Shadows flickered across the bones of long-dead lassertane, all made sharp and brittle by the cold air. Snow drifted down through cracked skylights and gaps in the brick-and-mortar floors, building tiny white castles on the frigid, stone-paced floors of this catacomb. Here and there, spears of sunlight pierced down into this darkness, though the spears flickered as hundreds of metals bodies blocked the sun in their mad, searching flight.
Search for Poire. For the whole troop of xenos, now huddled in the great darkness of this catacomb.
A few of the lassertane held guttering torches, which trailed black smoke up the stacks of bones and the stone shelves that held them. The shelves went high, perhaps all the way up, though Poire could not see the ceiling through the shadows. Statues, made of marble or bronze that had almost turned black with age, guarded the shelves. In some places, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of stone coffins, some decorated with metal plaques or engravings, others with no sign at all as to who was buried inside. Not to mention the bones that spilled out of every open space.
He held his hand out, the glow from the liquid armor illuminating just enough for him to see the lassertane skulls and ribcages, filled with other bones, piled on the shelves. Staring down at him. Or up at the ceiling. Or else, at nothing at all.
Had they run out of room to bury their dead? Had they lost the art of stoneworking, and resorted to just leaving their remains down here? Poire could only guess.
At every intersection between the shelves, rows of glass columns - as thick as trees, and thrice as tall - held up the ceiling. Perhaps, once, they channeled the sunlight from above, or brought illuminating energy from the depths below, but now the pillars cracked and broke and their innards turned milky-pale, as dull as unearthed marble, their high cornices lost in the gloom above.
None of the living lassertane spoke, as the troop of scavengers crept through row after row, shelf after shelf. Two-by-two, they walked into the maze of the dead.
Finally, the youngest one called for a rest. The Bloodchief was leaning heavily on his daughter, and when they stopped, she busied herself at his wounds. Poire helped her ease him against one of the sarcophagi. Listening to her whisper words of encouragement at him, as he groaned and made a wretched sound in the back of his throat.
The Bloodchief was hardly the tallest among them, but he seemed the sturdiest. Only, now his shaggy head looked grayer in the dim light of the torches, and his reptilian eyes more sunken. Poire thought he saw blood on the lassertane’s lips, before his daughter wiped it away with her own fur cloak.
Here he was, a great, shaggy reptilian humanoid, propped up against the resting place of the long dead. Two of those warming orbs were laid at the Bloodchief’s feet, and the lassertane spoke their holy words, calling them to ignite. To give up their red-hot heat.
The group separated into two. Poire and Agraneia gathered around the Bloodchief, while the rest of the lassertane huddled further down along this grand stone shelf, talking among themselves.
The Bloodchief was clutching his ribs, and Yarsi was whispering to him quietly, her clawed fingers trying to tie a cloth around his torso to keep his ribs in place.
Eolh had gone away “to look and see,” for a few minutes. He came flapping back, his breath came out in white puffs of air, barely visible in the dimness. He was shivering again, despite the second cloak wrapped around him.
“How far back does this place go?” Eolh asked.
“A few miles,” the Bloodchief’s daughter, Yarsi, said without looking up from her father.
“So many of them,” Eolh whispered.
“Our domain once covered the planet. The monarchies ruled the whole world, with Sen’s blessing. That’s what the Dirt Witch says.”
“There are other cities like this one?”
“There are hundreds. Or so the Dirt Witch says. I’ve only been to a few.”
“What happened to them?”
Yarsi shrugged, “Sen left us.” And she went back to tying the brace around her father’s chest, making him grunt and shove away her hands. “I’m alright, Bayarsakli. I’m alright.”
The other group had their own orbs lit, and were sitting and standing in an anxious circle. One of the lassertane was stalking back and forth, talking animatedly. Someone else tried to shush him, but his guttural rasps echoed through the stone shelves.
“What are they talking about?” Poire asked.
“Killing you,” the Bloodchief grunted, his eyes closed through the pain. Gasping as Yarsi touched his shoulder, and she whispered back her apologies. “They think you make machines follow us.”
“Well that’s gullshit,” Eolh said. And then, more hopefully, “Right, Poire?”
Poire could only shrug.
He had been exposed to so very few machines, in his time at the Conclave. Mostly construction or medical constructs. Constructs made for war, he had seen only in games and simulations, and even though he indulged deeply in those, he had never seen constructs like those drones. Or those massive, floating heads with all their tongues…
That rasping voice rose in pitch, as it spoke quickly over the others. They were arguing, when someone said, “What about the Dirt Witch?”
The one called Saltaq, one of the Bloodchief’s lieutenants, hissed, “I spit on the Dirt Witch!”
Yarsi’s head snapped up, her small head ridges filling with color. “What did he say?”
The Bloodchief and Eolh responded at the same time. “Leave it be, daughter.”
But Yarsi was already up and moving, stomping towards Saltaq. The Bloodchief groaned, and let his head drop into his hands, the slits of his nose flaring.
“What did you say about the Dirt Witch?”
“I said I spit on her!” This time, Saltaq enunciated it with real spit.
Poire watched them argue. The youngest lassertane might be half Saltaq’s height, but she found a way to be imperious and demanding, with both hands on her hips, her tongue darting accusations at the older scavenger.
“We hunt,” Saltaq said, “We fight. We borrow. Why does the Witch get anything?”
“She watches us! She knows the ways!”
“She stays home, never moves. Only eats. Never finds. We go. We find. We die.”
Some were nodding along with him, though they were too tired to climb to their feet.
The Bloodchief grumbled up at Poire. “Help me up.”
He held out his clawed hands. Eolh took one. Poire noticed Agraneia take a step back, like she didn’t want to touch the chief, so Poire stepped in. The liquid metal reached out, and touched at the chief’s graying scales, as they pulled and he hissed, and came to his feet.
He shuffled over to the ring of lassertane. Standing at the third corner between Yarsi and Saltaq, but both of them were too incensed to notice his presence.
“We go out. We bleed-”
“I don’t see any blood on you!” Yarsi stomped her booted foot.
Saltaq, ignoring her, continued, “And we look for Sen’s leftover scrap. What we find? Last year? Last ten years? Nothing. Scrap all gone. Dirt Witch makes us go, and we find nothing. Only machines. Only death. Saltaq says no more! Saltaq says…”
While Saltaq hissed out his tirade, the Bloodchief slowly began to pull off his layers. First, his outer coat, with all its fur. Then, the next coat, a coarse wool. More and more layers, until his torso was bare. Mottled scales, blackened and bruised. Flaking and gashed. Blood shining in long streaks across his abdomen. Crimson crystallizing into dark frost.
Saltaq trailed off into silence as the Bloodchief stood before him. His eyes trailed down the Chief’s sturdy muscles, worn and withering from age. Not shivering, not giving an inch to the cold that must be clawing away the warmth of his body.
The Bloodchief’s tongue flicked at the air. Waiting for silence. And when it finally came, he held out his arms. Giving an ample, if too personal, view of his stomach and bare torso.
“Nephew,” he addressed Saltaq.
“The Dirt Witch,” Saltaq whined, “Her way leads us to danger.”
All the lassertane were staring at them now. Their faces gaunt and stretched over bone from years of hard work and hunger. The ragged troop sat beneath the shelves, surrounded by piles of bones of their ancestors. Poire could picture their malnourished skeletons lying among the rest.
Even the lassertane on Thrass hadn’t looked this desperate.
Saltaq, emboldened by the Bloodchief’s silence, tried again. “I say get rid of xenos. Give human to machines. Maybe then, we safe. Maybe then, they leave us alone.”
Eolh’s crest feathers rose. Agraneia’s forearms tensed as she slipped her knives into place (had she been holding those this entire time?).
“Are you bloodchief now, nephew?” The Bloodchief swiped a claw through one of the wounds on his belly, gasping as he separated the scales and new blood started to drip. “Come and take my blood then, before it goes cold.”
The ridges around Saltaq’s eyes and scalp colored deeply. His head snaked left, and right, searching for any kind of support. But the others only sat back and watched him. Gaunt. Bone weary.
“Well, nephew?”
The lesser lassertane bowed his head, “You are my Bloodchief.”
“I am,” he nodded his head, the shaggy folds of his throat puffing up slightly. “And I bring xenos to Dirt Witch.” The Bloodchief scanned the troop, waiting for anyone to disagree. When none of them did, he barked a few orders, and they scrambled to clean up their camp.
The Bloodchief limped back over to Poire, Yarsi close in tow.
“Forgive my people,” he said. “They are never warm. Always hungry.” Thank you for saving my Yarsi.”
“We don’t mean to cause problems,” Poire said, but the Bloodchief was already waving away his apologies.
“You save my Yarsi. Now I save you.” He leaned heavily against a shelf, grunting and clutching at his side as he sank down among the pile of bones that had spilled off the sarcophagi. He squeezed his eyes shut and gasped, and started coughing, and laid his head against a tomb with some ancient script carved into its dusty recesses. The cough wracked his whole body, and Yarsi knelt at his side. Gently adjusting his leathers, and trying to rebind his bandages. Instead of worried though, if anything, she seemed pleased.
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“Don’t worry,” Yarsi said, without looking up at Poire. “She Who Remembers will help you.”
“Why did you stand up for us?”
“Why you save my life? It was foretold.”
At that, the Bloodchief groaned, “Yarsi, you think everything is foretold.”
“Well it is. She Who Remembers sees all. Knows all.”
Poire felt an overwhelming surge of gratefulness. A desire to help those that helped him. “I will ask her to aid you. To pay you back.”
Yarsi’s eyes lit up, “She said you would say that!”
“I’m serious. Maybe once I find Sen, I’ll be able to fix your world.”
Yarsi gasped. “That too! She said. Everything about you, she knows.”
Poire opened his mouth to argue, and found that all the words felt… empty, somehow. As if a void that had always been there was now growing.
How can someone I’ve never met know anything about me?
Foretold. Quickly, it was becoming his least favorite word.
How much of my life has already been written?
The void was growing, separating him from everyone else. Soon, he feared, it might be too wide to cross.
**\*
“Ags?”
A voice crowed her name. A puff of white vapor from his beak.
“Agraneia?”
It took her a long moment to remember this face was real.
“What?” she grunted.
“You alright?”
“Same as always.”
“Yeah, well,” Eolh sidled up next to her, wrapping himself tighter in his cloak, “That’s what I was afraid of.”
Were all avians this blunt? Even the greenest grunt could keep his opinion to himself.
I never asked for his help. Don’t want it, either.
And yet, Eolh kept offering. She hated him for that. Hated how good it felt, to know he cared about her.
The deeper they walked through the catacombs, the more disjointed the maze became. Shelves crumbled, sarcophagi were cracked and spilled their dusty contents onto the floors. A lassertane mummy, with half its scales still on its bones, lay on one shelf, all alone. It clutched something that might’ve been a book, rotted, so the papers and papery flesh were fused together.
Skulls peered down at her. Faces, too. Always those faces. Soldiers and xenos. Friends, enemies. All the living dead, still haunting her. At least they made sense down here, in this frozen tomb on a world no one had ever heard of. But that didn’t stop them from talking to her…
What good are you, if you won’t kill? A machine without a purpose. A waste of space.
The rest of the troop was sprawled ahead now, their shuffling boot steps growing softer as the ceilings descended. And the piles of bones turned to dust. Decades of bodies, maybe centuries. Maybe more.
“Can I ask you something?” Eolh nudged her.
She grunted, as if to say, couldn’t stop you if I tried.
“Back on the surface. We took out that construct. But you were going to keep fighting, weren’t you? You were about to kill them,” he nodded at the lassertane strung out ahead.
Her feet stopped, though she never told them to. Her mouth refused to open, though the answer was right there.
It’s what I was made to do.
All her life, she had been told how savage and primitive xenos were. The Academy and its glitterscaled officers raised that bar: even the provincials are beneath us true cyrans. But looking at Eolh now, at the sharp intelligence in those black eyes, and knowing that he could see right through her… She knew it was wrong.
And everything she had done in service of the Empire? In service of herself?
Your whole life is wrong.
A vessel, overflowing with emptiness. Her body was freezing. Her fingers were numb. But she couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel much of anything, except the burning hatred for herself. All these bones, all this dust, served only to remind her-
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” The corvani’s voice croaked in the cold air, cracking her thoughts in half. Agra forgot he was even there.
“It’s easy, when you know it’s kill or be killed. But afterwards, you’re not certain. That’s when you start to doubt.”
Agra said nothing. What does he know? She had gone so many years without doubting… Right?
“A while back, I had a hook for a hand. Did I tell you that?”
“No.”
“I got cornered in an alley. Two bloodwings, old friends you might say. One of them came at me, and I didn’t even think. I just sank my hook right into his eye. It popped and turned into jelly.”
Agraneia’s throat was tight. She knew what that jelly felt like. Had done the same with her bare fingers.
“You want to know the truth of it?” Eolh continued. “I was damn pleased with myself. He came at me, and yet he lost an eye. There’s a thrill there, knowing you might die, and you’ve got to put everything you have into living. It kind of fills you with pride. Fighting. Winning. Knowing that you’re better.”
Oh, yes. Agraneia knew that feeling. She had felt it so many times. Even before joining the Academy, before signing up to fight in His Glorious armies, she had felt it. Only fifteen years old, and beating another hotshot greenfin’s head to a pulp.
There was only one word for it: exhilarating.
Hard not to get a taste for that feeling. And once you’ve tasted it enough, hard to feel alive without it…
Another memory came to her. The first time she could remember feeling unsatisfied by the thrill. “We used to let prisoners out of cages,” Agraneia said, her voice sounding dry and cracked in that dusty, frozen place. “Give them knives. And tell them they were free, if they could run. And then, we’d hunt them down for ‘training.’"
“Wow.”
“Hmm,” Agraneia agreed.
“One time, we caught a whole gang coming to torch our side. A bloody scuffle, twenty dead or so. We spent a whole day sawing off their beaks, and nailing them to doors. It was my idea, thought I was so clever.”
“Why?”
Eolh shrugged. “They were getting in on our territory, and I thought it would make a good warning. Do you know how hard it is to drive a saw through a beak? How much dust it makes? This place reminds me of that. Bones smell the same, no matter where you are, I guess.”
Eolh made a face, his eyes and the corners of his beak wrinkling in disgust.
They kept walking. Through shelves and bones, the rest of the troop loping up ahead with their guttering torches. Poire’s armor, giving off a dull blue glow. They passed close to one of those glass columns, webs of cracks running down its mighty height. Their footsteps made a path through the corona of shattered glass.
Agra was talking, though she didn’t remember telling her mouth to open.
“One time. We were sent to clear out a village on Thrass. A few run down huts, thatched roofs turning brown and black. We knew they were hiding in the tunnels below. We made camp, the night before, just outside the village. I was on night watch. When they came to change shifts, they couldn’t find me. Thought I’d gone AWOL, or maybe one of the lassertane slit my throat in the night and took me away. Patrol moved into the village. Found me just sitting there, in the middle of all those huts. Sitting at a campfire. Covered in black and red. Said I’d killed the whole village. I don’t remember any of it.” She looked up at the shelves, marching away into the shadows. Out at all those grinning skulls and the shadows of faces.
This deep in the catacombs, the shelves were more crudely hewn from stone. More ancient. Cracked and slanted and falling against each other, making mountains of dusty rubble. Though they were cracked, two glass columns illuminated this place. A whie glow, flickering up from some place far underground. Casting mad, white shadows across the rows and rows of dead.
There was a hole in the masonry. Half covered by one crumbling shelf. The lassertane squeezed themselves into this tunnel, one by one the troop disappeared. Then the godling, and his glowing armor. And then, it was just her and Eolh.
How many tunnels had she crawled through, on Thrass et Yunum?
And now, she couldn’t make her feet move.
“You coming?” Eolh asked. Holding out his black hand - the feathers tipped with frost. His metal hand, on the cracked stone shelf, a scale’s breadth from some ancient sarcophagus, a thousand years forgotten.
This was wrong.
Normally, she was the one who kept the greenfins in line. Kept them moving, when all the horrors of death and war threatened to swallow them whole. Agraneia the quiet, the machine made of muscle and metal and gunpowder and mud. Don’t think too much. Do what needs to be done. And if you run, you will be shot. Xenos. Friends.
All the same.
The bird-like xeno blinked at her. Patient. His hand still outstretched.
“Why are we here?” Agraneia asked.
“Right now? We’re following this lovely pack of lizards down into yet another hole to meet some holy figure they call ‘Dirt Witch.’ Though why you would pray to a witch who lives in the dirt, I don’t know. Perhaps when you live underground, your gods do too.”
“No,” Agraneia said. “Why are you here?”
“You know why.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Because of him,” Eolh nodded his black, leathery beak at the dark tunnel, where Poire had just gone through.
“You believe in him?”
“Ags, I don’t have to believe in anything. I’ve seen what he can do. He changed my city. I lived in the Cauldron all my life, and I had no idea what it was. What it could be. I thought I knew everything about the shithole I was raised in, but gods damn me, I was wrong. I never knew anything at all.”
“And he does?”
“Listen,” Eolh looked around conspiratorially, as if all the bones might be listening. “Between you and me, the fledgling’s kind of idiot. But at that age, I was cutting off beaks because I thought it made me look tough. So who am I to judge? You can’t take back what you’ve done.”
“Atonement? That’s what you seek?”
“No. Maybe. Maybe, I do want to forgive myself, for who I was. For a chance to become who I’ve always wanted to be.”
“And what is that, corvani? What do you want to be?”
“Better. Same as anyone else.”
She swallowed hard. Heart racing in her throat. Her fingers itched to grab her blades, anxious to strike. The only way she knew how to deal with pain. But there was nothing to strike at. No amount of bloodshed could fix her.
“I envy you, corvani. I can never be forgiven…”
Eolh put a feathered hand on her arm, sending a jolt through her body. A dagger of discomfort so great, she almost jerked out of his grip.
“You have no idea what’s possible,” he said. “None of us do. Not even him.”
“What I’ve done-”
“Is done,” Eolh cut her off. “And it’s nothing compared to what can be done. You have no idea what’s out there.”
“So what?” Agraneia growled, “You think he can just wipe away everything? I’m supposed to follow him, because what? Will he bring back the dead? Will he make the faces go away? I killed them. I killed them and I killed them and I killed- and every time, it was my choice. I chose to be this. I created so much death.”
Both her hands clutched around the hilts of her blades. Gripping so tightly, her knuckles ached.
“You were born in hell, Agra. One of many. That’s not your fault. Now that you see, it’s only your fault if you refuse to climb.”
“What?” Her question came out in a breath of cold, white air. In the tunnel, she could hear the scurrying of lassertane growing quieter. More distant.
“Come with me, Agraneia.” Eolh held out his hand again. “Climb out of hell.”
It was just him and her, standing in this vast expanse of darkness. And somehow, she had never felt further from anyone.
“You were never a monster, Agraneia. You were worse: you were a person, trained to act like an animal. I know, because I was, too. I let myself wallow in it for all my life. Nothing can ever change that. But my eyes have been opened. I see the only thing I can change is what comes next. Do you understand how special that is? How powerful that can be? Look at me,” He leveled his black, knowing eyes on her. And all that space between them seemed to disappear.
“Do you have any idea how much better you can be?”
So simple. So easy. It made her angry. It made her heart beat red, and her chest go tight, and her shoulder tense. It made her want to scream, to fight back, to shove him away from her. To stomp off into that cold, frozen darkness, and never see another face again. Least of all his. Least of all...
“How do I start?” Agra’s voice came out in a cold whisper. “How do I climb?”
“Come with me. Help me help him. I don’t know who this Sen is supposed to be, or what answers Poire thinks she’ll have, but we’re on the right path. I think. I hope.”
“Will it be enough?” Agra asked. What she really wanted to ask was, do you think I’ll ever stop hating myself for what I am?
“That’s up to you,” Eolh said, somehow answering both her questions. “As long as you try, Ags, I can promise you one thing. I’ll be right here next to you. I’ll be climbing and trying, and when you slip and fail, I’ll be here to pick you up. And help you try again. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”
“For how long?”
“For as long as we can. And for as far as we can go. Imagine the gifts we might find. Imagine how we might help our people.”
Her people had already inherited a handful of godly gifts. Such destruction. Agraneia could only shake her head at the thought of what her people might do with more.
But Eolh mistook her. “Yes. Look at you. You’re stronger than I ever was. If I can do it, I know you can.”
He held out his hand once more. Black feathers, tinged with frost.
She took it, and followed him down into the tunnel.
Icicles hung like fangs from the earthen ceiling, trying to bite at her head, her shoulders. She barely registered the growing light that illuminated this dank, dark hole in the world. Coming from somewhere deeper, somewhere up ahead. All the while, the faces followed her. Their chins lifting, their eyes opening in the shadows. Watching her pass by.
But for the first time in forever, they were quiet. Their mouths were shut, giving her just enough space to think about his words.
To hope.
A mile, or ten, she couldn’t tell the difference down here. She only knew her thighs ached from crouching, her back ached from stooping down to avoid the icicles. Her feet were wet, her toes frozen. In one bend of the tunnel, the broken body of an ancient, metal drone lay half-covered in ice. There were more of them down here, lost in the tunnels and lifeless. Stripped and scavenged who knew how many years ago.
The troop of lassertane stopped in a small cavern. There were many paths out, but one path in particular held her attention. A wall of pure energy blocked this path. It rippled and wavered, but did not move. A light so bright, it stung her eyes.
The lassertane gathered, and all faced away from the wall of energy. They extinguished their torches so that acrid smoke filled this small pocket of the world. Then, they burrowed their faces in their clawed hands.
Are they praying? One of the lassertane was murmuring a phrase over and over again, and the others echoed her words.
Poire came up to them then, his liquid armor rippling up and down his body. Covering his whole face. Agraneia couldn’t tell if his armor still glowed, for the light from the shield door was so much brighter.
“Close your eyes,” Poire said. He seemed to know something about this place. “You need to cover your eyes completely.”
Standing with her eyes closed, a question came to her. One she had been pondering since the day she saved that blackmouth child. Or, maybe, long before that.
“Eolh,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“How do you know if you’re climbing in the right direction?”
“Hard to say. Sometimes, nothing makes sense until you’ve been on that path a long time. But sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, it’s as clear as day.”
The lassertane’s prayer came to a climax, a rasping shout. She heard the shield wall ripple. Heard the sucking energy sound as it disappeared.
And even though her eyes were shut, and both hands pressed to her eyelids, the light that came from behind the wall was so bright, she could see it through her fingers. A red, turned to white.
As if someone had stolen the sun, and hidden it underground. As clear as day.