As much as annoying it was after I lost my ability to open the detail screen of sothing, there was always a thing in this world that even I, with my heightened existence as a demi-god, cannot see.
Not because I lack the power to pry into them—no, I could do so effortlessly if it were rely a matter of force. But because the very nature of these things defies observation.
They are hidden in ways that are not just unseen but unseeable. As if the act of knowing itself is rejected.
Ishmael was one such enigma.
Even with my perceptive extension, my ability to sohow dissect the fabric of reality itself, I could not fully extract her history.
It was extrely fragnted, obscured by sothing deeper than re mortal obfuscation.
But through Viviane's thod—through a slow, patient unraveling of signs, gestures, and careful extraction—we now had the truth.
"How dangerous is this information if perceived by a mortal?" I asked Kuzunoha.
"It might maddened their existence~"
And it began with a bastion by the sea.
Long ago, there was a settlent embedded along the edge of a great, unknowable body of water.
This bastion, whose na had long since been lost to ti, was built as all bastions were—an average defiance against the Ordeals of Carcosa, a fortress against the unrelenting horrors of the night.
Yet unlike others, it was placed near the vast, ineffable sea.
The people who lived there did not know what the waters truly were.
They could not describe its color.
Could not tell if it was cold or warm to the touch.
Could not recall its scent, nor the taste of its air.
Whenever they looked at it, there was only a blur, as if their minds refused to process its existence.
But they lived by it nonetheless.
And every so often, sothing would rise from the depths.
The first ti it appeared, the bastioneers of the coastal stronghold stood frozen, staring at the vast, formless being that lood at the distant edge of the waters.
It did not move. It did not speak.
And yet, they felt it.
A presence so imnse that the air itself thickened, pressing against their bones with a weight that was neither physical nor ntal, but sothing else, sothing that defied the senses.
Its gilded eyes—devoid of pupils, of depth, of anything that could be called mortal—stared, unwavering, empty yet crushing in their stillness. There was no malice. No curiosity. No hunger.
Only waiting.
Hours passed beneath its gaze.
The sunless sky of Carcosa shifted above them, clouds of unknown consistency folding upon themselves, churning in unnatural rhythms. The waves along the shore lapped against the land in perfect silence—not a single sound—as if the very concept of noise had been stripped from the world.
And then, without transition, the being was gone.
No flicker. No dispersal of mass. No shift in air pressure.
One mont it was there. The next, it simply was not.
As if it had never existed.
Days passed.
And then, it returned.
The sa lifeless gaze, the sa stillness, the sa silence.
Again, it waited. Again, it vanished.
And it happened again. And again.
An unbroken cycle of appearances and absences, its visits never announced, never explained. There was no pattern, no logic to its comings and goings. Sotis it remained for hours. Sotis for minutes.
At first, the bastioneers took shifts watching the waters, studying the thing that had no na, hoping to decipher its purpose. They held their breath each ti, unsure if this would be the day it finally did sothing.
But it never did.
Days beca weeks. Weeks beca months.
And eventually—inevitably—they stopped caring.
They still saw it, of course. It was impossible not to. But what was there to fear? The being had done nothing. No attacks. No destruction. No manifestations of terror.
It was simply… there.
A phenonon, like the strange tides of Carcosa's distorted sunrises or the anomalies that sotis flickered in the corner of one's vision, regardless of day or night.
And so, the bastioneers carried on.
They walked beneath its watchful gaze. They laughed, they toiled, they ate. So even joked about it, giving it nas—"The Watcher," "The Patient One," "The Lazy God of the Shore."
It beca an afterthought. A background detail of their existence.
And that ignorance—that lack of awareness—sealed their fate.
They did not notice what was happening to them.
They could not.
For every ti the Watcher stared, sothing settled within them.
A seed, planted in the quiet monts of their unawareness.
An unseen corruption, embedding itself not in their flesh, nor their minds, but in the very records of their existence. A stain written into the concept of who they were.
At first, there was nothing.
No pain. No sickness. No change in behavior.
Just life as usual.
But the seeds grew.
So of them sprouted.
And those who blood—were no longer human.
The first Pallid rmaid was discovered not through sight, but through absence. One of the bastioneers, a woman nad Sula, had been a familiar presence among them—known for her quick wit, her skill in tinkering with Theotech implents.
One evening, she was there, laughing with her companions over a heated debate about the taste of food they could no longer rember eating.
The next morning, she was gone. No body. No signs of struggle. Only a trail of wet footprints, leading from her quarters to the sea.
Her belongings were untouched. The bed undisturbed.
It was as if she had simply stood up and walked away in the middle of the night, drawn by so unheard call.
For days, they searched.
Then—on the seventh night, sothing erged from the waves.
A thing, vaguely shaped like a human, yet not.
Its skin was pale, not in the way of sickness or cold, but as if it had never known light, never been touched by warmth.
Its limbs were too long, its fingers thin and webbed, its mouth frozen in an expression that was not a smile, yet not a frown, yet not empty either.
And its eyes—lifeless. Like that of the Watcher's.
It did not attack.
It simply stood there, staring.
And then—it slithered back into the sea.
Sula was gone.
There was no record of her. No traces in their logs. No evidence that she had ever existed.
Not in their writings. Not in their history.
Not even in mory.
Only those who had known her personally rembered. And even then—her na was slipping. Her face was fading.
Sothing was overwriting her.
And she was only the first. The bastion should have been dood.
The seeds should have erased them all, one by one, until there was nothing left but a colony of Pallid rmaids, slithering back into the depths, swallowed by the very thing they had ignored for so long.
But the bastioneers adapted.
They studied the corruption.
They learned to suppress it.
And eventually—they bent it to their will.
No longer rely victims, they found a way to control the process, to stop the transformation before it could erase them.
They even began to use it.
The ones with suppressed seeds gained abilities—strange senses, heightened awareness, and most importantly, the ability to traverse the waters without sinking into the void.
The Watcher's gift, whether intentional or not, beca their tool.
And they did not run from the waters.
They ventured into them.
What they found beneath the waves changed everything.
Foreigners—lurking in the deep, watching back. Warps of Theotech, their functions twisted, their purpose beyond comprehension.
The bastion grew stronger, more advanced, their knowledge expanding beyond what they had ever dread.
They thrived.
Until, at last.
They caught the attention of the Rift Voyagers.
An order of explorers, beings who sought out places beyond comprehension, who traveled through the impossible in search of greater truths.
After days of their intermingling, a deal was struck.
The Rift Voyagers settled in the bastion, constructing their own outpost, rging their expertise with the knowledge the bastioneers had gathered.
And together they pushed further into the sea.
Into the ineffable.
Until they found it.
A rift leading into the Unloving Sea.
It was then that the truth beca clear.
The vast, incomprehensible body of water they had lived beside for so long.
It was not a sea.
It was a spill.
A re fragnt of sothing greater—a place where corrupted liquid matter from beyond had bled into Carcosa, diluted by the weakened influence of this realm.
But, the mont they stepped through the gate.
The controlled seeds reacted.
Their suppression failed. And those who had been seeded, were claid.
Not by the corruption of Carcosa, nor by the sea they had once explored. But by sothing else. Sothing within the Unloving Sea took them.
The surviving Rift Voyagers and unmaddened bastioneers who crossed the threshold were lost, trapped in an endless voyage through unrelenting horror. They sailed forever, perpetually moving across an ocean of decay and absence, unable to die yet unable to truly live.
Their ship beca their prison. Their journey beca their curse.
But then—sothing changed.
Sothing entered the Unloving Sea.
Not a Foreigner.
Not a horror.
Not another dood voyager.
Sothing of light.
It tore open the boundaries of that forsaken realm, shattering reality with its presence.
And in that mont of sundered space, a rift opened.
A rift that, by sheer cosmic coincidence, aligned with the Theotech Site my bastion had once explored.
Ishmael erged there, escaping from her haunting curse.
She was one of the few who made it through. The only one whose seed had not fully consud her despite it fighting for dominance.
And in the wake of her survival, the remnants of her existence were twisted, her very being altered by the Foreign Seed that had lived within her for so long.
Her savior might had removed Ishmael from a certain prison, but it also made Ishal's existence unstable, resulting in her mory lost.
But thanks to Viviane's expertise in all rift-related, she managed to stabilize Ishmael's mory as they went on with their new thod of communication.
"How about her Authority?" Charis asked .
Of course, detail doesn't end there.
While Ishmael sailed the Unloving Sea, sothing forged from the corruption of another realm—an inheritance of the seed's influence, transmuted into a force that allowed her to command ti within technology, to disrupt and seize its essence in the sa way the Foreigners had once tried to seize her own existence.
In a way, her Authority was so sort of a uniquely building anomaly that just appeared out of pure luck. Since its nature was of Foreigner, so was that Authority that bypassed the law and comprehension of Carcosa.
And just as she re-entered Carcosa, the unseen law just dictated that her so-called foreign power matched with a certain unused place in this world.
Thus, how it is allowed and how it sohow becos an Authority in itself.
Charis then noticed sothing, sothing that I also found odd in the beginning.
"But how did she know that it was an Authority before it was denominated as an Authority?"
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