She puppeteered him, and now their wills struggled against each other, each straining over just a single motor nerve connection, threading all the way from thumb through vagus nerve to brain that was putting itself in a taurus’ eye. She pushed his thumb off but then he feinted – he was always tricky in his psi combat, the only way to take down greater force, of course – and was able to twist his intention to grab hold onto the handle hard at least, so that he could feel the grip, know it was his hand, and she couldn’t pry these dead, cold fingers off his gun.
She puppeteered his tongue to push the barrel out, and they could both taste the acrid, astringent, slightly salty flavor of propellant residue on steel.
So, he shoved the barrel harder up. She puppeteered his other hand to try and lever it off from his chin, but now it caught in his inner gum line, the pressure almost ripping out his front teeth. She could feel this too, so she relented, but at least he was no longer capable of pulling the trigger now. So, she instead trapped his grip on the handle, but her own nails dug hard into her own palm. She shoved her thumb into her fist all the better to puppeteer his thumb from squirming its way back to the trigger, but now her four other fingers now pressed so hard against her thumb she was afraid the metacarpal would snap. But Kay-El’s own hand was now getting slick with sweat, so if it slipped off in a momentary lapse, he might be able to-
I can’t hurt Queen Talisa. I can’t hurt my own mother. This is the only way to-
You can’t do this! Give me back my agency!
You disrespect me by taking away my body like this!
You’re not in your right mind!
I’ve never been more in my right mind!
He continued: This is the only thing I can do that is right. You’re the one who told me what it means to be a hero. I can’t take this anymore, I can’t be their weapon anymore, not if the target is the ones that I once loved, before they ripped my memories away. I refuse to help them anymore.
If I help them, I’m complicit.
I enable them.
This is the only thing I can do to stop it.
It was hard to argue with that logic.
Now Vilithe made a plea not to logos but to his pathos, by appearing before him inside that reaver as a psionic projection, in her jumpsuit, her cornrows, her gleaming dragonrider ports all along her scalp, her epicanthic folds and her aquiline nose, so that he could remember how she looked like though he had never really seen her with his own eyes. She appeared now, both hands clasped over his as if she was trying to wrest him away from giving himself a self-inflicted gunshot wound right into the prefrontal cortex.
“Stop it, Kay.” is what Kay heard the hallucination say. Gravelly. Terse. Tears did not appear on the hallucination but streamed down Vilithe’s face.
“Hah- hahh-”, he couldn’t really speak because he had a gun shoved into his mouth.
But he wouldn’t budge.
He wasn’t working from logos or pathos.
He was working from ethos.
This was the only way.
And it was his home turf. It was his mind. She was not going to-
Imprinting is but one of the three types of mind flaying, after all, even if it was just some distracting encryption.
She was desperate though. She couldn’t lose him. Not when they were this close! It was just one last final bloody mission, the safest one yet with the most backup possible, and she just- she just wanted to see him. Meet him, for real.
Of course, despite what he thought to himself, he wasn’t really that calm. He was hyperventilating, his heart rate was pushing a hundred and ten beats per minute. Epinephrine and norepinephrine were doing their demonic dance of fight or flight, his amygdala was lit up like an orcan death metal mosh. Survival instinct is hardwired.
“Fine.”
She was the one who feinted this time, the hallucination letting go of his grip hand but pulling and shoving hard to the left side, fish hooking his cheek and pulling the skin taut, with the hand that was holding the barrel, so that when he smashed the trigger the bullet whizzed by his ear, for she had just managed to rip the barrel away from his mouth. The blaring retort left him with a thrumming ringing in that ear, that droned on and on.
The bullet clanged into the hard gryphantene inner shell of the reaver, complaining with an ow, ricocheting and embedding itself in some insulation padding.
Second and Third abruptly woke up to see their Knight Leader appear to be trying to blow his brains out, unsure of what to do.
Vilithe let the tears appear on the hallucination’s face. Her watery eyes looked deep into the Knight Leader’s – Gods damn it she still didn’t even know his name – and even Second and Third could for the first time see her there, standing, sobbing, as the hallucination let go.
The Knight Leader was free to kill himself now. An hero.
But he just sat there, his breath heaving, his body trembling, looking right back into her blubbering eyes.
“If you’re going to do something so selfish,” the real her was stuttering and heaving and choking and gasping for breath between every syllable.
“If you’re going to do something so selfish.”, the hallucination spoke calmly, clearly, coldly, “then, please, at least have one last conversation with me before you go, so I can say goodbye.”
Since the gun was no longer in his mouth he could speak, but instead he chose to yell, “I’m not being selfish!”
The hallucination’s face crumpled up but held her head high. Vilithe’s face was already all crumpled up, and she sank, her neck drooped, watching the drops fall and stain upon the polyester cloth of her cot.
The hallucination gave him a withering stare.
“Did you ever think about how I might feel about this?” She whispered to herself.
“Did you ever think about how I might feel about this?”
He had not. He really had not.
The pathos was working now, and his cold and steely moral conviction began to bend to heated, malleable gold. Then, finally, the bright and magmatic flare of their love melted that metal conviction down to a puddle.
Like a burst, all of her dreams, all of her longings of them meeting physically for the first time, all the gratitude she had for meeting him psionically, for having him in her life, they flooded and filled him, and it was overwhelming.
Like magnetic attraction, his body’s aching, longing need for oxytocin and serotonin and dopamine, his raw testosterone pumping in agonizing necessities through his bestial, violent nature and purpose, and of course his raw elvan soul, who also, in the end, just needs the simple joys of comfort, and pleasure, and most importantly- company – familial bonds of the tribe – shot to her longing, and the psionic energies danced like yin and yang, two halves of a whole, neither feminine nor masculine, and yet at the same time both for both, just simply two conscious beings who now, more than ever, needed each other.
I can’t do without you.
“I-” this time it was the hallucination that stuttered while the true lips spoke it clear, “I love you.”
He dropped the gun; it clattered to the floor. Second and Third couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing, it was so alien to them, so otherworldly, and yet, so timeless.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He didn’t think he had ever cried this much before in his life, he was blubbering too. He choked and gasped for breath for a whole mess was running down the back of his throat and swallowed the phlegm, so he could say:
“I love you too.”
And then he staggered back to his feet, his calf crying in agony, but he didn’t care, he grabbed the hallucination and embraced her, and they kissed.
But the mathematical difficulty of trying to simulate multiple levels of tactilities – Knight Leader trying to kiss the hallucination, Vilithe trying to kiss her own projection of Knight Leader, transferring Knight Leader’s actual and not simulated tactility to Vilithe, and then transferring Vilithe’s actual tactility to the Knight Leader, when they were fundamentally apart in the spacetime continuum – it caused the simulation to collapse.
Attempting to transfer the feeling of real weight and substance and matter was something that spirits couldn’t do. Hallucinations weren’t real.
The nerves command the muscles to press too hard against a mass that just isn’t there-
-and just like that, in trying to hug her hallucination, she dissipated in his arms.
Now he collapsed, crumpling into the floor in a fetal position. She did the same on her cot, pulling her legs close to her, wrapping her arms around her legs. The simple comfort of a shared embrace denied to them; all they could embrace was their own bodies.
He was dry. He had no more tears left to shed.
He had to see her too. He needed her as much as she needed him. He just had to survive this damned ranging in hell! Hell! This was truly- hell.
Kill himself but-
Break-
Her.
Heart.
At this point Vilithe and the Knight Leader had gone way past straying dangerously amoral, they had now both finally realized they had gone completely and utterly rogue. What other word could be used to describe the choice they were facing?
How? How can I choose?
No response.
How can I choose between betraying my Queen Mother and betraying you?
She was unequivocal, you just choose.
And, indeed, she was trying so hard, so, so hard, to cloak, repress, suppress and hide her own psionic screaming from Kay-El, that begged him to please choose me.
Please choose me.
Please choose me!
Just choose ME!
Please, please, please just choose me.
Please.
She wanted to flood his every sensory input with herself, to give him no choice in the matter, but she also knew that if she didn’t give him a choice, then it would all be meaningless. She couldn’t bias his decision. She had to let him choose of his own volition. His - free will. No, there was no such thing. Just his agency.
And finally, with the weight of the realization of the full consequences of every one of his possible actions at this awful nexus of actions, Kay-El finally chilled the skai out, lok ting ting, stopped being so melodramatic, and started to try and properly think.
At last, in her favored arena of logos, of reason and rationality, Vilithe presented her case:
There is no way that Queen Talisa is going to win. Amefrid would not strike unless she was certain of victory.
Talisa – and now even she had stopped calling her Queen – threw you away!
She summoned the dream and dug deeper into the encryption. The details of the silhouette cast in the red light began to fill in now. Talisa’s lustrous pompadour, swept back to voluminous snow-white hair as if she was royalty of the ancien regime. Talisa’s royal spirit suit, practically composed of the spirits themselves, a living protective suit atop her skin, liquid carapace. Her thin nose, sharp cheekbones, sharp chin, big eyes, all the usual derivative configurations of elvan beauty. The sliding doors shut closed and then the momentary recall completed as Kay-El swung around to see mass shady forms of opponents marching toward him.
Talisa left you to die, to serve no more as a distraction for her getaway. Why serve her as your Queen if she takes your loyalty for granted? Talisa is the selfish one.
But my loyalty is granted – by my Queen. My Queen designed me that way. Because I am a bodyguard – How? Did he pluck that from her mind? – and protecting, sacrificing myself, is my purpose. Because soldiers die-
-and Queens don’t weep. But he could undeniably feel her weeping again now, though he could not see it or hear it or touch it, though he wished he could wipe them from her face.
And that is when Vilithe won because she had caught him in his own logic.
What is it to be noble? What is it to be heroic? What is goodness?
They had thought about this before together.
The original position. The categorical imperative.
If he did not know what soldier he would be, being born into this abyss, how would he want soldiers to treat each other? Would he want these acts to be universal? If a soldier couldn’t weep for the soldiers that he fought with, then what could he weep for? So, it stood to reason then, that:
Second will weep for you. Third will weep for you. Atell will weep for you.
She found it difficult to continue.
I will weep for you. And if you really want this to be goodbye, then I’ll accept that’s what you want. And I won’t stop you.
He flexed his fingers, then held them tight again in his fist to crack his knuckles, just to confirm to himself what he already knew, that he was indeed back in control of his own body.
But this time he couldn’t even bear to pick up his gun again. He couldn’t even touch it. The presence of the deadly thing reviled him, made him uncomfortable. He almost would rather just jump out of the reaver and suffocate, which maybe wouldn’t be the worst idea.
She was so deeply entwined inside him now that he did not notice the inception being imprinted at all, deleting his last suicidal thought, and was entirely convinced that this was something he himself was thinking. He hated pain, he was all too familiar with it. So finally, the suicidal ideation abated - probably one of the worst symptoms of psionic fraying.
What do we do, Vi?
We survive one last time. It’s over after this.
I can’t kill my brothers and sisters. I can’t kill my own mother. I can’t.
Right then Vilithe was inspired by the many times she had pain blocked for him, and indeed it was so many times that one could say that the Knight Leader owed her one, and so she came up with an idea - I’ll puppeteer you through it, Kay-El. I’ll take your place. I’ll put your consciousness in a coma while I steer your body, you won’t experience any of it. It won’t even be you doing it. You can just put the blame on me.
And now, in a role reversal, it was he who was stunned by her naivete, don’t be a fool, Vilithe. You might know how to ride dragons, you might be one of the strongest psions I have ever met, but you don’t know how to fight. I might as well just make this easier for both of us because if you’re that deep inside my mind when I die, it’s going to hurt you too.
But then it occurred to Vilithe that there was one practically forbidden form of mind flaying, the highest and most invasive of all, unforgiveable, that just so happened to be the perfect solution to their problem.
It was a sisyphean task that lay before them, for even after this, they would still be enslaved as vassals. An absurd existence.
I’ve got a plan, Kay-El…
But it was an anti-heroic one, to say the least.
Vilithe wondered how did he build up so many concepts in his head to make such an eloquent argument in such a short time since she began unwriting his psionic imprinting? All she did was brush away the encrypting cobwebs. Was this level of understanding there, all along?
Even telepathically, the command to ‘calm down’ had never calmed anyone down.
Replete with a giant flaming arch made of bamboo, a burning pyramid behind it, a burning gateway to hell that led to the moon so that the moon would burn too, more burning effigies and burning death traps, and a WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.
…spinning out a present that had no future seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Third thought of trying to deescalate the situation with a bit of levity – “Bro, if you’re going to do that, aim at the temple, please! Less of a mess to clean up!” – but then thought better of it.
Indeed, they had never even consummated in hallucination lovemaking for they had been so awkwardly interrupted by Vilithe’s post-traumatic stress disorder flashback, and the itinerary that Therys had imposed upon them simply mounted in its hectic intensity so that they simply had no time to try again. Not to mention their fear of being sucked back into the Amallarkean hellscape of that frozen moment in time, the fall of Clan Callethe, the Battle of Phyros. Still, hallucination sex was ultimately a poor imitation of the real thing, a simulation of tactile nerve firings couldn’t possibly compare.
Damn, this is truly a significant moment in his brief spark of existence and snot was dribbling out of his nose!
They could not overwrite physics, not without whisking their sense of their bodies away entirely, and in this moment, where their hosts sought true presence, and not the illusion of it, this pretense was unacceptable to the spirits.
If one really did think about the ethical implications, the correct answer is still obvious.
A precept in the Art of War: every battle is won before it is ever fought.
But this was not psionic fraying.
It would only just begin.
He already had, many times.
Vilithe would Totally Dominate Kay-El, forming a Gestalt.
But one must imagine Sisyphus to be happy.
The only truly important philosophical question.
Malevolent was slightly saddened. Kay-El choosing to end himself, to stop himself from taking part of the assassination of his own mother- was still resistance. But this… this meant that they would just become Amefrid’s ultimate puppet, fulfilling her greatest wish. But still, it meant saving Kay-El. And he knew he meant the realms to his host, Vi. And Vi meant the realms to Malevolent.