Metaworld Chronicles

Lei-bup was not coming back.

Gwen knew this fact on many fronts.

Firstly, she was the premier researcher and specimen on IMS Void Magic, with a foundation based upon Henry Kilroy’s research, which was based on the well-tested body of Elizabeth Sobel.

Between Walken, Sobel, Song, and Wen et al (2004) on Particularities of the Mechanics of Consume and how it Subverts the existing dynamics of known Spellcraft, they had deduced an absolute conclusion about the actions and reactions of Void Magic and Undeath.

Void, for reasons beyond IMS, consumed an additional component of living beings, unacademically known as the “soul”.

Creatures with their “souls” extracted, erased, or contained cannot be used in Faith Magic, specifically, in Necromancy.

Hence, despite the non-existent cost-recovery of Void Magic when dealing with Undead, it was a right terror to the Necromancers, who understood implicitly that body parts erased by Elemental Void could not be regenerated or attached, and that any being, including themselves, would cease to exist upon contact.

Now, a decade on, Song and Lei-bup et al (2012) proved once more that this theory was immutable. Lei-bup, her High Whip, her faithful fish friend, smelling grotesquely of overnight fish, was gone, odour and all.

He had given his all for her, given to the Devouring Dark.

It was an act Lei-bup had announced so often, noted so repetitively, that Gwen had stopped listening somewhere around the 2010s.

Now, Malakath had opened a door by sacrificing a God.

And Lei-bup had closed it by offering a High Whip, leaving his Pale Priestess with a miracle made flesh, his remains cradled in her ivory white arms, reducing the haughty goddess to a weeping, kneeling woman, her feelings of loss utterly outmatched by her golden and resplendent halo.

He had been a kelp farmer greedy for rice.

And now, he was her Saint Lei-bup, our Martyr of the Devouring Dark.

Watched by her ambivalent Red Dragon, Gwen gathered what was left of him with the care one gives to kittens and pups, terrified that she might drop the fragments. After an agonising minute, Slylth willed a semi-circular Telekinesis into being and scooped up the lot so that the fragments wouldn’t slip through her fingers.

Gwen gave her Dragon a thankful look as she gathered what was left using a sheet of priceless Elven Moon Moth silk. The bones had already begun to come apart at the joints, feather-light, the calcium leached to chalk.

She sent the bitter relic of her first Pope into her storage ring.

Lei-bup’s bones did not dematerialise.

Hope bloomed, cruel and merciless. Then she watched a Void worm ooze from the bottom, biting through the silk—and the final spark of whatever had made Lei-bup himself was completely gone, and her ring accepted the remains without complaint.

“Rest now, my High Whip,” she looked to the grey heavens, at a world no longer dominated by a Devouring Sun. “I will find the Elf, and he will keep you company. You have my word.”

Above the pair, the planar wound was already healed and hidden by the cloud cover. Below them, Neo Tenochtitlan was dying by the district.

From the height of the ruined plaza where she stood, where gravity had given up on Gwen’s body, the shape of the catastrophe was self-evident. The lake-valley capital, jewel of the middle-American continent, was tearing itself apart in the vacuum the god had left behind. When Quetzalcoatl died, its theocracy had not merely lost a ruler. It had lost its load-bearing Essence. Every creature had been bound to that divinity, and now they were reverting to a primal state of being.

The goddess looked to her Dragon expectantly for advice.

The Dragon shrugged; mortals' lives were not Slylth’s speciality.

“Slylth,” she commanded her Dragon. “Get Shalkar and Deepholm on Messages while I…”

Gwen wondered how she would break the news of Lei-bup’s passing to her faithful Mer. “... while I command the Shoal to help.”

The physical world faded once more. Diving into herself, Gwen heard and saw her Shoal loud and clear.

A bit… TOO loud and clear.

If her prior connection had been a static-filled two-way radio, her present fish-call was at least HD TV.

What was supposed to be an impression—a pulse of intent aimed not even at the Mer in general, but at the twins Velahi and Pelahwi—became a collective ripple of thought that inundated the minds of her Faithful. The Soul Link that she had spent weeks upon weeks etching into Aristotle and the ruling class now felt like HDMI cables, tethering her to the feelings and emotions of a grieving Shoal.

“FUCK—!” Gwen held her head as her frontal lobe erupted. The human mind was clearly not designed to hold so much information. The only thing she managed to transmute was her own desire: to help the people, restore order, do whatever it takes.

A million doors opened in ten million heads, diminishing in intensity from the lucid minds of her Sea Witches down to the dim minds of the numberless minnows. As a Hobbesian Leviathan, the body of her Shoal turned to its head, the psychic pressure of a billion creatures washing over her psychic self so that every neuron in her brain reported its desire to expand and implode like dying stars.

The golden halo suffusing her skull grew incandescent, enough that Slylth had to shield his eyes with magic. Her Astral Body, that glass sculpture of Lightning and Void, cracked. From within, something else emerged, something inhuman, without form, without constraint. Blood, sticky and warm, ran down the side of her face, from her eyes where the blood vessels were fragile, and from her ears. Her nose bled profusely. A line of scarlet ran down the philtrum she had inherited from her mortal mother in Sydney and dripped, dark and congealing, onto the pale petals of her ceremonial Elven folds.

Slylth slammed a Maximised Healing Injector into her thigh before she could even protest.

“Are you alright?” The Red Dragon’s voice sounded like he was underwater.

Unfortunately for either of them, there was no stop button, no on and off when it came to the spigot of belief. There was only the volume, and the volume, the flow of Faith into her body from her Mer, was magnitudes grander and richer than that of some provincial Precious Feather.

The Gwen of yesteryear might have straight away ascended into oblivion, or gone mad, like Sobel, or burst into pink mist.

The Regent of Shalkar, having been tempered for half a decade in worship, having become the Guardian of a World Tree, pressed the flood back into her head, forming the feeling into a single, entwined thread of Faith. She allowed the Faith, the causality of it, to diffuse into the Great Tree at the root of her consciousness, connected ever so intimately to her Astral Body.

In trickles, her lucidity returned. It was the difference between drowning and swimming, albeit her dog paddling was more instinct than instruction.

Loud and clear, then, she heard her Shoal answer.

Like a clarion on a cold, clear morning, a billion Faithful answered, joined by the twins, whoses answered were drowned out.

In the same manner that a Yinglong had heeded the Yellow Emperor, her Mer was ready to help.

Puerto Vallarta.

With zeal and zest, Aristotle mounted the coastal city like an earthquake, a fault and a tsunami all at once. Its continental body, the size of a city, came out of the harbour, its tentacles catching purchase via the canals, erasing just over fifty per cent of the coastal urbanscape in one crushing swoop, reducing the Mer’s divine labour by half.

Then came the Mer shock troops in coral plating, riding upon waves conjured by the Sea Witches, dragging survivors from the rubble to be placed upon the sheltering back of the same Leviathan that had just pulverised half the people they knew.

Spearfisher men, Archer Fish-kin, plucked crazed Coatls from the air, imprisoning them where they could, impaling them on spikes when… they could. Where the maddened Magical Beasts thrashed through the streets, jade-and-gold and screaming, the Shoal's troops pacified them with the sheer authority of building-sized Crab-kin smacking an Auroch so hard with a car-sized claw that its brain turned to sea foam.

From a spire atop Aristotle, the twin Sea Witches watched a knot of Jaguarmen, their divinity torn out from under them, throw themselves at a Mer phalanx with the suicidal fury of creatures who had no more reason to exist. They watched the snake-women, what Pelahwi considered the Temple Caste, set fire to a city block’s worth of survivors before they could be subdued. These females, these Faithful, the twins understood. The Jaguarmen... The twins did not, but there was no reason why they couldn't be processed into SPAM for the worthy survivors.

All knew that the Pale Goddess would know of their good work, because they had felt her, alive and writhing like a blessed Void Worm, in the recesses of their minds.

Glorious sacrifice! They prayed with glee, wonder and tearful worship, the brine leaking from their unblinking eyes. Such was the mercy of their Pale Goddess upon the coral throne.

As a golden tidal wave, their collective thoughts surged through the thread of faith, possessed of only a singular thought:

Our goddess will be so pleased!

A thousand kilometres away, the Regent of Shalkar set to work as the city’s new God.

She was starkly aware that there were other cities in Meso-America. Dozens of them, ringing the altiplano and flowing down both coasts, each one a smaller theocracy orbiting the great one, each one now feeling the same sky vanish from the heavens.

The whole region was going to convulse, but without Neo Tenochtitlan, there would be no Meso-America. The place would revert to the Wild Lands, and all of the humans who had called it home for four centuries would become an insurmountable wave of refugees or food for the monsters.

And that was discounting the Undead.

OH GODS, Gwen realised with horror. THE UNDEAD.

There was no way Malakath wasn’t counting on the destruction giving birth to either a Beast Tide or an Undead Tide, especially with a Phage that affected Demi-humans.

And there was exactly one person on the continent with the means to put order to chaos, rest to the Undead permanently.

Gwen hated that the person was the Regent of Shalkar.

Yet, such was the way of Karma. She did not doubt what Malakath had said was true. That this—all of this—had been some manifestation of Henry Kilroy’s choices made long ago.

But unlike her Master, the Regent of Shalkar had the means to make things right. Gwen had the Shoal; she had Shalkar. She had her Rat-kin engineers and the endless patient labour of her World Tree. She had Centaur cavalry, if the Khanate could be talked into a foreign adventure. She had Deepholm and Master Hanmoul's Dwarves and their obscene, beautiful efficiency of construction. Everything physical could be rebuilt.

But the lives… and the livelihoods and the theocracy? What would become of that?

“ARIEL!” She called out, conjuring her Demi-divine Familiar once more.

Her Kirin answered, though slower this time, its golden mana spluttering like a lamp run low on oil. Ariel rose anyway. Whatever Faith had made of it, it was more fish than beast now—scales broad as shields, gill-frills unfurling into veils of light, a vast piscine god swimming up the ruined air on fins that rippled where wings should be. It breached the cloud cover and hung there: a second sun, exhausted and resplendent, diffusing worship like a sachet of divine tea. Calm fell in place of thunder. Below, the maddened Coatls felt it in their jade-and-gold coils, quieted, and turned their blind faces up toward the light.

This story originates from NovelFire. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

But the city was large, far larger than what one Familiar could influence, and she wasn’t about to ask Caliban for help.

“GOLOS!” She called for backup from a Dragon that had taken far too long of a vacation. She did it the way she had reached for the Shoal, expecting to send an impression across a great distance.

Unbidden, through their Empathic Link, she saw him. In the liminal space of her Astral Body, she saw Golos in his half-Dragon form, lying on his back, wings folded, letting the hatchling—his nephew, the newborn child of impossibilities—gnaw uselessly at one blue talon. The Thunder Wyvern had never been gentle with anything in his long, greedy life.

Then he looked up toward the heavens. “Father?”

GOGO. Her voice reverberated. I NEED YOU HERE NOW.

Calamity? The Thunder Dragon’s face grew wide with confusion, then horror as realisation dawned. Across the demesne, across the world, across the very membrane of the Prime Material, he was called, and because of the contract they had agreed upon, he was helpless to refuse.

From the bed, the Elemental Plane of Lightning took him whole, and between one heartbeat and the next, Golos crossed time and space and was vomited back out into another part of the Prime Material.

“Calamity! How dare…” Her Thunder Dragon’s expression arrived in the midst of anger and insult. Then, he saw the burning world below them, breathed in the Godhood, the Void Mana and the psychic ripples blasting out of her uncontrolled Astral Body like a maelstrom in reverse, and his anger was choked out. “So… what did you need?”

With Golos subduing pretty much everything via Dragon Fear and Ariel restoring order by flying about and renewing the Faith of the people in a new and improved mythological being of guidance and goodness, Gwen then turned her attention to Slylth.

“No luck,” the Red Dragon threw up both hands. “Divination isn’t my thing.”

Quetzalcoatl never needed Divination Towers, because it spoke to its followers in the same way Gwen could now issue commands and invade the privacy of those she had Soul Tapped. Without the industrial mechanism, not even Slylth could overpower the challenge of distance and elemental disturbance to reach the Dyar Morkk being built somewhere below the crust, near the coast, south of Puerto Vallarta.

Just as she considered sending Slylth away via Teleportation, an idea and realisation came to Gwen of others that she had Soul-Tapped out of necessity.

“Natalia—” she concentrated once more, ignoring the splitting headache pounding through every inch of her skull, for the Essence of Natalia Volkova. Unlike Golos, Natalia Volkova was not a Familiar. Natalia was her Sparrowhawk, re-consecrated via Sympathetic Life-Link. It was not a bond of love. It was a bond of loyalty engineered under duress and worn like a brand upon her soul.

Through the murk, the tendril of her thoughts caught something small and fragile, a mere speck upon a speck compared to the burning beacon that was Golos, or the galaxy of souls that was the Great Shoal.

Regent?! The voice of Natalia Volkova, spy mistress of Shalkar, aide to Richard Huang, asked of the heavens. Are you… in my head?!

It is I, Gwen, hoped she didn’t sound too God-like. There was no authentication needed for the spiritual handshake; if she willed it, Natalia could act. That was the cost of Natalia’s freedom, the handling of a leash from a cruel and immoral master to one who preferred her followers free-range. Where are you now?

I am at the Bunker.

Good. I need you to tell Richard that Spectre came out to play in Neo Tenochtitlan, and now the whole continent is undergoing a Beast Tide, then an Undead Tide.

Natalia’s shock was duly transmitted, making Gwen dizzy until she mentally dialled back the connection strength. Clearly, there were many tricks to the trade, and she was a complete novice at this Faith Magic thing. I need you to tell Richard to contact everyone—

You’re all golden! Natalia’s thoughts replied. Mistress… have you ascended?

Have I— Gwen paused. Can you see me?

Yes, ma’am, Natalia replied. As clear as day, in my head.

Gwen looked down at her body. Am I clothed?

Yes? Natalia’s voice was full of reverence.

Gwen thanked whatever God was responsible for this small mercy at least. That or each receiver saw the form they worshipped, which meant the Mer saw something completely different to what the Rat-kin saw, or what her Human worshippers saw.

Nevertheless, Gwen told her spy mistress. Tell Richard and Strun. I need our Tower here. Send it across the ocean, full of fuel, food, and reconstruction fabrications. Inform Deepholm as well that we’re free to breach into Neo Tenochtitlan. Tell Cuzco to fortify their borders and ready food and water supplies for the Dyar Morkk.

Yes, Mistress.

Good, then inform our allies in the Commonwealth, across Australia, New Zealand, and in the United Kingdom. Without Neo Tenochtitlan, the whole continent is going to collapse. Start with the Duke. He’ll do the rest.

Natalia concurred, and Gwen quickly cut the link before her whole head imploded.

The material world flooded back, and she felt suddenly disquieted.

She could feel, in those moments of connection, the sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts of her followers. She could feel Natalia’s wonder and awe. She could feel the girl’s desire to obey, because that was what had been conditioned into Natalia since puberty. She could also sense, if she dug deeper, the resistance and the horror that Natalia had buried in her psyche, the little voice that questioned the validity of a circumstance where the individual called Natalia really had no free will at all if the Regent willed it so.

Caught by the liminal moment, Gwen understood just a little of what it was like to be a God, why the higher power always possessed this detached clarity, why the old Dragons had gone the way they had, why Solana seemed strangely distant and solitary. To be a being like this was to never, ever be alone in your own head again—to carry the murmur of every dependent mind, even subordinate ones, was to slowly, in minute and invisible fractions, change the God.

No wonder the Dragons slept; Gwen moped, looking at her unknowing Slylth, wondering if the True Dragon’s mother might give some advice on how to deal with this phenomenon. No wonder they slept for centuries—maybe that was the only way to make the choir shut up.

For a period of time that defied day and night, the Regent of Shalkar, now unwitting Goddess of Neo Tenochtitlan, moved between micro and macro worlds.

One would think that a Goddess might wave her hand of causality, and salvation would merely fall into place upon the Prime Material. Yet, reality had an atheist bias, and so did physics. A collapsed stonework did not unravel itself simply because a glowing goddess wished it were so. It still required Bilby’s Hand set to Empower and Maximise to lift itself from the rubble so that survivors in the tunnels below could be freed. Women and children rescued from frenzied Coatls did not mend themselves simply because she lit up the dark, nor could broken bones and bleeding organs be set by Golden Mead alone; they needed Potion Injectors.

Her Lightning Kirins and Void Hounds spread out, the Kirins bringing warmth and hope and promises, while the Void Hounds sniffed out survivors and informed Slylth or Gogo with a “Shaa!” where bodies still held the signs of vitality.

She wanted so very much to add Caliban to the task force—but knowing now that her Familiar was a fragment of the Devouring Dark—even if it was tethered to her soul—made her think twice about conjuring the creature at this delicate hour.

Street by street, starting from the Temple district, she and Slylth worked to do what they must. The city’s survivors, wide-eyed and bewildered, did not question the pale-skinned, glowing woman dispensing life from her hands while her crimson-horned aide dissolved stone and tossed aside shattered buildings like cardboard.

The first survivors became the new rescuers. Humans, Lycanthropes and Snake-women, all falling under the sway of her supernatural charisma. From her spare Storage Rings came the supplies she carried with her everywhere she went, a small warehouse's worth of SPAM and water, as well as healing injectors and portable shelter.

While she worked, whispers from her followers informed her that the coastal cities had been pacified and that peace was restored. The Dwarves were working double time to reach inland, having already breached one part of the coast at Puerto Vallarta. Natalia, through prayers, informed her that the Tower was another week away at best, as FedEx had denied the use of their Divination Tower in Hawaii. Strun had mustered the Rat-kin, a hundred thousand of them. Ten full Legions across seventeen Clans.

Gwen made a mental note to short the living shit out of FedEx.

“Gwen,” Slylth, her eye in the sky, her labouring grunt, and her dearly appreciated aide, gave her a knock on the shoulder. “We got trouble.”

“Now what…” Having not slept for probably three days, Gwen was in no mood for more bullshit.

“We’re going to have a Beast Tide situation,” Slylth duly informed her. “From the section of the city that extended into the jungle.”

They had not paid attention to that part of the city, because there weren’t any sounds of people screaming blue murder. Neither Gwen nor Slylth knew what the section was for—but now they knew.

It was a sunken temple, the ancestral home of the Cōātlīcue, the Teixiptla snake-wives of the Snake God. Having now slain the priest and broken the containment, the Titan Boas, Nagas, and possessed Cōātlīcue priests now spilt into the rest of the city as a tide of fang and scale.

In the air, with her glowing golden eyes, she saw them. Hundreds. Then thousands. A stampede of grief wearing the shape of a tide, howling for the god that had abandoned them, converging on the golden woman floating above their ruined world because she was the only sun left in their sky.

Slylth licked his lips. The Red Dragon was growing tired and irritable. “A Meteor ought to do it…”

“It would.” Gwen was tired as well, but she had no desire to fall into Malakath’s trick. She did not want to emerge from the ordeal as an internationally renowned butcher. “But give them a chance. Failing that…”

If I am a Goddess… Gwen acknowledged that, at least until she could study her own limitations, she should give every possibility a fair go. Facing the incoming tide of hissing serpents, she raised a hand—framed the place where she would like her miracle to appear—then called for Almudj.

Almudj, the oldest Primal she knew. Older than Tyfanevius, older than Solana, as old as the continent she called home in her girlhood.

Kin? Somewhere in that enormous inland lake that was her Astral Body’s surroundings, a familiar head, as large as a mountain, rose from the briny water of Kati Thanda.

It worked. Gwen marvelled, for once, at herself. Holy shit. For once, finally, something worked, and it was entirely as she had expected.

She steered Almudj’s interest toward the incoming serpents, which she assumed to be very distant relatives.

Almudj’s mirth could be felt in her bones as it read her thoughts.

Above the temple, thunder and lightning came down in sheets, tearing the clouds apart so violently that the sun shone through.

It was not lightning to kill. It was lightning to announce the gaze of a God that was displeased by the noise its followers were making. The Rainbow Serpent’s thunder lay across the temple district in vast, rolling, horizon-wide curtains of white sound, turning the southern part of the city’s pavements and avenues into molten obsidian about a kilometre across.

The Cōātlīcue slowed, tripping over one another, their coiled bodies running into head to tail until they lost all momentum. The howling insanity screaming in their heads ceased, and they found, in the next moment, a greater, bigger, older Thunder God than the last. A new God so ancient that the Precious Feather was but a single scale upon the heavenly rainbow of a serpent that spanned across dimensions.

Gwen and Slylth watched a Demi-human religious schism in real-time.

The female priests, barely clothed and bloodied, fell to their bellies in supplication by the thousands. In the wreckage of their theocracy, the jade-and-gold Cōātlīcue and fanged Jaguarmen pressed their faces into the fractured stone, their salt-heavy tears mingling with the dust of a fallen world, to worship.

Watching the renewed fervour in their eyes, Gwen felt strangely ill.

She felt their faith add to the brimming pool in her head, threatening to spill.

That was the tragedy of this absurd place, this city created by Malakath to feed the Shoggoth. These people had only ever existed inside a theocracy. They did not know how to be a citizen, only how to be a supplicant. The only difference was that it wasn’t the Black Sun that had come to claim their souls for the Rapture, but a bemused Land God of the Rainbow, heralded by its Goddess of Pale flesh, now wreathed in golden thunder and light, wielding Void and Lightning with equal might.

That was their new deity.

It was enough.

They were hers now, all of them, another ten thousand throats added to the choir in her head, and she could feel each new voice slot itself into the murmur of worship, demanding that she be remade in their form.

Gwen saw no point in complaining now.

Whatever these last few days had been, she had held the line.

The capital would live.

The region might survive.

The nation would not.

Yet, there was no rush for Africa. Her Mer had pacified the coastal cities and brought peace. The Dwarves would soon bring reconstruction. Shalkar would bring its numberless Rat-kin to bear, leveraging its limitless food supplies. America, of all the ironies, was not equipped for long-term expeditions. Their navies needed ports. They had no transit systems like the Dyar Morkk. Even if they sent Mage Flights, they could not claim cities. To do so would require Towers.

Whose Towers?

Who would pay?

Who retained the loot?

And who took the risk?

What about insurance?

The wicked goddess snickered.

What if she offered a handful of her allies first dibs if they held back the East Coast? By the time the Gilt and his Empire Tower acted, her control would be cemented beyond doubt.

And so it was that Gwen Song—Regent, Guardian, Plane-walker, Goddess, and whatever came after apotheosis— floated golden and resplendent above the city she had saved, with a High Priest in her ring and a billion minds singing her praises in her skull, waded through the wreckage while doing good, finding her human greed strangely comforting.

Still, in her golden glory, Gwen had one more pressing problem.

How do I turn this off?