Chapter Text
Begin Disk Two: The New Gods
===> CASSIE: Ascend.
Your name is Cassie, and you are not dead.
It takes you time to fully realize this.
You remember dying, certainly. You remember Rachel’s knives sinking into your flesh, scraping against your bones. You remember the blood gushing out. You remember Jake, and you remember telling him to go.
You remember dying.
But now you’re here. And your clothes aren’t bloodstained. Your clothes aren’t even there. You’re in some kind of brown hoodie outfit. But there’s a symbol on the front. A diagonal line, crimson, with three drops falling down.
It’s definitely got to do with blood. Is it because you died? Did you get some kind of second chance? Or is this what being dead is like?
It takes you even longer to realize that you are, in some way that is hard to pin down, lighter. There is something that is not there, that was. Not physically. In some other way.
It’s a little like having finally woken up, with the last of the haze of sleep gone at last.
You realize that there were spaces here. Pauses. You were almost expecting to be told something or to feel something but you aren’t. It’s like waiting for the other half of a dialogue and looking up and seeing that there’s no one there.
But why is that strange?
You’re so caught up in this that when a large spider with a glass back comes scuttling over, you don’t even appreciate that you should be caught off guard by it.
It beeps, and you realize that it’s been making this sound for a little while now.
There are letters on it. Words.
This little spider is a computer. Somehow.
T0bi: It turns out that frogs are really important.
T0bi: Nobody ever explained why to me, just that it was. But these stupid hawks didn’t have a clue.
T0bi: But it’ll mean the difference between winning and losing.
T0bi: It is winning or losing.
You take a minute to process the words, then decide that yes, they make grammatical sense, but not in any other way. There’s a more pressing concern for you at any rate.
Zoe249: What’s happening?
T0bi: You died, right?
And then he tells you about the God Tiers. Words come to mind, of a wolf song from this Land. “I die, and I die, and in dying live.”
Apparently it rhymes better in howl.
You’re alive. You’ll be that way for a good long time. If you die, you’ll come back. Unless. Unless you died for something. Or you deserved it. Heroic, or Just.
Zoe249: What is this that we’re talking with?
T0bi: How much did you play with your alchemy thing?
Zoe249: Only a little bit.
Zoe249: You made it with the alchemiter?
You shudder. The thing looks hideous.
T0bi: Yeah.
T0bi: We can’t talk for long, though.
T0bi: It’s really difficult to operate this and type as a hawk, you know, and I don’t want to break the two-hour rule again.
T0bi: I need to go find the others. Jake’s running around somewhere and he doesn’t know what’s going on.
T0bi: And you need to meet your Denizen.
Zoe249: And then what?
T0bi: I don’t know.
The spider crawls away before you can respond, leaving you alone.
You sit on the slab. You think.
You know where your Denizen is. Fenrir. The wolves told you about him.
You look at the knives all around you, growing from vines and trees and bushes, growing in nice yellow patches like grass.
Is this what you’re supposed to do? Kill Fenrir? It’s like the world has armed you. And maybe that’s exactly what it’s done.
You’re supposed to kill the beast. You’re a god. It won’t be a Heroic death until you’ve finished it. Heroes don’t call it quits with the job half-done.
You pick a bushel of knives as you walk.
As you walk you feel the world. It takes no effort on your part. You are, and you feel. The world is a web of connections. Relationships binding everyone and everything. You’d call it the circle of life if you were in a Disney mood. Even the grass is connected to the wolves, just as the wolves are connected to each other through their innumerable relationships with each other.
Sometimes a link is strong. Sometimes it is weak. You never find two wolves that you cannot, through others, find a connection between. Everyone is connected together. The world is one, and you feel… you feel the Beat.
And through this interconnected world you travel. It takes awhile and it takes a short time. It takes no effort to feel, but so much to process what you’re feeling that it’s hard for you to keep track of the time.
The wolves are as bad about giving straight answers as ever. But you can feel them like you never had before. Wherever you go, you can feel them. Wherever you go, you become directly connected to them.
You were so frustrated with them before.
Fenrir lives in a cave. You reach it. You descend it. You discover it. It. Fenrir.
Like the idea of a wolf. Claws that could slay armies, a mouth that could swallow up the sun. A coat deeper than night, eyes gleaming with the stars, this is the beast that is the end of days.
And it is not chained.
Fenrir is upon you before you even finish thinking this.
Beneath its paws, you are being crushed.
So even here I am interrupted in my exile
Then I will go out to blacker spheres
But that will be a long and taxing way
I must eat
Saliva drips from its jaws, like bits of the ocean. Dirty, translucent-black, once red but rotted and discolored, mixed with blood. It stinks as it splashes near your face.
You try to acquire him, but as soon as the process begins the great wolf presses its paws further on your chest. You don’t know if he understands what it is you tried to do. Possibly he just noticed the relaxing effect of the process and knew that you were doing something.
Regardless, the message is clear.
A hero's death is as satisfying as it is permanent
But I am not without mercy
The wolves that live above are weak but in number will suit for a feast
Choose then who will be spared
And what Tobias said before comes to mind. A death Heroic or Just. You didn’t deserve this, perhaps, but to die for the wolves? You think that qualifies as Heroic. So it will be the end of you. But what else can you do?
Did you come back just to die again?
But what else can you do?
You close your eyes. Whisper an apology that will never be heard by the one for whom it was meant. And then you tell Fenrir to spare the wolves.
There is silence. There is laughter. There is a great manic howl, a sound louder than any you have ever heard before.
And then the laughter stops, and the speaking returns, and you learn that you had been wrong all along.
You are the Hero of Blood, meant to restore a thing that was lost.
You thought you were meant to kill. You forgot your purpose. You added to it. You did not accept it as it was.
There were wolves in the world above, where you had walked. And Fenrir was a wolf. He was bigger than them. He was greater than them. He was a king of kings, but he was one of them.
Not a monster. An exile. Self-exiled. Disgusted with the distractions and the vanities and shallowness of his people, he abandoned them.
And then you came. The prophesied Hero of Blood. You knew the wolves. It was said that it would be thus. You had known them after a fashion before you had even come, and once you were here you came to know them after another fashion.
You knew their frivolity, their fickleness. Their disregard for things that mattered in favor of formulas and tables and trivia that only had value insofar as they were applied to things of inherent worth.
And you spared them anyway, even at the cost of your own life. Your life, so valuable and heavy and dear to you, for the sake of wolves that did not know enough to weep when one of their own had gone away or for the sake of their king and father that had abandoned them.
Perhaps it was possible to have judged them too hastily. To have given up hope too fast.
But one can repent and be a teacher once again, can one not? Perhaps it is time to try again.
All this, Fenrir tells you, in a way that penetrates to your soul like common sounds and thoughtspeech never had. And then he rescends to the world above the caves.
His claws can still slay armies. His mouth can still swallow up the sun. His coat is night and his eyes are stars. All these things that were, still are.
But you look at him as he leaves, and you are afraid no longer.
===> CASSIE: Be Jake. Feel the ash beneath your boots.