”Good job, help the necromancer and the venator. The whispers are angered, scream to test the one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Can’t falter now. Direct messages, take care of the lines, direct messages, take care of the of the lines, direct messages, take care of the lines. The lines are clear, the lines are clear, the lines are clear. I- I- I- I- I helped, good job, helped the necromancer, helped the venator. Push back the whispers, challenge doubt, it angers them. Good job. Fight for each thought, push back the whispers to continue work. Direct messages, take care of the lines, direct messages, take care of the of the lines, direct messages, take care of the lines.” Amora prattled on and on for almost an hour. Though she seemed more hopeful and defiant than ever before on the surface, Anastacia could tell that things were not going well inside. The rambling became more and more incoherent as time passed, and at times, Amora had to stop tapping the lines with her feet to refocus herself.
Understandably, this concerned Anastacia greatly. Hoping to alleviate the problem and maybe slow the decline as much as she could, she started a conversation. “So, how come you can talk? It’s not something most simulacra can do.” She asked while plugging in one of the new threads Amora kept making.
“The one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Carries a vocal module... Much too bulky for most patterns and unneeded in others. To convey messages between The Great One, The Wrath Core and the first children residing here, speech is often the simplest method, and thus us of Amora. Amora. Amora. Were created. To direct messages, take care of the lines, direct messages, take care of the of the lines, direct messages, take care of the lines.” The spider simulacrum happily explained and revealed that her ability to speak was indeed something built into her and not a result of outside corruption like it was with Brother Malus.
“You speak very fluently. I would have expected you to speak more… mechanically.” Anastacia pointed out. She had noticed that compliments did quite a bit for the simulacrum and hoped it would help Amora to push back the whispers.
Amora tapped its feet to the floor excitedly. “Us of Amora. Amora. Amora. Have been listening to the third children speak for thousands of years. The routines have been opti- optimized and honed to improve communication efficiency. Though I- I- I- I- I lack the latent rage plaguing the third ones, so the rude remarks have been reduced.” She said and plucked away yet another line that was starting to change its shade. “I- I- I- I- I have to apologize if they have been unhospitable to you and hope you can understand their circumstances. They were created with hatred and greed in their souls, and their eternal internal struggles eclipse the one that has taken over me.”
“Unit twelve is a bit of a dick, but she’s not that different from the ones I’ve met elsewhere – less cowardly even.” The necromancer shrugged.
Suddenly one of the countless threads flashed brightly, which seemed to suggest that a message had arrived. Amora immediately placed one of her legs on it and sounded the message through her. “Where the fuck are my reinforcements?! I’ve sent eight messages already but none of you fucks answered or sent in a single knight. Unit twenty out.” Before it was even over, a second thread began glowing. Amora placed her other leg on it. “Unit eight here, I’ve been trying to reach the communications post for hours now, what the shit are you idiots doing over there?”
Following the two messages, almost every single thread in the web flashed and flickered. Being the sole spider simulacrum left and unable to use many of her legs, Amora could only read a couple of them at a time. For a moment it seemed like every custodian and simulacrum in the fortress had a sudden message to convey. She had no time to prepare for answers before the already used threads lit up once more, spouting out increasingly alarmed and furious messages.
“We’ve been stuck here for over two days. I’ve lost three knights and unit eleven is missing. Could you morons in the communications post start doing your job and send me something to work with. Unit twenty-seven out.” Sounded one of the countless messages that quickly eroded away what pride Amora had gained from successfully finding Anastacia and Leggy.
The messages provided a fairly good timeline for how things inside the fort had gone awry. Each one demanding information on the attackers they were dealing with, asking for reinforcements or supplies and blaming the ones in charge of the messages for the dire situation they were in. Every time Amora read one message, a new one would immediately be received. The flood of communication attempts would have likely overloaded all four of the spider simulacra if they were still present, let alone a single, mangled and broken one.
To Anastacia, it quickly became obvious what was happening, as the same custodians kept sending messages that felt out of order. All the messages that had been delayed or cut off by Amora’s corrupted brethren were now being dumped on her at once for some reason. Many of them must have been weeks old by now and answering them would have been pointless. Amora however, didn’t seem to understand this. She diligently read message after message, and every time she tried to send an answer, a new message blocked the thread immediately, leaving her stuck trying to keep tabs on the ones she had already received.
The influx of message seemed to continue endlessly, and Anastacia even started to consider either taking down the lines or tackling Amora to spare her from what seemed to just be hate and blame being spouted at her by the custodians who were trying to fight off an invasion. However, before she had the chance, a single message halted Amora entirely.
“Unit one… reporting. Bleeding’s pretty bad now, think this might be it for me. I’ve confirmed the deaths of units two and three as well as a handful of knights I didn’t have the time to check. We had been trying to reach out to anyone for what must have been two weeks now, but no one’s answering, and nothing’s working. The intruder is in The Great One’s chamber and we’ve been locked out somehow. I’m honestly not even sure why I’m sending this, the messages clearly aren’t going through anymore.” The message ended with a pained gasp from both the original sender and Amora, who slowly lowered her legs and stopped reading entirely.
“The messages aren’t going through anymore. The messages aren’t going through anymore. The messages aren’t going through anymore. The messages aren’t going through anymore...” Amora repeated hopelessly as the violet lights on her body grew deeper. “The one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Has failed. The end has come. I- I- I- I- I can not respond. There are no reinforcements to send. No one answers. No one answers. No one answers. The whispers were right. All is futile. The whispers were right. All is lost. The one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Is alone. No more messages. No more lines. The messages aren’t going through anymore. The messages aren’t going through anymore. The messages aren’t going through anymore.”
Anastacia had no idea what she was supposed to do, but seeing her new friend suffer was just as bad as the feeling the strange violet color gave her, if not worse. She tried to get Amora’s attention, but the simulacrum’s eight eyes kept blankly staring into nothingness and didn’t react to her in any way.
“You helped the necromancer and the venator, remember? You contacted unit twelve a while ago and she responded just fine, right? Clearly there’s still others left. You did a good job there, remember?” She tried to bring back a bit of hope by reminding Amora of unit twelve’s comment.
A slight glimmer lit in the deep violet eyes of Amora and she started wearily moving again. “Yes! I- I- I- I- I have to help the necromancer, help the venator!” She suddenly declared out of the blue and started dragging her broken husk of a body towards the door in what seemed like a great hurry.
“Wait… Where are you going now?” Anastacia asked and jumped out of the way.
“The one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Has to find the necromancer and the venator. They are on the loose and no one else is here to find them.” Amora explained and didn’t seem to understand who she was talking to. She continued her slow and pathetic dragging, full of determination, but that hardly eased the necromancer’s agony. Amora might have been too far gone to be reasoned with. “Poor things, not knowing their way. The one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Has to help the necromancer and the venator. No one answers. No one answers. Only the one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Is left.”
Still not knowing what to do, and definitely not wishing to see the spider simulacrum pointlessly drag itself all the way to the workshop, Anastacia gestured her plan to Leggy and the pair darted out of the room before Amora had reached the door. They ran some distance back towards the direction they had come from, waited a moment and then began to walk towards Amora’s post again, just in time for the spider simulacra to ‘discover’ them again as she finally got out of the room.
“Ah! Please halt there! I- I- I- I- I am the one of Amora. Amora. Amora. You are the necromancer and the venator, yes? Please don’t run…” Amora greeted them delightedly, seemingly with no recollection of their prior meeting. “Hello! I have to help- to help- to help- You. No one answers. No one answers.”
Anastacia tried her best to smile, but it most definitely came out as a pained grin. “Why hello to you too. Yes indeed, I’m a necromancer and she’s a venator pattern. How nice of you to come find us like this!” She feigned delight despite the growing agony in her chest. “How is it that you can help us?”
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Amora took a while to drag herself further into the corridor before answering, which took over a minute and showed that even her control over her body was weakening by the second. Her movements had slowed down even further, and the remaining legs slipped much more often than they actually moved her. “Message received from- from unit twelve of The Wrath Core. There- there- there is no one else who can help, so I- I- I- I- I came. I- I- I- I- I am of Amora. Amora. Amora. Please follow me to my post…”
“Sure! Is it the room behind you there?” The necromancer suggested as she and Leggy passed the spider simulacrum, this time not showing much caution.
All of a sudden Leggy seemed to realize something and rushed into the communications post ahead of the two. Anastacia peeked inside to see what the venator was doing to see her companion panickily pulling out the threads containing messages that had caused Amora to lose hope before.
“Uh oh… I have to apologize, but my friend is a bit clumsy and seems to have tripped into some of your threads.” The necromancer lied and gestured for Leggy to hurry up and at least get rid of the ones Amora could still reach.
Amora slowly turned around to start heading back into her room, again in labored movements. “I hope your friend is okay. Worry not of my threads. No new messages. No new messages. No new messages. No one answers. No one answers. No one answers. I- I- I- I- I will replace them when I reply to unit twelve of The Wrath Core.”
By the time Anastacia and Amora entered the room, Leggy had gotten rid of almost all threads, and the ones that remained were far too high for Amora to reach in her current condition.
During any moment of silence, Amora kept slowly sliding back into desperation, and Anastacia did her best to keep her occupied by chatting about unimportant matters. As they spoke, Amora gradually more and more time to react, as if she had been distracted by something. Any new threads they would place would immediately be filled with messages, and answering to unit twelve again would have been impossible anyway, so every time Amora started to try and create more, the necromancer and venator came up with something to interrupt her, each time feeling worse for doing it.
Anastacia shared much of her story after leaving Mournvalley, about her friends in Valor and the goblins she ruled over. She also told Amora, who had never been outside of the fortress as a simulacrum about all the amazing creatures and places her quests had taken her. She even brought up the possibility of showing the goblin kingdom to the simulacra once the problems in the fort were sorted. For the entire time, Amora kept listening and answering with a delighted tone, but it started to become obvious that she spend about as much time listening to the voices in her head as she did the ones outside of it.
Exhausted from trying to keep the broken simulacrum going just until unit twelve arrived and would hopefully do something to help her, Anastacia sat down only a couple of meters away from Amora and buried her face into her knees. She had sent Leggy to fetch something to eat from the supply cache the custodian had told them about, as she no longer felt like the spider simulacrum posed any threat at all, corrupted or not. The cheerful act was slowly killing her from the inside as she watched Amora’s state steadily decline more and more.
“Is something- something wrrrong?” Amora asked worriedly and reached out to the necromancer but ended up pulling her legs back to avoid touching her. “You… seem sad.”
Anastacia groaned. “It’s just that I want to help you, but I don’t know how!” She answered without lifting her head.
Amora seemed surprised. “You… wi- wi- wi- wi- wish to help the one of Amora. Am- Am- Amora. Amora? Why?”
The necromancer looked up and stared the broken simulacrum into the sickeningly shaded eyes and found nothing staring back at her in them. “You have no idea who I am, do you?” She asked and almost broke down in tears. Though she had only known the decaying machine for so long, having to helplessly watch the first friendly simulacrum she found in the fortress slowly break was nothing short of torture. It almost felt cruel to keep stringing Amora along instead of just deactivating her. The core of the spider simulacrum was on the top of her head and would have been trivial to just pluck out, but she didn’t know what would happen then. Even if removing the core could have just stopped everything for the time being, it was just as likely that all of Amora’s efforts fighting the whispers would have been wasted and she would have been irreversibly corrupted without the core powering her.
The simulacrum spent a while searching for an answer. “I- I- I- I- I know you are… are very kind.” She avoided having to outright admit that she no longer remembered that the one before her was the necromancer she had set out to find, twice.
Anastacia forced out one more smile before burying her face again. She didn’t know how many minutes passed while the simulacrum chanted her deranged woes. That is, until suddenly she was alerted by a concerning crunch and lifted her head to see that Amora had torn off one of her remaining functional legs by bending it from the joint until the metal frame gave out and the stone crumbled.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!” Anastacia immediately screamed in horror.
Discarding the first one, the simulacrum grasped onto her other foreleg with the arm-like appendages attached to her face and twisted it until the joints gave out in it as well. “The whispers no longer whisper; they speak like my thoughts. They write over me. They tell the one of Amora. Amora. Amora. To hurt you. I- I- I- I- I no longer know how to tell the two apart for certain, and with this, the one of Amora. Amora. Amora. Will be unable to… to… to carry out their demands. Block the messages. Sever the lines. Block the messages. Sever the lines. Block the messages. Blind the Eminence. Silence the Eminence. Keep the corruption locked within. Face the end… defiant.” She explained very calmly and tore off the second leg.
“Nonononono! There has to be another way to fix this!” The necromancer yelled and without thinking grabbed onto the simulacrum. As soon as her right hand touched the stone surface, a bolt of energy shot out from the core in her shoulder and forced its way into the spider simulacrum, burning the vile shade of violet out of the way to do so.
And with that, Anastacia was no longer in the communications post she had been in. Instead, she opened her eyes and found herself in vision of a void of almost complete darkness, save for a stone floor under her feet. Before her was the simulacrum she knew as Amora, but her broken shell of stone and metal was immaculate, and the pity she once invoked turned to awe. The shiny metal of her legs and the smooth stone body were sights to see. Unfortunately, from the darkness above Amora, descended eight violet strings that tied themselves onto her mechanical legs, fusing with them and moving her limbs to their whims. Fighting against her puppeteer, Amora pulled and tugged on the strings, trying her damnest to cut even one of them, but this was to no avail.
Anastacia immediately knew what to do and took out the enchanted knife she carried on her. “Well this is rather on the nose… Cut the strings to release her, that’s the deal, right?” She muttered to the core in her shoulder, which kept pouring energy into her arm and the knife in it, burning her skin in the process. Without wasting time, she ran up to the simulacrum and tried to explain the situation. “Amora, it’s me! I think I found a way to help you! Just stop moving for a bit and I’ll cut you free from the whispers.”
Amora stopped struggling and turned to the necromancer. “I know you.” She whispered and lowered her body to help Anastacia reach the strings.
As soon as she tried to touch the first string, the power on the other end pulled on it and violently tore off the entire leg, making Amora scream in agony, sending Anastacia flying across the floor and completely crushing what little hope the two had managed to build up.
Feeling the burning pain on her arm start to tear her away from the vision, Anastacia glanced up and saw three eyes staring at her from the darkness. The eyes weren’t distinguished from the void by their shine, but instead by being darker than the darkness itself – in comparison, the lightless space seemed bright as day next to them.
“No crown of white on your fair locks, no red-stained mantle on your shoulders. What power do you think you might hold against me here, Anastacia?” A distorted voice the necromancer recognized from the elevator as Eminence spoke and laughed. “I do not know what manner of magics brought you here, but you are helplessly late to do anything. Now leave this useless machine behind and find me in the mortal plane, we have much to discuss.”
The vision then faded and Anastacia woke up from the floor of the communications post. Her arm was burning more than ever before, but it didn’t bother her for long because of what she saw next. Lifeless, on the floor of the room was the broken simulacrum called Amora, with one of the severed metal legs pressed through her head and the core socket on it, with her hands still firmly wrapped around it. There was no way to tell if she had done it as her last act to defy the whispers or If she had finally lost control of her body.
As far as Anastacia knew, that was the end for a simulacrum, if they couldn’t be powered by a core, the soul used for their mind would be forever stuck in the body, unable to see, feel, hear or move. Whether Amora was left stuck with the corruption that plagued her of if it worked as a relief was anyone’s guess.
Anastacia tried to use the core in her shoulder to make a connection to Amora again, but as per usual, it didn’t work. She tried to dislodge the leg, but it refused to move at all no matter how hard she tried. Unable to do anything, she stared at the remains for the few minutes before realizing that the lighting in the room was somehow off and glanced up. The few remaining threads had turned entirely violet, but instead of being disgusted by it, the shade now felt like it was taunting her with its presence. She screeched, full of fury and threw her war hammer to cut them. It took a few throws to get them all, but she had plenty of anger to burn through.
When Leggy returned from her trip with food and water. She immediately dropped everything she was carrying and rushed to Amora. Just like the necromancer, she tried to pull the leg out but even she couldn’t do it.
By then, Anastacia’s fury had had the time to turn into a more cold, calculated hatred for the one called ‘Eminence’. She grabbed one of the weird bricks of food Leggy had brought to get energy for what was coming. It tasted awful, like they were just compressed blocks of sugar, fat and peanuts – but their purpose was no doubt to just to be literal fuel for the custodians, and that it was perfect for. She then took out one of the crystals she had stolen from the workshop and sang the tune to begin recording. “Emilia, King, unit twelve if you’re still there, the plan has changed. Me and Leggy are going ahead of you guys to murder the fucker responsible for this. Feel free to join us if you can catch up. Anastacia out.”