She had heard those questions before, once. Lifetimes upon lifetimes ago, a new Master bright eyed and so bushy tailed. She remembers that to some the world of Servants, Masters, the Grail, and war are all so unfamiliar. It is the only thing that keeps her tongue from being too sharp.
“As I have said, I am Altera a Saber class Servant.”
It is a barely passable yet proper enough introduction. Pleasantries were far from the forte of a warrior king, Altera spoke with action instead of words. In action there is truth, in words there is deceit, but that. That reasoning will not make her Master trust her more and if she is here it is for a purpose, and for that purpose whatever it may be a Servant must abide.
Altera keeps her eyes trained on the Master before her as they sink to the floor and from her does she cast her gaze upon the broken room once more. Her gaze upon the old and worn summoning machine, upon the devices that read into the future and prophesied doom and utter despair once. The summoning machine does not flicker with the strength of magic and technology, not with the strength it used to. Nor does she spy an abundance of empty Saint Graphs.
Her summoning is a miracle, an omen of ill tidings and hope. So she believes. Because to think any less would be disservice to the Masters who had shown her love and mercy.
If they hadn’t, what kindness Altera showed in letting her new Master have peace of self and mind would not have been granted. Ever.
“A Servant is a hero, a villain, or a monster of great fame that responds to the call of a magus.”
“Once I was Attila the Hun, a king who conquered great swaths of the world. I was feared and loved and so I became both a hero and villain in the eyes of many.”
And so she could be summoned. It is a short, if somewhat incorrect way of explaining the matter but Altera is obligated to make sure their working relationship functions. She is not obligated to tell the truth, and so she will keep it close to her. Close until it is time, until her Master proves themselves to her that she may be entrusted with it.
If they ever do, something Altera does not hold out hope for.
The warrior king leaves the side of her new charge, dust and dirt briskly parting as she moved her way over to a console and brushes fingers across it. She remembers fondly of a man with bright hair, a Caster beside him. Yes, two who would take upon the burden of explaining everything and guiding their single lost Master and their Servants through a world of heroes and liars.
What she would give to see them here.
“As a Servant, so long as you bare that mark upon your hand I am bound to you and will obey your orders until-”
Until what? Is this world a Singularity? A false reality that needs be undone? Is it a part of a broken path, one that will see a true hero descend and be rid of it? Is there a war, where the Grail is at stake? She does not know. She does not know and that in some way scares her but Altera bites it down. How rare is it for her to come face to face with the utterly unknown, but she’ll be damned if she ever let fear take hold of her.
“Until the reason you or Chaldea called me here is resolved. Until that time, my strength and knowledge are yours and yours alone to call upon.”
“If you order me to, I will call upon the might of the stars and I will raze humanity to the ground. If you will it then I shall conquer empires in your name and wage war until our very last breath.”
Altera’s words lose whatever warmth and kindness she may have briefly had, the gaze she brings back to Maira cold and hard. All of it punctuated by a powerful silence.
The woman offers no kinder things, her hands do not craft. Her hands do not coddle or love. They are meant for wielding her sword. They’re mean for holding the reigns of a beast. She is meant to charge recklessly into the fray and survive. She is meant to destroy civilization right down to the very core and subjugate the remnants of it.
“I ask of you now: what will you have me do Master.”
Again, terms spilled forth like the clattering entrails of a machine birthed by a culture long dead. The phonetic corpses of a world belonging to a distant age were laid onto the cold steel of a floor that made for a slightly less poorer graveyard than ears unable to make sense of them. The scavenger welcomed them, as she did with most scraps too worn by time to find more use than adding weight to her backpack and little else, with frustrated resignation. The lack of knowledge left her starved, made her feel like a beast unable to savor the meat it nonetheless kept picking from its prey’s bones. All the more so when it left her vulnerable to the whims of something well beyond any of her predictive abilities.
It was a welcome mercy, then, that “Altera” offered Maira with her attempt at an explanation, however simplistic or insufficient. It was a thin, frayed thread, but it nonetheless established a connection, or at least the beginnings of one, a first step towards achieving even a modicum of mutual understanding. But such knowledge came at a price, and a hefty one at that. A chill exploded from the tip of the scavenger’s spine and spread across her hunched body, independent of the nigh-unbearably low temperatures permeating the abandoned structure. It only worsened with every passing second, each stroke imparted on the still mostly blank canvas representing the mysterious woman’s existence. The contours were still vague, but the silhouette delineated by the artist on her incomplete self-portrait suggested hints of familiarity. For how subdued and collected her voice was, the echo of its implications erupted and expanded with the deafening force of a thousand deflagrations.
Kings and heroes - monikers, more often than not self-imparted, adopted by those who time and again would try to tame the chaos of the wastelands, redefine it according to their own principles. As far as Maira and a sizeable portion of those in conflict with their lofty ideals were concerned, the two terms amounted to little other than synonyms to the much more fitting “tyrant”. Or - for those, herself included, who had little qualms about having their acceptance bought for the right price - “employer”. This being the case, it made the scavenger feel all the more weird for one such figure to regard her as the one sitting on the superior podium of the relationship.
She could have swallowed the morsel, had it only amounted to some easily dismissable awkwardness like this. But there was more, which put the entity dubbing herself “Altera” on a whole different plane - claims too outrageous to take them too seriously, the kind one would have heard spilling from a drunken pair of lips at a cheap watering hole. That Maira couldn’t muster the common sense to reject these notions made her doubt her own sanity - but, even more so, it made her wonder just what absurd thing she’d awoken from its sleep that it could so readily convince her to believe the impossible without question.
A thought crossed her mind, latching onto the matter at hand to lend it something in the way of recognition. Whispers seldom heard across the wasteland, but always pregnant with fearful wonder: of the reason why the world had died, of the kind of might which could redefine the fate of entire continents. A forbidden word, steeped deep into... yes, the stuff of legend.
The whisper barely made it past her trembling lips, dying in a puff of white smoke. Immediately, instinctively, Maira’s hands ran for one of the several satchels strapped to her body and took a fresh filter out, replacing with the one she frantically unscrewed and tossed away despite knowing it still had plenty of use left. The weight of a responsibility too daunting for most to even fathom had only just begun to wear on her with just the barest of glimpses. She shot one at the being responsible for this slew of heretofore unfelt sensations, at the weapon too priceless to be sold, too dangerous to be kept around. The burden she couldn’t get rid of.
Maira looked at Altera, gloved hands gripping the console’s edge tightly for a length of time that seemed to span aeons, but ultimately amounted to a smattering of seconds. Then, the scavenger hopped down on legs she willed to remain steady and put her still relatively empty bag down, opening the main flap, and looked up at those eyes that felt as if they held the fate of the world within them.
Altera had all but demanded an order - to be given purpose in a world which eld none for her. This alone was an understandable nugget lost in a vast sea of incomprehensibility, and Maira latched onto it for her dear life. Following not the ambition of kings, nor the courageous dreams of heroes, or the greed of merchants, for she was neither...
“For now, help me dismantle this machinery. Do not destroy it - if there is anything salvageable, I’ll need it intact, or mostly at least.“
She was Maira the scavenger. If it was destruction that this being, this “Servant” craved, she would offer only this much - and if it wouldn’t be enough to sate her thirst for carnage, then let her absolve them both of their burdensome predicament with a most final solution.
“I prefer to create rather than destroy, if I can help it. Will you be fine with that?”
She laid her question down as soon as she’d stood up, fists held at her sides, one of them still feeling the sting of that sealing mark. A bold statement, expressing the firmness of her lifestyle’s very core. The one thing she couldn’t have compromised with, even at the very cost of said life itself.
