Wielder of Names 6-107
Chapter: 6
“I wasted five hours of hard fighting and a hundred and fifty of my best men bringing it down. Then it exploded.”
– General Yross of the Yellow Moon Brood, on fighting angels
“I wasted five hours of hard fighting and a hundred and fifty of my best men bringing it down. Then it exploded.”
– General Yross of the Yellow Moon Brood, on fighting angels
That floating palace is looking a mite unsteady.
Also, not sure who the old man with the cane is.
Don’t be silly. That is the unending palace of of the Glorious Goddess Eternal, greatest of the seven. It Does Not Tip. Our planet is simply stepping aside in reverence.
– Old man of great faith to young man now fled
Mister Bug-eyes has been splatted.
How unfortunate.
Did white chain just punch a guy to death so hard that they caused the whole city to list…
Come now, Ingsvld, don’t lose your head.
Come now, Ingsvld, don’t lose your head.
It seems White Chain has finally figured out why the Prayer is outmoded.
It’s a nice sentiment, but no one really cared about it to begin with.
Great. Just great. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to deal with this when it happens? It’s a total mess, it’s going to take forever to get reunited, and it’ll be days before I get myself realigned just right.
On the plus side, I did not just get rendered down into warrior sauce, unlike Uktulkti there, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.
Bookkeeping has never been your strong suit.
Do not fear, Geas Knight, perhaps on my way out I will be able to retrieve your head for you.
I admire your perseverance in the face of decapitation. Most people just give up when that happens.
There are indeed worse fates, dear INGSVLD. A maid could mistake you for a discarded book of recipes and consign you to a kitchen shelf, wedged between such delightful company as How To Cook For A Demiurge And Keep Your Life and 1000 Rat Meat Recipies From The Furnace!
My sympathies, Knight. I too have spent time decapitated. Thanks to the remarkable properties of Trow physiology, I was cursed to spend some time as a ten pedes tall granite and marble head upon an admittedly pleasant beach.
It was only a matter of time before some lesser species, in the form of stunted, orange furred ape-men, came to worship the monolithic talking head, despite being completely unable to differentiate between my fruitless demands to retrieve my constituent body-parts, scattered through a crater a few miles away, and the garbled insistence of their recently dishonoured shaman who claimed my visage was a gift from their gods.
The ensuing bloody civil theological war was briefly interrupted by my comrades, Decius Marcus Tullius and Lucius Titus Flavius, having reclaimed much of my discarded body parts and restored them to a functioning vessel. While such an embarrassing situation is hardly something any sensible and thoughtful being would wish on anyone, save their truest enemies or truest friends, I do hope your rescue is far more timely and much less involved in the holy rituals of pygmies.
Hey now, Ingsvld, don’t lose your head.
Well, that certainly was a hard blow, if it’s tilting the whole palace.
Its always struck me how angels manage to seem both more and less human when they’re covered in blood.
Let’s see if I can come up with something original in regards to the soon-to-be-jokes involving Ingsvld…
White Chain knocked his block off!
…No? Knocked his book off? …Feh. Not going to stoop to puns, here.
No! Stoop to puns! They are the second lowest form of comedy and therefore nigh-universal!
The lowest and most universal of all comedy is, of course, slapstick, being violence and all.
The universal form of comedy is life. I have to stifle a chuckle just -thinking- about it.
“Aslan! Aslan! Have I made the first joke? Will everybody always be told how I made the first joke?”
“No, little friend,” said the Lion. “You have not made the first joke; you have only been the first joke.” Then everyone laughed more than ever; but the Jackdaw didn’t mind and laughed just as loud till the horse shook its head and the Jackdaw lost its balance and fell off, but remembered its wings (they were still new to it) before it reached the ground.
The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis
Generals are pompous fools who send swaths of weaklings to die in their stead; a true warrior of divine providence or absolute foolhardy courage could have stop that angel in half the time with only 236 broken bones to account for.
Yross, the magnificent bastard,, was right to say wasted when recounting his tale.
The power of fury is a false one. It is a power that reins you to its own end, rather than it to yours.
Power is not power at all that cannot be ruled.
Let’s bring the house DOWN!
Looks like the angels…
*procures tinted spectacles*
crashed the party.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYEAAAAAAH
Don’t lose your head, Ingsvld.
Once, many reincarnations ago, I was awaiting a company of mercenaries I had offended on an old bridge. The night was long and dull, so I distracted myself by catching some bream to offer at a local shrine. All of a sudden, a pike-perch came leaping out of the water and landed in the milk pail I kept my fish in. It made itself quite comfortable between the bream and ate a small roach I had kept to use as bait.
“How fortuitous for me,” said I.
“Fortuitous, nothing! It’s by my own design I’ve ended up in your bucket,” said the pike-perch, “for a terrible realisation has overcome me. All my life I’ve lived happily in this small stream, gorging myself and biting all about me even when I wasn’t hungry. Only mere minutes ago I was so terribly startled that I could no longer bear to live in this river.”
“Why so?” I asked, for I was more ignorant than I am now in those days.
“After I snapped up the so-manieth roach this night,” the pike-perch confided in me, “I realised all fish in this water have to share it with a terrible, frightening beast.”
What was the name of this beast, do you think, fellow witnesses?
A sturgeon? Perhaps a dragon-carp?
Were it only so that this were my house, that you could leave it.
The beast called I
10 Juggernaut is learned, but are they wise?
Probably my sibling Brechud-Argohsti Voul, The Virulent.
Little fucker never learned to stop shitting in rivers like a madman.
I am truly beyond words.
I have been known to occasionally drink water so I must ask; does your sibling limit themselves to rivers? Or are creeks and streams likewise imperiled?
It is moments like this that I am glad I do not require water.
Time.
I would not fertilise a barren field with the ashes of a fool like you. Begone at once.
The pike-perch itself, in a horrifying moment of self awareness.
Jhorne is observant. Horrifying, indeed, that even a true beast of the land can not bear itself to be a Beast such as is needed first to become Royalty.
Carry with you the sixth syllable always, as I do, and you will never be without home, never hungry, and never ashamed.
I compliment you on your retention of the sixth syllable and would like to ask about the mercenary company that you offended; not the nature of the offense, for that is between you, them and the multiverse.
Rather, I’d like to know of the resolution of the encounter, if one occurred.
It is hunger, dear Aeon.
This is a good guess from my cousin-Inheritor. But consider that the pike-perch is a fish also, and never hungered for its beastly ways, and also that hunger is a thing of mortals that angels pay little thought to.
The beastliness of the self is, though, as 82 is discovering, this being the point of the riddle.
That beast surely is water, for there is no greater beast than the environment you live in. It is a cage you cannot leave without dying.
Consider: a cage is not a cage unless one is fearful of breaking locks.
Shall the Imperatrix come and bathe them all in a fitful final nova of wrath? Mottom deserves no natural death, like the withering of a flower. She has unnaturally gorged herself, and so should, likewise, unnaturally resist death. Curses upon the Orange Queen. Curses upon her Swollen Throne.
Let none bear the curse of withering. The nature of Glory is to burn~
INGSVLD, please don’t
lose your head again
The Rage
Bursting through lives
Consuming all you touch
Fire quenched in blood
Desolation
Tears of molten flame
Godly sorrow
No time for healing
buried by necessity
Alas
Here we go
Angel fire burns hot as all, but there are rules.
That’s what Tony said before John killed him.
That’s what my Captain keeps telling me.
INGSVLD has been parted from his head once again, they do seem to be a precious commodity in throne these days.
A worm wonders at what fresh rot will be spilled with this giant stumble. Worms always get around to this giant or the other. Sometimes it just takes longer.
Fresh rot. What an intriguing paradox.
Rip and tear.
*slow clap*
Oh yeah. Mottom kept it floating, and now she’s finna bout to die.
Also was that a “dash through the crowd while hitting everyone” move? Because if so, I dig it. I dig it a lot.