Amidst bridges held aloft by skeletal arms, insane and cyclopean structures called out to each other in the dark. Baroque recreations of fleshy martyrs wept, long ago grown into the walls. The city remembered them, even if its inhabitants did not. Unable to die, mere simulacra shaped by the city itself, they lived a second life that was even more miserable than the first.

  The Eidolon emerged from one of the countless throats that lead into this lowest thoracic cavity. Here, the air was tainted with the smell of infection and pneumonia. Given no choice, he waded ankle-deep in the warm fluid, committed to a route well memorised but never before taken. The lack of light here forced him to navigate through the infrared haze, his surroundings hot, humid, and indistinct.

  The chamber was vast. The sky was bone. Construction modules moved high above, distantly crawling amidst spinal towers and arching ribs. Endlessly in motion, each possessed its own purpose, servicing this profound realm of blood, cold machinery, and metal rebelling limbs. They worked, oblivious to the creature that crept far below them.

  Here, the buildings were grown upon twisted columns and stilted legs. The Eidolon navigated a half-submerged and labyrinthian undercroft, then ever-rolling streets and sunken passages to find his destination. Permeated with rot, it was a long-forgotten reach.

  Once so long ago as to be forgotten, it was known as the Gates. Though unimaginable now, this reach was once an open surface in Acetyn. It possessed a great tower that once touched the sky — the real sky — a shard of star metal and glass that was diamond in its faceted qualities. It was said to have been the domain of the Pilgrim of the Axiamat, a holy half-human who once led the people to overthrow the cities of their cruel elders and saved the world from torment. Inevitably, though, he had fallen a millennium ago, and the world had slowly collapsed back to malignancy in his absence.

  Now, the Eidolon considered these depths, long overgrown, built upon countless times by the noble lineages seeking to put themselves above that lost greatness. This was now a city segment that those On High were happy to let die. Without their great works to maintain it, the Gates were slowly being rejected by Acetyn and broken down into the chaos of the depths.

  Climbing steps, struggling against the flow of infectious bodily fluid, the Eidolon stopped to regard nets that swept across the small waterfall, catching the smallest and most mindless creatures swept up in the downpour. The traps were woven of lace, delicate and fine, glistening in a gentle way that the Eidolon had never seen before. Curiously, his yellow eyes turned to find a freak sitting on a wall above. It was weaving a larger sheet from many smaller filament bundles using four broad hands.

  Ignoring the twisted silhouette below, the net weaver hefted a skull in its heavy hands. The severed head was desiccated, cold and black in death. The Gates were filled with half-consumed corpses, and the Eidolon assumed they were purposefully entombed here. The old dead bore all colours, including royal red and white, as well as the motley assortments of wanderers and the lost.

  First, the net weaver cracked the skull with a bone tool and pulled at the rotten brain meat. Then, they squeezed and wrung out the old, fragile cerebral tissues with a rough but practised motion. Soft and seemingly impossibly delicate lace was separated from the brain meat. Finally, that lace was worked into the next net, still speckled with the organic matter, proving more robust than the finer-than-hair fibres had any right to be.

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  The lace was just another universal-type augment shared amongst the freaks that clung to the cities. Its true purpose unknown to most.

  Atop the sloping steps, rows of columns and keels oozed scum and blood, staining the passages below. Climbing to meet them, the Eidolon finally reached his destination.

  A tall spire stood tall and pierced the vaulted sky high above. It was the legendary mark of the Gates, the monumental resting place of the fabled Pilgrim. The tower stood surrounded by a wide-open forum. Its shimmering, glassy mass was nestled into the city’s flesh with tendrils, anchoring it to buildings and supports with long, thick cables. Translucent glass, thick and solid and far more resistant than anything crafted by freaks, marked its walls. Lined with flesh and snaking arteries, its surface was warm, and that which connected it to the city moved, pulsing and sluggish.

  The forum itself was lit with a dim, sanguine glow. A dozen torsos were displayed, growing from narrow columns, bound where their heads and legs should have been. Their heavy breasts were pendulous, and their bellies bulged with a red bioluminescent glow. Slender arms and small hands cradled their wombs, swollen with their only purpose, to bear light into this doomed world. They surrounded a single monolithic head — indistinct and featureless, but for its likeness of a man — and illuminated its smooth surface.

  The Eidolon took a moment to look over the monolith’s featureless bone shape, one that his own distorted head had been carved down to resemble so long ago. The spire’s gate, sealed fast, showed no signs of granting passage. Turning his pale eyes to the second level of the forums, an expansive terrace surrounding its perimeter, the Eidolon spotted two warriors standing at guard.

  Battling a sea of violent emotion, the Eidolon climbed to the second tier, walking upright as if he had never crawled. Now, he played the part of so many others from the courts. He aped their enunciation and exaggerated obsequiousness, seeking acceptance if not trust. His noble act was learned, structured, and delivered in the perfect pitch of others of the court, synthetic in its knowledge. Like him, the two warriors he found on guard were bipedal, maimed and cut down into approximately the right shape since their conversion to the Axiamati faith. They wore plates of star metal over their clothes and hefted artificial blades alongside lances to combat the unworthy. Their clothes still bore the royal scarlet of Enelastoia’s Vat-Mother. Despite this inheritance as vat-born, they had long since turned away and defected from her agenda.

  “My shape, my kin,” the Eidolon said, bowing his hooded head, and they echoed it.

  “My shape, my kin.”

  Marchemm and Menmarch saluted the Eidolon, giving him pause. After all, it was not so long ago he swore to the same duties as them, albeit for the pale host. Although their distorted faces were emotionless, their withered hands betrayed the aggressive fear they still felt at their station, clutching at their armaments tightly.

  “A hound has breached the Gates,” Menmarch said, grim and clipped. “The shrine is sealed. Sir Enhash has relocated to the Layman’s Keep. We were tasked to receive you, and await your command.”

  The Eidolon did not waste words. Although they had come to the Gates for an altogether different task, as an idealised representative of their number, his ultimate duty to the Axiamati and the progenitor’s shrine was to end their enemies. The warriors took to his side with a single gesture, and they turned away together. Then, moving as one, they descended around the monolith before continuing down towards the infected depths that spilt out around the tower, towards the shielded bunker of Laymen’s Keep, where they would make ready to face a serpent in its domain.