Chapter Thirty-five: Ignorance
When a soul claimed by the new Chaos gods is released from its mortal coil, the first thing it does is get taken to the Halls of Sorting, where facets of the gods less independent than daemons worked out the individual merits of each soul. It was also a great place to stick all of the bureaucrats when they died. Those directly dedicated to a single god were of course the easiest to sort out, but those with no strong associations in life it took a little work to find out what god they would join with. A large number were divvied up randomly according to which deity was in greater need of a boost.
Once assigned to the appropriate god, most souls were simply consumed, made into a part of the larger whole. Loss of individuality was complete, and only by a special act by the gods could the unique essence of a person be returned. A few souls upon death were passed along by the gods to their servants, the daemons, to add to their power. And an astronomically small number were ascending to daemonhood after death and allowed to keep their identities intact.
Then there were those who did not make it past the screening process. These were the guys who somehow ticked off the gods. By far the vast majority, this resulted in getting stuck in a sword and auctioned off to the highest bidder for a three thousand year long work-release program for the purposes of attitude adjustment. These were primarily abusive assholes and serial criminals, the sorts who pushed the limits of tolerance to the point where a response was required to serve as an example to others so that society wouldn't collapse into the sort of anarchy that would cut off the god's food supply.
And finally there were the tiny, select few who really pissed the gods the fuck off. These included serial child rapists, genocidal maniacs, and anyone who somehow earned the ire of all of the gods simultaneously. Also, anyone who was terrified of death and tried to go out in a blaze of destruction for the purposes of getting stuck in an inanimate object rather than being consumed also fell in this category. It was this category that no one wanted to end up in, for that resulted in a one way ticket to the Hall of Torment, the one place where the gods would freely indulge in their most sadistic desires.
The Hall of Torment, while quite deep in the Palace, was open to mortals to let them know the price for breaking the big laws, although viewing wasn't recommended on a full stomach, but forbidden to any daemon under the level of a Prince or Princess or a direct offspring of the gods. The reasons for this were quite simple: the atmosphere was bad for daemons. That much suffering condensed into one area required a very strong will to avoid consuming it and being driven insane by all of the highly negative emotion. Higher level daemons considered it seasoning to a well balanced emotional diet.
Lars on the other hand was a minor daemon. He had only about a hundred different voices to deal with that sort of thing. Just getting stuck in a mortal place of extreme suffering, like say a long used and still active torture chamber, would be like the daemonic equivalent of doing a line of high quality, uncut Columbian cocaine. It would super charge him, but it would also send his aggression through the roof, lower his inhibitions, and cause all sorts of unpleasant side-effects.
Right now, Lars was in Hell, literally and figuratively. If he had known that this was what was in store for him, he would have stood his ground and risked annihilation rather than face coming to this place. He could not count the number of souls down here, or how long they had been here, but none of them were very happy. For Lars, well isolated from the main concentrations of souls and kept in rather neutral conditions, it was essentially the worst experience he had ever had.
It was like someone had injected him with a concentrated solution of cocaine, meth, and LSD, while also force feeding him processed sugar and caffeine slurry. Every moment he could feel himself being inundated with the psychic chatter of all the souls in Hell, filling him with their pain and fear and anger and sadness and… it was just too much. He could feel the primordial animal rising up within him, the alien psychopath that dwelt at the heart of even the most urbane daemon. The voices within him were being drowned out by the instinctive need to lash out.
ENDURE! RAPE! KILL! ESCAPE! That was the mantra running through his mind. Find someone, anyone, and utterly destroy them before finding someone else and repeating the process until he was away from this nightmare. He was starting to hallucinate, lurid fantasies of destruction and desecration.
He was trying not to absorb all of this emotional content, but it was like trying to hold his breath. He absorbed emotional content the same way he absorbed Warp energy, so trying to shut himself off caused him to simply weaken up until the point where he lost conscious control and automatically started sucking up the psychic smog of this place. He had resorted to basically trying to 'breath' less; only taking short gulps of energy when necessary.
Not only was he trying to slow his rate of ingestion, but he was trying to slow his rate of digestion by forcing all of the negative emotions he was taking in into a little ball of malice. The only problem with that was that if he kept suppressing all of that psychic energy it would eventually hit critical mass and gain sentience, at which he would give birth to an unrepentantly evil daemon that would probably rapidly begin feeding on the ambient emotions before attempting to get amongst the souls. So Lars was forced to absorb small amounts of that bile to slow down the rate of growth.
It was a delicate balancing act. On the one side, emotions were energy for him, so even though the atmosphere of this place was poisoning him, it was also making him stronger, more capable of tolerating the damage. The more he took in, the less of effect things had, and if he could reorganize the emotional content it wouldn't hurt him. The problem was that his rate of growth was less than the rate of intake, hence why he was accumulating so much undigested psychic material. If he could process the toxins fast enough, he would be able to acclimatize…
If he failed either he would go insane and attempt to become a Hell god, or he would birth an insane daemon, probably a la Alien, that would attempt to become a Hell god. Neither of those options particular appealed to him. He gave himself another day before he either pulled through or exploded.
This was one of those things that if Lars had known were going to happen, he wouldn't have allowed himself to be captured.
The situation with Yggdrasil had gone from 'bad' to 'teetering on the edge of insanity' in the few days since Lars had gone missing. The bugs had been multiplying at a rate never before seen, not even when Lars had first arrived. Shifts of gods were assigned to just smashing bugs and they had graduated to heavy artillery in the form of magical flamethrowers capable of taking out large numbers of bugs at once. The downside, aside from rapidly depleting the energy of the user, was that such objects also tended to do significant amounts of damage to Yggdrasil if not aimed properly. Unfortunately, at the rate the bugs were forming, it was worth the risk.
"Okay… so a nutty chaos monster appears to have been captured by the demons and dragged off to Hell. Can we list all of the ways that this is bad?" Skuld muttered to herself as she worked on the World Computer as quickly as she could, trying to figure out something to do to stem the tide of bugs on a fundamental level rather than just fighting back the tide.
Urd, having borrowed Skuld's mallet for her shift of bug smashing, answered, "Well, he's a self admitted psychophage, so exposure to damned souls probably isn't good for him."
Skuld blinked and then cried out, "Of course!"
"Of course what?" Urd asked while splattering more bug guts everyone. On the other side of the control room a flamethrower flared, incinerating a forming ring of bugs.
"While technically under the purview of Yggdrasil, the demonic realms are all encrypted so we can't do advanced searches down there. Aside from that, Lars doesn't have any coding that we can track anyway. However, we can plot emotional densities anywhere in the multiverse, it's just not something that would normally be useful," Skuld explained, her fingers flying over the keyboard to write the necessary program to do what she needed.
"But since Lars is a psychophage we might be able to find him by looking for any anomalous points," Urd finished. "I'm going to have to admit, that's pretty brilliant."
"And… running search now," Skuld said just as she hit the 'Execute' command for her program. For a few moments holographic displays skimmed over various readings until several different screens displayed locations with unusual emotional densities. Some, like the abnormal stress levels in the usually serene Yggdrasil Control Room, were quickly discarded.
The black hole in the middle of Hell on the other hand kind of scared the pants off everyone wearing pants. For anyone wearing a skirt, it made them want to put on pants for the sake of safety and so that they could have said pants scared off.
"What do you think; does that swirling vortex of doom look like it might be who we're looking for?" Urd asked, her eyes wide at the display. Huge masses of pain, rage, loss, and despair were all swirling down into a single point where it was being compressed into a ball of raw malice waiting to explode in an orgy of violence.
"Probably," Skuld replied. "I'm going to run a search for unknown readings and cross-reference with this report."
Splashing bits of bug across the absolutely filthy chamber, Urd wondered aloud, "Do you think that has anything to do with the upswing in bug production rates?"
"I would bet a fifty gallon tub of ice cream they are," Skuld answered. "There's a lot of energy in that vortex, and if his presence in the multiverse causes the production of bugs, it seems safe to say that as that energy goes into him, he would have a more disruptive effect."
Another screen popped up, and all of the gods paused to look at what was there. Finally Urd noted, "Well there's the problem!"
Had any of them known who, or rather what, was listening in, they probably would have been more careful with their words.
Think watch Hunters. Think avoid Hunters. Think listen Hunters. Think learn Hunters.
Hunters hunt Not-Like-Think. Hunters kill Not-Like-Think. But Hunters not kill Think. Think smart. Think hide. But Think not want Hunters kill Not-Like-Think. Think want more Not-Like-Think. Think want Like-Think.
Think watch Hunters. Hunters hunt Big-Think. Think hear Big-Think sometimes. Big-Think not know Think. Think still hear Big-Think. Big-Think and Think linked. Not-Like-Think not liked to Big-Think. Like-Think linked to Big-Think? Think not know. Think want know. Hunters kill Big-Think, Think never know. Hunters kill Big-Think, Think be like Not-Like-Think? Think not want know.
Hunters find Big-Think. Hunters find source of Not-Like-Think. Hunters want leave Think alone. Hunters want kill Think. Think not like that.
But if Think get Big-Think to source of Not-Like-Think? Maybe Big-Think makes Not-Like-Think into Like-Think? Think like that.
Not-Like-Think try to make circle, make more Not-Like-Think. Never work, too many Hunters. Maybe if two circles at once… probably if three circles… definitely with four. Think just need get Not-Like-Think to all make circles.
Hmmm…
One moment the gods and goddesses were all staring at the gaping hole in reality at the edge of the multiverse where they really ever looked that was tied by a thin string of energy to the 'swirling vortex of doom' in Hell, the next every bug in the room suddenly got the bright idea to sudden form a summoning gate or five.
To say that things exploded into mayhem would be akin to saying that getting caught under a thermonuclear explosion at point blank range was 'hot'. It was technically accurate, but failing to grasp the full context of the situation.
Bugs and gods were flying everywhere, weapons scything down massive numbers of bugs, but they just kept coming. In all of the confusion, only one deity noticed an oddly coloured bug sit down at a now unoccupied terminal for Yggdrasil and begin writing a program.
Snatching her debugging mallet out of her sister's hands, Skuld rushed over to smash the oddly behaving pest before it could do too much harm.
Just as she arrived the bug completed its task and leapt away, landing on one of the fully formed rings in time for the program to execute. What happened made everything that had preceded it look tame in comparison.
Lars was sitting down in his isolation cell, hallucinating chopping Hild into tiny pieces, using the remains to grow magic mushrooms, and then getting amazingly high when he noticed the fact that a hole in reality seemed to open up in front of him.
Lars blinked once before self-preservation kicked in and managed to return him to something approaching lucidity, at which point he really only had time to mutter, "Well fuck…" before the sudden rush of air falling into the tear sucked him in.
Upon hitting the other side of the unexpected portal, Lars' physical form disintegrated and he became more of an idea. For those who knew such things, this was his true form, a collection of emotions and thoughts bound together by one another. For those capable of seeing such things, he resembled a sort of bat shaped cloud of dark blue and green light, with a tight ball of luminescent whiteness at the centre and twin 'eyes' of blackness at the 'head'.
Taking 'flight' on currents of cosmic energy, Lars observed his surroundings. He was in an infinitely large neutral space of blank white, except for an enormous hole that led into the sort of inky blackness that Lars was used to when in the Immaterium. From that hole an enormous amount of energy was being spewed, creating great black tendrils of mixing reality.
Banking into the cosmic winds, Lars discovered that there was another hole in the limbo than the one he had fallen through that led back to Hell and the gaping rent in the structure of the universe. Out of this hole dozens of eight legged rabbits fell, streaming in towards the hole in reality, where they promptly began to explode when brought in contact with the darkness emitted from the exit from this section of the multiverse.
Following the tumble of the rabbit-things were several gods and goddesses, surprised by the sudden breach of space-time next to them. Several of them quickly flared wings or had angelic figures pop out of their backs and pull up, assuming a wide circling pattern around the hole, but one figure in particular took quite the long tumble before manifesting an angel, assuming a very close orbit about the hole.
Swooping in, Lars discovered three things. The first was that the pressure from the cosmic winds were quite strong, trying to push him away from the tear. The second was that the figure that had fallen so far was Skuld. The third was that Skuld's angel was struggling to hold them away from the tear, the complete opposite of the force Lars felt.
"Lars?" Skuld cried out in confusion and terror as she circled closer to the blackness.
Yes.
"Lars! Help me!" Skuld begged while tears of panic streamed down her face. "If I touch that stuff…" Her point was made when another one of those rabbit-things impacted a tendril of alternate reality and promptly triggered a mutual annihilation process.
Of course.
Swooping in, Lars sent out tendrils of thought to wrap around Skuld and then he flared his wings, trying to ride the storm up and out, but even with both of them pulling up and Lars being affected oppositely by the storm, all he managed to do was slow down Skuld's downward spiral.
The force pulling you in is too strong.
"Oh God! Oh God! Help me daddy! Oh God!" Skuld wailed, terrified and child-like.
Lars looked at the storm and then up at the gods in higher orbits, clearly able to get out at that range as they were not beyond the event horizon yet of their capacity to escape the pull, while Skuld was far past that point. He considered the detritus still falling. Lars considered the situation for a moment before he made his decision.
Can you hold on by yourself for a few seconds? I'm about to do something incredibly stupid.
Skuld screamed in panic as Lars let go, but her angel did not cease trying to pull them out of the maelstrom. Banking sharply, Lars flew up and snatched up an odd looking rabbit-thing an enveloped it in his essence. The thing went surprisingly calm as soon as he had it, which made what he did next significantly easier.
Lars stooped and dove into the storm, carrying the rabbit-thing with him as he smashed into the clouds of other-real essence. As he suspected, it was the equivalent to Warp-stuff so it was utterly harmless to him. As he hoped, by keeping the rabbit-thing out of direct contact with the stuff, it did not explode inside him, and was in fact utterly unharmed by the experience. Lars considered dropping the rabbit-thing but decided against it as while the force pulling it in was quite significant, the closer he got to the centre, the hard it was to dive, so he figured extra ballast might be a good idea, plus it would help him for part of his idea.
Flaring his wings again, Lars let himself be pushed out of the storm and back up to where Skuld was, and he noted that she had dropped perilously close to the edge of the clouds. It seemed that because she and her angel were not fully mature they were rapidly losing strength fighting the pull of the storm.
Settling in next to Skuld, Lars stabilized her like he did before, although this time it was significantly harder since she was lower.
Skuld, can you hear me?
"Y-y-yes…" Skuld answered, terrified of the looming black clouds that were at most a dozen metres away and getting closer with every second.
I'm going to wrap you up so that I completely surround you, and thus protect you from the black essence. We will then dive into the storm. If everything goes well, I will drop one of those rabbit-things at the bottom of the dive and we can slingshot back out. If that works, we might have to make several passes, but I'll be able to get you out. If it doesn't work, then we can plunge through the hole and I'll find a stable universe where you'll be safe and we can work on getting you home. Are you fine with that?
Skuld nodded fearfully.
Lars wrapped himself about Skuld and then dived towards the heart of the storm once more. This time however, he could immediately tell that he had made a mistake. He hadn't realized that all of the material he needed to cocoon Skuld would adversely affect his ability to produce lift as much as it did. Lars could feel the pressure trying to essentially blow him off Skuld and the rabbit-thing as they approached the very heart of storm, and he had to divert more of himself to just keeping her safe. There was no way he was going to be able to pull out of this dive and keep his cargo safe.
Sorry Skuld, we're going to have to do this the hard way.
Skuld had been screaming through the entire descent but now she was really panicking as they picked up speed and got closer and closer to the point where one form of reality began to intrude into another.
Upon impact with that interface, Lars was given a brief moment of insight as he realized that he was what had been holding the breach open. Unfortunately, now that he had enough energy, in the form of the kinetic energy built up by holding onto Skuld as they fell, he had essentially reversed the pressure on the system as he left.
This meant that instead of exiting the breach fast but at a controllable speed, Lars instead discovered that he was now a ballistic missile instead of a diving hawk. It was all he could do to hang onto Skuld as they shot across the void between universes like an arrow loosed from a bow. Skuld was of course panicking as she couldn't see anything of what was going on, but considering that she couldn't see the higher dimensional structure they were about to smack into at ludicrous speed, that was probably a blessing.
They impacted the outer shell of the universe at a velocity slightly less than what Lars had struck Skuld's home at, so he mostly retained consciousness even as he started to tumble like a bullet through flesh, ricocheting off internal cosmic structures until finally they had shed enough energy that they got stuck in one place and stayed there.
Manifesting his human form when through into a fully material world, Lars ended up dumping Skuld and the forgotten rabbit-thing back out as his form coalesced into his preferred human shape, and the three of them came to a painful, bouncing stop.
Recovering first, Lars quickly checked out their surroundings for any sort of threat, but all he could really detect was that they were in some sort of lightless, underground cavern that was quite large, so hopefully they would be able to find their way to the surface. Lars still had a headache from their entry, so he couldn't get a clear psychic reading, but it seemed that they were alone.
Feeling fairly confident that they were out of immediate peril, Lars did a quick check on Skuld and was immediately dismayed by what he found. Physically she was alright, but he could tell just from looking at her that psychically and spiritually she was in bad shape, probably due to the fact that she was cut off from her home universe. If he had to guess, he would say that she was probably little better off right now than an annoyingly precocious and genius fourteen year old mortal girl.
This meant that when the darts smacked into him and Skuld, he was more than a little worried. Skuld had just enough time to wake up from the pain of having a dart in her gut before she fainted again, obviously some sort of drug coating the barbs.
Lars on the other hand was not so affected and he immediately whirled in the direction the darts had come from, all of his senses flaring out to look for targets. Whoever had done that had picked the wrong daemon to shoot at.