[Mage: The Awakening 2nd Ed] The Red Word Cult and The Prince of 100,000 Leaves

Out of Character (OOC):
Chronicle: Mage 3: The 6th Watchtower
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

The following is perhaps one of the first inspirations for me to create a Mage Chronicle centered on fighting the Abyss for very advanced characters.  the Prince of a 100,000 leaves.  In our Chronicle, the Prince is a potential relative of the Crimson King.  The Prince may also be the Crimson King.

Sources:
1a. Core text on the Prince from the Boston Unveiled sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1e
1b. Core text on the Red Word from the Boston Unveiled sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1e
2. The Hunger (or Hunger Curse) as seen in the Antagonists sourcebook for nWoD
3. My breakdown of the Hunger Curse found here, and my short story parts 1, 2, 3
4. Opening quote from the Left-Handed Path sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1 & 2e
5. Ending quote from Imperial Mysteries sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1 & 2e
6. Red Word Cult opening from Mage: The Awakening 1st Edition corebook
7. Mizong/Hunt quotes from the Adamantine Arrow sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1e
8. Mr. Hart section from the Mysterium sourcebook for Mage: The Awakening 1e

The Red Prince of the 100,000 Leaves

"The Eldest gods of the Abyss dreams flood the anti-reality with alternate foundations for existence and negations of logic—endless possibilities that caress the cracked egg of the ordered universe. Sometimes the dreams drip in as Paradoxical Anomalies, Abyssal Verges and idea-beings that infect the Tellurian with their principles. Greater intruders include the Prince of 100,000 Leaves, a sapient history of the world where humanity experiences love through torture, sustenance through cannibalism and faith through betrayal, and where endless volumes detail all the torment that was, is and ever shall be..." -Noted from censored Baalim text

We have found a fragment of papyrus on which is written Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ancient, over three thousand years old. They speak of a blasphemy. This history exists, but it is not true yet. Egyptian cannibal-priests summoned what they called He Who Reveals Wisdom in the Fading Moonlight. They wove the demon’s body out of blessed, prophetic hieroglyphs and of flesh and blood and spread this testament far and wide.

It speaks of Cha’annys, the Land of the Broken Turtleshell, whose princes impaled the dead on bronze pikes so that their eyes could scan the living for signs of treason. It speaks of the war with dread Vah and the blood-sewers of nearby Rukhavira, all scales and cells of a larger creature, a demon made out of Time itself.

Five hundred years later, blood-quilled scrolls were offered as a sacrifice within the demon’s temples. Five hundred years after that, the demon’s charnel towers smothered the Second Temple of Judea, and now, lecterns of bone display copies in every nation, atop grand, horrible step pyramids erected to its glory.

The demon looks at its slaves through the pages of its being and eats at the will. Humanity screams in its sleep. The demon has many more titles. It’s been called Khonsu-Tohut, the Drama of the Outcast Erinye and the Secret Branch of the Tree of Possibility. It has been called the Blasphemous Scribe.  
It rules the world and we are beholden to its history. What it writes is true, through the hands of its priests. There is no hope, no mercy. There is only the words in red. This piece of papyrus has the touch of corruption in its words...

Salem:
Nearly 400 years ago, the Ebon Noose cabal (then called Epona’s Chariot) had its steading at Salem, ready to repel enemies from the indigenous mages and spirits that struggled with the Noose for the land’s power. One small medicine society was the cabal’s most potent foe. The society descended on the steading with spells and mortal weapons.

Worse, they created bestial warriors by calling cannibal Manitou to possess their followers. Sharptoothed, armed, hungry warriors besieged the steading for days. The Ebon Noose knew that they would fall unless they called upon unusual aid.

The Lernaean was the Ebon Noose’s sole warlock and its greatest historian. She specialized in a thread of lore that went as far back as Egypt and beyond, to the legends of great, terrible Abyssal manifestations caused by Paradoxes and the orders of entities that intruded into the world through them. There was one entity — the Blasphemous Scribe — that could change history itself by replacing Time with its own Abyssal coils. The Lernaean knew a ritual that would bring the Scribe forth. It was not Supernal magic, but a procedure that would attract the Scribe’s attention and give it a path into the world. She kept the rite hidden because it was too dangerous to unleash, but her allies read whispers of it in her surface thoughts.

The Ebon Noose tortured the secret out of her and called the Scribe to earth through the Lernaean’s wailing soul. The Scribe needed a gap in history to appear, and an obliterated soul was the easiest method — and its favorite.

The mad coils of its being unraveled on Salem and on the enemy nation. The medicine society was erased from history. Its long house vanished, leaving an empty cove that would one day be called by the name Howard’s Rock. One member of the Ebon Noose vanished in an instant. One turned into a boneless thing that wept blood and screamed blasphemies in the High Speech, until it was burned to ash by the cabal. One took his own life in shame, and four — those who are the acknowledged survivors of the Noose’s Salem settlement — left, their memories confused as to what had happened as Time shuddered around them.

But one mage remembered. The Medusan had destroyed the Lernaean’s soul and wrote the terrible history that existed in the Lernaean’s mind. The Medusan reeled from visions and crawled away to settle in Howard’s Rock. She had two sets of memories: one of the siege and the rite and one of an anti-history, spawned in the Abyss (a cycle of events that birthed wars and atrocities).

The Red Word Cult

Local New England legend tells of this terrifying cabal: “The man was missing most of his right arm. There were ragged, tooth-marked flaps of flesh left. Similar gnawed wounds had taken an eye and ear. His mind was gone, but he managed to find his way to Davy Jones, a man who he’d traded information and Mana with a week before. The wounded mage babbled about the Red Word, about cannibals and languages that should never be spoken. ‘They have taken a whole sentence from me,’ said the mad mage, ‘and I am damned for having known it.’ Then he turned a killing spell on himself.” Since then, rumors of the Red Word — cannibal occultists — stoke the fears of mages, even though stories conflict and none of the Awakened can claim to have ever seen one of them.

The Prince’s largest and most active cult infests the Boston area and throughout New England. The extended clan of the Red Word is given to extreme wealth or poverty. For every degenerate populating a rude, isolated hillside village, a career-oriented professional makes his way through Boston’s throngs. Despite these class differences, there is little rivalry. Red Word cultists put aside their differences to engage in the cult’s twin rituals: cannibalism and the recopying of sacred texts.

The cult claims descent from the mythic Egyptian priest who supposedly called the first stories of the Prince from the Abyss. The Medusan’s later influence is a minor tale, known to a few cult scholars. In any event, the Red Word place little emphasis on their own history. In fact, they rarely bother to record anything more about their past than they need to maintain social cohesion. To them, accepted history is false; the Prince’s chronicle is the true story of events, and needs to be fully told to bring it into being. The cult has compiled enough of the sacred corpus to learn of Boston’s counterpart in the antihistory, and Red Word uses this alien description as a secret code. They know the city as Rukhavira, City of Broken Eyes.

Red Word cultists ceaselessly track signs of the Prince of 100,000 Leaves. Naturally, they hope that by copying them all into a single volume, they will complete their master’s codex-body. Most Red Word members have their own handwritten books, word processing files and even websites that compile as much of the Prince as they can find. Fortunately, very few of these compilations consist of new fragments; most are recopied from other members. Cultists scour Boston’s port, museums and universities for more of the Prince; wealthy members pay antiquities dealers and smugglers handsomely for suspected fragments. The Dead Wrens have unwittingly sold these to cultists on more than one occasion.

The cultists complement fragment collecting with cannibalism, which they regard as the act of stealing a victim’s false history. According to their beliefs, every meal weakens the integrity of the current cycle, thinning the barriers that keep the Prince away.

No member of the cult is Awakened, but, thanks to the unnatural energies around Howard’s Rock, most of the local cultists are Sleepwalkers. They don’t care about occult lore outside of the sacred Prince, for it all comes from the usurping history. However, they do know that entities from the Abyss can influence mages, and so they sometimes hire themselves out to corrupt mages as thugs and intermediaries. The cultists are especially interested in mages who are bedeviled by Manifestation Paradoxes. The Red Word do not know why mages attract entities from the Abyss, but believe that such things are closer to the Prince and are thus worthy of veneration. If cultists actually meet these entities, they normally ask them for help in the holy mission of bringing the Abyss to the world. Most Manifestations do not respond at all, as they reflect faults in the mage’s own soul more than the Abyss itself. Some other Abyssal entities have responded to petitions, however. These beings might force a mage to cooperate with the cult.

"Maybe I am insane, but I feel good. Now that we’ve devoted ourselves to pure self-improvement, there’s no limit to what we can do. But we need you, Kalkin. We need your flesh to guarantee our ascension. We stumbled over the technique. That’s all it is, you know? Just like calculus, an elbow strike or a rote. We found the cult — No, best not let him know the whole thing, in case you somehow gets through the wards. All you need to know is that we discovered the formula to render power from your meat all mixed up with Abyssal religious trash. Now we wouldn’t touch that normally, but the cult we got it from weren’t happy to see us, right? Then Lupe died, we were hiding with his body in some shitty hunting shack while they were scouring with these dogs — well, not quite dogs. Backed against the wall, so we tried it out. It works. It saved us. It makes us fucking gods, for as long as we eat." - Mizong, The Hunt

The Master of the Hunt

Not every cannibal contracts the Hunger, and the Prince isn’t the only cannibal patron in the region... there are cannibal spirits as well. But we can assume that Mizong's cabal met the Prince’s cult and after a desperate escape from their headquarters, learned a way to draw power from the dead by eating them. The cabal is addicted to the power of human flesh and wants to eat only the strongest prey — and that means Adamantine Arrows. In addition, the cabal seems to need to capture prey who know they’re being hunted, but this might just be a collective derangement of some kind.
Howard’s Rock
Two kinds of towns dot the Massachusetts coast. Picture-pretty villages amuse the tourists with historical  plaques, antique architecture and friendly little shops. Visitors don’t see the other kind too often. Commonwealth authorities forget to repair their connecting roads and their moldering, crooked buildings. Erratic streetlights practically urge motorists to keep driving. Most of these towns are poor, with a hard-drinking mix of teenagers desperate to leave and aging farmers and fishermen loath to abandon their ancestral homes.

Howard’s Rock is the latter kind of town, except for two important differences. First, the village has a luxurious hotel that’s famous for its cuisine (French continental) and its friendly (if a bit rustic and ignorant) staff. Second, and certainly less well known, is the fact that every inhabitant above the age of 12 is a cannibal who worships n entity from the Abyss: the living anti-history called a the Prince of 100,000 Leaves.

The town harbors the largest enclave of the Red Word cult. Howard’s Rock is a place where Red Word cannibals can let down their hair, so to speak. They can cook severed arms on the barbeque without looking over their shoulders and freely worship a living fragment of the Prince itself. For all the utterly evil acts that the cult takes as a matter of course, many members still ape human norms enough to enjoy their hobbies and pursue career ambitions. (This doesn’t prevent devoted cultists from turning utterly mad. Rather, local culture has made it the norm, and the townspeople have learned to reflexively cover for the odd social gaffe.)

That’s why the Howard’s Rock Hotel exists. There was no particular sinister plan in mind when Ezekiel Johnston proposed the business at a town hall meeting. He’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur. He had worked hard, saved his money and earned his chef’s papers in Paris. He would have opened a restaurant in the fiercely competitive New York market, but the French police wanted him for the murder (and subsequent skinning, spicing and broiling) of a prominent saucier. Ezekiel knew very well that fellow citizens thought that the hotel would bring in meat on the hoof, so to speak, but he hoped that the cult’s sense of discretion would prevail.

For the next decade, it did. On one occasion, impulsive local teenagers caused a “boating accident” with some of the guests, but, even though Ezekiel shared in the sacred feast, the kids saw the business end of his hickory cane right afterward. Everything seemed to be running smoothly, until the Red Word attained part of their dream.

Cult scholars assembled a new, complete paragraph of their Prince’s chronicle. Combined with generations of worship, the act summoned a fragment of the Prince itself. It was called the Temple of Holy Devouring, and its arrival, sprouting out of an Abyssal Verge on coastal rock of the harbor, tore the town out of synch with the Fallen World. The phenomenon erased hundreds of records, effectively erasing evidence that the town had ever existed. A chilling mist cloaked it from aerial observation.

People in a few neighboring towns could still tell people where Howard’s Rock was and even make pointed remarks about the villagers’ notorious bad breath and odd habits, but, aside from that, only two pieces of information were still easy to find: its name and the existence of the Howard’s Rock Hotel. Both appeared on too many maps, brochures and fine dining magazines to disappear overnight. Ezekiel’s adamant refusal to allow cult business to take place inside the hotel may have shielded it from the phenomenon that hid the town.

The Verge: Eat or Be Eaten
It’s easy for urbane visitors to deride Howard’s Rock. This is something that may ensure their survival, because even though Ezekiel is strictly loyal to the cult, he has a real passion for his little hotel and resents fellow citizens who slake their hunger on the tourists. This does not mean, however, that he will shelter opponents of the cult or similar troublemakers; he may actually go to great lengths to see that they are properly marinated for their just deserts.

Now that the Temple of Holy Devouring squats on an Abyssal reflection of the shore, cultists prefer to eat human flesh there. They do not know exactly what the proper rites are (they have yet to find parts of the Prince’s chronicle that can tell them), but they believe that it is the proper thing to do. Cultists only have to walk through the Abyssal Verge to worship, and most adults have become so attuned to the place that they can even see it from a distance and have stopped noticing that it actually exists in another plane of existence. Constant exposure to the supernatural has long since dulled the Quiescence among the townsfolk; all of them are Sleepwalkers of a twisted sort.

The temple is an impressive edifice, consisting of three intertwined, twisting towers, with a fourth indescribable shape like a rippling polygon flickering in and out of an observer’s peripheral vision. The towers are built of blueveined rock, covered in green copper struts. Inside, each tower has a staircase leading to a rune-covered chamber with a free-floating, unquenchable flame in its center.

Beneath the tower, a labyrinth extends farther than any Red Word member has been able to walk. The cult has walled off certain portions so as to imprison sacrifices; another tunnel leads into the interior of the shape: a perfect sphere with one grilled drain leading into utter darkness. It is here that the Red Word performs its most holy rites.

Red Word cannibalism is based on the belief that once the cultists ritually devour a victim, that little piece of history that the victim creates with her life and actions has been obliterated. Normally, the feast is only symbolic, but when it’s performed in the temple itself it actually comes to pass. After Red Worders eat the victim, signs that she existed begin to disappear, bit by bit.

Sleeper friends and family forget they ever knew the victim and invent explanations for any traces she left behind. Eventually, even material traces fade. This is more than mere forgetfulness. The victim’s place in the universe erodes, and the discontinuities she leaves behind represent a ragged hole in reality. Sleepers with extraordinary Willpower experience a startling vision of the Void beyond reality the first time they contemplate the missing history. The experience is the stuff of nightmares; Sleepers must turn their horrified attentions away. If they fail, they are seized by temporary derangements and madness. From then on, sufferers have to fight to return to sanity over the course of weeks.

Most of these victims eventually shake off the madness, but a very small number lose their minds. These unfortunates become a danger to others, because once they fully, madly appreciate the Void, something notices. It’s only a matter of time until something from the other side possesses the victim.

Although the Awakened are immune to this effect, it does apply to Red Word cultists. The Abyss and the immoral nature of the feast take their toll on the townsfolk. The buildings fall into disrepair, enhancing Howard’s Rock’s already sinister ambiance. Visitors are likely to see rustic madmen tending the gardens outside of their teetering homes on the way downtown. If actual Abyssal
beings have taken hold of any of the citizenry, the beings are keeping a low profile, but the presence of mages may inspire any hidden demons to take action.

The Temple Hounds

Every adult in Howard’s Rock has at least the first stage of the Hunger. Over generations, town families have built up a resistance to the curse (or else the Temple of Holy Devouring has changed the curse to suit an alternate history where cannibalism is a way of life) so that it rarely progresses beyond the second stage. Sometimes the resistance doesn’t quite take, though, and a few town cannibals lose their minds to the lust for human meat. These unfortunates are not pitied, but revered. They are the Temple Hounds. The cult breaks them in with a steady supply of meat so that they won’t attack fellow cannibals. It teaches Hounds to lope on all fours and how to respond to a leash and muzzle. Seen in heavy shadow, a visitor might mistake a Temple Hound for a huge dog, but in any significant light the differences— staring human eyes, razor teeth and hairless, callused skin — are horridly obvious. Cultists tattoo Temple Hounds with fragments of the Prince to edify the devout, and then set the Hounds to patrol the Temple of Holy Devouring. When enemies invade, cultists loose Hounds to scour the town.

Temple Hounds develop excellent smell and night vision. Their claws and distorted musculature increase their speed. Exposure to the elements, the beatings used to train them and their ability to mindlessly disregard pain toughen them against blows. (In addition to the traits of a fifth-stage victim of the Hunger, Temple Hounds add two points to their base Speed, ignore wound penalties, gain one point of armor and +4 dice to perception rolls.) Aside from the Hounds’ regular handlers, they can only distinguish between cannibals and non-cannibals by smell. The Temple Hounds are, of course, trained to attack the latter.

Cleansing the Taint
Howard’s Rock is a blight on reality. The cannibals have called down fragment of the Outside so abhorrent to natural laws that the Fallen World appears to reject it. Red Word temple rites fray reality victim by victim. It’s only a matter of time until the cultists find more of the Prince of 100,000 Leaves.

Sometimes, you have to call down the thunder. Once mages discover the secret of Howard’s Rock, they might want to wipe the place from the face of the earth. This can be the center of a major, combat-heavy effort, with squads of cannibals fending off a fragile but potent alliance of cabals. Even Seers of the Throne and Banishers may be willing to put aside their enmity to join an invasion force. Thanks to the nature of the Abyssal Anomaly, invaders probably don’t need to worry about how it will all look to Sleepers until after the battle.

Besides hordes of Red Word cultists, leaders of the cult may call upon acamoth-ridden allies and dark entities for aid. Cabals may have to race against the cult’s efforts to assemble a potent sentence from the Prince’s history. This fragment could expand and empower the temple or summon potent Abyssal entities to ravage the ranks of mages.  For bit of moral complexity, for all its horror, the town has uninitiated children, frail elderly and citizens who never wanted to join the cult but had to eat human flesh or be served up themselves.

Decadent and Depraved

The more refined members of the cult are fixers and informants who carefully hide freezers of human meat in their condos. Ambitious cultists can carefully (and literally) eat their way through Boston Brahmins who inconvenience them. City Red Word members are conscientious anthropophagists who never let a scrap go to waste, so their victims’ bodies are almost never found.

Cannibalism is an excellent allegory for upper-class decadence and they sometimes conceal themselves among the city’s elite. Street people might start vanishing in their new terriroties. Mages can lose contact with friends and contacts. The cult will use its prestige and influence to foil the investigations.

The are also the country cousins: isolated mutants with bloodstained faces and a penchant for using power tools in personal combat. When these people aren’t serving dark mages or ancient spirits, they provide an interesting hazard for mages traveling the countryside.  Feast nights are particularly dangerous...

Cannibal Versus Cannibal
The Shadow Realm has a group of spirits that represent cannibal urges. These have been called wendigo, atcen, Bearwalkers and other names. They are found around the world, but have been most famously described through a Native lens. Some of these spirits are actually benevolent and represent the desire to cling to life against adversity.

Some of them preside over instinctual cannibalism in animal species. A rare few represent cannibalism as an expression of greed and domination. Humans in the presence of these spirits can transform into animalistic predators who lose their minds to the taste of human meat. This occurs through direct possession or the spirit’s Influence. The Ebon Noose riled up spirits like these, and the medicine society used the spirits to attack the Ebon Noose.

The cannibal-Manitou, also called chenoo, resent the alien spirits that appear with fragments of the Prince’s chronicle. Cannibalistic resonance is hard to come by, and the Prince’s extrusions into the Shadow World leave little left for the chenoo to feed on. Thus, mages who would fight the Red Word might be able to call upon some unpleasant allies. And, of course, there is only one easy way to keep cannibal spirits strong...

Land of the Broken Turtleshell:

In this anti-history, there was no America; there was instead Cha’annys, the Land of the Broken Turtleshell, whose princes impaled the dead on bronze pikes so that their eyes could scan the living for signs of treason. She remembered the war with dread Vah and the blood-sewers of nearby Rukhavira, all scales and cells of a larger creature, a demon made out of Time. She remembered the Blasphemous Scribe itself: the Prince of 100,000 Leaves.

She carried a small piece of papyrus with her: fragments of the Prince’s history that she wrote down to finish the ritual. She now knew that the Prince was contained in such fragments: she had only to bind them together to make his history true. The Prince was this history, this chronicle. To her scarred soul, the Prince was the truest version of reality now. The spell at Salem had broken Time before her, leaving the Prince. Most of the cannibal spirits that had once plagued her cabal were replaced by counterparts from the Shadow Realm that existed in the Prince’s anti-history. Rather than mad scavenger-spirits, these beings were considered kings, for cannibalism was a sacrament in the Prince’s world.

She used magic to bring the first followers to Howard’s Rock, and taught them the cannibal rites of the Prince. When her followers came to devour her a generation later, she didn’t resist. With her blood in their throats, the cult of the Red Word sang of cities that would one day exist for a thousand years and ancient lines of tyrants that would erect thrones.  This history exists, but it is not true yet.

Doom Yet Unwritten

The Prince of 100,000 Leaves is a bizarre Abyssal entity that can only fully manifest by rewriting Fallen World existence to suit its own laws. Occultists have predicted the entity’s existence by postulating heretical visions of Time that might exist in the Abyss. Some of these forgotten time lines exist in Astral Space as fancies and collective speculation, but the Prince is different: it is an alternate history so abhorrent that it has been rejected by reality itself. The Prince gained a certain self-knowledge and a desire to displace the flow of real events with its presence. The entity knows the Fallen World, because it has been called before by weak-souled mages who invoked Paradoxes using Time magic. The Prince is made of the essence of Time, but only as a castoff, a shell of genuine history that has twisted in the outer dark. The Prince realizes its nature as a timeline that has never been, and resents this. It wants to be the truth. It wants the Fallen World.

The Red Word cult believes that an Egyptian scribe tried to peer too far into the future. Touching the purity of the Void, this cleric encountered the Prince’s anti-future instead, and, in his madness, decided to write the entity a “body”: a comprehensive chronicle of history under its dominion. The completed book was to consist of 100,000 papyri, but something blocked the completion of the project. This is fortunate, b e c a u s e the cult postulated that, if the whole history were ever recorded
and gathered in one medium, it would eject the c u r r e n t timeline into the Abyss. Reality would be the outcast, and the Prince would be the true history of the world.

Naturally, members of the Red Word are the predestined rulers of the nations to come — the nations that will, one day, always have existed. Since the time of that alleged event, the Prince has managed to extrude more of itself into the world through mages who fall to Time-related Paradoxes. Each victim writes a little more of the Prince. One errant sentence in an occult journal describes Azatadghil, the African port inhabited by skinless beasts that arose in the third millennium of the Prince’s reign. A mad poet may ramble onto the sadistic legal code of Vah, the theocratic Britain of the anti-history.

Calling the Prince

The individual fragments are mostly harmless, but a powerful enough Paradox to cause an Abyssal Manifestion involving a fragment might bring a part of the Prince in the form of a ephemeral Intruder Gulmoth that would have existed if the Prince’s history were true. A fire-spirit might be replaced by the spirit of a green flame that sheds no warmth but rots whatever it touches. These spirits are as short-lived as any other Manifestations, because they are wholly alien to the Fallen World’s ecology.

Unfortunately, these entities are actually extrusions of the Prince and, as such, are determined to lengthen their stays and create more opportunities for incursion. These entities use whatever means they can to inspire and collect more fragments. Each additional fragment (a single sentence or a rough sketch) multiplies the entity’s lifespan by the number of fragments it has added to its own. For example, a Gulmoth scribe that has a fragment inscribed alongside the one that accompanied its arrival can survive in the Fallen World for twice as long.

Additional Paradoxes can bring more Abyssals, which also benefit from fragment inspiration or collection. These entities attempt to twist the material world to conform to anti-history. Not all of the spirits are wholly unnatural; if one does manage to twist the Fallen World enough, the Gulmoth can exist indefinitely.

Anomaly Paradoxes can gather fragments without calling entities. The mage scribbles the fragment down, then forgets about it or believes that she intended to put it down all along. Some Paradoxes may change the mage or her surroundings to conform to the Prince’s history. Compiled fragments also multiply the duration of these changes.

The anti-beings use their special Abyssal Numina to invade and influence the dreams of a rare few Sleepers (usually writers or artists), who are then driven to record their nightmares — which are actually chronicles of the Prince’s anti-history. In this way, more fragments are created. The entities then collect these fragments (or rely on Red Word cultists to find them) to extend their stay in the Fallen World.

Sleepers who encounter an Intruder or a place where it has manifested (soaked with its resonance, even many years later) can also dream of the anti-history. In this way, secret fragments unknown to the Red Word can be found throughout the world, waiting to be compiled into a greater whole.

To compile fragments, a writer or artist must collect them and put them down together so that they form a coherent whole. It must parse as a paragraph or a properly composed work of art. Two unrelated fragments (about Vah and about the giant centipedes of anti-China) would not extend a spirit’s stay. Oral traditions can sometimes have this effect, but they must be recited to an everexpanding audience at least weekly.

Once enough fragments have been compiled, an Abyssal Anomaly occurs — even without the help of a mage or a spellcasting Paradox. These are extremely rare, for the proper combination of fragments, scattered far and wide throughout the world, rarely come together. Once gathered, they have to be put together in the right order, a task requiring skill and a certain knowledge of the Prince’s anti-history. If all these requirements are met, the Anomaly can take place. An example of one such incursion of the anti-history into the Fallen World is the Temple of Holy Devouring in Howard’s Rock.

“They've already won. This world is a facade. The Prince’s world, the 100,000 Leaves — they’re real. We’re a fading afterimage of what was. We already live in the Abyss!”

Book Collecting
Since accidents with the Time Arcanum call the Prince (in the form of an Intruder), they often get recorded in books, artwork and oral traditions. Mages may quest to find and destroy these tainted chronicles or fight against the infection itself. A particularly disastrous spell or a compilation of work may threaten the entire region. Unless stopped, Boston might be transformed into the City of Broken Eyes.

Cabals have worked at tracking down and destroying the anti-history as it makes its way to the Red Word by courier, smuggler or acamoth’s bargain. Boston has the highest concentration of the Prince’s fragments in the world. It is unknown how far the Red Word has progressed in their quest to assemble the 100,000 “leaves” of the Prince. 

Even though Red Word claims that completing this work would bring about the anti-history, they have little evidence for this outside of their own doctrine. The true effect is unknown but no doubt unpleasant...

“In the Vast Egyptian Weirdness chapter, you quoted what you said was an Old Kingdom inscription. We originally thought you got it from the University of Chicago archives, maybe through your wife, but I had a contact of mine come up empty looking for it.”

He shrugs. “Well, I made it up. I thought this Scribe of Blasphemy figure you see in a couple of coffin inscriptions was kind of interesting. When it’s time to weigh your heart in front of the gods, he tries to switch the papyrus that contains your sins with a forgery full of terrible things. I thought it was reminiscent of the King in Yellow. You could have some fun extrapolating it into…”

“…an Ancient Egyptian version of those Chambers stories. I know, Mr. Hart. But you ended up with something else, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, it never seemed like it really hit my goal for the piece.”

“Well, instead of creating a compelling fictional document, you created… well, not actually a ‘real’ bit of Egyptian scripture. Think of it as a possibility, like one of your ‘alternate universes.’ Think of the worst of all possible worlds, where torture begins at birth and where the only miracles that exist serve to keep the victims alive and suffering long enough to breed and continue it all, forever. Think of a world where the only god is composed of every story of suffering in its universe, and its thoughts are processed in a loop of time that plays back every horrific permutation, like a computer that calculates its instructions with formulae of pain.

“Somehow, you found that god, Ken. You wrote a bit of its prayer book. That makes it more real than it was when it was just a shell, cast into the darkness when this world was born. There are some crazy people who want to make it real enough to replace our world.”

His eyes stop darting, and the rest comes along quickly. I tell him about the Red Word: the cult that worships the Scribe and collects fragments of its unspeakable history. They’re cannibals; they believe that the act steals the victim’s place in Earth, opening a tear in the world-narrative that their master might be able to seep through, one sentence at a time. 

“And that’s where I come in, Ken. You’ve seen what I can do — the pyrotechnic end of it, anyway. That was a simple trick from a vast body of knowledge — the same knowledge that sometimes hits you when you’re writing at 4 am. These are flashes of the Mystery, as potent as a bolt of flame. It’s my job to keep the fire that frees people, and snuff out anything that might rage out of control and burn them, or burn us all.”

Movie: In the Mouth of Madness - because obvious reasons

[Mage: The Awakening] Dead Air (Part 3)

Out of Character (OOC):
Chronicle: Mage: The Horseman
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 1st Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler 

This is the final part of a retelling of the final plot of our LAST mage Chronicle, which concluded in December of 2012.  End of the world and all that, obviously they succeeded.  It is chock full of insanity...  Also I lifted the Denarians from the Dresden Files to use as antagonists. It was so much fun.

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

Mage: The Horsemen
Death: Resumption after the events of our doom (Story: Dead Air)
By Casstiel, Lorekeeper of the Horsemen (Dec 2013)

((Jack Text))

((IndraText))

((Kairos Text))

CHAPTER 4 – The Ends of the Earth

CANTO I – The Ocean of Lost Fragments

Things got dark on the river.  Unnaturally dark, then a rushing of water and a roar of misty memories plummeting off a massive waterfall with a long drop.  We approached the falls.  The only light was the eerie glow of the memory waters around us.  The Ferryman said we had arrived and vanished… ditching us and his boat.  Man we are just really unlucky with these guys… remind me to lodge a complaint.

Featherfall, it’s a simple spell featured in the earliest versions of D&D.  It’s totally a thing on a mad adventure such as this.  A little bit of Forces and a little courage as we jumped over the falls and looked for a spot to land in the darkness below.  I hate the endless falling forever bullshit as the mist of memories passed over us… filling our heads with so much babble and nonsense.  Seraph and Indra coordinated a landing, man that guy always keeps his cool.  I noticed the boat vanished when it hit the falls too, guess Moon Moon hit the end of his line.

I don’t know what made me think of it – maybe it was some random snatch of memory, filling my head with a similar scenario from a book I’d read with a crazy mage in a grey robe, but I shouted ‘Featherfall!’ to those of use with Forces, hoping they’d get the reference.  I exerted a little will and altered the forces acting on us, allowing us to float down safely.  This could have been a comical Alice in Wonderland parody, if it weren’t for the dire situation.

There's a version of solitaire called idiot's solitaire. It can't be won, at all, but it has the advantage of being playable in one hand with no table while falling. On the down side, my cards were ruined by that dip in the river, they were barely readable. Still, it passed the time for a while.

There were a few times on this endless night where we needed to create light.  We landed on what felt like sand, but this place was dark beyond dark.  Enhancing the light from flashlights had been the easiest way, here we had to get some Life/Forces darkvision going on.

Part of the blackness could be explained by our surroundings.  The sand was black as obsidian, the towering walls of the cavern were also black as frozen ink.  We were on the shore of a massive lake so large you couldn’t see the other side even with enhancements.  Various Underworld rivers pouring their filth into it from all sides.  A giant toilet, a basin of soul refuse. The noise was truly monstrous as it echoed off the walls and made a sort of powerful insane white noise.  On one large obsidian stone down the beach the laws of this Death Dominion were posted.  Once again, some of these were different in my “where” but fundamentally they were the same.  There could only be one ship and one captain.  You could not take the waters of the Ocean.

There was a tiny hovel along the shore and then this place stuck me as familiar.  Loudon, Kairos,Indra, and Nergal saw it too.  This was some sort of black copy of the shores of the Ocean Ouroboros in the highest part of the Astral Realms.  Here was that scary hovel with the Gate hobo inside.. an emissary of the Abyss and maybe an Exarch who hadn’t made it.  Lore is unclear.  But who was the Gate down here in this reflection of that high place?  The gatekeeper Deathlord?  The hovel was abandoned, maybe Nico did something to him as he had planned.  We didn’t approach it, it filled us with dread.

So this place was like a reflection, but this wasn’t going up to cross the Abyss, no broken Silver Ladder here.  This was the way down, to Abbadon.  I walked to the edge of the shore and inspected the waters.  All the combined rivers of the Underworld must truly have supernatural substance, especially if you are forbidden to take from it.  I couldn’t get a read on it so I Rook and Kairos to get ready to reverse time and dipped my pinky in.  A bit of white foamy flotsam drifted off of my finger.  Something bad had happened, my mind spell alarms went off.  I scanned my memory frantically.  Loudon informed me that I no longer had a blood type… the identifier had floated away and the reality of my body with it.  Karios is very good at reversing time, bless him… I was alright.  But it was terrifying.  The Ocean took what you were… as if all people, souls, everything was just so much flotsam on the water, sinking down.

I was horrified.  Just that brief exposure could start erasing who you were.  How had the Denarians managed to cross it?

Then the waters churned offshore, a massive serpentine and tentacle thing moved beneath the black waters… it was massive but never broke the surface.  The Leviathan, the Kerberoi of this realm…. Fuck this place.

That’s when Nergal spotted it, he sent out his spirits looking for Denarians.  In the center of the lake was a sizeable maelstrom.  A whirlpool disturbance in the water.  It was created by powerful Supernal magic.. most likely how the Denarians got to where they were going.  So it would seem that to get below the Underworld to Sheol you had to go through the bottom of the Ocean of Lost Fragments.  We needed a submersible…

There was some debate among our number.  Barter something expensive to the Captain of the white ghost ship drifting on the far side of vision, that’s the way the Underworld wants it after all… keep losing yourself and everything you care about, maybe ride the Leviathan down. In the end, and frankly I am not even sure how we came to this.  Sometimes certain crazy personalities digress the discussion so hard and suddenly something utterly suicidal seems like a great fucking idea.

We built a little submarine… I shit you not.  Everyone’s spellwork came into play.  We used the sand and Matter to craft the sub, powered by mana, Forces and Prime.  Most importantly was the Death and Life magic.  Keep the good Life in, keep the bad Death out.  Death and Fate spells combined to hide from the laws of the Kerberoi… to have another ship on the water and break an old law for a time.  Space to make it bigger on the inside, it was only the size of an sedan by the way, and also to make it airtight.. preventing punctures..  There were countless other spells in the Fairy Glade Rook and Kairos threw down.  It looked like a black obsidian junker, like the Millennium Falcon meets the Blue Beetle but it would serve.  Kairos was insisting on weaponizing it but we were out of time.  He used Matter to make the walls transparent from the inside so we had 360 degree vision... extremely unsettling.  Lastly I did my best with Nergal to combine Death, Fate, Mind, and Space toward the little sub against the waters of the ocean itself.  This was Horsemen ingenuity at its finest, brash and angry, mad determination to live and win at any cost.  It was some of the finest spell casting I had ever seen…

We climbed in… crossed our hearts and hoped not to die.  The sub propelled itself into the waters and Time, Matter, and Forces was used to accelerate the thing to an impressive speed.  100 Knots?  There were no gauges… it was a tin can powered by will.

We were making good time… but it didn’t work out like we hoped.  About halfway to the whirlpool the sub “forgot” that it had a spell against forgetting things.  We all knew what was happening and tried to speed the thing up.  Next our little submarine “forgot” that it was warded and allowed to break the Old Laws of this Dominion.  It didn’t take more than a few seconds and a bubbling roar reverberated through the little obsidian capsule… the Leviathan was coming.  We had not counted on our spells forgetting what they were.

I’m not sure if this thing was made of the black memory water but its tendrils were darker than the water around it but seemed to seep into and through the waters itself.  It was naturally immune to the water’s ability to cause substance to lose its identifiers.  How to describe what was chasing us, seen through the transparent hull at our stern?  A massive jellyfish with an angry face and a million tendrils?  But it was also kinda like a massive sea serpent… and also kinda like a Cthulhuian octopus.  It seemed to alter its form and yet remain a sea-monster.  It seemed to rise up from the depths below and chase behind, gaining ground.  It filled up our vision… a couple of our more badass number threw some spells at it… they forgot what they were supposed to do once they left the hull.  We were pretty fucked as we redoubled the speed of the sub.  It seemed as if the monster were drawing energy and identity from us, accelerating the water's effects.

As the tight spiral of the maelstrom came into view the same time the boat “forgot” about its airtightness and we started to leak.  Some of us got sprayed as we scrambled to patch the holes and used Prime to continually renew the spells purpose, instilling things with symbolic truth.  I don’t know what they lost as a result but there was no time to address it.  I threw  a lot of mind effort into our tiny craft, trying to re-enforce what the submarine was mentally and what it was supposed to do with all my will as that identity trailed away.

We hit the whirlpool and were sucked down as one of the massive Leviathan’s tentacles with inky razorsharp suckers struck our tail.  We started dropping and spinning, pulling serious Gs.  As we sunk deeper into the Ocean, the stronger the effect of “forgetting” became.  The submarine forgot it keep Life in and Death Out.  It forgot it was a submarine…. It forgot it was transparent, it forgot it was obsidian… it forgot it was solid.

CANTO II – The Final Countdown (yes, just like the song)

The capsule rocked, half-real as it burst through rocks and crashed into solid ground.  The submarine burst open and the space effect failed and we tumbled out onto a truly ghostly and ephemeral landscape.  The water was gone, we had somehow left it above.  We shook ourselves off, we seemed mostly alright.  All 9 of us had made it to Sheol… The Lower Depths... to the bottom beneath the bottom in a place deeper... between the Underworld and Abbadon inside an enigma inside a taco.  .

We were on some sort of massive floating rock platform made of a ghostly blasted landscape, completely ephemeral but as solid as the rest of the Underworld.  Jack spent a lot of time grieving over the tortured dead we had encountered and making personal promises to come back and do some good in the land of the dead.  Now he went to the edge of our platform and was taken aback.  We looked and stumbled back ourselves.  

Beneath this bit of floating earth was the nest of the Hellmenth.  Massive crimson worms the size of mountains.  They slithered among themselves, hundreds as far as the eye could see, a bottomless pit of Hellmenth bodies.  I have never felt so helpless, so much like an ant.  There maws were endless rings of teeth. Out from the mouths shot tendrils of oblivion that could consume a city block with one bite.  And they were active, awake and squirming, shaking the air and our tiny platform with the slightest movements of their colossal bodies.  The seals were broken and they were agitated, ready to rise.  Infinitely high above us was a ceiling of jagged hellish rock.  In the distance a few of these worms rose suddenly and stuck it with titanic force. The blows were an earthquake complete with a delayed over-pressure shockwave.  But they weren't getting through... yet. The way was still closed.  But it was brittle and ready to give.

There were other platforms of ghost-landscape.  Fragments of Sheol that the Hellmenth ate thousands of years ago.  Hellmenth poop I guess. On one nearby platform we could sense supernal magic… a ritual casting was taking place and mana was leaking out of it.  That’s where they were.  We needed a way to get over there and we needed a plan of attack. But our vision was blocked and they were veiling themselves against the hungry world-eaters below.

Indra and Azazel but their heads together and came up with something efficient and stylish.  She summoned a large dragon construct made of Prime and Forces… a representation of the Dragon King Bahamut.  

Having developed and performed this summon multiple times before, it had only become perfected with each use – the details, the entwined magics, nothing wasted.  I placed my one-time-use-only red summoning crystal at the center of a blue magic circle and smashed the crystal with the bottom blade of Thrymja.  “Rise, Bahamut! Dragon King!”  I stabbed my staff upwards, the rush of released energy congealing into a massive form above our heads, wings nearly blotting out the cavern ceiling.  Meter long claws crunched into the edge of our floating platform, and the beast’s head dipped down, broad horns wide enough to walk on grating against the rock’s surface as it waited for us to board.  I pulled myself up and took a position right behind the Dragon King’s head.

We all broke into roles.  Seraph, Kairos, and Nergal would tank, being the least squishy of us.  Indra would be a step behind blasting and looking for openings with her staff.  Loudon would heal constantly.  I was once again on anti-curse and fate manipulation duty.  I would look for any weaknesses and exploit them, I would prevent the worst spells from affecting us.  When those chances came we would exploit them.  Rook would also be in a supporting role, fucking shit up with Time and Fate, boosting here and cursing there.  Jack would be on counter-spell duty, look for the most vicious attacks and weakening them.  We would coordinate via telepathy using Stark and Azazel to help.  I threw down some powerful fate magic here, I wasn’t going to hold back even with waning mana reserves all around.  If this was the final showdown we needed to exploit our Destiny of being here.  I Forged Doom on our Weapons of Mass Destruction, I Forged Destiny upon us… it was all directed at fighting and winning against Nickleheads and it left me drained.  Godsends.

I also spent a good deal of time on lookout in this coming battle, since I'm really used to Omnivision, and with One Mind, Two Thoughts, I could have two roving centers of attention on field of view.

We prepared and climbed aboard our dragon, riding into battle.  The Hellmenth have no eyes, they seem to look with their circular lamprey-like mouths.  A few “looked” at our small morsel of energy and one took a lunge.  Nothing like having a worm the size of a skyscraper flying up at you.  Hell of a dodge.  Nergal, who had carefully collected the coins of the Denarians we had dispatched (5 in total) decided this was a good time and dropped a small bag with the coins straight into the receding maw as it fell away.  Wisps of darkness shot out as the indestructible Coins ceased to exist… better than the Cracks of Doom baby.  A cheer went up among us, Loudon looked sick, but this was a big victory for us, no one had ever destroyed one of the blackened pieces of silver before.  Nergal just reduced the number of Archdemons abroad by 5… and the Cabal of 30 Scelesti were down to 25... permanently.

We flew up over the ridge of the Denarian platform, and Bahamut roared.  Below was another extremely elaborate ritual like the one we saw at the Hellmouth in Beulah.  Multiple intersecting circles of candles and crystal chimes resonating with sounds, magic circles created with light and sound rather than chalk and paper.  Something Lucifier created, big magic, Archmastery that Nicodemus would unleash and open the door.  At the center was what might have been a Deathlord or some other sacrifice, 10 black swords pierced the limp form (The 10 of Swords here, finally in a literal sense).  Nicodemus had already dispatched him and the end of the spell was near… the whole crystal configuration was powering up like the goddamn Deathstar to blast the roof open.

At Nicodemus’s side was his darling daughter Dierdre… daddies little Denarian.  She was in demon form, with her hair a massive of long slithering blades.  There were nine other Denarians around this sickly multi-circled Grace and they were all in demon battle form as well.  11, not 9… not liking the odds suddenly.  As usual Nick was not demonic, just his old self with his tie Barabbas Noose that could death-curse like nobody's business.  I told Jack if he could do one thing it would be to keep Nico from cursing anyone.

Indra didn’t give them time to unravel our mount and drop us into nothingness, she landed that sucker and he blasted the platform with Holy Fire.  It was too spread out to be effective but they REALLY didn’t like that.  Nicodemus destroyed Bahamut with a look, just like that he “killed” the spell with Death Mastery.  We weren’t ready for that.

Nick wanted to trash talk, Loudon nearly collapsed as Lashiel fought against the Geases placed on him to keep her from another betrayal.  Nicodemus, Judas, Aswadim, destroyer of worlds only got to say one thing before Kairos fired his bow at him.  “Oh Loudon… having trouble?  The first lie she ever told you was that she couldn’t lie…”  Then Karios’s Famine Bow, Forged with Doom, stuck Nico.  He tried to deflect the arrow, easy enough to set his will against it with Forces.  But with the suddenness, the Forged Doom, and the spells guiding its path the arrow blew a hole through his left hand and went though.  That bow's arrows hit like rockets from an Apache Attack Helicopter.

And like shot the final battle was on.  If we had ONE advantage it was that the Denarians were over-confident, of course they had many reasons to be.  They also had not expected us to ever get this far, even if we had even been able to follow the clues and enter the Underworld at all.  Fate had brought us here, to our doom perhaps, but this was the function of the Five Horsemen.  Fuck dying and losing, this was it, and we were going to stop them even if we blew up the whole cave and got eaten by the world eating worms.

Our plan really didn’t survive more than a few seconds, first contact with the enemy and all that.  Whips of living tissue flowed out of Loudon’s sleeves, his parasite and personal WMD, and he charged Nicodemus.  They had one hell of a good battle formation.  Each Denarian had enough shielding, armor, and healing to take care of themselves for the most part.  Nicodemus and Dierde stood their ground as three Denarian vanguards charged forward at us.  The remaining six… I repeat SIX monstrous Scelesti stood back and supported.  Three counterspelled all our good moves, the other three boosted the attacks of Nico, Demon-daughter, and the three brutish vanguards.  It was very effective as mage battles went.  AOE spells really weren’t concentrated enough to be effective against Masters of Arcana, and the boosting of various things using the whole spectrum of the Arcana made it so you never knew what was coming and how to counter it.

Seraph, Kairos, and Nergal couldn’t take the three directly, not with Nicodemus and "whipping blades" firing away at them.  With the two bad tanks and Seraph the one man army, getting boosted and our spells being countered and suppressed, we were not very effective.  My fellow Horsemen took hideous injuries in the first few seconds.  Loudon healed for a bit but then his internal struggle with Lashiel drove him to charge Nico again.  Karios had to back off and heal.

I was forced to use a few spells that compromised my morals and Wisdom... spells I designed to fight these monsters would never wanted to use on anyone.  One spell is based on the shackles they placed on Loudon when they captured him and force Lashiel's coin into his hand in exchange for his life.  It’s a Mind and Fate spell that when cast on a mage disrupts concentration with pain so extreme that when they try to cast they instead scream and lose control over their casting.  They can't hold an imago, attempting to form one results in agony.  I started working on the ranks of the six, we needed to take down their buffs and debuffs.  

Jack was dealing with Dierde, Indra was throwing Holy Fire at Nicodemus to keep him busy while Loudon attacked and dodged his rapier blows.  And Rook wasn’t doing much good against his three so he backed me up now.  He distracted with powerful Time spells similar to Chrono’s Curse and I would drop my Mind-Changer spell on one then another then another.  I took the three debuffers down before they got wise and blasted the two of us with a combined World’s Collide which I had no time to counter.  The three debuffers, unable to cast, there extra sets of eyes glowed and they charged into battle… now we had 5 in our faces, 2 leaders behind, and still three remaining.

Even with us at full strength without getting cursed constantly we were still not doing well.  I was engaged at close range and had to summon my Chimerical Thrakath Soul from the Astral in order to fight close range.  With some magic boosting my already modest skills I wasn’t doing to bad against this half-tree man with no face and an abyssal whip.  “Remember we were hunters first!  Tear them apart!”  I roared.  Indra fought close up with her staff, blasting away with electricity as Paradox in the area mounted up.

Dierde in demon form

“We only need to disrupt the ritual, it doesn’t matter after that.”  Seraph reminded us, his voice   Shadows and Soul Reaver out, Nergal was doing the best out of all of us until he got ganged up on.  Kairos fired powerful arrows and knocked the head off a wounded Denarian and healed healed always healed.  Seraph had to break off to drop healing too, but on someone else... again, unharmed.  The Paradox Backlash scoured me a few times, terrible muscle cramps, bruises and muscle tearing… shit.  It burned cold.
deadpan as he disemboweled one of the monsters with his shapechanging weapon, now a hammer as he finished the swing.

We were losing. Jack got one in the eyes and threw one off the cliff but got stabbed in the back to the hilt before I could cry out a telepathic warning.  Rook reversed time but it happened anyway, Jack not turning fast enough.  Rook kicked one Denarian square in the groin  then shot another, the bullets bouncing off the tough hide.  I was also shooting my gun, warping the path of the bullets, looking for weak spots in this tree-beast's body.  We couldn’t push forward to the ritual site and Nico was guarding it.  He threw Loudon to the ground and he didn’t get up right away, Nico’s clothing was ripped but he looked pretty fresh still.  The death curse of the noose lashed out and hit Loudon.

I saw the hit coming, but seeing it come doesn't necessarily help you avoid it. It's horribly frustrating but s'what it is.

Death curses ensure your death, they don’t kill you right away.  When a mage dies he can throw a final curse, sworn on his soul and powered against the one who kills him.  Nico’s tie is like a million bottled death-curses from dead mages all stored up and ready to fly.

Indra screamed and charged center-field, her staff making a forcefield which shot out chain lighting.  She got slashed and stabbed as she staggered to Nico’s feet.  He laughed the brought his rapier to her thigh.  She sat up holding a small ancient Lyre of Ishtar in her hands.  The Lyre we retrieved from the Temple of Sin, and it seemed to have the power to harm anything "evil" that hears its notes. The song rang out and the Dierde reverted to human form as fast as that, screaming.  Black burns burst upon the Denarians that could hear it, Nicodemus roared with anger and the crystals of the ritual shattered.  He swung his blade and smashed the Lyre in half, taking many of her fingers with it.

The ritual failed, the built up power backlashed and the floating ghostly platform shook and started to break apart under a titanic explosion.  Shattered crystal fragments embedded in flesh as shrapnel.  I feinted an attack and then dropped a targeted Fate teleportation spell, wincing at the powerful backlash.  It gave me the beneficial mobility that I just had to exploit.

I was not at my best in this fight.  When I get around a lot of abyssal shit or a lot of paradox I get migraines and nosebleeds.  I hadn’t been hit in the face and my nose was gushing.  Nevertheless I teleported everyone over to the far side of the platform and out of melee range as a massive crack split the platform in half.  The later half started to list downwards.  

“It’s over!  We won!  Let's book!”  I cried.  Now it was time to survive.  I looked at the cavern above and below for a minute, filling with dread… we weren’t going to make it.  There was nowhere to go.  Maybe we could get back to the ocean with prep we didn't have.

Spell accelerated machine gun bullets from an Uzi in Nico’s hand found me and blasted my chest open.  Seraph and Kairos dropped some group heals.  The Denarians charged after us.  The battle was rejoined. No planning, no thinking, only the fight to the death. Down and dirty.  They were down a few men, the remaining one I cursed had recovered, spell removed by another.  No more organization on their part, they all charged in 8 vs 9…

We had only just re-engaged when the platform really started to fall apart.  Nergal finally held one with his living shadows and hit it repeatedly with the Soul Reaver.. I don’t want to think about what happened to the Scelesti’s soul when the body split open like that.  

Bullets, arrows, spells, blades, whips, demonic appendages…  Loudon got back up and back in the fight, Nico stared at him. Again Lashiel tried to take over.  He turned around to face Kairos then stabbed himself with his own living whips.

Losing ground, losing mana, losing blood, spells unraveling… the ground collapsed around us into smaller platforms which broke up the fight.  I almost fell in to the worm put and Jack hauled me out.  One of the larger brutish Denarians wasn’t so lucky.  He fell into the pit of Worms and was no more.

Indra and Seraph dropped some flight spells and we were forced to move from platform to platform as the whole thing drifted apart into dozens of pieces.  Those pieces were also crumbling.  This was it. In a few minutes we would all be worm food one way or another. You couldn't portal straight out of the Lower Depths, cross-dimensional stuff is very difficult. At least hopefully the Denarians would die too, or at least some of the.  There has to be a way out somehow.  I think some of us had giving up hope on surviving at this point.  I think we were just fighting to fight, to finally settle business. 

Some Denarians didn’t get the flying spells up quickly enough, with big group all spread out like that.  Some were pretty athletic, managing to jump from tumbling rock to rock.  We finally had a chance to win the fight… in time to what?  World saved, now die?  That’s the Doom after all.  It became a game of king of the hill.  Wound a Denarian, counter a movement spell, knock them down into the worms.  I don’t know how we all made it.  My space magic, Indra and Seraph helped keep anyone from falling even while they fought at close range.

Indra and I engaged Dierde and we took some severe wounds from her hair-blades.  She knocked me off, I teleported back up.  She knocked Indra off and she flew back up.  Finally we knocked her off, I counterspelled her teleport… the same teleporting spell she used to capture Loudon, and Indra pushed with forces.  She rocketed into the open mouth of one of the Hellmenth.  

Where was Loudon?

Seraph, Rook, and Jack were in a triangle formation fighting three Denarians and going toe to toe.  Tons of blows and magic going off, Rook fired his gun, Jack slashed with his weapons, Seraph healed and took blows, knocking them off balance with massive hits, never getting hurt.  His skin was like Admantine.

We were spread out on multiple platforms. One one Nergal and Kairos charged Nicodemus.  He dropped his death curse on Indra and Seraph and I threw everything we had on knocking it down with counterspells as she also saw the attack coming and we managed to disperse it.  She rested for a second and then two of Denarians descended on her.   Nico parried the Soul Reaver with his rapier and engaged in a magical sword fight with Nergal, his black-wing shadows devastating Nergal’s shadows.  Kairos was always darting in and attacking at any opens.  It almost seemed to be working pretty well.

I use the weight of the Denarians on top of me as inspiration, and build up kinetic force as in a pressure cooker, reducing the pressure outside, and adding a little heat to the mix.  A little twinge of Fate told me exactly when to let the spell loose.

Indra exploded out from under the two Denarians, destroying her platform and leaving them little room to reach floating ground.  They flew after her but didn’t look down in time to see the lunging jaws of a mountain serpent overtake them both.  Only 4 left.

Indra landed my platform and we rechecked our spells quickly, I had lost my flying spell in the mix.  She picked me up and dropped me off on Nico’s platform.  Seraph, Rook, and Jack’s platform was drifting ever further way, a Hellmenth began to rise after it.  I telepathically warned them and as they began to fly off I dropped my own World’s Collide on the three baddies so they couldn’t escape in time as the worm ate the whole thing.

Only one big platform left… still no escape plan in sight.  I reached out with my senses and tried to find some way to push the limits of my magic and portal us out of here.  Even if I tried to cross planes of existence the paradox was so high it would certainly kill me... and I had already pushed myself as hard as I could by summoning my blade alone.

Nicodemus went to drop another death curse, this time on me since I was turned around and distracted.  Kairos grabbed his fucking neck-tie noose before he could land the curse and cinched it down tight around his throat, choking the Aswadim.  

“That’s enough of that.”  Kairos roared angrily.  Nico coughed but smiled as if to say “see ya losers”  (I might have imagined that) and made with his own getaway.  It was kinda hard to describe, a burst of mana and an afterimage… under the sights it looked like he literally vanished into his own soul… I didn’t understand it one bit but I knew it was our only way out.  Seraph saw it too as Kairos’s grip on the hangman’s noose began to slip as it vanished.  Seraph grunted and sent orders telepathically.  Kairos used time to hang on and Rook expanded this moment so we could react.  Seraph and Indra dumped Primal magic at this strange soul-vanishing and the opening into Nico’s soul widened.  Kairos kept the grip on the tie and was pulled through, we wordlessly grasped each other as the platform collapsed beneath us.

When we were getting pulled in a comical life or death game of tug-of-war I spotted Loudon. He was on a tiny floating bit of rock the size of a man hole cover… clearly fighting his inner Archdemon and almost too far away to get to us.  He had the coin in his hand, holding Lashiel’s coin over the titanic reality-gnawers… trying to will himself to drop it like Frodo and the Ring of Power.  I cried out within my time distortion field, we all watched him.  He saw us, shook his head, then jumped off.  He had been fighting Lashiel this whole time, and she had been blocking him from our minds so we couldn’t help.  In the heat of battle she had isolated him.  But I guess he won.  Never to be controlled again, fuck that bitch. 

There was nothing we could do.  Anyone who might have been able to reach out had blown their loads on whatever it was we were doing now… hanging in the air as many gigantic mouths turned and rose up at once.  We were pulled through Nico’s reality-defying escape method.

CANTO III – The Wending

This felt like “flipping over” when you go to the Astral Realms.  A reversal of orientation, and we landed on a granite pathway.  It was utterly quiet, so different from the roars of battle and the Hellmenth's bodies rolling against each other like tectonic plates. We just watched Loudon die… I was about to start screaming in sorrow when I realized we were still in danger.  

On this strange granite path surround by statues and simmering portals was our old pal Nick.  Also, the whole path was crawling with Soulless.  Forgot to mention that.  Like I said… can’t catch a fucking break.

“KILL THEM!”  Nico roared as he backed off, wounded, and the Soulless charged in to defend him.  His wings of shadow split again and again into six oily appendages, almost like an insect and an extra set of glowing green eyes (the Eyes of the demon Andruiel) opened up on his forehead.  

I am almost sad we didn’t get to have much conversation with the guy, he’s British, a good looking guy with 2,000 years of life experience.  Too bad he’s such a fucking world-ending dick.  Now soulless are a bit easier to deal with, despite the fact there were like 30…. I’m going to go with all of them.  All the soulless  they ever made were living in this guy’s astral path… crawling all over it like ants.  What’s that tell you about him?

Rook dropped a time loop in a wall to slow some of the chattering soulless down.  Indra sent bursts of lightning in arcing waves through the masses, paradox was not as bad here despite the amplifications of abyssal power in this place and from the soulless themselves.  Seraph increased his mass and swung his hammer, knocking them off path and into other soul-spaces off the road.  I lashed out with space and mind, frying their brains.  

Nergal does what he usually does when he encounters an undead horde (which these apparently counted as such)… takes control of half of them if he can and makes them fight the other half.  It didn’t work all that well but he sent half of them over the edge and into the darkness.  Kairos was in a rage, he would not be shaken from Nicodemus's noose-tie and Jack charged in to help.  We all soon followed suit and attacked Nico full on.

The Archmage is good at cheating death, I can attest to his little trick now.  But here in his own soul he can die like a bitch just fine.  Kairos shot him in the heart with his Famine Bow.  I finally got my hits in on the sword fight and slashed frantically, keeping him off his balance.  The whole place shook and glass pictures shattered, soulless howled.  Nico’s black demon wings batted at us, almost knocking us all off the soul-bridge.  Nergal took an arm off with the Soul Reaver.  Nico and the sword seemed to react to each other.  Seraph slashed open his neck and Indra planted her staff in his chest, blasting it with holy fire!  Rook shot Nico between the eyes and Jack stabbed at his middle.  The Aswadim staggered back and collapsed.  His corpse bled out on the hard granite floor, eyes open.  A bit anti-climactic for his death really.

Nergal recovered the Aswadim's coin using shadows to pull it out of the burned mess of his chest, he must have had it surgically implanted.  How did Nergal know where to look?  Karios checked the Barabas Noose but it was damaged beyond repair, just as well, nothing that awful should be allowed to exist.

We collapsed to the floor, all but Seraph, ever vigilant.  Healing all around, but against resistant damage accelerated healing rates did  little because of the pus from the river.  Kairos grabbed me and we hugged, crying for our friend Loudon.  Nergal bowed his head, tears crawled down Indra’s cheeks and I hugged her next.  Jack regarded us solemnly and Rook was at my side for support as I staggered back, my blade dissolving from my mind and the air.  This should have been a time of celebration, in the reptilian part of my brain a tiny voice from one of my minds reminded me that only losing one person was actually a fantastic outcome.  We had gone from never defeating a Denarian in a fight to killing 16 in a single night.  What is more, 15 of them are dead FOR GOOD.  Oh, and the world is saved.  I pushed that shit away, I needed to feel this.  I could make the pain go away but that is not the way of scourging.

Then the inside of the dark dead soul world shook and the path discolored.

“Really!?  This is getting old!”  I yelled at the starry roof of this pathway.  Survive impossible odds just to wind up in another strange and horrible place before it falls apart and we die again.  Typical.  We got up and I pulled a card to choose a direction.  The path we took was The Chariot.  Success and progression.  The other way was The Tower… very bad. Sometimes those cards get me into trouble, I prayed this wasn't one of those times but I had a sinking feeling.  We passed by doors we couldn’t open as the granite darkened and cracked.  They must have been keyed to Nico somehow.  We should have been awestruck by this place's evil and magnificence.  But we had seen so much tonight I think we were getting a bit desensitized.  The direction the card took us was to the edge of blackness that blocked the path ahead.  An ocean of black water…. Orouboros.  This was the Abyss, a black ocean of chaos and the place where Nico had tied his soul.  The distant end of the path behind us gave way with a crunch and fell into the rising waters.  Gods we were so fucked.  So this was the doom… the fate worse than death.  Abyssal waters filling up the path and no way home.

Then something caught my eye.  A glimmer of light on the horizon in the distance.  The tiny light of the Supernal Realms on the far side of the Abyssal gap.  Maybe there was only one chance.  Everyone else was in a panic and I turned back to them.  “I need to try something, it’s the only thing I can think of.  If you aren’t ready don’t try it yourself, but maybe there is a way to change the Doom without just overt magic.  Maybe we need to change the world, change it so that the Doom is survivable.  An Archmage’s curse, and then a death curse to destroy his own dead road.  We need to change the nature of Fate itself.  Just a little.  So… I am going to try pass the Imperial Trials and cross the Abyss.  Search your souls and if you think you could understand then try to cross.  But if you stay here you have a little time left, time enough for me to try it.  If I succeed maybe I can save everybody.”

Protests, but with the abyssal waters rising I starting walking.  I drew upon everything I knew about these trials, all hypothetical, wrapped in mysteries, holes and symbolic metaphor.  I walked into the empty, walked on the waters of the ocean of the dead dragon and the anti-reality tear from outside.  Seraph followed me.  My nose bled and my head pounded but I didn’t stop.  This place was empty yes, but it didn’t mean there was nothing in it.  The Abyss knew me, recognized my magic which had been pulled through it so many times.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing.  I reached out for my magic and was scourged by the darkness but I felt it there in the glimmering distance. I reached out and felt the Watchtowers I could touch.  The Watchtower of the Iron Gauntlet Pandemonium and Source of my Mind and Space, the root of my path, the Watchtower of the Lunargent Thorn Arcadia, source of Fate, the Watchtower of the Stone Book in the Primal Wilds and Source of my Spirit, the Watchtower of the Golden Key in the Aether and the source of my Prime, only the Lead Coin did I not touch.  On the horizon the singular glimmer became four dim lights, the brightest red light that of Pandemonium.  I pulled upon these strands of magic that I called down and tied to my soul, using them as a rope to guide me through the black waves.

Things rose up from the water, tentacles and spidery limbs, and they revisited upon me every paradox and every backlash I had ever caused.  It took everything I learned about magic to steady the beams and pull through for an endless amount of time.  There was no time for doubt or regret.  It was either I try this, and maybe others try this, or we die.  It was now or never.  If I didn’t feel worthy I should just sink into the black waves and let the Abyss have my soul forever.  I couldn’t glance back but I knew the waters were getting higher… and Seraph’s walk was not going well.

Just like that, I flipped again, stepped into… indescribable truth.  The ecstatic winds were nothing compared to this.  It felt good to be consumed by the Supernal Realms, to become part of the truth and the light forever.  Just let go and stop this torture of living.  It felt wonderful and horrible, I was losing who I was.  I reached deep inside and knew my friends were dying, my fucking family.  I threw up a wall of pure magic, not from the watchtowers but from within my soul.  These concepts are going to be a bit hard to describe.  But I used my entire existence to create an external barrier in which to filter the truth.  I created my Amnion, the black armor and black bat demon winds wrapped around me again, creating a barrier against the burning light.

I found myself within this fragile bubble, standing upon brimstone at the heart of the Iron Labyrinth extending infinitely in every direction.  In front of me my old teacher, the demon beast of latter days, face nothing but teeth and an angular light above his head.  This was my trial, this was my guardian at last.  No sign of the Iron Gauntlet Watchtower here.  I summoned my blade effortlessly in this place of power and we prepared for combat.  He asked me a question. For the sake of translation it comes down to “What makes you worthy to come to hell and liberate the damned and the sinners here?”  Very Messianic if I do say so myself…

I cannot tell you what I replied in return, it is my truth to bare alone.  It was a fundamental truth that I had learned through my sorrow, my loss, my scourging.  He bowed and stepped aside.  The battle of wills and wit was won.

The redish hell light from the Iron Gauntlet Watchtower dimmed and went out.  I drew up my will, my life, my soul, my memories, and let my truth shine through in this barren and blasted place.  The seven chakras lit up inside my starting at the very base of my spine and ascending, extending and I grew into the golden, serpentine, bat-winged dragon of old, akin to my familiar Azazel, named after the Demon Dragon.  With my talons I held the Die of Kaos in one hand and my Thrakath Soul blade in the other, made both from the mind and the very substance of hell. I combined them and stabbed the blade into the ground at the center of this maze.

A new watchtower grows there now.  It is my blade, the watchtower IS my sword and I hold onto its hilt and ride it into the burning heavens.  The Tower of Thrakath.  17 Spokes which run up the double blade and the same spokes shoot out in demonic flame across the maze, knocking down the iron walls and connecting to parts of the maze, reforming the maze in a clockwise turning spiral formation.  Seven rubies run up the massive tower’s “hilt” and glow brightly.  I stand atop my tower and laugh.

My Cabal is downing, my friends are dying the eternal death in the Abyss.  Suddenly beneath their feet slides a shimmering blade as wide as a bridge as it stabs all the way through the Astral Realms and back to Earth with a resounding boom!  My soul encases them and protects them as they are pulled into my Golden Road, the path I walked in dreams now manifest physically here.  My road shatters what is left of Judas’s Wending all the way down its length.  His coin lands on the surface of my road and burns somewhere deep inside me.

I can see them from this high bastion as if I stand next to them.  They look at this road.  The center of this star metal blade is a core that looks something like an Iron Omphalos with the language of Atantis in all the permutations I know written upon it.  It is the language of my sigils like Odins knowledge of the Runes.  It is the word of how I work my magic.  Two metals coil around this inner portion.  They look like miniature versions of the Spire Perilous and the Swath in Obsidian and Marble.  The ridges along the outer blade are wide and allow you to step off into any of the realms along the path if I choose it.  They now stand in front of the gate which opens to the Supernal and along the edges are the Abyss.  Here a blue glowing enormous marble cast of my head is the gateway and the blade travels out from the center of my forehead.

They stand at my third eye and look into Pandemonium unable to see it passed the red light which blinds them.  If they see it they will be consumed.  After a time they walk back the other way… I can’t leave yet.

CANTO IV – Merry Christmas

My friends walk through the gates of my road, Anima Mundi, Tenemos, Onerious, and finally the Fallen World.  The tip of the blade comes out at Shannon’s Place of course.  A seed of the celestial palace and a Hallow close to my heart.  They walk through the arch and appear on the shore of the Knife River.

I gather myself from magic and matter, from dust and energy and appear before them.  “I’m okay.”  I tell them to try to quell their concerns.  But I am not.  They aren’t the same.  They aren’t how I remembered them.  Where is Loudon?  Where is Andrew?  Where is John?  Nothing is right. 

I soon found out all the differences that really bothered me.  In my reality… John, Prodigy was also possessed by a Denarian though he was more pious than Indra he took up Cassius’s coin when it was tossed at his sisters from a speeding van after we defeated Nico the first time.  Ethen killed himself before the shit hit the fan.  Andrew, Loudon, was the older brother and already a Doctor.  Persephone and I had broken up, Nergal was an Engineer.  My sister Tori had died of Long QT instead of Shannon and this was supposed to be Tori’s place.

“But I have to go for a bit.”  They don’t want that of course.  Only Seraph seems to regard me gracefully and allow it, of course we had only just met.  I smile serenely, having a hard time feeling my body as real, trying to reassure them.  I can feel another one of my new kind coming to entreat, to greet, to teach and I need to get away from my loved ones in order to protect them.

I discorporate back into My Golden Road, a burst of Mana and an afterimage and I am gone. 

Later, the survivors found a crater 12 miles outside of Golden Valley.  Almost looked like a tactical nuke went off.  Bodies, lots of them.  Some Soulless, some Denarians but no coins and even some humans.  Prodigy taking care of things top-side and keeping Tessa off our back.  She wasn’t there though.

When Kairos post-cogged the scene he say Prodigy blowing up the place and touching down.  A whining baby-voice behind him but out of sight calling him “master.”  Then he looked at Kairos.  Looked him straight in the eye with his dark reddish eyes through the post-cog and with a whoosh was there in the present.  Kairos was knocked over and then Prodigy blasted off into the sky and was gone.  Paradox was everywhere.

Over the next few months we would see more of his handiwork but he never came home.  He had finally gone darkside.  And what was the thing that was with him now?  That could shape time against the rules?  Tessa is still out there too.

Merry Christmas 2012.  The Mayans were wrong after all.

CANTO V - The Sun, My Return

“There are other Worlds than These.” -Stephen King

I was gone nearly a year. October 2013.  Persephone moved to San Antonio and Seraph stayed with her at my behest as thanks for saving him from a fate worse than death.

We all drifted apart, coping, doing our own things. Saved the world and lost ourselves, one dead, one lost, at least three of us really fucked up.

I am back from beyond, and perhaps I should re-introduce myself.   I am Casstiel, and I am an Archmage.

Many people have claimed such a title (many are charlatans); let me assure you that it is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not a bragging right; it’s a fricken heavy-ass cross that I am still coming to terms with carrying. I apologize if my thoughts seem random, despite my limiting efforts I spend time splitting my thoughts into parallel processes of six and more often. If has had its effect on me.

I used to be a man, I am not sure the term mortal applies now. Even being Magus I still felt all the human frailty despite all the spells and incantations. But now it’s something I choose to do. I choose to hang on to who and what I am, I hold onto myself lest I be subsumed into the Supernal Truth. I don’t augment my body and mind unless the need arises, I try not to play god. But I am still human… I think, and I do sin.

I was a Mastigos a path of our the Awakened kind, a path of scourging. We are called to the watchtower of Pandemonium and face our sins, fears, and pains. We reflect this in our lives; it is a sprinting marathon of pain, willful perseverance, and self-improvement through torture. I have my own watchtower there now, the edge of the Dark Matter blade is my Golden Road. I am getting ahead of myself again.

I used to be a man, I still am a man. When I was just a sleeper, if we are ever “just” what we are and not a compression of potentiality weaved in fate, I was ignorant to the occult or what we have been known to call the World of Darkness, the Secret World. But everything is true, yes? My closest friends and I began to notice things happening in our hometowns, the stench of predators and time and time again we stopped them.

These were the symptoms of our trouble, not the cause. We were hunters, but then one of the lesser slumbering Acamoth sent an emissary to us which forced a response. The Supernal saved us from the filth that nightmarish night. We found the dark paths to our watchtowers and were Awakened from that night on.

Time went on, the Horsemen Cabal made friends, enemies, and even frienemies. Our worst enemies were a cult of nilistic Scelesti trying to raise the Hellmenth from the bowels of the underworld. We cracked the codes, and went on a one way trip to stop them.

It would have been a one-way trip… the shadow world of the Hellmenth’s Sheol cave collapsing into 144 abyssal maws… the Scelesti falling like black angels. We chased Nicodemus the Aswadim Archmaster into his blackened road as he tried to flee the collapse of his plan and the death of his coinbearers and killed him inside his own soul. The Abyss began to consume the Wending. We were never meant to live, this was the doom of the Ten of Swords upon us. The only chance was to hope for a world in which fate had a different path. A fate in which we all lived. So I tried to change it. I tried to cross the Abyss, following the glimmering light reflected off of the waters of the great Ocean Ouroboros. I faced every Paradox, every sin against Wisdom, every compromise of my soul… a second scouring and then I was back in the heart of the Supernal… back in Pandemonium and facing my own gatekeeper. We battled with will and riddle and poetry of the heart as I held onto myself against the purest of the Ecstatic winds.

I won’t bore you with the details. There was no room for self-doubt. This wasn’t about me succeeding or not succeeding. This was about pushing to the place, the potentiality in which I HAD/WOULD/WILL succeed. Not CHANGING the world but MOVING to a world that already was the way we needed it to be. Remember this truth. I became the fulcrum of that movement and shifted it. I forged my own personal tower in the brimstone and iron dust soil, the sword of my mind and made astral star metal creating the focal point of my reality.  I cemented a new star in the symbolic constellations of the Supernal.

My friends were drowning in the Abyss no longer, the road filled the space beneath them. I saw them, for me seconds later, for them a month after they saw me cross. But they were not the way I remembered them… and neither was the world. I had changed something in the Supernal by adding a focus of myself there, and by so doing I had changed the world…. but once again that is a misconception. I had moved to another world. I have grappled with these truths since that day in December, almost a year gone.

The world is changed. My friends are different. Some that had fallen in to shadow blaze with light, others are dead when they lived. I don’t recognize some brands of food. The changes are cascading… minor and maddening. I’ve had to adapt. Maybe I can get back? Would I be dead? Worlds split, run, intersect, and slough off into nothing all the time. I am beginning to think this makes Fate and Time subjective to a frame of reference. There is certainly evidence to support this.

Many of our original cabal was killed or driven mad. Prodigy, mantle of war has fallen into shadow. Loudon fell chasing his coin and putting an end to the Infernal inside him. Jack and Rook I haven’t seen in ages. Indra is off grappling with herself. Seraph and Persephone have perhaps formed something new and strong in Texas. Kairos and Nergal keep guardianship of our old stomping grounds and when they show up they are a force to be reckoned with, they also have demons of their own.

But I am my own demon, my Daemon – I name him Xelloss, the Daemon of an Archmaster of Mind is truly a dark god of something awful which I cannot overcome. A new scourging perhaps.

I am an Archmaster of Mind, were I to exercise this ability to create mind-based dynamically propagating spells I would violate a treaty among great powers which holds some of you chained in your ability to act. For the rest of you I will leave it at two words: Pax Arcana. Perhaps there will come a time when I need to do that. I am also a Master of Space, Fate, Prime, and have advanced understanding of Spirit.

When under true dire threat, I quite literally vanish inside my own soul. When I come back I am crafting a body, a residual self-image, out of supernal truth and collected matter. I can die… its just hard, like many of you. My body really isn’t me… I am my soul, I am my watchtower. You can see why I have a hard time feeling human. When you can proxy into at least six places at once and make yourself smarter than Einstein and have no real body except when you want to have one it sort of fucks with that human frame of reference thingy again.

Before I shifted dimensions by toying with the truth of reality (ugh, what an arrogant and horrible thing to say and a greater sin to do), Indra, Nergal, and I created a Virtual Intelligence called STARK. Many of you have decided to employ him on your mobile devices. He is a powerful investigative tool. He is what makes it so easy to coordinate.

I was gone nearly a year learning the ropes from another Traveler.  Now I have returned to you.