CHAPTER 317: THE WISE MAN’S EAR (THE NAME OF THE END) THE AVATARKILLER CHRONICLES

“Well, I haven’t heard of you,” said the youngest Timan council member. The cocksure man leaned back in his chair, arms still crossed. The empress had really put the guy in a grumpy mood. Before I could respond, though, his elder companions came to my defense.

“No, no, you’ve heard of him,” said a raisin-skinned Timan woman. “Stop being combative.”

“No, I haven’t!” the younger councilman protested. “I’ve never even heard of Closetland, much less its king.”

“Oh, I’ve never heard of Closetland either, but look!” The older woman waved a creaking arm at me. “That’s Arlo Xor’Drel! He even has the feather boa and everything!”

“Wait,” said the second-oldest Timan, leaning forward and squinting at me. “Esquire Arlo Xor’Drel?”

“The very same,” I said.

“Why are you calling yourself a king then?”

“Weren't you listening?” said the woman. “He’s the king of Closetland!”

“I’ve never heard of–”

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve heard of Closetland,” she said, snippily. “You’ve all heard of him; you just didn’t realize it was the same person.”

“Are we–” the younger Timan shifted in his seat. “Are we talking about the triple backflip guy?”

“Killed a c’thon lord with his bare feet,” said a middle-aged Timan with the confidence of someone who’d seen it with his own eyes. He hadn’t, but that was how it sounded. “Demolished a mountain with a pile driver from space, cause it looked at him funny.”

“How could a mountain look at him funny? They don’t have eyes!”

“It grew a pair just so that it could behold his magnificence. He took umbrage with that fact.”

“Why? And how did he even get to space?”

“Space agreed to come pick him up.”

“I heard he rode a flying atrocidile to the moon,” said the other female member of the Timan council. She openly looked me up and down with an appreciative eye, then stopped when she noticed Ishi catch her staring. Her Highness’s glare looked like it could melt steel.

“He sank the Littan fleet with one spell,” said King Celeritia, leaning back to look over at the Timans. “But his words hold nearly as much power as his wizardry, and he used his honeyed speech to convince the empire that they were the ones at fault.” He waved at the empress. “Now they’re bosom buddies.”

“Some call ‘im the Void King.”

“Others call him Godsbane.”

“I thought it was Spectersbane.”

“You’re both wrong, it’s Soulsbane. His gaze alone can cause the spirits of lesser men to flee their corporeal bodies.”

“He stole a princess.”

“Two, I hear. One from under the nose of a sleeping dragon.”

“He teleported the entire vassal state of Nohrrin!”

“Don’t be daft, the empress just

told us it was the whole town of Krimsim.”

“He spent the night with that Hiwardian witch Myria and left with his sanity and his life.”

“That’s quite impressive.”

“He was expelled from the Hiwardian Delver academy at an older age than most people are allowed in!”

“No, he got kicked out of the academy’s library because he kept sneaking in when he wasn’t a student.”

“He walks the Third Layer wilds when most fear to even speak of that layer’s tamed tribal lands.”

“He’s talked to gods.”

“Three, at least.”

“We know he’s loved an entire harem of women.”

“Concubines, I believe they’d be called at this point.”

“Men as well, from what I hear!”

“He’s written songs that make the bards themselves weep!”

“Actually, I believe that was his party’s mage, Etja. Look, she’s up in the shadows over there. Love your work!”

“Yes, well, we may have heard of you.”

I watched and waited for the Timans to wear themselves out. I knew that a group of minstrels was making the rounds in Timagrin, singing songs of Fortune’s Folly’s glory, but I hadn’t realized that the tall tales had gotten quite so out of hand.

The Mittakan giantess stood and cleared her throat. “Esquire Xor’Drel’s fame is undeniable,” she said. “What I do not know is what this Closetland is. Its name makes it sound a farce, and its prominence cannot be enough to justify his presence here.”

The empress was the one to respond. "Hiward, Eschendur, Club Dragon, and Litta all have formal treaties with Closetland. It matters little what the Timan council or the clans of Mittak think." She stared down the Grimvaldrim until the nine-foot woman relented and took her seat. Then Rona Littae turned away from the haters and gestured for me to continue.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said, then addressed the room. “Whether or not you are aware of Closetland, you will be familiar with the intelligence dossiers that Fortune’s Folly has been making available to all major nations over the last couple of years. While those briefings have, to date, included all of our valuable findings concerning Brae’ach and the avatars, they’ve been delivered piecemeal.

“I’d like to begin by considering all of our intelligence as a whole, which may recontextualize things and grant us all some valuable insight. I’ll also answer any questions to the best of my ability. Given that this is my first meeting with several of you, I think it’s important to offer everyone the chance to get answers directly from the source of these reports. Namely, me, my party, and the nation of Closetland.”

I tapped a stack of documents into a neat pile before I continued. The text all came from one of Grotto’s romance novels and had nothing to do with anything I was planning on talking about. It was a good prop, though.

“In the broadest strokes,” I said, “each avatar is a deific amalgamation made from the cast-off egos of every person within a specific Delver generation who transcended their mortal coil via the System-initiated ascension to godhood, and whose existence violates the metaphysical laws governing reality at a fundamental level. This has made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.” I looked up from the papers, seeing a few gobsmacked faces. “I’ll go ahead and stop right there for the first round of questions.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I could tell at a glance that some people had been ignoring the reports we’d been sending out. Others appeared to be familiar with what I was saying, but clearly hadn’t taken the information very seriously. Fortunately, some people had read the reports and also taken them seriously.

Okay, there’s really no reason to be hiding the ball here; everyone who knew me was taking my reports seriously. Everyone who didn’t know me was somewhere along the spectrum of ‘willful ignorance’ to ‘disbelief’. Except for Ayamari. I had no idea where she landed, but I felt that it was safe to assume she somehow knew even more than I did.

Basically, the Timans and the Mittakans had a lot of questions.

Were most of those questions already answered by the carefully put-together dossiers that had been getting forwarded to them? Yes.

But if this is what it took to get everyone on the same page, then so be it. If I had to debase myself by making meetings that could have been emails, then dammit, I would, because I could force someone to pay attention at a meeting, whereas I had no power over someone’s godawful reading comprehension.

“Who’s Brae’ach?”

A Davahn who got fucked over by Delvers and likes to eat people to power up.

“What’s Unity?”

The first avatar. See my previous description for what an avatar is.

“What do they want?”

To unify the world–and possibly all of existence–into a singular entity.

“Can’t we just kill Brae’ach?”

Probably, if you can find him.

“How do you speak with the Dread Star?”

Magic.

“Do you know which avatars work with Brae’ach?”

I hesitated for a second, processing that the question had come from a new voice. I looked up to see that Ayamari was the one who’d asked. It was a good one, since that info hadn’t been in any of the supplied materials.

“How many Avatars are loose?” I replied, before reciting the answer to the same.

Such is the System,

Eight by eight. Half that then, half that

Now, half that for him.

“Which avatars work with Brae’ach?”

Those who always want for more.

Save for her, his greatest enemy.

Still she will fail. So is she.

“Which avatars will never work with Brae’ach?”

Call to heed, and echo greed.

The hostile, wasteful creed.

“We’re still going down the Dread hole on that one,” I said. “Short answer is that eight work with him. Or, eight have worked with him, or will have worked with him, or there always will be eight working with him. Being a Dreadlock doesn’t always come with comprehensible answers.”

“Dreadlock?” said the youngest Timan.

“Like a warlock, but for the Dread Star.” Based on the man’s expression, I didn’t think that answer helped him out much. I went on to summarize things that were in the supplied materials. “Anyway, with Hysteria’s death, it might be down to seven. There’s Orexis and Anesis, obviously, although we consider them to be one avatar–Yearning and Release combined into Satisfaction. We’ve heard the name Limbo during our conflict with Hysteria, and we know that entity is responsible for Brae’ach’s vanishing army trick. Another name we’ve heard is Arbiter, and that came directly from Brae’ach when he was chatting with Hysteria inside Closetland. That one seems to deal with verifying the truth of things. We also know from various sources that Brae’ach has been searching for the avatar of Consumption, so that he can chow down on folks without their consent.

“That gives us five that we know of. Hysteria, Satisfaction, Limbo, Arbiter, and Consumption. As for the rest, your guess is as good as ours. The theme of those who follow Brae’ach is that they’re avatars who, by their nature, seem to want to unify into one big identity-destroying mass. Individual motivations are mostly unclear. For example, Yearning and Release seem kind of co-dependent, so they might want to combine so they can be closer to one another. But what did Hysteria want? They seemed like they were just along for the ride, which immediately bucks the trend.” I shrugged.

“As for which avatars will work against him, it’s probably more intuitive,” I continued. “Avarice explained that she needs something external to herself to covet and acquire, but I’m sure plenty just wouldn’t want to stop existing as individual concepts for one reason or another. They all used to be fragments of people in a crude sense, meaning that they’re all a kind of distillation of sapient experiences or emotions. Having a sense of self-preservation is likely baked in for a lot of ‘em.”

The itty-bitty-mini-yeti from Mittak spoke up next. “Knowing all of this, what do you recommend that we do?”

“We’ve got projections on the monolith locations, which the Littans have refined based on various factors, such as the location of the Temple of Yara. These are Brae’ach’s primary goal. Our primary goal should be playing keep away. Find the nearest monolith and park an army by it.”

“Has anybody found one?” the Iskarim asked.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

The tiny, ancient yeti looked thoughtful in response, but kept those thoughts to himself.

“I’m gonna let everyone absorb all of that while I pivot to my next topic,” I said. “Feel free to find me for more Q&A after.” I put my spicy papers away and pulled out some other, spicier papers. “We’ve actually got Director Umi-Doo of Hiward’s Central Delver Authority helping us out with this next bit. Director Umi-Doo, if you’d be so kind?”

The significantly less tiny mini-yeti hopped up from his very fancy high chair and floated out of the room’s penumbra to hover a few feet away. With a superfluous waggle of his eyebrows, the illusion of a Delve obelisk, a Delve Core, and an extraordinarily gifted woman t-posing in her skivvies appeared.

“Why are we looking at a woman whose assets are large enough to have their own gravitational pull, Director Umi-Doo?” I asked.

“You wanted, and I quote, ‘a generic Delver of some kind.’” He nodded at the model. “This person doesn’t exist, nor could they be confused with anyone who does.”

“Right,” I said, tapping a finger against the podium. I decided not to fight it and just let it happen. “For my next trick,” I said, addressing the room, “I’m going to show everyone here a process that you can use to make all of your freshly minted Delvers outrageously powerful for their level.”

I stepped out from behind the podium and began circling the illusion, although I kept my focus outward on my audience like a proper showman. “A process that I myself have undergone. A process that my entire party has undergone. It’s one of our closely held secrets to success. This is a process that, if used correctly, will net your Delvers at least seven levels worth of free attribute points, without raising their actual level by even one.”

The lengthy discussion of avatars had inevitably caused a few people to lose focus, but I had all the attention back now. If anything, this had people more laser-focused than the extinction-level threats I’d been explaining. Even King Celeritia sat forward in his seat.

I completed my circle and turned to face Umi-Doo’s projection. “The only drawbacks to this process are that it’s dangerous, prohibitively expensive, and none of you have the technology to do it.”

Celeritia huffed a cynical laugh. “But obviously Closetland does have the technology,” he said.

I turned back and smiled at the king of Hiward. “We do indeed.” I pulled a torso-thick tome from my inventory and laid it down on the desk before him. “Everyone will receive all of the technical details, such that no aspect of the process is hidden or obscured. We will not be claiming any sort of rights over the methods and will do our level best to work with everyone here to spread this capability beyond the borders of Closetland.” I patted the tome. “If, however, you have certain extraordinary, low-level Delvers that you would like to augment in the meantime, feel free to reach out to me later, and we can discuss the costs of doing so.” I sent the room a meaningful look. “Be forewarned, the costs are significant.”

I wandered back to the projection and stopped beside the amply endowed woman. “To begin, we’ll need to make sure that everyone has a basic understanding of the mana matrix and mana veins of a Delver. These are collectively referred to as the mana structure and are extensions of the same phenomenon manifested in different realms. You’ll also need working knowledge of how a Creation Delve modifies a normal humanoid mana structure, converting it to a vastly more robust structure similar to the one used by mana fiends. Then we’ll go over the latticed composition of a relatively novel form of crystallized mana, which draws inspiration from mana chips.

“Slap all of that together, add in some other odds and ends, and you get the ability to train stats up to a maximum value of 10 without having to do a single Delve to get there. So, let’s dig right into it.”