The pale light of the Gzolthit Terminal sprawled below Vashante. She stood upon an ancient walkway of iron and pitted alloy, its plating worn thin by the ceaseless churn of the living City. Her face—human, if one dared to call it such—shifted, plates folding and sliding in deliberate unity to frame an expression of grim calculation. She felt the creasing touch of her new faceplates shifting across her brow with each subtle motion—wearing a strange, half-complete visage fashioned from mechanical apparatus and a bare suggestion of flesh. Harsh lines converged at her cheeks, sharp and blade-like, while her lips formed a mosaic of interlocking segments that could bear her grim expression. The cameras nested in the hollows of her eye sockets turned in their mounts and whirred as she adjusted her now bifocal gaze.
From this overlook—a precarious steel walkway suspended over a steep descent—Vashante observed the constant churn of the spread of a Gzolthit Terminal, Acetyn’s dark mimicry of a railway station. Spines of living bone and tungsten coalesced to form the rails, converging in a labyrinth of platforms sunk deep in the City’s engorged flesh. Endless transport cars clacked along these rails, each reeking of heated metal and thrumming with a mechanical life alien to the City’s organic hum.
Vashante took in the scene in measured silence. She could see how cranes of shifting chitin and riveted steel unloaded humped containers of construction stock while other carriages received fresh lumps of biomass gleaned from the City’s inexhaustible stores. The hiss of pneumatics and the roar of straining servomotors became discordant music in the station’s gloom, punctuated by its manifold appendages darting in mechanical choreography to unload freight as the City itself fed upon itself.
Their small warband gathered at her flank, having travelled from Ymmngorad and Cruiros into the chaos of the City’s depths for this push. Transportation crawlers, reinforced for war and bristling with grotesque armaments, carried everything they would need to sustain their campaign: war machines, twisted infantry, and pulsating biomass. They bustled with a collective hunger for purpose, yet here, amidst the frenetic rhythm of the terminal, they seemed like unwelcome parasites clinging to the City’s lifeblood. Some stood at respectful distance, awed by the terminal’s colossal scale or unsettled by the sights yet unseen. Massive crawlers of bone and metal flanked by weapon-bedecked freaks yet trundled into place from the long march, each loaded with war stock and supplies. Vashante alone had advanced to the walkway’s edge, the ragged edges of her cloak drifting in the pungent air. She scanned for a path, plotting how their myriad forces might descend into the terminal.
Vashante’s solitary figure remained unmoved by her troops’ restlessness. Below, the terminal’s guardians—if any still lingered—were scattered. What remnants remained were unlikely to mount more than a token resistance, assuming they did not immediately surrender to their arrival.
“I expected the Pale to try to hold it,” said a voice behind her. Jhedothar had approached, his black armour gleaming as his powerful augmentations shone bright and alive beneath them.
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Vashante did not turn. Her gaze remained fixed on the terminal’s labyrinthine depths.
“They no longer have the numbers for a pitched battle,” she replied, her voice low and mechanical, each syllable an echo through the hollow chambers of her construction. “The City has tried to scour them away. But that does not mean they have given up.”
It was a simple truth, unadorned. The terminal’s inhabitants would see their arrival—the noble insignias, the monstrous entourage, the arrival of the Eidolon herself—and know resistance was folly. No blood need spill here. The price of their lives in an open conflict was too high for the motley and myriad bands of unaligned guardians that remained, and without a high noble above them, the freaks present had no concept of the strategic value of this terminal.
The objective was simple: to deliver Lady Bhaeryn safely through this line to the higher reaches of greater Acetyn, her walking carriage nestled amidst their procession like a jewel in an iron crown.
“Are they ready?” Vashante asked, her voice cutting through the metallic hum around them.
“They wait only for our signal,” Jhedothar answered with a glint of intrigue in his eyes. He stepped closer, peering over the edge alongside her. “The City’s drones are… distracted. It is as though they do not see us yet.”
Vashante nodded faintly, her metal lips pressing together in thought. The City’s indifference was a double-edged blade. It meant their path to the above might remain unobstructed… or that something far more complex and insidious was underway to make dormant Acetyn’s cruel intelligence.
Her mind turned briefly to the tales of travellers who had underestimated the City’s enigmatic depths, the extent of its roiling chaos, and their fates—swallowed by the living warrens. The thought did unsettle her, but she pushed it aside.
A sudden alarm shattered the terminal’s rhythmic hum, a piercing sound that echoed through the vast expanse. Vashante’s gaze snapped upward, her cameras refocusing as they fixed on the far side of the terminal. In the shimmering haze of the distant platform, movement emerged. Another warband had arrived, their numbers swelling as marching troops and grotesque transports rumbled into view. Banners fluttered above them, the azure and sable hues unmistakable even from this distance. The Hash family. Ancient, ambitious, and endlessly scheming. The sight of their insignias hoisted high sent a ripple of tension through Vashante’s otherwise mechanical composure. They had a history, and the air seemed to grow heavier, charged with the implications of their arrival.
“Signal the march,” she ordered at last, stepping away from the railing. “Ensure the carriage is at the heart of our formation. I want the Knights Consort with her at all times.”
Jhedothar made a thoughtful noise as Vashante departed and, even as the sounds of readiness rippled through the army behind him—gears grinding, beasts snarling, and the metallic clang of weapons prepared, he lingered for a moment more, casting one last glance at the terminal below.