[Warpworld] Ch 29 – Let Them Go Play

« Chapter 28 | Index | Chapter 30 »

            The phoenixes and dragons were clearly very excited over this turn of events, preening and posing and looking grand and mighty and very eye-catching. Despite themselves, their riders could not help but get caught up in their excitement and readiness to test out what had been done to them.

            The two archmages watching all this looked on kind of helplessly as the riders mounted up urgently, and without any specific orders, zipped down to the lowest level of the Pyramid, hopped off, and then immediately beat for altitude now that they were no longer above the Pyramid. The wings formed rapidly, and they headed off to the ‘east’ of the Pyramid, where some Warped forces had politely gathered and were escorting us along, ready to test out this new magic and how effective it was going to be.

            +5 to-hit and damage, +3d6 combined Holy and Vivic damage, was going to be Heaven come calling on those Warped when stacked on top of already-powerful multiple attacks from both kinds of creatures.

            Feature gave me a look, and I waved him off. Naturally Ices hissed their own frantic desire to get in on the fun, and I whipped up Disks for them to get towed along by Feature. A minute later both were zipping after the dragons and the phoenixes, both to watch over them if they needed help, since Feature could call on me, and ready to create some havoc of their own.

            The two archmages sort of drifted over, watching all the monstrous creatures heading out to have some fun. “Is that wise?” Master Sethanon asked slowly, but his eyes were dancing with a distant, draconic call to battle.

            “Probably not, but Feature will be able to pull all of them back when it’s time, and I can heal them all up if they are injured. As long as they aren’t stupid or don’t go berserk, they should be fine, and the ability of the Warp to mess with their minds is going to be non-existent with vivus Burning right in their mouths and eating away any hostile effects on their minds. They are probably calmer right now going into that fight than they’ve been in years.” I waved it all off absently.

            “You are a powerful Healer too, then?” Master Artlis asked, his eyes glittering.

            “I have to take care of my meat shields, or they stop shielding me. It’s a win-win situation,” I admitted.

            “I confess to never having seen dragons and phoenixes lined up like children receiving toys. That magic...” Master Sethanon murmured.

            I brought up the Wrath on my hand, and both elves flinched slightly, first looking at it, and then their eyes were slowly forced away, Master Sethanon’s more strongly than Master Artlis’, who steeled himself to keep looking at the sacred eldritch flames of Heaven.

            “One does not look kindly on the fires of Heaven without being a Good soul, or aspiring to be one.” I closed my hand, and considered the two of them calmly.

            “And who determines what is good?” Master Sethanon spoke up defensively.

            I raised a finger before he could go on. “I said Good, not good.” He opened his mouth, closed it, and considered the difference.  “And the answer to that is the same as ‘Who determines what is Chaos? Law? Evil?’ The Alignments themselves determine that. You and I have no more say in what is Good than we do in what is Evil, nor their uncaring counterparts of Law and Chaos. Those things determine themselves.

            “We are mortal souls, and what we do is determine where we stand in relation to all of those things. That is our right, and our free will, and yet, all of Creation pivots on the decisions set by those who actually decide to stay the course.”

            “I see.” His large golden eyes flickered. “And where would I fail in this... judgment of being Good?”

            “Well, first of all, you are calling it a failure and a judgment of yourself, which is ascribing superiority and self-righteousness to Good, neither of which is applicable.” He blinked in surprise at the rebuke. “Good IS. There is no judgment, there is no failure. It simply is, and the choices you’ve made in your life align more towards Law and neutrality, probably colored by your devotion to your own people above all others. That duty makes you willing to do things both and great and terrible to save them... a duty that does not extend outside your species, save, perhaps, as a distant courtesy to those who might be of use to you in that drive to protect your own.

            “Good... is not so exclusive. Good doesn’t care about your shell as much as your soul. Good endorses all souls who align with it, and could care less about their circumstances of birth. True nobility of Good comes from the soul. Bloodlines, race, and species are, in the end, utterly irrelevant to Good.” I nodded at Master Artlis. “You say you taught the humans here magic. While there was the thought of making them usable tools on behalf of your people, there were doubtless feelings of benevolence, generosity, charity, and goodwill in your attempts, not a strict calculation of costs, benefits, risks, and exclusivity. I imagine your peers were not at all pleased to let such knowledge, limited as it was, escape their grasp and control.”

            “They were not,” he nodded absently, his own golden eyes flashing as he remembered past times. “Yet it is a decision I do not regret, and it has worked against the powers of the Warp many times, as well as helping ensure that some of the wild experiments humanity was undertaking in pursuit of power were curtailed and did not bring complete disaster upon all.”

            “Always a convenient side benefit,” I acknowledged with a half-bow, and he chuckled softly.

            “This seems to be something that is subject to a great deal of interpretation at the level of mortals,” Master Sethanon began again, and I held up my hand to stop him once again.

            “Again, you are overthinking it. It is a habit of Neutrals angling for as many benefits as possible without having to pay the costs involved. Good IS. Law IS. Chaos IS. Evil IS. To stand with Good, you must be Good. No more, no less. If you believe that acting out the proper deeds, while your heart believes in none of them, will get you closer to being Good, you are definitely in error. It is possible to have a heart full of pure malevolence and to act the saint towards others. Physical deeds do not display the soul, and the Alignments are of the spirit, not just the mind and body.

            “Your own beliefs are tied to your people and your duty towards them. It is a very natural outlook, and it is definitely good for your people to have someone as powerful as you watching over them... but that does not make it Good for others. After all, you are still prepared to kill me if what I intend to do endangers your people, even if it would chase away the Warp Gods from this world forever.” His face froze at the very accurate assessment, while I waved at Master Artlis, completely unconcerned. “Your companion would let me proceed, and immediately hurry home to save everyone he could before the disaster strikes.

            “You probably consider that a betrayal of your people, while he considers hurling the Warp Gods away and stopping the endless cycle of slaughter of mortals and consumption of their souls to be worth that price, in the end.” My eyeless gaze was quite firmly fixed on Master Sethanon. “Good concurs. Law is only concerned with its own, Chaotics with themselves individually, and Evil, well, Evil has to benefit the most. As the Warp Gods stand with Evil far more than Chaos, they are naturally opposed to being tossed off the planet and having to live among just their own filth.” I tilted my head, regarding the streams of vivus racing past us overhead, converging on the tip of the Warpeater Pyramid and washing down and into it.

            “IS there a threat to my people?” Master Sethanon demanded quickly, seeing the course this conversation was taking.

            “Of course there is. You’re in the End Times. Everyone on the whole planet is going to die, their souls condemned to the Warp, and then time will be rolled back and the whole sordid history of the planet will be replayed again, with different players in the same roles making different decisions and the Warp Gods delighting in the futility of it all.”

            He grimaced expressively. After all, he had been bound up inside the Vortex for thousands of years, just trying to stave off the influence of Chaos. “You do not know that for certain!” he declared, and I just smiled sadly.

            “Yes, I do, and that is Truth.”

            He staggered abruptly, gagging, blood leaking out his eyes and nose and ears, golden orbs widening in horror as he looked up in the sky and realized how goddamn futile everything he had done, everything he had sacrificed for, actually was.

            It had been done before, it would be done again. He was an ant struggling against a god, all his accomplishments were just entertainment on a stage that could be burned down or crushed underfoot at will, and he had done nothing but neutralize his own ability to rise against them with his sacrifices by his deeds and defiance... and they had known he would do so, and laughed as they arranged things for him to hamstring himself by.

            He was a pawn and plaything on a board too large for him to manage, and now it was the end of the game, and he had nothing which would stop that doom from coming.

            Except what was under his feet.

            He actually slumped down in his ornate robes and armor, falling back against the block behind him, staring up at the stars as the whole path of his life, and the lives of uncounted predecessors, danced past his eyes in the shadows of the writhing skies above.

            The Warp Gods had played this game many, many times. From inside the game, what way was there to stop it? Their Rules, their board, and they had played and won and won and won.

            But now there was an outside player here, who did not give a fig about the Rules they had made for themselves and their little playhouse of a world, and was going to stop them from doing what they wanted.

            And they couldn’t pay him enough to do the task, so he was basically doing it for nothing!

            “Law,” he coughed hoarsely. “Order. Discipline. They have no true power here...”

            “Law made the mistake of buying into the Rules of the game as set by Chaos, and so all its influence here is totally hampered by such. It can be almighty locally, but in the overall scheme of things? The Rules are those of the Warp Gods to make and to break. It is why they have striven so hard to keep Good powers at bay. Good powers are no more beholden to the Rules than they are, and Good is almost unthinkably hostile to the corruption and degradation that the Warp Gods love the most.

            “The Good also tend to be mighty unpredictable, acting on moralistic grounds rather than practical or self-benefiting ones all the time. Doing the Right Thing, so predictably uncertain, infuriates the heck out of them. All those offers of power, enlightenment, status, are just ignored and looked past in service to a greater ideal that is opposed to basically everything they represent.

            “You can’t pay me enough for what I’m doing here. Heck, you probably can’t even properly reimburse me for the gold I Burned putting the Buffs on the dragons and the phoenixes, and likely you’d conveniently forget about it since doing so would be a pain, and why not take advantage of me, right?”

            My hard smile wasn’t making his expression any more stable.

            “I’ve a lot of experience reading Auras, Master Sethanon. There’re certainly ways to conceal them, but a fake one isn’t going to fool me, and I can see your attitudes on multiple ethical and moral subjects as clearly as if you wrote out your core beliefs on a sheet of paper.

            “Thus, I’m aware you feel only the mildest amounts of goodwill towards me for freeing you from the Vortex. Your attitude is that I’m extremely dangerous; since I’m not controlled by you, I’m also a radical factor and wild card you really, really don’t want to put up with; and you’re perfectly willing to kill me even after I rescued you from a living Hell if your duty demands it.

            “As you can also see, I am also utterly unconcerned by these internal resolutions of yours.”

            There was a lot of Truth in the air. The elder elf just closed his eyes and sighed at this point. “That Word...” he finally managed to say, looking at his younger companion, who had only had a spot of blood come out of his nose.

            “A Word of Creation. One of the basic principles of Good, boiled down to one Word. There’s a bunch of them. I know three, which is pretty much all a mortal mind can stand, and naturally they affect me in many ways, to the point where a good chunk of my personality is based around them.

            “For instance, knowing the Truth,” he flinched, but it just broke past him this time, “means I have a commitment to it, and I cannot lie successfully. It means I like to spread knowledge, and since I can’t lie even to myself, many of the blank self-benefiting fibs we tell ourselves are pretty empty on the face of it, and I can’t abide them.

            “The other two are Hope and Valor.” He tensed up again, and Master Artlis shook on his feet, but there was very little force to them, other than the way they subtly rang out and demanded attention. “The one gives me a reason to go on and believe there are always better days ahead. The other gives me the ability to spit in the face of anyone who would stop me from bringing Hope and Truth to the world, and defy them.

            “So, I’m not worried about you and yours. First, because you’re all going to die, and so even if my method results in a huge chunk of your people dying... it’s still better than ALL of them doing so. Two, because I believe that better things will come out of this, and I’ve shown you that there IS a better way, beyond the elf-centric worldview the Warp Gods have foisted upon you.

            “Three, because if you try to stop me, I am going to obliterate you as a tool of said Warp Gods, and then be about my business.”

« Chapter 28 | Index | Chapter 30 »