Strigoi Soul(Original Urban Fantasy)

[Strigoi Grey]

Apocrypha: Down Memory lane (II)

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AN: I initially thought about writing this as a lore post, but I decided on something a little different. This is meant to illustrate what an adult mage of typical power and versatility is capable of, though magic is such a versatile power it's difficult to have norms for even the mildest manifestations of it.



After this, I expect a handful of chapters focused on the cosmology, metaphysics and certain species and factions, like the pantheons, before I focus on some characters' backstories and maybe their past and future as well, unless I change my mind about the order. I'm using the list I made in the first Bridges chapter's AN as a guideline, but might add to or remove from it depending on what I think works best.



SS, and The Scholar's Tale as well, have both grown far beyond the expectations I had when I started them, not that I was sure what I wanted to do back then. I'm not just talking about story dimensions or the fact they weren't originally written as being in the same setting (nowadays, I can't imagine writing something original completely unconnected to my other series), there's a lot more lore than I thought I'd have to write. Lately, I've been focusing on large-scale stuff, both to establish some aspects of the cosmology and to set up things for my original stories' sequel (I need to get back to it too), but it's not always going to be like this. I have plans for more ground-level stuff, not just in the main universe.



SS began and I'd say is still mainly about people struggling with their feelings. There are facets to this, like "Impulses don't define people, choices do", "At what point is necessity too appalling to take into consideration? When is something that would ensure the good of many so unconscionable no person would commit to it?" and "When does redemption become and stop being possible? Is it determined by others or the guilt of the guilty? Both?", but I'd say this is the main theme.



I have not strayed from it in recent chapters, because Arvhek's journey, too, was about emotional struggle. But I'd like to explore different versions of this in street-level contexts too.



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Record requested: integration of mages of average power and versatility into law enforcement and military forces after Hell Decade.



Proceeding...



Polar black site bases were quickly becoming the fashion these days, the Prime Minister noted.



A frown split his jowly face as he puffed on his seventh cigar today. He'd started late, it was already evening, but in his defence, he'd been more out of sorts than he'd felt in decades as soon as he'd arrived, by dawn.



The demonstration room, visible through a one-way window made of material clearer than glass and tougher than bunker walls while thinner than a paper sheet, was not heated by any device or open flame, much like the observation box itself. It was also warm enough no one would've known they were somewhere built in the coldest spot on Earth.



That man had walked, at least.



The head researcher, who'd reacted flatly to his joking question as to whether she researched heads, was one of those women who could've been anything from thirty or fifty, the slight wrinkles around her eyes and the smattering of grey in her red hair more misleading than helpful.



She was also, the PM knew, far older than said ages combined.



The third person in the box was not human, had never been. The reptilian loomed like a crocodile would have, were it able to stand upright, though its limbs were much longer and humanlike - or rather the reverse, as the Zhayvin never ceased to remark when compared to the far younger species.



Its head was not crocodilian, though, but rather that fantastic shape one expected from dragons, more often nowadays, with them no longer confined to the pages and covers of fairytale books. Instead of the usual row of spikes, a paler green than the bright hue of its scales and curved, dotting the top of its head, said area was bare, while a spiked crest not unlike a triceratops' flared from the back of its skull.



When asked about the difference (the Collective's representatives to the surface having been identical so far), the reptilian observer had explained that the crest had been to its species like the aquiline nose was to humans, once, having been considered distinguished back on their now-destroyed homeworld.



The PM's eyes had glazed over at the flat-voiced reply to his attempt at small talk, not really caring about the rep recreating the genetic anomaly as a fashion statement, or however the aliens termed the ways they used to stand out.



He hadn't expected an actual explanation, but then, he hadn't expected the Empire to fade into irrelevance this quickly (oh, the home island still stood tall, but alone in a way it hadn't been in living memory) or himself not to.



It was an era of surprises they were living in, though, of interesting times, as a Chinaman might've said.



Dozens of metres below, a man stood in dark-form fitting clothes. Fair-skinned, with brown-haired and eyes, the only thing that might've made him stand out in London was what, from time to time, flickered above his face, usually beginning at the forehead: some phantasmal image of a crimson lightning bolt, like a photo imprinted into the air and light. A remnant of what his magic had awakened to defend him from during a storm, allegedly.



The clothes, the PM knew, were the man's handiwork as much as their surroundings. They were still working on integrating the Merlins (a nickname that had stopped being funny when their namesake, or so he said, had shown up) into society and its various arms, but things had quieted down enough that the army had asked one of the dogfaces if he didn't want to show off during his free time for some quick cash and a good impression.



Harold Potts (which the Prime Minister was sure was a cover name, though for no reason he could put his finger on) did not, strictly speaking, need money or ineed, any product of mundane human civilisation save, arguably, an encyclopaedia or some other manner of list of things he might have wanted to create through his magic.



Even then, that would have been more for luxuries than needs: Potts could rip the knowledge of any subject from a human's mind as easily as he could make himself immune to hunger, thirst and tiredness.



Or so the PM had heard. But he wanted to see it for himself, before he was quietly but firmly removed from the halls of power, or the military got tight-lipped about its monsters, or they took over everything and blasted the baselines to ash in a reverse witch hunt.



Whichever.



The PM blew out smoke in a circle, lowering the cigar to down half his whisky glass. 'Do feel free to floor us whenever you are ready, mister Potts.'



The words should have been inaudible to someone so far away, even without the isolating window in the way, but the mage smirked up at him, then warped the world.



The man's magic, the PM learned, might have broken physics like a dry branch over a man's knee, but it clearly obeyed its own rules.



'Which is why it is idiotic to claim that aetherkinesis cannot be researched and developed after proper study,' the reptilian said halfway into the demonstration. 'It bypasses the widespread natural laws, yes; the Collective has never denied that aberrancy can do this, else why would we call it aberrancy?'



Potts, on the low end of the adult mage scale, could blast an apartment building to rubble in one burst of mana, or reduce it to said state by channeling the otherworldly energy through his body, as easily as he could create or mend things on said scale; that was his range of power. However, while his Gift, as he called it, blatantly ignored leverage and conservation of energy, it could not do everything.



If the mage wanted to erase a limb, for example, from existence, he could do it with a thought, yet said flesh was not converted into energy as matter utterly annihilated in a mundane sense would have been. That was, the researcher remarked, because such amounts of energy far outmatched that of most a-bombs, while the mage's power was closer to single dight tons of TNT being focused unnaturally. Matter erased was made to disappear, she said, not to some other place, but simply from the cosmos.



The Zhayvin said things destroyed in this manner only persisted as information, but when it began talking about metagnostic recovery procedures and virtual spaces, it became about as easy to track as the wizard below.



Was it mass or size that set a feat's scale? Well, it depended. Sometimes it seemed to be both, in that Potts could (thanks to the spatially-warped chamber having room for such things) create something dwarfing any celestial body, as long as it was not heavier than the buildings he could destroy.



Yet he could also create townhouse-sized piles of what the reptilian called neutronium, the substance of compressed stars, which far outmassed an equally large pile of earthly materials.



'But do not despair,' the Zhayvin observer continued. 'It might be nonsensical, compared to non-aberrant applications of energy and knowledge, yet there are patterns. Follow the pattern, learn the lore.'



Was the rule, then, that most mages could not create something both larger and heavier than they could destroy? It seemed a strange kind of limit, but perhaps they were missing something.



Such feats were not the only examples of magic defying the flow of the cosmos: with the provided homunculi as practice dummies, Potts showed he could turn a manlike creature into an equally large gold statue, even though that was obviously heavier (yet where did the matter, the mass, come from? Mana was the closest thing to an answer, and mana was a protean thing, obscure and jealously protective of its secrets). He could also turn them into much larger gas clouds, but he could not, for example, slow time across the area they covered.



Was an object to cast on the catalyst needed to cheat the apparent rules of magic, then? Potts did not know. His magic did not anseer questions the way a book did, nor did it speak like a person.



Was dead matter the limit of his control over substances? By no means! Lifeless, living, organic or not, he could mould it like clay in a potter's hands.



The way he had warped his ears to hear as if always face to face with a speaker he was interested in, and vice versa, instead of enchanting the sound, showed he could sharpen the senses, as well as dull them, for infinitesimal sounds had not become deafening to him once his hearing had been enhanced.



In comparison to that, creating limbs, organs and, yes, whole humans (or animals, plants, fungi...) was a simpler affair. Laws were quickly being passed across several countries that mages could not simply make humans with healthy mental faculties, though the PM was sure some pervert had already created imbeciles to molest or beowbeat into being menials.



Not because such godlike people needed slaves (not labourers, at least; though did one who could feel others' emotions and take over their bodies need others for pleasure?), but because man delighted in tyranny, when no one was there to gainsay him.



A mage was a nation in of themselves, and one with far fewer needs and more means of production and warfare than one of mundane humans. What did they care about baselines quibbling over whether animals and mindless flesh puppets were ethical to create and control when they could force the issue and accomplish far more than such creatures' muscles by thought and will alone?



And what powerful thoughts! The only limit to how many baseline minds he could control at once was the speed at which he processed information, and if Potts' magic could quickly enhance his body to move nearly twenty klicks a second, it was no less generous in speeding up his mind to handle perceiving the world at such velocities. Thousands of humanlike minds could be manoeuvred like chess pieces when thinking like that, or, the PM supposed, one much faster or more complex mind.



That was because, the magic figured (for lack of a better way to phrase it; Potts' mana had not developed the pseudo-sentience other spellslingers sometimes described as speaking to them, literally or otherwise, but just because it lacked a semblance of sapience did not mean it couldn't react to its surroundings, like a primitive organism), if Potts was as strong as he was, he could also accelerate to speeds he would need such reactions to manage, lest he crash into everything after speeding off.



'Of course, we have not had mind controllers in nature to study whether this conforms to physics or not,' the scientists said drily, 'but it seems to us that this facet of magic takes into account how fast the user's mind can operate, rather than functioning in accordance to some amount of "psi-joules" available."



'Say he stops time,' the Prime Minister grunted around his cigar, 'so people's minds are just there for the taking. He doesn't have to manage their thoughts in real time, there's nothing to counter and keep track of, so could he plant suggestions? Hypnotise them to o whatever later?'



The researcher nodded. 'Casting on things stopped in time has delayed benefits. That is, making a man thinks he's a chicken will not yield anything until he is once more added to the timestream. Hypothetically...if every human on this planet was frozen in time, any mage could slowly - from their own perspective, though it would take no time at all - spread their mind so it is within every body and leave commands in their thoughts. They'd be impossible to manage once the flow of time resumed, but by then...'



Winston saw the value even in that. How easy would it be to put some enthusiasm in workers, then return them to changing reality? Or, in war, to ambush the enemy between moments and slaughter them, or drive them to suicide and self-sabotage?



Next, Potts demonstrated his control over spirits, though not the sort Winston appreciated. The PM could not deny he was impressed with the way the man made homunculi corpses raise and move again.



'Granted,' Harold murmured, though his magic made the words as clear as if he were among his audience, 'there's little difference between these chaps before they kicked the bucket and right now. It's not like they decay.'



Getting real dead bodies donated had proven a mite difficult, however, what with how many were zombified for labour or dismantled for specific body parts or raw materials when they weren't just buried, so this was the next best thing: control over the soul forcing the flesh automata to move, despite inert organs and limbs. A homunculus' animus was a simple thing, closer to a windup toy than even an animal's - it could do little outside "scripted" actions, besides defend itself and its maker -, but severing it from the body did cause it to drop dead.



Much like in the case of his telepathy, the number of souls handled determined how much the wizard could do. Individual spirits might have been much weaker and slower (though speed in astral combat was a pain to measure even subjectively) than his, but enough struggling against it would have him straining like a juggler trying to pull too many tricks off at once.



'Makes you wonder about man's immortal soul,' Potts mused with a sardonic smirk. 'They're like sparks around a bonfire to me, you know? The not-men's. They lack that spark of individuality which makes people that, but otherwise? They're the same weight- and I ain't talking about Doc Duncan's twenty-one grams. And these sparks, they're as easy to snuff out as you'd think.'



He demonstrated through an actions whose effect could be seen, in that the resurrected homunculi lost their driving energy and collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut, though perhaps only the reptilian had been able to catch the cause. In the PM"s eyes, the mage had simply held out a hand, and, according to him, a slaughter of souls had followed.



Winston was beginning to agree with Potts. How sacred was a soul, really, when anyone powerful enough to wipe it from existence with a gesture? A more pious sort might have been incensed at the sacrilege, but he hadn't got where he was by lacking a sense of practicality. Clutching pearls over blasphemy would not help Blighty when people on the other side started casting. Unless the good old Lord chimed in with a replacement, they'd have to make do with magic.



Faithcrafting, as it was beginning to be called, was common enough, in the sense most priests could do it, but just adhering to a religion did not appear to be enough to break the laws of nature, at least outside extremely faithful situations that pushed a believer to the limit. And rounding priests up to put them in uniform would be counterproductive, given how Father So And So was usually his village's first and last line of defence against unnatural nasties crawling out of the dark. If they tried this, the theurges would almost certainly end up back in their hometowns, and what'd that accomplish?



The Vatican was already offering to help coordinate Christian activities globally, since they had the reach and experience, and Winston would've wagered the Mahomedans had worked out something similar, centred around whoever was holding the claim to their prophet's grave, or whatever that box in the desert was. Point was, they didn't need the army butting in to tell them how do their jobs. Whether they were always drawing power from God or had a reservoir of it granted, to tap into whenever, did not seem to affect how often He spoke to them.



When Potts began casting spatial spells, the PM became more convinced his perception, what he knew and thought, determined how his magic worked, rather than any strict rules of the mana. The giant space became as small as a modest townhouse's living room, then expanded enough to hold every star and planet in the cosmos, but not once did the wizard strain. Because, Winston figured, his magic saw this as him working with "something empty". He'd have failed to make a star then force it to explode, but that was "substance." More than such a thaumaturge could handle.



Time, too, was treated strangely by this power: not as progress to be tracked with the development and decay of objects, but a thing in of itself, of a grander order of being than crude matter and the energy it flowed as when not frozen in one form.



When Potts froze a mock-man in time, everything about it stopped, from the body to the mind and spirit. Yet it did not crumble like flesh exposed to absolute zero, as it would have were the movement of its particles stopped by mundane means. Rather, it was like he had become a background character in the play that was time. Nothing differed when it was returned to the world of phenomena.



Potts was quite effusive when they suggested he showed what he had termed "reality warping" to differentiate it from the other aspects of his magic. All his spells warped reality, of course, but to compartmentalise was to understand, thus to classify, thus to control, for knowledge was understanding was power, and what could be called power but the means to exert one's will over the world?



'I can change the laws,' Harold clarified when asked to explain in what way his warping spells were different from what he had already done. 'Of nature, I mean. I could make wood freeze in contact in flame, change this area so gravity launches people into space.'



A few exchanges had the mage admitting that this was an inexact thing, not truly different from the rest of his spellcasting, for did that not change reality's laws? Were the weave of space and flow of time not part of those? Yet it was perception that held sway over mana, not logic.



The wizard neglected to show off what "those boffins" were beginning to call transition and united magic, saying those were more academic frameworks than something to show off to mundanes.



'But I can give you something to tell the grandkids about, yeah?' Harold, having teleported into the observation spot, looked each of the three watchers in the eye, craning his neck up for the reptilian, before settling on the PM. The older man drily thought he'd probably been singled out for being the most adventurous-looking. 'Now sir, if you'll just take my hand.' He extended a gloved one, the material resembling smooth dark leather though it was actually covered in symbols like miniature spell circles and the contours of ley lines.



Winston did not see those with his eyes of flesh, for his talents did not lay in that direction; but when he made contact, something flashed through the core of his being and all three of its main facets and the parts that followed them like auxiliaries tracking soldiers. It lasted - he did not count. Perhaps some disdain towards all those recent poems in which every twit insisted to call uncertain periods of time both a moment and an eternity played a part.



But he certainly did not feel weary when he found himself standing in the sky, though he could only dimly remember any time before this movement...ah. The invitation to the research facility. Integration of the occult, after the war and the insanity that dwarfed it...yes. He could recall it now.



Far below, he saw clouds as if he were looking at plains from a mountaintop. It was not cold as it surely should have been at such heights, nor was he choking in thin air. A handful of steps - for, he somehow knew, he could walk the sky as if it were solid ground if he wished so - stood Potts, hands in his pockets but for the thumbs, which rested on his belt as if he were some American cowboy.



'Steady now, sir. No chance of you falling long as I'm here.'



It said something about the last century and change that such statements had him feeling threatened on reflex, before he he got a hold of his instincts. Bollocks. The bloody Martians' (and wasn't it sad that alien invasions were one of the most normal problems one could expect these days?) foray across the globe still had him reacting like he'd been one of those dodging heat rays.



'Not a worry, lad,' he replied, taking his cigar in one hand. Amazing. The air up here felt as clean as anything without being biting. How many would pay for an experience like this, especially in stopped time? A holiday between days, no time lost. Luxuries were the only things that kept the economy slightly similar to the days before the Shattering, since magic and its paranormal cousins made it laughably easy to create space and resources.



It was, Winston knew, something of a balancing act. Having their basic needs covered kept people from getting into trouble, and the happier they were, the less governments had to worry about monsters from beyond the stars infiltrating countries or otherwise wearing bodies to wreak havoc. The less stressed everyone was, the fewer footholds there were for such creatures to find, which meant the thought police (no point to mince words, he'd say) of a given country could focus on combatting hostile telepaths and getting troubled people to therapy.



Ah, but he was losing track. Thinking up resort ideas like some idle salesman. Government was something that hadn't been magicked up yet, and he was still a person of interest to Britain and the world as a whole, so he wouldn't be out of work for a while yet.



'I was just wondering how many spells you cast to make this work.' A bald-faced lie - for all he knew, it'd been one spell or even some effect a mage would've called something else - but it would keep the man talking and not asking awkward questions. Old age was finally taking its due if he was getting lost in thought like that. 'I think I'd be going blue in the face without you here, no? Or even if I were a tithe this high up.'



Potts nodded. 'It's a multi-pillar...ah, it's the effect of mixing various disciplines. As far as reality is concerned, you're still walking on the ground, so you can act like you're still there. Plenty air, enough warm, stability.' The mage looked amused. 'You can tell them back in Parliament the best way to get sure footing is to remove everything under you.'



They'd probably take it as a metaphor and some genius would try to foment anarchy across the country for certainty's sake. He wouldn't try.



Potts sat down on nothing, lounging as if sprawled in some padded seat. Winston almost expected him to cross his legs and pull out a pot of...what? Newt's blood? 'Take a seat,' the mage muttered, 'here, anywhere. Made it all the same.'



Winston did. Remembering the time he'd flinched on the maiden flight of a plane with clear sides, he almost wished he was back on the enchanted glass contraption. At least you could see you where on something, there, if you squinted.



There was no trouble. The shaped air was neither overly yielding nor punishingly rigid, and the closest thing to texture was a sensation not completely unlike pushing through a mild wind, though there was no effort involved.



'I know what you're thinking,' Harold began, and the PM almost flinched, then cursed inwardly. Damn this last decade for having him jumping at everything. No matter that such things were becoming possible, it was still a turn of phrase. Right?



He saw that a table, or rather the outline of one, limned a bluish white, had appeared between them, a decanter of the same material, so to speak in the centre and a glass laid out for him. The liquid in the larger vessel was o a hue between amber and gold.



'My own spin on a classic,' the wizard explained, having caught his look. 'I'm not much of a brewer, but the magic takes care of it.' He snapped his fingers. 'Like how it will make a car for you even if you have no earthly idea how they're put together, much less work.' He shrugged. 'It's a middleman. Mine doesn't talk to me like some have theirs speaking, but I manage.'



What a challenge it must be, Winston thought sardonically, for this demigod to be less fortunate than some of his ilk. Modern mages were, he understood, much less constrained in terms of what they could accomplish than most of their ancestors, who'd usually needed complex, lengthy rituals to enact what would need a spell nowadays. Queries as to what'd changed mostly resulted in talk about the magic breeding true and blooming again. That'd just sounded like eugenicist claptrap to him, which made the result it apparently produced even more unsettling than the uunnatural effects in of themselves.



How long until some mages bred a god and loosed it at the hapless mortals? Hell. How many times had it already happened, and said monsters were just not in the open now?



'You were saying you'd read my mind,' Winston prompted, deadpan. He was unsure the sarcasm was warranted.



'You could say that.' Potts' smile went as fast as it'd appeared. 'It's not what you're imagining. Cold reading is no spell, and sometimes, you don't need anything more to get a feel of someone.' He snapped his fingers, pointed at Winston. 'You're imagining how to commercialise magic.'



'Might've crossed my mind.'



'Yours and most across the Isles.' Was there some tiredness there? It must've, Winston reflected, truly been exhausting to bear the burden of powers that could make one so much money. 'I'll look into it. There's nothing I need and can't make, and little I could want.'



Much as he'd expected. 'Cold reading, you've said.' Winston's mouth still felt dry, and the mouthful of the wizard's brew he downed didn't help. Being informed it had the benefits of alcohol without the hangovers improved his mood some, though.



Harold nodded abstractedly, eyes fixed on what, Winston couldn't say. 'No prying into minds.' He sounded lost in a dream. 'No point. You know those wards we've installed in London, for picking up malicious intent? But without digging into brainwaves? Because there'd be no point.'



The symbols were visible, even shone, but looking back, the PM wondered if they hadn't been made so as a reminder that people were being watched. Would it have been better to make them imperceivable, see who was feeling bold and catch them in the act? 'You've one on you?' He could see none, which was what had prompted the thoughts on invisible city wards.



A shake of the head. 'No point in that, either. Passive magic is more relaxing to use, since you can kick back once you cast, but this is simple enough I can wonder about matters of import around myself and I'll be informed.'



Which meant nothing of Winston's musings had shown up on the mage's radar. But then, he probably knew more about that sort of business than a mundane, so why would his power tell him of something he was already aware of?



Winston shrugged. 'You must admit it's useful.'



'Don't I know it.' Now the mage was attentive again, and wry besides. 'Just like I know you still haven't left the time the bombs fell, not in spirit. For you, the Nazis are still flying overheard, aren't they? Or maybe Martian skyships are.' Reacching into a pocket Winston couldn't see, Harold began rummaging. 'I know, I know. Don't call this a bribe.' There was a vaguely pained look in his eyes, the expression of someone forced into an awkward situation. 'With the grandest respect, and such, I'm really not interested in your favour, sir. No need, see?'



Not a bribe, in whose dreams. Something to settle Winston's nerves so he wouldn't - he thought he'd grasped the meaning - argue for some policy that would get in the mage's, or mages', way should his shellshock get the better of him could be called nothing less. Maybe a means of insurance, if one was feeling facetious.



'I know you've been watching magic rend men to pieces and turn them inside out for years,' Harold continued, 'and I doubt my tricks today have convinced you that no, it's actually a harmless thing that has been misused by madmen a few times.' Good. That would've been a lie too bold for him no matter how many drinks he'd had. 'So I'm going to give you something useful. Think of this as a test run before I start mass-producing them and selling, eh?'



The enchanted objects were beyond useful: they were the stories of legendary labour-saving relics made fact, though Potts (and not because modesty was pushing him to dismiss his skill) claimed he was only a middling artificer and enchanter, that mages actually specialised in those fields could craft much greater wonders.



The cornucopia was gilded ivory, a horn that could produce anything a human might be able to consume, even if said meal or drink was too large to pass through the horn's opening. Alongside utensils able to clean and sharpen themselves, which would never rust, it was meant to complete a set of self-filling plates and glasses, which did have issues with size, though that would've been a petty thing to complain about.



'I've finally managed to solve the problem with polishing them off in one go,' Potts said with no little enthusiasm, nodding at the dining set. 'Now even if you finish a scone or wineglass in one gulp instead of taking smaller mouthfuls so they can regenerate, a new one will just appear in your hand.'



'Don't tell me before they reappeared in your stomach and kept replicating until it burst,' Winston joked. The look he received in turn was blank.



'Ok. I won't.' Potts looked supremely relaxed, and it was a while until he continued. 'Though if such a thing were to happen, it would be because the meal's enchantment would try to overcompensate for not being filling enough fast enough.' He almost launched into an explanation into the metaphysics of greed and how such desires interfered with the functions of magic, but stopped when he was the PM's expression. 'Anyhow...'



The storage satchel was another mundane-looking marvel, even more mundane, on the surface, than the dining set, which was at least good silver. Brown leather, it could hold anything of any size or weight, without straining the bearer. Harold explained that objects in it were equidistant, in the sense they were always in reach of the owner when they reached inside but infinitely far apart from each other.



'The storage conditions can be toggled,' the mage added. 'As it is, no time will pass for anything inside, unless it would help. Aging wine and cheese in moments, that sort of thing. It's selective, though, so don't worry about your pocket knife rusting or anything of the sort. But just like when you reach inside to take what you want, your will determines how the interior functions. You just need to be in contact with the satchel.'



'Could you put another like this in this one?' Winston asked curiously. 'Reach in the first and take something from the second? Or...'



'Oh, yes.' Harold's eyes shone. 'We're talking about the shadow of layered infinities, which is finicky to handle with mundane will, but if I only wanted such things for myself, I wouldn't be giving them away. Yes, you could certainly have a fuel and rations satchel inside one for vehicles, inside one for holding satchels, and reach anything by reaching into the first. Well, technically, you'd want the openings to the other, or others, to line up for your hand, but the end result is the same. But keep in mind! If you ever need something to kill and it takes infinite power, I'm not the right one for the job. Making endless space is a different sort of magic, it can't really be rerouted into mana blasts.'



The ward would follow Winston along, Potts said, warn him if anything went wrong with his gifts, as well as about general danger, "as a courtesy, chief."



'I do want to make something of myself,' Harold confessed, as if he were some flea-ridden beggar and not practically a young god. 'I went on a Shoggoth nest purge some months back, with a few army lads. This captain kept getting on my nerves, telling me to do this and that now or then, even after I set up their camp in a jiffy, 'cuz it was tiring me to watch them drag their mundane asses along when I could blink the problem away. I told him, listen, I'm sure you're alpha of the chimp troop in your head, whatever, but I'm not some Tommy Atkins for you to order about, savvy? I'm more like one of the Yanks' A-bombs, 'cept I choose where I'm dropped, and I don't only go off once. I don't stand in line and march with these poor chumps you're wrangling. The reason I'm here is to walk up to the monsters you can't kill and rip them a new one. Get out of the way or set them up for me to knock down, but don't try to set my freaking schedule, you're way too ugly to be my secretary.'



There was some more ranting, which convinced Winston the self-contained mage corps and its counterparts pertaining to various supernatural breeds were good ideas, because trying to integrate these people into the armed forces as anything but the squad nuke, to lob when the coast was clear, would be a nightmare.



* * *



Harold Potts only had a smattering of silver hair because the birds told him it made him look distinguished, for all that nearly a century had passed since the polar demo. When strangers, seeing the timeless look in his eyes, inquired about his age, he joked that his Brighton lifestyle kept him healthy and eager to keep on living. It was the seaside air, see?



Not a complete lie. Harmony was an important part of magic, and his retirement was relaxing enough his casting hadn't dulled.



Semi-retirement, he reminded himself. His casting licence was still active, renewed whenever he could be arsed to go one of the exam areas (they could, he knew, know if something had gone wrong remotely, thanks to their wards, and shut down his magic just as easily), and he was known across town as a general practician mage, which meant people still called on him from time to time, and between the payments and the gifts, he almost got his pension twice a month, in effect.



Semi-retirement, too, because a lot of punks swaggered up to his place to learn some actual spells as as soon as they learned to make sparks. Flirting with the women had stopped being fun when (being too old, probably) he'd become unable to tell the difference between adults and jailbait without casting, and that took the wind right out of his sails.



Not just because the thought made him puke, but because this Silva guy who'd apparently been named supervisor of existence recently, whatever, tended to take exception to shit like that in very gory ways. Potts honestly couldn't comprehend a trillionth of what the guy could actually do, but it seemed to boil down to beating the utter shit out of people while cracking macabre jokes and using their shrieking remains for practical ones. The same guy had allegedly almost let creation end because he'd felt it'd wronged him and his pals, and holy fuck, Harold was having no business with someone that unhinged, and with the power to back up the craziness. Nah, not him, no sir.



His current headache (he'd imagined calling them apprentices once, and started dry heaving; at least this one was rich and appeared to hate his money, with how he kept giving it away) was some slim twenty-whatever kid who spent half the time around him rambling about how much better trains were than anything on wheels, which probably made him one of those metrosexuals he'd heard about, right? Anyway, Tristan (and he couldn't believe it even after seeing the ID) was so pasty you'd have thought he'd never crawled out of an underground cave, and his hair was just as colourless, mostly, except for the highlights in various hues meant to rip off Merlin's style. Potts thought it made him look stupid as shit, which he didn't need help with.



'So, what are we banishing today?'



Harold gave Tristan a baleful look at the unprompted question. Was the little shit expecting, what, fight with some demon or Grand Ancient to be knocked back into whatever pit it crawled from? There were agencies for that sort of thing, not that Great Old Ones tended to slum it in dimensioned reality. 'Nothing. Ever. When'd I tell you we would?'



'Ah. You're more of a summoner, then.'



The only thing Potts summoned was idiots who'd barely outgrown their kindergarten wands, to his door. 'What kinda action movie shite did you imagine after reading the "general practice" section?" He'd never really got into computer, but magic could put together a passable website in a snap. 'I put it online so people wouldn't think there's some invisible ink part in the newspaper or such.'



Tristan looked deflated as they made their way to the pest-filled house they were going to clear out. The insects and rats had been warped by a biomancy spell so that they absorbed mundane toxins and converted them into mass, much like they could do with the material they ate, not just gnawed at. An ad for paras licenced to use their powers indoors had been put out.



'We're really just going to play exterminator? That wasn't a metaphor?'



'Sure wasn't.' Maybe he'd like the following errand more. Some kid who'd hoped to make it into Scotland's Mandrake School had got himself looped in time while trying to safely jump off a skyscraper, and ended up falling. The spell he'd meant to slow his jump to safety had been miscast and he was now enacting a sky-high version of Groundhog Day.



Or that confused water elemental in Leeds. It was an old thing that hadn't really touched land since it had headed into Panthalassa, back when there'd been one, and now it kept moving through pipes, warping them and teleporting into other containers of water when startled.



Tristan sighed, mumbled. 'Maybe I'll look up that kooky private eye who seems to make tropes reality. I think he's on the continent these days.'



'The...what was his name, Flair? The "detective time" guy?'



'Panache, and yeah. It gives him time to brood and monologue internally, think back on clues, stuff like that.' The younger mage frowned. 'You know, I don't believe it's actually related to chronomancy, in the classical sense. No one who's been around him when things go grey has sensed the timestream being altered, not for themselves. My family might be interested in...'



Potts began tuning him out by that point. He wasn't interested in what the silver spoon brat or his folks were planning to invest in. Let 'em. Him, he'd found a niche he wasn't looking to leave any soon. Magicking up immortality was easy these days, not even an elixir needed, nor even any control of time. Just because making sapients was illegal didn't mean one couldn't wave the woes of aging away. Compared to making a thinking human, body and soul, smoothing away the wrinkles (ha) was child's play. And better yet, he didn't need to go to some spellcasting doctor to fix him up and make him like he'd been in his younger days for, thanks to his Gift, he'd never left them.



You're a wizard, Harold, he thought, and damn, it's a good life.

[Strigoi Grey]

Apocrypha: An Offered Hand

* * *

David



I had, from time to time, the occasion to deal with people I could reason with, rather than abominations anathema to existence and its laws, whose presence broke logic and left hungry nothingness behind. And, while stopping the monsters so that people could keep going about their lives was something I relished (less for the violence in of itself, though acceptable targets were always appreciated), I'd say talking to people was easily as important, not just cosmologically but to me as well.



It was less about keeping me grounded - I couldn't feel even close to mortal without lying to myself - and more about reminding me what I was fighting for. The "current" reason, at least, since the plan to make everyone Transcend was not even in its infancy yet.



So, when an universe very much like mine, except for an absence of the paranormal, drew close enough to my reality for metaphysical contamination to begin, I stepped in to observe and share opinions about ways we might want to proceed in.



(One of the things you find out, being powerful and important enough, is that everything can sound like a threatening euphemism depending on who's listening. You don't have to mean anything, just let them feel threatened. It's hilarious.)



From the mundane reality's perspective, months had passed since the opening of the portals, and they had been perhaps the most turbulent months in their history. Not because violence had been offered, or even implied, by us, but because they really couldn't have reacted otherwise to a cosmos like the one I'd been born in.



See, being a (for all intents and purposes) post-scarcity society whose fabrication methods couldn't really be replicated without breaking physics meant the other Earth's markets being flooded with cheap foreign goods (not to get into the weeds of relative value and multiversal cultural differences) became the main worry after they decided we probably weren't going to raze their countries to the bedrock with our impossible war monsters, since what could've stopped us if that had been what we wanted?



It would've been, their logic was, like worrying about being wiped out by a gamma ray burst. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen.



​Another cultural difference, there. You could tell these people had no experience making their planet impervious or otherwise untouchable to cosmic disasters. I could not imagine something so easy to weather or step around threatening my world even if all the people who could think GRBs out of existence on their lonesome disappeared.



But I digressed. As I sat here, updating my only book to sell well (definitely nothing to do with who the author is, at all) once more, I did not intend to speak of macroeconomics or the development of mundane Earths. This was a story about two men finding refuge in each other, for a while, just speaking.



* * *



It was the sort of bench you could find in any small town park. But for my presence, it would've been entirely inconspicuous, but I had arranged things so that people walking nearby kept going without bothering to account for me in the day's plans. A measure of privacy would help for what I had in mind, which was not what I'd been asked to be here for but would involve the same person.



I supposed this was the moment to remind that cosmic awareness and an ability to alter minds (not that I wanted or needed to use the latter, as a rule) didn't make someone a therapist. But that was ok. This wasn't going to be psychological treatment, just a talk from someone who could help.



The man who made his way to where I was was sitting wouldn't have stood out much in any crowd, except maybe for his height. He was a metre eighty-five, like me, about eight centimetres taller than the average guy from this world's Romania, and had one of those faces that could've been twenty or forty, though he was in fact much closer to the former.



He was a bit broader around the middle than me, more padded, though no one would've called him fat rather than, maybe, pudgy. Fair-skinned and brown-eyed, with short dark brown, a darker beard and black-rimmed glasses, he didn't look much different than I might've had as a human his age, had I eaten more. He was wearing dark blue sweatpants with white stripes down the sides and a jeans jacket over a red shirt.



'How should I talk to you?' I asked to break the ice, knowing what a pain in the neck it was to be sincere to people you didn't know, much less ask for help.



The younger men distractedly held up a hand, muttering about me waiting a bit as he took a look at my bench, shifting his footing, before seating down across from me. 'Sorry, I was just thinking it would be weird if we had to turn our heads to look at each other, you know. It's comfier this way.'



Not to mention this put him farther from the fanged, reality-warping corpse he was talking to, though several of my enemies could attest that narrow walkways hadn't put them out of my reach.



'Sure. But I was asking-'



'Yeah, yeah, I heard. I told you to please wait a bit.' He pushed up his glasses. 'You can call me Anton Preda.'



I could've called him a platypus too and it wouldn't have made him one, but I wasn't going to fight about it. 'If you want. Go ahead, man. I'm all ears.'



Anton was one of those "inspired" people who, by coincidence (most agreed) replicated the details of other realities to uncanny degrees in their works. It wasn't a paranormal power, exactly (especially when you accounted for possibilities becoming new realities and time being an illusion, which basically meant that every fiction writer wasn't actually that, because every universe was real, somewhen), but they were sometimes targeted across the multiverse for their apparent clairvoyance or precognition - timestream relativity, you know. I'd promised him neither he nor anyone he cared about was going to have trouble due to what he'd written, but astral projection and telepathy were like phone calls and texts to a lot of mundanes: they just felt better dealing with things in person.



Did you know some argued I hadn't really changed compared to back when I was falling apart? But imagine that guy meeting random people to make them feel better about themselves.



I patiently listened as he rattled off his fears, from being abducted by this or that government so they could get a hold of his "information" to being hunted down by people from my or other realities for similar reasons. He didn't sweat and his voice didn't quiver, but he was constantly shifting in his seat and glancing around, as well as adjusting his clothes, and those were signs of agitation as honest as anything else.



'No one's going to do anything to anyone,' I told him once more, like I'd done during our long distance talks. 'The worst that will happen is being hampered by terminally online nerds who'll bring up multiversal comparison charts to whine about how you've deviated from canon and aren't even bothering to keep up.'



'I don't care-' he paused. 'I'm going to keep writing. But I'm just writing to write, I'm not...doing a report on where you're from, David. You told me it's all coincidental. Creation's just making it seem like I've got sources but I'm not even good at guessing. It's happenstance. Right?'



'I told you it is,' I replied steadily. 'And you're in no more danger than any other speculative fiction author. Probably less, because your stories have way less of an audience than most published stuff.'



He looked annoyed at the reminder, but also grateful. 'Not really speculative, though, is it?'



'We can quibble about definitions all day, but that's not why I'm here.' I rubbed an eye with my knuckles, more for Anton's benefit than mine. I think they fact they were all black was made worse by my lack of blinking, but I couldn't help it. I didn't need that anymore that I needed to fidget in order to get rid of those small cramps living things got, hadn't bothered withe ither since my undeath.



And my years as a strigoi had defined me enough that, even with so much power I could never feel out of my depth, I'd decided to stick to beiing undead, at least as far as those who lived surrounded by energy and spacetime could tell.



'You can vent, bro,' I said awkwardly, knowing how reluctant I would've been in his place, and that a person similar to me wouldn't really have been encouraging. 'Just say what's weighing you down. Maybe I can help.'



I wasn't dealing with one of those "eccentric" writers who were drugged misanthropes, thank God. There were no weird vices or dangerous addictions to talk him out of. I could help people overcome such obstacles to their well-being, but not relating to them. I hadn't been an addict of any sort in life, and in death, my urges to rend people apart or hurt them in ways that made them wish for death was less like hearing voices or being pushed towards choices, and more like having a knife at the throat of someone I despised while someone as strong as me tried to push my hand down.



If I started talking about strigoi troubles to the average human, they'd think I was implying they should shut up because what I dealt with was worse.



No, Anton's worries were everyday things. Problems I actually enjoyed dealing with, as much as I could enjoy things of the sort, or rather, I didn't hate doing it. So I sat and listened, and he vented



'Ok, dude,' I said at one point, 'I'm not gonna lie and tell you eating because you lack something to do or are bored or need to eat that one thing, specifically, is ok, but it really isn't anything close to being an alcoholic or a raging toker or...look, you're not even obese, alright? You don't waste money on food or eat after you feel full. And you don't flip out and start raging at people people because you haven't had a snack this minute.' I shrugged. 'I think you just need more activity, something that won't strain the leg with the surgery. Take more or longer walks, find something to do that will build up your upper half, mainly. Things like that.'



He tapped his fingers one one knee, looked aside. 'David, you can see things like that before they happen. How long until...I mean, no, does our science improve in terms of what you talked about? Like, will my leg ever recover enough that it will be like I never had a humour to excise and the bone weakened? Or those, not the nutritionists, I'm drawing a blank...what I'm trying to ask is, do we ever improve in terms of making stuff that tastes good but is low in calories or something?'



I scratched the back of my head. 'You know that's a matter of perspective. Some people think bread or rice and water is the best damn combo ever and live like they're always fasting. Trying to broaden your horizons can't hurt.'



He paused, and I could tell what he wanted to ask, as well as the corollary the thought of as soon as he had the idea. 'Anton, what I'm telling you here won't change the future unduly or whatever you're scared of. Ask away.'



He scowled at me. 'I'm not scared of shit, David. I'm just thinking whether it would be better to know....I mean, do we start working on cures for things we've been knocking against for a while? Or not working, but do we start making improvements in curing, you know, diabetes, cancer? Do we get better at transplanting organs, or fabricating them? I've heard this stuff about 3D printing...'



I knew why he was really asking, and it wasn't entirely academic. 'Of course improvements will be made. When has mankind truly trended downwards, indefinitely? But by the time you or anyone else you're imagining will start having trouble with such, things will already be much better.' I tapped my chest. 'And I'm always a call for help away.' Sometimes not even that.



They were much less advanced than we'd been at the same date, but then, they had to deal with physics and their "AIs" were orders of magnitude dumber and less creative than what you could find on the cheapest phone back home, which highlighted the fact they'd started working on made intelligences far later than us. It was understandable to worry about the rate of future progress when it was so slow and the tools so rudimentary.



Hell. You couldn't even mind link with your devices to spend however much subjective time you wanted in the VRs you asked them to make, because they didn't have mind-software interfaces, perception adjusters or even decent virtual reality generation. You actually needed physical equipment to spend time a world of your making here, and the quality was patchier than what you'd have expected in our fifties.



When this turned into a tourist destination for people from my Earth, they'd have to deal with the fact that people distracted by their smartphones or headphones or such could actually lose objective time spacing out. There was no synthetic mind tracking your brainwaves and making sure you lost nothing important while taking a break from a conversation, by tweaking your senses so that time stopped for you. No forcefield projector to drag you away from danger in case you were too invested into scrolling to look around for vehicles (theirs didn't automatically stop or swerve away from dangers, either; not physical ones, and certainly not distracted people a driver could get into trouble for running over. It was as retro as any "Traffic of days past" museum expo, and the less to be said about the lack of portal networks or translocation, the better) or falling objects.



It was like being into one of those turbo-technophobic countries that believed everything someone did with tech was on their head and safety features were overrated. Maybe some thrill seeking live streamers would be into it. "How many streets can I cross while playing on my phone without looking around before I almost get hit by a car?"



You could get an interesting documentary about cultural differences between us and mundanes who actually needed cars, trains, ships and planes to get around instead of just being nostalgic about the good old days of human ingenuity and mistrusting paranormally-enabled alternatives, I supposed. "Our paranoia is their necessity!!!" or something. That sounded like they needed us to be paranoid (about what?) so it could be clickbait, too.



Still, tourism would remain the main form of interaction. I doubted anyone from my Earth but the workaholics would want to live somewhere you actually needed to work to put food on the table and have a roof overhead, like the entire planet was ran by neo-Stalinists. To say less of the free healthcare and "shackled" phones, TVs and computers people back home took for granted. Sure, it was lame for your devices to only tell you about the news and have no options for anything unrelated to your job, unless you paid for "luxury" apps, sites or programs, but at least you knew you'd never be cut off from the world or unable to get things done online.



Next, we talked about his web novels and fanfics.



'So you happened to get a lot of things right for your storytelling,' I agreed, referring to his urban fantasy series. 'I get the worry. When I was writing my biography and going around to get people to write things best related from their perspective, I was thinking about what would be too much, too. But don't stress too much; soon enough, people are going to look back at it like they do on those declassified spook agency files. Society marches on.'



His urban fantasy web novel basically was my biography, down to the names. With that in mind, I told Anton, 'You could change some of those, if it will make you more comfortable. Add a disclaimer that it's based on real events but dramatised for entertainment's sake. Or you could remove the free online versions and publish it as a book series.' Which a lot of people would rush to buy because it'd been written by a "clairvoyant", but it would be better than nothing. 'I'm not saying go ahead and do so as soon as you get home. Or ever. There are a lot of people who write web novels or make online comics and never take down the free versions because the fans want to support them anyway.'



Anton scoffed lightly into his beard. 'Yeah, and that's definitely a category I see myself in, David. My stories are so popular that I've gathered all of a handful of fans in almost as many years, discounting my co-writers. I mean, my friends whose stories I co-write. I'm sure I'd be much more popular if I started writing isekai and progression fantasy slop, but I don't want to turn my brain off like those people who read a couple paragraphs into my original stories and nope out because there's not enough wish fulfillment.'



'You're agitated,' I reminded him. 'That was all before your universe made contact with wider reality. Some people will read even shit you know nothing about, now, because it's written by you and you're basically a prophet. You should be more careful not to let that make you overestimate yourself.' Ok, I was being sardonic towards the end there. Like me, he was way too broody and self-critical to hype himself up too much even if everything was going well. A lack of problems was likely to make him expect a turn for the worse, actually.



'But do you really care about that?' I continued. 'So you have a handful of people who are invested in your works. Isn't that cool? Do you really care if someone you've never heard of or spoken to shows up to drop a mildly interested comment and leaves, because it's someone new?'



He sighed, scratching at his beard. 'Yeah, I've told myself that too. I know, I appreciate them. Some people write original stuff and never get any sort of reaction, so I'm glad I get regular engagement even from a few people. But it's just annoying to watch every hack with a computer churn out straight garbage and have idiots rush to gush over how unbelievably awesome it is, gosh!'



'And if they're tasteless, do you really want people like that sharing their opinions on what you write? I think it'd be worse than silence. Think about it.'



He was silent at that, a sour look on his face. I knew that being aware of things, intellectually, did not mean you could toggle off your feelings and ignore them. But stewing over what you couldn't affect wasn't healthy either.



I smiled humourlessly. 'Listen, Anton. After we're done talking about you, I'll tell you a story about this genius who was so blind to how much those to him loved him, that he took his life over a lack of appreciation from strangers, none of whom would've visited his grave to leave a flower, had they known him.'



He looked up at that, but avoided glancing at my neck so conspicuously he might as well have stared. He'd gone over what had happened to me often enough, though he'd extrapolated using his own thoughts to establish the plotlines, had brainstormed what he might do were he more impulsive.



'Ok,' he said hoarsely. 'As you say. I'm not going anywhere.'



This was the far less fun part of being known and feared. I found myself frowning. Fame, the thought of fame, seemed nice until you had people fearing for their safety in case they insulted your incredibly important self. Fixer had been right. I'd rarely hated myself more than when I'd had the macrocosm holding its breath, thinking it would end because of my inaction.



'This isn't all about you,' I ventured, knowing he'd be much more hesitant to talk about things like this with practically a stranger unless prompted.



He had trouble with his parents. Or, rather, he was troubled by his parents. He was not a child anymore, but seeing them get into screaming fights over what looked like meaningless bullshit to him still grated, and he wished it would stop. But no solution was apparent.



'My father's a jackass, ok?' Anton grumbled. 'He doesn't beat her or anything, and I don't want to think she'd be stupid enough to stay if he did, but she has this dumb idea that shutting up or not responding when he gets ticked off will help deescalate, but it doesn't work like that. Some people just take that as a sign you don't mind or are too scared to retaliate or whatever. And not talking about it afterwards is not ok either, because it leaves the impression that it's normal for this to happen, and soon enough there's a repeat.'



He leaned back, hands laced behind his head, with an acidic expression on his face. 'And they wonder why my generation goes to hell with marriage. Why the hell would I stay with a woman I can't stand, or react like I can't stand? Just because I'm too used to the routine to get a divorce? If I saw she and I ended up basically hating each other, why keep going? So I can cuss her out until my throat's sore then act like nothing happened, business as usual, what do you want to do now? For real?'



​It was always cringeworthy to see bullies hooking up with people who were made to be victims, like tolerance was the cure for everything. 'I get the frustration.'



He laughed sarcastically. 'Do you? Not to dunk on an orphan, but you had an awesome adoptive father you got along with since forever, and that was that. And, shit, I'm not trying to be ungrateful or act like there's never been anything good, but I wish it would fucking end...I don't want to hear another scream-fest half the time I have to be around them.'



I waited, hands folded under my chin. Eventually, he closed his eyes tight, hiding the tears that had gathered at the edges. I reacted much the same when I was so angry I could cry. 'But I still wish everything would get better, you know? I don't wanna see them grow old and wither and...I remember saying goodbye to my grandpa, my dad's father, when we buried him not that long ago. I don't want to see either of them for the last time and then the coffin closes and we can never talk again.'



He cleared his throat. 'O-or my sister. Or my fellow writers, they're about their age, older than me. What, am I supposed to see it all end one day and then spend my last decade alone? And then die as well and leave nothing but my writing behind? The way I see my stories will definitely disappear, and it's not like people who follow me online actually know who I am.'



He shifted on his bench to mee my eyes again, lifting his glasses to wipe his. 'And I know what you'll tell me, that I should be glad I can express myself whenever, unlike almost everyone in history. That I don't have to worry about my home turning into a warzone or starving to death or being executed because I think in ways other people don't like. There are countries like that and I'm thankful I wasn't born in them, but I can't...I can't bring myself to hate my problems less because some people I've never met have it worse.'



'That's just human nature,' I said in response. 'Putting problems in tiers just ends up with everyone unhappier. Don't waste your time thinking like that. Instead, listen to me.' In no time, I was standing before him, a hand on his shoulder. 'Progress seems slow and fruitless unless it doesn't. The more advanced a society is, in most cases, the faster it advances. And you're not alone anymore. We're quite ahead of you, and you can take my word that we're more than willing to help for goodwill.'



When you lacked for nothing, it was easy to want to help the less fortunate, in order to satisfy your ideals, fit your perception of yourself as generous or awesome, or impress them. Or simply because you had nothing better to do and could.



Their world was not like ours, in so many ways. Large-scale wars still happened, instead of countries squabbling over this or that para crossing a border to make trouble somewhere else. Territory and resources were taken seriously enough to kill for them, which was only to be expected from people who couldn't make their own space and materials. It would be the work of years if not decades to get these people to understand that we weren't here to exploit them, because they had nothing we cared about, and then to bring them up to speed, but it would be better for everyone involved when we were done.



And not just because helping the less advanced was good symbolism that might let you punch above your weight class by correctly harnessing the metaphysics. It was the opposite of that effect that could result in superior but oppressive or invading forces being inexplicably repelled by plucky underdogs. And, to societies that had practically everything, such things mattered.



There'd be other concerns. The pantheons' meddling, or the interference of polities unrelated to my Earth. But I'd be there to ensure everything went as well as it could. It was why I had the power I did.



'Death doesn't need to be the end,' I continued after sharing those thoughts with him. 'Interacting with afterlives is no obscure science or risky journey. You can get in touch with who you want if you do things right. And even if they don't pray to anyone,' not Anton's case, since he was as Christian as me, 'I'll be there, to guide them into the next world. I promise.'



There were still things to explain, about how the pantheons interacted with the various universes. More reassurances to be given that there was nothing wrong about dreading the deaths of people you didn't always get along with, though there was nothing unnatural about loathing such things and wanting to put an end to them through science, so everyone could go on for as long as they wished.



But that would follow. They were all matters for days yet to come.



I stepped back, removing my hand from his shoulder to offer it instead, and he grasped it, rose.



Strictly speaking, it hadn't been necessary. But a hand offered was not an offer to be spurned. Who didn't wish, now and again, to have showed and been shown more kindness?

[Strigoi Grey]

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* * *

Apocrypha: And "Logic" They Named It

* * *

In an oubliette no star's light has ever touched from without languished the King of such suns.



It was not the imprisonment that weighed heavy on his mind, for he had not opposed it, nor would he have if he had been able to. It was the reason for it.



The traveller knew this not, or rather, did not understand it, but the King had not been questioned about such yet, nor would he likely be, for that was not the purpose of the journey.



She clearly hailed from one of those cosmoses where the false dichotomy of what many mortals called science "and" magic had never taken root. The formless, colourless cloak that hid her features had been woven from both runes of obliviousness and quantum states of being unnoticed, and at her waist hung both a wand and a blade of light and plasma.



The King took note. For an instant, his tired frown teetered on the brink of becoming a smile, but his air of serene resignation returned.



With little chance to apply himself, he grasped every opportunity to live through the whimsy of others.



The woman inclined her head. 'The Void's Bite greets King Sun. I crave an audi-'



The Solarex of yesteryear would have been aghast at the perceived disrespect, before hurting the woman so badly she would've forgot how to wish for death.



His fondness for pomp having died with his malice, he instead replied, 'King of naught and no one. Do yourself a favour and skip the formalities. Should make this last less.'



She bristled, for some reason. 'Many have died with nothing trying to gain the courtesy of the Void's Bite.'



By the Mover's mind, he could not possibly have the misfortune of meeting someone obsessed with both titles and talking in third person. He might've wondered what he'd done to deserve this, had he been fonder of rhetorical question. 'People will die for anything. In any case, I fear nothing I may face from now on, for what is there to lose?'



His broad shoulders rose. Even sitting, he was more than able to meet her eyes as she stood, and the Bite was not short by most species' standards. 'You have your audience. Speak.'



How easily he fell into thd old patterns...happily, this was only going through the motions. No choices he made here and now - as false a dichotomy as the earlier - would have any grand repercussions.



The woman fell into a looser stance, the shadows of her hood coalescing into something like a black mask catching blue light, for a moment. 'I have journeyed far, to ask of you questions about those who would order the cosmos of cosmoses according to their desires and naught more.'



'I am the Idea of Light still, even trammeled. Illumination is within my purview.'



'David Silva,' she hissed the name like the curse it was already becoming, as counted within time's flow. This time, Solarex did smile, wryly. How many monsters huddled around dying stars, telling David stories? 'He is arrogant, but as powerful as his pride is overweening. Vexing as it is, neither I nor anyone I know of can check him, stop him from spreading his childish attempts at morality across existence. I am not here to ask of the path towards his defeat, if there be one.'



Well, that was smarter than what he heard from most people who made it here. And somehow believed David would leave a prison he'd built out of his sight. 'The Guardian in Grey is no one's enemy by choice. Too many elect to be his, however, by deed or by manner.'



'Regardless, I am not here to learn of his weaknesses, if he even has any. I would, rather, speak of some of his accomplishments.'



'Indeed.'



'Yes. Your capture, for example.' She cocked her head, waited.



Solarex smirked. 'You see, he was stronger than me, I didn't fight back, and-'



'Do not be childish, King Sun.' Her voice had turned cold. 'I am not one of those fools who believe you were bribed or somehow persuaded to go along. I know your reasons-'



'Then is there aught to be said?' After his disastrous attempt at building a family, he had stopped caring one whit about anyone within the Mover's Dream, as creation had been back then. Yet when it had been remade to have always been crafted, the Unmoved One had - despite having much better reasons than Solarex to see anyone not of its ilk as fake people - treated everyone with as much kindness as such an exalted being could show to those unlike it.



It even laboured to lift everyone up to its level, and condemned those who abused their powers. After observing that, Solarex had lost even the spite that had kept him struggling within the Dream-that-was.



'Perhaps not about your caging,' the Void's Bite agreed, with some frigid amusement. 'But you are not the only so-called monster Silva shackled.'



Ah, those three. 'Do not tell me you grieve the defeat of the Black God, or the Crawling Chaos? Or perhaps the Certain Uncertainty?'



Even those who agreed with their opinions thought they were awful obstacles to carving anything worthwhile out of existence. No one seriously mourned them being unable to roam freely anymore.



'It is not about morality,' the Bite said curtly. 'Nothing has ever been.'



He'd rather crawl into a corner - and David had made his cell round - than listen to what sounded like the reimagining of last week's self-styled objectivist, but putting his pleasure first was a thing of the past. 'The methods, then.' Solarex shook his head, his inbuilt sunburst crown shining dully with inner light. 'You will not comprehend the regent of existence's power with a guidebook and schematics. If you wish to, hoin him and be lifted up.'



She cursed at this, but without heat, and said, 'Not unexpected. Something simpler, then: great as the forces holding them may be, how can creation keep turning without their contributions?'



King Sun's golden brow furrowed. 'Who told they're cut off from it?' At her bemused silence, he added, 'You are right that existence would be alien without chaos, decay and the forces of chance active. But just because their embodiment-sources are barred from interfering unduly and - let's not get philosophical - malevolently, it does not mean they aren't active.'



Solarex launched into an explanation. Nyarlathotep might not be free to pulverise planets for a lark, throwing interstellar networks into disarray, but chaos still enabled the toppling of tyrannies by revolution.



Decay and withering, of which Chernobog had been a powerful but rampant facet, still ensured the cycle of life went on properly, keeping biospheres healthy, even if he could no longer crown himself ruler of an eternally rotting undead empire.



"Gray Mann," one alias among many, no longer nudged the best laid plans into collapsing: that was simply a result of how Wellspring's gears turned, sometimes. But the force it was also made death traps fail at the worst possible moment, for their builders, allowing heroes to strike back.



'Think of it as a cancer being removed,' the King of Lights and Kindness advised. 'Just because you've spent so long with too many cells that a healthy amount seems strange, it doesn't mean it is.'



'You seem almost happy at the "surgeries" Silva has engaged in.' The Void's Bite sounded more disappointed than accusatory. Oh, she must've underestimated the stories about his change of mind.



Fair enough. He'd done little to make any change for the better appear plausible. 'I am no longer "cancerous", either.'



'Is that so?' She walked to the side of the darkness that was his prison, as if position in what passed for space here would change how he appeared to her. A tic that had carried over from mortality, clearly. 'Am I to take it you now reach into existence in a wholesome manner, as wheel?'



'Have you heard about the number of star-spawned sicknesses going down?' he asked mildly. 'On one Earth alone, they're running out of excuses for sunscreen. And wait until you look into the droughts.'



'What droughts?'



'Exactly.'



The Bite returned where she'd started. Solarex beamed at her, or at least as close to that as he could get, with little true joy to share. His smile was small, yet his eyes were bright, as if to compensate. 'The prince of creation has little besides hatred for those who violate others. They are let out, out of places such as mine, that is, when their skills can be put to use, but they are always returned.'



It wasn't just the victims' resentment, he knew. David Silva was appalled by the idea of rapists, especially those of children, being allowed back into society for any reason besides public torture followed by execution (castration appreciated if included). Should one prove both psychologically sound and wanted back, maybe...



The once-strigoi saw it as extreme openmindedness on his part that he stopped at indefinite confinement with breaks for such people, rather than constant torment for the rest of eternity. His less restrained side was very accepting of treating them as they'd treated the unlucky, but then, strigoi instincts rarely needed a reason to force themselves on people. That this one made up justification was a sign of David's morals bleeding into it.



'And you agree with this?' the Void's Bite asked, sounding incredulous. 'Didn't you yourself once say that morality is what the strong force on the weak?'



'In that case, I subscribe to Silva's vision above all others. Certainly above my former-'



'You are content to be used by him?' she snapped. 'Put back in the box like a tool, after you stop being "useful"?' Her cloak warped in a manner that suggested arms being crossed. 'Don't you see that he's just revelling in being stronger than those deemed acceptable targets by the majority? Like everyone who's ever had power?'



'My dear, you are free to offer a better alternative. He'd tell you nothing else.'



'And he'd refuse in a moment, if he was told people should live in freedom and admit they only judge those they dislike, not because there is such a thing as universal decency by which everyone might be judged. Or that the laws passed to enforce this farce are nothing but the decrees of the slavemaster with the biggest whip.'



Solarex dipped his chin. 'Be that as it may, you should speak of such to him, not me. As I've said, he's always open to discussion.'



Void, the girl might actually call Silva a despot for opposing anarchy. To his face. 'You have questions still,' he said instead of voicing his thoughts. 'Speak them, and be enlightened.'



One of the best parts of self-important people was when they missed that they were being mocked. 'Certainly,' she said, as if she was doing him a favour instead of the reverse. 'The Zhayvin Collective, that heartless slave horde nestled within Terra's core. When they were the Technarchy, they ruled those they did not wipe out with an iron claw. Now, their tyranny is subtler, yet no less vile, for they poison the thought of all who listen to them.'



Eh? The worst thing you could hear while listening to reptilians drone was how much less advanced and logical than them you were and why. Since they loved being right too much to use anything but facts in their arguments, you usually ended up bored but smarter.



Likely taking his blank expression as prompting, the Void's Bite went on. 'Reality is the scion of perception. By rambling about such nonsense as empirical study and setting standards for creation's various facets, they enforce the lie of objectivity, and call it reason.'



Ah, so that was it. 'It does feel faintly ridiculous when they talk about removing aberrations using machines they unironically call rationalisers.' As if that was truly different from an EMP-producing magic circle. As if it wasn't all but an admission that they saw some thing as too anomalous, dangerous or reprehensible to persist within what they called reality. 'But, if you were to ask me, I'd say this is one of the few genuinely funny things about them.'



The Bite's silence was as much of an encouragement as any cajoling to go ahead. Solarex sat up straighter, a dim gleam and a faint crackle like that of fire issuing from his chest. It seemed that, by leaning into the idea of light in the sense of spiritual enlightenment, he felt healthier than he had in...was it worth counting?



'Think about it,' he suggested. 'What is rationalisation, really? Removing what keeps you from seeing something as logical, without mystique or sentiment? Or is it twisting facts to fit your agenda, your beliefs?' Before the woman could miss the fact he was being rhetorical, he elaborated. 'Aye, you could say there are no such things as facts and not be far from right. But the reptilians, whatever their philosophical stance on such matters is - and it does vary by individual; don't make the mistake of seeing them as Shaper drones because most aren't expressive by your standards -, as civilisational polity, they think the set of principles they grasped on their homeworld is or should be the truth.'



King Sun spread arms once statuesque with muscle that'd seemed carved from gold, now gone lean and rangy. 'Do you know what that means? No "aberrant" power that needs to be triggered instead of always being active can function within so-called rationalised zones. They're even working on more proactive versions, anti-aberrancy fields to push anomalous beings out of existence or manifest their weaknesses upon them. And so strong is the Zhayvin's ego, so unshakable their arrogance, that should the Makers of the Ur-City cast a warping bolt at their macrocosm, and should said creation devolve into eldritch chaos, the holdings of the Collective would stand in the resulting void, for such things have no place in the world they have measured and explored.'



It was actually impressive, from a certain point of view. Not unlike how the creature many humans called the Devil, in his prideful persona, was literally and metaphysically untouchable to those he deemed as beneath him, except on a civilisational level, and not framed in a way that made it clear it was arrogance that enabled the power to work.



'The reptilians,' Solarex continued, 'sneer when they see aberrants make matter or energy out of nothing, yet they see little unusual in forcing spontaneous events and beings to appear through proactive observation of quantum fields, or using similar methods to convert metainformation into concrete objects and energies. Similarly, they'll tell you how it ought to be impossible for people to move objects much larger than themselves without ripping into them, regardless of strength, or how any aberrant should be sent flying by forces surpassing their mass, because their power to resist them doesn't make them heavier.' He opened a hand. 'Then they'll tell you how they can do the same through virtual graviton projector implants making them act as if they have the weight to match their strength without crushing their surroundings. That inbuilt micro-wormhole generators sends parts of the energy of attacks into alternate reality or subspace pockets, so that they remain unmoved.'



'Lies, all of them,' the Void's Bite said dismissively.



King Sun made a so-so gesture. 'Not quite. Those machines absolutely work the way they say, but ultimately, there is no such thing as science against magic, as if they are clashing energies. Nor is technology truly different from enchanted artifice, for are they not both the application of knowledge obtained through the study of the surrounding world? Zhayvin provincialism places what they call rationalism and empiricism on a pedestal, but in the end, their methods are not any more or less valid forms of shaping the would-be Quintessence's pieces than a hedge witch's rituals.'



'They have a veneer of superiority,' the Bite retorted. 'They sound better because the justifications are more elaborate. The Shaper's clockwork slaves are obsessed with seeming responsible and reliable, because they want to extinguish all wonders.'



Solarex was not going to get into a fight with her over how the Collective constantly voted on everything by means of their perpetual connections with each other, or how they wanted to ensure everyone had what they needed and wanted in order to pursue knowledge without worry. This woman was a "space sorceress" in manner as well as dress, and superficial enough to stop at the aesthetics and the "themes."



'Regardless, you should debate this with the Shaper or another representative of the reptilians,' he replied. 'I'm sure they'll give you their take on it.' If nothing else, one could always bet on Zhayvin rambling about how void damned smart and successful they were. The fact bragging was almost never involved only made the stated facts more annoying to hear.



The Bite looked more upset at being brushed off than at having to talk to the people who'd probably call her a lunatic menace to the reality and all societies within it.



He thought that said everything one needed to know about her.



* * *



Outreach of the Collective was considered eccentric by many of its fellows, for while no reptilian truly hated being outside its society's territory (though most disliked it), "Out" actually enjoyed dealing with xenopolities. The Shaper, who wasted not and wanted not, had taken note of this and made sure its xenophilia was cultivated until it became the foundation of a skill instead of remaining a hobby.



(This was, Out knew, one of the reasons people misinterpreted the Zhayvin and their First Scientist as stuffy and obsessive, with the former being unduly obedient towards the latter. That was a nonsensical opinion based on ignorance, for the Synthetic Sapience that was the Collective's elected leader could no more abuse its power than any reptilian could act in a deviant manner. In any case, approval of its current mission had been put to a vote, like everything noteworthy pertaining to the Collective was.)



The teleportation that occurred outside the prefabricated shop it was currently running was crude, not in the sense of visibly disrupted air or an ozone smell, but in how the anomalous energy pulse released let everyone nearby to know the user of this ability had arrived and was to be taken notice of.



Outreach stood up from its desk, internally rolling its eyes. What was with aberrants and craving attention? Wasn't trampling the laws of physics with every act enough to make them feel special?



Light was shaped into the image of knee-length green-trimmed trousers, then the holograms became solid around it. Out had nothing to hide, in any sense of the phrase, but mankind made up most of the sapients on Earth's surface and mostly disapproved of thinking beings who went around bare.



Before the garish aetherkinetic could barge into the shop with the same grace exhibited during her arrival, Outreach turned its perception inward and subvocalised the code-phrase for quantum tunneling.



With correctly-channeled attention pinning the strings making up its particles so they could be vibrated by the codewords, Outreach relaxed. Moments later, fundamental fields warped and folded as the matter of its being was subtly entangled with an equivalent amount of air outside the door. It was now there, having effectively gone into stasis for the trip, and its Planck-scale wormhole generators flared open, to feed the teleportation's excess energy into the Collective's grand engines through short-lived openings in the fabric of space before it could damage the world.



Why couldn't people put their heads together to achieve things like this instead of using "magic"?



On the left of its establishment was that of a self-styled witch who made home remedies, and even some for people when there were no houses complaining. As it understood her reasoning for placing "my apothecary's workshop", it had something to do with the left, as a direction, being associated with spellcasting and stereotyped as sinister, so of course the "magic shop" was to the left of one embodying rationality and civilisation.



On the right worked a lunatic who practised so-called sciences straight out of the humans' pulp magazines before their first global war. He was a harmless lunatic, since if you listened to his (being generous) hypotheses, he didn't convince himself you needed to be shown his brilliance in more obvious ways. Didn't make his current attempt to sell Outreach on the galaxy as ice mist idea any less laughable, but he was harmless.



His current project consisted of heartwood grafts to people's brains, which instead of giving them obscure diseases, then killing the lobotomised unlucky, made them appreciate quiet and nature, "Because what else could the, hah, core of a tree do in contact with the fount of human genius?"



This Caesar Vhargar wasn't actually any less insane than the witch Otilia, only differently so. It was just that instead of pointing staves and chanting nonsense, he seemingly embodied the "intelligence as a superpower" gimmick of human comic books, in that he appeared able to produce any effect as long as the method was science-themed. Out had reached this conclusion after getting a look at one of his death ray pistols, which could disintegrate mountains without even heating up the air around them. The inside had been full of matchsticks, looking glass shards and other such fire-starting knickknacks, but there'd been no actual mechanisms. The trigger and the glass barrel both ended in that garbage instead of being connected to anything.



When asked how the weapon worked, where the energy was produced and why did it not affect anything but the target, Vhargar had blinked owlishly, before replying that, "Just like the unthinking universe and the blind hand of evolution have crafted laws that make things just so, the mind of Enlightened man can craft new, better ones. This is not any different from people building aircraft more capable than any bird or bat."



Which just made his inventions pieces of solidified aberrancy, organised chaos in a tech coat.



Outreach looked down, for there was a difference of a metre or thereabouts between its height and the woman's. She craned her neck to meet the reptilian's blank expression.



'Yes-?'



'Shaper's Slave!' the motley being boomed, her cloak swirling in a nonexistent breeze. Mimicking the wind for drama's sake should've had you kicked out by the cosmos in the name of god taste, Out thought. 'I have walked existence from the meanest of its depthless reaches to the brink of the Other Void, yet I have found naught any sane being could use to defend your philosophy.' She held an arm out, the cloak swishing aside. 'As the Bite of the Void, I would give you a chance to argue before I put you and your despicable ilk out of everyone's misery.'



Outreach tried to remember if it or the Collective had offended or even interacted with this "Bite", and kept trying. Looking left, then right, it noticed its fellow vendors noticing it, and conveyed its lack of understanding at the situation through body language.



Hopefully.



"Oti" was currently brewing a chimeric creature that would have both the senses and instincts of the several animals whose carcasses had been melted in one of her cauldrons and the raw power of the mana backing the process. She leaned against the boiling vessel, subtle otherworldly energies bursting into existence around her, then fading just as quick.



Caesar was handling the replacement of a woman's blood with octopus ink using one hand and eye. As he'd explained to Outreach, by the end she'd have the creature's flexibility, camouflage capabilities and the option to produce what had replaced her "vitae." The operation was allegedly centred on the dark substance, because "what else would Genius use to bridge these kinds flung so far apart by nature?" If she'd wanted flight, he'd probably have replaced her hair with feathers.



Both interested, but not alarmed or expectant. So, this wasn't the setup to a prank.



It was something of an unwritten global rule to use natural islands around Greenland or the Poles as neutral ground for paranormal exhibitions or similar arrangements open to the public, or make a new one if none was to the liking of the people involved. As such, the tourists who frequented such venues were used to strange beings letting their hair down in ways they wouldn't have in territory belonging to anyone, even allies. None paid more than a moment's attention to the commotion.



Could've been worse, Out admitted. This "Void's Bite" (by the Shaper...) didn't seem the kind of person to adjust her behaviour due to rubberneckers. Indeed, rather than being shamed, knowing she was watched might provoke her.



'You know,' Outreach said, 'there are people who'd throw you out on your behind for talking like that on a first meeting. Why should I give you the time of day?' She was lucky Earth's unnumbered defences against teleporters hadn't flagged her as dangerous.



It sensed a sneer behind the gloom of the woman's hood. 'How quickly you show your true colours. The instant you are called out, you wish for all voices raised against you to be lowered, or better yet, silen-'



Stupid opinions and an obsession with monologues, lovely. If the kick to physics' face earlier hadn't confirmed the aberrancy... 'Why don't we go inside so you can explain why you are here?'



As it turned out, the Bite was here to talk. That was alright: Outreach's shop wasn't just an excuse to give mankind dumbed down Zhayvin tech for a pittance, so they could improve their understanding of existence, it was also a debate spot. Provided enough people were attracted to the concept, the Collective would upgrade to a forum in some plaza and send dozens more debaters. It felt more natural than the interviews for mass media.



The Void's Bite's argument went thus: the Reptilian Collective was a nightmarish dictatorship consisting of enemies of wonder who wanted nothing more than extinguish whimsy and joy, so that people would be too demoralised and apathetic to resist their conquest (or maybe it would be the other way around, and such things would be purged after the conquest, since a crushed population would resist less; she was convinced both would happen at some point and the timeline mattered less to her).



'We're not imperialists anymore,' Outreach said bluntly. 'We've realised that turning all of creation into a copy of your homeland is a path to stagnation and decline, billions of years ago.' It rested an elbow on the counter as it leaned forward. 'Besides, other polities have nothing we could want. They can only offer us their opinions, and interaction is not something you need to conquer anyone for.'



'So you say,' the Bite replied, 'but have you not always nudged this planet's inhabitants towards adopting your soulless philosophy?' As it began to shake its head, she added, 'Have you or have you not made sure every "anomaly" you could repel did not enter mankind's noosphere?'



'Humanity has always been enamoured of aberrancy. This has only become more pronounced in the last eight decades. We in the Collective see this as a step back, but it is their choice. They have found something like harmony with their mutants and offshoots.'



The Bite watched it for several moments, saying nothing, a slow smile spreading across her features - Outreach sensed the subtle shifts in the air as it moved around the muscles of her face. 'I do not believe I have ever received a straight answer about this, so perhaps you can clear things up for me.'



'Enlightening the ignorant and confused has always been the Collective's mission,' Outreach said with that solemn Zhayvin innocence it knew exasperated most people. The Bite was sitting like she wanted to ground her teeth, but persevered.



'Why do you so despise everything against the grain of your clockwork world so much that you deem it aberrant? Are you so afraid of everything that might slip between your claws?'



It was not...the Collective could have cared less about things outside their direct areas of influence. How to get this paranoiac to understand and accept this?



'You say we stunted mankind by hiding aberrancy from them. That is untrue. We have let them flourish, in their view, with it in their arms, once we deemed it safe enough. Or do you believe we neither expected the Shattering nor ever had the means to reverse it? We know what man can twist into, when left alone in the dark.'



The Bite flung out a hand. 'And where did that leave you? Turning your muzzles up at all those who achieve success by means other than your dry, tepid science.'



The adjectives were misapplied and needless, but she was so close...she almost understood. 'Exactly. It's not the results, it's the method.' Before she could crow about perceived triumph, it elaborated, 'Occultism, mysticism, is the spawn of ignorance that begets further ignorance. Do you know that-'



'Claptrap.' She brandished a wand covered in nearly microscopic scripts, the wood a blue so dark it was almost black. The script began glowing a brighter, electric blue. 'I carved this from the trunk of the tree that grew above my father's grave, for it was his will that I have a strong arm and deadly weapons, that I might carve my way through life. His spirit lives in me, empowers me.'



She then drew her sword. Around a blade of adamantine metal serving as the core, starstuff and unnatural heat flared into being. 'When my twin sister lay dying, her sickness rotting her from the inside, her fervent wish was that, in this respect at least, we would be different. The flame that hope sparked is the same as that at the edge of my blade.'



Who knew what she'd pull out if she started going over her ancestors? 'The Collective has never denied that aberrancy is powerful or that it has its uses - did I not just mention results? But just because you can run a nuclear reactor without shielding, it doesn't mean you should.'



Her weapons returning to their inert states, the Bite placed them back on her belt and shifted in her seat so that her cloak covered them. 'You believe your way is more efficient.'



'It is - but not because of speed or because science bombs make bigger explosions than magic ones,' Outreach deadpanned. 'Let me ask you something: if people know that this action or phrase results in some deity or otherworldly power giving them what they want, how strong a need to innovate do you believe they'll feel?'



The question was rhetorical. The realistic endpoint of such situations was a population consisting of cowed ignoramuses, with the warrior-aristocrat aberrants oppressing them (no matter how benign it looked, disenfranchisement could never be benevolent, much less empowering) in the name of the over-force that could never be anything but an outsider.



'If things are wonderful, why change aught?'



The age-old cry of the conformist...both the coward and the brazen enemy of progress. 'Certainly, the people in charge might say so. Or their god would. But the peasants toiling for ore, or whatever resource their monster-kings need, or being treated like cattle because they are the resources, would strongly disagree.'



Out had the feeling her brow had furrowed. 'A moment. We are speaking past each other. You are describing a hierarchical society where one's standing is determined by personal, unnatural, power. With castes, perhaps.'



'Or subspecies. Alchemy and metagalvanism can spawn monsters as dangerous as anything ever put together in a nanoforge. But the exact nature of such is immaterial - yes, that is what I am speaking about.'



'But there needn't be a society in the first place! That is always the result of powermongers getting together to write the laws by which the cowardly sheep might be kept in line. If these peasants you speak of are so weak and stupid that they can be oppressed. Then they deserve it. Even want it, mayhap. What is keeping them from becoming stronger and educating themselves?'



Astounded by her vehemence - in voicing something this idiotic - Outreach almost drew back. 'An utter lack of opportunity! Not just misfortune, but enforcement of the status quo by the elites. Whether hierarchical or anarchic, any group with members more powerful than others will see the strong ensure their positions are never threatened by the weak.'



'If there is no opportunity, what is there to stop these weaklings from killing themselves?'



'Ha.' Out showed its fangs, honed to monoatomic sharpness in the gene-mill where it had been assembled. 'In the foulest of "ideal" worlds, nothing. There shouldn't be anything stopping someone from taking the one way out of dystopia. But you cannot be so stupid as to believe there aren't a myriad methods of compulsion, in life or - following the resurrection of the suicidal dissenters - in death or undeath.'



'There is always misfortune.' She might well have shrugged. 'It is the impartiality of chance that offers everyone a whetstone to sharpen themselves against.'



'Would you be stating this with the same serenity while dying from wounds dealt by one sharpened enough?'



'Most certainly not - but sentiment is as alien to you as anything not running according to the precepts of your tinpot autocrat, so I don't expect you to appreciate the sapient condition.'



There wasn't much substance to address, here, but perhaps a misconception could be corrected. 'The Shaper is as far from unchallenged leadership as anyone has ever been. Every Zhayvin knows what every other Zhayvin does. We watch each other's thoughts, all of us. The Shaper could no more order us to act against our conscience than a human can wish to stop breathing. It can only override our bodies and constructs when that is necessary for the survival of the Collective - and should it turn rogue, it would find itself unable to achieve its goals. The error would then be corrected.'



'And you think that is more free? Committees for everything? Each choice overviewed and voted on by the entire species, lest someone breathe wrong? It's only your technology that even lets you hold such debates effectively, as well as uphold this surveillance state you call a democracy.'



She was just as much of a paranoid loner as any human, it seemed. Pitiful, but by no means unexpected. Plenty of species held the opinion that even if they had nothing to hide and thus nothing to fear, that still wasn't a reason for other to watch their every moment - but what was the problem, honestly?



No Zhayvin would be troubled by others being aware of their activities, nor by being aware of theirs. When every thought and emotion was shared, every instant was an unfolding of joy and revelation. The fear of losing one's individuality could only arise in polities with shoddy technology and even worse social engineering.



Not to mention that being "one person" was no prerequisite for joy. The Shaper was the most famous gestalt intelligence within the Collective, but far from the only one. What was the harm in a stronger feeling of belonging, in a multifaceted perspective?



Outreach knew it was biased, in that many species and unique beings lacked the pseudo-eusocial mentality the Zhayvi'd had since they'd developed sapience on their arid world so many eons ago, but that did not mean people could not open their minds. That was the point of science: creating prosperity, material and paramaterial, and the security that would enable people to experience it.



'In any case, you can rest safely knowing we will never try to force our culture upon you, or anyone else, for that matter. Anyone who wishes to partake can, but that is not what you are so worked up about, are you?'



'The fact you persist is abominable enough,' the Void's Bite spat. 'Civilisation is nothing but the legacy of oppressors long gone. Any law not agreed upon by those who wish for it in one moment is just coercion by the dead. That is the natural state of the thinking being. You have raised an edifice that is unlikely to ever fall, and which makes a mockery of nature.' She jerked her chin at the collection of hypertech devices maglocked to the walls or suspended by beams of force. 'The science you peddle is another lie, though no less poisonous. Reality ought to be determined by the perception of the observer, not by some alleged laws beaten into their head since childhood so that everyone thinks only such and such achievement is possible.'



'I disagree most strongly.' Outreach clasped its hands on the counter. 'Void's Bite...is this your actual name? What do your friends call you? Bite?'



'Friendships are merely relationships between those who agree the continued wellbeing of the other is a benefit to them, whether outright or because knowing the friend is well pleases them.' The Bite lifted her head. 'Anyone worthy enough I would call them friend would not be so clumsy we would need to speak to each other in order to know each other's hearts. We could learn all there is to know with but a glance, if we did not simply know it in our spirit.'



...Right.



'I understand that, in a way,' Out admitted. 'In the Collective, everyone knows who everyone else is. Names, titles, all such things are matters of affection, or ways for outsiders to know us. But while I would be able to identify my Zhayvin friends by body language or brainwave patterns alone, many sapients are not so aware. You and your friends must love each other deeply.'



For the first time, warmth crept into her voice. 'Not all kinship is in blood.'



Outreach appreciated the pause that followed, both for being free of the lunatic opinions of its visitor and for having the chance to contemplate her latest reaction in silence. So, she was not heartless. The Void's Bite simply held an antisocial stance of the sort she could've never formed were she not insulated from most consequences of her philosophy being applied by sufficient power.



Out understood. It was a privileged sort of worldview, spoiled even. But just because it was loathsome did not mean it could not be changed, or that the person holding it deserved contempt or worse...it was only through argument that the exact sciences grew, and was society not the outgrowth of science too?



'I see you are labouring under a misapprehension, which I would strive to correct should you grant me some of your time,' the reptilian said. Calmness and a willingness to debate were the greatest weapons one could wield against those who entered a discussion expecting jackbooted followers who began screeching as soon as their leader or beliefs were challenged.



The Bite's nod was curt, almost dismissive. Likely, she did not think there would be anything she hadn't heard before or couldn't dismiss.



'Very well. You heard an inkling earlier, before we started arguing.' Outreach stood up, and internal reconfiguration permitted a casual production and shaping of photons, projecting an image that could be edited at will. It currently showed the evolutionary steps of Zhayvin and humans, with the latter's modern form preceding a blank space under a question mark, where a species' name had been for the previous stages. Large-scale transhumanism and posthumanism were infant sciences, but the reptilians deeply trusted their adoptive sibling species. Some might've said they had faith in mankind, but few Zhayvin would've phrased it so. Faith was conviction without a basis and thus to reasoning what arrogance was to self-worth.



'Do you know why we did not oppose mankind's tentative willingness to embrace aberrancy following the Shattering? We finally saw a chance of such powers creating not the tiered society I mentioned earlier, nor the sort of widespread nightmare we saw in Atlantis, where everyone was powerful but miserable and at everyone else's throats. We saw the potential for cooperation, and an understanding of the mechanics behind aberrant powers.'



But that was talk of the past, and nothing short of goals unveiled had a chance to convince her.



Outreach was not so detached to reality as to call them plans. The Collective's aims and simulations were one thing, the prediction-defying nature of aberrancy and metatemporal mechanics quite another.



'Do you know what the Collective sees, when we look at "divinity"?' Outreach asked softly. 'We see the end. The end of ambition. The end of understanding.'



It stood up, began pacing, gesturing. It was a pantomime one would never have see on Collective territory, but it'd help get the reptilian's investment across, a lamentable necessity when dealing with people more interested in emotions and who could scream the loudest than in facts.



'Let them know that they are blessed, destine to prosper at a deity's whim, and progress will die,' Out continued. 'Why would it not? When everything is so safe and easy, why take risks and push boundaries? Indeed, even discounting potential danger, why upset society? Aren't you glad that you have been given so much? And this needn't apply only to deiocracies. Any civilisation that has such lopsided dynamics between its citizens, but especially between the leaders and everyone else, will turn into a gilded cage at best.'



'You sound awfully disdainful of the paradises so many humans live lives of abstention and altruism to gain access to,' the Void's Bite remarked. 'Are you saying all the struggle against temptation is for nothing, because...what? Their gods are more powerful than them?'



'Worth and worthlessness are not so easy to measure,' the Zhayvin answered. 'But, if you ask me, those who believe only religion vindicates their morals are hobbling themselves at best. Or admitting they would be dangers to everyone around them without a restrictive framework. That aside, yes, it is not an admirable goal to run into prison just because the wallpaper's nice and the warden apparently affable. Or do you believe that, for example, Abraham's god would see nothing wrong if some faithful's soul became as powerful as him and decided his creation ought to be ordered differently?'



Gods thrived on an imbalance of power. They loathed even those who approached their power, much less people who matched or surpassed it. Surely she knew this? No self-appointed ruler of all they surveyed and source of morals would step aside just because a peer showed up with better ideals and ways to implement them. Perhaps especially not then. And it wasn't just the petty clinging to power that plagued so many thinking beings: many so-called gods genuinely believed their rule was the best, if not only way for their territories to progress.



A dangerous kind of delusion, especially when reality, at least from their perspective, seemed to align with their beliefs.



'That sounds like a problem for the weaker,' the Bite said. 'Those who agree to follow the precepts of a god, that is. To my understanding, forcing mortals to adhere to a faith is frowned upon nowadays.'



Outreach grunted. 'That is only a facet of the conflict between mundane humans and aberrants. Relative powerlessness persists whether the powerful call themselves deities, fairies, wizards or any number of such things.'



'Are you jealous?' the Bite asked mildly. Then, sarcastically, 'Is that why you're green? Because you're envious of those who can shape the world in their image with a gesture or thought?'



Jealous? Of the midwives of elitism and stagnation? 'Absurd. In far too many cases, that will end in stasis - because "we know the powers work this way, why change anything?" or in a vicious cycle of aberrants pushing their powers to the limit in order to grow them and maintain their superiority over mundanes and their aberrant rivals alike.'



'And the rest of the cases?' The Void's Bite asked. Outreach met her gaze, for all that it couldn't see her eyes, waited. 'In cases where the presence of such beings does not result in what you describe as disasters, what happens?'



Out allowed itself to smile fractionally, though it doubted the Bite was one of those rare people who weren't reptilians but could read Zhayvin expressions. It was, admittedly, a finicky thing to do, for reptilian faces had little mobility, and their unblinking eyes often seemed cold no matter how they were feeling.



'Behold the Earth of this day,' Outreach said, in answer. 'A world where quantifying the paranormal is not forbidden, nor is it considered impossible or laughable. I might lend you some recordings pertaining to the integration of aberrancy into mundane society and its industrialisation, if you are interested.'



'Is that supposed to impress me? Convince me your policies are worthy of consideration? "It's all right if they keep truck with these things we believe hobble thinking beings, as long as they act in ways that slowly strip said things of wonder."'



'You might not believe it, but for a human, this is the best time to be alive in their history. Needs are covered, everything is done to keep them and them safe and treat them fairly. No one is being conscripted and marched off to die in the name of a deity or its earthly regent or for the sake of profit through pillaging.'



'A smiling mask, splattered over the face of nature. Life is struggle. Coddling these mortals will only result in them developing warped morals and never amounting to anything.'



Out could've told here the natural state of man was being hunted by big cats and mauled to death if they didn't die of a broken tooth at the ripe old age of thirty, but would that even make it through? She was too privileged to relate to such struggled, or even care to relate. "Weaklings like that should get stronger, or take their lives in despair, if they cannot." She'd already made her feelings clear on the matter.



'Humanity cannot possibly surpass themselves in an environment where they struggle to survive. Thriving in their current state would, will be the foundation to greater excellence, but we must maintain and improve their living conditions in order to facilitate any change for the better.'



'But I thought you weren't expansionists? Or does cultural colonialism not count?'



Outreach gave her a look of patient exasperation. 'We don't want to make the humans like us. We would appreciate if it happened, but we have made our peace with the fact that is unlikely.' Did most humans want to be rational and beholden to none but each other? Why would they, when the years of research needed to make spaceships, and all the incidental advancements, could be replicated in moments by a powerful enough aetherkine waving their hand, and when their faith-eating friends in the clouds were all too eager to share their opinions of how the world should be like? 'Yet, wanting them to become better only makes sense.'



'Why?' the Bite asked pointedly. 'For decency's sake? Because you're feeling charitable?'



'Indeed - ethical rationalism demands nothing less.' How coulda grander cosmos with more and more phenomena to experience and research take form if some of its inhabitants were less than they could be?



Outreach clasped its hands behind its back, began walking back to its seat. 'Perhaps you are finding me brazen. It is not an uncommon complaint against us "Fitters."' Those of the Subjectivist Tendency, as well as unaligned reptilians, liked to joke that if every Objectivist suddenly collapsed into dust, the motes would start researching if that made sense according to their scientific worldview. 'You might find an Accepting more amenable. In terms of respecting the usefulness of the anomalies you deploy, rather than your politics, mind.'



Subjectivists, like all reptilians, knew that there were things that, at least at a glance, made no sense according to scientific principles. But while their rival Tendency tried to fit everything into a rational framework, the Accepting acknowledged the merits of aberrancy and even tried to reverse engineer or otherwise replicate them; "manually", even, and not by means of quantum entanglement or the meta-spatiotemporal equivalent used by the Collective to imitate anomalous powers.



No, they tried to understand such forms of aberrancy and make them work within their paradigm - which, some argued, was just another way of looking at the macrocosm, rather than the result of studying objective facts. Indeed, the Subjectivists agreed that the Collective's methods were the best way forward for civilisation as a whole, but they did not see aberrants and those whose views centred around their glorification as wrong in a fundamental sense, since they did not believe in objectivity. Rather, they were worse ways to look at existence than the Collective's, though existence could scarcely be better than its observers.



But, as Outreach had said, few Subjectivists would agree that a world with no laws besides that of the jungle was desirable. If nothing else, they'd say that letting everyone see reality in random ways would remove the conditions that enabled their framework to function. Even the most radical Accepting tended towards the sort of benign eccentricity embodied by such colourful characters as Delver - who had adopted a masculine body, male pronouns and had even, if his reports were to be believed, pair-bonded like a human. To an aetherkine, of all people.



It was baffling, but perhaps studying unvarnished reality while cut off from the Collective pushed one to make such changes.



'No branch of the rotten tree that is your ilk would be more agreeable to me unless it burned more easily,' the Void's Bite, the link between fanatics and setting things on fire being once more proven to exist.



​Which might've been funny, in other circumstances. But the reptilian's patience was running short, and it was no longer it was no longer amused.



'Careful,' it said casually. 'I am no law enforcer by occupation, but this is international territory, and few polities mind citizens' arrests in such places, especially in the name of stopping incitement to terrorism, anarchy and the general destabilisation of civilised society. Which is what the ideas you are strongly arguing for are close to.'



The Bite stood up in a blur. 'How astonishing: discourse is free, even encouraged, provided it does not contradict your-'



'Woman, are you insane?' Outreach asked, only half-sarcastically. 'You are within your rights to talk about anything that does not infringe upon the rights of others. Or are you saying you wouldn't unduly mind if someone offended you, since you'd just beat them to death?'



'You are asking that as if there is a problem?'



'Casual violence like that frays the fabric of civilisation. It is inefficient almost beyond description: if anyone can call out and kill anyone else, no one has the authority or time to resolve conflict more smoothly, and everything destabilises...but of course, you see that as only the honest nature of sapients.'



'It is better than what you preach,' the Void's Bite retorted. 'You hollow things. Soulless. Heartless. Artless. Classless. Moneyless. Your technologies might be tangible wealth if put to proper use, but you have nothing to offer, intellectually, besides the principles behind their creation. You are almost a caricature of...what do they call it here?' Outreach's thaumeters caught the aetheric probe she sent out. 'Communism. I see. All things of worth are handed over to the dirt-grubbers and the grease monkeys, everyone owns everything and is happy under the guidance of the omniscient, omnibenevolent planners. No need for distractions like choice.'



'I do wish people would stop dragging communism into politics,' Outreach grumbled. 'It's a matter of economics enabled by healthy social engineering and robust technology. There is no need for a "planner" pseudo-class when people can focus on governing themselves thanks to a lack of scarcity and dangers. It only clashes with democracy in the minds of idiots who hear "dictatorship" whenever it's mentioned.'



Granted, when the Collective had first read Marx, they'd wondered what species of selfless, self-sustaining reality warpers his ideas were meant for, because mankind was one of the worst options possible to put them in practice. But that was neither here nor there. This woman's stance on everything so far had been garbage, so Outreach held little interest in hearing her takes on property.



'But let us move past that,' the reptilian said. 'I have sat there and listened to you and I have a question...a few questions. You say agreements and alliances ought to be formed on the spot, without pressure from laws formed however long ago. Yet you are so opposed to the Collective? To us, who establish a consensus on every matter in real time? Who hide nothing from each other and are perhaps closer to our leader than the people of any other policy that is not just a hive mind? Call me paranoid, but I do believe you are only offended because our methodology clashes with yours.' It made itself blink slowly, transparent lids sliding sideways over green eyes. 'Or are your ideals only palatable when they result in a battle royale between spellslingers?'



After this was done, it'd run cognitohazard decontamination protocols, just in case. This was almost like listening to the Sleeper explain why everyone around it was crazy due to believing in limits, of themselves or reality.



* * *



The Void's Bite was frowning as she departed this dull Earth that had chosen to trammel itself out of fear of ever abandoning mediocrity. Just as she was thinking she had grown weary of translocating under her own power, one of her ships manifested.



With perhaps the first pleased smile of this day, she stepped out of the planet's thin atmospheric envelope and across empty space, before making her way up onto the wooden vessel.



Immediately, the attendants she'd once crushed to impress upon them the order of things crowded about her, to take her cloak and armaments. She graciously let the cringing things depart without striking them to keep her hand in the game, or even any harsh worlds. She wondered how they would pay her back once they finished pondering that rare mercy.



The crew was a mix of bloodlines that had been cultivated for nothing more than sailing and maintaining this ship of the stars. The founders had been captured and repurposed, giving their dull lives meaning and worth both, and their descendants scarcely had thoughts of rebellion anymore, violent or otherwise.



When outliers appeared, it made for diverting moments.



The best thing about the them was being able to grind them up for a boost in speed or endurance; though the living timber this ship of the stars had been wrought from was impervious to most celestial disasters, and lent itself to greater speed than that of most mechanical vessels, there was never too much power. Only power wrongly held by the mad and blinkered.



Like that damnable anthill of gears and circuits that was the Zhayvin Collective. No wonder so many species had dreaded them even before they'd started acting like oversized ants. Swapping genocidal fervour for that ghastly synchronisation had not weakened them, by any means. Coordinated so uncannily, they could yet reinvent and surpass the horrors of the Technarchy.



Some would've said they had, the instant they became able to ape the powers of the honest through their damnable entanglement procedures. But there was no sincerity in that sort of power, nor in the means to forge it.



Still, the one that'd called itself Outreach had gifted her the recordings it had spoken of. It did not expect payment or even their return, but then, it wouldn't would it? It was so pampered by technology able to easily recreate such things that it had no need to fret. When one lacked the need to claw their way to their needs, the spirit flagged and withered. It became an empty, stooped thing, dull and lacking the ambition to do aught but make others like it.



Their dystopia of greyness pretended to offer an endless, wondrous horizon, but it only led to more of the same. They'd murdered any individuality or worth their species might have produced, in the name of crushing tyranny, and called it "logic."



That was what happened when you flattened the mountains instead of surrounding the weak with such strife they tried to scale them in order to escape. Either they succeeded and new rivals to the strong appeared, or weaklings and distractions were removed. Nature took its course, whichever the path.



The reptilian had also been generous enough to give her some of David Silva's musings. The creature sounded utterly insane - listening to him, you could've ended up believing it was the duty of the strong to help those weaker than themselves, as if him doing so was anything besides a desire he was powerful enough to pursue.



She had learned, poring over them, of his goal. A magna-macrocosm where everyone was powerful enough to need fear neither the limits imposed on them by the nature of their being - for that nature would be made limitless - nor violence or coercion from others, for everyone would be both impervious to strife and in harmony.



It sounded exactly like the childish fantasy world of those born to be prey. Why would Silva want to make everyone a peer of his? What was the joke? Or was it just insanity?



It was unnatural that someone so powerful would do the opposite of revelling in his power. Indeed, he wanted to check everyone's, so that there would be no more struggle. As if the Zhayvin did not try to snuff out the spark of individuality already, this abomination would instead flood all there was with mediocrity, so no fire could ever be lit again.



Nightmarish...