Aetheral Space

Dragan fell.

He didn't much like it. Lingering pain was a sensation that had become unfamiliar over the last two years, and now it was spreading all over his body. His legs were gone, an eye too, and burns clawed at the rest of his being. None of it was regenerating. With Pan having transferred her consciousness into PALATINE to fight it from the inside, she couldn't give the fungus the instructions it needed to make effective repairs.

Dragan fell.

The unhinged laughter of PALATINE bounced off the walls of the cavern, growing more and more high-pitched as it went -- accompanied by a cacophonic orchestra from the ring of flamingos surrounding its main body. If Dragan's hands hadn't been shells of pain, he might have put them to his ears to block out the intolerable noise. Black ribbons slithered down to intercept Dragan, intent on finishing what had been started.

Dragan fell.

That beam attack was the biggest danger of all. If Dragan took a direct hit from it again, he knew that he wouldn't survive. Hell, it was a miracle he'd survived the first one. It was up to him now not to waste that miracle, not to let these ribbons skewer him and put a swift end to the battle.

Dragan fell.

He wasn't much worried about the ribbons, though.

Actually, he was a tad thankful for them.

The fact that they were about to strike him…

…meant he wasn't being Ignored right now.

Gemini…

Any projectile Dragan could have fired would have passed harmlessly through the PALATINE. Even if Dragan himself wasn't being Ignored, any other projectile he hurled at PALATINE surely would be. There was only one exception to this.

What is falling but being fired downwards?

That one exception… was if he was the projectile.

…Railgun.

Dragan simply stopped falling.

He vanished -- and a second later, reappeared, zooming upwards at such speeds that he was visible only as a shooting star. Faster than his eldritch opponent could react, the streak of light whipped past the incoming ribbons and slammed right into PALATINE’s main body, boring through it like a bullet. Dragan emerged on the other side of PALATINE through an explosion of blood, blue Aether fizzling as it recorded his wounds once more.

Whirling back around, he smirked, drenched in red from head to toe.

PALATINE didn't take it nearly as well.

OW OW OW

OW OW OW

OW OW OW

OW OW OW

OW OW OW

OW OW OW

The Aether Awakening screeched in what might have been pain, rushing to the other side of the cavern -- putting as much distance between itself and Dragan as it could. There, flat against the wall, it heaved up and down, emitting a high-pitched whine like that of a dog.

Half of its core had been shaved away by the attack, bloody flamingo carcasses hanging limp from the swirling darkness. The baby-seahorse wasn't grinning anymore: its teeth were bared in what was unmistakably a scowl, its squinting eyes fixed directly on Dragan's face.

It was tempting to think that PALATINE was afraid now, that it considered Dragan a threat to its life, but he knew that wasn't the case. If PALATINE truly believed it could die here, it would just phase through the cavern itself and escape to fight another day. They'd only been able to cover the exits to the caverns with the AWL’s barriers, after all -- they couldn't do anything to stop PALATINE fleeing through solid rock.

The fact that it was still here meant that it was startled, not scared -- and Dragan thought he understood why.

Slamming into PALATINE’s core personally, Dragan had gotten some idea of what exactly he was hitting. He was now reasonably sure that he could have destroyed the entire thing -- flamingos and seahorses alike -- and PALATINE would have kept moving. He narrowed his eyes in distaste.

That ‘core’ was nothing but a prop: a balloon filled with blood.

From what Dragan understood, Aether Awakenings typically came in two varieties: those that possessed and puppeteered their original body, and those that operated without it. He'd assumed PALATINE to be the former, warping and changing its original corpse over time, but that clearly wasn't the case. No, this massive body before him was something the beast had constructed.

Even if Dragan destroyed the entire physical form, down to the last atom, his enemy was living Aether. There was nothing he could do to stop it from just constructing a new body. This was a battle he could not win.

That was why he didn't intend to win. In fact, he wasn't even fighting PALATINE -- not really. His job was merely to run interference.

The one who would bring down the Flower of Evil… was Pan.

Pan perceived.

It would not be strictly accurate to say she looked around, as she was a consciousness without strict need for clumsy implements such as eyes or even vision. She simply reached out for information on her environment, and recorded that information into her own memory. But, for the sake of clarity:

Pan looked around.

It had been the right decision to temporarily part ways from Dragan, she knew that immediately. Twisted as Paradise Charon had been, she still had possessed a human psychology -- but PALATINE was something else entirely. This was a realm of incoherence, wrapped around itself in an infinite strip, stitched together with threads of pain and spite. Attempting to chart this place without her full focus would have been impossible, like trying to traverse a cross between a labyrinth and a hurricane with your eyes closed.

Her eyes were open, but Pan now existed in the storm's eye -- and that was an eye that liked to blink.

With each moment, the mental landscape around her bled into a new shape, solidified to provide the illusion of permanence, then melted away again. A city of glass became fields of golden wheat became a bleeding moon became a hole in the bottom of the sea. Was this chaos an attempt by PALATINE to defend itself from her mental attack, or was it always like this?

She didn't have the time to answer that: she had a job to do. If she left Dragan alone against this thing's physical form for too long, he would surely die. He'd grown dependent on her assistance since their synthesis, she knew, but she couldn't do anything about it right now.

Maybe she couldn't do anything about that -- especially not right now. She simply had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

Pan took a step forward.

Her steps left prints of tooth enamel in the maggot-soil beneath her, hollow echoes of faces looking up at her from the cracks. She did her best not to look at them -- she didn’t know why, but she knew that would be a bad idea. This was not a world of logic. Hunches were to be considered gospel.

A drooling path stretched out before her, and she walked it dutifully. In some places it twisted, and in some places it lurched. At some point, she became aware that she was wearing a red-hooded cloak, and with a frown she turned it orange. She preferred that colour.

Why?

Orange was the colour of home. Orange sand, orange stone, orange her. She’d brought it with her. In this world of many colours that she’d been dragged out into, she held onto the orange. A name amounted to just a few letters, but colours were shades upon shades. The closest thing to a representation of the soul that existed in this world.

The soul?

She supposed she believed in the soul. What else could she call this version of herself, that was asking the question? She was signals lurking inside mushrooms, spread out across the galaxy -- across unbelievable distances -- and the heart of that absurdity now crawled through the mind of PALATINE. What else could this searching entity be called but the soul?

Searching?

Yes, she was searching. She was searching for… oh. This wasn’t an inner monologue.

“Oh, and discovery? Indeed, discovered. I impress upon myself the necessity of change, however, the change offered is not something I covet. Do not, do not, do not, do not. Searching? Yes, she is searching for something. You are searching for something, aren’t you? You have a destination in mind. The arrow seeks a tendon, a tendon attendance a tenth den of thieves in which to drive the knife.”

Pan blinked. “What?”

“What?”

“You talk weird, dead things. Like buzzing bees. I don’t like. Sorry!”

“Dead… things. She knows? Yes, she knows. How? Dra-gan Ha-dri-en. There’s wariness of him. Heehee. His eyes crawl over the dark places. He knows, he knows, she knows. A triumvirate conspiracy. What is it you know? What is it you know, O pilfered goddess?”

Pan went to reply, but PALATINE lost patience before she could. The horizon twisted into a hand of sky and land, pouring down Pan’s throat in an instant and pulling the memories free. A tapestry of conversation was spread out before her.

The words of Dragan Hadrien echoed.

“As we thought, PALATINE isn’t just a normal Aether Awakening. If such a powerful Aether-user had been around, we’d have known who they were when they were alive, right? So I thought maybe it was an artificial Awakening or something -- there’s always rumours about the AWL doing stuff like that.”

“So what is it, dead boy?”

“Well, it kind of is artificial, but the method is what makes it interesting. PALATINE isn’t just one Aether Awakening -- it’s an entire colony of them, stitched and melded together until they became something new. That’s why it’s got so many half-formed abilities. That’s why it’s so damn strong.”

“That’s not good news, dead boy. That’s bad news. We’re fighting whole army today?”

“Even if it’s a gestalt, there’s part of it that’s the original -- and that original will have its own Aether core. If you get inside, if you can reach that original consciousness… if you can disable that Aether core… the whole thing will start to collapse, and we can win.”

“If, if, if, dead boy…”

“You don’t think we can do it?”

The lingering recollection of a slight smile.

“Nah, dead boy… I can do it.”

The world around Pan crushed itself into a sneering valley. Spite and hatred radiated from every blade of grass, the air itself so opposed to her that the slightest movement opened new wounds. The stars glared down.

LIAR LIAR LIAR

LIAR LIAR LIAR

LIAR LIAR LIAR

LIAR LIAR LIAR

LIAR LIAR LIAR

LIAR LIAR LIAR

Space quaked.

WHAT

CAN

YOU

DO

?

The answer to that was simple. Once again, Pan took a step forward --

-- and the world pushed right back.

Causality warped itself into new and hostile shapes, intent on halting or at least slowing her progress. The sky flickered between dozens of impossible colours. The ground melted into substances that could not possibly exist in the real world. Cause and effect declared war upon one another, and context deserted the battlefield.

In a burning highway, Pan pushed against a speeding truck.

In a freezing desert, Pan marched through swarms of stinging scorpions.

In a groundless sky, Pan bullied gravity into elevating her.

In a mechanised moon, Pan tore through laser-cutters in mutual ferocity.

In a horizon-eating graveyard, Pan crawled, even as the soil piled up over her.

In a, in a, in a…

And, and, and…

The conflict was finite by nature -- Pan would eventually reach her goal -- but how long exactly would that take? Perhaps hours. Perhaps centuries. It all depended on how much PALATINE resisted her advance. Pan could fight for hours, and Pan could fight for centuries, but the same was not true for the dead boy.

Without her presence, he was a normal human -- but that human was something she put her faith in. The only way for her to advance with any kind of haste was for PALATINE to not be giving this mental battle its all. The only way forward would be for that normal human to strike true fear into PALATINE’s heart.

The only one who could decide what would happen now was him.

Pan pushed, and pushed, and waited for the seam that would accept her.

PALATINE was wise to Dragan's tricks now, he knew. It was aware that Pan was invading its consciousness, and it was aware of how Dragan had got around its Ignorance. That much was obvious just from observing it.

It had ceased attacking entirely, instead fixing its body to the wall of the cavern like some great leech. If it came down to it, Dragan expected it would use the beam on him again, but for the time being it had abandoned use of its ribbons. No doubt it had decided that fighting Dragan and Pan at the same time would be too mentally taxing, and had elected to focus on Pan first.

For the time being, Dragan was being ignored by PALATINE in the regular sense of the word. It was a very nice thing to be ignored by PALATINE, Dragan found, but it would have to change all the same.

Dragan's role in this fight was to be an annoying fly. For that purpose, he'd buzz his heart out.

For an instant, he stopped his ricocheting flight -- allowing himself to fall -- and saw PALATINE’s body tense up in response. This was what he'd done last time, right before he'd managed to land a wound on PALATINE's body. Even if that hadn't done any actual damage, the Awakening was wary of him now.

Dragan took a certain amount of satisfaction in that.

What worked once will work twice. You think I'm that stupid, don't you?

Gemini Railgun.

Once again, Dragan fired his burnt body like a bullet, launching himself directly towards PALATINE’s core. The beast made no move to dodge or block. It remembered what had happened last time, when it had stopped Ignoring Dragan in order to attack. It wasn't so stupid that it would make the same mistake twice…

…but just stupid enough to make a brand new one.

Dragan passed right through PALATINE’s weeping face and phased into its body -- where he stopped. Everything around him was black. Embedded as he was into the physical form of this monster, he might as well have been blind.

But that was just as true for his opponent.

PALATINE saw with more than just eyes, that much was obvious. When Dragan fired off a Gemini Railgun -- an absurdly fast shot -- PALATINE registered the new object with whatever esoteric senses it possessed and instantly Ignored it, bypassing the attack… but there must still have been a moment, there must still have been the tiniest little segment of time between Dragan manifesting the projectile and the PALATINE registering its presence.

If Dragan fired from directly inside PALATINE’s body, the attack would land as soon as it came into existence. That infinitesimal delay… would cease to exist.

Gemini Railgun.

Gemini Railgun.

Gemini Railgun.

Gemini Railgun.

Gemini Railgun.

PALATINE screamed as countless blue stars burst out of its body, each accompanied by a fountain of blood and gore. Sapphire light bloomed throughout the cavern as the shots emerged, one after the other, so fast that they were more like a gatling-gun than a railgun. The squealing infantile face of PALATINE twisted and twisted with the persistent agony, contorting until it was little more than a spiral of flesh.

The ribbons thrashed and writhed, but did not move to attack Dragan -- for no doubt PALATINE now understood the predicament it was in. To strike back against Dragan, it would have to stop Ignoring him, allowing him to attack it from the inside with physical strikes. But if it didn't attack Dragan, he would just go on firing Gemini Railgun.

The obvious answer would be just to move, but it was somewhat difficult to find an obvious answer while fighting two separate battles, having your body and mind independently shredded apart.

The mental stress must have been immense. That would be a boon to Pan's efforts on the inside. Anything Dragan could do to lessen her load, he would.

So he opened his mouth.

“PALATINE!” he roared, voice echoing through the beast’s interior even as he continued to fire. “That pissed you off before, didn't it?! I'll say it again! You're simple -- and I can trick you!”

Whether the new scream that rang out was one of rage or further pain, Dragan could not say. All he could say was what happened next.

The body of PALATINE changed -- the massive form shrinking down to the size of a pinprick in an instant. In a split second, Dragan was no longer in the darkness, but hanging in empty air and looking this dot of pure malice right in the face. A second later…

…the dot expanded again, and the dark flooded over the world entire.