Toothed wind. Shay and Woid were already shivering, the wounded metal station around them in an older or younger state. Their throats were tight, painful against the frozen air. Everything had been strangled by Quiet. Holed walls glared and allowed in the howls of haunted winds. Holes bashed in from inside and outside. Corals grew weird across still things. The bony and distant reverse-spires of Imirka stared at Shay and Woid from the open wounds of the station.
“When are we?” Woid remarked. “The towers like that?”
Shay craned for a better look at those 'reverse-spires': towers growing into the earth and not out of it, deep rather than tall.
∞
She then joined Woid by a chewed-at railing, and there in the station far below among other mangled rails a ghostly shuttle waited alone.
“go back, and see it never left.” Shay muttered through her mask, remembering the paper Panzjrah had given her in the factory.
The shuttle’s ribbed mechanisms were showing, trying over-and-over to close and open air-locking doors no longer there.
“I got the location of the prison from Panzjrah.” She offered blankly, breathing hard against the cold.
“You beat him?” Woid was about to clap, if nothing but to warm himself up.
“Helped him.”
“Oh, he won’t like that.”
“He didn’t - but he just gave it up. Staged.”
Woid put his arms behind his head and stretched, disappointed. Intrigued.
“I didn’t learn anything new, it’s back here where we started.” Shay faced the shuttle below directly, her bony prosthetic clicking as she counted something on her fingers. “That one we missed before but it’s here now somehow, this rhyme around.” Unable to remember the word, she chose something that was close enough.
“Lay’d Payn throwing Fate off the thread, if I remember The Dam’e rightly.” Woid offered from memory.
“Could be.” Shay agreed, though tired from loops and circles tread.
∞
“Oh, look where we are…” Woid whispered as he and Shay crouched to better hide themselves nearby, watching what must to them feel like the past unfolding.
∞
Below in the station depths a younger or older Woid ‘fell’ onto the tracks and as The Ersecutor followed him, an umbrastep trick he pulled. Woid now on the higher ground, he leapt and stabbed down with every might onto Argus’ helmet. Though a precise blow and strong, a certain death from above to lesser souls and metals, his dagger glanced uselessly and he was forced to earn back his escape. The Ersecutor, totally unharmed albeit thwarted - was for all his eyes unable to find Woid - and vaulted with ease deeper into the forgotten dust of the shattered station. Knowing somehow which of those many ways was best to go. Shay and Woid waited for the noise of his movements to cease - the clang of his helmet against the narrow and scrape of his broken sword.
“Can he not see us from here?” Shay wondered aloud.
“He wasn’t all that well… Panzjrah was going on about his pistols or rifle being tampered with and I might well believe him. That first shot they fired was an odd colour.”
Shay recalled:
“Laced with something, I’d say - the sort of thing we might do. And I suppose even your technique can’t pierce his helm. Good to know.”
∞
“I’ve pierced through any armour ever in front of me, but his freaky helmet…” Woid reminisced sadly as Shay leapt down from the bent railing without him.
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Woid was already there sitting on a miserably crumbled bench: “His skin’s nearly as bad, can’t get a proper stab in - very defensive in his stance.”
“The helm must be Hadaeon steel.”
“Me and Serib heard something about that…” Woid was about to carry on, but Shay was too focused and her ghoulish ‘new’ arm disturbed him, there being finally a quieter moment for him to watch it move.
∞
She plotted silently. Mounds of drifting life grew oddly across what once was rubble and other debris over the station ground, climbing its halved pillars. She foraged for something useful but did not recognise any of the plants. Distant relatives. A scratching sound caught Woid’s attention and his eyes saw a message in a clearer patch of the station’s floor. Dug by nails, he thought:
“We have two options…” read a message I long ago left for them.
“What is that?” Woid asked Shay, both of them clearing frozen lichen out of the way, the scratches continuing:
“Where you are - splits into two versions - unfortunately. My enemy has the upper hand in this section, though it may not seem so as you go through.”
His warm breath was misting up the cold air in front him as Woid looked at his visible hand. His fingertips were bloody having brushed over My scabby letters; they felt like he had cut them on something. Nettles stinging.
∞
“The shuttle leads you to Me; though if you are to wait for the next thunder, you may further pursue Serib. I may be drifting more unreliably now, my Amneshay… I do so dearly need you here with me, that I might forget my sillier sides and get on with what needs to be done. Would you read the contract and come to me first? Serib is strong enough.”
“The purple has a bloody texture, too.” Woid rubbed it thin between his fingers, seeing some letters crimson and others not.
“Violet, I must correct you.” Floors and pillars scratched; ancient messages replying to the present. “I am very terribly old; you're beholding a being of ultra and infra alike. Blurred lines.”
Shay showed the contract to Woid’s puzzled face.
“Tripartite?” He scoffed. “And the whole thing contradicts itself. You should have given this over to me before signing… but your signature…”
“I was a girl. Through all the different versions, that’s the one I have some recollection of. Time was murdered or nearly was, I don’t know.” She tutted, against different stories with different authoresses and seamstresses vying to be true.
The walls scraped on:
“You’ve been trapped in Their tale spun and stitched, spinning trapped and feebly, venomed up as spider-prey, while I’ve been trying to write you back into mine. Back into my own Tayl where we long have known one another. Of course you feel confused, between ages and pages. I do not recall you in my tayl… Woid, is it? Woid…”
∞
Search the station as they did, no more of My messages could be found.
"That last part..." Woid huffed. "...intended to drive us apart, I wager. You know I'm always in your shadow."
With a hidden smile Shay nodded and motioned for Woid to follow: “I think the shuttle is a trap.”
“I wouldn’t know a trap from a treat at the moment.” Woid boggled his eyes from one bizarre thing to another, handing the contract back to her. “How do you know?”
“The colours match the contract.” She showed him again. “Fate is Lay’d Payn’s enemy. Payn’s words are in red. Fate’s in violet. Though the black, ‘older’ words - I can’t tell if they’re black or darkest red, or darker violet… could be either, so we shouldn’t read more words for now.”
“Not that we can find them. She’s leaving them there for us to find and read, the Lay’d Payn that Serib has been going on about? The one in prison, awaiting execution?” he struggled to suss the possibilities. "So, we follow Serib's thunder as we have been or we get in that shuttle..."
Thunder threw them both to the icy floor, so close was the smacking boom wiping everything out into panic and madness. Having regained their balance and senses, Shay and Woid looked dizzily at one another. While Shay could hide her dread behind her mask, Woid’s worry was far clearer:
“You didn’t hear the thunder come from the shuttle as well, did you?”
“Louder than ever.” She sighed.
Alas, their two options had become one.