CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN - MANTRA

...how long.

Meaningless. Her quill scratched across a page. Thoughts occurring to her, emanating outwards in bursts of black ink, spreading over the page like exploding stars. Random thoughts. Random tangents. At no point becoming unified prose... just anchors. Her thoughts ran in strange loops these days, in ascending, spiralling, descending patterns that whirled and whirled... then came right back down to reality. Her thoughts were multi-dimensional, and ink was confined to two. Each scratch of the nib across the page was an incision, a precise slide of herself removed and frozen. Comprehensible only when immobilised. Most beautiful when trapped in amber.

Her pen scratched.

Time

She knew she'd been like this for a while. Time blended together in the dark north, during the bleak depths of midwinter. In every action was the placid understanding that another day would come where this task could be completed, and that few priorities would insert themselves in the meantime. Food was either here, or it wasn't. Hunting was out of the question. Farming or foraging was out of the question. Even if the cold was gone, the wildlife had been driven away by the stench of mutation. Sometimes she could see them, out there. Deer with too many horns. Insects devouring one another and merging, becoming tumbling bundles of squirming bodies, lighter than air, dancing atop the snow. Silent animals that stared across the bleak landscape with eyes that glinted dully, like old silver coins. Water was easy, water was all around them, water fell from the sky and formed great blocks of ice they could melt down, a source of moisture better and purer than any contamination-clogged river or corpse-filled cistern. Heating was... tricky, yes, but ultimately if they remained in the bunkers they were fine. Insulation kept out the worst of the cold, collaborating bodies kept out the rest. Sometimes the fires they burned wouldn't even ignite properly, such was the chill. Just smoked and radiated warmth in all directions, not a wink of flame.

Their needs had been handled.

Womb

And like that, they became mutants. All the needs of survival taken care of - so why bother with all the activities connected to them? Speech continued, but it was always slow and meandering, more akin to people soliloquising in company. Barely aware of what anyone else was saying. Habits decayed. Dignity slipped free. People accumulated filth on their skin, dust working deep into their pores and wrinkles until it seemed like a new race of humans was emerged, grey-skinned and silver-eyed, their hair assuming the same greasy tone as bathing became more and more infrequent. So many habits were born of common needs. But once all needs were taken care of, alienated from one's own effort, everything else slipped away. And all that remained was waiting. They were human mutants. Only outside the bunkers did they become truly human, when they were wandering in the charred world.

Even now, the synapse burned.

Indigo

The fluid it used to convey its orders... it burned low, slow, and cold. Impossible to truly extinguish. Sent up little pillars of strangely coloured smoke that stank of liquorice. Burned with indigo-coloured fires. Mutants found the flames hypnotic, in a way. Soldiers barely even bothered shooting the mutants which occasionally came, aimless and purposeless, to stare at the fires of their old general, to stare and inhale the last traces of orders. Some would wander away again. Some would stay in place for days and days. Some would breathe deep... then sprint for the seal, for the expanse of pale stone that continued to gleam untouched by snow, too warm for it to accumulate, inhospitable to all things save itself. And there they died, like all the others had. Watching the congregations of mutants became a regular duty for her. Hours she spent, standing there, watching the gathering. The slow trickle of bloated, uncontrolled mutants. Gorging on the remains of their own army, bending low to graze on the charred remnants of the final flesh. Watching the indigo fires, maybe hoping that some more orders would come their way.

She stared into the flames herself. Sometimes.

Dreaming of a brass city in the far north. Of a lake of burning oil. Of the source of the synapse, the mother-father which birthed the strange emerald surface of the creature. Sculpted it slowly and carefully. Attached limbs so that it could move. Filled it with neurotransmitter to disperse. A single organ of a supreme intelligence.

Sometimes she wanted to go back to the underground river. To the bone orchard. All underground rivers were connected, after all. A single pulsing system that delivered poison to the surface. Somewhere along that network was the brass city. If she followed the right routes, learned all the convolutions, evaded the predators... learned how to swim in the frothing mass of raw contamination too potent for even mutants to bathe in, she could find it.

A thought. A road leading to enemy territory was a dagger at your throat. It needed to be guarded. Watched. Managed at all stages. When war came, it needed to be closed immediately, sealed off to stop the enemy from marching right down it.

Brasstide

The rivers led to the brass city. The rivers were under her feet. A road directly to something that had tried to wipe out humanity. And should've succeeded. Where were their underground fortresses? Where was their ability to close off the network of rivers? Where were their derricks that could be used to drain the things dry, to cut off the supply of contamination for the advancing horde? Sometimes she consoled herself with the idea that no horde would come up from the earth, because none had in the past. Even during the second invasion of Rekida, there'd been no threats from below. Simply impractical. But... the city rested on a bed of foundation stone. It wouldn't have done them any good to attack from below. Outside the cities... there was no such luxury. Humanity sat on little isolated pillars, anchorites surrounded by boundless ocean. The world belonged to mutants. Humans could just defend their little pockets of sanity. Keep the fires burning. Hop from one island to another, sprinting so the mutants wouldn't hear the sound of their footsteps, wouldn't burrow up and swallow them whole.

The mad Rekidans were still down there.

One of her first acts as uncontested governor was to quietly march out to the lift the theurgists had used to go to and from their laboratory... and to break it. Weaken the cable with a pair of pliers. Snap it with a swing of her axe. Send the compartment down into the dark, so deep she couldn't even hear it when it crashed. Theurgists had been infuriated when she told them the mutants had attacked the lift, or it'd just been damaged in one of the many, many explosions.

The Rekidans who were too far-gone still lurked in the darkness. Never significant in the final battle. Probably buried too deep for the synapse to control them. And no-one was tending to them now, no-one was soothing their hunger, containing their savagery.

All-Name said they were probably just going to devour one another down there. The tainted contamination of the bone orchard would clear out the rest. But still. Tanner thought she could hear them, sometimes. Moving around in the darkness, eyes bulging and pale, nostrils flared to catch any hint of their prey. Hunting one another perpetually, waging a silent war. On the surface, the mutants were chaotic and scattered, self-scavenging and auto-cannibalising. Underground... they were still intelligent.

Tanner slept rarely.

Only helped in the crushing of time into a single block of morning, noonday, and midnight suns.

Caste

The strangest thing to emerge from the midwinter was the clothing. People's clothes decayed, simply put. And there was no need to be fancy - so why bother wearing your spare suit, aware that you were going to watch it slowly decay like everything else, unneeded and unwanted for the entire duration? The buffalo hunters helped. The hides they'd taken during the rumbling foothills of winter, when the buffalo were ripe with thick, thick coats of fur in preparation for a winter they'd never experience, were used to fashion clothes.. Crude ones. Clumsy boots that ran up towards the knees, secured with strips of leather the colour and texture of seaweed. Heavy hats that draped around the ears. Belts to seal in place the long, ungainly greatcoats. Thus emerged the Rekidan look.

Even the factory owners started to engage with it, as did the cartel members, and as stubble spread lichen-like across their cheeks and their hair grew matted and thick, they all started to resemble one another. At the bottom, the civilians who wore buffalo pelts and shuffled loosely from place to place, often mumbling to themselves without thinking, eating slowly to try and fill up the long, empty hours. What complaints there were ceased, swallowed up by thick woollen mufflers and scarves, turned first to mutters, then to mumbles, then to absolute silence, broken only by vague words that had no meaning or purpose. Rarely talking to one another, because there was no need, and out of a dim awareness that being trapped together would become intolerable if they were humans. Better to be machines. In the middle, the soldiers who hadn't been initiated into the inner circle of fanatics, the theurgists who kept to themselves and spoke in languages no-one else understood, the odd misfits who clung to the old ways and were ostracised for it. And above... the brotherhood, the sisterhood. The guard.

Tanner's perpetual cluster of devotees.

They stank. Always stank. Refused to clean their coats of anything but the most dangerous contamination. Leaving behind enormous stains of blood and alien matter. Covered in grisly trophies from the last days. Wearing their gas masks even indoors, filters removed, turning the things into purely ceremonial objects. Wore their hair loose and grew their beards out. Ate with the quick asceticism of the truly fanatical, who nurtured themselves on things other than food. Eyes like the flints in a tinderbox - dark, dead, and always ready to create fire. Teeth yellow and chipped as seashells. They were her priesthood. Her bodyguards. Her army. Her jailers.

They never questioned her orders. They never defied her will. But their eyes... their eyes made her want to keep giving them the right orders. Never told them to stand down. To clean themselves. A zealot was... they weren't loyal. They were loyal to an idea of Tanner. The Judge. Their governor, their general, their mother, their priestess. Their idol, in the sense of a voiceless, mindless object on whom devotion is lavished. If she stopped being that... if she moved too quickly, the role would peel away like old snakeskin, and would stand independently of her. Maybe the skin would collapse. Maybe it would be draped on someone else.

But there was a rabid spirit in her priesthood. A spirit she had no control over. Not really.

Horseteeth

In the midday there was the screaming of a snow-blind horse. By midnight it was silent again. By the end of the week, it was shrivelled and hardened as an opal, and the ribs protruded like the vaults of a great hall. Tanner recalled staring vaguely at it, her priesthood all around her. She stared at the beast, and at the torn muscles in its long, powerful legs. Even now, thinned by cold, there was a dignity to the limbs. Frozen in place and stiffened, none of the soft sloughing of rot. Like a statue. She looked at the torn muscles of a creature that had gone blind, gone mad, and had promptly run until its own limbs snapped under the strain and it collapsed to die in the snow. A bad place for an animal to die. But where was a good one? She could imagine it pelting over the drifts. Must've been loosed from a stable in the colony, or from a crashed carriage. Miraculous that it had survived at all, supping on snow and little else. It wasn't a creature for this climate. Not enough of a hide on it, not enough fat. Too thin, too wiry, too weak. Unsuited for this land, unused to this snow, and abandoned to go mad from the endless light. The teeth had begun to erupt from the gums, themselves hard as flints, and she'd gathered them up like sacred tokens. Like she was about to cast them as dice or oracle-telling tools.

The next day, her priesthood were throwing dice of animal teeth. Puzzling over the erratic movements of things not truly designed for casting in the first place. Sometimes they threw them like dice, sometimes they caught them on the backs of their gauntlets like they were playing knucklebones, sometimes they just threw them and admired how they tumbled in the air like pure white comets.

Her horse-teeth slumbered in a pouch at her waist. She didn't like looking at them. Just liked having them there. Not sure why.

Days.

Months?

Not sure. Time was uniform. Divisions were pointless. She ate when she was hungry. Slept when she was tired. Spoke rarely, and only to give orders.

Surrealist

Marana was silent. Huddled in her buffalo-cloak, same as everyone else. No painting. No poetry. Nothing of the sort. When she looked at Tanner... there was always a second. Always a moment where it seemed like she was going to talk, that she had some random idea spring up that simply needed to be expressed. Even just an idle greeting, a silly request, a small smile. The moment would exist, singular and perfect. And Tanner was just a judge on a bone-clad ship heading north, and Marana was just a surrealist heiress who wanted to 'educate her in the ways of righteousness'. But just as suddenly as it came, it left. And reality crashed back in. Marana was an ageing woman stuck in a colony much like Krodaw, facing a younger woman who'd... started spouting things that might've been something she'd have said, in her loopier moments. Bright calm. Hallucinations of red skies. A constant flow of thought and action in a single loop, no divisions, no filters. Exhilaration, surpassing of old boundaries, ecstatic terror. All these things occupied Tanner's mind, at rest and at work. All of them were embedded in the gore-strewn snow. In the charred remains of endless mutants. In the indigo fires that refused to go out. The entire landscape rewritten into a mnemonic, a mantra that called to mind the terror of battle.

And the fact that, as she was, she'd achieved more in a matter of weeks than she'd achieved in all the years beforehand.

Marana was an ageing woman who, Tanner realised, saw the worst traits of her own ideas embedded in the judge. She saw Tanner, someone she'd told about Eygi. Maybe felt some culpability. Silly. But conceivable that she might think it. She saw another colony turning to madness, with her right in the middle, blessed with perspective and cursed with powerlessness. She maybe even saw a colony where she allowed a murder to take place because of her own weakness, though she'd never said anything about it, and Tanner wouldn't ask.

And the perfect moment disintegrated. Marana's head would fall back down. And her hands would continue to play over the immobile piece of the synapse. Lacquered by the evaporation of neurotransmitter, gleaming strangely in any light. Even now, possessed of a certain... flexibility.

Marana and Tanner didn't speak. Tanner moved her priesthood around, dealt with problems when they arose... nothing stood out. There were no insurrections, but there was the occasional whispering of dissent. There were no murders, but there was a scuffle here and there over food. There were no crimes of a serious and heinous nature, but there was a rich tapestry of infractions for her to hunt down. Initially, she hunted them all herself. Then, she told the priesthood to do it, and just to bring her the individuals in question for judgement. Lenience was the name of the game - but she always scribbled their names down in a large, large ledger, just as she'd been taught. The scratches of her automatic quill, oiled and fine-tuned by the delicate hands of experienced theurgist, filled the dusty air of her inner chambers. Constant. Repetitive. Soothing. Everything she needed.

Authority grew around her, layer by layer.

Authority

She didn't mean to become an authority. But she had. Laurels clustered around her head, nesting in her hair. Authority was a shroud. Authority was a chrysalis. Authority was a reflex you trained into yourself, a cancer that wrapped around all old habits and shaped them in new directions. Authority was unexternalised externalism. It was becoming one with the whole, becoming a creature fuelled and sustained by links to others... but it wasn't empathy, nor was it unification. It referenced others, and yet existed without reference or precedent. She was keenly aware of how bound she was, how un-free, but... she was also in control, more so than ever before. She broke through the ice of the colony, and strangely... strangely, suicide became a kind of relief. The choice was still hers. She could pick up a gun - easy enough, they were damn abundant - and could fire through her skull. Mutated as she was, she could still shut off her thoughts. And if she did, the colony would meaningfully change. There would be debates. A crisis of succession. A question of guilt. There would be examinations and scrutiny of all connected to her, maybe she'd be regarded as a tragic figure, or a woeful failure, or something else entirely. Remembered fondly or hatefully.

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But if she killed herself, here and now, she'd genuinely change the course of the colony.

She was bound up by so much. But she still had control. Still had control. Not just sovereign over her own life, but her life was so intertwined with the colony that ripping her out of it so suddenly and so violently would meaningfully change everything around her.

Sometimes she went days without talking. And she drummed her fingers against her chair... and wondered.

Just wondered. Never went further.

Not yet.

Chambers

Her eyes wandered around her rooms. Been months, must've been. Yes, yes, months. Had to be. No more bunker for her. The bunkers were still in use, obviously. Minimal casualties among the civilian population. The war effort had been a genuine success there, even if it'd turned the soldiers who'd actually done the effort in question into blood-soaked maniacs. But the bunkers weren't designed for this sort of long-haul living. The expeditions into the world beyond the wall had been... interesting. The explosion of the cold-houses had fused the ground around them, created a series of still-smoking calderas that no-one liked venturing out to. Men who did came back with reddened skin, burned by something invisible in the air, and spent the next day vomiting, and excreting blood. They didn't go to those now. New cold-houses would need to be built. The land was... a little better. Ripped apart and disturbed, yes, but the mutants hadn't been interested in destroying houses for the sake of it. Ambient contamination had seeped into the wood and stone of many, but a fair number were still intact.

Ambient contamination was... less of an issue, now. Inside the city, the compacted bodies of mutants, the spilled blood of an abortive legion, had stained the ground indelibly. Take years to clear it out. But beyond the walls... the mutants devoured their own leavings. Cleaned up their mess out of sheer, unfettered gluttony. Then, they devoured each other. And finally, they slipped away. The one gift they left behind, really. Their stink infested the houses - then they consumed the parts of the houses they wanted. Leaving behind strange, moth-eaten hulks of wood and rock, sometimes only gently nibbled, sometimes carved into pieces for even a scrap of sustenance. The civilians were going to stay in bunkers until matters were fully cleared up, but Tanner...

Tanner now occupied a house. An actual house. The first one - the one that had been filled with poisonous gas in an attempt to kill her. Back amidst the familiar furniture, surrounded by some of the trappings of her old life. Working away at a small desk. The bloodstained priests murmured about how she returned to a scene of normality to emphasise how she was one of the common people, she wasn't a queen or a warlord. Seemed oddly disappointed by that fact. The reality was, she just needed to be out of the bunkers. Writing down meaningless words on a blank sheet of paper, waiting for more judgements to be brought to her. Maybe she'd march out and deal with another problem today. Maybe she'd just sit around and wait for problems to emerge. Maybe. Her quill scratched onwards. The house was hers, hers alone, and it still bore the strange stench of mutalith. Felt appropriate to inhale it over and over. Inhaling the fossilised, compressed, incinerated remnants of things that weren't so different to her - inhaling her own future, feeling it fill her lungs, coil around her throat like a noose.

Waiting for something.

Authority was patience. Authority was never being at the whim of the tides of time, meant being their ruler. Rather, it meant being... in charge of a boat. A huge boat of metal and bone. Immune to the currents, sailing wherever it pleased, upriver, downriver, against the tides, through the storms... but whatever direction she chose, it had to be committed to. Had to be executed by a vast effort of crew and machine. Nothing could stop her once she began, but she had to begin, and once she began, she could hardly stop. This was the essence of authority. She could feel the chill of the sea around her. Taste the salt on her tongue. The red sky beyond, full of burning suns, glared down impassively over a landscape of torn earth, of smoking calderas, of grey stone plastered with innumerable skeletons. Mutated lichen, long-since drained of life, peeled itself from the great walls of Rekida and tumbled in grey-green snowflakes, some of them larger than Tanner's whole body, but none any thicker than the finest gossamer. Webs of matter drifting on the winds.

Tanner waited. And kept writing.

Redhair

Yan-Lam had become stranger. Something inside her had... changed when she killed Tom-Tom. Tanner's eyes drifted to an urn on a nearby shelf. The remains of her ashes. Not much more than a handful. She dreaded imagining the first execution she'd be compelled to do in this new world. Would she be expected to burn their bodies too, and keep them in her chambers? Imagined gathering ash upon ash, building up great heaps of it, until eventually the urns burst like overripe fruit and the white-yellow mist would expand out, smothering her in her sleep... Yan-Lam was a stranger creature now that she'd started to breathe iron, the scent of a mind that had oriented itself in the direction of murder, knew the routes, knew the territory, could navigate through to the conclusion with all the certainty of precedent. She continued to live in a bunker, despite being offered the chance to leave. Continued to prefer a cell, though she never closed the door. Waited just across from the redhead mutant, who likewise remained in place, content to wait for the chance to leave. Unwilling to provoke conflict if she didn't feel confident in victory. Yan-Lam sometimes spoke to her, in a halting, rambling sort of way. Tanner tried not to listen in, and told her men not to report the contents of these conversations to her, nor to anyone else.

She combed her red hair back with unpleasant force, pulled it back and tight over her scalp until it seemed plastered down. Wore buffalo pelts, like everyone else, but insisted on brushing the lingering fur until it gleamed like cockroach chitin. Everyone else had tiny bites from ticks that'd lurked in the buffalo fur, but she was unmarked - scrupulous in all her details. Her cell was always immaculate, but only to her standards. She kept it clean of everything, including decoration or comfort. Sometimes she'd sit there, on a cot without mattress or pillow, and would just... wait. Stare at the walls with the slow-simmering thoughts of the isolated and confined, the people who knew that tomorrow would look much like today, and today much like yesterday... and maybe a month from now would be different, leaving nothing to do but steadily murder the hours that lay between her and this promised change. One hour at a time, slashing through them, dreaming her way through the mists, until eventually she might arrive at a time more suited for thought.

Eels, like all fish, were cold-blooded. They never increased their heat on their own, their internals simply changed based on their environment. Passive increases and decreases, out of their control, but thoroughly in control of them. Yan-Lam was much the same. The world was silent and cold and monotonous, so she adjusted her thoughts to match them, adjusted her habits, did everything with deliberate slowness. Took an hour to do a job which should take a minute, because why bother hurrying? The world wasn't.

Yan-Lam was stranger, now. Sometimes she talked with All-Name. In a slow, dull voice. And All-Name...

Mourner

Perpetually he reeked of his funeral oils. Spoke around mouthfuls of funeral twigs. Every morning he'd reapply them. Waiting for... something. This was the last job he had to do. The General was dead, and his body had been burned. All-Name hadn't asked for burial rites for any of them - he said they knew their status as monsters. Had defiled their noble houses by becoming mutants, and as such had forsaken their names, their rights, all of it. He was the last noble of Rekida, and he conducted himself accordingly - readying himself to die, to redeem the entire nobility, to give them the honourable deaths they felt they deserved. Cleansed of the sin of mutation. None of the other sins, of course - those weren't even recognised. It was odd, seeing All-Name continue his rites, surrounded as he was by... well. Yan-Lam, who knew nothing of her heritage or the suffering she'd been spared when her father ran from Rekida. And Tal-Sar, who knew too much, and remembered keenly how the Rekidans had truly been. And the mutant girl, who had once been a noble, once been intelligent, and now... now she wore the trappings of a Rekidan, but her mind was completely gone. The four corners of the Rekidan soul - the ignorant, the noble, the lunatic, and the freed slave. The Rekidan soul was like a compass, and every Rekidan alive today had to orient themselves around these four cardinal points. And strangely, the four seemed to... unconsciously become those cardinal points.

When Tal-Sar grumbled at All-Name's scent, he made it more intense. He chewed more twigs. Painted his skin with the geometric patterns beloved of Rekida. In response, Tal-Sar prayed more fervently to the few gods of Rekida he still recognised, engaged in simple acts of worship that the slaves had practised, that had been beneath the nobility. Exaggerated his behaviours, like a peacock fluffing his feathers outwards. Yan-Lam spoke in a voice clearly Fidelizhi, from the accent to the vocabulary to the rhythm, and she committed to this, she did nothing Rekidan at all, consciously removed herself from All-Name or Tal-Sar, the former because he was strange and reminded her of all the worst parts of her life, the latter because he reminded her of her life before coming here, which was perhaps worse still. And the mutant... she regurgitated whatever was murmured to her. Parroted it back in her strange, rasping voice. An empty vessel that could sound Rekidan, look Rekidan... but could never even be human.

The four. Rekidan compass-soul. Four pillars holding up the sky. Foundation-stone pillars to hold up the city's body, compass-pillars to hold up the city's soul.

Cairn

Sometimes Tanner imagined there was a mystic significance to all of it. To their arrangement. Maybe the four were becoming archetypes of their own, maybe they were becoming more sacrifices for the hungry land. Idols of their people, ready to be sacrificed to the wall-gods who leered down perpetually, their faces now clustered with dead lichen and the bones of mutants, their eyes stuffed with glittering black chitin from innumerable perished insects. The Judge, the Cardinal Points of Rekida, the Bloodstained Priests... projecting myth onto the world. A final step of hallucination. Accepting the fantastical as part of her life, talking freely of sacrifices and mythic significance, turning the bright calm into a solipsistic remaking of reality. She could do it, if she wanted to. Already she could see the mythic patterns unwinding around her, like something out of Tenk. Judge-Queen-Goddess, Mother of New Rekida, living alone amidst the wasteland passing judgement on all who entered her territory. Her priesthood worshipping her and executing her will, gathering the bones of mutants to ornament their coats, casting horse-teeth to foretell the future. Under Tanner, supporting this new kingdom, the four points of the Rekidan soul, exalted to a high position as spiritual emblems. In the foothills of winter, great slaughterings of buffalo to gain the coats which marked out the lower castes. The axe taken as a symbol. Stitched into cloaks of bloody Rekidan red, raised as an emblem of the new order.

Other symbols. Other icons. A mystery play in the snow, executed by children in costumes. A large child hiding one arm under a red cloak, the other wearing a quasi-nautical coat. The General and the Captain. Soldiers of the Great War fighting one another, one long-gone, the other soon-to-go, while the Judge loomed behind both, ready to execute the winner. Mad struggle reframed as mythic contest. She could see it now, clear as day. A pit of buffalo skulls, repurposed as her tomb when she eventually died. A cairn of skulls, eyeless and leering, to stare at the people in her stead. Pilgrimage to the underground river, sacred trails in the bone orchard, shrines in the wreck of the theurgist's lab. In the cold north, madness could fester thoroughout the long dark of winter. Here, there were no references. Reality was unfiltered and raw, no safety net. Rekida had stood atop a heap of suffering for untold centuries, ruling brutally and frenziedly, creating an order monstrous to behold... yet terrifyingly self-sustaining. Only the Great War had shattered it. Madness slept in the stones. It could wake up, again.

Wake up, and make this place what it perhaps was always meant to be.

She had a vision of the great pillars of foundation stone. The interminable pale rock which made mutants shrivel like autumn leaves. Maybe there were words carved into them, into the bones of the world. Creeds that leached upwards. Maybe when someone died inside a city, their minds sank downwards and were locked up in pale halls, an afterlife with no escape, condemned to whisper the truths they held dear, infecting everyone above. The Rekidan pillar would speak of rulership, of superstition, of control and dominion. Of a mystic landscape that needed to be chained if it was to be lived in. The Nalseri pillar, murmuring softly of cartels and totems, of the hammer and the eye. A murmur that died to nothing here - and thus had the cartel died, trying to preach the word of one pillar in the land of another. Mahar Jovan whispering of duality, Fidelizh whispering of kings, such that no amount of rulership by the Golden Parliament could shake the impression of the monarch from the collective unconscious. Maybe the world was defined by those bones of the earth, these totems, ribcages of the world-serpent. Everything in the world was defined by whether you supped of the world's bones or the world's blood. The latter was mutation, madness... a state of formless creation from which anything could emerge. The former was madness of another stripe.

Madness all the same.

Could hear something in the air. Imagined. Delusional. Echoing in time.

Mantras drawn from her writing.

Time. Womb. Indigo. Brasstide. Caste. Horseteeth. Surrealist. Authority. Chambers. Redhair. Mourner. Cairn.

Repeated over and over in a sibilant susurration, religious dedication in each exquisitely pronounced syllable, repeated over and over and over until it all became mechanical, until the voices of humans became the voice of the redhead mutant and then she was there, sitting on Tanner's desk, whispering.

Brass city with a lake of burning oil. Burning behind her eyes.

A knock at the door.

Her quill was still in her hand. A mantra scrawled delicately on the paper. Carefully, she laid another piece over the top, hiding it from sight. And hummed, loud enough to be audible. Didn't want to put any words together right now.

Ms. Blue entered.

Ah.

Of course.

Her first.

Tanner looked over silently as Ms. Blue entered, stinking like the rest of her sisterhood. She removed her mask carefully, exposing her bright blue eyes, her eager, loyal smile. She approached slowly, Tanner not objecting to the approach.

"Ma'am?"

Tanner nodded slightly. Yes. What is it.

"...are you quite well, ma'am? You've been awfully quiet."

Crumbs. They were noticing.

"Hm."

"...myself and all the others would like you to know, ma'am, that we're with you. Whatever you choose to do at this juncture, we're with you. Always."

Tanner was very quiet indeed. Ms. Blue drew a little closer, her eyes burning with a passion that made Tanner's skin crawl, even now.

"We... will happily speak for you, if Fidelizh gets back in contact. Spring thaw will be in a month, maybe less if the year's warm, that's what the locals say. If they try and appoint a new governor, we'll speak for you. We'll support you. Always. We don't want a bureaucrat, or a spy, or any of the sorts they'd send. We don't want them - we want you. I understand if this is... already known, but your quietudes... we just want to make our position clear."

Was... was this it?

Did she just want to reiterate her loyalty?

Was nothing happening today?

Tanner said nothing. Ms. Blue drew yet closer, twisting her hands around one another.

"And... and if you think we need to leave, if Fidelizh says they'll send an army up to get you out, to get rid of all of us, we're with you. Some of the locals, especially the old man, Tal-Sar, he says he knows the landscape around here. And the woman, the surrealist, we've been getting information out of her. She remembers Krodaw, how that place fell apart. How the Sleepless worked. We'd be with you, if you wanted to go into the hills and fight from there. You deserve Rekida, ma'am. It's yours. You earned it when you fought for it. Fought for all of us. Fidelizh never earned our loyalty like you have. You proved you owned Rekida when all the other contenders died, ma'am. So... please, if anything is needed, just let us know. We're with you to the end."

Tanner couldn't even muster the willpower to be afraid. She'd heard all of this before. And she'd thought it time after time, conjured up hypotheticals that died in meaningless spirals.

So...

Ms. Blue placed a hand on her arm.

Tanner locked up.

Stared at her. Face utterly, utterly flat.

First time someone had actually made contact with her for... a long, long while. Months, maybe.

Her hand itched for her axe. Better than kneading her skirt.

Ms. Blue smiled widely.

"We're with you to the end, ma'am."

A pause. Her voice dropped a little.

"I'm with you to the end."

Tanner did nothing.

She just... just stared. Silent. Impassive. Her mind currently whirring to a state of panic she hadn't felt in... a long while. Not since the battle. Thought she had it beaten out of her by now. Ms. Blue continued to smile, her eyes were large and bright, their blue colour downright luminous. Her teeth were yellowed from neglect, her breath fetid, her skin plastered with dried sweat and grime, a necklace of teeth around her neck, a belt of tanned mutant hide around her waist, her rifle carved with innumerable images of the axe, over and over, whenever she had a free moment to scratch in another.

The mantra Tanner had written would pass her lips easily, if she was taught it.

Could even hear her murmuring it.

"Time. Womb. Indigo. Brasstide. Caste. Horseteeth. Surrealist. Authority. Chambers. Redhair. Mourner. Cairn. Whatever you say, ma'am."

Her teeth, yellowed as they were, seemed to glisten like tiny knives as she grinned.

Slowly, the smile became more strained.

Tanner's silence was one born of panic. And slowly, it sharpened. Crushed around Ms. Blue. The smile continued, but it was... tighter, more forced. Her eyes twitched constantly, scanning Tanner's face for any hint of feeling, of acceptance or rejection. Tanner had no idea what she was meant to do in this situation. A second of awful tension extended outwards, and Tanner could do nothing but listen to the sound of her own heartbeat. Certain that Ms. Blue could hear it as well. For a moment, she... she thought something. Something strange. Ms. Blue was... clearly implying something. If Tanner insulted her, struck her, acted enraged, would she cower like a beaten dog, or would she bite back? Was this her chance to let loose the rabid animal she knew nested inside every member of her priesthood? She could do it. Come on. Just... compromise her authority. Do it. Accept whatever she was implying, and become human in her eyes, dragged down to her level. Reject her, but do it so loudly and crudely that it tarnished her status as an idol. Come on. Break her pedestal. The mud was right there, if she dove in and wallowed around a bit, the... the mantra would just be words on paper, her grave would be a quiet hole in the ground, Rekida would be reoccupied by bureaucrats and nobodies, and normality would come back. No more delusions.

Just had to open her mouth.

Just had to say something.

Ms. Blue... nodded her head, suddenly. Then transformed it into a bow halfway through, a respectful inclination of the skull. Then she was gone, marching away, leaving the room with a click of her heels and a snapped salute. Comical civility from someone so drenched in gore. Gone completely.

Leaving Tanner alone once more to... think.

To imagine.

Coward.

Absolute coward. The chance was right there. And she couldn't take it.

Why not?

She wanted to take it. She wanted this all to be over.

...but at the last moment, she just... failed. The mantra seemed to burn through the page covering it. Her thoughts wound down slowly. Tension easing from her limbs. She'd been tested, and... she'd failed. Or succeeded. Depending on what she wanted to do with her life. No, no, hold on. If she... destroyed her authority prematurely, what about Yan-Lam, Marana, All-Name, everyone else in the colony? No, no, she had to plan out the destruction of her authority. But... no idea how to do that. No time. And...

And when the time came to pull the trigger, she genuinely didn't know if she could.

A few words was easy. Ending her life was hard. And she'd still failed at the former.

Hardly said much to her prospects with the latter.

...might as well keep going.

Her quill began scratching again, filling the accusatory silence. Just had to wait for spring. Once spring came, dynamism would return, there would be relief from Fidelizh, and she could move on. She just had to maintain her fragile authority until that moment arrived. That was it. Wait, and maintain. If she succeeded, she could run away back home. Mahar Jovan, definitely. Banished from Fidelizh, lucky if she could remain a judge. Lucky. But if she was a dull little bureaucrat for the rest of her days, she'd be happy. Live frugally, work hard, hide her mutations, and make money for her mother and father. That was all. Come on. Just a little longer. Few more months. They were over the hump, really. Midwinter was passing by. Once that dark period ended, it was all downhill to spring. To spring. To warmth and light and conclusion.

Thaw.

Patience.

Father.