Revision as of 08:03, 25 February 2006

Chapter Seven: the Grail Quest

First Drafts

Hlaren lounged on a divan beneath an acid-green sun. A creature of claws and valves fed him grapes. Another reached into his muscular fibres and painstakingly replaced them with spidersilk.

Hlaren plunged his hand into the substructure of the world and felt the natures and dharmas of the Demon City pluck at his fingertips. How simple the structure of the world seemed now! When before he had stuggled to understand even the simplest patterns of the seasons, or of karma or love, now that he could see the fundamental flows of Essence and Fate, it was all so transparent! And how foolish of him to have believed his former world ended in only three dimensions!

The tainted world. He cold feel it more and more acutely every time his extended senses brushed against his former home. A whining resonance, like some once great note now turned to horror and disharmony. How had he ever lived there?

***

Another day:

Today, declared their Lord. Today you will be tested. Come, all.

They came, and stood in the courtyard before the great brass citadel. Their Lord removed all the limits between their senses and the true nature of the world.

Ten out of ten men would have been lost to insanity in an instant. The world battered against the fortress of Hlaren's will and bounced off. It flowed through the halls of his soul and did not touch him. He laughed into the face of the storm. He faced all the madness and terror of the greater universe and was unharmed, because he was strong... no, he realised. Because he was righteous. All that could be found in Hell and Earth and the vast unformed pleroma failed before a righteous will.

He looked around at the forty-nine fellow exalts in the courtyard. None trembled, none had fallen.

We can do it he realised. He felt a great surge of love for his fellows. We can rescue the world. Our blessed brotherhood. The redeemers of the earth.

Brother Redoran, with forced casualness, expressed a blasphemy to Hlaren. Hlaren flushed. But the Yozi express and embody absolute moral authority! You surely must have felt so, as I did? Redoran agreed. When I look unto them, I see the truest expression of our universe. A moral schema that can be denied or fled from but never refuted, because it is logically complete and encompassing all things. And yet, more and more frequently I ask myself... Is following infallible moral truth the same as being a just man? Hlaren frowned. The two statements are equivalent, brother Redoran.

What do you remember of your life before your second breath? Hlaren searched his memory... recalled only a blur of confusion and misapplied emotion. I recall little... it was obliterated, I think, by the vaster experiences of my new life, as a child's memories are obliterated by the adult's. I feel only a sense of pity at my former ineffectuality.' Redoran nodded. 'It is the same with myself.

***

Hlaren woke. The substance of the world still reverberated like a gong. Hlaren ran to the common hall. Space there had been violently folded through a dozen dimensions, at some points torn and leaking corrosive chaos. Brother Morag Tong had been broken into many pieces; he was still alive. Brother Redoran, his lips gasped. And Brother Ellis and Sister Fire-Eyes. They attacked me without warning. We fought. As they left my broken body, Redoran said to me: "Listen, and repeat: Our Lords are ill. Our grail is corrupted and our Lords deny us the quest to restore it. Unless and until the fundamental truth of the Lords can be remade, we also are as corrupted as the world we ache to redeem. I must do this. Do not seek me. I will love you forever, Dear Brother Hlaren."

The Brotherhood is broken. Hlaren realised. He felt sick. Our noble quest... NO! He plucked Morag Tong's quadripartite soul from his remains and placed it in a pillar, where it could create itself a new body. He summoned arms and armour from a nimbus of green flame. He wrenched opened a portal to a hill under an alien yellow sun. I must seek him, he said. I must slay him. I must restore the honour of our Noble Brotherhood. Fare thee well, Brother Morag Tong. Carry forward the good fight.

The portal closed behind him.

Talk

Don't put anything in the first big header. Suggest and hash out topics here, and put first drafts under the First Drafts header, which will get moved to the "actual actual text" (under the first big header) when consensus maintains that it's ready to do so. --MUrielw