_{Content Warning: Topics Pertaining to Suicide}


Amidst the acrid and murky haze of the vale's lower atmosphere, sheet lightning blossomed and cast an ethereal luminescence through the murk as though daybreak had come once more over the otherwise gloom-shrouded confines of the lowlands. The illumination was all but soundless for its intensity.

A good omen, in Heinret's reckoning. Even with such light filtering through it, the industrial murk of the vale obscured vision beyond more than a few meters - but in the distance, the outlines and silhouettes of distant terrain, ridges, and buildings were faintly outlined in the gloom. For a moment it was as though the world had been lain bare, the shadows of its very bones cast in relief. The beleaguered vale-dweller put a hand to his brow and attempted to etch what he could of the distant delineations into his memory. They were being hunted, and the only advantage the Hemogeists had over their pursuers was their admittedly still tenuous and incomplete knowledge of the terrain.

The clarifying veil of ethereal light swiftly snapped away, and was soon followed by a sharp, attenuated column of crackling energy close by in the distance. The moment of edifying serenity was sundered by the sharpened, billowing roar of the direct strike - so close to the searing flash that had accompanied it that Heinret immediate knew that the worst had come to pass. A calamitous omen. Direct lightning strikes were rare in the vales outside the industrial settlements, where the massive sprawl would frequently aggregate differential charge at the lowest depths of the seething murk. There were no settlements or permanent structures out here though. For a direct strike to be possible at all-

Almost as if in response to the thunderous roar of the polluted gloom, an ear-splitting, bass warhorn bellowed from some monstrous engine, unseen through the smog but close enough that Heinret knew the end was fast approaching. He could not yet hear the monstrous footfalls of the towering mechanical deities over the air currents of the churning fog, but that was all the more terrifying. That meant they were moving slowly, likely formed up in a tightening net around the Hemogeists as they fled.

Only the Hemogeists' experience with evading the heightened senses of the god engines kept them from being instantly found out. The deific constructs had sight far superior to any mortal being, and could see a lone serf hiding in dense foliage from more than a kilometer away, even in the darkest passages of the thick smog in the lower atmosphere. Certain precautions and measures were necessary to evade them - which explained much of Heinret's unusual accoutrements. He wore a makeshift, patchwork bodyglove that had been pieced together from insulation foam and heating tape, stained to the color of soot and soaked in the blood of the god engines themselves - reactor coolant, procured from pools of industrial runoff that spilled over with the effluvia of the engines themselves, run down from high in the mountains where the noble Pilot Citadels presided to collect in the lowest, dimmest basins of the lowlands.

With a cowl and gas-mask patched over with more foam covering his head, Heinret looked nothing less than some monstrous trash-heap golem. The other members of the Hemogeists were much the same. A band of professional thieves who dared to encroach within the encampments of the god engine pilots whenever they dared respite in the lowlands, they had stolen their share of priceless relics and arcane artifacts from under the noses of the highland nobility for nearly a decade now. They had finally committed one of their profession's cardinal sins with their last effort however - they had stolen something far too precious. The god engines and their pilots had been driven to insensate frenzy when they had discovered its absence, immediately razing the entire settlement they had been encamped by until naught but cinders remained, and then they had begun to scour the surrounding wastes. The Hemogeists' handcrafted bodygloves were effective at concealing them from the gaze of the god engines themselves, but not from their mortal retinues - including skilled coursers who could could seemingly track the Hemogeists as they fled.

That was the only thing affording the Hemogeists even the faintest shred of hope. The god engines were moving slowly, dependent on their retinues to spot for them. If the geists could fool and waylay the coursers, escape would still be narrowly possible.

Heinret leapt from his the tall formation of boulders he had been perched on to try and spy outline of the pursuers, but the thunderous cacophony of their warhorn had all but given away their position: Too close. Heinret landed in a thick film of rancid muck boiling over with oily dreck and pollutants, where the other six members of the Hemogeists crouched both out of prudence and in utter terror.

"What's the point of it sounding off like that? It has to know we'd hear it!" Groused Arnswold, the bulkiest of the Hemogeists with so much bulk he seemed a corpulent ghoul in his own patchwork bodyglove. He was strong enough to bend steel bars and snap iron fixtures with his bare hands - whether by raw cultivated strength or some quirk of mutant physiology, none of the others knew, nor cared. One did not look too uneasily upon mutants, or the suggestion thereof, in the lowlands - rife with its polluted haze as it was. The immense man had a singular, practiced talent for moving silently in spite of his bulk, and snapping victim's necks from behind before so much as a whimper could escape their throat.

"They want us to hear them. They knew we'd pinpoint them from that lightning strike, so they're tryin' to rattle us. Make us panic and make a mistake. They know we're close." Growled Lukler. A wiry man with a spry build, who claimed to have once been an aspirant to the retinue of one of the highland households and armed with great insight into their strengths and weaknesses.

"We have to move now." Heinret hissed out. "I could see the crest of the Southern line after that bit o' glow. One good slip and we'll be away from here, but they'll figure that out soon if they haven't already. They might get desperate and charge in a line, odds no better than a toss they'd stumble right over us."

"We can't move fast enough with this damn relic! It was already practically coming to pieces when we took it!" Exclaimed Marnor, the group's ex-apprentice artificer. He had been on the verge of being sent offworld to study the secrets of the Machine God when scandal had ruined his prospects. Even with what little knowledge he had, on occasion he verged on the aspect of witchery with his insight of the devices they handled - such as the artifact he now cradled in a bundle sack of more insulating foam and heat tape. "If we're going to bolt, we have to stash it."

Stashing delicate machinery and components in the lowlands was scarcely any better than violently throwing it into a firepit. The tumultuously hideous weather patterns of the smog, flash-flooding, bizarre atmospheric anomalies and the shifting of the ruined earth itself could taint even the contents of buried watertight containers. The prospect of a ruined payout was still preferable to certain death at the hands of the god engines and their pilots however, and so the rest of the Hemogeists had already begun to cast their gaze about in search of a likely nook to cache their prize in.

"Not here." Heinret made a cutting motion with his hand and then jabbed at the sodden muck they crouched in. "This is a spillway. See the wear on these rocks and how mixed the filth is? The flow'll practically form rapids at this spot. We'll ditch it the first mo' we see a good spot."

The Hemogeists broke from their cover and ran, taking what care they could to baffle their trail and markings so the pilot coursers could not follow - though wearing their cumbersome bodygloves and with their pursuers within spitting distance, the Hemogeists' methods were more desperate than inspired, and rushed rather than expedient - and made all the slower for their need to preserve their haul. They slogged through the vale at an inconstant pace, making for high ground as far as they dared to get away from the spillway and find drier, stabler terrain to hide their prize in. Their faint lead grew fainter with every moment, until they could hear the distant shouts of the god engines - and the muffled impacts of the god engines' footfalls as they trudged through squalid mud.

"Nothin' that big has any business bein' that quiet!" Lukler spat.

"I beg to differ..." Arnswold murmurred. "Though speakin' of big things, check there." He jabbed ahead through the haze - to a warren of heaped, twisted foliage and mechanical scrap, all agglomerated and held together with packed and layered mud. A hovel for a local strain of mammalian mutants known as Ambuscades. It was said, in bygone lore, that when the world of Convergentiarum had still been hale and unbesmirched, the Ambuscades were opportunistic ambush predators who built modest lodges atop riverside hills, and would gather logs of wood to push downhill in order to stun or kill other small and medium-sized animals. Their mutant strains were different only in that they had become larger, more aggressive, and fearless of Humans.

There were signs of movement in the warren itself. The distant warhorn from the god engine early had doubtlessly unsettled them, though they had been so far distant at the time that they had not abandoned their hard-wrought lodge.

"Marnor, split. We'll cover your tracks and lead the god engines over the lodge." Heinret motioned to the bundle-laden man. "With luck the mutants will distract the Coursers if we unsettle them 'nuff."

The gambit was nothing fanciful. The Hemogeists simply scattered the remnants of Marnor's trail before then all turning and scrambling over the debris comprising the Ambuscade warren, clawing their way directly over its hump and over the other side. This served to unsettle the Ambuscades somewhat too well. One of the mutant animals reached straight up through the warren's roof with a limb of mattered fur oozing with lesions and ending with razor-serrated claws perfectly shaped for carving up tree stumps and also, conveniently, through Human bone. Easily as long and twice as thick as a Human leg, the mutant limb punched straight up through a sheet of iron scrap metal and then clasped at one of the passing Hemogeist's legs - lopping the appendage off with an effortless snap-clenched motion. None of the remaining geists slowed to assist their stricken member as they fell atop the heap of the warren's roof, howling in anguish as blood stained the edges of their bodyglove while the ambuscades worked themselves into a killing frenzy at the scent of fresh blood. The geists had their distraction.

The sounds of the shouting coursers and the footfalls of the god engines receded as they ran across the scene. The Hemogeists convened with Marnor another kilometer ahead, and seized the opportunity to fully baffle their trails before continuing to flee.

"We're not in the clear yet. We'll be out of the vale soon, more room to move in, but it'll be open terrain. Harder to shake them on, an' easier for them to follow us through." Lukler indicated. "They'll catch back up soon and we still need to stash the artifact. Heinret, this'll probably be our last chance to look ahead on high ground. See what there is to see."

Heinret nodded and scaled up a nearby metal pole jutting up from out of the terrain, perhaps what had once been some manner of waypoint marker or support for helpful device. Managing to balance himself precariously at its tip even in his bulky bodyglove, his scanned the horizon - and was graced with another omen.

The heavy, particulate-laden clouds of the lowlands parted ahead of them, revealing the unobstructed night sky of the Eastern mouth of vale. Unstrained starlight beamed down upon the Hemogeists like a noble maiden's smile, constellations twinkling like jewels.

Heinret gasped at the sight. It was something he had only seen once before in his life, when he was younger and more foolish still for it. He had a thought to creep through a window of a pilot citadel and make off with whatever he could carry. The highlands, set high above the polluted murk of the lower atmosphere, had seemed tranquil, serene, and utterly idyllic. He had been assured when he had asked innocuously that the cold and snow were not life-threatening, and security at a distance had seemed trivially lax compared to the citadel gates and bulwarks at the base of the mountain where the god engines came and went from their holds.

He had not made it far before the thin air had caused him to collapse, leaving him to stare breathless up at the unblemished night sky for hours before he had been found and consigned to indentriture for trespass. The memory of that breathlessness struck Heinret again in that moment as the stars glittered in his eyes. He could only stare on at them, awestruck.

His rapt attention was drawn, then, to several of those gleaming lights. They were moving, and far brighter still than the rest. With each passing moment they seemed to grow brighter and closer. At first, Heinret figured it was just some manner of illusion - but then, the other Hemogeists began to call out in startlement as they too saw the descending, luminous rain. It was no illusion. The stars were falling from the void.

Turning from mere pinpricks to long, scathing lines of fulminous radiance cutting across the horizon, the stars cut so close through the air that Heinret swore he could have reached up and plucked them out of the sky, if not for that the sound of their passage was but a dull, subdued churn of rushing, burning air. Out of reach. Each of them was wretched in a fiery aura of sputtering, wavering empyrean flames, casting off debris in jagged bursts that released plumes of iridescent plasma as they vented from their parent bodies. The cascade of stars curved and fell into the heavy mists as they broke apart in celestial fire, coming down from whence the Hemogeists had fled and their impacts with the earth casting an echoing groan across the whole of the vale.

For several moments, Heinret neither moved nor said anything, still agape and staring into the sky in disbelief. He was peripherally aware that the rest of the Hemogeists were shouting up at him, though their cries seemed muted and faint to him somehow. There was something about the sky. The sky he had only ever seen once before...

There.

Following in the wake of the preceeding shower of stars, a final ray of celestial light was curving down from on high - falling far shorter than the others had. There was not sputtering aura of flame about it. This was no flawed jewel of the heavens. This one was unmarred and perfect, not so much falling to the stained earth as alighting upon it. It was a sign.

An omen.

Already the haze of the lower atmosphere had begun to reassert itself, the oppressive gloom once more pouring back in to strangle the skyline and obscure it from view - but in those final moments, Heinret saw precisely where the immaculate star had fallen. "We have our way..." He muttered before hopping down from his perch.

The journey took the better part of half an hour. The others Heinret had neither needed nor bothered to persuade to follow, and they made no efforts to baffle their trail. The god engines would be entirely preoccupied with the shattered starfall that had rained practically on top of them - so the Hemogeists hoped without dwelling too long upon it. Their reason gave way to the portents of mythical phenomenon and legend. Come what may, they were now a part of it.

When they came upon it, the immaculate star had burnt away the dross of the polluted landscape, leaving only clean, scoured bedrock behind. There was no impact crater, quite. It was simply as though some great, invisible fist had swept away the filth and laid the star gently upon the eroded stone. Only the bedrock immediately beneath the fallen capsule had been dissolved to molten lava upon its arrival, and the raw kinetic force of its impact had pulverized it further into jagged, dusken glass that beamed with a dark, iridescent sheen - and which eerily terminated in a circle less than a meter in diameter. Three jagged spires of stone rose sharply in a wall at the base of which the construct of light had been lain, perhaps the remnants of a streamfall channel that had long been entirely buried in muck until the vessel had descended - for that was what the fallen star was as they approached.

A vessel - a silver casket, trimmed with gold and perhaps three by two meters wide, its sides emblazoned with two symbols. The first was the gold-textured impression of an unfamiliar, winged avian creature. Set directly atop it, as though its wings were an underscore, was a set of numerals.

The vessel was hollow, with a canopy of armaglass set over a bed of countless thin, nerve-like silvery tendrils. The canopy was cast open. No trace of its contents was evidenced - but the mud-encrusted tracks of several sets of footprints across the otherwise pristine stone, leading back the same way the Hemogeists had come, was telling. Another party had beaten them here, taken the contents of the vessel, and then immediately set off in direction of where the rest of the star shower had fallen upon the vale. Heinret felt a stab of envious annoyance at having been robbed of some grandiose, imagined destiny awaiting him - them - here.

Marnor pushed passed Heinret to collapse on his knees in front of the vessel, where he muttered something most peculiar and made an alien gesture with his hands.

_{"Omnissiah, I understand! The Machine Spirit guards the Knowledge of the Ancients! This is one of your universal truths! I accept your call! I will heed this test!"}

"What are you babbling about?" Arnswold demanded as he came up behind the kneeling Marnor. "What is this thing? Is it valuable? Out with it!"

"Valuable - does not begin..." Marnor stuttered for a moment, but composed himself before standing and peering with a more discerning eye at the vessel. "This - friends, this can only be Archeotech. Its value is incalculable. You could buy bondsmanship - no, you could buy a full Barony with this alone. Its contents, whatever they were - that would be worth entire worlds."

"Yeah, well, it seems like whatever lucky bastard was chasing us is about to lay their noble-ass mitts on it then!" Scoffed Lukler as he eyed the vessel, equally calculating as he was enraptured by its make. "If I were the same deadites who found this thing after seeing the stars fall, I'd be thinking all of them probably contain treasure just like whatever they took from this." He gestured at the vessel, and then to the muddy tracks. "Only they don't know about the god engines. They're thinkin' they're gonna be the first ones to get all the treasure from the heavens, but it's gonna be the lord pilots get and win everything again and blow everyone that crosses them to pieces. Probably including these sorry bastards."

Marnor had approached the vessel more closely now, though still he did not touch it. "Found an interface here." He announced, pointing to the rim of the vessel - where there was a crystalflex pict-screen. There were no evident manual controls of any sort, and the pict-screen was flashing with obvious alarms and alerts, though purely in unhelpfully indecipherable symbols. "Not seeing much of use here. Seeing something that might reseal the canopy, probably a dummy fail-safe. I would need to take this apart to tell its real worth."

Arnswold snorted. "Well I can tell you right now, even I'm not strong enough to move something like this. We'd have to come back with a gantry."

"...And I don't think we're gonna get the chance either way, check that." Lukler pointed up towards the jagged edges of the three stone spines rising behind the vessel. From between the sharpened cracks, rancid, fluid ooze was beginning to rapidly dribble over the edges and splatter along the edges of the glassy impact point. With every passing moment, the flow of muck grew almost imperceptibly more voluminous. "This place is gonna be sunk in dross again in just a few hours, especially if this was actually a streamfall channel like I think these raised stones are suggesting."

_{"...Ritual honors the machine spirit..."} Marnor muttered, and before anybody could stop him, he hefted the crude sack of insulation foam he had been carrying and, ever so gently, laid it upon the bed of silver tendrils within the vessel.

"What are you doing?" Heinret demanded as the others uttered a mixture of invectives, dismay, and halfway coherent threats.

"We still need to stash our prize. This Archeotech is about the only thing that can keep its contents uncontaminated by outside factors - and it is about to get buried in several tons of running mud and dreck. Nobody is going to be able to find it later except for us." Marnor explained. "We seal this up, split and make a clean break, wait for the heat to die down, and then regroup to dig up our prize."

"Dig it up? You cracked?" Arnswold growled. "You just said it yourself! TONS of fucking runoff! We'd need a whole damn operations crew for that!"

"We'd need that just to move the vessel anyway." Heinret remarked, one hand poised over his gas mask's rebreather in contemplation. "You were serious when you said we'd be able to buy a Barony with this?"

"At least a Barony." Marnor agreed. "Not to mention our prize itself of course."

"I think you're all forgetting that a whole bunch of Ambull shit is also happening not far away?" Arnswold spat. "We have NO idea what else has been discovered! It might make this precious little casket worthless in comparison!"

"Either that or somebody might be missin' a piece of a set and lookin' for it. Making it more valuable, even if empty." Heinret pointed out. "Either way, this buys us time to get more information on what this is and what it's really worth, along with the trinket we took. And if it's worth even a fraction what you're suggestin'..." He nodded to Marnor. "...Then it'll be worth galling a crew into helping us fetch it back later. This is an unexpected good turn, we can't be wasting it. Seal it."

Marnor nodded and pressed a sigil on the vessel's pict-screen. _{"Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension. Comprehension is the Key to all Things."} He subvocalized as the vessel seemed to shift upon itself. The armaglass canopy descended and encapsulated the makeshift foam sack with a rush of atmosphere - just in time for a thick glob of slime to shoot over the edge of one of the rock spines above it and splatter across the armaglass surface.

"Time to go." Lukler said, taking several performative steps back while making a sweeping gesture with his arms. "The floodtime comes."

Lukler was true to his promise. Less than ten minutes later, the increasingly violent spillage of unsettled ravine mud and sediment had completely buried the sealed vessel, and a river of mountain runoff once again flowed between the raised tips of the stony spires, only now just barely above the tainted waterline.



"...They don't even cry!" Murmured Claraine as she pinched at the cheek of toddler swaddled in her arms - or at least she tried to. The impassive child's face and their skin may as well have been cast from adamantine for all the give it seemed to have beneath Claraine's fingers, somehow. The child's expression, set in the gaze of their glacial steely-colored eyes, was utterly placid in spite of their circumstances and surroundings. The nomads had attempted to fit the toddler with a mask and filter to spare it the worst degradations of raw exposure to the lower atmosphere's caustic particulates, but the bare-headed babe in a fit of fussy pique had taken the sturdy plasflex mask and simply pulled it apart with both of their comically smaller hands. Its exposure to the unfiltered atmosphere did not seem to be ruining its vigorous disposition however, at least yet. The child was also far, far heavier than they looked at first glance - only Claraine, a mutant with a second set of ears, a grotesquely distended gut, and bulging, cancerous musculature could heft them at all - fittingly, as the nomads had then promptly dismissed the child itself as some form of mutant grown by the ornate vessel they had found it in. Its odd temperament, its weight, its raw physical strength and apparent resilience, and its complete lack of genitalia were all components of mutanthood - even if it was unheard of to see all of those features at once, and in a specimen that was otherwise so seemingly unblemished and unbowed by the twisted anatomical capriciousness of mutation. Which could only mean the child had been fashioned by the pilot lords.

"Those other vessels what fell had better not ALSO hold more freakish brats." Grumbled Tenket, the nomad leader, a man in his Summer years who through the ravages of the polluted atmosphere passed readily for one nearly twice his actual age. The treated, waterproofed, and oil-repelling fabric of his ragged outfit was unremarkable to those of his peers, the only sign of his status being the ritual notches gouged off the tips of his ears, adorned with small, unremarkable rings of various metals.

The nomad band, numbering perhaps twenty or so individuals of various stock, had hastily extricated the child from its vessel and moved on nearly as swiftly as they had rushed to the starfallen vessel that had contained them. They had counted more than a dozen other fallen stars when the smog had parted, and as their leader had remarked, the more time they spent gawking and gibbering over one find, the less time they had to find the next one before somebody else beat them to it.

"I've got a feeling if we can't ransom this one, it won't even be good for eating." Claraine declared. "Skin alone is so hard our teeth'd snap on it."

"There's the value right there then, idiot girl!" Tenket scoffed. "We can sew ourselves up a sturdy poncho from its skin! Though I'll still be real and proper mad if all we get out of all this mucking with these voidcraft is some new cloths. Everybody git! Somebody else was bound to have seen them fall, we've gotten git right on them!"

Tenket was so preoccupied with driving the band of nomads and the excitement of their new pursuit on that he did not even realize that the band's scouts were overdue by more than ten minutes - and so it came as a complete surprise when the gods themselves and their retinue of bondsmen fell upon them.

The bondsmen appeared first, all of them wearing thick leather and fur greatcoats over form-fitting plasflex bodygloves trimmed in red and emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos - a black-iron tree growing blades as its fruit, set within the center of a cogwheel on a starburst-patterned plaque crossed by a pair of tridents. Each of the bondsmen was armed with flintlock rifles at a glance, though careful examination would reveal the artifice of the pilot houses augmenting them, ornate bronze fittings running the length of the weapon to form a curious choke at their ends and encasing a ribbed power-nodule directly integrated into the body foreward of the trigger-guard. Most of the nomads knew from simple exposure before that these deceptively antiquated rifles were more powerful than even the best handheld las-projector, emitting bursts of bewildering ball-lightning. The maneuver was not so much well-executed as it was simply sudden and without warning, with more than two dozen of the bondsmen rapidly charging out of the fog, each of them covering one of the nomads in turn. All of them were dead silent, forgoing the necessity of issuing demands or shouting imperatives. That was the task of another.

A scant second after the first bondsman had charged from the thick obscurity of the fog to accost the nomads, the earth itself had begun to rumble, and very close by, the sound of earth and soil being upheaved and displaced by rapidly sequential, massive footfalls pounded louder than any wardrum and accompanied by the blaring of four tremendous, bass warhorn blasts that seemed to liquefy the innards of the unprepared nomadic band with their intensity. The raw volume and abruptness of the booming horn-calls forced several of the nomads to their hands and knees almost immediately due to the disorientation of the assault to their senses.

Charging headlong out of the fog came four tremendous figures. The smaller three, each of them six meters tall, were metal giants with adamantium limbs, armored joints, and an exaggerated hunchbacked profile that saw their mechanical skulls affixed to encapsulated hoods set in the center of their chests rather than atop their shoulders - where instead sat swivel-mounted autocannons. Each of their massive arms ended with a gargantuan weapon of such excessively destructive means that it could only be concluded they had been forged to slay others of their own kind. Massive chainblades longer and thicker than even the doughtiest mutant complimenting massive double-barreled meltacannons that hummed with ominous intensity. The most terrifying aspect of the countenance of the three leading figures was not their vast armored frames or their imposing weaponry, but the manner in which they moved. Their gait, the subtle twist and articulation of each joint, the way in which their heads and optics veered about in their cradles and their feet were set and poised as they braced - all was poised at the nadir of a valley set between the peaks of wholesome life and of unhinged imagination, both impossibly familiar and alive, and yet freakishly foreign and alien at once. Each of the giants was similarly festooned with banners and shield emblems all emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos, which they somehow managed to bear with some mechanically emulated semblance of perverse pride.

Looming beyond and above its three smaller giants came their similarly shaped but proportionally more massive superior, an engine reigning nine meters in height and nearly as wide. In spite of its more heavily armored frame and bulk, its motions were nearly as mimetically uncanny as those of its smaller counterparts - and it managed to halt the momentum of its charge with almost impossible ease, a disgusting sort of almost-mammalian counterbalancing motion evidenced in its stride.

The God Engines of the Pilot Knights.

Scarcely had the air-sundering warhorns ceased bellowing than the massive Questoris-pattern Knight roared with its warhorn once more, seeming to leer down at the cornered nomads. Almost as if by its unseen imperative, two of the accompanying Armiger-pattern Knights opened fire with the autocannons mounted atop their frames, lines of fire stitching up and around the circular clutch the nomads had huddled into with paralytic fear and disorientation in a mercilessly overdone show of intimidation - with several stray rounds catching fringe members of the group, their bodies bursting into grisly, visceral pieces as the massive autocannon rounds rated to punch through tank armor tore through them instead. A few of the nomads who had not completely abandoned their senses rose from their circle as if to break away and run - only to be met by the surrounding bondsmen, Galvanic rifles raised to the nomads' heads. No warning was issued to those who defied the evident will of the Knights. Those who even dared to suggest they might attempt flight with their demeanor were shot at nearly point-blank range, explosive bolts of crackling energy flash-vaporizing flesh and bone into runny, molten rudiments of organic frailty that billowed with massive plumes of steam as they fell into the lowland muck.

The odd dozen survivors understood the message: Move and die.

Amongst their number, the starfallen child was sat up, kneels folded and arms set atop them. It silently examined the massive Knight engines with curious and unworried eyes.

Several minutes passed as the massive Questoris Knight settled, braced and locked its limbs and joints in place, and went through some manner of cyclic signaling ritual where it crooned with ghostly vox-hails. Eventually its motions ceased entirely, its joints hissing with finality as a hatch along the upper ridge of its hunched, armored framed unfurled with mechanical slickness, and the Pilot Knight emerged from the confines of their engine. One of the Armigers side-stepped with impossibly articulated ease, and then knelt down and permitted the smaller figure to climb down a set of runs from the Questoris frame onto it before leaping in a practiced fashion from its crouched back, onto frame of its thermal lance and then down into the wet sediment below.


Austean Aienbek Derecho, Count of Shadowgate, Knight Scion Uhlan of the Second Noble Lance serving at the pleasure of the High King of Convergentiarum, was wroth in his displeasure.

He was a patrician in his golden autumnal years - technically older still than the leader of the filthy nomadic dregs he now confronted, though blessed by habitation of the blessed mountain arcologies and augmented with extensive bionics as he was, he could have easily been mistaken for a man in his early thirties, with thick and silken black hair, two sunken bionic optical implants that shivered in their cradles as he cast his gaze between the individual specimens in the pack of thieves he had caught, and skin that was practically ashen in coloration. He wore custom-fitted carapace armor embellished with the crest of his House and festooned with his many superfluous honors, seals, and medals - few of which he cared for having earned, but which the strict, tyrannical protocol of the Royal court instructed that he should bear at all times while in a public setting outside of the chambers of his own estate or within his own court. It was measures such as those very protocols that separated the Count and his peers from the filthy, weak, licentious crowds of serfs and peasantry who wallowed in the lowlands. Honor, pride, and valor through fealty and adherence to a higher order and code. The very fundament and firmament of culture and society, with which the Nobles reigning under the High King were charged with governing and preserving.

So that wretched, inbred, half-witted ingrates would dare to besmirch his repute, and impinge upon the very dignity of his rule, was something that could not be tolerated. Those who threatened the legacy of enlightened noble rule and enrichment of the masses had to be met with the most forcefully proportionate of responses. The fate of these thieves was already sealed - it was simply a matter of extracting truth and satisfaction out of them before dealing with them.

"Which of you churlish wretches..." Derecho snarled imperiously down at the group as he clasped he hands behind his back, speaking in the tongue of the low-Convene - a dialect of what would later come to be known as Low Gothic. "...speaks for you all?"

"That would be me, mi'lord." Tenket provided. His voice was low and hushed from fear, but clear enough nonetheless.

"Stand." Derecho demanded. Tenket obeyed, clambering onto his feet to stand before the Knight Pilot - only for the Count to viciously bring one of his fists around to viciously backhand the decrepit nomad across the face, causing him to almost comically pinwheel about on his feet before falling to the ground again. The Count casually leapt over Tenket's prone form, pivoting around with eerie precision on the slick, muddy surface of the terrain and transferring the momentum of their maneuvering into a brutal kick delivered to Tenket's ribs.

"What do you suppose you are doing, thief? I did not give you leave to rest. Stand at once." Derecho spat. Tenket, winded and with their mind practically roiling with panic, could scarcely even contemplate compliance with the demand.

"Such impudence! Far too sluggardly! Bondsman." The Count gesticulated to the nearest Bondsman, who snapped to attention with parade-precision. "I charge you to express the extent of my displeasure. Make an example of..." The Count waved a carapace-armored finger across the heads of the assembled nomads even as Tenket struggled to breath and right himself so he could stand.

"...That one." The Counter's finger alighted on a young, teenaged boy amongst their ranks. The bondsman immediately snapped their rifle back up and fired, a crackling sphere of ball-lightning briefly charging the youth with an aura of surging radiance that poured through his veins and organs, visible even from beneath his rags, before his chest cavity imploded. Bones, tissue, and interstitial fluid were all transmuted into rapidly flash-vaporizing, wine-colored slop that sprayed and slopped out from the ruined carcass across the shrieking faces and countenances of the remaining nomads.

The placid child finally made an expression - their lips quirked in the faintest intimation of a frown as they flicked a globule of oozing, molten gore from their bare chest. They did not otherwise move. The Count, focused entirely on Tenket once more, took no notice of the toddler's abnormal behavior and countenance.

"Do you see, you laggardly, putrid excuse of a fool? When I issue an imperative, I expect it to be followed with that exacting standard of immediacy. Commendable responsiveness, bondsman." The Count nodded ever so faintly at the masked bondsman, who simply snapped a smart salute and stood at attention once more without uttering a single word. Tenket, pure, uncomprehending horror dawning upon his face, finally managed to stagger to an upright position roughly in front of the Count once more.

"Now that I seemingly have your attention, thief," Derecho began, "I instruct you to tell me for what purpose you saw fit to abscond with my property, how you learned of its existence, who provided you with the necessary information with which to perform your heist, and of course to effectuate its immediate return to my personage or else in the alternative prepare adequate remuneration for its loss with the sum totality of your worthless life."

"...Stole? You think I-"

"That one." Derecho pointed at an older woman in the crowd. The bondsman's rifle snapped up immediately once more, the sharpened, whining crackle of its discharge interspersed with terrified screams and wails of the victimized nomads as another one of their number was reducing to a molten, ruinous mound of vaguely humanoid shape.

"I will brook no deceit from the likes of you." Derecho remarked briskly. "I will now reiterate my imperatives for your benefit. I instruct you to deliver unto me a full accounting and explanation on the aims of your benighted mind with particularity towards how and by what means you discovered the existence of, and arranged to pilfer, my property. You will reveal the identity of the conspirator who devised this plan, having cast you in the role of their tool, evidenced by your clear inability to have prepared a campaign towards such an end or with such methodology save for the provision of an educated mind."

"...The child just fell from the sky, mi'lord. In some manner of voidcraft, mebbe a savior pod of some kind?" Tenket attempted with a pleading tone, gesticulating directly at the serenely countenance child sat amid the terrified and sobbing nomads. "We did figure it was probably the work of one of some nobility, though I swear we did not know it was yours! We was just there when the pod came down, we fished this one out and came right this way looking to loot the rest what had fallen!"

Count Derecho arched a single skeptical brow, his orbital ridge rising above the narrow port of his bionic eyes. "You stole a child...from the debris that made planetfall some time ago?"

"Yes, mi'lord! I confess! We would've stripped the pod down for parts, if'n we hadn't thought we needed to rush and loot the rest of them as quick as quick."

Derecho turned his gaze finally to the child, giving them an unimpressed appraisal for several moments before turning their attention back to Tenket. "...Mildly interesting if true. How does this pertain to my stolen property, precisely?"

Tenket gaped with such genuinely confused bewilderment that there was simply no possibility any rational person would not have immediatedly determined he had no idea what was going on. The Count observed it with the interest of a man dissecting a small amphibian while it was still alive, and then gestured at the child without looking back at them.

There was another immediate snapping discharge, which blew the odd child's right arm into dilute vapor and visceral mist, slamming the rest of their body directly down into the ground from the force of the impact and spraying Claraine's despairing face with a thick sheet of blood.

The confrontation only lasted until there were no more intact bodies for the Count's bondsmen to shoot at, save for Tenket himself. The Baron rolled his bionic eyes in his skull with and, with a nigh theatrical sigh, ordered Tenket bound and prepared for transport to the Highland Shadowgate Arcology for more intensive interrogation.

Before the Count moved to ascend the kneeling Armiger and board the Questoris Knight once more, one of his bondsmen signaled for permission to speak. The Count reversed his motion and nodded expectantly.

"My liege. The hemisphere core was not amongst their belongings. Given its delicate state, it must have been handed off to the mastermind shortly after they absconded with it, elsewise it would very shortly deteriorate to uselessness in the present environs." The bondsman gestured to the dense haze of atmospheric pollutants around them. "The only viable alternative would be for them to have sequestered it in some remote cache. Shall we commence an exhaustive search of the vale?"

Derecho gave the suggestion serious consideration. It was not lost on him that if the hemisphere core had been stashed in whatever crude dead drop the savages had been able to devise, it was already on the verge of being lost forever. His immediate bondsmen could not be faulted for being unable to find it in time across the vast span of perpetually fog-enshrouded wilderness, and the bondsmen who had originally failed to safeguard it had already paid for their negligence with their lives. Dedicating manpower to such a forlorn task would simply be a waste. He shook his head. "No, though the suggestion is prudent. The assumption that it was handed off to the true culprit is the most likely eventuality. We shall return to Shadowgate at once and commence a purge of the court."

The Count mounted up and entered the Knight Questoris, and several minutes later once it had returned to full animation, it and its lance of Armigers hastened away through the murk of the lowlands while the bondsmen formed up into a single-file line and began the considerably slower march back in the same direction - leaving the twenty-odd group of partially vaporized bodies behind in an abandoned heap.



"Well now. Looks like we missed the show." Calaston crooned as he and his two lackeys came across the corpse pile hours later. Unusually finely adorned for a lowlander, he wore a short, fluid-sloughing gown and poncho over a bodyglove of indifferent patchwork quality that had nonetheless once been of the same make as those worn by Derecho's bondsmen. The balding head beneath his high-quality gas-mask with its built-in vox earpiece still bore long, oily strands of dark hair hung in a wide crown around his skull.

"Bodies have already turned and looks like their shit got rifled through pretty thoroughly." His first lackey Ferdrank, an obese man with a wide-brimmed rain-hat reported after peering over the heap with an appraising eye.

The second lackey, Tatronda, pulled up her own gas-mask with a motion of habitual practice and inhaled deeply before setting it back in place. "Knights were here. At least a lance. Think they must've had bonders with 'em as well, or at least a couple of guys with galvanics. Can't have been too long ago, maybe a few hours."

"Wowie. Not often you see shitheels like this bunch getting a full lance called down on them." Calaston whistled. "<Ill omened stars>." He spun off an abrupt, somewhat spurious phrase in the highland tongue that would later come to be recognized as High Gothic. "Guess that light show we saw from earlier might've drawn 'em here, gotten them killed for whatever it was about."

"You really think the nobles were behind the lights, boss?" Ferdrank asked.

Calaston shrugged. "Maybe. Hardly matters now. We shouldn't stick around too long, there'll be others coming here same as we did. <Similar minds, similar actions.>"

All three of them startled as the pile of corpses shifted abruptly. "Ah - whoops, looks like I called it too soon boss!" Ferdrank chortled. "Maybe somebody still has enough of a pulse for us to take it from them?"

"You'll be wantin' some quick fieldwork boss?" Tatronda asked as she reached into one of her belt-pouches and produced a plasflex-wrapped bag of worn surgical tools as Ferdrank started to dig through the pile, handily managing to drag dismembered limbs and fused segments molten viscera and hurl them away one piece at a time. "Can't promise the organs will keep, better to do this sort of thing in a sealed environ all clean-like, but I can probably get one or two good bits out of them."

"Depends. First let's see if - ah! Profit!" Calaston steepled his hands together with a smile as Ferdrank managed to pull a still-writhing body completely stained with muck and gore out of the heap. They looked to be a completely bald pre-adolescent teenager, though much more than that even he could not quite discern through all the filth. There were no evident injuries or missing bits at any rate. "<Bad news and good news>, lovely. This one is healthy enough for us to march back home!" He laughed as Ferdrank swore and dropped the youth abruptly.

"Little shitheel is a lot heavier than they look." Ferdrank hissed. "You're damn right we're marching them back! No way you could pay me to haul this fucker, they must have been feeding 'em rockcrete paste."

"You have a name, kid?" Tatronda asked slyly as they produced a switchblade with a wavering sleight of hand, running the tip of the blade across their filth-laden cheek as they stood up. The youth did not answer or move, simply standing up and peering with discernment between each member of the trio and completely failing to react to the knife being dragged across their skin. Tatronda frowned beneath her filter mask.

"Guess your name is either gonna be food or marks, stinky." Tatronda muttered darkly as she rounded behind the filth-stained youth and prodded at their back with her dagger.

"<No time to lose.> Let's get moving." Calaston gestured broadly into the softening haze of fog leading Westward into the vale proper - from where Compunctio, the system's star, shone as day broke, even if only to ever-so-briefly lighten the thick perpetual murk of the lowland and increase how far one could see by a few meters.


"Gotta admit, even by our standards, little mutie here is a strange one." Tatronda remarked.

Much later, with the trio having led the youth back to their hideout, several increasingly peculiar things had arisen. It was set in a condemned warehouse in the intermediary ring of the squalid industrial city of Dolor. Technically not condemned in fact, merely labeled as such due to a few well-placed bribes and favors, it was conveniently located to a logistics hub with access to the other city rings where they could rub shoulders with all their different breeds of clientele. The hideout accordingly was well-lit and furnished if not particularly clean, owing to the gang's lackadaisical hygienic priorities. It had atmospheric filtering, airtight seals, and cold running water, which was easily a step up as far as accommodations went anywhere below the highland realms.

Once they had hosed the youth down with ditch-water, they had immediately discerned, very clearly, that they had no genitalia. If not for their lack of hair, they would have appeared almost bewilderingly androgynous.

When the slavers had tried to place restraints on them, the youth had simply snapped them off. First the economic Plastek ties, and then steel cord, and then finally a set of plasteel manacles that had been made specifically to keep inhumanly strong mutants bound up. Then the trio had attempted to brand the youth with a chattel-mark, only for the superheated brand to simply fail to make any lasting marks on their skin. The youth had not resisted in any way while they tried to bind and brand it, merely breaking through each restraint in turn with casual motion. It had appeared momentarily interested in breaking the plasteel manacles down even further and peering into the locking mechanism, but had cast the twisted metal away after only a few moments. The young figure had otherwise been wholly compliant and passive, allowing the trio to poke and prod at them and to otherwise guide it around without complaint. The skin where the brand had been pressed had not so much as even tanned from the intense heat, and the naked figure had not even seemed to react disfavorably to the attempt beyond treating the slavers with an unimpressed frown.

...For additionally, by all determination, the youth was seemingly mute.

"Maybe catatonic?" Tatronda suggested as she casually lobbed a throwing knife directly at the figure's head, only for the weapon to bounce off, its tip slightly deformed from the impact. The youth simply continued to placidly stare at them in response. "You can see this kind of behavior from certain boys and girls who get passed around a bit too much."

"Or from people who survive a lot of explosive blasts. Soldiers and miners and the like." Ferdrank contributed, munching on on algae bar. After a moment of thought, they offered it to the naked figure - who simply stared at the bar for a moment with a blank expression, before reaching out and peeling away the wrapper to peer at the printed script on it.

"...That doesn't read catatonic to me. That reads simple. Simple as mud." Calaston shook their head. "Too dumb for speech and probably can't understand it either. Hey idiot, a grenade is about to blow your ass off! <Get fucked!>" The youth did not react at all beyond offering the algae bar's wrapper back to Ferdrank, who bemusedly took it.

"Ok. Well. Can't chain them to anything, they'll just get up and walk away. Bet they probably won't be able to climb out of the hole though."

"Only one way to find out. <Let's give it our best shot.>" Calaston agreed. "We can all get drunk and sleep on what we want to do with it. Pretty sure this little shit is some pilot lord vanity project, that or some Mechanicum experiment. Reeks of their bullshit, albeit with less metal bits than usual. <Religion is poison.> That means it might be worth some marks to the right person."

"Think maybe we could train them to respond to commands, like a dog?" Ferdrank attempted to wave the bar wrapper in front of the youth's face enticingly. The figure simply stared at them.

"I think it has about as much chance of being able to understand commands as boss here has of teaching it how to speak the Highland Tongue." Tatronda drawled as she collapsed in a nearby chair.

"Hey! I resent that!" Calaston quipped back. "My affinity for the Highland tongue is so refined that I can legitimately do business with the nobility! <Talent without peerage! I could teach this queer little ploin how to dance, juggle, and jump through hoops too if I felt like it!>" He rattled off the high tongue segue to and for nobody in particular other than himself and his own vanity, though the youth, for a moment, had cast a cool look of appraisal in the slaver's direction as he did so.

"Sure, whatever that all meant." Tatronda groaned. "Last one to call has to chuck this heavy little twit down the hole, one two three not it."

"<Not it.>" Calaston remarked expeditiously in the high tongue once more.

"Not- shit." Ferdrank swore.

The first half of the job proved reasonably easy. Ferdrank simply led the naked youth by the hand towards the edge of the hole that had been knocked in the floor of one of the second floor rooms. When it came to actually throwing them down the hole, things became difficult - as the rotund slaver, even with his considerable mass and muscles, was unable to make the figure budge in the direct of the hole itself once at its lip. Evidently their passivity was not so pronounced that they were going to let themselves be pushed down.

"Fuck me, did you get even heavier?" Ferdrank squinted at the youth with exasperation. "Am I going to have to get a damn shock maul to knock you in with? Come on, dumbo, I don't have time for this today! Could you please just jump in the damn hole?"

Much to Ferdrank's surprise, their plaintive request worked, as the naked youth then calmly proceeded to hop backwards straight down the hole. Startled, Ferdrank hesitated for a moment, turning what had just happened over in their head for a few moments. "...It must have picked up on my tone." He muttered to himself as he left the room.


Time passed. As they had intended to do, the trio of slavers managed to drink themselves to stupor and completely forget about the peculiar oddity they had picked up in the vale wilderness earlier. Days passed by, and inside the enclosed, sealed first-floor storage annex the hole dropped down into, several ill-fortuned future slaves and indentured servants subsisted on dripping water from a single tap left slightly running alongside small insects and vermin that habitually made the mistake of finding their way into the annex.

From the moment the youth had appeared amongst their number, the other slaves had immediately taken an intense disliking to it - its peculiar, androgynous anatomy, its disheartening lack of anything resembling so much as a skin blemish, and the fact that it was not bound in the fashion as most of them were, and also most damningly that it and it alone the slavers had seemingly elected not to brand with their chattel mark.

What made it all the more infuriating, was that the youth did not appear to desire any form of companionship or connection with any of them. After simply standing beneath the hole above for several minutes, the strange youth had simply walked over to the nearest wall, sat down with their back to it, and calmly watched the other slaves. Day in, day out, scarcely moving save to crane their head and flick their eyes from one end of the annex to the other. They did not ever approach the tap to eek out precious droplets of hydration, and they did not move to challenge any of the others over the privilege to hunt and consume the various vermin that found their way inside. The youth simply sat, and observed. It unsettled the others who, in the confines of the annex, had no means to escape the dreadful sense of bareness, of vulnerability they felt as the strange figure's penetrating stare fell upon them.

It only took a few days for Berginanda to decide enough was enough. The slave was naturally tall for his age, was still young and fit, and had been completely forgotten about by the slavers themselves since they had abducted him more than seven standard months ago. It had not taken long for Berginanda to prop himself up as the petty, insufferable king of the dismal annex, and he had ruled it with coercive brutality. The strange youth that had jumped down the hole displeased the slave king. They did not eat or drink, robbing the self-declared petty king of half his coercive influence, and even worse - they said nothing back to Berginanda at all, ever. Not in protest, not to insult or taunt him as some other slaves used to do, and not in response when Berginanda demanded they answer.

Having decided it was time to teach the new mutant slave a lesson about their place down in the annex, Berginanda stalked across the room to where the strange youth sat.

"You miserable waste of skin." Berginanda scowled. "I don't care if you're dumb or mute, when I talk to you I expect you to show me some respect, and it's clear I'm going to have to teach you some." He reached out with both arms to grab at the sitting figure.

The youth, in that moment, stood up - and Berginanda felt suddenly very terribly small. Not merely compared to the youth, who had seemingly grown substantially in the few days they had been in the annex and seemingly was just as tall as Berginanda himself, but also simply from the abrupt immensity of their presence. It was as though Berginanda were suddenly reaching towards some preening predator rather than naked, unarmed slave. Berginanda did not relent, recognizing defiance when he saw it and knowing he could not save face unless he acted.

Then, with a calm motion, the tall, androgynous figure reached out and gripped Berginanda by the right side as he moved to grapple the newcomer. With an imperceptible adjustment of their grip, they fractured Berginanda's arm.

Berginanda immediately howled with pain, tears welling in his eyes as he began to hyperventilate and gasp for breath. He instinctively tried to pull himself away from the figure's grip, but it was like trying to pull plasteel rods out of rockcrete. Their grasp was as immovable and uncaring as the mountains. Shivering with pain, Berginanda all but collapsed on the spot, still sobbing and choking back spit and snot, with their right arm still gripped tightly by the figure.

For several long moments the androgynous figure simply stared and watched as Berginanda writhed, anguished, in their grip. Other slaves in the annex looked on with some mixture of relief and trepidation. The petty tyrant was being dethroned - but perhaps they were about to be replaced by something even worse. At least Berginanda was Human.

...but then, with the faintest of gestures, the androgynous figure released Berginanda's arm, allowing the man to stumble back, still gaping. No longer in pain however - for to Berginanda's own astonishment, his forearm, which he had sworn the mutant had fractured and had been bent at nearly a full ninety-degree angle, was whole once more. The figure had simply gently twisted his forearm back into the correct orientation, and as they released Berginanda his bones had seemingly been remade whole. Even the pain was rapidly receding - though the memory of it would linger.

"Witch! Mutant freak!" Berginanda shouted, though now his tone was one of fear rather than denigration. The androgynous figure simply stared, and after several long moments, simply sat back down once more while Berginanda skulked away in confused shame.

Another several days passed. Actual hair emerged and grew at an explosive rate from the seeming mutant's scalp - long, black, wavy hair. By the third day is reached down to their shoulders. By then, the slavers returned.

The sliding cargo door set against on end of the annex was opened, and both Calaston and Ferdrank marched in. Raising an eyebrow, Calaston gestured towards the androgynous figure. "Looks like they've hit their mutant growth spurt. Imagine if we had let them have actually food? Their head would be scraping the ceiling. <Inconceivable!>"

"You sure about using this one, boss? We couldn't even brand them." Ferdrank whined.

"<Sure as sure.> Yes. That's the best part. Just look at their skin. It's fucking flawless, no brand will help sell it for this. Not even going to need a wig now. Making me feel a little self-conscious." Calaston rubbed with some awkwardly at his own balding cranium, from which only a few tresses of hair still hung around the ridged. "Well? Come on, dummy, we've not got all day." He began to reach for the shock maul he had brought with him to goad the slaves with, but much to his relief the androgynous slave - who was now the same height as Calaston himself and in no way mistakable for a mere child - moved to follow them.

"Wait." Growled a voice from the dark. Calaston turned as Berginanda emerged from the dark. "That thing is not just a Mutant. It is a witch! It has to be destroyed."

Calaston and Ferdrank shared a glance before guffawing. "Good one, slave." Ferdrank chortled. "There haven't been witches on Convergentiarum in millenia. Not since the Harrowing."

"Just look at them!" Berginanda insisted, jabbing as the androgynous figure. "They're unnatural!"

"Yeah, they're definitely a mutant or something." Calaston admittedly in an unbothered tone. "But honestly this one is tame compared to some stuff the Mechanicum makes. You remember the last doctrine war?"

"Why is it you're even sayin' this, meat?" Ferdrank challenged, drumming his fingers on the haft of his own shock maul, still hanging on his belt. "Not like this one could've even fucked you in the ass with how bothered you are."

"It broke my arm, and then...healed it immediately! Like it had never happened!" Berginanda scowled before calling out into the dark. "You all saw it happen! Tell them!" None of the other slaves secluded in the annex moved to the larger slave's aid however, much to Calaston and Ferdrank's impatience. Berginanda did not relent however.

"This one simply is not worth the risk-" He began.

"They're worth plenty more than you, dimwit. Unlike some other slaves, they do what they're told, they don't cause trouble, and they don't give us any backtalk." Calaston interjected as he unfastened his shock maul. "And they're a damn deal worth more than you'll ever be!" He lunged forward and jabbed at Berginanda with the maul, causing a cascade of energy to course through the slave's body, sending them crashing to the ground while convulsing uncontrollably.

"Here's what a break is actually like, meat." Ferdrank taunted as he strode over and stepped on the stricken slave's arm - affixing it in place before then raising his boot and stomping down viciously, once, twice, three times. Every stomp was accompanied by the sinuous, snapping sound of muscles and flesh tearing, and once Ferdrank stepped away, Berginanda's maimed arm was a bruised, swollen, and misshapen mess. The abused slave could not even scream properly, still writhing and convulsing on the ground as Calaston continued to press the end of their shock maul into Berginanda's gut.

"Now think about what you've done." Calaston spat as he returned the shock maul to his belt. "Come on, let's go. We're burning time here."

He and Ferdrank began to move towards the annex door, but halted when they saw the androgynous figure simply standing and staring down at Berginanda's broken body. An expression had finally broken its way across their face - dismay. Neither of the slavers saw it.

"Hey, you too, dumbo." Ferdrank said with exasperation, unholstering their own shock maul and prodding the androgynous figure in the back without switching it on. The naked figure turned to the slaver, their appalled look still evident on their face - but it faded a scant moment later, returning to the serene and untroubled look they had been wearing since the slavers had first pulled them from the pile of corpses in the vale. They willfully followed the slavers out of the annex, pausing only to cast a single placid look back through the sliding door as Calaston hauled it shut to peer at Berginanda's prone form.


"Right, so here's the plan."

Tatronda had joined them in one of the storerooms, which was filled with racks of old clothing. They had sat the androgynous figure down in front of a dressing table and started to look them over critically.

"I've got some noble prat coming down from the Highlands who has expressed an interest in our stock. He's being coy about it, so I figure he's looking for a new concubine or consort or whatever. I've intimated that we handle and trade in only the best stock, and this idiot is just oozing with marks - so we dress this one up, make it look real pretty, and get rid of them for a fat payout."

Tatronda sniffed. "Noble won't be happy that their new plaything has no bits on it." She jabbed at the androgynous figure's completely smooth and featureless groin.

"Well that'll be on them for failing to specify what they actually wanted, yeah? <Let The Buyer Beware.>" Calaston indicated dismissively. "All we need to do is take their money and split, lay low until they forget about it, and live like the nobility themselves in the meantime. There is one tiny detail however. I'm also going to need to dress up real good. <Time to put on my best look.> This noble is having some kind of private party, and wants both me and the product to attend. Probably so he can check the quality and make sure it can be domestic, yeah?"

"That might be trouble, boss. This one is still completely mute by the looks of it." Ferdrank interjected, reaching out to muss with the figure's hair emphatically. The figure let it happen without comment. The slaver thought for a moment, and then added, "Though actually they did follow a basic command right earlier. Maybe they do understand Convene?"

"Well they'd better. We have about a week before this little audience takes place. <No time at all>! So we've got to make this thing look refined and proper, maybe even see about teaching it some table manners."

Tatronda frowned. "So - we are dressing this thing up as a girl?"

"That's right. You'll forgive me if I consider you an expert in the subject! <Uppity harlot>." Calaston smiled. "Just pick out something from this collection here, maybe sort out that messy hair of theirs, get some perfume sorted so they smell less like a pit, and Ferdrank here will do what they can to teach them some basic fucking etiquette - and I will be going out and getting myself a real suit!"

"How did you manage to impress this noble anyway, boss?" Tatronda asked suspiciously. "You liquor them up first or something?"

"Such little faith! Believe it or not, it was my own clever tongue that caught their attention. They've never spoken with a lowlander before who was fluent in the high tongue. <Pompous, condescending bastard was practically starved for conversation somehow.> That's why I'm going at all, they have sort of indicated this'll be a small gathering with a couple of other friends, and we'll all be talkin' in highland."

"Uh, boss, that may be a problem then for teaching this one table manners." Ferdrank interjected. "This one MIGHT be able to follow simple commands in Convene, but I don't know if they understand a lick of your highland."

"Shit, you're right. Ugh, FINE, I'll see if I can teach them some basic commands as well." Calaston bemoaned.

"Weren't you saying earlier you could do something like that if you really felt like it?" Tatronda chimed in mockingly.

"<I said what I meant and I meant what I said!> You're damn right!" Calaston swore, jabbing a figure in Tatronda's direction. "You watch! By the time I'm done with this mutant, they'll be eatin' ashes out from my hands!"

The week passed. Tatronda managed to piece together an outfit made from some of the finer pieces in their collection, supplemented by a few costume pieces extorted from a nearby theater for effect. In the end she put together a somewhat over-embellished ocean blue ballroom gown, with long gloves and a little too much lace sewn on in places. The fabric was cheap cloth with a bit of plasweave, but in a dark parlor it would fit right in, gleaming with evident smoothness in the right places. Tatronda made a token effort to shove the androgynous figure's feet into a pair of heels - but the task proved all but impossible. The apparent mutant's flesh seemingly had no give to it whatsoever, and they managed to ruin every set of heels Tatronda tried to fit them with. Disgusted, Tatronda had simply stuck them with more flexible flats from another stage costume. To mask this a little, the slaver fixed several ribbons around the figure's wrists and ankles, and finally fashioned the figure's hair into a crown braid, with a second longer plaited braid tied at the end with a stage-bangle that had been painted gold.

"We're going to need to name it, boss." Ferdrank indicated later when they met again. "Got a good, classy highland name we can stick on them?"

"Hm. Names aren't my strong suit." Calaston ventured cautiously. "Not sure how much I want to oversell it either, this guy will probably know if I just pick a name from the list of historical crests or something." Calaston mulled over the prospect for several moments. "Aha. What was the name of that old techno-saint way back?"

"The one who made all those atmospheric engines in the mountains?"

"That's the one. It's historic, see. Nobody'll think twice about it if they think they're named after a saint."

"Don't recall offhand. Marini or something? Ended with something like that anyway." Ferdrank struggled.

"Their name was actually Kresimir." Tatronda threw in as she joined them, having finished playing dress up with with androgynous figure. "Then the highland nobility sort of washed it over in highland and it became Cresimir with a C. It's why you see a bunch of women named Cressy, Cressi with an i, Cress, Cresimi, that sort of thing."

"No need to try to get creative about it. We'll just call them Cresimir then." Calaston clapped.

"That's a male name though boss." Ferdrank pointed out.

"So just slap a highland ending on it. Cresimirae or something." Tatronda shrugged.

"Fuck it, good enough. <If it works, it is not broken.>"

Training the dressed-up Cresimirae the bare bones of etiquette and verbal commands proved to be a far simpler ordeal than any of the slavers had anticipated. Much to their grateful surprise, the mutant seemed able to obey simple commands, usually on the first attempt. In the few instances it had not, it managed to pick up the gist of it after a single demonstration. It even seemed to have perfect recollection for commands it had been taught days earlier.

"Good memory it looks like. Shame they are as dumb and mute as mud." Calaston mused. "If they grow any bigger they'd make for some good muscle. <Force has a wit all of its own.>"

Cresimirae simply sat and stared, their expression serene. In the gown and with their hair braided as it was, along with the lace and ribbons, Calaston found himself admitting even he might have mistaken the creature as female, even flat-chested as it was - and if could have, the idiot nobles definitely would, especially in a dim, smoky parlor after they were all liquored up. The plan was foolproof.


The plan was terrible and Calaston was sweating bullets now that the time to execute it had come.

Everything about the circumstances were as wobbly as a ploin. The slave could not be bound up during transport, Calaston would have to surrender his shock maul to the noble's retinue of guards, and while the slave could evidently obey simple commands it still had not spoken or even so much as grunted - and what would happen if the nobles tried to get handsy with the mutant freak and discovered it had no interesting parts?

"Going to have to start rationing the drink in the future." Calaston muttered to himself as the groundcar he had rented for the occasion came to a halt. Cresimirae was sitting across from him with the same cool look as always, hands folded. That, at least, seemed like it was the one thing that might go according to plan. As long as Calaston could contrive an excuse for their silence, the Mutant not being capable of speech was the least of his problems. The possibility of profiting off of this ill-conceived, so-called plan seemed increasingly remote.

He stepped out of the groundcar, chaffing at the ill-fitting suitcoat he had stolen. They were at the far Northwestern edge of the tertiary habitation dome, the one most proximal to the pilot lord ground-level bastion and the macro-lifts that connected to the palace arcology in the mountaintops above. Accordingly, the environs were richer and better maintained than the other habitation domes. The streets were clean with only the occasional instance of graffiti, and the large pict-screens adorning the buildings displayed far subtler and more tasteful advertisements than would be seen elsewhere. Only two-hundred meters above, the ceiling of the habitation dome had originally been lavishly painted to display a map of the world, prior to being built over and the original surface largely obstructed by a tangled mess of catwalks, suspended chambers, and rail-platforms - which at least had the side-benefit of presenting plenty of surface area with which to ensure the environs of the dome interior were brightly illuminated.

The building at which Calaston and Cresmirae had arrived was set very close to the noble promenade, where the habitation dome connected with the pilot lord bastion. It had all the markings of an upscale lodge deliberately built in the slums so that the nobility had a place to get away from the entanglements of their high living, with an exterior made from quarried marble and set with stained armaglass windows no less. Small, scale statues of several god engines were set into their own external alcoves in the walls, though Calaston recognized none of them.

Directly at the front entrance - a set of double doors that looked like they had been carved from professionally sawn lumber rather than haphazardly cobbled together from dead driftwood and cheap industrial adhesive - were a pair of household guards. They wore long, turquoise greatcoats with gold trim along with fanciful ivory-colored masks with narrow slits over the eyes. The purpose of such masks was utterly lost on Calaston, who could only imagine that they dramatically limited one's field of vision and provided little in the way of protection.

"Halt. Sir. Lady." The first of the guards held up a firm flak-armored hand. "Identify yourselves."

"I am Calaston, entrepreneur. I have been formally invited by the Baron Verinais to take part in the gathering be held here this day." The slaver smiled thinly, endeavoring to hide the full extent of his rotten teeth from the guardsman. "The lady here is an entertainer, procured at request."

"...Your last name, sir?" The guard inquired, though he raised his other hand to his ear where a vox-bead was concealed and began to subvocalize faintly.

"...I was an orphan, guardsman." Calaston's already thin smile wavered ever so faintly.

"I see." The guardsman said noncommittally. After several more moments he lowered his hand and nodded. "...and it seems you are indeed expected, sir. I will have to ask you to surrender any and all weapons you may be carrying, and I do apologize in advance, but I will have to search both of you. I am certain you are both upstanding gentlefolk, it is just bothersome procedure. You understand."

"...Of course." Calaston said, ever so testily. Surrendering his shock maul he had anticipated, but he had not predicted they would want to pat both him and the mutant Crisirmae down. They were not even through the front door and already there was a chance for catastrophic failure! If whoever felt Crisirmae down suspected they were a mutant...

He was thankfully spared the possibility of failure when the doorway to the establishment opened, and the target of Calaston's shoddy scheme emerged: None other than the Baron Verinais himself. He was an elderly man, easily eight decades old or more, with minimal bionics or other augmentations of note to alleviate the signs of his advanced age, save for a cortical jack visible at the base of his neck behind his fraying silvery hair. His face was pale, with a hint of gray pallor to it - a hereditary trait potentially inherited from some distant branch of the Shadowgate nobility, perhaps. He wore an ornate ivory eyepatch over the left side of his face, and a bodyglove with the same turquoise and golden livery of his retinue alongside a long bronze-textured sash. He also bore what appeared to be an ornamental blade with an altered sheath that had an extended base, which he used as an impromptu cane.

"<Calaston, young man.>" He conveyed in perfectly natural highland tongue. "<It is good that you are here. The others are eager to meet with both you and your...company.>" He eyed Crismirae with an appraising look, before switching to Convene with his next words. "What would be the name of this fine lady here?" He inquired.

Before Calaston could even open his mouth, the mutant spoke in answer. The utterance nearly knocked Calaston completely off his feet in amazement - and panic.

"Cresimirus." They said, presenting the Baron with a faint, cordial smile. Their voice was as clear and airy as a highland winter's breeze. Calaston's heart nearly exploded in his chest from panic. That was NOT what they had named the thing! That was not even a feminine ending of the name! Where in the darkest depths had that come from?!?

The Baron Verinais, if he found the name at all unusual, did not visibly react. He simply nodded and raised a hand to his chin to rub at it as he responded. "Ah. Named after the Engine Saint I see. A very handsome name, that."

Calaston hurriedly leapt to interject and explain the inconsistency. "Ah, you know how lowland conventions go, my Baron. They will just slap any kind of highland ending on their names without knowing what it actually means." He grinned nervously.

"Ach, it happens all the time even up in the highlands." The Baron waved congenially. "But come in, come in. The day is just getting started." He led both Calaston and, evidently, Cresimirus into the ostentatious parlor building. The household guards who had been intent on searching the pair more thoroughly conveniently elected to forget the need to do so - perhaps so as to not gainsay their own liege lord.

The Baron led them both through a small entry foyer - lavishly paneled with more wood, doubtlessly harvested, carved, and shipped from the alpine arcologies at tremendous expense - and onto a lift platform that took them up two stories. He then guided them down another hall and past an archway leading into an ornate and decadent parlor-room. A vast rug woven with the crest of House Crescentius dominated the floor, depicting a two-toned ornate shield with turquoise and white halves, rimmed with gold. A depiction of some manner of brass obelisk was emblazoned upon the shield, wreathed in thorns that sprouted roses. The shield itself was crossed by a pair of blades, and the household name was inscribed on a sheathe lain underneath the shield itself. Three long wooden couches and two highbacked chairs upholstered with turquoise silk occupied the center of the room, surrounding a great wooden table set with glass and already heaped with delicacies the manner of which Calaston had never before seen in his life. Exotic fruits lain appealingly on beds of fresh vegetables atop ornate silver platters, leaves still dripping with botanical dew. Whole animal carcasses stripped, cooked, and stuffed with spiced marrowcurd still steaming with wavering heat. Lavish pastry rolls, iced with a dazzling rainbow selection of glazes and a side of silver tins heaped to the point of overflowing with a multitude of butters and jams. Glass decanters filled with liquor and stamped with wax seals of smug vintage, dazingly with so many sorts and colors that even Calaston, no stranger to drink, could identify only a few. The far wall was dominated by a massive pict-screen showing what must have been a live view from the edge of the Sterine mountain range. Set high above the lower atmosphere's dense, polluted smog, the pict-screen showed only the uppermost bounds of the dense cloud coverage habitually blanketing the planet. From above, they roiled with a tranquil and brilliant mixture of red, yellow, pink, and greyish hues - swirling in puffy spirals and hazy columns, spanning on and outwards over the horizon as Compunctio shone down on them. The air of the upper atmosphere was a clearly, breathtaking shade of blue.

Calaston all but tripped over himself as he stared at the scene before him. It was like something out of of a dream. He knew he would see it again in his dreams. The obscene display of wealth completely eclipsed his capacity to envision it. This room and its contents alone was worth more in marks than perhaps an entire habitation dome on its own, maybe. So Calaston was forced to speculate. Already, the incident with Cresimirus' unexpected introduction had been completely driven from his mind.

The Baron Verinais strode into the parlor with a sort of wary apprehension, eying his two guests as he did so, almost as if afraid at what their reaction might have been. Calaston's stunned awe evidently alleviated his own anxiety somewhat, and Cresimirus striding directly into the parlor itself without any evident reaction whatsoever seemed to put him entirely at ease. He then turned towards the other two occupants in the room.

"<Baron Acephethon and Baroness Galatrode, may I please introduce to you Calaston. A merchant of indentured servants and skilled folk.>" He waved over airily to where Calaston still stood, evidently stunned, at the entry archway. "<Alongside his charming companion, Cresimirus.>"

The two peers the Baron introduced were dressed far more ostentatiously than their elder. Acephethon was a short, hunched man with dark skin and hair, missing his right arm and adorned in a voluminous veridian cloak draped over his right side, while his bodyglove was a blinding ivory-white trimmed in orange and embroidered with fluid golden emblems. He bore some manner of peculiar bionic augmentation around his throat, almost like a collar of plated metal that had been sewn directly into his skin. Galatrode was an ashen-skinned woman with faded blonde straight hair that fell like a curtain about her shoulders, somewhat on the short short side at only a meter and a half in height and wearing a long vermillion caftan brocaded with imagery of rolling clouds over her otherwise spartan, pitch-black bodyglove. She wore a golden circlet along her brow, and both of her hands were bionic prosthetics with distinctly ridged knuckles with evident nicks and scratches along their rims.

"Not going to speak in Convene for the benefit of our guest, Verinais?" Galatrode asked coyly, raising an eyebrow.

"Ah, but that is what makes our guest special. Calaston here is completely fluent in highland." Verinais explained, gesturing enthusiastically towards the slaver. "Come, Calaston, a demonstration if you would?"

"Ah, of course - <That is to say, of course, your lordships.>" Calaston finally managed to recover and hurriedly enter the parlor proper, gently tugging on the hem of Cresimirus' upper sleeve to keep them from wandering too far in past the point of politeness. The figure obediently stopped in their tracks and surveyed the two other guests with a faintly beaming expression, much to Calaston's relief.

"<My my. A lowlander, fluent in the high speech? A rarity indeed. You certainly know how to find them, Verinais.>" Acephethon remarked, snapping the fingers of his one hand as if to effectuate a clap. "<You must tell us about how you came by the talent, merchant.>"

"<Indeed, I understand it is quite the tale as well!>" Verinais exclaimed as he rounded the first of the long couches and seated himself right in the center. "<Then of course, afterwards, we can discuss business. Come, come, have a seat. Help yourself. The lady Cresimirus as well, of course.>"

"<Ah, well, I am not certain it is all that much of a tale to the likes of noble pilot lords such as yourselves.>" Calaston began, approaching the arrayed seating and the table heaped with culinary treasure with some manner of trepidation. Cresimirus, seemingly without further promptly, selected the highbacked chair furthest from the table itself and sat down, folding their hands and coolly surveying the rest of the group with mild interest.

"<I am certain the tales of your mighty clashes with other pilot lords, not to mention all that infamous courtly intrigue us lowlanders love to speculate about, have far more flair and substance to them.>" Calaston tentatively seated himself to the left of Baron Verinais, both as a sign of deference and also so he could attempt to keep an eye on Cresimirus - though in that moment, his gaze became completely lost in the sea of delicacies lain out before him.

"<Bah, there are not really any epic battles or instances of legendary intrigue the sort of which is worthy of stories. That sort of thing only really happens once every other generation anyway.>" Acephethon waved his one good hand as he sat on the opposite couch. "<All our battles have been sordid and our intrigue petty.> The Baron practically spat out the word as he reached for a nearby fruit from the table.

"<That, and of course it is always interesting to hear how charmed individuals like yourself make your own way down here in the lowlands. We only really ever go out in the murk to fight in it. Every other time I've been down here it's just been to come to quaint little retreats like this one.>" Galatrode gestured emphatically as she seated herself in another of the highbacked chairs, though she made a point of drawing it closer to the table itself. "<By all means, regale us.>"

"<If you insist. Well you see, I had a run-in with a certain artificer during the Sacristan scandal around...I think seventeen years or so ago->"

"<The same Sacristan scandal where the Princeps committed suicide and led to the rise of the secular High King?!?>" Galatrode asked, eyes widening.

"<Well when you put it like THAT it sounds all nigh-mythical!>" Calaston laughed cordially. "<But yes, that very ordeal. I am not certain whether this particular artificer was involved either but - ah, may I?>" He gestured to the array on the table.

"<Of course. Help yourself.>" Baron Verinais nodded encouragingly.

Calaston started off light with some cuts from the stuff meats as he retold the story of how he had been hired to transport an artificer between the settlements below noble Counties, on foot through the wastes of the lowlands. He dissembled slightly in the retelling, downplaying substantially the significance of the artificer in particular while exaggerating the detours and conflicts they had run afoul of along the way. He then made the mistake of pouring himself a measure of liquor from one of the glass decanters, and the rest of the night devolved into a muddy blur of lavish consumption, intoxication, and generally perverse divergences.

Calaston only partially returned to his senses nearly six hours later, when the lights in the hab dome had been lowered to help encourage some scant adherence to diurnal activity and he was stumbling on the sidewalk outside the noble lodge.

One of the household guards caught him by the elbow and gently propped him up against the wall. "Sir. Sir. Can you hear me? Seems you may be the one who actually stole all the oceans away."

"Thefleurgh?" Calaston inquired.

"Figuratively speaking, sir."

"Watta-the purdy? Verrrruy impun-impun-spotty purdy." Calaston was drooling slightly out of the corner of his mouth.

"The Barons - and Baroness - were all exceptionally pleased with your discourse sir. By my estimation." The guard supplied, evidently somewhat versed in completely insensate nonsense. "It is above my station to know of course, but I believe you concluded your business with them and managed to make it down here of your own...volition." He gave Calaston an appraising look through the slits of his unusual mask. "...Whatever was left of it."

Calaston seemed to visibly hesitate with his mouth half-open for several moments before he remembered something important. "Payduhrit?"

"...Yesss?" The guardsman speculated. "At least, I gather that would be the contents of this little number here." The guardsman leaned down, and hoisted up a small lockbox that rattled promisingly with the familiar sound of precious metal marks. Calaston greedily grabbed at the box, nearly fell over from the weight of it and dropped it a second time, and finally used it as a weight to help prop his upper body more firmly against the wall.

"Hork. Rrrrooty. Cahr?" Calaston ventured.

"Yes. Baron Verinais called down and suggested you might need one, a groundcar has been called for you."

"Grud! Wuffle it urp en blit gergers, hank." Calaston then promptly fell over on the ground, the strongbox clattering beside his head, and began snoring.


"Calaston! Wake the fuck up you dipshit!" Calaston was rocked to his senses a good half-day later when Tatronda beat him over the head with an empty tin for algae bars. He was back in his their commonroom at the warehouse, having been passed out on the couch.

"Ack, fuck me woman," Calaston howled as he scrambled upright, moaning as sharp lights cut through his eyes and brain. "Oh saints, my head. How long have I been out- no, wait, more important, did I get back with the marks?"

"Calaston, what the fuck did you do?!?" Tatronda screamed, gripping his lapels in order to properly project spittle into his face.

"I just woke up and FUCK YOU!" Calaston screamed, bodily shoving Tatronda away as he tried to sit up. "MORE IMPORTANTLY, where are the fucking MARKS?"

"Marks are here boss." Ferdrank, sitting at a nearby makeshift table fashioned from plastek palettes, spoke up. He pointed to the strongbox from before - now open and heaped with several stacks of precious metal marks. "Uh. Perhaps too many?"

"What the fuck does that mean?" Calaston swore.

"What it means is that we thought you had stolen them, because the entire fucking dome is crawling with house guards looking for you!" Tatronda howled. "There are two RIGHT ACROSS THE WAY right now asking vagrants about you!"

"What- but-" Calaston spluttered. "That is not what happened! I think?!? I got completely shitfaced in there, but I definitely remember walking out with that box! A house guard called me a groundcar to leave!"

"I think they may've just discovered that you sold 'em a mutie then, boss." Ferdrank mused.

"Enough to search the entire damn hab for me?" Calaston demanded.

"Well, that's the thing boss. It may not just be that you sold 'em a mutie. It may be how much you suckered them for." Ferdrank then took the strongbox and upended it onto the dim warehouse floor. More than twenty rectangular marks tumbled from inside to clatter with a distinctive metallic jangle on the floor. Every single one of them had golden lining with insets of platinum and engravings of the high king's face in electrum. Calaston gaped. The marks were worth more than he had ever seen in one placed before - probably than all three of them combined had ever had to their names before.

"HOW did you con those idiots for a literal king's ransom?!?" Tatronda demanded.

"I- I don't know! I was completely drunk out of my mind less than an hour in! It had to be-" He halted abruptly, horror cutting its way across his face. "Oh saints. Fuck. Maybe that slave was right? Maybe that fucking mutant is a witch? I don't remember anything! If anything weird happened, it had to be the stupid mutant - and- and they talked!"

"The mutie TALKED?!?" Ferdrank gaped. "What did it say!"

"They asked for its name - and it gave them a botched version of what we named it!" Calaston moaned, bringing his hands to his face. "But that's all I remember! I didn't think it had same anything else, but it must have said something while I was out of my mind!"

"Boss, there are people who know we are staked out here. Eventually those greatcoats are gonna storm the place and we'll be proper fucked." Tatronda snarled. "We've got to take the marks and split! Do you have anywhere we can lay low?"

"Fuck - yes, yes, I do." Calaston muttered. "We're gonna have to make it to the airlocks and make a bit of a trek across the wastes, but there's a place I know of in the next hab over. We at least have the marks to bribe our way through any trouble-"

"I'm not so sure, boss." Ferdrank indicated. He picked up one of the fallen marks and held it out for the three of them to all look at. "Check that. These're serialized." He tapped at a sequence of razor-thin lines stamped near the bottom. "That, and they're too high denomination. We try and split even one of these and we'll need a whole case just to carry the change on top of the guards running in once they get alerted."

"Well isn't that just great! We're the richest fucking pissants in the whole of the lowlands and we can't even spend any of it!" Tatronda spat. "This is your fault, Calaston. You had better get us out of this mess or I swear I'll send you straight to the depths!"


They had almost gotten away.

All three of them having disguised themselves with more of the stashed outfits and some wigs, they had flipped a breaker for the lightning around the warehouse and made distance from it under the cover of darkness. They had hired a groundcar to take them to the nearest airlock terminal, but had ditched it in a hurry when they saw that the household guards had set up checkpoints at various road intersections. They crossed the rest of the hab on-foot, doing the best they could to stay out of sight and stick to backroads, all of them clutching at barely concealed shock mauls - which did plenty to deter the interest of other unsavory sorts with an eye for trouble.

They had finally come within shouting distance of the airlock terminal when they were forced to step out into the open. There were household guards present at the terminal itself, but only a few - and they were having clear trouble inspecting the crowds of lowlanders coming and going. It should have been a clear shot out of the hab.

"Fuck. Don't look now but we've got a tail." Tatronda muttered. "Looks like four guards. They're coming right for us from down the way."

"The fuck- How?!?" Calaston swore. "Do they actually see us?"

Tatronda cast a quick, discreet glance behind them. "...No. I don't think so. The one in the lead has a dataslate though, they keep looking back down at it. Maybe they're here to set up at the terminal."

"If worse comes to worse, we'll have to use one of the maintenance hatches up top or something." Ferdrank groaned. "Let's just shake 'em."

The three broke off from their approach to the terminal and turned at the last intersection instead, before dipping into an alleyway. They started making their way for a maintenance-level lift when Tatronda swore. "They're still followin' us!"

"How?" Calaston hissed through gritted teeth.

"The guy with the dataslate keeps looking back to it and all of them adjust their path each time! It's like it's tracking us or something!"

"Well they can't all have that sort of thing. Time to make a break for it. We've just got to make a run for the nearest lift." Calaston declared. He looked between the other two, who nodded - and then as one, they all broke into dead sprints, Ferdrank doing his best to run as fast as he could while hauling the strongbox with him. The group of guardsmen immediately caught on and began to run in pursuit, shouting after the trio of slavers while the one in the lead put a hand to the side of their head and began to put out a vox.

They did not make it far. The lead guardsman had apparently alerted several other nearby squads of guards, and less than a minute later the three found themselves surrounding on all sides in a cargo lot.

"Ok, that was quite the chase, but it's time to do things the easy way now." Growled the lead guardsman with the dataslate as he came up behind them, while two more squads of guards raised their rifles and kept them aimed at the trio. "You there, with the stupid wig. You'd be Calaston, right?"

"...Never heard of him." Calaston said through gritted teeth. "What do you want?"

"Never heard of him eh? Well then, he will be wanting his marks back I gather. That lockbox you're lugging around belongs to him." The guardsman pointed to the lockbox clutched in Ferdrank's grip.

"Hey! Nobody said anything about marks! There could be anything in there!" Tatronda desperately bluffed.

The guardsman shook his head and turned the dataslate around for the three of them to see. A neat, digital outline of the ground-level hab and its layout was displayed, and right in the middle of the cargo lot all of them were gathered in, there was a blinking dot with shifting coordinates under it right where the trio were standing. "Those marks are valuable enough that they're individually doped with radioactive isotopes to track them. We couldn't find you at first, probably because you were holed up somewhere with lots of insulation - but we found your trail quickly enough once you came out into the open. Now, no more games. I don't suppose all three of you want some of this?"

Ferdrank and Tatronda both glanced to Calaston with some mixture of sympathy and calculation.

"Sorry, boss." Ferdrank said apologetically, and then called out to the guards. "Yeah, fine, this here is Calaston."

"That's what I thought." The lead guardsman said, stowing the dataslate in his pack. "We need you to come with us. Your presence has been requested. Did you want to take the marks with you, or leave them with your friends here?"

"...We're were just moving these actually, so you can just take him." Tatronda indicated before Calaston could protest.

"You conniving, Ambuscade-faced bitch-" Calaston spat.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." The guardsman said dryly as he gestured to his squad to move in. "Take him."


"You are going to need this." One of the guards remarked, passing Calaston a rebreather. "We'll be four kilometers above the surface once we get where we're going. You're not acclimatized to the atmosphere up there."

"What, the air up there is little too good for us lowlanders?" Calaston sneered. "I've spent my life in the worst pollutant smog on the surface. You think a bit of mountain air will hurt me?"

The guardsman laughed. "Yes. I do think...just a tiny, tiny bit of mountain air might cause you some discomfort."

"He's fucking with you." Another guardsman said tiredly. "There's not enough air up there. If you're not adapted to it, you'll get sicker than sick."

Calaston sourly fit the mask over his face and crossed his arms as they waited.

He had been roughly frog-marched back across the city, through the noble promenade (an otherwise momentous occasion), and through a lateral railcar leading from the hab dome into the heart of the mountain bastion of the pilot knights. From there, he had been escorted through a tight series of metal corridors until they had come to a larger rail-car that could seat thirty people plus cargo on its spacious floor-area. For now, it was just Calaston and two squads of guards.

The railcar began to ascend with a jolt. The journey would not be a quick one, Calaston realized. The railcar was moving at standard speed, but lifts in the habs could already take minutes to get to and from certain levels. The railcar was going to take them to the mountaintops.

"So, while we wait, what is this about? What'd I do to get a whole manhunt?" Calaston bit out, still fuming.

"That's the question on all our minds right now." The guard across from him drawled. "We were hoping you might tell us."

"Orders were just to take you up for an audience quicker as quick. Without breaking anything." Another guard added.

"An audience? With who exactly? The Baron again?" Calaston demanded. That got him an odd look from most of his chaperons.

"...The new House Chiurgeon." The guard across from him said. "Spoke of you real familiar-like."

"Chiurge- what, you mean a stupid Medicae?!?" Calaston snarled from behind his rebreather. "You're telling me a Medicae can order a hab-wide manhunt like this?"

"Well no." The guardsman admitted. "They mentioned wanting an audience with you to the Baron, and then he told us to jump and handle it."

"Really? And the Baron thought sending all of you was necessary? Sweeping the hab and putting up checkpoints?" Calaston questioned.

"I...guess you wouldn't know, huh?" Another guardsman contributed. "This is a little irregular, but the Baron was feeling especially grateful, see. After-"

"Everyone, be quiet." Snapped the squad's sergeant. "Are you guardsman or housemaids? Stow the chatter. Especially in front of hab scum." The atmosphere in the railcar soured notably, but the guardsman complied - and no matter how Calaston needled them, he could not get them to answer him.

As the railcar rose, a number of automatic thermal regulators kicked on to warm the interior - even with them, Calaston could tell why. The air was growing gradually colder and colder. What felt like an eternity later, as the railcar reached its destination at the mountain summit, the atmosphere had grown utterly frigid. Even in the radiant heat of the regulators, Calaston had to suppress the urge to curl up into himself from the piercing chill. The house guardsman, all of whom had parkas in the house colors and whose bodygloves seemed insulated for this exact temperature, all seemed perfectly comfortable - and had no trouble hauling Calaston out of his seat and frog marching him outside.

The view was one of astounding immensity and beauty. Once more, Calaston was treated to a topside view of the lower atmosphere's cloud layer from above. Whorls of red, yellow, orange, pink, and grey mist swirled and danced in an endless sea in every direction - only broken up in the far distance by mountainous plateaus and mesas looming up from the clouds like hunchbacked giants. From one end of the horizon to the next, the sky was a perfectly clear and deep blue in coloration. Seeing it in person rather than through a pict-screen, Calaston felt like if the guardsmen let go of him, he would fall upwards and never stop.

The chill outside was intolerably cold - it seemed to flay Calaston alive, his skin going numb as an icy frigidity settled into his bones, organs, and marrow. He could feel his muscles screaming as they fought to tighten in upon themselves. Even with the benefit of a rebreather, he felt like the sheer cold had jabbed him in the gut and blown the air out from him. There was only a light wind, but even that light wind seemed like a hail of knives to his senses - especially so as the wind carried with it glittering dust that shone in the light of day like diamonds as they flurried through the air.

Following the path of the diamond dust, Calaston turned his head and surveyed the whole of the mountaintops. They were drapped in a flawless, immaculate blanket of shining white sheets - snow. He had heard about this before. It was snow. Frozen, crystalized water. There was so much of it here he swore it could have refilled the drained oceans. He flinched as starlight from Compunctio gleamed off the snowy drifts and blazed in his eyes.

"Don't look right at the snow. You'll burn your eyes." One of the guards muttered - and suddenly Calaston realized the purpose of their peculiar, slit-eyed masks. They must have helped limit visibility so that they were not blinded by the light beaming off the terrain.

Regularly dotting the peaks were stony crags and implacable stony cliff-faces, sharp as daggers rising from the fog below. Interspersing the rock face and the fields of snow were copses of trees, but unlike any manner of tree that existed in the lowlands. Lowland trees were miserable, colorless, stubby things nearly wider than they were tall; all gnarled and hungry roots starving to draw energy and sustenance from anything nearby. The trees up in the highlands - they were vast, taller than some buildings, with concentric crowns of green foliage that drank up starlight.

Then, jutting directly from the mountain peaks, or else emerging abruptly directly from cliff faces, were the palatial Pilot Arcologies.

The one immediately before him was nothing less than a massive spire of gleaming cyan metal, with buttresses, towers, tiers, domes, and balconies all along its length, easily more than a kilometer tall like a serrated needle piercing into the sky. Its base, where they now stood, was a massive metallic platform - perhaps a cylinder - anchored into the heart of the mountain itself, a massive plaza festooned with lifts, railcars, and what even looked to be a landing pad for small voidcraft.

...and of course, there were also the God Engines.

Arrayed in order on macro-lifts that doubtlessly led down to the lowland bastions, and exposed inside a hangar in the side of the mountain spire itself, they loomed like vigilant giants. All adorned in turquoise and gold, draped in banners and pinned with shield-crests, wielding weapons of such potency there was no doubt they could have been used to topple the very tower they were housed in, had they deigned it. Crowds of artificers swarmed over them in groups - which Calaston knew were called Lances, with three engines apiece. There were more than twenty of the colossal engines in various states of repair or transport. One of them - one of the larger ones, which moved purposefully across the plaza - sent whirling cyclones of glittering ice adrift in its wake as it went, a cape of crystals adorning it as it moved to one of the plaza's macro-lifts and prepared to descend below.

"Yeah yeah, we've all seen it before. Get moving. We don't have all day." One of the guards indicated, jabbing at Calaston in the back and urging him onward.

The guards continued to frog march Calaston, leading him into the spire itself through a small set of engraved ceramite doors, themselves set into a larger ceremonial gate more than thirty meters tall. The arcology interior was a bizarre mixture of aesthetic between remote, impregnable fortress and sprawling and open luxury resort. Vast hallways or marble, adorned with rugs, banners, and exposed vista-balconies were interconnected by spartan metal corridors and hallways with multiple security airlocks. The personnel at this level were an even mixture of well-dressed servants and low-courtiers, intermixing freely with household guards and artisans.

Calaston was eventually taken to a lobby filled with more lifts. Only two guards accompanied him onto one of them, which then rose at a blistering pace compared to the railcar they had ascended on earlier - stopping only moment later on a floor which a pict-screen indicated was more than thirty floors above the base. There were substantially fewer inhabitants in the halls here, perhaps only a few dozen - and their manner of dress revealed their status as actual family members of House Crescentius, or else as highly ranked courtiers and aides. They wore fine gowns and silks worth more than the entire warehouse Calaston's trio of slavers had resided in. The more he saw, the more Calaston began to realize that even the unwholesome sum of marks he had evidently been paid amounted to just a pittance in the grand scheme of the house's wealth. It was unreal, like he had been spirited away to some fantasy realm.

Eventually, the two guards brought him to a particular doorway. "Here we are." One of them announced, and then approached to smartly rap on the doorway.

It swung open, and the familiar visage of Baron Verinais himself appeared. Both of the guardsmen immediately saluted. "Sir!" The one in the lead said smartly. "Forgive us, we were unaware your noble personage would be present."

"Quite alright. At ease." Baron Verinais said with an easy smile and unmasked delight in both of his eyes. "I was just having another session with our new Chiurgeon. Quite the miracle-worker, that one. I am feeling younger already."

Calaston blinked, screwing his own eyes together and taking another look. He was not imagining things. The baron had two eyes.

...When just the other night, he had been wearing an ornate eyepatch where one of them currently was.

"<A pleasure to see you again, young Calaston.>" The Baron beamed at him as he spoke in the highland tongue. "<I personally cannot fully express the gratitude I feel for your provision of such a fine and talented servant. I can only hope you are satisfied with the sum we agreed upon earlier. Do let me know if it is not enough.>"

Calaston gaped in disbelief at the baron, too stunned for words.

"<The House Chiurgeon, who has requested your presence, is within.>" The Baron indicated with a collegial wave to the doorway. "<Best not to keep them waiting.>"


The House Chiurgeon's quarters were simultaneously lavish, and barren. It was a two-storied chamber, with a balcony along the inner wall adjoining an array of armaglass windows providing an immaculate view of the exterior. The opposite wall was dedicated to the tall shelves of a private library - all the shelves being virtually empty, save for a small collection of half a dozen books that looked to have been recently propped up at the far end. The floors and walls, carved and tiled marble, were bare of any of the adornment otherwise commonplace in the halls. A rolled-up and dusty carpet along one edge of the chamber alongside several crates of bric-a-brack made clear that the chamber was either in the midst of being emptied, or perhaps furnished, if not both. A massive, barren desk carved from wood dominated the far end of the chamber, where stood a familiar figure and two highbacked chairs.

Cresimirus stared at Calaston with a calm, tranquil expression, their hands steepled together as they sat in the highbacked chair behind the desk. They were now dressed in a matching set of white trousers and long-sleeved tunic, along with a long, turquoise-hued and gold-rimmed apron across their front. The crest of House Crescentius was sewn into their right shoulder.

"You!" Calaston all but screamed.

Cresimirus raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. They gestured towards the highbacked chair opposite them. Calaston approached the desk, but refused to sit, glaring murderous down at the androgynous mutant.

A long silence passed between them, neither saying anything. Calaston wringing his hands in fury as Cresimirus gave him a familiar, placid stare. Finally, Calaston broke the silence.

"I know you can talk, you mutant shit." He spat. "So talk. Explain this!" He gestured to their surroundings. "Explain yourself!"

"<I would first like to thank you for your education, Master Calaston.>" Cresimirus spoke in perfect highland. Their voice was light, mellifluous, airy, and clear in tone. It was like listening to the chords of distant chimes, or ringing bells, carried in the wind. "<If not for your knowledge of the highland tongue, I do not envision my...>" Cresimirus paused and they seemed to think over their own wording for a moment before proceeding. "<...elevation here would have been so swift, nor so effortless. You were an adequate teacher. The extended conversations you had during the meeting last night were especially informative.>"

"That is Ambull shit!" Calaston spat. "Nobody can learn a new language in just a day, let alone over the course of a single party!"

"<I am an unusual specimen.>" Cresimirus ceded, unmoving, their expression unchanged. "<Which brings us to why you are here.>" They finally turned to gaze out the nearby array of windows, and at last, their expression shifted - they appeared very nearly unsettled, the curve of their mouth finally descending into something like a dissatisfied frown as they looked outwards.

"<...Perhaps more appropriately, why I am here.>"

"You must have done something to the Baron while I was drunk last night. You...did something to their eye!" Calaston accused, jabbing a finger at Cresimirus.

"<Yes. That is not what I meant however. Not why I am here, with House Crescentius. Why I exist. What my purpose is.>" Cresimirus intoned. "<I came to be...only some days ago. My first moment of awareness when I was taken from some manner of...I do not know the word for it yet. A container of some sort. Then, by several turns of circumstance, here. I know...I simply...know, that I am not yet fully grown. Perhaps I never will be. I also know, with certainty, that I was fashioned for a special, specific purpose. A function. Something...I am meant to execute.>"

Cresimirus then turned back to stare coolly at Calaston. "<That is why I called you here. Desperately. Master. There is something I need you to teach me. Something that, of all the people I have met, I think only you - perhaps Tatronda and Ferdrank as well, but they obeyed you - only you may know the answer.>"

"You keep calling me Master." Calaston said flatly, his eyes wavering with confusion, his tone a mixture of uncertainty and bitterness.

Cresimirus shrugged. "<You were factually my Master for a time. I was your slave. You kept many slaves. You still do. A Slave Master is what you are. Perhaps not mine, now? Though the people of House Crescentius are insistent on formality and title. Even if they do not recognize yours. That is why you are here. Why you are...the way you are.>"

"What, you still hung up on that? Deal with it. You're not special, mutant." Calaston sneered.

Cresimirus stared a Calaston passively for a long moment before continuing. "<Since the first moment I saw them - people, Humans, even the mutated ones. I knew. I knew, instinctively, with every fiber of my being, that there was nothing more precious in the entirety of the world than them. Humans. Humanity. A truth that is the foundation of my very being. I was made this way, I believe. I must have been. It is...not something the Humans of this world...appear to believe themselves.>"

"What." Calaston said flatly. "You think you're some kind of living saint or something? Think you're going to save everybody from themselves?"

"<I do not know what I am. Or what I shall become. Or even what I will do now. That is why I called you here.>" Cresimirus answered, gesturing lightly at Calaston with an open palm. "<It is simple. There is nothing more precious than Humanity. Nothing. It is...the most valuable, desirous...noblest state of being that there can be. That is why...you fascinate me so, Master Calaston. You, who takes other Humans as slaves. You, who trades and sells them for marks, objects, and favors. That is what I must learn. How...do you manage it? What secret do you know? How do you know, what Humans, and Human life, is worth?>"

It was finally Calaston's turn to stare at Cresimirus. His own gaze was narrow and spiteful. His lips were pursed in a thin line. He loosened the grips of his fingers however, as he finally came to understand what it was the mutant wanted from him. He did not answer.

Cresimirus's expression fluttered once more, a flash of what could only be yearning dancing across their face, vanishing almost as quickly. They opened their mouth to continue speaking, hesitated, and then stopped. They peered into Calaston's eyes, and frowned.

"<...Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to assume you would share your knowledge freely.>" Cresimirus finally continued. "<I ask of you. I beg of you. Anything that is within my power to give you in exchange, I shall. My means are...limited. I have little understanding of what else has value on this world, except for the people themselves. Perhaps marks? Or perhaps I can heal you, as I healed the Baron? I must understand the nature of my being, that part of me which knows without understanding. I feel that you can teach me. Master.>"

"You worthless garbage." Calaston finally answered. His voice was trembling with barely contained fury. "The nerve of it. I thought that me and the others were low, but you are amazing. Amazing like some grotesque gutter freak, by the way. You are so revolting I cannot help but be astounded by it." Cresimirus stared coolly at Calaston as he carried on, their expression serene and passive.

"I have to believe you now, and I suppose my first guess was right. You are some bastard vanity project by the Pilot Lords, or the Mechanicum. You are so perverse that they literally had to...I don't know, inscribe some instinctive awareness of Human worth in you. Like a machine. And somehow, you can perfectly learn the high tongue and probably Convene too in less than a day, but when you look at people you can't understand what makes anybody worth anything."

Calaston laughed then. It was an ugly, full-bodied, rancorous laugh. Spittle flew from his mouth, spraying across Cresimirus' apron. Cresimirus was frowning now, ever so faintly.

"You're less than mutant filth. Damn, you're less than fucking insects and literal water scum. You look Human, but there's nothing Human about you. You've got none of the right pieces or parts, especially where it matters. The way you look at everybody now makes so much sense now. You've literally been trying to figure us out this whole time, but even with your perfect memory and perfect learning and what I can only assume are miraculous witch powers, you literally cannot figure anything out about us except what you already know because some sick pervert somewhere literally wrote it into you. You are so disgusting that you even make slavers and Mechanicum zealots look alright in comparison."

"<...It is true there are many things I do not understand.>" Cresimirus began, their brow knitting into itself. "<Much as I do not understand what you are doing by saying these things to me. These...slights. Are you trying to make me angry? I ask this earnestly. I do not understand why you are saying this.>"

"I'm saying it so that you understand why you should kill yourself." Calaston spat. "There's a window right there, pretty long way down. You should jump, and good riddance, you piece of Ambull shit."

"<...I do not think a fall like that would harm me...>" Cresimirus ventured.

"Well fuck, turn on a furnace and lock yourself inside it. Drown yourself. Whatever works." Calaston said dismissively.

Cresimirus raised a hand to the side of their head, their expression one of pained bewilderment. Still, there was no anger. Only confusion. "<...You have not answered my question, itself. You have only...hurt me for not knowing the answer.>" They spoke, their voice falling in intonation, low and almost whispered in volume. "<I cannot know what I should do unless I understand. Please.>"

Calaston laughed again then. "I can't help but laugh at you. Some machine-freak trying to learn how it can commodify Humanity because it had some stupid rule raped into it. You want to know the truth? The truth is that you were probably made to be a slave. It's actually kind of fitting that you were one for a while - well, and you probably still are kind of, only even the most useless slave would still be worth more than you. Whoever made you decided that as a slave, you probably didn't need unnecessary things like empathy, or that you should be able to feel pain. That's the thing that really makes this so ultimately gross, by the way. You look perfect, you can't be meaningfully hurt, I bet you don't even feel much of anything, do you?"

"<...I feel pained from what you are saying.>" Cresimirus seethed. "<I do not understand why.>"

"You know, I don't know what's actually worse. The idea that somebody actually made you in order to make better slaves, or that Human slavery is just, on its face, objectively more moral and preferable to the alternative of something like you existing." Calaston threw in. "That's coming from me as a slaver as well, so I promise you I'm in a good position to make that judgement call."

Cresimirus raised the fingers of both their hands to their temples and stared at Calaston, wide-eyed. "<I have done nothing to deserve this->" They began. Then they stopped. Calaston began to laugh again as Cresimirus continued to stare. After several long moments filled with Calaston's hideous laughter, he quieted down, letting out a few final chuckles before looking smugly down at Cresimirus from where he stood.

"<...I think I begin to understand.> Cresimirus said, their voice and expression returning to their previously serene and tranquil states. They returned to steepling their fingers once more as they began to coolly stare at Calaston once more. "<None of the slaves you kept and traded away, none of them deserved that, did they? That is why you are acting this way. You know that they are worth infinitely more, and you...you use them as marks, for infinitely less than they are worth. That is why you denigrate yourself. That is why you are attempting to hurt me.>"

"Completely and utterly wrong, you dismal, festering stain." Calaston sneered. "You are incapable of understanding, as long as you think in terms of value or worth. Your existence is a sick joke, your 'instinct' is a degenerate paradox."

Cresimirus rose from their seat. "<I did not learn what I needed to from you, Master Calaston. Though you did teach me something nonetheless.>" They said. Their gaze was still serene, but there was the faintest hint of bitterness now carried in their tone. "<I agree that there is...a paradox here.>" They crossed over to the other side of the desk to face Calaston.

"There is nothing you can learn that will do you any good, whatever you are. You thing." Calaston smiled at Cresimirus, wraping one hand across his waist and planting his opposing elbow atop it, making a flippant gesture towards them with his supported hand.


A short time later, Cresimirus emerged from their chambers, and signaled to a nearby guard.

"Whenever any are available, please call a pair of menials up to my chambers. There is a statue that has been left by my desk that I would like moved. I would do it myself, but I cannot even bring myself to touch it."

"No shame in knowing it is too heavy to move, uh...sir...or...lady?"

"You may call me Cresimirus, if I may also know your name." Cresimirus smiled faintly.

"Ah. Well, you can call me Guardsman Fontebond, Cresimirus." The guardsman threw the androgynous figure a lazy salute. They then gestured towards the door. "May I?"

"Whatever you would like, Guardsman Fontebond." Cresimirus intoned, beaming. He nodded and peered through the door.

A perfect statue of Calaston right down to the clothes he had been wearing, with a peculiar smile and with one arm poised upon the other making a flippant gesture towards nobody in particular, stood right by Cresimirus' desk.

"Oh hey, I think I saw this guy come in!" Fontebond exclaimed, somewhat puzzled. "Did he come in to stand for this depiction or something?"

"Yes." Cresimirus said without elaborating.

"This is good work. Very likelike. Where do you want it moved, in case the menials come by while you aren't here?"

"The wall just left of the entrance, facing the windows. So you can see him right as you enter or leave."

"So you're always reminded of them or something?"

"Yes." Cresimirus smiled. "That. And something."

A more technologically equiped expedition might have fallen for the rouse; After all, in the poor lighting and some distance, they looked like people.

…If the expedition was completely idiotic and failed to account for where they were, anyway. The air wasn’t breathable, blood dripped from the walls and roof of a ship structure so warped by its time as part of this tortured hulk of metal that it seemed to have grown flesh… and what data they were able to glean suggested that this section of the ship had once, logically been the sump.

No living people would be found here.

Which made the fact things in a human shape were actively moving around all the more alarming.

Rik… needed a moment to process what his senses and sensors were telling him, because logically it made absolutely no logical sense at all: In the chamber in front of him, shambling through waist deep waste were creatures that had clearly once been human beings… but all sensors indicated that there was not a single life sign among them.

No detectable pulse. Their temperature was the exact same as the room around them. Some of them were breathing, but it seemed more out of some long forgotten impulse that raised it’s head in a haphazardly random way rather then out of necessity. Motion was the only sensor that reliably picked them up… and that depended on them actually moving.

By all sensor accounts, they were all dead. Visually, they looked it. Bloated, covered in tumours and boils where skin hadn’t just rotten off in a horrific green puss. Some still seemed to be wearing clothing, but it was little more than rotten rags clinging to their frames by chance rather than anything else.

They hadn’t been detected by the things yet. The idea of these things being able to detect anything was madness in Rik’s mind, but their very existence had already that they had left the sane laws of reality behind when they boarded this broken, twisted vessel.

Records from Pentious had indicated that warp travel had its dangers. The reanimation of the dead appeared to be one of them.

Figuring out the intent of these creatures was simply not something that Rik was confident in guessing at. Intention required intelligence and impulse… and these unnatural things didn’t seem to possess either that a living creature would have. He wasn’t about to risk the lives of his expedition for the sake of these misbegotten creatures and they needed to traverse the chamber they were currently gathering/standing around in.

With a signal, his forces formed a firing line. These creatures seemed to be physically slow to move normally, let alone wading through the refuse of the sump. But they didn’t have life signs and any that fell below the muck might not be confirmed kills.

This was going to be a time consuming pain in the ass.

Rik gave the command. The battle began.

The air was hot and dry, and the sand blew over the assembled army. Ming stood with other magistrate sorcerers of the operation to engage the Zhou dynasty over the great desert of Rang. The command tent had sixteen sorcerers. Ming stood in the back as a Magistrate of war. What seemed like an old man wearing green robes soon said. “As we know, the enemy forces contain the supply town of Shamonan, south of the great desert. Our forces have always had difficulty traversing the sands; the heat itself is extreme. Not only that, but the storm seasons have passed, allowing us to attack their town and sack it.”

Another sorcerer wearing gold robes replied. “Would it not be better to capture it?”

“It is a base that a Qishi can operate under. We are certain there are none, but another reason is supply reasons…”

Ming examined the plan to cross the sands into the base; it was located south of the great desert of Rang, but was quite central in some way. It explains why they could raid past north into the lands of her nation; taking it over could prove a great tactical blessing, the obvious issue was supplying it.

Yet, reading the supply route maps of the tactical map, she could tell that it was possible to supply the city if captured. It was a strange statement given about the supply issues. The only obvious issue was the Qishi in the city; the fortress itself was far from operations on one hand.

Yet she began to think for a moment until she heard her name. “Guang Ming Zhu, as a brand new Magistrate in this, you will be accompanied by Qián Jingting on the right flank to secure the advance.”

Ming could see that the woman in question, Jingting, looked shocked and annoyed, opening her mouth about to state a protest before shaking her head as the briefing continued. The order for Ming and Jingting was to maintain defensive positions in the right flank of the advance. As the room was cleaned of officers, Ming followed Jingting once outside. The sun was quite hot, and the air was drier than she was used to; it made sense. This desert was massive, and the heat it generated was so intense you needed a specialised suit for here.

As she followed Jingting, she turned around, facing Ming, saying. “You little!” She soon took a deep breath, seemingly thinking she was smaller than Ming. Her hair was dark brown, and her eyes were blood red with a physic that indicated she did not exercise much.

But she could feel she had more anger packed in her tiny form than she expected. “Right, so what are you? A newbie with a bronze-silvered identification?” She sounded sarcastic yet was shocked when Ming lifted her identification. It was a small silver rectangle with gold lines. The words written on it were of her name, family and the sigil of her family was imprinted on it.

Picking it, she was shocked, saying. “Silver with gold…” She said without words, thinking, then asking. “You fought in a battle before?”

“No…” Ming said, sounding concerned, it was understandable, the identification of silver and gold pertained to someone with wide experience, while Ming was very good at the military board and planning, even impressing many officers, but she was not tested. She wondered why she received this honour.

Jingting shook her head, giving her identification back, saying. “They give it to everyone these days?”

She then left, simply heading out. Ming was about to say something until a Magistrate sorcerer near her said. “Don’t bother…” Ming turned to him.

The man seemed to be in his thirties with gold hair and bronze eyes. His physique seemed to be well built, he continued saying. “She is a bit stubborn. I recommend focusing on your group.”

“Two commanders need to interact for better cohesion.” Ming said with the man chuckling, saying. “Yes, the issue is she is not the best at that. A bit of a loner in command, not surprising, seeing how she is from an important family and survived more battles than she likes to count and was never promoted.”

“I'd better see my man then.” She said to him with a light bow, and he gave a nod. “A great choice and my early condolences.” He replied, soon leaving, raising an eyebrow at the statement. She looked at her identification tag once again, a high rank for someone new. Either high expectations of her due to her scores, or something is off, there is a chance they are gambling with her.

She stored the tag back in her hip as she headed off to the central camp of officers. Exiting it felt like leaving a castle while it was tents. There was a tent wall around the inner area where sorcerers took base making it seem like a castle; the area around the central camp had tents of regiments ready for the operation; she wandered and saw many men and women readying for the coming battle some saluting her as she walked past arriving at the tents of the regiments she commanded she looked at the soldiers some of were mostly getting ready others relaxing seeing her they straightened up some in fear, some in respect others seemed in awe. She felt unease at some eyes, but managed to hide it well as she reached the central tent of the regiments.

Several soldiers rose up in readiness or curiosity of her, a human magistrate, an officer lower than her saluted approaching her, she smiled, saying. “Magistrate, I hope the regiments are ready?” From what she could see, he was of average height for a regular human, seemed not very strong, his black hair seemed to accentuate his green eyes, and his face seemed to show some battle experience, especially with a scar across it. He replied to her, saying. “Magistrate Yichen, my lady, yes, we are, albeit the other regiment commander is…”

“Here! Xiao Hui reporting!” A woman arrived in a hurry, saluting her, hitting her chest when close and giving a noble bow; she seemed younger than the man; she had red hair and blue eyes and was of shorter stature as well; her face was well polished, and her right hand had a gold chain of engagement.

She seemed inexperienced when looking at her, albeit something was off with her, as far as Ming could see. “I will keep note of your lateness, magistrate.” Ming said.

“Forgive me, my lady.” She said with another bow.

Ming gave a nod of confirmation, soon saying. “How is the status of the regiments?”

“Ready for battle.” Yichen said

Xiao Hui stated. “Mostly recruits, but we can deal with anything.”

Ming began to think of some strategies, while soldiers looked at her, she then said. “Ready yourselves, men, we are to protect the right flank of the advance. Expect combat and anything possible, sorcerers, depending on their specialisation, can do things you cannot imagine.”

“What power can you do, my lady? I mean, besides your formidable stature.” Xiao Hui asked, with Ming saying. “I can see the future and a few other tricks besides my strength…”

Some of the soldiers seemed at ease, unsurprising for Ming from the powers; the ability to foresee the future was the most beneficial in war and less prone to friendly fire from what she saw in some spells.

“Right, man, move out.” Yichen replied as the soldiers saluted and began to ready themselves. The camps began to empty themselves, soldiers marching in formation towards their goals in the sands of the desert.

The desert was extremely hot, plastic could melt in its heart, and the march was a large, extended line from side to side with soldiers in the millions heading south. Ming was in the front of the soldiers leading the march of her regiments looking around the sands blowened for a moment she could hear someone scream looking back a soldier patted the sand off their face probably burned himself, she shook her head, she still felt something was off looking at a distance she could see Jingting she seemed behind her lines but still accompanying as she looked she heard Yichen say.

“First time in the sands?” She looked at him, and he seemed to have approached as she looked around.

His curiosity seemed genuine. “Not really, it's too close to a war zone, even the dry lands that surround it are dangerous due to a raiding army.” She responded to him.

As she looked around, she opened her third eye. The sands vibrated with possibilities, her head aching as she witnessed the sands blowing in many possible directions, while hearing him say. “Raised close to these lands, sometimes you have to shelter from the sandstorms. But in this season it's fine.”

Ming’s eye showed a storm for a moment. She was surprised to see the sudden storm in a possible future as she looked around more. Fixing her gaze over a dune in the distance, she saw soldiers emerging from behind the dune. “Something wrong?”

“Enemy forces beyond the dune.” Ming said, pointing her finger at the dune as she unsheathed her sword and began to concentrate. She heard Yichen press something in worry, also readying, looking back, the regiment began to stop and ready arms. Almost immediately, a group of soldiers emerged over the dune and were opened fire against by her soldiers as the entire front line began to exchange fire, with the front beginning to explode into a battle.

Ming concentrated in her hand, she thought of a spear with great power accumulating in it, with a single purpose to expand against the pressure of the atmosphere. Unleashing the power, she launched a lance, hitting the dune and causing it to explode. She could see soldiers being thrown into the air with screams as they fell onto the ground. The gunfire behind her seemed to lower itself as sand and debris covered the view. As she stared on, she soon saw a flashlight pushing Yichen away; she soon concentrated on grabbing the lightning and aiming it at another dune, with the impact exploding it.

As she looked onwards at the other sorcerer, he seemed to float in the air, a small trick she thought both seemed locked into a stare until broken not by him or her. But the sound of a whistle, looking up, she could see a fireball colliding against the enemy forces, the other sorcerer disappearing in the fire and smoke.

As she stepped back, she looked to the side, seeing Jingting causing firestorms and launching firebombs everywhere, her clothes glowing bright red, as if it was enchanted or simply she had changed clothes before leaving. “Show off.” She mumbled, seeing her until noticing she barked orders she could not hear, but they were to retreat.

The gunfire soon resumed as soldiers of the enemy emerged from the smoke. Ming backed off a bit, retreating to her lines as her regiment had lowered themselves or lay down to open fire.

Xiao Hui was near her with her regiment; Ming could see Yichen to the right, also giving orders, while Xiao ducked and shouted at her. “This does not look like a regular skirmish!” Ming, still standing, said. “Yes, I can tell something is off.”

“Are you not afraid to be shot?” A regular soldier shouted, looking at Ming while Ming looked at him. Several bullets seemed to hit an invisible shield in front of Ming. She was able to project a barrier in situations like this that were not visible unless stress tested. The soldier soon went quiet after seeing it, staring back at the front. She soon noticed sparks. It seemed that the other sorcerer seemed to be readying to shoot at Jingting in the distance. Ming smiled as she felt the area around her; her senses showed hundreds of soldiers as time slowed for her, and she could feel the sorcerer just behind the chaos.

As she saw the lightning being launched, breaking through the smoke, she acted immediately, raising her hands so she could feel and control the world around her. The sorcerer was launched into the air as seconds began to count, and when she could see him in the air.

She refocused her mind to create spears with her Qi, and with a gesture, they flew towards the sorcerer as he was dismembered in the air by their impacts.

As body parts fell down, she then said to the soldiers. “Initiate advance, I think they don’t have any more surprises for us.”

Xiao Hui gave a nod, ordering the soldiers to begin advancing. Ming looked to the side; the lightning seemed aimed at Jingting. As she looked, it seemed she was fine from the lightning strike; the line was holding even while fire flew around her. As she was about to give orders to Yichen, she froze, and she felt a quake, and the wind seemed to shift direction, looking forward.

The quake continued as she began to sweat in realisation, and she then ordered. “Hold the attack!”

Yichen turned to her, saying. “What?”

“I said Hold the attack, something is off” She replied when a large quake shook the soldiers, making them stumble. As they refocused the gunfire ended as they looked up in the distance and a quiet silence runned over the soldiers as they saw a Qishi appearing in the distance the metallic giant moved slowly through the sands each step quaking the ground as it raised its arm a single shot caused a huge explosion as the center of the line was pulverised, Ming soon snapped out of the trans she was in and shouted. “WITHDRAW! ALL FORCES WITHDRAW!” Shouting to her men, they soon snapped too and began to retreat, turning to Yichen, she then ordered. “Contact Qián Jingting and ask her to move with us through to the west and say that the western rocky hills may help in our retreat.”

He gave a nod, rushing towards Jingting Ming, and soon turned to Xiao, shouting. “Hui!” She soon relaxed her face, seeing Xiao Hui staring into the titan, almost hypnotised by it. Her eyes fixed on it, not because of fear, but something else, from what Ming could tell, but that was another priority at the moment.

She shook her off, saying “Xiao!” She turned to Ming, saying. “Sorry, something took over me” “Organise the men, understand?” Ming said in a serious tone, her eyes seemed to glow with Xiao giving a nod in fear, Ming then replied with the words. “Good”

With the forces retreating, Ming still felt unease while a Qishi was behind her, and the retreating army, she felt something in the air, the wind was off, and she soon screeched to a halt as she sensed something off in the air. A sorcerer seemed nearby, yet she could not see it, turning her head left. She could see something, so she squinted until she widened her eyes, and she could see a storm very well. Seemed to have been made by several sorcerers, the storm was gonna roll into the army soon.

“What are you doing?” She heard Jingting's voice shout, turning to her, Jingting then said. “Why did you freeze? There is a titan nearby!”

“Storm!” Ming shouted, pointing at a distance, with Jingting groaning as she replied. “Oh, old kings be fucking damned…”

The sands seemed to begin to roll in their direction; the storm, by what the group could see, looked like skulls, part of it glowing as well, with some of the soldiers beginning to waver. Ming fixed her eyes on the group, and after thinking for a moment, she then shouted. “Forward!” Jingting turned to her, including many of the soldiers and even her officers, as Ming continued. “The storm is approaching, we can't escape it, put helmets on and close, then we need to get far from the Qishi to survive, and for that we need to run through the storm.” Many seemed hesitant, looking at each other until hearing Jingting shout. “You heard her! Ready yourself and get ready to run.” With both leaders in agreement with a plan, many soon began to put on armour. Jingting turned to Ming, mumbling so only she could hear. “Hope you are right.” She put on her helmet and closed it so as to not let sand through, same for Ming, as she felt excited.

The movement continued, and the Qishi seemed distracted with what remained of the centre force as the storm engulfed the flank and began to move. For Ming and Jingting, their regiments were engulfed in sand, and the visibility dropped to zero; lightning was the only thing visible during the strong winds, and the sand blocked visibility. Ming could more easily traverse the terrain; the sand heated her body, but the armour made sure she did not suffer burns. Looking back, her group had difficulty travelling compared to her. Unsurprisingly, given her stature and strength, visibility was zero, and it seemed that all of them followed her guidance as she marched. She had an idea. A smile crossed her face as she began to follow a different plan than the one originally proposed to the others. Instead of retreating, she would lead them somewhere else she wanted. Many would not like it, but that would require first knowing if the navigators of Jingting were still around when the storm passed.

But first she needed to guide those around towards safety and slightly towards her goal, the travel continued for a difficult to measure amount of time Ming occasionally held back to see the regiments still around they seemed to cladder more and more together due to the wind to keep up with the march even Jingting got to her own group instead of attempting to lead as the regiment tried to keep on moving through lightning and the sandstorm Ming felt the wind beginning to drag her looking back the movement of the group seemed to have finally grinded to a halt as she stared she saw a group nearby beginning to lose footing with her improved vision she could see someone was at a risk of being whisked by the wind with a dash she approached quickly of the woman and grabbed managing to pull her back to the ground and the others beginning to fix some anchors into the ground Ming shouted to them. “Anchor yourselves, keep yourself safe until the storm passes.”

They gave nods to her, some even saying ‘yes ma'am’ with things secured, and Ming thought for a moment to refocus until she heard a scream. Turning her head to the side, she could see Yichen holding on to someone as the sand and wind seemed to drag him, staring, she thought for a moment. ‘A ease replacement of an officer, the thought crossed her mind, there were hundreds of thousands of baseline humans that would kill for the opportunity. It was fine… It was fine…’

Yichen held Yan's hand for his life. It counted on him to fight through several battles in the eastern fjords. The trenches were not fun, and then he fought in the skirmishes of the Great Desert near his home. The desert was unforgiving at its heart, at its edges, you could live like he did, but its storms were always deadly in some form. The winds were always dangerous, but this one was conjured by the power of sorcerers; the winds were worse than he had experienced. As his hand began to slip, he soon began to think of ways to survive, holding onto a rock or attempting to latch onto something with a rope. Anything that would cross his mind, he would not let this be the end. He fought for seven years. Since he turned sixteen, he joined the army. He was not ready to go yet, and he would fight for it.

As his hand slipped, he felt time slow down; the world felt slow as he began to be taken by the wind, the lightning illuminating the world as he breathed slowly. Until he had his hand grabbed, looking down, he could see Ming Zhu dragging him down, anchored again, time moved again as he extended his other hand and held onto her, saying. “Magistrate, what are you…”

“Just Hold On!” She shouted, holding onto him as she managed to pull him back into the ground. Looking down at the ground, it was rocky compared to the sand as both stood together. He attached an anchor to the ground, a rod of metal that, when slammed, allowed him some stability against the wind. Meanwhile, she seemed to handle the storm well, surprisingly enough.

She felt the sand accumulating on her; it was rather heavy. The wind was extreme, but her size and strength made it less of an issue for her compared to the others of her forces; instead, the hard part was waiting it out. Looking down, Yichen seemed fine as he anchored to the ground as sand began to pile on ‘Why did she do this?’ she thought to herself as time was the thing she had the most with this storm.

Duty, probably, was the reason she thought or simply his experience, many sorcerers would merely let him go, mortals were replaceable, especially for sorcerers that managed to achieve hundreds of years of life. For her, on the other hand, she thought it was too cruel to ignore those below her, despite her teachers and other commanders treating this as normal as it could be. Plus, for what she planned, any living soul could be used in her plans, as the sands continued she focused on wards only maintaining meditation as Yichen stood beneath her, her size alone managing to avoid most sand hitting him as she stood kneeled as time went on she waited and sand began to cover the two until both were covered by the red sands. With the storm finally passing, the winds still blew as both emerged from the sand that had accumulated on top of both. As it dissipated, she looked around as people began to emerge from the sand, as well as from as far as she could see. She removed her helmet, and some sand fell on her while it was hot. She could easily resist its burning temperature, surveying the survivors who seemed exhausted, which was understandable. She looked to the surroundings; the storm was going away in the distance, and the Qishi appeared to be gone.

She soon heard Jingting shouting. “What a fucking disaster!” Turning her head, she could see Jingting approaching while cleaning her face after she removed her helmet.

She then said. “Great, a Qishi appeared and an arcane sand storm. What else can we expect?”

“Probably a random army if our luck is anything to go by.” Ming replied, Jingting seemed to roll her eyes at the comment, then asked. “Right, do you have a navigator to lead us back to HQ? ours died.”

Ming began to think, looking to the distance. She then looked at the sun; time was on her side, and she had a plan if things were like she thought.

She smiled at the thought of attacking Shamonan, she then said. “I know a way, just follow me.” She shrugged, making a gesture for her regiment to follow, same for Ming, albeit her gesture confused Yichen; she knew why he knew this place after all. Still, she pressed on as the day began to move. The army moved behind her. She thought of the possibilities; there were many, they did move after all, for a long time through the storm away from the Qishi and south, albeit she wondered how the others would react towards it. Many would simply follow her, at least her regiment would as for Jingting; that was a different question she would need to be convinced of. The good news was that she didn’t seem good at navigation, seeing how she hadn't noticed the sun setting in the other direction.

As the night began to quickly creep in and the stars began to appear in the darkened sky, Ming noticed Jingting approaching, and she seemed annoyed. “Great long journey; I say we make camp and…” As she talked, Ming walked along, stopping and grabbing her, pushing her down and gesturing for everyone behind to take cover as they followed. Jingting soon began to shout. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU…” When the sound of a machine roaring was heard, she went quiet, looking over the sand dune. The two, including some soldiers, could see that the town of Shamonan at its centre was the Qishi of the previous battle; it seemed to be stationed.

The town had several long pipelines running through it, refuelling lines, and one of them led outside, going further south, the source of fuel for the settlement's war machines, for food and water. There were probably other pipes not visible, but for the war machines, it worked well. The population of the settlement looked small due to its size, from what Ming and Jingting she soon whispered. “What are we doing… In the belly of the beast!” She emphasised the situation

Ming replied to her. “I had a plan to conquer Shamonan.”

“Conquer it? Conquer it!?”Jingting said, shocked. “Have your mutations erased your sense of self-preservation? We don’t have a big enough army.” She said in shock

“Judging them from here, I think we can, with our numbers, we can take the town, even the Qishi can be dealt with.” Ming said, analysing it

“Are you crazy? This is not just a settlement, it's a military base. There are only soldiers down there, and our small force cannot take it.” Jingting said back

Ming shook her head, replying. “We can, like I said… I have a plan.” After whispering the plan to her, she still looked skeptical.

“I don’t know, it sounds dangerous.” Jingting “If we win, they would have to promote us, and you did say you were tired of staying in this rank.” She looked to the sides, thinking before giving a nod, but then said. “If things go wrong, first to ditch.” Jingting began to walk away, with Ming saying. “They won’t…” As both announced the plans, the morale was a bit in doubt from what Ming could tell.

With her magistrates, she stood on top of the dune overlooking the town and explained the plan to them. After a while explaining, she stated; “This is not gonna be an easy task, we probably will lose a lot of soldiers. This is why I need you two ready for the early infiltration, understood?”

She turned to Xiao. The girl looked hypnotised by the Qishi in the town. Her stance was quite well postured, Ming noticed, even as she snapped out of her trance, she then said. “Ah, yes… I understand, my lady.”

She seemed distant when looking at her. The posture she posed was quite good; her appearance also sold something else besides being a soldier. She seemed to hide something Ming gave a nod, saying. “It is fine…”

Xiao then said. “While I rather recommend retreating, an infiltration can work. The obvious problem is gonna be fighting through hell. But if the plan works, it can neutralise the biggest threat the issue is gonna be securing.”

“I am sure we can do it.” Ming replied, Xiao seemed hard to convince, but gave a nod, saying. “Right, I will be seeing the man then.”

As she headed off, Yichen kept on looking on and both stood in silence looking onwards. After a long silence, she broke it, saying. “Awfully silent for you. You knew we were coming here, I noticed when I said where we were heading. But instead, you went silent throughout the whole journey. Why?”

He did not seem shocked, just looking for words. He took a deep breath and said. “Yes, it's true… I don’t know why I didn't mention, generally, sorcerers don’t like diverging plans from theirs or second opinions at times. So I kept my mouth shut… It's not like sorcerer magistrates last long in this group.”

Ming raised an eyebrow at the statement, asking. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, most sorcerer magistrates we had were young and well decorated when leaving the military academies.” He pointed towards her identification while continuing to talk as she looked at it.

“Many arrive here recently from camp with that identification and end up in coffins quite quickly. Either due to ambition, recklessness or just bad luck, I was sure we were gonna end up dead back there with the Qishi and the storm.”

Ming crossed her arms, saying. “I am different.”

“Our previous magistrate said the same thing before he was caught by a fire tornado, and he was quite a powerful sorcerer, so...” Yichen commented back with Ming looking at him, his eyes averting her. “I am stronger and more powerful than most. Still, don’t be afraid to voice opinions in private. I don't want my magistrates to be sycophants.”

He gave a nod soon after thinking for some time, then he said. “So with the plan you suggested, don't you think it's a bit… Ambitious?”

“Ambition is the material that creates golden ages, isn’t it?” She replied with a smirk. He seemed still in doubt, but gave a nod, soon saying. “Right… Remember to repeat the plan? Better to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

Ming gave a nod; she had worries about Xiao understanding the plan, but Yichen seemed more understanding. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment before turning back to the town as she refocused.

One hour before sunset, the guards of the town were a bit tired, the rotation seemed about to begin the guard post at the edge of town, the two looked on to the desert bored with a small flash one of them was hit on the head by a red laser shocked the other guard raised quickly searching for an alarm until he was shot too. With both men lying on the ground, a small group emerged from the darkness, led by Ming. ‘Our main strength is surprise. None of the defenders expect us to attempt to take over this town.’ The group began to go into the town, where Ming had her sword in hand.

The infiltration was quick, calculated. It was better not to initiate a firefight, Ming thought; otherwise, the cover would be blown and the plan would go to hell. She sliced an unnoticed guard, looking to the side, and another guard was killed as the group moved. She took a deep breath and focused again on the march.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the town, a soldier was electrocuted to death by Jingting. Upon teaching him, she gave a nod with a gesture, her regiment began to move as she whispered to herself. “Why am I doing this?” She shook her head, heading towards her objective, one of the silos. The area was luckily clear for her as her men went to begin opening the valves and redirecting fuel to the centre of the town. There were others, but she was soon startled by the sound of gunfire nearby. She cursed under her breath, her heart accelerating with panic.

‘Three groups left, centre and right will divert the fuel towards the centre of the town, where the Qishi is. If a firefight begins, the element of surprise will remain for a short while as people begin to wise up and the shock starts. But when it begins, be ready for everything to accelerate.’

Yichen stared at the dead soldiers, saying. “You were not supposed to shoot him!” “He reached the gun!” The soldier he commanded said in a nervous tone. “Well, get ready to feel more pressure”

Yichen soon began to order the soldiers to keep following. The centre was more dangerous compared to the flanks of the infiltration. With it, firefights started to happen more occasionally in the area, with buildings lighting up and eventually the worst sound to hear at the moment. An alarm whistle was being blown, and with it, the stealth was to be thrown out, something that Yichen did when he shouted. “Right, we still have our objective, be fast men!”

‘This mission, being an infiltration, is not all; it is the beginning. I hardly believe we will be able to contain this battle into a stealth mission, but when it happens, we have a timer. Sorcerers will wake up, and the Qishi pilot will too.’

Ming and Xiao stood watch as the soldiers turned the valves and someone redirected the liquid fuel, Xiao said with worry. “Great, who opened fire?”

“I don’t care. It was inevitable; we at least managed to divert the outer fuel depots; we still need the inner ones.” Ming kept focused on the mission

Xiao sounded worried. “Right, so we are now in a rush until the Qishi pilot wakes up.”

“Indeed, if I am correct, the Qishi may still need refuelling from this place.” Ming replied with certainty

Until Xiao interrupted her, saying. “Not really… This fuel is to power normal vehicles. A Qishi is powered by a Plasma reactor.”

Ming looked at Xiao. Time was slower for her than for her she raised an eyebrow, saying. “It is?”

“Yes, it seems this fuel is made for vehicular utilities, like a land dreadnought or multiple combat vehicles. Quite a lot of them…” Xiao said, inspecting the fuel tanks nearby, there were at least a dozen. Even Ming raised a brow at the amount. While her mind had many questions, things still had to move. Hearing the soldiers reply that they were done, she gave a gesture for them to follow; there were still other depots to divert. Meanwhile, the sound of gunfire only grew louder.

On the right flank, Jingting and her forces more easily manoeuvred due to the district being more industrial, as for the centre, where Yìchén stood, things were more complicated. Yìchén opened fire into groups of soldiers with the support of other men as he heard the valve was turned, and the man began to regroup with him. Observing it, he gave a nod and threw an impact explosive against the alley, killing a few soldiers through comms. Other groups reported steady progress. A soldier turned to Yichen and said to him with a smile. “I think we might actually do it, sir”

Yìchén shook his head, saying. “Don’t put too much yet, we are still halfway done.” The group soon began to move with the sun rise in the distance, illuminating the desert with an orange glow.

That was until an explosion rocketed down an alleyway as Yìchén halted his movement, with others seeing some of his companions burn; he soon saw a sorcerer merge flames burning around his fists, taking a look, Yìchén shouted. “GET TO COVER!” With the group spreading out, he hid behind a wall in an alleyway as fire went through the street. As he looked to the side, he felt shocked seeing a child in the alley. As he stared at the boy, he soon went on a run as he whispered. “Not just soldiers…”

With another fireball, he soon began to refocus the soldiers he commanded, went to other alleys for protection, and screams could be heard from a man burned as he thought. “Well, great…”

Ming and Xiao ran through the streets with sporadic firefights happening as Ming crushed a man. She soon noticed civilians inside houses, as she said. “They said this was a military settlement…”

Xiao stopped near her, looking, and she then said. “Well… secure settlement may as well bring the wife and kids of the men.”

“This can go very bad…” Ming replied with Xiao shrugging. “Well, too late to do much.”

“True…” The sound of fuel flowing through the pipes was heard as they took fuel to the depot at the centre of town, Ming said with a bit of relief. “Well… things are going to plan.”

The sound of comms interrupted the discussion as both turned to a comms officer, saying. “A sorcerer attacked Yìchén’s company. Jingting is engaged against one too.”

“Not surprised, I was counting the minutes until we met one.” As she commented, the sands beneath them seemed to be pulled in the direction of the city as the soldiers turned. Ming and Xiao could see a man wearing green armour staring at Ming. He seemed to await a duel.

As she stared, she whispered. “Go around… I will catch up.” Xiao gave a nod as the men began to follow her.

When the others left, she faced the man and took a battle stance as she waited for the first action, and it was taken. As the sorcerer put a hand on a wall and with little effort managed to remove it and throw the wall towards her like sliding a letter through a table. Her reflexes were quick enough to dodge out of the way of the wall flying in a vertical direction, crashing and collapsing behind her. Turning to him, he seemed to smile as sand formed around him, lifting him up, he grabbed part of another building and readied to throw it at her.

She quickly jumped forward as a section of the building flew at her. As she rose up, he seemed to land on the rocky floor, punching the ground. She could see spikes sprout from the ground towards her. The quickly advancing spikes made her look to the side, seeing a fragile wall, she bit her lip and crashed through it. The structure was not very resilient, and she could easily cross the stone wall. As she took her bearings, she noticed a family standing in a kitchen. The sound of stone changing pulled her back, though. As she saw the spikes following her.

“Run now!” she pointed to the civilians before quickly moving out of the way as a spike impaled the men and then the women. As she stared, she swiftly lifted the child and threw her to a corner of the room as the spikes instead followed her. Breaking one of the spikes with telekinesis, holding it in the air, time slowed as she calculated where the sorcerer would be. With quick reflexes, she threw it through the wall. The sorcerer seemed to be hit as she broke through the front door with her blade in hand. She saw the sorcerer seemed to have raised a stone to form an improvised wall in time to defend himself. As she readied her sword, she charged him, opening her third eye. From the actions he would take, she quickly rushed towards him and, with a quick dodge, left as from the ground a spike passed her right and with a swing of her blade, the sorcerer's head flew off.

As he fell to the ground, she cleaned her blade, saying. “Elemental school… quite skilled in the arts of earth.” She gave a light nod of respect before continuing on.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the settlement, Jingting panted heavily as lightning formed in her hand, and with a flash of anger, she unleashed a bolt of lightning against a group of soldiers as they all dropped dead. She returned to cover, taking deep breaths. She felt the Qi overbearing her, taking deep breaths, she maintained calm in light meditation as bullets riddled behind her cover, she jumped from cover again with a lightning bolt in hand, throwing it. A group of soldiers behind a barricade were electrocuted as her company moved forward.

She continuously sweated nervously, turning back to the fuel depot, the soldiers seemed to finish opening the pipes as the fuel flowed, she groaned, saying. “Hope this is the last one we need” Hearing shouts, she readied for another round of combat as reinforcements seemed to be arriving. She let the Qi flow again as lightning launched from her hands.

Yichen stood overlooking the street, taking cover behind a wall as a burst of flames from the sorcerer took a deep breath, as he knew this plan was gonna probably kill him or save his men and himself. Turning around the corner away from his cover, he opened fire against the sorcerer, the bullets failing to wound him by the looks they were blocked by either body armour or stopped mid air, he could not tell by the heat and the flames surrounding the sorcerer, but he could very well tell the sorcerer was staring at him. Raising his hand, Yichen began to bolt back to cover as a fireball was launched towards him. As the start of the street was engulfed in flames, he could hear the screams of people being burned. Looking behind him, he could see the sorcerer following behind him.

Getting up, he soon began to run towards the end of the alley, taking a turn into another street. The alley soon was engulfed in flames as he stumbled back. The sorcerer emerged from the fire, turning towards Yichen, the sorceress from what he could tell was readying another attack. Until she was shot in the back, the impact seemed mitigated by the armour she was wearing. She seemed shocked, turning around to stare at the shooter, and she soon seemed to take three other shots. Yichen could see the snipers behind her as she looked ready for another attack; he aimed his own weapon at her and opened fire. As the bullets hit her, she seemed to stumble forward with other shots from the sniper group, and she soon collapsed. Yichen took heavy breaths, coughing a bit due to the smoke of the fires. As he calmed down, the group of snipers soon approached, walking around the burning wreck, saying. “Well, the plan worked, boss.”

“Ye… I knew it would work since she seemed willing to beeline to anyone who called her attention. But not far from her post, probably a company nearby.” Yichen said, cleaning some sweat, gunfire was heard nearby as he cursed under his breath.

“Attempt to reorganise the company. Things may be getting ugly.” He said to the group. As they departed, Yichen soon saw Ming appear together with Xiao and elements of the company.

“Magistrate Ming!” He shouted as she turned to him. He felt relief as she began to approach.

Ming approached the area and seemed just as battle hardened as her quadrant she then said. “Status report.”

“A sorcerer and her company blocked our advance with no luck in our quadrant to push. I hope yours was better, my lady.” He replied, and she gave a nod.

“Things are not easy on our flank, too. I came here with a small company hoping to find an easily accessible depo.” She said.

“Things have not been easy in the centre. We do know there is one nearby if you can reach it through the battlefield. I take it, we can finish the plan with it.” He said, with Ming looking forward towards the depo. It was far, the battlefield meanwhile was still hot in the area after analysing the situation, especially the battle.

She then said. “Hold the line, I will see if we can reach it” He gave a hard salute as Ming’s group went ahead.

Running through the streets, Ming and Xiao continued fighting through a few garrisons, arriving at the last depot. Ming pointed to the valves, saying. “Begin turning the valves!”

As the soldiers went on, others began to take positions as she looked. She stepped aside as she saw the reflection of a scope as the shot missed, she mumbled. “Snipers…”

The place they were taking shelter seemed to be a three-story building in the distance, she squinted, saying to Xiao. “Follow me.”

“Is it not better to hold?” Xiao asked

“High ground can prove useful, especially to see the city and it.” Ming replied, pointing towards the Qishi that seemed to be turning on. Xiao gave a nod, following Ming towards the building.

In the tower, a man with a rifle overlooked the field. His partner soon said after he fired again. “Missed… I still can’t find the giant.”

“Who is suicidal enough to attack this place?” The sniper replied with his partner, letting out a light chuckle, saying. “Well… They are this far and this close to the Qishi, so I think they aren’t that crazy.”

The sound of gunfire was heard down below, including the shots of lasers as they looked at each other, his partner replied. “Should I hit the alarm?”

“Could be stragglers of this attack, I don’t think it is nee-” The man replied until the door of the roof was busted open with Ming throwing her sword towards the sniper as he was impaled. His partner quickly pressed a button as he was punched by the strength of Ming, killing him.

With Xiao arriving behind with a missile launcher, saying. “I guess they planned to use this as a last ditch.” Ming grabbed and took a look at the missile launcher. It seemed that the rockets were in good condition, and they were also of high yield.

“Pretty good to still use at least.” She replied soon, giving it back to Xiao as she looked around the town, which seemed chaotic, yet she could see where action was, at least where combat was happening and where some movements were going.

This was going quite well, she thought, until she heard shouting. Heading to the door again, she heard soldiers coming up stairs running to her sword, she said, picking it up. “Company coming…” She turned to Xiao, who stared at the Qishi as Ming looked. She soon noticed the problem the Qishi was activating and soon began to move away from the fuel; she cursed under her breath.

Towards the door, she soon used telekinesis to close it and partially crash the roof to block it as the sound of stone crushed around and partially collapsed the ceiling. Stepping back, she then said. “Right, plan B, we need to start reorganising and be ready to retreat. Understood, Xiao?” She turned to her but then froze as she saw both Xiao and the Qishi staring at each other. The Qishi seemed to stare into Xiao.

Xiao stared at the Qishi, saying. “Hello… Diao Feng…” The Qishi seemed to close its fists as she smiled at them, quickly pointing at her, and she chuckled, saying. “Too late.” Pointing her missile launcher, she fired at a nearby pipe leading to the central depot. Hearing it explode, Xiao then heard Ming scream. “No!” Being grabbed, she was pulled into the other floor, falling through the hole Ming had caused. The explosions continued following the fuel line. The Qishi was confused until seeing the fuel depot near him. Until the final fuel line explosion hit it, luckily for the Qishi, it stepped far from it, but not far enough. The fire consumed the depot, and the explosion was massive, the shockwave destroying multiple buildings and the sound of the explosion echoing through the desert. The Qishi was launched and fell on its back, its head hitting the sand outside town, half of it inside of it. The smoke of the explosion rose over the settlement, and the sound of gunfire died down completely.

Xiao coughed at the smoke. Rubble seemed to obstruct her until she saw Ming lift the rubble and throw it to the side; the building seemed to partially collapse.

Ming took deep breaths, bleeding from her forehead, and she turned to Xiao, saying. “That was suicidal in all definitions of the word.”

“It had to be done…” Xiao said, rose up, feeling her body in pain.

Ming shook her head, saying. “Hopefully not many soldiers died.” Stepping outside, the sky was obfuscated by the smoke, and the streets were silent with the occasional cry of a child, making Ming look unnerved. She then bottled her emotions and continued on, saying. “Let us go, we need to regroup.”

Marching through the quiet streets back to their group, Ming looked to Xiao. She looked calm, despite everything. Ming needed to talk with her later, they arrived at Ming’s personal company, which she brought they stood in the depot of fuel and luckly the area did not seem to explode together with the fuel line looking around it was mostly empty but then she saw a few soldiers near a building raising her hand the soldiers also raised with the approach an officer said. “Magistrate… The explosion was sudden. Wasn't it ordered to withdraw when all depots were turned?”

“It was, unfortunately, the Qishi turned on early when we finished with this one, so we had to improvise.” Ming said, side-eyeing Xiao, who seemed to sit to recover energy.

“Any sign of combatants?” Ming asked.

“Not yet… probably confused or recovering after the explosion.” The man replied, taking a small look behind the men, she could see fewer soldiers than when she arrived here. At a quick glance, she noticed a dead man she commanded lying on the floor near a building, probably others in the area. The explosion definitely hit her well without taking cover; the other forces probably took a lot of casualties too. Her enemy, on the other hand, was hard to tell.

The sound of a horn was heard as they turned. Ming could see the Qishi rising up behind the smoke.

“SHIT!” A soldier cursed. An apt reaction, she thought as the Qishi stood up Her heart raced with any plans coming up, especially as a retreat at this rate may cause everyone to die except a few survivors. Instead, she looked on, feeling more relieved as the Qishi began to walk away, seemingly damaged or not interested; it was hard to tell through the burning smoke, yet everyone could tell its rider chose to retreat.

“We did it?” a soldier replied, with others also repeating the words and soon celebrating. Ming, meanwhile, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The air was filled with smoke, but it did not bother her. She felt relieved that the plan worked out in the end, even if it was more damaging than she had hoped it would be.

In the central plaza, Ming and Xiao arrived. The plaza was mostly empty, analysing the area, Ming soon said. “Seems like the combatants also went on the retreat with the Qishi.” Xiao seemed a bit surprised, emerging from one of the streets. Ming could see Yichen, who hailed with a raised hand to her, approaching, he then said. “So we won?”

“Yes… The town is ours.” Ming replied with Xiao saying. “Well, where is our other sorcerer magistrate?”

“There…” Ming replied, pointing to the approaching company led by Jingting. Once close, Ming approached Jingting, staring at each other for a moment. Ming then broke the silence, saying. “Qián.”

“Guāng.” Jingting replied with a small smile, then said with a pompous air of pride. “Well… Contacted back home to say we conquered the place?”

“Not yet wanting to know if everyone survived.” Ming replied to her, crossing her arms, with Jingting saying. “But we are all here. I dispatched some of my men to clean up the other side of the town we weren't in after the explosion, just to make sure there are no surprises.”

The sound of gunfire was soon heard by all as she continued. “Speaking off… I guess we may need some patrols.”

“Contact, command, tell them that we captured the town of Shamonan, reinforcements are required,” Ming replied to a comms officer who gave a nod and began to work.

“Not much of an inexperienced person as I thought, albeit truth be told, this plan was suicide in all definitions.” Jingting said in a whisper for Ming to hear, and she then replied in a similar whisper. “Sometimes you have to do something bold to change things.”

Jingting rolled her eyes. From what Ming could tell, she seemed unconvinced with few watching and hearing, she then said. “Ambitious commanders generally die first. I guess you are lucky or one in a hundred.”

“I am sure I am.” Ming replied with a smirk. Jingting seemed less convinced. “If you say. Anyway, I hope we don’t work together soon after this, definitely a match to end up with me dead.” Jingting said

Ming replied. “Prefer to keep the same position?”

“No!” She said more angrily and in a loud voice, some noticed as the soldiers began to take some rest, she then fixed her voice, whispering again. “I prefer doing this on my own.”

“If you prefer, albeit that is a decision made by our higher rankings. Still a pleasure working together.” Ming said Jingting gave a light smile with a shrug.

Yichen, meanwhile, talked with the comms soldier and soon returned, saluting. Then he said to the two. “The high command said they would be sending a major reinforcement wave after I had to confirm three times that yes, we conquered the town. They said they would arrive tomorrow morning. With… a guest, according to them.”

“A guest?” Both asked, with him replying. “No further explanation, but yes.”

“I guess we will reorganise and garrison until they arrive. Anyway, I'm gonna go away from the burning wreck. The smoke is killing.” Jingting said, coughing as she left.

Ming gestured for her company also to follow as they went to another area. Xiao and Yichen followed her, she then said. “Begin a head count. I wanna know how many we lost in this operation, and try to save as many civilians as you can during the patrols. Understood?”

The two gave nods to her. “Good.” She finished walking away from the central square. The smoke was beginning to get dense in the area from the burning depot that exploded.

Many hours later, taking refuge in a former barracks that was taken over during the initial incursion, the soldiers celebrated below as Ming meanwhile stood on a tower overseeing the town. She heard reports of the patrols finding many wounded, and with the night beginning to rise, gods only knew how many were lost.

Xiao walked up the stairs, saying. “Magistrate Ming, I believe that…”

“Which house do you come from?” Ming asked, with Xiao freezing, Ming then continued after a moment of silence. “You know what I am talking about. Your behaviour is a bit more aristocratic. Initially, I thought you had some experience, then you began to stare into the Qishi like you shared a connection with it and of course, the roof where you called for it.”

Ming turned to Xiao as she continued. “... and… it answered the call, stared at you for a good moment and then pointed its main weapon at you like it knew who you were. By process of elimination of the obvious, you are from a Qishi house.”

Xiao looked calm, letting out a light sigh, giving a nod to Ming, saying. “Correct, my lady, I joined the army for experience gain.”

“Feels like you don’t need too, especially as by inheritance you end up piloting something that turns armies into insects.” Ming said with an eyebrow raised, Xiao closed her eyes, replying. “Each Qishi family has its own succession rules. Unfortunately for me, my family is a bit more unorthodox.”

“I see…” Ming replied after a moment of silence, she then said. “Which dynasty do you come from?”

“The Zhāng dynasty, we are as ancient as the colonisation of this world and proud of it.” Xiao replied; her tone of voice seemed like she repeated those words quite often, sounding monotone.

“Ancient rival of the Féng dynasty, if my memory is correct.” Ming replied, scratching her chin.

“Indeed, it's a rivalry dating back to eras. Generally, we fight with our Qishi. I think this is the first time our families fought with a Qishi and one without.” Zhāng Xiǎo huì saying.

“Not happy with the omission of this important information, but I am thankful for your honesty now.” Xiao looked over the town, and she then said. “Anything else, my lady?”

“No, is there anything to report?.” Ming asked.

“No, Yichen is still counting the dead. He probably will report later.” Xiao replied

Ming gave a nod with Xiao leaving, Ming was left with the flow of time and her thoughts, she thought of numbers, tactics, and what would happen. Promotion was the most likely outcome to come from this operation, and with higher responsibilities, she thought of what commanding multiple magistrates would be like. Her ambitions would align, and her vision for the future was correct; this was most likely the first step. At the present time scale, if she was right, the march towards the capital of the Zhou dynasty would be within a year. Her mind was filled with plans and tactics, including political speeches. Her third eye would become useful in some rituals that she planned.

As she was in deep thought, she heard a knock, turning her head around, and she could see Yichen entering, she soon said. “Commander, good to see you… What is your family name? I don't remember you saying it.”

“Don’t have in these sands, you have your normal name, and that is it. In the republic, the assimilation made this tradition nearly disappear, but it is still in some families. Down south, they say they care, but I doubt it.” He replied, looking reminiscent of the past.

“I heard that some of the cultures assimilated survived. Wasn’t expecting to find one.” Ming said with curiosity, with him shrugging, saying. “Well… while unity is promoted, some diversity will always exist. Even then, it's just a minor thing from the desert to the northern seas and the brand lunar fronts that opened up recently.”

As Ming pondered, he then said. “Well, what have you been doing, my lady?”

“What do you mean?” She asked, with him searching for words until finally saying. “Well, the men are celebrating, some are resting, and you are on top of this observation post, so I was wondering what you were doing.”

Ming kept on looking at the town, which was damaged; some lights were on in some buildings from families still around, she then said. “Just planning for the future. Next steps and next moves.”

“You do that every night?” He asked, approaching Ming as she thought she, then said. “Yes, almost every night.”

“No hobbies or anything to distract?” He asked.

“I mostly read strategy, or books of war.” she replied with a chuckle. Yichen looked a bit interested, thinking for a while.

He then said. “I wouldn’t call that quality free time. I generally spend my time trying to learn music.” Ming frowned at the comment, looking at Yichen. Was he hired by her father? she thought for a moment.

As she stared, she then said. “I know you are trying to lighten the mood… What you wanted to say.” Yichen did not seem to change much of his face; he still seemed to be in a neutral mood.

He seemed to search for words for some time until he said. “Don’t know what you have but… You managed to convince the men to follow you to hell. Unfortunately, only one fourth of them got out of it alive.”

Ming froze at that statement as he continued. “One hell of a loss lives for the regiments, but we still managed to pull this off. I guess your leadership pulled it in the end.”

“Thank you.” She said in a direct tone, and Yichen gave a light bow, replying. “I will let you be my lady.” As he left and Ming was alone again, she let out a large sigh. It was more dead on her side than she had hoped to be. A miscalculation she would attempt to correct tomorrow, on the other hand, something important would come. She wondered if the visit was a general of the army or the Taiwe himself. Albeit he would need to come from afar.

The next day

The scout could see the approach of a land dreadnought, a vehicle built to transport supplies and soldiers through the desert. It was accompanied by multiple armoured vehicles and even air support. Ming could see the convoy had enough soldiers to hold the town if not do more offensives. The defences on one hand for the carrier were interestingly high from what she could see, until she widened her eyes, seeing the banner. Jingting broke the silence, asking Ming. “So who is our guest?”

“Someone from the Shang Dynasty.” Ming replied, with Jingting becoming more tense, and those who heard it becoming more strict.

Jingting whispered. “The sorcerer king? He never leaves the orbital ship.”

“Probably someone close to him.” Ming said as both attempted to look cool, Ming maintained it well while Jingting looked a bit more nervous.

With the land dreadnought stopping, the soldiers soon began to disembark and formed a defence cordon for someone leaving as it came to view who it was, Shang Qiang, some of the soldiers whispered when he approached. The crown prince of the Shand Dynasty, a modified clone of the sorcerer king. Ming and Jingting kept themselves quiet as he approached. He was pale with short hair and green eyes. His clothes were expensive. As he stopped in front of them, he took a good look at both. He was smaller than thought and from paintings a bit different from the sorcerer king, less muscular and a bit thinner, same for the colour of his eyes, light green instead of black.

“Guang Ming Zhu and Qián Jingjing.” He said with both still maintaining their composure, he then continued. “You two did something that only great individuals could achieve. You should be proud of yourselves. I hereby grant you the high honour of your achievement.”

Both bowed in respect; a promotion was now all but inevitable, Ming thought, but still, the heir was not something she expected to be coming here when she arrived here. As the honours were given, the Shang Qiang was escorted towards the town, and as the two saluted as other officers walked past, Jingjing looked more excited whispering. “New position here we come!”

She seemed to smile quite widely in excitement; others also smiled in the army, unsurprisingly, a great change in the usual state of the war.

“A clone?” She heard, looking back for a moment, Yichen looked at the crown prince, curious.

“Does the sorcerer king want to be overthrown? Why make a thinking machine?”

“He is organic…” Ming whispered back in a condescending tone, but he continued.

“Still… made in a lab wasn’t the ancient war about the machines that could think and men? Why make one that thinks even if it is made of flesh.”

“Some say the sorcerer king trusts only himself.” Ming answered him as he went quiet, she kept on watching the army arriving, things would begin to move and get turbulent. She wondered what her family was up to as well and what else was happening in the stars.

Amunal looked upon his people, their arrayed numbers. To many of the cultures he had shepharded, they were the wisest, most intelligent. In two generations, people had gone from struggling to understanding how to work iron all the way to machine tools, power in their homes, so on and so forth. Amunal had barely even taken an active interest in their lives, almost all that they had learned was but second-hand knowledge from a being that was studying physics that eclipsed that of any theoretician on Mars.

It was thus that while these learned men had in mere years ingested more information than many human minds could muster, they were amoebas. Inferior, tiresome, boring. And yet as an impulse from his very core, he knew that this very inferiority was something to be shepharded. So clearly beneath the long-eared breed of the starlanders, it was in his very genes to protect humanity. He knew in part because he had examined his own flesh, his own making.

But… between his examinations of himself and the entire universe with the complex devices he had forged by crushing metal into advanced alloys with his bare hands, the Starborn knew that there was some aspect to this world he couldn’t examine. It frustrated him almost to the point of tearful emotion. There was some unexamined variable, some fundamental truth that would ground all of his epistemic and ontological queries. He had examined that neighbouring planet time and time again, and they were no closer to solving what plagued him so thoroughly. There was nothing to describe the unpredictability that he so often observed in the universe, there was nothing to account for the randomness.

There was….

Chaos.

It was beautiful once he came to the realization of it. It was a dark thought, one he dare not articulate for the danger he put into mortals. But this word he had for the roll of dice that determined far more than logic and sanity ever could enamoured him.

Without it, what purpose would anyone serve? Automata, puppets of disgusting meat and sinew and bone that were predestined to ignominious lives regardless. Those seeking nothing more than immediate hedonism at best, or those seeking to continue their lineage for some barbaric yet equally meaningless philosophy of attaining some form of supremacy either real or more typically merely imagined to be real. Perhaps the worst logical conclusion was merely the obsession with survival out of fear of the unknown that might come after death. The unknown was meant to be made known, and on some nights Amunal even dreamed of death for this very reason. But he never spoke of this, for such thoughts would quickly spiral into a death-cult in lesser minds.

It was with Chaos that a man staving off the barbarians attacking his farm to protect his woman could be anything more than a genetic predisposition to guarantee reproduction; it was by the virtue of Chaos that this was love. He had no capability to accept illusion of free will where there was none, in a world without Chaos. It was thus that he was infinitely grateful for it, seeing it as an undeserved gift brought forth by a truly loving Demiurge. There was no way to articulate his gratitude for it, and so it was that he remembered kneeling one night and praying towards it, for what else could Chaos be but God? God in His ultimate wisdom, creating a world such that it might give him the opportunity to truly come to conclude his existence in his own right.
It was Chaos that one day he sought to make the God of these people. For decades he had instilled in them that their prior pagan beliefs were mere echoes of Sophia, the feminine personification of knowledge as it translated to in one of the long dead court-languages of the planet.

But as he ever felt more weak in confrontation with the unknowable, it felt good to surrender to Chaos. Chaos would be the name of the one true God, the acceptance of a great inevitability that was the only way to account for so much that couldn’t otherwise be explained.

But all of this was a flash of thought on the matter of his people. They were the brightest, and the brightest were the best. They weren’t the scribes and scriveners of old, these were not hunchbacked stuttering fools, these were philosopher-Kings groomed specifically for this in the event Amunal died. Which, in the coming days, he might.

The Asclepians were not standing idly amidst the sudden change of their sister planet, and so the people of Brahms had to act lest they were acted upon.

It did not take Amunal to understand the long-ears were here in part because of the ancient war that ravaged this planet. It did not take him long to understand that these people were forced into their eternally primitive state by the planet so near yet so far.

In some sense he was appreciative of the wisdom of this world’s ancients, so carefully hiding away their technology just for the day someone like him would be there to capitalize upon it.

So it was that after addressing the best the world had to offer, he went to address the second, third, fourth, and so on in order of bestness.

Finally, they descended into the depths of the palace of Ummariah. Drones and other craft of the Asclepians were already visible in the atmosphere to the Primarch’s eye, they were coming for him. Little did they know, he was coming for them. It was a tragedy, one he would have to pray to this unknowable Demiurg to forgive him for. But people would die before his gambit could be completed.

He felt the first rumbles in the earth as faint vibrations from the violence on the surface of the world, but he didn’t show it. The men and women arrayed before him still looked the slightest bit uncomfortable with their new weapons and armour, for Amunal simply hadn’t the time to truly train them as he needed to make them competent users of these pieces.

It didn’t matter. There was a non-negligible chance most of them would die. All of them, even. He just needed to get himself to the leaders of Asclepius, and force them to end this madness.

When the humans finally felt the violence outside, hearing and feeling it reverberating in their boots, when that happened was the moment that Amunal finally activated the device.

He had spoken of it briefly, but most of the people with him were only here because of their personal faith in him rather than comprehending this concept. It was a teleportarium, superstitious markings of religion covering almost every corner. But it still worked, and with very little effort it was able to bring this small force unto the world that caused the woes of Brahms.

It was a shock. Amunal had envisioned it. He had envisioned worlds even more advanced than this, if anything. But seeing it in person so close rather than through bare eyes was an entirely different experience. But there was no time to muse. Already in the first second of teleportation there was horror. In some instances his assortment of warriors was already dead. A few had teleported into objects, the teleportarium’s thinking engine not adjusting sufficiently for them and hence they had bushes poking out of their skull or decorate fountains where their hearts should be. In a few particularly horrifying cases, they had teleported straight into the bodies of some Asclepians. Displays of gory anatomy never intended to be seen by anybody were on display both for the Brahmian invaders, and the shocked native Asclepians.

But there was no time for such ponderings. Amunal already urged his people onwards, feeling the slightest disturbances in sight and sound that heralded the reserve defence drones of the planet going towards their location.

They were faster than he expected, but slower than he feared.

Some of his own people were too uncontrollable, centuries of mythologized frustration apparent as they tried to take revenge on the Asclepians. A few he executed with a flick of the trigger on the laser weapon comically too small for him even if it was designed to be operated by human crews. The other barbarians he tolerated, if only because he expected justice to catch them otherwise.

Snatching a handheld electronic tool from one of the passerbies, it did not take long for the Starborn to understand how it worked, and shortly after use it to prevent a lockout from the nearby civilian vehicles from the security apparatuses of the world. Buggies more for leisure than practical use, they could nevertheless be forced to travel quite fast if safety measures were overridden to simulate a person suffering from a medical condition and so they flew to the Palace of Knowledge.

Out of almost five thousand people Amunal had assembled, only about three hundred made it to the Palace. It was enough.

Many Asclepians that didn’t need to die, did in fact die as their feet pounded up. The distance wasn’t far, but to all who were truly focused on what they were here for felt that their travel was taking an eternity.

Before they could enter it, a monumental blast door dropped down to bar their progress. Amunal wouldn’t let it touch the ground to seal them off however; in but a flash of movement he caught it in one arm, and then rammed it upwards breaking the sealing mechanism to keep it in place.

A single shot to the sensor apparatuses of the automated defences that came out of the walls made their exotic and advanced weaponry useless, and it was at this point that he simply ran past the Brahmians he brought with him, their services no longer necessary.

Arriving at the chamber where the apparatus of governance of the Asclepians was located, it was not too different to what he had expected. Ancient fellows with overgrown yet groomed white beards down to their knees. Pseudo-clerical clothes that gave some pretension of modesty yet were indisputably ornate to a person not deluding themselves.

But his eyes were immediately drawn to something else. To something that beneath the skin and hair and clothes was him. A mirror of his own creation, dressed in the same robes and fineries. He was already standing, having come to the same conclusion from having seen Amunal on the vid-feeds.

They approached each other, extending their hands to commune far faster than they could with verbal speech. In but moments they relayed to each other the whole of their lives, the slightest of vibrations in their fingers making a language they wordlessly decided on.

Through this, there was only one conclusion they came to; their superiority over all present made them ever more competent to rule.

But it was already clear enough, they had divergent philosophies. A mutually beneficial test of supremacy was in order.

At once, and in their own respective languages, both Primarchs spoke to their own people: “Stop the violence.”

//Vion 5
//Redoubt Alnor
//250 Miles From Great Bastion Tertiary Curtain Wall

There had been a silence over the battlefield for the past three weeks, baring the occasional skirmish or night raid over a pitiful amount of ground leading away from the redoubt. This small fortification was taken after little more than a three-day standoff after it had been cut from the underground supply network leading to the Great Bastion. It had been a near bloodless take over and the redoubt would have been an excellent lynchpin to assault further towards the curtain wall, but the False God knew as much as well and had immediately launched counterattack after counterattack to drive away the forces of the Angelus Machina to no tactical success.

Strategically, however, the machine had found success in forcing the Angelus to pool more resources into fighting over the relatively small area. This had halted other assaults that had been planned - despite the millions of soldiers and automata fielded by both sides, and as such a stalemate along the front had occurred. It was quickly a battle of the minds of both machine and man tried to fruitless goad the other into overplaying their hands. There was an unease from the mortally inclined on both sides, warlords from both wanted to fight over the rugged territory but they were leashed by their divine. Meanwhile, the Mechanicus did not stay idle as Usriel’s fortified key locations, repaired destroyed supply networks, and scouted for weaknesses in the enemy lines. The servants of the False God employed more insidious tactics, using Noosphere Trapfields, confusing the forces of the Angelus, as well as; transmitting Kill-code spoofs against the automata Usriel deployed, and activating long dormant technologies in Vion’s defensive network.

Even then, none of these would grant a true decisiveness that the other desired. For the False God, it only bought time and for the Angelus it merely increased the cost for a victory that would be his. Yet, Usriel held onto something that the False God always lacked, humanity.

Usriel did not want to commit his men to fruitless assaults that would likely bring him closer to the vengeance he craved, but it would rattle his mind knowing that more families would suffer as he did. He looked over the battlefield from atop the parapet of Redoubt Alnor, the surrendered warlord next to him as they could see the field of twisted metal and bodies loosely in the distance. His eyes could see each of his men that had died, yet to be collected and properly put to rest. He pitied every man that he forced to fight in this war as he had known war most his life, ever since he had been given up to the Bastion Lord he was forced to fight. Yet, he had been grateful for those brief few, happy years with his family.

The words of the man on his left broke him out of his remembrance and regret, “My Lord, tell me, why spare me?”

That question brought the Angelus’ gaze to the warlord, studying him in instant and trying to decide the best answer. Quickly, Usriel responded in a blunt tone, “You had the sense to surrender. Tradition dictates that you be allowed to live so long as you serve me loyally, Werner.”

“A tradition that has long since died during this war, my Lord. The Machine God-”

“False God,” Usriel corrected, “and that tradition was born of pragmatism. If you surrender during the siege, then your men and family do not pursue a blood oath against me or my reign. I do not need any more enemies in this war nor do I wish to see any more die by my hand.”

There was a silence for the moment as Werner contemplated those words, “You are far kinder than the False God’s propaganda made you out to seem.”

“And the False God is far more vile than I can put to words,” the Angelus snarled in clear disdain. He noticed a small nod of agreement from Werner. The two turned their gaze back to the distant battlefield, nearby artillery from the fortification began to sound - nothing to signal an assault of any kind but merely to ensure to the False God that they were not sitting idle.

“Yet, my Lord,” Werner began, “I am surprised you have not tried to seek peace with Bastion Lord Nirek. He may be allied with-”

The words were drowned out by Usriel’s mind, a single utterance undoing the stoic facade that he had built for decades. When had Marius been overthrown? How long had his father been fighting him? How could Nirek continue this war?

Questions unending raced through his mind, his eyes scanned the battlefield passively trying to peace together everything he could. The False God must know that Nirek was his adoptive father - just as he had with One-One being his mother. That machine knew and it was a cruel joke that this war had been perpetrated all to bring the Angelus Machina pain and despair. He wanted to rail against whatever divinity there was, whatever force dared to calculate that this was the outcome he deserved. Usriel felt wrath unlike ever he had felt since his mother had passed. Hatred welled in his heart and it became palpable as he sensed fear from Werner.

Usriel did not bother to look at the surrendered warlord nor did he feel the desire to hear whatever words the man spoke, all he desired in that moment was the head of the False God crushed beneath his boot. That Man of Iron had toyed with him for far too long - nothing would keep him from his destiny. He would see his father again. He would have a portion of his family brought back into his grasp and no one would ever force him to wage war again. His motive found a hold on his heart, to avenge his mother and to free his father - and to become free from shackles others placed on him.

The Angelus Machina turned to the now cowering man, anger clear on his face as he looked upon the warlord with such visceral hatred that it would cast anger into the machines he fought. He uttered an order to Werner, “Prepare all of all your men. Send for all other warlords, all other adepts of the Mechanicum. The time to plan our grand assault has come. This world shall be freed, Bastion Lord Nirek - the puppet that the False God toys with shall be brought into my service.”

“M-my Lord?”

“Why are you still standing there?! Go!” Usriel roared, sending the man scurrying away from the parapet and leaving the Angelus to his own devices. The Son of the Machine God breathed, attempting to calm himself while the news still perpetuated itself within his thoughts. Again, he cursed reality itself for forcing his hand - for forcing him to fight. He cursed reality for not allowing to lead a life of peace, a life where he could craft and invent. It pained him and he wanted to weep for all that could have been, but he knew that One-One would have chastised him for feeling anything for a fantasy.

She would have stopped him from acting irrationally. One-One would have calmed from the anger and hatred that he had been feeling. Yet, her calming presence had been robbed from him by a machine that sought only to toy with Usriel’s heart. The Angelus turned away from the battlefield ahead of him as the distant artillery grew more intense, almost as if the war waging reflected his psyche in that moment. Stalking back towards the interior of the Redoubt, Usriel swore that he and his family would be free.

And no one would command him to war again.

The Death of The Order
Caliban - Segmentum Obscurus - Ca: M30

Upon the 10th day of the Waning Sun, Caliban changed forever. It had been a dark day, the sun occluded by heavy clouds which bought with them the promise of rain. Sartana had no complaints however, he knew that the rain was needed to keep the forests green the crops growing and the wells full, after all, what was a little discomfort in exchange for the promise of tomorrow? It also helped hide him and his party from unwelcome attention as they crouched in the undergrowth by the side of the road their armour and weapons purposefully dulled to avoid catching the light, and the eyes of any watchful sentries.

They had been watching the fortress of their rivals, known simply as “The Order”, a title that spoke of self-aggrandisement that rankled the aging Knight of Lupus, as if they were the only order of knights on the world that mattered. He shook his head to rid himself of these thoughts, he needed to focus, concentrate, he, and his party were there to observe the comings and goings of the order, to ascertain their routines, strengths, and most importantly, their weaknesses. They weren’t at war of course, neither were any of the knightly orders in active conflict, but it always made do to keep an eye on the competition, to have a few bargaining chips on your side when it came to negotiating trade or disputes. It is for this reason that a knight as senior as Sartana had been sent, he was a wise figure, favoured to adopt the title of grandmaster, and would be able to ensure that the mission went smoothly, and if caught, his presence would be enough to convince The Order that he was engaging in a diplomatic journey, rather than a military operation.

It was then that it happened, the clouds cracked in the skies above the fortress and something shot from the skies at a speed Sartana could not comprehend, the air instantly took on the taste of ozone as the thing impacted the tallest of the forts towers, there was a moment of silence, broken by a white hot flash and the sound of a thunderous explosion the ground turned to liquid under Sartana’s feet as the shockwave passed over him, he heard the gruesome sounds of his horses rupturing under the pressure of the blast and the dying screams of all those who had not been in their armour. His head rang and ears stung as he faded into the blackness of unconsciousness.

Sartana awoke to the warm rain on his face. Another knight knelt over him, checking his vitals he didn’t recognize him at first as the haze of trauma induced unconsciousness slowly left him, suddenly he felt his adrenaline spike and he shot upright, slapping away the hand of the knight and scrabbling to his feet, he stared out at the scene before him in horrified awe. The forest that had surrounded him was gone, the trees uprooted and the ground turned to a fine, gritty sand, most of his partly was simply, not there, either blown away or buried under the now thick sandy ground. The fortress itself was absolutely destroyed, he could see where the stones had been scattered around the blast site like leafs in a storm, each one had left its own smaller crater, pockmarking the scene like a moonscape.

“Gather what is left of our supplies, we must make it to the Fortress with haste” wheezed Sartana, still not quite fully recovered from the blast.

“Sir, you should rest, there is nothing to be gain-” the knight was interrupted by Sartana snapping out a swift rebuke.

“The Order has kept its secrets from us for hundreds of years! Now their fortress is literally open before us! All that lore and technology is for the first order of knights that reaches it to claim. I will not waste this opportunity!” The old knight seemed manic, he knew that this was it, after a find this big he’d be expedited to grandmaster within months. He set off at a quick march, his fellow knights gathering their weapons rapidly and setting off running alongside him.

The knights approached the ruins with swiftness balanced with caution. Now closer, they could see that there were still the foundations of the fortress remaining, and some buildings had been shielded by the wave of earth from the blast, and still stood half buried amongst the devastation. They spread out, carefully checking for traps and hidden mechanisms as they approached, for The Order’s paranoia was well known and whilst most traps had been destroyed or inadvertently triggered, one could never be sure that they were completely safe within these walls.

Small teams of between 5 and 8 knights were formed, some went to the known libraries and armouries to search for anything they could find, and more still searched for the hidden storage places and vaults that they knew would litter such a fortress. All except Sartana, who strode with quiet purpose through the now steady rainfall towards the broken tower where this devastation had originated.
As he approached, the ground became more unstable, parts of the floor sagged and rose as the ground underneath them had rippled, he carefully picked his way forward, occasionally testing the ground before him with the haft of his axe, until he came to the edge of a great chasm where the floor had caved in completely, falling into the catacombs underneath the fortress.

He ventured down, scrabbling from rock to rock as he descended into the darkness below, and then as he rounded a great statue that had crashed through into the substructure, he saw it. It was visible only through the darkness due to the harsh glow that emanated from it, a cross between blinding white and malevolent energy that flickered over its surface as if battling for possession of the thing. These lights suddenly dissipated as Sartana approached, being instead replaced by a soft clinical glow that illuminated the surrounding area. Now he could see it clearly, Sartana saw that it was a construction of metal and glass, intricate and finely pieced together in a manner that he had not seen outside of the systems of his own armour. He approached the glass window at what he assumed to be the front, and wiped the frost that had inexplicably formed over the surface, and gazed down upon a face, entombed within the pod was an infant, many cabled plugged into it and fed through tubes in a gross parody of a womb. Glancing up, atop the hatch there was a simple numeral where he might have expected a name, “VI.”

From there on things moved swiftly, the Knights of Lupus secured their findings loading the relics and technologies into carts, and vanished into the forest. They would send a small group to double back a few days later, to “discover” the ruins of The Order and emphatically bring this terrible news to the rest of Caliban. Meanwhile, back at their own fortress, Sartana had the news of their findings supressed, and quietly disseminated the discovered technologies to those he knew were loyal to him. He moved fast and secured his timely election to grandmaster, before turning his entire attention towards the mysterious pod he had found, now wired into the power relays of his workshops. Within, the infant rested, unaware of its own importance, and the blood that already soaked its existence.

---

The penumbral sky was awash with spectral lights that danced like frantic, bioluminescent insects over a fresh feast. Lilac lightning arced between floating stone to swarming clouds to ashen tempests far above the black dunes. Astral bodies, natural and fabricated, decorated the dusk that ever blanketed the dark world. It was a never-ending performance that illustrated the penumbral planet and the dusken denizens within – and it was only the beginning of a long, drawn-out performance.

Zaphariel, Malik of Pandjoras, peered up from within the lavishly decorated chambers of Neu Alamut. The weathered armaglass of old had been replaced with crystalline, gilded glasscrete, bordered with imagery of his reign. Draconian rockrete had been meticulously renovated with gravcrete, a precious material harvested from the atmospheric stone-like anomalies. A thousand and one different effigies of the dusken world had been painstakingly carved into the structure. His environment had rapidly changed, yet the Palace of Varranis was the least important.

Even to the naked eye, the Malik could see the work that he had prepared a year ago taking shape. The metallic corpses of Old Pandjoras floating in orbit were being repurposed. Stations, orbital elevators, starships, and more were beginning to populate Pandjoras’ virgin atmosphere. Where once the sky was devoid of traffic aside from harvesters and void serpents, now there was a constant trail of blinking lights and atmospheric stabilizers. Even the immediate sands outside of Neu Alamut were transforming from the barren fortress of House Varranis to the Metropolis of the Malik. How many years would pass before his home would appear like the cities of legend?

The dusken deity turned his attention away from the sight of his rapidly transforming world – the world that he had walked down the path of metamorphosis. He was greeted with the original reason for his current setting. Albeit not nearly as grandiose as the council chambers of Neu Antioch, Zaphariel sat in the middle of a utilitarian audience chamber. He was adorned in a Varranian robe, dyed in charcoal-and-orange with his gravitational crown overhead. What had once been the Grandmaster’s meditation room was replaced with seats, rugs, cogitators, and tables necessary to receive envoys on a grander scale. Several Pandjorans patiently waited in front of a table carved in the shape of House Varranis’ sigil – the blade and dusk sun. To the administration of the Sultanate, he knew they were ministers of the minor houses. To himself, they were nobodies of importance outside of being Pandjorans.

“Continue, Hajib Armarr’z,” the Malik of Pandjoras said. His orange eyes had never left the delegate. Only through his peripherals did he enjoy the way that his dusken world changed.

“Thank you, al-Malik,” the minister replied. He closed his eyes and bowed his head thirteen times in Zaphariel’s direction. A custom in some courts across Pandjoras that the dusken deity wished to destroy. The Malik resolved to accept it until he could standardize their customs. After bowing his head, Armarr’z opened his eyes and spoke once again.

“An alliance between House Korvaix and House Tuturan has been announced, cementing their blood in marriage between the fourth son and fourth daughter. House Abdullahar and House Delukar have come together in unity to merge the Penumbra Fields and the Gravity Ocean through a mesa-canal. House Bahamut has lifted exploratory sanctions from House Galos after a series of inner house punishments.” The delegate concluded after presenting his dataslate for inspection. Zaphariel refused, offering a thin, toothy grin in response.

“Very pleasing, Armarr’z! Thirteen days and thirteen nights of preparing these events was well worth the fruit it bore,” the Malik responded with a pleasing lilt. He would’ve preferred the words being directly communicated by the House leaders or their heirs, but the exploitation of the minor houses was a normality. One that would persist.

Hajib Armarr’z bowed his head thirteen more times before stepping back and taking his seat, allowing another to replace him before the Malik. Another minor noble dressed in the finery of House Tallora, decorated in azure, alabaster, and amber. This one was more experienced than the last, forgoing the old customs of the minor houses and bowing her head once before speaking.

“Hajib Shamaara, al-Malik,” she said as she bowed. Zaphariel nodded in approval, gesturing with one of his talon-ringed fingers to raise her head. She continued with her eyes glued to a dataslate, “per your instructions, the previously untouched mesas surrounding the Valley of the Void have been excavated for minerals. Extraordinarily deep reservoirs of precious metals have been discovered with House Tallora beginning extraction and processing. Emir-i-Thanaa reports several days before the first products are ready.”

“And House Tallora shall prosper, no doubt,” Malik Zaphariel remarked. “The gravitic density surrounding the Valley was immeasurable for decades and unconquerable due to Falak’s presence. Without a void wyrm to haunt the slopes, the Sultanate can prosper from Emir Thanaa’s diligence. Cooperate with House Nathaz and begin shipment to the cities.”

As Hajib Shamaara bowed her head and stepped back, the dusken deity was reminded of previous progress reports. The unification had brought the dunemen, ashwasters, and serpent-tamers from their tribal homes. All of the Houses had grown in just a single year, Neu Alamut most of all. With a new influx of materials from the Valley, Zaphariel knew that they would grow ever closer to an ecumenopolis. Everchanging, ever shifting sands, he thought grimly as the final courtier approached.

“Hajib Jerul, al-Malik!” An androgynous courtier said with enthusiasm. Their dusken skin was blanched with the telltale signs of an ashwaster, reinforced only by the Bahamutian robe they wore. The faded stench of oil and machinery clung to the courtier’s grey-and-purple clothing, typical for their allegiance. A faint clicking, audible only to the dusken deity, confirmed the presence of hidden augmentations. Their cowled head dipped once in a bow before rising again to speak.

“Three more gravity palaces have been restored by your will, Prophet of Dreams! Your ten-year plan has shaken the very foundation of the Bahamutian maintenance cycle. We are truly in awe of your incredible intelligence, Malik of the Black Sands! Your dream of the thirty palaces is achievable, so report the great Saahir!” Jerul concluded, splaying both of his arms wide in a reverent bow. Zaphariel had become accustomed to the overt display of religious infatuation. This was one of many that he had received just today.

“Magnificent! Inform Saahir that these three are to be properly relinquished to the subsequent Houses without one. What of the seer-taming devices and agricultural experiments?” The Malik of Pandjoras asked, already knowing the answer. He had a thousand and one hassan spread across Pandjoras. There was never a moment he wasn’t aware of the situation on his homeworld.

“The Great Saahir reports that the augmentations are taking hold in the Urahalan desert-singers, allowing them greater control of the spirits. The first interstellar prototype will be ready for the reclaiming of the Star Serpent in months, al-Malik!” Jerul quickly responded, their milky eyes reading from something in front of them. Zaphariel could read the sigils that flitted across the surface of the courtier’s eyes. A recent creation from the mind of Saahir.

“The development of genespliced flora to weather Pandjoras’ dusk is progressing slowly, Deity of the Dusk Ring. Even with the assistance of House Delukar, we have reached an impasse. Concurrently, however, Emir Bahamut has made astonishing strides in genemanipulation. He believes that the creation and implementation of several organs could make the average Pandjoran-“

“I understand, Jerul,” Zaphariel interrupted with a soft chuckle. The response was enough to nearly melt the Bahamutian, who locked their legs to refrain from descending into a deep bow. “Tell Saahir to continue delving into the dark sands of gene-research, if he cannot make more strides with agriculture. The Star Serpent will open a thousand and one new avenues on that front.”

As the Bahamutia Hajib bowed low, Zaphariel watched him leave with fresh thoughts on his mind. How would the duskborn look after genemodding? Would they become svelte asasiyun with skin as dark as the black sands, as pale and hardy as the most legendary of ashwasters, or as scaled and monstrous as the void serpents of their home? Perhaps, he thought with excitement, they would be like me.

Siblings, just like himself, it was a thought that excited him greatly. His kin were family. Ramses, the Old Man, and all the people of Pandjoras, yet there was an obvious barrier between himself and them. His stature, abilities, and charisma were beyond that of a normal duskborn. He was not one-in-a-thousand born with special gifts. He was more than that, though Zaphariel did not know why. It dawned on him that his gleefulness was drawing attention to himself from the ministers. The train of thought was forgotten as he stood.

“Glory to you, Hajib of the Minor Houses! Continue to pursue the dusk dreams that we all see and the Star Serpent will soon be ours. Glory to Pandjoras!” Malik Varranis roared with delight, earning himself a cheer from the delegates as they quickly left the chamber.
The dusken deity fell back into the seat he had just risen from, allowing himself a momentary rest as the envoys left. His thoughts lingered back to Saahir’s genetic attempts and the things he had seen in various different ruins across Old Pandjoras. How many times had those before the Cataclysm attempted the same experiments? He wondered how successful they were. Ultimately, it mattered little as they were dead and gone. The silence was quickly replaced with the bickering of Pandjorans in the Varranian dialect.

“The young sheik that grew up tormenting Neu Alamut is quite busy!” Ramses said as he entered first, throwing back his cowl to reveal his maturing features.

“Thy days of terror are eternal and unbound,” Muahad, the Old Man of the Mountain, responded in a voice as tough and stony as gravitic rock. The alabaster skull mask warped his voice, deepening it into a grim tone.

“If I had known unification would bring endless torment in the form of endless sycophants, then I would’ve stayed in Neu Alamut to count a thousand and one grains of black sand.” Zaphariel replied, throwing his hands up in feigned defeat.

“The price of leadership is grievously steep, dreamer, yet it is among the most honorable burdens a soul may bear.”The Old Man spoke, seating himself into one of the vacant seats left by the courtiers. He carefully swept his long robes from his knees as he sat, though Zaphariel knew that his adoptive father had never once relaxed in his life. Azrael, the Old Man’s blade, laid across his lap in a silence more daunting than any roar.

“That would be true of any Pandjoran of respectable age, but I don’t think many thirteen-year-old duskborn can say they lead an entire planet. I’d bet it upon thirteen days and thirteen nights of sobriety!” Ramses playfully scoffed, sitting himself next to the strong-yet-ancient Old Man. He was rarely outside of power armor, so it was a rarity to find him in a bodyglove fitted with serpentscale.

“Would that I could sprint across the black sands without care anymore, but the Star Serpent calls for all of us and we will answer.” Zaphariel retorted, resting his palms against the Varranian table. His taloned jewelry traced the engravings of the piece as he admired the work that he put into it. He continued to speak, “Saahir has begun working on genesplicing the duskborn. No doubt in order to prepare Pandjoras for the stars.”

If the news had rattled either of the hassan, then they did not show it openly with their body language or facial expressions. Ramses raised an eyebrow yet remained nonplussed. Muahad nodded in understanding.

“Thou hast known this truth for some time, Zaphariel. It is the road once walked by the ancients of Old Pandjoras and now thou wouldst walk in their shadow, seeking to claim the honors left untaken.” The Old Man of the Mountain explained, his words carved with weight. The Malik knew it was primarily for Ramses, who wasn’t nearly as proficient of a hassan as either of them.

“I can hide nothing from you, Grandmaster,” Zaphariel chortled, bowing his head once to Muahad in defeat. “Saahir is a unique existence. An ashwaster with deep understanding of Old Pandjoras. Without him, there would be no Star Sultanate. In some ways, he reminds me of you. Otherwise, he feels born from another world. It is why we have such a strong kinship.”

“In another age, he would have drawn first breath upon a red world, not one veiled in dusk,” Muahad growled in an unnatural way. Zaphariel could tell when the Old Man felt uncomfortable in a conversation. His tone, scent, and body language said it all despite his excellent attempts to hide it. Despite this, he persisted, “the path thy take is like that of the oldest legends. From a world far beyond the Star Serpent’s coil. Tread it carefully, Dreamer.”

“It will take me another thirteen days and nights to understand either of you! Speak plainly for the sake of your uncle, yes?” Ramses spurted out, growing increasingly frustrated with the way the two spoke.

“Genemodding is the work of Old Pandjoras. It is fundamental to our success in reclaiming the Star Serpent, among many other things. The Old Man is warning me because of the Cataclysm; however, there is a way to dispel his fears.” Zaphariel calmly explained with a growing smile on his lips. One that spelled doom for the retainers of House Varranis many times before. Ramses felt an unnatural chill as the dusken deity spoke.

“We will announce another Scouring of the Ancients. The likelihood of finding the Old Pandjoran genevaults is higher now that we’ve unified. All will join this time, regardless of hierarchy. Even the ashborn, the dunemen, and the jinn will come.” Zaphariel stated. It was not a question or an expression of opinion. What he had said was an announcement. One that Ramses shook his head in distress.

“… The logistics of this will shake the wealth of the Houses for a decade, but it’s the sort of trouble I expected from you, al-Malik.” Ramses groaned at first but started to chuckle and picked himself up from his seat. He clapped his hands together and looked down to Muahad.

“Such an endeavor shall swell the fate of Pandjoras, yet do not think thy desires hidden from mine eyes,” Muahad calmly spoke, using Azrael as an instrument to rise. The action was pointless. Zaphariel knew how strong the Old Man was instinctively. Just the same, the Old Man knew exactly how the Malik thought.

The time for hiding within an audience chamber was at an end. The Malik of Pandjoras could barely hide his excitement behind his carefully crafted emotional mask. Freedom from the unending quagmire of building a global government from scratch. Something to benefit Pandjoras and to drag him out of the endless torrent of bureaucracy. A year of pure planning to momentarily halt and engage in a frivolous, fruitful adventure.

---

The sunrise peaked behind the carcasses of a thousand and one metallic ruins, worn into rust by gravitic anomalies and black sand. Although it only shone for an hour of the day before ascending into the Ring of Muahad, it was one of the few natural beauties of the dusken planet. To view it was to understand the Tears of Pandjoras – the brilliant orange of a duskborn’s iris. The sun danced off of the metals, spraying rays of light across the Ruins of the Old World. Magnificent, teardrop-domed palaces with enormous, broken engines were scattered throughout the region. Monolithic, spiraling towers with weathered engravings poked out of the black sands, while rivers of green-silver liquid flowed from the corpses of ancient reservoirs. They were the bones of an era that had perished during the Long Night.

The dreadful silence of the region was broken by rhythmic thumping. An unfathomable amount of gravitic engines hummed in the air, twisting the tranquility of the dead into an uproar. The sky became blotted with hovercraft, each in varying states of evolution. Some carried the vestiges of the harvester dropships of the old times, while others were resplendent with newly invented Bahamutian technology. Far behind the swarm, a pair of gravity palaces waited like titanic guardians. Their towering walls, grandiose spires, and bulbous domes watched over the region with their gargantuan engines vibrating the black sands beneath. Great banners of serpent silk unfurled from the top of towers, wildly whipping in the harsh winds.

At the fore of the swarm, a great vessel cut through the sunlight like a scythe through penumbral stalk. Half as long as the great wyrm, Falak, and as thick as three gravitic boulders, it was a monstrous thing in comparison to the rest of the fleet. The prow was shaped into the visage of a void serpent, while the body was reminiscent of a harvester dropship and a bronze scorpion. A three-tiered monstrosity, the middle deck was fitted with two dozen graviton multi-cannons. The bottom deck beheld reinforced glass flanking a huge door, while the top deck connected the ship to the sextuple heavy gravitic engines. A pair of orange-and-black banners unfurled from either side of the craft, proudly displaying the kingly insignia of House Varranis upon them.

Within the vessel’s cockpit, a wide command deck flowed out naturally like a freshly developed dune after a gravity tempest. Graciously sculpted pillars with spiraling snakes held glowglobes around the chamber, while incense burners wafted fresh spice into the area from the walls. A pilot’s throne sat just before an armaglass window, while several stations behind silently assisted. Overlooking the pilot and her entourage was a dais without railing. A meticulously sculpted seat of gravitic stone remained, fashioned with serpents, dunes, and bulbous palaces. Serpent silk rugs and banners with the sword and dusk sun filled the area where black sand did not.

Upon the seat, a dusken deity sanguinely watched the pilot and her crew with a thin smile on his lips. Golden, serpentine eyes peaked out from beneath a dusken cowl. His body was fitted with the ever-evolving powered armor of Pandjoras, thin as a bodyglove and swimming with graviton-particle tubes. Serpent silk robes spilled out from beneath him onto the vessel’s floor, while claw-tipped gauntlets tapped against the arms of his throne. To either side of the being were a pair of men. On his left, a mature hassan with his grizzled features hidden beneath an umbral hood and tabard overlaying his powered armor. On his right, an elder of Neu Alamut with a skull mask and piercing blue eyes.

“Lord Zaphariel, we have passed Neu Babylos and the Great Ruin. Sensors indicate a great clustering of the old empire within thirty kilometers to the north and northwest. The host eagerly awaits your permission.” The pilot, Zahia al-Bahamut, stated through the intercomms. Her slender form was slaved into her throne, extensive cables running from all parts of her body to several cogitators spread across the chamber.

“And do you eagerly await my permission, Zahia?” Zaphariel ibn Varranis pleasantly asked, leaning forward on his throne to peer down directly on the pilot. He could feel her heartbeat quicken and anxiety filter through her body as the Malik loomed. Teasing others never failed to amuse him, though Muahad heavily discouraged the act. The Old Man had always punished him for indulging in this one vice.

“I do, al-Malik,” the pilot responded with a flat tone. While her body responded naturally to the dusken deity’s words, Zahia’s mind had been further stapled of emotion for more augmentations in Neu Babylos. Her response saw the dreamer softly chuckle before rising from his throne.

“As it should be, my little Bahamutian,” he said with an emphasis on ownership. The nerve-stapler did little to suppress the turmoil within. Luckily, the dusken deity had already moved on from his teasing to begin orchestrating the Scouring. A terminal unveiled from the front of the dais with a long board containing a complete set of Pandjoran sigils. He rapidly pressed several of them in a rhythmic pattern, personally seeing to the completion of his project. The voxnet burst to life as the screen displayed innumerable connected devices across the fleet.

+’People of Pandjoras! Duskborn of the Black Sands! Children of the Dusken Planet! Today we repeat what our ancestors have done time and again from the Cataclysm to the Unification. By right of serpent and scarab, we descend upon the ruins graciously left by the spirits of the old empire. To my people, it is your day to prove your worth in a way that benefits all of Pandjoras. By my authority as Malik of Pandjoras, I announce the beginning of a new Scouring! Drown in dusk, my kin, and parse a thousand and one grains of black sand for your rewards!’+ Zaphariel heartily spoke with the guile and charisma he was known for. His voice reverberated several times over, dancing across the wavelength of time and space.

The response was monumental. Each of the speakers within the vessel threatened to burst into azure flame from the cacophony they transmitted. Zahia recoiled on her throne from the noise directly relayed into her skull. The attendants shielded their ears to avoid the worst of the pain. All of their agony was ignored. The Malik of Pandjoras greatly smiled as his eyes watched the sight beyond his descending terminal. A swarm of duskborn descended upon the corpses of the old world, eager to claim riches and glory for themselves. To him, it was the most beautiful display of humanity. Each one rushing to their potential doom for reasons as myriad as the shifting dunes of the black desert. How many of them sought riches simply for him? How many for their own glory? How many for their houses?

“Not too bad, nephew,” Ramses remarked with a guffaw, slapping the back of the dreamer in approval. Unfortunately for his hand, Zaphariel was as tough as an elder serpent’s scales and gravitic stone combined. He could feel his digits throb in protest after the action. The Malik of Pandjoras turned to his uncle and flashed his pristine teeth in a wide, cocky grin. Out of the corner of his eye, the Old Man slowly shook his head in disappointment.

“A zone of caution has been deployed, al-Malik. We are prepared for descent when you wish it,” Zahia stated as she recovered from the audible distortion. Her mind processed all that Zaphariel had queued into his terminal in a fraction of a second. She could feel scarab-like objects descend from the vessel as if it were from her own skin. The sensors within loudly communicated her intent while she awaited the Malik’s response.

“I wish for everything, Zahia,” Zaphariel replied with a wistful tinge to his voice. The pilot knew without guessing that the Malik of Pandjoras mocked her. She disregarded it as she did most of his playing. A thought-pulse from her command throne saw the vessel begin to descend.

As if signaling the start of the Scouring, Pandjoras’ sun dipped back into the Ring of Muahad and dusk claimed the world once more. A blanket of orange, purple, and black fell atop the Pandjorans. The swarm had rushed past the imperial vessel of the Malik, bursting forward to claim glory on their own terms. A great tempest of black sand was unnaturally produced, colliding with the oncoming gravity rain that plagued the umbral world. All manners of wildlife erupted from their hidden dens, terrified by the onslaught of noise drowning their homes. Rough-furred jakaal, bronze-carapaced scorpions, obsidian-shelled beetles, black-scaled serpents, and more stormed across the desert in fear.

“It seems this adventure will take less than thirteen days and nights,” Zaphariel clicked his tongue in disappointment. He watched the stampede of wildlife from the external monitors as they descended. A part of him had imagined that the delve would’ve been fraught with endless danger, yet this display of overwhelming numbers dismayed him.

“Thou art one who bears the burden of destiny, dreamer,” the Old Man of the Mountain responded to his adoptive son’s disappointment. His piercing, azure eyes witnessed the swarm and stampede with callous disregard. As if it was something he had expected. He continued without turning his attention, “know this: many happenings will slip beyond thy grasp. Still thy expectations. Everything is a weapon.”

“Everything is a weapon.” Both Zaphariel and Ramses replied automatically. The former riding off the waves of disappointment. The latter was more than happy to not have to deal with an onslaught of ferocious creatures. All three of them remained silent as the vessel entered it’s final descent onto the black sands of their beloved home. Klaxons began to bark while crimson lights drowned out the soft glow of alabaster glowglobes.

All six of the gravitic engines whorled and clicked audibly to confirm their engagement into low-intensity form. A horrible noise of metal grinding on metal, similar to that of a sword drawn from a sheathe, was heard from below. The vessel lightly rumbled as the ship finally settled into the desert floor. The objects previously dropped from the vessel illuminated a wide, circular zone around them in soft, orange light. The klaxons fell silent and the deck resumed a natural glow as adjutants shuffled about.

“As you ordained, so it is, al-Malik. Glory to you, Zaphariel ibn Varranis,” Zahia announced in a monotone voice. Although she could not turn her head or body to regard the Malik, Zaphariel felt as if she watched and waved him off with a smile. The adjutants around her began to swap out cables, tubing, and vats of synthesized fluid in preparation for the next flight. He regarded her one last time before absconding the chamber.

The three hassan of House Varranis crossed from the command deck to the hangar in a matter of seconds, offering nods and salaams to other personnel as they passed. None dared to follow the Varranians as they crossed the threshold into the lower deck, entering an automatic descender without a sizable retinue. Unlike during his days as a sheik, Zaphariel no longer needed a large party of asasiyun to go where he pleased. He would be lying if it said it made him lonely, but the banter was always appreciated between the Pandjorans of Neu Alamut.

The lower deck of the vessel greeted them for one final stretch. Where once a harvester’s dropship butchering-bay doors would await them, there now remained a diagonal ramp ready to be lowered. Stasis chambers and suit lockers stood at either side of the chamber with a plethora of serpent silk paraphernalia of House Varranis on the walls. Powered armor, gravguns, monomolecular armaments, and more could be equipped from the inventory. The three hassan had no need for any of them. Only Ramses paused momentarily to push a rebreather over his mouth before pressing a nearby rune.

Pandjoras welcomed the hassan as it did to all of its beloved inhabitants. A torrent of wind blasted their bodies with a thousand and one grains of black sand. The air filled with the scent of depleted ozone, pleasing cinnamon, and acrid sulphur. A sky of purple, black and orange loomed overhead, where dark clouds had since started to congregate. The patter of gravitic droplets warped the dark grains before them in miniature tempests from above. Chunks of gravitic stone clung to the air, lilac lightning arcing off of their stony surfaces. It was home to all of them.

“Can you imagine how many more ruins we’ll find of Old Pandjoras in another decade? A thousand and one? Perhaps two?” Ramses audibly proclaimed as he stepped out into the black sands, effortlessly stepping into the bottom of a small dune. The Malik calmly followed with Muahad a step behind.

“The amount doesn’t matter, uncle, all of it will be claimed by the time we rule the Star Serpent,” Zaphariel replied without pause. Although it wasn’t voiced, he was certain that the Old Man could discern his true intentions. He passed Ramses as they walked up the first black dune with ease, only stopping at the top to listen to continue speaking. “The Ruins of Old Pandjoras aren’t the only region that holds a thousand and one secrets beneath black sand. Pandjoras is a treasure, hidden in the penumbral stalks like a golden scarab.”

“Pandjoras is no mere treasure, dreamer. It is a fruit long-ripened, meant to unseal a destiny that stretches into the stars. That sacred fruit lies squandered,” the Old Man of the Mountain said callously as he crossed the dune. The response bristled against Zaphariel’s perfect skin, yet the Promised Dreamer merely smiled down to his adoptive father.

“Come now, brother, we could act like a trio of jakaal barking over a frightened ashwaster, or we could celebrate like a Delukarian on harvest day. We should celebrate that the fruit - which is Pandjoras - even ripened in the first place. Our planet could be much worse,” Ramses cackled, spreading both of his arms out in a welcoming gesture. The act is enough to see the dusken deity alight with laughter.

“Exquisitely said, uncle! I will reflect on my transgressions for thirteen days and thirteen nights, Grandmaster,” Zaphariel said with a deep, exaggerated bow. As ever the Promised Dreamer acted, it was a mocking attempt that was discerned by the Old Man of the Mountain. Despite his display, Muahad’s words would remain on his mind for the rest of their journey. He continued to speak after bowing, “but we shall see what seeds Pandjoras has awaiting for us from here on out.”

The Grandmaster of the Hassan simply stared at the Unifier of Pandjoras like one would look at a humorless, theatrical performer. The glance was enough to unsettle Zaphariel from his exaggerated mocking into a humbled stance. He threw his claw-tipped gauntlets up in defeat, shrugging his shoulders before dipping over the dune with fresh energy in his step. Muahad and Ramses followed after with a silence pregnant in the air, interrupted only by the natural drone of Pandjoras.

A world of ruins laid before as endless as the black sands of Pandjoras. Although the sun of the dusk world no longer shone on them, they still glistened in the umbral shade. Far in the distance, beams of illumination revealed the searching eyes of other duskborn from their dropships. The stampeding fauna had since fallen to a trickle as stragglers quickly found shelter within abandoned dens and unmolested dunes alike. Only three hassan journeyed across the dark desert in a wide radius around them. Any of the wreckages could’ve been their target, yet the tallest of their number aimed for one in particular.

Jutting from the sands like a megalithic serpent of unnatural proportion, a tower with a broken glass dome awaited. The structure stuck out diagonally out of the black dunes, low enough to enter from the top yet tall enough to require assistance climbing into. As the trio of hassan stepped closer to the wreckage, the detailing on the tower became apparent. Hexagonal in shape, each edge was reinforced with rusted armor. Shards of durable glass stuck out of the sand like spears ready to impale unsuspecting foes. Erosion had scraped away whatever color and imagery it had once possessed. Severely warped metal reflected wherever tempest flakes landed in the great storms of the northern hemisphere. Corrosion dissolved what remained of the engravings on the wreck’s surface. These types of structural remains were typical of the region; however, the Malik of Pandjoras saw something else.

As Zaphariel approached the tower, he instinctively picked up a piece of rubble and lobbed it into the air. His golden, serpentine eyes watched it descend for several seconds before confirming the gravitic density of the area. After the confirmation, the dusken deity launched himself up from standing position to the top of the tower. He rolled through the opening in the dome, avoiding the serrated edges of glass in a feat of practised acrobatics. The act was second nature to the Malik, who calmly awaited the rest of his party with a toothy grin plastered across his lips. He wouldn’t dare to provide aid to the other two hassan, both of which wouldn’t accept his assistance for fear of the dreamer’s mockery.

True to his thoughts, the Old Man wordlessly approached an area below the top of the tower and crouched down. He launched up, utilizing absurdly strong leg muscles and Pandjoras’ unique gravity to leap into the structure. His boot-covered feet lightly landed next to the Promised Dreamer. Ramses, a younger hassan than Muahad, groaned as he stepped several feet back to prepare himself for a running jump. Instead of relying on absurdism, the hassan raced forward and lunged into a somersault with the assistance of his powered armor. He fell into the ruin, recovering from the roll as if he had done so a thousand and one times.

“Do you desire this old man to suffer thirteen days and thirteen nights of joint pain, nephew? Have pity on this seneschal of yours!” Ramses feigned an injury, pressing a hand against his back as he turned to Zaphariel. As requested, the Malik of Pandjoras gave him a pitiful look and inclined his head.

“Oh spirits of Pandjoras, behold, my uncle who is weaker than a duskborn of thirteen cycles! Grant him the pity that I cannot,” Zaphariel meekly requested, clasping his claw-tipped gauntlets together in a feigned prayer. As soon as the dreamer put his hands together, the Old Man split his fingers apart from each other to prevent the conjoining. The dusken deity never had a chance to react.

“Fool. No spirits inhabit Pandjoras. We do not pray. Seek atonement from within to purge thy confusion,” the Old Man of the Mountain firmly stated. His words allowed no reply. The pair that played their small game physically and mentally straightened themselves out. Zaphariel was reminded why he never took the Grandmaster on journeys such as these. The dreamer simply shook his head and continued down the tower’s length.

From the inside of the structure, Zaphariel could confirm that the length continued far below the black sands of Pandjoras. The tower presented itself less as a living space and more of a corridor directly into the heart of what dwelled beneath. Skeletal remains of unidentified chambers reminded him that the wreckage wasn’t simply an ascender to an observatorium. Corrosion had taken it’s toll from within, callouslessly erasing markings and engravings on structural supports. Thankfully, the rush of wind defeated any amount of horrifying silence.

As his eyes quickly adapted to the dark, the dreamer became aware of several shapes awaiting them. A gang of jakaal - canid scavengers of the ashwastes - viciously tore at a void serpent’s corpse. He approached without care, testing the limits of his unnatural silence. Zaphariel loomed over the first and managed to reach down to touch the shaggy fur of the beast before it noticed him. The creatures yipped and barked in horror, scurrying off further into the tower with adrenaline pounding through their comparatively tiny bodies. If he so wished, Zaphariel could track them for thirteen days and thirteen nights to hunt the hounds; however, there was no need for it.

“It never ceases to surprise me that the jakaal managed to survive on Pandjoras,” the Malik announced as he leaned down. His claw-tipped fingers pressed into the meat of the void serpent, gauging how much blood he could squeeze out in one sitting for a momentary drink. He decided against it after removing a broken jakaal fang, dripping with blackened ichor. The meat had been ruined and so too was the vitae.
“Pandjoras was once cradle to a thousand and one species. Yet the folly of thy ancestors sundered a world in harmony. The jakaal remain - stubborn strugglers born of maleficence," the Old Man responded. The warning was apparent to Zaphariel. How would the future of the dusk world look with even more tampering?

“I’d rather deal with jakaal than void serpents in any given scenario. I’m thankful for their existence, even if they’re typically a nuisance. Now, as much as I love the wildlife, let’s move on,” Ramses said with exasperation. He walked past the dreamer, who finished observing the ophidian’s corpse. The hassan was preparing himself for the worst to come deeper in the ruin. He understood that delves like these had no guarantee of survival, even if the Malik of Pandjoras was with him.

The incline of the tower grew ever closer to upright as the entrance of their section met the trio. A small gap between an ascender platform and an alcove into the ruin proper required no shortage of acrobatics to cross; however, the hassan had no issue in environments such as these. They naturally excelled, regardless of whether they raced across the black sands, danced on gravitic stone, or leapt between buildings. They were born of House Varranis. The depths of Old Pandjoras required higher levels of focus as each was different from the last. Such was the case for this wreckage.

Zaphariel led the way through the structure, which was quickly proving to be an infinitely larger ruin than he originally predicted. Auspex scans and practical experience could only go so far without scouting. In his earlier days, the dreamer assured himself that he would’ve conducted proper reconnaissance before a delve. He made a mental note to refrain from further laxity. It hardly stopped him from enjoying the experience, with or without the Grandmaster of the Hassan observing every one of his actions.

As the Malik of Pandjoras guided them through a large, circular atrium, he couldn’t hide his curiosity for the ruin. Torches, arranged at sporadic intervals, were permanently affixed with blue, burning fire. Murals on the walls were still as pristine as they were before the cataclysm, yet each would momentarily generate static as if they weren’t properly real. Tarnished gold lavishly decorated wall lining and intricate engravings into every surface regardless of relevance. Sigils in a tongue familiar to him flitted in and out of his vision across overhead arches. The wreckages were a great many things, but he always appreciated their majestic sorcery for lack of better terms. The absence of serpent imagery stole his attention more than anything else.

“This one is just like the others, completely devoid of the black serpents of our home,” Zaphariel spoke aloud in feigned ignorance. He ran his claw-tipped gauntlets over the walls, spreading the hazy imagery around as if it were Pandjoras’ dark sand. It coated his digits in phantom slim, which disappeared the further he moved away from the walls. He turned his attention to Muahad, “Old Man, did the ancients not have any kind of snakes during their time?”

The conversation was interrupted by the sound of shattered ceramics, accompanied by a short gasp of surprise from Ramses. Zaphariel and the Old Man placidly turned to regard the hassan with his fingers hovering over the scattered remains of a peculiar storage device. He offered a short, wordless bow as an apology and returned to his exploration. The dreamer breathed a sigh of relief before returning his attention to his adoptive father.

“Thy ancestors claimed not the void serpents, yet serpentine creatures they did claim. The void serpent, as thou knowest, came after the Long Night - terrors born of the Empyrean,” the Old Man coldly explained. Zaphariel’s eyes widened in surprise. He had never made the connection, but it made sense to him. His golden orbs scanned Muahad for further answers. None came except for what he perceived as mockery, “Didst thou not realize when thou feasted upon serpentine vitae?”

It explained nothing, serving only to frustrate his thoughts. What was the correlation between the void serpents and the cataclysm? What did eating and drinking their meat have anything to do with their origin? How did the Old Man of the Mountain know any of this? A thousand and one questions flitted through his mind at a speed incomparable to another duskborn. Ultimately, he realized that none of them would be answered by his adoptive father. Muahad was the Grandmaster of the Hassan for a reason, he thought with grim reluctance.

The trio of hassan pressed further into the structure, now categorized by the dreamer as a fallen gravity palace. Many of the chambers remained the same as the tower or the atrium, devoid of life and filled with the exotic trappings of Old Pandjoras. Some traps remained, set by long-forgotten automata without masters, yet each was quickly disarmed by Zaphariel. Ticking energy bombs, laser rails, screaming vox-scramblers, classical pitfalls, and more awaited them but were all avoided.

In the dim light of safer alcoves, Zaphariel observed ramshackle belongings from ashwasters and sandlooters. If he so wished, the dreamer was confident in tracking them down; however, he already knew their fates. They had already passed myriad corpses in different states of decay. Some were torn apart by void serpents and others by ancient traps. Few were warped beyond recognition, their disfiguration a result of consuming graviton particles from tempest runoff out of desperation. An understandable, suicidal act. There was no water on Pandjoras. Only blood remained for the duskborn.

Their footsteps, muffled and silent, led them into a large half-circle chamber with an enormous, triangle-shaped door at the other end. The gate was large and slanted, built to deflect energized weapons back into oncoming attackers. Myriad sigils in the language of the ancients dotted across the entrance’s surface. To the right of it remained a terminal with a blank, dustless screen. Curiously, there were no intruders in the area yet trappings remained from absent ashwasters. Of course they couldn’t figure it out, Zaphariel thought to himself as he approached the center of the room.

“Ordinary security of the ancients,” the dreamer remarked with a sigh. His form crossed the room in two paces to the terminal on the side of the gate. He hovered a hand over the sterile screen, awakening the machinery with presence alone. The chamber began to illuminate as it was roused from slumber, azure fire lining the upper rim of the ceiling. His orange, serpentine eyes glanced up to the triangular door once before returning his attention to the terminal.

“Ut pretiosa semina intus aperiantur ac revelentur, vitam nostram in persequendo damus,” Zaphariel enunciated with practiced, lethargic ease. His voice reverberated several times over, reality bending to his will as he spoke aloud. The terminal blinked three times in response, but the dreamer was prepared for such a thing. Wyrd like shifting, black sand swarmed over his claw-tipped gauntlet as he engaged the screen. A single touch from his digits saw the soundless cogitator illuminate a soothing, green light.

“You speak the language of the ancients?” Ramses asked in a surprised tone. He was aware that the Malik of Pandjoras was a ludicrously successful and well-known relic hunter; however, the hassan had not realized to what degree.

“I can speak it, but I do not understand it. These ‘systems’ that the ancients used are tricky. It isn’t just about speaking. It requires a serpent’s song, a bit of wyrd-wielding, and my illustrious intelligence!” Zaphariel responded with a coy grin. Diving into the ruins of Old Pandjoras was one of his favorite hobbies. It was one of the few skills that Muahad had never taught him that the dreamer was truly proud of.

“So that the precious seeds within may be opened and revealed, we giveth our lives in pursuit,” the Old Man of the Mountain abruptly explained to the surprise of the other two. Zaphariel blinked several times in muted astonishment. He felt humbled in a way that only Muahad could make him feel. The other hassan, Ramses, offered snorting laughter at his nephew’s crushing defeat. The elder calmly strolled into the guarded room, leaving the duskborn in his wake.

As the Malik of Pandjoras had originally suspected, despite his verbal loss, this chamber was indeed their target. White tile stretched from the aperture across a distance as long as Falak and as wide as Neu Alamut’s training grounds. The room was illuminated by soft, alabaster glowglobes as thin as a fingernail. Sterile, fresh air unlike that of Pandjoras filtered through unseen vents. Wards, unlike the scrawlings of the dunesingers, lined the walls in harmonic defense against the unknown. Rows upon rows of sealed shelves dotted the aseptic expanse for untold quantities. Stasis chests as large as a jakaal accompanied each shelf in infrequent pairs. Sculptures, fashioned from varying antiseptic metal compounds, ringed the area just a hair away from the strange glyphs.

“As I wish it, so shall it be,” Zaphariel’s triumphant attitude returned no sooner than it had been defeated. He ambled past the Old Man of the Mountain with a toothy grin spreading across his lips. In his own way, the dreamer had defeated Muahad in a game untold and unsung. The elder quietly observed the Malik of Pandjoras as he investigated their new surroundings.

“It’s impressive that the ancients managed to keep this all going through the Cataclysm,” Ramses stated. His own claw-tipped gauntlets idly massaged his scratchy beard as he passed the Old Man of the Mountain. The hassan’s orange eyes primarily fell on the stasis chests which broadly displayed the contents within. Sigils of the ancients hovered aetherically nearby. He surmised it was the name of the sterile trunk or a date of some kind.

“Reckless meddling. Thy ancestors hungered for immortality, yet none endure to claim the seeds of their folly. A reckoning unseen descended upon them—like a grave tempest of black sand—and swept them into oblivion. All their preparations were for nought.” Muahad intoned, stepping in sync with the inquisitive form of Zaphariel. His azure eyes scanned the shelves as they passed, though it wasn’t the contents of such that fully drew his attention. Nor, did it seem, that they stole the notice of the dreamer.

The sterile shelves with the seeds of the genevault were forgotten for the sculptures lining the edge of the room. Zaphariel’s pupils sharpened as he scanned the first of many. He had never seen compositions of such mysterious perfection in his many ventures into Old Pandjoras. A claw-tipped gauntlet reached out and touched the metallic facsimile. The surface of the statue was surprisingly soft with a warm tinge felt even through powered armor. Each one was dressed in similar fashion to the elder that walked with him. Skeletal masks, suctioned to the face, in various forms of half or full. Long, dark robes accented a large, lanky body fitted with different manners of ceremonial armor unknown to him. Every single sculpture was dissimilar in variation. No two were alike as if ages passed between all of them.

“Old Man, it seems your ancestors had admirers in the days of the ancient empire,” Zaphariel frigidly joked. They were all exquisitely beautiful to him in their own way. It spurred the muse within to develop his own line of statues locked in ageless tranquility; however, their appearance was too similar to ignore. He couldn’t look past the incredible likeness between them and the Old Man of the Mountain.

“The fashion of the old empire, passed down from grandmaster to grandmaster in remembrance. Thy instincts serve thee well, dreamer. The title of Old Man of the Mountain long predated the Cataclysm. Their tales—shrewd memories carved to resist the yearning aetheric tide—endured through their inheritors.” Muahad explained in a rare display of humility. There was no emotion in his voice as he spoke. Only the austere timbre of duty remained. He continued, “Mine own title in the aeons before was borne to rouse the disheartened and safeguard their remembrances. The Old Men were solemn and ingenious warriors, devoted to the pursuit of knowledge - yet the avarice of the old empire was abhorrent. Short were the lives of thy ancestors, forced to wither in squalor beneath the decadence of hedonistic, god-like aristocracy.”

“Thus was it their duty to take their heads… and deliver them as feast unto Azrael,” the Old Man spoke as though Pandjoras herself spoke through him. Zaphariel hadn’t noticed that the black blade had been drawn and pointed into the sterile tile. The weight of infinity dawned on the dreamer. To emphasize his own astonishment, his adoptive father continued to speak. His tone became deathly and devoid of what warmth remained. “There are no gods on Pandjoras.”

“And these are your ancestors, hidden away in a forgotten datavault far from Neu Alamut?” Zaphariel cautiously probed with a question. A thousand and one thoughts crossed his mind, yet each one was only sparsely connected. Suspicions unbound filtered through the dusken deity’s mind, his genealogy assisting in bridging his many hypotheses. He arrived at a conclusion that toed the line between insane and mystical

“Nay — naught but pretenders, who clawed for dominion over the mortal coil to sate their own vain hunger. Thy forebears were wrought of a sublime genome, aye—but the usurpers dared stride beyond the true path. Mine ancestors visage they stole, seeking to bind their wayward creed in stolen flesh. Yet all their striving was for naught — for they foresaw not the coming of the Long Night, nor the doom it bore upon their folly.” Muahad concluded. It had been the longest that the Old Man of the Mountain had spoken in Zaphariel’s entire life. To the dreamer, his adoptive father’s words were ringed with truths and lies that weaved naturally together. How much of it was a tale passed down from the inheritors? How much of it was personally witnessed by the Old Man? He offered a reinvigorated grin in response.

“I don’t believe that the Old Man of the Mountain is a title. I believe that you - and your supposed inheritors - are all the same,” Zaphariel announced quietly to his adoptive father. He never turned to regard him with the accusation, simply saying it aloud to the elder. Muahad, after all, was known throughout Pandjoras as the Grandmaster of the Hassan. Some even referred to him as Malik-i-Hassan in shadows before his ascendancy.

A hushed, gravid silence descended betwixt them after the dreamer’s accusation. Slowly, the Old Man of the Mountain unleashed a noise - not wholly a gasp, yet not wholly a cough - that rasped against the alabaster tile. Zaphariel knew it for what it was: laughter. The first such utterance he had ever heard from his adoptive father. The action terrified him more than any possible fate that awaited his long reign as Malik of Pandjoras. His eyes - azure, cold-burning stars each - narrowed in baleful delight as he turned his gaze to his adoptive son.

"O’ foolish whelp - clever, covetous, thief-born son of mine. I am no more mine ancestors than thy are naturally born of Pandjoras’ black sands. Thy boldness amuseth me. Thy suspicion nourishes me. Thy hunger for truth stirreth mine own heart. Thy meddling shall be the grave that closes ‘round thee, my son. Temper thy hand, lest it carve thy epitaph upon the dark dunes," the Old Man of the Mountain responded. For a heart beat, Zaphariel saw it beneath bone and shadow - a fleeting glimmer of a toothy grin alight in azure flame. In that moment, the dreamer felt as if his adoptive father was stronger and taller than he had ever chosen to appear. A grim specter, midnight-clad bearing the apocalyptic blade that murdered the gods of a bygone era.

“Those are amazing statues! Thinking of bringing them back to start a new hobby?” Ramses interrupted from behind, several serpent silk sacks full of unidentified objects. The hassan’s tone indicated no knowledge regarding their conversation. An ignorant intruder. The dreamer was thankful for his uncle’s naivete. The heavy atmosphere deflated into a mute tranquility, yet Zaphariel could feel precipitation bead across his forehead. His heartbeat refused to calm.

“Of course, uncle! They’ll be visual practice for when I travel across the Star Serpent, sculpting my own image and whatever other fantastical beings that cross my path. Perhaps there will be individuals nearly as perfect as I am,” Zaphariel laughed. He couldn’t calm himself, instead resorting to absurdity to quell the turmoil within. The Malik of Pandjoras gestured widely with his hands to the sculptures to emphasize their particular assets.

“I wouldn’t expect any less from you, nephew! From my limited knowledge of the ancients, I’ve confirmed that this place seems to be the genevault you were looking for. I’ll send a vox to the surface and instruct a team to extract the lab. Shall we leave?” Ramses responded with his own raspy laughter before gesturing to the exit. At this current point in time, Zaphariel desired nothing more than to leave with his goal completed. His curiosity was beyond sated - dangerously so.

“Does a serpent simply wait while others dare to feast upon its prey? Set a thousand and one duskborn on this location and ship the contents to Neu Babylos. Let’s leave this place-” Zaphariel had begun to instruct the Seneschal of Neu Alamut when his golden, serpentine eyes were drawn to the exit. It had never occurred to him that there were more statues that lined the edge of the genevault. He had thought that he had committed all of them to memory, yet one last sculpture managed to escape his vision. The dreamer felt the piercing eyes of Muahad fall upon him as he calmly ambled up to the effigy. Reality felt weak to him in that moment as he crossed the distance.

A shimmering haze obscured the statue's fine details, like the stasis fields aboard the Midnight Serpent’s arming chambers. Perhaps it was this field that had hidden the statue from the Malik’s sight, or perhaps there was some other, more esoteric reason behind the lapse in his awareness. Whatever the reason, it did not matter now, for the Dreamer saw the statue before his eyes. He could discern no hidden energy source, no thrum of power emanating from the statue's plinth, no reason for the statue to appear as though it were shrouded in silken draperies of dusk. As though the statue's unnatural obscuration had been waiting specifically for him to approach it, the shimmer resolved. The statue beneath revealed itself as though a malady were removed from the Dreamer’s eyes all at once.

It was another rendering of a figure. This one was a dark-haired woman, dressed in a long, nearly floor-length cloak of vibrant blues, greens, and reds in interlocking geometric patterns. She had a shoulder exposed on her right side where the cloak came together in a simple knot, and a club of exotic wood and lava glass blades was held effortlessly in her right hand. The woman was staring outward, upward even, toward the Dreamer. Her eyes were the rich brown of a fine qahwa, brewed among friends and companions on a short reprieve from a hunt out among the penumbral sands. They were full of life, a burning desire for greatness radiated from them, and an overwhelming sensation of violence barely restrained crept in at the corners of her eyes and the way her smile had been ever-so-creased at the edges.

To Zaphariel ibn Varranis, it was one of the most beautiful sculptures he’d ever laid his eyes on. The ancestral statues of the Thirteen Houses of Pandjoras didn’t come close to the level of perfection that this effigy exhibited. His lips grew into a toothy grin as he caressed the statue’s face with his claw-tipped fingers. An unusual warmth permeated throughout his limb. A word threatened to bubble to the surface of his mind from the unknowing void. As his mouth began to form the words, the Dreamer’s body screamed in anticipation of danger. He jerked backwards just in time.

Azrael - the black blade of the Old Man - cleaved through the statue with the force of an angry god. The powerfield of the blade alighted in azure flame, melting the metal surface of the effigy with a single slash. Muahad had appeared next to him with a hand firmly pressed against his shoulder and another wielding the handle of the apocalyptic sword. Zaphariel’s mind and body writhed in agony as he watched the beautiful sculpture quickly transform into prismatic slag. The dreamer felt as if his legs would give out in despair.

“Father, what’ve you done!?” Zaphariel screamed out, eschewing what remained of his carefully crafted emotional mask. He bared his teeth in an animalistic snarl akin to a void serpent with its frills splayed in anger. A hiss escaped his lips in fury. How dare the Old Man take away something so precious!

“Such women dwell not upon Pandjoras, Zaphariel, nor have they ever walked its black sands,” the Old Man stated. There was a cold fury to his eyes unlike anything that Zaphariel had ever seen. His azure orbs bored through the slag as if it were a thousand and one insults given physical form. The blue flames that licked at the edge of Azrael disappeared, deactivated by an imperceptible move from Muahad. He quickly turned away, callously disregarding his adoptive son in that second.

A desire bloomed into his mind like blossoming azure roses in gravity rain. The features, the touch, and the appearance of the effigy had been committed to the peerless memory of the Dreamer. Determination replaced despair in half a heartbeat. His fingers demanded to carve endless sculptures in the likeness of all that he came across. In the absence of a beauty lost, Zaphariel made a promise to sculpt a thousand and one statues of the things that he loved. They would never escape him again.

---

Credits: @MarshalSolgriev (Zaphariel/Muahad/Ramses), @FrostedCaramel (Weird Statue)

"Joost! Up! Now!"

Joost startled awake, blinking in the bright light of a flashlight. "Cap'n Gerald?"

"Get up. You're being put on night watch."

"What's going on Cap'n? 'm not suppsed ta be on watch until next week." The ensign followed Gerald stumbling as he pulled on his boots.

"The mines have been attacked. We're sending nearly the whole fleet out." The captain ground his teeth, and the vein sticking out at his temple told Joost all he had to know about the man's current mood. "Attacked! By fucking Pale, no less! Arrogant fools who don't know their place."

"We're going to battle, Cap'n?" He quickened his pace. It had been over three years since Joost had joined the greatest fleet of the Karyon Seas, but he had never yet faced a real battle. The other mountain ranges were too afraid of Azoras's strength and worked hard to maintain treaties or stay out of their way. It meant that in the over three years Joost had been part of the fleet, he had never seen a real battle.

The captain was quick to dash his hopes, "No. I'm going to battle. Someone has to stay here and watch the Bay." He smacked the back of the ensign's head, "Now hurry up and get to your station!"

Joost's shoulders fell. He dragged his feet the reset of the way to the watch station. Azoras not only had the most powerful fleet on the Northern Ocean, but they also had the most protected range on the entire planet. On the north side, was The Wall, a mix of manmade and natural sheer cliffs that prevented entry and protected them from canon fire. On the south side was what they called The Bay - it provided the only access point to the rest of the mountain range. Any invading fleet would have the full force of Azorasi defense canons and be obliterated before they got anywhere close to breaching the outside. While the majority of his fellows would be out getting the taste of battle and earning their medals, Joost was, once again, stuck staring out across the dark empty ocean.

Something sharp startled Joost back to consciousness. How long had he been asleep? Joost frantically checked the portable computer, rewinding through the last couple hours before remembering where he was and relaxing. This was Azoras. The impenetrable fortress. And even if Joost had missed something, the other towers would have cauhght it. He had just been abot to settle back against the rock wall, when another object fell on his head. He leaned down, picking up a rock from the ground. Frowning, Joost turned around to look up. Stuck on the sheer cliff wall like a spider was a long-limbed monster in white armor.

Joost did not get time to scream. The last thing he saw was the pointed smile of death falling upon him.

These in-person meetings were now the default of the Martian Parliament, Salkor mandating such as a means to ensure some further measure of personal investment in the good order of the planet and this assembly. Anybody not present in person without accounting for it would be considered as having abstained from the meeting, anybody insistent on appearing through remote means would have restrictions on their capacity to speak and vote. Arguments that it was inefficient to attend physically when they could speak wholly adequately through transmissions would be countered with a simple observation: research could be done, orders relayed, and whatever other duties they would claim demanded their time had more than enough means to be done remotely upon the Red Planet just as easily as they could be done through personal intervention. It wasn’t as if any of the representatives turned centrifuges or engraved microwafers through their own hands or mechadendrites.

There were some frustrations with this arrangement nonetheless. For one, with everyone present in person it was much harder to deal with constant interruptions – figures speaking over one another, so on and so forth. The amplifiers of their voice were largely formalities, for turning them off for those that wanted to truly raise their voice would not stop their own bombastic amplifiers sometimes within devices as small as a finger resonating across the colossal scene. Worse yet, despite themselves being constant violators of it, they all believed that it was outright religious dogma (and indeed, in some sense it was with many scriptures bearing canons that spoke of this) for the Cult of the Machine that all must wait their turn and speak in an orderly and timed fashion. This meant that on top of the many and omnipresent violations of the many strictures of the Parliament, further time, goodwill, and something so pathetically human as sanity was wasted on everyone pontificating on each other’s infractions demanding Salkor do something about them. On the few instances he brought up the hypocrisy of the masters present - largely as an experiment rather than with sincere intent to have this endeavour bear fruit - he received long litanies that read more as rants about why each violator was somehow exceptional and deserving of extra time, or to interrupt another.

All by the will of the Machine God of course, the self-presumed divinity of their word justifying all without question.

A door opened, and Salkor was reminded of yet another privilege every attendee assumed they had; being late. Briefly he attempted to penalize those that were tardy, yet another trait so disgustingly reminiscent of the weakness of the flesh despite them citing business in their Forges they had to attend to that got in the way of timeliness. But nonetheless many still had the audacity to not come on time, or now did not even come at all. Reluctantly he waived these penalties now, unless the offender did something else objectionable at which point they were merely a way to incur further punishment on those that earned his ire.

Archmagos Kerano, a creature that would elicit disgust among humans and many of the Red Planet’s denizens alike. He opted largely for organic augmentations instead of those of steel. But those that had underestimated him in the recent violence suffered for it. The seemingly unsystematic meat covering his form was as unnatural as plasteel that made the bodies of other Tech-Clerics. Grown out of studies in meticulous labs it hummed rather than pulsed, transfer of blood and nutrients optimized to be faster and more discrete. Perhaps it was marginally less durable than the manufactured armours elsewhere on Mars but would-be assassins saw his vital organs regenerate in moments after attacks that would have felled other Archmagoses. Centuries from now people would have terms for what he resembled, an unfortunate coincidence of his tentacles and bulbous chunks of muscle looking not dissimilar to a chaos spawn; it was an analogy Salkor's mind wouldn't be tormented with for a long time.

But all of this was a distraction. He let the fleshy thing take its position, before resuming his point. “The audits of production are again inconsistent across almost all Forges. The agreed upon quotas to prepare for Terran Imperialism is not met. Every Forge that cannot explain the discrepancy will be subject to sanction.” Binharic complaints assaulted his feeds at the same time as his auditory sensors were overwhelmed.

“Access to magrails will be restricted. Access to orbital transports will be restricted. Access to-” and suchlike continued from Salkor’s unabated speech. A human couldn’t hear it over the cacophony, though he knew well enough that everyone present could filter out and process every single thing said despite its simultaneity. Eventually the Fabricator General finished his words that were not quite clearly sincere warning nor aggressive threat. It was only some time after that did all the Archmagoses finish their own angry retorts. They had slowly started to understand the somewhat paternal fashion that the Speaker had come to use with them, waiting for every individual tantrum to subside before continuing. Yes, he was wasting his own time standing on formality but he was wasting theirs in equal proportion and there was so much more of them here. On some level, he supposed they understood that in this war of attrition, he was expending and losing less than they were in total and gradually submitted to his efforts in taming their unruliness. “Further,” he continued. “There is a failure to re-militarize among more than half of the Forges present. Defences are not erected. Similar sanctions will be applied to any that refuses to adjust production to a standard of fortification that is being cast to every one of your receivers now.”

What a nuisance. He was born on earth and he saw the weakness of the flesh epitomized yet he couldn’t help notice so many parallels between the leadership of Mars and a squabble of tribal Terran children.

“These sanctions will only harm our effort to prepare for the Terrans.”

“Then do not make them applicable to you.”

Silence.

“We are forced to do such. We cannot trust those that so recently took arms against us.” This was from another voice, and raised much much more proverbial finger pointing about the recent conflict.

“None of these objections will matter if the Terrans ransack and pillage our holy world.” Salkor overclocked every single core of his processors, the effect analogous to time slowing down. He had an impulse for a speech. But would it be wise? Emotion was never truly gone, much of the writings of the scriptures memorized by all present hinting to that even if denying the principle.
He decided against it. The Fabricator General wouldn’t stomach being told to get on with it by these centuries old walking and hovering relics.

“Techno barbarians.” Came a voice from old withered lips, Archmagos Kalovan electing to use (at least, seemingly) unaugmented human utterances to speak. A sucking noise that a young Salkor might have seen as disgusting punctuated every syllable, but thankfully he had evolved enough to ignore it. “If we are unable in our current state to annhillate their unenlightened realm, then I would declare that either our dogmas are false, or we have failed to adhere to them.”

One of Salkor’s many mechadendrites tapped his Omnissian axe lightly. “Such arrogance will not serve. The Writings of Elder Zotian, Canon Nineteen. The Omnissiah’s greatest miracle is no personal intervention, but the endowing of capacity and reason to let the faithful overcome any hindrance to the divine order they are to bring about. Venerable Ulyzhec in the Fourth Epistle to the Phaetonites: Proactivity in the Machine God’s name is a virtue unto itself, for they that show sloth in their efforts are lacking in the graces of the Motive Force.” In both cases, Salkor was certainly paraphrasing, and even then they didn’t support his point outright. But citations of blessed archives even if tangentially relevant did give pause to those that wished not to obey the directive of the Fabricator General.

Another voice spoke, the chittering of Archmagos Nicil. “And if our defences should fail? What then?”

Salkor almost responded too quickly, for he along with others didn’t truly regard the defeat of Mars as a possibility. But, brashness could be seen as primitive folly.

“Provisions for evacuation will be made.” Confidence was not something that could be heard on something so neutral as a monotone mechanical enunciation, nor could it be seen in body language of a mechanical beast as himself. But nonetheless, part of him hoped he projected it.

Slowly, voices again began to speak out of turn, the connective handshakes of software not happening to maintain that orderliness Salkor so thoroughly sought.

“But, they will not be necessary.” He spoke over the litanies of grievances before they managed to coalesce into something uncontrollable. Rhetoric had to go offence now, to compensate for the concern. “Our projections indicate that - provided acquiescence to the terms outlined is given - the Terran hordes will be destroyed. To you, the faithful to the vision, possibilities will be open greater than ever conceived. Imagine, the archaeotech stores of Old Earth opened. Faithless barbarians turned en-masse to servitors in the sanctification of that barren world for the Machine God, and the unearthing of what has been lost to any archive.”

That interested them, as expected. But now that he had raised their mechanical passions, their expectations had to be tempered. “But that will only come to pass if the Terrans bring violence on our world, and we persevere with sufficient reserves remaining to mount punitive expeditions.”

Finally, he had them in a frame of mind he could work with. Stoking the furnaces of their greed for the unknown at least for now got them obeisant to his demands. Yet, he had managed to make no promises he couldn’t keep. No wars needed to be had, merely defences prepared.

All was well on the Red Planet.

For now.

The alarms had created a painful choir; Only one of them was operating at max efficiency, with damage and neglect causing the rest of them to wheeze and sputter at varying, off key degrees that would grind against the human desire for harmony, even for something that was intentionally meant to be loud and annoying so that it couldn’t be ignored.

Yet Rik was tuning it out all the same. The warp drive in front of him required his full attention after all and such minor distractions as the alarm system weren’t worth his time at the moment.

The plan was that the warp drive needed to be turned off so that it couldn’t trigger a warp jump in the larger space hulk. Ideally, all of the warp drives (or their equivalent) would be disabled before a random jump was triggered, but as long as a critical mass were offline then theoretically, the hulk wouldn’t be able to open the hole in reality of the scale required to move the hulk and thus it wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Not to say that having those warp drives try to do so anyway wouldn’t cause complications and technical issues, but that was a problem for the future.

The warp drive he was trying to beseech was his primary concern and it was proving to be the hardest challenge he had ever faced in his life. Much like how the warp had horrifically twisted the rest of the vessel to the point that its origins were impossible to tell, the warp drive was stripped bare of any signs of what its original template might have been. The degradation of reality that seemed to linger at the corner of the visual spectrum had taken its toil on the advanced piece of sacred technology, with the unnatural blood that rained from the walls and ceiling further getting into its inner workings and causing untold harm.

The machine spirit itself was… was…

Rik was honestly at a loss for words about what the state the machine spirit was in. The closest he could get would be that it was like trying to interact with a machine spirit that had somehow endured the brutal tortures of the orks for centuries and yet somehow was still able to mindlessly perform its original function, despite the countless defilements, broken pieces and unsanctioned modifications made to it but…

Truthfully, that didn’t truly capture the extent of the horror. Parts of its broken internals had been replaced by fleshy growths that were actively drinking the blood dripping into it and by all accounts it was somehow still able to perform its function, despite all logic and reason saying that it was impossible.

The machine spirit itself was… difficult to understand. It spoke with many different voices, all of them trying to speak over the others, each talking in a tongue that Rik didn’t know… but there was an emotional undertone to each one that was always either manically overjoyed or so deep in the pit of despair that Rik was pretty sure if anyone else was trying what he was doing, they would have killed themselves by now.

There was a part of Rik that wanted to save this drive. To gleam the knowledge of how to heal such deep damage and twisted corruption that it’s time in the warp had caused. The quest for knowledge demanded as such but Rik isolated those feelings in their vaults. The mission required him to be objective and treat this as the triage situation that it was.

With great difficulty, he managed to isolate and shut down some of its subsystems. Reactivate some of its long eroded safety features. With blood dripping from his eyes, he disconnected from the machine and looked towards those who had been prepping explosives to consign this poor, twisted echo of a sacred machine to wherever machine spirits went once they were truly destroyed. Rik honestly suspected that whatever the outcome, it had to be better than its current state. “The warp drive is as prepared for destruction as it can be. Once the charges are ready, get clear and perform the rite of detonation.”

Taking a moment to wipe away the blood on his face, Rik considered saying something: A sentimental urge to honour an ancient machine that, while it might not be sanctified anymore, deserved some respect all the same. When the pings of readiness appeared from the demolition team, he settled for “May this ancient wonder find the peace in destruction that existence denied it.”

---

Word had traveled quickly through the great city of Ocotopec. The cityfolk, those who didn’t toil the fields and hunt the jungle by day, were beginning to clog the streets, each pair of eyes morbidly curious to witness the girl and the boy who had slaughtered the city's sworn protectors.

The guards with the Jagr faces had brought them through the city with haste. The main thoroughfare, as far as she could tell, was choked with onlookers. Thousands of people lined the edges of the road, many had their faces painted in brilliant turquoise patterns, others possessed piercings of stone and ivory-white bone at their septum, ears, and cheeks. She took in the sight as she followed close behind the guards. She had seen people with such embellishments before, outside of the great walled cities she had stalked, and most recently inside that burning maelstrom of death and desecration, though the faces there had been far less curious and far more afraid.

She turned her attention back to the Jagr guards, noting the urgency in their pace, the tensing of their muscles as they led them onward through the growing crowds of Ocotopec. She could smell their fear, taste the metallic tang of cortisol on her tongue as they radiated sweat and heat just steps in front of her.

“There,” the boy, Cuauhtl, whispered to her as he motioned with one hand, “the heart of Ocotopec, the Hueyi Teocalli.”

She had never heard that phrase, but she understood it intuitively, The Temple of the Sun.

It had been slowly growing over the tops of the two-story rectangular clay construction houses that had surrounded them since entering the city. At first, it was a vague outline of a half circle, but her eyes had picked out the ornate filigree carved upon it, and the stonework reminded her of the beams of the sun rising at the far edge of the horizon. Then a roof had revealed itself, and a squat stone structure with an opening facing them had become visible beneath it. She had thought it stood atop a hill of considerable height to have been visible over the flat roofs of the personal dwellings and merchant shops surrounding them. Still, she had been surprised when they were finally free of the city blocks to find it mounted atop a mountain of stone.

The teocalli was massive, a four-sided pyramid rising above the city with all the majesty of an indifferent god too large to be concerned with the matters of the small folk. She quickly understood that this structure was the work of thousands of laborers and hundreds of talented stonemasons and artisans. A reflecting pool stretched the length of the way to the teocalli, flanked on both sides by well-worn roads of stone and choked by tens of thousands of people jostling for position to watch her be escorted to the Quetzalcoatl Totec Tlamacazqui.

At the foot of the teocalli, two statues twice the height of a fully grown man stood sentinel. Jagrs, their mouths agape to reveal rows of killing teeth of emerald, greeted them as they began their climb up the brown-stained steps of the teocalli. She could smell the chemical makeup of the stain, taste the iron on her lips as they climbed. There were few things she knew as well in this life as blood.

“It is far larger than yours,” the girl commented on the now fallen teocallis of Apaxco to Cuauhtl.

The boy looked puzzled a moment before he responded, already becoming out of breath as they climbed the steps.

“Apaxco was not so grand as Ocotopec; this place has stood defiant of the Easterners for fifty generations before my Grandfather's forebears walked this plain, and, Sun Above willing, for five hundred more.”

The girl did the math quickly in her head, and though she did not understand why she was aware that a generation equated to roughly twenty trips around the local star, she knew it all the same. If Cuauhtl’s knowledge was correct, though she doubted its accuracy, the city of Ocotopec was over 1500 standard solar years old.

Solar. She weighed the strange word in her mind. The importance of it was immeasurable, the worth of that unknown place priceless to her. She had never heard it spoken before, even Cuauhtl with his studied knowledge and embellished words had not placed it in her mind. She put it away, determined to figure out its origin soon enough.

The Jagr guards stopped, and the girl's mind came back to the present. They must have been some two hundred and fifty meters up the teocalli now, with about as many steps left to the top. But they were on a small plateau of sorts, cut around this central part of the staircase as an entrance to some chambers within.

“Do not speak unless spoken to, do not make eye contact unless addressed, and do not insult the Quetzalcoatl Totec Tlamacazqui.” The Priest of Our Lord, again, she knew the meaning of the strange title immediately, and a well of something warm began to grow in the center of her chest as she pondered the knowledge. She rolled her tongue as if tasting the meaning buried deep within the thought. There was providence in this moment; she could feel it.

Cuauhtl spoke cautiously as they left the bright lit sky outside the teocalli for the torchlit interior, “They will have your heart if you offend them,” he finished, though the girl knew without having to ask that he had left out words at the end, and mine too. She admired his selfless courage in that moment, in the same way a mother might admire a loyal dog placing itself between her child and a beast of the jungle.

The entryway was sparse, a smooth stone passage leading directly toward the center of the teocalli. As they walked, torchlight began to give way to sunlight once more. They exited into a sun-bathed circular chamber that was far too large for the structure it was built within. She retraced the steps that had taken them here in her mind, cursed her inattention on the comforting warmth spreading from her chest down to her fingers and toes. She could see it now, in her mind, the interior layout of the teocalli, the subtle downward slope, the turns nearly imperceptible to a normal human that wound them further and further down with every ignorant step. The creators of this teocalli had taken great care in their deception, care no simple plumb or square could have crafted measurements so exact; they had been aided by means beyond her comprehension, by powers no longer present upon Ixhun itself, of this she was sure.

She brought her attention back to the chamber before them, the length of her pondering shorter than a single beat of Cuauhtl’s anxious heart. The chamber stretched for some one hundred meters in what the girl could only infer to be a perfect circle. The roof above was a dome, the center of which was an oculus open to the sky far above them. She had no doubt it ran directly through the center of the teocalli itself and provided the light that so bathed this innermost sanctum.

At the center of the sanctum, arrayed beneath the oculus, was a mechanism so foreign to the space it occupied that there could only be one explanation for its presence. Like a tocatl, eight limbs of burnished material reached up into the ceiling and buried themselves into the stone roof of the chamber. The metallic limbs all reached down toward the base of the chamber, and all but one of them ended in several lenses. The closest lenses to the oculus measured some ten men across, while each subsequent lens grew smaller and smaller. The limbs holding them were clearly articulated, with many joints allowing the movement of the lenses to focus the sunlight from above in whichever direction was necessary for the contraption's function.

She turned her attention to the final articulated limb, the end of which was not a lens but instead a cylindrical device of silver and bronze. What function the entire contraption had originally been created to perform was not immediately clear, but its current use was more than evident throughout the entire sanctum.

Thousands of the stones of the sanctum, from those Cuauhtl and herself tread over now, to those lining the walls, or those making up the raised dais beneath the mechanism, were inscribed with finite text and miniature murals. Her eyes picked out cycles of the sun as timekeeping stamps on every stone, cataloguing thousands as she swept her gaze across the chamber.

“It is a record?” she asked, the answer already clear to her.

Cuauhtl, for all his composure thus far, seemed caught off guard by the girl's words. His nearly mute companion had finally spoken, and were her voice not as sweet as honey, he might have run from the creature galavanting as a curious girl his age at his side.

“It is more than that,” he began as he pointed toward the dais at the center of the chamber, “it is the entirety of our history, as far back as can be remembered, it is the story of our people,” he stated with a quiet reverence, “every stone, painstakingly cut to chronicle our greatest triumphs and our worst defeats. Our most abundant of harvests and desolate of seasons. These stones hold the keys to many of the problems we face, and the Priest of Our Lord deciphers them day and night.”

The girl turned her gaze to the center dais, to the man seated amongst heaps of scrolls and an arcane device that she knew controlled the spider-mechanism clinging to the ceiling above them.

His face was hidden behind a mosaic mask of turquoise tiles, only the whites of his eyes showing through as the two interlopers on his sanctum approached. His head was adorned with a conical hat of jagr, and his chest was bare but for a large breastplate of curved obsidian glass. He stood as the two began picking their way across the raised stones that crossed over the water that surrounded the dais.

“Tlein quihtoa moyollo?” What says your heart? the masked priest boomed from atop the raised platform.

“Noyollo moticpan, huan moyollotzin?” the girl responded immediately. Cuauhtl, for all his learning, was dumbfounded as the girl from the jungle rolled through the formal interaction with ease. He pondered a moment her answer, “My heart is in order…”, he was not sure why she had answered in such a way, but he dared not ask her in front of the Priest of the Lord.

“My heart seeks yours,” the Priest answered from atop his plinth. He began to descend the steps, his arms raised wide out to his side, a wicked blade of obsidian brandished between the fingers of his left hand as he approached, “I have dreamt of you,” he admitted as he took each step with ponderous inevitability.

“Of me?” the girl asked, surprise evident in her voice for the first time since Cuauhtl had met her.

The Priest nodded, pointing the obsidian blade up to the oculus and the sunlight streaming in above, “The Sun Above blessed me with your likeness, I have seen you.”

The Priest stopped only a few steps from the pair of outsiders, and Cuauhtl knelt as tradition demanded. But the girl remained standing in opposition to everything proper.

“What did you see, Priest?”

The masked priest stood still a moment before beckoning the girl to follow him up the stairs.

“Come, both of you, the Sun Above demands it,” he stated with the assurance of a true believer.

Cuauhtl rose and took a hesitating step behind the girl and the highest priest of the land.

“What did you see?” the girl asked again as they made it to the top of the dais. The priest was working the arcane control system of the spider-mechanism now, chanting prayers as his hands worked diligently.

The articulated limbs moved above their heads, reaching around and spinning lenses as the mechanisms redirected their focus from a stone in the ceiling to the girl at the top of the dais.

“A name,” the Priest said as he worked. The lenses began to slot into place from largest to smallest, light bathed the dais, and the temperature rose considerably.

“I saw a girl sent from the Sun Above, protected by his work just as we were gifted with it,” the lenses began to focus now as the articulated arms jittered and clunked into position, “I saw a warrior like none ever seen,” the final cylindrical device slotted in place in front of the smallest of the lenses, “a woman, branded and condemned to a life of violence.”

The cylindrical device began to glow red-hot, and Cuauhtl noticed with trepidation that there was an iris at the end of the cylinder.

“I saw a savior, and a destroyer in one soul,” the priest affirmed as the iris opened and a beam of concentrated sunlight cut through the space between them.

“No!” Cuauhtl screamed as he lunged forward to save the girl. He was stopped where he stood, an outstretched arm from the strange girl holding him in place without the barest hint of effort.

“Do not interfere,” the girl commanded calmly, even as the laser beam of sunlight worked across her upper body. The air stank of burning flesh, and scraps of smoldering clothing and embers floated around them as the beam etched an intricate rendition of the Sun Above across her chest.

“I saw a girl,” the priest stated with a wavering voice, “I saw Nelchitl.”

With the Warp Drive of code name 'Blood Labyrinth' having been successfully detonated, Rik had lead the expedition back to their landing shuttle for resupply and extraction. Blessed ammunition had been spent, cleansing and maintenance rituals were badly needed, but in truth the most vital of supplies that needed to be replenished were also the most basic for life: Air, Water, Food.

Since none of those keystones of human life that were somehow on the Space Hulk could be trusted in any capacity outside of the most tragic and dire of situations, the various expeditions had needed to bring their own supplies of all three. A logistical challenge to be sure, but one that the children of Pentious and heirs of distant Mars were more then equipped to face. However, no matter how gifted the logistical minds planning the campaign, there was only so much room within each individual shuttle to carry the supplies needed to keep its cargo alive.

Every expedition had a time limit in which if it didn't return to Pentious, it was going to perish. The exact number could be drawn out and flex with changing circumstance, but there was always a point where the supplies ran out. The overwhelming success of Rik's expedition, ironically enough, ensured that they needed to go back planet side sooner then later. The limited casualties meant that the drain on resources hadn't decreased by any meaningful amount.

So they had loaded up and began the four day journey back to Pentious.

It was on Day Two that the situation on Pentious started to change.



"[Professional and restrained, but emotionally charged.] Myrmidax Uixien, this is Magos GC-118. Respond."

Rik couldn't help but allow some degree of concern to linger in his mind as he moved towards the shuttle's long range vox caster. While he suspected that his partner had been worried for his well being since he had departed for operations in one of the most uncertain and dangerous sections of the Space Hulk, he knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't have been using a long ranged vox like this just to silence her doubts and ensure that he was okay; Both of them liked to keep their relationship out of the public eye. If she was reaching out like this...

"This is Myrmidax Uixien. The mission was a success. What situation requires our attention?"

Despite the power and range of the Vox Units in use, the distance meant that there was a delay of a couple of seconds. Encryption and Decryption added a few extra seconds. But the response did come.

"[Professional, but nervous.] There has been a development at Forge Delta. Magos Dak Virellan and Head Enginseer Dorox Xixos, alongside a number of their subordinates, have perished in what, on the surface, appears to be a tragic accident."

Rik was quiet as he processed that statement. He had personally appointed Magos Virellan and Head Engineer Xixos to oversee the purification and restoration of Forge Delta in his absence. Both of them had been the best candidate for the job and their sudden loss was going to set things back considerably. Lacyraemarta Volkov was almost certainly going to be frustrated due to the sudden death of one of their more successful students in Virellan; At least they had themselves to fall back on for support.

However, that wasn't the priority of GC's statement. "An apparent tragic accident?" He asked, seeking clarification.

"[Disbelieving tone]'Apparently', Generator-Y536K1 suffered a series of catastrophic failures and detonated, taking Magos Virellan, Head Engineer Xixos and a number of subordinates with it."

Rik had been tempted to interrupt her partner with a rather base 'That isn't possible' the moment she had spoke of the Generator-Y536K1 suffering a catastrophic failure, let alone several, but he had squashed the impulse. After all, she had clearly come to the same conclusion that he had. Generator-Y536K1 was a Anyanwu-class generator; It was designed to be as stable and 'idiot-proof' as a power generator could physically be. It didn't produce the most power for a generator of its size, but its stability and calm temperament made it next to impossible for it to suffer catastrophic level failures. It had suffered abuse and neglect from orkish hands for decades and all it had required to be restored to perfect working order was a few replacement parts and a basic data cleansing ritual.

They had still given it a full inspection and proper deep dive examination because it was better to be safe then sorry, but that had been done shortly after they had retaken the Forge. Even if something had been missed, between its fail safes and fundamental design, if something was seriously wrong with Generator-Y536K1 it wouldn't have been hiding its pain until the point of critical failure.

The only way Generator-Y536K1 would have detonated like this was if it had been made to detonate.

"Any recorded evidence of what happened?"

"Frustrated sigh]No. Surviving recording devices of the area around the time are proving difficult to locate. It would seem the blast has consumed them. Attempts to find the stored recordings themselves has also proven difficult. Cybernetica Syncwarden has taken over that aspect of the investigation and believes that the explosion caused an EMP effect that has wiped a number of data bases."

Rik suppressed a sigh. Cybernetica Syncwarden's unpredictability and wandering mind if regards to projects made them difficult to work with at the best of times, outright frustrating to get to focus on the matter at hand at worst... but he didn't doubt their ability with communicating with machine spirits and searching the noosphere; If they couldn't find any traces of any stored recording data, there was likely none to be found.

"[Additional Sigh]It gets worse. Macrotek Omnicron has flooded Forge Delta with their subordinates in wake of the disaster. Their personal student Magos Mu Vladimus has been put in overall command of restoration. Malagra Flux has also mobilized their forces in the Prefecture Magisterium, focusing their attention on those who survived the destruction for signs of heresy and negligence."

This required the suppression of a wince from Rik. Omnicron and Flux were natural allies on the Council of Pentious due to their shared Fundamentalism. This strict adherence to the Rules and Strictures placed down by Mars had caused... some degree of strife to existence between himself and them. The fact that an impossible 'accident' had just given them both the perfect excuse to expand their influence on Forge Delta and Pentious as a whole while diminishing that of himself and Lacyraemarta Volkov...

"I'll be back planet side within two days. Do what you can to try and find out what happened, but don't directly get in the way of the Prefecture Magisterium and their duties." Rik paused... before adding softly in a somewhat comforting tone "We'll work this all out."