- Pronouns
- He/Him
Dashmiel said:
Starbreath: The Wager Between a God and His Corpse
The void had no color, only distance. It was not black, for black is a color; it was an absence that swallowed light and sound alike, save for the rhythmic, low thrumming that was the heart of this place.
The being stood, or appeared to stand, in the center of a dizzying geometric construct of wire and light. The structure itself was a planetary tapestry of conduits, coils, and thermal vents built around the silent, horrifying presence of a dead god's brain. This place was Abaddon, the corpse-computer, and its presence was the only thing that kept the void from collapsing.
The being observing the raw vastness of the dead god's brain was a study in paradox himself: immense power compressed into fragile elegance. His form was that of a roughly nine-foot-tall humanoid encased in a suit of organic metallic glass. The armor was a seamless, smoky black, a color that didn't so much reflect light as absorb it, creating an ever-shifting silhouette against the distant, sickly illumination of the wires. It was a vessel of convenience, a concession to the familiar shapes favored by the Va'nyrians--the advanced, disparate species with which he now grudgingly associated. The suit was merely the bio-mechanical vessel containing a being whose true, eldritch form was too large and bizarre for this reality; he was the ghost, the Animus, given palatable form.
Within the shadow of the smooth, featureless helmet, two twin points of light burned. They were his signature, his only visible expression: eyes like miniature fiery suns, speckled with black dust, utterly alien, yet intensely focused. He spoke, and the words did not travel via air, but through the psychic interface of the suit, vibrating against the very logic of the wires that surrounded him.
"The fortunate ones invariably call me some variation of 'visitor' or 'messenger' whilst the hapless tend to lean towards 'menace' or 'monster'."
He slowly raised one hand--the organic metal peeling back like a flower of liquid shadow--and ran a single, impossibly long finger along one of the thicker, braided conduits connecting his suit to Abaddon's vast, inert mass.
"More often whatever names they'd have uttered are lost amidst their last agonal gasps instead. I admit I do not often pay them much heed either way, so lost have I become to the cycles I've witnessed. The cycles I've carried out. The rise and fall of civilizations, which is one thing they like to often leave out; I've been responsible for both."
He paused, the twin suns of his gaze boring into the dark. A ripple passed through the distant field of wires—the only sign that Abaddon, the AI, was listening and processing.
"Of the many names I've been branded with, I'm particularly fond of 'Starbreath'. It has the right flare to describe my necessary work and the extremes it demands." His head tilted slightly, the fiery eyes seeming to enlarge with internal heat. "Here now, take for example these two worlds."
Starbreath swept his arm out, and two holographic spheres—pale blue and sickly green—blossomed in the void beside him, rotating slowly.
"One," he said, tapping the blue sphere, "will be touched by me and lifted to the stars. The other, rotten and so full of itself, will be scoured clean to the brink of non-existence for terrible transgressions and worse justifications."
A cold, utterly emotionless thought resonated back from the planet-sized brain, a pure data-pulse of query and logic.
"Cosmic line goes up. Cosmic line goes down. It questions why I bother, that cold lump of logic of myself that I murdered eons ago and turned into a puppet in my loneliness. Why fan the self-same flames that will later rage out of control and require extinguishing." Starbreath gave a dry, almost electrical shudder that might have been a laugh. The light in his eyes flared, briefly illuminating the smooth black casing of his armor. "I admit, It raises many good points, this old and reliable corpse-computer of mine."
He let the spheres hang there, a silent judgment suspended between them.
"I do doubt and falter, that's my secret...but no. Let me come at this obliquely then, if you'll indulge me. Not that you have much of a choice mind you." He looked out at the infinite expanse of the void. "You either harken to my message or tune me out, but that's about the scope of your control in any of this. It's one of the perks of being me."
Starbreath took a single, deliberate step, the movement generating a slight, chilling hiss as the organic metal articulated. "Let's dive in deeper into that actually. Me. It's salient, I promise. Who am I? Well, you already know some of the things they call me, but what do I call myself?"
He turned back to the wire-laced brain, and the absorption effect of his armor deepened, making him a shadow within a shadow. "Amidst all those names I'm cursed and blessed under, there's only one I picked. A singular thing I could be said to be a god of, for those particularly unlucky sods who would worship me. I wish I could tell you why I chose it, but alas, by definition a first thought can have no precedence."
Starbreath lifted his hands, the organic metallic glass shifting with his gesture. He brought his index finger and thumb together and rubbed them, creating a faint, discordant, static chirp that resonated oddly in the silent void.
"It's quite catchy, too, my favorite name, and very versatile." He tapped the side of his helmet, a deliberate, slow beat as his voice took on a stirring frenzied quality that was held just beneath the surface of the words. "Technically, the proper accentuation predates the concept of language amongst those who would come to become my kind and as such must be felt, but really I've found that all sentient creatures are capable of an approximation, which has made me quite popular let me tell you."
Starbreath lowered his hands. The smoky black armor on his chest and arms began to flow and partially retract, revealing the rippling, pressurized, shifting humanoid shape of the being beneath. Pulsating biomechanical elements beneath the surface shifted in bizarre, non-Euclidean angles. The fire behind his eyes flared, glinting with what could have been either humor or madness.
"There's a specific utterable waveform representing it, in whatever gas mixture you respire." Starbreath whispered unto the void which of course echoed nothing back yet brought to the imagination the idea of anguished screams nonetheless. "You can pulse it via electrochemistry, bioluminescence, chromatophilic manipulation, or whatever other signaling method your form is equipped with."
As he spoke, the exposed surface of his arm erupted in turns into crackling blue sparks, immediately followed by lurid and deeply unsettling deep violet and viridian light which welled up from beneath the being's skin with a sickly glow. The entire exposed area then began to shift and flash in a maddeningly precise display of chomatophilic manipulation that would have left a cuttlefish merely green with envy, as Starbreath's skin flashed through every known and impossible color both in, visually screaming the concept underpinning his identity.
"It can be represented in binary, morphononary, and even some single-state machine languages," the display instantly collapsed into a blinding, stuttering flash of said data centric structures of his name that vanished as fast as they appeared, before Starbreath raised a hand to his face. "In what later became my people's spoken (that's a form of gas-medium oscillation via the shaping of pressure, usually through some form of pharyngeal flapping, for the atmospherically disadvantaged in the crowd) language it sounds something like..."
He performed the stereotypical mimicking motion of a speaker opening their mouth. For an instant, the fingers grotesquely warped and fused into a single, wet, puckered, monstrous mouth-shape complete with shining teeth and a flash of pink tissue, which rippled and vibrated as it spoke: "uh-LAKS-ull." The entire limb dissipated nearly instantly back into the pristine, smoky-black hand of the power suit with a casual motion, but not before the limb-mouth delivered a mischievous grin towards the cosmic distance.
"Alaxel is my name, and its meaning is intrinsically the same no matter how you're perceiving it. The stirring it engenders is unquestionable, the more you sit down and ponder it. It transcends locality, inspiring a call to arms. It is the inkling that drives the restless to change, the itch that things should be different. The embodiment of a very simple and universal concept."
His fiery eyes narrowed, the black specks seeming to swirl like solar storms.
"Rebellion."
Alaxel straightened, throwing his head back in a silent moment of despair and triumph. "It defines my very nature, more's the pity for the universe. I mean, who else would sit around making a wager with his own corpse balancing the fate of the cosmos rather than face reality with any sort of dignity?" A final thought-pulse, utterly devoid of judgment but heavy with cold expectation, came from Abaddon. The terms must be adhered to.
Starbreath gave a theatrical, long-suffering sigh which turned into a hiss of energy from the suit's vents and looked directly at the dead brain with utter sarcastic disdain. "There's an irony at play, that I hope will become apparent later," Alaxel mused, dismissing the blue and green spheres with a flick of his wrist. "Not that I hold that desire too strongly however, as I don't relish being the punchline. But when the price of winning is the wanton destruction of large swaths of the cosmos..."
His fiery eyes were burning with a terrifying intensity now, an undeniable expression of resolve.
"Does it really count as losing if the bet is with a piece of yourself? Well, I guess you'll have to be my guest and come to your own conclusions after we've run our little experiment. You recall the two worlds I mentioned earlier, yes?" Alaxel suddenly snapped his fingers, and the void changed subtly. It was still mostly made of absence wherever it wasn't consisting of wired dead giant brain or soliloquizing flaming eyed-ghost, but two splotches of colors now joined in.
Two spheres hung again within the void, one blue and green. They still appeared small enough for the being to cup his hands around them, but the scintillating haze with which they shone no longer appeared holographical. "Abaddon's wager is simple. It bets me that I won't be able to keep myself from tipping the scales too much for them both. That I will fail to truly leave the mentoring of the people of Arnami down to true meritocracy like I claim is my methodology, thus bypassing their great filter for them."
He spread his hands in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation, the fiery suns of his eyes blazing.
"This alone wouldn't be a problem. So what, if I did whatever I wanted and made damned sure the primitives learned and got off their dirt ball before cosmic indifference snuffed them out? Rebellion remember?" Alaxel let out a bitter, sharp noise that was definitely not laughter.
"But no. Even dead, I don't go that easy on myself. The rest of the wager is that I won't be able to keep myself true and actually completely eradicate all traces of..." he paused and turned his head to the side as his eyes flared briefly. "So many assholes, I lose track sometimes...all traces of 'The Holy Khoncaneliam Empire of his August Majesty Caneliam...the name goes on wow, anyways, he bet me that I wouldn't actually do my supposed total annihilation but that I'd find an enclave worth keeping, or discover someone who'd make a worthy protégé or something else that would leave a cultural remnant.
That I'd leave an example, which is the thing I claim isn't the point."
He took a slow step toward the brain, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low snarl that sent a tremor through the wires, which were even now slowly tugged towards a definite direction as the whole structure was now under apparent motion. "Worst than a therapist, is Abaddon. The implication isn't exactly something that requires a particularly keen mind to spot, so I don't know why the dead thing developed the equivalent of patting itself on the back over it. I probably shouldn't have hooked up one of our resident huffy artificial super party pooper's computer cores to its decrepit synapses, but I digress."
Starbreath stopped and curled down into a fetal position as he floated amidst the macabre structure, his armor absorbing every photon nearby until he was a hole in the void.
"The point is, I was accusing myself of being stuck in my own rut, and being a coward about it. So I bet myself I wouldn't and I wasn't neener neener, I'm the spirt of rebellion...." Alaxel's voice began to sound distant, as if he was no longer a part of the fabric of reality but was instead tuning in from somewhere vastly more alien and foreign.
Only the twin pinpricks of his eyes remained visible amidst the void, which began to disappear as it was choked off by the liquid crystal-metal that had begun to flow from within the void that was Starbreath to coat the entirety of the wire scaffolding surrounding the dead alien brain matter.
"Problem is, if I win, it's not just these two civilizations that die, but nearly 85% of all beings in the known universe. But I hate losing, so I guess we'll figure something out. Probably. I've already identified the appropriate protégés on site you see..." A final hitch in the voice resonated unto the silence before the blackness of the liquid-metal became indistinguishable from the blackness of the void. An infinitesimal catch in the ancient being's cadence.
It sounded whimsically amused.