Manageable meant manageable. The more severely wounded members of the Envenomed squad were not on the point of shortly bleeding out quite yet, and Ilshar supposed this was well enough. He still found it difficult to gauge how badly off an organism that was capable of bleeding out at all might be, but experience had taught him that if no large chunks were missing, odds were they could make it with someone to carry them to safety.
“Inject her. I doubt any medical point the League might’ve had here survived our attack, or that extraction is at hand yet.” He stepped back, leaving room for Alice and Kleo to clamber onto the helpfully sloped Warform as the eyes looking upward from his shoulders uneasily followed the cannon’s arcing shots. Something whispered to him that the thing was foul in its virulent mechanized channeling, perhaps even blasphemous. By the Nexus’ will it would not be standing much longer if battle broke out again on the hill.
As it seemed it would.
“So we’re doing that.” Ilshar did not address Rasch, or the squad’s handler, as he idly growled over the comms, so much as himself. The suspicion had been with him for some time, and bitterly enough it did not surprise him to see it confirmed. On Enthuur, the Dominion had at least refrained from bombing their presumptive allies, but the Intransigence had no stake in territory, did it? He wasn’t sure of what its interests were, really - keeping a low-intensity conflict going as long as the UCL’s operations were thwarted, he imagined, or something along those lines. He should not have cared much, either; he had only ever fought for his world, and Zanovia was not it. What happened to the ZRF should have been no business of his. And still, the whole thing tasted like poison in his mouth.
No time for recrimination now, however. CivSec and their allies would not be grateful for any incidental aid. His gun in his hands, Ilshar loped back towards the treeline he had used as cover at the very beginning of the assault on the League’s position, placing the dropship’s wreckage between himself and the lower slope. As luck would have it, the ZRF seemed to mostly still be on that side as well, and would perhaps be the first to take the brunt of the approaching new hostile - if they were not too fast to turn their weapons on the Envenomed, that was.
Noise and motion died down, but the tension in the air - and the commwaves - went nowhere. Taking a moment to center yourself with a field meditation technique did wonders, but Ilshar supposed one needed to have a spore of the Nexus to properly find that balance. If you lived for nothing beyond the world under your feet, moments like these were a time to be anxious. With a grunt, he splayed and clenched his fingers, severing the etheric wellspring that allowed the two Chasm-born that had not been shredded by gunfire to maintain their material presence. The serpentine bodies dissolved into strangely writhing clouds of fog that lingered in the charged atmosphere.
He squinted, reducing his eye-organs that faced the prize of all this bloodshed. The infernal machine inspired little confidence in him, and he was glad that Rasch was the one relaying their handler’s commands to its targeting systems. Picking up League small arms was all well and good, but this kind of ordnance was sure to have some diabolical etheric mechanism or worse hidden in its bowels, and he did not want to be too close when it fired. Going to watch over the wounded was as good an excuse as any, though he wondered if the voidhanger didn’t have some other motive to keep him distant. It did not take a savant to see that the Intransigence’s plans for the cannon weren’t going to be to the ZRF’s liking. Typical. No such thing as benefactors in the Rim.
Ilshar trudged back through the ravaged camp, leaning slightly to the right, where his arm had begun to feel heavy with clogged capillaries. He walked around Echo, whose bluntness made him question if unztadtlige really weren’t some kind of synthetic. Halting behind the endoform, he gave the guerrillas a knowing shrug.
“Relief forces go at their own pace. Pray you will not need the likes of us on your world again.” For their sake, he hoped there still was a world left after all was said and done. This wasn’t the War, but one never knew.
The two Envenomed who had weathered the worst were easy to find not too far from the gunship’s crash site. He wasn’t sure what to do with them besides stand watch; what basic first aid training he had did not extend to anything other than fellow tarrhaidim, and the supplies to tend to his own wounds were wholly integrated into his body. Not that they would have helped someone with an endoskeleton or lymphatic vessels that wide.
“Everything under control here?” he addressed Alice, who at least seemed lucid, “Shouldn’t be too long until extraction now, unless our handlers have some other surprise for us.”
Flashes of light and concussion followed one another in quick order, so much so that Ilshar had to retract some of his sensory nodules to avoid getting distracted from his frontal view by the overload. He stepped wider to keep his footing through the shock of the gunship’s fall - they really should’ve used the egg-peg, this is how it ends with low-precision missiles - and leaned aside as a piece of Echo came barreling through where he had been standing not long ago. He had trouble not thinking of it as a drone detached from the behemoth’s real body, but then this was not the time for that sort of reflection either. The grazing heat from some stray energy fire punctuated that. Thank the Nexus they didn’t have time to aim.
The comm traffic flared up in frantic bursts. Of course a crash like that was going to make trouble. Ilshar was idly surprised it had taken until now for that reckless human to go down for the count for the time being.
“Acknowledged,” Rasch’s remark made him glance in the direction the rebel fighter’s victorious cry had come from, “Better hope they didn’t hear that last part.”
Near him, Echo’s now scarred huge main body was falling back, but what it called its Endoform still looked sturdier than the whole armour on his back. The best course to press their advance was clear enough in his mind.
“Echo, take point,” he shifted to place himself behind the metallic humanoid and held his hands in a broken circle before his chest, “You keep them looking away from our wounded, I’ll help up save bullets going ahead.”
There was an unpleasant sensation of unravelling in his diminished arm as he called on the Chasm which he pushed down. Body strength was renewable, given a few moments out of harm’s way. Pale-blue fumes of processed qillatu seeped out from his wounds as if to contradict him, and his teeth scraped with strain as fog gathered between his fingers and three undulant shapes breached out from it like from a vertical surface of water. The semi-translucent bodies of the lamprey-mouthed ether worms coiled and scattered around the Endoform before loosely reconverging through the air towards the trench the last CivSec troops had taken refuge in, guided by the impulse of bloodlust the tarrhaidim had impressed on their simple sentience.
Corpse was lying in his hut, where he slept with Song and Rage, and chewing on a bit of jibaga-root. He liked the jibaga-root, because chewing it helped him think of clever things. He said, “When you cook antelope meat over the fire, it tastes better because it takes in the smoke. But the fire makes smoke from above, and ash from below. Perhaps we should coat the meat in ash so we don’t lose half its taste.”
Song, who was outside by the firepit, took a bit of cooked meat from a jar and rolled it in the ash, then buried it in the embers so it would take in all their taste. She asked, “Here we have some tubers, which we did not cook. Should I coat them in the ash also?”
Corpse chewed on the jibaga-root a little, and answered, “Cover them in ash and lay them with the meat, but set some aside, so we might taste both and see which way is better.” Song did so, then she stood up and took a bucket carved from the rough-bark tree, and went to take water from the well she had dug because her throats were parched from her humming.
Now Baboon, who had been hidden behind the hut and listened to what Corpse said, came out and went to the firepit. He thought to himself that if Corpse was right and the food coated in ashes tasted well, he could steal the ash from the Rakshasas’ firepit and coat his own food also, because he did not know how to make fire. So he took out one of the pieces of meat that Song had buried in the pit and tasted it, but it was not to his liking and he spat it out. The tubers he liked much more, and he ate several; but he left some in place, so Song would not miss them and know that they had been stolen.
Then he went to hide behind the hut again, because he knew that Song would be coming back soon. And it was not long before she did, and having drank her fill she sat by the firepit.
Hearing her there, Corpse spoke again, and having chewed on the jibaga-root he said, “The wood of the steppe trees is hard and heavy, and the huts we make with it are hard to build also. But if we take the reeds that Rage found by the stream in the jungle, we can easily build a hut with them, because they are soft and pliant. Then if we cover it with dirt and let the reeds dry, it will still be as hard as a hut made of wood.”
Baboon listened and was envious of the things that Corpse said, because he could not think of anything so clever. He went to the jungle, dug up a jibaga-root and tried to chew it, but it tasted earthy and crunched under his teeth, so that nothing came of it. Then Baboon thought that if he couldn’t be clever like Corpse, he would steal the wisdom from him, and smiled to himself.
In the night, when the Rakshasas were sleeping, Baboon crept quietly between their huts, and with a sharp stone he made a hole in the bottom of Song’s bucket. Then he hid again and waited for the dawn.
The sun rose and smirked in the sky, and Rage stomped out towards the jungle. Then Song came out humming, took up the bucket and went off to the well. Corpse lay in the hut and chewed the jibaga-root.
Song came to the well, which was quite far from the huts, and dipped her bucket inside. Because the hole Baboon had made was not very large, the water did not all come out from it straight away, but dripped out little by little. So it was that Song took her bucket and started on the way back to the huts, and did not see how the water spilled out from the bottom until it was empty. Only then she felt that the bucket had become lighter, and looking in saw that there was no water inside.
“Wai! The sun is thirsty today, if it has already drunk all the water!” she said, and went back to the well to fill it again.
Meanwhile Baboon came out from his hiding place and sat by the firepit in a spot where Corpse could not see him from inside the hut. He patted the ground, and hummed like he had heard Song do.
“Are you already back, Song?” Corpse asked, “Why is your voice so rough today?”
“The sun was thirsty and drank much of the water, so my throats are still a little parched,” answered Baboon, and went on humming.
Corpse did not think much more of it, but chewed the jibaga-root, and said, “When we catch something and kill it, we either drink the blood straight away or throw it out if we’re sated. But if we keep the meat under the ash to eat later, we could do it with the blood also. We could gather the fat and mix them, then leave it to dry with herbs.”
“That’s a fine thought,” said Baboon, “What else could we do?”
Corpse chewed some more and said, “If we want a herb of some kind, we have to go and look for it. If we take their seeds and bury them in the ground by your well, they will grow there, and we will always know where to pick them.”
“You think of so many clever things!” exclaimed Baboon, “I sing to myself all day, but I can never come up with something like this.”
“It’s because I chew the jibaga-root,” Corpse answered, “You can try a little of it if your throats are parched from singing.”
“I would like that, but I have so many mouths,” Baboon said, “A little would not be enough for all of them.”
“You can take what you want from the bundle I put under the right-hand corner of my sleeping mat,” said Corpse, “But don’t take it all, it takes so very long to dry it and smoke it over the fire.”
Then Baboon jumped up, and as quick as the wind he ran through the hut and snatched all the jibaga-root from under Corpse’s sleeping mat. He jumped and danced and ran off cackling, and he was so fast that Corpse was still blinking in surprise when Song came back from the well after finding the hole in her bucket.
Since then Baboon has had the jibaga-root, and he keeps it hidden inside a tree. If he is sitting still and chewing, it means he is thinking of something clever and devious.
In Hot India, Corpse has discovered a root that helps him think when he chews it dried and smoked, and with its help comes up with various practical ideas. The Baboon once flicked by the Rakshasaraja spies on him and is envious. Coming up with a plan to steal the root, he masquerades as Song and succeeds in nabbing Corpse’s stash. From that day on, by the power and virtue of Cyclone, Baboon is that much more cunning and tricky.
He could not keep this up, Ilshar thought as the mechanical soldier’s fist slammed into his shoulder and sent him staggering, his still restrained arm twisted in a way that would have been painful to someone with a less diffuse nervous system. The automaton’s reeling at his own blow had allowed him to twist and take the swing on the stronger plating of his pauldron, but even so the thing’s entire body was a weapon, and he felt the outer layers of corded fungal tissue in his shoulder liquefy under the impact. If this fight went on any much longer, it’d leave him crippled, if not permanently then enough to get him killed here. The renewed gunfire from outside and comm crackling did not sound encouraging.
It was time to get out of the tent and join in finishing it. The automaton had dropped its rifle, which meant he could safely turn his back to it as long as he put some distance between them. The machine’s hand was holding him high enough that most of its grip was on bare skin rather than armour; this would play to his advantage now. Clenching his teeth, Ilshar sent an impulse through his neural web to the organomechanical implants built into his fungal muscle. Unbreakably firm as it was, the metal hand on his elbow began to slide as the arm under its fingers - or at least the upper layer of its porous skin - slickened and quickly dissolved into a dark putrid sludge, the pungent stench of accelerated decay filling the tent. This reaction was designed as an emergency insulation measure, but it would have to do.
Snarling, Ilshar tore his oozing arm from the automaton’s unstable grasp, taking a long step back in time to avoid its brutal downward swing. Moving as rapidly as his battered body could in the cramped and increasingly chaotic confines of the tent, he shoved his way past some toppling crates and out into the open, the hand of his intact arm reaching for his machine gun. One of his eyes glanced with some regret at the stocky egg-launcher he’d originally dived in to retrieve before that Nexus-damned robot had gotten in the way. If they both survived this firefight intact, it could at least make for a nice trophy.
He emerged in time to see the remaining League forces scrambling into a counterattack, and Rasch materializing in their midst. Ilshar did not have time to load the Ulvath with something that could damage the walkers, but the humanoid troops with them were no less a danger. Propping his gun’s barrel up with his oozing forearm, the fingers below still momentarily numb from the necrosis impulse, he fired a burst towards the assembled troopers - inaccurate even by auto fire standards, but more than adequate to cover the rest of the squad.
Two hundred steps away left, one hundred, fifty. Ilshar only dimly kept track of the staggered blasts coming from behind him, only parsing the comm chatter as deeply as he needed to be sure that nothing was aiming at him. His eyes closed and reformed at a quickened rate on all sides, tracking the fire that streaked down from the sky and the moment it would strike the ground, his foot ready to bear the quakes that followed it without missing its stride. Now that the aircraft’s guns were turned against the squad, even delaying slightly in the open would have been too much. If he knew anything about League vehicles, it was that they had enough sensors to catch an emission-dead commando at night, never mind a clear hostile between a few battered tents.
Arms of the Spiral, he had made it. He let his momentum carry him through the entrance flaps even as he took in the unmistakable shape sitting prominently among its contents. That damnable egg-spitter, may the Abyss devour it. Ilshar knew the likes of it well enough, more even than he would have liked it. He’d seen them time and again in the hands of dead Leaguers and their sponsored militias - easy to learn, easy to use, after all - more often than not after firefights erupted near crash sites. Occasionally he had been among those sifting through the wreckage of an improvised transport to see if any of the crew’s spore-sacs had survived. Grim work. It was eerie to see bodies lose their shape like that. But it had certainly taught him that this was the right weapon for such a moment.
whirr-
His inner eye briefly turned to the past, Ilshar’s rear-facing sensory organs barely caught the movement behind him in time. The machine was at least smart enough not to shoot among a munitions store, though this was of little consolation as he lurched into a crate in a desperate bid to avoid the automaton’s strike. A wet grunt escaped through his teeth as the bludgeon clipped him across the back, staggering him to the side. A little closer, and a piece of him would have been as liquefied as a crash victim.
Snarling, Ilshar turned on his foot, letting the strike’s push carry him along with his own strength, and reached for his own gun. The sharpened edges on his armour’s vambraces were useful weapons in close combat with an organic enemy, but they would do little to an automaton’s plated skin. Something bigger was needed. He brought up the Ulvath’s stock in a sideways swing at the machine’s head; it was sturdy enough to breach doors, and would survive putting a dent into metal. A moment later, he was reflexively following it up with a blow from his armoured forearm. It was unlikely to bring down the automaton for good, but all he needed was to damage its sensors enough to put it out of commission for the moment. The gunship outside remained the greater threat even with this more immediate one now showing itself; he couldn’t afford to get caught in a protracted fight with an untiring opponent right now.
For that weary Rakshasaraja who lay upon a lilypad atop the golden lake, there was to be neither rest nor peace. When next he was disturbed, it was to the sound of one tremendously Big Bang. Never in the short span of creation before that point had there been any sound more offensive and insipid than that horrific tumult, just as it was impossible to imagine that anything in the future ever could be.
The last echoing notes of the Celestial Music were drowned out and shattered and silenced by the hideous racket; its clamor was more anathema to the great black ape-demon-king than that scraping of metal upon stone were to all cultured and noble beings.
It would have been enough to drive anyone mad, but remember, this was a most enlightened soul who fancied himself the Universe’s appointed Ear. That made the offense of the deafening sound all the worse. “SHHHHHHHH!” the Rakshasaraja hissed through his curled lips, and also through his gritted teeth, even as they ground upon one another with a force that could crush down tall mountains.
It was futile, that one first Rakshasa battling the Khodex and the whole of creation, but there was nothing to do but fight. Nothing to do but hush with all the vigor of his chest and lungs, loud enough to make the wretched universe hear and then quieten and redden in shame. So he hushed, furiously and incessantly, “SHHHHHHHHH–!” He made the sound that a waterfall makes, hushing the universe with a vigor that no cataract–no matter how mighty–could ever rival! But that sound was not enough to silence the raging Big Bang, just as the big fat fingers plugging his ears were not enough to spare the noble Rakshasaraja from the Big Bang’s sound and fury. As his mind throbbed and the entirety of his being reverberated, he was wracked with pain. The sound and the pain built up and up, like a great lake swelling from endless deluge until no dam could ever contain it. Finally, his shushing was split by a piercing cry, ”--EEEP!”
The universe itself seemingly wanted to silence him just as he’d sought to silence it, for he suddenly found his mouth filled with a whole flock of SHEEP. It was now impossible for him to make any sound but a garbled gagging! “Galbargalbargalbar,” one might imagine he sounded like, but fortunately he wasn’t so loud or passionate as to create another three Galbar-stones at that time. In any case, the sheeps’ wooly coats smothered his tongue and parched his lips, and their wretched bleating filled the inside of his mouth and head just as the thunderous bang roared on all around. The Rakshasaraja was stricken unconscious once again, thrown to-and-fro upon his lilypad and rolled this way and that by the furor of the Big Bang, until he found some semblance of peace.
Slowly, one ewe managed to wriggle through the Rakshasaraja’s lips in between his snores. A lamb followed, and then a great ram, and then the whole of the flock. They spilled forth and began grazing upon the warm lake of gold.
At that time, the vast gleaming surface stirred slightly, and the five lesser Rakshasas, those wrathfully cast words, rose up from it after having been toppled and submerged in the turmoil of creation. Corpse floated placidly about, no worse off for having drowned. Song spat streaks of light out from her mouths. Perfection and Preserver, the malcontent siblings, churned and wallowed a while before they could right themselves in a way that left them satisfied. Rage struck his way up with a persistent pounding like the drip of water on a sheet of ice.
They looked around, and saw the sheep.
Corpse said “Hum!,” then thought no more of it and went on floating. Song began to hum, but one of the sheep bleated, and she broke off confused. Perfection squinted, took up one of the sheep and stretched it out, then pushed in its legs, and stretched them again; it bleated terribly, and Song’s mouths just hung open.
Preserver threw up his hands as he watched, then sat and began to think.
“These sheep are plentiful,” he said.
“They are,” answered Song, speaking with one mouth while the others hummed, because her song had no words. Rage’s eyes bulged and he shook his fists and stamped in place.
“We can’t do away with all of them,” Preserver spoke, “but we have to. What if they eat the whole lake, and there truly is no more place left for us to stand?”
“We could find a better place than it,” said Perfection, but then she could think of none that she would gladly have gone to. Corpse blinked.
“We could eat the sheep ourselves,” proposed Song.
“I am full,” said Corpse.
“They won’t do,” frowned Perfection.
Rage twirled in his dance like a whirlwind and glared balefully every which way. If he heard something, he could not say it; the others did not seem to.
They looked to the Rakshasaraja, but as he was asleep they did not want to wake him.
“We should fetch someone,” concluded Preserver, “that is hungry enough to eat with us.”
“Good day,” said the sun.
Now the sun was all around them, and very bright. They had not noticed him among them, for his body was all of gold, like the lake was gold. “I have heard here that there are many sheep bleating. Now I am wondering, to whom do all these sheep belong which are grazing on the lake of warm gold? I would like to sit with that person, and be their guest and eat their sheep. For I have not eaten yet, and I am very hungry.”
One of the sheep looked up from its cud, which was brassy-tinted but still golden. “Mre-e-e-e-eh! Do not let the sun sit down with you and eat. His tongue is like fire, and his belly is very big and round. He will eat everything, even the lily pad. Mre-e-eh! He will eat you also, if you let him sit down with you and make him into your guest. He will drink the lake of warm gold and lick it all up.”
Preserver was pensive then, and said, “The sun lives alone inside the lake, and people do not approach him, for he is bright and burns all things. There are many sheep here, but certainly his hunger is very great. Truly he might eat us all if he does sit with us.”
But Song answered, “Still these sheep need to be eaten, and none of us can do it. Corpse has eaten already and is grown fat; my mouths will be full if I eat, and then I could not sing. Perfection will not eat, and Rage would burst if he did so try. Thus you would have to eat the sheep all alone if the sun does not sit with us, and I do not think you could do that.”
Then Preserver was quiet, but he took up and moved further away. Song spoke to the sun: “O sun, these sheep are Grandfather’s, but he is sleeping now; you see he is there. Come sit and help us eat them, for they are very many, and this troubles us.”
So the sun walked up to their gathering where they sat, licking up the sheep as he went. He stretched out his long straight arms from his body, going in every direction about him, and his arms were golden and very hot. When he sat down with the children of the Rakshasaraja they began to sweat with the heat, for his tongue was like fire as he ate. Only Preserver did not sweat, because he had gone further away.
Then the sun smiled, showing all his white teeth. He picked up the bleating sheep in his hands and ate them all up, filling his belly. The little lambs he ate, and the ewes and rams also, eating up their wool, their hooves, and their horns. He ate and ate and ate, and soon the air was all quiet from the bleating, for he had eaten the whole flock which belonged to their grandfather the Rakshasaraja.
Now the sun was round and heavy from all the sheep that he had eaten, and he walked very slowly, so that it would take a whole day and night to walk around the same way he had come. When the sun had stood up and walked a little closer, he ate Corpse, who had also become very slow and fat. But there were bones inside of Corpse, and the sun choked and coughed and grew very thirsty. The sun kneeled down and began to drink the lake of warm gold, gulping it down and becoming hotter and hotter. For though he had eaten and become round, his belly was not full.
Preserver looked on, and he stood up and went behind the Rakshasaraja’s lilypad. He called Perfection to him and said, “O sister, you see that the sun’s hunger is truly very great. He has eaten all the sheep, and Corpse also, and now he will drink the lake of gold. Then all of us will have no place to be but in his belly. Go and measure out the best piece of the lake, which we will hide somewhere until the sun is full.”
Then Perfection stooped over the lake, which was ebbing with the sun’s gulps, and began to trace a circle across it to measure out the best piece. But none seemed quite the best; as soon as she had traced one, she saw that it would be better if one end was cut away, and the other made a little wider, and so she began again. She traced out another piece, which seemed quite good, but as she was admiring it the sun took a great gulp, and the circle was unsettled as the lake of gold ebbed. So she began again, but try as she might she could not find the best piece again, and scowled furiously.
So Preserver wrapped himself in his hands and went to Song. Rage was dancing angrily before her, even though it was very hot because the sun was with them. Corpse was quiet, because he was in the sun’s belly. Preserver said, “O Song, you have called the sun to sit with us, and he has eaten all the sheep, and Corpse also. Now he will drink all the lake of gold, and we will have no place to be. What are we to do?”
Song answered, “I cannot give the sun anything else to eat, for he has devoured all of Grandfather’s sheep. But I will sing to him, because even though a song is not as good as a full belly, it can make you forget that you are hungry.”
So Song began to hum with all her mouths, and the sheep could not bleat as she did, so that it was smooth and warm and heavy like the golden lake. Rage listened and became drowsy, and did not dance and leap as fast as before, and Preserver went further away so he would not hear too much.
Now the sun's belly was very heavy with gold, and he had begun to stoop low. He stopped a little to listen to Song humming. Rage was stumbling as he danced there, and when he tripped for a moment, the sun lifted him up and ate him whole. But the taste of Rage was very bitter, and the sun went red in the face, as red as a dying coal.
Then the sun stopped and listened to Song's melodies, and found them very sweet. Finding them sweet in his ears, he thought, 'they must also be sweet in my belly, which is all upset now that I have swallowed Rage.' So he began to eat all of Song's melodies, licking them up like sweet fruits. But his tongue burned the sounds and they became harsh.
So the sun said to Song, "Sing now inside me, to calm my belly, so that I may hear you better. For I have grown ill with what I have eaten, and will soon die." Then he swallowed Song. And when he had done so the sun grew very drowsy with the sweetness of the music, and began to cool, stooping very low and looking very red and large.
"Now I am finished. I must have one last meal before I die. I will eat that herb that grows on the lake of gold, and I will eat the great ugly one who sleeps upon it, for he is the seasoning." So the Sun ate the lily-pad on which their grandfather the Rakshasaraja was sleeping, and him he also ate. And when he had done this he lay down, so that only the top half of him was showing, and grew very dim.
Then Preserver said, “See, the sun has eaten Grandfather, and Corpse, Song and Rage also. I said that perhaps we should not have him sit with us, and they did not listen; now they are in the sun’s belly. If he dies now, will they die with him? I want to take them out from his belly before then.”
But Perfection answered, “Is the sun not very great and round, and his tongue burning like fire? You cannot find them inside his belly, because all the things that were here are inside him now, and you will be scorched before you can take out Grandfather, or Corpse, or Song, or Rage.”
Preserver went close to the sun, who was no longer bright and hot, and put his hands inside his mouth. But when he touched the sun’s tongue, his hands were scorched, and he tumbled back.
He sat and blew on his hands, which were burning hot. Perfection said to him, “Did I not tell you that the sun’s tongue burns like fire? You cannot take them out from his belly through his mouth, because the sun is round and large, and they are lost inside him; but if his belly is flat, then it can be done.”
So she went close to the sun, and she stretched and squeezed his belly, so that it would be wide and flat and not rise so high. But the sun’s belly was full of many things, and so it rose up again when she did not hold it, as if it were hanging down to the ground. So Perfection stretched and squeezed it harder and harder, and still could not make it flat.
Now the sun groaned and rolled about as Perfection squeezed his belly, but he was too round and heavy to move. And he was very ill and weak and dim. When Perfection pressed down on him with all her strength, he burst like a blister, and died.
Out came the sheep which the sun had eaten, the ewes and rams alike.
Out came the warm gold he had drunk which filled up the lake on which the sheep had been grazing.
Out came Corpse, who was dead, like him.
Out came Rage, kicking and screaming.
Out came Song, and melodies came out of her.
Out came their grandfather the Rakshasaraja, still laying atop his lily-pad, of which he was the seasoning.
The sun burst open and all these things came out of his mouth. So quickly did he spit them out that they flew far over the air. They came down a very long way away, more than ten days walk. They landed in a puddle of warm gold that had soaked the sand, and made it into a land rich and hot. And it was night-time there, because the sun was dead.
Then there was nowhere left for Perfection and Preserver to be, because the lake of gold had been drunk up, and the sun was dead. So they went to live in another place, which was called the Indias.
Throughout all of that, the Rakshasaraja slept fitfully, for he’d dreamt of a defiled and most unclean world indeed. All was of night-black and ash-gray and haunting yellow, as though the whole of creation was some jaundiced hide stained here and there with black ink. The skies were naught but crumbling black ichor, the wind carried the aroma of necrosis, and the only sound was that of a discordant wailing; the world itself lamented its desolation, for the Sublime had all been reduced to ruin and its Ear had been powerless to spare it from the fury of its defilers.
The Ear could hardly even remember the purity of its true and original form!
The Rakshasaraja raged against this phantasmagorical hellscape, trying to rearrange the flakes of ash fallen from the sky into something beautiful. He tried to make a gargantuan mandala upon the ground, an icon whose concentric circles depicted a grander and far purer scene, but as he toiled in that artifice the ashes rain down, and he had not gone far before the black-snow had already undone all of his progress behind.
When all the world was ash and motes of dust, there was no way of transfiguring the ruin back into anything resembling wood, let alone an unblemished forest.
So the Rakshasaraja despaired and wept. Though his two lower eyes had their vision blurred by tears, the third eye upon his brow still saw clearly, and it beheld one marvelous sight upon the far horizon that he had somehow overlooked until now. It was a single white shaft, a Pillar that was Purity.
Perhaps, he had conjured that miraculous redoubt, that one tiny bastion of beauty, through sheer force of will. Or perhaps he had simply chanced to see it for a split moment before the blackened sky rained down upon it and smothered its grace forevermore. But that did not matter, for in that same moment, the Rakshasaraja awoke, and so exuberant were his thoughts, so tangible his awe, that in his dream he had brought a man to form. He had not even spoken this creature into existence, and yet here before him was a man and a son, beautifully and perfectly formed.
As he was not word-formed, this man had not been innately named upon his birth. Yet he did have a name, or perhaps would come to know it later, and that name was Stambh.
Though Stambh was a man of sorts, and certainly one by appearance, Stambh was also different. Though far too humble to ever proclaim himself greater than any other mortal, he was certainly of a different spirit; having been fully-formed even in the very moment of his nascence, poetry was the first thing to leave his lips rather than some shrill cry.
This being the case, it was only natural that he went on to become known as a great sage.
When Nawal came to the land of mountains, it was empty save for the howl of the wind between the slumbering bulks of the stone giants and the creaking of snow underfoot. It still bore the traces of the bloody rain that had swept as far as the eye could see, and the peaks were mantled with dirty red like so many fields of strange flowers. This was no more than the trick of a hopeful mind - few things seemed to truly grow there, some patches of dark trees on the lower slopes, hard and grey spiny bushes clinging to the rocks, pale flowers of strange shapes dangling from sparse and steely stalks. Odd, hairy butterflies flitted between the blossoms in places where the twisting rock gave respite from the elements.
Behind him, the mountain pass loomed, steep and forbidding. The journey to reach it had been long and arduous, full of strange turns and shadowed passages, and the last stretch of climbing it had made his bare feet sore. He sat down to rest where he was, cross-legged on the rocky ground, and breathed deeply of the crisp air. Now that he was at leisure to contemplate its every detail, the view ahead was more curious even than it had seemed at first, unlike any of the ranges he had crossed in his travels.
Most of the mountains were not sloped, as it was wont to be, in the shape of sand dunes. They stood, straight and slender, like a wide forest of trees petrified by time. Their feet climbed gently up in a way that reminded Nawal of anthills, before abruptly breaking into sheer walls of stone that surged arrogantly towards the sky. Some of them were bare and impervious, forbidding to any but the most foolhardy climber. Most, however, were not as inaccessible as he had thought at first glance. There were sloping ridges on their sides where the red snow had gathered, some wide enough for a few trees to precariously cling on, winding their way upward at inconstant angles. With the trained eyes of the pilgrim, he thought he could spot the mouths of some natural caves over one of them. Enough determination, he considered, could see one to the very top of such strange peaks.
His ears caught a light rushing sound somewhere nearby. Rising to his feet, he looked to the side, where a cleft opened in the mountainside whose break he had crested. A clear stream of water rushed out from the gap, thin but gleaming with the purity that could only be born of the very ground. Nawal approached and stooped over the source. Further down, the rill was tinged with crimson where it dove into a drift of bloody snow, but here at the fount it was as clean as any water he had ever seen. Hands cupped, he drank of it, and the shivering cold that spread through him banished the last of his weariness.
The dust of the journey washed from his throat, he looked to the mountains again. The tall, straight pillars spoke to him of isolation, narrow as they were, their summits like so many tiny islands up in the boundless sea of the heavens. Up there, he thought, the air was clear and the eye unperturbed. All things would be open to one who dwelt there and had the patience to delve into the emptiness for the fruits of wisdom that grew in its depths. If one were just stubborn enough to reach so high a place.
Nawal wiped his beard, shook the cold water from his fingers, and walked on.
The Rakshasaraja falls asleep on his lilypad, and his drowsy mumblings birth a herd of sheep. The five Rakshasas that were formed from his words don’t know what to do with them: their only idea is to eat the sheep, but none is hungry enough. Itzala shows up and offers to help if they’ll invite him; despite the warning of the sheep and the Rakshasa Preserver’s misgivings, the others accept. Itzal gobbles up the whole herd, then, unsatisfied, he eats Corpse, Song, Rage and the Rakshasaraja himself, and drinks the golden lake. Full at last, he lies down and announces that his death is near. Preserver and Perfection, the last left uneaten, try to get the others out of his stomach, and squeeze him so much that he pops open and dies for real. Everything he’d eaten spills out to a place on Galbar; Preserver and Perfection leave as well, and settle somewhere known as the Indias. In the sun’s absence, it gets dark.
Meanwhile, the Rakshasaraja is mourning in his sleep for the lost primordial harmony. He finds a fragment of order in the shape of a pillar, and dreams it into being as a man called Stambh.
Down on Galbar, a wanderer named Nawal arrives in a distant land of strange mountains.
By the power and virtue of Cyclone, the sage known as Stambh is created for 0 MP.
It could have been a trick of the mind, but he thought he was starting to feel the exhaustion. Probably just the heaviness of the qillatu absorption together with the bullets still embedded in his mouldering body. He was not so old that he’d be feeling stiff and dry in the limbs after a couple of firefights and some hurried marching, not yet. Ilshar shook off the familiar post-ethereal dizziness and focused his senses on the now much bloodier battlefield. Their side of the CivSec camp looked mostly clear now, automata and their controllers both reduced to inert masses; on the other end, the guerrillas seemed to have the situation mostly in hand - if it weren’t for the latest surprise the planetary government’s masters had sprung on them, of course.
“Got it,” he rasped into the squad’s comms, “I’ll search inside, tell me if the skimmer-worms start looking my way.”
Unlike some of his squadmates’ equipment, Ilshar’s armour was a simple thing, unpowered for the most part and with little in the way of functional add-ons. Even the helmet, where most of the electronics were, didn’t mount the sort of equipment that could sweep an area like that for something as specific as a certain make of weapon. He did, however, remember that the trooper who had been caught by the Chasm-spores had gone to retrieve a heavy launcher from one of the tents. While that weapon was useless given the height the aircraft was at, even without the risk of lingering contamination around it, odds were good that others were stored in the same place.
Hunching down to reduce his profile in case any surviving CivSec or their scielto allies did decide to turn in his direction, Ilshar sprinted across the blasted ground towards the camouflage tent. By the Nexus’ will, if he did make it he would be in a safer place than any of the others for the time being, but right then he was in the open. The prize had better be worth the risk.
Ilshar grunted as a volley of return fire tore through the brush, a fair few shots finding their mark in him. Several clanged on the chestplate of his armour, leaving pitted impact marks. Four struck in less protected points, burying themselves in exposed joints and, in one case, passing clean through his upper arm where the metal plates left it open, the rotting fungal mass more yielding than flesh and bone to its focused trajectory. He registered the wounds with clinical detachment, his deadened neural system and multitude of small internal watcher-organs reacting to them more like an old, hollow mouldering tree and its curious inhabitants than a body that had been struck. The penetrating shots could debilitate his limbs if not extracted, but there would be time for that; thanks to tarrhaidim sturdiness, right now getting distracted by them and suffering more accurate fire was much more dangerous than themselves.
His branching senses followed the unfolding of the ambush all the while, while an ear remained on the comms. Predictably, the power-armoured soldier was both the greatest danger to the attack and the lynchpin of the CivSec forces. The automata were likely controlled by either him or the lighter troopers, and the latter were difficult to focus as long as he was alive and fighting like a one-human platoon. Or was it really a human? The blood dripping from the cracked armour didn’t look like theirs, but maybe that was just a side-effect of genetic augmentation, which this monster was no doubt full of. Whatever it was, it was blunting the Envenomed’s momentum, and pressure was mounting on their allies. If he could take out both the power armour and the CivSec with it, or at least break any control they had over their automated weapons…
“Keep clear of them a moment! Echo, you’re good,” Ilshar barked over the comms as he let his gun fall to his hip and stretched out his arms, flexing and unfolding his fingers as he stirred the channels of his ether-implants. Channeling now that he was exposed and the enemy knew where he was seemed dangerous if not completely suicidal, but the barrage the two voidhangers were laying down and especially Echo’s charge should have been enough of a distraction.
He raised his hands, held in the familiar circular shape, and sent his focus inward through the pulsing web within his limbs. The air before him darkened, then appeared to ripple as if from intense heat, or if it were somehow reflecting flowing water. Moments later, a murky brown-bluish cloud of what looked like dense smoke coursed across it from emptiness. The clumps of Chasm-spores were carried by the impetus of the impalpable current towards the enemies’ position, spreading into finer clusters as they did. Their effect on anything organic they met would be virulent, turning flesh to suppurating rot in seconds. The titan of rock and metal that was Echo would be safe from their influence, but for the CivSec troops they could well be deadly, and now that the power-armoured soldier had several holes in his defenses, he was no less at risk.
The capsule sliced through black skies, parting the planet’s anaemic air with the ease of a knife hurled through water. Light glanced off its chromed sides, the pale glare of the stars mingling with the stain of incandescent heat expanding like an inflamed welt on its underside, but never quite overtaken by it. Sparks scattered in its wake, never finding quite enough opposition in the tenuous atmosphere to coalesce into a blazing trail, nor the robustness to grow the screech of its friction into a fiery roar. Least of all did it find a force to oppose its precipitous descent, so that the incredible speed at which it had been vomited from the void was scarcely diminished.
It was not flawless, that capsule. Whatever paths it had taken through the realms immaterial had left its scarred, with burned, jagged gouges running down its flanks. An uneven round pit marred its front, as if a tendril of impossibly hot flame had lashed against it there. What yet intact quartz eyes spanned its length were extinguished, leaving to fall blindly into the endless night of the world below.
From those shadows, grey wastes rose to meet it. Sharp mountains stood in the distance like silent witnesses to its fall, as impassive before it as they had been to the aeons of desolation at their feet. A hulk of rigid angles and dim yellow lights briefly flashed underneath the arc of its trajectory, and was soon lost to the horizon. Soon the mountains, as well, receded into murk, and nothing was left but the expectant face of the lithic desert. It looked up lazily at the pod’s approach of the many eyes of its craters and cavern-mouths, unstirring in its dreary immensity.
The capsule struck.
Metal screeched against stone, its sound deadened by the emptiness. The tremendous impact, of momentum unhindered by compact heavens, pulverised and crumpled rock upon itself. The minute gap the pod had blasted into the loose grey surface blossomed into a spiderweb of cracks which soon tumbled down into an expanding sinkhole, as the shattered equilibrium of the world’s crust dragged more and more fragments into the exposed gash of its hollow underbelly. Had the stars in the black sky been any less apathetic, they would have briefly glimpsed the cavity of a small vault before it was buried in the settling debris of a great crater. But their snow-white marble eyes were jaded, and this moment of devastation went unseen and unremembered.
And below, in Laethem’s depths, the capsule fell still.
“How far away?”
“Too far, Implementor. It went over the Dtheni ridge. Beyond striking distance even in the best conditions.”
“Hmph.”
Myrline turned away from the auspex-tech hunched over his console and stalked towards the centre of the monitoring chamber, the metronome clacking of booted heels cutting through the droning hum of machinery and sporadic rattle of switches. The station took up a sizable section of a spire-floor’s corner, but its acoustics were impeccable, their design enduring after centuries of less than optimal maintenance. The lighting, on the other hand, was feeble, and issued from the rows of consoles along the walls and their shifting emerald patterns on abyssal black screens as much as from the dirty-white tubes overhead. The shabby look this lent to the worn rockcrete walls irked her, but the best she could do about it now was spend as little time in the place as possible.
“You heard that. Stop tracking the meteoroid,” she barked, the command carrying from where she stood to the remotest monitor, “Return to standard operation status.”
There was a uniform murmur of acknowledgement from the auspex-techs, more metallic in some places than others, followed by snapping and clicking as they reoriented their instruments in the customary downturned direction and reactivated their resonance functions. Some did not budge a finger as they did, the knots of cables running from their temples to the consoles relaying their instructions to the machinery with the ease of a thought. Myrline’s eyes alighted most sharply on them, for a moment’s distraction from one of them would have been more disastrous for the entire grid than the missteps of every unaugmented technician at once. But they carried through their motions as diligently as they had thousands of times before, and she strode out from the corner chamber with some amount of momentary relief.
Outside, the hive greeted her with a nervous bustle of motion. News of the rogue meteoroid had been curtailed by the Spire Council to forestall tension and unrest - which the underdweller scum was counting on, if the latest reports on their activity were correct - but somehow word of some vague novelty never failed to slink out onto the passageways. There was nothing too abnormal in the sights around her, not overtly. Small groups in light grey boilersuits filed around the massive habitation blocks in good order, without tarrying in place longer than sanctioned nor raising their voices above the permitted low tones. To her practised, intransigeant eye, however, the minute traces of apprehension were almost glaring. A ring that formed at an intersection of connecting passages near the central well and milled in place very nearly long enough for the nearest Secutor to take notice, only dispersing when his crystalline red faceguard began to shift in their direction. Some mumbles rising to a momentary pitch before being guardedly quieted.
Her glare quieted the nearest cluster, which promptly scattered along the inter-block passage, but then she turned away. Reprimands or even simple acknowledgement would confirm to their restless minds that the Council sought to suppress something, and the seeds of disorder would be sown then and there. Instead, Myrline purposely crossed the thoroughfare between the coreward hab-block clusters, vast and many-eyed pillars shadeless in the ubiquitous yellow glow of artificial light, cutting a direct path towards the well. Like an immeasurable sacrificial pit in the middle of a temple, the perfectly square abyss awned hungrily in the reinforced floor, the parapets around its edge all but invisible before its shadowy immensity. The pit measured nearly a full klick on each side and pierced the spire through its core, like a trail carved by an impossibly precise meteoroid into its semi-hollow massive. The dozens of elevator cabins and platforms that served as the main means of transportation between spire levels appeared minuscule in its maw, despite some of them being spacious enough to fit a hab-block’s base. The nests and strands of thick metal cables supporting them were no more than fleeting silver sparks in the gloom.
The entrance to the cabin she had ascended on was covered by a Secutor. His presence truthfully served no greater purpose than to denote that this conveyor was being used for pressing Authority business, as the transports in that well area were designated for exclusive military usage regardless, and so Myrline motioned the black flak-armoured figure aside with some irritation. There was the customary instant of unease when the cabin, which was more akin to an elongated cage with a lower half of solid plasflex, swayed under her entering steps before finding its equilibrium again. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the surface of the door as it closed. It was an unpleasantly ruinous sight. A sharp-edged stony face, still all too young, pale even for a Koytan and marked with weary shadows; once trim chin-length black hair deteriorating into greasy strands; dark grey uniform whose press and silvery pins could not hide how limply it hung in places. She grit her teeth and yanked a lever in the wall, and with a silent shudder the cabin began its downwards slide.
There was no independent lighting in the well, and so the cabin fell into darkness when it crossed the floor-stratum beneath, only to dazzlingly reemerge into the next layer, and thus again and again, in an accelerating succession that would have been kaleidoscopic had it not been so monotone in all its parts. Every shadowy interlude was exactly as long as the previous one, and every illuminated layer was so uniform as to appear a continuation of each other. The yellow light, the even rows of towering hab-blocks, the geometrically regular passages and crossroads, the grey figures that traversed these sterile landscapes in regimented order. In spite of the elevator’s now considerable speed, it was a long time until shades of imperfection began to appear in the defilade. Dimmer lights, grimier walls, the stench of rust and cinder in the air. The spire’s lower levels were ailing from the decay that crept up from the degenerate underworld, and though the figures moving about its bridges and grate-floored alleys - ever so gaunt now - were no less orderly, the hive around them was steeped in the rot of centuries despite their and the Council’s best efforts.
For all that it held to this tenuous and unwilling compromise, even that precarious balance stood on the brink of annihilation if the underdwellers were to breach it. If they struck at the generator districts, the entire spire would fall with it. If they cut through her defences, she would be the one to bear responsibility for it before humanity’s last silent grave. If she failed ---
The cabin ground to a halt with a moaning clank. Myrline breathed in, straightened her jacket, its edges beginning to wear from the periodic redundant tugging, and unlatched the door, stepping out into the subterranean corridor.
The depth she had reached was not the lowest one, reserved for the mustering of rank and file troops and the unloading of supplies from cargo platforms. Here, the elevator opened directly onto the entrance of a tunnel just about large enough for two people, once carved into the live rock, then reinforced and sporadically lit by evenly spaced illumination tubes. The two sentries that greeted her with their faceless salutes were not Secutors, but grey-clad troopers of the Entrance Guard. The bulky tubes and reserve tanks of their flamers gave them the look of something mechanical, but under their protective masks she was glad to know them as human as herself.
The stone corridor led Myrline through a claustrophobic span that was deceptively short for how it awkwardly twisted and sloped, as if in preparation for the striking sight that awaited on its other end. Under the natural balcony of the outcropping she found herself on, almost wide enough to accommodate an entire hab-block, but minuscule in proportion, there gaped the enormity of the access chamber. The cavernous hall was at least a fourth as large as a spire level, and almost as high; testament to the immensity of the work that had reared Koytos itself, its smooth floor was covered in a labyrinth of control towers, depots, rail stations and inspection points, most of their angular carcasses now eviscerated by time or worse. In the potent floodlights that still lit the half of the chamber closest to the entrance, she could see the teeming of grey-uniformed bodies among the ruination. On the further side, however, only the distant lights of a few guardposts tentatively straddled the edge of what seemed to be boundless, bottomless shadow.
It was a sight that could awe a newcomer, but not one who, like Myrline, had seen it more often than the hive proper in the latter years. What instead drew her eyes was the handful of figures gathered around a wide plas-table set on the edge before her, near the pointed antennae of a field vox station.
Two of them turned to look as the clacking of her steps on the stone roused them from their contemplation of the sonar chart spread on the table. One wore the same dark grey as her, though the fabric of his uniform was stretched taut over the girth of his flaccid constitution. None knew how Implementor Zarec Guicon could have grown fat on siege-time fare, though rumours abounded of misappropriated rations and a ghoulish taste for reprocessed meats, but as long as he kept himself useful about the access, none thought to ask either; his unassuming stature and dull, faintly melancholy eyes drowning in rolls of pale flesh belied the mind that had won him his position. Presently, however, any wit in his features was further concealed as he flinched at the inhuman rasp that rose from the man across the table.
“Implementor Levran! Were you hoping to arrive as the next push began? Your punctuality would be wasted on the Pale Ones.” Myrline did not dignify the mechanical jibe with more than an undisguised contemptuous sneer. If Guicon was respected or tolerated at worst, Tech-Intendant Kleial was suffered. There was little about him that could endear - not his abrasive flippancy, not the mystique he deliberately and grotesquely cloaked himself in, and least of all his awareness of how indispensable he was for the hive. She avoided the sight of his fleshless jaw’s eternal sardonic grin and the five lamp-eyes set in a semicircle above it, of the wires and tubes protruding from his bulky frame’s rust-brown trappings, of the two faceless hulks of steel towering behind him. Even after years of reluctant collaboration, she could hardly stomach the wilful rejection of humanity that oozed from him like a miasma.
Guicon gave her a placid shrug and nodded upwards. “How is it up there?”
“Controlled,” Myrline leaned on the table, running her weary eyes over the charts. Masses of movement. Sharp spikes signalling the clatter of metal. Jagged plateaus, something heavy scraping over the cavern floor. The mutants were moving in force. “The Secutors don’t need reinforcement.”
“Good, it’s not as though we could spare any,” the older Implementor looked discontentedly over the troops shifting around the chamber below like grey rivulets. Numerous as they were, they were far too few to fully cover such an immense space. “If anything, the Council could have transferred some of them to our command. Lasguns are lasguns.”
“And donate more of those precious guns to the enemy?” Kleial leered, “Levran’s newfangled vanguard units have already cost us enough. My manufactora are not so boundless as to supply every genetic reject and untrained floorwatcher you fancy.”
“The vanguards are adequate as long as your machines cover them, Intendant.” Myrlinee picked up a simple magnocular device from the table and pointed its lenses at one of the chamber’s central thoroughfares. A column of grey-clad scrawny figures was marching down it towards the edge of the light, holding weapons that seemed bulky in their hands. Most of the vanguards were young, having just entered the age of conscription and immediately fallen under the purview of her new recruitment census. Lawbreakers, gene-deviants discovered by the Council’s periodic scans, children of unsanctioned couplings - all dangers to the hive’s stability, better served holding ground in the siege’s deadliest spots. Kleial was not wrong; more than one lasgun had been pried from their inexpert hands by the Pale Ones. But the mutants had paid dearly for it every time, and that was what mattered.
She shifted the magnoculars further back along the road, where a second, smaller column trudged in the vanguards’ wake at a distance. Twelve hulks of rust-coloured metal akin to Kleial’s bodyguards marched in perfect lockstep, dome-shaped heads staring stolidly ahead, arms ending in piston-claws and integrated heavy weapons rigid at their sides. Since the last cyber-priests on the planet had perished in the fall of Hive Baligae many decades prior, the venerable automata had been dwindling in numbers. As with most relics of the order, its inheritors in the Tech-Intendancy could maintain them well enough, but were unable to reproduce their design, and their losses to the mutant hordes, however rare, were keenly felt. Unbidden, the thought grew from this stray observation: the Pale Ones were innumerable, and Koytos only had so many robots, so many weapons, so many people. Eventually, it was inevitable that their sheer mass would drown out anything the hive could array against them, and then it would go the way of Baligae and Stagyas. It and, as far as she knew, all of mankind.
Only something unexpected could change that. Something from outside the dying world, like that insignificant meteoroid…
No. She scoffed and clenched her jaw. That was not the way. They had not survived until now by hoping for miracles. They would trust in their own strength alone, and it would have to suffice.
For her, for Koytos, for humanity.
Golog Kin-Breaker crouched at the summit of the ruined tower. Once a compact square pillar of a structure, the edifice had been eviscerated by surfacer weapons in the early days of the siege, and now bared its skeleton of stairs and crumbling floors to all sides through ample fissures in the walls. He preferred it this way; the sounds and smells of the battlefield reached him easily through the gaps. The padding steps of his warriors told him of their advance, how they split off to slip into the stone maze ahead and flank through hidden tunnels in the distant walls. The wafts of metal, unsettled dust and restless bodies showed how many had gathered where, who was afraid, who was impatient. All this Golog knew, though he had no eyes to see with.
His enemy alone was outside his reach. The surfacers were too far for him to smell, without a breath of moving air to bring their scents to his perch, and only the echoes of their war machines’ clanging steps reached him now and then. But he knew well enough that they were soaked with fear, twitching with unease in their holes. They were aware that the thing which fell from the upper world would herald his next attack, and they dreaded it even more than they must have the mystery of that impact. For many lifetimes, they had held their vault against every warleader who had tried to breach the last way to the surface, and then he had come and claimed most of it in less than half a generation. They were right to fear. No vault-lord in the lower world was or had ever been greater than he.
The Kin-Breaker slavered with pride as he took in the immensity of his horde. More of his warriors had already been spent in this siege than in any conquest, and still he had the strength to both advance and hold his vast dominion in the lower world against his many rivals. His predecessors had paid with their reigns and their lives for rushing blindly to the surface, sure that their forces would overwhelm the sparse defenders of the uppermost vault, but he knew better than them. By moving forward with the steadiness of the iron-head worm, he had come so far that the sharpest eyes among the lookouts could see the vault’s far wall and the great doors that opened in it. He was patient, but he knew that soon he would reach these gates and storm through them, sweep away their last defenders and climb to the very top of the surfacers’ lair.
And then he would live like a god.
But Golog reined in his ambitions. Before that moment, many battles awaited still, and one lay just ahead. He rose from his haunches and grasped his shard glaive, the unbreakable weapon whose blade was a fragment of a metal lost to antiquity. Scales of that strange alloy were fixed to his armour, tightly held and padded with dry moss so that its jangling would not disturb his ears. His panoply was the envy of every warrior in the lower world, but it did little more than flaunt his wealth and authority; it had been a long time since he had taken to the field in person, and he knew that not even this protection could stop the strange weapons from the surface.
With almost silent steps, the Kin-Breaker loped down the spiral staircase in the tower’s center and out upon the vault floor. The semicircle of his warleaders and advisers already waited for him around the gouged door, and they prostrated themselves upon his appearance. Satisfied with the scraping of their hands and chins on the stone ground, the warlord clicked his tongue, and they obediently rose again.
“Is everything done as I’ve ordered? Are all the warriors in place?” he growled in the chest-deep voice of a native of the deep vaults.
“Yes, great Kin-Breaker,” replied one of the warleaders, stooped in servile cringing. Most would have balked at that title of infamy, but Golog wore it with nonchalant arrogance: let all know there was no blood he would not spill in his bid for power.
“The Glaathi will be stirring again after that quake from the upper world,” Uluudh, one of his veteran advisers, spoke up, “It’s just the sort of thing they would take for a sign from their putrid god. I doubt the sealed tunnels would hold them back.”
“Then send word to Ogon to take his warband against them. If they clear the tunnels, tell him to clog them again with their rotting carcasses.”
Uluudh made a sound of assent and scampered away to summon a messenger. At a curt grunt from Golog, the others scattered in the same way, their footsteps rushing in all directions. The Kin-Breaker listened to their sound growing faint for a few moments, then unhurriedly crawled forward over the unnaturally smooth ground, his long loose-jointed limbs stretching and bending like the legs of a spider. He smelled broken rock and dust ahead; his hands found grips in a broken wall, and he deftly climbed onto the roof of a small monitoring cabin, his dense armour of little burden for the still powerful muscles underneath. From his new forward station, he breathed in the first signs of the starting battle.
Feet and hands scrabbled over stone, metal quietly rattled. His warriors were on the move, advancing, encircling, probing. Soon came the surfacers’ reply, the sizzling and strange smell of burning air spat out by their weapons. Golog’s scouts had told him that the vault’s defenders made a habit of sending their youngest, weakest runts to the very front. Perhaps they wanted to lure him into striking this weak, inviting target, all the more likely since their far more threatening machines were usually close behind.
The warlord knew better than to fall for such transparent bait. More scorched wafts filled the air, but now they came from his own side, fired by the chosen warband he had armed with trophies seized from fallen enemies. These clumsy armaments, guided by eye rather than ear and instinct, were not made for Pale Ones, and almost none of their shots ever struck home. But these surfacers were young and nervous, and the mere sight of his horde returning their fire threw them into a panic. Their cries rose in pitch, their shots became scattered and disorganised. They were already as good as dead.
Heavier running steps came and passed. The Kin-Breaker expected the machines to show themselves now, and he was not disappoint as the crash of heavy mechanical movement drowned out the frightened voices. More fiery intangible spears cut the air, this time impossibly fast and regular, and other arcane smells accompanied them - acrid fire reeking of earthblood, something difficult to describe and crackling like a sack of dried bones. Golog had felt some scraps of armour struck by the strange forces let loose by the unliving monsters from the surface; it was as though the iron was melted and cooled in the same breath, and only ashes were left beneath.
Yet the machines were not invincible. He heard the heavy steps again, and then sharp Pale One battlecries, tremendous crashing and shattering, the screech of wounded metal. Under the cover of the surfacer vanguard’s disorientation, some of the strongest and bravest among the horde had slipped past them. They carried great shard-mauls tipped with spikes of ancient alloy, and their sudden attack was clearly costing the machines dearly. The Kin-Breaker grinned to himself as he savoured the sounds of the surface’s most terrible weapons being smashed to scrap. Many of the champions would be dead as well, but more were always eager to take their place.
The commotion of battle was steadily rising. More voices shouted as the surfacers’ main force came into motion, and their weapons’ fire filled the air. Savage cries answered from his side as his warriors surged to take advantage of the frontline’s disarray. The deafening scrape of enormous iron plates pushed ahead as massive shields filled his ears.
It was now impossible to follow the course of the battle, but he had heard and felt enough to be satisfied. The Kin-Breaker bared his pointed teeth in a rapacious smile, knowing that his conquest of the upper world moved ever ineluctably closer.
His first sensations were a hard impact, followed by silence, distant points of light in blackness, and the smell of dust. This, he decided, was birth.
He lay unmoving for some time as he absorbed all that was laid out around him and tried to make sense of it. Under his back was a rough presence, rigid and stinging with many small points. It was not pleasant, but nor was it unbearable, and so he let it be, sweeping aside the tiny spikes of pain. Above him was emptiness. He could vaguely see something large and grey with the corner of his eye - his eye - but was shapeless, indistinct, no more than a sign of presence. Everywhere else, his sight met nothing but empty murk and innumerable white eyes far above.
It was restful. The darkness felt welcoming, somehow familiar, a protective and reassuring embrace he did know he could long for. The lights did not feel like an intrusion. They were but an ornament to the gloom, a toy for his eye-
His eye.
With jittery, uncertain motions, he raised his right hand to his face, smelling the dust and pebbles that stuck to it. Cautiously, he ran his fingers over the bare smoothness of his forehead, the timid bristle of his eyebrow. After that, nothing. He lowered a trepidant finger into the cavity, and felt nothing but more unblemished skin. His hand quivered as he withdrew it. The absence rankled him, chilled him with anxious unease and a nameless feeling that resembled impotence. He knew that it was wrong to not find anything in that hollow, that he lacked something he should have had. Suddenly, the ground below him seemed less tolerable than before.
He tried to push himself to his feet, propping himself up on backward-turned hands until he could raise himself upright with a shove. More things came into his view as his head moved up. The amorphous grey presence resolved itself into a compact enormity of matter - a wall, yet more than that, a monumental outgrowth of the earth underneath him. He lay, he saw now, at the bottom of a titanic pit, so wide and deep that its rim was lost in shadow far above. It reminded him of the aberration of his socket, but magnified on an incalculably greater scale. As with it, there was a wrongness about this staggering hollow, obvious in the great shattered heaps of boulders, some of mountainous size, that rose around him. It was as if the earth had fallen inward and met a hungry gap of emptiness that swallowed yet more of it.
His arms strained, shoved, and for a moment he staggered on his two feet. But his legs were unsteady, and he collapsed forward, landing on his outstretched hands. The unsettled dust stung his nostrils. Laboriously, he moved on four limbs. A hand and a knee. A hand and a knee. He looked around.
The seed of the cataclysm lay behind him. Rounded, hard and smooth, it bristled with angular growths whose purpose he could not imagine. It was surprisingly intact for having struck such a blow, but it had suffered all the same on its deformed, dented underside, and an odd darkened gouge ran along its side. Something about that last detail unsettled him, not merely as another image of mutilation, but with a deeper, more obscure feeling he could not catch hold of. He left the object behind and crawled towards the edge of the pit, his motions quickening as they gained confidence.
It was a long way. The fissure was immense, so much so that soon he stopped thinking of it as one. He was moving along a surface, one that seemed without end, among the feet of ruined colossi and fractured giants of silent stone. Cold began to set in. Breathing, something so natural he had not noticed it until now, became more difficult, first stifled, then almost painful. Whatever sustained him in this abyss was fading, and it was being replaced by an emptiness that had little in common with the soothing arms of night. He redoubled his efforts, the ache from his scraped and torn hands and knees rivalling that in his belaboured chest. Would he truly be safe if he reached wherever he was going, the thought stung him, or was his survival just a brief accident whose time was quickly expiring now?
His eye had begun to darken, his breath grown ragged, but inexhaustibly he crawled on, unconscious of his own tremendous endurance. The wall of the abyss now towered before him, and the pale lights were nothing but a memory. With fading sight, he saw heaped stones at its foot, and among them, a gap. Small, perhaps just wide enough for him. A final, furious effort pushed him through its mouth, its edges scratching his sides, and into the blissful reward of warm air. Unbalanced by his passage, stones fell behind him, sealing the opening.
Exhausted, he did not immediately notice that the darkness was now absolute, even more than at the foot of the wall. He lay on his belly, breathing deeply, feeling nothing but the strained beating - in two places, as it seemed - inside his chest. Gradually, more sensations came to him. The smell, still dusty, stale, dry. The solid bodies all around him. And to his ears, at last, so feeble, yet persistent…
Water. Somewhere far away, he clearly pictured in his mind, ran a flow of something light and limpid. Water.
Life.
If there was water, he realised in a way that astounded him, he could survive.
Breathing deeply, he rose to his hands and knees again. He moved without haste now, crawling leisurely, but with surety undaunted by his blindness. He smelled walls in his path before he met them, felt the emptiness of tunnel turns and branches at his sides. The darkness here was not constrained, as it had seemed at first, but winding and sinuous, enclosed in many passages that ran deep in the rocky earth. He could scarcely imagine the spaces he was moving through, but he held steadfastly to his guide, the clear, flowing sound that drew closer little by little.
It was, he thought, very close by the time he heard the other. Somewhere behind him and off to the side, a heavy, rhythmic dull thumping on the tunnel floor rolled to his ears. More sensations followed it closely: a stench of something warm and unclean, the perception of something very large moving in the dark, and a strange weight inside his head. He did not immediately understand what the latter was, and the realisation only unfolded after a few moments of confusion. Something alive was approaching, and somehow, by means he still could not grasp, he felt this life, this thinking mind as it neared. He had no sense of what it was, but instinct stirred in alarm within him. He hastened his pace, but it was not enough.
Massive, horrid, something loomed behind him, sending out foetid breaths that almost made him wince. A monstrously large hand forcefully curled around him, filthy nails digging into his skin, and he lost his grip on the ground as he was lifted with dreadful ease. He felt something - a mouth - opening before him, disgorging its rancid breath, and then he was moving helplessly towards, into it-
Anger surged up, surpassing his alarm. He had survived the journey through the abyss. He would survive this. His hand reached forward, brushed over the sharp points of gigantic teeth and found the coarse sides of the cheek. With a surge of strength that almost rivalled his captor, he seized it and tore away.
The next moment, a dull, raucous roar deafened him, and he fell, landing painfully on his tailbone. His hand was warm and wet, dripping with something that ran down his arm in twisting rivulets. He hardly had the time to think about it before the hand seized him again, swung him through the air and let loose.
He struck the wall with a crack and a jolt of lacerating pain throughout his body. He had not imagined anything could hurt so much. Dazed, numb from the spreading agony, he tried to reach for something, but found himself rising again, a furious grip around his ribcage wracking him with more torturous fracturing snaps, feral roars rattling his desperately groping mind.
His hands moved almost of his own. He reached forward again, but instead of avoiding the thing’s teeth he eagerly grabbed them, heedless of the wounds they tore in his wrists, and stretched his fingers around its jaw.
Then he wrenched.
The bellowing was so stunning that he barely felt the blow of his fall, though he himself cried out as it cascaded through his broken body. Hazily, he felt his assailant stumble away into the dark, howling and gurgling as it gripped its limp lower mouth. He did not think of it anymore. The pain. He could not die. He had to survive.
Life. Water.
With no thoughts, no conscious hope, he tugged in the direction he thought he had heard the flow. The throbbing in his head filled all his senses now. He could no longer move his legs, or perhaps he did, yet felt nothing but pain. His left arm hung deadly from its broken shoulder. Every twitch seemed to nearly tear him into bloody shreds.
Still he moved. Stubbornly, he dragged his mangled body ahead, leaving behind a damp, viscous trail. His senses struggled to rise above the pain, sporadically warning him of walls, turns, descents. In the moments they did, he could feel the running water increasingly close.
Rapid, continuous motion. He sensed it in front of him, its strength enough to momentarily dissipate the fumes of torment that clouded his head. He leaned forward, trying to reach it with his lips, only now conscious of a thirst almost as overbearing as the pain, but it was too far below the lip of its dimly perceived stony canal. With an effort that made him groan, he leaned forward, trying to reach deep, deeper-
Too deep.
The half-agonizing, half-insensate weight of his body slumped over the sheer edge. He tried to grasp for it, but it was futile, and instantly he was wreathed in cold more pervasive than he had known outside. He spluttered, flailed, but the current had him in its grip, and carried him far, far and down.
The last thing he felt before utter inanition claimed him was the chill of water spilling down his throat.
Izurich
Archetype Zero
Lord Zee
Cyclone