Divine Communications Array

The Divine Communications Array is a rare interworld communications device whose importance emerges only when the System’s conflict reaches the level of gods, severed worlds, and collapsing networks. Expensive to operate and difficult to replace, it is not merely a means of conversation: each surviving array preserves links to related devices and to mortal-ranked counterparts, allowing a determined deity to reconstruct lines of contact that political upheaval and destruction have supposedly erased.

Nature and Operation

The Divine Communications Array is sufficiently esoteric that ordinary deities cannot invoke it casually. Its use demands a costly tithe to the System, and the reserves required to activate one are beyond what a deity such as Emsen can freely spend. For that reason, an array may be received and stored without ever being turned on. The device therefore occupies an unusual position in the System: it is both a communications instrument and a dormant archive of relationships, transfers, and surviving connections.

Its networked character is more important than any single unit. When Muar examines an array, he discovers that it has seven sibling devices distributed among other gods, along with broken links where corresponding siblings have been destroyed. Two surviving arrays have already been used, identifying deities who may possess relevant information; five have lost their connections, presumably because their mortal-ranked twins were destroyed. The artifact thus records absence as well as access. Its silence can indicate death, severance, or the destruction of an entire channel of contact.

Muar’s Recovery of the Network

Muar’s investigation begins inside the Estates, where his access to another deity’s Interface exposes requests, essence stores and transfers, and scry communications. He finds that Marus sent a Divine Communications Array to Emsen several years earlier. The discovery might have endangered Emsen, but the device had never been activated; Emsen had simply stored it, a rational choice given its price and the limited essence reserves available for such an obscure tool.

Muar does not ask permission or announce his intention. He plucks the array from Emsen’s storage, queries it through his Interface, and follows the links it retains. He then removes every surviving sibling that he can reach, testing each one in turn. Five are inert because their mortal counterparts are presumed destroyed, while the remaining arrays still resonate. The device’s material network gives Muar a form of investigative leverage: even when Marus is unavailable for questioning, the communications infrastructure can still reveal where contact once existed and which channels remain alive.

Contact with Cato

Muar activates one of the surviving arrays from the in-between space. It projects a view of a small inn room containing an otherwise unremarkable member of one of the crab-like clans. Muar recognizes the occupant as Cato and addresses him directly. The exchange immediately establishes the array’s strategic value. It bypasses ordinary distance and allows a deity to confront an opponent whose operations are distributed across many worlds.

Cato is not surprised by the contact, and Muar is not surprised that Cato appears to regard the visible body as expendable. Muar assumes that a private summons would reveal only a hollow puppet, given how many incarnations of Cato have already been killed during the Crusade. Cato confirms the assumption and advises redirecting the conversation to an Inner World because the frontier is collapsing rapidly. His calmness frustrates Muar, but the array still gives Muar something more valuable than an immediate threat: a controlled channel through which Cato can be questioned and pressured.

Muar transfers the otherwise empty building containing Cato to the outskirts of a city on the nexus world of Gripke, using the array as the point of continuity for the encounter. He then returns to Misse Eln without closing the connection. Misse recognizes the significance of the projection at once. Cato identifies her without using an honorific, and the conversation broadens from a private contact into a confrontation over the sudden absorption of Mishkell and the collapse of the frontier. The array therefore changes scale during the scene: it begins as a device for locating Marus’s trail, becomes a means of contacting Cato, and finally serves as the communications bridge for a negotiation involving Muar, Misse Eln, and the enemy of the System itself.

Strategic and Narrative Significance

The Divine Communications Array embodies a communications order that is powerful but fragile. Its seven linked siblings suggest a distributed system, yet broken links reveal how quickly that system can be reduced by death, destruction, or severance. The device preserves the possibility of connection after political structures have failed, but it cannot restore channels whose mortal counterparts no longer exist. In this sense, the array is both a tool of continuity and a ledger of catastrophe.

Its importance also lies in the contrast between ordinary divine limitation and Muar’s exceptional position. Other deities must pay the additional System tithe to use an array, whereas Muar does not; he also possesses enough essence to activate the device without hesitation. The same artifact that is prohibitively expensive for Emsen becomes almost effortless in Muar’s hands. That difference turns technology into hierarchy. The array does not provide equal communication to everyone who possesses it; its practical power depends on rank, reserves, and the authority of the user.

The device’s dormant state is equally revealing. Emsen’s unused array initially appears to be an inert possession, but Muar’s inspection exposes a latent topology of divine relationships. What seemed like stored equipment becomes an investigative surface, and what seemed like a single object becomes a network. When Muar uses it to reach Cato, the array makes hidden conflict visible without resolving it. It enables surveillance, forced relocation, and interrogation, yet Cato remains capable of treating the contacted body as a disposable interface. The communications channel narrows distance while exposing the limits of control: Muar can reach Cato, but he cannot make the encounter occur on terms that Cato accepts.