Godclads

Chapter 30-9 Unworthy Vessel

And so it is that love found its newest vassal, himself a mirrored shadow to this city, a perfect, unworthy vessel. Chosen by the Dreamer, blessed with debauched lust and virtuous love, within him burgeons power beyond gods below and mortals above.

Yet what path he takes, what shape will he bestow upon this city, driven mad with want and ruin from old? No path is clear, the future uncertain, for struck down is truth and the pasts and memories interwoven…

-The Stormsparrow’s Chorus

30-9

Unworthy Vessel

—[Chambers]—

COG-CAP - 134%

CRITICAL: WARDS OVERLOADED

UNABLE TO SUSTAIN TRAUMATIC YIELD

REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 74%

Chambers was love. Chambers was bliss. Chambers was lust.

Above all, he was the source of all pleasure, want, and romance. It was an honor to dissolve amidst such sublime desires, and should this become his end, so let it be. All his life, he sought bliss, a substance to fill the emptiness that constantly gnawed at him. Ever since his mother left, after all his father inflicted, there was something missing in him. Something that made him less of a person.

Now, he knew what that wholeness was. He knew that missing part was love. To care absolutely. To be the heart of this great loving between all. He knew what he sought all those years in his vicarities, experiencing Dannis’ suffering over and over. True love. True lust. All-satisfying. All-filling.

All him.

He was a providence of wonder returned to New Vutlun after years of exile, and he brought for this city blessings untold. And none would go without. Not him. Not any other being left in existence still capable of love. They would know pleasure and raw warmth of the heart like never before. And there would be no choice in the matter. His bonds multiplied and spread, every person an endpoint and propagator for his spread at the same time. His miracles grew with each arcing back, each screaming release, every sobbing sensation. Best of all, he wasn’t bound by space, and so his spread slipped across entire Sovereignties, bestowing people glory by metaphysical connections.

The bond that constituted his ontology usurped the very fabric of the material world. Buildings ceased to be. Space was an obsoleted notion. There was only him, the lovers, and the bonds that joined them—many and one at once. Though they shared different voices, they all felt the same relief when Lovebringer touched them. Everyone had been heart-dry for so long they could drink and drink and know only happiness if they were to burst. No parched fool feared a death by drowning; anything for one sup more.

The bioforms folded in on themselves, their senses overloading. The Whalemaws flopped limply in the air, screeching loud. The hammer of desire smashed through the people as well. None stood a chance. None could reject the gifts Chambers delivered. Not Citizens nor subjects, not ephemerals or lesser Godclads.

Chambers was a heart. He was a beating organ of magenta bright, and from him, through his bonds, his miracles pulsated, shivering and rushing into love filling the once-void at his core. They knew what it was to be love, and they knew what it was to be him, and this was all perfect.

“Perfect,” Lovebringer said, "All this time, this is what we've been waiting to find. All these years… for this moment, it was worth it… All of it was worth it."

The Lovebringer was weeping, sobbing. Their purpose had finally been met, and Chambers wept alongside them. All this time, he never knew. He never knew what he was missing, and it was then one of his bonds dissolved. A backlash detonated through his being. Soulfire bathed the world in incandescence.

REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 83%

The bond that just broke belonged to a connection between Chambers and a joyfiend known as Halcyon Reed. The man had been close to death, laying in an alleyway not four kilometers away, nested between two blocks. There, he'd done the last of his joy, and he was awaiting death to begin with—thought rapture had finally come with the destruction of Scale.

But before his final end, Chambers grasped him. Chambers bestowed upon him a pleasure beyond all chemical pleasures. A pleasure above, and it was too much. His biology, already driven to the point of overload by his addiction, collapsed. His nerves fried, and with a final, rasping breath, he passed over the threshold of ecstasy and then death.

A shape vanished from within Chambers Absentheartedness. And so it was that the object of Chambers' love vanished, lost. The correspondence lingered for a moment longer, but the string scattered apart instead of breaking. Love wasn’t broken here as much as it was withered, wilting like the petals of a dying flower.

With love came counter-emotion. One equally consuming, one equally devouring, and one most unwelcome. Grief. Such was the thing Chambers had fled from all his life. Such was the thing he was most familiar with.

"No," the Lovebringer cried out, "no!"

The Joyfiend wasn't the first and only to fade. Other bonds disintegrated as well. Individual strings too small to be noticed amongst the myriad lattice. But they were equally important, for love was absolute, and every bond lost was a love lost. A love absolute. A backlash in response. Chambers practically welcomed the metaphysical agony.

VENT! VENT! VENT!

REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 96%

“Stop love!” the Bioigniter crackled. The Heaven of Biology roiled inside Chambers, trying to rouse him from his stupor. But it was just a thing of fire and flesh. What did it know about the true nature of being human? “Stop!”

Each death represented a love lost, and each death reminded him why Chambers was so afraid. Afraid to care, afraid to give himself to anyone or anything, finding feeling in vicarious moments stolen from another.

He was afraid he would break if he lost it. That something inside him. That feeling of wholeness. He was afraid, and he was right. Losing just those few lovers was enough to sending him plummeting to the point of ultimate despair.

COG-CAP - 1ERRR>

“Chambers!” A cry breached through his drowned consciousness. Chambers barely noticed who was calling him. Was there someone calling him? There were so many, so many sensations, so many other people he was with right now. How was he to tell?

The voice came a second time, carried on a growling riff that shook the world. He knew that noise, it was…

Cas? Why was he talking to Chambers right now? What was happening? How was he not consumed by love? Chambers turned his attention the faither next to him in the real—no nearer or further based on the powers of Correspondence, and found them man consumed by lust as well.

Consumed, but not ruled.

Another bond circulated through Cas. One that cycled between him and himself. This was a bond of love. No hint of lust in it. It was pure. And it was somehow one of the strongest things Chambers ever known. Faith. True faith. True before Chambers even amplified it with his Domains. Genuine envy followed. Cas was a whole person. Whole even without the Heaven of Love.

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Chambers was the wrong man for the Heaven. The wrong man for anything.

But he couldn’t stop now. He couldn’t let go. Because he didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to return to just being himself.

—[Cas]—

Myfaithismyshieldmyfaithismyshieldmyfaithismyshield…

Cos was feeling a special kind of violated suffering what could only be described as a spontaneous, forced, and unending series of “releases” that ruined his favorite pair of pants, but that needed to be resolved later. Right now, they had a district to escape, and he had a half-strand to save. Mostly from himself. The bonds drifting out from Chambers were only growing brighter and brighter with every passing second, and the heaven of love, that so-called love-bringer, was flooding the district with absolute, all-consuming lust.

When the first waves of lust passed through Cos, he thought he was going to lose his mind. But alongside this absolute lust came another force—love. Love was also magnified to an impossible degree. A love that crossed all bonds, including the one that existed between Cos and the Good Lord. That was the only reason why he was still sane now. The only reason why his mind, his rational choice, could surmount the overwhelming ache that consumed all others around him.

But even so, he was dancing on the brink. The sheer amount of pleasure flooding through him was nearly enough to leave him mindless. He wanted it. He wanted it more than anything he ever wanted in his life. Almost anything. But to deprive himself of True Heaven’s embrace, to debase himself here of all places, to fall in Nu-Soddom, was something his ego couldn't accept.

But while he prevailed, Chambers succumbed, and succumbed hard. It seemed that the heart of love, the heaven that brought forth all these miracles, was no more resistant to the drug it peddled. Chambers was now an epicenter to a new contagion, a contagion of absolute release. And try as Cas might, he couldn't stop him. His Heaven was a roaring melody, strings slamming into folds of space as he created plane after plane around Chambers. But it did nothing to contain the bonds leaving the Lovebringer.

Whatever Correspondence was, Cas had no way of directly influencing it. But it sure as shit could twist his mind and body something bad. “Fuck,”Cas muttered to himself. He wasn’t an Agnos—maybe Avo or Kae might’ve had a plan, but he was more used to performing terrorist actions and sabotage than trying to pull someone back from False Apotheosis. And Chambers was experiencing as bad a case of Godclad delusion as anyone else Cas knew.

But he needed to set Chambers free. He couldn’t just leave him here and let one of the Guilds snatch him. Losing both a shard of the Stillborn and the Heaven of Love would basically leave them past the point of fucked. If they weren’t already there.

He just didn’t know how. “Avo?” Cas said out loud, "If you're there, some guidance would be helpful. God… I’m open to all the help I can get right now…"

The pulsing miracles rushing out from Chambers were only growing faster. Cas bit his lip. Maybe he could use a disruption—

“I wish I was you,” Chambers said. His voice sounded clear across existence, like it was just the two of them. “I wish I could just… have that. That belief. That wholeness. You should have taken this Heaven… should’ve been you.”

Okay. An opening. And an emotional topic. Fuck. Cas wasn’t great with those. Truth be told, he was plenty bad with his own feelings all the time—tried not to think about them. “Probably not,” Cas replied. “Avo chose you—”

“He was wrong!” Chambers cried out. “I can’t do… I don’t want to let go. It… it feels too good. I don’t want to stop being like this. And it’s going to overload me, kill me, snuff everyone connected to me. But I can’t stop…”

Another burst of Soulfire spread through Chambers, and Cas could practically taste the entropy. Shit. They were running on the edge of again. Time to figure something out, Canduir. “No. No. It can’t be me. Because if I was there with you, with all those bonds connected to me, I might just fall too. That’s probably why things are the way they are: so I can look in from the outside. Chambers… you trust me, consang?”

“Yeah. I mean, you’re a cultist, and you talk about weird shit—”

“Chambers—”

“Yeah, okay, I do. Do you want me to pray or something?”

“I want you to just stop. Let go of your Heaven.”

“No!” The Lovebringer roared. “Keep going, Aedon. We need to let these people be happy.”

"I can't," Chambers groaned, speaking to Cas. A loud sob shook the world, and the veins that spread out from the Lovebringer pulsed at a rate far faster than before. It was like an accelerating heart reaching the point of bursting. “I don’t know how to not want this. I don’t know… I could never beat it… The lust… the want… I can’t beat it…”

“You don’t need to win,” Cas said, struggling to find the words. “You just need to give yourself a moment. Think… think of how good it will feel if you just… cut the sensation, felt the lack, and then went back in. Think of the spike. From nothing to something. Imagine how good that will feel.”

“Yeah… yeah!”

“So do that,” Cas said. Truth be told, he was going to null and snatch Chambers the moment he demanifested his Heaven. It was the safest way to see this done. “You deserve it. Let yourself feel truly good.”

A long pause followed, and then, to his surprise, an answer came.

"Okay," Chambers whispered. "I… I know that… I need to be… be hard…hard enough to be my own man…”

What the fuck was he talking about now?

Chambers continued. “This is true love. True lust. But it isn’t real love. Real lust. It wasn’t here before I decided to make it so… I’m fake… just like this Heaven… Just like…” A long, strained pause followed thereafter and for a crushing moment, Cas wondered if Chambers was going to rupture. But then the Lovebringer winked out of existence with a despair sigh, and Chambers fell. Fell as bond after bond dissolved around him. Feel, his halo broken, his mind unraveling into phantasmal emissions of leaking memory.

A wall of sound swallowed Chambers, and at once Cas was moving.

Alright. New Vultun wasn’t going to experience death by unending orgasm. Part two of the plan: Fucking leaving.

“Jesus Christ,” Cas muttered under his breath as he dove into the ambient noises across the city. “What the fuck is my life.”

***

—[Dowager Ning Golden Song]—

+D-dowager? A-are you okay? A-are—+ A whimper came across the Ghost-Link. The Second Daughter sounded like how Golden Song felt.

Unable to form words, the Dowager simply released a high pitch squeak. Her bio-rig had all but repainted the interior of her aerovec. The leather of her couches glinted beneath the lights, ruined. What the fuck was that? That was…

Incredible.

The best thing she ever felt in her life.

And how could she get a taste again? It’s been so long since… The absence ached like a hollow wound inside her. For a few heartbeats she knew love, knew lust, knew herself on a level she could have never fathomed before. And then it was gone. Quieted and lost to her.

Slowly, Golden Song began to sob, mourning the passing of the instant, the passing of love absolute.

***

—[Marlowe]—

Marlowe found herself folded over the board top when she returned her sentence. Tilting her head at an angle, she saw a room with people strewn all over the place, their bone bodies arcing, their voices groaning, the floor slick, and not with the good kind of fluid.

"Ah, shit," she muttered. Damn, she wanted a cigarette right now. Maybe some numb too. She hadn’t felt this way in a long time, and her pants weighed a full pound heavier and made sticky noises when she moved. Well, this was all kinds of embarrassing, but honestly, six out of ten—she been in more deviant situations.

“My balls,” a man groaned staring at the ceiling. “I think I’m bleeding from inside my balls.”

A Scaarthian knelt next to him, her eyes wide and shell-shocked. “These pants are fucked. These shoes are fucked. Gods, I’m fucked.”

“Marlowe!”

The Guilder screamed and tumbled off the bar top. Strong, metallic fingers caught her before she could hit the ground and planted her on her feet. She found herself staring into the face of Cas who looked somewhere north of haggard and had Chambers slung over his back.

This felt all kinds of messed up, and strangely, she really missed it. The feeling, the high, the throbbing vibration entered the sound system. The speakers skipped a beat, and suddenly, Carlos was right next to her, carrying with him limp and blank-faced Chambers.

For a beat, she just stared at him, and then her accusation came. "All right, what the fuck did you two do?"

“What we came to do,” Cas muttered. She looked down and saw a massive splotch— “Marlowe. Please, for the love of fuck, don’t look at it.”

“Sorry,” she said. “If it helps, I’m also—”

A groan from Chambers interrupted her words. Tilting her head behind Cas, she studied the former Enforcer’s face and winced. His eyes were bloodshot and wide, his tongue was hanging out, and his accretion was fucking shattered. Chambers was beyond nulled.

“And what happened to him?”

“Nutted so hard he turned himself into a vegetable,” Cas murmured. He flicked his transplanted arm and the strings upon it twanged. Folds of space collapsed around Marlowe as a new song began. “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here. I want to have my psychological break somewhere safe.”

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