. It’s like… you need something that can crack against actual reality or your Heaven will never make contact.”

“That’s why paradox? That’s why I backlash? Because an agreed point of impossibility between the revolving echoes sacrificed by my cyclers and how reality actually is?”

“It’s… more complicated than that, socio-culturally, but I suppose if you wish to view it that way, it can work. So, don’t remove the hubris. You should just… change it.”

“Change it?” Avo asked.

“Yes,” Kae continued. “With what your Frame can do, there won’t be any delay in culturing the sacrifices to accept the new lore.” Despite her earlier hurt, a sense of bubbling effervescence escaped from her. “So, keep the mass limit the same, but what if we keep the number of towers you can generate variable…”

That widened new possibilities in Avo’s mind. “More… towers?”

“Uh… more vessels for the Heaven, so to speak. Just try it. With how you can attune your ontology with singular thoughts and commands, there shouldn’t be any danger here.”

Encouraged and enthused, he did as she recommended. With an internal confirmation, he watched as something nigh-unseen twisted through the air, and two Heavens bled into each other.

They melded and merged, the greater whole Woundshaper infecting the Sangeist with its immensity, but it too was beginning to change as new possibilities of development began to phase into place.

“What was that you said? Eclipse phase?” Avo studied the look on Kae’s face.

Her anticipation hardened into triumph as mem-data flashed through Avo’s consciousness and in the unifying realities, the pool of sacrifices widened as a second spire rose up to accompany the first.

“Yeah,” Kae said. “Eclipse phase.”

DOMAIN OF (BLOOD)

UPDATING MYTHOLOGY

->REVIEWING FOR PARADOXES…

UPDATING HUBRISES…

CONFIG 1. [HUBRIS: ONLY UP TO EIGHTY TONS OF BLOOD CAN BE MANIPULATED AT ONCE (x2)]

CONGFIG 2. [HUBRIS: ATTEMPTING TO MOVE AN MANIPULATE AN EXCESS OF EIGHTY TONS AT ONCE WILL TRIGGER THAUMIC BACKLASH]