Not His Sword
The automaton cringed as he worked at rendering this latest horror of the Outside first into tar-soaked chunks and then down into the basic slush of existence. He was not sure how something could be spread across three and a half dimensions, but this thing was and it made his vision swim to look at how it’s literal epidermis of eyes clipped into one another.
Across the rim of the Excess he knew his troops were doing as he did, hurling the billions of abberant corpses back into the Outer Dark, like sailors bailing seawater out of a ship. That he worked in relative solitude at the present time was due to the sheer mass of the occular collosus rendering it not unlike an undetonated warding glyph. The imbalance brought about simply from carving it up to the point where it would not simply reanimate and mutate once returned to the formless chaos beyond necessitated he do the work alone. For their safety.
“Three minutes. Four if the dimensional paradox collapses on itself. Five if it tries to polymorph me when it does.” The machine summarised for the figure behind him. There was no interval between her being there and her not being there. No teleportation nor arriving from a vast interstellar distance. She just decided to start being there, and so she was. Following in her wake was a veritable herd of infant Yame, sheperded by an exceptionally old one, which climbed up and draped itself over the woman’s shoulders like some mantle once the newborns stopped trying to rush forward to eat the whole body.
Icae, Goddess of Magic and Lady of the Lens, quietly nodded in acceptance at this assessment. Which the warforged perceived as her neck becoming marginally harder to rip out with his bare hands, the self-directed disgust coming milliseconds later. She answered his statement. “Thank you, Vortigern.”
That dazed Vortigern for a moment, like it always did. He was not sure if she was just being polite, or if she meant it.
He was not sure how to respond in either case.
Silence descended once more around the two, save for the sound of an eldritch horror being messily disassembled and Icae humming along to the lyrics of one of that Avariel singer’s songs as she groomed her Yame. Not that Vortigern minded, they were very good songs. And Icae was not a terrible singer. Far from it.
“You might have an easier time of it,” She began “if your sword was more th-“
“It is not my sword.” Vortigern cuts off furiously, turning to glare at her.
She did not speak further, waiting for him to continue. He wished she would shout and curse at him. This......empathy? It was maddening. Worse yet, it was working. “Forgive me. A moment’s lapse in control.” He relented as he continued his task, his hands refusing to be stained with anything but red.
“So why have you clung to it for all these centuries?”
He paused again.
Vortigern looked up at the mortal standing over him, one of those who Liphan first made to reseed the shells. Not for the first time he wondered whether the lifemaker felt the need to craft so many varied breeds of them because it distracted him from the absolute suffering of his trueborn son. At the human’s side hung a crude blade of iron, and Vortigern could taste it’s history as a tool of carving meat from carcasses, even in his diminished state.
And diminished he was! Vortigern could behold his reflection in the mortal’s eyes and what he saw sickened him. It would be easier to name what wasn’t ruined beyond all function. That the mortal before him did not flee in fright at the bizarre creature laying slack against a stone drove home the point. He was utterly unthreatening.
The human drew closer. Ah, here was where it ended. In his guttering candle of a soul, he wished he could hurl one last insult at Liphan. ‘They must learn to survive without our interference.’ Bah! Why the fuck did he make so many things that can kill them then?! Indeed, it was dealing with these creatures that led him to this point, because somehow the idea of these ‘mortals’ dying because their maker couldn’t plan ahead was the single most infuriating thing to a being designed to hate literally everything.
The human’s shadow fell over his destitute form, yet the blade never ran him through. Instead, incomprehensibly, the human hauled the broken god onto his own shoulders, and-.....
"Would you cease putting up walls when people try to reach out to you?” Vortigern barely heard her as he resurfaced from his reminiscence. But he did respond.
“No.” She could not quite hear him through the curtain wall he conjured between himself and Icae. The goddess considered disintegrating the wall and putting him in an antimagic field. The impulsive idea was discarded as quickly as it came. Confrontation only encouraged Vortigern, it was how he was made. So she waited for Vortigern to lower the wall on his own.
Within minutes, she heard magic going wild and Vortigern shouting out in annoyance, his cries of resistance sometimes transitioning into the clucking of a chicken before turning back into oaths of defiance. But the wall was still up, reflecting the Warlord’s impressive dedication to shutting people out.
Another minute later, the wall ceased existing, and Vortigern stood before her without any stray feathers as he hurled the dissolving corpse past the boundary to The Outside with crimson hands. His lack of lungs did not impede how he breathed heavily, as mortals did after a great struggle, as per his desire to ape them.
“It tried to polymorph me.” He confessed as Icae allowed the Yame around her to surge forth like a flood of fluff to cleanse the Tide around the Warlord. With ginger strides did he extricate himself from the feasting morass, to stand at attention besides her as she watched over the Yame.
“As flattered as I am by your adherence to that chivalry of yours, refusing to leave a lady unattended at the edge of existence,“
Icae teased before she continued more seriously “I know you must reorganize your defenses in preparation for the next incursion. Go. Please. I can defend myself.”
Clutching the hilt of the sword now sheathed at his hip, Vortigern shook his head. “Irrelevant. You are too valuable to risk. It cannot be permitted for you to be placed in a position where you must defend yourself. I swore so centuries ago.” He answered with surety, as if nothing were more right. She did not respond to that.
The moments ticked by in silence. “But I did have a request.” Icae turned towards him, silently signaling for him to continue. “I need your crystal ball.” And this made her frown.
“You and Facit are perfectly capable of scrying the Source-Lock Finals yourselves.” She reminded sternly. But Vortigern would not surrender.
“But the sound is much better with your crystal ball.” He insisted. Icae blinked in annoyance at his behavior, acting as if that somehow made sense.
“The two of you will just get upset when Fyoreland loses like they did last year.” She reasoned
“They’ll win this time!” He declared. She couldn’t even muster up a response to such a blatant denial of reality. Made more so by how both of them steadfastly refused to bless Fyoreland’s team in the slightest. ‘In the interests of fairness’ they would say. Icae remained silent for a while longer before she sighed, long and loud.
“You will tell me why that sword matters so much to you. Then you and Facit can have my crystal ball for the evening.” Icae sensed her triumph as she saw the gears grind together in Vortigern’s head. Either he broke through his reclusiveness and opened up to her, or he broke through his stubbornness and learned to take things back when they were stupid.
By this point the voracious Yame came back just a bit pudgier than they were before, and for the Warlord’s sake she started to ‘walk’ the long distance across the Astral Sea back to Vortigern’s Wall. To give him time, she thought to herself, as he mutely fell in behind her like some dutiful bodyguard.
Which is what he was trying to be, she reminded herself. Despite all the other duties he had taken upon himself, he threw his everything into all of them regardless of the circumstances. It might not have been 'His' sword, but Icae chose to believe it's owner would not mind Vortigern using it.
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