Chapter 279 - Family (Patreon)

I'm tireeeeed. Man am I stressed and also doing nothing about it sometimes! Graaaaah!

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Long in the dark. Long in the quiet. As it should be. As all good things crave to be- dark and quiet. And moist. Moisture is important.

She checks the spawning pools, checking that the air is just right. She has to grab the edge of the pit and lean her whole body over, forming handholds from the earth with the same ease as walking as she turns upside-down to check. There are more than a dozen bundles of grey matter clumped along the inside walls of the bowl of the pool, each of them glistening with humidity contained by the small opening. 

She lightly pats one of them, feeling it tremble ever so slightly at the touch. The life within it is warm, near-ripe, but not ready quite yet.

Shapefixit crawls back out of the hole, looking around the chamber at the fifteen other holes in the side-chamber. This is the third such bowl-crater she’s checked in the last few hours.

She has three-hundred more such spaces to check before tomorrow.

It’s not easy, being a denmother. Even with the aid of her God, the pulse of its attention on the walls she touches and the weight of its power in the air where its mind wanders, it’s still a lot of work. And yet… what a work it is. What a task. What glorious labor. 

She cannot fault her God for its eagerness. After centuries trapped, wrapped tight by hair and dark magic, its freedom has had marked effects on it, and it hasn’t stopped working since it gained the power to do so once more. The spaces rearrange themselves constantly, often digging even deeper into the earth and further obscuring itself even as it grows broader in scale, and she has begun to hear the skittering of life in the massive caverns, though only ever in the distance, and only ever on small, sharp legs.

Shapefixit does worry for her God. It’s unnatural for it to dig this far below ground without an exit-point, or at least not without a much more extensive safety net. Without the flows of Qi from the outside world, muffled by the solidity of earth and the lack of movement in stone, a God cannot live for long, cannot attain its true strength. While it is said that the oldest and greatest of the Gods can drink from leylines and magical pathways of the movement of the world itself… all those Gods are spoken of as mighty, extensive, full of life and majesty.

Her God is quiet, and hurt, and recovering.

But, she must admit, it does hold power.

Whatever else the Witch did, she most certainly kept the guts of the God well fed. There are some points of connection to the surface that remain, primarily those tying to the underground sea and to the deepest of the mining tunnels of the city above. Those connections bring in what little energy is needed to sustain the vastly reduced amount of space her God has demanded, and the small number of defenders it has formed. 

Her God is hiding. But her God is good.

She moves to another crater-bowl in the cavern, methodically checking each of the carved-out pools and the growths within to ensure their health. There may not be much energy entering the system, but what little there is is being circulated constantly, preserved and looped into generator-patterns whenever possible. What little is left over, besides what is needed to burrow deeper and into safer dens, is being used to repopulate.

It has been a long, long time since Shapefixit knew her home. She can still remember it, proud amongst the Overgrowth, the towering mushroom-caps of her skyline and the winding blooms of purple, red, gold and brown making mosaics of the earth. The way her people would dash and climb and chew and shape their way through the world, building fresh cluster-hives and ensuring that they were beautiful, filling them with farm-clumps and allowing in other beasts made by their God so that all could grow and feed into and upon each other. 

It was a growing place. A place of beatific strength, glowing with the glory of bioluminescence. She could not go anywhere without being aware of where she crawled, lest she stumble over an elder fused with a stalk or a space dug through the world and made into a home.

This place is nothing like her home. It’s dark, and cold, without the warmth of evergrowth, and it neglects the sky for the deep- but it is good. Because it has her people in it.

It will be weird, being the eldest, but she supposes that she has more to teach than most. Lessons about how to survive the attention of monsters, how to endure pain, how to take chances when they are offered, lest you be lost forever. 

Still, there are… so many. It’s a lot to work on. So many rooms, so many lives yet to be born. Her God does much of the work, and is more than capable of helping to guide her to whatever room has an issue it cannot fix, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not exhausting, being denmother to so, so many, and being all alone. It’s good to have something to do to wile away the hours- she’s never been one for the meditations of power, and without the young ones to watch over, there’s not much she can do to directly help her God. It was hurt, and her presence is healing, but like any God, it prefers its audience chamber isolated, and she is no great sage or ancient expert. If there is a way to erase the memory of what came before, to remove the scars carried by the God’s Heart, she has not yet found them.

So she tends to the little ones, and she thinks.

They can’t stay down here.

It might be for months, it may even be for a year or two, but eventually, they’ll run out of supplies down here. Her God has the ability to sustain itself, and that will increase as more life fills its halls and manipulates Qi further, but there’s an upper limit to that with so little energy flowing in, and its formations being so discreet so as to better keep them hidden. And it’s no life for a community, trapped and isolated from any sort of world, even if it’s the world that makes monsters like the one above.

She thinks about the monsters too, sometimes. 

All Gods can create “monsters”. Beasts, defenders, and what the Empire called “constructs”, life that cannot think for itself but which can feel their God intimately. These, to her, are not monsters. There is no inherent cruelty to their design- the few Mad Gods that were whispered of by old sages in her childhood were culled, long before the time of the Wall and the end of the world. Her God has made no such creatures yet, beside, perhaps, the small skittering things she sometimes hears- its priority is to hide, not to fight.

But they’ll have to.

It’s that… or die in the dark. 

Without a God, her people aren’t capable of growing as quickly as most humans she has met. Supposedly, that was a large part of the reason why she was taken by the Researcher to be examined. With the aid of a God, they can grow more profoundly, mutating, changing, evolving, and becoming imbued with power directly, rather than “cultivating”. She can do it (she’s had to learn how, after all), but it’s… difficult. Her channels and core aren’t shaped like they’re “supposed” to be shaped. Personally, she feels they’re shaped really well for the things she actually wants them for, but since that isn’t being strong or fast… well.

But if she’s going to convince her God of that, it’s going to take time. And effort. And the hope that it decides to listen.

She checks another bowl and finds the life within just about ready to emerge, twitching not at touch, but at her presence. She makes sure to dig a bit further at the bottom of the pool, leaving space for more water to accumulate, and her God accommodates, a fresh stream of droplets filling in the difference.

It is good to be needed. It is good to have people she can help.

But she worries.

And then- a pulse. 

She feels her world shudder. Not a quick warning, this time. Deeper fear, deeper reaction. Something more primal.

She moves fast. For all that speed is not her forte, it is easy in this place, as every time she touches the ground or grabs a corner, it moves with her, pulling her along. She moves in synchronicity with the earth, and it launches her forward fast enough that should she move with sight, the world would be blurring.

She arrives at the audience chamber in minutes, the thrill of alarm running through her world the whole time. 

The room is sparse, a small window into the Heart the only real feature it has save an indent she’s made on the floor. It’s been strange, coming here and soothing her God, communicating with it, but it’s also been nice, in its own way. She expects to enter a place of chaos, the ground rippling as the Godflesh moves in tune to panic.

Instead, it glows.

She stops at the entrance, her breath catching. She’s gotten used to the darkness, the comfort of cool moisture and protective shade, but this… the room glows with bioluminescence, radiant with joy. It reflects and glows off of mirrored surfaces, playing in sequences of aurora and ripples of veins that crawl and bloom and fade, only to be reborn again in moments after.

Joy. Joy, says her God, and it speaks with its entire voice, that she might feel it in her feet and taste it in the air and see it with her eyes.

She places a hand on the wall separating her from the Heart, feeling its pulse through the Godflesh and stone, and taps her claws against it, asking questions, worried and happy and scared and wondering what could possibly cause a reaction this severe, this complete. Moments before, her God wanted to hide, to be as shadow, and now it screams out in celebration with a voice of color and change.

It sends a pulse through the stone at her touch, and for a moment, the chamber looks just like one of the dens, forming a dozen pools and sending a pulse of brilliance through them.

One word. One all-consuming word, framed in such a way that she could mistake it for nothing else.

Family.

The family of God is coming. It is close enough to be felt, for the first time in what might be centuries, might be millenia. 

Shapefixit holds her hands close to the wall, as close to the Heart of her God as it allows- and finds herself surprised as the wall opens.

Beyond it, the Heart has changed.

Before, it stood as an alien organ, its many valves and pumps carved open and exposed- in return for this trauma, it has isolated itself. A shell of armor and coral has bloomed around it, forming armor that stiffens its movement but allows for some measure of protection against what bound it before.

That is not what surprises her. What surprises her is the thing behind the Heart.

It stands almost fifteen feet tall. Veins connect it to the walls like pipes and hoses of fluid, pumping thick slurry into its form. All six of its arms are bulging, heavily armored and covered in scales and keratin, and its face is like that of a martyr, a skull exposed to the air and crowned in gold and antler-velvet.

It has no eyes- but it turns to look at her, and she feels the Mana in her body whisper and shudder at the pulse of awareness it broadcasts.

It is powerful. And in its hands, dripping like tears from open palms, liquid shadow falls unto the ground and roils like rolling eyes.

So this is where her God's attention has been.

And through it all, the Heart beats in a new rhythm, loud and strident and only barely kept hidden to the room they’re in.

Family Is Coming, says her God.

We Rise To Meet Them Soon.