The Guardian gods

Kaelen paced, his brow furrowed in concentration. "And the mages out there... they’re nearing their breaking point. Even Sixth-Tiers can’t withstand this mental assault indefinitely. We buy them a few hours of uneasy rest each day, only for it to escalate the next night." He stopped, turning sharply to Rattan. "But have you noticed, Nixbolt? The demons out there. They don’t suffer this. They wade through that psychic miasma as if it’s the air they breathe. No mental fatigue, no shattered minds. Why?" Rattan, still leaning against the crate, offered a weary shrug. "It stands to reason, doesn’t it? They’re from the Abyss. Perhaps they’re immune, or perhaps they’re simply... too far gone to be affected."

"Too far gone, or perhaps perfectly attuned," Kaelen countered, a new light entering his eyes. "Think about it. We’re fighting a ’corruption’ that changes iron into flesh. It fundamentally alters reality. But it only seems to harm us. To the demons, it’s just... home. This psychic onslaught, the very ’corruption’ we’re fighting, it’s likely just the Abyss’s way of preparing the land for assimilation."

He began to gesticulate, his pacing quickening. "We’ve observed how the corrupted ground shifts, how it almost welcomes the abyssal energies. It doesn’t fight back; it absorbs. It’s like the Abyss is a living, cancerous entity, and this psychic attack isn’t just a weapon, but a digestive process. It softens up the reality, breaks down our resistance, makes the land, and perhaps even its inhabitants, ready to be subsumed."

Rattan’s blank expression finally began to shift, a flicker of his old intellectual fire replacing the despair. "You’re saying... it’s not trying to destroy us, not entirely. It’s trying to convert us? To merge with us, and everything around us?"

"Precisely," Kaelen affirmed, a grim determination setting his jaw. "If the Abyss is ready to welcome anything into its fold, ready to merge, ready to corrupt to its very essence... then perhaps the answer isn’t to fight it. Perhaps the answer is to partially become it ourselves."

Rattan pushed off the crate, his eyes widening in disbelief. "What? Kaelen, are you insane? ’Partially become it’? That’s not a solution, that’s surrender! That’s succumbing to the very corruption we’re fighting to stop!"

"No, hear me out," Kaelen pressed, undeterred by Rattan’s outrage. "Not full assimilation. We can’t become demons. But what if we focus on protecting our minds, our very essences of being, from the corruption, while allowing our physical forms, or perhaps specialized constructs, to adapt to its influence? If the Abyss wants to merge, perhaps we can merge just enough to navigate its internal logic, to move through its psychic attacks unimpeded, while safeguarding what truly makes us us."

Rattan threw his hands up in exasperation. "Safeguarding our essence while letting our bodies become... whatever that iron-flesh monstrosity was? That’s a pact with madness, Kaelen! That’s walking the line to becoming the very thing we despise! There’s no coming back from that, no ’partial’ corruption!"

Kaelen held his gaze, his expression grimly resolute. "We’re already walking the line of total defeat, Rattan. If we can’t fight it head-on, if we can’t purify it... then what other choice do we have but to understand it, and use its own nature against it? We don’t need to defeat the Abyss entirely; we just need to survive its embrace long enough to cut its influence."

Rattan looked from Kaelen’s intense gaze back to the glowing light above. The idea was abhorrent, a betrayal of everything they stood for. Yet, the relentless THUMMM! from outside the tent was a constant, terrifying reminder of their dwindling options.

Rattan pushed away from the crate, the desperate fanaticism in Kaelen’s eyes unsettling him. He had no power to stop this, not here, not now. His expertise lay in Magitech, not in navigating the treacherous currents of extreme magical theory or the Empire’s rigid hierarchy.