They pushed their machines to the redline and past it, for they knew what the thunderous roar meant, they knew they couldn’t have been the only ones to hear it. Such all-consuming fury would be carried on the winds all the way to the oasis city, and the Igrons would understand it as the challenge it was.
One of the voices in Karzon’s head resounded.
“I’ve not heard a howl like that since…”
“...Since the Great Heresy,” the eldest voice finished, continuing on with a tangent of its own.
“‘Tis a shout of defiance, a doubtless statement of ‘I AM, I WAS, AND I WILL CONTINUE TO BE’. A demand for acknowledgment from the universe itself. Such supreme ego could only be...”
It couldn’t finish, as Karzon interrupted it with his own thought of “I need to focus on keeping this thing under control, old man,” and he heard several of the younger voices laughing in response.
They drove their metal beasts onward through the desert, for minutes and hours, their perfectly direct path causing them to entirely avoid the site where their past selves had faced their deaths at Amalgam’s weapons system. Soon enough, the gates of Canyontown came into view - even just as a speck on the horizon, they could tell the great gate was open. As they neared the foot of the cleft mountain, Karzon felt the trepidation of his comrades in the back of his mind, and before long, received a direct transmission from the Armored One.
“You feel it too?” she asked, and he responded with a simple “Yeah.”
She continued with “Whatever is in the middle of town, it’s like a pyre on the verge of burning out and collapsing under its own weight.”
“...a Novahuman,” the eldest voice finally finished its thought process, reverence echoing in its creaking sound.
“A Noh-va-hyu-man? What’s that?” one of the younger voices questioned, its echoing tone filled with puzzlement.
“A-a many-limbed one, as you would know them.”
“No way, that’s-” the younger voice began to rebut, but then stopped itself. “...Do you think that’s the one who set us alight?”
Whilst Karzon could hear their conversation if he chose to, they had retreated to the deeper recesses of his mind, deep enough that they no longer disturbed his focus. “That’s the only possibility. Even the Lilac-Eyed Preacher had to have been set alight by another, one who had never been blessed in the first place,” the eldest voice continued.
Closer and closer, the engines roaring under them and sand flying around them, the great gate was the only thing in their sights. Only a few more minutes and they would be there.
“How do you know this much?” the younger voice asked.
The eldest voice chuckled. “Y’remember the old lady that runs the butcher shop?”
“Of course, old lady Auntie what adopted the stray whelps whenever someone died on a mission.”
“I was one o’ those, way back in the day, ‘fore the oasis-city dipshit took over. Whenever I couldn’t sleep, she’d tell me all about humans and their great monoliths with entire cities inside ‘em, about their eternal war ‘gainst the great old ones. She’d tell me about how they mined livingmetal from a whole ‘nother universe, about how their world was defended by some sorta artificial man-shaped god called the Triumvirate. Still ain’t sure how much of it she made up.”
Though their arguing did disturb his focus, Karzon listened in on the voices as he drove, in the moments when he could spare some attention at least. It made him wonder as well - just how many of all those fantastical things were fiction? Perhaps, when they met with the human, they would answer at least part of that question.
Once they did indeed reach the gates, they were faced with a vanguard of what looked to be Truthseekers in power armor - the one at the front was a full chaplain going by the ornamentation, whilst the others had minimal ornaments. Of the several dozen warriors that spilled forth from the gate, a quarter wore full casements, whilst the rest had a variety of servo-suits and traditional armor. Only… As the chaplain stepped forward, something became clear.
The ornamentation upon his armor was defiled, defaced. The Ecclesiarch’s likeness especially had been thoroughly scraped away, and in its place, the image of a strange skull now sat, freshly etched by a 3D-printer. It couldn’t have been done by hand, the lines were too clean.
Beyond the gate, however, they spotted the source of that great fire. Off in the distance, in the middle of the town square. They could only see the top of it, but it couldn’t be mistaken - it was one of the sacred living walkers, the most recent one to be unearthed.
Karzon’s attention remained fixed on the chaplain at the front of the battle-line, especially the weapon in his hands. A graviton accelerator, heavily ornamented, and its ornaments too were defaced and remade with that strange skull in mind. The chaplain finally spoke, his helmet amplifying his speech to where it was audible even inside the rovers.
“Unknown visitors! State your purpose and allegiance. You drive Igron assault rovers, but they’ve clearly been disabled and repaired, and you don’t stink of the blessing. Who are you?”
Being the leader of the group, Karzon decided to meet the chaplains in conversation face to face. He opened to door on his left and stepped out onto the arid soil. His scars still hadn’t healed, but he chose to channel his inner fire regardless, if only to form faint distortion fields around his arms in case he had to defend himself.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
He began slowly walking towards the chaplain, speaking out as he did so.
“Once, we were called the Dishonored Ones. Someone burned the Ecclesiarch’s Blessing from us and set us alight with the fire of the void, and that same someone is here. We can feel it.”
“...Karzon? Is that you?” the chaplain queried, bewilderment filling his voice. Bewilderment and… Was it guilt?
He nodded. “Were you my superior?”
The chaplain visibly shuddered and fell to his knees, bowing his head before Karzon.
“There… There is nothing I can do to make amends for what I’ve done to you. I was the one who branded you as honorless. Please, forgive me!”
Karzon smiled, but not out of satisfaction for seeing the one who had damned him on their knees, begging for forgiveness. He ceased fanning his inner flame, allowing his distortion fields to dissipate, for he knew he was not in a hostile place. No man intending to fight would put themselves in such a vulnerable position.
“The guilt sits upon the Ecclesiarch, not you,” he said, “and the Ecclesiarch is dead. I’ve no revenge to take.”
The chaplain looked up, tilting his helmeted head ever so slightly to the left.
“How do you know?”
“I… Don’t know how, but we felt the sickly beacon of his blessing going out.”
At last, the chaplain stood to their feet and asked the question they were going to ask in the first place.
“Why are you here then? Do you just seek the one who did… Whatever was done to make you as you are?”
“We also have a message to deliver. Some time ago we sent a zero-latency transmission, but we thought it plausible that it would not arrive.”
“The message arrived days ago,” the chaplain stated, their voice suddenly grave and cold. “Is it true, then?” he asked, dreading the answer. Karzon had no choice but to nod in response.
A heavy sigh echoed from the chaplain’s helmet and he barked a command. The defensive line split behind him, then began to dissolve as the warriors returned to their usual posts.
“As grave as these news are, the early warning was appreciated. You’re welcome to reside here for as long as you need, just make sure to speak with Elder Nesgon as soon as you can. He’s in the town hall,” he said as he turned and began walking back to his post near the gate.
Karzon returned to his rover, and with a few moments of radio chatter coordinated an ordered convoy through the city to reach the town square, with Karzon’s rover at the front of course. As he drove up to the gate and passed through it, he noticed two things in particular.
First, the number of guards was much smaller than he remembered.
Second, there was a small number of worshippers surrounding the great walker in the town square, at a quite significant distance. He couldn’t be sure if they were praying or… Mourning?
As slowly as they drove, they still moved far faster than walking, and would reach the square in no more than a few minutes. The closer they approached, the more Karzon dreaded the answer to his question - the flame in the walker was flickering, like a candle in the wind. Did that mean whoever had remade them was dying?
They finally reached the square, and after switching places as driver with one of the others riding along in the same rover, Karzon stepped out to question who he hoped to be worshippers, rather than mourners.
“We know not,” one of them answered when questioned - a brightly colored thinker, yellow of scale and with very small markings. “The Skull-faced God doesn’t like being worshipped, so we merely observe and pray.”
Karzon looked to the thinker, then to the great machine before him, towering even as it kneeled. There was a strange shape on its torso, which he remembered as a cockpit hatch from having seen similar ones on other walkers during his time as a Truthseeker. As his eyes darted across the walker and took in its appearance, bit by bit, the Yellow-scaled Worshipper spoke up again.
“The hatch was open, but it closed after one of the great warriors entered to commune with the skull-faced one.”
He continued to stand there and watch as the others parked the rovers around the town square, but eventually, the rovers were parked, and absolutely nothing had happened. Turning to leave, Karzon decided he would return here later, after speaking with Elder Nesgon. He would’ve been surprised had anyone else replaced the Ecclesiarch, but Nesgon, the Old Dragon, diminished as he was, was still the single most powerful individual in all of Canyontown, and the most capable leader. At least that’s what Karzon personally believed, having grown up being told how great the old man was by Auntie, and how even though he had been gravely wounded he would one day recover and overthrow the Ecclesiarch through the Right of Heresy.
Left. Right. Left.
He heard the hatch open, not by the noise it made, but by the wave of hushed whispers that swept through the crowd of worshippers. Whipping his head around to look into the hatch, he saw two things, one of which he had dreaded all this time.
The first was a female warrior of truly prodigious size, carrying a pair of empty food containers under one arm and holding onto some sort of metal rope with the other, her foot in a loop at the bottom of the aforementioned rope as she descended from the cockpit to the ground. Her face was almost expressionless, but Karzon could make out an almost equal mixture of lingering sorrow and relief. She had clearly just let out an enormous sadness, which only served to exacerbate his dread of the second thing he saw.
The second thing was truly accurate to the Yellow-scaled Worshipper’s description - a vaguely humanoid figure, one arm a gigantic weapon with great fang-like grippers, whilst the other was an ornamental Dragonhead prosthetic, his body a strange mixture of metal, sinewy black flesh, bulging muscle of the same color, and a baleful lilac light flickering in the seams, and... A skull for a face. Not a skull like any draconian, but a skull nonetheless. The so-called “Skull-faced God” was wrapped up in thick cables that seemed to plug into his body, so many of them it was a wonder they weren’t hopelessly tangled.
And the thing he had dreaded… There was no light in the man’s eyes, and he remained entirely motionless. He drew no breath, he didn’t sway or shudder, there wasn’t even the most subtle of vibration that would arise from the beating of a heart.
Caught up in the moment, Karzon failed to retain control of himself and stepped forward, unknowingly walking right up to the female warrior as he tried to get a closer look into the cockpit. “Don’t tell me he’s dying,” he said more to himself than anyone else.
The warrior remained wordless, but as she let go of the metal rope to let it retract, she turned to face the cockpit. “Don’t leave them hanging, it’s bad for morale,” she said, and a twinge of playful happiness sounded through the growl-like noise of her voice.
Karzon would’ve questioned, were it not for what happened moments after.
In the skull-faced man’s eye-sockets, there blazed a pair of lilac beacons, and the flame that Karzon felt as wavering suddenly roared into a great blaze that outshined his own a thousand times over. Karzon of the Liberated gazed upon the empyrean blaze within those eyes, and he knew this avatar of the great empty had remade the Dishonored Ones.
“I can’t die yet. There are still things to be done, rights to be wronged, tyrants to be overthrown. There is still vengeance to be taken,” Armless’s voice resounded from the cockpit with an unwavering certainty. As he spoke, he stood up in the cockpit, and the cables let go of his body with a unified hiss. They clattered to the ground, their tips glowing a bright orange, but their heat was but dead ash compared to the fire within the body they had just been released from.