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328 - Theurgy - Vol. 3 FINAL [Cherno]

A/N: I decided to just make this longer rather than have the vol3 final be a minichapter

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In mentally placing herself before the sword and staring into its mirror-like surface, she could witness any of her eidolons, or even “step through” into their vaults, all spaces suited perfectly to hold them.

The Chthonian Eels’ vaults were nearly identical to their natural environment, resembling enormous volcanic funnels above an endless void of black brine.

Zhah-Rhan-Thule’s vault was a desolate planet, upon its surface the guidestone fragment in the form of a mountain wreathed in runic chains, with the eidolon’s perpetual-eclipse vessel hanging in the heavens. Krahe had yet to communicate with her, and yet she got the impression that Zhah-Rhan-Thule would be the easiest out of all her eidolons to work with.

Y’Alha’Zor’s vault took the form of a rather familiar maintenance and holding bay, where he was crucified, suspended weightlessly in an anti-gravity field such that even breaking the exoframe would avail him naught.

She spent a few moments in that place, taking some time to write various restrictions; she barely needed to think in the process, instead going down the list of typical restrictions that one would code into any given mutant’s control measures. The eidolon’s frustration and haughty anger made itself known through the writhing of its musculature, visibly tightening around its nails in the futile effort to dislodge them.

Krahe finished writing, and stood face to face with Y’Alha’Zor.

“There are tales of your kind in my homeland, you know — tales of you, or at least something so similar it may as well be “another you,” one named Y’golonac, the Defiler.”

The eidolon halted in its silent thrashing, tilting its artificial head as if it was putting the pieces together, as if it knew which short story she was referring to. Haughty unrest shifted into an uneasy motionlessness.

“Don’t you worry, you’ll get to carry out slaughter aplenty. It’ll just be at my say-so, and under no other circumstances. Am I understood, Y’Alha’Zor?”

The muscle-writhing resumed, different now, a shudder that passed through the eidolon’s form from its core to the tips of its limbs. Finally it spoke in an unearthly rumble, even as the head remained locked shut.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Barzai’s vault was nothing.

It wasn’t an abyss, it simply wasn’t any sort of space at all, and contained only Barzai.

“Empty, huh?”

“This is a comfortable place to watch from,” he said frankly. “I dislike illusory reality. It is real, or it is not. That which lays in between is distasteful, far too questionable.”

“Like Zor’Aguhastra.”

“You said it, not I.”

The next several days rushed past in a blur of talisman-crafting and study; Krahe visited both the Lost Sun Society and the Temple of Records for texts to guide her, not having expected to contract with Greater Eidolons. She of course mixed the texts she perused to confound whomever might be observing. Similarly, she visited Garvesh and several suppliers whom he knew to source higher-quality ink, as Yao’s talisman paper was already better than anything she could buy on the open market. At this point, expenses she would have wept at didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. Before sequestering herself to her work, Krahe made sure to contact Yao regarding the hunt to ensure that the old witch wouldn’t bail at the last second.

Zhah-Rhan-Thule made it all too easy to adapt Wandrei Faust and Schwarzfaust to her, requiring only minor modifications, but talismans were still time consuming to produce. When it came to Zhah-Rhan-Thule, there were two custom theurgies that Krahe wrote solely for her. The first was intended to channel a limited degree of the eidolon’s power solely to imbue a particular action or thing with Palefire and Pyrovampirism; this was the Pale Blessing. The pattern was simple, being a representation of Zhah-Rhan-Thule as the eclipse, with fire dripping from it into a chalice. The back side bore a more detailed rendition of the vampiric mouth, with a burning silhouette impaled on a stake with the life drawing out of it into the mouth, with Fire Vampires surrounding the corpse. It was a perfect and elegant representation of what Zhah-Rhan-Thule was in concept and ability. Krahe made several dozen, and found the process almost relaxing, as the pattern wasn’t excessively exacting in nature; each individual talisman had a slightly different figure being burned at the stake, a slightly different number and positioning of Fire Vampires. Some chalices had jewels, others not, others were basins. Zhah-Rhan-Thule understood, and this was the simplest of theurgic invocations.

The second, of course, was the full summoning; the Black Sun Halo, which would bestow the properties of Palefire and Pyrovampirism onto all acts of magic she performed for the duration, be they theurgy or thaumaturgy. The duration wasn’t fixed, but Krahe got the impression it would be a little over a minute, and could be either longer or shorter depending on how heavily she made use of its supportive effects; that is to say, if she pushed hard and cast as many theurgies and thaumaturgies as possible, it would naturally be shorter. The pattern, of course, focused on Krahe as the beneficiary of the Black Sun Halo, with the back side largely being an abstract pattern of sigils surrounding a large symbol of Phlogiston. The Black Sun Halo, given its complexity, demanded six talismans of the same pattern.

Despite the work she had done with Zhah-Rhan-Thule, the majority of her effort during these days was spent trying to work with Y’Alha’Zor. He wasn’t stupid, and his vessel compelled him to cooperate; it was a simple matter of familiarity, or the lack thereof. There had been some adaptation necessary with Zhah-Rhan-Thule, certainly, but this was something completely different. Trying to arrive at a workable theurgic pattern for Y’Alha’Zor was akin to working with a completely unfamiliar programming language. The first was the simplest in concept: A complete summoning, sheer brute force with no refinement whatsoever. In the end, the problem turned out to be that the pattern was too complex to fit onto a single talisman paper. It required eight, plus a ninth non-theurgic talisman as a lynchpin to ensure the others would consistently end up at the right spots when thrown. Moreover, only the best ink she had on-hand worked, as the remainder of her stock couldn’t withstand the energies involved. Krahe produced only two full sets of these Crucifixion Advent Talismans, seeing as one use would completely exhaust the eidolon. The patterns that summoned only parts of Y’Alha’Zor’s body for a brief moment were markedly easier, especially those employing his hands, as they were, in the end, the most similar to her existing theurgies, even if the language was different. She produced several copies each of theurgies making use of Y’Alha’Zor’s full capabilities in parts; the head to launch nails and bite, the arms to grapple and bite, and the upper torso to bring a larger portion of its brute power to bear without a full summoning. The upper torso theurgy, due to approaching Crucifixion Advent in scope, required three talismans, also made with Krahe’s best ink.

Altogether, the theurgies calling on Y’Alha’Zor’s power were:

Hellmouth, which summoned the head and neck for the purpose of launching nails or biting.

Stigmata, which summoned one of the arms, and Twin Stigmata, which summoned both; Twin Stigmata was in fact a proper separate theurgy using a single talisman, and summoned both arms a fixed distance apart to ensure they could reach the target. If this was not required, then two Stigmata talismans could be used.

The Three Curses, which summoned the upper torso, including both arms.

And last, Crucifixion Advent, which summoned Y’Alha’Zor in his entirety with a maximum time limit of 33 seconds. This time limit could be extended if the summoning was blessed by Zhah-Rhan-Thule; that is to say, if Y’Alha’Zor kept killing and devouring, his rampage could continue beyond the time limit.

At first, Krahe had wondered if it wasn’t strange that communicating with Greater Eidolons was that much easier than her eels, but she came to the conclusion it only made sense. The Chthonian Eels were animals, they thought like animals, and thus had to be communicated with on terms they could comprehend, like emotion, intent, and basic concepts of movement. By contrast, Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule were sapient. The differences didn’t end there; theurgies using Lesser Eidolons had a fixed power output, and there was a fixed number of theurgies of a given power that a Lesser Eidolon could fuel before being exhausted. With the Binding Obelisk’s enhancement, each of Krahe’s Chthonian Eels could power four Wandrei Fausts or eight Schwarzfausts, a 30% increase. A Greater Eidolon’s output couldn’t be quantified as easily, because the degree of power they could put into a theurgy was variable; a single theurgy could be given more or less “fuel,” it could be held for longer, and so on, depending on the limit of the theurgic vessel and/or medium. Moreover, Greater Eidolons continuously recovered their stamina, and did so quickly enough that it could end up being a factor in a protracted battle; unlike Lesser Eidolons, there was no delay after exertion before they could begin recovering.

In short, if a Lesser Eidolon was like a hardpoint with a single torpedo or a one-shot pod of missiles, then a Greater Eidolon was a turret connected to the battleship’s deep stores of ammunition, or a fighter that could land and reload in battle. There were still hard limits that would cause a Greater Eidolon to become "exhausted" and thus unusable until the next day or even longer, such as firing off too many theurgies in quick succession or summoning the eidolon in full, but it could stretch much further than a Lesser Eidolon.

The summoning limitation also made it blatantly clear just how different True Eidolons were. From what Krahe had read, the ability to remain materialized for long periods of time was not unique to Barzai, it was just that his stability was completely disproportionate for his relatively low strength in his initial, pre-evolution state. In fact, Barzai’s “base form” had been somewhat pathetic in terms of combat capability, even for an unevolved True Eidolon. And now, after evolving, it was the other way around; his capabilities, at least as far as she could test them on dummy targets, surpassed those of first-evolution True Eidolons by a substantial margin; not an extreme degree, but enough to be beyond normal deviation. He had been two weight classes below others of his developmental level, and now he was two weight classes above. This was all, no doubt, due to Krahe’s own priorities; when she had summoned him, it was utility, so he manifested with greater focus on utility, with most of his offensive power being contained in harassment and the overwhelming finishing blow of the Daemon Core. Now that Krahe considered herself strong and connected enough to act more in the open, Barzai’s evolution had changed him to reflect that, merely retaining his original utility capabilities without significantly improving upon them. Sure, the form of the Executioner’s Assistant had hands and could thus pick locks, but it could also wield weapons made for humans.

With all other preparations made, Krahe carried her final act in Audunpoint for the immediate future: Picking up her armored jacket. It was nothing truly exceptional and had no outstanding abilities or characteristics, as it was only “nice” as far as mid-ranker equipment went, but it was still a very, very good quality jacket with a remarkably strong defensive rating thanks to a combination of shapeshifting soulbeast leather and a layer of metallic omniphage. Besides its direct defensive power, it gave her an entirely independent, self-regenerating layer of wards, something she sorely needed, even if it wasn’t a thick layer of wards. As utility went, it came with the ability to change size to a fairly significant degree, with the caveat being that it only had so much omniphage inside, meaning if she turned it into a trench coat, the armor would be more spread out. Her only customization was a patch on the back, that of her own grasping left hand. Besides the jacket, she’d had the craftsman make a harness to go with it, to comfortably stow her Pattner, some spare ammo, and a number of talismans. Just in case she couldn’t afford to pull them from the Kenoma Pocket at any given moment.

With that last errand, it was done. She killed the final day at the Lost Sun Society, reading, partaking of the shooting range, and trying her hand at wargames.

Come morning, Blackhand met with her compatriots at the Crow & Raven agency’s office, and thereafter rode out from the city upon an iron horse.

327 - The Lesser Heterodox Cycle Pt. FINAL - The Sword of the Self [Cherno]

The King of Many Colours continued chiseling until, simultaneously, his finger-chisel wore away and his antler-hammer crumbled to dust. It was a few minutes, a few centuries, and an instant, but by the time it was over, the timespan only registered as “long enough to embed one’s entire identity into carvings.” Krahe genuinely couldn’t conceive of a way to quantify it in linear time, beyond describing it as terribly long, yet far too short.

“It is done. SAKAR. ACHRA. DAOLOTH.”

The pronunciation of the three “words” was the only thing that stuck in Krahe’s head, like splinters, while their true meaning washed over her, leaving the impression that it was for the best.

There came no grand display, no transformation of the obelisk into a more portable form. At one instant, the ritual was there. At the next moment, it had transformed into a slab-like executioner’s sword a third of a meter wide and as tall as Krahe, with a handle-and-guard formed by fanged tendrils, giving the appearance that the obelisk-sword was emerging out of a Wound-like Grin. Even scaled down it retained the full detail of its carvings, both sides depicting different versions of the same grand unified diorama. Despite the distance and vastly reduced scale, it was perfectly legible just at a glance; the profound meaning embedded into it surpassed causality and directly portrayed what and who Krahe was.

It floated, waiting for someone to pick it up, and it was the King of Many Colours who did — with visible effort on his part, which, in turn, spurred him to express surprise, albeit only through facial expression.

“How weighty, this one. Such are those with the will to usurp something of the Outer Gods, I suppose,” he remarked. Turning his head with the sword that was Krahe’s entire identity in his hands, the King of Many Colours took up a stance that Krahe truly didn’t like, because she recognized it. It was the Stance of the Keyhole, a stance in classical germanic swordsmanship, used for thrusting through defenses. “I have two things to say to you, interloper. First, I do this for your benefit, for you are not yet strong enough to properly wield your own self as a blade. Secondly, grit your teeth — this must be embedded into your astral body such that it remains fixed in place until you have both the strength to pull it free and the wisdom to not do so lightly.”

The instant the words sunk in, Krahe witnessed the King of Many Colours from up close, as he had just traversed the distance and plunged the Binding Obelisk halfway into her stomach.

To describe it as transcendently painful wasn’t quite appropriate. There was no physical pain to speak of. It was shock, an inability to comprehend, like her mind was lagging, simultaneously being fed an overclocked sensory stream and having that datafeed cut out and reconnect over and over, a hundred times per second.

The Wound-like Grin lurched open in her mind’s eye, and the same took place down the length of her stomach, from the sternum to the pelvic bone.

At this moment, Krahe was not aware, yet she was also fully lucid. She couldn’t think, but her mind was racing. She could do nothing, and yet she tore the Obelisk Sword from the King of Many Colours and swallowed it in a single gulp.

When she came-to, it was not in Zor’Aguhastra, nor somewhere in the Astral Gulf, but in the basement of Sorayah’s home, left with only the knowledge that the King of Many Colours had sent her back, as he had done for countless others before her.

All things considered, she felt remarkably good; exhausted, both mentally and physically, sure, but that was all. No pain, no soreness, no headache. She was also covered head-to-toe in a membrane of plasmic slime. To an unknowing onlooker, her return from the gulf would have appeared as if she had been birthed or perhaps spat up by the void itself.

After carefully making her way up the basement stairs and getting into the bath, Krahe sloughed off the layer of astral ectoplasm, and looked inward.

In the place where only Barzai and the Chthonian Eels had once dwelt, there was now that executioner’s sword, fixed in place by two means. Six chains were wrapped around its guard and grip, reaching upward, each held fast to one of the Six Maxims Control Rods, hanging in the void above the sword. The second was the Wound-like Grin itself, savagely biting down on the sword just below the halfway point, just below where Krahe, her eidolons, and her closest allies stood in each version of the diorama.

The Seven Spokes System recognized the sword as a graft.

[THE MURDERER OF MURDERERS]

[Tags:] 

Inseparable

Binding Obelisk

Astral Body Graft

And the world will be better for this…

[Details:]

Grants a Restraining Greater Eidolon Vault, containing the Greater Eidolon “Y’Alha’Zor of the Crucifixion.” This Eidolon Vault possesses the unique characteristic of “Absolute Restraint,” preventing the eidolon from any form of direct rebellion against the contractor’s will. Commands and conditions may be written within the vault to further adjust the eidolon’s behavior.

Grants an Enthroned Greater Eidolon Vault through the power of the 516th Zor’Aguhastra Guidestone Fragment, containing the Greater Eidolon “Zhah-Rhan-Thule.” This Eidolon Vault possesses the unique characteristic of “Enthronement.” Zhah-Rhan-Thule may be designated as the King-Regent for any number of contracted Lesser Eidolons, so long as they are all of the same original type. These Lesser Eidolons automatically become Fire Vampires and benefit from both their native characteristics and those of the Fire Vampires; Fire Vampires possess a lesser form of Zhah-Rhan-Thule’s Pyrovampirism, but do not possess Palefire. Zhah-Rhan-Thule may be employed as part of any eidolon summoning ritual to guarantee that the summoned eidolon is a Fire Vampire.

Incorporates and reinforces the Snare-sign of Blackest Pitch. Improves the efficiency of theurgies conducted using the eidolons contained within the relevant vaults; therefore, the relevant eidolons may be capable of fueling additional theurgies. No further discernible effects.

This graft grants the Lesser Heterodox Cycle, reinforcing the owner’s Astral Body and enhancing their ability to host and summon eidolons.

This graft’s effects grow in proportion with the owner’s “Personal Legend.”

This graft’s effects grow alongside the eidolons bound by the Lesser Heterodox Cycle.

Further details have been sealed by the King of Many Colours, he-who-once-wandered, praise be upon him. The seal upon this sword-that-is-you shall come undone when you possess the strength to wield it and the wisdom to not do so lightly.

326 - Lesser Heterodox Cycle Pt. 3 [Cherno]

“Behold, the stele upon which your cycle shall be inscribed, and let us hope that it is merely the first of many; this is your own Binding Obelisk, and from this day forth it shall be the anchor-stone of your theurgy, granted weight and solidity by the history inscribed upon it.”

The King beckoned with his fingers; both his torn-off finger and antler flew into his grasp, and he leapt from the throne alcove, halting in mid-air in front of the Binding Obelisk. He wielded the antler as a hammer, using its root for the striking face, and the stiffened finger as a chisel, speaking as he worked, the chants and drumming of uncountable eidolons still carrying through the throne chamber.

“Within this myth, you shall be rendered as the lynchpin of all things, as the protagonist of the myth that is thine life and identity, and by its binding power, the narrative of what you have done and who you are shall serve to grant your astral body the strength to host and channel the strength of countless spirits, far beyond those you contract with today. This is the Lesser Boundary of Theurgy, which so few have the mettle to surpass, and here you are, barely raising your leg to step over it. The guidestone-shard shall be your path to Zor’Aguhastra, your proof of communion, and it shall remain with you always, even through death, for that is your lot, god-eater. That snake-mouthed fool has doubtlessly already said as much. The truth is, the guidestone shards mean little; we would honor the accords even without them, for they benefit us. What truly matters is that the guidestone’s shards are never gathered again. Entombing them within Binding Obelisks is the method to this end.”

He stopped carving, craning his neck to address Krahe directly.

“I will not lie, for I am not able: Having a piece of the guidestone as part of thine obelisk grants it no greater power; it merely reinforces it a little, and eases your return to our great city. All that you see before you, all that you receive from us, is a direct result of your own efforts and of the fact you have made it clear that you are a worthy contractor for my beloved children. You have paid the price in advance.”

He had carved nothing of particular detail up until this point, only a scattered mass of lines that swirled and swam over the surface.

Looking the obelisk up and down, the King position his finger-chisel and drew back his antler-hammer.

“The Murderer of Murderers!” he called, and struck the chisel.

A woman’s silhouette, standing atop a pile of corpses, with emerald jewels for eyes and billowing hair thrice as long as the figure itself was tall, spiraling upwards from its head. Despite being fixed in place, carved into stone, Krahe was convinced that the hair was billowing and the eyes burned with light.

Another invocation and another image followed. 

“The Executioner’s Assistant!” he called, and struck again, hands blurring. Krahe came to realize that it wasn’t a single strike. It was in fact an infinite number of chisel-strikes compressed into such a short span of time that she perceived it as one strike. In moments, the King of Many Colours performed the work of centuries.

The silhouette of a giant raven, half as tall as the woman, appeared at the woman’s feet, bent down and pecking at a corpse’s eye socket. The slightest shift of perspective caused it to change into a silhouette of Barzai’s humanoid form. The Daemon Core was absent, as Barzai no longer required a dedicated vessel to invoke that High Theurgy.

It was at this point that she began recognizing the corpses. Behind the chisel-strokes, within the dark stone, she glimpsed the faces of of those who were being carved. That wasn’t a silhouette, it was the CEO of Shiva Inc., Arjun Patel. And the corpse beneath him was the captain of his security forces, his cousin, Sanjay Patel. Each and every corpse, Krahe recognized as someone who had died by her hands, and in the same manner, she recognized herself upon the carving. Barzai wasn’t pecking at the hollow eye-socket of a random corpse, but that of Aldritch.

As more and more corpses joined the piles, the King of Many Colours grew increasingly more manic in his chiseling, and he cackled in joy all the way. 

“Such history! Such a deep personal myth! I needn’t embellish at all!” he laughed.

Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule soon joined, one crucified atop the corpse pile and another hovering above Krahe’s head, waiting. They had yet to carve their own place into their history through deeds, so this was their portrayal.

Another hammer-blow.

Incomprehensible giants loomed in the sky above it all.

Another.

Krahe’s figure became holographic just like Barzai, rapidly shifting between countless incarnations. Krahe at age 23 with metal arms and a cybernetic eye ripped from a defunct hunter-killer dog drone. Age 30, first fullborg conversion, eyes dead. Age 40, both arms converted to housings for the Blackhand Radiation Blasters. Age 43, a beheaded cyber-zombie, standing back-to-back with Krahe as she was immediately upon her rebirth, rampaging in two worlds at once. Krahe the Green-eyed Demon, the vision of her that only existed in the eyes of those she had killed face to face.

There was one version whose face wasn’t visible; it was Krahe as a knight, wielding a lance tall enough to reach the top of the obelisk. She stood with her back turned, pointing the lance at the giants in the skyline. In this interpretation, Krahe stood just high enough that the lance pierced one of the giants through the heart; the corpse-mountain was overgrown with flowers, and atop the artificial mountain stood the figures of all those who had aided her in her path, each standing upon another’s shoulders, with Krahe at the very top. She couldn’t tell who, exactly, it was that hefted her the rest of the way, whether it was Casus, or Barzai, Favonia, Firminus, even the Wizard, the King of Many Colours, and the Shadeless Queen were among them. That final figure upon whose shoulders knight-Krahe stood was completely inscrutable, carved out as a hollow shape with no definition.

She blinked, and that version of the carving vanished from sight.

325 - The Lesser Heterodox Cycle Pt. 2 [Cherno]

A/N: At least one more today. Maybe two more.
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Krahe felt her life flash before her eyes. This path, which she had painstakingly and far-too-often walked in the near past, simply zipped by her now. There was neither doubt, nor confusion to speak of. This outpouring of what she deemed to be “Liquid Identity” from her palm was nothing more than a reaffirmation, a recitation of a hymn she knew by heart, and its flow dragged the guidestone’s power out of its shell, reams of scrawl flowing along the current. As they settled, their whitish glow flashed through the trench like the strikes of lightning within a storm cloud. These “scrawl-serpents” moved along the grand glyph’s perimeter, their movement represented on the floating diagram by the subtle shifting of colour, and, after making the full circuit, they gathered in the circle surrounding Y’Alha’Zor and reached up from the trench, forming an upside-down curtain around the vessel. After all, the guidestone’s eidolon-binding power was to be used for this purpose.

Pulled along by its threads, the guidestone fragment “slipped” out of her grasp, carried with the final current into the trench. It immediately became clear that there was a subtler and far more profound role for the guidestone to play in this rite. Once more, she was reminded of how little she knew before one such as the King of Many Colours. It was entirely possible that this exact, specific variation of this ritual was simply one of many within his repertoire, and that his knowledge was so vast he could simply substitute or alter parts of it on the spot with perfect confidence.

“Y——KH!”

The King of Many Colours invoked. Myriad voices answered, matching his call, all soldiers in accord, answering without question, without hesitation, answering simply because that was their place, to support their King in all endeavors. From everywhere and nowhere at once came the voices, voices from the deep, the singing of beings great and small, from every tower that hung above the Grey Fog. From the black spires of Zor’Aguhastra, calling, invoking, commanding, an impenetrable tapestry. All of Zor’Aguhastra became the ritual choir.

A distant, indistinct thumping carried from below, the contribution of those interred in the Grey Fog, those who had carved off their own faces and thus had no mouths with which to sing. Drums, drums in the deep.

Once more, the King invoked: “Y——KH!”

Only now, as Krahe moved to raise her hands from the basin and found herself moving in slow motion, she finally noticed the pressure that had begun bearing down on her from the moment the King began drawing the ritual glyph. This crushing force, ten thousand times the force she had withstood when the King carelessly stepped off his throne, ought to throw her to the ground and squeeze the life from her, yet it wasn’t doing that. Despite being surrounded and pressed upon by this tyrannical presence, she was completely fine; it was as if she had dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a tin can, and the ocean simply chose not to crumple her.

“Y——KH!”

With the third invocation of its name, a cold, savage, and lurid aura washed over the throne room. The vessel that was Y’Alha’Zor came alive, a greyish-blue glow filling its flesh. The entity within its confines raised the vessel’s arms as if to examine it with its nonexistent eyes, only for the collar and head to slam down upon its shoulders, its respective nails slamming into place. The Black Crucifix followed, each nail finding its place unerring. The more Y——kh struggled, the more of the guidestone’s scrawl wrapped itself around the vessel’s limbs.

By the end of it, as the exoframe locked into the posture of crucifixion, Y’Alha’Zor was strung up like a puppet. Some reams of scrawl cruelly bound the vessel’s flesh and cut into it, while others stretched between the nails that pierced its limbs like the strings of a guitar, and others still crawled beneath the flesh in the same manner as Krahe had observed with Sorayah. Gradually, they faded out of view, sinking fully into the vessel..

“Cease this farce at once. You have agreed to the terms, knowing your vessel-to-be,” the King of Many Colours scoffed. The indignant aura that swirled about Y’Alha’Zor didn’t let up even a bit.

As the reams of its script entangled Y’Alha’Zor and bound the true essence of Y——kh within it, the stone itself flew into the middle of the triangle, hanging there.

“Now, F———A!” the King called, gesturing towards the vessel of Zhah-Rhan-Thule. The sensation of an impending meteorite strike overcame Krahe, she felt the blood drain from her limbs, and simultaneously felt a searing heat well up in her stomach. Then, as swiftly as it had come over her, the sensation passed. A pillar of pale fire consumed Zhah-Rhan-Thule, obscuring it from sight, only to be sucked into the sigil of Phlogiston upon the glass moon’s surface. The vessel’s appearance was the same, and yet its presence completely changed in a way Krahe couldn’t properly put into words even if she tried. The line between the circles of Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule erupted with a curtain of iridescent-black, an inverted waterfall akin to an Archon Flash, only devoid of the screaming noise. Krahe could still easily see the King through this curtain.

An expression of disgust and hesitation took hold of the King’s features as he turned towards Barzai.

“And… Lastly, you, o Nameless Thing; you, who are a Herald of Ruin and an Executioner’s Assistant.”

Barzai barely moved. He inclined his head ever so slightly, his eyes flashed red, and that was it; the lines joining his circle to the two others also erupted with the same iridescent-black.

The trench overflowed, yet its contents spilled out only inward, and the darkly-pearlescent fluid surged upward, enveloping the guidestone in an upside-down vortex. Slowly and gradually, but at the same time within the span of only seconds, an enormous slab of dark stone solidified around the guidestone fragment. It simultaneously towered far out of sight, but it was also the exact right dimensions to be “just big enough” for Krahe to lay atop it. Tendrilous shapes framed each of its faces, and Krahe knew just by seeing them that they represented the Snare-sign of Blackest Pitch, the strength of theurgy she already possessed. Teeth lined the insides of these tendrils, as if “biting into” the obelisk, and, just the same as with the tendrils, Krahe immediately knew them to represent the Wound-like Grin, proving this was not a simply matter of what the Seven Spokes System recognized as “Boons.”

324 - The Lesser Heterodox Cycle Pt. 1 [Cherno]

“So it was no fluke after all,” the King uttered, his spirits visibly lifted as unworldly hues and five or six different outfits pulsed over his form.

“For hollow vessels to be this vivid… You must admit, dear, the snake-mouthed sorcerer was right once again,” the Queen said. Irritation twitched through the King’s face at the positive mention of the Wizard, but this time, it wasn’t enough to break his good mood. 

“Interloper, if you would, move the vessel into the circle,” said the King, holding out a hand to make it clear he was addressing Krahe. At his words, a circle of nine pillars rose from the ground, blank versions of the mural-bearing pillars that had marked Krahe’s approach earlier.

Krahe willed it to move, and the sphere of of Zhah-Rhan-Thule rose above her, hovering into place. No matter the angle of observation, it always appeared as “a dark moon being devoured by the sun it is eclipsing.”

The instant the vessel reached its designated position, the King of Many Colours swept his arm leftward, moving the vessel to the Queen’s side of the throne room, across from Y’Alha’Zor. With each gesture, the grin on his face grew, and so did the definition of his form and the liveliness of his movements. Manic now, his arm lunged forward and he began drawing a glyph in mid-air, formed from oily, virulent light, as if tearing a gash into the already-thin reality of this place. It was a triangle with circles at the points, clearly patterned after the symbol of Phlogiston. With each line he drew in the air, the stone floor followed suit; a trench was carved out of it; it was a trench in the truest sense, wide and deep enough for Krahe to stand within it without seeing outside. Y’Alha’Zor and Zhah-Rhan-Thule respectively were placed within two of the circles at the triangle’s points, with the empty circle glowing before Krahe. This of course didn’t make sense spatially; the triangle had sides of equal lengths, therefore Krahe stood too close to the throne and to the two vessels. And yet, this was the truth. Krahe stood “a few dozen steps from the throne,” she stood “within direct sight of the royal couple,” and yet the throne room’s spatial dimensions distorted to accommodate this impossible glyph’s existence without simply moving Krahe further, and all this without her noticing it take place, simply because the King of Many Colours had willed it. Somehow, the straight lines connecting the circles were arched. It made no sense, but this, too, was the truth. 

Nothing up until this point had gotten to her, but for some reason this casual denial of basic spatial logic made goosebumps run down the back of her neck, despite the fact she had experienced similar things in virtual environments. It was simply different here.

The King continued, completing the sigil of Phlogiston, placing the plus-sign shaped cross such that it pointed to the throne alcove. The trench moved with his finger, burrowing beneath the altar of the scales and the stairs to the thrones. The cross itself didn’t form an open trench, but instead rose from the ground as an altar right between the thrones, its dimensions of tens of meters somehow fitting between the thrones in open spite for the fact that the thrones were separated by a gap of no more than three meters. A shallower channel ran through the cross, funneling towards a hole downward into the rest of the sigil. Krahe couldn’t see this all taking place directly; she learned it directly from beholding the King drawing the sigil into thin air. Just from that she could vividly picture the physical structure, including its flagrant defiance of euclidean spatial dimensions. The mere consideration of what would happen if she tried to approach the thrones was enough to provoke the sigil. With a single flare of invisible magenta that washed over her with the gentleness of a spring breeze, the sigil imbued into her mind the knowledge that she could walk forever, traverse thousands of miles, and yet never move from her designated position, because the ritual had started the moment the King had deemed it so, and none of the participants could move from their rightful places until the ritual was either completed or halted. She could forcefully halt the ritual, but unless she decided to toss aside the fruits of this venture, she was stuck for now.

Alongside this knowledge also came the awareness of what the sigil was and what it represented. It was the Threefold Sigil of the Lesser Heterodox Cycle

“I had intended to ask of you the provision of a sigil suitable for three subjects and two ritualists, but there is no need for that any longer. I quite like this sigil of yours. It shall suit our purpose, with a small adjustment,” he said. Another gesture, and a second cross altar extended from the empty circle at the triangle-point that faced Krahe. Once more, she did not move, she was no further from the throne, space itself distorted to accommodate this change.

“First, you shall manifest that tar-stained thing and place it within the empty circle, that it may complete the Cycle. Second, you shall take in one hand thy shard of the guidestone. Third, you shall offer of yourself to the ritual, using that very hand; not an offering of blood, but of whom and what you are. Simply will into being the same intent behind the epithet by which you previously identified yourself before us, o Murderer of Murderers. That which you give, I shall match in equal measure, and thereafter add another ounce of my own flesh to balance the scales.”

Just as before, thinking about the actions described elicited a response from the burning glyph, transmitting the necessary knowledge directly into her mind, almost as if it was a failsafe in case verbal communication failed. The glyph’s mind-impulse made it abundantly clear that the third instruction was similar in principle to the test of conviction she had undergone before the three saints guarding the relic-vault; the difference was that instead of conviction, this depended on the “weight” or perhaps “volume” of her identity and history. Even with direct thought-transmission, it was still this vague. Considering the trench and everything else, at least the “physical” mechanics of fulfilling the request were straightforward enough. The thought that the “liquid history” must run down the guidestone fragment kept repeating in her head, a blinking warning.

She didn’t expect a sudden waterfall; after all, the totality of both her lives equaled a bit under forty-four, while the inhabitants of Zastreon could live for centuries, if not longer.

First, she willed Barzai to manifest in the form of the Executioner’s Assistant and willed the giant to walk into the circle. Barzai obeyed, but turned his head to point his beak towards the Queen, who raised a hand to cover her mouth as if she was witnessing something truly scandalous.

Then, grasping the guidestone in her left hand, she used one of its edges as a visual aid to “cut” herself, forming a small fissure in the palm of her astral body’s right hand. With only swirling void beyond it, the fissure resembled a Wound-like Grin, only without any teeth.

Approaching the edge of her side’s cross-altar, Krahe held out the guidestone fragment over its edge, keeping the palm of her cut hand closely to the stone. This was the only posture that silenced the nagging warning-thought in her head.

Finally, she centered herself, and took the brief time that she had not been given previously to fully center herself and dredge up a more complete sense of self-identity. She was a Murderer or Murderers, that was true, but she was also many other things. In the end, putting it into words wasn’t the point here, so she simply dwelt on her own identity, on the path she had walked thus far and the path she had yet to walk, and allowed this reflection upon the self to spill out. She had held back her thoughts up until this point, trying to rein in her wandering thoughts as best as possible, and now she wasn’t just not restraining them, she was doing the opposite. Every thought passing through her head was pulled along by the current of introspection and reminiscence, and with it, a river of pearlescent blood spewed out of her hand wound. It wasn’t as if an artery had been cut; an entire river’s worth of ichor spilled into the cross-altar’s channel, somehow fitting inside the meter-wide diameter of its channel, and it flowed into the ritual glyph’s trench just as swiftly.

The King of Many Colours cast off the mask of self-control; laughing like a madman, he bit open his own wrist, and bled himself of iridescent-black in equal proportion.

323 - A High Priest Creates the Deity [Cherno]

At this point, Krahe had completely surpassed any form of surprise or disbelief, finding it both easiest and safest to simply move with the flow of events unless something unprecedented or obviously dangerous presented itself. So, she simply nodded in agreement.

“Now, then,” the Queen said, trailing off. Then came the barest crack, the subtlest parting of her lips, for she had spoken until this point without even having distinguishable lips, and from her mouth issued the name of F———A. No sound nor booming voice, only the Name.

With the Queen’s soundless invocation of that name, Krahe felt her thoughts cast towards one of the sigil-moons wheeling above Zor’Aguhastra, towards them and past them, to a comet-like body orbiting the vast city faster than mortal sight, a half-molten boulder of burning-blue glass. Upon it, at its rear, the origin of its immense thrust, there was a dark crater, and within that crater, in the storm-eye of its thrust plume, there was a building the size of a city, a temple of fantastic architecture, dream-like, unreal, with curved angles and alien geometry of sinister beauty.

In that temple, there dwelt F———a, King Regent of the Fire Vampires; a living conflagration, a maelstrom of pale-blue fire, centered around the sole distinguishing feature of a vampire-fanged mouth.

There was no doubt. This was Fthaggua. 

About her swarmed the Fire Vampires, and they, too, were just as featureless, having only large mouths and elongated bodies of flame, flame that blazed with preternatural heat in a manner unlike their King Regent. They were Lesser Eidolons equal to Krahe’s own eels in their status as the pinnacle of the smallest mountain, the greatest of the small, the strongest of the weak; that is to say, the apex point of what a Lesser Eidolon could become without surpassing the boundary of evolution or making the yet greater leap of transcendence to Greater Eidolon. Were she not already accustomed to the Chthonian Eels, she would have strongly considered divesting herself of them in favour of these Fire Vampires; in the future, she would certainly seek to obtain at least a handful. There was no doubt in her mind that having a contract with F———a would render them a better choice than most other Lesser Eidolons.

The royals had made clear that Fthaggua qualified as a Greater Eidolon by a small margin, and certainly, the magnitude of its being was indeed far lesser than that of Y——kh; where Barzai felt nearly perfectly real and Y——kh was approaching that point, F———a felt noticeably ethereal, as if she was “stretched thin.” Even so, F———a was to the Fire Vampires as the sun was to a candle. The leap of eidolon classifications was just as much of a qualitative transformation as the difference between unrefined thauma and Six Maxims Thauma.

Krahe willed herself back to the throne chamber as the King of Many Colours began speaking once more. In the middle of the chamber there now hung a projection of the scene she had just witnessed, F———a burning upon its altar as countless Fire Vampires swarmed around it.

“F———a is weak, for she is young. Therefore, her power is formless and readily fills any vessel, as you have observed with Ktynga, the comet that is her current home; she shall confer the characteristics of “Palefire” and “Pyrovampirism” to any vessel into which her power is poured. Theurgies cast through her strength may erode the strength of others to replenish your own, or to sustain themselves for longer than they otherwise could. Should you wish it, she will devour the astral bodies of others to replenish herself and to grow. The King Regent of Fire Vampires; a pale, undying flame that devours life and grows in perpetuity, yet which never rages out of control; that is F———a.”

There was an undeniable sense of pride in the King’s words, entirely unlike his tone when speaking of Y——kh.

“I have witnessed the inhabitants of Zor’Aguhastra summoned by a witch and bid to devour the astral bodies of condemned prisoners. How does this “Pyrovampirism” differ from that devouring?” she asked.

The King thought for several seconds before he replied.

“One is brute force, a method which scatters much of that which is devoured in the process of digestion, breaking down the devoured and using the lowest-order energies for the devourer’s benefit. It is a capability inherent to us all just as eating is to you. Those whom you have witnessed are merely those of us who have developed their inherent ability to “devour” to an exceptional degree. Y——kh’s devouring, while more refined than most, is also of this type. F———a has developed an altogether different method.”

The Queen spoke up to fill in for her husband.

“Pyrovampirism, the means of digestion through combustion, smelts-subjugates-transmutes what is devoured into a form best suited to the devourer, discarding a far smaller proportion. Palefire, furthers its efficiency, for it is uniquely suited to "digestion by fire," breaking down that which it burns without destroying it; it could be said it cooks in place of burning, or that it pre-digests the victim as a spider would. We have judged this to be the ideal pillar to support the Lesser Heterodox Cycle and to ensure that you, the contractor, do not meet an untimely end.”

“Y——kh to cripple them, F———a to drink their blood, the cursed raven to consume their corpse,” the King chimed in, audibly suppressing disgust as he mentioned Barzai.

“It ought to be comparatively simple to determine a suitable contract name for F———a,” the Queen said. Krahe wasn’t sure whether there was a veiled request within that statement, but it didn’t matter either way; she didn’t see any reason to reframe or reinterpret F———a’s vessel as she had done with Y——kh’s vessel.

As she had done before, Krahe cast her mind back into the mythology of her own world, to the Old Ones and Outer Gods that, to her, had been mere fiction. She considered if perhaps their existence in her world’s fiction was some ephemeral consequence of its cosmological proximity to Zastreon’s reality within the sea of Kenoma, but that was not the matter at hand at this moment.

F———a, as an eidolon, was one suitable for theurgy in the sense of lesser eidolons, of scrolls and talismen, of direct instructions and vessels that gave instruction to the eidolon’s power, allowing it to influence the outcome, but not to steer it entirely. In short, while Y——kh would do best if she summoned his strength directly, F———a was fluid and best used to empower other things. This line of thought led her to the idea of divine invocation in the esoteric sense, of a remote force descending its power unto others, perhaps even of an official invoking the power of the emperor through the imperial seal. The mental image of a solar eclipse stuck out in her head, of the manner in which Aztec astrologer-priests had callously invoked its occurrence as proof of their and their liege’s authority. An eclipse was indeed a potent omen, one with real weight in this world, and so Krahe allowed that image to influence the vessel that she formed for F———a.

In fact, to say she formed the vessel was somewhat inaccurate; there was no iterative process, as with Y’Alha’Zor. The mental image snapped into place, and well before the throne chamber could respond to her thoughts, she already had the name on her tongue.

“The contract name is Zhah-Rhan-Thule,” she said. Despite its compound nature, Krahe found it remarkably easy to pronounce.

A crystalline sphere of iridescent-black, shrouded by blue flame that formed the shape of a vampiric mouth. The alchemical sigil of Phlogiston was inscribed upon the sphere’s surface; three circles joined by lines into an upright triangle, with a plus-sign extending from the triangle’s bottom face.

The sphere in its totality was half a meter across. 

It formed from nothing at Krahe’s intonation of its name, crumbling in reverse into existence behind her head, the unnatural darkness of its surface giving it the appearance of a pale halo formed by the eclipse of a blue star; in other words, a black sun, and Krahe was its high priest.

322 - Black Spire Communion Pt.9 [Cherno]

No verbal response came; not for quite some time. The King of Many Colours, his high brow furrowed, stared at the vessel. His gaze shifted to Krahe, then back to the vessel, and he rose up from his throne. An enormous weight smashed down upon Krahe’s shoulders, as though a waterfall striking her all at once, but she remained upright. Krahe instinctively drew on the Adamas Organ, without even thinking, and for reasons unbeknownst to her, it worked, albeit in a manner unlike material reality. Instantly, she turned pitch-black head to toe, body stiffening to solid stone, taking the form of a living statue. She wasn’t alarmed even as the King walked down the steps and the pressure intensified, knowing by pure gut instinct that this was not the King’s wrath, but merely the result of his rising from his throne.

It was equivalent to what, ten times earth gravity? Eleven? She could withstand that. Not for long, but that didn’t matter. The will to withstand it was enough to warp her surroundings. Even as the King walked around the vessel, inspecting it with a mixture of confoundment and interest, the section of throne room immediately around Krahe’s feet continued to change, a geyser of black smoke erupting from her head, tendrils of shadow spreading, and furious red light erupting from the cracks of her form in a voiceless struggle. Krahe, despite having to strain just to stand, was too busy observing the King to voice a complaint. Compared to the pressure she had experienced during her initial approach, this felt like nothing. Just as the pressure of his presence, so too did his form come unshackled when he stood up. The vague figure of a human body remained, but it swiftly unfurled into an ever-shifting maelstrom of forms, different clothes and faces, different colours, different numbers of limbs, and limbs of wildly varied anatomy. At one moment he was a saurian, then a human, an insectoid, and ten-hundred different insectoids. Antlers. A minotaur body. A form of metal hemispheres coupled by dull-grey rods, so dull one couldn’t make out which of them were nearer or further, merging into a flat mass, and eyes, why were there eyes in the empty spaces, and why could she not see them with her own sight and only through a vague awareness of the immediate past? Gradually, with each passing moment, the King of Many Colours unfurled further and further, expanding to a scale that Krahe was in no position to comprehend, let alone quantify in words. It wasn’t until Barzai acted of his own volition, manifesting behind her in his humanoid form that the King’s attention snapped in her direction; its scale was just as distorted as his raven form, resulting in a manifestation of a truly enormous scale, towering over everything else in the throne room, everything except the King of Many Colours.

The King’s reaction wasn’t one of fear or intimidation, but an appalled one, recoiling at the sight. Thereafter, he looked down towards Krahe, only to freeze.

“Ah. I am being most discourteous, aren’t I. Seeing you mould this vessel in so effortless a manner, I forgot myself,” he said. He rolled his shoulders, and his rapidly-expanding form collapsed in on itself. As he did this, he muttered with irritation, “Careless, careless…”

The Hueless Queen, having observed the whole thing in silence, barely raised a hand and caused a wave of Grey Fog to wash over the throneroom, and everything seemed to reset, as if the previous few moments had not taken place. Krahe’s astral form was no longer a living statue, her surroundings were the same, and the King’s form finally stabilized into a fully humanoid shape. 

As if nothing had happened, the King raised a hand and willed the vessel that Krahe had wrought, as of yet devoid of its inhabitant, to disassemble itself, each nail, armor plate, and component peeling off, hovering to a distance from the main mass. Layer by layer, this continued, down to the greyish-white muscle and black bones, finishing just as the King reached the foot of the steps before his throne and reached up to his head, grasping an antler that had not been there the moment prior. In a geyser of iridescent-black ichor, he tore it from his skull, trailing root-like nerves and veins behind as it fell upon the scales. They had been tilted askew, Krahe realized, and the antler brought them back into balance.

“I must apologize once again for my indiscretion, and any undue discomfort it may have caused. I believe this vessel is beyond suitable, and so I shall set it aside for the binding ritual. If you wish to proceed, we may move on to F———a, or we may adjourn for a few subjective hours or even days if you so wish. You may choose to depart, should you wish, but upon your return, all that has already transpired must transpire once again. Ah, and… Please, if you would, put that thing away.”

Krahe realized that Barzai was still behind her, this hunched-over giant, waterfalls of smoke pouring down from his feathers and waterfalls of tar trickling from his scales. Craning her head back as far as it would go, she stared up his beak, willing him to return to his vault. She was aware, in retrospect, that he had intervened on her behalf, and she intended to reward him for it, but this was neither the time nor the place. Just as before, he melted into her shadow.

The King of Many Colours, having sat back down on his throne, deflated into his seat at Barzai’s departure. It truly seemed as if the not-eidolon’s mere presence caused the King far greater discomfort than anything the King’s presence had exerted on Krahe. The King gestured once more, and the crucifixion vessel, including the tar and pillars surrounding it, shifted off to the side, out of the way. Afterwards, he fell silent, strangely deteriorating in the opposite direction as before, becoming an abstracted silhouette of facets and colours.

The Shadeless Queen, seeing as her husband was not speaking, perhaps sulking even, took the reins, her monotone voice reminding Krahe that she was even there. It was remarkably easy to forget the Queen’s presence.

“Shall we proceed with F———a, then?”

321 - Black Spire Communion Pt.8 - Y'Alha'Zor of the Crucifixion [Cherno]

It was here that she diverged from the pure path of changing the name to change the vessel. As she saw it, there was no need. If the name of something informed its manifestation, and if looking upon something instantly conferred an idea of its nature, then it stood to reason that remaking the vessel’s form more directly would result in being able to glean an appropriate name for it. She could tell the royal couple were not entirely comfortable with her plainly-obvious intentions, but they made no effort to stop her, nor did they even speak up, so she proceeded.

First, came the restraints. A frame of dark stone, rising from behind the vessel in the shape of a cross. It hovered behind the vessel, held up by black tendrils as the hands of attendants might hold up an emperor’s robe.

Krahe didn’t simply pull this design from thin air; as many others, this, too, was based on something she was familiar with. 

The Wolf & Raven Type-39 Alhambra exoframe. The Black Cross. One of the earliest and most resilient models to have a structure made entirely of graph-fullerene, a supermaterial structured like graphene, with fullerene spheres in place of single carbon atoms. Its nickname originated from its appearance prior to application to a subject, combined with its somewhat infamous use on humanoid mutants as both a strengthening and restraint measure, as its design made it particularly well-suited to that purpose. With restraint mode engaged, the subject would be forced into the pose of a crucifixion.

Krahe bent down, reaching into the tar, and fished out a six-sided rod of black iron. With her bare hands and simple will, she wrought it into a nail the length of a railway spike and twice as thick as her index finger. Its head flared out to one and a half the spike’s diameter, and it had a pyramidal tip formed by six diamond-shaped facets, tapering down to a pinpoint. Into this, she poured the full force of her intent for Y——kh, the intent to “strengthen him through restraint.” There was no resistance. The world that was Zor’Aguhastra, whose world-law of leverage was even more intense than that of the surface world, gave form to her intentions without a speck of resistance. After all, she wasn’t imposing this vessel unto Y——kh, so there was no conflict. She was simply constructing the best possible vessel for the fulfillment of their future contract, and Zor’Aguhastra itself was more than happy to help her facilitate it through leverage.

Then, she commenced with the hammering.

Six nails through the spine to secure the main frame. Six more for each limb; three through each major joint along the axis of articulation, and three more to affix the exoframe. From the feet, she moved up, towards the shoulders, and ended with the hands, whose nails were through the palms to best pin their mouths shut. Only one empty spot remained — the head. Y——kh had no head, not even after all the work Krahe had already done. A gruesome mouth yawned atop the vessel’s torso where the neck ought to be, having, at first glance, two rows of six-sided nails in place of teeth, and a tendrilous tongue writhed behind them. The tongue ripped a nail free and, wrapping around it in a tight spiral, launched it with such force it cracked the air. When the mouth closed shut and opened again, it once more had all its “teeth.”

But Krahe, in her gut, knew that she couldn’t fully subdue Y——kh when it came down to it without giving its vessel a head, and that she couldn’t just alter the exoframe to exclude that design element. She guessed it might have to to do with the fact the Black Crucifix of her own world had that requirement, so much so that before being applied to a mutant with a particularly deformed neck or head, said mutant would need to have these deformities corrected first. The world-law of leverage went both ways, she had to play along to take advantage of it.

Once again at her intervention, a head emerged from the tar, formed from the same glistening black stone as the nails and exoframe. Its shape was that of a wedge, its upper half resembling a cut gemstone with triangular facets, devoid of any sensory organs; the entire head was one giant mouth, with a seam that spanned it end to end, and it had a socket at the back specifically for the exoframe’s head section. To the vessel’s torso, it would be joined by a long neck with plenty of space for the tongue and whatever the eidolon bit out of a target, the neck’s articulated frame armored by interlocked, articulating rings of armor. When it came to joining that neck to the vessel’s main body, Krahe once more turned to nails.

The sheer width of the vessel’s frame demanded a bespoke collar to seat upon its shoulders, one that came down over the top of its chest and back, leaving a gap for the exoframe. She formed sockets upon this armored harness at the points of attachment and nailed it to the vessel’s flesh, wedging them between the vessel’s metal ribs.

For an eidolon, true physicality was not a necessity, it was yet another point of leverage. A body would be tougher because it was armored and thus because considerations had to be made for the mobility-limiting factors of that armor and for the fact other things couldn’t be put in its place. At the end of the day, it all boiled down to leverage. An eidolon’s manifestation vessel was an idol, every design element a symbol, even those seemingly impractical.

Y——kh’s natural manifestation, and even the manifestation as Y’garokh the Biter, would likely have potent abilities related to biting and devouring. Y——kh’s corpulent form would have been one to withstand damage by sheer mass and regenerate from it, whereas Y’garokh’s lither form would retain these traits while trading durability for nimbleness. Despite retaining that aspect, this vessel’s chief defense would be armor, and both its nimbleness and regeneration would be stunted as a direct consequence of its restraints; its hand-mouths would be slower to open due to the nails, and the bulk of its armor would limit its movement, forcing it to either move deliberately or charge in a straight line and go to the effort of deliberate anchor-turns using precious nails, placing it somewhere between Y——kh’s natural form and Y’garokh the Biter in terms of mobility. Its chief offensive capability would be to inflict its own state upon others: Impalement, pinning, and crucifixion by way of its six-sided nails; in this manner, it would compensate for its limited mobility by removing the mobility of its targets, creating the openings it needed to bite them. 

The Black Crucifix melded seamlessly to the head. Finally, it was done. The exoframe stiffened, pulling back the vessel's arms and head back as it settled into its locked configuration.

At last, all else fell into place, and Krahe felt satisfied with both the vessel and the name it evoked in her mind.

Krahe stepped to the side, glancing past the vessel at the royal couple. The King had eyes once again; six eyes, to be precise, three on each side of his face. Of these eyes, four shifted to stare at her, while the lowest pair remained fixed to the vessel.

"You are finished?" he questioned, making no effort to conceal his taken-aback tone.

“I’ve decided," she nodded. "The Contract Name shall be Y’Alha’Zor of the Crucifixion.”

320 - Black Spire Communion Pt. 7 - Y'golonac and Fthaggua [Cherno]

The two royals observed Barzai with a bearing best reserved for the aftermath of head-on train collision. Somehow, for reasons that evaded Krahe, the faux-eidolon's manifestation seemed to be utterly repellant to the two; perhaps it was a sort of uncanny valley effect.

“That's enough. Put... Put it away, quickly,” the King said. Krahe looked up at Barzai, and Barzai looked down at her, holding her gaze for a moment before he melted into her shadow once more. Only once Barzai was gone did the King continue, clearing his throat with a sound like distant artillery. “If we make proper use of F———a and that tar-stained thing, we can establish a Minor Heterodox Cycle. The initial stress shan't be an issue with that obelisk of an astral body, and once the cycle settles the tension within it will only serve to render it more resilient. No weaknesses, the toll paid in advance, in accordance with the Wizard's ideals.”

There was no mistaking the sudden left turn into seething bitterness that the King veered into at the end. Even the Queen saw fit to interject.

“Should our esteemed guest agree to the terms,” she said. It sufficed to steer the King's thoughts back on track.

“Ah, right. Will you, god-eater? The terms of the ancient accord cannot be overwritten, but, should both sides agree, and should the scales remain in balance, the exact fulfillment of the accord may be adjusted even to this extent. The scales are in your favour, hosting Y——kh and F———a shall benefit us both, but you more so in the short term, thus leaving the scales in balance.”

“Two Greater Eidolons, in place of the Lesser Eidolons I had expected. Far be it for me to presume a catch, but I do not recall possessing the means to make of myself a sufficient vessel for such beings,” Krahe said.

“This is of no concern. We shall carry out the rites of binding at this very moment, should you agree to it. The stone shall serve as the core for Y——kh’s anchor, and I shall carve the anchor for F———a from my own flesh," the King said, conveniently gesturing to his thumb, still sitting on the scales. A new thumb had already grown in its place. Of course, he had intended this from the start. "I shall spare no effort to ensure that you remain a suitable vessel for those two for as long as conceivably possible.”

“Is there a price to be paid on my end? Memories lost, a curse?” Krahe asked, allowing some doubt to creep into her voice. That alone was enough to distort her surroundings for a moment. She knew well enough that if something seemed too good to be true it probably was. 

“We do not deal in the business of such exchanges — the royal We, that is. Should you wish to trade, you needst venture below, into the Grey Fog, where those of us who have carved away their own “faces” dwell. As for this exchange, the scales remain in balance because you have already paid in advance by becoming a suitable vessel, and to be forthright, a suitable punishment for Y——kh.”

“There is just one issue, then — neither of these spirits’ names translate into any language I understand. Considering that Barzai is an exception, how is this to be resolved?”

“That would normally be a matter to be resolved between you and your contractors, but he merits no such courtesy, and would likely attempt to interfere with the naming besides.”

“It would be best to place the shackle of a Contract Name around his neck sooner, rather than later.”

“The simplest method is thus: Focus on the meaning of his True Name and assign it sounds, or even the name of something or someone from your world, so long as it fits. Know that the mere utterance of a True Name carries within it the essence of the mentioned — we can speak of him freely, for we are his progenitors, but in speaking it, we bring here an echo of him. When you settle on a suitable Contract Name, a form representative of that name, one influenced by the meaning behind it, shall take shape, and thereafter we shall summon him into that vessel in full. Are you ready to proceed?”

Krahe nodded.

“Y——kh. Simply raise your hand in the gesture of the hollow spire, and I shall repeat it again.”

The Gesture of the Hollow Spire was the same gesture Yazata used, wherein one formed a ring with the thumb and little finger while holding the others straight. 

She was certain now, there was definitely an entity within her world’s mythos that matched. It was from some obscure short story. As she dwelt on it, her immediate surroundings changed — black pillars rose up around her and Tar bubbled up around her feet, overtaking a full third of the throne room. The entity in the story wasn’t quite the same as this eidolon, possessing a far stronger bent of sexual depravity and defilement, and for this reason, Krahe shifted the sounds around until she had a name that truly fit.

The fictional entity was Y’golonac, the Defiler. A towering, headless, corpulent thing with mouths on its hands. At the mere thought, a perfect representation of that description rose up from the tar, headless, and yet nearly three meters tall, laden with hanging flesh and lard, and having lamprey-like mouths in its crooked palms. Its feet were masses of gnarled toes in the approximate shape of those of an elephant. It seemed at first wrought of tar, but at second look, it was merely coated in it shoulder to toe. This eidolon, even if it shared the trait of maws on its hands, could be bent to a different manifestation, a form suited for its desire to rampage and carry out savage violence. 

Y’garokh, the Biter.

At the instant of decision, the pillars pulsed with red light and tendrils swarmed up from the tar to consume the shape of Y’golonac. They tore it limb from limb, and corpulent meat sloughed off to give way to pallid, translucent-white flesh stretched taut over a frame of darkened metal. Cables, tubes, and spurs of this dark metal protruded from within the figure’s back and joints, and their surface resembled the gleaming-black stone of sacrificial altars more than it did steel.

Y’garokh’s vessel-to-be possessed enormous, clawed hands. They had six digits each, with four fingers and two thumbs on either side, and their palms bore visible slits along the horizontal axis, drawing a line that separated the fingers and the thumbs. These skin-slits extended to the wrists. Its hands in their entirety split open to expose the jagged teeth and writhing tongues within. The mouths each had an additional row of upper teeth, and their tongues possessed ridges of teeth of their own along their outer perimeters, creating second, inner “jaws” of a sort.

Still, Krahe wasn’t satisfied, and neither of her royal hosts moved to interrupt her as she continued changing the name. The name fit the being as it was. She dwelt on the name Zor’Aguhastra, on what it meant, how it related to what the city was. Moreover, she dwelt on how she might best rein in Y——kh’s tendencies. When handling a feral gene-hound, the offspring of ancient bioweapons, one would use every kind of restraint and reward mechanism from the straightforward to the cybernetic and chemical, but there was one more crucial element that separated those gene-hounds who were mere weapons to those who could be socialized and serve for decades. Something to protect them from their own self-destructive ferocity. Armor, regenerative treatments, anything to make sure they survived their own behavior for long enough to train it out of them.

Krahe would chain and armor Y——kh until he learned to behave.

319 - Black Spire Communion Pt. 6 [Cherno]

“Is it not dangerous to allow my thoughts to roam too freely in Zor’Aguhastra?” Krahe questioned, expecting this to be a catch of some sort.

“Under normal circumstances, yes. You can sense the solidity of this place, no? Your thoughts, weighty though they may be, shan’t distort the fabric of our realm unless we permit them to.”

With permission given, Krahe began considering what to say, where to start. It was one thing to be asked to identify oneself, but she couldn’t very well recount her entire life’s story before the royals, and she didn’t intend to do such a thing even given infinite time.

At the moment she had decided to agree to the royals' request, she noticed a set of golden scales upon an altar below the throne alcove. Somehow, she knew that they had always been there, yet she had not noticed them until now.

Even this brief few moments of consideration, not enough to begin deciding on where to start, was apparently too long for the King of Many Colours. He reached up, grasped his index finger, and tore it off at the base.

“This Imperial Majesty bets that the petitioner shan’t be able to fulfill the criteria within ten words or less,” he said, and threw his finger onto one side of the scales. They tipped, just a bit, and Krahe felt a compulsion to speak, to say anything. Countless options bubbled up in her mind, all at once truthful, all a suitable descriptor of who and what she was. She had experienced such compulsions in the past; under the effect of drugs, hijacked datafeeds, and others, but a compulsion such as this one was not beyond her ability to resist. There was no point to resisting it, and Krahe was certain the compulsion was not even remotely close to the King’s true power, tantamount to a mere nudge. After all, he knew that the accord must be fulfilled one way or another, and the relationship was beneficial to both sides, so he had no reason to pointlessly exert himself in the attempt to prevent it.

“I am a murderer of murderers,” she said, releasing her thoughts from the fetters she had held them in up until this point. The ground to her sides shuddered and the vast majority of the throne room fell away. In an instant, the grand chamber had been made into a narrow walkway suspended above a desert of smoldering cinders, littered by mountains of burned corpses. Innumerable crows and ravens pecked at the piles, and, wherever one looked, white flowers blossomed from the devastation, not dense enough to cover it, but enough that one couldn’t miss them no matter where one looked.

The King of Many colours emitted a sound that Krahe could only interpret as being one of amusement as he glanced about. With a snap of the Queen’s fingers — the first substantial movement she had made so far — the throne chamber reverted to its previous state.

“I’ve decided,” said the King, putting on a grin of teeth that were like the shards of oil-slicked mirrors. His eyes were gone. When had they disappeared? Krahe couldn’t remember. “Y——kh.”

There was no sound, not in truth. Krahe merely got the impression of a Y and kh sound, perhaps as a result of her associating part of the Word with the name of some fictional entity. Even so, the Word, spoken with no voice of mortal word, carried with it a distinct meaning. It was that of a corpulent and cold body, as of an aspiring fullborg who has neglected his flesh as if the onset of necrosis were a fashion statement. It was also savage and lustful at once, a deranged druggie who enjoyed biting people.

“Be not so hasty, I do not believe our visitor has been so uncouth.”

“I mean this with no malice. He shall serve her best of our offspring — and she, alongside that thing in the guise of our kind, shall rein him in as none have thus far.”

“I must warn you, Y——kh has driven hosts to violent rampages in the past. Others who were already bloodthirsty, and even those whose natures clashed with his own. We’ve had to render considerable compensation as a result; in order to prevent any such incidents in the future, we would entrust you with our dear Y——kh under a somewhat nonstandard master-disciple contract. Simply use him as you see fit, and rein him in when he misbehaves.”

“What makes you think I would accept- no, before that, what makes you think he won’t drive me to violent rampages as he has done to others?” Krahe questioned.

Both of them spoke at once.

“The fangs in your belly are far sharper, far longer, and far more thoroughly bathed in viscera than those upon Y’golonac’s hands. He shall behave as a dog behaves before a tiger, or his stay in your company will be long and excruciating indeed. Your raven would take great joy in meting out punishment, of that we are sure, but we bid you to only punish him when punishment is merited. Miscreant or not, Y——kh IS our offspring.”

“I cannot help but feel that what - or I suppose who - you describe sounds far more like a True Eidolon than the Lesser Eidolons I had anticipated,” Krahe said.

“I would not give him such merit, not yet, but she has a point, dear husband. Y——kh would easily fall into the middle of the surfacers’ Greater Eidolon classification.”

“If not her, then who? Bring Y——kh and… Hm. F———a, perhaps.”

“F———a also falls under the surfacers’ Greater Eidolon classification, albeit just-so.”

“It would fulfill the accord of ancient times and grant us the leverage to justify also contracting Y——kh. Surfacer, it galls this one to say this, but, if you would, call out your familiar.”

“It would be most helpful for us so that we may better determine which of our family best suit you; it matters little for the beasts and children you call Lesser Eidolons, but those who stand above them do well if they are matched not only with the correct contractor, but also the correct… Compatriots, let us say.”

“Speak it as it is. Two eidolons of overly clashing characteristics will tear the contractor’s astral body asunder. Now, if you would, show us.”

Krahe, rather than risk the two royals descending into another exchange, summoned Barzai. Even here, he emerged from her shadow. However, taking the form of a bird, Barzai manifested twice as tall as Krahe, with waterfalls of smoke cascading from his body and geysers of liquid fire trailing stickily for meters behind his eyes.

318 - Black Spire Communion Pt.5 [Cherno]

In accordance with the ritual secrets, she raised the guidestone fragment, reaching with it forward, while performing the Gesture of the Hollow Spire - known also as the Sign of Closing - with her right hand, keeping it close to her chest. In this manner she approached, with the guidestone’s scrawl swirling above her.

Time, for once, flowed normally. The walk towards the throne proceeded entirely mundanely, with nary a sound issuing from anywhere as she approached. It wasn’t until she reached the mark of ten pillars from the throne, that she felt a weight descending onto her shoulders. With each step, the pressure grew, and with it, so did the vigor with which the guidestone’s script whirled about, and the intensity of the stone’s thrumming in her hand. By the point of five pillars from the throne, it was a struggle to take a single step, and the stone thrashed in her grip as if it was actively trying to tear itself free.

“That will be close enough,” came a voice made from the overlaid sum of ten thousand voices, its dissonance reaching a point where it circled back and became a single, coherent voice again — the voice of a man, regal and composed yet stern and harsh in equal measure.

The Grey Fog rushed in from all sides, washing over Krahe and her surroundings before she could react, taking with it that crushing pressure and even the pillars. The throne room in which she now stood was blank, starkly so, with the only features that remained being the throne alcove and the door through which she had entered. All else was flat, blank, iridescent-black stone, and even its iridescence was faint enough to mistake it for mundane polished granite.

“Take our test not as an insult; we seek only to be certain that those who seek audience with us will not go mad and cause an undue mess if we show ourselves,” came a second voice. Besides being recognizably female, it had absolutely no characteristics whatsoever, and in fact seemed to change the moment Krahe felt like she was getting close to discerning anything beyond that vaguely female sound, just as the Grey Fog scattered and obscured any shapes within it.

The curtain rose, and Krahe beheld the rulers of Zor’Aguhastra; the King of Many Colours and the Hueless Queen. Where the King was so strongly iridescent-black as to look like a window into an infinitely-stacking fractal of incomprehensible depth and colour, the Queen indeed had no colour at all, and was greyer than grey. Where the King possessed a majestic crown floating above his brow, burning eyes, and exquisite robes whose immense detail somehow popped out amidst the incomprehensible colour, the Queen was just a vague figure of a woman in a dress; she even had no face, no face at all. Where the King sat in a spread-out, bombastic pose, nearly floating above his throne, the Queen sat with hands folded in her lap. The King, just as the Wizard had said, cast numerous shadows in all directions, each appearing as the shadow of a different person, while the Queen cast no shadow at all.

These two were the very opposites of a spectrum, each perfectly embodying the aspects of Zor’Aguhastra they represented. There was a small miracle to their extremity; despite registering as “a mass of iridescent-black” at first glance, the King’s robes all had clear and distinct colours with each passing moment, as if Krahe’s mind was slowly, ever so slowing, coming to interpret those imperial vestments, and in the same way, despite having no detail at all, ever so slowly, the Queen, too, gradually gained the vaguest suggestion of facial features. It felt like an eternity and a moment had passed before her eyes were dragged elsewhere.

Behind the throne, half-obscured by glimmering mist, Krahe beheld a flash of xanthous colour. Pinned to the wall by wedge-shaped nails that were at once square yet whose heads had five corners, there hung a mass of tatters, to the eyes a brownish-yellow, but wrong somehow. Merely by gazing upon it she knew it to be an evil, wretched thing, and she knew that its colour was an illusion, a representation, a metaphor born from her mind’s attempt to interpret it while also shutting out its corrupting influence. That colour alone was a pus of the soul. The sense of wrongness that it exuded, the sense of rottenness, of madness and sheer evil, were no doubt restrained only by the very nails that pinned it in place. Yet in the same, there was also an unsettling beauty to it; the garment’s weave contained hypnotic patterns, and a mere glimpse of its inner lining whispered of the absolute apex of art. The wall behind it was crisscrossed by cracks and overgrown by strange moss, in stark contrast to the impeccable perfection of every other surface in the throne room. The robe seemed perpetually on the verge of falling apart, pieces constantly tearing away in the astral wind, yet its totality never decreased. It wasn’t permitted to decay. The fluttering of its fabric seemed to almost be the writhing of a prisoner in torment.

Once more, the royals spoke, drawing her attention from that tattered derelict.

“Another sent by that snakemouthed madman-thief-destroyer-conqueror. This is not The One whom we have awaited.”

“What difference does that make? Look upon the traveler. God-eater, the snakemouthed one’s kin, yet unlike him.”

“She brings with her an eater of carrion, fat with the torment of sinners. This one must dwell only in the darkest places, for such a grievous omen to think her a suitable master. Were you to doff your mask, I suspect your mere presence would turn this chamber into a desert choked with corpses. Why ought we consign one of our own to dwell within you, if your path is likely to end in an ignoble death before the astral tides change but once? You fool, who strides with a dagger into a leviathan’s den, and for what?! Because you believe it evil? Because you believe your death will somehow avenge those the beast has eaten?!”

“Take my husband not to be malicious. He cares, more than any, for the wellbeing of our kin. The untimely death of a host-contractor spells dire consequences for us. Should one of us be summoned and then cast out of the world of light within too short a span, the loss will far surpass what we gained from communion. Eons of effort and a great number of hosts, wasted. I would bid you to speak, traveler. We would hear of who you are.”

317 - Black Spire Communion Pt.4 [Cherno]

As she approached, more and more detail emerged. Zor’Aguhastra’s upper half consisted of countless spires, all of whom were at once black and iridescent, just as the Wizard’s notes had said they would be. She spied among them the shapes of skyscrapers and megabuildings, of the towers of Neo Babylonia, but also the organic towers of Jas’raba and the art-nouveau and art-deco architectural sensibilities of church-adjacent Calbian architecture. All these towers varied to an unbelievable degree, no two were the same, but all shared two traits: The first was a restrained means of movement either attached, growing out of, or part of the spire. The second shared trait was a binding that moored the tower to the city’s foundations, disappearing into the Grey Fog below. Among the restrained means of movement, she saw spires with clipped wings, pruned tendrils, amputated and chained limbs, actual rocket nozzles that were simply taped over with caution tape. The bindings ran the gamut from giant chains, to wrappings, ribbons, roots, tendrils, arms joined with arms joined with arms joined with arms to form their own sort of chain, and so on.

She passed through the barrier with no incident or even sensation, it was as if it wasn’t there at all, and before long, she stepped foot onto the crumbled end of Zor’Aguhastra’s main thoroughfare, one of countless walkways making up the city’s horizontal plane.

Just that step, and she was there, truly there.

That final step — crossing over the fathomless abyss from a piece of floating rubble — was as a step from one world to the next, as if, until she had taken that step, she had only beheld a mirage of Zor’Aguhastra, an image reflected in the water.

Only now, as she stood, did she see the twin black suns wheeling through the heavens and the swarm of moons spiraling in the west, the light of the suns drawing an incomprehensible pattern of glyphs across the moons’ pallor, each crater and ridge positioned exactly to ensure the shadows of any given moon continuously shifted from one sigil to another — the same sigils of the guidestone, and the same sigils that had torn free of Sorayah’s skin. The sky burned with a hue of green no paint could reproduce and the spires of iridescent-black were as windows to worlds untold, and merely glancing upon their surfaces sufficed to engender a crushing sense of the sublime, an abiding faith that within each spire a world unto itself awaited, worlds from whose bounds she was forever prohibited for her mere passage would be as that of a blowtorch through the hair-thin wall of a glass bubble. Krahe felt a grave certainty that if she didn’t force herself to, for once, stop noticing, she would get lost in it and become a true inhabitant of Zor’Aguhastra.

She saw no people, nor any monsters, or, really anyone else. There were only the vaguest of shades scattered about, some milling to-and-fro and others standing on balconies, and others still floating through the air, some having the shapes of men and others being far too vague to discern. More notably, the all kept well away from Krahe, with several of them shrinking back the instant she stepped foot at the edge of the city. Even the faintest bit of direct focus was enough to begin giving more concrete form to any such shade, and, in this matter, Krahe knew better, forcing herself to focus on her destination.

Wasting no time, she made for the one spire that towered over all others in the city’s center.

It was neither a short journey, nor was it a long one; it simultaneously felt as if she had walked the city for months, if not years, yet it passed by in a flash, as if it had been fast-forwarded by a factor of thousands. A high-rate sensory feed with no time cognition safeguards blasting petabytes at a time.

There were neither steps nor guards before the throne room. Only gates, whose scale sprawled beyond conceptions of height and width from where she stood. 

The guidestone’s script-reams stretched towards the doors and that alone sufficed to open them, and the masses of mirror-like stone spun apart into segments and frayed out of being, simply gone in glimmers of un-light. She could see nothing beyond the gate, only an event horizon of Grey Fog.

Once more, crossing a precipice meant transition from one realm to another, a sub-space “within” Zor’Aguhastra, one “at the peak of” Zor’Aguhastra, not merely in literal terms, but also conceptually, from the perspective of material reality being the highest realm. Therefore, this throne room was the place in Zor’Aguhastra “closest to being truly real.” She didn’t need to look back to know that the gate had shut behind her the moment she passed its precipice.

And indeed, Krahe could almost mistake the sensation of standing here, in this place, for truly being in some subterranean chamber. Ahead of her, the throne room stretched for hundreds of meters forward. To the left and right, countless pillars rose up at intervals of around five meters, each with lifelike murals of detailed scenes that Krahe had to force herself not to look at, in spite of the fact their “iridescent-black” was so rich that even the slightest motion made it shift as if a cosmos roiled inside each pillar. She could see neither the walls to the left and right, nor the ceiling above, for they were shrouded by the Grey Fog. Past the pillars, far in the distance, she could just about make out a raised alcove, and within it the bases of two enormous thrones; their majority, as well as the figures seated upon them, were both obscured by a hanging curtain. A curtain that, among all else in this place, was the most real. Krahe was certain that, somehow, that thing was the only object from the “real world,” the place regarded by the dwellers of the deep as “The Surface” or “The World of Light.”

Thus, the throne chamber was reduced to its most fundamental components: The entryway, the carved pillars extolling the dynasty’s history, and the twin thrones of the King of Many Colours and Shadeless Queen, shrouded behind an unpierceable curtain.

316 - Black Spire Communion Pt. 3 [Cherno]

The two titans’ struggle continued on for what felt like at once seconds and hours. Before long, the wheel on Talos’ back had come to revolve so wildly as to appear as a static circle of light, stirring up an immense maelstrom within the astral gulf. Similarly, Rahu had somehow grown a hundred times over, as had its flames, giving the impression of a moving mountain range, despite the absence of any landmarks to compare its size against. Simply seeing it was enough. Howling in the midst of a clash against Talos’ axe, Rahu raised its elytra, the enormous wing-covers emblazoned proudly with strange green sigils that were distinctly not Vedesian. It then unfurled its wings, which were also shrouded in green fire. Their thunderous flapping set a vast swarm of green missiles against Talos, whilst an entire army of smaller insect-taurs emerged from holes that had been concealed until now, lining the thorax under the wings.

However, Talos didn’t dodge. The machine simply stopped, and so did its wheel. In fact, everything stopped. Dyed in gold and silver, the entire region of the astral gulf that Krahe could perceive simply halted. Only Rahu didn’t halt completely, continuing to move as if stuck in molasses. A sense of creeping cold washed over her and sunk into her bones.

BE INVOKED

ABSOLUTE THEURGY

FROM THE LOST WORLD

THE WINDS OF LEMURIA

Talos turned its head, even as its wheel resumed turning, and a strange and gentle voice thundered inside Krahe’s head.

“You do not belong in this place, inheritor of Ibn Ghazi Barzai. We sought to end this quickly, knowing that an unfortunate traveler using one of the guidestone fragments may get caught up in our battle, and still, we were not fast enough. We can only consider ourselves lucky that the one caught was one with as sturdy an astral body as yours. Go, now, to Zor’Aguhastra.”

Before the cosmic turbulence stirred up by the two titans battling could sweep Krahe too far off her path, the guidestone’s reams of scrawl reached out and dragged her back into the proper current. Seeing them unfurled in this manner, singular and burning with power, she couldn’t help notice the similarity to Sorayah’s theurgies. In fact, she was certain this was the same exact alphabet.

At the instant she was pulled back onto her proper course, Talos resumed its battle. With Rahu still half-frozen, Talos spun up its wheel all over again, and the glow that issued forth was as if a star had been born, drowning all in radiance that consumed sight, but didn’t blind her, a radiance that boiled the astral sea, but didn’t burn her. Krahe saw nothing, before she was completely swept away from that battlefield, and was only left with the true name of the feat that Talos began at that moment.

BE INVOKED

IDOLA IGARIA

TALOS LEMURIA AL-AZIF

FULL LIMITER RELEASE: FACE OPEN

FROM BHAVA-AGRA, THE SEAT OF BANISHMENT

SIC SUNT DAEMONES EXTIRPARE

Krahe encountered numerous further points of interest in the course of her journey, from the wrecks of clearly technological vessels to a spire built inside the smashed-open head of a giant deity with the head of an octopus and the wings of a bat. All of them sort of just passed her by, lacking contrast to the battle between Talos and Rahu. At last, she arrived at her destination, and somewhat unexpectedly, she found herself standing atop a pillar of dark stone above a fathomless abyss. For a moment, she was taken aback by how concrete everything felt; there was no more floatiness, she could breathe, and perhaps most strikingly, she felt almost as if she was really here, even her form was far closer to her physical body than her astral one. It was surprisingly similar to the sensation of a high-fidelity virtual environment, or the mental construct she had experienced under High Grafter Fidelia’s care. None of her mundane clothing had come-with, leaving her with only her biosuit, the Oculae, Forming Toroid, and Crimson Star Ring.

Her surroundings were blank, but once again, the guidestone steered her right, reams of script stretching out from it to her left. She followed it, and fragments of rubble rose up from the fog below to meet her feet wherever she stepped. Soon enough, the sunken city rose before her, emerging out of the colorless fog. To the eyes of anyone other than Krahe, it would seem comical to regard this vast landscape as a city.

At a glance, she instantly knew that “half” of Zor’Aguhastra constituted the majestic spires and walkways that she saw first, and “half” was everything beneath, shrouded by impenetrable Grey Fog.

Something didn’t look right; or rather, it didn’t look as she had expected it to. The Wizard’s rather limited travel notes had mentioned it, and that it wasn’t quite part of the city itself, but not in what way. Now, it was obvious.

The “Great Eightfold Duplex Barrier” was not a solid wall, but two sets of four moons of black stone, each quartet forming a square, joined together by enormous, perfectly straight swaths of yellow surrounded by iridescent aurora light. Both squares orbited the city’s upper half, above the Grey Fog, at a 30° offset from the horizontal plane in a different direction, forming a sideways X if viewed from the front. As she neared the island, which seemed at once the size of an island and the size of a planet, she realized that the yellow was just what she had thought it to be — paper talismans. It also became readily apparent that sight was not a true limitation, here. If she could cast her mind to somewhere, she could see it. Even so, she chose not to abuse this power, in accordance with the Wizard’s warnings.  Even so, she did notice that the moons themselves were in fact not perfectly round, but, at the points the talisman-belts joined them together, they each bore a ritual altar surrounded by eight octagonal pillars. The same pattern repeated over and over at all layers of the Great Barrier, Krahe was certain even the talisman-belts somehow repeated it.

315 - Black Spire Communion Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Krahe opened an array of mouths down the length of her left arm and on every other surface of charred skin, even including her neck the side of her face, and with them she invoked the names of ancient deities and kings, those who had reigned over the world in times when great men rose and fell by the virtue of their own strength. She compared the dwellers of the city in the deep, the Chained Ones, to the likes of Gilgamesh and Solomon and Ashurbanipal, and further still to the pioneers of cybernetics and live gene-splicing who most literally carved at their own flesh in pursuit of transcending the limits of man; “Panzer” Asakura, Jack Hammer, Adam Francis Stone, even Joseph Erber and Sauer. 

Proceeding to the Angle of the North-East, she recalled the words of power that she had glimpsed those months ago, still not able to fully comprehend them, but now at least having a tenuous grasp of their shapes. Zasas. Zasas. Nasatanda. Amrakas. Crossing the Penultimate Angle to the Pinnacle of the West, she once more invoked: “Eternal darkness now surrounds me, Sunken One be my guide!” 

At once, the eastward line became as a road of molten glass, and, as she walked across it, she traced with her left arm's fingers Barzai's Sigil of Transformation and chanted: “Stepping past the precipice, into the howling vortex, let the sword wrought of my own bone and oiled by my blood carve my chosen path! Trespassing the boundaries of mortality, I invoke the accord of ancient times! ZENOXESE, PIOTH, OXAS ZAEGOS, SPIRAE NIGORSUS, ZOR'AGUHASTRA, SOLOMON, BAYAR!”

She didn't feel the same pressure as before. The substance of the near-surface Astral Gulf felt… Thin. Almost as thin as air. The texts had spoken of this, of the influence one's own spiritual strength would have on their ability to move within the astral. Krahe just hadn't experienced it until now. As she moved and got her bearings, Krahe noticed that her astral body, too, had changed somewhat — to her eyes, it was plain as day that she had become more like Favonia, in that her hair and the tendrils wrought of her own shadow reached out towards her surroundings to better sense them and manipulate them. Perhaps this was simply the manner in which a domineering, territorial power of thaumaturgy manifested. How else would she hold a vast mass of energized thauma under her control if her spirit couldn't reach out to grasp it?

That moment of levity didn't last, however. The very nature of her rite was akin to jumping into a lake with leaden weights around one's ankles in the hopes of reaching the bottom as quickly as possible. And so, she sank, drawn downward by the momentum of her rite, death-gripping the guidestone fragment all the way.

The mental experience of following the guidestone’s pull was best compared to interfacing with a data-tomb through a thousand miles of century-old fibre-optic. There was a point at which the landscape blurred into colours, and past that point, colours bled together, but this was beyond velocity and distance. Krahe crossed distances of space and time untold in an instant, yet at the same time, she witnessed countless sights whose bizarrity would have surely drilled into her thoughts had she not seen stranger things spawn from the minds of true digital natives, those children born already plugged in. It almost seemed as if passing in the vicinity of something of any real magnitude slowed her down, the more substantial the point of interest, the greater the slow down.

Shattered thrones hanging in the void, corpses the size of solar systems. A mountain of glass swords which themselves were made of glass swords, towering next to a mountain made of blood and corpses, a sea of salt roiling around them. All of these, she merely glimpsed the after-images of, imprinted into and refracted through the Oculae; never at any point did she truly see any of these things.

No, she didn’t slow down sufficiently and for long enough at any of these points.

It was at an unplanned detour, at a point of turbulence, that Krahe found herself thrashed by such violent astral tides that she was torn out of the current that the guidestone had formed for her. And there, at last, she beheld the cause of that turbulence, and for the first time truly saw something in the astral gulf with her newly-developed faculties, further enhanced by the Oculae.

Two figures, each an infinite distance from her, yet still plainly visible, for space-time was not in the astral gulf as it was upon the surface.

Between the two figures, the larger was an insect-minotaur with the lower body of a mantis, ten black tails like enormous horsehair worms tipped with blades, and the upper body of an evoy war-morph. The creature possessed two sets of four wings wrought of green fire, one set each on its upper, humanoid and lower, mantis-like body. It possessed six arms, two of which were those of a mantis, and four carried scimitars, each with six rings in its spine and with their points split into two, forming forks, and from these forks further jets of green fire poured, extending these weapons twice over.

Instantly, with a single glance, Krahe knew this abomination’s name.

SHAH-SHAYTAN

RAHU NAAMAH AL-VIKSHE

In opposition to Rahu, “below” it, there stood or perhaps floated a shape about half its height and much smaller in total volume. Even so, it burned with its own golden flame of such intensity it almost made Rahu’s green fire seem dim by comparison, or perhaps less concentrated and far less pure, like comparing the blaze of a plasma torch to a pile of burning tires. That shape was unmistakably a work of the Twin Churches, in no small part due to the golden seven-spoked wheel that floated behind it. It was a bulky, mechanical humanoid with an animalistic golden head or perhaps helmet, which had horns pointed forward and diagonally up. The horns bent sharply so as to almost form a circle. Its chest bore another golden face, much larger and resembling a snarling, stern oni, and its legs and forearms had huge, pointed crosses of red crystal, similar to the star on her own ring, only shaped such that one point was much longer, obviously hearkening to the most basic shape formed by the imagery of Zavesh pulling his own ribcage open. The rest of the machine’s armor seemed almost utilitarian by comparison, made up of monolithic black plates and silvery interlocking plates at the joints. The influence of Zor’Aguhastra was plain to see upon it, as countless bright yellow ribbons and wrappings trailed from any and every empty space to be found, swirling in the wake caused by the leisurely spinning of the wheel at its back. Just like with Rahu, simply seeing it for a moment was enough to imbue into her mind knowledge of its identity.

INCURSION ENTITY EXTERMINATION FLEET: AMALEQ

BANISHMENT VEIL OUTER PERIMETER PATROL DETACHMENT: HADRIAN

ZOR’AGUHASTRA ROYAL COURT AND SEVEN SPOKES JOINT DEFENSE FORCE

FIVE OF SEVEN

ULTRA-HEAVYWEIGHT HUMANOID DREADNOUGHT

TALOS LEMURIA AL-AZIF

It bore a halberd in hand, its handle as long as Talos was tall and its blade half that size. Somehow, despite being only a fraction of Rahu's size, it was the Twin Churches machine that clearly had the upper hand, outright overpowering the kenomic monstrosity in direct clashes. Whenever it seemed that the machine might get pushed onto the back foot, the wheel at its back sped up in its rotation ever so slightly, and the balance tipped in its favor once again.

314 - Black Spire Communion Pt.1 [Cherno]

The Sorcerer’s Hand effectively played the role of a substitute in a “rehearsal” of the ritual proper. After imprinting her thauma upon it, she placed it where she would begin, and spurred it into motion by pouring thauma into it. The corpse hand twitched to life, barely managing to stand up on its fingers, and, with some struggle to control this quasi-graftbeast, Krahe went through the motions of the dive ritual using it as a substitute body, muttering the incantation under her breath. The angle-web came alive just as it would normally, albeit to a far lesser intensity, and when the hand reached the ultimate angle, there came a piercing screech and an abrupt outpouring of many-hued, hazy-distorted blackness. The hand was gone, but Krahe could still vaguely sense it; it was a drone with a very weak signal, but a signal nonetheless it had, and so she had to close her eyes and mentally shut herself off from her immediate surroundings to tune into the hand’s senses.

It had no eyes, but she could faintly sense the surrounding astral gulf and “see” through her mind’s eye. Based on nothing more than gut instinct, she guessed the rite had cast the hand particularly deep into the gulf, which was good. Now she just had to reel the hand in to see if anything dangerous would bite. She expected nothing, and received exactly that; a few strange entities passed the hand by on its way to the surface, only whose silhouettes she could make out, but they didn’t approach.

The Sorcerer’s Hand emerged with yet another miniature archon flash, alongside a small puddle of translucent slime. Krahe pulled the artifact from the angle-web using a tar tendril and set it aside. Another check of the angle-web showed no issues, so she moved on, taking the guidestone fragment out of storage as she went over her incantation and mentally prepared herself for the journey. 

“Barzai, return,” she thought. The raven picked an almost-burned piece of meat out of boiling oil with his bare claws, shut off the burner, and made his way to the basement. Meanwhile, Krahe went over the Wizard’s dossier twice more just to ensure she hadn’t missed anything, especially that which pertained to the actual structure of Zor’Aguhastra.

While the structure, shape, and even apparent size of Zor’Aguhastra proper is highly dependent on the diver’s own perception, there are a handful of consistent traits. Firstly, the city is divided into two sections: Above, and below. Above, it consists of “Black Spires.” Below, all is shrouded in “Grey Fog”. In the middle, all is joined by a two-dimensional plane, with intermittent connections between individual spires.

This fundamental structure directly reflects the two rulers, the King of Many Colours and the Shadeless Queen. The “Black” of the “Black Spires” is in truth a conglomerate of countless colours, most of which your mind will not be able to parse, and so they will appear as “iridescent-black.” In the same way, the “Grey” in “Grey Fog” refers to the total absence of any colour. Moreover, regardless of manifestation, the King possesses numerous shadows as if he were lit from many directions at once, while the Queen casts no shadow at all. In this way you can easily distinguish them from any other of the Chained Ones.

It also spoke of an impenetrable defense that swirled about the city and was anchored by eight points, a barrier which had been put in place not by the Chained Ones, but by the hands of a young shrine maiden who had become stuck in the city for a time, and had thus decided to replicate her home, including a copy of her shrine and of the enormous barrier that the original shrine had supported. 

There are few protections in this world or any other that surpass the works of the Demon Shrine Maiden. I consider it fortunate that I have never met her and that her barrier reacts only to existential threats against Zor’Aguhastra, sealing them within its prison-moons to serve as its power sources forevermore.

With Barzai returned to his Eidolon Vault, Krahe took one of the talismans she had prepared specially for this, a long strip that she used to bind the guidestone fragment to her hand, just in case. The idea was to seal the stone to her astral body such that even if she lost grip it wouldn’t have any chance of being lost, as it had to be used in the ritual and couldn’t just be kept in kenoma storage. As she had done in her first endeavor, Krahe raised her left arm and began chanting, stepping onto the angle-web from the Gate of the North. Once more she called upon key-holders and lock-openers, breakers-down of walls and locked gates — the pseudonyms of hackers and jailbreakers — yet she also interjected the names of guides, of those who had reverse-engineered labyrinthine systems and had written extensive guides on how to safely navigate the dataplane to reach its deepest depths. This was the first change in her effort to bend the ritual to better suit her goal of reaching Zor'Aguhastra. The guidestone fragment thrummed in her grasp, and the eldritch scrawl that had crawled upon its surface now crawled from it, spreading over her arm, halting only once it had passed her elbow.

As she reached the South-most Pinnacle, she entered a partial dive. The Astral Gulf flooded in, the world of Man frayed out of awareness, and her angle-web twisted across inconceivable vastness of space, time, and vastest vastness whose ken can never be described by any mortal tongue. Even so, the direction in which it sprawled was unmistakable: “Down.” The guidestone-scrawl rushed out from her arm and spiraled ahead in that “downward” direction, laying out a path that felt at once like a current and a timeline, insofar as a line of text or the timeline of a video recording could be considered one; that was how Krahe parsed it in the moment. In effect, it was a diving shotline.

She briefly shook her head, reminding herself that this was still the middle of the ritual and she was not in full dive yet.

313 - A Chimp With a Gun [Cherno]

Once the Sorcerer’s Hand was done smoking, the hand needed to be left to rest until it stiffened to a stone-like hardness. Krahe took this opportunity to take a break, moving to the  bedroom on the upper floor, as it had the nicest sunlight at this time of day and overlooked a nothing-street without any good sightlines to speak of. She sketched up a few protective talismans, pasted them around, watered the plants, and spent some time rolling cigarettes to refill her stock. With this finished, a freshly-rolled cigarette between her lips, she brought out the Nu-Vasara and took to cleaning it. It felt a bit more like brushing an animal’s teeth than cleaning a gun.

“I wonder. Can you shoot a gun?” she asked Barzai. After all, he could now pull objects out of her Kenoma Pocket if she willed him to do so; actually using that in combat only made sense. A moment later, she amended that thought: “Can you shoot a gun competently?”

The gargoyle tilted back his head to stare at her with one eye as he seemed so fond of doing. The halves of his beak pulled back to reveal his teeth, and he opened his mouth, and the greasy voice of a chainsmoking old man spilled out.

“I see it I hit it, I’m like a nympho chimp hopped up on gas station dick pills and mail-order phenazepam. I was out there putting lead in heads with a strip of leather before y’all even became a type-1 civilization, I’m really in this shit. Make Scanners look like a joke the way I reach out and touch a motherfucker, call me Zeorymer.”

He pointed towards the ceiling, where the desiccated husks of insects littered a spider’s web. With a strobing staccato of his eyes, several bug corpses vanished in a rapid succession of tiny flares.

“Alright,” she said, taking the Nu-Vasara in hand. “You may use it. As for kenoma storage, you may take out and put in things you would reasonably need. That means ammo, lockpicks, et cetera. Anything else, ask first. We’re working with limited capacity here.”

With that, she tossed the gun at Barzai, and he caught it. Krahe had been thinking of the best way to use it ever since Favonia had given it to her, and this was the most logical conclusion. She felt that she didn’t have the mental and sensory bandwidth to effectively use two identical guns, let alone two guns with distinct characteristics and ammunition types, plus Thaumaturgy, Theurgy, Afterburner, Astro-Skimming and Diving, the Forming Toroid, the Crimson Star Ring… Et cetera et cetera. All of the tools in her arsenal were something to keep in mind, each occupying variable degrees of focus at a time, and an extra gun to deal with on a moment-to-moment basis would take up too much mental bandwidth. Theurgy…

“Oh, right. And I’ll occasionally shoot you from now on. When I want to cast the Wandrei Faust or Schwarzfaust through you, I mean. So if I aim at you with that intent, don’t dodge.”

Krahe packed away the gun cleaning tools, newly-rolled cigarettes, writing implements, in short everything she had used in the last not-quite-an-hour, and, as she did this, she closely observed Barzai acquainting himself with the gun as one might a chimp who had just been handed a blister pack of gas station dick pills and a baggie of phenazepam powder. Somewhat surprisingly, Barzai had better gun discipline than some self-professed experts that she had had the displeasure of working with; he racked the slide a few times, pulled out the magazine to reload the ejected shells, and then shoved the gun into his gaped-open beak, swallowing it. She considered whether he had learned proper gun handling from observing her during their time together, but didn’t give it much thought beyond that. She was just glad this choice wouldn’t bite her in the immediate future. With the Sorcerer’s Hand as stiff as if it had just been cut from a statue, she grabbed it and .

With her concentration broken, she realized she was terribly thirsty. She hadn’t drank anything at all since the bitter decoction. In the attempt to clear her throat, the sensation of phlegm in her throat made itself known, and, in the process of trying to cough it up, she realized this would be best done in the bathroom.

Her lungs, being a Dead Man’s Root model graft, wouldn’t suffer any long term damage from smoking, even smoking far heavier than her own.

How it achieved this was the ability to clean itself, either when the user triggered that function or when it was truly unavoidable.

That meant hacking up tarry phlegm every once in a while as the lungs expelled their lining alongside the toxins that couldn’t be filtered out and metabolized.

It was a somewhat disgusting silver lining that, on the way out, this phlegm tasted exactly like the smoke of her cigarettes. She didn’t catch even a whiff of the taste of the Seven-sided Spire Cigar. Besides the fact she hadn’t expected it, it didn’t feel bad. Halfway through she figured out how to make the process work through blowing her nose, and decided it would be easier to just spit it all up instead.

She almost opened the tap to rinse out her mouth, but a thought hit her — couldn’t this be traced back to her? So, she held out her hand and incinerated the blackish-blue jiggling mass until only ashes remained, and only then rinsed her mouth. Still, she was thirsty, and Sorayah’s tapwater tasted bad. Not wanting to go looking for a store in this area, she simply went to Sorayah’s kitchen and made some tea. It was either barley tea or mushroom tea, so barley tea it was. She grimaced when the bitterness hit her. Barzai, having followed her, opened the fridge, which Krahe herself had not dared to do after how long it had been left unattended. Grumbling about mushrooms, he walked to the kitchen’s other door and opened the pantry. A bit of wing-flapping later, and he walked out with a hunk of cured, purplish meat.

Krahe met his eyes, unconsciously taking another sip of the barley tea, and realized that it was one of those drinks. The sort you would never recommend to someone else, because it’s disgusting, but you keep drinking it, even though it’s disgusting.

The eidolon stared up at her, and she stared down at him. This went on for some time. She took another sip. Disgusting.

“You have thumbs. Cook it yourself,” she said. She was fairly sure that it would be fine to eat as it was, but she wouldn’t tell him that. As she made her way to the basement, Barzai fumbled around with the meat and began searching with cooking implements. Even as she prepared the Sorcerer’s Hand for its first use, she passively watched through the eidolon’s eyes, as she always did. Ten minutes of rustling and pan-rattling later, finally there came the sear of meat against oil. Several more minutes of this sound followed, intermittently broken up by the sound of chopsticks on metal and the utterances of various profanities and slurs, half in Barzai’s own croaking and half in a collage of other voices. Krahe was a bit taken aback; not by the slurring, but by the fact she learned a few new ones. She’d thought better of her own vocabulary.

312 - Sorcerer's Hand [Cherno]

"I hope, for your sake, that you didn’t eat all of Calvus’ souldregs,” Krahe thought as she walked, directing it towards Barzai. If the eidolon had indeed devoured them, she would need to source another hand and souldreg pair. Not difficult, but an irritating detour.

“I had a taste. Bland, detached. Accepted his fate without emotion. He had anticipated it far in advance. Half-repentance through acceptance at fate’s end. No true anguish, no flavour,” the eidolon replied in thought-speech. The tone of his thoughts was one of distaste, but it also gave Krahe a window into Calvus’ thought process. In some ways, it wasn’t so different from her own. As bitter as it had been, her death had not been a surprise — the circumstances of it perhaps, but not the method or causality of it. In the same manner, she would not be surprised if she eventually met her end in this world as a result of getting too careless, meeting too strong of an enemy in open combat, or diving too deep in pursuit of greater strength or greater secrets. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It galled her that even one of the four rapists had the presence of mind to come to peace with his own end, though. He, of the four, had the self-awareness to understand his actions and their ramifications and make peace with the consequences, and in some way, that made him even more repulsive than Aldritch, who was more akin to a mutant, a vile creature wrought from broken parts to begin with. Calvus had a foundation of awareness and perspective, and still chose to partake in the gang’s vile activities, time and time again.

Krahe spat into a nearby sewer grate. On the way, she stopped by a butcher shop to purchase a meat-smoking tripod. The apostate evoy proprietor was visibly on-edge the whole time she was there. It was actually impressive that he nonetheless attempted to upsell her on a more expensive model.

Upon reaching Sorayah’s house, Krahe found it untouched. As she approached the door however, she realized it would likely be better going forward to think of this property, and thus refer to it, by its actual address, seeing as it was now her own in every way that mattered. The church knew of it, and nobody had come forward to dispute her claim, even if it would be another few years before the statute of limitations on such a dispute fully elapsed. This was St. Kannan Street, that she knew, but the house number was nowhere to be seen. The plaque turned up inside the door leaned against a wall – it was a brass plate so badly oxidized it looked overgrown with oversaturated lichen, bearing the number 55 and a scratched-out name below it. Of the four holes in its corners, the top two were split and the bottom right corner was missing entirely. After a few moments of consideration, she decided to have it replaced, to help the house better blend into its surroundings. For all she knew Sorayah might have told someone she trusted that her experimentation site was a house with the number plate removed, and even if not, the one house without the plate would stand out. There was also the matter of finishing up the proper warding of this property, but, considering that the basement cell was already sufficiently insulated, she left it for later. Time was precious right now.

She brought out an inert vessel of brass, a sort of miniature cauldron, densely embossed with Zaveshian imagery of the man-god performing the very acts for which the vessel had been created: Anointment, and the preparation of anointing oils and unguents, in the sense of transforming flesh into workable graft material. Tied to it by a red ceremonial cord was a rod of brass the length of her forearm, at once a stirrer and a wand, its handle heavily-adorned while the rest of its length was smooth for practicality’s sake. The Sorcerer’s Hand barely qualified to be described as a grafting anointment ritual, but in Firminus’ eyes it shared the fundamental principles, and so he had given this to her alongside the reagents, and so here she was, teetering on flagrantly misusing an object of religious provenance. Alongside the vessel, she brought out her reagents, then got to work.

After wiping down the vessel’s interior with “holy spirit,” — blessed medical-grade ethanol — she poured in Graft Embalming Fluid #14. It was a slightly viscous and strongly fragrant oil, purplish in colour, and unmistakably the self-same substance that had contributed to the staining of Firminus’ hands not long ago.

Then, came xanthous gum, a bright yellow powder. Shieldback molting bile, from a third molt cycle, also yellow. Unguent of Nug-soth to bind it all into a paste, a small amount of which she spread out in a thin layer in the shape of a circle a little wider than the wrist of Calvus’ severed hand, in order to measure how much to set aside.

The bulk of the paste went into the vessel and dissolved remarkably quickly; she stirred for only a few minutes before it had completely unified with no bubbling or other fanfare. The result was a reeking paste whose invisible fumes stung the eyes, its colour a bright, saturated yellow that somehow held within it a sense of… Not decay, but of the most disgusting forms of transformation, of the leaking of pus, sloughing-off of flesh, the changing of ways and of things in the most drastic and traumatic manners imaginable.

The process of embalming the hand was a touch messy, as she had to remove it from its wet-storage capsule and inject it with the solution, causing a mix of blood and preservative fluid to ooze out of the stump. Afterwards, she sealed the stump with the paste; all said and done, putting the stench aside, the whole preparation stage didn’t take more than fifteen minutes. Next, she rinsed the vessel and piled in her Zkauba Shrub Roots, setting them alight just enough to get them smoldering before she hung the hand over the vessel from the tripod. Krahe passed the four hours drawing talismans, seeing as, on one hand, there wasn’t much that could go wrong with this, but on the other hand, she did need to keep an eye on it.

Pillar Templar [Misc/Zanma:PT][Artwork]

melo-arts

White, the Eater [Misc/Zanma:PT][Artwork]

comm for personal side project

artist herbyfox

Smoke Break [Cherno][Artwork]

comm from kozmos/kozzz_y

311 - Bitter Decoction Pt.2 [Cherno]

Krahe stared into the middle-distance for a moment, steeling herself for the great struggle to come. A few minutes later, with only some grimacing, she had choked down the rest of the decoction and returned to Firminus with the glassware. She immediately rinsed and refilled the glass in the sink, emptying it in the vain attempt to get the decoction’s aftertaste out of her mouth. From behind came a cackle of cruel schadenfreude.

“It will linger for a few hours. Nothing that can be done,” Firminus said from right-behind. He held his hands up, stained deep purple to the wrists. Stepping aside to let him get at the sink, Krahe asked, “How long was I out?”

“Not long, thanks to me — the rite was yesterday,” he said, nodding towards a wall-mounted clock. It read:

11:47

DAYTIME

Self-satisfied, the grafter added, “Without my and the Inquisitor’s aid, you would have likely regained consciousness within two or three days. Another four days before the headaches would have abated, give or take. You’re welcome.”

“The Inquisitor?” Krahe asked. She figured Firminus had dosed her with something to lessen the aftereffects, but she wasn’t sure about what Yazata Heptaxia could do.

“Of course. She sealed your consciousness. No drifting, no risk, no dreams,” he said, gesturing to his forehead. Krahe reached up, and realized a band of Black Binding was still wrapped around it — but the moment she tried to slip her finger beneath it, it crumbled like an old leaf. She ran her fingers through her hair, but found no remnants at all, like the rest of it had disintegrated in an instant.

“Your eidolon. How did it turn out? I am told the ritual was quite a spectacle. It certainly felt the part, as narrow as my frame of reference is,” the grafter changed the topic. Krahe realized then; that’s right, since he was playing the organ during the ritual, with his back turned, he could not very well see it taking place.

“And just how narrow is it?” Krahe asked.

“Two others. One was a patient who showed it to me. The other was a fellow apostle when I was young; I was also the only one qualified to play the ceremonial organ, so I played, just as I did for you,” Firminus answered, continuing to wash his hands. Whatever reagent had dyed them was taking its time coming off. She wondered if there was an actual reason not to use gloves.

“And? My own frame of reference is not precisely wide-spanning, either,” Krahe continued her questioning.

He thought for a few moments. “The first one, a cat, simply grew larger and more ferocious, gained an extra tail and two additional eyes. The second one, a sort of winged serpent, changed altogether into a chimaera — it sprouted spider legs, gained a line of spikes down the full length of its spine, and somehow gained the ability to manifest either large enough to envelop a man or as three smaller copies of itself,” he said, halting every few words. It was obvious to Krahe that he wasn’t making things up, but rather trying to discern what was acceptable for him to disclose. In the process, the stain of his hands finally came off, and as he wiped them, off, he finished his thought: “Based on what I learned, it seems to be the common pattern that, when evolving, eidolons either simply become more of what they already were, or change in a drastic manner. I am not certain what became of the spider-serpent, but the patient with the feline eidolon spoke of the spirit’s growth as if it had become a peer to him in battle, rather than a mere familiar. Whether that applies to your case, well…”

He shrugged, walking back to his previous spot, sorting through several phials of differently-colored oils.

“Did Heptaxia not have anything to say? If anyone, I presume she would point out any serious abnormalities, and if not point out, then at least notice them,” Krahe tried digging in a different direction.

“Oh yes, she made a note. ‘Not particularly abnormal given the circumstances,” I believe is what she said.”

With a mild groan of frustration, Krahe circled back to Firminus’ own experiences: “You’ve seen the two evolved True Eidolons. I can just show you mine and you tell me if it lines up, how’s that?” 

“Do you not know the Speaker of the Lost Sun Society?”

“I am here right now, and unlike the Speaker, I am at least three-quarters certain you won’t leak whatever you learn from me showing you the eidolon.”

“Three-quarters? I thought it would be two-thirds at best,” the grafter said, facetiously. He set down his phial and turned his full attention to her. “Alright, bring out the carrion bird. It still is a raven, isn’t it?”

“More or less. Barzai, come out.”

Once more Krahe’s shadow solidified, and from within its inky black the flame-eyed gargoyle emerged.

Firminus looked down at Barzai, one eyebrow raised. Then, he looked at Krahe, then Barzai, then Krahe again. He shrugged, “I am not sure if this is the answer you had hoped for, but I must agree with Ms. Heptaxia’s assessment. I can at least say the eidolon still matches its owner.”

Krahe sighed, and willed Barzai to return to her. “It was worth a shot. One more thing-” she started.

Firminus interrupted, “-Juno is sitting in on scriptural studies until two. She is in high spirits, if that is what you meant to ask.”

She didn’t even have it in her to call him an asshole, and instead just gave him a dead-eyed stare for a few moments. “Alright, I get it, anointing and reshaping eyeballs must be fiddly work. Which way to the exit?”

“Oh it’s remarkably easy, I simply hate having someone hovering over my shoulder. The door behind me, straight ahead until the stairway.”

To somewhat mild disappointment on her part, once again, Krahe did not find herself being accosted by a convenient target on her way from the Invisible Temple to her office. She did however, ever so briefly, spot a semi-familiar shape across the street, that of a young woman in a dress and bearing two enormous gauntlets.

She well and truly weighed going straight to the Lost Sun Society, but she really, really wasn’t in the mood for it. She already had all the actual material she expected to get from there, and revealing Barzai’s evolution in a semipublic setting would only risk stripping her of the advantage of surprise if an informed enemy came after her, and for what purpose?

No, none of that. The headache was gone and Krahe was fresh from her longest sleep cycle in a while, so right when she arrived at the office, she took to finishing preparations for the Zor’Aguhastra dive ritual. She departed for Sorayah’s house that very evening, tools and reagents in tow, intent on preparing the Sorcerer’s Hand and performing the dive ritual that very night.

310 - Bitter Decoction [Cherno]

A/N: I got stuck on what to do with Barzai's evolution ability-wise. I had the design worked out months in advance but I hadn't settled on the ability changes so I went in circles working up multiple different versions of his evolved powerset before I eventually settled on the current version. There were much more extreme versions where he got way more that I considered.

____________________________________________________

The yellow decoction, astringent and bitter, brought with it a renewed sense of wakefulness, as if it had been prepared specially to wash away the headache and exhaustion that sleep had failed to rectify. Krahe chugged the entirety of the glass, shaking her head afterwards in the vain attempt to shake off the mouth-drying aftertaste.

Swinging her legs off the side of the bed, Krahe noticed that she had been stripped at some point, left wearing only her biosuit leotard and imitation-biosuit thigh-highs. The remainder of her clothing sat folded up, a fair bit cleaner than she remembered it being. Her headache gradually began to return, mere minutes having passed. Without thinking, she closed her hand and flicked one finger in the attempt to summon an arrha cigarette, and realized, for the first time in a while, that she was out. The wound-like grin yawned open, a tar tendril tongue lolling out of it and tauntingly wriggling to-and-fro for the brief moment before she willed it to retract and bring out her cigarette roller instead. It was soon followed by everything else she needed to replenish her supply, medicinal-grade dry arrha and papers. She only took the time to roll up five, lighting one and stowing everything away as she downed another glass of that thoroughly unpleasant decoction. It was almost as if the unpleasantness of its aftertaste was the leverage-point of its medicinal effectiveness.

Smoking and nursing the third glass, not quite yet feeling like enough of a person to make it known she was awake, Krahe sat back down on the bed and summoned her eyebox, setting it to play a melancholic action-drama about a traveling saint, at a very low volume.

With this background noise, the cigarette, the censer, and halfway through the third glass of decoction, finally, it seemed she was managing to medicate herself into a semblance of functionality.

Who knew a perfectly orthodox ritual would inflict such a nasty hangover.

“Alright, come out,” she croaked, pulling up Barzai’s system readout as she willed the eidolon to manifest. The raven didn’t fly out of her stomach, but rather, her shadow darkened, solidified, and from it Barzai emerged, as he had emerged during the ritual from the tar-pool, only without the painstaking struggle this time.

“Too long,” he immediately complained, raising two fingers. “One and a half?”

“Every time you bring it up I will add a day,” she retaliated. The fire-eyed monstrosity of bulging muscle and sinew barely contained by spiked scales and bladed feathers shrank back as if he were a dog that had just been smacked with a broom. The sight alone was comical enough that Krahe had to suppress a chuckle. She decided to let him stew in it for a week or two, or at least until the hunting caravan’s departure.

As she smoked and tried to get the third glass down, Krahe looked over Barzai’s readout. This was less to go over the information within it than it was to check the edits she had made immediately after the ritual but before she had lost consciousness, to make sure she hadn’t filled the readout with nonsense in her, at the time, possibly impaired state of mind.

[TRUE EIDOLON VAULT NO. 1]

[Astral Morphology:]

Variable

Barzai, Raven of Ruinous Eyes

Developed via retroactive cogniphagy of the host upon bonding.

Barzai, Executioner’s Assistant

Developed via cogniphagy of ritual reagents during evolution ritual.

[Morphological Archetype:]

Raven of Ruinous Eyes: Scout/Skirmisher

Executioner’s Assistant: Striker/Scout

[Morphology Special Capabilities:]

Flight

Capable of unassisted flight both through the use of its manifestation’s wings and quasi-theurgies.

Flames of Cthugha: Omen of Ruin

A bright flash of the eidolon’s eyes, followed nearly instantaneously by a high-energy detonation. Arcane.

Flames of Cthugha: Breath of Fire

Variable-intensity, variable-range expulsion of fire or burning tar from the eidolon’s mouth. Energetic.

Winds of Ithaqua: Scouring Gale

Variable-intensity, variable-range expulsion of corrosive black salt from the eidolon’s mouth. Does not fall under any general elemental category. NOTE: “Salt” again.

Winds of Ithaqua: Stymphalos Flights

Hardening of the feathers to permit them to be used as armaments. Can be used as a defensive measure or as melee weapons, most optimally when taking the form of the Executioner’s Assistant. Can also be launched as high-velocity piercing or lacerative projectiles, most effectively when flying in the form of the Raven of Ruinous Eyes.

Corpse Eater

Capable of extracting a corpse’s souldregs, storing them, and regurgitating them in solid form. This ability is substantially more effective if performed as part of consuming the target’s eyes or other ocular organs. Also capable of consuming suitable souldregs to nourish and strengthen itself.

[Eidolon Status:]

Six Maxims Seven Virtues Daemon Core

As a result of boon symbiosis with the boons Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom and Sixfold Astral Implosion Soul Furnace, this eidolon was able to form a stable, permanent Daemon Core and integrate it into its astral morphology during its evolution ritual. Future invocations of High Theurgy: Daemon Core will no longer require a support construct. Manifestation coherence and astral weight class massively increased.

Boon Symbiosis: Deathsmoke Blessing

When manifested as the Raven of Ruinous Eyes, this eidolon is difficult to notice for those not intended to notice it, and may appear as a mundane raven. This symbiosis applies to a lesser extent to the form of the Executioner’s Assistant.

Boon Symbiosis: Phase of Earthen Jade

This eidolon benefits from the reinforcing properties of this boon.

Boon Symbiosis: Kenoma Pocket

This eidolon can be used to freely access the contractor’s Kenoma Pocket storage under its own effort.

Graft Symbiosis: Adamas Organ

Due to possessing a fully integrated Adamas Organ during the eidolon evolution ritual, this eidolon’s durability has been further enhanced.

Fully Nourished

Greater Contract Bond

Once she was certain that she hadn’t butchered the readout with her changes, Krahe took another half hour or so and a few more glasses of decoction before she felt well enough to get dressed and exit her room, with Barzai returned to his vault of course. A third of the pitcher was still left by the time she opened the door and walked out into the hallway. It only took a few moments of wandering before she found Firminus, in the middle of doing something to Aldritch’s eyeballs, presumably to prepare them for grafting. He only graced her with a brief glance up from his work.

“Ah, you are awake. You pushed too hard. Spiritual exhaustion, nothing serious. Finish the decoction and you can be on your way,” Firminus said. He paused for a moment, then added in a much sterner tone: “By finish the decoction, I mean all of it.”

309 - Eidolon Evolution Pt.Final - Executioner's Assistant [Cherno]

A/N: Edited to expand body formation sequence on 26th Aug. 2025

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The diminutive figure of a humanoid raven stood stone-still at the center of the angle-web, meeting its contractor’s gaze with a single eye. To the world, it seemed as if the ritual halted for a mere handful of seconds, enough for perhaps two breaths, only to resume once again with an incomparably greater intensity than before. Out of the angle-web’s lines, a tremendous surge of power poured out, distorting the air and coagulating into the form of jet-black pitch that ran with the consistency of blood, spreading until it completely filled the angle-web’s inner volume. The twisted, dysgenic chimera that Barzai had become melted into the bloody tar, and from the tar arose a shining jewel of reddest red, seething with heat and lashing at the puddle beneath — it was a half-sized apparition of the Daemon Core’s anathemic core. Following in its wake, six rods of black stone also rose, and one of red crystal, imitations of the Atomica and its Six Control Rods, downscaled imitations resembling the originals but not quite matching them. These rods enclosed that core, and tendrils of tar and panels of smoky jade emerged from the tar to enclose the sphere completely. It hovered there, crackling and seething with barely-contained empyrean force.

Painstakingly, with painful struggling and twitching, as if being formed through a series of seizures and heart attacks, another version of Barzai’s crow-man image came crawling from the black, as if clawing its way out of a sinkhole. Barely coherent, the shape lacked a midsection altogether, upper and lower halves joined only by a thrumming tar-tendril in place of a spine, and into the gap gap in its gullet it shoved the apparition of the Daemon Core. The moment the core was in place, hundreds of tendrils rose up from the tar and rushed in to fill in the rest of the gap, sending Barzai stumbling to-and-fro like a man encircled by a firing squad. 

This went on for the span of nine breaths. 

All incoherence, all struggle and painful effort to merely exist washed away in a burst of scarlet light, and Barzai’s new body dropped to the clean stone floor.

It was a muscled shape of raven and man seamlessly twisted together, a hunched over posture belying a shapely, even magnificent anatomy. Feathers and soft down covered half the figure’s shape, this being the sections most clearly belonging to a raven — the back, wings, undersides of the thighs, tail, and head. The remainder of the body was shod with darkly-gleaming scales from whose surface protrudes subtle spikes, akin to those of a desert-dwelling lizard. Bird-like thighs gave way to lithe, yet still powerfully muscular raptor calves and four-toed feet with claws akin to curved knives, whose surfaces shimmered with strange, rune-like patterns, as if an embossed pattern had grown alongside the claw itself. The feathers and scales scarcely covered the work of muscles and tendons beneath; his flight-feathers were a lustrous black, gleaming with shades of green and purple in the light. These luxuriances only formed a more unsettling contrast to the  he empty pits that he had for eyes, within whose depths burned the flames of Cthugha itself, or the razor-teeth within his beak and the muscle that rendered them more than a hollow threat; indeed, his skull was substantially more imposing than of any raven, with prominent bone ridges above the eyesockets and behind the lower jaw, with a beak the shape of a polished warpick, yet one that was supported by muscle suitable for a warhound’s jaws. It was as if the skull of some antediluvian raven ancestor that made its living tearing out the intestines of dying dinosaurs. Threads of smoke arose from each surface of his form, and his scales possessed an oily sheen.

Barzai, now truly transformed, straightened his posture and spread his wings, each as long as he was tall. Despite being a little less than a meter tall, the raven nonetheless possessed an imposing presence.

Krahe, snapping out of her trance, squinted her eyes, observing Barzai’s figure as she tried to recall something. She raised her left hand, performing the Sign of Closing; a gesture formed using the thumb and pinkie together in a ring, using the three middle fingers as a baton, much like the gestures Yazata Heptaxia often used. The Sign of Closing itself was meant to signify the end of a ritual, its motions directly based on the movements of the ritual itself, and therefore based on its angle-web. As she drew out the motion in the air, she invoked, “Oxas Zaegos, Pioth, Amrakas.”

The non-avian aspects of Barzai’s form melted into heavy, black smoke that dispersed rather quickly, only for this substance to be sucked back in to reform a fully animalistic shape. This “raven,” now the size of a harpy eagle, took off, and flew headlong towards its contractor’s midsection, diving into Krahe’s stomach. She knew, logically, that he would simply enter his eidolon vault as he had done many times before, but she nonetheless instinctively wrenched open a wound-like grin down the entire length of her chest, the gaping maw pulling apart her bodysuit and exposing sections of the Liminal Coil, her organs conspicuously absent inside the cavernous gap into which Barzai vanished.

Krahe staggered backwards, once more grasping her stomach as a burning heat spread out through her chest, a discomfort she had come to expect, a common side effect of particularly substantial eidolon evolutions — as common as an exceptional instance of an already uncommon event can be, at least. It wasn’t unexpected, but it wasn’t pleasant, either. As she came to terms with this temporary discomfort, she turned her attention inwards.

Barzai’s system readout had only changed somewhat; it was frankly not very useful, in large part due to the fact Barzai was something altogether different trying to shove itself into the mold of a True Eidolon. From what she had read, the system was supposed to detail the general characteristics and abilities of any given True Eidolon’s manifestation or manifestations.

As of his evolution, the only major change was the addition of a second Astral Morphology and a slight change to the whole category. Not particularly useful, but she couldn’t reasonably expect it to be, after all the system wasn’t built to accommodate a case like this.

Krahe almost wanted to see if she could push her luck a little further by attempting the Zor’Aguhastra dive ritual right here and now while she had access to the ritual chamber, but she thought better of it. The Sorcerer’s Hand would take some time to prepare and the ritual itself would also require preparations. Not only that, the dive ritual wouldn’t particularly benefit from an extremely well-built ritual site such as this one, if anything its very nature might cause the chamber to interfere with it.

As far as she knew, the dive ritual would work regardless of location so long as it was prepared properly, as it was fundamentally just a basic full dive with some additions to allow the guidestone to do all the heavy lifting. There was no need to rush just for the sake of using this ritual chamber, so she decided not to. It was as simple as that.

There was also the small, tiny issue of her rapidly-fading consciousness.

That was the issue with communion of this kind. Preparing the ritual was one thing, as was the strain of carrying it out, but few could withstand without consequences the forceful initiation of an eidolon evolution ritual, followed by spiritual communion, followed once more by the strain of being made to accommodate a burgeoning “eidolon’s” newly-expanded astral body.

It was a small mercy, at least, that it wasn’t painful; Krahe simply felt suddenly overcome with a floaty fatigue, wakefulness slipping between her fingers like jelly, slipping away all the more quickly as she gripped tighter to hold on to it. Along with the fatigue came a sense of distended fullness, altogether forming a sensation akin to an impending food coma.

She awoke in an unfamiliar bed within the Invisible Temple, simultaneously feeling fantastic and fuming with rage. As she shook off the morass of slumber and came to her senses, her right cheek twitched, just below her right eye. The room was fairly small and sparsely decorated, containing a bed, a desk, and some Twin Churches iconography. A censer, a pitcher and glass of yellow herbal decoction, and several miscellaneous ritual implements sat neatly arranged on the bedside table.

“Two months. No meat for two months,” she seethed.

An anguished croak sounded in her head.

308 - Eidolon Evolution Pt.3 - Murderer of Murderers [Cherno]

Yazata’s bindings came undone, and from within fell a formless mass of smoke and tar, and upon its fall it instantly began coalescing, moving along the angle-web in the only direction permitted to it by the ritual — into the Gate of Metamorphosis, along the Initial Angle, towards the dreg-gem of Joseph Ogura. Slowly, it moved, leaving the unguent in its wake lifeless and spent, enveloping the dreg-gems of the four dead men as it moved. Slowly, it grew into the shape of a raven, and then further still, twisting that animal form towards a humanoid direction, legs elongating and bulking up, wings receding towards the back to make room for the arms that burst forth. As this body took form, so too did Barzai’s movement quicken, from crawling to dragging himself along by all fours to stumbling on two feet. Upon arriving at the Ultimate Angle, the center of the angle-web, the humanoid raven turned its head sideways such that one of its eyes met Krahe’s gaze. It was then that the world flickered with the impossible colours of Kenoma, and all things halted.

Krahe found herself here, yet also not here.

The general shape of the ritual chamber remained, but that was all. No pillars, no other people, nothing.

Just a flat outline with the ritual angle-web as the only remnants of reality, and, in Barzai’s place, there stood a featureless table and two chairs. Upon one of the chairs sat a figure of blackest blackness with a luminous band of gold around its neck. For a moment, at least. Like assets loading in, the figure grew more distinct with each passing moment, and so did the furniture, taking on the carved-and-lacquered-wood aesthetic that Krahe had gradually been getting used to as she lived in church safehouses.

The figure took the form of a young, pale-skinned man of indeterminate ethnicity, wearing a dark suit of black pants and a maroon satin shirt. It was in the sharp, overly-clean cut Krahe had come to know as corpo-chic. His hair was tied back into a ponytail, with a texture that produced the illusion of feathers at a glance. His face was sharp, nose was pointy, and he had a golden, shining collar with seven spikes around his neck. His eyes shone red.

The man that Krahe knew to be Barzai looked up at her, and, with a grin of razor teeth, nodded towards the chair opposite himself.

“This is not a normal eidolon evolution ritual,” Krahe stated the obvious, walking towards him. She almost expected this un-place to have similar rules to the Astral Gulf, but it felt no different to physical reality, at least in the superficial sense.

“It is, and it is not. To the outside observer it makes no difference. This-”

Barzai gestured around.

“-is a moment.”

“And that’s not the form of any eidolon,” she deadpanned again, gesturing at him as she sat down.

“In this, the blame lays with you, I am afraid. This face is the meaning of a servant. The manner of my speech, too, is part of that projection,” Barzai said, looking himself up and down. The appearance checked out, though the fact he spoke like a stereotypical butler had more to do with fiction than reality.

“Fine. You say this is a moment. Perceived time dilation isn’t anything new to me, the question is how you’re doing this and why. More importantly, what made you think it was a good idea to force the evolution rather than just, oh, I don’t know, speak up.”

“I would have spoken up were I able, truly, but… The force of stasis that the Seven Spokes System exerts upon an eidolon to keep it stable in such an in-between state is something truly remarkable. To illustrate my point,” he gestured to the collar around his neck, and a muzzle took shape upon his face, and a leash of light extended from the collar, towards Krahe, fading out halfway. After exaggeratedly yanking on the leash for a moment, he dismissed the projection. “As I was, I could pull on the leash and not much else. At this moment, I am completing my evolution, and my manifestation — the me that you understand to be Barzai — is in a state of flux. Through that state of flux, I can momentarily show another facet of myself, one that you would never see under different circumstances. That is all. For this moment, we can speak in this manner. I have done this, knowing that you would lose all trust in me if I forced the evolution without properly explaining myself. Shall I?”

"You're clearly not an eidolon. You can fool the system, but anyone with eyes to see can tell that you are something in the guise of an eidolon. What are you really?" Krahe questioned.

Barzai smiled, clearly having expected that question.

“I am that I am. Forever repeating. A new face. A new form. The same old me. I am that I am. No matter the contractor, no matter the form I take for them, I am always the same at my core. I sup upon the anguish of sinners brought to justice, for it is to I as ambrosia is to the gods of Olympus. Nothing more. Nothing less. I am the raven that pecks out the eyes of a hanged murderer. I am the hound lapping up the blood of a beheaded tyrant. I do not grow, I do not wither, I do not die, I do not live; from whence I have come, so too shall I there return. I am not an eidolon, I am not an Outer God, I am none of the things to which the tongues of those who dwell in light or the astral twilight have given a name. In the next life, perhaps we will reunite, god-eater, you who have consigned yourself to the eternal pilgrimage, perhaps not, it makes no difference to either of us. Know this, my master: I have chosen to wear the Collar-With-Seven-Spikes and to place the leash in your hands. As any loyal hound, I would not pull the leash without good reason. Know that I am not capable of even attempting to harm the one with whom I am contracted, lest the Wheel cast me out of this world and never allow me back in. Speak the word, and I will don a hundred more chains — but you must speak now, for only now do I possess the power to change myself in this way. Trust in me, or do not. The choice is yours, contractor. It makes no great difference to me, for I know that I will eat my fill either way. After all, to whom else ought I flock than the murderer of murderers?”

“I take it that you either can’t or won’t act outside the system’s rules, then, by, for instance, jumping yourself to a level of power wildly disproportionate even for an evolved True Eidolon.”

“Correct. I am neither able, nor willing to do such a thing.”

“Communication, then. Absolute communication. No more incidents like this one.”

Barzai thought for a few moments.

“It can be arranged,” he eventually nodded. “The leverage-point is to be a high degree of cognitive strain in order to facilitate such communication, that is to say mental effort.”

Their surroundings shuddered, and Krahe began hearing Firminus’ organ music once more, albeit faintly. 

“Our time is up.”

307 - Eidolon Evolution Pt.2 [Cherno]

A/N: This one is a bit shorter. Next one is a significant bit longer.

_______________________________________________________________

Krahe’s anger didn’t abate; that she understood why Barzai had done what he had done didn’t change anything. She resolved to punish the demonic bird by refusing him any meat for a month. The mere thought of this was enough to cause the ball of Black Bindings containing the spirit to writhe and to emit anguished cawing. Juno and the Red Hood guarding her remained where they stood, observing, the girl obviously trying not to draw attention to herself despite the fact she was the reason they were all here today.

Hair floating, eyes glowing, unearthly tones ringing from the Black Trapezohedron, Yazata glared Krahe’s way, not in anger, but in effort, warning: “This will work once, and only once. You have twelve minutes, fifty-seven seconds. Fifty-six…”

Krahe wasted no time in pulling her supplies out of storage. The Unguent of Nug-soth, the relevant talismans, and the papers for those she had not drawn yet. She began with drawing out the angle-web’s framework, and found the ritual chamber answering her every need. In place of the talismans she would have needed to put in place, the ground shifted. Relics and statues rose in their place, each exuding such a pluripotent form of its arcane energy that it felt almost pointless to attempt recreation through mere ink and paper.

Of course the churches would have such resources — an obscure ritual was one thing, but this was eidolon evolution. The fundamentals of the rite weren’t obscure and unknown. Sure, the angle-web she was using wasn’t widely known, but it made use of the same principles as its common counterparts.

Technically, an eidolon evolution could just be allowed to take place on its own and cause no issues, but this was true in the same way as the statement that one could go fishing with no bait and still catch something. The purpose of the ritual was to better contain the energies involved and steer the process, and even a half-baked ritual would consistently result in an overwhelmingly superior result. The problem that arose, then, was that Krahe had not actually finished the ritual, meaning she would have to just make up the rest of it on the spot. If nothing else, at least she had the Six Maxims to draw upon.

“Three Virtues, Five Bindings, Seven Vertebral Truths…”

The angle-web continued to take shape, and with it, the ritual chamber shifted further and further. Krahe had never intended to push Barzai towards a great change, but to reinforce the form he had already taken, the most orthodox of approaches to eidolon evolution. The definition of that form was not necessarily that of a bird, but a form capable of flight, remote observation, and skirmish combat. Krahe added precisely one thing: The ability to manipulate tools as a human does. As she worked, she scattered the four souldreg-gems across the angle-web’s most vital points, and automata-statues arose to take hold of them. The most important, difficult, and time-consuming aspect of the ritual preparations came next: It was the blending of Semzar’s souldregs with the Unguent of Nug-soth, a substantial quantity of Krahe’s own blood, and, as a result of a gut-call, the dust of Aldritch, Ogura, Radanov, and Hegio. The ritual chamber provided a basin for the purpose, one that was mechanized and integrated with a cognition engine and a keyboard. She merely had to type in “unguent medium” and was instantly met with a variety of choices, all of such a high grade that she had only ever read about them — despite her attempts to source them, and despite the fact she could get the money together, most merchants simply didn’t carry these particular unguent-mediums. A few keystrokes and the basin filled itself with exactly as much medium as she needed.

It only took a few moments of bubbling as the basin’s auto-stirrer incorporated all the ingredients. The resulting compound unguent had a colour darker than blood and was streaked through with shades of abyssal blue. Its quantity seemed excessive, and yet, as she painted the angle-web, it became increasingly more evident that she had exactly as much as she needed to complete it. Krahe finished the angle-web with one minute and forty-three seconds to spare.

Only the ritual proper was left. Normally, a dagger or sword would be used as the ritual implement, representing power, but a gun was also suitable, and the ritual implement’s durability mattered the most above all other characteristics — it had to be an item that could withstand the energies of the ritual. Therefore, Krahe’s Pattner was the best for this purpose.

With gun in hand, she walked through the angle-web, reciting an incantation:

“There is naught to be said that has not already been said, there is naught to be changed that has not already been changed, we shall continue along our chosen bearing until the end of all ends, om Igaria sowaka. I am the Lord of Spirits, Oridimbai, Sonadir, Episghes. I am Ubaste, Ptho born of Binui Sphe, Phas. I am the name of Aue-bothia-bathaba-itho-behostra, I am the sun in the yawning abyss, I am the sight of the blinded eye, I am the small that slaughters the immense and the torch-bearer who walks amid a myriad dark ones, I am all that has been and shall be, all that has not been and all that cannot be. Come unto me, o spirit, reveal thyself and become the hand of my spirit, make of yourself that which you ought to be, make thyself known, follow the path laid out for you, and render unto me thy apotheosis, o servant!”

306 - Eidolon Evolution Pt.1 [Cherno]

A sudden churning and writhing came over her. It was no pain — pain would’ve been easy, a momentary disruption that she could fight head-on with sheer force of will, but this was different. This discomfort was altogether more insidious than mere pain. It was a churning and shuddering comparable only to the transcendental agony she had experienced at Mirzaii 2, when she had attempted to skim with the then-nascent Atomica in hand.

A voiceless thought forced itself into Krahe’s mind, and she felt her attention dragged inward, towards Barzai’s Eidolon Vault.

“THE TIME HAS COME.”

There, the creature pretending to be an eidolon resided, still as formless as before, only… Smoldering, for lack of a better term. A singular point of scarlet glow in the midst of its smoky mass, and it pivoted to meet her mind’s eye.

“You petulant bastard, now? Can you not wait?!” she spat inwardly.

At the same time, the system blared an alert, as if she didn’t know already.

!!!EIDOLON EVOLUTION SELF-INITIATION DETECTED!!!

“There will come no better time and no better place. This will appear as though any other eidolon evolution,” Barzai argued, continuing to writhe. Krahe felt a mounting pressure in her stomach, as though Barzai was attempting to manifest of his own volition, but she simply refused to permit it.

“That doesn’t matter. Did you think I wouldn’t punish you for a stunt like this?! I’ll trade you to the Chained Ones, what good is an eidolon that acts out like some fucking demon?!”

While Krahe was busy mentally scolding Barzai, her shadow stretched from her feet, as if an intense light had suddenly been ignited behind her, and if that light source was slowly being lowered. The shadow’s silhouette flickered and wavered, growing darker and deeper, solidifying; a raven’s wings burst from its sides, and the silhouette of Krahe’s head twisted into the side-on view of a raven’s head, beak open, and somehow, a point of luminous red took form within the black.

Then, from the shadow’s mouth, as Krahe got her bearings, a distorted voice spoke — it spoke aloud, not merely in thought. It was not the voice of a raven or any other bird, but another voice the eidolon had once used, the fried baritone of a man who shouted too much, further distorted in the manner of a voice synthesizer using a too-small vocal sample to imitate someone.

“Hiding every little thing, at all times, for what purpose?! We both know there will come no better time, not better place to conduct this, my becoming! We must do it HERE and NOW, else we shall come to dearly regret our overcaution!”

Near the end, Barzai’s voice grew frantic, clearly trying to speak fast enough to get out all it wanted to say before Krahe choked it — which is just what she was doing. Before he had even finished his first sentence, his questioning of her methods, she had already turned inward and wrapped her soul’s grasp around the mostly-formless tenebrous mass that was Barzai. With each passing moment, she was enveloping him, just as she enveloped him in his anathema-core state when preparing to use the Daemon Core, only this time, there would be no gaps. Krahe intended to suppress the eidolon to the utmost extent.

“I speak no lie. I acted knowing that the master would forgo this opportunity! Knowing that you would excoriate me in anger, still I acted! What is done is done, we have revealed ourselves, so let us benefit from it!” the eidolon argued his case.

“Blackhand. Blackhand!” Firminus clapped his hands in front of Krahe’s face, dragging her into the here-and-now. “Your eidolon is trying to initiate evolution prematurely, is it not? Use this ritual chamber. We’ll help you suppress it for now, make whatever preparations you must.”

At that moment, she knew that Firminus knew Barzai was no ordinary True Eidolon, and that he had likely known for some time. She could see it in his eyes. It was not simply because Barzai had acted out — an eidolon was “already evolving” the moment it entered the dormant state, meaning that even an entirely normal eidolon could forcibly initiate evolution the moment its criteria had been met. Behind him, some fifteen meters away, Yazata Heptaxia had already unraveled several Black Bindings and was staring at Krahe with four pairs of eyes, three of which were in her hair. The witch-inquisitor gave a shallow nod as their gazes met, and Krahe knew… At least that Yazata would help. Krahe knew enough about Yazata’s character to be sure that if she was going to do or say something about Barzai, she would have done it already.

Despite her instinct to keep everything about Barzai to herself and to handle everything to do with him on her own, she had no choice. So, she released her grasp on the eidolon. She was certain she could maintain her stranglehold on him for quite some time, but doing so demanded a significant slice of her focus — a significant-enough one that she wouldn’t have been able to make the ritual preparations while also suppressing Barzai. She realized that, no matter how she went about it, she would have needed some kind of external assistance.

At that moment, right when she loosened her grasp of the writhing, semi-incoherent eidolon, her shadow once more transformed into the image of a humanoid raven, and once more began speaking. Firminus swiftly made his way back to the pipe-organ and began playing once more, a different melody this time, ominous and impending.

It was then that Yazata’s Black Bindings wrapped around Krahe’s shadow, and with a wrenching, pulling sensation, the witch tore it clean off. Krahe almost fell to her knees at the abrupt sense of relief, while Yazata forced Krahe’s shadow, and with it, Barzai, into a ball about the size of a human head. Slowly, it floated towards the center of the chamber, into the middle between the dust-piles that had become of the four condemned. In spite of this, and to Yazata’s visible surprise, Barzai spoke again.

“If that is how it must be, then punish this one, chain and grind this one! That is how a sword is honed, how a spear to pierce the hide of any dragon is wrought! This one will be Gungnir-Laevateinn, this one will be Excalibur, this one will be Muninn and Yatagarasu, this one will take one-hundred and eight shapes, but this one will not hide in fear of the master’s allies!”

305 - Execution Day Pt.3 [Cherno]

“Oh, Black Trapezohedron, sound forth from the spires of Zor’Aguhastra…” Yazata invoked.

Slowly, the sense of the sublime that already filled the chamber began to grow. The sound of machinery intensified, and one after the next, seven pillars rose up from the floor, each depicting a different saint, eyes ablaze — these were not statues, but automata, so lifelike that, without the gleam of metal, one might mistake them for a living person. Each pillar-saint performed a different hand-sign, and with each sign, increasingly stronger waves of numinous pressure descended. Yazata spoke, but not in the language of man. She spoke four Words, just as she had done during the raid on Mirzaii 2. Then, she had made the ritual work by any means at hand, using six Red Hoods as stand-ins and even hijacking the Soul Furnaces of captured enemies. By comparison, under these conditions, in this ritual chamber, being facilitated under her role as executioner, things were completely different. Still, she had to make considerations — Juno Oldfield couldn’t be safely included in the ritual, but that meant she wouldn’t receive the protections that being part of the ritual afforded, so Yazata’s choices for how to carry out the execution had been severely limited. There was one choice, however, one that Yazata would not even consider were it not for Juno’s visored state — a state that meant she could see without seeing.

Even so, the Witch cackled to herself as she drew occult symbols between Words using the Black Trapezohedron. Heat-haze distortion bled upwards from the weapon, and with each symbol drawn, the surroundings themselves grew increasingly more distorted. Blackhand glanced left and right, for she knew this. To her, it felt almost as if the entire ritual chamber was being drawn into the Astral Gulf, with some marked differences from an actual dive — no transition into an astral form, no loss of ability to breathe, no singing.

At least, not until it started.

There came a ceaseless, distant sound of unearthly tones, at once dissonant yet so beautiful it seemed to mutually magnify with the sound of the Twin Churches’ pipe organ. Blackhand only ever-so-faintly felt a familiarity. It was similar to Bulgarian choir, insofar the sun was similar to a candle. The incomprehensible magnitude of that distant singing from the deep simply could not be described within ten thousand words, let alone a few dozen. An indistinct shape seemed to coalesce, a figure only vaguely outlined by distortion. The only concrete aspect of its manifestation was the robed garment which it wore, betraying the presence of six arms, a humanoid torso, and a single head. Its robe wasn’t colorless, yet it didn’t have a particular color either; it was as if the robe itself was a window into the abyss, billowing to and fro in nonexistent currents.

Three others followed in the shape’s wake, each outlined by a garment in the same manner. The second robe was tattered, and only had the hole for a head. The third had two head-holes and eight small arm-holes. The fourth wasn’t clad in a robe at all, but instead was wrapped by bright, mustard-yellow wrappings that trailed from its limbs and back, somehow managing to imitate the basic shape of a shrine maiden’s garments in the process — thus, one could discern that the wrapped figure had a mostly-human, feminine shape, the main aberrations being that it was “stretched out,” and had a head covered entirely by mouths.

HIGH THAUMATURGY 

SIGN OF BLACK SPIRE COMMUNION

WITCHCRAFT HEPTAGRAM: XANTHOUS KING’S TRIBUNAL

“In accordance with the Third Tower’s ancient accords, heed my shining words, o children of those chained in Zor’Aguhastra! Come forth, come forth and carry out this sacred decree!” the witch-inquisitor invoked, casting the scroll forward such that its full length sprawled out, hanging nearly to the floor. Indeed, the scroll’s contents far surpassed what she had read aloud; Neocalbian writing gave way to esoteric symbols that thrummed and crawled over the vellum. None besides Yazata could read the symbols, just like those upon her Black Bindings, but all who looked upon it instantly knew the meaning it contained.

The four shapes each moved in a similar manner, with the wrapped one showing that it was a shallow bow.

Then, they feasted.

That was the only way it could be described.

These beings, who had traversed the Astral Gulf to answer the inquisitor’s call, instantaneously darted across the ritual circle and set upon the condemned men. There was no gore, nor the tearing-off of limbs — the men were hefted into the air as if they were ragdolls, and the four beings dragged them into the middle of the circle, each facing a different cardinal direction. The first among the summoned, the four-armed being of many-and-none colours, grasped Aldritch by the head. The second simply made Ogura float, while the third grabbed Youssef by the limbs, and the fourth bound Hegio in its wrappings. Within moments after this took place, the colour drained from the men, their skin grew pallid and laden with cracks like the parched surface of a desert, and tears of blood ran from their eyes, and this blood was soon replaced by black, boiling pitch, rendering Aldritch’s eye-sockets into bubbling cauldrons. This process, somehow, proceeded for over a minute, and by the end, what was left of the condemned was better-described as mummies than corpses. By the time it was over, each of the beings gave a simple push, and a vague, luminous silhouette emerged from the corpse, briefly darting in a straight line before disappearing. The summoned beings once more bowed. For a moment, Blackhand felt something unsettling, and she was certain that the wrapped one had turned its head to look directly at her.

However, the ritual ended before she could become certain. Yazata raised her hand in gesture and struck the Black Trapezohedron against her leg. The sense of something immense washed over all those present, and the world snapped back. There were no robed shapes, and the bindings by which Yazata had connected herself to the ritual’s participants simply retracted back up her sleeve. The only evidence left of the rite were the four mummies, still floating in mid-air, crumbling away into piles of dust on the ground.

Abruptly, they collapsed all at once, with each mummy leaving behind a small, iridescent jewel within its dust-pile. Each had different colours, but there was no consistent pattern.

A sense of finality began to settle over the procession as the organ music wound down and eventually stopped, Firminus walking out from behind the statues, stretching his hands. 

At least, until Blackhand doubled over, clutching at her stomach.

304 - Execution Day Pt.2 [Cherno]

Yazata paused for a moment, waiting for something. That something was the arrival of three further individuals, through a heretofore concealed side door — two of which the four men recognized. The first was none other than the madwoman who had assaulted and captured them. The second was their victim, astride automaton legs that were a bit too long for her, her body concealed by a coat hung loosely about her shoulders. The madwoman, Blackhand, carried in her hands a box of dark, lacquered wood, bearing a symbol of Zavesh the Three-hearted upon its lid in brass inlay. This one, rather than pulling his chest open, showed Zavesh holding a golden heart in one hand and a short dagger in the other. Among the four dead men, none could get a good look at her face — somehow, Blackhand’s glasses seemed to always reflect the light exactly into the observer’s eyes after just a brief glance. The third individual wasn’t a person. It was an unsettling figure, the shape of a young maiden rendered in silver metal, draped with maroon cloth. The face under that red hood was perfect, but motionless. The Red Hood, as ever, followed in silence and moved with unsettling grace.

The inquisitor, then, proceeded, while the two women approached. Was the organ growing louder? Aldritch and Hegio both asked themselves this question. One thing was undeniable; the music was definitely becoming faster, rising towards a crescendo as the Inquisitor continued reading.

“In addition to these charges, Aldritch Herebor is hereby condemned to blinding by the hand of Juno Oldfield prior to execution, so that your eyes may replace the light which you took from her, as is her right. In the same manner, Hegio Calvus is hereby condemned to the severing of the left hand above the wrist.”

“You lie! You speak of mercy, yet condemn me to this needless cruelty?! I know well enough that flesh forcefully taken can never-” Aldritch began to scream, only to fall silent at the sight of Juno, or rather, at the sight of his arm, attached to Juno.

Somewhat surprisingly, Aldritch didn’t resume his screaming. In fact, he did nothing, it seemed that this sight had pushed him over the edge, and he simply fell silent, staring in bewildered disbelief.

The screaming didn’t return even when the two women stopped in front of him and Blackhand opened the box, revealing its contents to be things that Aldritch was familiar with, at least enough to know what they were: Two graft-stock wet-storage capsules, a small syringe with a dull tip, and an ocular extractor, a type designed to seamlessly sever the eye from the ocular nerve. It was a metal apparatus with a bulb of countless petals, a handful of which were bladed so as to sever the optic nerve as close to the eyeball as possible.

As the pipe organ reached its crescendo, Juno took the syringe, and walked towards Aldritch. The man just stared, trailing the hand that had once been his as it approached. He couldn’t move from where he knelt — in fact, he couldn’t even consider moving, so tight a grip the witch-inquisitor’s curse had on him. Perhaps because he had come to expect the pain of being punished by a curse, he didn’t notice the lurid blackness beneath his skin writhing and flaring magenta at the inquisitor’s wordless command.

Juno grasped Aldritch’s chin in her right hand, tilting his head back as one might do in order to re-pose a life-sized doll. She administered three drops of the syringe’s contents, a yellowish solution, into each of his eyes. Almost instantly, they took on a glassy appearance, stiffening in their sockets, even bulging out a bit. The ocular extractor followed, and slowly, the girl brought it down on him, craning her neck such that, were she not visored, one could be certain she was squinting in effort.

What could be done within thirty seconds instead took an excruciating, exacting several minutes due to the limitations of Juno’s visor. Throughout the whole process, Aldritch didn’t so much as make a sound or twitch. The extractor’s blades were so sharp that one could only notice they were cutting when the light went out of his eyes.

And, just like the glass eyes of a doll, so too did Aldritch’s eyes come out nearly exactly spherical, floating down into their waiting capsule with the thinnest trails of crimson. With that, Blackhand closed the box and handed it off to the Red Hood. Aldritch was left kneeling in that exact pose, rivulets of blood and tears trailing down the sides of his face and mouth agape in a wordless scream.

Blackhand, then, approached Hegio Calvus. He, who, among the four, bore no black halo, had the dubious mercy of retaining enough control over his body to crane his head and stare up at the monstrous woman, not with hate or defiance, but simple resignation.

“I shall now conduct the ritual execution,” Yazata said. She drew her bar-mace, the Black Trapezohedron, and struck it against her leg. Its unsettling resonance joined with the organ, and, from the sleeve of her left hand, two further Black Bindings emerged. One circled the statue of Igaria, joining with the unseen organ-player, and the other wrapped around the left wrist of Blackhand. A pulse of magenta light ran down the lengths of her bindings, bidding all those joined with them to move into position — those bound by their hands as a simple impulse, those bound by their foreheads as an irresistible command. The seven involved in the ritual moved to form a heptagram centered on the statues of Zavesh and Igaria, and therefore the organ-player. Yazata stood to the right of this twin monument, while Blackhand stood to the left, with the four dead men filling the remaining positions.

Juno, guarded closely by the Red Hood, retreated slightly further so as to stand clear of the ritual circle, also to the left of the statues. It was at this point that Juno noticed the organ-player was none other than Firminus.

303 - Execution Day [Cherno]

The ground shuddered with the whirring and thumping of distant machinery. 

Two kinds of incense hung heavy in the air; a bluish haze just above head-height, and a greyish one at the floor.

Four prisoners waited in their cells. Even these cells were suffused with incense, piped in through the vents, lest the prisoners try to hang themselves on the censer-chains or eat the burning coals. They were dead men, that was beyond all doubt, but their deaths were neither theirs to decide nor to carry out.

Metal on metal approached. Two of them shrank back in their cells, each bearing a black halo around his forehead. One didn’t, because he had dissociated entirely, believing that if he delved deeply enough into delusion his punishment would pass him by just as the hours did, or that he would simply drop dead when one of his grafts’ signal failed to reach his benefactor. He, too, possessed a black halo, one that extended downward and swirled across his face and down his neck, his skin bulging and peeling at the edges as the curse writhed beneath it. The last one bore no such thing, and he didn’t shrink back because he had made no attempt to deceive the witch-inquisitor or to withhold anything he knew, and so had not tasted the bite of her curses.

One by one, their cells opened. One by one, they were led out like animals, each having his forehead and wrists bound by black wrappings that thrummed with lilac magic, tethered to the slim wrists of the owl-faced woman with eyes in her hair, Yazata Heptaxia. Each, except for Aldritch — for he had no wrists to bind. He had no arms at all, and so only his head was bound.

She led them through the Audunpoint Inquisitorial Office, its walls black stone dark and foreboding, its shuttered windows letting in only thin rays of false, sodium-yellow “sunlight.” From all around, from the walls and ceilings and even the floors, there gazed the countenances of long-forgotten figures both real and mythical, for this was not a building of the Twin Churches’ making. This was an ancient temple that had stood here, in this place, since times immemorial, and which would stand here for millennia to come. It had merely been eviscerated and reanimated by the Twin Churches for their own purposes.

This was the Second Auxiliary Temple of Audunpoint, concealed wholly from sight within the north-west of the city. To the eyes of all those without the permission to see, this compound didn’t exist, for on the surface it was a tangle of various church-affiliated facilities and seemingly secular buildings, joined to the temple proper by subterranean tunnels. A city within the city, inhabited entirely by over three thousand Twin Churches personnel. 

It was within this “Invisible Temple” that the Audunpoint Inquisitorial Office had been established for the duration of Yazata Heptaxia’s stay.

And it would be within the Inquisitorial Office that the execution of Aldritch Herebor, Joseph Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus would be carried out.

Slowly, the thumping and whirring of machinery grew louder, and Yazata’s metallic footfalls synchronized in perfect lockstep to that noise. The foreboding sound of the pipe organ soon reached them, too, rising in volume. Hegio Calvus stumbled and fell, but Yazata continued, dragging him behind her for half a minute before she yanked on the bindings in her hand, dragging him to his feet by his wrists and jerking the others forward.

Eventually, they reached a particular chamber, one deep within the compound, one among the few built from naught solely for its purpose. Its floor and walls were bare to the naked eye, concealing myriad hidden implements; this chamber, among a handful of others, concealed enough machinery behind its walls, beneath its floor, and within its ceiling, that it would suffice to equip three dozen grafting clinics or mechanic’s workshops. Overseeing it all from above, there loomed the brass upper half of Zavesh the Grafter, majestic hair trailing down to the floor like a metal waterfall, arms held in the usual elbows-out gesture of wrenching open his own chest cavity with his bare hands. In front of him stood the figure of Igaria, clad in a flowing, hooded robe and with no distinguishable facial features. She stood atop a seven-spoked wheel in the Inner Wheel Configuration, with the spokes jutting like rays of light out of a smaller inner wheel, with seven distinct figures hefting each spoke. All the detail was of course lost to the eyes of the four who were being brought to their deaths, the only thing any of them took note of was the statues’ imposing stature and the undeniable, almost oppressive aura of the sublime that flooded the room even more densely than the incense smoke, smoke which somehow didn’t seem to stain anything.

The music, then, revealed itself to originate from what one would expect, this being a pipe organ just behind the statue of Igaria, its mechanisms threaded seamlessly into Zavesh’s hair, using the statue as an enormous resonator. One could feel each tone reverberating in one’s bones, and the playing produced an impenetrable illusion of the Zavesh statue’s three golden hearts beating.

Yazata, giving the four no time to settle, dragged them from the entrance to the middle of the chamber, in front of the statue of Igaria. She made them line up side by side, and, drawing out a heavy scroll, she unfurled it and began to read.

“Those hereby condemned: Aldritch Herebor, Joseph Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus, shall be put to death. No final rites shall be given, for the method of their execution is in itself the most final of rites. The hereby condemned are to be subject to the Astral Body Ablation, by which their souls shall be stripped clean and cast unto Kenoma to reincarnate in any world other than this one, each upon a distinct bearing such that they may never reunite even by sheer chance. The only remnants of the hereby condemned’s Astral Bodies are to be souldregs, to be recorded and subsequently annihilated by the True Eidolon Barzai. Consider this our final mercy, for there are far worse fates than this. Be cleansed from our world, and stain not another.”

302 - Henshin; Metamorphosis Pt.2 [Cherno]

Krahe wasn’t sure what to say to that. On one hand, the statement itself, “Weakness is a sin,” sounded idiotic to the utmost extent, it was the sort of thing she expected to hear as a non-justification from some dehumanized psycho before turning them into a greasy stain. But the sentiment behind the words, as hyperbolic as they were, truly wasn’t wrong.

“That’s the worst way of saying something true I have ever come across,” Krahe eventually said. At the same time, she couldn’t dismiss those words. After a few moments formulating the thought, she added, “The measure of personal strength one ought to possess depends entirely on the dangers one can reasonably be expected to encounter. A gun and a fistful of reapers would’ve been enough for you. The part that so many so often forget is the willingness and ability to do what needs to be done. A lion who has lived a life of constant combat and is thus ready to kill at any moment, will defeat a tiger who has done nothing but wander his territory devouring creatures far smaller and weaker than itself.”

She briefly considered whether to say the next part, whether it would be too harsh, whether she ought to reconsider, to use a different example, but in the end, she decided it would be best to put it plainly.

“Had they been ready for me, Aldritch and the others would’ve had a real chance to drive me off or even kill me, but they weren’t, just like you weren’t ready for them.”

Juno chuckled. “But my power, I need more power! Weakness is a sin! Morality is a lie!” the girl mocked, then performed a dismissive wanking gesture with her free hand, a mocking grin on her face. Her new teeth were pointy. Why were her teeth pointy? Not fully beartrap, but much pointier than they ought to be. Juno ate another piece of pie, and let out a contented sigh.

“I get it, I’m not delusional, though I’m sure the more I say that the less you’ll believe me. It’s hard to believe that someone who went through what I went through could be in their right mind so soon after it happened. I don’t feel entirely right of mind, either. But if the way I’m coping is madness and sanity is becoming a shivering vessel for trauma, then I’d rather be mad,” she said. There was a change, in both her voice and her expression, or what Krahe could see of it. She knew it well, she’d seen it upon the faces of others and had worn it herself. A strain to the way she spoke, a flickering fluctuation, an indefinable madness seeping through. It wasn’t the conventional insanity, the sort that would land one in a straightjacket, but the madness that drove one to unravel their entire life and rewind it around a singular lynchpin. Of course Krahe knew it well, how could she not?

“I can believe that you’re no less sane than me. But, let’s say it’s a few months from now. Aldritch, Ogura, Radanov, Calvus, and the Helmeted Man are all dead. No strings. Vengeance fulfilled. What then? It’s fine if you can’t give an answer, but really think about it. The point I’m trying to make — there is nothing wrong with vengeance, but there must be an after. There’s no point to killing those who have wronged you if they continue to control your life afterwards,” Krahe said. It wasn’t lost on her that it could be seen as hypocritical, but she didn’t consider her crusade in this world to be a continuation of her vengeance against Whitestone. And regardless, she of all people was aware that she often didn’t live up to her own ideals.

Juno seemed to really take the question to heart, because she fell silent. Thirteen minutes passed by in silence as the girl thought, and a full one-third of the ekarone pie was gone by the time she spoke, somewhat uncertainly.

“Hard to say. Contractor work, probably. At least for a few years. Something tells me those four won’t be enough to sate me, and I figure I should do my part making sure others don’t end up like I did. After that, I’m not sure. Grafting, maybe? Could learn on myself while I work as a contractor, who knows. I’m sure I’ll have it easier than most if I can just use myself as a test subject with no risk of rejection. That’s why I asked for Aldritch’s arm. I know that you can’t just use an arm you tear off of someone for a graft, but I can. That’s why you’re so concerned, isn’t it? You don’t want to risk me becoming a serial killer or getting snatched and used as a test subject. Or both, I guess.”

“Firminus,” Krahe said, holding Juno’s gaze. Well, as close to it as she could — she stared at the expressionless visor. As she did this, she retracted her Tar tendril, placed the dagger it was holding into her Kenoma Pocket, and began opening a maw leading to her Kenoma Sack.

“Yes?” the grafter responded, exasperation in his voice.

“A moment,” she said. Not long after, Shiva’s Warding Chain emerged from the palm of her hand, gripped by another tendril, and she handed it to the grafter. “Is it safe?”

“For implantation? It’s just a modified first-order key, there is no danger,” he said without even touching it. He could tell just from a glance. She didn’t expect him to need more than that, this was just a gesture to give him the chance to make known any misgivings he might have about what she was doing.

“Good,” Krahe nodded, satisfied, and whipped the tendril around towards Juno. It took the girl a few moments to properly see the voidkey, but when she did, she thankfully took it from Krahe.

“Replace it if you get a better one. Just be careful about keys rated Third-order and higher. As for the execution…”

“Can we do it tomorrow? I really would prefer to do it sooner rather than later,” Juno interrupted.

“Can we, Firminus?” Krahe asked.

After some consideration and hesitation, just a touch of hemming and hawming, the grafter acquiesced.

“I believe it can be arranged. I will send word to the Audunpoint Inquisitorial Office.”