Altbalsoft

Altbal, bruise-roof’d Hangar of the Firmament
The Steadfastness of Northern-Western Altbal, typically shortened to Altbal or otherwise known as the High Rock, is an impressive network of policies, pyramid-schemata and impromptu arcologies that collectively hold grim vigil over the gloamings of Reach, Ritual and Refuge. The inhabitants of Altbal, organised in sparse communities across numerous planes and balconies, are as physically and culturally diverse a people as one could hope to find anywhere in the countable heavens. Outside High Rock territory (and thus outside of High Rock's consideration) these folk are known as Albalics or Albaliche; they frequently refer to themselves with titles or invented stations, such as "dukes" or "marchionesses".

The lands of Altbal are considered brutal and terrifying by many denizens of foreign kingdoms, and impressions of Albaliche themselves readily support this view: an Albalic is, regardless of mechanical or ideological function, at foremost a violent and unpredictable creature. Interaction with these beasts has been restricted to traffic with the state of Sun's Sextus, the hold of Northpoint and several independent communes of Ghreiweg - thus, save for irregular Tinvaak Harpis, knowledge of the Rock's modern state has been gleaned through open warfare. For centuries, Sun's Sextus has consistently persecuted the Men of Muroidea in skirmishes throughout the Alik'r, and more recently, Northpoint hold's militia was reconstitutionalized in the aftermath of the Siege of Mir Korruth: memories scraped from the resulting wrecks (as well as descrambled Ghreiweg Yazatas) form the bulk of Albaliche Lore in wider Mereth. This information is summarized herein, and is augmented with a dubious report of direct conduct with inhabitants of the inner landings.

Saarith-el and Auld Diren myth
Altbalate history as understood in the current Irae begins with the Rise of Saarith-el. The principal projection of High Rock is said to be sustained entirely around an elaborate Bretonnic math, originally home to primitive tribes whose law developed into the Auld Diren Avratauthis Gravia Malatu, marking the beginning of Altbal as an independent body. Construction of the Saarith-el began at approximately the same time as hexadendrite-mining was introduced to the carapacial dominions of Deep Sea's Ghost. Correspondingly, Albaliche desire-meddling confines itself to popular styles of that singular pole, and many of Altbal's landmarks of creatia hoard are situated over a pastiche of ferried reminiscences. Saarith-el is no exception: Misrule's pioneering cirrus empaths note resonance around the centrum of Bal Proper that is equivalent to folklore of Lower-Hoary-Liturge, Redayn Marchings and numerous other regions of the Pale.

Saarith-el even in her heyday was known to be a precarious wreck, threatened by refutation, buffeted by noisome winds, and protected little by her delicate concrete-and-gauze forests. It is assumed that the nearby state of Mefmaul (then an irregular webwork of unimportant Daedric hamlets) held the insular natives of that land in some religious regard; otherwise, the Diren Candle would certainly have been extinguished before its time. Instead of being subject to the whims of cradle-conquest, the early Albaliche were nurtured and fattened by their land and their awed neighbors. Many of the oldest Mefmauloon hymns describe the intervention of magical beasts from holy sites at the centre of the sea, who sang in "terrible frequencies like the Claviger's cry."

The eventual upheaval of Saarith-el, her inhabitants and attendant cult came with the appearance of the “Cormogion”, conjectured to be the golden "Aether's amanuensis" ubiquitous in fairytales of Sgr Astar and the central basin. Distinct from their southern depiction, Altbal's Cormogions were grim flit-eyed giants, shapeless hissing forms (presumably representing the fierce weather of High Rock), or a mass of immaculate lampreys. These demons are a feature of Albalic superstition even today. In all likelihood the settlement of Cormogions near the Albaliche was a gradual process, but the myth of Saarith-el portrays it as an invasion, quaintly known as "Landfall" – referring to the arrival of foreign ships on their shores. During the ensuing years of violence, the adjacent sovereignties of Swath, Balfier-under-Bal and Rorix were expunged and scattered to the winds; however, as is often the case in conflict-ridden ages, the culture and technology of Saarith-el herself advanced in leaps and bounds. The impassive pleasure-cult had in several decades evolved into a complex array of rites and legalistic protocols, with the aim of encouraging the noble precepts described in Avratauthis Gravia Malatu as “singularity, structure, [hard-like-crystal]”. The math that had, in humility of primordial gravel, received Malatu was also transformed, taking in the nearby countryside and making of it a anvil cloud that was her crown and downcast face upon the earth. It was with these developments that Saarith-el armed herself against foreign influence, and sped her departure from the cradle.

Weathering sieges prolix and various, Saarith-el became a satellite, adolescent in ceramic-plated magnificence, borne aloft upon the stratus of sacrifice and pride that had been the land's passing gift. In comparison to the saint-ships of more recently blooming worlds, the Bretonnic hive was initially fuelled by the mutual antagonism of countless small councils in her belly, and this method – although primitive – would overshadow her development in Irae to come. When the last ship finally fell upon the abused shores of Auld Dirennis, it bore forth the queen of Cormogion empiricism and empty-headed wrath: the she-bear Ur-Grammar. This creature, described in the barely-audible orl-trad as “already language-starved”, was able to break the Saarith siege and cut a smoking line through the terrestrial remnants of the math. Yet, in a miraculous turn of rhetoric or perhaps covalent fracas, the cold anchors of longing were heaved into the High Rock's underside along with her numerous belligerent courts - and one skeletal captive, who was executed on Altbal's first dawn as a new stellar state.

This origin myth appears to date from much earlier than the Rock's secession from Actuality (this latter event occurred no earlier than the deforestation of Salatrimac) but Albaliche orthodoxy remembers them as one and the same event. While the significance of this confusion is not readily apparent, the paradoxes resulting from it are all too clear.

The Arcologies of the Nowadays Alt-Bal
Deep imprinted as we are, it is next to impossible to dissect the substance of Altbal in full might, yet she sheds a skin – an image, into this wider shell of existence playing host to the domain of His August Majesty. In grander times of sturdier bureaucracy, this epidermis would have served even as a port – chiefly for use by the Heiroccules, of course, but occasionally some boisterous state or other would propel their way an ambassadorial sacrifice, merely as a gesture. For the greater good or not, no longer do the swarms of Imperial clerks bustle around this intense metallic body, noting minor movements of its curved face and pressing their telescopes deep into their aching sockets for a glimpse of acknowledgement from the Direnni homestate. Albaliche have been recorded departing from that world in momentous times for interface with Actuality; however, never in history has their exodus been mediated through the corporeal, the surface of the High Rock. It is understood that the surface currently hosts nothing more than rusting, defunct arms-codes and geometric mountains that score the retinas. Three Irae ago, a settlement was founded upon this wasteland shell, watched over with Imperial benevolence; communication has not been made with this colony for almost as long as its existence.

Only so much can be said of the observable skin – its bristling arsenal is a front and is in part owed to the old God of Omens that the Rock once associated itself with. With the correct lexiphanic leverage, it is possible to insinuate one's way into Bal Proper: the full bulk of ever-crumbling and rusting legislature, barely capable of supporting its own weight. The term “pocket dimension” is often bandied about for the latest means of individuation in the waters beyond Actual's embrace, but never has the designation been well suited to describing the fractal immensity of the curious non-space born of the Direnni hegemony. The first layer of the plane that could be referred to as at least “animated” if not alive, a crust of sorts, plays host to the most permanent installations of Altbalate pollution: the Courts, the Duchies, the petty fiefdoms that encapsulate every motion of their violent perpetuity.

While these systems and empires do not occupy the depths of a creature's reason as the Diren routine does in its fullest, their power is nonetheless absolute; most of an Albalic's meaningless existence will be spent blasting the scales off his fellows – if not in blood-unslaked perversity or the will of the divine, then at the behest of whatever Court body he considers to be his own. Each of these Courts has a rigidly defined sphere of influence: easily recognizable by the traditions and regulations scrawled across the girders, and the galvanized cadavers of the fallen hanging in the deep hallways, awaiting some signal to breathe Altbal's musty, exsanguinated ozone once again. While the crust contains the proper domain of most institutions of the Rock, arrayed in uniform area and purpose like the subcutaneous seeds of a Torval-pear, the conflicts and revolutions – whose intensity is so vital to the function of the land – take place further from the interface with our plane; deeper down, to continue describing Altbal as a discrete planet.

Beyond the crust can be detected the sparsely occupied and treacherously unstable space we call the “humor”, a creaking hollow wherein this world resolves its critical questions of national identity and systemic self-loathing. Besides the perpetual warfare of city-speak and brittle Law occupying the Courts, there seem to be remnants of further belief-propellants – with far subtler means – which may well contribute to the well-being of the Diren domain as much as the ancient methods. One such mechanism is betrayed through the presence of violently emotive vesicles, housed in prismatic spaces suggestive of the core of the grand whole, and yet unblooming, unperturbed and fruitless; an approximation of the spiritually moved organic, but never arriving at a point of small decease, restless and yet unimaginably cold. It is assumed these are maintained in their state by the absence of some delicate reagent in that grit-ugly place; this lack might be immediately conspicuous to a foreigner in that land and remains unnoticed, it would seem, to the natives. The volatile results of this process can be recognized from hours away by minute stresses in their media; this being vox, terminological loophole, punch-card or theoretically any similar waveguide employed regularly in Altbalate stratostructure. They are identified and often rendered null by the insertion of cooling rods, although the presence of the Sweep is sufficient to agitate even lesser vesicles to the point at which the pressure will dissipate harmlessly.

In addition, the mundrial quickly becomes an alien terror in this space; in Altbal, the womb-close aspects of the diamond-striped embrace familiar in Actual Citizen's existence is indistinguishable from the pulse of the predator's throat. The Bones of society, the magic numbers stitched by man into the forms treasured by Serpent Spiel Jewel and Thu'umaturgic Gondoliers alike, these are the cause of intense stress on the fabric of several amnirnic planes, the High Rock among them. In the Humor of Altbal, the ossein Mulch of our genesis rapidly begins to distort their intricate arcologies and vast landings into shapes not seen there since it was a rapid-cobbled patchwork of stolen skeletons; an audible groaning will reverberate during these ehlnofeyn incursions to the utmost borders of its origin, a keening indicative of a malnourished rule bent to breaking point. If this continues, not only will her air be distorted, but Altbal's very fundaments skewed; in the gravest case, enormous masses of verdant flora have exploded across an area of land equivalent to several Imperial provinces, presumably causing millions of creatures – for we cannot call them people – to revert to their heartless pining molecules in flight. To prevent such disasters, the minds beneath the matter of the plane employ Guild Sweeps, similar to those known in our own chromic tradition, utilizing Sigh Chords bound in an unfamiliar solute.

To the reader, one budding question might be that of native matter: from what deep quarry does the Rock source its own bones; what kiln furnaces her gargantuan porcelah scales; where is smelted the alloy for her girders, her sky-mirrors, her neuronal wires woven throughout? Are these materials simply pulled from the void, cheated from some ancient demon or crystallized as thoughtform on the simmering foam of Albaliche strife? While such an image would sit well with our understanding of this distant world, it is only fractionally true; it would appear that its current expansion is propelled by a more organic method. The curious materials that are employed by the north-western Altbalate engineers self-replicate without interference, presumably in reaction to some field permeating its spaces. This gives rise to the haphazard lattice of machinery constituting the greater part of the Rock's mass, accidental but expunged of naturality.

At the utmost boundary of the demesne Dirennis lies the Latch, a barrier supposedly impenetrable to all inhabitants of Altbal save those that have uncovered some secret of grim spiritual triumph. This swath is not solid – for nothing in this place can be – yet is as absolute as the light of Whitegold to you or I. It is the true horizon of all Albaliche complexity and perversity, and as such is the site of all the most violent and tragic conflicts in their cold-arduous history. These wars are fought in the name of hunger, or of prophets – alight with impassive nihilism, devoid of fervor – or of the blind urge instilled by the Direnni within each of them. It is thought that whatever lies beyond the Latch, in the core of the Rock, long-fermented in absence of consciousness, is some sort of liberation or upheaval from their toils. Only a small portion of the Latch is approachable; the remainder being coated in a sea of vitreous, washed surface-wards from the Outer Core. This liquid we call asperes ; it is our only suggestion of what lies in the center of the Rock.

The Northern Neck of Bretonnic Fable
Far along some undiscovered vector of cardinality, deep buried in whispers, corridors, nonspaces volatile and secret: here lies the land of Bretonnia, land of Doors, unknown to the common Heiroc, yet perceptible from stations unimaginable leagues away, in our own world. In stark opposition to all that confines itself to proper Altbalate ideals of delineation, harshness and non-mathematicity, the fields of peaceable Bretonnia yet pulse with an organicity found nowhere else in that lonely rock. Its walls bristle not with killing glances or forebodeance plates, but with growths not unlike fungi; in its valleys there is soil, rich and balmy, reeking of promise and unscarred by the hurricanes and Sweepings that maintain the wider Rock's order. And spanning from one sacred border to another, there are mountains: not the point-perfect lattices of Durcaoch or the whirling hemispheres of Titsprin, but real teeth of earth, of stone, of a randomness belying numbers that the outer Bal will not – cannot – produce. Within these spines of every-which-way noise we detect a greater treasure still: people; thinking, breathing, feeling people whose every existence is weighted with a passion outweighing the sum of all souls outside Bretonnia.

Each of these mountains possesses a hollow core, steep-shafted and free to vibrate like the termite-bored instruments of Sard. Coating the passage down to its base-bellows is a membrane seeping with ichor-of-Theor, and this throat is the substratum upon which the Bretonnids while out their short gasp. Each such growth will persist for but a matter of months or weeks before they crumble off as ash fertilizer for the mountain. During this lifetime, a Bretonnid will engage in psychic communion with the whole mound, and further afield, sharing in unusual polyp-art: theoretical genome cross-stitch, psyche overlays, communal authorship of sentient fugues and other such fields made possible and necessary by their strange biology. The wind echoes up from the depths in contrabass gurgles, and they take joy in its beauty; their cousin's-cousins disintegrate and they weep for the fragility of their own flesh. It is commonplace for nodes of the throatnet to be virtually preserved along with the other creations of the colony's thinking engines, the brain-cum-stomach that every Bretonnid polyp hosts, but the divorce of consciousness from sensation is still a cause for funereal gravity. Around the stony heights of their homes springs an ever-revolving ecosystem of flora, resembling at times the agricultural vastness of our own greencubes or the impenetrable jungles of lost Yr; the air above the canopy is warm, breath-sticky and rhythmic.

How, then, does this apparent paradise exist in the harshness of Altbal and wherefore has it sprung up? Has it blossomed out of some foreign body, merged with its steel-carapaced host in some calamitous interplanar collision? Or is it a peduncle extended in the manner of its inhabitants from that hidden mass in the Inner Core? We are left to speculate on these matters without evidence; however, what can be measured is the effect of the interaction between Bretonnia and the High Rock. It is possible to characterize the natural as an infection of Altbalate matter, or conversely, to consider the artificial as an invasion upon Bretonnia; while its borders remain largely unmoving, throat-substrate and polyp may sprout spontaneously in small colonies hundreds of miles from their home, and will rapidly decay, not into wholesome ash-fed soil but stone, brittle like clay, and cold. The aforementioned borders, having no guards or laws on their innards, are maintained by shrines of annulment, chest-receptacles.

And here we note a most fascinating interaction: while Bretonnian land is not allowed to exceed its bounds, checked by the actions of a select few Albaliche barons, it is also not permitted to recede: for the Bretonnids, anathema though they are to the ordered troubles of the outside world, are in a vast corral; farmed, it might be said. In spite of their fear and hygiene, the Direnni profit from their apparent ailment, their relationship with Bretonnia. Through foul ritual of the scaled eyemask and amnesia, they are able to extract the lifeblood from the polyp. This process invariably results in death, without the possibility of recovering the soul as after natural decay. Their essence is then refined into a stream of coordinates, a place where prophecy fails, unholy to all blue-boned Albaliche yet intensely craved; almost orgasmic in its taking and usage. Polyps within the embrace of their homeworld are not subject to such acts, but those born from an outbreak in the assembly-tundra beyond are eagerly sought by all castes of society and more often than not meet a cruel and bloody end.

The Balance of Power in Anaesthesia
It would be forgiveable to suppose that the High Rock's rule is constricted by the mind-iron appendage of the Diren routine, ubiquitous and incomprehensible. However, this is not the case: all castes of society regard the Dirennis as a distant phenomenon, likely having no brush with it in their calloused lives. Instead, rule is provided by the Courts in their bloodthirsty rigor, and those in the improbable situation of lacking political affiliation are considered ruling bodies of their own. The rise and fall of all these groups, set deterministically by the seasons, or the influx of heart-fluids and polyp-numbers, or of blind geography, is a pre-figured movement like the obsolete Kalpic techs of Saulace. Cyclical though their violence is, it is never questioned in cause or disrupted; it is assumed that the role of the Diren routine is in part worshipful adherence to the predictable; facet-bright and sweet-ticking as the engine of their own star.

Indeed, the Altbalate perpetuity has been chronocule-scraped into a most efficient form, far more capable of self-fulfilment than the legislens of the initial Saarithelic hulk; for while the past Rock was sweat-polished and exothermic with void, its outcroppings of clause and lemma were also hung with poetry-scrolls, pleasing diversions of technical wordplay, finite systems with glorious pathos. Unlike the role of these morsels in Imperial ontology, they provoked something akin to fear in those first Heiroccule analysts, for they made the lightweight construction of their lexermass all too apparent, mining lamprey-like peep-holes and hollowing out wakes for their departed. So, this too was abandoned, and along with many other conventions of emotive ballast were bone-fired in favor of the now circular method of stonelocks and hells in place today and likely until the end of time.

Disregarding the edicted Actual Individual's rights of Sensation, the Albaliche Courts maintain an immaculate construction of decentralization, whereby any corpus comprising more than one individual will have all possible outcomes of thoughts and calculations – and thus all authority – distributed about each node, so that the system may retain a state of stasis, not expending energy on precarious procedures such as navigation or contemplation. Nonetheless, as a universal law affecting all persons or once-persons, the node experiences, if only minutely, an amount of spiritual gravity, a congealing, whereby memories and associated procedures will be drawn closer to something resembling a self-image, and this will then endeavor to effect small heresies and individuations. While regarded as possessing a rebellious nature by Diren and Court authority alike, even those particularly gifted in this way are predestined in their minutiae, for the mental walls of Altbal are impenetrable and further solidified by familiarity.

A Dedication
I hope this document finds you well, Certainty; Correct not the incomprehensible, -Your Drake-Heron.

[The first Glance is holy and no more]:/int/forn/DECR -m anal -f sang.wav -b 21 -p 10 -y 190

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A Report
Each step the proxy takes seems to echo with solemnity about the walls and through my very bones, countless chilly years away though they are. The atronach is unwelcome here, and Aut-Bal's cadaverous hallways creep with a grasping malevolence when his mortary shoulders scrape too close. Ahead, my guides trudge on, punctuating the hours-turning-weeks with hidden communication, either a rhythmic tapping or their gods-unbearable grating yell – the meaning of which evaporates into the thick metal gases, as neither these exchanges nor my own questions seem to alter their course in the slightest: on and ever inward.

For certain the route is not without challenge: my proxy must mimic every slight of the native footwork – possessing, as he does, some smaller number of limbs than they – and must execute heartbeat dodges against nearly-imaginary missiles that leave no scintilla but yank at exposed nostalgia. Consequently I refuse to shift the visual from their irregular silhouettes ahead, for fear of missing the next crucial clue, and from suspicion that the optic joints are broken anyway. This atronach has an air of disposability about his gait. His shortcomings are easily forgiven, however, when a metallic appendage probes up from some pit with glossal sinew, and I consider the small span of seconds that my fragile flesh would experience in this place. Ill-fitting it may be, but proxying in relieves the mind of all but the most alien of dormant threats.

And now, dip-diving through one chasm lined with heart-catching pathways, gravity pawing all-too-slow behind our steps, and right – no, left – outward into an oppressive space, walls close and ceiling above beyond sight – and then, perhaps, the reverse, all diffused with a monochrome glow imitative of green-yellowing fear. Perhaps there is awe and grandeur in this place, but there will never be a system capable of perceiving it: it is invisible to the Albaliche, as are many similar things, and it is invisible to machines and men of my ilk, as all art is obscured behind the pressing concerns of survival – I see no more beauty in this place than the gnat does in the dew-hung webs of a spider.

Anchoring its feet down to the next strut as we scrape across one more webwork of concrete and syringe-like nails placed into the abyss, the atronach pauses, disturbed by unsignalled movement at the edge of its vision – yet not peril, for it is the native guides, turning back and chittering their daylup language at me. Not considering the inquisitiveness of its pilot, the proxy vets the message for salvageable information without attempting a translation, and seems to have gleaned some measure of position or distance, for it displays – or suggests, rather – a map, of uncertain number of dimensions, certainly not an arrangement suited to the small mind of organic-reared mannoid. I pay no attention to the shifting image, as my faith in the interpreter has diminished from an originally minuscule quantum. All translation here is superstition, raw superstition. So, satisfying themselves with my unenlightened blankness, the guides continue on, pausing to send back a tap on their ceramic (skin? Armor? Membrane?) and an indication of some new trap or hazard.

Time passes in some irrational measure. The number of Albaliche I am following is perhaps more than there were originally, and perhaps less. The pace is slowing, so I shift my mind briefly back into the Actual: my quill-bound wrist aches like no-tomorrow and my nostrils have both developed a rash where the feed-tube enters. This is comfort, and I relish it while I can. Gripped then by a disembodied force of vertigo, I return to the atronach:

I stand in roughly the same position as before, but all is different around me. The walls are crowded with Albaliche, all screaming and whirring. Pangs shoot up my leg, and I look down to see a small figure grasping a brick in the base of the proxy with some clawed tool or limb. This atronach claims to be capable of combat resolution, but he is slow and cumbersome, useless in an ambush; I grind my teeth in frustration as the surrounding forces advance. This is death, I realize, death of a fearsome expensive piece of interplanar hardware. Tallying up information acquired versus cost of expedition, I see figures flashing in red before my mundrial eyes; worse than death, this is debt. It's going to hurt, too. And yet – the pain in my leg disappears. Has it cut out? And the visual? The creatures have stopped moving – but no, they really have, and casually approaching through the petrified ambush are two figures, verging on familiar. When they are within spitting distance, I recognize them as part of my entourage from earlier, distinguished from the bandits by a rough red mark on the skull-like part of their bodies. It would seem that I have been rescued from a sudden end by the subtle and decisive ways of Heiroc warfare.

Sparing only a glance in my direction, the guides work at disassembling the catatonic attackers with gruesome tools and enthused bites. I stand statue-still until their grim work is finished. Shooting one stream of atonality at me, they continue along the path, and I follow in a daze. I consider the coördination and speed of the ambush, and hypothesize that I have just had a near-final brush with a Court of Altbal, the bandit-barony gangs and legislative militia. Recalling the images, I try to pinpoint some distinctive feature and indeed it is there, a jet-black T-shape on each thorax, as if gang insignia were a universal phenomenon. I thank the gods that happenstance is dead in Altbal, yet worry that fate, if not luck, will rule against my escape from the next such occurrence.

Rounding one more turn of an inclined passage like the shell of a vast rectilinear mollusc, I catch a reflected image in one shining facet: behind the atronach, there are at least two creatures, scuttling many-legged but unlike the Albaliche in appearance. Each is smooth and matte-white unlike the dirty clay and gunmetal of my hosts, with intricate machinery of brown and blue visible under its bobbing plates. Mounted on top is a clumsy blockish tower, engraved with pareidolian faces like the hoar-pylons of the fatherland. They extend in all directions spindly knife-hands wreathed in sparks, which they use to sever growths from the walls, incinerate small pests, or beat out dents in the metal. My whimsy suggests that these are janitorial beasts, cleaners, for surely even the most violent creatures appreciate hygiene in their universe. They seem to sense my awareness, for they retreat along the walls, and although I cannot make them out clearly it appears that they are far larger than any other man or beast in this place.

The guides are agitated. The path ahead is more certain, now, and glistening with fresh-salvaged equipment of the ambush we proceed faster than before. A crescendo of aleatoric sound and pulse mounts around the atronach, and all around the matter of the Rock appears more organised, perhaps relaying patterns impressed by my mortal consciousness, but it appears to display more hints of artifice; indeed, the tension resolves to wonder when we climb one immense concreted shaft and find ourselves in a square hall, packed in every impossible direction with Albaliche creatures, some Direnni, some not; all fidgeting and chirruping. It would seem that either they are under treaty, or under one singular rule, for there is peace of a sort here; conflicts are quickly resolved and inconsequential, and I appear to be treated with the same distant respect I have received from the guides – now invisible in the congregation of similar models. Nonetheless, I can feel hungry eyes on the atronach's shifting bulk: they sense my consciousness, its organic forms and fleshy alien themes, even across the stars and all the planes; although they do not recognize it in totality, it has a scent that suggests food to them. In response, the ancient sinew of Yr Valley instinct awakes dimly within my skin and presents the unfamiliar but undeniable sense of being prey; I feel I am pursued by something even as I stand here alive among these keening beasts.

Standing head and shoulders above the congregation, the proxy has the stature and position to take in and relay to me the surroundings: only one wall – the one closest to me – appears to be solidly constructed, the others all a latticework covered with tight fabric reminiscent of a surgical chamber. The block wall extends up into darkness, but not far above my head is the root of a massive growth of pistons and cord, ceramic plates and sparking cables and drooping streams of code all fashioned into a stout trunk which arcs down from the wall, ever tapering to a more delicate assembly at its tip: a hand, yes, certainly that, and with this realization the whole oppressive mechanism resolves itself in my eye to the shape of an arm, gargantuan and muscular. The arm takes up an enormous amount of space in this hall and has a presence humming with ominousness despite its stillness. It is entirely black, and as I stare at it I cannot but feel it is stained with baked blood, all the more jarring in this place: the Altbal's inhabitants do not possess the sanguine fluid as we do, and here it is, in phenomenal quantity; the limb above me is painted with the wounds of a city's worth of people, of many cities. As it boggles the mind, my stomach churns in the physical space; I retreat further into the proxy to repress the vomitory impulse.

A commotion stirs the masses: one enormous door opens in a latticed wall and a procession is borne in, carrying gray blocks that exude steam into the dull air. Flattened figures bear the huge slabs on their backs, groaning with ritual necessity rather than strain. They make their way into an opening in the crowd, a space underneath the tip of the arm-appendage. The hubbub dies down as the last of the steam escapes in one great mushroom, and some ceremony-draped Albalic approaches the sarcophagal hulk. Reaching within, he draws out some object, red and bulbous – but no, my breath catches as I see it, increasing the zoom, it cannot be – a child, a babe, human, crimson-new and fetal-curled. And yet – I look further, and I realise I have tricked myself; it is but a bulb of flesh, one single organ, as far from human as anything living can be. Yet – it catches in the corner of my eye, as pareidolia's wilful magic, a curse of the conscious, kicks me again – it is a babe, in suggestion and aura and almost-form, as human as anything could be while entirely unlike myself.

I am left no time to suffer the mysteries of this illusion – there are no humans here, this I know – before the clanking mystic lifts the flesh-lump into the air, and the massive blackened arm, soundless despite the immensity of its construction, reaches down to cradle it, and softly, so carefully, raises it out of the Albalic's grasp. The world, the universe of the High Rock, is frozen on this point, and the moment burns like liquid metal. A cavernous room, air heavy with something like smoke, walls hung with gauze, ceiling supported by metal struts of emaciated thinness and impossible height; floor carpeted by bladed creatures, still, unwhispering, each statuesque and metallic like the animate dreams of a fever-maddened sculptor; near one corner, a brick-ruddy construct of magicka, linked to the mind of a small man in another world. And hanging over it all, the arm of a god, immense, virtual, coated with congealed stalactites and redundant machines, bulbous and tapering like a teardrop to one hand, small in contrast to the bulk of its limb, cradling a polyp-like tumor surely as the day I was born it has the face of a child. Somewhere in the room, the air, the machines, there is a tiny motion, a pin-point's twitch; the motion is reciprocated everywhere as the stillness is broken; the star tips over the precipice.

In that atomic breath, the arm unfolds upon its length, expanding every outwards into fanned shapes and faces and bellows and gears and blades upon blades upon blades; the Albaliche appear to jump all at once and open up into something; the polyp, the babe, it explodes. So it seems: in a fraction of a second all the world's sharp edges converge on that creature and tear it to the five corners. And the machines are everywhere, spreading the viscera around every joint of iron and every molecule of air. That the blood, almost limitless now in its volume, has come from that one living thing, this is absurd and terrifying, yet it is so: so much, indeed, that the vast room has red pooling in inches upon the floor. I hear – static, I think, pure sound, yet the mind filters it into one scream, pulling at the most raw of living frequencies, a newborn's cry. The room is shifting, grating, whirring like the blades above; and the blood is boiling into gases, into red letters spelling names, songs and poems; I see the prose taking on living complexity, forming spirits and worlds. Outweighing the letters are numbers and symbols like numbers, forming equations and formal systems of delight and suffering. The numbers are unnatural – no, too natural: they are irrational in the extreme and omnidirectional. The machine-folk, the Albalics, are drinking down the numbers, but they cannot hold them; not having the correct stomach, they regurgitate them and gleefully swallow them again, gradually absorbing the matter into their crystalline skeletons. Fearful, I retreat from Altbal into my flesh; having organs in the real, I retch again and again until I have purged the shock from my soul, and return to face the blood and the numbers once more.

The Altbals have quieted themselves, but still writhe in orgy-linked shapes, slower now. A disruption now occurs, something new, but something they all knew; the release, the inevitable end – a formality, there are no true resolutions in the Rock. Here is its portent: a distant boom, with a rattling end to it, stilling all activity in the chamber. Beyond the translucent bounds of the hall, enormous shapes can be seen in lumberous movement, for a moment like shadow-puppets. The gauze then bursts, and in fantastical numbers march the Cleaners, totem-faced and pale as before, craving the lifeblood's numeromancy as much as any Altbal. Thirst-crazed, their care and hygiene abandoned, they swarm in, crushing the Albalics against each other; they crunch the adjacent beasts with immense force, and rage-blinded trample through the thin supports. Far above, the ceiling begins to fall, with the end of the gathered Heirocs. Caring little to share in their demise, I push back from the proxy for good, and begin to clean up in my office. I do not wish to participate in a death so grandiose and meaningless when I, human as I am, can hope for one leavened with emotive worth.