Slumrat Rising

Truth crawled out of the sewers. It wasn’t easy. The manhole he had come down through had partially collapsed in on itself. It was, in his inexpert opinion, a minor miracle that the sewer itself hadn’t caved in. Theoretically, he could use Earth Folding Step to bypass the blockage. In practice, he was in no mood to try. The concrete and dirt moved easily enough in his hands. The weight wasn’t a problem. It was just dirty and tiresome. He was used to that.

He clawed his way out of the earth, and thought he had dug in the wrong direction. For a moment, he thought he had dug into Hell.

Rubble. Desolation. His mind scrabbled to find the words to describe the feeling of what he was seeing. Buildings destroyed. But it was different when they were the buildings you grew up in, walked past, dreamed of living in. The convenience stores you despised or shoplifted from, ruined. Gutted and unmade. The clothes stores that would have chased out a little rat like him now displaying rags even a beggar wouldn’t wear.

He staggered down the street, trying to reconcile what he was seeing with what he remembered. That was a cafe, a chain cafe. They did okay muffins and coffee. Never again. There wasn’t enough there to make a counter, let alone a sandwich. That was an office building, there was a chain dentist on the third floor. He could still see the sign for it on the one wall of the building that still stood. Had there been apartments over the offices in this tower? Mixed use was popular around here.

All gone now. All gone. The apocalypse was here, and no God or angels were needed. Humans were enough. Humans were entirely enough. Remnants of the bone machine still existed. Cartouches of some obscene inversion of spells glistened in the twilight. The same principles that lead the tumor-growth of the machine gave rise to the symbols. There certainly hadn’t been time to carve them by hand.

It was a remarkable achievement. The thought grabbed him, making him lightheaded. He couldn’t process what he was seeing. Couldn’t reconcile the evidence of his eyes and the truth of his heart. In that moment of agonizing unreality, as rationality sank like water into sand, the thought remained on the surface. It really was an incredible achievement.

They must have spent decades on this. Centuries. Entirely new fields of theoretical spellcraft and high energy thaumaturgy would have been carefully researched by tiny cabals with virtually no funding. He couldn’t even imagine what it would have taken to conduct experiments and field tests. Well, yes he could, he saw it in Xandre. But still. A lot of people worked extremely hard, for centuries. Absolute geniuses contributed their greatest achievements to the project.

If there were wounded, they had been harmed by the bombardment. There were no survivors of that necrotic bubble. One of the greatest technological achievements in the history of the planet, and its creators carefully left no living witnesses. He was too stunned, too shattered to hate them. He staggered forward down the street, not sure what he was trying to find, or trying to see.

Truth felt an insistent sucking on his skin. It was a vacuum. There was a void of cosmic energy here. One that was persisting, somehow. His spells and blessings could persist here, for quite some time. Not forever, though. Not without taking drastic steps to refill his energy. This wasn’t a preview of what was to come. It was worse. Even if the Nephilim did capture the planet, they wouldn’t build here. This was a dead land. How much of the city was lost? He didn’t know.

He couldn’t even conceive of the land recovering. The city rebuilding. There was tumbled rubble and streamers of cloth with confetti paper everywhere, and somehow this was the better outcome. This stopped the other decorations from spreading- the garlands of organs and soft, suffering meat shuddering in the light and cold air.

Another intrusive thought- why not pigs? Why did it have to be people? Why not go to an industrial hog farm and cast the spell there? Was it atrocity for atrocity’s sake? He had never heard of the anti-theists making political demands. They didn’t have a propaganda programme that he knew about. Hell, he had never heard of them until Merkovah explained what he saw. The only time he had come across them before Xandre…

The only time he had come across them before Xandre was at the border crossing during his National Service. The fight that got him military merits, a secret medal, and a promotion. The fight that got him on that PMC rocketship at Starbrite, because that NCO rating stacked with everything else to guarantee speedy promotion.

How long had he been fate’s fool? How long had he been led around by the nose by these mighty beings? He could believe that he was a special rat, not like the other rats, but there had to be a limit, right? Right?! What about whatshisname, the researcher, the biotech guy who was in the booth with him at that fight, and again when he was smuggling Sally through the Free State. When he got murdered and died for five damn years. Ludovic? Something like that. What about him? Did he have a destiny? Was he fated to be at these important places and somehow keep missing getting shot?

Had Ludovic been in the volcano when it blew up? If he had been, Truth would bet an unlimited sum that he had made it out alive thanks to other people.

Truth kept stumbling down the road, headed nowhere, unwilling to accept what he was seeing. Past the bus stops. Past the train stations, and he didn’t for a second believe that all the machinery was destroyed down there. Some of those tunnels ran thirty meters deep or more. Nothing short of specially armed and equipped demolition crews were going to clear those out. Didn’t some of these buildings have basements that connected to the subway? He remembered stations that had little restaurants in them, or doors that let you go directly into department stores.

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It wasn’t just the horrible thing that was done here, it was knowing that it would never heal. That he could never make it better. For some reason, that was just unacceptable. It shouldn’t be that way.

He checked Perks, clumsy hands pawing at his shirt. Banged up again. Cup and Knife healed him up, though it cost far more energy than it should have. He really had to stop bringing this poor snake into these horrible situations. Not that he expected anything like this. How could he? He was just going to visit a friend, look around his home city a bit, then head up north again.

Made a fool of by who knows what ancient and impossible powers. All this slaughter. For what? For what? To strike a blow against a God that couldn’t care less? Do they really think that they can steal souls from the being that made the world? Or maybe he didn’t make the world, who knows, but any which way about it, this was a pointless horror! It achieved nothing. So why rub his nose in it again and again? Why did destiny drag him back to the Anti-Theists over and over? Was it all of them? One of them? What?

Truth made his way to a playground between some apartment buildings. It was a sad little place, with a basic plastic climbing structure and the faded outline of games spray-painted on the ground. There were, at least, benches for tired parents and a few established trees around. Not very fancy trees or anything. Probably what was cheap at the tree farm. Some kind of pine trees.

If all this was destined, if all this was according to some great plan… then what. Was. The. Damn. Point? How was he supposed to act like he had free will if he was running around with three destinies on him? Where was the ‘free will’ for all these senselessly killed people? It sounds very sophisticated when you nod seriously and say “In the long run, we’re all dead,” but it’s a lot less smart sounding when you are standing on top of a massacre.

He couldn’t fix this. He couldn’t make it mean something more than it already did. Or didn’t, at this point he was too exhausted to play games. It was just sad. Wrenching. He couldn’t wrap his feelings in words yet.

He watched the trees swaying in the evening wind. They didn’t appear bothered by the sudden lack of cosmic rays. All the mystical significance of a turnip. Maybe less. The abolition of cosmic rays from an area meant nothing at all to them.

Was it sacrifice? Some kind of terrible, awful sacrifice to who-knows-what, that would permanently forbid cosmic rays from entering a defined area? It made a sort of sense. The transformation required energy, and energy couldn’t come from nowhere.

He couldn’t escape the feeling of futility. Futility of the massacre, of the lives of the massacred, of his own struggling against all the awful things he was seeing. Nothing came from nothing, but since everything came from God, which was everything, then everything came from everything which brought everything back around in an empty circle.

What to do in the face of all that pointlessness and nothingness? Might as well make art. Might as well make homes for ghosts and write poetry to ease their souls. Not that he was artistic. Truth couldn’t manage a plausible rat.

He didn’t like moping. And he hated feeling helpless. It brought out the meanness in him. The playground was very ordinary. Nothing here reeked of symbolism, and it all certainly lacked grandeur.

It really wasn’t very big. Very standard iron fence marking the boundaries. These kinds of parks were utterly common near apartment buildings.

“You know what? I have absolutely no reason to believe this will work. But, on the other hand, fuck it.”

He carefully fixed the boundary of the park in his mind.

“I think I can be considered something of an expert on arrogant pricks.” Truth looked up towards the sky. “So I can confidently say that, as over the top as it sounds, I am unquestionably the most important, most real, thing within the boundaries of this playground.”

He casually directed a bit of his energy into the Meditations of Valentinian, feeling his reality reinforce. “I can also confidently state that the world knows it too.” He let Incisive have a trickle as well.

“In fact, with the sudden absence, permanent absence, of cosmic energy to make things ‘realer,’ There is literally nothing here that can even compete for the title of realist. Which means I get to set the rules.”

He let his words and will slowly hammer on the void around him. “This area has been ‘cut off’ from the energy of the universe. Cut off from the emmanations of those higher beings who ultimately descend from the single unified totality we call God. Which means, in this place, I am the closest thing to God there is!”

Next was Cup and Knife. This place was terribly wrong. Time to fix it. Easier said than done, of course, but easy or not, it had to happen.

“Now, I don’t agree with what was done here. I think it’s horrible, and horribly wrong. I’m not putting up with it! Everywhere should be connected to the universe, all the way up to the Godhead. Even if the local area thinks otherwise. Even if the whole damn planet thinks otherwise. It’s not the boss either!”

He could feel Cup and Knife coming together. Getting closer and closer to Manda’s original vision for the spell. Feeling the air shuddering and trembling as the venom of Incisive etched his reality on the world around him.

“And, of course, if God is truly universal, there is no such thing as cutting its energy off from a specific place. So I decree that in this place, the flow of cosmic rays shall never stop.” He reached out with Earth Folding Step. This wasn’t how the spell was supposed to work, but Truth had always believed in jank. Right now, there wasn’t a single person who could remind him that “fuck around and find out” applied to him too.

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