Here lies Arach-Tûn, motionless, on the slab, bereft of a sarcophagus and a godstanding. He did not recall, not truly, how he had come to be here in this place— only the sense of having slid among phases, a glass cutter run along another’s surface, a tight, whimpering memory that refracts itself inwards, endlessly, until there is nothing left but the initial slice and the echo of it through every last nerve in the body.
Moments or eons prior, he had lost consciousness, or what passed for it, and when the world returned it was by increments: the boomerang recoil of sterile lighting, and the scent of peroxide, and the sensation of being pinned— no, bound, caught along the edges with a cleverness that seemed ceremonial. He does not like to think of himself as prey, though the evidence before his waking mind is plain.
Surfacing, then, in the body and the body is not itself: a braided confusion of sensation, the mismatch of familiar neural overlays— Feyd-Rautha’s own, spliced with the decaying fragments of an old god’s consciousness, torrents of memory sluicing in and out with all the reliability of a sine-waved broadcast.
“D’ane,” voice rasps from the pit, the sibilance scored with wetness and dust.
Out loud, speaking her name, the syllable a lure and a beacon. The lights above shiver in response. Before him: the glassine veil, the signature of containment. Outside it— a shape. And though his limbs are stone, are marble, are heavier than the starstuff he has decimated beneath the reign of his own ego, something dangerously akin to relief washes through.
“I have missed you, my mate. Why do you stand so far from me?”
