279 (II)

  Chrysalis [I]

  His fingers left trails of Animancy in the air, and he began shaping soft, subtle spells that looked so fragile they nearly broke apart before Adam's gaze. A spell sank into the Hatchling's being, and it began to radiate a bright series of colors—ones that twisted and writhed with animated movement, almost as if it were a living thing.

  “No… What have you done? What are you doing to me… Will see you all claimed for this. Claimed!” the Eldest seethed. The air around the Hatchling seemed to wither and wilt like burning paper. "You, Valor Thann. You are meant to be broken. You are meant to be scattered. Udraal shattered you…"

  "Yet he could not kill me, just as I could not kill him," Valor tutted mockingly, chastising himself and his son for a shared sin. "And so the mistake continues. Very unfortunate for you, O Eldest. What did I tell you three hundred forty-eight years ago when I carved your offspring free? When I kept it in an Animancy core for the next hundred years, testing all manner of experiments and Animantic spells upon your very being? What did I tell you about intruding into my world?"

  Before the Eldest could respond, Shiv let out a loud rasp, and the Hatchling and Uva responded in kind.

  "What the fuck is happening?" Rose hissed under her breath.

  "Oh, don't worry. Things are going according to plan. Mostly, I think." Hymn side-eyed Shiv. "Actually, I think I need to intervene on the Hatchling's behalf—which is something I didn't expect to say at all."

  Adam sputtered. "What do you mean you need to intervene on this thing’s behalf?"

  Hymn smacked his lips. "I mean, we still need to have the creature rip its mind out of Shiv back into its own body so it can resist the Fingerling's metamorphosis. If the Stranger overtakes the Eldest, then Uva is lost to the Stranger. Regardless, I need them both to exhaust themselves. Right now, I think that the Hatchling bit off a bit more than it can chew when it tapped into Shiv's worst memories. It's currently screaming. And he seems to be laughing at how pathetic it is."

  With that revelation, Valor and Adam both threw their heads back and barked a laugh. A laugh that sounded suspiciously like Roland’s. Roland shot both of them a surprised look.

  "Fucking Deathless bastard," Adam breathed.

  Roland’s surprise grew three times the very moment the curse left Adam’s mouth. Rose, meanwhile, muttered something about her bloodline proving true.

  Valor smiled. "Oh, Eldest, you poor, stupid creature. This one was never meant to be your prey. Quite the opposite, if I am to guess my son's intentions behind creating the Deathless. But the impending loss of your Hatchling will be a secondary concern. I have returned, and I am here to remind you, as I have reminded the Stranger, why Integrated Earth is beyond your grasp."

  The air around the Hatchling curdled. The colors that it emitted turned blacker and sour, darker than anything Adam could fully perceive. Just looking at it made the Gate Lord feel sick, but Valor was unaffected.

  "You cannot kill me, Valor Thann," the Eldest declared. "You cannot end me. You cannot break me through pain or torment. There is no anguish that will leave me changed. I am immutable, I am inexorable. You can only stymie me, you can only delay."

  "Can I, now?" Valor asked. "Or can I infuse you with more of the System's mana? Can I perhaps inflict you with the inverted metamorphosis that you have inflicted on so many others? How many Hatchlings, after all, are forced to bear the burden of Human Skills, dominant Skills, Skills that are bound to laws and patterns? I cannot kill you, yes, not until the System truly reduces your kind to little more than beasts and individuals. But I can cage you. I can make you less than what you were. I can turn your desire to colonize all there is the opposite way around. Now, I'm going to strike a deal with you. Similar to the deal you struck with the girl. Either you submit to her will, give your power unto her, and remain in existence, or be subsumed and suffer my grand humiliation. And after that, I will find another vessel that you are trying to corrupt. I will find another one of your Hatchlings. And I will not slay it. I will break it. I will keep you caged in misery and misfortune, and I will make you endure inside that vessel. No matter what you do to kill it, I will make it endure, and I will inflict every atrocity I can recall upon it."

  And Valor laughed coldly. It was like the harsh wind of a bitter winter. "And I can remember a great deal now. So very much more compared to the fragment I was before. You have a choice to make, Eldest. I will let you think you have until the mind of your Hatchling returns to this body to decide. After that, I tilt the scales in favor of the Stranger. And you already know what he will decide."

  Adam never knew colors could flinch, never knew the air could quiver. But the Eldest did flinch, it did quiver, and it did fall silent—the kind that betrayed one's deepest fear.

  ***

  Shiv didn't really like getting his mind broken. Compared to a ruined body, a broken mind was more of a pause. Death, he could come back from immediately if he had the source of vitality, but the collapse of his consciousness? That was a slow process of regeneration. When the Jealousy broke his mind in their fight at Theborn, it took him hours to come back. And the hours thereafter, he couldn't remember who he was or even what he was. He escaped purely by happenstance and instinct, and it took a few hours longer and making a meal out of said Jealousy for his neuro-regeneration to be complete.

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  Later on, his mind was broken again when he faced the Recollector. That was a more painful experience. Downright torturous in all regards. His soul was ribboned and violated from within. His body was mutated and twisted like a thing of clay. His mind was shattered over and over. And he was driven to the point of misery and madness. Yet... he never stayed there. He constantly crawled back. But there he'd only been capable of recovering so fast because Uva started nudging the bits of his mind back together.

  In the present, the Hatchling mimicked its host. It began putting Shiv back together. Instead of trying to force its way out of the ruinous debris of his psyche, it connected memory to memory, thought to thought, reshaping him until a faint wholeness of his self returned.

  Shiv found himself lying amidst ruins, a shattered representation of Weave. It was like the entire city, no, the world, the very air itself, was made from broken fractals of glass. Within that glass were the Hatchlings. They reached across with strands connected to their wings, but the strands also had someone hiding within their vibrations—faint outlines of various Uvas pressed together and trying to break free. They reached out for Shiv. A few of them even brushed their fingers against him, but their presence never stayed. They could never truly connect to him, not with so many layers of Psychomantic insulation preventing her full release.

  "U-uva?" Shiv slurred.

  "Shiv." Her voice echoed in from all sides as a chorus.

  Even more of the strands were gliding in now. They started attaching Shiv's arm back to him, stitching it back onto his body. He realized that he was in pieces too, no less shattered than the entire mindscape. The Hatchling said nothing. Its eight eyes were focused intently on him, but as it devoted its concentration to the task of reconstructing his being, it no longer had so much sway over Uva herself.

  And she tried to take advantage of that. Some of the strings began to vibrate, and a few twisted, shivering in deviance of all the other threads. The slight rebellions were quelled constantly by the Hatchling, cut low with a scream-inducing surge of malicious intent. The Uvas were then pressed back into the silken threads themselves, but every now and again, their outlines would emerge, pushing free like vibrational ghosts greeting Shiv with renewed determination, dauntless in their attempts to escape.

  "I, uh," Shiv choked out, struggling to put his words together, "came down here to help save you."

  "Have you, now?" the many Uvas called out to him, a dry mockery in her voice. "I am very touched." There was no mockery there. It was all genuine, but weak, weary, and almost on the point of despair. "Was collapsing your own mind part of the plan? You’re using that same old strategy again? One must get new tricks, Deathless.”

  "Believe it or not," he replied, "you're gonna love it. I'm supposed to be some kind of fallen temple holding the Hatchling in place."

  "In place?" Uva asked, and now her doubts were slowly parting. An instance of her squeezed out between the silken threads and greeted Shiv. He grinned at her true form, and she gave him a soft and warm smirk back. A moment later, however, a clawed hand grasped her violently by the skull and pulled her back down beneath the waters to drown once more. That didn't stop Uva's other apparitions from their enduring defiance. "What are you trying to do?" Uva asked. "What is this plan?"

  "No more talk. Silent. Stop. Mine. My will over yours!" All the Hatchlings cried out with the Eldest’s voice from the fractals that held them, but the various instances of Uva resumed their rebellion, ignoring the creature that had consumed so much of her soul.

  Shiv elaborated on the strategy he wished to enact, and a scoff escaped the Umbral.

  "I see. Well… At first, this seemed like one of your mad strategies."

  "Why? Because it was built around the concept of self-destruction?"

  "Yes," Uva replied tersely.

  Shiv wanted to rebut that, but he couldn't find a proper argument. He realized that perhaps one too many of his plans relied on him dying and surprising someone, or blowing himself up in a horrible way, or self-harming to damage his enemy, or connecting his mind and then brutally traumatizing himself until his adversary's psychology collapsed first.

  "Yeah, alright, maybe my methods are a little bit messed up—and getting kind of old by this point. But this isn't me at all. This is all Hymn. And we're gonna get you out of here. We're gonna get you out, and then I'm going to crush this godsdamn thing beneath my heel for fucking daring to touch you in the first place."

  "I fear your wrath must come second to mine, dear brute," Uva said, her voice falling to a hateful growl. "For there is much I must repay the Eldest for. Much pain indeed. Additionally, I need my Skills back. I refuse to let this thing keep them."

  "You are MINE!" the Hatchlings shrieked in unison, and the Uva's were briefly silenced once more.

  After a few moments, the Uvas grew animated again. But Uva didn't respond immediately. Instead, she turned the outlines of her person, staring back along the extending strands. All of Shiv was practically back together now. Soon he would be whole, and it would try to recede, to pull itself away from him.

  "No," Uva said resolutely. "You will be mine, however. And when I see you, when I reclaim my soul, I will teach you a lesson about delving within a Psychomancer. I will reduce you to nothing but a thing, an object, less than a slave, less than a pet. Less than the worst the System would have ever done to your parent."

  Shiv found himself grinning. Uva’s sheer viciousness was always a pleasure to behold.

  As a small piece of Shiv's chest was shoved back into place, all that remained was a glinting shard that comprised a portion of his cheek and his left eye. It was drawn over. Their time was coming to a close, and when he surfaced, it would be the moment of truth. The moment to see if they could usurp the Hatchling's metamorphosis with another. To see if they could tear it out of Uva or if she could overcome it somehow.

  But before the Hatchling was to depart, Uva turned and looked at Shiv. "Wait. The others. Blackedge. Did they escape?"

  Shiv smiled. "Yeah. You saved them. You're a Pathbearer to the core, sweetheart. Maybe the Starhawk should consider taking you on as a long-term Avatar instead of Roland."

  Uva let out a laugh. "Maybe. But I think I will remain his second favorite, or at least a consideration in the future. Anyway, this might be good for relations between Weave and the surface, if there are relations to maintain in the future at all."

  "I think there will be." Shiv smirked. "I think there will be—"

  Before he could finish, the last piece slid into place, and the binding pressure connecting him to the Hatchling broke apart. Immediately, the nightmarish creature receded, pulling its strands away and retreating to its own body, far too late to stop what was already in motion.

  Uva was going to transform. But what emerged from the cocoon was no longer something the Eldest could sculpt.