LX.

It was nightfall by the time Nabu freed Vagari from the imprisonment of its body. The ancient mechanoid’s body melted away as red sand, throwing Vagari from hours of darkness into the light of a full moon – as full as a shattered moon could be. For a long moment, all he could do was sit there and shield his eyes, seemingly stunned by the sudden influx of external stimuli.

The wind blew hot off the fields of glass, spread out as far as his shielded eyes could see – maybe even to Eastend, maybe even passed it. It burned his skin, giving him the sensation of standing too close to an open oven. Vagari peered out below his wrist and gasped at the utter totality of the devastation. The site of their battle for the world, of Armageddon, was gone. The Algae fields, New Houston, it was all gone, all craters of spiderwebbing glass. And BP was gone with them. That thought, that pain, coursed through him, overwhelming his paralysis with rage. Vagari leapt to his feet, spun about, and let that rage be felt. He raised his claws and screamed as he brought them down across Nabu’s body, carving out trenches with each repeating blow. “Why?!” He shouted, tears he didn’t know he had left streaming from his eyes as he struck the immense robot over and over again. “Why?! I didn’t ask you to save me! I could have done something! Why didn’t you let me try? I should have been there for her! It should have been ME! It… It should have been me…”

Vagari’s assault slowed with his words and died with his rage. He fell to his knees and stared into the cracked shell of the world, at the scarred reflection of the truest target of his hate and fury – at a man who once again let others pay the ultimate price for him. “It should have been me…” Vagari uttered hoarsely. “Why wasn’t it me?” Vagari’s assault slowed with his words and died with his rage. He fell to his knees and stared into the cracked shell of the world, at the scarred reflection of the truest target of his hate and fury – at a man who once again let others pay the ultimate price for him. “It should have been me…” Vagari uttered hoarsely. “Why wasn’t it me?”

“Vagari…” came a voice so distant it was hardly a whisper in the back of his mind. He shot to his feet, spinning about on his heels. “BP?!” He called out, turning in circles to try and locate where the voice was coming from. “Vagari…” the voice sounded in his mind only. BP was still out there alive, trying to reach out to him. “Where are you?!” He cried out, picking a direction at random and running towards it with reckless abandon. Across those fields of glass he ran, shouting her name, hoping desperately to hear her voice grow closer. Vagari soon discovered that Nabu hadn’t just entrapped him but moved him away from the blast zone entirely. As a ridge came into view, he found that it wasn’t all the world he saw in that reflective crater, but only the part of the city the Tevat’s initial misfire had struck. Vagari climbed over the jagged ridge and found himself in the heart of New Houston, divided now not only by that edge of destruction but by the bulk of the war ship spearing it through the gut.

Vagari gasped for breath, surprised to see how much of that colossal ship survived both the explosion and the fall that followed. From what felt like the edge of the world, the very precipice of the abyss, he called for BP, shouting her name through cupped hands. “Vagari…” her voice rang, louder this time, his instincts being proven right. Tatters of the Leviathan were strewn all over the ship, fibrous endings of the tentacles that had infiltrated it, and charred remains that somehow survived the blast. All Vagari could see now was what he had feared he would – destruction and death. He staggered down into the city streets below, rushing to the side of the Tevat, calling her name. She had to be around there somewhere, somewhere close. “BP?!” Vagari shouted as he looked in every nook and corner for any sign of life. “Where are you?! I’m here! I heard you! Please come out! Please… Please come out…”

“Vagari… Inside…” her voice called out to him, loudest yet.

“Inside…?” he repeated in his racing thoughts, the realization struggling to overcome his distress. She was inside the Leviathan! “Jesus Christ – I’m coming!” Vagari blurted out, praying to GOD for the first time in his life. “Hold on, BP, I’m coming!” Quickly Vagari slid his shaking hands over the wall of flesh, probing each side trying to feel or perhaps see some sign of BP through it. He began growing more and more frantic with every square inch he found nothing, a growing dread welling up within him that perhaps she wasn’t even there, that it was all a trick of a broken mind. But then he found it on the last turn, a slight bump, a difference in the way the light hit it. “Oh my god…” Vagari uttered in a moment of both shock and relief. “BP! BP, can you hear me?!” he hollered as he sunk his claws into the half-cooked slab of flesh. “Don’t worry – don’t worry – don’t worry…” He repeated frantically, “I – I’m going to get you out of there! I’m going to get you out!”

Vagari began digging quickly but gently, unable to see exactly how deep in the biomass she was. Handful after handful was tossed to the side, thankfully more and more raw the further he went in – warm from life instead of the inferno of the Leviathan’s death. Soon enough he could see the outline of her, and after a few more handfuls he could tell she was alive and moving within. With one last push Vagari breached into a protective membrane that had formed around her. It burst with a waterfall of amniotic fluids that pooled around his feet as he reached in and pulled her free. Vagari fell to his knees, cradling BP to his chest, sobbing like a father at the birth of his first child. He shook her gently and called to her. “Hey… Hey, wake up,” Vagari uttered shakily, “come on now… are you going to sleep all day?”

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BP stirred, her bulbous eyes rolling a bit under slowly parting lids. “You heard me…” she groaned in that avian croak he had grown to love so much. Her eyes opened and she stared up with a smile in them. “I knew you would find me…” Vagari returned the smile with a sputtered laugh nearly hidden away behind his veil of tears. He nodded assuredly then said, “Of course, now and always. I have quite a large debt wracked up to you, after all. I think… I think it’s two to ten now.”

“Add a few more zeroes to mine,” BP replied with a struggled laugh. She took a moment to absorb her surroundings, letting out a sharp whistle when she pieced it all together. “This definitely doesn’t count as just one…”

“It can count as pi for all you’ve managed to do,” Vagari offered with a chuckle. He pulled her close and held her tight. “You did it… You saved us, BP.”

BP accepted the embrace wholeheartedly, pressing her muzzle into the nook of his arm. She sat there quietly for a moment more before speaking up. “I… It wasn’t just me…” BP said softly. “She was there too, they all were… Everyone from the lab… They all helped me, helped me reach up and hold on.” Vagari leaned in and kissed her on the top of the head, not rightly knowing what to say. “They were sorry in the end,” BP continued, “her most of all… Sorry for what they did to us. None of them understood, but neither did we, not until we were one…” BP sighed wistfully. “They’re free now, all of them; the scientists, the Mother, and her… Ecclesia.”

The name stuck at the forefront of Vagari’s mind like a needle stuck deep in his brain. “What?” he asked, his voice a croaked whisper as the charge into the battlefield replayed in his mind. Xu had said something, right before the blast, before the thunder of destruction had defeated his words. “She loved you,” BP told him, her words filling the void in the memory “Ecclesia. That was her name, Vagari…”

“That was… the name of my mother,” Vagari choked out, “the strongest woman I ever known – until you. She was the only one who could ever stand up to my father. She fought for me, for my dreams – but I wouldn’t. I did what he wanted me to do in the end. She wasn’t mad, she… she just said I’d find myself eventually. Said I only felt small besides him, that in her eyes I was… I was as big as the world – her world…” Vagari freed a wrist to wipe the tears from his eyes, and BP took the chance to push away so she could face him. She locked eyes with him, and those green hazel eyes just cut deep into his soul. “So did she,” BP stated as firm as she could with a quivering voice, “and so do I. Believe me… I know how it is to feel that way, to feel small. Even when I stood as tall as a mountain, near the end… I felt small, small and weak. I felt like I was there again, just a small thing shivering on the cold floor of that lab, afraid of failing, afraid of falling short of what he expected of me, of what you expected of me.

“But then I heard you… ‘Once more unto the breach, my friend, once more,” heard your confidence in me – me, something so small, nothing but the byproduct of something greater – and they did as well. I remembered how you never once made me feel that way, that all you’ve ever done was lift me up, just as you were. Only small people make others feel small, but that’s not you. She saw that – they all did! They could see you projecting that image of me – the real me, the me you knew me as, the me I could never quite reach on my own – a star in the sky as bright as the sun! Ecclesia saw you, who you really were: the father she always dreamed you were, that she knew you would have been, that you would have looked at her the same way you looked at me – as big as the world. She took my hand, her and Nintu both, and together we reached for that star.”

Vagari stared into BP’s eyes and saw in them that new being of light, the child of the sun staring back at him. In those flakes of green-hazel he had always found oddly familiar, Vagari found something else, something he thought he never would: the daughter lost to fate. He found in those eyes, his eyes, his Ecclesia. He pulled her close and pressed his forehead against hers, uttering a ‘thank you’ and a promise, the promise that he would always believe in her, always see her as the giant she was, as big as the world – his world. Together they sat for a time in silence, no further words beyond the unspoken ones of that bond clear in each other’s minds, bodies, and souls – a most holy trinity that said, “I love you.”

But, as sweet as that silence was, eventually came time to leave that place of death and rebirth behind. “What now?” BP asked Vagari as they departed. “Where do we go?”

“Where do you want to go?” asked Vagari, his eyes scanning the horizon. BP thought on it for a moment, and then said with a shrug, “Eastend was nice. Homey, I think. But I do want to see the Megacity and that shop you’ve told me about – Alto’s Oddities! I never knew them, him or Soprano, but I would have liked to. I want to tell them that.”

“I think they would like that,” Vagari told her with a smile. “I think you all would have been great friends – you and Soprano specifically. She was like you: sharp, inquisitive, willing to do what she had to, what she thought was right. Yeah, I think you would have been great friends.”

“Me to,” BP replied with a few quick nods. “But really, the answer to that question is wherever you are. That’s where I want to go.”

Vagari smiled broadly and pulled her close as they walked side by side, as father and daughter, into whatever future lay just around the bend.