He called himself Hastur now. The name Cortus wasn't his anymore, that man felt more like an old friend than anything else, or... Enemy, that was a more appropriate identify. Without his aspect, he'd lost his identity. Cortus was just a memory, only accepting that name as his own because it gave him the respect and reverence of others. A little secret between he and his more loyal followers. He only vaguely remembered the self he'd been in the past, before his shard, some fifty years of life before he'd properly ascended. What a mistake that had been.

He wasn't a primus any longer, but he would be far more than any of his kin again.

That time was coming, very soon.

This place was Hastur's home, lab, magic tower, whatever he needed it to be. Of course it hadn't always been his. The Baccian's had tried to kill him on many occasions – and they'd never given him any official title. At first the 'Gran Taurus' or whatever silly title they'd made up for their sovereign had tried to bargain. To use him, naturally. Mages were rare in Baccia, the blood and heritage of these people ensured it so, but there were many adepts. Weak ones, granted, but a human with a baseline resistance to foreign mana could be quite useful. Without them, he never would have come so far.

Their genetics were adapted to an environment of corrupted mana, and some of the mutant nomad clans were such that they could walk right through it. Frail, but if given purpose, they'd serve as incredible vessels. Like living their entire lives breathing at high altitudes, all he needed was to weigh them down. To anchor them, and they would grow beyond the norm. That was his gift, the grace, a varied experiment to create nephilim, with inconsistent results. Utilizing Pattoli's ability to steal, and share, to do the rest – all artificial but it worked just as well.

Naturally, he'd infiltrated all walks of life in the nation. His doubles, the haemonculi that behaved not unlike normal humans when given mundane tasks. Nobody knew it, but they didn't need to look like him. And he, Hastur, was everywhere, in tens of thousands of these anima constructs all over the world.

He was aware of his genius, always had been. It took genius to prepare so far in advance, ready for the day he was fated to die by Tyr's hand, as he had in the past. Jartor, still to this day, had never figured out that this was the original design. Hastur was aware of his enslavement to the shard, of hatred no less – and he'd found a way after decades of study to end it. Mad as he might've been, here he was – it had worked.

The 'plan' as it were was for him to kill the boy, that much was true. The boy was a monster, a being that should not exist and his mind had screamed to end the child, to remove him from the equation. But the same voice was just as forthright with the knowledge that Cortus would fail and die in the process. To set things on the right path and remove the one who was born to eliminate each and every primus.

Only... He hadn't expected the boy to devour his aspect and make it his own, thereby surviving in the process. And in the same token, ensuring that Cortus was still alive – as his aspect still existed as a mass collection in the boys body. Confusing, no doubt.

Tyr was still alive, or... Unliving, and somehow 'relatively' sane, but his body was crumbling from the pressure of it all. The dao, the crystallized embodiment of spira, some said, could not sit so heavily on anyone but a true awakened. Even one of their kind, the primus', couldn't possibly hold so many without discomfort.

Unbalancing the body, akin to handing a toddler a knife and expecting them not to hurt themselves with it. Too heavy to lift, but well capable of being fallen on. In any case... Hastur was conflicted for the first time in a long time, Tyr wasn't special in any measurable way, in fact the boy was killing himself willfully. That made him special, after consideration, Hastur wanted Tyr to succeed.

He wanted Tyr for himself, to make him great, but he knew that Tyr would never accept his tutelage.

Emotional dao were almost universally weak. Dao, as the personification of a thing, was inconsistent at best. Too wide in scope for a mortal being to properly make sense of. But if one could properly master a singular emotion, something impossible, they'd become the most powerful. Incredibly so, to a degree that no other aspect could match them. Again, the analogy of a weapon too heavy to wield properly.

What use was being the most angry person on the planet? There really wasn't one, unless one could convert that emotion into power. Which was possible, even a common mage could do so with the right training. What they called 'stigma', a rare form of expressive emission that was no longer practiced in the modern era. Instead, they typically opted to prevent mages from doing so via arcane theory and making logic out of anything, so as not to create walking bombs.

And now... Tyr had five dao of emotion. Over a hundred more besides that, and his existence ran beyond all known conventions, all of the rules that dominated their plane being spit on, and not a single person had done anything about it. No Guardians, no Watchers, no Seekers, and all of those factions that had to be aware of his existence.

Why? Hell, how?

If the world were a just and fair place, Tyr would have died. If it truly had it's own will as the ancient ones said it did, he wouldn't exist in the wretched state he did now. Whether his death came to him or not in so literal a fashion, Tyr lived on borrowed time. Even if he survived, his mind would shatter. Too many shards in one place, too many eyes. Dao were often formless, cosmic energy and universal concepts that went beyond mana and spira, but the shards that existed in the vessels were not. They were conscious, living things that would struggle for an eternity to take the proverbial wheel and control the host. It wasn't quite so foul as it might sound, some shards were gentle and equitable to partnership, but some...

Hastur was the shard of Cortus. One part of a collective mind, the price of power – and what eventually ensured they would never be true immortals in terms of their time on this planet. Consciousness corrupted them, making them 'human' – or whatever else sentient identifier they wanted to use. Just as they, in turn, corrupted the primus' – connecting them with the higher planes. In essence, a 'human' was not likely to remain sane after centuries of life – this is where the shards came in.

A shard was not a dao, shards were formed of the spira as anchors to hold the dao in one's body. In a manner of speaking, no man could ever 'use' a universal concept. It was a prism, a seed that became a shard, that became a fragment, that became a core, that became a sentient astral entity with a physical and immaterial body. A piece of a literal god, nephilim were merely the vehicle for the transit of this power into the material world.

“Is it ready?” She asked, and Hastur nodded. Had been for some time, but he had to do it right – no more rushing. His greatest creation yet, though only an inferior copy of the original. Room to improve, perhaps, but he didn't need it to be better. They needed more of them. More spira to ignite their cores, to animate them and give them strength, and the greatest harvest of spira was about to fall into his lap any day now. This was just the beginning. “Good. We still have plenty of time, but the work should be hastened regardless. And the boy?”

Before them was a figure of a man, taller than most, pale skinned and hairless. Flayed and spread wide on a rotating wheel, no eyes to see, no tongue to speak. Still alive, through the magic, a triumph of alchemy and anima melded into one form. Stretched and twisted, joined by dozens of others in the process of being fit with pseudo-organic artifacts. Another marvel of magic and science made one, none of it possible without her.

The Seeker's, the only faction that made a contrivance out of dealing with forbidden and cursed artifacts. They had their uses, though Hastur would have said they made him sick. He used, and ultimately discarded, everything was a tool to him – but he didn't torture. At least he didn't fancy himself an overly cruel person.

Everyone had their perspective, and he knew it. Every villain in history thought they were on the right side of their respective eras. Here, they'd begun to break the minds of cloned human beings, lobotomizing them magically in a similar fashion to what he'd discovered in the astral space. Only better, each one of them serving as an infinitely circulating reactor of spira.

“You were right.” Hastur offered her his compliments. The harsh red light illuminating the deepest parts of this facility throwing baleful shadows all about. Deeper within, one would hear the beating of a truly massive heart, the haggard breaths of hundreds boxed in steel cages awaiting deployment. And the thrumming of the engine that powered it all, at its core the skeletal figure of blue flame still raging against its bonds. “Without his sample, we never could've balanced the mark one units properly.”

The Fingers had been a field test, that was all. But the appearance of Tyr and nine out of ten Fingers to contain him was divine providence. Unfortunately, his body was not an infinite source of biological material. Remove the heart, and it would regrow, but the old heart would wither into dust that facilitated the process. Hypothetically speaking.

Even when he was cut into tiny pieces, those pieces separated by steel, his body would reincorporate from scratch. But only from one piece if the others could chart no proper path back together. Tyr, by all scientific measurements, did not 'exist' at all. Hastur couldn't possibly explain it, not even 'she' could – perhaps the greatest living genius in the world when it came to the topic of forbidden magic. Tyr's body... In a manner of speaking, a contradiction, was more real than the world itself. Shred him into his baser components and drop him into deuritium, nothing could separate his soul – it was too heavy.

Like the void borne tears in space that might bend universal law like gravity, light, or even time. It didn't have to make sense to observe it, and Hastur had.

Thus, bringing him here was the only option, in a facility that could properly stabilize an organ that had been removed. Stasis fields wouldn't even work, Hastur had tried dimensional stasis first – but the cells would die whether time and space were involved or not. All they needed was one, though, and Tyr had shattered all expectations by delivering himself directly to Hastur in order to see it done. He'd been kept down here for weeks, and they'd gotten all they needed from him.

And Tyr would never remember it.

More data. With Pattoli unintentionally ripping away... Something. An aspect? Pattoli said it hadn't been, Hastur honestly wasn't sure, it wasn't his area of expertise. The dao was spiritual, and he was a man of science. Those fields tended to butt heads at the nest of times. It was like a loose thread inside the man wasn't holding onto those dao like they should. But he was almost certain that the 'healing factor' possessed by the boy was not related to the dao, it was something separate. Calling it an 'immortality curse' would have to work, he didn't need these units to rise from the dead, only regenerate.

Just as Tyr wasn't, these things weren't truly alive. Unliving, not undead. Existing somewhere else, but physically corporeal...? It wasn't natural, whatever the case, a rare thing beyond Hastur's ken. It was as if Tyr were already awakened, existing on both planes at once but without a shard to anchor him. Which shouldn't be possible, by any stretch of the imagination, and he certainly wasn't able enough to be named ascendant. Not even close.

“Might have been a mistake, allowing him to leave.” She said. “His resistance to Bergen's magic is bizarrely low. I still recommend collecting him and preventing him from working against us – he may find a way to stop us, for all his perceived frailty of the mind – he is still my child and might've inherited something worth notice.”

“You're a cold woman.” Hastur inhaled, breathing deeply of the mana rich air, the pleasant thrumming of ancient machinery not human in origin. “The pot calling the kettle black, perhaps. Your son is dying, his time left on this world is limited no matter what he does. Either he dies the way he wants to, or the shards keep stacking up and the world does it for him. Let him live a normal life, just for a little while longer.”

“I chose you because I believed you bereft of all conscience. Not to play nanny for the dreams of young men. That thing is not my son, and I can always make more.”

“You chose me.” Hastur slid the cervical implant into the 'mother' on the wheel. A viscous fluid filling the creatures eyes as it let out a groan. The biological matter of women was too rich in life to properly bond with the birthing artifact. Another oddity. Thus, they'd needed to implant an artificial womb into one of the male flesh constructs instead, so as to harvest the seeds by which more were made. A gruesome, disgusting thing, even Hastur didn't like this part.

In any case, all women had a baseline spira level above the norm, unlike the men, and that was a problem.

A woman could not be primus, and yet they were clearly the superior vessel for etheric energy, whether from above or below. Better paladins, better mages, but they seemed to progress at a slower rate in certain vocations. All of that spira remaining dormant until it could ignite the light in the breast of an infant, losing bits of themselves as they aged and bore children. The ultimate sacrifice by any other word, the sacrifice of a human mother.

Perhaps that was why. Women were just too powerful to ascend in all but the rarest cases. They would die before they could become awakened as true nephilim, almost universally. Men didn't need the stabilizing factors that women did, and when their cores advanced that energy saved for birth would begin to damage their body. Tyr Faeron was the only known individual in history that seemed capable of ascending a female, whether intentionally or not. Another mystery, one that didn't need to be answered, calling him the world's greatest battery would suffice. After all, that's exactly what Hastur was using him for.

The pinned corpse on the wheel being drained of everything within, namely blood that was fired off and purified in forges. Hastur's 'gifts' were nothing of the sort, he hadn't given his adepts anything, he'd merely taken from Tyr and the cards had fallen where they may.

“Because I was the only one who would listen to the ravings of a madwoman.” Hastur concluded with a chuckle. “In any event, he is too weak to stop me now. As soon as it begins, not even the lesser Aesir could stand against us.”

“Understood.” Signe Ebonfist nodded, as satisfied as she was bound to be in this situation. Hastur was right, but she'd always been overly cautious about this sort of thing. Ensuring the universal balance was maintained was worth more than anything. She was trapped on this world. Again. And she wouldn't allow anyone to threaten it, not even that creature who'd managed to fail at his one and only purpose.

To kill all devolved humans, primus' alike, and free the world of the ticking clock that brought the end. The turning of eras, with his sister and counterpart here to ensure that he was killed once his great duty was over. And then, they would start anew, only true nephilim born to efficiency would be allowed life.