Lore:Sintering
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Sintering is a Lore book introduced in Renegades. The first five entries are aquired through the Renegades quest while the last four entries are unlocked from completing mission in the Lawless Frontier or the Fire & Ice Exotic Mission. The entries describe the rise of Dredgen Bael and the Barant Imperium.
Entry 7: Only from Pain
Division is the universe's force for creation. Reality is ripe with possibility when things spiral and fly and crash into each other. When the outcome becomes unpredictable, something happens: Possibility emerges. I can grab on to possibility. Widen the gyre that deafens the falcon and spins the center apart, as they say.
All coalitions not grown from the inside out, but made instead by bringing outsiders together, have cracks through them. Foundational kintsugi can be exploited. A union made from gold is just nice to look at. Nothing is stronger than the monocoque, the single piece. This is Lume's "Imperium." For all the great gifts of flat time that VI has given us, the Imperium has not resolved the tension that animates its core. Lume has enjoyed decades in a moment, using VI's grace to propagate and train vast legions of Barant soldiers and weapons, to capture and recondition generations of Psions. But for all that effort, the Imperium still lacks the summative soul of a nation. Torobatl is still beyond his efforts. All he has built is a self-contradictory revanchist movement stitched together by grievances, garbed to look like an army.
Shared hostility makes tight bonds, but the main partners—Barant, Psion—are still enemies. The would-be master and the defiant servant cinched together for millennia, bonds broken for centuries. They haven't shaken the pain. The soul remembers the imprint of the bindings. These tidy categories both hate Caiatl, but they hate her for different reasons; those reasons aren't germane here.
What I can use is this: Barant and Psion have come to despise each other. The Barant see themselves as superior to the Psions. The Psions have never been free enough to consider themselves supreme. Lume will lose control of his coalition despite the powers afforded to him by our patron, VI. Lume's nascent state is fraying not from the edges, but from the center: the point of the stitch, where the binding is meant to be strongest.
The Imperium will fail. I can see this in my dreams. I can read what trembles the fibers of reality. But until the Imperium collapses, I will use it to further my ultimate goals: Defeat the Vanguard; break their tyranny. I'll reach into the seams of his Imperium. Tug the right threads. Spiral them apart in a way that I can predict. Stoke the fires to burn in a controlled manner, prescribe the burn, and then search the violence for promising candidates necessary to complete my work.
The Psions will be my first attempt. The fruit plucked from division's harvest.
Cabal—Barant, especially—live long lives. Lume's project will fail, but he will endure. That is the Cabal nature, anyway, to endure. Even if he must use the last of his pliable muscles to drag his ossified corpse to Torobatl's shore, he will see it done, and I will be there with him. He has the last of my admiration; let this effort of mine be a test of his mettle, a lesson in pain that will prompt him to grow stronger. This is the lesson that VI confirmed for me: growth and knowledge can only come from pain. Ancient cultures practiced scarification. I do the same.
VI, are you listening to me? Witness this vessel. I await your response.
Entry 8: Crop Rending
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex tex tex texxxxxxxxxxx]
FEED DIES (reason_burn) 00:00:07:15
—-
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex mechanica mechanica fl350 fl350 apricot apricot]
#synch
'no'
FEED DIES (reason_reject, reason_burn) 00:00:15:59
—-
BEGIN TEST 00:00:00:00
[render render me me true true]
[mirror mirror weapon weapon tex tex mechanica mechanica fl350 fl350 apricot apricot]
#synch synch synch synch
[mirror weapon tex mechanica fl350 apricot]
[render me true]
[open up janus conduit]
[catchment]
FEED DIES (reason_burn) 00:00:45:03
TEST CONCLUDED
—-
Rao,
Forty-five seconds is the longest any of your Psions have been able to sustain a connection to me before burning out. That's barely enough time for me to even begin to construct a shared understanding. Without additional minds to link to my own, I cannot form the agony catchment required to shoulder this burden. Enough. If you're not stalling, you're incompetent.
Where are you keeping your strongest Psions? No mission you undertake is more important than this; I am the conduit through which our shared patron distributes his power. Power that flows to you, through Lume, by me. Send me your best to share this burden, or I'll have Lume shut down your Totality Division, and I will use you as my primary catchment.
Entry 9: Direct Me
It's not working. None of it is working. I can't get them to listen. Lume's Psions are too stuck in their dreams and their delusionary concept of the individual, the self, THEMselves. Arrogant. Selfish. There is a greater movement at work, and they're too myopic to understand the beauty of being a part of it. They are improper tools for the work I intend to put them to; it seems that I will not be able to dismantle the Vanguard with them.
I need you to help me, VI. I need you to speak to me, to speak through me, so that they can see. I would cut off their eyelids to force them to see, but only if you guided my hand. Speak! I need you to speak! Let me be your conduit!
Is this what Guardians feel with the Traveler so still? Do they feel a similar agony when the Light animates them? I have never seen a Guardian in pain—could it be that the Light protects them from that pain, or does it withhold its greater power and deny them a fuller strength?
There is an old word for Guardians who turned from the path of Light. I have seen it in my texts on Darkness: "Dredgen." A word given to the exiled by the preening arrogants that expelled them. I think I should use this word. I should give it a new meaning.
I can't stop trembling, but only the parts of me that have not yet been changed. Only anticipation, an animal's apprehension at a transformational moment of pain. Those that have been made in the shape of his vision are all the better at channeling his power. The agony shaped me from meat to beauty. Gave me meaning beyond a decaying body.
This is the thing Lume's Psions are afraid of: the pain. Only pain. That's so small. A rat fears pain. A frog. Creatures, beasts—these Psions claimed to be the mightiest beings in Sol, but they wither when I share a moment of my agonies with them. Pathetic. They refuse to accept that pain is a pathway into meaning, not merely the spasmodic firing of anguished nerves. Of course transcendence would be excruciating! What did they expect? To meditate themselves into absolute power? To relax into freedom?
Please, VI, direct my hands. Direct my feet. Direct my search to those who would more willingly become my Dredgens. Find me those who can endure the agonies necessary to become open to your power. I am your vessel, but the more I channel your strength without you, the more my own wanes.
Entry 1: The Engine of History
There is a level of suffering that I am quite used to, and then there is working with Caiatl's bureaucracy.
Moving this battle rifle platform through Caiatl's latest round of trials has dampened my spirits. Competition against the other foundries typically lifts my spirits, but not this time. I find myself wishing something terrible would happen to me. Maybe I will be struck by a meteor, so I no longer must suffer the signatures they ask of me in duplicate, triplicate, etc., etc.
The Cabal marched into empire not just because of their legions, but also thanks to their armies of quartermasters, logisticians, factory-masters, armorers, and so on; their soldiers brought the stars to heel, yes, but only because of that greater force that kept them fed, fueled, and stocked with ordinance. One would think the soldiers of the Cabal to be arrogant, but in this twilight age of their state, I've found that the haughtiest and most entitled of the Cabal are the bureaucrats!
They stand in the way of progress, clutching their columns, tables, and limits like a border guard and his rifle. When I want to give soldiers what they ask for, some quartermaster lumbers over to tell me that I must not, for it would be too expensive. Small! Small minds who don't dream, but think in terms of cost, capital, and limits. Discard your limits, factory-masters and accountants. Follow your heart!
Father, when I can get him to emerge from his tinkerer's shed, only mutters about how we must cling to Tex Mechanica's "brand" of old-world class and style. Father's a sentimental dope, and I'm sick of having to wait for his nod of approval. In the old world, people killed each other with less. They threw rocks. They fought with sticks. It's time for us to make something new. Until I run Tex Mechanica, I will push the firm into the future, despite him. I will follow the voices of soldiers and those who dare. That is how one keeps reverence for what came before, by responding to the will of the masses, who compose the very institutions these moribund leaders claim to represent!
Father eventually will understand. He must. Until then, I find camaraderie in the field. Bracus Lume, my liaison and the commander of the test unit that fields my weapon, understands and agrees. We have spent long hours together discussing many things. He serves as a muse to me: a rogue in uniform. He respects Caiatl, as a soldier must submit to their commander, but through his words, I can pick out the shape of his true intentions. He paints inspiring images of the Cabal before Calus, when they—as Lume so poetically put it—"made an empire in tribute to the sun." Brave Bracus Lume has dreams, like me. Dreams of liberation, of rousing history and leading it forward. Torobatl, their empire—I am moved by his vision, how similar it is to my own.
What weapon would we need to build to realize the aspirations of dreamers like Lume? That is what I ask of my designers and engineers. Imagine a weapon to be carried into the breach and beyond. A tool as mighty as the ones who wield it. Make Lume a weapon that he is proud to carry and let me be the vessel through which it is delivered. Of course, there is marketing in this thought but I don't think of my ask as something that base. We make weapons, not sugary drinks. We give power a body, milling it from inert metal into an implement that shakes the columns of reality itself. The bark of our beasts makes kings and tyrants just as mortal as the lowest of us. I want "Tex Mechanica" stamped on the side of the liberator's gun. I want us to be the engine of history. So, we begin with Lume.
I will continue to tilt at those bureaucratic windmills, but I think now, at least, I do it with a steadfast squire as company. Together, we'll score a victory over that class of manicured, deskbound elites. They might think they can control the world with the stroke of a pen, a perfected spreadsheet, or the tweak of an allowance, but we'll show them that people with dreams should be the ones to make decisions. People united, individuals of supreme motivation, who wrest the tiller of history away from those who would prefer to crouch on their piles of Glimmer instead.
It is time for dreamers to lead in a direction of their choosing.
Entry 2: What Mother
I've known Mother to be dead for longer than I knew her alive. I remember small moments: Falling asleep on her shoulder as she carried me home at night after a holiday party. Teaching me to swim. Singing as she washed dishes. I remember feeling safe with her. Even when Father shouted, her voice would silence him. Protecting me. Memories that comforted me. Until I saw her.
The market at Bonnet Plaza, in the West District. I was getting lunch outside the Mechanica home office. Caiatl's logisticians, Father's lickspittles, hiccups at Factories Three and Four—a miserable day.
I had interred her. She was ash. But in this moment, I saw my mother moving through the crowd with her Ghost flitting around her head. She had been dead for three years at this point. Somehow, the Light had found her. It seems all it needed was ash.
Two others chosen by the Light marched at her side, bristling with weapons, leashed to their puppeteers. The Chosen, on some holy business to save humanity. She glowed, flush with heat, as if the fire that cremated her now animated her from within. I cried out in horror, unable to stop myself. It made sense: of course the Traveler would grant my beloved mother the gift every child in the Last City dreams of, every dying elder longs for, as they move away from the main of life. Eternal life without fear.
But when I embraced her, crying her name at the center of a cheering crowd, what did my mother do?
She shoved me away.
I felt the searing push of Solar energy in her strength. A sizzling reminder on my chest as I stumbled back and fell. Not a twinkle of recognition in her eyes, just discomfort, the look one gives a clamoring beggar that gets too close. Cold She was cold; she was hideous, a doppelganger, homunculus. Her chirping idiot of a Ghost commanded me to clear the way, and off they went. Bystanders helped me to my feet. Strangers, kinder than my own mother.
Is this the truth of the Light? Is this what it does? Animate the dead and possess them with Ghosts, puppeteers who keep them hooked to life like a fish on a lure? To prey on desperation and transfix the City in this poisoned dream? What miracle makes a mother spit on her child? My memories of her are now curses. Leaden dead weight. Every single one a searing ember.
Entry 3: A Hierarchy of Pain
My dear friend Bracus Lume has been deployed, likely to some miserable theater in Sol as part of Caiatl's efforts to stymie the Hive. If my father had any passion left, I would believe Lume's deployment to be part of a plot to stop me. A favor asked for and granted. A reminder that my efforts, clients, accounts, and so on, are given to me by him. The generosity of an overbearing father: my life, from his largesse.
However, my allies within Tex Mechanica have not been able to source any missives, directives, or dictates from Father's office to stop my project. He spends his time tinkering on museum pieces and Vanguard baubles. I wonder if he even knows the world exists beyond his workbench; his cruelty is bottomless. He is a clever coward, and this retreat from the world is a favorite tactic of his.
I think he wishes for me to rot in the family estate and be quiet again. I was a quiet child and he, a colossus. I would shroud myself and slip through the cold halls of our home, fleeing the muffled sounds of his rage—a phantom by choice, to protect myself. When mother grew ill and died, my father fell silent, listless. This was his first retreat. Father ignored me so profoundly that I truly believed myself to be invisible. It made me think that I had died with my mother. That was even more terrifying than his rage; I was losing my father as well.
But now, I am older and braver. Father may or may not have clipped my wings. I don't care. I will take care of myself. I am used to being alone. But I also have been exploring other ways of being, even those prohibited by the Vanguard.
There are fascinating texts in this world. Volumes and folios that speak of clarity in purpose and the methods to attain it. I have tried many—meditation, religion, self-actualization—but they all failed, save for one: an old text of assured providence, an exegesis on the sermons of Twin Bird, of the Binary Star. Agony and pain exist, Twin Bird once said, but not all pain is meaningless. Some pain hones. It hammers bladed agony into shape, and an edge is made. Utility formed as a survival mechanism, making the afflicted sharper.
So I began to run. Thousands of steps, each a moment of pain. Each a nail, pinning me to the present. The pain worked. The pain guided me. The pain led me to power. The Vanguard and Twin Bird both called it Darkness. I call it a new path.
The Light comes for you in death, and only if it chooses. But Darkness is always there, within, waiting for you to grasp it and pull it to the surface. And so I had a revelation: I needed to attempt communion. I planned routes to run that took me deeper into the City. Down among the people, in their parks, in their streets, full of sound and life and beings—others who did not fear life but made it, composed its raw cacophony, all a part of a pattern so vast, I could not perceive it. But I was, too, one of its parts; the petri dish is a pandemonic universe to the single cell, but utterly still to the human eye.
I think the Light is selfish. To see the state of the Last City below the Vanguard's Olympian refuge is to understand this. The Light sends out its little Ghosts and elevates only the dead whom it deems worthy, never touching the desperate living. It pulls them up to the graceful decks of the Tower, damning the rest to live without its gift. This story is common among the citizens of the Last City. I should know: It happened to me, too.
My mother died and was returned and abandoned me. My father consigned me to the annals of his memory and moved on as if I, too, were already dead. But in the City, the people welcomed me. The dockworkers, the vagrants, the shopkeepers, everyone hurrying on every errand, all denied the Light's gift, but were subject to its rule. I disappeared among them, but I was not consciously forgotten by them. I was not spurned by them. At any moment on one of my excursions, I could stop and talk to someone, to have a moment of connection, to see them as well. I moved among them as one of them, an equal in dreams and aspiration, seen and heard.
The Traveler has the power to shape reality, and yet there are beggars in the low districts of the Last City. There are children that go hungry. The streets are policed. From where do violence and crimes of desperation spring? The individual rendered miserable before their birth, or the great systems above them that maintain the status quo? My own wealth—though it can be stripped from me—is not a shield. It is not a weapon. It is fiat. Exchange, only as long as I play within the bounds of the Light's rules.
There is a pattern to who the Light picks. I think it chooses based on how jagged the hierarchy of pain will become when it intervenes. I think the Light wants to hurt me. But the Darkness wants me to do something with that pain.
Entry 4: Paper Histories
Tex Mechanica is a huge, old foundry. At its height, the Mechanica had multiple proving grounds, distribution centers, autofabricators, and other facilities across Sol. We even used to build ships! Though we were never good at it. That was centuries ago, when the tide was high, before the Vanguard determined that contraction and consolidation to the Last City was the prudent move. Squash the frontier, they said. Focus on one stronghold and its satellites.
Father, though he is fantastically wealthy and powerful, is a king at the end of a dynasty. He's the sucker left holding the bag as the house lights come on. What is Tex Mechanica in the age of the Last City? A sporting goods supplier. A widget factory for the Guardians of the Vanguard. A toolmaker for a junta, always building larger and deadlier weapons to face an enemy that is always approaching, never arriving. What do they face next? An arms dealer loves that question because it has no answer—only fear.
I leave my father to figure it out without me. To play weapons-master to undead tyrants. I have a new faith now. A new way forward. The pursuit of freedom and understanding hidden by the Vanguard—this is my task that I take up without guilt and with clear eyes. I am willing to pay any cost; I think of my dear friend Bracus Lume, who has returned from the Hive front terribly wounded by one of their most vicious paracausal weapons. He convalesces in orbit (Father denied him the use of our personal medical suite on campus here) but still insists on fighting to live for a tomorrow he so furiously believes in. I should do the same.
Together, Lume and I make a mighty intellectual and spiritual pair. He, the soldier, and me, the dreamer. Our correspondence sharpens our desire and renders in actual fact the targets of our heady dreams. Father, the Vanguard, and the Guardians are too removed from the people of The City that they might as well oppose their liberation! The current order restrains their growth, restricts them to huddling behind high walls, fearing nightmares beyond them. This ruling elite demands we cow to their dictates and proscribes any group or individual that speaks against them. Caiatl and her Cabal are much the same to Lume and his soldiers, he assures me. Her father twisted what it meant to be Cabal, and though she deposed him, she has not fixed what he broke.
Forces, ideologies, and thoughts opposed to these twin malignancies are deemed evil, dark, and wrong by the institutions they threaten. I ask—what is evil about opposing tyranny? Neither the Vanguard nor Caiatl will abdicate without a fight; liberating the City will take a mass movement, which I don't yet have. However, a small cell that is committed to the cause, acting at the right time and in the most critical places? A bullet is ignited by a firing pin; great movements need a catalyst. The people of The City cry out for one.
I could be the one who brings about the first wave of change. Should I not grasp any weapon, tool, or thought afforded to me to oppose a foe that separates mothers from their children? I have availed myself of the deep records Tex Mechanica keeps hidden in its off-book archives. Paper histories. Nothing that can be searched unless one is physically present. Our guns once barked as vicious dogs across the ruins of fallen Earth. Once, we made tools for seekers on the frontier who used our weapons to carve new paths into the future. According to my research, these weapons became more than their first form.
I, the shunned heir of Tex Mechanica, have scrubbed my name and history from our archives. I go out into the darkness away from home, as our weapons before have. I will find a new name. I will sound out across the frontier and then come home to address the world the Light has built.
Entry 5: A Conduit for All Futures
Lume calls his people "Barant": a name once used by and for his kind. One, he says, they are still owed as children of Torobatl. "Cabal" is a name without weight; it is the label, Lume says, of decrepit imperial bureaucrats. A dry moniker.
Lume's Barant are raucous in their new identity. They worship their distant home star, the heroes who once fought in her name, and the dream that they might pile banners of the conquered upon her plazas once more. They strip themselves bare and howl their praise to Torobatl, calling her warrior and queen, boasting so that she might hear and smile upon them. They trample the ground into a migratory temple, ennobling it with the impressions of their feet. They make orbits of worship around their old idols, mighty challenge columns, as their ancestors did on her plains. Though born on an alien world, Lume's Barant are fierce patriots for a homeland they have never once beheld. This fervor inspires me, this clear dream, this grand project.
Lume has given me a gift: an awareness of this type of power. The Vanguard and the Light have their silent deity in the Traveler, but their celebrations are muted. They do not bid the people to exult in their power because they do not want people to realize their power. They want only the Guardians to be powerful, only the Vanguard to be mighty. I want all humanity to be strong. I want us to celebrate alongside the Barant as they do, but with our own undeniable strength.
My teachers—my brother Lume, my long-dead master Twin Bird—both speak of the same thing, which I have now found for myself. Years ago, I exercised my body through rituals of agony. As I write, it appears this new power will do likewise for me. My vision will be made clear, and with that clarity, I will actualize. I will become greater than the gifted.
I had found a place of power on Europa. A trove of artifacts tainted with Darkness. Rumors of real power, hidden deep within a forgotten Praxic temple. I took a maniple of Lume's most fearsome volunteers into that place, losing many to the elements before we even reached its entrance. It was sweltering inside, the air so thick with damp dust that we were burning our filters at thrice the baseline. Lume's warriors chanted liturgical cadences to fill the halls with celebration from the deep organs, but that dead place swallowed all sounds they made. They thought it was a trick of acoustics or some other paracausal phenomenon, and so they armed themselves accordingly. But the closer we approached the heart of the temple, the more I grew assured of the futility of conventional weapons.
I began to hear a voice. A whisper. Not one of us or Lume, who was watching from his convalescing bed aboard our ship. A new voice, just for me.
In the heart of the temple was a great sepulcher that contained a fantastic, glittering crystal. From my studies, I knew it to be a crystal of Stasis, a paracausal manifestation of Darkness, that power to which I had spent years attuning my body and mind. I touched it, and invited power in.
A voice. His voice. Lume still swears it was a devil of unknown power who spoke to me, but I know the truth. Unseen, a voice leaped between his soldiers, possessing them to speak one word at a time. A message born from howling pain that found its final home in me. The agony was unrelenting, the pain immense, but I had prepared for this moment for years. I did not ignite. My soul did not burn out. The devil's voice became my voice, and the devil became me, and I understood: This was not a devil. This was not the Light. It was not even the Darkness. This was a third power. A new thing. My own path.
TO SATURN, the voice and I cried. TO THE RINGS, MY WEAPON.
VI. This was the name of the great one, the third power. VI held my hand and showed me Lume wounded and Lume mighty, myself wounded and myself mighty. VI. This was the power's name. Tombs and temples. We entered a tomb and made it a temple with our cries, as the Barant once stamped migration prayers into Torobatl's dirt, as I once ran through the halls of my family manor fearing and yearning.
In the quiet after, I was alone. Lume bellowed in my aurals, screaming at me in fury for the death of his brethren. He swore to kill me when I returned, but I knew he would not, so I told him, and I began to laugh and made him another promise: I would heal his wound, erase the Hive magic that rotted him from the inside out.
I am happy. I was chosen. I had been right. I was the vessel; my actions—perhaps from even before my birth, but certainly from the moment I became conscious—were guided by these hands that now rested on my shoulders. My explorations of Darkness, my readings and agonies, were indeed the method by which I would attain a power that could be shared among the masses, a counterweight to the Light—but it would have to begin with me. It could only begin with me.
I am, was, and will be the conduit through which all futures flow.
Entry 6: Nine Thoughts out of Time
• I can kill Ghosts faster than new Guardians can be raised.
• "There is a world beyond this one."
• The walls that keep us in are feeble. One more push. Take a hammer out and whack away the keystone.
• I have a sword now. Like the dead Ghosts, I took it from the heart of the enemy and made it to be dim and still and without Light. That makes my sword cut better. I've killed Guardians. I've killed a couple, and they didn't think I could, but what do they think now? Nothing. They're dead, and I have their Ghosts slapping against my thigh. Kiss my ass.
• I want to go back to the City. I don't want to hurt anymore. I want to be with everyone and have them pick me up. I miss the feeling of hands on me. Among the people, I was never a phantom; I was a moment waiting to be met. The masses were my first love, how much potential a crowd holds, how many dreams.
• Time is a thought that goes backward and forward; that's how VI shares it with me. He promises me things that haven't happened yet and says they have. If they're done, why does he make me wait?
• I wanted to be a Guardian as a kid, and now, I would slap myself for wanting that. I'm more. I'm many things more. Cadmium, lead, metallic hydrogen, platinum. I'm elements you've never seen larger than a milligram. I am more than what I was. Agony and grace.
• To be a Dredgen is to endure this and more. Give me more. I'm not done yet.
• Mother, talk to me. I need to know. VI, if you can hear me, if you are there, I beg you—show her to me again.
