kenoscomm | communion | stargazer-focused but ota

[Liem doesn’t know who Jesus is, but he assumes this is a swear, and Matt is correct to do so. His mouth thins as he pauses, since he doesn’t want to freak Matt out, but also, Matt already went through all of this in person in another universe, so he should be able to handle it secondhand.]

Newcomers were brought to a secure location and confined there until they harmonized. They were fed a… [—he falters a little, here—] what I can only describe as “concentrated despair,” in order to reinforce the belief that their worlds were gone, and couldn’t be brought back.

[He takes a deep breath.]

For me, that was some months before we were brought here. We were all purged upon arrival, but after that… I wasn’t eager to sign up for either side, regardless of how different they might seem.

[ The language Liem uses is somewhat distancing. You could almost think he's describing something he witnessed, rather than something that happened to him. But Matt doesn't blame him. A soft horror suffuses his face, draining it of color.

His brain is quick to spin up questions and rejoinders. The semantic distinction between saving and reviving. The fact that some of the people who joined the Zenith side under extreme duress seem to have chosen it again, with less duress this time. Though that's not a mystery to him, is it? A stranger with a birds-eye view into his past might see how he and Vincent met, then Matt's choice to date him--clear-eyed, no teeth at his throat in that instant--and find it puzzling. A sign of Matt's stupidity, or naivete. He knows these things can be more complicated than they appear from the outside. ]

I can understand that. [ Quiet. ] If something was working on you before, I'd find it hard to trust that it wasn't happening again.

[ Which does make him wonder about Cyrus and Yima. He trusted so immediately that they were honest, if not necessarily perfect. ]

[Liem nods slightly, though he doesn’t know that it was necessarily distrust about the influences involved that was keeping him from pledging to either side. A large part of it was just the choice in general; he hadn’t felt like he could possibly know what was truly right, so how could he choose for either side? Especially because this time, the choice really was only his.]

It was challenging—and I didn’t know how I could discern how true either side’s position really was: Whether our worlds really were gone for good. Whether going back was truly possible.

[He folds his fingers around the plain black coffee he ordered, pensive.]

But I made promises in the world I came from, to my country and to my god—so I thought that until such a time as I found evidence against the possibility of returning home, I should give my services in support of Meridian’s cause. And here I am.

[ Matt definitely has questions about this quasi-involuntary servitude they evidently shared, things like are Amos and Silco okay and did I ever mention a guy named Vincent. But he's not sure how useful those questions are just now, and he doesn't want to poke at something so painful.

For the moment, he nods, faintly surprised that Liem wasn't sure what to believe but tucking it away for later. The mention of god and country draws a softer expression, a mingling of wistfulness and recognition. ]

A lot of people on the Meridian side seem to have that, [ he says. ] Some really concrete obligation back home. You're the first I've heard of that has one to a god, though. [ Rather than, you know ... being a god. ] I respect that. If I had a situation like that, I'm sure I'd choose the same way.

[Amos and Silco are definitely not okay, but that’s a matter for some other conversation, probably, unless Matt really wants to bring it up. Suffice to say that most of the people over in Zenith are probably not normal, but especially not the ones who came over from Horos.]

Did you not have a community where you lived, Matthew?

[The way he says it, it’s clear he doesn’t just mean a neighbourhood, or a place where Matt happened to live. He means a community that he could be a part of, that accepted him and valued his presence. Some place it would be hard to leave behind, to divest himself of.]

Ah, well-- [ Matt looks sheepish. ] I mean, I had a cohort in my program. And some of my self-perpetuating wards were showing great early results, so I was doing a lot of work on the ground where I lived, and I know a few other practitioners. It's just, the way I see it ...

I'm sure I must've told you all about this before. [ NOPE. Matt, oblivious to his failure to communicate across multiple timelines, traces the handle of his mug with a fingertip as he considers his words. ] I only learned I could use magic as a teenager, and it was ... like a light coming on for the first time. I felt so connected to everything, and everyone. I have people I've loved, and places I love, but what I feel the most strongly is like.

[ He looks up at Liem, with a crooked smile like he fully expects to be laughed out of this cafe. ]

I think there's an energy that binds us all together. Something that gave us our shape, and our desires, and it's--way, way too big to understand fully. But it's good.

[Liem remembers Matt telling him that he was lonely, and that before learning magic he’d been lost, without direction. These things do not give him confidence when he considers the situation Matt is in now. He does not trust Matt to do what is best for himself, when he is so keen to look to the world around him for a sense of purpose.]

So—your community is wherever you are, you mean. In Kenos, in your original home, or somewhere new.

[He seems a little melancholy as he says this. Even in Horos, after attuning to Kenoma’s influence, Liem had yearned desperately for the land he’d left behind. He cannot imagine ever belonging somewhere new. He hadn’t even belonged in Taldor, really—he just belonged to Abadar, and he’d been content with the knowledge that one day, when he reached Abadar’s realm in the afterlife, he’d have a place he was truly supposed to be.]

I don’t understand, though. How can you feel that way, connected to the existence you came from, and have doubts about whether it should be saved?

[Knowing him as he does, having suffered alongside him in Horos, Liem has to assume that Matt wouldn’t have come down so firmly on Kenoma’s side if he’d been able to decide for himself—but at his own level of harmonization, he can tell from looking at Matt’s shard that he also hasn’t opted to lean towards Meridian, either.]

Sort of, [ Matt agrees, though only hesitantly. ] Maybe everywhere is my community. And places that aren't even places, in the way we're used to experiencing a sense of place.

[ "Place" doesn't taste like a real word anymore, but at least Liem isn't laughing. Even if Matt's answer doesn't seem to have satisfied him.

Though Matt doesn't blame him, really: First of all, Matt has never successfully explained his view of the cosmos to another person and has long since stopped trying. Not even at 3 am when everyone's really fucked up. And second, Liem's question is one Matt's been asking himself. He puffs out a breath. Glances down into his mug for a moment, gathering his thoughts. ]

I guess, because ...

So we know we're not the first creatures to ever live on our planet. There were others before that went extinct. And that event was supposed to be really sudden--we don't know a whole lot about it, but we know that much. And before that, we don't know how the universe originated. There might've been another universe that collapsed and created our current one, there might be infinite universes that are always moving away from each other ...

I guess I'm trying to say that I don't know if it's right to bring my world back, when cataclysmic events are part of nature. My world got its start in the first place because something else made space for it. I've never done, like, necromancy or anything, but the stories about bringing things back that are gone are pretty gnarly.

[Matt’s response draws a frown from Liem—it can’t not, when he says things like I don’t know if it’s right. It inspires the same reaction as if he’d questioned whether someone should try to resuscitate a drowned person, just because they were past the point of struggling. Death is a part of life, so why try to help those on the brink of it, right?

He knows that isn’t fair, and isn’t what Matt means. He’d just hoped things would be more different with a version of him who hadn’t been steeped in Kenoma’s dogma.]

You said something similar to me in that other place, when I first arrived. [When Matt first found him, naked and still half in shock in the Champion Shrine.] Not about necromancy—you compared reality’s destruction to a forest fire that lets new life grow from the ashes.

[He hadn’t agreed with him then, either… but ultimately, he hadn’t had anywhere else to go but with him.]

What if it isn’t like that, though? What if something ripped it apart and ate the pieces, and is coming for what’s left? No bed of fertile ash: just a hungry darkness. Is that “right”?

Oh. [ Intrigued, but cautious. Matt's sensitive to rejection on points like this, and interprets anything that isn't overt assurance as faint damnation. ] Well ... I believe in that too. That at least on my world, destruction can be the necessary force that creates something new, after.

But you're right. [ About that characterization of the darkness. ] It's a lot of unknowns. And to that point, what if it's a hungry darkness looking for worlds to eat, and resetting everything just like it was in the moment before that happened--what if it puts us all in the same situation again? [ He laughs, sheepish and a little overwhelmed. ] One version of me already met you. So who's to say we haven't done this a hundred times, and haven't figured out how to break the cycle yet?

[The things Matt says come so close to making sense to Liem, and yet they keep falling short. He makes it sound like what Meridian wants is to wind the clock back, to turn back time until they get to the point before everything went wrong. Liem will admit to not having all the answers, but that has never been his impression of Meridian’s goal.]

Resurrection is not… time travel. That’s not what I’m suggesting. Before coming here, I didn’t think time travel was even possible.

[Now… he doesn’t know. The whole situation with the Iconoclast Oracle was a strange one, and he isn’t sure what to make of it. He frowns for a moment into his cup of coffee. Takes a meditative sip.]

The longer we’re here, the more I think that before we can do anything, Meridian or Zenith, we first need to defeat Oblivion. Otherwise whatever worlds we flee to, new or old, will just be consumed regardless.

[ Matt winces a bit, guiltily, for not what I'm suggesting. Most everything he says here is a hypothesis, of course. It has to be. But he can see how it sounded like he was leaping to a conclusion, and he hates when other people do that to him.

However, at the talk of defeating Oblivion, his expression sharpens curiously. ]

Okay, now that makes sense to me. [ And indeed, the maybes or apologetics that have colored his tone thus far in this conversation are absent. ] I mean, I don't know how you're defining Oblivion, but if you mean just broadly the thing that destroyed our worlds--yeah. I agree.

And what's really interesting about that goal to me is that it doesn't really require fighting each other. In fact, a war sounds like it'd get in the way.

[Lifting his coffee cup, Liem regards Matt over the rim as he sips it, considering the tenor of the other man’s musings. It’s a little interesting to see Matt trying to straddle both sides of the line here, when he’d been so firmly on the side of entropy before. Perhaps this is truer to the kind of person he was before the Kenoma’s indoctrination wormed its way into him.]

That is what I mean, yes. The way our worlds were ended, they were clearly undone by some outside force. And the things I’ve seen here have made me think it might be… if not aware, then at least a distinct entity. Like an Outer God.

[This is not a comforting thought to him, particularly because it seems unpleasantly plausible. And how does one kill an Outer God? Can it even be done?]

I don’t know why things are set up to be this way here, though. I spoke with someone who’d been here since the first Oracle War, but they were either unwilling or unable to disclose who’s set Kenos up to be this way.

[ Distinct. Aware. Matt thinks of the hungering shadows again, the ones he saw in the depthless shallow of Yima's pool. Only this time, he doesn't think of them as creatures unto themselves, but as the tips of clawed fingers. In his mind's eye, the hand extends a long way back. ]

Unwilling or unable? [ Matt frowns. He wonders if this is the person Gavial alluded to--the sketchy mage. ] Did you talk to them? I mean ...

Based on what I've been told, [ with a briefly irritated moue--hearsay! great! ] the contest has never actually been successfully completed. And even if this is some god's divine will to have us fighting for these opposing goals, I kind of feel like ...

Okay, I've been trying to explain this to people. [ A sheepish smile. ] But there's this concept in a religion where I come from called "anahata nad." It translates to "the note that strikes without the two parts touching," and it means basically that when you expand your view of the cosmos, you can see ways where things that appear to be in conflict can actually harmonize, and there's space for both. So even here, in a place that seems really driven by heightened polarity ... why shouldn't there be a third way?

Well… When I say “spoke with”, I mean over communion. I have not been unlucky enough to meet this person face to face.

[As far as Liem knows, everyone who’s actually seen Aetós in person had terrible experiments done to them. He only knows what they look like because of the memories of one such person.]

This person, Aetós, told me that when a resolution cannot be reached, the shard-bearers are all “purged” by… who or whatever governs Kenos. They said that they alone of the first generation were able to discover it, but that they could not say why information on these past, failed generations is so lacking. I am fairly certain their silence must be part of whatever bargain they struck in order to be allowed to continue existing here.

[Does that make Matt’s theory more likely, or less? Liem couldn’t say, but it certainly adds an extra sense of urgency to their conflict, which was already urgent to begin with.]

But… the shadows, and these other strange phenomena that have been happening of late; I think they might herald something terrible. Aetós said they had never seen anything like it—at least, the people appearing and then vanishing again in mere moments—and I wonder if it’s because… whether we succeed or not, this generation might be the last.

[Perhaps Oblivion has finally begun to catch up to them even here.]

[ Matt frowns, an interested flicker passing over his face for "unlucky enough." But he's positive this is the person Gavial was talking about; the accounts of what they said match up too perfectly.

Most of the rest of this, Matt turns over in his head without drawing any particular conclusion. Liem is personifying the underlying metaphysical architecture of Kenos in a way Matt hasn't thought to, but it doesn't mean he's wrong. And this generation might be the last--it sends a chill down Matt's spine. ]

I agree with you that it's meaningful that this has never happened before, [ he muses. ] I mean, I don't know if every cycle has had its ... idiosyncratic elements. But from what I've seen of these shadows myself ...

I don't know, [ he says. But then he adds, ] They remind me of my dream. What I saw, just before I came here.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that was the source of them, [Liem agrees.

He doesn’t know, of course, that the hungering shadows and the searing light, the disappearing landmarks and the strange dreams are all heralds of the same force that destroyed their homes—but they herald something, and he has a feeling that if they cannot discover a way to triumph over that nothingness, they won’t get another chance.]

We dream, sometimes, after being dissipated—while the Tree reforms us.

[He says this like the idea of being popped like a soap bubble and regrown is totally normal.]

Those dreams can be illuminating—like the Tree is trying to impart insight into why it brought us here, and what we must do. But the information we have is hard to piece together.

[Stitching scraps of dreams together with lived experiences is difficult. He still feels like he’s completely adrift.]

[ Most of this conversation has been fraught, to put it mildly. But this time, as Liem elaborates, Matt's expression drifts into a pleased sort of wistfulness. He's thinking about being back at the Tree of Life with Tezcatlipoca, staring in awe at the endless sky. It's the kind of place where a hungering darkness feels impossible. ]

I love that Tree, [ he says, verging on a sigh. Matt absolutely believes the Tree of Life is trying to communicate with them, though he wonders if maybe it's being prevented somehow from speaking freely. Like that sketchy mage person is. ] And I totally sympathize with getting communiques or portents that are hard to square, but if you need a fresh set of eyes, I'd love to know about whatever info there is.

[ He wonders if it would be worth it to die--sorry, dissipate--for the chance of glimpsing something meaningful. It's not like he wouldn't come back. ]

[If there’s one thing about this conversation with Matt that hasn’t surprised Liem at all, it’s Matt’s clear reverence for the Tree. The Tree of Life is exactly the kind of huge, beautiful, unfathomable entity that Liem would imagine Matt would fall in love with. Also, as locations go, that one is just quite peaceful.

He’s not sure if that love necessarily translates into trust, though. He’s still not entirely clear on what kind of answers Matt considers significant, or how he would interpret them coming from an inscrutable cosmic entity. Nonetheless, he’s clearly interested, and Liem sees no reason to withhold information from him.]

Would you like to see the dream I had the last time I was reforming? This would have been last year, in the middle of Erqu, so quite some time ago now. But I haven’t been able to grasp its significance yet.

[Because D hasn’t yet made his communion about Cyrus’s empty husk.]

Oh. [ Matt's eyebrows lift in surprise. The soft, wistful look gains light and heat, as well as a touch of bashfulness--like Liem's just given him an unexpected compliment, or asked him out for coffee. Matt you're getting coffee right now ... ]

If you feel comfortable sharing that-- [ Matt was spitting up dirt for what felt like hours after he arrived here. He can't imagine how the process of reforming would feel if you knew it was because you'd received a mortal injury. He imagines it might be personal. ] --then yes. I'd love to see it.

[ He's not as confident in dream interpretation as he is in some of his other occult skills. But at least he has a decent mental rolodex of symbolism. ]

All right.

[Liem is very much not going to share the reason for why he had to be regrown at the Tree on that occasion, or discuss what had been going on with him around that time in general, but he is willing enough to share his dream. He sets down his coffee when Matt agrees, interlacing his fingers on the table while he delves back to retrieve his memory of that particular vision.

It’s not quite as clear as it had been in the days immediately after his revival. Mostly it’s the broad strokes that come through: The night sky and the glassy water reflecting it. The sense of peaceful detachment as he regards the twinkling tapestry above. The sight of his physical form continuing on across the water without him, and the gut-lurching certainty that something else now dwelled within it. The terror as the black between the stars swallows him whole.

He’d had his own questions, his own fears in the wake of that dream, but he’ll let Matt come to his own conclusions. That is, after all, the point of sharing.]

[ It's a pleasant vision, to start. Matt smiles thoughtfully at the impressions of night and water. The stars gleam like gemstones set in black glass, and then--

Liem's body continues without him.

The dark eats.

Matt's shoulders tighten in a brief shudder. His magic has been so intertwined with his body for so long that the idea of something else walking around in it--it's why he got the tattoo on his back, the diagram to prevent demonic possession. He thinks about the voices he'd heard in Alenroux, the shadows he saw in Yima's pool. About the wendigo, with its talent for ravenous mimicry. ]

Are they anglerfish? [ he says, letting the words rush out before his self-consciousness can stop them. That's how you have to be with portents: turn off your editor, let instinct drive. ] Are they practicing?

[When Matt floats his impressions, all Liem can do is spread his hands slightly in a brief suggestion of a shrug. He’d wanted a second opinion—or third opinion, really, given he’s already shared this dream with Set—but he’s still at a loss as to how close to the truth any of them might actually be.]

Perhaps. If this phenomenon is related to the destruction of our existences, I don’t know what the connection is. Perhaps it is how the entity arrives, gains a little footing, so it can break everything open.

[The idea that the thing swallowing the sky and the thing to “take” his body in the dream would be the same is relatively new for Liem. He’s only just begun to consider things from that angle.]

During the previous Oracle trial, some shard-bearers were dissipated by shadows in the form of people, and then their shards possessed so the shadows could mimic them instead. As far as I know all of these people had their shards retrieved before the trial was over, but it is a worrying thing—and perhaps related.

[ Finally, someone's telling Matt what the hell happened in one of these Oracle contests. The knowledge does nothing to diminish his horror, however. He turns over gain a little footing and break everything open, wondering--could that have been happening back at home, and he had no idea? People being overtaken by stretching shadows?

Undoubtedly. The world is such a big place--or at least it was. Plenty was going on, including mystically, that Matt's awareness didn't touch at all. ]

Yeah, [ he murmurs. ] I mean, whatever the mechanism might be exactly ... there's shadows, this feeling of familiarity, a desire to overtake in some way. People have been disappearing, I heard. I know there's plenty of monsters out there, however you define them ... but I don't know, Occam's razor would say that the explanation with the fewest pieces is most likely to be the right one.

It feels significant, [Liem agrees.

He doesn’t know what Occam’s razor is, but he certainly feels like the appearance of these creeping shadows throughout Kenos is unlikely to be unrelated to the hungry force that seems to have swallowed up their worlds, and is now seeking the leftovers here.]

I know others have had concerning visions as well. Those who were dissipated during the last trial reported a dream where that vast, hungry blackness was stalking them: following them through the cosmos, like a hound with a scent.

[As though it was seeking them even here, at the very ends of existence.]

communion | stargazer-focused but ota

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cw: some discussion of abusive relationships

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