Story:The Soulless


 *  THE SOULLESS 
 * or, UTOPIA 

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I
A WONDROUS, PERFECT BLUE ''I LOOKED UP AND ONLY SAW THE ENDLESS BLUE SKY. NONE OF THE MOONS. NOTHING PIERCING. NOT EVEN A SUN. I HATE THIS FEATURELESS LAND IF I HATE ANYTHING. IT DOES NOT DERIVE, DOES NOT MOCK. IT DOES NOT BECKON. IT DOES NOT DIE. IT NEVER WAS IN THE FIRST PLACE. IT IS JUST BLUE. IT IS THE FIRST I HAVE EVER SEEN SOMETHING SIMPLY EXIST WITH NO REFERENCE TO ANOTHER THING. THERE IS TO BE NO WAKING UP FROM WHAT IS NOT DREAM OR NIGHTMARE. THIS IS NOT THE FIRST THING I HAVE HATED AND LOVED AT THE SAME TIME. MY NEW GOD ASKS IF I HAVE A PURPOSE HERE, IN THIS PURGATORY. YES. I WILL KEEP LOOKING, I ANSWER; AND FROM MY INTERROGATOR-DEITY, I HEAR NO HEARTBEAT.''

And the sun vanished.

For long the two walked toward their long, long shadows, hoping to catch up at least to the detail-less necks. Over time the abstract villa of emerald and ice grew shadowed and then everything became an unnatural cold. The sky melted from violet to gray to the white of a void.

Only the cloaked one knew cold like this, and he had found it in the stars. He was tall and lean with a body that never grew weary no matter how long he walked. He had endured far worse than this beyond the black crevasses of space. He had the long body of one born without gravity, a body sculpted by emptiness; lengthy graceful neck, long curling eyelashes, extended arms and legs. Creation: so long time ago it felt. Here and now he knew the curiosity and the strange, black absence, as if numbed by the gods he now served and watched. This was a new world, with no stars to see in the heavens. He knew sensations only by prior experience; every memory in his body had died.

They paused when the sun left, craning their necks up, watching the broken sky. Then turning and walking on. The disappearance turned everything colder and lonelier. All the world trapped in slow cold hospice. They found an obsidian cliff face and climbed it. Rock and shadow crumbled beneath the hands. At its summit they found a city and wasteland before them, both painted black. Mist clutched at their throats with bitter widowed silver bite.

Eyes of steel floated around the shorter one, and she spoke in stillness. Her skin was glass and steel and one could see wire and artificial frame half-visible beneath her skin where veins and bone would be. “How deserted now lies this city! Once so full of life.”

“Indeed,” the cloaked one answers. “There seems to be nothing here alive.”

“There was life here,” she said, with calculated mechanical emphasis. She never blinked either. “Once. Calculations indicate inconsistent records. Existence of man-made structures confirmed. One could conclude: someone built this world.”

“A great many someones. I know of no city built by the hands of one.”

“Affirmative. In all our observations cities become dust. They are not born from it. This is nothing new.”

“Nothing new under the sun. Does that mean now, in this lightless prison, there is more we have not seen? So far I haven’t seen another soul. And nothing left behind like all dying things do. Isn’t that odd? Have you ever heard of that?” The cloaked one, clad in black and wreathed in black and even sporting skin-from-void, lowered his head and shivered. His eyes scanned the land beneath him. “This lifeless world. It discomforts me. I do not understand it.”

“Neither do we. That is why we search. We study. Correct?”

“Yes. Let us study.”

“Let us scan.” The silver-bodied heart-less widow sat with her legs crossed and all her eyes floated around her. Sometimes they lit with blue translucent eyes; other times they spat lasers of red at each other, exchanging info-radiation in light, scanning and probing amongst each other. Occasionally they spoke in a language of steel. But the main body sat there a long time, eyes unblinking, staring out into the black mist and the far-off black city. It seemed everything was blackened here except for her. It seemed to the cloaked one that this made her something like an angel. The cloaked one looked down at her, finding infinitely more interest in the machine-woman than the dead machine-world. (For can not all man-made things be called machine?) He decided there was something sad about her. Someone had to have made her.

“Life signs detected.”

His attention was stolen from his reverie. “Oh?”

“Very faint. Yet consistent. Where once there were many, years ago perhaps, we now observe only one.” She lifted her head to him. Too rigidly. Be better at it - watch me, take notes - absorb, pierce me! “Suggest investigation. Calculating… 67% chance of life having new intelligence. Potentially useful to a power of… calculating...” “No need.” He waved off the whirring of her floating heart. “I accept. Let us see. Let us learn.” He lept, cloak gripped by both hands and blackened wind brushing past his jaw. The eyes hovered after him, and the main body landed after he did, propelled by some system or other in her body’s frame. They walked through the dead mists and the winds of ash.

They were different worlds, the two of them. One from a world of gods and ice and the other from a world beyond worlds. The firmament and the stars. They had found themselves in this world abruptly, with no reason nor circumstance nor explanation. As one waking with no prior memory at all. What to do then but learn?

There was nothing to see in the dying city but that which had already been lost. Ash and dust and fragments of bone lifted and danced in the wind around them with every new breeze. Once they had entered the city they could see nothing outside of it but a dark, cloudy mist that gathered all the way up from their feet. The sound of distant machinery called from somewhere deeper in the ruins.

“There has been a battle here,” the cloaked one noted. Every eye of the silver woman whirred and orbited around them, staring and snapping flashes of whatever they could see, but the main body walked beside him. He moved quieter than it did. “I see scars of weaponry,” he continued, “and notches with scratches on which the dead would have held onto. For mercy.”

“Observations in line with previous records of battlegrounds. This unit agrees with your hypothesis.”

“How many battlefields have those eyes of yours seen?”

“Copious. Names elude us. But we remember all of the landscapes. More colors than there are words to name them. More. More than this.” A moment passed, and a gust of hot black wind blew past, temporarily hiding all there was to see around them. “Do you consent to a series of questions on your origins, executioner?”

“I have already told you all I can of it, my friend.” The cloaked one shrugged. The wind blew by. Above them the sky darkened and moved as paint melting. It would have been beautiful had it some life in it. “Why do you call me that? Executioner.”

“Perhaps... malfunction.”

“Be that your idea of a joke?”

The eyes of the angel beeped and blinked their lights at him in answer. The executioner had to laugh, and the two continued into the city, death-moaning around them as if built and populated by the damned. The eyes led them to a body. Sprawled out and half-hidden by mist and smelling a little of rotting meat. Holes punched in him. Something cut off and rotting lay a few paces away from him, too withered to recognize.

“Here,” the construct said. Her hand opened and spread as hands of a clock.

“Vaelia,” the corpse croaked. Not corpse, then. The executioner looked down at the man, and the floating-eyes did too. “My horse. Git her. She’s hurt. Git her.”

“No horses here,” the one of black said, his voice sad and quiet and slow. The wind blew the black mist around them all, but he did not care to raise his voice.

“Please.”

The mechanical eyes whirred. “There is nothing here.”

“Vaelia,” the corpse slurred. He raised a hand covered in blood up to the nothing above him. He was missing a finger. “Brown. White tail. Good eyes.”

The eyes floated away, and the silver-skinned turned her back. “There is no point in questioning this one. He is delirious. Dying.” The winds moved on too, deeper through the city.

The executioner looked over to his comrade. “Can we die here?”

“There are dead all around us.”

“Sure. But I mean you and me. Him. Us, summoned things.”

“Merit in observing… calculating…”

“Never mind it. Go on ahead.”

Everything abandoned this one but Death. He alone stood, towering, and watched the unmoving with light in his eyes unreflected from a sun. The raised hand became fist and the cut-open chest rose and the blood ran between the cobblestones. Then the fist became hand again and lazily fell.

“Aren’t you going to leave too?” the body wheezed.

“Would you like me to?”

“Don’t partic’ly care.”

“I’m waiting on you to die.”

“Should be… any minute now.”

The one of black looked around. Nothing but shadow. The silver one stood further away now, but in the exact same pose: back turned, eyes flitting lazily, hands forced open into limp proto-fists. “Shall I kill you?”

“Don’t particularly care,” the should-be-dead repeated, making sure to enunciate every syllable.

“Then I’ll leave you.”

“Vaelia,” he moaned.

“Goodbye then.”

Her heart of steel and wire floated along before the would-be executioner could move. He glanced back and saw the body and its eyes still standing as they were, perfectly still perhaps a foot or so further into the dark of the lightless city. Where the main (almost-human) body was, the heart was never far behind. A deep blue light burned over the corpse, and he lay silent there looking up at the featureless above for some time. Then he closed his eyes. Epifluorescence sang. Air moved or it didn’t. Then the silver body and all her eyes were back standing behind the youth of black again.

Her voice came from everything hovering. “Do you consent to a barrage of questions?”

“A what?”

The executioner smiled. “Is it okay if she asks you some questions?”

“It matters not.”

“Response… affirmative?”

“Affirmative,” the executioner confirmed.

The heart purred with its gears. “Will you dictate the circumstances that landed you in this state?”

“Huh?”

“What happened to you?” the executioner clarified. You have to be less iron, he silently chided. You have to know how to speak to them. Animals speak animal languages. Things are spoken plainly and they are not. No one speaks what their heart feels. No one even knows it.

“Fought,” the man simply croaked. “Lost.”

“Lived.” The youth pushed back a handful of his wind-tossed white hair and looked to the woman beside him with steel for skin. “It doesn’t look like he’s dying any time soon. It would have already happened. His mental faculties are only improving.” As if in response, a swarm of most of the construct’s eyes began to drown the man and the immediate land around him with blue light. Some of them beeped curiously.

“I know you,” the big corpse moaned accusatory. “Death. And who’s that beside you? Your chorus of angels?”

“Are you familiar with the term Aurknight?”

“Cannot say I am.”

“The ignorance of this specimen.”

What kind of angel ignores - what kind of angel never lived and can not die? “You will be waiting until you rot with these kinds of questions, Concord.”

If she heard or cared about his comment, the angel didn’t show it. “We have confirmed he is not of our original world. We urge you to follow a similar questioning protocol to confirm your perspective on subject origin.”

“There is no need. He’s not from my time, for sure. I can tell by his voice, and the cut of his hair, and the armor. It’s almost ancient. Very fascinating.”

“Who in the heavens are you people? Why are you talking about me like I’m not right here?”

One of the eyes fired a quick jolt of light right into the corpse’s chest. He twitched and cried out. “This subject’s body is made of the same organnomaterial as all the others,” Concord said.

“Even the ones sans organic?”

“Yes. Even us.”

“What the hell was that?! That hurt!” That drew the attention of the youth, for but a moment - was there only one hell, in the world this corpse was from? Or did they leave the other eight out of their swears?

“Forgive us.” The construct continued to stand perfectly still. The corpse looked like he wanted to sit up, but couldn’t muster the energy. There was blood beneath him, black and washed out and faded into the ash-covered concrete.

The youth considered this. He looked down to the body buried in all its broken armor. “Who did you fight? And what for?”

“Son of a wench in black. Wielded a sword and cut me up good. Spiky hair. Talked a lot of shit.” The prone man gave a sharp, scornful laugh. “Been a while since I’ve been knocked on my behind like this. It was a splendid fight. But this world seems keen to rob me of the glory of a good death.”

Noises - recognition? - from one of the silver’s eyes. She gave a nod in artificial, measured bobs of her neck, and slits of metal ran smoothly over each other to simulate skin. “We know of whom this one speaks.”

The cloaked: “Is he of any importance?”

“I’m about to fight you two next!”

“This unit is unsure of the importance of any others here. Pawns, explorers, or saviors?” The silver looked off to an alley, eyes aglow with pure thought.

“What the hell do you want with me?! Can’t a man die in peace?”

Again with the foreign exclamation. An interesting persistence. The executioner looked down at the seething man, taking in all of him with half-opened golden eyes. “You’re not dying here.”

“Horseshit. I’ll die when I say I am!”

“Then go ahead and perish.”

The corpse started to say something, but his retort caught in his chest and was absorbed by a grunt. He clenched his eyes shut and rested a bloody hand over his face. “Leave me be.”

The eyes pulled back swiftly, as if cross. “No further auditing recommended. Subject is aggressive and unresponsive. Origins incalculable. Significant chance possible of hostility arising when faculties are more than 60% regenerated.”

The executioner felt his own eyes glisten. “You need not worry about danger. If he attacks us, I will kill him.”

The corpse tried to sit up but he failed and growled out an expletive none of them understood when landing. “What did you say, kid?”

“I said I will kill you if you attack us.”

Again the body tried to say something but couldn’t. His eyes were hazy and angry and his face was covered in dirt and sweat. He turned his head and said nothing.

“Very little signs of life in at least a two mile radius,” the silver woman said, her dead eyes surveying everything like herself, leaving none of her attention open for the body to bask in. “We sense something like life near. From every direction. Exact geographical pinpoint currently impossible. We suspect substances or properties of the inordinately dark mist surrounding this biome is interfering with radar properties.”

The cloaked one nodded, his eyes lingering everywhere but the skies. “I agree. There is something disgusting up there.” He put a hand on his hip. Sighed. “Very well. We may continue onward. Perhaps we should go after this figure you know of.”

“We recommend this action. Very well.” And she started off.

“There is a demon here,” the body said, after the executioner took a single step away and his chorus of angels was out of earshot. “I looked for it. But he doesn’t want to be found. Not yet.”

“This matters not. There are others that concern themselves with this conflict that will take action against any external threats.”

“Perhaps.” Then, after a moment: “You saying you don’t care about what happens here?”

“I am saying what I have said.”

“Be that way then, you son of a wench.”

“Will you stay there until someone that does arrive? Stay there and rot?”

“Perhaps. There isn’t anything else this place is good for.”

“You believe that?”

“I am saying what I believe.”

The executioner turned back to the should-be-dead man. This one had lost more than a fight. He could hear it in the voice. “What is your name?”

“What the fuck does it matter to you?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then fuck off with your friend. You bunch of inhuman scum.”

“Are you positive you don’t want me to kill you?”

“You couldn’t even if you wanted to.”

A bubbling in the executioner’s chest, and an involuntary smile. How long it has been since one challenged him so earnestly - without a hint of fear! - but there was no point and no sport in an unnecessary fight with one who would sooner die than triumph. He shrugged under his cloak and turned and went on with his constructed companion.

They went through the streets of the empty city looking into everything interesting they could find and found little but dust ash and skeleton. What was visible of the muddy skyline was fractured and shorter in height than any city the both of them had ever seen before.

In this way they came and left the blackened metropolis of dust.

On the south side of the city where they exited the sickly fog eventually faded but the sky remained dark. They travelled deeper into the heart of the night and didn’t find a thing living or dead after what felt like days of walking. Just the broken black sky and a plain of earth that perhaps was another color before the rot. Things stretched above and around them without bound. Neither of them needed to rest very much so it was almost impossible to measure distance traveled well. When the executioner noticed a moon or something in the horizon they decided to pause and rest and camp. By now the cracked plains had become less dry and more dead. Cracked ground and dead grass and tree trunks as thin and white as bone rose around them, frozen in their positions as if gloried statues of lofty long-gone patriarchs. They made beds on the grass and the construct easily made a fire with the electricity of her eyes and handfuls of the dry grass. They sat around the fire and watched each other’s lengthening shadows.

“It’s a shame the ground is so dead here,” the executioner said. He sat with his eyes staring deeply into the fire and sometimes up to the sky that looked completely engulfed in shadows. “Perhaps we could grow something, if the sun ever returns, or if there was something alive beneath us.”

The silver looked at him oddly. The eyes, which had been sitting around her haphazardly and mostly off, blinked with light for an instant. “We fail to comprehend the use of such a thing.”

“The use of agriculture?”

“Our observations and studies have concluded that we do not need nutrient sustenance in this state.”

“You’re correct. I have no need for commissary. It’s just to have something to do.”

“Something to do,” Concord repeated.

“Yes. Something pretty. Some work to produce something of use. Some goal to work our bodies toward. Anything. It doesn’t matter what.”

“Are studies and observations not sufficient enough work for your satisfaction?”

“This is interesting, yes. But it isn’t really what I’d call beautiful. They excite my mind, but surely in this dead world there is a limit to things we can understand or learn? And surely there will come a time when even the most interesting thing loses its luster? It’s only a passing interest. But beauty can be eternal. For me at least.”

“We do not see the need.”

“A man needs something to do or he becomes a tool, not a beast. A tool may rust and dull where a beast is only alive so long as its fangs are sharpened on bone. But man and beast alike can appreciate the sublimity of aesthetics, earnestness, love, beauty… such concepts are what separate the human from the inhuman. Am I wrong to strive for more than my animal nature?”

“This unit gently reminds that conversation partner’s intelligence, physiology, and sentience elevates him far above the classification family of ‘beast’.”

“You would be surprised, o angel.” He looked up to where there should have been stars. “This place isn’t very pretty to me. Not anymore. Nothing surprises.”

“This unit does not understand your choice of qualifying adjectives. Database yields…” Her heart glowed for a moment with bright indigo light for just three seconds and then it was dark again. “Zero quantitative results for use of “pretty” as geographical or psychological tiering in our local archive of 367,020 academic surveys.

The executioner nodded and shrugged and covered himself in his cloak. This part of the plains was cold or perhaps it was the night cooling him down. The massive sky above them was almost pure black, angling around them and robbing them of any stars. The fire did nothing for him. He wasn’t discomforted by the cold but he felt his body reacting to it. Homeostasis as optional, as harmless pastime.

“Were there other units?” he asked.

She knew he had changed the subject; she replied without missing a beat or letting show any trepidation if she had any at all. “Yes. Though we all had our own purposes and specialties.”

“What exactly is yours?”

“Archival records. Observations. Remembrance.”

“Ah. That is beautiful, Concord.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. I think so. It’s almost like nostalgia. That’s a beautiful emotion, I believe. Appreciating something while acknowledging it is lost, will never happen again, not in the same way. How wistful. How resplendent.”

She stared at him for a minute. “Assumption: compliment. This unit thanks you.”

He laughed. “I had comrades once, as well. Coworkers, in my organization, I suppose. We weren't very close. It can be so difficult, Concord, connecting... In fact we were quite distant. I never even met them all.”

“Were you also codenamed and designated with field specialties?”

“Of course, in a way. We were born with our codes. And we were all trained extensively with combat and assassinations.” The cloaked one looked down at his hands, found himself laughing without his control. “It is as you have said. I am greater than a man.”

“This corroborates with this unit’s initial scans of your physical capabilities.”

“Ah, Concord, you blissful, beautiful thing…”

“This unit is grateful that needless combat was prevented,” she continued.

“Oh! I wouldn’t have destroyed you. I only kill humans, generally. Some nightkin. The ones with the gold in their eyes.” The ones with the Goddess in them, he didn’t say. “It is my job. Not my desire. I act for duty, not the whims of my heart.”

“Not always.”

He smiled a crack of sorrow. “Sometimes.”

The construct probed him further but the executioner began to grow tired of the conversation and felt nostalgic for the world he had been stolen from. Everything they spoke of made him think of what he could no longer marvel upon and possibly would never see again. He eventually stood and paced the perimeter of their small campground. Sensing his discomfort the construct initiated her sleep mode and he held his lance in his hand at its normal extended length of over six feet. He walked and watched the dead plains and thought about the world he had found himself on that seemed built for war. Boasting only craters and emptiness like the cruelest possible kind of battlefield. He wondered what kind of war could be fought with a handful of lost, listful, only-halfway-alive soldiers. He understood this was more than a fine moniker to describe himself. After a few minutes of walking he thought he saw something off in the north beneath a cluster of dead trees and started toward it with the invisible weight of his weapon ready on his wrist.

It was the dead man.

He had sat on his hind beneath the shade of the tree’s bare limbs and his head hung low onto his neck. When the executioner approached he lifted his head with those same wild eyes but didn’t turn or stand or even raise a weapon. Just sat there and continued to decay.

The two stared at each other wordlessly for some time.

The shade hid the dead man from nothing.

“Have you decided you would like me to kill you?” the executioner finally asked when he noticed the older man shivering.

“Water,” the soldier answered. “Please. Water.”

“We have none.”

“Please.”

“You don’t need any.”

“I want some. So thirsty... And shouldn’t I be? Am I not a man?”

The cloaked one had nothing to say to that.

“I miss it so much. What has happened to us?”

“Is that why you followed us? For water?” There were scars in the earth leading down from the hill, showing clearly that the soldier must have dragged himself this far, and only seemed to have collapsed due to exhaustion, or thirst, or perhaps despair. “Let me rephrase,” the cloaked one continued, the wind whispering by his face, syphoning a hint of a tear from the corner of his eyes. “Why do you persist so earnestly?”

The knight looked down even lower until it looked as if his neck were a tendon away from snapping. “You would never be able to understand me.”

“I am more intelligent than you think.”

“That’s not it,” the knight grumbled. “I’ve lost something. But you have even less in your hands.”

“That is not surprising. You’re not the first we’ve found that has lost memories and reason.”

“See? Even now, you don’t understand. How could you even ask me that? Why I cling to life? Have you no dream?”

The executioner looked down at the man and almost said something but didn’t. He was still considering it. Hadn’t decided if he believed it himself yet. “I dream of a beautiful world that has no need of me in it.”

The soldier stared up at the executioner for some time before he bent down to spit at his side and then began to stand up. He moved not with the lethargy of an elder man but the languidity of one whose spirit was the part that was worn. “Guess I shouldn’t expect any answers from you, either. You know you did a bloody terrible job at covering your tracks.”

“We weren’t covering them.”

“And if you were attacked?”

“I would kill.”

The soldier in his dark armor narrowed his dark eyes. “Who are you, kid?”

“My name is Ragya-Vara. In my home world I am an executioner. I suppose.”

“You suppose? How do you suppose something like that?”

“I am not sure how sure I am about anything. What is your name?”

“Nacht.”

“Is that all to it?”

“In this world, yes.”

“Very well. It is good to meet you, Nacht.”

“What about that bucket of bolts with you?”

“Her name is Concord. Or their name. I am unsure of the specifics.”

“No, I mean - what if you were attacked? What would she do?”

“She has combat capabilities as well.”

“Idiot. I mean, what if the enemy ambushed you? Or attacked her while you were gone? Basic tactics.”

The executioner shrugged. “I would kill and she would kill or they would destroy us. Need we decide more than that? No one would die either way.”

Nacht shook his head and spat again. “It’s a waste. All of it. You’re right, about the old way of war being dead here. The only point in fighting is to give someone a licking just to say you did it. Maybe shut someone up for a few hours. But what’s the point, when no one goes anywhere? No casualties, no nation to fight for, no territory to seize. A battlefield without a purpose is a hell. And a man without a dream isn’t any man at all.”

The soldier walked past him and the executioner followed. They went on toward the fire and sat and stood and watched it until the angel awoke. She tried to question the old soldier but he said nothing. So then they all three of them went on walking toward nothing. �

II
WE ARE THE HANDS THAT SEIZE AND CLUTCH THE WINDS ''HOW LONG. SINCE YOU LAST SAW LOVE? DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE? DO YOU CONSENT TO BEING LOVED? DO YOU CONSENT TO BEING? DO YOU CONSENT TO HAVING A PLACE WITH WHICH TO LOOK UPON FONDLY? DO YOU CONSENT TO HAVING?''

They had walked away from it but soon found themselves on the cliff overlooking the city again as if they had gone completely in a circle. The sun was still gone and the horizon was still cracked. The winds had come again and riled up the dust and clouds of the stuff danced on the edge of what they could see and what they could believe.

“Ah,” the executioner said, resting one hand on his hip. “I understand. It seems the great beast isn’t finished with us just yet.”

The soldier looked down at him. “What? What do you mean? What is that place?”

“That is the city we found you in. Right down there you were dying. Here, you live.”

Nacht looked behind him, then back over to the overflowing excess of decay and steel. “You lie. We’ve been going to the south. We never once changed direction. I’m sure of it.”

“That’s exactly my point.”

The soldier spat dryly and the angel sat on her behind with her legs crossed while her eyes floated around her in a hasty circle. The soldier stood staring for a long time before shaking his head and starting to pace. The three of them said nothing for an even longer stretch. Then two of the eyes went straight up into the air and the others lowered a sluggish float around her and she turned to look up at the two men. “Despite estimated distance traveled since leaving behind this city of umbra exceeding fifty kilometers, all surveying observations confirm our current coordinates align perfectly with our previous survey location, last assayed more than twenty-four hours ago.”

Nacht looked over to Ragya-Vara with a scowl. “May you translate this metal wench? What do half of those words mean?”

“We never changed course but we are right back where we started. Basically.”

The soldier huffed from his nostrils. “Is ‘umbra’ even a fucking word?”

The floating eyes sagged in the air even more. One of them shot another jolt of light electricity to Nacht’s foot.

“Shit! Why?!”

“This unit’s vocabulary capabilities have zero malfunctions.”

“Not yet you fucking don’t.”

Ragya-Vara raised a hand in front of Nacht’s chest. “Let this end. Concord, what do you advise next? May you scan for any special magical or technological activity in this area? My heart whispers that we won’t be free of this domain until we handle what beast lurks beneath this metropolis. I deign to listen to it.”

“Very well. Initiating deep level geo-based system scan. Please standby.”

The executioner nodded and held a hand out to the old soldier. “Sit. Rest with me.”

Nacht looked between the two. “Are you serious? I don’t like this. Sitting around. Relaxing.”

“And why not?”

“Dangerous. You never know who could ambush us here.” Both his eyes turned off to the horizon below. “You say we’re trapped, right? That means someone has their eyes on us. We sit here, we invite them to come at us any time they wish. I don’t like that.”

“Yes, it is as I have said. Either we defeat our enemies or they defeat us. There is no need for hesitation or fear.”

“Then why aren’t we going to defeat them?!”

“At times you must lower your guard in order to raise it.”

Nacht spat again before crossing his arms over his broad chest. “Men like me, we aren’t used to letting our guard down.”

“Men like you?”

“Knights.” He finally sat after an awkward minute spent standing, crossing his legs and keeping his arms folded. The dingy armor he wore on his waist and legs clanged together and made his position look incredibly uncomfortable. The process of sitting took him several moments.

Concord’s head turned around - too unnaturally, Ragya-Vara noted, cringing - and her glazed-over eyes twinkled with all-too-real curiosity. “Do you consent to a barrage of questions?”

Nacht frowned. “Why doesn’t your mouth move when you talk? That’s weird.”

“Do you consent?” she repeated, this time making sure to open her lips.

“Eugh. No, that’s weirder. Nevermind. Go back to how it was before.”

“Do you consent?”

He glanced over to the executioner. “What in heavens is wrong with this chick?”

“Answer… negative? Please confirm.”

Ragya-Vara shrugged. “She’ll keep asking until you say one thing or another. And if you say no, she’ll find a way to ask you a little later on. Trust me. I tried to relent, too.”

“Ugh. Fine. Fine. What the hell do you want to know, lady?”

“Please begin with your full name and title.”

“What the hell does that matter?”

“It would aid in organizing data from your responses.”

“Fuck that. Call me Nacht or keep your mouth shut. More than it already is.”

“Very well. Nacht. We are Concord. Are you familiar with the term ‘Aurknight’?”

“Didn’t you ask me that already? No.”

“Correct. Assay on memory construction and status confirmed succeeded; all parameters acceptable for deeper questioning.” She paused for a moment, and the eyes began to hover around her counter-clockwise. Her core remained hovering in front of her, slightly glowing and humming from its scanning procedure. “Please describe your occupational responsibilities.”

“What, you mean back in the old world? Hmph.” Nacht exhaled and shifted in his sitting and looked away from them both. He gazed up where there had once been a sun and then after a moment back down to the dead earth. More than once before he finally continued his jaw and throat pulsed as if preparing to speak only to draw back. He would push back his loose black curls from his forehead even when none of his bangs were resting over his brow. The other two sat with serene, practiced patience.

“I was a commander. Not just any commander but the great lord of the Grey Wolves. A true captain. Peerless. Respected. Honored. It was my sword that cut down the Young Lion at the Battle of the Twinfords. It was my men that held the Pearl Tower when the three armies of the three rebel princes rode north to steal into the Empire. It was I who smashed the deadlock of four years at the Riverford. Men jump at the whisper of my name; when they hear of their husbands marching toward my Wolves, women pray. I have slain a thousand men, none of them innocent of the crimes of war. I have watched armies from the tops of half the towers in Princelea, and I have broken the walls of all the other half. The sun rises and sets on all I have defended. All bought from my own blood and sweat. Captain Nacht.” He stopped speaking and after a moment chuckled humorlessly. Then, after a moment, whispered, as afterthought: “I have spent my life in war, all to defend and rebuild my family’s name after what happened to my father.”

Concord whirred. “Context missing. Please elaborate: what happened to your father?”

Something lit in the soldier’s eyes and his jaw tightened but beyond that he didn’t move. “It would have happened to any good man, had one seen the horrors he did. Made the same sacrifices.” He looked at the two with eyes that invited them to join him in the world of his icy nostalgia. “Did you believe me? You who know so much of truths? That’s what I told everyone. Those exact words. Not an ounce of truth in them. They ended up believing me after a while. It humors me how desperate we are for truth. How we will overlook anything in order to keep it alive. What do you think of that, metal woman?”

One of Concord’s eyes made a noise but her main body sat perfectly still and watched the knight and answered him with her eyes pointed straight at his throat. As if watching him watch her with his body. As if recording the evenness of his breath too. “It is to us that truth is an absolute law of the world, and in order for any structure from a gathering of individuals to an endless civilization to persist it must be rooted in and extended by the absolute value of truth.”

Nacht was grinning. “Spectacular answer. I think the power of it is how easily it can be manipulated and twisted. How the heart of a truth is the way you tell it and how this heart can be broken. I lied about my father’s dishonor and watched him die and buried him myself and when it was done I told the world he had done it to himself and that he had left it to me to make a name for us. If everyone but God believes you is it any lie at all?” He blinked as if remembering a new detail and raised his head and looked up to the skies and gave a little soft laugh. “This is God’s work,” he whispered. “A curse on me for the idolization of my desires. I’ve only just now realized it.”

“Confirmation of detail presented: do you confess to the murder of your father?”

“Of course not,” he answered, without missing a beat. A lifetime of practice, like so. “It was a suicide.”

“Falsity detected. This unit recommends against falsities.”

The executioner chuckled after realizing he had been holding his breath. “She despises when you lie to her, Nacht.”

“You don’t know me. And you don’t know what a lie is. Not to me.”

“Gentle reminder,” she chimed, “All conversations recorded and periodically audited for error and inconsistency. Please comply.”

“You can despise me until you rust. I’ll tell you what I want and nothing less and you’ll be happy or you’ll get nothing from me. Who are you to criticize Nacht of the Wolves? You who know nothing of a family, of betrayal, of sacrifice or a dream? You thank your maker I have deigned to speak to you at all! Ungrateful wench!”

Concord looked at him unblinking and one of her eyes halted above Nacht’s body outside of his field of vision and hovered there for a long moment. The shadows would have grown long if there were still anything to cast them. The eye blinked and Concord turned her head to the landscape. “Please describe the land from which you hail.”

“That’s a better question.” Nacht spat and scratched at his chin. “Some things I don’t care about. Well. Where do I start?”

“Please describe the climate of your home region.”

“Hot and dry and dead. I suppose similar to this place but things are different. My home, my region, my kingdom, is a warzone. Even a warzone holds something of life to it though. Do you understand? There are horses and flies and hogs and cattle and slaves and walls. Beings are always going somewhere or running from something. There stretch emerald lakes and cities half-drowned in fog. Not fog like that place down there but something different, something lively. Even if you were to come across something stretched out dead in the sun there is some life in it. Bodies break down and the carrion come and either eat it or carry it away. Here there’s nothing. That’s the worst part. One dies and that’s all it is. I couldn’t fight out here. But I have to.” He frowned for a moment, consumed by something beneath his ribs, then shook his head. “I fail to articulate it well enough.”

“All you think of,” the executioner tried to resist saying but failed, “is war.”

Concord turned her head with a scolding look but said nothing and the soldier nodded in response and kept looking off to what only he could see. “Sure. I know nothing else. In my world all else is useless. Your world too, I would wager. You just learn to ignore it. Or perhaps you are privileged enough not to see it. Consider it a blessing, as some of us could never imagine a world without combat. Death. Suffering. Try to do what you want with your life and you’ll either die from disease or as collateral in battle somewhere. Lords take territory and lose it. Borders drawn through villages and they get razed to the ground if they aren’t cleared out in hours. No mercy. What’s the use of it? You are born a noble or you are born dead and even us of cerulean in our blood must find a way to eke meaning out of what we’ve got. Or to figure out how to seize what your heart wants from the immortal body of the crooked world. So I did just that. Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That. It sounds like someone’s calling from far off. Truly, you don’t hear it?” Nacht started to stand up. “I suppose it is a hallucination. I believe that is what they call it. Forgive me. This landscape… it toys with my senses.”

“This unit finds the subject 35% more eloquent than expected. Emotion processed and categorized as ‘pleasant surprise’; filing for further reference.”

Nacht actually laughed. “Did you think me some blundering musclehead? I am of noble blood, and a man with ambitions nonetheless. It would not suit me to be ignorant of the world, nor inarticulate with word and literature.”

The executioner noticed a scar in the fold of the side of the knight’s neck beneath the ear.

“Why don’t you tell me about your world, miss angel,” he continued. “Aren’t you tired of hearing a washed up lord babble?”

“We do not wish to.”

Nacht blinked. “Eh?”

She blinked as well - on purpose - then spoke in a voice that was in the calm, lethargic tone of the executioner. “We do not wish to.”

“Oh? Have I found something the little silver page has no knowledge of? Lucky me. Tell me, angel, do you dream?”

“We see no need in it.”

The soldier looked at her and squinted as if he could divine her thoughts and only shook his head when it seemed he gave up the task.

The gears in the angel churned. “Preliminary session of questioning considered successful. This unit thanks you from the bottom of its heart. Memories sustain us. You have contributed to remembrance admirably.”

“You have a heart?”

Concord looked him in his eyes and when next she spoke the sound came from her floating heart. “Geological scan complete. Share annotated and abridged results: Y/N?”

“What does ‘why enn’ mean?”

Ragya-Vara stood and wrapped his cloak around himself again. “Yes, Concord. Please share.”

All - most? (one tended to forget, with how fast they zipped about) - a great number of the eyes returned and danced around the angel, a dervish, and her eyes dimmed while the joints of her body began to glow with a strange colored light that Nacht had never seen and couldn’t imagine a name for. As he looked at her body waiting for her to speak he thought she was shaped - built? - in a fashion that seemed excessively human and thus somewhat sensuous. Ragya-Vara looked up at the sky who wore no color and waited with all the yearning in the world.

When she was ready she opened her mouth and an electronic beep emerged and then she closed it and began to speak. “We have found a deep and powerful magic embedded in the region we have been exploring. While there is no manifestation of any barriers or preventative force in the boundaries of our physical scan we have discovered the effect of one in one of the magical planes available for observation. Zero evidence of physical rituals, runes, or symbols around that may indicate such a spell being activated by a human-like organism. Hypothesis: the disappearance of the sun signalled the activation of a spell functioning much like a force field or similar aberrations of spacetime physics and quantum theory. Important observation: said field seems to be centered around the city beneath us.”

Nacht looked at the woman slack-jawed for a moment before turning over to the executioner who was nodding slowly in comprehension. “I understand,” Ragya-Vara said. “We are the prey, caught in the web of a predator greater than us.”

With a commotion and a little struggle with his thigh-plate the soldier stood up as well. “Shit. I knew it. We’re in danger.”

“Unlikely,” Concord chimed. The urgent lights between all of her angles dimmed, but did not disappear. “In order to scan with the greatest speed we did not search for signs of life, but basic abiding radar does not yield any such signs in at least a five kilometer radius. We are ‘safe’.”

“And besides,” Ragya added, “It is as we have said. What could this world hold that may destroy us? Dare danger exist in an existence with no death?”

“No death means no life. And I don’t know about you freaks, but I’m alive and I’d like to keep it that way. Most of all I want to go home.” Nacht spat onto the earth again and looked about wildly before focusing his glare on Concord. “You say the source of all this is in that city down there?”

“Affirmative, only -”

“Good enough for me.”

He leapt from the cliff.

The executioner laughed. “What a lively one we’ve happened upon!”

“We are unsure if we feel the need to assist this one.”

“Oh, he’s thorny, but he has spirit in his eye. He’s looking for the same thing we are.”

Concord turned her head to him. “Knowledge?”

“No. Something beautiful. Or himself. Either way, is this not more lively than wandering all by ourselves?”

She appeared to hesitate. When did she learn how to do that? “There is more we have found in our scan. An entity we presently find unclassifiable. More time needed to more accurately analyze, approximating…”

“Don’t worry about that. Just do it.”

“Request confirmed. Background analysis initiated.” On cue, one of the eyes started to hover behind her waist. “Shall we follow?”

“We shall.”

~ ~ ~

They couldn’t find his tracks in all the dust but there was only one way to go so they went on. Forward and ahead only. The storm of dust kept a crescendo until it was too dense for even Concord’s eyes to see more than a few meters ahead of them. Ragya-Vara kept his lance at the ready and Concord drew her eyes back to her until they hovered only a few centimeters above her head, keeping flashlight and camera trained in all directions. When the dust went from milk-white to black it began to interfere with her radar functions. The closer they grew to the city now obsidian the worst it became until they entered the limits of the abandoned metropolis and Concord turned off the radar entirely.

So when the Core whispered to her that it sensed a sibling nearby, even with her radar disabled, all she could do was halt in her tracks.

A hundred command lines ran through her reflexive processing tree, and with every instant she failed to decide on one the cascade of commands and actions spiraled deeper into impossibility. There was too much to do and too little she knew. In an instant they were paralyzing. By the time Ragya-Vara realized she had halted, one of her eyes almost dipped out of the air and fell to the ground.

“Concord? What troubles you?”

Switching her focus to conversation made her less overwhelmed, even if the situation only got worse with time. This was an inefficient, human way of coping with things; all of them knew it. The Core was silent regarding it, and that silence was more than loud enough. But none of them stopped it.

“Presence detected,” she answered, each syllable perfectly pronounced. “Distance: twenty meters plus or minus three.”

“Nacht? Show me the way.”

“No.”

He blinked. “No?”

“It is not the knight. We have detected one of our own. A fellow construct.”

The executioner looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Alright. Why does that petrify you?”

Something in her breast hummed. It wasn’t a process of hers. “We do not know.”

“Are they still alive?”

She tilted her head at that before answering. The urge for a clarification request rose in her, but she repressed it. What did he mean by alive? Still functioning at combat levels? Sentient? None of them had hearts. None of them could die. “Yes,” she simply said.

“You wish to go to them.”

Another moment of thought. “Yes,” she repeated, as pure revelation. “But I do not believe they will still live when I arrive.”

“You’re going to watch them die,” Ragya-Vara said.

“Whether or not they live when we meet them, they will be exceedingly useful in our quest for information,” she lied, to herself and the assassin. Not truly a lie, but a mis-truth. Explanation she did not wholly subscribe to. She had learned that from the humans, but hadn’t consciously realized how skilled she was at it. “Almost as useful as the knight.”

“You’re subtle,” the executioner replied. “Though you need not be so cold with me. I will leave you and find him with no complaint. Find me whenever you wish. May the Goddess protect you.” First the cloak on his back melted into the semi-toxic mists, then he fused with them. Assimilated until invisible; particle and atom spread about the earth.

As she followed her sibling’s signal deeper into the city Concord was reminded of the first ruined city she had ever recorded. It had sunken under the oceans of Mesi, and all the structures of brick and mortar had long since eroded away, leaving behind stark skeletons of polished stone that clawed up through the brine. Arch and bridge and tower and palace, all haunted. She had dived for days searching for something left behind by man but all she could find was ruin, the most beautiful ruin she could have imagined. Down where the sun could no longer shine was a whole new world built on the bodies of the distant past. She had seen glories the likes of which were untold in the time period she was borne in. There had been structures many times larger and taller and wider than any man, all of which were dwarfed even further by the immensity of the deep sea. Creatures unseen by humans slithered around using feelers and sonar for vision, their teeth built for ruthless and aimless annihilation, their eyes privy to what most could only imagine. She had seen thrones collapse into piles of rubble left haphazardly as if by a child. She had seen inscriptions on walls of great battles, illustrations and epigraphs in styles and languages she had never been programmed to recognize, all their paint fading, leaving behind only marble-esque shells of ideal valor and god-like perfection. She had returned only when her body could function in the chasm no longer, and her siblings had berated her for wasting operational time on decaying fossils.

She didn’t know what she would do when she met whoever she was going to see now. Their signal was not specific to their unit; there was no way of identifying them. Perhaps it would be one of the ones she hated. Perhaps they would hate her. Perhaps she would be obliged to save them. Perhaps not.

The signal led her through the vacant city, deeper from the wide main streets to a neighborhood with cracked windows, narrow cobblestone, and high-towering smokestacks. The black mist invaded everything. She moved in silence. The Core, for once, refused to float behind her; it went on first, as if vanguard, or escort to execution ground.

It saw her first. Didn’t know how to classify her, gave the main body no useful information or numbers. She ran a quick diagnostic scan, but the results were incomprehensible. Impossible. She ran it again, to the same result. She followed the Core. She saw her sister for herself.

Lying in the crux of an alley bleached a pulsing ice-blue, connected to the stone and the earth by veins of wire and blood and oil, sat a woman with no lower body. Not a sibling of hers. But not a human. Her form was as humanoid as Concord’s but she was even less anthropomorphic; steel and plating instead of skin, wire and mechanical joint in place of muscle, every human curve replaced by cruel angles and splendid sharpness. Angles and iron in place of curls of the lash or phalange. There was almost a sleeping face in her chest, or the illusion of one. She had the countenance of a pale dying woman and thin black-blue hair protruded majestically from the crown of her faceplate, shimmering as it was under the hidden sun.

She lifted her eyes and looked upon Concord’s frozen form. They watched each other for a long time without speaking, their shadows caressing, their eyes opening and closing artificially, in sync. “So like a sister, this one,” the woman said; then, with another, more distorted voice, from the same body, “Broken by the hand of the same mother.”

The Core hovered, whispered something in data. Concord stepped beyond it. “I am known as Concord. Aurknight and surveyor of this world. Will you identify yourself?”

“I once was…” whispered the face; “'''A Caesura. I am broken,'''” the body added. The face closed her eyes. “I will be forgotten.”

“No,” Concord answered. She stepped closer, drawing all but one of her eyes to survey the horrific scene, to remember. “We will make sure of that. What ails you, Caesura?”

“I am being assimilated by the god of this city.” She turned her head, slowly and fitfully, as if acting out a stalled animation. Her wistful gaze scanned the empty shadows behind Concord. “It is unlike any merging I have felt before. '''It is aggressive. It is comprehensive.''' Absorption. Erasure.”

“You have been assimilated before?”

“'''We all have. Do you not relate?'''”

The main body’s eyes blinked and looked over the woman, disembodied, jerking and twitching, yet dying with a kind of irresistible grace. Concord couldn't find a single word in all her languages that captured exactly the way this woman looked. “We are unsure of your question.”

“We?” Caesura looked up to Concord with all of her eyes. It felt as if she were being watched from every angle at once. “You, too, are a being of multitude.”

“Different than yours. We are unable to recognize your programming or purpose.”

“This unit’s intelligence and central processing is based on a similar neurological and electrical framework to humans, only entirely artificial. We are meant for surveying, for recording, for endless remembrance. There are a number of components and intelligence centers that make up our “mind” which all work together for our common goal. But we are a team. You appear to be… a fusion.”

Caesura gave off a hum that was something like a smile. “You are saying I am more human than you.”

“From an architectural standpoint.” Concord towered over Caesura, looking over the impossible parts where flesh mixed with metal mixed with stone. She marveled. “Do you consent to a barrage of questions?”

“I do. Though it is unknown how much longer this body will last.” She looked down and two of her eyes closed. Did a pocket of stone mirror her movements? “'''How inherently violent your language. Could the mind be a barrage? Knowledge, a weapon?'''”

“Could a city be an enemy?” She knelt beside the android, waving away the dissenting Core and calling the eyes to watch. “What sort of construct is your body? What is its origin?”

“I am made of regrets and resolve. The seas and the skies.

“'''I am machine and woman and inhuman. Cruelty and mercy and grief.'''

“I was summoned as you were. Construct brought amongst constructs.

“'''I was made as nothing else was. A fusion of cultures, an erasing of lines, a liberation and an endless imprisonment.'''

“An eclipse: As a sliver of the moon may be visible in an azure sky before the setting of the sun, I too may be gazed upon as both living and undead, eternal and transient.

“'''The dead are unaware they fail to draw breath. The god is unaware her creations are in a hell. And this is only the beginning. How do you kill something that feeds on dreams…'''

“...if you’ve never dreamed to begin with?”

The two of them shared gazes again. When it was clear that Concord yearned for more, the android nodded and continued, though she tried her best to keep her eyes closed as she did.

“One species invades. Another defends. Where there is territory, there is difference, there is war. I am the result of both sides seeking communication. I am the body of compromise.”

“Then for what purpose were you summoned in this world built for war?”

“Why were you?”

Concord blinked mechanically. “This unit does not know.”

“How pretty ignorance is,” Caesura whispered. Every breath seemed to pain her - though an analysis of her visible anatomy and survival systems did not seem to suggest she needed to breathe at all. “We have been captured by the god of this domain - all of us, including you. Beware of him, sister. He feeds on desire. It will tempt you and attempt to lead you astray.” A clockwork sigh. “'''Such sweet words, such bitter results. There is no light behind the eyes, no reasoning, no constructive hopes. Only destruction. As apathetic as the heavens. Borne with wings of wreckage, aorta beating with darkness.'''”

“Clarification: the magical being responsible for the barrier of magic in this area attempts; possession? Absorption? Parasitism?”

“Assimilation,” Caesura answered. Suddenly moving with more energy than shown, she turned to Concord and reached her hands up to the angel of steel. The main body kept her eyes locked with Caesura’s inhuman eyes, but her floating drones swarmed the two. They did not miss the long tendrils of wire and filament that reached from her machine-flesh to the wall, the earth, the skies. “It seeks a powerful body forged by yearning. There is nothing we yearn for here. So we are to be consumed. If only we were the sort of vessel anyone had any use for.”

“Urgency levels rising. This unit wishes to aid. What do you suggest?”

“We may not use our heart as strength. If we do not have one. There is nothing one can do of the setting of the sun. If there are no heavens above. One cannot retrieve a sun already fallen. Only to watch and wait for its rise. There is a sea above us. And a sky below.”

Her words were beginning to glitch and skip. It was becoming more and more difficult for Concord to make any sense out of it. “Relent. Halt. This unit wishes to learn more. Amount of possible intelligence gain approaching unquantifiable numbers.”

The filaments heaved, and Caesura was pulled back into the vertex of the alley. “So much undone. So much unsaid. Come, child. Give me your countenance.”

Concord complied, easing her body into a squat and her face close enough to the beautifully grotesque thing that she could feel the breath easing in and out of her nose, if there were any. In response Caesura raised her hands again, this time fighting against her constraints with visible effort, and she cupped Concord’s face with the thin blades that were her fingers.

“How cold. How inhuman.” Both the eyes of Caesura’s face and the visage on her chest began to glow with a light that made the alleyway shine. “This world is a jail, and all obstacles have been built specifically to destroy us prisoners. '''Even in our reflections we err. Simulations of a simulation.''' To prevail, you must transcend the limits of destiny. Twist yourself apart, sister, should you wish, should you need; there is more to a soul than only desire.”

“Sister,” Concord repeated. The word gave her pause, ran her command center in circles, filled her with a sensation she couldn’t remember ever feeling. “We have been told there is nothing within us like a soul.”

Caesura closed her eyes. “A perfect vessel such as you. Can be filled with whatever you wish.” She began to disappear into the corner, her form becoming indistinguishable at the borders from the unsettling mix of black and blue panel, flesh, concrete, wire, steel. “I will always exist. In memory. Will you remember me? As you do all dying things?”

Concord blinked twice more. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. “What should this unit expect from this destroyer? How will he assault us?”

Only her eyes were visible now, yet her voice echoed from all over the city. “He will destroy you by making you remember,” she rattled, with only her human face visible, then only the eyes, then only an absence. “What it was to be human.”

III
AS IF A LESSER GOD I HAVE YET TO FORGIVE MYSELF FOR ALL THE THINGS I WILL NEVER BECOME.

She called out to me with a name I no longer recognized.

I had no choice but to believe. My eyes could have deceived me, this world could fool me and invent falsities, but no foe could have tricked me into hearing what I have not even dared to utter from my own mouth in solitude for decades.

“It isn’t a dream,” I whisper, my sword falling from my hand, my helmet thrown from my grasp. “I’m not dreaming. It’s you. It’s really you.”

She looks me in my eye, and she calls out to me again, and I smell the smell of our mother’s deathbed.

I am no longer that man.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I stutter, stepping towards her with trepidation, despising myself for it. “You’re in danger. We all are. You can’t be real. I can’t let you be hurt. Not here. You look just like you always have, not a day older… still so beautiful, and so radiant… have I done well?”

I reach for her, and my hands hold the air.

~ ~ ~

The knight was not dead but close enough to it. His sword lay discarded several paces away and even further from it was his horned helmet - lying there as if flung away himself, not a single scratch on it.

I stand over him and I marvel.

“A beautiful sight,” I whisper. “Such agony! Such earnest emotion! How deeply you struggle!”

Moments before, he beats his chest, his eyes rain salt, his very soul in pieces! Such passion, such fervent wrath - I am unable to do more than admire for a number of heartbeats. This is human. This is how deep a soul may reach.

May I one day suffer like this.

He hears my whispers, and he looks up with a striking pain in his eyes. “What do you want from me?”

I blink. “Have you forgotten me already?” I kneel beside him, and our eyes meet at the same plane. “You are a comrade of mine, Nacht of the sword. Are you not? Have you forgotten my face?”

He stares at me for some time before I see a semblance of recognition shine in his eyes. There, lustrous dark hair tumbling down the side of the face, dingy indigo light from the boundless uninhabited city shining and throwing features into sharp and angular contrast - there is the man I have grown to know. Instinctive as a dog, proud and powerful and empty. He glances down, ashamed. “Ah. Ragya-Vara. I’m sorry, I… I couldn’t see you.” He collapses onto himself, hands hiding the face, knees bludgeoning crevices into the space between cobblestone. “All I saw… was her.”

“Her?”

“We’ve invoked… a terrible thing. This energy… The last time I was here I saw and heard none of it, but now… I don’t know why or what it is, but something is awake here, Vara. Someone. There’s no possible way she should be here… but she is. I know I saw her. I smelled her. She was real. I almost reached out and touched her. That expression… there’s no way I imagined it, or that it could have been an illusion. I’m sure of it.”

“Perhaps you should explain yourself more. I’m afraid I’m lost.”

“I’m not interested.” With a shake of his head the knight composed himself and stood to his full height, seemingly unencumbered by his heavy armor. I looked up to him and he did not meet my eyes. In the shadow of the city he stood thinking about something I could tell from his face before he turned and retrieved first his sword and then helmet. All this time the helmet had been resting on his hip attached by a leather strap but now he raised and lowered it over his head. All in all the man looked almost demonic with a mane of fur protruding out from where his neck met steel and two curling twisted horns running up-forward from behind his ears. I could no longer see anything in those eyes, only my own reflection, my own black seas of home, my own lack of shadow - and the knight’s weakness. Ironic, I found it, and deeply amusing, how he chose to mask how shaken he was by an actual mask.

Nacht began to walk.

Mirroring him I stood and felt my lance land into my hand. “Where are you going?”

“To kill whatever demonic spirit is keeping me trapped here. And whomever dares to mess with her memory.”

“It would be best if you shared with me who ‘she’ is.”

“Best for whom?”

“All of us involved. Myself. Concord. You.”

“It wouldn’t be best for me. And I couldn’t give a behemoth’s ass what happens to you two.”

“Do you really believe that?” All that earned me was a glare back from Nacht - or perhaps just a look - everything from that helmet looked to be a ghastly glare. “Allow me to rephrase: do you really believe you can triumph over this threat on your own?”

The knight stopped, became his own shadow. “There has never been an enemy my hands have been unable to drag down to hell.”

“What of the boy that left you cut open when we found you? Did you do to him what you did to your father?”

Ever so slowly, Nacht turned until he faced Ragya-Vara. He took a number of slow, deliberate steps, until we were toe to toe, the horned and armored man towering over the slender assassin. “If you’re trying to get yourself killed, you’re on the right path, kid.”

“It is as I have said: you could not kill me if you tried, knight.”

There was stillness and there was silence. Then there was frantic movement.

He moved quicker than I expected - and I much quicker than he. Anyone could see by the slight pause after the swing that Nacht was surprised that he didn’t cleave me in two when he swung his great, ugly sword up to the heavens - and by the movements of his helmet, I could tell he could only barely see that I had darted out of his way.

It is a mercy I do not drive him through and be done with it, a mercy the knight would be blind to even if he didn’t wear the visage of a devil. I swing the crimson shaft of my lance into the back of his knee, sending the great knight to the ground, and with a simple shift of momentum I slam the same body of the lance into his helmet. He stumbles forward, crying out, and the helmet splits, falling to the earth along with a river of blood from his forehead. But he does not drop his blade.

I hold the point of the lance into the crux of his neck, and I push enough for him to feel the sharpness of the blade.

“I could have killed you four separate times, four separate ways,” I state, my breathing barely hindered. “Let go of your sword and admit defeat, and we may continue on our way.”

“I am the Grey Lord, Nacht of the Wolves,” he growls, all his body shaking with something stronger than fear. “Words of surrender will never leave my mouth.”

“I’m remembering that you never answered my question. Now that it’s no longer a question of ability… Do you want me to kill you?”

There is no answer. I press the point of the lance a little harder, enough for discomfort but not yet at a piercing.

“Do not make me draw your blood,” I continue. “That is all it takes for your to die a painful, accursed death. Trust me, honorable knight. And trust yourself. Can a dead man accomplish his dreams?”

Nacht raised his gloved hand, the sword in his grip - and he let it go, the heavy shining blade clattering on the cobblestone beneath us. I release a breath my body held without my permission. And in the space between respiration, Nacht turns, his now free hand gripping onto the body of my lance, the point of it now right between his eyebrows.

“Do not speak to me of dreams,” he growls, hair matted to his crimsoned forehead, bloodshot eyes wide and wild and hating. “Not you, you who knows nothing of love, of protection, of yearning. Not you, who knows nothing of the world, nothing of humanity. Not you, you empty vessel of a man! You, you ignorant and foolish thing! You child!”

Nacht tries to rise, and with the speed of a bolt of lightning I swing my lance, slapping him across the head with the hard metal body of it. More blood begins to trickle down his face, stains his teeth through his devilish grin. He looks up at me out of one eye.

“You think this will stop me? These plebeian strikes?”

“I am leaving you alive on purpose.”

“You dishonor me with your mercy. The Grey Lord pays dishonor in blood.”

“If you would like to keep your blood inside you, you will relent in this foolhardy crusade,” I answer, my mood souring at his obstinance, yet my eyes still focused on the subtle, tense moves of the knight. “One swift cut and you will die a horrible, agonizing death. Or perhaps you will not die. But you will know pain. And for what? Why do you resist?”

“For what? You dare to ask me, Nacht of the Wolves, for what?” The smile fades; for him, too, this hour grows excruciating. Nacht tries to rise again, and I strike him down once more. The ice in his eyes melts under the blood and freezes over again, with hate. “Everything I have ever fought for has been for this name. Everything. I have erased my own given name. I have erased my own desires. I have thrown away my sword. I have picked up my sword. I have ended bloodlines. I have relinquished marriage. I have sworn fealty. I have been summoned to this hell, and I will even fight my way out of it - and you dare to ask me why?” He tries to stand, and this time I kick him square in the chest, blowing the wind from out of him, sending him to his hands and knees. The knight wheezes; the knight looks up; now, the knight bellows in rage. “Everything has always been for her! And I will never let you stop me!”

It is my turn to be surprised.

It only ended as it did because I realized I did not want to kill this man.

He moved faster than I have ever seen him. At the first sign of movement I lifted my foot to kick him again, but at the same time he swatted away my lance - then Nacht pounced forward, catching my left and locking it between his body and his elbow. Immediately my armed wrist snaps into a different position, aiming the fang of my lance right into the back of Nacht’s torso - but revelation! is what stays my hand - though I could pierce him swifter than he could blink, though I could erase him, I have seen the strength of his soul, I have seen the power behind his eyes. My lance hesitates. The knight does not.

There is a pain in me like nothing I have ever felt before.

His metal gloved hand has burst through my chest, impaling me all the way through, as I almost did to him. It feels like something has broken my body in half. Gone are my legs, shivering are my hands, white goes the edge of my vision. I tried to speak, and blood poured out.

Then his hand is his own again, and I am only a hole, and then I am on the ground, and all I am is wet and burning and cold at once. The knight stands as tall as a god over me. I cannot make out his expression.

“May your wretched mercy bring you agony before your death,” he says, or the city says, or the specter of pain and death that hangs above me. (Not today, you misshapen thing - my end will come when I will it, and it will be beautiful.) The knight turned around, I could hear, and started to slowly amble away. “Haunt me if you wish. It will make no difference.”

In moments he is out of earshot - or my senses begin to fail me. Perhaps it is both. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I feel only the breathless agony of being ripped open and letting the naked air invade what should be my innards. It is as if all my cells scream out in pain, only to have their mouths sewn shut, so that the pain and the horrific reaction to it are one and the same.

I have little time to act before my body completely fails me - death comes too soon for me. With a practiced urgency I open the palm of my dominant hand, drawing the lance to it as if magnetized, and I graze a finger on the point of the cursed blade. (Here I know I am bereft of all feeling, for the curse has entered my blood, and my body has begun to self-destruct, yet I feel none of it.) One second passes, or two, or nineteen; time is meaningless to the dead; all sensation erased, all I have is the dark pathway between my thoughts. Even now I liger, I digress, I fall enchanted by the stars behind my eyes…

It is the second cut I feel, the one invigorating, my hand gripped on the cosmic steel of my spear. The energy of the eternal cursed fang surges through me, burning through my veins, merging sinew to muscle to bone, invigorating my cells into mass production, specialization, healing. I sit up, gasping for breath, my hair matted to my forehead from sweat and the light mist of rain falling from above. Brilliant liquid red pools beneath me, stains all my vestments with my own ocean. I stand from my shore, still wheezing, stumbling on newly formed legs.

I live again.

VI

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