384.5 - Nameless Interlude [Sturmblitz]

Cut in half.

Burned and scattered.

Frozen and shattered.

Disassembled cell by cell, molecule by molecule.

Countless years passed, and I met with countless deaths, beneath countless skies. Each time, forgetting. Each time, coming to remember just as my next death approached.

But there, in the depths of Hedan’s Wall, I approached my death, I met with my death, countless more times, only to be pulled back. The first time, it was simply raising it. I awakened, a crippled husk, but alive. Even stripped of my cultivation, however, I still could not find it within me to sit down and die. So long as I lived, the knowledge that I had failed my people would not allow me that peace of mind. When I awoke, I found a foreign thought, burning at the back of my mind like a splinter: “Find the core chamber, find the answers, find the way out.”

Stripped of all arcane might as I was, I still knew all that I had known when I entered the wall. Though it was a near-nonexistent chance, I could attempt to recultivate from scratch. And so, crippled, I began my long journey into the fathomless depths of Hedan’s Wall.

From then on, no matter what challenge the wall put before me, I always found that someone had placed a contingency that offered me a way out, or saved me from death outright, and each time, I saw it coming. It was as if I was following a trail I had set out for myself.

Even so, I lost much throughout those years. A finger, a hand, a foot, a leg. I also learned just as much. By inspecting the contingencies my other-self left behind, I learned how to bend blackstone, learned how to make it move. Through supping from the ichor-basins my other-self left behind for me, I learned how to directly draw life from the wall itself. For reasons I would not come to understand for some time, all but its highest-level functions bent before me, so long as the local subcore didn’t actively override my efforts — thus, each chamber became a battle of wills between them, myself, and I. They always gave in, eventually, and when they did, I had free reign of the sector for some time. I made good use of that time, more often than not.

When at last, I arrived in the true heart of Hedan’s Wall, in the space-out-of-space where I had not been permitted when I first tore out my own cultivation and threw it into the furnace of this place, to buy my people just a few years’ time, I was no longer truly myself. After countless years, after living through lifetimes of illusory trials and traversing labyrinths conjured from the mind of Hedan himself, I had hollowed myself out and filled myself back in a hundred times over. I now walked astride legs of blackstone, manipulated the wall’s arcane magicks with a right arm of its substance, and two-thirds of my torso comprised it, mended to my flesh along the line where I had been cleft in twain by a final trap: From above my right shoulder, to above my left hip.

There, in the depths, I found it.

I found myself.

A smiling, unrotting corpse, fingers clasped around a staff of blackstone.

Shriveled skin met with indomitable, gleaming blackstone, lilac trigrams pulsing beneath the surface. Crystalline orbs sat within his — within my — cavernous eye sockets. Iridescent blood still stained the staff’s pointed bottom end, and, in the same manner, two holes gaped within the corpse’s flesh, arcane sigils of two kinds still raging and crackling against one another, eroding and repairing, in perpetual equilibrium, marble-green against royal purple. One stab through the heart, one through the head.

Unable to die, yet also unable to live, I had chosen to flee the prison of my flesh to be reborn later.

My name… I remembered it, yes. I remembered a thousand names. And I remembered when I gave up on them. It was all too much, too many differences across too many languages and cultures. Nobody. Nameless. Nikto. Anon. Yes, that name was universal, it could always be translated.

Right. Left. Up. Down. Royalist. Populist. Leftist. Rightist. Liberal. Conservative. Too many ideologies. Too many names. Throughout my many lives, I had come to believe in nothing and everything at once, I had witnessed the extremes of all beliefs. I also knew better than to fall into the pitfall of utopian thinking, of the “If everyone would just do X” delusion.

Whomever Ikesia needed, I would become… And I would have my vengeance, one way or another. For throughout my many lives, I had learned that forgoing vengeance against a foe that yet actively seeks your eradication is no different from tying your own noose.

I took up the staff, and began my journey back out. With the staff in hand, not even the subcores could oppose my authority, for it predated them — it predated Ankhezia itself. It was not a thousand or even ten thousand years old — its creation could not be permitted by the world’s laws as they were now. No, this relic was as old as the rods that pierced the sun itself.

I could not tell you how long my journey out of the wall was. By comparison to my odyssey to the core chamber, it was a short hike.

But… As I neared my escape, eventually, I could no longer recognize the man in my reflection. The emaciated, gangly wretch, with hollow eyes and matted hair. So just like blackstone, I changed myself. But even then, I could not recognize the man reflected in the stone. An expression of bitter anguish sat frozen upon my face, no matter how I tried. It would not do.

I thumped my staff, and with a thought formed a statue of myself. I took the statue’s head, crowned by laurels of gilded leaves, and I hollowed it out, moulding it to mine, fusing it not to my skin, but to my very flesh and bone.

Invincible, ageless blackstone would be my face, the face of my reconquista.

In the time to come, preceding my return, the wall’s faculties would be as my own. Its vast sensor-networks would be as my eyes, its aetherwave arrays my voice. No matter how Hedan meddled to subvert my sacrifice, I would subvert him in turn. I would even guide Ikesia from within my prison, should it come to that. 

And so it came to pass that I laid treasure maps of untold import at the feet of a Grekurian nobleman, who, to my great disgrace, had come to be a greater Ikesian patriot than any of the treasonous dogs who still remained in my own capital.

They would get what was coming to them. 

Each and every one of them.

By my own hands.