Then, amongst the silence of his victory, he heard it. Clang.

Orsha had dropped his helmet to the ground. He stared at the human, his face in full view. His chameleon-like left eye had been replaced, a hololens in a spherical casing jammed into the socket. Threads of silvery livingmetal crawled across its base, connected it to the living tissue like a glimmering sinew. And the glow… It was gone. His living eye now shined with a different light, one of pain and regret and self-loathing.

The High Chaplains, resolute and unmoving, stepped into the pit. One of them spoke, her voice calm and collected, but just barely. Under that voice filter, under that battle-hardened commander’s tone, there was trepidation and reverence. “He must be taken to the home of his clan for burial,” she said, hesitant to make a direct request.

Armless stepped away, willing his body to return to a lower level of performance. He felt the pressure of energy dying down. The fire in his eyes went out, miasma no longer rose from his mouth.

He looked all around as the High Chaplains dragged their leader out of the pit, and the people were silent. Some were frozen in abject awe or terror, or perhaps both. Others were looking themselves or others over, as though they couldn’t believe they could do and think freely. Of the Ecclesiarch’s inner circle, the guards he’d brought with him, forty broke ranks when his body was carried away, a dozen of them apologizing to their comrades profusely as they ran to their relatives in the audience. The High Chaplains dragged the Ecclesiarch’s body out through the door behind the throne. The present Truthseekers eventually turned and followed, loyal to their leader despite his mental influence being gone.

“I… I was wrong, there is honor in you. I am the one without honor,” Orsha said. He was on the verge of breaking down, it seemed, but he ran off towards the door behind the throne before Armless could respond. He stood there stone-still, thinking, unsure of what he should do.

He dwelled on the fragments of memory from his past life to try and divine some sort of guidance, as he’d done time and again.

Seconds passed. Minutes. The townsfolk continued watching, as though waiting for him to do something. Some began to pray, believing that he’d fulfilled his purpose and left this mortal coil for lands unknown.

The Ecclesiarch’s cleaver gleamed in the sand before him, humming even as it sat there, ever so quietly. “A clan of my own, maybe. Yes, that would be nice,” the skull-faced man thought. He reached out to pick it up, and felt the rumble of feet hitting the sand. He felt a scaly hand on his left shoulder, and when he turned around, he saw the faces of his comrades before him.

Red-eye, Rika, Vezkig, the Word-bearer, the Marksman.

Red-eye was the one to reach out. “There’s still work to be done,” he said. The Word-bearer nodded in agreement, “The townsfolk will determine a new leader in the coming days, but until then, the burden is yours.”

“Are you alright?” Rika rumbled with great concern.

Armless nodded. There wasn’t a more peaceful place in the universe he could think of than the company of those who’d come with him all this way.

It didn’t matter where he went days, months, or years from now. He would trust those choices to his future self. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, file by file, he willed the remains of his past out of existence, erased. He wouldn’t dwell on them any longer. His past self wanted him to be free, to be a hero.

So he would.

“Tonight, we drink,” he said.

A razor-toothed grin cracked Rika’s mouth, and a similar sentiment spread throughout the group. Armless even shaped his eye-lights to replicate the eyes of someone who’s smiling. One after the other, they climbed out of the pit and began walking towards the hall’s front doors. Some townsfolk, mostly Thinkers, broke off from the crowd and followed along at a distance. Most waited for them to leave the hall altogether before they themselves dared to leave.

Just before they crossed the holoshrouded precipice, Armless heard a yell from behind. It was Auntie’s voice. “Hey, skull-man!” she called.

He stopped in his tracks and turned to look, and there she was, a smile plastered across her venerable guise. “You and yours eat on the house. What you’ve done is a bigger gift than these people realize.”

He nodded, “Thanks, Auntie.”

“Don’t mention it,” she beamed before returning to the hall. Two children followed closely behind her, one kept shooting Armless scared looks as they went, while the other appeared fixated on Vezkig’s jumpsuit of all things.

They crossed the precipice, and were met with Truthseekers in servo-suits, over a hundred in number. The Ecclesiarch’s Cleaver in hand, Armless was ready to defend himself, as were the others. “We want to stay,” the frontmost one said. “We have families here. Sons and daughters.”

“Why are they asking me? It’s not as if I have a say in-” he thought. The realization of his position hit him soon after. “Then stay, not as Truthseekers, but as free people. You are Liberated, now,” he proclaimed.

“Understood,” the frontmost one said, the group dispersing into the walkways to the whirr of their servo-suits. The others didn’t seem to take issue with the decision. Red-eye even remarked that he “Fought alongside a few of them. Decent folk. Did some horrible things under orders, but so have I.”

The group continued to make their way through town, walking the walkways towards the same bar they’d visited before. It was a good bar from what they’d seen, and more importantly, they wanted to know what came of the Accursed Bartender.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

“Horrible things? Like what?” the Marksman piped up.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Red-eye retorted.

The hotblooded gunman stepped forward and blocked Red-eye’s path, staring down his masked face. “Did they harm others? Mangle them? Did they make a man explode like a metal hedgehog from inside out? I’ve done all those things and more just to protect my home town from the ‘good men’ you used to lead. I at least deserve the truth.”

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Armless hadn’t seen the youngster this angry before, and going by Rika’s and Vezkig’s reactions, neither had they.

Red-eye stared, and thought, and didn’t move. He sighed into his mask, then pulled it off his face. “Fine. He made us burn down houses. Poison wells. Smash eggs. Rig plastic explosives to caravan rovers carrying medical supplies. Because they belonged to heretics.”

“Is that it? Is that why you switched sides? Guilt?” the Marksman accused, his lanky frame somehow looming over the towering mass of power and muscle that Red-eye was, despite the fact that of the two, Red-eye was taller by a longshot.

The towering gunman looked down on the youth before him, thought for a moment. He had no excuse. “Yes,” he stated plainly before he pushed past the young builder-caste. It was like that admission took all the wind out of the sails of his anger. The Marksman returned to a far more quiet state in the span of a few seconds, following behind the main group once again whilst Red-eye forged onward with the urgency of a man who wants to drown his thoughts in the hustle and bustle of a bar, putting his mask back on as he did so.

The Word-bearer eventually allowed himself to fall behind, far enough that he was walking side to side with the Marksman. “I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it, but you didn’t have to do that,” he whispered to the youth, quietly enough that only Armless could hear it. He chose to not listen further, and tuned out the remainder of their hushed argument until it was just background noise by focusing on other noises. The creaking of the walkways, the tip-tap of townspeople’s claws against the polymer, the barely-audible sound of Vezkig’s breathing.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

“Where’d the old man go while I was out of it? I hope he didn’t keel over...” he mused to nobody in particular, moreso thinking out loud than expecting an actual answer. “Stumbled out the front door, didn’t say where he was goin’. Looked like he was on his last legs, though,” the tinkerer answered.

“I did my best to not kill him, but without a lazarus organ...”

“...He’s a dead man walkin’.”

“Think you could-”

“-Build ‘im a replacement? It was a miracle that I had the parts on hand last time.”

“What did you use?”

“Uh… An ammo plume from a gravgun an’ some infrastructure implants I dug up from a lil’ puddlejumper ship that crashed a couple days’ walk from town. Thing was stripped clean, but whoever did the job didn’t think to dig through the medbay disposal bin.”

“Did you look in the pilot’s cabin?”

“‘Course not, would’ve taken weeks to cut through the fuckin’ door.”

Armless chuckled to himself.

“What’s funny?” Vezkig questioned.

“First you dig through my trash, then you give me a gun and get me to fight raiders for you,” the human said jokingly.

“You were in that wreck?”

“Not many other wrecks around your town, are there?”

“Well, shit. Guess I’ve got some o’ yer guts in me then.”

“You can keep them, I’ve got mine.”

The lizard let out a cackling chuckle at that.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

The Word-bearer slowly caught up along with the Marksman, who looked… Apologetic? Armless wasn’t sure. It wasn’t particularly easy to discern the more subdued of emotions from the youth, in part due to his high-coverage mode of dress.

“You joke, but you worry for the old dragon’s life,” the frog-man piped up.

“Why so? He stated his intention to die in battle clearly.”

Armless knew why. He saw himself in Nesgon. He could tell the old man’s past glories and achievements alongside his perceived unforgivable sins were weighing on him, like unbreakable chains a man forges for himself by living. He hoped the old man could find new purpose in defying those he’d once served.

“I don’t recall who I was before all this, but I know my past self wanted to die as well. It’s only fair that I do all in my power to give him another chance at life,” the ancient gunman stated plainly. That answer seemed to satisfy the Word-bearer’s curiosity.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

They had just about reached the bar, a few of the townsfolk who knew the walkways better than them already waiting at the front door. They were all young, and almost exclusively Thinkers or Builders, with only four or five Warriors among their ranks. They were all dressed in rather normal civilian clothes, and none of them carried visible weapons beyond knives, which weren’t intended for combat if the size and shape of the sheaths were any indication.

They didn’t try to stop them passing through, and they definitely didn’t try approaching Armless. They just stared, brazenly and openly, without shame. It was almost refreshing after all the sideways glances he’d gotten. When Armless passed, their stares shifted to the Word-bearer, and their expressions shifted from awe to a confused mixture of distaste and respect. They recognized him.

The doors to the bar opened, and they crossed the precipice, one by one. It was deserted, save for two figures. Red-eye and the Accursed Bartender. The gunman sat atop one of the larger stools, drinking. Meanwhile the thorned Builder-caste, his face crusted in his own blood, was meticulously scrubbing away at the countertop in an attempt to get his own blood off it. His eyes, bloodshot and tired, shot up from his work at the sound of the door opening. His voice, hoarse and almost gone, sounded through the silent bar like a rattlesnake’s warning call, “I told you to stay out, the old man wants some priva-”

He trailed off at the sight of Armless, as he hadn’t seen him without the disguise. “Guess you weren’t exaggerating,” he muttered to Red-eye, his eyes still fixated on Armless’s face.

His clearly annoyed tone evaporated nearly instantaneously, and he bent down to retrieve something from under the bar as the group continued to approach. Armless took a seat at the bar, right next to Red-eye, while the others took up seats at a table near the bar. To Armless’s great amusement, the bartender nearly jumped back at the sight of him when he popped back up, a plate with what looked to be bluish noodles in hand. The smell of sandswimmer meat was unmistakable. “By the seven don’t scare me like that, could’ve dropped the plate,” he blurted out, placing the plate in front of Armless. “It’s the least I could’ve done. The rest of your sandswimmers are in the fridge if you want ‘em.”

Armless wanted to eat, and he wanted to drink. He really did. But celebration couldn’t come before the well-being of those who’d helped him. “What about you? You looked like you might have an aneurysm back there,” he said, genuine concern echoing in his voice. He still sounded slightly distorted, but much less so than during his fight against the Ecclesiarch. The voicebox was a small module, not too complex, and as such, fast to repair.

“With the incantations and the nosebleed?”

Armless nodded. “You were counteracting the Ecclesiarch’s Blessing, weren’t you. Nesgon told us.”

“Oh, the old man really doesn’t know when to shut up does he… Look, I’m okay, it’s not some sort of dark force that will make me explode or anything. I asked him to do the ritual so I could… So I could...”

The Builder-caste seemed to be struggling with himself, trying to get something out despite the fact he didn’t want to say it.

“I’m asking if you’re going to be okay, not accusing you of posing a threat to others just because you can counteract blessings. Just look at me. Blessing-burning demigod straight from the old stories, sucking down sandswimmer meat and cheap stimmix.”

A faint smile cracked the thorned one’s face at that remark. He reached under the counter, and put a bottle of stimmix in front of Armless. “That one’s on the house, o great many-limbed one,” he said mockingly.

“Where’s the old man anyway?” he questioned in between sucking down long strands of sandswimmer meat, dripping with savory meat-onion sauce. Going by the taste and consistency, it was based on some sort of culinary flavor-enhancing biogel.

Red-eye froze mid-sip, then put down his bottle. “Go on. Tell him,” he rumbled.

The bartender’s jovial mood melted away as quickly as it arrived. “He’s… In the back. Not so good. Stumbled in here and told me he’d either walk out of the back room or we’d have to carry him out, then shut himself in,” he explained with a grim sort of plainness about his speech. No flare, no upbeat tone, no emotion at all. Like he was reading an epitaph.