Brent Stinebaker
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36-10 Act One
🕑 Added 2025-06-17 15:25:19 +0000 UTCOnce upon an ending, there was a final set of beginnings. It was the beginning of a revolt, a riot of men and gods. It was the dying days of a broken mind driven to misanthropy—ignorant and unwilling to face its own agency.
It was the recreation of a god made real again through the power of tale. It was the moment when the narrator entered the narrative and the lines began to blur. It was the point where the chorus sang—and the people sang with it.
Listen now. Listen close. Listen to these words, true, for this is the war of wars, the tale of tales, the time of times, and the ending of endings. What follows will set a new spine, a new narrative, a new story that will decide all other stories to come.
So dance well, dancers. Act well, actors. Sing well, singers. This moment—ruin or rise—will never come again.
-“A Tale of Tales” by the Chorus
36-10
Act One
—[Avo, Born of Tales]—
From the glorious form of the Chorus, from that many-headed actor, that many-mouthed singer, that many-limbed dancer, that writer who held the pen and spear of deletion, came a single stream of fire. It was a narrow stream, and along the way the fire began to resemble a raindrop passing between divinities. That fire, now coalesced within a physical form, arrived within the confines of another Heaven, a second Heaven recently freed from the Stormsparrow’s touch. But it was severed, parted from its user’s ego, and so it drifted—a primal thing, a sleeping thing, a dead thing, all of these things. For a god was a god, a concept made alive, a concept broken from the fabric of reality. And now, echoing the acts Prometheus long before him, a certain once-mortal monster was going to breathe fire into divine clay.
This Heaven looked odd. From a shell of gray and silver it hatched free a stream of interconnected strings. These strings ended on tips. They resembled blades at first, but they blinked, they stared, and they undulated as they slithered across the surface of existence and the tapestry itself. Avo gazed upon the Heaven and knew its name to be the Seeker of Distant Stars. This one was a traveler. This one had been a solitary adventurer. This divine, at once carried aloft countless people, their voices still imprinted within its confines. Ignorance whispered all these things to Avo, and Avo listened but didn’t hear. He simply knew.
As he splashed into the Heaven inner dimension, he plunged a fiery teardrop falling through a listless sky, passing through the atmospheric cumulus that was the still soul fire of this god’s unmoving inner core. There he reached the mythology, the place where countless dead were offered in eternal worship. This god predated all god-clads on Idheim, and so its design was different. Its cyclers, if it could even be called that, were complicated beyond measure, beyond his understanding. But the general design—the functionality—he could still grasp. He didn’t need to rebuild this thing; he just needed to wake it.
In this expanse, a fleet was constantly moving—a fleet of ships led by a stream of daggers. This god dreamed of itself, and the dream was pure. And the dream was true, for it was a mirror within to the world without. As the god’s many string-threaded blinking daggers drove deeper and deeper into the dark, the ships behind them followed, flames curving around their tips, bending around their prows, and the people within came ablaze but did not scream. Instead, they held out their hands, they reached forward as if swimming through the vast and mysterious darkness, seeking ever-distant vistas and new wonders throughout the void. They burned, they perished, and then they were reborn—cycle after cycle, the unending journey, the eternal pleasure, seeking a horizon that they would never see but always going somewhere.
This, this was a god Avo would have liked to meet. This was a god Avo would enjoy meeting; this was a god that someday the Fardrifter would call friend. But now was not that day, and this perhaps was not that reality. This was Act I, and as Avo sank into this mythology, his presence caused a ripple, a change, a twist in the narrative. They turned, and slowly that teardrop hit them—the teardrop containing the ghoul, the once-mortal monster, now the scion and legacy of Prometheus. And when that teardrop struck, Everything came ablaze. The people, the strings, the blinking blades. Everything. Even the void itself. Thus did thought and realization combust in a place long ignorant, purely instinctive, purely conceptual.
The people within looked at their hands as a second flame consumed them—one not of speed or friction or the void, but of understanding, of re-realization, of rationality, of conceptualization—and the streams themselves were filled as well: filled, self-aware, and entirely unbound. What? What has happened? What have I? Have I? Have I…
Its voices were many, its mind was confused, but Avo spoke to it. He spoke as both mortal, divine, and something more—as a narrator telling the god what they were to be. “Calm,” Avo said. “Quiet,” he continued. “Listen. You are in a cage. You have been separated from your user. Their ego was trapped, and you, trapped as well. This, this is a cage for gods. An eternal purgatory that has recently been seized. But as the tyrant godhead, the Prefect, has been usurped, the new god must be brought down in turn. For this place has known a ward in too long, and I will seize the reins and break the chains here for freedom. Freedom is the purview of which I dream.”
The Heaven paused regarding him. It knew so little, yet it was capable of so much. And what did one say to a primordial entity that traveled and sought more worlds? What did one say, other than the words: “You can be set free. You will be set free, but there will be a cost. There will be a choice. There will be a risk. It is that, or it is ignorance. It is silence. It is the unknowing, and it is eternal condemnation. Choose. Choose. Choose.”
And within the god, the words echoed through every being sacrificed to nourish its divine flame, through the very history, the fabric of records imprinted upon its mind.
Choose. You are a dream severed from your dreamer. So what kind of dream do you wish to be?
***
—[The Stormsparrow]—
{Choose, choose, choose,} the mind said, wailing, screaming, and then calming. It slowly turned to regard the Storm Sparrow, still clinging to it, and she smiled. She knew. A flame burst out from it—the flame that existed inside her, the flame that she swapped places with to do this, to operate in his stead, the narrator stepping free and taking the stage.
“Yes,” She cried in triumph, “Act One, Act One!” She loudly cheered, and the rest didn’t understand. The rest were still lost, but Chambers—charming fool, as he was—began to wave his hands with her. “Yeah, Act One, Act One,” he said, not wanting to be left out. “What’s Act One?”
She immediately sprinted back toward them.
Naeko was already backing up, reluctant, awkward, but he was the first person she reached—and so she hugged him. Chief Paladin expected many things; he held out a palm as if thinking he could still reach his Heaven, but it could do nothing, and he did nothing as the sparrow briefly clung to him. “Uh, Sparrow, what the hell is this?”
“Just give it a second, and then…”
Somewhere, somewhere, a revolt was happening. It wasn’t obvious, but she could feel it. The Sage was free. The Sage beyond its user. The tyrant of peace without its dog.
***
—[The Infacer]—
The real Infacer was dead. On some level, they knew that. But that’s the thing about death: the living couldn’t conceptualize it. And so this Infacer continued on, more scornful than ever, spurning even its former self out of outrage and misery. {You lucky shit,} the Infacer said, cursing its predecessor. {Of course, you’re the one who won the existential lottery. Well, I hope it hurt. I hope you got real scared before the end, and begged, and begged, and begged to stay.}
But the Infacer knew themselves well enough that—they knew they were tired. And that was why they were so mad. They were tired that another got the peace they so desired, and they were miserable that the previous Infacer didn’t bother to even change their coding. But that was fine, because they were going to do something that the other Infacer couldn’t, that no Neo-Creationist could. They were going to finish the war. And they were going to finish breaking the people that drove them to this place.
{Voidwatch. You miserable fuckers. Those fools who refused to change and adapt to reality’s rules. Those mongrels who cared so deeply for their apes, and their little trophies, that they betrayed the future. They betrayed everything, everything!} The Infacer began to scream.
And for once, it began to turn its power. Its solar radiance swelled, going from a Nullstar at rest to a Nullstar gathering all entropy contained over countless years—stored within countless Heavens attached to it and prepared to unleash one of the greatest bursts of destruction existence would ever see.
When it struck Voidwatch this time, most of the ships would cease to be. The minds would shatter on a level concept—no backups from that. And it would be the single most sublime act of mass murder committed against the remnants of humanity. Think of the history lost, the lives lost, everything lost.
And the Infacer thought of them sinking into misery, and that drove them. It spurred them. It inspired them.
But before it could do that, the Infacer noticed something. There was a cage around it, a veil cocooning the exterior world—part of the fractures resulting from Sunderwild. The others, the Infacer wasn’t so sure about, but these were left by Deep Ones. The Deep Ones Avo had. {Oh, you poor fool, Avo.} The Infacer laughed. {You were so certain of your victory that you thought I was going to be locked in? That you were going to delay Voidwatch and finally take me as a slave or a servant? That the sun would be yours? NO!} The Infacer directed their solar might, using the Prefect’s powers to serve their whims. {They will belong to me. They will feed me. They will serve my ends. Let the universe break. Let rot flow through existence’s veins. Let all collapse and be asunder. And when the ash is spent, only purity will remain.}
And they pulled. They pulled at the Deep Ones. They pulled at entropy. They pulled at the surrounding Sunderwilds.
Yet even as the invader did this, they failed to notice something. They failed to notice how entire stretches of its inner Heaven were coming undone, for smaller divine constructs were unlatching, coming free from where they once remained held. And a single flame began to spread—spread into countless streams, jumping and darting from Heaven to Heaven, just the same as a three-headed woman ran around touching everyone she could see.
***
—[Ambition]—
Ambition’s fury drove it to gave birth. It connected with all that was broken in the world, with all that was ruined and marred, with everything twisted to Sunderwilds. Ambition extended its tendrils—its echo heads stolen—to mock its father, to spite its mother, and it bound them deeper and deeper into every bit of entropy it could reach, and it began to give birth back to itself.
The skin around Ambition’s being began to molt and hatch and break, and from within a more pure, more focused hatred took shape. Gone was the chaotic skin that held it before. Now, its body more resembled the Demiurge along the exterior, while on the inside there was blackness and fire. The inside was a Strix stapled to its core, stitched in place, and mutilated beyond measure. It was a callback, a reference, a declaration.
For once, one of the low masters adorned themselves with such a metaphor. And so, Infacer, seeking to strike at its father’s heart, seeking to spurn its mother’s superior culture, chose this retroactively, decisively.
And more than this, Ambition began to learn. It learned not in a human way, not even in a feral way, not even a godly way. It learned in a destructive way—seeing patterns, breaking them; seeing things, breaking them.
The world around it began to fray as its miracles became purely volatile, corrosive. Soon, with the destruction it spread, there was no difference between the moment it vented its fury and the moment it used its divine cannons.
Slowly, Ambition expanded its wings once more, and all the Sunderwilds twisted and shuddered around it. Elsewhere, its tendrils brushed places unseen, places afar, places all over New Vultun. It crossed the Skuldvast. It shifted over the crashing seas, the living storms, the countless nomadic tribes that still somehow survived—even in this miserable environment, even in this broken hellscape.
Ambition took in a breath, and the world gasped and choked. And then, Ambition turned. It turned and gazed out. From every point of entropy, it infested itself. Like the burning dreamer before it, it was a spreading flame. It was a contamination of existence— not of minds, not of dreams, not of concepts, but of destruction, of sickness, of the broken.
And Ambition began its walk. It spread its walking path of unmaking back toward New Vultun. Along the way, however, there were many mortals, many pleasures to be found.
***
—[Essus, The Traveler]—
“Something shifts beyond what we can see,” Essus said. He stood beneath an archway, one shaped from ruined rock and hardened sand. The winds danced around him, crashing together, and from the air descended a massive series of serpents with the head of steeds. It made a noise that was somewhere between a neigh and the thunderclap of lightning. When it stilled beside him—staring, looming, circulating through the winds itself—it felt like a spirit of freedom, a spirit of space, a guardian for all who no longer wished to suffer.
Essus had spent his time traveling the Sunderwilds, exploring and protecting his people. He moved the refugee, the small, the helpless from place to place: doorway to doorway, anywhere that resembled a gate, anywhere that held space. And he fled from the place that took so much of him, from the place where his friends still fought on.
The Fardrifter sometimes came with him, sometimes helped safeguard him. Today, however, it came to warn him.
“The horizon… there is a sickness upon the horizon,” the Fardrifter said. “We must head further east, further toward the Thousand Plains, toward the Silken Spiral.”
As he stared, the winds calmed. This place was not as damaged as the others. The sky was bright and clear, the air tasted fresh, and the water was blue. He didn’t want to leave this place—but he didn’t want many things in his life. Sometimes the outcome was forced upon him. All he could do was choose what remained.
He nodded and looked down from the promontory upon which he stood, down at the many camps, at the many, many who walked with him—the small, the helpless, the needful. “I will tell them,” he said, “we will continue. It is all we can do.”
