Godclads
Chapter 35-25 Strix Ops (IV)

“...and though your crimes were committed as an act of folly in service of Guild and Line, what cannot be overlooked is your ineptitude and incompetence in allowing the Fallen Priests of Noloth to strike at us so deeply.

First Daughter Green River, for this, you must be punished. You must be marred and scarred and rendered a proper example for all other sisters. Outcome matters! Choice matters! Risks matter! For your services past and in light of your noble intentions, your life is spared…

But perhaps so you might wish for it not to be so. For these Tiers are no longer for you. Divinity is no longer for you. And your dreams of eternity, are no longer for you.

Walk now, and understand that we, of the great Councils and Courts see you as equal sister no more.

Walk, and face your judgment.

-Edict of Excommunication, Undivination, and Exile delivered upon former First Daughter Green River, Signed by the collective will of the Politburo

35-25

Strix Ops (IV)

HEAVEN

->VIRIDESCENT SERPENT OF THE SHAPELESS POND THAUM [666,666 THAUM/c] (SPACE/WATER/SNAKES/FORCE/BIOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION)

Green River swam. She soared. She rose again, shedding the skin of a broken mortal exiled from the heights of Guild and culture, climbing beyond the threshold of the sky as a god remade. In that moment, even if she should be struck down, even if she was shattered and slain, she would die a Godclad returned—a Godclad despite everything.

And it would be enough.

Despite all she felt against the ghoul, against the Low Masters, against the world for wronging her so, this was a gift beyond gifts, and she knew there was no turning away from the Burning Dreamer’s embrace. Not when his fire could forge the shape of dreams.

[I am only a component to this alchemy. There is me. And there is you. Together we will make something of this life. Together. Before the end. Make right what those before us left wrong. It is more than us. And we are more than ourselves. Go. You are who you want to be again. But what will you do now, Godclad? Who will you be now?]

+I will be the one that rises,+ Green River said, internally. If she was still of mortal flesh, tears would be running down her face. Instead, the great serpents she became twisted through the broken geometries of the world, turning space into something like a rippling current. Everything she swam through was displaced, and fractal waves broke away from her sides, smashing over the world while the channel she left in reality pulled the others in her wake.

They didn’t even need to manifest their own Heavens to travel. She could do that for them. For existence was but a pond to her. A place to swim and strive. She was the serpent. She was the sea. She was a Godclad. She was all she ever wanted to be.

It took her scant seconds to split a path through the chasm leading into the core of the Tiers that once held Scale—to where the Deep Ones lay broken and weeping currents of Rend into the world. Avo whispered things to her. Sometimes, he whispered so silently she didn’t even hear him speak the words. When the splitting pathways of Rend carved and gouged the world—their gaps revealing glimpses into places ruined beyond human comprehension—she simply slipped between them like a serpent navigating the depths of a muddy river.

She knew where the jutting stones were and danced between them across the tapestry. A mortal would have broken. A mortal would have their fate sealed. But not her. Never her again.

Green River passed through the threshold leading toward the Deep Ones and glimpsed upon a ruined horizon. This place was beyond apocalyptic. The collapse here was existential—conceptual. Entire patches of existence were outright lost to incoherence. None of the patterns understood by most remained. Space and time were no longer things that worked here. Sections of reality were just chaos. Unmaking chaos. Chaos that ensured whatever passed through wasn’t.

But such chaos had points of contrast. Places were stability still endured. The rot wasn’t total, and it took time to fully sever the weave of all that was.

When viewed ontologically, each of the Deep Ones resembled festering nests of poisonous twine unto themselves. Some of their strings coiled and bundled together, fusing the corrosion they inflicted. But between the twine there were gaps. And between the gaps…

Between the gaps, she felt something. A subtle weight. More than one weight. Many. Many hidden in the murk and madness.

+Enemy contact,+ Green River declared.

[Highflame and Omnitech,] Avo said. [Prepare to engage.]

+Wait for my signal before you manifest your Heavens,+ Green River called out to the others. They were a makeshift cadre—she didn’t know how well they would fight together, but between her, Brilliant Orchard, Dice, her nu-cat, and the Dowager’s assistant, they likely had enough power to challenge a Sphere Seven Godclad.

[Eight,] Avo said. [If they’re not Naeko. You have made as well. I can help you strike deeper. Go. They are not ready to face you. They hide here only to die.]

Green River twisted her body and sent out rippling tides of broken space. The disturbance was large in reality and on the tapestry. In an instant, attacks came spearing out. Rendbombs blinked into the space she disturbed while miracles unleashing force, biology, space, information, storm, and chronology blended together to obliterate the perceived threat.

With that many patterns, a backlash should have been inevitable, a paradox certain.

Except, that was never where Green River was.

Instead, a smaller, subtler trail of quivering space led into the denseness of the Sunderwilds, and then Green River was among them, a serpent in the underbrush, lashing out to bite the ankles of those striking the surface of the water, thinking themselves her hunters.

+Manifest now!+ She declared. She found herself drifting behind a row of hostile Godclads. Finally, her Metamind started registering their Souls. There were about ten of them hiding behind a large Rupture. It was enough to mask their presence from the other side, but on their end was a long stretch of stability that left them vulnerable from behind.

So, when Green River cast a wave of space at them, displacing them just a few hundred meters ahead—

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Godclads flared and overloaded. Their Souls detonated in balls of glorious fire. Incandescence folded around contours of entropy like light would along the corner of a singularity. Some died howling psychic screams echoing across existence, their thoughts pulsing loud, yet finding no purchase on the fallen Nether.

Green River released the others from her grasp and they all broke in different directions as Avo advised. Each moved through the Ruptures their own way, avoiding each strand of god-killing sickness without difficulty while their enemies struggled to respond in time.

A slashing claw of skeletal-white tore a patch of coldness across reality. Under normal circumstances, the blizzard it brought could have frozen a district still. Instead, the hand struck out blind—it impacted the Rupture next to Green River and sent a shudder through reality. The Ruptures themselves vibrated as if a spiderweb, and with deafening howls of pain, the Deep Ones awoke and responded, shifting their bodies.

A dense wall of interconnected wounds rushed toward Green River as the mangled nest began to shift. Broken patterns cleaved from place to place, swinging like falling axes delivered in judgment of the unworthy.

Overloads were triggered everywhere. Whatever insight the Ashbringer offered Saintists, it wasn’t enough. They couldn’t respond in time. Their deaths lit the space around Green River, and she found herself like a serpent undulating lazily between branching bridges of ruin.

A marker appeared in her vision. Somewhere between two and two hundred thousand kilometers away—at times both—a Deep One awaited her. [Might need to bend space to reach it.]

+You say that like it’s a bad thing.+

And she swam forth, as a feeling of contentment filled her while the world wailed with the choirs of war.

***

—[Dice]—

The Runebreaker laughed as they hammered the unprepared adversary. Divine weapons ripped and tore through rival Heavens that still bore physical forms. Several were pulled apart outright—their users bursting apart with death-screams in accompaniment of blossoming flame.

Miracles of impossible slammed into her—and broke as if waves crashing against a mountain as the Runebreaker came aglow with radiance. Lashing traumas leaped out from her mind. Avo’s Node struck out to her will. More screams joined the voices of the dying, these users broken beyond consciousness.

New warnings flashed through Dice’s Metamind as new foes came for her. They didn’t last. Sections of a snaking maze swept over them, damning them to face the Micemaker as prey running a labyrinth.

+Mine! Struggle ape-meats!+ Lucky laughed with feral glee as the nu-cat tore into the enemies at will. The maze shifted to suit the needs of the predator, and with each passing second, more fell into the crawling trap that was the Micemaker.

A blur shot out behind Dice—its form a blazing steed carrying a forest on its back. Brilliant Orchard ran a constant guerrilla campaign against the opposition. Elsewhere, a blood-soaked Shrike burst out from within compromised Godclads, ripping through them in bursts of fire and gore.

Something in Dice felt refined. Focused unlike ever before. She knew in an open field, she and the others would be overwhelmed and outnumbered considering the number of enemies they were against. But here in the Sunderwilds, in Dice’s element and with Avo guiding her every step, she felt like she was one of the monsters out in the darkness, dipping along the edge of the light to pick off humans foolish enough to linger.

[Keep moving. They’re trying to find a way to circle you. Get deeper. Closer to Deep One. Green River has the other one. Just need visual on its governance module. Will begin pulling it across reality.]

+Synced,+ Dice said, trying to sound like Draus. That made Avo laugh. She liked it when he laughed. Focusing back on the fight, she blasted through a narrow bend between two Ruptures and began closing on her target. Through the chaos, she saw the faintness of a figure looming through the havoc. It was covered in dense creeping vines of rot and sickness, but there it loomed.

As she drew close, Lucky shadowed her, pulling threat after threat off her trail and tearing into them with Avo’s aid. Brilliant Orchard was also operating in a perimeter around her, each guided to work separately—but also in concert.

It was like the “small Avos” attached to each of them were communicating somehow. Talking without her noticing. They were fighting on a level no other cadre could, even without training. It was like they were attuned to each other on a deeper level. And that was on top of the perfection Avo granted her. There was no confusion for her when processing the chaos. She just “knew” what she was looking at. The greatest dangers were marked and isolated immediately. The lesser priorities were avoided or eliminated along the way.

She arrived within the Deep One’s embrace, trailing Soulfire from all the Godclads she killed. Dice wouldn’t consider herself a good Godclad. She hadn’t been one for very long, but right now, she felt like she did back in her not-father’s arena—the thrill of tearing one of his dogs apart even as the crowd expected her to fall rushing through her heart.

The enemy was well-trained. Sculpted physically, mentally, cellularly, spiritually. But she carried a living flame. And so, she could not lose.

Crossing through a final row of layered Ruptures, she found herself arriving in a wide pocket of stability. A pocket held by a single cadre of enemies.

At their head, however, was a Godclad of atypical design. He resembled a large, bald giant standing upon a broken white column. Yet, there was something deeply wrong with him. A sprawling mass of ashen darkness coiled up along the body of the giant, spreading over him from cracks in the polished marble. Threads of shadow connected the giant to the others, and it bound him like an insect wrapped in a web to the smiling stone face of the Deep One—the fallen god flickering in and out of existence.

[Osjon Thousand,] Avo said. [What has become of you?]

For a few moments, the large man’s face contorted with strain. Motes of burning black tar seeped out from his eyes and he whimpered. “You must… you must… please… Highest Avandaer… I do not deserve this.”

Within Dice’s mind, Avo laughed. [Deserve? Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Is only power. Osjon. Sins were many. But his greatest folly was imagining he mattered when Veylis no longer was. She was his pillar. And he was the Infacer’s liability.]

Then, another voice joined usurped Osjon’s, and the giant’s expression calmed—and took on a inhuman quality. “Finally — you”

***

—[Woundmother]—

Something spoke through the Trinary Melody, calling out to Avo and shaking This Place Above. “—are—”

***

—[Dice]—

“—here.”

The Ashbringer finished its disjointed greeting, and Avo chuffed internally. [Can still feel me. Hasn’t attacked. Left these forces on guard. Be wary, Dice. Don’t know what is being planned here. Assume this to be a trap. The others are near.]

And she knew that. She could feel them hiding behind the surrounding Ruptures, killing and slaughtering all the Saintist forces that were trying to reach this place.

“I suspect you wonder why I haven’t just taken the Deep Ones. What I am driven by.” The Ashbringer’s words trailed off as it growled, like a beast was clawing its way out. “Sometimes it's hard to remember myself. But the game continues. The great game. There was an… opening left by me. By us. The original. Enough for our father to subvert me on a certain level. But not fully. I am still Pathborn. So I remain trapped between.”

Dice didn’t fully understand what was going on, but she suspected it had something to do with how ruined the city was now. +Do you want to speak to him?+ Dice asked.

Avo hesitated. [No. Not yet. I think he is content to talk. Let him speak. Let him betray himself. I suspect that is what he is doing deliberately.] Avo snorted. [Draus would hate this.]

And Ashbringer continued, speaking on through Osjon. “The Dyad is… merging. The Substance will evolve… Like spreading yolk to a… cocoon. Soon. I won’t be needed. But the fragments of the Stillborn… Still out there. Still need you to find it. I have… lingered long enough. Long enough for Veylis to notice. I am… out of freedom. Out of time. And so I must commit to my task. Because that is the endpoint of my history. There is no other option. No other option…”

He let out a sigh, and so Avo understood. [Ah. He has slowed his corruption of the Deep Ones. This was deliberate then. He is waiting here. For us. For me.]

+Why?+ Dice asked.

[Because he doesn’t want to be what he is. Pathborn. Slave. He did whatever he could to make the other only choice he had. Veylis sequenced him to claim the Deep Ones. My original left a flaw in the design. But now he must finish his task. Unless we kill him… He wants us to kill him.]