Chapter 380 - And Are Forever Changed

Alright! I have the title for 381 ready, but... gonna hold off. Back to editing. Like thirty more chapters to go, at least, before Book One is done. Still! Not a terrible place to end on for a couple days! See you guys again soon for more updates, and enjoy! I dropped hints at some of how this chapter's events would play out for a while, but let me know if it feels kind of forced!

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Oh self, oh I, oh privileged eye

That looks at me from the mirror, lo

Oh beast, oh burden, oh future uncertain

Answer please what I wish to know

Oh self, oh I, oh judgemental eye

Tell me there’s good in my soul

Oh gift, oh curse, oh crimson-clad hearse

I beg you to grant me control 

Oh self, oh I, oh self-seeing eye

That stares out from deep within

Oh beloved, oh hated, oh self-flagellated, 

Tell me whether my heart beats with sin

Oh self, oh I, oh merciless eye

Please, just pray, tell me I plead

Oh self, oh me, oh crooked, bent tree

How, from myself, can I ever be freed?

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It hurts to be in this place. Surrounded by death and devastation made manifest, even his newfound immortality aches at the pressure. He can’t imagine how the others are coping- save that he assumes that they’re hanging on by the skin of their teeth, or are being actively changed from who they were into who they will be. The fragment of what was once Raika sits there, pristine in its ruin, and offers itself to them.

A field of ammunition, shaped to a thousand effects and a thousand different chambers, tinkling softly at the feet of an undead amalgamation.

A hill of gunpowder-made-blood, thick as mud and twice as heavy, presented for consumption by she who would eat of a god’s flesh.

A blade, free of any hilt, bare and sharp-edged to the world, ready to be plucked or to sever oneself upon for the three-in-one who would claim supremacy in the war he has come to live in.

The statue at the center of this place remains silent, even as the pressure mounts. Whatever brought about the collapse and self-destruction they had to maneuver through to reach this central chamber, it feels distant, but the effects of it can’t be denied. Something, somewhere, has affected this place, damaged it, and it has reacted, even as the thing at its core has remained intact.

Well. Relatively.

“You want us to take these?” Shin Ren asks, his voice firm but strained beneath the growing weight of the air in the chamber. “Why? You said it yourself, you’re fading, becoming something else. I’d rather not just be a vector, but if you need an anchor, just ask.”

The statue doesn’t move, but its Intent comes through as dismissive, calm. Too calm. 

“I Fade. I Grow. Fade. Grow. Lose What Was To Gain What Will Be. This Too Is Ruin. This Too Is CHANGE.”

The clinking sound comes from his right, off to one side, as Taran starts collecting the ammunition at his feet. Many-Grasping, on the other hand, seems to share some hesitation.

“I Came To Bring You Back,” she transmits, her hands moving subtly, breath carrying weighted meaning. “Not To Be Made Into You. The Rest Of You Misses You.”

“I Would Be A Burden,” whispers the fragment of a greater being. “What Was Her Fades. The Rest Would Fade Too, Tied To This Ever-Growing Me. I Have Endured Her End, And What Remains Has Become The Seed For The [Hungering War].”

At its name, the space trembles, the keening of metal being shorn apart and ripped back together, exploding and roiling in turn, rising in volume again. The ground shakes, rolling like the deck of a ship on a stormy sea, the collapse advancing.

“She Has Died. She Dies Further. She Calls It Upon Herself. It Reflects To Me. I Shall Not End By The Knife. If I Am To End, I Shall End As Birth.”

Parts of the figure start to crack, tremble, turning to powder or breaking off from the rest of it as they watch. Shin Ren feels the power of its “words”, the language of Intent transmitting only absolute honesty- and the more it speaks, the more its intentions are shouted into reality, the more the wider catastrophe, or transformation, creeps closer. The obsidian machinery and malformed weaponry of the shade slowly come apart, more and more as it speaks, as it transmits what it shall do and is doing out into itself.

“She Made Me As Weapon. As Architect And Student Of War. As Warrior And Slave Both. I Have Learned, And I Have Built. Out Of Eons-Old Slaughter, I Sup. Out Of Constant Strife, I Feed. Out Of Death And Conquest And Violence For Its Own Sake, I Am Infected, That I Might Be Born, Embryonic And Parasitic.

“She Died, And Left Me Here, Broken. I Die In The Forever War. What Shall Be Born Of Her And I And Consequence Shall Be Something Suited To The World I Have Suffered.”

“You’re planning to attack the Wall,” Shin Ren whispers.

It turns then, finally moving. A crack shatters part of its face from the movement, even the slightest shift causing damage now, the gun-shade breaking itself and unmooring what has come from it in every act. 

“The Wall Is Home. The Wall Is What I Am. A Landscape Of Death Forever, Of Ruin For Ruin’s Sake. What Is Born Of Me Will Consume It, And Consume These Sands, And Consume Those That War Upon Me, And Take That War To The Rest Of All That Is. Empire, Overgrowth, The Bright Lands Of The South, The Bone-Cold Of The North- Eventually, Even That Thing Which We Feel, Sister-Blood, Off To The West. 

“Born Of War And Ruin, I Shall Bring Broken Ruin To All That Is, Or End In The Attempt.”

Its face shifts, and what was an artful manifestation of twisted metal instead becomes like pottery, cracking like ceramics. In the shattered pieces, out of the forming cracks, the statue’s smile turns wide and horrible.

“At The Very Least, It Shall Be Quite The Problem For Greater Powers To Deal With.”

For all that he wants to be horrified, for all that he wants to spit at the statue for its malformed philosophy… Shin Ren finds that he can’t. He sees the logic. He can even see how the person he experienced a tribulation alongside, the strange madwoman that his orbit has brought him into contact with again and again, might come to that conclusion, left alone for too long. This fragment, by its own words, is dying, and seems to imply that whatever damage created it in the first place is still ongoing. That comment about a Knife had a lot more weight behind it than he expected. Left powerless and alone, feeling himself die, forced to feel part of himself growing stronger by devouring the constant suffering of the war above and the graveyard all around… there’s a twisted logic. Self-destruction, but with a purpose. That purpose being “cause problems” also seems… rather in-character for what he knows of her. It might be a smaller part of her motivations, but that spite… he’s seen it in her. He’s seen it in himself.

“If I’m dying anyways, might as well take some fuckers with me”. 

“She Would Not Do This,” Many-Grasping says, an absolute and total certainty in her “voice”. 

“Of Course Not,” says the nightmare of obsidian. “But I Am Not Her. She Died. The Her In Me Died. What Is Left Is The Thing Made To Kill And Learn And Suffer, And Soon That Too Will Break. What Comes Next Is What Comes Always, And Most Especially From War.

“Consequence.”

“What about those who aren’t part of the war?” Shin Ren asks. “The healers at the Wall? The people in logistics? The civilians, the city-folk in the trenches behind the breach? Your plan is just to become something that reflects more of this war back on itself?”

The smile widens, but the way that it does, the cracks that spiral out from it, make it hard to tell if it’s something joyful or the kind of smile that comes with tears. Bereft of tear ducts, or even eyes, the statue breaks further, his words shaping the harm. 

“Maybe it would be a burden on the other pieces if you reconnected,” he says. Pointedly ignoring the look of frustration and horror that Many-Grasping shoots his way, he steps forward, past the offered blade growing from the breaking ground. “Maybe it wouldn’t even work. But do you really think you shouldn’t even try? If there’s a chance that you could be more, that something better could come from you, shouldn’t you try to grasp it?”

“I Have No Hands. I Cannot Grasp. I Am As I Am.”

He pauses. 

“Now that’s not what you said a minute ago.”

The statue remains perfectly still- but a little crack runs through it, barely more than a hairline fracture, spawning at his words.

“That’s her Truth, right? ‘I Can Change’. You said it too.”

“We Are What We Eat. I Have Eaten Of This Place For… Months. I Have Changed. I Shall Again. I-”

He shakes his head, pulling a bit more Qi from out of himself. The air around him begins to sizzle, heat-haze distorting perspective, impossible fires softening the material he stands on. The gunpowder-hillside begins to smolder, even in the strange wetness and weight it’s gained in offering to Many-Grasping. 

To cultivate is to become more of yourself. It is to be more of who you choose to be. It is to create a Soul and world and reality that you claim to be equal or higher to than reality itself, and then prove it to be so.

The black metal beneath his feet begins to flake away in flickering bits of flame like burning paper, gold and purple standing higher than the other colors of Dao as it changes. From beneath, the cold and pale marble of a temple, of a [Court], shows itself as truer than what is.

The chamber begins to bend, its edges finally starting to malform as the wider vision of hell beyond them push inward at the perceived threat, at the way it is being transformed. 

The statue seems… still. It doesn’t seem sinister, for a moment. It seems tired.

“You claim that you’re changing, but refuse to be more than you are. You claim to be abandoned, but turn away the hands that have arrived to bring you home. The Raika I knew, that I owe a debt to even now, that showed me, through the pain I put on her, that I should be better than I was, wouldn’t stand for you.”

“She Is Dead.”

“You aren’t.”

The chamber rattles with the weight of them both, two conflicting versions of existence dragging against each other like sandpaper. He tastes the defeat, the pain, the exhaustion in the broken thing- it is no demigod. It is a ghost of something better, malformed by a diet of suffering.

In the obsidian-metal of its creation, he sees his own reflection staring back at him. In spite of his realm, in spite of how he has gained biological immortality, how he can more or less choose to appear as the version of himself he imagines… he sees scars. He sees ash. He sees soot and blood, little flecks on him from months of war. He’s killed… probably thousands. He’s failed to save almost as many. He’s barely slept. The weeks spent inside a living war-hell hasn’t exactly helped matter.

‘Prince Of The Wall, Prince of the Breach, Flame Atop The Wall’. In all his war-streaked glory. 

A Corpse Aflame looks out from behind his eyes, birthed and fed upon the ruin of the world. His sin and ruin, which he has held close to his heart. Beside her, the lies he told himself, that others told him, that he told others, smiling in a way that speaks more of pain than delusion.

And behind them both- the Flame that burns, consuming and fed by and feeding them in turn. A triumvirate, balancing itself, seeking something higher.

“We can be better,” he says.

The words echo in the chamber, loud enough to hurt. There is something of Intent in them, something he recognizes from how he’s spoken with others, but more than that, there’s… a presence to them. It’s not just what he’s trying to say, the meaning he’s trying to imbue- it’s a promise. It’s truer.

Many-Grasping, beside him, gasps at the sound. A pulse of something near-reverence, briefly fluttering from her. Off to one side, the undead gunman with them stares at him, eyes of colorless pitch recording it all.

And the statue trembles, as if alive, as if fluid and mobile. Just for a moment. 

Shin Ren inhales. Exhales. He feels the flavor of the words.

Yeah. They’re True.

“We Can Be Better,” he says to the broken thing, and through it, a [Hungering War]. And, in that moment, he can feel that it listens.

“Keep your present,” he says. “I don’t need a perfect blade. The one I have was gifted to me by one that I owe my life to, and doesn’t need replacing. You don’t need to make us more like you as a ‘gift’, not when you think so little of yourself. It’s insulting.”

The ground, the air, the space around him- it burns. It is reshaped. The distant shadow of pillars start to creep into the chamber, illuminated by something burning with all the colors of what is and could-be. 

He extends a hand to the statue, palm-up. “Do you want to be more than you have to be?” he asks.

That same hairline fracture from before starts to yawn a little wider. It’s slow, but the crack goes so deep that it begins to simply pull things apart, out to either side, until the figure has a seam splitting it down the middle.

And it nods. 

“Many-Grasping, get up here. She needs you.”

He doesn’t pull back his presence- but the beastkin woman, who feels so alien and so weak and so solid to his senses, steps through ruin, delusion, and purifying flame untouched, up onto the hillside beside him.

Everything Burns

Choice Is Universal

We Can Be Better

His hand catches flame, Purple and Gold flecked with Green, Blue, Orange, Red and Black replace his skin, burning through himself and liquifying what was into what is.

That liquid self, that higher ur-ideal, that flesh turned flame turned Truth, bleeds out from him, drawing out of his cores and his realm and his deepest self- to drip into the crack in the seams, falling into the dark inside the statue.

It hits metal, hits mechanism, hits flesh, and pressure begins to build, the air screaming out from within it as Shin Ren’s ontology burns against what’s left of the shade.

We Are What We Eat.

He turns the offer back to the one who presented it to them, and feeds what he is and wishes to be to a starving thing.

The statue starts to tremble, the cracks widening, a multi-hued glow coming from within it out of the fresh damage as it is further ruined. Consuming something so against its nature, even tinged by her mirror in the Corpse Aflame, only speeds up her dissolution. In turn, the chamber starts to cave in, metal shrieking as exterior forces treat it like a tumor to be destroyed by an obsidian-sharp immune system.

He doesn’t need to say anything- the moment he pulls his hand away, Many-Grasping-Reach-Towards Divinity is there, her presence like a shadow, anchor, and beacon all in one. From out of the flesh she holds, she grasps the obsidian rod, reminiscent of the avatar of her god that they met above- and stabs it down the torn-open gullet of the statue, into the iridescent magma and black steel. 

The miniature pillar screams, hissing in tune with the bubbling pressure and escaping air of the gun-shade- but it also leaps into action, immediately beginning to mutate wildly. The gaps through which neural tissue and muscle could be seen become windows for bone, tendrils, metal and more esoteric biology to sprout from, stabbing out in all directions. A spider’s web of biology explodes outward, impaling the statue, thrusting to meet the ceiling above, dozens more branches shooting out to brace against the collapsing parts of the chamber. The metal groans, but holds, the denting and distorting exterior holding just a little longer as the fragments of something more and other fuse together in a bloody, burning, transcendent horror of experience.

The world outside howls. The skittering of metallic legs, cracking and booming of gunfire, and screaming of sharp-edges against sharp-edges echoes in the chamber, the few remaining bits of mutated growth in the central chamber of what might have been the [Hungering War] spasm, dying and being revived at almost the same velocity, sprouting flesh and eyes like tumors out of metallic seams. 

Before he can stop her, Many-Grasping steps even closer into the chaos at the center of the chamber. Her face thrusts out of her hood, flesh armored and transformed with strange whorling patterns and sprouting metal, and-

She kisses the statue, right in the open maw of metal that was its face, against the pillar of impossible flesh, amongst the transformative magma. The smell of cooking flesh rises from the chaos- but she doesn’t flinch, and Shin Ren sees her take a gulp, her jaw working in a pattern that is part romance, part cannibalism.

And then the hood is back up, and she steps back to face him. 

“We Should Go,” she says.

“Go where?” Taran asks, his eyes still strangely black, like the other colors have bled away or been replaced. “The way we came out isn’t exactly friendly. I’ve got an emergency escape, but no guarantees that it’ll work this deep, or that it’ll take us somewhere you want to go.”

“Teleportation, right? Something that transports you straight back to your master.”

The corpse-gunman blinks, a flicker of color returning. “You knew?” 

“Common sense. You’re more loyal, and working with someone called a Runemaster. One of very few. Does it take much to set up?”

Taran shakes his head. “No, but-”

“Do it.”

Taran just nods, though his expression flickers for a moment. Hesitation, maybe, or reluctance. Still, without further options, he acts. Opening his jacket, the jangling of weaponry and acupuncture needles barely audible over the transformation occurring in the chamber and the battle against it outside, he reveals a torso wrapped in bandages almost entirely, thousands of intricate runes spiraling throughout them. With a yank, he pulls them apart, revealing a cavity where a stomach should be, and-

Crystals. Hundreds, maybe thousands, barely flecks for some of them, each one glowing slightly different colors, each one emitting the barest hint of Qi. For a moment, Shin Ren feels almost overwhelmed, his eyes hurting at the complexity and amount of detail stored inside the corpse-figure- 

But then a hand reaches in, to a spot above the crystal amalgamation in the core of their strange companion, and grabs something hidden up higher in the ribcage.

It emerges a moment later, clutching something that looks like a cube. Shin Ren recognizes Imperial gold, some of the runework on its very surface, but then it starts to unfold, pieces clicking in and out of sequence, expanding the shape and transforming it, over and over. In less than a second, it’s reached the size of a person, then of a horse, then a carriage, and seems prepared for a final unfolding, a final portal out to someplace else-

And then Shin Ren stops avoiding looking at the edges of his vision.

In the heat-haze of his Soul, out from where she’s been hiding since they descended, a burst of mist and illusion floods out into the space.

Mei Yu emerges into reality, and hands of mist and a kaleidoscope of colors grabbing hold of the runic array as it forms.

Her re-entry into reality brings with it a scream of agony, the sound of someone being dragged over burning razors- but her hands hold firm, dozens of them spawning from out behind Shin Ren’s eyes, the edges of his perception inhabited by a being of illusion and impossibility. 

He can feel her Nascent Soul realm cultivation trembling, fighting not to be ground down by the forces at play, fighting not to let the Qi of this place infect them- but she does not let go of the array. Instead, her Qi manifests as impossible disorientation, mist and madness drawing from a [Gilded Smile of Delusion] for power where her own wavers.

Taran’s hands come up, shadowy doubles emerging like a halo around him to clutch at a multitude of other weapons. Shin Ren doesn’t even turn to look- a single pulse of flame is enough to force the undead agent of the Empire back, singing the bandages that even now have returned to protecting his core.

Taran has grown much stronger in this place, gained profound depth from drinking of gunpowder-war- but the difference between the Warrior realm and those who have yet to breach the Divergent Paths is vast.

Shin Ren does what he can to shield Mei Yu’s manifesting technique, his own aura slightly less harmful to her as her illusions reach into the portal. He can’t quite follow what she’s doing, but the plan is simple- 

The portal thinks it is emerging in one place. She is lying to it so it thinks it’s emerging somewhere else.

It’s not quite enough at first. The chamber creaks, the pillar and statue and the birthing fluids of flame and transformation between them only growing in power as time passes, the world collapsing in on them. The cube fights the changes, runes flaring to life and battling against the illusory mist-

But it’s enough. 

“Thanks, Taran,” Shin Ren says. “This makes the plan much easier.”

Just as the runes of the construct begin to burn up, begin to finally break down or push Mei Yu back entirely, the world is shaken by the sound of a falling impact.

Everything goes silent for a single moment.

And a beam of purest blue, the light of sky, the light of night and brightest day, the light of the world above everything else, when one has climbed to its heights, slams through miles of earth and metal to shatter the construct outright.

At its center is a towering figure, a series of fresh scars bright on him- and a smile brighter than all the rest.

“Brother! This Gou Mai thanks you! With such a target, what excuse could this one have to miss?”

The world shrieks, and tries immediately to sever the pillar of sky that has penetrated so profoundly into its depths.

And it holds firm.

Gou Mai’s smile is a thing of sunlight and lightning-strike, and Shin Ren is at his side a moment later, hugging the man’s broad shoulders tight. 

“It’s really fucking good to see you, brother,” he says.

“Maybe Wait Until We Are Not Dying.”

Shin Ren laughs, but does stand aside, opening up space for Many-Grasping to step into the light. After a moment’s hesitation, Taran does as well, and the mist of Mei Yu’s presence manifests her out of itself, looking a bit ragged but intact. Shin Ren doesn’t look beneath the illusion, though the smell of blood and cut flesh coming from her hands is sign enough of her harm.

“Yes, maybe we hold off on celebrating until we’re out.”

“Quite!” roars Gou Mai. “Always, To The Heights.”

And with that proclamation of his growth, as the world shatters around them, they are gone.