Chapter 552 - Loaves and Fishes
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When Gwen was just fifteen, she was groped without consent by a Huang family associate in Sydney.
At sixteen, she was abducted by the CCP against her will from Singapore.
At seventeen, she was roped into a Dragon’s decade-long scheme in Shanghai.
At eighteen, she was unwillingly invited into a Rolls-Royce Phantom by a Duke in London.
The same year, she lost Elvia to machinations stemming from an incomplete comprehension of Draconic ploys.
At twenty, as Regent, Guardian, and an Plane-hopping powerhouse, Gwen had promised herself that these ill-consenting incidents would not happen again—
Gwen had made good on that promise for five years.
Now, at twenty-five, without her consent, she was being filled with the cosmological psychic constant known as Faith. As a torrent, it was pouring into her Astral Soul, creating its own Kati Thanda, the shallow lake once known as Lake Eyre. It was a strange sensation and a stranger phenomenon, for her Vessel wasn’t just being filled—it was expanding at the same time. Would her beloved Almudj bathe in such a lake? Gwen suspected it would, since the Rainbow Serpent had been worshipped since the origins of oral sorcery.
In the final seconds of her liminal moment, all that was left was Shoggy’s unblinking stare, the hush of invisible energies rushing into her being, and the unhappy acknowledgement that every time she jumped out of a Mandala, she discovered the subordinate patterns of a bigger one.
Unfortunately, addressing the layers of Solana’s Tryfanian plot would have to wait.
“Shoggy!” she shouted at the roving eye connected to what was essentially a Void-tinged cumulonimbus cloud. “GO HOME!”
Her voice reverberated as a woman’s, but echoed like the howl of a God.
Then—time collapsed, or shattered, or compressed. Either way, from Gwen’s perspective, the universe shrank into a pinpoint. Her consciousness emerged through the event horizon, sending her barreling into her own brain.
She opened her eyes.
“Are you alright?” The Red Dragon was in his hybrid form, horns out and mana leaking from every pore. Beside him, Lei-bup’s gaze of unadulterated supplication was bordering on profundity.
The temple groaned.
It was, disturbingly, a living sound, organic and deep, the sound of something vast shifting from slumber. The walls sweated blood. The floor breathed. They were drenched in gore—even so, the fresh secretions dripping from the axe-wound ceiling were deeply disturbing.
Gwen’s frontal lobes throbbed.
Her ascension, without consent, continued.
Apotheosis, Malakath had told her. Such was Sobel’s original purpose.
Was Sobel meant to be a Goddess then? Was she the original Pale Goddess of the Void, the Vessel of the Devouring Dark? Of Shoggy?
She pressed her palms against her temples. Bloody hell, somebody, make this stop.
Inexplicably, the throbbing ceased.
She removed her hand from her temple and found that her elegant digits were glowing with an inexplicable nimbus. It was a faint, golden glow, the hue of summer afternoons seen through shards of amber glass. If she paid attention, REALLY paid attention, the blood in her wrists was no longer blue, but more so resembled—
Is that… Golden Mead?!
The walls compressed.
“Gwen…” Slylth squeezed her shoulder and thigh. He was, after all, cradling her like a princess. “We need to go.”
“Okay,” she said. I think I am okay… “Teleport us over the city. Shoggy’s up there; we need to stop it.”
“Your ascension, Mistress,” Lei-bup didn’t seem too worried that they were in the belly of the beast. “Will it be disturbed?”
“I WISH it could be disturbed,” Gwen protested against Lei-bup’s joyous face. “Slylth, get us out of there.”
“Your wish is my command,” Slylth stamped a clawed foot. A Mandala formed in the blink of an eye, then the trio winked out.
They emerged into a blood-dimmed vista, not so much a vision but the reality of what Malakath had fomented over four centuries, perhaps longer.
Gwen clambered off her Red Dragon, a Flight spell halfway across her lips, then realised that she didn’t need it.
Like Slylth, she had said no to gravity, and gravity replied, “Yeah-nah, no worries.”
What did this portend? Her mind churned. Golos looked too fat to fly, but he broke the sound barrier. Almudj didn’t have wings, but her mate flew as effortlessly as a kite. Is this a Faith thing? Am I a Saint now? Gwen didn’t know. She had skipped religious studies at both Blackwattle and Peterhouse.
Below, Neo Tenochtitlan burned.
Under the Black Sun, reality was tearing at the seams. Shoggy’s influence wasn't continental, but it did cover the entire valley. Its tentacles spread across the sky like a black bruise; its sickly radiance made the flesh tremble, and the mind yearn for madness.
There were a million souls down there, fewer now, from the looks of it. Had Gwen not been the Regent—had she not lived in Sydney, Auckland, Tianjin, and her own home being torn asunder- she would have gone mad at the scale of what was unravelling beneath that all-seeing hazel eye.
Gwen looked up.
The Black Sun looked back.
Her Astral Body trembled.
The Shoggoth wasn’t malicious, or curious, or feeling, really. Shoggy’s hunger was a climate event, and that was the precise problem. How could she reason with an Elemental disaster? How could she rebuke this floating sun hovering three hundred meters above a living city of a panicked population, and expect it to take a hike?
She tried again to communicate with the Shoggoth, not through her voice but through her mind, through her soul, through her Astral Body.
Nothing.
Shoggy understood that she was there—it may even recognise her—but there was no conduit of control. Shoggy had not been conjured by her Mandala, or any Mandala.
Ignoring her demands, the Shoggoth began to shift its incorporeal mass into reality. The central eye—vast, lidless, ringed by a corona of smaller eyes all turning independently in their orbits—had speckles of golden flakes in its hazel irises. The same gold as the Faith in her veins. The resemblance was not approximate. It was exact.
Fuck. Gwen swore internally. How dare you use me for fuel but refuse my steerage?!
“Slylth! If this doesn’t work, I am going to need your help!” She called on her Red Dragon. “Ariel! Come forth!”
Slylth concurred with a grim, stoic nod.
She didn’t call upon Caliban because she had no idea what would happen if she did. If Caliban, in its Pale Goddess form, started crying “Shaa—! Shaa—! Shaa—!” and the Shoggoth came down to tango, that would be the end of Neo Tenochtitlan and the middle-American continent.
Her Kirin phased into being almost immediately. “EE-ee! Mama—!”
“Mama needs your help,” she sent over her usual allocation of mana for Ariel to take on its demi-God form.
Ariel’s answer came as a burst of golden mana vivid enough to make Slylth shield his slitted eyes. A line of roaring lightning from the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Lightning infused its body. Ariel grew to the size of an adult Dragon. The air around her Kirin sizzled, turning oxygen into ozone. Her Kirin glowed with the demi-divine voltage of Almudj's gift. Staghorns taller than Gwen, thicker than her torso, sprouted from Ariel’s maned head. The fish-scale fur was no longer patterns, but actual, true-to-god scales in interlocking plates. Its tail, a massive fish-shaped fan, casually tore the air as it swung happily to and fro.
Whoa… Gwen gulped. Faith and Kirins really did synergise like tea and milk.
Uncaring, the Shoggoth’s numberless tentacles descended upon the city.
“ARIEL!” Gwen shouted at the top of her lungs, calling upon Almudj, the Tree, and every ounce of rebuke she could muster from the depths of her soul. “Barbanginy!”
“EE—!” Her Familiar answered.
What erupted from her Familiar's horns was not merely lightning; it was the Prime Material conforming to the psychic will of her Kirin. Ariel, now truly the Lion of God, burned with the brightness of white fire, its antlers branching and re-branching until they mapped a geometry only mathematicians and madmen could follow. Against its lidless cousin, whose ancient hunger spread like petrol sheen across the heavens, Ariel called for divine rebuttal.
The Prime Material tore.
Slylth spat and swore.
Evocation Magic, if her Barbanginy could still be called IMS magic, filled the space above the city from horizon to horizon, a living carpet of bisecting lightning. The Black Sun shuddered. Tens of thousands of eyes winked out.
A few stray bolts struck the earth, sending up plumes the size of skyscrapers, leaving no survivors. Gwen’s heart bled. She wasn’t naive enough to think that there would happen to be no people in the places struck by grounding electricity, but she could still hope.
Ariel’s howl lasted two, maybe three minutes, then her Kirin shrank back to its usual size, exhausted. She recalled her Familiar, for a weakened Kirin would be a snack for the Shoggoth.
Overhead, what remained of the Devouring Dark stared at her unblinkingly. It was theoretically wounded, but absolutely not rebuked.
“May… I try?”
The voice that answered Gwen’s despair wasn’t Slylth’s, but Lei-bup's. “Milord Slylth can save us with his fire magic after, should I perish.”
Gwen gazed at her High Priest. “Lei-bup?”
“The blessed Hunger is merely wanting what was promised.” Lei-bup smiled at her.
Incredibly, the comprehension that came to Gwen did not come from Lei-bup’s words, but from some deeper connection. It wasn’t words—not exactly, but something closer to Draconic speech, something akin to empathic telepathy, told through sensations and belief.
If her own faith was Kati Thanda, then Lei-bup’s was whetted and shaped like a sacrificial flensing knife.
She gave her consent. Her Mer seemed so confident.
Lei-bup stepped through the air, black puddles forming beneath him. There was no Sea Witch magic holding her High Whip up either. Gravity had lost its hold on her apostle, just as it had given up its authority on Gwen.
Lei-bup opened his coral robes, then discarded them entirely.
Slylth swore, louder this time.
Gwen swallowed her sickness; her premonition screamed like an insane child, but she could not look away.
What her High Whip was, beneath the ceremonial dignity, was this: a body that had hosted the Devouring Dark so long it had become a fantastical garden of pain.
“GREAT SHOGGOTH!” The High Priest’s voice filled the heavens from edge to edge. “HEED YOUR GODDESS!”
Lei-bup’s transformation did not understand the notion of subtlety. The skin along the Merman’s shoulders split first, not violently but obligingly, the way an overripe persimmon splits. What wept from the fissures was not blood but the tenants—the small, many-headed things that had colonised his subcutaneous folds. Hydras no larger than a thumb tumbled free in their dozens, their infant mouths already working at the air with the blind, expert hunger of eyeless instinct.
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Gwen felt her knees buckle. Her High Whip’s Faith was unfathomable. Her Mer, compared to the Precious Feather’s multi-specie populous, were numberless.
Underneath his skin, Lei-bup’s tumours had tumours. His organs had secondary organs, each maintaining its own arrhythmic independence, a percussion section playing in a dozen keys simultaneously. There were eyes, her eyes, adorning his interiority like jewellery.
JESUS WEPT… Gwen held Slylth as the young Red Dragon held onto her. Both of them, it would seem, were discovering new realms at the edge of sanity.
Above them, the Shoggoth stared, its attention wholly focused upon Lei-bup.
Was it working? WHAT ARE WE WORKING TOWARD? Gwen fought down her growing horror. She had to trust Lei-bup, even if her Divination senses begged to be put down.
Lei-bup moaned. His utterance was guttural, primal, total.
Gwen wondered if it was possible to pluck her ears from her head like oyster mushrooms.
“Iä! Iä! Iä!” Her High Whip made his petition.
Iä! Iä! Iä! The heavens answered as the groaning of an Old God rolling through the secret spaces. Faith surged through Gwen, through her High Priest, through the liquid Void swirling in Lei-bup’s chest cavity, through his Hydras and his many hearts and the trembling voice of his supplication.
I am the door. I am the key. Her High Priest said to the Shoggoth. Mistress. Listen.
The Shoggoth, that pitiless and pre-moral hunger older than the concept of appetite, older than the creatures that first experienced it, responded to Lei-bup’s posture.
It listened, Gwen realised, to Lei-bup’s absolute, annihilating release of the self.
The Shoggoth reached down.
Lei-bup reached up with his Hydras.
An inky tentacle, three hundred meters long and wider than the Empire State Building, descended.
The tentacle crossed spaces that were not space, places that had no place, and the two touched—like Adam and God on the Sistine Chapel, while Gwen watched like a tourist with a camera, her mouth half-open.
The Faith in her body dimmed.
A volume of it—a quantity she could not quantify—moved from her to Lei-bup, from Lei-bup to the Shoggoth.
HER Shoggoth accepted the offering of causality.
She felt the thread. The same thread that was formed by the constraints of a Mandala formed between her and the cosmic horror.
Gwen felt it the way one felt a wire in the dark: thin, humming and taut between Lei-bup's blaspheming holiness and the Black Sun's ancient appetite.
It was a door, a channel, already open, consecrated via the oldest possible currency.
Gwen didn't fight the connection; she became the connection.
GO HOME. Gwen told her creature. OR SLUMBER ETERNALLY.
Without complaint, the blackened sky closed like a fist clenching.
The spatial roar that followed was the loudest thing she had ever heard.
She knew now what Malakath knew, that with sufficient sacrifice, the door could be opened and closed. But did Malakath know that the Devouring Dark could be made lucid? That it would be bargained with and spoken to?
“Lei-bup! You did it!” The glad Goddess gazed at her High Priest, then fell into silence.
Slylth covered his reptilian mouth with a clawed hand in sympathy.
Lei-bup, so bloated and obscene, was now skin hanging from hollowed bones. He was a husk. There was nothing left.
No mana.
No flesh.
No Mer.
Gwen left Slylth. She hugged her High Priest before the shell could fall.
Gods… just what had this Merman given for his false Goddess? When they had met, he was so… normal. He was just a kelp farmer greedy for rice, and now…
“Stay with me, High Whip,” she commanded the body as it collapsed in her arms. “Such is your Pale Priestess’ wish and command.”
The bones were already falling apart.
Gwen wept, and from her golden eyes came the golden dew drops of the World Tree’s Golden Mead, dripping on the broken body of her shattered Whip.
“Take it! Take as much as you need,” she demanded of the limp corpse in her arms with magic as ancient as the first God-Kings. “Lei-bup! Come back to me.”
She consented to whatever was needed—as a friend, as a priestess, as a Goddess.
The husk said nothing.
The sky wept.
Globs of ink, tinged with fading Void-mana, fell in dew drops, its pitter-patter playing a requiem for a Land God and a High Whip who no longer existed.
Shalkar.
The Agrarian District.
Brother Ossik of Clan Isk was washing dishes when he accidentally grabbed the paring knife.
He retracted his hand immediately, but knew from the welling blood that the cut was deep, possibly to the bone, and that he would need to make an immediate visit to the Ordo Bath clinics for a Healing tonic.
Wincing, he wrapped his hand in clean rags, pulled a hoodie over his perky ears, then made for the door. Near the entrance of his warren-room, he stopped and prayed to the visage of the Pale Priestess. Half a decade ago, he ate one meal a day. Now, he could buy Healing Injectors.
“O Paleness…” he said to her likeness, mounted between two incense pots. “Please don’t let this injury be grave.”
It took him thirty minutes before he saw the Cleric.
Together, they unwrapped the cloth, healing injector beside them, then—
“Where’s the wound?” The Cleric asked, amused by Ossik’s shock. “Did you even see the wound before you wrapped it?”
There was blood, of course, but… The wound was gone.
Not healed. Gone. The skin was smooth, unbroken. Simply absent, as though the wound had been edited out of continuity.
Ossik stared at his palm for a long time.
“NEXT!” The Cleric called.
Brother Ossik went home and prayed. There was no begrudging a small miracle, even if it was a boon born from inattention.
By nightfall, there were seventeen confirmed incidents in the Agrarian District alone. The Clan’s High Priest, Brother Meskh, had relieved the fever of a merchant's fawn by laying hands on the Centaur’s forehead, producing a soft gold luminescence that neither of them could explain. Sister Yrra, whose joints had burned after forty years of hard labour as a Şöpter farmer, rose from the evening prayer to discover that the ache was gone.
A few days later, the faithful gathered in the underground temple of the Pale Priestess to trade their stories.
On the altar, the Pale Priestess's statue, a local craftsman's interpretation with proportions somewhat more generous than the truth, watched the proceedings with familiar, green-gold eyes.
The Rat-kin were a simple people, quite literally the salt of the earth.
They accepted all happenings without complaint or ambition.
What they did not know was that, a hundred kilometres from the Agrarian District, in a basin of sand and broken shale, even the Earthen Wyrm Garp was awakening to Faith.
The creature had always moved with a blind, geophysical indifference, a force of nature navigating by pressure, vibration, and the magnetic memory of deep stone.
Now, it felt.
In the cave of its mouth, in the wet dark behind the grinding ridges of its maw, a surface that had never held anything but teeth and darkness developed a fleshy tumour. When fully formed, it would develop optical anatomy. And when the lid opened, Garp would finally witness its Goddess in all her glowing glory.
Satisfied, the Earthen Wyrm turned, slowly, in the direction of the city, prayed, and slept once more.
Puerto Vallarta.
The Great Shoal Forward.
Lei-bup’s immediate subordinates, the twin Witches Velahi and Pelahwi, felt it first.
Sea Witches were, in the scope of the Great Shoal, the psychic nerve endings of the Leviathan Aristotle. They sang the coral songs, tended to the kelp gardens, and ran the living city’s administrative functions through their subordinates.
They were tending to the city’s affairs when the sensation arrived—both of them reacted simultaneously, heads tilting in the same direction at the same angle with the unsettling synchrony of interlinked minds.
"Something has happened to the High Whip," said Velahi.
"Something sublime," Pelahwi touched a hand to her eyes. Mermen did not weep as humans did when under duress, but they did excrete brine. “Can you see what happened?”
Velahi wove a Glyph through the air and found that it glowed golden. “The connection…”
“High Priest?” Pelahwi spoke to the Glyph, one hand on the SPAM glowing between her voluptuous bosoms, the other reaching for their lost Whip. “Answer us!”
The throne room began to shake.
Coral, slabs of it, drifted from the ceiling in slow motion.
“Aristotle is moving?” Velahi cocked her head, overwhelmed by grief. “What has our Priestess done now?”
“I think…” Pelahwi cradled the SPAM can with both webbed hands. “I think our Aristotle is changing.”
The Sea Witch was not wrong, for outside the throne room, on the body of a creature larger than most geological features, its morphic shell was taking on features no Leviathan had ever acquired.
The Shoal’s residents, long used to extinction events from their moody teenage island home, moved away from Aristotle as it began to transform in an unsubtle way. Coral cascaded, chitin fell and chipped away. New muscles and strange growths sprouted fantastical gardens in strange nooks and crannies.
The transformation did not take too long. Just a day and a night, excreting enough secretions to seed the Pacific with living spores for the next hundred years.
That and Aristotle now had eyes at the end of its tentacles.
Not too many, just a few thousand, here and there—some the circumference of an athletics oval, others the size of a human-sized Mer. The inhabitants were terrified at first, but within hours, they had accepted this as their new normal.
After all, these were the eyes of their saviour.
And for a God-fearing people, the ever-watchful eyes of the Pale Priestess weren’t an invasion of privacy.
It was evidence of their Goddess’s love.
The Tenderloin.
John DeShawn had been clean for six months, housed for five, and employed for four.
He kept a shrine in the corner of his municipal-assigned studio. It was nothing formal, just a few things that marked the before and after. He had a collection of SPAM cans with her likeness in different poses because he saw on the Lumen-cast that there were these crazy Mermen that worshipped the Regent using her SPAM-sponsored products.
DeShawn’s life before the “Pale Priestess” had arrived was like a sodden dream that had nestled at the recesses of his mind. To his clarified soul, those addled days of living in a haze were not something DeShawn was ever willing to experience again.
Along with the cans, he had a Stock Certificate that doubled as scriptural parchment. All the original residents of the Tenderloin, anyone who was registered, had received them as compensation for the teardown and reconstruction of their homes.
DeShawn had the thing laminated because his late mother had told him that important documents should be laminated.
Sometimes, when he felt the potion-itch, he would pray to the shrine.
The absurdity of imploring the picture of a CEO on a can, together with her printed signature on a Stock Certificate, to give him strength was funny enough to make him stop thinking about the potion injectors.
Tonight, when he knelt to fight his old demons, something inexplicable happened.
He was mid-prayer when the flecks appeared—gold, drifting, catching the candlelight in ways that light didn't usually catch. They settled on the SPAM can. They settled on the laminated receipt. One of them settled on the back of his hand. Instantly, the blissful potions lost their grip.
“Okay?” he said, to the room, to the SPAM, to whatever was listening. His chest instead filled with the Evangelical desire to run into the street and shout her name. “Alright… I guess I’ll knock on some doors?”
London.
The Ravenport Manor.
Mycroft Ravenport was not the kind of Mage who was prone to astral dreaming. He was more of an analytical thinker, and if he did have an Astral Projection event, it would be at his office, solving problems, rearranging information into usable configurations, occasionally producing something that amounted to an insight his conscious self refused to provide.
As a rule, he woke from these dreams both refreshed and contemplative.
His present dream was an exception to the rule.
The Queen’s Master of Arms lay in the dark of his ancient bedroom, gripping his heirloom bedsheets, staring with unseeing eyes at the ceiling while his ageing heart negotiated with cosmic horrors beyond his control.
His dream was specific in an unpleasantly explicit way.
He saw London, only it wasn’t London, because he could no longer identify any of the landmarks. The geography had been rearranged by the familiar language of Strategic Sorcery, something that had not even happened during the Great War.
The Tower of London was a hole in the ground. The Heart of Flames was gone. The Palace was in pieces, like a dashed puzzle set upon by an angry toddler.
The Shard was shattered into smithereens, broken by something far too powerful to be shielded. Griffin Knights and their mounts were scattered like crushed confetti, floating down a blood-red Thames.
The sun…
The sickly London sun was blotted out by an inky void, a Black Sun, sending out tendrils as far as Swansea.
Above him—above the Ravenport manor, which was miraculously intact, floated a triangular tower in the shape of a spearhead battle barge.
On its tip stood the familiar silhouette of a girl he had dragged to London without her consent.
She was clad lightly, as upon their first meeting. He recalled that moment like the first fresh peach he ever tasted, her obsession with floral dresses, her teasing perversity in preferring light clothing in winter weather, her studied informality that was itself a rebuke to authority.
In her obscene fashion, she stood at her Tower's sharpest point like a golden figurehead. She was weaving a spell, directing the Black Sun. She glowed golden, her skin pale ivory and flawless, her flashing eyes full of warning and strange sorrow.
She did not look at him.
Mycroft was awake and panting before her gaze landed.
He reached for the glass on his nightstand, conjured water into the glass with a thought, then drank it with a trembling hand.
My God, what have we engendered? He asked the darkness. What great beast had been born in Bethlehem?
The water was icy against his throat as it sedated his unwelcome vision.
He conjured forth an LR Message device.
He dialled Ollie Edwards.
He hoped, tentatively, that Ollie would know what good their Regent was up to.