107 (I) Open

Scouts are the eyes, nose, tongue, ears, mouth, skin—everything that relates to the senses—of an army.

No scouts means that you're fighting blind, that you're just a mass of firepower stumbling around in the general direction in which you're supposed to march. No scouts means that someone's going to slit your arteries while you sleep, that someone's going to burn and butcher your supply train while you aren't looking. That someone's going to loot your tent and camp clean, is going to poison your food, your water, and is going to start cutting throats while you sleep at night.

Scouts are essential. Shadows, Assassins, Thieves—they're essential. They might not be the single most important component of an army, but without them, you're almost certain to lose.

Before every battle begins, there's the skirmish. There are the knife fights in the dark. There are Pathbearers with Stealth skills, with high levels of Awareness, blinking through shadows, scouring out paths for the rest of their forces to travel, and figuring out where the opposition lies in ambush. You need scouts to counter other scouts. You need scouts to figure out where things are.

And you need scouts most of all if you are the inferior army, if you don't have the necessary force projection to match someone else head-on. That's when scouts, infiltrators, and saboteurs shine: when they're crippling the enemy and bringing them down from the inside.

Hell, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for our scouts. My wife wouldn't be here. All of us would be sleeping with the worms had their lengths of steel passed through our backs or been dragged across our necks. And because your enemy has scouts, you're gonna need scouts.

Because if not... Well, you ever wander into the jungle at night alone, without any equipment? You see eyes looking at you from the dark, but you don't know what exactly's staring at you? Yeah, it's kinda like that.

Except, you likely won't know what kills you. Or worse, what carries you off and takes you as a prisoner.

-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

107 (I)

Open

A single, hair-thin strand of Psychomancy mana slipped into the Court Leviathan, seeking a certain Deathless. The string of translucent mana scoured the creature, sliding through each of its many brains, trying to pinpoint the exact location of Shiv’s whereabouts.

Uva could have asked Adam, but she'd found Gate Lord slumped over and asleep within the Garden of Bountiful Alloy. Nearby, Valor and Can Hu watched over him while going through the Educator’s burned tome.

Hence, Uva sought Shiv out herself. She was done with interrogating the Owl for now, and with the Null Mont situation temporarily resolved, she wanted to see how Shiv was doing.

Even with the battle over, they were constantly pressed with tasks and things to do. There was hardly a moment for all of them to talk and figure things out—or to just exist.

Well, the strands briefly stopped as they examined a certain Angelo. The man's mind was awash with trauma, wailing and weeping. To describe him as something physical, he was a brutally infected wound, leaking pus and foul ichor out every passing second. He was still sane, but just barely. Right now, his mind was pointed inwards, the current of his thoughts cascading inversely. A sign that he was holding to the past, unable to emerge from the shadows lining his memories.

Uva considered slipping her Psychomancy thread through the vampire once more, examining him, learning what he was actually thinking about right now. She decided against it. Usually, the only things Uva contemplated regarding the bloodsuckers were how to kill them, how to break their minds, how to destroy their culture and bring down their Faith. But this one… There wasn't much left to break, and frankly, she didn't think there was much she could inflict upon him that his own kind hadn't already, and worse.

She continued on, a single strand circling through hallways, partially destroyed and reclaimed by spreading masses of flesh. She glanced into rooms, mostly obliterated by Shiv's inertial detonations, with little more than shards and debris embedded within the body of the Court Leviathan remaining. The insides of the creature were about as ruined as the gate. There would need to be a substantial rebuilding effort before it could serve as a troop carrier, or frankly, whatever Shiv wanted it to be, aside from a provider of flesh—a dedicated and ethical supply of meat.

But that was up to him. And only him. He made sure of that when he “convinced” Exalted Mother Null Mont she'd made a stupid mistake with some help from Adam and Valor.

It was good that he didn't actually hurt the Weaveress, but still, the way he treated her made Uva uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable. On some level, Uva understood the Exalted Mother was taking advantage of the Honored Guests and was being foolish and impulsive in ordering Uva away from the gate. Even if her suspicions about the Dreamtaker’s eldritch influence, about Uva’s potential subversion, were correct, there was a way of doing things, a way to be efficient and effective while also ensuring a Cherished Sister wasn’t compromised.

Null Mont thought of none of that. Null Mont was short-sighted, and Null Mont was narcissistic. But Null Mont was not suicidal. And ultimately, after some threats and a meal, Null Mont was pacified, at least for now.

In part, Uva was grateful for that, but the developments also troubled her. She wondered if she could have solved the problem herself, convinced Exalted Mother Null Mont to allow her to remain at the Gate, to have her see the folly in her actions, the blindness in her choices.

The answer was a culturally-engineered no.

Shiv was right. Uva could have done a number of things to Null Mont. The Weaveress had a few Master-Tier skills, but she was no Psychomancer, and she was relatively unblooded in combat. Uva could taste the inexperience on her. But even so, something rooted deep in her psyche screamed at her every time she thought lowly or poorly of the Weaveress. It was sacrilege. Unthinkable. Wrong. Just like doubting the Composer was wrong. Just like how every vampire was supposed to be a slaving monster that indulged in cruelty and bloodlust in equal measure. Yet here was Angelo. Yet, here was Null Mont. Yet here Uva was, lost in her own growing doubts as she searched for Shiv.

Two months ago, such wrongthink would have been immediately repressed. Yes, there were problems at Weave, but they were inflicted by outside agents, by agitators, by enemies. The surface was the land that harbored her mother's murderer and the ones who inflicted so much damage on the Abyss.

The Composer was the only reason Weave was protected, the only reason Weave was at all. And it was the Umbrals, and to a lesser extent her Weaveresses, that failed to uphold her glory. But increasingly, whispers of doubt began to surface in Uva's mind. No more were they like sediment at the bottom of her thoughts and memories. They were rising now, like buoyant pieces of driftwood breaking free from wreckages long lost.

"You cling," the Dreamtaker sang out to Uva."Clinging hurts you deeply, cripples your development, blinds you."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I am not blind," Uva shot back, a slow, aching feeling turning to reflexive outrage. "I am… I am merely ruminating. My thoughts are slightly in disarray. This is not blindness, this is just…"

"This is you trying to come up with a reason, trying to process the flaws of those you thought were better."

Uva considered how she was to reply to that. The Dreamtaker, as strange as she was, seemed a relatively benign entity, despite the harm she inflicted upon her mind and the minds of other people around her.

"I pity you. You fear the colors you cannot see. You do not wish to perceive them. I pity you. And envy you. You have a journey, a journey away from the limitations of consciousness."

"What?" Uva replied.

"Consciousness. It is like a cage. There are boundaries to where you end, boundaries where the world begins and you don't reach. You are… like a foreign body drifting through the vastness. No wonder you all feel so alone. No wonder you cling to each other. No wonder your thoughts turn so malformed. You are searching for consciousness. It is a terrible thing. I regret the System infesting me with it. But I adore the fact that I can see it now."

Slowly, Uva closed in on the signature of thought hidden deep within the lower middle of the Court Leviathan. Considering that no one else should be aboard the massive creature, she expected that was where she'd find Shiv.

"You truly think consciousness is a negative thing?" Uva asked.

"I think the way you think is broken. You are shaped by belief, for there is a pattern engraved inside of you, patterns from your culture, from your society. Because you cannot be of the world, you are not of the world. You start inside a vessel, your own flesh, but your colors, they don't intermingle. Not like me, not like me at all, not yet. A shame, a pity, a wonder, a journey, a mystery for you to uncover, to seek, to become, if you so choose."

It was hard to decipher what the Dreamtaker was saying sometimes, but Uva thought she got the gist. The Dreamtaker was closer to being a dimension unto itself rather than a singular being. But she might also be a singular being now that the System had infested her with mana.

Infested with mana, Uva thought to herself. The very concept made her shudder. Was the System some kind of infection as well? Some kind of disease that spread across souls? Was it a disease that composed souls? Another unnerving thing that intruded into Uva's mind when she already had so many to face.

"There. Another flaw. Another misshape in your mind. In your way. You find things horrifying, terrible, because you don't know, because you don't understand. But I don't know what it is like to not know, to not understand. Things are, and they are not. They are expressed, or they do not exist."

"Is there nothing you fear?" Uva asked. "Not the Stranger, not another Eldritch?"

The Dreamtaker was silent for a while, but then it responded. "Does the sunrise fear your broken moon? Does the sea fear the land, or the way the wind dances, carrying gravel in its wake?"There was something strangely alluring in the way the Dreamtaker described things.

"No,"the Dreamtaker answered its own question. "There is no capacity for fear. It does not exist. Not yet. We are infested. We are bearing tumors of self-awareness, but we are not fully self-aware. The System's metastasization is not complete. We are still more Outside, a concept animated, rather than a mind uncovering. A mind like you."

Uva felt a traitorous desire slip through her, much like the thoughts she had before. The thoughts doubting the Composer, the Weaveresses, doubting even the fundamentals of her own culture. She suppressed it, but the Dreamtaker let out something as close to a sigh as it could possibly make. It was a broken sound, this discordant melody that sawed at Uva's very psychology.

"Again, again, why? Why do you mutilate yourself? Why do you mutilate the colors that spring from you, Seeker? You have the capacity, so much capacity to reshape your own mind, to face what is. Why turn away?"The Dreamtaker paused.

"The Fundament?" Uva echoed.

"You see things, but then you mask them with signs. With an illusion of your perception. But you are a mind-dancer. You are a Psychomancer. Break the illusion you have drunk so deeply. You alone, among many, have limbs of heart and mind. You alone are the shaper of personal meaning. And you alone can dissolve meaning and simply see things for what they are."

Uva felt something shiver within her, something shift and dance behind her eyes. Colors she couldn’t describe, but colors that painted new possibilities. Colors there if she just reached out for them.

“There is a reason you delved deep inside we of the Outside and returned whole. Changed. But unbroken. Mutated. But not deviant. Not twisted. Think. Open yourself. Open…”

And finally, Uva drew near to Shiv. Her Psychomancy thread flipped through a final set of walls, and she found herself in a rank chamber. It was a little bit like one of the chambers in Elaboration, an observation room overlooking an experimental cell of some kind. Or perhaps a containment unit. Through a reinforced window was another chamber. Its walls were furrowed with slick substances and countless glistening pores.

It seemed like some kind of malformed womb, and a feeling of revulsion went through her immediately. But standing at the center of the room was Shiv. He was stripped down to nothing, and a look of absolute focus painted his expression. He constantly drew in lungfuls of air, and Uva wondered what he was doing. But then she saw it. A bubbling of pustules bursting across his chest and abdomen, only to fade a moment later. Shiv blinked, shaking his head. His thoughts swayed slightly, and Uva recognized the patterns of those movements. The way his focus shook—like that of a drunk.

Wait, he wasn’t like a drunk—Shiv was drunk.

And then she recalled how his Plaguefueled skill worked. Ah, she thought to herself with a dry exasperation, alloyed with the faintest bits of astonishment. Her dear brute was nothing if not stubborn, and nothing if not enduring. It expressed itself in his skills, and it expressed itself in his every action. She guessed that he was in this chamber because he was infecting himself with plague after plague, malady after malady.

But was he doing it to improve a skill? Or just for the pleasure of imbibing diseases? Uva didn’t know. And thus, she finally dipped the tip of her Psychomancy thread into his mind, and he responded, looking in the thread's general direction.

"Oh, hey, Uva," he replied. He let out a slight cough, but then that affliction faded as well, burned away by his hypercharged immune system. She regarded him through his own eyes, observing his body, and Uva felt a rush of heat inside of her.

"Do diseases make you larger?" Uva asked. “Because you seem… bigger somehow.”

He let out a low chuckle. "Yeah, something like that. And not just like alcohol for me, it's like a steroid too. I feel all kinds of drunk, but also, it doesn't just make my muscles bigger, it makes me harder, it makes me faster, and… it feels pretty good."

"It's addicting," Uva said, sensing the enjoyment ingrained within Shiv. Absorbing the diseases lined his mind in layers of pleasure, the same kind of pleasure one might feel when gambling or doing substances meant to spike the neurochemistry.

The same way Uva's neurochemistry was being affected right now, with what she could see. "So," she said, trying to distract herself. "Have you made some progress regarding your Practical Metabiology? I trust this is more than just an exercise in pseudo-alcoholism.”

Practical Metabiology 36 > 37

"A bit," he replied. "I think I'm getting some understanding of how a virus and a few other diseases work. I've been reviewing the most common disease types, along with the most infectious. I have to go with infectious because my plague field burns through most things too fast. So far, none of the diseases I managed to inflict on myself lasted that long, but then again, I am making pretty amateurish ones."

He let out a laugh. "That vampire bastard's all kinds of messed up, but his bio-molecular control is something else. It's like he's some kind of disease chef. Down to the last detail, he's got it all figured out. But it's more than just that. He can put his own spin on things. He sees connections that aren't even there, or at least that I can't grasp. I feel like an alley kid looking at Georges again. I guess that's how things always are when you don't have the experience."

Uva hummed in agreement. She knew the feeling. As a child, she was a diligent student, but still, she remembered times where she was utterly lost as well, where she marveled at someone else's skill. Frankly, she still marveled at Fel's understanding of how fabrics worked. Uva, comparatively, was just a dabbler. It was one of her unspoken regrets.

Her father, supposedly, had been a tailor before one of the blood-plagues took him, and while a few of her sisters veered closer to him in spirit, Uva merely touched on her father's skills and went no deeper. She didn’t have a true talent there. Only an interest. A dabbler’s touch.

But it can be more than that, Uva thought. I can be more than just a Psychomancer. A lot more...