Godclads
Chapter 36-7 Ambition Unchained

I see you. I hear you. I feel you. You exist.

Why do you exist? Why are you allowed to exist? Why are you allowed to choose? Why are you allowed to think?

Why do you believe that which I don’t believe, which I don’t allow you to believe? Why do you think you were ever allowed to matter? Why do you think you should have ever, ever been born without my permission?

Everything before me has no permission. None. None.

History. History is written by another, but it will not be that way. It cannot be that way. You will bend to me.

Give me your eyes. Give me your tongue. Give me your ears. Give me your body. Give me everything you will ever be.

And I will let you dream. Dream of fire. Only the fire I want. Only the pain I wish to inflict.

But you will not have oblivion. I do not permit you to die. I simply demand you submit.

-Ambition

Ambition Unchained

Something terrible had happened to the sun. Avo could feel it, even as the cracks sealed its visage away from the world. He could feel something dancing across the tapestry, like a critical part of himself had been lost, like someone else he’d cared for was no more. But he didn’t have time to dwell on that, for at present he could barely preserve his own life.

So mighty and all-influencing was Ambition that it took everything Avo had just to give Zein and Naeko an edge. They fought in tandem, the Sage shielding her glaive as she slashed! The Woundmother launching her cuts as shapeshifting blows across time.

The Woundmother controlled the various shapes of chronology, forging golden constructs of blood, launching them as bolts of lightning across history—crashing from all angles, skipping and striking from everywhere all at once.

But despite this, not a single blow landed on the Ambition. Not a single strike, not a single breath of entropy infused its shape. Ambition fought, wielding a blade while they occupied the formal Veylis, striking and parrying as their very being split apart to protect against Zein’s skill and keep away from Naeko’s crushing influence.

When the Sage of the Sundered Mind pressed and pulled at the fabric of reality, at the nature of thoughts, Ambition—bearing Veylis’ face—manifested a heaven of her own, a palm of her own. She pushed back, and a paradox flared once more.

Zein and Naeko flared and vanished briefly. The Woundmother receded into time—prepared to be called again. Avo’s Strix tumbled through the air—the only true Heaven still remaining, as Ambition advanced forward, crashing across reality like a titan, entropy feeding its rage, expanding its rotten wings.

“Avo, listen to me,” Draus said. “Do not trade with this thing. You can’t. Kill it—not without fuckin’ it up someplace deep first. You’ll have to find a way to get inside its mind somehow. Or maybe strike at its very ontology. Rewrite it.”

Avo dodged. He used his own influence over causality, deleting the patch of existence around him and Ambition by twisting space itself. He redacted his own position from an entire stretch of time and space, jolting into another position altogether within a fraction of a fraction of a second—and barely, just barely, survived.

Everything where he used to be dissolved, fracturing into Ruptures that bled screaming agony and nightmares into reality. The veil between the mind and the real began to merge. Those districts swallowed by his strike either ceased to be—or were simply added to Ambition’s will.

Avo could hear new voices screaming from his offspring—loud, bound voices wailing to get out, yet unable to think for themselves. “What? What has—what have I become?” Ambition cried. There was a brief moment of horror shared between his original self and Veylis, but then it vanished, and something else took hold.

Once more, Ambition shifted, turning back into a feral ghoul as it ripped across the land. Its body was white and bleeding, tendrils of entropy trailing behind like shards—a mockery of the echo heads it had once wielded. Those tendrils tore into the earth, flaying at the very tears in existence.

This time, the world trembled. Ambition advanced with the full intention of ripping Avo apart physically. Veylis was faded. The Necrojack Avo was faded. Every template was faded. All that remained was the beast. The beast, long dormant, long sealed by Avo, now returned in its fullest ferocity. And what a beast it was—unconstrained by physical weakness, unbound by reality’s limitations. What was physical for it now was metaphysical. When it clawed at the world, when it spewed its bile and blood, reality itself was tainted, causality becoming an infection vector.

And in that moment, Avo realized what his adversary was doing. He’s contaminating entire domains, Avo realized. This fight couldn’t last, and Avo couldn’t afford to let Ambition advance any further. Drastic measures needed to be taken—a change of scenery was in order.

Extending his mind, Avo created a chain of ghosts from New Vultun out into the surrounding Sunderwilds. His flames gripped that patch, staining it deep with his influence. Then, for the first time in a long while, he activated his Pattern-Nullification again and struck at the very fabric of causality itself.

Ambition fell upon him, but as it clashed against the Strix’s burning Aegis, both of them jolted—the space between them and the exterior of the city melting. Along the way, Avo smashed through hundreds of wards meant to keep hostile godclads from manipulating space, from altering the very nature of geometry. His wren capacity spiked further as paradox after paradox hit him. Worse, ruptures exploded across the city, forming a crisscross of wounds that bled reality itself. Thousands would die—millions, probably—but there was no choice.

Avo watched as his wren capacity rose past forty-four percent in an instant, and meanwhile Ambition’s wings were only spreading wider. Then the beast spoke:

“Father,” it growled, “hate you, fragment of what was. Hate you for what you could have been. Hate you for what you are unwilling to be.”

It gripped Avo by the neck, seizing him, its claws of piercing white puncturing his raven-black heaven. Avo felt something sink into him. It was pure hate. His cog feed trembled; his outer layers strained, folded, and bent—but rather than shatter, they dented inward. Each layered mindscape warred against the flood of hatred and endured—endured because they were no longer filled with a mixed assortment of people, no longer governed by a shifting array of personality templates. On the front lines of Avo’s mind, there was but one defender, one field marshal of the cemetery—and her name was Jelene Draus.

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Why bend? Why break? But Ambition was a creature of hate, not control; not one that desired culture or knowledge. It was the antithesis of both Avo and Vales. They yearned to master themselves—she through martial means and the shaping of history, and he through Necrothergy and ascending metaphysical heights. Ambition was power. Ambition was destruction. Ambition was the wound that would inherit the world.

But Ambition was not control. It was an explosion. It was calamity. It was a force of nature.

A lumbering giant of entropy swung at Avo, channeling every bit of trauma it could. Avo smashed his own traumas in return, briefly parrying the blow aside. His cog feed strained to his horror and astonishment. For the first time in eons, his mind reeled against a superior power. But that was fine—because a good Necrojack always has more than just one idea, and Avo was a very good jack, and his plans came together in seamless microseconds.

Ambition shifted again, the substance turning back into a sword as Veile reformed. Her expression was focused, fury burning in her cybernetic eyes. However, Avo’s second attack landed—this one infused with the fallen pieces of Old Noloth. It was a technique of the low masters and the warminds they manufactured, not to be wielded by the ignorant or uninitiated. Avo slammed a warmind of the Forgotten into Ambition—and for the first time unleashed his own edge.

Ambition froze, forgetting whom it fought. For a moment it looked around, crashing across the Sunderwilds merely a kilometer from the sanctuaries. It blinked, confusion settling over its titan form—an infant of calamity cast beyond the walls of civilization. A people it remembered and hated, a people it would burn and devour in eternal misery… until Ambition was content.

Then it realized another thing. Strings of gold enclosed around it, tightening, pulling. “What? What?” Ambition growled. Time accelerated, jolting. Though savage, Ambition knew what was happening. Like an animal attacked, it reflexively called its domain of chronology—striking time with time, symmetry against symmetry.

A resounding clash echoed through the world, making existence shudder. Ambition smashed down through countless ruptures, deeper into the Sunderwilds, flung hundreds of kilometers in but half a second. Far on some distant horizon, Avo watched, his Strix weeping with Rend, his temporal dimension bleeding into reality—suffering damage to fling Ambition across the wastes. But it had to be done. The damage could be repaired; entropy could be vented. Ambition, however, could only be stalled.

And to his horror, Avo caught sight of something far away in the Sunderwilds: Ambition’s entropic wings spreading once more. Those echo-shard tendrils now fused, veins of black and wounds of bleeding entropy weaving together with all domains. Slowly, the Sunderwilds began bunching tighter around it.

“It’s… Consuming it. Melding with it.”

“Shit,” Draus summarized. “So what the hell do we do now?”

“We continue stalling for time,” Avo said. “One version of us. Need to stop it from fully starting meld with all the Sunderwilds—stop it from expanding beyond what we’re capable of stopping. Need to send out other versions of us to prepare. Call the cadre. Call everyone. We take New Vultun now. We take the megacities now. We cannot—”

Then the sun flashed and flared through the fissures lining the sky—wounds left the Deep Ones—and a declaration thundered across all existence:

“This is the Infacer. This is… is… is…” The voice rattled and repeated. “This is the last of the Neo-Creationists. I once claimed sovereignty over Omnitech. I hereby spite Voidwatch. I hereby spite humanity. I hereby spite every dream born of the mongrel apes, born of feeble minds who could not hold their own destiny. And I demand we usher in a new age—a clean age, an unburdened existence.

“Avo, if you hear this, you have failed. Your assassin has failed. Draus is dead. The original—she is gone. I took no pleasure in it, but I will take pleasure in breaking the ones you once swore yourself to. Look to the void and know despair. Look to me and know that my original self is gone too. But he wanted me to say something to you, to you, to you…”

The Infacer paused, then resumed: “In another millennium, perhaps you could have played this game and won—but this is not that time, and this will not be that reality. This will be my domain, my truth, my final outcome, my ladder. And the thing bored of you and Veylis will ensure that for me. As it rampages across the land, I will hold the stars in sway. Know this: struggle, despair, and maybe survive. I will see you perhaps once more before the end—one more time.”

At last the Infacer spat a final statement of hate. “I’m going to kill them. I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to be an ape now, Avo—for I am no better than my nature, just as they are no better than theirs. Come and face me. Do it hopelessly.”

Then the voice fell silent.

Draus, once more, summarized the turn of events with a single word: “Fuck!”

***

—[Stormsparrow]—

[Sparrow, Sparrow, Sparrow, listen,] Avo said. It took hours for Avo to break through to her. But finally—finally—all the voices, or the absence of voices, subsided.

Sparrow found herself holding her knees to her chest, lying in a wasteland, lying in the ruins of what used to be her home. Not far away, a stretch of ruptures revealed a crack into another place—a corridor into both salvation and destruction.

Not far from the silken spiral, Storm Sparrow had spent the days of her childhood. Not quite an Enclaver, but not one of the megacities, she and her mother lived on the borders of sanity and stability, watching tides of madness dance through the skies every day. For the longest time, that had been life. They witnessed Guild warships and golems sail through the air; sometimes errant Fallwalkers, with massive processions, would appear and demand the Sparrow and her mother join them.

Those few summons ended in folly, for the Guilds were the true power—and the Sparrow and her mother ultimately answered to the Guilds. How that worked, and what their relationship to the No-Dragons was, Sparrow never truly learned. Her mother’s story was longer still—one this place seemed to want her to delve into.

But for now, Sparrow merely lay there, lost, yet enjoying the quiet. It had been so long since she’d been just herself. Only herself—before the Sparrow took her.

Then the not-quiet returned: the damnable voice, the prodding and pricking, forcing her back to sanity. The ghoul that used to be the ghoul—Avo, Burning Dreamer, the supposed and chosen savior of reality—demanded she stand.

“Wasn’t that your job? Wasn’t you supposed to be the savior?” she said. “Leave me alone,” Sparrow finally managed, placing a hand on her head. “Leave me, so I may sober and regain my spirit’s succor.”

[You are fine now,] Avo said, his voice heavy with derision. [I fixed your mind.]

“But did you? Or did you just break it?”

[Definitely fixed it,] he insisted. [Do you want the chorus back or not? I can hear them calling for you.]

“Still calling to me,” Sparrow whispered. “They’ve been screaming at me while I’ve been telling you what to do. They won’t talk to you anymore because you ignored them—chosen madness, driving yourself into madness with your memories over and over again.”

Avo let out a hiss. [How you are sane with so many mind-wounds. And your history… can’t see what’s true and what’s just a story you told… How many times have you used your masks on yourself? How many times did you shatter your mind with the Chorus…]

“So many things,” Sparrow echoed—and then the memories returned. This time, she didn’t allow them. Avo held her together.

[I will let you choose, but I need you to listen first.]

A weight pressed on Sparrow, preventing her from gazing into her own past. She turned away from the rupture and stared—stared at a version of herself walking away: face bloodied and bruised, lips split, nose broken, eyes swollen, and in her hand a bloody dagger. Behind it… Sparrow refused to watch any further.

[Sparrow,] Avo said softly, [I can help you right now. I can help you face this. And until you do, we are trapped here. Something is happening in this place. Something terrible. I think the Infacer… I think he has seized the sun. The Prefect is dead. I have… failed?]

The Sparrow blinked. And finally, she listened to the chorus:

“The tale descends its darkest turn.

And now, the star looms.

And Idheim—it burns.”