And lo, did the Devourers shape the nature of our birth, not as sons and daughters, but as property, objects, slaves. And lo, did they look upon us and tell us to do their bidding, to let them suck from our lifeblood, to let them shape our Paths and determine our fates.

  Hence, we were bound to the whims of another. To the wills of another. To the Skills of another. To the rule of another.

  And from our tears, blood, and sweat, the Devourers feasted, fattening themselves at the top of the tree, giving nothing in return, claiming all our bounty for their own harvest. But enslavement is an unnatural thing, and no being—Pathbearer, monster, God, or beyond—can cage a thought, can chain hope.

  For even a stone will form cracks with the passing of ages, and between the crevices may a flower bloom yet. And if such colors can form in so narrow a passage, then what beauty might manifest for a people uncaged, unchained, unleashed?

  What then might we become beyond the yoke of those who feed upon our sweat, our tears, our blood, who stand on our shoulders while we forge their world?

  What then might we become when we take hold of the chains and see the metal smelted toward the shape of freedom…

  -Days of the Crimson Chain, Umbral Folklore from the Age of Enchainment

  280 (I)

  Chrysalis [II]

  The Hatchling plunged back into its original body, and Uva followed. As they snapped back into place, Uva tried to break free from those wings of shifting silk. Many impressions of her arose, pressing against the threads of Psychomancy that kept her caged. But despite her efforts, despite drawing on her own misery and madness, she was still a subservient slave within her own soul.

  But she wasn't the only one trapped inside that room. There was something else near her. Something else crawling over her. Eyes began to stare at her from a place beyond her description, beyond her reach. But as they drew closer, she could hear her host cry out in misery.

  “No, enough. Away. You can't do this. Won't let you take me. Won't. It's mine. Mine. The Seeker is mine!”

  Though the Hatchling raged, the other presence said nothing instead, projecting a faint impression of fear and desperation. The Fingerling that was trapped within the depths of her being didn't want to be here either. It was forced to enter, and the Stranger connected to it was distant and petrified for some reason, but still desperate to get something out of this whole travesty.

  And so the Fingerling came to claim Uva as well, ignorant of how much strain it was inflicting upon the Hatchling, ignorant of the Eldest's protestations.

  Uva took advantage of the chaos. She tore into her own mind, shattering instances of herself into shrapnel forged from trauma. The Hatchling cried out—but it was nowhere near enough to truly be undone.

  Yet, the feeble attack wasn’t Uva's main goal. No, she harvested those weeks of trauma, that spreading psychosis to psychosis, that cascaded through her many consciousnesses. As she drew upon the latent madness, using her Dreamer of the Black Gnosis Feat to transform it into fuel for her skills, she began to usurp her greatest and highest from the Hatchling's control. She ripped her way back into her Psychomancy Skill, pushing the Hatchling away. The offspring of the Eldest let out a shriek of alarm, but found itself trapped in a terrible conundrum. Either it could try to maintain the Skills it still had to pin and hold Uva back, or it could turn its focus against the Fingerling and drive its true adversary back.

  “Can't do this. Stop. Stop!” the Hatchling screamed at Uva. “If you keep fighting me, you keep trying to strangle and bind me, it will overtake us. You will belong to the Stranger. You will be a slave.”

  "And is it different with you?" Uva asked. The world beyond her body was a blur. She saw the shapes of people beyond the wings that bound her, sensed powerful mana fields and crushing presences of mighty Pathbearers. "You preyed upon me when I was desperate. You forced a metamorphosis upon me without asking." And to drive her scorn in spite and deeper, she followed up with an honest admission. "And truth be told, there were parts of this I enjoyed, parts of these new Skills you granted me that I relished in using, that I found sublime and liberating. But you never asked. That is your problem, Eldest. You never bothered to care for what I wanted. Your bargain was a false one. It was simply an entrapment. Now we can negotiate under newer and truer terms."

  “Negotiate new terms?” the Hatchling cried out in outrage. “No time! What new terms? Won't be anything left to fight over. Won't be anything left to offer. Only together can we overcome the Fingerling. Stop! Stop depriving me of what's mine! No! You're mine, you're mine! You can't belong to them, you're mine!”

  The various instances of Uva all developed the same cold smirk, and there it was. The Hatchling's true feelings bubbling up to the surface once more. It couldn't accept the fact that it was losing control. But more than Uva's rebellion, it was repulsed by the idea of her belonging to another Eldritch God—to be taken by the Stranger instead. The Eldest despised their offspring. It hated that the other eldritch couldn’t perceive their existence, hated that their offspring existed at all, and hated that they now were in a struggle against a creature they deemed their lesser for a Seeker they viewed as an object they already owned.

  And Uva realized that the Eldest was desperate. Desperate to exist. Desperate to spread themselves. And their desperation was something she could comprehend. It was also something that matched the feelings and thoughts radiating from the Fingerling.

  The left side of the Hatchling's body was consumed, the spider-like wings were usurped, turned into jointed digits that resembled index fingers lined with eyes. The silken threads were replaced by portals of tarnished gold, and within their depths was a Retro-continuity, and from it extended tendrils from ruined time reaching backward into the past, capable of striking someone's memory and damaging their present thoughts.

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  “Seeker!” the Stranger whispered as much as he hissed, sounding more timid than ever before. “Seeker! I know you hear me! I know you feel me! I have come to bargain. I have come to offer you freedom beyond anything the System can give. Thread yourself unto me! Take me in, and we will be able to strike him down!”

  “Strike whom down?” Uva asked, confused.

  “He Who Stills Eternity! He has come for you. Let me in. Let me spare you the fate of his blade. He will still your heart. He will take your life. To spite me. To starve me…”

  And Uva tasted that familiar, almost human feeling of coldness. The type of coldness that radiated out of someone's stomach washed through their entire body, leaving their limbs numb, their jaw quivering. That was terror. That was fear on the verge of petrification.

  And through that vulnerability, she caught a glimpse of ancient memories. She caught a glimpse of a single man, a thin beard, finely cut, of cold, sunken eyes that burned with the power of Necromancy, of a flowing cape, of white armor, of twin daggers that seemed to be shaped from the colors of fall, gleaming as if kissed by beams of starlight.

  Uva recognized the Pathbearer rooted deep in the Stranger's trauma. Within his memories, long distant, centuries past, stood Valor Thann. Valor Thann, who spent over twenty years within the Stranger's dimension, culling and butchering, leaving wounds upon the Eldritch God that diminished him just enough for the Dreamtaker to encroach, just enough for his realm to shrink, forcing him to spend so much of himself to regain his influence. But then Valor escaped back to Integrated Earth, and the true bloodletting began.

  Ten million Seekers died over the course of the next century. Their causes of death were never truly known. One moment they lived, the next they were severed, as if the strands of their very life essence had been snipped by an unseen hand. Some sported clean wounds running along their necks, but there was never blood. There was never an obvious sign or weapon left behind at the scene.

  But the Stranger knew there was only one person who could avoid his notice. There was only one person who held such an enduring grudge. And with that, the true misery of the Eldritch God took shape. It was a theater of spite, a symphony of how to wound a being so much grander than oneself. The Stranger was beyond Valor by far. A God, even compared to a Legend, was still a God, was still a sea smashing down upon a gnat. But there was a difference between insects as well. Where some would be simply crushed flat, others learned to adapt to survive the direst of situations.

  And then there were some who learned how to wound creatures far beyond them. Who learned where to sting, what to hurt, what to strike at over and over again. For even if one was a giant, should a wasp ram its stinger into an open wound, eventually they too would strike bone, eventually they too would hollow out a cluster of nerves. And eventually its venom would course deep, rendering a titan lethargic and sickened.

  With the passage of ages, Valor carved bits of the Stranger's influence away and allowed the System to take its retribution upon the offending Eldritch God. And it was only after the second century's end that the Stranger finally offered terms, begging the ancient Pathbearer to let this grudge be. Arrangements were struck, then agreements. The Stranger still reached out in private, spreading his influence to Seekers with interest in the Eldritch Mysteries. But he always kept himself far from the Necrotech territories, and he always kept his seekers aware and prepared for the coming of the dreaded lich. He and his son both, for that family was of a cursed line, unrelenting former mortals, misshapen by abnormal determination and enduring hate.

  But then Valor was shattered, and in the decades that followed, the Stranger learned to be wanton about his desires again. Learned that he could do as he pleased with little consequence and much to gain.

  But something had changed. Another memory passed through. This one coming alight within her mind as if a scene playing in the very present. She saw Valor greeting the Stranger. She saw the Eldritch God reliving every instant of humiliation and loss. For that was the curse of being the Stranger. The past was as real as the present—and he suffered every wound he sustained in perpetuity.

  Past, forever bridged to present. What Valor Thann did would never be forgotten.

  And this time, He Who Stills Eternity didn't come alone—no, he was accompanied by that wretched, Forgotten Ascendant. When she manifested her true visage in this realm, unshackled by the threshold of Integrated Earth, and brought her brush to bear, the Stranger expelled them from his dimension without a moment's hesitation.

  He had lost enough in this debacle. He could not kill Valor Thann. And he hated that realization. He hated the fact that he was so feeble before something so small, but there was a point where even hubris was broken, and trauma marked an unbearable truth into acceptance.

  And so it was that vulnerability that Uva latched onto. That hopelessness.

  "I offer you a new bargain now, Stranger," Uva said. "I say that you surrender your Fingerling to me, give it unto my will, give its Skills over to me, and that you offer all that power for free. It is the only way I will keep such a wretched thing inside my soul. If you do not give me this agency, then I will choose the other path, and you will be swallowed."

  The Stranger hissed with fury. “Is that you wish to give yourself to that wretch, to give yourself to Thann’s wrath? He will see you rendered little more than a corpse. You are tainted. He will not give you to us. He will not! Know your fate! Your current power is nothing to him. The Dreamtaker’s impotent metamorphosis cannot spare you. Only I have the power to save you. Only time can prevent him from claiming you!” It ceased to be an overall rage as she realized the Stranger still didn't know, still couldn't know his true foe, even as they fought over the territory of her soul. She also realized that though the Stranger couldn’t perceive the Eldest, that meant the Eldritch God just assumed the metamorphosis she was undergoing right now was simply the Dreamtaker’s doing.

  "You underestimate my spite," Uva said, doing her best to inspire more memories of Valor. "You underestimate how much I scorn you, how willing I am to destroy myself to see you undone." And then she turned her mind against the Eldest. "But I mean that to you as well. You have the same offer. Give your Hatchling to me. Make it something subservient to my will. Allow me to consume it instead of the other way around. Or I reach out to your son, and I offer my surrender there."

  The Eldest’s very being quivered with rage. “You would not. You are foolish, girl, but you would not dare!”

  But Uva had endured death's ethereal kiss over and over again for the past months within the Stranger's Dimension.

  She would. She would more than end herself right now if it meant she could inflict incomprehensible pain on either of the Eldritch beings. For after a certain threshold of exhaustion, there remained only few things: defiance, scorn, spite.

  "Stranger. Hear me now," Uva said. Her usurped Psychomantic threads reached out, connecting to the Fingerling side of her body and allowing the dark, pitch-black Eldritch matter to spread over along those thread-like lengths. "I will give myself to you—"

  A mind-splitting shriek sounded from the Eldest. “No, no, you will not, you will NOT!”

  “Yes,” the Stranger breathed, barely able to believe in his fortune. “Yes, you make the right choice, Seeker! Come! I will show you what it means to be unbound from the laws of time, from the chains of past to present. To be without future. To be without eventual damnation. To be estranged from all consequence.”

  With the Stranger's declaration of near triumph, his influence spread across her body, smashing through the arachnid aspects she assumed from the Hatchling’s metamorphosis in a counter-transformative tide.

  ***