IGS #4, Chapter 44

Dameon

Hospitality was not one of the Silverines’ strong suites. Never had been. But Dameon had never spent quite this much time simply sitting to one side watching them at play.

In previous lives, sure, he’d had plenty of interactions. But those had usually been surgical, either fighting his way south to the Lustrous Maria or, obviously, that one momentous life when he’d reached Imperator and helped construct the Red Road.

But he’d never been forced to just sit and observe them.

They were… surprisingly simple. There were, obviously, far more complex fiendish species out there. The blazeborn, the Viridian Host, the utterly bizarre Unctumesh of the Void Veil. But none, he’d warrant, were as numerous now as the Silverines. You’d think the sheer scale of their species would give rise to greater complexity, but somehow they’d remained single-minded.

He’d picked a spot as far from the Abstraction as he could get, right up at the edge of the plateau, and there sat to pass the hours and hope the ambush was resolved successfully before he starved. And during the past span of time—however long it had been—he’d watched the Philosophers as they flew and whirled through the air, as they dipped down to land before the Abstraction and feed it mana, only to hurry off again in search of more.

They were like honey bees, he decided. The Silverine Suns were their hives, and their every thought was bent toward feeding those vast agglomerations of mana. It didn’t matter that they learned to talk, or made gestures toward clothing, for in the end, that’s all it was: gestures. They aped Great Souls to sufficient degree to earn their trust, and by doing so either become employable or lure them into ambushes.

They had no real ‘culture’ to speak of. Perhaps it was because they weren’t afraid of death. Quite the opposite, actually. Did one need a healthy fear of death to evolve culture, religion, and complexity? Dameon toyed with the idea. Probably.

But the Silverines. Eels to Instinctuals to Philosophers to Abstractions to Suns. A long life cycle. They built no cities, created no art, had no traditions beyond their vague mythology. Even the Abstractions were single-minded. Attuned to the vast rivers of power that flowed between the Suns, they were more akin to spiders sitting at the center of webs than anything else, their thought patterns more alien than elevated.

Dameon’s stomach growled. He did his best to ignore it.

Yet had any species of fiend been as successful as the Silverines? Their closest parallel was the Veridian Host marching out of the Emerald Reach, but even the Host, vast and incredibly powerful as it was, lacked the… Dameon searched for the right term. The elegance of the Silverine ecosystem. Without philosophies or religions or cultural practices of other species, all the Silverines had to do was dedicate themselves to growth.

Like insects.

It was almost a pity that the Great Souls were running out of time. It would be fascinating to be reborn again and again to witness how the Silverines would handle the crisis of resource management. Already they’d consumed almost all of the Silver mana that flowed north into the Unfathom. What would they do when their numbers demanded more than Hell’s natural output? Pour into the Lustrous Maria to begin collecting Gold? The tenebrites would prove fearsome foes, individually as powerful as Great Souls, if not more so, but they were far too few in number to hold the Silverine horde at bay.

The Viridian Horde was marching north. The Silverines would swarm south. The Lustrous Maria would become a vast battle field between the Suns and the Viridian Heart.

Now that would be a fascinating war to observe.

But… alas. Time was up for the Great Souls. As soon as the Academy fell to the rot consuming Bastion, their eternal cycle would be disrupted. One by one they’d die, and then humanity’s presence in Hell would be erased.

Dameon sighed, the thought making him morose. If only his memories extended all the way back to the founding of Bastion. But the farther back he tried to squint, the more vague everything became. He could recall his last dozen lives as if they’d happened yesterday, the hundred before that with rough clarity, but then…? It got lost in the fog. What was interesting were the memories of his having that perfect recollection of the first lives. It was as if he could only hold some hundred lives’ worth of memories at once, and each addition over time resulted in the loss of the eldest memory.

Dameon stared out over the cloud ocean and tried to recall his very first memory. The new Academy had actually been new at that point, in operation for a couple of centuries. The rot had only extended several hundred yards out from the portal. He’d reached… what had he reached in that life… Blood Baron, he thought it was.

But the memories felt alien. Clearly his own, but the man who’d created those memories felt… other. Lighter, in some sense, clearer of purpose. He’d been fascinated with the deep tunnels under the Iron Weald, the alien construction that had preceded humanity’s arrival in Hell. Something about how the channels that run from Bastion south into the Iron Weald, flowing into each other and eventually forming great, echoing, vast chambers of cyclopean size.

Who had built them? To what end? Why had their orientation been on Bastion? He recalled probing the channels beneath the Weald’s Defender’s Shield, and there dying, just as he’d been on the verge of an epiphany. Something had arisen from a chasm, from the dark.

Dameon narrowed his eyes, trying to recall. A hint of mechanical movement, a body of stone and steel.

But no. It was gone.

He sighed.

Boy, he’d really grown melancholy while sitting here waiting, hadn’t he? He raked his hair back and forced a grin. He generally avoided all his earliest memories. Something about that Dameon rubbed him the wrong way. How earnest he’d been, how focused on… being a goody-two-shoes. If he stepped back and looked at the arc of all his lives, there was a definite pattern, a sense of growing more obsessed with power, or the power he’d once held, as if the very knowledge of all his past lives influenced each new self, who sought…

Dameon made a face.

Power.

He snorted. Perhaps he was no better than the Silverines after all.

Still. There was no denying how much easier it had once been to reach Pyre Lord. The very power that granted him his old memories showed that once he’d tended to race up the ranks, easily reaching Blood Baron or Charnel Duke each time. But the past thirty or forty lives… well.

Not so much.

Dread Blaze had become a near insurmountable barrier.

The last time he’d cracked it had been twenty-seven reincarnations ago. And that was because of his rather soul-shaking love affair with Bronwen. What an incredibly poetic and messed up relationship that had been. He’d caught a glimpse of her in Bastion during this last go round. She’d been a… what? Tomb Spark? Obviously no memory of him.

Dameon’s shoulders slumped.

As always, he’d been tempted to go up to her, to strike up a conversation, to seek in the depths of her brown eyes some spark, some hint of the passion they’d once felt. It wouldn’t be there, of course. Perhaps he could have kindled a new affair, a new love, but that never went well.

How many times had he tried to rediscover a genuine friendship, a soul-shaking romance, only to find his own meta-awareness of their shared past ruined the very effort?

He was surrounded by living ghosts.

A few Great Souls, however, were reliably great. Though, again, if he examined his deep memories, he’d find that he’d once been attracted to people he found insufferable today. Why on earth had he been drawn so strongly to Grunsch? Over dozens of their early lives they’d found a natural synergy and worked off principles that now felt so alien to him.

How naive he’d been, how sincere, how principled.

Ah well.

Much better to keep an eye out for folks like Simeon and Davelos. Strength married to flexible morality that allowed one to take short cuts and advantage of Hell.

Dameon sighed. What would it be like to approach a new life in Hell shorn of all knowledge, biases, experiences, and disappointments? To have love be fresh and exciting, friendships not contextualized by a dozen past go-rounds, to see the Rain Barrier or the Reach’s Green Fire Canyon for the very first time?

To feel wonder?

Hope?

No.

All that remained was the dizzying joys of power. He was so sick of the upper reaches of Hell. He’d cavorted and fought and fucked and explored his way through the Rascor Plains and Iron Weald and Telurian Band so many damn times the places made him sick.

What he wouldn’t give to reach the Scorched Swale. The Azure Expanse.

Dameon closed his eyes and summoned one of his most precious memories. The ineluctable weirdness and majesty of the Twilight Cradle, where all sound was muted, every gesture significant, where symmetrical trees like the patterns inscribed in the subterranean channels rose toward the arcs as alabaster spheres floated up from pools of steel…

A figure alighted beside him.

Dameon cracked open one eye.

Braxofitz.

“Ah!” He sprang to his feet, energized. “You’ve returned. How did it go? Myla claim Scorio?”

“She did,” agreed the Silverine, bowing his web-eared head. “I discharged my dolorous duty as agreed by the accords.”

“And the rest of them? Jova, Druanna…? You took enough numbers, surely…?”

“They escaped by swimming into the rock.” Braxofitz didn’t sound too disappointed. “We dug after them, but Philosophers are not Instinctuals.”

“They escaped?” Dameon froze, thoughts spinning. Could they pin…? They might suspect, but he wasn’t in evidence, and—

“Thusly, you end of the bargain has not been fulfilled,” continued Braxofitz. “We delivered one of the two Great Souls we captured to the Herdsmen, but remained with empty-handed of all the rest.”

“Right, right.” Dameon paused. “One of the two? Who else did you capture?”

“We have you in our possession,” said Braxofitz politely.

Dameon glanced up and around. Scores of Philosophers were watching, each hanging in the air in perfect silence. The vast Abstraction itself was no doubt aware of this, too.

“I am your guest,” said Dameon tentatively.

“You were our guest,” agreed Braxofitz. “But you promised us much and delivered nothing.”

“Because your Philosophers weren’t able to grab a handful of Great Souls before they dug a hole. I delivered the dish. You failed to eat the dinner.”

“We Silverines are focused overly much on end results. We do not like to quibble. You promised us Great Souls. We have none. You are here. You are now ours.”

Dameon resisted the urge to back away. Arguing with Braxofitz was a useless endeavor. He might as well try to convince the Silverines to stop being hungry for just a bit while he ran away.

“So… you’re going to feed me to a Sun?”

“An Abstraction,” corrected Braxofitz. “You are of moderate power, but valued highly due to your traumatizing actions many centuries ago. We still hear the mangled cries of the broken Abstractions you helped entomb beneath the Red Keep. It is not pleasant, but it is constant reminder that there are debts to be paid. You shall pay your portion of it.”

Dameon resisted the urge to curse. Instead, he forced a smile. “I… I reckon it’ll be tricky to convince you otherwise. Which Abstraction will it be?”

“We shall feed you to The Shadow of the Shadow of the Memory of the Moon,” said Braxofitz. “They are Primarch to the closest Sun, and eager to taste your dissolution. It is poetry that your essence shall empower us, when it so long ago caused us pain.”

“I love it, yeah.” Dameon shrugged. “And you know me, I can’t resist poetry.” There was only one hope. “But I do have this.” He drew out Myla’s amulet. “So, by the authority invested in this symbol of the ancient pact, I must demand you return me to the Red Keep.”

Braxofitz’s stared at the amulet, then faster than Dameon could track, backhanded it out of his grasp so that it sailed over the edge of the plateau and fell into the clouds.

“I don’t see what you’re referring to,” said Braxofitz calmly.

Dameon opened and closed his hand, glanced away and down into the clouds, then back to the Silverine. “I… can understand why you might be confused. To be honest, I thought your debt to the Herdsmen was sacred.”

“Our accords are sacred above all else,” agreed Braxofitz. “But you are not a Herdsmen, merely their envoy. If they protest, later, that we erred in eating you, we shall apologize.”

Dameon was rarely left at a loss for words, but for a long, aching silence he simply stared at the Silverine, and then he laughed. “Well! I do appreciate that assurance. Let’s not delay, then. Are you ready to convey me to Sir Shadow of a Shadow of the Memory of the Moon?”

Silverines descended upon him, grasping him by the arms and shoulders once more. Braxofitz arose at the same speed, his butterfly wings not stirring. “We are ready.”

“Splendid. I would hate to keep them waiting.”

They flew higher, the wind cutting and cold, and Dameon closed his eyes so as to not tear.

Into that darkness behind his eyelids he summoned his tapestry of future paths.

And as before, his road to Charnel Duke was as broad and golden as the heart of the Crucible. Perhaps broader.

Dameon grinned.

That meant his plan wasn’t as insane as he’d feared.

In fact, it was a stroke of genius.

What should have been suicide was guaranteed now by his own power to work.

Delighted, Dameon laughed, the sound tinged with hysteria even to his own ears, but honestly, who could blame him?

“What is funnisome?” called a Silverine from above.

“Oh, nothing. I just can’t wait to be served up to your Abstraction. The thought is making me giddy.”

“How nobility-infused of you!” The voice of the second Silverine was infused with longing. “If only all Great Souls were as generous and obliging as yourself!”

“Oh, I’m afraid there’s only one of me.” Dameon’s smile eased to a wry, predatory grin. “But trust me. That’s more than even all of Hell can handle.”