It sees me. It sees me. It feels me. Across the length of time and history I feel it. It’s crawling.

It's crawling into the future. Its limbs are festering and biting and ruining the world.

From the past it's raging inward. From the past. From the past.

There's nowhere to run.

There's nowhere to run.

It's coming.

It's coming.

It's inevitable.

I hear it.

It knows my name.

I must run faster.

I must keep running.

I must keep running until there's no room left.

Until there's no time left.

Until there's no time.

"Can't run from me, little monk.

I remember you.

I remember you two ways.

Wouldn't I make a lovely bride?

And don't your eyes look awfully tasty?

Run, little Alysim.

Run into the future.

Run.

Move your legs.

Pump your blood.

Scream and fear and think and think and think.

For as long as you exist, for as long as you have thought, I will find you.

I will take you.

I will take all.

I will become all.

"The future will never be without my permittance, not without my satiation, not unless it satisfies my hunger."

No, no, no, no, no.

"Scream, cry, beg.

Doesn't matter.

We'll be doing that forever and ever inside.

I will take your thoughts, your memories.

I will make you run over and over from me, and I will find you, and I will pull you apart, and I will let you remember the last moment, and I will make you do it again, again, again, again.

There is no end."

-Ambition and Alysim

36-15

The Stroll

—[Ambition]—

Through the Garden of Ruin, Rot and Decay, Ambition strode.

And it wasn't quite ruin, rot and decay anymore. It was part of Ambition. It connected him. It granted her the wisdom of all that was lost. It consumed the broken in the world. And it spread itself wider. And he learned. And she remembered. And all slowly collapsed inward as one.

"Things grew here once," Ambition spoke to itself. In that moment, it was feminine. But impossibly strong. Impossibly arrogant. A cartographer of human history; a rebuilder of human lies. But what then were lies to a god? What then were lies to someone that decided the course of human chronology? Still lies. The beast known as Ambition turned more monstrous. Its feminine face collapsed inward. And a creature of fang, maw, bearing a burning crown, took hold.

Within its chest, however, a many-handed singularity still pulsed. And its heartbeat echoed in a place where dead stars dreamed as time turned to dust and empty space.

Ambition pulled their wings inward, and an entire section of the Sunderwilds ripped across the landscape. He kept dragging it until he felt something break. There, minds wailed out at him. Little minds, little people, eEnclavers. They lived along the length of a fallen entity. Its body was colossal, its flesh constantly regrowing. They were a nice community, living off the land, off the giant. The eternally dead, but not fully decayed, giant that fed and nourished them.

And suddenly, the beast known as Ambition strode across the ruins of the world. It injected itself through the Sunderwilds, riding the entropy and reemerging on the other side. Its substance-formed blade, a weapon forged from the placenta of its rebirth, glistened and pulsed. Eyes opened along the blade, mouths licked out, lashing tongues formed of conflagration fire, searing the very fabric of existence.

From within the mouth of the Burning Dreamer, a face emerged. "What are you doing?" her voice chided. "We have no time for this."

"Wrong." The Burning Dreamer cursed Veylis. "Have all the time in the world. This is your problem. Not interested in the present. The past, always the past. Your father would rebuild everything. What does he rebuild now? He has justice. He has wisdom. He has you. You hurt him. You wish to make the most wounded man in existence the one-god. What little remains of his wisdom after you mutilated him so."

“Through the Ladder, all can be restored, all can be made divine; all can be refined and perfected,” Veylis retorted. “You think in such limited colors for one who invokes possibility and experience so much.”

“I did. But I am also not a fool. I have peered into minds. Beyond them. Humans betray their thoughts all the time. Just like you betray yours. Your father can be made perfect and still choose imperfection. From sorrow. From spite. From the very strength you force upon him. He can be made perfect and still do wrong because you are a one-eyed creature.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“And how is that?’

“You see strength. And you see above everyone. More than everyone. Beyond everyone. You see all the lives they could have lived and all they could have been. And then you think we will all make your choices. But that simply is not the case. That is just not how things become. We will be the shape of totality. But for now we are so small. And it disgusts me.”

Veylis hummed in agreement. “Of that, we are of an accord. It is… unbefitting for us to be little more than this wretched world as the time of times draws nigh.”

And then the Burning Dreamer paused. He twitched a finger and a memory returned. A memory of the Woundmother. His original Heaven. A creature nourished. Most true of desire, structure, and power. A shadow of a crimson tower flashed behind him, and the beast laying on the ground was flayed apart. Within its bones were a small city. Perhaps a million people. Perhaps less. Perhaps more if Ambition willed. But they did not. The little enclavers had carved small buildings into the bones of the great beast, and Ambition simply laughed.

"I suppose we do have a bit of time," Veylis said. Though if it were her own true will, Ambition couldn't tell. Her interests in anthropology and history leaked over into Avo's personal and psychological obsession with people. Both could be nourished right then, and both were. But he reached across to them, and his blade cut across time, across causality, into flesh. But it didn't rip them asunder. Rather, the mouths of the substance covered blades bit into them, and it gave them.

The venom coursing through Ambition's veins while it took from them imprints of their mind, searing them, binding them to Ambition.

And at once, the Sunderwilds around them quivered and grew as Rend spiked. A vulgar miracle took shape then. A little enclave fractured, parting a thousand times into a thousand layers, rising higher and higher and higher into the sky. In each one, a new instance of time and possibility unfolded. In each one, Ambition assumed the life of one person. Sometimes, Ambition just watched.

Other times, Ambition tore through whoever they wanted, mutilating them, cannibalizing them, unleashing atrocity after atrocity until the others were driven mad.

But slowly, through the convergence of mendacity, tyranny, anarchy, and even extinction, the layers collapsed into one, as all the enclavers then suffered the conjoining. They remembered the myriad of fates they experienced. They remembered everything Ambition inflicted upon them, everything that happened.

And the little enclavers broke, but they broke in such beautiful and separate ways. Some immediately went catatonic. It was too much for them. They chose to break. Others went insane, clinging to one obsessive thought or another. They spiraled, and rather than letting the world break them, they deformed. They deformed until their view overcame the world's.

And in that sense, weren't they gods as well? If one drowned in an illusion and they reshaped the illusion, wasn't the illusion real all the same in the end? For Ambition, illusion was no different from existence.

For this realization, the stroll had been worth it alone.

YOU HAVE INTERNALIZED A DEFINEMENT OF [FANTASY]

PLEASE—YOU CAN’T DO THIS

STOP

REMEMBER—

MAKE REAL WHAT YOU DESIRE WHEN THE WOLRD BREAKS ENOUGH, AND TEAR FREE FROM A HUMAN MIND WHAT RESIDES IN THE DEPTHS OF PLEASURE AND NIGHTMARE, FLAYING THE WITHIN TO PAINT THE WITHOUT.

With a long gesticulating hand, Ambition beckoned the enclavers to its body. Some writhed, some screamed, some dreamed that they were Ambition, that they were all that reality should be. They were pulled from their homes as the body of the giant was fully dismantled, and it too began to flow towards Ambition, liquefied, collapsed, condensed into a steady river, a bloodied current running to a slavering maw.

But as they were drawn in, the moments of their nightmares and relived lives remained—imprinted on the fabric of existence, scarring the place they used to exist in the stacks. Something of the enclaves remained as if a mirage. Mirage that repeated over and over again, its shape and structures a thing of madness if viewed by the common mind.

As a small section of reality poured into Ambition, it had its new worshipers perform a final act of supplication. They blinded themselves, they tore off their ears, they bit off their tongues, and finally they castrated themselves, or spayed. They rent productive organs brutally. It was more than a statement. Thaumaturgy was symbology made manifest through obsession. Faith was obsession. Faith was condensed belief. And they believed there was nothing else that could see no other god, that could hear no other will, they could speak nothing ill against Ambition.

Ambition was, Ambition is, Ambition will be.

WEAREWEAREWEAREWEWILLALWAYSBEANDWEWILL BE ALL.

And as they plunged into the singularity at the core of the deviant god, Ambition let out a twin voiced sigh. They would relive their lives over and over again, but they would experience so many delights, so many endless runs and cycles of history.

They would dream thereafter that they were waking up back in their enclave, but every single time another one of them would be Ambition. And they would not know whom, they would never truly know whom, and they would remember all their past lives. And they would do this because it was an interesting experiment, because it pleased Ambition, because inflicting it was the point, and learning from it was simply a pleasure.

And both Veylis and Avo shared in this joy, and it brought them together, this thing, something between an unwanted marriage, an unwanted bastard, a new god fused between.

As Ambition continued its eternal digestion of cyclic history after history, it decided that it wanted more. It would need to return to New Vultun, but its accursed parrot brother and sibling fragment was waiting there, waiting to face Ambition, building something of its own.

It despised the Hidden Flame, despised them for bearing Ignorance, Ambition’s warmind, Ambition’s Definement, Ambition’s everything. Everything that the Hidden Flame had, Ambition didn't, it despised the Hidden Flame for that. It hated the fact that Draus wasn’t here, that the Infacer was missing, that it was alone with itself and there weren’t enough voices on the inside.

And it despised all the other Godclads for their cannons as well, for their power, for doing things that Ambition did not allow, that Ambition didn't get to dream of.

Why did they exist? Why did the world exist? Why was there anything beyond Ambition? They should be like the enclavers, they should break in so many beautiful ways and then dissolve in the glorious body that was pride unchained.

Ambition was about to say something to itself, himself, herself, and then paused. It looked and sent something down to the future. Someone was jumping, someone was leaping across entire years of history, leaping forward, forward, forward, again and again. But the funny thing about jumping across history was that the future was always theoretical, always in flux.

Someone stayed gone across the chaotic present only to return in a time that they could only guess at through simulation or other esoteric means. And more importantly, Ambition held far more power than the adversary himself. He was trying to jump beyond the point of his own death. What foolishness. He couldn't escape that final fate after all. Ambition reached. Ambition briefly touched the back of the Mad Monk's neck as he escaped from the destruction of scale, and Ambition flicked a finger and gouged the back of the man's head open.

The Mad Monk screamed, and Ambition left an imprint of themselves within the Mad Monk. They wouldn't kill him now. They couldn't. But they could play with him. And so Ambition launched a miracle after the Mad Monk, just a shadow of themselves. Just a mockery, a parody. But it followed him everywhere. And it followed him because it nested in his mind. And so the Mad Monk wailed as he jumped again, again, further and further, with only his madness to sate his pride.

"A shame my mother killed that one in the future," Veylis said. "I would have enjoyed watching you burn someone for once."

The original Burning Dreamer grunted. "Didn't like him. Was a choice-taker."

"A choice-taker," Veylis said.

"Yes, I remember." Ambition looked at its hands, its clawed hands, layered over mechanical limbs, enhanced limbs born of a higher, glorious age. "I remember thinking that choice was precious for everyone. But now, I think there should just be one choice, made by everyone, made in supplication."

"Supplication," Veylis echoed. "I used to think that mattered as well, the assertion of the finest kind, the finest being, the bestowal of absolute power upon them."

"And now?" Avo replied.

"And now, there should be one true god. But it should be us."

Ambition reasserted itself, and the beast clamped its head around the woman, but her core spread out, and she seized the body of the beast. And they resumed their walk, their walk across the world. They eyed New Bolton once more momentarily. They could return, could return and face the Strix again. But right now, there was still a whole other world out there, and the Sunderwilds could spread even further. Ambition decided to take a walk. A walk through every remaining enclave it could find. A walk towards some of the other megacities. A walk until the Ladder finally arrived, and Ambition reclaimed enough fragments of itself to make things simple for Ambition.

After all, even a whole and intact Strix was merely a fragment of whom the Burning Dreamer used to be. And when the beast born of the Seraph and the Flame claimed all the remaining strands of entropy across existence, across the void, it would draw the final curtain of destruction tight around Idheim.

It would squeeze until all that was broken was concentrated in one place within one being on one will. On one world. And what a beautiful way to die that would be. What a beautiful destruction Idheim would experience. One final gasp for the last world in reality. And one final pulse. As the latter arrived, as Ambition claimed its eternal throne, and death was banished forevermore, but life was enslaved towards higher pleasures and stranger delights.

Across the void, the lattice that lined the ruins of existence began to move, and snake toward the last refuge of man.