Krahe opened an array of mouths down the length of her left arm and on every other surface of charred skin, even including her neck the side of her face, and with them she invoked the names of ancient deities and kings, those who had reigned over the world in times when great men rose and fell by the virtue of their own strength. She compared the dwellers of the city in the deep, the Chained Ones, to the likes of Gilgamesh and Solomon and Ashurbanipal, and further still to the pioneers of cybernetics and live gene-splicing who most literally carved at their own flesh in pursuit of transcending the limits of man; “Panzer” Asakura, Jack Hammer, Adam Francis Stone, even Joseph Erber and Sauer.

  Proceeding to the Angle of the North-East, she recalled the words of power that she had glimpsed those months ago, still not able to fully comprehend them, but now at least having a tenuous grasp of their shapes. Zasas. Zasas. Nasatanda. Amrakas. Crossing the Penultimate Angle to the Pinnacle of the West, she once more invoked: “Eternal darkness now surrounds me, Sunken One be my guide!”

  At once, the eastward line became as a road of molten glass, and, as she walked across it, she traced with her left arm's fingers Barzai's Sigil of Transformation and chanted: “Stepping past the precipice, into the howling vortex, let the sword wrought of my own bone and oiled by my blood carve my chosen path! Trespassing the boundaries of mortality, I invoke the accord of ancient times! ZENOXESE, PIOTH, OXAS ZAEGOS, SPIRAE NIGORSUS, ZOR'AGUHASTRA, SOLOMON, BAYAR!”

  She didn't feel the same pressure as before. The substance of the near-surface Astral Gulf felt… Thin. Almost as thin as air. The texts had spoken of this, of the influence one's own spiritual strength would have on their ability to move within the astral. Krahe just hadn't experienced it until now. As she moved and got her bearings, Krahe noticed that her astral body, too, had changed somewhat — to her eyes, it was plain as day that she had become more like Favonia, in that her hair and the tendrils wrought of her own shadow reached out towards her surroundings to better sense them and manipulate them. Perhaps this was simply the manner in which a domineering, territorial power of thaumaturgy manifested. How else would she hold a vast mass of energized thauma under her control if her spirit couldn't reach out to grasp it?

  That moment of levity didn't last, however. The very nature of her rite was akin to jumping into a lake with leaden weights around one's ankles in the hopes of reaching the bottom as quickly as possible. And so, she sank, drawn downward by the momentum of her rite, death-gripping the guidestone fragment all the way.

  The mental experience of following the guidestone’s pull was best compared to interfacing with a data-tomb through a thousand miles of century-old fibre-optic. There was a point at which the landscape blurred into colours, and past that point, colours bled together, but this was beyond velocity and distance. Krahe crossed distances of space and time untold in an instant, yet at the same time, she witnessed countless sights whose bizarrity would have surely drilled into her thoughts had she not seen stranger things spawn from the minds of true digital natives, those children born already plugged in. It almost seemed as if passing in the vicinity of something of any real magnitude slowed her down, the more substantial the point of interest, the greater the slow down.

  Shattered thrones hanging in the void, corpses the size of solar systems. A mountain of glass swords which themselves were made of glass swords, towering next to a mountain made of blood and corpses, a sea of salt roiling around them. All of these, she merely glimpsed the after-images of, imprinted into and refracted through the Oculae; never at any point did she truly see any of these things.

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  No, she didn’t slow down sufficiently and for long enough at any of these points.

  It was at an unplanned detour, at a point of turbulence, that Krahe found herself thrashed by such violent astral tides that she was torn out of the current that the guidestone had formed for her. And there, at last, she beheld the cause of that turbulence, and for the first time truly saw something in the astral gulf with her newly-developed faculties, further enhanced by the Oculae.

  Two figures, each an infinite distance from her, yet still plainly visible, for space-time was not in the astral gulf as it was upon the surface.

  Between the two figures, the larger was an insect-minotaur with the lower body of a mantis, ten black tails like enormous horsehair worms tipped with blades, and the upper body of an evoy war-morph. The creature possessed two sets of four wings wrought of green fire, one set each on its upper, humanoid and lower, mantis-like body. It possessed six arms, two of which were those of a mantis, and four carried scimitars, each with six rings in its spine and with their points split into two, forming forks, and from these forks further jets of green fire poured, extending these weapons twice over.

  Instantly, with a single glance, Krahe knew this abomination’s name.

  SHAH-SHAYTAN

  RAHU NAAMAH AL-VIKSHE

  In opposition to Rahu, “below” it, there stood or perhaps floated a shape about half its height and much smaller in total volume. Even so, it burned with its own golden flame of such intensity it almost made Rahu’s green fire seem dim by comparison, or perhaps less concentrated and far less pure, like comparing the blaze of a plasma torch to a pile of burning tires. That shape was unmistakably a work of the Twin Churches, in no small part due to the golden seven-spoked wheel that floated behind it. It was a bulky, mechanical humanoid with an animalistic golden head or perhaps helmet, which had horns pointed forward and diagonally up. The horns bent sharply so as to almost form a circle. Its chest bore another golden face, much larger and resembling a snarling, stern oni, and its legs and forearms had huge, pointed crosses of red crystal, similar to the star on her own ring, only shaped such that one point was much longer, obviously hearkening to the most basic shape formed by the imagery of Zavesh pulling his own ribcage open. The rest of the machine’s armor seemed almost utilitarian by comparison, made up of monolithic black plates and silvery interlocking plates at the joints. The influence of Zor’Aguhastra was plain to see upon it, as countless bright yellow ribbons and wrappings trailed from any and every empty space to be found, swirling in the wake caused by the leisurely spinning of the wheel at its back. Just like with Rahu, simply seeing it for a moment was enough to imbue into her mind knowledge of its identity.

  INCURSION ENTITY EXTERMINATION FLEET: AMALEQ

  BANISHMENT VEIL OUTER PERIMETER PATROL DETACHMENT: HADRIAN

  ZOR’AGUHASTRA ROYAL COURT AND SEVEN SPOKES JOINT DEFENSE FORCE

  FIVE OF SEVEN

  ULTRA-HEAVYWEIGHT HUMANOID DREADNOUGHT

  TALOS LEMURIA AL-AZIF

  It bore a halberd in hand, its handle as long as Talos was tall and its blade half that size. Somehow, despite being only a fraction of Rahu's size, it was the Twin Churches machine that clearly had the upper hand, outright overpowering the kenomic monstrosity in direct clashes. Whenever it seemed that the machine might get pushed onto the back foot, the wheel at its back sped up in its rotation ever so slightly, and the balance tipped in its favor once again.

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