And though the skies fall, though the storms whip, the winds howl, the seas burn, and people die and suffer and wail, we’re still here. The faithful. The small. The ones who survive. We don’t believe in so monstrous god that just wants to consu and defile and twist. We don’t want to rule and tornt and stomp and butcher because we don’t understand sothing or soone.
We have our laws. Old laws, from old tis, forgotten even before we ca to be. We had a na for a place we burned and destroyed. A wonderland made for us that we lost.
Eden.
Because the “strong” would rather sit high on a throne of shit, filth, and corpses than evenly with those they love, and who love them. Because their hearts are brittle and their appetites have no fucking end. Because they do terrible things, and to hide themselves from these things, they spin new stories, false myths and ugly tales where strength cos before wisdom and humanity, and they give it a na.
Worthy.
Well, I don’t want to be worthy. I just want to be good. I just want to follow the righteous ways—the ways we all know by heart, but are mutilated by the wolves who herd our flocks. I want to be without fear or suffering. I want to make art, pluck my strings, and just be in the mont without thinking of what more I have to give, and what else I still have to lose.
I don’t want to be “a god.” I can’t be a god. I can’t imagine it. And neither can they. These things they think to be the divine? They’re just ugly tumors on the face of existence. A nightmare of a concept. Fires that don’t burn right. Rain that fall like bombs. Songs that twist your flesh. Parodies of things that are. Demiurges. Pretenders.
And that’s why I know we’ll win. Maybe not in my ti. Maybe not in ten billion eras, but we will win. Because they maul themselves as well, they disfigure themselves to be so supposedly strong, and when there’s nothing left of them, the lambs they abuse will walk on, and on, and leave the wolves to die from their own wounds.
And in ti, the children will leave the shadow of what ca before, forget all the darkness, and maybe… maybe then, the unworthy will find their way back to the garden again, after losing the purgatory that traps us now.
-Cas eld’Canduir
34-22
Triumph of the Unworthy (I)
Chambers always breathed in deep before sinking into Avo. It didn’t actually help much—air wasn’t an issue, but there was sothing psychologically intense about sinking below a sea of animated fla. The dread and tension never got that much better, either. It was always high octane. Noise and movent and wonder and sothing new, sothing growing or changing. Too much for a simple fuck like Aedon Chambers. Way too much.
But into the valley of nightmarish fiery bullshit he went again. Because what else was he supposed to do? Leave his consang? Who else was going to co? Who else was going to stand right here, right now? Draus and the others had their own shit to deal with. Cas and everyone connected to him were trying to keep him clean of Rend, and the Lovebringer was handling the thaumaturgy bullshit too.
No. Chambers was what they had, and frankly, all he truly needed to do was help clear out whatever was keeping Avo held in place.
Sensations prickled his avatar. Stimuli tickled his entire body in crawling waves as he heard screams, felt cold and hot and sticky and clean, and had enough flashing images blasted into his feed to overload most minds. But even if Chambers was just so fucking gutter rat, his mind was a hard thing to crack.
Steel-hard, he thought to himself. Gonna stay steel-hard.
The Conflagration splashed around him, and though they licked at his being, they rged and passed through him thanks to his newfound ascension, regarding him as a symtrical being rather than sothing to purely consu. Yet, through the flas, Chambers felt a shudder—a flinch. Like a body tensing before a coming blow. Then, a resounding blow echoed—an impact that resonated across ti and thought.
“Ah shit, that doesn’t feel good,” Chambers muttered to himself. He tumbled further, the fire twisting and parting around him like clouds. Soon, he found himself descending. But in place of Avo’s ntal fortress created from constructed mories, there was only chaos. The sequences that ca together—rising to beco a thousand separate and desperate environnts, gablocks, ruins, battlefields, districts of all varieties, of all forms and all guilds—were now clutched in a miasma of incoherence. Golden residue and ethereal fire raged as the struggle even deeper persisted. Chambers could hear Avo, felt a booming snarl, bestial and ghoul-like—sounds his friend hadn’t made for so very long.
The Conflagration went still. Then started flowing fast, and along their wavelengths sang a note of tension.
Avo didn’t get anxious often. When he didn’t, shit was usually about to hit a wall at mach speeds.
“All right, ti to find out what’s got your guts churning,” Chambers said to himself.
But before he continued, he reached into his own mind and played a recording—a recording from one of Dannis Steelheart’s finest scenes. This scene was not one of smut, of gore, of extre tastes, or savage kinks. No, it was sothing pure, sothing simple. Acting.
I might not be able to endure this forever, but I can endure this mont right now, this mont, and the next second, and the second after that, and the second after that, and you’re gonna give up before I do. I know it. I always know it. Dannis gritted his bloodstained teeth and grinned. Through the pain. Through whatever torture was going to follow.
Chambers let the mont loop in his mind. The second, the second, the second. That’s all he needed to do—just keep himself together. The second, and the one after. It wasn’t much of a Necrojack. Frankly, it wasn’t much of anything.
But Avo still imparted him enough experience to seek out anomalies within soone’s mind. He used his ghost to interface with Avo’s fire, and as Diagnostics filled his cog feed, he tried to locate where the discord was at its highest.
Yet this proved to be unnecessary. For a mont later, the many sequences that composed Avo’s inner world twisted as if a spiderweb shredded through by a falling weight. His Conflagration beca as a fabric stained to the point of ripping. Things snapped. Echoing sounds of wailing minds and fracturing mories sent jolts through Chambers, fragnting ghosts that scattered and skipped over his form.
And finally, from the fire rose two figures, their bodies engulfed and shrouded. One was the Strix, struggling, with ash leaking from inside its body, slowly being pulled apart by a far larger adversary who held it by the skull. The other was sothing out of Chambers’s recent mories. He had seen it once, from afar, through Avo’s perspective during the trial, at Scale.
An enormous being—titanic in design, radiant in aesthetic—rose, with so many limbs reaching out from its body, its chest a spiraling set of gears composed of more hands interlacing with each other. At the very core, however, was a singularity: a symbol of unifying dominance and an inevitable focus.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Veylis,” Chambers breathed.
And suddenly the reason behind Avo’s internal havoc was made clear to Chambers. Veylis Avandaer, the High Seraph of Highfla, was sohow resurrected. And more than that, she was inside his friend—tearing and gnawing at him—echoes of chronology pulsed out of her being, expanding her, multiplying her bullshit Heaven across multiple places in ti as they ripped and tore, shredding the connecting fibers of fire that composed Avo’s true existence.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Chambers said. He called upon the Lovebringer, and a second set of woven strands descended through the fire. They followed him, compelled by his mind, as thin tendrils of magenta bright. Instead of going for Veylis directly, however, they began to wrap around Avo’s form, cocooning the Strix in a layer of protection and pulling him away from Veylis’s grasping hands.
Tried to pull at the Strix, but Chambers drew him away from her—out of reach. As took a mont to regard Avo, he winced—-there were even more patches of pale ash spreading. “Fuck, consang, what the hell did they hit you with.”
“My…” Avo wheezed, and strangely laughed. “Myself…”
Veylis Avandaer spoke then, her voice commanding Chambers to face her. “Aedon Chambers. The gutter rat. The mistake that never quieted died. You prove yourself to be quite the cockroach, scuttling beneath the feet of your betters, avoiding every footfall, and now coming to snatch my adversary away from , my esteed foe. And for what? To delay the inevitable?”
A pulse of ti trailed out of her. Not chronology, ti—a ringing peal that sawed and slashed at Chambers’s mind—emanated from Veylis’s very being. For a second, he felt himself torn, drawn back, and then suddenly, a counterforce surged through him. Avo’s flas flared gold, and the realm he was connected to— that ti-woven dinsion grown from the Sang—pushed back.
An invasive force was driven out of Chambers, and he let out a gasping breath. “What the hell was that?” Chambers coughed.
“Trinary lody,” Avo said. He sounded incoherent, wounded even. “It’s trying to steal it from . She’s not just one of her. I thought she created a pathborn of … Not just… but a fusion… A… antithesis… Anathema. Agent of… order against a tyrant of freedom.”
Chambers blinked. “What, so like she made a ssed up path baby with original you? I don’t know, Avo, that sounds kind of nasty and kinky and, well, even kind of hot.”
“Chambers… please…” Avo said.
Veylis regarded the still present Lovebringer with curiosity. “There is an opportunity now for you. I see that you are a survivor. I do not respect your—well, there are many things I do not respect about you. Your addictions, your flaws, your very nature. However, your loyalty and your willingness to risk yourself for your—” She regarded Avo. “Master—”
“He’s my consang, sow,” Chambers said, spitting with as much venom as he could, trying to hide his fear. “Sothing you might not have.”
“I have a friend,” Veylis replied, sounding almost a little offended. “Trust , the Infacer is far better company than the likes of you. But I do take your point, and it is comndable, despite your list of lacking qualities. You’ve chosen a good person to bond with. Still, this is not a fight you can win. This is not even a fight he can win. He rots from the inside so long as I remain. And remain I shall, for my poison is bond to him in symtry, in design, and in Soul.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s happening,” Chambers said, his voice thin. More gleaming bonds descended, and the full manifestation Lovebringer itself dipped in through Avo’s flas. He was still constantly shifting Rend, but what if he could push that back into the pathborn…
“The Heaven of Love,” Veylis said, her voice high and almost taunting, “I see a fragnt of it—or a good portion of its whole—crashed down in the Warrens, and you claid it from the broken body of Kae Kusande.”
Chambers felt an anger harden in him. It was like ice, calcifying together, freezing around a searing ache. “Yeah, I suppose I have you to thank for that.”
“We do things in war,” Veylis replied languidly. “Her fate was lantable. She was a soft soul. A good intellect. But she proved to be an adequate lure for the Burning Drear, and it was his misstep that got her taken.”
“Oh, cut the bullshit,” Chambers snapped. “You’re the one who made sure that she suffered. You’re the one who stuck her in that broken Heaven—to separate Avo’s attention. And she…”
“She died. Utterly and completely. Was there anything left of her?”
Chambers’ mind went blank at Veylis’s question, and then he realized she was trying to provoke a reaction out of him. It worked. “Fuck you,” Chambers snarled.
“Spoken exactly like Shotin Kazahara, it’s not surprising that you two bonded in so of my paths.”
That admission barely registered in Chambers’ mind. All he could rember was Kae—Kae’s broken body, her fractured, crumbling remains, her death. He didn’t even get to say goodbye to her properly. Sure, her template was back. Sure, she was resurrected in so way, but her original self was just gone. That continuity, that version of her consciousness, was just gone into oblivion— not even darkness, just nothing forever and ever.
Chambers started to growl. “I’m going to wrap these bonds around you, Veylis, and I’m going to pump as much pleasure as I can into you, so you get to feel as good as you want, so you turn hollow, and you don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve any goddamn bit of love. You don’t deserve any goddamn bit of pleasure. You don’t deserve anything. Fuck your worthiness. Fuck you, and fuck Highfla, and fuck everything you’ve done. All you are is a giant, self-conceited, delusional, stuck-up, high-off-your-own-joy nectar bitch! Sa fuck! The sa kind of fuck who will press a barrel against a child! That’s all you are! All you people ever are!”
He was shouting at her by the end. Raging. Truly raging. His heart was pounding, and the anger ca out of him in torrents, and there was so much of it—an entire lifeti.
She laughed. Because of course she did. Of course she thought nothing of him. Because he wasn’t real to soone like her. He was just a thing. Just a godsdamn joke. “The entire world is just your childhood bedroom isn’t it? And every pain you suffer is a hot gun barrel pressed against your little armpit by a broken drunk of a father? Ah. Trauma. It is a fine thing. It shapes the mind in such strange ways.
These histories… the slightest event angles so much of your path. And all that has led you to this mont. To . Aedon. Chambers. Whatever you wish to be called. I want you to know that you are mistaken: I am not your father. I am nothing like you father. And if you choose to stand and deliver, I will teach you how little you know of trauma, that he was but feeble, and I am capable of breaking you so much more.”
Maybe… Maybe…
I can endure this mont right now, this mont, and the next second, and the second after that… The scene played. It was a mantra. It was his truth. And he was his path. Bitch didn’t know about the other stuff. Bitch didn’t know how hard he was.
“Bitch, there’s no girl-cock large enough to break my ass. And if there is, you don’t have it.”
Veylis paused. “I am not going to dignify a proper retor—”
“And you know what? My entire life, I was intimidated by you— you Citizens, you Guilders. I was in awe of you Godclads. You were literally divine. You were so much more than . I was like a cockroach. A cockroach, like you said,” Chambers stuttered. “But you know what? I see you now. You co in, you just break things, and break people, and then you leave them in ruins, and you talk big words, you put together a speech, you make things sound so pretty—but you know what?”
He ford his Lovebringer over himself, letting the Bonds pulse with entropy. “You’re just like . Ah, fuck. You can’t help breaking things either. Except when I break sothing—when I shit the bed, it’s just a deal. It’s just a couple of imps. It’s just a Deltaware biomod. When you shit the bed, however—oh boy, do you shit the bed. Your own daddy? Who does that? I an, Draus, what? When you let her go for what? Politics? Is that what it was? And poor Naeko. He deserves better than you. To love sothing that won’t cut him or hurt him. You can say the word ‘paths’ as much as you want, but that doesn’t change what you are: a fucking half-strand. Just like your sow mom, except you like flapping your face-cunt more! But I’m done being afraid or in awe. I want to see it. Show your so-called power. Show your glory, oh, mighty Seraph. Because I got a load of sothing just for you too, and I like my fucking odds.”
Veylis was silent for a long mont. “So be it. Stand and deliver, Lovebringer.”
“Go fuck yourself, Veylis. Actually, let help you with that!”
And his Bonds speared out to inject her poison back into her.
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