Godclads

Chapter 34-11 Master of Hounds (I)

+Little was known about Frederick Three-Eye before 92 P.F. His early life is without account—no details, no mem-data, no acquaintances. He emerged from nowhere, first spotted in New Vultun as a Squire, a mysterious beginning that only added to his enigma.

Well into his middle age, Frederick specialized in kidnapping and spying. His methods were never overt or high-octane, and he Avoided causing significant collateral damage. Known for his professional and quiet demeanor, he was unnervingly incisive. Notably, he never ran with the same group twice; his solitary approach seemed driven more by self-preservation than by any general antipathy towards people.

Towards the end of 98 P.F., Frederick went missing, only to reappear later in the Silken Spiral during a run against Dowager Kui Quick Arrow. In the midst of a procession involving a new experimental golem, the operation went awry. He was presumed dead when his severed arm was discovered in the wreckage. However, subsequent data suggested otherwise—he was later spotted in the Sunderwilds, leaving a destroyed enclave near an Omnitech surveillance unit. Although this information cannot be fully confirmed, the captured figure matched Frederick Three-Eye’s known dimensions, sheath, and demeanor, and even fragments of his surface memories placed him at the scene.

Sometime in the 200s, he returned to New Vultun to run the circuits and compete in the 200th New Vultun Grand Prix. Despite never having raced before, he finished in third place—an astounding achievement. When offered numerous sponsorships, citizenship opportunities, and various other benefits, he declined and once again receded into anonymity.

His final confirmed act was a daring raid on an experimental Agnos facility, during which he stole a highly classified Highflame and No-Dragon cross-commissioned frame known as the Master of Hounds.

We tried looking for details regarding this Heaven, but most of the information is heavily redacted. What we could decipher indicates that this is a Heaven that is primarily based in perception and offensively wields of

The reason we collect information about Frederick Three-Eye is simple: he is an enigma, and we are Ori-Thaum. It is our business to know about everyone. Information is key, information is power, and the fact that so little is known about Frederick Three-Eye and his capabilities is, above all, unnerving.+

-Ori-Thaum Mirror [Redacted]’s Threat Profile of Frederick Three-Eye

34-11

—[Avo, The Hidden Flame]—

Using Vator as a catalyst, Avo sought his Beloved and soon found himself pleased. The creatures he spawned with Vator’s aid—the beasts that were once the ghouls—had now experienced a new flowering.

Hundreds of thousands of signatures littered the substance, dotting the expanse of the tapestry in reality like falling embers upon a canvas of blackness. They were flecks of light and love, spreading, growing, and multiplying with every passing second. As Avo reached deeper into the Greatling, he felt Chambers sprout his own bonds.

Magenta branches tunneled through Vator’s body, gliding into his being, out from his Heaven—the Portrait—and wove him closer to his many “offspring.” From across separate timelines, trespassing the barrier of liminal realities, the Beloved lifted their heads as they felt the presence of their creator descending.

Held within this temporal realm, Vator was only too happy to serve as a channel to his children. “Can you feel me, my wonders?” Vator breathed, his voice almost euphoric.

Chambers shuddered. “Man, this guy’s really into this shit,” he muttered under his breath. Avo didn’t comment; he knew Vator’s peculiarities and understood that Chambers would continue, even if slightly unbalanced by the Greatling’s behavior. “Ah, what the fuck, Aedon. Don’t kink-shame. We’re fucked up aren’t we? Would Dannis do this? No. I just… gotta be hard for him. Even if I don’t want to.”

If the flames could grin, they would have.

The Beloved weren’t the only ones flowering. Chambers had come so far as well…

Moments passed, and while Chambers focused on establishing connections between Vator and his Beloved, Avo extracted one of the unborn Sang males.

Their body was a thing—twisted and damned to die. Yet by the power of a risen Heaven, a Heaven of Blood, blessed with biology, elevated once more with time, and further supported by a dragon, the plague that claimed so many young song males was to be denied. The hemorrhage within them roared and tried to tear their organs asunder, to exsanguinate them in an instant, but the Woundmother screamed; the Woundmother fought.

Where the dragons remembered an illness that claimed so many and seated it within the males of the Sang clade for purpose or punishment, the Woundmother’s domain was blood—and so her will reigned while the miracles flowed. “They will live, master,” the Woundmother said, her voice alight with purpose and interest. “This plague within them, it is complicated. I tried to break it several times, but it reconstructs itself. It is like a structure that remembers its own shape. No matter how much you break it, it reforms.”

The heaven of blood didn’t know just how much they inspired Avo—a structure that remembered its own shape. This could be a new canon, something he would set to work on immediately. He created another instance of Kae and spun her up. Almost instantly, the Agnos began contemplating and constructing a new canon that he could use, something to replace memite within his Soulscape and beyond.

“All right, I got ‘em synced tight,” Chambers called, recapturing Avo’s attention. Now, a full web of connections was established, running between Vator and controlled by the Lovebringer. Avo found himself capable of traversing these bonds, his unseen flame gliding through Chambers, into Vator, and down through this place of parallel time—back to baseline reality, back to where the Beloved warred and spread.

Avo glimpsed the world through their eyes then.

He saw the battles they were fighting, felt the triggers they were pulling, the guns they bore. More than that though, he studied their forms. Their bodies were a mixed architecture, born of ghouls but infused with the mark of someone who had left a deep impression in Avo—Draus. It was a merger of Highflame’s pride in the form of a fine Regular, and the Low Master’s greatest folly, represented by the ghouls.

These Beloved fought with far more control, focus, and deliberation than their predecessors. Gone was the feral urge to tear, torture, kill, bleed, and butcher. Now they attacked methodically, trying to overcome their adversaries through surgical operations, often coordinating with one another, yet sustaining that fearlessness and indifference toward death.

Within their breasts, however, there was something else—a seed of love. They loved their enemy. They loved war. They loved every bit of pain inflicted upon them, and they loved inflicting pain. They reveled in holding their enemies as they died and in spreading themselves. Their infection was different. It was thaumaturgic. It wasn’t just a plague through which they spread; rather, it emanated from every act of affection, every worry one held for another—the times a soldier cried out for their comrade, the moments a man did all he could to save his brother from bleeding out. This fed the Beloved, making their ichor ever more infectious, their breath spreading cells into the air, staining the world with their unnatural taint.

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And so it was that across 600 different districts and 14 separate Sovereignties, the operations of every major guild were blunted and stymied. Instead of being able to seize these parts of fallen Noloth, they were forced to hold in place, applying containment and purging protocols. Entire offensives ground to a miserable halt as infections needed to be contained, Lustaways needed to be adapted, and every inch of ground needed to be secured or cleansed.

Tendrils of light carved through sections of the fallen dragons. This method of scalpelling was stolen from the paladins, while others were cleansed by falling tides and rolling flames. The unclaimed no-dragons used their own plagues to beat back the Beloved.

Yet Vator’s finest work held strong. As long as there was love in the hearts of men, as long as there was someone to care, the Beloved continued to fester within infested flesh. The ghouls were relics of fallen technology twisted by ritual and retribution, while the Beloved had ascended—a phenomenon of unchained love. And because they were manifestations of unchained love, they were perfect recipients for what was to come.

“Wombs,” Avo whispered to them. “You will be wombs. Inheritors of the rash. Proper descendants against the guilds.” Though they did not hear him directly, a feeling passed through each and every one of the Beloved. They let out sighs of relief; their eyes widened with euphoria and bliss as they realized they were blessed—blessed by their first creator, by the one who empowered Vator to create something that could twist the very fabric of the patterns and infuse them with purpose.

Slowly, Avo filtered through the Many Beloved, searching for that lucky one who would be the first to bear the Sang Unborn. There, he found a section of fallen Noloth, one just bordering Scale.

The path between this section of dismembered dragon and the place where the Paladin Headquarters once stood was still blocked, but with a slight turn of the Deep Ones, Avo could slash a gouge into the substance to open a path. From there, he would implant the unborn in their body, a new bridge would form, joining the risen temporal realm—now rooted to Avo’s Soulscape—and baseline reality itself.

“Oh, oh, dead gods,” Vator said, tears spilling down his cheeks. His face glistened with both glory and grief. “I could have been doing this all along. I could have been creating children—perfect, full children. Oh, the things you have that I never will.”

The flames within Avo turned as he regarded Vator . He understood the boy perhaps better than the boy understood himself, yet some of Avo’s templates declared this was heartbreaking—to never truly know what it was like to love, to be loved. Others envied Vator, for he would never be hurt the way they were. It was funny how consciousness reacted. Every mind was of a pattern, a set of beliefs, but where was that universal truth? Nowhere. Nowhere at all—and that was why minds were so delicious to cultivate, to learn from.

“So,” Chambers said, “we gonna put one of these kids inside these… new ghouls?”

“They’re called the Beloved.” Vator responded with a hitched breath as the portrait hovered over him, observing what they had created.

“These creatures,” the Portrait began, “are not… they are not of a people. They have no families, no lines. They’re just…

“They’re just perfect,” Vator finished. “They are our family,” he told the Portrait. “They are our finest work, our art piece. I made them in a time of desperation, but now look at them—look at how they sprout and spring.”

But as Vator raved, gesticulating wildly and clawing at the bonds connecting him to his so-called offspring, the portrait flinched back—unnerved by its user’s ravings and disturbed by the things it had created. How odd it was to see the heaven rendered mundane and normal compared to the madness—the atypicality—of its user.

Then a third mind entered the fray, expressing discontent regarding the design of the Beloved. [Why, in all the dead fucking gods, do they look like me?] Draus said. Her voice was thin, but her tone teetered on the verge of violence. Avo could feel her desire to rip and tear at Vator until he undid this mistake, until he pulled the aspect of the Regular out of these ascended ghouls.

Avo, however, decided to use this opportunity. There were so few things that truly unnerved Jelene Draus, and he had to savor this moment. “Think it’s an upgrade for you—once you enjoy life, have more desires, and just shoot, shoot, shoot; kill, kill, kill.”

[Yeah, you’re one to fucking talk,] Draus sneered. [Before I met you, you were just a broken thing in a barge, couldn’t even deal with a captain of a fucking waste crew. And then what? Then you were some sad sack I had to pull out of the gutters. These things—they’re less than that. Don’t piiss down my back and tell me it’s rain. You tell that piece of shit,] she continued, referring to Vator, [to pull my face off of theirs and turn them into the ugly sow-sons they were.]

Avo grunted. “I don’t think I will.

[Avo, I’m gonna—]

“Where are the cunts?” Chambers asked. The question was so out of left field that everyone reeled in surprise—even Avo.

The thing about Chambers was that you might know what he was going to say in a few seconds, but then he actually said it, and it tended to surprise everyone.

“Excuse me?” Vator said, blinking rapidly.

“You know, vaginas and fucking pussies, consang,” Chambers continued, doing his best to infuse his voice with enthusiasm. “Like, I was thinking, right—since they’re all built out of love—why can’t they just, you know… you know, Draus likes guns, Avo’s a ghoul, so why don’t they just have, like, teeth down there that gobble people up and channel the biomass, and have, like, fire at people—fetus missiles.”

It was then that Avo realized what Chambers was trying to do. He was trying to bond with Vator, to connect with him, and he was doing it in the only way he knew how—by stealing bits from previous Soft-Master vicarities he had watched before. This one was from Night of the Forsaken Poon, a terrible miniseries universally panned except for one thing: It was based on an actual No-Dragon biovirus.

However, that virus didn’t involve someone launching dead fetuses from their vaginal organ; instead, it featured someone launching a parasite from their throat—a parasite that created more hive-like ports across a human body which then grew in a jagged nest of infections briars.

Vator was at an absolute loss for words. He drew in a long, deep breath and… “What is wrong with you?” he demanded.

“What,” Chambers stammered, reeling back, “I’m just trying to give you some ideas that might be helpful.”

“Why don’t they have a p—p—p—” Vator couldn’t even finish the word. “Why don’t they have a v—vagina? Why? Why would I give them a vagina? Why would they have such a rudimentary, primitive organ—a new organ that humans barely use now? Do you know the last time someone gave natural birth?”

“I think someone’s giving natural birth right now,” Chambers said, his bonds twitching. “I think I can feel them.”

“I don’t care about the FATELESS,” Vator snapped, balling his fists. He pointed a finger at Chambers, at the Lovebringer’s string-like body. “You might as well tell me how many dogs are fornicating? Or if apes still shit in trees—”

“Do they?”

“DEPENDS ON WHICH SPECIES YOU IMBECILE!” Chambers struggled to master himself. “You, you, you have no idea. What, what do you think this will do to the aesthetic? A slit? Is that what you want? A long slit on the bottom of my masterpiece? This perfect, pristine human architecture, musculature, fine-tuned—and then a slit. Why wouldn’t you give them such a thing? What is wrong with you? What are you thinking?”

“Fuck! I don’t know, cosang, I’m just trying to help.”

“You—you’re trying to sabotage me. You’re trying to make me break. You are a disturbing man, Aedon Chambers—a sick, disturbing man with terrible taste.” The nonexistent Bond between Chambers and Vator somehow grew weaker.

“Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were that sensitive about this stuff.”

Vator drew in a deep breath and let it out. “I forgive you. Now never offer me suggestions regarding my art again.”

Chambers hesitated for a moment. “I mean. Imagine additional armor in the shape of ti—”

“You’re a ruiner You ruin things! I loathe you!”

“Enough,” Avo said. “Amusing. But now it’s time for a test. Vator, prepare for delivery. Chambers, maintain Bond. I’m going to go across.”

“Impregnation underway,” Chambers and Vator said at the same time. The latter’s eyes widened as the former laughed.

A flickering, weak Bond manifested between the two, and Chambers barked a laugh. “Got ya, bitch. Looks like we’re gonna be consangs now.”

A look of genuine disgust crossed over Vator’s face. “That might be the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“So far.”

“Gods.”