~March 18th, 140 AH~
~Sector Taurus, the Quickash Fields~
Silon learned to walk.
She did so the same way she’d learned to fly. By borrowing from others who were already fully formed—who possessed a more complete picture of what they were.
It hadn’t been difficult to find those she could borrow from. The barren earth was fertile with broken and long abandoned creatures, some of whom she could mend with her [TEARS].
She’d never noticed just how rich the planet was with its deaths and unfulfilled intents. All she’d needed was a change of perspective to discern the reality that lay hidden behind someone else’s perception. To see the planet through her own SPU.
With the help of these riches, she’d been able to add an obsidian left arm to counterbalance her ash-laden right one. To this she added a portion of the hard outer shell of a Nautilus unit, better to protect herself from creatures who were still intact and intent on fulfilling their purpose. Under her right arm, she hid a knife borrowed from a Voras unit… just in case ‘protection’ required her active participation.
By then, however, dealing with the planet’s persistent threats had become a mostly passive process. For her journey had taken her along a path rich with the remains of broken creatures, ones she could raise and add to a growing cadre of companions, who seemed more than willing to fight in her stead.
This ‘team’—if she could call it such—consisted of a second Hornet that could scout out dangers ahead, a Brutus to assist with odd tasks that called for more manual dexterity than Silon herself was capable of, and even a Kentavros, albeit an early-generation unit that was missing a few key upgrades to its arsenal. This last addition had been a real coup, making Silon’s travels much safer while also giving her a perch to rest upon whenever she tired of flapping her borrowed wings. The only drawback was that the group’s progress was now limited by the Kentavros’s lumbering pace.
She’d even given her teammates names, driven by an impetus whose origin was as loose as her grasp on her own knowledge banks. The Hornet was ‘Tethers’, the Brutus ‘Poet’, and the Kentavros ‘Cherry’. She couldn’t fathom the inspirations behind these names, but that didn’t stop her from being sure that they were right. The truth of it encoded itself into the hollow of her central chassis.
Along the way, Silon had discovered that not all broken things could be restored by her [TEARS]. Perhaps these cases were beyond repair even by her powers. Perhaps they simply weren’t as broken as they appeared. In any case, there was still much she had to learn about her Einkunst: its limitations… as well as its potential.
She’d since decided that it was just as well that she couldn’t mend every broken thing she came across. Selectivity was a virtue. For indiscriminate growth and dissemination were what had contributed to humanity’s downfall: the path she wanted desperately to avoid retreading. She still didn’t know if there might be unintended consequences to her recruitment of what had previously been Syntropy units. Until she did, it was best to exercise caution.
Besides, she now knew that the planet was rich with resources, and she would have her pick of potential new teammates everywhere she went. Indeed, the latest such wellspring lay scattered amidst the Quickash Fields, an expanse of rolling sand dunes in the northern lowlands of Terra Latamir. The terrain was especially hard going for Cherry, who took minutes at a time to drag one of its four legs out of the sand and onto the next patch of unstable ground.
The glacial pace gave Silon plenty of time to scan her surroundings and confer with the more mobile units on her team. She soon learned that, beneath the topmost layer of sand, the Quickash was a veritable treasure trove of broken things, buried within strata upon strata of long forgotten battles.
With grief in her heart and respect on her mind, she nevertheless set to unearthing these relics of strife and violence. As cautious as she tried to be, she couldn’t in good conscience pass up an opportunity of this magnitude.
As Tethers brought back more intel, and as Poet helped her dig up more potential candidates, Silon was struck by an unnerving observation. It was that she couldn’t identify much of the unearthed remains, of either Syntropic or human origin.
To be sure, there were significant gaps in her knowledge banks, but even these gaps couldn’t account for the alien design that was prevalent in her latest finds. Chief among them were desiccated obsidian globules that looked more organic than synthetic, forming mesh-like clusters that called to mind a ‘colony’ rather than a swarm.
There were also ‘Eidolons’ among the artifacts, though they defied categorization into any model known to Silon. If she had to pick, they were most similar in appearance to a model ES-V, but much smaller. So small, in fact, that it was a wonder any human could fit inside their cockpits.
Then the thought struck her. Perhaps there weren’t any cockpits at all. Perhaps these Eidolons fit around their pilots, to be worn like a Nexa-suit, except much bulkier and plenty deadly on its own.
How could she—and the warrior she flew alongside in a past life—have missed these before? Had these alien beings lain hidden beneath layers of Quickash all this time? Or could they be the remnants of another reality entirely, summoned to this patch of the barren earth by the unknowable whims of the Nexus?
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And if the latter were the case… why had this other reality also been enriched by so much death and war?
With grief deepening in her heart, Silon nevertheless instructed Poet to pull up one of the more ‘intact’ Eidolons onto the surface. As much as she mourned tragedies that transcended realities, she couldn’t deny her own curiosity and desire for progress. This alien Eidolon was of a size that seemed to be perfectly congruent with her own modest frame. Perhaps this was the appropriate testing ground for the possibilities her [TEARS] could offer.
[LACRIMOSA]. Silon felt the heat of her own [TEARS] spread through the Eidolon’s inner cables and channels. The response was immediate, and she knew right away that this was one broken thing her powers had deemed fit to mend.
The Eidolon twitched to life, then rose to its feet in halting jerking motions. Even at its full height, it was smaller than even a Brutus unit like Poet. Silon hovered at the Eidolon’s eye level, wings fluttering in nervous anticipation.
After some time, the optic modules on the Eidolon’s SPU also regained their light. Only… something was wrong. Instead of the ghostly blue that imbued the Eidolons of Silon’s memories, as well as her new faux-Syntropic companions, this alien ES-V’s ‘eyes’ glowed a fierce and unmistakable red.
Silon sensed too late the deadly intent that emanated from the Eidolon. Before she could react, she found herself flung backwards, held bodily in Poet’s slender obsidian arms.
Her SPU swivelled to follow the action. From the corner of her visual field, she saw Tethers fly into the frame, with its belly distending to produce the armament housed therein. But by then, the red-eyed Eidolon had raised its right arm, the end of which now swelled and surged with a burst of deadly energy.
A ray of white-red shot from the Eidolon and across the sand dunes. The energy then dissipated, revealing Tethers’ incinerated remains, which crumbled and dissolved into a sea of ash just like them.
No!
The hollow of Silon’s central chassis screamed in a language that felt foreign to herself. Her inner mechanisms ached with a pain that should’ve been physically impossible.
As if in direct response to Silon’s pain, Cherry’s massive frame rumbled into action, pointing its own right-armed cannon at what was indisputably the enemy. The Eidolon, comically small next to a Kentavros, readied its weapon a second time, with the impunity of a creature that had never before met an opponent it couldn’t subdue.
Once more, the air ignited with a beam of energy, white-hot and rimmed with blue. The Eidolon had, after all, detected the sheer magnitude of the threat it was under. For it cancelled its attack into an evasive manoeuvre in the last possible moment—too late to have avoided the full extent of Cherry’s wrath.
The beam took out much of the Eidolon’s upper body, leaving a roughly circular imprint where half of its SPU and nearly its entire torso had been shorn clean off. Only its legs remained largely undamaged, and it was these that kept the Eidolon standing: a grotesquely deformed mannequin that twitched and convulsed with the last of its dying life force.
The sight of it only added to Silon’s pain. She couldn’t bear to watch and process the final gasps of a cruelty she herself had unwittingly engineered. She wriggled free of Poet’s grasp, unsheathed the knife from her ash-laden arm, then buried its blade into what remained of the Eidolon’s SPU. The ‘enemy’ finally ceased its convulsions, then collapsed onto the Quickash.
For some time after, Silon hovered in contemplation, as her two teammates waited patiently beside her.
She could no longer find the particles that once belonged to Tethers, even if she were to sift through the ash and sand. As for the Eidolon, it was back to how it’d been before she found it: broken and dead—only somehow more broken, and perhaps even more dead.
How was it that her [TEARS] could bring with them yet more sorrow, yet more pain to encode itself into her machinery? Was she going about it the wrong way? Or could it be that strife and violence were the way of the world, unending and inevitable no matter how many times reality mended itself?
No. That couldn’t be. She refused to believe it. Because she knew. Between the gaps in her knowledge banks, she could still recall warmth where there should’ve been pain, love where there should’ve been solitude, a fervent hope for the future where there should’ve been the release of death.
Her journey wasn’t at an end. It was only the beginning. And ere anything and everything worth preserving on this planet could turn to ash, she would prove that there was a different way. A different reality.
But first, she needed to learn to walk before she could change the world.
The Eidolon’s legs, just as expected, fit her moderate frame almost perfectly. One chunk of the right thigh was missing from where Cherry’s energy beam had torn through it, but that was a small inconvenience in light of the benefits. Limping was better than not having any legs at all.
Best of all, the legs came with thrusters! Silon took to them immediately, relishing the speed and freedom of movement they offered. Slowly but surely, gaps within her knowledge banks filled with the fondness for long flights she’d whiled away in the company of a nameless warrior.
With her new thrusters, she had no more need for the wings that sprouted awkwardly from the base of her SPU. They couldn’t even be rationalized as ‘form over function’, for they no longer served any function at all, and as such, their form too was utterly meaningless.
But as Silon contemplated severing her wings and leaving them behind on the Quickash, she realized that they did hold meaning. Within the same part of her hollow that could feel pain and share in the planet’s grief.
They were keepsakes. To commemorate the first obsidian life she’d resurrected with her [TEARS], her first voyage across a roiling ocean, and the second Hornet friend she’d just lost to senseless violence. For the same hazy reasons that had compelled her to name her travelling companions, she wanted also to hold onto her now meaningless wings. She wanted to remember.
Besides, they were kind of cute. And in the world Silon dreamed for herself and her friends, that was the kind of frivolity that held the deepest meaning.