Chapter Text
Snowman’s comin’, snowman’s comin’
He’ll take you by the hand
He’ll say 1-2-3 and you will be
In Cotton Candy Land.”
- “Cotton Candy Land,” Stevie Nicks
A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
Go to sleep, everything is alright
-“In Dreams,” Roy Orbison
♟
There is no pain.
Later when there is a person cobbled together from scraps and fitted back together piece by broken piece, the edges scraping neatly against each other just as they should with hands that are delicate enough to handle blown glass and yet are handling bits of soul instead, he will find that part the most unsettling. It should have been painful. It should have hurt.
Pain would have made sense. Pain is bearable. He is no stranger to pain, no stranger to tearing himself open for just a little bit more. Pain is proof you are living and bleeding and fighting.
But there is agony in an absence of anything. He who has screamed when he couldn’t bear it any longer, but bit his tongue and smiled more often, so he would be treated just a little bit more respectfully and be noticed just a little more, instead of ignored entirely as another hot-blooded tiefling brat. He who has clawed desperately for a place in this world, only to be kicked back down to the bottom of the hill to start again. He who was born glorious under a Ruidus flare and yet was never given his due. He has fought to be something. He has done everything right.
And now he is nothing.
He scrabbles for purpose- a thousand shards all knowing that they are something but unable to grasp it until they slip, one by one, into the void of oblivion, drifting among the stars, swallowed up and lost. That is when the thoughts find him- them, for they are many and they are nothing. Thoughts and dreams fighting for attention, brushing past them as they drift with someplace to go. They want to be heard and the shards have ears to listen, to absorb what little they give, but it’s too much. It is a war for attention and none of it fits and everything is screaming its frustration to the heavens. It’s an endless argument.
But the fighting and searching and buckling under all these thoughts that gather is better than remaining nothing. The shards that were once someone brush up against whatever they can find and try to find purpose again with little result.
Nothing is somehow unbearably lonely.
And then there is a presence- something that looms and hunts like the bottomfeeders that lurk in the deepest parts of the creek- and the shards are not alone anymore.
(the image of a young boy with lavender skin, wrestling a catfish from the depths of the creek and having to be fished out in kind by three faceless children is broken into fragments like someone has punched a mirror.)
The fragments drifting by chase the image and find another as it breaks apart, all of it in an effort to understand the thing coming up upon them- an old, fat elfling man with blackened gums from too much chewing tobacco leaning over a gaggle of children and telling them stories. “They say if you swim down deep into the pond the creek feeds into, you’ll find an old cat big enough to suck you right down its gullet just like you were detritus. It doesn’t care you ain’t what its supposed to eat, laddies. It’ll eat you up, bones and all, no matter what and there won't be a thing left of you. All it is is hungry and all it does is eat.”
These are all abstraction, things that might belong or might not. They are an explanation to a problem that they are ill-equipped to solve. They will not fit correctly and they are accompanied by a thousand other thoughts and memories and dreams unrelated to this and they are splintered and carried away on the astral winds as much as anything else. But something in all of that madness sticks- it’s always hungry and it doesn’t care what you are.
But what does it matter? There is no person here, only detritus. The strange astral bottomfeeder’s reaching tendrils is only taking in that which it is supposed to.
In some strange feat of lucidity as fragments are drawn in and down, down, down into some dark massive gullet to fuel the furnace so that he may keep feeding, there is a single thought- does detritus scream so much as it’s being devoured?
And why does the screaming sound like a homecoming?
♟
Lucien comes to himself again with no concept of how much time has passed, only vague memories of being nothing and everything and everywhere and too much and not enough. He feels nothing, but it is not the nothing of oblivion, but the nothing of something formless. He cannot open his eyes to see because he has no eyes. He cannot reach out and touch what is in front of him because he has no fingers. He feels like the beginning of something- the spark of an idea that quickens within a womb to become something else.
Rebirth is the word that comes to mind.
All around him, there are voices.
”Look! Look! He is waking up!”
”How can you tell?”
”The glow is brighter! Nonagon? Can you hear us?" The words can you hear us echo in a whisper that rises and falls like the crests of a wave. Lucien tries to open his mouth and realizes he does not have one.
I hear you. The sound of his own voice in his head is a relief. If he could weep he might have done it right then and there. He has a voice. He’s whole again. Somehow.
”You were trying to reach us!” A sorrowful voice wails.
A low growl: ”The Usurper is reaching out to us. She has taken the tome.”
”We will not heed her calls.”
It takes Lucien a moment to pull back the veil on foggy, disjointed memories that haven't fully slipped back into the lockboxes of his mind. He finds himself stuck in his childhood for some reason (he vaguely remembers trying to place something but he's lost the threads of it now) and he propels himself forwards until he’s laying prone on the hard ground with his hands over his chest, expectantly smiling, and there's Vess DeRogna standing over him.
DeRogna. Traitor bitch. His anger surges because it is all he has.
I’ll kill her.
The growling voice he knows is Ira’s is a balm to his bruised ego. ”In time, Nonagon. You must wait. You are still weak.”
”What happened?” He was scattered, yes… She botched the spell, then. All to take it for herself.
He shouldn’t have leaned so hard on desperation. Cree warned him.
What became of her? Is she safe? Are any of them safe?
How long has it been?
To that, he receives no answer.
”We pieced you back together. We searched across the Astral Sea until we found every last piece!” Gaudius washes over him like a warm blanket being tucked in just so. He is back in his childhood again when he actually was allowed to have one. A mother who wasn’t his but did her best anyway trying to make him feel safe and loved.
He pushes that thought away violently. She couldn’t even survive. What is love of any kind if it can be withheld or taken or just abandoned altogether. The Somnovem though… They’re truly loyal, truly loving. They came for his shattered pieces and didn’t replace him with a new Nonagon because the old one broke. They put him back together.
I am the true Nonagon.
Vess DeRogna has not won. He is exactly where he needs to be for now and the Somnovem love only him.
She’ll know that soon enough once he can return.
It'll just take time.
♟
There is no concept of time in Cognouza. Lucien does not have a way to measure the length of his shattering, only that it felt like a thousand years of endless nothing and the memory of it haunts him. He cannot measure the time of his healing either, only that it is easier to bear. The Somnovem speak to him in their riddles and batshit insane lamentations of their fallen world and their plans for something greater as he heals and he grows to feel like a part of them- he is a light glowing brighter and brighter within the Aether Crux alongside them.
He is closer to them than he has ever been in his dreams. It feels as if this great sacrifice was preordained, that he was meant to end up here and like this. When Cree calls him home, he will have the insight and wisdom of the ages from being in such close proximity to his gods.
But it feels like it has been an eternity and he wants to return now. He is standing still, stagnating as a glow within the Somnovem’s sacred place.
And he cannot reach Cree. He tries to find the same threads that the Somnovem use to reach the dreams of their brethren but all the routes are cut off. Can’t you tell her to hurry it up? He demands when he finds his patience waning.
”There is more for you to learn. We are only waiting for you to fully heal.” Vigilan, ever watchful and ever like a fucking father. He has had his share of men who thought they were his father, who felt he needed the firm hand of one. He’s never much cared for the mentality except where he can turn it around. He has always considered himself the father of the Tombtakers, even as he is one of the youngest.
As if age matters. He is older than the cosmos now, surely, and yet strangely newborn. He is still piecing himself together in small ways, but he cannot grow if he is left here, and his flock have been left without him. What if they’ve scattered too far and he can’t find them again?
No, he cannot grow this way, but also he is terribly, terribly bored and impossibly lonely among thousands, and that is somehow even worse. He is under-stimulated and in teeth grit anguish over it without having any teeth to grit. Can’t I leave? I want to see the city properly.
There is a murmured conversation that he can’t pick out very well- layers and layers of voices placed on top of one another in an uncoordinated mess that he has never heard from the usually perfectly unified Somnovem- until finally, ”We will teach you.”
♟
It’s only simple astral projection- or at least some sort of variation of it. His soul remains locked up tightly in the Aether Crux, while Lucien (or a ghost of himself) wanders the city, exploring every inch of it as it breathes and shifts and adds new structures and new flesh with every strange thing it encounters. From the observation deck of an astronomy tower, he watches it devour an entire party of Gith who could not get away fast enough and observes their flesh rise up out of the cobblestones to form a tall, spiraling tower that blinks with five sets of eyes and then settles into gleaming metal that reflects the stars.
“It’s alive now,” Lucien murmurs as he leans over the rampart. He knows it’s not stone he is pressing against, but he can’t feel it. He would pass through it entirely, but this much of the aether he can manipulate at this moment.
(That is all he can manipulate, he’ll realize later. Just enough to not walk through walls or slip through the fleshy ground to the arteries and organs beneath.)
Beside him, one of the denizens has followed him, their feet attached to the ground as if they are only there to be a lure- an illusion of civilization made from the flesh and bone and blood of a thousand damned souls. Their minds are what matters and they are everywhere here. Lucien can feel the way they press against him, offering him knowledge until he feels like a god among them, himself.
But only the Somnovem can access their flesh. The figure behind him widens one eye until it extends upwards and over his shoulder, attached to a thick, veiny eyestalk. The eye expands until it is as large as his head. It hovers close enough that if he were to lean over just slightly, he's sure he might pass right through it.
He steps to the side, just enough for a bit of distance.
”It hungers,” the voice of Culpasi says, high and reedy and strangely whimsical. ”So many lives we must sacrifice to keep building, but we must… we must send many souls to oblivion so we do not fade into oblivion, ourselves.” The eyestalk shudders. ”We don't deserve it, do we, Nonagon? Surely you don't think that.”
“No, you don't.” Lucien says, stepping away from the rampart and shaking his head. He didn't come here to hear Culpasi's bleating. He's here to dream big enough to change the world, just as they promised him he could. “Just keep feeding. I’ll see you glutted on the world soon enough.”
When everything is part of Cognouza, when everything is of one mind… It will be better. His importance to the world will never be in doubt.
He will not be nothing, because he will be everything.
♟
A soul is nothing but a vessel for memories and knowledge.
It does not have to be your knowledge or your memories.
♟
Lucien loses himself to dreaming when he is too exhausted to astral project. He still cannot manifest anything the way the Somnovem do. He cannot take over the flesh to experience any sensation or speak to wanderers who accidentally find their way to Cognouza’s cobblestones that hide hungry flesh and are eventually devoured to become part of it, themselves. He can find their minds and pick apart their knowledge, but it isn’t enough, and every time he drifts, he finds himself just a little bit less, like all the souls of the city are tugging on his to bring him in deeper and deeper until he is lost among them.
He protects his own mind from slipping off and joining the deluge by building a wall between them and gathers his memories to him in order to sift through them, good and bad. So much more bad than good. Years of people kicking him, attempting to use him, attempting to break him into something that could fall into line. When the Nonagon heralds the rebirth of Cognouza, then none of that will matter. They will be the ground he walks on. They will be the servants he beckons. They will be the knowledge he tears through voraciously for his own ends. He will make right what was set wrong.
He has never been broken. It’s the world that is broken.
It’s been waiting for a savior for such a long time.
♟
The Somnovem are in need of a savior first and foremost.
It starts as a glorious realization that they come flocking to him, their familiar emotional signatures enveloping his soul as he rests or finding him among the buildings, wandering aimlessly just for a change of scenery. It begins with them coming in twos and threes, offering him their insight and then pulling back. He starts to notice patterns in who comes together and who he never sees with one another until they are all huddled in the Aether Crux and Lucien is only held apart by the Omega by a flimsy mental barrier lest he be accidentally absorbed into them and lose himself entirely.
When he realizes the Somnovem are being cliquey, it’s too late. He has been dragged into a war he never realized existed.
They have no focus and their drive is concentrated on a single emotion and that emotion reduces them to illogical messes that all want different things that occasionally brush up against the things the others want and stand in opposition to the rest. Lucien is free from that. He can reason- he can parse out the flaws in their individual plans and strike compromises between them. He maps excellent resolutions to what starts out as how best to wield their powers and then rapidly dissolves into pettier disputes between individuals.
The glimmer of their godlike appeal begins to fade.
Lucien was a mature child, but at only twenty and two years (before he lost so many in the abyss of the Astral Sea that he can no longer truly keep track), he still remembers what it was like to be constantly waging a war with his desire to be seen as grown up and the fact that certain insignificant things felt like the end of the world. He recalls being nine and Dodger slapping hard enough to knock the freckles off his face because he whined about not wanting to do a particularly difficult task.
The old elfling had knocked him on his ass and then squatted down in front of him to say- coming an inch away from spitting his tobacco in his face as he did: ”Don’t make a fuckin’ mess of your own potential by bein’ a lazy little brat, laddie.”
He hated Dodger with every damn fiber of his being like he had never hated anyone, except perhaps his mother, but the lessons he drilled into his head about not letting your feelings drive you, about never wasting your time, and about actually proving you were worth your freedom in a town where the lazy succumbed to death or confinement stayed with him. He was the only person he ever counted as a parent, because at least what he spat out had been useful, instead of hurtful or infuriating. He idolized him.
Hating your idols seems to be a reoccurring theme with him. Some say that's why you should be the one to kill them.
(Metaphorically, anyway.)
The more he is forced to bear witness to and mediate with false politeness, the more he sees what Dodger saw in him that day- an irresponsible sense of laziness that will make a mess of everything. The Somnovem need a firm hand and someone to slap them right into line again, focus their attention, and get them where they need to be, otherwise this isn't going to work. It will fall apart into nothing before he can even finish what they started. And he can't have that. No. That would mean none of it meant anything.
When kings leave their kingdoms to rot because they drift off from their purpose to pursue some useless end, well… You need someone to bring them back, don’t you? That’s the hero of the story. That’s the savior.
Maybe it’s time the Fisher King was replaced with a better one.
Savior. Father. King.
He could be all three.
♟
He cannot do this from within.
It pushes his limits to constantly be wading through the minds of thousands to find solutions to problems as they crop up and his firm hand is easily rebuffed when his astral body flickers and fails and he’s left a dim soul having to be cosseted and consoled to bring his light back up. Our guiding light, they call him and gods does he love hearing it even when he's angry with them. Every little compliment or expression of devotion only feeds him and makes what he must do become that much clearer.
They want him to take the reins from them, but he isn’t strong enough to take them yet. He needs to be more than an insubstantial soul. He needs to go home.
He still can’t reach Cree. He can’t reach any of them.
He will not be the first to break and bend. The Somnovem will kneel first. He just needs to figure something out.
♟
If the Calamity occurred because the gods laughed at the folly of kings, then what happens when kings become gods?
Someone still has to play the king.
♟
The Somnovem give him the key to their eventual demise.
It’s a particularly bad day of reaching too far. He tried to leave the city entirely, to catch the wind and freefall in the hopes of maybe finding a way into a dream to get a message to Cree and, in the process, he thought he would scatter entirely again as if he was smashed on the rocks of a cliffside.
It still didn’t hurt.
(He would do anything to open a vein and feel the sting of blade on flesh. Anything to feel.)
The Somnovem tugged him back and now he is tucked away in the Aether Crux, a miserable, flickering soul. He thinks he might be dying, but dying should hurt. Once more he has looked upon oblivion and been terrified of it and here are the Somnovem soothing him like he’s a pet afraid of a thunderstorm.
Some fucking king.
But they have a gift and that gift pulls him inwards, his curiosity overtaking him, to a space beyond the Aether Crux. It’s an endless void, but he finds he has form there- still a whisper of a ghost, but it’s less difficult to maintain. The Somnovem appear as red eyes as big as moons in the empty space, their words echoing all around him.
”Welcome,” they chorus like this is something to be celebrated, like they are inviting him home again.
”What is this place?” He pivots in the void, tries to see the appeal. It’s a blank canvas. His fingers twitch at his sides, trying to call the aether but the aether won’t rise to meet him. It doesn’t feel like there’s any here to manipulate. It's something else.
The Somnovem don’t speak in unison, but, instead, are half a step behind one another. Something about them feels a little less unified in this space. ”This is the mind of Cognouza. The Dream Within the Dream.”
“That explains nothing,” Lucien says, idly.
”It means nothing to us. We have no true power here. We manipulate the aether and the flesh of our city, but we are all a part of a singular mind. We cannot sort through the mire to solidify our true dream. No matter what we do above, it will never truly make our dreams real. It takes everything to sustain ourselves.”
Lucien knits his brows. He closes his eyes and… Oh. Oh yes. What felt like a cacophony of nonsense and a difficult to sort through muddled mess in the Aether Crux that took all of his efforts to search through feels as simple as strolling through a library here. Ideas spread out before him- images, memories, knowledge, and all of it within easy reach. He settles on an image of a courtyard garden, holds it in his mind, and when he opens his eyes again, he is staring at what feels like a colored pencil sketch of it- a bit lacking in refinement and detail, but real enough in physical form.
His hand passes through the outline of a fountain. “I still can’t touch it.”
”No, but that is no matter right now,” Elatis says. ”If you dream for us here, so above will reflect what is below. You can piece Cognouza back together as it is meant to be. You can find our way back. If we are not so hungry and desperate for clarity we are not free enough to seek… then perhaps…”
“I’m the only one who can do this,” Lucien murmurs. You can’t do it without me is what he means. He tries to make the pencil-sketch garden clarify into something more substantial, but his form flickers and he recoils like he’s afraid he’ll be torn away. He takes it a bit slower and finds that if he is careful, he can shape things in finer detail without it draining himself. It will take time, but he can see the potential in it.
Gaudius trills: ”Yes. Stay here and dream for us. Sort the madness. This is what the Nonagon can do for us- dream free from the chains that bind us to our needless hunger and soon we, too, will be set free.”
Set us free echoes around the space, desperate, pleading, ever-so-needy. He is the most important person in Cognouza, because he can do what they cannot. He has all the power in this space.
So be it then. If what he builds is what their fair city will be- what they will become with his guidance- then he’ll dream them a better world.
They’ve handed him the keys to their castle and never stopped to wonder what he might do with them.
♟
This is how the fairytale goes:
The children are hungry. The witch offers them sweets.
The biggest mistake they make is that they don’t stop to consider that the witch is hungry too.