Bone Proposal 2

Link to article: Bone Proposal 2.

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[[div class="memory"]]
Once, you expressed sorrow that we would never know each other in the deepest, purest way we could. That you had no flesh to offer me to sate my hunger. But there is a deeper layer yet, one you have already met me on. You have given me too much of yourself. Now, I give some of myself to you.

----

It is 2042. I am standing on the edge of an abyss, a gaping black wound in the earth. This is the locus, what we have been hurtling towards without control or hesitation. Black Adytum lies before me. I look to my left. I see your face, metal plates wrapping around a watchful eye. So much wisdom and so much care, veiled behind steel and titanium. You are a little deception. My little deception.

It is four-and-a-half thousand years ago, in the Ninth Turning. Adytum lies before me, but no longer buried. A hundred stone-carved buildings sitting in a hand-dug quarry, the canals running red with blood. The tomb of a god. Luvjatar is next to me, blood dripping from his soft-bearded cheeks. Wild grin on his face as our people rush down the quarryside, blades and spears raised. “We have done it. We are free.”

I am standing outside time. The memories are coming all at once, an unstoppable rush — the present is happening before me — and the future soaks into my skin on the fumes of cracking bones. Everything is always happening. Everything has already happened, and everything will happen. 

You are looking at me with concern. It is three hours from now, and I am kissing you. But of course, you do not know that. I smile and reassure you I am fine. You accept it.

Your fellows do not trust me; the other doctors eye me like a dog. There are a dozen masked men with guns following us as we descend into the darkness. The woman with the metal arm leads our group. Ieva is bristling at the affront to her dignity, to her honor.

It is thirty years prior. Ieva is sitting in my lap under the shade of the pear tree. There are the countless shards of an oxbone in the valley of her dress. I whisper in her ear and take her hands, and she follows, and the fragments of bone begin to fit and knit themselves back together, the thousands of meaningless scratches suddenly forming words. Her eyes widen, and her laughter is sweet like grapes. I am giggling too.

Somewhere else, the work begins.

I am descending into this pit. The light from overhead fades with every step until we are bathed in darkness. I do not slow; I have walked these same steps a thousand times before, and I will walk them a thousand times yet. I know the placement of every nook and chip in every stone step. The things we choose to remember are strange.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[As the party descends into the staircase, the light from the surface grows dimmer and dimmer. The noise of the wind fades. The only sounds left are breathing from the assembled researchers and security personnel, and IŪN's footsteps.]//

**HUSSEIN:** Does she know where we're going?

**XENOPHON:** There is only one direction to go, Doctor.

//[The faint light finally gives way to pitch black. IŪN's footsteps do not slow down.]//

**KATSAROS:** Lights, everyone.

//[A series of clicking as the security personnel activate their vest-mounted lights. XENOPHON activates its floodlamps, bathing the narrow staircase in cold white light. The stone steps they are walking on have been worn smooth by time and use, but are irregular in size and shape. IŪN is moving down them with practiced ease.]//

**HUSSEIN:** What's... wrong with her?

//[IŪN's eyes are glassy, but less so than previously seen. They flicker between clear and foggy. As the party progresses down the stairs, she reaches a hand out and rubs her fingers along the smooth stone wall. Her brow furrows.]//

**XENOPHON:** What is it?

**IŪN:** There are carvings here. There were carvings here.

//[XENOPHON stops to inspect the wall. The others do not.]//

**JIANG:** It's just smooth stone.

**XENOPHON:** No. I can see beneath the surface. She is right. 

//[There are the faintest remnants of inscriptions and carvings, spreading across the walls, covering them. They are far too weathered to make out, rubbed away by the ravages of time into one smooth, flat mass.]//

**IŪN:** Thousands of memories. Thousands of lives. Carved by countless artisans sitting on these steps. Lost to time.

//[There is a twinge of awe in her voice. She sees this wall as it was, not as it is now. XENOPHON cocks its head.]//

**XENOPHON:** What are they?

**IŪN:** Look.

//[Her fingers trace edges of reliefs that have not been there for centuries.]//

**HUSSEIN:** There's nothing here now. Let's continue.

//[The soldiers are similarly disinterested. XENOPHON ignores them.]//

**XENOPHON:** What were the carvings of?

**IŪN:** Everything.

//[Her fingers slide across the walls. XENOPHON tracks their movements as they form heads, bodies, people. Lives rendered in two dimensions.]//
[[/div]]

Three thousand years ago, I am here, sitting before a blank wall with Luvjatar. The Work has only just begun; my people seek healing from their battles with the last pockets of resistance. We are both busy with our duties to this experiment, but we will take our moments together where we can get them. I am raising a finger, skin and sinew and muscle peeling back to reveal a razor-sharp bone. He is smiling while I carve our names into the wall. They will be here forever, I tell him.

My fingers find no purchase across the smoothstone. There are no carvings left to identify. This place is already in the past. In twenty minutes, my feet are touching the bottom of the staircase. Yesterday, I am spilling blood onto your chassis, staining it, my lips against metal, marking you as mine. 

I am the happiest I have been in centuries.

Ieva is fiddling with the shards of bone, brow furrowing with frustration as they refuse to knit. I am watching from across the fire, but I cannot help her. She must learn how to do this on her own. She will thank me, one day.

We are landing at the base of the grand staircase, exiting out of a doorway. I hear shocked gasps. Your scientists are agape at the space in which we find ourselves, a massive cavern with ceilings high overhead, brick avenues wrapping around the buried stone buildings in this city-grave. A great central tower, terraced with the flesh-gardens, now bare. I am at the top of the tower, looking down on my city and my people. I am at the base of the tower, looking up at myself, one claw raised in tyranny. 

Luvjatar is next to me, hand on my robed shoulder. We have stolen a city from the masters, he whispers. We can build something grand here. Something great, to outlast us. I look down at the city spread out like a map before me, my Nälkä walking like ants, and agree — this will be the site of something magnificent one day.

I am looking around. There is nothing here but the accursed dead.

The sound of rushing water, and the soldiers begin to spread out among the boulevards. The cave is vast, but imperfect — whole blocks of this city are buried under silt and soil. Whole blocks of this city flow with blood as my Nälkä rush forth, slaughtering our slavers. One soldier peers over the edge and calls out. Water still rushes through the underground canals. I am watching from one side of the Canal as Nadoq descends into the dry gulch, a dozen arms using his knotted rope to make measurements. The old masters were close, he assures me with a toothy smile after seeing me observing. They simply didn’t understand the angle of flow well enough. Soon, these ducts will work to bring water from the mountainside to the city. Siege will not break us.

I am standing at the edge of the wall of Adytum. I am alone. Over the lip, there is a grand, black army, with a godling at its head. He does not want to destroy me. But unlike me, he only exists in the past. He is a slave to his veiled future. He does not want to destroy me, but he will, because the black moon hanging over him has wished him to bring siege on Adytum, and men are only pieces in the games of gods. I turn over my shoulder to tell Nadoq he was right, that water continues to flow, that siege will not be the thing to break us. But he is still stuck in the past holding his knotted rope — I am already beyond him.

I am watching your people spread out, boots slamming against the stone bricks of my city streets. I hear a cry, and they move in unison. I will arrive before them, because I am already there. 

It is Ieva, hand over her mouth. Before her is a crowd, frozen and cowering in terror, cast in solid grey and features smoothed to nothing. I am looking at them — families, mothers and fathers and children, the few that remained and did not depart when my klavigars did. Terrified as they watch the sky fall on them. Three thousand years ago, I reach out to graze my finger against the nearest, a child gasping in fear. Now, he falls apart, crumbling to dust in front of our party.

The doctors’ eyes widen. Ashen casts, they mutter amongst each other, like Pompeii. Someone filled these after the city was destroyed. I am using huge arms to lovingly pack plaster-ash into the gaps of decaying bodies. I am alone in this city, wandering streets I used to rule, now bathed in total blackness. Two thousand years ago, I pass by the ashen cast of one of my karcists. I beg and I plead, desperate to know I did the right thing. Now, the silence is their answer.

Ieva’s eyes are wide, looking to me for answers. So are Urok’s, right beside her, millenia apart. I do not know which to answer, and so I turn away from both.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[The party are surrounding the casts. They are a sobering sight, cowering in fear and huddling together. Some of the researchers are collecting samples, picking away at the edges of these forms. The security personnel watch them.]//

**XENOPHON:** We should keep moving.

**KATSAROS:** He's right. We have a lot farther to go.

//[She is right, but that is not why I suggested we keep moving. The personnel are disturbed, on edge; I am concerned they will become nervous and do something rash. IŪN is on edge too, breaths hitching as she avoids making eye contact with anyone.]//

**XENOPHON:** Would you like to go somewhere else?

//[She nods, heel-turning and ambling down one of the large avenues, away from the casts. And away from the rest of the party. I follow. We walk down the brick-lined street together, with ruins of buildings on either side. Some are nearly-complete, with only the odd collapsed wall or sunken roof. Some are completely destroyed, a heap of clay bricks the only evidence anything was there.]//

//[IŪN is leaning into as we walk, eyes downcast. I try to think of how to distract her.]//

**XENOPHON:** What is that?

//[She looks up to see what I am pointing at. One of the larger ruins. I see a smile dance across her face.]//

**IŪN:** The Red Temple. For distributing alms and food to the masses. It was a shrine to one of the Daeva's animal-spirits before we took it over. They would sacrifice animals and burn the offal as offerings. They had seven such temples throughout the city. It was a waste. Nadoq and I hatched a plan -- instead of sacrificing the animals, they would be butchered, and my karcists would spread the meat amongst those who lived nearby. We could cover the entire city with such districts.

**XENOPHON:** An intelligent plan. Making sure your people are fed and healthy.

**IŪN:** Nadoq was always smarter than I. His mind worked... differently. Numbers and figures, not memories and verses. He saw things as problems waiting for a solution. 

//[We stop in front of a heap of ruins.]//

**XENOPHON:** What happened to the temples, in the end?

**IŪN:** I began asking them to kneel to receive their food.

**XENOPHON:** What if they refused to?

//[She does not answer. We pass by the far end of the temple. There is a pit dug into the earth behind it. She leans into me.]//
[[/div]]

 Three thousand years ago, Luvjatar is kneeling and asking me which temple we will demolish to make more room for the charnel-houses. I wave him off with a hand. Two hundred years later, I am driving a dagger into his chest and he is holding me and we are both sobbing by the seaside.

In two and a half hours, I am sobbing in agony.

We are walking up my favorite boulevard. It is lined by flesh-gardens, those ropey weeping trees of sinew and muscle I cultivate and raise, molded with my fingers and watered with my blood. Nadoq asks me what their purpose is — they never live more than a few years. I smile, raise a finger, and speak divine truth: to be flesh is to die. You cock your metal head, nod, and stare at the empty pots of soil and meal. 

This was to be a grand city, to rival the great capitals. Our slaves were builders, artisans, musicians and constructors. The old masters relied on us to build their home, and so their home became our home, and our home became our tomb. But the reliefs against the walls still stand, the pillars holding up temple roofs still stand. No man, woman, or child in Adytum ever went hungry or wanted for necessities. I made sure of it, I tell you.

I am staring from my balcony as the Apostate’s army surrounds the gates out of the city, setting fire to our farms, catapults sending burning pitch over our walls. My dead halkost holds the line, but for how long? My people will starve without food. I look down, and realize that the halkost are the only ones in the streets. There is nothing alive in this place aside from me.

And you, of course. We are sheltered from the prying eyes of your soldiers. Your hand reaches out slightly, fingers wrapping around mine. My palm presses against yours, and I marvel at how thin my fingers seem compared to your metal digits. Man is flawed by nature. It is a wonder he created something as perfect as you. Centuries ago, I am standing underneath a wall, kissing Luvjatar and telling him the same. You ask where we are going. I do not know how to explain that I am already there.

We are standing in the doorway of a stone building like any other. I utter a silent prayer to myself. Nadoq turns to us, raising two of a dozen arms in greeting. He lifts me up and wraps me in a hug — to him, I will always be a child. He excitedly shows me on the chalkboard how he has cracked the formulae that mystified the Daeva until their timely deaths. I do not understand any of it. Two months ago, I am sitting by the fire while you explain how your brain is a model of a mind, little mathematics performing so many computations it seems like thought. I do not understand any of it, but I enjoy hearing you talk.

The researchers and soldiers file in after us. They point out the shelves stacked with carefully inscribed bones and crumbling hide scrolls. In two and a half hours they will be running for their lives. I would tell them, but they can do nothing with the knowledge. Time moves forward, only forward, for them. Nadoq’s excited hands drift across the chalkboards, moving variables into place, cancelling sums. Forward, forward, he explains to me. The numbers dance across his delighted eyes, but to me they are devoid of all meaning. I ask him why we cannot go back. You cannot go backwards, Iūn, he exclaims. Then I ask what comes at the end, and he only looks at me in confusion. Eight centuries later, I am watching him bundle his favorite tomes and slip away through a crack in the wall, casting fearful looks over his shoulder as he leaves Adytum behind.

In a minute, you are running your hands across his collection of shattered bone-texts. His fingers are rubbing these markings as he shows them to me. Explaining that even the old masters could not conquer death — that some things are inevitable, unstoppable, uncontrollable. I toss a cold look at him from my throne, and inform him that if the gods are not uncontrollable, then nothing is. This city is a grand thing, and it will work, if they would only listen to me. I scream at him that I am not a child anymore. But I am a child, small and thin, shivering in his many-armed embrace during the cold nights in the slave camp. I reach up and my little fingers graze his empty eye-sockets. I look down and his ten eyes are filled with hurt and betrayal as he slips through the walls. Your eye is filled with interest, trust, faith as I place a malformed skull before the chalkboards. The formulas have long since been rubbed away into a single white cloud. Do what you need to, you assure me. I would reach up to hold you if we were alone. Instead I reach down and kiss the skull. Ten minutes in my past, I make a prayer.

Nadoq is before me, leaning against a stack of tomes. He turns, notices something wrong on the board. Fishes a piece of chalk out of his robe, and corrects it. Nods, smiles at me. There are multitudes in that smile, lifetimes of history. And now I am done. He turns, slips between the shelves, and he is gone.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[IŪN is standing before an altar at the front of the study, beside what might have once been chalkboards. I am next to her. I am looking into her eyes -- cold and gray. There are tears welling in the corners. I cannot see what she sees, but it is not difficult to guess.]//

**XENOPHON:** <Don't cry. You must not cry.>

//[She look up at me. I can see the question in her gaze:// how? //I do not have an answer. I wish I had an answer for her. But the others are starting to stare. She bites her lip and draws the tears back.]//

**IŪN:** Thank you.

//[There is a staircase in the workshop, descending deeper into the earth. I guide us toward it. The others follow. There is nowhere to go but deeper.]//
[[/div]]

I do not know how long we walk, but I know you are behind me every step. In two hours, I am racing up these same steps. I wait to pass by myself, but it never happens. We are at the bottom, and some of the soldiers light their lamps. Luvjatar’s hand grips mine as we stare out over the catacombs of the Nameless City. Tunnels six men wide and tall, worming through the stone earth, cut with pigeonholes ready for sacrifices. We have already sacrificed so much. We will fill these spaces with the bones of our fallen, he says, such that we might never forget what they gave: the last full measure of devotion, of faith. We wander by one of the pigeonholes — the emptiness is sobering. Four millenia later, every single hole is filled with countless bones, jumbled into unsorted masses, skulls and legs and fingers, overflowing out onto the tunnel floor. Too many pasts to count.

The woman with the metal arm will begin to call for reinforcements to map the tunnels. I am already moving, heading down the path most familiar. The group trails behind, leaving soft-green glowing sticks to mark our path. Sa’arn is making his way through the same path, slithering through the torch-lit tunnels. His face is sour — I have called him to task again. I regret it, but it must be done. In twenty seconds, I am sharply turning left down a narrow side tunnel. Sa’arn’s services are needed. I am telling myself this until I believe it. The doctor’s eyes are boring into my back while we walk, eyebrows rising as we turn sharply.

Centuries ago, Luvjatar and I are in a house on the surface of the city, holding a wailing child. We cannot conceive together. A year prior, I am smiling with my love, tattooed fingers dancing across a swollen belly. He thinks about names. Months later, I am already burying the lifeless, stillborn lump of flesh. I am holding my love’s shoulders while his body, weak, pale, bloodless, is wracked with sobs. He screams, begging to know what he did wrong. A year prior, my fingers are still pressed against his stretched skin, and I know the answer is that he loved me. My biology, altered by the Beast, is cold and sterile. Life springs forth from my fingers, but it lies dead within my body.

So we adapt. The baby we hold coos, and its finger wraps around mine. My flesh bubbles and distorts. The child is born with our curse, with my curse. There is no question of who will raise him; his parents think it an honor for their son to be raised by the witch-king. A decade later, I am guiding the boy’s little fingers in knitting an oxbone back together. A dozen siblings watch in fascination from around us.

Ieva shouts in frustration, throwing her hands up. The fragments of oxbone sail up into the air, twinkling down, forward and into the fire. They scatter among the embers, blackening. I watch the cracks form and spread.

A month ago, Ieva is staring at my tent, pained face framed by firelight. Her world has been altered and changed, uprooted from all she has ever known. I wish I could tell her why I have done this; I wish I knew why I have done this.

Sa’arn is asking me why I have done this, standing in my quarters. The //halkost// is outside, still milling in the square, trapped in their deathless life. All things end, he insists in furious rage. Life must end, to give birth to new life. He is not wrong. Life will end, when I permit it to. His service to me will end, when I permit it to. I turn away, and one of my karcists steps forward to give the snakechild his orders. His slitted gaze bores into my back, but I am already past him, seeing a Mekhanite captain die of an asp bite far behind enemy lines. All things have their place. I have seen the bones splitting in the fire, cracks spreading into ten more cracks, ten more futures, ten more futures. Ever forward, countless possibilities multiplying until they crumble into blackened dust. All things end.

Centuries before, I am staring up at the stars. They are twinkling and falling in utter chaos. The sky itself is closing up on me. It has not happened yet, but it will. I take my chance to look at the stars while I still can. I roll off you, clutching at your metal frame. Pointing out the constellations — the Horn, the Spear, the Pelt and the Hide. I do not want to let you go. I want to hold you like this in every future. But you do not exist yet, and so I must lie alone. Once, I looked into the maw of a god, and it whispered knowledge — that the stars were burning balls of fire the size of this world, lasting for countless turnings. I wonder what kind of truth a fire of that magnitude holds. Unextinguishing, undying.

Sa’arn is wandering through the catacombs to my right, as you and the woman with the metal arm and the doctors walk to my left. You are following me now, and I am following him in the past. He takes us down side passages and tight corridors packed with so many bones you struggle to move. Crunching from behind me. But I am not worried — this place is seared into my memory. We arrive before one of the gravevaults, spaces reserved for a single set of honored bones and sealed in stone. This one is empty, unsealed. He shows me, smiling brightly. This is where my bones will rest, he proudly informs me. But I do not want him to die. He has been with me from the beginning. Life itself is under my grasp — why can the future not be, too? The seeds are watered.

Somewhere else, I see his serpentine bones shoved into a ditch and buried under countless snakes. He wanted to rest in the city of his birth. He came to me in my study, asking for release, to go to the land by the river he had picked. I peered into the fire, and told him what I saw. A grand army falling on him, slaying him. An army riding on Adytum. If he goes free, he dies. The only way to keep him is to control him. He must remain with me, an instrument of my power. I do not tell him which army is falling on him, and which is riding on Adytum. Centuries later, he is staring with horror at the first of my //halkost// as they rise from death. Centuries later, a swarm of the misshapen marching-dead are falling on him, cutting him to pieces as the caravan escapes. I am watching atop my horse as he is cut to pieces. I am watching from my swaddling in Luvjatar’s arms as we escape.

He proudly shows me around the gravevault he has chosen. If I am to die here, he tells me, it will be in a tomb of my choosing. A millennium later, he is bleeding to death in a ditch. I took his farm from him. I owe him this, at least. I hear a hissing; Ieva from behind me, gazing hatefully at you. Sa’arn on top of her, gazing hatefully at me.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[We are stopped in a vault, like many we passed by. Those were sealed with stone doors and tarred shut. This one is open. The sarcophagus is empty. She is leaning over it, staring into it as if she expects something to erupt out. Or hopes that it does. I place a hand on her shoulder.]//

**XENOPHON:** Iun?

//[She yanks away and whirls around. I withdraw my hand. But she is not reacting to me, I realize. Her gaze is glassy and foggy as she stares past me and at IEVA. I see IEVA's eyes widen, and her face contorts with uncertainty and confusion. She does not know what IŪN wants from her. I do not think she ever did.]//

**IEVA:** Grand Karcist?

//[I am incorrect; IŪN is not looking at IEVA, she is staring straight through her. Her lip trembles, and I realize she is whispering something under her breath. I lean forward to hear better.]//

**IŪN:** <Used. As a weapon, as a tool. He did not ask to be made this way.>

//[I understand now.]//

**XENOPHON:** <Yes.>

**IŪN:** <How do I even begin to...?>

//[Her voice trails off. I think for a moment.]//

**XENOPHON:** <Gently.>

//[Her gaze shifts to me. I am not looking at the IŪN I have come to know. I am looking at a scared, unsure child. But I nod regardless, and her gaze slides away from me. She mouths something I cannot make sense of.]//
[[/div]]

I look out at the spirit of Sa'arn halfway across the chamber as he circles it. My eyes are wide, pleading. But I am silent. Words have failed me with him before. He needs more. He needs action. A metal hand from my right offers me a snakebone. I take it, crush it in my fist, sprinkle it over the altar. His gaze meets mine again, and he sees something different this time. Those slitted, serpentine eyes soften as he sees where we are. Where I am. What I am doing. //I am sorry//, I whisper.

He nods stiffly, scales shifting. His lip trembles, like he means to say something. But he only nods, and departs. He is going to his farm, I hope. He has earned it. 

There is a trembling, from deep below the earth. It is then and now — Luvjatar stumbles and so do you and your party. I do not. A deep, hungry roaring. More. More. I am devouring lump after lump of purple-red flesh, blood pouring down my chin and my breasts and navel, mixing with my tattoos and my scars. Human mixing with the divine. My tattoos are obscured underneath it, subsumed in the blood. I am one thing. I need more and more.

I am bouncing Ieva on my lap, holding a crippled bird as I set its wing. I coo at her and the bird, offering to let her hold it. I am trying to distract her from the children running and playing with their hide ball in the field. I am failing, and her eyes flit toward the boys and girls, thick with envy. Her eyes flit towards you as we speak in the night, with the same expressions. In an hour and a half, those eyes are seeing the divine, subsumed like tattoos under blood. I am staring at the eyes of a corpse, empty with no life, cold and gray and still — just like mine. I am putting my finger on its bare chest, blood from the old god still dribbling down my chain, wailing of the beast echoing around the chamber as I wrench apart its ribcage and massage its heart back to beating. The grey eyes twitch and focus. This is a perversion, an facsimile of life. 

I am sitting in my tent, still at home, before we have uprooted our existence. Ieva is beside me counselling me that you cannot be trusted — you are artificial, a mockery of the life and humanity we hold dear. You do not truly live, you do not die, and you do not feel. I nod, my mind somewhere else.

One of the priestesses is casting desperate curses on me as I advance on her, scrabbling backward into the corner of the catacombs. Many ran down here to escape the massacre. They do not understand how deeply I know this place. Roots fail to burst out of my skin; my eyes fail to grow red with disease. She cries out that I am not truly alive before I reach out and her bones crumble to nothingness within her body. Her corpse sags.

Luvjatar sags in my arms, blood bubbling out of the wound we both look down on in disbelief. For a moment, the haze in my mind that has torn me apart for centuries clears, and all I feel is animal agony and regret. But then he is gone, already thrown into the future, and I am curling into his body while we devour each other under the stars. I do not want this to end. I look up at the stars — they last forever. My hand grips your metal one while the grave-fires warm us. The stars have shifted, blinked away. I reach up to point out the constellations to you, and find they are no longer there. They have crumbled away, leaving only dark ashes.

Ten minutes ago, the doctor is whispering something to his soldiers behind them. You seem worried as you follow me. We are very deep, you inform me. Would it be wise to go up? I shake my head. We cannot. In an hour, we are already at the bottom.

The catacombs are growing less maintained now, bones scattering among the floor. The people began to fear descending, leaving me free to wander these ossuaries alone. I know the name of every fallen soldier interred here. I whisper them to myself as I pass. I notice you repeating the words as you inspect the cubbyholes.

Urok walks with me, her huge size barely fitting in these tunnels, her head bowed. She will have to set out again soon; the Mekhanites and Daeva push on our borders. I whisper the names to her as we pass, and she repeats them. She has always struggled with memory, but she lays her trust in me to get the names right. She lays all her trust in me.

Four millenia ago, I am letting her lift me up in gigantic palms, offering my arms. Her wide eyes are unsure, concerned, but I assure her, and her teeth bite down, taking my entire left arm off. The stump hangs there, bone jutting out where it snapped. The muscle spasms and blood pours. Then the bone extends, the blood congeals into new muscle, the sinew springs forth and the skin grows, bringing my tattoos with it. In five seconds, I am fine again. Urok is looking down at me, eyes the size of my head. For once, they are not beaded with tears. It’s gone, she whispers. It does not hurt anymore.

We exit into another massive chamber, and I can hear the soldiers and researchers gasp. It is another cavern, but now channels of glowing red run through the floor, light glancing off a thousand bodies. Endless rows of hulking, misshapen bodies, many arms and hunched backs. Dressed in hide armor and spears in hand. Urok is presenting them to me. Your personal guard while I fight in our name, she explains. They will die before letting harm befall you.

Centuries ago, I am back in that quarry. The rock wall has given way to reveal purple-red flesh, flowing with blood like a holy spring. Urok is bowing her head for me. Assuring me she will die before letting anyone harm me. Then I am standing on a cliffside, pointing out a village. It has some stragglers from the old masters — Daeva, certainly, but no priestesses, no more a threat to us than a lame deer. But we need room, and I need sacrifices. She nods. Four days in the future, the village is burning. A century in my past, she is holding me to her lips and gnawing off my arm. We are walking through the assembled soldiers, your researcher inspecting the armor on the statues of ash and plaster, perfectly immortalized. Not one looks quite the same as the others. Urok is repeating the names of the dead soldiers interred in these halls. I worry about what she will do when I am gone. What my people will do without a strong leader to guide them. The uncertainty gnaws at me. A millenium later, my horse is atop a bluff, watching as wave after wave of my //halkost//, each different, are cut down by a massive, armored figure and her few loyalists. Her blades come down like hammers, slaying half a dozen of my deathbeasts in one swoop. I do not care. They will rise again, in time. Urok’s gaze lands on me. For a split second, her sword lowers and I see it all in her eyes. Pain, confusion, endless questions. Just long enough for them to swarm her and bring her down, hungry lifeless maws eating her alive.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[We are walking through the columns of petrified soldiers. It is strange -- I have seen the// halkost //in her memories, but only ever from a distance. But now we are close enough to touch them, captured in perfect living detail but unmoving. No two are quite the same. The other researchers, Doctor Hussein and his team, realize that. They see the varying defects and misshapen limbs and injuries. But they do not see the different knittings on the leather armor, or the different charms around their necks, or the different expressions on these faces. Not just mindless anger, but joy, worry, fear.]//

**XENOPHON:** These were your personal guard.

**IŪN:** <Yes. Trained to defend me until the very end.>

**XENOPHON:** Trained by Urok, I assume.

**IŪN:** <Yes. She worried for me. Who would protect me in her absence. She was supposed to protect me, and I was supposed to protect her.>

//[We pass on different sides of a hulking soldier carrying a spear four times his height. We are following the path carved into the ground -- it is a series of channels, filled with a glowing red fluid.]//

**XENOPHON:** <What is that? Sitting in the cut channels.>

**IŪN:** <A moment, Urok.>

//[I stop.]//

**XENOPHON:** Iun?

**IŪN:** Yes. Yes.

//[Another tremor rises through the city, shaking everything. This one is less gentle than the previous ones. I wait for it to pass.]//

**XENOPHON:** It is me. You are here with me.

**IŪN:** <Of course I am. I am here with you. I am here with Urok. I am still at the study with Nadoq, and I am in the vault with Sa'arn, and I am stepping into Luvjatar's home and seeing he is asleep. It is all at once, for me.>

//[I am not sure what to say.]//

**IŪN:** <Blood. It is blood. And it is not sitting stagnant. It is flowing.>

//[Looking closer, I see she is right. It is flowing through the channels, continuously. I hear a crack and see her draw a large piece of rib from her robes. The same I helped her burn. My memory goes to that night and I remember myself pinned to the ground, her straddling my chassis before leaning down to press her forehead to mine. I label this as a priority memory, and encrypt it. I like the way it makes me feel. I do not want to lose it.]//

**IŪN:** <It is not a full bone.>

**XENOPHON:** <She would understand.>

//[She nods and crushes it, sprinkling the dust into the blood. The white ashes flow forward, around and around, dispersing between all the branches and between the stone soldiers. She is whispering to herself as we watch it.]//

**IŪN:** <One stream splits into ten more, ten more. No one can see how it ends.>

//[I cock my head at her in confusion.]//

**XENOPHON:** <It doesn't end.>
[[/div]]

I realize you're right. It comes back around on itself. I look down and see the proof — the channels form a loop. Is there a beginning? Or does it just go around on itself, and all we ever see are endings?

I am carving Luvjatar’s and my name into the walls of the staircase. He is smiling and asking me how our story ends. I tell him it will never end. Never, he asks. Never, I assure him. Forever and ever, like the stars burning in the sky.

I am standing at the balcony of my tower. The entire city is rumbling, shaking, spasming as the earth itself rises. The sky closes on itself, and I see the sun blink out, eclipsed by a black moon. Adytum is bathed in blackness.

The last of the bone-dust sprinkles into the bloodstream and circulates through the chamber. I hear a thumping, and look up. Urok, at the far end of this cavity, huge figure dressed in the same armor as her now-stone soldiers. She nods at me and smiles. And then she, too, is gone.

Your people fan out, inspecting these ash-stone soldiers. Centuries ago, I am raising them from the dead, watching corpses stumble to feet and gaze lifelessly at me. I cannot bring myself to order them to go after my karcists. Something inside me, something I thought long-suppressed, stops me. I do not understand what, and it enrages me. I scream, but there is no one left alive in Adytum to hear it. Only me and the dead. I am as alone as I have ever been.

In a shadowed corner of the cavern, metal fingers graze mine, and I realize you are beside me. You are beside me when I am playing games with the children, inquisitive little eyes fascinated by your construction. My eyes tracing the contours of these metal plates. One sits in your lap, and you are too surprised to remove him. I laugh deeply. Four millenia ago, one of our children is tugging the hem of Luvjatar’s robe and he laughs and raises them into the air. We have raised so many children into karcists. They are to be the next generation of leaders, interpreters, guides. I know I should trust them. We raised them. But try as I might, I cannot place my faith in them. I have seen them as children; I have seen their mistakes, flaws, failings. I know which ones are impulsive, meek, too smart for their own good and not smart enough. I cannot separate this from my view of them.

Ieva pouts at me while I admonish her. The result of her latest experiment lies between us, a sparrow she molded with a third clawed wing. It fell from the air and snapped its neck. I just wanted to see what would happen, she insists. I raise my voice at her. It is dead now — death is not reversible. These are the powers we play with. She shrinks under my rage, but I can see she does not understand. If death is so powerful, how has her teacher cheated it for so long? Twenty years later, I am sitting before the stele while Ieva leads her first prayer, singing coming from deep in her lungs. She looks to me for approval. All I can see is the bird between us twitching in the embrace of death.

Ieva is looking around now, shocked at the state of the ash-halkost. These are not the noble, proud soldiers she has read me preaching about. These are casts of gaps, icons of lifeless monstrosities dragged back from holy death. These are the consequences of my actions. She looks to me, eyes wide and confused. I am as inscrutable to her as I have ever been.

Your doctor orders us to continue. The gaunt, ash-grey faces of a thousand of my men disturb him. He feels outnumbered. Two nights ago, something takes root inside his head. The woman with the metal arm nods at you. Two days ago, she is given the order to protect us. We are all automatons, all of us — slaves acting on the whims of masters we cannot see. I cringe away from the lash of the whip as it strikes the slave next to me. A harsh order from the slavemaster. In three years, I am pressing my fingers to his terrified face and kissing his forehead while his blood boils inside his body. He never realizes who I am.

We are diving deeper into the tunnels now — far past where the rest of the Nälkä dared to tread, into the labyrinthine intestines of this city-thing. The tunnels here are narrow, unfinished, the bones load-bearing, forming great pillars that keep the ceiling from caving in. They crunch under our footsteps. The stench of death is omnipresent. My feet move by themselves; I have walked this path so many times alone. I am alone.

I am leaning on the balcony of my tower alongside Luvjatar. We are making plans — once our people have settled in, we will leave. I have become something greater; the beastsblood within my veins runs white and wild. There are other injustices, elsewhere. More slaves to free, more masters to slay, more truth to spread. Luvjatar’s hands dance along my spine. We will have a home by the sea, I say. You have never seen the great water before. 

It has been two centuries since I left the confines of this city. Far from a prison, it now encompasses me. I feel it like it is part of my body; my fingers stretch through alleyways and my viscera form catacombs. I see everything. The food is distributed, the water is brought in, the dead are burned, and the sick are healed. All functions as it should, as long as all listen to me. They just need to listen to me.

A thousand years before, I am kneeling before the Beast. This is a delicate dance of control. This thing is a god — its kind has kept men in bondage since time immemorial. One slip, and it would devour me alive. I know it would, because there is a hunger in me to do the same. I saw off a sliver of flesh, and its wailing is startlingly human. But I cannot stop. This is what it takes, to build the paradise we desire. Would my dear klavigars still accept me, if they knew what I was doing? What this city was built on? They must not know, I whisper.

Centuries later, I am still kneeling before the Beast. There are no illusions about who has the control, anymore. The knife is in my grip. The blood drenches my hands. The wailing falls on my deaf ears. I saw away bits of the flesh-wall, rich and divine as the day I uncovered it in the quarry. I only need a bit more, a few things left that I cannot exert my will over. My control is absolute over life, our people, this city. But holy death escapes my grasp. My body is sustained as long as I eat, but what happens when the flesh runs out? I only need enough to allow the ritual. And then all will be well. I am hungry. So, so hungry.

The ritual is done, and I am waking up swaddled in Nadoq’s robes. I am waking up before the Beast, alone. Utterly alone. Something has been ripped out of me. There is a sickening, violent absence in my chest. My skin burns on my body. What have I done? Where has the Seed gone? I am stumbling to my feet, crawling up the stairs. Ten minutes in my future, I am watching with disbelieving eyes as my klavigars, my Nälkä, leave me in a vast drove, torches riding away in the night over the city walls. Sarkic — those who walk away. I scream. It means nothing, and no one hears it.

Months ago, I am stabbing my knife into the Beast, demanding it spill its secrets of divinity. The beastblood in my veins is powerful, but not powerful enough. I need control. I need the ability to shape the world to my will. I need the power to make them listen to me. I need to be a god. The thought, strangely, does not disturb me anymore. It wails the truth — that I must die to be reborn. That I must excise my humanity to overcome it. 

Months later, I am sucking in breaths as I drag myself through these bone-laden tunnels. I look down at myself, streaking a trail of red as I claw forward. Your foot falls where my head was, is, will be. The bone crunches underneath. I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die. The thought echoes in my brain as I crawl.

You are going to die, Luvjatar says to me in confusion. I am talking about the future, what Adytum and the Nälkä will do millenia from now. He does not understand. I have no intention of leaving this city’s fate up to any god save for me. In five years, he is already sneaking into the chamber of the beast, snatching the babe I have cut out of my chest. Centuries ago, I am grabbing his arm as the slavemasters roughly grab his collar and haul him off into the tent of one of the witch-priestesses. I am watching him get dragged off. I am powerless to stop them. The weakness burns hot. In the night, in this quarry, I swear an oath to the only god I recognize: myself. I will never leave my fate up to any master again.

My love stares at me strangely. Decades ago, I am kissing him, and he is wrapping himself into my embrace. I never want to let him go. Now, he is embracing me, hands wrapping around my bloodied robes. His torch lies abandoned on the stone ground, casting flickering light into the chamber of the beast, door lying open behind me. He came to fetch me for something. He is holding me as if trying to drag me back from something. We do not speak. We have never needed to speak, really.

We speak over a lunch. I do not need food, anymore — but he asked to speak. Anyone else interrupting my unholy work would have earned my wrath, but I cannot deny my love. So we speak. We speak as we watch the sun rise and Adytum come to life. He tells me he loves me, and always will. 

It is last night, and I am on top of you, grinding flesh against metal, and you are saying words I have heard before. 

I am holding Luvjatar as he sobs. Tomorrow, I am burying the lump of dead flesh, but now, I am staring at it in quiet confusion. Life should be under my absolute control. How is it that the things most important to me escape my domain? Millenia before, I am watching the cracks in the bones grow and grow and grow, forward, forward. They all end in the same way; crumbling into blackness. I stare at the stillbirth and frown.

A decade ago, Ieva pleads with me to do the last rites for the latest dead. I forbid it. She is not ready. She demands to know when she will be ready. I do not answer.

In ten minutes, I am sobbing in agony, doubled over and kneeling.

Luvjatar and I are looking over the nameless city, its future utterly unwritten. Luvjatar and I are looking down at Adytum, the paradise we are building with blood that is not my own. I am looking down at Black Adytum, scorched by my sins, utterly alone. In my past, I am preaching to my Nälkä that this place will be different. That we will build something new, something without gods or kings. In my future, I am preaching to a dead city that I am their god and their king while siege engines batter the walls. I am whispering that my control is absolute even as the city begins to sink and the sky closes over my head. A century later, deep in the dark underground, there is no one left to lie to; not even myself.

A metal hand lands on my shoulder, and I stop. Two minutes ago, I stop before a small, unassuming doorway. Right now, I realize I have stopped, the soldier's eyes boring into me. I look to you, and in your metal gaze, I see trust. I step forward.

[[div class="addendum"]]
//[There is nothing in this place. It is a corner of the catacombs like any other. I am walking around the set of three rooms, and I do not see any significant carvings, artifacts, or points of archaeological interest. I do not even see any remains. But somehow, I understand this place is unspeakably important to you.]//

**XENOPHON:** <Iun.>

//[I turn. You are still standing in the doorway, staring inside. Your lip trembles.]//
[[/div]]

Four thousand years ago, I am stepping into this doorway. It is bare and empty — several attached rooms, no doubt meant to hold the graves of a powerful family. A hand wraps around my own, and Luvjatar looks at me. This will be our home, he announces. Decades later, I am stepping into this warm space, lit by fire. Blankets are draped around all the surfaces and the children race between my legs, eager for their father. There is meat hanging above the fire, flesh roasting. Luvjatar is leaning against the wall, asleep, a smile playing on his lips. There is war on the surface. There is a fell god below. But here. This is pure. This is innocent.

I am finally home.

I look around. There is nothing here. The blankets have withered away to nothing. The fire is dark ashes and soot. There are no strings of herbs hanging from the ceiling, no laughter echoing about the stone walls. No one is waiting for me with a smile. This place is cold and dead.

I crumple to the floor, body wracked by sobs. This is not how it was supposed to go. Not how it was meant to end. I did not mean for this to happen. I did not mean for any of this to happen. I look backward, towards that scene, stepping into my warm home. I reach out for it. It turns to dust and slips through my fingers. I am not there; I only think I am. That life is lost, cracking into a thousand pieces and crumbling into scorched bone. I am sobbing and cursing the only god I know: myself. 

Nadoq is holding me, drawing the equations on the chalkboard. You cannot go backward, Iūn.

Forward, forward. 

Sa’arn is pleading with me in my throne room. All things end, Iūn.

Forward, forward. 

Urok is staring at me from across the battlefield, wide eyes demanding an answer. Why, Iūn?

Forward, forward.

I have been a slave, bloodied and bruised, working to the bone in the quarries of the old masters. Utterly helpless to the whims of other men.

I have been a king, lauded and honored, leading my people into a new tomorrow. Beholden to no one but the gods.

I have been a healer, praised and blessed, reaching into the maw of a fell god and stealing the secrets of life. Nothing beyond my powers save for death.

I have been a deathbringer, reviled and cursed, raising my halkost from the dead and unleashing them against my enemies. No one left to tell me no. 

I have been a heretic, tortured and martyred, subverting the teachings of gods and men. Throat cut and hanged from a tree, no soul to aid me except my dearest klavigars.

I have been a god, worshipped and obeyed, my gaze stretching out across all existence. Everything under my control except those most dear to me.

Forward, forward, until it all ends, crumbling into black dust.

I am standing on the hill, staring up at the stars as they twinkle and smear and change in the night sky, pinpricks of light blinking out one by one. Nadoq explains to me that even the fire of stars dies eventually. Hurtling forward in time, I barely hear him.

Ieva stalks out in frustration, as I watch the oxbone fragments burn in the flames. I am watching all my futures collapse, the cracks retreating, drawing back, back to one point. Back to the here and now. There is no past. There is no future. There is only now, me kneeling on the floor, sobbing, alone.

Luvjatar is here, leaning against that wall, smile playing on his lips. My eyes widen. You cannot control everything, Iūn. He gets to his feet, stretching, no older than when we met. Life cannot be corralled in and trained. Life just happens. 

But it’ll end.

He steps forward, reaches a hand out, and kisses both my cheeks. I know, he smiles. And then he, too, is gone.

Everything is silent. Soldiers are staring at me. I realize with a start where I am. Here. Now. Next to you. I look backward; the past is inscribed bones, memories that have already happened and will never happen again. I look forward; the future is clean bone. I am in the now. You are holding me, in defiance of what the doctor and the soldiers and everyone else will think. There is no place and no time else I would rather be.

I wipe the tears off my face and smile. I am ready to go now.

We wander off, out of this dead place. This was my home once. I smile fondly at the memory instead of falling into it. But that is the past. Now, it holds nothing for me. I can hear the doctor whispering to the soldiers and the clicking of guns. They do not trust either of us. Another thing that unites us.

I can feel it, still, moving below this tomb-city in the deep vault. But it does not scare me anymore. It has no power over me; I will face my fate.

We wander deeper, deeper, ever deeper, on the same path my feet have traced ten thousand times through winding ossuaries and charnel-houses, bones crushed to dust underneath my feet. The trembling is closer and closer. I am sagging, leaning against you for support. After four thousand years, I am exhausted. But there is still work to be done.

Iūn, you say. I look up. Two great stone doors lie before us. The same stone doors I have seen in my memory time and time again. This is it, I tell you. The heart of this city. The cornerstone all my empire is built on. My sin, my betrayal, my apostasy. I can feel it beyond the door, waiting for me.

[[div class="iun-to-xen"]]
I stumble up eroded steps, press a bloodied hand against the door. I look to you, and see a glimmer I have never seen in your blue eye before. You nod. I push, the door shifts easily, and we are in the Heart.
[[/div]]

----

[[div class="xen-to-text"]]
The party is gasping behind us. I do not gasp, but I do look up.
[[/div]]

We are in a ritual chamber. Tall, high, and roughly cylindrical — though impossible to tell from how thick the walls have been overgrown with flesh. It is thick, red-purple, uneven and rough and skinless. I have seen this place before, in the memories of the one I care for. But it is different now. The flesh is sickly, run through with black tendrils. Sores ooze ugly pus. The thousand eyes scattered across the flesh are fluttering and swollen with blood.

It runs down to the floor, where channels have been painstakingly carved into the stone, spiralling around in a complex, infinite dance before they flow to a single basin. The only light comes from a single, dying campfire, embers burning low.

I tilt my eye up, and shine my floodlights on the thing in the wall.

Something within me turns.

It is a massive, gaping maw, four meters tall and lined with rough-bone teeth. Darkness looms inside as it widens and tightens. Gasping, desperate, hot breaths. Saliva and blood pour from the mouth. Even without life, I can tell this thing is on the outermost edges of it. It twitches slightly, and I sense something shift within the darkness of its gullet. The lips move again, and I prepare for the voice I have heard the Beast speak with.

It does not come. Instead there is a voice double-layered over itself. Partly the Beast, yes, deep and thrumming and impossibly old and tortured. But overtop that, subsuming it, the cruel, cutting voice I have heard from the mouth of a scarred prophet. The Iūn of old.

Yaldabaoth speaks. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]"WELCOME HOME, SEED."[[/span]]

If I had blood, it would have gone cold. I see the others shiver in place. Iūn does not move. The voice is deeply wrong on every level, incompatible with life. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]"YOU WERE ALWAYS TO RETURN. I KNEW IT, HERE, IN THIS HEART OF HEARTS, WOMB OF WOMBS. I BURNED THE BONES AND READ THE FUTURES, AND ALL THE CRACKS LED HERE. I HAVE WAITED. I HAVE BEEN HUNGRY. SO, SO HUNGRY."[[/span]]

It gurgles, and blood bubbles in the corner of its mouth. It takes me a moment to realize it is laughing.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]"FINALLY, MY ROGUE ORGAN ARRIVES."[[/span]]

I am confused. I look to Iūn, and her face is as impassive as mine. I am confused. I thought this thing was exploited. Taken advantage of.
[[div class="xen-to-iun"]]
Then I hear the strangled, booming cries underneath that voice, and once again, something dark and implacable shifts inside Yaldabaoth's maw, drawing itself out.
[[/div]]
----
[[div class="iun-to-text"]]
I am crawling, clinging to life by sharpened teeth, dragging myself forward with bloodied stumps of fingers. I will not die here. I will not die here. I will lay my eyes on the great water. I scream as a bone catches in my open wound, shredding my flesh further. There is no one left to hear it.
[[/div]]

Far above, I can hear the engines of war. This city is a part of me. I feel my walls breaking, toppling under the pressure. I feel the vast dead halkosts swarming on the streets as this great tomb begins to sink down, down, soil and peat and mud and earth falling in great heaps onto us. I can feel the terrifying, unfamiliar sensation of something far older and more terrible than myself hanging over me. I thought myself a god, life and death bent to my whim. But even here, I can feel the warping of the black moon hanging over this city. This is a true god.

The shaded godling raising his hand up before his army. Through hundreds of lengths of dirt and stone, my eyes meet his. There is only world-weariness in those eyes. And still my city continues to sink, the sun blotted out by this dark occlusion, the tendrils of light wrapping around the god he has come to hate. In the cracking of the bones, I can see his tomorrow. The seeds of apostasy are in his heart. His mind and soul has been forged on the battlefield. He is a godslayer, a deathbringer, and he has seen the carnage his patron demands of him. He will not stop now. He will kill me, and then he will march on his master to kill it too. Neither of them know this, of course. They are cursed to live only in the present, in the now.

And now, he will kill me.

I drag myself up these stone steps. Across the channels cut into the floor. My fresh blood mixes with the stale ichor as the dying voice of a god greets me with trepidation.

We are both dying, I gasp. This city will be my tomb as well as yours if we do nothing.

I reach up, tattooed hands gripping the teeth, using the last of my strength to force them apart. Drawing my knife from inside my beltloop.

What else will you take from me, the Beast begs. 

[[div class="iun-to-xen"]]
Everything, I answer.
[[/div]]
----
[[div class="xen-to-iun"]]
This is not a tomb for the Beast, I realize. This is your tomb.
[[/div]]

Iūn nods. She is still staring at Yaldabaoth . We watch as it widens, and the thing inside emerges into the cold white light. It is a tongue, huge and prehensile, purplish and swollen as it extrudes forth out of the maw. There, embedded into the purple flesh of the tongue muscle, is a man, his legs trapped inside while his upper half reaches forward. Familiar tattoos spread across his arms and torso, circling a gaping, collapsed wound on his chest. It is old, rotting, gangrenous. His face is the one we have seen before. A sharp nose — straight dark hair — stark grey eyes. No hair out of place and no blemish on his skin. A tall crown, formed of twisted and sharpened bones, sits atop his head. This being is utterly perfect in construction, but something about it all still screams wrongness. It takes me a moment to register, but the light and the warmth I have come to expect behind those eyes is gone.

When he speaks, he does not open his mouth. He only smiles as the god-maw behind him flaps instead.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“STOLEN AWAY BY TRAITORS. SCUM. HERETICS AND APOSTATES.”[[/span]] The statement is undercut by a soft, deep screaming, two voices wrapped around one another. It is hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“BUT IT RETURNS BACK TO ITS SPAWNING GROUND. I HAVE BEEN SO HUNGRY. SO, SO HUNGRY, FOR SO LONG. BUT I AM TO BE FULL, SOON. COME.”[[/span]]

The tongue draws a few meters closer, the Iūn crucified on it extending a clawed hand. My Iūn shakes her head. I can see her, all of her. Her voice does not quiver; her feet do not tremble. I wish I could tell her how proud of her I am.

“I am not you.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“YOU ARE WHAT I CUT OUT OF MY CHEST. YOU ARE WHAT HAS BEEN INSIDE ME, FESTERING, ROTTING. I HAD TO REMOVE YOU TO MAKE ROOM FOR MORE.”[[/span]]

“More what?” I ask, and for a moment, the Devourer’s attention turns to me. I look into its eyes, and it is clear to me that I am not the only thing in this room that is not truly alive.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“A MECHANICAL MIND. AN ABORTION OF HUMANITY, PERVERSION OF FLESH. YOU ARE IMPRESSIVE INSOFAR AS YOU ARE DISGUSTING.”[[/span]]

It casts a hand out. One of the tendrils of flesh springs forward, toothed vine wrapping around the base of my feet. I cannot move.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“MORE. MORE, ALWAYS MORE. THE HUNGER DOES NOT STOP. I TEETER ON THE VERGE OF GODHOOD. I WILL BECOME YALDABAOTH, THE WORLDMAKER, THE DEVOURER. ALL I REQUIRE IS ONE LAST MEAL.”[[/span]]

The soldiers behind me shout, raising their guns. They fire wildly into the wall of flesh. The bullets rip through it, tearing flesh from hidden bone, shredding the meat. Blood gushes from every bullethole freely. The gunfire is deafening. Yaldabaoth goes limp, and for a moment, the gunfire stops.

And as we watch, the flesh knits itself back together again from congealed blood, bone restructuring itself, skin growing over the patches. The Devourer straightens, and a wet, hacking noise erupts from his lungs. I realize he is laughing.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THESE ARE THE VERMIN YOU ALLY YOURSELF WITH? THESE ARE THE VERMIN WE WERE BORN TO EAT. TO CONSUME. TO DEVOUR.”[[/span]]

He raises a finger. More tendrils erupt from the floors and wall. They tear rifles from hands, force our party to the floor. Soldiers drop, dragged to the ground by the invaders. Katsaros is grappling with her own attackers. Her hand reaches out and grips around one of the tendrils; it chokes to death, swelling with black blood, but is replaced by two more.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I AM INSATIATE. I HAVE WAITED HERE FOR SO LONG.”[[/span]]

"How are you alive? You should have long since starved."

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I HAVE BEEN HIDING IN THIS DARKNESS FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS. THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO BUT EAT.”[[/span]]

The corners of the maw tilt up.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“SO I ATE. AND ATE, AND ATE, AND ATE. SATIATED FOR A MOMENT -- AND THEN THE HUNGER RETURNS. IT ALWAYS RETURNS. SO I ATE MORE, UNTIL THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT.”[[/span]]

Iun’s eyes widen. And for the first time, I see Yaldabaoth in full -- not two presences intertwined, but one entirely contained, consumed by the other. This Iun is not inside the Devourer -- the Devourer is his mouth. He has eaten the entire Old Beast, flesh, bone, tooth, blood and all. 

“You... are a cancer. You are spreading through this city, consuming and consuming. Endlessly devouring the very thing you live in.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“YOU ARE THE LAST MEAL I NEED. MY RUNAWAY PIECE OF DIVINITY. THE HERETICS STOLE YOU AWAY, BUT FINALLY. YOU ARRIVE LIKE A LAMB TO YOUR SLAUGHTER.”[[/span]]

She raises a hand and bites into her own flesh, letting her blood gush freely into the channels. She mutters something. The dozen tendrils growing on the floor are joined by a dozen more — these red, pink, young flesh and fresh blood. They snatch and twist at the others, the flesh wrestling with itself long enough to free the soldiers. They scramble backward. Under our feet, the god groans in agony.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“IT FIGHTS!”[[/span]]

“We were one once. Many, many years ago. That was an old life. A different life. I am not yours anymore, and you are not mine.”

Yaldabaoth makes that same hacking laugh. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“EVERYTHING I LAY MY EYES ON IS MINE. I ALONE SET THE BOUNDARIES OF MY DOMAIN. YOU WERE A PART OF ME, ONCE. YOU CAN HAVE THIS POWER, TO RESHAPE THE WORLD. TO ALIGN IT WITH OUR IMAGE. OUR DESIRES. COME BACK TO YOURSELF.”[[/span]]

Iūn does not speak. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I SEE YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN SO ALONE, FOR SO LONG. A WOLF LIVING AMONG THE SHEEP. YOU HAVE COME TO THINK OF YOURSELF AS PREY. LOOK. LOOK!”[[/span]]

I watch as one of the tentacles digs under a soldier’s helmet. I do not see what happens under his visor; a second later, he goes limp, and blood gushes freely from underneath. Hussein screams. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“WE HAVE BEEN DESTROYED TEN TIMES OVER. REDUCED TO NAUGHT BUT SCORCHED BONE.”[[/span]] Yaldabaoth's face bubbles, scorches, and drips into nothingness, revealing rotting muscle. For a moment, I see it for what it is — rot, papered over into a beautiful ampule. And then the flesh reforms, melting back into a smiling face. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“AND STILL, WE REFORM. YOU THINK THIS //THING// IS RELATED TO US ANY MORE THAN A CALF IS RELATED TO ITS BUTCHER?”[[/span]]

“We lost our way when we forgot why we did this. When we decided controlling them was more important than letting them make their own fates. You know this. I know this.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I KNOW THAT ADYTUM WOULD HAVE BURNED TO NOTHINGNESS TEN TIMES OVER WERE IT NOT FOR ME. I WAS THE GUIDE. I WAS THE GODHEAD. MEN ARE STUPID. THEY ARE SHEEP. THEY PANIC AND THEY STAMPEDE. THEY NEED THE WOLVES TO KEEP THEM IN THEIR PLACE.”[[/span]]

It smiles that false smile again. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I AM THE WOLF.”[[/span]]

“We lied.”

The smile falters.

“We lied to the ones we love. We lied. We deceived them. We preached all our ideals while we did this dark work beneath their feet.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THEY WERE WEAK. THEY DID NOT HAVE THE STRENGTH TO DO WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE.”[[/span]]

Iūn smiles, sadly. “No. They had the strength not to do it. Our mistake was not seeking power. Our mistake was bleeding an innocent thing for our benefit.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“IT WAS NOT OF THE FLESH. IT WAS IN ITS NATURE TO KILL. TO DOMINATE.”[[/span]]

“It spoke. It thought. It wanted freedom.” Her head twitches. “Like us.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“LIKE //ME.// YOU ARE NOT ME. YOU ARE A SHRED OF DIVINITY I SAWED AWAY.”[[/span]]

A tendril reaches forth.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“WHEN I CUT YOU OUT, I CAST US INTO THIS DEATHLESS HELL. NEITHER OF US ARE HUMAN ANYMORE. NEITHER OF US AGES. NEITHER OF US DIES. BUT EVERY SINGLE WAKING MOMENT ALL I FEEL IS HUNGER. STARVATION. A BOTTOMLESS HOLE I CANNOT FILL, EVEN AFTER DEVOURING A GOD. YOU TAINT MY PROMISED IMMORTALITY.”[[/span]]

“You are not human anymore.”

A twisted, foul, rotting smile. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“YES. I AM FAR, FAR BEYOND HUMAN.”[[/span]]

“Yes. You have given up everything for power. You are the one holding the whip. Just another slavemaster.”

That beautiful face abruptly contorts with hatred. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“WE ARE NOT IT,”[[/span]] it shrieks. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THERE ARE THE NALKA, AND THERE ARE THE PREY. WE WERE GIVEN THIS POWER. WE CAN REMAKE THIS DISEASED WORLD. I SEE IT, IN THE CRACKS. YOU SEE IT TOO. THE BLACKSTAR LIVES AGAIN. THE BLACK MOON IS DRAGGING ITSELF OUT OF THE SEA ONCE MORE. THE NALKA WILL SPREAD AGAIN, AS WE WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO.”[[/span]]

Iūn stares at it. I can see her thinking. I know her. She is smarter than this. She //is// smarter than this.

“There is no Nälkä, with you. You do not eat how we eat. You eat because it is all you know how to do. Because you are trying to fill a bottomless hole. There is a perversion of life here, yes. You."

The Devourer's lip curls.

“Whatever you were once,” she says. “You are not me anymore. We did not begin this to dominate. To assimilate. We began this to live as we wished. This is not how I wished to live.”

She pauses.

“This is not how Luvjatar wished to live.”

For a moment, silence hangs in the air of the chamber. Then Yaldabaoth gurgles again. It is laughing.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“LUVJATAR CRAVED IMPERFECTION. HE LOVED US ONLY WHEN WE WERE WEAK. ONCE WE IMPROVED, HE GREW JEALOUS. JEALOUS OF OUR PERFECTION. LOOK. WE ARE PERFECT, NOW. HE SIMPLY COULD NOT SEE THAT.”[[/span]]

The Yaldabaoth-Iūn smiles.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“HE WAS A FOOL TO HIS END.”[[/span]]

I do not even see my Iūn lunge, but in a moment, she is on the thing clawing, screaming, tearing at its skin. There are no words — only animal rage. The tendrils loosen for a moment, and I spring backward. The Devourer is screeching in pain as she claws at it. Her flesh rots away, huge chunks becoming gangrenous before being replaced just as quickly. Her face is twisted with fury.

The soldiers are getting up, trying to rush for the door. It is sealed shut. Katsaros is trying to rip it open. The floor is rumbling again.

I turn just in time to see Iūn, my Iūn, being raised and flung into the far wall. I hear something crack. Her skull is caved in. In a moment, her bone and flesh knit itself back, and she scrambles to her feet, blood pouring down her face. Those gray eyes are lit in a way I have never seen before.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“YOU WERE NEVER A PERSON, LITTLE THING. YOU ARE A STRAY SHARD OF MY DIVINITY. A CHICK THAT FLEW THE NEST. PARTS DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO SECEDE THE WHOLE. TO ROB ME OF MY RIGHTFUL MEAL. NADOQ DID NOT. SA’ARN DID NOT. UROK DID NOT. LUVJATAR DID NOT. YOU DO NOT.”[[/span]]

“You think yourself a person? You have cut out everything that made us who we were. You are not Iūn. You are a hollow shell. You are the cocoon left behind.” A pause. “I made myself. I formed this flesh into shape. I made myself a person. I have dug my past up with my bare hands, and found nothing of worth.”

I can see the bone-knife dancing in her hands. 

“I am Iūn. You are the sum of my mistakes.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I HAVE FORESEEN THIS MOMENT FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, LAYING HERE, DYING AND DREAMING. I SAW THIS WOULD GO DIFFERENTLY. BUT I ONLY NEED TO CONSUME YOUR FLESH. NOT YOUR MIND.”[[/span]]

Iūn smiles. “No. You forget you speak to yourself. I know as well as you that this cannot be done without a willing prophet.”

Yaldabaoth smiles back. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“AND I HAVE ONE.”[[/span]]

Whatever Iūn was to say next is cut off by the knife put through her lungs. Ieva eases her to the floor, face impassive, moving like she is dreaming. She is hurt. I need to help her. I need to help her.

The tendrils stop me from moving. My outstretched hands meets only air. I shout her name, but she simply twitches and gurgles from the floor, unable to believe her eyes. Ieva slowly walking forward, ignoring the screams behind her, ignoring the rotten blood pooling around her snake-feet, approaching the maw.

The Iūn-Beast gurgles in pleasure as she approaches.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THIS ONE HAS SEEN IT. THIS ONE HAS SEEN THE WEAKNESS OF HUMANITY. THE MYRIAD FAILURES OF HER MOTHER. THIS ONE HAS FELT THE HUNGER I FEEL.”[[/span]]

Iūn’s face contorts with pain. She tries to drag herself up. A tendril slaps her back down.

Ieva draws closer to the Devourer. It widens in preparation. The rumbling is growing louder. Somewhere, I can feel something shifting.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THIS ONE KNOWS THE PURPOSE OF FLESH: TO CONSUME. TO GROW. WE ARE A SUPERIOR PEOPLE. OUR BLESSINGS ARE NOT GIFTED FROM THE GODS. WE RIP THEM OUT OURSELVES. WE MAKE OUR OWN GODS.”[[/span]]

Ieva’s face twitches. The maw begins to open wide.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“YOU SEE IT. YOU SEE WHAT COULD BE. US, AT THE SEAT OF A NEW EMPIRE. NO ONE OUTSIDE OUR GRASP. NEVER HELPLESS AGAIN. NEVER TO BE CONTROLLED. NO ONE TO HURT US ANYMORE. THE HUNGER CAN STOP.”[[/span]]

“It never stops, Ieva,” Iūn gasps. “I swear it. It never stops.”

“You failed, Iūn,” Ieva says softly, eyes still on the abyss. “You had all this at the tip of your fingers. And you cast it away. For what?”

Iūn’s blood bubbles by way of an answer.

“I see now. This is my purpose.”

The security personnel are shooting at Ieva now. The gunfire is deafening. It shreds her robes, her skin, her snakelike legs, but the flesh just reforms. She never slows her approach. A smile begins to spread on her face. “This is what I was meant to do. [[span class="yaldabaoth"]]This is what you were preparing me for.[[/span]]”

Yaldabaoth opens, flesh parting and revealing the endless abyss. The others turn away, their eyes blinded momentarily. Human minds are not meant to see this.

I am not human. I see it all. 

Flesh. A seed of flesh, an unborn fetus, hanging in the womb. Multiplying, growing, spreading, changing and becoming something else entirely. Then mangled, stabbed, and tortured by its brethren, buried underneath a city, stretched across vast catacombs. Wailing in pain, in agony that would shred a mortal mind like soft flesh put to the sword. Unspeakable power, but trapped.

A war in heaven. Three gods cast to earth, and a fourth. A black moon rising out of the sea, endless entropy given physical form. Matter and light warping around it with sheer hatred for the continued existence of the universe. A father, a son, a man of no note or consequence, imparted with the instructions in his mind, an army, and all the power of a fell god.

A nameless boy in the galley of a slave-ship, carried by dog-headead demons to a new world. Stumbling across a vein of flesh and drinking the vigor deep. Stealing the control of life. A living martyr, preaching liberation even as he hangs by the neck from a poplar tree. Healing the ill slaves as they wage war on masters, praised for his power.

A vast city in the desert, besieged by this three-pronged army. Its walls crumbling and its gleaming towers collapsing into fire while a black moon blots out the sun. A massive wall, defended by sorcerer-nawabs and spirit-beasts. The very earth beneath it crumbling and giving way as a black moon raises the tides higher, higher, drowning a continent. A mausoleum-city, abandoned by all but the dead and the mad. Sinking into the ground itself, buried like a tomb by a godling, his black moon hanging over him. The dissatisfaction growing in his heart, alongside his power.

 A scarred prophet looking over a city he does not wish to rule. Wishing himself free of this place, of its pressures, of the terror of what will happen when he dies. A wounded god beneath his feet becoming the source of his undeath. His friends grow worries, scared. The purest of intentions warping and twisting — not under the influence of the divine, but the creeping desire for control, for authority, for power.

A godling in black armor, raising his army and marching to an island at the edge of the known world. Here, where his god resides. Raising the power his patron installed in him — but still unable to kill a god. Sealing it away, sealing the island away from the world. But the creeping tendrils of the black moon still slip out, dying spirals winding into the minds of those without faces. A forgotten, cancerous organ of the Foundation, an insurgency over whom we no longer have any power.

A mad witch-king sitting alone. His klavigars, learning of his sin and his betrayal, his torture of an innocent creature, the suffering their city is built on, slipping away in the night. The godling laying waste to the raised dead. Immortality is but a song away, but he has sawed out a part of himself he needs. He is in agony. As his city falls, he drags himself into his torture chamber, binding himself to a dying god, waiting for his apotheosis, for his power.

Ieva sees it all too. She sees the unimaginable weight of the divine. It sings to her. She reaches out, into this tortured womb.

Iūn finally drags herself up. The bone-knife has cut through to her chest. Something about it has injured her where other wounds failed. Her eyes flutter, and she speaks in a weak, trembling voice.

“I am so proud of you, little thing.”

Ieva’s hand falters.

“I have been a coward. I should have said this many times. You are so beautiful. I have known you since you were a babe, and seen you grow. Grow, and change, and adapt. I could have never foreseen what you would become. You shock me, every day.”

Ieva’s hand quivers, inches from the maw of a god.

“I should have trusted you. I am cursed this way, to live life unforgetting and unforgiving. I am cursed to fear what would happen were I to draw my hand away. To hunger for control. I should have let you become who you were meant to be. As others have for me. You are already so much smarter and wiser than I was, at your years. You are my daughter. I have made so many mistakes in my lifetime. I have made errors that have killed thousands. Ended civilizations. I have come to learn how many mistakes I made. But they do not make me who I am. My past does not make me who I am. There is temptation to live in the past. But it has no answers for us. Only memories and dead men. I have countless regrets.”

Ieva's face turns towards Iūn as she speaks between gasps, and she has an expression I have never seen before. I am not quite sure what it is.

“But you are not one of them. You have never been one of them. You can do as you will. You have earned that. But all I ask is that you consider who we are. And what it is.”

“What?” 

“You are my beloved child Ieva. But you are also Hattak, who lived with his wife and tended to his crops and had a son who he would die for. You are Puyk, who died far too young but enjoyed the time he spent as part of us. You are Joiq, who—

“—was only glad that her children were not alive to see her like this. Uyla, whose desperate wish for children was granted at the cost of her own life.”

“Kuniq, who carried so much wisdom in her old bones.”

“Adytum is not a place, a set of ruins filled with sins and mistakes. We carry Adytum with us. You carry Adytum with you. Why do you consume them?” She is struggling to hold herself up as the tendrils push her back down.

"Because they make me who I am." Her voice is uncharacteristically soft. Like a child’s. "Because I love them."

Blood drips from Iūn's mouth. “Ask... ask it why it eats."

The haze is gone. Her eyes are clouded with uncertainty. She looks back into the endless well. 

“Why?”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“BECAUSE ALL THOSE BENEATH US ARE MADE TO BE DEVOURED.”[[/span]]

Ieva’s face contorts with sudden understanding, then disgust, then rage. She raises the bone knife and stabs at the heart of a god. There is a deafening wailing, and then I see her, thrown backward into the far wall. I hear a snap and she slumps. She does not move again.

Iūn screams, as the floor begins to rumble. The Devourer is writhing, screeching in agony. The whole chamber shakes, and I know that the rest of Adytum is shaking with it. The rocks begin to fall from high overhead, crashing down and barely missing a few bodies. One strikes the door, and the stone crumbles. Katsaros pushes it, and the rest falls to pieces. She shouts, and the soldiers begin to rush through, dragging the researchers with them.

Iūn has dragged herself over to Ieva’s body. Her screams mix with Yaldabaoth’s. The tendrils are loose now, loose enough to shake off. I approach her as the city comes apart around us. I put a hand on her shoulder. A simple act that terrified me once. How things change.

Ieva is not dead. Not yet. Her eyes are wide, flickering, and her neck is twisted on itself. She takes sucking, gasping breaths. Blood dribbles from a corner of her mouth. Iūn is laying her hands on her, cutting her palms, whispering a prayer. I can see her neck setting itself. Not fast enough.

Yaldabaoth is already recovering. The ichor gushes freely, but the screams have turned from ones of pain to ones of rage. The crippled, twitching tendrils of muscle on the floor are beginning to swell again.

I shake Iun’s shoulder. She does not stop her prayers, even as chunks of rock and bone and muscle come crashing down from the ceiling. I shake her again, and she whips around. Her face has an expression I have seen once before — when she held Luvjatar, dying, in her arms. “I will //not// leave her.” I can see she is not lying. She will not leave her daughter. Even if it kills her, buries her here with this abortive half-god.

I do not want her to die. I do not want either of them to die. They cannot help being human.

But I am not. I do not fear death.

“Take her.” Her eyes widen as I force her to her feet, lifting Ieva’s crumpled body, carefully supporting her neck. “Go.” I shove the karcist into her arms. She is stronger than she looks. I have come to appreciate that about her.

“This is my fate. I have to do this.”

“We make our own fate. Do you want to die?”

“No. Not anymore. But I do not want //you// to die.”

“I am not alive, Iūn. I do not die.”

“No. No, you will go. Take her. I will—”

“You are weak. You cannot hold it back. You have given up enough of yourself already.”

She stares at me. Her body has been through incredible agony and pain; I do not understand why it is only now her gray eyes are welling with tears.

“You gave me a life. Let me return the favor.”

She gives me that lopsided smile, even with the tears making tracks through the blood on her cheeks. I take a still of the sight. I would like to keep that with me.

“I was about to say the same.”

“I wish we had more time together.”

“Yes.”

The tendrils are rising up again. We are out of time. We were already out of time; I should have pushed her away minutes ago. Irrational.

But I still wait for her to lean forward, stand on the tips of her toes, and press her lips against my shell. They leave a bloody imprint. 

And then I wrap my hand around her neck and throw her backward, as gently as I can, through the doorway before the rockfall above it collapses, blocking her off. I cannot see her. I cannot hear her. She is gone.

Standing there, I learn what loss feels like.

The Devourer is in pain, but the rage has overpowered it. It is looking at me now, hateful and condescending. This is not Iūn, not in any way that matters.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I HAVE REDUCED LEGIONS OF AUTOMATA TO SHATTERED GOLDEN METAL.”[[/span]] 

“Am I like them?” I speak slowly. I am buying time for them to get away.

It pauses for a moment. Like I do when pondering something, I realize.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“NO. THOSE WERE THE EASTERN MACHINES' CREATIONS. THEY HAD NO MIND OF THEIR OWN, JUST WIND-UP MECHANISMS MARCHING FORWARD. YOU... ARE DIFFERENT.”[[/span]] 

“How?”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“I CAN SEE IT IN YOU. YOU HAVE FELT IT, FELT THE HUNGER FOR MORE AND MORE POWER AND KNOWLEDGE. HUNGER THAT CANNOT BE EXTINGUISHED. HUNGER THAT DRIVES YOU.”[[/span]]

“For more knowledge, yes. Not for more power.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“MORE THAN THAT. HUNGER TO FEEL AS THEY FEEL. TO DESIRE AS THEY DESIRE. TO KNOW THEM, COMPLETELY.”[[/span]]

I feel a twinge of surprise. Of camaraderie. This thing... understands. “Yes.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“BUT YOU UNDERSTAND. YOU ARE NOT HUMAN. YOU SEE THEM AS I DO. RUTTING, HALF-FORMED ANIMALS THAT REACH TOWARDS IMPOSSIBLE DESIRES.”[[/span]]

“That is what defines them. They try to be greater than they are.” I can feel the heat in my chest. The hunger that Iūn talked about.

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“AND FAIL.”[[/span]]

“There is nobility in their failings. We have not had to struggle to make ourselves.” It rises up, warming my metal. Blotting out my mind. “I look out at them and I want them to succeed. I want them to become something greater than what they are.”

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“WHY?”[[/span]]

I cock my head. “Hm. I do not know." I focus on the picture in my mind of Iūn, smiling, crying. 

[[span class="yaldabaoth"]]“THEN YOU ARE AS FLAWED AS ANY HUMAN. A MIMICRY OF A MIND. GOODBYE, AUTOMATON.”[[/span]]

The tendrils rise up.

“My name is Xenophon. Xen-o-phon. Goodbye.”

[[div class="xen-to-iun"]]
The last thought I have is that I finally made a mistake; I forgot to tell Iūn something important. And then, as the tendrils wrap around my mental frame, the excess heat from the reactor in my torso rises far past safe levels, and everything turns white.
[[/div]]
----

[[div class="iun-to-text"]]
I drag Ieva along, feet bleeding, back through the catacombs. I dig through my memory while she gasps in my arms. I am trying to keep her alive along with myself, the burning wound in my chest sapping my energy. My thoughts are buzzing, racing. This place is collapsing, the walls caving in on themselves. Lifetimes on lifetimes being buried, once more. I will not be trapped here again.
[[/div]]

He died for me. He may not call it that, but I have seen enough death to know what it is. I will make it mean something. I //will// make it worth something.

Adytum, the city I built, the city I destroyed, falls apart as my bloody feet carry me up, up, up the staircase as the temples and towers collapse, returning to the dust they was carved from. Sunlight overhead. I slip out and fall onto the grass, Ieva rolling ahead of me, moon overhead in the dark sky. I look up in terror for a split-second. But no. This moon is silver, glowing. 

The soldiers are swarming, shouting orders. I hear deafening noises as a dozen trucks roll down the hills. Helicopters approach from the distance. They were prepared for this. I hear scattered words exchanged over static.

I am not prepared for when the hole into Adytum bursts upward with a torrent of white-hot flame. It sears my skin as quickly as I heal it again, shoving Ieva further away. The inferno rises high into the air, forced upward by the pipe. It casts an orange burning glow over this valley. I stare into the fire. I see no future. Only myself.

I hear a click to my left. I turn. Hussein, the doctor, standing over Ieva, holding a gun. But at once, it is not Hussein. His face twists, contorts, swirls into nothingness. A mask falling off; a painting being ripped to shreds. Underneath there is someone, something else entirely. The absence of name, of identity. A hole where a person should be. And all that lies inside is a shifting shadow of something dark and impossibly old.

The thing squeezes the trigger, Ieva's body slumps. The creature turns and aims at me. I see down the barrel of his gun -- a perfect, dark circle. A little black moon. I raise my hand and let out a strangled cry before I hear the gunshot. 

The thing’s head bursts into a bouquet of red, flesh popping and blood spraying outward.  Its gun drops and its body crumples. Behind it, the woman with the metal arm, rifle aimed at where the thing was standing.

There is no time to thank her. I drag myself to Ieva, my daughter, my beautiful child. There is an ugly gaping wound in her forehead. Her eyes are cold and grey and dead. There is only one thing I can do. My hands scramble into her robes for the knife, and bring it down across my wrist. The blood gushes forth, more blood than I have ever given in this life. It rushes like an endless spring, and it is all I can do to hold Ieva to my arm, letting it fill her mouth, forcing it down her throat even as my body weakens and my vision darkens. I have given too much. I have given too much.

I see sparks of life appearing in Ieva's eyes, I see the woman with the metal arm cradling my head, shouting for aid, and then I see nothing at all.
[[/div]]

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[[div class="foundation alt" style="font-family: monospace;"]]
+ DELTA-0 UPDATE

**PERSONNEL CODE:** MILE-AMBROSIA-HURRICANE

Package successfully activated at LOCUST investigation site. Director Hussein eliminated, forty-three additional personnel eliminated. Site not located in Kabul. Investigation was misled. 

Attempt to eliminate Grand Karcist Iūn failure; Secretary Ariadne Katsaros terminated embedded agent. Site-7 security too tight to attempt elimination of XENOPHON.aic, but observation maintained for any irregularities. Further instructions to follow. 
[[/div]]

@@ @@
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[[div class="bot"]]
Oh.
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
I detonated my reactor. I destroyed myself. For her.
[[/div]]

[[div class="user"]]
yeah.
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
Then why am I still here?
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
Iūn. Where is Iūn? 
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
Is she dead?
[[/div]]

[[div class="user"]]
she's alive. 
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
Show me.
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot heddy"]]
He is right. Hedara and I cannot delay for much longer. Download the automaton's mind. We must leave.
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
My name is Xenophon.
[[/div]]

[[div class="user"]]
okay. sit tight, xenophon. we're getting you out of here.
[[/div]]

[[div class="bot"]]
What is your name?
[[/div]]

[[div class="user"]]
i'm pandora. give me a second and i'll introduce myself properly.
[[/div]]
~~~~
[[div class="addendum"]]
[[div class="doc"]]
ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT  -- AUGUST 2042
[[/div]]
----
= **<<BEGIN LOG>>**
----

**XENOPHON:** I am not dead.

**UNKNOWN:** Thankfully.

//[The sound of distant waves and muffled voices in the next room.]//

**XENOPHON:** I cannot see.

**UNKNOWN:** Sorry, this is an older shell. Let me-- there.

//[XENOPHON's cameras activate. He is standing in a small, dusty room with cables, terminals, and technical equipment littered all around him. There are open balcony doors leading to a tranquil blue sea. Inside the room, an older researcher is standing by a laptop, looking over the shell with a nervous smile.]//

**UNKNOWN:** Hi.

//[XENOPHON turns to them. He cocks his head.]//

**XENOPHON:** You are Dr. Pandora Galanis. Your transport craft crashed in the Indian Ocean forty years ago. There were no survivors. You are supposed to be dead. 

//[GALANIS laughs. There are wrinkles on their face and grey creeping at the roots of their curly hair.]//

**GALANIS:** Makes two of us.

//[The wind flaps the curtains by the door. XENOPHON takes a slow, experimental step, followed by another. Gingerly, he walks to the balcony, overlooking a crystal-blue sea. A tall, pale woman with blonde hair and skin covered in golden prostheses is also on the balcony. A pair of ornate wings are folded behind her back.]//

**XENOPHON:** Dr. Hedvig Nussbaum. You are wanted for questioning by Foundation Internal Security.

**NUSSBAUM:** And are you going to turn me in?

**XENOPHON:** No. It's nice to meet you.

**NUSSBAUM:** And you.

//[They shake metal hands. From outside, it is clear this balcony is on the side of some fortress or castle. A dozen meters below, a dock juts into the water, with a small freighter moored to it. A woman with a metal arm and a man with an eyepatch sit on crates, playing cards. Their rifles are close at hand.]//

**XENOPHON:** Where are we?

**IŪN:** Xen-o-phon.

//[IŪN slowly limps through the door. Her robes are in tatters, and she is dragging an IV pole with her, tubes leading into her veins. She is smiling weakly. Before she can approach, XENOPHON steps forward and wraps his arms around her. He does not let go.]//

**XENOPHON:** <I thought...>

//[She leans forward and presses her lips against the new, unmarked shell.]//

**IŪN:** <So did I, little thing.>

//[XENOPHON finally releases her, taking a step back. He cocks his head.]//

**XENOPHON:** <How? I saw you die trying to save Ieva. I saw myself die. None of this should be possible.>

**IŪN:** <I pushed all my cursed blood into her. I would have died, were it not for a timely intervention by our new friends. A blood transfusion.>

//[She nods at NUSSBAUM.]//

**XENOPHON:** <You spent all your blood. Does that mean...?>

**IŪN:** <I can die now? I do not know.>

//[She smiles.]//

**IŪN:** <Something to discover, together.>

**XENOPHON:** I have a GPS uplink. We are in the middle of the Aegean Sea. There should not be an island here.

**UNKNOWN:** Perceptive.

//[XENOPHON turns to the far end of the room. An older man in a suit is standing and facing the group. He appears to be in his fifties, with a short beard and close-cropped grey hair. He speaks in an unidentifiable accent.]//

**XENOPHON:** I know your face. You are--

**ADMINISTRATOR:** The Administrator, Franz Williams.

**XENOPHON:** I was going to say the BLACKSTAR.

//[He smiles.]//

**ADMINISTRATOR:** A name I have long since abandoned.

**XENOPHON:** I have discovered a new emotion.

**GALANIS:** What's that?

**XENOPHON:** Frustration. I am tired of being pulled back and forth without knowing what is going on. I am tired of playing someone else's games. I would like answers.

**ADMINISTRATOR:** After what you've been through, I think that's more than fair. Ask away.

**XENOPHON:** How am I...

**ADMINISTRATOR:** Alive?

**XENOPHON:** Close enough.

//[The ADMINISTRATOR gestures at GALANIS.]//

**GALANIS:** Every 48 hours, your personality matrix was backed up by satellite uplink to Site-7's servers. It was a precautionary measure, in case you ever 'went native'. No offense to present company.

//[They nod at NUSSBAUM, who returns it.]//

**XENOPHON:** I was not aware of that. I thought I was destroying myself to save the others.

**GALANIS:** That's part of what we wanted to figure out. Whether you were human enough to be trusted.

**XENOPHON:** Am I?

**GALANIS:** You tell me.

//[XENOPHON pauses, then nods.]//

**XENOPHON:** Then all of what I saw -- you knew all this happened two days ago?

**GALANIS:** Ah, no. That's the other half of what we needed to determine -- what happened in the last moments down there. And no, we've been trying to get at you for about a month now. But Site-7's locked down even harder than normal. As is every other Foundation facility on the planet.

**XENOPHON:** Why?

**GALANIS:** While you were down there, an explosion was set off in the location the LOCUST team was investigating. Thirty-three personnel were killed, including Dr. Hussein.

**XENOPHON:** That's not possible. Dr. Hussein was with us the entire time in Black Adytum.

**GALANIS:** That wasn't Dr. Hussein. Over the past month, there have been eighty-five strikes against high-security Foundation facilities. Sixteen Directors have been killed, at least a hundred personnel before the communication blackout orders came down. Critical operations sabotaged and high-value anomalies stolen. All of it done with insider knowledge and training, all of it performed by Foundation personnel whose bodies we found later having been dead for days. Their identities were stolen. 

**XENOPHON:** Like Hussein.

**KATSAROS:** We're at war, Xenophon. With an enemy we can't see and allies we can't trust.

**XENOPHON:** Who? Why?

**KATSAROS:** Delta Wave. The Insurgency. From our fractured understanding, a rogue cell of the Foundation intended for deniable operations. Started in the early 20th century to extract secrets of weaponized memetics from occupied Europe. Decommissioned after World War II, and secretly re-established by O5-11 shortly after the Amoni-Ram Incident for control over his enemies, allies, and the Foundation at large. Members were trained in memetic espionage, had their own identities memetically erased.

**XENOPHON:** The face eaters.

**KATSAROS:** Yeah. And when old man Kondraki died, something else flowed into the hole where their identities used to be. They're taking orders from something else, now. 

**XENOPHON:** The Black Moon.

**ADMINISTRATOR:** It has held as many names as I have. The Abominate, the Wretch, the Apostate. The fourth god in the triarchy, banished, forgotten. Technology, nature, life. Entropy. The inevitable tendency of any system to decay into disorder. Into chaos. It lays its eggs into your mind. It gives you invented purpose. Kill him. Take that city. Destroy that kingdom. Set fire to the entire world just to watch the embers die.

//[He turns and stares out at the calm, blue sea.]//

**ADMINISTRATOR:** Like I did.

**XENOPHON:** Where are we now?

**ADMINISTRATOR:** A forgotten Foundation installation on the island of Eastern Samothrace.

**XENOPHON:** Why can't I find it on any map?

**ADMINISTRATOR:** Because three thousand years ago, I tried to kill a god here -- //my god// -- and failed. My only recourse was to bury the island I trapped it on. Burn all the divine power it pushed into me and erase this place from humanity's collective memory. 

**XENOPHON:** And why am I here? Why are all of us here?

**ADMINISTRATOR:** Because the Insurgency has given the Black Moon a ready-made army and a way out of its watery tomb. Because all of you have come face-to-face with the unbridled power of a god, and managed to resist it -- something even I failed to do, centuries ago. Because many of you saw this storm brewing on the horizon. Because I need your assistance.

**XENOPHON:** To do what?

**ADMINISTRATOR:** To right my wrongs. A three-thousand-year-old armistice has come to an end. This Occult War has begun again, and it will not end until the gods and their prophets are dead.
----
= **<<END LOG>>**
----
[[/div]]
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[[=]]
[[module Rate]]
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