The Grand Battle II! [Happy End!]

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

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Screaming. A plea so desperate it had torn out its own throat, its own words, and dashed them regimental across the page like so much starless, Entropic blood. Everything else was trivial, rendered inconsequential by the screams of reality itself. Worse, it wasn't even the cry as it fell from a single mortal wound, but something agonised. Drawn-out; as each piece was extracted and laid in neat lines right in its pain-hazed line of sight. Only able to stop when it had no strength or lungs left.

Gestalt didn't recognise the book's language; could barely wrap its mind around the syllables before it spat them out; couldn't remember uttering that first awful word – one no less terrible than the others, save for the fact it had condoned the rest of them tumbling out unbidden. Each page and paragraph and sentence bled into the next, an entire ocean of words to hide the dead beneath. Trying to read one wave from the next was impossible; to the schrotgolem, understanding only reached as far as sensing the shifting tides. Line after line, its language was intoned - by a speaker and spirit cracking under its absolute weight - but only a sliver comprehended. The language of reality. A language capable not only of describing everything, but more crucially proficient in describing everyhow. A language of links and consequence, of fate and preposition. All things – all places, objects, people – suspended or ensnared in a web of context. Of interrelation. The language of atoms and multiverses, and nothing in between.

Vyrm'n's language, in fact, though she'd abandoned the snarl in favour of sanity and settled for knowing only the nouns – all those suspended by the struts or tethers she'd forgotten how to see. And even then, those of the here and now. Or, as the book was conceding (before it reaffirmed true oblivion) the there and then.

Gestalt was vaguely aware of all this, though it all seemed to fly simultaneously above and below it. It was reading a present even as the Diarist primed it for disproving. The preamble to the dissertation. To destroy it, one had to absolutely know what it was they were destroying. An odd courtesy extended to that which was going to die.

Life. A mind. An abandoned, skeletal scaffold wreckage of a mind, and the spark of life that had found a home in it. A home with its history crafted so that it would withstand the necessary destruction, and impart it then to its new inhabitant. It was unique, and a labour of strange, amoral love.

That spark was being extinguished - pounded into submission beneath wave after inky wave. Or perhaps it had never been dredged from the depths of the ocean. Gestalt wasn't sure. It might've simultaneously been both. The schrotgolem was slowly returning to itself, albeit reluctantly. Its very consciousness seemed viscerally aware of what it had unleashed – the dichotomy and illogic ripping as their herald read - and shied from it as though it had tainted the vessel in its passing.

The book served to define the real. Gestalt knew this. It had read it in the book was the book or the two were conjoined to bring forth something else that tried - despite its nature - and failed to be neither. The real needed an anchor - reference in a self-spun sea. A champion, perhaps. One mind to know its contents as real, and preach it to the world.

Ideas were so easy. Manifesting them, harder. The Diarist took rightful pride in his ability, though he still found the hamfisted practical applications of his art distasteful. It was a strange aside, but one the author had deemed necessary. More context. More reference. More binding.

Footnotes. An epilogue. Reaffirming the place and the time and the circumstance of this little segment. The feeling Gestalt had previously, of tangling, burred and snagging on the Speakeasy's reality, simultaneously intensified and faded. Weaves were aligning, threads or lines of words lying side by mistrustful side. Meshing. Coming right. The schrotgolem felt violently ill, as though its senses were telling it that it was in two-and-a-half places at once

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Static.

It took Gestalt a good few moments of reorientation to re-place itself in the real – no, it'd almost forgotten, this murdered taunting shell of a real – world and find, to its surprise, that the noise persisted here as well.

Vyrm'n loomed over the pile of boxes, frozen perhaps at the apex of a crushing slam. The cosmos still tracked slowly across her, but Gestalt didn't recognise the hissing, black sphere in her chest. It sent out a cautious tendril; feeling only the uncaring massiveness of a place which swallowed universes whole, the schrotgolem retreated. Gestalt huddled against the enormous double doors; the sphere fell out and was silent.

"Vyrm'n?"

Silence. So rudely interrupted by the screeching deaths of Homunculi some ways off, and Lucian's choked laughter. Unable to contain himself, the man stared incredulous at Gestalt.

"You don't even realise what you did." His grin, unsmiling, wavered a little as he tossed a snigger in Frank's direction. "You fucked up, Frank."

Another contraption extracted, unfolded, and waved from head to toe. Lucian ignored Gestalt's demands – ignored the schrotgolem altogether - guiltless contempt in his eyes as the ring which encompassed him began to spin. The Organiser's servant could spare only a hateful glance in Lucian's direction, bullets ricocheting off her raised arms.

"Frank, you knew I only promised to help until Vyrm's memory was put to rest."

There was no malice or apology to the man's voice. He merely inclined his head to Gestalt, and vanished with an ozone-smelling crack. The metal hoop fell to the ground, spinning on its edge until arrested by a glass-encased tendril.

Jessamine extracted her snaking, quilled form from some indeterminate point above where Lucian had stood only seconds prior. She landed on skittering, needly feet, cracking some component of the teleportation device in her claws.

"My master told me not to intervene," hissed the creature. Her contempt dripped less from her pincered jaws, than from the air congealing around Gestalt itself. With no preamble, the schrotgolem found its very essence impaled upon those talons, being lifted screaming voiceless dredged from its boxes from itself and it was almost vicious merciful when Jessamine finally tossed Gestalt across the atrium, kicking the boxes after it.

The Speakeasy's guardian glanced at Frank, still pinned by the door as she cut through swathes of the Observer's minions. The servants' gazes met – Frank's expression darkened; the glass-hulled monstrosity tittered with a previously-unheard glee.

For now, business.

Jessamine raised a claw, scrutinising the still-motionless Faceless – then charged with a speed that was too unobservable to truly call frightening. Gestalt, trembling and groggy and in actual, exotic pain, pulled itself together just in time to curl up screaming again as the book tried to split its mind in two.

The Speakeasy seemed to warp and crack about the Faceless, two realities snapping and biting and clawing at Gestalt's insides for escape. For the briefest moment, the schrotgolem found itself scattered and diffused between them both-

<font color="#FFFFBF">The transfer had been arrested by the Diarist's meddling Jessamine rose calmly to her feet it should have been its nature to seize the first approaching foolish mind between where she had started and stopped a Faceless was writhing but it was written rewritten that it had never bonded never could never would slashed in two hot spines of glass burrowing piercing burning the black it had snatched as they all do at her briefest murderous touch and the moment missed in the turn of a head or page it repelled the noise

and Jessamine finally struggled to her feet, a few quills snapping where they'd pierced the double-doors. A crack running down one leg lengthened with an unpleasantly reminiscent noise, a smoky blue tendril or three slithering out, shrugging the glass shell away.

Vyrm'n still hadn't reacted, but a sort of dull animosity tinged the nothingness. No comprehension precluded it; the Faceless simply lunged for the Speakeasy's proprietor. She darted out of the way again with reality-breaking speed, but the shadow seemed to predict Jessamine's movements, jack-knifing every which way as only a beast without knowledge of gravity or inertia could. Jessamine snarled. The Faceless' pursuit continued, unabated.

Gestalt slithered behind Reccxer's glass case, the book and its promise thumping away like a headache with every narrow miss. The schrotgolem paused as it neared a tireless, furious Frank. Her expression was grim, but it changed to alarm when she glanced a second time at her companion.

A smooth, featureless slab of a door was shimmering into existence behind the schrotgolem. It seemed to pause, waiting for the lull in Jessamine's desperate dance to fade, before swinging smoothly open.</font>