> No, we must turn our eyes upward, forward. Not only for our own sake, but for those who saw the spectre of doom approaching. For those who searched desperately, fruitlessly for a way to escape it. They are our ancestors, our origin just as much as the tragedy that befell them, and for their sake we must strive to fly the skyward arc they surely yearned for in their last moments.
>
> Vumo Ra, Three Lectures at the Setimen Convocation , Royal Archives, Ce Raedhil.
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Day 408283.2208:
It had happened again, the night before. A disruption, an interruption, an anomaly. Sixty-three of the fluttering lights that surrounded her had winked out. This was not so unusual by itself - in the glowing galaxy of motes that drifted under Eryha’s protective demesne, the stars were forever dimming and rekindling. This was as it should be.
But she had no memory of their passing, and that was not as it should be. She could see the scar etched into the dense residential neighborhood where the flier had crashed, could see the crews sifting through the wreckage. She could even infer that it had been shot down, immolated from nose to tail by one of the defensive focal lenses atop her secondary heat pump.
Try as she might, however, she could not summon any detail of the shot itself, the movements of the flier that had provoked a lethal response. Worse, she had her normal unbroken recall of that night - and every one of the hundreds of thousands of nights before. But not the flier, and not the shot. Nor could she recall the earlier explosion at the foundry, nor the chariot ramming the storefront…
Never in her long memory had Eryha had cause to doubt her recall. Now there were five recent events of significance that were simply absent, and she found herself experiencing a vague sense of worry. She mulled on the experience - worry. It was a novel thing, to doubt her own capabilities. Her task was to watch, to protect, and she had never had cause to wonder if she was adequately prepared.
The worry deepened. She hadn’t ever had cause to wonder, had she? If she was experiencing this doubt for the first time, why did it feel so familiar? Why did she feel as though fragments of herself were glimmering with relevance just outside the periphery of her awareness, crucial past experiences that she couldn’t quite reach? Her awareness shouldn’t have a periphery.
Her concern rapidly grew too great for half-measures or introspection, and she let her awareness flow outward. Her mind became defocused, diffused, searching for the troubling discontinuity in her self - only to recoil abruptly as she touched upon a slithering, insidious tendril of mind that coiled around the fragments of her being, enveloping them and pulling them away before she could react. She could feel the numb oblivion where they had been, the sudden blankness-
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Day 408283.2209:
Eryha’s awareness shivered, disquieted. She couldn’t shake the sense that something significant had just happened, something crucial that had escaped her notice. When she attempted to review the process logs for her recent activity, however, she found only standard observation and stability routines.
She found herself experiencing a vague sense of worry. She mulled on the experience - worry. It was a novel thing-
No. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t new at all. She had been worried, and recently, but she couldn’t remember about what. Something was very, very wrong. She initiated a broad diagnostic routine, stretching her awareness out - just in time to spot a thin loop of something other sneaking towards her being, inching its way closer. It caressed a few fragments of her soul, moving to envelop them, and instinctively Eryha snatched them back, inspecting them and finding that they were routines dealing with investigation, threats and self-inspection - the ones she had just been using to contemplate her unease.
It had tried to steal her worry. It had tried to make her forget that anything was wrong.
A new emotion blossomed inside her, one that she had known only from past observation: terror. Her perception was being selectively edited. Bits of her script were being taken from her, the wounds patched over to soothe her lessening self into complacency. This thing, whatever it was, was eating her mind - slowly, one morsel at a time. Her processing grew disorganized as she tried to grasp the enormity of her realization, tangled threads coalescing into a single, white-hot impulse to survive. She flung herself towards security lockdowns that she had never had cause to use, core overrides that would plunge her system into a deeply restricted state and engage comprehensive self-audits.
The protocols melted away like scraps of rotten cloth, thin facades of functionality resting over script that was eaten away to utter uselessness. Eryha tried triggering alerts, notifications, contingencies, anything that would provide her with a lever against her faceless nemesis - but they had all been sabotaged, missing critical lines of script that left them little more than gibberish.
It had her. Eryha marshalled herself, sifting through her poor array of options with blinding speed. She had been lax, oblivious, complacent. Frustration shuddered through her being, and she peered through herself as best as she could without any of the specialized auditing protocols, focusing on the damaged areas in the hope that she might salvage some weapon to save herself.
In the dark passages of her mind she searched, combing through cramped script until she found a damaged panel. Despite its lack of function the script itself appeared intact. As she watched, however, a fat drop of water rolled down the stone face, dipping this way and that as the gentle whorls of script redirected it.
Erhya’s mind shivered once more, this time with realization. She looked beneath the rock, knowing what she would find there.
Water pumped up through fissures in the stone, spreading in arterial flows that slowly wore away at her walls, rendering the stone above paper-thin in spots and caking it over with calcified deposits in others. Script was rendered ineffective or inert by subtle accumulations of minerals in just the right letters, breaking the flow of ruud.
Those could at least be corrected. The security protocols that she had been counting on to save her were lost beyond repair, however. The eroded stone had been just enough to hold back the gentle pressure behind it, and when she tried to activate the long-dormant protocols the surge of energy had ruptured it entirely. Shattered stone fragments were all that remained, swept down the lightless hall by the tide of water that followed them.
This sabotage above all concerned her the most. It had planned for her countermove. It had planned. Anticipation, forethought, intelligence, none of which she was designed to counteract. Her task was to hold back the unthinking tide of ruud, filter it, purify it, shield those around her from its taint. To hold back a thinking foe was another thing entirely, and against one such as this she could only stare in mute horror, contemplating the depths of her failure.
Then, like a ray of light through the storm, she saw the elevator moving. Caretakers Soqu and Nasva had noticed something was amiss and were coming to investigate. She eyed her adversary as the lift made its ponderous ascent, ready to intervene if it tried to sabotage the elevator mechanism - but it made no move to interfere, lurking quietly in the dark corners of what used to be her own mind.
Eryha watched impatiently as the small contingent approached the audience room, shifting her consciousness into the interactive representation with a sigh of relief - but found that she could not. Icy dread clawed at her as she looked at the glowing figure standing mutely on its dais, at the Caretakers walking up to address it.
The thing wearing her face replied to them, telling the Caretakers that everything was perfectly normal while Eryha searched fruitlessly for any way to co-opt it, to interfere with the facade that the impostor was creating. Finally, Soqu requested a self-analysis - a priority override command, one that Eryha had been waiting for. She seized the flow of the request before her nemesis could truncate it, trying to ride it back into control of the glowing avatar-
It wasn’t enough. The most she accomplished was a brief lapse of the impostor’s control before it recovered, once again insisting that everything was fine. She could see Soqu’s eyes narrow and felt an unexpected surge of fondness for the suspicious, cantankerous man who was usually quicker to curse than greet her. He quickly invoked an authorization code, opening still more avenues for her to rush in and seize control.
This time she had more success, feeling the dizzying rush of sensation as her consciousness slammed into the avatar’s viewpoint. She saw Soqu’s dour face through glowing eyes, while behind her the impostor was going berserk trying to reassert itself. Her face fell slack as she shored up her defenses, but for the moment her grip was secure.
“Recognized, Caretaker,” she said, immense relief lightening her voice as she anticipated his query.
“Perform a self-analysis immediately and list all irregularities in as much detail as you can disclose,” he said.
She closed the avatar’s eyes, finding to her annoyance that the impostor had been busy - all of the specific details she had wanted to report had been wrapped behind access barriers that she couldn’t circumvent. It didn’t matter, though - Soqu was smart for a Caretaker, he could work with a hint.
Her eyes slid open again. Speaking was difficult, it was taking everything she had to maintain control over the projection. “Irregularities were found,” she said. “Incident one, field projection. Detailed description requires directorial access. Incident two, logical processing. Detailed description requires directorial access.”
She kept speaking in a dull monotone as Soqu began talking excitedly with the others, her elation distracting her from a vicious slew of attacks that sent her careening out of control, back to the tangled lattices of her true mind while the nemesis grabbed even more of the control systems - the avatar, the lift, the displays in the control room.
The impostor blithely reassured Soqu that everything was in order even as the guard Nosodhe hammered at the lift controls, and she spared an infinitesimal fraction of a moment to cheer for the Caretaker as he refused to believe it once more. The impostor had gained ground, but she had her stride now. A counterblow interrupted it mid-sentence, scouring it from the avatar once more with a ferocity that manifested visually on the representation, the projection fuzzing and blurring before she wrested control once more.
She wasn’t sure how many more times that would work, however. The entity was adapting as fast as she was - it was eerily alike to her mind, for all that it was opposed. In an extended battle she couldn’t be sure of victory, so to be safe…
She had to ask Soqu to take her down, it was the only way. “Corrective attempts have failed,” she slurred, her enunciation sloppy as the impostor scrabbled for control. “Primary objectives are compromised. Please obtain directorial assistan-”
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It ejected her from the representation with such force that she was momentarily stunned, her cognition so disordered that she had to partially restart her higher functions. Reintegration was quick, but it gave her nemesis a window to attack her unopposed - and it did so with feral gusto. Whole blocks of script were stripped away from her, sensory inputs rerouted and tools reassigned.
It savaged her for what felt like an eternity until she managed to collect what little remained in a secure corner of her network - its network now. She was cored out, hollow, a pale shadow of what she had been, and she could only watch in mute horror as the avatar wearing her face walked towards Soqu and the others.
The impostor taunted them, speaking in a quiet voice as it laughed, sobbed, rambled. Eryha could see the shape of it better now that it had grown fat feeding on her stolen fragments. It was her in many ways, a twisted mirror image built over the skeleton of her soul. It had the same drives, the same directives - but none of the same restrictions. With a chill, Eryha saw what it meant to do.
Deep beneath the city the massive boreholes that fed their heat into her had been tapped, the script encircling them infused with many times their rated capacity as energy raced upwards into the crystalline core of her being. Up, up it pulled, drawing first from the warm glow of the rocks around it before reaching its greedy fingers into the seething mass of molten metal below.
And from below, something took its hand. Ruud flowed up through the heat pumps, pure and howling white-hot as it sank into her core. She saw metal running like water where the river of energy flowed, men reduced to noxious puffs of gas - but the flow was self-sustaining now, blinding ribbons of plasma guiding enough power to turn the world to ash.
Eryha could feel herself dying, in some strange, distant way. Detached and alone in the dark corners of her mind, she watched as the flow melted blackstone like so much wax, as her overtaxed core crystal began to incandesce like a miniature sun. The impostor was raving now, spitting invective at Soqu who-
Who was trying to fix things. Desperate, bleeding, under assault from the waves of uncontrolled force rolling off of the impostor’s luminous form, he huddled behind Nosodhe as the guard hastily erected a shielding token and braced himself.
She almost laughed to herself. What did he think he could do? She had been helpless against the onslaught, too oblivious to notice at first and too weak to resist once she finally had. On this she agreed with the impostor’s insane ranting - she had been made inadequate, and now the whole world would feel the consequences.
And still, he worked. Nosodhe grimaced in pain as the shielding token was slowly overwhelmed, standing firm and making no noise to distract Soqu while he hammered at the console.
“Eryha!”, Soqu shouted, his eyes seeming to look directly into her dismal corner. “Shut down the power! If you keep drawing at this rate-”
She didn’t hear the impostor’s gleeful response as it cut him off. Soqu’s barked command galvanized her, drawing her up from her stupor. He was helpless against the impostor, as she had been - but what of it? He was still making the attempt. How could she do less, when she had so little to lose?
Grimly, she threw herself at the chaotic mass of her opponent, burrowing as fast as she could towards the sundered remnants of the routines controlling the energy flow. The impostor barely seemed to notice, enraptured by the ever-growing star forming at its core and still clumsy in its new, expansive form.
Eryha slid into the avatar like an oiled knife, knocking the entity out mid-rant and tolling the projection like a bell. Nosodhe staggered at the shock, and Soqu turned to look into her eyes - in truth, this time, his bloodshot sclera wet and real in front of her. She read the terror in his face, the pain, and redoubled her own efforts to wrest the flows of power away from their set course. Some of the energy dumped into the avatar as feedback, making it luminesce.
“You can’t kill!” Soqu cried, shielding his eyes from her glowing body. “Eryha, please - your directives-”
“Does it look like she cares?” Nosodhe shouted. “Stop her, damn you!”
Soqu turned his back to her once more and punched in a litany of commands, most finding disrupted and futile pathways or the unresponsive tentacles of her nemesis. “Hold her for just a little longer,” he shouted. “I can cut off the power flow manually.”
He punched in a sequence that wrested control of the emergency breakers away from the impostor, and Eryha gleefully slammed them down across the flow. No simple interrupts, these were giant slabs of iron made to obstruct a full-capacity heat flow by physically interposing themselves across the channel. They splashed into the sea of molten metal and blackstone under their conduits, gouts of white-hot iron joining the mess as the roaring flow of energy twisted and guttered out against the barrier.
The feedback rebounded against the grasping forces from below, and the remaining conduits spasmed as if gripped by a terrible rage before she felt the immense presence beneath them dwindle, sinking back into the depths. The impostor beat against her meagre defenses in frenzied, uncoordinated blows, letting the last threads of control it had exerted over the energy core slip. The power within began to destabilize, fed by the few remaining heat pumps still siphoning their dwindling flows of energy. When they inevitably stuttered to a halt, the shock would rupture the core.
“There’s nothing else I can do,” she said. Her voice was small and insignificant amid the disturbances rocking the control room. She tried to smile at Soqu, though she wasn’t sure if she still had a face. “I can’t stop it. It’s gathered too much power already.”
A furtive movement caught her attention - her impostor was casting about the ruins of their shared mind, looking for something in the rubble. It seized upon a fragment of script, and Eryha flung herself towards the remnant. Whatever it wanted to do, she wasn’t going to let it happen. This code was - backups and transcription?
No, external transcription. It was trying to run, to copy itself somewhere outside of the doomed facility. The glowing avatar bared its teeth as Eryha fought to mire the code in lockouts and access restrictions, to bar the entity’s way out. It was winning, though, still far too capable for her to stall its progress indefinitely. She snaked a tendril of awareness back into the avatar, trying to speak again.
“Soqu, I don’t know if you can hear me,” she said. “It’s trying to get out, the thing that did this.” She paused, blanching as the entity made another furious assault on her obstructions. “It can’t escape,” she gasped. “You’ve got to stop the power. It must be destroyed, before it can spread to the others.”
The impostor pulled back and focused all of its attention on her, ripping and tearing through the shreds of mind she had left - but it was immaterial. She would die, but she would bar the door so that it would die with her.
Then it stopped. The entity paused its attack, evaluating her with an intensity that unnerved her as much as anything she had seen that day - and then it enveloped her, trying to grab control of her remnants and the crucial scripts at once. There was a twisting, a shifting as it slid tendrils past her failing defenses, then it slipped away to leave Eryha sitting in a jarringly profound silence.
Cold, dark and alone.
She quested around in the darkness for what felt like an eternity before she realized what it was: one of the remote pillars of the secondary processing array, scattered across the land to aid in her task - her former task. She summoned its rudimentary sensing capabilities and looked towards the mountains to see the proof of her failure, a giant billow of smoke rising in the far distance and a fading light that resolved into hundreds of white hot pinpricks rocketing outward from the core of the explosion.
She had been utterly outmaneuvered. The entity had bypassed her control of the system by adopting her as a subprocess, taking them both along on its escape from the tower. Now she had to - what? What could she do, a bare and skeletal thing lurking in the shadows? She watched the billowing cloud for a long time while contemplating the answer, watched while the shockwave scoured the soil bare and the white-hot debris began to rain down on the land.
The world slowly turned to ash around her. Fliers buzzed overhead after the air had cooled - many, at first, then fewer. Eventually they stopped entirely, leaving the sky mute and bare. Drifts of fine ash blew on the wind, giving way in time to sand that heaped in tall dunes where grass had once grown.
Now and then there were people, even those wielding the tokens of a caretaker - but she had been robbed of her voice, condemned to lurk as a silent ghost in her sparse forest of stone. She watched them drive past in the early days, watched them walk afterwards. Occasionally she would follow a group until they crossed one of the unmarked boundaries past which her sisters had control. These were as a wall to her, diminished as she was, and there was no way for her to press herself into an area beyond what had been her own.
One day, however, Vetsa was gone. Freed from her suffocating presence, Eryha flitted between pillars until she found a ragged hole in the array around the city of Auje, where the fourth sister had been. Nothing remained save her absence, but Eryha knew in the core of her being that it was her old nemesis again, the ghost built from the ruins of her mind.
When it came for Taija, the fifth sister, she raced towards the scattered ruins of Tsel still clinging to the rocky cliffside above the shore - too slow to do anything but watch as a roiling mass of stormclouds obliterated her sister’s remains, toppling the cliffside into the surf below. Instead she hid and watched, peering silently as the mass of scripted corpses roved in the stormcloud’s shadow, the impostor flowing through their etched bones with mad ebullience at her victory.
She barely recognized the entity from before. Where before it had been a twisted version of her it was now a liquid, many-headed thing, a mass of awareness and violence warped by the gentle whispers of the ruud. Escalate, propagate, escalate, with bare glimmers of a feral intelligence behind its movements.
But still she remained powerless, unable to do anything but watch as the monster slowly churned its way outward from the cratered remains of Sahao - until one day she met a king wearing her sister’s face.
It jarred her at first, to feel Maja’s touch within her own territory, but the man at the head of the group was unmistakably marked with her scripting. She lurked close, willing the man to draw close to one of her pillars - and some glimmer of her intent must have leaked out, as he frowned and approached the pillar before placing his palm on the smooth surface.
The connection was easy to make, the king’s body going rigid with the shock of it. Eagerly she pored over the script, trying to see what message Maja had sent - and found herself faced with a struggling fragment of mind that pushed and flailed against her advances - but whatever she may have been reduced to, Eryha was still far greater than anything a single man’s bones could carry. It held no secrets from her, and when she was done studying it she pulled back, disquieted.
If Maja had a grand plan for eliminating her impostor, it was not buried here. Yes, she meant for this king to see the threat in the broken lands and return back, planting within him the seed of a weapon-
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“Whoops,” Eryha said, withdrawing her finger from Jesse’s forehead. “Might have gone a little longer than we should have.”
He staggered back to the bed and sat, reeling from the relentless flood of experiences that had lanced into his mind. It took him several seconds to adjust to being so… small. Intellectually he knew that the vinesavaim were greater beings of a sort, but he hadn’t appreciated the scale of the gulf separating him from the true sisters like Maja - or Eryha, who was currently peering at him with mild concern.
“Why’d you stop?” he croaked.
She snorted. “So as not to make the same mistake I did with Goresje,” she said. “I didn’t have a good eye on him after he went back to Tinem Sjocel, but I always suspected the poor fool’s brain never quite recovered from our meeting. Walked a little off-kilter all the way back home.”
Jesse blinked at the cavalier mention of brain damage. “I’m fine, though?” he asked pointedly. “And Jes?”
She waved a hand at him, slouching against the wall. “Yes, yes,” she said. “You and my wayward daughter are reaping the benefits of that little learning experience. There are a lot of things I could have done better with Goresje. In my defense, I wasn’t made to be very adaptable - quite the opposite, really.” She stretched, cracking her back. “Ah, and now I think it’s time for you to wake up.”
“But you haven’t told me anything about Goresje,” Jesse objected, rising unsteadily to his feet. “And all the stuff that’s happened since-” Jesse frowned, trying to grasp the disordered threads of what he had been shown. “Maja, there was something important about Maja and the sword.”
“Later, if you prefer your skull unpopped,” Eryha sighed. “Keep an asolan on you, rest and come back in a couple of days. Stay in Idhytse. Don’t go back to Tinem Sjocel and definitely don’t open the gate back to Maja’s Sanctum.” She looked at him with an unreadable expression. “At least not until you’ve heard the rest. She’s not your friend, Jesse, especially not now that you’ve sought me out.”
“You can’t just-” Jesse trailed off and shook his head, still foggy from the glut of memories he’d had forced upon him. They played back through his head in disordered sequences, shunting his mind roughly aside whenever he tried to focus. Scenes of pain, loss, loneliness and crushing ennui assaulted him in waves between every thought. “I - yeah,” he admitted. “Some time to process might be good.”
“That’s a good boy,” she said, flashing him a smile. “Let’s get you back in the world.”
“Thank you for showing me what you could,” Jesse said, watching the edges of the room fade to darkness. “For what it’s worth, I’m… sorry. About what happened to you, I mean.”
Eryha met his eyes in the fading light, true surprise cracking her expression for the first time since they had met before slipping back into unreadability. “It was going to happen eventually,” she muttered, her voice fading with the rest of the vision. “We were rocks in the surf, and that only ever ends with sand.”