Repaid
This is the beginning of the Repentance plot. It is followed by Everything We've Earned.
Guardian Artifice & Jastes Verdan | Present Night
Purple blood gushing, splattering, leaving her precious body.
Wounds it had just made. Bladed hands through her chest.
Tesi -
No life in her eyes, in her splintered bones, punctured organs.
Tesi, stop -
It knelt down by her body on the grass, cradling her face though that cut the skin further, and it wailed.
ARTESSA!
Precious body, now broken. Beloved flesh. Soul of its soul, spade of its life.
Killer of trolls.
Forcing it to preserve their security by killing her in turn. What it had been made for.
Now nothing.
Gone away.
It shivered and threw its head back, letting out a piercing wail.
“Tesi…” it murmured as its head ducked again, looking at her. Taking in every inch of the purpleblood. Hybrid. Parasite. Beautiful.
Bury her. Yes. Bury her in the garden. Clean up her corpse. Dress her in beautiful clothes. Love her. Love her always.
Time blurred.
It scooped out clawfuls of earth, back in the soil where she grew flowers.
It ripped out the ones made of itself savagely. They did not deserve to be there.
All others it left untouched. It dug. Even sides. Even depth. Perfect.
It lowered her now serene corpse into the hole. Cleaned off. Dressed in fine black clothes. Hair redone.
Then, mournful, loving, it lifted her shirt and carefully cut out her heart. It cauterized the wound cleanly.
It did not deserve to have it. But it ached for something of its lover. Anything of who she had been, even if this lump of muscle was hardly a hint of such a sharp and clever woman.
It pressed the bloody thing to its own chest, shuddering. Its body opened up, allowing the heart in, weaving it into the living metal.
Hers. Its. Theirs.
It buried her, then curled up on the freshly turned soil, keening a lamentation.
It laid there for a night, watching the stars. It was so still that insects settled on it to rest.
Yet it could not stay here forever, watching the sky grow brighter.
It raised itself up on unsteady limbs.
Metal wings bursting from its back, it turned into a bird, flying away into the sunrise.
—
Rain fell lightly over the city of Civitrecce.
Hints of early daylight peeked through the clouds to illuminate its skyscrapers and factories, its slums and the precious few parks reserved for the wealthy.
Jastes Verdan idled in one of the latter, knowing he shouldn’t be here as he sat on a bench near one of its statues. His face - altered slightly as it always was when he went out in public now - wore a weary expression.
It wasn’t the rain he minded, its cooling touch welcome.
It was how his hand reached out automatically, hoping for the fur of his missing lusus.
He’d come here hoping maybe it would - as had been pointedly suggested to him - get his mind off things.
Luckily, there were few trolls out to see him among the greenery draped in red light, bushes and small trees clustering together in the small space.
Flowers unfurled that stayed shut overnight, absorbing the deadly rays.
If he had been pure flesh and blood, he would have started to sizzle slightly, even in weak beams such as these.
Instead he carried metallic augments in his muscle and bones now, tougher skin woven with invisible fibers that could resist the sun. He had kept his body this way for perigees; he never knew when the empire might find him, and he needed every advantage.
He could heal faster, too, repairing his flesh and complex tech with tiny drones.
A memory of a flat metal face floated in his mind, reminding him where he’d gotten that idea from. His mouth twisted bitterly.
He rose from the wooden slats and stretched, watching the rain stop and leave dewdrops behind that quickly evaporated. The clouds began to thin in the growing heat.
The cyborg looked at the statue near his seat, a bald troll of average height with small, nondescript horns. They had their hands pressed to their chest, as if concerned or frightened.
It was a little out of place in a park only intended for those teal and above; so weathered he couldn’t make out the troll’s features exactly, and the plaque only read that it was a remnant of the original settlement of Civitrecce, from before the empire came.
Much like the slightly woebegone statue, there was no real good reason for him to be here.
He was wasting time as stared at nature instead of repairing scavenged tech or helping the younger resistance members find decent work. He could be sighted and caught even at this hour, false face or no.
Then he went still, his ears pricked.
Sure enough, that noise was the low buzz of a small surveillance drone as it came his way.
He activated his cloaking tech, eben thought it was probably just looking for any hiveless trolls trying to sleep among the bushes and trees.
If they were lucky, they’d merely be ousted, maybe shocked a bit for their trouble.
If the drones were set to auto-cull…
The small gray machine hovered past him and into the foliage, completely unaware of his existence as he blended in with the environment. He blocked his presence from any sensors it might have - visual, audio, temperature, humidity.
A yelp came from the bushes.
Then a scream of pain.
Jastes ran toward them, cursing himself for his stupidity. The resistance didn’t take on new jobs anymore; it was too risky, they couldn’t ruin the new lives he’d bargained for them from Jikiro Takami and his strange magic.
But what good was a rebel leader who couldn’t even help -
- a young girl.
A small mutant, pale-haired with big claws and spikes on her arms, thrashing and whimpering in the shade of the trees as the drone tried to shock her unconscious.
It couldn’t have expected her tail, long and bladed, to cut deep gouges in its thin metal and propeller blades. It let out garbled distress noises, slowing and barely staying aloft.
It would call for help any second, alerting nearby fellows in its network that it had a mutant resisting capture.
Jastes snatched it from the air, turning one fingertip on his other hand into a connector for its data port. His part-computer brain analyzed it, then disabled its ability to send a distress signal about either his interference or its damage.
The mutant girl laid on the grass, breathing shaky from her electrocution. She had small cuts and scrapes, yet somehow, he saw no blood.
Was she even injured? Were his eyes not working?
Wait.
She bled clear.
Jastes blinked as he uncloaked himself, having never seen a total lack of hue in a troll before. How had she survived this long?
She stared up at him with terrified white slits on red sclera, ears pinned back as she looked at the drone in hands and up at him.
“I won’t hurt you.” He assured her in a gentle voice, hands raised. “Do you want any medical help?”
“Who’re you?” She said in an unsteady tone, taking a grubby cloth out of her sylladex to wipe off her wounds with.
Jastes held up his partially tech hand in a ‘wait’ gesture.
He needed to take care of the drone, or its network absence would be noticed soon and then they’d all be sounding the alarm.
“One second.” He said, then walked a few steps and turned away from her, just to be safe. He didn’t want the drone to have any chance of picking her up again; nor did he want to leave the cover of the trees and bushes, as there could be other mechanical spies he didn’t know about.
He edited the drone’s footage, creating a false memory in its files of a minor accident with a spiny lusus to cover for the damage it had sustained.
All it took was a few seconds of pulling existing video footage from a zoo’s archive and editing it into the background of the park. The process was as easy as breathing; he was long accustomed to using his own mind for such things.
Cloaking himself again and stepping into the open, he released the drone - not a moment too soon, as he saw others hovering on the edge of the park. Luckily, it now had its false report to give to its fellows and any troll who examined its contents.
Jastes went back to the troll -
The cyborg blinked. Where was she?
His pointed ears flicked slightly, listening.
He could faintly hear her labored breathing; she was still around, merely concealed somehow.
The yellowblood knew better than to push the mutant girl - she was wounded, scared, and would likely lash out if he did.
“I’m leaving my contact information.” He said, clearly and evenly as he took out a piece of notebook paper and wrote down a safe handle that wouldn’t incriminate him or the resistance even if it was somehow compromised.
He then buried it in a shallow hole he quickly scooped out, and marked it with a large, pale rock he found nearby.
“My group and I can help you if you need it. If you don’t come to us, I recommend leaving the city as quickly as possible. Someone is always watching around here.”
He turned to leave the park - good thing he’d lingered after all, but it was time to go - and stopped in his tracks as he saw a troll standing by the statue, hands clasped. A wavy-haired, freckled purpleblood a few inches taller than him, who had the most hollow eyes he’d ever seen.
Standing in direct sunlight wearing nothing but a black t-shirt and purple overalls.
Not burning.
Staring directly at him - unblinking - as his skin prickled with unease.
“Jastes.”
The voice was different. The face was different, troll-like, no longer a flat metal sheet with the barest of rough features.
But he knew.
That one word was all the resistance leader needed.
“You.” He said, soft and accusing through gritted teeth.
An undercurrent of hurt and anger pulsed through the yellowblood as his fingers slowly clenched into fists.
“Why have you come back?”
The smallest, most morbid smile appeared on the security system’s face.
“To fulfill what I was made for. Protecting this city. Driving out the empire. Following the orders of my creator’s descendant.”
He stared at it in stunned disbelief.
It bowed to him, features starkly lit by hot red light.
“Guardian Artifice, returning for duty.”