Chapter Twenty Three: Cosmogony
As the flame in the fortress danced its last, the shadows that surrounded the lone figure of Susumu Kamiyama leapt and shifted as if they were extensions of his own body. The intangible appendages encroached from the man's meagre frame towards the Phantom Thieves. All eight stood prepared for a possible enemy attack, especially their leader, who sensed ominous oppression in his very veins. The fact that he still felt weakened did not dull his resolve.
The memory of what occurred when he tried summoning Satanael was harrowingly fresh in his mind. He did not know if he could summon Arsene, Cybele, or any of his other Personas without facing the same outcome. But these concerns he pushed out of his head with inflexible certainty. Regardless of his spoken intentions and the apparent nature of his character, he was a threat.
"My apologies." Susumu spoke, still grinning wide. "I do not mean to put out the flame around which we gather for warmth. Kingdom, palace, dusty cave… Every abode man has inhabited necessitates a gentle light of care to keep the horrors at bay."
"Kamiyama-san?" Noir said cautiously.
"Yes, Kamiyama. That is certainly me, and that is certainly my name." A flash of doubt crossed his factions. "What would you have of me? Would you like me to rekindle the fire? My pleasure." The man approached the flame Panther had ignited. He only needed but one sloppy snap of his fingers for the small fire to come alive in a grand column; the embers that sprung forth all spiralled outwards and faded after.
If for only a moment, the humble expression of Susumu Kamiyama returned to his face as he looked upon the fire. Three seconds of uncertain respite, before his lips again curled into a disgustingly wide smile.
"Fire is what makes a home. A fine fire this is... a home, a nucleus for the new world…."
"Oracle, Mona." Queen spoke hushed. "Have you detected the path of least resistance?"
"We're not entirely sure if it's the best option, but we're sensing a lighter concentration on our twelve." Morgana responded.
"Meaning we'll probably need to fight our way for an escape, right?" Panther confirmed.
"A chance for an escape, more like." Oracle remarked.
Though dire circumstances made their attention on the details sparse, seven of the Phantom Thieves recalled how the fortress came to be. By the power of his Persona, Ozymandias, Susumu Kamiyama erected the structure around them, so there was no route outside to run for. If they meant to flee, rather than fight, their best chance would be to burst through the fortress walls. But that raised an alarming problem in Itself: if this sheltering edifice was purposed to protect them from Akira's doppelgängers outside, could they even hope to make a dent on the surface?
"What is the matter?" Susumu asked, completely without reverence. "Is there something wrong? Do you suspect I may be a threat you? Do you… wish to leave?"
The Phantom Thieves said nothing, but their body language betrayed their intent.
"Do not look so surprised, my much esteemed Thieves of Hearts… fear is something I can recognise at the most imperceptible shudder of the mind. You could say fear is as much part of me as it is part of you." If only for a split second, the man's face was entirely different. Joker was not sure how could it be, if it was something beyond a cruel jest of his imagination, that Susumu Kamiyama's face suddenly resembled his own father's.
The only constant in that flicker of perception were the man's bright, yellow eyes – similar to a Shadow's.
Was this man in reality a Shadow?
"That can be arranged for." The man said with Susumu Kamiyama's moderate tone, only to shift back into his distorted, menacing demeanour. "Through Ozymandias, I built this shelter. Through Ozymandias, I can provide a way out into the fields of mauve and dusk… Let's give that a try, shall we?"
With a snap of his fingers, Ozymandias materialised at Kamiyama's back. The composition of the scene was the last thing of relative calm before the fortress violently mutated. Joker felt the floor beneath him shake with a jolt. The young man instinctively turned to look behind, and found only his lover standing at his side, but the rest of his friends was nowhere to be seen. The scream came afterwards, before anybody could try and make sense of what was happening.
"WHAT THE F-!?" Skull's voice could be heard briefly before a rush of distance muffled it mute.
"J-Joker!?" Queen noticed they stood on a narrow strip of floor with an abyss in front and behind them, which was not there a second ago. The sudden shock made her lose her balance, but Joker caught her hand before gravity pulled her down. No sooner he did so, the patch of ground in front of them surfaced upwards at a daunting speed. A flash of red and blue indicated that Panther and Fox stood on this patch. Makoto turned to Akira and only got a fleeting glimpse before the ground under his feet sank.
Queen precariously stood alone on top of a column, vertigo pulling her from all directions. Despite the situation at hand, her inner fortitude and physical strength kept her standing, even as blocks and columns of granite flew around her with no discernible order. It was as if the fortress was reassembling itself into something new. Makoto no longer possessed notion of above or below, left or right. The confused and scared cries of her friends came to and from, flashing by and then disappearing just as quickly.
But amidst the chaos, one small platform floated down, slowly landing in front of her as if it was an elevator about to reach her floor. From their attire, Makoto recognised this individual as Susumu Kamiyama, but the head she saw standing on his shoulders was one she pined to see in her dreams, but never imagined she would see again: She saw her father, Akihiko Niijima, staring straight into her eyes as the platform descended further, soon to vanish from sight.
But this was a depraved mockery of the man who raised her. She was greeted with spiteful joy instead of the warmth and stoic fortitude she remembered in her father. His eyes were bright yellow, rather than the deep, reddish brown she and her sister inherited. Though instinctively aware this was a terrible – perhaps deliberately so – mirroring of Akihiko Niijima, the sole impression took her balance from her. And she fell from the column, thoughtless.
All around Makoto Niijima was the pitch black of the abyss. Her friends' terrified voices were nowhere to be heard. The young woman kept her eyes open as her body travelled through the abyss, falling or rising, she did not know and she did not care. Even as her eyelids began to ache, she would not blink for fear of seeing that man's face in her mind's eye. She found herself mindless to the likeliness of perishing soon, but a small speck of dust in the distance retained what focus was in her.
Little by little, the speck grew bigger until it became a small square. That too grew bigger, and she reasoned the increase was actually proximity. Then, in the very centre of that square, she started to see red, black and white.
It was Joker, gloved hand reached out, dire urgency in his factions. In his eyes, there was a plea.
Do not give in.
Queen closed her eyes to bring one image into thought. Her father, the real man, the author of her illusions of the future and her principles. She let that image, that warm smile fill her insides as she felt her boyfriend's fingers entwine with hers. They held tight, linked against the chaos.
The perception of her body in relation to her surroundings returned gradually, and soon she realised they were falling. The air resistance beneath filled her nostrils with speeding, overwhelming wind.
"Dad." Makoto uttered, feeling this may be the last word she would ever speak.
Then, the ground met them both, impacting against their chests, and expelling the air from their lungs. The break of the fall was unpleasant, but far from the fatal outcome physics dictated it would be. Makoto opened her eyes and saw her lover struggling to stand up, grunting under his breath, isolated on top of a block hovering over the void. As she turned around, she caught sight of all their friends, each standing on a platform of their own. Judging by their faces, they too experienced something nobody could put into words.
A dim, yellow light appeared amidst the darkness. It radiated no warmth. Lines slowly began to appear around it, seemingly random at first until their placing and shape revealed it to be originating from inside a vaguely human-looking mouth. Two dark fingers delicately plucked the light out as if it were a small egg. The Phantom Thieves gravitated around this puny sun laying atop the palm of a hand; they were all transfixed, clinging to the one certainty they had: that all eight of them were there, alive still.
The palm closed around the light, audibly crushing it. Instead of the absolute dark, they found themselves in the interior of the fortress, standing before the pillar of kindled flame. Their surroundings unchanged, as if nothing happened at all.
But they knew something happened. And Susumu Kamiyama knew that as well. His face shone bright with cold sweat, as if he just woke up from a terrifying nightmare. But the quivering of his lips, and the feverish, bulging look of his eyes hinted at something worse – a terrible experience they could only guess at.
"There's not much time…! You must leave!" Kamiyama yelled out. His eyes shut in painful strain as he commanded Ozymandias. A tunnel started to form nearby – a way out.
"No…" Joker said seething. "Not until you answer our questions. Who… what are you?"
"I am… " The man opened his eyes – they were again an ordinary, earthly, human shade of brown. "I am Susumu Kamiyama. I am Susumu Kamiyama. I am Susumu Kamiyama!" His words turned into a scream. "Quick! You must go! He is coming!"
"Who is coming?" Queen demanded.
"The life made from the template… the other Joker." Kamiyama's knees gave way. "That's what he wants… that's what he's wanted from the beginning!"
"He? Are you talking about your 'benefactor'?" Joker asked.
"Yes…. He lives in me. I feel him taking over." His voice broke. "I don't know what he seeks. But this world, his Joker… they suit his purpose. He… he must be…. No, no time…. I made a way out… Take it… Please go…"
"His Joker…" Akira repeated the words, as if savouring for a hidden meaning he could also know a hint of.
"Akira." Makoto placed her hand on his shoulder, urging him to run into the tunnel."
"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry, young man…" Susumu Kamiyama's face contorted sorrowfully, as if he was being broken from within, twisted beyond mending by the weight of his own actions. Akira had no words to give the man in response. The young man was empty of all things but the drive to get his friends to safety, and the pervading sensation of being somewhere, somebody else at that moment - a feeling experienced with increasing frequency on recent days.
The way out of the fortress was long and arduous. The Phantom Thieves ran as fast as their legs allowed them, with Skull at the lead. The path ahead was a straight line, but the low visibility and the rumbling sounds of warping stone imbued the trek with labyrinthine confusion. Eventually, a distant smudge of purple and red marked the way out. With each step, and each pant, Joker felt the sensation of displacement with more intensity, translating thus into a loss of synchrony with his own limbs. Only by sheer will and dominion of his own body could be keep up.
"We don't know how much resistance we'll encounter." Joker yelled loudly. "We'll need to split into two groups and surround the fortress, and we'll meet on the other side. Skull, Mona, Noir – we'll go left. Noir, Fox, Panther – you'll follow Queen to the right. Understood?"
"Got it!" Mona spoke for them all.
The risks of Shadows spawning outside notwithstanding, the plan operated on simplicity. If they were swift enough, they could make a clean getaway towards safety. But as they soon found out, this could only work on the assumption that things remained the same as before Kamiyama built the fortress around them. Their plan met early failure when the shock of seeing the world outside the fortress made them all stop dead in their tracks.
The landscape had changed. The plains, the slopes, the valleys, the strand, and the distant mountains – all shifted into strange, impossible forms. The boundless ocean they dubbed a landmark drained its waters by torrents that spiralled out into the skies. The mountains rippled waves that somehow did not even shake the ground around them. The trees, the grass itself twisted into swirling tendrils. And the clouds beneath the foreign constellations receded past the horizon, past the reaches of sight.
Behind them, the great stone structure was also changing. It grew taller, wider as it reached greater heights. And soon, the fortress became something else; castle, ziggurat, an alien hybrid of olden constructions, titanic in size, and unmakeable by human hands.
And true to Oracle and Mona's assessment, the immediate region in this mutating landscape was populated with Shadows, the very same shapes they remembered from the voyages into Mementos. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. But not one of them seemed to notice the Phantom Thieves. The Shadows all gazed immobile in one direction; those who were closer to the ongoing shifting of the land were sooner crushed or swallowed than disrupting of the collective behaviour.
Far away, the atrocious figures of Akira's doubles also stood still, gazing in the same direction as the rest.
At first sight, this represented a golden opportunity to escape somewhere calmer. But was there such a thing as 'calm' in this world anymore?
Chaos is all there is. That, and one question nobody dared ask or contemplate to depth. The Shadows, adversaries by design to the Phantom Thieves; the gangrenous replicas of Akira Kurusu, who made easy prey out of the mighty. All were subject to some great unknown lost in the distance. What could case such menacing beings to gaze so intently?
Morgana climbed Yusuke's shoulders, seizing the considerable growth spurt the young man experienced upon turning eighteen, and watched.
"I don't like this." The feline said. "It's quiet and still."
"What are you saying, Mona?" Ryuji snapped.
"Everything around us is changing quickly. But this one place far out, it's still. It's not moving or changing."
Akira said nothing, but he suspected. And as soon as the words formed in his mind, it came into view.
The world went silent, and the light of the stars was put out. A lone silhouette rose in the distance like a flare elevating. A blanket of what looked like black flame extended outwards, edging on a luminous circular crown. A dark sun.
"In the beginning of what you may call time, the Earth originated from a cosmic phenomenon. A burst of immeasurable proportions that gave way to creation out of destruction." Kamiyama's voice broke the silence. He was unseen amidst the almighty darkness. "It was a random, highly specific set of chemical configurations what spawned the first life forms on the planet. The rest I'm sure you can surmise… But thought, consciousness, the notion of self, it existed an awful long expanse of time before. And its name was Chaos."
Akira felt a spike in his pulse. Though he could not tell by sight, he knew the figure in the distance was starting its approach.
"Do you know the first thing Chaos' disembodied awareness did upon encountering the first thinking human being, huddled by the fire, instinctively staying its eyes from the darkness at his back?" A pause. "Chaos chuckled, on the art of deviants, on the irony that this being, this living machine, specifically fashioned so, was begotten on millennia of disorder - of random, spontaneous occurrence. From that day on, Chaos sired human kind forevermore, until the last living thing that thinks and feels expires."
The uncanny star's approach was slow, but at every millimetre of its movement, Akira felt a strange pull towards it.
"No matter what some may stubbornly think, there is no denying the pull humanity feels towards the Chaos that fathered it." Kamiyama let loose of a tone of spite. "With or without me, breathing, thriving in this paradigm, Chaos continues to guide humanity. That said, I have been kept away long enough. I couldn't let that continue, my dear puny playthings. When this world is complete, and the other is rendered obsolete, I will again take my rightful place."
"What do you mean? What are your intentions!?" Morgana demanded to know.
"Wouldn't you love to know, you sweet, sweet aberration?" Kamiyama snickered. "The uncertainty from withholding something so desperately pined after is such a delightful sampling. But I've taken a shine to you, righteous agents of Chaos, Phantom Thieves of Hearts, reforming society through subversion." He mocked. "I'd say you deserve to know… after all, these Shadows, my children, you opened the gates for them to join us when you accompanied your Leader on his way through. And he, your Joker… just precious. I had one of my own, I tell you. To see such… unique incarnation… it fascinates me so."
"Speak!" Akira spouted angrily. "What do you want!?"
The dark sun's approach increased its velocity. The light returned to the world as it drew nearer.
"What I want… is to exist once again. To walk amidst the galaxies and observe the countless and the fathomless. To assert my will as perennial force, drive, causality. To make my voice heard across all creation so HE will know that his sacrifice was in vain."
"Sacrifice? What are you talking about?" Queen called out loud. "You are not human. What are you?"
"Ah… that's an answer I've been dying to declare since my banishment."
Against all laws of physics, the spurious star that rose from the depths of this world did not consume the surface with its approach. It gave off not even the slightest warmth, and its dim light illuminated little; still, in a proximity of one kilometre, it sufficed to bring light to the structure around which the world transformed. The Phantom Thieves looked up and identified the figure in the guise of Susumu Kamiyama standing on a ledge. Yet each of them saw a different face at the same time, sometimes more than one, but in every instance, the very sight made them shudder to the core.
"I have a variety of names. Sadly not as many as the archfiend of the human mythos." The individual looked down on them no different than a God gazing on vermin. "Before making my home in the soul of Susumu Kamiyama, I was known as the Man in Black, the Pharaoh, the Messenger of the Outside, the Faceless One, the Stalker among the Stars. the Fear of the Dreamer, the Father of all Shadows, the Maw, the Crawling Chaos..."
Bright yellow eyes looked ahead, shooting across the distance, directly to the silhouette at the centre of the false star. Its eyes then opened, and the world knew light once more.
"I AM NYARLATHOTEP."
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Auhor's note:
As of this chapter, I'll have uploaded everything I've written in this fic so far to ff. Further updates will be one chapter a week as I finish writing them.
