The trees shook, and General Vorpei didn’t care. She barely registered the splintering cracks of tree trunks as something huge raged in the valley.

Gunshots found their way up this hill, too. They ripped the leaves and snapped branches and tore holes in the tattered remains of a warcamp. Smoke filled the air, though the heat of the sun still bulged through the great brown and gray clouds. Ten paces to her left, the ground heaved as a cannonball smashed into the earth, painting the broken tree stumps and trampled rows of tents in mud. Still… Vorpei didn’t care. A stream ran down the hillside, thick with cyran blood.

Down in the green valley, a giant thrashed, crashing a ragged path through foliage and soldiers alike. Murderous warcries filled the jungle, almost like the song of birds. But Vorpei was distracted. Even the soldiers in running across the otherside of the tents with their muskets and rifles clutched in both hands could not hold her attention. They didn’t see her, and she didn’t see them. Instead, she stared at her palms, at the broken scales and blackened skin laced with new metal. Wondering…

What was I doing again?

A flap of pinkish white flesh hung loose on her arm. It clung only because a patch of glittering scales refused to let go of her skin. When she pushed the flap back into place, it slipped back off. So she grabbed the flesh of her forearm, and pulled. Tearing the chunk away so easily.

How weak is this flesh?

Underneath, she caught a glimpse of old muscle intertwined with metallic strings. Then, the blood gushed over the wound and the scent filled her nostrils, stingingly sweet. Vorpei could smell the trace metals in her blood: copper and nickel and zinc. And strange, alien-sounding words she had never known before her transformation. Words like chromium and magnesium.

A gunshot ripped the air overhead, missing her and smashing the wooden pole that supported a massive tent. A medical tent, she thought, though the thought was blurry and slow to form. One huge section of the canvas collapsed on itself, causing a gust to blow out from the tent. She could smell the bodies still inside. Some were ripe, and some had passed long ago.

And one was crawling out of the tent, clutching at his side. His white armband, labeled with a red symbol, was almost completely obscured by blood. Vorpei’s legs whined and hissed, her feet sank deep into the muck, as she walked to catch up with him. He flopped over, looking up at her, until she could see the whites of his eyes. One hand lifted, as though to fend her off.

“Please,” he said. “I’m just a medic.”

She stopped, leaving one foot next to his head. All that metal sank deep into the mud. The medic whimpered. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he kept whispering that word over and over, “Please.”

Vorpei’s boots were grown over with metal, and shining alloys carved twisted paths up leg, thickening and strengthening her stride. Next to her new form, this cyran medic seemed so slight. Slicing through that scaly flesh, she knew, would be so easy. Barely any resistance at all.

“Please. I have a family.”

Vorpei heard, but did not listen. Instead, she was focused on the sluggish thoughts that clawed up from the depths of her consciousness. What was I doing again?

There was someone she needed to find. Someone she needed to speak with? No, that didn’t seem right.

Her neck, sprouting with so much new machinery, creaked as she gazed down at the medic. Trying to remember. What is a medic? Not a threat. A solution to some kind of problem, right?

It didn’t seem right that she should be here, towering over this cyran body as he whimpered and begged at her feet. It didn’t seem right to kill him.

This isn’t right! Something inside her surged to the forefront. He is innocent-

A jolt ran through Vorpei's body. It seized her machine parts all at once, so powerful that she even felt it in her remaining flesh. The jolt sank into her thoughts, and stayed there. It changed her, and became a part of her. A revelation that, once found, could not be unseen. A command.

And commands do not require thought.

Vorpei lifted her foot, and brought it down. One last whimper ended with a wet crunch.

Vorpei stood tall, with one foot sinking into the mud, and the other buried in some lifeless body, scanning the treeline and the haze of smoke.

Across the tangle of ropes and canvas, a flurry of movement erupted from one of the last-standing buildings. A squad of soldiers poured out of a broken doorway, clutching their guns, and charging forward to take up their positions. One barked, and the others dropped down and aimed at her.

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A shower of bullets whispered through her organics parts, plinking off the metal. It was like being brushed by a cold breeze. The bones of her cheek shattered and one of her eyes went dark. The absence of pain made her frown in confusion. Could it really be this weak, this flesh? She was half-blind now, and her mind struggled to regain some semblance of depth perception.

The pupil of her other eye widened, compensating for all the smoke in the air. A shambling shape rushed out from the treeline—not quite a cyran. Wires hung like vines from his body, and his face—once so close to human—was a mass of rotting flesh and malformed metal. Eye sensors sprouted from his mouth and a hole in the side of his forehead revealed a mesh of wires burrowed into his skull.

The shambling thing tore into the squad of soldiers. They died where they stood, except for one who tried to shove his bayonet into the thing. When the thing gripped the musket back, the soldier tried to pull it back. He ended up only bringing the thing closer.

Vorpei watched, impassively, as the thing grabbed the soldier, who was screaming as a metal fist ripped through his chest. The scream became a wretched gurgling.

Vorpei turned away. She had orders that she longed to obey. Why? She slogged deeper into the warcamp, into the remains of the Sseran Thay City. A thought wandered into her mind. I was the keeper of this place once. There was her stone manor, where she had spent so many late nights planning her grand approach with her advisors and military aides. Tattered flags hung from its parapets, and stirred some long-forgotten memory inside of her.

Where is Amarius ? And where are my officers?

Vorpei stopped. Turned in a slow circle, gaping at the destruction of this city she had helped build with her own hands. There were corpses of xenos all around her. No. Not xenos…

My gods, what have I done?

Cyran flesh filled the streets. Bleeding and screaming and burned. She had come to save them. She had given herself up, so that they might live…

With the memory, came the pain. The bullet that was still lodged in her eye-socket suddenly erupted in an agonizing, white-hote fire that tore a scream from her throat and brought her to her knees. She cupped a hand to her eye, her fingers curling and clawing into the ruined flesh, as if she might rip the fire away.

Another jolt pinged through her body. A wordless command, a sound like nothing she had ever heard. The voice of a god?

Cold liquid dripped into her emptied eye-socket. Vorpei brought her hand away, and there was metal hardening on her fingers. It was filling the gap where a bullet had drilled a hole through her eye. And the pain was still there. She knew it was. She could still feel that white-hot fire.

She just didn’t care.

Vorpei’s legs carried her through the manor. Her metal feet crunching through the sea of bodies and decorated uniforms. There were papers thrown across the room, some stuffed into a fireplace. Secret documents, Consul Deioch’s attack plans burned in haste when Vorpei and the rest of her soldiers stormed the city.

Vorpei bent down, and picked up a sheaf of paper. The rough paper, detailing gunpowder and cannon shipments from Cyre, crumbled in her hands. How many spies had she sent to Sseran Thay to catch even a glimpse of this?

A cannonball smacked into the manor, shattering the last of the windows. Deioch’s army was shelling the city. And another sound—a thudding, crashing sound, which was not artillery. More like giant footsteps. She knew it was something important. She just couldn’t remember.

Outside, in the courtyard behind the manor, there were soldiers tied to stakes. All but one of them was dead. This last one tilted his head to look down at her. His lips were cracked and the flesh of his face was bruised and torn in places. His skin was dying in places, she could smell the rot. Machines don’t do that. As Vorpei gazed up at the fiery glint in his swollen eyes, a sensation scratched at the back of her mind. A vague familiarity.

“General?” the tied-up soldier’s voice creaked like a rusted hinge. “Is it really you?”

Yes, she did know this soldier. Not by his name, but by his purpose. He was from the scout squad they had sent out months ago, back when Deioch forced Vorpei to abandon Sseran Thay.

“Thank the gods,” the scout said, “I knew you would come for us. I knew you would come back to help us.”

Help you? The thoughts swam and spiraled, just out of reach. Is that what I’m doing?

A shock of realization.

I gave up everything to save them. My army. My life. My body.

She couldn’t believe what they had done to her scouts—to their fellow cyrans. He was so emaciated, and there were stains all down his pants, and his wrists and torso were raw where the ropes dug into his flesh. It pained her to look upon him.

He was going to die. But she couldn’t leave him there. Vorpei moved to cut his ropes. She said, “Don’t move,” and her voice sounded strange to her ears.

A command jolted through her body, and the pain changed. Vorpei’s metal-filled eye socket itched and bulged. Something made a wet, slurping sound as it crawled out of the pool of metal.

Deep inside her, something was screaming. But Vorpei didn’t care.

An articulated strand of metal snaked out from the socket, long and twisting like some segmented insect. It serpentined its way up to the scout’s eyes, brushing his face with long feelers.

He recoiled. Gasping in pain. He almost said something, before the metal insect-thing dove into his mouth, and burrowed up into his skull.

What remained of the insect-thing retracted back into Vorpei’s eye socket. She watched him for a moment, twitching and writhing, flailing his head back and forth as the machine took root in his brain.

Not sure why, Vorpei felt the need to soothe him. When she spoke, her voice was an eerie combination of cyran song and guttural electronics.

“The end of all things is coming. Flesh is weak. Only the machine will endure.”

Perhaps, if the scout was lucky, he would endure too.

A ball smacked into the dirt, not three steps from her, spraying her with mud. This time, she didn’t need the jolt of command. She remembered.

Deioch was dead. Her hybrid soldiers had taken the city. It was the Emperor who was sieging the city now, trying to reclaim his gate. She could feel the vibrations his massive feet made over on the next hill, as he flattened trees and hybrid soldiers and tried to turn back the tide.

Yes, he had come down from his high throne to lead the masses. A machine, who wore flesh. She could taste the scent of blood in the air, and all those delicious trace metals.

It smelled like he was losing.

The machine that was once a cyran named Vorpei trudged towards her prey. Obeying the commands of her Sovereign.