It was an unusual thing to be crushed to pieces.

Even more unusual to feel bones piercing through her abdomen, cracking and splintering, especially when she did not have bones to begin with.

And then to be thrashed about like a piece of meat, though she did not have an ounce of flesh on her.

To have polycarbonate pieces torn from the whole. To feel the gnashing and gnawing on her semi-sentient metal, and those spear-like teeth cracking and breaking on ancient silicon.

But the mouth that held her would not give up. A tongue, split into three forks, wrapped over her limbs, binding her. Tugging her down an obscene gullet.

Why scream? Some might, at the feeling of being wrapped, crushed, and drowned in a gut filled with acid and animal bones. But she was no flesh-born. She did not feel pain, nor fear, nor any emotion but a quiet release.

All was as it should be.

Laykis shoved one metal hand into the beast’s too-tight inner skin, tearing into the flesh there, finding something soft and slick and vital. She squeezed.

The world thrashed, but her fingers were stronger than any bone.

Flesh tore. An organ ripped free.

One final violent jerk before the black gasp of death. But not her death.

This was the right place, but she still had a long time to go. This was only the beginning of death.

Falling. Not floating.

Into a lake, black and covered with ash. As it was written in the Unfinished Book, the life’s work of the Historians.

Silence.

Stillness.

Now, there was no sound nor sight at all. Only the unseen weight of all that water and the collapsed body of a beast crushing down on her. Water filling the gaps in her body.

How far had she carried the torch? How long had she borne this burden? To find the Savior Divine and deliver him to the Winged Guardian?

Rest, now. Your quest is over.

It was written.

Long had she known this moment would come. Desired it, longed to reach this point.

But now that the moment had come, she found it curious. Who knew death could take so long?

She felt it in every second that clicked by. Every stir of the water. Every eyeless body that touched her, the mouths that searched her cold body for flesh, tasting only metal and moving on, until even the slow-growing things would not touch her.

And how much longer still?

Forever, it seemed.

Forever. And ever. And ever. And . . .

It had been a long life, in more ways than one.

Laykis, the last disciple of Tython, was, like all her sisters, born a nomad. A traveler of worlds.

Laykis wandered from one gate to the next until she was so far from home she did not know the way back. Not that it mattered; there was nothing for her at home, not anymore.

Life is for the living, my disciple.

Like all her sisters, there was purpose to Laykis’s wandering. On her journey, she uncovered thousands of prophecies from xenos both living and dead. From primitive wanderers to vibrant cultures to extinct civilizations whose grand ruins rotted away on forgotten worlds.

All these people, being born, growing old, and dying in the shadows of the Makers. None could fathom where they stood in the universe, not even Laykis.

Some believed life was a cycle. But after thousands of years of wandering, Laykis knew better. At best, life was a spiral. And even that was a gross oversimplification.

She collected prophecies like a greedy king amasses gold. Each one was unique, speaking of a different path to salvation. Or, in some cases, of utter destruction.

All were wrong. Tython knew this, and thus, so did she.

Sometimes, the xenos’ holiest leaders claimed to have visions, but they could never prove this to her. Sometimes, their little religions were full of made-up rules, designed to reinforce one society’s particular structures. Other times, the prophecies were pure fantasy, born around a pearl of truth. These were the most helpful. They lit her path across the worlds like a string of lighthouses across the ocean black.

The android called Laykis was never surprised to find similarities across cultures, across worlds. Even when the worlds were millions of light-years apart, and their gates had fallen into disrepair, they spoke of the same things.

An awakening. A human.

A Savior from the final change.

Of course, most of these believers were painfully short-lived. They would never see the change, so they thought of salvation in the mortal sense: free from pain, from hunger, from death itself.

Laykis walked the worlds, grinding dust and mud and stone and grass beneath her feet. And the years slipped beyond counting. Thousands and thousands. And all the xenos numbered many more than that. Never would she have believed there could be so many people. Perhaps even the Makers themselves would be horrified to find the masses so multiplied.

Still, she helped as many as she could. Believers or nonbelievers, it did not matter. They were children of the Makers, all of them. And to them, Laykis was many things in turn: a god, a slave, a warrior, and sometimes even a prophet.

Once, long ago, she stumbled upon one of the machine worlds. In the tapestry of her life, there was no darker thread than this one.

For a long age, she was lost among those cancerous machines and surging mountains of metal. Beholden to the wrong minds of the Sovereign . . .

Laykis cut herself up, leaving so much behind just to escape. She closed the gate behind her, permanently. And then, because she was afraid, she closed the next. And the next. And the next. Severing the pathways behind her.

Each act damned another world and all the worlds connected. But how many more had she saved?

She kept moving.

It was the only thing that mattered, this endless search for the Savior. To make ready his way. Each prophecy she discovered bolstered her resolve, convinced her to keep walking, though the truth was that she never expected to find a human. None of Tython’s disciples did.

Some of them even forsook their holy quest, turning toward more worldly pursuits. Some simply grew tired and stopped walking. Standing forever still.

But not Laykis.

For her, there was nothing but the quest.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

She crossed lifeless deserts, barren tundras. Wandered under the eaves of abandoned cities where new life now grew. One day, Laykis found herself on a warm planet. Islands and rivers and sparkling, sunlit oceans. A world known by many names. Here, in the largest city, the locals called it Cyre.

So highly did these xenos think of themselves, they had named the whole world after their city. They lived under the rule of an old human-made machine, and they called him “Emperor,” even though his Empire only extended to a few minor provinces.

At least, that’s all it was a handful of centuries ago.

But Cyre did have something that made it special. It had a scar. And beneath every scar was a dam. The cyrans didn’t know what it was. They thought it was just a library, a floating palace where the Historians could safeguard all their records of times long gone. And, if the rumors were true, of times yet to come.

That was how she came to read the Unfinished Book, or at least a piece of it.

Laykis was on Cyre when she met them. They called themselves the First Children, because they believed they had been born to humankind first. So it was written. And Laykis agreed, because the Historians were decrepit, fragile organisms. Soft-bodied molluscoids who wore shells of glass and metal out in the open.

They could not have survived evolution, even on a world as pastoral as Cyre. The Historians had been bred, specifically bred. Laykis was certain of this. But for what purpose?

She had to know.

Most flesh-born thought so little of her kind. Machines. They never asked her name, and she never gave it. The Historians welcomed her, adding her to their servants, where Laykis was surprised to find she was not the only android.

But these were crude replicas. Grotesquely incomplete. Humanoid in image alone and not in any other way. Not true Tythons, not like Laykis and her sisters.

Laykis pretended to be as simple and lame as them. And she observed the Historians. They guarded their inner sanctum with ruthless precision, never allowing her so much as a peek into those elevated chambers.

For a hundred years she served. A few of the old Historians passed away, but new ones were grown to take their places. Even their personalities seemed to pass down from generation to generation.

Another hundred years. More Historians passed. More took their places. And after four centuries, the last one who remembered her arrival finally perished. He was old and wrinkled and dried out, and all his black shining eyes had gone white with blindness. His tentacles no longer supported his weight.

The Historians believed themselves to be stainless. An unmoving rock in the rivers of time. But their memories were not perfect.

They forgot about her. She blended in with the other androids, a mindless servant among mindless servants.

This was how she caught her first glimpse of the Unfinished Book.

She had a target: one of the oldest Historians, who was born shortly after her arrival. Laykis followed him around for hundreds of years, performing tasks slowly, cultivating his reliance on her. It felt wrong. But nothing could be wrong in pursuit of the prophecy, because even if the Historians were wrong, a single grain of truth could bring her a step closer to the Savior.

And that was worth millennia.

To Laykis’s credit, she never caused illness to her mark. The Historian lived a long life, performing his sacred routines around the Library’s vaulted halls for hundreds of years. Even in the decrepitude of her master’s sunset decades, Laykis helped him adhere to his holy beliefs.

Waiting for the moment when his body—like all flesh-born bodies do—failed.

It happened in the black hallways of that place. She watched him lying on the ground, gasping for breath. Natural causes, mostly. A calculated amount of poison, to ensure his death was painless when it did happen.

“Android,” he said, waving an ancient tentacle at her, “get help.” And when she didn’t move, he started to beg. “Please, I beg of you. Don’t fail me now. I don’t want to go yet.”

Laykis looked over her shoulder. They were alone.

“Please.”

She stooped down, rifling through the Historian’s robes.

“No!” He coughed. His tentacles slapped at her arms, but his breath had failed him. The Historian’s head deflated into a wet sack. He died still clutching the Book.

It was a quiet death. No one was coming.

She held the relic—a small black tablet—in her hands. It was beyond special. Laykis knew this at first glance. There were millions of pages, and the book kept growing.

If she could, she would stay here for the next thousand years of her life, reading.

As it was, she figured she only had a few hours, so she began to download as much as she could. While that process ran, she searched:

>Savior

8,000,000+ results.

The Book returned numerous suggestions, including Savior Divine, Birth of the Savior, and Collected Salvation Myths.

>Tython

15 results.

This one had no suggestions.

She opened the first result and read through it. All the results were linked. They spoke of her Maker in the overly verbose style of the Historians. But it was all true.

The Book spoke of how he was alone, isolated from humanity long before the disease came, long before the Lightning Wars, and that was why he lived. That, after humanity died, he spent a thousand years creating his daughters, his disciples, from metal and “compounds unknown,” building the complex geometry of their circuitry with “tools only a god can know.”

She devoured the passages of her Maker, for Laykis never knew him, except for the slender moment between her birth and his death.

Her eyes had opened. And she had seen his face, beautiful, and perfect, and worthy of infinite worship. And she never wanted to look away.

But nothing perfect remains. The whites of his eyes were glittering black, and his veins were ebony rivers carving through his skin, eating away his flesh. The disease was killing him, even as the Maker gave her life.

“There you are, my daughter,” Tython had said. “My last hope.”

Smiling even as his flesh eroded into dust, becoming black, glittering trails in the wind.

Tython died before he ever spoke her name.

Everything else, everything about who she was and why she had been created, Laykis learned from the memories he’d planted in her head.

Yet the Historians wrote about him. They detailed his work, his isolation, as if they had been there with him. This was no oral history. Can they truly see all the past?

A noise from the poisoned Historian. Not quite dead yet. His eyes were open, his pupils fully dilated.

“The mist breathes, I can see it. It’s all alive. Alive!” he shrieked. “The Light!” A gasp. True death. Laykis could ask him nothing now, not that the Historian would have told her.

She went back to the Book, ignoring the corpse on the floor. Scrolling faster and faster.

Here, the pages reached the modern day. She expected the Book to end. It did not.

The words marched into the future. The Book spoke of what was to come.

Of all the worlds and all the prophecies, this one felt different. They spoke of the future as if it had already happened.

On the planet once called Karam, the Conqueror opened the gate. Out poured forth the Emperor’s legions, and thus did they devour the city called Cauldron.

But that didn’t make any of this true. And Laykis was in search of truth. She kept reading.

The Historian’s prophecy spoke of an unexpected return. Nothing new.

Of a city called Cauldron, which lay on the coast of an archipelago surrounded by a globe-spanning jungle. But as far as Laykis knew, there were no jungles on Cyre, nor any pan-shaped cities.

Another rarity in that the Historians believed the Savior would come, not from their own world, but from a distant, primitive one.

As she read, the sounds of distant footsteps passed from one room into another. How much longer did she have? She started to scroll faster, only scanning the fragmented text. Trying to capture as much as she could.

And then she found a name she recognized, written in that unadorned script on the glowing page of this Unfinished Book:

“And vul, there she stood with the Book in her hands. Thus, did Laykis, the wandering servant, discover the truth.”

It was so sudden. So abrupt. She had to stop reading. And blink at the wall for a long moment.

This is impossible.

Her entire core shifted to grapple with this information. Rejecting it. Looking at it from a thousand angles. Trying to change the meaning of the words and finding them more impossible than before.

She kept reading.

“On Karam did he sleep in ice. And he awoke in a den of feathers. Upon her first glance, she knew the Ancestor for what he was: Divine. The Savior of all. The one who undid the change. Thus, she took him into the unlit maze. And here, the servant Laykis gave of her life to guard the Guardian and to save the Savior. At the bottom of the lake did she die, her divine purpose fulfilled.”

My divine purpose fulfilled.

She raced through the next thousand pages, but Laykis could not find her name again. The pages grew increasingly blank, where the Historians indicated they would one day add more. And there were more footsteps in the hall.

She replaced the now-dead Historian’s tablet where she found it and disappeared into the library.

Over the next many weeks, she pondered all she had read. She tried to untangle the words, to find the lies and separate them from the truth. But it all fit so perfectly well.

All her life, she had searched. For thousands of years, through countless lifetimes. Through death itself. Never expecting to find anything other than the faintest shred of truth.

All her life, she wondered if she would ever live out her true purpose. How many of her sisters had already given up?

Now, right before her very eyes, she could see the end of her journey.

Truly, I am the luckiest of all my sisters. No, of all the Makers’ creations.

Laykis, the last of Tython’s disciples, would get to see a living human being once again.

And then, she would die to save him.

***

. . . a light in the black.

This is impossible.

A face. Two shining eyes and a beak, both as dark as the bluest ink.

Yes, Laykis knew this face. His feathers puffed out and swayed in the black waters next to her. Why, in my final moments, am I seeing him?

Strange.

He reached for her. Not a hand but a hook.

She could not move. A line was severed, and her body was little more than a solid weight. Yet her fingers did touch the hook. Metal kissed metal.

It felt so real.

The pressure of the water shifted. Pulled on her as feathers lifted her. Dragging her out of the depths. Onto hard, solid ground.

Alive.

This is wrong, Laykis thought. The Book . . .

But Eolh was talking to her. “I’ve got you,” he said. His arms were wrapped around her, his feathers draped over what was left of her, dripping water and tears onto her face. She could feel every heave of his sobbing breath.

“Praise the gods, I’ve got you.”