Chapter 257: Personhood
Otto was not a bad person. Mercury felt the need to remind himself of that fact.
The man was gentle, almost all the time. Sometimes, he was unaware of his strength, but almost all the time, he held back. He moved slowly, just to make sure he did not break anything. He never ran, never yelled, never hit things. He opened doors as if handling a delicate butterfly.
All of that is to say… seeing it drop away was terrifying.
When Otto moved, Mercury saw that there was no elegance behind it. When the layers of restraint peeled away, Otto moved according to one law, and one law only: Violence. The earth cracked, the air shattered, space crumpled and fractured around him. Where once there had been a man, all that pretense of humanity bled away. There was none of that within Otto.
All that was left was brutality.
He crashed into the skinstealers like a meteor. Bodies were irreversibly changed by the impact. Like watching a car crash, the skinstealers crumpled. Skin rippled, folded, tore and ripped at the seams. Their stolen visages ruptured, revealing muscle and splattering blood through the air.
A mix of crimson liquid and scarlet haze spread. Otto lashed out with a combo of punches so fast that they splattered bodies by the sheer pressure waves that spread through the air. Trees broke from the aftereffects, toppling over, splinters flying to join droplets of red. Otto's fists blurred, and the world roared and tore.
Lightning sprawled from the cracks that covered his skin, surging through the air, latching onto targets. And yet, they didn't carve scars or burns into them. Anyone struck by the lightning simply exploded. Every droplet of blood in bodies boiled within a moment, expanding, rupturing vessels, tearing muscles, ripping bodies apart into sprays of viscera.
And then, Otto was somewhere else already.
As if Iris was a maestro, directing an opera, anyone she pointed at simply splattered. Blood sprayed, skin flayed, and the thieves of Envy died. Within a moment, though, the monsters adjusted. They warped themselves to survive the punches, stretching thin into nonhuman shapes, returning to the amalgamous state that they originated in. Grass was covered in stretched, unhurt bodies, and for a moment, they began to crawl away.
Golden, wrathful flames tore through the air, incinerating them.
Lucia stood, holding a golden bow, made from her own fire. Wrath bubbled so bright around her she was covered in a sheen of heat. Golden fire dripped from her eyes like tears, streaming down to wreathe her hands in spiralling gauntlets of iridescent power. Her bow was far taller than her, an enormous thing where one end rested just above the ground and the other quite a bit above her head.
Flaming arrows lit up the night, turning into a stream of violent gold when shot, tearing through the air and burning the avatars. Their skin seared and bubbled and boiled away. Bodies burnt, and the fire stuck to them, even if they tried to reform. It simply consumed more and more flesh, turning it to smoke.
But, despite all of that brutality and violence and fire, the skinstealers stirred. Broken bodies reform. Blood stopped spraying in the air. It paused, rebounded, and coalesced back into semi-human shapes. Blank, expressionless faces, smooth and featureless, stared onward. They turned, grew more limbs, and attempted to run.
Envy was not brave, after all. They were devious thieves, cowards who took what was never theirs. They did not try to fight, but they healed quickly, and were hard to keep down. Except, there was one thing stopping them.
Zyl sprouted wings. He hovered above the lake. And when flesh reformed, blood wove into strings of essence, heat rose.
A tyrant's crown sprouted above Zyl's head.
And yet, nothing burnt.
The forest steamed, covered in
They burnt.
Skin incinerated, golden flames fed by the heat. Otto broke them, Lucia set them aflame, and Zyl cut off all avenues of escape. Fire sprouted like flowers, like spores that attached to any wound dealt, that festered and grew and would never be extinguished.
And Envy burnt. They burnt and burnt and burnt until their regeneration stopped. They broke and broke and broke until there was nothing left to break. Until each skin they had taken disintegrated, until each face they had stolen was turned to ash and cinders. Until the grey of the corpses was washed away by the falling rain, sloughing off the world like the meaningless dirt it was.
There was no banter. No words exchanged. There was a simple decision, and Mercury decided that the comfort of his friend was more important to him than the lives of killers. Perhaps, putting them in jail and rehabilitating them would have been more ethical. Offering to change them at their core, perhaps. But then, he saw it, too.
With each death, their face broke and fractured, and a new one slid into place. With each death. And some of them took a hundred killings to finally fade.
They laid on the ground, flickering as skin disintegrated and reformed and disintegrated again. Flickering through face after face after face. Dozens of them. Children's faces. And they did it without repent, without remorse. No, he didn't feel bad. Mercury killed them and didn't feel bad in the slightest.
All he felt was a faint grief at the loss. The world was full of big and small tragedies, and he was preventing future tragedies with a small one now. Perhaps that was unfair, perhaps that was unethical, and yet… he did not mind too much. Because he looked at Iris and saw tears stream down her face, saw her shaking slowing and subsiding, saw the way that she looked on at the death.
He watched as she stabbed her knife through eyes into faceless facsimiles of humans, tearing through skin and bone and brainmatter. Sacks of meat were carved by her blade, and she simply looked relieved. Not happy, not bloodthirsty, just pleased to finally, finally put that chapter of her life behind her.
Blood spilled, dousing the world, then rain fell, cleaning it all away. Red and gray, blood and ash, returned to nothing as the dirt sloughed off. Zyl's heat was reabsorbed, Lucia lowered her hands and the bow disappeared, fire streaming back into her skin, and Otto calmed himself, his heartbeat quieting until it went from world shaking war-drum to a quiet thumping.
When the rain subsided, about a third of the skinstealers were dead. The remaining ones shifted uncomfortably, standing a little further back. But, at the same time, they needed this, to some degree. They needed to face it if they wanted to change.
"Anyone else?" Lucia asked, turning to Iris.
The assassin took a long moment, looking over everyone, then shook her head. She wiped her bloodstained dagger on the clean grass. "No," she said, sheathing the weapon. Then, she wrapped Lucia in a hug. "Thank you, my love. Thank you, my friends."
"Anytime," Otto said, smiling faintly, his fangs poking his upper lip a little.
Mercury just replied with a nod, instead focusing on the agents of Envy that were still there. Despite the brutality, they had not fled. They just… waited. A little awkwardly and a little fearfully, but they waited nonetheless.
"What now?" one of them asked, after a while. It was in the shape of a young woman, with long, brunette hair, spiralling down the front of her chest, above the dark robes they all wore. "What will you do to the rest of us?"
With a small shrug, Mercury replied, "I haven't quite figured that out yet." Which was the truth. He'd need to unravel them and see what happened. What bound these creatures to envy? Could he sever those ties? The answer seemed likely to be yes, but there was always some chance to go wrong.
The skinstealer hissed. "You make promises you can hardly keep, then, mortal."
At that, Mercury snickered. "No, no. I can keep it alright. I'm pretty sure I can, at least," he said, and it was the
Was that really still an accurate designation to him? He certainly didn't feel very mortal. But then again, he was a natural inhabitant of the mortal realm. The prime plane of Chronagen. The fae realms, and even the minor realm of the sins, lie the ashen plains or the steel forest of wrath, all of them were less solid than the mortal plane.
Rules stretched and flickered, there. One's will was more important than anything else. It was easily apparent in one simple thing: Mercury could take those worlds apart. He could undo their fraying threads and steal them to solidify and expand his own dreamscape. But the mortal realm was different from that,
Somehow, it was still untouchable to him. He could see the gaps, the places where reality frayed and ended, but he could not pull on them. The void couldn't reach in properly. Simply because this place was so much more ordinary than the fae realms. There was some inherent defense in having millions of people who perceived the world in a stable way. The inhabitants of Chronagen didn't think their world could break, so why should it?
This did mean that interfacing with less densely woven patches of existence could cause some troublesome circumstances. The realms of sin, for example, stole lives and turned the world frail. The fae realms manifested at spots where reality grew thin, unseen places that few mortals knew about. But while the fae realms were minor portals, often two ways, the sins were like gaping wounds, driven by the expansionist madness of their world cores.
In that, there was the difference. The fae were erratic and unpredictable, but Mercury had felt comfortable changing their origin, and Titania had been willing to cooperate. They simply wanted their realm alive, and Mercury had been able to give them that. The sins, on the other hand…
He could not see himself making Wrath into something that didn't need to kill. The sins came first, the realms second, he thought. The fact that there was a realm of Wrath was a testament to how prevalent the emotion was, how often it consumed people, and spread like a wildfire.
And he ended it.
Perhaps there was a better way, somewhere out there. Perhaps everyone and everything was redeemable. He thought, in some ways, he did give wrath a second chance. The strings of reality that its forest and colosseum were made from now suffused his dreamscape, after all. His inner world, where Kim grew a garden, where Whisperstar flitted through the sky, where Arber's avatar grew.
It was, perhaps, closer to recycling than redemption, but maybe that was enough. He hoped so.
Mercury shook his head, dropping the troublesome line of thought. Instead, he focused on the agents of Envy again, looking them up and down. He smiled, in what he hoped was a reasonably friendly type of way. "Any volunteers?" he asked.
Zyl tapped him on the shoulder. "Did you get an intimidation skill for that?"
The mopaaw tilted his head. "Well, my current 'reality surgery' type skill did originate from
"Oh," the dragon said, surprised. "Well, uh, my joke fell flat, but what I was trying to say is that you're scaring them, Mercury."
"Huh?" the mopaaw asked, scanning over the skinstealers. And, indeed, they'd stepped back again. Oh dang it, he was at it again! "No, no, you'll be okay. Uh, let me explain. I can use a skill to take a look and alter someone's underlying nature. This works better the less… realistic someone is. It doesn't work well at all on average humans or elves, but against beings from another realm entirely? It lets me alter them."
He paused, letting that sink in for a moment. "Now, there is a reason I tell you this, and that is trust. I promise, as an oath, that I will not alter any of the parts of you that constitute your personality or sense of self. My only intention is to attempt to snap your connection to Envy. Whether that is as simple as cutting a line, or means that I need to make more changes… I don't know. Until then, I can simply promise to be as uninvasive as possible, but there may be differences. You may be a different person after this - same as with any big life event, I like to think. But it is up to you."
And then, he waited. The words rang across the clear lake, the rain having long since washed away the blood from it. He waited as the thieves shifted in thought. As they came to consider and make their own decisions. Until, eventually, the first answer came.
"I want to change," the woman with brunette hair whispered. She stepped forward, a tiny motion, at first, then a full step. She looked at Mercury, in the eyes, and repeated it loudly. "I want to change!" she said. "Let me change. If this means I become something else, so be it. I want to be… human. Something close to it. I do not want to hate anymore, I do not want to tear off faces, I don't want-"
Her voice cracked. Mercury nodded, slowly, and gave Iris another look. Despite her quivering eyes, she swallowed dryly and then nodded at him. Mercury nodded back. If she was okay with it, then that was good. He turned to the skinstealer. "What is your name?" he asked.
She flinched. "I only have stolen ones," she admitted. Mercury smiled, faintly. "Then pick one. Pick who you want to be."
"Huh?" she asked.
"Customs on names are different in many places," Mercury said, "but in the end, they are about your identity. My parents gave me a name once, and it was not Mercury. But I am not that person anymore. He's a part of my past, and I respect him as a step in the journey of who I am now, but I do not use that name. Lots of people pick their own names as a part of big steps in life."
There was a long silence from the woman then. "How… do I pick a name?" she asked.
"Is simple," Otto said. "You think of name, think of thing, and then be happy. I am Otto. It is me. It is nice."
"Common naming conventions are profession related, or metaphorical related. Names of weather phenomena are common, for example. Professions are usually surnames," Zyl added. "There are lists of them, but none of us took any here."
"I could, reasonably, try to have the system fetch some, to be fair," Mercury suggested.
But the woman shook her head. "No, that won't be necessary," she said, looking at the sky. "I think… Yes. Please call me Aurora."
Mercury smiled. "The good news is that I can, in fact, write that name into your existence, which will also update it on your status sheet. Would you want that?"
"Yes," she replied, stepping forward again. "Please do."
The mopaaw nodded, smiled a little, and walked around the lake to meet her on the other side. "Alright, Aurora, please sit down. This may feel a little weird," he said. The woman nodded, seating herself on the wet grass, uncaring about the stains on her robes. She crossed her legs, then closed her eyes.
"Ready?" Mercury asked.
"Ready."
With that last affirmation, Mercury focused. His mind split five ways, the entire weight of his
Dreamy threads, shimmering a pale, iridescent colour spilled out of the woman. The world seemed to halt as she warped and unfolded, like a cube being halved over and over and over again. Fundamental building blocks of what made a person, arranged into an immensely complex, interweaving tapestry of strings.
Each thing that had ever happened to her left a mark. Each identity, each face she'd ever worn was yet another testament of her life. There were almost separate sections in the thread that constituted the woman, showing each mask she'd worn, each face she'd stolen. There was a horrid, deep undertone of desire.
Seeing the joy of others and wanting to take it away from them. Wanting to take it for herself. An underlying nature that was so human, and yet so alien. Jealousy truly was an insidious emotion, because despite understanding her own feelings and knowing they existed, the woman felt guilt at them.
She hated herself for feeling that envy, but that did not matter to her nature. Despite the loathing, the emotion stayed, festering and unaddressed. Restrained and bottled up until there was nowhere for it to go, and it exploded outwards. Until there was another victim.
It was a tragedy. The fact that she had a need to sustain herself off of the lives, off the faces of others. There was some attempt to pick people who deserved it when the hunger became overwhelming, but the envy rarely targeted the wretched. She hungered for others' happiness, a desperate need to claim that kind of thing.
To have a family. To live a life full of friends. To find joys. And she had to take them from others.
Mercury shifted a block. He twisted that spiral of emotion, that desperate need in on itself. The strings twirled and rearranged with the motion, ringing out in soft tones as though playing a harp. The nature of the tapestry, of the woven painting that was to be Aurora, changed and moved.
Writhing and spinning like a den of snakes, Mercury observed. He dug for the origin of Envy, not its consequences. Ruined lives were placed aside. Briefly, he thought that he was doing it again. That he was absolving a killer. But then, he looked at her guilt, guilt that he would not take away, and he decided that it was her burden to bear, her burden to be good and kind.
All he needed to do was give her the option.
So he sifted through threads and little knots, undoing contradictions, tracing his minds along that web of strings like a maze, unveiling hidden sections, secrets that the skinstealer had not wanted to share and that he would take to his grave. He dug and dug and dug, until he found the root of it all.
At the very core of that envy of hers there was a festering core. It was deeply anchored within the centre of her being, a deciding factor in its nature, in deciding that she was a skinstealer, a creature of sin, of Envy. It was a truth that there was no running from, no escaping from, and almost no battling against.
It was the original sin that had been committed and birthed her. Envy spewed out skinstealers because people were envious. That was all. She was born from jealous humans and a manifestation of their unspoken desires. But that was not all she was.
The center of one's existence was important, sure. But it could also be changed. Not always entirely by oneself. Sometimes there was help needed in how to approach a problem. Sometimes, that help was a magical cat with the ability to very directly change these things, other times it was in self-reflection and a lot of work with the assistance of professionals.
Right now, though, Mercury was in front of a problem he could solve.
So he tore at it with that terrific Skill, trying to invert it.
Envy screeched, and howled and fought. It tore at Mercury, trying to infest him, but the power of infinity burned it away. When it tried to make him jealous of the skinstealer, prompting him to steal her face, it was simply washed away on his
Luckily, Mercury was very resistant to those kinds of attacks. He burned and fought and
One by one, its avenues of flight were cut off. Thread after infected thread broke and cut and tore. Some of Mercury's minds took those parts, reattached them, weaving them into a complete tapestry that isolated Envy, that cut it out.
And as the anchoring, the support of a whole person faded, the core of Envy cracked. It twisted, a single pinprick hole on its surface that rippled and spread, sucking in the dark green sin and twisting it into an opposite. Bright, radiant, generosity. The desire to give and give and give everything one had.
[
That, too, was wrong.
Mercury looked at the sphere of self-sacrifice and discarded it.
He could have done that with Envy too, but twisting it like this forced the knot to fight back, to try and infest whatever it could. Envy did not fade easily. It self propagated, it latched onto, it infested. He did not want to simply leave those kinds of threads hanging, hoping it would go well.
This generosity, though… When asked to disappear, it simply replied with excitement. If it pleased Mercury, it would destroy itself without hesitation. And so, the inverted, twisted Envy disintegrated before his eyes. Particles of white and blue and green sprawled out.
Those, Mercury caught. One of his minds swept them all up, and transformed them into new
Mercury wove. He took those strings and made them into her name. Aurora, constructed from sea-blue and emerald-green curtains hanging in the night sky. Like a new breath after an age of suffering. He shifted her tapestry, and wove that new truth in. There were some complications, some room needing to be made, so he had to pull a few of the identities closer together.
The stolen faces would melt together a little. It was an imperfect job, but perhaps suitable. Perfection was unattainable, anyway, and maybe, this would allow her more of a new beginning. He wove, and then double, triple checked the ethereal tapestry. The building blocks that made a person, the hundreds of emotions.
Sinister and good, intrusive thoughts and kind gestures, even cruel impulses… he left all of those well alone. They were fine. No one was kind all the time. Mercury could not take away viciousness from someone after murdering two dozen people because his friend had asked him to.
Instead, he just made sure. He reaffirmed himself that it was okay, and then, with a nod, he spooled the thread of existence back onto its axel. Aurora's personality and personhood was woven back together, into tiny packets and then larger ones, lengths of string that folded in on themselves to become a maze so dense it was no different from a cube, or maybe a sphere.
Then, he placed it back into her chest, and watched her open her eyes.
The face was different now. Her brunette hair had turned lighter, the features of her face a bit rounder, an amalgam of the faces she'd worn. And her eyes were blue-green, shimmering with a distant light. Disorientated, Aurora blinked. "Huh," she said, with a voice that was not quite the same. "This is… different."
Mercury waited.
Slowly, ever so slowly, a smile spread across her face. "Different, but… okay. Things are okay. I do not mind who I am? I think this me that I have become… perhaps we can be friends? I hope so." She rose from the ground, then gave Mercury a bow. "Thank you," she said. "I don't fully understand everything yet - who I am, who I will be, but thank you." Then she turned to the other skinstealers.
"The envy is gone."
The words rippled through the crowd, and soon, another stepped forward. "Me next!" a young man asked. "I want to be different, too!"
[
And Mercury set about doing more work.