You see him. Eirikr. The rust-blooded lamia, shamefully walking on two legs, down at the very bottom of the social order. He is so small compared to Fenrir. He is so small and bitter and angry.
He turns. He is looking at you. He knows what you are. Who you work for. What you’ve done.
He smiles the sardonic smile of someone who doesn’t get the point of the facial expression anymore, and he flips you off.
He’s not supposed to acknowledge you. That’s not how sGundia works. The audience back home is entertained by the eight gods guaranteeing the empire’s eternal future, and the eight gods pretend that they’re not being watched, and that one of their number isn’t trapped by cybernetics he didn’t ask for.
“No more,” he says, and points to the invisible point in the sky that serves as your point of view. “No. More.”
And one by one, the Lands fade to static.
You see her. Zawhei. Jade, blessed by the All Father, caretaker of future generations of sGundia. It’s exciting to watch her raise the children that will be passed out of the medium and back to the planet, or even sent elsewhere through the vast networks the All Father has spent spiraling through the multiverse, and her owobear lusus is cute, one of the cutest lusi you’ve ever seen.
Something first goes wrong when the all-seeing eye of your observation dips underground, showing Something you’re certain you should not be able to see.
[You know the All-Mother; you are not meant to see the Titan in its entirety, it is not so small that it can be observed.]
It gets worse in ways you still can’t articulate, but at least you can still watch.
You’re grateful for that, once the Guide’s Realm goes dark.
You’re less grateful, once the signal for this Realm follows suit.
The last thing you see is the All Father, all wrong.
Okarin Seelee does not notice when the world ends.
He did not notice the first time, either, or the thousandth. He has bigger problems to deal with, and time to kill. The slow, steady circles of the All Father do not matter compared to how many times he has found himself going in circles, keeping the forces of Sleipnir from invading the Land of Smoke and Chariots. The others don’t understand why he bothers, why he doesn’t just kill his Titan and be done with it, like you’re supposed to in a Quest.
They don’t understand that Sleipnir cannot be killed, that he is here to destroy, here is here to end. He is here to make sure that this wall is never built, that this task is never completed, that this branch of the world tree rots away like so much dead wood.
Okarin Seelee may not remember the loops, or even care if he does not, but Sleipnir does. The many-legged steed of Odin is many things, but first and foremost he is a Denizen of Time, of the intricate mechanics undergirding the universe itself, and so he can see the gum—or snake—in the works, chewing at the soft flesh of the world.
So he invades, and invades, and invades, until there is no more Time.
Okarin Seelee does not notice when the world ends. He can take all the Time he could ever need.
She’s the first to notice that they’ve gone dark. Of course she is, she’s the Skald of Light, the destroyer of relevance. Her schtick is almost like Void, if you look at it sideways, if you look at it misdirected and upside-down.
It’s not her fault. She was just trying to tell stories to her pigeons, figure out how to get to the center of the world, see every possible future. It wasn’t hubris. It was Icarus, too full of the joy of freedom to know better, a tragedy that was nobody’s fault.
Technically, voiding the worlds doesn’t do everything except cut the Medium off from Segundia. Technically, voiding the worlds shouldn’t affect them too badly. Technically, it should affect them all equally.
The problem is when you take all eyes off a Light player you say you are irrelevant, and even a Bard of Light can’t bear irrelevance.
“This can’t be it,” she says, to her pigeons. “There has to be something more than this.”
There’s an infinite number of plays her pigeons can, and have, put on, even in the secretness of the void. They know, as much as birds can know, what’s happened. What’s been happening. What the All Mother means.
It’s time to end this. This Light is gone.
It’s time for new stories.
(And damn the consequences)
She notices the Void Out because her head clears, just a little bit.
She’s floating with her back against the great sea serpant, letting its breaths move her body. She shouldn’t be able to swim, she thinks. It’s not how things always were.
From what she’s pieced together over the course of her journey here, this was not her original body. Not even close. She was... Jade? Maybe? And she knew things, important things. She was Important, and failed.
She was a failure. Didn’t know who she was. Didn’t know her friends. Lost in dreams of Alternian past, forbidden knowledge of empresses, sea puns, the ocean.
She’s supposed to be on the All-Mother’s side. She figured that out early, it’s part of the game of four players with legs and four without. But the thought never quite stuck, not with the haze in her world and her mind. Not with the game she had to play to even reach this point.
“You’ll be going then,” the serpent says, surprising her with its speech. “They’ll be needing your memory.”
“What memory?” she asks. “It’s all been taken from me.” Is she even a girl? Was she ever a girl? Or is that the Heiress speaking, a lie passed down from when there were Empresses?
“You’ll have room for them again,” the serpent says. Is it speaking, or has she started talking to herself? She can’t tell anymore. There is so much room inside of her for information; an empty vessel waiting to be filled. “They’ll need your memory. Only one other person remembers the currents the waters once traveled.”
Peewee, she thinks. They remember.
She’s not sure why being Voided lifts the haze in her memory, but it helps. It’s the last step, the last link to be broken.
No more fish puns.
That’s not what they were, when things were as it should be.
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I’m sorry, your session “owowhatsthis” does not appear to exist! Please select which of the following options applies:
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, please elaborate in the box below:
<> All of the example tokens are strings of numbers, but according to what I’ve been able to interpret in the sim, this session has the id token “owowhatsthis” which appears to mimic the speech patterns of one of our lusi. We have a God Tier Guide of Void, who seems to be doing something that has interfered with our home planet’s ability to observe our session. And I checked the last box not because I consider it accurate but because my planet is called Segundia, and I thought this was a little bit funny.
Is there anything you can do to help? Things seems to be falling apart, and half my land appears to consist of black and purple placeholder textures and the rest are circuitous roundabouts that lead nowhere. Some of the other lands are having better luck but everything here seems to be going wrong.
I also haven’t seen Othala in weeks.
You’re supposed to be customer service, what do you mean my session doesn’t exist.
There’s something about being unobserved that makes the Frog Temple easier to find. It’s as though the All Mother had been using the eyes of their audience to increase her own eyes, her own observation, increasing the interference all the way.
Hagala should, she knows, be one of the All Mother’s worshippers. It’s only by sheer luck that Nidhogg decided to make this iteration’s space player a Purple blood, thereby giving the power to forge new worlds to the one player guaranteed to be a heretic. She still doesn’t understand why it did that. Maybe it did not realize.
(Purple blooded lamia are a strange existence on Segundia. By rights, they should be destroyed, but the Eagle has just enough protective ability to keep a handful alive, and Hagala, regardless of her status, is “special.”)
The forge lights. It should not light. It should not be. Regardless, it is. The game has, technically, been won.
According to what Hagala understands, this whole mess began, if events that never happened can be said to begin, with splitting the original game like a rib cage laid splayed on a table for examination. She probably shouldn’t be making things worse.
There’s no chance a frog will make it alone, is the problem. There’s no chance they win.
But there are other animals. Other creatures.
A dinosaur egg.
A chicken egg.
Frog spawn.
And finally...
Wait.
What’s this?
(Hagala has eight arms instead of legs.)
(It seems two of them were loyal to Nidhogg instead.)