A flash of light echoed through the jungle, chirping shouts and the crackle of merrily blazing fire, a roar consuming the forest. A-ait ducked to the side with a curse, feeling the insidious power gripping weakly at her lifeforce. It called to her- to break, to rend and shatter… something, ephemeral and possibly non-existent, impossible to categorize yet all too real.

It passed, eventually, leaving behind heavy air and a shattered forest sunk into the ground. The corpses of a village that tried to flee yet fell from the air, bones crushed, feathers stained scarlet with their blood. Though the ground was wrecked as if by the hands of a deity, most of the wounds were clearly from talon and wing. A madness-

It was the fifteenth town she’d seen this exact thing happen. She landed with a single, powerful beat of her wings, ruined buildings shifting beneath her talons, shattered stones scraping against their brethren in the air moist with rainforest mists and unpleasant energy. Devastation had played its tune, and before her it played again, rubble and broken earth as far as the eye could see.

Passing a crumbling edifice she paused- a single wall remained standing, propped upside down against a massive boulder. Its roof- now a floor, lay stained, sticky red congealing in acrid puddles beneath the smoke-smeared sky while, feathers stained red, an unrecognizable meat that might have been a person once lay equally pinned. That wasn’t why she paused- the corpses were a depressing familiar sight at the epicenters of calamity.

No, it was the drawings. The maddened scrawling slapped across the wall, drawn in haste, drawn in blood. A sinuous form, chitinous plates and rows of eyes and scything claws- and, slashed across the drawings entire left half, a torrent of crimson blood.

For a long time A-ait was silent, paying her respects for the dead. She’d almost joined them, this time- that sensation was… it wormed its way into her being, tugging at her lifeforce and mind in equal measure. It was a power she wasn’t equipped to handle.

Which meant, much as she was loath to go above and beyond for Oi-i, she would have to seek out an old acquaintance, and worse- write a report. A god shell wasn’t something she could handle with the weapons she had on hand… perhaps, if Oi-i had felt fit to give her the celestial compass, she might have felt confident taking pot-shots, but that mystic construction was all ‘never to leave the cathedral grounds’ and sanctimonious proscriptions like that.

She stared out for a second more, for the one who’d seen the end and wrote it in blood, before flying off in a flurry of feathers and haste.

………

“Honored guardian.” A vast tunnel opened up below them as the ground slumped away, a sea of green cascading into shadows below. “I’m somewhat surprised you came here. We’re… out of the way.” The captain of the remote parish’s militia looked incredibly unsettled by her presence there. Understandable, she supposed. “We’d thought you be out there fighting that… demon? The reports aren’t clear.”

A-ait shrugged, even as she carefully observed the captain’s efforts in mapping the local underground. “I can’t convince Oi-i to do anything, so I’m off to find someone slightly less stubborn.”

“I’m not…” the captain looked up timidly- seriously, she didn’t bite. Near immortality made people look at her differently, and it got old fast- “who, if I may ask?”

“A god shell.” Shock and awe. She lived off the tears of the non-believers, and it was going to be so satisfying to come back and beat up another threat. “The map you provided is sufficient for my purposes. One of the tunnels was much, much newer than the others, long gouges in the stone still present from a recent journey.

She saluted, and received a nervous response in kind as she swept into the tunnel, wind whistling past feathers as the miles bled away- infinite darkness, strata lines and god shell paths tumbling down to the earth’s center so far below. So she flew- ever and onwards, the air beneath her wings buried by a simple twist of her lifeforce, reactions honed to a razor’s edge as she ducked through intersections and flickered by solitary metal-kin.

A day passed, and yet she pushed on. Not perseverance- she was too lazy for this to be perseverance. Not altruism- she didn’t do that… it was probably the long-range influence of Oi-i’s… persuasion.

Yep.

That’s what it was. Not the massacres she fled from and the salvation she flew toward. Not the impending tug of unity, pulling at her mind that begged her to come and be one, grasping, tendrils whispering across cities and provinces and driving the earth to rubble beneath it-

She gasped, narrowly avoiding a row of immense stalagmites. These thoughts weren’t helping anything, least of all her focus. New plan- no thoughts, head empty. That would help her do something, sometimes. Maybe negotiate with Oi-i and her featherbrain.

A week passed, lifeforce burbling beneath her skin, wings shaking in exhaustion as the tunnels drew ever onwards, twisting, rising. A meandering path through the earth’s depths, worming its way- patterns laid upon its base, twisting through the weave of an ancient story she could just barely perceive on the edge of her awareness. A language of gods, written into the very plates of the earth…

It was beautiful. She hadn’t been down here in years, but now that she could appreciate the make of the earth… it was little wonder they’d been considered gods. Yet, a single line ever-present played itself twice over in her mind, infinitely more subtle than any bone-beast’s, like a flame dancing on the tip of her talons. It was a simple message, an endless pattern, a memory encoded-

Annihilation. It spoke of natures.

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She burst out into the vast sanctum of magma and metal-kin as exhaustion grasped her shaking limbs and compelled her to land. Just a little further… just a few more miles… exhausted and thoroughly drained, she settled on the sleeping bone-beast’s head.

Damn… Oi-i. This was clearly her fault.

For a time, she slept.

When she woke, surrounded by suffusing heat and magma’s gentle light, the only thing that told her this wasn’t another one of Oi-i’s devilish pranks was the presence of the same writer-thing metal-kin, standing patiently besides a greeting.

Well, at least she’d learnt the divine script. Hopefully it’d be enough.

………

Curious.

The one directed an image-forged to greet its visitor, who’d promptly collapsed atop its carapace the moment it’d arrived. It was the second time she’d come to it, and the second time it’d come exhausted. It hadn’t been long, though… or maybe it had, in the timescale of the transient? The one couldn’t really tell.

So it wrote- “Hello.”

A while later, it got a response. “Hello.” Interesting. Previously the blue one had been the one to talk, but now the other wrote in her delicate hand on its carapace. Well, it would have had to have been a spectacularly bad learner to fail to comprehend a single language in even the short time since they’d last spoken. “How are you?”

“Tired.” Expected, it supposed, with such a weak lifeforce. It directed some of its energy to her, reinforcing the guttering flame that was its existence. “Thank you. You are very kind.”

It felt good, hearing that. Divinity had once called it kind, long ago when it’d taken the effort to learn how to carry smaller beings delicately. “Can you tell me of the surface? I have slept down here for a time, and the movements of the transient are obtuse. They do not follow the strata.”

“I am running from an enemy. A bone-beast, rampaging strangely across inhabited lands.” Very interesting.

Its brethren remained asleep- the image-forged would have reported otherwise, so it must have been one their lesser brethren. None of the elders from their time remained alive beside them. “Describe it. Does it have any scars?” Many of the younger kin were forever wounded from the war at the end of the second age. Perhaps, if it got a good description…

“I’ve not seen it. It has an insidious mental power… but descriptions are common. It has the form of a god shell of pale stone- one half bloody.” A rush of rage and fear shivered through the one- how could she know? How could she know! It had never told anyone, not even the other of the ten- for they had been commanded to keep it secret. How could…

If she’d seen it.

Rage. Rage and fear.

………

The bone-beast stiffened beneath her, chitinous plates locking together in a cacophony of apocalyptic clacking. A low rumble, the shuddering sound of stone eternally grinding against itself rolled out from beneath her, impossibly loud-

The bone-beat’s life force was angry. In its power, more angry than anything she’d ever felt before. More angry… and deeply, vastly terrified. It shifted, scuttling legs uncoiling from beneath it and lifting it into the air as it swirled out from its sleep, circling around the metal platform at a speed that threatened to tear her from its head. “What’s happening! Are you okay?”

“No. Yes.” The response came even as the bone-beast paced- for there was nothing else to describe the nervous circling as it walked the perimeter of its immense steel dais. “Our divine purpose was to watch for the being you described… the fire described it as a danger to all existence.” Then the bone-beast reared up miles into the air, angling its talons in front of it, and dove-

In a single blow, it sundered the steel platform in twain. Mountains of magma gouted into the air, the entire cavern- the entire earth shaking in response to its blow. It reached into the roiling heat, long minutes passing as it dug through the center of the earth- pulling, ripping- tearing out a block of stone and metal it placed gently on a floating shard of metal.

A single tap of a mountain-sized claw tore the stone in two, revealing a sphere of glassy metal, evanescent swirls gleaming in the bone-beast’s pale blue fluorescence. Carefully, almost reverently, the bone-beast raised a claw to the sphere, tracing a line down its side and eliciting a faint luminescence from within its depths. She could feel something beneath the overwhelming terror and unlimited curses she’d been throwing at Oi-i for dragging her into the end of the world, a ripple of… real-ness was the best she could describe it as.

An alteration- that she knew instinctively. A collapse- that she felt, the faintness snapped back inwards, pulling all the breath from her lungs and sending her reeling, lifeforce rippling in twisted eddies. Even the bone-beast wasn’t spared, keening as it stumbled to the side.

She scratched a quick, jagged sentence on the bone-beast’s shell. “What. Was. That.”

“The call of the divine…” a grimness seeped into its lifeforce, terror and resolute duty. “Now we must pray we can keep the world together until the dawning of fire.” Somehow, as she recovered from the aftereffects of a fragment of divinity left behind countless years ago, she thought that might be just a little difficult.

From the grim cant of the bone-beast’s lifeforce, she’d surmise it shared the same thought.

Huh. Empathy. This time, she wouldn’t just ignore Oi-i’s next request- she was going to beat her up.