Chapter 14-391: What Happens in Rio (2/2)

So, I let them handle it. They were more than happy to do so.

And now, there were no more Poison or Hungry Kiss/Heart Warlocks on the planet, save Shvaughn and Legion themselves. That didn’t mean there weren’t dops, or body-swappers who thought they were clever, or Possessors, or mind-control parasites and symbiotes and other shapechangers and the like.

We could only be alert and look for them, and extinguish them when they were found. The mortal races had to be vigilant to survive, and if everyone couldn’t live that way, well, there were some who could and took upon themselves the duty to do so.

It was considered one of the Church of Harse’s duties to watch for infiltration of society in that manner, and was one of the big reasons they were so closely associated with law enforcement personnel... and it took a Divinely-motivated organization to look and watch across the decades and centuries for some of the really long-lived beings out there pulling shit.

Harse didn’t look at all kindly on body-swappers and the like, and would pursue those using unnatural means to prolong their lives by taking those of others tirelessly and forever. It was pretty hard to evade the servants of the Judge of the Dead who were always looking for you...

Shvaughn was also one of those people. However, she had made herself invaluable by locking away Dark Pacts, and she didn’t destroy or rape clean the souls of all those she Consumed, although she did Gestalt a lot of them.

Master Fred doing the same with Legion was technically the same way, but soul-wise, all of them were totally intact, and he gave his Cohort the right to truly die and be released at any time. The only ones trapped without alternatives were Pact Grantors, Pactbound, and those who desperately didn’t want to go to their final fates. Being Pactbound could be considered an afterlife for those people, and as long as they were contributing positively, judgement on releasing them could be suspended until their time came... which it always did, in the end.

If Cleansing them of Sin also killed them, well, it was Heavenly power doing the job. Master Fred was obviously not going to be judged poorly by Heaven for giving said souls a chance to not go Down, choosing between a painful Redemption or Oblivion if they couldn’t endure was probably better than post-death Torment, and Heaven didn’t profit until AFTER the Redemption took over. It cost Heaven the same amount of power as the Sin destroyed, so Good and Evil stayed in balance...

Also, the Shroud interfering with where the dead were going was a huge issue for the afterlife. The purgatory of the guarded cemeteries and holy grounds warding souls from a torturous existence in the Haze was a very real issue. What was being stuck inside a Warlock Grandmaster when compared to that? At the very worst, they were equal dooms... at the other end, it was being merciful while they waited for proper Judgement.

Ninety miles in radius, ten thousand miles a day. About a month to cover the Atlantic. It would take over twice that to do the Pacific.

As I was finishing up the Atlantic, there were other forces moving. The final blow would naturally wait until I had the Pacific and Indian Oceans properly mapped out, too, but this was a bit different. They had a special request for me...

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4/28/2019, ten days earlier...

“Wisdom of Winter, I know you are watching. I could use a moment of your time.”

The cold wind moaned, absolutely dry, the only ice and snow it blew about being that which scattered from off of the ground. It swirled in a sheet of refraction, and Ughril materialized out of the fractured light.

She actually couldn’t track me unless I allowed Her to, which I expressly did in Her new Domain. It was only polite.

She had taken a less brutally primitive form, catering to our modern expectations of an Ice Goddess, while avoiding the white-skinned appearance that might bring a Cultivator to mind. This was done rather simply by inverting the meme and going black as onyx of skin, and crystalline white of hair and robe, snow and ice swirling about Her in cold, ageless beauty that forcibly brought to mind the stars at the South Pole, and the cold between those stars.

Looked damn sharp, too.

“You are styling, Goddess,” I complimented Her. “Nobody is going to mistake You for Rue or Voyd looking like that. Well done!”

She lifted Her finely-sculpted head in what might have been a sniff, but Her eyes gleamed. “Why are you here, Lady of Icefire?” She asked formally.

I held up a long tube filled with crimson. “I’m going to give a shoggoth a mental anchor. If You could suppress one just long enough for me to apply this without me having to beat on the thing, that would be wonderful.”

She looked past me at the moaning, wailing teeth of the Mountains of Madness leering into the sky beyond me. “They have been mad for ages unknown. Think you such simple tricks might affect them?” She scoffed.

“Shoggoth are ageless biomechanical creations. Mad for a minute, mad for an eon, all the same thing to them. I’m going to give it a biomagical anchor it can latch onto and use to retain some semblance of its own identity. It has already worked once... although that shoggoth was not part of the Choir of the Mountains.”

She was silent for a moment as She contemplated that idea. “You can control them if this works, Icefire?” She asked curiously.

“By no means. Actually, this a method that makes it nigh-impossible to control them successfully, which is why it works.” She gave me another gaze, as if She simply could not understand my thought processes, and fixed on the tube in my hand.

“Blood-binding in some manner?” She asked, interested.