Luther started screaming.
“Hold on. We’re already fucking dead? What is this? Peter, tell me. What. The fuck. Is this?!”
Anya had been lost in thought for so long, and yet no time had passed.
“I told you, Luther, we’re already dead.”
“We’re already fucking dead you say?! Tell me something I don’t know! I’ve died several times by now, so how about you tell me why my fucking corpse is over there with its belly slit open?! What the fuck is going on Peter! I would quite like to know! I don’t care if you have to brief me on PHD-level archontic fuckery, tell me what’s happening! We have all day, all night, all day tomorrow. I’ll clear my calendar…
“Oh, it’s already empty because I’m fucking dead and we’re trapped in fucking time loop!”
“So please, shut up with the platitudes about “We’ll find out later.” This is later. Start talking.”
Peter let out a long sigh and rubbed his face with his left hand.
“If you insist.”
“Finally.” Anya and Yuna muttered simultaneously. He’d stalled for a very, very long time.
“It’s called the immortality project, and it’s deeply linked to the nature of the air.”
“Tell me, do you know what ideology is?”
“Yes Peter, we’re not children.” Yuna said.
“Explain anyway.” Lululu countered.
“It’s like the collections of beliefs and ideas of the ruling class, in this case the emperor and the Most High.”
““Magic” as it’s commonly known is a property of the air inside a country. It’s fundamentally a product of the beliefs and ideas of the place it’s located in. There’s a give and take between the rulers and subjects of a given region and usually the “ruling” or “dominant” ideology is a majority subset of the beliefs and ideas, but it doesn’t have to be. When you channel the arcane you’re accessing the power of beliefs and ideas to change the natural world by whatever intrinsic property of humanity allows us to tap into those beliefs and ideas supernaturally. Perhaps it’s a natural extension of our will to change the world. Whatever the mechanism, when you use magic you’re both pulling from the existing ideology in the air and presenting yourself to it. You are both controlling and being controlled by it.”
“For most, they will be dominated. They stand no chance. It’s like trying to breathe water while standing in air. It can’t be done.”
“Our ideology once dominated the world, taking a plurality of control over the world’s arcane potential. We channeled it to great heights of archontic power, but the other powers feared us consolidating it further and rebelled. They eventually beat us back from their borders, fearing and shunning our power so intently we began to lose our ruling status, becoming just another power vying for control of the world. There would have been no great power, only a soup of chaos, and our emperor might well die.”
“One thing about controlling the world’s archontic power is that it fundamentally makes you immortal. In truth, our emperor is the first emperor and has always been the emperor. But with our power on the decline he might well have faced death. He implanted his organs in them as a countermeasure, but the effort backfired. Just as he took control of the other powers, the other powers took control of him— the very power that granted him eternal life and sublime power was inverted to become the puppet-strings that would soon strangle him to death.”
“The emperor didn’t want to die, so he entrusted me with this project after I delivered him the greatest weapon of our time, even if it turns out there was someone else pulling these strings, too, all along.”
“You might be asking how the emperor might live for so long when the farmers whose organs started this died suddenly and youngly. That is, in fact, your answer. They are granted power by the emperor but their bodies and organs can’t take it and the emperor claims their excess life. Most who see the face of the emperor find an early grave. Archons are the exception, but archons are incorruptible—”
“Uncontrollable. The emperor can control his power remotely to a certain extent, but only slightly. It’s never been a sure thing, almost like the air had a mind of its own. And it did.”
“Oh it most certainly did.” Peter began laughing.
“We took the organs of the emperor’s power that form in all who wield and submit to it and implanted them in the body of one of his officers.”
“But the organs didn’t take.”
“I don’t know anything else because in the moments before the operation it was made known that I, too, would be included in the body. I do know this, however: it was the emperor’s will that spawned this project, and it was his will that this new body might grant him both eternal life and ultimate power. It was his will that this new body would become a new avatar both for himself and for his power— that his own body would dissolve and enter the body of this officer, reborn as a new man and a new flesh that might rule over all creation.”
“...”
“God damn you Peter.” Anya said.
“No, Anya, God has already damned us all.”
“The emperor is dead and we have killed him. His power was stripped of its former skins and trapped in one set of organs he willed an incarnation of it all. Everywhere but here has been deprived of his power, replaced with the disparate beliefs and ideas beneath it. Whoever this new man is? They are the one who powers this base, and they are the one who have stolen the organs of a star.”
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“It turns out that the sun is a reflection of humanity and a reflection of our power just as we are enthralled to the sun. And because the sun has no ruling beliefs or ideas, ours become the sun’s. So by stealing away the organs of the star we have awakened the body that once housed them.”
He hadn’t explained the time-loop, but what Peter was saying sounded completely deranged and incomprehensible already, even as he put the whole series of events into words. Was he… on crack?
“Peter,” Luther began, “I’m going to need you to tell me bluntly. What happens now?” His tone was even, but it was clear Luther’s sanity was breaking apart. He had gotten this far only after being yelled at by Melissa. There was a chance he could go no farther.
“Your body is dead but your organs have been separated from it and given new life. You are the organs that have grown new skin.”
“I said bluntly, Peter. Tell me bluntly.”
“If we all die then the world will return to a kind of normal. If we emerge from this intact, the new world will persist.”
“What happens to our families, Peter; what happens to us?”
“If the loop ends after your family is turned to ash, they will remain ash. If the loop ends before that, it’s hard to say. It depends on if the necrites and tridecadactles—”
“Children and handlings,” Anya interrupted, correcting him. “tridecadactle” was a terrible name.
“On if the children and handlings and necrites survive past the end of the loop.”
“As for what happens to us… Well, we are already dead. It depends on if our new bodies are allowed to harden their skin.”
“In standard, Peter.”
“We may survive, we may die, same as it ever was.”
Luther seemed to accept the explanation. Nothing had fundamentally changed. To be a soldier was to confront death. To be a soldier was to be already dead, living for so long as your superior officer’s pleasure allowed it. There was no great distinct moment of transition from seeing your own corpse, not when the flesh you could feel still beat with life. There was no meaning in seeing your body. There was no meaning left in the body at all.
“What now?” Yuna asked.
“We must determine who the organ-golem is.” Peter answered.
“Hold on,” Lululu said, “if we’re all implanted with the emperor’s organs then why is Anya the only one that’s turned white?”
“When Melissa died on the first loop some of her organs were also white,” Anya said. “Maybe there’s some catalyst to it. I have been abusing the enhancement pills.”
“Those are placebos.” Peter said.
“What?”
“Those pills are made of sugar.”
“I heard you. What?”
“They don’t do anything.”
“But… But they did.”
“No Anya, they did not.”
Anya said nothing; there was nothing to be said.
“What now?” Yuna asked.
“There’s nothing left to be done here.” Chris answered, an inch from the ear. “If we stick around, the black sun will come out and continue to poison our world.”
“We could try to fight the angels again? Use Pleroma?” Yuna said.
“There’s no point fighting the manifestations of the loop and the sun.” Lulu answered. “If we can’t complete the loop it’s better to end it early.”
“Fine.”
“Who’s going first?”
“I will.” Luther said. Yuna hefted a rifle. “Someone else take me next.”
*BANG*
Anya watched the bullet hole form in Luther’s temple.
*click*
His body thudded wetly to the floor, bleeding into the barrier that had kept out the pool of it under Anya’s feet.
*BANG*
Peter shot Yuna. Her blood added to Luther’s, deeping the puddle on the floor, her body splashing against what was already there.
*click*
He pointed the gun at Lulu, but she put her own fingers under her neck and fired a ray of fire through her own head before he got the chance to fire.
*BANG*
He shot Chris instead. Chris’ spartan helmet rang out with the impact, but he, too, fell into the pile, bleeding. Lululu’s hole did not bleed, it was cauterized.
*click*
Peter put the gun under his own chin.
“Use the sword if you want, Anya. I’ll see you in the next loop.”
“Wait!” she wanted to say, but no words came out.
*BANG*
The gun and Peter’s body splashed against the floor. The blood inside the barrier was now only mildly less deep than the blood outside it. The barrier soon began to flicker and dissolve.
*click*
They killed themselves that quickly? Just like that? There were still so many questions.
Anya stepped inside the dimming barrier to grab the sword. As her hand approached its hilt, the sword stopped shining and as her fingers grasped it the barrier fully disappeared. Blood mixed with blood, and all distinction of whose was where disappeared. All distinction of what blood was human was gone. The sword became a normal-looking white saber in her hand, light as a feather. It was as white as her skin, but the sword no longer glowed. It seemed an extension of her arm, like it was a part of her. She put it to her throat.
What meaning was there in death when the whole world reset when you die?
None.
She slit it and the world slipped into darkness.
Anya knew what needed to happen next.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, and a giant throbbing eight-inch tentacle around the neck. The eyes were bloodshot and beginning to bulge out from the pressure. David’s white hands clawed at his noose, but there were still other tentacles at his feet, keeping his full weight from the upper one.
Beneath Anya’s feet the ground was no longer grass. It had turned to meat. David’s blood ran down the tentacles and disappeared into the abomination beside him. The abomination bled constantly into the ground, as well, which absorbed all the blood like a sponge. It was a flesh sponge (that is to say flesh).
This time, the creature was a bit different. It was no longer humanoid, simply a mass of writhing tentacles with human fingers. The fingers had skin, the rest of the tentacles did not. There was no face, but every six or thirteen inches there was a collection of eyes and a set of lipless teeth about half that often. Surrounding each set of teeth was a ring of tongues.
Fingers and tentacles grasped David’s legs. Tentacles and tongues molested his neck, and one licked his eye. Anya held down her revulsion and screamed.
“Get off of him!”
But the abomination had no ears. She ran, but the abomination was holding David by the neck. What does a mortal do against the power of a monstrosity?
Anya took the sugar-pills but they did nothing. She ran at the beast but it cut off her head. She was conscious as it fell, and it hurt when bouncing off the meaty ground. Compared to dirt, the landing was soft and its primary pain came from the sharp shock that her head was detached at the neck, pills having failed for lack of belief in them. It had become clear that her power did not originate from the pills.
