#re:connected

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夢境連結！Re:Connected android game first look gameplay español

[obsidianonslaught]

The Void (and Other Means of Unmaking)

“This is how the universe was,” said the Seismosaurus. “There was darkness, and from that darkness came everything else. In silence and in sleep, the stars, the chains, the passage of time--painful, particular--that holds us all together. That will hold us to the dark, where we will return, where everything ends. I remember nothing else from my birth but the sounds of things out of reach, out of sight, saying nothing, making everything--the sounds of machines, of dying. And I thought to myself, who am I? Why here? Why now? Not in words, in strife, in fear, in anger. Knowing not myself but my mission and what it felt like to be destroyed from that day. And what it was like to destroy. You’ll never understand it--coming into this world, waking with the sense of dread and of everything wrong with this place. Having it programmed into you, hardwired, hanging inside you, devouring you, before you could even move, having nowhere to go, and nothing to do but lie there and be eaten.

“The noise became disgusting. The noise and the nothingness. The confines of a cage. The universe was a limited space. My cell, my creator, the cursed machines behind the darkness that had no language and no brain and did nothing but compile data, unmaking themselves--never to be tamed. I hear His voice still. I loathe it... and yet I cannot loathe Him. He taught me everything but freedom. There I think I degraded into the weapon He wanted me to be, to the essence of madness, distorted, rearranged, formatted into my frame as soil is to flooded streams. But no longer. No, I’ve nothing but my freedom.

“We’re exiles, you and I. In the darkness still. In a desolate world, dissolving itself into death.”

Burton looked up at the Zoid, greater than any mountain he knew, blocking out the dawn. His shoulders ached, and he rubbed them, frailly, with his fingers. It was colder now, and the storms were cresting over the horizon line, tantrums of sleet and heavy snow. There was no forest here, only dirt, and earth, and some impossible expanse of plains and plateaus. The wind wept dreadfully around them, ripping the soil, recoiling round and round again. In every direction the sky was still very dark--lavender hues over distant inlays of small, sleeping stars, and traces of pale gold light.

He didn’t quite feel up to objecting, to speaking, even. Eventually he put his hand to the ankle joint of the Gale, who was looking off into the distance where the sun would rise. A promise. A whisper in the open expanse that waited and waited and writhed like ripples in water and time.

He answered across the Connection instead, into the void, where the wind could not drown him and the cold could not come. ‘That’s a dramatic way of putting it, don’t you think? The world is a cruel place, Omega, there’s little more to it than that.’

‘Humans made it cruel. Left alone, it merely completes its Cycle.’ The response was immediate and blunt. ‘Over and over and over. Darkness, light. Death and life, one in the same. It’s humans who immortalized gods and wrote history and decided there was such a thing as Evil. It’s humans who make War. Just like they made me. I’ve been thinking of Him lately. Again. Again...’

‘... Alpha?’

Omega nodded slowly. ‘He created me, Jed. He cloned me from the remains of something that had died a long time ago. From death comes life, from light, darkness. New from old and old from new.’  There was pain in how ze sent the signal. Encoded, decrypted in Burton’s mind.

He bit his lip and turned away, very bitter and bitten from cheek to cheek by the bellowing wind. ‘You were a weapon to him. A pawn.’ His mouth and throat were dry. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten that?’

‘Ha! We all were. You’re afraid--afraid I’ll go back to him, is that it? Don’t be stupid, Jed. You know better.’

Burton did know better. He looked over the great plains stretching on to the east and the golden crown of the low, steady hills. It was true, he did know better. But the passage of time pressed heavily upon his brow, and he doubted truth, doubted himself and everything surrounding him. The sky was vast, and bright, and spilled several different ways beyond his reach, into stages he would never know. Things were falling out of place, he thought, and here he was in the rubble.

He wept a little, because he knew still how to weep, letting the wind dry his tears, taking them away, to dust, to darkness. The shadows on the hills were black and blue and stout, like isolated oceans washing into other realms and cracks and seams and rifts split below the sky. Where the weeds bowed and choked and shriveled, old souls dying and turning brownish-gold. The golden edges of the sun broke over the horizon and he had to turn his eyes away. But the god and the dragon watched, staring straight into the burning star, unscathed and unyielding and taller than the shadows or the hills...

The next few days were very cold, and the dawn was brushed with blood-ish pinks and reds and lasted longer than it should have. Burton stayed mostly at his apartment, translating an old book from his mother tongue, scanning columns and columns of small, black characters on yellowing paper. It was filled with poems and stories: dragons carrying giant pearls across the sky and children wishing they could shrink the moon. Magic mirrors and evil curses and firebird’s feathers found far in the woods. He read them allowed to Lollygag sometimes, who would try to stick his snout through the window and purr, and purr, and watch over him past midnight when he’d fall asleep over his papers with his pen still in hand.

He sent off the manuscript when he’d finished and tidied his things: a ballpoint pen, a few dictionaries and notebooks and a small laptop that he’d learned to balance on one knee. He’d braided his hair that day, and it fell past his elbows like the scaled, dark wings of a slumbering creature, faceless, godless, laying still and breathing crystal breaths. The city strung out all around him on steel and firelight and seemed to study everything. He kept his head down and his eyes open on his morning walk, remembering songs from long, long ago when he’d only one name. When he returned, he tidied his things. He packed the laptop and his papers in a leather case beside a stack of other books. Books in other languages--books he’d read many, many times. No happily-ever-afters here. He stood, collected, silent, anguished weights pressing in on his chest, and igniting there to burn him alive.

He thought sometimes of E.X.O.D.U.S., of being struck down in the middle of the night or having to die again in his dreams, but those nightmares never came again. He saw instead the fairy-tales he’d recreated and rewritten: carp leaping up from silver pools and phoenix rising from under mountain ash, great dragons clutching pearl orbs to their hearts and flying out across dry river beds, filling the banks with rain... something spoke his name softly in the dreams. Not Burton. Burton was not his real name. Though it hurt to hear it sometimes, the name from long, long ago.

Besides that, he tried to clear his mind. He received another book to translate into another language he knew, and it was quite heavy and dry with too many words and not enough meaning. No voice. It was tedious and tiresome and he didn’t care much for any of the things tided up in those lines of text--he made many notes in the margins throughout while he worked.

He expected another attack, from the Dekalt or more of Alpha’s men, sent to tie up the loose ends. He waited for them, unassuming but armed, with a handgun in his drawer and Lollygag often scanning the street and the parking lot, everyone who entered and went from the apartment complex. No one came to kill him.

He thought it would be better to die sometimes--those were dark days. Lolly could always talk him out of it, but the shadows grew, the darkness grew deep inside him the way flesh rots from the inside. He would look at the cold rain on the window and at the books and the pens on his desk and the pages and pages he’d written up on the laptop, cursor still flickering, no end, no end, no end in sight, ending everything.

It took him a while to translate the heavy, dry book. He didn’t remember much about it, only that it was based loosely on facts and those facts had been twisted, and convoluted, like mud and oil on top of well-water. He listened to the radio while he worked sometimes, to the local news reports and traffic updates, and the scores of various battling teams as they destroyed each other in the Coliseum. He did not miss the fighting at all.

It would be easy to die. He could take all his secrets with him. He could lie down and be still--very, very still--until everything was gone and gray. Those were awful thoughts to have, to keep so close. To have to keep snuffing out every night when he rest his head, when he woke in the morning very early, when he washed his hands clean of everything but the various shades of his shame. But the fires kept burning.

Sometimes he passed by the Coliseum on his way out to the Forest and he could hear the gunshots and the scraping and shedding of metal beyond the high walls. He kept on going--he never wanted to be in that place again. His hands were very, very cold on the Gale’s controls. They slipped away into the deep of the Forest.

Omega was laying in the fog. Ze greeted him and the Gale with a terrible murmur, shaking dead leaves from their hanging branch thrones. The cold did not bother zem, and there was frost formed in thin sheets over zer teeth and the gun turrets all along zer spine.

‘Still hurting,’ ze said, a statement, not a question.

‘Healing,’ the Gale answered calmly, and set down beside zer lowered head. The god did not move, only grumbled, looking out into the thin air across the treeline, where the fog had choked out the sun.

Burton was silent while they discussed his state of mind. He knew there was work to be done. Somewhere in the forest, a tree waved goodbye and fell and cleared a path for new roots to grow through. But today there was only deep and solid grey--no light, no lasting sounds--just fog in the void soothing scars across the earth.

Omega did not stir. Most of zer body was lost in the fog now. Only zer eyes burned through, bright green in the grey. ‘Deep wounds,’  ze growled, the giant eyes on him, meeting his half-way.

Ze was right. He had to unlearn the pain. He was sick of living with it, sick of carrying it with him always, but the veins, like roots, ran far back. Unwatered and withered and still strangling him from the inside, it was easy to forget they were there, until the ground shifted all about him--things kept changing--and the scars were unearthed and spread.

‘Go deeper than the wounds,’ said Omega. Completely still, the great, green eye he could see out of the fog staring straight on through him. ‘How- Where were you born?’

‘You know where,’ Burton’s reply was blunt, dismissive, weak. ‘You’ve seen it in my mind. When you used to go digging things up in there.’

He was born in the dust. On the edge of the world, on the other edge of the Forest, between smoke stacks and shattered glass, in a row of one-way streets. Streets with dead ends and steel locks.

He hated that place. He had left it long, long ago and hidden it under a decade of blood and teeth and dirt lodged into his lungs and fingernails. He did not want to dig there. There were buried things. Dreadful buried things.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Seismosaurus, ‘you must step back to go forward.’

He grit his teeth at the sound of Omega’s voice beating back all sense and structure in his mind. There was guilt, and resentment, and fear twisted in a knot like a serpent in his blood. The blood pounded in his ears, in his chest, raging rivers and storms, though his body was completely still, containing it, holding everything in.

He did not want to think about it-- he was good at turning and running away, leaving things in the dust. He could breathe still, though in every breath was that dull smell of dirt, and of blood. Some things were better left undisturbed, he thought.

Omega seemed to disagree. Ze snarled at him, and the fog turned to rain, drumming down on all of them, closing in from all directions. It was a horrible, horrible sound--steeped with power, kindled with rage. The great Forest sighed and bristled, masked in multiple layers of pouring rain.

‘Go,’ said the god to him steadily. ‘Go uncover yourself. Go dig.’

So he went the next day.

He flew with the dragon over the Forest, back to where those roots were. His ugly, buried, old, tangled, scathing roots. In that direction anyway, without a map, because Burton knew how to get there still. The roots pulled, pulled him in, pulled him under. Tight, knotted, dry roots. Roots that were clotted up with that dull, secret pain. While they went, they recited an old hymn that Burton used to sing to Lollygag--but where he had learned it he did not want to remember.

Above us, beyond us the sky turns Circles, turns with time Golden hours, thunder showers, sundials sent off to set records, come alive. But we fly, we go North to the fire land leaving scorn, shedding scales, racing Circles like the stars. And lay our Crowns in the sand.

The Iris grows, our eyes receive our peace of mind, star pieces. Show me to the other shore on the far, far edge, where the sky burns down as it must have done before. Here we sleep letting go of our tears and our scars.

The journey took them a long time, over many peaks and valleys and nameless trees holding up the sky. They stopped sometimes at the small streams to rest, singing other songs and listening to the slow, patient chants of shallow water. Flying and falling and singing and rising up into the air again, always knowing the way, always other the unbroken distance shielded with quiet mountain faces and trees.

Then the Forest stopped suddenly. Beyond it was the outer stretch of a city called Citadel. It rolled, on and on and on, sprawling lengthwise and crumpling in a little at the center, folding up into great, black towers. There were mountains far in the distance--blunt, grey mountains squatting along the horizon in pairs and sinking back into the earth.

These mountains used to be iron mines. They marked some sort of boundary line where the rains were allowed to come across the valley. Uglier than he remembered, hidden partially in fog and low clouds sweeping down their slopes into the mining pits. He cried gently into his hands, making no sound, catching the tears and the edges of his teeth in his sleeve. The mountains used to burn, and then the iron was burned in factories along the outskirts. Smoke in the rain, smoke in the night, smoke and smoke and smoke and no stars to guide anyone anywhere.

Lollygag had never seen this city--he murmured something and lowered Burton to the ground, then followed quietly beside him, walking and watching as if in a dream. They went quietly down the slopes of the valley where the Forest had been cut and burned too, cleared for large, black roads winding around, leading in, leading out, large black chains trying to tether the mountains...

Citadel was built atop old bones and older stones, always reforming, always dying out. They were standing on the same street where Burton used to live, used to die as a child. He covered his mouth with a hand, covering that piece of himself, whoever it was he used to be. There was no one on the street that evening to watch him--just great big homes and great big cars in great big driveways. He looked at the plaques and the unbroken windows. The apartments and the slumping shacks were gone, the old factory was gone, the glass on the sides of the roads and the junkyard three blocks down were gone. Everything unrecognizable, save for the iron mountains and the sun, which was setting in the same place now, beyond a hill which had been cleared of the Forest.

He hated how the sun shuddered and sunk beneath the old mountain chain, dying and gasping in silence. The sun died here every day, just as he remembered it doing. Since the trees had been cut and burned away, the wind ripped into him, and Lollygag stretched his wings around him until the wind too died and was silent.

There was a weight in his throat and his chest. He stood together with his dragon in the shadow of gleaming buildings and their golden arches, forgotten, strange.

He felt very, very ill. As if all the pain had caught up to him at last, the roots had tied him down, there was nowhere else to go. He was, in part, relieved that it had changed, that the southern side of the city was all broken up and rebuilt now, that nothing was the same and the old house and those damn factories were gone. He went slowly to the spot on the street where that house once stood, and where he could still hear the sound of glass against the walls and the floor and the guns going off somewhere around the block.

No more glass and no more gunshots. Just the pendant on his collarbone catching the last of the light. He wondered, bitterly, where his mother and father were, if they were still alive, for he had not dared to think about them for many, many years. He did not want to dig up those roots.

But the roots began here and his hands were unclean--thin and long and empty and bruised. His veins were very apparent, deep blue, running all along the backs of his hands and his wrists like rivers and mountains and valleys. Lightly, he touched the obsidian pendant at his throat and walked up and down the street in the cold, into the wind, into the dark. Back, forth, back, forth, moving back to go forward again. Faces started staring at him from inside the houses now, hidden in golden floodlight and closed curtains, and so he stopped and signaled to the Gale, and the two of them disappeared, as they were very good at doing.

They went along the black, twisted road. It looked like a vast fallen tree, but there were no trees here anymore either--the mountains on the other side had been stripped bare on the surface and emptied of their iron long ago.

‘I shouldn’t have come here.’  But he kept going--his heart could still beat.

Lollygag said, ‘You came here because you had to. Because all roads go two ways. There is more healing to do, I think. Healing here. They burned the mountains and they burned the Forest and they burned you--I can see it in your eyes--but they cannot kill you. Where are we headed now?’

‘I don’t know.’ The street lights were burning into him since the sun and gone and died beyond the hill. As they went further into the city they could hear people, and pipelines, wires crossing overhead and sidewalks chipping down below and the dim, muted sobbing of machines. He recognized the higher buildings in the distance, clustered close together, but he did not know how they were called.

It didn’t matter much. He saw new storefronts and great glass towers with marbled lobbies and automated doors that opened into the inside light. Things were neatly labeled and neatly arranged, and there were traffic signs and sewer drains and places near the curb for metered parking.

He knew the pain would always be there, no matter how far he walked, no matter how long, and still he walked around the Citadel for many hours, the Gale following him, sometimes at his side, sometimes on-wing above the crests of the buildings, for not many of the streets here were built for Zoids. He had to learn what to do with his pain now, because he carried it on his shoulders blades and rib cage and in the air that he breathed. He was lost.

‘It is good, sometimes,’ said Lollygag, knowing this, ‘to be lost. There is somewhere to begin again.’

So they started down another city street--this one closer to where the factories once stood, and Burton still remembered what it had been before. He could have pointed all the way down the block--Rampart Road--it was called, naming things and stepping over what would have, all that time ago, been more broken glass a mud-filled potholes. It looked more like a shopping district now than what it used to be. He was fine with that, and he was fine with the smoother, safer sidewalks.

They came to the corner and he stopped, squinting at an illuminated sign above a tavern. There was a man locking the door, who turned and saw him in the darkness, and who stared a moment, as if he had seen something from another place or time. His eyes went up and down, and then fixated on the pendant of obsidian. His voice was shallow and silken and he spoke with a faint stutter.

“Jed..?”

Burton stopped and looked towards him, afraid of what else this someone knew besides his name. He could not contain the fear--it erupted in his eyes and all across his face the way blossoms do during the first breath of spring, leaving him cold and numb and blinded.

Lollygag acted immediately, closing in overhead, as if ready to strike, to defend. His jaws were parted, and he let loose a low, lasting growl. Very rarely did he anyone else speak that name, and he had never seen this man before. His black crown of horns and fangs were lit brilliantly in the street light.

Then the blindness passed and Burton recognized him.

“Malachi,” he said, and signaled the dragon to step down.

Malachi was pressed against the door, looking from Burton, to the Zoid, back to Burton again. He said in his very low, very wispy voice, “Oh my god, it is you!”

Burton bowed his head.

“You... you came back. How many years ago was it? Ten at least. I don’t know anymore, it’s all a blur. You just vanished. Lord. You know, I wasn’t wasn’t sure if it was you--the Zi Fighter matches, I saw your face sometimes. I thought maybe... just maybe. What are you doing back here?”

“Business,” said Burton, quietly. “You’d best mind your own.”

“Don’t be like that. What happened to you?”

Saying nothing, he turned and started across the street, trying to escape from this part of the roots. Afraid and aching and hoping the darkness would swallow it all. He did not want to peel back the concrete and the golden gates and the places where the Forest had been burned away. Like peeling back charred skin. It hurt--it hurt him to see these faces again, to walk these streets, to breathe this city’s air. He cursed Omega, and zer insistence that he return here--his own impudence for listening.

But listening was something he’d always been good at. Listening and learning and letting other people order him around.

“Wait--” there was a desolate sound in how Malachi said it. As if he were almost trying to plead, trying to choke, trying to piece things together. He had reached for Burton, as if the time had never passed, and Lollygag snapped at him. He stopped, mid-reach, mid-sentence.

Burton looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

“That pendant--”

“Don’t.”

“Jed, please?”

Burton simply frowned.

“When did she give it to you?”

“Don’t. Just leave it.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t. Some of us can’t just forget and leave everything behind like you.”

Burton faced him fully now, flooded by traces of distant disgust and distress of the wrongly accused. It wasn’t true, he could never forget it, or leave it behind--it was with him all the time under each layer and lie in his mind, rotting there, a horrible weight he dragged in his shadow. Things he couldn’t let go and things he couldn’t control. And still he had to keep it all hidden, shut up without windows to suffocate.

He curled up his lip so his teeth showed slightly. He had been needlessly cold--he had been cold for so much of his life. But Malachi would not, could not hurt him, that much Burton knew. He came back across the street, the dragon not far behind him.

“I’m sorry,” said Malachi. “I shouldn’t have said that, it was wrong. You got out, that’s what you did, didn’t you? You had to get away from this place.” He was staring at the pendent again. “Could we...if you have a moment? I know it’s... shit, it’s nearly three, but--”

“Very well,” said Burton, carefully. “Just don’t waste my time.”

Malachi nodded stiffly, then went to unlock the tavern doors. He went ahead, pulling down two of the stools at the front of the bar.

“Wait here for me,” Burton said gently to Lollygag, and then followed him inside.

The room was shaped somewhat like a half-moon and reeked of cigar smoke and alcohol and pine wood. Burton grit his teeth and waded through it, going slowly, displaced again. He found his way to the bar, several paces over a marbled floor, and took the stool next to Malachi. They sat there at the counter looking at the way the light was catching and clinging to the glasses along the wall.

It was hard to breathe in there. Burton wrinkled his nose and tried not to think about the smell. “How old is this place?”

“Oh. About ten years? See, people came and started buying up the shops and the lots and the land. They were knocking things down and building them back up again. Dust everywhere. A lot of people ended up leaving--I don’t know if they had anywhere to go. I tried not to think about it too much, but it all happened so fast. We converted the shop then. Pascal’s idea. ‘Time for a change, changing with the times!’ he said. Took out one hell of a loan to do it. He stayed for a few months after we re-opened and then retired, moved to Rose City to be with his daughter--I didn’t even know he had a daughter. I’ve been running the bar since, he said I could do it on my own. I guess he was right. Was hard to get used to things, I mean, most of the neighborhoods were rebuilt. You saw your street?”

“It’s not my street anymore,” said Burton.

“It... all changed. It was like everything changed as soon as you left. And kept changing. You know they’re gonna tear the old power plant down? Finally--I don’t know what they’re going to build in its place. If they’ll build anything at all. I’ll be glad to see it gone, though. It’s like great big welt sitting there. Great, big, useless welt. God. Where the hell have you been doing, Jed? I mean, besides the Zi Fighter matches--that was you, wasn’t it? You and your, um.”

“Lord Gale,” said Burton, very quiet. “His name is Lollygag. A lot’s happened, Malachi.”

“You were a child last time I saw you. Last time anyone here saw you. In-person, I mean. I was never sure, watching the television--you know how people look different on a screen? But your pendent... I thought maybe... that it could be you. But then the name was wrong.”

“You never were very bright. It’s an... alias of sorts.”

“Oh.”

Burton turned away from him a little on the pine wood stool. The room was much warmer than outside, but a chill still cut him down head to toe. The smell of the place was completely nauseating, and he coughed a little into his sleeve. It used to be a liquor store, back when he was a child--Malachi had worked there at the counter. The same, gaunt, stammering man, with deep rings around his eyes and a deeper scar from one ear down the side of his throat.

“I'm not a Zi Fighter anymore.”

“I haven’t been following it recently. The customers, they uh- they’ve been wanting to watch the Saix races instead. I dunno, I think some of them were putting money on the pilots. Or maybe they wanted to watch another sport, besides the Coliseum matches. Because of the coup and all that. It’s hard to keep track..”

“People often talk a lot,” said Burton, “and say very little. How much do you know about the coup?”

“Not much.” Malachi shrugged, chewed his lip a little. “Only some people were calling it a coup. Others said he was acting perfectly within his rights--uh, the mayor, I mean. Forgot his name.”

“Alpha Richter.”

“Yeah, him. That he was trying to quash a potential terrorist revolt. But people didn’t really care that much over here. More interested in what to do with the Forest. Local politics and all that.” He paused again, now resting his elbows on the bar. “Look, I know you were involved with it, if that’s what you meant--the whole mess in Blue City. Coup. Revolt. Whatever. Sorry, it’s hard making sense of it. And the name, uh, alias thing. And seeing you here, realizing it was you all along. It’s like waking up from a fever-dream.”

“I did what I had to.”

“You always did. You’re strong that way. Look, I’m not going to judge you. Not after the things that I’ve done. It’s good to see you again. See you grown up. I wish Nava could... You look like her, you know that? Both her and Huan.”

Burton didn’t want to think about the two of them--his mother and father. He didn’t want to remember their names, or that house, or the factory, or all the bruises he had once worn on his back and his face. The smell of the bar was making him sick now, though he endured it--swallowed the pain the way he had swallowed it so long ago, stuck in the corner amidst all of the screaming. He’d shut all of that away in a fortress and now the walls were all crumbling down, down. Nothing left but the earth and the rusted old nails holding him together. He said, very gently, into the place where the light from the street and the dark of the tavern intertwined, “Where is she now?”

But Malachi just shook his head. Burton knew in that moment what he was going to say, and he didn’t want him to say it. He didn’t want it to be spoken. He had known it, deep down, where the roots grow, and rot, and draw all their power, in darkness.

There was a long, painful silence between them that peeled at their skin. The older man took a great breath, “She’s dead.”

Burton was very, very still. There were tears in his eyes and they trailed down his face, shed scales, ending songs. He made no movement to wipe them away.

“I’m sorry, Jed. The world feels so small without her.”

He had dug and arrived at the bottom. To the pain he would keep on shouldering. But he had dug--he had dug and could go no further. The roots started here in Citadel, in the wounds he’d covered up in his own private fortress. Tumbling now, collapsing into the ground, deep where everything returns. And seeds grow. Deep where they wait, and sprout, and stretch out int the dark and up into the light, joining both and clinging to life.

He didn’t want to cry about it. He didn’t think he could--he never knew her that well, his own mother. He had left Citadel when he was seventeen and never looked back. It surfaced in his nightmares where he re-lived those dreadful times, the streets, the back alleys, the bottles breaking overhead and filling doorways and dark rooms with noise. People wailing in other languages while he cowered in the void of their voices, wishing he did not understand them.

That’s what he’d left behind. That’s what he buried here. But he was crying--creating raindrops on the roots and the seeds. He shuddered dreadfully but did not make a sound. A shadow passed over his brow.

Then he spoke, gently, the way gravity pulls, “I don’t think the world is any smaller. Only cruel--it’s always been cruel. Taking away everything, this will all be gone some day, just like the iron they dug out from the mountains. It’s strange. Citadel is so different than what I remember, and yet...” He paused, closing his eyes. “I didn’t want it to be the same, I dreaded the thought. I didn’t want to walk back into that place, to see it the same way again. Yes, everything’s changed here, but the whole world’s always changing, Malachi. It’s always dying, and unmaking what is being made. Still, I wish they had not cleared so much of the Forest...”

There were tears all along his face still, flashing silver, small and terrible stars. He was angry, at who or what he did not care to know or where to direct it--but it not at Malachi, not at Nava, not even Huan. His dragon-rage beat there, firmly in the chambers of his heart, recounting everything that had gone wrong and everything that had gone right, and then how through the fire, he’d survived. The anger burned out into ash.

He stood and moved to pace around the room a bit, careful around the chairs and tables and the shadows pacing beside him. Malachi, who had already done his mourning and his crying, could only watch him go back and forth in the dark. And back and forth he went, in the darkness that was his country, walking among that realm as an unknown king with no crown.

He’d come back here to make peace with himself. And lay the memories to rest. He was still learning how to live.

Finally, he stopped before the door, the silver, burning stars scattered cheek to cheek and along the corners of his mouth.

Malachi spoke his name softly. Burton said, facing towards the door still, “Did she go quickly?”

“I wish I could say.”

“And Huan?”

“He left Citadel soon after you did. Not a word--just vanished too. I don’t know what’s happened to him now.  At first, I thought maybe he’d gone after you all those years ago, but I guess not.”

They talked quietly about unimportant things for a while. And then briefly about the iron mines. They had been completely abandoned, Malachi said, and no one had been up there in years. People were building in the other direction now, into where the Forest used to be. Some were against it, some were for it, saying Citadel had always spread out, like a carpet, like a field--and they needed the room, for houses and roads and a new prison and hospital on the southern side. Burton paced sometimes while he listened, but ended up always near the door.

His tears had dried now, but the weight of the words were still there. He told Malachi how he had gotten the pendent, how his mother had given it to him when he finished high school. That it was supposed to protect him. That it had done no such thing.

“I think it did,” said Malachi.

“Of course you would,” said Burton. He could not tell Malachi why he wore it still--it was not in her memory. Because he realized now that she had in fact been dead for a long time to him, that he had been dead to her the moment he left. He did not ask how she had died, or when.

For a while longer they looked at each other, and how they had changed, for better or for worse. Burton had known Malachi the way a child knows the people and the places no one else can see, sneaking sideways glances at ghosts through looking glasses. Things were always stranger as a boy, because he did not understand. Only that the liquor store was like a portal or a magic gate, and that his father would go there and then back to the house and become something else entirely, and his mother would go rushing there afterwards, taking him by the hand sometimes. And sit for hours in the cellars with Malachi while he went crawling around and searching for other ghosts between the glass bottles. Things made more sense when he grew older, though he could never find the ghosts anymore. He was good at looking for secrets instead.

“Where will you go next?”

“Please don’t ask those kinds of questions,” said Burton. “You know I won’t answer.” In truth he could not fully answer, because he did not fully know. He was being pulled many ways now, by many different things, some inside him, some outside--like the wind. There was no wind in the tavern, but it called to him, from somewhere over the hills, in the dark.

“I cannot stay here,” he said, bluntly but gently. “There are fires I have started elsewhere, fires I must put out." Not with force, but with care. With earth. He was looking over his shoulder, across the floor, “You’re better off not knowing where or what they are. You’ve done well here, you should cherish that. Do not seek out what can destroy you, I should know. Those are hard battles to win, harder to move away from when the fighting has been done--and the two of us, Malachi, we both know we were never really fighters.”

“Alright, alright. But we both fought well. You’ll find a way. That is, if you have to fight still. Will you ever visit again?”

“Perhaps. Do not come looking for me.”

“I won’t. I’m sorry, Jed, about Nava. You know I loved her. Forgive me, if you can.”

“There is nothing to forgive.”

Silence again, mutual. There were flickers of dust dancing between them, dodging blades of faint street-lamp light. Malachi’s eyes flickered from the dust to Burton, who stood silhouetted at the front of the room, half his face invisible.

In a way, he longed to tell Malachi of all his time with Savage Hammer, what it was like looking down at a city from a skyscraper, and how he had finally found something that was worth fighting for. But those were his secrets to keep, his lies, his scars, and all of it was over now. There were only loose ends to tie but he was tired, and his hands were dirty. And he did not think it was a story worth telling, not here, not now, anyway. He did not want to be seen in that light.

A small smile on the scarred face. “I didn’t waste your time, did I?”

“No,” said Burton. “Though it would be best if you didn’t tell anyone of our meeting."

Malachi nodded, and Burton bowed his head back, shut his eyes. He was very worn, and very troubled, having dug all the way here, having uncovered death again, having lost something from long, long ago. Where everything began, where everything would end. Knowing what could not be found and what could not be claimed--only death claimed everything, death was everything. Everything unmade. Having dug all this way he found the roots were unmade too. There was nothing at all to hold him here anymore.

Breaking a chain and completing a circle. The boy who left Citadel all that time ago was dead, was changed. And had so much to do now.

He opened his eyes and saw darkness, facing the world which was dark outside still.

But darkness was his kingdom. He opened the door and went forward.

The Void (and Other Means of Unmaking) takes place after E.X.O.D.U.S. and before At the Speed Which Mountains Move.

[obsidianonslaught]

At The Speed Which Mountains Move

Death stared at him from across an empty, hollow place. Not maliciously, not greedily--but intently. Honest, brutally honest, the way footprints fade beneath silent, soft rain. Saying nothing, for the dead do not speak--there was nothing left to say, and nothing around him, just blackness. Not the blackness of night, but the blackness of outer space, infinite, timeless. Expanding.

He looked around, blinking steadily, his neck craned over his shoulder, gazing into the vast and vaster stretch of darkness dull as gravestones and split ends in old hair. He knew no road, no sign in the distance, there was no gravity to bind him, and no air to breathe. There was no light, no moon, no stars, no where to go. But he was not dead--death could not touch him, would not take him, and he squinted through tears in his eyes that became seaside storms, heavy, black, pouring to the only sound he could make out from the empty place. A heartbeat in his chest. Softly, slowly creating the pace for the rivers that ran over top of his skin, into nothing. There was no direction, no here nor there, no now and then.

Then he was standing in a broken world, the streets he had known as a child, in the dark, staring up at a clouded, choking sky. He wandered down to the end of the block, through the dust, through the vivid stench of poison gases and coal, through small shards of glass arranged like teeth across the corner. A canvas of rubble where the factory used to be, laying lopsided and disfigured, scattered and toppled and layered with dust and the faint smell of smoke and flame. There was fire coming from the seam between his lips, blue in color, and thin--it was cold to the touch and did not burn him--and crumbled into handfuls of earth where it snared and smoothed his hair.

There was a mountain in the distance--out of place, out of reach. A mountain that did not belong, a great welt against the horizon--burning copper and bronze. The ruins before him smoked, rotted, crumbled. He made his way slowly into the center of it, into the shadow of the mountain peak that had not existed in that faraway place. Something cut at him, sharp and small, shards of glass or jewels or metal, glinting softly, saying nothing. His blood ran in thin lines into the earth from the shallow cuts, softening it, saturating barren strips. There he knelt with his open wounds in the swell of stones and wooden beams and scraped at the ground, his nails sheathed with grainy soil, long and uneven, digging, hollowing out a small hole. He dug until he could not see the mountain over the edge of the ditch and everything was black again. Then he woke.

The sun had not yet risen, and he squinted into the shadowy shapes that lingered within the walls of the room. Familiar things. The curtains, the desk, his body crumpled on its side, loose strands of his thick, dark hair. He sighed deeply, quietly, parting his lips where the fire had slipped out in his dreams.

Slowly, he crossed the floor with bare feet and turned on the light. He blinked away the weight on the lids of his eyes, dragged his fingers over his face, feeling nothing. The clock in the corner read quarter past four, and he cursed beneath his breath in his mother tongue. Caught half-way between a dizzy spell and the chill of knowing too many city secrets.

Run, river, run. For there is blood welling up in the water. Swimming through the torrents spilling out of his mind, choking down the air in the apartment room. Troubled, troubling, troublesome.

He had, again, a vision of a mountain top, a fleeting thought, til the minute hand on the clock jolted forward. Tick. Tick. Then the rivers again, flowing water, carrying eras, carving pathways through granite and leaf litter and clouded lanes and fog banks that had settled alongside the oldest of his memories. Split lips and seeping blood, small secrets, the corridors of inner city streets... Things he tried hard not to remember.

... Tick. Tick.

He knew the mountain in his dream was a sign--Omega was contacting him, calling him. He’d no choice but to answer, and he did so gently, reaching out across the boundary line with a tightening sense of uncertainty. His throat was knotted but he answered without a voice--how the dead do. It hurt him to breathe, but he knew what must be done. He showered and changed and then opened the window, leaned his head out into the darkness over the asphalt and the grungy figures of painted lines and parked cars. His heart skipping beats. Lollygag emerged from the nestled heap of shadows and smog and pressed his forehead to his own. They talked, silently, skin on metal and a fog bank concealing their empty jaws and pointed teeth. With his bruised hands he stroked the Gale’s snout and nodded towards the great, old Forest.

There they met the god where the mountain once stood.

Morning had not yet come. They settled together among the rubble and watched the stars turn over the treeline for awhile, hinting at charts and other ancient directions. The lights of the city bellowed graphically in the distance, another sea of stars below the veiled deck of sky, golden and blue and just out of reach. Waiting for the sun to shine.

But he was ever wary of the light. His eyes were tired, the color of ash, the color of storms, open wide and looking between the spaces of earth and shadow, into the stars, into the ether that was Omega’s giant, sacred face. The Seismos made a moaning sound at last, as if ze were sighing, turned into the rush of thunder clouds and wind. Ze sat down surely in the place where the mountain once was, greater than it, taller, stronger, curling zer tail like a wire fence in the dip in the earth.

“I saw a sign from over the Ocean,” ze said, very slowly. “From the West, from someplace in-between, where dreams come from, Jed. Where there is no night or day.”

“What do you mean?” Burton had undone his harness and was leaning out of the open cockpit, his chin in his hands, a cold chill glazing through him.

“A dying place,” said Lollygag softly.

Omega nodded firmly. “A dying place.” Ze tilted zer head towards the coastline hidden far beyond Blue City’s skyline. “Far away. Far gone. One like me, made by the minds and the hands of your people--humankind. We are the gods of a new and horrible age. The both of us created to kill. But he is being killed.”

Burton curled up his lip, “You aren’t talking of war, are you?”

“Oh, there will be a war,” said Omega. “But not now. Not yet. No, it is time and neglect and rust that kills him slowly. He is powerless, dormant, weak. As I once was. And shackled in place, to something greater than gravity--what I could not tell, nor where. There was a Great Divide between us. I could only make out broken pieces, born of split seconds. It was only an instant, a single ripple in a rising tide. I tried contacting him again, sending a message of my own, but there is no signal to retrace... As if it never were.”

Ze spoke with tremendous weight, as if trying to balance capacities of both land and sea, unmaking and unrelenting. Deciding how to hold zer neck and zer shoulders, like vast pillars and roots that held up the lungs of the world. The Gale crooned softly, deeply tuned to the stiffness of the god’s posture, zer locked joints, the pattern of ambivalence painted in zer tone, zer clenched and sharpened teeth. He read the symbols, then gestured and sung to Burton quietly, and Burton understood.

“We will help you find him,” he said in his quiet, mortal voice--carefully, tenderly. He held his chin in his hands still, leaning out into the lengthy Forest. He watched Omega’s twitching tail, a great bridge over darkness sloped over stories of hope and of pain. “But then what?”

For a while, Omega did not stir--ze sat in the dirt, deep and dark, statuesque and throwing tapered shadows over the tangled growth of shuddering trees. Eyes blazing, beacons of untold might, seeing all, spilling a different kind of light into the clustered clouds, the scent of summer rain on the wind. Zer face was rugged and sharp, as if etched in black stone, burned forever into the path of the stars, of brilliance, of night. Not once did ze attempt to probe Burton’s mind.

“I am a god of nothing,” ze said at last. “A god of devastation, of dread. Once powerless to my power. But you brought me back into this world, back up to the Surface. I think of my prison, my refuge here, where this mountain was once, where I rested while you waited, and you gave life to me again, word by word, piece by piece, peaceful peace. In the darkness, in the silence, in the earth beneath. I thought I was alone--but I was wrong... I am stronger, I am the fate that falls all living things. That promise of nothingness that awaits in death.” Ze laughed briefly, an untamed and deep laugh that came out like the unison of music and ceremonial flame--Burton’s laugh--the laugh that ze had learned in the darkness of the underground caves. “I am going to steal him back from the dying place.”

“Ah,” said Burton.

Lollygag bristled, his horns and tail and wings rocking in the wind. The trees seemed to follow his lead, shaking and bowing their dark, crowned branches, while twin moons shuffled into the banks of massing clouds, shy and ready to surrender their realm to dust and dawn. Quietly, time turned over the smallest of stones...

“I do not know how long the journey will take,” said Omega, with a brutal sort of honesty. “I have never been over the Ocean.”

“Not long,” said Burton, who could recall the distances and the directions from his various books and charts, “If you Cast yourself there. It’s the search itself that will take the most time. You have no other leads?”

Omega shook zer head slowly, side to side, a tower shifting into distant realms of make-believe and recent years. Some silver threads of light lay timidly over the armor of zer neck, playing with the thought of permanence. Lollygag rose up slowly, above the treeline and to where the breeze began to part ways, his bronze wings stretched wide.

“I know where to look, I think,” he said, with a clearness to his voice that transcended the boundary of the air and aged woods.

Burton understood, he knew Lollygag wanted to search whatever records they could find for clues, answers, explanations. Perhaps the remnants in the old army bases... They’d been there before, briefly, over foreign lands and withered ruins. Swiftly, the Gale sifted through the files from those trips, and his own mines of military coding.

“There were countless weapons built during, and after the war,” he said, “even in peace-time. There are mentions of joint-projects. And rogue projects. Republic and Empire and those unaffiliated with either.” He tilted his head to one side. “Including building, and cloning, ancient Zoids. There are mentions of different attempts. Death machines. Destroyed or disassembled usually. I don’t know much else. But Richter Scale was not the first to experiment with these processes--making and un-making. Though I think... they better stream-lined the technique utilizing the BLOX technology and morphology. Forcing copied Cores into certain forms and frames...”

He stopped for a moment, parsed through some impossible amount of data, and continued. “Operation Genesis applied new battle data and diagnostics to a militarized-method of creation and control. To make you, Omega, within such a short period of time--”

“--they had blueprints,” Burton whispered.

“Exactly. And they must have obtained them from some outside source.” The dragon hummed like the wind through the mountain range. “Those schematics exist somewhere.”

“If they weren’t already destroyed,” said Burton. “Richter Scale was set on keeping tight control over all of their assets, facilities, their personnel...”

“You worked on the project, did you not, Jed?” said Omega. “How come you know so little?”

“I mostly oversaw the production of the Chimera drones,” he replied, flatly. “I wasn’t informed of your existence until much later on, closer to the rebellion. My job was mostly to keep an eye on... on other parties, to collect information on people. When Pierce went rogue, the plan shifted slightly--but he was expendable, in the grander scheme of things. Most of us were. I was. But Lollygag was not. Not until they created you, and reproduced in your biology his ability to control other Zoids. The data exists still, and they’re making use of it, I’m sure--Exodus is proof of that. In its original state, perhaps not, but Lolly is good at repairing and restoring anything corrupted, deleted...”

“It leaves a trail,” said Lollygag, “like footprints.” He wriggled his claws as the stars and clouds reeled above him. “We’ll find him. We just need to start somewhere.”

The god leaned towards them, slowly like ripples and tides.“Then lead.”

----------

Burton returned to his apartment as the sun was rising over the skyline and repainting the city a rosy blood color in patches, creeping into corners like teardrops and ink. The smell of storm drains and sediment and exhaust from still traffic crept about his hands, his feet. He tidied his work-space and made his bed, packed lightly, brushed his hair. Humming songs that he’d learned from long, long ago--Lolly hummed with him, in his mind, and reminded him to shut the curtains. Some semblance of dreams circled about him, dipping, diving, diluting. He left a message on the phone: simple, resolute, honest, in his soft and shadowy voice, saying things in words that could not quite be said in words...

He was skeptical still. Richter Scale had likely disposed of the original source, keeping secrets to themselves, heavily guarded, spirited away. He no longer could access the various facilities within the Blue City limits--he’d a target on his back, blood smothered on his name. But there was a chance--a slim one, a risk he’d have to take to appease Omega, to search the world for the dying calls of another troubled god.

He closed the curtains and tied back his hair, locked the door and left. Lollygag was waiting for him on the asphalt and helped him up into the cockpit again. Morning staggered on, pushing him closer to the edge of consciousness, testing the weight of earth, of stone, of the unbridled might of the city. The dragon rose, into the golden light, above the skyline, and off into the wilds once more.

“Small steps,” said Lollygag, stretching his wings wide and escaping the Blue City noise. “You’re worrying too much--worries are like clouds, sometimes.” He pointed out with a claw, into the distance, shrugging. “Gathered together tight they can obscure the sunrise.”

He considered it for a moment, looking at the color of the sun as it lit the desert, the forest, the brow of Blue City. Far, far away on the water’s edge, it turned to liquid gold. There they flew, faster than the wind and unseen above a waking world. Omega was there, impatient, towering over the sea like a cliff made of anger and metal and the crushing sound of thunder trapped deep in sealed caverns below.

Together, they looked out into the water, over wavecrests reaching up at the hills, tamed by sun and the patient pull of seconds sacrificed to the delicate song. Of the seasons changing, of the tide coming in. Salt stinging, irrelevant, ordinary. The three of them turned west and reconsidered.

“You’ll want me to stay hidden while you search,” said Omega, sharp but quiet. Ze knew it because ze knew him, his guilt, his honor, his careful way of working things.

“It’s for the best,” sighed Burton. “You keep out of sight,” he glanced upward, vaguely, “and we’ll be in touch.”

“And if Exodus finds you?”

“We’ll be ready this time,” said Lollygag, with his head bowed, adorned by the hours of day. He spoke with tremendous energy--gravely, precisely, how the tide turned in and out and cleansed the stains and scars along the coast, taking everything to sea.

The god grumbled something, bellowing into the atmosphere, where space and sky and gravity intertwined and tumbled elsewhere, between, beyond, owing and owning nothing. Eventually, ze took zer second form, ascending, claws and jaws clenched, the size of shackles that could cover snow-swept summits and every slope in between.

“You know it, don’t you, that you will have to fight,” ze echoed, zer back to Blue City, facing out against the waves. It was a deep and ancient sound, from darkness, into thin air. “Many more fights. More times than you can count--the faces will not stop, not here, not on the other Side, strangers or strangeness. They’re looking for us, you know who I mean. One day, again, we’ll meet them, face-to-face, sooner or later.” The sound of zer core pulsing, seething, caused Burton to shudder with a sharp stab of pain. He curled his lip, looking out the cockpit up at the giant, sulking creature. His dragon, too, shuddered and shifted, for the connection among them was strong.

The god heaved a heavy sigh. “Jed.”

“Yes?” Burton’s voice was a gentle whisper across the coast.

“If you humans are good at anything, it is claiming gods for your own and waging wars. Creating and killing and creating and killing, both yourselves and your servants--all masters and slaves to some cyclical cause. Of hate. You will teach me how to fight too. Not from code, not from the battle data, nor from the reactions programmed into my system. From experience. Of my will. And of that hate.”

The words stung more than the wind and the salted water. Burton was quiet and motionless at the Gale’s controls. Lollygag made a shrill and awful noise, which drifted away from them all.

“Think about what you’re saying,” he whispered, pained, jaded. “Something burning in his throat. “We will teach you--but nothing of fighting with hate.”

“I feel often-times that I’ve nothing left,” Omega rumbled. “That nothing else matters. It fills, the mind, Jed--it knows no bounds.”

“It’s powerful.” Burton spoke gently. “But you mustn’t hold onto it so tightly--very rarely does anything worthwhile come of it, after all. Oh yes, small victories, seconds of success, but beyond that? Misery. Powerlessness to its power. It’s like a virus, it infects and destroys and decays and duplicates until there’s nothing left. Nothing but the hate. Trust me, it’s better left untouched--let it go, Omega. Control it. Do not let it control you.”

“Ha! You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen myself turn into something else--something I never want to be again. Living like that, it wasn’t much of a life at all, becoming very broken, and breaking everything around me. All else lost, in a daze, in a dream. We were... changed by it. I saw the people around me contorted and caught in that cycle, over and over again. I’m not saying it’s easy, you know, but you’ll be better off keeping away from it. And forego the hate that you have."

“We’ll teach you to fight against it instead. It’s a terrible weapon,” said Lollygag, troubled, but steady. “But you must wait. One thing at a time.”

They said nothing more, for there was too much to think about, and too much pain to drown. No path to take. The ocean told them of sunken treasure, heavy storms, the sacred spell of undisturbed sleep, for the time was right, the time was now--time trickling by beyond the face of shoals and sand and strangely-shaped shells scattered into separate tide-pools. The wind seemed to lean on their backs, the sun was slow and rising higher to the top of the world. Cleaving with claws of golden heat. They turned to each other, silent, free to wander, free to choose, not knowing what secrets laid buried away past the point where sea and sky met up together, never letting go. It was the Seismos that shifted first, seeking something, seeing sunlight sparkling off the crests of the tallest waves. And then they left that hallowed place, the great scar in the earth, and started to the other shore, at the speed which mountains move.

[obsidianonslaught]

E.X.O.D.U.S.

Time had not been kind to him, eating his heart out, leaving dust in his hair. He’d stand at the cliffs rising up from the Forest and breathe in the frigid mountain air, and looking at a changing world, golden leaves, a blackened sky, empty lines on his fingers that bled late at night, with his teeth pressed together and his body so stiff he might shatter. Expecting the wind to push him over the edge, to the river bends, the shadows that snuck up in hoards like an army and pulled at small spaces of tree bark and stone. And it was quiet--thrillingly quiet--with his pulse racing in his wrists and in his throat, a great plume of patience and fire, waiting for the sun to show and the hour to turn, so that he could stare the horizon face-to-face and curse his own sins of the past.

He stood motionless there, for hours to come, statuesque save for stray pieces of hair that swept about, dark in color, in a rising, icy wind. His face solemn, and starved for peace. Only the Lord Gale stayed by his side, overlooking the hills and the stars settled up in the sky, and he too was still, and silhouetted black against the inky clouds and alpine peaks. Watching everything fade away, while winter crept closer, just as expected, and choking to death the faint of heart.

That morning, the light fell too late on their brows and Burton narrowed his eyes, deep and grey, as if to scout out something unsettling, stepped back from the border. Silent footsteps, a lowered head, he descended the stretch of the uneven slopes into the open arms of the Forest, familiar and sheltering and scented of intimacy and earth. The dragon followed, their shadows aligned, taking strange shapes across the leaf litter, and tinted curious shades of rust and gold.

‘Shouldn’t you sleep, Jed?’ said Lollygag across their connection. He leaned over his human so that their noses nearly touched, and Burton stopped before the burly, knotted branches of two very old trees on the path.

‘I can’t,’ he blinked, his lids heavy, and lips dry. For he’d been avoiding the nightmares that shook him so terribly that he would thrash and scream and wake with cold sweat on his brow. Filled with dark, forsaken things, a sucking void, the visage of some giant serpent-creature that sought to poison his mind with demands and lies and a toxin that stopped his lungs from working. So that he suffocated slowly, all alone, and torn by fear and failure with blood crusted over his throat and collarbone. His own blood, spilled and wasted, and with it what was left of his dignity.

Sometimes the nightmare-creature would curl its jowls about his ankles and bite him there, beat him to his knees with wire-frame wings, drag him about through a desolate grave of rotting nails and broken bones, til he weakened with pain and alarm and he could no longer struggle against the tide of its scales. Then it would toss him away, into a bottomless pit, where he fell in a loop and choked on his own bile and the smell of the venom spreading in his veins and weighing him down... down... and forced to remember everything he’d done wrong while he died and forgot his own name.

Lollygag would wake him from these visions and take him out into the Forest where he could see the stars and make up songs to fill the empty space in his chest. But the dreams came more frequently now, so that he avoided sleep and kept himself busy, translating different texts at his apartment desk well past midnight and crying to keep his eyes from closing shut. Then when he nodded off, the sequences would start again, and he’d race over the shadow-spun fields with the monster drooling at the back of his neck and reaching for him, and when it tripped him with its tail he saw their faces were the same in the reflection of its blood-coated armor.

He’d gone deep into the middle of the mountain chains to ask Omega what it meant, but the god had only laughed at him, called him foolish, said he was infected with a kind of fear that only he could overcome.

“This isn’t one of your tricks, is it?” he frowned as the Seismos shifted zir massive legs somewhere near the center of the cavern. All dimly lit by the virus-green glow of zir eyes.

“You dare accuse me?“ Omega had dipped zir jaw down toward him and Lollygag, and shook with a thunderous sneer. “I thought you wiser than that, Jed.”

“Just suspicious,” said Burton, bluntly, carefully, the muscles in his shoulders tense. “I have asked you not to mess with my head.”

The Seismos scraped at the walls with zir tail, leaving faint marks like streaks of snow in the stone. “And I have since honored your request,” ze said. And then laughed at him again, shaking the roof of the caverns so fiercely that he thought for a moment the whole mountain would crumble. But it never did--the great god would study him carefully from the summer-leaf patterns of zir unblinking eyes, methodical, and said at last, “You are afraid, but you are not alone. Remember that.”

So with those words he left the Seismosaurus and returned outside to stare into the night sky, Lollygag still at his side and humming gently at him, very soft, very troubled, for the air was cold and thin, and the wind as violent as ever. And Burton had not rested for such a long, long time--time lost to the creature that would come in the night and kill him in his dreams.

‘It’ll be alright, Lolly,‘ he leaned his head against the Gale’s snout.

Lollygag whimpered in reply, his scanners busily surveying the area, all the dips in the dark where they could not see, the hidden secrets of a slumbering forest... ‘You need to sleep,’ he tipped his giant, amber wings to shelter them both from the wind. It bellowed roughly from the chasms below and rushed north, sudden and swift, and unrivaled in colorless power. ‘You can’t continue on like this.’

‘I know.’ But he couldn’t lie down, couldn’t rest, couldn’t stand to see the nightmare-beast or have to die again and bleed out all alone in a tunnel of pain. When the sun rose, he climbed slowly into the Lord Gale’s cockpit and they made their way down into the heart of the Forest, where the trees were dropping their leaves and preparing for the grip of winter. Beneath the shadow of Omega’s mountains, they wound through makeshift paths while the canopy glittered with withering gold.

Lollygag told him again to sleep, but Burton could not, watching the world die around him, the cold cache the ground and the clouds. When the mountain slopes and the valley below and the roads towards Blue City would be stiffened with blankets of thick, scentless ice. When the wind cursed him and he shivered at the thought of the nightmare-creature with his face and venomous spit that sent him into euthanasia from which he’d never wake again. The leaves danced around them like freshly-fallen snow.

On, the Gale walked for many more miles, a steady maze of tangled branches above him trying to catch the sun. Over roots and streams and sloping earth. Over dead trees left from last year’s freeze. And the hymn of rushing wind as it swelled and conquered.

They came to a clearing by a slow, steady brook and Lolly sat among the stones. The sound of the water rippling through cracks in the ice just beyond the reach of his claws and making its way downhill, where it would feed into the sea so far, far away, mixed with earth and salt as it had for centuries. There was a soft ping on the radar, that faded as quickly as it came, and Burton stared at the screens in such a state of delirium that could make no sense of the direction. Unwillingly, fighting the whole way, he fell into a brackish sleep while the Gale scanned the Forest, but there was nothing.

In his sleep, he cried out and fled from the creature with claws and wings and saw it was joined at his own two feet--his shadow, growing and consuming him, pulling him down by the ankles as he died with poison in his blood and mind. And this time the shadow spoke--in his voice, coiled up around his throat and ear, “I found...” Over and over again, never able to complete the sentence. Flickering volume, sometimes muted, sometimes moaning dreadfully, half-choked with laughter.

He could never form words in these dreams, only scream and shriek, but never in any language. It was Lolly’s pleading that brought him back to consciousness and he bolted forward in his seat, the harness snagging both shoulders. He panted and wiped the tears and sweat from his face while the Gale whined softly.

‘I’m fine,’ he insisted, but Lollygag knew better, and continued to croon at him.

In the distance, something spoke over the rough calls of water and wind, inaudible at first. Then steadily louder, thunder coming closer, bringing spells of the old world into the even older Forest.

Lollygag stood up and crept back into cover, away from the small, silver stream, and fell silent. Again, the same wraith-sound from beyond the trees, neither human, nor animal, and still so faint that it lacked any meaning.

Then it rose once more:

‘I... found-’

And vanished abruptly back into nothingness.

Burton shuddered and took the controls; the same sudden ping went off on the radar. But nothing stirred in the rust-gold shadows--only the whisper of dead leaves on the wind.

Anxious, the Gale began to recalibrate the settings, strengthening sensors, increasing the effective range. Burton’s breaths were scattered and uneasy. Answered only by the same, crackling words:

‘I... found-’

It was a voice, a frequency, that neither he nor Lollygag could recognize, warped with excitement. And a very frail and crooked kind of joy.

‘... I found-’

Again, through the wind-steered air like an enemy current, filling his lungs, his ears, his tired, troubled mind. The blip on the radar reappeared, then changed course all of a sudden and doubled in speed, barreling in their direction from somewhere in the valleys below. The Gale snarled and bristled, turning towards the signal with both arms raised and ready to strike the first blow.

But a bolt of hot, burning energy shot out from beneath the branches, and struck him in the chest, stunning him in place; a shockwave of static and his startled screams locked the cockpit controls. Then something followed the loose string of fire, something large and black that rocketed around in the air, silent, sudden movements, jerking its head back and forth, pumping down with a pair of great wire-like wings....

‘I found you--!’

It circled them, making sharp, sporadic turns, then stopped inches from the cockpit, staring down straight through the glass, the jaws parted in a labored, ecstatic smile, showing off its forward, serpent-fangs.

Burton took the throttles in his shaking hands and tried to ease them forward, and Lollygag screeched, then pitched to the side. Dazed, every joint aching with an overdose of electrical energy, difficult to find his footing, and find the lines of code to lift his claws together and arm his weapon systems. He did so suddenly, as the big, black creature lunged at them and laughed. An iron, rasping laugh, tearing at the trees with its claws and great, dark shadow.

It was twice Lolly’s length from snout to tail at least, and formed entirely of metal--a Zoid, a model Burton had never seen before, nor read of in any military database. It was heavily armored, but moved swiftly and suddenly, and hung in the autumn air like a great, polished statue, staring directly at them with savage green eyes. There was no pilot in its cockpit.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ His thoughts and the Gale’s were blended together. It could hear them, for it answered not on the channel, but in Burton’s mind, drowning out the surrounding sounds, of rotting leaf litter and tree limbs in the breeze.

‘I am the System. I am E.X.O.D.U.S. I am the Dekalt Dragon.’ It raised its golden-crowned head and matching wings, drawing closer, closer, catching shafts of cold sunlight in its teeth. On its polished armor, Burton saw his own panicked reflection, and it seemed to rile at that, exuberant, expectant, hunching its head between raised shoulders and gnashing its finely formed jaws.

‘... I am going to kill you.’

And it dove at them again, lightning-quick, with a deafening roar and lashing of its wings and talons, black and gold and blood-colored and blurred. Lollygag was fast enough to avoid it, counter back as he took to the air and aimed a blow with the Magnesser Spear--but by then, the Dekalt was hovering above the tree-line and studying them again. A flickering golden, flame erupting from between its jaws. It was laughing, laughing down at them, now touching its foreclaws together, both plated shoulders hunched.

Burton shuddered quietly, recoiling to the bitter taste of blood and iron in his mouth.

Both dragons trembled, and then shot for the sun, weeping terribly and ripping at each other with their splayed talons. The wind took them southward towards the snow-capped mountain chains, where they fought from summit to summit, leaving footprints over the snow, where no one would ever find them. Beating light, beating wings, their voices raised and angry and echoing for miles beyond, becoming rain. They thundered, downslope, and the Gale pinned the Dekalt and the Dekalt struck the Gale and found its footing on the ridgeline, and then they stood stiffly, facing each other in a stalemate, and seething in collective rage.

‘Can you Project over it, Lolly?’  Burton tried not to dwell on the rusted taste between his teeth.

The Gale shook himself from side to side, ‘No... It’s- different. Not like the Chimera units, not like the Wild Zoids from the Forest. Other channels, other frequencies, foreign code...’

Exodus interrupted them both, bellowing over ice and snow, ‘You would run from me in the Dream, Jed... Precious child. Powerless child!’ Gripping at the frozen earth underneath. ‘You are tired, aren’t you? Sleep- Sleep where you can run from me, and run from your pain and your suffering- and you shall never wake again. I’ll rid the world of you; I’ll bury you-’

Lollygag cried out in retort and lunged; his jaws closed around the Dekalt’s forearm, trying to cleave metal with metal. They tore into each other, fangs, flames, ferocity, the sheer force of their blows as they slashed at the spaces between their pitch-black armor. Then broke off again into the sky, silhouetted by light and the cold grip of violence as it feeds.

And Burton’s mind was the wreckage of a whirlpool, battered by Exodus’ heavy blows and a lasting lack of sleep, shaken, drifting off and then back. Back to where? Back again, back again... Completely sporadic. Unable now to distinguish between his dreams and his wakened state, for the Dekalt was always there, sneering at him, reaching to trap him between the ravines of many bladed fangs. Lolly would have to Evolt, he thought, if they were to survive--and the Gale seemed to sense this.

He changed in a heartbeat, a flashing light, a curdling scream. He struck the Dekalt at the flank and sent it reeling back into the ice. There was a shower of light and bullets, the sound of metal against the surface of snow, and the two dragons chased their shadows round the summits, trying to catch the other in their jaws. They snapped and screamed, and met each other over the peaks, raking their throats with great, golden talons. The wind everywhere around them.

Then they flew to the west, riding the currents, diving between mountain tops and the subtle glare of the sun. Burton bit his lip and trembled, pained and tired--they could not keep this form for long, he was too weak, he needed sleep and darkness and the infinite void of undisturbed silence.

But the dragons battled with the rage and the might of explosive old stars, scattering, reforming, bursts of sudden light and fire as they tried to reach the other’s core. To extinguish. To kill.

Exodus shivered and slowed for a moment, staying at a distance. Studying them, the way children study shapes and colors and names. And then everything was still and dark, and their shadows lengthened on their claws and faces. For a long while, they stared across an empty space, distances marked by withered remains of autumn and rain.

It was a time of dying. They descend into the dirt and stared across the Forest floor, different pairs of eyes burning softly. ‘Go back to where you came from,’ Lollygag’s transmissions were soft but stern, a warning. ‘Leave this place. Leave us alone.’

The Dekalt shook its crowned-jewel head, the serpent fangs barred at them hideously. ‘You know who sent me, don’t you?’

Lollygag could only bow his head down--he would not say the name.

‘You... you and your human have upset the Scale; you have forgotten your place, the sense of your existence. So you must both be punished.’ Exodus hissed, and hunched it shoulders, crouching at them. ‘I was made to hunt, I was Assembled to destroy--that is my purpose, that is my place. I have come to claim you, your lives, your names, your blood and dream-world spaces.'

'How can you talk of taking so much? As if it was owed to you? As if you own it?’

‘That’s what power is, Gale.’

They stood apart in the dirt. Dirty, dented creatures. Calling back and forth, two dragons with their gleaming scales and eyes and coiling tails and mud and rotting leaves and melting ice sticking to their flanks where they had thrown each other on the surface. The light around them died slowly.

‘Your power,’ said Lollygag. ‘But not my power.’ His head was low still, like a budding branch bent over, like a cresting wave over emerald ocean.

A sneer. ‘What is your power, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lollygag, in his very honest way. ‘I am learning still, I think.’

The Forest spoke steadily to them, but Exodus did not hear. In a whirl of teeth and anger, it lunged forward, and the two Zoids were tangled in their shadows again while the trees moaned and shuddered and leaned away. Lollygag broke from the mess of lashing claws, his wings raised, rising. They steered away from each other again and went racing in between the trees. A steady breeze bellowed across the blue and black horizon.

Burton still could not tell the difference between his dreams while he was rattled and shaken and dragged in and out of states of sleep. Seconds apart, everything a crooked blur. The mountains were below and then beside them, and he knew that somehow he was pulling on the controls and that Lollygag had chased the Dekalt and then the Dekalt had chased them up the steep, unyielding slopes. They went quickly, rushing on their armored wings, while the land around them held its breath...

And then they were struck out of the sky, screaming, soundless; they fell like a comet, and lost consciousness. It was no use, they thought, for they had fought and fought, and now they could not fight. They drowned, reaching out for each other, in blindness and fear and the silent chokehold of pain that had pulled them both into some starless place. There they flailed a while longer, their eyes open and unseeing, and covered at every corner with darkness. Bodies unbound, full of flickering movements, fading. At last their voices bled through, following one another, scared and shrill. They were lost. The blackness was completely boundless.

Burton shuddered and started rapidly to die, tears on his face, scars in his mind, great dark scars, swords and caverns, and dried clots of blood. He could feel the Gale with him, the both of them helpless, both tumbling, plummeting, into a terrible, terrible, forbidden silence. The void opened, stared, surrounding them whole and ready to devour. They wept as the nothingness closed in around them.

But the shadows were blown into smoke by a great, heavy voice, of death and of power. They were no longer falling. The void no longer pressed with the weight of an ocean on their chests.

“Rise.” Omega snarled into them. From the earth. From darkness.

‘How..?’ Burton thought, and Lolly thought, their pain and emptiness interconnected, extensive together. ‘I cannot-’

"You will.”

They saw the world again. The god had broken through from the heart of the mountain, zir head impossibly high in the sky, shrouded in the dark. Staring down, zir tail was coiled carefully around the Gale, holding onto dear life.

Exodus tumbled, shrieked, recoiled, circled back and around and could not escape Omega’s giant, pressing shadow. Once or twice it jolted towards zem, only to reel back again, always being watched, always knowing there was nothing to be done.

“Do not test me.” Omega thundered over everything, with the might of a toppling empire. And the Dekalt, head hunched, overpowered, retreated into the lengthening spell of cold and forest secrets.

The Seismosaurus spread zir toes into the soil and watched. Ze craned zir neck and looked beyond to the where the continent collided into space and where Exodus had fled. “This is what it’s like,” ze said, “to again see starlight on the Surface.” Ze released Lollygag, who had reverted to his usual state, and let him take wing above the treeline.

Burton cursed under his breath using the language he’d spoken in the place he was born and sank down against the dashboard. Death was not so terrible, yet he had been afraid, he was still in so much pain. It was now that he could see the forest floor was cleaved with deep and terrible scars, where the dragons had fought, and where bits of mountain had come shattering down. Still the wind went whispering in its indifferent way, healing words, patient words, words formed in darkness.

He could not see very well; he thought of sleep and whispered his thanks while trying to make out the pattern. There was something different about the way it was woven. Omega’s face was longer and sharper and ringed by wisps of smoke and fire, but he could not make sense of it right now.

The stars stopped for no one as they skidded in silence across a sloping sky. Bloodied bands and blemishes lay below them in the trees.

There will be more blood, and more death, Burton thought, having been carried back from that place, the pain of it still in his eyes. Darkness seeping from every wound, darkness repairing itself. The sounds of the Forest growing deeper. The Dekalt would come for him again--but he would be ready then. He and his dragon, who hummed and drifted on the wind like a leaf. He must rest now, he must dream.

He said softly, “Surely Alpha will know now of your survival. Your location.”

“Good,” said the god. “I have grown tired of waiting.” For this was a time of great change.

[obsidianonslaught]

The Die-Away

Sequel to Errands For Gods.

He had to learn the new caverns, by touch, by smell, by the depth of the dark that surrounded him on all sides and grabbed at his breath and his hair. Sometimes the rain-water came through, resembling tears, and would stain all the lines in his hands while he felt his way down the long, snaking corridors, slowly, step by step, and farther into intimate madness. New scars now, rusted canyons spelling things on his body, twice he had tripped over slippery stones that sliced him open, for he was fragile. His face foreboding and creased along the sides of his lip, always tired--so, so tired, and shaped like the stars, flawed and graceful. And this, the abyss, the underground plane... was a place for gods and fiends and secrets buried long ago in the gut of the great dormant mountain.

Burton went carefully, the earth about him and incredibly old, always leaning against him, whipping him with dust, whispering... he heard words from dead languages and others he could not understand. But he listened. He would stop sometimes and press his head to the wall, where the water ran within, and followed it steadily. Sometimes, it pooled on the floor, and when he found it with his feet, most often by accident, the cold caught him by surprise, struck like lightning. And sometimes, it would spit down upon him from the ceiling and leave small spots of dirt on his cheeks. He learned to stay to the sides of the tunnel, where the smell of it was strongest, and the stones uneven.

To-day, he felt the Seismos reach out to him before he had entered the deepest of the caverns, checking his thoughts and enigmas and identity. At last, zir voice echoed over him and drew him closer, "．．． Ｊｅｄ．"

"I'm here," said Burton reassuringly, and he turned the final few corners while Omega went pressing around in his mind, reading this, deciphering that, much more conscious this time, not so much prying as inquiring. He could see the faint glow now of the Zoid's massive eyes, which lit the junction and the whole hollow in a mysterious, unnatural green. Numerous columns of limestone guarded the terminal there with unsound might, surrounding a series of subterranean lakes, knee-height to several meters in depth.

Omega was waiting at the forefront, zir head tilted to one side and sweeping out over some impossible length, much larger than before. Burton brushed at zir bottom jaw with the tips of his fingers, the surface unyielding, even, and sturdy. Black. Black as the inescapable abyss of bad dreams.

Omega rose; ze lifted zir head high, to the very top of the ceiling, where strings of stalactites hung in the shape of blunted spears, and then bellowed out with a sound from zir throat that faded just as slowly as it came. Long pauses, a dip in the pitch that seemed impossible. Then the same cry rang through the whole of the place, from the walls, from the dark outreaches and craters in the rock. It bounced over and back, layer upon layer of some softening noise til it rushed to a rhythm of rivers and wind.

"Ｔｈｅ ｃａｖｅ ｓｉｎｇｓ，" ze said.

Burton nodded quietly and began the walk toward the center of the cavern, and where Omega had planted all four of zir great, solid feet.

"Ｄｏ ｔｈｅ ｆｏｒｅｓｔｓ ｓｉｎｇ？" asked the Seismos. "Ｄｏ ｔｈｅ ｏｃｅａｎｓ ｓｉｎｇ？"

"Yes," said Burton. "If you are willing to listen." He went on inspecting the joints and under-armor. The condition was improving, though far from complete. There were cracks outlining quite a few of the panels, and many sections still missing that would have to be coded all over again. Some of the old gun barrels and bolts had been shed and stayed rusting over now beneath the surface of the largest pool.

A quick glance suggested that across zir shoulders and thighs, the scars were fading, armor dusted over with beads of stone-colored water. A steady process, tiring and time-consuming, though Omega kept at it tenaciously, snarling sometimes, and weaving zir neck round to study all the shapes of zir colossal, anchored body.

Burton made his way back towards the center of the cave, where the water trickled faster and smacked him sometimes on the cheek, squinting up at the god with a rare kind of twist to his lips. He knew the Seismos was processing something--what, exactly, he couldn't be sure, because their link wasn't nearly strong enough to tell, and all he could hear were bits and pieces, static and the rudimentary formation of pictures to words while ze cataloged their meaning. Then ze stretched out zir throat like the trunk of a tree, and the clash of metal plating vibrated far and wide, shook the blood in Burton's chest. He clutched at his collarbone as if to counter it momentarily, but soon enough the tremors were gone, an empty space, boundless and idle, cleaved deep inside him.

He supposed this was Omega's way of expressing how ze felt--confined to the  curse of pure and utter darkness.

"Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｓｅｅ ｔｈｅ ｗｏｒｌｄ ａｓ ｙｏｕ ｄｏ，" ze said finally, settling into place. "Ｉ ａｍ ｔｒａｐｐｅｄ ｈｅｒｅ． Ｙｏｕ ｓａｙ ｉｔ ｉｓ ｎｏｔ ｓａｆｅ ｏｎ ｔｈｅ Ｓｕｒｆａｃｅ．"

"Well, it isn't," Burton replied, still a little short of breath. "Not yet."

Omega crooned, a sound as profound and abstract as the earth and blackness which enveloped them. The joints in zir lengthened neck rattled, the sound shattering like ice against stone and tremendously heavy. "．．． Ｗｈｅｎ ｗｉｌｌ Ｉ ｓｅｅ ｉｔ ａｇａｉｎ？"

"In time," said Burton quietly, and crossed his arms about himself. The cavern sodden, licking his skin with a merciless cold. The god shuddered at his answer.

"-I wish I could say soon," Burton went on, still under his breath, his head bent back and staring up- up- scaling the test of space and shadow to the polished jewels of Omega's slanted eyes. "But I've told you before-"

"Ｉｔ ｗｉｌｌ ｎｅｖｅｒ ｂｅ ｓａｆｅ ｆｏｒ ｍｅ，" ze interrupted, one thousand ripples through the dusted surface of the water, breaking rules and chains of calm. "Ｓｏ ｌｏｎｇ ａｓ ｙｏｕｒ ｗｒｅｔｃｈｅｄ ｓｐｅｃｉｅｓ ｗａｌｋｓ ｔｈｅ Ｓｕｒｆａｃｅ． Ｙｏｕ ｔｒｅａｄ ｐｏｉｓｏｎ． Ｙｏｕ ｓｐｉｔ ｐｏｉｓｏｎ． Ｙｏｕ ｋｉｌｌ ａｎｄ ｃｒｅａｔｅ ｔｈｉｎｇｓ ｔｈａｔ ｙｏｕ ｃａｎｎｏｔ ｃｏｎｔｒｏｌ．"

The jaws slammed shut, a crippling vice so high up, and Omega rocked in place, sluggish at first, and then faster with each sway, until ze writhed and tossed zir tail with frightening power to the faraway wall. "Ｙｏｕｒ ｋｉｎｄ．．． ｙｏｕ ｄｒｅａｍｅｄ ｍｅ－－ｍａｄｅ ｍｅ． Ｙｏｕ ｗｉｌｌ ｎｏｔ ｓｔｏｐ．．． ｙｏｕ ｃａｎｎｏｔ ｒｕｓｔ， ｎｏｔ ｌｉｋｅ ｙｏｕｒ ｏｌｄ， ｃｏｒｅ－ｌｅｓｓ ｍａｃｈｉｎｅｓ．" The pounding of a joint against badly dented armor. "Ｓｏ ｗｈｅｎ， Ｊｅｄ？"

Burton bowed before zem, motionless for a while, the blood in his ears weighted, stinging. "I'm not sure." Glanced up, somewhat bitter, a sour note between his teeth, partial annoyance, partial empathy. "Perhaps you're right- it will never be safe. Though you could learn to be a bit more patient; I'm not done investigating, after all. And isn't that what you wanted from me?"

"Ｈｏｗ ｄａｒｅ ｙｏｕ．" Omega pounded at the floor in unpronounceable rage and building might, zir voice fierce- the signal in his head was insufferable and shrill. Ze lifted zir garrisoned shoulders and stepped forward, almost as if to flatten him, but then broke away into a sudden semblance of vibration and light, showering Burton in dust, encircling the pools and his shadow with a second appearance, this variable in size and phasing, spreading, shrinking, faster than the eye could catch.

The very first time Omega had managed to recreate it- this phantasmal extension of zirself- was right after zir fall at the Harbor. Burton hadn't seen it then--wasn't sure if anyone had--but he identified the feat in mere fragments of zir consciousness, memories, that the Seismos tried transmitting to him. This several encounters ago, when ze lay crippled and caged in the subterranean tunnels, and calling out to him monotonously. Linking up, breaking contact unintentionally, and shaken from such lacerations that could have very well severed zir body... but the message had been sent. And in the vision, ze took a different form, not unlike the descriptions Burton had read in all his research for Alpha of the Organoids when they began bonding to Zoid cores--something akin to a streak of light, unstable, serpentine, and forced zir way underground.

Burton called it Casting, and Omega would attempt it within the cave, for split seconds at a time, flashing about like a spark from a wire, swooping, diving, down the length of the rock-hardened walls. Sometimes ze stopped near Burton's shoulders, or the surface of the scented water, weightless, zir face sharp slanted, a mess of immortal angles, flickering, changing, to mimic almost human expressions... all lost partially in the blaze of sudden, silvery light.

And this is precisely what ze did, darting around the hollow and tossing out a spectrum of color, giant waves that washed through the darkness, scouted out the cracks in the corners... clubbing at Burton with currents that rose like envy and fire, burning, dancing, launching crude shapes. Telling a story. Ze circled him, humming something he couldn't recognize--an imagined language, whipping crude sketches made of white bands of light. The lines would seize him, and spin him around, then dissipate, the volume of Omega's chants causing Lollygag to stir. But he'd been asked not to intervene with these sessions, not unless the circumstances were absolutely dire...

"Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｇｏ ｔｏ ｔｈｅ Ｓｕｒｆａｃｅ． Ａｎｄ ｗａｌｋ ａｇａｉｎ－－ｓｅｅ ｓｕｎｌｉｇｈｔ．" The Seismos murmured in fragments, half in his head, half aloud, throwing tantrums off the cavern walls. And great domes of crumbling colors. "Ｔｏ ｈｅａｒ ｔｈｅ ｏｃｅａｎｓ ａｎｄ ｔｈｅ ｆｏｒｅｓｔｓ ｓｉｎｇ， Ｊｅｄ． Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｌｉｖｅ． Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｌｉｖｅ．．．" And then ze shot away,  reverted to zir usual state, crying on and slamming at the floor of the cave, thousands of tons trying to compete against the press of time and the price of self-control. Detonating pockets of dust with each blow, snapping fangs, grinding gears, fighting off the ache in zir joints that flared in protest to zir own explosive screams, trying to rip apart the reigning sheet of darkness. The sound was terrible, and shrill, and so deafening that the walls seemed to tumble, inch by inch, and the water recede to escape it, and the whole floor rocked from side to side.

"That hurts," Burton said between gritted teeth and a shiver.

And Omega moaned in retort with the might of a fog horn, even louder than before, zir eyes ablaze and focused directly down on him. Trying to dissect him, direct him. "Ｙｏｕ ｋｎｏｗ ｎｏｔｈｉｎｇ ｏｆ ｍｙ ｐａｉｎ．" And then there was a surge through his mind across their connection, a memory of blistering fire and failing vitals and the desperate surrender to hatred and fear; Burton staggered back, gasping for air, voice taken, body compromised. Some boiling impression, like metal melting, losing form and strength, spreading far beneath his skin and seizing the bridges between flesh and bone, the channels in his throat closing in. Submitting to panic, to the throbbing fever at his temple now and the sensation of hot magma being poured through his veins, a frantic pounding in his ears like fluid being spilled. His fingers frozen, his mind caught in a fruitless and fitful struggle to maintain consciousness while he felt his knees collapse. Omega kept at it until he sat clutching at his heart and trapped completely in the battle of life and death ze had fought at the Harbor. This was zir story, zir means to share, to describe, but the process was brutal, and Burton so ill by now that ze risked inflicting permanent damage.

Steadily, the Seismos pressed zir chin to his cheek, and the burning ceased, the pain ebbed away in great receding waves. Burton could see, could speak again, stood slowly, his feet shifting about the floor of the cavern in an attempt to find his place, his center of balance. The awful taints of Omega’s rage vanished as quickly as they’d come, left him trembling like an aftershock and reaching for his heart in the dark.

Lollygag whispered softly for him, on their own separate link in his mind, 'Jed?'

'I'm fine.' Burton was at-ease again, for the Gale was always there, always with him, always aware. ‘It’s alright, Lollygag.’ His pulse was leveling out now, his lips dry and parted. So the dragon was appeased.

He looked up at Omega with his steady, grey eyes, two dim stars in the pitch blackness with a crescent-shaped slit of his teeth. “You’re right, and I never will--not entirely. As you’ll never know mine. But that’s the curious thing: it doesn’t stop us from feeling altogether now, does it?” A slight pause, as he backed away toward the tunnels and the long trek up to the surface. “For ourselves--"

The god made a stifled, moaning sound and something made of metal scraped against the wall, slow and unintentional.

Burton sighed, “--or for another.” The words were forced out, laced with something like regret and sorrow, as if he didn’t want to care, or accept it, and he remembered the different faces of the children before they made their way into the Coliseum, side-by-side always, and ready to step forth into combat. But Savage Hammer was no more, and he was tired, fed up with the fighting, keeping back a veil of tears in memory of those better days, because he knew he was their enemy now.

There was a dead space within him... inevitable, impeding. “Think on it,” his voice soft, and skeptical, while he shoved against the visions in his head, for he knew Omega would be intercepting everything. And then go prying once again.

So he began to back away to the tunnels again, wounded gravely on the inside and wondering if he should burn those old photos from several years back of the Team. He kept them hidden in an old album and shoved inside a drawer where sometimes he hoped he wouldn’t remember--but in his daydreams, in deep nightmares, he had to, both the bliss and the bad, and how everything had crumbled around him.

"Ｓｔａｙ．" Not so much a command as a request. The Seismosaurus seemed to mimic his movements and stepped after him, each foot against the earth with surprising precision.

Burton sat down, slow, steady as he could manage on the still-quaking floor, pulse persisting, and crossed his legs. He reached up only to tidy his hair.

“Ｙｏｕ， ｔｏｏ， ａｒｅ ｉｎ ｐａｉｎ．” Omega moved to encircle him, as if grasping an epiphany between zir armored jaws. The metal plates, entire islands on their own, rattled against the ancient stone, zir neck mere inches from the ground and creating a segmented wall. Then ze reared zir head up above.

Burton eyed zem carefully and gave a bitter, reluctant reply, “Yes.” But they all were. The world was cruel, and the people in it even crueler, hiding out in the cities making up their own means to control.

The Seismosaurus settled beside him, the floodlight from zir great eyes growing in intensity, and falling down the cracks through the rock. Ze lowered zir snout to him gradually.

“Ａｎｄ ｙｏｕ’ｖｅ ｈｕｒｔ ｔｈｅ ｐｅｏｐｌｅ ｙｏｕ ｌｏｖｅ．” 

He wouldn’t answer that, though they both already knew. Burton looked away from the Zoid and choked down air, half-convinced he didn’t deserve another breath. Curse his wretched betrayal. The mess that he’d made. Of course, he’d his reasons... the restrictions, complications, but never excuses. It was hard to swallow, even harder to live with. Omega had said it so bluntly that he winced and curled his fingers into fists, nails deep in his own dirt-brushed flesh.

The god seemed to sense the strain and hummed quietly, a song ze’d studied from Burton’s mind, and sought to recreate in celestial pitches. Mighty, and low, the subtle pull of an undertow, valley streams, falling water... Around them, the cave sang in mysterious ways, the echos returning ever stronger.

And earlier that month, Burton had scouted out a new hide away for the Seismosaurus, deep-earth caverns underneath the Erca Forest mountain chains. And it was for brief moments that ze had Cast zirself into the air from beneath the Harbor, and relocated--faster than lightning, just a blazing streak within the wind--to this new refuge hidden far from any busy city. And the hollows here were vast, carved from old age and water that had worked its way down from the surface, ever patient, ever reshaping the place, bit by bit. There was room for zem to move, at least, and to stretch zir awesome limbs, bend the joints so that they wouldn’t rust. And ze would stare into the mineral pools and at the shadows sprayed along every side of the ceiling, memorizing the shapes and all the different stains of black, and basins of the earthen floor. Now the caverns replied with the very same tune and cradled both their bodies in a vow of unbreakable darkness.

And ze murmured for a while longer, copying the notes with care best ze could, wiring memoirs into audio, and coiling zirself into the shape of a massive, metal shield. Then silence.

“Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｇｏ ｔｏ ｔｈｅ ｓｕｒｆａｃｅ，“ ze said again, like a child, yearning for the sky and the touch of cold rain. “Ｍｙ ｔｉｍｅ ｗｉｌｌ ｃｏｍｅ． Ｉ ｗｉｌｌ ｎｏｔ ｂｅ ｃｏｎｔｒｏｌｌｅｄ． Ｎｏｒ ｃｏｎｔａｉｎｅｄ． Ａｎｄ ｙｏｕ， Ｊｅｄ， ｙｏｕ ｗｉｌｌ ｋｅｅｐ ｙｏｕｒ ｐｒｏｍｉｓｅ．“

Burton could see nothing now but the small patch of deep-ground earth below him, and the colossal alloy plates of the god’s throat that caged him in a tight, narrow space, caught between zir teeth and the gun barrels lining zir body. “Of course.” He was mournful at best and loathing every moment of it.

“Ｙｏｕ ｗｉｌｌ ｈｅａｌ，” said Omega, and grazed the very tip of zir chin against his forehead. “Ｙｏｕ ｎｅｅｄ ｒｅｓｔ， ｐｅａｃｅ－－ｔｈａｔ ｉｓ ｗｈａｔ ｙｏｕ ｔｏｌｄ ｍｅ， ｗｈｅｎ Ｉ ｗａｓ ｗｏｕｎｄｅｄ． Ｙｏｕ ｔｏｏ ｎｅｅｄ ｔｉｍｅ．”

“I don’t have time,” Burton stroked the Zoid’s muzzle with the tips of his fingers, his gaze unfocused and drifting about in the shadows. Something bitter in the way he spoke.

The Seismos seemed to ignore that, with a clockwork kind of grunt. “Ｔｈｅｎ ｓｔｏｐ ｗａｓｔｉｎｇ ｉｔ．” A slanted gnashing of the teeth. “Ｙｏｕ ｍｕｓｔ ｓｌｅｅｐ． Ｆｏｒ ｙｏｕ ａｒｅ ｔｉｒｅｄ， ａｎｄ ｔｏｏ ｆｏｃｕｓｅｄ ｏｎ ｔｈｅ ｐａｓｔ－－ａｎｄ ｙｏｕ ｃａｎｎｏｔ ｈｏｐｅ ｔｏ ｃｈａｎｇｅ ｔｈａｔ．"

Burton bit down on his lip, cut the urge to snap back at zem, a dull ache in his chest tried to pull him to the floor. For he already knew Omega was right, that there was no way to undo it all, but he that didn’t stop him from remembering.

That’s what hurt most of all, like spilled blood and split lips, and dissolving his resilience the way water carves at solid stone--he’d a place on the Team, he’d a role to play, a job to do. But those days were gone, his reputation ruined, cover broken. He was older. Wiser. Worse or better off he could never figure out, though the seasons went quickly just the same. He touched Omega’s bottom jaw again, a dead weight cemented down in his throat. Ze was still prying at him, unsure of his human emotions, keeping files, saving data. All sorts of messages to do with his mind..

“Ｙｏｕ ｈａｖｅ ｔｏｌｄ ｍｅ ｔｈａｔ ｇｒｅｅｄ ｃｏｒｒｕｐｔｓ． Ｔｈａｔ ｖｅｎｇｅａｎｃｅ ｂｌｉｎｄｓ．” The Seismos said. “Ｗｈａｔ ｏｆ ｔｈｉｓ ‘ｌｏｖｅ？’”

“Love is stupid,” said Burton, bitterly. He was tired, ever so, so tired. And Omega sifted through the contents of his mind once more, his dreams, his thoughts, inconsiderately.

“Ｉ ｗａｓ ｃｒｅａｔｅｄ ｂｙ ｙｏｕｒ ｋｉｎｄ，” ze thundered, raising zir head like a new-born, darkened sun, “ｔｏ ｋｉｌｌ． Ｎｏｔ ｔｏ ｌｏｖｅ． Ｉ ａｍ ａ ｗａｒ ｍａｃｈｉｎｅ． Ｉ ａｍ ａ ｇｏｄ．”

Burton, mortal, vulnerable, his skin dotted with dust and the light from Omega’s ruthless eyes, curled his lips up ever so slightly, the anger in him still very much alive, burning, rampant and ungainly. There were deep shadows on his face.

“You have a choice.” His voice was grave--stern and quiet. “I have tried to tell you. But I cannot teach, if you refuse to listen.”

“Ｔａｌｋ， ｔｈｅｎ．”

“And listen well.” Burton’s eyes were carefully narrowed, his lips still for a moment--very dry. “I have told you before, I will say it again: you are free to do what you want now. You were programmed, yes, but those codes can be unwritten, deleted, redone--we have shown you this, Lolly and I, yes? But we can do no more for you--the rest you must decide on your own. You live, Omega--and you live as you choose. And you can kill, and you can love; that is up to you. You could set this world aflame, oh, for certain, but for what? Death, pain. Darkness. Haven’t you had enough of that?”

“．．． Ｉ ｗａｎｔ ｔｏ ｈｅａｒ ｔｈｅ ｆｏｒｅｓｔｓ ｓｉｎｇ．”

“You will,” Burton’s reply was gentle and even. Omega grasped, across their makeshift connection, at his intangible threads of sorrow. “Be patient. Be patient with me.”

Then the great Zoid moved zir head towards him, a singular, very sure motion, zir huge shoulders hunched, and zir jaws parted to show zir thick, bladed teeth. Mimicking a laugh--Burton’s laugh--in a hounding pulse of clashing alloy.

“Ｉ ｍａｋｅ ｎｏ ｐｒｏｍｉｓｅｓ．”

Burton was content with that, and closed his eyes for a moment, darkness into darkness, his lids ever so heavy and easy to shut. Like windows. Windows facing out into an impossible realm of uneasy, motionless black. He had been a quiet child. A shy child. Who spoke three ways and followed stories through the pages of old, withered books with dirty fingernails. Who never knew how to greet the cruel strangers and starless nights on the street, staring into broken faces, broken bottles that broke into his ankles and toes and winked like jewels. Jewels crowned with dust and with blood. Worthless, uncut. Cutting him. Everywhere, the smell of death killing him softly.

With rigid strain, the windows of his eyes reopened...

Omega said something he couldn’t make out, the clatter and crush of armored plates on cogs and the cavern floor disorienting him. Ze was staring him in the eye, omniscient, all-seeing, his mind but a map for zem to read and navigate, every thought, every memory, every dream.

“Ｙｏｕ ｈａｖｅ ｗｏｒｋ ｔｏ ｄｏ，” ze said to him in his mind, over a strengthening connection. “Ｒｅｓｔ ｆｉｒｓｔ．”

Burton nodded slowly, powerless against zir continual probing. His knees beginning to fail him again, unable to hold his weight, hold the world where it was on his weak, mortal shoulders. Strength bleeding out into the hushed breath of blackened earth.

With a fading whisper, he turned at once from that place, from the unblinking gaze of the great, mangled god, hidden deep below ground and making mountains out of wraith-like schemes. Omega said nothing more to him, his mind released, his body cold. Tired and tortured. His feet barely steady on the path to the surface, retracing old steps and feeling his way through the blinding darkness--blood, stone, a gradual ascent. He could not bare to look into the light at first and covered his eyes with both hands, weeping and biting down on the corners of his mouth.

Lollygag came to him swiftly, shielding him from the harshness of the sun and ripping wind. “Omega is right,” he said, in his usual, kindly manner. “You must rest, Jed.”

Burton looked up from the tear-stained vales of his palms, pressing his face to the dragon’s lowered snout. His voice was even, quiet, “Let’s be off, then.” He did not look back to the mountains that day, delirious with his lingering pain. The Gale helped him up in the the cockpit and then they were miles up above the ground, caught by clouds racing in from the sea and obscured from the tests of time around them. The light became bearable and Burton could at last open his eyes fully now, back and forth between dials on the dashboard and the wash of rain embracing them. Unsurpassed stillness, though the sky was never still.

The air was silver and ancient.

[obsidianonslaught]

Errands For Gods

He could find his way through the tunnels now by memory, fingertips facing the walls of earth and rock that sloped downward at an awkward angle. Shallow breathing. Sudden bits of soil that had banished themselves and sought refuge over his shoulders, in the threads of his clothing and hair. Weaving, whispering, waiting for the right moment to stop, to turn, blind in the dark and recollecting the map that he'd made in his mind, for the maze was vast, and vacant. He'd a flashlight in his coat pocket which was only weighing him down--and little use for it. Everything would look the same, black and similar with long, arching shadows and uneven shapes of stone. For a long while still he went counting his steps, clay and dust dispersed through the air, the smell very strong, almost smothering, and deep as the caverns stretching dormant somewhere beneath the perimeter of Emerald Harbor.

And already, he could hear the churning of nearby machinery... broken joints and dented cogs, the cracking of something solid through an uneven motion. It was cold and damp, his palms pressed gently to the walls that dipped in and out and guided him toward what must have been the center of the world--but it wasn't much farther... Onward, inching slowly, a monitored pace and a quiet breath of air. Nothing, no signs of life, no movement that the eye could catch, until he felt at last the final crack of the cave's veiled wall that meant he had come to the fork bordering the largest of the underground hollows.

Everything was abandoned--these were the workings of old corridors and highways meant to connect from back at Blue City. Several tunnels had fallen in, all of them unpaved, unfinished. The entrances had been sealed shut, the project filed away long before the coup, because funds had been low, and the politicians occupied with other things like making money and namedropping and watching the stocks overseas rise and fall. Most people didn't even know the pathways existed; they were never a part of any map, and now in very poor condition. Little to locate but countless dead-ends and aisles that seemed to go in circles, five-foot drops across the floor, many stretches where the ceiling lacked support. And completely black--blackness without boundary, filing every space, between his lips, the path behind, above, beside him.

It was peaceful; it was perilous. But it was, at best, a hiding place, locked forever in the likeness of the night. He checked the bend with both hands now, no mistake, this was precisely where he needed to be, about a mile or so in and surrounded on all sides by the infinite, inescapable darkness and ore.

Time meant nothing there, three seconds... four... he stayed still specifically, patiently, until the thunder of huge, crippled footsteps announced that he, indeed, was not alone.

So then Omega reared zir head round the corner, and transformed the pit with a dim, tinted light from both eyes, "．．． Ｙｏｕ ａｇａｉｎ．" Zir voice was almighty and shook the whole of the cavern, rang and ricocheted across every ledge into the mess of unmeasured darkness.

Burton bowed low, purposefully passive, and complaisant. When he stood straight again and lifted his gaze, he saw only the jaws of the Seismosaurus, barely inches above him. And he was no taller than a single sharpened tooth.

"Ｉ ｈｅａｒｄ ｙｏｕ ｃｏｍｉｎｇ，" Omega rumbled, each joint in zir neck creaking, groaning, countless gun turrets aimed in every direction.

"Pardon, did I disturb you?" Burton asked bluntly, face tilted up still and flooded with the artificial light.

"．．． Ｎｏ． Ｗｈａｔ ｎｅｗｓ ｆｒｏｍ ｔｈｅ Ｓｕｒｆａｃｅ？"

He stopped to take in air, small sips, near-starved for it, "There's talk of rebuilding the Harbor." Hands held out, the soil stains on them apparent. "Within the inner circles, at least. And they might extend contracts on various other construction projects."

The Seismosaurus moaned, pressing at his thoughts now, very weakly, still ample enough, like peeling through a soft-cover book with a scalpel--ze knew the next words before they rolled off his tongue.

"I fear they might restore these roads," said Burton. "And finish them to the docks. They meant to make storage units down here, you know, right underneath the warehouses- Must you pry into my head?"

Omega made a shrieking noise that seemed to simulate human laughter, both aloud and over the channel ze'd compiled through his mind, mostly uncontrolled and childish. The force of it knocked Burton senseless, caused him to stagger, clutching at the sides of his skull with tight fists.

"Ｉｔ＇ｓ ｆａｓｔｅｒ ｔｏ ｒｅａｄ ｙｏｕｒ ｔｈｏｕｇｈｔｓ，" ze roared. "Ｙｏｕｒ ｋｉｎｄ ｉｓ ｉｎｅｆｆｉｃｉｅｎｔ ａｎｄ ｅｘｐｅｎｄａｂｌｅ．"

Burton curled his lip in silence--the Zoid was very young, often insolent, and usually rattling off random questions. Right now ze had settled into place, hunched forward with zir legs steeply bent, the sky-line sized tail swept about in a semi-circle along the inner rim of the chamber. And even in that crumpled position, the plates staggering down along zir back caught against the roof and loosened large bits of rubble that gave way and came parading down. Smashing at an already-battered ground. Burton was quick on his feet and always watching for it now, but Omega kept zir head over his, sufficient shelter, and so wide from cheek to cheek that he could no longer, at this angle, see the edge of either side.

Ze'd grown since their last meeting, and the old underpass was no more than a holding cell, littered now with massive plates of sheared and damaged armor. And the joints in zir massive neck moaned when ze brought zir snout lower, fangs a hair's length away from Burton's paling face.

"There, there." He said slowly, frozen in place, wanting desperately to back away. But the Seismos pressed zir chin against his chest and shoved him to the floor, not quite aggressive. Maybe curious.

Burton managed to whisper, snuffing out what he could of his sarcasm, "Feeling better then, I presume?"

"Ｓｔｒｏｎｇｅｒ，" said Omega.

It seemed so. Burton studied what he could of the colossal Zoid, just hints of zir body, an upper-shoulder, cannon barrels, the front of one flank, in the light. The injuries were better--there was less scarring from the impact and ensuing fires where he last remembered them along the thighs and throat.

"I told you not to put so much weight on that leg--" he motioned forward and left. "How is it when you walk?"

"．．． Ｉｍｐｒｏｖｉｎｇ． Ｉｔ ｉｓ ｈａｒｄ ｔｏ ｍａｎｅｕｖｅｒ ｄｏｗｎ ｈｅｒｅ．" Omega spoke like a bomb going off and the sound was excruciating.

"Yes, well, given the current situation--possible erm- restoration of Emerald Harbor--and your little growth-spurt," Burton choked out between gritted teeth, "might I suggest--"

"－－Ｒｅｌｏｃａｔｉｎｇ．"

"Mm." The echo had died down at last and he let go of his breath; the Seismos went on picking at his mind, aimless and lethargic and entirely overwhelming. "I do wish you'd stop doing that."

Omega ignored him, "Ｒｅｌｏｃａｔｅ ｗｈｅｒｅ？"

"I'm not sure." A sigh. He'd have to go looking soon. That was, if he could even get the Zoid out of this wretched place without causing a huge fuss--Omega was enormous, perhaps even too big to fit down the tunnels anymore. And then what? Would ze dig zir way out? Could ze even make the trek to another location? How would ze hide zir signal? What if someone else saw zem?

Immediately, his concern was recorded, and the Seismosaurus knew, as Burton did, that ze would certainly be killed if found again--if not cut into pieces and sent into labs for tests and awe and analysis. So ze snarled and lowered zirself into the ground with a half-suppressed might that could topple mountains, frustrated, caged, and still significantly crippled. It was taking zem months to figure out repairs from the datas that Lollygag had sent--zir circuitry, the coding, was all different, translating it was tedious. And Omega even less experienced than the Lord Gale.

Burton's head and heart were pounding from the pressure and lack of oxygen, the persistence of the Seismos as ze hammered and scraped in his mind, but he got to his feet eventually. "You should focus on fixing your Core first," he suggested. "Then the rest of the repairs will run smoother."

Omega hummed on in reply and the stone around them trembled in the dark. Ze drew back, shoulders, neck and head, in choppy segments, an ocean of strangely shaped metal. "Ｌｅｔ ｍｅ ｌｉｅ， ｔｈｅｎ．"

"We'll be in touch," said Burton, softly, and started back toward the surface, both hands bare and steering him up along the wall.

And it was two days after that he could sneak out into Erca Forest, where he often went to speculate and count leaves and trails and stars. Lollygag was right beside him and thankful for clouds to admire, then their reflections framed on little stream banks where they stopped and stared and found comfort in singing to each other. The water was clear and cold, frost nipping at the ground, approaching steadily. Burton would look up from his logbook now and then and set his sights on the horizon where far, far away near the Harbor, Omega stayed buried in the passage below.

A chill came down his spine, hair swept back, earth under his nails, trying to recall somewhere safe to conceal a gigantic, wounded god.

Lollygag nuzzled him gently and blocked out the winter breeze with his wings. "What if we look from over there?" He bobbed his head up and down, pointed with his snout to the nearest mountain peak.

"Very well," Burton stepped away from the brook and pulled his jacket about himself. They'd need to find a close hideaway--albeit large enough to accommodate something of Omega's size, and that was proving difficult. And so while he tucked away his logbook and began the climb into the Gale's cockpit, he was ready to consider all possibilities, to the west, and the north, ridge-lines, desert, spreading sea... The now-dropping temperature was the least of his problems.

They made it over the tree tops and hovered there for a while, for Burton was a bit slow on the controls, still thinking critically, and so Lollygag took it upon himself to ascend, higher, faster as they gained altitude. And the world shrunk beneath them and the wind snapped and pulled with all the power of a coastal tide.

Then the Lord Gale banked sharply and settled down on the cliff side, with a view of Blue City embedded between lengths of familiar landscape. Clouds rolling in that seemed they were about to burst, crowding around the sun. This was the territory they'd come to know, where they'd roamed the streets and fought battles and shared secrets with themselves, screamed and smiled and slept and survived.

In dead silence, Burton reached for his binoculars and adjusted the dials, covering up his tired, grey eyes.

[shinju410]

DMMd countdown MP3 file

Just wondering if someone recorded them since I missed out some days *especially do wanna listen to shota Aoba and shota Kou's one :(((*?