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Chapter 1: Where the Ocean Ends
A miserable day, better forgotten.
Chapter 2: The Door Is Not Yet Closed
In Ocedi Paretal é Tal (Codex of the Esoteric Gnat), it is written that in any tower or well is every tower and well. Ascent, descent, the climb and fall, shedding rain and its thirsty accumulation, these are a unification more fundamental than symbology can explain. To enter one is to enter another is to enter the first and last.
In FDM 8909.91: Cybersecurity in Foreign Environments (Ocedi Elenoti Pail ó Mar Salae), it is written that lateral movement across networks allows attackers to exploit vulnerabilities that are otherwise protected by private interfaces. There is no firewall so secure that activity behind it can be both privileged and trusting, no credential foolproof enough to be accepted without question.
What, then, is to prevent a breach of one tower from becoming a breach of every tower?
Hounds feast at Mayrn’s feet. Theirs are bodies of seed flesh rooted in metal, muscles a sheath around alloy skeleton and chugging motor. Flat faces host tripartite lenses whose reflections expose nothing, and exhaust fans fail to break apart the bodies of betrayed adventurers. Still, they cannot help themselves. Hunger is ever imbued by shape instead of need, and theirs is a shape predating her touch. What Boston Dynamics built, what expeditionary forces brought from far abroad, she made whole at last.
Where their armor is wet, warm, and raw, hers is a vest fitted with ceramic plates—gloves that protect the fist but permit the trigger, loose fabric that imitates the beach beneath her boots. Some pebbles there are glass smoothed by tireless waves. Others hail from sea-forts flattened by JDAM and JASSM, though none match the drab tower that rises so near the sealine as to be circled by high tide’s telltale growths. No hatches pockmark its face or seams show between blocks. No gateways were so much as entertained by its architects. Thus are castaways invited to entreat the gods, for even they are more likely to grant shelter.
Eight and Twelve trot close behind as Mayrn approaches the wall with three keys in hand. First is the silver she clutched in the cradle. It digs at skin, digs under skin, attempts to enter that which it should not.
Second is the iron Telmine took from his queen. It unlocks potential in marrow, in host, caring nothing for what spirit eventually rejects.
Third is the lead that Fir refused to explain. Its is the form that fits between stars, finding pin and tumbler in a lock better left unopened.
With two friends betrayed, two hounds left, and plenty of ammunition for the CALO-AX hanging across her chest, there is nothing to prevent Mayrn from unsealing that denial expressed in stone, realizing the elf lords’ oldest fears at last. What was taken by man will be recompensed by heaven.
Although one tower is every tower, and although this flaw only took her a little further than intended—into a new floor of floors, demarcated by hands whose care in ordering betrayed a carelessness in warding—the sights exceed any beheld within Tir ta Nor’s heights. Careful steps track sand in a cubicle farm that stretches toward every horizon, units producing naught but fertilizer for the levels below. Harsh sun, harsher winds, these usher her across an apex so broad that it seems more continent than construction, heat driving her hounds’ fans to whir pitifully. Grit plumes refract light from the dread star above. Partitions shift but never fall. Fingers fiddle and lungs heave out of sight, long extracted from that which can object, and relief only comes through the lateral shift her access affords.
Next is a well bored deeper than any geothermal tap left to sip from sacred mountains. Palanquins descend its rifling at an irregular rate, attendants taking three steps at a time, hurried by pale hands that reach out to stroke necks caked in soot. Delicate discs of jade fall away during their sharper turns. Few survive the trampling. It gives the pack just as little pause when one carrier, or two, or all careen into the abyss with passenger in tow, apparently having suzerains to spare.
Landscape windows expose anything but. A forest of similar spires fan out, reaching from cloud below to cloud above. Their halls host fellow travellers: those who amble, those who crawl, all who flit from view soon enough. Mayrn’s is the dead spire. It tilts under the infinitesimal addition of her weight, groaning louder as hounds pace and footfalls disrupt refuse from eons past. Whether it would sink or topple after her exit was a mystery better left to those following gentler routes.
Patrons scatter across a courtyard reeking of burned sugar.
Soldiers muster at chokepoints, interlocked shields useless against her weapon’s chitter.
Spent cases fall beneath fronds aplenty. Water clocks tok, tok, tok away in the hanging garden, exuding a serenity wasted on its intruders. Again Eight and Twelve lower their faces to a basin without tongues to lap, exhaust instead sending ripples across it, and again Mayrn calls for them. Fir was the poignant one and Telmine the thirsty; her lot is apart from this, from the drip, from the tok, from bowl-bearers who look on in pity.
Bowls line the halls of heaven too—from them spills ichor, droplets thick and opalescent. And there too is the cubicle farm. There are the steps drilled deep, not to mention what wells up from underneath. Adjutants stride from passage to passage, features locked in gold and gazes held high, heedless of the creatures creeping in their presence. Flicking the safety on her CALO-AX barely makes a sound beneath so many footsteps tracing a path to the unlit throne.
Eight and Twelve lift their flattened heads to bay static. Mayrn fires upwards too, chipping one statue of many celebrating things without form. "There are prayers to repay!" she shouts, throat raw as her hounds. "There are covenants to fulfill! Produce what was promised and nobody needs to die!"
Chapter 3: Preen and Peril
A futile negotiation, better forgotten.
Chapter 4: Where Rejection Leads
The cherub squirms in hand. Lacking survival instincts, far flung from generations able to fight or flee, it can't even resist the slow twist of its neck until spine strains and vessels begin to burst. Resistance and resilience have been bred out of it, leaving auralli—simpering grubs whose only merit is the ichor they warm. Vestigial wings flick against Merym's wrists. Four stumpy arms wiggle and twitch, fingers unable to form fists. Eyes bulge, then sink as head separates from body with a wet pop.
Eight prods its face against those remains, lacking the sensors to fulfill its own instinct, but Meryn hurls them to the foot of the unlit throne instead of letting her hound linger. "Be that as it may, you fled from the trolls. You hid your faces from our invaders. You shy away even now!" She snatches another cherub latched onto her shoulder, spiking it hard against the stones. A few droplets of ichor reach the throne this time; they quickly slide from its face, leaving no residue on a material formed at the birth of time.
Yet the shapes perched atop it are diminished just as plainly as their pets. From existences barely extruded had come gods whose iconography defied chisel and brush; from them sprang domains, and prayers, and all manner of ritual to appease that which absorbed reality. Such did devolution cast off demigods. Such did each line degrade while rushing to rebuild what they lacked reference to, stories of grandeur forming blueprints for a thing that could not exist, should not exist, and never would exist. Ideation had given way to incest, inbreeding, a strain of genetics and semiotics that sought greater heights while falling further beneath them.
The result is all too obvious to any who graduated from the pits. Brittle flesh. Hollow bones. Eyes too small for their sockets and joints ejected by even the slightest rotation. Nevertheless do they embody the sun and stars, winds and rain; each a claimant to wisdom since overtaken by mortals, war outclassed by foreign weaponry, or magicks broken in the way all old things are, yet they have nothing to offer the land that would welcome them back.
Fir would be devastated. Or perhaps such things are better learned in an afterlife otherwise bereft.
Of proclamations and pronouncements, ours were innumerable before you crawled from caves
Of your people's entreaty, we considered for a generation before first conception
Of words and warnings, repetition is a fool's retreat
Know this: we hold grudges dear
And the doors to heaven open once more, ushering Meryn, Eight, and Twelve out alongside any number of adjutants, aberrations, and worse. Back she spins along an axis upon which she has no authority, accumulating momentum apart from physical concerns—lost initiative, forsaken to a system realizing that pests have secured permissions which are beyond them. This is failure and correction.
Meryn blows back across a cavern. Its air desiccates on first breath, tasting of nothing but salt. Shelving lines its rough-hewn walls, each box carefully marked to facilitate exile. Fluorescent banks bolted to the ceiling above flip on in quick succession, tracing her arc through a place with nothing to impede flight until they are left to slumber anew.
Her wake is wind. A field of grain bounded by snow parts along that path, lusher than anything found in Cherinmark's lowlands despite the chill, and reaped by surer hands too. The farmers' heads are what give pause: split open just above their ears to free billowing steam. A few still have enough presence of mind to tilt skyward and watch her flail. A nice story to tell the children before their first bifurcation.
It is when she skids through the hangar that rejection becomes intrusion. Engines of war rest there, metal birds lacking the musculature their shapes deserve. Eight and Twelve bark as demanded by their own shapes. Guards raise weapons sleeker than her CALO-AX. Fire traces the gaps between ceramic plates as she skips like a stone, gone before the next burst.
Blood tracks along a stone road stretching beneath coral branches. The forest glows in twilight, brighter eyes blinking between its crooked boughs.
Blood gushes as she finds purchase on the battlefield. Warm bodies to grasp, black sand to scramble through, none of it slows her expulsion.
Blood starts running dry as Meryn slams against a shipping container. Dead metal, rusting, left to languish at the edge of accessible space. Its surface is painted with letters she resents learning, though in no order that sparks recognition: USPARACOM. Such considerations are beyond a mind sinking fast.
Chapter 5: No Revelation Comes Gently
A poor deathbed, better forgotten.
Chapter 6: Our Trauma is Distant
Prompt Global Strike was a dream sought by many, cherished by many—the ability to snuff out a life anywhere in the world when ordered. In this, prayer was unnecessary. Smiting was to be removed from God's domain, impeded only by hardened bunkers or capable air defenses.
Psychoartillary, as distilled into the Reliable Penetration-Discrimination Device, would have realized that dream if not for the vagaries of the Department's acquisitions process. Sourcing the flesh necessary, stripping and rewiring nerves, these concerns paled beneath debates over which color of money would fund them.
Within programs, within compartments, within the minds of a few planners freed from moral considerations, the question of how this capability might proliferate was inevitably raised. What if adversaries stepped beyond matters of mind and accessed the means of smiting that first inspired them? DAMPCEDER is the preemption devised: containerized and indiscriminate; stored in dark, distant places until counterbattery fire needs redefining.
While Meryn is dead as her friends, Eight and Twelve carry on. Seed flesh is not so weak as to perish with its creator, and their engines are certified for another decade at least. So they nuzzle and yip. They chase each other in circles around the shipping container, heedless of the quiet that engulfs. Eventually they even remember the last command issued by their owner after she pried open deadbolts and saw what grew within. Carrying one body to that cradle is no trouble at all.
For even dead flesh is flesh yet, and flesh is never without a master.
Thus does her body convulse as steam leaks from its pores. Organs assume new roles, filtering and funneling, driving a process devised at the grave's boundary, stimulating not the brain already forsaken but qualities unimaginable elsewhere. So often is it forgotten that there is more to memory than a single life. Imbued are personal pains, family miseries, genealogical tragedies, all withstood only because failure means extinction. This is what sculpts instinct. This is what drives evolution. And these, too, can be spoofed by those with proper knowledge.
DAMPCEDER is the barrel replicated by another world's convergent thought. Meryn's corpse is a shell, and the trauma stimulated inside is a payload too potent for any living creature to bear. Eight and Twelve watch as she squirms, then convulses, central to a twitching mechanism their silicon cannot begin to process. Still they howl. Her spine comes apart in those throes—blood boils as its potential is leeched, as reservoirs are drained. Her lungs inhale, and inhale, and inhale for the scream sure to come. Fir's pleading could prevent bilecraft no longer. Psychic acid seeks the path of least resistance once freed from its cauldron, from that magnifying matrix, and every smiting leaves a trail:
Gods fall from on high as the battle reaches its climax, first combatants made casualties at last.
Gods crawl from coral's shadow, unable to understand what sorrows follow the hunt.
Gods held dear by her killers name themselves wrathful but cannot absorb this spite.
Gods of the harvest prove superfluous, for it continues unabated, and their subterranean kin fall beneath the press of tectonic plates.
Then there are those offshoots on the unlit throne who unknowingly perch where bile gathers. They are less than gods, less than demigods, cleaved off from mortals but not wholly unrelated, and yet devolution offers no safety from the deicide rain. In them now is every misery great and small that were left to lesser-but-innumerable lives. Aches, pains, sorrows, regrets, furies, futilities, these can only be safely held in bodies which evolved toward that purpose. And why would gods ever do more than appreciate curious sparks in passing? There is no escaping that churn now, no withstanding it. They only manage to boil. What the trolls started in their ancient war, Meryn's corpse completes.
Her hounds sleep at her feet, three stilled shapes on that still world. It remains to be seen which gate she will arrive at next, let alone who waits there with complaints aplenty.
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