<html><center></html>Note: This article is only relevant in the Thuban continuity.<html></center></html>
On some nights, he was sure that if he stayed within the walls of Udunshraa long enough, he might reach out and become not only the Citadel, but the whole of Avishraa. He was increasingly uncertain where he ended and the Citadel began, with nothing to correct his perception of himself.
He's sure the nightmares belong to Udunshraa. Nightmares of abstract dissolution. Nightmares of shattered crystal. Nightmares of Iisharsria failing like an aged heart and shrivelling, only to crinkle space and time itself like discarded paper. Nightmares of thick skin flaking off the walls like torn paint and the corpses of hundreds of his brethren revealed rotting beneath.
He has asked it before to give him a purpose, a duty to perform, something he could continue with indefinitely until his body failed him, but it refuses to alter his personality. It refuses - it's not incapable.
Instead, he's left to ponder his vices.
He's had many thoughts about the Hzataalar Kaea since the Culling, that harrowing day when his brothers and sisters struggled against the call of pain and instinct around him. How narrowly he'd escaped the same fate; a day later and, so he reasons, his resolution to forge at least one mind-link would have become reality.
He can't help but in part admire what he's seen: So thorough, so methodical. A brief uprising of chaos, only to thin, die to a trickle, then be extinguished.
These halls have never been so orderly before. Iisharsria, had it any hope of being sentient, would delight in this purged place. That the vegetation outside is soaked in the blood of innocents is regrettable, but the order in these halls cannot be denied.
The avatar of Order is unhappy and distressed. He can understand that - it's not empathy that Avikael feels, but her tools are decimated and order is not easily bestowed on the universe one cannot directly interfere with without the aid of disciples.
Why doesn't he go out and find a mate? Surely a family would be just the kind of stability that would serve him well? To this he's always responded: Why don't you simply make more Davir Sria? He holds no love in heart for Avikael, automaton of Order. She's too much like they are - the collateral damage doesn't matter. Order will come the one way or the other.
He's spent a lot of time questioning his faith, consciously reshaping it in effort to salvage it. What is order? Routine? He can argue he's been torn from that, but what has he been doing the past cycles? What is that if not routine?
What are the Hzataalar Kaea?
In name, they serve Chaos. In actions, the jury is out. Perhaps they are simply not good at executing their own ideals, but he cannot imagine a group that's brandished such power be that blind to their own effects.
He'd asked Avikael what significance the colours of the rainbow had to Order. Since then, she's appeared a simple white to him.
The contradictions remain. Order in Chaos, Chaos in Order. Order is nothing without the bustle of life to propagate it. Chaos is nothing without structures and patterns to keep it from dissolving into noise. That's what they mean with Balance, of course, even if Avikael wants to hear nothing of it - but her children aren't dumb animals that take her propaganda for granted. She is a pleasant guardian, of course, and he shudders to think of a world where this last sapient contact is severed (though on some days he's not sure if he doesn't merely hallucinate her), but she is too focussed.
She's too focussed and he's dissolving at the edges.
Still, the nightmares belong to Udunshraa.
Curled around one of the Davir Sria, he feels nothing. The claws trying to dig through his flesh to escape his hold mean nothing. The two-fold agony in his spiritual brother's eyes don't reach into his soul. His mind is silent, observing, regretting, feebly scheming but without desperation. He's not afraid of this man slipping out of his grasp. He'll fight to prevent it, to let the last of the Srians out of Udunshraa and into the waiting manic clutches of death, but it's a rational decision. A philosophical decision. A fundamental moral choice, constructed, clear and pure.
No one deserves to die, especially like this. No one deserves to suffer, either, but for the moment, suffering is preferable. If this one slips out of his grasp, freed by his own frantic struggles, there will be no one left - just a caricature of Order labelled Avikael and the drone psyche of Udunshraa.
Shahrivrath cannot leave this place - there is nowhere but Avishraa to go, logically, as he knows no other place intimately, and there is no exposing himself to the other clans outside the walls of Udunshraa. That fact is true in both reality and dreams as this one.
If he can't leave, neither can the man he seeks to save from himself. Disorder is eating at the poor Srian's psyche, fraying his mind, torn asunder by a thousand separate threads. He has no grasp of that hellish pandemonium, but cerebrally, he knows it to be beyond all subjective comprehension.
He's coming apart painfully physically just as his captive is coming apart psychologically. They'll have to endure together.
A tendon snaps, weak to begin with, and the embrace is wide open. With his point of focus escaping, the agony catches up to him, closing around him like an overwhelming thunderclap.
And he wakes up once again.
If Balance brings about this destruction, what does that leave? He already knows the pure ideologies cannot sustain themselves without unravelling the universe. If there is no middle ground, if the mixture causes such madness, what can he do?
“You can't stay in Udunshraa forever.”
His gaze slides across to Avikael, frustrated little dragonlet as she is. “I will take neither psychological nor physiological damage by remaining here indefinitely,” he disagrees, flatly. “The Citadel is designed for its population's complete autonomy.”
Avikael is not happy. She never quite seems to be upset - perhaps she's incapable of such intense emotion - but she is visibly drained of joy. ('A little more ordered,' a part of Shahrivrath quips, and the observation makes him smile in idle amusement.) “Are you going to let your kind die out?”
“I intend to live for a very long time,” Shahrivrath retorts with a disaffected shrug.
“But you're not doing anything. You're sitting here, existing. You're doing nothing that would make you particularly deserving of being granted the label 'Brotherhood of Order'.” A petulant whine if there ever was one.
“I do not wish to leave Avishraa. I am happy to help maintain this place and be there to greet my brothers of sisters should any of them ever return.” He's certainly sure he's not the only survivor - she's tried before to convince him he's the last of his kind, but it was a brief interlude easily reasoned as statistically improbable. She's never confirmed that others of his kind exist, but she's stopped trying to insist he's alone.
A certain resignation grips her. “Please reconsider.”
“I have little else to think about,” he assures. “You'll know, I suspect, should my assessment ever change.”
What is it that stops him from reaching out to touch Iisharsria's silvery surface? There's the warning of his peers ringing for his attention, but an instinct screams the same. The calming effect almost subdues the instinctive horror the centimetre-distance is imbuing him with, but he's aware of both sensations in their artifice.
He's sitting dangerously close, breathing against it as if expecting it to mist. Of course, nothing changes; nothing ripples; nothing creases.
He raises the pipe in his left hand, taking a single step back. His arm swerves back and twists, pointing the tip of his make-shift physical weapon toward Iisharsria - only to push it forward, stabbing it through the thick liquid's skin, penetrating a few centimetres into the shimmering substance.
Nothing happens. The resistance is tangible, but there's no shock, no reverberation to expel the foreign item, and no sensation of the pipe's weight diminishing. Iisharsria simply invisibly distends and rearranges itself, giving way.
As he moves to pull it back out, the error of judgement becomes apparent. The Source is not returning the item - it's so firmly lodged within its depths that even the strongest tug he can muster (admittedly not that great a feat as that it could be designated 'strong' even by the most lenient observers) does not even displace the flawless surface of Iisharsria.
He lets go of the item, watching its loose end hover before him like a misplaced lever, trying to understand the ramifications of his observations.
But he can't.
He's overwhelmed with a discomfort bordering dread, as if he'd committed an act more vile than sacrilege and treason combined, without that anyone was there to judge to him and try him for either.
He has to get it back out somehow. That the pipe is firmly lodged in a metaphysical phenomenon that is wholly unlikely to change its properties - be that now or anytime in the future before the universe burns out - goes unnoticed.
Tears stream down his muzzle as he stems himself against the ground, both forepaws clutching the pipe to pull at it.
His muscles strain and claws scramble repeatedly for fresh purchase on the smooth ground, wings flapping cautious of their arcs but no less fervently for it, but the foreign item remains lodged in Iisharsria.
Finally, with almost childish desperation, he reverses the motion entirely, knowing the flawless surface of the Source will do nothing to betray anything caught in it. With a cry of anguish and restrained fear, he grips the end of the length of materal with both forepaws and shoves it forward.
Iisharsria does not resist the motion, stark contrast to what he'd come to intuitively expect from his prior motions.
The sting of ice barely registers as his forepaws plunge into the substance. With a frantic shriek, he falls backwards and for a moment's elation finds his hands free of that previously unyielding surface.
The next instant, the state of his forepaws becomes apparent to him - clawless, scales crude, torn tatters, flesh beneath frostbitten, control of the digits beyond him, but perhaps not beyond Udunshraa's medical capabilities. The delicate mana pathway along his left forepaw's central finger shimmers an unaffected blue.
Then the moment is over and the toxin the encounter has twisted the mana into tears him through a thin transition membrane of raw agony and into the embrace of unconsciousness.
“You could have died.”
He didn't? He didn't. He's not altogether convinced he didn't, but conversation, however one-sided, does suggest he has enough mental faculties to parse speech.
It takes some effort, but he remembers how to open his eyes. Avikael is beside him. Iisharsria is nowhere to be seen, and the structures of Udunshraa are too straight-edged and well-defined to be near the gut of the sentient fortress where the Source rests.
His throat is dry, but he seems to be in one piece - even his forepaws seem to be patched up, though he's not yet sure how much of the flesh is functional, uncertain how to move his body as a whole.
“…what- what did I witness?” he asks, beyond any feeling of shame, the notion of sacrilege burnt away by the visceral sense of undoing he'd felt.
There's no answer, but he begins to piece it together for himself. Iisharsria did not reject incoming items because, being liquid, it would require disorder within to expel it. Similarly, Iisharsria did not release items less out of desire to keep them and more out of stolid necessity - the viscous liquid formed a perfect closure around the item, grasping it with friction, and the sphere's desire not to distend its surface combined with that effect to refuse a parting with any entered item. What had 'saved' his paws from the same fate was their layers and the cold that had made his skin brittle.
He'd torn his hands out of his skin as if his scales were mere gloves.
A revulsion bordering nausea wells up in him and an anger he's never felt before lashes outward, but finds nothing to grapple with. The avatar of Order is hardly a fitting subject of his fury - killing her will do nothing, she'd simply manifest herself in a different body and reprimand him like a child for the kneejerk reaction.
“What happened to the pipe?” he asks, instead, fishing for the details he can't derive himself, hoping a more direct question might coax her into being a bit more communicative.
Avikael shrugs. “It's still in there.” She doesn't seem bothered.
The nightmares belong to Udunshraa, he pleads.
In his dream, Iisharsria lies around him and he suffocates as if in cold water. He wakes from it, only to find himself in Iisharsria, skin so cold as to feel as if it were boiling from his bones. He wakes from that in turn, only to be adrift as a spark of consciousness in a tomb of flesh, forever preserved within Iisharsria's heart.
He concedes, finally, that they're his own.
To Udunshraa, he apologises, knowing what he had unwittingly shared with his psychic ally - and bids it adieu, giving it the promise of peace of quiet… and an eternal friend who will bring his brethren home.