Armless thought it might be a good idea to go visit the old man and assess his condition.
“Shouldn’t we see him?”
“I wouldn’t do that, but I’m not a death engine on legs. Go on ahead,” the barman answered, jokingly adding “Regardless of what folks would think if they knew why I didn’t come to prayer day.”
The lizard’s attitude amused Armless and endeared him to the human even further, but that wasn’t the case for the Word-bearer. The frog-man muttered angrily under his breath like he wanted to give the barman a lecture, but he held back his tongue.
In one go, he slurped up the rest of the meat-noodles and got up from his stool, gesturing for Vezkig to follow with “Come on you mad doctor, you’ve got a patient to treat.”
The diminutive engineer obliged, as did everyone else when the bartender spurred them on. “You might as well all go to the backroom if mister big iron’s going, townsfolk are gonna get nervous if I don’t open up soon, with the inevitable celebrations and whatnot. Y’know, ruler’s dead, let’s guzzle stimmix and pick a new one,” he said. He was putting on his usual upbeat bartender persona in preparation for a flood of patrons, quickly wiping the blood off his face with a wet rag.
And so, they did. Red-eye finished his bottle in a long gulp before he got up to follow, and grabbed the bottle which the bartender had placed in front of Armless. He pulled his mask back down, as he’d pulled it halfway up to drink.
The backroom door hissed open, and they crossed the precipice. Just as it shut behind them, they heard the music beginning to play. A fast, upbeat, pulse-pounding tune whose sole lyrics were something about a “Turbo Killer”
The old dragon was sitting some ways from the table, facing away from them. There was a white polymer bucket at his feet, partly filled with his blood, and at least a third of the stimmix bottles on the table were empty. The sickly-sweet stench of necrotic flesh assaulted the senses, prompting coughing fits from the less resilient of the group - the two Thinkers, and the Builder.
Nesgon tried to move, his armor’s servos whining as they struggled to support him. The strain caused him to break into a coughing fit, so instead of speaking he gestured for them to come closer as he hacked up more globs of semi-congealed blood into the bucket. They took up seats around the table, now face to face with the old man. One could clearly see the seam between his meat and machine parts through the hole in his chestplate, barely held closed with haphazardly placed medical staples. The glow within it had changed to a flickering, faint lilac. Vein-like tubing glowed under the skin of his face and neck, pulsing with approximately every two seconds; in tune to his heartbeat. His eyes were bloodshot, his face was plastered with a pained grin. He knew pain worse than this, but not by much.
His gaze fell upon the Word-bearer first, who had already taken the liberty of helping himself to a bottle of yellow stimmix, eliciting a disgusted huff on Red-eye’s part.
Still wracked by a hacking, bloody cough, the old man managed to choke out “Hgh- Haven’t been this out of bghr- breath since I got wrapped up by a Deathgrip Serpent back during tgh- the war.”
He looked to Word-bearer with a genuine respect, questioning “You went through this willgh- willingly?” before spitting a half-congealed blood loogie into the bucket.
“It gets better,” the frog-man stated flatly as if hesitant to risk a remembrance of the pain he was in only days prior. He took a sip of stimmix.
“It also gets worse,” Red-eye filled in.
Nesgon coughed even more urgently, as if he was trying to finish hacking up another blood-loogie to say something. He did just that, and his gaze fell upon Red-eye’s masked visage. “You,” he gurgled, wiping blood off his chin with one hand and pointing with a half-empty bottle held in the other.
“You deserted alongside him?” he questioned, gesturing towards the Word-bearer.
“I left the Ecclesiarch’s service before he did, but joined the group some time after,” Red-eye explained, attempting to sidestep the issue as best as he could. The Word-bearer’s desire to reveal his identity was evident in the way he took prolonged sips, as though trying to silence himself.
Nesgon narrowed his eyes. A noise rumbled from his throat, nobody being sure whether he was going to speak or break into another coughing fit.
“Hrrm… Before… And you use blacktech… You one of Goldeneye’s men? His requisition squad was the only one we sent out in that direction before the raid attempt.”
Red-eye deflated in his seat, letting out a long sigh into his mask. “No, I’m not. I was Goldeneye,” he explained with resignation, pulling the mask off his face and tossing it on the table. He’d intended to continue, but Nesgon blew up in a frankly horrific, bloody mixture of laughter and coughing. Between those two, he hacked up the words “Ygh- you of all peohgh- people? Do you worsh- worghsh- worship the ground he walks on?”
The word “he” was punctuated with a weak, shaky gesture towards Armless.
“No, I don’t. I do owe a life-debt, but now you do as well,” the gunman retorted, a venomous smile on his face.
“Pfeh, it’s not as if I’ve got a chance at livgh- living more than a few more months in this state. A thingkh- thinker-caste could overpower me in this state.”
“Not if we got a say in that. These folks need a leader, and we can’t risk ‘nother idol in that position,” Vezkig chimed in.
Anger flared in Nesgon’s face, as though he’d been reminded of a painful memory.
“So what, you want to mummify me and puppet my corpse around like they did with Lord Fourth?!” he growled, a surprising clarity in his ragged voice.
“We’ll build you a replacement lazarus organ,” Armless stated plainly. “One that will feed on your “cursed light” or whatever you call void energy.”
“What, like what you have? And how are you gonna do that? I’m no human,” the old man dismissed, apparently hellbent on wasting away in pain and misery as some sort of redemptive punishment.
A grin spread across Vezkig’s face. “Same way I did for the lad Red-eye o’er here fucked up in the pit,” he hissed.
Nesgon’s eyes went wide. He’d met Orsha before. “You made that thing? Hghck- his body’s almgh- almost half livingmetal by weight!” he exclaimed with horror.
“How do you know?” the human quizzed, and the elder’s attention immediately refocused on him, his expression fading from sheer horror to guilt.
“One of the High Chaplains found him half-dead in the desert. We took him in, put him through standard medical exams. The Ecclegh- Eccgh- the highborn took him to his clan’s home oasis. Kid came back all cybered up, you saw. Cried about lilac flowers in his sleep,” he choked out with grim determination, holding back a room-shaking coughing fit until he finished what he had to say.
An oppressive silence hung in the air, the echoing music and slowly building hustle and bustle of the bar being the only sound to keep them company. One by one, they each reached for a bottle and cracked it open.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“So how do you plan on pulling it off? Frgh- From what I could tell the device was some arkgh- arcane blacktech,” the old man piped up with a sort of dark optimism stemming from his acceptance of death.
“Issue’s not the how, it’s gettin’ the materials that’s the hard part,” Vezkig hissed in frustration.
“I’ll need the guts from a homunculus or somethin’ similar, a plume o’ livingmetal damasc-” he cut himself off mid-sentence, as he heard the sound of the Ecclesiarch’s Cleaver humming in Armless’s grasp. “That thing. Gun-cleaver. Give it ‘ere,” he demanded, and Armless obliged.
He stared at it, examining it closely, taking care not to trigger the firing mechanism. A ragged chuckle escaped Nesgon’s throat. “Don’t bother, it’s a-”
“-a glorified wallhanger!” the engineer roared. He tossed the cleaver aside, and it slid towards Rika. “Do you mind?” she asked Armless.
“Go on right ahead,” Vezkig answered.
“It’s balanced nice…” Rika muttered to herself as she maneuvered it around. The blade sang in her grasp a little differently than it did in Armless’s or the Ecclesiarch’s. A rabid dog that found someone it trusted.
“Isn’t your old executioner’s gun a grav-accelerator? We could use the ammo plume from it,” the Word-bearer suggested.
A rumble rose in Red-eye’s throat, and he growled “That’s enough you vitriolic-” as he raised a hand to smack the Word-bearer, who was just about ready to scurry under the table.
Nesgon stopped him with a grimly determined statement of “He’s right.”
“I used it so much and for so long, the ammo plume alone was considered one of the Great Treasures back in the day.”
A sad laugh rumbled from him, briefly turned to a cough, then back to a laugh before fading away. “To think the instrument of my sin would serve to let me atone. Fate’s got a sick sense of humor sometimes, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Well, that’s one part sorted. What about the, ah… Guts?” the Word-bearer said, nearly instantly recovering his composure thanks to the sheer self-satisfaction of being right.
Armless piped up.
“The wreck. It’s bound to have what we need.”
“It takes years to cut through just one door, and it’s segmented to all hell, not to mention the security systems. Most of our diggers would die from a turret or a murderous homunculus,” Red-eye argued.
“Who said anything about forcing our way in?” he asked, a slight smugness rising in his voice. Vezkig’s and the Word-bearer’s faces lit up.
“What, do you just so happen to have-”
“-Administrator privileges, yes. That’s how I got the walker to obey without a brute-force override.”
“...Human. Should’ve figured as much,” Red-eye conceded with disappointment. He was obviously thrown off from the events that had transpired earlier.
“So who’s goin’ ‘sides me an’ Armless? We can’t all go, it’d be too suspicious,” Vezkig asked, almost slurring his speech in excitement
The others weren’t particularly eager to go diving into a buried human ship, potentially filled with murderous security automatons. Red-eye grumbled and raised a hand. “I’ll go. I’ve been down there and void exposure isn’t an issue for me.”
“Right, then it’s set,” Vezkig said, before turning to Nesgon, asking him “How long d’you think you can hold on?” with a clinical sort of curiosity.
“A few days tops,” he rasped.
“That means a good few weeks if he keeps drinking,” the Word-bearer corrected in-between sips of stimmix.
Red-eye shot him a dirty look.
The three of them got up and headed towards the hidden door. Nesgon raised his hand so it was in the sight line of the hololens, hissed an unintelligible command word, and the door began to open.
----------------------------------------
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Karzon hadn’t felt this good in years. His comrades were all there, the living in body, and the dead in spirit. It honestly felt like those he’d performed the burial rite on were actually there. He sometimes heard their voices encouraging him, when the going got tough.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
It wasn’t easy, dragging manual cargo transport platforms across the desert. The whine of their grav-drives got on his nerves, for the first few hours. The rainbloom flowers made for soft walking, and the fact their presence made the flowers turn lilac made getting lost impossible, but they had to sit down and pick them out of their wounds every once in a while.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
“Come on, just a few hours more! Heave-ho!” he called out to encourage those of his comrades who were falling behind. His voice was like a chorus of seven, almost as if the spirits of those he’d buried were aiding him even in helping others.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Something tall finally crested the horizon. That must be the exile town’s tallest building!
Left. Right. Left. Right.
No, that wasn’t right. That didn’t look like a man-made tower. It was a great, glimmering spike into the heavens.
“By the seven, no… A Glass Spire,” he said, terrified of what might come within sight if they continued on. But they had to. That was what the Lilac-Eyed Preacher told them to do. Bring supplies to the southmost exile town.
“An elder of the sacred flame has died here,” one of his brothers hissed.
They didn’t stop advancing, but they did slow down. Their survival instincts were telling them to turn back, and were they not blessed by the great empty, they wouldn’t have been able to disobey.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Their eyes soon had to contract to the smallest possible slits, they even had to close their protective middle eyelids to shield from the raging light that shone from beyond the horizon.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Hours passed.
They walked still.
The sun went down.
Amongst the pale starlight, they reached what was supposed to have been the exile town.
It was very much there, or what was left of it. Karzon moved in closer to investigate, and even from afar, he saw them. Great tracks ripped into the desert, too deep and too jagged to have been produced by consistent travel.
They walked into the ruins, leaving their cargo of supplies behind. There were fragments of polymer and metal strewn all about, broken and burned-out shells of buildings lined the streets. By the seven, he even saw fragments from broken eggs...
Blue blood colored it all, trails of it on the ground, splashes of it caked on the walls, puddles of it pooling where rainwater once did. And the corpses, oh the corpses… Warriors, Thinkers, Builders, males, females, whelps… None were spared, it seemed.
There, amongst the devastation, he found the cause.
“They sacrificed… How many speed-blessed? How many machine-blessed?!” he cried to the heavens, for he knew what the Truthseekers had done.
He counted ten sets of tracks, ten wrecked rovers, and twenty mangled corpses clad in light servo-suits. Their scales were faded and falling away, their faces were bloody, but not from injury. They’d pushed their blessings to the absolute extremes and killed themselves in the process, all to reach the exile-town before any of their enemies could.
They’d brought ten assault rovers, vulgar, violent vehicles on self-aligning wheels that traded all other characteristics for sheer speed, maneuverability, and firepower. They even had small onboard grav-engines to further improve speed. Aboard them, they’d brought no fewer than ten dozen elite Truthseekers, all clad in full casement suits. All dead, cooked in their armor or worse.
All that sacrifice, just to destroy some exiles.
But they knew not what lurked at its center, who’d founded it.
He knew, and he knew why that spire was there. Why the ground was sand in some sports, and molten glass in others, in lines and cones that all converged on - or rather, originated from - the Glass Spire. The glass was in spikes or walls in some places, like a great hand had grasped it and shaped it like clay while it was still molten, with chunks of polymer and Truthseeker corpses crushed within it.
They approached it, and they saw the source, shining like a beacon even in true death.
A great elder of the sacred flame, said to have been exiled by the oasis-clans millennia ago, as a scapegoat for all their collective sins.
Even in death, he burned brighter than all.
A grim determination overcame him.
“Get me the emergency comms kit. We’ll affix it to the top of the spire and fire off a zero-latency transmission, send word to Canyontown,” he commanded.
“And let the Ecclesiarch know his allies were successful? Are you still loyal to that monster?” one of his men questioned.
“No... He’s dead. I felt the remnants of his blessing fading, and I know you did too. The one who remade us must have burned him from this world.”
There was no counter-argument, for he was right.
He could only hope the Old Dragon would hear and heed the warning.