IGS #4, Chapter 58

Dameon

The Silverines bore Dameon on, and as he flew through the frigid skies toward the awesome Silverine Sun, he sought frantically to find some means of wresting victory from rank impossibility.

For he knew victory was possible. His damn power told him such. Each time despair began to squeeze his throat and blanket his mind in darkness, he’d summon that tapestry of threads and stare in disbelief at the broad, golden road that rated his chances of success as impossibly high.

There was a way to win through. There was a means to achieve impossible power. He just couldn’t think of it.

The Silverine Sun hung massive and impossibly potent before him. Few in all of Hell could fathom just how miraculous, how powerful that entity was, but Dameon was one of them. He could cast his mind back to some of his earliest memories and recall the drive through the Unfathom, those impossible, glorious years as an Imperator, and how they’d studied and marveled at the species.

Even then the Suns had hung heavy and potent in the Unfathom skies, served by Abstractions and Philosophers both. The Unfathom had teemed with other fiendish life, but that richness was already under siege, being consumed and ravaged by the voracious Silverine appetites for power.

But even as an Imperator Dameon had known not to tamper with the Suns. The Abstractions, sure; the huge, statuesque beings whose thoughts were near impossible to comprehend were intelligible, in their own fashion, but the Suns had too many unknowns. And even then the number of Imperators had been too few to dedicate themselves to unnecessary puzzles; the True Fiends had been a constant menace, and each step toward the Pit had been fought at great cost.

So it was that the mystery of the Suns were set aside, like so many other mysteries in Hell, and the focus instead placed on utilizing the Abstractions and their power to master fragmented planes to cement the Red Road and create a safe path for all Great Souls to travel.

Dameon stared at the distant sun, and sneered. What blindness. To choose to ignore the Suns when they had still been manageable. Now? Dameon could only marvel at how vast they had grown, how utterly beyond anything his memories could comprehend.

It hung before him in the pewter sky, wreathed with slow moving bolts of white and purple lightning. Its potency made it appear far larger than it truly was; he felt as if he gazed upon a huge, celestial orb glimpsed over the horizon, when in truth it was merely a massive sphere that hung a mile away above the desert sands, the horizon ringed by mountain ranges.

This one was bloated with power, its face darkened as if by some perpetual eclipse, a corona of purple light ringing it in majesty. The clouds whirled slowly about it like mana about a vortex, and the landscape itself seemed to shimmer and flicker, as if the Sun sorted through the many planes that surrounded it and manifested a different one every so moments.

His mouth tasted metallic. His skin crawled. And the sight of the tens of thousands of Philosophers forming a diffuse ring about the Sun gave him no comfort, either. They floated as if in a trance, their multifarious forms blending into a seamless whole, enough Philosophers to wash away the Red Keep like a great tide, and this but one Sun. How many were there in all—just over a dozen?

What a force. What a tremendous menace they’d allowed to grow at their doorstep.

Allowed, are been manipulated into ignoring? Dameon couldn’t help but smile now as they winged ever closer. Had the Imperators from so long ago truly decided that the Suns weren’t worth investigating, or had Herdsmen guided their attention away? Even now, today, were the Silverines given so little attention because of the very real threats that the Viridian Heart and the Blood Ox had posed, or for other, more nefarious reason?

Academic questions.

If he didn’t divine a way out of this, he’d die, and be reborn once more ignorant of everything until he came into his Dread Blaze power.

But what to do?

Only as an Imperator had he possessed the self-mastery to maintain the integrity of his soul within the Abstraction. The process, the actual devouring, was hazy in his memory; something about the act had blocked his ability to recall it.

But.

Staring at the rapidly approaching Silverine Sun, Dameon knew with cold certainty that he’d better figure it out quick.

The Silverines that bore him twittered and called to each other, ecstatic over being entrusted with delivering Dameon to the Abstraction below. He tuned them out and studied the landscape. The vast Sun blazed malevolently over a cracked stone landscape, a singular mesa rising like an altar before it. That was their destination. He could just make out the Abstraction, a behemoth of white marmoreal flesh that knelt in obedience to the Sun, the top of the mesa wreathed in an alien forest of moonwhite stalks and garlands of emerald green.

Damn it. They’d drop him before the Abstraction, and he would be engulfed by its power. The way they ‘ate’ people was to absorb them into their overwhelming mana-fields. Dameon wouldn’t be actually, physically consumed; he’d dissolve, his flesh transmuting into that alien energy that was fed to the Sun.

He could recall retaining his presence of mind throughout. The act didn’t kill, but transformed, and those with sufficiently strong minds and egos could hold on to their thoughts, their identity, for some small degree of time.

Long enough so that as an Imperator he’d been able to suborn the Abstraction from within, where it had no defenses.

But that Abstraction had been far from a Sun. Not right beneath one like this.

Again and again he compulsively checked his power, and now the broad golden road seemed to mock him. Could his power be malfunctioning? Could it be interpreting his requests in some bizarre, alien manner?

Dameon resisted the urge to just curse as they swooped down. The pressure from the Sun was surreal. Still half a mile away, it bathed him in rippling waves of force that made him feel as if he were being brought into a spiritual oven. His Heart was besieged just by the proximity, the mana in his reservoir growing restive and than tugging at its confines as it sought to flow toward the Sun.

The pressure became such that with a gasp Dameon expelled the mana from his reservoir before it could rupture its own way free. Emptied, he felt immediate relief. But his Heart. It was being abraded just by being so close to the Sun.

Which was… magnificent.

There was no denying its alien majesty up close. Great currents folded and surged across its face, releasing shimmers of white light that were beautiful against the royal purple, the incandescent blues, the permanent lightning bolts that crackled soundlessly over the vast sphere.

Awesome. Utterly inhuman. And in some manner a living entity. Fed for countless centuries on all the mana that had existed and which had flowed into the Unfathom. Gorged. Yet a mystery for all that—why had it never ruptured? Could they grow forever? Or was their purpose misunderstood even by the Silverines that worshipped them?

Down they flew, down to the mesa, and here hundreds of Philosophers hung, each striking and powerful in its own way, the exemplars of their tier, each on the very verge of becoming an Abstraction. They watched him with inhuman curiosity.

If this was to be his final hour, than he would manifest some damn dignity, at any rate. He schooled his features, raised his chin, and resisted the urge to sneer.

Let them sacrifice him to their gods. It would be the last sacrifice they ever made.

The Philosophers released their grip on him a dozen yards above the plateau, and he dropped to crash down onto the rocks. Unable to resist, he let out a wail as he fell, arms windmilling, only to hit a surprisingly spongy network of roots. For a second he lay thus, gasping and horrified at how quickly he’d lost control of himself, but then he grunted and rose to his feet.

The Abstraction loomed before him. This one’s head was a slowly revolving crown of fragments, more orchid than anything else, pale marble petals spinning with glacial slowness about golden pistils whose ends tapered into nothingness, gradating into pure spiritual essence. Its knelt before the Sun, its arms spread open wide in a permanent pose of adulation, and from its back extended great ropes of stone that became milky vegetation, descending to the plateau to their spread out and grow into this lunar garden. Its body was carved into muscular perfection, its size overwhelming, and the sheer power that wafted off its skin caused Dameon’s mouth to dry out, his stomach to clench, and his thoughts to still.

A Philosopher wrapped in emerald robes descended to hover before him. This one bore such a startlingly large array of antlers that they extended more like a bone web about its head than anything else, a great outgrowth of prongs that seemed to capture some of the ambient mana and funnel it to its head, shaped like that of a beautiful woman, the lower half painted a perfect crimson, its eyes blazing like twin golden suns.

This being was more powerful than he was. Dameon couldn’t help but feel grudging awe as he gazed upon its majesty. If it wished, it could ascend right now, mutate and grow into an Abstraction right before its eyes.

Which mean it would soon die, willingly feeding itself to its master so that all its accumulated power could flow into the Sun.

“Welcome, Dameon. I am Vanatasiar, Primarch and devotee of the first rank. I remember through my lineage your name and deeds. I see them now, refracted through broken memories of my ancestors. Your duplicity. Your accomplishments. How you mutilated our Abstractions toward your own ends.”

Dameon managed a mocking bow. “I am as you see me.”

“Indeed. It is fitting that you delivered yourself into our hands. Fitting that you should be one of the last sources of power our Silverine Sun needs to evolve. You shall cap the cycle that began so long ago. Your essence shall propel our kind into the Light, and through you we shall achieve immortal greatness.”

“You know, you’re not the only one who has access to their past memories.” Dameon tapped his temple. “I’ve got so much stored up here that I can barely keep track. And one thing I do remember is someone very much like you giving me the same damn speech. What’s up with that? Are your Silverines so dumb that you don’t realize that you’ve been on the same verge of ascending for centuries now?”

“Time is not as you understand it. Not all is linear. We Philosophers and you Great Souls live moments sequentially. Abstractions can view the wheel from a remove. When all that matters is the evolution of our Suns, what weight does mortal impatience carry? None. The event shall transpire, and against the span of infinity, it transpires soon, for it has always transpired soon.” Vanatasiar’s blank face cracked to reveal a mouth, and its smile was as faint as it was contemptuous. “You Great Souls have been offered wisdom through your own process of rebirth, but you live each life as if it were your last. You are too limited to truly grow great. To realize the potential of your station. For all your power, your Imperators, you are divided, impatient, short sighted, and incapable of truly great works. That is your downfall. And now is our time to Ascend.”

Dameon shrugged. “Sure. That sounds great. Good for you all.” His heart was pounding away, and he could barely breathe from the tension, but still he forced a rakish smile. “But unless you plan to keep chatting with me forever, how about we get this done? I’ve got another life just waiting for me to squander.”

The Philosopher’s smile crooked at the corner. “Yes. Let us… get this done.”

And the world condensed around him. Dameon couldn’t even scream as his every muscle clenched and his back arched. He rose to the balls of his feet and would have toppled over had something vast and gentle and utterly powerful not cradled him where he teetered. The world grew painfully bright, his every sense suddenly overloaded. He could smell the metallic dust in the air, the verdant greenery about him, the pulsing of the flowers, the rich pollen that each harbored. His robes were rough against his skin, the air too cold, and he could taste terror in his mouth, a flat acidic tang, his stomach spasming, his body aflame.

And the Sun. It somehow grew more prepossessing, more prominent, as the rest of the Unfathom receded, the mountains falling back, the waist-high garden fading away, the swirls of color, the gravitational depths, the interplay of mana that coiled ceaselessly within its divine corpus calling to him, a siren song he could no longer resist.

He was flensed.

His mind peeled apart.

Memories were summoned against his will. Countless memories blurring through his mind as life after life was examined like a careless reader riffling through the pages of a tome. Moments of joy, of boredom, of climax, of euphoria, of horror, of boredom, of amusement, of calculated cruelty, of boredom, of ambition, of hope, of anger, of nausea, of boredom, of rare love, of exultation, of boredom—

He was screaming, but from very far away, and it didn’t mean much.

Life after life. Decade after decade. The Academy, the Gauntlet, the Archspire. The Academy, awakening upon his bier, the Archspire, learning what it meant to be a Great Soul. Each life a moment of ignorant bliss followed by cynicism, wonder, and despair as soon as he regained all his memories. Life, laughter, wounds, fiends, exploration, ambition, hope, despair, boredom, death.

Death, death, death.

Dameon was rising into the air. His very form was lightening, becoming light. Further back his memories went. A younger Dameon, in soul if not in body, where hope was more genuine, ambition more altruistic. First loves, first friendships. The bright sense of manifest destiny, taking their kind ever deeper into Hell, fighting fiends, rebuffing True Fiends, exploring new layers of Hell, the wonder of being the very first to see the Efflorescing Chasm, to simply stand at its edge and be awed, truly awed, by the wonders and beauties of Hell.

Youth. Innocence. Hope.

Back and back the memories went, beyond what he could consciously recall, and he saw the rebuilding of the ruins, the confusion and wonder as to who had built Bastion and left it destroyed for them to recover, the re-light the sun-wire. The Shepherds instructing them in the necessity of the tiers, the greater power they’d achieve by acquiescing to the Archspire’s mandate, the first deaths, the first rebirths—

Up he rose, no longer screaming, just weeping tears of light, rising toward the Abstraction, up toward its petals and pistils, its broken geometries, but it was so much more, he saw that now, its spiritual form dwarfed the physical, it was a small planet unto itself, a coagulation of garnered mana that it tempered and nurtured until it was ready to be fed to the distant Sun, which hovered in a vast web of Silverine power, oh, glory, it truly was a god, so much more than Dameon could have conceived, and now he was fading, fading into wisps of himself, sublimating into the Abstraction’s reservoir, but it wasn’t a reservoir, it was simply Acherzua, no, it was—

—and there, what was that? In the distance he saw a floating cube, huge and impossible, arcs of power lancing across it, and from the Sun flowed a great river of energy, a vast amount without end that flooded into the cube, that lit it up as brightly as star going nova, and it was into this web, these impossible objects of beauty, that he would—

With a supreme act of will Dameon forced his thoughts to coalesce. It felt like trying to build a tent in a world-ending storm, an exercise in futility, but Dameon knew, through and through, that if he had anything, if possessed any merit, any categorical quality, it was an overwhelming sense of self, of desire, of ambition.

It wasn’t the Silverines that was ascend.

It wasn’t their kind that would rise.

It was him.

Power.

Imperator.

His sole lodestone. His guiding star. He would achieve greatness once more. A burning need. A need he didn’t question, simply accepted, as a creature lost in a blizzard might accept a fire.

Keep it together. Just a little longer.

His consciousness rose higher and higher, and thought became harder.

I am me. I will not stop. I—I’ve worked so hard, but for… for what? For power. I…

With desperation he grappled at this thoughts. The technique he’d used before to suborn the Abstraction was there, but he couldn’t employ it. He wasn’t an Imperator. The Silverines were too powerful.

I tried so hard… I sacrificed… everything… and for what? Make this… I… no… please…

He was a single dimming star lost amongst countless constellations. A paltry creature of ugly greed and ambition who had failed to see the beauty all around him. A speck of nothing, unaware of his own insignificance.

He had hoped for so much, but only now did he see how insignificant his hopes had been.

How paltry.

How… pathetic.

If I go… then let me… in my next life…

A great pulse flooded through existence. A ripple of existential import. Dameon could barely discern it, so lost was he, so on the edge of annihilation. But it washed across the sky, the world, and, uncomprehending, he saw the vast stream of mana that flowed from the Sun cease to pour into the cube.

Other strands, other rivers that stretched across the heavens from impossibly far distances continued to pour power into the construct, but the Sun, here, now, ceased to be so compelled.

No; it wasn’t an abrupt cessation. It was cycling down through the rarest forms of mana. Passively, barely curious, Dameon saw the little flecks of Emerald cease to flow out of the Sun.

Strange.

Then the Gold. There wasn’t much, but far more than the Emerald. This, too, ceased to flow.

Emotions flooded the aether. The Abstractions were singing. Dameon wanted to join their song, but he didn’t know the melody, and in an act of heartbreaking realization, knew that he never would.

Time passed.

His own dissolution stopped, leaving him on the cusp of death. He hovered there, intangible, barely self-aware, but there was no longer a hunger for his essence. He could dimly, distantly sense how the Sun was no longer being siphoned.

Then the Silver mana ceased to flow out of it, and the Abstraction’s song soared, became a fractal and endlessly repeating, self-encoding song of triumph.

The Sun began to swell. Like a cup filled to the brim, it had no room left to retain the mana that was no longer being drained. It grew brighter.

Dameon could only marvel.

Then, in a final bid for life, in that peace that he sensed came just before the dissolution of the world, he found a moment of calm in which to act.

The pressure to consume him had momentarily abated. He was ignored, an insignificant speck in comparison to the vastness of what was at play.

But yet he remained consubstantial with the mana around him.

Tentatively, not quite knowing what he was doing, he reached out to the Abstraction’s mana, and found it pliable.

Dameon Ignited his Heart as he pulled the most rarefied mana types into his reservoir. Awareness, desire, hunger, ambition. Naked need. He would not die.

He would consume.

And now he had impossible reserves with which to enact his Abstraction technique.

Calling upon a discipline lost to Hell for nearly half a millennium, Dameon began utilizing the Abstraction’s fractal field against it. A wonder deciphered by the best of the Imperators an age ago. A realization that the Abstraction’s mana was locked away from direct usage by anyone else due to being curled into infinitely recursive patterns that duplicated themselves the smaller they got. Mana folded into mana, space and time folded into ever smaller reflections of themselves.

Dameon no longer understood the nuances of the theorem, a theorem that smarter, more capable Imperators had devised, but he recalled how to weaponize this mana field against its owner.

Even as the vast intelligence and awareness of the Abstraction began to focus on him, akin to how a cloud whale might slowly notice a bothersome itch caused by the slightest of wind remoras, the Abstraction began closing its might about Dameon’s mind, intent on snuffing him out.

It was too late.

The trick lay in introducing corruption to the highest level of the fractal field, and then compelling that error to duplicate itself into the ever smaller infinities of its mana well.

Dameon shaped Emerald mana even as it seared his mind, ashed his Heart, and wove the complex borderlines into impossibilities. Instinct, muscle memory, ancestral strength: he enacted the technique with intuition where once he’d used it with purposeful deliberation.

And drew upon all the power of the Abstract to do so.

Where once it had been Dominion and an Imperator’s absolute mastery of mana that allowed him to corrupt the field, now he used the Abstraction’s own strength, his near complete-attunement to its transmogrified mana to accomplish the deed.

He introduced the error, and the entire mana well immediately sensed how the pattern was no longer perfectly mirrored, and sought to rectify the change.

The error spawned ever smaller errors along its own boundaries, and as the strain grew, the errors did what they were designed to accomplish: they ruptured.

Limits broke. Mana began to gush forth, uncontrolled. The most visibly striking manifestations occurred at the largest level, but the true damage was done deeper in, where the Abstraction’s own propensities for higher level thinking allowed it to store immense amounts far beyond what the eye could see or the Heart perceive.

All of it began to vent uncontrollably as the errors multiplied and ruptured.

The Abstraction moaned, and the valley shuddered.

Dameon crowed with joy. The Abstraction sought to crush him, but he was too far melded with its own essence to be easily targeted. His very body, his mind, moved with the Abstraction’s thoughts, part of the weapon it sought to bare against him.

But it didn’t matter.

Whatever had distracted the Abstraction, whatever glory it had thought itself on the verge of enjoying, had given Dameon just the right window in which to act.

And then, to his delight and amazement, he saw the error not only descend into the depths of the four dimensional mana well, but ascend through the currents into the sky, rising up in ever greater duplicates toward the Silverine Sun.

Dameon’s thoughts stilled.

That he hadn’t anticipated.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity since he’d wrested control back, he felt something other than savage joy: fear.

The Abstraction moaned again, the sound bruising the wind, causing the land to shudder once more and flow and rise and fall as if the very stone had turned to mud.

The errors in the multi-dimensional mana manifold rose toward the Sun, and he lost track of them against the Sun’s royal and surging glare.

For a moment all grew still as if Hell itself held its breath, and then the Sun began to roil and hiccup.

The error, the ancient technique, was introducing corruption. And the very surfaces that maintained its structural integrity were beginning to rupture.

Acting on instinct, ignored now by the horrified Abstraction, Dameon willed himself to rise, to fly through the currents toward the Sun. He was laughing, screaming, his mind a maelstrom of victorious emotions, but in his very core, he knew he had to act.

Act now.

He’d never had the understanding to reach Pyre Lord. Despite all his memories, despite all his accrued experience. Everything he’d learned had only served to work against him.

But now, with so much mana at hand, and no longer limited by the nature of his reservoir, he felt himself riding a surge in power akin to that of an Imperator.

And that sensation he knew.

It had been so long, so very, very long, but it was the memory he prized the most. And, half-transformed into a mana field, he no longer was limited by the need to simply understand himself and make Pyre Lord.

He could move right past.

It was simple to reach out and acquire his ferula.

The Silverine Sun contained mana collected across the centuries. The vast majority was Silver, but in its core he could sense Emerald, Ruby, even Diamond.

As the sun belched and great ropes of mana erupted from its convulsing surface, Dameon reached for that enchanted mana and using the old techniques, forged himself a ferula. Diamond wrapped in Sapphire, with a prism of Ruby at its head.

Exquisite.

The ferula grounded his thoughts, his act of mastery further empowering him. The ambient intelligence, the Abstraction’s sense of self, was tearing apart. It could no longer cohere.

The Sun was collapsing.

And in this chaotic field of endless mana Dameon willed himself to become incarnate once more, forging his body out of the highest quality mana he could find. No longer would he be Iron tempered, but forged from Sapphire.

He couldn’t hope to master this erupting heaven, but he could use his memories, his past, the sense of old selves that the Silverines themselves had awoken to manifest a miniature Dominion.

Exerting himself, Dameon smoothed out the errors that rippled in the tides of mana about himself, and then erased those boundaries altogether. It took all his strength of will, but he felt the accumulated might from his past selves bend themselves toward this single act before they were erased by his own increasing sense of self-definition.

“I…”

He had to tear the word from his core.

“I… have…”

His will battled with the storm tossed mana winds even as he fell.

“I have… Dominion.”

An expanding sphere of Silver and Iron mana calmed about him, growing ordered and subservient under his command. Only a fragment of the heavens, a pitiful example of Dominion, but it was all that he needed.

He ceased to fall.

Hovering in the midst of his island of calm, Diamond ferula in hand,  Sapphire-tempered, Dameon through back his head and laughed, laughed as the heavens burned, as the Sun breeched and vomited forth centuries worth of power, slowly unraveling into an unstoppable apocalypse.