IGS #4, Chapter 33

Dameon

Damn it.

Damn it all to Hell.

Dameon hitched his pack nervously and glanced out of the stairwell into the entry hall. Even at this impossibly early hour a few people were up and serving themselves some of the fine slop that Lady Krula had trained the domestic Silverines to produce. Nobody important, luckily, so if he affected an air of sublime indifference…

He marched down the last few steps, through the archway, and with a calm and casual expression he made his way down the hall.

Anybody glancing at him would have thought he was going out for a casual stroll around the Keep. Getting a little exercise. Some fresh air.

But within he was practically screaming in panic.

Fuck!

Out through the main entrance and onto the Keep’s landing. The gray diffuse Unfathom light was as ubiquitous and awful as ever, shreds of cloud passing by slowly overhead, the ground fog devouring the sandy wasteland a hundred paces out in every direction, so that it felt as if he stood upon an island lost in a nebulous sea.

As expected, Silverines descended upon him in a twittering clamor. Humanoid to some degree or another, some with geometrically abstracted heads, others almost stupefyingly gorgeous, most with some manner of bestial feature, be it a bone bird head, stag horns, or ivory feathers framing their faces like a peacock’s fanfare.

“A fortunate voyager sets forth in search of his fortune, and is most fortunate to be offered assistance by—”

“Wherewith the twither bither you seek to meet your doom? I, forthwith, should—”

“I humble myself before your noble essence, your puissant force, for I alone—”

The offers tumbled about him like a melodic waterfall, some Silverines hovering above, others genuflecting low upon the landing, still others swooping down and then up and away with trilling laughter.

Madness.

To entrust himself to their care.

To throw himself upon their mercy!

Dameon drew himself up as tall as he could, squared his shoulders, and stepped away and to the side so that nobody within the hall could see him.

The Philosophers, sensing something of interest, something awry, clamored ever closer, thirty or forty of them swirling about and pressing in.

“Listen to my request!” he snapped, fear making him sharp. “Who here is the Philosopher most advanced? Who is closest to Uplift?”

A stir. The Silverines quieted, heads canting from side to side as they examined him, and then they gave vent to a musical swell of notes and half-formed words so that it felt as if a tide were rising about him, a musical deluge that would sweep him away.

But the crowd did part, and a single Silverine stepped forth. Dameon immediately recognized its power, for it seemed more dense, more real than its fellows. Slender of form, its skin was lead gray and formed into the tight, muscular body of a young man, though textured strangely as if carved with near perfect strokes from a chisel that had left countless subtle marks. White cloth like ivory was gathered into a skirt about its waist, and held there by a burst of golden fronds that encircled him and spread like the branches of a tree up his navel. Butterfly wings of pearlescent white extended from his shoulders, each segment delineated in gleaming gold, and its head was an ivory mask with great fin-like ears and a crest of sharp-tipped fronds framing its featureless, stark, and somehow menacing face where only two black holes were punched out.

“You ask for the Philosopher most adjacent to Uplift,” said this Silverine, tone svelte and smooth and cold like a knife. “I am known as and do name myself Braxofitz. I have consumed near unto sufficient light that I can upon the nonce hear the aetherial strains. What would you have of me, Great Soul?”

“I, ah, was told to seek you out and request a favor.” Dameon’s throat was tight, his mouth dry, his stomach a single clenched acid-sweating knot. “My name’s Dameon. I’m a Dread Blaze. I can guarantee, I can promise with the most sacred oaths to deliver you Pyre Lords and Dread Blazes and Flame Vaults. About ten in number.”

This caused the great cloud of Silverines gathered about them to lift into the air in a twitter of delight and excitement, wings beating, others simply levitating, heads turning, limbs stirring.

Braxofitz inclined his head in that bird-like manner of all Philosophers. “I listen.”

Dameon took a deep breath. “But in this matter I must talk with an Abstraction. You will guide me to the closest, and quickly. If we delay, we’ll lose the opportunity.”

“Great Souls are not brought upon the Abstractions of our kind, for your minds are punificent and unequal to the task of interlocution with such a being.”

“I’m well aware of my own limitations. But I can only treat with an Abstraction on this. I need their full support for my scheme, my proposal, if it’s to work.” Dameon licked his dry lower lip. “To, ah, guarantee the authority with which I speak, I bring this.”

And he reached into his robe to draw out the amulet which Myla had given him.

The horde of Silverines drew close and then sighed, falling back.

Braxofitz leaned in, fixing the amulet with his empty-socketed stare, and then inclined his ivory masked head. “I see the ancient sigil, and do recognize its authenticity. You shall be borne to the closest Abstraction.”

“Thank the fucking fiends,” whispered Dameon. Had they doubted its veracity, had Myla been selling him a lie, the Silverines would have torn him limb from limb for his audacity. “Good. We should leave now. How long will it take?”

“The closest Abstraction is the Willingness of the Past to Consider the Present as it Should Have Been as Dreamt by One Who Died Too Soon,” said Braxofitz softly. “We can convey you to itself in the amount of time it will take to carry you there.”

“Right,” said Dameon, putting the amulet away. “Is that… can you hazard a guess as to how long I would consider that to be?”

“You are hasteworthy, so you shall believe it o’er long no matter how quick.”

Dameon bit back a curse. “Right. Let’s just get going. How shall we—” His words cut off as he squawked in dismay. A handful of Silverines dipped down to close their hands or long-toed feet or claws about his shoulders and arms and hoist him aloft, their grip firm and confident, their laughter piping and hooting as he kicked his legs and fought to calm his panic.

Never allow yourself to be alone with the Silverines, he’d heard, time and again, spoken as fact by the lowest Flame Vault to Lady Krula herself. They want nothing more than to consume you.

The Keep fell away as they flew up into the clouds. A flock followed after, but these lost interest in quick succession and fell away to swoop back to the Keep.

Beside those that gripped him, only Braxofitz flew ahead, his complex ivory butterfly wings not stirring, as if he couldn’t be bothered to feign that they were his source of flight. The others laughed and peppered him with questions, asking him if he’d ever had intercourse with a river, or how he liked his steaks cooked, or why his toes pointed forward instead of backward. Dameon tuned them out. Arms gripped out to the side, the wind streaming into his face, he fought to relax as his body swayed and was buffeted by the icy cold winds.

On they flew. His robe grew crusted with silt. The clouds in the Unfathom weren’t made of moisture, but flecks of silvered mica. Soon his lashes were gummed with the stuff, and his mouth tasted like iron fillings. He took to spitting and keeping his eyes closed, his face angled down so the stuff wouldn’t get in his nose.

They broke free of the clouds without warning and were high above the Unfathom floor. Spitting again and again to clear his mouth of the last of the metallic crud, he craned his neck and tried to spot the Red Road.

Of course it was gone.

Obsidian dolmens punched up from the dunes of white sands below. They were massive, each a dour tower of weathered black rock, and they passed beneath him by the hundreds, a great silent forest amongst which blew fine sand like a pale fog.

On they flew, Braxofitz never turning back, and the land below became fractured, great chasms tearing it apart so that it began to look like a sheet of white glass dropped on the ground where it had broken into patterned blocks. The cracks grew bigger, the fragments becoming plateaus, and then they ended and they flew out over an ocean of cloud far, far below.

Dameon’s stomach clenched and he fought the urge to pull his knees up to his chest. If they dropped him now he would fall forever before cannonballing into that ocean of fog far below.

The plateaus fell behind and then were lost in the general mist. Clouds above, fog ocean below. The Silverines had finally ceased their questions, and now played a musical game, one trilling a tune, the next taking it up and repeating it with new trills and additions, the third doing the same, round and round except for sudden bursts of laughter as if something hilarious had taken place with the latest iteration.

Dameon’s arms had grown completely numb. His shoulders burned, and where the long toes dug into them, ached. He wanted desperately to drink from his waterskin, to stand on firm land, to just fucking get there.

Instead, he closed his eyes and summoned his Dread Blaze power. Before him bloomed the many roads, ranging from the crimson of certain death to the threads of copper, bands of silver, the paths of gold.

Taking a deep breath, he restated his purpose: to ascend to Imperator, to become a being of incalculable power, to earn the respect and fear of all other Great Souls and bow to nothing but his own desires. And then he smiled.

The slender golden thread that had led him to Myla had broadened and moved to take the center of the tapestry. It wasn’t as broad as he’d like, not nearly as bold and certain, but it was a definite band now, brilliant and true. The path he’d chosen to walk was bearing fruit.

Dameon let out a breathless laugh, exhilaration filling him, making the landscape gorgeous, the future beautiful, everything worth it, every sacrifice, every murder, every loss, every moment of doubt and pain.

“Twillest thy becockingest grillo?” called down one of the Silverines.

“You sound like an idiot!” Dameon called back, feeling invincible.

“My companionest does not yet understand the nature of wordings!” called down another, as amused as Dameon. “They are but very teeny-tiny eons removed from arising from the Instinctual frame of mind!”

“May the Pit bless their ascension!” shouted Dameon back.

“You seem abruptly amused by nothing we can discern!” This from the largest Silverine whose claws were sunk into Dameon’s shoulders. “Wherefore whither thither the cause of thy merriment?”

“Because I am invincible!” Dameon roared this answer not at the Silverines, but back at the whole damn expanse of Hell, all of the Unfathom, addressing the Imperators and the True Fiends, the Academy and the Red Keep, Scorio and Jova and every other prepossessing asshole out there who’d underestimated him. “Invincible!”

“So if we droppingest you at this very moment, you shall survive?” asked the same, genuinely curious.

“No, I’d splatter into a thousand thousand wet pieces of quivering meat, but you’re not going to drop me.” Dameon kicked his legs a little just for the fun of it. “Not after I showed you that amulet.”

“Very true,” called the fourth. “You are rendered immaculate, sheathed in ancient tradition and endowed with wondrous glory!”

“That I am,” grinned Dameon. “And don’t you forget it.”

On they flew, the wind whistling by, Dameon occasionally pulling up his vision of the future to admire that broad beaming band of gold. The cold no longer touched him. The temerity of his course of action now confirmed his bravura instead of filling him with terror. Of course this would work! All one needed to conquer Hell was knowledge, talent, and the verve, the tenacity, to do what needed to be done.

And by the ten Hells, he had all of those in spades.

Eventually a cliff arose from the fog ocean below, its face white as if dusted with snow, its top a broad and rough plateau. Down toward this they flew, Braxofitz taking the lead.

White mist blew off the plateau’s face into the void in a continuous vaporous cloud, but the plateau itself was adorned with a riot of purple blossoms whose virulent hue clashed violently with the otherwise monochrome world. Great purple roses, and from his high vantage Dameon saw that they formed a great spiral, their arms revolving and tightening to mount broad white steps to a platform on which a god-like being, a titan, an impossibility was crouched.

The Abstraction.

Dameon marveled.

Hell truly was wondrous.

The Silverine was huge, vaguely humanoid, immobile. Its head was a great rectangular solid, no, a series of rectangular slices that hovered in perfect alignment to give the illusion of a solid, their faces carved with sigils and intertwining geometric patterns. Bare torsoed, its hips wrapped in a great swathe of white clothe that flooded down to meld with the plateau proper, its chest burst open and proving to be the source of the purple blossoms which poured down from between its exposed ribs to litter the platform. Its arms were extended forward, fingers dug into the rock, each hand massive enough to form a tent under which Dameon could cower, the whole of its body tensed as if it were about to pounce.

But from its back extended a morass of tendrils, bands of white fabric or ivory or soul-stuff, a confusion, a web that reached some hundred yards up into the air before just… fading from view.

But Dameon knew better.

As they drew closer, ever closer, he gazed upon the Abstraction with his Heart senses.

The sky above it blazed alight with mystical Silver mana, but mana constrained, contained, processed and untouchable. Mana that flowed up through the bands of ivory to filter into the air and there become a miasma that wafted up and up into the heavens, moving, he knew, in the direction of the closest Silverine Sun.

Could he tap that cloud? Siphon it? No. The mana had been rendered immune to his influence.

But so much. A wealth of power just gassing up into the air, all of it processed by the Abstraction, which itself glowed as if white hot in his Heart vision, a terrific concentration of power unlike anything he’d ever seen.

Dameon’s exultation began to fade.

A memory from five centuries resurfaced. Four Imperators in the sky around a different Abstraction, the great titan rearing back and poisoning the air with its weaponized mana, reality curdling, whorls of dimensional space collapsing upon itself. Only the Imperator’s combined will kept bubbles of stasis around themselves as Dameon approached, himself an Imperator, oh, how godlike he ‘d been, complete, refulgent, to sacrifice himself upon the Abstraction’s altar, to force it to consume him, to take his consciousness into itself.

The seventeenth he’d helped destroy, the seventeenth he’d take over from within and forced to reverse its plane-dividing power so that it became an anchor instead, and could be compacted, mutilated, broken, and buried beneath the Red Keep so as to keep the Red Road always and forever on one harmonious singular plane.

Dameon grinned as they descended rapidly toward the titan. It hadn’t moved, but all around it hovered Philosophers, hundreds of them visible now, tending to their miniature god, their great stationary master.

If only they knew.

If only they recalled!

But Dameon banished the memory. He was no longer an Imperator, and had not the strength nor will to curb such a vast fiend.

No, today he approached as a supplicant.

Braxofitz flew forth to meet with a dozen other Philosophers who’d flown up to meet him. Dameon’s escort slowed to give them time, and then when Braxofitz turned to gesture, sped down.

Up close the Abstraction was only more impressive, more awe-inspiring, more alien and terrifying. It loomed massively over Dameon as he was deposited on the platform before it, the great rectangular cross-sections of its head hovering high above, the white skies visible between each slice.

The air thrummed.

A Philosopher stepped forth from between the tree-like arms. This Silverine was clad in purple robes of the same hue as the giant blossoms that spread across the platform, and its face was crystalline, its eyes sapphire blue, its tiny mouth the size of a coin. Now this was a truly advanced Silverine. Any day now it’d be feeding itself to the Abstraction, merging its essence with the titan and that of their entire species.

Braxofitz bowed low, arms spread wide, then righted itself with singular grace and spun in a circle. “I am being now and for however long this infinity lasts the Philosopher Braxofitz, and I have hied here from the Red Keep, commanded by ancient pact and emblem to bring this Great Soul, Dameon, to the Abstraction, as was agreed upon in the years after the Writhing!”

The august Philosopher raised its chin and scrutinized Dameon.

Braxofitz began to dance, a fitful jerking composed mostly of shuffle steps, pumping its arms out and pointing in erratic directions, and then abruptly it went still and stepped aside.

“Hello,” called out Dameon. With the huge bulk of the Abstraction looming overhead, it was hard to hold onto his earlier euphoria. “I come in peace and with an offer from your ancient allies. I bear their symbol, and I call upon the ancient pact so that we may reach an accord.”

Still the great Philosopher said nothing.

Hundreds of other Silverines floated in silence, watching.

Dameon cleared his throat and threw his arms out wide. “We live in perilous times! Times of scarcity. Where once the Unfathom teemed with life, with plentiful mana, now all is desolation and Silverines! You crave excess, but where can it be found? The amount of Silver mana flowing in from the south is constant but insufficient! You must grow, you must cause your Suns to incandesce, but the centuries have gone by, and still they hover,  quiescent!”

He had their attention. He had the Abstraction’s attention. It coalesced around him like a closing fist, making it hard to breathe.

But Dameon had always had a talent for performance. He lowered his arms. “Just as in times of yore, I bring you the symbol of your oldest allies and promise you great mana, Great Soul mana, Great Souls themselves for your feasting! Three Pyre Lords, three Dread Blazes, two Flame Vaults, and a blazeborn queen shall soon venture into the Unfathom, and I shall lead you to them!”

The floating Silverine Philosophers broke into eager whispering.

“All this I offer to you in honor of our alliance.” Dameon made a half-bow from the waist. “In honor of ancient pacts, ancient promises. I shall lead you to them, so that you and you alone may benefit from their great Hearts, their rich mana, their beautiful energy. A thousand Philosophers will be needed, perhaps more, as they are powerful beyond compare, legends in their own rights. But with enough numbers, you shall sweep their resistance away, and drink deep of their refined mana!”

His voice faded away, to be replaced by the low moan of the wind. It stirred the purple blossoms, it caused a fine mist to rise and blow out over the cliff into the endless sky beyond.

Was it the wind, he wondered, or the Abstraction thinking out loud?

“Your facial features and energetic signature is known to us,” called the august Philosopher. “Long centuries past you were part of the Great Rivening, when many of our focal points were extinguished. Your voice. Your bathos. It is as if yesterday were today, and the chance to right wrongs presented to us anew.”

Fuck.

“My friends!” Dameon pitched his voice to carry as he drew forth the amulet once more. “That Dameon is gone! Dead, less than dust, his memories scattered, his deeds reviled! I am not that man. If you devour me, you gain a mouthful of paltry mana, but for what? Those deeds cannot be undone. I spit on his memory, but like you, I can’t change the past! All I can do is make amends, and I do so by bringing you an offer of far greater power, of ascension, of potential uplift! Allow my apology to be a tangible one, especially as it is one made on the platform of an ancient alliance!”

And here he held the amulet aloft.

C’mon. C’mon. Take the damn bait, you stupid ravenous gluttons.

The Abstraction’s attention was so focused now that the air around him was shimmering, smears of rainbow iridescence manifesting then fading away.

The Philosophers stood stock still.

Braxofitz wasn’t even looking at him.

Despite the chill, Dameon’s brow prickled with sweat.

He wanted to thrust the amulet closer to the Abstraction, to fling it up at that huge weird head. Myla had sworn this would work. Worse, he’d sworn Heart Oaths that made it so he didn’t have a choice. She could have asked for him to chew off his foot and he’d have been forced to do just that.

But that band of gold. That avenue of beautiful success.

Dameon resisted the urge to summon it anew.

C’mon. C’mon!

“We shall respect the ancient accords,” said the Philosopher at last, and Dameon’s shoulders sagged with relief. “If you can deliver such magnificent Great Souls, you shall have paid penance for your previous transgressions.”

Dameon bit his dry lower lip. Glanced around at all the watching Silverines, then stared up at the huge titan that loomed above him.

And grinned. “Wonderful. There’s just one caveat. You may have them all to consume, but there is one—just one—that you must deliver to me.”

“One?” The Philosopher canted his head to one side. “Very well.”

“Then please, whenever you’re ready. Gather up your army, a thousand or more, and I shall lead you to them.”

The gelid focus of the Abstraction began to ease, the rainbow shimmers to disappear.

It was done.

Unable to resist, Dameon summoned his tapestry of paths.

And saw that the golden band had more than doubled in width.