Page 9

Deiphage

Y ao Fu. Devil Woman. Temptress. She had taken that name as a bitter joke, one she knew very few would understand in her place of hiding, if anyone at all. She had truly seen and experienced it all, the highest highs and lowest lows. Risen from nothing to the highest highs one could hope for in Tiengenzhen. It was the dubious honor of being truly unparallelled in one’s specialization, to such a degree that the mightiest members of warring sects took the time out of their war just to come after her, knowing and rightly fearing that in all of Tiengenzhen, she was the only person who could single handedly tip the war one way or the other at any moment. So, they had decided to get rid of her.

When she came here, even as she spoke to that green-eyed woman with murder behind her eyes, Yao hadn’t expected much. She’d seen the type. She had been the type, for a time. Hardened by adversity and human callousness to the point of near-misanthropy, yet still retaining the sense to know that one couldn’t isolate oneself completely.

But, as she looked upon Brunhilde Krahe, she saw… Well, not quite her own past, but echoes of it. That was the thing about the Eye of Tar; it was a roundabout, fickle thing, even with this ritual that attempted to focus its gaze. Wars consumed millions of lives for the profit of the wealthy and powerful.

Places whose people were too healthy or prosperous were erased, sabotaged, polluted, or erased with desolation magic altogether, all so they couldn’t threaten the power of those who held it. A mighty conqueror, a man born two millennia late through artifice and strange technology, took back a country whose landscapes looked very much like Tiengenzhen from a pathetic, tyrannical regime, though he himself was a tyrant of another sort. Dozens of millions burned in sun-like flame during that conflict.

Then, through the eyes of another, Yao saw Her. She barely recognized Krahe under all that metal and other strange materials. This version of her seemed to be more artifice than flesh, but the murderous spark behind those eyes was unmistakable. Then, their gazes met. A flickering deluge of death in moment long snippets, many directly involving Krahe. So much death. So much killing. The Eye of Tar made her witness and feel what Krahe had felt in the detached manner of memory storage artifacts. Anger beyond rage. Hatred beyond articulation. And against what? Monoliths of power that may as well be sects, controlled by untouchable, elder-like figures who would just start another if the current one was destroyed. No, not the monoliths, nor the elders themselves, but the hidden powerhouses who stood behind them. She had sought to tear out the weed by the root.

In this way, Yao instantaneously knew that she and Krahe were alike.

It was a world so unlike Tiengenzhen, yet so similar in many ways. To Yao, it looked like a twisted, surrealist painting of the worst-case scenario should the great sects’ constant vying for power go unchecked for too long.

And then, Krahe died to a simple act of betrayal, driven by one man’s fear and greed.

The desolation that followed, wrought by her own contingencies, was a truly marvelous act of revenge, as far as Yao was concerned, but she also saw the futility of it.

Finally, she saw nothing. Not the usual blackness of the Eye when it decided to stop working, but nothingness, the wrong anti-color of the outer cosmos. Kenoma, as it was known in the continental languages. There, among incomprehensible cosmic vastness, shapeless forms stirred, eons passed in an instant, and myriad worlds flickered in the dark like stars in the sky—infinitesimal bright ones among infinite blackness.

Then, Chernobog’s unimpeachable vastness enveloped the drifting soul. An embrace of blackest blackness and vastest vastness. A being simultaneously unsurpassed, yet of a capricious nature, with no desire to be a conqueror, but instead to create conquerors, with no ideology of his own but the ideology of giving those mortals with a conqueror’s wherewithal the chance to enact their own ideals. Yao knew who it was; she couldn’t conceivably not know, for his handiwork was within her—a part of her. In ancient, antediluvian times, before the Wheel, before Igaria, in a time only recorded in legend, Chernobog’s apostles were known as the mightiest among the mighty, yet his cult never claimed dominion, for his Paragons warred among one another.

Yao beheld a few tiny flickers of that time from the perspectives of priests and would-be faithfuls, but her vision ended with the firing of the World Needle, and the realization of why the Eye of Tar had led her here and why it had led her to Brunhilde Krahe.

The unlight faded, and Yao quickly sealed her eye once more. She doubled over as she instantly went into a meltdown, shivering as her skin cracked and golden light poured out. Meanwhile, Krahe propped herself up with her hand against her thigh, her meltdown being a comparatively mild coughing fit spitting up ash and soot. The smoke maelstrom dispersed, the burners returning to steady, upward streams of gray.

???

Krahe felt like she had sand in her eyes, and the rapid buildup of entropy near the end was certainly unexpected, but she managed. After about half a minute, Yao finally recovered from her meltdown, the cracks in her skin closing as she raised her gaze to meet Krahe with an uncharacteristically manic grin plastered across her face.

The Talisman Mistress soon broke out into a stifled laughing fit.When it waned, she finally said it.“I get it now. It’s… It’s you. It’s all of you.”

“Please don’t start speaking in riddles.”

“I assure you, I am wholly lucid. I saw… Well, I suspect I saw far more than you would like, but most importantly, I now know for certain that it is you who is able to help me mend myself, and I know why there is no apparent corruption to your soul like there is to mine. Chernobog, he… took you. Plucked your True Soul from the void and sheltered it within himself, and in the eon which passed between that point and your rebirth, you took from him. I know not how or why, but perhaps a surpassing will to live and to reach for the power to eradicate those, like the creators of the Sect of White Stones, led to you usurping an infinitesimal piece of the Black God. Then, upon your rebirth, your outer soul, or as you know it, your astral body, formed without the irregularities produced when an Outer God touches and alters a living being’s soul. The blessings I gained from communion are still fundamentally part of Chernobog, they will return to him when I die. But you… There was no giving. No communion. The Outer God slumbered, as gods are wont to do, and you, perhaps unknowingly, took from him all you could, and in his vastness, he either didn’t notice, didn’t care, or found it amusing.”

Things clicked into place in Krahe’s mind. She tried to query Chernobog’s Mystic Knowledge, expecting nothing, only to receive more accurate memory flashes of her own rebirth that all but confirmed Yao’s hypothesis. Perhaps most unsettlingly, she felt an unquestionable certainty that Yao was right about one thing: Chernobog had found it terribly amusing when he realized a mortal soul had usurped a piece of him. She also suddenly became aware that she had not been the first and she would not be the last in the Black God’s eternal span of existence to do so.

“There was no taint to find,” she murmured, still processing the new context. “I came into this world already changed. Chernobog did no more than facilitate my incarnation.”

“And upon your death, your next reincarnation will be the same,” Yao finished.

Casus chimed in with a skeptical tone, “An unsettling proposition even from the most generous of perspectives. What would that make her, then? Not a saint of Chernobog, certainly not an avatar. Once again, the nature of such empowerment would have been detected and would directly conflict with any Zaveshian relic’s implantation.”

“A divine parasite, perhaps. Like a tarantula hawk wasp…” Krahe mused. She sighed, deciding that since Yao had already dug up the truth, there was no point avoiding speaking of it. Nonetheless, she wouldn’t spill everything. Not that easily.

“As far as I remember, the only time I ever communicated with Chernobog was upon my incarnation,” Krahe continued. “Hell, to call it communication is generous. A short time after I woke up, his voice rang in my head commanding me to get out of Jas’raba, and that was that. Afterwards, when I looked inward, I never found anything like Chernobog, no connection to some greater power, nothing that felt truly alien or separate from me. There was always just… this.”

She held up her left hand and made it split open into a fanged maw from the palm to the elbow.

“This… nauseating, Wound-like Grin. At first I thought it was a piece Chernobog had left with me on purpose. In retrospect, it was… I don’t know. An extra spiritual organ, maybe? It seems my Astral Body is abnormal in the extreme already, wouldn’t surprise me if-”

“What did you call it?”

“The Wound-like Grin. That’s what it looks like.”

“That, in my mind, is proof enough. Never once have I come across any such thing in relation to Chernobog. Always… Always curled horns, labyrinths, giant beasts representing unparalleled power. Your friend is correct, however—the absence of a word for what you are gnaws at me.”

After a moment of thought, Krahe flatly stated, “Deiphage. God Eater.”

“Fitting. As for how exactly you might be able to—”

Krahe exhaled, cutting her off. “I think I already know, at least as far as what I can do right now is concerned. Give me a second.”

She turned her focus inward, once more trying to query Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom, this time in regards to how Yao’s Soul Furnace might be permanently mended. A vast deluge of information flowed, but trying to take it in felt much like trying to drink a river. Nonetheless, she captured two vital nuggets.

“I can only grasp fragments, but permanently repairing your Soul Furnace will involve Thaumic Fusion,Anathemism, and… something from Xaugeth. I don’t know what. I will try again later, but that’s all I can get for now.”

A spark of hope lit up Yao’s eye, and a smile curled her lips.

“Oho, the Land of Beetles and Moths? I shall have to look into that. As for anathemism, that will be a difficult one in my state. Perhaps with help…”

“I also happen to have that covered—I can control Thaumic Fusion. Within myself, at the very least. There is no doubt in my mind that I will have to be far stronger if I am to involve myself in such an operation, though, whatever it entails.”

“Is that so? Perhaps an effect of your, ah… Deiphagy. I must admit that I am terribly curious as to how your unique constitution compares to the rest of mankind, but I lack the equipment to make such observations safely.”

Yao stood slowly as she stretched back and forth, her body popping and cracking with each motion. Krahe took the hint and stood as well.

“Well, I am more than satisfied with the results of my gamble,” Yao said. “Ask what you will of me and I will see what I can do.”

Stepping out of the ritual circle, Krahe leaned against one of the talisman-plastered walls. “I’m looking for two people. One killed a friend of mine, and another crippled me in an attempt to kill me. Both are assassins. One goes by the pseudonym Crescent Jezail; he is a Dead Night Tiger, though I haven’t been able to confirm whether he is a customer of yours. The other is an unknown, but he used a life-saving talisman that formed a partial shell of talismans around his body,” Krahe explained, bringing out the talisman Garvesh had given her as evidence.

She only had to reach out, and the paper pulled itself free from Krahe’s hand and flew into Yao’s waiting grasp.

“Paper Cocoon Talisman, one of my more popular pieces. Come.”

Returning to the ground floor, Yao brought out a handful of tools from the desk. A jade bottle, a basin, and ivory tweezers among other things. She shallowly filled the basin and dropped in the paper. Then, she flicked her wrist to extract a tiny, purplish blot of glowing ink that had escaped alongside all the red, and dropped it onto a blank paper strip. As this delicate process took place, she explained, “I do not make an active effort to collect the identities of my customers, but… many of them either take no care to conceal their own magic, or simply identify themselves to me openly, and I happen to have a very good memory. My Paper Cocoon Talismans harness the user’s own magic as an ignition source, which results in a trace of it becoming embedded within them, and my Messenger Talismans are wholly powered by the user, causing a similar phenomenon. Thus…”

She raised the paper with the purple blot.

“I can identify who is who even if they never give me their name. Well, as long as I get my hands on it before the trace dissipates. A few more days and this remnant would have been much less useful.”

As she funneled some of her golden thauma into the paper and felt out the captured trace’s reaction, Yao hummed to herself, her brow furrowed as she fished around her memory. Finally, she turned her singular burning eye towards Krahe.

“Ah, I remember this one. Very pretty handwriting, but a disrespectful little lady. She came off like some spoiled brat who was never smacked as a child. She is an Aspirant-ranked Silversword Agency contractor by the name of Eutropia. I am not wholly familiar with your CQF ranking system, but I believe that places her in the D-One to D-Three range—the low mid ranks.”

At that moment, she gestured at the paper and splashed a new pattern onto it, creating an eye-like shape with a dot of purple at its center. It became enveloped by golden light and an image came out, slowly solidifying as Yao sharpened her concentration.

“There. I requested one of my employees to look into her suitability as a customer when she was trying to contact me, and he sent this back as part of his report. I’m afraid I know nothing of interest about her. She is not well known enough for specific information to leak and be circulated.”

The image was that of a young woman, and had the unmistakable appearance of a snapshot from a larger photo, enhanced and zoomed in after the fact to pick someone out. She looked… normal. Wealthy and dolled up, but normal from her curled brown hair to her makeup-caked face, notably paler than the rest of her swarthy complexion, to her eyes and lips which were accented by streaks of purple. She looked like any middle-eastern young adult with too much spending money.

“No further information?”

“I’m afraid not,” Yao said. Her smile returned, and she added, “Though I am certain that, knowing her identity, you will have no issue finding out more. You got to me, after all, and how long did that take you? A week?”

Before Krahe could respond, Yao moved on, sending the talisman over to Krahe. “You may keep this. Now, Crescent Jezail…”

She took a moment to gather her thoughts, not searching her memory, but considering how much to say.

“He is a customer, that I admit. He signs each of our communication slips, but he is also elusive enough to avoid both my and my employees’ efforts to identify him. Moreover, he disfigures his magic such that I cannot trace anything specifically back to him. That is to say, I have traces, but they are no more useful for finding him than traces from any other customer. You already know who he is, so I am sure your next question will pertain as to whether I can help you exact retribution upon him…”

Yao’s smiling expression, heretofore nothing more than that, became tinged with a demonic malice. “I assure you that I fully understand the thought process.”

Krahe hadn’t actually planned on trying to track down and kill Crescent Jezail at the moment; it wasn’t a high-priority objective. After all, he was just a hired killer. Odds were, she had been just another job, and killing him would only harm her efforts against Hashem by tipping them off that she was after them. Still, she went along with Yao’s not entirely wrong assumption, as it was true that she did want to take precautions against Jezail if she had to fight him in the future.

“Crescent recently sent in an order for a custom offensive talisman, self-powered, with a fairly hefty prepayment for the supplies necessary. It may be intended for you, if his employer realized that you survived.”

“How recently?” Krahe asked.

“Four days ago. I had started working on it just before you received the Tarnished Jade Flower stamp.”

“That… lines up, I believe. I made myself known to Hashem’s people in the process of tracking you down.” She wagered that Yao already knew it had to do with Hashem, but she purposely dropped the name to be sure.

“In that case, I will show you.” Yao nodded. A gesture brought an unfinished talisman to the surface of her arm, then made it float before her. Just the paper’s texture spoke volumes to the higher grade of this talisman, appearing to be an ultra-thin but otherwise unprocessed strip of wood, grain and all. The patterns, too, were mesmerizing and an order of magnitude more complex than Wandrei Faust. It didn’t seem so at first, but, like layers of a hologram, different patterns came to the surface and receded depending on the angle of the light.

“Once activated, it will multiply, much like the Paper Cocoon talisman, then surround and envelop the victim before flash-cremating them. Failing that, it will fire off its stored energy as a deluge of individual beams.”

Yao took back the talisman once Krahe had gotten a good look, replacing it with a blank paper as she added, “Pour your magic into this. I will add a hidden trigger to the Cremation Cocoon Talisman so that it backfires if used against you. Only a true master of the craft equal to myself could even have a chance to notice it.”

“I cannot bring myself to trust your word alone,” Krahe admitted. “How about you demonstrate how such a selective disarm trigger would function?”

“Sure.” Yao shrugged as if having expected this. She brought out a pair of plain talisman papers and began splashing ink on them. In the time it would take another to cast a normal thaumaturgy, she finished the talismans. The relative simplicity of their designs did nothing to detract from how impressive a feat this was. A single thick-lined, Chinese-adjacent symbol served as the centerpiece.

“These contain the First…” Yao began, then paused, choosing to simplify her explanation. “They create a direct kinetic attack. I only put enough power into them to equal a normal, mundane punch.”

With a mere flick of her finger, she sent one of the papers, now strangely rolled in a narrow tube, darting at Krahe. The moment it left her vicinity, a rod mace of golden light took form around it, and it smashed into Krahe with, indeed, the force of a very strong man’s punch, albeit concentrated down to the surface area of a fingertip. It punched a small hole into her wards but didn’t do much more.

Waiting not a moment more, Yao splashed an extra streak onto the second paper, masterfully camouflaging it among the rest of the pattern. Both Krahe and Casus immediately lost track of it. Once again, Yao set it loose against Krahe. The bar-mace construct formed as normal, but before it could strike, it suddenly exploded into many shards towards Yao, though they dissipated well before they could harm her.

“The backlash will be far more significant in the end result, but as you can see, I am no liar. Should you still not trust me, might I perhaps allow you to watch as I place the contingency upon the finished Cremation Cocoon Talisman?” Yao asked facetiously.

“No, I believe this will suffice. Our business, as it pertains to my investigation, is concluded, but I still have a request—as a customer. To start, you are familiar with the wards and barriers defense paradigm endemic to the Seven Spokes System, yes?”

“Of course,” Yao said, waiting for Krahe to continue.

“Would you happen to be familiar with an alternative to barriers which entails becoming semi-intangible through partly submerging oneself into the immaterial?”

“Spirit Walking, yes. I believe it is far more common in Tiengenzhen than the wider world. In fact, there is a nearly even split between those who prefer it over Barriers, though any well-rounded martial expert is expected to be skilled in techniques of both defensive types, and ideally others as well. In this, I find the Seven Spokes System’s layout to be a detriment, as it creates such a false dichotomy.”

That seemed to grab Casus’s attention, snapping him out of his state of silent observation that he had been in for much of the conversation. Nonetheless, he remained quiet, merely paying greater attention. It seemed to amuse Yao a touch.

“Do you think you would be able to procure or produce a voidkey specializing in Spirit Walking, then?”

Yao gave a knowing smile, as if she wanted to say something but decided not to, instead stating, “Procure? No, not in any reasonable amount of time. As for crafting one… As I am now? Perhaps, but I would require materials exceptionally well-suited to it. Parts from a beast naturally able to Spirit Walk, for instance, special resonant metals or stones, and so on. Ideally, an existing key of that type as a core. Whether fully intact or damaged by forcible extraction wouldn’t matter. Of course, you would not be asking me this question if you already had such a key, but the limitations of my state are nothing if not suffocating. That is all to say, I cannot fulfill your request right now, but I believe I can help you approach that goal. Before we get into that, however, would you have a more immediate request?”

Krahe stood in silence, thinking. She held eye contact with Yao for a good twenty seconds before she summoned a Wandrei Faust talisman into her hand.

“This talisman harnesses an eidolon. I don’t think I need to tell you what it does. Suggest improvements and provide the means to apply them. You are the Talisman Mistress, are you not?”

A thread of golden light extended from Yao, enveloping the paper and bringing it to her. She examined it with a mixture of curiosity and amusement until commenting, “How very crude, and yet, profound all the same. The brush strokes, in their roughness, embody a visceral nature which doubtlessly aids in the talisman’s combative ability, but it is abundantly clear that the roughness of the brush is a detriment to the delicate components. I presume these centipede-leg-like, or perhaps rib-like patterns around the edges cause the highest number of failures. Am I right? You shall need a clean writing brush for that, no wider than a single hair at the tip. The paper…”

Yao flipped it back and forth, waved it around, and even sniffed it. With a grimace, she admitted, “It’s fine. No more, no less. It has no serious flaws but no standout qualities, either. I can sell you some of my stock, so long as you swear not to resell or otherwise redistribute it. The ink, though, is good; I like it very much. There are layers of secrets in its formulation, I can tell. Just one charge of ink for each side, and yet all these colors. Very nice.”

She abruptly turned to Casus.

“Silberblut. Do you know of a place where one might be able to hunt soulbeasts?”

Before he even got halfway through his tentative nod, Yao already continued. “Fantastic! We will go there, and you will slay a beast. I will even be so magnanimous as to process it for you, but I must see what you can do for myself in order to be certain, and frankly, I need raw materials to work with.”

“For what?” Krahe questioned.

“A better brush, of course. We will find a beast with a nature suited to the kinds of talismans you intend to make and use its body parts and spirit remnants to produce a brush.”

“It will be a matter of weeks at the absolute minimum before an appropriate hunting ground can be scouted and perhaps months before we find the right kind of soulbeast. Even being optimistic, I would say up to a month if the only constraint is a destructive, wrathful, or malicious beast with fine fur,” Casus remarked.

Yao, smiling, answered, “I don’t see how that would be a problem. A truly sublime, custom brush gives twice the results with half the effort, but the minimum effort which it demands is far and above any generalist, mass-produced tool. Not to mention, the process of crafting such an item can be one of months. I, in my unparalleled skill, can do it much faster, of course. I’m sure you understand my intentions, Silberblut. If at all possible, it would be best to hunt both beasts in one hunt, given my limited knowledge of this land’s limitations on spirit beast hunting.”

Casus nodded in acknowledgment, and Yao continued without pause as she pulled open one of her drawers. She removed a brush with a handle of dark wood and bristles of fine, white hair. A wrist-flick sent both it and the Wandrei Faust talisman flying into Krahe’s hand.

“This one ought to be an improvement over what you’re using at the moment.”

Looking around, Yao’s eye landed on a wall-spanning shelf near the writing desk.

The brush was soon joined by an ancient bamboo-slip scroll, pulled out of a partition with at least twelve more identical scrolls. Not just in make and thickness, but the wear patterns, too.

“Ah, and take this as well.”

“What’s the catch?” Krahe asked suspiciously.

“The scroll is a collection of oft-missed fundamentals and tricks I put together for my disciples, back when I still had any. It is quite outdated now. The brush is one of my many spares; consider it an investment. Have it checked if you so wish; there are no curses or scrying tags. If you wish to pay me, suggest some good texts on this land’s counterparts to my art. Advanced or fundamental, it doesn’t matter. I will require a full understanding, including the foundations.”

Krahe stowed the brush and talisman, her eyes glazing over for a moment as she looked inward. Her inventory now contained a bookshelf’s worth of texts from those commonly found to the rare and esoteric, and she named off those which were not too rare but still useful.

“Secrets of the Atropal, The Reaper and its Legacy, Hammer of the North, De Re Theurgia, Thaumshot Modification and You, and… Retracing the Path: A Re-Evaluation of Paper as a Theurgic Medium. Zachariah of the Lost Sun Society should be able to provide copies of them all. The first two may seem like sensationalist slop at first reading, but they contain a wealth of fundamentals.”

With a look of pleasant surprise, Yao hesitantly asked, “I shall start with your suggestions, then. I have one last request before you leave. Feel free to reject me, as it is entirely selfish, but…”

Her eye swept over the two of them before landing back on Krahe. A palpable tension built over the few seconds during which she was silent.

“I am well aware of your ability to Spirit Walk, Lady Blackhand. May I see it?”

After a tense pause, Krahe acquiesced, seeing little reason to refuse. At that moment, when flesh gave way to a form of smoke and orange-glowing metal ribs, with only two burning eyes as the sole distinguishable facial feature, what had remained of Yao Fu’s doubts was dispelled. Certainly, she had seen incontrovertible evidence of Krahe being who Yao thought her to be, but witnessing the shape of her astral body in person was different to the detached, often fuzzy and disorienting visions granted by the Eye of Tar.

Yao watched them leave and spent some time afterwards re-enabling her lethal defenses. This was one of the reasons she was careful about bringing others directly to her home. In her state, it meant that she had to remove many of her defenses. Neither her many talismans nor her puppets could be disabled remotely; Yao knew better than that. Even failsafe triggers, such as the one she would embed into Crescent Jezail’s order, were, in effect, hard-wired. Once it was placed, there was no removing or disabling it after the fact. This caution was born from the method by which Yao had destroyed one of the most powerful talisman-specialist sects in Tiengenzhen. Having not just seen remote-control features breached and exploited, but having done it herself, Yao had permanently decided to avoid including such vulnerabilities in her own creations.

One of the downsides of that security was relative unwieldiness when restricted in the way she was at this very moment. It wouldn’t be a problem she had to deal with for too long, if things proceeded in the manner she hoped.