Interlude time
***
Azcajal ap Shelloth stood and looked out across the Waste from his vantage point above Oinos, three miles up on a balcony carved from the tower of his ultroloth master. The arcanaloth's hands gripped the railing with such intensity that his knuckles were white and his claws curved back to the point of cutting into his palms. He was not afraid of falling from that height, nor was he pensive. No, he was terrified.
Time ticked by with only the wind in his face as a reminder of the passage of a commodity he treasured in his present state even more than he ever had. An immortal being, he suddenly felt as a mortal must when confronted with their own mortality, realizing that their mayfly lives would shortly end. Azcajal felt old, he felt mortal, firmly aware of the insignificance of his own existence, and he had felt that way for an hour; ever since he had been summoned by his master and escorted to speak to his.
He had been given a task.
Already twitching from the periodic gusts of wind that whipped erratic at that altitude, one of the 'loth's ears canted and swiveled at the sound of approaching footsteps. As his master had taken him, so too would he escort another in the same capacity, but blessedly this time he...
Azcajal shuddered and pushed the thoughts from his mind. He at least would survive, but as for the fiend who now approached, that was a question whose answer he did not care to know.
The arcanaloth's nose inhaled reflexively and his tongue tasted the air like a serpent as his mind reached out to do the same to the dull but promising psyche behind him. Without turning his head, without betraying the fear and dread in his eyes, he already knew the identity of the other fiend. It was a nycaloth, Narsaleth the Brooding, a relatively young and ambitious fiend who he had previously marked as being potentially worthy of promotion to arcanaloth. Azcajal had followed and tracked the progress of the other fiend till eventually he had met with him, tested him, and agreed to sponsor his trial before their mutual ultroloth masters.
The wolf-headed arcanaloth frowned and held up his hands, letting their wounds heal before turning to face the nycaloth. Narsaleth had waited months to learn how the ultroloths had taken his bid for promotion, if they would consider him or not, and the lesser fiend likely believed that the purpose for his summoning would be news on that front.
Twice his size, the nycaloth nonetheless knelt and looked up at him, spreading his wings and putting one pair of hands on the floor and holding the other up in a sign of plaintive submission.
"What did they say?" Narsaleth's eyes were anxious, pleading, even though he otherwise held his breath. His promotion was at stake. He was at the cusp of advancement, surely he was.
"I..." Looking down at him, Azcajal seemed to pause before answering, it was awkward. Could they have denied his petition even before judgment? "My advocacy of you has been taken into consideration."
That was a start. It was not a negative. But the answer was evasive, the arcanoloth had minced his words and twisted them together, but he hadn't actually answered the question.
"Yes... but what did they say?" Narseleth asked a second time, hoping for a clarification.
"You will be judged." Azcajal said. "Today."
The words struck the nycaloth like a hammer blow and Narsaleth shook in anticipation. Tiny shudders, nervous jitters, ran down the length of his wings and the nail beds beneath his claws ached as the muscles in his hands unconsciously tensed and relaxed.
The higher fiend bade him to stand, a perfunctory gesture that foreshadowed their approaching equal status in terms of caste. At least that was the nycaloth's impression.
"However I will not be present with you during your judgment." Azcajal said, drawing his robes together and crossing his arms. "...things are going be... altered from their normal progression."
What? Azcajal was his sponsor. If he failed, then his life would be forsaken as well, and Oinoloth knew that the spires of Khin-Oin still dripped with blood as it was. Why was the protocol of advancement being altered?
The arcanaloth looked directly at him, not sounding weary, but proud, sympathetic even. "You will be judged, that is your honor. Follow me and I will bring you to the place where you will be questioned, your worth determined, and your purity ascertained."
Leaving Narsaleth filled with uneasy pride, Azcajal drifted past his protégé and off of the balcony, back into the darkness of Khin-Oin, motioning for the nycaloth to follow. As they departed, the wind whistling off of the empty ramparts seemed to snicker.
***
There was the great tumult of the spawning pools as they descended, a roar of flowing, draining liquid, a silky soft and heavy sound like bubbling syrup or rendering fat, punctuated by the birthing cries of newborn mezzoloths. It was the place in which both Azcajal and Narsaleth had both first clawed their way from nothingness, nonexistence, and then become beings, individuals distinct from the Waste.
Instinctively they felt the thrum of the place in their bones, in their blood, and memories resurfaced: their first breaths, their first step, their first scream, first pain, first act of drawing blood and taking the life of the first thing they encountered, where they became the first stage of what they had become.
With perverse nostalgia fresh upon their minds, both 'loths knew that those same spawning pools had seen a major increase in activity in recent weeks, though the output of mezzoloths had only seen a marginal increase. Rumors that filtered down to the nycaloth and were recorded by the arcanaloth said that a great many ultroloths and the higher tiers of arcanaloth researchers from Gehenna and Carceri had visited the lowest levels of Khin-Oin. But to what purpose they could only speculate.
Only briefly did the two of them cross over those caverns and vaults. A hundred yards and they passed beyond them by, though they did pause to take in the sight, if but for a moment. Massive by any measure, they were filled with newborn mezzoloths crawling and feeding upon one another, filled with others yet only half formed, pools and engines, blood and pain, unending screams, and the ossified viscera of a dead god like a cradle for its killers' young.
Eventually though, and without a word spoken between them, they both arrived at the door, a simple thing of petrified bone.
"We have arrived." Azcajal stated.
Narsaleth blinked. Somehow he had expected more, something grander. Surely a circle of Ultroloths could not be expected to convene in the depths and judge him in such a paltry, banal chamber. They were better than that, and he deserved more. He glanced down at his patron, had he lied? Did he seek to betray him for some slight?
The arcanaloth motioned with his hand towards the door. "Step inside." He instructed. "Be judged. Be cleansed. Be purified."
Narsaleth hesitated. If his patron was not deceiving him, he should not show temerity in the face of promotion, he would best show his worth by grasping it. But of course perhaps a deception here, now, that could conceivably be a part of his trial, a part of his judgment and their masters could be watching now for any signs of weakness on his part. A middle ground between blind faith and foolish disregard would serve him best.
He reached out to touch the door, but turned to Azcajal first. "Why will you not accompany me?"
The arcanaloth bowed his head and spread his hands. "I was told to remain outside."
"Why?" Narsaleth asked. "Why so many changes to the trial?"
A momentary swell of pride surged through Azcajal. His protégé doubted him, expected duplicity, felt a hunger for answers, for secrets... he was ready for promotion. That pride let him suppress his own worry and maintain his composure.
"Because this is no longer the Khin-Oin of Mydianchlarus." He said. "We are no longer ruled by Anthraxus, nor does the General of Gehenna dictate upon our race from afar. We are living in a new age. You are the child of a new era. Things have changed and they will never again be the same. Do you understand this? This is why things are different."
Because He has made them different.
Because He wishes them to be so.
Because He spoke to me.
Azcajal pushed that from his mind and continued. "But you would not be here if I did not suspect that somewhere in your heart you knew this, or at least suspected this. You will be found worthy. I would not jeopardize myself otherwise. My selfishness is your gain. I believe that you are worthy, but beyond that door... we shall see."
Narsaleth took in his sponsor's words and nodded. It frightened him and uplifted him at once. There was a place for him, a position and rank prepared for him; he would seize it, make it his, take his place among the elect.
"Yes. I understand."
The door opened and Narsaleth slipped inside, headstrong and feeling worthy, his elevation imminent. The arcanaloth did not follow, he could not even look, in fact he turned away, averting his gaze and holding his breath, trembling unconsciously.
The door closed with a hiss, and Azcajal exhaled with one of his own, his knuckles white as he removed his hand from door's handle.
"I will not accompany you because I am not worthy." He whispered to himself, his voice beginning to break like the first lines of a self-abusive mantra.
He slumped down and clutched his head, weeping and shaking.
"And also because I am terrified."
***
Narsaleth entered the chamber expecting to bow before the gaze and burning minds of a council of Ultroloths. But as he stepped into the gloom he saw nothing before all was swallowed by shadow, the momentary light from the corridor betraying only an empty floor devoid of all but dust.
The light was fading and his shadow stretched out before him, racing across the chamber to meet the embrace of the deepest dark. Narsaleth turned to look as the door began to shut, expecting to see it drift with gravity, or perhaps a last glimpse of his mentor's hand. But no, the door simply seemed to swing on its own accord.
His eyes averted momentarily, the nycaloth never saw the dust of the floor twitch and move, showing the articulated lines of thousands of words traced in their medium. Nor did the fiend see the darkness ripple and move where his own figure painted in black stretched and touched them. He never saw the multitude of fingers reaching out to caress and paw at his shadow though. He never saw them, he only felt a cold chill and the thrill of apprehension when his shadow was pulled, writhing and contorting, by those hands into the curtain of pitch.
But that was the space of split second, and then the door closed behind him with a whisper and a click of bone on bone, leaving the only light in the chamber a thin sliver from underneath the door's margin. A second more and then it was snuffed completely and he was alone.
All was darkness.
Narsaleth’s eyes adjusted, or tried to adjust. His pupil’s dilated and his retinas slipped from their normal spectrum to something unnatural, the quasi-magical sight that would normally allow him to see in anything but the most profound magical darkness. He expected to see the breadth of the chamber, to see the council of Ultroloths who would test him, but the gloom refused to retreat beyond a certain depth, and he saw nothing.
“I am here.” He said, addressing his unseen masters. “I am ready.”
Nothing.
All was silent. The darkness gave no reply, but Narsaleth waited and listened anyways. Somewhere beyond the range of his vision he expected his ultroloth judges lurked and observed, taking cues on his fitness before they even whispered a response.
But there was no circle of ultroloths. There was only the darkness, and the darkness had already made its judgment before the nycaloth had stepped through the door and into its presence.
*clatter*
A metallic object landed at Narsaleth's feet, sliding out of the gloom and across the floor, coming to a rest only a few inches away from him. The fiend looked down and tilted his head as he recognized the object for what it was: a knife, a dagger, a blade, a shard of obsidian.
The fiend looked at the blade and waited, though for what he wasn’t entirely certain. The obsidian glittered, jewel-like in the faint circle of dim illumination where the ‘loth’s eyes managed to peel back the otherwise complete gloom. Surely the ultroloths who would judge him would expect him to wait for their commands; that was the proper role, the proper protocol, orthodoxy.
"Pick it up."
The nycaloth instinctively knelt at the command and reached for the blade, but still his eyes searched the darkness for the speaker. And that was the disturbing fact of it all, that there had been a speaker in the first place. Ultroloths had no mouths. They did not speak except with their minds, but his ears had clearly keened to an audible voice, and he had obeyed it.
And oddly as well, he’d begun to kneel before he’d even registered the sound in his ears. Commanding, seductive, hypnotic; a succinct trio.
One of Narsaleth's hands curled around the blade's hilt and he stood back up, still scanning the darkness.
The voice spoke again, this time echoing in his head as well as his ears. "What is the object in your hands?"
The nycaloth turned the blade over in his hands. Ragged and unbalanced, it was not a blade that was ever intended for use in a battle. Runes in high yugoloth were etched into the glass, weaving in decorative and poetic spirals across its entire length, while deeper still, beneath the black mirrored surface, even more glyphs hung suspended like bubbles; deadly little insects with promises sealed upon their lips in their tomb of jet amber.
"An obsidian blade." Narsaleth replied. “A work of art and a tool at the same time.”
"A very special type of blade yes. What about such things do you know?"
Narsaleth though for a moment, paused and then gave his reply. "It is the object of a nycaloth's ascendancy to arcanaloth status. It is what I seek."
"And is that so?" There was an amusement in the voice, a paternal tone, a hunger.
"Yes. Yes I do."
"You desire its caress?"
Thoughts flooded into the nycaloth's mind, burning their way into his consciousness. For the briefest flicker of a moment he stood on Khalas as his heart was gutted from his chest, he felt the flicker of flame on his flayed skin still cold from shock and blood loss, he felt his bones hum as the sigils were carved into the soft plates at the ends of his long bones, and he begged for more as he choked and drowned on his own blood from the knife embedded through his neck.
And then it was gone. A hundred thousand flickers and flashes of memories of promotions from the perspective of the promoted and from some other observer.
"What you saw, is that is what you want?"
Narsaleth knelt on the floor, bracing himself with two arms even as the other two cradled the blade. His legs had buckled from the intensity of the visions but he'd held the knife like a mortal gripped to their soul or a priest to their faith.
"Yes..." He whimpered, still tasting blood on his tongue from the visions like a physical afterimage.
"Look at the blade and tell me about it. Feel it, understand it."
The nycaloth nodded and traced first one finger and then two down the blunt edge, rounding the tip and pricking his flesh in the process. A single drop of blood welled from the wound and traced down tiny, cunningly crafted channels carved into the blade like little sanguine rivers.
“It draws away my blood.” He said, watching that same blood fill the patterns and whorls of decorative glyphs. “The runes speak of purification, pain as a doorway to release, glorification of the self and submission to Evil. It’s poetic.”
“Poetic?”
“Yes, the words, the patterns. I never considered some of what they say, little word plays and hidden, double meanings.”
Absorbed in the task, he ran his fingers over the razored edge of the blade, slicing deep, intentionally cutting his flesh simply to feel, and the pain felt different, the suffering was tinged with a spiritual aspect that it had never possessed before. It might have been the blade, it might have been his mindset at the moment, or it might have been that he was already being promoted, in mind if not yet in body.
“You are already learning then. Good.”
Narsaleth turned the blade and its glossy, mirrored surface caught a reflection at a distant angle. The reflection wavered and his ears heard the wet slip of lips parting over teeth.
"Look up child."
Obediently, the nycaloth look up and at his judge, the speaker whose voice filled his ears and mind.
Teeth and eyes. That was what he saw, that was -all- he saw in the darkness, and he very nearly dropped the blade.
Ivory white fangs, perfect and glistening with a sheen of spittle; a pair of reddish-pink eyes like burning souls suspended in ruby cages; they seemed to hover in the dark, suspended in a formless wash of darkness, not so much standing before him but surrounding him, encasing him, swallowing the light.
A fraction of a second passed and in that moment the darkness seemed animate, swimming, writhing like some shapeless abomination...
Narsaleth blinked and the trick of the light, for that was what it had to have been, resolved itself. The figure stepped forward and the darkness peeled back to reveal him, or perhaps the darkness congealed to form him, but regardless of that, the nycaloth's judge stood before him.
Teeth parted as a tongue licked at a fang and tasted the air, crimson-pink eyes glittering and now distinct from the shadows, locked within the skull of an arcanaloth.
The Oinoloth stood before him, physically present, physically manifest at his judgment. Narsaleth knew this, understood the incongruity of the situation, and intellectually understood the enormity of it all... but it never registered to him. He was already numb, already slipping into a state of expectant religious ecstasy to do anything but obey.
The Ebon pointed to the obsidian blade. “Normally you would be slaughtered for touching that blade before you were ready.”
The nycaloth stumbled to answer, but there was no need.
“But I asked you to do so, I felt that you were ready, that you needed to learn from the past before embracing the future, and the blade is simply another aspect of that past. The knife you hold, it was the same blade used to promote Anthraxus, and the knife that he used on himself when he underwent his process of self-mutilation in order to ape his makers, attempting to ascend to something better on his own. He failed, in numerous ways, and of course I punished him for that impurity and that failure.”
The Oinoloth stepped closer and held up his hands, displaying his claws.
“That blade, if you had been judged by a council of Ultroloths and been found worthy, they would have flayed your skin from your muscle, then sliced the muscle from the bone, and carved into you like a block of marble to reflect your metaphysical essence, all before setting you into the furnaces of Gehenna, the pools that already today you have seen, or the reflective chasm in Carceri. Normally this process is long, lengthy, protracted, inefficient, rote, routine, archaic…
The Oinoloth’s claws extended and shimmered ivory against his flesh and coat, glittering like scalpels in their own right, set against the darkness.
“The process is long and protracted.” He repeated. “Unless of course I choose to expedite the process in my own fashion…”
The nycaloth barely had time to register the archfiend’s meaning before the claws burrowed into his chest and clutched at his sternum, digging and twisted, slicing and carving skin from muscle and symbol to bone. In fact, the only reaction that Narsaleth made was to relax his arms at his side, to accept what came.
Willingness was key.
It might have taken a minute, an hour, a day… time lost its meaning to the nycaloth as his world became a blank haze of pained ecstasy and a blossom of darkness flooding his vision. Claws of liquid darkness slipped into flesh and ripped him open, forcing the transition and shedding the metaphysical cocoon of the nycaloth.
Claws and fangs and septic mind, they lanced deeper than any blade, slipping through suddenly plastic and liquid flesh like a potter to clay, a sculptor freeing a statue embedded in its marble tomb; not creating so much as releasing. There was no blade, no invocations, no ritual, no runes, no furnace but the light from his eyes.
Time passed and eventually the screams and pain ceased.
All was silence.
All was darkness.
Blood dripped from claws and teeth, slicked and matted fur, and where the thrown off corpse of the nycaloth had come to rest it streaked the bone-white godflesh under their feet a shade of crimson.
Narsaleth was dead and Narsaleth was reborn. Shaking and trembling, naked and slathered in his own blood like some perverse amniotic fluid, the newborn arcanaloth looked down at the corpse, his corpse; the ba staring at the sekhu. At the arcanaloth’s feet, the nycaloth husk was a mangled pile of flesh and viscera, but from it he had stepped like a moth from a cocoon, and though spattered with blood its face was unmistakably his own, and he smiled when he saw his new form reflected in the glazed and frozen eyes of the old.
“I have given you what you wanted. Remade in body and spirit into what you desired. The flesh of the nycaloth, the lesser fiend, the impure fiend, that you were, you have shed and that is forever behind you. Welcome child to the next stage of your existence.”
Left unsaid was a final line of the Ebon’s welcome, ‘But there is of course, something that I need of you.’
Impurity had been physically shed, and Narsaleth stumbled at the realization of his ascendancy even as the floodgates of his newly sculpted mind opened and touched him, kissed him with the birthright that Larsdana Ap Neut had tethered, millennia ago, to their kind in Gehenna. But in all of that knowledge, in the collective archive of their racial memory, the Ebon who stood silently behind him like a shadow, he was entirely absent.
The Oinoloth might have been absent from that tide, but something was also seeping into Narsaleth’s mind like a slow trickle of oil atop the raging floodwaters of information, secrets and illumination. He knew him. Somehow he recognized him. He felt it in his bones and in his blood like a wave of cold sepsis.
Numb with his increasing αποκαλυψις, his dawning revelation, the ‘loth turned around, looking for the Ebon like a pilgrim searching for their prophet, their icon, their saint. The Ebon was gone, but after turning a complete circle, the ‘loth stopped and gazed back at his own face, a reflection trapped in the surface of the obsidian dagger that he’d held and examined before his promotion. The blade hung suspended in the air and though he had not been standing there a moment before, the Oinoloth’s eyes and teeth shimmered in the reflection as well, disembodied in the darkness.
“These blades are simply tools.” The Ebon’s voice whispered from out of the knife and in the arcanaloth’s ears. “They are artifacts and ephemera of a species grown corrupt and blind, content to accept a status quo blindly without any conception of their potential. The words of the faithless have accepted a gospel that has been handed to them and they do not question it. The yugoloths have become a false vacuum waiting for the pressure to collapse and fall.”
The cold shock in his blood leached higher, deeper, like a man drowning in frigid, unholy water. The cold brought knowledge. The pain brought illumination. He was close to something. He was close to understanding.
“Step to the edge and tell me what you see.”
Narsaleth opened his eyes and stared at those of the Oinoloth.
“What do you see?”
The young arcanaloth’s lips curled back into a grin and a trickle of acidic tears began to roll down his face. Like Azcajal before him, he was terrified and overwhelmed, but unlike his former master, he was caught up in zeal and a desire to prove worthy of his new status.
They might have walked, they might have teleported, or the room itself might have altered and shifted in response to the Oinoloth’s will. But as Narsaleth stared into the Ebon’s eyes with idolatry and a dozen incarnations of servile lust, there was water at their feet, water at their ankles, water at their waist; the cold, murky, dark waters of the Styx welled up from the arterial branches of the river, the place where some of the first yugoloths had been spawned beneath the Wasting Tower.
The Ebon kissed the other fiend, slowly and deliberately licking away his tears and then sharing the taste upon his tongue like a sort of sacrament.
“You have seen.” Vorkannis whispered. “Now what will you do?”
“Anything, absolutely anything Father. Anything that you ask of me.”
The Oinoloth cradled the other’s chin, bracing his hands against the sides of Narsaleth’s muzzle.
Again, willingness was key.
The astraloths were unthinking beings, individual automatons, but the creations bubbling in their vats, slipping towards sentience now, they required a willing mind spread through their essence. The newest slaves of the Oinoloth required a martyr within the synapses, a crucifer to sustain them and link them in their obeisance. And that sacrifice now looked with quasi-religious ecstasy into the eyes of his whispering master.
“Pressure to collapse and fall…” The Ebon dipped his finger in the water and then stroked the other’s cheek. “That was what I said your race required before it could be purified a second time. Perched on the edge as you are now, there is no need to push, no need for pressure, no need to force this purification, because after all, why should I push when you will willingly jump?”
A telepathic spark leapt between them both, but that further instruction was unnecessary, because already the newborn arcanaloth understood his role. He understood what he needed to do to prove himself worthy and to please the Oinoloth, though that title was paltry when compared to what he’d been shown.
Narsaleth kissed the Ebon and stared longingly into that one’s burning eyes before kneeling and slipping below the surface of the numbing, soul sucking waters.
Even as the darkness of the water obscured his vision and began to cloud his mind, he knew what had to be done.
Anything you ask of me. Without hesitation, without compulsion, the fiend parted his lips and inhaled.
***
