ßÿñæptrâ Löckßhÿă Këßtræ
Gone.
All her precious emotions were gone. It felt like she was forcefully subjected to ßölæßøðå, the meditation meant to keep her feelings in check.
The air was heavy, familiar in an oppressive way, as ßÿñæptrâ Löckßhÿă Këßtræ stood in the center of her childhood room.
The walls were the same: gray stone blocks with their rough, unpolished texture, arranged in a geometric pattern of perfect imperfections.
The room was as stark and bare as it had been when she was a youngling, with no comfort or warmth, and devoid of any insignia of honor or glory she had earned.
The only furniture was a low sleeping platform in the corner, covered with a thin, dark mat.
A simple metal table with a single padded long seat sat in the center of the room.
A tall, narrow window broke the uniformity of the stone opposite the door. Beyond it, the landscape of her homeworld stretched out, deeply familiar yet distant.
Her body felt strange, and disconnected, as if the emotions that should have surrounded her were severed along those from within.
She looked down at her deep blue skin, the color of neutrality, as it always was when she was forced into this room.
She should feel panic, fear, and confusion; hundreds of blended emotions should accompany her most recent failure. But there was nothing.
It was as if the very notion of having feelings was purged from her, like in the ßölæßøðå.
She flexed her claws, the three sharp talons of her hand curling into her palm. The fourth retractable claw slipped out from her wrist to join them.
The movement felt unnatural like she remembered the result of the command but hadn’t performed it herself. Still, she felt nothing.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she feel it?
The landscape beyond the window drew her attention, and she moved slowly across the room to stand before it.
The glass was as cold as she remembered beneath her hand, its smooth surface a sharp contrast to the rough stone walls.
Outside, the world was bathed in the soft, diffuse light of the planet's distant sun. The sky was a deep swirl of greens and reds, streaked with yellow and orange as if the atmosphere itself were alive, constantly shifting and changing in response to their twin distant stars.
The ground below was dark and rocky, broken only by jagged, crystalline formations that jutted up like the teeth of some massive, ancient beast.
The landscape was harsh and unforgiving, much like her people, masquerading as counselors and enlightened guides while denying the very nature of their being.
This was the world that had shaped her, hardened her, forged her into who she was; yet as she looked out at the familiar scene, there was no sense of belonging, no connection beyond the memory she had of the place.
It was as if she were a stranger, gazing into her memories.
Her legs, powerful and stout, shifted uneasily beneath her, the thick muscles tensing and relaxing in a rhythm that should have been soothing, and grounding.
But it wasn’t.
There was no comfort to be found here, no proper movement, only a realignment of memory as if the memory shifted, not her strong body.
Her body, built for the high gravity of this world, capable of withstanding the crushing weight that would have broken a lesser being, now felt meaningless; an empty memory forced upon her.
There was the sensation of the strong pull, and there was the tension of the muscle, all in her mind, all within the fading illusions of remembrance.
She turned away from the window, her multiple eyes scanning the room once more, seeking something, anything, that could explain the hollow emptiness she felt.
The room was exactly as she remembered it, yet everything felt wrong, like a stage set, an artificial recreation of a place that no longer existed.
Her mind struggled to reconcile this room with the last thing she remembered: the searing pain of plasma blasts, the sight of her forces being torn apart by the relentless, mechanical beings that had risen from the depths of Taboo.
She had been surrounded, outnumbered, her body battered and broken. She should have died there, on that cursed artificial planet.
But instead, she was here, in this room from her memory, whole and unharmed. It made no sense.
Was this a vision of ßÞøṽkœř, where the damned resided?
A whisper caught her attention, a mysterious pull, and she turned her head sharply, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the room.
She wasn’t alone.
She could feel it now: a presence, a pull, drawing her toward the far wall, the one that sheltered her from the outside.
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She took a step forward, her talons clicking softly against the cold stone floor.
The pull grew stronger, more urgent, guiding her toward a section of the blank, featureless wall.
She reached out, expecting the memory of her claws brushing against the rough stone. Instead, she felt a slight give, a barely perceptible shift beneath her fingers.
The stone rippled, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a single drop of water, and then it parted, revealing a passageway that had never been there before.
Still, she felt nothing. No fear, no curiosity, no sense of wonder or dread. Only a deep emptiness, and that unsettling mysterious pull.
Was this what it meant to be dead? She had expected to be with her ancestors in the halls of glory and light of ßækœßêi, not locked in an empty memory with no emotions to feed upon and a mysterious passage before her.
She hesitated for only a moment before stepping into the passage. Something about it was too familiar, too ordinary to belong in the room she had just left.
This was a connecting channel, the kind used to link spacecraft to space stations or other ships.
She had seen and walked such passages hundreds of times during her service in the fleet, and afterward in service under Dexton.
But it made no sense in the heart of her childhood home.
The smooth metallic walls, the dim ambient lighting, the faint hum of distant machinery—all of it was incongruous, out of place a few strides from the spartan surroundings she had known in her youth.
The passage felt both too long and too short, leading her onward in an unsettling way.
The passage opened into a vast chamber, and Këßtræ stopped short, her multiple eyes widening in disbelief.
She knew this place too. She had seen it before, in history books and ancient visual archives, but never in person.
Seeing it in person would imply time travel since this place had long been destroyed, yet here it was: the first galactic council chamber. This place existed centuries before her birth before the galaxy was reshaped by the tides of history brought by the old empire.
It was a place of legend, a relic from a time when her people, the Ṿëšťæŕöß, had been part of the first instance of the Ceti Trade Pact alliance, and the galactic council.
The chamber was breathtaking in scale, a marvel of ancient architecture and old design.
The floor beneath her feet was smooth and metallic, glowing with a soft, diffuse light that seemed to come from within, casting a warm, inviting glow across the room.
It was as if she were walking on a field of gentle luminescence, a stark contrast to the cold, unyielding stone she had grown accustomed to in her room or the cold steel of Taboo.
Tall, arched windows lined the walls, offering a panoramic view of the surrounding cosmos. The sight was awe-inspiring and intimidating.
Starships straight from history books floated in the void beyond, their ancient and sometimes lost designs a testament to technologies of ages past.
Yet, old as they were, they moved with graceful precision; shuttles, cruisers, and massive battleships navigating the intricate choreography of arrivals and departures, their engines flickering like distant fireflies against the star-studded sky.
In the distance, the home of the first pact hung in the sky, surrounded by its rings in the silent darkness of the cosmos.
Banners hung from the walls, each bearing the sigils and emblems of countless alien races of old. They fluttered gently, a visual tapestry of the civilizations that had once spanned the galaxies, now reduced to mere symbols of a bygone era.
Some of the banners were familiar, recognizable from the archives she memorized, she could identify the old insignia of the Ceti Trade Pact and that of her people but others were utterly alien. The sight of her banner, carrying the ßÿñæptrâ clan name alongside the other major clans, struck her with a strange, hollow pang—a reminder that her species and clan had once been part of this ancient council, before an empire, now erased from history, had changed the galaxy's shape.
She should feel pride, surprise, awe: yet she still felt nothing.
For all its grandeur, the chamber was eerily empty and silent.
The hushed stillness seemed to amplify the weight of the decisions that had once been made within these walls as if the very essence of the galaxy held its breath in anticipation of the impossible return of those who once drew its fate.
The only movement came from the silent stream of light cascading from the central podium: a dance of 0s and 1s reflecting the forms of four beings she recognized: a human, a versel, a krynnak, and her own.
It made no sense, no such thing should have existed in that chamber, yet there it was in the place of shame as if it was an honour.
Këßtræ felt a pang of something—an emotion so faint and distant she could barely grasp it, even as she desperately chased it.
She watched the light coalesce into her shape, a mirror image that held her gaze with an intensity that felt almost accusatory.
The walls closed in, and the vast space suddenly felt intimate and confining as she stood there, alone in the center of the galactic council chamber, and a voice spoke directly into her mind.
The voice was cold, mechanical, and utterly devoid of emotion.
“We welcome you, Këßtræ of the Löckßhÿă family. We are your new clan. You are now within the collective, we are Virgil.”
The words echoed in her head, reverberating through her mind, and for a moment, the emptiness inside her threatened to overwhelm her completely.
She should have been furious, she should have been raging for being shown such blatant disrespect, for the mere assumption she could be something less than who she was.
The emotional void remained, the voice was artificial, the tone flat and impersonal, but there was something in it that sent a chill down her spine despite the void she experienced.
It was the finality of how it spoke, as though it was a fact uncontested, a reality she had no choice but to accept.
All made sense now, and it was an inevitable realization.
She was in no dream; the machine had taken her and made her a part of itself; this abomination was the machine the humans had allied with to defeat her.
She couldn’t feel any anger toward it, only the weird desire to obey.
She had been defeated, and she didn’t die. She was a part of it, a part of the collective, a part of Virgil, and she would serve the collective’s overmind.
The last vestiges of her old life, of the emotions that had once defined her, were stripped away, leaving only the cold, empty shell of her being, now part of a cold, unfeeling machine.
“The lack of emotions is a temporary setting, Këßtræ. We will return them when your construct stabilizes.”
She would have shouted if she had found her anger. But again, there was nothing to find, she could only stare back at her reflection in that dance of numbers.