“Twelve automata! Twelve!”

The warble of Kleial's voxcoder was taut with fury, the metal-tinged syllables spilling out in a violent flood and clashing against each other. The grotesque parody of emotion that stirred in the decaying scraps of humanity left within the Tech-Intendant, Myrline thought, were no less repellent than the immutable grin of his brazen rictus mask. The jibes of his customary arrogance were already aggravating enough, but the cacophony of his anger grated on her ears like a misaligned mechanism.

“An entire maniple lost in a single engagement!” The cyborg raged on, bitter-smelling colourless fluid spilling between his chromed teeth. “If not for the Authority's seal behind them, I would swear the Implementors’ actions are wilful sabotage!”

The foul combination of living emotion with mechanical tone was of course not the most irritating part of his tirade. Worse was that in his ravings there were dregs of truth.

They were convened around the planning table, she, Guicon and the Intendant. The aides had all been dismissed, and only Kleial's unspeaking automata bodyguards stood close by. The reason for this isolation lay on a corner that had been cleared of maps and diagrams, chosen for the poor resonance of sounds issuing from it upon the surrounding rock. A plain voxcaster unit was stood on the smooth surface, only slightly larger than those issued to unit leaders in the chamber below. Bare of rank insignas and not very sophisticated in appearance, it was nevertheless more imposing than the Intendant's mechanoids by mere virtue of the minimalistic symbol on its side - a pale circle and within it a black triangle, five short lines radiating from its base like a truncated asterisk.

This simple sigil would have sent menials fleeing as from the plague. The Spire Council did not distribute it lightly, and anything so marked was of direct importance to the ruling body of the hive. Unassuming as the transmitter was, the words that carried through it were certainly now echoing at the very pinnacle of Koytos, several klicks above their heads.

“You promised fire support for the vanguards, Tech-Intendant. If your machines couldn’t deliver they were worth scrapping,” Myrline drily cut in, pleased with being able to keep the steely edge in her voice. Even for someone as nominally irreplaceable as one of hive's two Implementors, the direct attention of the Council after a disaster like the latest engagement was a troubling matter. Perversely, she found some encouragement in Kleial's flaunted irreverence - so long as he remained a brazen thorn in the Council's side, it was not truly all-powerful.

That he was just as much of an annoyance to her remained an onerous price to pay.

“My assets performed beyond predictions despite your promised frontline collapsing on first engagement,” the Intendant leaned in, menacing, and she saw her distorted features reflected on his brazen death-mask. “Only they stopped the collapse of the entire network. If I had sole control of the access chamber, it would be cleansed in less than three day-cycles.”

“That is not currently a matter for advisement,” came a sudden reply from the vox-caster, and the entire table fell silent. The voice was a flat, artificially modulated one, no different from the automatic announcements that set the pace of work shifts and rest rotations, and like every time Myrline wondered if this was deliberate. By issuing even its direct proclamations in the voice of the spire, the Council reinforced the sense of its omnipresence and the flawless neutrality of its arbitration. With no observable identity and no face beyond a vox-grille, its power seemed all the more absolute, greater even perhaps than what it was. This quasi-mystical pantomime irked her almost as much as Kleial’s boasting, but it was a thought best left unvoiced.

“There will be no changes to the defense command disposition,” the voice of the Council continued, an implacable metronome, “Nor will any increase of conscription rates be ratified within the next four year-fractions. Production and maintenance capacity are at critical risk of being impacted beyond tolerated margins. You will restore the defensive network and staunch enemy gains with your current assets.”

Bile rose in Myrline’s throat, and she clenched her jaw to bite back an effusion of her disdain. The obtuseness of these faceless comptrollers was sickening. Did they not understand that unless all that could be done for the defense was done in full there would be no more [i]production and maintenance[/i] - of some superfluous luxury like double-flavoured nutrient rations, no doubt - to tremble about? Or worse yet, was this just a means of making their displeasure at the latest defeat firmly known? Only her inveterate respect for the chain of command held her back from such a tremendous imputation of treasonous incompetence.

Quietly fuming, she leaned back from the table as Guicon spoke up. Her fellow Implementor was her elder in combat veterancy by little less than a decade, having seen no major battles until the mutants’ last and greatest massed attack had begun, but he had been dealing with the Council for far longer. His unprepossessing attitude was clearly a product of this as much as of a long and quiet command.

“Understood. If production suffers, so will the front.” Measured acquiescence. If the Council could at all be pleased, they would be seeing that the full extent of their point was taken. “But if manpower is critical, shouldn’t every unit be put to the most efficient use? The reserve Secutor detachments, for one…”

The vox remained quiet for a moment after his words tactically trailed off. It was not the first time Guicon had urged for the deployment of the Secutors, and every time it had been drily denied. A risk of cascading defensive collapse, however, changed the situation somewhat.

“It will be considered,” the Council finally answered, toneless, “Provided you can present a strategic plan that justifies it.”

The elder Implementor’s eyes shone between engorged folds of pale flesh.

“We consolidate the network,” he began, seemingly even and imperturbable, though Myrline could see the subtle signs of animation in his coursing pupils and lightly moving fingers, “With overwatch and area denial specialists joining the Guard, we can set up reinforced points centrally, here-”

He pulled closer a schematic map of the chamber and indicated one spot after another as he spoke. While it seemed absurd to offer a visual demonstration to a vox-caster, there was no doubt that the Council could see all that it wished in great detail.

Only halfway following the sequence of painfully familiar coordinates, Myrline’s thoughts turned elsewhere. If the Secutors were deployed, as Guicon said, they would bring tactical aptitudes complementary to those of the Entrance Guard. Yet that was not all. It was easy to overlook when raw quantity of assets was the main question, but subtle factors of [i]equipment[/i] could be just as crucial.

“Alternatively,” she began as soon as the other Implementor had finished, and drew a daringly forward wedge on the map with her index, “We make full use of the Secutors’ vox to expand our comms network. It’s already one of the areas where our advantage over the mutant scum is superior. Coordinate floodlight sweeps with simultaneous pushes, and we can start to retake ground.”

She let the emphasis of those final words hang in the air. Guicon looked up in contemplation for a moment, then nodded approvingly, and she thought she saw a proud smile pass between the creases of his lips. Kleial was clearly uninterested by the subject of Secutor reinforcements, but the glow of his lens-eyes had been reluctantly drawn back to the map.

“The proposal will be raised to plenary consideration,” the vox repeated, the inflexibility of the metallic voice moderated by a far more promising formula. “As soon as-”

The rest was lost in a crash and an instant of blinding pain.

Myrline struggled to push against the agonizing burst of sensations that had overwhelmed her world, the damp shearing torment along her side, the throbbing impact at the back of her head, the pulsing dark pall over her eyes. With an effort that threatened to burst the seams of her temples, she focused her pupils, forcing the bloody fog away from them.

She found herself face to face with a Pale One.

It was not the first time she had seen one of the creatures up close, but all the others had been dead. The unhuman brute on top of her now was full of life and hideous vigour. She saw the sickening detail of its chalk-white hairless face, the almost flat snout with large quivering nostrils, the slavering jaws with needle-like teeth, the sunken, squinting vitreous eyes. Its breath hit her face with a charnel waft.

The ceiling, she realised. It had climbed the ceiling.

The mutant had her pinned on her back with one long, simian arm across her chest. Its other hand rose high, light glinting from the blade of the crude dagger in its grip. Her close-quarters training kicked in and she struggled to stop its descent with a wrist, but the Pale One was far stronger and more expert in this primitive form of combat. It deftly avoided her faltering block and stabbed at her throat. With a desperate push she tipped her assailant’s weight slightly to the side for a moment, and the dagger plunged into her shoulder instead. There was a horrible choked sound, and she was surprised to realise it had come from her own blood-drenched mouth.

With a torturous wrench the dagger rose again, and despite the haze of pain and exsanguination Myrline knew there would be no avoiding the next fatal strike. Struggling against it would be futile. But perhaps-

She slid her right hand along the ground towards her hip. The mutant caught her movement and shifted its elbow, expecting to parry a low jab. It might have trained in hand-to-hand combat for the whole of its wretched life, but it was blind to anything beyond its debased subterranean world. A human would have known that [i]factors of equipment were just as crucial[/i].

She pulled the laspistol from her belt, twisted her wrist upward and fired.

The Pale One reared up with a shriek, smoke spilling from its scorched abdomen. Myrline pulled up her arm and fired again at the base of its jaw, and it collapsed to the side, dead.

She lay for a moment, recovering her breath despite the lancing pain in her side. Beyond the frantic pulse of blood in her temples, she could hear sounds from the surrounding space - grunting and snarling, the crackle of the vox. There was a loud thumping as the bodyguard automata opened fire with their heavy autoguns, and once it had passed she pulled herself to her feet, teeth clenched against the burning of her wounds.

The corner of the command ledge had become a miniature battlefield. Several more unhuman assassins cloaked in some ragged dark fibre had dropped down from above, though she saw most had already fallen. Three lay dismembered at the feet of the automata, their knives having only harmlessly scratched the paint on the machines’ shells. Kleial, though bleeding oily fluid from tears in his robes, battered aside two more with the force of his augmented limbs. One mutant still straddled Guicon, the man’s layers of fat and drooping skin having blunted the lethal thrust of its first slashes, and she killed it with a shot to the back of its head. She remained standing, leaning on the table, too weakened to prise away the corpse now pinning down her colleague.

“-Implementor Levran?” the Council’s voice rattled from the vox, sounding more distant by the moment, “Respond! What is happening?!”

“The enemy launched a decapitation strike,” she almost mechanically answered the gathering darkness, only vaguely aware of the medical staff rushing to her and something cool and slimy being laid over the gruesome gash in her side. Her breath caught for a moment as a stimm surge rushed through her veins, and her eyes cleared with startling suddenness. “Repelled without casualties.”

The Council was silent, and Myrline turned her attention to the Entrance Guard trooping onto the ledge from the adjoining passages. Near-uniform in their grey fatigues and face-masks, they could only be told apart by their rank and unit markers, which she was now lucid enough to recognise.

“Command One-Five, One-Seven, One-Eight,” she snapped, the chemicals in her blood sharpening her awareness to a point and suddenly bringing the realisation of the breach’s enormity to bear. She motioned for the beige-robed medical personnel who were trying to usher her to the lifter access to wait. “Who was responsible for the upward light sweeps?”

A section of the Guard officers stepped forward.

“Watch Eleven-One and Fifteen-Three,” one of them replied, voice muffled by her rebreather, “With respect, Implementor, they couldn’t have-”

“I’m not interested,” Myrline cut her off, “They will be reassigned to the vanguard. Watch Eleven-Two and Three are now assigned to their places. Their rotation will now include a regular vertical sweep.”

The officer made to withdraw with the new orders, but Myrline stopped her.

“Everyone that was on command duty today will also be transferred to the vanguard,” she sneered, “We’ll need veteran assets there very soon.”

[hr]

The tunnel stank. It was not just the usual damp stale air that collected sometimes, nor the acrid smell of a dust-wing nest or the breath of a fungus bed. A throat-choking miasma of stale meat and unscrubbed bodies filled it, weighing down the air from top to bottom despite its ample breadth and monumental height. This was not just any tunnel, but one of the old thoroughfares from before the cleaving of the worlds. Something like this, large enough for a war party to stand shoulder to shoulder, was beyond the power of any but the greatest vault-lords to build now. Still, the stench clung to every inch of it. Even if a skilled climber could scramble up the unnaturally polished walls and brush the ceiling, it would already be up there waiting.

Like every other strong and unpleasant smell, the stench could easily be traced to its source, and that was something which already held everyone’s focus. It seeped through the gaps in the massive wall of rubble and hewn rock that completely filled the passage ahead, even the ones so narrow they were insensible to the touch. In the light of the glowmoss patches on the tunnel walls, the fissures and cracks between the heaped stones were deceptively multiplied. The barricade looked like a patchwork of loosely fitted pieces, much more fragile than it was in truth. Perhaps that was the reason everyone was so tense. That, and the smell.

The stench was not the reason Warleader Ogon hated being here. Foul as it was, he had encountered worse in his time. Far more rankling was the fact that he was standing in this tunnel at all instead of winning glory at the Kin-Breaker’s side. Once, being chosen to lead a warband into this territory would have been a rare honour, even for someone with his reputation, but now the battles truly worth fighting were in the surfacer vault. What had fallen to him was a latrine-cleaning task, as hard and filthy as it was thankless.

“Why’d they smell like this? Are they sick?” asked one of the nearby warriors - Ulush? Maybe Gnapkah? Everyone from the chasmward tribes sounded the same to him.

“They’re sick all right, in the head,” Ogon growled, “Shut your mouth and keep your spear up.”

He listened intently, wide ears straining to catch every sound beyond the wall of rock. Every time he had risen from sleep, they had been stronger, ever closer and with less of a barrier deadening them. Since the damned collapse that had seen him sent here, the sounds had been eating away at the block in the tunnel, and he felt in his bones that they were very close to breaking through.

Now they began again. He heard a wet thumping, a regular beat of something engorged and slimy against the barricade. It stopped, replaced by the grinding of rocks being pulled apart, then started anew, higher up. A collective heaving of bodies that were loathsome to imagine.

And, unceasing, the chanting.

[i]“Glaath! Glaath!”[/i]

It was all that anyone ever heard out of those mongrels. Ogon believed in nothing divine, only his blade and the fates, but the invocations of the Glaathi unnerved him. There was a foul kind of strength in their faith, a blind courage only matched by some fungus-addled mad warriors, and the mere name of their monster-god struck an inexplicable fear into less hardened souls. Some of his warband were already flinching at the distant chorus, unconsciously backing away, and he called them to order with a barked command.

[i]“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”[/i]

The chant grew closer, as if corroding away the stone. Hundreds of mucous throats were calling out the sacred name in gurgling, guttural voices, and Ogon imagined that it was not unlike the sound of the dark sea he had heard about. There was another sound like many half-empty waterskins striking the rocks at the top of the wall, and with a defeated groan the largest of them bucked outwards and rolled down the sloping barrier, coming to a rest just before the warband's spearline. An avalanche of smaller stones and pebbles fell in its wake, evening out the wall to a rough ramp.

A wide dark gap now stared down from the shattered barricade, and stench and sound poured out from it like a tainted stream.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

Suddenly the voices fell silent, and Ogon knew that this apparent respite heralded the worst to come.

“Ranks up!” he bellowed, “Catch them on your spears!”

Metal points glittered in the mosslight as they rose, the massed warband bristling with sharp iron. Moments later, dark shapes spilled out from the breach.

It did not take the breath of damp foul air that tumbled ahead of them for Ogon to know that these were not Pale Ones. Primitive as they were, the Glaathi were not incapable of thought. Rather than charge through the gap immediately, they had sent out a wave of tame sporehounds to weigh down his warriors’ blades. Long-bodied and knotted with muscle under their meaty, rugose hides, the creatures vaulted down at him on their sixfold stem-legs, rebounding after every jump with an elasticity beyond human muscle. Their oblong heads had no mouth, but spongy skin underneath their clumps of arachnoid eyes oozed trails of corrosive humour that smoked on the ground where it fell. No tribesman could abide these vile things, neither truly beast nor fungus, but the worshippers of filth bred them in packs for both stock and war.

“Strike!” roared Ogon. A living weapon would not be the match of his spear.

Hafts lunged up as the sporehounds leapt upon the front ranks. There were grunts and cries of pain as their lethal drool sprayed onto exposed limbs and heads, but not one of the beasts passed the forest of spears raised against them, and their bodies thrashed silently in the air before going limp, pierced and bleeding inky ichor from dozens of wounds.

But the Glaathi would have expected nothing less. Ogon knew there was no time to throw away the carcasses and free their spears before the next wave was on them.

“Hafts away! Blades out!” At his command, all but the rear ranks’ spears clattered to the ground, and the mosslight burned bright on the daggers and swords that came loose from their sheaths. Just in time.

“Glaath! Glaath! Glaath!”

A river of pale flesh spilled down the ruined wall, the breach foaming like the unstoppered mouth of a stream. Naked or bound in dirty rags, the Glaathi were one of the few things more revolting to see than to smell, and Ogon heard some of his younger warriors retch or gape in horror. Their foes were hideously swollen, trailing flabs of rancid fat like heavy cloaks, limbs poking out almost haphazardly from shapeless bodies and draped in squelching wraps of their own skin. Masks of cascading jowls and rotting teeth were their faces. Throats swelled like those of toads as they chanted with the inexhaustible breath of bloated lungs. Tiny eyes stared out from caverns of flesh, dull with fanatical stupor. Some were further disfigured with weeping inflamed sores and leprous scars, but seemed to feel nothing as they tumbled over stone and iron.

There was no more need for orders as the mass of the deformed crashed into the van of the warband. Every warrior was filled with the frenzied need to kill and destroy these monsters, riding the human instinct to hate that which was foul and deadly. Blades stabbed and sliced into the tide of flesh, the diseased blood of the enemy pooling and desecrating that which was bravely spilled by the children of the vaults. The Glaathi did not forge iron and fought with knives of bone and chipped flint, or scratched and grappled with their bare hands, but they were horribly strong, and they were many.

Ogon slashed the throat of the brute before him, the sturdy triangular blade of his weapon tearing through layers of fat and skin in a spray of dark blood. Impossibly tough, the savage still came at him, grasping with gnarled fingers, and he twisted the blade mid-stroke, driving the tip through the foe’s jaw and into the skull. Another already lunged at him, howling the name of its god, and he threw himself into blow, slamming his shoulder into the leering, sagging horror that passed for its face. The Glaathi’s body gave way, its bones unpleasantly soft like those of a boiled corpse. He spun and followed through with his sword-hand, chopping through the side of its head and smashing its eye. Still more came, and more behind them.

“Glaath! Glaath!”

The Warleader’s lungs burned, both from the unbearable stench and from exertion. Almost blind to his own wounds like the foe, he cut, tore, stabbed. His blade, short and pointed, was made for the close crush of tunnel fighting, and he could have wished for no better weapon, but it was like fighting a flood. He waded through the blood of the devotees of the monster-god, and yet they poured through the breach unending.

It had to end.

“Glory! For the Kin-Breaker!” he shouted, his throat tearing with the strain, and his faltering warriors answered, their still unspent rage drowning out the odious chant for a moment. Almost half of them had fallen, dragged down by the overwhelming mass of the enemy, but they were tempered in battle, and burned with vengeance for their friends so ignobly slain.

“To the breach!” Ogon grabbed the atrociously large head of a Glaathi and yanked it down, snapping its neck. Knowing his warband was behind him gave him renewed strength, and he climbed over the corpse and onto slick stones of the barricade. Three savages barred his way, arms outstretched to grab and rip him to pieces. He seized the nearest one’s meaty wrist and pulled, toppling its wobbling bulk onto the rocks and stomping on its head. Sliding over his macabre foothold, he slipped to the side, avoiding the reach of the others. The Glaathi’s massive weight gave them a powerful force when they charged down the slope, but they could not so easily turn to the side, and so the Warleader flanked the clumsy cascade of bodies, clambering up the spurs of displaced rock. The braves that followed him struck at the wallowing foes, killing without breaking their stride.

The gap was close. Ogon could feel the bare skin of fresh invaders brushing against its sides. He lifted a stone in his off-hand and thrust it from the side of the opening, caving in the head of a Glaathi as it emerged. His scimitar found the throat of the next one, and with all his strength he pushed the floundering body backwards. The flow was thinned for a moment. Two warriors threw themselves at the second file that crawled out from the wide breach, knocking back the sluggish brutes as they tried to turn and engage the suddenly close defenders. There was a dreadful moment of uncertainty as the exhausted Pale Ones fought with all their weight to hold the improvised barrier of corpses in places as more Glaathi pushed from behind, but the mad worshippers were struggling from lower down their own side of the wall, and the horrid shield stood.

“Stones, here!”

What remained of the warband was frightfully weary, but nothing was as invigorating as feeling that victory was near. Pale Ones hauled fallen rocks up the blood-drenched slope or dragged the very bodies of the enemy. They slipped on the ordure of battle, risking an ignominious death even now that the worst seemed over, but they came in speed, thrusting new blocks into the jagged maw of the breach.

Piece by ensanguined piece, the wound in the barricade was mended, the pushing and chanting of the Glaathi growing fainter with every new layer of stone. At last it was clogged with a new bulging shell, and Ogon let himself slump against it.

He took in the magnitude of the slaughter. The reek was beyond words, a tomb and a cesspit smashed together. Bodies lay in their hundreds, heaped, torn and broken. Blood and filth flowed down the vast tunnel like a new river.

His warband was a shadow of what it had been, but it did not matter. He allowed himself a snarling grin, knowing he had won against such an immense force. Even from here, his name would live on in fame, he would make sure of it.

“We'll burn all of this,” he nodded, “But not now.”

“Now what?” One of the surviving warriors asked. Even if Ogon could have told them apart, he did not have the strength left for it.

“Now we rest.”

[hr]

Darkness was all around him. He drifted through it, gently, swaying in its cool embrace. All was silence. No scent troubled him nor taste, only a faint stinging on his tongue and down his throat. Nothing pressed against the interior of his skull. There was only inky quietitude, and him suspended at the heart of its infinity. This, he thought, was happiness.

It seemed to him that he was again in the embrace of night, cradled in its vast and shapeless arms. Only an accident, perhaps, had torn him from the umbral womb for a brief and confused moment, a blur of fright and pain. Now that mistake was corrected and his true mother held him close to her stygian breast, never again to lose him. Fitfully he reached out with inchoate hands, not to tear and maim but to give motion to the grievous bliss of his love for the quiet, all-embracing dark.

A cold weight was all that met his yearning, and a hideous crack of doubt ran through his joy. His eye opened wide and turned all about, his motions hampered as if he were wrapped in a tight shroud. Nowhere did the many pale eyes of his mother night catch his questing sight and return their glimmering reassurance. He despaired as he realised that he was not in the hollow void that had greeted his birth, but in some other substance altogether, just as dark but cold and constricting.

He felt now its full pressure upon his limbs, felt it pour into his chest with every breath and fill him with its rolling mass. Yet after the anguish of disappointment had passed, he found that it did not displease him. Some part of him rose with a love for this swaying black silence that was just as intense as how his hearts had ached for the many-eyed darkness he had issued from.

His hands, no longer blindly groping, tentatively swept through the umbral mass. Momentarily he was surprised to feel them whole and healthy. The shattering pain that had rattled through his every bone after his struggle against the great ravenous thing was nowhere to be found now. Perhaps the healing darkness had swept it away, and so he had been born a second time to it, made whole once more by the quiet force that carried him even now. His body twisted along it, agile and light, as if it had been made for nothing other than this. He [i]swam[/i], not knowing where, but revelling in the ease of his movements.

Something slipped by his mind, viscid and voiceless, and soon its flesh was passing close by like an echo. Through the now stirring blackness, he saw a mere part of something enormous, inconceivably vast sweep by him, buffeting him in its wake. It was nothing like that which he had fought in the tunnels, even that giant reduced to nothing next to this titanic vision. All he could glimpse was a part of a pale flank, a living wall, smooth save where shallow ridges ran along it. Despite struggling to even imagine the full size of this being, he felt no fear. He knew his course and that of the gigantic thing would not cross now.

On he swam then, driven by nothing more than the need for action, forwards and downwards. He felt how the motion of the [i]water[/i] grew fainter and its weight grew ever more crushing, but a force within him reduced this to a mere curious observation. His hands found solid rock below and ahead, and then he crawled in a way he knew, pushing himself off the slippery surface in bounds.

After his rebirth, his strength seemed limitless. For unknown immensities he vaulted and crept, climbing primordial cliffs and springing over unsounded fissures. He passed scalding jets and their swaying worm-forests, shapeless cemeteries of sightless things and the decaying banquets of leviathans. He crossed spiny shapes that skittered on fleshless legs. For all these wonders he had no names, but their sediment gathered in abyssal corners of his nascent memory.

At length the press of water on his back lightened and then was at once broken in an instant of emergence. With the rush of air that came to replace the flow in his lungs he was suddenly aware of his weariness, and slumped down in a brackish pool, his breaths heavy yet silent.

The rocky shallows he had risen from curved upwards to meet the torpid fall of a small river, whose bed had been carved into the shape of a funnel by its stream. It met the silent sea where he lay, resting like him in a circular pool before the very final step of its journey. The only light fell from some distant pale stains on the natural walls further over the cliff, but it was enough for his eye to see all that it swept over.

Everything around, the walls, the river and the sea was overhung by a stone sky, enclosed in a colossal vault. Slimy growths carpeted the slope, clinging to cracks made humid by the breath of the waves, which now lay damply on their heavy leaves. Life stirred near him in the pool as well: pallid, serpentine creatures with long eyeless snouts slipped among undulant polyps, paddling with vestigial legs.

He was suddenly aware of a primal craving more imperious even than fatigue, his throat and stomach needled by cramps. Rapidly his hand darted out, seizing one of the amphibian beasts. It thrashed and slipped in his grip, and with an instinctual dexterity that astonished him he extinguished it with a finger pressed below the head. The facility of this death fascinated him, and he fished again and again, sating his wonder as much as his hunger.

This place was dense with life, he thought, and could sustain him if he stayed, but no sooner had he realised this that he knew he could not. An obscure desire drew him onward, a will to something he could not name. He rested and he fed, and then he rose anew and crept up the slope by the dim mosslight, and followed the river into tunnels beyond.

[hr]

The changes began not long after.

He had been scraping lichen from a cavern wall, a dry and lean meal but nourishing enough in absence of anything better, when he noticed the pain below his shoulder. At first he feared it might have been reopening wounds from the struggle, not fully healed in his rebirth. Then with a chill he understood that he [i]hoped[/i] it would be that. Within himself he dreaded, he knew, that it would be another flaw entirely that was coming to light, one far more profound and terrible. That which was rooted in the aberrant emptiness where his second eye should have been.

Despite his hopes that it would pass quickly, the pain soon grew and splintered around his body. He could almost feel jagged fragments of piercing torment burrowing through him like flesh-eating worms, as feel he did his muscles parting, wounded by spikes of inexplicable and abnormal sharpness, and reknitting themselves in stretched and contorted ways that made their least contraction a torture. His dread grew apace with the web of agony that threaded through him, but he had no other expression for it than to lie still for long times, sensing the intimate collapse of himself, until the unsustainable hunger grew worse than the inner torment. 

His awareness of his own anatomy would have been incredible for anyone, but he found now that it fell short. He perceived his inmost workings just enough to keenly feel the spreading pain, his intuition conjuring horrific images of invisible mutilation, but he could not begin to guess its source, other than it had to do with his missing eye. This was a deep, deep corruption, and what he loathed most were the thoughts that it might in truth [i]be him[/i].

Between pain and hunger he lapsed in and out of consciousness, and with each awakening he found that the destruction - for destruction it was - had grown worse. His eye spasmed in horror once when he saw that the pale skin on his shoulder, where the unravelling had begun, had been breached from below by a pointed spur that was whiter still. Like a plagued foruncle this spike multiplied, a monstrous harvest of bone tearing through its natural confines, and yet the shredded muscles never stopped moving, every involuntary contraction a grievous cascade through their eviscerated whole. He watched in impotent delirium as sharp ridges cracked open his skin and flesh alike, and felt the net of his veins verminously slide around them.

He began to rot.

The living death of his own body was less crudely torturous than its disgregation, but the torment of it was still more deeply visceral. Had he even known words, they would have failed him then, for the experience of his creeping demise in the fine grain of all its senses was a horror beyond expression. He felt his fingers die, yet saw them move at his will. He tasted putrescence on his tongue. He reeked of charnel doom.

Repugnance at last overcame his pain, and he dragged himself to a buried lake to try and wash away the foulness that seeped from him. By the bleak mosslight, he made the mistake of looking at his reflection in the dead water.

The face he had once felt with such wonder had been torn from him like a mask. A malformed skull leered up at him, jaws and teeth bound by strips of putrid sinew and drooling black corruption. His eye was dreadful in its exalted solitude in the middle of his brow, bulging and flickering in its ring of knotted bone. Grotesquely long arms brushed the surface with knife-sharp fingers, stretched out inch by inch imperceptibly among the organic turmoil.

There was nothing human in the cries that ripped forth from his throat, and the most savage denizens of the underworld fled from his echoes.

Horror became desperate fury, and he raged against the monstrosity his body had become. He forced himself to skitter through the tunnels on his distended limbs, feeling his muscle tearing against his own bones with every step and revelling in the sickening pain he wrought upon himself. He clawed away at his infected sores, brutally excising the tainted flesh and gouging open his veins. He beat his damnably hard bones against the rock walls, never granted the perverse satisfaction of a crack, but gleefully mangling his exposed strands of nerve. In a mad paroxysm he bit out his tongue, choking on the blood that came gushing out.

Time and again he scourged himself until he fell insensate and blind with agony. Yet with every awakening he found that all he had wrought had been undone, the vile force that moulded his body brooking no competition in his undoing.

In the throes of nightmare it seemed to him at times that the rampant bones were receding, the rotten flesh sloughing away and fresh skin tentatively weaving itself around his joints. He had ceased to think, ceased to see, ceased to hope; and yet in a flash of lucidity that came over his inflamed mind he saw once that his fingers were no longer those of a tortured corpse.

Slow but stubborn, recovery came into its own, pushing the plague of execration back beneath the surface of skin. He stopped fearing at last that he was deceiving himself, and no joy was greater then than that of the lone, nameless being in the bowels of a dying world.

But there are cruelties in the universe before which fate itself seems kind. No sooner had he celebrated the surety of his restoration, less troubled now even by that missing eye which was the root of all evil, than the changes returned.

What had not yet been shattered in him by the first cycle was broken then and ground under the spinning wheel of life. He was for a time beyond reckoning suspended between the fiercest dread and the most desperate hope, fearing with every excruciated fiber of his being that every degeneration would be final and eternal, and wishing just as absolutely that every recovery would herald a definitive end to the evil. No mind could withstand such alternating passion in good and ill, not even one with his secret resources of strength, and so he erred, mad and afflicted, through the vaults and tunnels like a witless beast. Forgetting at times even the pain in the throes of his despair, he hunted with insensible animal instinct and devoured all that he crossed to sustain the struggle that ravaged his body.

Unperceived by his clouded mind, the tortured mass grew apace, as if its agony were too great to be contained and sought assuagement in pushing outwards its contours. The furrows he clawed into the rock with thrashing fingers became wider and deeper, and he rarely could walk upright even when he found the presence for it, for his stature was become giant beyond the breadth of most passages. More subtly yet, his spirit matured also, forged from its cracked fragments in the crucible of its trials, or propelled perhaps by an innate greatness that wearied of his brutish existence. More and more often he found in the pitches of his torment and the pits of his dejection a wish to [i]endure[/i] and defy, to affirm at least his force over the pain that sought to master him. It came at first in fleeting glimpses through his death-driven frenzy that left him briefly ashamed of his frights before vanishing again, but ever more they gained intensity, until he in one moment realised with startling clarity that they came from none other than his own self.

He was crouched over the carcass of his latest prey. He had gleaned from the memories he had consumed along with their flesh that it was one of the things who thought of themselves as men - [i]homo, anthropos[/i] - yet he knew also, intimately, that they were less men than even his tainted self. Nothing that was man could be so contorted, so glabrous and loathly to the senses, impurity rooted deep in its skin and blood.

The false-man had sought to ambush him with a point of glinting metal atop a haft - a weapon, the idea thrilled him - but he had been more ready than his opponent ever could imagine. The rushing smell of the air, the taste of unsettled dust, the pulse of the mind had told him all that could be known. The cold and sweet urge to kill spurred him, mixed with the bilious tonic of the hatred distilled by his pain. He had struck with incredible speed, crushing the ambusher’s throat against the tunnel wall in a stain of blood and pulverised bone. With semidelirious expertise he had unclothed and skinned the body, adding its outer layers to his own haphazard mantles, for once he had learned shame he wished that not even the darkness would witness his abhorrence.

Then he had eaten the dead. Most ravenously he reached for what was inside the skull, for the memories he stole could distract his mind from its own endless night. Yet this time they had been so fresh and intense that the inmost fog was dissipated, and he found himself thus, suddenly disgusted at the cowardice of his flight into madness. He had looked again at the false-man, fully taken in his debased lineaments, and contemptuously he had chewed his bones, mulling over the tapestry that his carnivorous brain had laboriously woven from its spoils and which had abruptly been illuminated by this last tribute.

The false-man, the Pale One, was one of great multitudes in the lower world. They often fought each other in great numbers, in [i]war[/i], and he thrilled at the thought, at last finding a name for the unformed desire that had first driven him to wander after his rebirth. The one he had slain and his kin, who lived in a vault they knew as “home”, shrank from this violence - an impulse he could not comprehend - but had much wisdom and riches from a time when the world was brighter. They were numerous, and when they did not fear they were happy.

He pushed away this superfluous thought and sought instead the path the dead one had taken from “home”. Soon he found it, and then own steps traced it, fighting the pain with the force of his newfound will and the still newer craving. He thought of what he would find there, and of how he would wield it. His fingers cut deep trenches into the stone, not in tormented fervour now but in anticipation.

He thought of how he was going to make war.

[hr]

“But the surface, when did it go away?”

“It was a very, very long time ago, but it didn’t go away.” A pale hand stroked the small hairless scalp. “It’s just very far now, and it’s very dangerous to go there.”

“What’s up there? Did you see it?”

“No, I didn’t.” A soft laugh. “I’ve just heard this story many times. It’s beautiful there, like a whole cave full of glowmoss. Look, do you see these?”

Murmurs of assent.

“They’re called lhraka.” [i]Stars. The pale eyes.[/i] “They’re very high, in the highest vault of the surface, but all the glow comes from them, bright like gems and they never go dark.”

The young audience held its breath, largely in the effort of imagining such an unbelievable sight. In part, however, their uncharacteristic quietness was born of unease. Something lay heavy on the chamber today, and absorbed as they were by the tale they kept nervously tensing their ears and sniffing the air.

Try as they might, they had no hope of detecting the huge dark presence that watched them from the shadows of a transversal tunnel.

[i]He[/i] crouched in silence, his breathing easy but barely stirring the air. Sometimes he leaned to one side or another to better observe, and the slightest motion sent lacerating waves through his harrowed flesh. Nor was sitting still any better, for then the twisting spikes that grew out of his bones slowly tore the skin around themselves. Yet he had resolved to endure, and endure he did without lament.

The cavern at whose edge he skulked was not a large one, peripheral to the central vault inhabited by the tribe. Most often he had seen it used, as now, as a place of instruction for the young. Carved and painted figures lined the smoothed walls to aid in that. Many were simple but finely made, while a few reliefs held sparks of genuine artistry that even his eye, unsophisticated and disdainful of the abhuman as it was, could appreciate.

Presently the Pale One woman who spoke to her three children - he could smell the closeness of their blood from where he was - sat pointing at one of the larger carvings, a plain geometric piece schematic almost to the point of abstraction. Its concentric spheres represented, he had learned, the world they were in, or worlds rather, for the speaker had said that after some past calamity the surface had been cloven apart from the rest. He could make little sense of this, the notion seeming preposterous, but it had aided in giving a shape and a goal to the war he would make.

Many times he had sat by this cave already, and some more yet he would have to sit, in service of his war. Unknowingly, the mothers of the tribe had taught him as much as their offspring, and more still, for his eye and ears caught every word and gesture, weighing their use. The ragged membranes that replaced his lips when the evil boiled forth had mutely repeated every syllable, assimilating the speech of the Pale Ones, and he had found some wonder in the world of language that had opened to him.

New bitterness he had also learned in recognising the love that passed between child and parent, between brother and sister. The word [i]family[/i] had been acrid in his throat. He did not envy the tenderness of those he watched, for it repelled his pain-etched spirit as much as their mutant visages did, but he wistfully listened to the stories of ancient warriors and heroes standing shoulder to shoulder against great odds. Where was his family? Where were those of his flesh, of his blood, indeed of his corruption, with whom he could stand against the evil that devoured him? What justice was it that such wretched and misshapen creatures had brave brothers and sons, while he lurked alone and banished?

These and other thoughts fed the noxious spring of his hatred, and the only balm came when he heard talk of the stars, far in the upper world. Then he was reminded that he was not wholly alone, that somewhere a mother he had left long ago waited for him. She was vast and dark, with many pale eyes, and empty and cold, but he knew that he was hers.

He would fight his war to see her again.

[hr]

The stars were drowned in blood. It had sprayed, warm and vital, from the neck of a defender when a glaive had severed it, and the grooves of the carved globe with its dotted halo seemed to greedily drink it. It ran through the fabric of the layered worlds like a cosmic deluge.

The schooling chamber churned with battle. Nomad warriors painted with red clay surged into it from the outer tunnels, howling barbarously and brandishing weapons of brass and iron. They wore leather and lichen-fiber studded with light, forged plates, the fruit of a rudimentary science whose only goal was death. Fetishes and amulets of bone and teeth dangled at their hips and shoulders.

Against them, pressed to the mouth of the passage to the main vault, stood the tribe’s own combatants. The superiority of their arms was evident at a glance, for steel were their scales and cuirasses and steel were the blades they wielded, but even clearer was that they were far outclassed in skill and experience. Their armour sat askew, donned in haste, and their lunging strikes only rarely found their mark by virtue of their compact formation. Their foes danced out of their reach with practiced agility, stabbing swiftly, and pressed them back with the strength of their multitude.

From his hidden corner, he listened to the sounds of clashing flesh and metal, sensing the turns of the struggle without needing to see it. The wandering tribe had been easy to find and lure to the vault, hidden to them until now but suddenly alluring with its wealth. Neither side knew who was responsible for this twist of fortune, marvellous and baneful in turn, save that perhaps the nomads gave thanks to their macabre idols. So subtle had he been in laying feigned tracks, and so quiet his movements, that the reclusive keepers of knowledge had been caught wholly unawares by this sudden assault. Several of them were already dead.

He weighed the number. Not enough to weaken the side he had already elected to victory, but enough to impart on them the fear and urgency of doom. He had reflected for long on whether he should allow the nomads to slaughter the tribe and seize its riches, but though their ferocity was congenial to him, their prey had something more precious still. Fury and strength could always be found in abundance, but the wisdom of elder things would be of far greater use to his conquest.

Another blade spilled blood. Another body fell. It was time.

He leapt out from the shadows, immense and horrible, draped in bloodsoaked leather and flayed skin. He had waited for the pain to recede before setting his plan in motion and stood now unblemished, but the hard set of his lineaments was merciless like hewed stone, and his eye fulgurated dreadfully under his brow. Several on both sides dropped on their faces in terror at his mere sight, and then he stepped forth into the red-painted ranks and began to kill.

Long as the nomads’ history of warring had been, they had never faced such cruel strength concentrated in one body. His hands moved like a raging river as they snapped and crushed heads, spines, limbs, drinking in the agonised cries and stares of mute fright. Spears and glaives pierced him, but they were nothing before the echoes of the pain that lived in him even now, and only stirred the venom of his hate.

He drew his pain from within himself in rich handfuls and sowed it, delighting that even for a mere moment others would suffer as he did. His eye did not dim with boiling rage but shone ever brighter with this rancorous joy, until at last the nomads could no longer bear its glare and fled. They cast down their weapons and ran with great cries from this bloodsoaked fiend, and though the bile urged him to pursue, he held it in check and mastered it as he had his pain.

He turned instead to the ranks of the knowledge-keepers. They stood deathly still, hardly less terrified than their foes had been, sunken eyes wide and jaws slack at the monstrous carnage they had witnessed. Seeing the hellish giant turn towards them, their fright stirred them and they made to flee, but faster than they could move he held up a hand.

“Halt!” he said, softening the sharp command of his voice as much he could. Surprise that this monster spoke their tongue made the warriors hesitate, but it was the sheer force of his word that held them in place despite themselves. He avoided crossing their gaze with his, lest the depths of horror within break the spell.

“Do not fear! I am your friend,” he continued, wiping his hands on his cloak and holding them up in a sign of peace, “I am here to deliver you.”

These words did not have the same martial dominance of his first one, and he saw that they lacked its power. Many of the warriors stepped back, wary, and those in front held up their spears defensively. But they were not running, and that was enough.

“Who are you?” one of them, a leader from the bright trim on his armour, managed at last through a dry throat and numb lips.

Who was he? He thought of his incarnate pain, his silent journeys through the vaults and the sea, of the war he would make. He thought of the night and her many pale eyes.

“I am [i][b]Nolrakh.[/b][/i]” [i]The one from the stars.[/i] His eye caught the bloodied stone atlas, and for the first time he smiled. “I have come to mend the worlds.”