You have made a mistake, one that will cost you. You've come to our world thinking that you are unknowable and that we are vulnerable. Pray, I give you this: there are many weak-minded among the people. There are many who will never be able to stride beyond the confines of victimhood—those that will always be cattle, the blood whetting your appetite, the flesh filling your ravenous guts. Yet there are those who stand as more. And so you fail to know your true enemy. You've assumed all of us victims, and now, in attempting to claim me as a slave, I will place you in that category myself.

  What I have inflicted upon you, Stranger, is not a wound of the flesh, but of the soul. You will not be able to find me. I am within your dimension, I stand in your shadows, I nest in your flesh. I am here—beneath and beyond your notice. I am less than a flea. But that is just the thing: the most dangerous plagues are unseen; the worst foes unknown.

  Let me tell you a truth. Let me give you portents of your future. I am going to cut pieces away from you, day after day, month after month. I will drive pain into your awareness until you learn what the word entails. Until you understand that you are never to come for me or anyone I am associated with. I will see you frayed at the edges. Until the other eldritch gods breach your barriers and consume you bit by bit. I will see you shrunken. I will see you reduced. I will see you suffer things you could not imagine for the simple insult of viewing me the same as all your Seekers and slaves.

  I am Valor Thann. I have been here a thousand years before. I will be here for a thousand years to come. Eternity is not your gift to squander, but my mercy to give. You think you are unkillable? I have seen gods die. You think you are beyond consequence? Then why do you scream? Why do you suffer? Why are you unable to strike me down, for all your power, for all your immensity?

  Struggle and wail; curse and rage; nothing you do will matter. I am Unseen, Unheard, Unknown, unless I will it to be otherwise. I will butcher and bleed you at my whim and will, and you will not even know how.

  There is no stopping what is to come. This is fact in progress. This is history happening upon you. You think your triumph inevitable. I am here to show you that inevitability is me. Muster your power. Rage. Rage against what you cannot see, what you cannot sense, what you cannot find. Rage and know that for all your mana, for all your power, for all that you are—a monstrosity dwarfing entire worlds—you will never be able to find me; you will never be able to stop me from bleeding you at a whim.

  You haven’t the Skill to match mine. What measure is a gnat to a giant? A valid question, perhaps. But what use is a giant before a cancer? You should never have come for my son, Stranger. You should never have offended me. You should have never touched my world.

  Now, you learn at my hand. I name you disciple in this ritual of humility, and I will remind you that there are those whom even the gods should never trespass.

  -Valor Thann

  275 (I)

  Liberation [V]

  Adam surged forward with a desperate snarl. He pushed himself against the eldritch colors, even as they glanced across his mind like hooked blades catching on naked flesh. He couldn't even see the top of the Perch anymore, but he still remembered where it was. He could feel the very nexus of the unnatural mana spilling forth.

  He wasn't too late. He wasn't. He refused to be too late. Too late for Uva, for his family, for everyone still left in Blackedge. He refused. The System had taken too much from him already.

  And within that whirlwind of impossible gradients, a single color defied all others. A single dawn rose once more—before the eldritch, despite the eldritch. A dawn of azure bright, of the promise of another tomorrow, of the twilight at a hard day's end. And though the color moves of metamorphosis were blinding and bright, that didn't make Adam Arrow's Shattered Star any dimmer.

  His wings flared bright as he slammed into walls, burst through parting glass, and knocked structural supports aside before he shifted into his hydrokinetic form. Splashing into the Perch's interior, he groped blindly, using sound more than sight, trying to find where Uva was.

  "Uva!" Adam cried aloud. “Where are you? Uva?”

  He couldn't hear her heartbeat, couldn't feel her blood circulating through her body. There was so much ambient noise, so much distant sound that blocked his clarity. And the color—the color made his mind whirl. It was hard to focus, hard to remain in the present. He was drowning psychologically, magically, even physically. There was a weight pressing against him, and his wings were straining before the oncoming tide. He wasn't sure where Gone was anymore. The rest of the evacuation party was missing.

  He didn't have time to wait. He reached out blindly, expanding his form in lapping waves. Soon he felt himself bumping against downed bodies, washing over debris, dragging furniture away from the center of the room, and pulling it against the far walls. At the center of the tower was a single unmoving figure, a figure that was the source of all the eldritch mana. A figure that was staring out at him, that was striding toward him, each step purposeful, each step bringing them closer.

  The horrifying resplendence of Uva's eldritch mana began to dim for the first time. It was Adam's Shattered Star that painted the ambient coloration of the room. Everything was a soft azure twilight, bathed in the soothing balm of a setting sun. And he saw her. Her form was in shadow at first, almost a mirage, but truer than illusion. She drew closer, and he recognized her sharp chin, the ever-shifting color within her eyes.

  The raging waters that formed Adam's body stilled as he prepared to embrace her.

  "Adam," she breathed. Her voice was weak and ragged, less than a whisper, but still loud enough for him to hear. And this close, he could feel her heartbeat thumping fast, so fast that he was afraid it might burst within her chest. "Adam, please…"

  He wrapped his fluid limbs around her, taking her weight into his hands. "It's alright. I have you now. I have—"

  And then he saw something else. Something far grander and larger looming behind Uva, attached to her, fused to her, sprouting out from her like a tumor that had become something so much more, something so much worse.

  Adam's mind went blank. He struggled to process what he was seeing. He moved reflexively, doing all he could to create distance between him and the horrific abomination that was wearing his friend. He made it less than half a meter before something speared into his back. His armor’s Magical Resistance buckled and cracked as an injection of unnatural cold and temporally stilling mana washed over him, freezing him in place. The world around him was silenced. He felt himself isolated, sealed within a cage of unnatural ice. The world wasn't just cold; it was unmoving. Everything was frozen: space, time, everything.

  But he could still see from within this prison. His Shattered Star dimmed, and before him came a thing that made the ape nested deep within Adam's ancestral biology scream and thrash.

  Uva's head hung limply, little more than a skin tag pointing out from the right arm of the horror’s body. Everything beneath her neck had been assimilated. Her bones were practically poking out from her shallow skin, and her features were worn beyond measure. She was withered; she was still being drained. Soon, there would be no more of her. The rest of her body had transformed into something terrible. Into something beautiful.

  It was painted with such mesmerizing colors that Adam couldn't help but be enchanted by—how they changed, how they flowed. Glowing like glossy peacock feathers, hues and gradients beyond his description mended his mind, yet they commanded him to love, and love deep. It was a beast of three parts, the bulk of it resembling Uva back when she was still an Umbral. The outline of her humanoid form revealed itself, but it was taller than she was—thinner, gaunter, grander. It was practically twice her size and moved with a grace that put hers to shame.

  Its other characteristics, however, were not humanoid at all. Instead, it was something harvested from a Weaveress. A sprawl of spider-like limbs extended out from her back. There were twelve of them in total, each one a length of temporally altered frost and natural chitin. The spider-like appendages were all connected to one another, the space between them filled with glowing pools of mana.

  Things swam within those pools: faces that resembled Uva. Faces screaming. Faces crying. Faces trapped. They were drowning beneath colored surfaces, colors that seemed to boil the Umbral's very consciousness. And they all writhed, clawing and pushing at the eldritch membrane, trying to get out. But they couldn't.

  There were other things within the pools. Other eyes that gleamed bright. Feathered serpents that slithered and snaked underneath all of Uva's separated consciousnesses. And Adam realized with wordless horror that they weren't pools at all. Instead, they were finely woven strands of Psychomancy fused together to become wasp wings.

  And that brought him to the monstrosity's lower body. The stinger was a thing made from fractured glass. Drifting fractals cleaved through the air, distorting space and parting the geometries of the world itself. It was like beholding a constellation drawn close, a constellation that shifted the space between where things were, that created a tip that hurt to look at, that cut your eyes when you beheld it.

  And that was the Hatchling. That was the Eldest’s child, the parasite they'd embedded within Uva. That was what approached Adam with ravenous intent.

  The worst thing about the Hatchling was that it still had Uva's face. It looked just like her when she was healthy, when she was hale, yet its eyes were brighter, and it had more than one. Eight blinking eyeballs dotted her skull, and each of them held promise—promise of malice and hunger. And finally, there were the fractal palps that jutted out from her mouth, and the rows of gleaming teeth made from ice laying within, perfect to swallow, perfect to cage, perfect to freeze the prey that went down her throat to savor it as long as she wanted in a frozen instance of time until she was sated, until she grew bored of these predatory pleasures.

  "Finally, you're here. You've come to me, Adam." The creature spoke using Uva's voice, but there was a reverberation afterward, a slight hiss of something else, and a faint echo of screams.

  Screams that carried Uva's actual thoughts. “Run, Adam! Run, please! I'm sorry—I'm not strong enough. I tried. I tried. I tried! Composer, help me, please. Please, Lady Arachnae, help me…”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  But her desperation was worth nothing. She was an instrument, a plaything of the Hatchling's whims now. And so was Adam. Where he was frozen in a stasis of halted time, the Hatching’s Psychomantic threads extended from the very fabric of its wings, and they wrapped around him. They drew him close. There was no more incandescence—and he suddenly noticed his mother and father were here too, just a few steps away. Both were still, Rose draped over Roland, as if she had flung herself upon his body in a futile attempt to protect him. Both of them were as if corpses on a battlefield, bodies blending with the debris.

  Adam didn't know if it was because he was trapped in this cage of frozen Chronomancy or if they were truly dead. He prayed it was the former, but the coldness of despair overtook the chill of unmoving time.

  He tried to look around, tried to find where Valor was, where everyone else was. But he was stuck. Unable to move. Unable to even blink. And in that moment, he was less a hawk preparing to sweep down on his enemy and more a flea trapped in the spider's web, unable to stop his death from approaching. Unable to do anything but face the monster that was certain to devour him.

  "No, no, stop," Uva begged hoarsely. "Let him go, just let him go. You already have me. You're already going to get everything you want. Is that not enough? Is that not enough?"

  The Hatchling stopped moving. It looked down. Adam remained suspended in midair, frozen but held firm by a dense weave of psychokinetic strands. For a moment, the faintest flickers of hope were kindled inside him. He thought that there was a chance, just the slightest chance, that the monster would let him go.

  And to his surprise, the Hatchling reached out and brushed Uva's face as if a parent would for a newborn infant. "Don't worry. It's okay. It is. It is the way things are. Never enough, never enough. But we don't hate you. We love you. We'll always be you, part of you, you and me, one. Eventually from two, one, but no other, no other."

  And its final words were a vicious, animalistic snarl that betrayed its hate, its distrust, its animosity toward the rest of existence. "No, we would breathe again," the Hatchling said, turning her face aside, giving her a small showing of decency. "Don't need to see this. We'll spare you the drama. This will be quick. We'll devour you. Need to devour you. Something Unique inside your soul, something special. Need to have it. Will have it. Will become. Will become. Will become!"

  By this point, the Hatchling no longer sounded like Uva. Instead, it was a reverberating thing of elemental force, like if thunder could speak, like if hunger was given a voice.

  It wove arms into being, forging them from the strands that made up its wings. Two hands took hold of Adam, pulling him closer, as if he were something precious. As if he were something divine. He wanted to scream. He wanted to rail against the System for how unfair everything was. Even after everything he'd been through, after all his sacrifice, after all everyone had sacrificed.

  It was too late for her and for Blackedge. What would happen if—

  No, Adam snarled internally. His Shattered Star flickered, struggling against the cessation of time. His will buckled under the oppressive weight of the eldritch magic, straining harder than ever before. Something cracked.

  A new Skill flickered before his eyes: Chronomancy. That would have been useful a long time ago. It was followed by a natural Magical Resistance Skill.

  Skill Gained: Chronomancy (Adept) 1

  Skill Gained: Magical Resistance (Initiate) 1

  No, Adam repeated mentally. He would refuse even if he died. Even if the System killed him, he would refuse to cross over to the other side. He would stay a specter, a hateful ghost. He would show Shiv the meaning of deathlessness and not stay here until this existence repaid him for everything it had taken.

  No, his mind snarled a third time, and with that, his Shattered Star flared bright. The frozen time that clutched him fractured down the middle, breaking like ice being heated by a ball of pure flame.

  The Shattered Star Unites 178 > 184

  The structure was destabilizing, and the Hatchling took a step back, surprised, awestruck, and slightly terrified, judging from its expression. "How? Impossible? No, not impossible. Unique Skill. Favorite son of the Hawk. Favorite son. Refused to die, soul burning. Burning before, because of the Undying One. Deathless abomination. We'll consume you, we'll take you. Your future will be mine, mine, all will be mine."

  Its palps twitched. It hesitated a final time, as if part of it was struggling against itself, and then Adam realized that it was Uva who was trying to hold the Hatchling back. Spectral arms, each one pale as marble, kissed by moonlight, clutched and pulled at the Hatchling's unnatural body. But her will was spent. Her Skills were consumed. Her soul was colonized. There was little more that Uva could do against the Hatchling than an arm could overrule a mind. The fact that she managed to struggle at all was an impossibility in of itself.

  The Hatchling sank and darted forward, preparing to bite down on Adam. Yet just as it trespassed between the space of reality that was frozen, that was encrusted in her stilling frost, it was greeted by Adam's Shattered Star for the first time. And its soul came alight as the full radiance and weight of his soul’s judgement befell it. The Hatchling screamed.

  Adam realized that it had never known pain before, and now, in its haste to devour him, it had found itself judged at the deepest level. Its soul was regarded by his as a malicious evil—something that needed to burn and be scoured to ash beneath the righteous dawn.

  Its focus scattered, and in that instant, a golden bolt of lightning slammed into the Hatching from the side. Gone tore into it, lashing and slicing and ripping like a whirlwind of claws and fury, thousands of cuts raining down in less than a second. Sparks flew out into the air and scattered across the room. The Hatchling was driven back, though no wounds appeared upon its body, its form condensed in a layer of frost and time.

  Adam crashed down on the ground, released from the eldritch being's unnatural hold.

  "Get up," a loud and gruff voice rumbled from behind him. Adam felt a strong hand reach around his torso, dragging him back to his feet. "Got no time to be kissing the ground, Gate Lord. Got us a monster to flatten."

  With that, the orc strode past Adam. He raised his massive club and prepared for a full swing.

  Meanwhile, Gone was a blurring form beyond Adam's ability to perceive. She waged a guerilla war alone against the Hatchling, striking her from all angles, unable to pierce through the stilling frost but keeping the Hatchling on the defensive, forming a crackling sphere of lightning around her with her movement alone.

  And then the rest of the evacuation team entered the fray. They crashed through the walls, widening the entry wound that Adam had made. The Culturist was the first among them. Beside him came the Educator and everyone else.

  "Wait!" Adam cried. "She's still alive. Uva is still alive! She’s still connected to the Hatching! Don't kill her!"

  As Adam shouted his plea, a slicing strand of Psychomancy glided through the walls, carving towards his head like a scythe.

  The Culturist accelerated so fast that he practically teleported, blinking from where he stood right next to Adam. He flashed gold as a temporal shell formed over him, and the orc parried the Psycho-Chronomantic strike with a raised arm—and then caught the strand between his massive hands. His muscles flexed, and he pulled on it as if a man playing tug of war. The Hatchling was wrenched off its feet. The stillness that it shrouded itself in—that unnatural Chronomancy—broke apart as it was yanked toward the orc's open-handed grasp. He seized it by the midsection, and it strained against him. The horrific creature lashed and struck, but the tendrils of mental mana, further infused by time-halting coldness, broke apart against the orc's Legendary Magical Resistance.

  "You," a new voice rumbled from within the Hatchling's body. This one was older, primordial, an echo from before time, and was filled with outrage.

  "Me," the Culturist replied with a vicious smirk. "Good to see you again, Eldest. I see that you found yourself a new vessel. I see that you haven't swallowed this one entirely either. She must have quite the soul."

  The Hatchling didn't respond with words. Instead, its eight eyes grew bright, each one flaring with incandescent colors—colors that had a leftover hint of divinity within them. A portal to the Dreamtaker's realm opened behind those glowing pits, and a flood of power poured forth, preparing to rip the orc asunder. The Culturist responded by widening his eyes as well. He threw his hood back, and a beam of spiraling energy, dense and fetid with the Stranger's colors, responded in kind. A clash unfolded between them. The world quivered, and an inky blackness poured free from reality as if pus being squeezed out of a wound.

  The Hatchling snarled in outrage. The Culturist simply enjoyed the struggle, reveling in this battle against the Eldest. There was history between them as well. History the orc was keen to revisit, for the sake of spite and dominance.

  But before a victor could be decided in their stalemate, the Educator stepped in, her brush glowing the faintest blue of Animancy. With a sharp stroke, she severed three of the Hatchling's wings, painting them away in a spray of glossy colors. The Hatchling's focus broke. An overwhelming wave of eldritch mana slammed into it, launching it back across the room, ripping it out from the Culturist's grasp. It didn't manage to get far. The orc blinked through space again, seizing the Eldest's nightmare before it could fully escape. Once more, it was pinned, this time down against the ground. Temporally stilling frost crawled over the Culturist's arms, but he shattered it with a rolling of his shoulders.

  It was a disgusting show of strength, of superiority. Bile licked at the back of Adam's throat as he realized how much stronger the orc was compared to him, how much more power the orc possessed. It was a vile realization, one that filled him with aggravation and frustration. But despite his personal animosity against the Culturist, he was glad to have him here now. He was glad because they needed someone to save Uva, and it couldn't be Adam alone.

  And so the Gate Lord lent his strength to the orc. His Shattered Star plunged forth, spewing a beam of azure radiance, and the Culturist briefly looked over his shoulder, surprised as Adam lent what strength he could to the orc's being. Adam bestowed his Commander’s Foresight Skill upon the Culturist, but the main boon the Shattered Star provided was a general enhancement of all the orc's Skills. His levels were climbing; he was growing dramatically stronger. Where he'd already been dominant against the Hatchling before, now he proved overwhelming and inexorable.

  Yet, the creature that was growing out of Uva's compromised soul wasn't out of options.

  Its stinger lashed and cleaved, striking against the Culturist's body, but leaving only the thinnest scratches upon his bone-plated armor. Flashes sparked into the air, flashes of blades deflecting the fractals. Adam realized it was that ghost of Valor fighting now, protecting the orc from true harm. In his hands were twin blades, both of them thin like needles and bright like pieces pulled free from starlight.

  Gone sped by, ripping a chunk of the Hatchling's face off. It let out a piercing shriek and then adapted its strategy. Instead of striking at the Culturist, pitting its strength directly against that of its adversary, its strands reached out, spilling wide until they came to a sudden jerking halt just as they slipped past the walls. It took less than a second for Adam to figure out what it was doing. It was reaching into the compromised Fingerlings that shrouded the town of Blackedge, the hive of eldritch biomass. The Fingerlings were still alive, albeit paralyzed mentally and temporally. Now, however, the puppeteering strings that Uva used to weave herself around someone's ego had been repurposed into an escape mechanism.

  "Stop her!" Adam cried aloud.

  He released a Veilpiercer, trying to distract the Hatchling. But it was fast, faster than he expected, and it moved as if fluid lightning. In a sudden instant, it burst apart in a mess of strands between the Culturist’s grasp, and only afterimages of Uva's trapped consciousnesses clawing at the air, reaching out for Adam, lingered—taunting him, fading thereafter. In an instant, the Hatchling was moving, and the town began to rumble and shake. A few of the Indexes she had compromised were beginning to rouse, were breaking free.

  The Culturist huffed. "How unlike you to flee, Eldest. Do you still fear me? Do you still dream of what I did to you, how I broke free? Did you not promise me that my future was yours as well? That my fate belonged to you? Is that a lie? Are you but a coward, Eldest of all Primordials?"

  There came a rumble outside, and the world shook as if swept by an uproar of turmoil. It was as if the earth itself was trying to rebel, trying to dash Blackedge free from existence. Adam found himself torn in two directions: to go after Uva, whatever form she took now, whatever she was trapped within—he guessed that it was one of the Indexes from how violently Blackedge was rattling—or stay. The Hatchling was doubtless trying to escape and blend in with the Fingerlings—and to finish consuming Uva.

  Adam couldn't allow that. He couldn't allow his friend to find herself lost to this nightmarish creature.

  But he also had a duty to his town, to his family. After so long, Blackedge's salvation was at hand. Even if it had come too late. So many had died. He should have been...

  Adam made up his mind. He cursed himself, but he made his choice. No longer did he hesitate.