Chapter Text
All throughout the infinite spheres of the multiverse, and throughout the boggling variety of life that inhabits them, there is but one, single thing that remains unwaveringly persistent, and that is the tendency for things to unite, persist, and then sometime thereafter dissolve. Not necessarily creation and destruction in the sense that Dlo’Yug tended to think of, but more as a perpetual dance of elements both physics and conceptual; the relentless churning of the cosmic waters, vortices forming and unforming, material stuff gathering and exploding—it’s such a ubiquitous, mathematically perfect constant that it’s a wonder why any thinking creature should see any mystery in it all. Everything and everyone must obey this oldest and most unavoidable law. Ubbo-Sathla did when she congealed out of stellar filth and forthwith decayed into Earth’s biosphere; Cthulhu does when he scatters his material form between dimensions; and even Hastur bowed to it when he witnessed Carcosa rise from and sink back back into Hali. All thing begin and all thing end. That is the way of the Dream. Atoms come together via strange and elusive forms of attraction, twirl around the aether as a single being for a few centuries, and then slowly come undone, flying separate to opposite corners of spacetime to repeat the process again and again.
So why, then, did Dlo’Yug not see the War coming? How was it that the Emperor was able to so easily neglect such a self-evident reality and submit to the delusion that the Aristocracy would stand forever? Why did Dlo’Yug think themself and N’hil’eh would be friends forever? In truth, it did know the answer to these questions, but that answer was laden with such an absurd and contradictory melange of pure but directionless shame that to even begin to address it would have invited a sort of madness that goes beyond that which is found in the eye of Azathoth. And so Dlo’Yug chose to ignore the obvious and shift the blame away from themself and natural disorder, placing it squarely on their old, old ally and beloved companion N’hil’eh.
With the past abandoned, the future uncertain, and all emotional ties severed save for that which bridged them to their almighty Lord Hastur, Dlo’Yug had nothing left to cherish but the present, and to say that was in quite a sorry state would be a severe understatement. The date was 12,003 G.E. The place was the Ah’vlar Plains just two-hundred sixty kilometers South from the Pinnacle. And the current players in this transient but unforgettable moment in time were the conflicting armies of Yuggoth and Sy-or, all of seventeen million soldiers lumped most uncomfortably together in a brutish maelstrom of zipping aerocraft, shrieking plasma cannons, and strutting artillery platforms, to provide a simpler image. Had Dlo’Yug any insight into the future they would have known that this battle would later go down in history (however little was left of it) as one of the last skirmishes of the dreadful “Nightmare War”. Though to look at it from Dlo’s immediate perspective the chaos below hardly looked nearly as threatening as it really was. The Emperor, as well as dozens of other members of the martial parliament, were then stationed aboard the Zyzzyva-Yl’ha—flagship of the Yuggothian armed space force—hovering high above in the clouds at a comparatively safe altitude of thirty kilometers. Dlo’Yug themself chose to stay on the bridge, despite the frantic protests of their advisors, and direct as much of the action as could be legally relegated to the former aristocrat—which, sadly, wasn’t much. Dlo’Yug was certainly more of a spectator than a commander, a fact that instilled them with a gnawing sense of uselessness that would have felt wholly alien to anyone who had been as abruptly stripped of their rank as Dlo had been. It had been thousands of years since the last time the Emperor of Yuggoth was without nigh omnipotent authority, and as harrowing as those intervening millennia were Dlo’Yug wished for nothing more than to have them back. They wanted to return to the good old days when it was just the three of them—the three Kings of the Tri-Kingdom Aristocratic Order—slogging through paperwork and sitting at meetings; no crater-pitted wastelands, no soldiers screaming as they died, no smoking gattling guns, and absolutely no uncertainty as to wether or not the next day will even happen. There was peace back then. There was order. There was the government, the King, and the Kingdoms; there was the upper class, the lower class, and the occasional refuse inhabiting the ashy corners of the planet.
Yet out of all of those bygone things, there was only one that Dlo’Yug truly missed: N’hil’eh. And in the most rancid, diabolical of ironies, N’hil’eh was most assuredly the one thing Dlo’Yug would never have back. It was a separation wider than death, far more difficult to mend and made all the more horrific purely because N’hil’eh was still very much alive. No, Dlo’Yug’s greatest friend and most valuable ally wasn’t on the other side of death, but on the other side of the battle line.
With their sense of rationale all but repressed, Dlo’Yug considered the exact reasons and chronology leading up to this divorce to be largely inconsequential (and, perhaps, a little too much to think about). But the end results were here, present, and much too vast to ignore. After many ages of peace and cooperation, kept stable by mutual trust and a shared desire to see the multiverse recover from it’s fall to madness, the Tri-Kingdom Aristocratic Order has divided, with it’s leaders clawing at each others’ throats like the hoary gods they once swore to conquer. N’hil’eh now hated Dlo’Yug, and with such primordial passion that the old crinoid was willing to unleash galactic war upon the Gestalt. Yet the damning thing about this was that the Emperor had almost no idea how to feel about it. For Dlo emotion was a new and unwieldy thing that all at once seemed to be the utmost crux to material existence and the very thing that threatened to unravel it. Joy, fear, love, sadness—Dlo wasn’t born with these feelings, they had to learn them, incorporate them by force into the Yuggothian design, all the while struggling to understand precisely why they had to do this. The effort had lasted some six or seven millennia, and yet by the time the War started Dlo felt no closer to understanding how this apparent mental illness (as was the common aetherian view on emotion) was supposed to sync with themself and the society of the Gestalt. Although, at least, Dlo’Yug knew that war was meant to be regarded with horror and despair, like a human looking into the face a tier-20 organism. The Emperor never enjoyed conflict—inimical as it is to Carcosian law—but this aversion has always merely been a matter of common sense, just as war was always another dysfunction that begged to be resolved with skillful planning and adherence to regulations. And if tact failed then there was nothing that genocide couldn’t easily solve, yet—according to N’hil’eh own lessons on emotional thinking—genocide was bad, but war was “sometimes okay”. Hypocrisy, too, must be a typical element of emotion.
But to Dlo’Yug this transition from a monotonous, practical lifestyle to one infused with the hallucinogenic buzz of feeling was never a strict matter of diplomacy or cultural synthesis, despite what some edicts might claim; it was about empathy. Dlo held a very personal desire to understand how and why carbon-based life behaves the way it does, not for the sake of the fleshy Earth-beasts or for Hastur and the Gestalt, but purely to satisfy their own gnawing curiosity. The raw savagery, hopeless persistence, and abysmal ignorance of the typical four-dimensional organism had at one time appeared to Dlo’s young antenna to be a grimly, distantly mystical side of the cosmos, like a literal otherworld that none but the most unhinged scientists would have ever expected to exist. And yet the Yuggoth Empire has always known these slimy animals were there, on the other side of the veil—it’s just that nobody ever bothered to look through their beady, bloody eyes. So when the Gestalt Ethereal first gathered, bringing not only varied dimensions and universes together but different orders of life too, Dlo’Yug was given an ample opportunity to do just that: sympathize with the earthly flesh creatures. More than that, really; the Gestalt proved to be an ongoing experiment to see if the remaining species of the multiverse could build a paradise together—no matter if they were made of hydrogen gas, carbon, aether matter, solar fire, silicon, or out of plain old stone—and for just a little while it seemed as if this were, indeed, possible.
Again, Dlo never felt inclined to question what went wrong, even if they knew they should. The Emperor could only pick up the pieces, praying all the while that they and N’hil’eh could one day make amends. But so long as they remained on one side of the planet and the beloved crinoid on the other Dlo didn’t think that little miracle would be very likely. The best they could do now was watch and wait, and the bridge of the Zyzzyva-Yl’ha was a decent enough place to do both of those things.
Their antennae waxing a nervous orange and uncomfortable green, Dlo’Yug skittered hastily out of their seat and over to one of the many egg-shaped monitors wired into the chamber’s steeply leaning walls, around which orbited a handful of technicians eagerly probing it’s many glass panels with their luminous craniums and spidery claws. Nearly oblivious to the rapidly flashing signals that passed from one officer to the next, Dlo’Yug wedged their way through the crowd and leveled their attention squarely at the awkwardly stitched together collage of videos roaming across the monitor at speeds just slow enough for the idle watcher to appreciate. Despite the visual chaos they showed—searing bright pulses splattered with specks of black, slithering trails of sickly green, ballooning ghosts flying towards the star-painted sky, harsh angles twisting and bending with soulless rhythms, hoards rushing away from thrashing walls of fire—the images were a real-time feed of a single square kilometer directly below the ship, which for the moment was occupied by less than a thousand Yuggothian soldier units and their valiant struggle to hold the line against an enemy squadron of Syorian berserkers. If Dlo’Yug had the will to look into any of the other forty-nine screens they would have no doubt shown more of the same playing out on other sectors of the battlefield. The Emperor found it difficult to look for any longer than a few seconds, but out of a vestigial sense of obligation (or morbid fascination) they forced themself to focus on the horror that N’hil’eh had created and tried to nurse any small grain of hatred to match the crinoid’s own. Dlo had ample enough reason to, in any case. There, in a black and smoldering blast crater laid strewn the gnarled pieces of an artillery-walker as well the hot remains of it’s pilot, which was hardly discernible from the spilled contents of a waste receptacle. And over there, on the western slope of a once floral hill, was a drafted fungus-artisan lumbering miserably with a tank of fuel cradled between their four shaggy arms. Not far away was a sniper with half of their proboscises gruesomely burned off and wielding a badly damaged x-ray rifle that seemed on the verge of exploding. Up in the air was an aerial unit flitting swiftly on black wings until a disk-shaped projectile came shrieking out of nowhere and sliced the unfortunate decapod in half. There was a perpetual snowfall of ashes and winking embers that might have been beautiful had Dlo not suspected it to be mixed with the shredded flesh of Yuggothian soldiers, whilst the ground was made course with hastily carved trenches and scorched forests, and the bloated stars above were slashed and pocked with the greenish explosions of low-orbit quark-bombs. Every so often Dlo would count how many troops were visible on the fifty monitors—whoever was still scurrying on eight able legs and whoever lied dead, infirm, or forgotten among the detritus—and each time they did the former category would surrender at least ten to the latter category. There was no audio or olfactory augmentations to the display, but the Yuggothian Emperor could nonetheless hear the agonized howls and smell burning exoskeletons just as vividly as they would if they were down there among the carnage.
Yet, the obvious dissonance between the roaring hell below the cold security of the Zyzzyva-Yl’ha above was so wide and so jarringly at odds that whatever empathy Dlo’Yug might have felt for their own troops was mostly supplanted by an almost whimsical sense that this whole war and the endless profusion of torment it belched was but an elaborate play, staged and directed by a cosmic mind as twisted as Nyarlathotep’s own. It was somehow difficult to believe that the dead were actually dead, or that the Aristocracy was anything less than intact and stable—in fact, Dlo even doubted their own role in the drama. For just one, aeon-long second it actually seemed not only feasible but inevitable that the Emperor had lulled themself into grim and especially deep daydream while cruising on a perfectly peaceful, perfectly normal ferry ship en route to, perhaps, Jiool-Zzak, or some other civilized planet they often frequented.
Any doubts were decisively buried when—either by coincidence or association—Dlo happened to look into one of the monitors and saw a six-member troop of Syorian soldiers confronting a pair of injured Yuggothian technicians. With a detachment that felt almost rapturous, Dlo’Yug watched the sextet of winged crinoids—their cylindrical bodies heavily clad in silver chainmail and cargo packs from tentacle to tentacles—spiraled down from the air and promptly shuffled towards the pair of fungoids with an aggressive writhing of their bladed fingers. The technicians hardly hesitated a seconds before both of them charged with beautifully symmetrical movements towards the attackers, each seizing one of the gigantic metal barrels in their claws and violently thrashing like worms gone mad. Then the other four Syorians came to their comrades’ rescue, executing the unarmed Yuggothians with swift, graceful slashes to the soft and luminescent tissue between their tattered wings. Before Dlo could process the fact that the struggle was over the Syorians ascended up and out of screen, leaving behind two splayed carcasses with limbs curled and antennae flattened in a rather sickening state of disorder. Dlo stared at the photographically still video feed for several more seconds, inwardly wrestling with a misplaced and implacable sense of disbelief, and after that silent duration they finally realized that, at last, this nightmare had made them feel something other than pure fugue: it made them feel anger. For a moment it was a blind, nebulous hatred, directed at nearly everything beneath the Throne of Carcosa—most particularly N’hil’eh and everyone who allied with the Syorian nation—but as abruptly as it bloomed the feeling collapsed into a certainty as sharp and primal as fear itself: Dlo hated themself above all else.
No sooner had the realization emerged than Dlo drowned it again, this time with forced concern for Sy-or’s now-infamous leader. The Yuggothian wondered, in some shallow way, what dear old N’hil’eh was thinking and doing at that moment, and wether or not they were ensnared in the very same struggle for mental stability or silently fuming at the wonton slaughter they and Dlo both were leading. Dlo—weary and confused as they were—had no want to hold N’hil’eh in contempt, let alone aggression, but the Yuggothian Empire, along with it’s status, it’s assets, and it’s people, had to take priority over a single life, regardless of how valuable it was. N’hil’eh had to die, and Dlo felt quite certain the crinoids death would be at their own hands.
“Navigator!” Dlo’Yug harshly buzzed, their antennae flashing an authoritative red. The Emperor turned and undulated their wings at a particular beta-class Yuggothian attending to a console in the far corner of the bridge, their almost serpentine form wrapped in a layer of greenish mycelium and their spidery hands gesticulating a rapid series of calculations. At their calling, the navigator—better known as Y’zz’rethk to the ship’s inner circle—promptly spun and skittered toward Dlo’Yug with an organic swiftness that betrayed a vestigial reverence for the dethroned leader.
“Yes, Dlo’Yug. What do you require?” Y’zz’rethk flashed yellow, standing up on their hind legs to meet the Emperor’s antennae.
“Can you tell me the location of enemy unit ‘N’hil’eh’?”
“The Syorian patriarch?” the navigator buzzed with an audible frown. “Our latest intel indicated that N’hil’eh was aboard target 566-89Z, which is most likely the enemy flagship.”
Dlo’Yug’s antenna rippled with mild annoyance, having forgotten—and being bluntly reminded—that most Yuggothians were unimaginative drones. “Yes, I surmised that much. I mean what is the location of target 566-89Z?” Dlo screeched a bit more harshly then they intended to.
“I am sorry, Dlo’Yug, but we presently do not have any specific data on the location of the Syorian flagship.”
“What?” Dlo’s sharp tone was fully intended that time.
“Target 566-89Z was last seen leaving local airspace in the southeast direction, presumably in retreat. We…” Y’zz’rethk stalled nervously, evidently picking up on the ex-Emperor’s ire. “We assumed 566-89Z was no longer a threat so we stopped monitoring it in favor of the *other* obstacles.”
“You fool!” Dlo’Yug roared, rising to their full height and tersely snapping their wings with a sound like bones breaking. “That was an enemy command vessel—the chief enemy command vessel! Your greatest priority was to destroy their flagship, not let it escape!”
“With all due respect, Emperor…” Y’zz’rethk buzzed in a decidedly disrespectful shade of green. “…you are in no way in charge of this mission.”
“That doesn’t excuse your incompetence! Do you not realize you’ve given the enemy a strategic advantage?!”
“If it appeases you, I can bring your concerns to the captain and allow them to decide…”
“No!” Dlo snapped. “Save us the time and proceed *immediately* with course corrections. Follow their flagship and once you have it in visual range lock on to them and do not them out of your sight!” the Emperor leveled a claw in indication of the bell-shaped targeting controls hanging from the ceiling and screamed with a lurid flash of red “GO!”
Y’zz’rethk lingered for only a moment, during which they regarded their former leader with a bemused and slightly frightened look. “Very well. We will do as you wish.” the navigator conceded, slinking away to carry out the given orders.
Dlo eagerly resumed their study of the monitors, now flicking their optical antenna towards the ones that displayed the frayed and spire-laden horizon southeast of the Zyzzyva-Yl’ha. None of the bubbling, seething screens showed anything the Emperor had not already seen before—the amorphous shapes or airships floating fish-like through the lower atmosphere, whole forests of smoke pillars and ultraviolet beams crisscrossing the ashy ground, massive stars boiling and lumbering behind a tattered veil of clouds—yet the one thing Dlo wanted to see was nowhere to be found, either on this monitor or on any other. The Syorian flagship and N’hil’eh’s own chariot (which, as Dlo’Yug recalled from the days they were allowed to freely wander about it’s decks, was really called the Founded Pride) was a particularly difficult ship to miss as it was notoriously archaic-looking and fabulously decorated, in true Syorian fashion. It was shaped exactly like an enormous pentagram laid down on it’s face, slowly spinning on it’s axis and flashing thousand of viscously bright lights along it five arms, appearing for all world like a gilded weapon thrown by the vengeful hand of Nodens. Whereas once it might have been regarded as a luxurious castle housing a jolly-old king glutting themself on earthly pleasures nowadays the Founded Pride was nothing less than a monstrous harbinger captained by a mad but horrifically cunning harpy hellbent on the complete extermination of all Yuggothian life. That change alone was enough to rattle Dlo’Yug to their core, but to think that apocalyptic warlord was once the sweet and tranquil N’hil’eh…
Again, Dlo’Yug turned their attention to the plethora of soldiers dying alone and empty on the battlefield, almost wondering why Hastur would be so cold as to let this chaos happen. But long before the illegal question could gain any significant weight on their conscious Dlo came to the abrupt and rapturously certain conclusion that the King in Yellow does nothing because he knows this is as apt a punishment as any for Yuggoth’s ineptitude and Sy-or’s haughtiness, with all other Kingdoms suffering as necessary reminders to obey their Lord and uphold order at any cost. The former Emperor waxed blue thinking about how they and all of their people would have to go extinct after uncounted trillions of years of expansion, all because of one crinoids brattiness.
But, perhaps, Dlo’Yug was just as much at fault as N’hil’eh. It was this infernal attachment that had dammed them all; this irrational, emotional attachment to one very particular life-form and a disease-like desire to preserve it’s wellbeing over all else. N’hil’eh called this “love” one time, and that enigmatic word stuck with Dlo’Yog ever since. Love was allegedly a good thing, but it was very patently love that had broken the Tri-Kingdom Aristocratic Order, and will very likely be love that breaks the Gestalt Ethereal if N’hil’eh has their way.
It wouldn’t be too incorrect to say that Dlo’Yug once loved N’hil’eh, nor would it be incorrect to say Dlo loved N’hil’eh even now, during the fiery twilight of their lives. Yet…
“Alert. Alert. Defensive area has been breached.” A navigator suddenly droned in a disarming monotone, breaking off Dlo’Yug’s train of thought before they could form any climax. “Enemy vessel has been detected Aerial-Northwest, sixty-four degrees lateral, eighty-seven point two degrees diagonal. Target designation 566-89Z. Target is approaching at approximately five-hundred duls an hour and will be in our immediate airspace in ten seconds.” The navigator paused, looked up at the ceiling and turned blue with an emotion approaching despair. “Impact with the Zyzzyva-Yl’ha is imminent.”
That damned lunatic is attacking us from above… Dlo’Yug at once realized. To their own surprise, the Emperor didn’t pay hardly any more than second’s thought to how they were all about to die because of one soldier’s egregious oversight, instead choosing to spend their last nine seconds appreciating, in some distant, dismal way, the absolutely spectacular way N’hil’eh was choosing to take revenge. Ramming an airship from the upper atmosphere with another airship? The notion was so amazingly surreal and impractical that Dlo’Yug actually exchanged their ire for the rebellious crinoid for a final, wistful longing for the days when N’hil’eh’s antics were much more innocent in nature. Dlo knew they themself would surely perish, but in the off chance that N’hil’eh survived the former Emperor hoped the Syorian Patriarch wouldn’t regret this little act of mass murder too much.
When ten seconds were up the world abruptly blurred into a hellstorm of violent shaking metal, fire, and visceral booming unlike anything the sheltered Emperor had ever heard before. Gravity became a painful tumult of motion, the air conditioned atmosphere became a searing wind of shrapnel, and the calm lighting became a dire mix of orange and red.
And then everything went black and silent.