Summary: In an antique land at the border of the Apocalypse, Emiya journeys to seek the Sword of Beginnings. The vectors toward the Land of Steel align, and the stage for a final confrontation is set. A 'crossover' of FSN and the general Type-Moon setting, with use of the short novel, Notes. An addendum to Ol'Velsper's Eureka.
Fragments
o: Prologue - Khoros <-- (This Post)
I: Coins for the Ferryman <-- (This Post)
4: By the Root of the Blessing
6: Agartha et Duat
8: Whitechapel, 1888
Io: Prometheus Unbound
I2: In the Court of the Cups
I5: Jormungandr
I6: Cutting and Binding
I7: Epilogue I of 2 - Diamonds & Clubs
Concordance
I: Notes & Timeline
2: Alchemy & Thaumaturgy
3: Geography & the End of Days
4: The Things That Remain After the End
5: Magic & the Nature of Reality
O // Khoros
(age of steel common) ref Y.000000@2955
It was in the abeyance of the planet's conceptual defenses that the desolation truly began.
The immediate cause was the appearance of the atmospheric toxin known as 'grain' -- a class of miniscule particles bearing substantial mass, but no discernible molecular or atomic identity. Though chemically inert, their very presence in an environment propagated structural damage to the cells of living organisms by mechanical action.
Deprived of a unifying consciousness, the ecosphere managed to persist for a time -- but as the average air saturation at sea level rose to exceed 1,999 units per cubic meter, a practical means of halting the onslaught of desertification ceased to exist. Topsoil biomatter was by the poison from the skies reduced to so much dust, and viable farmland gradually degraded past the point of salvage.
This was the setting in which the Great War was fought.
The conflict was, in essence, one of selection: Liberated from enforced servitude by their archetype and leader, the post-human slave races consolidated in alignment against humanity, vying for the extermination of their former masters in a zero-sum competition to secure access to dwindling resources.
Their advantage lay ultimately not in their superior survivability; nor in the fact that humanity could match their innate functional endowments only by aid of technology -- it lay in their capacity to synchronize autoevolution across members of a given genotype, rendering obsolete the traditional advance of a species by death and procreation and genetic diversity.
In the first place, it was not a war that 'humanity' could have won. The folk of the era strived by every means to see their progeny to the future, but absent of the supplies and stability to safely relocate off the planet, the only course was to fight -- and the passage of time came to demonstrate that light-based weaponry and other conventional military armaments simply weren't enough. Any advances in technology could be outmatched in a number of weeks, and the post-humans were more than capable of producing their own innovations.
Faced with the near-certainty of extinction, the scientists of the late twenty-ninth century turned to the possibility of breaking the oldest taboo of genetic engineering -- supplanting the human genome with an artificial creation.
The time for baseless pride was over, they argued. Mimicking the biological shifts that had permitted life to survive the Oxygen Catastrophe of the Precambrian era, 'grain' could be nullified as a toxin with relatively few genetic modifications; and physiologically inherent combat capabilities on par with the post-humans weren't beyond imagination. Given a choice between death and genomic eradication, the latter would at least grant the children of humanity a chance at survival. This was the only remaining salvation that the scientists could envision.
The leaders of men considered the proposition at length, and by their grudging agreement, the race of the Liners were eventually allowed to come into existence -- forging by their feats the turn of the tide of war, and the dawn of what came to be called the Age of Steel. Such was the empirical reality that concluded the twilight of man, lived and cast by generations of bloodshed and objective certainty; a 'historical truth.'
Behind the stage of the known histories, however, a very different story could be told:
Somewhere in the deserts at the cradle of civilization, a murder was committed. A sacrifice was made to the oldest existing demiurgos.
Always, the bones would remember.
~// Chapter Separator //~
i // Where Flowers Are Born
X.??????@198X
The woods were dark and deep, and already he'd emptied the final clip to his silenced Smith & Wesson 422. Leaning his back against the base of a tree, he sighed softly.
The assignment-specific orders he'd received stipulated that he was to exhibit his skills as minimally as possible -- but unexpectedly, tonight's opposition was of sufficient prominence that 'possibility' itself was beginning to run short. Stowing the semi-automatic in his shoulder holster, he drew a recently-acquired CRK Mark IV from a sheath on his leg.
'Let it run until he breaks this, I guess,' he thought.
Given the enemy's competence in frontal engagement, it was rather fortuitous that his presence suppression wasn't similarly immaculate. The gaping 'absence' that the man exuded was conspicuous; and one could locate him merely by taking note of the air displacement that he left in the slight breeze.
From behind the tree, there was a clear sensation of approach: Three steps; two steps; one step -- pause.
'He's found me again?'
Efforts at presence manipulation subsided, and from within the tree, there crackled the noise of splitting wood. As the mass of the foliage tilted and descended to the earth, dagger met dagger with metallic sparks some ten meters away.
Crossing the edge of the one-piece survival knife was an ornamental khanjar never intended for practical use. Its wielder, a bearded, overweight Arabic man, glared coldly.
"I don't know who you are," he said, "but so as the blessing of Djibril extends, my protection of this place shall not yield."
Abruptly, he pulled away and delivered a backhanded circular slash, cutting from the right. The survival knife was in position to block -- but, mirage-like, the fat man's body /shifted/, altering the trajectory of attack and delivering a hard throatwards thrust from below.
Shallowly cut across its surface, a bone-white mask split in two, falling to the ground.
"Takes a pretty big ego to compare yourself to an archangel," said Emiya, backing away defensively. "Knives aren't meant to go blade against blade like that, you know? Warps the metal too easily."
In response, the man 'shifted' again, entering his range of defense in an indescribable movement. Barely able to avoid injury at a reaction time within human threshold, Emiya began to subtly reinforce his flesh.
'Might be related to Kariya Kagetoki's 'Ukiyo?'' he thought, blocking the khanjar. 'Nanaya taijutsu had a similar technique, as well ...'
It was, broadly speaking, the exploit of a sensory lapse known informally as 'Saccadic Elusion' -- the temporary 'suppression' of updates to object position within the perceptions of vertebrates and similar organisms, typically achieved by adopting patterns of irregular motion to escape the tracking of the eye. The flight behavior of the common fly had over millions of years evolved to take advantage of the mechanism as means to escape potential predators -- and here before him, it had been reenacted by human means as a martial arts technique.
Despite himself, Emiya was suitably impressed -- but the technique held at least one critical failing that was immediately obvious: It was really only a 'problem' for opponents wholly dependent on vision.
"You'll have to do better than that," he said, implementing conscious structural grasp.
"And I will," said the fat man. "I won't make the mistake of underestimating you again."
He tossed the khanjar at the Counter Guardian, who moved easily aside -- and fell to a duck when a jerk to the etherlite that linked the hilt to the man's left hand pulled it back toward Emiya's neck. The purpose of the attack was in truth merely to create a distraction, however. Catching the returning blade in his left hand, the fat man swung his right arm back as if to perform a punch.
"Number Five," he said.
Momentarily, a glowing thaumaturgical circle traced itself perpendicular to the ground, and he plunged his arm forward -- splashing through the surface. The appendage that emerged on the other side was not his own: A skeletal arm extended disproportionately forward, grasping in the palm of its clawed hand a transparent heart.
"Delusional Heartbeat," he intoned.
The claw enclosed the lump of flesh, tearing viscerally through the surface and crushing it in a burst of black fluid.
Emiya staggered -- and then smiled.
"Did you know?" he asked. "Curses and wishes are made of the same exact substance."
[ Sword // Vector ]
being an eschatology of Type-Moon in twenty fragments
and an addendum to Ol'Velsper's Eureka
by fallacies
I // Charon at the Frontier
X.999999@2909
Some impressions of the town that Emiya had arrived at had been filtered into his consciousness in the hours preceding, but as usual, seeing it with his own two eyes was very different from merely being 'informed.' For a human settlement so close to enemy territory -- and so far into an Alaya Frontier -- the population felt surprisingly large. Probably, it was due to the low regional grain index.
Cutting the steam turbine and letting the boat drift into the muddied waters of the river port, the smiling ferryman reached out with a prosthetic arm and opened his palm expectantly. He'd been paid in advance when they left Behdet earlier in the day, but Emiya saw no reason to deny him extra compensation for entering a militarily active zone; he pulled his wallet from his beige traveling mantle and tossed it underhanded.
The surprised man fumbled a bit before catching it. Disbelieving his luck, he opened the wallet and removed the bills from within, holding them up in the twilight to confirm that they weren't counterfeits.
"You must have made a mistake," said the man, looking to Emiya in bewilderment. "I am no highwayman."
Emiya shook his head to the negative and leapt on to the stained brickwork of the docks.
"Keep the money," he replied. "I won't be needing it anymore."
II // Alaya Nemesis
(overcount common) ref X.002491@2007
One of the things he'd learned early on was that 'the laws of physics' weren't really as non-negotiable as scientists believed. The illusion of universality persisted only because, in general, 'something' was actively preventing humans from empirically confirming otherwise.
If one were lucky, though, and bothered to look, lapses in the facade could occasionally be found -- locations and times where, figuratively, a tree falling in a forest truly didn't make a sound. The antiquated laws asserted during the Fifth War of Fuyuki -- so far removed from the sensibilities of the modern man -- had demonstrated to him well enough that optical camouflage could be attained merely by refracting light through a column of revolving wind. By the true weapon of the King of Heroes, moving air could be made to rend time and space itself to shreds.
These weren't phenomena that twenty-first century science could have accounted for -- but only by miscomprehending the nature of science would one actually expect accountability.
The power of the natural philosophies didn't lie in their capacity to accurately describe the workings of the world -- it lay in that the world itself could be made to conform locally to a consensual reality dictated by human understanding. Assuming any validity to the principles of evolution, this 'invasive' feature had likely emerged as an adaptive mechanism sometime in the prehistory of man, as a defense from threats to the species -- and it was by this force that entities designated with the status of 'phantasmal' were barred from interaction with the human domain; faded by gradation from the very realm of tangibility.
In the end, even 'Gaia' was made to meet its conclusion.
But like a system of antibodies, auto-immune processes could be turned upon an organism by a dysfunction -- and against the consequences of their own collective unconscious, humanity had little defense.
Such was the advent of the Sixth.
III // Widening Gyre
X.999999@2909
"Could've dropped me off a bit closer," he muttered to himself.
Somewhat atypical of settlements on the warfront, the bazaar at early evening was dense with pedestrians, and Emiya's efforts not to draw attention to himself had left him plodding along at the less-than-expedient pace of the crowd. The ferrugination of his flesh had thankfully left him passable as a local on casual examination, as he might've otherwise spent hours being accosted on various fronts for his hypothetical wealth.
[Perhaps you could show a bit more gratitude,] said a young, female voice. [We have given you your most conscious desire where our analogues have refused. Aswan was as near as we could place you.]
The words weren't spoken in Arabic. Unquestionably, they had been uttered aloud, but the precise phonetic structures somehow slipped his mental grasp even as he listened, leaving only an impression of their meaning.
Turning about, it took him a moment to locate the probable speaker -- a preteen girl with an amputated leg, slowly hobbling away from him with the aid of a crutch.
[We have forcibly maintained this region as a Frontier for your convenience,] said a drunk-looking man seated on a bench nearby. [Our influence here is weak, but so too wane the operational faculties of the Hundred Breeds.]
The surrounding townsfolk went on about their business without interruption, either because they couldn't be bothered to notice the alien quality of the language, or -- more likely -- because it had been blotted from their consciousness. Frowning, Emiya resumed his course, leaving the man to his bottle.
"Can't be that weak if you're showing off a gimmick like this," he said, directing his words at no-one in particular. "What's wrong with communicating the usual way?"
[It is no longer possible] said a street hawker as he passed. [Twelve kilometers south, we possessed sufficient primacy of jurisdiction to do so, but the same cannot be said here.] Standing in a doorway a short distance ahead, a woman breastfeeding an infant intoned, [We are too distant, and you've become far too distorted.]
"Distorted," he scoffed. 'Deviation from common sense' was a description he could accept, but 'distorted?' Though he'd been described as such often enough, beyond seeming like a particularly adolescent term for 'uniqueness,' he'd never quite understood how it practically differed from possessing a conventional mental abnormality.
While it was on some level repulsive to accede the King of Heroes as more than of dubious authority on the subject of human norms, if the Egregore were in fact affirming the suppositions the bastard had drawn in his forays into amateur psychoanalysis, Emiya knew better than to argue otherwise. It was almost the very definition of a losing battle.
Entering a small, grassless lot, he replied, neutrally, "The way I am never posed a problem to you before."
Alone at a chess table beneath the shade of a withered tree, an old man moved a black knight. Taking the white bishop from the board, he met Emiya's eyes.
[When you were severed from your status as a terminal to our will,] he replied, [what remained of your essence was sufficiently deviated from the common sense of man that you could no longer rightly be called a human.]
"What am I, then? Issues of mortality aside, I certainly feel human enough."
[There was once a great man who predicted the inevitability of the Sixth's coming,] said a small boy, speaking to a pair of younger children in a sandlot. [Hoping to protect humanity, he entered into a contract with the Black Princess of the Apostles, and shed his flesh to become an idea -- a wish. Ironically, it is his existence that would be closest to your own. If at present you still perceive otherwise, it is an artifact of the familiar and banal, not yet succumbed to entropy.]
The children that had been listening on turned their heads as one.
[You are the curse that is called Unlimited Blade Works,] they said. [By your inhumanity shall mankind be delivered.]
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Originally Posted by mAc Chaos
