EventuaChapter 1
Nazurathal
Hell’s Gate 7
220 km north of Cadmagh
2:38 AM
The black form of Hell’s Gate 7’s southern side blocked out the light of the stars like a jagged wall of flare stacks and towers, stretching from one side of the horizon to the other and high in the night sky. A team of three Baranese laid down among the bushes atop a nearby hill, hiding under thermal cloaks. The constant, distant cacophony of industry on an unthinkable scale had been worrying at their nerves for hours while they observed the dark mass with night vision binoculars, trying to discern an opening.
“Perhaps we should turn back.” Captain Drystan was gruff, his voice harsh from yelling orders for twenty-five years of service in the Caerthen 4th Highlanders.
“We still have time before the sun rises,” Ariana replied flatly.
“My lady, we have only been here for five hours. Finding an entrance can take several days, if we are too impatient-”
“Are you calling me rash, captain?” The red-haired young woman’s voice snapped despite being almost as quiet as a whisper.
“No, I…”
“We are staying until dawn.”
“As you command, my lady.”
A handful of minutes passed before the third member of the team spoke up. “Captain. There’s… Oh, stars above…” He was audibly shaken as he kept his gaze fixed on a point on Hell’s Gate 7’s flank.
“Sergeant Cadfael. Report.” The officer’s order cracked like a whip and snapped the younger soldier out of his shock.
“A door is opening. Eighteen degrees, ground level. It’s too large to be a Chimera, the Gate is releasing a Harvester!”
The rest of the trio followed the directions with their own binoculars. The side of the structure was parting like a monstrous vertical maw, impossibly large and yet small compared to the vastness of the Gate. The ground trembled as multiple trains of gargantuan treads hauled a mess of oversized metal shredders, mining diggers, cranes and refineries out of Hell’s Gate 7, like a monster giving birth to another.
“There’s our opening.” Ariana put the binoculars away, getting up to one knee and checking her gear. Drystan did the same, while Cadfael tightened the sling of a heavy plasma cutter to his shoulder while hurriedly murmuring a prayer. “Spirits of my ancestors watch over me and guide my steps into darkness, spirits of Antar protect me from evil and aberration, spirits of my fathers give me your strength…”
Ariana of House Gwynn said a silent prayer as well, for the men who would soon stand in the defence of Cadmagh against the Harvester.
The run from the hill to the Gate seemed like it would never end. Ariana’s every instinct screamed at her to stop and turn back as she struggled to keep her balance on the ground trembling from the passage of the Harvester, the sounds of countless of industrial machinery pieces growing louder and louder. She expected weapons to open fire at any moment, her body blown apart by explosions or scorched by particle beams from a thousand invisible emplacements. But nothing came, and they reached the huge door the moment it began to close.
They had made it into Hell’s Gate 7. The easy part was over.
Drystan took the lead as the group started to make their way deeper inside, flashlights clutched in their hands. There was no light apart from sparks showers coming from assembly lines and molten metal flowing from crucibles the size of small lakes. The interior of the Gate alternated between vertiginous and claustrophobic, confusing and nonsensical, with oddly shaped rooms, warped corridors akin to tight, sinuous tunnels and chasms stretching deep down into inscrutable darkness. It was not a place made with human workers in mind, no marked pathways, no secure catwalks. Every single hazard inherent to heavy industries was magnified a hundredfold as the automated lines busied themselves with their endless work.
Ariana and her companions had put on gas masks to protect against the vapours of countless chemicals, marking their way back with phosphorescent paint every few steps for nearly three hours of grueling progress. Drystan checked the scanning device held in his hand regularly, following the largest power lines as best he could. Perhaps he was distracted by the scanner’s display. Perhaps he was simply in the wrong spot at the wrong time and took a fraction of a second too long to notice the vibrations under the metal floor beneath his feet. It mattered not, as he only had time to scream as the floor opened under him to let through a piece of unfinished chassis, carried by dented chains embedded in the walls. The captain was caught between the chassis and another piece of alloy pressed from the side by a robotic arm. Drystan’s screams were cut short as his lower body and abdomen were crushed, blood oozing between the metal plates and filling his gas mask with sickening crunches of broken bones and gurgling noises, even as the uncaring assembler bolted the chassis pieces together.
“Captain!” Cadfael extended his arm as if he could grab his superior and pull him out, but Drystan was dragged up and disappeared into the ceiling through another opening along with the unfinished machine that he was embedded in. The only trace that remained of captain Drystan was a pool of blood on the floor.
In shock, Ariana had to lean against the wall. She had known Drystan since she was little. A trusted servant of her uncle, an officer of the famed Caerthan 4th, ‘Gwynn’s Woodsmen’. And he was gone, swallowed by the Gate in the blink of an eye. Only when sergeant Cadfael grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her did she realize that she was hyperventilating.
“My lady!” His voice sounded distant, but it did snap Ariana out of her stupor. She could see the young soldier’s tears through his gas mask. “My lady, we cannot stay here!”
She nodded, forcing herself to move. Both of them crawled into a nearby tunnel and soon hit a dead end, where they allowed themselves a minute to breathe and collect themselves. Ariana’s ears were ringing, her hands still trembling. Huddled next to her, Cadfael sobbed quietly. She reached to hold his arm.
“Sergeant. Cut through this wall.”
“Wh- My lady?” Cadfael seemed dumbfounded.
“This one. We’ll go through. We are close.” She had no idea where this conviction came from. In that moment, it was as if she simply knew that her goal was near.
“My lady, if I cut a cable we’ll surely be found…”
“Do it.”
The engineer gulped and, after some squirming, applied his bulky plasma cutter to the metallic wall. Two minutes later, a roughly circular hole had been cut out, the edges still glowing red from the superheated plasma. As he peered through, Cadfael’s face went livid. “A cable. We have to go right now!”
The pair hurried through the hole, only to discover that they had ended up on a platform above a huge canyon. There was nowhere to go, save for a container hanging from some sort of monorail above the abyss. The rail itself went down in the darkness below amongst a tangle of power lines and other rails. Ariana looked around frantically, looking for a way forward, somewhere to hide, anything. And then she fell, something with inhuman strength having clamped down on her ankle and dragged her to the ground. All she saw was a formless clump of metallic limbs, one of which held her legs, others raising various cutting tools, before its core was vaporised with a blinding flash. Leaving the drone inert on the floor, Cadfael aimed his plasma cutter to the limb that held Ariana and cut it as well. Loud clanking noises came from the hole through which they came through, growing closer and closer.
“There’s more Beasts coming!” The sergeant helped Ariana to her feet.
“There! Climb up on it!” She pointed at the monorail container and ran towards it, climbing on top of it and offering her hand to Cadfael to follow suit. “Cut the coupling!”
Cadfael was beyond questioning her orders at this point, and just as a horde of drones burst forth onto the platform, the container was cut loose by a plasma burst. With nothing to hold it in place, the container began rolling down the rail and into the chasm, slowly at first and then picking up more and more speed. Sparks flew from the wheels supporting the carriage as it took sharp turns one after the other while plummeting down. Both Ariana and Cadfael struggled to hold on to whatever they could grab. One particularly violent turn sent them rolling to one side, the engineer going over the edge and barely holding on to the rim of the container. Ariana grabbed his wrist and forearm, trying to help him get back on, before another shake sent him falling down.
“No!” Ariana’s cry out was the last thing she did before the container slammed into a hard surface with tremendous force with a thunderous crash, sending both it and the young woman flying. Her head impacted violently onto something, and everything went black.
Pain tore her away from merciful oblivion, a pounding, heavy pain in her head. Only then did the rest of her senses begin to come back. She was laying on her back on a cold, slightly sloped platform. Darkness was near-total, but she could discern a humanoid silhouette knelt beside her. She did not need to see his face, as she already knew who he was.
“Cadfael.” Her voice was pitifully weak, but she did not care. Right now, she was just glad to see him. The deep dark of the chasm was eerily quiet compared to the rest of the Gate above.
“Lady Ariana! Blessed stars, you’re awake.” Relief was evident in his tone, and he sighed. “I feared…” He shook his head.
“I saw you fall..” She began, having difficulty swallowing as there didn’t seem to be a part of her body that was not hurting.
“I was fortunate. I fell on some cables. They broke my fall, and I climbed back up to you. Though… I’m not sure that it will change much. We’re at least five hundred meters below ground now. There’s little hope of us getting back out, much less finding an Ironclad.” Cadfael sounded defeated. There was no panic in his voice, simply a reasonable assessment of their situation.
But Ariana shook her head, a motion that pain made her immediately regret. “No… We’ve found it.” She murmured.
Cadfael was taken aback for an instant. “My lady?”
“Take my flashlight. Look.”
The sergeant obeyed and lit up the surrounding darkness. At first he saw nothing in particular, as the powerful beam of light illuminated the structure on which they had taken refuge. But then, he realised that the platform they were on was no platform at all. It was one of the armor plates of a monumental shoulder.
“We have found it… My Ironclad.” Ariana struggled to sit up. “Sergeant Cadfael, I must ask for your help. We will climb up to the head. I must reach the cockpit.”
Cadfael nodded, assisting his lady up on her feet. She could not stand on her own, and he had to carry her on his back, painstakingly climbing up the gigantic machine meter by meter while Ariana clung onto him for dear life. It took an hour of grueling effort from them both and many close calls, but the pair eventually reached a hatch that led inside of the Ironclad’s head and to the cockpit. It was devoid of much of what one would expect from a complex war machine, but the Ironclads did not rely on instruments and displays to interface with their pilots. With great care, the engineer helped Ariana to get out of her military fatigues and boots, leaving her wearing only the sleek black bodysuit that she had underneath. She then stepped into a sort of capsule at the center of the cockpit. A full helmet, which was linked to the top of the capsule by a bundle of cables, rested inside. After she put it on, the capsule closed on its own, and filled up with a viscous shock-absorbing gel. And then, Ariana’s mind reeled with a sudden rush of information as her latent psionics connected with the Ironclad’s arcane technology. She was assaulted by an onslaught of data being projected directly into her mind, weaponry status, motor functions, sensors on spectrums that a human could not witness.
Ariana’s body was not of flesh, bone and blood anymore. It was steel and alloy, electrical cables and armor plating. Deep inside the chest of the Ironclad, the main engine was roused from a timeless slumber. A beating heart. Heat vents began expelling prodigious amounts of byproduct energy, scorching the metal of the Gate outside close to them and setting fire to exposed cabling and polymers. Ariana almost passed out several times under the mental weight of the onslaught of new sensations, yet she still managed to speak with her real mouth. “Cadfael, hang onto something.”
The Ironclad raised a hand as large as a medium-sized building up to the cliff that was the wall of the chasm, its fingers crushing through it with amazing power. Having secured a grip, it did the same with its other arm. Then a leg moved up, as a foot slammed and dug into the wall. With a cacophony of groaning and rupturing metal, Ariana began to climb. Swarms of drones poured out of hatches and gaping holes in the structure of the Gate, furiously seeking to destroy the threat, only to be swatted down by a deluge of fire from the Ironclad’s point defenses. The ascension was over in a matter of a few dozen minutes.
But Ariana did not slow down for a single moment. Her Ironclad poured plasma fire and laser blasts into the Gate from a myriad of weapon systems, tearing chunks out with autocannon shot and the machine’s own hands. She dug through the abominable flesh of the cursed structure again, and again, and again, until the Ironclad burst forth from inside Hell’s Gate 7 and stepped onto the earth, covered in smoking debris and molten metal. It ran, its energy shields being hammered from behind by the Gate’s automated weapons. Alarms and warnings blared directly into Ariana’s mind. Even as the Ironclad go out of range and in the quiet safety of the Baranese countryside, it was all too much for her.
The last thing that Ariana would see before drifting into unconsciousness was a jumbled mess of characters as the systems glitched again. She did not know what was real or what was mere hallucination anymore as they began coalescing into a single word, burning themselves into her mind like a hot iron brand. A name.
“Nazurathal.”
