Godclads
Chapter 36-5 To Seize a Star (II)

+Try your Cognisoft again. Do it again. If you don’t do it, we’re gonna be dead anyway.

Try it again. This is Fireteam Windborne. We need immediate extraction. The entire district needs immediate extraction.

The Substance, it’s shifting, it’s cracking. Something’s coming out of the—

Oh, oh God, oh just, oh no, no, no, no, no, God, no, please don’t, stop, I don’t want to see, I don’t want, I don’t want—okay, okay…

I—I will obey, my god. I will obey.

I will take the blade to my cock. I will carve my eyes from my skull. I will bite off this tongue. I will burn these ears. You can have my skin. You can make me your slave. You can change me however you will. Fill me with your fire. Fill me with your will. Fill me with your hate…+

-Last Transmission from Glaive Fireteam Windmourn

36-5

To Seize a Star (II)

The last time Avo remembered feeling this terrified, he was but a ghoul, nothing more than a mortal infused with a desperate urge for flesh and cruelty. Now, as something beyond even a mere god, he thought himself ascended above mortal emotions. He thought himself beyond all surprise, all sense of dread. But what spilled over him, what assailed his very mind, was something that he couldn’t control, something greater in thaumic mass and in cognitive capacity than he was.

With every word the horrific offspring—the merger between him and Veylis—spoke, he felt his insides quiver and quail. Its name was Ambition. He knew this without it even telling him. Everyone knew this. Everyone could feel it.

All across New Vultun, a collective wail rose: countless souls assailed by a single oppressive, all-consuming psychic mass. There was nowhere to hide from it—neither in baseline reality nor in the void, or even in the temporal dimension between.

It screamed using the Tapestry; it spoke with miracles and entropy together, and it raged. It raged against an existence that it couldn’t own, that it hadn’t enslaved yet. It raged against history it hadn’t shaped. It raged at the fact that there were other people who could make their own choices, who could live, and who could decide who they wanted to be. It raged because this world was not within its mind, burning, breaking, changing to its whims for all eternity. It raged because that was what it was capable of—the only thing it was capable of—after the best parts of Avo and Veylis shattered each other in a nightmarish, paradoxical dance, achieving mutual destruction through their only virtues.

What remained? What remained was horror. What remained was arrogance. What remained was a single, all-consuming desire. Ambition.

“My name has Ambition. I am Ambition. I am, I am, and I am, and you will not be!”

Ambition’s voice rumbled through the world, and halfway through, Avo realized that his outer layers were screaming. The very birth of Ambition had driven over fifty ego layers of the Hidden Flame outright insane. But this was a good thing, and a fortunate thing. If Avo had condensed himself into a single, solitary body, he knew not what might be left of him by this point.

Having so many insulating sections and buffers allowed him to endure. And, better yet, there were still Draus templates left in the external layer. They withstood, regardless of everything. Rather than accepting his outer layer as lost, he replaced the primary egos running there, adapting them to instances of the Regular. As she winked into place, she too flinched, but she didn’t break.

“What in the Hells is happening?” Draus growled.

“I—I think that me and Veylis, we had something of a child,” Avo attempted a joke.

Draus, for once, seemed outright horrified. “Jaus. No wonder everything’s so goddamn fucked up. This thing—it must be an abomination. I can hear it screaming from here. How is it even screaming through reality? I think it might be bound to reality itself, and it’s not even fully born yet.”

He turned his attention down from this place above, back to New Vultun.

The Substance was congealing together, slowly collapsing inward, pulling away from all the districts. It was becoming a narrow dome around the place where Scale used to be. More fissures lined its exterior, and the Sunderwilds left in the aftermath of the Deep Ones were pulled outward, becoming new fractures as well.

Avo wasn’t sure how the Substance was capable of doing this, or if Ambition even knew what it was doing—but it had a weight. It had an influence over reality on a level he could barely fathom. And it was barely born, he thought again.

With building horror, he watched as the top part of the egg split into two. A hand—a clawed limb layered over mechanical human digits—began to push and press. As the hand continued to pry open that metaphysical shell, Avo saw something unnatural: the hand was lined with many small mouths, each leading into a quivering darkness, the same kind that ebbed around the curve of an event horizon, like a singularity—like Veylis’s singularity generator.

Then, finally, Ambition extended an arm into the world. It was a perfect arm and a broken arm—shattered and composed of countless patterns. It was not of the world. It was the world absolute: concept made matter, matter expressed divine. It wore the patterns and miracles of reality as its own shape, quivering as bands of unnatural power composed its being. Veins flowed through it, carrying not only blood but also the stuff of storm, fractals of time, shifting pockets of space. It was a calamity. It was a miracle. It was history and memory. It was a god beyond gods, a god of higher hate—a god that tore at the very fabric of what was.

Its head came next, and it was a horribly skinned thing, like the face of a flayed ghoul wrapped around the mangled, cybernetic skull of Veylis. It wasn’t clear if she wore him like a helmet or if he was biting down, chewing on her, but they both looked so ruined, so miserable together. When it spoke, Avo wished he could unsee the sight. Both of their mouths moved as one; her eyes snapped open, but inside were his eyes—those eyes. A fire burned there, a fire of the Conflagration, screaming, reawakened, trying to kill itself but unable to finish the deed.

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From Ambition’s back, a mockery of Avo’s Echoheads extended out into reality. These Echoheads, now composed of arterial-shaped Ruptures harvested from what had been left by the Deep Ones, whipped out, coiling and twisting through the air—each one capable of sundering time itself, of shredding the flesh of existence.

With a final stretch, Ambition broke free, floating high into the air. It hovered there in its horrible, glistening majesty, then reached down into the substance, now withering and dying. It compelled its will upon the placenta of its birth. The substance began to twist and fuse. Slowly, all that ethereal content churned and thickened, folding like bands of steel. Finally, it came into shape: a sword—a sword of scorn, forged from the contents of ghosts of one’s mind and lit and refined by the flames of the stillborn. Rippling hate and misery radiated from its edges.

As it held the blade high, it swiped down—and Avo felt a billion people die at once. They died because they saw the blade. They died because they looked the wrong way at the wrong time on the wrong day.

The strike fell like a blow from the Sunderwilds, cutting through a single point in space and a billion others. Necks sprayed open, blood gushed—and from that blood came variants of Avo from before: Avo, from where he’d just awoken in the barge surrounded by corpses; Avo with the bone demon, better than just a ghoul—stronger, but without his moral inhibitions; Avo with the conglomeration finally installed, ignorant to what he was going to become; stripped of his Necrotheurgy, if only for a while.

But all of them began to attack different parts of the city in a mockery of the Hungers. If there was one thing Ambition despised, it was the Hungers—its grandparents—for failing to take the world, for being prisoners when it had so much power.

The Hidden Flame himself took a wound watching the scene. As he flinched backward, he burned the wound away. The strike, to his fortune, had been merely physical. Even though it tapped into the concept of causality, physical damage meant nothing to him. But if it continued—if it was allowed to strike at the city—untenable destruction would follow. “I must descend again,” Avo said. “I must descend and face him. I must gather the guilds.”

What’s more, he refused to risk any of his people against this. Dice and the others had little recourse against such a foe—and his Deep Ones were needed to delay Voidwatch.

He spoke then to the people within his temporal dimension, telling them of what was about to happen and what they would need to do. Some of them panicked; others couldn’t conceive or understand what was transpiring. He let them be. There would be time and hardship enough if they managed to survive the coming days.

But for now, the Strix tore down from the clouds above. Through the near void, another blackness fell like a dollop, its heart nested within its singular eye, burning balefully, screeching with defiance. Limbs of burning tendrils extended across reality, flexing wide to fracture the sky. An aversion of a father called out to its ruined child, demanding that it stop.

By this point, Avo saw and sensed countless accretions dotting all over the horizon. Hundreds of thousands of Godclads were manifesting: miracles were closing in on the beast known as Ambition. He spoke, not to his spawn, not to the thing born between him and Veylis. He spoke to the rest of the city.

“New Vultun, hear me. I am Avo. I am the Strix. I am the Burning Dreamer and Symmetry’s master. Stand together. Whatever happened before, whatever grievances you have, it can wait. We must contain this. We must stop this. We must pin this thing here, or there will be no Ladder, no paradise to achieve.”

He channeled every bit of his cognitive capacity into the speech. Waves of his intent and memory washed out like a tide, crashing against the rage and fury unleashed by Ambition. He struggled against his unwanted offspring, directing his mental powers like blades between cracks in its focus. He was the swifter mind, the focused mind, the one with Ignorance, and refined of Necrotheurgy.

But he was a hawk pecking at a giant. It had all the ghosts he had and more. And its mind was broken yet whole, untouchable by trauma, misshapen by nature.

Ambition pointed its blade up at him. Ontology twisted around the blade; causality and chronology began to fuse into a singular concept—a concept it intended to cut and strike from reality: the concept of Avo himself. He wasted no time weaving a counter.

“If you strike at each other, if you part from the greatest threat, if only for a moment, we will all fall,” Avo roared, his words smashing into the Guilders and half-strands that thought now was a good moment to keep fight. Some shattered beneath his intensity. Most stopped as fear gripped them, as they realized the true battle looming ahead.

Ambition slashed reality, but Avo—channeling his own might—forged a blade from time and blood. Descended from his realm of above as the Woundmother splashed into him, coating his streaks with golden red. An echo sounded across existence. The Tapestry shivered as two clashing miracles slammed together. Avo felt a paradox rip through him. He jolted, his cognitive capacity flickering, and his Rend climbed, for the first time in moments, past sixty percent. Ambition stumbled back, briefly stunned.

Then, to Avo’s horror, the patches of entropy lining its back grew longer and wider. It wasn’t even venting; it was simply extending parts of itself across reality. It was so broken it defied even Kae’ss understanding of thaumaturgy.

“How is it still alive? Is this the doing of Stillborn? Is this because of him?”

Ambition twisted its blade again, but this time, rather than striking instinctively like a monster, it took on a stance. The ghoul around its head receded, folding inward until Veylis’ was on the exterior, and Avo slumbered within her mouth.

Suddenly, her stance took on a martial lean. This was no longer just another monster. This was a monster shifting through permutations of hate, and now it was bearing the legacy of Zein Thousandhand.

Thankfully, Avo had prepared for this. “Zein, are you there?” he called, and within the planetary ring, a woman drew her glaive and felt her mind bind with a long-time enemy.

“Yes,”

“Tell me what you want to cut. I will show you, and you will strike through me,” Avo said.

And then the Strix took on a new dimension. It became as if a cloak, a regalia for a figure far away. The shape of a woman—no, the greatest killer Idheim had ever known—emerged from it as the burning skull of the Strix sank into her core while the rest of it, its collective power and Avo’s mind fused around her like armor. A new glaive was formed for her in the shape of the Woundmother—tower that became a glaive of golden-red: of blood and time.

The thing born of her daughter struck, and she channeled her full power and all of her skill in a parry that shattered even memite. The risen mountain of alloy that was the Tiers experienced its first true damage that day as the patterns of reality began to snap and wither in this contest of Overheavens.

Fractures grew at the base of the gleaming metal, and more and more people—now freed from the substance’s constraints—began fleeing en masse for the city they had spurned so long below.

As golems, Godclads, and Guilds mustered themselves to face the calamity unfolding at the center of New Vultun, a protective barrier of time and ichor rose to part the Strix-Bearing Godslayer and the all-ruining beast that was Ambition.

“GRANDMOTHER!” The nightmare of existence screamed. “Hate you! Despite you! Burn you! Enslave you! Break you!”

“Silence, wretch,” Zein said with a yawn. “You are not of my daughter’s flesh, nor do you bear even the slightest shadow of my chosen son in you.” And at her mention, a larger form emerged behind Zein—the muscular shape of Naeko standing upon a massive, shadowy palm with an eye at its core flowed in connection with her.

Avo might feel the lesser weight, but he was no less an archive of gods—no less a shapeshifter of the divine than Ambition. Zein was merely the tip of his spear. Naeko and Draus would be his shields. And all his other templates would serve as his guide.

Once more, he primed the virus he used to destroy the Ashbringer, and this time, he loaded it into the tip of the spear the Woundmother became.

“It is time to administer this… abortion,” Zein sneered. “What a pity, my daughter. What an ugly thing that wears your skin.”