Nurgle and Isengar in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Chapter 26: A gothic love song
Moho refuge, Lower crust, Confluence dimension
Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)
Nurgle, walking naked around the house again, swung gaily into the tastefully decorated flower garden where his friend, lover, and co-conspirator liked to eat breakfast. “Fancy meeting you here,” he joked, not for the first time. “Sleep well?”
“No.” Isengar was not in a particularly good mood. He might have slept just fine if he had wanted to, but he had stuff on his mind that did not go away.
“Still feeling guilty?”
“And alone, I suppose.”
“Touché. Like a beast with his horn.”
“You seem not to understand. That makes it worse.”
“Senga, I do understand. We have been through this so many times. I agree with you, we were wrong – it’s just that brooding over it will do no good. Especially not now that we have something important to take care of.”
“Just forget it and move on. But I don’t think I can do that.”
“I know.” Nurgle paused. “I get the feeling you want to go through it again, so just do it. Maybe it will help.”
Isengar sighed. “We held them back. For 5638 years, we held them back.”
“We did. Although maybe you should deduct a few years for the early period. We set up the Confluence, you know. That was us. Before it there was just the ancient world – not entirely a wonderful place. And I don’t think we held the world back much for the first century or so.”
“Let’s call it five and a half millennia, then. It might have been five and a half millennia of development and progress, but it wasn’t, was it?”
“With some exceptions, no. And it was our fault.”
“Imagine what this world might have been like, it if was not for us.”
“Actually, I find it hard to imagine something better than the Confluence Republic there is today. I’m not saying that’s to our credit, except maybe in the indirect and not praiseworthy sense that they learnt from our mistakes. But still, it turned out pretty well.”
“Despite our best efforts to hold it back.”
“Yes. We thought the alternative to our rule would be chaos. There is no way we could ever have imagined that the Confluence would turn into something as good as this after escaping our grasp.” Nurgle conjured up some breakfast while he spoke.
“We thought they needed us.”
“We did. And the truth was they just needed to get rid of us.”
“We’re the embodiment of tragic irony.”
“We are. But we did some good things along the way. Remember when the Demons attacked? We fought them and won. That was us.”
“They would have managed on their own, if we weren’t there to hold them back.”
“Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe if we had abdicated at that time, there would have been a return to the chaos of the ancient world instead of a thriving republic. Perhaps they were not ready yet.”
“I would have believed that once, but now I don’t.”
“I’m not asking you to believe in it, Senga. It’s just a possibility. Maybe we could have left them to themselves five millennia ago, and they would have turned it into something even better than the republic they have today. Or maybe they would have driven the whole thing off a cliffside. Who knows?”
Isengar sighed again. “Maybe you’re right, Nurg.”
Nurgle grinned. “I'm always right, except when I'm left. Or bluffing.”
“You’re a silly naked oaf, that’s what you are. And while the Confluence is looking good right now, five millennia of further progress might have turned it into something far beyond our imagination.”
“I would once have called that na?ve. Seeing how things are now, though, I think you’re probably right. But brooding over it and feeling miserable won’t undo the damage we did. The way forward is to do something useful. Come and look at the latest message I received.”
There was no particular need to go somewhere else in the house to look at Nurgle’s communications, but the two of them usually did their magical work from some very comfortable recliner chairs in their lounge. Isengar sighed and followed Nurgle there.
The Moho refuge was named after its location deep in the planet’s lower crust. Isengar and Nurgle constructed it about three millennia ago, back when they were awash in energy skimmed off from the ten billion Confluence citizens alive at the time. Telling absolutely no one, the two of them found a reasonably intact ancient-era mine shaft and started digging. It was tedious work, and they spent about a century finishing the thing. Along the way, they filled in the passage above them using the rock below, obfuscating everything very carefully so that none of the other Elders, or anyone else for that matter, would discover their secret hideout.
Having penetrated deep into the lower crust, they hollowed out a house-sized hole, made a thick protective layer of superstrong materials, and proceeded to furbish a pleasant home for themselves. Of course, there were plenty of things they needed to take care of, and they employed various magics to compensate for the pressure and the heat and to secure a supply of oxygen, which were the top three issues. While never, in those days, living in their refuge on a permanent basis, they sometimes travelled there for weekend getaways – always going by an indirect route that the others would find very hard to trace, should they attempt such a thing. When Ambrose was attacked on the day of the Revolution, Isengar and Soth responded by initiating a series of conveyance jumps, via carefully chosen stops designed to be untraceable, leading right into their Moho refuge.
Some would say that such a focus on self-preservation – abandoning their old companion to his fate to save their own asses – was perhaps not especially honorable, but the consensus among the Elders during the past millennium or so was that in the case of an attack, the most important thing was that some of the Elders should survive. Otherwise, it might be possible to take out the whole group of Elders with a single surprise attack, decapitating the Confluence and leaving it at the mercy of the hostile forces. Soth had done something similar, although he also made the effort to mount a counterattack, futile as that turned out to be.
Today, both Isengar and Nurgle were very grateful that they had abandoned Ambrose and let the Revolution succeed, but noble intentions did not play a part of their decision-making process at the time. As Nurgle liked to say, however, all that didn’t really matter – if you find yourself doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, just be happy about it.
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Nurgle had previously told Isengar how his conversation with the mysterious stranger(s) had started. When the Erd author’s book on the last days of the Elder regime gained widespread attention in the Confluence, Isengar and Nurgle had read it, and were as surprised as anyone to learn that simulation spaces might spontaneously emerge as magical dimensions. Having millennia of experience with traveling to such dimensions, the two of them had searched around, and eventually managed to identify an emerging dimension corresponding to one of their old simulations – Erd. Isengar lost interest in the whole thing soon thereafter, but Nurgle, being a little bored at the time, spent a while playing around with this dimension. One of the things he found was that he could manipulate the simulation by affecting the half-formed magical dimension. It was a one-way thing – he could affect the simulation via the emerging dimension, but apparently the dimension could only be affected by magic occurring spontaneously in the simulation (obviously, though, he could affect the dimension directly, by throwing magic right at it).
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Nurgle thought it was fun to leave little marks on the Erd simulation by affecting its corresponding dimension. He thought of it as a kind of graffiti, and went about it in rather whimsical ways, although he was careful to hide everything very carefully (while one could not trace the marks in the simulation back to his work, one could trace magics from the dimension in the normal fashion). His game was to leave little messages that were non-trivial to find, and which he expected would not, in fact, ever be found. For instance, he changed the value of pi a tiny bit in an area around the millionth decimal so that it spelled out an obscenity in the Hebrew language. And deep in the Mariana trench, he left a surprising whirl of water which served to encode a rude Japanese word for a certain sexual act. Those kinds of things. As he started to lose interest, however, he found that someone had responded to one of his little messages, basically by mirroring it with a corresponding obscenity.
Over the years, this initial exchange burgeoned into something like a conversation. The beauty of the exchange was that it was quite untraceable, as the effects on the dimension dissipated almost instantly even as the magic left a permanent mark – however insignificant – on the Erd simulation. In the simulation, it was a message chiseled in rock for all of posterity to see, although artfully hidden, while in the emerging dimension the message was entirely ephemeral and could not be traced back to Nurgle except by someone who knew exactly where and when he had cast it. Of course, the same was true for whoever he communicated with, about whom Nurgle knew nothing. Neither party had ever asked the other who they are or similar unpleasant questions; instead, they used their intermittent communiques to exchange views on more lighthearted matters such as their favorite weird Erd tradition and their taste in Erd pop culture – Nurgle liked the disco scene of the 1970s and Victorian-era British pornography; whoever he was talking to liked disaster movies and black metal.
Nurgle had no idea who the other party might be, although for a while he suspected Soth. Later he had stopped worrying about the issue altogether, accepting that he would never know. Identifying the other person’s messages was simplified by their practice of embedding spacetime coordinates for future messages into the present message – in effect, each message pinpointed the physical and temporal location of where the next message might be obtained. This setup was necessary for Nurgle to keep talking, since he no longer had other people’s energy to play around with and therefore could only perform limited searches in the Erd sim without spending energy he needed for other things.
From their comfy chairs in the lounge, Nurgle showed Isengar the latest message from their ostensive allies. While offering assistance, the allies basically suggested that Nurgle and Isengar could just fix the whole thing themselves.
“And you still have no idea who these people might be?” Isengar was skeptical of the whole endeavor.
“No. But consider it this way. Somebody – probably Soth – is attacking Erd. Whoever these guys are, they want to stop the attack. Don’t you also want to stop the attack?”
Isengar had a particular distaste for Soth, whom he had never really liked and who now continued his old project of holding things back – in this case, holding back a simulation that was maybe trying to emerge as a dimension (Isengar understood none of this and was not sure he really believed in it. But whatever). It was like Soth was a middle school bully whose old victim had now grown too big for him, so he picked on someone even smaller – a simulation, for fuck’s sake. Soth was everything Isengar hated about himself.
“Sure. But if we do this, we are basically attacking Soth.”
“We don’t know it’s him, actually. He certainly hasn’t told us anything and asked us to stay away.”
“Who else could it be?”
“Who knows? Maybe Soth is the guy I am talking to and the people attacking Erd are, you know, some disgruntled person from the Confluence, or demons. Maybe it’s Yeek.”
“Yeek and Raistlin? Seems likely.”
“The point is that we have plausible deniability. We’re not knowingly acting against Soth, we’re just defending Erd from unknown assailants.”
“While actually acting against Soth.”
“Yeah. Don’t you want to give him a little comeuppance?”
“I wouldn’t mind. But there is a part of me that does not care if it turns into a war, so I don’t know if I can trust myself.”
Nurgle might at this point have observed that there is a part of Isengar that does not care whether he lives or dies and would maybe prefer the latter, but he said nothing of the sort. Nurgle wanted his old chum to live on, partly because he liked him – or was that love, after all those years – and partly because Isengar was the only person he had in this world. The latter situation was mostly his own fault, of course – or perhaps he should say entirely his own fault – but anyway it was true. If he lost Isengar, he would be all on his own. Unless he wanted to team up with Soth.
Isengar had been Nurgle’s friend since before they set up the Confluence, and they had been lovers for about four millennia. Nurgle was not quite sure how they had managed to stay together for such a long time – the world’s longest-lasting relationship by quite a good margin – but he suspected it helped that they had also been allies at a time when it was far from obvious that Ambrose or someone else might not try to grasp full control and get rid of potential competitors. The fact that their alliance seemed necessary for survival did wonders for their relationship.
Since the Revolution, however, they had stopped having sex. The problem was that Isengar had developed a serious case of body shame – he felt bad about walking around in a stolen body – and had decided to punish himself by refraining from bodily pleasures. Or something like that – the bottom line, in any case, was no sex. Instead, Nurgle watched Victorian pornography from the Erd sim and similar content from erotic performers in the Confluence. Nurgle thought Isengar’s self-contempt could rather straightforwardly be expressed, possibly therapeutically, as various forms of erotic games, which he had hinted about without getting any positive reply so far.
“I understand, Senga. But I see no way for this to progress to something like that. And if it did, well, Soth is not stronger than the two of us. If he attacks us, he will lose.”
“It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. But I’m not sure I trust this person you are communicating with.”
“I don’t trust them either. But why does it matter?”
“Whoever it is may be trying to gain something from this debacle.”
“That’s possible, but I don’t see how it could make a difference.”
“Let’s say that this is someone who wants to attack the Confluence. So, they set up a situation where you and I are fighting Soth, and maybe all of us end up exhausted, depleted, and weak. And then they attack.”
“Ok. One thing is that such a line of thinking would be confused, right, because the Confluence no longer needs us to watch over it. Another thing is that we are not going to exhaust ourselves over Erd. My idea is to just set this little thing these guys have suggested into action, investing just a tiny amount of energy, and then see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, we have lost nothing. I am not suggesting that we throw serious resources into this – if that’s required, the guys will have to send us a donation.”
“You would use that, if they sent it?”
“That’s a good point. I’m not sure how they could infect a hoard of energy with something, but we’d probably have to be really careful just in case. Maybe we don’t actually want any material help. So far, they have just pointed out a general procedure, and it seems they are hoping that will be enough.”
“Maybe. You said the other messages from these people were embedded in various horror stories from Erd – is that true for this one as well?”
“Yes. Soldiers killed a child and cut his head off, holding it up for all to see. The message was in the blood drops.”
“Well, I can’t escape the feeling that these choices say something about who these people really are.”
“I get that. At first, I thought it was some kind of dark humor. Now I’m thinking it’s maybe a warning. Maybe if Erd’s magic is sucked away by those shadows, the horror will proliferate. Or, at least, there won’t be much to compensate for it, so to speak.”
“Always the optimist, aren’t you?”
“Makes life easier and happier. Anyway, I’m not saying this is the only interpretation. But if they show us this stuff because they like it – well, I mean, if this is who they are, don’t you think they would hide it a little it?”
“Because that’s what we would do.”
“Right. And if they’re enjoying the horror, why would they want to stop the attack on Erd?”
“Maybe they think the horror will be supercharged by Erd emerging as a magical dimension. Or maybe they have some other horrible motivation that we cannot imagine.”
“Ok, that’s possible, but is the mere possibility that this may be true sufficient reason for us to not help Erd even in the slightest way?”
“Maybe not. But there is one more thing. If we can mess up these shadows with our counter-shadows as easily as their message suggests, then Soth can get back at us with counter-counter-shadows. And then we have to escalate again, and it turns into a war.”
“Well, look.” Nurgle had already replied to the unknown party saying he would look into things, and that’s what he intended to do. But his real motivation for getting involved with this in the first place was that he hoped to draw in Isengar – and thus maybe succeed in drawing his only friend out of his gloom by giving him something productive to think about. “Taking one step does not commit us to future steps. We try what they suggested, and if it doesn’t work, that’s on them.” Nurgle was already regretting that he had not asked these guys about the possibility Isengar had raised. “In the process, we’ll learn something new. That’s fun.”
“If you say so. When they say magical constructs, we should assume that they are referring to these shadows, right? Not illusions.”
“I think so. And energy collection is probably a euphemism for vampirism. Self-replication is the tricky part – to do that, we need to use the energy that our shadow collects to produce replicas of itself. Figuring that out will take some time, I suppose.”
“But the shadows attacking Erd are already doing that. So, if we capture one, maybe we can observe the flows involved.” There was a glint of excitement in Isengar’s eyes.
“You’re right!” Actually, Nurgle had already thought of that. His enthusiasm was real, however, because this was the first time in years that Isengar had shown real interest in something other than his guilt trip. “We can learn how to do this by studying one of those shadows.”
“But we’re not dragging it here. That’s too risky.”
“Right. We set up a base, either in the Erd dimension or somewhere else where it doesn’t matter if the shadow escapes. Erd would maybe be the easiest?”
“Yeah. Let’s save Erd from Erd.”
Nurgle and Isengar in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Nurgle and Isengar in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
