A Lullaby For Gods Chapter 130

CHAPTER EIGHT:  A DOWNWARD SPIRAL’S JUST A PIROUETTE

Nothing was working.

While John hadn’t popped about time and space in a long, long while, the last time he had done so was seared into his memory. He’d followed Terezi’s instructions and used her psychological triggers to help him hone in on the right spots in the timeline; moving around freely through reality had come to him as naturally as air seeped through cracks. It was easy – it was supposed to be easy. He was an Heir. Rose had told him abilities bending to him was supposed to be easy.

So why the hell wasn’t anything working?

He’d tried focusing on TH3R3’S NO PL4C3 L1K3 HOM3. He’d tried imagining himself at a specific place. He’d tried thinking about specific people: Jade, Dave, Rose. He’d tried thinking about specific memories. Nothing.

He could still fly, still turn to wind, he could still control the breeze around him, but for some reason, his reality-hopping powers weren’t working.

He was stuck here, in this quiet, desolate landscape, surrounded by the bodies of his dead friends.

John stared down at the carnage below him, still floating high up in the air. His stomach was in knots, his hands were beginning to shake. There had to be a way out of here. He had to be dreaming or something – hallucinating, probably. Some of the others started hallucinating when they were infected with a bloodleech, right? Sure, he didn’t know how he’d gotten infected, but it had to be the only explanation, because how on earth could he have gotten stuck back here? This place was two realities away from him.

There was a large metal scrape and a thump, as if a huge, heavy lever was being pulled. John turned towards where he’d heard it, immediately regretting doing so when two, bright white lights assaulted his eyes. He squinted, raising an arm to shield himself from the sudden brightness.

There was that clanging noise again. The lights changed to an angry, deep red. A siren screamed from where the lights were coming from.

John froze as he remembered exactly why half of his friends were dead below.

The Empress.

The Empress had been here the last time this had happened. No, the Empress was here now, since he was back here. He’d forgotten about the battleship.

More metal clangs sounded from the direction of the Battleship Condescension. John didn’t wait to see what it was. It could be artillery getting ready. It could be the underside opening so someone could come and collect him. He wasn’t going to risk it. He couldn’t afford to risk it.

As quickly as he could, John Egbert dispersed into air and got the fuck out of there, fast.

#

JANUARY 22, 2014

It still hadn’t stopped raining, but it was quickly flooding under the bridge as the river began to overflow, so Eridan begrudgingly woke everyone up and told them they needed to move since everyone outside of him couldn’t breathe underwater.

He waited while they packed what they could (what wasn’t drenched in the rising flood at this point) before all of them waded through the floodwater – which was up to their calves by now even on flat, even ground – weaving through the dirty, silent streets of what was once New York City.

The only upside to the situation was that there were plenty of mostly-empty multi-story buildings in the area, and it only took them an hour to find one that was uninhabited, at the grim price of all of its former tenants lying dead and rotting in the building.

Well, beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially not if they couldn’t survive in a water-logged city.

Still, they made sure to look for rooms that weren’t covered in gore – bedrooms their owners hadn’t died in, living rooms that weren’t occupied when its tenants were killed by their hallucination-ghosts – and found one unit where the owner was an old, rotting smear on the ceiling, the walls and the floors of their bathroom. This one was easier to clean, so Eridan declared that this place was useable.

The kids thankfully seemed to be too exhausted to complain, more than happy to drop onto either the bed or the couches in the living room. Eridan let them be, shucking off his heavy, drenched jacket and kicking off his wet boots in the gore-painted bathroom. His skin felt sticky with grime, he could feel bits of dirt and mud between his toes, and his shirt and pants clung to him uncomfortably.

He didn’t have anything else to wear considering the apocalyptic situation, so he was going to have to suck it up. Besides, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was cleaning up the fucking bathroom.

Eridan found a large knife in the kitchen and started scraping away at the rotted gunk on the floor, shirt pulled up to his nose to keep as much of the smell away as possible, though he’d unfortunately traded the smell of decay for the smell of dirty rainwater. The gore came off in chunks, some of it till wet and chewy in their middles, though most of it had thankfully hardened. The streaks of rot wedged in the middle of the bathroom tiles were a little harder to scrape out, but at the very least, he could turn off his brain by focusing on that and that alone. Outside, in the living room and the bedroom, he could hear snoring and muffled conversation. At least some people were getting some rest.

God, what the fuck was he doing? He used to live in a cool shipwreck and hunt lusii and go on treasure hunts. Now where was he? Scraping dead human puree in a bathroom in a city that was smack dab in the middle of the end of the world.

“Do you need help?”

He stopped in the middle of digging up a stubborn piece of black gunk between the tiles. He didn’t look up. Jaeger’s shoes made a noise as she shifted on her feet.

“The others are asleep, I went to look for you,” she said. “This is, um…unpleasant.”

“I’ve got it,” Eridan said.

“I can help, though – ”

“I’ve got it,” he repeated, angling the knife so that the gunk between the tiles popped out.

Jaeger huffed. There was the faint buzz of electricity in the air, the smell of ozone and then – “Manifest.”

The chunks of dried gore by Eridan’s hands and knees disappeared. Even the tinier bits of gunk that still clung to the wedges between the tiles were gone. There were no traces of dried blood or human mush, just scratches on the surfaces of the wall and ceiling.

Eridan grunted, sitting up and dropping the knife.

“See? That was faster,” Jaeger said, putting her hands on her hips. “Way easier than uh, scraping dead people off the tiles.”

“Jaeger, I don’t need your help.”

The girl opened her mouth to speak, then shut it after a few seconds. She looked down at the sparkling, clean floor, frowning.

“I know you said I reminded you of you dead friend, but – you know I can’t help that, right?” she said. “I don’t know why you’re being so…unlikeable, so I’m just going to assume you’re still grieving, but I literally can’t help it if I look like your friend.”

It wasn’t just that she looked like Anshu, it was that she shared their powers, their name, the one he’d given them instead of their birth one – wait. Why did she have Anshu instead of Anya? Was it just a timeline thing? It could have been, considering the fact that his own alternate-universe ancestor was sort-of-matesprits with the Heir of Doom, but in this run of the timeline, Hal seemed to be cozying up with Sapphrel Angeles. He wondered how those two were doing in the kid’s hometown. Fine, probably. Good for them.

“Is your real name actually Anshu Jaeger?” Eridan asked anyway, standing up. His hands were still stained with melted gunk. He made a face in disgust and headed for the sink.

“Oh, um!” Jaeger started. When she still didn’t answer after a full minute, a full minute in which Eridan had already washed off most of the mess from his hands and was soaping them up for the third time just to ease his concerns on contamination, he turned to them.

She looked…blank. Like she’d somehow zoned out in the middle of answering the question. Her eyes, glazed over, gazed emptily at the floor.

“It’s, um…” Jaeger raised a hand towards her head, as if to scratch it, but her fingers twitched, her hand clenching a second later. “It’s…it’s not…?”

“You’re not sure?” Eridan raised an eyebrow.

“No, I’m – not – sure. I’m sure,” she said. Her frown deepened. Her expression twitched. Some lucidity returned to her eyes, but now she was just glaring hard at the floor like it’d offended her. “No, Anshu is a nickname. My name is…um. My first name’s actually Anya.”

“So where’s Anshu from?”

“It’s a nickname.” Her clenched fist twitched again, like she was fighting to unclench it, but her fingers weren’t cooperating. Instead, her nails dug deeper into her palms. It looked painful.

Eridan paused. Jaeger still wasn’t looking at him, still fixated on the goddamn fucking floor for some reason. Sweat beaded her forehead. Her shoulders were beginning to shake. She looked like she was going to throw up.

“You okay?” he asked, leaning back against the sink and crossing his arms. He made no move to approach her.

“Anshu is, um…” She was still on that? Christ, she looked like she was having a crisis over it. “A nickname a friend gave to me. Let’s see, I can remember it – it was – I think his name was E – ”

Her eyes suddenly rolled up, showing only the whites. Eridan froze in shock, before snapping out of it and lunging forward to catch her just as she staggered backwards, nearly collapsing –

And then she didn’t. Instead, Jaeger’s foot shifted back just as Eridan caught her, effectively balancing her body. Her eyes were still rolled up, and her upper body limp, but the limb had just moved like something had pulled a string on a puppet and had it right itself. Jaeger’s torso hunched forward. She blinked, and then straightened, smiling as if she hadn’t just nearly collapsed.

Eridan stared at her. What the fuck?

“Yes?” Jaeger asked. “Thank you for catching me, I think I tripped.”

She pushed him away gently, extracting herself from his grasp.

“You should find something in here to change. The closet should still have its tenant’s clothes in there.” She ducked out of the bathroom, smoothing her hair down – it’d gotten a little tangled from how she’d been exposed to rain earlier – and disappearing into the living room. Eridan stared and watched her go, and then looked back down at his hands.

What the fuck just happened?

What the fuck was going on?

#

JANUARY 22, 2014

Sat in a near-empty bus station for the evening, Cronus Ampora chewed on some cheap microwaved sushi and relistened to the audio recording the late Sapphrel Angeles had sent him. He’d just hitchhiked all the way into a new state, but traffic and evening had caught with him, and it was better to spend the night at a station and catch an early bus than camp out at another motel and waste precious hours trying to get a ride. Time was certainly not his element, and thank fuck for that.

Checkmating the devil. It appeared little Angeles was as ambitious as their original counterpart. And perhaps as deceptively more involved than they first appeared; when he’d last met them, they seemed to be having memory problems, but for the Heir of Doom to allow them a sizeable chunk in the plan, they either know the kid’s capabilities well despite being under a handicap or they trust them enough to pull it off even with the handicap. Who knew with these two?

“Now, I don’t know everything about my death,” the recording continued. “I have also had visions of versions of it, which I suppose is par for the course since I do inherit death, even though these alternate versions are a little muddier; I’ve tried to infer whatever is important from there.”

They paused suddenly, uttering only one cut off syllable, before they cleared their throat, restarting a completely new thought:

“I’ve also seen visions of other things, events that pertain to me or to versions of me, scattered across paradox space. No matter how disparate it is, if it’s a version of me – whether it’s a Guardian instead of a Hero, a troll or a cherub instead of a human, a faulty ecto-clone or some weird genetic experiment – so long as it has the same data coding that I have, I have some knowledge of what happens in their own lives and of what happens after my death because of them,” they said. “Note that I say some. Even the collapse of knowledge amongst my other selves once I fully realize my classpect by inheriting death and therefore actually dying is limited. The human brain can only process so much, and I will already be on the mental decline before my death. Or, at least that’s what I’m garnering from my original counterpart’s future-memories. Don’t tell them I’m inside their head. This’ll be the one advantage I have over them.”

Sapphrel chuckled.

“To some extent, I can see through other versions of myself. Or rather, I’m peeking through their future memories, and I’m trying to use that to my advantage,” they said, and then, in a peppier tone, “Did you know I’m a purple blood in another universe?”

Cronus nearly choked on his sushi as he stifled a laugh. He fucking knew it. The Heir oozed clownery.

“But enough about that, let’s discuss the matter at hand – ” Cronus could hear papers shuffling on the other ends. Their notes, probably, to help them remember with their unfortunately-failing memory. “Number one, the most obvious problem being: The Heir of Blood’s gotten his claws into a Sylph of Hope.”

Cronus nodded, though it would do nothing. Hope was unparalleled by other aspects in terms of scope and power, and if his own uncontrollable, latent magic could cause fatal ricochets by the smallest of actions, then it wasn’t a reach to assume that anyone who shared his aspect, regardless of class, would be equally as dangerous.

“A Sylph’s power set is to heal and to restore – where a maid generates and covers over a lack, a Sylph restores what has been taken or destroyed…they often draw from others rather than creating their own like a maid does,” Sapphrel said. They sounded like they were reading off of something. “Essentially, a Sylph of Hope is a wishgranter. A massive, cosmic, wishing bone who could do anything if someone just wished it. From my own future-memories, I observed some rather alarming things, so I’m sure you can deduce where I’m going with this.”

Cronus wiped his hands off a napkin and stretched his arms high above his head. The apocalypse happening in NYC – where he was headed – and all across the world, must have either been caused by the Heir of Blood or accelerated by him since universal decay was already a thing even before he got the Sylph of Hope on his roster.

“He’s done this because he’s an asshole,” Sapphrel said, before chuckling over their own joke. Cronus snickered along with them. “But in all honesty, our dear brother is essentially dealing with a problem of having two separate people stuffed into one body, not unlike a cherub, but this one’s more from possession than genetic inclination. Now, I suppose one could assume that one wants to wreak havoc for the sake of wreaking havoc while the other wants to stop that, resulting in either a contradiction of actions of a compromised quality to the destruction. While I have a theory, that’s not entirely the case.”

There were the papers being moved around again.

“The possession came to be because my brother and his denizen had a deal – and a deal with any Blood player is a nigh unbreakable vow, since you’re essentially making a deal with a pillar of the universe, and thus, effectively with the universe itself. The denizen is bound to do whatever he promised, as is applicable by the universe he’s in, as that universe is what binds him. And in case I’ve lost you at this point, I will now clarify, so worry not, I am not patronizing you.”

Cronus shoved his phone into his pocket, made sure his earphones were secure, and got up to toss his empty plastic tray into the nearby trashbin in the corner of the room.

“Let’s talk about a hypothetical in HTML. Imagine this promise to be like a sentence with a very specific tag. Imagine universes to be the language we’re using for coding: HTML. Now, whether you drop this sentence and its tags in any document, whether it be for a webpage or a blog theme or post, that tag is going to take effect. It doesn’t matter if that sentence was originally from a post and it was moved to a homepage, the tag will take effect and it will have the same effect because that’s how HTML works. You following?”

They paused, as if prompting him to respond. He nodded.

“So, if this promise existed in my alpha-version-brother’s universe, even if it’s brought over to another place, if the denizen is in that universe, he’s still bound by that promise,” Sapphrel said. “He would either have to a) give up the body or b) risk death by breaking his promise. There’s always the option of leaving the universe entirely, but that’s a place of emptiness and loneliness, so it’s his call on whether he wants to spend the rest of his existence unbound by his hubris but under a self-imposed solitary confinement.”

Papers shuffling again. Cronus went back to the row of benches he’d claimed and laid down, draping his jacket over his face to shield his eyes from the light.

“Lord English’s carnage had started corrupting their timeline, causing problems for their session, so my brother’s deal was for the denizen to stabilize the universe. Through any means necessary.” The kid paused, hesitating. “Often, the destabilization of a universe is caused by foreign elements falling into its structure. Like pathogens entering a body, infecting the entry point and the rest of the system. Any possible means…includes extreme violence and prejudice,” Sapphrel said. “The carnage in New York has been on a level that’s rungs above everywhere else in the world, hasn’t it? Guess where most of the assets on Earth are hiding.”

New York. He’d stared at his ceiling in surprise the first time he’d realized it last night. Jegus.

“He’s trying to either smoke them out or eradicate them through a scorched earth approach,” Sapphrel said. “Like a body entering fever to boil its threats away. If my original counterpart and their friends scattered them, then they risked taking the whole world down with them. However, because I had already driven most of the people in the city out, they let everyone escape to NYC, just like Senna – the Mage of Space – knew that his other self would do, and then never gave them any hints to get out until it was too late. Earth is still their Peyer’s patch, after all.”

The kid coughed. Cronus heard them mutter an ‘excuse me’, stand and move away, before coming back and setting something that made a ceramic clink on a surface. A mug of something. Water or lemon to soothe their throat. Their health had already been failing here.

“I will admit this next part has been a gamble on my original self’s part, but they’ve given me enough reason to risk it.” They paused again. “A few weeks ago, the Heir of Blood confronted a friend of mine. Hal Strider. He taunted Hal, egged him on, tried to convince him that killing me would be a better option than letting me waste away and suffer, because as Anathema Point, I was fated to die a slow, agonizing death. Which isn’t wrong – that’s what I’m doing now. I can barely move without everything hurting, but pain is nothing I’m not used to. But, I digress – look at the problem with this picture: why would he approach Hal but not me? What is he not doing? Why does he instead to choose to use Hal to get to me instead of killing me himself?”

They chuckled to themself. “He’s still in there somewhere. And when he’s very determined, he tries to fight his way through to make sure nothing happens to his loved ones. He’s still lucid, and my original counterpart reassures me that he’s doing something to mitigate his denizen’s malice,” they said. “He’s still our first line of defense against his possessor.”

God, to be awake for the whole time that something like that is using your body and your abilities to wreak havoc when all you wanted was to help everyone. That sounded like hell.

“Don’t worry about him, he can fight his own battles.” There was another shuffle. “Damn, I’m running out of storage – okay, I’ll have to split my messages, then. Well, let’s move on. This is number two and an important factor of your mission: the Moon and the lesser lights that are within your care are to help the rest of our assets who aren’t on Earth to find their way there. See, none of them know where the others are, and from their perspective, they’re the only ones who made it into this universe. So by making a fuss, we’re essentially drawing them in like moths to a flame and finally reuniting everyone without backing them into a suspicious corner. Most of them also do not remember their time on the Blueberry and don’t remember the agreed on plan, so to mitigate lashing out from fear, we’re going to let them gather on their own.”

Yeah, that sounded like the Heir of Doom.

“The lesser lights will not activate until it is time, and you’re the one who calls the timing. For the list of places you will have to lay the lesser lights on, I’ll send you another message so that you don’t have to sift through this one trying to find a timestamp. I know that can get annoying.”

He hadn’t gotten a message yet, so he must have not been close enough to NYC, at least by their estimated timeframe.

“As for how you’re going to activate the lights, they respond to the Full Moon – all of them merely reflect her light, you see, and none of them are sentient. They’re more like little cups that collect moonlight or something. And I’m sure you’ve been getting along with the Full Moon.”

Burning a hole in his pocket, he could feel the Full Moon’s laughter in his head. Cronus tried very hard to imagine flipping her off.

“And for the when…well, this is a bit of a gamble too. Again on my original self’s part, though I admit we do have a bit of a wager going on. For this reason, please try to get to NYC just a little bit faster, and prepare yourself for a fight.”

The kid paused again, longer this time, and had Cronus not heard this recording the night prior, he would have thought that the message cut off here, but after a bit of waiting, Angeles sighed.

“You see, Anshu Jaeger was – or will be - killed. Or, that’s what I’m getting from my future-memories. I remember seeing Eridan losing his shit over it, and I’ve told my predecessor. The Empress will have her murdered, but it appears our brother will decide to hand over the reigns of resurrecting her to Eridan by delivering her body and her heart over to him…you remember what I said about contradiction, don’t you? Our brother is always playing this complex game of chess with his own denizen, moving things about when he can get away with it. Sure, delivering a friend’s dead body to someone might psychologically break them, but when the means of reviving them only require a body, then it’s a bit of a more subtle play that gives someone the chance to get that dead friend back,” they said.

“But the denizen will counter it by resurrecting her himself. I puzzled for a while about how he would go about this, as I do remember seeing her around the city – perhaps I’ll change my actions during the actual unfolding of these events as I don’t want to be a swaying factor – but then I remembered an old tidbit from my friends, specifically Jade Harley. She godtiered with her dead dreamself in a kernel sprite. Then I remembered that John resurrected his Nanna by throwing her ashes into his sprite, and Rose did the same with her cat. So they’ve told me, anyway.”

Another pause, though shorter this time. The ceramic mug clinked on the recording again.

“And I thought, of course. How obvious. Someone who would be hopping from session to session would be able to collect empty kernels, wouldn’t he?” Sapphrel asked. “And furthered by the evidence of Jade’s dogtierdom, it appears her abilities and consciousness, as well as a few impulses, merged with her First Guardian and friend Becquerel. So let’s walk backwards: a Sylph of Hope who should be on our side suddenly working with the Heir of Blood. She’s been killed and suddenly resurrected, and following this resurrection has suddenly switched sides. A sprite kernel must be prototyped twice to be fully prototyped, and a body is only one item.”

Cronus closed his eyes, feeling a headache building between his eyes. He knew the answer to that. He’d turned the thought over and over in his head the night previously, and reviewing this didn’t make it easier.

“I’m thinking the other item is a bloodleech. Those things messed with Dave and Cecil badly before, it must be overpowering her,” Sapphrel said.

God, the poor kid. Another case of possession, then.

“So…yes, essentially, she has been resurrected. And that is her in there, but she’s just not herself,” they said. “But as sad as it is, her abilities are a liability. There’s no way to undo a prototyping, at least not from what I’ve heard. If my predecessor knows any secret techniques, they have not disclosed it and I have not seen evidence of it.”

They sighed again.

“As sad as it is, we have no choice but to make sure she’s taken off the board: Eridan Ampora must kill Anshu Jaeger,” they said. They didn’t continue right away, as if they were letting the fact sink in for themself. “That’s what my predecessor wants. That’s what my predecessor is gambling on. They believe he’ll be able to do it.”

But they didn’t. Cronus opened his eyes underneath the cover of his jacket, looking up at the faint lights visible through the cloth.

“You have to understand how grief can affect people. Either he will completely reject the possibility of her actually being Anshu and kill her, out of cautiousness and psychological fragility, the fear of being given hope only to be let down if he finds out she’s fake,” they said. “Or…he’ll find out the truth that it is Anshu Jaeger and instead of putting her out of her misery, he tries to save her instead.”

Another pause to sip their drink.

“I’ve met the kid. Granted, I don’t know him that well since we’ve only met via Manifest projections – at least by the time I’m recording this. I believe we’ll meet better in the future if my visions don’t change too much from my plans to muck about – but I have heard what his friends think of him, which is certainly a way to gauge someone’s personality, particularly if they’re volatile, if you take it with a grain of salt and some common sense. Their anecdotes seem to line up. This boy went on a massacre when he believed things were dire,” they said. “And when I saw him on the island he was…well, he was pretty chill for a guy who went on a killing spree, though he was very careful with interacting with his friends. Anshu especially. He was very protective. As if he was afraid to hurt anyone again.

“It’s for this reason that I’m worried. He’s trying to turn a new leaf, and I’m sure his own guilt and his attachment to his friends will be a hindrance if the survival of the universe hinges on him being able to kill the one person who right now has the ability to shut down the entirely of reality without even blinking. All she needs is for someone with enough desire to want that, and she’ll make it happen. And while that’s drastic and I know the denizen is cornered enough not to do that, I know he’s got enough freedom to cause mass destruction without the eradication of an entire reality.”

Cronus’ hand inched towards his pocket, right where he’d kept his phone. But he didn’t reach in and turn it off. His fingers twitched, but did nothing more.

“And so, though the Heir of Doom trusts your dancestor to kill her, I’m enlisting you to be my backup plan,” Sapphrel Angeles said, “In case his attachment gets to him…in case Eridan Ampora cannot kill the Sylph of Hope…

“Then I need you to kill Anshu Jaeger.”