The walls groaned with a disturbing, buckling sound, and Olm had to shout to be heard, “Come on, couran! We’re close!”

He could smell the stone dust of the quarry, somewhere beneath their feet. And the bitter, metallic scent of the Dys. Thought he could hear the sounds of battle not far below. Despite the hole in his heart, his veins started to sing.

But Caly was staring. It wasn’t the trail of black dust that caught her attention. Nor was it the Queen’s gnarled creature, sprawled on the ground in front of an open door, unconscious yet cradling his staff like a rigid and unwieldy security blanket. No, Caly was standing, mouth agape, at the light pouring out of the doorway.

The light washed over her, brightening her pale blue skin, and making her eyes glow gold. It was a painfully familiar light. Tantalizing, in the way that a really good dream stops right before you get to the best part, and no matter how hard you try to shut your eyes, you can’t go back.

“Olm,” she said. Her head didn’t move.

Olm lumbered back to her, and looked over her shoulder into the room. And then his eyes were glowing, too.

“Wow,” Olm rumbled.

Hills of gold and palladium coins rose up from a valley of jewels. A river of sapphires wound through banks of necklaces, rings, charms, bracelets, and at least one tiara. But these were mere trinkets, compared to the mountains of cash and credits that had been shoved up against the walls.

“How much do you think it is?”

“More,” Caly choked on her own drool. She wiped her lips, and tried again. “More than my House. Void and stars, this might be enough to buy a position on the Mass Council.”

“Or a piece of the Navy,” Olm said. Suddenly, the world was going dark for reasons entirely unrelated to the hole in his heart. For a brief moment, he entertained the fantasy of what he might do with all that money. What glorious past he might reclaim… Or better yet, what glorious future? My own ships … a mercenary Navy.

The floors shuddered, spilling Synar credits and fine-cut gems down the hillsides. A gurgle made Olm spin around. The Queen’s servant was seizing, his limbs jerking back and forth, though his blue-black fingers still clutched the staff. A distant, haunting screech echoed through the hallways. It seemed to go on forever until something caved in with a muted crash.

A new scent poured in. Even down here, he could taste the open desert. For once, it was as sweet as a sugar lemon. It must’ve been close, because Caly smelled it too.

“There’s a way out,” she said.

“The ceilings must be caving in.”

“And—” she wheeled around, searching the hallway. “And there’s a cart. There’s two of them. Olm, we could load them up.”

“We could,” Olm rumbled. It took a surprising amount of effort to keep his face a mask.

“We can walk. We can walk all the way back to Blacktree, and then maybe we’ll find a truck or something. And the money, Olm.”

She was looking at him. Almost pleading.

He didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t give her an inch of rope with which to drag him into this.

“I could buy my way in to the Cavaliers. Fuck Zyroc. Fuck the sponsorship. I could buy my way in, and I could buy my own ship, we could get you one too, any kind, and we could—we could—”

She went silent. Her hands bunched into fists. She grimaced and shut her eyes and squeezed them tight, and it looked like she had tried to swallow a thorn-orange without peeling it.

“Cal?”

Her face was doing that thing. Normally, she’d have her visor up, and it would frost over, and those little fans would click on, but now he could see it happening. Her pale blue skin, getting darker and darker. Purple, almost red now. She bit her lip until it turned almost white.

“Caly.”

She threw her head back, and shouted, “Fuck!” She stomped into the room and kicked at the closest pile of precious metal, sending an explosion of silver and gold across the room. She scooped up armfuls of credit bills and threw them at the wall, the effect of which was rather diminished by the fact that the drifted around like flower petals at a wedding.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing,” she snarled, “The stupid, fucking right thing, okay? Saints and fucking stars, this is all your fault, Olm.”

“What is?”

“He’s our partner. He’s our partner, and we need him, and more importantly, he needs us. So, we’ve got to go back down there and save his stupid face and his stupid smile and his idiot ass, and all this?” she picked up an outrageously expensive egg-shaped bauble, the kind of decoration one usually finds in penthouses at the top of very tall skyscrapers. Caly looked at it longingly for a moment, and then smashed it on the floor.

“Satisfied?” Olm said, barely holding back his smile.

And, like the winds of a storm going suddenly still, she changed. She sat on a hill of coins, and sucked in a shuddering breath. “What kind of couran am I? Never good enough.”

“What the hells are you talking about?”

“Him. Olm. Him. You said it yourself. I need him. We have to risk both our lives to save some half-cocked idiot from a planet nobody’s ever heard of because he can do things that I can’t. And how am I supposed be enough? What couran will ever look at me, the girl who can’t stand on her own? I hate being like this.”

Complicated things, courans were. Olm wondered if they ever got exhausted dealing with other courans. Imagine a whole planet of them. He shook his head, and asked, “Being like what?”

Her glare softened into sadness. The hard line of her lips trembled. “Too small,” she said. “And too weak.”

Olm opened his mouth, ready to spill the wisdom of the War Poets, about the ten thousand forms of strength, and how true weakness came not from an absence of strength, but from an absence of will, and how she—Caly—was maybe the most willful person he had ever met, and how Olm was more than honored to be here with her, that the two of them might be a little stronger together, but before he could say anything past the word, “You—” Caly threw herself at him, and wrapped her arms around him, and squeezed.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“I don’t want you to get hurt, Olm,” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder, “And I’m sorry, and it’s my fault you’re out here, and I don’t know what the fuck the Queen is, but I shouldn’t have—I don’t know, I just—”

“I’m with you.”

She blinked up at him.

“As long as you’re with me,” he finished.

She sniffed. “Always.”

“What’s the plan?” he asked. “Go in, guns blazing?”

She sniffed again. “You got any guns?”

“Ah,” Olm said, clenching his fingers where the contacts of his Hammer should have been. “Right.”

Caly pulled away, and smoothed out the wrinkles in her tunic. She stalked over to the body of the Queen’s servant and, with some effort, she pried its fingers off the staff—even unconscious, the creature was weirdly strong. Small bumps and nodes acted as the controls, and when she ran her fingers over them, the shape of the staff’s tip changed, so that it squeezed and grew into a kind of claw. Olm felt a shift in the air, and all the lights in the room seemed to focus on Caly.

She waved it. The walls rippled.

Olm shrugged, “That could work.”

***

The Spirine told her this planet had another name, once, in that ancient and endless cipher used solely by the Dys. When the last of the Elder Diaspora disappeared, and the old connections went quiet, that name (along with untold knowledge) was lost.

I will be the first to know it. The first in a thousand millennia.

It was so obvious, now. Why hadn’t she done this before? Why had she toiled for so many long years, carefully tapping and picking away at the Shell, trying to learn every last rune on its surface without waking it—when all the real knowledge was locked away inside? It must be opened.

It wanted to be opened.

In a way, she had to thank the human for pushing her to this. For too long, I have hesitated. I have clung to caution. Like the wind blows the seeds of a tree, she had needed this push. And once she opened the Shell, she would find everything. Perhaps, she would even allow the human to live as one of her servants, a reward for his constructive cowardice. But first, she had to open the thing.

She knew how it began. The Spirine told her. The first touch. Entombed in the Spirine’s own dyssian metal, she could feel it, the shell responding, opening like a flower waiting for her pollen.

The problem was everything that came after. Breaking the cipher was no one-sided exchange. Even as she read the dyssian script, it read her back. Symbols and arrangements changed, even as her eyes (the eyes of the Spirine) passed over them. Only whispers of meaning, like the shreds of a half-forgotten dream, passed into her.

And yet, the Shell awakened.

The Spirine hummed, its immense reserves of stored energy charging down the pillar of the Breaker. The roots went deeper than anyone on the surface knew, and drank not only from the magnetic core of this planet, but also by consuming the matter of this world, as if this planet was nothing more than a packed with vital nutrients. All that vast, stored power, waiting just for this moment.

The Breaker’s tip touched the Shell. It etched over the first line, spiraling slowly out. There was a moment of nervous tension, as she worried that she would reach a point and not know how to continue, but her fears were unfounded. The runes, shifting and unknowable, resolved as her many eyes passed over them. The runes glowed, a spiral of light carving out from the center so smoothly that she could not help exalting in the energy running through her, through the Spirine.

Her understanding of the world became clear. And when she thought she could see it all, it only grew clearer.

Where had all this truth been? How could I have not seen it before? All the secrets of the Dys, all the answers, all the great, lost knowledge, all of it—hers.

The Spirine crooned a warning, a metal siren moaning a single, forlorn note into the cavern. She felt it, shuddering through all her obsidian limbs. Something was wrong. Her reserves were draining—being siphoned. She tried to pull back. Tried to slow the current of her energy, but when she reached under the surface, she felt something reach back. It felt like fingers, wrapping around her forearm, dragging her, no matter how much she resisted, down.

No, she thought. No, this isn’t right. This isn’t how I—

And a whisper, like the voice of Time itself, answered with a single, echoing word that filled her with a primordial dread.

“YES.”

***

Shattered glass glistened in the hall, and pieces of metal rained as the ceiling buckled. Hyper-oxygenated air burst through holes in the walls, and the scent of waste water and astringent chemicals filled the halls, undercut by a current of fresh-cracked stone. Caly kept looking back to make sure Olm was still with her. He had a hand clutched to his chest, the other held out to keep him steady. And when he tripped and plunged to the shard-covered floor—Caly was there to catch him. She shoved him up, and steadied his shaking feet on the ground, only for him to fall down to his knees.

“Come on, hrutskuld. You’re stronger than this.”

He looked up at her, and she could see how frustrated he was with himself. How close he was to giving up. All she could give him now were empty words. But you would be surprised, her mother had once said, how much power the right words can have.

The memory gave her an idea. Her mother used to do this to her, all the time. It made her burn with shame and fury, but it never failed.

“Hrutskuld,” she said, summoning every ounce of disappointment she could muster, “Where is your honor? Are you really the kind of worm that everyone thinks you are?”

He grunted. He growled. He stood with a roar, and pushed himself forward, spit flying from his gritted teeth. “My honor,” he said. “Is right here, couran.” He howled and took off running, stomping through glass and leaping over metal braces, and she had to sprint to catch up with him.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, barely visible through the crumpled, winged doors. Not even Caly could crawl through such a small gap.

“Another way,” she said, panting. “There has to be another—what are you doing?”

Olm, still gripping his hand to his wounded chest, lumbered up to the blocked entrance. “You know there isn’t time,” he said.

“There’s no way we’ll both fit. We won’t make it.”

“We won’t,” he agreed. “But you will.

“Olm—”

“Never said this to a couran before, ‘specially not you, but for once, Caly, just shut your mouth and go with my plan.”

And before she could argue, he braced his legs, and hooked his arms under one of the wings, and heaved. She could hear his teeth grinding and popping against each other as he strained his whole body. A dark flower of blood blossomed on his tunic. She wanted to stay. She wanted to get him out of—

“Go!”

Caly dove into the gap. Her shoulders bruised on the edges, and metal jabbed her stomach and her hips. The door shifted, and despite all of Olm’s efforts, the wings clamped tight on her chest, so that even her shallowest breaths couldn’t fill her lungs. Stuck.

The hrutskuld screamed a roar. His voice, muffled by the door, yet echoed through the groaning hallways. A great hrutskuld always sings at his own funeral, he’d told her once. And by the stars, did he sing.

The wings of the door lifted. Sweet, cold air filled her lungs, and she wriggled through the gap and slipped out on the other side, falling, face and elbows first, onto the floor. She jerked her legs out, and the door snapped shut.

“I’ll come back,” she shouted through a gap in the wings.

He said nothing.

“Olm?” she peered through the branches. Saw his pale face, weak from the effort, sweat dripping from the cracks in his skin. He smiled at her, too weak to say anything.

But his smile was calm. Peaceful.

Happy is the hrutskuld who chooses his final hour.