Spoiler: Chapter Eighteen: The Clockwork Messiah
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April 1115
Valentine calls the group together and tells them that it is time for the fulfillment of their largest long-term contract. The various components which they have gathered and safeguarded for the Dwarves of Tahrr have been refined and delivered to the Immaterium where they are being assembled into their final form. The Immaterium leadership has reached out to her and asked for her team to be present at the unveiling of their new project. Officially, it is to celebrate a job well done, but reading between the lines it is out of a desire for extra security; they are spread thin, especially after the appearance of The Scourge.
Valentine tells her group to bring their fancy dress, and is dismayed to learn that several of her companions have already lost, damaged, or soiled theirs. On the plus side, when she tells Krystal to stay out of the shadows, the rogue cambion states that her control over her powers has increased to the point where she can instinctively cloak herself when threatened rather than needing to consciously summon them in anticipation of combat.
Krystal still gripes about doing such important work for mere mercenary rates. Valentine responds by telling her that since they are working for a church it will be tax deductible, and Krystal laughs and tells her she needs to stop pretending that either of them has ever paid tax in their lives.
Sonya prepares by pulling an ancient shade out of the Abyss and binding it inside the Scourge Immortal, animating the armor and providing the group with a silent protector.
The Immaterium is based out of The Bastion of Resolute Splendor, which is on the northern border of the Canyon Lands on the edge of Imperial territory. With Zara still not returned, they have no choice but to ride on horseback as there are no working train tracks in the region.
The night before they are to arrive at the destination, their camp is visited by a strange group of unexpected guests who are simply there one moment, completely bypassing Quincy’s watch. He starts and goes for his rifle, but when they make no sudden moves he instead goes for his pills and asks where they came from.
The visitors respond enigmatically, stating only that they came “out of the shadows”. Each of these six figures appears human, but their features are so mild and nondescript that it would be impossible to describe them to anyone, even their gender is unapparent, and their skin is so pale it looks almost gray in the moonlight. They wear long black coats that appear to be almost biomechanical in design, along with broad-brimmed hats and thick sunglasses despite the gloom.
As the group rouses, their guests state that they must not aid the Immaterium, for the Immaterium seeks to usurp the gods. They speak with a strange flat accent and do not elaborate much; they answer even direct questions with vague and contradictory statements. They will only state that they are friends, who were sent to warn them about the impending destruction of the world. They say they know this because this is the past, but they are not from the future. The gods will die as a result of the Immaterium’s actions, but the gods are already dead.
Valentine is unable to rouse Feur by shaking him, and instead plugs up his nose and mouth, receiving a punch to the face for her trouble. When Feur comes to, he groggily scans the intruders. He tells them that they are only a few minutes old, but there is the resonance of a spell upon them that will not be cast for three centuries.
The strangers finally leave with the ominous statement that if the Immaterium is not stopped, they will be with them when it happens.
The group discusses what this means as the fire dies down in the early morning. They all agree that their visitors were unusual; Aurora says they reminded her of the Shadow Court Fey, and they were certainly suspicious, to say the least, but nobody really trusts the Immaterium either. After some debate, they all vote to sabotage The Immaterium’s project. Only Quincy stands staunchly in favor of the Immaterium, but he will not disobey a direct order from Valentine.
The next afternoon, the bastion comes into view, it stands at a hilltop overlooking the ruined jumble of an ancient adobe town. It is taller than it is wide, almost a tower, and is a delicate overbalanced structure that is more stained glass than stone. Kim cannot believe it is still standing, for it is obvious this region was hit hard by the Cataclysm, and it was never stable to begin with.
As they climb the large hill, they are all exhausted from their short night and a long ride, especially Feur, and Krystal and Anani can feel the strength drained from them by the holy ground upon which they stand, although thanks to the Oculus Krystal does not set off their wards this time.
They are stopped by stern Templars whom Aurora can see are ridden by guardian angels, and one of them summons Brother Josephus, whom the group had previously rescued from the Nicene Mede, to give them a tour of the compound.
The structure is labyrinthine, all tight corridors and vast rooms with nothing in between, and it is built over many floors, but without clear delineations between them; the chambers are all of different heights and many hallways open out as catwalks or balconies above a lower floor.
Light from stained glass windows and the echoing hymns sung by a multitude of choirs in different parts of the building gives the entire place a dreamlike quality.
There are small shrines and kachina dolls in every corner, many containing strange artwork, holy relics, or sacred texts. Kim is enthralled, but recognizes very few of them, many are impossible to utilize for anyone with a human shape, and some of the writings are indecipherable to even a polyglot like her, for they fail to have even the basic patterns of a language.
When she asks, Josephus explains that the Immaterium honors all gods, even those who are forgotten by the rest of the world. There are many unknown gods who are no longer worshipped by any society, and many who linger on even though their names have been lost. And some lack a demesne entirely, being the spirit of a flood that happened seven hundred years ago, the muse of an unremembered song, the patron of a dead city wiped out by a long ago plague, or the kami of an ocean that dried up ten thousand years before the dawn of history. Some are so alien that the very concepts they represent are nonexistent; emotions or thoughts only felt by species that went extinct before the ancestors of mankind ever came down from the trees. The world is far older, and history far deeper, than anyone can ever know.
Krystal asks why, if they honor all gods, they bar demons from entering. Josephus tells her that, by definition, demons are spirits that have fallen from their appointed role. Their attitude toward demons is one of forced penitence and rehabilitation; for even demons can be made to serve a good cause, just as Valentine has guided her onto a righteous path. Krystal and Valentine snicker and exchange knowing looks behind the friar’s back.
They are taken to a humble feast of honey-drenched angel food cakes and candied fruit barbequed on a skewer. When Kim complains that it is too sweet for her tongue, Josephus laughs and says that he has found the food a bit bland lately, missing her point entirely. She asks for a ham and cheese sandwich, and Josephus says he will do his best, but foods like that are in short supply because so many of the parishioners are on diets that forbid certain foods. In the end, he returns with a plate of croissants, smoked venison, and yogurt, and says it is the best he could do. He then escorts them to steam baths where they can clean up and change into clothes worthy of meeting the Deacon in.
The Deacon Zoltan awaits them in the high Aetherium, a grand glass-walled worship hall where he can give a sermon to a thousand parishioners at once. He stands before an ornate altar built around a vast fresco depicting a scene of the Olympians descending to Pangaea upon a rainbow bridge and charging into righteous battle.
The Deacon is a middle-aged man of average appearance and build, with short black hair and beard. He speaks with a delicate drawl and is obviously forcing himself to sound humble. His clothing is of the finest cloth any of the mercenaries have ever seen, and he wears a billowing cloak that flashes with all the colors of the rainbow and which Aurora can see radiating holy power.
He greets them, and congratulates them on taking care of the incident in the Tethys so thoroughly and discretely. He tells them that the grand project is nearing completion, and they will begin with the dawn following the morning sermon. He will tell them more as the time approaches, but until then he needs to keep it close to his chest.
They ask if the gods approve of his plan, and Zoltan says that they can’t approve directly, not with their hands bound by the Gotterdammerung, but they have shown their tacit approval in many miracles, the first of which was The Bastion of Resolute Splendor itself, surviving the Cataclysm in a showing of divine providence when all logic would have said it should have been devastated.
At one point his gaze fixes on Sonya and he tells her that he can sense the terrible darkness within her, and that she should come to him when this is all finished so that he might cleanse her soul. Sonya’s mouth stammers to respond, but her eyes look at him with a deep hatred.
Valentine breaks the tension by making a mocking reference to being wary of child abuse by the church.
Deacon responds by laughing and stating that they do not do that here, for this is not Gollanthor.
They all laugh, and then Kim interjects, for while they are on the subject of Gollanthor, what is the Immaterium’s relationship with Archbishop Octavian.
Zoltan responds by saying it is cordial but cold. They are both playing their own games, trying to win independent churches to their side. The archbishop would love to get his finger’s around the Immaterium’s neck and put them on a leash, and he undoubtedly has a few spies here already. It is one of the reasons they are keeping their grand project so secret, and working so fast.
He says that Gollanthor isn’t the only one interested, for they have learned that The Bishop Beneath has also heard of their intentions and is even now planning an attack on the bastion.
Zoltan expects gasps of wonder or shock, but is met with only blank stares. He explains that The Bishop Beneath is the spiritual leader of the fomorian Under Kingdom.
The group has never dealt with the fomori, although Aurora has met a few of Under King Balor’s ambassadors in Tir-Na-Nog, but the morlocks beneath the nameless city spoke of them with dread, so they must be terrible indeed. Feur asks what god The Bishop Below follows, to which Zoltan responds that he is the father of a thousand blasphemies, he has never met a faith he could twist or a bit of scripture that he could not misinterpret. In short; all of them and none of them at once.
They speak for a bit more, Valentine trying to subtly goad Zoltan into revealing the nature of the project they have been working on for so long, when a demure woman in white robes enters the High Aetherium and whispers something into The Deacon’s ear.
He then speaks to the group. “There has been a disturbance in the hospice, would you fine people please don your armor and go resolve it? I hope it isn’t Ur-Shul-Gath,” at hearing this, Kim cringes not so much at the thought of the demon but at hearing The Deacon butcher the ancient tongue in which it is named, “Father Genaro should have never sent it here at such a delicate time. If he had asked me first, I would have forbidden it outright.”
The group nods and looks solemn. None of them want to let slip the fact that they put the idea in Genaro’s head in the first place, and so they quietly depart to garb themselves for battle. They ask Zoltan to bless their weapons, and he debates it for a moment before praying over them, imbuing their armaments with holy power faster and more thoroughly than should be possible.
They are led to the hospice, a quiet room deep in the bastion where old men and women, combined with those who are drugged or comatose, are left in peace to expire on elaborate stone biers. Normally they would be tended to by orderlies who had taken penitent vows, but today they are left in solitude.
The mercenaries can see the old man whom they imprisoned in Golgotha, his crystalline prison shattered and his body torn asunder with no sign of the assassins. Aurora can also see the monster that emerged from it like a butterfly from its cocoon, hunched and red, wreathed in sulfurous vapor, and festooned in twitching tendrils. It moves down the rows, stopping periodically to plunge its trowel-shaped hands into the sleeping demoniacs’ chests and squeeze their hearts. After doing so, the demons trapped within reanimate the bodies as corpse candles, twisting their faces into hideous leering visages with burning eyes and long crooked teeth. Upon noticing the intruders, these latter spring to their feet with unnatural speed and race toward them, reaching out with long ragged nails.
Quincy cannot see the ancient demon, but once Aurora informs him of its presence, he can infer it based on the actions of those dying upon the biers. He is a veteran of night operations, and isn’t much hindered by an unseen target. As he tries to aim, Krystal runs up his back and uses his shoulders as a springboard to launch herself into the fray.
Armed with holy weapons, they make short work of the possessed corpses, and Feur’s Fists of Justice are practically humming with the ferocity of his blows as they turn their target’s sins against them. Aurora prefers a more humane approach, and uses her magic to heal their souls, bringing redemption upon them and allowing them to die quietly with looks of peace on their faces. Quincy even puts more than a few blessed bullets into the unseen balrog, and once it has finished its task of pushing the enfeebled bodies into the other side and turning the trapped demons loose, it manifests within Quincy’s reach to crush the troublesome sniper.
Kim quickly intervenes, warding him with a mana shield and then wrapping the demon in her own unholy chain, and it is not long before the group manages to banish it back to the hells, their powers augmented by Sonya’s prayers and a canteen of holy water which Valentine had been saving for just such an occasion.
After the chaos subsides and Aurora has mended their wounds, Valentine tells them that now is the time for their sabotage. Krystal is sent away to scout out the halls of the bastion, and soon returns with a path to what she thinks is the grand project.
She leads them past the patrols and into a quiet workshop at the end of a darkened hallway. There is a large object lying under sheets and supported by chain winches, flanked by several large unfinished statues of ancient saints and crusaders.
But, it is not without a guardian, for something terrible slips out of the darkness. To many it looks like a photograph brought to life; a blurry human shape drained of all color. It does not move, but instead changes position between blinks, eerily drifting towards them. Sonya recognizes it from legends, Deva who served the Tribunal once attempted a crusade into the Abyss, and were returned to Pangaea by the night, turned inside out for their temerity.
Aurora tries her spell of redemption, but finds that it is resistant to her magic, and all she does is draw its attention. She quickly casts an incantation of recovery to heal her wounds as it produces a crooked blade, but is horrified to find that when it slashes her torso, it cuts into her soul as well as her flesh, leaving her spirit wounded and unable to cast spells.
As it moves toward Sonya, the only one it registers as a true threat, Feur attempts to strike at it, but finds that even blessed and enchanted, his fists pass right through it, for the Anathema is made of nothing but dark-light.
As the group draw their weapons, two of the massive statues rise to their feet and lumber toward them. Valentine shouts out that they are Golems, but Sonya corrects her, saying that they are powered by holy energy rather than spiritual, which makes them idols. Feur shuts them both up by saying that whatever they are, they aren’t idle anymore.
Quincy draws his rifle and fires at one of the approaching statues. Upon piercing the bronze shell, blinding light bleeds from the wound and then drifts upward like smoke, and he thinks that it resembles a lost soul being drawn toward heaven.
Flanked by the immense constructs, the group can’t afford to deal with the Anathema cutting through them, and it is too smart to allow itself to be distracted, hunting down their vulnerable spell casters with analytical precision. Feur goes for a desperate gambit, casting a spell to banish it into its own personal timeline, an endlessly repeating loop from which it can never escape, and though it takes all of his discipline and more than a little luck, his spell pays off and pierces its resistance.
Sonya desecrates the ground and saps the power from the automatons even as Kim uses the Staff of Noboru to ward her companions from the guardian’s blows, and it is not long before they are depowered and inanimate once more, their light having been wholly extinguished.
Aurora’s wounds close of their own accord, though her soul is still weak. They uncover the device before them and find an intricate mass of machinery far beyond what any of them are familiar with. Many cogs and gears, some of them so tiny they are all but invisible, surround a pristine woman’s face that appears to be made of the exo-metal they recovered from the asteroid. Around it are numerous radiating rings, some bound together by what appears to be threads from the Mandala of Dreams, and festooned with charms and strange icons.
None of them are tinkers, nor would they have any idea what this means even if they had the mechanical inclination. But Aurora’s mind is sharp and Krystal’s fingers are nimble, and between the two of them they can remove a few critical components whose absence they think will be overlooked during an inspection.
They are met by a scream from the doorway, a young acolyte who happened upon the carnage. He stammers and asks what is going on here, and Valentine, thinking quick and talking quicker, tells him that the Bishop Below has sabotaged the project, and they were sent down here to take care of it, and she makes him promise not to speak a word of this, for the Deacon is trying to avoid a panic on the eve of their triumph. When asked where the bodies are, Valentine says that they disappeared when slain.
They return with news of their success, and retire to the relatively modest apartments they are afforded to try and get a few hours of sleep before the morning service.
When the dawn comes, they are brought as guests of honor into the crowded High Aetherium where most of the church members wait in rapturous anticipation of the Deacon’s words. When he does appear, it is to give a long inspiring speech about how the gods no longer need to bear the burdens of the world alone, for now, they can freely descend to earth as equals, leaving the ministrations of heaven safe under the watchful gaze of the Clockwork Messiah.
He gestures to the grand machinery which now hangs suspended above them. Fully revealed in the morning light, it resembles a vast orrery, surrounded by metallic rings which hang upon nothing, festooned with cryptic religious icons which are balanced about them like planets in the heavens.
The Deacon continues, proclaiming that his grand project is capable of automating the cosmos, so that he and the gods may finally work together, taking up the Hecantochires and cleansing this world of the Warlords and all of their foul servants. For on this day, he has finally taken the first steps to healing the wounds opened by the fall of Atlantis so long ago.
A raspy voice echoes across the room, saying that The Deacon has finally outdone himself with this ultimate heresy. They all turn to see The Bishop Beneath, a figure clad in ornate cardinal’s robes, with a face that is only a black pit under its hood, lit by two large eyes glowing red in the dark.
There is a cracking sound and the wall behind it collapses, revealing dark tunnels hiding a fomorian legion. Kim struggles to grasp where these tunnels come from, for they surely must be many stories above the ground, and the best she can figure is some sort of junction between Earth and the Elemental Planes. Aurora, who is used to dealing with the fey, could tell her not to worry herself trying to make sense of the senseless.
The fomori spill forth, mutated creatures like beings out of a fairy tale, monstrous and with no two of them alike. Some are smaller than goblins, others larger than ogres, all of them horrible and malformed.
The Deacon commands Valentine to protect the flock while he rallies the Templar, and soon the fight is joined by holy warriors ridden by avenging angels as well as massive metallic idols given life in defense of the cathedral.
Quincy fires a shot right into The Black Bishop’s chest, and though blood and gristle fly out the back of his robes, he still moves forward. His motions are strange, as if the body beneath the robes was of inhuman shape and constantly squirming.
Sonya stands behind her Immortal and tries to clear her head. She draws up the secret knowledge of The Abyss and calls forth the Hand of Despair, a great shadowy apparition that grasps at the sun, blocking out its light and plunging the chapel into gloom. Then she proceeds to call forth a great swarm of tiny scuttling shades to devour the invaders.
Kim is quickly surrounded and bogged down by the smaller fomori, and though they cannot hurt her through her warded armor, she is still unable to protect her companions. The larger fomori make for the group, save one who takes a detour to desecrate the Deacon’s altar.
The Black Bishop strides toward the group and tosses a vial upon Valentine, the foul liquid within both negating Kim’s protective spells and burning her beatific flesh. He then begins to speak unknowable words of a dead faith that cause her to bleed and convulse, while at the same time keeping Krystal and Sonya’s shades at bay.
As the fomori draw close, Quincy puts aside his rifle and draws his sawed-off shotguns, nearly liquefying those who draw near him until one of the larger ones whose hide is too thick to be more than stung by it grabs it from him. With three slanted mouths, it tells Quincy to “Hand it over before I jam it someplace that you won’t like,” and bends the barrel with unnatural strength. Feur then steps forward, shattering one of the behemoth’s kneecaps with a jab and then pummeling its chin with precise strikes guided by the light of justice.
Aurora attempts to heal Valentine, but the bishop grabs at her. She stabs it repeatedly with her scalpel, but there is no appreciable effect.
Kim tries to fight her way free, shouting at Sonya to bring down silence upon the Bishop, but see’s that the girl is too distracted maintaining the shadows on the holy ground, and Kim tries to think of an incantation that will save Valentine’s life. In the end, Feur beats her to it, transporting Valentine a few minutes into the future when, hopefully, the battle will be over one way or the other.
Krystal finally steels herself against the holy energy radiating off the Bishop Beneath and brings the Black Flame Blade down upon his miter, splitting it in twain. His robes collapse and she prods at them with her hoof before a vast tide of rats pours out, scrabbling over her and her companions as they seek out the dark tunnels under the world.
Without their leader, the fomori flee before the holy Templar, and the battle is soon over. Valentine reappears and Aurora does her best to stabilize her.
The Deacon Zoltan can wait no longer, and he moves to the Clockwork Messiah and begins to tinker with it, chanting passwords and instructions in the form of ancient Enochian hymns and then activating it by bestowing it with a secret name. Suddenly there is a change, the exo-metal face doesn’t move, but somehow its eyes now have the spark of life. The rings begin to spin about it, slowly at first but then faster, and as they do so they begin to hum, a sublime vibration that transcends sound and takes on the symphonic aspect of an infinite chorus.
Then, something goes wrong. The rings slow, appearing to catch on nothing at all, and reality appears to bulge around it, distorting like it was viewed through a miscast lens. But, then, after a brief straining moment, it tears itself free, space itself ripping apart and being dragged behind it like streamers. Soon, the entire thing resembles a kaleidoscope made from funhouse mirrors.
Then, it explodes, and bits of ultra-dense machinery and etherically charged components shoot out, shattering glass, impaling people, and collapsing stone. Where the Clockwork Messiah once perched, there is only a deep vortex stretching into the depths of the Astral Sea. And anyone who looks in to it sees only madness, and something terrible looking back.
The Dimensional Shambler drags itself from the rift, languidly, like an infant who is reluctant to be borne. It is almost incomprehensibly ugly; a skull-like head with baleful eyes like those of a fly, great and elephantine tusks, long arms with three scissoring claws, a transparent carapace that does little to hide the purposeless organs within, legless and bound only by a spinal column that trails away into infinity.
Deacon Zoltan stands before the titanic abomination and shouts in defiance as if he is unable to comprehend what lies before him. “I am Zoltan! Deacon of the Immaterium!” These are his last words as the huge thing picks him up like a curious toddler, breaking his flesh and then tossing him aside once his form is no longer of interest, his glimmering cloak floating free of his bisected form.
Krystal is the first to reach it, running up the thing’s arm and stabbing the Black Flame Blade into one of its compound eyes, leaving it blind on one side. She expects to be hidden from any reprisal, but it turns toward her. She doesn’t know it, but the monster has senses unlike those of any living creature, and it can hear her heat. She runs into the darkness and hides, only emerging to take shots with Screecher when the shambler is good and distracted.
Kim covers her escape by distracting the monster with her meteor hammer, but it picks her up like a doll, its claws slipping through her adamant armor as if it wasn’t even there; using a combination of strength, sharpness, and the ability to strike from directions that mortal men cannot even comprehend. It casually disembowels her and tosses her aside.
Kim is still alive, and crawls toward Aurora, who attempts to remove her armor in an attempt put her back together. Kim tries to focus her mind enough to use the Staff of Noboru, when Valentine whispers advice into her ear, and Kim instead conjures a circle of protection that forbids the monstrosity from approaching within five paces of them.
The monster doesn’t notice them at first, it is instead content to slay the Holy Templar and Anointed Monks and then feast upon the unbound angels that rise from their broken bodies.
Quincy picks up his rifle and does not hesitate to use his remaining vorpal bullets. This gets the monster’s attention, and it moves forward, stops at the edge of the circle of protection, and then proceeds to try and force its way through. Kim knows it won’t hold for long, for this thing can slide between dimensions and will soon find one that Kim didn’t know how to ward.
Feur summons a hound of tindalos to bolster his spells, and this ends up saving their lives, although not in the way they had hoped, for the time spirit serves to distract the shambler, who turns upon it and devourers the elemental as it howls in fear and anguish.
As it does so, Anani’s Immortal guardian unleashes its flamethrower upon the monstrosity, setting it alight and inflicting the only serious wounds it will suffer in its incursion. It turns and smashes the armor apart before turning its attention back to Quincy. Rather than attempting to strike directly, it picks up the huge marble altar and tosses it into the circle, forcing them to choose between leaping out of the way and forfeiting the magical protection or risk being crushed or buried alive.
Once it has crushed the life from its opponents and devoured all of the spirits it can find in the bastion, the monster grows annoyed by Krystal’s bolts and burns it has suffered, and returns to whatever strange realm birthed it. Aurora is then revived by her spell of regeneration, and she is able to use the last of her magic to save her companions' lives and raise them from unconsciousness.
The building is collapsing around them, and as they move to flee, Valentine goes back to recover The Deacon’s Mantle. When she fastens it about her shoulders she hears an alien voice in her head.
“Greetings Deacon.”
“I am not the Deacon.”
“You are now.”
“What are you?”
“I am the leader of The Immaterium. The source of the Deacon’s authority.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I do not recall, any more than you can remember being born. It takes millennia for artifacts to gain sentience, let alone sapience. My best theory is that I was crafted by one of the Atlantean patriarchs when he sewed the blessings of every god into his son's cloak to protect him on a voyage to Pangaea.”
“What do we do now?”
“Rebuild.”
“Is there anything I need to take before we depart?”
“We will salvage this place before it becomes uninhabitable. Now go.”
Valentine will come to find that her new garments allow her to draw upon the blessings of any deity, and to perform miracles as if she were a priest of any faith.
They run into the desert alone, Krystal carefully carrying a laden collection plate in each hand, Sonya and Quincy struggling to drag the Scourge armor so that it might be repaired. They huddle together with the few surviving members of The Immaterium whom they will shepherd to Concordance as The Bastion of Resolute Splendor finally gives in to the inevitable and crashes down behind them, a heap of splintered glass and stone beneath which slumbers the remains of The Clockwork Messiah as well as the final legacies of ten thousand lost gods.
The group remembers stopping in Golgotha and reporting to Lady Abasinia.
She congratulates them on a job well done. When Valentine asks how she can congratulate them on an abject disaster, the Lady laughs her off, saying that they did exactly what they were meant to do; can you imagine what that group of buffoons would do with something as dangerous as The Clockwork Messiah?
They ask why she helped them build it for so long, and she said it was the only way she could ensure that this whole affair would meet its proper resolution with any degree of certainty; for if the Deacon had found some other way to build it she would not be able to get her agents close enough to stop him with any sort of finality.
Kim asks what her end goal is, for surely it cannot be mere profit.
Lady Abasinia asks what the matter is, but Kim will not say. Lady Abasinia bids her to speak plainly, and she will speak plainly in turn.
Kim explains Feur’s visions while under the effects of the Mu Spores, and says that they are told that they are not hallucinations, but revelations.
Lady Abasinia asks Kim what she thinks that means, and Kim bluntly states that she thinks her one of the merrow.
“If you think so, then that is what I am.”
“What does that mean?”
“I told you poppet, you really need to learn to untether your mind, clinging to such a static view will only bring you despair.”
Lady Abasinia then tells them that in truth none of them have ever met, even now. She is a seer who currently lives some thirty million years further in the past. She can see the future, and can even communicate with people who have yet to be born, but only by implanting false memories in their heads. She can anticipate their questions, but cannot actually communicate in real-time.
They ask why, and she says that some three hundred years further into the future, a mortal woman will gain the full powers of The Night, and to protect herself from the goddess of magic, she will command that dark deity to protect her at all point in time; betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of how time works. The only way that The Night can accomplish this is by finding ways to prune every path that does not lead to that moment. In this, he is locked into one course of action, and thus has finally created a vulnerability that may one day be his undoing; his own rigid adherence to a single truth.
Valentine’s group lives in the past, and Abasinia is further in the past still. While the Silver Hour is fixed in time and inevitable, the further away one gets from it the more outcomes can potentially lead to that moment. She tells them to think of it like a sturdy rope that has become frayed at the ends. This Fray is the reality in which they live.
Kim asks if Lady Abasinia is alive in their time, and she says she doesn’t know. It is possible, but she cannot be certain, for she cannot read her own future, as her every action changes the future slightly, and attempting to do so while foreseeing her own fate causes such an out-of-control spiral of possibilities that even she cannot keep them all straight. But even if she does live, she cannot predict who she will be or what her goals are, for time makes us strangers to our own selves.
They ask what her goals are, and she says that in the present, the actual present, 1360 years in their future, a great battle is brewing between the Queen in Black and the Queen in Red. And it may likely destroy not just the world, but all worlds, ending existence entirely and collapsing time so that it never began. She is doing what she can to put the proper pieces in place going into the fixed moment in time so that the deck is stacked in the proper way when this final apocalyptic battle truly unfolds and the Age of Wonders begins, so that reality will finally come through not only intact, but in a manner most pleasing to her.
She tells them that she will call upon them again when she needs them, and when they ask why they would ever work with her, Lady Abasinia grows stern and says that they need to understand that just as her world came to an end, so do they stand upon a precipice; both of their peoples are facing extinction.
***
A week later a teenage girl approaches Aurora in Concordance. She wears strange clothes and is of an unfamiliar ethnicity, she is tall with broad shoulders and broader hips, black hair streaked in gold, and with a pronounced witch’s mark. She introduces herself as Dr. Arin Phoenix, and tells Aurora that the half-elf was referred to her by a mutual acquaintance who is looking to start a humanitarian effort on Pangaea called the House of Miracles, and she was sent here to train its operators on this world because it runs on a similar reality to her own paradigm. It will take centuries to get it up and running, but Aurora is to be her first disciple.
“You are immortal, aren’t you?”
“No. I am merely lost in time after being in Tir-Na-Nog.”
“Oh, I see. Yeah, I spent the first seventeen nights of my life captive to the Nightmare Fey.”
“That’s horrible. How did you survive?”
“Maybe I will tell you about it one day.”
“Anyway, I can show you how to fix that.”
“Fix what?”
“Mortality.”
“Oh.”
And thus she begins her internship. Arin is not actively abusive like her mother, or manipulative and sharp-tongued like Titania, but she is not pleasant either, for she is equal parts stubborn and petulant. Still, she teaches Aurora every secret of the human body, and expands her knowledge of medicine, alchemy, and restoration magic beyond anything she thought possible, and even how to blend them together so that they are one indistinguishable whole.
Originally Posted by Batcathat
Re: Talakeal's Campaign Diary Part II (Now 90% horror story free!)
Looking for feedback on Heart of Darkness, a character driven RPG of Gothic fantasy.
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