Chapter 149: Book 3: The Empty City
Rhoran's mind was fragmented, but he was slowly gathering himself.
It was nothing unexpected. The Integrator—former Integrator—was held in place only by the meager mental structures he'd created for himself before this transition, and the trip through the broken Intermediary had maimed those structures even more than he'd been prepared for. If Lhore had given him a little more time, if any of the others had fought for him, he might have been able to build something more secure. More able to handle the torment of the dimensional phase.
Of course, no one had seen fit to give him any additional time. Typical. They blamed him for what Gheraa had done and for what Ethan had been able to accomplish through him. Not Lhore, who had been there when Gheraa programmed the Interface to send Ethan those damnable skills. Not Nhava, who had been the one to suggest they send the damn asteroid after Ethan in the first place.
Him. Because he'd been the Overseer in charge of Gheraa. Because he was supposed to have caught on to what the slimy bastard was doing behind his back. It wasn't his fault Gheraa had betrayed the entire Integrator cause! What, just because he'd been a little rough with him? He'd deserved it, with all his snide jokes and comments and that remark about the size of his Firmament.
You were prodding him first.
Rhoran decided to ignore that stray thought; it was nothing more than the product of his fragmented mind. Subconscious and conscious melting together because there was no more structure to hold it together. He'd only barely managed to find something he could take control of—though even then, his control had been suboptimal—and then that thing had torn it to pieces.
He didn't even know what it was. There was no record of any such creature on Hestia. He didn't know why it stirred that deep and terrible hate within him, either. That was supposed to be reserved for the Trialgoer.
Who was nearby. He was sure of it. But there wasn't anything nearby he could take, and without first doing that, he couldn't see what was around him. He could barely feel what was around him other than powerful sources of Firmament, and the biggest ones had too much of an identity for him to be able to overwrite them.
Rhoran would have scowled if he could have. It rankled at him that he was stuck like this, little more than a viral sequence of Firmament with occasional bouts of lucidity. He was far from weak; there was enough identity embedded into his Firmament that he could survive like this for centuries, if he needed to.