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Summary:

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels. Mormeck helps with surveillance experiments conducted across alternate realities, currently focused on a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled a conflict that reaches across time, space, and other dimensions. The story is told from the POV of Mormeck on the planet (Mountain) and the Mormeck in the winter city (avatar/Outpost)

Archive is here Journals of Mormeck and first entry is here.

I was not rid of my avatar once he traveled to the winter city under siege. I thought I might be, and I was glad of this, for he still troubled me. But the angels had their luna moths in the city, and they wanted me to use them for surveillance. “Only you,” said Gabriel, “will know what might be odd and what might be normal for your avatar. If your avatar is subverted by the Komodos or a presence, the evidence of this may be imperceptible to anyone else.”

So I watched my Outpost performing his mission in the city. First, his disappearance into the soil, which I knew was to acquire the right molecular structure, and then his reappearance as a member of one side in the conflict. I knew where to look, knew the signs, for where he might arise.

In those first moments after he once again registered in the surveillance of the luna moths, my avatar was a stranger to me—more even than when he had stared at me while Seether destroyed him to rebuild him. This sense of something wrong grew stronger. I was here, but I was also there, with no connection between the two. He wasn’t my doppelganger or my brother. He was me, but now different. On the one hand there was my sense of loss, of a need to communicate with my avatar. On the other, there was a growing dislike, as if I watched someone else pretending to be me and not behaving as I would behave, but being taken as me by those around him. This feeling was bizarre to have, I know, and yet it seemed encoded in my DNA.

It did not take long, watching him run from shadow to shadow, sometimes hiding in plain sight by joining members of the same army and sometimes leaving them to wander in the most deserted places, that I began to want him dead. My avatar. Me, in a sense. Most of me rebelled against this idea—found it perverse and distressing—but underneath like some constant, distant drum beat, I still had the thought.

By the time he encountered the komodos on the second day, I had become too embedded in the situation, too fixated on my avatar, and it took awhile to realize that within thirty-six hours of my Outpost entering the city, a third of my luna moths had winked out, just disappeared into the snow.

And I had no idea who had done it.