Path of the Deathless

402 (I) “The Enemy of My Enemy is but the Dog on My Leash” [II]

—Legend-Philosopher Melaia Kelhaus402 (I)

“The Enemy of My Enemy is but the Dog on My Leash” [II]

The fear of the Stranger spilled through the Supplicant in molten floods and infused Shiv with ever more power.

With the meagerest of gestures, by exerting its power over time itself, the Supplicant could see Shiv torn apart, especially this body of his, deprived of attuned skills and bereft of Magical Resistance. Yet the Supplicant made no move to act; it held itself at bay, even though Shiv could feel the enmity emanating from it. It felt akin to a Pathless reluctant to smash a wasp between their hands, lest it manage to sting them before perishing and causing a fatal allergic reaction. The Supplicant had tried earlier to pull every single one of Shiv's vessels from across time, yet only managed to grasp the string for one among the ensemble; the Severed Shadow that was left unprotected.

And even if one of Shiv's bodies were to be destroyed, the others would slip Backstage, and a true dance between an unnatural god and this tiny, stubborn immortal would begin in full.

Then there was simply the risk of facing the Red Rider's Hand and the Challenger’s Blessing again. Even now, one among those great and colossal fingers capable of sinking cities, of cracking continental plates, and of enshadowing towns, remained shattered and maimed.

Shiv could see a mess of broken fragments jutting out from the mangled digit. Its upper half was reduced to less than tatters, and the injuries were coated in a dense layer of gleaming vitality that sang odes to the glory of war.

The Supplicant had been touched by the will of destruction, a will that expressed one of the System's purest desires. And so, beneath that will, the Stranger, who long dreamed of returning to his false omnipotence prior to his self-awareness, now suffered the full burden of permanent damage.

But despite the ruination of that digit, the rest of the Avatar’s flesh remained unscarred. The Chronomancy emanating from its being created a veil of tarnished gold, a sphere of time wider than a nation, all to take hold of a single entity, like a fly encased in amber.

Rather than only sounding from the Supplicant, the Stranger's voice emanated from all corners of his dimension, wracked with emotional exhaustion.

The surprise within Shiv gave way to a dark schadenfreude as he realized the Eldritch God was succumbing toward humanity at an alarming rate. “Constant strife and struggle are not that fun when it's happening in your front yard, huh? I get it; normally, I’d even sympathize, but you see, I remember you and yours trying to hatch freaks from my mind, flesh, and soul. And I haven't let go of that grudge yet.”

A glistening shimmer caught Shiv's attention, and he peered beyond the Supplicant. A great core loomed in the distance, bright and polished, clearer than ever before. The Stranger's emotions were getting easier to read, and within his empathetic nucleus rained a downpour of lament and frustration.

The damn Outsider didn't feel bad for his actions as much as he was developing the ability to feel self-pity, which was still far from any semblance of morality. He despised Shiv for not surrendering himself to his power, and he despised himself for not claiming Shiv. The Stranger ultimately remained still too close to a monster to be fully human, still too deprived of conventional morals and emotions to fully grasp what he was doing.

In months prior, especially after the battle against the Recollector, Shiv would have reveled at such a sight, would have taunted the Stranger and tried to deepen his pain, but Shiv at present was imbued with higher insight, with finer means of manipulating both thought and emotion.

And with this power, the analogy between him and the Supplicant collapsed. He wasn't merely a wasp; he was a nail fired from a gun, seeking to strike a brittle surface. The Stranger's Avatars, every single one of his Fingerlings, everything that was stained with its emotions and imbalanced from its thoughts, were shaped from a foundation of compromised glass.

All Shiv had to do, if he wanted to inflict another measure of harm, was strike the Supplicant and pry at the Stranger’s psychological wounds through it, but he didn't. Instead, he soothed. He confused. And he sought to find an adequate leash for it. “But you know what? I understand you. Feel the same way. Don't get me wrong, I still despise you. I'd like to rip into you and leave you gored and bloody. But I can't do that to you. Not easily, anyway. And whatever you do to this body of mine is just going to amount to nothing, because I'll be back over and over again—and you'll never have your peace.”

The Supplicant's remaining fingers curled in fury, its body and manner tensed and crashed down as a turbulent sea commanded to rage at the will of an anguished god.

But before the tantrum could truly become apocalyptic, Shiv's Harbinger shifted over, leaping across time and vessels to manifest over his physical shell. The titanic fingers forming his cage flinched back; the eyes dotting their lengths as loathsome constellations squinted and flared bright, prepared to shred Shiv from time itself for his impending transgression. Yet, instead of lashing out with fist or spell—or even attempting an escape—the Harbinger came bearing a conveyance of understanding with an emission of Psychomancy.

Shiv adopted a casual demeanor for his words were honest, and he had an idea about how to bend the Outsider God to his will.

But the Stranger's voice was straying from mere anger now and veering toward delusion.

Shiv regarded the trembling fingers of the Supplicant and scoffed.

Shiv let the Stranger’s discomfort drag before he asked the following question.

At that, Shiv crossed his arms.

Not a single invective left Shiv's lips during that entire monologue, but the faintest cracks began to spread, starting from the Supplicant, but spreading through this dimension itself as if it was a broken pane of glass.

Shiv replied, shaking his head.

The Stranger's emotions plunged away from rage, away from delusion, toward the valley of darkest grief.

Shiv couldn't help it. It was horrifying, but it was also immensely demented.

the Stranger screeched, causing the entire Garden to tremble. And Shiv did. He respected the Stranger's request instead of pushing, because if he pressed any more, the Eldritch God would break. Something soft in its emotions would succumb, and it would seek to relieve itself of tension and outrage the only way he knew how.

Shiv nodded.

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The Stranger said nothing, for he had nothing to say. His emotions boiled over his mind, and darkness swelled across this realm, a painful darkness, a darkness that resembled a ravenous fire enkindled from the fumes of trauma.

Shiv continued.

The Stranger's voice was tinged with miserable suspicion, but the faintest echo of hope. It still scorned Shiv, despised his nature, hated his presence, and it waited for him to strike. It was prepared for him to break his word and resume hostilities at any moment, but he didn't, and so it kept waiting. Trust was not inherent to its nature. Trust is far from its heart, but trust was what it needed to understand if any kind of peace or diplomacy was to take shape between the Stranger's garden and Gate Piety.

A supernova of pure anger went off inside the Stranger’s emotional core, and a continental avalanche of black flames washed over Shiv. The Eldritch God wasn't just immense in physical or magical size; the feelings he suffered were overwhelming and devastating, far too potent for even a core of its size.

The Supplicant's curved fingers reared back, exposing patches of the garden once more. Shiv realized that every single eye dotting every branch across every square centimeter of space was looking at him, all prepared to unleash their powers at once to see his complete annihilation from the timeline.

But that was a lesser revelation. He understood something else about this Stranger—why he seemed so chaotic and diminished, how the loss of his once imposing and dreadful majesty had come about so quickly.

Shiv asked calmly.

The Supplicant stiffened. Its countless eyes twitched. Shiv smirked.

Deductive Reasoning 35 > 39

Those words of mocking sympathy struck the Stranger deep. He wasn't just a fractured pane of glass now. He was a bottle at the moment of striking the ground. Just a scant heartbeat away from shattering. All Shiv needed to do was strike once. One tap with a casual blow, and parts would break and stay broken. The Stranger’s perception of himself, his worldview, his understanding of his own ego, his own existence, had been irrevocably mutilated already at the will of the System.

But Shiv stayed his hand. He wasn't here to trade punches. He was here to pacify a volatile and dangerous god by whatever means necessary and make sure he didn't break their mana core while it was spreading uncontrollably.

There was a path now, a clear path where a measure of peace or at least non-violence could continue between Gate Piety and the Stranger's Garden. If that could be established, if the Stranger could be subjected to persuasion, then Shiv wouldn't just gain a reprieve but would establish one of his first and most dominant victories over the System itself.

Shiv whispered telepathically, using truth as a weapon once more.

The Stranger tensed once more. Every single eye under his dominion gleamed bright. And then came an influx of fear, a massive, explosive influx that drove Shiv’s Intimidation Skill closer to the edge.

Shape of Monstrosity 194 > 199

An ominous, weary silence followed. The Stranger said nothing, but Shiv could feel the tension building inside the dimension—could feel how unwilling its master was to yield to another's will. But now he had no choice. Either he played into the System's hand, or he found himself subservient to Shiv's schemes. There was no third option, and with how unbalanced he was by his own emotions, by his own ruinous psychology, he wasn't capable of coming up with any third options—not in this state.

Shiv continued.

With that, Shiv's own words ran dry, and he waited for the Stranger to enact his verdict.

The silence that followed was anything but calm. It was like being inside a cauldron as the water boiled. Shiv suddenly felt a pang of empathy for all the poor lobsters he'd cast into those scalding pots. Georges claimed the crustaceans felt no pain, that their ends were sudden and their ignorance kept them from true torment, but now, in this realm, faced with this creature beyond human experience, past the threshold of human intellect, Shiv wondered if Georges had been full of shit.

It was easy to imagine something as being hollow of emotions and utterly devoid of consciousness when you didn't understand it, when it didn't resemble you. So much of the human experience was just that, an experience, and it became a cage for most people. They never looked beyond it; they thought the cage was the world, but the world is the world, and your perception is but a narrow lane. Missing so much, so many details, slipping between your fingers, depriving you of true knowledge.

The Stranger was the same way. He didn't understand people, not until now, not until these Social Skills fashioned a pseudo-humanity that saw him lesser than he ever was.

The scintillating flame within Shiv sparked with new vigor. His bound field of time and mind mana flared and hardened, gaining newfound resilience. Both the Harbinger and the Nihilist spoke to Shiv as one.

Nihilism Be My Hearth, My Banquet 127 > 135

Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 338 > 347

the Stranger finally declared, echoing Shiv's Skills. The Deathless lifted his head, prepared for anything to follow.

The Supplicant's leftmost pinky twitched. Shiv nearly flung himself back in time to avoid whatever blow might fall. But when the sphere of tarnished time didn't implode or strike him in any way, he stayed. He waited, and the Stranger spoke once more.

Shiv sneered. “Feeling's mutual, you oversized sack of eyes.”

Shiv thought.

He kept those words to himself, though. No need to tip the scales back the other way when things were already moving in his favor, but another epiphany came to him unbidden, one that troubled him further. It seemed that all Pathbearers and gods even couldn't escape the trauma of their legend. For every battle you survived, scars lingered. In that, Shiv grasped why his mind held major aspects akin to a Tarrasque.

By the time most Pathbearers who gained Pre-Legendary Skills descended into their first Delve, they were so rich with conflict and story that lesser Pathbearers would have shattered a hundred times over. But a Delve was more than a capstone evolution for a skill. It was also the encapsulation of all the trauma a Pathbearer had survived. It was the culmination of all their regrets, all they'd failed, generated into a simulation to be overcome before the Pathbearer achieved their full advancement.

But defeating your own shadow and prevailing against pre-existing traumas wasn't the same thing as truly healing. And that was the problem: few people truly healed. For every year a favored Pathbearer survived, they sustained more wounds. Most were like Adam, who was still broken, who went into his Delve broken.

No one was untouched by trauma, but Shiv walked away from it. He didn't even scar; he shed those wounds, the toughness of his mind and flesh now perfect mirrors of one another.

The Stranger had calmed now. There was still agitation in his voice, but he had a measure of control and was negotiating with Shiv with a measure of hardness.

The battle was practically won, but Shiv answered—made sure to see things through. “I'll try and see it concentrated near the gateway if I can. If anything expands too far, you have my permission to prune those branches. In fact, the Terrorspawn that spill over deeper into your realm can be hunted and removed by your Fingerlings—I won't treat that as a hostile action, and neither will anyone else from my Gate. We're going to try and move our spill somewhere else so that we don't need to annoy you too much longer, but I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep about when or if we'll even be successful.”

the Stranger suddenly grumbled.

This request gave Shiv a moment's pause, but it didn't leave him stymied for long. If the Stranger was planning something underhanded, Shiv would see it coming. The Eldritch God's core was a naked window of emotion, and the substance that splashed and churned within hid nothing from his eyes. “Fine. You get to have one body. But I got a counter request for you as well. You're going to attend my coalition back in the Gate. You want one of me to represent myself and my Gate here? Well, I want something of yours to be in my Gate, representing you as well.”

A sound broke out of the Stranger, which was no noise a human could make, and sounded like a thunderclap yet trilled off into a trill.

“You have Hymn.”

“Yeah, he feels the same way about you, but he can still hear you, so if you have something to say, you can speak through him as well, or maybe you can shout in his direction. See what happens. Whatever the case, you want my representation; well, I want yours as well. This is diplomacy. We don't need to like each other, but we do need to have a clear line of dialogue, if only to tell each other what we want and when the peace is done.”

And then Shiv had noticed something. A shudder went through the Stranger. His core flickered with budding anxiety. Something just happened. Something the Stranger tried to hide.

Shiv figured it out immediately. “Another level, huh? For a Social Skill too.”

The Stranger's hiss was as furious as it was ragged.

“Fine, I don't see,” Shiv played along, and then he noticed something in the Stranger's Garden: a small core, possessed of its own emotions, connected to a tiny swirling cloud of intellect. There was a third form here, a third being watching, observing. Shiv wondered then if he was being studied by whatever had captured his other body.

But then his logic took hold and asserted itself.

For now, Shiv resolved matters with the Stranger. “I'll keep my body here for now. You think on what I said. I'm not going to push you yet, but unless you can come up with a better idea, I want you in the Gate as well. And before you suggest that I be your anchor, I got another thing coming for you. You couldn't take root in me before, and even if you could, are you really willing to risk yourself inside me? And aren't you afraid I might twist your words to my benefit back in my Gate? Best for you to represent yourself in some way—look out for your own interest. Just a thought. This thing's double-edged too. If talking to me and struggling with your emotions is giving you a few levels, then I got another bit of bad news: dealing with more people is going to feed you new skills with even more levels. Everything has a price now. You want to think about that.”

The Stranger’s words were genuine, and his frustration was deep, but Shiv simply shook his head and turned away. He remained within the Supplicant's grasp, and there, like a fly frozen in amber as the metaphor went before, he contented himself, establishing a new zone of peace right outside the front door. The swelling roar of triumph swept through him as he realized he had prevailed. He had prevailed and slain strife before it could ignite.

Diplomacy was a difficult weapon to wield, but when one had a grasp of their enemy, mastering the opposition from within offered a feeling of victory unlike any other.

Shiv mused.

And as if offering concession and incentive to further practice his way of fighting without fighting at all, a new reward arrived for Shiv—one worthy of his forking tongue.

Feat Gained: Inland Embassy (Legendary) - You have shaken monsters and rendered doubt upon gods with nothing more than your words. Within your persuasion is a seed for peace or the fuel for war, but whatever you do, whatever you say, whoever you face, you know that to subvert another's will is to win a battle before it even begins. When you shake someone's heart and mind, you will leave a portion of yourself within them, and you will be able to talk to them regardless of their location, so long as they are capable of dialogue.