Cobalt knew from the moment she arrived at the Spiked Shore, that she needed to talk with her mother. She had immediately smelled her out as soon as she had come within range of her heightened senses, and it did not take much longer than that to meet her eyes. She was a proud-looking woman, serpentine body carried with an imperial grace only slightly marred by her undisguised shock hearing what was in hindsight probably a bit too public of a callout. But could you blame her? She who had lived her whole life never really knowing her mother besides vague second-hand accounts. She knew what a mother was meant to be, of course, everyone had a mother, didn’t they? But the closest there had been to that sort of figure in her life was Aunt Cinnabar, and though she had loved her profoundly and the loss of that wise old woman ached painfully in her soul… both due to her station and the duties that came with it Cinnabar was unfortunately not a constant presence in her life like the spectre of her father was like.
What was a mother meant to be like? She had asked Faith that question, knowing John was an orphan and Gorekin likely had values incongruous with any human culture regarding the matter. But to her question the only response was…
“I don’t know. I was taken in by the Church from a young age, my parents either died in the famines or gave me up to save me from them.” She had said.
Really what did she expect, in this great big kracked-up world?
So in the end, when her mother called for her, she felt distinctly unprepared. What was she even like? How was she to address her? She had asked for her name, and was told it was Saha Crane, was it acceptable to call her that or should she call her mother or even Sister Crane? Great Spirit it was strange knowing her cultivation was perhaps only a Step or two below her own mother…
Those distracting thoughts melted away to total oblivion as she approached the room. The Spiked Shore Sect was a post-war construction of salvaged scrap vaguely in the shape of a crown with the guest quarters down on the lower floors and the higher ranking members higher up. Here, midway up the structure, there was a cool lake-side breeze carrying with it the scent of very distant fungi. She used this to centre herself, she needed to keep a cool head, no matter how this went, a first impression was vital.
“Ah, you must be Cobalt. Come on in.” An elegant and dignified voice called out from within. The accent was very different from her own, but she could hear something in there that she heard in herself. Something she knew didn’t come from her father.
She slowly opened the door and saw coiled across a luxurious set of cushions her mother, white scales glittering in the sunlight streaming through the window. She was… beautiful. Scales like polished marble, eyes of glimmering ruby, a stature easily twice as large as a full-grown man, and nails reminiscent of barbed brambles.
“Mother-” Cobalt began before being quickly cut off.
“Saha will do fine, please.” Her mother insisted.
She bit her tongue. “Saha, thank you for honouring me with this meeting.”
Saha hummed. Her expression seemed deliberately inscrutable, but Cobalt could feel her gaze prodding at her from every possible angle. Intending to peel her away and reveal her true intentions.
“No, it is truly my honour. I did not expect you in truth to make the journey here. Come and sit with me child, it must have been difficult.” Her mother said… diplomatically. There was truly little warmth in her words, it felt like the politics that had been beaten into her skull since childhood. In fact it probably was.
But in spite of everything, Cobalt listened, she sat and waited. They stared at each other for a little while, an uncomfortable silence filling the air before…
“Why don’t you be honest, I know you are here because you want something. And perhaps something can be arranged, I certainly do not wish to make an enemy out of you.”
“An enemy? Y-you are my mother?” Cobalt blabbered, taken aback.
“So it would appear.” Saha muttered, not quietly enough to evade notice. “Look, everyone wants something. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Your little play back there, I admit, took me off guard. Cut off many options. So let’s talk, woman to woman, perhaps this can be beneficial to us both.”
“Benefic- WHAT ARE YOU KRACKING TALKING ABOUT!” Cobalt screamed, swelling in size as the rage burned through her. The air around her shimmered and glowed with the pulsating bioluminescent reds coming off her shifting skin. Wings of bone protruding against her fresh robes, “YOU TREAT ME LIKE I AM- I AM SOME STRANGER! HERE TO SQUEEZE SOMETHING OUT OF YOU! HAS IT EVER OCCURED TO YOU I MIGHT HAVE WANTED TO SEE MY MOTHER?”
Saha hid her emotions well, but she could see the microscopic twitches on her face. Uncertainty, fear, and something else she couldn’t quite read snuffed into a mask of neutrality. “Are we not strangers? Our lives have never intersected, and only after your Sect fell and burned did you come crawling here. What am I meant to assume?”
Cobalt forced herself to shrink back to normal. “I- I wanted to.”
“What?”
“I always wanted to meet you.” She admitted, gripping her arm so tightly she could feel scales peeling at the edges where her nails touched. “I met you once, years ago, when I visited this place. I never saw your face, but I recognised my scent on you and part of me was desperate to reach it. To know that there was something in my blood tha-that wasn’t my father. That I would know that half of myself that surely couldn’t have been him, couldn’t have been that warmongering monster… so in my desperation yeah I sought you out. I thought- I thought you would at the very least understand.”
She bit her lip, hard enough to draw blood, that sweet ichor rolling across her tongue drawing tempting thoughts that mixed with her rage. She shoved it down, no, if the world was to think her weak she would be all the stronger for it. “You are a shell of a woman! Y-you! To think you can only think in terms of this meaningless dox-shit politics like everything is a power play- do you know what it is like to miss a person you never knew? Is it so much of a stretch to believe, I wanted to see you, to talk to you?”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
“Whatever you are trying to say, I-” Saha tried to rebut before Cobalt slammed her fist against the polished stone table, sending a large crack rippling through the surface.
“WHAT AM I TRYING TO SAY? AM I SPEAKING IN RIDDLES TO YOU? IF YOU HAVE NO INTENTION OF TREATING ME LIKE A KRACKING PERSON WE ARE DONE HERE! YOU AND WHATEVER BOMB-CURSED DELUSIONS YOU HAVE GROWN CAN LIE HERE AND ROT!”
Without another word Cobalt turned tail and left. She did her best not to let the woman see the tears down her cheeks, she did not deserve that. When she finally had a moment of privacy she finally allowed herself to break down, the emotions she had held in rushing inwards like a tidal wave.
Could things truly have gone any worse?
----------------------------------------
“A moment of your time, if you please?” The man who had escorted him and his friends to the guest quarters. The man… was uncanny. A large scar splitting his face along the middle, almost like he was hit by a blade and badly sewn together on the battlefield, probably contributed in part to that. But there were other things too. Gorekin certainly seemed uneasy around the man, having placed himself as far as possible when the group was escorted. And maybe it was the body language, or the stiff way he spoke, or the indescribable smell hanging around him but he was put off too.
But one could not judge too hard a Mutant of course. Only the Great Spirit knew and catalogued every possible mutation the world had to offer. He could feel perhaps one of them, a magnetic field around the head stronger than usual. Not iron, for he felt he could not reach out and manipulate it like he did the rusted metal he had been manipulating with his latest mutation. But certainly something metal or perhaps electric.
[Magnetism and electricity are fundamentally linked. The phenomena originate from the same source, the movement of electrons in atoms.] ARTOS mentioned helpfully. Something about the tiny Atomos spirits that gave Cultivators power? Honestly, he didn’t really understand the latter part.
“What do you need him for?” Faith asked skeptically. The green-skinned girl hadn’t been much in sunlight lately, her itching skin growing more irritable than usual. Part of him worried that it was the Curse creeping up on her, but she was strong, he knew.
“It doesn’t concern you. But I assure you, your companion will be in good hands.” The man replied.
“It’s fine Faith.” He assured his companion. “I’m sure it’s just something procedural.”
The man nodded. “Indeed, I simply wish to make right certain records.”
And with that, they left, out the main gate to one of the many disused spikes jutting from the sandy soil. There was some Si in the metal, John realised, though diminished over centuries of being absorbed by Cultivators. Perhaps at one point, they served a greater purpose yet, but if anyone knew of it none spoke of it.
Reaching a hidden maintenance shed of sorts carved into the side of one of those pillars of metal, the slightly creepy man looked around shiftily before speaking.
“Designation and model?” He asked robotically, far too much like ARTOS.
His gills stood up straight all at once. Clearly also perturbed, he felt the machine part inside him seemingly lock up, returning to a more mechanical train of thought he had nearly forgotten.
[SCANNING: SIGNS INDICATE NO RELATION TO THIS MODEL. RETRIEVING DATA BANK ENTRIES ON SOVIET MODELS… NONE FOUND.]
“What do you mean?” He asked.
“No need to be secretive now, as the briefing indicates so long as we do not communicate through radio signals the humans here possess no means of detecting our conversation. Unless such measures are outdated, but unfortunately this unit was not designed with the capacity for alternate means of communication. It will have to suffice for now.] He explained.
“Who are you?” He asked, mind drawing upon the metal around them. If he needed to… there were weapons everywhere.
“Designation QS-2, Prototype Espionage Homunculus. Assigned to Greater Gestalt-Platform R-13-1.” He said. His eyes began to glow with a strange silver light, and though no emotion seemed to express on his face he could feel the suspicion rising instinctively in his gut. He did not have long now.
In lieu of giving an answer he ripped large chunks of metal off the walls, jagged razor sharp edges shooting towards the thing. To its credit, it reacted faster than expected but was unable to guard its back. The flesh ripped and a foul smell emerged, not rot, but something else entirely.
He remembered coming across the preserved corpses in the abandoned mausoleum of a rotten Gilded Tomb. On many of them, the flesh remained remarkably preserved, still bearing some superficial resemblance to albeit mummified bodies that lay strewn across the streets during the worst days of the Great Famine. It was not a productive day in the slightest, most of the valuables long since robbed by previous teams, but he could never forget that smell… the caustic smell of artificial preservation.
Long tentacles of pulsing black flesh ending with bony blades, that he could vaguely see now in the sunlight streaming in from the holes he tore were reinforced with metal much like his own flesh, lashed out towards him seemingly from the hole opened by the wound. In response he transformed his right arm into a shield, blocking the brunt of the impact… but not stopping a tentacle slamming into his right shoulder.
The initial impact was a shallow cut, but he quickly realised there was some sort of corrosive venom in there. Where his skin was covered by a layer of slime there was no problem, but in the otherwise shallow wound, the substance ate its way down burning with agony the whole time as it exposed muscle, wire and the tip of a metal-crusted bone.
“Why do this? This fight serves no purpose! How have I displeased the collective!” His opponent asked, almost as confused as he was angry.
[PAIN SUPPRESSANTS ADMINISTERED] ARTOS informed him, washing him with a wave of numbness that allowed him to respond.
“I am… nothing like you!”
With a clench of the slightly distorted fingers on his right arm, he sent much of the spike-workshop collapsing in on the man, an entire half of the structure turned into weapons against him. He moved admirably quickly, now that the element of surprise was out of the question, but it was still more than enough to sever the vast majority of the tentacles and his right arm.
His vision was swimming, even through the pain suppressants. That venom was stronger than he thought… and he could vaguely feel the writhing of tiny wire whips desperately trying to stitch the gaping hole back together. Lashing out at all his surroundings when he failed. Desperate to do something to neutralise whatever was causing this, he lit a spark of electricity around the wound and felt lightning ripple into the wound.
Vision swimming he looked up to see some people had gathered looking in shock over the scene. He tried to speak but found himself too weak, only being held up by the pain suppressant drugs.
Wrapping his stump and wounds with the tatters of his clothing, the Homunculus said to the crowd. “This one is an imposter! A machine man in our midst! He planned to amish me but failed, see how the sparks and metal fly from his wounds! See how his bones are plated with steel!”
Well fuck.