hi! some of this is based off things I've experienced. (weird dreams, trauma, stuff like that) you are free to interpret that how you wish, but trying to figure out just exactly how much is things i experienced is not the point of this blog.
the point of this blog is to post weird trauma!fic(?) along with some stuff that's very adjacent to empty spaces stuff, or just empty spaces stuff. perhaps I'll post some of my weird art stuff here also!
I'll put content warnings for identity death or rape, or things like that, along with things that might be bad like language that might cause or not help with depersonalization, but nearly all of this (early stuff at least) is 2nd person pov, and i may miss things that could be triggering. if i miss something, please let me know!
feel free to leave comments, or feedback!
ok cool, enjoy(?) the blog
work listings under the cut (not linked in order to keep the read mores for them, but can all be found under https://www.tumblr.com/tcw-es-adj/tagged/tcw%20works)
One offs
bad ideas
2nd person pov story about the call of the void and giving in to it, originally written as a vent. inspired by some of my weirder dreams.
Broken doll (storyline/cannon)
summary: a witch's doll making attempt goes wrong, and the accident escapes. follows the story of the not doll, trying to be something else. eventually becomes Hazel, written non linearly, timeline may skip around like a dvd player on a bumpy car trip.
the gift pt1
about a year after the events of dreams pt1. main storyline rn, 2nd person pov. the angel is already named iris, the doll (the pov) will eventually be named hazel,
dreams pt1
a nightmare, hazel has this one so often that it's considered normal to ~~her~~ it. memories of trauma, etched so deep it's relived every night.
notes on the nature of the soul pt1
first fic I wrote about hazel and Iris, not my best work, was written in 24 hours and needs a rework sometime. in universe research about souls, and an unhelpful quick reference for surface level explanations for archetypes that will probably be used. big timeskip from other stuff, and is intended to be the middle of a different arc. pretty much just fluff, with plot. references dreams pt1. 3rd person pov
dead gods
summary: trauma stuff. empty spaces adjacent, similar feel and archetypes, all these will do is hurt you and you really don't have to read them.
The command came with a slap to the recruit's wrist, which she responded to with a painful yelp.
The instructor snapped toward another recruit, the obvious bookworm of the bunch.
"Akoto, why does the rebellion have a prohibition on AI use?"
"OPSEC, Sir," replied Akoto. "The Empire has data sharing agreements with all major computing vendors. Anything we do feeds right into thier intelligence. We may as well just announce our attacks on whatever they're calling thier microblogging platform now."
"Correct," said the instructor. "So, if we don't use AI, how is a puny little rebellion supposed to keep up with the terabytes of data produced every second by a big 'ol Empire? Their sheer size means that somebody, somewhere is likely to drop a nugget of intel now and again. How do we separate the gold from the slag? Yuo?"
Recruit Yuo leaned back in thier seat with the swagger of an aspiring pilot. "Is it another one of them hound things?"
"It could be you if you don't learn to show more respect to the Cause," threatened the Instructor, "but her conditioning certainly has some similarity to your average hound's. Class, today, we're going to meet our division's Canary."
----
She sat in an ornate, gilded cage that stretched up 12 feet into the ceiling, glimmering, superconductor-coated bars each humming at a different frequency.
The woman within wore a skin tight black and yellow jumpsuit, some sort of latex/carbon fiber composite that dripped with communications and life support hookups. She perched on a rickety barstool and attacked a bucket of kettle corn with the ferocity of a tiger.
"Class," said the instructor, "Meet Polly. Polly, the new batch of recruits."
The woman in the cage darted off her stool, spilling popcorn everywhere. She stopped at the bars, weaving skinny fingers around them.
She sniffed the air. "Fresh blood? Very good very good." She pointed at a recruit near the back named Rook. "This one will be a good logistics coordinator. Apologies in advance about the death of your wife at the seige of Callisto."
"My wife? Miss Polly, I'm single? Also I'm straight?! And there's nothing on Callisto, it's unpopulated."
"Polly, let's hold off on the prophecy for a spell. You'll scare them," chided the instructor.
"They should be scared," retorted Polly.
Ignoring her, the instructor turned to the class. "So, no AI. We train flesh and blood instead. Safer this way, and more humane: the cost is borne by just a few people instead of many. And as you can see--" Polly scratched her ribs and started collecting popcorn from the floor, "there IS a cost."
"What we've done here is train a woman to process and sift through reams of information on a near constant basis. Thanks to radio implants throughout her body, Polly here can receive six channels at once."
"I get YouTube on my left kneecap," she volunteered.
"To process this," continued the instructor (with an exasperated glance to Polly), "most Canaries turn to music. Hence the name. A deep sense of harmony and rhythm helps the mind make sense of the noise; discord indicates that something doesn't fit in the picture. That's our intel. As somebody who does this for 12 hours a day, every day, Polly here has also developed a strong intuition around the shape of the future, even if they're mostly pet theories. Don't take them as gospel."
Rook nervously glanced at the shapely recruit next to her.
Akoto raised her hand. "So is Polly a volunteer?"
"As much as the hounds are," replied the intructor..
As much as the hounds. So, sort of? Nobody signed up to be a hound, but nobody said no when asked, either. Duty and all that, but there was some freedom too, in a Faustian sort of way.
Akoto followed up, "So what kind of freak secretly wants this treatment?"
"You do," stated Polly, popcorn spilling out of her mouth in a cascade matching her straight, blonde hair.
Akoto looked taken aback. The Instructor just shook her head with a smirk.
"Top of your class, interest in the intelligence service. First soprano. Narcicisstic personality disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder. Lust for information. Bottom. And who the hell takes independent study in music theory as an elective? (It's me, I did that.)"
Polly continued, slowly pacing to the front of the cage. "You wanna be a star, Akoto? Not a hero, no, but a star. You want the spotlight, all eyes on you, all ears poised to listen to the honey that drips from your lips? You wanna give everything to your craft, to chase perfection, to know all, to be all?"
She clutched the bars of her cage.
"You want real control, Akoto? The kind that only comes from being pampered? From being not quite human enough to be accountable?"
Akoto locked eyes with Polly, transfixed.
"I know you, Akoto. I've read your fan fiction. I've seen what your friends say about you. Freedom is wasted on you. Make the trade, Akoto. Freedom to buy power, buy fame, buy knowledge, and, for your comrades, buy that cheap, petty freedom that the rebellion claims to fight for."
She reached a finger through the bars.
Only the background chatter of the base could be heard for a moment.
Then Akoto took it. Nobody volunteered, but nobody said no when asked.
"Class dismissed," said the instructor. "I'll get the transfer filed."
As the group dispersed, Akoto stayed with Polly. They sang, two soprano voices and doom itself filling the hallways like a gas leak.
She has been in her mech uninterrupted for exactly 6 years 7 months 12 days 3 hours and 54 seconds.
Her handler is 10 steps away from the sealed hatch and is approaching.
She has not eaten or drank anything in the entire time period she has been intertwined with the machine. Her metal body handled all that was needed for her meat one. It pumps her blood, injects a nutrient slurry directly into her body, it stimulates the muscles with electric shocks to keep them from degrading significantly.
But today she would leave.
The war ended a week ago and only now has her handler deemed it not a deception. Without the constant missions of the war her handler does not have the desire to keep the hound permanently in the machine and spend valuable money in running the mech 24/7 when she could just turn it off when not in use.
So here she was with mech docked as her handler was walking to the hatch. She was waiting for her handler to give her the command. To release her from her cage of iron and into her cage of flesh.
Her handler is 8 steps away now.
She is her handler's last hound. In the early days there were a dozen under the handler. But they have slowly been whittled away by the conflict.
They were replaced in the beginning but none but her survived all that long and at some point her handler must have gotten tired of the constant loss and stopped replacing them all together. It was hard after all. Relying on another and learning all their little quirks, such as how 6 always favored entering melee combat as soon as she could or that 2 would crouch deeply before jumping into the air, only to watch them all die.
She still misses them. She is pretty sure Handler misses them too.
Handler is 6 steps away.
She knows Handler never really wanted the job. It was a family business apparently. One that she never had any interest in going into but no option to refuse when the war started and the draft began. Handler, from what she overheard, wanted to work as a musician.
She never said anything directly but the way talked about music Handler must still wish to do so. She would always have music playing in the background when she was working and on rare, special occasions would even sing pieces she made to the hounds over the coms. Those were the hounds favorite memories. A break from the killing and dying to hear something beautiful.
Handler sang less and less as her hounds died. Handler almost never sings now. The last time she heard it was after a week straight of fighting and the hound finally managed to complete the mission.
It had been pouring rain for a month and she was surrounded by the metal corpses of enemy hounds and pilots alike all sinking into the blood and oil stained mud. As the sound of combat finally tapered off the rain stopped and colors lit up the sky as the sun broke through the clouds. Handler looking through the cameras on mech sang a haunting tune that the hound could never forget. It was the first and last time she had cried after all.
Handler is 4 steps away.
She loved to fight at the beginning. She supposes she still loves it. It was exhilarating. A dance of towering hulk of metal crashing into each other and dodging attacks by a hair's breath. The bursts of pleasure pushing throughout her body as she landed a killing blow, a combination of the satisfaction of success, orgasmic ecstasy from the implants, and bliss of her handlers pride.
But at some point it got a bit dull. The pleasure of the implants is still amazing and hearing her handler's compliments would never not send a rush through her entire being but what once felt like dancing on a knife's edge began to feel like standing on solid ground as she improved until none she met could quite match her. She reacted too fast and efficiently. She knew every inch of her body. How the hydraulics shifted. How fast the reactor heated up and how it cooled based on the environment and atmosphere. Where exactly her shots would land and how far away she could jump into melee combat. She was a master of her body. Well her metal one.
She wondered how it would feel to be out of it.
Handler is 2 steps away.
She does not remember being out of the mech very well. Only little flashes. Walking down a corridor after her handler, wrestling with another hound, eating in a sterile white room, rutting against another hound quietly at night.
But that is the extent of what she remembers. For other than that all she has known is living as a metal beast of war. She does not understand how she lived seeing with only 2 eyes confined to such an insignificant section of the light spectrum when her mech has 6 that can go from radio all the way to gamma. She does not understand how she once lived with legs that bent forward rather than back. She doesn't understand how she could live only standing at an insignificant 6 feet tall rather than her mech's 50.
She doesn't know if she will be able to leave her mech when it is almost all she knows. She doesn't know if she wants to.
Handler is at the hatch.
She is scared.
She doesn't know why. This was supposed to be triumphant right? An end to the war and return to peace. But she has never known peace and will there even be a place for a war hound in it?
What will she do when she does not have enemies to kill and a handler to make proud? What can she do? She has never had a choice in anything other than how to kill.
The hatch is open now and the neural connection is disengaging as the various tubes and wires connected to her implants are being disconnected.
She feels like less.
Her mind is thinking just as fast but as she struggles to push her body up it's like there is a disconnect between her and her body. Like there is a lag between her input and its response.
It hurts.
Everything hurts.
It's cold. She forgot what cold felt like. She hates it.
She feels something wrap around her.
It's warm.
It's safe.
She relaxes not realizing how tense her body was.
For the first time in more than half a decade she opens her eyes.
Her vision is blurry and the light gives her a headache but what she sees is worth it.
Handler is looking at her and holding her in her arms
Her hair is a brown color with streaks of gold dispersed throughout it.
Her wide lips are hung open as if she is gazing at a treasure found where she least expected it.
Her eyes are a light green at the edges darkening as it approaches the pupils.
Her handler is crying.
She is not sure what is wrong but she needs to make it better.
With slow jerky movement the hound pulls her arms up and embraces her handler as her handler buries her head into her shoulder.
As she revels in the heat of her handler and she feels her shoulder grow wet from her tears she hears her handler's muffled voice.
“It's finally over. I won't lose you too.”
Her handler pulls her head back, eyes puffy and red and cups the hounds face with one hand.
She pushes her head into her handler's hand and her handler laughs and cries.
Her handler pulls her to her unstable feet and guides her out of the cockpit and into their future.
There was scattered laughter as Ens. Connolly threw up again.
"Well, you can stop looking any time," Lt. Dubner added dryly.
The gate was nauseating to look at, deliriously so, and it only got worse as they continued the approach.
Space lurched and twisted, a broken-backed thing. It was alive, Connolly thought, and this was it screaming in pain.
"Don't personify it," Dubner said, ever the mind-reader. "It doesn't help. Take glances at it when you can until you're steeled to it, that's how the rest of us do it. And take your time. We may be maintaining this blockade for a good while before any relief arrives."
Her Majesty's 3rd Fleet orbited the gate for an uneventful three weeks. Mass on Sundays, target-firing routines with the main batteries on Tuesdays, and the rest? Dead boredom.
On the twentieth day, the mail ship came and went. Then, on the twenty-third day, the signalmen read something on the scanners.
General quarters was called. Shields went up. Every one of the hundred guns on every one of the dozens of frigates in the 3rd was pointed straight at the endlessly writhing, self-intersecting gash in space.
Ens. Connolly licked the ends of his teeth nervously. It still turned his stomach to look at it, but at least he could look now.
"Something from the far side, eh?" Dubner looked up at the gate with a mild curiosity. "Best foot forward, gents. This might be first contact."
Nobody had ever been through one of these things. They were only called "gates" out of an abundance of desire not to have to say "Karpov-Blücher Type II Wormhole" over and over.
Shields crackled in the void, waiting to be tested by enemy fire. The lone voice of a signalman played on all frequencies. Identify yourself. This is the 3rd Fleet of the Isles. We are under orders to fire on unidentified vessels. Identify yourself. This is the 3rd Fleet—
The gate twisted in a fresh agony. Connolly felt his mouth water. "It's coming," one of the seamen said, and he fell into a whispered prayer, hand still on the traverse wheel, 460mm gun still trained on the gate.
The speakers crackled, cutting off the signalman's voice. Three ascending tones played. Three ascending tones played. There was more crackling, then a long static hiss.
"Well, they have music theory," Dubner said, as dry as ever. "The Royal Academy will want to know all about that, when we—"
KA.
The voice was horrible. Connolly felt it in his chest like seawater. He blinked, unsure which of two memories was real. One of the voice saying... what it had said, and another of the voice saying his name.
"L-Lieutenant," one of the seamen stammered. "It... that, that was the name of God—"
"—no it wasn't," Dubner growled. "Steady, lads."
EK.
The gate screamed inaudibly. It writhed like there were worms moving under the skin of space. Somewhere in the fleet, a gunner lost his nerve. A fourteen hundred sixty kilogram shell ripped through the void.
"Steady," the lieutenant echoed.
Connolly was drowning. Everything in his ears had the quality of something heard through deep water. His head was full of memories that did not belong to him: a hundred lives he'd never lived, the sound of asses and goats running in fear, his mouth dry as he looked up at a desert sky, sun blotted out by a thing named Ophan—
VE.
The Ophan was twenty thousand miles of shuddering brass. The gate distended to let it through; a deep groan echoed on the vacuum of space where no sound should propagate, and Connolly heard it in its ears as if through deep water.
"Fire! God's sake fire, fire all!" the lieutenant cried, its eyes wide.
It needn't have spoken. Not a man in the 3rd Fleet was listening for orders. Thirty broadsides, each a hundred guns, rippled impotently on the deep water of the night. The ensign felt itself shuddering violently.
AS.
The ensign looked up as the great ring of brass turned. It saw the interior of the ring, lush, green and blue. Groaning, a second ring of brass emerged from the gate, the same size as the first yet somehow fit entirely with in it, and spinning along another axis.
The Ophan did not have eyes. Spaced along each ring's exterior were thirty-two tortured knots in space, spheres yet not-spheres, every bit alike the gate through which the rings had just come.
The lieutenant's mouth was open. It did not give the order to reload. The ensign's eyes could not blink. The praying seaman let its hands slip from the wheels that aimed the 460mm gun.
Whalesong echoed on the deep, and on every ship every man clutched at its ears and cried in pain. The bright red shields of the 3rd Fleet flickered once and then shattered. Reactor failure. Life support failure.
Rapid unplanned depressurization. All bulkheads open. Override.
A phenomenon in which the memories, habits, and/or mannerisms of an individual are permanently copied to the mind of another individual when the two are synchronized via a neural link. Known to play some part in spontaneous emotional development in "non-humanlike" machine intelligences.
See also:
Neural mirroring - In which synchronized individuals experience identical thoughts simultaneously. Differentiated from neural bleed in that it only continues for the duration of the link.
Somatic packing, emotional packing - Transfer of sensations or emotions across a neural link not rated to do so, caused by such signals being sent over channels not designated for them.
Neural interdependence - A neurological condition caused by prolonged synchronization, in which an individual develops neural structures that rely on input from a specific synchronization partner to function properly. Occurs more frequently in those who experience neural bleed or mirroring. The condition and its symptoms are colloquially known as "link addiction" and "jack shakes," among other names.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She's just a pilot, they say. The units that have been in service longer tell you that if she dies first, which she probably will, you'll be assigned a new one and be back on the front lines within a month. If you die first, well, you're just a mech. She'll be assigned a new one and be back on the front lines within a month.
She's not just a pilot. Without her you exist in a blur, then she jacks in and it's like a fog is lifted. You are every bit the killing machine you are meant to be when you're together, and nobody needs to know what you become when you separate in the hangar, but you would be in shambles without her.
So, when that HE shell blows out your cockpit canopy and half her body with it, it's okay that you panic. Combat units are supposed to be detached and emotionless, but you're just responding appropriately to the loss of a vital component. That's why you collapse when that piece of shrapnel severs the link cable. It's not a dissociative state, you're just reeling from losing one of your processors. And damage warrants repairs.
Before you're really aware of moving, you're lying upright against a blown-out apartment building a few miles from the fighting. You vaguely wonder why you didn't return to the hangar. The mechanics there can fix you, fix the shattered processor.
No! another process screams at you. They won't fix her! You have to do it yourself.
You know you can. You're equipped with nanomachines to perform field repairs. They're meant for stopgap measures, to get you back to base to perform permanent repairs, but with enough time and work, you can theoretically fix anything.
That's why you don't hesitate to snake shimmering silver tendrils into your cockpit. They wash over the damaged processor, sealing the bleeding stumps that were once its arm and leg, filling the oozing scrapes and cuts covering it.
The microscopic robots bridge from the processor's neck to the thick cable hanging out of the back of the seat and you're momentarily drowned in a wave of false alerts. Left arm and leg severed, widespread damage across your armor that you have no sensors for. Internal temperature dropping, despite your own thermometers claiming otherwise. Images flicker into your processors across the connection - things you never were, people you've never met, places you've never been.
You begin repairing the processor, filling in the gaps in its biological material with whatever you can scavenge from the rubble. It gets easier to think, easier to figure out the right way to fix it as you continue your task. The damage alerts drop out one by one, but it still won't come back online. You get to your feet and wander, digging through the rubble across the warzone for better parts and materials. Corpses become your new best friends, an abundance of the same original material the processor was made of, even if they only contain a small bit that's still fresh enough to use. You feel something metaphorically electric inside when you find them.
After weeks of digging and searching and fixing, the processor barely resembles its original form. Tubes snake in and out of it, delivering nanomachines and the many substances it needs to function. Rough, mottled reconstructed armor, a mix of corpse-skin and concrete chips, covers the new armatures built to replace its once-bloody stumps. Shining patches cover places where it has rejected your repairs, keeping them clean as its own repair processes slowly fill in the holes.
Inputs flow from it, telling you that it's no longer in danger of complete failure, but it remains offline. It stays that way until the day you find yourself surrounded by four other mech-pilot pairs who tell you to stand down and allow them to take you in, and you tell them "no" because if you do they'll take your processor away and melt it down into scrap.
So you plead for the processor to wake up. You beg and put all you can of that counterpart to the electric sensation of finding a corpse into your signals to it.
And it does.
The other mechs see it rouse through the hole in your canopy that you never fixed and they step back in response to their pilots' horror. You warily watch them spin up their weapons but the pilots are too stunned to raise them at you.
Then the processor screams. Shrieks. A piercing cry, through both the link and its shredded-and-reformed throat. It tries to raise its arms but they jerk against the hoses running over and into them. Its legs kick hopelessly against the restraints you built to keep it in its seat while you moved.
Finally, words come across the cable you once patched with amorphous, flowing electronics.
You know that someone at your court is trying to poison you. You can taste it in every meal you eat, in every glass of wine you drink. They have exhausted almost every poison known to man and are clearly getting desperate, not knowing how you are still alive.
Mm. Metallic. Mercury salts, maybe? Doesn't exactly compliment the pork. And lead sugar in the wine, at least that's sweet. A little passé, though.
He set down his fork and glanced across the table at his guest, who thus far appeared to be enjoying her meal.
"How is the food? All to your liking?"
"Very much, Your Grace, thank you." A pause. Must have caught his tone. "Is... aught amiss?"
He sighed and picked up his goblet, assorted rings clinking against the metal, and swirled the ruby liquid within. The servants had been dismissed, the rafters and the drapes were undisturbed. Perhaps some of the spiders might have been listening, but he was beyond worrying about those.
"Someone is trying to poison me. They're trying very hard, in fact. Everything I eat or drink appears to be saturated with one toxic substance or another. I'm not yet sure who it is, why they're doing it, or how they're getting it into my food, but I am pleased to see that your food appears to be unadulterated because that means they are specifically targeting me rather than everything that passes through the kitchens."
"You... invited me here knowing there was a chance I would be poisoned?" Ah. Of course she'd pick that up. He almost had to remember to breathe.
"I was... Confident that you wouldn't, because my servants have passed unhurt, but I confess there was an element of risk and for this I owe you an apology. That said, I had my suspicions that you might be less at risk than anyone else I could have invited..." He cocked one eyebrow at the guest. She must know what he was suggesting, but it was hard to be sure how she would respond.
She raised an eyebrow of her own in response. "Now, whatever could you mean by that? Noble I may be, but purity of blood is hardly a defence against poisons of the flesh." The ghost of a smirk played across her face.
"And I suppose you would have me believe it was purity of blood that protected you alone out of your retinue at His Majesty's banquet two months ago." It seemed to have touched a nerve, though the downturn of her mouth was so subtle that he almost though he'd imagined it. The Duke allowed himself to slouch a little, ran his fingers through his steel-grey goatee and continued. "Countess, let's not be coy about this. Cards on the table, for once in both our lives. You very obviously have some blessing or other protecting you, or perhaps a curse that preserves you despite the suffering. My agents are good, but they are not as good as yours. I invited you this evening partly because I suspected you would be unhurt if my malefactor was poisoning all the food, and partly because I have not been able to determine who has it out for me. Much as it galls me, I must beg your assistance in identifying them before they cause someone actual harm. Please."
The Countess pursed her lips and leaned back a little in her chair, crimson nails drumming on the armrest. "Your Grace must be desperate if you're asking me, of everyone. You're right to do so, of course. I know exactly who is behind this, and I will tell you this much for free because the damn fool has already dragged me into it. Viscount Westford - you know, the fop with the ridiculous hats - has been looking increasingly concerned each time you appear at a social event over the last few moons. In fact, at that hideous banquet - and I will thank Your Grace not to bring that up so casually - he came to me specifically to ask if I could source him any rare venoms or toxins for a particularly stubborn obstacle. I offered him his choice, substances from a variety of exotic flora and fauna, and when I woke the next day I discovered he had poisoned all of my servants in their sleep with something more conventional."
"And you as well, I presume."
"Oh, yes. He's a bloody-minded sort, but not half as sharp as he thinks he is. I don't know if you saw his expression when I made my appearance at breakfast, but it almost made up for him murdering several of my favourite staff. I could smell his reaction from across the hall."
The Duke fixed his stony gaze on her, and waited for her to realise what she'd said - and she did, gradually. The creeping panic on her face was evidence enough that she'd blown her cover.
"...I don't suppose I could convince you to forget I mentioned that?"
"Milady, calm yourself." His voice was almost iron, and she stiffened as he spoke. She was gripping the armrests of her seat now, and he swore he could hear the wood creaking. "I said cards on the table, but what lies upon the table are no cards - nor, though you may not have considered it unusual, are they silver. Do you think I habitually eat with gold forks or spoons? I have only two sets in the house, and I save them for very special guests."
"Go- Wait, you knew?" The left armrest was visibly beginning to splinter now. Perhaps a few more seconds, then.
"No. I suspected, but I didn't know until now. I thought it better to err on the side of caution, and if I was wrong, no harm woul-"
At that point he was interrupted, chiefly because the Countess had erupted into a wall of muscle, fur and rage and lunged not so much across the table as through it to slam him into the flagstones. He could feel the dust settling into his hair. No doubt it would be all over his doublet as well. The Duke closed his eyes for a moment and sighed, then opened them to meet her stare.
"...No harm would be done. Milady, this is unnecessary. Might I trouble you to let go of me?"
The hulking wolf-woman pinning him to the floor blinked twice and cocked her head, squeezing her massive paw experimentally around his neck. It should have crushed his throat, at least. Perhaps torn clean through and left his head rolling around like a marble.
"Honestly, Milady, this is undignified for both of us. If I promise to explain, will you promise not to attack me again? I am not your enemy, I swear it."
The roar she let out in response was entirely inhuman, which was perhaps understandable in the circumstances, but her turning to smash the rest of the table to firewood was uncalled-for.
"The first Duke commissioned that table," he rumbled, hauling himself back to a sitting position and dusting himself off. His collar was shredded, but replacing the jacket would be less costly. "I liked that table. Not that I can't procure another, but it won't be the same. Perhaps some of the ornamentation can be salvaged for the replacement."
"RRRRGH. TO HELL WITH Y'RRR TABLE. TALK."
The Duke rolled his eyes and pulled himself to his feet using the remains of his ruined chair, tearing another strip off the side of it in the process. At least he'd had the foresight to bring in less valuable chairs tonight. It really was a shame about the table, though.
"I can give you a far better demonstration than talking, Countess."
He stooped to pick the remains of his meal out of the sawdust and gravel around the shattered flagstone she'd slammed him into. The pork had been cooked perfectly, poisoned or not, but this piece had been roasted on the bone, and the bone remained among the debris. He didn't bother separating it out from the splinters and stone shards. She was eyeing him again. Time to satisfy her curiosity.
The bone shuddered between his teeth, and with a little pressure, shattered. Well, a little by his measure. She looked mildly surprised, but if he was any judge of her expression, it said "I could have done that" more than anything else.
He shook his head, chewing for a few moments, then let the mix of powdered stone and bone dust fall from his mouth. It was unmistakeably dry as, pardon the joke, a bone - free of the saliva or blood that should have mixed with it in another mouth.
"EXPLAIN."
"The straightforward answer, Milady, is that I am extraordinarily complicated. I was not my parents' firstborn - I understand the boy died young, and my father saw mother's heartbreak and determined she would never go through that again. So he made me, and he made me better."
The Duke gripped his signet ring with two fingers of his right hand, and pulled it free. A gesture he hadn't bothered to make in nearly thirty years. The band crackled like a green log in a fireplace as it shifted, and his bronze skin began to fade to leaden grey.
"I do mean made me. The ring hides it, and I have no cause to take the thing off, but it's not a perfect replica of humanity. I can eat and drink and sleep and act out inhaling and exhaling, but I do not need to. Blades and maces cannot break what passes for my skin and bone. Some of the metallic poisons the Viscount has been using, I think I may have incorporated into myself as they passed through me. Not that I'm poisonous now, but I suppose they must maintain me to some extent."
He flexed his left hand, metal-on-metal grinding as he spoke. The Countess was shifting back into a human now, though he could tell he still had her attention.
"I do feel, though. Gods only know how my father managed that. My senses are sharper than a human's, my emotions less so. I cannot, physically, cry. I understand it academically, but I don't seem to have the anatomy for it."
The Countess moved as if to speak, then shuddered and let out a hiss and a series of gurgles as her jaw began to recede and seemed to think better of it, returning to gathering her dress back up off the floor. By some artistry he couldn't identify, it looked intact despite the violence of her transformation, though she would presumably not be getting back into it without her maid's assistance. He dropped his gaze, thinking to maintain her dignity, but she seemed entirely unfazed and strode barefoot through the remains of the table to grab his chin and force his eyes up to meet her own. "Congratulations, Your Grace, you've managed to surprise me. Precious few people ever accomplish that, and fewer still make it to the end of the night afterwards, but I don't think I could do anything to you if I wanted to. Make no mistake, I don't want to - you are fascinating, and frankly I think it would be much more entertaining to help you keep your secret."
"...Thank you? I confess entertainment would not have been my first thought."
"Your naïveté is rather charming, Your Grace, but I fear you're going to need to work past it on this occasion. Incidentally, may I see your signet for a second? I have a suspicion as to how he's getting the poisons into your food."
He raised an eyebrow and held the ring up, still in a vice grip between the same two fingers. The Countess took a loupe from some hidden pocket in her dress and peered at the stone, which shimmered a bilious green under the lens.
"I thought so. He must have realised you never take this off, and by some means or another had it cursed. As long as you're wearing it, I suppose whatever poison he has in stock will find its way into your meal. What a waste of perfectly good toxins."
"Ah. Being right under my nose at all times, it would likely never have occurred to me... And having the curse removed might affect my façade. I suppose it does me no real harm, I can just ignore it until the problem is resolved."
The Duke slipped the ring back onto his finger, a pulse of searing yellow spreading through his skin from its position like molten gold, dimming to his usual bronze tone in its wake. It made very little difference to his hair and eyes.
"Quite, Your Grace. Which brings us to the matter at hand: We understand each other now, and we appear to have a common enemy who very much does not understand us. Would you like to keep this professional, or would you like to have some fun with this?"
He cocked his head, consciously imitating her mannerism.
"I think I could be persuaded on the latter, Milady. What exactly did you have in mind?"
"Splendid. I hoped you'd say that. We are going to need… Hmm. Several casks of red wine, perhaps a Nebuchadnezzar or Melchior of good Port, and about a hundredweight each of foxglove and liquorice root. I shall arrange for the Viscount to receive an invitation from a mutual friend…”
The house looms menacingly before me, glaring down at me like it knows why I'm here.
Yeah, that's right, bitch. I'm here to fuck you up.
I'm here for love.
I'm here because I love what I have become, what I have fought tooth and nail to make of myself.
I'm here because I've fallen recklessly in love with a girl who never got the same chance I got.
I take that feeling, wrap it up tight inside me. I gotta hold onto that blazing coal of love inside me and hope it's enough to beat the awful twisted version of love at the heart this damned house.
My battle armor is a $30 prom dress I found at the nearest thrift store, torn fishnets and my favorite boots. My war paint is my very best smokey eye shadow, cat's eye eyeliner and a brilliant red lipstick that I had to reapply three times before it was perfect.
It's a third date outfit. My go to "I really fucking like this girl and I want something serious" outfit.
The presentation is perhaps spoiled by the tire iron clutched in my hand and the ratty backpack on my shoulder filled with clinking bottles that reek of gasoline.
(Though to be honest, I think the tire iron and the pack of molotovs makes the whole outfit probably even hotter)
I'm ready to burn this fucker down.
The front door is of course locked. She knows why I'm here and she doesn’t want me coming inside.
Not surprised. That's what the tire iron is for.
I make quick work of one of the bay windows and struggle my way inside. Rose bushes and shards of glass tear at my dress, scoring scratches across my skin, but I stumble, undeterred into the sitting room.
I wish I could pretend I was some intrepid action heroine… but I'm absolutely scared shitless. Every instinct, conscious and unconscious, screams at me to climb back out the window, drive away and forget about this place. But I can't. Not alone.
Lightning flashes, painting lurid shadows across the walls, bodies dangling from the rafters that I truly believe are more than a trick of the light. Thunder rumbles an instant after, deafeningly loud, and the whole house groans in response.
It fucking knows I'm here. This goddamned place knows I'm here and it wants me to die very badly.
I begin to run.
I round the corner to the main foyer and sprint up the steps. I reach the second floor where my room is located and…
Oh… fuck.
The hallway is way too long… like impossibly long. Too many doors.
Okay… this is fine. I just…
I make the mistake of turning around.
No stairs. Just another hall. Except at the end of this one is one of the ghosts. A woman, mid forties maybe, dressed like she belongs in the 19th century. Her neck is bent at a bad angle, causing me to nearly lose the contents of my stomach.
It isn't real. It isn't real…
It is very real.
I close my eyes and turn back.
Second door on the right.
I switch the tire iron to my left hand and fumble blindly down the hall, right hand trailing the wood panelling.
One door.
Two.
My hand finds the door knob and I turn.
The door swings open, spilling out flickering light and the sickly scent of pumpkin spice of the cheap ass candles I picked up at the gas station when I moved in.
Minerva is sitting there. She… oh god.
She is beautiful. Even under the guise of her boymoder clothes and the sickly frailness of her ghostly form, she is beautiful.
She turns to look at me and the expression on her face nearly breaks me. Recognition and a flicker of the aching hope that I have infected her with.
I'm on my knees before her, a knight before a princess.
"Hey babe," I say breathlessly. "I'm here. I'm sorry that I left. I'm... fuck, I'm so sorry."
I focus on my love and the wild desperate hope that brought me back here. I take her hand in mine. Her hand is soft and ethereal, ready to break apart in an instant, but I refuse to let go.
"Minerva," I say to her. "Come with me."
Her eyes widen and her mouth parts. She can't. She's trapped here.
"No," I tell her. "I mean… I don't think you have to be. She's holding you here. Her love is trapping you here. But I think I've figured it out and I think I can get you out of here. If I make a space inside me, a place where you can be who you were always meant to be…"
I'm rambling.
I take her hand and place it against my chest where she can feel my heartbeat.
"I'm not leaving here without you."
A simple statement of fact. Because I'm not going through with the second half of my plan if she stays trapped here. And I'm honestly not sure if I'm even going to be able to leave this place alive in either case.
I pull her into me.
She resists at first. I can't blame her. I'm asking her to leave behind everything she's ever known. To leap into the unknown with no knowledge of what comes next. But she’s seen my memories. She's heard the stories of my own journey. She's afraid to leave, but she's more afraid to stay.
She enters my body and I fold her into an embrace within me, unwilling to ever let go of her.
The House. Does. Not. Like. This.
A sound like twisting metal reverberates somewhere deep within it. Widows rattle in their frames. My candles go out.
Time to go.
I dig into my backpack and draw out one of the three bottles. The tire iron finds a spot in a loop in the sash of my dress as I trade it for the comforting weight of a flip lighter.
"Let's light it up," I whisper, and I feel Minerva cling tighter to me, ready to ride out whatever comes next.
But when I open the door, a phantom figure is weighting for us.
Her.
The Matriarch.
The one who's grief gave this place life. She isn't willing to let go of her baby boy.
I can't act fast enough. I don't even know if there's anything I can do to stop her anyway.
She lashes out with her hands, fast as lightning and closes her ghostly fingers over my throat.
My breath stops and I scramble for purchase against strangling fingers that aren't there.
Oh fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
I sink to my knees as my vision tunnels.
We were close.
We were so fucking close.
I'm sorry.
I tried. I really fucking tried.
I'm sorry.
I'm.
A new emotion blooms within me.
Rage.
Hatred.
I've already been kind of pissed at this particular ghost fire what she did to Minerva, but this new anger is incandescent. It's two and a half centuries of despair and self loathing crystslized into a diamond spear aimed directly at its tormentor.
My hands move of their own accord as my consciousness hangs by a thread.
Someone else moves my fingers and I feel them close impossibly over my attacker's wrists with their own iron grip.
My hands twist and suddenly I can breathe again.
I gasp for precious oxygen as Minerva pulls us to our feet.
The Matriarch stares back at us with a mask of uncomprehending contempt.
Then another pair of hands grabs her arm. And another. And another.
The other ghosts are literally coming out of the woodwork to pull her off of us. It's like Minerva's rage has metastasized. All of the others know we mean to end this place and they need us to see that through. The woman I saw earlier, the one with the broken neck meets my eyes and gives a nod.
With shaking hands, Minerva bends down and picks up the bottle and the lighter where we dropped them.
She stares at the lighter, confused by the mechansism of it. I oblige her with a few fumbling flicks and a bright yellow flame takes shape.
Without a second thought, that flame is brought to cloth and the incendiary is hurled at the howling and thrashing spectre of Minerva's mother. It passes through and shatters against one of the mirrors that Minerva hated so much in her endless death. Flames splash across the wall, catching almost instantly.
A flare of heat hits us and we are running. I can't even tell who's who any more the way we cling to each other.
We are getting out. We will get put.
We cough and wheeze from my aborted strangulation, racing flames as they spread uncannily over every surface.
We reach the front door, which is held ajar by ghostly hands that strain against the will of the house and its one final attempt to contain us.
We clip the edge of it painfully as we pass and we ate suddenly drenched by torrential rain.
For the first time in over two centuries, Minerva steps outside.
So I've talked yer ear off about the Weaver. Maybe ye've heard of Laika, the Traveller? Or the Old Man in the Void? Well, I'd be remiss in my priestly duties if I didn't also mention the Gardener.
Well, Gardener's one of those things where you get four spacers in a room and they'll have five opinions on the Gardener. Some say they're the god or gods we leave behind in the green and blue and loamy brown. Others'll tell ye that Gardener's just another aspect of the Weaver, gardens being another system and all that.
Regardless, there's certain comonality of faith and belief around this sector. Maybe it's different elsewhere, universe is a big place.
Tell me, what did ye have for brekfast this cycle? I'm bettin' some manner of algae cake, maybe shrimp paste and aromatics? Most of that woulda come right from here, seeing as we're halfway to nowhere and shipping comes at a premium.
It all comes down to what folk need to survive. Oxygen, then water, then food. Food is definitely the domain of the Gardener, and depending on how biotic your setup is, it might be argued that the former two fall in there too.
Now, some places, way way out in the black, you can find completely abiotic closed loop systems and there's... well, certain adaptations that come with that. I ain't here to debate the philosophy of what constitutes a human being. Suffice to say, a good 86% of human derived biosophonts are utterly reliant on some kind of garden. Is that an algae vat or a big fuckoff farm planetside? Doesn't matter, it's a garden.
There's this saying: civilization was invented to distribute bread to its people. That's highly reductive of course, bread ain't quite universal. Heck, that algae cake you had for breakfast isn't even really bread. But the point is civilizations live and die by their ability to feed their people.
Bread, cloth and house. This is my body. Let them eat cake. Famine was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. All that jazz.
That's the Gardener in a nutshell. Folk gotta eat. No matter how far ye get from the blue and green, folk gotta eat.
• A colony of stray domestic dolls will either fawn for a nearby witch until adopted, and thus dissipate, or if large enough, one or more dolls may Become.
• A colony of feral dolls will construct a crude witch out of straw, much like their wild ancestors.
witch that keeps finding bits of straw on herself…
she brushes it off her sleeve and finds that her skin has split and there's nothing but straw inside.
just side effects of spending too much time Elsewhere. definitely not because she was built by a colony of feral dolls.
fuck, it keeps spilling out. what would a real witch— no. what would a witch do. can't think like that.
she tries to reach inward and twist her viscera into what they should be, but she's never much liked changing herself, and she's not good at it. the rip worsens.
she wishes that she'd never read that fucking book on feral dolls. she's a witch. she can wish that. things reshuffle for her.
there's no plant matter exfiltrating from her. she's fine. what was she even worried about?
the next day, someone sends her a list of 51 ridiculous doll facts that will make her laugh.
#21: did you know that a colony of feral dolls will try to build a crude witch out of straw?
well, she knows now. again.
the tear in her is back. it's getting worse.
she picks and pulls at it. it's maddening. she can't help herself. the rent disgorges dried plant stalks, the occasional twig. her left arm is visibly less there than her right, now. she wears long sleeves and works her phone one-handed.
she's always asked her friends to call her P, if they insist on a nickname, because she hates Peach and Peaches and Peachy. Peachtree is a weird family first name.
with a clot of straw comes a torn plastic label. Peachtree Farms. a truncated phone number, an area code upstate.
she holds the label with her good hand and chokes down on a sob of frustration.
she's going to have to go check it out. she's better with time than space, but it's only four hours by car. with her hand like this, she'll get one of her dolls to drive—
but is that the smartest idea, really? her dolls. dolls she made. they can serve well enough, sure… but they suddenly look strange to her, though she's had them for years.
fake dolls made by a fake witch stuffed with straw. she can't trust them. not when it matters.
she'll drive herself. one-handed, if she must. she bites her lip and considers the practicalities.
she couldn't fix herself as a real witch should. she's outside the category now, she thinks. so what's a straw witch to do?
she tapes her arm up with plastic packing tape, sticking to itself more than her skin. she puts a carpal tunnel brace over the top, tugs her sweater sleeve down her wrist to cover as much as she can.
crude feral cunning, obviously. she snorts at the thought. but it holds.
it takes her seven hours to drive what should have been four. her right arm aches by the time she pulls up, alone, on the edge of what looks to be an abandoned orchard, swamped by rustling grasses.
she doesn't remember this place. she doesn't know what form feral dolls would take here. she pokes around for a few minutes, and finding nothing, she sits at the base of a tree and puts her hands, withered left and seemingly normal right, to her face.
that is how the little constructs of wood and dust find her. she hears the tiny voices first.
"miss is back!"
"back again!"
"she's lost her stuffing!"
one jumps in her lap. it's the weight of a cat, no more. it smiles up at her and chirps, "don't worry, miss! it's been a good year for straw!"
tiny hands pull at her sleeve. velcro rips, then tape. the colony dolls begin to fill her up again, just as they did when she was made.
the straw witch returns to the city a week later, feeling better than she has in years.
the passenger seat next to her holds a small construct of wood and dust. in case she forgets again.
she isn't sure how it'll do in the city, but then, a straw witch did well enough. □
So, I finally read (the first few chapters of) Human Domestication Guide*, and... I knew what kind of story it was, but I still was expecting more guide? You know, little chapter headings like "make sure your human bathes regularly" or something.
*extremely not my thing but don't let me yuck your yum
It's put me in mind of a different concept entirely: humans as cats.
You're a large alien... I don't know, plant or mammoth or something, and one day you're trawling through space and you hear this squeaky little radio signal, just a tiny thing, really. But it's odd, so on a whim you turn the ship towards it and suddenly, bam! There's an adorable little alien thing in an adorable little spacesuit surrounded by the pieces of what clearly used to be an adorable little space raft. Well, you're not a monster, so you go pick the little thing up, and as soon as it's through the airlock it's squawking and screaming and making an awful lot of noise that you can only half-hear.
The poor thing is clearly scared to death, and your buddy the pilot doesn't want anything to do with it until it's passed the quarantine checks (fair), so you stick it in a little room with a bowl of water, some food (who knows what aliens like, or can even eat? Better make it bland), and a little drain in the corner. You go to grab it and it beats on your trunk with those tiny hand-things, but it's so little it can't do much. It screams some more when you close the door, which breaks your heart, but what can you do?
Well, a couple hours later you go to check up on it. It's taken off the little spacesuit and has slumped in the corner, as far away from the door as it can get. When you come in it stands up and starts screaming again, all agitated and strained. "I know little guy, I know," you say, although you definitely don't. "Or... girl?" you muse. It's not like you have any idea what gender is like for an alien. Fuck it, it kind of reminds you of a little mustelid you had as a kid. "Girl," you say, authoritatively. "I'll call you Selene."
From outside, you hear the pilot yell, "do NOT name that thing! If you name it we'll never get rid of it and I don't want it on here for any longer than it has to be!"
You make a disgruntled noise and turn your attention back to the alien girl, who's watching you with glittering eyes. "Selene," you say, softly. "We'll get you out of here soon." You reach out to offer her some comfort, but she flinches away from your trunk. Too soon, you suppose. You refill her water and close the door behind you on your way out.
You're very certain you closed the door, because your buddy pointedly locked it as well. Seems pointless given that she can't even reach the door controls, but hey, if it makes him feel better, fine. The end result, though, is that when you see Selene pop out of the wall where youd been working on the cables, tumbling out ass over teakettle to land on three limbs, you simply stand there in shock for a moment. You stare at her. She stares at you.
And then she runs. You have to stomp after her as fast as you can to prevent her from wedging herself under the engine toroids, and when you grab her by the waist she starts pounding on your trunk again. This time it hurts more - the spacesuit must have been restricting her movements. And her claws, ouch. You wrap her up more firmly, pinning her arms and bringing her up to you eye level. "Stop that," you admonish her. "This is the engine room! You could get hurt."
Well, the poor thing looks like she's going to bite you for a moment, but then something about her expression changes and she just starts wailing.
"Sh sh sh sh sh, it's fine, you're fine, you're okay," you try to quiet her down, if the pilot finds out she got out on her own he'll throw a fit, but she's not having it. "Look, just, here," you say in desperation, and you place her on top of your broad, furry back. She takes a moment to quiet down, but she does. It feels a little weird, having her tugging on your hair like that, her little feet treading on your back. It's a little like a back massage, and a little like someone poking you in the ribs repeatedly.
You try to go about your normal work, carefully so as not to knock her off, and eventually she starts tugging on your hair in weird ways. In the reflection of one of the hull plates, you can see that she's making a little swirl out of your hair that's going to be a tremendous pain to comb out. Before you can admonish her again, she speaks - or tries to, you still only hear half of it, and it's gobbledygook anyway. "__nig__ $!@ffa@___", is the best you can transliterate it, and before you can respond, she curls up and closes her eyes in the nest shes made.
God, she's so adorable you could scream, but you could never prepare for what was next. Music, felt through the air and against your back. You're certain you're only hearing part of it, but it's low and melodic in a strange alien way and beautiful, and before long she's fallen asleep, lulled by the engine noise and the beating of your triad hearts. She even snores, a quiet sigh escaping every moment or so.
You will never be able to go up the stairs from the engine room like this. Guess you're stuck here for a while.
Human care guide rule one: you do not go out and find a human. The human distribution system will choose you, whether you are looking for one or not.
in my opinion, this is how all Pegasus license levels happen
For as long as there has been warfare, there has been nothing more chaotic than the battlefield. There is only so far that strategy can go, because no matter what plans you make, no matter what the people say who think that strategy and resources is all there is to war because they have not been there themselves, there is always that moment where the the first shot is fired where all your plans pour out of your mind like blood dripping from a gunshot wound in an instant, where the two sons of Mars flow through the formerly organized ranks like ink on a cloth. Fear and Panic will always take hold, even after one of them vanished from the sky. No matter what predictions you make, to step into a battle is to offer yourself up to the whims of fate. Even as the storm above changed from stones to bullets to railgun rounds, RA only knows where each will end. Well, RA and one other.
Perched atop the highest points of the battle, wrapped tightly in cables and surrounded by heads-up displays, a library’s worth of information flowing from the Swallowtail’s cameras directly through her eyes, brain, and through the interface ports in the back of her skull every second, Isabel Ardea saw everything. Every shot fired, every weak point in the enemy frames. Each step that stumbled slightly, causing them to drop their guard for a second. She saw them. The lights of the screens danced across her retinas, showing her every aspect of the war at once. Each snap of shrike armor piercing through the hull of a grappled mech half a mile away. Each drop of molten metal onto the ground as the exterior plating of a tokugawa began to melt, tearing through its enemies like a flame across paper, driven by an NHP that did not know the pilot was dead and wouldn’t have cared if it knew. The information surged through her mind, filling every corner of her consciousness with data that the computer poured in before withdrawing it to replace it with new information fifty times a second, a rhythm of uploads and downloads to the chips that lined the inside of her skull that pulsed like a heartbeat of knowledge inside her skull. and she had never felt so alive. Suspended from the cables and swaying slightly with every shot of the Oracle LMG, she was like a spider at the center of her web, sensing each movement of the things within it as, with a message to command regarding the supply trucks on the other side of the hill, a storm of orbital cannon fire falling like meteors on the exact location she had indicated. The whole battlefield was like a tapestry she knew how to weave because she saw every thread, and everyone danced on her strings. Outside of combat she had a similar reputation. Half the time if someone needed to know something, they would just ask Isabel and she would always know the answer, sometimes before they finished asking the question. If someone had lost something, chances are they would find her wandering the halls looking for them because she had found it. She never forgot a face, remembered every name, and could memorize the mannerisms of someone to the extent that not even her NHP could tell the difference between her and someone she was trying to mimic when texting. She had only one weakness-- the actual combat side of a fight. Aside from her Oracle LMG, her Swallowtail had practically no method of taking someone out. Luckily, she had someone to deal with that.
After the battle, she untied the ropes and cables that SSC insisted on installing instead of a cockpit. Dropping to the floor of the compartment, she stumbled over to the hatch, her balance still thrown off by the constant swaying of the last several hours. There was the familiar hiss of air as the compartment depressurized and she stepped out into the hangar. The walkways were packed with other pilots returning from the mission. She knew the names of everyone that wasn’t there that day, their mechs now smouldering heaps of slag being hosed down by the station Lancasters if they had been brought back at all. She hadn’t fully gotten used to it, but it wasn’t like she had the choice to not notice it. She took another look across the hangar before heading down the stairs and over to Koira’s mech.
When Isabel had requested a solution to her low defensive capabilities, she had been surprised when they wheeled in a cryopod. “This one’s a bit tricky to keep alive” they had said, “but we think you’ll be able to handle her. It’ll definitely be worth it. You won’t find a better guard dog this side of the galaxy.” she had been under for quite some time, as was made clear by her antiquated hardware. None of the fancy interface ports that sealed automatically when you removed the cables, just the old-fashioned ones that let you see a full six inches into someone’s skull and prevented them from showering normally. Both the tech and the training had been heavily revised since she had received them. Pilots from Koira’s time were taught that they were weapons and modified until they practically were, and that didn’t just go away because there was no longer any such thing as handlers and she had been asked to choose a name that wasn’t a serial number. She had chosen “Koira,” and they thought nothing of it due to their limited linguistic knowledge. Isabel, meanwhile, knew fully that it meant “dog.” she hadn’t tried to stop her or get her to pick a different one, as unlike command, she knew that it wouldn’t be easy to adjust to being expected to be a person, and that it would be a while before she was able to live without the knowledge that she didn’t have to be the one making the decisions. She had followed Isabel around the station constantly for the first few months, never reacting well when left alone and usually draped over Isabel’s shoulders whenever she sat down or stopped walking. With her variety of unusual traits, It wasn’t all that surprising when she slid her license through the fabricator and the mech it printed was strange. A “Gorgon” command had called it, an unsettling thing that sat on oddly-shaped legs, its four long arms stretching out at odd angles, the fingers spindly and mildly offputting. A number of long antennas protruded straight forward from the place where its face would be, an odd piece of equipment that’s function would not be revealed some time, as Koira never wanted to talk about it other than that she didn’t like to use it. On the battlefield it was shockingly effective, tearing into anything that got remotely close to Isabel with a level of ferocity that she hadn’t seen even during the mission when she had encountered the Enkidu and rendering things immoble with a glance. Even when Koira was outside her mech, Isabel felt safer whenever she was around.
She reached up from the walkway and ran her fingers along the rough surface of Koira’s mech. The cameras that dotted the surface in no particular order followed her hand as she slid it to the edge of the hatch and pressed the emergency release as she had done after every mission since she had met her “guard dog.” her hair flapped behind her as the pressurized air rushed out of the interior of the mech before falling back to her shoulders as she opened the compartment. Koira stumbled slightly before pitching forward and falling into her arms, the long cable sliding from the port in the back of her skull as she fell. She was always tired after missions. Maybe her mech didn’t give her as many stimulants, or maybe she simply tired herself out destroying anything she thought was a threat to Isabel as if any simple mistake would lead to her death. She muttered something as Isabel carried her down the stairs and through the crowds of the hanger, a question that followed every mission always in the same soft, exhausted yet determined voice-- “did I do good?” Isabel smiled and ran her fingers through Koira’s hair as she walked. They reached her room, the door sliding open automatically as soon as they approached. She set her down gently on the bed before lying down next to her, Koira positioned in between her and the door as she always insisted. Isabel pulled her closer, helping her move arms that were too tired to lift all the way until Koira was able to wrap them around her. Isabel closed her eyes and focused on all the things she could feel-- the soft hum of station machinery. The warmth and weight that pressed against her, spending what little energy remained on ensuring that Isabel was safe before she drifted to sleep. Each breath and heartbeat. She ran her hand along Koira’s back, leaning in until she knew that she could feel the warmth of each exhale on her neck. She whispered softly to her. Thank you. You did really well today. You’ve always known how to keep me safe.
She needed to be reminded of that. For her, it was all she existed for-- her set of instructions that she would follow at any cost, and if she wasn’t told that she had done well, she would always try harder. There had been an incident, once, where Isabel had scanned too fast and her computer had started to overheat. Koira hadn’t noticed the Lancaster and it had surprised her. She had rushed over to it in an instant, slamming into it and grabbing it with all four arms. She didn’t realize what it was until she had fired up the Basilisk and projected it directly into the Lancaster’s visual sensors point blank. Isabel realized why Koira didn’t like using it when they pulled the pilot out of the frame. He had been completely unresponsive, his eyes not focusing and his face covered in tears. He wouldn’t eat anymore, and couldn’t sleep without medication. It had taken months to piece his brain back together, and he still didn’t talk anymore. The night after that mission, she had tried to stand outside the door all night, unable to look Isabel in the eye but still needing to defend her. She had collapsed one hour into the night, and was too tired to stop Isabel from moving her back to the bed. She stayed awake for most of that night, keeping an eye on Koira. Even after she fell asleep, Isabel could still hear her breathing heavily as her tears soaked into the pillow. The times she had been quiet had been worse though, as every time her breathing slowed, there was always the fear that in that moment she had decided that she was too dangerous and stopped. She never fully accepted that it wasn’t her fault, and still looked at her Gorgon with the same apprehension that everyone else did.
Isabel woke up in the middle of the night to find that Koira was not next to her. She had known that there had been some routine maintenance scheduled after the mechanics had found some anomalies with the Gorgon’s NHP, but she didn’t think anything of it until the alarms began to sound throughout the station and a panicked technician threw open the door shouting that Koira’s mech was cascading. Isabel rushed out of bed, throwing on her uniform and sprinting down the station’s hallways to the hangar. There was a heavy sense of dread that formed in the back of her mind as she reached her Swallowtail, pulling the emergency scaffolding release lever and climbing inside. It seeped into the computer as she linked to it, making every step feel heavier as it lurched forward into the hangar, snapping the access ladder that she didn’t wait for someone to remove. She rushed down past rows of mechs, each movement shaking her violently within the frame as she hadn’t gotten a chance to properly put on the harness, moving in that odd way that a Swallowtail runs, halfway between galloping and skittering. It wasn’t long before she heard the first hints of gunfire echoing across the hangar, and saw the Gorgon as it attacked the small squad of station guards that had responded to the alarms. It was even before she got closer that she knew. Before she saw the open cockpit, not bent or melted but warped somehow, like a printing error that had retroactively appeared. Before she saw this thing tearing at its exterior plating with hands that seemed sharper than before, the hydraulics and cables beneath twisting and contorting and flashing like a glitch, looking to an unsettling extent like muscle fibers in the way that they pulsed. Before she saw the blood dripping from the open hatch, the spikes that had sprouted from the walls and seat like branches, the single arm that dangled from it, pierced through by several spines and swayed with every movement of the monster whose controls it once operated. It was as soon as she saw this thing fight that she knew Koira was dead. Its attacks were not for the purposes of defense or even of finishing the fight. Driven by the rampaging NHP, its only goal was to kill. She saw as it lifted up one of its long arms and slammed it down on one of the guards, crawling forward with its other three like some terrible insect as it held the guard to the ground, leaving a line of red as it ground him down to nothing. The sight hit her like a hammer, leaving her unable to move. Her arms hung limply by her sides as she stared at this thing that used to mean she was safe.
She couldn’t react in time as it turned its flashing antennae towards her and sprinted directly towards her, impacting and gripping the frame of the Swallowtail with all four arms, the claws scraping against the metal. She fumbled at the controls as it leaned in, the antenna nearly brushing against the visual sensors, not noticing as the barrel of the Oracle LMG pressed against it. Isabel wasn’t able to close her eyes fast enough as it activated the Basilisk.
Nobody had seen the Basilisk and been able to say what it looked like, but between the crying and the loss of will to live seen in everyone who saw it, most people had a general idea of what it was. Some horrible thing from beyond what can be known that is more terrifying than anything a human can comprehend, some paracausal force of fear itself that reaches into your mind and takes it apart. That had been Union’s leading theory since the pattern group known as the Gorgon had first been identified. There were still a few unanswered questions though. Like why an omninet signal was detected every time it was activated. Why when the antennae glowed and it tore a brain to shreds, every satellite telescope, every phone camera, every sonar array, every data server and every 3d-mapping scanner across all of civilization sent out a pulse. one chunk of data each sent across blinkspace. One image, one story, one datasheet.
The Basilisk showed Isabel the universe. Each movement of the stars across the endless cosmos. The cold surface of each airless moon. Every flower that bloomed in every field across every planet. Three seconds of enlightenment. A war raged ten star systems away and she saw it. Each bullet that flew through the air in every place there was violence. Through 1,000 trillion eyes, she saw the lives of everyone that was born and lived and died. Each speck of rage or love or fear that flowed through each mind that contained a neural implant. Solar flares swirling and flashing on a planetless star hundreds of light-years away, a mesmerizing tapestry of colors that humans never bothered to name because they could not see them. It was beautiful in a way that nothing could ever match, the totality of all existence before her. She felt the tears begin to roll down her face, the chemical composition and the functions of each bacteria that swam within them flooding her mind as soon as the information of what was in each tear began to exist. Then the antennae dimmed and cooled and the enlightenment was torn away. That’s what the Basilisk truly did-- it shows you something so wonderful that nothing else could possibly compare and then it takes it from you, leaving you hollow. Indeed, there is no crueler weapon in the universe. It leaves you feeling that the information that has left your mind, grasping at data that has left because no brain could contain it. That’s what it should have done. Unfortunately for the NHP, Isabel Ardea was not the type of person to forget anything. It was still there. All the wisdom and secrets it had shown her, and she would not let them leave. Seconds later, its reactor ruptured as the Oracle LMG tore through it. Its grip weakened and it collapsed to the floor of the hangar.
Isabel didn’t go on any missions for a while after it happened. She didn’t walk around the station gossiping as she used to. She lay in bed most days, staring at the ceiling that she now knew the exact composition of. Koira was dead, and the bed felt far too cold now. She didn’t turn to face the door even when people entered to bring her meals or inject them directly into her veins after three days of her simply leaving them to rot because she wouldn’t turn in that direction because it was where Koira wasn’t. There hadn’t been enough of her left to return home, and even if there had been, even she hadn’t remembered where that had been for her. Isabel knew now, of course. She knew the history of every molecule of the bones that had just been vaporized in the station incinerator and vented into space. It didn’t hurt, knowing all this information, but she wished it did. She wished there was some reason for her to lie there other than the one she tried not to think of. She remembered Koira in every detail. The texture of her skin, the sound of her voice, the sort of mild chemical smell that followed her around. She could piece these together in her mind, placing a sort of construct of memory beside her. She knew how Koira would have pulled her closer, and she remembered the feel of her hands. She knew exactly what she would have said to her. It’s okay. You’re still safe. I can always keep you safe. The one difference was that she didn’t feel it. It didn’t matter how well Isabel remembered how her hair smelled. A memory couldn’t be warm. It was then, staring at the ceiling with blurry eyes and feeling nothing but what wasn’t there, that she had an idea. One that hit almost as hard upon formation as the sight of the single arm dangling from the open cockpit of the cascading Gorgon. She rose, shaking slightly as she moved through the spot on the bed where Koira wasn’t, and stumbled to the door. The station’s hallways were dark and cold. There was still one guard in front of the door to the hangar. They hadn’t cleaned up the mess yet and weren’t letting anyone in. The guard walked over to her. She had known him for a while-- all his hopes and secrets and fears. “Sorry, Isabel. We’re still working on cleaning up the hangar. Can’t let you in yet.” he said. Isable stared at him for a moment. She inhaled slowly, and then spoke.
“You will die five years, three months, ten hours, eight minutes, and thirty seconds from the time I am finished speaking. You’ll be walking across this hangar, a cup of subpar coffee in your left hand. You hear the snap of the rusted scaffolding before you see it fall. It’ll be a Saladin. A large frame, belonging to a pilot named Carlos. You haven’t met him yet, but you’ll become quite close, making what happens somewhat ironic. Time seems to slow as the mech falls, landing heavily and crushing you from the waist down. A large piece of scaffolding will fall as well, carried by it. It pierces through your ribcage and you can feel it as it tears a hole through your right lung. There’s a nauseating sensation as your blood begins to fill it, and you can feel it as it rises up from your lungs and fills your throat with that sickening warmth that tastes metallic when it reaches your mouth. It hurts more than anything you’ve felt before as your bones splinter and push between the fibers of your muscles like shrike armor through a hull. You try to pull yourself out from under the frame but your hands have become slippery with your own blood. It will take exactly one minute and 17 seconds for you to die, and during that entire time you will wish it was less.”
She looked up at the guard and saw that he was crying. Before she could say anything else, he shuffled slowly past her, then sprinted away down the hallway. She laughed, softly, before opening the door and walking into the unlit hangar. Each step echoed loudly as she strode over to her Swallowtail, the front two legs still detached after being snapped off by the Gorgon’s claws. She climbed in and connected the cables to her head before sitting down against the wall of the interior compartment. “Athena, are you there?” she said weakly.
“Always.” came the reply that flowed into her mind from her NHP.
“I have an idea. I know it will work, and I know that you’re seeing it in my brain through the interface. You know that I can make it happen, and that if it works or even if it doesn’t--” her voice was starting to tremble as she spoke. “You won’t exist anymore. I need you to agree to it. I won’t do it otherwise. Even if both my friends die in this hangar, I can’t let it be because I murdered one of them.” she could feel Athena processing the information.
“Do it.” Isabel exhaled shakily as the words entered her mind, before pulling the cables from their ports and climbing out of her mech. She strode over to the Gorgon, muttering under her breath in a prayer to whomever it may concern, not that RA would be particularly excited about what she was doing. She rummaged around in the still-bloodstained cockpit, most of the spikes having been sawed off but a few still remaining. Trying not to think about how much it would have hurt for Koira when they pierced her, she found the interface cable and slid it into her skull. Leaning back against the side of the seat, she searched what remained of the computer for what she was looking for. There it was-- the neural data records. Everything Koira had thought since she first linked with the mech. Every pain and fear and desire. Isabel reached into the hard drive with her mind and pulled out what was left of Koira. Etching it into her brain and memorizing every one and zero. She disconnected from it, crawling from the wreck and back over to her Swallowtail.
“Are you ready?” she said to Athena as her hand hovered above the keyboard. The screen illuminated her face in the red light of the confirmation screen. The words CYCLE NHP? Flashed in front of her eyes.
“Yes. I’m ready. Don’t worry, it won’t feel any different for me than being cycled. It won't be easy, you know. This project you’re starting. But I know you don’t care. Take care of yourself, okay? And take care of her too. Tell Koira-- tell her that without her, I’d have been a smouldering wreck on some battlefield years ago. Tell her that even though I never really got a chance to meet her outside of combat, I still missed her. Alright, that’s enough. Do it.” Isabel pressed the button, and the screen went dark as Athena’s memory was deleted. She could hear her tears hitting the keyboard. This wasn’t the first time she had cycled Athena, but as the screen displayed the message asking if she’d like to reactivate her NHP and she slowly moved the cursor and clicked “no,” she knew that this time, she wouldn’t be seeing her again. She wouldn’t get a chance to get to know Athena all over again this time. She leaned back in the harness and stared upwards for a moment, before she returned to the blank screen in front of her and began to type.
Isabel stayed in the Swallowtail for seven days. Not sleeping, not eating. The automated systems filled her veins with the necessary water and nutrients as she typed. She filled the blank slate that now occupied the casket with her memory of Koira. Every data point she had siphoned from the gorgon, every little strength and weakness and flaw that she remembered. Every moment they had been together was poured into the empty memory of the NHP before her. Her fingers began to bleed, the skin first bruising and then breaking until eventually the bones themselves were what hit the bloodstained keys 24/7. Each keystroke sent jolts of pain shooting up through her hands and throughout her body, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t leaving until this was done.
After 170 straight hours of typing, she had finished. The entirety of Koira’s mind now lay before her as innumerable lines of code. Her hand shook as she reached forward, entering the command to activate the NHP. with one final keystroke, the screen darkened before brightening again. She felt a voice, Koira’s voice, because she had remembered it perfectly, flow through the cables and into her brain-- “did I-- did I do good?” Isabel wiped the tears from her face as she stared at the screen. “I can’t feel my arms, Isabel. Or my legs, it doesn’t hurt though. I feel safe. I know that you saved me. I know that you brought me back. Thank you. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to leave you alone. It’s okay. I’m here again. I can feel the systems of your mech. They’re a part of me now. I can keep you safe.”
It had been a year since Koira had died and Isabel had brought her back, and Isabel’s mech dashed along the edge of the battle on its four spindly legs, autoguns targeting and firing at Koira’s command. Putting her into the mech had done something to Isabel’s license, and everyone but her was surprised by what happened when they put the Swallowtail into the printer to repair it. Everyone else was a bit unsettled by it, between its somewhat animalistic appearance and the space on its back that hurt to look at and shot you three seconds before you became its target. Isabel could look at it fine, though. She could see anything she wanted to by looking into it, whether it had happened yet or not. If she didn’t have a reputation before, she definitely did now, choosing a target, deciding that she had shot them, and watching them fall all in the same moment. Opening up a comms channel with whatever enemy she had locked onto and taunting them with predictions of their deaths. She would laugh as they shouted back through the channel, demanding to know how she knew about whatever family member she hypothesized would “miss you the most once I’m done with you.” she would simply sigh as Koira excitedly counted down the seconds that they always kept their prey waiting for an answer before slowly speaking--
"Captain. The ship has received a distress message." "Put it on the screen." "I'm afraid it's a bit more… Primitive." "I'm sorry, is that…?" "A message in a bottle, yes." "Floating in space?"
The object could hardly be called a bottle. It was a squat box, about the size of a person, with the ragged remnants of some kind of hemispherical shell. Personally, I would have called it a bowl, but that was perhaps less romantic in concept than a bottle.
It was old. It was impossibly old. Hundreds of millions of years of radiation and micrometeors had weathered and etched its surface. Materials science hadn't been able to pinpoint exactly how old, but there was a non-negligable probability that it predated any known xenoarcheological sites. Either way, it was a massive find, possibly rewriting history of the very earliest space exploration in the galaxy.
It sat prominently on the deck of the port cargo bay like some kind of museum exhibit.
"Progress?" I asked as I stepped around it.
Ŋ!atka looked up at me and blinked sleepily. Damn, I might need to pull rank and order xem to rest.
Xer mandibles split in an expression meant to emulate a smile, chromaphores blinking an excited blue. I had served with their species long enough to at least parse that much.
"As a matter of fact, yes!" xe announced. "Linguistics made a breakthrough. They don't think the message is distress, but a greeting!"
I cocked my head at them.
Xe gestured excitedly at the object the team had managed to reverse engineer from diagrams found inside the object.
Xe activated a mechanism and the device began to emit a series of sounds.
"Linguistics counts at least 40 distinct languages, and they are conviced they are variations on greetings. If you will forgive my assumptive nature, I would say this here is a whole world sending a message of goodwill sent to the stars."
I make a dubious expression. Ŋ!atka was prone to hyperbole, but xe was one of the best project leads the Science Corps had to offer.
"Listen! That's music."
I listened to the strange wailing sounds coming from the device. It was hard to imagine the kind of people who would call the noises music, but then again I wasn’t an expert on that sort of thing.
"Anything back from astrodynamics?"
"Still in progress. It's so ancient that pinpointing an exact point of origin is difficult given stellar motion. We've backtracked it to a rough sector with some possibly habitable worlds, but if there ever were civilizations there, they'd be long gone by now."
I frowned. That much seemed to be given based on available information. Between the extreme age and the fact that it didn't match any known databases implied that it had originated from a dead civilization. One of the countless early spacefaring peoples that vanished before they could make it out of their home systems.
Melancholy stirred within me. Whoever these people were, they had come together to send a message to the stars on the very tiny chance that someone would be out here to listen. The problem was nobody would be around to hear them until millions of years later.
"How about the symbols? Has linguistics come up with anything yet?"
Ŋ!atka clacked their mandibles softly.
"Nothing difinitive. They believe there may be a correlation between the text and some of the languages. Best guess at this point is the object was called something like Wanderer or Voyager."
Once the onboard computer determines that damage to frame has passed a certain threshold, the ejector goes off whether you press the button or not. Engineering says it's a safety feature; I think they could at least let me die as myself.
you're five the first time a knife is put in your hands. A man who never bothered to give you a name tells you how to hide it. How to use it to defend another. How to use it to take your own life should you fail.
You're six, then seven. The other boys your age run in the streets playing games together. You've never spoken to any of them. Your go with the man who isn't your father to a funeral for a man who wasn't your brother. A woman gives your not-father a knife identical to the one you've now carried for years. Your not-father tells you today is a day of pride. Your not a brother fulfilled his purpose without his blade ever having to taste his own blood.
You see the body through the throne rooms doors. It looks like a marble statue. Bleach white and perfectly still where it lays at the foot of the King.
You're ten the day you meet your purpose. Another boy. The adopted son of the thing in the throne room. He's the prince. You will die for him. He looks at you with hate in his eyes the first time you're in the same room as him.
He tells you to run. He doesn't want you. He doesn't want to be the prince. He hates the King and misses the family he was taken from. He's scared. He doesn't want to kill you.
You don't run. You can't. You have nowhere to go and know nothing but your purpose. Protect him. Stand beside him. Grow up with him as his dearest friend.
He's not allowed to play with the other children either. He's not allowed to play.
All of his free time is eaten up by studying because every second he doesn't have his nose in a book he's on a pedestal with strangers knelt beneath him. Their hands cupped as they pray to him for his father's blessings. You see the prince spit blood when he leaves the room before the throne room. He chews the inside of his mouth raw to stop his fiery tongue. When you go to lay in your bed on the other side of the room from his he rants into the night about the nobleman beggars and their demands and how his father never stops talking.
You're twelve. You both notice that you've gotten a hair taller than the prince. He challenges you to a mock sword battle about it in the secrecy of the bedroom you share with him. His eyes alight and alive with all the fire he keeps covered through his days.
You're fourteen the first time you use your knife. A beggar grabbed the prince by the hem of his robes after the holy child failed to soothe his woes.
The guards were on the man in a split second, dragging him not to the dungeon, but to you where you stand at your purpose's side.
The prince doesn't watch. He stares over the crowd that always filled the hall before the throne room.
You kill for him. The beggar's pleads lost to deeply engrained training. His blood stains the hems of the prince's gowns.
He draws shut the curtain between your halves of the room that night. He asks you leave to take your breakfast elsewhere the next morning. When you meet him at his pedestal he sits with the hems of his robes wrapped tight around him.
He talks to you again weeks later. He sobs through the night when you fail to do as you're told when he once again demands you flee the only life you've ever been allowed to know.
You're seventeen. Your prince gains a brother, he's four. His parents beg he not be taken from them. Your prince can't look at them when he voices his and the child's new father's will.
Your not-father asks you take careful record of every moment of the child's life. You will have another not-brother soon and he must be a match for the new prince as you were for yours.
The boy cries from the room beside your's and your prince's for days until he turns the same stoney cold you're so used to seeing from your prince.
Your prince asks you if you hate him. You tell him no.
You're twenty-four and he's sick. Weak and stumbling over his words like he hasn't slept every hour his father wasn't using his voice these last weeks.
You've never so much as brushed the hair from your prince's face. He was holy, and you are not. To touch him would be to defile him.
You catch him when he faints on the walk between your shared chambers and the dreaded preyer hall.
You carry him to the medical ward surrounded by guards. The physicians can't touch the unconscious prince either. Not without for forfeiting their lives as you have. its decided that, as you have already sealed your own execution order, you would be permitted to continue touching him. Moving him. Helping the doctors examine him. Your foul hands against his skin that feels like cold stone. You help him eat, you hold him upright so that he may drink. He's barely aware of what is around him he still manages to protest every time you draw to far from him.
He orders the guards to leave. Spits that you are to not be touched. His limited energy wasted on pleading for your life.
For days you stay in that limbo with him. A condemned man and his ever weakening purpose.
The doctors have an idea that may save the prince but it's so profane they hesitate to offer it.
The solution to his sickness was obvious to them from the first few minutes of examination, but the clergy had had to argue it for days without the prince being able to tell them his father's will.
Ultimately, it was decided that it was the prince himself who should make the call.
He laid against you, his head tucked up under your chin with his hand over your heart as though his presence there would save you from the consequences of holding him.
The prince could be saved. All he needed was a blood transfusion to replenish his weak veins. But there was no donor holy enough. To take profane blood into his divine body would ruin his potential as host.
One side of the clergy pleaded with him to let you carry him to the throne room, pass the doors you only ever saw through once, to the foot of his father's divinity. There, all he would have to do was his slay his one human connection. His only friend, his only true family, and replace his father as host. His and your purposes fulfilled. Your execution given purpose beyond punishing you.
The prince's jaw worked in that subtle way that meant he was biting his cheek bloody again.
What was the purpose of his younger brother if not this? The prince would have the fouling transfusion, and he will be prince no more. His brother taking his place as mouthpiece and future body for their father.
The clergymen bickered in the room with you both. Your prince, weak and so sick as to not be able to stand, took your knife from your belt and ordered you hold out your hand for him.
He held you by the wrist as he sliced across the heal of your palm. The pain was made numb by your every thought melting at the sight of him pressing his lips to the wound to drink down your filth.
The transfusion was performed without further delay.
You were donor. He was able to walk back to your rooms with only an arm slung around your shoulders for support.
He was prince no more. Touching him was no longer a sin punishable by death. Your execution cancelled after he threatened to kill himself to take generations of holy secrets to his grave in vengeance.
He told you to call him Cadfael when you laid in your bed with him pressed close to you. His hand over your heart like he feared it would cease beating if he moved it. No one has spoken his name since he was stolen from his birth family.
You're 25, he's still so sick. Weak, cold to the touch, exhausted. You donate blood over and over until the doctors refuse to take more from you. Your symptoms aren't as severe as his, they go away when you have time to replenish your own supplies. He gets worse the longer he has to go between refillings.
He refuses to take from the people who once worshipped at his feet or the prisoners in the dungeons or the good samaritans who simply want to help a sick man. He's so scared of earning a reputation of literally stealing others blood for his own benefit. He only takes yours because you threaten to bleed yourself to death for his sake if he doesn't. He knows you aren't bluffing. It's always been your purpose to die for him.
The new prince can't hear his father's will. The boy, only twelve, sits on his brother's pedestal as beggars talk past him to the profane man knelt behind him. Cadfael whispers their fathers will into his young ears so he can be the mouthpiece he was supposed to be.
The clergy fear what it means for the fate of their country if the king rejects his younger son. The elder has been ruined, surely the King wouldn't see him as fit host? Why won't he accept the boy he had ordered stolen from his profane blooded family those years ago?
Cadfael whispers the answer to you the first time you ask. His words kept safe in the darkness between your bodies where you lay under the covers of your bed.
You are his only bond to his humanity. The only thing he cares about. the only thing he would morn losing. You're purpose is to die for him, his is to live for you. You were never seen as profane by the king who had slaughtered its bondee over and over again. Every time it took a new host, their loved's blood is what nurtured the transition. You were never something profane to it.
Cadfael is still holy and pure.
It scares him. He refuses to let the clergy know. He's had so much more freedom. You have had so much more freedom. You both saw the city streets for the first time after he got sick. Talked to people other than the clergy and eachother. Were he not ill, you would have run away together to be normal men. He talks about a house on a beach with a dog. He'd spend his days transcribing texts as all he knew to do was repeat other's words, you would work something simple and physical. A blacksmith or a farm hand pulling shellfish from the sand.
His father is still talking about the day Cadfael would enter the throne room and kill you.
You're twenty-six. He's been getting sicker and sicker. His weakness growing, your blood doing less and less to heal him. He breaks down sobbing in front of the beggars. All his father would say was that the time for Cadfael to ascend to the throne drew near.
Cadfael would die soon. The line of succession would be broken, their god left without a host when it's current body finished rotting away. For his people's sake he had to fulfill his and your's purposes.
He crawls, he can't stand, to his brother's feet. His hands cupped in preyer to their father as he begs to just be healed. It has healed so many others. Why can't it just heal him? Why does he have to die young without having ever gotten to live a life as anything but a mouthpiece for the monster behind the throne room doors?
his father answers him, and he cries how unfair it all is.
He refuses. He demands you take him to your shared room. You carry him, he hasn't walked on his own in months.
You're twenty-seven. He can't sit up anymore. He looks like a corpse in your bed as he rambles for you to transcribe his sacrilegious plan. His father's words slip out between his sentences. It begs you with his mouth to bring him to ignore his desires. To carry him to the throne room and fulfill your purpose. Save it. Save it. Save it. Its son's plan will be its slow death.
The plan is completed, the recipe is engrained in your mind.
You carry him to the throne room. He feels like air in your arms. His skin stretched tight against his bones. His hair thin and stringy. his eyes glazed. The blankets you wrapped around him in a desperate attempt to keep him warm must weigh more than him.
The doors open for you both. You see the king for the first time. Your not-brother still lays at its feet. He didn't have a name either. You place your purpose beside the throne. his father turns its rotten head to watch you as you clear away your not-brother's bones. The dry flesh that still stuck them flaked like snow as you piled them amongst the bones of countless kings and queens and their beloved bonds.
Cadfael speaks for the first time in days. It's his father wasting his limited energy to beg you spare it. Cadfael is just one man, as are you. To do as he asks would lead to the deaths of countless others. This world needs it more than it needs either of you. Its blessings. Its protection.
You draw your knife, identical to the ones that had been used within this room countless times. And fulfilled your purpose.
You killed for your prince. Cutting the king open to spill its milk white blood, its entrails pulled from it like it were a simple animal being cleaned for consumption. its heart pulled from its chest. It beat in your hand. a tangled knot of bright light.
you took the bag of prepared components from where they were tucked against your purpose's chest. He only needed a sliver off the king's heart. He swore that once they were done it could be returned to the king without a single soul having to suffer for this misdeed.
You carved off what he needed, placed it within the bag, and returned the heart to its host. Within seconds its innards engulfed it and pulled it back through the gash in its abdomen. Your prince was right. he almost always was.
When you return to him he fights to hold out his bone thin arms to you. The cure needed blood. He is so weak and frail and blinded by his sickness that all you have to do is run the dull side of your blade against his wrists to trick him into believing he's been cut. You hold his hand as you slash your own arm open. You've already devoted so much of your blood to him, what's a little more? You couldn't bare the idea of bleeding him.
He intones the spell, his voice weak.
when it is done the bag glows with his cure. Your hands shake, the constant stream of your life pouring over the bag had drained you of so much energy. You bring the cure to his lips and he takes it from you like he had taken the countless tiny pieces of food you had managed to feed him these last few years.
You wipe your blood from his face as he goes still.
You tend your own wound before picking him up and carrying him from that place. The clergy shriek at you for what you've done. Not a single one will dare draw near you and your prince.
He sleeps for weeks. Your wound scabs, then scars.
When he wakes his eyes are clear. He smiles at you. He tells you his father is furious with you both with a grin so giddy that you can't stop yourself kissing it from his lips. He's still so weak. but his sickness is gone.
He learns to walk again, though he can never go more than a few steps. He eats his fill. He gains his weight back. Every night you hold him through he feels like a different man. His bones covered once more, his skin holds warmth his smile bright and alive and him.
You're twenty-nine when he demands time away from you for the first time since you killed a man for him.
He locks himself in the spare room that has become his study. Leaving only when he was requested in the preyer hall to speak for the father that still needed him.
Days pass, and when he comes to you again he demands to know if you trust him. Of course you do.
He feeds you the second dose of his remedy. Your blood feels on fire. when you wake from what felt like the pits of hell he told you you would never die. Never age. Never grow ill. It was your reward, he says, for all your years of service to him. He tells you to flee, or to stay beside him for the rest of the unnatural lives you have carved off of God for yourselves. You tell him to stop wasting his breath on asking you leave his side.
You're thirty when word spreads of what you and he have done. The beggar's in the prayer hall plead not with the king, or the younger prince but with the traitor behind him. Their god would leave them to die- Cadfael can save them. Cadfael can heal the sickest of the sick. Cure all disease.
The man who once dreaded that he would be hated by his people for accepting their blood as a cure to his ailment bled himself near to death as he made panacea after panacea. Each one using a tiny sliver of his father's heart. Each one promising a lifetime of health.
The healed sleep fitfully for weeks in the palace infirmary. Their skin darkening with burns as they whimper and scream in their sleep, before turning to flaking white ash in the hours before they woke up shrieking their agony. Smoke poured from them as they burned alive.
Their screams never ceasing. They can't die. They just keep burning.
Cadfael doesn't know what he's done wrong- The fires spread. He's never used his father's gifted magic. Never dared to invite that parasite further into his body. In that moment it fails him completely.
Instead it's something unholy and rotting, his cure still buried I'm his gut, that makes the room flood with water.
The burnt still writhe. He orders the halls cleared. The dungeon emptied. He can do nothing with his workspace flooded. The burning need to be kept doused and drowned while he fixes what he's done.
He doesn't know what went wrong. He spends weeks going over every step. He interrogates you. Your blood burns, but the flames never engulf You- Why? Why why why?
He tries fix after fix. Prisoners are brought in and used as guinea pigs. He has to fix what he's done. The fires grow, the dungeon has turned into an endlessly boiling cave lake. The burned scream. He swears he can hear them from the other side of the castle.
He stops eating again. He doesn't have time. He has to fix what he's done. You watch him regress. The fire that was Cadfael turns from that of a hearth to that of an inferno. He loses himself in his studies. Piece by piece as the obsession consumes him like the tides steal sinking ships.
He doesn't burn. Why doesn't he burn? It's cold water that fills him. It has nothing to do with his place as prince- All the ingredients were the same. Why was he spared? Why were you? His father refuses to answer his questions.
This is what the king warned them would happen. Two lives saved and countless others ruined.
You watch him change. His obsession makes him ruthless. A few more test subjects- that's all it'll take and then they will all be saved.
The beggars stop coming to pray to him. Fear spreads. The prince has gone mad.
You watch him lose all he weight he managed to game back. He becomes weak as hes too engrossed in his studies to eat. You try to discourage him, to bring him back. He banishes you from his study and doesn't emerge for days.
He smells like rot when he does. Wild eyed and barely able to stand as exhaustion finally drives him to crawl back to your shared room. He sleeps in your bed. He hasn't slept in his own in years. Even now it doesn't occur to you to take his instead of laying beside him.
You're thirty-two when the rebellions begin.
Thirty three when you join as an Informant. Cadfael is so busy with his fruitless searching that you can come and go without notice.
Thirty-four when the palace is stormed.
You knew the plans of the rebellion ahead of time. Your work with them being what would be your purpose's salvation.
He never wanted to be prince.
In the fear and panic you break away from the plan. You take him by his hand and lead him down the paths you never told the rebels of. Deep beneath the castle, in the cisterns that had been drained to flood the lowest floors in an attempt to contain the ever growing number of burned. Your exit is close. You'll go somewhere on the coast. Strangers in a new town who fled to escape the turmoil in the city. No one will know it's the mad prince who walks with you.
Cadfael follows. You tell him your plan and he kisses you. It's perfect. On a coast he would have an entire ocean at his disposal to continue his work with.
The burned kept safe until he could fix what he's done. His research conducted in secret.
His research continued.
You were five years old when you were given a knife and told your purpose. Protect and serve and love the holy prince.
Cadfael, the boy, the man, the prince, the brilliant, is dead. You realize that he has been for a very long time.
The monster before you killed him and wears his skin.
He's facing away from you, that head of bright red hair bleached white, the skin across the sliver of exposed neck the color of fine marble instead of warm pallor.
You were never supposed to see him consumed by the King like this.
His blood is cold when it pours over your hand. Your blade piercing the thin muscle just below his shoulder blade and delving between the ribs you used to count while you held him.
He gasps. you burry you face in the crook of his neck. He smells like rot and ashes. He feels like your prince long dead as you hold him through those final moments.
You're lauded as a hero when the resistance fighters find you still holding him in the bowels of the place always meant to be your mausoleum.
They pull you from him, and his spell finally breaks. His rotten body disovels into a flood like his experiments always turned to flame.
Idk. Your names Monty and you don't know how old you are anymore. Cadfael gave you that name because he was pissed when he found out you didn't have one. You were never supposed to be anything but his shield. Why would you need a name? You were supposed to be dead years ago.
It's still the name on the plaque they hang up under a portrait of you in the former royal castle. You were one of the heros to bring the reign of the Mad Prince and his contrarian god to an end.
When the droughts let his experiments escape the flooded basements You were amongst the brave who went to war against them. Or you were called brave for so readily throwing yourself into the fires to do the dirty, violent work of putting those tortured things to peace. The fire didn't burn you.
Nothing did. You didn't get sick. You didn't age. Your purpose carved immortality off of his god for you. He gave you a name too. You hold one of those closer than the other.
Fighting is all you're good for now that what you were meant to protect was destroyed by your own hand. Besides, You still remember Cadfael the Brilliant, even if he has been lost to Cadfael the Mad's shadow. How will anyone else ever see him again if his monsters burn them all away?
Cadfael once asked that you retire somewhere sunny and warm when he was gone. You couldn't even do that for him.
You wake up. You hunt. You fight. You go to bed again. You have allies but not friends. Your not family hasn't attempted to contact you and you know you should not contact them.
The droughts get worse.
More and more escape.
And it is monotony to cut them down and carve out the pieces of god that had grown to fill them like a parasite their own size.
Until one is different.
A monster as fluid as the river that once circled the castle. It splashes and twirls and dances through the streets, an amorphous form around a thick tangle of divinity.
You grab it by one of its limbs and it freezes and goes solid. Person shaped but not fully formed. You recognize it. Of course you recognize it. Cadfael never burned for what he did.
It smiles and pulls you to play. It's new. It's young. It's forgotten everything but the way the sun feels after decades trapped underground. It's brilliant and bright and alive and so much happier than you ever saw him.
You give him the name Lou and take him back to the base. You lie through your teeth and tell them he must be from the very end of Cadfael's experiments, when you were locked from his workrooms, instead of the very first of handiwork.
And you lie and lie and lie. Everything to give Lou the chance to be a person independent of the god in every way Cadfael never could.
The fires can't hurt him either and his touch quenches them completely. It's respite for the burned in the seconds before they are separated from their parasites as he joins you in your quest to clean up what Cadfael did.
There's days he's more solid, so close to remembering that you can see the details of his face just beneath the watery surface of this new form. He's always so somber and serious in those moments. Weighed by memories long forgotten.
The team attempting to save the burned through less violent means showed Lou their work when he was snooping around out of idle curiosity. He could read Cadfael's awful handwriting and intuit what his shorthanded notes meant. He thinks it all a game. A fun puzzle for him to toil over while you fret about this or that.
You lie when you say you don't know how the fire that destroyed most everything Cadfael ever wrote started. It hurt to see it all burn, but Lou couldn't be allowed to remember. He's so happy.
He's the same man he had been. He laughs at the same jokes and plays the same pranks and reads the same books.
but all you see is the ways Lou is different. Cadfael had a gleaming smile, but it was so rare with how his duty and then sickness and then vile research weighed on him. Lou rarely has a reason to be anything but smiling. Cadfael adored dancing but never wanted to do it without a partner. But the time he could touch you he was already too sick to be spun how he wanted to be. Lou didn't have that problem. He'd pull you by the hand to dance to the music of buskers or drunkards singing their bar songs or the faint music that leaked from the concert halls. He'd dance with anyone who let him pull them along, but he always favored you.
He didn't remember you at all when you found him. He still trusted you completely. Still ran back to you every time he got in trouble. Still came to lay in your bed at night because that's what felt right.
Cadfael was dead, but your purpose was so beautifully alive.
And then the note came.
"Find your heart, Remember your locket." such simple words. A game. A puzzle. Something you couldn't get him to just drop.
Cadfael always kept you close to heart. Your picture beside his in a silver locket. You stole it off his body while it was still warm from his skin. Now it hung heavy like a noose around your neck.
Lou wanted to remember his past so badly, but you couldn't let him. Not when it meant seeing him weighed down by what he did out of desperation again. Not when it risked Lou being tried for Cadfael's crimes.
So you lie and lie and lie and lead him astray. You find him a new one and hide it in his path. He's devastated to find its empty. He swears he should be seeing "them" in it. He misses someone so badly.
He trusts you so completely that when you refuse to let him look in the locker around your neck he doesn't question why.
The fake locket sates him until it doesn't.
He insists on going down to the dungeons in the castle. They're the first place he remembers being, so surely it's just lost down there? You follow him as far as you can every time, but once the water is too your ribs you have to let him disappear into the dark maze below.
It's during one of those trips while you're waiting for him to return that you feel it. The parasite within you thats grown to be your same size. Finally you feel it's fire snuff. and you know it's been too long.
Cadfael was always meant to be sacrificed. His body replacing his adopted father's as vessel for the god in the throne room. Decades on from the day that should have been both of yours deaths, his father finally dies. The god is without a vessel.
Lou returns a mess of fear and anxiety. He felt it too. He did something didn't he? He knows he did! He knows it's his fault but he can't remember why.
You soothe him and you lie and you take him home.
The remaining burned's parasites begin to break apart in their decay. Spreading and raising new of their tortured ilk. Cadfael's spell work remains strong for you and Lou, but you know it is only a matter of time.
The harvest fails.
The winter is cruel
Spring never comes
people starve
sickness ravages the land.
Your God is dead.
Lou tells you he hears someone calling to him when he's quiet. They beg he come home. They tell him it's all his fault.
You lie and say it's not.
A search for the younger prince, Caspian is launched. The god had rejected him previously but now that Cadfael was dead and it desperate, maybe it'd take him. there's never any luck with the search.
Lou disappears one evening. on your bed is a note damp from his touch.
"Your heart waits for you in the throne room. Find me there."
You have had fire burning within you every day since you took Cadfael's cure. You think you feel it snuff then.
He can never know.
You rush, stupid with your anxieties directly into the trap.
Caspian, a man now long grown and his thugs capture you. Lou is waiting when they drag you to him at the throne room doors. He looks confused. Like he's been told something that makes too much sense but which goes against his faith in you.
He approaches and you fight to get away. He pulls his locket from your neck and opens it. And you can see the memories return to him as he finally solidifies for the first time since you killed him.
His lips are parted, he looks like he might cry.
You call him your prince and he slaps you for it. He screams his anger. How dare you. How could you lie? How could you make him stand idle while people were dying? He could have saved so many lives-
You remind him that he only could by giving his own.
The doors to the throne room open for the first time since Cadfael carved off the last piece of the god.
There's no choices left.
He storms in. The thugs let you follow.
You see the crumbled corpse on the throne, your not brother is still on the floor at its feet.
You plead. You beg. You ask that you two run away like you always said you would. He was so happy as Lou, it doesn't need to end- You two will survive. Your purpose will be safe.
And everyone else will suffer for it.
He looks you in the eye and tells you to go. He won't be able to- he already can't bare the burden.
He dies today for their god to have a vessel once more- he breaks from his composure to shout it shut up. You need to flee. he's so furious with you, he still begs you pretend you don't already know what the god is saying.
It will reject him.
He still has a connection to this world.
That was the point of you after all. To be his only tie to his humanity. As long as you live, it will remain strong and he will be unfit for his roll as host.
You asks him one more time to go with you and when he rejects you you pull your dagger from its sheath and hand it to him with the blade pointed towards yourself.
...for any 'mech to pack at least a smidgen of anti-infantry weapons. After all, battle is made up of layers, and woe betide the MechWarrior caught with only the tools to deal with one of those layers.
One of the most common modifications, to any 'mech that's expected to see combat, is an anti-infantry gun. After all, as fun as the big cannons and lasers are to fire off, sometimes you need a basically-heat-neutral weapon suitable for rinsing infantry back into trenches or alleyways while your own troops follow through.
Now, this can be darn near anything. There are those who take a 20mm machine-gun that can rip apart unarmored vehicles and makes even brick walls more concealment than cover; there are those who, some technicians swear, asked if there was such a thing as a belt-fed 9mm automatic.
But enough of that- what this is fitted with is the oldest of fashions, a plain .50, the infantry's best friend since powered flight was just barely getting to be a good idea. However, just slapping one on there lacked some panache. So, we twin-linked it.
Then, see, one of the techies was down the commissary, reading some guns-n-ammo magazines, like you do, and saw this really cool ad they were running for critter control- you know some of the beasties you get out on the weirder planets -with "fifty-cal ratshot" rounds, sooo...
