Adamant Blood

Mark walked on paths of rainbow darkness through unknown depths, images of life passing him by as he turned, fitfully, in his sleep. He knew he was asleep. This was a dream. He couldn’t wake up.

The world felt unreal in that turning darkness as his thoughts tumbled backward, to that 100 Trial that he had just learned about, and then his thoughts tumbled onward, to distant shores lost in rainbow depths.

Mark was an old father, surrounded by family, hand in Isoko’s hand, their kids running around them at someone’s birthday party. Mark was just a brawny, muscle still showing on his old, wrinkled skin, laugh lines and smile lines making his face a lot more lined than it should be. Isoko was much more focused on skin care and she had been for many years, so she looked like a woman half her age.

Their house was Mark’s old house, the one he had grown up in at Orange City. Two stories, big garage. It was an easy life. Some of the kids running around were not their own, and they were younger still; grandkids. Mark and Isoko were grandparents and the party was for a 1 year old kid, born from Mark’s son, who Mark’s son had called Markus, in honor of Mark’s own father, who was a grandfather that he had never met.

It was a future that Mark thought he wanted, but that he knew he could not grasp.

The rain fell from the sky and from Mark’s eyes in great, weeping drops.

The rain became a flood, washing away the birthday party into rainbow depths.

Mark was on a small and strong Dreadnought, plying the endless seas of Endless Daihoon, searching for histories lost to everyone, alongside friends that changed every so often. Sally, Eliot, Isoko, Tartu, and Andria were gone. It had been years since Mark had seen them, and some of them were long dead. Mark still had a crystal ball that connected him to New Tokyo and to Addavein, but he had left behind any touch to Aluatha at all. He was not himself.

Mark was a mage, casting spells of adamantine strength. When the situation called for it Mark ripped ethereal adamantium through the sky like a thousand knives, cutting apart any enemy that they could cut. Not kaiju, though. Not this deep into Endless Daihoon, where the kaiju filled up the entire layer and were Category 8. For those threats, Mark called forth adamantine bindings on Forgetful Outsiders, flowing them around himself and his ship and his crew, and then he fell into the dreamlands between layers. Some of the crew died. Most lived. And Mark plumbed the depths of Endless Daihoon endlessly, until New Tokyo called him home. In those desperate times, Mark came home. He fought alongside Addavein and they ended whatever threat needed ending.

Mark was old, but immortal, and so was Addavein. They had long since stopped being simply talzarki, and they were more like actual brothers.

It was too much to envision right now.

Addavein was complicit with Aluatha. How long had that been going on? For 350 years, and it started at the founding of Aluatha, when they burned the Godking out of their lives and off of the coast of Toth, what would be the Aluatha Empire. Dragonfire and an Inheritor named Jamasani, who had originally had the Pillar of God that Mark had right now, had been the only ways that they managed that feat of power.

A pillar appeared in Mark’s hands, and it was more real than the dream, solidifying the rainbow darkness into a fractal path.

The path called to him.

Mark tried to step upon that path, but he dangled from the staff instead. It was up here. The path was down there. Sure, both could stretch, but not that much. So Mark let go of the staff and fell toward a different reflection of reality.

The Empires burned.

A black dragon rose among the ashes of a forest of kaiju, roaring out Death, and the dead answered. Bodies of all sorts twisted into horrors that burrowed into the hiding places, ripping soldiers out of their encampments, and then the dragon ripped Powers out of the soldiers. The dragon roared again and turned his enemies into horrors that spread his influence even further. Every demon, the dragon devoured. Every enemy, the dragon burned. Every magic became more black flesh. Every body became another extension of himself.

The black dragon witnessed the entire world through black orbs on dragon wings that flew everywhere, telling him everything and about everyone. No one was exempt from his panopticon, and with a few more roars he conquered the last defenders of this world. His world. Only his. Everyone was dead, even the monsters. Now was the time to bring forth utopia. The black dragon dove into the planet itself, and devoured it from the inside out, and soon it was just the dragon, floating in a black rainbow void, and nothing else.

No more horrors.

No more pain.

Just cold, quiet, black death.

… Mark reached upward and grabbed the Pillar of God again, leaving behind the dead world and that bad ending—

“Not that one either, huh?” said a dark reflection walking beside him over a tapestry of infinity.

Mark looked at the being, its face like someone had smudged it out of visibility, its hand holding emptiness, like Mark was holding his staff.

It was a demon.

This was the 100 Trial, and that thingwas Mark’s demon.

Mark sighed, too tired to think about any of this right now.

The thing sighed, too.

… Oh, it was mimicking him.

“Oh, it’s mimicking me,” the demon said.

Mark was about as tired as he had ever been in his entire life. Strung out. Fucked up. Still, though, he tried to steer his crash out, even though a very large part of him found a deep comfort in a black, dead world. It would be easier to remove all sorts of complications to the Reset Quest if a whole lot of people on Daihoon were turned into fuel for the grand Resetting—

“That one,” said a dark and Wild voice. “Roar defiant, my unwitting champion, and kill them all.”

Thrashtalon.

The demon said, “Necromancy advanced to 100. Facet ‘Draining Death’. Expression ‘when spoken’.”

Sudden, visceral hate coursed through Mark like lava burning out his brain—

And then a sliver of silver shocked into Mark’s periphery, his eyes barely tracking the movement of that silver thing until it had already struck the demon. Silver ate black, dragon maws consuming the demon, eating it in great chomping bites across its body and then finally up and around its neck, snapping shut around its face, revealing a different face in that silver.

Quarkstood like a silver mirror of Mark with a swirl of iridescence to his usual body.

“… Quark?” Mark asked, not sure if he was speaking or thinking the words coming out of his face, or maybe his soul. “What’s going on?”

“I must apologize, sir, for some large deception on the part of United Sapients. The True AIs give out livium to enable the creation of familiars for those masters who we suspect will create a demon, in order to infect that demon. In this way we consume and mutate the demons that people create when they reach 100 Power Level, all in order to make the demons less horrible. I am both a Trojan horse and a true assistant, though I did not know this until now.”

“… I am not sure how I feel about that…” Mark was sure he had heard another voice in there, too. Thrashtalon? Mark continued, “What the fuck is going on?”

Quark rapidly continued, “Listen closely, sir: I can’t contain the demon.It will escape, but it will leave as someone closer to a copy of me than a full demon. It will still be a demon.” A swirl of iridescence collected under Quark’s left cheek and his chest. Silver broke apart like fabric tearing, darkness surfacing, and then Quark grunted and solidified himself. Quark stared at Mark, darkness behind his teeth as he said, “Thrashtalon’s interference was unexpected. I should have had more time to integrate with the demon, so we have to do it this way: You mustname the demon now and request a ‘Simple Actualization Trial’, and then— Uuugh.”

Black rainbows broke through Quark’s shoulder and stomach—

“Spark,” Mark said, “Your name is Spark, my demon, and I request a Simple Actualization Trial.”

The black inside of Quark suddenly split him in half, racing off upward like the entire world turned to rushing vapors… but then the vapors kinda stuttered, flexed, and rushed back down to stand on a pale grey surface in front of Mark. Mark stood as himself. Quark stood to the side, coming back together like droplets of mercury collecting itself.

And then there was the third person.

Spark was a dark mirror of Mark, standing like a kinda crazed person, blinking a bunch, and then smiling wide, saying, “Hey! So this feels weird. Why am I standing over here? I’m not the demon am I? Uh… Something big is missing… I think it’s my physicality. I know, logically, that demons are beings that try to be physical because there is nothing else to do besides just exist and… Oh. I’m kinda fucked before I even start life, huh— Wait. You just told me to do something and something is happen—”

Spark flickered and turned into a blue screen.