Stillness. Not even the wind dared to blow. What had once coerced the sea of grass into dancing like twine-bound puppets was now timid. Timid, sombre, silent as though paying their respects.
A graveyard, not so much of bodies buried six feet under, but of something that once was, something that could have been, provided something had gone differently. There was no point in crying over spilt milk, a shattered pot…but what surrounded Iris had once been everything.
Life, shelter, love, learning, sanctuary. Rising up from great planes to rival mountains, a miracle of nature or the toil and will of something greater now lay in ruin.
Overgrown and buried by the movement of dust and dirt. Small shards, no taller than her shin, were littered across the site, standing in for gravestones. Brilliant azure dulled by coatings of dust, invasive vines and the simple passage of time.
That was all there was.
Iris looked up, her Beast coiled around her feet.
Autumn, and the sun was low in the sky, casting shadows from every headstone like the peaks of a sundial.
Besides a profound stillness, the valley was as she remembered. The grass still cushioned the ground, concealing whatever she swore she could feel nibbling at her feet. The sky, still a blue, infinite canvas for the air to draw its favourite pictures—billowing mounts of blissful white, forever drifting in a magical, innocent stupor.
There was nothing left. Nothing to explore, nothing to take in, nothing to extrapolate into a step closer to who she really was. Being the Spirit of Destruction was more than she could bear, but at the same time, it wasn’t enough. Confirmation, if she was lucky then something more.
But all she could sense was an overwhelming feeling of finality. In a world that now felt so real, the dream was over, and she’d reached the back cover. Still, silence, an audience waiting for the show to start.
Now it’s your turn. Try it if you dare.
Iris exhaled, feeling the markings along her arms and back glow, vibrate, and shiver with anticipation while her hair de-atomised, layer-by-layer.
Solid. An orb. Not perfectly spherical, but an efficient enough storage of mass, at least it was what came to her mind first.
Another exhale, and the markings grew brighter, the hair on her arms stood on its ends as she let another notch of control go, turning closer towards haywire.
Liquid. She hadn’t been training recently, and so in the extra second it took for her to readjust, she lost the orb's form. Lukewarm water gushed to the ground, breaking the surface tension and losing itself amongst the blades of grass. She puckered up, bringing the water back to form and holding it. Five, ten, fifteen seconds.
Another deep, long exhale. The sloshing turned to bubbling. A rapid expansion of space and heat threatened the tips of her fingers. A balance between letting go and forcing control, keeping shape yet letting the particles of her devolve, be free.
And then there was an impasse, a point of no return. An inhale, then an exhale.
She emptied her lungs, testing how far she was willing to tread.
Like Evalyn had said, with her, it had never been a matter of reaching higher limits, it had been a matter of cutting back, learning how to handle them. Letting go, one step at a time was how she regressed, bringing things back to control was how she grew.
She knew that, but the sparks that flew, the small bolts of heat and light travelling through the ball of gas called for something utterly animal within her. Emotion, subconscious, abandonment of all higher functions.
Rage, sadness, whatever concoction of hatred fuelled the thunderous bolts of purple lightning she had once condemned the ruins under her feet to. Whatever that was. Whatever that terrifying, primal feeling was.
People who wouldn’t listen to her warnings, prefer to kill each other than risk a chance at peace. People who wouldn’t consider kindness, prefer to kill her rather than place their trust in someone that had only ever worked for them.
Perhaps a fraction of that rage, but enough for the sparks to consolidate and spread across the ball of gas. Then, all at once, lightning. Glowing, hot, purple lightning.
Thunder. She grits her teeth as the sound cracked her eardrums and echoes through the valley. She armoured herself in the unbearable heat, cooking herself alive on her own plates.
“Do something,” she groaned through gnashed teeth, and the Beast coiled around her feet rose, opening its maw and, ever so gently, placed the glowing orb between its two jaws.
Iris relaxed, gasping for air and releasing the tension in her body. She stepped back, out of the heat’s radius as the glowing orb sustained itself, being kept alive by a different part of her. The Beast’s mouth was locked in place, with perfect tension and perfect angle, controlling the matter and the heat it radiated.
Iris controlled her breathing, gasping and choking herself in random, erratic intervals. She coughed, hacking out her lungs until she was left doubled over, once again heaving for air. Slowly, her vision realigned, and her knees regained their strength. She stood and watched the glowing orb spark, the crack of thunder subsiding as the air grew accustomed to the sudden source of heat.
She rounded her Beast, coming face to face with the ball in its jaws. The same colour, yet in wildly different states. Her puppet-servant, so dead that she could see the strings attached to it looked like a long-cremated skeleton compared to the new state of matter. Alive by the second, birthing and dying a thousand times every moment. Energy, too much for anything mortal to handle, or anything that made sense for that matter.
But creating the matter was only half the equation.
She pointed at a distant relic, finding it painfully ironic that the same power would come to haunt it however many centuries later. Iris aimed, not paying the sentimentality any more heed.
“Shoot.”
Thunder. A crack that sent her hearing into a frenzy. The sun dimmed in fear, the grass charred underfoot like a vapour trail behind a bullet. The purple travelled, no, it was too fast for her to make such an assumption. All she knew was that her senses were overwhelmed, and her target no longer existed.
She opened her eyes, the afterimage still burning into her retinas as her ears scrambled to put everything back into place. They were taking too long, so she disassembled and reassembled them, hoping a fresh start would avoid any hearing loss. She’d do so with her eyes, but admittedly losing her sight was a lot more terrifying. Even her ears hurt enough to make her bite down on her gums too hard.
The smoke from the burning grass was getting in the way. Iris let more of her hair go, calming until it turned liquid she could quench the fire with.
Smoke, but what dregs were too stubborn to dissipate quickly moved on, leaving her with something peculiar at the end of the smouldering corridor.
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A door. Bottom-of-the-shelf plywood painted over with cheap varnish and probably held up by wooden supports. She could tell from a distance it was fake.
A façade, with a stubborn brass door handle that refused to open unless she proved herself in some way first. Iris could only take them as horrid punishments for her efforts, mockeries prepared for whenever she got one step closer. Deterrents…but she couldn’t afford to think like that. Knowing what she was had truly become a matter of life and death.
So she walked the path, following the deathly corridor of her own design towards the fake door. The grass was still warm, singing the leather of her boots as they brushed past her, their weak attempts at revenge barely registering.
She grabbed the brass handle and, once her Beast was in sight, swung the door open.
The corridor contorted into a staircase, spiralling down and disappearing below her feet. Recalling the feeling, she took a fingernail’s worth of hair and let it run wild in her palm. A small boom as the air panicked, swirling around her fingers as though to find shelter from the small sun. Light. Quite handy too.
Iris breathed, starting down the path.
Stairs wound down in a circular dance while she provided the first light the walls had seen in centuries. It sparked unevenly, her fingers retreating away from the heat. Iris released more of her hair, wrapping her arm in its gauntlet and alleviating her pain.
Outside of the small radius of light was nothing. Stairs appeared as quickly as they vanished once serving their purpose, nary a farewell as they dipped back into shadow.
She grew tired and came to a stop. The space was big; she’d need a lot.
Releasing her hair up to her shoulders, she choked her surroundings in gas. It expanded gleefully, pressing the full brunt of its rampant enthusiasm against the walls of its new container.
By metres per second, the scope of her nerves expanded, coating the spiral's walls as they continued, looping endlessly one after another after another.
Then the monotony broke; a rough opening in the wall as though blown to pieces. Her Beast rose underneath her, merging with her legs before it began to pick up its speed. Round and round, the trajectory remained perfect, never widening or tightening its circle even as Iris’s head spun and the blood rushing to her brain began to vignette what little she could already see.
Until the Beast began to slow, the full stop still enough to send her and the contents in her stomach lurching forward. Time was crucial; she didn’t know how long she could spend in her dreams before fear began to take over, but she was taking things too far.
She did her best to recover, regretting the decision as her eyes rose to catch a brilliant blue sparkle. Sheer walls of sky-blue rock and gems closed in on a small barrier, pounding the air with a deep drone of Aether. Behind it, floating scrawls of illegible characters.
She'd seen it before, greeted by it after breaking a door down.
Silent as it was before, silent as it had been for thousands of years no doubt.
She dismounted, stepping closer to the small cutout in the staircase when she heard the clicking of boot heels. She stopped her footsteps, and yet they still kept coming. Slow, approaching the barrier as though in wonder, the figure emerged into her line of sight.
A tall someone—ragged coat hem caked in mud and long, auburn hair frayed and tangled—approached the barrier, outstretched hand first.
Their fingers made contact with it, the softest touch sending ripples across its surface, five times for every digit, once for their palm. Iris watched as broad shoulders tensed underneath their coat. The figure muttered something, but to Iris, it was nothing more than a garbled string of sounds. The barrier nary glanced at the transgression, and Iris herself wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to expect.
The figure tried again, louder this time. More strength into the garbled words, yet the venture gained nothing. She watched the figure try and try again, words getting louder and louder each time until...
“I am your master. Open to me.”
The figure’s hand slipped through an opening, and like a fresh wound, the barrier began to leak the floating characters that syphoned into the figure’s ears and eyes. They bared it for a moment, but soon collapsed to their feet, retracting their hand and closing the wound once more.
Silence as the man no doubt processed the gushing information. Laboured breathing, ribs creaking, gasping for air. There was nothing else more to see there, and yet the staircase continued.
Iris started the process again, mounting her steed and starting the downward spiral. Longer this time, as she went slow enough to avoid losing consciousness while keeping her body close to her Beast. All the light in her hand could do for her now was illuminate the dark blue blur around her.
She felt her beast slowing down, coming to a halt outside another cutout in the winding staircase. This time, guarded by another flimsy door.
Same varnish, same cheap plywood she could’ve bought herself for the Ixa in her pocket. The only thing of any value was once again, that stubborn brass doorknob.
She breathed, unsure if she was making up a sense of finality all on her own or if this really was the end of whatever her dream had to say.
Iris turned the doorknob and was greeted with a rushing cold wind. Freezing as though she’d stepped back out onto the pinnacle of the Northern Chain Ridge again. It was the same cold, although she couldn’t make out anything concrete through the blizzard outside the cave’s entrance.
Iris stepped through, the soles of her boots scraping untouched land and interrupting an ancient slumber. Between her and the storm beyond the cave boundary, nestled in frozen rock formations and lifeless frost, was a single light, making steam of the moisture in the air and melting the rock beneath it. Barely a spark, the purple light faltered in the face of the cold, clinging to its slowly fading heat.
Iris approached it, barely able to feel the intense heat she expected. Her bare hands wrapped themselves around the dying spark, and her Beast coiled again around her. The last semblance of warmth that she could offer it.
The Northern Chain Ridge, it was an intuitive guess but she never felt like she had died anywhere else. Her dreams had jumbled things, swapping their placement with the Karaxians, but Iris had watched it. She had died once in that city, taking everything and everything down with her, then fizzled out into nothing the second time, tucked deep somewhere in the Northern Chain. Two deaths; all her mind had done was consolidate those two into one dream.
She encircled the spark, finding in herself no particular affection for it. Its feeble state didn’t change her feelings, but even in a dream, she wished she could at least give it a final mercy.
The spark shrivelled, silently taking its final breath as the cave went dark. Iris’s arms dropped to her side, and she let out a breath as the chill once again set in.
The wind outside howled as the edge of the cave caught it, beckoning it inside to claim another victim. Her Beast curled around her as she sat, opening its jaw and creating another spark of her own as though reading her mind.
There was no way out yet unless she was to brave the storm outside. At this rate, she’d have to wait for someone to shake her into reality the next morning.
She threw her head back, closing her eyes and slowing her breathing. Her fingers near the ball of light began to roast, and she brought them up to her chest.
Where her fingers encountered a head of hair.
She looked down. Silver. Her silver. Her long, silver hair sprouted from a small, warm head.
She sat up, holding the thing out in front of her. A child, her exact make and model, with extremities still being assembled piece-by-piece, the seams between her skin still glowing a reinvigorated iris purple.
The child was unconscious, amid a deathly slumber Iris was too scared to shake her out of. But undoubtedly, it was her. She’d stared into the mirror enough times to recognise that. Considering she grew like any other human child, she was not so far into the past.
Then, as though to celebrate her birth, the cave rumbled, vibrating under her feet. An explosion, one that rocked the cold, stagnant air, followed by another. She looked through the cave entrance, squinting her eyes to see past the blizzard’s white veneer.
A downed fighter plane, one wing missing in a plume of black smoke fell past the opening. Another explosion, this time blistering her eardrums and rocking her backwards. Her child self, still incomplete, stayed silent.
The explosions continued, growing louder by the second until she began to doubt her original hypothesis.
Yes, there were explosions, hundreds all coming together in a deathly cacophony, but the ones that shook the earth itself were too regular, booming at measured intervals.
She stood, her Beast propping up her back as she held onto her old self. Every few steps, she’d rock back and forth, the vibrations stealing her footing from under her.
Iris came to the cave’s edge, and through the falling snow witnessed the distant pops and cracks of artillery fire as planes circled what Iris could only describe as a moving mountain.
Another vibration and the mountain moved. Another step.
The cannons came into view, the two behemoths she’d seen on either side of the dormant Citadel. The icebreaker bow, the thousands of guns running up its mechanical legs and crowning its pinnacle. The titan moved as the thousands inside worked like the individual cells in a body, attacking the invaders with hundreds of offensives at once.
It commanded thunder, and the flies about its crest were nothing compared to its unrelenting march. Iris had known the battle without ever seeing it, and she knew somewhere in that sky, her father was fighting for his life.
The war of Aether and Diesel, the Citadel that moved through the Northern Chain, bypassing the border before burning Aerilia. Right underneath its centrepiece, the defining metal God that began a new era of war and technology, she had been born.
She knew her birthday now, but Iris had no desire to claim it over the one her mother had gifted her.