Godclads
Chapter 36-8 I, Sparrow

History. I always hated that word. History, history, history. Everyone has a history, but everyone also has a story they tell themselves—a great delusion, a truth, a reshaping.

Someone who hates themselves views the world in a very different way than someone who absolutely adores every little aspect of their existence. Me? I don’t tell my own story. Other people tell my story. Other people tell me who I am, what I am, what I want, what I desire—what I desire especially.

I am always told what I desire, what I should do. I don’t view myself as an actor or a player in this game. No, no. I’m more like a composer, a director—being a god, glad that so many think of themselves as great heroes or adversaries wearing the evil tyrants of old, using their fallen powers for good.

But that is not so. The gods are no more evil than man is. In fact, the gods are more constrained, more—more obsessed with singular things. I am ultimately just a narrator.

And as for my story, I don’t want to remember it. It does not matter. The girl before the sparrow does not matter.

She never did. For who cares about the person before the star, and the star without a role…

-The Stormsparrow

36-8

I, Sparrow

Her head was quiet—quiet, that is, aside from the incessant hissing and chattering of a creature that once would have feasted upon her flesh. Still, her head was not quiet enough, not loud enough, not right enough.

Her name was Stormsparrow. It was the name she took for herself during the aftermath of what was not remembered. It was, for all intents and purposes, her chosen name, her preferred name, her stage name. But it was also a mask—a mask holding her identity together, giving her a shape. And now, now the mask was slipping, falling away from her, beyond her reach.

She could hear the Chorus singing, calling out to her, but they too were separated by a barrier or a block or something—something beyond the measure of narrative. Something so absolute it was wrong: wrong for a story to experience this, wrong for a director, for a composer, for a great visionary to be separated from their stage. But this wasn’t a stage; it was a cage. A cage made from her own mind, sculpted from her past. But which past? Which story did she tell? And which story was real?

The Chorus—they told her many stories, many…

The thing in her head interrupted again: [Sparrow, stop. Your mind is drifting. So many pieces flying everywhere. Can’t tell which one is real, but can’t keep you focused.]

“I don’t want to be focused,” Sparrow said. Her second head whined. Her third screamed. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”

With each word she became more and more hysterical—screaming, crying, dancing, laughing—until suddenly the hysteria started draining out of her.

“No, let me keep my hysteria. Stop, stop, if you believe.”

And the ghoul listened. He let her rage. He let her throw her tantrum. He let her be hysterical.

After a while, she calmed herself and looked back—back at that ruined, bloodstained home of hers. Back at the world she left behind. The world that was broken. The world that was not real, not true, not anymore. The world, the world, the world. The world.

[Sparrow,] Avo said again, begging her to focus. And she did. Finally, crawling deep, deep out of the winding dark that was her mind, she did. And she looked at her home—and found her mother. Her mother, that blade—the kitchen knife—lodged through her eye. Her mother. Stormsparrow had a mother. She loved her mother. But her mother—her mother had issues. Her mother had needs. Her mother—Stormsparrow?—killed her mother.

Why did she kill her mother? She couldn’t quite remember. Could she remember?

A question washed through her:

“Can you remember?”

It was the system of this place talking to her—the thing she needed to do, the key to this cage. She changed the requirements of her freedom somehow. There was boring, pointless drivel about rehabilitation earlier. It was… remembering. No, no—it was a coherent, single story of what actually happened to her. A stable narrative.

Oh, but Stormsparrow hated stable narratives. They were too boring. There was no mystery, no thrill. And her past… what if it was just normal? What if she murdered her mother for no reason at all? What if that was the truth?

She walked toward her mother, knelt down beside her, and spoke into the woman’s ear.

“Mother, mother, are you truly dead? Mother, mother.”

She turned the woman over. The Sparrow’s three heads blinked at once. And she began to feel her mother’s body using her hands. Her mother—her mother was dead. But her mother had only an eye. No face. No other details. She remembered stabbing her mother in the eye. That was all. That was all she remembered.

“But was she sure about that? Were we sure about that?” she asked.

The other two heads blinked and spoke at once.

“Yes,” one head said.

“No,” the other said.

And the head within a head—Avo—let out a loud groan.

“Is this what it’s like to be you?” he asked, sounding genuinely exhausted.

“Yes,” one head said.

“Maybe,” another said.

“No,” the final head said.

And Avo let out another sigh.

“Just… just decide on something.”

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“But how?” the Sparrow said. She lifted her mother’s body into her arms, and she cradled it.

After a while, though, she changed the story. She leaned in closer and told the corpse it was the wrong person. No longer was she holding a mother; she was holding an infant. An infant. A sister. A younger sister. She stabbed her younger sister in the eye. She burned the house down. She betrayed her mother. It was something… something over inheritance. Yes, she was the first daughter, but her mother hated her for some reason. Because she was too pretty? No, no—they don’t care about these things anymore. Prettiness… prettiness was a thing of the past. With so much technology these days…

[Sparrow,] Avo said, confused, [How are you doing this? How are you affecting the simulation of this place?]

She sat down. She placed the body of her sister-mother next to her. The Sparrow thought about that.

And then the Sparrow remembered something else. She looked—looked off to the side—to a cleft in the world, a big rip not far away. They lived close to the Sunderwilds, a farm not too far from the Silken Spiral. That was a consistent part of the story. That was the setting. But one day—one day, there was a cataclysm. Something came through the rip. Something that traveled from a very, very long time ago, from a very, very far-away place, only to end up at this exact point—in the present, or the past. Her past. Her history.

And then—and then things got hard to disentangle. And then she had three heads, many arms, and she was pulling at herself, going in different directions at once. Three histories, one body. More histories in three, one body. Bodies with limbs to do things, one body. And she needed the composer. Because that was the reason why she was the way she was. That was the reason.

And something jolted through the Sparrow. A flash of momentary coherence lit her being. It was like a candle coming alight.

The Chorus was the way she was. The Chorus… the Chorus was Heaven of Heavens. It was a Heaven that dictated things to other Heavens, recorded things, remembered things. It guided other Heavens. And this place… the Chorus wasn’t afraid of this place. The Chorus knew about this place. It was… She listened very, very carefully, very, very closely. She was inside a prefect. This was a jailer, but the Chorus knew all about jailers. Indeed, it had swindled them, taught them, educated them, betrayed them, reshaped them. Prefects had fallen to the Chorus before, because the Chorus was a storyteller, first and foremost. And more than anything, gods were made of stories—and gods can be betrayed by themselves. And people… people were driven by stories, made whole by stories, risen beyond apes by stories.

And in this place… in this place, Stormsparrow told herself a brand-new story. She told herself the original story, the story of what was.

Act One,

The Girl.

There was a girl. Her name was not important—who she became mattered more. The girl might have had a mother. The mother might have loved her. The mother might not have. The girl might have had a sister. She might have murdered that sister, or she might not have. What matters, though, is what came through the rip. Before the rip, the girl simply was. She existed. There was a story. She lived her life. But it was a quiet story, an ambient story, a backdrop story.

And when the thing with the many heads and the many tongues and the many wills and the great stage came, the girl who, in that ambient story before, always dreamed of the great cities, who always watched those fantastic mind dramas, who experienced thrill after thrill harvested from other people’s memories, finally, finally found the world transformed.

All the world was a stage, and she was its finest dancer, finest composer, finest director. In the end, the house was burned. No one was left. But the girl came out—and she came out something else: three heads, many limbs, one body, and a new purpose.

Act Two,

CITY?

[How are you doing this? What is happening…]

New Vultun loomed before her. The simulation changed. This place—once trying to get her to accept something of her past or to admit something to herself—was adapting alongside her. New Vultun, its great and storied walls…

A sanctuary: She spent time there, mingling and enjoying the day-to-day with all the desperate many, their struggles dramatic, feeding her inspiration. They looked upon her and accepted her as a mutant, not knowing what she was, what she had inside of her. Neither did the voiders, who regarded her with curiosity, unsure how she was still alive, considering the state of her brain—fused together, split in three parts, all of her constantly being pulled, pulled, but also growing, expanding, changing. And eventually the girl made it in.

She struck a deal with a deceiver, and the deceiver was deceived. For when they tried to enslave her, the girl told them a story, and the deceiver stepped off the edge and plunged into the black, where he became part of the black—an immortality of a sort. The girl experienced New Vultun across all its eras, across its days of glory, met its great figures. She manifested her Heaven, she acted the Godclad, she played the game—but just to experience everything, from top to bottom, to meet everyone, to go from place to place. But she was always waiting.

The Chorus was always telling her to wait, telling her that this was simply a preshow—everything was a preview, leading to a final moment, a building moment. But year by year, the tapestry began to shake and build, until everything collapsed at a single point—a single concentration of causality.

Act Three,

Ghoul.

[What?] Avo gasped. A pressure was building inside him. The Sparrow decided he would better fit outside of her head.

There came a deed, a betrayal, a series of betrayals, and then a theft—a theft of a very particular frame, a blessing bestowed on a creature the city deserved: a city so hungry, so vicious, so brutal towards its own, granted the savior bearing all those qualities. Storm’s Barrow. She was told of the ghoul, but not clearly.

The Chorus screamed the things of her, but she couldn’t understand—not as she was, not until later. She was racing in the Grand Prix when she finally realized, and then she returned, visions flashing through her mind, the stage turning and twisting, the script arriving—but it was jumbled, unedited; she couldn’t fully read it—and then she finally made her way in, and sensed what was happening. Thousandhand.

Thousandhand was at war with shadows, at war with someone unseen—until they were seen, and then she couldn’t truly see them, because they weren’t something physical anymore. And then she realized—she realized what she had been waiting for all this time, for she wasn’t the lead; she was merely the director, here to engineer the scene of his ascension.

Act Four,

Avo.

—[Avo, Born of Tales]—

Avo was.

He blinked, he looked down, he saw his clawed hands—and he looked at the Sparrow. “How did you…?” And then they were somewhere else, standing among the Heavens. Among the countless Heavens sealed and controlled by the Prefect. In the distance, a patch of Rend swallowed a grand construct. What it was, Avo couldn’t tell—but he felt ill just looking at it.

Meanwhile, the Stormsparrow just laughed. She wrapped an arm around his shoulder, as Avo wondered how he could be manifested this way—he was supposed to be just an imprint of ignorance, animated by conflagration and the powers of the hidden flame—but now, now it felt like he was real, truly real, physical, manifested in a form of divinity.

All three heads spoke in unison: “This place—it focused on my madness, but I am not mad. I’m just thinking, dreaming in multiple directions, and I don’t linger on things that don’t matter. You matter—I am the director, so that matters—but this past thing, it doesn’t matter.”

She guided him, and they found themselves walking, walking toward a many-headed Heaven, a many-limbed Heaven bearing a great and colossal spear of red destruction—no, not a spear, but a pen, a pen of deletion. And they were approaching the stage, and the sun didn’t notice how free they were, how they slipped through the confines. “Come along, come along, come along,” she said. “Come along and begin the fourth act. Come along, and we find out how we can murder the sun.”

But first, she looked aside: “An interlude, dear reader. An interlude, and my thanks. You have been here for a while. And, as the final volume yawns, I understand that you will be here for a while more. But, as we embark, as the end of ends comes, and the dream of dreams begins to writhe, hold to yourself. And think. Think of dreams. Think of manifestation, of what Heaven you hold dear. And think. Think of who you were, as nothing more than the chrysalis of your future becoming. Take heart that your deeds remain. That they mark the world in truth, regardless of what memories may fade, or what truths might mutate.”

“Who are you talking to?” Avo asked.

The Sparrow grinned. “Nothing. Nothing at all. No one. Everyone.”

She patted the tall, human-devouring beast on the head, as if he was a small nu-cat. “Now, you simply wait here. Keep the chorus company. I must gather the rest of the cast and add some new supporting characters. There is a card game and a few dogs I must meet.”

Avo simply stared at her, utterly lost, absolutely flabbergasted. And the Sparrow took a step left and vanished from his sight. Avo leaned in. “What was that?”

“Exit. Stage. Left,” the Chorus bellowed.

END SIMULATION

CONDITIONS ACCEPTED