Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2307: Iskaleth

Sylas knew there was more, he could feel it every time he held the brush... Layers of inheritance hidden so deeply that even his current Will couldn't casually peel them apart.

The old man had given him something that didn't seem to care very much about the rules everyone else followed.

Sylas stood in silence for a long while.

Rhykan wanted him to bring the Milky Way forward within a week.

"Okay." Sylas said calmly. Then his gaze shifted and something changed within it.

There was no smile, no excitement. No sudden burst of realization that would have betrayed what conclusion he had reached. There was only the faintest flash in those emerald eyes.

Then Sylas raised a hand and Beacon erupted. Blinding golden light seemed to connect the heaven and hell of the universe, a siren for as far as the eyes could see peeling across time and space.

His Will simply seeped into the void, spreading past the dead worlds around him, slipping through the darkness between stars, crossing star systems without slowing and yet continuing onward.

Further.

And then further still.

The scale expanded until distances that once would have taken ships light years to cross became meaningless beneath the pressure of Sylas' Will.

It stretched until even the edges of Sylas' senses should have long failed, reaching scales that Sylas' Beacon should have long broken under.

Then it stretched further... until, finally, Beacon touched the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Sylas' hand lowered and looked into the endless dark.

Then breathed out a single word.

"Come."

**

The Vosskarr Clan ruled the galaxy.

Their name had been written into its history so deeply that many of the civilizations beneath them no longer remembered an era before the Vosskarr. Dynasties rose, Races collapsed, but the Vosskarr remained.

There was a reason for that.

Their language was ancient enough that translating it into a universal common stripped away most of its meaning.

Vos meant blood, that much was simple. Skarr, though, was a lot subtler.

Most translation matrices rendered it as scar, or to scar, but neither captured the true meaning. A scar, ugly as they might be, could fade, be faint--it ultimately reflected a bandaged and forgotten wound.

But Skarr meant to leave behind a mark of Will, something that could be remembered after flesh rotted away, after names disappeared from records, after even the people who had witnessed the act themselves turned to dust.

Their cities reflected it. Every important structure across their ancestral world was covered in writing. There were no statues commemorating their greatest ancestors, no enormous monuments carved in their likenesses, no portraits hanging across endless halls.

There were only words. The words alone were enough. Thus was the Vosskarr Path.

Every member of the main bloodline was born with crimson hair, though calling it hair wasn't entirely accurate. Each strand was a living extension of their circulatory system and their blood flowed through, their Will gathering within them.

The stronger a Vosskarr became, the more blood those strands could contain, and they cultivated those strands from birth. They washed them in mineral baths, fed them Aether, hardened them beneath Will pressure and trimmed them only during specific ceremonies.

Those strands were never thrown away, instead they became the brush heads of the brushes they carried on their backs. And every one of them had one.

For younger members, the brushes were little different from ordinary writing instruments, their handles forged from bone, metal, or wood, and fitted with bundles of their own crimson hair.

The brushes of powerful Vosskarr were enormous, some stood taller than the people who wielded them, others were so large that their shafts resembled pillars, with tens of thousands of crimson strands hanging from their ends, just as long.

The greatest among them didn't need to write complete words at all. A single stroke of their brush could carry meaning. A curve could become death, a dot could become distance.

Their children learned poetry before combat, grammar before footwork, calligraphy before they were trusted with weapons.

A poorly chosen word could waste half the blood in one's body. A perfectly chosen one could accomplish with a single stroke what another Vosskarr might need an entire paragraph to achieve.

The Vosskarr Clan was led by a patriarch, the strongest of their Clan... Theoretically. But there was another. One that never took part in formal combat or seemed to wield true power, and yet might have been the most respected of them all.

The Reader.

A peculiar name for a clan of writers, to be sure. But maybe that was always the point.

From the moment a Vosskarr accepted the position, their brush was sealed. They could write records, annotations and interpretations, but never again could they impose a written law upon the world. Even to their own, it sounded like castration.

Still, the Vosskarr ruled an entire galaxy.

They had survived wars, invasions, rebellions and assassinations. Their ancestral home had never once been successfully infiltrated, their intelligence carrying him forward through the ages. It was a feat as incredible as could be...

At least, it would have been… if someone hadn't slipped into their midst so easily.

A young Vosskarr woman walked through the Hall of Strokes with her head lowered, a crimson brush resting across her back. Her hair matched everyone else's, her blood smelled right, tinged with just the right sort of Will. Formations washed over her body, and yet not a single one of them reacted.

She continued forward, her pace liesurely and measured, unbothered and even.

Only after she passed beneath an ancient character meaning Truth did her tongue flicker out between her lips, for the briefest instant, pink and violet scales shimmered along her jaw before disappearing.

Iskaleth smiled, entering the hall of the Reader to find a woman sitting at a lone desk beneath a towering bookcase that seemed to reach for the very stars themselves.

The Reader immediately looked back as though a jolt of electricity had run through her.

Without bothering to hide her form any longer, Iskaleth morphed and changed, rising until her Serpentes body towered over the Reader.

"Hello, Reader. I've been interested in your Clan for a very long time now. It seems our interests might align. The Fates tell me you may very well lose your galaxy soon if you do nothing."