"Are we there yet?" asks the flayed corpse of god.
"…"
"Are we?"
"Does it matter to you?" Chi snaps back.
Xe's cruising down the Australian outback, motorcycle wheels kicking the dust into a cloud that streaks behind the vehicle like a red gash, engine drumming against the chassis with a heartbeat rhythm. At every bump in the terrain the sarcophagus strapped to the back jumps. The chains strapping it on glow the cold purples of hexed steel. They constrict tighter.
"I know what you plan to do with me. It only seems fair that I'd be allowed the time I have left until I'm sold."
The fleshheap that's in storage isn't 'god' — too monotheistic of a stance to accurately portray the cosmos. Rather, it's a higher-planar thaumic lord and patron saint to the local flesh-bound minds, native to the sphere of Earth and the aleph-null pocket universes therein. That description is far too long for Chi to ever give a shit about, though. 'God' does the job fine.
"I don't know."
"You don't?"
"I don't have a map. Or a timer."
"Then how do you know where you are headed?"
"Instinct."
Xer job is simple: Mull around the grounds of a rotting temple for weeks on end, brain hopped up on arcane crack that practically jackhammers your head with knowledge of every occult incident for miles. You sit around, waiting and managing the hangovers with the dull weight of ennui. Eventually a signal drills in; data of a higher-planar descent shrieking through your mind like a broken radio. Once the information is processed you suit up, hop on your motorcycle, and shoot off into the dunes. Find the site of impact then locate whatever dropped down from above.
If artifact, toss it in the sarcophagus. If deity, check if it's alive. If dead, toss it in the sarcophagus. If alive and active, fucking run. If on the verge of death, put your scalpel to use. Once secured, toss it in the sarcophagus.
Drive back. Get your cash. Wait. Rinse and repeat.
It's the sort of work ethic Dark wants to see of their employees.
"If you're omniscient I don't need to see why you'd ask."
"I'm not omniscient."
"But you knew I was going to pawn you off without me stating it."
"I overheard you speaking to an overseer located at your base of operations."
Chi turns around, checking for potential cracks in the sarcophagus. "I wasn't speaking out loud before you asked." Nothing spotted.
"It was psionic."
"…"
Eyes jumping down from the barren terrain ahead, Chi glances at a rectangular wedge of LEDs welded to the middle of the motorcycle's handles. Xe clenches on sets of buttons under xer fingers.
OUTBOUND: PAYLOAD MONITORS PSIONICS. SNOOPED ON COMS.
Half a minute drags by before a response arrives.
INBOUND: UNDERSTOOD.
INBOUND: LOBOTOMY CAN BE PERFORMED ON PAYLOAD BEFORE SALE.
INBOUND: FURTHER MESSAGES WILL BE SENT THROUGH PDA.
OUTBOUND: ROGER.
A pause.
INBOUND: P.S.
INBOUND: SALE PRICE RAISED COURTESY OF DARK.
INBOUND: REWARD FOR OUR DILIGENCE.
INBOUND: ENJOY.
"……"
Part of Chi feels like xe should be shocked. That their should be a mote of surprise, of elation, that, after so much work and boredom and exhaustion, the higherups finally pass down a raise from their throne of gold to those hard workers who deserve it. Xe doesn't feel anything of the sort, though. Only a faint tiredness.
"Why the silence?"
Xe jumps. The motorcycle swerves, breaking its straight line course, then slowly arcs back to its prior trajectory. "You caught me off guard."
"Sorry."
"I was just thinking."
"I see."
"I shouldn't be speaking to you in the first place."
"I could guess."
"……How are you speaking to me?" Everything Chi's said has been muffled by the cycle's hum and their helmet's protective padding. Even at a yell no sound should be penetrating the sarcophagus shielding.
"I can register when your mind takes certain actions. When it sends messages. Even the most abstract ones are picked up, so long as they are nearby. A voice is simple enough."
Xe taps at the handles.
"Morse code too."
"Mhmm. Was that what you involved in," Chi says, raising a hand to point skywards, "up there? Communication?"
"Gods need their relays. They need someone to translate between lords, to intercept the undercover signals spies sling through the dimensional cracks, to inform the troops that they may not survive the next wave of soulcutter attacks. Message recognition and telepathy is the perfect set of gifts for the duty. Only way for me to make a living, too."
"…You had to make a living?"
"It's not so different up there as you would expect. There was a time when I wasn't beholden to any god, when I had my own worshipers, sacrifices of letters and cryptography to sustain me, but it fell apart. I had to find a way to survive, even if it was… Not preferable."
"Mhm."
Flecks of dust spatter on xer visor. At first xe wipes them off, but as more spit up the less xe cares to deal.
"Most of my time was drudgery. Wandering from plane to plane to whichever combat zone the divine demanded my presence at. Most of the inhabited areas were being shelled so I had to stick to the back routes, the places you would never imagine existing unless you looked at the thinnest cracks in the world, squirmed through them, and drifted out the other side."
Something tugs at the back of Chi's mind. Neurons are plucked like the strings of an instrument, nonexistent hands vibrating them in psychic harmonics that resound through the catacombs of xer headspace with each fine-tuned oscillation.
The music that emanates is visual — optical. Sights of experiences Chi never had and never can have. A wanderer trudging down a road of visual noise on legs of radiance, a dimensional strip distant from all else that winds like a loose ribbon through a pitch black void. Cities assembled along hyperspherical curves that link into latticeworks of chrome bubbles, buildings cordoned off by nothing more than shredded plasma barriers — barricade tape erected by creators who never returned to finish their designs. Fields of pale white radiation where the dead machines of war descend to meet their final burial grounds. Warnings of treacherous terrain in abysses where no terrain exists. Skies without horizons. Nothingness.
Xe sinks through the memories, brain working overtime to turn the impossible landscapes into comprehensible structures. "That's a lot of jack shit, huh."
"I never met another being while I was there. As far as I was concerned it was me, spacetime, and the detritus the wars left in their wake."
"Boring?"
"Boring."
Chi nods as best as one possibly can when you've become a disembodied consciousness in something else's mental sea.
"If that isn't the mood of the day I don't know what is. This desert is the same, really. Just with even less to keep you occupied on. Sand and only three dimensions. I'd take…"
'I'd take this over my job any day.'
'I'd take this over my job.'
When communication turns thought-based it can be hard to restrain stray ideas from escaping. That single sentence, that single phrase, nearly worms its way out alongside xer intended messages, but xe yanks it back in at the last second, leaving it to rebound through neural pathways, only for xer mind alone to dwell on. To forget.
"I would agree, if I had been given the chance to see any of the desert. Before you locked me away."
Something is off about the way god speaks — a twinge of static ensnares every syllable. Before Chi can ask xe's thrust from the tedium of a dim abyss into the crosshairs of a hyperluminal projectile. The sky is shredded in the wake of a technicolor bullet barrage that dices reality with every shot, slicing trails through space that bleed impossible colors, impacting skyscrapers with the explosive strength to eviscerate them in a split nanosecond. The structures the bullets miss are dispatched by bombs that delete Being and replace it with pockets of Null. The cuts the bullets leave are shot into further to gush torrents of rotting geometry. Existence is as thin as paper and the onslaught is tearing it in half.
In the instant the attack hits everything breaks. The world drops away, swinging upwards as nothingness rushes in on all sides and as a descent through higher dimensional space begins. There are constellations, arrays of heavens beaming dots of the whitest whites, zipping in a direction Chi's brain can only conceive of as "upwards." Clouds of other debris spat out by the warzone approach but vanish as Chi thuds against the thin barriers between dimensions. Cracking, slipping through. Dimensionality drops with each collision — 777, 111, 70, 40, 10, █'. 5. 4. 3.
3.
3.
There's heat. Light. Physicality, concrete and burdening. Desert sands, whipping by and lacing wounds that suddenly sting worse than any reality-cracking bullet. Cloudless atmosphere, the sky blues burnt into oranges by the setting sun's glare. Blast crater smaller than their entire body should be. They reach a wing over, running several tendrils against the gouges in their exoskeleton.
. . . .
Half of their entire body missing.
A shadow casts over the crater rim. It's… It's somebody. Some native human, garbed in biker leathers, a helmet, and a makeshift rig of seraphic gold armor that's strapped on. No one to be concerned about, likely. Watching, they see as xe reaches into a satchel, fidgeting around before producing a blade, a thin ritual scalpel. Every particle of the obsidian comprising it radiates an aura that stabs at all of their pretercognitive senses. The human whispers an incantation. The blade triples in size.
Chi is glad the memory cuts short before xe had to re-experience what came next.
"Sorry, by the way."
"About?"
"About cutting your muscles apart. And limbs."
"Trust me when I say that I don't care. Deities have more to our forms than the physical extensions we extend into material planes. This doesn't matter."
With the reminiscence concluded Chi now drifts in complete darkness. Not the darkness of a cold, empty dimensional shortcut, but the darkness of a shroud, thinly layered over something warm and personal.
"Have your bosses sent for any help?"
"Why would they?
"Why would they not?"
"Thousands have the ability to fill my role. It's fine if I slipped out."
"But you still had a use, right? You had experience with what they asked you to do."
"Thousands also have the same experience."
"No, but they could offer something to bring you back, anything to let you call back for aid or rescue—"
"It's fine."
Chi sighs. "…Fine. Okay. If you say so."
"Besides, I believe my usefulness would be coming to a close anyways."
Something patters against the other side of the darkness. Dripping.
"What?"
"You understand, don't you? You ferry payloads, not of information but of material. You've operated in the wastelands of your own dimension. I assume not as long as in my lifespan, but operated regardless. This should be familiar territory to you, would it not be?"
"Well, I guess. Except that the desert isn't an interdimensional back route. Even if it was lifeless you had sights to witness, any variety in desolate landscapes to vary your experience. I haven't. Once you've seen one plain of dust you've seen them all. And up there you could, eventually, find someone to talk to, even if it was some hivemind you had to spill military secrets to or some shit. At my base camp I only interact with the overseers who organize Dark— my employer's efforts out here, and when they shut their formal traps there's just… Nothing. No one else on scavenging duty cares about what goes on with me — they're too busy keeping themselves together."
"So what do you do?"
"I sit. Wait it out, until the next descent happens. Were you expecting me to respond with something actually interesting?"
[stuff]
"But would your employers send aid if you were in danger?"
"I've been rescued when a drone from one of your wars reactivated and tried to grind me to mush between its halos. They would."
"Would they?"
"Why do you keep probing at this? I thought you stopped it when you brought me into your headspace but no, you're still at it. If you want to insinuate that Dark is an awful person that I could get harmed without a single person batting an eye then fine. Say it. I don't care."
"Sorry. I didn't have that intent — I was genuinely curious, but if you need me to step off then I'll oblige. I can extricate you from my mind too, in a few moments."