Re: Intense Struggle! (Round 6 - Frozen Destinies)
05-03-2012, 11:07 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
Many things had prepared Clara to handle the sort of moment that had crystallized the instant she had dispelled her ward: being undead gives the mind a clarity of purpose and intensity of focus that can only be bred from the removal of the endless distractions biology dumps on a brain; being a practitioner of spirit magic and a follower of a gentle death-god steeps one in exactly the lore and practice one needs to shepherd disembodied and irrational spirits; her own caring nature and attention to detail left her with a ghostly empathy that few could match.
And despite all that, she was still swarmed on all sides by a mass of uncountable ghosts that wanted nothing more than to act out their last thoughts and wishes through her body, to finally fulfill the destinies that had been ground to a halt by their worlds' collision. Not only was the very air permeated with more minds than molecules across the entirety of the three-worlds-in-one, but many had been attracted to the barrier that had woven its way through their existence, curiously following the one thing that had happened since fate stopped. Between the nature of the round and her own actions, Clara had come face to face with an unfathomable number of unique souls, and she simply couldn't handle it the way she wanted to. With her last vestiges of mental strength, she shoved Karel into the space she usually occupied and made a stand against the onslaught of innocents and villains who could do nothing but try to push past and take over.
Numbly and vaguely, as though through several feet of ice-cold water, she could hear Karel beginning to try to talk her husband down, but the words were just sounds to her now, devoid of meaning or significance. Gradually, they were drowned out by the clamor of unfairly-ended lives swirling around and through her, and Clara could do nothing but hold fast, hoping to leave her possessor enough time to say what needed saying.
The spectral rush of voices screamed louder and louder, the push of nonexistent hands on the body she didn't now have became rougher and more hateful, and under the onslaught of several civilizations' worth of restless not-quite-dead, the world went silent, then dark, then gone. Still doing her best to act as a shield for her own mind and body, Clara lost the last vestiges of what could be considered consciousness.
---
Something that probably wouldn't have called itself Clara if you'd asked – which would have been hard to accomplish in any case – drifted dreamily through a serene nonscape. It wasn't the first time it had died. She had died? Last time, of course, the sweetness of nothing had been a faint blur at the edge of her vision or the back of her being. This time, it was all around her, through her, part of her. She was it as much as she was in it. Something perhaps occurred to the little scrap of thoughtself that this wasn't right, that she knew for a fact the afterlife, that her afterlife, wasn't this way. But she either ignored that or simply didn't think of it in the first place, and she was happy that way. She expanded or moved or thought through the darkness without black for a time without time or even duration. She simply was, forever and never.
Until there was a point where previously there had been nothing but an unmarked expanse. From that point arose the concept of before and after, and more literally arose a thin thread of glowing silver that cast everything that wasn't it into true darkness. It reached for her, despite there not truly being a her to reach for until it began reaching, and as it contacted the self she hadn't had, she gained understanding too. Painful memories of life and death and struggle returned to a formless mass that hadn't even understood the idea of remembering until it had been forced to, and she became Clara again.
A voice she had never truly heard but was instantly recognizable hummed through the delicate strand of existence to her.
"You have done well and fought mightily, Slate Emissary."
It was high praise, considering the situation, but it carried an undercurrent of sadness and – most disturbingly, given the source – powerlessness.
"But as you know, your work is not yet complete."
Of course it wasn't, not while the Monitor walked the worlds, but there was little she could do for now.
"I can aid you but little, Clara Jungfrau. Against those who would keep you, the veil of death has little meaning and less influence. The power that you wield against them must be as much yours as mine, and as much your allies' as yours. Rally those that remain, and unshackle them from the ignorance and fear that has bound them."
But how was she to do that when she didn't even understand everything herself?
"I cannot give you a sword that will slay your masters, nor a standard that will lead the downtrodden to fight at your heel. I can give you only enlightenment, and ask as I always have that you work for the betterment of those who march towards the shroud."
As the strand spoke or thought, it began twisting and expanding; several shapes formed along its length, further convoluting until they took on recognizable features.
"Many have been those who passed beyond the last curtain for reasons that were not theirs, in worlds they could not call home. Some were thrust through despite their best efforts and in spite of their strongest wishes."
A wavering image of B formed in front of Clara, looking terrified but hazy.
"Some took up the black mantle of their own accord, serving their dark masters and their interests as accomplices and traitors among those who should have been their brothers."
A blurred, watery form came into view next to B's unmoving visage; it morphed disturbingly into several others, then settled back into Bae's natural shape.
"Others still were not even truly their own souls, yet they fought valiantly as any could to throw off the yoke of those who would see them sacrificed meaninglessly."
The third and final twisting mass resolved itself into a doppelganger of Clara herself, but this one was much clearer and sharper than the others had been; it felt more real, like actually looking at herself from the outside rather than seeing a cheap illusion.
"Those who are not my children I have limited influence over. Those who would actively fight my careful hand, even less. But from beyond the darkness, I can bring you light. And from a devotee, I can create a great beacon."
B's and Bae's shapes flickered and began expanding and diffusing, merging with the nonexistence and with Clara herself. Memories and facts wrote themselves across her consciousness in a flaming, bloody hand and as promised, understanding wrote itself in their words.
"The greatest weapon in the arsenal even of those who move entire realities to their whims is still deceit and confusion. Look upon their works with clarity, and your victory will reveal itself from the mists of ignorance. Remember what you have learned. Spread it to those who still survive, and save those who can be saved."
'Those who can be saved'. Then there were those who couldn't. It was a harsh truth Clara had strived for some time to ignore, but perhaps the only way to save anyone was to accept that there were those who would always escape the fold and charge for the wolves.
She was left staring into her own eyes.
"There is more you must know, and by teaching you I may have done all I ever may to aid you. My child, know that you are loved as much as any frail soul born into the dark world, and that when your time comes and your fight is over, you will be accepted like any. Your success or failure, and your prophesied destiny, do not slate you for disappointment in my eyes. You have accomplished more than most ever could. Remember this."
With the last words vanishing to memories, Clara's image distorted and moved to merge with what she was forced to think of as her body, despite its literal absence. The scraps of thought and memory and notion and fact that she'd been shown by B and Bae retreated to the back of her mind as she was jolted into a past that wasn't hers. A rider in her own mind, or the mind of someone who had only diverged from being her in a very cosmetic sense, she watched and listened and felt as she awoke in a mall, as she met a lich, as she wondered and worried. Beings she'd never seen and places she'd never been passed before her metaphorical eyes, and they all seemed painfully familiar. A man died, a cave came into being; with a jolt, she experienced the most painful deja vu she'd ever known as the underground temple slid into place as the place she'd seen back in Old Salem.
She watched as her double followed through the trap-filled halls and listened as it concocted a plan. And then, with a sensation that no being – living, dead, or otherwise – should have to feel, she was tugged into an out-of-body experience within another within another. The scene blurred past and events with no coherence but immeasurable significance overlaid themselves onto her mind. Explanation, destruction, amusement. Transition, meddlesomeness, duplicity through honesty. Crystallizing time and nonphysical space. A scream and a jerk and the doubled dream ended, and she watched as she was corralled by boxes and fought a man beyond mortality and a god from beyond divinity. She felt unimaginable power well up, and felt as she was crushed like an insect. She died without having ever lived, the ghost of a puppet.
The silver thread returned and her accelerated journey through time that was not hers ended. Metadarkness filled her.
"You must see the stakes that are played with here. Understand the scope of your battle. The strength of your foe."
She did. She was cowed.
"But do not fear, for what you saw was the last stand of a doomed group, stifled by the deceit that ever clouds those who face the Grandmasters. Prepare, shed light, and divine. Gather those you can trust, and your fight will not see the same end your shade's did."
"Go forth, Clara Jungfrau, and save the weak and the strong and yourself. You are blessed; fear no failure."
The strand snapped into a numberless cloud of mercury droplets. They swarmed around her, covered her, and bade her sleep.
---
"Sora, don't jump! Please, please! It can't be worth it!"
Really, it can't. "Shut up, you're not even part of this! It's my destiny!"
"How can you say–"
"Not you, him. He's trying… Look, Karel, I have to. I have to. I can't live with this. None of us can!"
"No, honey, no, it'll all be over eventually. It has to be. Until then, just… remember me, remember our love. Isn't that enough for you?"
Sora clutched his head with Aegis's gauntlets, shouting and pacing terrifyingly close to the edge. "No! No, that just makes it all worse. It's never going to end. I've seen it, I've seen the infinity of nothing. It's all over, and we don't even get to die."
Clara's face wrinkled with another woman's expression. "I don't understand."
"And I can't tell you! Can you imagine what they'd do to me if–"
Aegis was panting by now, eyes wild. He obviously wasn't lucid by this point, which was probably understandable if he'd spent endless ages in a single moment of suicidal torment. Nevertheless, Karel tried to reason with him, tried to save the man she loved.
"Well, if nothing's ever going to change, then surely you can't get in trouble. Right?"
There was a brief silence, which Karel interpreted as a good sign.
"It can't hurt to talk to me. It might help you look at things differently, or at least make me feel a bit better."
He sighed and ran clumsy metal fingers through his hair. He was still on the precipice, but at least he looked like he was calming down a little.
"Okay, look, okay. Okay. Okay." He inhaled again and slowly let the breath out. "So, the company. The one I work for. OmniTec."
Sora's juddering, circular sentences were getting pretty frustrating pretty quickly, but Karel bit her tongue, figuring it was best to let him sort out his hangups on his own time.
"Well it… er, they… We. We were, you know… We were doing… Were doing some, uh, some pantemporal prospecting."
Karel's lips moved silently as she thought. pantempo–…
"Wait, you were using timeline readers?! That's–"
"I know, I know. I know. But that's the job. That's what they told us to do, that's what they payed us for. If I'd refused, they'd just get someone else. Why shouldn't I be the one who gets paid for it, right?"
You could have told someone. The trade commissions take accusations of timeline reading seriously. Karel figured it wasn't productive to say as much, though, and kept her mouth shut.
"So this morning, maybe last night… Something changed. The operators thought it was a glitch. We called the technicians in, and they…" He trailed off for several seconds. "You should have seen their faces, Karel. Seen the way they got confused, got scared, got angry. Everything was fine though, all the instruments working. It was all accurate, not a bug, not an anomaly. Should have seen the way their faces went dead. They just… They left. Shrugged and left. Couple of researchers came, but what could they do?"
Karel's voice floated up, straining to sound normal and calm. "Do for what exactly, sweetheart?"
"Every timeline. Everything. It all just stopped, every quark trapped in one unending moment. Nothing moved, nothing changed. Forever and ever. Crashed the computer when we told it to project to a point when things changed. Everything just paused in one moment for all of infinity. Forever. Forever and ever and ever, Karel! This undying hell of nothing, and it never ends!"
Sora was nearly hysterical now, biting back the urges to cry or scream or shove his own statue from the ledge. Karel spent several tense seconds formulating a reply before speaking.
"But there are people here now. They're changing things! The readers were wrong. You don't know this is forever."
He scoffed. "What can two insane offworlders do against the entire collapse of causality? That one thinks she's some kind of wizard for fuck's sake! They're just stupid and lost and they can't do anything!"
"But they're proof that–"
"No! I'm never going to get this chance again! I'm sorry, Karel. I love you, but I have to do this. I love you."
Sora lifted Aegis's feet and fulfilled his destiny.
Karel started to scream in a borrowed voice and raised Clara's hands helplessly. Her body and brain, without her spirit to guide them, ceded to Karel's panic and desire; her instincts and abilities jumped when asked, without context and memory to guide them. Unthinkingly, fingers wove a spell, bidding the air to congeal and send Aegis sinking through it like jelly. The world pushed against her magic, and Clara automatically pushed back, straining against the saturated mana until something tipped. Instead, something broke.
Everything.
---
The Non-Infringers hadn't even left the little clearing of souls XMO had cleared with his inhalation when Aph started screaming and writhing in her bonds.
"Saints alive, Non-Infringers!" shouted Iota McTaggart. "What could have gotten this little lass in such a frenzy?"
One of PAX/Tom raised an eyebrow, struggling to keep ahold of the nymph. "She doesn't even seem to be conscious. Perhaps Portraitist somehow escaped and followed us?"
"No," grumbled Crazyman Dragonarms pensively. "He couldn't have. Besides, she's not manifesting the ghosts of her psyche, so it couldn't be–"
He stopped as the group became aware of a low rumbling from the horizon. Before any could speak up, the rumble had become a roar had become an indesribable wall of sound slamming into them like the fist of a petty and furious god. All around them, the world seemed to be breaking into pieces and being hastily reassembled by some inexpert hand. What was once featureless grey stone was being replaced with real materials from the worlds that had spawned them.
Just… Wrongly.
With the exception of the spiritless area near the Non-Infringers, the world was being transmuted into a nightmarescape of flesh and bone and wood and glass. The statues of people and animals seemed unaffected, but every inanimate object and senseless plant was being replaced by a duplicate of itself made of conflicting, nonsensical materials. Moreover, where buildings and landscapes had quietly overlapped when their destinies had been frozen, matter suddenly realized its error. Buildings and trees exploded outwards in shards or chunks or nearly-whole scything blocks of masonry, all waveringly morphing as they were replaced with the wrong constituent parts. It was as though whatever had changed the worlds to their erstwhile stony form had forgotten what was what and was just dumping everything back into it in a churning mass of chaotic randomness.
XMO was forced to expel his lungful of souls to blow a huge block of iron and teeth away from the group; the still-faintly-glowing spirits immediately dove into whatever bits of life and limb they could insinuate themselves into, attempting to carve out whatever bodies they could from the liberated matter and continue with their interrupted lives. Judging from the hideous forms that were emerging from the distance, it seemed the souls freed from the robot weren't the only ones with the idea.
Once the cacophony of unfreezing had passed, to be replaced by the stomach-churning sounds of almost-human bodies forming themselves from muscle and sinew and steel, Aph finally stopped screaming. Her eyes slammed open and her tentacles writhed furiously.
"Fuck!"
I'm going to finally be the first one in today, I can just feel it; besides, if Dane's out sick then it's not like anyone else is going to be punctual.
I've got to get to the bus in five minutes if I want to be able to catch Bathtubs of Blood 3.
I need to find Ulg' Urush before he can escape with the princess!Did I remember to ask Unit 1212 to run the Zilgrax projections for tomorrow's meeting?
Christ, why are there no public restrooms anymore? Someone has got to do something about all these dwarves.
If I could just get past you, ma'am, please. ________________________ Oh, no, I think that camera was pointed this way.
I really need to see a doctor about this ankle, I think. ________ Why won't this asshole take the hint and go around?
I remember when you could walk these streets without someone glaring at you because you're a gnome. ____What was that noise?I have to have one of those hot dogs right now.________ Tell that girl you think she's cute. Come on, just do it.
Kill that hivefucker. Show them all they need to go back to their own planet. I think I have time to check my messages...
If the robot's projections are correct, then When did she sayI'mgoing to have get back to school soon.
It's getting harWe need toDoes it really mI can't do
WeTheIcan'SheWhIt
IIWSINBW
I I I I
I I
I
I
I
I've got to stop Sora!
Kill that hivefucker. Show them all they need to go back to their own planet. I think I have time to check my messages...
If the robot's projections are correct, then When did she sayI'mgoing to have get back to school soon.
It's getting harWe need toDoes it really mI can't do
WeTheIcan'SheWhIt
IIWSINBW
I I I I
I I
I
I
I
I've got to stop Sora!
Many things had prepared Clara to handle the sort of moment that had crystallized the instant she had dispelled her ward: being undead gives the mind a clarity of purpose and intensity of focus that can only be bred from the removal of the endless distractions biology dumps on a brain; being a practitioner of spirit magic and a follower of a gentle death-god steeps one in exactly the lore and practice one needs to shepherd disembodied and irrational spirits; her own caring nature and attention to detail left her with a ghostly empathy that few could match.
And despite all that, she was still swarmed on all sides by a mass of uncountable ghosts that wanted nothing more than to act out their last thoughts and wishes through her body, to finally fulfill the destinies that had been ground to a halt by their worlds' collision. Not only was the very air permeated with more minds than molecules across the entirety of the three-worlds-in-one, but many had been attracted to the barrier that had woven its way through their existence, curiously following the one thing that had happened since fate stopped. Between the nature of the round and her own actions, Clara had come face to face with an unfathomable number of unique souls, and she simply couldn't handle it the way she wanted to. With her last vestiges of mental strength, she shoved Karel into the space she usually occupied and made a stand against the onslaught of innocents and villains who could do nothing but try to push past and take over.
Numbly and vaguely, as though through several feet of ice-cold water, she could hear Karel beginning to try to talk her husband down, but the words were just sounds to her now, devoid of meaning or significance. Gradually, they were drowned out by the clamor of unfairly-ended lives swirling around and through her, and Clara could do nothing but hold fast, hoping to leave her possessor enough time to say what needed saying.
The spectral rush of voices screamed louder and louder, the push of nonexistent hands on the body she didn't now have became rougher and more hateful, and under the onslaught of several civilizations' worth of restless not-quite-dead, the world went silent, then dark, then gone. Still doing her best to act as a shield for her own mind and body, Clara lost the last vestiges of what could be considered consciousness.
---
Something that probably wouldn't have called itself Clara if you'd asked – which would have been hard to accomplish in any case – drifted dreamily through a serene nonscape. It wasn't the first time it had died. She had died? Last time, of course, the sweetness of nothing had been a faint blur at the edge of her vision or the back of her being. This time, it was all around her, through her, part of her. She was it as much as she was in it. Something perhaps occurred to the little scrap of thoughtself that this wasn't right, that she knew for a fact the afterlife, that her afterlife, wasn't this way. But she either ignored that or simply didn't think of it in the first place, and she was happy that way. She expanded or moved or thought through the darkness without black for a time without time or even duration. She simply was, forever and never.
Until there was a point where previously there had been nothing but an unmarked expanse. From that point arose the concept of before and after, and more literally arose a thin thread of glowing silver that cast everything that wasn't it into true darkness. It reached for her, despite there not truly being a her to reach for until it began reaching, and as it contacted the self she hadn't had, she gained understanding too. Painful memories of life and death and struggle returned to a formless mass that hadn't even understood the idea of remembering until it had been forced to, and she became Clara again.
A voice she had never truly heard but was instantly recognizable hummed through the delicate strand of existence to her.
"You have done well and fought mightily, Slate Emissary."
It was high praise, considering the situation, but it carried an undercurrent of sadness and – most disturbingly, given the source – powerlessness.
"But as you know, your work is not yet complete."
Of course it wasn't, not while the Monitor walked the worlds, but there was little she could do for now.
"I can aid you but little, Clara Jungfrau. Against those who would keep you, the veil of death has little meaning and less influence. The power that you wield against them must be as much yours as mine, and as much your allies' as yours. Rally those that remain, and unshackle them from the ignorance and fear that has bound them."
But how was she to do that when she didn't even understand everything herself?
"I cannot give you a sword that will slay your masters, nor a standard that will lead the downtrodden to fight at your heel. I can give you only enlightenment, and ask as I always have that you work for the betterment of those who march towards the shroud."
As the strand spoke or thought, it began twisting and expanding; several shapes formed along its length, further convoluting until they took on recognizable features.
"Many have been those who passed beyond the last curtain for reasons that were not theirs, in worlds they could not call home. Some were thrust through despite their best efforts and in spite of their strongest wishes."
A wavering image of B formed in front of Clara, looking terrified but hazy.
"Some took up the black mantle of their own accord, serving their dark masters and their interests as accomplices and traitors among those who should have been their brothers."
A blurred, watery form came into view next to B's unmoving visage; it morphed disturbingly into several others, then settled back into Bae's natural shape.
"Others still were not even truly their own souls, yet they fought valiantly as any could to throw off the yoke of those who would see them sacrificed meaninglessly."
The third and final twisting mass resolved itself into a doppelganger of Clara herself, but this one was much clearer and sharper than the others had been; it felt more real, like actually looking at herself from the outside rather than seeing a cheap illusion.
"Those who are not my children I have limited influence over. Those who would actively fight my careful hand, even less. But from beyond the darkness, I can bring you light. And from a devotee, I can create a great beacon."
B's and Bae's shapes flickered and began expanding and diffusing, merging with the nonexistence and with Clara herself. Memories and facts wrote themselves across her consciousness in a flaming, bloody hand and as promised, understanding wrote itself in their words.
"The greatest weapon in the arsenal even of those who move entire realities to their whims is still deceit and confusion. Look upon their works with clarity, and your victory will reveal itself from the mists of ignorance. Remember what you have learned. Spread it to those who still survive, and save those who can be saved."
'Those who can be saved'. Then there were those who couldn't. It was a harsh truth Clara had strived for some time to ignore, but perhaps the only way to save anyone was to accept that there were those who would always escape the fold and charge for the wolves.
She was left staring into her own eyes.
"There is more you must know, and by teaching you I may have done all I ever may to aid you. My child, know that you are loved as much as any frail soul born into the dark world, and that when your time comes and your fight is over, you will be accepted like any. Your success or failure, and your prophesied destiny, do not slate you for disappointment in my eyes. You have accomplished more than most ever could. Remember this."
With the last words vanishing to memories, Clara's image distorted and moved to merge with what she was forced to think of as her body, despite its literal absence. The scraps of thought and memory and notion and fact that she'd been shown by B and Bae retreated to the back of her mind as she was jolted into a past that wasn't hers. A rider in her own mind, or the mind of someone who had only diverged from being her in a very cosmetic sense, she watched and listened and felt as she awoke in a mall, as she met a lich, as she wondered and worried. Beings she'd never seen and places she'd never been passed before her metaphorical eyes, and they all seemed painfully familiar. A man died, a cave came into being; with a jolt, she experienced the most painful deja vu she'd ever known as the underground temple slid into place as the place she'd seen back in Old Salem.
She watched as her double followed through the trap-filled halls and listened as it concocted a plan. And then, with a sensation that no being – living, dead, or otherwise – should have to feel, she was tugged into an out-of-body experience within another within another. The scene blurred past and events with no coherence but immeasurable significance overlaid themselves onto her mind. Explanation, destruction, amusement. Transition, meddlesomeness, duplicity through honesty. Crystallizing time and nonphysical space. A scream and a jerk and the doubled dream ended, and she watched as she was corralled by boxes and fought a man beyond mortality and a god from beyond divinity. She felt unimaginable power well up, and felt as she was crushed like an insect. She died without having ever lived, the ghost of a puppet.
The silver thread returned and her accelerated journey through time that was not hers ended. Metadarkness filled her.
"You must see the stakes that are played with here. Understand the scope of your battle. The strength of your foe."
She did. She was cowed.
"But do not fear, for what you saw was the last stand of a doomed group, stifled by the deceit that ever clouds those who face the Grandmasters. Prepare, shed light, and divine. Gather those you can trust, and your fight will not see the same end your shade's did."
"Go forth, Clara Jungfrau, and save the weak and the strong and yourself. You are blessed; fear no failure."
The strand snapped into a numberless cloud of mercury droplets. They swarmed around her, covered her, and bade her sleep.
---
"Sora, don't jump! Please, please! It can't be worth it!"
Really, it can't. "Shut up, you're not even part of this! It's my destiny!"
"How can you say–"
"Not you, him. He's trying… Look, Karel, I have to. I have to. I can't live with this. None of us can!"
"No, honey, no, it'll all be over eventually. It has to be. Until then, just… remember me, remember our love. Isn't that enough for you?"
Sora clutched his head with Aegis's gauntlets, shouting and pacing terrifyingly close to the edge. "No! No, that just makes it all worse. It's never going to end. I've seen it, I've seen the infinity of nothing. It's all over, and we don't even get to die."
Clara's face wrinkled with another woman's expression. "I don't understand."
"And I can't tell you! Can you imagine what they'd do to me if–"
Aegis was panting by now, eyes wild. He obviously wasn't lucid by this point, which was probably understandable if he'd spent endless ages in a single moment of suicidal torment. Nevertheless, Karel tried to reason with him, tried to save the man she loved.
"Well, if nothing's ever going to change, then surely you can't get in trouble. Right?"
There was a brief silence, which Karel interpreted as a good sign.
"It can't hurt to talk to me. It might help you look at things differently, or at least make me feel a bit better."
He sighed and ran clumsy metal fingers through his hair. He was still on the precipice, but at least he looked like he was calming down a little.
"Okay, look, okay. Okay. Okay." He inhaled again and slowly let the breath out. "So, the company. The one I work for. OmniTec."
Sora's juddering, circular sentences were getting pretty frustrating pretty quickly, but Karel bit her tongue, figuring it was best to let him sort out his hangups on his own time.
"Well it… er, they… We. We were, you know… We were doing… Were doing some, uh, some pantemporal prospecting."
Karel's lips moved silently as she thought. pantempo–…
"Wait, you were using timeline readers?! That's–"
"I know, I know. I know. But that's the job. That's what they told us to do, that's what they payed us for. If I'd refused, they'd just get someone else. Why shouldn't I be the one who gets paid for it, right?"
You could have told someone. The trade commissions take accusations of timeline reading seriously. Karel figured it wasn't productive to say as much, though, and kept her mouth shut.
"So this morning, maybe last night… Something changed. The operators thought it was a glitch. We called the technicians in, and they…" He trailed off for several seconds. "You should have seen their faces, Karel. Seen the way they got confused, got scared, got angry. Everything was fine though, all the instruments working. It was all accurate, not a bug, not an anomaly. Should have seen the way their faces went dead. They just… They left. Shrugged and left. Couple of researchers came, but what could they do?"
Karel's voice floated up, straining to sound normal and calm. "Do for what exactly, sweetheart?"
"Every timeline. Everything. It all just stopped, every quark trapped in one unending moment. Nothing moved, nothing changed. Forever and ever. Crashed the computer when we told it to project to a point when things changed. Everything just paused in one moment for all of infinity. Forever. Forever and ever and ever, Karel! This undying hell of nothing, and it never ends!"
Sora was nearly hysterical now, biting back the urges to cry or scream or shove his own statue from the ledge. Karel spent several tense seconds formulating a reply before speaking.
"But there are people here now. They're changing things! The readers were wrong. You don't know this is forever."
He scoffed. "What can two insane offworlders do against the entire collapse of causality? That one thinks she's some kind of wizard for fuck's sake! They're just stupid and lost and they can't do anything!"
"But they're proof that–"
"No! I'm never going to get this chance again! I'm sorry, Karel. I love you, but I have to do this. I love you."
Sora lifted Aegis's feet and fulfilled his destiny.
Karel started to scream in a borrowed voice and raised Clara's hands helplessly. Her body and brain, without her spirit to guide them, ceded to Karel's panic and desire; her instincts and abilities jumped when asked, without context and memory to guide them. Unthinkingly, fingers wove a spell, bidding the air to congeal and send Aegis sinking through it like jelly. The world pushed against her magic, and Clara automatically pushed back, straining against the saturated mana until something tipped. Instead, something broke.
Everything.
---
The Non-Infringers hadn't even left the little clearing of souls XMO had cleared with his inhalation when Aph started screaming and writhing in her bonds.
"Saints alive, Non-Infringers!" shouted Iota McTaggart. "What could have gotten this little lass in such a frenzy?"
One of PAX/Tom raised an eyebrow, struggling to keep ahold of the nymph. "She doesn't even seem to be conscious. Perhaps Portraitist somehow escaped and followed us?"
"No," grumbled Crazyman Dragonarms pensively. "He couldn't have. Besides, she's not manifesting the ghosts of her psyche, so it couldn't be–"
He stopped as the group became aware of a low rumbling from the horizon. Before any could speak up, the rumble had become a roar had become an indesribable wall of sound slamming into them like the fist of a petty and furious god. All around them, the world seemed to be breaking into pieces and being hastily reassembled by some inexpert hand. What was once featureless grey stone was being replaced with real materials from the worlds that had spawned them.
Just… Wrongly.
With the exception of the spiritless area near the Non-Infringers, the world was being transmuted into a nightmarescape of flesh and bone and wood and glass. The statues of people and animals seemed unaffected, but every inanimate object and senseless plant was being replaced by a duplicate of itself made of conflicting, nonsensical materials. Moreover, where buildings and landscapes had quietly overlapped when their destinies had been frozen, matter suddenly realized its error. Buildings and trees exploded outwards in shards or chunks or nearly-whole scything blocks of masonry, all waveringly morphing as they were replaced with the wrong constituent parts. It was as though whatever had changed the worlds to their erstwhile stony form had forgotten what was what and was just dumping everything back into it in a churning mass of chaotic randomness.
XMO was forced to expel his lungful of souls to blow a huge block of iron and teeth away from the group; the still-faintly-glowing spirits immediately dove into whatever bits of life and limb they could insinuate themselves into, attempting to carve out whatever bodies they could from the liberated matter and continue with their interrupted lives. Judging from the hideous forms that were emerging from the distance, it seemed the souls freed from the robot weren't the only ones with the idea.
Once the cacophony of unfreezing had passed, to be replaced by the stomach-churning sounds of almost-human bodies forming themselves from muscle and sinew and steel, Aph finally stopped screaming. Her eyes slammed open and her tentacles writhed furiously.
"Fuck!"