Godclads

Chapter 8-14 The Inverted Dreamer (I)

Ah. The Hungers reach out again. Yes. I know, like a worm burrowing through the soil of time.

Liven yourself, Akunsande.

It has been too long since we bled one of your kin.

-Zein Thousandhand, the Godslayer

8-14

The Inverted Dreamer (I)

The last words the scabbed Low Master spoke came synchronized with a flash of light. From above, the bone palace widened and withered, the mem-data around him twisted by the countless nodes, their mastery considerable alone nigh-overwhelming synchronized. There was something special in working with oneself–a deeper intuition that couldn’t come even after years of teamwork.

Guiding hurricanes of ghosts flowing in perfect tandem, they rewove structures around them as sequences shifted, the simulated reality flickering.

Above, the simulation of sky suddenly ruptured, a new dawn opened up at its center. He felt as if a frog at the bottom of a well gazing upon an unfathomable light. And then, everything clicked into shape for his perception.

The tunneling path led toward the shine of another place. Another extension to the barrel. Another beacon cast by a distant Auto-Seance. Other loci. Other lobbies. Ghosts flowed down the conjoining sequences as memories were laced like knots on a rope bridge, the sequences descending further and farther.

Drifting fragments of memory washed over Avo as he tasted flashes. Instants of recollection. He knew some of these memories. He had seen them upon his infiltration earlier. They belonged to the tenants that once lived here, their minds now half-nulled, restrained by an unseen force.

As another series of Auto-Seances flashed and connected, he understood what the Low Masters were trying to build.

This was a bridge. Something that was raising the bandwidth of memories across a cluster of minds, capable of spreading out the strain. With each palace bridged, the cognitive capacity of the Low Masters grew, and they wielded their swelling influence. Was it to mask their presence from the Exorcists? To house something so great and obvious from the curious eyes of lurking Necros–

The answer came as the waters of the Nether suddenly shook. The ghosts rocked and quivered, but through the fusing of palaces, the new superstructure the Low Masters were creating held.

A presence bled out from each of the Walton-faced nodes, a thing felt rather than seen.

Ghosts bearing patterns and mem-data beyond comprehension bubbled from the orifices of the Waltons, their existence a paradox, a knot, their wisping shapes a loom of cycling sequences, trauma spun seamlessly into other emotions as if they were one and the same.

Gazing upon the impossibility rattled Avo’s wards. Fathom a blood red hue, but then know it to be all other colors universally, in hue, in structure, in concept. The only separation was a trapped reverberation at the center of these anomalous ghosts, these strings coiling memories all bound together like a rat-king.

The vibration shivered unnatural, un-gradual. Displacement. Such a word described it best. From one place to another it lurched as if there was a missing stretch of time between, as if focus had slipped from Avo’s mind.

Confusion resounded from the depths of his Frame, arising from his Woundshaper. “Master… these ghosts… they are skimming in place upon the waters of time.”

Inside, Avo felt himself grow cold.

“Oh…” the weepers began moaning in tandem. One after another, the countless concert of nodes clutched at their skulls as the ghosts bubbled out into the palace, forming an amorphous cloud at the center of the space. Their pain was a thing of unity, and they all wept as shadows, mirroring the pain of one man. “It comes. Our master. Our slaver.”

The scabbed ones laughed, their minds discordant, but all joined with the same hum of burgeoning brutality. “Oh, the godsdamned thing is even bigger than it was before.”

All the while, the heartless had begun to pray. “Praise be Noloth. Praise be the kingdom of the unseen mind. Praise be our protector.” He suddenly looked up, his eyes widening in shock as the first flash of emotion overtook his features. “It arrives. It arrives. Praise be the master above. Praise be the Lord of the Undying! Praise be the Inverted Dreamer! Praise be Noloth, fallen now, but fated to rise.”

And as one, the Low Masters fell silent, bowing their head in supplication for the un-god.

It would be too vulgar a thing to call its arrival a cataclysm, and its spontaneous manifestation could not even be described as blurring. Its movement mirrored the first few resurrections Avo experienced. Reality shuddered. The Nether shivered. Ghosts lurched and flowed as if a stone fell upon the waters, movement-choked.

The mass inflicted suffocation on all that was. Even with all the minds joined in unison, the structure the Low Masters had lashed together was fraying, memories shattering, Auto-Seance’s crumbling as ghosts fragmented into frayed memories.

Avo stared uncomprehending, trying to see it. He focused on, the congealed cloud made from tumorous ghosts as it began to thunder, and with the deafening wavelengths blasted out from the trembling mass, a sudden comprehension came as Avo heard a chorus of words spoken in both High and Low Nolothic.

Where his understanding of the tongue failed him, the purity of intent that bridged from mind to mind brooked no confusion about what was being said.

“Greetings!”

“Greetings!”

“Hello!”

“Fucking traitor!”

“We need the Frame! We need to be free!”

“Why did you betray us!”

“Master–”

“So hungry!”

“EAT EAT EAT!”

A flash of something appeared then, its presence leaking out from the mists like a color from the void. As he felt with Mirrorhead’s Twice-Walker, a sense of thalassophobia encroached. A ponderous shape slithered out from the obfuscation, its form coiling into itself.

Smaller serpents spun as hoops along the circumference of the grander engagement. Like a vessel cleaving through parting mists, the Hungers became known to Avo as a dream hidden within a network of dreams, its ontology both familiar and fraying to gaze upon.

They resembled that which dwelt within his Soul, the mainstay that allowed his thaums to churn indefinitely.

Dragons. Dragons eating other dragons, predation cycled in perpetuity, the vastest of which spun eating its own tail, while four of its smaller kindred burrowed through its flesh in cycles, forming five interlocked hoops bound by both metaphysical architecture and cannibalism.

Within the looping cycles of autosarcophagy at play, were accretions clinging to the golden ichor that flowed free from the many wounds marring the hunger. Sparkling along flaps of temporally flayed scale, the fullness of minds–not mere ghosts or sequences of memory–greeted Avo as things intact in consciousness and form.

He felt them then, their multitudes and masses, glaring out at him hatefully from the clefts of the great beasts they festered in.

Millions watching him. Millions of minds spilling their perceptions out from millions of eyes.

Avo felt his cog-feed flicker, the overwhelming tide of traumatics and minds pressing down on him. Cupped in this panopticon of eyes, he turned, watching each of the Low Masters as they hovered, their avatars conduits for the lord which they served.

The faintest apparition of thoughtstuff condensed from the wounds, their accretion reverberating as echoes out from the trailing gold that the dragons bled. “The polis speaks as one. We see you. We witness you. Entrapped though you are, you have not been judged yet. Speak now, our priest. Be not afraid. Tell us your truth, or the closest lie you have to it.”

It spoke with such volume that it drowned out Avo’s very thoughts.

“What a… pointlessly convoluted construct.” The Woundshaper spoke in his stead. “All these little egos fused within the wounds of dragons become this… thing hiding within the Low Masters. And for what? To… to expand its presence in this realm of the undying? To hide from the wrath of time itself? The architecture displeases me in structure and aesthetic. Such a waste. They would have offered more poignance if fed to our fire.”

“Can’t remember what I did,” Avo said. His speech pattern didn’t much sound like Walton at that moment, but then again, he was supposed to be “broken.”

The cloud hummed. “We see. The chain is broken in you, is it?”

“Fucker did a bad fork,” the scabbed one muttered, their speech echoing from the depths of the Nether disembodied from their avatar.

The cloud sang, and its voice was a catastrophe. The sound spilled free from the dragons as it twisted from rage to laughter back to rage as if time was spiraling back in on itself.

“Let us recount then, the history of our natures,” the Hungers said. From its opened flesh flowed the ink of gold, painting a new vista as if a fluid-based holo-vid, a resplendent pond within a sea.

A city greeted him, then, its form a near mirage, familiar construction running wide and round along the outside while descending in each Tier toward the inner districts. A single chasm bifurcated the city, its walls pale white as a trickle of darkness rose as a mist. Avo knew that channel. He had seen it before.

The Maw. A single section of the Maw.

“Old Noloth. Dead Noloth. Beautiful Noloth. In the time of the long quiet, when men knelt before their own instruments.”

The scene changed. Time shifted. The phantoms channeled a new scene then, the very image they were manifesting causing them to boil, to scream and laugh in sync. Trauma and joy bled over into each other as if they were of the same emotion, the same pattern of cognitive architecture. A tower formed. A tower fused from the bodies and bones of a sea of writhing people. Skinless as they were, Avo could still see the weeping joy scarred into their faces, their arms reaching out high in a rise of parapets, a ladder of praise to an unseen sky. Around the rising spire, the silhouettes of ten other dragons circled, the pattern of their revolution a blur bleeding into the tapestry of reality itself.

His wards shuddered then. Something broke. A dull rising hymn of madness seeped into the shallows of Avo’s inner thoughts. But he could not look away. Would not look away.

COG-CAP: 63%

The tower vanished. All that remained was the cloud.

The cloud continued. “Do you remember the great ladder that was promised? The offering that the deceiver from Kosgan offered us? We taste… Confusion. Tell us, Defiance, betrayer of your faith, betrayer of yourself, what confuses you.”

“That’s… the Flayed Ladder?” Avo asked.

“Only named as such by the outlanders. Those of the rooted thought. To us, it was the instrument of our ascension. The final salvation for all those born blessed to be Nolothi. Tell us, our priest of Defiance, do you remember what our dream was? And do you remember what the false-tongue Jaus Avandaer took from us?”Avo let his silence linger as he studied the mem-data of the being further. The Hungers, unnatural entity of Necrothurgy that it was, still held a modicum of structure to its memories.

The definition of its composition, however, was based upon a foundation of recursion, each memory a barrel, shifting from positive to negative and back again as if all the experiences it contained were but moments to a vicarity being sped up or rewound on an entertainment system. A series of schematics filled the void at the heart of the Hungers. The architecture of the tower was beyond Avo’s understanding both materially and metaphysically, but that which stood out from the image alone were the ten rings that looped its length and the fact that there was an inverted spire on the bottom of the structure as well.

“We sought an escape. A utopia that cannot be constructed in this reality,” the Hungers said. “The native pillars of this… canvas do not support the world we wish to design. Hence, we seek to elevate this Tier of reality. To derive what we need from this substructure and from its image, mold something anew. Something grander. Something of tunable perfection.”

The ancient city returned then, but now it sank deeper, and the channels of the Maw had spread further, slowly forming a symbol. The Hungers continued. “The idea of the Ladder was offered to us in a conclave. To you, Wahakten, priest of the Nolothi. A conspiracy rose against the gods as the Unprophet Jaus swayed us with his arcane technologies and a chance to subvert the Heavens. By chance of fate or circumstance, we, the Hungers came to be born of dragon and men both, our culture fitting the designs of his scheme to starve the gods from the inside, to split them will from ego.”

“It speaks of the Parting,” the Woundshaper said, a note of loathing coming through. “That which you know as the Godsfall. To think that were castrated from our own divinity by the mental-temporal equivalent of a knot of snakes…”

“What were you?” Avo asked. It took a surge of audacity to ask the question, but he needed it answered. The face of his former master–the master of his masters–remained obscure to him, its design cloaked behind concepts and shrouds.

“Are,” the Hungers said. “Are. We still remain. Trapped. Imprisoned. Sealed between planes, our totality is a trailing wound running parallel above the structure of reality, crippled before the fullness of ascension.”A crash of emotions spilled out from the Hungers then, notes of howling anguish and despair raking against his wards like a river of nails washing down a chalkboard. Discomforting as it was, Avo found a comparative metaphor in likening it to a gestalt of negativity leaking into the public Nether after a disaster, the synchronicity born of communities vast and conjoined in a way only a city could be.

His following question was born more from compulsion than curiosity. For all the confusion the Hungers inflicted, for all the dread, it was, in a manner, strangely beautiful–Necrotheurgic artistry in style and function. “How many are inside you?”

Scorn rose from the cloud in trailing mem-data, the visual scene before him resembling steam hissing from a cloud. “We numbered five hundred million during our attempt at ascension. We hold all the highborn houses of Noloth and their retainers. Our beings were made eternal by the touch of a fallen dragon. Upon death, ours is where a mind’s eternity should lie, not to be fuel for some paracausal parasite. Us. A community unending. A shared dream eternal, inverted away from the laws of entropy and demise.”

“We were to become a new reality!” the Hungers snarled suddenly. Its voice in that instant was every adult, every child. “Or we should have been.” It paused, letting its lament fester anew before turning its ire on him again. “We were the first to ascend the Ladder, its construction made beneath our surface, an allowance on our part, a deal on Jaus’, and a feat belonging to those of the Old Banner.”

“Old Banner?"

“They call themselves Voidwatch. The last bastard inheritors to a star-striding empire, now broken, now twisted. Nonetheless, it was our nature that allowed this great work to continue. Stripping mind from hollowed bodies, we coveted the best of our people and bled a human design into the wounds of the dragons. Wounds where we could fester without being swallowed.”

“Why?” Avo asked.

“To hide from the gods,” the Hungers answered. “To cheat fated death and build a paradise eternal. We hide all those we deemed of worth within the Hungers–this design of ours–and left it to linger in the catacombs beneath the city. Noloth was always a beast of two forms–a reflection of brutality and gluttony on the topside where the gods ruled, and the hidden power where the future was promised below.”

“The Ladder… Helping Jaus build it? Using it as an escape from the world?”

“Yes. We were to disentangle all memories of myth and worship upon our promised ascension when we seeped between liminality. Ascension assured. Ascension denied. Jaus had our precious tower skim across time when we were partly up the ninth circle, just as we fulfilled his desired deed.”

The Woundshaper hummed. “Ninth circle. Ninth sphere. The tenth, then, must be the installation of oneself into the totality of existence or something similar thereof, master.”

“We are trapped now,” the Hungers said. “Trapped in a transition, pulled away from time. Jaus promised us a world to ourselves. But he cleaved us using our very own nature. Time. A pocket within a pocket, we remain here as an… anchor of his making. That which you call ‘ghost?’ These memories? Phantasmics? Have you wondered why they resemble a city of the mind so, even in your besotted state? Have you?”

“It’s… a reflection of you?”

“Ah, so only missing facets of thought. Not lame of mind like Peace so claims.”

“Just kill the cunt,” Peace said.

A new realization dawned, and with it came horror born of philosophy. The Hungers were slaves using slaves feeding into slavery itself. His father–the Low Masters–were slaved to it but used the Nether which it supposedly engendered, their art Necrotheurgy, born from a new pillar of metaphysics lodged between realms of existence, an entire people serving as a counterweight for the foundations of modern-day communications, intelligence, and entertainment.

“And so you see now our predicament. Our torture. These false waters flow only because we exist. These waters were ours and our own! No one else! A place as true as the material, not this… this facsimile. The traitor Guilds use our very ontology as scaffolding for your ‘lesser miracles’ while the eternal city is bound to place, our paradise made purgatory.”

The Woundshaper sighed. “Master… do take heed that this creature may be exaggerating its involvement in the art of wielding minds. For all their claimed discredit toward the Ori, those of the archipelago were to have mastered this ‘Necrotheurgy’ of yours long before the split. Perhaps pacts between the ephemerals and dragons were not so rare in those days.”

The clashing details tore at Avo’s mind. He hissed and his annoyance flowed through his Metamind, raw and pure. The more answers came, the more questions followed. Why the Low Masters? Why the Uprising? How even were the Hungers trapped?

“It weighs on us,” the Hungers said. “The use of the Nether. It’s very existence. We feel it, growing with each death, spreading the wounds of the dragons. We were supposed to be the sky, but instead, we find ourselves as soil tread upon! A scale to bear the weight of our betrayers! And you, oh priest of mine, have opened a symmetrical wound. Have you no shame? Have you no decency toward your own people? How could you do something so foolish? How could you entomb our Frame in that… that creature?”

It felt as if a gauss flechette had struck him.

“Creature?” Avo asked.

“The ghoul. Your successful experiment. And a mistake on our part. We should have never permitted you to install that child’s memories into that ghoul! And you should have never imbued the ghoul with our Frame!

A keening wail of heavy anguish erupted out from the Hungers like a typhoon. Avo felt his cog-feed crackle and fissure, his ghosts receding even deeper behind his wars. The Hungers possessed a distance from him, a separation of entire realties, but its weight could be felt still, and with a whim, it could shatter him like an anvil falling upon glass.

Like a pendulum, its ire turned to the other priests. “And how could you have missed this? The ghouls were an instrument of your conception! Replaceable bandwidth to alleviate the strain! Death to fuel the Heavens we need to win this war!”

The heartless said nothing. The scabbed one scowled. The weeper sobbed.

“Did you hear me, ‘Walton?’ You gave our greatest instrument to a creature that was less than a slave. Less than a dog! They were made to express our hate! Our hate! Our boundless hate for the world! To bleed the betrayers forever! Lick sacks of fucking waste-trauma! And you made the meat meant to carry our excess metaphorical shit a god!”