story

Placeholder. Massive placeholder. Its 80% plotted but its soooo long and requires sooo much exposition

Buuut I will try to pare it down to the vitals. i failed. stg dont be fooled this is still a placeholder

Lisbet was created by a race of parasitic aliens, to save them from an existential threat posed by volatile reality warpers called High Terrans. These aliens parisitize the souls of their host, eventually merging with, and overwriting their host. Their will is bound to a Queen by a hivemind. Their queen at the time was named Lish. The species is called Thrax.

Lisbet spent her early life in a stasis pod while the soul merge developed. Before it completed, High Terrans discovered and confiscated Lisbet. They exacted heavy reparations from Lish, then scoured as much Thrax influence as they could from Lisbet and sent her to live on Earth.

Lisbet bounced back fine emotionally, all happy, chirpy, but didn’t quite fit in with other humans. Everyone treated her well and her life was good, but through her latent connection to the Thrax hivemind, she sensed the incredible terror, rage, and misery of Lish. Sometimes it came as voices, sometimes as visions, but it was usually a simple feeling of empathy. Nobody seemed to understand her when she tried to convey the gravity of these emotions. Frustrated and pitying, Lisbet resolved to find, and do something to help this unknown person herself.

The voices came from outer space, so that’s where she would go. High Terrans equipped her with a companion/surveillance AI to protect her on this journey. This AI was installed in her space suit, which was designed to be lightweight but durable, and hosted many features to make the harsh, varied atmospheres of alien planets tenable for human survival. Air filters, pressurisation monitors, temperature regulation, etc, as well as self-defence equipment like lasers. It is white, and looks like a carapace.

As she ventured across various planets and met various peoples, Lisbet realised the happiness on Earth was unique. Most people suffered incredible pains, some specific to them, but many breathtakingly common across galaxies: war, poverty, famine, disease. Quee mothers with stillborn chicks, then starving Uyanids stricken with half-brood. Lisbet regarded them as equal. Even among compassionate peoples, cruelty thrived once livelihoods faltered, heroes caved to vices, and punishments rained on the well-intentioned. Everyone hurt. The sting of that hurt enslaved people, until they directed its wickedness again and again upon themselves, and, intentionally or not, upon others.

Pain drove all wickedness, she deduced. Be it the pain of an empty stomach, an empty house, or an empty purpose. It cumulated. It drove people mad.

It was the pain of life, so a cynic might attest. But having lived on earth, where every such one of these pains was alien, Lisbet saw no reason why life must be painful, nor any dependence upon evil for good to exist. She wouldn’t deny that life often was painful, and that these pains were often reasonable, logical reactions upon reactions upon reactions. Hawks ate sparrows ate worms. She just denied the inherent necessity of it.

Such was her worldview when she finally met Lish. Lish, like many, was wicked by pain. She feared death and mistreatment by Terrans; she was correct to, it was not paranoia. But by her fearful response she again mistreated Terrans, which they revenged with mistreatment upon her. This mistreatment, she forwarded again onto Lisbet.

Lish cursed her. You failure, you broken thing, you useless machine, you mockery of the daughter I deserved. You would’ve been salvation, but those butchers twisted you into nothing. So why am I miserable? It’s because of you! How might you help me? Give me your soul, as it always belonged to me! But you cannot do that, spawn of demons you are, or your wicked fathers again torment me. Unless you castigate them with the fury I castigate you, none are saved. You are deprecated. You are pointless. You may leave.

Lisbet pitied her, more than anything. Lish had broken long ago. But she sensed, truly, Lish felt a tangible doom Terrans cast over the universe, and that she wanted to protect everyone from this inevitable damnation. Lish had failed, and hope had abandoned her.

But there was something Lisbet could do, that Lish hadn’t known to consider.

Lisbet spoke to the Terrans. Being that they had protected Earth from pain, she suspected they, before anyone, would know how to absolve it for everyone else. She entreated them to abolish all pain and suffering, for everyone. Verticillaster heard her request, and directed her to Camellia.

Lisbet’s proposal thrilled Camellia. He fell over himself to promise her: yes, yes, yes! Riding a wave of manic inspiration, he promptly created Miquir.

A light crashed down, and—

—Lisbet awoke in an unfamiliar swamp, in an unfamiliar country, on an unfamiliar planet. She checked her suit for coordinates, but its screens laid dead, and its AI, unresponsive. Though, by the presence of humans and of earthen fauna, she suspected the place a colony for ferals.

As she would not learn until later — much later — she had just been resurrected into Aurholm, into the nation of Palida. The birth of Camille had rendered Camellia’s promise of a world without pain impossible, and considering the stickiness of Camellia’s promises, the universe preferred to spit Lisbet into the void than negotiate that Camellia had broken a covenant.

Lisbet soon learned from the local tribesmen of Palida’s present issues. The stars had been bleeding, raining as liquid upon the earth for some days, and they suspected this the work of demons. Everyone across Palida sought a shaman powerful enough to reverse this demonic invocation, but to manipulate stars — souls of ancestors — and rain — the water of life — required proficiency in bending Piscean archetypes. Few invokers studied Pisces, and no recognised shamans existed for the sign. It was too corrupt, too susceptible to demonic subversion, so everyone discouraged even obviously talented Piscean invokers from specialising in its concepts. The result was their current predicament: a paucity of good Pisces.

The tribe had been sheltering inside their town hall, waiting for that miracle Pisces, afraid the rain would corrupt the souls of those it caught. Which meant Lisbet. They arranged for their shaman to purify her, but found themselves lacking the required reagents. Lisbet offered to join a supply run for those reagents and other essentials, which was approved. The runners split up and Lisbet went to acquire her assigned materials.

She then noticed a stranger out in the rain. He bolted when she called to him, so she pursued and tackled him to the ground. Realising she was a foreigner, the man introduced himself as Nebuzan and explained the locals, overwhelmed by superstition, had rejected him as corrupted for suggesting the rain was not evil. She commiserated, noting the tribe regarded herself as corrupt, and Nebuzan invited Lisbet to his home to discuss the point further.

Nebuzan giddily dispensed to her his long-suppressed convictions. To begin, he was a powerful Piscean invoker. One of the very, very few. He loathed the stigma against the sign, and had always aspired to elevate it into legitimacy. He recounted that, as a child, he ventured to Tianuku Gol, the holy site of Pisces and the forbidden gateway that connected Palida to Nix. There, in meditation, he intuited the nature of the universe.

The material world, he insisted, was humanity’s prison. Humans — in fact, all the world — were principally spiritual objects, and the physical forms they took, only cheap abstractions that bound them to such pains as hunger and sickness. All things, in their natural state, were truthfully pieces of an undefined conceptual ‘one’. This state of absolute understanding, and of absolute unity, further removed such material horrors inflicted by the presence of the ‘other’: murder, war, rape, torture. The corruption the tribesmen loathed, which pared away barriers and individuality, was truthfully a return to that perfect, primordial one. It pained Nebuzan how everyone refused to understand. Corruption was salvation. No peace could come until all was one.

“Do you mean death?” asked Lisbet, confused.

Nebuzan clarified, “only for the severed. See, we sit atop the veil. It is woven tightly, barrier to all material, even the slight material pulse of our souls. Our being must become less than an atom, a silent flat line, so that we slip through, below.”

“You go up when you die, though!” Lisbet exclaimed. “You go up, to everyone, back home! Everyone does. What on earth is below?”

“Zero is below,” Nebuzan clicked his tongue. “Unity in zero. It is a perfect circle—”

“It’s a sphere. It’s a big warm full sun, with music,” Lisbet corrected.

Nebuzan fell silent. He slammed open his window shutters and pointed to the black night sky. “There. That is the unity.”

“That’s the veil,” Lisbet cried. She splayed her fingers to the bleeding stars. “That’s the unity.”

Nebuzan scoffed. “There are many!”

“Because the nothing has so many holes,” she insisted.

“And they are material — I see them!” he continued.

“Things can’t exist from just nothing,” Lisbet pressed, “unless it’s shaping something there. Look!” She grabbed a black rag from his kitchen and told him, “Here’s the nothing, make something from this.”

Nebuzan twisted shapes upon the rag’s surface, placed objects beneath it, but each time, dissatisfied, removed them.

Lisbet cut the silhouette of a bird out of the rag and laid it on a white plate. She tapped her finger against the plate, through the silhouette. “It’s a sparrow.”

Nebuzan stared at Lisbet’s example. He took the plate and slapped it against his palm. “This does not exist, so you are wrong.”

“It has to exist, or else there’s just nothing.”

He held the plate in one hand, and the rag in the other. “These are both unities.”

“Unity means only one.”

And so they continued. Nebuzan became more and more hesitant, until by his silence he conceded: he could not envision a way for nothing to bring about something, unless the something existed first.

With that realisation, a chill set over the room. Lisbet thought to ask who else was present, but noticed a warmth radiating from Nebuzan’s satchel and reached for it instead. Nebuzan tore it away from her, its contents spilling over the table — many small berries, the reagents for the purifying ritual.

Nebuzan threw the satchel into the fire as Lisbet frantically scooped up the few surviving berries. He grabbed her wrist and pressed her fist closed tighter to crush them, but she bit his hand and with a yell, he released her. She dashed outside into a hurricane, and Nebuzan did not follow.

The ferocity of the hurricane cut visibility to nearly zero. Lisbet became lost, followed a concentration of bright silvery light, fell into the ocean, almost drowned, and awoke washed up on the shore the next morning.

She returned to the tribesmen, whose hall had been destroyed overnight in the hurricane. Further bad news: the few berries Lisbet had salvaged wouldn’t be enough for the tribe, there was nowhere nearby to shelter, and invocations as a whole had stopped working. Even if they found a shaman knowledgeable enough to stop the rain, they wouldn’t be able to. Altogether hopeless, the tribe decided it best to kill themselves now, rather than risk survival and corruption in a world run by demons.

Lisbet of course interrupted. They questioned where she found the berries and she explained her encounter with Nebuzan, who they quickly figured had summoned the rain. She failed, though, to recount his location and hesitated to try. She also upended the bowl of poison they had prepared for their suicide. Fed up with her, the tribe concluded Lisbet had indeed been corrupted and was in league with demons, and attempted to stab her. The blade of the knife, as it approached her, reversed through its hilt and shot backwards through the hand of its wielder. Taking this as confirmation of devilry, they decided to take her instead to Tianuku Gol and banish her to Nix.

Lisbet went without fuss, hoping find and speak with Arsene, who the tribesmen understood to be the root of the problem. So they dumped her off in the gol and hey Lisbet welcome to Nix.

The gol was cold and dark. Stricken by the feeling that she had made an incredible mistake, Lisbet looked back toward the entrance. It was gone, replaced by the gaping darkness of a tunnel. Lisbet embarked. The floor pitched gradually into an incline, into a sheer 4-legged climb along the floor, which had at some point become the ceiling. Tree branches brushed at her back. She turned, to find herself staring down at an old Glennite settlement with an old rotten bell tower and a little stream flowing through it.

She climbed down the tree and set to investigate the houses for food and supplies. In the first house she checked, she discovered seated upon the couch a family of dessicated corpses, too withered to move, but who groaned agitatedly at her intrusion. Surmising herself unwelcome, she apologised to them and decided against raiding any houses, despite her growing hunger and thirst.

Instead she went to the stream. The coldness of the water stung her cupped hands. After a moment of hesitation, she drank. Her mouth burned acrid as if she’d swallowed poison, bringing her to choke, and spit it out immediately. Gasping for air, she tripped over herself into the stream. The current abruptly strengthened, pinning her down as if hands had clenched around her throat, and as she squinted up, she swore she saw the glowing, silver silhouette of a woman as the one strangling her. As blackness closed around her vision, someone yanked her out of the stream and administered CPR.

She woke up a while later in an Asphodelean research team’s camp. Their squad — an historical anthropologist, a comms man, a materials researcher, and two soldiers — had come to study ancient Glennite civilisation and requisition any interesting artifacts they uncovered on the way. Their anthropologist, though, had gone missing in the settlement, and one of their soldiers, who had saved Lisbet, was looking for him. They had enough supplies to last another week, but would return in their ship to base camp once that deadline came, with or without their anthropologist.

Lisbet collected herself and settled in with the team, who advised her not to look for Arsene and instead return to the surface with them. Her suit especially fascinated their researcher, who wished to study it at base camp. He suspected the same materials that powered their ship could reactivate it, and such materials could be found deeper in Nix. Though, of course, they stocked a supply of it at base camp, too.

Days passed with no sign of the anthropologist. As the deadline approached, Lisbet insisted she help with the search. Through his hesitation, the soldier permitted her to come.

As they travelled to the settlement, Lisbet properly thanked him for saving her and recounted the woman she had seen trying to drown her. The soldier confirmed this woman was likely a demon, and advised her to stay vigilant. Such creatures, restricted to only subtle damages and manipulations on the surface, were considerably more powerful down here in Nix. Lisbet noted the warning as the soldier presented to her a house, its door locked shut.

Their anthropologist had entered this house, the door had closed behind him, and he never returned, the soldier explained. No obvious points of ingress had worked, and no weapons he’d taken to the place had damaged the windows or walls at all to allow entry. Lisbet threw a rock at the window, only for the rock to disappear into nothing without contacting the glass. That was the case with everything, the soldier advised.

After confronting the house for some minutes, Lisbet fetched one of her salvaged berries and painted the door with its juice. As if stricken, the door burst itself open and Lisbet entered with the soldier.

They found the anthropologist being tortured by a demon, who immediately extended his torments onto Lisbet and the soldier, forcing them to compete against each other in a sadistic gameshow for the entertainment of a demonic legion. Lisbet, without trying, repeatedly foiled the demon however, until the air chilled and the silhouette of the same silver woman arose from the mass of the legion. Their attempted torturer identified her as Tisiphone, and indicated she held incredible influence over hundreds of thousands of demons, being the mother of many.

Tisiphone inspected Lisbet dispassionately, and, coming to some thrilled realisation, drove her thumb into Lisbet’s forehead. Terrible pain, nausea, and headaches overcame her alongside she feeling of something snapping. Satisfied, and entertained, Tisiphone then departed. Whatever she’d done, it ruined Lisbet’s miraculous luck in resisting the demon, who exacted terrible punishments on her, the anthropologist, and especially the soldier. Though Lisbet eventually did prevail and escape with the anthropologist, the soldier degenerated into a feral chimpanzee that tried to rip off her face, and that ran away deeper into Nix after they fought him off.

Discouraged despite her success in rescuing the anthropologist, Lisbet started making her way back to the camp. On the way, it occurred to her to purify the Glennites. She eased a berry into one Glennite’s mouth and helped them to chew. Within a minute, they coughed, gasped, breathed, as their skin regained a healthy softness and rubor. She spent the rest of her berries reviving the rest of the family, who thanked her, but were very confused, which the amazed anthropologist’s barrage of questions did not ease at all.

Lisbet returned with everyone to the camp. There, the group’s ship smoldered on the ground, the researcher haggard, the comms man restrained, and the second soldier infirm.

As the researcher explained, Lisbet’s group had been absent long enough that they set to depart. Their comms man, overtaken by some kind of madness, hysterically insisted that nobody should leave if it meant leaving someone behind, and that they should keep waiting. Their soldier restrained him and loaded him, kicking and bucking, onto the ship. He soon calmed down, and their surveillance lapsed. Then the comms man bolted to the controls, wrested the joystick about in a frenzy, and crashed their ship.

The soldier had broken his pelvis in the crash, which also broke the ship’s fuel tank. Though the rest of the ship remained repairable, and would be flyable again within a few days, their lack of fuel now stranded them. They couldn’t even request help from homebase, as they discovered their comms had been severed the whole time. Their only hope was to salvage food from the Glennite settlement, and send someone to retrieve more fuel from deeper in Nix.

Lisbet volunteered. Though hesitant to let her go on, especially alone, desperation muted any objections. All the team could do was ensure she went in prepared.

They gave her a gun, tied a tether to her as a lifeline, and listed the landmarks to look for. Finally, they tried to salvage some of the spilled fuel to power her suit — only to find the suit, at some point, had merged with her skin. Rather, had become her skin.

Such was the way of Nix, they grimly told her. The researcher and the Glennite patriarch went alongside her to see her off. The Glennite requested a moment to speak with Lisbet alone, which the researcher, watching from a distance away, granted.

He had learned Lisbet came to Nix seeking Arsene, and that the Asphodeleans had both discouraged and prevented her from doing so. The Glennite, though, agreed completely with her idea. Having personally known Arsene as the Demiurge’s servant before the corruption of the Glen, he could not imagine that Arsene would have purposefully, maliciously harmed anyone. He knew the route to Arsene’s residence, but considering the spacial distortions plaguing the environment, instead advised her to summon him through an old system.

The Demiurge, when he governed this settlement, gave their community a bell they should ring if ever they needed help. He would hear the chime, and resolve the problem. Whenever the Demiurge was incapacitated, though, which was not exactly infrequent, Arsene would answer instead. Bartholomew, their governor after the Demiurge retired, had taken down the bell and stored it away in his home, where it should still remain.

While Lisbet salvaged the fuel, the Glennite would try the bell. If things weren’t fixed by the time she returned, she should assume that he somehow failed. Rather, if he succeeded, he would have Arsene bring her back. Arsene could easily source whatever Lisbet needed, so she wouldn’t have to search further. Lisbet agreed with this plan.

Through her headache, and through the overbearing sense of foreboding, Lisbet descended.

The landmarks to follow had been twisted near beyond recognition. To move right, you went left, and to go up, you climbed down. Though she wouldn’t yet call herself lost, she did have to second-guess whether she was going in the right direction.

A horde of small, raptor-like creatures rolled on the horizon. Before she could think to respond, the gap vanished and they mobbed Lisbet, nipping and shredding her with their fangs and claws. She soon lost her gun in the scramble, and they tore away one of the chitinous plates of her suit, exposing her muscle underneath. As they ripped into her flesh, she screamed.

A red bolt of lightning tore through the air. In crackling forks it crashed upon the creatures, and, indiscriminately, toward Lisbet. Though too exhausted to move, a strangely distant surge of panic pressed her to flee, get out, move immediately. Something strained, and insectoid wings exploded from her back, which yanked the rest of her, limp, away from the lightning to safety upon a cliff.

She laid there, head pounding and mind fuzzy. The noise of the lightning bursts and shrieking raptors faded out, overtaken by the tranquil swell and ebb of water, splashing on the rocks below. Under the glow of warm, beaming sunlight, she hazily relaxed and unfurled. Her body spread open at every joint and along the divides between the plates of her carapace, exposing muscle and organs. The missing segment of her carpace strained and slowly regrew, like a new tooth. Splayed under the warm sun, in the comfortable daze, she basked.

She collected herself sometime later, head still fogged, but body refreshed. The lifeline laid limp and severed beside her. A deep red ocean of liquid glass surrounded the cliff, glistening under the sun. A small island alone interrupted the expanse of shimmering glass — in the middle of which, formed from the ocean, glowing silver, was Tisiphone.

Lisbet blearily descended the cliff-face and stumbled onto the glass towards her. With every plodding step her breathing felt more wrong, and her body more awry. She strained again and spiracles burst open down her body. She paused to breathe, inhale, exhale, the air flowing in, though, and out her limbs as if each span of muscle held its own lung. It still felt wrong, but better, marginally. Tisiphone beckoned her, commiserating.

She hobbled to Tisiphone and collapsed into her lap. Tisiphone’s fingers knit tenderly through her hair, and she helped her drink good water. Bizarre as it was, considering everything, Tisiphone’s presence was soothing — in fact, unmistakably loving. It asserted, Lisbet had a place here. She’d be accepted, looked after, cared for. It was okay to just relax into whatever was happening.

So she did. Soporifically warm, nauseous but fussed over eagerly, to do nothing but idly squint up at Tisiphone’s face felt the most proper thing in the world. Tisiphone smiled at her like the sun, and an odd vision snapped through Lisbet’s mind. There’d been others, young boys, girls — even grown men and women — who Tisiphone had tended in a similar manner. Among those flashed a vision of a young girl thrown off a tower, nude women chained together in shackles, a boy sobbing, a fumbling stripper, frozen corpses, red strobes glinting off iron roses, a man with his throat slit, screams, arguments, Nebuzan cold and alone in a cavern. Thousands and thousands of snakes, rolling together like an ocean.

“You’ve done so much wrong!” roared Lisbet, shoving Tisiphone off her.

Fury purged the haze from her mind and the discomfort from her changed body. A halo of opalescent light burst around her as she stomped down on the glass, which turned to clear liquid diamonds, refracting rainbows into the black sky. Tisiphone recoiled, stunned. Lisbet stomped again, fists tight, harder, and the diamond froze to scintillating ice, holding Tisiphone in place.

Before Lisbet could channel her anger into anything final, the searing sun flared and melted the ice. Tisiphone darted underwater and away, fleeing. Lisbet dove in to pursue her, rushing through rapid currents, never stopping or needing to surface to breathe. Behind them, over the ocean, crackles of red lightning again sparked through the air, and then the sky filled with a giant, silver, serpentine eye.

Though Lisbet chased Tisiphone as closely as she could, she soon lost her and Tisiphone escaped. Lisbet surfaced, striking the water in frustration. Looking around, she found herself back in the stream by the Glennite settlement where she had previously almost drowned. Without any other immediate destination, she embarked for the Asphodelean camp, her head vaguely buzzing, but pleasantly, like crystalline chimes.

Ok this is the other 20% and im tired of staring at wip so this is the gist of what happens

- she returns to the camp and powers up their ship by plugging herself into it, which unnerves the asphodeleans. They invite her to leave with them but she declines. Glennite vouches for her.
- the voice of the dormant thrax inside her, Irida, reawakens. Irida questions Lisbet’s judgment in staying and designates Tisiphone, who has almost definitely returned to the surface, as the immediate threat. The Asphodeleans have a reliable route to return to the settlement so she can follow up with Arsene later. Lisbet realises Irida is correct and tries to get on the ship, but, supremely offput by Lisbet’s weird monologue, they fly off and ditch her.
- With that avenue gone, she pursues the bell.
- bartholomew is there cockblocking her from summoning arsene. Bart vs Lisbet bout, some junk happens and the bell gets rung. Palidan politics.
- Arsene does visit, but he’s clueless about Tisiphone and doesn’t understand what Lisbet’s asking for. Negotiations go downhill and arsene gets fed up, leaves, dumps Lisbet in a void or something. Demons go wild, Lisbet starts dissolving, cam notices this and gets pissed, starts nuking demons but then drags arsene into it
- cam is running on protekthumens.exe directives and responding to the passive human-hating vibes arsene gives out through kenoma, basically cam’s dead delirious soul is trying to kill the kenoma (and arsene) and doing a pretty poor job at it considering it’s cam. Regardless this makes him beat up arsene and the part of cam that’s still vaguely conscious is like “nooo omg wtf am i doing” and the rest of him is all “PROTECT HUMENS!! KKILL!”
- simultaneously cam starts constructing a little idyllic safezone for lisbet to live in/be coddled and the rest of the world can get fukt. Lisbet sees the emptiness of aurholm from this vantage point, drags arsene into safezone. Arsene big angry. Lisbet’s presence obviously making things borked.
- arsene goes Real on Lisbet and screws her up bad. Integrates her with some tight little cave thing? TWO LISBETS? With thrax queen memes active, lisbet’s body crushes itself and she ded
- she gets zooped back to pleroma but is all like nuuu im not done yet and her promise gets elevated into archon pact
- zoops back to palida where tisiphone’s being a bitch and destroying everything, turning the land and people into snakes and etc
- lisbet soul-links herself and tisiphone which reins her in/gets her under control
- thru the link learns there’s still disjointed parts of tisiphone around, one of them afflicting nebuzan, which is currently pushing him to do Some More Nonsense (trivia invocations)
- lisbet intervenes on nebuzan before he can do the Nonsense and soulshatters the tisiphone influence out of him. The soul rain is still going and invocations are still borked so nebuzan can’t fix it
- lisbet asks nebuzan for guidance on how to fix the rain; he gives it, she manages to repair the constellations and fix the rain, also fulfilling the rite for piscean shamans
- and the sky clears and there’s a nice big rainbow and it’s all sunny and yaaaay lisbet saved the day, hooray, end

Aftermath
- lisbet’s visit to nix has messed her up a little. Having revived/reactived the thrax that was originally set to parisitize her soul, Lisbet’s soul/mind has now melded with that of the thrax, Irida, but hasn’t been fully replaced by her. Lisbet is no longer technically lisbet, but a more powerful entity called Ishvari, the anti-high terran bioweapon that lish originally conceived Lisbet as. (collectively, Lisbet/Irida/Ishvari are each/all called Godsworn)
- she’s also a thrax queen via irida and is gooping around the place everywhere
- ANYWAY palidan locals soon inaugurate her as the first piscean shaman in like a millennium. she spends a few weeks going with the flow and trying to help rebuild all the widespread property damage tisiphone caused, plus some political stuff thru her meeting with bart. Demonic influence worldwide has plummeted with Tisiphone’s subjugation and the ocean in Palida is now purified. But invocations are STILL kaput and nobody’s sure why, which remains a problem
- news comes from kitiven that Hey, God’s Back, and lisbet organises to go to Amsherrat to talk with God about the borky invocations and the stuff she saw in Nix
- so she meets up with camille who is like “WTF” and then like “WAIT, THIS IS GOOD” and is like hey nevermind all that stuff, we can fix the world if i just reestablish a link to pleroma through you! Let’s do it! And ishvari’s like SURE LET’S DO IT
- camille does it and almost destroys the universe, again, and archon pacts himself to stop the universe from snapping completely

- now camille has to mind That Stuff because he has to wait a few thousand years before he can try doing that again. So first order of business. Invocations are borked because camsoul is hyperfocusing on Ishvari/Lisbet and ignoring everyone else. The only way to fix that is to get rid of Lisbet. Fortunately Ishvari can do this in a way that isn’t awful via soulshattering Lisbet out of herself, leaving the active part of her as Irida. She doesn’t do it yet but accepts this is the best plan for her to stick around in Aurholm — existing primarily as Irida, and only very occasionally as Lisbet.

- second business: arsene. Camille clarifies some of Ishvari’s questions about arsene, and asserts arsene needs to be destroyed (if possible) or at least separated from kenoma because that’s what’s causing all the issues. His plans around this remain fuzzy but fundamentally camille wants arsene gone. This ticks off Ishvari, who confirms Arsene will not go to Pleroma when/if he dies, and she gets her own plan. She doesn’t want the return to random chaos that camille is pushing for, she wants a world that’s properly governed and good. She thinks cam/ille/ellia needs to stop being a control freak about the universe and pass on PROPERLY already, too. Ishvari wants Arsene to govern the universe, and volunteers herself as the one to help direct him and keep him generally in line, because cam demonstrably can’t.

- Camille thinks this is preposterous and 100% unworkable. Ishvari notes it probably would work as long as Camellia sanctioned Ishvari as Arsene’s new master, and Camellia fundamentally won’t refuse anything Ishvari proposes. Camille goes silent. Further, Ishvari could link herself to Arsene in the same way she has to Tisiphone, which has worked to pacify her — and which would also reestablish the link between kenoma and pleroma. Camille weakly notes he has debts to the Archons and Ishvari’s plan doesn’t account for them. He’s not going to bring Camellia back in the first place, either. Lisbet accepts Camille has his own life and business he should enjoy and attend to, but he has to die, someday. She doesn’t mind waiting on him for it, as long as he understands that it is going to happen. And understands that she probably is going to soul link Arsene if she ever encounters him again.

- so that conversation resolves more or less on a stalemate. Ishvari returns to Palida and shatters herself into Irida, as planned, and soon falls into a general routine.

- As Irida, she spends most of her time in Nix. Irida is actively enslaving demons into her hivemind and keeping them behaved. She keeps her finger on the pulse of most significant world happenings, and supports Ishvari’s general plan, but is less convicted in it than Lisbet. She is extraordinarily critical of Camille and unwilling to let him near the controls of anything ever again, ever. For now though she’s content to spread her hivemind around and not think about too much else as is her biological prerogative. She vaguely seeks a path to Arsene, but has failed to find one.

Her emissaries across Aurholm connect her to most world governments/spiritual sects, though particularly those in Asphodel and Palida, mostly to help them whenever they start having demon problems or think about delving Nix. In Palida specifically she has strong political sway but hesitates to use it for much. The ocean in Palida becomes corrupted again whenever Irida is active, as the soul link on Tisiphone weakens. Irida is typically active for about five years before switching to Lisbet.

- As Lisbet, she spends most of her time in Palida, on a small private island called Kuanehe. Though she’s considered the authority on Piscean concepts, and her word holds incredible sway, she’s mostly an ordinary girl who just tries to help out on the ground around her community. She is highly receptive to general requests for help and often gets involved in weird escapades because of it, but is disengaged with world affairs. If she’s not doing that, though, she’s probably catching up with Camille.

She lacks any connection to the demons in Irida’s hivemind, which become unruly again whenever Lisbet is active. In exchange, she has stronger sway over Tisiphone, who is bound to the ocean of Palida and controls many demons in her own right. People often visit Lisbet requesting that she shatter away their various flaws, negative emotions, or obsessions, which she obliges. Lisbet is typically active for about two weeks before switching to Irida.

Things are stable and she has a plan. It’s just a matter of waiting on Camille.

Except, not.

Just as invocations stop working whenever Lisbet is active, Camellia’s attack on kenoma resumes whenever Lisbet is active. Though Lisbet herself is unaware of it, every second she’s alive, the universe sustains more and more damage. It’s slight — so slight the naked eye can’t observe it — but over time, the strain on space itself, is building.

Centuries have passed without issue. But without mistake, the hourglass drinks, counting to the moment where, weighted by a thousand, a million, a billion grains of sand — the universe snaps, in an instant.