CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN - NEUROTRANSMITTER SACRAMENT

Nothing had truly changed.

How could it? The world remained basically the same. The same systems, functioning in the same way, operating to the same conclusions. Just because she hadn't experienced those conclusions didn't mean they didn't exist. It just meant she was a very premature individual. Nothing around her, despite all the madness, really felt unnatural. Just... unusually advanced. Why shouldn't flesh melt together into a single living landscape? Why shouldn't an intelligence rise up amongst the mutants? When did humans emerge from animals? When did animals emerge from whatever came before? They said, these days, that once upon a time creatures like the gorgonopsids of the mudlands ruled the world - they'd found bones of such creatures, glistening wetly from the earth's darkness, illuminated by cautious lamps of burning oil. If humans could emerge from that sort of world, why not an intelligence from the mutants? The red mist was rising around her on all sides. Her arms were heavy, weary with the effort of killing the General. She still struggled to process that. Once violence started, it became an instinct. Her mind was guided to it, comforted by precedent.

She had become a violent person. That was indelible. Tanner Magg was capable of immense violence. She was capable of splitting a man's skull open to kill him instantly. Once was a random occurrence. Twice... twice was more. The gap between one and two was an infinity - the gap between two and three was a formality. Precedent lurked around her in the red mists, sparking amongst the crimson stars. Precedent dwelled there, shadowy and clawing. Reaching for her. Latching on. She'd built this version of herself, carved it into the world. The reflection of the Tanner-yet-to-come, the version of her that would linger after she was dead - this was the version she had been. It was real, it had lived, and it stretched to influence her in indelible, concrete ways. She'd just flipped her polarity, moving from obsession over the future to enslavement by the past.

Oh, well.

The red mists were endless. And the meat... the meat had harmonised. Her soldiers... the soldiers, not hers, were gathering around her in their final numbers. A last stand against the terror. They were blood-drenched, their armour was beginning to reanimate around them, coats moving without reference to wind, detectors screeching perpetually until someone turned them off with sharp, decisive clicks. Guns smoked endlessly, and their bodies were lined with sharp veins of silver snow. Even the hot gore plastering their bodies shimmered, glass-like, as ice formed over it all. The long dark was here, and they wore it over themselves. Until the spring thaw came, they'd be blood-soaked priests and priestesses, glued to their weapons, sealed in their armour, locked in their roles. Their gas mask lenses reflected the twisting, burning lights that lurked in the mist, the... she knew what they were. Her addled mind knew, immediately. They were connections. Thoughts were nothing but connections. A chain of information colliding with another chain, in different places, for a single instant. From each connection, another chain. Some died on their own. Some were swallowed whole by others. Some simply... slowed until they were imperceptible. But wherever they joined, they burned. She was standing in an immense brain. There were no mutants around her - just cells, just lesser organs and organelles. Beings that served a higher purpose, that died without thought and lived without question. Her soldiers were all around her now, clustering in a protective layer, the lights of mutant-thoughts burning in their glass lenses, giving them a zealous fervour that... deeply unnerved her. It was just the blindness of it. The strange lack, the desire to become her. She'd... sensed it, yes, sensed it happening, but this was something else. Seeing it happen. Realising that behind those lenses...

There might not be anything at all.

Nothing but more of herself.

She waited for the coming intelligence.

And over the horizon... over the horizon, it came. Shaded by the light of an illusory red sun, that had long-since set, and might never rise again in Tanner's lifetime. Her eyes burned. Her axe ached. The landscape squirmed, awaiting...

She had no idea what she was looking at.

It was a logical conjecture that something like this existed. Step by step by step, causality legitimised this being. Yet... yet she couldn't quite... at the end of logic there was madness. She could follow every single step and find nothing waiting for her.

Nothing but this.

It was... conceivable that there was a shape. Geometrical and sharp. A protein coat shading some vital component inside. Glittering the colour of emerald - something shaped like an erratic geode. And from the geode came long, shining limbs, locking into the ground tightly, gouging deep into the earth to hold the great stone up. It seemed primordial, something unshaped and primitive, from the earlier ages of the world. A shining emerald geode suspended on limbs the colour and consistency of wildfire-scorched wood, flowing like oil and holding like hardened steel. A dozen limbs, six on each side. No feeding mechanisms. No mouths. No teeth. Nothing to devour. There was no need - it had reached a final state. The final mutant would be mouthless, she realised. It would be nothing but shell, for it had nothing remaining to improve. From gaps on the emerald surface emerged long jets of gas, geysers that melted snow easily, and filled the air with the stench of concentrated cinnamon, and the burn of crushed ginger. Always reshaping. The geode itself reshaped constantly, stones flowing into one another, out of one another, tessellating and tesseracting, opening new geysers, closing old ones. Never static. It had no eyes - the eyes were all around her, flowering from long fleshy stems in a great garden. It was the bulb. The root. The seed. The blind, searching creature which supplied all the flowering bounty that surrounded her.

She faced some sort of... of final mutant.

It was just as alien as she thought.

Towering. The size of a building. Smaller than the titan she'd seen in the Tulavanta. But... but clearly designed for a much, much higher purpose. Tall enough to dwarf her. Tall enough to awaken all the old evolutionary fears.

No point of reference to any animal. The limbs it moved on weren't tentacles - they were too articulated. Nor were they arms or legs, they were too fluid, and devoid of bones. The body these limbs held up was between rock and flesh. No eyes, no mouth, no horns, no stingers, no wings, nothing. No organs of any kind. All it did was expel red gas that mingled with the rest of the mist. It shone black-green, and seemed to hover above the ground on limbs too thin to support its body. She couldn't... her instincts failed her. How heavy was it? How light? How strong? How weak? Where was the front, where was the back? All reference points had been detached. She saw life without reference to all its constants. Even mutants needed to eat in some way. Look for the mouth, and you saw their purpose expressed purely. This thing... it was blind, it was deaf, it had no mouth, it had no sensors, it had nothing. It was nothing but thought and influence. Living organ - bold enough to delegate to others. Learning the one lesson no other mutant truly could. Interdependence. But from it...

From it came the buzzing.

Not a high sound. Not a low one. It was a sound that turned her into an instrument. Resonated in her bones, echoed within her organs, a throatless voice, a soundless scream. A buzzing that blasted into all the corners of her skull. Like having an icicle driven through her ear, piercing deep, freezing every thought, every emotion, every instinct. It was intrusion, clambering up her spine and lurking in her limbic system. No orders. Just inclinations and enhancements. A knowledge of what was happening around her. Flesh was growing more efficient. Tangles in circulatory systems were smoothing. Everything was working exactly how it should. A gardener had come to tend this place, and it was here to order her, too. Her limbs wanted to move in more optimised patterns. Her breathing wanted to stabilise into the sequence that maximised oxygen dispersal. Her heart was pulsing to the beat of an unfamiliar drum. She wasn't being ordered. She was just being improved. Piece by piece.

Cell by cell.

Thought by thought.

Every movement the creature made, sliding gently over the earth, not leaving a single mark on the meat which parted smoothly to accept it, orifices opening, clutching, and releasing in perfect sequence red tongues emerging to grease the black limbs with lubricant and moisturiser, ointments to grace their one true owner...

Tanner felt it more than she saw it. In her eyes, it was always shimmering, hazy behind layers of gore, snow, ice, steam, madness, delusion. In her ears, it was nothing but buzzing, but the creaking of organic stone. In her nose, it was cinnamon and ginger. In her mouth, it was cloying and sweet and addictive. On her skin, it was warmth and familiarity, the tickle of red mists that sparked idly with fire no warmer than the blue flames on a brandy-soaked treat. And in her mind it was clear. In her mind, she knew every emerald-jade convolution, every carbonised-wood pseudopod, every single spark that twisted on the surface of the impossible creature. It was a primitive idol and an avant-garde sculpture, it was a logical extension and illogical madness, it was animalistic... and it had no reference to any animal, living or dead.

It was the alien matter which... which...

You could never really know what your own organs looked like until it was far, far too late. They were intimately familiar... but so very alien. She had no idea what her liver looked like, and wouldn't for her entire life if she was lucky.

This thing was much the same. It was familiar. And absolutely alien. And in the liminal space between the two, there was a creeping unease that spiked into terror, lancing up and down her spine like a swinging, sharpened pendulum.

It approached.

The last regurgitation of the horde.

Buzzing spiked in her ears, almost clawing at her vision, the swarm unending, the sound unceasing, the-

Brass city by a lake of oil.

Glowing mists of gas too noble to react with anything around it.

Sewers-streets-aqueducts-throats, channels for liquid-solid matter, nurtured on wall-milks that made the air spark and-

Stop it.

Stop... thinking. Focus. Focus.

And the meat began to shift. Spiking upwards. The soldiers grunted in irritation and fear as half-formed hands wrapped around their ankles, projected bone spurs that glistened with venom... one or two were caught. Crumpled to their knees and wheezed madly as their bodies turned against them. The others... they began to burn everything they could. Alcohol-fires bloomed all around her, a halo that slowly, slowly cleansed just enough. Just enough to keep them alive for a little lkonger. The mass wasn't perfect, but... the intelligence had to get closer. If it got closer, it could manipulate more finely, move flesh in ways no normal mutant could. The closer it was, the more the mass became it. So... right. Strategies flowered in her mind. Convictions. No speculation - this thing needed to get closer. To kill them, yes... and to satisfy whatever mad urge had made it waste its entire horde on coming here to begin with.

She raised her axe. Her face was flat as a cliff face. Just as unyielding.

The flames rose higher...

And she charged.

Fleeing her own mad entourage as they burned more and more. She trailed blue-purple flames from the edges of her cape as she ran through the mists, plunging shin-deep into gore and meat, tearing free with all the strength she could muster. Every reserve tapped, until she felt like she was on the verge of tearing every last muscle in her body. A red sun that only existed in her mind blazed overhead. Red mists clung to her, sparking and fizzing, sensing her every movement. Eye-flowers tracked her, orifices scented her, thin red tongues tasted whatever they could in the split-seconds they had available...

The creature was close.

Her near-paralysed arm shifted. Her horn rose. Just in range, just in range. As close as she dared. And... oh. Her arm was working. Already the contamination was repairing it. Making her whole. Stronger fibres slithering to replace the old. Dark meat invading her flesh, the same texture and shade as the tissue of her heart.

She aimed...

And nothing happened.

...overloaded.

Been using it all day.

The thing had never been anything but a weaponised instability. And she'd never been anyone but a judge and a brute. Never a fighter. Nor a general. Definitely not a captain.

The intelligence loomed. Moved closer with great speed that was almost imperceptible from a human viewpoint. It lacked the normal signs - no panting, no bunching of muscle, no rush of air. One moment, it was there. Now, it was here.

A pseudopod lashed, and Tanner stumbled back...

It grazed her. Flung her a few feet away with dismissive ease. Barbs forming from the burned-wood leg, leaving long gashes in her coat, deep enough to scrape the skin.

Could barely feel it as the air was driven from her lungs. Too exhausted to even feel exhausted. Her axe failed to fall. Her horn burned anything it touched. Overloading. Had to be. Beyond all rational limits, about to reach the fate of all theurgic engines.

Detonation.

Her soldiers were already moving. Their own clothes wreathed in blue alcohol-flames, keeping the mutations away. More were falling.

She could barely feel it as... as things formed around her.

The land was waking up. The hunger was rising to the surface. The intelligence... her eyes itched looking at it, her mind strained to place it in an evolutionary chart. Where had it come from? Why did it go down this road? The shifting emerald offered no answers. The buzzing offered nothing but madness. The land was coming alive. Jaws were forming around her, moving with the lazy urgency of all organic life - millions upon millions of systems and subsystems arranging themselves at a frantic pace, forming organs, teeth, acid, venom, all the tools it needed to kill her. She saw the anti-Tanner grow in real time - a leering, gaping mouth that stretched from her feet to her head, ringed with teeth. A blast of fetid air emerged from the gap, and she felt herself sinking, her way eased by glistening digestive fluids that hissed on contact with her buffalo skin coat, hungry for anything even slightly living...

She thrashed violently, animal agonies racing through her limbs. Her face was exposed to the air, all but her mouth, and she could feel... feel the warmth, the cloying sickness, the almost copulatory sensation, the earth readying itself to welcome her, could see a stomach shaped for her, a red pulsing coffin filled with glistening acid... the buzzing rose, the buzzing rose, snow above, flesh below, she could feel the darkness closing, could see her death staring her in the face, could see the throat developing mechanisms, valves, channels, all of them made to process her downwards, grind her up into repurposed paste...

The buzzing, the buzzing, the buzzing...

Brass city with domes of sand-jade laced with quick metals that carried thrumming signal-hymns. Mutant-flesh grafted to near-living stone, amoebic shamblers vomiting matter that hardened to chitin to stone to brick, circuit-maggots that bred gold filaments in their puckering mouths, reactor-drones that buzzed on silvery wings too small for bodies the size of snowballs and that bred blue fire in their metallic stomachs, gargoyles melted into the walls, weaponry with a pulse that nurtured humming deposits of reactor-drones in their distended stomachs as their barrel-tongues projected downwards to the festering streets and-

Her axe smashed teeth, scattered them into pools of snow where they vanished instantly. She focused on the teeth. On the scattering. On the simple randomness. On reality.

Her burning horn scorched flesh the colour of the intelligence's limbs.

And her strength snapped muscle, cracked bone, forced the land to flow more - saw muscle fibres moving like tree roots to ensnare her, to drag her deeper... she fought against the gleaming vines, felt them shudder and twitch as she ripped them away...

With a wrench, she was free. Staggering from the wounded mouth, which continued to gape pathetically as she staggered away, face flat with primal panic. The intelligence was still there. It was moving... oh, gods, it moved in a way that made her eyes ache, set her teeth on edge... the buzzing, the buzzing... stop it, stop it. Kept seeing hazy marks around her vision whenever it rose, following the tune of some apocalyptic song. Kept seeing faces. Shadowy. Unformed. Barely there. Whispered features. Eygi's broken teeth. Algi's bored eyes. Mother's guilty mouth. Father's dead expression. The aunts and uncles with their judgemental brows. All of them floating, alien from one another, interlocking into strange constellations, into tesselated mosaics... the buzzing was everywhere, it was crawling in her hairs, it was playing across her skin, it sparked in the red fog around her, each pulsing star making it spike...

The intelligence didn't float. Nor did it walk. It had no muscles. No joints. No bones. It simply... simply adjusted what static shape it was taking at that time. It was a living fossil, a living stone, the most stable form of life... buzzing, buzzing...

-synapse required, limbs devoured by liquid ground, walls opening like mouths, flesh-stone birth canal widening and tongues the colour of cobalt lashing to swallow and move the emerald mass of the synapse to the right places, to tight stomachs ripe with neurotransmitter, to pulsing sewer-lungs, to the gorging recyclers and their endless mouths welded to endless coral-pipes that projected digesting matter for the city to reharvest and remake into new drones and-

She stumbled away from the maw. Feet sinking ankle-deep into meat. Her boots were boiling hot - but her head was racing towards being freezing again, fat white flakes of jagged snow lingering in her hair, blowing from all directions to fill every contour and crevice. Devoured by the earth, or devoured by the sky. The soldiers ahead... they were firing wildly at the intelligence, which advanced with the steady inevitability of an avalanche. Tanner had a second to watch it truly, truly engage... she saw exactly what they were up against. What needed to be done. The soldiers fired, bullets impacted from the creature, and none left any wound which lasted more than a few moments. Nothing deep enough to damage. Nothing enduring enough to weaken. Maybe they were damaging it, in some way... but it left no outward signs. The creature wasn't fast, but it was steady. Not a single bullet made it actually pause in its motions. Even a grenade lobbed clumsily towards it did nothing but prompt a swish of the pseudopods, a crack of alien matter striking metal... and a distant explosion.

Could already feel bony thorns growing around her legs. A briar of venom that pressed closer and closer with each second, learning how to pierce her armour, learning what dosages she required... could already feel her skin turning numb, anticipating the pain that was slowly worming through the leather, eating through with boiling solvent...

She tore free. Lunged through the ground, dragging up great devouring clots of meat-earth as she went, veins trailing like roots, capillaries like mycelia.... the others were moving slowly, the intelligence gliding slowly towards them, bland despite the murderous intent lurking inside that emerald mass. They were tearing through the bleeding soil-flesh, lifting their knees up high to escape mouths that formed to gnaw at them, necks twitching frantically to avoid lashing vine-limbs, and even so, the gore plastering their bodies began to slowly bloom with small, parasitic growths, flowers that leaked venom from their petals, soft and white like milk, filling the air with a sweet stench. Their shambling-stumbling-tearing-twitching was like a strange priestly dance, like something ecstatic practised out in the mudlands. Like she was seeing a whole ritual invented in front of her eyes, all the exaggerated motions, all the zealous focus, all the costuming, all the pulsing significance...

They shamble-danced towards the intelligence, firing their weapons...

She lunged through the earth, feeling her horn heat up more and more, the buzzing in her head reaching an unbearable pitch, the simple assertion that she was no longer her own brain running up and down her spine like a red-hot spark. I am your brain, the intelligence seemed to say. You are an organ. Specialise. Refine. Optimise. Integrate. Submit all higher decisions to something better qualified. All mutants did this to their own organs - every mutant was a colony of cooperating flesh, chunks which were integrated and thus didn't flee. A dying mutant erupted with fleeing organs. The intelligence was just... expanding the concept a little.

Come on.

Keep moving.

She was almost done. Almost finished. A plan was flowering in her head. Unimaginative. But effective.

That was... really her primary strategy, wasn't it? No dazzling brilliance. No startling innovation. Just a slow, sluggish, inevitable march, the same motion over and over again. A mutant mindset - when something worked, do it again, and again, and again. Maybe she'd been contaminated from the day she was born. Swollen to immense size... and bound into fundamentally dead ways of thinking. A mechanical mind, better suited for the mechanism of a pocket watch.

Come on.

March.

And over the breeze... through the drifting flakes of snow, larger than her fist...

She could hear the soldiers roaring, voices audible over the sharp, erratic rapport of their guns. Wild. High-pitched. Utterly clear.

"Judge!"

Her blood ran a little colder.

The chant was taken up. No idea who started it first, not there to hear it. By the time she processed what was happening, they were all screaming along.

"Judge! Judge! Judge!"

Repeated the word so often it lost all meaning. An assembly of meaningless letters that could be the name of a profession, a king, a priest, a hero, a god. A blood-soaked idol. She could feel the zealotry in the air, a raging surrender that was... was both unnervingly mutant and terrifyingly human. The chant merged with the buzzing into a single maddening roar:

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge!"

Her mind was too weary to understand anything. She was just marching on, eyes dead as flints. Horn overheating. The theurgic engine inside was on the verge of death. Theurgic engines burst when they were at this stage. Climactic detonations that made the air boil, that tore apart sound itself. She'd seen two theurgic explosions thus far. The cold-houses. The pale seal. And now this. Three explosions to end the horde. There weren't many left now. Not enough to fight if the intelligence could start to bring creatures out of the garden. The Rekidans were dead. The soldiers were butchered. She was wounded and mutating and exhausted. She had nothing but this final shot.

Get close.

Let it explode.

Kill the intelligence. Maybe it wouldn't kill it. Maybe it wouldn't even save the city.

But...

Whalefall, great leviathan dredged from ocean depths, hauled to city, eaten alive and reused, sprays of yellow venom-fat like geysers, organs popping and sagging, liquid drained by clouds of iron mosquitoes, and great pulsing membranes floating overhead to catch all gaseous issue, each membrane wide enough to cover a city block, thinner than any gossamer or silk, riddled with veins, turning the sky the colour of flesh and-

Tanner saw one of those carbonised limbs lash out, extending far beyond any natural range, thinning as it went to accommodate the extension...

A single switch across the front of a soldier.

He walked a few steps.

His torso fell away from his hips. Cut smoothly along the waist.

Saw the white expanse of bone for a second before the organs began to spill out, propelled by their own furious internal pressure. Coils and coils of intestines. The remains of old rations spilling from a ruptured stomach. Fat, yellow and glistening, spilling into the snowy ground and hissing as it went. Blood flowing in such quantities it became meaningless, assumed the same position of water in her mind. Took him long moments to die, long moments of his blood pouring free, his consciousness fading, his life vanishing while his brain remained intact. Like withdrawing sap from a tree, watching the leaves wither even as the trunk remained impeccably smooth. By the time he hit the snowy ground, body steaming, he was already dead.

They would be torn apart by this thing.

She had no control over this situation.

She felt that was important to note. Tanner Magg, judge, had no control here. She had no combat expertise, and was running purely on instinct. Tactics was basically beyond her. Humans were a tricky subject she still failed to even somewhat grasp. No area in which she was skilled held precedent here. Nothing but brutal strength. Running on nothing but natural talent that had, until now, not been truly, truly tested. And she was coming against the limits. This wasn't her world. She had no idea what to do.

Improvisation upon improvisation. She saw her blood-streaked priesthood shamble dance-like through the mire, and she had no idea of their formations, either any they had, or any they might take. They fired, but she couldn't say if it was better to concentrate their shots or just fire at will, or how to coordinate the former in any reasonable way.

Some hit. Some missed. And if she was holding one of those guns, she knew which cadre she'd be a part of.

There was no control here.

Their morale was zealotry. If they held the faith... her stride increased, her face was stone-like in its flatness. She had no idea what was happening. If she hadn't been so exhausted at this point, she might be terrified. As it was, she was just... she was calm, but it was a calm of absence. She had no idea how to cultivate faith or confidence. No idea how to make these chanting soldiers keep going, even when the intelligence tore them apart. All she knew was that the intelligence was in front of her, the situation was on a razor's edge, and she had an exploding theurgic engine.

That was it. All thoughts of the future vanished. The future was dark, full of teeth and chanting. All around her were implications. Implications she didn't want to explore. Just... charge. Charge. Burn up. If there were any thoughts after that, confront them as they came.

The intelligence loomed.

Finality clung to its emerald flanks.

The buzzing was in her head. Louder and louder.

Neurotransmitter pulsing from coal-black glands larger than boulders. Murmurs. Orders. Instructions. Targets. Organic coordinates painted in pheromones. Spinal-vertebra skyscrapers sags into ruins as repurposed for armour and weapons by a birthed horde. Emerald synapse receiving all orders, digesting them and expelling them, fanning out controlling impulses, never to know why, only to know what, slender worms of spinal columns injected into limp mutant-flesh, growing brains like mushrooms, spreading filaments of nervous systems, birthing something better. The spinal-worms live in fat purple-black fruit-glands nestled deep in the birthing ziggurats that gleam with contaminated syrups, sheltered around their living vines, sustained by mutant-mothers with no eyes, no mouths, no senses whatsoever, completely de-nerved and used for sustaining the minds of the new army, devoid of imperfections and old hungers, pulsed through the thorny coral-hearts of the city until they are smoothed and de-anxietised and-

...neuro... what? What? She didn't know what... what was happening to her head, why couldn't she... she kept seeing things. Kept feeling the tightness of meat, kept thinking... thinking of... she was running down a ruined Rekidan street, she... a street was a sewer was a vein was an artery, just processing different types of matter, she was a clot in the vessel she... stop it.

She charged. Adrenaline keeping her stupid. Keeping her human.

The creature was thrashing. Buzzing in her head. And chanting in her ears.

Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge. Judge.

Mocking her with their certainty. Mocking her with their conviction that she was a judge, and not a mockery of one. And yet... each chant filled her with nervousness, and a kind of desperate frenzy. Not confidence. Frenzy. A role was settling around her. A thorny, clinging, unyielding role. More... more than anything she'd allowed before. Her thoughts began to spiral outwards, unfurling in new and frightening directions. Her blood was burning. The Tanner who received chants was not a Tanner she knew. Not a Tanner she wanted to know. Yet she was emerging all around her. The same bright calm. The same sense of instinctive motion that pulsed through her muscles. A revival of the shimmering madness she'd started to cultivate down in the bone orchard, when every angle was sealed off and only thrashing could unblock them. She was being validated for it. The Rekidans were dead, their best soldiers. There were no more theurgic weapons, none that weren't presently exploding. Their fuel was gone. The cartel had unwound itself. So many were dead. The seals she'd unblocked... the reservoirs she'd shattered were empty. This was it. The lake of mud that lay beneath, infertile and treacherous.

And yet they chanted.

Validation of her actions.

And pressure for her to continue.

She missed her mother.

No, no, no, she didn't, she didn't.

The creature moved. Cut apart another solider, who died too quickly to scream... or didn't scream loud enough to overpower the chants, that kept going, over and over and over and over. Louder and louder with each passing second, until she could hear them tearing their voices apart, scarring their throats with volume.

More volleys of gunfire.

More tiny, swiftly healing wounds that vanished as soon as they were made.

Another rotation of the carbonised limbs... another soldier falling to pieces .The intelligence was killing them mechanically. One target after another.

Probably barely recognised them as threats.

Mutants reprocessed by the brass city into better soldiers. Scarred veteran of twelve extermination campaigns returning. Auto-amputation. Limbs purpling as veins voluntarily constrict, sores opening like gaping mouths as contamination is willingly shed, thing with metal beak and no stomach picking over the rooftops to snip the final filaments, wound tighter than piano wire, the guitar-twang of severing fiber echoing over the city. All veteran parades announced by the filament-twang of auto-amputations, dead skulls crashing to ground as balut-engineers extract nervous systems like tearing a tree-stump from the earth, removing it from flesh eager to lose what needed to be lost and-

The buzzing in her head was becoming intolerable. The meaty landscape burst under her feet, each footstep sending up geysers of sweat, pus, blood, and cloudy liquid that lubricated the immense muscles, smoothed the passage of reshaping bones. Near-fluid bones surged up to clamp around her like bear-traps, and she tore her way free with greater and greater effort...

This was how the intelligence was going to kill them.

Use the landscape to slow. Then kill one by one. Trap and kill. Over and over and over again, until the city was dead and only it remained.

She could barely hear the chanting over the buzzing.

Kept running.

Kept tearing through. Each second was harder than the last. The land was reshaping even further - hills of meat rising up, a single living mass, plastered with hair that glistened with mucus, too slick to climb, always reshaping until it was painfully smooth...

Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge!

Each second made the next more intolerable. New defences. New weapons. An intelligence that buzzed from the peak of a growing mound. She...

She roared.

"Detonate it!"

Grenadoes were thrown without hesitation or questioning. They threw them like they were scattering confetti, unleashing every last reserve, trusting that she knew what she was doing, that she would've specified if she wanted restraint. Didn't even interrupt their chanting. The metal spheres... some rolled down the hill, glistening with gelatinous liquid, some were extinguished before they could do anything. But some. Some. They managed to explode - in mid-air, largely. And the shock, the shrapnel... it opened the way for others. Bloody canyons and craters were sliced into the growing mound, sending up sprays of anonymous liquid that splattered warmly on their armour, hissing in the fierce cold. She saw blood vessels knotting themselves into tapestries, anything to staunch the flow of matter. She saw muscles writhing like burning cords of rope, propelled by their own incendiary momentum. The mound was shaken...

And when her foot pressed into the flesh, it found nothing but unresponsive necrotic matter, and heaps upon heaps of bone. She clambered on a carcass, wrenched herself upwards as it slowly tried to reanimate. The intelligence lunged, a single limb flexing and contorting unnaturally, snapping out... her axe rose instinctually... no, no, it didn't. The buzzing. The buzzing was in her head, louder and louder, intolerable, so loud it was making the world shake, made her mouth go numb, made her entire body turn into a single pulsing drum. And in the buzzing, she'd... she felt the lunge.

She felt it before it happened.

Some ideal state between being utterly consumed by the intelligence... yet still aware of it. Buzzing roaring in her skull, loud enough to shake the world. Riding the wave of sound. Riding the panic. The loss of control becoming control, disease becoming advancement, mutation becoming strength. The same spiralling catastrophe that had brought her this far. The fiery calm of someone trapped in an avalanche. Nothing to do but ride to the end.

Human faces. Innumerable. Bloodless. Walls of a brass ziggurat plastered with them. Living colonies of shaped fungus, living epidermis, all designed to be glued on. They were eyeless and senseless and thoughtless, only designed to be grafted to infiltrators and assassins. There a careworn father. There a wrinkled grandmother. There a child, smooth-cheeked and expressive. There a dull thing of jowls and sagging lines. There a sharp thing of intelligence and wit. Everywhere the convolutions of cheekbones that slithered and crawled like slugs through faces they fit when they needed to. The faces were immobile. The bone structures were not, and they crawled on tiny legs, reassembling in new and exotic formations. The halls of faces were innumerable.

And always in demand. An infiltrator walks in. A face is suddenly infested by bony maggots of cheeks and jaws and teeth... it moves like a leech, undulation by undulation, leaps from the wall, glues itself to the mutant, neither party struggling, and long filaments of blood vessels extend like questing mycelia and-

The limb snapped around her axe.

Strained against it.

She felt impossible strength behind the limb. It sealed in place, joints healing like old wounds, structure fusing into something as solid and enduring as the bones of the earth.

She felt weakness. She felt how limited her form was.

But her muscles... oh, gods, they were burning. She was wrenching against the intelligence, could feel the fans of muscle along her back pulling tight against her ribs, muscles in her arms bunching and tensing, muscles in her fingers straining until they were liable to snap, could feel her lips slithering from her teeth as she focused, could feel a vein popping at the side of her scalp... everything reduced to the binary of hold tight or let go.

She held tight.

She strained.

Could feel the intelligence winning. And handily.

More limbs about to move, the buzzing screamed at her. More wounds coming. More strength.

The emerald mass was shimmering. Unfolding and flexing and collapsing and shrinking and growing and blooming. A fractal, a rose, an explosion. An impossible chemical reaction. She couldn't even... even identify features. She was seeing crystallised thought. She was seeing an organic function blown up to massive size. This was the brutal mechanism lurking in her own body. She saw herself.

And she saw nothing that could even be called living.

The roaring of the soldiers was louder and louder. Firing uncontrollably into the creature, running closer, distracting, obscuring, delaying...

She had no idea what was happening.

Was she winning?

Was she managing a victory through constant sacrifices?

Was she losing?

Was she about to die?

Mother. Mother.

Eygi, please-

Terror and validation ran through her. She was terrified beyond belief. She was being told that all her choices were correct. If she'd chosen differently at any stage...

Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge! Judge!

The horn was warming. Hotter and hotter. Impossible to hold. Ready to detonate. She...

She did the one thing the intelligence couldn't expect.

She ran forwards. Not struggling to get her axe back.

Using the axe as an anchor as she was dragged closer. Ready to be crushed.

The intelligence hadn't recognised what was happening with the horn.

Didn't know what it meant.

Hot enough to make the air spark at this point. Tiny white spots dancing around the shimmering metal as it began to melt down. All the nonsensical processes that had made it work starting to disintegrate. All the power starting to spiral uncontrollably.

Every part... every part of what she was doing was an uncontrolled gallop. Carried by tides she didn't understand. Even the intelligence was wrapped up in them. Driven to a suicidal charge by the detonation of the pale seal. Confronting a judge driven to this by the constant hungering snow and the festering madness and the collapsing mass of conspiracies. A judge wielding a weapon that was destabilising in ways she couldn't restrain or delay. Surrounded and protected by soldiers driven by stress and panic, by the slow erosion of self under the weight of war. No-one here was in control.

No-one.

The horn was...

She could...

There was something in the air. A heat that sank through her bones.

She stared into the emerald mass of the intelligence. The unfolding complex of all she did not know.

And she waited for it all to be over.

She wanted it to be over.

She wanted to...

To sleep. To stop. For everyone to just leave her alone.

She-

She saw something.

* * *

Something screaming in the buzzing.

Sound without sound, thought without thought, labyrinth-wandering spirit clawing through her nervous system, catalytic catastrophe, her own body birthing memories to experience, she remembered through her gut, through her stomach, through the convolutions of her spine.

She was surrounded by carbonised limbs wrapping closer and closer, joints opening like gaping sores, healing like old scars, over and over in different places. The sky had been eaten by an emerald head that twisted like fluid pressed into service as a solid. All the properties of both mashing together. Nothing made sense. She stood on a kurgan of flesh and bone. She walked beneath a red sun. The snow was thick. The cold clawed at her skin. The heat of the burning horn clawed at her skeleton. Crackled in her brain. She had no control. She hadn't been in control since the siege started. No-one had been. There'd just been chaos upon chaos upon chaos, systems collapsing, conspiracies imploding, structures disintegrating until... until this. No-one in this entire affair had been in control. Not the governor, enslaved by priorities and his own corruption. Not the cartel, doomed by its members and the madness of its leader. Not the theurgists, too blinded by their own isolation to do anything of value. Not the Rekidans, too rotten and short-lived to care about the tides of time. Not the mutants, driven by mad priorities and suicidal impulses. Not her. Never her.

No-one in this entire colony had ever controlled a single thing.

Everyone had ruled a tiny kingdom. No larger than a pimple, but they cherished the territory. Warred over their borders. Maintained their security.

But no-one had been in control.

And she could hear...

Could hear...

Her mind burned... but there was... she... the creature had never felt anything. Only basic impulses that twitched in ecstatic binaries. Her body was numb with heat, exhaustion. She was nothing but an intelligence. She was on its level. An equal idiot. Visions sharpened...

She saw what Lantha had seen. More, perhaps.

She saw what Lantha had seen. Oh, gods...

There were rains of black oil.

There was a lake of shimmering matter. Deeper than the earth should allow.

There was a city of living brass. There was a living city. Artery-streets. Spinal-colonnades. Capsid-coated wanderers crawling the chitin pavements, protein spikes injecting new orders to the festering walls that bristled with accepting orifices. Lubricant seeping from enamel drain-grates, oiling the passage of a city that hummed and sang and wept.

She saw...

The intelligence had never been in control.

It wasn't an intelligence.

It wasn't. No original thoughts. Nothing.

Synapse.

Conveyor of blessed neurotransmitter.

The gap between which the orders echoed. All echoes required space. All echoes implied both vastness and confinement. Without both, the echo never came. It needed space - it needed an ending to space. The intelligence stretched in the gap. It lived in the echo. Sustained it. Sometimes it was space. Sometimes it was confinement. Always it was the medium and the message and the messenger. Ink, orders, general, fused into one. Undifferentiated matter to be reshapde as was necessary.

Humming synapse-chorister of the brass living city.

Living singer of the Great War's hymns.

She had no idea what she was seeing. Images danced through her brain like they'd always been there. Her own memories, suddenly recalled. Pulsing into her mind from every part of her body. She felt memories marching through her veins. Not even memories. Not memories at all. The substance of the creature. It was invading her mind, purely because it must. Because it did it to every single mutant it encountered. And the invasion was... the great haze it emanated, the thing which allowed it to control mutants, it was the synapse. The emerald was just the flask and the lung - the being was in the air. It was in her veins. Arteries. It nested in the chambers of her heart.

It sang with her voice.

Synapse of the Great War. The echo of orders. March. Consume. Exterminate. Cultivate. Continue. Over and over and over and over and over and over. The Great War continuing, she remembered this, she knew it like she'd been there. Experienced through thousands of eyes and noses and tongues and teeth, and other, stranger organs. She saw the great pattern of the war in magnetic fluctuations and the thrum of pheromone wavelengths. The orders blasting. Refinements, but never revolutions. No alteration to its overall function. No regression, and no deviation. A blasting source of orders to all mutant-flesh. Living chorister of the brass mind. The Great War exploding out like... like the brass mind had fertilised the world. Impregnated it, let the earth weep with new young, with new generations. Forced evolution. Forced development. Tear the foundation stone. Drain the underground rivers. The earth was growing bloated with its own seed, needed to spill it out from time to time. To drown humanity, to breed new mutants. The Great War as reproduction? The Great War as... something else? Revenge for something. Lust for something. Simple madness. The orders had no reason.

The intelligence had never known why it was ordered. Even now... the flush of data was too much. She felt too much. Knew too much. All of it meaningless. Purpose refused to emerge from the chaos.

If she could scream, she would.

All it knew were the orders. Nothing besides.

And when the orders stopped coming...

Her breath caught in her throat. The horn was glowing. First white... then blue... fanning rays of blue exploding out and out, catching pitch-black shadows across the snow...

The Great War had ended. The intelligence was a single synapse of the great mind. The supreme authority. Never to know why. Only to know what needed to be done. And how to accomplish it.

When the Great War ended, the orders stopped coming. The purpose ended. The serpent had been decapitated - and the body continued to wriggle.

The sound was dead. The echo continued.

Over and over. A soldier still following orders no matter what. Loyalty undimi-

No. Wrong. The story wasn't quite there. Loyalty was not a mutant word.

Not just this.

The buzzing screamed another truth.

There... yes, yes, the Great War ending. The orders ceasing. Mutants returning to normal behaviours. Legions ripping one another apart. War-engines becoming cannibals, torn to bits by their own engineers. Oocytes squirming through veins like parasites. Great beasts exploding into flesh-worms that had a better chance of surviving, organs turning revolutionary. Useless mutants sagging to the ground in silence as the others began to eat them. Troops eating their transports. Knights eating their horses. Birds eating their wings. Unfathomable gore stretched across miles and miles, bodies crushed and pulped and gnawed. In the north, there was a living layer of earth where the mutants had torn one another apart. A layer of bone and meat, buried under a shallow lid of earth. The bone orchard growing towards the sun. Devouring itself. Being devoured in turn.

In the north, the earth was spongy and soft. The earth whispered. Bones the size of buildings loomed from the fog.

The intelligence was no different to these cannibals. She saw snow. She saw snow unending. Saw northern reaches so far and so harsh that no human could manage to survive. Only mutants, with their cold blood and their unnatural biologies. The intelligence... being a mutant, doing what it must. Controlling others. Issuing commands. Consume. Adapt. Evolve. The intelligence was never meant to be alone. Adaptation to independence would be costly and pointless. Better to keep controlling. Organ outliving owner. Just an animal - like all the others.

An animal that lived too long.

She saw the intelligence living onwards... gathering more mutants... doing what it was meant to do. A wolf howled. A bird sang. And the intelligence ordered. Natural process. Nothing more. It had gathered protectors, for it needed them. Gatherers of contamination, as they were necessary. Scouts to keep the first two safe. Supporting mutants to assist in the optimisation of war efforts. More and more. Never any true control - just a limited set of tools, and a single priority. Live. As long as possible.

No understanding. No control. No real intelligence.

Just a synapse milking itself for neurotransmitter to keep a few burning thoughts alive. Anything to stay warm. Anything to keep going. Trapped. Too specialised to change its ways. Too advanced to countenance degrading itself.

Overqualified.

But it had... worsened. Too many mutants. Too many needs. Expand. Consume. Evolve. The intelligence had no real invention in it. Nothing but the commands it'd been given. It was an organ without a body. When given mutants - control them, organise them, specialise them. When confronting humans - exterminate them, repurpose them, cauterise them. And what about when there were too many mutants. What about when too many were controlled. When too much contamination was needed to keep them optimal. Expand, yes. Expand, and take more mutants into the fold, cannibalise them, and... and that was only going to work for so long. Expansion only worked with multiple intelligences. And there were none of them left. Just one. Expansion ceased to function. The horde roamed. Eating whatever it could. Starving frequently. Cannibalising its own just to keep biologies from collapsing. A ravenous wolf that ate and ate and could never be sated. Growing fatter and hungrier with each meal, hunger rising to always be beyond what the land could provide.

An organ of the Great War becoming tumorous. The same orders, over and over and over again... but without a goal.

All the wells of contamination were dry. All the rivers were drained. All the old stores were emptied. What now?

The intelligence had no intelligence. It just did what it always did.

Repeat an old order.

Come here.

Come to the city it had once been ordered to kill. Attack it. Invade it. Find the centre, and...

And there the orders stopped. Those orders had never been issued to this synapse. It was to break the city. That was it.

The mutants came. They reached the pale seal. And they froze, dying quickly, minds emptying. There were no orders after that. Only: enter the city. Take the centre. Maintain position. That was it. If the access to the underground river was threatened, respond aggressively. No plan to access the river itself, only to secure it and prevent interference. Presumably more would have come. In those others slept the orders to break the foundation stone, to harvest the river.

But those others were dead and gone. Leaving only... this.

No-one else was coming. There'd never been another step to this plan.

Tanner could've wept.

There'd never been a plan.

The mutants had never been here for a good reason.

There were only ever here because... because they were idiots. Old orders echoing mindlessly in an empty space. The Great War repeated because it was all they knew. They weren't even feigning this out of some kind of terrified purposelessness, clutching at anything that resembled the old order - they were committed to this, saw it as the only way out. The only way to achieve anything, to get enough contamination. The intelligence had been meant to die when the Great War ended. But it'd lived. Lived, expanded, consumed... gathered a horde, failed to feed it, lacked any direction. Just did what it had always been meant to do. They'd attacked so suicidally because they were trying to stop her denying them a river that they'd drained a generation ago. Dying for a cause that was already lost.

She'd been fighting... fighting a pack animal marching on and on to its destination, even when its handlers were dead and its load had rotten from its back. Until a skin-and-bones mule staggered into a deserted frontier town, long-since abandoned by all rational men... and collapsed in confused exhaustion. Content in doing its job.

She was fighting a loyal animal. A scared thing left alone with... with nothing but dead orders from a lost war.

It was no different to the Rekidans fighting for a city that was dead.

No different to the cartel fighting for a culture that was already gone.

No different to the governor working for priorities that didn't really matter out here.

No different to any of the people in this colony, controlled by conspiracies they didn't understand, a collapsing web that was never designed to support so much weight. Trapped in fronds of cobweb they'd spun themselves. Webs that had strangled their own spiders.

No different to herself.

No-one had even been in control.

The horn was white.

Blue.

Red?

She saw... saw stars explode in front of her eyes. Felt the heat rise higher and higher...

The intelligence was gripping her like she was a stuffed toy. And for a mad moment... she thought it was embracing her in terror. Asking her if it had done a good job. It had invaded the city, yes? It had... had prevented her from detonating the ground and preventing harvest of the underground river? It had done a good job. Followed all the orders it was given. First, it had survived in the cold wastes - impressive, admirable. Then, once survival was achieved, it just... kept doing what it had to. Because it had no other idea what else to do.

She was fighting a creature that had never even thought of doing anything but what it was meant and expected to do.

As the horn bloomed...

She almost welcomed it.

The creature was crushing her so tightly she couldn't even feel the heat as the horn exploded. As theurgic reactions came to a calamitous conclusion. Could feel it vibrating through her skin and bones. Could feel the burning that stabbed through her armour without a second's hesitation. Spots dancing all around her. Skin burning. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, but she could see... see the intelligence being ripped apart by the explosion. Saw the emerald head turning black and charred, turning tumorous as beams of theurgic light ran through it. Destabilising the biology it had spent so long perfecting. Saw the limbs turn actually carbonised, too stiff, snapping whenever they tried to move. Saw the creature soften. Saw layer upon layer upon layer of hardened, blackened, rotting, festering, tumorous matter slough away in the heat, soft as candle wax, dripping to the ground where...

The light was blooming. First the light. Then the heat. Then the wave of pressure.

Saw the kurgan of meat devouring the intelligence as it collapsed.

Saw the general being cannibalised by its soldiers.

And then the light was too much. She saw no more.

All she knew was heat... and the sound of the Great War's last true soldier dying. Burned by a giantess. Eaten by its own men. Deluded into a purpose it could never hope to fulfil. Something else driven here by expectation and conspiracy and senseless intrigue. A mad, mad veteran, doing whatever it could to achieve goals that had already been lost.

She almost envied how silently it died.

Almost envied how... quietly dignified it was. It had done all it could. That was all. No shame. No humiliation. It had done what it was meant to do. How could it be happier?

Then light. Then heat.

Then the ending of her thoughts. And long strands of darkness devouring her vision in greedy, greedy gulps.

The last thing she knew...

Was that there was no more buzzing.

For the first time since the siege began...

Her head was silent.

And in silence, she drifted into blackness.

Her face absolutely, absolutely flat.