All this suffering. All this ruin. For what?
You killed them. They were innocent. Does that mean nothing to you?
Was it worth it?
Did you get your taste of paradise?
My shape, my kin, trauma is immortal. You cannot kill it with your moonlight blade…
<hr>
CHAPTER 9: KISS THE BLADE
The Pate Gardens burned. The rubble of the mausoleums was piled high with the corpses of dead soldiery — those brave souls who had died defending a fallen order, now set ablaze. Thick black smoke tumbled into the air, blotting out the wicked light of the day star, which invaded through the broken sky. Those who hadn’t died had turned out their coats instead in a desire for survival or out of belief in a fable. Discarding the pale, they had thrown themselves down supplicant before a mad titan who, according to myth and legend, had once led their City to rule the world millennia ago, before this age of inequity and misery. Now, he had returned.
A freak in rags climbed upon a collapsed shrine, his talons defacing an old monument to a fallen culture he lacked any knowledge of. Like all who clung to this depraved faith, he was nameless, eschewing the letters printed into each of their genetic memories and digital beings, and he shrieked mad song. “A new dawn to usher in paradise!” He cried out in delirium, jubilant as crowds of the poor and downtrodden overtook this realm once claimed by a rotten master. They were emboldened by the strife and rallied on by zealotry. No guardians yet stood to hold them back.
At the periphery of the chaos, at the garden’s edge, an ancient elevator ascended, dragged metre after metre on old chains, thick and hewn of metallic bone. Even before it reached its destination, though, the roar of the crowds reached the three freaks within.
Two fat grubs, young children of an overthrown noble, trembled in fear.
“I’m scared,” Inmi Hash said.
“It’s okay,” her brother, Betan, tried to reassure her. He pressed his swollen side against his sister. Slightly older, slightly larger, it was his job to protect her.
Waiting before them, a tall humanoid warrior looked back. Wearing shining star metal armour with a pristine black cloak and tabard, her expression was guarded beneath a stalwart great helm, but her posture was cold and in control.
“You have naught to fear,” she said lowly. “You have my word. I shall never allow harm to come to you.”
“Thank you!” Inmi blurted out, still trembling, mandibles fidgeting nervously.
The rising elevator found its level, and a ratcheting snap of its mechanisms resounded. The gateway of its cage groaned open, and the warrior stepped out to meet a cadre of guards, who had removed their white and now wore only piecemeal armours, forgoing their anointed position beneath the Lord of Bone.
“My shape, my kin,” they uttered together.
“My shape, my kin,” she said, stepping from the cage. They had long planned for this day, for a treasonous revolution arising from faith. At her heel, the grubs carefully crept with their stubby legs, speechless of the havoc beyond the checkpoint that was growing by the minute.
“Dame Vashante Tens,” the guards’ leader dipped his head.
“I have brought the children of Abstrek Hash, as His messenger demanded. Will the Eidolon be receiving me?”
The guards shared a look.
“The Eidolon is dead,” one of them said.
“He gave his life to restore His Grace, and has joined Him in eternity,” their leader corrected, clinging to the minutia of some evolving dogma.
Dame Vashante stared until he continued.
“It’s not good. Without the Eidolon, all those converted are going feral. They’ve got no-one to follow, except...”
None of them spoke for a painful moment. The calamity beyond was oppressive in its rising volume.
“His Grace isn’t interested in them,” one of the guards said with great hesitation.
“Charming.” Her gaze turned towards the barricade and the revolution beyond. “Well, we didn’t work towards this day for nought.”
“Well said, Dame.” The captain bowed his scaled head.
“Open the barricade.” She gestured ahead with her gauntlet. “I shall escort our guests to His Grace, myself.”
So they pushed away the debris they had piled high to brace themselves against the tide. The armoured figure stepped out to breach the faithful, head held high. The impudent masses scattered around her, forming a wide perimeter outside of her reach.
Waiting patiently, the Dame raised a hand to usher the two children. Inmi and Betan followed with lopping strides of their fat, wiggling bodies.
Vashante could see contempt in the eyes of the masses for these two helpless children and what they represented. However, they faltered. The Dame, a trained killer, stood before them; individually, they were easily frightened. She could see them for what they were, the desperate, the destitute, and the starving. For them, the revolution was survival. What passed as order must evolve, or they would die. Thus, the Axiamati faith had been fostered in the depths.
It was a careful march towards the Ossein Basilica, the crowd parting before them and closing in their wake. Vashante held her head high and, from the depths of her helmet, met the eyes and scintillating scales of any who looked bold or foolish.
The upper levels of the Ossein Basilica had collapsed. Perched upon the highest floor that remained was a great dragon, but it was wounded and bound down with chains and stakes. It raised its head and screamed as skinwelders used their needled devices to close great gouges in its armour and replaced pieces of its meat and augs, careless of its agony.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
In another direction, the great hall was punctured and collapsed inwards. In the rubble, the corpse of the colossal turret Otz Garzed was being butchered for parts, electric cutters hissing and spraying gore as it was dismembered.
“Don’t look,” Betan tried to protect his sister, who turned white from fright.
Then, amidst the crowd, fervour grew. Finally, one of the starving retches screamed invectives and hurled a handful of rot and excrement at the children.
“Damn you!” The freak cried out as the muck hit young Inmi, and she screamed.
Vashante turned, extending her arm, and cast out her black cloak to shelter the child from their vitriol. More grew bold and pelted them with filth, howling their rage and putting all the pain and hate that had been thrust down upon them into these two children. Still, though, none dare stand before the warrior, and together, they made slow progress up into the waiting gates and dead halls of the Ossein Basilica.
“Comport yourself,” Vashante said softly. “You are to meet the Lord and His new master.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Imni steeled herself, trembling, as Vashante used a corner of her cloak to wipe grime from her squat face. Her mandibles fidgeted together as she tried not to cry. Her brother looked around the desiccated halls of the Ossein Basilica. The dry, cracked skin of the walls stretched taut through the long-dead structure like nothing he had seen.
Vashante stood straight once more and led them into the dead palace. It had been ravaged, stormed and looted by those who had turned traitors or the few base freaks who dared to trespass and seize valuables in the confusion of the revolution. The Dame knew the way without escort, though, for she had been here before, knighted at the feet of the malevolent Lord of Bones and his corrupt witch-wife, the Least Lady.
The indignities of that day — which should have been joyous — had seeded this betrayal.
Now she led the children past vaulted rooms, once sacrosanct, now ruined. There were none here left to receive them, and the purposes of the laboratories there, the altars of science within them, were unknowable now. The old electric lights had gone dark, and the machines had fallen still.
Finally, under an oppressive silence, they arrived at the sealed gateway to the former Lord’s court.
Vashante gestured for her wards to stand back and placed her gauntlets on one of the doors that split the gate. Then, she shoved it open with a grunt, the old structure groaning from the disturbance. Struggling to hold the doorway open, the armoured warrior gestured the children through, and they wormed their way inside.
They emerged into the smell of death, an inky blackness, an abyssal court in which they could only vaguely sense the tall benches that rose in steep steps on each side of the massive chamber.
“Be brave,” Vashante whispered. “Come...”
Vashante stepped into the dark, the children shivering in fright at her heels. She advanced to where she knew the throne to be, questioning the darkness until her armoured foot met something familiar.
And that voice shook the cathedral space, hitting Vashante in the chest hard enough to make her gasp.
“Leal soul, you bring to me a sacrifice of flesh.”
A sharp emerald laser beamed down from the darkness high above them, scattering brightly as it crossed mists in its path. Vashante slowly brought back her foot from what she recognised as a corpse on the floor. She had to turn her helmet away as the burning beam threatened to flick into the gaps in her visor. Behind her, Inmi cried out, afraid, and she instinctively stretched out her arm with her cloak to shelter the child.
There, something terrible stirred before them. Vashante looked upon his shape hidden in the dark, and she knew instantly that she was wrong.
All these years of secret service, this sworn devotion, love and allegiance to a promise — it had not been to a man but a monster. This was no creator, no saviour, not anymore. He was a destroyer, twisted with malice, and now it was too late.
The Dame summoned her courage and called out to the mad titan, hidden in the dark.
“I am Dame Vashante Tens. I was tasked with bringing the children of Abstrek Hash here before you. I have crossed the Crawling City from the towering realm of Genmabandon, to plea for your council, Your Grace.”
That deep voice laughed and shook them.
“Am I one of those simpering puppets?”
Vashante swallowed down fear, lowering her head. “No.”
“Then tell me why you address me as such.” His bassy electronic voice made her knees weak.
A pause. Vashante carefully chose her words. “I meant you no offence.”
“In this grim millenium, what use have I of a sycophant?”
“None,” Vashante found herself pleading. “Forgive me.”
The children whined, and Vashante sensed motion in the black as the green laser light cast a shimmering reflection in the shape of a giant’s gauntlet, reaching out of the black towards them. Lunging, Vashante instinctively put herself between the little grubs and the threat, but it smacked into her. She was cast aside effortlessly.
Betan, too, defended his sister, shoving his fat body before her, and with a shriek of pain, was plucked and lifted high into the air.
“Betan!” Imni screamed, voice breaking. “No!”
Vashante could only watch from her fallen position as Betan was dragged into the shadows beyond the laser light. His fearful cries were cut short with a macabre crack and tear. Then, a mist, black by the sole green light in the chamber, sprayed out. The warrior felt it flick in through the gap in her visor and knew its smell and taste well — blood.
The grisly sound of meat and bones crunching between chrome teeth resounded in the stygian dark. It was with careless regard that His voice came again, filling the vast space.
“Tell me why you profess your loyalty to me, but you are shaped feminine in her illusory image.”
Vashante faltered. Her ears were ringing from shock, but she could hear Imni screaming distantly.
So, the Pilgrim continued.
“Do you wish to be a woman? Perhaps that is your desire, your plea. Is that why you have carved your flesh into that shape?”
“I don’t understand,” Vashante found her voice shaking. “I thought you all progenitors. I thought there was reconciliation. I thought...”
“There can be no reconciliation between the shape of man and the shape of woman.” The Pilgrim boomed, shards of masonry falling and smacking down into the court around them. “Her treachery is boundless, her being itself an empty vessel. She is no progenitor. I am the fated return.”
The Dame, fighting the terror, activated her augmented musculature. With preternatural speed, she flipped from her fallen position, rolling into a crouched stance and turning. Reaching out her hand, she lunged forward and took hold of Imni, pushing her back towards the doorway against the tearing resistance of air and the cracking, scratching, buckling of the stone beneath her hyperaccelerated footfalls.
It was futile. The Pilgrim was faster.
A massive force smashed into Vashante’s back, crushing her down against the floor hard enough for her armour to dent and the stone to pulverise into gravel. She could only look on as Imni, too, was snatched up and out of sight. She could only listen as she, too, was torn to pieces.
“I see your faith is easily swayed,” the Pilgrim said around the grisly sound of his meal. “You are broken, just like all who have fallen victim to her lies and deceit. No matter.”
“No! No, no...” Vashante realised she was begging, dust stinging her eyes, filling her mouth.
Only when the Pilgrim was done with his desired portion of the child’s physiology did he cast down her remains before Vashante to witness. The body slapped down onto the hard floor, a carcass torn apart. Vashante’s stomach turned at the sight of poor Imni’s ravaged body.
“You would dare to tell me no? Such insolence.” He took a step, shaking the court, and then another and another. “Let us see your defiance then rendered silent evermore, for I have use for you yet, Dame.”
Outside the Ossein Basilica, haunting the Pate Gardens, innumerable freaks turned their sunken eyes and feathery antennas towards the ruins. They saw there the wicked red glow of the Pilgrim’s moonlight blade cast its light out through the arched windows and the cracks in the vast structure’s broken bones. They fell silent for a time, hearing the screams of agony from within. However, once the cries for mercy ended, it was soon forgotten. The ignorant masses went back to scratching the dirt and digging amongst the corpses of the dead, hoping to find perhaps morsels of food, a hint of their fate to come, or maybe even a modicum of justice amidst the slaughtered.