Godclads

Chapter 8-4 Venting (II)

+You know why I’m calling. You know why.

Got something that can work out for both of us, and you got a debt to even up.

Yeah. A debt. We both know you wouldn’ve been selected by the Longeyes. They would’ve chosen me. Instead, I gave you that spot. And the Frame that came with it. I made you as much as they did. I did.

So I need you to come down now. No need for me to say why. You know. You already know who’s bleeding me. That–that Highflame fuck. That Greatling shit. He’s torching our home. Rusting up our trade.

Yeah. Yeah, your mom’s fine. Think her mind’s clearing more these days.

Talk to her yourself if you don’t believe me.Think she said your name a couple of days back. Heh.

Well you don’t believe, come down and see.

Yeah. Yeah, I am using her to pull you down.

Piece of shit?

Reva, I’m your uncle. You should know this already. It runs in the family.

-Thoughtcast between Vincintine “Ripperjack” Javvers and Reva Javvers, Bloodthane of Stormtree

8-4

Venting (II)

In front of Avo, the turbine spun like an old egg-beater, coiling the yolk of existence.

Past scattered licks of shrapnel damage and the crumpled wrecks leftover from crashed spearships, the bodies of those slain here remained.

There was an impossible freshness to their corpses despite the passage of a month. No one had come to claim them. Here, they lay, a garden beneath a garden, bodies piled in a wide and empty room, unrotting flesh squirming with knots of writhing insects.

Ethereal flames spilled forth from the cracks in the turbine, defiling the fabric of reality, more like luminescent arteries than dancing hues of blistering heat. The design of the thaumic reactor was hard to conceptualize. To call it a mere turbine neglected to mention how it sang. The polarized tiles once plating its cracked exterior, curved in a sprawl of square cells up all along the ceiling and then floor. A mirage speckled the air around the miracle machine, a shimmer to a place unseen–a reality as near as it was distant, falsehood made true.

COG-CAP: 13%

The ghosts within his Metamind wailed. But Avo did not look away.

Stepping out from the parting mists of his Galeslither, he directed counter-gusts of wind to balance his Rendsinks as they emerged from the Yondergales. He placed them on vortex-pedestals and puppeted them along like luggage on strings of air.

Almost immediately, a spike of pressure greeted his flesh. He felt something wriggling as if the fabric of space itself was trying to stitch itself under his skin. Where there was biomass, there was the presence, the discomfort. But as a glinting segment of chitin squeezed free from the exposed–still somehow bleeding–wounds of the enforcers, Avo noticed a build up of Rent climbing in his Hell as the sensation collapsed, breaking upon the bulwark of his Frame.

REND CAPACITY: 68%

+Intersecting Domain,+ Draus said, conferring Kae’s words.

+What happens if I didn’t have a Hell? One with a similar enough Domain?+

Draus laughed. +Well, I guess you should look down then, consang. Them Scalpers are puttin’ on a show.+

Synchronized to her words, a chain of twitching hydrapedes spurted out from the oozing wounds of a bifurcated Scalper. Avo frowned. The pool of blood seemed to be frozen in time, the flow continuous, but never growing beyond a certain threshold.

+Kae says best to assume that the blood ain’t there. And don’t touch the bodies. Might be part of the mirage. Who knows with these hydrapedes, Heaven-touched as they are.+

He heeded her advice. The Rupture might not be able to grow insects under his skin as it so desired, but they might still be able to take a more direct path. No sense in risking it.

Looking up, the turbine spun and revealed the long gash running down its middle. He watched it turn as he came to a halt, each rotation churning reality and inspiring dizziness. Inside, Avo caught a flash of the damage–a cracked Soul leaking ripples of thaumic essence into the world like metaphysical solar flares.

COG-CAP: 34%

A pitched scream rose amongst his ghosts. Several overloaded from trauma and fell into a dormant state. Automatically, his Metamind shuffled sequences to maintain his phantasmal architecture. Spots formed behind his eyes as his cog-feed flared with errors, a kaleidoscope of secondhand memories playing in tandem.

He wanted to look away. But he hesitated. He felt something there, meeting him eye to eye, another awareness, suffering in silence. The dismembered light of the turbine-clasped Soul rippled, the colors of its wavelength ineffable, beyond the means of words to describe.

But it was beautiful. And he hungered to drink in its mutilated brightness.

From the depths of his blood, another cry of pain joined his ghosts. His own Heaven was rattling. The Woundshaper shaking, its being infused with raw dread unbefitting a god. “No… no this… Master, please… please look away. I beg you! I beg you! I can bear the sight no longer! It cannot be! We–we are gods. We are the divine. How…” A mournful note played now. A whine that sounded more befitting a dog. “We gave you the world. Why did you do this to us? We did not deserve this! Enough!”Avo couldn’t help but give a chuckle. How did an immortal being fare when faced with the irrefutable proof of its own fragility, that it, like a cheap plate, could be broken once and again?

They fared as humans did. Like mortals–for in that moment, it too bore witness to the truth of New Vultun, the truth of this new age: for though that which is eternal may burn immortal, in this strange eon even the gods themselves could shatter.

But not him.

He would never shatter.

He would learn. He would taste. He would become.

Avo faced the pain, and he let it sink it further, feeling his ghosts writhe, listening to his Woundshaper scream.

“No more! No! No more!”

+Avo! Gaze into mind-breakin’ shit later! Trauma’s leaking over, godsdammit.+

He blinked. He pulled his gaze away, finally noticing the cascading errors burning across his visual display as his tertiary phantasmics shut down one after another.

COG-CAP: 89%

“M-merciful,” The Woundshaper muttered, its self-awareness shaken. It was trying to thank Draus. “Of higher make you are. Higher blood.” It paused. “Praise be, master. No more of that. I will be silent. I will supplicate with every word of yours with due obsequiousness. Never let me gaze upon such again. I cannot… It cannot be my fate.”

He grunted. Part of him still wanted to peek, but he knew better. +What next. Deploy Rendsinks?+

+Kae says to set ‘em down first.+

He did so, each vortex choking off to rasping wisps. Four cracks sounded as the large chunks of thaumic machinery he carved free from the golems but a day prior greeted the floor, spreading fissures. With two sinks from the Galeslither and two more from the Sangeists, each of them should possess a symmetrical Domain to the Fallen Heaven.

Now, the question was how to integrate them into the structure of the Soul.

+Okay,+ Draus said. She cracked her neck and the relief spilled over to Avo, a comforting feeling though a bit uncanny. +So, here’s what you gotta do: reach inside it with your Heaven of Air. Just… wind its exposed core, I reckon. Do the thing you do when you slurp the golems. It should interface with your Soul and try ejecting its waste across to the sinks. Kae says your Meta-Fac should do the heavy liftin. Theoretically.+

+Theoretically?+ He replied, tone bland.

+Yeah, rotlick, theoretically. You wanna get a new Hell or not?+

This sounded like a stupid way for him to overload. Avo sighed.

+Then?+

+Then you start venting into the Rendsinks. They should have some kind of containment sigil on the inside. Same stuff that Kae’s eye is made from. Corresponding thaumic… some shit.+ A brief pause came as he heard Kae snarl uncharacteristically with anger. Draus, deciding to do something unlike herself as well, flinched. +Yeah, Kae–look, that’s how I talk. I don’t mean it’s actual shit. Your eye isn’t shit. I was bein’-- Respect? This is me bein’ respectful, you think I was near as nice to the other Regs? We were–+

+Draus,+ Avo said. He wondered if she felt as annoyed as he did doing these interruptions. +Apologize later. Feed me now. Going to interface now. Current Rend at seventy-one percent

+Godsdammit, two of you talkin’ at the same time…+

He ignored her and cast his being wide. The winds around him answered, rising in lifting billows, their path lined by a contrail of cracking spatial fractals.

+Nothin’ to worry about,+ Draus said. The way she cleared her throat made him worry. The way packets of nervousness drifted over from her mind didn’t help. +Should be just slight deviations between the two canons, two separate subrealities gonna adjust to overlapping in the prime. Rupture would’ve widened if any backlash was triggered.+

+Good to know. Glad to not die.+

+Yeah, me too. Spatial Ruptures have a tendency to shift asses where heads should be for miles. There’d be good odds of us goin’ with you.+

Reaching into the openings left upon the turbine, he felt his Woundshaper shiver as he pushed further, groping his way blindly toward the Soul inside. The warmth greeting him then was a stained one, the kind you would feel when sliding your fingers into the cleft of a wound.

WARNING: SOUL DETECTED

THIRD SPHERE THAUMIC REACTOR

HEAVENS: [1]

- [ERROR]

- [ERROR]

DOMAINS

- [ERROR]

- [ERROR]

- [ERROR]

- [ERROR]

THAUMIC OUTPUT - 534 THAUM/c

WARNING: THAUMIC CYCLER DAMAGE [MODERATE]

-TEMPORAL LEAKAGE DETECTED

That made Avo tilt his head.

+Ignore that,+ Draus said. +Seen it myself. The overload probably cracked the cycler. The dragon’s loop is still runnin’ seeing how the Heavens are still goin’. Its canons are cracked. Won’t be shitting any stable miracles into the re–.+

The Fallen Heaven shuddered. A soundless crackle rattled the fabric of reality. Tears opened around him, the fabric of space itself, a maw widening across the seams of geometry. Immediately, the bodies around him glitched; they disappeared and reappeared, freshness gone, rot and rust coating flesh and armor.

A rain of hydrapedes came forth through the spatial wounds. Incubated from the bodies of the dead, the insects fell, their unnatural conjoining revealed to him for the first time. Fused by lengths of fingers and eyes, stretches of sinew extended from each hydrapede, the organs pumping beneath their cracking shells, biology of a foreign make.

Avo sniffed.

Human flesh. Human offal. Human bone.

The Soul within the turbine erupted, the borders of its ontological structure lashing existence, flaying shape from reality as its broken canons surged. Connected to its structure, Avo felt it prying at his Liminal Frame.

WARNING!

THAUMIC MASS OF UNIDENTIFIED EXCEE–

ERROR!

+Draus!+ Avo sent.

+Stay zero,+ Draus said. +Kae says this is… uh, normal.+

For a moment, Avo felt his eyeball turn into a writhing hydrapede before his Hell filled further.

REND CAPACITY - [ERROR]%

LEAKAGE: SPHERE III FALLEN HEAVEN

EXTERNAL RESONANCE BLEEDING OVER

REND CAPACITY - 434.444%

His session crackled. +That’s also–+

+What next? Tell me what!+

Inside, he could feel his Hell straining. Errors burst out behind his eyes like fireworks. His perception blurred. He was himself, struggling, wrestling with a larger Soul, funneling the entropy decaying its structure into himself. But through the cracks and gulfs of the turbine, he looked upon himself through the Fallen Heaven.

Its structure was characterized by collapse. If there was a shape to its Heaven, none existed now. Instead, gleaming shards of fragments danced a weightless ballet, the disfigured pieces resembling parts of a conjoined arm. One part shone viridescent with buzzing wings and glinting chitin, but from its base swayed strands of human tissue. Fractals of space ran in radiant ponds in three parts.

CANON - [ERROR]

HUBRIS - [ERROR]

BACKLASH! BACKLASH! BACKLASH!

REND CAPACITY - [ERROR]

Waterfalls of ghosts and mem-data flowed down like a deluge from the perspective of the leaking Soul. To its gaze, it looked down where Avo stood and only saw a collapse–a maw across all existences, a single point where light flowed inward to feed a singularity.

A cry of surprise rose. The Woundshaper stirred. “What are we…”

The session cracked again. Draus sounded almost nonchalant in her words. +Connect with the Rendsinks now. All of ‘em.+

Dislodged from his stupor, Avo threaded his being into the four Rendsinks. He stood a junction to flowing Rend, his being a fork in the mouth to the sinks. From the Rupture, the flood came, and he served as both funnel and engine.

VENT! VENT! VENT!

REND CAPACITY - 434.444%

BACKLASH IMMINENT! BACKLASH IMMINENT!

+Just keep the flow goin’,+ Draus said. +Long as you keep it flowin’ and don’t let it bottle up inside, nothin’ should break.+

Avo didn’t respond. His muscles were frozen stiff with stress while his mind raced, the wholeness of his focus locked to his falling Rend Capacity. The world was a blur around him as the rain of hydrapedes began to wane. From on high they struck him, splattering against his person in clinging sap of mucus white and speckles of human offal mixed between the chitin.

He lowered his head and found himself glad he put his mask on before this. Would have been tempting to get a snack.

In the corner of his feed, four new windows appeared, each belonging to a different Rendsink.

LOADING…

INTEGRATING RENDSINKS…

ATTUNING SINK CAPACITIES

RENDSINK A - 8%

RENDSINK B - 3%

RENDSINK A - 2%

RENDSINK A - 3%

The three “A” were primary units attached to a golem. The B indicated the second one that he got from the Galeslither. They had a bit of leftover Rend from the golem patrols

Their Rend grew while the Fallen Heaven’s fell. The contrast came uneven across his sinks, but the pace was going to be close.

+Don’t think I can offload all the Rend,+ Avo said.

+Don’t need to,+ Draus replied. +Just gotta get it down below a hundred. That’s how much your Hell can pack. You drain the rest of that on your own.+

As the process continued, the thought of integrating the Rendsinks for future runs and dives appealed. The ease of being able to eject his entropy into a…

Avo frowned. Lugging around a two-ton module was a bit unwieldy. Might be easier for the Galeslither than the Woundshaper, but even so, they seemed a burden for the present. This required more contemplation.

RENDSINK A - 100%

CAPACITY REACHED

RENDSINK B - 100%

CAPACITY REACHED

RENDSINK A - 100%

CAPACITY REACHED

RENDSINK A - 100%

CAPACITY REACHED

REND CAPACITY - 50%

+Now! Now! Do the thing! Take the Soul!+

Avo didn’t hesitate. Reaching out with his Heaven, he tugged with all his might. His perception coiled in and out and back down into his skull. Spots formed behind his eyes as he felt the structure of the Soul collapse like a folded envelope.

Dolloping into a single beam of coruscating resplendence, fire greeted fire as his Soul expanded, blooming out from his very being in a reality-shaking ripple. Waves of echoing brightness danced upon the fabric of all that was, the walls whorling, the bodies twisting, time itself knotting around him.

Draus’ thoughts came as muted crackles, her voice broken and discordant.

For an instant, Avo felt himself rise into the air, a pure white scar that gouged deep into the roots of all that ever was.

At the center of things stood Avo. Time. Force. Space. Matter. Signals. All bled into him and crossed his borders warped by the resonance of his Frame.

And then, the wave shattered, and slammed back together, spiraling in a whirlpool of indelible markings as they collapsed and descended, draining deep into the depths of his broadening flame.

No. There was something different. Not wrong, but more. Another presence spiraled within him, its severed shine mirroring his own.

[SOUL] OBTAINED

ONTOLOGICAL DAMAGE SEVERE

HEAVEN INTEGRAT–

ERROR

SCANNING HEAVEN

ONTOLOGICAL DAMAGE SEVERE

THAUMIC CYCLER DETECT–

ONTOLOGICAL DAMAGE MODERATE

REVERTING MYTHOS…

REPAIRING ONTOLOGY - 2%

THAUMIC OUTPUT - 966 THAUM/c

REND CAPACITY - 50%

Head spinning, Metamind flickering as his ghosts struggled to reform themselves, Avo staggered on shaking legs. A new weight settled inside him. A new breadth. As his Auto-Seance came back online, he heard Draus, her tone hushed and intense.

+Avo? Avo? You there? We saw the flash! Shit, half the fuckin’ Sovereignty probably saw that.+

+Got more than the Hell,+ Avo said, stumbling away from the Rendsinks, stunned. He could feel the entropy budding within them, the instability of his existence boiling inside. He needed to take them. Couldn’t leave them here. He could still use them somehow. +Subsumed everything. Took Heaven. Domains. Took… took cycler. Soul too. My Frame… trying to repair them. Thinks it can repair them.+

A moment of silence came over the other end. +Kae’s squealin’ right now. Somethin’ uh, somethin’ about a thaumaturgic breakthrough. Sayin’ your Meta-Fac’s gonna put her kind out of a job.+

He nodded. +Convenient.+

+Convenient's a sidearm, Avo. I’ve seen Godclads work to contain Ruptures before. This shit… it ain’t supposed to be a one-man job.+ She breathed. +Yeah. I see why everyone’s gunning for that Frame now. You should get back. Take the sinks with you. Kae’s gonna wanna make a dive again later.+

He responded with a grunt.

“It is not the end,” his Woundshaper whispered.

Avo frowned. “What?”

“The other Soul… your brightness is mending it. It’s… it’s refusing the structure.” A laugh came from his Heaven of Blood. “It is not the end. We remain… we remain eternal.”

A shiver ran through him. A passing memory manifested.

He saw himself from the gaze of the Fallen Heaven.

He saw a wound that would drink the world.

He saw a being of ever-growing hunger.