Godclads

Chapter 7-9 Feed the Beast (II)

Fucked, my kindred.

Deeply, thoroughly fucked. That’s what we are. So, please, go outside. Take a drag of that thaumaturgically cleansed air free of radiation from this morning's customary exchange of nukes and praise the Guilds that you’re tumor free. Taste that sweet addicting produce grown in voidfarms thanks to our helpless benefactors at Voidwatch. Jack yourself into the Nether-sim for the next twelve hours on a drip feed of bliss, nova, and joy.

And slide on off into the big nothing, knowing with sweet relief that nothing comes after.

We’re fucked anyway; food for our betters. So kick back. Stop caring. Indulge yourselves. Might as well anyway. We have no way of getting out of this. No real power. Choose the needle. Choose ignorance. Choose nihilism and hedonism and all that other shit that makes the Guilders squirm.

Choose to die good and vacant, consuming everything, providing nothing.

If the Guilders want to play gods, fine. But I’m done with this. We’re not alive now. Not really. We exist. We’re just along for the ride. Nothing is ours to choose. Nothing is ours to keep.

Stay FATELESS. Stay empty. Stay yourselves, if just for a moment longer.

Jaus knows we’re bound to be forever-fuel for some half-strand’s Soul soon enough.

-Calla Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast

Feed the Beast (II)

“You two alright back there? Felt my blood knottin’ up inside me just now. Kae? Kae? The hells happened in there.”

Ghosts scaffolded his perception with popping icons and data as the world booted into coherence. New sensations assailed him, the rush of his blood stronger and heavier than ever before, the reach of his Domain allowing him to feel the flow running through the veins of those beyond him.

And further.

In his mind, the DeepNav had them at eighty feet from ground level. The ghosts painted a cavernous portrait of the environment around them, the gutters stained with sewage and rust. They were a dot trailing amidst a jungle of urban decay, the bases of megablocks conjoined by shanties and shacks, with barrels and wrecks providing campfires for the FATELESS deemed too worthless for even the Spine.

Yet, beyond the extension of his ghosts, through the cold plates of matter of the aero, he felt the flow of blood still. Hundreds of lives lingering in drifting pockets, the ground around them greeting his mind in flashing patterns instead of visual shapes.

“How large the world has grown… But the frame displeases. From my touch are these structures severed; the matter offered to the world in freedom and without offering to us. Spurned are we, master. Spurned and forgotten.”

Her words caressed the flame inside him as he felt the countless lives he could claim. They clung to their shackles, their abandoned hovels like aratnids, cloistered together in pockets of hundreds up and wide around spheres of brightness.

In the depths of the narrows and alleys, Avo felt other presences as well. Gangers, filling themselves with joy, unaware of the ghouls inching forth from the dark. Heavyset nu-dogs released on the prowl, their blood tasting of the titanium of autocannons bound to gene-modded muscle, their pace a blur as they tore along walls in packs four, hunting for that something unknown.

Beside him, framed in the hourglass mesh of her pilot's gimbal, Draus was speaking to Kae as the Agnos was gesturing toward him. The latter was incensed, her voice half-awe, half-fear. The Regular betrayed nothing. One a minute, her heart offered a single beat, sending hyper-oxygenated cells across her augmented architecture.

A low hum of pleasure came from the Woundshaper. “The Regular. The soldier. She pleases us. She above all others is the closest thing you have remaining to a fellow. More than those that share your make, she knows what it is like to kill. To like it. But to wield it all the same.” She paused. “A shame she was born a partling?”

Partling?

“You know not this word? Its construction is simple in conveyance: It implies a kindred born of the parted sexes. Weak and feeble of body and mind, and sparse indeed in fertility. If not for their blessed lowlands, I would have seen those of the first draft replaced.”

Avo grunted. A resurrected god was teaching him old slurs. What useful knowledge.

Turning his attention upon his companions, he frowned as they remained deep in conversation with each other–if it could be called that. Kae stumbled, her thoughts and words both fractured, her speech guided more by her reaching heart than coherence of mind. Draus, to her credit, was piecing what was being said together, but her confusion alerted Avo to a more important fact.

“They can’t hear you…” Avo said

His Heaven of Blood laughed.

“But of course. My shape does not reach into the tapestry beyond. How does one perceive the nonexistent?”

Its answer came with a chorus of ghosts melding into the shape as Avo’s Auto-Seance activated. A gate opened within the territory of his mind, and through a tunnel in cognitive reality, the edge of his thoughts flowed, its waters mingling with those of Draus.

“So,” Draus began, thoughtstuff tinged more with bemusement than terror, “Kae’s sayin’ you done fucked around and woke a dead Scaarthian god back up. That true?”

A genuine spike of curiosity came from Woundshaper. Avo felt his blood bubble, its contemplation compelling him to react. “She speaks? She hears? What unseen architecture allows for this? The murmurs of her thoughts… I hear them as well.”

+Recent development,+ Avo replied. +Probably from my diet of Sangeists.+

Draus didn’t respond. The atmosphere of her mind, then, was blank. A thoughtless, halted void as she heard the Woundshaper for the first time.

“Thoughtlessness has devoured her. Disappointing. During my reign, the feeble would open their veins in offering and the strong would bring me more matter to be molded. Silence, to a god, is a cousin to blasphemy. This cannot be made to linger. Kneel, huntress! Supplicate, partling! Though your ichor is of nobler mettle, it does not absolve–”

Avo clenched the Woundshaper into silence, his patience with its pointless egotism expended in an instant.

Draus, for all her virtues, hid confusion poorly.

Between the Regular and the ghoul, Kae’s eyes bounced like pinballs, her expression mouselike and timid. “I–uh–did… did you h-hear it?”

The Regular’s frown grew as she tilted her head, sampling her brief encounter with a god from days ancient as if it was sour wine. “The fuck is a partling.”

“Slur,” Avo explained, “for Non-Scaarthians.”

Draus’ frown deepened. “Shit. Been called plenty of shit but… ain’t never been slandered by no racist god before.” Her features softened as a sudden chuckle squeezed its way loose from her. “Nothin’ but firsts with you, huh, rotlick.”

Avo glared. “Yeah. Wouldn’t know what it’s like to be insulted like that.”

“B-but… uh…” Kae swallowed, uncertain if she wanted to speak. “Draus… she just… used an… epithet against ghouls. Doesn’t… doesn’t that make her a… a racist?”

They turned to stare at her, speaking in sync to clarify what was actually meant.

“I was bein’ facetious–”

“Draus is racist.”

A chortled noise came from the Regular’s throat. “Fuckin’--really, Avo?”

A low giggle came from the Agnos. A faint mist of understanding spilled forth from the clefts lining her wounded mind. “Y-you shouldn’t be racist, Draus.”

“Godsdammit, Kae. Don’t help him. He doesn’t need your help.”

“Be nice to your fellow partling,” Avo chided.

The glare she turned on him could have burned a hole through a foot of reinforced titanium. “See you’re feeling’ a bit better from your little episode earlier.”

“Better. No. Not better. Not worse. Just thinking about things less. I feel… lighter.”

His reply rewarded him with nothing visual in response. Tranquil in expression and thought, the only indication of Draus’ wariness was a passing beat of contemplation.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. Better than seein’ the emptiness inside you.”

She didn’t believe he was healed. He knew that even without the open link binding him to her mind. But she pressed no further, old experience and personal wisdom forming her habits; she didn’t pressure him to speak of what was stripped from him before, she was willing to accept whatever facade of control she thought he was presenting now.

It was said that the mental willpower of Regulars was a thing near absolute, that to shatter their resolve would take unmaking the very foundations of their minds.

An exaggeration perhaps, but it also might have afforded Draus perspective. Understanding of mind-wounds from all those she survived, and all those that left nulled husks of those around her.

“Alright,” she continued, cracking her neck, “we’re comin’ in on the spot. Just a minute or two before I cut you loose.”

“Spot?” he asked. His recollection of any mentioned objectives or designated targets came to him as a haze, as did much of his memories since leaving the Second Fortune.

Through the struggle of trying to bind his mind to a fractured ego, the world around him peeled by in colors and blurred shapes outlined in his cog-feed. It wasn’t until he requested Draus kill him to allow Kae access to his Soul that some semblance of agency returned to him.

Now, he felt as if he… molted. Some manner of his burden was shed, but not fully. A gorge ran along his ego in a place he dared not look, dared not dive.

The nature of his personal palace had been twisted, and a pillar of his past was now consigned to oblivion. Consigned along with a lingering vestige of his father, who, in using Avo to break his own mind, severed the chains of virtue that Avo shackled himself with even while bereft of a Morality Injector.

As the phantasmic passed through his thoughts, he deactivated it in an act laced with undeniable spite. From depths flooded with dissolving counter-memories, the beast roused itself from suppression, its drowning a thing of passing note.

For the first time in his life, Avo did not fight the creature as he waited for it to arise. He wanted to see how it would act. He wanted to see what compulsions it would levy upon him. The focused sharpness of his senses returned, as pronounced as it was when he was ascending the Crucible.

He could hear Kae’s heartbeat tapping away in her chest. She was a slip of a thing. Barely an appetizer. Less than a meal. It would take little effort to scrape what paltry flesh she possessed from her bones. The caloric potential of her body likely numbered less than a full day as well.

Disappointing when compared to Draus, but the beast thought otherwise.

Despite his recent empowerment, despite his evolving Heavens and rising power, the creature sculpted into his sinews remained just that–a creature. A beast. And like the reactive being it was, it remained ruled by its wariness of the Regular.

Its mind was still hovering amidst nightmares. The flashing tongues of fusion burners cleaning entire nests. Hundreds of his kind cut down in the intervals between seconds.

An urge to kill her remained. But that was all it was. To kill her for his own safety. To kill her and move on.

For the first time, Avo felt himself sneering at the beast, disgusted with the frailties of its nature.

“Well,” Draus said, voice low with grim amusement. “Ain’t that somethin’? It’s scared of me. Really flatterin’.”

He grunted. “It’s like a nu-dog. Not scared. But wary. Afraid. Doesn’t see you as meat. Another predator.”

Through the visual feeds, he noticed they were passing by a half-melted husk of a building. Its shell was fire-sheared and imprinted shadows lined its surface. Even through the damage, Avo could see the claw marks on windows and ledges.

This building was an oddity amongst the towering megablocks. It looked too nice to be quick-fabbed, but was too frail of hardness to be part of the original architecture. Potentially a slummer estate for the wealthy?

It mattered little in the end. The marks left upon him made clear its face: the ghouls had little difficulty overrunning it during the Uprising. Little difficulty until the Guild scoured them from existence.

“Still haven’t told me where we’re going.”

A mem-packet drifted through their session. Accessing it activated Avo’s DeepNav functions, the three-dimensional simulation of the local environment fused into shape by the phantoms within his Metamind.

Three hundred feet away, a wide plaza sprawled out in the simulated map, its expanse stretching three miles between the bases of two megablocks. It rose, an octagon of five decks with a narrow stretch of pathway biting into its outer radius, the lane flanked by five stories of long-looted storefronts and autovendors.

Overhead, the words “ULTIMART” bobbed in blocky letters. Avo scanned it for more information but discovered that the Nether lobby it once hosted its information had been invalid for the past decade.

No ghosts. No hosting.

“That there,” Draus said. “Used to be the Nu-Scarrowbur Ultimart. Some kind of… refugee-friendly mall initiative before everything went to shit. Picked up some whispers ‘bout it while workin’ our run over the last couple of days. Scalpers are puttin’ on a show here tonight in about an hour or so. Crucible. Open air. Open participation. They’re calling it the ‘Ultimart Five-Hundred.’ As in five hundred ‘fugees fed to about a good hundred or so new-meat recruits. A bloodin’ ceremony, if that makes sense.”

“Good entertainment. Hunters’ adrenaline will make good vicarities. The killing will make good snuffs.” A thin smile widened across his face as he clicked his fangs. It was harder to do with his mask on. “Would have.”

“Yeah,” Draus said, grinning. The thrill he felt was a shared one, it seemed. “Would have. Hey, that’s the nature of the city, right? You come down to the gutters to shoot a snuff-flick, don’t whine if you get snuffed in return.”

Avo didn’t want to hear them whine. He wanted to feel them die.

A thought possessed him them. A sudden impulse.

With a thought, he connected to their aero’s locus–the old Zephyr’s locus needing a moment to respond to him.

He had a Galeslither functional as well. Why was he still in here?

What need had he of an aero when he was the wind itself?

Deactivating the inhibitors of his gimbal, the inertial clamps of the helix-shaped seat hissed as he stepped out, digging his clawed digits into the soft rubber to avoid toppling over. The interior of the aero was a cramped space, with splashes of external feeds lining the ceiling and the windows, and a single gleaming locus spinning overhead.

With three steps between him, Draus, Kae, and an empty seat that was thankfully not occupied by Green River, he shuffled sideways toward the rear doors as he sent a mental command to the locus.

The door rasped and opened. The wind gushed in, taunting him with a biting chill.

“A-Avo!” Kae cried. “What are you doing?” Her heart was surging fast now. The beast screamed for him to turn around and tear into her.

He refused.

Not because she was choiceless.

Not because she wouldn’t taste good.

Just because she meant more than food to him in value.

And where the beast was only a ghoul, Avo had fully intended to see what it meant to be a god.

To some, that meant feeding whatever vice they so yearned to slake. For him, he wanted to start with something simple.

Control.

He wanted to learn anew where his boundaries lay. See what transgressions struck him as amusing, and what was too banal to hold his attention.

Not far from the Agnos, Draus was narrowing her eyes at Avo. “You wanna make this a race?”

“No,” Avo said. “I’ll win. Galeslither’s faster than an old aero.”

The Regular chuckled. “Ain’t seen me drive proper yet. And last I checked… I don’t think you got the right Heaven slotted into you.”

She was right about that.

Turning, he looked at her and shrugged. He could stand to gain from having a suicide implant of some kind. Or maybe learn to pierce his brain with his claws.

There weren’t many benefits to being a ghoul. Being hard to kill but easy to hurt was more trouble than it was worth sometimes.

A click sounded from under Draus’ wrist. Kae winced and squeezed her eyes shut, turning away in a rare instance of reactive intuition.

“You going to shoot?” Avo asked.

“That depends. You reckon you can ask me to do you the honors?”

“You like shooting ghouls. Shouldn’t be hard.”

“Yeah, but I’ve met a new one.” She brought her arm online and aimed. His Phys-Sim painted vectored warnings across his cog-feed. “Been a real pain in my ass.” She paused. “Hope he gets it back together tonight. After gettin’ the killin’ out of his system.”

Avo chuffed a laugh. “Out of my system. Will only be temporary, Draus. I can’t–” His voice trailed off.

He already had changed who he was. With his Frame. With his Heavens–including the change that was about to happen now.

With the destruction of one of his key memories.

He was always, always changin–

Something plunged through his shattering fangs. Copper and tang filled his mouth as the pieces of his teeth speared into his flesh while his bones spread and lifted, the shattered parts of a lid lifting out in a blossom from the back of his skull.

Errors codes spiked through his vision as he tumbled, stumbling out into the embrace of nothingness, his fall cradled by air.

The last sensation he felt before he receded into his Soul was the wind screaming through the open tunnel made in his face, a pole of air whistling a shrill note that tickled his mangled flesh all the way down.

INITIALIZING RESURRECTION - 1%

First death.

Then, to see if he could clad himself with some new wings.