Melody heard whispers. Warnings of Goethe of Goetaria, rising from the triune grave, and the eternal forlorn on their long march to a violent end. All the while the blood rushed from her body, and she wondered how her body continued to walk so drained.
She brought color to that white void, leaving her red trail on wall and floor. The whispers grew louder as her blood grew thinner, asking what happened to her and if they should stop and help her. But no bodies accompanied the voices, so she carried on alone and weak, her head throbbing from a concussion.
When she vomited, she wondered how far she’d walked. Twenty paces? Three hundred? A thousand? When she vomited again, she wondered how many more lay ahead of her.
She wiped her mouth clean of yellow bile with her sleeve, feeling sick as the smell of puke and blood mingled under her nostrils. She stumbled forward and cried, clutching one hand by her face and the other against her wound.
And there she saw her choice; to move on through her pain or to lay there and accept defeat. So she rose and leaned on the wall for support, taking slow, shaky steps onward into… what?
She saw a vast expanse of grey metal walls. Thin lines indicated distance as the panels making the walls were immense, and the chasm had a blue tint from the sheer distance it encompassed. Instinct drew her eyes downwards, where she saw no floor, but blackness broken by the lights of many machines too far for her to make out, forming a starry terrestrial night sky beneath her. Her knees quaked and she collapsed. She wanted to turn back. But a whisper drew her onward, saying “If the body is the temple, what then is the mind?”
And she answered in thought “A part of the body, like any other organ”.
But she knew she meant the brain, and was imposing her meaning onto the whisper, rendering her understanding mute, knowing beyond her sweet sciences that the brain itself was unfathomable, being the dwelling place of many great powers and a hall of many locked doors.
And then she saw a door, arched and very tall, leading to an inner chamber sixty feet long and thirty feet wide with a ceiling forty-five feet high.
In the middle of the floor was an infant, a boy. He was crying. He was crying and he was naked, and two skeletal creatures were crawling towards him. They were crawling towards him as if they were spiders scaling a wall, though they lie upon the ground, kissing dust shaved off the Rock of Ages.
Melody groaned. Her wound ached, though the bleeding had stopped. But it hadn’t stopped on account of any healing. It had stopped because all ten units within her had spilled to mark her path. And while she somehow was kept alive, she felt all the pains of death. But the whisper called to her again, so she dared to reach a hand over the chasm and felt a surface cold and smooth.
She struggled onto all fours so she could reach further out. Her hand found the cold, smooth floor, but the floor revealed itself to be a bridge when she found its end. The bridge seemed to make a sharp turn right, so she stayed on her belly, and found the bridge soothing on the gash torn by her attackers’ knife.
Hugging the bridge with all four limbs she dragged herself along. She closed her eyes, too frightened to look at the expanse, her narrow path so windily spanned. So inch by inch she crept along, plagued by an irrational fear of something crawling over her hand and the consequences of her panic if such a thing were to occur.
There can’t be insects here, she assured herself. The whole complex is hermetically sealed. And the Sentinels did not eat physical food, so why would there be any organic matter in there besides her? She felt foolish, and yet her fear refused to leave. So she carried on with it clinging to her heel, feeling her way along the bridge’s many turns.
At last she found herself moving directly towards the opposite side from where she entered. The bridge only made two turns then, and she began to feel slightly less terrified until her pathway forked. Her instinct drew her to the left, so she carefully lifted one leg, feeling physically pained by her fear, and slowly dragged herself forward onto the left path while repositioning one leg and then the other. For an awful instant, her left leg dangled over nothing. Her stomach sank then, triggering a thundering in her heart that she couldn’t stifle. She saw herself falling over and over, each time landing on a different death trap. She paused, caught her breath, then reached forward slowly. Her head spun from all her blood loss and again she paused, then pulled herself forward until her hands, gripping the bridge, were by her ribs.
Another pull and her head spun again, so she made her slow way, pausing after each pull, until she reached out and felt nothing.
What?
She groped along the edge in front pf her, slowly at first, searching for another path. She felt a steep angled drop directly ahead, so she spread her hands apart, finding no additional pathway. She’d come to a dead end.
No.
She searched again, frantically. Nothing.
Why? How?
She closed her eyes and fought back tears.
Crying won’t help you.
She looked over her shoulder. Somehow, she would have to travel backwards, navigating with her feet. It seemed impossible. She brought her hands back to her sides and tried to rotate her torso, but the second her hip crossed the threshold she yelped and clung to the edge. Her fear was now hugging the backs of her knees.
She took several sharp breaths, then slid backwards. She screamed when she missed the first turn, pulled herself back up, and after another volley of sharp breaths angled herself slightly, then slid backwards some more, screaming less loudly when she met the next turn, and on the third she merely yelped.
Then she found herself in a space too tight to navigate backwards. Her path angled twice sharply, and she was too delirious from shock and pain to tell which way to turn.
She whimpered softly, then began to rotate, struggling to keep her legs bent with her feet over her buttocks so her lower half wouldn’t dip over the edge. Her stomach nearly imploded when she felt her groin pass over empty space. Her fingers gave way for just an instant and her body slipped a sixteenth of an inch over the edge, only a little ways, but enough. Her hamstrings cramped, her legs straightened, and she went over the edge, banging her knees against something semi-solid. She instantly pushed herself upwards with her legs, screaming breathlessly through the cramps and pulled herself back onto the bridge, this time facing the direction she needed to go. She felt for the surface her knees had struck, hoping to use it for extra balance, but she couldn’t locate it, so she pushed on, her fear now clutching at her shoulders and breathing against her neck.
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In time she found her way to the ledge on the east side of the chasm. There she dragged herself to her feet and found the door she saw. She felt along its surface for an opening mechanism, hoping to find a light source during her search as well. What little light there was in the chamber came from fixtures too high up for her to see, and mostly illuminated a swatch of wall several dozen feet above her head. She kept feeling wherever she could reach, noticing geometric patterns engraved into the door, but no discernable opening mechanism presented itself.
Then she heard the crash of a great latch being released, followed by a low and distant hum. Lights began to glow beneath the metal skin of the door, gradually forming a shape like a leafless tree with nine diamonds on either side.
Blue light spilled in as the door opened. Melody walked through like she was in a trance. This room had a much lower ceiling. Its floor was checkered, black and white, though it looked blue in the room’s light. It went on without change for what felt like an eternity. Melody knew that was partly due to her condition, and also the lack of changing detail, but still the room was quite vast. Until it ended at a cliff.
Or so one would call such a feature planetside. But the floor dropped suddenly, and when she saw the space beyond, she gasped, and tears flowed down her cheeks over the beauty of the scene. She looked then at Albion’s heart, and clustered around that swirling vortex of unknowable energies were thousands of pods held in a spiraling net of glowing tubules. Melody could not see the pods, but she knew somehow, they contained those radiant machines, the Sentinels.
How anyone could associate them with the Surge, Melody could not explain. Whether the infamous and legendary Doctor Yamin had a hand in both species’ creation or not, the Sentinels were angelic creatures, the Surge demonic. She was all the more offended by the comparison now having seen where they roosted while dreaming in their virtual haven.
Then the question struck her like the hammer of Hephaestus. Why was she there?
A blinking light caught her eye. The power core of Albion was housed in a spherical chamber so large Melody could only vaguely make out its shape. She had always wondered why such an enormous craft housed so disproportionately small a population, and now her suspicion proved true; that the power source of that mystical machine took up a large percentage of its space.
She felt somehow guilty that amidst all that grandeur she was vexed by a solitary blinking light. It was distant, ensconced above a peculiarly placed workstation on a platform below her and west. Acting on an urge, she searched for a way down, and saw a switchback stair leading down to the platform.
Why are you doing this? she asked herself. And she might not have, but the strangeness of her waking with a stab wound, and all she endured to get this far, formed a resolve to go on that seemed to grow like a callous over every doubt that cropped up in her mind.
The footsteps didn’t add to her comfort. Her head darted all around, but she saw nothing. Then she heard a hiss and instinctively ducked, ut she couldn’t see anything moving besides her. Then another sound, somehow distant while being near, came from behind her and seemed to shoot a shockwave of echoes towards the footsteps.
Run! a voice shouted in her head.
She limped as quickly as she could towards the railing that marked the top of the stair. Something struck her and she fell over the side, but she only fell a few feet before she snapped still. She launched upward and slammed spinewards onto the ground. Her back was broken, but somehow, she was able to stand again and walk, but she wailed as she did, her pain being extreme.
The chamber, loud with the pulse of Albion’s radiant soul, echoed too with snarls and curses and Melody’s screams. Something hit her again and she went over the edge, only to be caught and hoisted again with more spinal fractures. She rose again and staggered on til she was struck again. This time her nerves were severed, making walking even more difficult but sparing her from pain. She shambled on like a corpse dragged behind a car in some ravaged desert, taking in stride each time her invisible attacker knocked her down and her savior lifted her back up.
Her dad chose her name. Their last name meant grain, which to many civilizations meant life, and so he named his firstborn Song of Life. But now she was Dance of Death, and she felt aghast at the horror of the moment, wondering with suddenness what would become of her when this nightmare was over. Had the vessel drawn her to its deepest parts for its own ends, preserving her life until she’d served her purpose, only to cast her aside once used and left to die? Who even knew where she was? The thought crippled her, and she dropped to her broken knees to weep.
“Hey kid.”
Dad?
“Yeah. You’re gonna be okay.”
How can you say that? Don’t you see what’s happened to me? I’m dead, dad. Dead.
“I know, but you gotta trust me. You’re gonna be okay.”
The railing was close.
“Come on, Mel. You can do this.”
Do what?
“Something important. Mel, have I ever lied to you? I mean, other than the usual lies parents tell their kids.”
The usual lies?
“Yeah. You know, what happened to the fish, how much money your daddy makes, who those mean men at the door were, why mommy makes those noises when the door’s closed…”
Dad! But she laughed. She couldn’t reconcile what was happening to her, so she clung to the humanity her dad helped her to feel and stood.
“Atta girl! Now I can give you some answers, as long as you keep moving. Albion is playing a game of chess now, making new programs out of the ones it already has to fight Ulro’s insurgents. Sensus thinks they’re a slave race of the kzinti, but it’s the other way around. And they’ve been here a long time. Solomon brought the Shadow Children here to deal with them. You owe one of them your life, by the way. Easy! Watch that first step.
“So the ship made programs that could communicate with its population, then programs that could do so subconsciously. Pretty smart, when you think about it. So here you are, hon, the most important piece. All you gotta do is make it down these stairs and push a button. That’s the one, kid. Melody?”
Yeah, dad?
“I’m proud of you.”
She fell to the ground, this time with no more strength to move, and watched with dimming eyes as a hatch opened in the wall nearby. Golden light poured through that hatch, and in the light, she could see her attackers swarming up the walls from below and down the walls from above. Her protector was battling with several of the creatures. It was more monstrous than they, but they were wearing it down.
Then two figures ran out of the golden light. One stooped to look at her. It was Sam. Were she able to, she would have smiled. Sensus came next, armored in the golden light she saw and streaming violet fire behind him. He didn’t walk but he flew, and lashed out at the invaders on the walls with searing radiant beams while Sam and the other man helped her hideous guardian.
“Melody?”
Yeah dad?
“It’s gonna be okay.”
She felt warmth around her, and luminous fiber optic tubules slithered across the floor towards her and pierced her skin. She closed her eyes and saw the face of a smiling old woman before all went dark.