Neytopia › Part 3: Night › Chapter 5

Through the looking glass

The traveler crawled through the years finally with a reason to live. The more souls the deathless brought to his bottomless pit, the stronger he became. His ghostly sight reached farther, seeing things miles away. Soon he absorbed enough people to see the pattern behind the watchers’ attacks: their mission was to maintain the global balance of power. To that end they sometimes intervened to destroy or break up large empires like his city. So he had to camouflage, to look like a small, harmless cult to the watchers.

Instead of consuming whole cities, which would draw the attention of his mortal enemy, the deathless captured solitary people. The deathless only acted when their victims were alone and there were no witnesses. Their victims would hear a noise in the night on their way home, and when they turned around they were met with a big white grin. For a few centuries, the traveler lived in peace, his sight and reach growing silently. Then one night came the raven and you, dear reader, know what happened next.

The raven had always been the vessel for an original idea, nothing more. That idea possessed the traveler, relegating it to a position of spectator, and putting the raven in command.

Then he was patient.

He continued the traveler’s work, slowly harvesting souls without alerting the watchers. When Cruelty broke out of her prison he went to visit her at her mansion, to torment her. His deathly sight now soared over the clouds, watching civilization stretch before him. He could see everything above ground, every corner, every secret passage. He ravaged all her remaining communities, weakening her but not yet finishing her.

The watchers noticed the disturbing pattern of mass disappearances and started their investigation. However, the watchers had one big blind spot: they believed the world was completely rational. They could not conceive that a pain as deep as what the traveler had suffered could grant such power.

Still, the raven moved quickly. When the empire fell, the truth got out: the emperor was long gone, all that was left in his stead was a long chain of measly subsecretaries. She immediately suspected the raven was up to something, she never believed he was dead or retired. She again contacted the watchers, begging them,

Please, listen to me, the emperor is helping the Thing. If we don’t stop them—

There is no such alliance or we would know about it.

The watchers weren’t happy taking advice from the locals. A week after the empire had fallen, one of the capitals in the northern continent vanished overnight. Sixty-four thousand people gone without a trace. The watchers scoured the area and found four humanoids with a device, fleeing south. They picked them up and brought them to their ship.

The raven followed them closely, invisible to the watchers. Once inside the ship, the watchers hovered about, discussing loudly with each other in their own tongue. The raven scouted the ship. It was a massive cyclic library filled with reports and copies of everything ever produced by man. There were millions of watchers working, collecting information and generating reports.

The deathless were all handcuffed and on their knees, with thousands of watchers surrounding them. The chief commander at the ship made his way through the mass of watchers and screamed at the deathless,

Who are you and what have you done!?—But the deathless only smiled—You know, you are going to talk one way or another. Torture always breaks mankind.

But the deathless looked at the commander in silence, almost laughing.

Oh, you laugh? We’ll see what you think after thousands of years in the void!

A hoarse voice echoed across the whole ship,

FOOLS!

The watchers drew out their weapons. The commander shouted,

Come out right now, wherever you are!

The raven laughed. The commander pulled out his gun and executed the deathless closest to him with a shot to the head. The bullet went through the deathless without killing it, making all the deathless burst with laughter. The deathless’ laughter grew louder and louder into a deafening roar. At its peak the deathless stood up and touched the device that the watchers had foolishly brought to the ship. It exploded with an electric pulse that rushed across the entire ship, destroying every chip and circuit in it. The explosion only killed a few watchers, but the electromagnetic impulse fried the rest of the watchers’ circuits, rendering them immobile.

People on the surface first heard the explosion on high. When they looked, they saw the ship materialize, with a massive ghostlike cuttlefish latching on to it with its tentacles. That was the raven, looking inside the ship. The deathless, watchers and books closest to the explosion had vaporized. The ship was scattered with the millions of bodies of the immobile watchers, who could only wait for death as their vital systems failed and their lifesuits hopelessly ran out of energy. The damaged ship precipitated toward land, but the raven pulled from it, dragging it instead to sea.

Ironically, the strange cuttlefish creature was praised as a hero that had avoided the death of thousands. News of the event traveled the world, ships went out to sea to find the ship’s remains.

Little did they know that there was nobody to keep the raven in check now. The world was his for the taking.