CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN - DISASSEMBLY LINE

Tanner couldn't rightfully say for how long the battle was waged. She only knew it by the shade of the stones. Her image of the sky had become perpetual sunset - she saw nothing but the glaring red eye of the sun leering through the Breach, like some burning infant pushing through a marble birth canal. The cloud of silver dust behind her had obviously gone away, but she couldn't help but see it still, an axe of radiant pale. Two forces clashing against one another, sending their avatars out to do battle. The red run with a red tide, the silver axe with silver-covered soldiers, dusted lightly by the pale matter which gleamed and killed every insect that touched it. It smoothed off the blood and gore, took them from the inhumanly violent to the simply inhuman, metamorphosing in the statues which guarded Rekida. Tanner hadn't spoken a word that wasn't an order or a request for information in days. The stones were the only way of telling that the day was slithering, inevitably, into night. And the changing of the mutants from definite shapes into vague outlines, into shadowy things with gleaming teeth and hollow, black eyes.

They must've been at it for hours.

All around her, she saw scenes of carnage. Soldiers falling. Rekidans going mad and ending up put down by their own kind. Pyres rising... then dying out as the fuel ran so low that they could barely even maintain these flames. Then... nothingness. And the axe. Strangely, she couldn't really remember each moment. She swung, she moved her body to avoid a mutant's blow, she felt... utterly in tune with the crimson tide. Nothing it did occurred in a way that surprised her. She felt less like a fighter, more like a dancer in a strictly choreographed sequence. Move here, and avoid the crushing jaws of a wolf-thing. Move there, and crush it behind the head, sever the spine, leave the other soldiers to erase it from existence. Tongues of fire licked into the light, the tiniest of incursions that could purge contamination. One by one, the Rekidans fell.

Tanner felt... so very detached. The buzzing in her head was so terribly loud...

Ms. Sulphur was dead.

She'd died standing up, at least. The mutants had overwhelmed her, simply put. Tanner had tried to fight her way over, but... the bodies were too thick, the crowd too manic. And the woman was already failing. Tanner watched as she was overwhelmed by a scrum of the diseased, and the next she saw, the woman had barely fought free... though with too many wounds. The only way to heal would be to surrender her mind to the poison marching through her blood. All she saw before the mutants came once again was All-Name crouching over the fallen noble, and the malformed woman reaching up to gently pinch his cheek. Then a crash of a firearm going off. Then nothing at all. The death had been sudden and brutal and... saddening, yes, but Tanner just felt so drained inside that there was very little she could do. She staggered to the next mutant, crushing its skull with her face remaining paralytically flat. Ms. Sulphur was dead. Never knew her. Not really. But she'd picked gore from Tanner's back like a monkey cleaning fleas from another monkey. And that'd been appreciated. Tanner hadn't known her, had known her less than she knew even her acquaintances, and she knew them not at all. She didn't talk to people, really. Just... never knew how.

And with Ms. Sulphur, the chance to even try was now gone.

She'd died pinching All-Name's cheek.

That image stuck in her brain as she kept going. Kept ripping. Kept hacking. The mutant tide was seemingly boundless, but... she knew it wasn't. She knew it was 'barely the size of the one that destroyed the city the first time', according to the General. Soldiers were dying around, the ground was slick with blood, and she felt none of it. Her mind ought to be more vivid, should see the blood starkly, the violence viscerally. But the drive seemed to have left her. All she knew was the mechanical execution of one mutant after another after another. With dull interest, she even saw an enormous mutant lumber over the horizon. The father of the diseased. A bloated, toad-like thing, bristling with fleshy pockets from which welled pools of diseased fluid, ready to animate bodies, to drive them in battle like chariots. There was no thought in her as she looked upon it, at this hideous, fleshy pile of matter, a gland inflated to tremendous size and given a set of limbs. An ambulatory organ, and nothing more. It was surrounded by egg-creatures - by oocytes, by creatures that had been mutated while still in the shell, still not fully formed. They squirmed about the great creature, pale as milk, with eyes that were the size of Tanner's fist despite the bodies being barely larger than her arm. Barely differentiated to the point where they had arms and legs, and they wobbled unsteadily across its back, staring out coldly.

Not even designed for war. Just designed for maintenance, for cleaning, for the creation of the diseased.

Tanner found herself moving.

Her face was flat as a stone, and just as changeable. No great emotion bubbled in her, but she felt... driven nonetheless. She rushed, her axe clearing a path, she aimed the horn...

And the creature was no longer here.

A spray of matter washed away. The blind organ had left this world with all the passion with which it had entered. Wondered if Bayai would be happy to know that the creature which had desecrated the corpse of his uncle was dead. Wondered if Bayai was alive in his bunker. Spy that he was...

Spy that he was. Liar that he was.

She'd had her fill of liars.

Tanner felt a slow movement around her ankles, and glanced down vaguely. The oocytes were still here, their pale limbs grasping, bodies devoid of muscle undulating up her sides, trying to reach her mask, to tear it free. There must be... gods, many of them. Very many indeed. The crude engineers of the entire process, really. Maybe infecting something with contamination in the egg made them... go in the same direction, so to speak. Nothing to interfere, nothing to insinuate itself. They had nothing in their stomachs, no diseases in their bodies, precisely nothing that could interfere with unobstructed growth. Creating beings of remarkable stability and consistency. Good for cleaning out the others. Bizarrely, she could even imagine the mutants eating these creatures, slurping them down like balut, using them like janitors. Clean out the remnants of old meals, clean out anything that could make further mutations complicated. They were pawing upwards desperately.

A shake, and half of them were gone, flying away to slap, jelly-like, against the ground. No bones to snap, no muscles to tear, just... matter.

She was back in the battle.

What did it matter, talking about it?

She knew what she was. She was enormous, and she was powerful. Her axe, when it met flesh, disintegrated it. Her horn, though scarcely used and growing worryingly unstable, evaporated whatever she pointed it at. Her fists were iron, her boots were steel. The soldiers gunned them down when they could, and the bodies mounted up on both sides. The Rekidans were whittled down in the last show of heroism they would ever demonstrate - and they died, if they died with minds intact, with smiles on their lips. Rekida was dying all around her, and yet it seemed more alive than it'd ever been. She couldn't even remember what the colony had been like. All she knew was the snow and the ash and the endless blood. The red sky loomed mockingly overhead, and she retreated to the cover of the great pale axe, her axe, while her gas mask filter rattled incessantly...

Her face was warm.

And she lashed out, crushing yet another creature. The white river of oocyte mutants, their fluid engineers, pooled harmlessly around ankles and did everything in their power to contribute... but what was the point? The intelligence which drove the mutants had gone mad.

Buffalo charged into box canyons. Buffalo ran around in circles while hunters picked them off one at a time, until the entire herd was dead. The intelligence had gone insane, and was trying to get them to reach the pale. Tanner could even see them reaching the pale, sometimes. Breaking through the lines, reachnig the stone... and looking around, confused, as they rushed into the pale fire and burned up, carbonsing and freezing. The graveyard she'd dismantled with her explosion was rebuilt under her watchful eye.

The violence had never been the point.

The violence had always just been means to an end. What mattered was survival. A second occurred - she'd see something, realise that the only solution was violence, execute said violence, and live to the next second. Killing became an act like any other. Dying became an act like any other. Passion slid out of her mind and was lost amidst the seething oocyte mutants, which burst and popped whenever trod on, until trails of purest white fanned through the stew of ash and blood which now littered every surface. The winds were howling, and she didn't feel them. The cold was clawing at her bones, and none of that mattered. Violence had never been the point, she thought as she crushed another skull - she liked crushing skulls, there was visceral satisfaction in watching all the lights suddenly turn out, sometimes so fast that the body didn't even realise it was dying, just fell dully over and shut off.

The hours wore on.

The mutants weren't unceasing. But they were relentless. And that was enough to whittle her numbers down.

It'd been a reckless move, agitating them like this. If she hadn't taken control the way she had, she had no doubt that the soldiers would've mutinied against her before she could even have tried to execute her plan. Certainly would've questioned it more, rather than going along to life or death, the result determined by the flip of a coin, a twitch of her will, and the pulsing of their hearts. Some of them were looking at her with empty eyes even now, wondering what she was going to do. She realised, with a very dull sense of surprise, that they were looking at her like she'd once looked at everyone else. As natural disasters, as things that needed to be studied like a natural phenomenon. Clouds for a sailor. Stars for a seer. Shoulder-blades for a scapulimancer. Once you seized enough control of the world, people generally seemed to think that you had a degree of... well, understanding. You knew what you were doing, you were privileged to certain pieces of information. It was like falling asleep on a mattress warmed by someone else's body, a memory that still hovered hazily in her mind even now, years later. You could feel every little vestige of another person through the mattress. The cigarettes they smoked. Every sweat after waking up from a nightmare. Every writhing of meat atop fabric, every... every misadventure, every indiscretion. And you knew, not thought, knew, that this mattress was theirs, nobody else's. And that it was a safe place, a warm place, a place where sleep could, in some sense, be achieved. And with this precedent established, you could rest. In a way that a cold, hard, unfamiliar mattress that still smelled of the outdoors could never achieve.

But you always forgot the nights you'd spent thrashing in your own bed, sweating, delirious, ill, simply reluctant. Every embarrassing twist and squirm. Every hint of your own smell, a reminder of all the physical processes you couldn't control. To you, the mattress was just... a mattress, something that maybe ought to be thrown away. It contained too many personal imprints, too many lingering marks that were far, far too revealing. A mattress still warm with your body's heat was more intrusive and invading then even a nude painting. To others, the evidence of your panic and your embarrassment somehow became comforting. Tanner had felt the contours of Eygi's body, worn into her mattress, and had relished in them. As Eygi, perhaps, hadn't. And somehow that didn't matter.

Precedent made them warm and complacent. Precedent made them give up agency. Precedent made them surrender everything to her, because she clearly knew. They knew the warmth of her body, they knew the contours and the way she twisted. They had slept in her bed, and they nourished themselves in the knowledge that someone else had been here, someone else had achieved rest, someone else had then moved on. I, too, am here. I, too, may rest, and I too may move on.

In her warmth they sheltered. Even now, they were trying to huddle around her like infant animals, like shying calves spying a horned bull for the first time. Like wanderers in the snow, snow up to their waists, seeing footprints ahead in the pale. Deep footprints, that would make the journey easier, that proved another had been here. Another waited ahead.

Another quality of the snow that had made Rekida - you knew when someone else had been here. Until more snows fell... your tracks were obvious. Always you were surrounded by the ghosts of precedent, by the temporal shades of those who came before. Always where they'd been - but never where they were, or, indeed, where they were going.

In the snow, the ghosts of others were an acknowledged, scientific, rational reality.

And even for people from Fidelizh... the snow had infected them. The dark had infected them. They were learning the hunger of the earth. They were learning how to be Rekidan, in a way. The mysteries of a campfire, the reminders of old presence, how would they cope with these things? What patterns would they develop? Nalseri? Rekidan? Or one of the other dead cities?

She stood in the middle of a mass resurrection. The destruction of identities, and the slow reviving of one, atavism emerging from the bleak depths of their souls.

What was she doing?

Oh, yes. Fighting. Dull mechanisms of violence executing over and over and over and over. Until eventually they stopped or she did. Factory assembly line, nothing more. More soldiers dead around her, falling into the great pale sea of oocyte engineers, which gulped toothlessly at them, sucking likfe infants at scraps of bloody flesh, black eyes bulging with a feeling she found resonating with her. The horde was attacking with everything they had. Their bodies screamed anger. Their eyes screamed boredom. Fighting mutants meant having your own emotions teased out... and then crushed under the sheer weight of indifference emanating from those black, black eyes. She could describe so very many conflicts - so very many. The buffalo had charged in a living black wave, either early on or recently, her mind couldn't quite settle on which. They'd torn themselves apart in their eagerness to arrive, their nostrils were perpetual sores from which leaked all the waste matter they were shedding, simply to speed up... while their eyes were already dead and glazed-over, as living as the eyes of a crab, as the glass eyes of a doll.

She dimly remembered crushing more and more of them. Sometimes so fast that the bodies couldn't quite catch up, still living through the paralysed ectoplasmic thoughts of a mind that was now quite completely gone. They shuddered through these last orders. Kicking forward across the ground even as changing inclines forced them to sink into the bloody mire. Horns tossing and trying to catch even the slightest hint of flesh... yet when they did, they seemed to have no idea what to actually do. They were crowded in the streets, a black tide so thick she could walk from back to back to back without needing to touch the ground once. A tide she broke with her axe, now so thickly plastered with lacquered scabmatter that it'd swollen to... almost one and a half times its normal size, and when it reached any larger, she'd have to smash in a certain way, twist the blade, remove the compacted, pudding-like mass. Another part of the mechanism, a little hint of self-maintenance. By contrast, the buffalo would plough up mud, they'd plough through each other, they'd gore thin air if their brains were destroyed. And then the slow after-image would fade away...

And they'd collapse, steaming, into the ground. To be trampled.

A meat layer was forming.

The flames weren't sufficient at this stage. They couldn't burn all the mutants, not here. There was no plan for dealing with them, no plan but 'wait until the end, and if we're still alive, we can think about it'. Not a conscious thought, of course. To the soldiers, to the Rekidans, to Tanner, there was no future. Only moment upon moment. To think beyond them was to be a bird dreaming of being a whale, or a whale dreaming of crawling up a mountain. A chick dreaming of the world outside the egg. Didn't matter until the time had come. Every bird had to shatter the egg it was born in, had to destroy the only world it had ever known. To enter the world, it destroyed the world. Thus for the soldiers - but as humans, and yes, even now they were humans, they knew terrors no bird ever could. They feared breaking the egg. They feared ending their narrow, cloistered world.

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Maybe they wanted the warmth of an idol to keep them from hatching. To stop them from ever dreaming of the future... or to guide them out of the egg reassuringly, when the time came.

The meat under their feet was alive.

The congealed mass of uncounted mutants, split open by guns, pulverised by axes, pierced by bayonets, detonated by grenadoes, ripped apart by Rekidans... or, as the case may be, mercy killed by those Rekidans once they went mad. And for every body that fell... parts were shed, and the body itself would be trampled into oblivion in moments, flesh sagging and rebelling against itself. Over and over. Until the carpet was inches thick, the red shade of fresh organs, of membranes and inner structures that every butcher trimmed away in seconds. It was a carpet the colour of meat-scraps and greasy film. It was sufficient - there was enough meat for it to fuse, for it to grow rudimentary structures. Amidst the horde there waved long fronds of flesh, spinal columns oozing out of orifice-burrows, their heads tipped with a dozen varietieis of teeth. Brain-flesh made into leeches crawled wherever they could, their own mouths nothing more than black holes filled with wiry hairs that dripped with solvent. Termite-mounds of meat rising up, quivering like stomachs or wombs, generating more and more exotic forms of the mutant plague. More cures for humanity. These little factories belched out strange glittering vapours from smokestacks that'd once been bones, now hollowed of their marrow and set to better purpose. The land hated them. The land vomited up tentacles and puddles of fangs that did everything to breach their suits. Stomach acid pooled in little valleys, mountains were ridged with spare bones, oocyte-engineers wetly clambered across everything, assisting the flow. She saw bundles of vessels become so tangled that they ripped apart like high-pressure hoses, and the oocyte engineers would swallow buckets of rotten blood and other fluids with toothless mouths, suckling on the ruptured vessels, before waddling bloated over to wherever they needed to go. So in-tune with the needs of the meat garden that they could act as a circulatory system, not spilling more than a few drops of blood in total. The legs of mutants were clustered with red carbuncles, lingering like symptoms of some awful tropical disease, weeping and oozing matter... desperate to reach the enemy. This matter was...

Harder to kill.

Soldiers were falling to living attrition. Their boots would be gnawed until the rubber and leather split, and they didn't even scream as poison marched through their legs and towards their heads. The legs mutated first - when a soldier moved too fluidly, when they ran too unhesitatingly, when they blinked in surprise at how fast they were going... the process had begun. And Tanner would grab them, like a mother cat with her kittens, launching them off the battlefield and away from the matter. Tkae your pills. Consider your options. And, without a word being exchanged, some of the tainted would pick up bombs and sprint into the mutant tide, no howl on their lips. Mutant infection powering mutant destruction. Their greatest weapon against the mutant had always been the mutant, their prime predator and competitor, their most enduring rival in the race to survive. Rekidans were forced to clamber back to the rooftops, where they rained down projectiles and screamed joyful obscenities - she even saw bottles from the governor's cellar being ignited and thrown down to splash into pale blue flames as wispy as an old man's beard, racing across the backs of the mutants and scorching flesh that refused to trouble the mind. Why care for a single lost cell?

She was standing in the intelligence.

The intelligence was all around her.

She could smell it.

She could sense it through her skin...

They were disintegrating the mutants. As the fuel ran dry, they stopped being able to kill them, only to... atavise them. Remove the conception of independence, surrender them totally to the intelligence. And she could see the tides, the currents, the waves, the waves, the slow pulsing cerebral activity of a creature beyond her understanding. She'd cast aside ideas of fighting the great intelligence of the mutants. Maybe if she just... killed enough, the intelligence would emerge from their compacted remains, or... no, no, the mass was changing. Red-purple cords were lashing up, propelled by spurts of rancid air from pulsing glands, and they latched umbilically into other mutants, feeding them notions, feeding them flesh. Giving them all they required in order to live. Buts he could still see the waves, the rippling muscle and slithering bone, the subtle indications that was something was happening. In this primal form, she saw the intelligence.

She saw how vast it was. How complex. Thermodynamic demon, sorting at an infinitely vast pace, billions of connections handled, sustained, redirected... needs met, dangers challenged, weaknesses patched, strengths accentuated. Her boots were sinking inches into this spongy matter, and she knew she was treading in the thoughts of the final mutant. The point where their species had always been going.

Her mind twitched. Certainty overtook her.

Her axe swung before she even realised what she was doing, flying upwards...

A bird.

A monstrously large eagle, with the beak of a stork, slapped into the mud in two halves. Bisected so perfectly she'd even split the beak down the middle, and it fell like a defeated banner. She lashed out with the hand that usually held the horn, now stowed over her back, and grabbed both halves of the beak, feeling the warmth of the matter which had been aimed right at the base of her neck. Held them like ceremonial sticks.

...how had she known the bird was flying down?

How had she swung so perfectly?

...yet she'd known. She had, the feeling had been undeniable.

Maybe she'd read this from the meat. Maybe there'd been a contraction - snap around her ankles to keep her in place, move in a manner that was distracting to her eyes, move the rest of the swarm to occupy her attention, everything moving, moving, moving... but she'd seen through it all. Meat-seeress, priestess of the shapeless temple, living altar of the temple, upon whose flanks all things were sacrificed. If her face felt capable of moving, a mad smile might've spread across it. Might've. Her mind would worry her - but adrenaline was washing everything aside, and the fact that she was still alive meant her every thought was beautiful and perfect, because if it wasn't, she'd be dead. Survival became a matter of purity and holiness, if she lived she was both, if she died she was neither. Every second she lived validated everything she did during that second - executing violence, thinking weird thoughts, moving on absolute instinct. That bird had been trying to kill her - she'd killed it first. Her thoughts were aligned in patterns of abject goodness, and so her arm had moved appropriately. Her arm had just been weighed with expectations and a sense of cosmic fairness.

...part of her was screaming how nonsensical that was.

That part of her didn't survive to see another second. The meat mass crawled around her legs, and she kicked violently, sending chunks of ripped meat in all driections, showering to the horde and clinging like ticks, surrendering their matter for the greater good.

Sometimes she was alone, and struggled through the garden of meat, surrounded by flowers with tongue-petals and eye-buds, by emergent trees of bone that wept contamination from their branches, by clustering bushes of teratomas and waste material, a shivering mass of malformed eyes, claws, organs, muscle fibres, strung together around networks of shed hair. Great black tangles which still had enough intelligence to try and wrap around her, wetly struggling to shift and cling before her movements snapped them. She made strands of hair weep droplets of greasy blood from their split ends. Underground rivers formed, contained in pulsing, fluctuating blood vessels thicker than her wrist, and when she burst them with her ankle, she felt how the ground grew mouths to lap up the spilled material. She waded through the garden, she tore up the soil, she wrestled with the undergrowth, she fought a world - and at the same time, fought actual, ravenous mutants. If she kept looking ahead at the red sun frozen in the sky, she might've thought that the entire world had become this, and that she was the last human remaining - the rattling of her filters a countdown to total extinction.

And sometimes she was in a crowd of bodies, of gore-slicked soldiers and dwindling few Rekidans, more falling as each hour rolled on - though who knew how many hours that'd been. And she felt like she was still unique... just a unique cell in a single organism. Humanity doing what the mutants did. Melting down into sludge, combining into a river of leather and steel and gunpowder and gore... and then rushing onwards. All things coming to resemble, somewhat, the thing they hated the most, the thing which dominated their minds, which hollowed out all other emotions and squatted toad-like in the cavity.

That was it.

The pulsing of two hearts under two stars. The intelligence, rushing in, rushing out, gathering contamination, releasing contamination, fighting under a star that blazed blood-red. Tanner, sometimes surrounded by others, sometimes letting them wash away so she could stand alone, fighting under a silver axe which couldn't possibly still be there.

More bodies than she could count.

And just as suddenly as the battle had started...

There was a lull.

A combination of explosives falling at the right places at the right time, a splash of the last quantities of fuel they had, the establishment of a blazing wall of fire which lingered and blocked up the street. The mutants... actually remained beyond it, the heat a little too much, their numbers too diminished to freely waste matter. The horde looked thin and strange, mottled with red matter that squirmed loosely across their bodies. They'd all been changed. Hair had fallen free, dismissed as unnecessary. Eyes had become so clogged with defects and additions that they resembled nothing more than black stones, none of them perfectly spherical. Paleness had taken over, their bodies losing even the ability to remain warm and red, every internal system which allowed for flushing completely contorted and non-functional. A host of pale, black-eyed, hairless creatures, staring silently as oocyte engineers squirmed over them, and the red forest continued to bloom, sustaining them, recycling them, the fullest manifestation of the intelligence.

The General was at her side.

She stared at him. Unblinking. Unspeaking.

He stared back... and half his face was wrong. Half his body was wrong. Muscles were swelling at an alarming rate, bones were contorting and snapping into new, inhuman positions. One side of his face was nothing but growths, slithering, oozing, hummnig growths that reminded her faintly of... of oysters. The soft white flesh of an oyster's interior, wet and vulnerable, riddled with anonymous black and grey veins and membranes. It looked like the General once had a shell, and did no longer.

And when he grinned, one half of his face moved normally (for the General, anyway), and the other just... split apart like something closer to a liquid, revealing small, black, thorny teeth.

He gurgled a few words.

All-Name translated. His voice was shaking - she could hear his paleness through it.

An image of Ms. Sulphur pinching his cheek through his gas mask as she died. Story she had no involvement in. Relationship she had no comprehension of. World operating without her, trains moving through her station without stopping, while she waited patiently.

One hand had an axe. The other had a horn. Broken stork beaks, flecked with human blood and spinal fluid, were stuck into her belt. She had no hands free to pat him uncomfortably on the shoudler. And with the chaos the way it was, there was no time.

But she tried to look kindly at him.

The shiver told her she wasn't quite effective.

"...the barrier... the barrier will hold for now. But that's just because there's fewer. Once they regain cohesion..."

They'll come through. She surveyed her men grimly. Dead, dead, dead... enough living to still call them a 'force', but so very many wounded, so many with gunshot wounds inflicted by their own comrades as contamination seeped to the brain. Some were lying on the ground, writhing with corpse-eating mutants, and she saw a grotesque thing shaped like an enormous woodlouse crawl unsteadily over the ground on half-formed legs... before trying to vomit a putrid mixture of substances down the throat of a dead man. Tanner idly kicked it away, watched disinterestedly as it sailed to a nearby wall and snapped, exoskeleton rupturing and shapeless innards flowing away. A chunk of the creature she'd killed, the one who made the diseased. Even after she'd evaporated it with her horn, the garden could mop up the remains, and pour them into a shell for mobility's sake.

They'd never die.

She nodded silently.

"...he senses something. Something in his mind. It claws. He says that... there's a chance he's slipping."

Tanner turned suddenly.

"You can feel it?"

A murmur.

"He can."

"You can feel the intelligence? The one in the swarm?"

"Yes, yes. It claws at him. He is succumbing. His memories are gone, he no longer remembers his childhood, nor most of his adulthood. Sometimes he forgets that there was ever a general who lived before this battle. He likes this. He says it is purifying."

Kinship. Uncomfortable kinship, but... oh, she didn't care. Interesting to see someone else in the same position as her. Eerie to see it desccribed so similarly.

"...is there... something..."

She trailed off, regaining her thoughts a moment later. Be blunt.

"Is there something we can kill. Is there a foundation we can break."

Lantha had felt enough from them to know they were coming for the colony - that was a deeply specific, strategically invaluable piece of information, obtained while she was still basically human. Only as time went on had she degenerated. The General was in... this place, this timeless hell. He was perhaps going to be gone within the hour. She was speaking to a dead man, and his ghosts hung over his skin like mist, shades of all he was, bleeding away into the dusk where the arterial sun swallowed them whole. Leaving behind only... him. A body. A weapon. A humourless, childish smile. Man after her own heart.

But if anyone would know...

Gods, she wanted to kill another mutant. Her hands were itchy with the need. Her face was warm, and she could imagine her skin growing red, red, red, like something was building up that needed releasing at all costs, lest she pop...

"He senses something."

Tanner froze.

"Go on."

"He senses... he senses a feeling. Dredge. Like vomiting after you eat too much food. Like... the matter you pull from a clogged drain. Everything is coming. The entire horde is here. Even the things they want to keep are here. Nothing is held back."

A pause.

"He senses the world beyond is cold and empty. That even their lichen has torn itself apart to come here."

...she could almost see what he meant. Tumbleweeds, albeit carnivorous, some of them the size of barns... tumbling across the streets, propelled by the midwinter gale. Green, grey, snow-tinged... filled with the bnoes they'd eaten on the way inside, some of them trying to construct rudimentary legs. Fat blue sparks ran around the plant matter - their thoughts, turned to light. Funny. Most of them were never going to get here. Too slow, and too erratic - they bounced in one direction, then another, then another, and if the wind changed they could be hurled across the city, sparking and rolling and clicking with interior bones. Some weighed themselves down, but they were still slow, slow, slow. Slowness meant never participating. Speed meant being erratic. Being erratic meant being at risk of constant derailing. Little sparking lichen suns whirled across the sky, twinkling gently. In her red sky, there was no place for normal stars, only bleeding orbs... but it was nice to have a gentler light, something more pleasant than sun or axe.

Even if these stars were ravenous, vengeful things... they were still somewhat pretty, and when they touched a wall-chain, they sent blue sparks coursing up slowly, painting the whole city in chemical shades of blue and white...

Red sky and red sun... pale axe and silvered soldiers... a city turning the colour of electricity...

She wasn't even sure she was in the normal world anymore.

Did mystics always see it like this? And...

Anyway.

Focus.

Harder to focus... but easier once she narrowed herself down. Once she committed, her focus was absolute.

So commit.

"Right. And that means..."

"...we have always wondered how the Great War started. What made the mutants do what they did. But by the time it was over... we think the mutants consumed whatever was responsible, or they were killed and no-one knew the significance. They would be guarded, of course. Out of the line of fire. But now..."

Conditions unlike any in the Great War.

A smaller horde than any the mutants had fielded before...

A goal which seemed to waver between being hidden and being non-existent...

A range of control of uncharacteristic slimness, not the command which one spanned all the Tulavanta...

A frenzy which was completely irrational and was already bringing out their armouries, their troop-makers, their boneless engineers and tinkers, even their lichen...

And isolation from the surrounding world. Absolute isolation. No risk of information breaching this quarantine.

If there was any time for a controller to make itself known... it'd be now. During the Great War, so wrapped up in defences and concealment that they'd likely only die during bombardments, or would willingly be torn apart to prevent capture and study, or would be near-indistinguishable from other mutants. Capable of controlling massive numbers... but maybe limited in number themselves? So limited they could bypass all attention...

Maybe that the case. Maybe they were just killing enough mutants, squeezing the control out, turning the intelligence into something approximating the entity, the disease in their blood, the chain growing from their own minds...

Like only fighting an actor if they'd removed all their masks and roles and costumes. Only then could you fight the real thing.

Maybe.

Maybe they'd squeezed enough.

Tanner stared at the wall of dancing witch-flames, too infused with odd chemicals to burn orange. Through them, the black-eyed, pale, hairless mutants stared. The soliders, gore-drenched and lightly dusted with the silver ash from the explosion, waited silently as well, eyes dead, hands stiff around weapons, swelling to fit their uniforms in such a way that it seemed impossible to ever take it off - they sweated through their uniforms, breathed through them, had grown into them so completely... well, Tanner was in the same boat. She changed her filter - not many left. Be out of them in a few weeks if this pace kept up.

Which it wouldn't.

She knew it wouldn't.

It was... it was a quivering in the garden. A strange excitement, as if functions were being formed with greater complexity, greater skill, greater power. Everything driven by an intelligence, an intelligence that was growing... closer.

The General spoke quietly and quickly, his voice still slipping into incomprehensible slurs and gurgles. All-Name's translations took on a religious tone, he was reciting, going automatically, some key functional part of his brain shutting down due to stress. Taken a while, but he was being squeezed, like all the others. Be hollow, soon enough.

"...this is... is an event which no Rekidan has ever seen. This is a final spit in the face of our enemy, our killer. The mutants are machines, one easily replaced by another. This one is identical to the ones who killed the city, our culture, our past and our future. Final insult for us to kill it. And kill it we must. We honour you as Rekidan - in the last moments before the closure, before all titles become meaningless, with our memories dying, we - the General, the nobles, the entire Rekidan aristocracy, name you Tanner Magg of the House of the Lacquered Axe, formally proclaiming you the progenitress of a long and storied line. May your loins have great fecundity. May your offspring multiply like rabbits. May you swallow the world, chain it, whatever you like."

A pause.

"You'll be a noble for a few more hours. Once all of us are dead, I'm afraid your title vanishes too. Legal reasons, given that we can't convene for a formalised meeting in the grounds of the temple complex, we'll have to give you a probationary title. And once we die, that meeting will never happen, so the title expires automatically. My General apologises."

Another pause, and the General gurgled a little.

"...he also proclaims you queen."

"What?"

"Queen of Rekida. Well, technical title is... Queen Tanner of Lacquered Axe, Progenitress of the Lineage, High Priestess of the Temple, and Mother to the City. Oiler of Chains, Maker of Statues, She Who Swallows the Sun and Enslaves the Land. The usual titles. He's decided to be a little mad. We don't have kings or queens. But, ah, he thought... might as well suggest you as a claimant. Sorry that all the necessary functions will never start."

Tanner let out a long, wheezing sigh, her jaw, throat, and teeth too taut to give out even the smallest of laughs.

"...right. And I... hm..."

What privileges did she have, at this point? Oh. Wait.

"I consider you citizens of Fidelizh, as acting governess. I also expunge all criminal records. I further recommend you to the... Seventeeth Committee on Circumlocution within the Golden Parliament, provide an all-expenses paid scholarship to the Judges of the Golden Door, with the Entrant's Award for Advance Promise, with associated book tokens, and I... uh..."

A pause.

"I recommend you for the empty throne of Fidelizh, and invite you to undergo all the relevant procedures. If you wish, you can try and become king. It'll be difficult, and you may need to start a political party, but... there's procedures."

Still had those.

Could barely remember them, but the legal framework for restoring the monarchy did exist. The judges had worked it out a long, long time-

Stop it. Stop relaxing. Even a little.

There's a flaw in the fabric of your heart. It widens when you relax. A tense man can avoid bleeding for hours, even from a rent in his stomach.

So.

Tense.

Up.

Her mind spoke sense.

And above the horizon...

Came all she did not know.