Ptah tore his eyes from Skipper to narrow them, instead, accusingly on Pax. “This planet is destroyed. There are no spacefaring ships anymore. You know that treaty meant nothing. As soon as they made it, they started killing each other with it. With us.”

“Not my problem,” Pax said, shrugging. He cocked his head, glancing at the light peeking through the hole out to the canyon. “Hey! Wanna get some fresh air?! I think it’s time for some fresh air. I’ve so been looking forward to this…” He crawled out of the brilliant crack in the far wall, the two of them forgotten.

Neither Ptah nor Skipper followed him. They stood in the room, facing each other like wary coyotes in a cage, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Skipper could feel him there, tugging on her mind like a thousand little strings buried in her brain.

“I’m not obeying you,” Ptah growled, body stiff like he were expecting to fight a sand king.

“I’m not having your kid,” Skipper retorted.

Ptah took a step towards her. “You try to control me like the Pharaoh and her whipped dogs…” The threat in his glowing yellow eyes was…terrifying. “I will find a way to bring you down.”

Skipper lifted her chin, though she was startled by the vehemence there. “Don’t threaten me.”

Immediately, Ptah grunted and stumbled forward to one knee, the blue strands whirling and tightening around him.

Outside, Pax called, “Oh lovely! It’s still blue!”

Ptah gasped and lifted his head, tearing it away from the blue strands, accusation written in his face. “What the fuck did you do?!”

“I didn’t do anything!” Skipper snapped. “I grabbed the stone like you told me to and then that showed up,” she said, pointing at the exit of the cavern. “He didn’t tell me any of this shit before he got me to touch the stone. Just said I’d be able to make water and keep you alive.”

But Ptah’s face darkened. “So he promised you my abilities in exchange for setting him free.”

Skipper frowned. “We were both trapped in here. If you weren’t a drooling sand-maggot that left me to clean up your mess, you would know that.”

“So you bargained for my servitude,” he snapped, getting back to his feet, looking truly enraged.

“What?” she blinked, taken aback. “No. I was trying to get us out of there.”

Ptah bared his teeth at her, and it was not in a smile. “All those years the Pharaoh tried to bend me to her will, tried to lure me with sex, luxuries, presents…anything to get me to willingly bind myself to her like the others. All the pleasures you could imagine to lure me into signing my name as her slave…and when that didn’t work, pain…” He made a bitter laugh. “Three centuries of that, I end up a slave anyway, out in some fucking desert, to an illiterate who sells hair for the dehydrated corpses of rats.”

“You’re the one who wanted me to take you to see the stone!” Skipper cried, more than a little angry he thought this was her fault.

He waved his hands in despair. “Because I thought it was just a power source I could use to get me home! I didn’t realize the stone still had that damned treaty embedded in it! I did not agree to this.”

“Technically, you did!” Pax cried, ducking his head back through the hole. “Your people signed a mass agreement, enforceable across the entire population, and those chosen by the collective as representatives were automatically bound to obey the terms of the treaty.”

“Fuck the treaty!” Ptah snarled, with a more vehemence than Skipper had seen from him about anything—even the Pharaoh—before. “The treaty is dead. You’re just using it as an excuse to get out of this cave and perpetually stay unbeholden to your station because the contract is unfulfillable as it stands!”

The ‘man’ in the two-piece black garment cocked his head as if in thought. “Why…yes! Yes I am. However did you guess?” He grinned and withdrew his head, once more allowing morning light to shine through. Then, muffled, she heard, “Oh look! We have some guests jogging up the wash!”

Guests? Skipper gave Ptah a startled glance, but he apparently wasn’t listening. His eyes had flickered to the stone buried in her forehead, and his hands were balled into fists, his body like a tense statue.

“I’m not your slave,” Ptah gritted.

“No shit,” Skipper snapped back. “And fuck having your kid.”

“Deal.”

“Deal!” she cried.

Ptah gave the gem in her brow one last, dark look, then turned and stormed toward the exit, showing not even a hint of a limp.

“What are you doing?!” Skipper cried, snatching up her gear.

“I’m going to have a friendly chat with this AI asshole!” Ptah snapped. “And somewhere in there, I’m going to rearrange his face.” He turned and started stalking towards the exit.

“They’re very clean, so they’re probably officials of some sort,” Pax mused from outside. “Though the tattoos are…unfortunate. Oh, look, they found the entrance!”

Ptah hesitated. “Who are you talking to?”

“Wait, I think someone followed us!” Skipper cried, even as Ptah moved towards the exit with a frown. The Skymancer grunted and dropped to one knee again, wrapped in blue bands of celestial fire, then immediately shot her an angry look over his shoulder.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Too late, Skipper realized what she’d done. Even then, the bands of energy tying them together were tightening down on him, forcing him to remain where he was. “Sorry!” she cried.

Ptah glared. “You and I are gonna have a cha—”

At the same time, a man flashed a light in at them and shouted, “He’s still in there! Ptahmohtep’s down in the cave! Fire, fire!” And, a moment later, the cave began to pound with the pulverizing retorts of automatic weapons.

Skipper ducked back into the metal room and hid behind a silver wall even as Ptah shouted and held up his hand in a vain attempt to block the bullets.

“Why are these barbarians shooting at you, Ptahmohtep?!” Pax demanded, suddenly back in the metal room with Skipper. The smooth black material of his clothing was ruffled, like a man who had been running.

“He refused to fuck the Pharaoh, best I can figure!” Skipper cried.

He blinked at her, green eyes stunned. “You guys have a pharaoh now?!”

“We need to get out of here!” Skipper cried. “Does that door in the wall open behind us?”

But Pax wasn’t listening. He had moved to stand beside her, pointing up at the two men spraying bullets into the cavern with them. He looked and sounded insulted that they were being shot at, not in the least bit concerned. “Look at those oafs, carrying around steel boomsticks like they’re Larthenian jappers. Haven’t you discovered anything better by now?! We gave them access to our ship’s encyclopedia! I knew this planet was filled with intellectual bottom feeders! Give them a tourino wand and they beat their chests and fling pointy wads of lead at each other, instead!”

“I’ve gotta help him!” Skipper shouted over the retorts of gunfire against the cavern walls.

“Why?” Pax called back, squinting over his shoulder at Ptah, who was screaming as the bullets pounded into him. “He seems to be doing okay.”

Skipper stared. “He seems to…” Mouth dropping open, she grabbed her bow, and nocked an arrow, trying to memorize where the two Ibis men were crouched in the cavern entrance.

Pax frowned at her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to kill them,” she said, waiting for a lull in the gunfire.

“Oh, you’ll leave that to him, now,” he said casually. “With the anchor, he’s now nigh indestructible and you’re…well…” He looked her up and down dubiously. “Squishy.”

Skipper ignored him and started inching from around the metal wall.

“Hey, now,” Pax said, beginning to actually sound nervous, “it’s my duty as your contract moderator to mention that, while you can cut the contract short if you choose to self-terminate, I’ve waited a really long time for this, and I’d find the last sixteen hundred years to be incredibly anticlimactic if you go get yourself killed just outside my prison door trying to catch a bullet from a couple of dumb neanderthal grunts when you have a perfectly indestructible Tuliin willing to do it for you.

“They’re killing him,” Skipper snapped.

Indeed, Ptah was screaming profanities, huddled behind a too-small stone protrusion in the center of the cavern, slumped over himself in pain, holding his arms as the bullets were ripping holes into his skin with little puffs of blue fire, showing glimpses of multicolored blackness within.

Frowning at her in confusion, Pax ducked his head around the corner again to look at the Skymancer, then back at Skipper with a questioning thumb in Ptah’s direction, like, Is that what you’re concerned about?

“He’s trapped out there and they’re shooting him!” Skipper cried.

Pax’s face actually relaxed, realizing that was, indeed, what she was concerned about. “Oh, he’ll be fiiine,” Pax commented, waving a hand dismissively. “As an official Ambassador to the Galactic Core, you now have an indestructible bodyguard just strategically waiting for the landborn imbeciles to run out of ammunition. You, on the other hand, need to stay back here out of sight until he takes care of them. He might be bulletproof—you are not. Just wait for him to put an end to this.” Pax seemed totally confident it would happen any second now.

Skipper ignored him, waited for the shooting to stop, took a deep breath, and twisted around the corner.

“What are you doing!?” Pax shrieked. “You’re immune to aging, not to death.”

Ignoring him, Skipper drew her bow, aimed at one of the faces peering in at them through the entrance hole, and released the string.

The first arrow bounced just to the right of the first one’s ear, making them both cry out in alarm. Damn, Skipper thought, quickly re-nocking and firing another one. This time, someone cursed.

“There’s a cragnanny in there with him!” one of them cried. “Shit! Get the grenades!”

Skipper quickly dropped her bow for her knife, and rushed the exit. A few moments later, a little metal ball tinked down the rock slide and into the cavern with them. Skipper snatched it up and threw it back out the opening. Outside, men screamed and scrambled to get away.

“This isn’t how this is supposed to work!” Pax shrieked behind her. “You’re the anchor. You do anchor things, like stay safe and eat healthy foods.”

An explosion outside threw Skipper off her feet and she rolled partway down the rock slide, back into the cavern, ears ringing.

“Ptah, control your counterpart! She’s gonna get us trapped here before I even get out of this cavern! She just grabbed a bomb. A bomb, Ptah. With her hand. She’s insane!”

As soon as Skipper could shake off her disorientation, however, she scrambled back up the rockslide, her old scrapper instincts kicking into gear, fully ready to fight her way out…

She was starting to crawl out the entrance and into the sun, knife in her teeth, when some huge force grabbed her from behind and yanked her back.

“Let me take care of this,” Ptah said, his voice filled with warning. “They’re too dangerous for you. When I get back, you and I are going to talk.”

Then, like something out of one of the Silver priests’ picture books, Ptah shoved his way past her, his body outlined in a column of colorful black flame, the clothes all but torn from his body from the machinegun fire, the golden collar around his neck shining like the sun. It didn’t, she realize, still have the alien blue scribbles glowing across its length. Now, the blue glow had died, and in its place was an etched half-sunburst pattern that pulsed with a golden glow, and the entire collar was rolling with licks of flame that completely ate the light except for the colorful sparks within the inky black plasma. The Skymancer himself seemed to boil over with void-black mist that even then rolled across the ground outside the cavern in foggy waves of night.

He looked, quite simply, like a god given breath, a being binding together the galaxy itself and coalescing it into fire that literally burned from his very body…or was his body? The odd outer shell that had been his skin was no longer the same, having become thin, like paper, and had been punctured in the same way his clothing had been ripped apart, leaving gaping black nothingness beneath.

Skipper realized her mouth had fallen open, but she was in such awe that couldn’t will it to close.

Then a strange metallic snap dragged her attention back to the collar. Skipper realized what she had first mistaken for a sunburst was actually a hundred little fissures in the collar’s surface, golden energy shining through the metal, breaking through the color-speckled black flame surrounding him.

For his part, Ptah didn’t seem to notice the collar, the fog, nor the tiny patches of his skin that were sloughing away, revealing something…else…beneath. He moved with determined purpose, eyes focused on the two men outside. Then, as Skipper watched in wonder, Ptah climbed out of the hole and into the sun. A moment later, she heard men screaming…before it abruptly stopped.

Skipper numbly stumbled back down the rockslide, staring up at the place the god had disappeared through the hole.

“See?” Pax said. “Strategic.”