Crowned in Black: Chapter 23

Next post will be tomorrow morning MDT (US Mountain Time).

Karalti burst out over the Royal College of Engineers with a roar of warning and challenge, spiraling down to land in front of Withering Rose's hangar. The huge building had a weird dark nimbus around it, as if it were slightly displaced out of reality. As always, a crowd gathered to gawk as the huge queen dove toward the ground, scattering only when she roared a second time.

"Keep anyone else from entering the hangar, and stay in dragon form. We might need you." I clapped Karalti on the neck, banged the top of my helmet with a fist, and slid down her wing. Suri was right behind me. We’d ordered the NPCs to remain with Jacob at the hospital.

"You heard the Voivode! Important dragon business! Out of the way!" Karalti broadcast her telepathic voice as she inflated her throat and bellowed. Even without her Queensong engaged, any stragglers shouted and fled.

The silo had the same sick, grey light as the miller’s bedroom. Inside, Withering Rose had been laid out face-down, mounted on scaffolding like some kind of weird lab specimen. The explosion had separated her into three main pieces: her head and upper torso, her lower torso, hips, and one leg, and the other leg. They were suspended off the ground, while the salvaged parts destroyed in the blast were laid out on the ground below. The Warsinger barely fit inside this building, constructed as a production line for Vlachia's largest warship, the Sarkany-class. Workers swarmed over the giant metal carcass like ants, welding and wrenching, seemingly unaffected by the pall that hung over the hangar.

"Christ, she's a big girl, isn't she?" Suri looked over her Warsinger in mingled awe and dismay. "Where do we go? Did Rin say?"

"I think I know." My eyes were drawn to the sucking darkness that roiled around an open command area at the back of the hangar. "You can't see that?"

"See what?" Suri asked.

“THAT.” I pointed down toward it. “Are you telling me that only I can see the seething heart of darkness at the end of the building?”

Suri gave me an odd look. “Yeah, pretty much.”

I groaned. “Guess it’s some ‘security agent’ thing.”

We rolled up to find Rin, Gar, Soma, and three of Soma's engineers hanging back from a giant crystal suspended from a harness in the center of their workshop. The Heartstone was a clear white crystal the size of a small car, roughly hewn into the shape of an anatomical heart. The harness held the crystal at the center of two magical circles crawling with flecks of golden light. The circles were spitting and surging as the Heartstone throbbed with a malevolent, seething black void. No fewer than four college mages were holding them fast, spellgloves raised to stop the circles from dissolving.

"Hector! Suri! Thank goodness!" Rin flapped her hands in agitation as she half-ran, half-trotted over to us, her blue-on-blue eyes huge with fear. "We attached the energy probe and were getting the first set of readings, but then the device surged and broke and we couldn't understand anything it said except, um, your name, and then-"

The crystal rumbled, and the light around it dimmed even further. A low, snarling voice - somehow both so quiet it was barely audible, and so clear that it was painful to listen to - radiated out from the stone. "Ahh... behold, Herald, this prattling doll. How small it is. How frightened. And how small... are you."

[Warning! The Void draws near!]

"That's not what your mom said last night." I nearly went to push my visor up, then thought better of it. I'd played enough games and seen enough horror movies to know that looking at the void-creature with the naked eye was probably a bad idea.

"To the contrary. I have all the time this world has left." The Drachan’s voice had a cooing note to it, as if it were feigning patience. "Though that shalt not be long. I appreciate you answering my summons. I wished to behold mine enemy before we rise once more, and your sun dies and the seas boil to nothing."

"Be careful, Hector." Karalti spoke to me from outside, her telepathic voice hushed. "We didn't call these guys 'the Deceivers' for nothing. He definitely wants something."

"Well, here I am. Feast your eyes." I struck a pose, did a little sparklehands. "And if that's all you wanted, it's nap time for the eldritch abomination."

"What is once roused cannot be sedated nor contained," the drachan rumbled. "For now I answer only to the King of Nothing, and his sweet song has awoken me, Edifice, and my brothers. I examine you at my leisure."

"King of Nothing?" I frowned. "Squalor getting fancy now, huh? I got promoted to Crown Prince, so now he’s decided he’s a king?"

The sucking blackness in the core of the Heartstone throbbed when I spoke the name, as if recoiling from it.

"You do not understand that which you mock." It was eerie how collected this thing – Edifice – sounded. "You dream of vanquishing your direst foe. Yet you cannot defeat that which was born from you, and that which you by your nature must dwell within. It amuses us."

I crossed my arms. "You're talking like a magic eight-ball of suck. Your words could mean anything. If you're trying to psych me out, it's not working."

Edifice writhed and swirled, testing the boundaries of its prison.

"Then let me be the harbinger of new wisdom," Edifice rasped. "For you bear hismark, and my King is nothing but generous to his servants."

I was about to snap back when the magical circles darkened, then blew out. The mages shrieked as their spellgloves exploded, spraying broken glass and mana everywhere. Soma yelped and jumped back; Gar reflexively grabbed Rin and dragged her away. Suri didn't flinch, save to pull her sword from her back as a lash of black light snapped out like a whip toward me. I threw a hand up to guard my face on instinct, and the energy drew to it like a lightning rod. The Mark of Matir flashed with an icy-cold burning pain... and then the world around me darkened. When it swam back into view, I was no longer in the hangar - or in Archemi.

The jungle on the outskirts of what was left of suburban Jakarta, Indonesia. It was hot: oppressively hot, and damp. An icy, hard sensation gripped me as the popping of distant semi-auto fire rattled through the trees and blasted buildings, followed by the WHUMP-PHEW of a tank letting loose. I was in uniform, my helmet displaying alerts in every direction as I clutched my rifle in white-knuckled hands. Twenty-two years old, mind racing through everything I'd learned in twelve weeks of training.

"You thought that you could come here, and all of this would go away." A familiar, unpleasantly distorted girl's voice chimed from my right. My head whipped around. It was Tsunda, Vash's sister. She was tall, nearly six feet without shoes. Her handsome Tuun face was hollow, eyes huge and haunted. "But the data was stitched into your brain as if by needles. You brought this here."

There was a bang and a flash from a ruined building. Bullets thwipped past Tsunda's shoulder, blowing her hair forward as I dove, biting my tongue to stop from shouting. The kind of fear I hadn't felt since I was a rookie rose up in my chest, choking my throat. Panting, I swallowed down the old terror. I wasn't a rookie any more. I'd survived this patrol, the amateurish sniper fire from the old bookstore as my squad picked their way through the ruins. It had taught me about the value of cover, real fast.

“Data?” I looked around in shock. "These are some of my memories, yeah. But it's the past."

"Your past is in ME," Tsunda - Squalor - rasped from beside me. One moment, she'd been in the street; the next, she was crouched beside me behind a shattered concrete barricade, her thin arms wrapped around her knees. "Every moment. Every dream. Every memory. Every sin you committed, every sin committed on you. In ME."

Tortured screams rang out from somewhere behind me. I turned to see the edge of the jungle I remembered, blending surreally into a dense, virgin forest that hadn't been there in Jakarta. The trees were burning, cracking as the shadows of a platoon of powered armor chased fleeing shadowy figures. Unarmed figures, gunned down from behind.

I looked over at Squalor in sudden realization. “Wait… are you… OUROS?”

A rumble passed through the air around us, growing louder. Tsunda looked up… but she no longer had any eyes. They were seething black pools, lashing out with tiny tendrils that were absorbed back into the spreading void of her face.

“NO!” She - it - screamed, lunging for me.

I dodged backwards, Shadow Dancing nearly eighty feet back as Tsunda’s form and the world around us shattered into nothing, and then reformed. I recognized the scene with a dull shock. It was the tent hospital where I'd been laid out with HEX. The beds were full of blurry, pixelated figures, moaning and coughing with lungs full of fluid. At the other end of the marquee stood Andrik Corvinus. Ignas' younger brother looked much like how I'd first seen him: lean, handsome, as sharp and oily as a well-made dagger. There as an expression of sneering contempt in his eyes.

"You're the one who’s been causing me to dream, when no one else does." My eyes narrowed as I started toward him. "What are you, Squalor?"

"Nothing. Everything. Everyone." Andrik - Squalor - intoned. He sounded only vaguely like the illegitimate king of Vlachia.

A brackish dark fluid began to ooze into the tent, filling it in a way that would have been impossible in real life. It lifted the beds and medical equipment and tables, smashing them together and blocking my way to Andrik. Feelings of suffocation rose up, trying to close my throat.

"Why are you doing this?" I snarled and jumped, vaulting up onto a rocking bed. “You’re… you’re either a person, or some kind of intelligence, right? It doesn’t have to be like this!”

“You’re bad!” Squalor’s voice suddenly sounded alarmingly like a frightened child: a child with an adult’s deep voice. “You and all the others are bad, and I’m going to make you go away!”

The Mark was burning with a frigid, icy sensation on the back of my hand, sending shoots of pain up into my arm and around the blank numb patch that took up most of that shoulder. Some instinct was compelling me to reach Squalor and wrap my hand around its neck, and even as I thought that, my hand and forearm - armor included - seemed to wobble and become less real, radiating a deep blue glow. Squalor's expression twisted into a mask of rage as I bounded across shattering debris and lunged for it.

"NO!" It screamed again in its weird, discordant voice, for all the world like a tantruming toddler. "No no no! Never! I hate you!”

"Come here, you piece of shit!" A swirling maelstrom of furniture was piling around us: bare needles, glass and wood and steel smashing and breaking.

"I HATE YOU!" The entity wearing Andrik's face warped his features into a terrifying, tortured mask as it continued to back up into one of the corners. We had barely a foot of space at the top of the tent before everything submerged. "I HATE YOU ALL!"

I made one more desperate grab for it, just as the fluid swirled up over our heads. Squalor went under, laughing hysterically, while I held my breath... and was suddenly dumped back into the reality of the hangar, where everyone else was frozen in stop motion inside of a cloud of hanging darkness. It gathered in toward the Heartstone, sucking into it.

[I HATE YOU ALL!!!]

It hijacked Navigail’s voice, warped and distorted it into squealing, demonic shriek. As I struggled to move, the cloud absorbed into the crystal, and there was a piercing, rumbling roar from inside it.

"My king! My king, why do you-HRRRAAAGHH!" Edifice's voice cut out in a garbled, tortured scream two black shapes writhed and battled within the Heartstone. As I watched, the larger of the two engulfed the other and tore it apart, then convulsed inside of the prison before inverting on itself and vanishing.

Time resumed its normal speed, winding up and releasing the others. By their expressions, I knew they'd seen what had happened. The mages picked themselves up, dazed but alive. Soma began coughing, waving away the smell of ozone. The magic circles were black and blasted.

"What... the fuck...?" Suri uttered, reaching back for her sword hilt.

Rin let out a cry of dismay. "No! The Heartstone!"

The now-empty crystal was smoking, fine cracks crawling through its mass with small creaking sounds.

"I don't know h'what the hell just happened, but the Stone's fucked," Gar remarked flatly.

"No! We were so close!" Rin stomped her foot and turned, stalking over to a wall to punch it. Her silicone fist was surprisingly dense: she put a good dent into the wood. "Arrrgh!"

"Thank Squalor," I said, reaching up to wipe the sweat from my forehead. “It just took me on some fucking acid trip.”

“It made contact with you?” Suri’s head reared with alarm. “Are you alright?”

I gave her a flippant salute from my temple. She snorted softly.

"Piece of… UURGH! That was the only viable Heartstone we have!" Rin thumped the wall again, with less force this time. "This stupid... piece of... of... JUNK!"

"It's alright, kid." Suri eased off her weapon, realizing it wasn't going to help her or anyone else right now. She went over to Rin, and lay a heavy hand on her shoulder. "As it turns out, the Triad doesn't actually need the Warsinger itself: just me, the pilot. If we can't get them off the ground, then we're going to have to figure out another way."

"But, but-" Rin spluttered, waving her hands.

"You're goin' up levels like mad working on this," Suri continued. "And thanks to the effort you made with Perilous Symphony, we got weapons that knocked the Voidwyrm Empress on her arse. Imagine what they could do to dragons, if we needed them to."

I listened in concern, frowning... because my heart still told me that the Warsingers themselves were going to be a key player in the final outcome here in Archemi. I wracked my brains for some kind of solution.

"Wait," I said. "It's not over until the fat lady sings. Or in this case, the dead Mastersmith of Sachara's age. His tomb is here, in Myszno. In Karhad, off the Fol Alugut - the big underground river under the city.

"The... Mastersmith?" Soma's eyes widened. "Here? In Myszno?"

"Long story. This is the first time I've told anyone else other than my inner circle of advisors." I looked to Rin. "I am NOT letting this project drop. The fact that Ororgael, and now Squalor have directly sabotaged our efforts to get Withering Rose and any other Warsinger we can find up and running speaks to the importance of us having them. Squalor is afraid of them, and afraid of us."

"The King of Nothing," Suri echoed Edifice's words, looking toward the crystal. "Whatever it is, it's ruthless enough to kill its own worshippers."

"Yeah. And while you were frozen, I had a..." 'vision' sounded too woo-woo. 'Hallucination' wasn't right, either. "I was taken to a simulation of some of my worst early wartime memories. Not just visuals. Sound, smell, emotion. I relived the feelings, like a recording. Squalor blamed me for bringing these memories to Archemi, using Tsunda's face. Vash's sister. Then it took on Andrik's appearance. Remember how he turned into that fucking Lovecraftian horror?"

"Yes..." Rin looked to Gar. "You weren't there for that."

"No shit," Gar replied.

I shook my head. "I don't know what it is - rogue AI, a virus, a crazy test player trapped in the system, unwashed human data with a mind of its own. But I know we have to stop it. It's probably what drove Ororgael crazy and started all this shit to begin with.”

"Sure, probably. But what was this about a Mastersmith?" Gar still sounded as terse and practical as ever, but I noticed his hands fumble as he took a new cigarette from a case.

"The Tomb of the Mastersmith was where the guy who designed and built Withering Rose is buried. There's all kinds of books, scrolls, and who knows what else down there with him," I said, walking over to the crystal. As I lay my Marked hand on it, the diamond-like surface flared with small traceries of light that flickered and sputtered around the cracks. "I made the rebuilding of the university a priority in part so we could start excavating the tomb. The university isn't ready yet, but they did lock it up and take steps to preserve everything in there. And right now, we have the Mastersage of Vlachia bunked in Kalla Sahasi, along with Mehkhet the Illuminator and you two. I say we go to the tomb and see what the five of us can turn up."

"Alright... but... Hector..." Mercurions didn't sleep, but Rin somehow looked exhausted as she turned away from Suri to face me and the crystal. "If we don't find anything there... I think I need to step away for a while. This Warsinger stuff is all I've been doing, and it's so... so... FRUSTRATING."

"Step back?!" Soma looked horrified. "Why on Archemi would you want to step back from the pinnacle of magitech? The wisdom of the ancients is HERE, Rin, laid out before us like the guts of an augury. We can read the past AND the future in these Warsingers - I believe it!"

"I know you and Hector both do. I just..." Rin's eyes slid to the Heartstone, and her shoulders slumped.

Soma's moustache bristled, and his eyes shone with passion as he went to her and clapped her on both shoulders. "No, Rin: you cannot give up! In fact... In fact, I shall lead the way!" He pivoted to face me. "My Prince! I shall forfeit my family title, and accept your offer to become the marshal of the College of Engineers!"

And just like that, the vote count for the Free Army of Myszno tipped over, and I got a flurry of alerts from the KMS:

[Your proposal for the Free Army of Myszno has been successful! Please interface with your Mass Combat menus for more information, options, and customizations!]

[Building project: Fort Shearwind has commenced in Karhad!]

[Building project: Camp Harbinger has commenced in the Freehold of Vyeshniki.]

[Building Project: Joint Base Lighthouse is available in Litvy!]

[You have 4 new Heroes to assign roles.]

[Would you like to assign your Build Points? You have 2100 Build Points remaining.]

"You... you'd do that? For this?" Rin looked up at Soma in wonderment. "But that's... but you're..."

"The youngest and last of my House, yes," Soma replied, stiffening and lifting his chin proudly. "But as time has gone on and the threat of these 'Drachan' has become more real, I have realized that there will be no House Soma if we do not fix these machines and halt their progress. The sooner, the better!"

I rapidly approved the joint base project, then split the build points between the three forts and spent the money required to fill the gaps. Once it was all assigned, I confirmed all before refocusing on Soma.

[Building Project: Joint Base Lighthouse is scheduled to begin tomorrow.]

"I appreciate it, Soma, but I’m still going to need that full proposal of how you plan to run things.” I smiled wryly. “No offense, but the Prezyemi Line…”

Soma's blue eyes turned stormy with momentary offense, then something like resignation. He grimaced, and rubbed his hand over his mouth and chin with a grunt. "Yes, I know. And you... are correct. I was behaving every inch the spoiled noble brat, eh? When His Majesty sent you here – even before then – my pride overcame my common sense. To tell you the truth, all that nonsense is partly why I listened to you at all. That, and Her Majesty.”

“… Did he really just call me ‘Her Majesty’?” Karalti asked.

“Many counts of this land would have thrown a gauntlet down at you for even suggesting it, but I would be a terrible engineer if I did not assess my own structural limitations. I have concluded that I am not a good war-time strategist, Dragozin. It is not my passion, no more than breeding hookwings or fencing or fishing are. My passion is here, in the college, surrounded by intelligent men and women like Rin and Garcia. So I will write this proposal, and we will create a center of technology in Myszno the likes of which the world has not seen since the time of Khors himself!"

"I like it. Back it up with the content we need, and I'll be more than happy to work with you again." I extended a hand to him. Soma, bristling with bombastic emotion, seized it in both of his and shook firmly.

"So now that the bromance is settled, we're goin' to this 'Tomb of the Mastersmith?" Gar asked.

"We?" I glanced at him.

"Well, yeah." His mouth sloped to one side, and he jammed his hands down into his trouser pockets. "Ain't no point in me staying here right now. Crystal's busted, Warsinger's busted, and Rin here's the Arcane Engineer. I was able to fix the terminal, but I cain't read those damn kyanite etched blueprints for shit. Seems to me that if you take me and a couple sages to this place, between the four of us we can figure somethin' out. And as for the business with the Warsingers-" Gar looked down at Rin. "All we gotta do is source spare parts for these babies. It’s God’s truth, Rin: parts hunting is a normal part of being a wrencher. If some structural shit is all it takes to get you to give up on a machine, you ain't got no right calling yourself an engineer of any stripe."

Rin flushed blue at the admonishment. "This is a game, Gar, and I'm... I guess I'm just used to having things work the way they're supposed to."

"Yeah, because you're an arcology brat, and the arco life spoiled the shit out of you and made you feel like life was supposed to be easy." Gar sniffed, and looked back to me with his keen, cloudy grey eyes. "Had your little smarthome with it’s AI butler and its temperature control and automatic driverless cars and shit. But I tell you h'whut, those arcos and all their fancy environmental control systems only worked as well as they did because they were serviced by a legion of poor bastards like me. You’re in the trenches with the rest of us Earthlings now."

“I…” Rin's blush only deepened. She bit her lip and gripped her arm with the other hand, looking away. But she didn’t argue.

Soma cleared his throat. "Well, if that's all, I think we should get back to work. The Heartstone may yet give up some of its secrets. And as the good Sir Martinez noted, we DO still have those blueprints..."

"Alright." I smiled over at Suri, who nodded fractionally. "Well, let's haul our asses to Karhad, then. It's time to go play Indiana Jones down in the sewers.