Chapter 8-12 The Twice-Built Cage
The first of us offered that which feels. And so, their vigil was numb coldness.
The second offered all the joy, never to be. And so, their vigil was sorrow everlasting.
The third offered peace of mind and body, forswearing bloodshed and damnation. And so, their vigil was fury unending.
The fourth and final offered nothing and everything, accepting the Hungers for what they were, accepting the world for what it was. And so, their vigil was hollow emptiness.
Heed the four; heed our words, the lowest masters of Noloth, no better than slaves nor vermin.
All we have, we give to the ones that feed, to spare the future for the ones above.
-Lamentations of the Four Famines, [Redacted] Text
8-12
The Twice-Built Cage
The skies over Xin Yunsha bled screaming Specters, their neon-scarred paths echoing commands for all to remain indoors, to await the completion of thoughtscans. In answer to these orders even the structures of the district changed, growing layers of enamel and bone to shroud the fragility of hab-blocks.
Something about this sight appealed to Avo as he drifted down slopes caked by drifts of still molting exoderms from the nearby structures, the dead skin flaking forth like descending snowfall. A problem came and blocks rebirthed themselves, evolving in pace to contend with the obstacle.
Without the Galeslither, Avo would have been forced to jack into an aerovec for cover. Probably one of the food trucks. With his Heaven of Air, however, the latitude of his liberation was far more expansive. The nature of his freedom necessitated that he merely mask his mind to slip from unseen Exorcists.
From block to block, he surged, using public access loci to hide from the sweeping tides of Exorcist cast Specters lashing down from above.
His cog-feed narrowed in on Yosanna, Metamind attuned to filter in on her accretion. All other spheres of thoughstuff faded from view as he approached the dockside with care.
The buildings across from the silenced docks were shaped like chipped teeth. Their topmost sections were carved to leave a curved groove of emptiness, serving as a placeholder for an animated ox carrying a flashing number, the range running from one to twelve. Strangely, the number four seemed to be missing.
A cultural issue there, perhaps.
In the block marked by an ox carrying the number three, Yosannas presence was unmoving, her presence nested deep.
A mere hundred feet away, he noticed that the street signs were pulsing, their oscillating phantoms sputtering erroneous strings of mem-data. Beside the staircase leading up before bone-caged doors, vending machines crackled, their speakers playing discordant notes as they vomited a deluge of consumables.
Something tugged at the corner of his awareness, a subtle sensation like a flea landing upon the pond that was his Metamind. Strange how so small a feeling could narrow ones focus. The silencepreviously unnoticedgnawed at Avo. Switching his memories to a more public wavelength, shards of ice burst through his being like shrapnel.
Every sphere of thoughtstuff was perfectly stationary. Unmoving. Only Yosannas mind flowed alone, its presence a candle walled in by discs of ice.
Avo knew the work of another Necro when he saw it, but for someone to quarantine their effective harm to Ox-Three and no other structure displayed a level of precision few could attain. That none of the Specters soaring overhead noticed anything also told a tale of secrecy.
Whoever managed this was beyond adept at the craft. There was true skill on display here. Enough for him to be concerned; suspicious.
REPAIRING ONTOLOGY - 95%
FINALIZING STRUCTURING
RESTORING CANONS
A flash sparked inside Avo, spilling out through currents of wind made fissures by perversions of reality. His second Soul burned, its existence known to him, but not fully felt. Not like his first.
Cracks still remain upon its structure. And the vessel his Woundshaper made a note of disgust. Is disfigured. Twisted into itself, I know not how. These ephemerals ruptured its ontology but left this Heaven a machine structured upon stilts of self-mutilation. You should slay yourself using your new limbs, master. Sieze the nearest opportunity and come see the harm for yourself.
Soon, Avo replied. It would be a lie to say the growing power of his Heaven did not thrill him. It would be pure folly for him to stop and indulge in another apotheosis now, however. Not when the cache promised to him by the node was at stake.
He found himself hesitating. He considered his path forward as if he was about to face someone like Waltonor maybe another node of his father. For all the years he devoted to the art, Avo only considered himself an accomplished practitioner.
Walton was a master.
Much of what Walton accomplished was still beyond him in scope and complexity. His father spun plots upon plots to access locations thought impossible, smuggling sequences and mem-cons through nu-pets and other sources of symmetry. Likewise, the way he built his phantasmicsof all phantasmal architecturewas a thing beyond artful; even now, Avo could not speak higher of the mans ability to shape his mindscapes, for at Waltons hands, aesthetic blended into pragmatic in a fusion of form and function.
Suddenly, the bone-molded doors seemed the closed jaws leading down the throat of a hiding leviathan. On string-thin currents of wind, he made his approach, intruding with caution while under the guise of a gale. He slipped through a windowits layer of protective enamel not yet finished growing. His approach sent cups crashing and rattled cupboards, and with his being spread wide, he felt his way through the room as a swirl of wind, the Yondergales masking the full weight of his presence.
There were three bodies in the room, all of them Sang, and none of them moving. One lay collapsed against the floor, foam flowing free from her mouth, a broken wine glass rolling across pearl-sheen tiles, inches from her curled fingers. The other two that lived with her were slumped on their couch, eyes empty but open, an unnerving vacancy in their stares.
Casting his Whispers perception over them, Avo found the cause of their comas to originate from their frozen thoughts. They breathed still. Their bodies functioned. Their minds, however, remained caged, something impeding all flow.
Activating his Ghostjack, Avo attempted to interface their minds and after but a moment diving through each, felt the weight of apprehension lean on him further.
Wards were in place, but not on the outside. Instead, most of the mind remained exposed while a single phantasmican Auto-Seance if Avo were to guess by the sequences it derivedwas surrounded by pylons of lashing lightning, its currents jumping from ghost to screaming ghost. It was like someone had built a wall of defenses inside their minds, but left part of the foundational structure exposed.
These wards themselves were also of strange design, leaving what seemed to be deliberate gaps around the phantasmic. It was as if whoever designed it wanted someone to strike deep, reach in. During his brief study of the phantasmal mechanism, he realized that the wards had been synchronized to the Auto-Seance themselves, effectively allowing stacking of traumtic output.
But even so, the nature of a ward's design meant that if they were to be deployed through a session, the minds it leap across would also suffer immense damageit was like firing a kinetic kill rod, but using a bridge as the chamber: a butchers bill of damage was certain to be reaped.
Faced with such uncanny instruments, the foreboding within Avo only grew.
It made little sense in terms of defense, but perhaps that was not their function. The lives in this block meant little to a invading Necroor cadre of Necros. Carefully, he retracted the ghosts he paired to the surface memories of the three Sang and scythed the room using his Whisper. A beat passed. No retaliation came. No one knew he was here. Not yet.
There were certain strategies someone could employ if they held minds in thrall. Every being capable of thought and reason could theoretically serve as a makeshift locus of sorts, and human minds were more than susceptible to such designs. From the perspective of an infiltrator, perhaps those placed in a coma were meant to serve as tripwires against scrying Specters or surveillance against physical intruders.
Regardless, they werent protected. Not in a manner that would allow their minds to remain preserved.
Spreading his ontology into the next room as well, Avo discovered more people in similar conditions.
The Ox-Three wasnt just compromised, it was a trap; a den of wandering eyes made panopticon.
Avo activated a session and contacted Draus. In moments, he felt her mind syncing over with his.
+Avo?+
+On-site at Ox-Three. Need to tell River that everyone in the building is considered nulled.+
+Copy that. Exorcists?+
+Not them. Theyre flying overhead. Didnt notice anything. The topmost loci of the structure are probably compromised as well. Broadcasting cover.+ Avo felt his frown bleed over into her session strings of mem-data. +Enemy Necro in play. A very good one. Strange wards. Stranger tactics.+
+They better than you?+
He didnt respond, the possibility pressed against his pride and apprehension as if a blade against the cartoid. +Might be more than one. Need to proceed carefully. Return once Yosanna is secure. Or the cache.+
+Got it. Stay zero, Avo. Id tell you to try and avoid gettin snuffed but+
If he was still in his mortal guise, he would have grunted a laugh. +Will respond soon. If not, assume Im nulled. Then blow up the building or something. Or just snipe my body.+
+Look at that: might just get to kill you after all toda+
He ended the session and reviewed his overall condition.
REND CAPACITY: 9%
He didnt so much rise through the building as he swam, his Galeslither thundering hard across a plane. In the real, only a slight fluctuation in the air betrayed his presence. It spoke to the quality of Xin Yunsha that even the interior of a standard hab-block was well maintained. At least compared to the destitution afflicting Mazzos Junction. Smooth wood lined with whorls of discolored brown served as the walls, while veins of bioluminescence spread like vines along the ceiling. Between each apartment, the walls developed fractures by design, the separation in the wood marking the number of each apartment.
Sweeping through the rooms, all that possessed affinity toward thought and memory had been broken or enfeebled. Holovisions flickered and glitched. People were stringless puppets, collapsed against the walls and upon floors.
As he slithered into Yosannas room, he found himself beholding a sight no different. Except, the room was less a living space than a barren cell containing a cracked locus, its ghosts displaying frayed sequences. Obvious trauma damage.
If Avo had to guess, she was adjusting the contents of her identity here, with the residents around the area offering thoughtwave interference from prying eyes.
She was likely midway through creating her new identity when her husbands session came back online.
From her synchronized mind, whoever was holding this block captive mustve flooded out. Spread their ghosts wide. Contained the area. Crippled anything capable of cognition.
Unwilling to reveal himself in flesh, Avo continued using layers of protection. Casting his Whisper out from the Yondergale, he interfaced with Yosanna, her Metamind answering him readily, wards unmade from the inside.
Threading himself into the myriad streams of memories comprising her mem-data, he touched the dormant structure of her Sanctus Starseekershe hadnt had the time nor the intent to alter her wards it seemedand found nulled ghosts loading errors in place of a storm-molded constellation designed to serve as defensive batteries.
She had been dismantled then. Disassembled from the inside, and neatly so. Someone siphoned away the sequences she used for her protection thoroughly.
Redoubling his efforts toward secrecy, he masked himself using memories she was familiar with, and used what he could recall of their encounter in the Second Fortunes elevator to aid him. He drew out memories of her children, her twin sons as he coated his inserting ghost with their facade.
Subtly, he felt for a series of memories pertaining to the children before editing his current design using his Ghostjack and slipping into the depths of her palace via rails of symmetry.
As he descended the world housing her metacognition, damage reports greeted him and he knew she was nulled past the point of return.
But yet, some parts of the mind still remained. A single phantasmic like all the othersthe Auto-Seance.
INITIATING META-DIVE
Drawn in through a spiraling sequence of dreams, Avo found himself descending into a cracked citadel created using the clearest of crystals.
In this place of partial oblivion, Avo found himself studying the severity of the damage. Even impressed by it. Whoever inflicted such devastation on her mind intended to hurt, to break. Sneaking himself out into a series of memories that used to comprise her now inactive wards, he realized an entire section of her Metaminds palace had been cleaved down to mental bedrock by a blade of nothingness.
Slipping deeper into her phantasmal architecture that analogized her mind, Avo found himself swimming through cracked spires of mirror-bright crystal as he climbed from memory to memory, the purity of their aesthetic Ori-Thaum to the root. Glowing gems floated and wisps danced across pylons. The sky above was a mountainous landscapea colossal titan of sun-baked stone scarred by arteries made from mercury-hued rivers.
The world was nothing but reflections and angles, the streets bright like intersecting daggers. Memories of ghosts danced through imagined networks of floating loci, drifting along the streets for purposes both aesthetic and pragmatic. Where Ori-Thaum ruled, the city was a thinking machine, obeying the whims of the citizenry with but a call. The ground bore the same polished brilliance as the spires, and Avo knew that those of the FATE to be under the banner of Ori-Thaum needed an offer, but thoughts before the pallid surfaces turned fluid and ferried them toward their destination.
She knew this place to be home--a few blocks stretching out from the Purg up in the Tiers.
Suppose there lonelier ways to die. She could have been nulled entirely, without even a vestige of her home to serve as a backdrop in final fleeting moments of coherence.
Ori-Thaum loved their efficiency and reveled in control. One need not be burdened by the inconveniences of traffic; one need not ever learn the blessings of being able to travel a free and open sky.
Sometimes, it was hard to tell where the will of the people and the will of the state ended.
With his focus sharp and using a cloak of memories he copied over from her sequences as cover, he studied the phantasmics of her palace and found himself evermore confused.
PHANTASMICS DETECTED - [ERROR]
[DAMAGE SEVERE]
[DAMAGE SEVERE]
[DAMAGE SEVERE]
[DAMAGE SEVERE]
[DAMAGE SEVERE]
[AUTO-SEANCE]
Where several constructs used to remain were only chasms spewing mem-errors. They were unmade, similar to the wards. Dismantled instead of frayed or fragged by brute traumas.
At the heart of her palace was a small shack. Or what used to be a small shack. Parts of it had been deletedshredded clean by invasive ghosts. Only the door seemed tangible. The rest of the structure was flickering in and out of existence, drifting between the void of forgetfulness and deep memory.
Throughout his journey, he found no traps, no planted spyware or trap-phantasmic.
He was merely a lonesome intruder in the post-apocalyptic mindscape of a woman near fully nulled.
Still, it was unwise to expose himself. It would be a loud thing to do if he wanted to dive deeper and pluck at the foundational structure of her memories to see what she could recall. In his cog-feed, her awareness remained at zero. Always zero.
It was as if her ego had been extracted clean from the structure of her own mind.
As he was turning a corner to study the last of her ruined phantasmics, the flash of a holovision flashed in the corner of his eye. Halting, he adjusted the memories his ghosts were channeling and shuttled himself back along the sequences of the current structure he was diving through.
He noticed then. A string of mem-data straying from the rest, its ghosts shaped to hide amongst the other via merging memories, but part of it still lingered on the outside, swaying like a thread of human hair growing from the matted fur of a nu-dog.
He traced the deviance through a fractured structure made of honeycombed glass and, through its porcelain-white doors, on the floor of a blindingly white and barren hotel lobby, was a Kosla-12 entertainment system.
Avo felt his gut clench. Carefully, examining each moment of memory drifting past him with the utmost care, he swam through the mem-data, shifting himself below the Kosla-12 to better scry at it.
Interfacing with her Metamind, he found the construct deposited approximately a month ago. A month and a few days. Around the same time he woke in the Maw.
Up close, there was no mistaking the item, it looked to be the very same system Walton used to take him on his first dive.
This could be a cache.
Or a trap.
Both were mutually likely.
Prepared to end his dive at any moment, he cast a ghost out from his Ghostjack and had it access the Kosla-12.
Ghosts: [406]
If things went wrong, he could cut more of his ghosts loose as well. Use them as sacrificial flares before fleeing deep into the Yondergales, pocketing his mind using the protection of planes as a layer of defense.
Error codes flashed as his deployment tried to access the construct. The Kosla-12 rippled thenjust for a moment. It blended into the environment of her palace, but its foundational memories displayed themselves as he scried at the mem-data.
Ghosts: [407]
The coldness inside him grew. He knew these sequences. They came from his mind. Moments from his first dive, of him beholding the Strix in action on the day of the block war. Of Walton walking him deep into the street squire kill team.
The compulsion weighed on him. The need to see its secrets grew heavy. Reaching out, he reintegrated with his drifting ghost and accessed the Kosla-12 directly.
Almost immediately, the Kosla-12 vanished into strings of collapsing fractals, the data sinking deep into his mind. Multiple downloads flashed through his cog-feed, with new functions and markers appearing within his DeepNav by the second.
PRIVILEGES GRANTED: WELCOME, FAMINE OF DEFIANCE
[HELIX INSTALLED]
HAEMOPHAGE RESTRICTIONS REMOVED
PENUMBRAL GATEWAY ACCESS: GRANTED
- INSTALLING ACCESS KEY TO [SANCTUARY]
ELDER MYTHOS VOLUME (I/II/III): INSTALLED
New knowledge and mem-data fused to his Metamindand even deeper. Something within his ontology thundered as a missing piece snapped into place.
If his Woundshaper could gasp, it would have. Master I feel I feel the nature of your blood loosening.
But as these new gifts solidified in his mind, so too did the palace around him decay, collapsing, the absence of the Kosla-12 as if a lodestone to the pillars of her mind.
Around him, her palace turned to ash. The crystalline spires bled into a winding dome given structure from the ribs of a titanic beast. The ground hardened into a thing of obsidian and decay, bodies spilling out as he rose upon a dais. As the sky ruptured and wept darkness, Avo made to end his dive, ejecting himself from the collapsing mind of the former Ori-Thaum Guilder.
A single voice halted his escape.
Do not run, a voice similar to Waltons spoke. The sound was the same, but it lacked all warmth and filled his senses with the choke of falling ash and rising smoke. We wish to speak with you, Strayer. Come and rejoin your brothers, if only for the last time."
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