Godclads

Chapter 9-2 The Helix

This message is directed to all cadres attached to Assignment: “Gutter-Crucible-Lacing-688-HalfDawn-Urs.”

Do not–repeat–do not stray into the shadows. Most darkness in the gutters is natural. None thaumaturgic. However, leftover Ontologics from the Nolothi Usurpation have been noted to be still in effect. In plain terms, you are at risk of interception by Nolothi-classification bioforms–ghoul or otherwise.

Or pulled in. No individuals taken by the “Darkness” return or are ever found. Attempts have been made to penetrate this spatial anomaly. Currently, there have been no successes on that front.

As such, keep to your cadres and stay in the light of the drones. Let the drones make a perimeter before beginning your investigations.

Keep together. Keep each other safe.

Steady the flame.

-Internal Paladin Memo, “Shadows in the Gutters”

9-2

The Helix

It was through the waste pipes connected to the Youmeng Sleeper Farms in Xin Yunsha that Avo and the others worked their careful descent down to the gutters.

Drifting in through the farms wasn’t hard. The Galeslither allowed for much ease of access there. He breezed, a three-headed steed carved from clashing wind and storm, carrying the others along. Spoofing the twelve patrolling Specters, likewise, was a matter that took Avo meager minutes.

Through Zein’s guidance and Avo’s Necrotheurgy, Exorcist patrols existed more as obstacles of delay rather than detection. Part of their protection was thanks to the Sleeper Farms, which housed approximately a hundred thousand dreaming workers.

In the Warrens, the Sleeper Farms existed as the most legitimate form of employment offered to many refugees. The imps paid weren’t bad either. If placed against working as an organ-bearer or some demeaning role for one of the Syndicates, it wasn’t hard to see the appeal.

All one needed to do, was sleep. Little to no physical labor required. Merely apply to the available Nether-lobby silo and report to the location. There, a wall-mounted dreampod would display your mem-data from a holojector, and after stepping in and laying on the neural interfacer, the pod would pump you full of all the nutrients and chemicals needed for a tour in the Nether.

Of course, that was where the good ended.

New Vultun was a big city, but the logistical weight demanded by its consumers harbored a heaviness that could fracture even a titan’s bones.

Many needed to hide mem-data in a cheap and disposable mind, or needed to borrow proxy memories as capacity for a job or a Nether-lobby they were running. The Sleepers were always an option. The unfortunate would be kept lucid, assigned to puppet targets in cross-session war-sims. Their memories would be permanently altered, with grafted recollections befitting the time period of the engagement injected. The resulting rawness of their terror and joy rewarded players with a far more immersive experience.

That was when they weren’t serving as extensions for Crucibles on the side. Most came out broken. A few came out nulled. Such was life as FATELESS, mem-tags imprinted along the side of the silos voicing their pain.

+Ori-Thaum killed my mother.+

+FUCK YOU TOPSIDER HALF-STRANDS TO ALL THE GODSDAMNED HELLS+

+I’m going to gun down as many Scalper shits as I can. For Lyra. My sweet Lyra.+

Sinking down aisles of screaming minds trapped in unwaking bodies, Avo listened to Zein as she tumbled within his Yondergales. She, unlike the others, had opted to stay outside the protections of an aerovec, choosing to yell the directions at him while running along tumbling storm clouds.

Through the twists and turns spilling out from a network of waste pipes connected to the pods he flew as a quiet mist. The sensation of pushing and squeezing through even the tightest confines instilled Avo with a sense of strange satisfaction: He could feel the filth gliding past his being, but it didn’t touch him, slipping past him. It allowed him to appreciate the low beauty: The smear-crusted edges of ejection chutes, the fetid edges turned gleaming light slipping, fingers of neon hooked along the crevices.

Not even matter could inflict a choice he rejected upon him.

After spending a moment or two waiting on the eightieth floor for a swarm of Exorcists to pass below, they finally emerged into an ejection chute as wide as a barge that spewed a nigh-endless waterfall of waste into the Maw rounding the borders of Xin Yunsha.

REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 22%

Even after so long and carrying a load of a Regular, an Agnos, a screaming limbless ghoul, and an aerovec, his Galeslither’s Hell was holding. He made the right choice not increasing the weight of the Heaven as Zein suggested. Balance was a virtue, and keeping to it, the winds possessed by Avo remained unfettered.

Arching under the block, they found an abandoned docking bay for offloading cargo resting just above the plates of Layer One. The lip of the edge was worn away by rising entropy. Access doors were welded shut and lined with polychromatic tarp where holes lined the walls.

Avo wasn’t sure whose idea it was to build such a structure here above the Maw, but bigger fools had been put in charge of more important decisions.

“Here, next to that welded door,” Zein shouted while chewing on a techno-organic stem of Se1-Sure. Avo wondered if the Omnitech-made holy plant made her one with the Alloyed Will, whatever that was. Her body spiraled through the winds as she spun around the Galeslither. Twitching her neck, she missed the wing of Draus’ aerovec by a hair. Luck, skill or a blessing of the Fused Ones.

Arriving on the terrace of an abandoned habitat, Avo pulled out Draus’ aerovec first, the Regular steadied the vehicle without issue, even as the sudden change from torrential wind to still air tore another stray piece off from the aged aero’s rear bumper. Accelerating slowly, she brought it around to a hover.

Three sheens of thoughtstuff shone from within the car. Beside Draus, Kae, mind a conflagration as always, hung festooned in her gimbal. In the trunk, however, a captive ghoul currently bereft of arms and legs howled in the darkness. Avo pitied his fool brother–being used as a key to access a plane hidden by god-touched darkness would not be pleasant.

The stillness was ruined when Zein cast herself out, riding the force of the winds to embed herself right into the wall next to the foam-coated doorway that once led out to the terrace.

Stepping out from the fading winds, Avo cast his Whisper beyond the edge to check for patrols.

“Another group will find us in thirty seconds,” Zein said as if it was no big deal. “Best that you hurry.”

He gave Thousandhand a sniff of annoyance. Best that he hurry. Was she not the one with the powers to twist the nature of space and time? Why couldn’t she just skip ahead to when they had the ghoul out? Why–

The line of thought suddenly went deeper.

What were Zein’s limits? What were her hubrises? Her canons? Why couldn’t she just predict every action the Guilds made? Assassinate the heads and powers behind each faction? Send it all tumbling into chaos?

Connected to that, why hadn’t she taken his Frame? He knew she could. She knew she could. But she just… allowed it to remain with him. Uneasy emotions kindled within Avo. He despised the weakness and uncertainty she made him feel.

Using his Echoheads to open the trunk and lift the ghoul, he found his brother a feather in his grasp. A struggling, biting, mind-bare-to-the-world-with-hate kind of feather. The analogy died an ugly death in Avo’s mind. He couldn’t much imagine it serving well as even an unwilling key either, but Zein hadn't explained.

“Now what,” he asked, holding the creature up before the still chewing sword god.

“Access its mind,” Zein said, eyes narrowing to slits. He had no idea if she was concentrating or just high. “And make sure it is completely shrouded in darkness.”

He looked up at the endless forest of structures forming an alloyed nest over them, offering only the briefest flashes of light. “Good enough.”

He had little idea as to how such a thing would work. So far, he sensed no shine of another Soul. Other than him and Zein, he felt not even a breath of the thaumaturgic. Didn’t mean that something wasn’t running at zero burn according to Kae, but a cycler needed to come online if any canons were to be used.

The darkness just seemed like the absence of light. Nothing miraculous about it.

Casting his ghosts into his brother, Avoexpected the familiar screaming chaos that was the mem-data of a ghoul’s mind. However as he sank deeper, he felt its mind scream, the madness of the other beast clashing desperately against him, unraveling as something flashed across his feed.

HELIX ACTIVE

INFUSE SACRIFICE? [Y/N]

After a moment’s hesitation, he selected yes.

Avo felt his blood vibrate and shiver. The ghoul, once held in his grasp, sparked into a flash of light and burned away, its flesh, Essence, and ghost seeping into the shadows. Avo blinked.

The darkness radiated a purple hue into the real and shivered then. Slowly, unnaturally, it pooled together and collapsed inward like a black spiral. A tunnel of fluid ebony formed as phantoms flashed into place, lighting the way deeper inward. There, at the very end towered a tall gateway.

Its two bone-plated doors were crenulated with threading veins of obsidian. Wide as a truck and tall as a building, it reached high into curved grooves molded seamlessly into the shivering wind chimes dangling from the ceiling. Small bone totems clacked to the swaying breath of wind.

“You should go first,” Zein said, gesturing for him to enter. Behind, Draus followed, the tint of the block aerovec’s windows flaking just enough for him to see the uncertainty in her eyes.

+I shoulda bought a burner,+ Draus sent. +Godsdamned chokepoint if I saw one. Collapse the back. Open the doors. Send the rotlicks. Another glorious last stand waitin’ to play out.+

+Scared of the dark, Reg?+ Avo asked. The jab was reflexive. Truth was he knew how she felt. They both knew what the dark held in store for the unwary. Long before careless squires went missing in the dark, the first meat that the Darkness tasted was that of ghouls.

Looking around, he observed the Essence of the ghoul sacrifice gradually die down, dimming from flesh to embers. The fluid along the walls was beginning to drip. Strain. He realized what this place was, then. Or at least he had a guess.

When he was but a ghoulling, he often wondered where his brothers disappeared upon venturing into the darker parts of the Penumbra. Now, he knew. They were being fed upon. The shadow ran down and far, this tunnel one branch of many leading into a vast Heaven hidden at the center of the underground, the vagueness of its shape a tree made out of a thousand nibbling jaws.

They weren’t entering a tunnel. This was a throat. They were walking into the stomach of a leviathan.

Zein sighed, intercepting his alarm. “It’s not going to eat us. Well, yes, metaphorically, but it’s not a bad thing. It is, however, bad if you let the tunnel collapse as then we would have wasted all this time and need to get another one of your kindred.”

“Worry not, master,” The Woundshaper added. “The creature that laps at us cannot slay us. The crone is right. By my judgment, the only fate that might yet befall us is to drown repeatedly and endlessly in its stomach acids as we learn how to make our escape.”

Encouraging.

Shooting another glare at Zein, he marched in, but not before sending Draus another thought. +If the Darkness starts chewing us, shoot Kae. Then yourself. I’ll try to kill Zein.+

A note of incredulity sounded from her depths. +Can you?+

+Said try. More likely she blows herself up again.+

+What?+

+Anti-matter bomb. Inside her.+

He ended the session just as Draus’ anxiety spiked. Ah, simple pleasures.

Entering the tunnel, each step cast a shiver into the floor and walls as he passed, melting like candles. The liquid dark beneath his claws flowed, pulling him deeper and closer inward. He felt a spike of fear spilling over from behind him. Not Draus. Definitely not Zein. Kae.

He wondered if feeding the Agnos to the dark would prove inimical for its structure somehow. Seeing as it consumed the ghoul’s ghost, he wondered what Kae’s might do. The sheer devastation that it might wreak was almost too tempting to resist. In scant seconds, the distance between him and the gateway turned from gulf to mirage, as if sensing his hunger for destruction.

He found himself standing before the twin doors of bone. On them, a cross parted them into four quadrants, each bearing a symbol. An owl eating a heart; a skull weeping endlessly; a man mutilating himself; and a figure engulfed in fire, embracing the flames.

The last of which flashed before him.

+WELCOME, DEFIANCE+

The loudness emanating from within the doorway made Avo’s mind shudder.

He shook his head. “Does it always do that?” he asked Zein.

“I cannot say,” she said. She twisted the hilt of her umbrella and–

And Avo suddenly remembered it was a sword.

A long blade rippled, casting afterimages on the tapestry of space and time. A dragon circulated the edge of her blade as she shouldered the weapon, its form lengthening into a curved glaive. “This is the first time I have been down here. The only other knowing of I have of this location is from the memory the Strix sent me.”

“Is that why you had me go in front?” Avo asked, incredulous.

Zein nodded. “Yes. That and this place has too many possibilities in play. It gives me a headache to read, truly. I wanted to see if anything would have killed you.”

His glare slipped past the older Godclad and onto the aerovec gliding in behind them. Draus and Kae were following. If something could kill him, then–

A hilt nudged his chest. “That is a mistake,” Zein said.

“What?” Avo asked.

“Considering the ephemerals,” Zein continued, face blank of jocularity. “They die, Avo. If you find either of the two interesting, find them a Frame. We tread a path mortals cannot follow. Lambs can not follow lions.”

Her words hung over him as she twisted her glaive, casting it's light above to part the flowing dark.

Shaking her words off, he turned to the pathway at hand, and took a step forward.

A click rattled from the door. The bone relief of the Low Masters dissolved. The veins of darkness flecked away.

Mustering his Heavens, Avo felt his blood surge as he pressed into the door, balming his mind with readied violence for whatever might await him on the other side.

The door sank inward at a push, its weight capitulating as if a curtain. Avo stepped into the grand confines that his former masters once indulged in, reviewing their planning and worship. Where the exterior delivered a front of muted darkness, the interior was a cascade of colors and silks. Four apses held multi-colored semi-circular frescos, colored church panes bearing the imagery of ages long past and histories forgotten.

The center of the room rose to become a dais, with four rune-carved paths trailing down its steps to vacant thrones of ebony. The interior itself was cavernous. Labyrinthine. Far larger than the outside suggested it would be, sprawling further than even his Whisper could travel.

Countless walkways lined the walls, leading into crevices of shadow, the railing perpendicular to the ground. Beneath the apses, Avo counted no less than a dozen intersections and bridges that defied the laws of gravity and geometry. The air with thick with a taste of some kind of antiseptic.

It wasn’t until he stepped in fully and beheld the panes of shimmering glass that lined the corners of the room that he saw something shining in the distance. It looked as if… a star. And a large, solid ball of chrome vines with concentric lanes of light spiraled around it.

Draus’ alarm speared into him with a note of surprise.

+Avo… I think we’re in the fuckin’ void.+