~March 26th, 140 AH~

~Sector Aries, the Painted Isles~

The more Silon saw of the world, the more she became convinced it was already changing, with or without her.

The shores of the Painted Isles were awash with colourful carcasses, in a belated and unintended justification of the archipelago’s name. The more Silon saw of the carcasses that filled her world, the more she became convinced that they weren’t of this world—at least not in the way she and her nameless warrior remembered it.

It was difficult. To hold onto her dreams amidst piles of evidence that they were just that: frivolous dreams that had no basis in reality. To dream of warmth, love, and hope… when she walked and flew amidst shores that were awash with the inevitability of death and strife.

But she couldn’t stop now. Not when she still had debts to repay. Not when her growing ‘team’ of mended things sought and looked to her to lead them, to give them purpose and a path toward new conclusions.

And not when a nameless warrior still awaited her return, somewhere amidst the planet’s haze.

With grief on her mind and stubborn dreams in her heart, Silon sifted through the wreckage that had washed upon the Painted Isles, seeking the next broken thing for her [TEARS] to mend.

Members of her team—a strange assembly of spare obsidian parts—assisted in the search. Hornets buzzed about to scout the landscape. Brutuses lifted scrap heaps and dug through dirt. Kentavroses and Vorases gathered in a defensive formation, ready to fight—to inflict more deaths and more strife—should the need arise.

If Silon were to set her dreams aside for a moment and be honest with herself, she knew that her team had outgrown its purpose, at least for the time being.

The Syntropy were ever-present upon the barren earth, if not growing in numbers over the recent days and weeks. Even so, scattered pockets of Syntropy activity no longer posed credible threats to Silon and her growing and infinitely replenishable team. She needed but to flutter her functionless wings and hover in repose, as her faithful teammates laid waste to their enemies. Afterwards, she’d have her pick of broken things to mend and reintegrate.

Every engagement deepened her sorrow. Yet every new death only strengthened her resolve. Hers was a necessary evil. The storm before the calm. As much as it pained her to perpetuate the tragedies that filled a barren earth and transcended merging realities, she mustn’t stray from her course. She must see her dreams to their necessary conclusion.

Break the cycle. Honour the planet’s grief. Let healing take its place.

To that end, she and her growing team needed to be prepared for and ever vigilant of those who would stand in their way. Because unlike Silon, things of this planet were fully formed and set in their violent ways. The more she saw of the changing yet ever-constant world, the more she became convinced of the recklessness of her self-imposed mission.

So, she walked and flew amidst shores that were awash with death and strife, seeking the next broken thing to mend and reintegrate. Her ‘instructions’ to her team were simple: find us an Eidolon.

For as much as she loved and honoured her strange assembly of spare obsidian parts, she knew that she needed more. There was a storm brewing, even bigger than the one she herself had called down upon a barren earth. And she needed a phantom warrior that could spearhead her flight into buffeting winds and pelting ash.

Today of all days, Silon was more optimistic than usual. For the carcasses that now coloured the shores of the Painted Isles weren’t random collections of spare parts, but rather the sundered components of a rational and fully realized whole.

The sleek and pliable frames of marine Syntropy, specialized for the singular purpose of diving underwater at speed. The clipped wings and spent casings of its aerial brethren. And enormous pieces of scrap metal that defied categorization into single units: bent, jagged, and thick—sturdy enough to have once made up the hull of a ship.

A naval battle of grand and unfathomable scale had taken place here—or somewhere, before its wreckage washed up on the shores of the Painted Isles. The knowledge in between the gaps of Silon’s memories told her that a destruction of such scale must’ve involved not one, not two, but whole squadrons of Eidolons. If only she could find one that would be amenable to her [TEARS]—one that wouldn’t stray from the course the moment it was granted th means to fight on…

One island in particular had been all but upheaved by the wreckage. A severed section of the ship, more or less intact from keel to deck, had embedded itself into the side of a hill, forming an entire landscape unto itself.

The ship had become a cave, hiding secret memories within its darkened corridors. Something about its darkness called to Silon, and she perked up with anxious enthusiasm, calling several Hornets to her and sending them a new signal.

In there.

The Hornets went first, and Silon waded in after them. In her eagerness, she strayed farther than usual from her guard of honour. The Vorases kept up with her pace, but the lumbering Kentavroses lagged slightly behind.

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The intricacies of the ship’s interior only added to Silon’s excitement. High-ceilinged hallways lined either side of a central cavity, one that housed the familiar remnants of a strange war. Weapons, machinery, transport routes. Jostled, destroyed, and strewn about, but still somehow retaining the organized chaos that was the hallmark of human society.

It wasn’t just war, however. There were also signs of life. Evidence that whoever had once occupied this space had cherished and taken solace in each other’s company—had loved and nurtured each other in whatever ways they could. Canteens and gathering halls right next to a command centre with its instruments of war. A school for children, just across the hallway from a barracks that housed the next generation of warriors.

It was this last sight that halted Silon in her track. For something about it called to her more strongly than anything else she’d unearthed on her journey.

The foreign writing on a chalkboard was accompanied by apparitions of a roomful of humans, some more attentive than others. A stuffed doll on the grimy floor—depicting an ‘animal’ Silon knew not the name of—evoked the image of a young girl who held it tightly to her chest.

Before Silon knew it, she’d lifted her arm—the ash-laden one—to her ‘chest’, as if to imitate the girl in her dream. No stuffed animal cushioned the clatter of metal against metal. No real warmth radiated from the hollow of her central chassis.

Even so, this functionless gesture reminded her of something else. A word that hid in the shadowed recesses of her knowledge banks. Shy, apologetic, almost afraid of being spoken aloud.

Home.

Was this what home was? Had this been the dream of all the ghosts Silon had met on her journey, and of the ones that had washed up on these foreign shores? A place to call home—and defend with their lives. Even if it meant—

A deafening explosion snapped Silon out of her imagined past and back onto the wreckage of her reality. Farther ahead in the seemingly endless hallway, sparks of ghostly blue energy flew between the walls, leaving more ruined structures in their wake.

Her team had happened upon another enemy. But who? There’d been no signs of Syntropy activity in the area. Unless—

More explosions widened the hallway into a gaping atrium. Flying bits of crushed obsidian told Silon of the latest casualties to her team. Even as she struggled to process the sudden shift to her priorities, her companions moved before her: fast, decisive, and all but autonomous.

A pair of Vorases lurched and jumped down the corridor, blades readied. ‘Cherry’ the Kentavros caught up to Silon with a rare burst of speed, with its lumbering frame tearing through and adding to the wreckage around them. Both of its arms were raised, glowing with more destructive intent.

The smoking rubble ahead of them cleared, and Silon’s SPU got its first glimpse of the enemy. At the same time, the hollow of her central chassis rocked under the weight of her latest discovery.

There was no mistaking it. It was a model ES-V. Muscular, agile, and deadly—despite its broken-down appearance and the fact it was missing its right forearm. Faded and tarnished as it was, it even had the kind of paintwork that was characteristic of Eidolons most immediately familiar to Silon. This one happened to be…

… Crimson in colour. With dark segmented coils that were reminiscent of an ‘arthropod’ Silon suddenly recalled the name of.

Stop!

The signals went out too late. One Voras had already fallen, victim to the blue beam that shot out of the crimson centipede’s left arm. The other Voras clung to its target, draped over the right shoulder, with sharpened blades digging into whatever they could find of the Eidolon’s torso. But then the centipede’s shoulder erupted with a flash of energy that tore the spider apart.

Cherry too had entered the fray, pushing past Silon to shield her from the centipede’s wrath. From her now limited view, she detected another clash of blue-on-blue—the Kantavros’s shockwave against the Eidolon’s sphere—before Cherry’s bulbous back burst open to reveal the jagged end of an amputated right arm. The giant centaur’s entire frame sagged into the floor as the life went out of it.

No!

But by then, Silon’s guard of honour had been decimated, and no one was left to receive her signals. Only the lone Eidolon remained, having pulled its arm out of Cherry’s chassis and pushed it unceremoniously aside. The Eidolon’s pair of optic modules—familiar in its ghostly blue yet utterly foreign in its emptiness—now trained upon the chimaera of ash and obsidian before it.

Silon’s functionless wings fluttered, betraying her very real fear. She nevertheless stood her ground, pulling up the Nautilus shield on her left arm and the Voras blade on the right.

Something between the gaps of her knowledge banks told her that this was a futile fight. That the monster that now lurched toward her was one of if not the single deadliest entity this planet and its endless wars had ever produced.

Her defeat was inevitable, but that didn’t make it any easier to give up, to surrender herself to her fate. She’d come this far, hadn’t she? And she still had so much farther to go. She couldn’t die here. Not when her dreams were still so far from reality…

Just then, the ghostly blue of the centipede’s eyes faded, leaving blackened lenses that were now devoid even of the emptiness they’d once housed. Soon, the rest of its crumbling body followed suit, losing its strength and sagging into the floor, in an uncanny imitation of its fallen foe. Its arms—both the intact and the shortened ones—fell to its sides, now absent any and all threat.

Silon stood and watched the Eidolon for a while longer, before she slowly lowered her own arms and put away her makeshift armaments. She watched… and thought she understood.

The broken thing before her wasn’t the nameless warrior of her dreams. But it had fought the same war, flown into the same haze, and lived through the same inevitabilities. And at the end of its personal hell, it’d wandered its way to its final resting place—the long forgotten wreckage of someone else’s home.

Silon watched, understood… and hesitated.

Before her sat the faceless ruins of a once deadly warrior—a deserter that had turned his back on the only war he ever knew. Surely, the kind thing—the only thing—to do was to honour that choice. Leave him to savour the final few moments of release that had eluded him all his life.

And couldn’t the same be said for her nameless warrior? The one she so desperately sought amidst an ever-growing wreckage? What fate awaited him, even if she were to mend him—to set him on a path of healing, as she’d imagined it? How could one creature’s frivolous dreams stand against the weight of falling stardust?

Silon watched and waited for a while longer. Until the edges of her own optic module brimmed with the bitter [TEARS] of a dreamer’s remorse.