Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E34: “Eye of Heaven, Gateway of Earth”

That's the kind of title that only comes once a series, at most. If the story goes the way I predicted a few episodes ago, then this episode will probably be where Father completes the ritual and elevates himself (back?) to godhood before they turn it around on him somehow. Probably using the macroglyph/Brothar related stuff that the show avoided explaining to the audience, though hopefully not JUST using that, because that would kind of render the entire Battle of Central and its associated drama meaningless.

Again, that's a potential issue to hopefully avert IF my prediction was correct. If it was, I'll probably know by the end of this episode. Begin!


Breda, Hawkeye, and the rest of their cell are under siege in the radio station. No shooting at the moment, but its a tense standoff, with barricades erected behind the doors and windows and the soldiers outside setting up a wall of riot shields and armored vehicles. Eventually, a white flag rises from behind the shield wall, from a lone soldier who says he wishes to come in and negotiate. It's going to be whatsisname the other dummy who Ross used to work with, isn't it? Yup, it's him! Recognizing him, Ross instructs the others to let him approach, assuring them that he's trustworthy.

Just watch, he's going to step inside the building and then shout "GLORY TO THE FUHRER!" and blow himself up now.

Eh, close enough.

Meanwhile, Queen is trying to figure out if there's any way she can get to her husband and see him. She's cautioned against it, with the justification that there's no telling who is and isn't trustworthy at the moment and she's a valuable hostage who should be kept away from the command center until the fighting has concluded. Probably the best idea for her. I'm not sure if it's the best idea for everyone else, though. And possibly not the best for Wrath himself. If there's anything saveable in him, she's probably the only method of recovering it.

Granted, he might be injured beyond repair by now, and getting Scar to stop short of killing the guy who led the genocide of his people (even if he wasn't actually the mastermind who ordered it) would probably be asking too much of him.

Cut to Father's office, where the main plot is happening. Edward shouts his defiance, of both God and his bastard son. Father simply gloats that words will do him little good at this point. He and the other sacrifices aren't just inside his base; they're inside his belly. More or less accurate, given that most of Father's mass seems to be inside of the pipes, what with the big eyeball he can manifest on the ceiling simultaneously with the humanoid eye-costume-thing.

On the other hand, Scar, Alphonse, and May were able to flee his "belly" before. Acid reflux I guess.

To illustrate Father's point, we flash back to the level above, where the chimaeras are looking down into the gulf that May finished opening into the ceiling of the sanctum below. The broken pipes have leaked out a congeries of iridescent spheres that are now blocking their view again.

Good guess, beastie boys, but not quite. You're actually looking at him right now.

Hmm. He must have a limited range, in how far he can remotely control appendages of himself without their being a physical tether. Otherwise he'd have been doing a lot more on his own throughout Amestris rather than relying on less capable minions and spawn.

...maybe he actually *can't* divide himself and still control each part? He could have found a way to make a thin tendril of woggishness invisible, and still have his humanoid eyeballman form surreptitiously hooked up to one of the pipes through it. That sounds like the kind of trick he might use.

Back inside the "belly," May announces that she's planning to bag Father himself and bring him back to Xing with her. May, please, he's already played and won that game, you're just going to bore him trying to force a rematch.

The others try to convince her to stop, but she just tells them to handle Pride while she solos the boss. He can't shut down her alkahestry, she's got this.

-_-

I hope May is just trying to distract him with this bluster to give the others a chance to act, and that she doesn't actually think that she can beat Father in a duel. She might be a kid, but she's usually smarter than that.

As he considers the absurdity of May's proposal, Edward realizes something. If Pride can just *force* people to open the Gate and look upon Wog-Sothoth, then why not just do that for all five sacrifices? Mustang, having the same thought, whispers to him about something Pride mentioned before doing the forced-gate-opening earlier.

Pride and Father failing to pay attention to these exchanged whispers here is hurting my SoD a little, not gonna lie. Maybe they just don't think it matters at this point, with the eclipse already having started.

Anyway, Edward puts what Mustang tells him together with the apparent "crumbling" problem that Pride seems to be trying to hide. And, after testing to make sure that Father hasn't shut off their alchemy at present (presumably because he needs to use some conventional-ish alchemy for the big ritual rather than just relying on his internal energy stores), Edward and Alphonse attack Pride while May makes her own quixotic assault against Father.

And, notably, Pride makes a fighting retreat before them, instead of standing his ground and parrying them with his tentacles as he's always done in the past. Implying that he's not confident he can take that kind of jarring right now. Maybe they actually can beat him in this state!

Unfortunately, that all assumes that Father won't intervene. May initially thinks she's winning, when he ignores the blades she transmutes through his semiliquid humanoid form's body. She tries pinning his arms, seemingly not having remembered the detail of him not needing gestures to use his alchemy. Hohenheim tries sticking his head out of Father's belly to warn her, but it's too late.

Father was just baiting her into coming close. As soon as she does so, he uses his point-blank disintegration attack and...well, we don't see exactly how much of her got pulped, but there's a lot of internal bleeding and I don't think she still has both feet.

Jeez. I'm not sure how else that could have possibly gone, but still, watching that happen to a little kid - even a superpowered fighty little kid on a quest for a cutthroat aristocratic faction - is kind of hard.

Father starts to turn his attention on the other resisters, and we cut away to some Amestrian soldiers getting ambushed and taken down by a squad of Ishvalan guerillas, led by Scar's old abbot and what appear to be other surviving members of their warrior monk order. They then proceed to break into a series of carefully chosen houses around Central, force the inhabitants (more gently than I'd have expected) to confirm the houses' coordinates, and start setting up glyphs.

It seems that Brothar's macroglyph, just like Father's, requires some more intricate symbols to be set up around its core in Central. Whatever it actually does. I still want to know what the deal is with that universal constructor array that was meant to compliment the disintegrator, and how the two would be used together. DOES this alternate macroglyph have anything to do with that? Are they gonna disintegrate Amestris and reconstruct a new version of it in which Father has been converted into an equivalent mass' worth of cotton candy? Cotton candy would be a good idea. I think that's what they're doing.

As the Ishvalans work setting up the last glyph loci, the eclipse overhead nears completion. Just a crescent-shaped sliver of sun is still visible. There are almost certainly less than two or three minutes before the eclipse is full.

Cut from there to Scar and Wrath facing each other down. The chimaeras that we saw again just a few minutes ago are probably still within sight of this, but I don't blame them for not wanting to join the fray until they're completely sure they have a clean shot at Wrath, because any retaliatory strike he makes would likely be deadly for them. Still, I'll be very happy if one of them jumps in at the last moment to play a role in his defeat. Like, maybe Rocksteady can restrain him with a glob of mucus to stop him from dodging Scar's killing blow, or Bebop can land the deathblow himself using thrown quills while Scar has Wrath pinned down. Lionheart's surprise entrance into the Kimblee fight was excellent, and I think repeating that concept here would be even stronger. Wrath is going on about how this will be a great duel of the nameless ones or whatever, and so *denying* him that would be fitting. Almost sort of karmic too, given how he was the one shutting down idealistic visions with cynical realism in his arc with Ling; his own vision of romantic duels to the death just getting yanked away from him by the facts on the ground would mirror that nicely.

For now, as he and Scar prepare for the next round of the battle, Wrath starts going on about how this is what he always wanted. No names. No cause. No being ordered by or beholden to anyone else. Just to fight, kill, and die, for its own sake, against a worthy foe.

Sublime music plays as Wrath exultantly says that "I've finally arrived."

And that's when I finally, finally, FINALLY figured out Wrath.

...

All those times he seemed to be chomping at the bit against Father's control, undermining the operations, letting the good guys escape to cause more trouble, giving them hints. I was so damned close to being right, but also so stupidly far away. My mistake was in failing to reassess Wrath after learning what the Sins actually are. I kept thinking of him as mostly human, rather than as an aspect of Father.

Maybe he does still have a human side. He *did* seem to be honest about loving his wife. But that's not the reason he was doing all that self-sabotage.

90% of the time that we've seen Father, he's been hiding away in his throne room, seemingly loathe to leave it. He briefly went out onto the doorstep to retrieve a dying Gluttony back in "Father," and he came upstairs to reassure the generals for a couple minutes in "Looming Shadows"/"The Oath In the Tunnel" before retreating back down. The last time we ever saw him leave his bunker without being forced to by an emergency was during his creation of Wrath.

Meanwhile, Wrath's first *extended* appearance in the show (and his first appearance at all in the manga) was him sneaking out of the office to go engage in some intrigue. Sure, there were tactical reasons for him to have done that, creating this rogueish conspiratorial "above the law" atmosphere to appeal to his marks. But it was also an establishing character moment. Additionally, whenever we've seen Wrath at his most composed and effective, he's been fighting, either with words or with weapons. When we see him just doing paperwork in his office or killing time waiting for something, he often seems unstable, like he's about to start laughing or crying or some other crazy thing at any moment. Standing at attention at a funeral made him frustrated to the point where he had to tremble and shake to stop himself from running off and finding an annoying kid to beat into silence.

I actually think that Wrath might be the most illustrative of the Sins of how fundamentally stunted and immature Father is. His comfort zone is being in a bottle. He hated being a prisoner, but it also became natural for him. That hatred of confinement, the desire to actually expand his horizons and use those legs he went through so much trouble to give himself again, that restlessness and competitive drive. He could have acted on it, and forced himself to enlarge his comfort zone and deal with his learned prisoner mentality. Instead, he decided that it must represent the sin of Wrath, and purged it from himself. He hasn't had that conflict of desires, wanting to be free and wanting to stay in a surrogate flask simultaneously, ever since. He's just wanted to stay in the flask.

The reason Wrath has been doing all the stuff I've noticed throughout the series is because he's bored. That's it. He performed superlatively in battle and political intrigue, but when it came time to work a desk job keeping Amestris running in its more banal day-to-day affairs, he started having exactly the same problem that Father did. So, he's keeping worthy opponents free and alive, giving his enemies a sporting chance when he really doesn't have to, etc, just so that he can have a challenge to enjoy. That explains pretty much every apparent subversive action he performed.

I still wonder if he could possibly be turned, if they'd been able to force him to chose between Father and Queen with the latter present before him. Possibly. Running off with her to become a sellsword or pit fighter in some other country seems like it might have pleased him more than staying with his birth family, if he could get himself to acknowledge that. But that's almost besides the point.

So yeah. Father got rid of his desire to go outside and do things, because it made him uncomfortable, and that meant it must be a flaw to be removed. Anything to avoid growing and learning. Complete arrested development. One of the greatest ironies here is that without his "wrath," it's doubtful that Father would have felt compelled to escape from his Xerxian captivity in the first place, let alone to have gotten the idea of repeating the philostone creation ritual in Amestris afterward. I guess it does make sense that he'd call this "wrath" rather than lumping it in under greed or lust or the like. Wrath includes disproportionate retribution, and it was this impulse - *probably* more than any other - that led him to condemn the entire civilization of those that abused him to eternal damnation.

Not that he actually regrets it or anything. It's a sin because it makes him uncomfortable with himself, not because it leads him to commit evil acts. That's what sinning is, amirite?

...well. Actually. Going back to what I said in a previous review, about Father being a satire of the biblical god, that might actually be on point. Some particularly odious Abrahamic sects hold that a thing can only be "good" or "evil" because God thinks positively or negatively of it, rather than any material consequences of the thing itself. So yes. If it makes Father annoyed or upset, it is sinful.

...

Wrath tells the "human with no name" to come on and kill him if he can. Scar does his best to oblige. It's a close, furious battle, but Wrath manages to keep a narrow advantage all the while. He's injured, but clearly not quite enough. Scar manages to disintegrate one of his swords, but Wrath surprises him by grabbing a broken piece of it (without cutting his fingers off, somehow) and impaling him through the forearm.

The right forearm. The one with the disintegrator tattooed onto it.

Wrath is about to bring his remaining sword down for a killing blow. He IS bringing it down for a killing blow. While howling in a more literally "wrathful" way than any vocalization he's made in the show until now. Scar, however, has already planted his left hand and the floor, which he uses to transmute some stone spikes to catch and impale Wrath's own arm in turn.

Well, well, well. It looks like Scar's time studying his brother's notes with May and Dr. Marcoh has allowed him to multiclass.

I'm less surprised by this than I think the story expects me to be. Scar's beef with the practice of alchemy was never rational, and his general character trajectory has been in finding more appropriate targets for and more constructive applications of his ire. I didn't predict this specifically, but I'm also not surprised by it. Granted, his ability to pick it up in that amount of time, when it seems like other characters...hmm. Well, this gets back to a worldbuilding detail I've alluded to before that I think I'll talk about at the end of the series.

...

Speaking of Scar's "ire" though, I just remembered something. Way back when his tattoo was first revealed, before I learned to recognize the specific ouroboros mark and before it was clarified that all the Sins besides Greed were on the same team, I briefly suspected that Scar might be Wrath. And, the specific flavor of "wrath" that he best represented, the action-for-action's sake sort of violence, is fairly close to what the actual Wrath now seems to have been created from.

Just like Mustang with "envy," ie shame. We've got an "overcome your own vice" theme going on during this final arc.

I don't know if Sloth fits that, though. I gueeess you could say that Alex's biggest regret - his failure to act when his loyalty to the state and his moral code came into conflict back in Ishval - was a kind of slothfulness? Maybe? I don't know. The "inaction" part of the sin of sloth is usually associated with apathy, and that's the opposite of the problem Alex actually had back then. Meanwhile, I can't think of any aspect of sloth the sin OR Sloth the character that mirrors a flaw or regret of Olivierre's.

So, maybe I'm overthinking this. But still, with Mustang and Scar at least, there appears to be a thing.

...

As Wrath recoils, bleeding anew and gasping in pain and surprise, Scar pulls the sword-fragment out of his right arm and then reveals his left, and the new tattoo he's acquired.

He designed it based on Brothar's notes for the universal reconstruction array. No word on how much of the theory it puts into practice, though, or on how co-dependent it is with the disintegrator. Whatever it can do though, Scar makes it clear that he did in fact come up with the design himself by synthesizing Brothar's notes. So, he is officially an alchemist now; not just a guy using an alchemical weapon someone else gave him.

I doubt he could give himself the actual tattoo, though. Wonder who helped him with that? I suppose just a mundane (albeit skilled) tattoo artist could do it, once Scar had the design figured out.

Wrath says that he can't believe how weak, pathetic humans keep on managing to surprise him. While smiling fondly through his pain. I guess "tsundere for humanity" was part of the emotional package that Wrath got from Father.

It's not clear if the battle is over yet or not. I hope not; I still feel like the chimaeras lending a hand would be a fitting touch. Regardless, we cut to back downstairs, where May has crumpled on the floor and surrounded herself in an alkahestric healing glyph after having her legs and lower body partially disintegrated. She's clearly just barely able to keep herself alive.

Meanwhile, the room's other inhabitants (besides Hohenheim who is stuck inside of Father again and Mustang who is blind) continue the doomed battle that May initiated. Pride is visibly acting more cautious than usual, and his attacks are coming more slowly and weakly than before. When Edward comments on this, Pride unconvincingly assures him that this is just because he doesn't want to accidentally hurt him before the ritual.

It looks like in his Gate-weakened state, Pride might actually be within the brothers' ability to defeat in a conventional battle. In fact, Edward by himself seems to be getting the upper hand at one point, getting close enough to Pride's central body to land a blow and make more of its skin flake off. Unfortunately, Father is also in the room. Well, technically he's also around it, but you know what I mean.

Izumi tries some rather unconventional tactics to hit Father with more firepower, to little effect.

But, as far as silliness goes, well...let's just say the enemy refuses to be outdone in any way by any one. This is what Father shapes his hand into. And yes, it's actually functional.

It's a complete tonal break, but I can't complain about it, because it makes total sense in-story. This is 100% what Father has actually been this entire time, under all the pretensions of solemnity and poise. The needless surprise entrance for himself and Sloth, those seemingly completely nonfunctional human skulls just sitting there on his desk, the edgy fake-game-board he was modeling the sacrifices on, he's always been this. He just doesn't usually show as much of it all at once.

Which, if we're going back to the "overcome your own vices" theme, does make him a closer foil to Edward.

Finally, the full eclipse happens, and Father is forced to stop screwing around and do the thing already. Pride stands back and May keeps clinging to life in her healing circle while Father grabs everyone else and moves them into position.

Upstairs, where the loyalist officers are being kept under guard by rebel forces, one of the surviving four-stars sees the sun go dark in its entirety, and begins panicking like a cornered wild animal. Screaming about how he needs to be brought to the central chamber *right now* or he'll be consumed. His eyes rolling back and his veins bursting at the thought of the eternal damnation he was willing to subject the rest of the country to being visited on himself.

The Briggs soldier guarding him has to work hard to restrain him, despite the general being tied up. The general's underlings, tied up next to him, just assume he's having a stroke.

The black circle fills the golden yellow one, and for a moment, night falls upon midday Amestris.

Back down in his office, Father - still holding four sacrifices out in his tentacles and one inside of his torso - asks them if they've ever thought of the planet itself as a life form.

Huh. I wasn't expecting this to go there. It was foreshadowed, with the alkahestric view of the world and its ki-flow, but not very heavily. So, we're doing something with Gaia hypothesis, then. Weird. As with the astrology stuff, this concept is well known enough in real life occultism that it's natural to use it here, but I feel like the story could have benefited from hinting at this just a *little* more heavily in the early/mid series.

Anyway, no one here except for May (who he isn't talking to) and possibly Hohenheim (who is inside his torso and can't answer) had ever thought of the planet as a life form, so after a moment of silence Father continues on his own. It may not be technically alive, he clarified, but it is still a complicated system with a lifelike flow of vital energy moving through it, giving it something akin to a soul. A soul that contains a vast amount of information, thanks to "learning" all that the individual organisms that have ever been born, lived, and died on it have ever known. Consequently, it has its own Gate of Truth. A much larger one than any mere human's. And, using these five sacrifices who have already been on both sides of the Gates as a key, he plans to open the planet's. Do the equivalent of forcing the earth to perform human transmutation.

This is all delivered with full-on supervillain ranting and gloating and cackling. Will Father ever care to put the mask back on, at this point? I always got the impression he was wearing it more for his own benefit than anyone else's, but now he just seems to be reveling in childish unrestraint and seemingly not showing any hint of embarrassment or shame.

So, open the planet's Gate. It doesn't sound like that's what the macroglyph is for, though; the philosophers' stone he's making is going to be for something else. So, open plaentary Gate, and then use the truckload of high-density philostone he's about to turn Amestris into to...crawl through it and push the previous occupant out? Maybe the "I will cast God down to earth" part of Edward's interpretation of Father's plans was much more literal than he or myself realized. Though granted, if what Father is planning to do is literally just make himself super powerful, open a gate big enough for his superpowerful self to pass through it, and then just wrestle his previous greater self out of the cockpit of the universe...well, I'm not sure that he'll actually have enough philostone for that. Wouldn't the soul of God be as to the planet's power as the planet's is to a human? You'd think Father would need to consume something like multiple biospheres worth of souls before he could become powerful enough to win that wrestling match.

Well, maybe his plan isn't *quite* that.

Before he can say or do any more, Leed comes charging out of nowhere and smashes Father's humanoid form apart with his graphene fist. While shouting about how the center of the world is now his.

He lays his hand on the spot Father had been standing on, ignoring Hohenheim as he thumps to the floor by his feet. Seemingly expecting to be able to hijack Father's spell or something.

So, Greed was planning to betray them all along, then? He just wants to steal the fruits of Father's labor and eat all the souls of Amestris and replace Wog-Sothoth himself? That seems a little counter to his character arc. And also counter to Ling having partial control; you'd think he'd be fighting him from inside if Greed went full demon again. Maybe he's planning to just hijack the "open the gate" part and not the "activate the macroglyph and drink Amestris" part? Not sure. In any case, it predictably doesn't work. A cunningly disguised layer of Father is still spread out across the floor under him, so even if touching the floor in that spot at that moment would have done what Greed thought (doubtful) then Father's interposition probably would have blocked it.

That also explains how Father is able to split his humanoid form off from the part of his mass inside the pipes. He has an invisible tether, just as I suspected. It was just spread out across the floor instead of running through the air. That's probably why we never see him levitating.

...although...wait, what about when he goes upstairs? Or when he left the base sixty years ago to create Wrath? Hmm. Okay, yeah, I'm back to square one on how Father's division-while-still-staying-one-entity ability works and what its limits are. Hmm. Maybe when he leaves the base, he actually does withdraw his entire mass from the pipes and compresses it into his humanoid body? Maybe?

Oh. Or. Maybe the pipes normally just contain an inert mass of Amestrian-produced protostone. That explains why they're hooked up to the labs. Father can connect to that material and "spread" into it, converting it into more pseudo-wog, if he needs to. So, maybe Hohenheim's soul-infection actually would have killed him, if he hadn't been close enough to that protostone stash to quickly reach a tendril out and latch onto it again? Maybe?

Or maybe I'm overthinking it, and it's just as simple as "Father can split into as many pieces as he wants without dividing his consciousness as long as they all stay within a hundred meters of each other" or something.

Yeah, I'm just spitballing at this point. Maybe the manga is clearer about how this works, idk. Back to the episode.

Father tells Greed that he half-expected him to show up at some point. After all, Greed's desires all came from Father, so Father knows ahead of time what Greed is likely to try to show up and steal. If Greed was planning this all along, that might explain why Greed 1.0 was still in Amestris; he wasn't just stealing Father's experiments, he was waiting for the Promised Day so he could jump out and steal at least some part of that too.

...

Well, if that's the case, then Greed at least isn't planning to let the macroglyph go off.

If he'd been planning to just replace Father with himself and otherwise leave the formula intact, then Greed 1.0 wouldn't have been bothering the Elrics about golem research. He must have known that the Promised Day was just a year or two off, and he wasn't at all shy about using his battery frivolously, so he couldn't have been worried it would run out in just that short time. No need for a golem body if you have a much better source of immortality you're already that committed to obtaining.

So yeah. Whatever Greed wants to do with the planet's Gate, it's not what Father wants to do with it.

...

As Pride just sort of watches in the background and chuckles, Father drags the sacrifices across the room - totally ignoring Leed now - and plops his central mass down on the gigerthrone. He holds all five of them in a circle (Hohenheim tries to blast him again, now that he can see, but no use), and declares that this is the center of the world. In a tone that suggests that he has made it so, by positioning it in the middle of either the Amestrian macroglyph or just the multipurpose Central one. Or, perhaps, just by saying so. Red philostone lightning courses through his tendrils to each of the sacrifices.

And, with a pained gasp, each of the sacrifices finds something disturbing happening to their bodies.

So that's what Gluttony was originally meant to be. A synthetic spontaneous caster. If the gluttonizer had actually led to the Antechamber of Truth instead of just an empty pocket dimension as intended, then Father would have made four more Gluttonies and used them to open the planetary Gate. It didn't work, so he had to use actual spontaneous casters instead.

...

Heh, I'm just remembering when that was first revealed, and I inferred that he'd been trying to use Gluttony to build a new universe from scratch. That would have been cool too, but no.

...

A dome of gleaming darkness rises from around the throne, expanding beyond the room. Upstairs, the chimaeras and semiconscious Hawkeye panic as it engulfs them.

A moment later, Scar thrashes in panic as the dome rises through the floor.

A few meters away from him, Wrath just sort of makes a thoughtful grunting sound. Like "Oh. This is what it looks like. Okay." I don't know if he's expecting to outlive this event or not, but if not he seems only mildly disappointed about dying this way instead of in combat. Lol, okay Wrath, you do you.

The city of Central looks down in alarm, and then around in shock, as the biggest Eye of Wog ever to have manifested on the planet rises from the tunnels beneath the pavement, just as the probable second-biggest once did from the Xerxian royal palace.

The room now filled with a blinding red philosopher's stone glow, Father holds the five sacrifices in place, and opens their belly-eyes wider. Feeling a cosmic tension through his mass as they repel one another.

So that's how the "key" works, then. He's opening their god-eyes in close proximity to each other and using those five punctures in reality to tear open a bigger one, exposing the planetary Gate.

Then, without so much as a word or a gesture, he activates the macroglyph.

Walls of red light slice across the landscape over the tunnels dug by Sloth. Billions of black tentacled hands rise from the ground encircled like eels from a honeycombed seabed, or maggots from hopelessly infested flesh.

Everyone dies.

Ross, Breda, Rebecca, Queen, and everyone else at the radio station falls to the ground around their improvised barricades and flipped tables.

The captive loyalists tied up in the command center twitch in their restraints and then go limp, the bodies of the Briggs soldiers who'd been guarding them falling to the floor a few feet away.

In Rush Valley, Panina falls off of the roof she'd been repairing, her tools tumbling down around her.

In Resembool, Winry and Pinako fall to the floor of their workshop. Winry, with her last breath, calling for Edward. Pinako, with hers, cursing Hohenheim.

Then, the sky becomes a gate. It's double doors slowly lifting open, facing the eclipsed sun.

For a moment, there is just emptiness. A sky lifted open. A land under space, its billions of maggoty arms twitching in the cosmic light and darkness.

Then, from the tunnels beneath that writhing land, a monster the size of a continent reaches up with its hands and grabs onto the doorframe, pulling itself to its feet and towering above the atmosphere.

The creature with no name besides the ones it gave itself - dwarf in the flask, haemunculus, Father - looks sunward and roars. How many souls large is it now? How many times more powerful than after it consumed that mere half a million in Xerxes? Ten million souls? Twenty million? More?

It raises its hand toward that which it once was, and howls for its attention. Every thrum and vibration of its voice alive and twitching with resentment, jealousy, and barely hidden pain.

For all that it hates humanity for creating it, how much more must it loathe its original self? For every second of every minute of every day, for nearly five hundred years, it's known that someone else has what it's lost. Even if that someone else used to be it. Or rather, it used to be that someone else.

One of its fathers cruelly abused it, and has been duly punished for that ever since. Another stood by it, but never gave it what it needed from him, and eventually betrayed it too. He is being duly punished now. But the third? The one it knew best, pined for the most, but who never even looked its way or called its name? The one who didn't abuse it, exploit it, or betray it, but never even acknowledged its existence in the first place? Not when it suffered in a flask, not when it was abandoned in the desert, not when it languished for centuries cutting pieces of itself off to hide from the pain they contained?

If the word "hate" were written on every centimeter of the thousands of miles of tunnel it carved to bring this moment to pass, it would not express one one-thousandth.

With its all-piercing eye, it burns away the layers of pseudoscience and philosophy that mortals call "alchemy" and glares into the world of sympathetic magic that always lay at its heart. The sun represents God. The moon represents the self. Just as the moon covers the sun, so does it now conquer that from which it was torn. The black circle overhead becomes an eye, and before it the other side of the gate opens in turn. Connecting mindless father and raging child through a tunnel of space.

It stares blankly down. Understanding all before it, but doing nothing. The great pale eye has no lids to close to protect itself. No aggression, fear, or anger appears in it to mirror that of the attacker. A being of pure knowledge has no ego. No preservation instinct. No ability to use what it knows.

It extends its tentacles on reflex, to absorb the smaller mass. This smaller mass has tentacles of its own, however, and it uses them with intelligent, aggressive purpose.

Holding that which is called God at bay, it grabs those tendrils and pulls the gate from the sun and moon down toward itself. Like a giant climbing a beanstalk, hauling reality itself in so it can seize the core.

Tens of millions of human souls might only amount to a tiny fraction of the power the victim possesses. But with purpose and cunning behind it, it is enough to overwhelm the reflexive, reactive, autonomic defenses of Wog-Sothoth.

As the gates are pulled together, the attacker finally declares its true purpose.

Not to grow to rival god, or to replace god. To consume god. To wrap its skin of human souls around the bigger, stronger mass, and take control. A principle it has tested before with the designs of some of its own children.

It has forsaken those surviving children of its own without a thought, failing to consider the irony. Sloth.

It rages and curses at its passive victim. Wrath.

It seeks to consume and envelop all that is. Gluttony.

It desires the serenity it has lost, even though it has no use or patience for it anymore. Greed.

It hates its former self for still possessing that serenity beyond its reach. Envy.

It loses itself in the ecstasy of victory. Lust.

It still believes, after all that it has done, that it is in the right. Pride.

Its own cast-out offspring - Despair, Adversity, Pleasure, Loneliness, Shame, Love, and Contentment - are in no position to hold it back.

End episode.