Mage Tank-Chapter 267: Perfect Ego

During the time between meeting the Dragons and hanging out with the Littans, I had enough time to ask the Dread Star several questions. Eleven, specifically, and I’d been willing to throw my brain in that cosmic blender as frequently as necessary to get the info we needed. Most of the questions were even relevant to our main problem, which made me proud of my resistance to the temptation of that sweet forbidden knowledge. I’d always wanted to know how many turtles there were and how far down they actually went, but it wasn’t germane, so I avoided the topic.

By this point, we’d hemmed and hawed more than enough over what would or would not be a good use of a question, and I realized that I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by overthinking it. Yes, the questions were valuable, and it was important to consider each one carefully, but at a certain point I noticed that I was experiencing a weird sort of FOMO. Like if I asked the question and it wasn’t perfect, it was an unforgivable waste.

Really, the only waste was sitting around and not asking any questions for fear of fucking it up, so I stopped holding back and started working my way through the interrogatories we’d already put together.

I also decided to ask these questions alone, without any avatars, kings, Zenithars, or murderous wasteland gangs listening in and making shit weird. I got comfortable in my newly constructed bedroom while the rest of the party did their own thing. I took a deep breath and reached out to the Dread Star.

“JuRoQi,” I said. “Why did you offer me the ability to ask you questions?”

In the past, asking the Dread Star a question had always resulted in the universe shredding itself open and casting everyone nearby into an infinite, psyche-killing oblivion. This time, however, the world simply went black like the god flipped a light switch on the universe. It was similar to what had happened when I finally accepted my Dimensional 40 evo and received deific portals and teleports, but the world didn’t stay black.

There was no grand resonance with reality announcing the Dread Star’s arrival, and my identity did not immediately begin peeling back in layers. The god’s eyes appeared before me, silent and without spectacle, both close enough to touch and more distant than the farthest star. It was the difference between approaching a king in their throne room, filled with pomp and circumstance, as opposed to meeting them for a private discussion in their study.

The eyes watched me for an indeterminable length of time, and I was once more reminded of when I’d accepted the Dimensional evolution. I’d undergone some kind of emotional blending, and the emotions had been those of the Dread Star.

Admittedly–as with most attempts to describe any aspect of the eldritch being via normal language–“emotions” wasn’t the right word. It didn’t experience reality in a way that was comprehensible to me, but the god seemed like it was trying its best to be delicate and communicate in a way that I could digest.

I felt feelings that the Dread Star thought would make me feel the way it imagined the feelings it itself might feel would feel like, to a feeling entity like me.

More or less.

Anyway, the experience gushed up from my memories like a geyser, and little details started to leap out at me.

I bent a rule to enforce a rule that had been broken, but made the change as the one who makes the rules. The exception was accepted.

I did as I wished, but would not do what was never wished for. A fraction of this cycle had been marked by invasion into my realm. A threshold had been reached. A subject was chosen and the offer made. Acceptance collapses alternatives.

His will shall be my own, and my will shall be as his.

This made perfect sense to me.

The Dread Star’s domain was the space between all things, the separation that allows for identity and distinction, among other nuances. This extended to the separation between the celestial sphere and the mortal sphere. Events on Arzia were somehow violating that domain.

The Dread Star’s nature did not allow it to intervene directly to address the source of these violations. However, the Dread Star was the ultimate arbiter of what rules it was governed by, and the violations had for some reason become grave enough to reach a tipping point. It was finally willing to change its rule of non-intervention to allow it to address the greater wrong. Even so, it could not do this without a source of free will to ask it to act in such a way.

The offer of the evolution was an offer for me to accept the Dread Star’s limited interference with Arzia and, to a lesser degree, all of mortal reality. This raised several more questions that would be added to our list, such as “why the fuck was I allowed to decide something of that scale?” and “where the fuck was all of that in the evolution’s fine print?”

Once I’d accepted the evolution, it drastically reduced the other types of actions the Dread Star was willing to take to solve this problem. While receiving the Dread Star’s offer was extraordinary, I wasn’t some kind of ‘chosen one’. There were and would have been other ways the Dread Star could try and involve itself in Arzia, but so long as I took advantage of what the Dread Star had given me, there was no reason for it to push the envelope any farther.

This was probably a very, very good thing.

In other words, DS gave me the evolution because it was irritated at our planet and needed a vessel of free will to step in and beseech it for an assist here and there. By doing so, I allowed the Dread Star to interfere with my life in limited ways, which the entity could not do otherwise. Hopefully, this would help enable me–or someone else I interacted with–to clean up the problem, and the god would no longer have to be bothered by our annoying planet. It was scratching an itch. I’d volunteered to be the fingernail.

The Dread Star’s eyes closed, and I returned to my room. I felt like it had just politely told me that it had already answered this question, and that I should pay better attention next time. In my defense, I was Hysteria mind-fucked at the time I’d gotten that Dimensional evo.

I relayed the wisdom DS had dropped on me, but my tale was met with a small amount of confusion.

“DS?” asked Nuralie.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, Dread Star. DS.”

“Arlo,” said Xim. “Please don't treat a deity who's been described as a 'god to our gods' with complete irreverence.”

“There’s no way that it cares what we call it,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Nuralie. “But consider the risk.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“You think giving it a nickname might threaten all of reality?” I asked. “That it might annihilate Arzia for my perceived disrespect?”

Nuralie shrugged, then went back to working on something she’d been calling a ‘mecha’. It was way too small to be a proper mecha, but she apparently already knew that.

“Yeah, I guess when you put it that way, maybe I should refrain,” I said.

“You could always ask,” said Varrin.

“That’d be one of the most indulgent and wasteful things I can imagine doing,” I said, scribbling the question down on the list.

So, yeah, I did end up asking whether it would be offended if we referred to it by quirky nicknames from time to time.

Eventually.

It totally happened during a week where we didn’t have a lot of strong contenders for what question to ask, and it was contained within a more general query about how I could avoid offending the Dread Star. Not only did I get a straight answer, but I also learned that the Dread Star’s kid gloves would still come off if the knowledge I requested was of a certain… character.

After making my inquiry, I sat and contemplated the Dread Star’s presence as much as I could with a bleeding mind's eye. It hovered, or just was, for a long moment. I saw the eyes squint ever so slightly, sending my cognition reeling into a cascade of embarrassment and irrelevance until I screamed at the insignificance of my own thoughts.

The reply was only one word, but it’s something I’ll never attempt to repeat, partially because it would be impossible for me to reach the state of mind required to even acknowledge the word’s existence, and also because I just wouldn’t. No one deserves to experience the weight of all Creation bearing down upon the one neuron in their brain that controls their sense of relevance to the cosmos, while an implacable hand holds it up, refusing to let it give way to emptiness.

The experience was bad, negative zero out of ten because math cannot hold a number that low.

The point is, no, Big D didn’t care. Big D really didn’t care.

To be clear, the god wasn’t mad at me for asking the question. It just let me know, in no uncertain terms and through first-hand experience, how much it did not give a shit.

There were several other questions I tossed to Judge Dread that didn’t result in too much new information. Some of them built on responses to other questions, others resulted in a response that was totally incomprehensible. Either the answer was something that couldn’t be, or it was too big for us to hold in our heads all at once. Some of the answers were the kind of things I’d classify as “nice to know”, but not critical to our journey. To avoid muddying things, I’ll touch on some of those a bit later.

The most valuable response we got was to a question suggested by Xim: “Why do the avatars exist?”

“Don’t we know that one already?” I asked. “They exist because the System fucks up the ascension somehow.”

“That answers how they are made,” said Nuralie. Pause. “Badly. But it does not explain why.”

“When mortals ascend, why do the heavens cast an avatar back down?” Xim continued. “Is it punishment for our hubris? Retribution for the violation of the celestial realm? Do the gods receive the worthy and return to us those who have failed their judgment?"

“I see,” I said, trying to formulate the right wording for such a question without repeating this entire exchange.

Eventually I decided to use this one as part of an experiment. Did it even matter what I asked, so long as I focused on the intent of the question? Certainly Mr. Gaps didn’t use the sonic vibrations of my words to determine the meaning and context of my requested knowledge. It had to be reading my mind or soul to some extent, if not relying on nonverbal communication entirely.

I also didn’t want to fuck around and say something totally unrelated to what I was thinking, since that felt like an arbitrary exercise. Plus it was kind of asking a second question in addition to the first, with that question being “will you ignore my verbal words and respond only to the intent I am sending you with my question?” I wasn’t ready to toy around with two-part questions just yet.

I didn’t want another brain-melting response like the nickname question had gotten me, so I was being a bit more careful.

I went back and got cozy in my room, then asked, “JuRoQi, why do the avatars exist?”

Cue the darkness, galactic eyeballs, and other dramatic scene-setting. Then I got the longest reply we received during this three-month period.

Wanton sin, want and sin.

Bereft of guilt, they must enter.

Bereft of self, they must join.

Bereft of mercy, they must purge.

Bereft of worry, they will surge.

A sickening radiance withers the dark.

Shadows flee the light. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

They find refuge from the blinding burn

Amidst the crevice of desire.

Saved by cold from fire.

A shadow cannot survive the sun,

But must adhere to its subject.

To sever is to break,

And the pieces fall to earth.

A shadow without a puppet.

A purpose without a cause.

A form without a function.

This one led to a lot of discussion, further fueled by the other responses we’d gotten. Answers such as this one were like having a terabyte of encrypted data dropped into my organic hard drive. Each sentence contained depths of meaning and context that had to be sifted through, and even though all the information was at my fingertips, it still took time for me to synthesize it into something useful and succinct.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to rely on mortal language and all its foibles when relaying my experience to the rest of the party. I could connect with everyone using Reveal and contemplate the response, granting everyone a much better grasp of the communication. Not only was this more accurate, but it also saved them from being subjected to the entire answer all at once which reduced the chance of a spontaneous aneurysm by several thousand percent.

In other words, this protected them against most of the backlash that came from communion with the god.

"So avatars are… shadows of gods?” I asked the group. “Our original understanding was that they were physical embodiments of gods, or at least the concepts governing those gods, but this feels like something else."

"No, I think it is more than that,” said Nuralie. “They are shadows of pure light, which should not be possible.” Pause. “Their entire existence is a paradox, anathema to reality."

"How so?" asked Varrin. Nuralie looked thoughtful, but couldn’t formulate the words for whatever she was thinking or–just as likely–comprehending.

Xim leaned forward and propped her elbows on our roundtable. "I don't think you can have ego if you wish to enter the divine realm,” she said. “Everything that makes you think of you is excised, allowing you to exist in perfect harmony with the divine without need or want. You can't approach the divine any other way.” She folded her hands together and set her chin atop them. “The System forces its way into the celestial sphere, sending through a batch of people along with all their mortal flaws. When they touch the divine, that part of them cannot exist there.” She looked around, making eye contact with everyone at the table. “I think the avatars are the cast-off egos of the ascended.”

Nuralie sat back, looking disturbed. “Each one is the manifested sin of an entire civilization," she said, voice just above a whisper. We all sat and stewed on that for a while.

"Damn,” I said, shaking off a chill that had crept up my spine. “That's… quite the metaphysical claim. So, Dr. Dread doesn't like paradoxes?"

"I think it's that there is supposed to be a gap between the divine and the material,” said Xim. “The avatars are straddling that gap. As we saw with Hysteria, the Void Daddy is not fond of things being where they are not supposed to be."

“Why does this make them so powerful?” asked Varrin. “If they are merely a splinter, should they not be weaker?”

“They still have a connection to the celestial sphere,” said Xim. “Part of the paradox is that something like an avatar shouldn’t be this strong. They harness divinity in a way that violates fundamental rules of the universe.”

“Rules set in place by powers at the scale of Galaxy Hands-sama,” I said.

“Or even higher,” said Nuralie.