Ascent 9.10

2005, October 22: Phoenix, AZ, USA

Aasdier struck with no warning. It was a silent mass that defied easy description. It looked like it was made of smoke and shadows, but that that wasn’t quite right. It could not pass through walls nor squeeze through a keyhole.

I could see deep into the construct and it was more akin to a school of tiny piranhas than true smoke. Even its bleached-white skulls weren’t true bone, merely particles positioned in such a way as to reflect the appropriate wavelengths of light.

That explained why Aasdier had a reputation for being invincible. It behaved like a singular creature in that it was under Moord Nag’s command, but its structure allowed it to replace its own mass as needed like a school of fish. In essence, it was a moving sandstorm that ripped and crushed anything in its mistress’ way.

I skipped upward, dodging out of the way of one shadowy tendril. Before it could chase, I drew Isolde and extended it until it was the length of a longsword. The scissor blades spread perpendicular to each other and spun like the blades of a windmill.

The Hallowed Mist answered. Haunting, pale-blue mist enveloped me in a protective barrier. The mist engaged the black smoke, forming a solid wall that refused to mix. It reminded me of a textbook diagram of a stormfront.

Whether it was a single grain of sand or a billion, it didn’t matter. Nothing crossed the boundary set by the Hallowed Mist, not bullets, not false-shadows. That was what “hallowed” meant, after all: holy, and therefore “to be set apart.”

I grabbed a set of Gwen’s needles and threw them at the warlord. A veil of smoke erupted from Aasdier’s skull, buffalo at the moment, and parried the attacks.

Curious, I drew my relic pistol and fired, with the same result. I supposed that made sense. Despite how ominous it looked, the black smoke wasn’t truly a necromantic effect, and so neither Lucian’s pistol nor Gwen’s needles had a conceptual advantage over it. The plasma did sear the smoke, but Aasdier’s smoke was so abundant that I’d be here forever if I only used the light pistol.

Constructs of bone emerged from the smoke. I recognized the heads of lions and snakes, even an elephant that tried to gore me with its tusks. It was all very dramatic, and wasteful. If Aasdier could form any shape at all, there were better means of attack than a horde of skulls.

Then again, it was likely that Moord Nag wasn’t able to control the shapes consciously. Did her power form these constructs because a young Lou Joubert saw these fierce animals as the apex of strength? Or did her Shard determine that a “seat of identity” was necessary for a semi-autonomous construct like Aasdier?

My musings were purely academic, of course. I pushed back with waves of mist even as I climbed higher into the sky. Rule one of fighting masters: Target the master. I launched a halfhearted attack towards Moord Nag to see how the constructs would react.

Gwen’s needles curved around, faster than any human could possibly track. They would have struck from her blind spot. Even had they missed, the threads that bound them to Isolde would have allowed me to draw them closed, using the threads to capture her or garrote her head from her shoulders.

And yet, the smoke reacted on its own. With whip-like speed, the skulls of vipers reached up to surround their mistress. They took the needles in her place, stopping the attack cold.

I could see how she became so dominant in Namibia in just a few, short years. Her construct provided automatic protection, visual cover, and area denial, and could attack from many directions at once. It could also output tremendous physical force, enough for Khepri to have found her useful in stalling Scion, if only for just a moment.

But she suffered from the same problem as any parahuman. Her Shard was all she had. Her power was not her own, and so she herself had very little control in its expression. It made capes rather inflexible in my opinion.

I swirled the Hallowed Mist around myself like a shroud before lunging at her. Aasdier tried to strike, but it was the equal of my mist. Neither could breach the other.

Moord Nag must have realized the same because she commanded Aasdier to carry her away. Her lower body seemed to fuse with the inky blackness, allowing her to be moved like a leaf on the water.

She wasn’t fast enough. The smoke surrounded me in an attempt to mask her escape, but I could see through it all.

I saw her lose altitude in an attempt to put distance between us and Isolde extended in response, lashing out like the beak of a great heron. My blade pierced her in the stomach before shrinking again, forcibly dragging her up with the motion. I fished her out of her smoke, much like a heron might spear a frog.

When she came in reach, I grabbed her by the back of the neck before clamping a set of petricite handcuffs around her wrists.

The moment the cuffs clicked around her, she froze in my arms. Her brain went haywire. I could literally see her corona pulsing, as if the Shard was attempting to figure out what just happened. Aasdier slumped like a sand castle assaulted by the tide, becoming an indistinguishable black mass.

“Y-You. How? What have you done?” she rasped. Despite the hole in her stomach, it was the absence of Aasdier’s presence in her mind that bothered her most.

“Petricite,” I replied, though I was pretty sure the translator said something like “magic stone.” “It inhibits powers.”

“Give him back… Give Aasdier back,” she whispered.

Her eyes were dilated. Her body broke out in cold sweats. Goosebumps ran along her arms. Her breath came in ragged gasps, each convulsion of her chest causing her to bleed out faster.

I realized quickly that this wasn’t Moord Nag anymore. This wasn’t the fearsome warlord who conquered a hefty chunk of southern Africa. This was Lou Joubert, the broken woman she’d been before her Shard gave her power and independence.

I remembered reading that Aasdier had once been the size of her palm, that she’d grown it like a favored pet on the corpses of countless people. It was “Corpse Eater” for a reason. She robbed graves. She scavenged battlefields. Sometimes, she followed raiders and rampaged through already-broken villages. And in all that time, little Aasdier had been her sole comfort.

Now, that connection was severed. From her perspective, it was probably far worse than losing a powerful weapon. Aasdier was like a dear friend who was also a part of herself, her other half.

I found myself pitying her a little. As much blood as she’d undoubtedly shed, she was a product of her environment. Ten years ago, she’d probably been a traumatized young woman who desperately sought freedom. That was how masters triggered, through a deeply internalized loss of control.

Maybe that was why she became a warlord, not for wealth or power, simply so no one else could shackle her again. Given my own experiences with Tequila and the Crips, I could relate.

Shaking my head, I cast aside my pity. Circumstances could excuse only so much. Maybe it was hypocritical of me, being a Cauldron executive and all, but her callous disregard for life wasn’t something I could forgive.

I jammed a potion down her throat and knocked her out so she wouldn’t have to relive what was probably reminiscent of her trigger. This was Earth-Bet; it made broken people who made other broken people.

Then, I noticed something. There was stirring down below. Rather than dissolve completely, Aasdier began to move again. It reared up, taking on the form of a massive cobra. I could see the smoke bubbling along its “scales,” generating more and more skulls of countless animals.

It was unnerving to watch, if only because of how soundless it was. It struck my defenses with fangs of ivory that faded into black smoke. Dozens of beasts clawed away at me, only to be pushed back by the Hallowed Mist. And when the mist  intercepted it at every turn, it instead dove back towards town.

I wracked my brain for what was happening. This was… unexpected.

A moment later, I had a hypothesis.

Strictly speaking, petricite didn’t erase powers, despite what PHO claimed. It merely prevented the cape from manifesting powers externally. Brutes were still brutes. Thinkers were still thinkers. But a blaster couldn’t shit out lasers anymore.

Masters… They weren’t supposed to be able to control anything. Moord Nag was unconscious anyway. But hadn’t Aasdier had a certain degree of autonomy from the beginning?

Moord Nag wasn’t a typical master. Aasdier could consume and grow, seemingly independent of her. It protected her without regard for her own awareness. It behaved like a living thing, enough that she genuinely considered it her friend and companion rather than just the expression of her power.

Maybe it was. Maybe it acted with so much independence from its mistress because it had a lesser connection to the Shard. Moord Nag’s Shard wouldn’t be the first to form two connections. What should I call that? Was it a quasi-bud in its own right? Did that even make sense?

Or was Aasdier something similar to a robot? It could be that it possessed certain routines, behaviors coded into its construction that allowed it to emulate life. Then, it might not require a constant connection to its Shard at all.

I didn’t have time to think more about my ideas. Aasdier had gotten dangerously close to the city limits and I could see dozens of people gawking. I crashed down in front of the construct, placing the Hallowed Mist between it and Mariental. Mana flooded Isolde, generating more and more mist. It formed a foggy barrier that met the smoke like two tidal waves.

I held it off. The more I thought about my hypotheses, the surer I became. With the connection to Moord Nag severed, it was acting with as much intelligence as it had. Aasdier was a facsimile of life. It could not defeat me, so it was following the directives it had been created with to the best of its ability. It would feed. It would grow.

Anivia’s Grace could erase the entire smoke, probably the core too, but it was too indiscriminate. I was too close to the city; too many people would die if I triggered the spell. I had no choice. I supposed it was as good an answer as any.

I reached for the Mask. ‘Farya. Wolyo.’

‘We are here, little turtle,’ Lamb’s soothing voice washed over me, setting my mind at ease.

‘A fascinating prey,’ Wolyo growled. I could hear his snarling grin.

‘You fight something that is not alive.’

‘But there is something there.’

‘It lies beyond.’

‘We will hunt it nonetheless.’

That was all I needed to hear. I slipped it on and became the Turtle, the third Aspect of Death. The world expanded around me. I could close my mortal eyes and see the countless candles that flickered, the countless souls that would greet us one day. Ever since I’d invited Death to dwell in my soul, putting it on meant opening my eyes to everything that died.

I could not don the Mask for long, but it would be enough. The spectral forms of my soulbound friends materialized behind me as Isolde took on a deeper, deadlier hue.

Calling it a battle would have been an exaggeration. Nor was it a “hunt” in truth, for there was no soul to prey upon.

Aasdier lasted but a moment. I didn’t even have time to cut. Farya did not bother nocking an arrow. Wolyo, ever hasty, lunged with a snarling howl I could almost mistake for a happy cheer. And though Aasdier and Wolyo looked similar enough, there was no contest.

Death came. Death found. And then, it was over. The smoke dissipated, revealing nothing but the Wolf.

He looked at me, then at the woman who used to be Moord Nag. ‘So… Are you going to eat that?’

‘You’re not as funny as you think you are.’

‘Feh. Human humor is hard.’

X

No, I did not feed Moord Nag to Wolyo. The Kindred made no claims to morality, only a human’s attitude towards death. Moord Nag had not run from death, and so Wolyo wasn’t too broken up about not eating her.

Still, a part of me thought she deserved to die. She killed so many to feed her power. What disgusted me was that Aasdier’s meat-to-smoke conversion rate was abysmal. It did not gain a hundred pounds of mass when it ate a hundred pound human. Each corpse consumed only added a teaspoon or so of extra mass.

Aasdier had been as large as a multi-story building and then some. Even assuming that Moord Nag obtained much of the biomass by robbing graves, she would have had to have a body count in the thousands at least.

Suffice to say, it consumed more than enough people to warrant a kill order in America. In the failed states of Africa she ruled over? The law of the land was strength, plain and simple, and plenty would have killed her for far less than her body count.

Then again, there were reasons to keep her alive besides my own conscience, at least according to Cauldron.

The first of those was that she was a warlord. As Kurt noted, she ruled over what used to be a country and then some. There were a little over a million people in her territory by his estimate and I wasn't inclined to doubt the Number Man. Losing their warlord would create a power vacuum, which would result in greater infighting and death. 

It was an argument I was all too familiar with; I could quote chapter and verse by now. Whether it was Phoenix or Brockton Bay, China or Namibia, it seemed like all of Earth-Bet ran on this dynamic.

I rejected it wholesale, not here. I might have been more convinced had she shown even a surface-level care for those under her charge, but she hadn’t. She had a shocking disregard for human life, seeing casualties as no more than potential food for her projection.

That wasn’t the kind of person who should be elevated as a keeper of the balance. Maybe it was naive of me, but I wanted to believe that a leader had an obligation to care for their people. Infrastructure. Wealth. Education. Basic food security. Had she paid even the slightest attention to any of these things, I might have been more sympathetic.

So, I dragged her to Babylon and began testing. I found that once I removed the petricite cuffs, her Shard formed a second Aasdier. It formed whether Moord Nag was conscious or not, and behaved completely independent of her will.

It was almost cute, a black, snake-like wisp of smoke that lunged at everything and everyone. If I didn’t know any better, I would have called it a real-life pokemon.

And that was a problem. Aasdier Jr. wasn’t big enough for Moord Nag to return to her post, even if I was inclined to let her. She'd feel compelled to feed it by any means necessary so that she could return to her power as quickly as possible.

That was assuming she didn't get killed by one of her own subordinates before she could build up her strength. Her territory was “hers” in the same way the forest belonged to the tiger. People avoided her, paid tribute where necessary, but no one looked to her for stellar leadership. They certainly wouldn’t hesitate to take her throne should the opportunity arise.

No, the power vacuum argument didn't work here. She was no longer fit to rule, not that she'd ever been before.

And maybe that was a good thing. There had been plans to help revitalize Africa before my slumber. Those plans had gone unfulfilled for so many reasons, but following Leviathan’s death, we had a brief lull to prepare.

In the end, after much discussion with my peers, it was decided that Riley would be put to work towards developing disease and drought-resistant crops using Freljordian wheat as an example. This project was something she'd dabbled in already to help control her tinkering urges while I was asleep. What was good for Lordsmith could be tailored to help Africa as well, though we’d likely gravitate towards more native plantlife like yam and millet.

She could even be tasked with eliminating malaria and other major diseases. Her fugues could be problematic, but so long as we ran her products through several levels of inspections and simulations, we could eliminate any unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, Fortuna and Kurt would handle distribution. They were a little miffed that I'd made more work for them, but that was what delegation was for. It wasn't as though they had no assets working beneath them. If they weren’t equipped to raise up a proxy government in Namibia, then who was?

A more compelling reason to keep Moord Nag around was that she could be useful against Scion. She was one of the few capes I knew for a fact could hold her own, at least for a few moments. Those precious seconds were more valuable than words could describe.

If we brought her on, we could easily rebuild Aasdier. Given how many worlds we had access to, feeding it wouldn’t be an issue. Even taking only corpses, how many countless millions could we acquire before we had to fight Scion? How much bigger could we make it than it had been during Gold Morning?

Controlling it or Moord Nag wouldn’t be an issue, either. We had Slug, who could simply wipe her memory. And if Aasdier went berserk, no amount of extra mass would let it last more than an instant against the Kindred. Death was death, end of story.

And yet, after some consideration, even that wasn't what we decided to do with her. It was a controversial decision, but we decided that her best contribution to killing Scion wasn't as one more pawn, but as a lab rat.

It wouldn’t be like the Cauldron experiments I remembered reading about. If Eva wanted to splice random fragments of Shards together, she had Eden’s corpse to dick around with. No, we had a clear objective in mind: Scion’s Shardspace.

It was sometimes called the Firmament, and not entirely incorrectly. While it wasn’t the magical, foundational layer of reality upon which all existence was formed, it was the foundation of everything Shards did. In essence, it was a meta-reality that was at once dreamlike and corporeal.

In Ward, Worm’s sequel novel, Victoria Dallon and her allies got to glimpse Shardspace via the dreamscape of a cluster trigger. They found a series of islands made of crimson crystals that represented the bodies of Shards, many connected by a tenuous line. They also found that many such connections had been damaged since Scion’s death, which was why broken triggers became so much more common following Gold Morning.

The exact details weren’t too important. What mattered was that they ultimately were successful in altering the Shard network and trapping the Simurgh inside Sleeper’s storm for the next several million years, functionally ending the Cycle.

That was the key. Right now, the Shard network was a kingdom with an absentee king. It had yet to be damaged irreparably. Eden’s death undoubtedly wrecked a fair chunk of it, but it could be salvaged. And, given Scion’s depression, he didn’t care enough to manage it.

If we could access it, the idea was that we could do what Vicky and the Wardens had: alter the Cycle. Perhaps we could even co-opt certain Shards for humanity’s sake. It wouldn’t be easy, but with Eugene and Fortuna on my side, with David a more stable and responsible host of High Priest, our odds were pretty good.

Moord Nag perhaps wasn’t the best cape to experiment on, but she wasn’t the worst, either. Her Shard’s independent projection implied a certain degree of autonomy that most Shards did not express. Maybe it was wistful thinking, but I wondered if it was more active, more willing to make decisions amidst the “experiment” that was Moord Nag’s life.

It was a lot of guesswork, truth be told. Then again, any foray into a novel field began with guesswork; scientists just called it a hypothesis. In the end, we had to start somewhere. And since we needed a lab rat, well, here she was, an expendable, powerful parahuman with a semi-autonomous Shard.

All of that, establishing a way to access the Shard network, was just one step. For our takeover of the network to be feasible, we needed more than just a gate: The Simurgh needed to disappear.

Barring Scion, High Priest, and Queen Administrator, I could only guess that she was the one with the most authority in the network. It wasn’t because she was an endbringer; it was because her prime directive was to “preserve the Cycle.”

That would be my job. No one and nothing could run from the Kindred forever. The Simurgh had been Marked; I felt it each time I donned the Mask, a blazing sigil that shone like a beacon to my senses, urging me to finish the hunt.

One day, she would die by my hand. And then, the Cycle would end, one way or another.

Author’s Note

Funny enough, I don’t think there’s been any concrete statement on what’d happen to Aasdier if the connection broke. Since it’s a semi-independent projection, it’s assumed that the Shard controls it, or at least that the Shard set certain rules/parameters for its continued operation.

Was what Andy and Cauldron did with Moord Nag right? Eh, it’s up to you. I think I’ve made it clear by now that Andy believes in a “greater good” morality. He’s convinced that being a Cauldron executive isn’t necessarily about being right, but oftentimes about being “least bad.”

Animal Fact: Cats only leave two pawprints, not four. This is because their hind legs perfectly step into the prints left by their forelegs. This is also true when cats group up. They will follow the leader, stepping perfectly into the set of prints he leaves behind.

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