Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a rodent, by all means, though much larger than any of Old Earth, adapted to harsh life on the open plains. Though it was most comfortable in its warren among its vast collection of stockpiled curios, matting its mottled ashen fur and sleeping away the days, everything had to eat, and necessity had forced it to the surface in search of sustenance. It arched downward, spinal bristles flaring outward in sequence as the long comma of its spine compacted, pawed the side of its head along one long ear—always swiveling to detect the things it could not see—and watched.

Despite the immaculate bio-engineering of its origins that rendered it more intelligent than any rodent before it, it had degenerated with time and trial; It’s ancestors withered down by the necessities of natural selection until they’d gone completely feral. It was now as simple a creature as any could be in this age. It had little emotion other than fear, pain, and hunger. Hot blood gushing against its tongue, the resilient fibers of the maprico pulped between molars. The agony of a wound becoming septic, maternal guardianship. But it was curious nonetheless.

There, crawling through the weeds—dazzled by the light cast on its upturned stone. A small lizard, more similar to the common scolopendra than reptiles, with its many legs and split jaw biting the air. It tilted its angular head up, four eyes finally adjusted to the harsh daylight. 

Without a moment's more hesitation, the ashen kuaka lunged forward and took the lizard in its jaws by the midsection.

Though primarily herbivorous, all species of kuaka were not as picky as their pobber cousins on neighboring Venus, and would bite, gnaw, and nibble on just about anything they could get their grimy paws on—not even being above cannibalism should the need arise. It wasn't even hungry after a full day of foraging, but knew better than to let a meal pass it up.

Smooth scales brushed against its tongue, coaxing saliva from the glands within its mouth. Genetic information ingrained within the rodent told it however tempting the heartbeat on its tongue was, it could not bite down on the squirming lizard yet. Drawing blood now would only attract attention. It had seen the desecrated barrows of others of its species that had not been able to resist the allure to crush the delicate bones of creatures such as this in the open. Its bristles twitched, seeming to sigh.

Before it could lope off to its lair, taking the hapless lizard with it, it sensed a change in its immediate surroundings. It stiffened. Ears swiveling, it sniffed the sky, its rural, animalistic thoughts of an aerial predator. It saw nothing. It heard nothing. Above, the yellow-grey bruise of the sky was broken into pieces by the shrivels of windswept leaves, seeping between branches silent as they flit, catching between the brambles of skeletal ferns, the white of its pelt.

Soon it heard it. Then it felt it. A staccato, repeated in quadfecta, thudding through the ground into the sensory organs of its three-toed footpads. Even the lizard had gone still. It felt it too. The kuaka’s eyesight was surprisingly sharp for a creature that spent most of its life in the lightless underground—another wonder of its manufactured origins survived through the ages. It could see pale worms wiggling to the surface, disturbed by the seismic resonance. It had never seen these creatures so close to the surface before.

To a creature such as this, an influx of unknown information could only mean two things. It dropped the squirming reptile immediately, bunched its legs, and skipped fast into the underbrush. There it purged its stomach contents, vomiting up gnarled roots, tart berries bleached of color, and the shells of freshly-hatched sesam beetles stolen from their broodmother’s beachside clutches by the crafty creature. Better to be hungry than envenomed.

It buried the offal quickly before the malodor could attract attention. The dull noise grew louder, and was soon joined by the much lighter shrill of a voice, shouting as it competd against the clangor to be overhead. Its spines contracted to rest flat against its hunched back. From the alcove it glared, yellow-eyed, keenly judging for threats. Unnoticed, its prey skittered off to live another day.

Twyst hugged tight to his harness and saddle with his legs, then pulled sharply on his reins, riding out the jolt with an increasingly indignant series of chivvied placations. Dirt and bladegrass sprayed in clumps as the kaithe’s composite hooves dug into the dry soil. The gelding beneath him croaked in protest: a sound like a skeleton’s jaws clacking together, then huffed a breathless exhalation, curving its metal-railed head to glare at him with empty eye sockets. 

Staring straight forward, he sighed.

“Now I may be mistaken.” Twist said when the dust settled, half-glancing over his shoulder. “But I do recall expressly asking you not to do that less than a minute ago.”

His travel companion spent several more moments patting the kaithe's flank, mollifying the incensed beast with her gloved hand. When she finally deigned him, her other hand—drenched in a loose line of dragging red velvet like the mouth of a pitcher plant, which her lower arm protruded from—went to the hollow of her neck as if hurt by his accusal. The look she slides him—heavy and coquettish—is so audacious he can’t help but laugh. The ways she managed to express herself with her hands alone outside of semiotics more than made up for her lack of a voice.

“Immortal though we largely are, at least one of us can still get seriously hurt. So, in an effort to keep away from the local chirurgeons, I’d appreciate every endeavor taken by you to keep my face attached to my head from here on out.” Tywst whipped the reins lightly and dug in his heels in a much more deliberate manner than his companion had, spurring their steed onward. Dry grass and twigs crackled under their weight. “The Ostrons are a loyal, resourceful people, but needless to say their medical practices are a few thousand years behind the norm.”

The Warframe crossed her arms and looked the other way, shoulders shrugged, pouting. Twyst rolled his eyes and smiled, used to her antics, and adjusted the overlapped plates of his collar. 

He’d traded the bodyglove he usually wore for hammer cloth of Ostron origin—crudely-hewn, bulky—ferried to him by a Quill agent before the War. The two pieces had somehow been stitched to his exact specification without any measurement being taken. They were also waterproof—a fact Onkko had provided apropos of little else and with his standard deadpan delivery of someone who had to realign themselves in reality every time they wished to have a conversation. Though the exchange had happened too quickly and too long ago for him to be sure in hindsight, he swore he’d saw old Quill smirk after mentioning the ruggedization the apparel had undergone, which had been a somewhat unsettling experience all its own.

They’d skipped traveling through the bazaar and had deployed right outside the main gate. It was better the general population saw the Tenno only as their ferrous exosuits, and not the strange, half-living youths linked symbiotically to them. Though by no means fragile, Twyst would admit his outward countenance didn’t exactly live up to the marshal image of a towering Styanax, or the hope-bringer seated behind him herself. Even if he really was closer to them than any normal human anymore. Tethered both to here and that other place: a living conduit of the Void ethereal. Or everywhere else, if the Quills had anything to say about it. Even here, lightyears away from the Red Planet and its plague-moon, he could still feel the beating of the Heart. A delayed thump, almost in sync with the pulsing of his own organ. Almost.

He pushed that thought aside easily.  He didn’t like thinking about the multitudes of parallel hims running around. Ironic, he knew, given he was seated comfortably on the back of a cantering four-legged paradox. Krysis, he’d dubbed the charnel destrier. A gift from…himself, technically. He…they loaned… himself the creature occasionally. Said it was good for it to get out of the cave without getting shot at or fighting off giant flying worms. A stupid name. Definitely the kind of thing he’d come up with though. Other than its sohseki saddle, Krysis lacked the embellishments—chamfrons, coronets, excessive quantities of gold—popular of the flesh and blood creatures of the Empire. 

This was not a flesh and blood creature. Its dermis was a red that could be mistaken for leather, or flayed muscle coated in dust, but was hard as a Warframe’s shell when touched, and cold as stone. Its tail was a whip-coil of metal arrangements stacked like vertebrae, ending in a brutal spike. When it raised its head to fend off beaconflies attracted to raw coloration of its body, it accused the world with empty sockets. 

It had had eyes, once, according to his other self. Aetigo, its breed was called: once a memory, coalesced into being at the will of a temperamental king seeking to fill his world with the few things that brought him contentment. When its home drifted off into the Void—for not even a king could control that Vast Untime—reduced to not even anything substantial, but the memory of a memory, the kaithes shut their eyes and wept. They didn’t open them again until they had keened so much the organs shriveled to nothing from their grief. 

It was a walking memory of the kaithes that once were. Twisted into being by the Void, clad in the steel of a malleable memory. But its heart remained true, its spirit bellicose. In any case, the horse could still see perfectly fine. Somehow.

The clothes were comfortable and they weren’t getting shot at. That made Twyst uneasy, though he tries his best not to let it show. This was supposed to be a frille excursion, after all. He’d even conceded to forsaking his scrimshaw mote back on the Orbiter before they’d made planetfall, deeming the osteological weapon an unnecessary burden after much internal arguing—to his companion’s great amusement he’d later learned. She’d likewise gone without any heavier armaments, only a sidearm. His Yareli never favored the exotic kompressa pistol associated with her model. Instead, a relic zylok was hidden beneath the rolling waves of her kimono-like skirt, magnetically locked to her leg. It was a lighter package than what he’d prefer they brought, but he’d seen her pull shots with it that would have put a Mesa to shame. He’d pulled dozens of them himself. Together, they had killed hundreds—maybe thousands. They’d saved many more.

It was not enough.

Staring off at the expansive grassland, Twyst felt a strange surge of nostalgia. As if the war never really happened, and all this was some strange dream. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d awoken from a false reality. Not even the second. But blinking away the dust in his eyes didn’t dispel the towering carcasses of galleons, or fill the detonation craters dotting the landscape where sections of earth had been scooped away. Sentient dropships still stood like tombstones from the ground, their split centers revealing hollow innards. 

Twyst felt slim hands encircle his waist. Yareli rests her head in the crook between his head and shoulder, gill-like netting of her face-veil brushing the skin of his neck. She sensed his disquiet. 

Right. I’m supposed to be relaxing.

“I’m fine.” Twyst sighed, staring at the distant husk of a Condrix, embedded like a cenotaph in the Earth. Leave it to her to drag him back to the surface. Hah. “You know how I feel about sitting around. Make me antsy.” 

You and me both. The Warframe signed, fingers twisting helixes of neat calligraphy. The handshape she was adept in contained a wide enough variety to encompass nearly any conversation topic with a surprising level of depth. It even supposedly included several expletives unutterable by vocal means. He was certain she'd made them up herself. So, let’s get this show on the road before I have to apply motivation again.

Threat acknowledged, the Operator raised the reins, feeling Krysis trodding beneath him again, and cupped her chin to run digits along the side of her head. The veil was laminar on his fingertips, smooth as polished azurite, but strangely adhesive when he tried to pull away, as if damp. 

“Ready?”

Yareli took her head from his shoulder. He sensed through their tenuous link: she knew it was deeper than that. But she left it be. He imagined, not for the first time, what she would say were she capable. Some things handshape could not encompass. But it was difficult to speak when your lungs were vestige sacks of leather filled with saltwater. Whatever secrets her tongue had accrued, the organ had lost the ability to share. He knew through that same link it frustrated her to no end. She had, to put it lightly, a lot to say about a lot of things. His inability to relax among them.

The Waverider gestured to something in the distance, at the end of an arterial alcoved by sandalwood, colonies of withered ferns: a formation he’d mistaken for debris but her keener eyesight had determined as something of note. He steered them towards it.

Krysis cantered to a halt atop the crest of a rocky ridge. Beside them, whorled in thorny vines along the wayside, lay a cairn. Twyst dismounted. Yareli took the initiative of having extra space to lean back, both hands on the kaithe’s flank, legs kicking back and forth. She wasted not a second in spoiling the steed with affections, laying herself down back-first and patting its broad flank. Yareli had quickly taken a liking to the creature. Twyst guessed she could relate to it. Or more likely she just thought it was cute. Krysis didn’t seem to mind: its horned head lowered to nibble on the dry plains-grass with cold metallic clacks. The weeds it pulled and swallowed tumbled down its neck when it raised its skull, then fell out between exposed ribwork. It didn’t seem to mind that either, because it kept doing it.

Rising above the whispering bladegrass, it was a plain sepulcher: a pinax of whalebone, unadorned with embellishment save for a single hieroglyph embossing its surface, and beneath in neat rows, small runics painstakingly scrimshawed into the calcium. Different writing styles at play suggested several dozen authors, each contributing to a minimum of one line of text, often more. The stencil lay nearby: a rare example of Ostron ironworking. A pikestaff leaned against, a bag twined to the top, heavy with aromatic herbs and spices: bomba leaves and mulala twigs. Amid the area around the tablet, tarnished and glittering obols sat side-by-side, packed into seram beetle shells alongside offerings of fruit and bread. Some crowns were decades, centuries older than others, while others still were crude imitations of wood, stone, or gem. Twyst even recognized a few of the rare Entrati types there. The charcuterie was somehow largely untouched by the wildlife. 

“So they can pay their passage into the afterlife.” Twyst said aloud, finally realizing. Behind him he heard Yareli stirring, her dotting ceasing, though didn't turn around. He lowered to sit on his toes, careful not to disturb the edifice. “An old tradition. It’s largely fallen out, just like those empty houses in town. But just in case, I suppose.” He turned around, looking not at his other half, nor at their steed, but at the golden tower looming far behind. 

The Unum’s roseate peak scraped the firmament: an atlas of ruin holding a sky like an inverted void storm, still gored from injuries sustained during the war. But it was rejuvenating under the watch of its caretakers. Hot air balloons bearing scaffolding and growth stimulants instead of explosives and temple flesh floated to and from the harbor like leaves around a vast Yggdrasil. He’d once thought the comparison to the ancient tale nothing more than Ostron superstition: something to be publicly respected but inwardly nothing more than a quaint local curiosity, even to a surah who was of the nomads in all but birth. But after the War, the Drifter…Twyst wasn't sure anymore. He couldn’t help but wonder: in how many different worlds had things played out differently? What would this yellowing tablet look like if they’d been here when the invasion started? Would it even be here?

A coercion encroached upon his consciousness; a steady external influence brushing against him like gentle waves lapping at the beach—vast as an ocean, but free of the tempestuous turbulence. It is the tepid comfort offered by a stillwater pond at the heart of a grotto, or an oasis flourishing at the center of a desert. He looked to the source, knowing who was responsible.

He hadn’t heard her dismount, which wasn’t surprising. Warframes were surprisingly clandestine when they wanted to be—even the heaviest constructs in the Rhino chassis could evade the most extensive of manual security measures, so long as they could avoid direct exposure. But Yareli moved like she was walking on water that would break with one wrong step. So she never misstepped—gliding to him as silently as morning dew down the stem of a sapling. Her armor is red rather than the ice blue and white typical of her sisters: the perfect velvet of an oceanic flatworm, quartered by black, bone, and brass filigree. Inbuilt jewelry along her sternum, midriff, pulsed softly. The helmet entombing her head was beset on either side with a gown delicate as villi while leaving her cordiform faceplate exposed, like an open wedding veil cut from a floral membrane.

The lapping grew stronger, but no more cloying, with every step she took closer. If anything it was only more soothing. Her attempt at words of comfort. He did not push her away. He would never push her away. It just simply was not enough. 

Twyst favors her with a thankful smile. A private gratitude, paid in advance. She motions for him to join her again. He doesn't. Not yet. 

He stands vigil over the tablet for long moments. A condroc screams, something squeaks, chokingly, then there's the low wing beats of a meal being ferried back to a nest. 

“Not sure if I believe in an afterlife after all we’ve seen.” he whispered, and Yareli backed away, sensing these were not words entirely for her, for here, for now. Her hands clasped in front of her, she watched patiently as the sea itself as he extracted a small pouch, drew a handful of coprite coins, weighed them, then plunged his hand back in to come out with more. The dull alloy glittered like the dawn on fish scales as he set them atop the pedestal. “But just in case. To make sure the greedy bastards let them through.”

Yareli says nothing when he leans over. Even if she could, she wouldn’t have. This was not her misgiving to split from belly to throat, reconstruct with bone and gold. Not even to hear. Only to be here.

You see and are seen. The Operator mouths the words, unwilling to utter them.  Sho-lah.

She helps him back onto their steed. Her Operator—much to her amusement and his chagrin—mounts with all the grace of a vehemently flung brick compared to her. She laughs silently as he fandangles for the reins before sliding over the top in a quarter the time until she is in position to slip her hands around his waist again and press herself to his back, her knees in the crevices at the back of his. The psychopomp huffed at the weight: a calcium sound, vaguely insectoid, though didn’t seem particularly bothered. She supposed it had been through much worse than current company. If anything it was largely indifferent, though it favored Twyst with the reins, and her with the occasional nuzzle. She loved the creature at first sight. The seating arrangement was the only thing that needed servicing. The saddle needed alterations. It was never made for two.

Not that she was complaining.

The greater plains stretched away before them. Them. She was still unused to that term, years later, when I had the normal way of referring to the self. She’d thought her actions were her own; he’d thought she was him, before the second awakening had shattered those expectations with the hard evocation of truth. It had not been a pleasant discovery for either of them, initially. Waking up with a sword through your heart and its wielder holding her struggling Operator by the throat hadn’t been a great initial impression to regaining her sapience. 

She didn’t remember who she had been. Sworn Dax or Archimedean. A mortally wounded noble or prisoner sentenced to transmogrification for some heinous act against the Empire. A smuggler. A cheater. A killer. Or a volunteer desperate for continuity—that bizarre brand of divinity—pushed to extremes when the Kuva finally began to wane, and every drop found its way to the bowls of the Seven. 

Yareli felt her mouth—locked shut behind her helmet—fill with tingling saliva, tasting of salt and something musky. Floral, but closer to fungal. Something between her shoulder blades shuddered. Blinked.

For a split second, the need to tear her armor off and see what she looked like was almost overwhelming. But with a moment of focus she submerged herself back into the link and rendered the brief surge of alien sensation familiar, and then agnostic. Just as she had thousands of times before.

What little of her mind that hadn’t been brutalized—strategically slashed and burned alongside whatever else they’d deemed fit to maim every time they’d cut her open—had simply corroded over the centuries she’d slept. The natural result of a mind being turned inside out and another imprinted over it. She considered herself lucky not to remember the process too greatly. Her Operator, meanwhile…his misremembering was deliberate, possibly self-induced. She wondered sometimes which of them got the worse end of the stick, and found she genuinely had no answer.

It was funny, in a way. The moment she’d laid eyes on him—the moment the facade dropped on sundered Lua as he’d crawled out of the iso-somatic cradle towards her on atrophied limbs, the unwitting parasite re-adopting its role as a symbiote, she just…knew him. Knew everything about him. His strengths, his weaknesses, his fears. They’d become her strengths, her weaknesses, her fears. When he’d cradled himself in her arms for sanctuary, re-established their link the way it was always meant to be done, she’d seen his void-self, read his void-tongue name, burning like a midnight sun cradled in reality far from here, yet close enough to touch. Separated like that, they’d been more connected than ever before. It was…like meeting another half of you, you’d never even known you had. Would she have once been offended by that? She didn’t know. No. She didn’t care. Not in this life.

But maybe he did. For as well she knew him—having practically been him—some things were kept hidden even from her. The Void answered every question with several truthful lies, refracted through time as though it were a simple prism. His true heart, his oro, was something not even she could touch, much less glean anything from.

Just like how her own was hidden from him.

“Whatcha think?”

He was referring to their next destination on this rarely-afforded, spontaneously enacted, poorly-planned sabbatical. The decision to even make landfall had been the bastard child of an void-storm induced blackout in the sector communication grid that only their ship cephalon could resolve given time and an equally spontaneous communication somehow received through that same storm from his other self. She’d pointed to the plains on the star chart, then their newly acquired steed, vocalizing in the only way she was capable of: “I want to go here now.”

The Plains were far from idyllic as a choice; with little to see and less to do. The most interesting things occupying the empty quarter also happened to be the most recent: the hulks of destroyed galleons and husked dropships made the land uneven and jaggy, the former like artificial valleys over the formerly flat land, the later looming like stitchwork in a tapestry. Then there were the stones. Curiously shaped edifices of unnaturally cold rock deposited all across the landscape, ritualistically carved in seemingly deliberate appearances—islands amid a yellow-green sea, some small enough to fit into one’s hand, others as tall as the pylons gridlocking the region. Out from the sea to the east, viewed from the shoreline under the light of the sun or venomous Lua, a colossal specimen, crownlike, blocked out the horizon, tall as the Unum itself.

Except they weren't stones. They were bones: megalithic detritus of a Sentient war machine from the peak of the Old War. Not the mindless facsimiles the sterile machine race was forced to produce now, but a single engine. One mind, one body, stronger than the entire invasion force deployed here. Some remains still thrummed with vestigial energy that interfered with her systems when she touched them, the effect more pronounced past dusk. The chill lingered deep even after she broke contact. She’d swam at the bottom of oceans, and even that hadn’t been as cold as grazing the fragment’s surfaces.

Truthfully, she’d grasped the opportunity for lack of knowing when they’d next get the chance too. The only remarkable thing the endless fields of yellow-brown grass had to offer only manifested after nightfall. And no one was particularly interested in seeing those mournful phantasms from afar, much less up close. The Origin System as a whole had seen enough of the Sentients to last another millenia. Even undead ones.

Looking at those bones as she had every time before, though, Yareli couldn’t help an inkling of discomfort dredging within her. She harbored not even roots of affection for the old enemy, but she didn’t think anything deserved this. To be separated from itself. Sundered into an umbral choir, unable to reconcile with what it was. Unable to remember what it had been.

She knew a little of what that was like.

She didn't feel like picking a destination, after that thought. The honest answer was also the simplest. She didn't care. Without the familiar of a sentinel hovering over them, or Ordis monitoring their vitals day and night with hourly updates, it was just the horse, him, and her. After all they’d gone through, that was all she wanted.

Yareli answered him with a one-sided shrug. Twyst gawked, a vulpine sound, though was unsurprised. No one had told him growing up would be largely full of people answering his queries with, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” but he’d figured it out quick enough. And his teachers always said not knowing wouldn’t pass in the scholas.

What he wanted to do was clean this place up. One of the largest ongoing operations post-Narmer was the salvaging of all the relic equipment left behind after the destruction of countless Warframes. The bio-drones themselves—the Tenno’s most prized secret, most potent tool—self-immolated on death under most circumstances: their infested biocomponents secreted potent vitriols to dissolve mechanical and biological hardware into an indistinguishable compost. Already Twyst could see patches of vibrantly colored flowers marking Warframe graves, some distinguished with their own small cairns, adorned in colorful mache masks mimicking Warframe helmets. 

There was so much to do. Debase larceny was stupidly profitable in the modern day. Didn’t need to be Corpus to know that. Even a sidearm of Tenno or Orokin make was superior in almost all ways to any modern long gun. And they'd brought the heavies with them to this fight. The kind of weapons only brought out to kill a civilization. Or when one was being killed.

He knew their presence here wouldn’t have made any significant difference. It wasn't an attempt at justification: only a matter of fact. Tau had millennia to gather strength—the Tenno, a scattering of enclaves assembled over the course of a handful of years, less than a decade. His Waverider would likely be another patch of exotically colored flora had they arrived with the rest of the volunteer vanguard. As it was, he’d been cast into the other side, and she’d been left adrift in the much more literal void of space, an encoded transponder grafted into her flesh signaling her location for Ordis to later retrieve. She’d been upset enough to flood most of the ship shortly after coming aboard before the cephalon had coaxed her into stasis—information Twyst had received from with much magnanimity, throwing his Warframe an appreciative smirk from where she sat sheepishly in the Orbiter, brushing Merulina.

It had happened so fast, and what followed his banishing was hardly more comforting. Despite everything that happened in there—going back to that void-stranded vessel to meet himself of all people—being separated from her was by far the worst part.

He gripped the reins tighter, motioned for Krysis to move. They lumbered along the path with no destination in mind, his eyes peeled, full of fresh suspicion. He just needed to be moving. The further along the path they got, the less easily he’d be able to argue with himself in getting out of it. Sunk cost fallacy was a wonderful trick of the brain. 

At least there was a silver lining to this old feud. Golden pricks had it coming a thousand years ago, and that golden prick had it coming now for an especially long time. In that, Tenno and Sentient were in resounding agreement.

The Plains smelled like…well, like dirt a year after the largest war the system had seen since the fall of the Orokin. It was a particular smell of brimstone and ozone, of fuel leaks and resilient flora filtering pollutants. Still, it was beautiful. One of the few locals of Ancient Er untouched by overreaching jungles and their hypercarnivorous fauna and flora or disjointed hives of ancient infestation, gone feral after being separated from the greater gestalt. Or even had anything to begin with. Vast swathes of the planet were stretches of hellishly plain nothing, or so clouded by radiation thousands of years later even a Warframe would develop new tumors under their armor. The rest of the planet was either noxious with life, or was sterile as Lua’s gilded halls while she was cradled within the Void. This offered the only median.

Though that comparison might not be truly accurate anymore. The Void was far from its namesake.

Eidolon-moh was a remarkable display of the cradle-planet’s resilience, though perhaps its preservation was somewhat intentional; cultivated at the behest of gilt hands. A luxury for the Orokin once to retreat here away from the endless pleasures of gilded halls and ornamental arboretums to a more banal existence. To hunt in the way of old on the backs of Krysis’ distant cousins, hearts pounding like naga drums in their chests, watch the setting sun along the rocky jawline of a beach, dive into an ocean that all these years later, kept secrets not even they could prise from its depths even with the help of constructs such as the one charged to him. Or perhaps simply to exist in a quiet that no study or bureau could truly offer. When you’d lived so many lifetimes of extravagance and boring delirium, quietude probably became the new excitement.

Maybe, for once, bastards might have had a point. It was worth trying out. They were already far enough from the gate to Cetus he’d feel vexed for wasting their time if he turned back now. 

Cresting a new hill, he looked over his shoulder, past Yareli again. Twyst stared fondly at the simple tribal decor set out beside the ivory and gold gatehouse leading into Cetus. Every time he looked back at the Unum, at the Plains, it seemed a little better for wear, a little less sorrowful, and was reminded of all they'd done. 

They’d won. Ballas was dead. The Sentients were pushed back. The Grineer were in disarray. With personal investments threatened and the Board in tatters, the mountebankers of the Corpus had little reason to poke their refrigerator heads into the business of settlements like Cetus and Fortuna. The system, for the first time in centuries, almost knew something like peace.

So why did it still feel like a defeat?

This close to the wreck of the galleon, the scent of the grassland was pulped to an aftertaste. From the ridge the ship was easy to mistake for a massive skeleton: the iron-buttressed framework like a ribcage, antennae like hands stripped of muscle reaching towards the sky, external hatches like mouths and eyes, wounds by which scurrying things could crawl into. Chem-spills formed in iridescent pools in detonation craters, its blood. Plant life refused to grow around the blighted ground. Even half-buried and broken, the Grineer capital ship was fearsome and enormous, made small only by the bones dotting the scape. Twice now the Plains had been made into a boneyard, only now it was both literal and metaphorical.

It smelled like a corpse too. Grokdrul carried an odor a little like petrol, and a lot like mortis lungfish stuffed into a sock and left to putrefy to a degree atypical of the fish while it was alive. Twyst shoved his nose into his sleeve, the perfumed muslin helping by just. Yareli drifted alongside him, unperturbed. Even separated they moved in simpatico. Transference was an intimacy unlike any other, though like everything else had been bastardized by the Orokin to suit their needs. They no longer overlapped so much as…melded? He didn’t stop being him, and she didn’t stop being her, but it was like everything they did, every action taken, originated from one point rather than two. The symmetry was a remnant of the joining on the disjoining. Onkko would probably have something illuminating to say about that, but everything the Quill said dwelled dangerously close to the tedious theological debates the Tenno typically delighted in when they weren't lopping the heads off threats to the Origin System. He hardly had time to feed himself anymore.

Raw calx riming the floor was evidence of carnivorous fusion fires, alongside husks of Grineer armor. Gently kicking aside a blackened Ballista’s suit—her vulkar absent, taken by the locals likely—Twyst deduced nothing biological remained within the shell. Above through holes in the roof, the sky was visible in narrow bands and pinpricks of grey-white, tinged red. Krysis’s shadow could be seen flitting above where the steed followed them, the pounding of its hooves unerringly accurate with their position. The structure groaned warily around them, upset at this second desecration. Twyst occasionally took chalk from his satchel, marking the ground around unstable machinery and suspected undetonated munitions. Detonite was an especially volatile substance prone to exploding if you looked at it wrong, potent enough to be used both as a propellant and the payload itself. Nothing save a jat kittag shouted Grineer louder. 

Of the major factions, Twyst detested the clone race the most. Degenerative and short-lived though the clone-species was, they were even more resourceful than the Ostrons, and thrice as dogmatic. The Plains had been quiet since the New War; only hold-out groups of abandoned troopers remained, encampments made in the mouths of caves or hulks of despoiled Thumpers draped in camouflage netting, beset by the later stages of clone-rot yet still loyal to their failing hearts, cataract-thick eyes bright with zeal against rusting and jury-rigged augments. They were dealt more with pity than acrimony, such was the threat they usually posed. A shame. They’d become exactly what they’d once risen up to fight against, perpetuating a cycle of absent-minded servitude without the majority even understanding why. Still, their single-mindedness was a boon for the rest of the system. Such resources they pooled into waging war, scant few retained the artifice necessary to seek the solution to offset their rapid degradation. The system was lucky, then. The Grineer of old could lose an arm, a leg, and still keep working with barely a hitch. These frailer offshoots were less in every way: bone and gristle and grit, held together by brotherhood.

That last trait was the only redeeming quality among the militaristic industrialists. A certain defector had proven that anyone could learn how to make a mean kuaka stew. So there was hope yet.

He was about to break to chalk another doorway for avoidance—he couldn't read the bar-code like Grineer language, but the bold missives in red more than made up for his ignorance of its contents—when a hand found his. He didn’t tense; barely registered her muslin-light touch until she tugged them in a different direction. Yareli pointed to the closest exit.

“So soon?” Twyst laughed. “We just got here.”

Her hand released his, fell to her hip. The Warframe gestured to his hands, white with adobe, black with rancid machine oil. 

You already smell like decaying fish. she signed, claw tip along the index fingering tapering to append vexation.

Twyst opened his mouth before considering. Alright. That meant something coming from her. 

“I’m a multitasker.”

Yareli shook her head gently before taking his hand again, dragging him along. It was a fight he couldn’t win. Though they typically did everything together with a noncommittal turn-based authority, it was evident she would be having the final say this time. Yareli wanted to leave, so they were leaving. He took mental stock of what they hadn’t looked at for later, and followed close behind the Warframe. He didn’t glance back, pocketing the stick. The Ostrons weren’t uncivilized idiots, contrary to Corpus belief. If anything, they probably knew the Grineer better than him. If he knew not to touch it, they knew it too.

But still.

Despite being among the shorter of the Warframes, his Yareli was still near a hand’s breadth taller than him. His eyes traced the aquatic filigree along her back: a skin of fiery copper that flowed into her dress, whispering around her ankles, stylized into a fishtail that glinted like diamond and ice crushed into a constellation. The accents between her joints were a sinewy cream like melted tallow. A clutch of tentacles spilled from her back like a waterfall, twitching occasionally as the creature slept.

The fluidity of Tenno designs succumbed not to the ostentatious and rigid tyranny of the golden medium. But he'd always found her appearance especially pleasing, even more so when she’d regained her sapience and been allowed to alter her armor however she saw fit. He'd never seen much purpose in cosmetics, but she'd been ecstatic: quickly taken to the reds and purples; torn out the platinum filigree and inlaid herself with dirty copprite and cinnabar. She’d finished the act with an almost ritualistic scarring of her faceplate: a hand-carved diagonal slash running the length, bissecting. He’d laughed when he first realized why she’d done it. Spitting on her creator's memory.

He never used that word around her. It dredged a visceral reaction from the Warframe, so had been quick to excise it from his lexicon. He’d hardly wept. After Umbra—elsewhere performing his own duties in place of the duo—he could well imagine why. Why they’d swaddled her in satins and silks, inlaid her with precious accents and mother-of-pearl; a single gem of which could buy a Corpus obelisk and its entire crew’s loyalty. Even during the height of that ancient war, the Orokin couldn’t extenuate making something so hideous. Easier to swallow they’d made a nymph than a viperfish.

He looked at the vacated armor of the Grineer, her, himself. Hard to believe they were all members of the same species. All human, occupying various branches along the evolutionary continuum. Despite his existence caught between the Wall, Yareli was still further along the line, submerged in the silt of the unknown. How far, Twyst wasn't sure. He didn’t think even Ballas was sure. A thousand mythologies contributed to her conception. Few were pleasant. Here be dragons.

But the Orokin had, for a time, their perfect warriors. A poison against the Sentients, body and mind. However, their purity was misjudged—tarnished by an idea instilled: a bond with the children charged to them. The Night of the Naga Drums was a day they both remembered fondly. It was only a little because of the regicide involved.

He was no longer that child, and she was no longer that golem of warped flesh and metal. Funny, that their torturers had given them the best thing that had ever happened to either of them.

Far, the sun was on its way to setting—a golden obol dipping into the sea, painting the glade orange. Closer above, the faint outline of broken Lua—a cataracted eye veined by black blood vessels; trenches miles deep in the tectonically ravaged moon. All things considered, it was looking pretty good for an astral body recently pulled out of an alternate reality.

And before them, more bodies. The corpses lay strewn in poses of gruesome death. Battered and rusting armor crushed back-to-back described a final stand. Most were cut through by energy projection, ferrite armor parted as though it offered no more resistance than a hologram. By this point most were little more than mummified tissue clinging to yellowed bones, flowers blooming from vacated eyesockets, gaunt and haggard as the vultures who stopped to periodically feed. A rogue condroc perched on the gray armor of a bombard, picking at the fetid footstuff within the shell. It shrieked in surprise and flew away when something within, gore-grimed, lashed out at it. The kuaka sniffled once, then dived back into the carcass to resume its decrepit marrow meal. Plains wildlife, charming as ever. 

Yareli’s hand left his to cover her lower faceplate. As amiable as she was, girl had an executioner's sense of humor.

Krysis crashed down some yards away, metal bones clattering. Yareli was quick to throw her arms around the creature's thick neck. Its eyes—lack there off—looked at Twyst, accusing, denying. Though he didn’t miss the way its tail raised slightly at her dotting.

Saddled, they again set off in a random direction through sparse covenants of trees and grass. A thumper without a leg, ochre with rust like the shell of a crustacean. A ghoul field upturned, lousy with debris coated in the plastic of the aborted clones' diapause bags; the ill-fated troops lives mercifully ended before they even started. A orphix—or was it a condrix?—standing watch over the valley like a god’s gnarled fist. Unlike the capstan Grinner counterparts, the alchemy of nature was transmuting the drop site into the beginnings of a span of forest, anomalous for the Plain’s poor soil quality. A curious effect the remains had on the environment—though one that made sense. They were originally terraformers, meant to seed worlds for habitation. How they managed to promote said growth was a mystery. Sentient biology…mechology…schema? Was confusing at best—even to those like the Quills, who’d in part devoted themselves to the study—as most things Orokin were. Twyst hailed from that Byzantine period, and the majority of the techno-arcana from that age still remained indecipherable to him.

They stopped, again, at what had once been a waterhole. Jagged black stumps of charcoal and glassy rock showed where a stray globe of plasma had evaporated the meadow. Krysis stoops down and sniffs disinterestedly at the cracked ground, finding nothing edible. At the far side across from them, a mischief of kuakas—fur ratty, muzzles dry—stirred the dust by the bankside. Twyst watched them pawing at the ground, sharing from thumb-sized puddles of muddy water. Yareli stirred behind him, face veil brushing his cheek. Her hand flowed out, phalanges moving in curious—but ultimately familiar—motions. Her hand splayed, collapsed, and below their feet, Twyst felt something shift. Heard something crack.

There was a gurgling sound, like liquid being expelled from a drowned man’s lungs. Bubbles formed at the bottom of the ditch. The rodents pulled back, but either through curiosity or necessity did not flee. Twyst could swear he saw the little creature’s eye widen when the dry earth began to darken, the dust bowl to clot. 

The first spout breached the surface in a spray nearly their mounted height. More came, each just as tall, frothy with oxygenation. The pond rapidly filled with springwater dredged from deep within the earth: liquid that had been trapped below the rockplate since water had first been introduced to the planet billions of years before.

The spill receded. The water became still, silt stirring at the bottom, bubbles drifting to the surface. Tentatively the first of the animals crept forward to sip from the spring. When it didn't keel over or break out into pox, it was quickly joined by the rest to drink greedily.  Behind him, yareli made a muted cooing noise—one of the view vocalizations she was capable of.

“Didn’t know you were secretly an Oberon.”

Yareli curled her hands, clawing at the air. She stylized herself more a Khora.

Twyst squinted. His eyes drifted downward, then back up.

“Nah.” he announced. “Not big enough.”

Several moments passed before her face veil flared outwards.

Twyst smirked, fox-sly. It was wiped away when he turned in time to be struck in the face by a fist-sized globule of water. Yareli beckoned with her hand, dredging more of the projectiles to orbit them. The Operator threw up his hand to guard his face as the salvo struck again.

“Gking!” He sputtered through a nose full of water. “We’re going! Don’t distract the driver!”

The rodent’s chittering followed them all the way to the shoreline.

Twyst rested back his back against the unnaturally cold bone, gazing upward at its length. The sun was setting over the sea. Vasca kavats slunk in the shade, muzzles dripping red. The chill didn’t bother him the way it did others. It was familiar, comforting even. He wasn't sure that was a good thing. 

It was tapered towards the top, the base jutting untold depth into the ground, its mineral-encrusted length inscribed at the base with Ostron hieroglyphs meant to keep the spirit within dormant. It was ineffective, to say the least. Twyst was careful not to chew his lip as he wondered, distantly, what part of sentient anatomy it had contributed to. The habit had resulted in a series of scabs he’d only taken notice of after speaking extensively with the Drifter—also a stupid name. Also the kind of thing he’d run with given the chance. He’d learned not to do it after discovering just how irritating his face was.

Was it a rib? A ribcage? It was impossible to tell from this one shard: it had been so thoroughly dismantled, its parts scattered across the land, each left to brood out the centuries alone, that an accurate reconstruction was out of the question. The Sentient’s anatomy was protean—took such varied forms for any multitude of purposes that one could never be solidified as a reference point to compare with others. Another mystery of the Orokin, he supposed. Dramatic even in death.

He knew what he felt about the Grineer and Corpus. The infestation, too, was a relative no-brainer. But the machine-race’s history was too parallel for him to have those same emotions towards them. Too familiar. What he felt instead was something precariously close to respect, even sympathy.

Which made it all the harder to accept what had happened. Why were they still fighting? What was this war about, even? A conflict initiated on the grounds of an old grudge? Yes, now he knew who had been orchestrating it all along, that made perfect sense. “Not with bombs and blood, but with truth.” the blue bastard had said. The Ostrons would disagree.

He stood across a narrow band of beach, jagged silica crunching underfoot every time he shifted. Yareli crouched a distance away atop the ocean surface, tiny ripples emanating from her flowing dress, face veil waving in spite of a lack of any breeze, undulating like the waves sweeping across the sea. The briny cyborg tested the water with two fingers pressed to the suface, barely stretching the tension holding it together. She was husk-still in the same way unpiloted Warframes were; the empty facsimiles of reconstructed sinew that mostly comprised Tenno manpower. He could imagine her eyes—if she had them—shut in concentration. 

He liked to imagine she had eyes. He had no clue why. He guessed he wanted to compare them to his. At some point his own had gained a vitreous sheen, prismatic like seriglass oceans. He wasn't sure if the Void’s spontaneous whimsy that had resulted in their coloration, or his link with her, or both, or neither.

She could beckon to him to dive into an infested hive with her on a whim and he’d do so without a second thought. But she’d insisted on this, in that silent way. He didn’t mind, content to wait for her approval. Really, he was thankful for the moment to collect himself. The sea…unsettled him. The sea and space were often, incorrectly, compared. They couldn’t be more polarizing. It was too similar to the Void in all the ways space wasn't. Teeming. Alive. Every cresting wave, every bellow from below, every murky silhouette, added to this convincing incoherency, like a code only leviathans could decipher. Not even a Hydroid could command the ocean—only guide it: able to swim against the tide for brief spans, nudging it in ways they saw fit. But even a Warframe would tire and succumb eventually. 

That was all cosmically ironic, he knew, given who had been charged to him. Hell, he could barely even tolerate the gulf of space to begin with. If there was one thing he agreed with the Orokin about, looking up at the eye of Lua, it was that humanity had ever been a people of land. Now vacant derelicts teeming with ancient infestation, colony ships, void-beached towers haunted by single-minded sentries. They’d wanted to own the stars, yes, but had only been willing to do so when they could finally take their land with them.

The hubris used to be entertaining.

To exist on a placid island of ignorance. He would strangle Albrecht Entrati, he decided, if he ever met the father of Void travel. However unlikely that was.

Yareli stood up, head bowed as she moved slowly, almost respectfully. In turn, the waves—as if placated—buffeted around her, only rising high enough to lap at the rim of her elaborate weave. The syandana attached to her back by a clutch of venous umbilicus shuddered loose, hit the water with a much less elegant splash, then floated like a patch of seaweed. Her shoulders sagged briefly, back arching as it detached its pseudopods and proboscises, a thin crimson trail briefly following it into the water before dissipating, swallowed by the hungry sea. Tywst mimicked the motions sympathetically, feeling sharp fingers between his shoulders.

Unfurling tentacles from its center like a knot of kelp coming loose, the formerly inert syandana began to move. Slow at first, still waking up, it revealed the window-like surface of its back and underbelly as a fleshy scroll unfolding: a layer of see-through cartilage holding its flat, translucent organs. Short, loud clicks bubbled up as it contracted and relaxed muscles around its gills, the noises unmistakably happy, if a little groggy.

Merulina was, by far, the strangest beast Twyst had ever laid eyes on—which was saying something ever since receiving Krysis. The ray-like creature was a thing of living water and tame virulence, kept alive out of submersion by feeding off its host organism while dormant. It looked exactly like something the ocean and Void would spit out were they to conspire to create a creature.

It was also devilishly fast, on land and in water, which made for a delightful and exhilarating experience when behind the metaphorical armor of transference—and the much more literal armor of a Warframe.

Like the Warframe beckoning for him to join her right now.

Merulina drifted across the surface by curving its anguilline body and jetting water from specialized retrothrust gills. Yareli stood upon the oval-shaped cephalopod's disc-like mantle, perfectly balanced atop the shifting waves in a way that, even having been her for a significant proportion of his life, he just couldn’t mimic. She reached out for him, head tilted in a manner when he didn’t take it right away.

“I’m not afraid of getting wet.” 

Her hand didn’t waver.

“We could get ambushed,” he pointed out next, keeping his tone level. “We’ll be exposed. It’ll be like shooting pobbers in a coolant flow.”

Yareli brushed aside her dress. The fiery metal accents of the zylock locked to her thigh matched its wielder. The weapon was waterproof. He imagined her eyes now: lazy, chatoyant, a smirk played on her features but patient nonetheless. Every courtesy of hers stayed just the right side of mocking. 

Twyst eyes the ocean behind her, infinitely black aside from the river the sun had weft, then returns to her hand.

“Please?”

...

Yeah. No way was she letting him get out of this.

The texture of her glove was smooth as water-worn stone, but with an underlying warmth, enough to trick the brain into thinking oxygen-rich blood ran through her veins instead of icy saline and whatever other alchemical nightmares they’d pumped into her. He locked his arm around the much taller construct’s midriff from behind, muttering a series of Ostron folk-blessings. Yareli doesn't even notice as she guides them further out, skimming across the waves, building momentum. Kyrsis had been dismissed to roam. It would find its way back to them when they needed it. Mercy on any Grineer foolish enough to threaten the creature.

The waves began to blur by. Looking back over his shoulder, stomach dropping, Twyst saw the shore as a vague suggestion of sand and rocky outcrops.

Don’t look down. Do not look down.

He looked down through the translucent sac holding Merulina’s organs. It was a perfectly black hole underneath him, cutting a window through the frothy spindrift. He cannot see the bottom. 

Ai yo…

A quick squeezing of his arm was the only warning Twyst got before Merulina breached, taking them up into the air like a stone skipping across the surface. Beneath them he saw pigments of pink and blue shawls of fish; the palid gray of something immense and cetacean; the vestige meridian of the sun riding the horizon. And beneath them, Void only knew for the next few seconds.

Twyst tightens his grip, holding on for dear life as his world becomes a white scream swaddled in cold. But just before the sea hits him like a frozen fist and the negative pressure pops his ears, he has a thought. He imagined her face now. He imagined she was grinning something fierce.

That made it a little more bearable.

The fire croaked and cracked—the sounds coming through his ears muffled by water. Past its flickering corona the world flattened into a painting, broken up by once lordly terraces—now slimy, sunken ruins—revealed whenever the churning sea pulled back enough to unsheath tarnished gold steeples before they vanished beneath the waves again, their gold and silver a little duller every time. One such gorget of coral and once-opulence belayed a reef formed around a lighthouse since crumbled into the sea, now little more than a buffer against the swells that ensured the waves that reached the islet did little more than lick the beach.

Twyst pulled on his lobe with two fingers, gently palming the other side of his head with the other hand. Yareli had been able to dry him off with little more than a snap of her fingers—the water parting from his damp skin. Then she’d stoked the fire, having an innate sense of which twigs were dry, and which were still green and wet at their hearts. She was unable to help with his ears out of fear about the side effects. Namely that coaxing the water out may rip his eardrums apart. She was good, but not that good.

It was annoying more than painful. The knowledge he was being debilitated was like a lead net over his mind. He’d once made the mistake of staring at an open void battle when a capital ship’s reactor went critical and had been rewarded with a week spent in the sanitarium as the tissue of his eyes peeled and regrew. Impatience had nearly drive him to the edge of demanding bionics.

Sound crystalized as warm liquid trickled down his head. Twyst rolled his shoulders, satisfied, a lazy half-smile playing on cold-numbed lips as he raised a table. It fluoresced at his touch, very bright to dusk-attuned eyes. He began scrolling through it's contents, annotating as he saw practical.

Yareli crouched beside the beach, gliding her fingers underneath her familiar’s cephalic before lifting it into a quick hug. Merulina reciprocated with several pectoral appendages, the barbs along their undersides each making a slight suctioning noise when they popped off. Villi waved as the ray bubbled happily, then swam off into the briny deep. She stared off toward the sea in it’s wake, her back turned to him. Past her, the indigo horizon begins to bleed into the water; a purple-gold fade beneath sleepy stars. The light turned her metal accents into something molten.

For several moments she stood, still drenched in saltwater, limned in the dimming light of the sun. In that wan sheen her technocyte steel-skin almost glows, the flesh-weave of her dress perforated, jellyfish-luminescent, and her veil become a dowry of diamonds.

Then, her shoulders dropping, head lolling half-back, she turns around. 

A few strides carry her to him. Fabric soughed, a whisper through grass and stone The fingers of the fire almost seem to eek in the opposite direction when she stops and stares down at him. Twyst looks back up, the pad pulsing with an unfulfilled query. For a while they watch one another, the flickering firelight painting faces brass.

“What?” Twyst laughs.

She put out her hand and clicked her finger. Twyst slid her the tablet.

“Galleons. Thumpers. The one’s we’ve visited so far.” He explained, still uncertain as to her sudden curiosity. “A tally is all. Scrap of value for the locals. Raw material, credits. The usual stuff we ran before…” He trailed off. Really, nothing needed to be said. “Figured we may well get back into the swing of things.”

Yareli didn’t look up from her scrolling. She nodded slightly, appreciatively. Then she reared back her arm and threw it. 

Considering that Yareli—sylph thought she was, she was still a Warframe—had the strength necessary to throw a glaive and behead a grineer, alloy-armor and all—as well as anyone unfortunate enough to be standing immediately behind them—it travelled an admirable distance before vanishing like a droplet of kaleidoscopic water into the sea.

She turned around again. If she still had conventional eyes under there, Twyst knew she’d be glaring at him.

“Oh.” He replied eloquently. “You’re upset with me.” 

Yareli looked like she was trying to resist engulfing his head in a sphere of water. Thankfully she just nodded instead. 

“What for?”

You’re worrying too much. 

Irritation made her gestures rapid and somewhat slurred, compounded by whatever native accent she’d originally possessed working into her movements. Twyst’s knew he was in trouble when her pointer crooked at a severe angle. The degree of pique that implied her voice carried took him back. He was usually better at discerning how she felt.

“I don’t think you can worry too much when it comes to undetonated ordinance and Grineer kill-clades, the latter of whom may be armed with our own weaponry. The Ostrons have, what? Fishing poles? Zaws? The odd blunderbuss?”

The Ostrons have been surviving excursions for centuries longer than we’ve been active. They’ve been thriving off of it. They will be fine.

Twyst thought of the Unum, battered and gored. He thought of the air thick with ashes and embers, and licked salt from his lips. He thought of that ocean running red with blood, the shrill shriek of a condrix cracking open, the throaty thunder of artillery hitting home. He thought of the cairn.

“I’m sure they thought the same thing.” Twyst said bitterly. “After all, they were supposed to have us with them.”

We can’t be everywhere at once.

“Technically we already are.”

The false eyes on her helmet glared at him. Stop that.

“Could you please direct your blood-chilling emotionless gaze elsewhere? It’s really not like you. And I’m being serious. Eternalism and al—”

Stop. Her fingers stabbed toward him now, jutting in accusation. The sea seemed to churn, seeming irate We don’t know when we’ll get the chance to do something like this again, and you’re wasting it. Even then, there’s only one of you and me here, now. Why not consider yourself lucky to be him?

“That’s what this is about? That I’m not having mandatory fun?” He sighed, then pointed out to sea. “Seven hundred credits, by the way.”

No. You ass. She signed back, fingers paused in their parabolas, considering. You’ve been like this for a while, now. I wanted to give you space. But…you can’t keep doing this to yourself.

Her digits paused again at the end, discarding a half-formed phrase and substituting it with reference to himself. Twyst did not miss it.

It’s not about having fun. She looked away, body turned half to him, half to the open water. The Warfame stared out-sea, and he wondered what she felt stirring within that briny deep. It was rare he saw her troubled as such. 

I nearly lost you. She signed one-handed—quietly—movements placid as pondwater with very little of the fluency she usually articulated with.

Twyst felt foolish for not realizing sooner. 

There had been no celebration the day the war ended, and barely a commemoration for the dead the following weeks.The Grineer militay-industrial complex exponentiated every day while opportunistic Corpus exploited isolated communities. That was to say nothing on the Narmer and their enigmatic figurehead. The system would not wait, so life for the Tenno had gone on as it always had, only moreso: invasions had to be stemmed, fleets crippled, war-supplies defended and delivered, infestation culled. Their list of duties had only expanded in the aftermath, with less Warframes and Operators left to fulfill them. It had been redline since day one.

But that didn’t mean he could just ignore her. Or himself.

We did lose each other, Twyst signed, slipping into handshape. Every Tenno pair involving sentient Warframes and their Operator’s he’d met before had their own variations on the language that made aspects indecipherable to anyone other than that particular pair. It added a layer of idioglossia to the exchange that made it feel more personal. We were just lucky to find our ways back.

Plenty didn’t. Yareli signed back. She made to say more, but Twyst cut her off.

I still haven’t told you what really happened after I fell in. He paused, forming the hand-glyph for uncertainty. I’m not really sure how to describe it. I don’t think I can. But being away from you? He smiled. “That sucked.”

Yareli stared down at him some more before deciding she didn’t like the angle. She sat down on her keees, hands in her lap—a common position of Tenno meditation. The zenith of his head barely reached the uppermost protrusion of her faceplate. Were they eyes, he wondered? One had been gouged by her carving. He wondered what the self-enucleation symbolized.

So why not appreciate the opportunity we've been given?

“You remember the martial display the alliance hosted three years back?” Twyst waved his hand theatrically. “Three dozen Tenno in perfect sync. Days of preparation. Pretty lights and food and literature and history and—”

Yareli ticked her head in a way that implied a snort. I remember having to keep waking you up.

“Then you already knew my answer. Wanderlust is lost on me. So why ask?”

Yareli paused. One hand retreated back to her lap. You don’t need to feel guilty.

Twyst shook his head. “It’s not guilt. Not entirely. I…I know there’s nothing we could have done here to change this. I just…how can I relax when every second we spend indulging ourselves, someone is in need?”

It’s not “indulging”. It’s a necessity. Pressure makes diamonds, but it also makes—

“Rubble.” Twyst surrenders a wry smile, bordering on a wince. “Please, never quote Ordis again. He’s a good cephalon, and we owe him a lot, but his advice is a little…”

Schizophrenic?

“I was going to say mollycoddling.”

But?

Twyst laughed, realizing it’d been hours since he last contacted Ordis. No doubt the old ghost was on the verge of a parental panic-attack at the lack of contact, caught between deciding whether he should do nothing, send a passive missive-query for acknowledgment, or order an orbital bombardment on their surrounding location. 

He thumbed a device on his waist that sent a signal to confirm they wouldn’t need to turn the surrounding sea into an artillery range. “It’s the way of things.” He said to her after a pause. “It’s our responsibility to them. We made a mess of the system and just expected the survivors would have sorted things out after we left with our happily-ever-after. Not even mentioning the Sentients.” He smiled dryly. It wasen’t that there was anything particularly mirthful about remembering the genocide the Tenno had perpetuated. He just found the spontaneity amusing in hindsight. “We really didn’t think this through, did we?”

We only had one shot…but no. Not really.

“‘You’re actions have consequences.’”

Shut.

Twyst undid the lid to a canteen by his side and took a sip. The kubichi was pleasantly warm, mostly sweet thanks to maprico syrup, but noticeably bitter, helping soothe his razzled nerves while dissuading overindulgence. Even when he permitted himself luxuries, they was measured. The cheap liquor was associated with inexperienced offworlders attempting—and failing by virtue of said inexperienced—to more successfully integrate with the culture, but he’d always found the drink agreeable enough. What that said about his standards or lack hereof he’d yet to find at the bottom.

“And we made the right one. No two-ways about it.” He gestured with the canteen over his head, pointing landward. “But this is the fallout.” 

I hate that. There was no hint of reprimand or malice in the gestures. Only vexation being vented.

“Me too. But still.”

Yareli seemed to breathe deeply: her shoulders shrugging back, spine arching. She collapsed at once, appearing shorter than before—sheepishly so. Was she ashamed of her outburst? Did she think she was being petulant? He was about to tell her not to worry about it when she raised her hands again. What she said next took Twyst aback.

Your parents.

Twyst paused. He slipped the lid on and buried the canteen in the sand to his left before asking at length, “What about them?”

Wherever they are, whoever they were—they’d be proud of who you are now.

The Operator’s eyes drifted out to see. Something had spilled tentacles across the reef-tower. They slithered closer to a lone condroc, its back turned, head buried in crevices for landlocked fish cast up by the most recent wave.

“I don’t even remember what we were doing there.” He muttered, uncertain what expression he wore as he recalled events. “I mean, what we were doing there. My family. If we were just trying to do our part for the Empire, or starting over, or if we did something to warrant relocation or…or if we were just voluntold.”

The condroc’s head swiveled up, raptorial eyes blinking away salt crustation on its lashes. A fish of vivid scales was caught unmoving in its beak, having suffocated. It tilted back its head and took the fish down its gullet, scales and bones and all. The tendrils crept closer, encircling. The rest of the creature remained submerged.

“We were in class when we made the jump just past Saturn. Studying…I don’t know. Wasn't paying attention. Not until the alarms went off.”

They huddled in the dark near indiscernible to one another under the faint cast of emergency lumen-strips. Every accidental brush was met with a sharp inhalation, followed by shuffling as they moved away. But not too far away. To the ship’s left, a window gazed out into the Void. Someone had blocked it off with curtains when the blast shield failed to fully deploy. Migraine-bright colors bled through the imperfect seams, saturating the room in lambent light that refused to blend with the narrow diffusion of their flashlights and lumen-strips, like oil and water in the same cup. And though he couldn’t be sure looking back, Twyst could almost swear it was like it was reaching inside, encircling them like…like fingers.

“I hadn’t even spoken to most of them before then. But I…felt like I had to take care of them. It was just us, for days. We didn’t eat. We didn’t sleep. We couldn’t.”

He’d just drank, but his throat was already parched again.

“When they started beating down the door, when they started breaking down the barricade…I was desperate.”

Desperate enough to make a deal with the Devil.

“I don’t even remember their faces.”

That was the one thing about the nightmare he was thankful for.

It took Twyst a few moments to register the pressure around his hand. The digits atop his. He refocused, blinking back tears. He tasted blood at the corner of his mouth. He’d been chewing his lip.

Yareli was on her knees, crooned down to his level. The Warframe held the back of his hand in one of her own and cupped his cheek with the other. Tapered digits trailed along his jaw, pricking at the skin slightly. Around them, the sunlight had dampened to something spectral. The strange ephemera the Ostrons called Breath of the Eidolon pooled around the islet, curing embryonically, luminescent and writhing discomfitingly like something alive. The fog was noticeably moving in the same direction, reaving towards the mainland, flooding there with obvious intent.

Yareli didn’t care. If a Hydrolyst showed up, she’d kill it. If whatever that thing on the Praghasa was showed up, she’d kill it too.

The Condroc twitched, head shuffling to ruffle mangy plumage. The pseudopods lunged, whipcrack-fast. The avian was faster, launching off into the air even as the limbs uncoiled to their full lengths in pursuit. But it was already gone.

It was several more moment’s before the Warframe released her Operator at the latter’s insistence. She removed her hand from his—reluctantly—and it was only then he realized his hands were shaking without her to stabilize them. He spent the next moments running through a series of Vazarin breathing techniques until his heart stopped racing. The insistent second-beat remained irritatingly monotasked, and its presence had never before been so easily noticed.

“Sorry.” Twyst said breathlessly, eyes fluttering from the hint of memory. “I don’t know what happened.”

Yareli shook her head. Her hands hovered in front of her past that, unsure if she should ask the obvious question.

I didn’t think you remembered anything from the Jump. She signed wearily.

“I didn’t a year ago.”

This has to do with what happened after I dropped you.

“You didn’t drop me. You were shot in the back. It nearly cut you in half.” He recalls the unpleasant memory with a glance into the fire. “It was neither of our faults.”

You can…  

“I know I can tell you. I know you’ll listen. But I’m…” A twig cracked. He winced. “I’m not ready to.”

He’d said it earnestly, and Yareli knew immediately it came from his heart. It didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Not being able to help him felt like a failure—one that only compounded upon the day’s unsuccessful excursion. It had been a mistake dragging him out here.

Either through the transference link or the myriad ways he read her, Twyst took note of her dejection almost immediately. He beckoned for the Warframe to come closer, hand outstretched. Yareli took it without hesitation, slithering closer, silks skimming across fingers of grass. Her faceplate is inches from the flesh of his own. He capriciously eyes the complexion, the variegation where enamel and salt have built, and takes note when she seems to shudder and slink away under his gaze. He’d never had that effect on her before. But a lot changed in the last year.

“You’ve never let me down.” He squeezes her hand, and she reciprocates. She could twist her wrist slightly and dislocate his arm, shatter a few fingers without even meaning too. “You’ve always had my back, even when neither of us knew it.” 

He believed it completely. Eternalism or not, nothing would have changed that. The heart was an unreliable organ, and he could no longer be certain his consciousness was the only one in his mind anymore. But he felt it in his bones, his hand, and in her.

She was trying to look away from him now, though didn’t make any effort to pull away. A flicker of consciousness brushes against his own and he smiled, smeeta-sly, understanding.

He adjusted his grip so he was holding her by the fingers alone—a curious arrangement, though one she didn’t protest to—thumb running the nacreous valleys of her knuckles. Warframe skin was like very flexible rubber. Firm, but not hard. The cloth accenting her was the smoothest, softest thing he’d ever felt, but the armored parts were harder than steel. Super-dense muscles coiled beneath.

With his free hand he brushed aside the veil and took the side of her head in his palm, mapping the topography of trenches adoring the mask. It had the texture of jagged rock, tossed to the bottom of a riven, worn by eons to a smooth finish. In the antumbra the firelight revealed the arteries within the veil as lines of black, thin as fish bones. He knows she did not breathe in the same way he did anymore, but Twyst swears he hears a mute inhalation, like someone holding their breath.

“Did it ever occur to you that I didn't care what we were doing, or where we were going, so long as I did it with you?”

Not even a Frost could have stilled her in her tracks so perfectly. But he wasn't done yet. Slowly, carefully, he raises her hand to his mouth and plants a bare kiss to each tapered digit.

He smiled at her fugue state. He’d never in his long years seen a Warframe look nonplussed—much less his Yareli. He catches movement behind her and realizes the waves were beating against the shore harder than before. He focused on her as she began to recover, an amused glint in Void-touched eyes.

“Are you doing th—”

She pushes him back. The strength of a Warframe, even one as petite as the Yarelis, was still more than an unaugmented human could ever possess. He went down into the dry grass, feeling it fold beneath him. A weight settles on his lap. Something knocks against him, smooth, pressing the ridges of his face in maladroit ways. 

It takes him several moments to realize what she was trying to do. Turns out, so did she.

Yareli pulled away as fast as she’d gone in, breaking their connection in a rare moment of total insolation. Numbing transference static buzzed in their minds. Oscillating across the link, the emotional whiplash was felt by both right before they disentwined. Shock from the Operator. Embarrassment, distress, revulsion from Yareli. And now pain.

The Warframe was still in his lap, her knees on the outside of his legs, lotus-like dress flowering beneath her, moving tempestuously as her upper body swung, panicked, like a shark caught in a net being slowed to a crawl. Suffocating. Hands had flown to her helmet. Claws probed the spot where her mouth should have been.

Drowning! Drowning!

He takes her wrists without even thinking. The moment he touches her the link reestablishes. She stops immediately. Goes slack. Lets her Operator guide her hands away her faceplate and the marks her claws had left on the surface. Her shoulders heaved, though whether that was her breathing or a subconscious imitation of a redundant act, Twyst didn’t know.

They stare through one another for what feels years. He knows the injury has subsided to a dull throb, rendered ignorable through centuries of exposure. But it was the threat of its return—sudden, unbidden, familiar —that made her wilt inward and appear so, so small.

The Warframe adjusts herself, trying to stand. She wants to apologize, but her hands are clumsy and cannot form the gesture so close to him. Hands on her back stop her from getting any further. She could, of course, have broken his grip on her easily. But she finds herself unable to move past the barrier he’s formed of his hands and torso. She has to look down at an incline to meet her Operator. Chatoyant eyes swim with liquescent horrors. She latches on like a lifeline.

“Breathe”

The oxygen is absorbed straight into her skin through mucus-lined gills supplied by vents in her armor. It is a poor substitute for breathing. But it mostly works.

“They're not here. They’re gone.” He squeezes her gently. An embrace, she realizes. “They're never coming back. We made sure of that. Remember?”

The Night of the Naga Drums. Umbra. Praghasa. 

No more Seven. No more surgeries. No more Ballas.

Ataxia wins. She sinks fully into the numb embrace of the link. Her head finds the crook between shoulder and neck. Her helmet does not entirely fit into the groove, but neither minds. Metal and flesh are not so different. The former can be soft, and the latter hard, under the right circumstances. Strange, how natural this configuration of dermis feels. With the Orokin, every cursory brush of maintenance, every innocuous artisan stroke, felt like a violation. But of the two of them—one capable of grabbing the other and snapping his neck with a twist of her wrist—he handled her with utmost carefulness, though she’d wilt like something of thin arteries and gaseous bladders brought up from the bottom of the sea. So gentle. So cautious of how their bodies fit.

When they break an indeterminate timespan later, it is brimming with reluctance. He’s still looking at her, though now his expression has condensed in an irritated manner. But it wasn't directed at her. Rather is was…the rest of her.

“You wanted to kiss me.”

His hands release her back and trails to her helmet. Phalanges lace around the front of the mask, probing the sides. She stiffened when the questing appendages found the latches tucked behind the circumference of her head.

Her fingers lace with his, stopping their motions before they can be enacted. Yareli eyes her Operator unsuredly—something she felt amused him greatly.

Twyts shrugs out of her grip. “How about a deal, then?” Her Operator says unremarkably. But she can feel, physically, his heart racing in the cradle of his ribs. “Like always. Meet in the middle, for one thing we both want.”

Was her apprehension born of trepidation or excitement? She cannot tell. Cannot focus on anything other than reading his face. Was that a rueful bend his lips had taken—as if consigned to a bitter fate—or his usual predisposed smirk?

“I’ve forgotten too many faces.” He said, thumb running the ridge beneath one of the carved eye-like protrusions of her faceplate, then became thoughtful. Were they practical, or inspirations from a mythology long forgotten? “I’ve forgotten my own.“ He smiled ruefully. “I want to see you.”

She dips her chin, submitting.

She shucks her veil. His hands find the left side of her face; her the right. She helped, hesitantly, unsurely, to shed her half-mask. Digits that could balance a razor betwixt fingers while cresting colossal waves fumbled with the latches: near invisible seams hidden within the depths of her veil along the lower and upper half of her helmet, behind the jaw and eyes.

The bottom are undone. The top follow. By the end, only two clicks have sounded: both sets broken in perfect synchronicity. Water drips from between the moment the hermetic seal breaks.

She waves him away, leaving her to finish the ritual. Before she pulls away the plate, she studies his eyes, burning gold in the firelight. 

It was said to look into the Void was to invite madness. Baseless superstition that still received blame for hundreds of unexplained cases of delirium, assault, and murder every solar year. The Void was empty aside from sentry-haunted tower-bastions—sanctuaries constructed, sent, and then Void-beached during the Old War—and whatever other Empire-era technology had fallen through the cracks into that other-side. It was a thing useful only as a medium of travel and storage, and could be respectfully ignored in all other aspects.

The Tenno knew better. The Void was an ocean—teeming, alive —and took every opportunity it could to invent itself upon this one. The end result of such incursions was her and him. And they were the best-case scenario.

But she didn’t see malevolence in those permutating oceans. What she saw was crushingly close to eagerness. To hunger of a more wholesome kind. But hunger nonetheless. One she shared. 

He was like her. No. He was just like her.

Yareli rips off her mask and exposes her naked skin to air, and breathes the way she was meant to for the first time in one thousand years.

Myths are pretty things. They are also full of lies.

Argosies of Old Earth had tales and songs of beautiful women at sea. Half-fish, half-girl, they’d lure sailors to watery graves with irresistible hymns: water-witches dragging infatuated sea salts overboard or capsizing entire ships upon jagged, unseen outcrops as captains steered towards their plainsong. This was all, of course, so they could feed on the unwary, the unprepared, the foolish, or the young and merciful.

How such things came about, who was to say? Perhaps there was something of the primordial Void tearing the Membrane even back then. Enough influence to turn men and women into beasts; angels from memories dead so long they knew only rage and sorrow; young girls into wights of salt, teeth, and black hearts pushing ice-water through narrow veins.

Myths are pretty things. They are also full of lies.

She was neither of these things.

Silence steeps for a time. Fog breaths across the ocean. Neither moved when the fire choked and dimmed, leaving them under Lua’s dull effulgence. Amid the still sea and dim light, it felt as though nothing ever had.

Twyst moved first. He takes the mask from Yareli’s unresisting grip, traces the ritual disfigurement along its diagonal. He wonders, a mark of freedom, or a scar? He probes the cardinals around the edges of each quadrant, and feels himself scowl at the callous method of linkage. Not latches. Zinc anodes, salt-crusted, sunk into the pale flesh and bone of her face, stuck in a cycle of corrosion and restoration. 

He set he mask next to the canteen. The sand around it dampens. He looks up. 

Yareli oils away, twisting her veil to obstruct her features. Her eyes: four black over-protrusions set into her skull, wide enough to appear almost alien. Scant curling inks of translucent hair, like the lures of anglerfish, swept across transparent skin, blue-red arteries swimming beneath cheekbones carved for killing. Everything that was a reminder of what she now was: an inhumane thing wrenched from the deepest abyssal plains, brought squirming to the surface accoutered in rotten meat. The seam of her mouth remains shut.

Twyst briefly rankles at the smell. The briny headiness suffusing them nearly disguises the vinegar of the carcass within that hell of confinement: the formaldehyde she’d been steeping in for centuries. He brushes aside the veil, again, and feels her whole body go rigor-tense. He does not touch her, merely looks. What he saw of her skin was the unhealthy gray of a waterlogged corpse, or of a shark’s underbelly. Where there should have been her mouth was the smooth flesh of a lipless seam—spongy and chewed like his own. Her expression, as such, was entirely unreadable. A first in all the time he’d known her.

He regards the pensiveness that has possessed her, and quickly re-discovers where it stems from. He glides forward, freeing himself from passive observation to slide a hand to the nape of her neck, feeling the cap of vertebrae there, the pulse of icy blood through thin, moist skin. He does not move to restrain, to control, to adore. He does nothing but rest her head in his loose grasp. 

Eventually, she looks at him again, pupiless eyes peering out from behind her hair. It triggers something rudimentary in Twyst, and her shudders from rigor. He returns her regard neutrally at first, but becomes unable to stop slyness from infecting his voice and seizing his muscles to shape something that could have been mistaken for a grimace by anyone who didn’t know him better.

“Is this really what you were afraid to show me?” Twyst asks, mocking offense. 

A nod and unclenching of her jaw. Yareli blinks her eyes, unused to undiluted light. She hadn’t heard him say anything after removing the mask, so had expected the worst. Not even Warframes were immune to trepidation.  

Twyst smiles, face becoming taut, a little grim “Did you forget who I crawled to too pick me up after I finally got out of that excessively-decorated coffin?”

Yareli again shook her head. She seemed to relax, finally, enough that Twyst felt confident in asking, quietly, “May I?”

the Waverider considers. Nods again. His grin is devilish, belying his touch. It had been a wager, she thought: exposing herself to his judgment. For all she knew about him, there were still things beyond her ken, hidden in paces beyond her reach, and what she’d chosen had been an antiquated method cold and old as the ocean’s deep. It had threatened to crush her. But Warframe or not, you should never bet against a demon.

He runs his hand over her jaw, dipping in and out of the crevices beneath. He discovers that the pale flesh of her face is not skin, but a layer of scales so small, so finely set, it confounded the eyes, only able to be discerned by dragging his finger opposite the grain. The degree of osteo-deviancy she had been subject to was less severe than some other models, giving her an almost streamlined quality: somewhat angular and raptorial—like something made to move quickly through fluids while expending the least possible energy. Less shy now, she leans into everything he does. She places her fragile faith and unbreakable flesh in his grasp, eyes shut. She probably hasn’t felt true touch since internment, relying only on the haptic feedback of her armor. Perhaps, then, this was a drug to her.

It’s in one such moment—tracing the seam where her mouth should have been—his thumb finds an unexpected lack of resistance behind the tissue. “What’s th—

Yareli’s lip peels back, slightly, and he sees that she does have a mouth. She must have seen his surprise, because she smiles. What follows looks painful. The act—a peeling of muscles, a twitch of waterlogged arteries—splits her face apart by the seams. Her mouth is razored and round. Her translucent black teeth were needle-sharp and pinky-long, numbered in the dozens.

Twyst laughs in easy reply. “Oh.” His keratin strokes the outside enamel, imploring her to hide nothing. She opens wider: a tongue like a distended eel writhes inside amid polyps of flesh. The salt-tang is both overwhelming and has nothing to do with the ocean.

He removes his hand, thumb trailing a membrane of mucus, and settles fully upright. His Warframe’s hands find the small peaks of his shoulders as she balances eye-level with him. What follows is a moment of almost childish anxiety from both of them, dispelled by a liquid sound. A gurgling intonation, made manifest with what little humanity remained in her. Yareli’s substitute for a laugh. It sweeps uncertainties under like a wave crashing on unprepared heads. Twyst thought of her many expressions, all symbolic of that precarious non-committance unique to youth. Had she been any older than him when she’d been transformed? Had she been willing?

He smothered the thought, killed it before it could be born so it does not cross the link. It would not ruin this.

It’s not a seamless melding. Definitely no transference. The telemetry of his face did not fit with the flatness of hers, requiring irritating adjustments. But it is enough. It is more than enough.

It’s little more than a superficial peck. Dipping one’s toes in the water. Twyst breaks, smiling like a fool. Yareli licks her lipless lower face before gazing at him with opaque eyes that blinked out of sync.

“See?” He says, voice feathery. “A lot easier without the mask in the—”

Claws envelop the back of his head. Yareli lunges—an angler chasing its lure.

She presses herself into him until their teeth nock together. The skin of her tattered lips is cold, clammy, corpse-like. Her spittle is mucus-thick, tongue a compass of salt and copper. The orchestral flavor of it all is completed by an underlying medicinal sweetness, like something artificially produced. Not the worst thing he’d tasted. Still probably a good idea not to swallow too much—which was difficult, her tongue invading his mouth, seeking his. The smell, astringent embalming fluids and salt, repels and bewitches.

She released him, finally. Twyst pulls away gasping for breath. He is distantly aware he can hear waves pounding the shore now,  water sloshing back out to sea and things scutting for cover. Still heaving, he smiles tiredly and bats his lashes toward the turbulent ocean. “So that was you.”

So what if it was?

“Nothing at all.” Twyst purrs, feline in his satisfaction. “Indulgent enough for you?”

The device at his hip buzzes. Yareli pulls away, face taut in a scowl. Twyst reaches for the clip, assertains the recent bevy of information. Missed messages from Ordis. Lots of missed messages from Ordis, among more critical information.

“Sentient energy spikes visible from orbit. We just missed our pickup for the next planetary half-cycle.” As if in reply, the dread-moan of an emerging eidolon rolled across the waves like thunder. Not a roar. A dirge. Its source was easily miles away. But better not to risk a run in with the vengeful revenants. Even before the War, the landscape was littered with the wrecks of transports that thought they could outmaneuver the lumbering behemoths.

Twyst sighed, throwing his head to stare up at Lua, resting his back on a bed of dry grass. His Warframe drift’s silently closer, presses herself to the chapel of his chest, carefully fits herself into his arms, body curling into a question. The irony of the position suited them just fine. He pats her head, rolling the membranous flesh-fabric between his fingers, marveling at the softness. She had, at some point, fitted her mask in place again. He would have preferred she had not, but acknowledged it was the empirical choice.

“This is your fault.” he says without accusation, idlying stargazing. “One day he’s going to slip into a refrenation cascade over how much he worries over us.”

He felt her shrug again into him, singularly unrepentant, and he realized something that at first surprised him. It was beautiful here. The sun had fully set, leaving the ocean swaddled in fog fanned by caressing, salt-laden breezes. Once golden splendor became deified in silver, became almost ageless. The scene spoke of a sense of timelessness, or perhaps patience.

But none of that entertained him. That was the issue, really. Every attempt to appreciate the scenery resulted in the frustration of trying too hard to take it in. He was not made for these quiet moments. But it was tempting—painfully tempting—to imagine himself here, with her, until the islet sank beneath the sea.

But that was impossible. It had ceased to be possible a thousand years ago, on a ship at the very edge of the Empire, during a perfectly calculated mistake that changed everything forever. That devilish exchange in that house of horror that perpetuated a lifetime of war.

He’d known, even before he’d taken that thing’s hand, one way or another it was getting what it wanted. There was a reason it had approached him. Every possibility had converged to a simple conjuncture: yes or no? One of them would have to pick whatever the other didn’t. They’d been herded like tamms, and this was the fallout. Tomorrow would likely see them picking through a debris field, or culling what remained of the Narmer, and they would do so without complaint. Sacrifice eternal amid a duty without end. The sundries of the Ostron's pastoral existence was something to be protected and envied—never attained.

But at least he had her. That meant something, in all of this.

“Now that I finally looked…it is a pretty nice view.” 

Told you so. Yareli signed one-handed, the other being used as a pillow on top of his chest. Twyst was content to let her think he was talking about the sea.

Chapter Text

“Listen. Listen to him howl.”

She listened. Repeat bouts of screaming could be heard from the pit level below, sometimes breaking down into quiet moans, other times—like now—rising rapturously into howls that rode up from the oubliette, echoing off the golden steeples of the crown-shaped stadium in tortuous ways. It was human, that much was certain. If only just.

She peered over the rail-less edge of the parapet, aware of the Warden visible in her peripheral, the unblinking stone eyes of his mask watching her intently from a tilted head. The hold reeked of some musky, burning carcinogen. Sulphurous air caught on the updraft blasted her, making her eyes itch and water. It stirred a touch of anger in her heart she struggled to fully control or explain.

She kept her expression utterly neutral. It was an easy thing to be unbothered by scrutiny and bad weather after you’d been executed a few thousand times. 

Staring down into the prison was like staring into a jug without a bottom as it attempted to be filled. The stone bowl had been hollowed out to make room for the waterfall spitting out from the landing she stood on—all of which poured ceaslessly through the opening and out into the nothing below the hold. Narrow open-top catwalks jutted from the walls in a downward spiral, concoursing between holding cells honeycombed into the vast masonry that stared inward, golden gates unfettered by the constant spray of mineral water. They could have been iron, or wood, or straw, and they’d have stood forever. Nothing ever rusted in Duviri.

Despite its purpose as a place of holdings and executions, it was still Orokin, and that normally meant priceless articles at every angle. Orokin architecture and artistic taste was like being gouged in the eyes by a leucotome of precious metals—and under the King’s reign it had only been exaggerated to proportions that would have envied its originators. Silver begot gold just as piety begot fanaticism, or thought begot fact. 

In that aspect, it stood out in its forsaking of the formermost tedium. Of course, there were hints of gold here and there: princely affluence peeking brightly through the fiery sphere surrounding the island, the odd brutal spike in place of vexilla. But the ostentation was otherwise kept to a offensive minimum. The simplicity seemed somehow to clash with everything else she’d seen in all her time spent here—stood out because of how distinctly unlike it was—which, she’d only recently learned, was a great deal. From atop looking in, it appeared nothing more than a grey-black pit of destitution, as if it slid up from the antediluvian plateau it ranged above. Not Orokin. Something adjacent to it—the ancient brutality without the gilt exterior.

If that wasn't enough, if she hadn’t known anything else, she still would have figured it out. Under it all—no, in the stone itself—she could feel a concentration of despair, of violence, of hate in its bones and golden tops like a knife dragging across skin, incumbent within every joist. A vortex of paranoia, anger, and guilt. She stood on floors made of sorrow beneath skies of rage surrounded by walls made as much to hide the world away as keep someone within.

She steadied herself against a lurch of nausea. She was still unused to the intricacies of transference, but she hid it well enough for the Warden to mistake her qualm for understanding.

“A dreadful sound, isn’t it? His voice was a snake’s sigh, echoing whimsically after that first bellow. A honeyed travesty that matched with the headiness of wine lingering around his person above the cinder-smell of the spiral. It was the kind of voice that told you exactly what you wanted to hear. “It’s been some time since he’s lasted this long. Robust as he is, his larynx usually gives out by this point.” 

Dow watches him shiver slightly, though knows it is not from the mournfulness of the noise. This was opera to him.

She looked back up. Ashen winds buffeted her, an indiscernible sulfurous bitterness tickling her tongue. The sky was bleeding: a fiery red above the glittering faery necropolis and its silver foliage. Clouds and Void-eddies alike formed furnace-faces: facsimiles of the King with burning coals for eyes, stopped mid-shout, mouths open as if about to devour the floating islands of Duviri whole. She knew it was irrational, but could not help feeling they were glaring squarely at her.

A single arm extended towards the hold past her, almost close enough to brush her cheek. The Warden’s skin was the blue of an asphyxiated corpse laced with gold filigree. His hands were like spiders. “Though I think it more pitiful. Wouldn’t you agree?”

His hand remained extended, curiously long fingers grasping at nothing, like an invitation unanswered.

The hand finally retracted, coyishly. If the Warden was offended, his mask did nothing to betray it. 

“Alas, it is only fitting for a creature as wrrretched as he,” The Warden rolled his r’s—something that Dow, unreasonably she acknowledged, found especially irritating. Evidently so had the prisoner, else this echo would not be doing it. “His mother named him well. Cursed from the moment of his creation. His torment is right. It is just.”

Dow finally acknowledged the only other person on the overlook with her—though perhaps that was stretching the definition. Her eyes settled on his hypnagogic face: a stony mask of irritating familiarity and beauty. Her’s had just begun to finally show the leathered erosion of age. The telltale sign of one who’d broken the cycle. Who’d escaped. 

In this place of black and white, the golden man stood out. He leaned forward in his backless seat, legs crossed, a steaming cup of mulled wine in one palm. Just as the prisoner was not referred to by his name, this manifest-echo lacked one too. The Warden. She remembered what Acrithis had told her, and wondered if he knew of the irony his title crowned upon him. 

Dow drew breath before wincing. Brimstone stung the sores within her mouth. She’d relished the feeling at first. It meant change. But she’d quickly learned change isn't inherently good.

“The children don’t seem to think so.”

“Children,” The Warden made a venomous play of the word. Bombastine would have envied that one, surely. “The brats are at their chanting again? Fools. Were the King himself not a child, I would have them hanged for an eternity until they learned to behave. Do they not know it is rude to gossip?”

“Is it all rumor, then?”

“No.” The Warden shook his head. Dow got the impression he was smiling behind his mask. “I assure you, the truth is much worse.”

Another howl—just as forlorn, just as anguished as every other. Fire shot from the sky, as if in spiteful reply. The meteor came close to smashing into the isle, but careened off into the infinite Void below instead. Scowling faces of smoke and spark twisted in the trail before dissipating into nothing.

“What is he?”

“Offender of sins unimagined. A murderer of rare and gruesome tale—”

“But what is he?”

The Warden looks her up and down, pausing at each new instance of tattered rags. Though not pompously dressed in ermine and satin like the covetous courtier himself, she could well imagine the disapproval in his eyes. Her thick coat, once black, now an indeterminate gray. Dust clinging to her heels. She never stayed anywhere long enough to bother telling folks her name. Besides, she'd learned early: never do more than you had too, and nobody would ever ask you for anything.

Nothing rusted in Duviri. But people did.

He settled eventually on her face, and chuckled quietly. “Don’t you already know, chimera?” He gestures despotically to the dungeon below. “He is more than a monster. I keep him locked up here for his own safety, and that of all Duviri. He understands this. It is voluntary. In a way, I am doing him a favor.”

Ah, yes. To protect the palaces of gold, the verdant fields of green, blue, and fuschia. All of which were—yet again—burning to the ground because the King woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Oh, well. She guessed she shouldn’t be too harsh. It was her fault, after all.

Another howl, but quieter, like it was mustered with the dredges of the former’s energy. It was followed by a barely audible clang, like metal on metal, then quiet.

“That does not sound voluntary.”

“Of course it does not. He is in pain.”

“So what if he wanted to leave?”

“Then he is free to do so. But why would he ever want that? This citadel was made by him, though I doubt he knows that much. If he wanted to leave so badly, why, he could just walk right out!” The Warden leaned forward in his seat, head resting on his grotesquely overextended arm, knees crossguarded. “Yet, he does not. He screams and sobs all day and all night and all day again in an echo chamber of his own design. He does so because deep down, he knows this is what he deserves.” He sighed elegantly before prostrating himself again. “He really is a fascinating incongruity. Such a zealous propensity for torture, offset by an abundance of penitence.”

The Drifter looks across the firestorm to the citadel of the King. Apart from forlorn hold, it stood a tower of gold and glass: the most stalwart structure in all the isles. But below perilous skies, it looked remarkably gaudy but equally fragile—like a house of cards hanging over a vast ethereal blankness, waiting for a stray gust to blow it apart. That summed up everything here, she supposed.

“The King wishes for him to suffer?”

The Warden sighed, as if disappointed. Dow rankled, though kept her tongue. “Foolish girl. Were you not paying attention? Of course, The Great Dominus knows all that goes on in His land. But this is not His land. It’s a…blind spot, we shall call it. Though I doubt he is left unaware of when this place drifts close to the mainland again—we’re on his doorstep, after all—he is witless to what goes on past its shores. He has no power here. Not even the orowyrms dare come close.” He shifted closer and shared in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think, if I may be so bold, that they are afraid of him.”

“He does not sound like the kind of person to be afraid of.”

“Not in this state. As I said, he may leave whenever he wishes. Who's to say that if they annoyed him enough, he wouldn’t stop his moping long enough to come out and see what the ruckus was about? No.” The Warden gestures to the sky above, roiling like an ocean of fire. “Even in his foulest of moods, the King is wise enough to leave the fiend to wallow in his own pity. As it stands, I get the odd Dax—tired of ransacking villages and beheading suspected spies of our One True King, I suppose—wanting to test their mettle in the pit. Fools. Entertaining, at least.”

Dow perked. “He is allowed to fight?”

“Of course. His sentence embodies pain both mental and physical. And though he does an admirable job of taking care of both accounts without any outside assistance, the trials ensure he does not grow numb to it. If he were to only suffer, he would forget he suffered at all.” The echo of the Executor gestured to himself. “Obviously, he does not want that.”

Dow looked down into the pit, catching the faintest glimpse of hands pulling away from bars, receding into the black.

“Maybe he does.”

Just as she’d hoped, the Warden was quiet to that. His stony mask regarded her with the hostility of the besieged, yet never stood from his seat. If he did, he’d likely tower over her.

Abruptly, his supercilious and sneering disposition changed. He perched upright again. When he spoke it was with palpably bitter delight.

“If you still have your doubts…then perhaps you’d like them burned away?” He offered. “It has been a while since the last contestant came by. Care to find out why? Though I warn you, if you’ve learned nothing else, learn this: he does not like to be disturbed.”

Dow glanced back to the dank and numerous cells over the precipice. The only sound now was the waterfall’s filtering as it plummeted off to places unknowable. She could see the vague figure of someone leaning against the gatehouse against a different cell, though could discern no further details. 

“I accept. On one condition.”

The Warden entertained the notion with amused disdain. Dow weathers it. She’d been far too patronized by far less pleasant individuals to otherwise be bothered with his sarcasm. Mostly. She’d be willing to make an exception for this one under different circumstances. Then again, maybe he was incapable of refusing at all, if her hunch was right.

“An equitem, it was.” The Warden eventually said. “I allowed her to bring her kaithe in, and it was the most splendid duel I’ve seen in a long time. So, I suppose it is only right I make an exception for you, too. Oh, fine, troublesome chimera—what do you propose?”

Still keeping her expression neutral, Dow pursed her lips and whistled. For some time there was relative silence. Then came the low wingbeats and otherworldly hum of a kaithe drawing near. 

The pegasus came to a clattering halt across front hem, its bony frame chunking loudly before it settled, wings dispersing into swirls of sand, head twisting unnaturally to regard them with a vacant stare.

The Warden tilted his stone mask, bemused. “You wish to do the same? It didn’t help her, in the end. He took down her steed with his bare hands and ran her through with her own sword. It was devilishly entertaining. Loathe am I to admit it, were there a crowd, they would certainly have thrown coronets.”

Ignoring him, she gave it a quick pat along its flank, reached across the saddle. “I’m not bringing the horse.”

“Oh?” 

She gripped the cloth bundle she’d brought, pulled it over. The ludicrously oversized instrument required both her hands to heft, and was nearly as long as she was tall. Something made by human hands, but not meant to be wielded by one. And like everything, changed by its time here. Duviri was a place of stories: the legacy associated with it only added to its cumbersome weight—and its formidable edge.

She brought it before the Warden, undid one side of the oil wrapping—lovingly affixed by hands much smaller than hers—to reveal the hilt. 

“I wish for the prisoner to be armed.”

For the first time, she got the impression he was taking her seriously. Surprise mingled with exoticism, familiarity, and caution. You knew, his stone gaze said. Above all else, though, bubbling to the top of his endless boredom and mystique, was glee. He could not resist the chance to engender upon his privileged, empty life a trite of excitement.

“What," The warden says, voice a whisper. "a marvelous idea.”

It was not like waking up so much as coming to.

Swimming back into focus, he recalled—through a brume of time and trauma—how it had been to wake as a man. The brief mercy of uncertainty as the senses flickered to life. Memories accreted, synapses firing in delayed sequence to bloat the package of personhood that was you back to full height. All of it without panic, without pain, without horror.

He no longer slept. Here, in the dark, in the depths of his silent incarceration hemmed on all sides by drooping masonry, the respite it offered seemed an alien indulgence.

He sits with his back to the wall, spine arched so the pommels of only some of the daggers were pushing into him, grinding against rock and bone. He had been staring at the opposite end of his cell for a long time—though the sky never darkened. He could have first arrived hours, days, or decades ago, and he would be unable to distinguish them. As such, it was easy to let his mind wander when his body could not. It was always countered by the inevitable return to the present—the one thing he was mostly sure of—and the pain would come down all at once, fresh as the first time. But it was the only thing keeping him from going insane.

His mind drifts, much like the island itself, through phases. Some days he came to furious, and would slash at his binding for hours at a time, heedless of the pain excertion brought him. Others he would find himself in a cold sweat, swiveling for unseen threats, the agony of his daggers becoming a biting cold. Others still, he’d find himself so entrenched in sorrow so profound, he could not muster the energy to raise his head, to lift a finger. And sometimes, they would work together. They would stab at his mind like fire. And when the violence overcame him, when the guilt became too much for him to bear, he would put his back to the wall so the pommels rested against the stone, focus on the one, tiny crack in the ceiling of his cell, and push himself into the brick.

It did not help.

He lingered somewhere in the middle of his cell, where the light extended to its utmost before meeting with dim and heavy shadow. It is where he had fallen this time, and had not yet mustered the energy to move again since. That was fine. The tinct was too bright, it's quality stretched and metallic, migraine-inducing. The rich darkness was too comforting, so he shunned it as well. 

Solid masonry hunkered around. On one side, the entrance to his cell: a golden gate of irrationally garish design for something used only to hold individuals likely to be unable to appreciate the ostentation. A gilded chain is still a chain. On the other, the enclosure broke apart, its brick and mortar coherency reduced to a series of suspended islands and sparse motes of blasted dust reminiscent of Duviri itself, the ground dissolving into a sheer drop away into the Void. He thought, sometimes, of stepping off the edge and into the sucking spectral nadir of its vacua, forsaking the tedium of confinement for—at least what he hoped for—a swift, bloody release. But he knew that would be the coward’s way out. That was the only crime he had not been guilty of, whatever they said. 

His prison was a polychrome holocaust so bleak, it sucked the color out of everything else. Even during the mawkish aurora, when the King’s mood rarely turned toward a taste of whimsy and the sky bloomed a colorful infestation, it remained glanceless: an eerie half-stadium devoid of comforts. A hay bale had comprised his bed, he’d long since torn it into straw scattered to the wind. The simple reminder of sleep had been enough to enrage him. He had a marble bench. He had a chamberpot. All else was cryptic sand and uninformative stone. It was cold, but not cold enough to numb his lacerations.

He did not remember much. But he remembered enough. 

It had been decades in the making. He had been about to do it. He had been so close. His blade poised for the killing blow, bittersweet vengeance in his grasp.

And then… and then…

There had been interventions. From who, he did not know, but he didn’t think they were human. He didn’t even think they were Sentient. All he knew for certain was what had followed when his sword cleaved the arc it never finished. The one it still needed to finish. 

The Void had opened, prised apart by material hands. It had come upon him, that fissure in the fabric of nothing, wide and hungry. It had sucked him down. It had swallowed him whole. 

And then he remembered…altitude. He was falling, intumesced in living fire. That was how he had arrived.

His fall into this world had been quick and painful. Spark, flames, blood, a smoking crater. Himself, reduced to bone and sinew and arcane technology, alive only on his anger, knowing only that it had been stolen. Newly incarnated, furiously reborn at the base of a crucible for the second time, he reached for his weapon—

And found the wall instead.

He’d frozen in that instant, rage smothered beneath dumbfounded stupor.

He recovered quickly. His anger had long since become self-sustaining. It rekindled, then blazed like never before. He knew not where he was—only that he had to get back. He hacked and slashed the gate with his daggers. He ran himself against the bars time and time again. He tore his fingers to the bone scratching against the hunkering walls, and then ground them down to the knuckles. He screamed and swore and raged against confinement for what must have been a full month like a beast floundering in tar, sinking centimeter by centimeter. He’d lost his mind.

And then, bled of his vitality, he tasted the cyanide of acceptance piece by piece, lost all hope of escape, resigned himself from reality, and accepted imprisonment.

He’d been here ever since.

That was what he remembered. Everything past and before that was a haze, spun in a slick of poison. Voices he’d heard before but couldn’t name, places he’d seen but didn’t know. Every look out between the gaps in his cell to the arena beyond fired distant recognition in his mind's eye, but he could draw nothing from the suggestions. It was like something that wanted to be remembered, but didn’t even know what it looked like. And always, always, there was the impression he was missing something important, but could not put his finger on. Some want. Some intrinsic need.

But he could not find it in him to muse further upon the unknowable circumstances that brought him here. That was in the past. It could not be changed. 

The details of his dull little chamber offered nothing more than the most rudimentary of diversions. He usually whittled away the pallid small “hours” after coming to by staring at the opposite wall and listening to the screams, thuds, and slick sounds of metal piercing meat raging from the cell adjacent to his own. But the murderer had—after excruciating hours filled with anguished howls—finally fallen to the floor with a metallic clatter, dead. Again. And so he was left in silence. That is probably what dragged him back to the present this time.

As every time, the wall eventually lost its capacity for distraction. He didn’t feel like counting specs of dust quite yet, so mustering every bit of energy he could, he dragged himself to the gate of his cell. Wrapping red hands around cold gold, he peered with his one eye through the gaps.

Across from him was a long-curving pan that vaulted a semi-circle across the entire lower arena. A single catwalk spiraling the rim comprised a landing for the cells. His prison was an oubliette; a bowl with no bottom attempting to be filled by an untiring spout below the royal viewing platform above. An updraft from the bottom up splashes his armor with droplets. Strange refractions through moving water cast stranger shadows across the hold. In the light of the pyrotechnic swirl overhead, the droplets looked like blood and molten metal. 

Somehow the entire hollow of the oubliette could be replaced with a slab of noctrul, forming the floor of the arena where he was occasionally summoned to fight. It never happened while he was looking at it. The sudden materialization had long since lost its luster. There was no logic to this half-real illusionary realm, where every whisper seemed to have more to say. He’d broken out on a few occasions—though it was more accurate to say the gate had simply vanished , leaving him free to walk out—and what he’d found in his attempts to escape made no sense at all. Stairs that led to nowhere, the steps thick with dust. Tunnels twisting in on themselves, going on far longer than could be possible. One room had him walking on the ceiling in spite of gravity. Cloistered archways hung with strangely devoid tapestries spilled into brutal compounds. Haphazard partitions next to dining rooms. A nursery. A sparring arena. A surgical table under a single broad illuminator. But no matter how far he walked, all paths led back here. To them. To him.

He did not know when they had first shown up. He would look up at intervals impossible to chronicle, glancing his broken faceplate through the gaps in the bars, and see new cells had simply…appeared beside his own. And sometimes, he’d see himself staring back.

There were seven cells—like golden veneers in a stone mouth—and six of them. The first was to his immediate right. The prisoner stalked the boundaries of its cell like a caged beast, crashing its head against gate and stone, breaking itself on the walls of its partition. Usually. Right now it lay dead on the floor of its cell, splayed in brutal fashion. At first glance, it was easy to think the murderer had been murdered. A dagger was death-gripped in each hand, as though it had attempted to fend off an attack. Their edges were condensed with dissolving vapor. Trails of blue ether—the same color as that smoking from the blades—rose from its torn exoflesh like clouds of blood in water.

There would remain no evidence to the contrary until—hours, days, weeks, years later, he had no clue—it would spontaneously stand up again. Only then might one be inclined to discern the unusually bountiful slashes in its frame: more injuries than there were daggers lodged in the killer's body. A tremble wracked the grief-stricken wraith then, a shiver that made him think of a fever, before perplexity quickly succumbed to anger. Jinxed of its death, driven by the corrosive madness of a broken demigod, it would launch fresh into another mental cataclysm, tearing harpy-like at itself with its blades until it fell again, taking its lonely death-rattle chorus with it. Silence would rush to fill in the vacuum its howling had left.

Unlike the first dramatic manifestation, the third rarely journeyed to the front of its cell. It recoiled from the light, slinking into the dark like an injured kubrow. It brooded at the back of its partition, head cradled in its hands as it rocked back and forth. The darkling creature had spent the entire time here gazing into the miasmic nothingness: that utter nullity that was said sucked at the soul.

The fourth stood dejectedly in the center. Its shoulders sagged as if carrying an invisible and heavy weight. Endowed with a sort of nervous motion, it would muster the strength to occasionally look up for brief periods, eye meeting eye, before it quickly looked down again, like it was afraid of being seen watching.

The fifth leaned against the entrance and ran a blade along the bars with a cut and bleeding hand, producing a sibilant hiss that crept down the walk. The rasp of metal meeting metal instinctively made the flesh on the back of his neck tighten and the scars along his body begin to prick anew, as if festering. The curse-edged daggers had once been weapons in his employ, like Vaen. Now they were a part of him. 

The sardonic spymonger would look up at him occasionally, still wetting its blade, and chuckle at some incomprehensible jest between the two of them.

The sixth mimics the pose of the fourth, though even more so. The invisible weight had forced it into a forward stalk, its broken head perpetually downcast. It visibly strained against whatever was holding it down, but refused to succumb and be cast to its knees. It seemed, despite its wretchedness, somehow defiant in the act despite the discomfort it caused. If only it wasn’t behind bars, it may have been inspirational. As it was—half obscured behind splendid gold, the life being crushed out of it—it only proved the futility of its altruism.

The seventh cell…the seventh cell bore no prisoner. Its gates were splayed wide open, a landslide from within knocking the doors off their hinges Whatever had been inside, if anything at all, had been buried under several tons of dirt and stone. If it was still alive, if there was someone representing his greatest failure in there, it had refused to free itself from confinement even now.

And…himself. The Coward, the weakling, the traitor bathed in the red of royal blood. Who hid as his brothers and sisters were culled like chaff before the farmer’s scythe. Who refused to raise his hand in their defense or their extermination. Resistance at least implied guilt. But abstinence? By Orokin law, there were few crimes greater than neutrality.

He acknowledged—not for the first time—that he despised them all. He’d stumbled through half-lucid reveries, grappled with nightmares taking his shape, lost his mind sixfold because of them. Yet…he knew them better than he knew himself. He knew them where he didn’t know his own name. Perhaps, then, they were the real him, and he was the pretender? 

He wondered if unprotected passage through the empyrean had driven him mad, or if he had simply died. It was a hard choice to pick between which he preferred.

Looking at these mimics, he became aware of just how much he had changed since entering this place. He had never been beautiful. Not even his masters—who wielded their influence with artistry and opulence—had seen it fit to bestow him with their typical grandeur. As if they already knew what would eventually happen. But now he was ugly: twisted by the Void, drinking in this place like a demon at a feast. 

He was more and less than he remembered. He seemed to fade by the day, and the places left in the now vacant spots seethed with raw energy, whispering and semi-real. Half of his face had been torn off, taking an eye with it. He did not remember or even know for sure when it happened but believed it to be the first actual injury he’d sustained. The fire of the fall had cauterized the wound, and it did not heal the way it should have. Reconstituted ether flowed from the injury like a spectral cord, whorls of cold blue-white maccabean fire wreathing his head like a living mantle, glowing with a hollow and sepulchral resonance. It smelled softly of niter.

His armor, once blue, was now oxide red, as though he was an iron golem, a machine dissolving in its own fuel. A ramshackle homunculi with a dangerous, flayed aesthetic. His battlefield of a body was testament to both untold resilience and masochism. Runes daubed his steely skin, glowing dully with spectral dust from where tender mince had been made of armor and flesh by the hateful daggers: his sins preserved in scourged metal, inscribed like an ugly legend written by careless hands. He had been shot, cut, bludgeoned, burned, scarred, gored. He had even lived through artillery and orbital fire. He had suffered every injury known to man. He had endured it all. He had used it as fuel.

And now you squat in a cell, sobbing all day and night…

He groans, hating the pitiful sound even as it wrenches its way from a half-shut facade of a mouth—a whisper, rustling like pouring sand—and grinds his fists against the rock of the floor. Not for the first time the thought of escape flashed upon him. Perhaps he would make the door budge this time. Maybe, he would find the exit, if he only gave it one more try.

But was that really what he deserved? 

And like that, the thought died before it got anywhere meaningful. The guilt had always had teeth, and when it bit, it bit deep. Anger and shame commingled, and he suppressed it over and over, pushing it down into his guts. It was metabolized eagerly, imbuing his spirit with a brooding insolence, robbing him of his energy. Such always came about from these moments of unavoidable introspection. Easier to wallow in pity, to accept the inexorable fate assigned to him, than to entertain alternatives.

He no longer slept. That meant he no longer dreamed. He could not take comfort in the fact that anything he saw as he languished, no matter how wretched, how sickening, how pitiable, was just the product of his own imagination: the oscillating of hemispheres within his demented mind, and owed nothing to reality.

He could no longer dream of escape. 

So he lay, unable to summon the energy to do anything more than exist, hating himself for not wanting to try harder. Too weak to live. Too alive to die. Content, in a way, to suffer until someone finally laid him low—if the Warden would even allow such a thing. The only thing he found himself glad about was that he had lost Vaen when he’d fallen into this world. It did not deserve to share this punishment. He barely deserved to wield it when it had been in his possession.

An indeterminate time later, a fell light kindled at the zenith of his cell. A klaxon rang out, once, echoing through the prison block, making him flinch. His other selves were equally roused from their isolated brooding—even Murder was beginning to stir back to life, thin wisps coruscating from a hundred new self-induced slashes beginning to fade as the wounds cinched shut. They all knew what that sound meant. The Warden was due his entertainment, and they were powerless to deny him. 

He rose. His huge pauldrons—guarding dense metal-melded pectorals—sagged, giving him an almost decrepit look. He fixed the outside world with a stare and saw the arena had already formed. Even then, one eye peering to the gatehouse opposite of his, a flutter of bleak anticipation caused his exoferrous flesh to crawl. The daggers howled.

Maybe they would be the one to put him out of his misery. 

The thought, as it was, almost brought him comfort.

He stalked from the dark of his cell: an archfiend walking his personal road to hell.

The arena was perfectly circular and devoid of all color. The floor was a shaed-stone black of beauty and ghastly hardship, so perfectly laminar one would think they were walking on nothing at all if not for a shallow layer of water topping the surface, splashing slightly with every step. But there was something off about its quality. Like someone had an idea what water looked like, but was unfamiliar with the qualities of fluids. His reflection matched him every step of the way, and he actively avoided looking down into it. His altered physiology and biology—altered further by his time spent in this strange place—rendered him immune to nausea and dizziness, taking away what might have been disorientating, but he’d never like looking at his reflection. Even less so now. He had no desire to stare at another echo of his failures.

Polyphemus walls loomed around, their surfaces devoid of hand grips or other means of escape. He could see no terminations to their tops when he tried looking up. No signs of battle-wear from any previous bouts was present: the arena repaired by mysterious, unseen means in the potentially centuries-long spans between his summonings. Vexilla pronouncing in golden glyphs devotion and loyalty to the King of Duviri poured down the walls, fluttered in the brimstone wind, edges smoldering from the dry heat. The text was not static, but attempts to look at it directly ended with his eye sliding off like water. 

“The wretch is summoned from his torment to fight for the entertainment of men better than he.” The Warden announced from atop his baroque station. The coliseum was empty. Not a soul was present, yet he shouted regardless. “Duviri trembles at his mere footfalls. A far cry from he who, in the hour of rending and bloodletting, hid away. ”

A stilhetto in his side inched further into him. His stride became ungainly. He was no longer walking so much as lifting one side of his hips up.

He stepped off the landing and into the black morass, nearly falling. Hell seethed above: the sky an oppressive curtain of ash, meteors and trailblazing comets its lightning. Faces of soot and cinder manifested high in the infinite sky, hovering mute, sardonic, terrible, sightless eyes blazing. Sometimes it was torn by blue-white lightning, the ceiling a black shroud like the wings of a stormbird, the air charged with tension. Other times it was gray and thick with sleet and rain like steel droplets that froze instantly on his armor. He had no idea what caused it to change, if anything at all. No matter the color, no matter the temperament, the hold stayed the same: a small, sad island floating adrift from all else, lonely and forgotten. 

He stopped a dozen paces from the landing, tilting his head toward the Warden. On the golden promontory overseeing the arena he stood, bright and ageless as gold, peering piously down. A goblet he cradled in one egregiously long hand. It was a hand meant to steal from someone: long, slender, nimble, mesmeric. Meant to distract while the other held a knife to your belly.

“Who committed crimes so heinous, so unspeakable, it is nearly a crime itself to merely list them.” The Warden expounded, one hand curling out across the empty air before him. “But list them I must, as is decreed by our King for all in his domain.”

He gestured to the only thing reaching higher than himself. Central and supreme above the compound: a statue depicting the fire-flushed figure of Dominus Thrax, made present in spirit, deified in gold iconography. The statue clasped a sword in one scion fist, towards the sky as if rallying his troops, or directing a fleet high above him.

The rendition of the child-king shamed even the most luminary Warden himself. But he had seen it time and time again—fought tyrants and conquerors to the bitter end enough to see what others missed. One eye meant he paid attention to more.

It had an almost ornate fragility to it. His posturing was simply terrible: the sword would have dropped right onto his face if he were to lose grip of it, and the weapons simply looked too big for such small hands. Even were it made entirely of oxium he would have struggled to hold it up. Despite its splendor, it was though it was trying too hard to impress the viewer rather than simply awing them with its passive eminence—like a street-side onomancer who’d picked up a few tricks of hand and thought to call themselves an archimedean. 

It bore every ounce of itself: afraid of the viewer being found wanting from their King. Oh, what circumstances demanded that a child should take the throne, should have to fight and kill before adolescence? That was the decree of the Orokin: innocence crushed out under the weight of all that gold.

He felt the same thing looking at it every time. He wanted to meet this boy. He knew little of the King—only what the Warden had told of him in bittersweet tongue: a welp tasked with controlling his land, but who couldn’t even control his own disposition. But he wanted to tell him that, yes, his statue was impressive, and he should be proud of it. Even if it was a lie. He’d already sinned enough, what was one more?

Anything to distance himself from what came next.

“Murder.” The Warden began, dragging out the syllables. “Cowardice. Flight from Just Custody. Treason, twice over. Espionage.” 

With every word rose a greater commotion behind him, snarls of aggression and clanging metal. The Crimes stirred into a frenzy at being invoked. He heard it distantly, like a conversation from a half-remembered dream. He was on his knees in the water, twitching with pricks of icy-hot pain, feeling each dagger slick in and out of his body with every torturous phonetic. His wounds hummed woefully, their soreness enhanced by the astringent quality of the sulfur-infused air.

Vision fading, he silently willed them to be quiet.  It wouldn’t be much longer, and the worst was yet to come. 

The warden leaned on the very edge of the royal landing, crooning down as if they were face-to-face. 

“Attempted. Regicide.”

When sight returned to him, his faceplate was submerged inches in the water. He’d blacked out. 

The Warden was picking at his nails, waiting for him to return.

“The insolence. Even now you waste our time” He started. “We elevated to you godhood. We made you perfect. And this is how you repaid us. With treachery. With debauchery. With the spilling of precious Orokin blood.” The Warden sipped from his goblet through a seam in his stone mask, and made a sound of bitter delight before tilting the cup slightly, letting a stream of the purple liquid splash down into the morass below. “Well, now look at yourself. The cost of betrayal. Does it even bother you, or are you too thick-skulled to notice the pain?

“You sought to punish us. But that is not how this game works, you dumb brute. Our mistake—our only mistake …” Again, the Warden leans down. “was in thinking these titles criticism. Wasn't it?”

They both knew it was nothing more than rhetoric. But that didn't make it any less true. The prisoner swayed on his feet, struggling for breath as his vision swam. He may have collapsed, have let whoever his opponent was going to be have him without raising a finger in protest if he hadn’t heard the tail end of what came next.

“And yet…despite all of that, some still have honor enough to boon you.” 

Barely a second passed before the gate on the opposite side of the arena opened, admitting his opponent.

The prisoner blinked.

He had been expecting the usual contemporaries: one of the mockeries of the Dax Order, fleshless warriors seeking his downfall for favor, honor, or glory. Maybe even an equixus given how much trouble—and entertainment for the Warden, of course—the last one had given him. They would have at least had a plausible chance of putting him out of his distress, and if nothing else, he always took some spiteful satisfaction in inflicting his pain on the fraudulent beings. In all his time here, the best of them had nothing on the weakest of the blooded Dax—the one’s he’d once called brothers and sisters in arms.

She entered unarmored. 

The young woman was a hand’s breadth shorter than him, two copper fletchings set into one brow, rags draping her wiry form. As lowly as opponent as he could imagine. Along one arm was locked an Argo and Vel: the crozius and aegis combination of the Dax, symbolic of their role as both the Empire’s—now King’s—protectors and soldiers. In the other, a long rag conealing something that she strained to hold up, one drooping edge wet where it had fallen into the water.

He kept his eye trained on the darkness of the gate, hands flexing—dismissing her initially as some herald  of his true opponent, a sword bearer or artificer. But all it took was a tilt of her head, a slanting of pearlescent eyes, and he knew with what was left of his soul why she was here. He refocused and noticed what he’d originally missed. With new insight, his one eye widened in surprise. She was not one of the czar’s skeletal Dax, held together by the magics of the Void. Where rags parted—her hands, her face—she was blood-flushed tissue, at least from the outset. And her eyes…like saggen pearls…

Where had he seen eyes like that before?

What was she? Another echo, perhaps of his dear Anikki? If so, this place had for once gotten the memory all wrong. He had never known what his surrogate mother had looked like when she was young, so any effect upon his psyche it may have had was lost. If this was meant to be some new form of mental torment, it was a very strange one.

The Warden was speaking again, though he hardly heard. This woman had captured his frame of attention entirely. She, likewise, paid the Warden no heed. Her hands found the bundle of cloth, and delicately, began to unfold the layers.

He was uncertain. And annoyed. Did she intend to fight him? Was the Warden really so world-weary, so petty to allow this woman, this beggar pulled from the side of some street-market, to pry him from the depths and summon him to this place? Of course he had. Depriving him of even an honorable end was but another layer to his torment.

He stepped forward, hands bunched, daggers aching, singularly intentioned. Fine. If that is what these fools wanted, then that is what they would get. Let him be done with this so he may return to his solitude, his imprisonment, his mourning.

She peeled back the first of the wrappings. It fell to float on the black waters. Protruding from the rough rag’s depths was a pommel.

The throbbing of his wounds rescinded to nothing.

And then the rest of its beggar’s sheath came off, spreading its oil-slick luster across the water where it fell.

It was far from a noble weapon. Its iron snout was criss-crossed by jagged scratches. Its edges chipped and blunted, discoloration denoting where it had been refurbished using steel grafted from the arms that wielded it. It had not seen a proper artificer's touch in a very long time. Even then it was still a straight, sharp sword, thin as a razor. One of the only weapons to kill an Orokin, slash-severing their head with a single clean cut, devouring their oro.

He had never cared about how he looked. But he’d always taken good care of Vaen: tending to its needs above his own, lovingly stenciling works into its side, stories lost on anyone but a select few of his inner circle. Of that underworld clade, only he remained.

The sight of the bitter momento cut through his slothfulness like a blade through water, sending shivers of recognition—and rage—up his spine. It…how was it here? How did it get into the hands of this… this—

He had thought it lost. He had been glad it was gone, destroyed, away from unworthy hands. But it hadn’t been. It had been taken. It had been stolen.

She had stolen from him.

She saw him isolated and ripe for the taking. He’d killed bounty hunters before, those slavishly loyal to the rotten Empire or merely after the golden lords favor. But to see Vaen wielded by this sinner, this lowlife scum who thought herself to be his executioner, with his own blade no less…

Lightning shot through his body, crackling recognition flaring a long-dormant temper into something molten, shocking off the rust of pity. Serotonin mingling joyously with adrenaline and painkillers, an all too welcome reprieve from the destitution of his existence. The furious nectar flooded every part of his body with fire. The end result of the pulsing through him was a peculiar vexation distinctly disassociated with choler. Something too wicked to be called anger, too directed to be called rage. A hate so cold it could kill a man.

Caged within a timeless prison without hope of escape, he had emptied his mind of all personal memories, unburdening himself as much as he could to make room for the new guilt. Now recollection came in whispering degrees; bitter memories filtering in amid the freshly-stoked embers of his anger. Bit by bit, shard by shard, he re-accumulated the fragments of personality and memory, sucking in delayed consciousness like a sponge soaked in poison. A far more human awakening than he was used to.

But he was no longer a man.

He was Kullervo, the Crimson Renegade, greatest traitor to the Empire. And he had forsaken his humanity a long time before.

In the instant before burgeoning fury overwhelmed him, the warrior in him wanted to demand: who was she, why was she here, where did she come from. Where did she get his sword?

Instead he cackled on dust-dry air, pulled a rattling breath into leather-stiff lungs, threw back his head, and screamed 

The Warframe yanked forward like a hunting beast slipping its leash, and the world became like shattered glass.

She was fast. She had slipped her bonds nearly as many times as she had died; evaded the king’s proxies for spans at a time, stole what she needed to last as long as she could. She was used to acting quickly, shunting the pain from her mind, trusting in wit and making providence work for her.

He was still faster.

Time seemed to slow, the flush of adrenaline working through her like liquid eternity. She had the briefest impression of him blurring towards her, fast and vicious, before the claws of his gauntlet had wrapped themselves nearly all the way around her neck. She dropped Vaen, hand flying to her throat, instinct overriding cognition. It didn’t even make it to the ground before it had the sword secured in his grasp.

Underneath the Warframe’s mechanical shell was a body honed to teak hardness. Hideously dense muscle bulged as he drove the joint of his elbow downward and inward parallel to her with hydraulic strength, lifting her up like she weighed no more than a bundle of dry reeds. Her vision swam. Lightheadedness nearly made her pass out. The knowledge of the King’s gloating that would follow if she did was the only thing that stopped her from doing so.

What glimpses she caught of her aggressor was of a broken, razored helmet, baleful energies seething from the hollow of his exposed head, metal bones suspended in the ephemeral trail. A backswept half-coronet above a ravaged, red-armored thing that took the form of a killing field. An avatar of war incarnated in its effigy, deeds scrawled across its chest in incision and blood.

And she saw Vaen's hacking edge ready to disembowel her. She heard, above the still-echoing war-howl of the tortured demigod off the arena walls, the Warden’s grandeur. 

“The cutthroat is so eager for blood, he doesn't even acknowledge his opponent! Even after she has been decent enough to arm him! Truly, his savagery knows no bounds.”

She felt something in response, but it wasn't her own. Brushing against her consciousness, slick and hot and wet.

Straining, she swiped away the world from her senses until only him and her remained. She reached out with her mind: a blunt, crude psychic lash that slipped through his sluggish guard and slid frictionlessly into the ocean of his soul. She encountered no resistance from the Warframe, her empyric advance entirely unnoticed. It was like he was completely unprepared for the possibility of psychic intervention.

Or like he doesn't even know it exists.

Her grasp on transference was still a fledgling thing. The total sum of her knowledge mainly consisted of using it on docile warforms: constructs entirely devoid of will or animus of their own—no harder to control than riding a horse—and the occasional golden maw which, though temperamental at first, lacked the mental endurance to fight off her astral presence overwhelming their simple animal consciousness. The hardest thing she’d ever used it for was the taming of the orowyrms, but the fragmentary personalities that spawned them were so desperate for order that they practically let themselves be controlled.

The mist of her senses parted to show his. She plunged into the boiling exoplasmic ocean of his anima with the confidence a thousand deaths had given her. She tasted his flavors, swam around nebulizing tentacles of memory, basked in his personhood looking for the nucleus, that orderly diamond-hard core of “ this-is-me ” that all living things cradled deep in the folds of their psyche that directed their entire person. She was not prepared for what she saw, and it nearly killed her.

His mental nebula was an oil-slick riptide that threatened to suck her under. Coal black and blood red, an ugly bruise of singularly murderous intent. Anger, vengeance, and sorrow jockeying for dominance on a tidal wave of suspicion and fear. He had a solid core of ego like a block of ice, bitter-cold soulfire driving him long when even a Warframe’s body should have given out. 

And that was just the surface. Helpless, too far in to turn back, she plunged deeper, deeper into layers of memory, past tiers of repressed desires. And there, below the superficial id and into the depths of the superego, it was even worse.

Fully submerged, she could taste his disposition: the ageless medley of bitter flavors that comprised his being, swarming at the forefront of his soul like a cloud of flies. Bitterness. Anger. Betrayed. Haunted. Spiritually empty. Hate-filled. Such words of venom, such heartbroken sentiments, such ruthless self-criticism. They took the form of blades, daggers with hooked edges pointing inward that formed a bulwark around his being. A cage. A prison.

He didn’t know who or what she was. He didn’t care. He saw only an enemy. He was alone. He was confused. He was in pain. He was angry. And his hate—

By the dark, his hate…

In the confines of their secret union, she shared the weight of his burdens. Of the secrets he kept bottled, like poison gas in a grenade. Of hiding in the shadows. Of living as an outlaw of the greatest empire to ever live. Of sleeping with one eye open. Of tearing down everything he had once sworn to protect in the name of vengeance. Of having every faith, every loyalty, every comfort dissolved at once. Of what—and he had of clue of this—she had indirectly done to him.

He could trust nothing, not even his senses.

He could tolerate no one, least of all himself.

The world was against him.

And she could feel something else in here with them. Something vast. It swam around her meager presence—dwarfed by its sheer size—and slid through the fabric of the mindscape like an orowyrm rising from the twilight Void, absorbing and interconnecting all the fragmented islands of his tormented mind, bulging its mass, feeding like a parasite as it subsumed everything else into the same moribund category.

A single word rang in her mind, as if from a great distance.

Guilty.  

Her immaterial self was hemorrhaging, the wasteland of his intellect tearing her to tatters. Even then, mind recoiling in paroxysm, blood trailing from her nostrils, skin cyanosic, she noticed something, shimmering like a black beacon. A slumbering pearl at his heart, ignored entirely by the ravenous presence too busy gorging on everything else. There is movement inside. Life. An echo of a whole world. A kernel, a seed—but fully formed nontheless—of the faintest rebellious sentiments.

Bloodshot eyes bulging from their sockets settled on the pommel of one of the daggers impaled into him. The blade has slicked out from the exsanguinated meat of his body a few inches.

Throwing up her legs, Dow used her boots to slam the blade back down to the hilt.

There was a shikt of metal gliding over leather, then the airy hiss of compressed vapor outgassing.

He screamed.

Next thing she knew she was in the morass, hacking, raw throat straining for gulps of air that felt like knives going down her throat. Even as she sputtered, she was reaching for one of the cylinders hooked to her bandolier. A moment slower and she’d be nothing but meat and memory.

Kullervo staggered through the water, fighting the urge to rip the blade out and toss it aside. To remove it would only make it come back with a vengeance that rendered the temporary relief insignificant. But infinite hells, the temptation was there.

The moment he finally regained his composure, raising Vaen to finish what he’d started, relishing the feeling of it in his hands, the world became swaddled in a thick blanket of white vapor.

He spun through the smoke, Vaen held in a horizontal cross-guard. He was unperturbed with the occlusion of visibility. During his first duel in this place, he’d found the loss of one eye to be an additional layer of challenge he was not entirely opposed to. As a Dax, he had risen above reliance on the five simple senses. What had kept him alive through countless battles, and the decades spent a brigand that followed, was contrivance and foresight. 

The only distraction he was subject to was his sword itself. His hand itches around the handle, afraid it was another apparition that would vanish if he held it too loosely. He had no idea where the thief had managed to procure his blade. Likely some underground market—it’s where he would have gone. The thought that it had made its way to some hobbled bazaar, been stolen or bartered over like some plebeian commodity crossed his mind, and if his rage could have found greater peaks, it would have then. Vaen could have been a rusty shiv, a cartouche, or a fist-sized rock and he’d have cherished it all the same. Despite the whisperings of unworthiness, having it back in his grasp felt indescribably right. It was as much a part of him as his eye, his hands, his daggers.

His hate.

Kullervo twisted through the smoke wreathing him, hearing something splashing through the black waters to his left. Lactic acid burned through his muscles like whirling blades howling over naked skin. He could taste the adrenaline in her sweat, the fear mingling with aggression from where it had seeped into his mind. His one eye narrowed, dismayed by the intrusion. Were his own demons not enough?

He could not sit still forever. Patience, even when he was human, was not a virtue that could contend with his rage.

He cast out his senses like the lines of a spiderweb, seeking movement. There. A microcosm of waves, splashing into the totem of his leg, coming from—

Damnable mist. Furious, patience expiring, he decided to do something rash.

With a whisper, soft as satin, tense as sword-steel, he invokes the daggers. Two of the blades, as though grabbed by invisible hands, twist out of his back, dislodging themselves on trails of ether. They reoriented themselves mid-air, paused in perfect synchronicity, then swoop off into the smoke, seeking lifeforce. They did not care whose flesh they plunged into—innocent or guilty—only that it was yielding. That’s why he kept the hungry blades within himself, for what better vessel to be a tribute to their pain than he?

The blades vanished into the smoke, trailing ribbons of nocuous dust. A second later there was an unmistakable sound, one the renegade relished above the pain: two sibilant clacks, and the hiss of a power field under strain.

Scum!

He was moving even before they had begun to make their way back to him. Indignation of the theft burning hot in his mind, he hopped through the air, vulture-like, knives plucking at his flesh, smoke sticking to him on long contrails as gracile armor cut the air. Vaen held high above his head, flickering with hellish light from on high. Its broad twin edges were made for slashing rather than stabbing. For hacking. For decapitating. It could split a lightly armored Warframe from crown to groin in a single slash such as this. It would shatter her shield like glass.

Contrary to many sappy stories by unwizened poets—hands uncalloused, free of bruises and needle pricks—and philosophers alike—the kind that don’t know a thing about the world, but thought they did—you did not get used to pain. It was not something simply overcome. You learned to transmute it. In the moment, he hardly noticed when the daggers rattled on the noctrul, spinning on the tips of their blades before hovering on esoteric animus, piloting their wicked edges to him and shooting back to plunge home in the holster of his flesh as if magnetized. By then he was already airborne with the full weight of his leap behind him. He was an incandescent juggernaut at the unforgiving mercy of inertia, and pain could not stop him.

For a moment he relished in what she must be feeling, and fancied he could taste the anticipation of her realizing her fatal mistake. Did she pause in her panic when she glimpsed his figure, mirage-eyes widening: a one-eyed voodoo doll, a ritualist creation haloed in voidfire, blazing down atop her? Did she feel insignificant? Was she awed?

He bathed in the horror he had surely sown, envious in the humbling of this lowly sinner, glorying in his own awesomeness as he ascended—for a moment—to heights of joy, of viscous pleasure he had not felt in an age’s age! 

And then he was careening backwards, tilting head-over-heels, rebounding like a bloody wave against a cliff before slamming sideways into the golden gate of one of the cells. The walls vented a layer of mortar dust.

Above the din of reverbing metal. he heard the Warden laughing.

“Touché! Though, admittedly, outsmarting him isn’t particularly difficult.”

He looked up, still trembling with the aftershocks of confusion, and see’s the woman, smirking at him. Her crozius is holstered in the built-in guard of the shield generator strapped to her arm. And in her hands was something he hadn’t noticed she’d had before.

She had a gun.

The hand cannon shivered in her grasp, struggling to hold onto its unstable ammunition. His chest felt like it was on fire, which was hardly new, but whatever damage it had done was entirely superficial—unnoticeable against the myriad cuts and scars already dug into him. A Void-based weapon. Its entropic touch was fatal to anything living, but entirely incapable of harming creatures of the empyrean. He guessed he counted as one of them, now.

She fixed him with a flinty half-smile. He paused, taken back before confusion quickly collapsed into anger. The disrespect! The gall! First she’d thought to kill him with his own sword, now she so casually breaks the ancient dueling rules? And the Warden allows it. He heard chuckling behind him. Espionage’s cell, then.

Did she not know who he was? What manner of monster—what manner of warrior he was? He breathed conflict and guerrilla war, had spent the longest years of his life living for the duel. He had served with honor back when it meant something. He deserved better than this.

No, you don’t. But it was a whisper. He almost didn’t notice it. 

Almost.

Still holding Vaen in one hand—he’d sooner forfeit his entire arm than willingly let go—he lurched to his feet on the cusp of a wave of anger. Galvanized by his own memory and the breaking of such sacred tradition, ignoring the acid in his chest, he twisted around. With blinding speed and precision, he snatched the dagger from the echoe’s hand and jumped back into the fray like a shark scenting blood before it could protest.

Fine. Let the Warden, the Orokin bastard, peddle his pretend-honor like the rest of them. Real honor, his years an outlaw had taught him, was a precarious thing found only among thieves and murderers.

Dow was only now realizing the full depth of what mad game she was playing. In hindsight, giving him a weapon had not been the best idea. Relying on the council of children even less so. She had hoped it would be an adequate peace offering, but now that she’d skimmed his tortured mind, seen the depths of his loathing, she knew that had been a fool’s hope, as were any attempts to lull him into complacency. His guilt was an engine of infernal design, pounding, pounding, pounding into his psyche over and over like a mantra-wheel spinning through boiling blood. But it was focused. Clean. Like a neatly severed limb. 

With an start, she realized what she felt in him was the same thing she'd felt on the royal parapet.

He was not a prisoner. He was the prison.

She had no clue how a Warframe of his age had wound up in Duviri, but he had spent far too long here. That may not have been entirely involuntary. She knew from bitter experience that such infatuated stalwarts were difficult to persuade, and she’d seen the dragon coiling through his consciousness firshand. Not even a god could outrun trauma. 

It was said that in order to ride a wild kaithe, you first had to break it. Succeed, and it would follow your every command until you died. In her experience, the one’s that went beyond that barrier were those that had broken themselves in.

She holstered her pistol. Her aegis sparked back to life, the flickering blue energy shield wreathing her arm in a protective layer. Disruptor-edges oscillating the water around where she stood. She smiled as he lunged toward her again.

This was going to hurt.

Chapter Text

Dow could tell from the first strike alone that he had always been fast. Fast and strong. The Helminth, clearly, had only driven both to new extremes.

He circled her, a kubrow hounding an injured elk, darting in to snap at the exposed flanks faster than it could turn to bare its antlers. The aegis could turn his weight against him so long as he didn’t strike it directly. It was the only thing keeping her alive.

Vaen flickered out like a serpent’s tongue, tasting the air. In his hands the greatsword became lithe as any dagger. Its movements emitted the harmonic rhythm of quantum mechanics, existing and de-existing as if stretched across infinite parallel realities, holding possibilities in frigid inertia, and would only commit to one of them the moment it struck. The motions alone—practiced, easy—churned her confidence to paste. She knew there was no arcana responsible for its shivering sweeps. It was pure swordsmanship.

It was only a matter of when he would get through her guard, not if.

Though the threat of impalement had long lost its bite—she had lived and died and lived again by that very medium too many times for it to be bothersome anymore—she was aiming to avoid another visit with the oscillation of herself whose statue watched their duel quite so soon. She needed to do this in this life, and that meant not getting cut through by the same peace offering she’d armed him with.

She had considered before she’d entered, of course, the possibility that interment had driven him mad. She at least had Lodun to talk to. The Prince of Fire wasn't a particularly hearty conversationalist, but his varied backbite and breathless tirades had kept her sanity from completely falling off the edge of the isles. He’d had no succor but the Warden’s admonishments, nobody but the specters she saw watching their feud with interest from the dark of their cells, baleful false-eyes glowing.

She at least had infamy. He’d had ignominy.

His savage form lunged forward in a blink, kicking up fountains of water with every ironclad footfall, oozing forward with languid menace, his movements recalling liquid in their smooth, roiling reactions. He did not move like one of the King’s Dax: clumsy skeletons swaggering with the exaggerated army march of the soldier as imagined by a child, pumped with false bravado. They were dangerous, those toy soldiers. Quick to find range and quicker to draw a bead. But this was something else entirely.

He looked like he was falling apart. He looked like he had fallen apart. A being whose body was comprised of lacerated strips of metal and dried leather hewn together with dark wire had absolutely no right to be so nimble. She saw a silhouette. Something blood-red and steely blue, clothed in wildfire and moved like lightning. She had the shield, and though it was a fearsome implement, it was entirely dependent on reaction. You had to see what your opponent was going to do. She could barely even see him.

She braced, for all the good it would do.

Anyone who's actually been in a fight worth their spit will tell you that in one you know almost nothing of what is happening outside your immediate field of view. Fights are disorder, they are confusion, they are sensory overload. It’s a sore throat, stuffed nose, and burning need to piss. It’s adrenaline and shock keeping you from feeling that hole in your chest the size of your fist. It’s choking on dust and sand in your eyes. It's wondering if those buzzing things flying around your head and licking your sweat were going to get you killed. Nothing is certain. There is no concept of confidence or innate advantage. It becomes an overwhelming challenge just to stay oriented, on your feet, and not on the ground with a sheath of metal driven through your belly.

Fighting a Warframe was that magnified by a hundred.

She didn’t go down immediately, and that’s the only victory she could claim. A gunmetal blade burned across her vision again as she barely recovered, shield raised against this hellish advance. The jolt rocketed up the strut of her arm and knocked her teeth together. She bit the edge of her tongue, copper filled her mouth. Argo absorbed the impact and repulsed it, knocking the blade off with a gunshot-report, sparks infusing the air like miniature galaxies, birthing then collapsing within a second. A human—even a Dax—would have been unbalanced by the whiplash, but the iron sinews woven into his limbs snapped taut before they could overextend. The Warframe turned every stumble into a spin, conserving momentum, hitting harder the next time. And the next. And the next.

Her arm went numb under merciless clockwork blows. She felt she was holding back a storm of vengeance and pressed steel with a piece of reed paper. He fought like a minotaur possessed, but there was poetry to him. At no time did he strike past his reach. Not once did his eye leave her, filtered to a static incandescence through the aegis. She had never known that a stare could invoke such tenderness and grief even as it radiated such breathtaking violence, but that’s exactly what it did.

She took his transdimensional feign. The blade solidified, slung high in a downward arch, set to split her head in twain, and she raised her shield to meet it. The first giveaway should have been that she could even see it approaching at all; everything she tried to counteract was a half-second lentor. By then it was already too late. It stopped in its terminal arch, all momentum scorned, and dropped from one hand to tumble into the other waiting below. She tried to take it back. Too late. Too slow.

Vaen hooks into the lip of the shield and slides in to dig a deep furrow through her vambrace, decoupling the generator. The tip twists, an absurdly delicate motion from such an insane weapon, and slung outward to rip the shield from her. He slid into her exposed guard, shoulder-barging her hard enough to tear the air from her lungs. It's like being bit by a viper and kicked by a iron boot. Her spine crackled as one of the dagger hilts caught her under the chin, jabbed her bruised throat. Bile rised. Her lungs were rocks in her ribcage. The colosseum floor titled like a black iris rolling in its socket as it came up at her. The universe flares white among a sympathy of smaller agonies. Her face is soaked. It’s not just with water.

Better suck it up or she’s dead for.

She dropped the mace and hefted the shield by its ruined strap, street-dog hindbrain kicking in where rational was just too slow. On the other side Vaen’s edge sparked off an inch over her eye. He was on her in three rapid bounds, bulk filling her vision, blocking out the statue of Thrax directly above and the others leering in the gaseous topography of the sky

She had never seen so many scars in her life. Even his fingertips were lacerated, which seemed to carry intention beyond her understanding. Not all of them were from the daggers.

He had been fighting for eons.

Vaen came down again, pressing against her, pressing her into the ground. Steam billowed around the disc. Her cuffs smoldered. Smoke, then metallic vapor, soon her flesh.

Not yet.

Working to block out the din of the shield straining under every return blow, like a clock counting down, she reached out for that ancient, awful psyche again: that fetid pit of insanity and disappointment, more careful this time now she knew what snaked through his soul, how easily it could pull her in, tear her up like the revving teeth of a chain blade. Again, she encountered no resistance, and again, his soul was barred before her astral scalpel. Without grace she flung herself over the rungs of the arco-mental ladder, reaching for something that was nothing. She tugged—messily, clumsily—at what she thought would work: plucking at heartstrings, swelling nourishing tonics of lyrical thoughts, demulcenting scabs where she saw best, cognizant not to control, to command, to persuade, only to pacify. To take away his pain. To get him to ease up!

It picked at his unfocused mind like an itch. He ignored it at first, the daggers howling, his blood howling, escaping him as a sickly desiccated noise, drowning it out. Loud. Louder!

But he could not overlook it forever. When it dredged up things he had not thought of in an age, emptying his skull against his will, it was surprise enough to momentarily stall his impetus. He felt a rise of panic as the past called him back, slipping on the runnels of ghostly memory. But when he finally went under, it was almost with a sigh of relief.

Memories flowed through him like a transfusion: each a salty tear in an ocean of gore. The return of the Zariman. The unveiling of its devils. The second generation succeeding where his had so spectacularly failed. He’d been on the run by then. But he’d fired their clay. He’d whispered poisonous truths into their ears, and though they scorned him and tried to kill him, they listened. And when their mother, their Margulis, had been executed by the realm they were fettered into protecting, when the bones lay at the bottom of the ocean, they sought him. Not in retribution, but for it.

He’d accepted the unwilling mantle as their patron saint of vengeance. They’d planned and schemed in dark places, how to kill an empire. They parlayed in blood slicks and near-misses, sowed controlled chaos so their masters never suspected a thing was amiss. He honed their rough edges into razor-points. He directed their vengeful wrath, compressed it into something righteous. And when the time was right he headed the avenging hoard himself.

The Tenno were as formidable a fighting force as he could have imagined, even more so than the Dax. They fought with their heads. They killed with their hearts. But it was not their volatile powers, or even martial prowess that made them so. They were a family formed from the most perilous circumstances unimaginable. Thrust fresh and bloody from the womb in the sky, from one war for survival into another. The Orokin tried to separate them, as they did to him. To trample their loyalties, psycho-condition them into unerring obedience. But even they had been forced to concede. The bond they shared was too strong. Nothing forged loyalty like complicit bloodshed. But when it became too much to bear, they leaned on one another.

It is ugly when love dies. Most often it bred resentment. Ignominy had a way of festering unnoticed, creeping to enshroud the soul until it was all that remained. It made for the most talented, most ruthless, most vengeful of killers. Very rarely did it fuel nobility: the desire to ensure no others ever had to suffer the same way they did. They were as effective as they were because they bled not for the empire, not for its ideals, not even for themselves, but for each other.

Despite his efforts, he’d found among them something almost like the brotherhood he’d shared with the legions.

He almost paused, bleakly charmed at the path of his own thoughts. There was nothing of the past he was used to brooding on. The fulsomeness of the recollection was vivid enough that he felt he could close his eye, reach out, and touch it. It was reflection in the truest sense. The crimes he’d been convicted of then were not softened or exaggerated, not worn with boundless humility or toxic pride. He was scarred, but not ruined.

It stroked his mind and soothed him, coaxing him to put down his sword.

It bid him spiral away from his anger, his hatred.

It was a lie.

The Tenno were dead. The coup failed. If it had not, then they would have come for him.

A fresh wave of agony daggered through him like a combat stim: a full suite of chemical insanity burning through whatever he had in place of veins. Unseen within his helmet, what his face had become split in two. There were no words to describe the sensation.

“You dare!?” He croaked, sand-course, to no one but himself.

Duels were usually to first blood. That typically didn't mean the opponent necessarily had to die, but he was far from considering any alterative. A scathing whisper rattled against the chain in his head, pulling him back, telling him not to do it. Before he could even think of stopping himself, Kullervo holstered Vaen at his hip and ripped two of the daggers from his chest. It whined in his mind, discontent. Each and every cut screamed, salt-sharp, and he welcomed it as if keeping a tally on his revenge. This time his muscles could no more be overridden than his bitterness neutralized. This time all the dimensional tampering in the universe could not stop him.

His knee buckled into the shield with force enough to powderize a human’s ribcage. Armor scorched black as it collapsed on top of the hissing arrestor field, outer layer bubbling after only a second. Steaming with flux, curse-edged tips found the coil-globe surface of the shield in a furious reverse flurry, whistling with deadly surety, eager to explode bone and gore across the water and walls. 

The rumble of diminishing power was music to his ears.

This was getting out of hand. Even worse, it was beginning to bore him.

Seeing the wayward vagabond getting slapped around had been interesting for a span, and her retaliation worthy of drinking too. But the silent reception to her comeuppance had quickly dulled the experience, not to mention that whatever she’d done to spur the oaf into such a fury had him more focused on butchering her than castigating himself. Not a bad outcome, but he’d like to have his wine and drink it too. Not to mention her coriaceous face he’d found irritating even as his fingers traced the unblemished, ever-consistent runnels of his own mask.

No matter, he thought, shaking the cup to banish his reflection. He was not the one being judged here.

Their voices were soft, resonating murmurs itching the inside of his ears. The air around him grew thicker as his next breath steamed. Hearts of crystals bloomed like frozen stars in his wine.

“You’re timing is impeccable.” He omitted an annoyed sigh. These were allies to be bartered with after all, not subjects to be commanded. Unfortunately.

Thankfully, they both wanted the same thing.

Turning to directly face the choir was the same as standing before an icy sea and bracing for the plunge. Even with his eyes closed behind his mask every part of him rebelled, but it was necessary to keep appearances. He could give them nothing to work with, less they find a more appetizing meal elsewhere.

He did not like children because he did not understand them. How they looked at the shambling corpse below like a false idol. But these somber wraiths? He understood them perfectly.

He gestured with a closed hand, trying to re-heat his drink. “If you would.” He phrased it halfway between a suggestion and command. Whether they noticed, or even cared, he could not tell. The moment permission left his stone lips they sank back into the ground, leaving patches of black ice that quickly melted in the fuming cinerary. Beneath a sky of ashes and bone, grim, low laughter echoed across the empty viewing box.

The Warden sipped from his still-cold wine to calm his nerves, and turned back to the fight below. The sweetness had left his drink.

Her disarming verity had the counter-effect. She noticed this immediately when he almost crushed the searing energy corona into her face. He knelt on the other side, fauld spreading out like a metal cage. The Warframe crooned above her like a terrible vulture, a carrion-lord waiting for her shell to crack, the occulting light above haloing every sharp angle on his person. His center of mass remained eerily static as he pinned her in place, but his arms and the cruel spines they wielded were blurs.

There was a moment when the psychic glut reached agonizing saturation behind her eyes. She had unwittingly touched the place where the daggers dwelt. Sensing new blood, they came for her. His hatred had erupted to the point it had overflowed into her, and she worried it would not leave her quickly enough to stop her from doing something rash. Way to make a bad situation worse. Maybe she should have taken the horse after all.

But there was something in there she gleamed. A single pleasant memory buried in the bitterness—sustained as a diamond of ice in that swirling limerence. A constant through countless cycles. That starving want she’d sensed earlier. He wasn’t offering it willingly. They were simply close enough, somehow, that she could feel it. Hear the memory of laughter.

Maybe not.

The generator’s keening was a sound like glass under pressure, about to break. Music of terror. Mollified, Kullervo raised both daggers and swung down with a ferocity that would have put a malleus to shame.

There was a moment—barely a heartbeat—where the daggers stretched the shield concave, as if the energized barrier were a malleable tarp instead of a repulsive force-field that could shrug off body-bursting ordinance. The very tips pierced into the shimmering barrier above her eyes, and leveraging his incredible strength, the Warframe prised her barricade apart.

The breaking of the aegis resembled a popping bubble in almost all respects. Iridescent light swirled outward, coalescing like perfectly symmetrical droplets concurrent with an outward bow-blast of displaced air as the hardlight barrier cascaded into its collapse. Heat blasted over her. The Warframe was flung back, landing feet-first, daggers carving long gnashes in the floor. Feedback shocked through the glossy petrified wood-looking generator, heating its baroque internal resistors to insane temperatures, ultimately coming apart around her arm. A strand of glowing wiring pushed through the kaithe-leather of her vambrace, ironing a long trail across her palm like an artery brought to the outside. It would never work again.

She was exposed.

Defenseless.

Brows wrinkled, eyes watering, her hands moved on autopilot. She smelled ionization and scorched steel, and a breath of burning tamm beneath it all as she undid the strap, tossing the ruined mechanism away. Next she looked up he stood over her. A titan of wrath and fury, red-bodied and augmented with ludicrous strength, an eye that seemed to leer right into her mind, seeing through her. A praetorian monstrosity closing red-gloss claws around her throat all over again. Set on either side were the daggers, ready to collapse on her like the prongs of a trident.

He was not very pleased with what she had tried.

And then, past the figure imposing over her, Dow sees something that actually makes her pause.

They rose like shadows out of tar. Left to right, figures of swirling black mist floating above the water, noonwraiths with unblinking stone eyes. Lithe as fae, devoid of entire segments of their bodies, held cohesive by black rags and things that hurt the eyes to focus on. Each wore a stone mask, twisted in expressions of comedy and tragedy, switching between the two every time she blinked. One moment their eyes were jade. The next, onyx.

Liminus. Petty demons that fed off emotion. She really shouldn’t be surprised.

But the King held no sway here. And she knew there weren’t any on the island when she’d first arrived. They would have been on her like flies to a carcass.

Her death was spectacularly postponed when one flickered forward and took the Warframe by the arm. It was only the size of a child—all sticks and bones, emaciated, desperately hungry—but it used its entire body, coiling its shadowy form around the limb like a snake. The noise that wrenched from the atrophied warrior was one of anger and surprise. She fully expected him to backhand it away, but quickly gave to a lower intonation when he laid eye on it.

He backed away, forgetting her. Forgetting, she sensed, his own hate and anger. He never tried to swipe at it, to drive the edge of a dagger through its stone mask and send it screaming hungry back to the ether.

It reached out for him. And he reached back.

The child reached out for him with curled claws for fingers, brittle and thin, stifled and slow, skeletal digits seeking the comfort and assurance it was not offered in life. He had not been made to provide either, but it had nobody else. So he started to reach out, wary of the dagger still in his hand baying for blood, and offered his knuckles. A meager solace. But the most he had to give.

Who did this? How? Why? He would find them. He swore it then, he would find them. He would tear them into a hundred pieces with his bare hands. He would—

Its smoking digits crept past the hand offered to it. It slid sideways, like a black-winged bird banking, to cup his face. To be sure he was real. He offers himself. It feels as natural as falling, as burning, as grief. An effervescent calmness that first began as needlepoints of light within his wounds suffuses deeper. Sinking like acid into stone, sluicing away metal and everything else that didn’t belong in the human body, almost becomes torrential, spreading as feathers might along a wing.

And then its hand found the dagger embedded into his clavicle.

And then it twisted.

It never started as a vague pressure with the daggers. No inkling of discomfiture in cripping increments that preceded a mercy of mental preparation for the pending trauma. They cut the preamble like they cut his body. A new world of pain explodes into being, augmented by the trust capstoning it. His shout is like the crackling of kindling as embers burst and leap. It sits there along his arm, wrist twisting unnaturally, poking with childlike interest at the wound on his shoulder.

His hand closed upon it. He’d gouge his thumb through its eye and crush its head to pulp for this betrayal.

The air opened up in a way human eyes could never hope to comprehend. To him, Void-touched, it was as if they erupted from his own shadow: cords of black weave knotting themselves into shape. A half-dozen chittering underlings, each the size and build of a child, each with tapered digits outstretched. In every dimension at once they ghosted, hardening to take hold, then fading to smoke as if uncomfortable with solidity. Burning not with visible light, but with darkness. They radiated malignancy as a fire emits heat.

The one on his gorget yanks, pulling him along like a puppet dragged by the strings Another latches onto his other arm. Another attached to his ankle, claws sinking into his armor, grazing the skin beneath—they were ice to the touch. Another jockeys on his back. Another hooks the ringed prosthetic of his knee.

Every one of them grabs a hilt.

He cannot reach Vaen. Should never have holstered it. Should never have lost focus.

They drag him down into the water. There was nothing apocryphal to their stunted immaterial bodies. Combined preternatural strength overwhelmed his infested gifts. He notices, amid what follows, that the water had a grainy, abrasive consistency that served no purpose other than as further astringent.

They stab him. They cut him apart. They slide between his armor and dig in with claws of black-ice and spirit-sharp edges. They cut and cut and cut. Ether boils into the sky in long strips—liquid gore that glimmers and dissolves as it touches the air. Each new incision is a needle of doubt and horror prickling at abused nerves, flaying his sanity, seizing his muscles and crippling his rage. But it is only when they begin their chant that retaliation abandons him:

Kullervo, Kullervo, broke like a flood!
Ripped and he ravaged with a slash-slice-thud!
Many lay headless, armless in the mud!
Kullervo, Kullervo, bathed in blood!

Dead arms fell on nerveless threads. He crashed to the ground insensible under the onslaught—a wall of pain unlike any before caroming into and through him. Every triumph was rendered a failure. Every solemn joy and instant of ecstasy was cut away, excised from his soul, gouged like they were tumors. And still they kept going, these wraiths of sullen, carnivorous darkness that took the forms of children. That weaponized his trust.

One rises up above the others. Its face is cast in mimicry of the Warden’s impassive stare. It raises one of the knives, reverse-gripped, dripping with condensation that looks to be blood. The point is a strip in the center of his vision, growing larger.

He screamed just like a man would.

It frightened Dow. Out of everything she’d seen and heard in her near-infinite oscillations, it frightened her. There was a full spectrum of emotion in that cry, and none of them pleasant. Where she had become desensitized to her own death, it tore open wounds she’d long thought stitched and healed, and all the rotten stuffing inside fell right out until nothing but frayed edges and scraps were left. The kind of hurt that can never really be mended.

She peered through her tears, raised her gun, and fired.

The first shot spawned a mote of light—a pinprick of suspended flame—between the eyes of the first liminus. It froze completely, stolen dagger stalled in its downward arc. Then it exploded, unraveling in a burst that sent black sand and rag scattering across the water. The cracked halves of its stone mask hit the ground and shattered. There was a cry: an echo, becoming more distant with time as its essence was pulled into the sky to be swallowed. Subtler, underneath, was laughter.

Though manifestations of the Void in every sense of the word, liminus needed a vessel to insinuate into the semi-physical world. The masks were the vessels. Raw void energy was known, among other things, for its vitriolic properties.

The second shot clipped a dagger, sending it skittering from the wraith’s hand. It turned, irised opals to rubies, and made a sound her ears struggled to parse to her brain before she shot again, silencing it in a miniature sandstorm. And then they were bleeding toward her—all but one, shivering between the here and not as if on fire, gliding between material and immaterial like sowing needles diving through skin.

On the very edge of his peripheral sense he detected the vagabond fighting off the rest of the vultures. She’d done something to attract their ire. He found the mask fragments of one lay to his right, split halves staring at the sky. She killed it. Why?

Fury emulsified, overriding his paralyzed muscles. Freed of the assault, he rose with red rage in his eye and every sinew bunched together. A single one of the creatures stuck to his back, plucking at his daggers with reckless abandon. He shrugged his massive shoulders and tilted forward, reaching hands of razor-steel to sling it overhead. It struck the water back first, and before it could rise, he curbed it into the rock. Its mask splintered with an unpleasant crack, so he did it again, and again, until powder remained.

He was moving before it had even fully dissolved. Already the wounds they had plucked into him were fading, scarring over, everything but the crevices the daggers had made their permanent homes cinching close until it was nothing but memory: something even worse. He watched a rogue shot from her sidearm carome into the sky and strike the King’s statue in the knee. A pinprick of inverted light began to fester at the spot, smoldering rainbow-black. The Warden was casting admonishment. He ignored it. Background rabble.

Vaen found its way to his hand, though he didn’t remember unholstering it from its magnetic plate. He barely even felt responsible for swinging it. Sword-steel cleaved from left to right—finishing its arc trailing a smoky contrail—and another stone mask fell in two seamless halves on the cusp of another air-bleeding shriek. The inverted whomp of her sidearm—a breathless sound that started quiet and echoed louder—abraded one pauldon with spraying sand. The final liminus weaved between the shots, snake-like, sweeping low before rising with crooked talons outstretched. She drew a small blade from the depths of her rags, eyes narrowed, teeth barred. As a immaterial being, it could sever the tethers holding her soul to her bones with a brush.

It never even got close. He was upon it, claws clutching a handful of rags and pulling it away. Its frigid fingers flew up, weak hands clawing at the gauntlet that held it, mewling innocently. He heard his mother's voice in its voidtongue cries, pleading not to be hurt.

There was no room for mercy in that grip. He smashed it, headfirst, into the brackish water, silencing its cries. Before it could slither away like the unctuous little viper it was, he impaled it.

Vaen slid halfway into the noctrul beneath. With any other weapon it could have phased away unharmed, but the replete legacy of the sword lent it properties unfettered by earthly tethers. There was a curious resistance as its edge contested with the imbibed density of whatever gestalt essence held it cohesive—like slicing through the thick hide of a root to reach the soft fleshy interior. But Vaen had cut through harder before.

Its fingers uselessly brushed the blade skewering it like a butterfly to a page, slicing its hands apart as it failed to get a grip. He felt Vaen purring through the handle. It was a vellum and shaky revenant, wearing the face of his guilty dreams. He knelt over the sword's hilt and wrapped his red claws around its horrific mask, sick of looking at it. Before it even had time to struggle, he ripped it off.

It boiled into nothing as the pieces fell.

A greasy silence hung over the coliseum. He heard her coming to her feet behind him, quiet gasps on the air broken by fits of wet coughs. He could hear something inside of her grinding together as she wheezed—he guessed a rib by the way she clutched her side. The statue of the king castigated a shadow over her, making her strange eyes glimmer with fluorescent colors. Her vel lay de-energized by his leg. She had only a knife to fight him with.

Clapping echoed from above.

“Well done!” the Warden’s tone was a parent's indulgence. “Those wretches attempted to intervene, and you massacred them most entertainingly for the transgression. I was worried I’d lost you for a moment, but I see you have been most excellently conditioned against excruciation. We’ll have to keep at that. Wouldn’t want it to fade, now.”

The wound in his shoulder throbbed devilishly. The last of the newborn slashes were just beginning to seal over. Without breaking eye contact with the prosecutor, he plucks one of the daggers from his body and glides the blade across his throat.

His lictor’s stone masks seemed to shift subtly, miening into a new bliss. “Oh, there.” He purred, nearly dropping his goblet. “You have no conception of how sweet genuine hatred tastes. The only bitter note is that you, for whatever reason you deem worthy in that brutish skull of yours, see fit to direct it toward me. If the punishment, dear Kullervo, was too much to bear, the crime should never have been committed. You sealed your own fate, my poor, burning little martyr. Be it hell or high water, you will forever be a low murd—”

“Shut up.”

The Warden stops. Kullervo can imagine his eyes—if he had any—were blinking behind his mask as he struggled to come to terms with what he’d just heard.

“What…?” For once, they were both in agreement.

“Shut up.” The vagabond repeated, idly brandishing her knife. “Be quiet. We’re fighting.”

“I…how dare—”

“If there is a problem with that, then please, Your Excellency, come and bloody your robes in the pit with us.”

The goblet shook in his araneous hand. Kullervo thought for a moment he’d throw it down into the pit in an attempt to strike her until he retreated from the edge of the parapet to collect himself in quiet degrees. She made no remark of his passing other than to turn to him and shrug. Espionage cackled.

“He’s worse than Bombastine. And that nark gives me a punishing headache as is.”

He watched her assiduously, trying to ascertain her intent. His anger had bled enough for him to come down from the bloody peak of vicious pleasure he’d stood atop before—though Vaen seemed to pull his hand toward her. Oceans of rage and astonishment no longer pummeled at his restraint, crying out for more carnage, more justice for the insult of the theft, and with it he viewed her unarmored form with a new eye.

She was a thief. A smuggler. A lowlife. A sinner. He should kill her without pause.

And yet…she had helped him. So she was either foolish, or of foolhardy integrity. Whatever her intention, she had proven honorable enough to merit death with a weapon in her hand, and it was his part to give it to her.

That rage-born half-awareness no longer held direction over him. Slaughtering a lowly thief, hungry for bloodshot under the pretense of justice…no. He would not be riled like a mad dog before the pit fight. Inglorious, he’d lost himself the pursuit of murderlust: relieved to shunt vinegar-strong guilt and enjoy the simple promise of violence and pain. It had claimed him, sunk him, drowned him. No longer. The middle-ground, he resolved, was to let it burn slow and steady, without crackle or explosive impulse, for as long as he could.

Again he locked with her eyes, again suspicion arose in his reeling mind, again he crushed it down. He had purified himself of the red effluvium that had infected his heart—for now—but the inexplicable familiarity remained. It changed nothing. There could only be one victor.

He kicked her mace toward her and waited for her to arm herself.

One of them would be set free.

There was no hesitation. She gave him a smirking, tolerant look, one filled with forbearance, like she’d succeeded at getting this solemn bit of sentimentality out of him. Naturally he found that infuriating. Her nonchalance spoke of either an excess of hubris or confidence: either would normally be ground for his ire. But he restrained himself enough that he almost found it impressive. Her kvelling in a place like this—exasperated in his favor no doubt by her telling off his castigator—was somehow invigorating. As he focuses on her, it’s almost like…color bled back into the surroundings. Flickers on the electromagnetic spectrum he didn’t recognize at first, so used to the achromatic lines of brightness that parsed for hues in his world.

As soon as he noticed them the creeping tendrils of tincture vanished, sucked back into the monochromatic soup. His opponent made no indication that she had even seen them. He shook his head, irritated with himself. Imprisonment did things to you. It stripped you of what you saw, where you slept, where you moved. It flayed you of agency. He’d spent too long sulking in the gloom. Deep beneath his aches, it felt good to be active again.

That was no crime, but he felt guilty for admitting it to himself. His thoughts turned to the flensing knives with a tingle of anticipation. Recompense would come later. Now, he gestured to the weapon with a flick of Vaen, impatient for the restless solitude of his cell.

As she knelt in the shaky waters to cradle her weapon, a sound rang across the battlements, like a metal bar snapping.

The shadow beneath her grew starker. If any color remained at all, it would have been swallowed whole.

Kullervo saw it all, inching by as if trapped in amber. She leaned down to reclaim her weapon, still smirking. In a flash of corrosive un-light the knee of the statue above buckled like a pillar of salt before a torrent of blood. The monument listed and stretched before breaking from its foundation with a metallic shriek, plummeting toward the arena floor where she stood.

For all its smallness and introspective frailty, it was still several tons of unalloyed gold. And gravity, as far as he could tell, held just as much sway here as it did in the world of stone.

He’s almost too her before her fingers have even grazed the shaft. He twists awkwardly, driving the knives in, trying to make sure their tips wouldn't impale her upon his broad frame as he carried them out.

The perfectly laminar arena turned into the surface of a broken mirror. He was tossed across the splintered landscape, riding the fractured ingress like a tidal wave of glass shards, landing with his head hanging off the edge of a section of floor that had fallen away entirely. The echoing in his ears jacked about with his sense of balance. Were he still entirely human, he would have felt nauseous. The ground gave away in other places, the shallow water quickly draining away through similar faultlines.

“Oh, now look what you’ve done.” His lictor bemoaned from the depths of his drink. He’d returned to the gallery at some point. “Do you have any idea what kind of a fit the welp is going to throw when he finds out about this?”

He was slow to pick himself up again. It had next to nothing to do with the spine-shocking impact and total destruction of the arena. The pain of the daggers—driven deeper in his dive—was a dull ache he almost managed to ignore. Whatever residual anger he’d had left him entirely, displaced by hopelessness that was infinitely more effective at berefting the spiteful armaments of their teeth. Hope had flared in his heart: the most treasonous of emotions, and this was his reward.

He wasn't quick enough.

The statue speared halfway into the floor, partly hanging from the bottom of the coliseum. It listed unevenly, the ground continuing to shatter and crack as its enormous weight settled. It would fall through at any moment, down into the sea to be swallowed whole and returned at the behest of the hold. The Crimes shuffled to attention behind him. Espionage and Murder were both silent. They were as dispirited by such an anticlimactic end as him.

"Well then?" The Warden leaned dangerously over the edge, head titled to one side as if listening. "Where is your howl of victory? You've won, in case you haven't noticed. She's—” He paused. “Wait…don’t tell me…really? Really, now? You were seriously trying to save her? After she shot you?"

The obelisk settled uncomfortably. It listed at an angle that implied it should have fallen the rest of the way through. Vaen still tugged him toward the crater, thirsting and unaware. He tightened his grip. Out of every trait it could have gained, it had to be immoderacy.

“—you even listening to me? She. Is. Dead. It’s over, you simpleton. Get back in your cell before I—”

Kullervo held up his hand. He felt the strangeness in the air. The daggers trilled, but where there should have been raw misery, there was something else. Like Vaen, they were trying to jump from his skin. Used to worse, the pain was insufficient to stop his tired mind from formulating a query:

Toward what?

The statue pulled up on one side, tipping again. There were other sounds: murmurs below stone crackling. Indistinct from any other whisper insinuated every second upon the air. The dust had not yet cleared, obscuring Its features in a dull patina of airborne ash, cloying half the hold in a shroud.

At the center of that gray blister, behind the toppled monument, something glowed.

Out from the pallor leapt something broad and armored. Something with cloven feet and curving antlers like broken tassels from birch trees, sharpened to indomitable points. Something that wielded a Dax’s mace in one hand and a shivering sidearm in the other. Something that bulled toward him with horns down. Something he barely even caught a glimpse of before the air in front of him flared.

Instinct honed over decades to respond in an instant failed. While he struggled against the fuzz of shock—not believing what his eye was seeing—Vaen squealed with delight, slicing through the space between his ears like a knife through rotten meat. Runes glowing eldritch along its stenciled length, it barely turned the morningstar away in time. Steel clashes, he twists awkwardly. Vaen tilts at windmills, spitting fire in his mind. His center was off-balance. His certainties pulverized. The return strike caught his pauldron, obliterating its edge, sending him into a spin.

His mind finally caught up with the rest of his body, making sense of his surroundings. Coasting on what remained of his fury, he slashed radially. What his sluggish retort lacked in precision it made up for in raw strength: a axe-blow that could have felled a tree, severing it at the hip. It swung down, alarming him with the speed it brought the cumbersome morningstar to bear, deflecting his sword over its topmost antlers. It had no shield. It was made to be one. Limbs snapped taut for less than a heartbeat. In that instant he saw the flowing heraldry of its pauldrons; a cape-mantle fluttering, pine-green and caked in ash; the templaric order emblazoned on its chest: a knotted ivory tree, its roots digging deep into the earth. Like the story of a culture that lived on as nothing more than a pile of broken pottery. But he recognized the shambles for what they were.

Blade of the Lotus.

Hyper-efficient muscles throbbed as they were suddenly deprived of all oxygen. He fell to the side, stumbling into a springing roll across the splintered arena floor as the return strike split the air where his head had been. He didn’t even feel as one dagger caught the ground and dragged. No sooner had his hands brought him back to his feet did a forest of fire spring from the faultlines. His sword writhed in his grip, but he held it fast.

It stood in the midst of its hallowed ground. Sanctified fire around its hooves burned with no visible smoke but an abundance of clean, cutting light. Greens and fierce azures crept back into the gradient first. The walls were sandstone. Hangings the color of old blood descended from the walls. They scald his eye. Every step left such blazing footprints as to burn away the semblance of the hold as he’d known it before. Nothing physical changed; but in its new colors it became an entirely different place, time, thing.

It was another illusion. That was easier to believe. It could not be real. He ignored his broken pauldron—one of them could not be here. But all it took was a tilt of its corniculated head, a flourish of its disruptor-edged weapon and explosion of color from its crown of thorns, and he knew it was more than real.

Flesh and blood. Eyes like saggen pearls.

He was a fool. How had he not recognized it sooner?

“What is the meaning of this?” the Warden gave voice to his thoughts. “Who are you? Where did you come from? Answer me!”

They’re here.

It cut clean through the bleakness, the despair. It chilled the vosfor burning in his veins, and what he felt in that instant was joy. Vigor abruptly renewed, he stood, weapon raised. Vaen still tugged, but he deftly reeled its bloodlust in. It hissed at being handled so, but he cooly brought it to bear, coaxing it into solemn compliance with a slice along his finger. It purred, demanding more before the rush even faded.

They’re here!

Whatever glories and solemnities had been inflicted in his absence, they were here. They still lived.

And if they lived…then the Orokin…the empire…

He wanted to drop to his knees. Such powerful emotions tremored through him he could no longer tell where hate became solace, where anger became relief, where despair became exaltation. An Oberon. Here. his allies had not been slaughtered. The coup was a success. It had not been for nothing!

The wrath that had sustained him for so long was nowhere to be found. It was like a mountain had been moved off him. Unurdened, he would have wept. He would have moved to embrace the warrior across him. There was so much he wanted to say for so long, but now that the moment he was here he found nothing came to him as easily as it once had. Greetings, challenges, and pleas for forgiveness caught in his savaged throat, tangling on his tongue, dying as breathe on smashed and bloody lips. Words could not answer for him. They had not in a long time; his voice lost to long days howling in his cell, his mistakes his only echoing audience.

She gestured to Vaen. The blade had always been his preferred medium: it was a language more pure than anything vocal, with just as wide a scope. To those that could understand it was precious beyond price. Something that shrugged all ornament for pithy.

He advanced across the fractured landscape, kicking Vaen up from the ground to catch the long blade in deft hands, tilting off upturned shards of cracked gem sharp enough to pierce a Warframe’s carapace. Already the new cuts in him were nothing more than angry scars. Any pain that renewed exercise brought to his limbs was completely enveloped by the euphoria and gratitude of a worthy opponent—transmuted in the sharpest exhilaration he’d ever felt. The anticipation between the ticks of the second hand from a clock. They met in the field of fire. Sword and mace fulfilled with a twinned crack! that all but drowned out the Warden’s most recent attempt at intervention. He struck with the unpredictable and spontaneous power of lightning. But she was a willow: weaving, roiling, never where he expected her to be. He was ecstatic. She was just as fast as him.

He smiled as the thunder struck again. His first narrow slash severed her bottom left horn. The next she caught on her upturned antlers before it could run her through. The sword swung wide with no hope of recovering in time to stop the vicious backhand coming toward him. Barely thinking, he ripped a dagger from his chest and sent it hurling hilt over blade. The mace swings regardless and, surprising him, obliterates the blade. Nothing had ever damaged them before. Moving into the opening he’d made for himself, he felt the wound closing.

“Murderer! Traitor! Saboteur!”

The voice of the Warden, counseling him in rage and pain. But they were whispers; memories from that same half-remembered dream lost entirely to the cacophony of the duel. The only thing that existed was stinging steel, stomping feet, and measured breaths. Hooves tapped and prosthetics shuffled. From the outset they were a dervish-fury; a howling gyre of sparking metal. Invisible to anyone else was the conversation beneath. Neither were going for kill-shots, but blade-clashes. Prolonging their spar for the thrill of action and reaction. With every crash and deliciously narrow miss he felt himself ascending on wings of muscle and memory—echoes of arrogance and power and purpose infecting him with new life.

It outstretched its hand, fingers beckoning. Something shot above his shoulder. It split, divided into two, orbiting around him before collapsing. The first dissipated along the Vaen’s length. The second got through. Glutted with exhilaration, he barely felt it burning a long strip across his ribs, leaving the flexing pico-woven bones exposed to the air. He looked down and time elasticated. A dust of the past settled over the present, swirling in his mind like a decoction of milk, honey, and ash.

He blinked, and suddenly was back in the training pits. He was bleeding from a gash along his brow, but he smiled down at his opponent and swallowed the pieces of his broken tooth. Blood and salt was sharp against the roof of his mouth. More watched from the sideline, dressed in stages of armor and bodygloves. They had just finished putting down an insurrection, and there were not as many as there were before. Still, brotherly disorder reigned. Most were resting, but he was sharpening despite the healing wound along his ribs. He meets their eyes and thinks of the empty spots. He knew them each by their true worth. Their measure as fighters and comrades. They used live weapons for their training, each trusting one another to hold their fury at the last second.

He thrust Vaen out, then a slim blade in his dusky hands, and dared any who thought themselves his equal to come into the pit and test their mettle. He was so focused on their rolling eyes, their scarred lips curving into smiles, he hadn’t noticed the archimedean in the shadows at the back of the room, looking at them, mantis-eyed. Looking at him.

He gripped gauntlets with the warrior on the floor and the scene turned inside out. The hand became a terrible claw bursting from fingertips, like branches erupting from within. Eyes the blue of a noon sky on Earth spoiled to the color of milk, dividing in their sockets. Fat shifted above cheekbones. Sinews hardened and ossified before ripping free of overstretched skin. Fluid oozed from pores and eyes. Cheers died on twisting tongues as the display repeated around him, each warrior becoming something unrecognizable.

He had submitted willingly to their cruel demands. Most Dax had. Some hadn’t. His mountainous body daubed in crimson, he’d hunted all who’d refused to undergo the transformation. Persuading where he could, breaking bones where he could not. Chained by the hands, feet, neck, he’d dragged them, screaming, before their lords and watched them vanish into the laboratories. There were other marshalls like him, tasked with bringing in all who refused—but the ruthless efficiency with which he’d worked astonished his commanders. They were pleased enough to see his loyalty to them eclipsed that of his order, that when the time came for himself to be remolded, his reward was a mind and body grafted to the standards of the god’s themselves; special care taken to preserve his faculties and devotion. That did not mean it was painless.

It was a punishment in the end. He’d watched his brothers and sisters be turned into weapons. He’d watched them lose their minds to wanton slaughter. He watched them become beasts, then he watched them become something even less. Finally, he watched as they were put down—a mercy by then that earned him his first crime. Of course, it had looked like cowardice. They could never have seen it for what it was. How could he face them after what he’d done to them?

The memories were seriglass shards, falling on him like relentless rain. He saw the Executor approach him in a cloak of gold and black, fool’s gold masque glinting wryly in the dim light, an offer in his curling pearly hand. A promise. The Orokin is young but he smells of death. He knew better. Yet he’d taken it like a starving dog presented a slab of bloody meat, and became his scapegoat. That earned him his title, and his second crime.

On the killing fields of Lua, they’d come in a hoard. A centurion sent after him. A fleet of blades and embittered myrmidons out for his blood. The sharp sound of lunar rock grinding beneath boots. The flash of a drawn blade in their eyes, the flash of fury in his own. Dax, every single one of them. Loyal to a fault.

He’d killed them all. They were order, discipline. He was rage. He howled and reaped until every individual act, no matter how depraved, every biting scar, no matter how agonizing, every scream for mercy, no matter how pleading, lost meaning entirely. Then it happened again, and again, and again. His anger inexhaustible. His hate inescapable, from Lua’s halls to the outer rim of Neptune. He re-walked the highway of corpses left in his wake. He walked on until his feet were broken and his blade was dull and his hate was all that was left. Then he kept going. Weeks became months. Months became years. Years became decades.

And then…then they returned. Erupting bloody and crying like newborns. Clad in steel and stolen skin and sent in his place. The second generation.

He’d been furious. But more than anything else it pained him to see these twisted mockeries of all that was pure. And yet, they had kept something that he had lost. That he had cast away to prove he had what it took to stand among his lords. Carefully preserved, something that the brutalities and beatings the Orokin called training were not enough to carve from them.

They were more than a brotherhood. Sharpened by hate. Tempered by love, not loyalty. And when the one comfort they had was taken away—atomized for her apostasy—it had only strengthened them. Hate was a weapon. The motivation—not the goal.

How did he forget? Focus was the key. That was why they had seeked him out. They knew he could give it to them. In base exaltation lay insidious danger. That way lay madness. That way lay solitude. That way lay dishonor.

Finally, he saw himself. His void-logged, dagger-riddled, guilt-soaked corpse washing up in his dismal cell, consigning himself to such an ignoble end as fighting for the entertainment of some stone-faced nobody. Starved into false faith. Weeping sleepless through what counted for as the nights as the daggers ignited every nerve in his body with raw, screaming desire like the demands of a blind idiot god.

Spinning in retrograde, he felt himself unwinding into so many loose threads. The core of his person was being unmade. Daggers fell from him, vanishing before they even hit the ground until only six remained. Void, does it hurt.

Kullervo laughed, reveling in the freedom of the fight. He laughed as the mace swept in and tore pieces from him. Blow after blow, armor peeled from skin, skin peeled from bone. The broken, enraged thing was ripped away with it, blowing away the toxic fog he had wandered lost in for however long. His return strokes were equally devastating: hacking off a pauldron, gouging a faultline through the druid’s broad chestplate. Blood stained bright against ivory robes. The Warden was shouting, trying to fit a word in edgewise. But they fought harder, louder, drowning him out under crashing iron until it was only him and her. And as the last dregs of loyalty to a dead empire fled, he threw back his head and roared against the horrors of their collective mutilation: an overwhelming cathartic release of untold anguish that obliterated the sorrow and despair from his tormented heart. He lost his anger. He lost his hate. He lost the fuel that had sustained him for ten centuries. And he had never felt more alive.

Let him die! Let him be torn to pieces! But let him die with blood on his sword and fire in his heart.

Damn the crumbled empire for the sham that it was! He was free!

The next time they met caught them in a deadlock. The sparking disruptor edges met with the otherworldly properties of Vaen. The sword pushed out a hissing mental challenge. Unpleasant shocks run up his arms from the hilt, excruciating and oddly motivating. He had taken her measure by then. He saw her intent in the tilt of its neck, the dropping of its hips and shifting of weight on its hooves. She broke the deadlock, tilting her mace to direct their weapons outward before throwing herself at him, head downcast, tusks bared: two upper, one and a half lower. Sharp as the devil. She meant to gore him.

He dropped Vaen almost without thinking, ignoring its surge of other-anger as it clattered to the floor. Outstretched fingers grabbed his opponent by the pointed antlers and torqued. Its whole body contorted sideways, slaved to the center of balance and ruthless inertia. He made a half-turn to follow, and with a fractional movement—no longer than a quarter-second—tore a dagger from himself. He rammed it under the other Warframe’s chin, burying it to the hilt in its stag-like skull.

The tip burst from its socket in a spray of crimson and crawling amber pus. A silky pale eye sat impaled on the tip, vitreous humor leaked down the blade and sizzled. Red-blue optical nerves and hair-thin somatic fibers coiled around the shank, trying to pull the organ back into its ruined socket even as the taurus went limb against him. Thousands of years of technological advancement and biological marvels could do little to change the fact that a solid projectile through the head would kill just about anything.

There was a distortion in the air in front of him. An outline. Then a silhouette, rapidly gaining solidity until two pearlescent eyes appeared, glaring at him. One hand grasped the haft of the mace in the dead Oberon’s limp hand.

He was fast.

Not fast enough.

She hit him. In the face.

The crozius took him under the chin. His neck snapped back. His spine became a column of hot metal between his shoulders. White nails lance his lumbar. The flat blades ricocheted off, breaking free from the weapon as he stumbled and dropped the corpse. It sloughed off the precipice and into the hungry emptiness below.

His senses stabilized some seconds later. The first thing he noticed was that the arena was ruined. Radiation blasts along the walls, pockmarks on nearly every surface. The vexilla was little more than rags of once-royal drapings. The statue had fallen through. The floor shifted underfoot, teetering on the edge of complete collapse.

And before him, a little girl. That was what she looked like, then. All wire wrapped in pale skin. Her knees wobble and chest heaves. She eyes him dangerously. The mace, even without its bladed head, is comically oversized in her hands. Moment’s before the blow could have crumpled a malleus’s head, but outside of her Warframe, she was only human. It had taken everything she had left to strike him, but she remained ready to do it again. Vaen lay on the floor between them, glinting maleficent in the firelight. It vibrated against the ground, as if trying to be noticed.

Finally, he became aware of…warmth. It started below his faceplate where he’d been struck, then steadily spread down his neck in a slow welt.

His hand found the hollow of his neck. There his fingers met the source of the warmth. It stung. He pulled away and saw something sticking to his digits. Red. Oil-slick. He was bleeding.

He looked down at her, tilting his head at a angle to do so. The slightest inclination was a searing spinal torment. Her breath hitched, but she never looked away. In the face of cold power, she is fire. He was reminded of the archimedean, Ainikki: his surrogate mother, his death-ward. Tasked with the preservation of his sanity. Her hands had never known the field or the sword. But she knew enough to know there was more than the sterile labs. Her field of battle was the surgery table; her enemy, death itself. Her weapons were the scalpel and tissue-fuser. Her brilliance in outwitting the enemies from within. Killed by his reckless hand in a bid to save her.

He looked lower, at Vaen. Then back at her. The muscles in her neck braced as he took a slow, deliberate step forward—

And fell to one knee.

“Kullervo…kneeling?”

He took no relish in hearing the disbelief in the Warden's voice. He was no petty martyr to his spite, no matter how hard he tried to be. He was realizing that being angry took effort. It came with a sensation like clean water scouring away grime and filth, blood and tears. He felt in that instant he’d always known, and never wanted to accept it.

The way people describe you held more power than most ever realized. If a persona was constructed, if that’s what everyone saw you as, what reason did you have to be anything else? There were times in life when someone had their mind so set on something, naysay became an insult. But what are scars? How little they really matter.

The Tenno lowered her mace, using it as a crutch. She looked on the verge of collapse, but acknowledged his genuflection with an issue of her eyes and a smile that showed her teeth when she panted. They flickered to the sword between them. The air above it shimmered weirdly, things flittered across the surface. She reached to pick it up, struggling at first against the mire of exhaustion before hefting it. It twitched independent of her motion. He let her take it. In a world full of betrayal, it was his only ally. But a sword was no friend. It would as readily kill him as any other.

Her face was host to a hard-to-place expression. Neither happy or sad, calm or angry. It looked closest to relief. He agreed. The Warden did not.

“What are you doing?” He inquired. “Stop. He is beaten. You have won.”

Kullervo nodded, succinct, before his hands found two of the daggers—parallels prised onto either side of his ribcage. For the coda of this pivot, he pulls apart his necrotic breast, barring his pharaonic heart to the one who bested him.

He is hollow on the inside. Empty aside from his beating heart. It was not an organ as anyone else would recognize, anymore. A valence fusion of light and dark. An unbreakable bulwark gripped in an unshakable fist. An infinitely fragile diamond. A mote of dust. His oro: his eternal life laid bare. On his knees—bruised, bludgeoned, scarred, gored—he seemed bigger than he had before, his shoulders back, his head high. He is messianic in his mutilation. He is calm. Here, at last, was the beauty behind the tempest-tossed beast. The warrior-ward the children sang of.

Vaen weighed a hundred pounds. She knew what he wanted, of course. After all he’d gone through, who was she to deny him?

He listened to the beating of his tranquil heart, a faint tremor. The sound of its slow murmurs cleared his mind like spring rain. For the first time he could remember he was not tense; braced in preparation for the next assault. Not even as she gave him that solemn, forbearing look from before as she bowed. He closed his eye as she gripped the handle with both hands and sighed his gratitude.

“Stop! He kneels. He kneels! You worthless collaborator! STOP!”

His tormentor tried invoking the crimes, but they remained silent, rapt from their cells. What use was it to list indictments placed on him by a kingdom that no longer existed to enforce them? Who else was there to descend into the pit to carry out his punishment? That was what the Warden never grasped. What no Orokin could understand. He was right in one regard. He was a fool and a traitor—never a coward.

The sword raised.

And fell.

Something was amiss.

Ash overcast rotted away to the black of his partition. The firestorm has passed. It rained outside now. Ice winds buffet the bars and drag across the block, a mournful, drawn sound. It is the same heavy portal as always. It is quiet.

It is cold in his prison, but a warmth deep within himself kept the worst at bay. He looks down and sees the spots where most of the blades had been were empty. Not gone. Knitted over. Sore, but not searing. There was pain, still, always, but it was far away. Had they ever really been there to begin with?

But that wasn't it.

He did not know what exactly gave him the premonition. But he had been here long enough to know when something changed. Like coming home to see the furniture had been moved ever so slightly aside, the discolored scuffs where they’d remained for so long wiped over as to hide their passing. But his bench remained where it always had, immovable as if welded to the floor. The chamberpot was much the same. The dim overhead light was extinguished. Distant lightning strikes illuminated the block in searing white flashes. He did not flinch when the thunder boomed across the hold some seconds after.

His memories of the fight, like the pain, were receding from him. Trying to hold them was like gripping dust in your palm as the wind wails its frightened song. He looked around and picked himself up. His eye was slow, his hands slower. Vaen was nowhere in sight. He wasn't entirely upset with that, and had a faint idea of why.

He had been about to accept that all that had transpired had been another illusion—a conjuration of his sullen consciousness as he drifted out of tune yet again, withering in its condescension—when he remembered something, and it severed that idea by the roots. He no longer slept. He no longer dreamed.

With that, he realized something else. A lack of something else.

It was silent.

And in that silence, were the murmuring scratches that couldn’t have been anything other than metal meeting metal. Intentionally quiet, paired in conjunction with the tardy roils of thunder so as to remain hidden to any not attuned to noticing the parlays of the criminal underworld.

Someone was trying to say hello.

His hand found one of the golden spars branching off of the gate, icy and dense beneath his fingertips. The first thing he notes is that the King’s statue has not returned. The plinth has been cleared of its amputated leg, but the monument itself was nowhere in sight. The rest was unchanged from the perpetual expanse of smooth bone-pale stone he was accustomed to: its grand, deserted ranks unperturbed by the sullen wind under a crushing gray sky. Though, perhaps if he looked hard enough, he would have seen the faintest shimmerings of color with every flash of bead lighting. Though, he did notice that something was off with it, too. He’d always thought of his prison as a lived-in place, even if he’d never seen another soul aside from himself, himselves, and the Warden. But now it looked more like…sculpture, he supposed. The blank surfaces, the lack of furnishings or other empire-era aesthetics. He was no poet like his mother. It was the best comparison he could come up with. There was nothing to suggest it had ever held anyone else—or had even been made to hold anyone else.

The second thing he notices is the hand waving in his peripheral. His head turns as far left as the gaps and shape of his helmet allow. He first sees Espionage, knife in hand, tip pressed into the metal by its head. The others, like him, free themselves from their prostration as much as the geometry of their cells will allow. Even Flight has come to the forefront. They are looking at him. No. They are looking behind him.

He follows their gaze and blinks—a slow, languid affair. The cell to his immediate right…is empty. No injured yelps crooned from within. No howls rose from the bottom up.

Murder was gone. That’s why it was so quiet.

And in that utter void came one final sound. A noise so inconsequential even a Warframe could have missed it. Motes of dust, settling to the floor.

His trained eye found the source instantly. In the ceiling of his cell, stenciled into the stone by the glow of the sole chain-hung light, just as he had somehow known it would be, the crack had grown just a little wider.

Chapter Text

Beyond the curving duroglass viewport, the fires rage. I think they are beautiful.

The Galleon resembled the carcass of a great fish, stripped of skin and scale but still swimming. It filled the space before me with its cacophonous form, colossal even from hundreds of kilometers away. I calibrate my neuroptics with a thought, zeroing in for a better view until we could pick out the fusion fires crawling from airlocks, gutting it from the inside out, the spraying fuel lines, the desperate blue dots of welding torches in the savage grip of void-frost, and all the other ugly convolutions of its spiny hull. It rolls, going belly-up, quiet flowers blooming and wilting like demons being born, silent in the ink, and then insides and people are dragged out in the screaming wake of depressurization. Swarms of smaller craft—firbolgs, mainly—hover around its melting dermis like carrion-things. We watch a munitions sub-section detonate outward, hypersonic shrapnel shredding several closely packed craft. The others are more cautious after that—for what little good it will do them.

It was admirable in the same way a sturdy hammer was. It was smaller than an Obelisk, but that hardly mattered. Those vessels were workshops, temples, foundries, and warships. This had only one purpose, and everything about it was designed to fulfill it. It looked the part. Ugly and efficient as a crab. A hull bristling with weapons to level cities. Several thousand crew complement—soon to be unburdened. There is an honesty to the brutal industrialism I envy. 

They were trying to get it under control before it entered a total meltdown. It is too late for that. Polluting the antimatter drives had been a simple, irreconcilable affair for what should have been a life-threatening task. But they had the bodies to spare; ships were harder to produce. This was the expediency so common to empires at their peak in full. I am no longer saddened by the sight.

You have already left, not wanting to watch the rest. You see little point. I feel you receding like a plug being pulled—a jolt of disconnection, then mind-fuzzing static as the cold creeps in. Numbness spreads from my center outward, ending when my fingers curl. Something else wells inside me too, but it is crushed down as another tremor wracks the already-dead vessel. Finally, I feel nothing. But I stay despite the vitruvian flashing its damage report, as if I’m not aware that I’m missing my arm. It feels important that somebody sees this through, though I can’t say why. Maybe I’m just procrastinating. Regardless, there’s no blood left in me to bleed out, so I alone watch the coda arrive.

There’s a flash of light, followed by an astrophysical jet of ejecta easily moving faster than the speed of light. Ninety mega-therm bloom, erupting in absolute silence. For a fraction of a second, a star was born. Then the capital ship was stripped to its component atoms, along with everyone and everything else for several hundred kilometers around. The shockwave hits us and the orbiter shudders. It vanishes in an instant, the pseudostar swallowed by the ink spill of space, gone. Not as thoroughly as it could have been: the very fore and aft listed away as everything across the center dissolved into tiny slivers of metal, gliding from the tendex line out into endless night. A courtesy of that ballista who shot off everything past my elbow. Had she lived instead of being scattered by that spiteful antimatter drop we sent her way, she’d have lived in luxury for the rest of her short, rotting life. She probably died happy. Good for her.

In a vacuum, there’s no atmosphere to dissipate heat via conduction or to counteract the pressure-pulse, so the detonation is even more dangerous. I command the orbiter to run an external scan, but the ship Cephalon beats me to it. No damage sustained in the bow-blast. No life signs detected among the debris field. Perfect.

I remain at the viewport. It will be a moment before you gather the necessities and coax your assistant to wakefulness. Fire and bone are all that remain. As the shipwreck scatters, everything behind comes into view. Lua, Earth, Mars. Deimos, a bloody jellyfish, its poisonous membrane burst open like an omen to come. It is caught in its aphelion from its planet, seeming to reach out of the black-noir for me. The spores it sheds in the gigaton biovolume are as numerous as the stars. Some are the size of my hand, while others are as large as the orbiter. All careen off into space like pebbles tossed by unfurling tendrils hundreds of kilos in length. Most of them will freeze out there, becoming clumps of hardened insert tissue, toothsome calcium gnarls. Some will be tethered by Mar’s orbit and burn up on entry. Of untold billions, few will clear the well and latch onto the sides of passing vessels, burrowing inside, and then we’ll have to clear those out too.

I realize I’ve been staring. In panic, I turn away from the moon fashioned in a fleshling skull. As I walk, something where my stomach used to be knots, which I know to be impossible. I am gone before the vacuum has stolen the last vestiges of heat from the remains of the galleon.  

You have me limp down the ramp, I know where to go. I drop my sporothrix off by the arsenal, leaving it to restock its bio-flechettes in peace. It growls as I turn my back. Cute. A trail of fluid follows me, leaking from my resultant stump. There is no blood, only a pasty substance: dark, sweet-smelling, like nectar of the gods mixed with muddy spirits. Timeworn unguent that has outlasted civilizations. It will probably outlast us too. I cannot close the valve, yet I would happily let what has become my lifeblood trickle away if it meant never crossing the threshold.

No wormholes out of this one.

The infirmary door does not open with a hiss of venting pressure and still air. It sounds like someone gasping for breath. 

The garden is lit in amber biolume. Every surface writhes or pulses with oily spills of vital and redundant venous systems. It is warm, wet, stagnant. The skin along the walls shivers as I bring the cold with me. It is a miniature reflection of the plague moon: an ecosystem in replica. As I walk, I am aware of the churn of rotting mulch beneath my footplates only because my glitching haptic system tells me I should be, and that the ground sags and feels as though it will break beneath me, plunging me into the exocrine beneath where bacteria burst and divide in the humid depths, for much the same reason. Tendrils lazily sway as if wind blows through them—they brush me as I pass the frame, strands and fronds reaching out as if welcoming me home, only to lose interest when their barbs grasp metal instead of exoferrous meat-armor. They recognize that which is not and cannot be made their own, and reject me. Thorned clusters guarding fragrant fruits sigh and small verminous things scurry into pores lining the walls, leaving me unimpeded. I ignore the growing lotus—one of many: a virulent green stalk with arterial pedals—pushing its hooked head through the biomass to my left, behind the arachnidian arms of the auto-chirurgeon in the center of the room. The chirurgeon itself is a fusion of meat and metal: a light in its center was an eye surrounded by three twitching foreclaws the length and thickness of my arm. It slithers like a vague hydra, regarding me. It is the devil’s own invention.

I do not like this. Stepping inside is going from one extreme to the next. In comparison, my frigid metal and harsh lights seem sterile and lifeless. I am contoured to the figure of a human female, but these gnarls of root-muscle and bone remain so much closer. And then there is you: swaddled in glossy coveralls and a haztec’s rebreather to filter out miasma’s best left unmentioned. What to say about you? We’ve never exchanged a word. 

We watch one another for a second, two, three, then an impatient inflection of your hand. Beside you is a tray atop an ionic sterilization box: a globelight, a tool kit, a replacement arm, the oils that assist my locomotion. The chirurgeon will handle the bulk of the work, but the rest requires a more deft touch. Yours. 

Swarms of wooly moths scatter as I take the table. Technocyte oozes against my back, along with it rolled the phantom sensation of once having blood, and an unexpected, nostalgic revulsion tore its way through me. It will not be the last, but it will be by far the easiest to ignore. I am leaned back, not sitting, not standing. They are attracted to my lights—the ones that get close wither and die from the exposure to such raw, flensing energies. Their dried leaf wings don’t even flutter to the ground before the rest of their ilk snatch them from the air. The Helminth is a ravenous thing, but it creates more than it destroys. If it didn’t have its uses I’d have vented this room long ago. In these walls, venoms synthesize, mutagens catalyze. Beneath our feet, things get eaten by bigger things get eaten by bigger things, and the byproducts await refinement. It was entirely self-sustaining. On the frontier, we don’t get to be picky with where our bullets come from or how writhing they may be.

There is no threat of malady to me. I am not inoculated; there is little left to infect. Despite how it looks, this is one of the most sterile locations on the entire ship. This strain is unusually benign and doesn't spread much, but is nothing short of internecine when it comes to defending its territory. In any case, it is where your tools are. 

I disconnect what is left of my arm on my own, place it on the tray offered by the spider’s many limbs. The light in the center of the creature-machine's headplate stutters as its legs curl and stretch as if waking up from a deep sleep. The lens is cloudy like a cataracted eye, you primarily use the globelight as you replace what was damaged. Its purpose was in restoring expired organs: imbuing them with new, artificial life. What resides within me now is something else entirely, so it is of little use to either of us as anything more than a subpar assistant. But it is still more enthusiastic about this duty than you, and its clumsiness is somewhat endearing, so there’s that.

To her credit, it had been a wicked shot: taking the back of my elbow, twisting the chrome servo-actuators in the one direction they weren’t meant to go. It could have gone much worse, given what we were trying to do at the time. I’m only realizing that now for some reason. We were more annoyed than anything as we directed the antimatter drop along the crossover diodes, re-established quantum containment, and deployed it out the other hand—a perfect black orb, searing toward her and the emplacement the rest of the assault squad was setting up. She and everything else vanished in a flawless sphere of sharp nothing, the emplacement’s stockpiled detonite not even cooking off as it was pulverized under stellar pressures.

It had all been in vain. I was made modular: similar unbinding points sit along my ankles, knees, hips, and other joints. Next you insert a probe into the arterial to clear the blockage. Like blood, the unguent has clotted from exposure to the vacuum, and you must break it apart before I can finally close the valve. I hear it more than feel it.

There is the buzz of an ionic germ-killer sweeping the probe as, finally, you affix my new arm. With a quiet crunch and whirr of servos it locks in place. The five fingers—metal-capped claws—spring to life as flux flows through them. They look like spines on the ends of my hands, but are capable of superhuman dexterity. You take my hand and lock your fingers with mine. You feel the warm flush of raw plasma and fluxlines holding me together through the composite. I don’t. 

You hold my hand, but there is no affection in the act. You are testing tensile strength. I compact your fingers until they are about to dislocate, then release. I almost do not stop. When you recover, you chalk it up to a neural alignment issue and have me move marbles from one container to another. I do this for what seems a lifetime, taking my time trying to index the faint sensations. Smooth glass, microcracks under thumb-tips, tenderhook-tugs. It is all gutted for the dull sensory reception of numb fingers gliding over frigid metal—not the feeling, just the knowing that it was happening. I do not know what criteria you are looking for, but eventually you nod your head and take them away. It did not last long enough.

It is done. But we are not finished. The paradigm shifts, and now I am looking up at you. You lay a towel soaked in antiseptic across my thighs and legs. I do not know why you do it. There was nothing to avert from; public nudity was common enough among the castes. Peasants had no other option. Dax were expected to bathe together during campaigns. Archamedians? You could only be so modest after sharing a decontamination flush with your peers a few dozen times. The palace birds—did I need to say anything about them? Gold, made soft and supple in man’s form. They loved having an audience. 

Fluid swishes behind the eye-lens above me, bright as embalming fluid, dappling shadows onto the light, dragging across my armor, your skin-tight hood. I enhance and see things squirming inside. The apparatus watches me like a mantis; dissecting me with its one eye. Of the two of you, in that scratched breather and goggles you look something from another world. Perhaps that is fitting. You lock my arms to the table with energized coil-cuffs. Oxium-ticor alloy, imbued with pyrus essence. I can’t break it. I tilt my head, wondering why you even bothered giving me back my arm before doing this.

You swat away a rootlet that settles on your shoulder. The rest flinch and leave you alone after. You are slow in reaching for your tools, knowing already what you will need. I no longer have any say; this goes at your pace, and you will take your time so as not to make mistakes. A single crack in the shaft of even the finest blade can cause it to shatter on the wrong strike. It is practical, necessary, but I still hate you for it. 

You never cared for the grandiosity that made vagueness sound huge. Naramon: cold facts were what you craved. Like all of your school, you maintained a singular focus in your path. In everything you immerse yourself in your duties, concerning yourself with nothing but the mission ahead. Even downtime—the luxury of sleep as you called it—was enjoyed only for the purpose of recovery, with the end goal of preparing you to better carry out your function after. We are close, as charges, but that’s a relative description, for I am nothing but a tool. An extension of your will. You are aware that I am aware, but it makes no difference. You consider my individuality as noteworthy as the scratches along the side of a trusted weapon: minor tombstones that denoted association as possessions, but hardly affection—incurring no drawn eyes unless they impaired functionality to a degree considered unacceptable. I eye the flower in my peripheral.

That didn’t mean you wanted to hurt me, or that you aimed to cause me discomfort. More that the idea never occurred in the first place. Were our places switched and no anesthetic available, you would expect me to cut you open and do whatever was necessary. If I was indisposed, you’d do the surgery yourself. Your attitude with me was completely natural in keeping with your lifelong tenets. Everybody had something to hold onto; this was yours. Your clinicalness made it all the harder to care between the distinguishments, though. I guess, at the end of the day, you have the inhumanity to spare, and I do not. How deliciously ironic.

The Orokin were not a perfect race, as the Corpus idolized them. They were not cruel, as the Grinner propaganda machine foretold. They were not immortal, as we had shown them. No modern zeitgeist looked at through the lens of the past could accurately portray the ludicrous and seductive splendor of the time. Likewise, it failed to show the opposite. We often mistake our own experiences as the map upon which all truths are drawn. We are rarely correct in that respect. The Orokin were the best and worst humanity had to offer. But above all else, they were expedient. They did not want soldiers when they made us: warriors, heroes. Warriors break. Heroes die. It's funny then, that all my venom is reserved for you alone.

The chirurgeon lowers—a smooth hydraulic descent from the twitchy apparatus—spindled arms wide as if to embrace me. Suddenly I remember the stitches. I struggle for breath. I want to scream in the moment before the worn neural diodes shunt the concept of breathing and blood and suffocation and meat down scarred noetic pathways and replace them with more adequate, colder terms. Blood becomes flux. Meat becomes metal. Fat, gristle—polymer, concentraction fiber-bundles. Fasttwitch muscles have been replaced with sticky, conductive nanofibers that fill both anaerobic and aerobic functions. I have no heart. The corded bullion ligatures lacing my chassis connect to the crystalline semiconductive electric ingress at my center. It pulses with a dull forever-moan. This is what keeps me in this illusion of life.

The wonder of consciousness is really nothing more than a cocktail of drugs, chemicals, and electric nerve impulses generated and processed by an internal controller. Ergo, there is no reason that you can’t replace parts of it: cut out one or more of these elements, grant the body time to recover, and then re-introduce something else that serves the same function, but better. If you rip everything out of the human body all at once, what you'll have is a dead human and a very big mess for some unfortunate custodian to clean up. But if you remove it, piece by piece, hair strand by fingernail, and replace it, then it is fascinating what a body can survive without. What it adapts to. What comforting mirages it latched onto to convince itself that all is well. 

The cutting nearly unravels all of that. The legs curve like scythes up the sides of my abdomen, below my neck, meeting and ending just above my hips. Quenching acid gleefully sizzles through my exterior plating. There is no sectioning of dermis, fat, and muscle to reveal the veins and tendons rippling beneath. It peels away one layer of ablative plating, one buffer, then one layer of impact cushioning, then the hollow of my insides. Every millimeter its claws drag brings to attention something new and unpleasant about my own nature. When it is done, it closes on me like a clamp, tips of its legs reaching under my skin, and all at once removes my grossly over-architectured ribcage. The damaged spars flex under the pressure as it is placed on a nearby table and carried out of sight. It will see to the repairs and fetch a replacement elsewhere. But its job is done. It’s all on you now.

You fumble at first. You always become disoriented when we disconnect, unused to returning to your base faculties. It irritates you. It makes you feel weak. Frenzy, war, numb the senses of man. When we’re together, you can compute it. When we’re apart, the debt stacks. I am better at dealing with it than you, but I still suffer—just in a different way. You…envious is not the right word. But you yearn for what I offer. Lust for it, even. The power helps you make sense of it all. You used to frequent your quarters, gazing into the stars as you meditated. Recently, you spend more time in that glorified chair than on your feet. Our eyes meet, as if you hear me speaking. I still have nothing to say to you.

What follows is closer to maintenance than surgery, but shared some elements with jury-rigged bomb defusal. You don’t like blood, neither do I, so that suits us just fine. But you work with a mechanical apathy that makes me miss the spider-leg caresses of the chirurgeon. It weaves in the background like a charnel-drunken carrion bird, engrossed in its own task of honing my ribs with deceptive care, weaving mono-metal strands like a spider spinning silk, threads flashing. In contrast the ritualism of your repairs is hopelessly efficient to the point of being utterly devoid of passion. You're just going through the motions—but at least you're being quick about it. The first time you did this you had groped blindly at my mechanisms. It had been a matter of necessity, but I still feel a worm in my spine thinking back on it. You understood machines too well. You look at these walls and see only vulnerability. Perhaps that is why they chained us together, like two boats in a storm.

I am meticulously vivisected. You work with a modified gammacore to excavate my crushed insides, its superheated beam cutting away artificial sinews, parting mangled struts to be grabbed by the needle-nosed pliers in your other hand. Lubrication lines are cinched and redirected—to where, I can’t begin to say. First came out the prana reservoir: a glossy slab encrusted in fulgurite on the very edges that pulses faintly and was cold, almost unbearably so, to the touch. My indicator lights dim the moment it is removed, and my thoughts slow almost to that of a mere human. If you hold the piece close enough for frost to prick your skin, you could hear voices whispering inside it: hexes and promises. Your fingers tingle handling it even through your rubberized gloves, and the sensation remains long after you put it to the side: a touch of madness, stirred deep inside you. Its removal nullifies the accidental discharge of my abilities. 

Like the ballista, that bombard had done a number on me. Not many things are strong enough to lift a Warframe. Even fewer are quick enough to get within range to do so. He had been a prime specimen of his race; some overseer was getting flayed alive right now, because he sure as hell wasn’t meant to die a grunt without his template being preserved for future use. A shame then that all his genes went into raw strength. It didn’t help him when we left him splashing in tachyons. From there, all it took was a hasty glance-shot to spark nuclear fission. Every molecular bond holding him together split and released enough energy to make a grain of sand jump and inch into the air. How many molecules were there in one hundred thirty-three kilos of meat, bone, and gristle, on top of another twenty-five in bionics and armor? A lot as they’d found out. I didn’t like doing that, you know—even if he hit me hard enough to leave me limping all the way to extraction. It’s a slow death in stasis.

You drag out a tangle of somatics and still-pulsing circuitry that, together, looks like barbed wire and broken glass knitted into a nest, fried in the crossover. No viscera slops free of containment. Unraveling that Gordian knot takes you a moment. I look down the column at the rest of myself. Glossy black and metallic red, the spaces between a gaseous purple and blue when energized. The colors of a quasar. I am atomica: rare for how utilitarian my model is. As always, principles died to practicality. Even now, my heart bared to you, my reservoir removed, I still sing with power. Not in the way of the Octavia or Banshee, but of something altogether more volatile: the collision of particles that were ancient when the universe was young. 

Each of us embodied some aspect of humanity through the eons. Swordsmen. Wordsmiths. Hollowed butchers. Stony pugilists. Chrono-engineers. Soul reavers. Blood-starved maidens, crimson jewels swaddled in black and white. Void-priests. Monsters. Some were patient. Some were fury incarnate. Some were conquerors, others, liberators. Some could walk the razor-thin line of existence and non-existence and the nothing in between. All were made to be weapons. Blades. Guns. Daggers in the dark. But me? The Novae?

They made us into neutron bombs.

Gravity is not a force but a particle field—no different than light or magnetism. Among the mechanicals—the Gauss, the Vauban, the Mag—my…enhancements, are unrivaled. They had to be. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed—but you will inevitably lose some in any process of transfer. Entropy always takes its due, even to those who may otherwise be gods. Others have to work around this veritable truth. They recycle, they cut down, they convert, they re-use. There is no power source in the known universe greater than that of a singularity. A normal black hole produces enough dark energy to sustain its own existence. Some of them produce enough to sustain themselves and all the stars in a galaxy. It is, for all intents and purposes relevant to mortal life-spans, an infinite source of power. But to take it, one had to be willing to let go of all rationality.

That would require sacrifice—self-cremation. They’d never do that. That’s why they made me.

You have finished deboning my other arm, separating the ulna and radius for individual examination. Next you lean into my chest cavity, my head raises to follow you. The pain is less than I thought it’d be. Duller. Vaguer. Distributed across my body. It’s not true pain, just the facsimile this new body forces me to endure that tells me that I am coming to harm. Perhaps, I was expecting the tactile delirium of the first time: the coldness of a metal sliding in, the blistering heat of air on bare muscle—an experience like drowning. But the bite of the scalpel is not what it once was. I am not what I once was.

Everything is measured, mapped to the millimeter, then removed. Each piece is glossy black in a pool of preservative unguent, pocketed with connection sockets, some glowing off the reserves of internal capacitance. I rely on no biological hardware. You cradle my head with one gloved hand and glide textureless fingers across the polished dielectric runnels of my faceplate. You noticed a crackle in the static, but my vision is fine. It was on your end, not mine. You believe me, though I haven’t said anything. I am thankful you don’t need to replace the neuroptics. I still remember getting enucleated. Out of everything they cut free from my body and everything else they shoved inside like you’re doing right now, I only felt dead when they took those. My mother left me them.

All models shared one thing in common. We cannot speak: only howl, roar, or scream. Above all else, tyrants fear things that can’t be quieted—so they took away our voices. They feared me enough that even that wasn't enough. So they took everything else too. You had been less surprised than me to discover that all that remained mortal inside this shell was a spine driven through with titanium rivets and sullenly crowned with a handful of gray matter. My eyes were flat discs behind my helmet. My skin is smooth metal beneath a patina of moldering brown-black filth—dried blood streaked with rivers of ash and slag. It soaks up the humid air, becoming moist and pliant. The baroreceptors scrying for blood pressure curl up at the searing touch of radioactive cinders. I know I died at least twice during the initial surgeries. Each time they restarted my heart, until they got irate and replaced it with something that requires less maintenance. That killed me too.

I was not tormented with the cravings like so many others of my generation. The hunger, the despair, the insanity: that brand of rampancy that welled like a puncture wound through the ranks of the first transfigured. No hyms haunt my hours offline. There wasn't even enough left of me to take some spiteful satisfaction in leaving our torturers wallowing in the antimatter of their quantum detonation. I remember envying them. 

So I’m surprised, at first, to find myself quietly trembling against my cuffs. I do not resent this. Not always. Not usually. It is not one-sided. As you are a ghost in my machine, I am the winterglass spirit leeching off you for the faintest traces of warmth. But there is stillness in your soul when you are like this. I do not like it. I am supposed to be the engine—but I am scared, and I don’t need your help to be. I can snap my fingers and burn a hole through a meter of ferrite. I can move through space-time like moving a piece on a Komi board. But despite every part of me being replaced with something else to facilitate my incredible abilities, they left me the barest trace of humanity. Just enough to feel fear.

Deep in what has taken their places, phantom alarms begin to chime. Each one cried out, afraid, that my brain was being starved of oxygen. That the flesh-quilt mass of dry blood and cremated remains coating me was being mistaken for the skin I no longer had. That my blood was boiling in my veins, metallic vapor expanding against the thin arterial membranes. They will soon burst. My ribs were gone, my chest was folding in. My heart was in your hands, straining with every beat—stretching out its life, making it last—desperately clinging to me as you tried to pull it free. Behind the fused plate of metal over my mouth, I find the stump of my tongue probing the tubes plugging into the firmament below my brain.

I knew, rationally, what it was. The memory of a long lost body catching up, centuries later, with the fact that something, everything, was wrong. That nothing was the same despite what the stimulus it relied on to parse the world was telling it. A ghost that didn’t know it was already dead. Alive just enough that, when my attention flickered to what had been, it became aware enough to scream out before the corroding seals cinched tight, and it fell back into fitful silence. That did little to help against the rising swell of panic. The brain was an emotive organ; I cannot escape its raw biology. Especially not in a place like this. This is why you removed the reservoir.

When it becomes too much to bear, I give in. Steadying myself, my hand curls, fingers twisting in skeletal calligraphy. You were ready for this. A blast of leptons disables haptic feedback, and I topple back into the merciful dark. I prefer to be awake for these. I don’t trust someone so irreverent, but that’s because I don’t trust anybody. I do not dream while you work.

Maybe the issue was more mechanical, and you could fix it. Maybe pattern-ataxia was starting to take hold, in which case, there was nothing either of us could do. Maybe I was simply coming apart, as was the fate of any machine, no matter how well invented or how clever its designers thought themselves to be—and the Orokin had thought themselves very clever indeed. Copper, steel, gold: metal does not know death, as it has never known life. There is purity in flesh as surely as there is no greater agony than rictus. In abetting evolution, I have forsaken the wisdom of my bones.

Next I initialize, I see a tray stacked high with pieces of me, aggregate handfuls of organic-inorganic viscera. You have not disconnected anything you are not certain will need to be replaced. As it is, the end result is strangely pleasing: a web of alimentary canals and flux-lines made by an industrious spider. You have cleaned off the grime and pasted skin. There is a baritone, slightly muffled, like gravel rolling downhill, from the back of the room. A satisfied sound. The air stank strongly of musk and mildew and, faintly, gastric acid and other things digesting, so I know you didn’t vent the cruor. I wonder what new horrors drift in the protoplasm beneath. You have done so to prevent corrosion, but after what has happened the act of care, no matter how utilitarian, makes me love you. Another remnant-trick of the brain.

Let me clarify: I do not think you are evil. At least not like they were. They cared too much, but only about themselves. You don’t care enough about anything. I can’t blame you, but you are wrong. The Tenno—you, not us—say it is better not to lie. It is better not to make slaves. Yet what do you do with us? To yourselves? That pretty flower was not always in the corner over there. If asked, you’d say it is a matter of honor. You fight to defend the defenseless. But that’s not true. You fight because, of the two of us, it’s what you were made for. It’s what you’re comfortable with. It helps you forget.

It makes me remember.

You check what can go back in, and call for replacements for what can’t. The process repeats again in reverse. It is no more pleasant for this fact, but that rogue pattern of biology-converted-code is blessedly silent. The chirurgeon holds my refurbished ribcage in its three foreclaws. By the time it is assessed by your skeptical gaze and re-fused to its cradle I am barely cognizant of the act. I feel curiously detached from myself—more than usual. Like you’ve measured my mind and body but not me.

The infirmary is quiet now, aside from the gurgles of indigestion coming from the walls. Your assistant retreats as you put the reservoir in and my tertiaries course with energy like a plume of hot gas igniting into plasma, held by an electromagnetic ward. Starved, they glow brighter than before, ravenous for the boundless other-energies offered by the Void-idol. I have more power to spare than a Dyson sphere. Gravitons and stars lay at my very fingertips. Yet moments ago, I was impotent before you. I still am.

That was the crux of our bonding, wasn't it? I could destroy this vessel with a snap of my fingers. Blast it into so many loose particles, shred it into subatomic quarks and scatter the ashes to the solar winds. I could do so much worse to you. But if I strike you down, I will lose myself entirely. So I tolerate you making use of my existence, and skim off what little sensoria I can off of yours, reaping my ill-gotten gains every time we link. On good days, I can feel something like sunlight on skin again, underneath a layer of cold, damp clothes. I recall watching the last of the galleon’s obliterated remains cooling, and am reminded with some amusement that stars do not twinkle. They burn.

You undo the cuffs before I can snap them. Your nimble fingers deposit them into a separate bag for sterilization. You stretch outward in all directions: it has been hours of sitting deathly still. After a pause to consider, you remove the upper half of your mask and wipe sweat from your brow.

I know sleep is friends with death, but you should really get some rest. Instead you pull out a yellow-banded filter and place it into the empty slot affixed to your mask. You lean back, breathe. Dayglow smoke slithers from the breather grille as your chest caves and I watch you press palm-heels into bloodshot eyes. We were linked for too long this time. It’s too much for a human to handle, too unstable, even for one who stretches the term to its utmost. I burn you out, but you don’t let yourself recharge. Your chromium salt eyes, indigo in the amber glow, have dilated to pinpricks and your breathing is calmer. You say the burners help you recover; the compounds absorbed by your respiratory tract releasing endorphins and serotonin into exhausted regions of your brain, stimulating not a high but a cruise. I know it’s just because you’re addicted.

I haven’t gotten up yet. I am uncertain if I can stand. Neither do you. A minute becomes ten, then and hour bleeds into three. I ratchet my new arm, occasionally summon a singularity in my palm and then crush it into diamond. I make a game of feeding potshots to mouths in the walls. You watch, eyes commenting. There is an uneasy calm in the humid air, as there always is when we are isolated together. But I like you in these moments. It’s a spiteful kind of affection, seeing someone so uptight willingly indulge is something self-destructive. I guess it makes me feel closer to you. I have never had or understand the fondness some other pairs share: we are both solitary creatures, manufactured or otherwise. But still, I enjoy it, so I take it and wonder if I would mourn you if you died. I already know you wouldn’t.

I do not bother wondering if this respite will last: I read my answer in the tension lines of your neck, the opaqueness of your eyes. Even with tar in your lungs and xenoplasm in your brain you are unable to completely relax. There's always a new grinder to throw ourselves into, and the chirurgeon is more than happy to help stitch us back together so long as it gets fed. 

To this, I of course say nothing. And you, my Operator, say even less.