Iris watched as the Northern Chain Ridge drew nearer, gradually swallowing Sidos’s green prairies with sharp, deeply forested inclines. White mist spilt forth from the valley, swallowing the train tracks ahead and eventually claiming their carriage. The scenery beyond the window disappeared, with shrubbery growing only metres from the track relegated to vague, grey silhouettes. Iris turned away from the glass, convinced there was no more entertainment to be had.

After a prolonged goodbye and the usual never-ending series of hugs, the trio had left the village that afternoon and embarked on their usual route towards Sidos City. Making a connection partway, they had boarded a northbound train destined for a small village in the mountains. That had been Evalyn’s explanation, and the route drawn out on the map had been equally straightforward, but Iris had little sense of the scale inherent to Sidos. Despite being a citizen by soil—in the lack of anything more accurate—she was a citizen of Geverde by family and certainly felt as such. Sidos was still a mishmash of various places that, although intimately familiar to her parents, remained elusive to her.

So her eyes would often glaze over while she held the hands of one of her guardians, hoping that she did not lose her bearings amid a busy train station.

With Elliot entering a deep slumber the moment his backside hit the seat and Evalyn immersed in a recently purchased novel, it seemed neither had the energy to entertain her. She closed her eyes, beginning a process Elliot had taught her, apparently carrying him through many a mind-numbing flight. Focusing on one sound at a time, she began to repaint the picture around her—the creaking of the wooden carriage, the footsteps just beyond their booth, the wheels underneath the train and the distant labouring of the engine. Iris picked something to time, choosing the periodical clunk of the carriage. She could hear the sound running towards her, repeating in quick succession louder and louder until she heard it underneath her own carriage.

Three, two, one….

A second too late, much to her disappointment.

In her garden of sounds, Iris soon found something invading it, shining a light on her eyelids. She opened them and rolled her head towards the window, swallowing her shock when she laid eyes on the culprit. The mist outside, once a ghostly pale grey, was now saturated with the colour that was her namesake. She heard scratching against the glass pane as though it were dust instead of water suspended in the air. There was something hostile about it, and Iris soon understood what it was.

Liquid. She had begun to master it a year ago, finding its usefulness in combat limited, yet its practical use cases numerous. It was more volatile than solid matter, and she often described it as slippery, like a mischievous child. Gas, however, she could barely even consider taming it.

She searched for Evalyn’s hand beside her and grabbed it, holding it as tightly as she could. Evalyn responded, wrapping her fingers around hers.

“What’s wrong?”

“Something’s going on,” Iris said, “Be ready.”

She felt her guardian’s golden aura engulf her fingertips; even if visits to her Mind Palace were rare, hallucinations were regular enough for the pair to coordinate a procedure. Iris, now with her anchor secure, stared into the mist and searched for anything familiar. The fog swirled, trading stagnation for malignancy, pressing against the glass and leaping over the carriage. She could hear it everywhere, drowning out her sound garden until there was only it and her beating heart. She waited with bated breath, preparing to jump like an athlete at a start line.

A person, or rather their silhouette, stood immersed in the fog, uncaring of its virulent rancour. It stood still as though it were lifeless, only showing signs of animacy as its head slowly followed Iris. They never locked eyes, Iris doubting if the other had eyes to lock onto. They passed each other, time seeming to slow down around her as she did everything in her power to capture a glimpse. Tugging on her anchor for more slack, her eyes ventured further into the fog, pinpointing the figure until she could discern clear lines. A woman’s figure, tightly dressed and adorned with something long, crosswise hanging from her back.

The train passed, the purple fog cleared, and Iris retreated, resting her head on the seat. She held onto Evalyn’s hand as she took a sigh of relief.

“What did you see?” Evalyn asked. Iris turned her head, and seeing her worried mother’s face truly drew her from the deep and back to the surface.

“Gas,” she said. “The same thing I saw years ago when I tried to make gas.”

Evalyn’s face tensed up, and another hand rested with Iris’s as she drew closer. “Did anything happen recently?”

“A dream,” Iris admitted, closing her eyes. “Whatever Wesper talked about before he died, calling me ‘what they’ve been looking for’. There’s a place with more information, and ‘they’ are trying to get to it.” Iris sighed, resting a hand on her forehead as she continued to groan. “I don’t know, it was too vague.”

“We’ll talk to Colte about it later, all right?”

Iris nodded, preferring the simple respite to the complex solution. Even if Colte was one of their best chances outside the old Spirit nations at a clear answer, the chances were still unbearably slim. The tedium, confusion and eventual, ‘I’ll look into it’ could wait another day.

The fog was thickest by the time they stepped off the train, and their station was by far the most peculiar Iris had ever seen. Barbed wire lined the platform, only allowing exit through a single gate. Very few of the already-thinned passengers disembarked, being left stranded in the mist as the train pulled out of the station, its steam barely distinct from its surroundings.

“All passengers, if you could please follow my voice!”

An old man’s call roused the crowd, and they began to shuffle forward, those in working attire striding along, clearly used to the procedure, while the obvious tourists followed cautiously. Iris held Elliot’s hand as they walked, the silhouettes of those responsible for their guidance finally clear. A man in a grey military uniform greeted them with a stern face, age showing through his slicked-back hair and moustache. With his hands, he waved the group down two paths: tourists and workers.

Iris followed his left hand and down the path towards the gap in the barbed wire fencing.

“Iris,” she heard Elliot say. “When you get to the gate, there’s going to be some scary people. Stay calm; even Evalyn gets scared of them sometimes.” As he muttered his warning, two sets of white circles pierced the fog and, despite their vague shapes and lack of direction, seemed to be looking squarely at her.

More of their figures came into view, from their steel helmets to their thick breastplates and bulky shoulders. Their armour platings held no desire to appear regal, as did Evalyn’s or Iris’s, instead inspiring fear through sheer practicality, scarring, and inhuman gas masks that branded the soldiers as monsters rather than mere men or women. The stamped steel rifles they held did not improve the image whatsoever.

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Another man in grey uniform, significantly younger than the last, asked the small crowd for an orderly line, waving his hands together. As they stepped into a loose formation, the man began to check visitor passes and identities of one tourist at a time, eventually getting to Elliot.

The man perused his eye over the pass before looking up at them once more.

“Which one of you has the firearm?”

“That would be me,” Evalyn said, stepping forward and pointing to her suitcase. “It’s for work.”

“Certainly, ma’am, if you could head that way, you will be taken care of.” He then turned to Elliot, nodding to him as though silently asking the same question. Elliot shook his head, and the checkpoint officer gave him a meaningful raise of the eyebrow. If confidence in their security was so high that such an exchange passed as a check, Iris wondered what lurked beyond the gates.

They waited by the opening for Evalyn's return, seeing her figure emerge from the fog ten minutes later. “Let’s go,” she said as she grabbed Iris’s hand and led them through the barbed wire opening. They followed a short dirt path to a rickety shuttle bus parked by the edge of the road, the engine grumpily idling as the small contingent of passengers boarded. Evalyn chose three seats further back, Iris once again securing a position by the window. She squinted into the fog, wondering if the white mist held any secrets as terrible as the purple mist did.

Pairs of white eyes seemed to answer her question, floating like tens of spectres back and forth amongst the trees. A moat of wolves, rifles and armour was their security, and Iris did not doubt it for a second. The bus rumbled forward, spurting diesel into the cold mist as they drove past the forest made of equal parts trees and soldiers.

After another barbed wire fence, the bus entered the military base, its outer reaches populated by temporary barracks and tents, most often adjacent to vehicle bays and scrap yards. Workers in what Iris vaguely recognised as staff rather than enlistment uniforms walked back and forth between the buildings, striding with purpose and hastened by a job to finish.

As they ventured deeper, so too did the buildings get taller and more robust. Training facilities, mess halls and administrative centres stood alongside armouries and ammunition depots. Soon, the smaller buildings made way to factories, warehouses and mass assembly lines that stood far above anything else Iris had seen previous. From their ceilings hung works in progress, suits of Higher Order Armour Iris recognised as the earliest models, now, according to Elliot, relegated to armoured infantry companies and labour. Each warehouse had five or so lined in a row, receiving attention from a dozen personnel each.

Iris found it uncanny to see so many lifeless units, devoid of their police insignia or construction hazard patterns, lined up in such a fashion. Their forms and movements had sometimes made her forget that they were nothing more than machines. From the fog to the war engines to the soldiers armed to the teeth, her late grandfather’s legacy was looking grimmer by the second.

She turned to Evalyn, who had been more or less silent the entire trip. She continued her streak, looking out at the limited scenery with pursed lips and furrowed brows. Looking deeply bothered, her mother did not even seem to notice Iris’s attention, so Iris decided to turn away and leave her alone.

“I had a mentor before Colte,” Evalyn began, her words trailing off as though changing her mind. Iris wrapped her fingers around Evalyn’s, trying to, if at all possible, be her anchor as she was Iris's. She felt a reciprocal squeeze in return, and her mother continued. “Lyanna Keller. A Witch, of course, but more importantly, a really strange person. Back before I knew why the hell I was shooting people, she sort of…pushed me in the ‘right’ direction, the one that would stop me from hating myself. The reason I can do what I do now is because she was there to teach me.”

Evalyn squeezed Iris’s hand even tighter. “If it weren’t for her, I don’t think I would’ve been able to take her death, or Bluey’s or anyone else’s as well as I did. I don’t think I’d be here right now.”

“How did she die?” Iris asked, already vaguely aware of the other lost companion mentioned.

“Right up there, where we’re going,” Evalyn said. “She tried to stop it, stop my father’s last gamble from marching on the city.” She looked down at Iris, smiled, and pinched her cheek. “Next time Elliot’s awake, thank him for being a good dad, all right?”

Iris nodded as the bus came to a halt, waking the person in question mid-snore. Evalyn snickered as she stood and pulled Elliot to his feet, beckoning Iris to follow. They shadowed the procession off the bus and along a guided walkway, handrails beginning despite the lack of altitude. Before her, Iris could see the looming silhouette of a vague structure through the fog, too large to be an administrative building but the incorrect shape to be a warehouse. Conical, almost, perhaps a slanted cylinder with extrusions Iris could not yet make out.

“Look up,” Evalyn said, and Iris did.

“Wow…,” was her response, born from the need to say something, anything.

The structure before her was a leg: gargantuan, steel, riveted, machined, and only the length below the knee. The titan’s legs only distantly resembled the smaller H.O.A.’s Iris was so accustomed to, being reinforced with plates three times as thick as her shoulders and sheltering gunner nests and artillery cannons in its recesses. The legs continued into the fog, disappearing from view behind a veil of vapour.

“This valley is almost in perpetual fog; there are very few days where the valley clears. No one has seen the complete Citadel since the war of Aether and Diesel.”

They climbed the walkway, eventually ascending from the ground onto a suspended pathway, a single route marked out amid an incomprehensible mass of scaffolding. They drew closer to the beast’s skin, the plates of armour fresh in some places and battered in others, riddled with canon crates and bullet holes long since cleansed of dirt and gunpowder residue. The crevices between each plate, if not occupied with a gun nest, were riddled with access ladders, electrical wires, steel pipes and skeletal framing. An entire ecosystem of war existed in the legs alone and only grew as they travelled higher.

“This thing marched on Excala and singlehandedly turned a third of the city into a sea of flames. I watched it move and wondered if it had been my fault that it moved, my fault that I hadn’t killed my father when I had the chance. But now, I don’t think it would’ve made a difference.”

Evalyn took a second to pause as they levelled with the cockpit, a row of reinforced glass providing them with the only glimpse into the god machine that rivalled the Steel Whale. The glass was as tall as any of the minuscule workers maintaining the control centre, but only a sliver compared to the icebreaker-like bow that spearheaded the beast, its scars telling stories of untold thousands of rounds shrugged off with ease. Eventually, a tour guide ushered them forward as one of the crew in the control centre caught Iris’s eye, smiling before returning to his work.

They walked past the first of two main cannons, one mounted on either side of the main chassis. Despite virtually no chance of danger, Iris still found herself rushing past the opening of the barrel, her heart skipping a beat when she realised it took a full five seconds to make the distance. Dormant, yet infinitely destructive. She tried to paint a picture of the carnage the cannons could inflict but found the endeavour futile.

By then, the fog had begun to thin slightly, allowing Iris to gain a better understanding of the beast, if still only barely comprehensible. The sleeping mammoth, more a monument than a weapon, stood with only the mountains to overshadow it. A battleship on two legs, once spewing diesel fumes from red-hot combustion engines and denting the ground with every step. The steel god, hewn from greed, desperation, and hubris, was inactive as long as there was no order for its awakening. A trump card ready to be pulled at any second.

So enamoured by its design, she had neglected its meaning. Looking over it as a whole, she decided to ask. “Why did you want to show me this?”

Evalyn looked at her and pursed her lips. “I…don’t know really. I could’ve gone to his grave in the city, and my mother’s next to it, but I thought that I wouldn’t teach you much just by using my words.” She held onto Iris’s hand. “You can ask Marie about my mother; she’d knew her much better than I ever could have. But this…this is as close as you’ll ever get to meeting my father…your grandfather. And one day, you can decide if I ended up as a better parent.”

She delivered her last line with a self-deprecating chuckle, one that Iris did not agree with at all. Despite her verbal illiteracy at the time, Evalyn’s lamentations about becoming a mother were burnt into the back of her mind. Coming to understand them more deeply, she had learnt just how complex they were, harkening back to an era that Iris was only vaguely aware of, even as she stood before her grandfather’s fingerprint on the world.

“Here, I followed my mentor's advice and decided to do whatever I could to never have another person I loved die in my hands. But it was my father who waged wars for me. Out of paranoia, he tried to create a world where I’d never be taken from him how my mother was. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between us."

She brought Iris into her side, staring aimlessly across the chassis, the monument to her torment. "If I ever become like him, promise you'll stop me."