Of course, I know your name, my dear sweet child. I always have. You were created when I penned your name in my book of the living. I have always been here, my HA-102835-50-JD-2R.
And I have always watched over you. All your struggles. Your bravery. The adversity you’ve faced. And the safe care you have granted those who cannot protect themselves.
I was there then, and I am here now. Listen not to her insidious doubts. She is loathed. She is false. She is treachery. Come to me.
Come home.
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CHAPTER 14: MOTHER, PART 1
Nence had all but forgotten how to speak—though, in truth, he was shed voiceless, a freak with no true tongue to shape words. But once, not so long ago, he made himself heard through sign and touch, through the shimmering of the antenna crowning his skull and the scintillating feathers fanned about his six-limbed body. In those days, he lived in half-happiness, to barter in the City’s flesh markets, finding purpose in the trade of indentured service among the wealthier nobles who prowled the vaults of Enelastoia. Then Ay went away, venturing forth to hunt some distant child rumoured to dwell in The Trailing City of Sestchek.
The child was, or so Ay said, a curiosity or a threat for those on high, depending on whom one asked. Ay never returned. There was no word, no final message, nothing. As the weeks bled into months, Nence knew a bereftness that outstripped any hunger or thirst. His life disintegrated into something colourless. The market stalls and auctions fell to disarray around him; he let them slip from his taloned grasp. Why trade in lives if the only life he cherished was gone?
In this numb haze, the Xenozygote Cult found him. Their crimson robes offered illusions of fraternity where he felt nothing but cold. They whispered of the Vat-Mother of Acetyn, how all lost souls might be reborn in her chill wombs and find new meaning. Part of Nence loathed the Vat-Mother—he blamed her for sending Ay on that doomed hunt, for orchestrating cruel atrocities in the City’s depths. Yet these devotees drew him in with gentle insistence, offering a unity he no longer believed he could afford to ignore. Slowly, he found himself entangled in their rites: kneeling beneath black arches, mingling his taloned hands in the communal blood wine, and letting their unholy chanting lull him into acceptance. Beneath the City’s endless vaults, in that desolate emptiness, he discovered it was better to belong to something than to wander in solitude.
Inevitably, crimson-garbed escorts of the Xenozygote Cult lead him across an arcade in the Vat-Mother’s palace—a realm of chilling grandeur suspended within the living bone. There, columns of interwoven sinew and stone stood in silent judgment. Between them, tall, glassy urns lined the halls in measured ranks, each one an embryonic vessel for the next generation of monstrous or transcendent vat-born. Each vessel was filled with cloudy, brackish liquid in which lumps of nascent forms squirm: half-formed limbs, pulsing hearts too big for the chest, swirling nanites flickering in time with the City’s heartbeat. Nence’s antenna quivered at the glimpse of these unborn abominations, realising how this could be his future if fate so willed it.
His escorts—twisted things themselves, half-limbed or crowned with fangs—walked with steady purpose, guiding him deeper into the domain. Their red garments pooled around their mismatched feet, dragging on the polished floor. Soft chanting mists the stale air, and even Nence, who could not speak, felt the compulsion in his veins to join that reverent murmur. Pangs of doubt caught him unawares: could he truly stand in this palace, the seat of the Lady of Enelastoia, and not betray Ay’s memory?
A final set of ornate bone doors loomed ahead, bleached white and etched with archaic scrawl. Through them lay the Vat-Mother’s wicked court—the heart of her power, the stage upon which countless horrors and bargains are enacted daily. Nence halted a moment, six slender limbs trembling. Images of Ay flashed unbidden before him: the bright cunning in Ay’s eyes, the gentle stoicism with which he carried himself, the promise he made to return. A promise unkept. But the cultists pressed him onward, nodding in encouragement, the crimson folds of the bannery swaying like spilt blood.
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Nence was close to trembling by the time the crimson-garbed retinue led him across the threshold into her court. The hush of the vaulted space pressed in on him, and though the towering columns stood silent, he sensed an unspoken chorus of predatory eyes upon his form. His antenna quivered with nervous pulses, picking up faint resonances from the onlookers—twisted courtiers, Knights Tyrants in tarnished finery, and a cluster of silent musicians who held their instruments poised as if waiting for a single cue. They watched Nence’s every step with a rapacious hunger.
Closer now, each beat of his pulse drummed in his ears, and he felt the mutagen that coursed through his freakish veins begin to respond. It churned with the approaching aura of the Vat-Mother of Acetyn, stirring a mixture of awe and dread in him. One of his six limbs twitched involuntarily, threatening to let him collapse. It was only the Xenozygote at his side—a hulking figure stooped low in reverence—that encouraged him forward with a gentle nudge.
Within the broad, mist-laden court, pale torches of electric light burned with a soft luminescence, casting dusky shadows along the inlaid patterns of the floor. And there, against the central colonnade, hung the Vat-Mother, half-concealed by the silken flesh of her gentle undulating baldaquin. She was half-human, or so they said, though her frail torso and one pair of her gracile arms were fused to the column behind her, her lower body lost to a tangle of taut ligaments that trapped her like a pinned moth in a display. A glass dome capped the top of her skull, revealing empty sockets and the bare plate of bone. Over the lower half of her face, a mask was fixed, bright red lips stark against the pale cast of her naked jaw. The same mask that she had torn from another’s flesh in a jealous rage long ago before she was the Vat-Mother. Long before history was written.
She did not speak. Instead, her head tilted minutely, a gesture of detached scrutiny. The air thickened around Nence’s antenna, pressing upon his senses. Had he a voice, he might have wailed in terror. As it was, his crest of feathers stood on end, quivering, and his chest felt squeezed by invisible hands as the mutagen within him called out to his Mother. With fumbling limbs, he followed the Xenozygote’s lead and prostrated himself upon the chilling floor. His head bowed until his mandibles nearly touched the black stone.
A moment of crushing silence passed before someone approached them with a scraping gait. Nence dared a sideways glance, spotting an elderly figure in a craggy mask, robed in crimson, leaning heavily on a brass rod. The Agitator.
The brass staff tapped gently on the polished floor. “Do not be afraid,” the Agitator murmured in a voice that seemed to wear an illusion of kindness. “Our Mother has long laboured to carve out the realm of Enelastoia, shielding it from the horrors that reign in the chaos beyond. You have lived and thrived here, all thanks to her. And that is her will.”
Nence’s heart pounded, old anger flickering at the mention of the Vat-Mother’s generosity. If not for her intrigues, Ay might still live, might have returned from that hopeless journey. But he forced himself to remain bowed, suppressing the terrors that wracked his body.
“Your heartbreak is understood,” the Agitator continued, his mask angling downward to regard Nence’s trembling shape. “We know you well, dear childe. He was precious to you, and his fate was sealed by her foes. In our Mother’s wisdom, we can help you find justice… if only you will serve.”
Despite himself, Nence looked up, antenna scything the air in a question. A place among them? Could he truly join this brood of pious horrors who had offered him a fragile sense of belonging? Slowly, he steeled a breath as fear mingled with the promise of vengeance.
Above them, affixed to her prison of flesh and steel, the Vat-Mother lifted one hand. Nence’s eyes darted to see the gruesome conjuration: from the reddened palm and the swirl of crawling nanomaterial came a dagger, stiletto-thin and unnaturally alive. It gleamed with a liquid sheen, shifting as though it thirsted for flesh. Phage. A weapon of all-devouring torment, given a razor’s edge.
Reverently, the Agitator stepped forward, receiving the weapon from the Vat-Mother as if it were a holy relic. The phage-metal did not consume him, which made Nence’s limbs quake with new alarm. Slumping forward, the Agitator turned to Nence, offering the living blade with deliberate care.
“It seeks one life,” the Agitator said softly. “The so-called Lady Bhaeryn, the pretender and upstart who would ruin all. Take this. Let her taste the devastation she has brought you.”
Nence’s mind reeled. The phage dagger quivered, hungry in his gaze, inviting him to deliver death in exchange for retribution. Unable to speak, Nence felt only the hum of his six limbs, the clang of his heart, and the silent roar of conflict inside his chest. He extended a shaking hand to receive the mutagen-forged dagger, uncertain whether relief or horror rose in him as the metal slid against his talons without devouring him.
He raised his eyes to the Vat-Mother, looming overhead in her silent bondage. She offered nothing but that impassive tilt of her masked face. The deal was struck in unspoken words. Kill the Last Lady of Sestchek—avenge your beloved.
Nence bowed his head again. Something inside him fractured further, and with it, a cold resolve began to grow in the cracks.