Suspended high in the mists, the Wire-Witch leaned upon the balcony railing. Watching the court of the Vat-Mother, her very being felt contorted in anguish hidden, ill-expressed by her skeletal visage.


    Below, picked out amidst the swirling dim cerulean glow, the court of her sister-clone played. The Vat-Mother’s gossamer tendrils reeled down from the high order in which she had been staked. The tendrils and the hooks, like the ligaments with which she held the palace together, were the same shade of crimson as the painted lips of her soft mask and matched the arteries that fed the bare biolights embedded within the ceiling.


    A child was dragged out from the assembly chamber and thrown before the horde, still dripping with the viscous gel of their birth. The child struggled on digitigrade legs, the ribbed hoses connecting their mouth to their chest, heaving as they tried to yell out.


    The massive thralls that bound the the child forced them to stand before the altar of their Goddess. She watched silently as the child was put to the test.


    A drone dropped out of the haze, catching itself mid-air and buzzing on four biomechanical wings. Armed, it inched towards the vat-born. Its hooked pincers were high, twitching in the air with violent and hungry urges. It drooled from its weaponised glands.


    Star metal glimmered from the back of the drone’s head. The Wire-Witch recognised her own work immediately. Grafted into its brain stem was an implanted brain-machine interface, one of many gifted over the years, the generosity of one of the Immortal’s premier lines to another. Long ago, she had taught the Vat-Mother of Acetyn and her servants how to control the city-drones. It was never supposed to be for this.


    The vat-born child recoiled in fright from the drone as it lunged unerringly for their eyes, a cry of fear issuing from their distended throats. Designed to kill, the drone’s pincers hooked onto the flesh of the child’s left shoulder. Terrified, the vat-born tried to get away. However, the more they struggled and fought back — the more they thrashed — the more the drone caught their struggling flesh with its hooks. Every motion caused the drone to fasten into the child’s upper body with its bladed pincers harder, deeper. It wasn’t a battle. It was murder.


    Blood spilt over the chitin-shelled floor. The vat-born was then devoured alive - head doused in slime from the drone’s digestive glands, and its contents then sucked out by a penetrative barb. Fragments of half-grown bio-ceramic armour remained, a fractured shell over despoiled flesh.


    Yet, in their struggles, the child had inadvertently injured the drone. A long-bladed claw on their left hand had left wracking gauges in the side of the mindless drone as they tried to hold onto life. That was enough. A lumbering brute, carrying a cleaver of metallic bone, made his way over the body. Ignoring the suckling of the drone, he took a firm hold of the child’s limp arm and hacked off its hand. This he presented to the Vat-Mother, who, with only a look, granted him permission to leave and continue honing the aug-type.


    Activity returned to the floor. Courtiers gathered, ignoring the child’s remains and the drone feeding on it. Musicians played symphonies, using instruments drawn from metal roots beneath them or grown from their contorted bodies. A table, made as a trophy from the plating of some long-dead beast, was brought before the Vat-Mother. Distantly, freaks were led through the misty halls of the palace, deprived of their freedom. Their march brought them within sight of the vast doorway to her court, letting her dark cavities linger on the distance, watching the activity as the seemingly endless line of the captured and enthralled made their way through her palace grounds.


    The ruler of this demesne silently watched each captive, each shaped by the genetic discord and life in the city in their own unique way, be consigned to her tyranny. Finally, watching her sister-clone and the freaks struggling for their passage in equal regard, the Wire-Witch exhaled in despair.


    Skinbound. That was what the Vat-Mother once called herself, a designation for the flaying that had made her into something else long before they pretended to be royalty. If someone uttered it now, they would be in for a sorry fate indeed, the Wire-Witch thought.


    The Wire-Witch remembered the Vat-Mother when they were just Djay and Eye. They walked free and spent their hours together in play as children. When it was cool outside, they would run around the maze of the rusted walkways surrounding the manifolds of their steely home, chasing each other around the sky. Then, when the heat raked their skin, they would hide in the shroud, whisper in the dark, share secrets, and pretend that the desolation beyond didn’t exist.


    One day, their creator summoned Eye to their sleeping space with a voice that carried through every hallway and issued from every wall. Djay had followed, holding her sister-clone’s hand. Something was wrong, though. When they reached their bedroom, Djay backed away at the threshold.


    The memory of those whip-sharp tendrils that took Eye still shook Djay with fear. They had seized Eye, coiled around her and seemingly melted into her. Eye’s screams, combined with the sudden violence, frightened Djay. She ran away instead of finding a way to help, abandoning her sister-clone.


    Logically, she knew she was just a child. Nevertheless, the shame haunted her to this day. Djay had hidden in the darkest section of the shroud. She couldn’t tell if the howling outside was the agony of her sister-clone or the sound of the wind against the hollow vessel.


    Eventually, when Djay dared return, it was only to find her sister-clone collapsed, still bound on the chamber floor. The tendrils had fused with her legs and lower body and even then continued to reshape her. This time, though, Djay stayed. She dragged Eye to the blankets they slept in, held her and tried to reassure her. It had always been difficult to share their feelings. Unlike the people in their old recordings, they didn’t have faces, so they had to be patient with each other. There was no denying Eye’s agony, though. Djay remembered Eye whimpering in pain as her back opened, ulcerating and weeping. She was delirious with the pain. Djay used a rag and clean water to try to soothe the lesions, to no avail. Hours went by. Eye sounded in such pain, and she could barely eat the food that Djay brought her from the dispensers.


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    Later, the image of their creator came to take Eye from their sanctuary. Djay’s memory of her creator was distorted, motion jumbled with sharp, flickering lights. However, she remembered that she swallowed down her fear this time and insisted that she go too. She wouldn’t leave Eye again. So she walked with them down the long stairway from their steely home to the desolation below. They ventured down into Acetyn when the city was still small, and it sheltered in the craggy old valley, supping from a tumbling waterfall and growing vast.


    Their creator, who had carried Eye in a sphere of pure light, planted Eye against a fleshy outcropping just beyond the heads of Acetyn. Sternly, the creator told Eye to care for her children, and then simply vanished.


    They were both confused and distraught. Djay stood there, trying to reassure Eye. Djay wished she could do something to save her sister-clone, but there was nothing she could do. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a way to pry Eye from the wall she was now fixed upon. When she managed to get a wedge of shell and tried to cut them apart, there was a limit to what she could do whilst Eye seemed to feel every part of it. Despite their struggles, the edifice slowly seemed to harden, simultaneously supporting her sister-clone and imprisoning her against the city.


    The great layer of meat that the city consisted of was not impermeable, and it let rain in and sneezed out clouds of noxious vapour from its narrow passages in equal measure. When night came, the city’s parasites became emboldened enough by the dark to creep out. Desperate, the sister-clones would scream and shout together, waving their arms to look big, which drove away the smallest of them. When behemoths passed, their massive bodies clad in armour-like hides, Djay would hide, and Eye would fall silent, trying to avoid notice.


    Or, at least, that was what she did at first.


    Trying to do all she possibly could, Djay began to hike back up the great stairway daily. From the depths of their home — she still thought of it as their home — she would grab things that might help. Tentatively, she brought a blanket to cover the front of Eye’s bare body, toys to occupy her, and even the machinery she could pull from the walkways. It was difficult work, and she ached from the strain. Still, she wanted to find a way to make this right.


    The first time that Djay returned and found Eye speaking to the parasites, she instinctively hid. Unable to hear what they were saying, Djay berated herself for her cowardice, for hiding again. She charged out with a digital screen she was carrying held up above her head as if she could use it as a weapon. Despite her fears, the small malformed freak scrambled away from Djay and fell down, making a frightened noise, before she even got close. It was just as helpless as they were.


    Djay discovered that Eye had been tricking the stupid parasites that crawled out of the city and found her. Occasionally, they would do things for her, like fetch something out of her reach or tell her stories of life below, within the city. The parasites, with their simple minds, had their own history and lived their lives with their own motivations and paths, and seemed content, often with as many goals as just hiding in the dark, scavenging for loose meat, and creeping out to the surface to steal some clean water when they might not be seen. Djay would have been fascinated if they did not seem so deranged. She noticed, however, that Eye had started to crave the attention. Lacking freedom and with only her sister-clone for support, it shouldn’t have been a surprise.


    It had not meant to go so far, to get so out of control. Eye, seeming depressed by her inability to move around by herself, began to tell the parasites wild and impossible stories, convincing them that she was here to teach them important things. At first, Djay had been glad to help. They used technology stolen from their home to impress the freaks and frighten them when they showed doubt. Djay would set up the screens to show the parasites the old recordings that they themselves had once watched for fun and education.


    It was a marvel to the denizens of the city. Before long, the parasites overcame their fear. They began to assemble together, amass into small crowds, brought together by Eye every night. Their favourites were the old period dramas. Grossly inaccurate but romantic, fairytales of humans on far-flung worlds saving maidens and protecting their homes from monsters and evil men. Recounts of beautiful, perfect people in courtships and dalliances. Tales of intrigue, backstabbing, and ambition, where the righteous person won in the end despite all odds. It was pure fiction in every way except for their dreams.


    During the day, Djay would sleep leaning against her sister-clone. When the sun beat down on the blankets they had managed to make a shelter with, the city seemed indifferent to her presence, and Djay preferred it that way. During these peaceful hours, it seemed like there was no one else besides them in the whole world. Such a time could never last.


    Then, one night, a lumbering brute decided he wanted Eye all to himself. When he arrived, his roars scattered the easily frightened freaks. Trying to stop him, Djay put herself between Eye and the giant and told him no. There were no heroics, though. Instead, it raised its columnar arm and struck her so hard that her skull cracked.


    Djay could only recall the flashing lights of dizzy vision and a numb version of the sensation of crawling. She awoke sometime later to find herself collapsed at the base of the great waterfall. Parched and disorientated, Djay drank from the frothy waters before realising she was surrounded by the colossal skulls of Acetyn, the city itself. They watched silently as her creator appeared, lifted her into a cradle of light, and ushered her home once more.


    Despite every regret, Djay had been too scared to go back. She didn''t see her sister-clone again for years. When she did, things were different.


    Now, the Wire-Witch glanced down at the bound figure. Familiarity revealed the contours of the Vat-Mother’s new anatomy within the architecture — fissures of skin, the ribs, new bony growths, and the arteries and nerves. Even beyond the physical, they had both changed irrevocably since those by-gone days, on a path tread by two children who were trying to survive in a world that would easily consume them. That was the lie that Djay told herself, swallowing down the bile that rose in her throat before she stepped down from the bastion to confront her dear sister-clone.