The city crawled up the mountain. Stone keeps and half-fallen towers reached up to greet them. From here, Agraneia could see a glimpse into a garden square, which was now nothing more than dirt and tall sprays of grass.

She lost count of the cracked domes and collapsing towers, but even at a glance it was obvious: whatever this place had been, it must’ve been huge. Easily larger than Cyre, though she saw no railways nor highways for carts and drudges.

Millions must’ve lived here once, and in the cities that dotted the plains out toward the horizon.

“Old home,” the lassertane called this city. And they pointed out across all the fields, at the scattered remains of walled settlements, and named them all “Old home.”

“We lived here,” the small lassertane said. Yarsi, or whatever her name was. Agra still wasn’t in the habit of remembering such things, and she was only starting to catch the godling’s name.

“Long time before I was born, this was home. Before father was born, too.”

“What happened?” the godling asked.

“Sen,” the Bloodchief growled as he walked past them.

And Yarsi nodded her small, forest-green head. “Sen left us, went to sleep and never woke up. Demons came. Kill all people. Burn and break all buildings. All dead.”

“Not us,” the Bloodchief said, and patted his daughter protectively on the head. “We find better place to live.”

He nodded up ahead at the city of ruined castles.

But all Agraneia saw were the shadows, and the shapes of those three huge, heavy ships floating above the city.

They looked like heads, or bulbous metal pots, or something in between. Hundred of stories tall, every surface that faced down glowed with a blue light. Repulsors, the godling had called them.

Hundreds of long, flexible “tongues” stuck out of each Head, and each tongue was draped like string into the enormous pipes that jutted up from the city ruins.

“You want us to go closer to those?” Eolh asked, dubiously. He was wrapped in a fur-lined coat, but it didn’t quite cover him and he was shivering still.

The Bloodchief said, “Stay quiet. Not touch anything. No sound. Not even from feet.”

They set off down the mountainside, a single-file line picking their way slowly down the steps. Agra walked behind Eolh, and watched him shaking with every step. It seemed the jungle-dwelling corvani wasn’t used to anything less than his balmy planet, but he refused to complain.

Agra peeled off her outer layer, and made him stop. He started to protest, but the moment she put it on him, he sighed into the warm coat.

“Thanks,” he said, still chattering. “Isn’t this great?” Aren’t you guh...glad you left that prison s-s-cell?”

“Mhmm,” she said.

“It’s a j-joke, Ag.”

Agraneia followed him for one reason: because Eolh was following a god, and following a god was a mission of death. They should not have survived the mists. Nor anything thereafter.

Somehow, though, they were still alive.

But now, as she watched this godling, she couldn’t help but feel like something was still missing. Perhaps they had only been lucky so far.

That’s what the faces said, anyway. The ones that laughed at her. Or spit at her.

Faces of people she had killed. Or people she had seen get killed. Or people she didn’t know at all, but who still cursed her name and watched her with those dead eyes. In the rocks, in the grasses, in the castle walls, they watched her from everywhere she went.

You can never be forgiven.

Of course, they were right. And this did not bother her as much as it used to.

So, their accusations transformed.

You can never change. You loved it. You love nothing more.

She didn’t want to listen, because she feared it was true. They had gotten worse, since they passed the thread of light. Almost as bad as when she was in the templelands…

Stop, she told them. And she told them again, it cannot be undone.

And they laughed, and it sounded like rocks, skittering down the mountainside.

Agraneia’s foot kicked a stone, and it skidded over the edge. The lassertane hissed a warning, and everyone dropped to their stomachs.

The rock smacked and cracked against the mountain, bringing slides of pebbles with it, rattling and shushing down to the castles below.

They waited. All of them, not moving, not saying anything. Even the godling was quiet, as stone clapped into the frost-dusted ruins.

Tendrils of dust rose into the air.

The Heads hovered ponderously, a million tiny lights quietly blinking, their hundred tongues wavering slightly in the air.

But nothing else.

The Bloodchief moved first. Taking a few cautious steps down the trail. And when still nothing happened, he hissed quietly for the others to follow. Everyone took more care than before, especially Agraneia. The faces could laugh all they wanted, she was focused on the steep steps and cracked shelves of stone.

Poire’s armor seemed to learn the ground as he walked, and tendrils of it stretched off his skin, grabbing onto this boulder or that ledge, fastening him lest he should fall.

Agraneia could only imagine the usefulness of such an armor on someone who knew how to fight. How powerful a killer they would be. Could it stop projectiles? What about old tech? She tried to think of something in the Emperor’s arsenal that might compete with such a gift as sentient armor.

And without meaning too, she started thinking of herself in that armor. Running through trees and mud. Running, with no one but enemies around her. How she would throw out her arms and send threads of silvery metal to pierce their skulls before they could even understand what had come at them.

She knew it was wrong. But she couldn’t feel how. And it angered her, because something hurt, something was wrong, but she didn’t know what and-

Stop.

Her feet stopped. Poire almost bumped into her. Eolh turned around.

“Ags?” he looked at her with an alien’s concern, still bundled tight in the coat she had given him. Her own scales were starting to stiffen in the bitter cold, and not even the sunlight could warm her bones. But the frozen numbness was better than what had been there before.

“Nothing,” she grumbled back and was about to keep moving, when she felt a cold hand on her shoulder, feathers covered in ice.

“The faces?” he asked.

She nodded grimly.

“You can’t undo what’s been done. Can’t bring anyone back.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Mmm,” she agreed. But saying a thing did not make it any less painful.

“We’re looking for something better,” Eolh said. “Both of us.”

A machine. That’s all I’ll ever be.

But Eolh was shaking her, “And don’t you dare tell me you don’t deserve it. Yes, you do. It’s yours, if you look for it.”

They gathered at the top of a landslide, where the mountain met the city. The Bloodchief slid down first, and crept into the city. His ice-covered claws crunched slightly in the patches of snow, but held steady on the ice. Frozen blades of grass cracked in his steps.

He motioned for the rest to follow, and they did, each one sliding down exactly as he had done.

Many of the buildings were nestled up against the pipes, and the snow dripped down their sides. The pipes were hot to the touch, but not unbearably, and at times they would make a deep, sighing sound that almost sounded like a death gasp. Once, Agraneia thought she saw a cloud of gray mist rising from its top until one of the Heads floated closer and dropped another tongue into its depths.

Tumbled masonry filled the paths, ancient stone walls and roofless buildings huddled against each other, competing for height. All of them were half-destroyed, though Agraneia could see no sign of battle here. Whatever had happened here, happened a long time ago. Collapsed bridges made walls that blocked the streets. They made their way through dark manor houses, crumbling temples, buildings that might’ve been town halls or almshouses and multi-storied homes, so narrow that each floor was its own room.

One temple had a whole copse of trees growing inside it, tearing the foundations down with their roots. Gorse grew in every garden, and ivies as red as blood crawled up the ruined keeps, especially near the pipes.

And over it all, the three Heads cast shadows like black clouds. Down here, she could see all the metal spikes and blinking lights and layers of shelled armor and mechanized infrastructure, idly rotating. Cranes and bar-arms, tipped with flashing lights, jutted out from hundreds of decks, and she thought she counted more than one weapons bay, where some enormous piece of gunnery might yet protrude.

The scale of it was difficult to comprehend, like looking at a mountain upside down. The harder she stared, the further away it appeared.

Even the Exonerators, the Empire’s planet-class warships, looked fragile compared to these hulking behemoths, despite those feeble tubes feeding into the city, drinking from whatever heat source they could find in those pipes.

Each one could’ve been the size of a small town. Simply hanging there, as if they weighed nothing at all. How vast they were. How small she was.

How many lassertane had this machine killed?

Did it feel anything when they died?

The heads, too, offgassed their steam, and a gentle twinkling precipitation drifted down to them, like near-frozen mist.

Nobody spoke.

The lassertane’s path through the ruins led them into the shadows, and through the broken gapways of the old buildings. They seemed to want to walk between the heads, but not directly under them. And Agraneia couldn’t argue with that. Even the godling seemed wary, like he had no idea what these things were.

They moved slowly, careful not to make a sound.

A single word froze the whole troop: “Swarm.”

The speaker pointed at the sky. Far across the horizon, a flock of shapes grew black. They looked like they were flapping, at first. Or bobbing up and down, as a hundred specks became a thousand, became ten thousand.

They grabbed at Eolh. They grabbed at Agraneia, and she almost lost herself, before straining against her instinct. They gathered around Poire, not touching him, but urging him forward.

“Go.” They said. “Run quick.”

And then, they were all running. Claws scraped and boots clapped on the ancient stone streets. They knocked bricks and kicked rocks as they skittered around corners and dove into broken windows and doorways.

Agraneia heard the rattling first. A symphony of shrieking, scraping metal, as the drones flooded the skies. Thousand of metal bodies, with mechanical tentacles trailing behind them like ocean rays with too many tails. They jerked and rattled as they flew, their clattering hulls knocking against each other in the race to rise up to the Heads.

In anticipation of their arrival, the Heads let out a long, low tone that echoed over the rooftops, loud enough to dislodge snow, which crashed down and filled the streets with white clouds. Enormous racks rattled out from the Heads, and the drones attached themselves by the hundreds to hang from the newly-extended perches.

But soon, there were more drones than the Heads could handle, and these began to alight on the city, finding perches on the broken stonework. Landing in the rookeries and the high windows. Covered with rust and frost, some with broken bodies, others trailing dead tentacles behind them. She couldn’t help but notice how slow some of them were, how dangerously close to the roofs they flew, as if they might drop out of the sky at any moment.

Still. Each drone was as large as a Fang, and Agraneia had no doubts about their ability to destroy.

And then, one drone did fall. It smashed into the street, just as Agraneia was crossing. Something inside the machine whined and went quiet and all its segmented tentacles went limp. Laying there like the carcass of a recently airborne whale.

And then, the drone whined again as it turned itself back on, and its tentacles rose in synchrony, pushing the body of the drone up.

Agraneia threw herself into the nearest building, where Eolh helped her inside.

The troop was divided. Agraneia and Eolh with half, and Poire with the others.

The lassertane tried to usher Agra deeper into the building, to some hidden underground tunnel they had here. But the Bloodchief was still standing in the doorway. His eyes were fixed across the street.

At first, Agraneia could only see Poire and the drone. The drone’s had sensors on its body, and most of them were irising open and closed, as if they were trying to turn back on. Lights flashed weakly across its sleek hull.

It turned its body up, watching the shapes of other drones, wheeling above the buildings, making the sunlight flicker. And then, it cast its eyes around the street.

Its tentacles went rigid, becoming six insect-like legs that let it creep away from Agraneia.

It was aimed straight at something standing in the middle of the street. The Bloodchief’s daughter.

Her scales were still painted white, but they had gone as gray as the castles, and it took Agraneia a moment to actually see her. The drone was having an even harder time. As if she was nothing more than a statue, slightly out of place.

Curiously, its spear-tipped legs clacked against the stones. Circling around her.

Yarsi didn’t move at all.

Beyond, Agraneia could just make out the black feathers of Eolh, shifting in a doorway. Cut off.

“Bloodchief,” one of the lassertane said, and before they could speak, the Bloodchief whirled on the voice. “My daughter,” he growled.

“No. She is lost.”

The drone’s hulking form towered over her. It lowered itself down, its sensors irising wildly as it tried to see her true shape.

“No!”

Twin wings of liquid metal flew out, and wrapped around the young lassertane. Poire threw himself against her and shielded her with his metal body.

A flurry of feathers exploded in the doorway, as Eolh launched himself out. He smacked into the drone, and he was a fool if he thought he could do anything alone.

But Agraneia’s hands thought faster than she did. Her knives were out, and she was running. A growl at her side told her the Bloodchief was there, too, his spear clutched in both hands.

Together, they jabbed up at the drone’s underbelly. Barely denting it, but trying again and again as its tentacled legs whipped out to meet them. One metal tentacle swiped the Bloodchief, smacking him with such force that he went sprawling across the street and slumped against the stones.

The drone’s single, lightning-fast kick had brought it close and low to Agraneia. She drove both of her knives into its belly, grunting with the strike and throwing her whole body into it. Feeling every muscle pushing, as the blades punched through a patch of thin, rusted metal, burying the blades up to the hilts. She rattled her knives, making three slices. Just like they had taught, back in the academy. One down, one out, one back up. She felt the cracking of fragile parts, felt the tug and snap of wires, as her knives cut the innards of the drone from inside its own hull.

The oversized blades came out clean. She half expected them to be covered with blood. But machines did not bleed. Nor did they have faces.

Then what were these? A dozen of them, standing around her. Hissing and shouting and stabbing with their spears. A tentacle reached down to grab at her. At the same time, she heard a triumphant squawk from above as something ripped loose.

The drone sagged, its long, jointed limbs scraping against the stones as it collapsed to the ground. Agraneia barely had time to move out of the way.

Tumbled, rolled, and turned her blades on the others. Scaled faces, and black tongues flicking at the cold air. She was surrounded, but she was armed and ready.

A voice called her name. Too quiet to hear over the pounding of her heart and the urge to kill burning in her blood. “Agra!” Eolh’s beak mouthed, but she could not hear him.

Agra growled. And he approached, putting his hands up to calm her.

“Our side,” he said. “These are on our side. Sort of.”

Agra gritted her teeth. This was wrong. They had spears and scales and black tongues in their black mouths and she knew the smell of their blood, because she had cut so many of them open.

The lassertane were gathered around their Bloodchief now, and Yarsi was directing them to carry him inside. Their eyes caught on her, but none of them attacked.

Agra's arms burned with battle fury, her hands clenched around her knives. She should be killing them. She should not be killing them.

Confused. And angry at being confused.

A soldier who thinks is a soldier who dies, she thought.

Kill them. Stop standing there and-

"Agra," Eolh croaked.

And just that one word seemed to haul her up from some deep, black lake. Opened her ears. Opened her eyes.

The grip on her blades softened.

An ear-shattering blaaat rang out over the rooftops. Two more answered its call. Agraneia looked up, to see the Heads lifting from the city. Withdrawing all their thousands of tongues.

And all those drones that were roosting so quietly, dropped from their perches to whirl in a maelstrom that blacked out the sky. They landed on the castle towers and broken walls and roofs, crawling down the stonework and into the streets.

Don’t think.

Eolh was holding her arm, holding her back. She almost threw him off. Almost threw her blade into his black-feathered neck...

A sting of realization bit into her scales. Made her fingers go weak. When did I become... this?

Her legs went weak. Her knees threatened to stop working.

“Come on, soldier,” he crowed, “This is a stupid place to die.”

Begrudgingly, she let him pull her into the building. Into the darkness, and away from all that rattling metal.

“They all are,” she agreed.