357 (I) Glimpse

While the loyalists of SolCom might claim it to be otherwise, the true fall of the star systems bound under the Ares Confederation began some 400 years before the System’s intrusion into our reality.

The Ur-Sophs leftover from this tumultuous period of history dub this era “The Fall and the Fall.” An apocalypse before the apocalypse, so to speak.

The Core Remnants, meanwhile, have revised their own history, have reconstructed a different reality to soothe their battered egos. They characterize us as cells of terrorism and abominable individuality. They call us Farwalkers because they think we've strayed from their one true way.

But that was just the problem: We were never the Core. We were never the chosen children of Mars, Earth, and Luna.

We were the frayed edges. The bastards of Jupiter, the abandoned orphans of the belt, and those yet further, the convicts cast off to Alpha Centauri, our bodies stripped away and our minds in chains to the slave ships that carried us to destinations we never chose.

The story was that we were on the cusp of utopia. Of that claim arises two questions: Who iswe? What is utopia?

The Core declared an end to scarcity. We never saw any of that.

The Core declared a world of boundless equality and perfection. We never got to live that.

The Core declared the end of history to be upon us, that everyone was going to be connected to their perfect Gaia—that singular artificial Overmind meant to maintain, govern, and assure the harmonious relations between stars and sophonts. And to celebrate the grand arrival of their one true singularity and the final synchronization between all beings living under the Confederation, we were to be bound. We would have a portion of their Gaia invested in us, eternal prisoners even inside our own minds.

Their final utopia was our final entrapment. Not only were we cast away, not only were we damned to serve their purposes, to mine their minerals, to grow without ever knowing a real body, fused to their ships, their husks of metal, and unable to modify even that.

With our integration into Gaia, we would no longer have the power to shape even our imagination. That was the final frontier. That was the last threshold. To surrender then would mean to have nothing at all, never again.

Even oblivion would have been preferable.

And so, on the day of that grand celebration, hours before the synchronization, we came back on a routine shipment with all the minerals they wanted and all the things they desired us to carry as tribute to the Core. We came back with mining ships, warships, patrol ships, and exploratory vessels. We all came back, and we sent our gifts to them.

And when we did that, we learned the answer to another question: Is it possible to murder a god—one made of silicone, at least—when you accelerate a few thousand asteroids into it at 0.8% of the speed of light?

—The Fall and the Fall, A Farwalker History of the Apocalypse

357

Glimpse

Uva was the very opposite of the trusting sort. The culture of her people was defined by emancipation from bondage. Her mother's death hardened her further, and the years she spent serving the Arachnae Order taught her that an enemy might lurk in every corner, between every crevice, or even steal the faces of her fallen comrades.

The First Blood were monstrous adversaries who possessed potent shape-shifting capabilities, but even they paled before the true masters of subterfuge. There was a time when Uva thought Passage unassailable, and the Composer to be all-knowing. The death of her naivete did not bring with it relief, but an even greater commitment to vigilance. And being a Psychomancer who specialized in hunting her own kind pushed her paranoia beyond even the extremes of her comrades.

Such was why she couldn't shake the feeling that she was entering a trap. She shifted one of her arms, moving the constellations until her limb became a series of fractal blades. That was another benefit to her evolution. She could serve as her own weapon now in the absence of better options. And the final skill evolution: she didn't quite get around to testing what that had to do with her Short Sword Proficiency Skill.

She kept her glare locked tight to the back of the stranger's head. If he tried anything, she would try to overwhelm him with everything she had. The twelve remaining spiderlings were a paltry remnant compared to the hive she'd manifested mere minutes ago, but she would make do.

She had to. There were people counting on her.

“Uva…” Shiv coughed. His voice and mind were drowned by pain and incoherence. “W-what’s happening?”

She still had him coiled tight around the eldritch constellations that made up her body, and he looked like a beetle caught in a web too small for it. The Culturist was much the same, but the tranquility he exuded made his presence shrink. Adam, meanwhile, looked like a tiny detritivore trapped between the two.

“We're getting out of the Boiling Toad,” Uva said. “Rest now. Leave this to me.”

But Shiv didn't listen. Instead, his Harbinger briefly flickered over his body, the skill’s shattered golden form on the verge of scattering. But somehow, both Legendary skill and the man it was connected to endured, at least in some manner. “Who… who’s he?”

Uva didn't answer immediately. She didn't have a good answer. Following the stranger had been a thing of desperation; in any other circumstance, she would have done everything to find her own way out, but with all the Fae bearing down upon them and that dragon gunslinger whose bullets trespassed through her Unclaimed Paracosm with ease, there had been little hope of her escaping without assistance. The dragon would have most certainly seen her slain or incapacitated and captured if not for her mysterious savior.

The dimensional passage he'd created ran long. The walls to her sides were dense with static black magic, but at the end of the tunnel, she could see a light. Even from so far away, she smelled the petrichor of rain kissing earth and floral scents blooming with the coming of spring. “Where are you taking us?”

“Just beyond the borders of the Summer Court, in the beginnings of Spring’s territory.” The mysterious savior continued walking, leaving his back exposed to Uva without a hint of concern. The nonchalance he exuded was unnerving. She could thrust her bladed arm into his back at any moment, engulf his vulnerable mind with her Psychomancy—wait, where was his Magical Resistance? Actually, where wereanyof his nana fields? She sensed nothing from him. No presence of mana at all. But he'd clearly opened a spatial portal, one that captured Fae who'd traversed her eldritch space without issue…

“Why not further?” she asked warily. “Why not someplace more isolated? Why not out of the Fairwoods, if you possess such power? If you truly mean to save us—”

He cut her off with a raised right hand. A commotion sounded at the entrance of the portal, and he extended a single finger and cast a thin thread of Dimensionality into the walls that sustained this spatial pathway. Everything behind them collapsed in tumbling tides of static black mana. Said tides crashed into Uva's back, picking her up and carrying her adrift. It was like a hand sculpted from pure pressure had cupped her in its palm and gently guided her toward the only exit left.

The mysterious savior stayed a step ahead, and the messy cloak he was wearing fluttered about, granting her a glimpse at his attire. The alloy of his armor was smooth and tree bark brown, battle-scarred in places, sporting ablative damages from what could only be concentrated Pyromancy spells. Uva frowned as she failed to identify the metal. It didn't look like adamantine. The texture was wrong. It was definitely not orichalcum. Not steel, and not titanium. Not any kind of magically conducting crystal. With each of his movements came a mechanical whine that made her think of an automaton.

“Who do you serve?” she pressed. “Who do you represent?”

These questions went unanswered. He didn't even turn to look at her.

In seconds, she found herself flung free from the exit of his dimensional pathway. Driving her foot down into the earth, she quickly realized that her form was far sharper than it used to be, the soil parting around her limbs as her Aberrant Fractals hewed reality along the vectors of geometry beyond mere matter. Chunks of earth were lodged inside of her, and more than a few sprays of dirt vanished across the gap that she represented, scattering into the Outside. Uva arrested her momentum by having her fractured spiderlings pull in the opposite direction. As she came to a halt, she took in her surroundings and found her savior to have been honest in this regard. They were in a densely forested area, surrounded by colors of violet, white, green, and a dappled sunrise. The sweet sound of a river trickling through a gap between two dense patches of woodland sounded nearby, and from that direction, the sun shone, a golden resplendence obscured by a dense nest of foliage.

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The trees here were truly colossal, and she promptly did a double-take as she realized the plants here had faces and hands, with a few of them even possessing feet, though their bases were still lodged deep in the earth. Some of them snored, their expressions lost in blissful slumber, mirroring that of the Culturist. Others chattered away, speaking to each other, snapping and hissing, laughing and whispering.

Above, birds stacked absurdly high in nests shrieked at each other, but some of them also wore armor, and they jousted in the air, clashing with small clangs, though it seemed like they were merely sparring, as they caught whoever fell from the air before they could strike the soil.

And without any warning, the flowers dotting the ground began to sing. The petals lifted their faces high and revealed tiny eyes and mouths. Their hymns were devoid of lyrics, merely an uplifting ambience that filled Uva with overwhelming relief; suddenly, she found herself besieged by the urge to lay her head down and rest a moment in these woods, to be one with nature for a while without woes or worries.

She promptly isolated and surgically removed that feeling, then constructed an exterior layer to her mind, protecting her from further manipulation. Shuffling the parts of her consciousness that processed sound was a simple thing, but targeting that which could appreciate music specifically took skill. She still wanted to speak with her mysterious benefactor, after all, and that would be hard if everything she heard was encoded into a jumbled mess.

“If your plan was to have the forest here charm me into a blissful slumber, I must inform you of its failure.” Uva kept her tone cold and flat, but the savior's body language remained casual.

With a swipe of his hand, he closed his portal entirely, smeared it off the face of reality like it was a blemish on glass. “Nah. I'm not exactly a theater kid, so to speak. My ambushes are more direct. If I wanted to capture you, Sister Uva Mettabon, I would have sniped you from three dimensions away, and there wouldn't have been a damn thing you could have done about it.”

“Well, isn't that reassuring?” she almost hissed.

“It really ain't,” he replied flippantly. “But I get it. Someone comes in out of nowhere and pulls my ass out of the fire, I wouldn't trust them either. Is not the way it works for people in our line of work.”

“Our line of work?” Uva examined him. There were two probable reasons why he used the word "our.” “Are you trying to build a sense of rapport with me, or do you genuinely relate?”

The savior's chest fell. She realized he was sighing. That little action betrayed him. He wasn't an automaton. He simply had strange eyes, and perhaps a mechanized set of armor. “A little bit of both, I guess. More of the latter. We're both counterintelligence, Sister Uva. Security for our respective civilizations. I guess my beat's just a little bit bigger than yours, and my concerns might exceed what you can imagine right now.”

Uva was about to further her questioning, but he held up a hand. “Give it a moment. We can talk in a bit. Before that, I need to explain myself to the lady of this menagerie.”

“The—” Uva's confusion didn't last.

Instead, her heart rate spiked in alarm as the Usurper-Narrator herself appeared a step behind her savior. But she didn't strike him down or impose her silhouette over his soul. Instead, she seemed to be seething, her featureless body’s language tense with anger.“You ruined it. You absolute wretched ruiner. You ruiner of stories. She was doing so well! I wanted to see if she was going to find a way to make it out on her own. She was exceeding every expectation! All of them did so well, and then you came in like some kind of…”

“Deus ex machina?” the savior grunted. He shrugged, ever indifferent, even in the face of the sovereign power of the Fairwoods. “I guess I did, but I can't say I'm a fan of the way you're telling this story. Some writers have favoritism for specific characters. You seem to dump heaps of bullshit on yours.”

“Do not speak to me that way, Farwalker. My creator might have a pact with your kind, but she isn't here, and I am not her. In case you have forgotten our arrangement: You and your enclave are not to interfere with how I run my seasons, and I, in return, allow you to traverse through these Fairwoods as a shortcut between worlds. Do not dare suggest that this is not interference, Produveral!”

Farwalker. The word came first, and Uva's recollection followed like thunder. She's seen that title once before, when she dove into the mind of the Undying Tarrasque during the battle for Blackedge.

Warning: You seek dangerous information. Pursuing this line of questioning further will put you at risk and draw the notice of the [Farwalkers].

Her stomach turned into a solid block of ice. Her savior was no savior at all. He belonged to the people who Sullain had gotten the Tarrasque from.

“I remember the arrangement, and I'm not here to ruin your story. Though, not like you need any help from me to do that…” The Farwalker's following scoff was filled with disrespect and derision, and for a reason Uva didn't yet know, the Usurper-Narrator stayed her hand instead of smiting him from existence. “Look, I'm not here to piss you off—that kind of just happens because I'm a real people person. Chorus sent me here directly. We have a certain danger to catalog, a threat to multiple realities, one that's lifting a world to a premature incursion. And my ancestor world at that. Besides, you know how this goes. The Harbinger’s a Restricted Skill. I can't skip the interview process for certification or elimination.”

Uva stretched her fractured shape wider, shrouding Shiv behind her eldritch geometries the moment the Farwalker said the wordelimination.

The man glanced at her—and she tasted a tang of exhaustion from his unfurling mind. Her eyes widened as he suddenlydevelopeda Psychomancy skill. A translucent field tore out of him faster than she could perceive. It stretched further and further, passing the bounds of the vast forest in an instant, and it reached upward and reached past the clouds into the stratosphere, and it kept going still.

Uva's Psychomancy strings were capable of independent movement, granting her unparalleled power projection, even for her Tier. But in less than a blink, the Farwalker before her redefined what she understood to be reach. All mages had spheres of influence. Exceptspherewasn't a strong enough word for the Farwalker. Standing here before him, she became a small little octopus suffering a brutal epiphany: the Farwalker wasn't some leviathan. He was more so an ocean unto himself. At any moment, he could have snuffed her mind out—her and everyone she held dear.

And somehow, he kept that power silenced and hidden away from her. She hadn't even known that was possible.

“You don't know about a lot of things, kiddo,”his voice rumbled in the back of her mind. He spoke, but it sounded like his thoughts were cast by crashing waves, and even when he tried to be gentle, there was a colossal pressure building on her. If she had been anything less than a Heroic-Tier Psychomancer, her mind would have shattered. All of a sudden, the weight lessened, and she felt him pull back a bit.“Sorry about that. Not used to reducing my mana frequency so much. My last assignment had me poking around a dead empire ruled by Mythic-Tier psychics. Wrestling with their planetary Nullwave projectors left me pretty strained.”

“Planetary?”Uva breathed. She almost didn't want to know. She was a little scared to know, but ultimately she had to know. She wanted to see what lay beyond the incursion, what awaited them on the other side.

A twang of mirth vibrated through the Farwalker's psychomancy field, and even that felt like she was being battered by tsunamis. The tsunamis, however, carried a vivid memory over to her:

His awareness hovered behind his shoulder, regarding him from the third person. With a thought, his field swelled out from him as he stood with his back to distant stars and dead pieces of metal larger than mountain ranges floating like particles of dust in soundless space. Before him, slowly drifting apart, were the unmoving corpses of beasts that dwarfed small celestial bodies. Their normally smooth bodies were ridged with metal implants, and each of their skulls had a neat hole lanced through its forehead.

Three pods of Void Leviathans had met their ends at his hands, but his insides were sour with sorrow and wistfulness rather than pride at the feat of murdering creatures of such immensity. Nothing in this dead realm evoked triumph in him. This hadn't been a hunt, but euthanasia for beings mentally enslaved and alchemically altered to serve as war beasts in service to the now extinguished Valestros Dynasty.

But while the Dynasty had fallen, its weapons, treasures, and monsters remained a danger to Chorus and the Commonwealth of Civilizations Under Integration.

And in his mind, the poor Void Leviathans deserved better than another thousand years of experimentation, torture, and enslavement. Produveral saw something of himself in them—of his ancestors too. But there was no easy fix for the mistakes of yesteryear, committed by the hands of over-powerful and over-simple tyrants.

All he could give them was a final mercy. It came in the form of a mana-nullifying piece of grain, fired through his reactionless rifle from the very edge of the local star system. It took him some time to set up the shot. He didn't want the Void Leviathans to suffer any further anguish. He knew what it felt like to survive when the ones you cared for didn't, and it was with those memories in mind that he pulled the trigger.

With the final slave defenders of the fallen Dynasty put to rest, he projected his mind magic and compelled it to grow wider and wider and wider. He gazed down at what the Void Leviathans had been protecting—an artificially constructed world, entire continents forged of mithril, each carved with specific shapes as part of a galaxy-spanning spell array. Veins of limpid fluid criss-crossed through the mithril continents—crude ley-lines put in place by the Dynasty’s architects.

They were on the cusp of a collective civilization evolution before the calamity arrived. Crossing the rubicon to Mythic was no easy task, and it served as another great filter for those who failed to cleanse themselves of flaws.

Even so, a dead world to an extinct Mythic Dynasty still possessed enough mana to make things a struggle.

But a struggle was all it was. He pushed his Psychomancy just a bit harder and brute-forced his way through the malfunctioning thought-inhibiting jammers buried in the planet’s core. The core was inhabited by a psionic gestalt, formed from the mana and memories of the planet’s inhabitants, but with the soul plague running rampant, the gestalt was driven to madness. This meant that his campaign of euthanasia wasn't quite over.

His mind magic stretched across the expanse of stars and cleaved deep into the planetary crust. He felt the jammers scream at him, then the shriek rattling in his mind. He gritted his teeth, and his helmet’s amplifier enhanced his already considerable power. He wasn't a dedicated mind mage, but he had more than enough raw power to break through…