The attack usually starts with a mystery, a suspicious death. Seems like natural causes, nothing confirmed. But then there's another, and after that, a bombing. And slowly, the tempo begins to pick up. Scouting outposts go dark by the dozen. Some Master-Tier Shadows are sent back to us in pieces—finger by finger, limb by limb.

  And then the rhythm increases. Trench lines are immolated. A chain of mana bombs goes off far behind the front lines, devastating our logistical cities, decimating our population. Disaster after disaster, we're forced to divide our attention. We need to respond. And then the first wave comes.

  The orc raiders don't coordinate with each other. They don't talk to their Shadows, they don't work with their Thieves, they have no central high command. What they do have, however, are Maestros. Maestros that perform and play to the Grand Orchestra by ear. Everything is intuition. Everything has been calcified into them after years of war.

  Some strike at our gaps; others deliberately spend their lives to tax our response forces. They attack us where we're strongest so that they can gouge us where we're weakest. And we push them back. It always goes this way. Under a hail of siege-level magic and unceasing artillery fire, we drive them back. We burn parts of our own homes just to clear the infestation. But that's only the first wave.

  When they have our measure, when they've mustered enough, the real Gray Tide comes. Vanguards the size of small houses charge across the plains. They move like missiles, and the ground beneath them burns. The soil is ruined. The flames bring smoke, and as the columns of haze rise, we make things worse; we fire into the mess, we bombard them with everything we have.

  And then we brace. We move people from the outer city to the inner city. Families descend into their bunkers and man their stations. Our Heroes and Legends climb their towers. Our Masters and Adepts form on the walls.

  And then comes the wait. They don't attack immediately. They play music—actual music—that they make from those they took from us, music born of torment and pain. The screams are mingled with melodious strings, with hammering drums. The siege of our spirits begins before the siege of our walls. We endure. We cover our ears. We pretend not to hear. But we have to listen. No matter what, someone has to watch. And so, before the actual war, comes the suicides, comes the despair, comes the breaking.

  And when things go silent, when the long silence stretches, that's when we know. That's when they come. And that's when our alloyed walls turn crimson. That's when the Gray Tide shows us who they really are.

  And that's when we tell them: No. You are not enough. Not this year. Not the next year. And not every year after that.

  We tell them that even when we don't believe it ourselves. We tell them that as the monsters die laughing, die killing, die bleeding, die happily, willingly, joyously. They die. We die. And they seem to only grow stronger from it.

  There seems to be no end. No end. No end.

  -Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny

  273 (I)

  Liberation [III]

  The Fingerlings tore through their own, desperate to pierce the final layer of Uva's nest.

  Or so they assumed.

  Indexes crushed the Recollectors and Pinkies, pulping them by their hundreds as they tried to ram their way through. But it wasn't enough. Most of them became new blockades as they were consumed by the stillness, gliding through Uva's Psychomantic strands. Divine incandescence empowered her spells to new heights; her partial metamorphosis made her a spider among ants here in the Outside.

  The Eldest whispered to her, implored her to stop holding it back, to transform and reach true beauty. The Fingerling she'd compromised wailed and cried out toward the Stranger, telling their patriarch that her powers were flagging, that Blackedge was on its last legs.

  As with all good feats of deception, there was some truth there. Blackedge wasn't going to last much longer, and Uva wasn't far from a full transformation. But she still had more left: more time, more options, more traps to spin.

  For one, they weren't actually attacking Blackedge right now. Once they finally managed to breach through the final layer of her Psychomantic nest, they would discover an ugly surprise of Aberrant Fractals hidden within the corpses of long-dead Fingerlings she had been amassing over the past few months.

  That would cost the Stranger a great deal more. But also not nearly enough.

  Time. The currency they were dealing in, trading, and amassing was time.

  But even with everything Uva was doing, she felt there just wasn’t enough.

  As to where Blackedge was, exactly... Well, that was an ingenious act of subterfuge inspired by Roland Arrow. Though the Town Lord was still nowhere near fully recovered, he was coherent and stable enough to fire a few scouting arrows, using them to search for vulnerable Fingerlings and additional places to hide.

  As the Stranger had been moving and shrinking his clearings, there were fewer and fewer refuges for Blackedge. Paired with swelling mana storms sweeping through the Stranger's inner dimension, there was no more avoiding the Fingerlings. Everything had to take place in close quarters.

  This should have meant constant combat—a brutal trade between the Fingerlings and Uva's divinely empowered mana. Except it wasn't quite so.

  "I still miss things from time to time," Roland had said out of the blue. "But I don't miss things because I can't see them or sense them. No, I miss things because I brush them off. I assume they are safe. I look past them. They're within my Awareness, but I put them beneath my Awareness—hidden in plain sight.”

  "What do you mean?" Uva had asked.

  "I mean that if there is a way for you to deceive the Stranger's senses, if you can hijack the minds of his Fingerlings, then perhaps the safest place might be among our enemies. Well, no. Rather, should we be able to find a sanctuary or manufacture a sanctuary of our own made from a hive of still-living but compromised Fingerlings?"

  And that was a stroke of genius she couldn't deny. It was a desperate stroke, however. If anything went wrong, if her presence was betrayed by a failure on her part or a moment of astuteness on the Stranger's part, every single Fingerling would find them, turn on them, and tear the town asunder. She didn't have enough mana to spare for two lines of defense. But if they stayed static and treated this as if it were a siege, they would have been overrun days ago.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Instead, they had front row seats to their own sacking. They were behind the enemies, nested among the groups of enemies. A cluster of Pinkies, Indexes, and Recollectors was fused to the town's outside. Along the inner walls were massacred eldritch creatures, painted and mangled into nightmarish biomatter that still blinked, that still dreamed, that never fully died. But could be deceived mentally.

  If one had the right mental template, that was.

  The inner layer of butchered Fingerlings screamed in tandem with a single unfortunate instance of Uva as she offset her trauma and madness into them. And they, connected by her Eldritch skills, howled as they learned what it meant to be human. As they were deadened and severed, they became a volume of static noise and incoherence to the Stranger.

  Eventually, the Eldritch God would notice, but for now, they had time. Time enough for Shiv, Adam, and all the others to come in. Time enough for hope.

  "No, no time. No time at all," the Eldest hissed at Uva. "I have been holding off for too long. Too long. You know, you know, no turning back. It has to happen. It will happen soon. You can hide the town. You can hide the others. Can't hide from yourself. Can't hide from the change."

  "I know," Uva almost snarled. "I know, but I just need a while longer, just a few moments longer, and this can be done, this can be resolved. And then I will face your metamorphosis."

  "No, still fleeing, still fleeing." The Eldest growled with frustration. "Still fleeing, fleeing from what you are, what you must be, what you can become."

  But then a third voice interjected in their conversation. "She is not fleeing. She serves the Light. She serves herself. Be quiet, parasite. Be quiet and away." The Eldest refused to acknowledge the Ascendant, and sadly, the Starhawk had little means of compelling the Outsider’s submission. "Sister Uva, are you well?”

  "No," she said honestly. “The time is nigh. Whatever end is to come, it will come soon. For me. For all of us. I will do what I can. What little I can.”

  The Starhawk went mute with sorrow-filled shame. “I can ask no more of you. No more of any of you. Whatever comes, know that I was honored to have you as my Avatar.”

  “An honor shared. Even if you still aren’t my god, Starhawk.” Uva smirked slightly. “But perhaps I can muster up room to have a second favorite.”

  Thus, a rare joke from the Umbral earned an even rarer laugh from a god she'd never asked to serve.

  As the words left her, she felt something else cracking beneath her left arm. A spider's palp sprouted free. It also had patches of pale, glossy skin. Uva didn't want to look down at the left side of her body; she didn't want to behold what changes were taking place. But curiosity and compulsion overcame her discipline, and she lowered her head.

  She lowered her head to see a nightmarish replica of herself staring back. It looked like a mingling between her and a Weaveress, but also something more. There were too many limbs, too many wings, too many eyes on her face. More than that. There were too many colors. Brilliant, beautiful colors that belonged to the Dreamtaker's domain.

  "Not long," the Hatchling whispered. "Not long. One feeds off the other. One remains. Want to taste you, want to be you. Will be you."

  "Don't be so certain," Uva said through clenched teeth. "Perhaps it is I who will eat you instead."

  "No, no," the Hatchling replied. "Gave away too much of yourself. Gave away to protect the others. But now, now invasion, it's almost complete. Preserve Blackedge. Sold your own soul. Tragic. Won't make the same mistake. Won't."

  "Pathetic," Uva whispered under her breath. "I once assumed you were meant to be a being born from my flesh, but now I see that's just a lie, a delusion, for something so weak, so cowardly to be birthed from me. I reject you. I reject your very existence."

  The Hatchling chittered like an agitated insect. "Desperate to die, to feed yourself, to thrive. But I will not be the same. I will not. I will live, I will grow, I will climb. Will become. Will become more. It's fated. It has happened. It will happen."

  But Uva had been doing something else in the meantime. As she delved into the minds of the Fingerlings, so too did she gain glimpses from the Eldest, from how the Eldritch God spoke and from how the Hatchling of Metamorphosis yearned to be. It saw the future in wavelengths, in imprints of what was likely to happen. It saw, and it tried to travel along these waves to ride the riptide of strife and possibility.

  As such, the past didn't exist so much for the Eldest; instead, the future and present were intermingled at times, making it hard to judge what was happening when. However, on top of that, she tasted one thing that connected the Eldest and the Hatchling to her human cognition. One point of fear that bridged them. Something engendered into all creatures by the System's hand. Fear of non-existence. The Hatchling yearned to be, yearned to remain, and would do anything to ensure that.

  Up to and including abandoning Blackedge to its fate, if it meant saving itself. But the poor creature was near-sighted. It refused to acknowledge the Starhawk. It thought it could fool the god. But Uva and the Ascendant had already talked about this, even as the Eldest raged. Uva didn't want to die. She didn't want to fade from existence. But if her position was usurped, if she was consumed from within, then the Starhawk would deliver a final coup de grace on her Path. If she wasn't going to make it out of this, if Blackedge wasn't going to be saved, then the thing meant to be born from her skills, from her very being, would serve as a final ember amidst the ruins of this forsaken town.

  Sister Uva Mettabon endeavored to be nothing if not neat. No loose ends.

  A spasm of mental agony pulled her attention back to the Fingerling assault. A massive beam of concentrated retro-continuity tore through her strands. A dozen Indexes were firing at the same time, cleaving through the remains of their trapped kindred. Bits of blackened matter twisted and writhed in the world, expanding and bubbling until new eyes and vortexes grew along their sides. The Fingerlings regenerated eventually. Such was the Stranger's will. But when they re-grew, they began as Pinkies once more. Scattered. Reduced. Not nearly a threat, but now there was a gaping wound in her nest. A wound that revealed what was inside, and a flood of Recollectors and Pinkies charged in, seeking to flood the core of Blackedge and devour the town from within.

  They thrust forward, cruel digits plunging into an open wound. And then they were severed, dismembered as exploding shrapnel ripped through them. Pieces of drifting Fingerlings filled the space once more as a counter-rush of Aberrant Fractals tore across reality. Aberrant Fractals further enhanced by Eldritch Skill Evolutions. Uva saw through them, was partially connected to them as well. She guided them using her many mental instances. She shredded geometry and Eldritch bio-matter alike. And the war went on.

  Blasts of Cryokinetic stillness propelled the Aberrant Fractals out of shrapnel upon the moment of their destruction. The world became an ocean, blackened by blood and mutilated debris.

  "Roland," Uva whispered, "It will be soon. The Metamorphosis.”

  The Town Lord looked upon her, and his face was a mask of shame and pain. He reacted like his god in so many ways. Uva wondered in the depths of her mind if the Starhawk chose more than just an Avatar when it came to Roland. Perhaps the Starhawk was seeking a successor as well.

  Uva scoffed quietly. "Enough. Do not make that face at me, Roland. We both know that this was a possible outcome. We are prepared for this. You must assume your role as Avatar once more. It might kill you as well, but at least it would buy the town a little bit more time. Just a bit more time."

  Beyond the town, the struggle ended. The Aberrant Fractals cut and tore, but there weren't enough. There would never be enough to fill the Stranger's domain. A chain of golden detonations erupted around Uva's fraying threads. Recollectors were spending their past instances to overload her mana. With every death, she felt a bit more strain grow in the back of her skull. It was like her brain was fracturing from within. There was a limit to how much she could channel, even with her ongoing Metamorphosis, even with the Starhawk's power, even with the Dreamtaker sustaining the bulk of the Divine Mana.

  Not long now, she thought to herself, not long at all.