“You’ve come to pray at the Tree of Mystery,” said the Gnomon. He lifted a hand, branch-like, though to battle them he’d twisted himself from the ground and took the form of a man, stretched and bent in every wrong way, his face a sack of soiled cloth draped over a calcified mass with a yellow ooze where eyes should be.
Solomon felt the force of his radiance diverted, and to his horror the Gnomon had shifted him with some foreign power and his blast struck Needle.
“Watch it!” Needle shouted.
Relieved, Solomon withdrew a few paces and recalled a time in Ulro when a conspicuously strong Anunnaki tried to prevent his escape. The imprisoned soul fragments within were very strong, and they turned away his every attack.
Solomon focused on Goethe of Goetaria, feeling the pulsating thoughts of contamination spewing from the point in physical space his energetic form stabbed through. All the while Goethe swatted away Needle’s missiles, lasers and jets of flame. Solomon stood his full height, closed his eyes and folded his arms with one hand above the other in front of his chest, palms open and facing.
Needle flew and darted around the Gnomon, who stood almost three times as tall. He sprung tanti blades from his wrists and slashed off the Gnomon’s long, groping fingers before they could take hold of his arms. The fingers grew back. Needle slashed again and withdrew, launching a volley of micro missiles as he did.
By then Solomon had a pinpoint of light between his hands.
Needle dodged a swarm of shards hurled from Goethe’s mouth, then ran straight at the monster. Goethe reached to grab him and lost his fingers again. While his digits re-grew, Needle kept running, then dropped to the ground, sliding on his knees, and fired upward with a trio of small gun barrels that popped out of each of his palms. He shredded Goethe’s legs where they joined his misshapen hip and the creature lurched forward but caught himself by fibrous tendrils of ash that reached out of his severed halves and pulled him back together.
The pinpoint between Solomon’s hands split in two.
Goethe reached for Needle and caught one of his ankles. “But you have come instead to the Oak of Weeping.”
Needle ignited the rocket engine on his ankle. Goethe’s skin turned red from the heat, but he clutched at Needle heedlessly. Needle produced a small saw blade from his calf, extended by a slender, jointed arm and cut Goethe’s fingers yet again.
Goethe growled in his vacuous, throaty voice and exploded into a cloud of grey dust. The cloud spun in a whirlwind, scaring Needle’s hyperfiber hide, then coalesced into four smaller shaped. Whatever limbs or protrusions they needed to fight the Sentinel they formed, and he was hard pressed to stay in one piece, calling upon all the devices he had illicitly installed; weapons no Sentinel was allowed by the soothing power of Samhadi to adorn their bodies with.
The two pinpoints of light between Solomon's palms split into four.
Goethe’s four shadows split into eight.
The pinpoints between Solomon’s palms split into twelve, then vanished. Solomon closed his eyes and sat cross-legged; each hand splayed on the ground to either side.
Needle was overwhelmed, at last succumbed to the Gnomon’s assault. Six shadows held him down while a seventh grew long spines from its fingertips. The eighth began hovering towards Solomon, its hideous dry limbs extended.
Solomon opened his eyes. Eight of the pinpoints of light appeared beside each shadow, two per foe, and struck them through again and again, flying with dizzying speed through the ashen husks until they were powder heaped in piles at Needle’s feet.
Needle kicked at them as he walked back to Solomon’s side.
“Smart strategy,” he said, “sitting on the ground while I do all the fighting.”
Solomon looked up at him and gestured towards the ash with his head. The piles, scattered by Needle’s indignant feet, shook and stirred and crawled along the ground until they formed a pillar of sickly stone roots all twisted cruelly together.
“The grains may scatter,” said Goethe, his form taunting them with altering visages, “but the wind carries seeds to fertile soil. Strike me all you wish.”
And they did, until they could find no trace of him, burning and blasting every fleck they saw.
“He’ll appear again,” said Solomon. “He is famously hard to destroy.”
“He may not be dead, but he ain’t happy either.”
The fight was over, but Needle still bristled with ilegal weaponry.
“Did you do all that yourself?” Solomon asked.
Needle glanced at the micro missile tubes protruding from his trapezius. “Actually, they just grow if you let ‘em. Of course I didn’t do it myself. How many people do you hear of performing self-surgery?”
“Allright, allright. So you’ve got a guy.”
“I’ve got lots of guys. And girls too. Can we get back to business? In our rush to punish Goethe, we may have destroyed Hod’s echo.”
“No. Look.” Solomon pointed at the shrine. The ember glowed again. “He was hiding.”
“Clever little dead bastard.” Needle retracted his weaponry as quickly as he’d brandished it, and went to the shrine, leaning forward and resting his elbows on its rim. “Hey little guy, you still there?” The ember flickered.
Solomon went to him and cupped his hands over his wavering flame. In his mind, he heard a name: Netz.
“Who’s Netz?” asked Needle.
Solomon turned in surprise. “You heard that?”
Needle shrugged.
Solomon looked back at the bones and began a whispered chant. “Brother, daughter, winnower, sage.”
“Rosemary and thyme,” Needle quipped.
“I’m the sage.”
“No kiddin’? I wanna be in a cryptic chant.”
Solomon repeated the verse, ignoring Needle, until the ember glowed continuously, and he felt Hod’s voice rattling in his brain, choked and pained and halting as if interrupted.
“…doesn’t know. She can… remind her. Don’t trust… Fight, Solomon. Fight.”
The ember went cold.
Solomon leaned his head on Hod’s remains.
“Poor little guy.”
Solomon lifted his head and turned to Needle. “You knew him, didn’t you? If you were really there back then.”
Needle cocked his head. “I knew of him. But I was already altered by the time the good doctor found his missing link.”
Solomon stood and faced Needle directly. “Why did he make you? No lies, no double talk. Tell me what you are.”
“Or what? You can’t threaten me with anything Sol. If we went toe to toe, we’d be fighting forever, and leave all around us a wasteland.”
“I’m not threatening you, Needle. I’m imploring you.”
“It’s not exactly fun to talk about. I have waking memories that would make your worst death dreams seem pleasant. And it seems to me you just want me to divulge those things because your trip was wasted.”
“It was not. No trip is. But sometimes the goal you set out with is not your true purpose.”
“Well, well, Sol. You do have some wisdom locked away in that shiny dome.”
“Needle…”
The Sentinel put his hands up. “Sol, we gotta get out of here. Whatever questions you have will wait. Afterall, we’re gonna be stuck together for a while yet correct?”
Solomon’s shoulder sank. “Allright. We’ll talk back in our space.”
“Which calls to mind the embarrassing fact that we never bothered to ask how to get back.”
Just then Solomon heard a soft voice humming. It was a pleasant melody, until the voice shifted suddenly off key, seemingly at random points in the song. Then a figure appeared from an unseen horizon, walking as it looked out of nothingness. It was robed and hunched and walked with a limp. Needle again bristled with weaponry but withdrew his micro guns when the figure passed through both of their bodies and bent over Hod.
“Now what?” Needle said.
Solomon watched and saw that the figure was a woman with a slight figure. Her fingers grew long like the roots of trees, wrapping around Hod’s bones. Then her toes grew in kind, wrapping around the ankles of the two fighting men, and there was a slow fading to white of Solomon’s vision.
He felt like he was waking from sleep. He blinked his glowing eyes and saw the bower, cold and dry and lightless and dead. Shah Rii was a withered husk.
“What happened to her?” Needle asked as he walked towards the pale corpse.
Solomon followed him and dared to touch a sprig. It cracked and floated to the floor, exploding in a small puff of dust on landing.
And that’s when the door opened. The large, bear-like man stood there, flanked by the scorpion guards.
Needle put his hands up. “We can explain.”
The scorpion guards raised their tails and the guns grafted onto them whined, but they weren’t fast enough for Needle. Laser barrels jutted out of his palms, and he sliced the guns off before they could fire. Then a white light flashed, and the bower revealed itself to be an empty room, its gray walls lined vertically with corrugated conduits and dimly glowing troughs. There were no corpses, no dead fungal tree, just a colorless fog in the center of the chamber. Shah Rii’s guards bowed their heads, then charged, ending their own lives on Needle’ guns for their perceived failure.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“We’d best leave,” Solomon urged.
Needle was still, his micro gun barrels smoking.
“Needle.”
He stirred, then retracted his guns and went to the colorless fog. “Sol. Come here.”
“We’ve got to leave. Now.”
“Sol. Come here.”
Solomon grumbled. “We have to leave, Ned. Now.”
“Sol. Come here.”
Solomon growled and went to where Needle stood, brooding over the fog. “She’s gone, Ned.”
“Meaning this fog is someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“You seriously can’t feel him?”
Solomon, curious beyond his jaded senses, reached out with his radiance and felt the ember renewed.
“I can hold him, but I need you to gather him.”
Solomon held his hands apart from each other, palms facing and fingers spread. With his very essence he reached and touched the scattered photons of the near dead sprite.
Hod only knew pain, confusion and regret, and through the bond her was forming with the little ghost, Solomon felt those emotions as well, and as his own pains, fears and regrets mingled with Hod’s, tears streamed down his cheeks, their flow greater than the heat of his flesh that fought to turn them to steam.
“One thing I’ve always wondered,” Needle said as Solomon gathered Hod into a pinpoint, “is why sometimes your tears burn.”
“The tears of the past are cold,” Solomon began. Then Hod started to wake, convulsing, and if you could picture a pinpoint of light vomiting than you can understand the sudden calamity Solomon sensed in that tender victim of time.
Hod was now only barely visible, faint and minute. Needle stood facing Solomon and held up his right hand. “I can store him here,” he said, “temporarily.”
Solomon shifted his radiance to angle Hod outward, careful not to let him disperse. Hod was close to Needle’s hand when a thin jet of misty light seeped out.
“Careful,” Needle warned.
“I’ve got him.”
Solomon moved his hands spherically around Hod, creating an energetic orb the compressed him again. Needle then opened a small compartment on his right palm and closed his fingers around the little light. Both men sighed with relief.
“Now can we go?” said an indignant Solomon.
They opened the door to a small, feminine creature. She was very different from any species either had seen, yet Solomon recognized the garb and bearing of an intendant. She didn’t appear to see them at all but looked past them with her seven eyes full of shock and grief at the empty room. Then she saw them, and from an unseen organ emitted a high-pitched wail.
Solomon readied orbs of golden power in his palms and leapt past the attendant, followed closely by a bristling Needle. Several of his micro missiles whizzed by Solomon and met with a pair of sentry robots just as they rounded the corner at the end of the hall. The missiles staggered the robots, who quickly regained their poise with little more than scorch marks on their armored chassis. Solomon followed Needle’s attack with a pair of narrow beams that cut away the armor over their motors and Needle sent another pair of missiles into their now exposed workings. Solomon sent a kinetic wave to shove their smoking hulks aside as they ran past them.
The sentries kept coming in pairs, adapting their attacks. When threy’d fought their way past their fourth duo a larger mechanoid appeared at their exit.
“You can’t be serious,” said Needle.
“I’m rarely not.”
“Heh. True enough.”
Of all the creatures to encounter here, once defending, now avenging, the Queen of the Rift, Solomon would never have suspected Shah Rii was keeping an Archeus knight in her employ. But there it was, battered and disheveled, its one blue eye blazing in the center of its torso.
The knight’s torso was ovular, with four multi-jointed arms springing out of the top like vines spilling out of a flowerpot. Its hide, in so many finely delineated segments, was light bronze in color. The guns sprouting from its four arms made Needle’s array seem impotent.
On six legs the knight rose, then a thing Solomon had never before experienced took place. The Archeus spoke.
“She gave you trust.”
“The Gnomon killed her, not us,” said Needle.
The guns glowed orange and their barrels spun.
“No,” Solomon corrected him. “The Gnomon killed Hod or wounded him mortally. Shah Rii gave her soul to Hod and revived him. We’re carrying him to safety now.”
The Archeus regarded then silently for what felt like an eternity while staring down the barrels of his clustered cannons.
“Show me Hod.”
Needle held out his right hand, palm upturned. The cavity Hod lay on opened and his faint little light flickered weakly. The arms lowered and its eye turned to a cool cyan.
“I give you time.”
The knight stomped past them and around the corner. They followed it, and as the doors of Shah Rii’s bower closed behind the knight its torso cracked open, and in a flash, they saw a brilliant light of every color fill the room.
The station buckled.
“What was that?” Needle blurted.
“She kept a portal open to the Phrastus Belt,” Solomon speculated. “She may have had a massive failsafe system in place, in case anything happened to her.”
“I hope that’s it. We were technically inside something akin to a singularity, afterall. I’d hate to come out of it and find we missed our chance to stop Orak.”
Solomon shook his head. “No. The Phrastus Belt has different physics than anything we know here.”
“I’d be fascinated to compare notes… in my ship.”
Solomon nodded and they turned, jogged down the high-ceilinged hallways to the doors where they encountered Shah Rii’s guardian. More sentry-bots had converged, but they didn’t fire their weapons. They ran past them into an antechamber they did not recognize. There they could hear sounds of panic, muffled and distant.
Needle held up his hand, signaling for them to halt.
The antechamber was a nexus of many doors. “This is not the way we first came,” said Solomon.
“Let me concentrate. We can’t afford to get lost.”
The station buckled again, but Solomon remained patient while Needle stood still, his head angled downward, and his eye-glow dimmed. The station buckled again, then again.
Needle’s eyes then grew bright. “Follow closely.”
Solomon followed him through a door on the left, then the right, then into an elevator where Needle collapsed, clutching his right hand in pain.
“What’s the matter?”
Needle stood slowly and flexed his fingers. “Little guy’s waking up.” He pressed a dial on the elevator’s console, and they went up one floor, then exited.
Needle led them through a series of drab, unpopulated halls before finding another elevator. There was a moment where they silently locked eyes with the laborers crowding the lift, after which Solomon and Needle proceeded to bodily remove them. Needle took them down two floors, through a maintenance shaft, then up to the hangar level.
There the station was in bedlam. Those who made the Cork their haunt were pressed tightly, moving in a heaving, cacophonous mass towards the hangar where sentry bots kept the throng bottlenecked.
“This won’t work,” said Solomon.
The station buckled again, this time enough to knock the whole crowd off their feet.
Solomon reached down to help those near him up. He saw Needle on the ground among the rabble, again clutching his hand. Solomon helped him up as well.
“Took my servos off guard,” he said.
“Is Hod allright? Can you tell?”
“He’s not happy. I can tell that.”
Solomon saw a sensible looking older woman and put his hand on her shoulder. “Madam, why is the station shaking?”
“We’re under attack! Forces from Ulro, they say.
“Ulro?”
Caught up with the again moving throng, the woman left, leaving Solomon to puzzle over the implications of her words.
“Sol,” said Needle, “can you…” His hand glowed suddenly and he howled in pain, this time dropping to his knees. “We have to get to my ship. NOW.”
Solomon picked Needle up and dragged him away from the crowd, then scanned the vast boarding facility and the doors to the hangar. The sentry bots maintained their order despite the speed at which fresh herds flowed from the elevators and intersection hallways, swelling the crowd til Solomon was afraid they would be crushed. He readied his energy for an attack on the sentries, then possibly a blast to open the walls to the hangar up. But he held back, knowing such a haphazard act would not help them board the Iron Catastrophe any sooner.
Needle growled and readied his arsenal, his every weapon aimed at the crowd.
“No!” Solomon shouted.
But Needle opened fire with everything he had.
Solomon focused his gathered radiance into a singular point, then thrust it between Needle and the crowd and spread it into a sphere around the Sentinel’s ordinance. The sphere of radiance became filled with searing heat and excruciating force as the munitions detonated, interacting with his plasma bursts and causing a cascading effect that Solomon could not contain, though he channeled more power into the sphere as quickly as he could. He was quickly overwhelmed and the sphere burst. Acting fast, he managed to direct the released energy upward, where it blasted a massive hole through the ceiling.
Furious, Solomon grabbed Needle by the throat and lifted him in the air. “What is wrong with you?!”
Something big hit the station outside the hangar. Solomon held Needle in the air while people screamed and tried to flee as the wreckage of an invading craft ravaged the station’s hull.
Needle’s hand then glowed to the point of blinding and Sol dropped him, his hand scorched from the scintillating forces running through the Sentinel’s body.
“Needle!” Solomon hunched down where Needle landed and looked on helplessly as his comrade writhed, his right hand twitching wildly and spewing trails of ultraviolet light.
Then, as Solomon began feeling grief over Needle’s affliction, he perceived a rift not unlike the exotic composition of the Phrastus Belt, and unnamed particles filled the air in the boarding facility, spreading outward from Needle’s right hand in rings within wheels within spheres. They were in the void of space, watching stars wheel in a blur of cosmic oak and holly. Planets spun and were hurled away as their suns died. Conway’s Veil reformed from its death, battles raged around them, and a corpse the size of a frigate drifted lifelessly from Nuglavong’s dead maw. The corpse twisted and was reborn, fending away attackers no larger than its smallest finger. The station formed from its exploded remains and the crowd rushed backwards in all directions before freezing in place.
Solomon was too shocked to move, but Needle’s pained voice shook him from his stupor.
“We have to go.”
They dodged the still crowd, careful not to touch anyone, and made their way to Iron Catastrophe. Needle was in too much pain to pilot, so Solomon took the helm, flying past a fleet of Topar’s strange, elongate warships. The ships were as still as the crowd outside the hangar, until the final moment when Solomon took their vessel through its summoned portal.
“Where are we going?” Needle asked weakly.
“Back.”
“Back? What about the General’s orders?”
Solomon took what felt like his first breath since he blocked Needle’s assault on the crowd, then turned to his fellow soldier. “My research will have to wait. There are more armies from Ulro than Orak and the outriders. We can’t handle both Topar and Haleon. Not now.” He glanced at Needle’s hand. “Please tell me Hod’ still alive.”
“He’s fine. Just a little tuckered out. Poor fella drained his capacitor back there. Seems Doctor Yamin got further with his Kadmon project than I realized.”
“Kadmon project?”
“Long story. Forget I mentioned it.”
“Forget you mentioned it? What Hod did was incredible. To summon foreign particles for power is…”
“Miraculous, for sure. So what gives, Sol? You see a few enemy reinforcements and you turn and run?”
“Think, Needle. Each of the Tangents is an entire nation unto themself, and they can conjure forces from Ulro to throw at us indefinitely. The only thing saving us right now is the border between our realms. But now Topar has a way through as well. If both her and Haleon have beachheads before Bastion can be fortified, then we’ve lost. We need to focus on one enemy. Orak made the mistake of engaging us, so we’re going back to help Vala win the fight.”
Needle leaned back, put his feet on the console in front of him and folded his arms behind his head. “Okay then. Tally ho.”