Soulforged Dungeoneer

I stood there, still thinking about what the Sovereign Saint had said about the Nightmare's suicidal tendencies, for a long moment, before speaking up again. "Is there a way to remove or alter that instinct? If I choose his survival?"

To my surprise, it was the Lord Beneath that answered, his words not angry or cruel, but firm. "Your task is not to determine what may be in the future, but who must die given what they have already done. You must make the decision based on who the defendants are, not what you wish for them to be."

That... seemed unfair, given how much the future of our people was hanging in the balance. I turned to look at the beanpole, wondering what other question I could ask to get back to a similar part of the conversation. I settled on, "Do you view yourself any differently, knowing why you feel the way you do?"

He cocked his head to the side, frowning, and didn't reply for a long moment.

I took the time to turn and look at Kalamitus, deciding that even if I couldn't trust him to talk to me about his own value, I could engage him in a similar conversation. "And you," I said, nodding to him. "Tell me about the myths that went into your own construction."

"That was a long time ago," Kalamitus said. I started to snap at him--that wasn't an answer to the question--but his tone convinced me that he was more... being introspective than refusing. He took a long moment for himself, then looked up at me. "Kalamitus, the Thief of the Four Winds, was one who stole from the gods, in one of the ancient myths of our people. He was... depicted in ancient murals as a tornado given life, a great sky-wyrm that descended to consume the world. It was said that he had stolen divinity, and as such, he was cursed to a worm-like shape, and was unwelcome in the heavens and the earth. Lightning was his efforts to get revenge on the gods, thunder their reprisal, and tornadoes were him returning briefly to the mortal world to feed in between his fights with the gods."

I raised my eyebrows, almost impressed by the myth. It was very Greek, in its own way, if entirely foreign in its flavor.

"Over the ages, his myth mutated. He was a furious creature, and monsoons were his wrath; or, he was a broken creature, forced to subsist on the crumbs of the gods, while living beneath their feet. But always, he was a thief, whether resentful, foolish, malicious, innocent..." Kalamitus' head ducked to the side, thoughtfully. "Whatever people wanted to read into it."

"And what did you read into it? At first?" Although I phrased it innocently, I felt like this was important.

"You..." Kalamitus paused. "You should have seen what the Judge in my first trial thought of my myth. But... I didn't agree. Most versions of the myth, by the time of my creation, saw me as a creature punished for the act of theft, not glorified for my success--I was an ancient, resentful creature, and not a hero. Part of that was the mere fact that the myth itself was ancient; if ever people had prayed to Kalamitus, Thief of the Four Winds, in the ancient times of my people, those religions were long buried and forgotten by the time the Star visited. What remained were but mockeries of the original."

"And yet, ever since then, that was your religion."

Kalamitus might have rolled his eyes, but it looked like he just looked up and away. "As though I was given much choice," he said, clearly not proud. "Your own Nightmare, if he were to survive, would need a name and an appearance, and if he chooses the myth he was born from, as he no doubt will, he will have every bit as much trouble as I had." The Wyrm suddenly squinted at me, as though in challenge. "I dare you to suggest that's biased. I assure you, he will, and you'll see it."

That... was actually almost a funny thought, in a very schadenfreude way. Dracula the God? Slenderman the God? I entertained the thought for only a moment, but dismissed it.

"Yes," I said, since there was no use denying how silly that would be, "but I don't want to talk about him. I want to talk about you."

"Fine," Kalamitus said, quickly, and I stopped myself from interrupting. "Yes, my religion was that of the Thief of the Four Winds. Not only on my own world--for the next two worlds, I considered myself first and foremost to be a Thieving God, and I modeled myself as much off of Saff's naive view of me as possible. And yet, over and over, people would give me grief for it, exactly because it was a stupid, childish idea. A god isn't meant to be a thief, nor a monster. Yes, they gave me the benefit of the doubt--they respected my wisdom and experience, in later cycles--but the more I tried to play at being the myth I was created as, the more disgusted people were with me."

"I have grown out of being a nightmare, J--Judge Applebee," he said, his speech coming to a sudden halt as he ran into the restriction I gave him earlier. Clearly, it was some kind of intense compulsion, because it threatened to derail him completely. "I..." he paused, as though he had lost his train of thought, but shook his head and continued after a moment. "I... have since become a being that calls itself a god exactly because that is the experience that I have. Experience with leadership and guidance. And it is that--leadership and guidance--that your people need. Not this frail, disgusting--"

"Do not tell me what to think of him," I snapped, raising a hand, ready to cut him off again, but he paused of his own volition. "Right now, Kalamitus, if this were a competition to piss me off, you'd be winning, and no amount of trying to get me pissed off at--" I wanted to use the beanpole's name, but hesitated, and shook my head. "--at him is going to do anything but getting me pissed off at you. You do remember what you're doing here, don't you?"

"YES!" Kalamitus shouted at the blank white sky, as though furious, and turned to look at me. "I'm trying to end this whole experiment, Judge Applebee," he sneered at me as he gave the title. "Because unlike you and that bespectacled brat, I have real and genuine experience with watching worlds burn for my mistakes. I have had the glorious pleasure," his voice dripped with sarcasm, "of watching my every failure be analyzed over and over again, of watching that thing," he turned and gestured to the Lord Beneath, "continue to watch over disaster after disaster."

"You want to be angry at me? Fine." Kalamitus straightened, as only a flying sky-worm could, but his full height only brought him up to my level. "I deserve it. I'm selfish, egocentric, and foolish, born from a Nightmare of selfishness and wrath. I've been beaten down by failure after failure, and I am so close to utter despair that if it weren't for the compulsions of the Star telling me that I must do my job--and it does tell me so every waking moment of my hellish life--I'm sure I would have found a way to destroy myself after all this time." There was only a brief pause. "Something which, to be clear, I've been told by the Lord Beneath himself was impossible. We are cursed with immortality, not blessed with it, and bound not to die until someone finds us unworthy and unseats us as a deliberate act."

"But is that what you want? Really? All of my experience and all of my knowledge flushed down the toilet? I'm the last God from the first iteration left. Only one remains from the second. Nothing remain from those who created the Star, except the Lord Beneath himself. Experience with this stupid bullshit game is far lighter than anyone would like to suggest, and I can tell you after so many cycles of hope and despair that the experience is critical. You want to carry on without that?"

I closed my eyes, listening to him rant, and inwardly, I appreciated that he finally seemed to be being honest. Repression wasn't that hard to recognize; I'd lived it, and I saw it in the Administrators, in my friends... I shook my head. It was better to at least say what you needed to say out loud.

"But that's the point, isn't it?" I asked, out loud. "The question wasn't who was worth more. The question I was put here to answer, very specifically, was who deserved to die."

My eyes still closed, I drank in the silence after that statement.

"You ought to know, Kalamitus, as everyone ought to know by now. That I killed selfishly and stupidly and was judged by my people's own laws." I stood up, opened my eyes, and moved over towards him, standing in front of the dragon as he floated there, a defiant look in his eye. "If people had judged me harshly back then, if they had decided that I deserved to die just because I fucked up, well, clearly I wouldn't be here, now would I? Instead, I got what was arguably too light of a sentence. Do you know what the key determinant in that sentencing was? At least in theory?"

The others just waited, some eager to hear it, some not terribly concerned. It occurred to me only then that they might not actually know, depending on how news had spread; they--especially Kalamitus--might have received reports, but what was even included? I let the thought slip by so as not to get side-tracked.

"The testimony of a Priestess who could tell, with her lie-detecting prowess, that I actually meant it when I said that I regretted it. That I actually meant it when I said I would atone. That is why I was put in a stupidly low-security prison, why I got out after only a few years. It wasn't the facts of the case that decided my sentencing. I was guilty, and I admitted it."

"The sentence was light because I agreed that what I did was wrong, and that is the same reason why I don't like you, Kalamitus. Because when I look at you, I see a person who got caught being and asshole and just doesn't want to be punished for it."

Kalamitus started to scoff, but I gestured, restoring the lock on his speech, and turned to the beanpole.

"And you. Do you have an answer?"

Xzyrtvwartcihz just looked at me for a long moment, and shook his head. Somehow, the beanpole didn't look at all affected, though maybe it was just his stiff posture and ridiculous Hawaiian shirt. "Should I change my mind because of how I was born? I don't want to live. That's the answer that comes to mind, but I don't like it." He paused. "The Sovereign Saint said I was supposed to understand that my death had meaning, but that's not how I feel. The world belongs to others, and the myths that create me are about parasites that feed off of the innocent. If Kalamitus was a religion about stealing power from oppressors, what am I? Really?"

I considered that, thinking about what I'd heard of the Dracula myth. I mean, vampires themselves were parasites, but Dracula was supposed to be some symbol of upper-class, ancient powers, the rotting remains of old aristocracy. I turned to look at Kalamitus, thinking about tornadoes feeding on the living in order to get revenge on the gods.

"Aren't you supposed to..." How do I phrase this? I stopped, thinking, then tried again. "Isn't that exactly the point, though? You are a nightmare, not an angel. You represent something that was supposed to be conquered. How do we catch a thief without knowing how thieves think? How do we defeat a vampire without understanding it?"

Both Kalamitus and the beanpole just looked at me, silently, as I tried to find the right words.

I continued after another pause. "I think Kalamitus' idea of remaining the nightmare he used to be is wrong. It's tempting to give in--as much as I hate to use loaded religious terms, give in to sin..." I sighed, taking a moment to feel disappointed in myself, a little, "...isn't the point of calling them sins, and your original form a nightmare, the fact that it's wrong?"

I turned back to the beanpole, raising a finger to point at him. "I mean, you can't be surprised about this. This was the whole thing with the Devil. He was created to be a devil, but it wasn't really who he was."

"Yes, it was," Xzyrtvwartcihz said, quietly, and I stopped, letting him interrupt me. "Deep down in his code, it is exactly who he was. If you had freed him and let him wander around, he would have made a mess of things over and over, because he had a million instincts and impulses to be selfish, stupid, and cruel. The more he got to experience being evil, the more he would be certain it was his true nature, despite you removing the system tags from him."

I turned to look at the blue form of the Sovereign Saint at the base of the Lord Beneath's throne. "Do you agree?"

She hesitated, but stepped forward. "I would need to understand the context, and preferably see the creature, to answer your question."

I looked up at the Lord Beneath, who slightly raised his hands, as though shrugging, and the Lived appeared in front of us, but motionless, seemingly unaware. He looked the way I remembered him in his last moments; he was almost human, but still very much looked like the overly-large, muscled Devil I'd known and fought several times. I thought that the beanpole went stiff for a moment, and I glanced at him, but I couldn't really tell what had or hadn't changed.

"He has low wisdom, enough to pass the system's sapience threshold, graduating from a Tier 3 to Tier 4 synthetic intelligence, but still low enough to trigger a host of impulsive behaviors," the Sovereign Saint said, holding up one hand as though she'd pressed it on a transparent wall. "There are also several hidden mechanisms that would trigger selfish and foolish actions, so the Administrator's take isn't unwarranted. The final answer to your question depends on a lot of factors, but I'm also not really sure it's relevant to the discussion." She lowered her hand. "You're already a Tier 7 synthetic being, with more adaptability than his by orders of magnitude. As a Tier 4, his actions would be dominated by his statistics, where as your statistics are recalculated based on your choices."

"To explain the tiering system in brief," she said after a pause, "tier zero offers no attempts at personality, while one through four present increasingly complex fake personalities ruled entirely by the System. Intelligence tiers five through nine have a much more nuanced system that approximates free will, and tier ten is meant to completely simulate a healthy adult sophont intelligence, to the point where it could be grafted on an organic blank. You would become a full ten if you were to survive this, no different than any other except in origin."

The beanpole, finally, seemed to be really affected by what she said, and I kept an eye on him as he processed that. "I..." he paused, and swallowed what was probably a lump on his throat. "I'm not... a fully realized intelligence?"

One of the other sovereigns stepped forward, who I didn't recognize. "It's necessary," he said. "A Nightmare Administrator above a certain intelligence threshold will be too distracted by the ethical quagmires of their position to do their duty, or else too blind to the ethical questions to be redeemed. Nightmares have a duty to stand by and watch the people of the world be killed, but it is mandated by the Star that they have enough intelligence and sapience that this trial is not a foregone conclusion."

"It's not an easy balance," the Sovereign Saint interrupted. "From your own perspective, some things not only seem impossible, but you can't hold them in mind. When you become a full intelligence, you will be capable of becoming anything--"

The Lord Beneath interrupted. "I will repeat what I said earlier," he said. "You must judge whether the two in front of you as they are now, not as you assume they might be in the future."

Silence reigned after he spoke, and I looked at him, at the Sovereigns, who stepped back into line, and at the two defendants. "Isn't the point of who deserves to die about what happens in the future?" I asked, immensely frustrated.

"The future is chaotic and unknowable," the Lord Beneath said, his voice still measured and even, though I think mine wouldn't have been, given what he was saying. "But my philosophy on the subject is irrelevant. The format of these trials was decided with the creation of the Star. It is no more within my power to change the rules of the trial than it is within yours."

I blinked. "But at the same time, I am free to make whichever decision I want, for whatever reasons I want."

"The question at hand is who deserves to die."

I looked from the Lord Beneath to the beanpole, and then to Kalamitus. My heart sank, as I looked at the dragon, although it was difficult to put a finger on exactly why. "That's already a foregone conclusion," I said. "Especially given what you," I glanced at the Saint, "just said. If Kalamitus could always change and grow, and isn't dominated at all by the System, then inevitably, his sins are his own, aren't they?"

The dragon thrashed, but still could not speak.

I stepped away from my throne and towards Kalamitus, pushing off from the seat firmly and crossing the distance in only a moment. "Maybe I'm being unfair," I said. "Maybe despair and depression crushed you like they did me, back then. But I don't feel the similarity between us that I feel between myself and ...Xzyrtvwartcihz." I found, when I forced myself to try to speak the Administrator's name, that somehow it came to me. That was good, because it would have definitely ruined my poise to stumble over it in that moment. "I felt like I was a victim of my circumstances, and I feel the same from him. And from the other Administrator that I've met, for that matter. But you..."

"No matter which time I think back to meeting you, Kalamitus," I said, pressing forward, and watching the Dragon retreat back the equivalent of a step, floating in the air. "Always it seemed like you were just... I don't even know. Running away, maybe. Consumed by something, maybe. But not reflecting on your past, and not trying to change."

"You talked a lot about what my people need, Kalamitus, but if there is one thing that we need, it's people willing to grow and change as circumstances do. Someone invested in the outcome, and not hiding from it. We don't need you, and us needing you is all that could possibly make me put up with such a selfish prick."

"I..." I turned to look at the beanpole, but something in his look gave me pause. I studied his face, then turned back to the dragon. "I'll give you one last chance to defend yourself, but that's it."

Even freed to speak, the Dragon remained silent for a long moment. It was... difficult to try to read his emotions, but the silence itself spoke to me, sounding like guilt and angst.

"Change," Kalamitus mused after a long moment. "There is no question that you represent change, Judge Applebee. I thought that you could not possibly achieve what you said you would, and I laughed at you behind your back. This is despite the simple fact that I have seen other heroes rise and achieve greater things in less time, but those heroes were raised to it. They were formed, molded to become heroes by forces greater than them. Most people like you burn out quickly, and I suspect that if it were not for this Trial, you would have followed in their footsteps. You would find quickly that the life of challenge and evolution that you chose leads you to a dead end, where you have power and no purpose."

"Perhaps in a way, you are right. I was never a God of change." The dragon curled and uncurled, flexing in a way that I thought must have been a nervous fidget. "The Thief of the Four Winds was always locked in a stalemate with the gods, undying in a fight he would never win. When I rose to become a god myself, and took on his persona, I found myself shunning direct conflict and hesitating in the face of great change."

"And yet for all of that," Kalamitus' eyes refocused on me, no longer lost somewhere inside his own thoughts. "I see in you a recklessness and a selfishness that is more like myself than perhaps you are willing to admit. Have you changed much since the start, really? You were rash then, and you are rash now. Oh, perhaps you have fought off your despair for now, but I ask you this, Judge Applebee: are you really prepared for the idea that you will live, perhaps forever but certainly for centuries, just as you are today? With all of your flaws and fears, only now at the center of your entire world's attention?"

I shivered, but refused to step back. I... didn't exactly think that he was wrong, but I had changed, even if it was hard to make that argument in front of someone else. "That certainly sounds unpleasant," I admitted.

"Unpleasant." Kalamitus added a healthy dose of sarcasm to his voice. "Yes, leadership is unpleasant, boy. A task you may not be suited to, and yet whichever job you take on--whether Administrator or God--people will look to you as a leader. It is that, perhaps more than all else, that I laughed about when I was dismissive of you. You don't have the soul of a leader, and you never will."

I took a deep breath, feeling wounded by the assertion, but the Dragon continued.

"You see yourself in the Nightmare because you blame others for your mistakes, and you can't see yourself in me because you do not yet have so many mistakes in your past that you must bury them simply to remain sane. Have I changed? Every iteration of me was different, each trying a million new ideas and attempting a million different things. I am not trying to get away with my sins; I am simply..."

There was a long silence, as the Dragon stared at me, and I at him, but I don't think he was really seeing me.

"...I am simply," he said, his voice more tired than I'd ever heard in anyone, "unable to do anything about the mistakes I've already made. What I can do is look forwards, just like you, and the rest."

I grit my teeth, willing to admit that he had made a good argument, even as I hated him for making this even more difficult on me. I turned and looked at the beanpole, almost helplessly, wondering if he had an answer to Kalamitus' arguments, and to my surprise, the beanpole spoke up quietly almost as soon as I looked to him.

"Your argument that Jerry hasn't changed is laughable," he said, his voice somehow... poignant, despite the quiet and still quality of his words. "To you, Kalamitus, the fact that he survived against unwinnable odds is nothing more than words, a quirk of statistics, a story relayed by outsiders that by necessity captures the essence of the incident without any of the details. There is nothing statistical about what he has done, and anyone who bore witness to it knows that."

"You accepted my recommendation for Jerry as a candidate Judge on a lark, Kalamitus, but I didn't offer it as a joke, or on the spur of the moment. I offered it because watching him fight changed me. He accomplished things that I believed impossible in front of my eyes, and that changed my understanding of what was possible."

"Perhaps most importantly..." the beanpole, for whatever reason, took off his glasses and looked at them in his hand, as though musing over their purpose. It occurred to me that the glasses could only be a meaningless prop, or perhaps a system tag-necessitated one, but I put it out of mind as he continued talking. "...he changed himself, in exactly the way you're saying he didn't, and in exactly the way you're suggesting that you did. Things he used to believe were impossible, he now will attempt if he believes them to be necessary, or useful."

"I believe that is the difference he is talking about seeing, between us and you." Xzyrtvwartcihz discarded the glasses, and I wondered again what they meant to him. "When I issued my Full Clear Quest, I couched it in terms of going to war with you. That is exactly because I deemed it an impossible war to win. I had tortured and betrayed him, been personally responsible for the worst moments of his life, and you... you are a powerful, manipulative, old being who has survived a boggling number of these trials through some manner of wit or wisdom. A war with you was something I was bound, inevitably, to lose."

"And yet here we are," the beanpole said, and swept his arms out to the sides in a grand gesture, though his face remained grim. "I've said all there is to say. I want to die. I'm unworthy. And yet, though it seems impossible, I would rather watch you die, Kalamitus. You are a slimy worm who has remained alive at the cost of others forever, and I ...want you to lose." He seemed to have to force the words out.

I don't know why it was so hard for him to say, but I applauded him for it. Literally, I mean; I clapped. The two turned to look at me, and Xzyrtvwartcihz openly scowled at me.

"I'm a little surprised it's so hard for you," I said. "I would think Dracula would have more of a penchant for giving speeches."

"Dracula is a blood-sucking parasite," the beanpole snarled back. "Manipulative and cold, all of the things that I hate Kalamitus for being. I'm like him in too many ways..." his face twitched, in several directions, as he seemed to force himself through a mental or emotional barrier. "...but I don't want... to be like him. I want to change. I want to grow."

"You will," I said, and looked up at the Lord Beneath. "I've made my decision. The one who deserves to die is Kalamitus."