Path of the Deathless

347 Broken Things [I]

—Farwalker transmission intercepted by Udraal Thann347

Broken Things [I]

The Bread-Knights found the elven slaver shivering, stammering nonsense about a burning man of gold. Though they scoured their surroundings with Divination and potent Awareness Skills, they found no sign of Shiv and moved on to continue their pursuit.

Before they continued their hunt, however, they returned the elf to his rightful owner in the Boiling Toad. As they left him on the long bridge leading into the kitchen fortress proper, Longinus stood at the shattered gates in the guise of Georges. He greeted the elf like an omen, and his expression spoke of inevitable violence. Terror swelled in the heart of the elven slaver. He had gone from being a captive of an unknown Pathbearer possessed of unimaginable power to being abandoned and now returned to his master.

There was no pleasure in Longinus' eyes. No hint of softness.

The slaver shivered with every step, and it took him a small lifetime to cross the bridge, to arrive within the confines of the Boiling Toad once more. He kept his head low. He kept his gaze averted. He did all he could to spare his own life, but part of him knew that his survival was no longer something he could ensure. Longinus killed on a whim. Killed for the pleasure of killing. Killed when he was frustrated. Killed to retaliate against any perceived disrespect. Though the Wanderer didn't harm the Fae and did all he could to stay in the Princess' graces, the mortals that he kept within his kitchen were his to punish or spare.

“Stop.” Georges’ voice was heavier than a steel anchor cast down on the elf's body. The unwilling slaver responded to the order. He went utterly still and bowed as deeply as his spine permitted.

“Ser… Cuntus,” he squeaked.

Before any other words could follow, he was seized by the jaw. He couldn't move his mouth anymore, and crushing power radiated from Cuntus’ fingertips. With the slightest twitch of his hand, without any effort whatsoever, Longinus could render the elf’s head little more than paste. But he didn't. Instead, he forced the elf to meet his eyes. “Where did he fucking go?”

The elf's mouth opened and closed. He struggled to put the words together. He racked his memories, desperate for something to say, desperate to appease his wrathful master. “I…” He swallowed. He couldn't say that he wasn't sure. That wasn't an answer Longinus would accept. “He took me to the Hall of Remembrance. He left me there. He tried to cast a spell on me, but then he was just gone. He disappeared after doing something. The Princess' personal guard came hunting for him after, I—I think they chased him off. I think they're still hunting—”

The Wanderer's grip tightened. The elf's jaw creaked, and micro-fractures formed. A wail sounded from the man.

Death was close. Death drenched in an incandescent aura. Death in the form of a centaur rising free from the body of an ever-displeased chef. But death hadn't come to take the elf's life from him yet. Longinus asked directly, voice somehow at once ice-cold and on the verge of screaming.

Again, there was no easy answer. The Wanderer hated ignorance, and leaving him unsatisfied often condemned the speaker to death. “I think it might be something to do with time, a C-hhronomancy spell maybe! Or he jumped somewhere else! He asked where I was from before I got here. I told him, but I didn't tell him anything about the kitchen! I didn't tell him that. I told him about my home, about how I was brought over. Maybe he's trying to escape?”

The elf was drawn in close. Longinus met him, gaze to gaze, and the god's Avatar burned brighter. His irises were like simmering flames, embers spilling out from the edges.

Cuntus’ teeth grew clenched as he channeled a spell through his eyes. Lances of divine flame gouged into the elf's pupils. A bubble of translucent Psychomancy formed at the center of the slaver's skull. The elf cried out in surprise, but there was nothing he could do. A foreign will had usurped his body, had taken control. A will far greater than his. A will that was now brutally rooting through his memories, like a hog would dig through the underbrush in search of grubs. Things inside the elf broke. The damage the god dealt was worse than the physical.

When one tore through another's sense of self with little regard for what they misplaced or what they left shattered, what followed most often was the collapse of personhood. It was an act most vile, but Longinus certainly didn't care. Because the slaver belonged to him. Because if he broke his own toy, that was his choice. His doing. No great loss. The world had no worth beyond him.

Everything outside of his body was as much his as that within. And right now, one of his many things-to-be was hiding deep inside the mind of a body he'd stolen.

Because, of course, the Deathless would do that. It was a common trick among potent Psychomancers to hide themselves in another's mind, to ambush their enemies from an unexpected vector. And it was a trick Longinus knew well, because he himself had used it to great effect multiple times, even before he became a god. There were few pleasures greater than hijacking someone's body, than using them as your unwilling saboteur. And so the Deathless had to be there.

He had to.

***

But he wasn't.

Though Longinus tore through the fabric of the elf's memories, though he smashed apart everything inside the little mortal's mind, from the moment of his birth to the present, desperate to find any sign of his hated foe, there was nothing there, not even a trace of Psychomancy. No one was piloting the elf. No one had even changed the elf's mind from within. And now, drooling and ruined, the elf let out a fleeting moan as he wet himself once more, unable to control his own bodily functions.

A bomb of pure rage went off inside Longinus' stomach. The fucker had done it again. He'd tricked him. He'd made Longinus turn one of his own toys into a vegetable and made a fool of him. He was using Longinus to hurt himself, sneering at him, spitting at him, defiling his kitchen and his subjects from the shadows. But he was still here somewhere. That Longinus knew, because he could still remember the Deathless. Every time the bastard truly disappeared, he took Longinus' near-term memories with him.

It was really quite the Legendary skill, probably a fusion between Psychomancy and Stealth. Perhaps even a Unique Skill. Past the aneurysm-inducing anger the Deathless inspired, Longinus looked forward to claiming the boy and taking from him his most useful skill. He would enjoy breaking the Deathless down, but he was absolutely certain now that he didn't want him dead. He wanted him preserved long enough for the torture to last, long enough for that to turn to enslavement and pleasure and a proper subjugation. Long enough for Longinus to gain a proper enforcer in this place.

There was potential in his skill, and if it was good enough, then maybe, just maybe, he had new options to use against Evanescia. For the first time in decades, the Wanderer dared to dream of escape.

Longinus released his elf. The little mortal, broken of mind, simply fell into the dirt. He was no longer capable of forming his own thoughts. He was no longer capable of perceiving himself, of understanding the world around him. It was a minor miracle that he managed to continue breathing at all, and a special hell that he was left alive.

The Wanderer walked away from his former subject, leaving him there in front of the battered gates. The dimensionals would remove him when he started decaying. He would be a lesson to the others, a reminder that there was no escape, that all belonged to Longinus here, and that if someone took them, they were to resolve themselves rather than disgrace this kitchen and the one who ruled it.

Once more, the Wanderer strained his Divinity. He used his Awareness to the fullest extent, seeing the world through the eyes of his emotionally touched subjects. He perceived every atom within his domain and then some. He used his Divination to map out every last bit of his kitchen—and the only thing that pulsed was the mind-hollowed elf-slaver.

He used his Divinity to blanket every bit of space, but still, he couldn't find his quarry. Longinus gnashed his teeth as he began walking in circles.He gestured at the man he wore, the one once named Georges.

The fact that there was no reply enraged him more than any insult the Deathless could throw.

Longinus snarled and rose into the air above the Boiling Toad. He scoured his districts. He surveyed the grill, the aquarium, the rivers of sauce, his mountains of pastries, his cold service, the frylands, the great butchery…

The Deathless wasn't hidden. Longinus could remember him. So then, where was he? If not present, then where was he? Had he actually just run? Could the elf have been right in his assumption?

Longinus seethed.

The aggravating thought burst when a mocking taunt, carried by the voice of the Deathless, was forced into his head via an elbow to the back of the head. “Because you’re a felling dumbshit, Longinus!”

A section of Longinus’ skull shattered. Cuntus shrieked in pain—and so did the godly visage that flared around him. Three more blows fell upon Longinus, and each sent chunks of his body bursting and breaking, filling the air with incandescent shrapnel.

For the first time in years, the Wanderer suffered true pain. His already unstable mind shifted and collapsed in places; his emotions, erratic and depraved, were cast into a whirlwind, and his body was rendered glass and scattered beneath the blows of the one he hunted.

And inside, deep inside, there came a clarion cry of triumph, as the flagging remains of the man who would become the Wanderer cried out in jubilation, cheering on his would-be killer.

***

Though the Harbinger granted Shiv the power to invade a mind, he quickly discovered that doing so was a bad idea—for him especially. Even stable minds were chaotic vortexes of swirling impulses, subconscious functions, distant memories tangled with present recollections, urges, confusing psychological fault lines, and so much more. Shiv had drowned in alien minds before, had used his own mental durability as a weapon, dragging enemies into the throes of insanity alongside himself.

Where he returned, they remained broken. Such was how he prevailed against the Jealousy.

But breaking things was easy. Intruding was simple. Navigating the mind was hard and required someone to have more than a knack for psychology. Shiv's knowledge of biology remained amateurish at best, but at least he knew fundamental things about the lore of life. His expertise regarding the lore of the mind was even lesser—would have been altogether barren without Uva's instruction. But a bit of theory and practice did not a true Psychonaut make, and so Shiv found himself dashed upon waves of trauma that crashed into him in rolling walls. It battered him. It battered his Harbinger. Shiv’s Legendary Skill cracked while his body suffered bruising blows.

He clawed toward points of stability, but it was hard to tell what led where and which patches of the elf's mind were tranquil or how long they would stay tranquil before the next thought would soon arrive. To make matters worse, the elf was undergoing a series of panic attacks, and the turbulence of his mind and state of his emotions were anything but calm.

But though lost, he wasn't helpless. Possessed of twin Legendary Skills, Shiv swatted waves of tumult aside. He rampaged through the inner confines of the elf's mind, and he did what he could not to dislodge anything as he explored the chaotic maelstrom of thoughts he now hid in. Though not a psychonaut, he remained a Psychomancer, and the Harbinger allowed him to parry hostile thoughts and leap across mental instabilities aplenty.

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As he did so, however, his skill offered an almost shameful admission.

A phalanx of Shapeless Tides emerged from the Harbinger's body, allowing it to shoulder through a horrific memory. Shiv screamed as flashes of being scalded by an abusive parent passed through him. A moment later, it was gone. For the briefest of instances, he and the elf were one and the same. Minds were dangerous things when entwined.

Singular was just about the opposite of what Uva was. Her strands allowed her to control countless people at the same time. She was a puppeteer, and a skilled one at that. Even though Shiv's Psychomancy was technically Legendary, he was not nearly the Psychomancer she was. He couldn't arrange things quite as fast. He lacked her knowledge, lacked her control. Lacked, as the Harbinger described it, breadth. And it wasn't just the Harbinger itself. Aside from Shiv's newest Legendary Skill, Legion of Self allowed him to perform surges of actions across a condensed period. It gave him the processing power of an army.

But Uva an army. Her consciousnesses were stacked and all working in tandem. She had minds running in parallel and could still wear and wield his many physical forms better than he could right now, even though he would overwhelm her in a direct skirmish thanks to how many actions each of his bodies could perform at the same time against her.

the Harbinger whispered. Its Enkindled Shadow moved with Shiv, helping him pry and crawl through the insides of the elf's mind. He didn't even know what was happening back in the material world.

Surprisingly, Shiv didn’t crack at that admission; the Harbinger felt no shame nor scorn saying those words.

Shiv asked. But inside, he feel something. Where the memories were hard to parse, where the space of the elf's consciousness was like waves caught in a ceaseless storm, what lurked below called him. Shiv's knowledge of magical theory was limited. His understanding of the Psychomantic lore, pathetic. But his intuition when it came to people, their psychological flaws, their emotions, their social cues, was bloodhound sharp. And such was what lurked beneath the waves of the elf’s thoughts. Emotions. Feelings. If one's consciousness could be likened to a sea, then the subconsciousness was a sprawling depth of sensation.

Thoughts and feelings were interlinked for individuals. Waves of passion summoned inspiration or periods of malaise, while epiphanies could create the conditions to achieve heights of extreme delight or deepest despair.

Where understanding had often failed Shiv, instinct rarely led him wrong, and now his instinct told him that if he wasn't capable enough to sail the surface, he wasn't without choice at all. He could dive down, sink deep, and with the Harbinger, he would not drown. He would not be burdened by the weight of the waves. Instead, he would swim in the dark. He would meld with the fire that crackled within the core of every sapient heart.

the Harbinger whispered.

Shiv's hesitation evaporated. He sank deep into the waves of primal energy suffusing the waters of the elf's subconscious. The Deathless followed the heat. He knew the taste of grief and sorrow and wrongness and acrimony and anger, most of all. Anger became Shiv's North Star; anger was the heat, the geothermal lightning that guided him as he reached the bottom. The lightning that he tore open and crawled ever deeper into.

And somehow, somewhere along the way, the Harbinger traveled from mind to emotion. The Deathless hid there, letting his own enkindled flames consume his Legendary skill, wrapping him in a shadowy inferno that blended him with a flame. Memories washed against him unbidden. He remembered people who had wronged him—not him, but the elf. Of former slavers who whipped him. Of the things that had been taken from him by slaves of higher status or esteem. But Shiv wasn't going from thought to emotion anymore. Instead, the rage he festooned himself with was the nexus of countless thoughts.

And the beautiful thing about being empowered by rage was that he could start soaking in the elf's ire, and he could use his own to camouflage his presence.

The Harbinger's words filled Shiv with a grim discomfort. He didn't want to imagine that. He didn't think he would become a monster, but he would be lying if he didn't admit he was guided by emotion often. Lust wasn't the thing that ruled him the most, though. He had felt lust before, but it was nothing compared to his wrath.

And the Deathless had an answer to what he might be if wrath consumed his entire being. The answer had the same face as him, after all.

Something inside Shiv’s torso almost cracked. The Harbinger grunted with more strain than ever before as it warded off a feeling of crushing indignation.

And now it was Shiv’s turn to wince.

The Harbinger chuckled.

A Glimpse of Perspective 89 > 91

Shiv did just that. Ironically, he had to clear his own mind to best interface with the elf’s. Drawing on the slaver's worst memories was easy—and there were plenty of them. But finding his way back to the true surface and tapping into the elf's senses was another level of difficulty. It felt insurmountable. It wasn't a thing of labor or effort. He didn't know what to do, and he was no closer to discovering the right path than he was a half-second ago.

the Harbinger interrupted, its voice calm in its criticism.

For once, Shiv didn't ask the Harbinger what he meant. He stopped, and he thought, and after a moment, he understood. Ignorance made him want to give up. He didn't know, and so he thought it was impossible. He was creating larger obstacles for himself before he even began. Shiv never stopped trying, but there were times when he tried as a token effort and expected nothing to come of it. There were times when he didn't solve the problem. He just threw himself at a wall because that was what he was used to.

That took patience. But Shiv had patience in ample supply. Instead of letting himself be overwhelmed by what he didn't know, he followed what he already understood. He crept along branches of memory connected to the emotions, and when he got lost, he retraced his steps, doing it all over again and mapping out the interior of the elf's mind. He kept moving.

He found that certain memories intersected other branches, and that they were constantly changing. There were memories buried deep, there were memories on the surface, and finally, after what felt like a small eternity of searching, there were memories that were being spun at the very present: the near-term memories that were tethered directly to the elf's senses.

A rush of triumph filled Shiv. To go from assuming himself incapable of doing this to finding his way out was rewarding. In the end, he didn't manage to actively tap into the elf's senses per se, but he did manage to gain a second-by-second understanding of what was happening on the outside. Such was how he learned that the Bread-Knights were escorting the escaped slaver back down to the Boiling Toad, and such was how he came face to face with Longinus through someone else's eyes.

The Wanderer was wearing Georges' skin once more. His expression was wretched and dark with aggravation. His core burned the same color that leaked free from the cracks lining the Harbinger's body. The Deathless prepared to plunge Backstage, but his new skill told him to wait.

the Harbinger guessed.

Shiv knew that, and so Shiv remained hidden within the core of the slave. Longinus seized the elf, strangled him, poured his divine power into him, and he groped blindly, splashing and tearing at the surface, taking bites out of the elf's emotions. But Shiv learned something about Longinus. Something peculiar. The god was a picky eater. He drank the bitter. He tasted the sweet. He nursed himself on joy, or sorrow, and despair, but he didn't quite like touching anger. There was a heat to anger, a spice, and the Wanderer's sympathetic tongue was sensitive.

He never came close to licking Shiv. He avoided the fires that hid the Deathless altogether.

The Harbinger laughed.

And Shiv did see. Even when Longinus drew upon his Divination, his eyes glowing purple and his mana growing bright with the fervency of faith, he failed to uncover where Shiv was.

The elf’s mind crumbled. Shiv felt the memories that sustained the slaver’s sense of self come undone, and that dislodged the Deathless’s perception of the outside world. But buried deep within the slaver’s core, the emotion still remained. Dread, terror, and hopelessness were the greatest feelings within, but there was no small flicker of anger toward Longinus with how callous the Wanderer was, with how desperate the elf wanted to choose his own fate.

There was little that could be done for the elf himself.

There was everything Shiv could do to Longinus in return.

The Harbinger snorted.

They burst free from the downed elf slave as one. They manifested in a flash of gold and struck so fast that even the mighty Wanderer failed to react in time. And when their blow landed, when the Harbinger’s elbow—further propelled by Shiv’s Shapeless Tides—came down upon the god’s Avatar, things inside Longinus shattered with a ruinous symphony.

There was a price to pay for being disturbed and unsound of mind.

There was a price to pay for addiction and pointless cruelty.

There was a price to pay for living someone else’s story and seeing yourself rendered a shadow of who you were.

All that came due as the Wanderer, near unbreakable in mana, soul, and flesh before, was betrayed by his decaying psyche, and the frailty of his mind was transmuted into the fragility of his flesh.

The Deathless struck, and for the first time, things inside the Wanderer truly broke.

A scream escaped Longinus. He lashed out with a blind swipe of his lance—his divine aura and uncontrolled vacuum outright obliterating the outer walls of The Boiling Toad. Madness and blind emotion took hold—and Shiv tasted his loss of control, exploited it further by dropping out of context.

As soon as the Deathless plunged Backstage, he saw a rain of broken god fragments come with him and fall into the growing Garden of Wounds and Broken Things.

“Holy felling shit, now a Skill Evolution,” the girl breathed, whistling. “That’s just absolutely—”

Longinus vanished in a burst of divine mana, scattering into hundreds of identical bodies. They attacked blindly, trampling the land and riding in all directions, seeking their now-forgotten foe.

the Harbinger said.

And so minutes passed, as Longinus did rage, and when he finally calmed enough and became one once more, revealing Georges within himself, the Deathless emerged from beyond context, and hit him again.

The upper half of Longinus’ skull ceased to be. He regenerated the damage in an instant, but there were still cracks on his divine form; pain overwhelmed him, giving Shiv an opening to slash and tear his very soul with his cutting aura.

Suddenly, the campaign of terror meant to destabilize the entirety of The Boiling Toad shifted to a focused series of skirmishes chipping away at Longinus. The hits came one after another. Shiv struck with his Harbinger. Shiv vanished. Longinus attempted to retaliate, but he struck nothing, and he remembered nothing, and the cycle began anew.

***

Where Longinus would have likely come up with a strategy before, his mind suffered as much damage as his flesh, and every part of him was shaken—with emotions spilling out from his wounds like yolk, with his being partially resisting the fullness of Shiv’s blows via Magical Resistance, but unable to shape the psycho-alchemical effects inflicted.

The ambushes ran on for hours. When Longinus faded and retreated, Shiv broke other parts of the kitchen. Dimensionals were butchered en masse. Stations were dismantled. The convention plate below was shredded and mangled beyond the repair of even a Master-Tier Engineer. And shaken of spirit, unbalanced of sanity, and mad with frustration, Longinus would return and allow himself to be victimized once more.

Hours dragged on, almost reaching a day.

Almost.

On the ten thousandth ambush, just as Shiv was about to add another spiderweb to Longinus’ cracked form, a continental avalanche of golden brilliance washed over the world, a tidal wave of gold so dense with Chronomancy that it dwarfed his own Legendary mana by a magnitude and then some.

Continuity Error 214 > 227

Inertial Overdrive 318 > 323

Legion of Self 109 > 114

Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 204 > 208

This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul 233 > 239

That was all the Harbinger had to say as the world around Shiv went still. The Deathless prepared to dive Backstage to escape Evanescia’s cursed intrusion into the fight, but before he could, she cried out to him.

“Wait!” the Usurper-Narrator shouted. “I’m not going to stop you. I just want to talk. And after that… I want to see if you can win. I want to see if you can actually beat a—”

But Shiv wasn’t having any of that bullshit. He was already trapped here; there was no negotiating between a warden and a prisoner without any options.

Again, almost.

Continuity Error allowed him to do some very interesting things.

As he slipped Backstage, a new, even more powerful divine presence within the Fairwoods made itself known, burning like a greater star over the cracked and battered shape that was Longinus.

A presence with an emotional core.

Suddenly, Shiv had even bigger game to hunt.