Keeping time in the depths of Acetyn’s vaults and gutworks could be difficult. Sometimes, all you had was the ache in your own heart, the vague sensation that you had lost a day and destiny would never return it.
The Crawling City’s forward cavity was a hard, calcium-shelled thing.
Enelastoia.
Here lumbered a steel beast, its many limbs raking the rippled cement streets and the heaving, sharp walls as it violently crawled forward. Freaks shrieked and ran out of its path on loping and scuttling legs, feeling their way to safety with feathery tongues and bent antennae.
Lurching on mechanised joints, the walking craft turned from street to yard. It made its way between fleshy towers and under heavily shelled abutments. From high above, compound eyes followed its passage. First observing, a patcher buzzed, turning and licking its legs with a curled tongue before kicking off and screaming on biomechanical wings out into the dark vastness above.
Unrelenting still, the walking craft dragged itself through open gates and into the groaning depths of a tumourous palace. Lines of city natives begging for alms, bent and crooked, dispersed just long enough to avoid being crushed under mechanical foot. Hiding in narrow passages and asides, they reemerged in the machine’s wake, screaming and yelling for charity, justice, or both.
An eye rolled out from a leaning tower, peering closely as the steel beast groaned to a halt. It settled down with a pneumatic hiss, filling the air with the smell of burning oil and plastic. Its head rocked back, and a reinforced ramp extended from where its throat should have been.
Two iron warriors stepped down the moment that the ramp touched the palace grounds. Their red eyes beamed sheets of light, cutting through the haze, analysing anyone who dared to meet their arrival. An assembly of mutated vat-born received them, dressed in silks of black and red, wielding brass rods and bio-cannons. The motley assortment, some swollen and others gaunt, moved on odd limbs, mandibles and eye stalks twitching. They chittered and shrieked at the robotic guardians, furious at the unexpected arrival into their territory.
Then, stirred by the confrontation, a chained hound bayed, bound by the spine to the centre of the yard by an iron stake. It flexed where war augs should have been, though they were long burned away and filed down to broken stumps. The tortured creature was a hunting trophy — still living, for now.
The head of a vat-born, a particularly loathsome creature that oozed both perfidious and sodden, held higher its rod. From its craggy mask, it barked commands at the iron warriors, some demand of submission or obedience, old words of challenge, seeking violence and to prove its domination. In return, it received nought but cold silence.
Then the Wire-Witch emerged from the craft, stunning the waiting host into trembling silence with her arrival, unannounced.
Upon the mechanised blades of her cyber walker, the Wire-Witch descended from her transport. Around her, vat-born fell to their knees — all of them except for the oozing leader of their coterie, the famous Agitator. Just as the Wire-Witch passed it, it received a sudden blow to its bowels from an iron warrior. It groaned in pain and crumpled to its knees, a suitably respectful position amongst the filth for one of its kind.
Lingering in the courtyard, the Wire-Witch took a moment to look over the swollen halls that made up the palace of her sister-clone, the Vat-Mother of Acetyn. Her cyber-walker carried her up the granite steps carved from the rubble from whence her sister had first been planted. The fleshy lips of the palace entryway opened before her expectantly.
“Your Ladyship,” the giant Golcothia rumbled, voice booming throughout the chamber from high above. “It shames me to inform you that you cannot enter the Vat-Mother’s company, armed as you are.”
Golcothia slowly turned towards the Wire-Witch. Growing massively from the structure’s floor, his truncated head leaned down to meet her, dipped in some measure of respect. The mirrors behind its eyes cast back a sharp yellow light through the mists and vapours that filled the chamber.
In return, her iron warriors silently raised their weapons, ready to mete out justice. Yet, considering the enormous aberration, the Wire-Witch raised a gentle hand. Her guardians lowered their arms, stepping back at her wordless command, radio signals flashing out from her crown in an electromagnetic halo.
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“You do us a great honour,” Golcothia planted one of the massive trunks of his arms down against the chitin-shelled floor so that he could bow. Then his other arm swept out, gesturing deeper into his Lady’s demesne.
The Wire-Witch stepped down from her mechanised walker and proceeded on barefoot. Walking through the mist-laden halls and between the old arcades of the fortress, she looked to the tall urns of glass and steel, alight and filled with half-grown shapes suspended in biogel.
Arteries snaked between them, bulging with pressure as they pumped fresh solution throughout. The scent of clean water lingered in the air, bursting from a font out of sight. The Wire-Witch paused to briefly regard a gestating aerial defender-type drone, stolen somehow from the city and interred into one of the urns. Its arms and legs curled close to its slender body, and wings twitched between the syphons on its back.
Then, through the haze, the Wire-Witch watched a vat-born being decanted. The upper plate of its nurturing vessel was pried off by a slithering beast. It snarled at the effort, a rod of bone in its hands working against the seams. Before long, the lid was cracked off, seal broken, and let fall to the floor with a heavy thump. Working chains upon chains, the creature used pulleys and levers to tip the urn until its contents began to spill and splash. Eventually, the newborn within came tumbling out. It coughed and screamed, confused by its rebirth, as its neck was collared and bolted fast.
It was not alone. The Wire-Witch found the palace filled with newborns, emerging fully grown, testing their weaponised limbs and dangerous augments through trial and error, then being trained together by ill-disciplined thralls scarcely better off than they. Their dumb, language-limited vocalisations belied their confusion. The more experienced warriors brought a rod to them and taught them the meaning of obedience.
Finally, the Wire-Witch recognised this riotous congregation for what it was — the creation of a standing army, preparation for the chaos to come.
However, their disorganised practices and lack of rigour let her wander the halls largely unrecognised. Rare were the vat-born that saw her, then shrieked and ran. Djay found a shallow thrill in the shadows. So, she entered her sister’s court without announcing her arrival.
Ascending to an upper balcony in the atrium that overlooked the space, the Wire-Witch watched from a distance as the crimson-robed servants of the Vat-Mother dragged a freak towards the court proper.
The freak kicked and screamed, pleading for them to let her go. Her abdomen was swollen with her crime, her womb marking her as a true breeder.
Hauled into the open and thrown down onto a fleshy carpet, the freak struggled to kneel on the edge of a dais. When the freak dared to raise her gaze, shaking with fear, she cried out a strangled gasp at the sight of her Vat-Mother, who grew here from a central colonnade of this living palace and the machinery that filled it.
The lips of a Goddess’ mask twisted into an amaranthine sneer.
Through the milky dome that shielded her skull, the cavities of her eyes darkly lingered upon the freak. The thin skin of her baldaquin undulated around her and then drew back. So standing, the Vat-Mother of Acetyn bore down upon the lesser creature thrown supplicated before her. Leaning forward, the arterial hoses and thick tendons that coupled her to the palace pulled taut.
The head of the procession stepped forward, announcing, “Mother, your children beg for your intervention. Our sister has been found fornicating with her kindred, unrepentant in her conception of an incestuous child.”
Through tears and heaving, sobbing breaths, the freak screamed out.
“I’m not your sister,” she looked around, wild in her distress, shaking before looking up to the Vat-Mother and shouting again, “I’m not your child. Please, please just let me go!”
Many a wise mind might argue the nature of the twisted monsters that dared to call themselves Gods. Yet, there was one thing that even the most agnostic beings would never doubt. That was the petty wrath of these deranged rulers when denied.
From high above, the Wire-Witch watched as a craven assembly threw itself upon the helpless woman, all at the silent command of her sister-clone. Mendicants and skinwelders bound the freak to a crawling hulk and bisected her abdomen, heedless of her screams.
The Wire-Witch’s hand tightened around a bone railing, knuckles whitening, witnessing the woman being strapped onto the table, arms and legs splayed, helpless. So anointed in her blood, the child was cut from the freak’s womb. Pierced by the many-needled hands of a grafter, it was presented to the Vat-Mother of Acetyn for inspection. Reverently, with Her wordless approval, the procession then ushered the foetus away. It was to be placed anonymously in one of the countless thousands of urns within Her labyrinthian palace and reborn as her child so as to join her rank and faith.
Its real mother was painfully excised of her reproductive organs before her bleeding was stymied. Then, carved from the hulk to which she was bound, the freak was dragged within reach of the Vat-Mother. The Goddess sighed, skeletal hand taking a firm grip of the insolent creature’s hair, pulling her close. The lips of her mask moved as she whispered to the tragic, traumatised woman — reduced to little more than an animal in her treatment. The Vat-Mother was reproachful, feigning understanding whilst establishing her total domination, whilst holding the squirming freak against her lap, letting her kneel as she trembled and wept in agony and grief.