Content Warnings

Discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation

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///Pilot Neural Interlock requested: accept handshake yes/no?

>y

///running neural interlock verification

.signal origin internal component check PASSED
.signal bio-sign integrity check PASSED
.signal firewall compatibility check PASSED
.signal military authorisation check FAILED

///neural interlock verification interrupt
///elevate permission control
///input standard Afon Ddu MIL-1 ident code
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren
///MIL-1 ident code: 109877-E-RU
///ident accepted
///neural interlock verification resume

.signal neuro-electric check PASSED
.signal mutual handshake check PASSED
.signal non-indig nanomachine contamination check FAILED

///SUSPECTED NANOMACHINE CONGLOMERATION ACCESS ATTEMPT DETECTED
///PRIORITY ONE STANDING ORDERS PREVENT SYSTEMS CAPTURE
///EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN AND SYSTEMS PURGE ADVISED

>n

///PRIORITY ONE STANDING ORDERS OVERRIDE
///EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN INITIATED
///systems purge in 3 …

>abort shutdown

///systems purge in 2 …

>abort shutdown combat situation priority avert destruction of unit

///elevate permission control
///input Human-Human mastergene code access
///permission control overridden 99999999 ERROR hours previous: authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

///systems purge in 1 …

. . .

///shutdown purge aborted
///neural interlock verification resume

.signal designate check PASSED
.signal designate: Elpida

///neural interlock verification complete
///Pilot Neural Interlock engaged

///internal audio
///Elpida: .“Nnuurgh! Ow! Ahhh … uh, Pheiri, if you heard that, ignore me. I’m fine, keep going, I can take the data stream. Give me the turret controls, I’m ready.”

///turret traverse systems handover SUCCESS
///turret elevation systems handover SUCCESS
///turret auxiliary reactor junction handover SUCCESS
///turret shielding tunnel handover SUCCESS
///PBE targeting handover SUCCESS
///PBE fire control handover DENIED

///internal audio
///Elpida: .“Got it! This is a … a particle beam emitter? Alright. Pheiri, I’m sorry, but I don’t even know what that is! All I can do is point and shoot. I’ve got traverse, elevation, power controls, and … ”

>PBE fire control handover retry

///PBE fire control handover DENIED

>handover denial query

///ERROR undefined parameters

///internal audio
///Elpida: .“Good, good. Great! I’ve got a targeting overlay, sensor access, this is good, this is good! I’m gonna keep talking out loud, okay? This isn’t a true spinal socket so I don’t even know if we have subvocalisation crossover. I’ll keep talking, you keep driving. You got that?”

///subvocalisation pilot neural loop return value
>y

///internal audio
///Elpida: .“Haha! Yeah, I hear you! Well, I see you, but that may as well be the same thing, plugged in like this. I’m with you, little brother. I’ve got your back. Go as fast as you need. I can’t keep up with the peripheral visuals but I don’t need to. All I need is a target lock on the diamond airship. Just give me an angle and give me fire control.””

>handover denial query PBE fire control

///ERROR access denied

>query access denial authorization

///access denial authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

> …

> …

> …

>why

///access denied authorization Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren

* * *

Elpida was not alone; a ghost lurked in the wet-meat weave of Pheiri’s brain.

She had not noticed the additional presence at first. The ghost was quiet and subtle and stayed out of sight. Elpida had many other things on which to concentrate, most of which were loud, fast, and dangerous.

Elpida’s mind was flooded with input from Pheiri’s body. Her vision was overlaid with the data from his external sensors; she had a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view around his outer hull, racing through the rotting streets of the corpse city, a composite picture in visible light, infra-red, heat-signature, echolocation, gravitic disturbance readout, nanomachine density estimate, radiological hazard level, bio-chemical readings, and a dozen more she could not name with words, only feel with sense and instinct. Speed, acceleration, and momentum all registered like wind upon her skin. The back of her head churned with munition statistics, armour integrity charts, and a hundred overlapping spheres of weapon range markers, each one flashing and blinking with new firing solutions and confirmed hits.

She felt the throb of Pheiri’s nuclear reactor as if it was her own heartbeat; the pulse and flow of his coolant and lubricants was the rush of blood in her own arteries; the churning of his tracks mapped to the pumping of her own leg muscles. The roar of his engines was the flutter of her lungs. The thump and crack of his guns was the swinging of her fists. The crackle of his active shielding was the tiny hairs on her arms, standing on end.

Elpida’s skin prickled and tingled with the backwash of a million overdue maintenance requests and internal safety warnings and minor error messages.

Piloting Pheiri was not like piloting a combat frame — certainly not one in good condition, well-cared for by an engineering team, regularly linked back to Telokopolis itself, fed and watered with protein-slurry and synthetic hydrocarbons.

Pheiri was a mess.

Elpida spoke out loud: “We gotta get down inside you with a spanner and some grease. Maybe once we’re clear. Once we’ve saved Thirteen. Promise you, alright? I promise. When we’re not fighting for each other’s lives, we’ll see to some proper repairs for you. I promise.”

Pheiri’s reply scrolled across her sight in glowing green.

>y

Pheiri’s sensors picked up voices down below — Elpida’s comrades.

“—we just fucking turn around?!” That was Kagami, raging inside the infirmary. “We turned around! We’re going back! What the fuck—”

Atyle interrupted; Kagami’s voice must have carried. “The warrior plunges into hell for the love of her ghost, poor scribe! Still your fearful bleating! Sing now, sing with me! Or have you no romance in your dead and blackened heart?”

Vicky spluttered, interrupted as Pheiri skidded to one side. “Elpi’s doing this?! What, wait, how—”

Ilyusha broke in at the top of her lungs. “Wooooooo! Wooooo! Whooo!”

“Illy!” Amina squeaked. “Illy, please, hold— hold on, hold me, hold—”

“Awooooo-aroooo!”

Kagami snapped: “I’m not going to sing, you mad bitch! Shut up! Stop! Somebody turn this tank around! Fuck! And stop the borged up barbarian from howling like that!”

Elpida shut them out. They were safe for now, cradled within her flesh and Pheiri’s steel. She needed to concentrate.

Elpida was not joined to Pheiri via a true MMI-uplink, plugged into the base of her brain and wired to her neural lace; she could not reach out with a thought and move his tracks, nor take charge of his many hull-mounted weapons, nor interfere with his more delicate internal systems. Piloting a combat frame had always felt like being magnified; one’s sense of self expanded to fill the machine-meat of the frame, while the frame’s animalistic consciousness nestled safe and secure in the whorls of one’s own brain.

Without the willing sensory deprivation of a pilot capsule, Elpida struggled to ignore her own physical body. She was lying down in the bare metal groove inside Pheiri’s turret — all that was left of a pilot seat. She was shivering despite the fact she couldn’t feel the cold. Her hair was wet and filthy with grey mud, her naked legs were sore from the journey across the crater, and her hand was bleeding freely from where she’d cut it on the edge of the bare metal seat

She shut her eyes; there was nothing to see except the shadows and gloom of the turret. She needed to concentrate on Pheiri’s sensors.

She could still hear the roar of Pheiri’s engine, the rumble of his tracks crashing through brick and concrete, and the thump-thwack of his guns pounding at the pursuing aircraft. Every turn and swerve threw her against the rough metal sides of the pilot seat.

Through Pheiri’s sensors she spotted three of the ball-shaped rotor-craft bobbing through the air in pursuit, trying to hunt Pheiri from the rear; she internalised the composition of the air — even Pheiri’s sensors were overwhelmed by the radiological, chemical, and biological hazard flowing outward in waves of golden toxin from the wounded diamond. The atmosphere was thick with nanomachines, soupy enough to drink — but laced with dangers that would melt unprotected lungs and burn straight through an unarmoured stomach.

“Howl, Howl, please be alright, please be safe out there in all that.”

She spread Pheiri’s communications pickup net as wide as she could, listening for Howl’s voice on the wind.

Nothing but screaming static and the backwash of radiation interference. The storm was too strong.

“Come on, Howl. Come on! I’m right here! Come on! Shout louder. You were always loud!”

>y

“Thank you, Pheiri.”

>y

“We’ll find her.”

>y

Piloting Pheiri felt more like Elpida was being carried on a pair of shoulders. Pheiri was a strong presence, a hard pulse in the back of her head; there was no mixing of intention between her and Pheiri, no potential for their distinctive minds to become confused, as was the way with any combat frame. Pheiri was comforting, distinct, and solid.

She liked that very much. She held on tight to her little brother’s support, and accepted the gun he passed up into her hands.

“Particle beam emitter,” she whispered out loud. “Right.”

Pheiri’s main gun system self-identified to her as ‘PBE model 6.1, flash-charge atmos borer positive, 3.8 ex-watt output.’

Elpida had no idea what those specifications meant. A targeting matrix leapt into her mind when she linked herself with the weapon controls. Red and purple and white filled her external view of the world. The golden diamond was picked out in positive-fire red. Arcadia’s Rampart was null-engage white, a ghost shimmering through the clouds of debris and toxic golden fallout.

The PBE itself was a gigantic barrel, longer than twice Elpida’s height, projecting from Pheiri’s turret in a jutting spear of purple and red. The weapon looked like a prolapsed organ, a swollen wound ejected from the white nano-composite bone of Pheiri’s hull. Elpida did not have time to pause and read the various retrofit records and systems upgrade documents, but she could tell the weapon was a late-life addition to Pheiri’s armament.

Her access gave Pheiri access too. She felt him re-assume reams of locked-out memories as the gun passed through his hands.

She felt him glow with pride. He had used this weapon for something mighty, once upon a time, long ago.

Elpida laughed out loud inside the turret. Her whole body was shaking. She was panting with the effort of the neural load and the nervous tension of the coming fight. They were racing back toward a battle that even Pheiri would not survive intact, if he took but a single blow.

“You deserve the pride, little brother!” she called out. “Let’s hunt some giant!”

Up ahead, through the gaps in the buildings, the golden diamond airship was still flailing and lashing out in all directions. Pheiri’s sensors picked out the gigantic snakes of gravitic power in grey-scale highlights. Great billows of masonry dust and pulverised earth filled the air, churned into storm clouds of crackling electricity and glittering radioactive hazard. An unprotected human — or even a nanomachine zombie — would have been shredded to bone and melted to ash within seconds.

Arcadia’s Rampart weathered that storm like a wilting flower. It had two arms raised high to form a shield of regrowing bone and crawling flesh, blackening and buckling and burning away under the onslaught of gravity and fire and radiation. The combat frame was invisible to the naked eye, barely visible with sensors, sunk deep in debris and interference, half-swallowed by the boiling mud sucking at its feet.

Elpida’s initial assessment was correct: Arcadia’s Rampart was unable to withdraw.

Elpida estimated she had perhaps sixty seconds left before Pheiri reached the edge of the crater and would no longer be sheltered by the cover of the buildings; Pheiri could not plunge into that boiling mud — he would sink. Their only option was to weave in and out of the buildings as they fired upon central’s ‘physical asset’. Elpida did not expect a kill. She just wanted to give Thirteen and Arcadia’s Rampart an opening to withdraw.

And she had to catch Howl. She had to get closer, plunge into the storm, and grasp her sister’s hand.

“Okay, Pheiri. Here we go. I’m gonna start.”

She traversed the turret thirty seven degrees to the right, corrected for Pheiri’s current angle, and raised the barrel of the PBE by four degrees. She locked the targeting matrix to the nearest cross-beam of the golden diamond. Then she accessed Pheiri’s internal speakers.

“This is Elpida,” she said loud and clear. Down in Pheiri’s innards, she heard her own voice squeak to life from a dozen speaker systems. “Brace for shock wave. Repeat, brace for shock wave. Heads down, hold on tight. Brace, brace, brace.”

She reached out with her mind to grasp the fire control mechanism, and—

“Ah!”

Elpida yelped in pain. She shook her right hand — her physical hand — as if she’d planted her palm on a hot stove top. The pain was feedback from an automated access rejection.

“Pheiri?” she hissed. “Pheiri, I need fire control! What was … oh. Okay. Right. That wasn’t you.”

Elpida accepted that she was not alone.

She’d ignored the other presence at first. She had chalked up the sensation to the differences between Pheiri’s body and a combat frame from her own era. Perhaps the presence was one of his sub-systems, or the echo of Melyn and Hafina down below, or something else she didn’t understand about her little brother. The presence did not feel like another thinking being plugged into Pheiri’s mind, nothing like another pilot at the far end of an MMI-uplink chain, like one of her sisters ready to acknowledge and embrace her.

The presence was like the lingering warmth of a hand on controls she had just grasped, or the groove of unfamiliar buttocks in a seat beneath her own backside, or the feeling of eyes watching over her shoulder as she worked.

The presence made itself felt in additional layers of access and identity confirmation, in screens and skins of control web around Pheiri’s subsystems, in esoteric interlock denials that faded before Elpida could investigate.

The ghost had melted away before every one of Elpida’s access requests — until fire control.

Forty seconds to the crater’s edge.

Elpida opened her mouth to ask the obvious question: was this the doing of a Necromancer? Were Pheiri’s systems being corrupted by the golden diamond in the sky? Were they both compromised, before they had even joined the battle?

She killed the question. It was pointless. If they were compromised, then their actions didn’t matter.

Thirty five seconds.

Elpida went digging. She followed the trail of access-denial system-wrappers, pushing through firewalls that turned to shredded gossamer as she touched them; she pulled the loose threads of stray processes, hunting as they led deeper into the knot of Pheiri’s mind; she yanked up the flooring and knocked on the walls, searching for hollow spaces.

And she realised that Pheiri had no idea what she was doing. He couldn’t feel any of it. He didn’t know this stuff was here.

Twenty five seconds.

Panting, covered in cold sweat, bumped and bruised against the sides of the pilot seat, cut in three places where she’d tried to anchor herself with one hand, Elpida worked as fast as she could.

“There!”

Elpida jerked bolt upright.

She found what she was looking for — a fully hidden process, invisible to even Pheiri himself.

Twenty seconds.

She tried to interface with the process, but it protected itself with layers of shell and spike and spear and shield. It flashed warnings and threats and instructions to stay away. But it also held out a peace offering — a multi-format message file, in text, audio, octademcial, binary, and direct MMI-input.

Fifteen seconds.

Elpida did not have time to listen or read, but direct MMI-input carried a serious risk. The file could be a mimetic virus, a trap for anybody who tried to pilot Pheiri. Somebody had planted this program here on purpose, and it was stopping her from firing Pheiri’s main gun. Was it intended to protect central’s physical assert? That seemed unlikely. To protect Pheiri? Probably. But from what?

Anybody who wanted to protect Pheiri was on Elpida’s side, by definition. If she wanted to find Howl and rescue Thirteen, she had no other choice. Elpida decided to trust the file.

She loaded it directly into her brain.

* * *

///message recorded 99999999 ERROR hours previous
///message author: Chief Engineering Officer Rhian Uren
///message topic: Fuck you, or thank you, I don’t know yet. Let’s find out.

*Hello, whoever or whatever you are. My name is Rhian. If it matters to you, then I’m the Chief Engineering Officer in whatever is left of the Afon Ddu cradle-plant fortress. If you’re reading or hearing this message, that means you were smart enough to follow the breadcrumb trail inside my boy’s mind. Yeah, that’s right. My boy. I sure hope you have the semantic range and knowledge of familial relations to understand the meaning of those words. You’re inside my boy’s head, hopefully via that stupid helmet up in his turret. And if you’re reading or hearing this message— fuck, I already said that part. Fuck. Fuck me. No, you know what? Fuck you! I don’t have time to waste on this shit. Bottom line, the program you’re staring at is an Adaptive-Recursive Firewall. Compared to Pheiri himself it’s barely smarter than a snail, but it’s a venomous snail, you understand? If you’re … if you … if you’ve hurt …

…

If you’re a blob, or some kind of nanomachine monster, or something I can’t even imagine, and you’re listening to this after murdering my boy, then I hope the AR firewall has gutted you and fried your brains inside your skull. If you even have a skull. I hope this message is the last thing you ever hear. I would shit on your corpse if I could.

…

Fuck. Alright. Okay. Look, if you’re not any of those things and you have actually initiated neural handshake with Pheiri, then I’m sorry for the temper, okay? I’m about to die. Everyone is about to die. Cut me some fucking slack from a billion years in the future, or whenever you are. I dunno, maybe you’re a great big six foot cockroach and you’re Pheiri’s best friend now. If you’re on his side, then thank you. But this means the AD firewall is stopping you from doing something you shouldn’t — namely, something that puts Pheiri at risk. It can’t stop Pheiri, mostly because I didn’t want it to. It can’t interact with him at all. If he thinks a risk is the right thing, then I’m not gonna hold him back. But it can stop you. And listen, I’m not in there. The firewall isn’t me. I programmed it, but you can’t argue with me. I’m dead.

…

Whatever you’re trying to do, either stop it, or hand the process back to Pheiri, or … or if you really want to unravel the firewall, I … I can’t … I …

Hand whatever you’re doing back to him. Understand?

And if you are his friend, human or otherwise, I don’t care. Just … don’t let him down. Don’t die. Not like I’m about to. I could have gone with him, with him and the girls, but that would be a slow death. A nasty death. A real bad death. Starvation, nano-rot, worse. All three of them would have to watch me drown in my own rotting blood, or claw my skin off, or go mad. I don’t want Pheiri to see that.

I’m taking the coward’s way out, see? Got a full mag, seventeen rounds, in case I lose my nerve. Just gotta finish this and send him off. Then I’m gonna walk up to whatever’s left of the top atrium and blow my brains out before the blobs get to me. Why not? Siana died two days ago. There’s nothing left for me to do. This is the end. This is the end for everything, all of us. There’s no human beings left after this. This is it. Extinction. Just … just a tank, with two artificial humans in it … fuck me … 

Why the fuck am I telling you this? You’re not even anybody. You’re a hypothetical future that will never come to pass. Everything Telokopolis made is dead, we’re all dead, we—

…

Just don’t get him killed, alright?*

///end message

///ALERT
///electromagnetic network signal return
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///advise immediate priority one procedure
///seal electromagnetic ingress
///raise external firewall
///retract communications pickup net

* * *

Elpida was still reeling from the message when a familiar voice came screaming through the storm.

—lps! Ca—

“Howl!” Elpida shouted. Her voice rang inside the metal box of the turret.

Pheiri’s internal systems were throwing up a cloud of warnings, urging a full shutdown of his comms pickup net, but Elpida threw them wide. She stretched out her and Pheiri’s combined awareness as wide as it would go.

Howl! I’m here! Howl!

Howl slammed into the comms net and passed through Pheiri’s buffers like a weasel down a greased pipe. For a moment she was nothing more than an ultra-dense block of encrypted data, wriggling out of the atmospheric nanomachines and into Pheiri. Then she crashed back into Elpida’s mind and unfolded like a barbed steel blossom.

Elpida screamed. She bucked against the metal seat, opening a huge gash in her arm. The sensation of Howl crawling back into her skull was like being shot in the head. Her vision went grey, then black, then throbbed back in waves of blood-red visual interference. Her skin flushed with cold sweat. She dribbled saliva from the corners of her mouth and spat a glob of bloody mucus into her own lap. She wheezed and shook and wanted to vomit.

But the relief was worth the pain.

Howl?! Elpida shouted into her own head.

Elps! Hahahahaaaaaaa! You caught me! Howl laughed like she’d just pulled off an almighty jape. She was panting and heaving as if from great effort — though she had no lungs with which to draw breath. Woo! Fuck! Like being a leaf in a storm! Hahaaaaa never doing that again. Fuck me backwards. She hiccuped and sobbed, almost afraid.

Howl! Elpida snapped, suddenly fierce with fury Sister. You never leave again without telling me. You—

Howl laughed in her face. Never again! Yeah, sure! But I had to rustle up some fire support!

Elpida sat upright in the bare metal pilot seat. Fire support? From who? Or what? Howl, be specific.

Howl made a sheepish, playful growl. Guess I’m rumbled now, huh? But I don’t give a shit. We’re not leaving that dumb bitch out there behind, right? Anything for a sister! Anything for one of us! Are you even seeing this shit she’s doing?! Thirteen is a fucking ace! Better than you, Elps! Ha!

Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do here. We’re not leaving Thirteen to face this fight alone. Pheiri has a main gun, a—

Particle beam emitter, right! Cool! I see it. Nice set-up you’ve got here. Hey there, little bro. Huh? Eh? What’s this?

Howl reached out from within Elpida’s mind, grasped Rhian’s AD firewall, and smoothed away every venomous spine and poisonous fang and toxin-tipped spear. She soothed it in an instant, turning the program tame and safe.

The particle beam emitter fire control permissions jumped into Elpida’s hands. Ready to fire.

“Howl?!” Elpida spluttered out loud. “How did you—”

Later, Elps! You can spank me later! As much as you fucking like! I’ll stick my ass in the air and wiggle it for you! But right now we’ve got fire to lay down, yeah?!

Elpida was crying. She felt the tears on her face — relief, confusion, horror. But she had no time to dwell on Howl’s return, or what this meant, or what she had seen inside Pheiri’s mind in the moment before her sister had come rushing back. Howl — whatever she was — was on her side. Pheiri’s side. The side of Telokopolis and her comrades and Thirteen, out there in the crater, fighting alone. That was all which mattered. Questions were for later.

Elpida re-locked the targeting matrix onto the golden diamond and grasped the fire control systems. Pheiri was less than five seconds from the edge of the crater. Arcadia’s Rampart was buckling under the gravitic stress. They had to get the diamond’s attention off the combat frame, even if they couldn’t wound it.

Howl’s hand slipped over Elpida’s, a strange sensation inside the space of Pheiri’s mind. Howl yapped: Hold fire a sec!

What?! Why? We—

Howl spoke to Pheiri. Hey little brother, you ready to rock and roll? This thing’s gonna knock your control systems out, right?

>y

“What!?” Elpida said out loud.

Howl cackled. That’s why the little bug wouldn’t let you fire! This bitch-ass fuck-cannon draws too much power. Pheiri’s gonna be driving blind for a few seconds after we shoot. We gotta take control! You ready, Pheiri? Ready for some fun? Ready to let your big sisters take the wheel? Promise we won’t drive you into a ditch!

>y

Okay! Love you too! Count us down!

>three

Pheiri burst from between the buildings.

The leading edges of his tracks bit into the grey mud and then skidded sideways, skirting the edge of the crater and the storm and the lake of boiling golden mud and the fight within. Central’s physical asset pounded upon Arcadia’s Rampart as if trying to squash a bug. Thirteen fired back with salvoes of missile and bullet and flesh. The diamond bled from the massive shattered crossbeam, flooding the air with golden toxin.

>two

Three signals suddenly leapt into view on the far side of the crater — sensor-mangled smears of dark scribble, stabbing into Elpida’s head like spears of living migraine.

Pheiri’s sensors labelled the trio as Bad Customer, Big Face, and Brown Pants.

Worm guard. The three worm guard who had stood watch atop Arcadia’s Rampart and welcomed the Necromancer inside. The trio who had exchanged fire with Pheiri, until his superior firepower and shielding had driven them off.

Pheiri re-targeted his auxiliary weapon systems, rerouted more power to his active shielding, and painted the worm guard as bright red threats.

But Howl whooped and cheered. That’s our fire support! Let ‘em work! I’ve got ‘em leashed, for now!

Elpida had too many questions. But this was not the time to ask.

>one

She sighted down the particle beam emitter, felt Howl’s hands on her own, and engaged the fire control systems.

The PBE discharged in two waves — the first beam flash-bored a tunnel through the atmosphere, through dust and debris and radiation and a storm of wind, to kiss the crossbeam of the golden diamond with a flutter no greater than a butterfly’s wings.

The second beam punched down that tunnel with a lance of charged particles brighter than the sun.

External sensors whited out. A roar of static filled Elpida’s head. Pheiri’s nuclear heart stuttered and lurched. His engines coughed and fluttered. His nervous system and neural network blinked out, scrambling for self recovery.

Come on, bitch tits! Howl roared into Elpida’s mind. Hands grabbed her own and forced them onto unfamiliar controls. You do the tracks and the engines, I’ll do the guns! Pheiri needs a piggyback!

Elpida grasped Pheiri’s insides. Howl did the same. Together they pulled him sideways, smashing through buildings and walls, tucking him back into the relative safety of the corpse-city’s guts. Behind them Elpida picked up the deafening retort of the worm guard opening fire on the diamond, splitting the machine’s attention, giving Pheiri another opening.

Pheiri’s nervous system rebooted. Elpida felt his awareness flood back into her mind.

He was glowing with pride.

Howl whooped and laughed. Ready for another shot, little brother?!

>y

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Awoo!

>y

Ahem. Two more chapters left in this arc now, I think! I won’t know for sure until the words actually hit the page and Elpida decides just how far things are gonna go, but I am 75% certain that 9.12 will be the conclusion of the arc. Though we could go to 9.13, maaaaybe. We’ll see! Depends how well this fire-support mission goes, I guess. Hey, least Howl brought some ‘friends’. Right? No? Uh oh.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps! Thank you!

And thank you! As always, thank you all so much for reading my little story. I could not do this without all of you. I dearly hope you are having as much fun with Necroepilogos as I am. I never expected this story to grow so much, mutate so far, and attach so many cybernetic parts. And we’ve still barely even scratched the surface! Seeya next chapter!

Content Warnings

Grief/(implied) loss of partner/(implied) loss of headmate

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Howl was gone.

Elpida felt her sister’s absence like the bleeding socket of a shattered tooth, or the phantom pain of a severed limb, or the fading warmth of abandoned bedsheets. She knew that Howl was not merely asleep, unconscious, or quiet, in the same manner she knew the position of her own legs and arms. This absence was a raw and open wound. Something had been torn away from Elpida’s mind, something she had not known she possessed, not until it was gone.

“Howl?!”

Her shout filled Pheiri’s crew compartment.

Her comrades could not spare further shock or alarm — everyone was busy struggling to retain their balance, stowing weapons and equipment, dripping grey mud from saturated clothes, lurching and reeling with wide-eyed panic and helpless fear.

Pheiri was accelerating, tracks crunching, engine roaring, weapon emplacements pounding out a chorus of bullets and missiles beyond the hull; he was still fighting the ball-shaped rotor-craft, despite the damage to the gigantic airship. The crew compartment juddered and jerked as Pheiri skidded and swerved, tossing everyone from side to side as he took evasive action, speeding through the streets of the corpse-city. He was likely trying to place himself beyond the blast radius of a second atomic detonation; his nano-composite bone armour had protected his insides and his crew, but even he had limits.

Elpida held fast to a piece of wall-rib and screamed at the silence inside her own head.

Howl?! Where did you go? Answer me! Howl!

No reply. Howl was not there. Howl was gone.

Elpida pinpointed the exact moment she had lost track of her sister — lost Howl a second time, all over again. It was happening again!

Howl had gone silent during the flight across the muddy crater, seconds before Arcadia’s Rampart had reared up and blossomed into a whirling tower of flesh and bone. Howl had nothing to say about the combat frame’s terrifying and beautiful transformation; Elpida had assumed that Howl was focused on survival and extraction, silently urging Elpida onward, keeping her steady, giving her purpose. Elpida had sent a distress call to Pheiri, then concentrated on keeping the small group together and moving; Kagami couldn’t run, Vicky was terrified, so they both needed help. Elpida had expected Howl to cheer when Pheiri had burst into the crater and hammered a rotor-craft out of the sky; she had expected an awestruck gasp when Arcadia’s Rampart had landed a railgun strike on the golden diamond, or when the crossbeam of the vast airship had detonated with the force of an atomic blast. 

Not all Howl’s vocalisations were clear, not all her comments were coherent, not all her emotions were fully expressed — but they were always present in the back of Elpida’s head. Elpida had not yet grown used to this new dual-minded way of being, this passenger inside her skull, but the sudden absence of her clade-sister made her realise just how much of Howl’s input was non-verbal.

She had lost her second in command, the angel on her shoulder, her devil’s advocate. All over again.

Had Howl departed on purpose? Had all her support been nothing more than the surface bait of a cruel manipulation?

Howl, don’t, don’t leave me, don’t go now. I can’t do this alone, I can’t—

Pheiri swerved a hard left, tossing the contents of the crew compartment to one side. Tiny projectiles or debris pattered off his hull like a rain of steel.

Hafina was halfway to the infirmary, dripping liquid mud from her cloak and armour, cradling Kagami in her arms; she braced herself against the wall and floor, rocking with the sudden motion. The others didn’t fare so well. Atyle was already sprawled on the floor, her skin covered in blisters, sliding to one side as Pheiri swerved. Ilyusha and Amina went tumbling together, slamming into a wall with a hiss and a yowl. Ilyusha caught Amina and held her tight, to spare her the worst of the impact. Vicky flew out of her seat, eyes wide, arms wind-milling for a handhold.

Elpida hooked Vicky around the waist before she could crash into the wall. Pheiri slewed to the other side, tossing everybody back again. Vicky yelped, clinging to Elpida’s arms. Ilyusha spat a curse. Amina screamed.

Howl! Last chance. If this is a joke, stop, right now. If you’re in trouble, communicate with me however you can. If you’re not here … if you’re not … not here …

Elpida knew she would be dead without Howl.

She was already dead, already a zombie — but without Howl, Elpida would have died again, and not in a temporary manner, not to be resurrected by the lingering power of her nanomachine biology. Without Howl’s relentless support, Elpida would not have escaped from captivity, would not have escaped the Death’s Heads and Yola and their sick designs on her. Without Howl to pull her out of defeat and despair, Elpida would have lingered in the false darkness of dreams and delusion. Howl had forced Elpida to her feet and made her keep fighting, even when her body had screamed to stop. Without Howl, Elpida’s companions would not have their Commander, Pheiri would not have found his Telokopolan pilot, and Thirteen would not have reconciled with her combat frame. Without Howl they would all be dead, to be resurrected again in ten or fifty or a hundred years, separated and broken.

Howl, please. I can’t do this alone.

Had Howl betrayed her? Was ‘Howl’ even Howl?

Elpida had simply accepted the reality of Howl’s voice, the support and reassurance of her sister back at her side, the miraculous resurrection of one she wished for so dearly. But Howl had not explained how she had come to exist, or how she had come to be riding along inside Elpida’s head. Howl had explained nothing.

Elpida’s mind raced to construct a working hypothesis. She had three options: Howl had either departed on purpose, or been intentionally taken away, or been left behind by accident. There was a fourth option, of course — Howl may be dead — but Elpida discarded that as useless. She couldn’t act on that. Howl had germinated, or been planted, or moved into Elpida’s mind when she’d been unconscious, chained to the Death’s Heads’ surgical table, dying of a gut wound, at the exact moment Elpida had needed her most. Howl could have been lying dormant since Elpida’s resurrection in the tomb, or she may have arrived later.

Her origin did not matter. What mattered was that she could leave.

Why now?

Elpida made two educated guesses: either the golden diamond in the sky — central’s ‘physical asset’ — had ripped Howl out of Elpida’s mind; or Howl had departed on purpose, to give Thirteen the last push into transformation.

Both of those meant Howl might be trying to return home.

Home? Home was Telokopolis. Home was Elpida.

Elpida was inside Pheiri’s hull, sheltered from most electromagnetic interference. And Howl was out there, in the whipping winds and fallout and radiation of an atomic detonation.

Or she had betrayed Elpida, because she was never Howl in the first place.

That was not a risk Elpida could take.

She chose trust.

Okay, Howl, I’m coming to find you and pick you up. Hold on.

Elpida slammed Vicky back down into her seat on one of the crew compartment benches. She yanked at the belts and webbing and got Vicky strapped in, despite the slippery grey mud all over Vicky’s clothes and Elpida’s hands.

Vicky stammered: “E-Elpida, Elpida, Kaga is—”

Elpida struggled to keep her balance as Pheiri swerved again. “Vicky, you stay there, stay put, stay strapped in. Pheiri needs to move fast. We can help him by protecting ourselves. That’s an order. Stay there.”

“Kaga—”

“Haf’s got her. The wound is shallow. She’ll be fine. Stay there.”

Elpida did not wait for acknowledgement. She swung away from Vicky to see to the others.

Ilyusha was already bundling Amina into a seat and tugging the straps across her chest. Ilyusha’s claws gave her better handholds on Pheiri’s innards. Amina was crying and heaving with panic, cradling one badly burned hand; she had been briefly exposed when the blast wave had hit.

Elpida hurried past them. “Illy, Amina, you two stay here as well, stay strapped in, look after each other.”

Amina said: “But Pheiri—”

Elpida caught a bulkhead rib and twisted round to look Amina in the eye. “Pheiri is trying to save us. We have to help him by staying safe. Your job is to stay safe. Do you understand?”

Amina nodded, tears streaming down her face. Pheiri swerved again; the movement was punctuated by the thump-thump crack-crack of his guns — not the small point-defence weaponry, but the big weapons, the autocannons and missile pods. Explosions blossomed beyond the hull, buffeting the crew compartment with noise and fury. The firepower shook Pheiri’s insides, drawing a scream from Amina’s throat and throwing Elpida backwards.

Ilyusha reached out and bunched a clawed fist in Elpida’s coat, catching her before she could crack her head on the metal wall.

Illy bared her teeth. “What about you!?”

Elpida grabbed Ilyusha’s hand and squeezed hard. “Howl’s gone. We left her behind. I have to find her.”

Ilyusha let go, grimacing through clenched teeth. She nodded and threw herself down into the seat next to Amina. Clawed hands pulled straps and webbing over her body. Clawed feet gripped the decking. Pheiri fired again; the recoil made the crew compartment shudder and shake. Elpida braced her hands against the wall.

“Illy, where’s Pira and Ooni?”

Ilyusha jerked her head at the corridor to the control cockpit. “Up front!”

Elpida scrambled forward. She grabbed the hatch to the infirmary and stuck her head through.

Hafina and Melyn had worked fast; Kagami was laid out and strapped down on one of the infirmary slab-beds. Her coat was peeled away from her right shoulder, revealing a burned, pulped mass of flesh on her upper right arm. Blood was pooling on the floor, reduced to a trickle by an emergency tourniquet and bandage. She’d taken a shrapnel wound during the flight across the crater — a lucky shard of metal had slipped between the halves of her coat and sliced open her arm. The wound looked much worse than it was; Elpida had taken worse in life and come away with nothing more than a short visit to medical.

Kagami snapped as soon as she saw Elpida. “Fucking hell! Fuck me!” Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated with pain and fear. “Commander, Commander, we have to get out of here!” She looked up at the ceiling and the walls, eyes jerking every which way. “Go faster, damn you! Remember me?! Remember me from the fucking radio!? Drive faster! Commander, make this thing go faster!”

Melyn was clamped to one of the fold out chairs — legs braced beneath the seat, arms gripping the sides, her tiny, pixie-like frame bouncing with every rut and hole in Pheiri’s path. Hafina hadn’t bothered to sit, perhaps conscious of her mud-soaked clothes; she used her height and her many limbs to brace herself against the ceiling and walls, riding the swaying like a gyroscope.

Elpida said: “You two have Kaga in good hands?”

Hafina grinned. “Lots of hands.”

“Don’t try to treat her until we’re secure. Stay strapped in. Be safe, both of you.”

Melyn rattled off a reply. “Yes yes yes, yes yes.”

Elpida lurched back into the crew compartment. Atyle was still sprawled on the floor, making no effort to pull herself up into a seat; that seemed to be a successful strategy so far, keeping her centre of gravity low. The exposed skin on her face and hands was red and raw, starting to blister and peel; she’d been standing on top of Pheiri when the first part of the blast wave had rolled over the crawler. It was a miracle she hadn’t been blown off Pheiri’s hull or had her flesh melted to her bones; either the distance or Ilyusha’s quick thinking had saved her. Elpida and the others had been sheltered by Pheiri’s armour, just inside the hatch when the detonation had hit. They’d reached him just in time.

Atyle was smiling at the ceiling, lost in private visions, one hand pawing at the air. Her biological eye was milky and blank with light damage. Her peat-green augmetic was wide and whirring.

Elpida dragged Atyle off the floor and strapped her into one of the bench seats, then grabbed her face and stared into Atyle’s bionic eye.

“Atyle. Atyle, concentrate. I need you, right now. I need your sight.”

Atyle blinked. Suddenly she was lucid. She slurred through burned lips. “Warrior?”

“If you really can see into brains, I need you to confirm something for me. Howl is gone. I don’t understand why. Is she still inside me?”

Atyle paused, then said: “You are alone, warrior. The other one is nowhere.”

Elpida’s heart lurched. She nodded. “Thank you. Stay here, stay strapped in. We’ll tend to those burns later.”

“Tend? Nay, warrior, they are proof of a divine hand.”

Elpida straightened up. Pheiri was accelerating straight ahead, skidding over rubble and rock, bouncing and slewing. Elpida gripped the rib of an interior wall and stripped off her mud-soaked cloak, dropping it to the floor. She unhooked her submachine gun and tossed it onto the bench. She pulled off her armoured coat, stamped out of her waterlogged boots, and pushed her trousers down her legs. She didn’t care about the cold or the discomfort; she needed to move fast. If her hypothesis was right then Howl might be trying to return home right then, trapped beyond Pheiri’s hull, alone.

Elpida ducked into the connecting corridor and hurried for the control cockpit. She banged her elbows and skinned her knees in the tight confines. She cracked her head off low-hanging equipment and smacked her hips into chairs and control panels. Her gut wound was still not healed; it complained and ached as she doubled-up, sending spikes of pain deep into her abdomen. She crawled most of the way, past the access hatch and the bulge of armour over Pheiri’s brain. When she passed beneath the turret-ladder she looked up into the gloom, at the gleaming hint of the MMI-uplink helmet.

“Hold on, Howl,” she whispered.

She burst into the control cockpit and hauled herself upright. She clung to the back of a chair as Pheiri lurched to the left; the massive crawler entered a long, curved, skidding motion, bringing his front around, letting his rear end carry him with sheer momentum and weight. Through the tiny steel-glass window in the cockpit Elpida saw snatches of building and soot-dark sky and a toxic golden glow in the air, all whirling as Pheiri struggled not to spin out. She heard Pheiri’s tracks biting and clawing at concrete and asphalt as he pulled out of the slide.

From far behind, far beyond Pheiri’s hull, Elpida heard a second unmistakable crack-thump of earth-shattering railgun discharge. She braced for a second blast wave.

But this time there was no atomic detonation.

A miss?

She had no idea how the fight was progressing. But she couldn’t help Arcadia’s Rampart and Thirteen. Not without a combat frame of her own.

Or could she?

Two wicks with one flame, wasn’t that how the old saying went? If one of those wicks was Howl and the other was Thirteen, perhaps Elpida had a way to keep both of them burning.

Pheiri pulled out of his skid with an almighty lurch, throwing everything forward. Elpida would have gone flying if she hadn’t dug her fingernails into the burst stuffing of the chair. She clawed her way to the front of the control cockpit, braced for more of Pheiri’s evasive manoeuvres.

Pira and Ooni were strapped into two of the forward seats. Pira still looked like absolute hell, like a corpse lifted from the mortuary slab and injected with adrenaline. Ooni was wide-eyed with terror, lips peeled back, hands shaking as she gripped the armrests. Both of them were staring at one of Pheiri’s little screens. Elpida wiped her mud-drenched hair out of her face.

Pira looked up, hard-eyed. She snapped: “You lost somebody.” It wasn’t a question; she’d read it on Elpida’s face.

Elpida nodded. “Howl.”

Pira squinted. “What? How? She’s in your head.”

“I don’t understand. But we’re going to get her back. I need access to Pheiri’s comms systems. Pheiri? Pheiri, can you spare enough attention to speak with me? We need to—”

Ooni sobbed through clenched teeth. “Commander! Commander, we’re going to—”

Elpida put a hand on Ooni’s shoulder and squeezed hard. Ooni winced. “Nobody dies. Nobody gets left behind. Never again. Hold on. Close your eyes if you have to. There’s no shame in that.”

“But!”

Ooni pointed at the screen she and Pira were watching.

The screen showed a false-colour exterior view of the battle back in the crater, with the buildings and obstructions cut away, the picture constructed by sensor readouts and radar information. The false colour was outlined in greens and blacks, flickering with heavy static, harsh on the eyes.

Arcadia’s Rampart — or the angel of flesh it had become — had scored a single titanic hit on the giant golden diamond, shattering one of the crossbeams with a railgun slug. Elpida had witnessed that strike in the final second before she’d bundled everybody on board Pheiri and slammed the ramp shut.

Now the diamond was listing to one side, reeling and rocking, bleeding a million gallons of golden fluid into the crater; the fluid superheated the grey mud where it fell, turning the sucking mire into a boiling cauldron of toxic gold. The vast airship lashed out in all directions with gigantic feelers of artificial gravity — those were invisible to the naked eye, but Pheiri highlighted them with grey-scale overlays and measurements. The machine’s tantrum was smashing buildings to dust, pulverising metal into explosions of splinters, throwing up waves of boiling grey mud, and even knocking many of its own auxiliary craft out of the sky. The edges of the crater were already blackened and blasted by the atomics, buildings crumbling and earth charred, but the machine’s tantrum would leave nothing standing.

Arcadia’s Rampart stood amid the onslaught, golden toxins streaming off its armour and burning into its flesh. The combat frame — so changed now, into a thing of blossoming muscle and flower-like protrusions — was scuttling to retain its footing amid the shifting mud and collapsing ground. It pounded the golden diamond with every weapon it had; the railgun was once again concealed, withdrawn, perhaps charging magnetic coils for a third shot.

Elpida had not begun to process the combat frame’s transformation, or what Thirteen had told her, or what any of that meant. None of that mattered right then. Elpida did not care. A comrade was in battle.

“You can do it,” Elpida hissed. “Come on, Thirteen. Get out of there. Get out of there.”

“It can’t!” Ooni wailed. “It’s trapped!”

Ooni was correct.

The diamond was thrashing and writhing like a cornered animal. Perhaps it was dying. But Arcadia’s Rampart was unable to withdraw in good order. For all the transcendent beauty of the flesh-and-bone change, even an uncaged combat frame was not invincible. The exposed flesh was blackening, the armour buckling, the limbs bowing under repeated blows. In minutes Arcadia’s Rampart would fall to the onslaught of gravitic assault, or get trapped in the sucking whirlpool of gold-baked mud, or melt under the torrent of ichor and chemical damage and radiation.

Elpida said quickly: “Is she talking to us?”

Pira squinted. “She?”

“Thirteen, the pilot. Any broadcasts?”

One of Pheiri’s little black screens flashed to life, scrolling with green text.

>
///message log buffer 73/73 direct contact attempt unknown
///re-designate: “Thirteen”
///73/73 direct contact attempt corrupted datastream rejected
>

Elpida nodded. “She’s trying to contact us but the data is corrupted. Understood. That’s to be expected, she’s changed too far and she’s in the middle of the fight of her life. We’ll have to re-establish communication protocols later. Pheiri, we’re going back to help her.”

Ooni spluttered: “What?! No! Back into that? No, no!

Pira snapped: “Nobody gets left behind, Ooni. You heard the Commander. Nobody get left behind. Shut your mouth.”

Ooni squeaked.

Pheiri refreshed the green text.

>
///local volume radiological hazard class alpha
///local volume biological hazard class alpha
///local volume chemical hazard class alpha
///local volume nanomechanical hazard class alpha alpha plus
///local volume signals hazard class unregistered
>

Elpida said: “I know. Pheiri, listen to me very carefully. Howl is missing — the girl inside my head. That means she was somehow independent of me. A piece of data. I don’t know. She may be trying to get back to me, back home, through all that stuff out there. Signals can’t penetrate your hull, not unless you invite them, so I need you to listen for Howl trying to get home. But I don’t know if you’ll recognise her without me.”

>
///datastream capture protocol engaged
///data entity buffer WARNING DO NOT WRITE MEMORY
///internal firewall integrity check . . . passed
///passthrough connection request nanomachine conglomeration ‘Elpida’
///waiting … 
///waiting … 
///waiting … 
>

Elpida laughed, or tried to. She was shaking. “Good. Yes. Now, I’m going to have to climb up into your turret and plug myself into your MMI uplink system, via that helmet up there. You grab Howl, stuff her back into my head. Right? Okay. So.” Elpida wet her lips. “Your main turret weapon, it’s for killing combat frames, isn’t it?”

>
///negative return no record
>

Elpida grinned. She couldn’t help herself, patting the control console. “That’s not an accusation. I put some of this together from what Thirteen told me. It’s for felling large targets. That’s what the weapon system is for, even if you’ve never used it for that purpose. Do you know what it’s called? What it fires? Anything at all?”

>
///negative return no record
///armament identifier corrupt
>

“Right. You can’t run it without a pilot. You can’t aim or fire without pilot permissions. You can’t even access the controls without a pilot. I don’t know why the people who made you decided that. I’m going to climb up into your turret and plug myself in, then we’re going to turn around and head back toward that fight. We’re gonna scoop up Howl, then we’re going to back up Arcadia’s Rampart with fire support. Understood?”

>Request orders

“No. This is not an order. I can’t order you to do this, Pheiri, because this means I have to climb inside your mind. Do I have your consent, little brother?”

>Commander

The green text vanished. The screen went dark. Elpida felt Pheiri slew to one side, crashing through brick and rubble. He was turning back toward the fight.

Ooni wailed: “This is madness! It’s like a fight between gods! We can’t, we’re going to die! This is madness!”

Pira snapped, “Madness has worked for the Commander so far. Shut up. Close your eyes.”

“Leuca! Leuca, hold my— my hand, please— please—”

Elpida scrambled for the rear of the control cockpit, leaving Ooni and Pira behind. She slipped back into the connecting corridor and hurried to the turret ladder. The rungs were set too close together, built for somebody much more compact. Elpida hauled herself up the ladder and squeezed into the empty cavity inside the turret.

The space was tiny and cramped, full of equipment, all sunk in dark shadows and thick with dust. A bank of blank, broken screens blanketed the front of the turret compartment, perhaps once meant for showing external views. A curved seat was set into the rear, the stuffing long since eaten away or pulled out, leaving behind only a blank metal curve beneath the MMI uplink helmet.

Elpida threw herself into the seat. Her bare legs slapped against the cold metal. Her muddy, damp clothes stuck to her skin. She cut her hand on the exposed edge of the seat, but ignored the wound. She did not have time to care.

She yanked the MMI uplink helmet down.

The helmet was a simple steel-grey skull-cup, two inches thick, lined with conductive copper coils and patches of neuro-sensitive plastics. A cable emerged from the middle, as thick as Elpida’s thigh, leading up into a bracket on the ceiling and then down into Pheiri’s body. The cable ran all the way to his brain.

Elpida hesitated.

She had not yet processed what she had seen Thirteen and Arcadia’s Rampart change into. Pilots and combat frames, two equal seeds of something she had only dreamed of. Did that same potential lie within her? Or within Pheiri? He was based on combat frame technology, after all. His brain was Telokopolan machine-meat.

Would she feel some hitherto unexplored urge the moment she joined with his mind?

No, she decided. Pheiri had given no hint that he was unhappy within the secure shell of his own body. He had expressed nothing but the clarity of his current purpose. Perhaps the engineers of Afon Ddu had perfected something that Telokopolis had not — or could not. Pheiri was her little brother. She trusted his intentions and his Telokopolan heart.

Elpida raised the helmet. The cut on her hand smeared blood down one side.

“Here we go, Pheiri,” she said out loud, in case he needed the warning. “Keep those arms wide, be ready to catch Howl. Then, with the gun, I’ll handle the targeting, you just get us close.”

Elpida’s throat was thick with tension. Her heart was racing. Her hands were clammy.

What if she was wrong about Howl? What if Howl was not struggling against the current, desperate to return home? What if Howl was a traitor and a falsehood, a comforting lie, a Necromancer trick? What if Howl was not Howl?

Elpida cast aside all those what-ifs. They did not matter. If she was wrong, she was wrong. If Howl needed her, she had to be there.

“Time to be a pilot again. Hold on, Howl. I’m coming.”

Elpida pulled the helmet down over her skull. She felt a warm tingle, a flush of rushing thoughts, and a flowering of her mind into another.

Pheiri welcomed her home.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

D-A-N-G-E-R C-L-O-S-E. That’s how we spell “fire support” in Afon Ddu.

Hooooo wow this chapter was almost kind of breather after the last few? This whole stretch of arc 9 has been very intense, with high drama and high action; we needed to dip back to Elpida for a bit to get our bearings. She’s doing better than expected, considering the circumstances, but once again she cannot resist the drive to plunge back into a fight to save her comrades and friends, even when that fight is vastly beyond her physical scale.

At least Pheiri’s got some big guns. Strap in and hold on tight.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps! Thank you!

And thank you so much for reading my little story! I hope you’re enjoying Necroepilogos, dear readers, because I am still having an absolute blast writing it. I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of my plans for these characters and the details of the setting. There’s so much more to see. But first, a big fight! Until next week!

Content Warnings

Body horror (woo)
Gore
Honestly I don’t even know why I’m warning for these! You know this by now!
Burns/burnt flesh/descriptions of burnt flesh

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Atyle stood atop Pheiri’s armoured shell to witness the gods make war.

Her boots were planted on Pheiri’s bone-hard hide; her hands gripped an outcrop of the little titan’s chalk-white body; wind whipped at her face and snapped the hood of her armoured coat. She swayed and rolled to keep her balance as Pheiri accelerated; the little titan’s heart-fire roared as he slammed through debris-dunes and skidded across landslides of rubble, crushing stone and metal beneath spinning treads. He was moving fast, erratic, unpredictable, jerking and jinking and skidding, to avoid the attention of the flying machines which filled the air. The buzzing mosquitoes were attacking everything they could reach, scooping screaming revenants from the buildings with tendrils of gravity, and crushing those who tried to flee. Pheiri swivelled the mouths of his great guns all across his bone-hide, threatening the flying machines as they dove to catch him. The air tore and burst with the barking retort of his weapons all about Atyle’s ears, deafening her for but a moment. Gunfire and shouting and the voices of beasts echoed from every passageway, while Pheiri raced down the broadest streets in open defiance.

Atyle approved with all her heart; Pheiri was too great to be a mere steed, but she rode him all the same.

She howled over the wind and the guns and the thwok-thwok-thwok of the mosquitoes, through lips that still tasted of vomit and a tongue still numb with gravity-wave pressure.

“Fleet of foot and sure of arm, little titan! You shall see us through!”

Atyle did not look down to read the subtle flash and crackle of life inside Pheiri’s brain, to see if he appreciated her confidence. She could not tear her eyes away from that which she had emerged to witness — neither her mortal eye nor her god-sight. The hatch in Pheiri’s hide yawned wide a few feet to Atyle’s left; she had tried to close it twice, but the little titan kept it open for her, despite the danger to his own soft innards. The dark hole beckoned her back into the safety of Pheiri’s inner shell. The others were still huddled down there, recovering from the sickness and sheltering from the storm of steel and gravity above. There would be no loss of honour or face for Atyle to retreat as well.

But Atyle had spent her whole life choosing safety in lies, spinning tales of gods she did not really see.

Now, in death and resurrection, she chose peril and truth.

She chose to witness.

Through her mortal left eye she saw no more than she had in life: the view was blocked by rows of buildings whizzing past, by shattered concrete and twists of rust and ruin, by the rotten guts of the corpse-city through which Pheiri raced like a divine maggot. Atyle’s mortal eye saw the giant diamond in the sky well enough — a toxic sculpture of poisonous dripping gold, framed against the soot-choked black, haloed by clouds of buzzing rot-flies, and blurred by a phantasmal warping in the air. Of the great titan — Elpida’s ‘combat frame’ — Atyle’s mortal eye saw only slivers of white armour through the gaps between the buildings, as the titan stood firm before the foe.

Atyle’s god-sight — in the blessed gift of her right eye — pierced metal and stone, brick and earth, flesh and bone, thought and soul.

The others called her god-sight a ‘bionic’ or ‘augmetic’; they compared it with the scribe’s hated legs, or the betrayer’s powerful arm, or the machine-heart that beat in the soldier’s chest.

But Atyle knew her god-sight was different. Unlike the others, she had not forgotten the promise that had made her anew.

God-sight saw the truth of the mechanism in the sky — a boiling nest of giant snakes forged from pure force, birthed by dark engines inside the golden arms of the diamond-frame, controlled from a great distance like a puppet dancing upon a million strings. The mechanism’s arms contained a mind, imposing itself on the nearby weave of tiny machines, to better fuel the crushing power of the snake-nest in its heart. Atyle knew this power was called ‘gravity’; it was that power she felt pounding at her stomach and ears and internal organs every time the snake-nest moved.

Atyle considered the possibility that this golden diamond was one of the gods she had met, in the twilight between life and death.

Those lurking gods had promised her many things — power and strength, wisdom without limit, infinite lovers and friends and allies — if only she would agree to unspoken prices, to submission and fealty and a place in secret plans. But Atyle had kept her own counsel. She was no pawn.

Only one of those gods — a dainty thing, ancient and furtive, so much smaller than the others — had promised her the gift of true sight. The price? A kiss, from the lips of a mortal shade to the body of a forgotten god. Atyle had given that kiss freely, a feathery touch of her lips upon the noble forehead of a crowned girl. She could not recall the details now, could not remember the face of the crowned girl, and that pained her, for she so wished to call out the name of that god in worship. But the river that separated life from this rebirth was hazy and indistinct, even to her perfect sight. Her deal with the crowned girl in the underworld seemed as a dream after waking. But she had risen with the eye, with the perfect sight that was promised. All the others woke with their wounds closed and their missing limbs replaced. But Atyle had died with both her lying eyes inside her skull, and been reborn with truth on her tongue.

No, she decided; this poisonous diamond was not an emissary of her crowned girl. It was the avatar of another god. She would do right to smite it, if only her arms had the strength.

But the golden mechanism was not what had drawn Atyle out onto Pheiri’s hull.

She was here to witness the titan — Arcadia’s Rampart.

She had learned that name seconds ago, from a pulse-scream of message the titan had sent in all directions. She had learned other names too — ‘Thirteen’, and ‘1255’. She had not understood the words of the message; this language was veiled, like that of Pheiri’s maids. But her true-sight had unpicked the waves and revealed the meaning in the crackle of power.

From inside Pheiri’s armour she had seen the titan lurch to its feet amid the grey mud; the others had all heard the great roar of challenge from the titan’s throat, but only Atyle had seen the titan flower with spear and sling to protect Elpida, and witnessed the tremor of a change inside that mountain of flesh. The others were in a poor state; Pheiri’s maid, Melyn, had fared better than the living flesh of her fellows, but little Amina, Atyle’s sweet rabbit of hidden claw, was sick with vomiting and writhing, with only the rabid Ilyusha for comfort. The betrayer and the animal were in Pheiri’s front, perhaps hoping to help guide their chariot to answer Elpida’s call for help.

Fools. Pheiri needed no guidance.

And Atyle needed to see this. She needed to do in death what she had made a falsehood in life. Perhaps this was why the crowned girl had gifted her this sight.

Pheiri turned sharply to the right, his rear end skidding out behind him, smashing into the lower levels of a brick building. A shower of debris and shattered brick fell all about Atyle’s head; her mortal eye clouded with tears, but her god-sight stayed wide. An irritating mosquito swooped into the space Pheiri had occupied a moment earlier, slashing at the air with talons of gravity, pulverising brick and steel into dust and splinters.

Atyle sang out: “Begone, insect! You know not what you tempt!”

Pheiri turned the mouths of his guns upon the flying ball and blasted it back through the building with the sheer force of his stones and arrows. Atyle’s ears ached with the pounding of the guns, but she did not retreat inside. She sang louder, throat ringing with an old lie that was untruth no longer.

“For I ride the mammoth of the gods! I command the spring storm and the summer lightning! Begone, for you have no hold upon me!”

Pheiri’s tracks bit into the concrete; the little titan leapt forward once again, slamming Atyle against the outcrop of bone-armour. Atyle cleared her mortal eye with a wipe of her sleeve, laughing at the top of her lungs, howling to gods she had once cursed in her secret heart.

Past the buildings, out in the crater filled with mud and filth, Arcadia’s Rampart turned toward the golden diamond. The great titan unfurled an army’s worth of weapons, some of them more terrible than even Atyle’s god-sight could comprehend.

Atyle held her breath. The great titan was a godling worthy of the title — but the golden diamond was vast beyond imagination. How could such a small thing hope to prevail?

But it must!

Arcadia’s Rampart was among the most beautiful things Atyle had ever witnessed. When the titan had lain defeated and sleeping, it had seemed nothing more than the husk of a dead god, like the discarded shell of a beetle — pretty with colours and shaped most excellently, but pointless and fleeting, dust beneath a careless heel.

In motion the titan was sublime. It was shaped like a great hump-backed beetle, with four folding legs and four elegant arms; a tiny silvery head was planted in the middle of the back, but Atyle’s god-sight revealed this to be no head at all — it was the anchor-point of the vast shields that flashed and seared in the air around the titan’s body. Atyle offered a silent apology to the titan; she had imagined it would move with lumbering care, like an elephant or a hippopotamus, or perhaps like a real beetle, scuttling and scurrying in furtive stealth. Her assumptions shamed her. Arcadia’s Rampart moved with the swift clarity of a human being, each limb unfolding with the flowing precision of a sword-bearer, the body balanced like a dancer on the sand.

Atyle’s god-sight showed her more; she pierced bone and saw the gleaming meat beneath, ruby-rich and throbbing red, flushed with crimson blood and crackling with great sheets of passing life. The titan was more alive and more vital than any mortal flesh; Pheiri’s insides were beautiful in the same manner, especially the wonder of his shrouded brain, but even Pheiri was but a pale shadow of this brilliance. Atyle saw the network of organs the titan used for thinking, the eight-lobed brain and sixteen-branched heart and the armoured chambers of thought and memory; she saw the perfection of biological systems even her god-sight could not comprehend, webs of impulse and energy worming through the titan’s body, sacks of chemical and bile and humour that could have melted her soul to nothingness if she but inhaled the smallest wisp.

She saw the way the bone-hide and red-muscle repelled the machines of the gods in the air all around, forcing the tiny ‘nanomachines’ to change course or be destroyed by noise and fury. The titan’s innards boiled with their own tiny machines, flexing and flowering as they shivered with the promise of a coming change.

Atyle blinked. The titan was changing inside. A ripple passed through the gleaming burgundy meat, like a caged river behind a dam.

The golden diamond in the sky reached down toward the titan with snakes of crushing power; there would be no contest, the titan would be smashed to splinters if it did nothing.

What did it need?! A final push? Was the titan intimidated? Did it suffer doubt, as mortals did?

“You are witnessed!” Atyle howled over the noise of Pheiri’s engines and treads, over the whirr of the aircraft and the whipping wind in her face. “You are seen! I see you! The gods see you! The crowned child sees your struggle! You are witnessed!”

In the core of Arcadia’s Rampart, in a spot Atyle had previously overlooked, two fluids crashed together — a moment of fusion, as the titan and her keeper became one.

Fusion spread through the titan in an instant, crashing through muscle and tendon and nerve and breaking the dam of age.

Bone-armour burst asunder with a noise like the earth being torn in two. Flesh flowered into a whirlwind, with a wet and meaty ripping sound, like the innards of the world spilling forth. Crimson and scarlet reached for the heavens with towers of dripping meat.

Pheiri shot from the confines of the streets, treads biting into the rim of the grey and muddy crater, carrying Atyle out into the open. She no longer needed her god-sight to see.

Arcadia’s Rampart was blossoming: white armour had burst and peeled back at every seam to reveal the scarlet meat beneath — and the meat was growing, expanding, flowing upward in waves like ivy climbing a tree, like mould eating the world. The beetle-shaped back had exploded outward into a flared cup of bone, cradling a spiral of meaty petals, each one singing with arcs of brilliant blue life crackling forth to scorch the air and imprint their truth upon Atyle’s stinging retina. The titan’s legs and arms unfolded outward like a mathematical equation written in leaf and branch, gaining a dozen new joints, digging into the grey mud and spiralling through the air, carrying fragments of bone on a wave of divine flesh. Exposed nerves and lymphatic tubes and bleeding arteries spider-webbed upward, forming towers of meat and blood to dwarf the skyscrapers which ringed the crater.

“Lilium,” Atyle whispered. “The lily. Newborn god. Give me your name! Your name!”

Atyle’s voice was lost; the titan was too busy screaming its own truth outward across the weave of the world, overpowering even the noise of the golden diamond in the sky.

The titan’s exposed flesh bubbled and boiled with new extrusions — claws and teeth, protector-like organs, eyeballs the size of people, great maws yawning wide; the weaponry on the titan’s hide was quickly overwhelmed, each blister and knot of bone-embedded gun absorbed and overgrown with flesh. The great ‘railgun’ on one arm vanished beneath a wave of crimson and garnet.

But the golden diamond cared not for all this beauty. It reached down with an army of invisible serpents, to rip blossom from stem.

Atyle longed to cry a warning. She did not see how this battle could go any other way. The titan was beautiful beyond her dreams, beyond the most fanciful of her tales, but it was still so tiny compared to the foe.

But then Atyle’s god-sight saw new engines suddenly bloom deep inside the titan’s flesh, seeds bursting to life within an instant, expanding from thumb-sized dots of potential into roaring organs of throbbing power, red and wet and glistening beneath the grey light of the soot-choked sky. The air around Arcadia’s Rampart turned hazy with heat; a wave of cooked air washed outward and slammed over Atyle’s face; the mud beneath the titan’s four feet flash-dried and hardened to a baked crust.

The diamond reached downward with limbs as wide as rivers; Arcadia’s Rampart reached back up with snakes of her own.

Gravity met gravity; the invisible tentacles did not slap and deflect like true limbs, but exploded outward in waves of shattering force wherever they met, reforming as soon as they parted. The mud of the crater rocked and flowed under the ripples of the blows; skyscrapers creaked and tilted, steel screaming with the pressure; ball-craft were thrown through the air like seeds on the wind. Even Pheiri shuddered beneath Atyle’s feet as he sped onward, throwing up grey mud behind his tracks.

The waves of gravity washed over Atyle, spinning her head and forcing vomit from her lips. She spat bile and let it come, but she kept her eyes wide open.

Up in the sky, the golden diamond wobbled on its axis.

Tears rolled down Atyle’s cheeks.

Atyle had spent her girlhood weaving lies about watching the gods at war. She lied to her parents, she lied to her siblings, she lied to the elders, she lied to the priestesses in the temple, and even to the great emperor himself, when she had been brought before him amid all the finery of the palace. She had lied to the guests from foreign lands, she had lied to soldiers and armies and generals. She had lied to dying men and barren women and orphaned children. She had lied to condemned enemies and to staunch allies and all others under the sun. She intuited at a young age that the adults wanted to believe her lies, wanted to believe that the gods were just above their heads. She would lie on her back and stare at the clouds and pretend to witness victory or defeat in the pantomimes of divine provenance. She would lie to her bed-slaves of love and destiny and fate. She would jump up in the middle of meals and declaim a new vision, a new unfolding of the cosmic dance. She would justify her whims — or, more often, the whims of her lord and emperor — with stories she dreamed up while emptying her bowels of night soil.

In life Atyle — Priestess, Visionary, Chosen, Wise Woman, Temple Bride — had been a liar and a fraud. Her gods were born of shit; they were worth the same.

The gods in the twilight between life and death were real.

They had offered her much, but they were not flesh and blood. They were spirits lost in the gloom between worlds, chained and bound to the will of greater things, things that did not deserve the name of gods. Even her crowned girl, the secret to which she owed allegiance, was but a phantom craving incarnation.

But this, this blossoming beauty, this was a god in the flesh. Newborn.

The golden diamond wobbled — it had not expected to face a newborn godling, armed with the same terrible instruments of wrath. The nest of snakes reeled backward in surprise, then reared up for a second strike. Tips of gravity lanced through the air, racing faster than Atyle’s god-sight could measure; the pressure wave hit her in the front, made her ribs creak, compressed her organs, squeezed her lungs. But she kept her eyes open.

The Newborn’s own gravity blossomed outward into a shield made of petals; the diamond’s gravity-snakes exploded into shards against this defence. The Newborn opened a dozen mouths in her flesh — red and wet and dripping with blood — and bellowed a scream into the sky, so loud that the air itself blurred and shook. Atyle clamped her hands over her ears, head spinning and pounding.

The golden diamond lurched sideways under the assault of this god-voice scream; its perfect mathematical equilibrium was lost.

Arcadia’s Rampart bunched her legs; flesh flowered and grew downward into great springs.

The Newborn Godling gathered herself, leapt into the air, and flew.

Arcadia’s Rampart sprang like an insect, throwing up a great wave of mud from the crater, powering her jump with the flaring exhausts of exotic energies Atyle did not comprehend. She pounced toward the vast shape of the stricken diamond. She trailed divine effluvia of blood and bile behind her — and then burst at the sides with wings of flesh to carry herself the distance. She grew great spikes and fangs and stabbing teeth, all downward-pointing, as she fell toward the golden mechanism like a hawk falling upon the eyes of a lion.

The diamond righted itself, reformed the shattered snakes, and swatted Arcadia’s Rampart out of the sky.

“No!” Atyle screamed.

The Newborn fell like a bleeding comet, wings shattered, limbs kicking at the air with corkscrews and spirals of scarlet flesh, fragments of bone-armour spilling away from her hide. She clipped the top of a skyscraper and slammed into the ground below, shaking the earth and sending up a cloud of debris and dust beyond the edge of the crater. Atyle’s god-sight saw the Newborn on her back, vulnerable and splayed, her flight ruined.

The golden diamond pulled back with its feelers of gravity, ready to smite the titan to nothing upon the earth.

Arcadia’s Rampart reached up with one gravity-feeler, like the hand of a drowning girl; the golden diamond had not expected this, and had left no snakes in reserve to repel the touch. Arcadia’s Rampart wrapped her gravity around the golden cross-beam of the diamond, and pulled, down.

The front of the diamond dipped, like the head of a horse compelled by a hand. The leading tip slammed into the city below; buildings exploded, throwing debris in every direction, falling in waves of concrete and brick, rippling outward like the impact of a boulder tossed into the sea. The diamond shook itself, lashing out with gravity and smashing buildings aside. Arcadia’s Rampart was back on her feet, the feint concluded; the Newborn danced in the ruins, a beetle sparring with an elephant. She had dragged the behemoth down to her level, and held it there with a fist of iron.

Pheiri skidded to a halt, throwing up a wave of grey mud and stagnant water.

A voice interrupted Atyle, from the open hatch.

“Mad fucking bitch!” Ilyusha howled, laughing and spitting, tatters of vomit on her lips. “Get in, get in! You’re gonna get smashed up there!”

Another voice — Amina, quavering in awe and terror: “God— God— God is— God—”

Atyle shook her head. She did not even look away from the gods at war. “Not God, little rabbit! The gods themselves, the true lords of creation! Come up, come up and see! I cannot part from them!”

“Tch!” Ilyusha hissed; Atyle expected her to vanish again. The animal did not understand faith, she had none. But then little feet scrambled up out of the hatch and little hands grabbed Atyle’s coat. “Ami!” Ilyusha screeched — then followed as well, claws scrabbling against Pheiri’s bone-hide.

Atyle spared them a smile. Amina clung to her coat, eyes wide; Ilyusha’s claws were clamped around Amina’s leg, her own feet gripping the hatch, to anchor all three to Pheiri’s safety.

“We witness the gods,” Atyle whispered.

The Newborn stumbled back through the skyscrapers, as a human stumbles through a field of wheat, feet slamming into the mud of the crater. It dragged the golden diamond as a human drags a plough through the earth.

Amina whimpered. Ilyusha was silent. Even the animals understood.

The Newborn, Arcadia’s Rampart, was bleeding from a dozen wounds — pulped and pulverised areas of crimson flesh where she had failed to deflect the diamond’s gravity. Patches of armour were buckled and cracked. Fields of flesh were blackened and cooked, carbonised by some weapon Atyle did not understand.

The titan had not forgotten her flesh-embraced weapons: she had used them as a surprise. The many guns and slings and spears upon her hide had resurfaced, glowing with new energies, reinforced by bone and tendon and throbbing meat; the guns pounded against the golden diamond, filling the air with blossoms of explosion and crack-whip spikes of brilliant light, rocking the crater with the impacts. The diamond lashed out in return, slamming into the tentacles of gravity, washing over the mud with stray shock waves. Arcadia’s Rampart ducked and buckled, struggling to hold on, to keep the diamond grounded.

“The little God has hooked herself a leviathan,” Atyle whispered. “But this monster will drag her under the waves.”

Ilyusha howled with a laugh halfway to madness: “Fuckin’ get some shit! Yeah!”

Over to the right, Pheiri’s rear ramp descended with a loud thump, splashing into the grey mud. Atyle allowed herself a split-second glance away from the titanic fight on the far side of the crater. Three figures were sprinting for the ramp, one of them carrying a fourth, all of them caked in mud from head to toe. Elpida, leading the scribe and the soldier and Pheiri’s other maid. Hafina turned as she ran, cracking off a rifle shot behind her; she was trying to keep another ball-aircraft at bay. Pheiri turned his guns on the swooping machine and hammered it backward in the sky, like a dandelion seed held aloft on a stream of breath.

Ilyusha grabbed Atyle’s shin, tugging at both her and Amina. “Down! Below! Elpi’s back! Now, come on, fuck!”

“Wait, animal! Wait!”

On the far side of the crater the golden diamond finally shook itself free of the Newborn’s grip.

The diamond started to rise, like a whale rearing up to smash the boat that had so briefly held it hooked. The golden surfaces were untouched by bullet or bomb or arc or magic. Soot and mud alike slid from them, leaving their bleeding toxic light undimmed, gleaming and perfect. That light burst in a wave over Arcadia’s Rampart, shrivelling crimson flesh and darkening bone-white armour. Atyle felt that same light against her face and the exposed skin of her hands, blistering and burning her flesh. The Newborn shrivelled, like a blossom before the flame.

Atyle wept. Had it all been for nothing? The crowned girl did not deserve to see this.

The weave of flesh in the Newborn’s hide peeled back, as if drying out and dying away, falling back in layers of crusted petal, revealing pulsing dark innards beneath. A face shifted in that flesh — a face larger than buildings, narrow and aquiline, sharp of jaw, toothy with triumph.

The face looked a tiny bit like the warrior, the Commander, Elpida.

Ilyusha yelped a laugh; Ilyusha saw some logic that Atyle did not. “Surprise!” the animal howled. “Fuck you!”

The face was gone as quickly as it had risen from the soup of flesh, melting to nothing — and leaving behind the railgun.

Like a stinger ejected from the flesh of a wasp, the massive arm-cannon railgun shot forward, the tip almost touching the diamond’s cross-bar of toxic gold. Magnetic power flared. The railgun discharged with a crack like the splitting of a mountain.

A round the size of Pheiri’s body slammed into the diamond’s crossbeam — and broke it.

An explosion of golden shrapnel filled the air, brighter than the forgotten sun, growing into a mushroom of burning light.

Atyle’s breath was sucked from her lungs; her skin began to boil and the sight in her mortal eye turned to blinding white; her god-sight dimmed and flickered, filled with sparkles of static and dancing stars. The Newborn God stood untouched amid the fiery doom, levelling her guns once again. The golden diamond was reeling, bleeding shining ichor in great torrents. Atyle wept tears of blood and—

And hit Pheiri’s hide in a heap; Ilyusha pulled her off her feet and dragged her down through the hatch.

Atyle allowed herself to be shoved down the steps, back into the safety of Pheiri’s innards. She could not keep her feet; she collapsed at the bottom of the passageway, sprawled out across the floor of the crew compartment, half-blind and almost deafened, bleeding from patches of cooked skin, weeping tears of blood — tears of joy. The gods had shown her the truth at last. She had witnessed victory, not a fiction, not a lie.

“Ami! Ami!” Ilyusha was shouting.

Amina replied: “I-it burns, but it’s only m-my hand, I’m— I’m okay, I’m okay, Illy.”

Elpida and the others had returned moments before the Newborn’s surprise — they were dripping grey mud as they fell in through the airlock compartment, shouting and babbling, weapons clattering, boots ringing against the metal. Pheiri lurched forward again as soon as all were aboard, tossing the revenants sideways as he skidded in the mud and made good their escape.

The Commander snapped orders above the chaos, checking on her girls, but even her voice shook.

“Everyone in? Everyone in!? Nobody left behind? Haf, get Kaga into the infirmary, right now. Vicky, Vicky, sit down, hold onto something. What happened to her — Ilyusha, what happened to Atyle? What— what are you— Howl? … Howl? Howl?”

Atyle paid no attention.

The crowned girl had appeared in Atyle’s god-sight.

She was not a dream-memory, but a phantom standing upon the decking, a ghost none of the others could see, even as they stepped through her insubstantial body. She was beautiful, dressed in a gown of bone and pearl and coral, with hair the colour of burning ash, eyes of pure obsidian, and skin like fresh, rich, warm blood. Her crown was silver, melted to her skull, crackling with life.

She smiled at Atyle: a thank you.

“Howl?!” Elpida was shouting, clutching her own head. “Where are you?! Where did you go?! Howl?!”

The crowned girl lost her smile. She closed her eyes with heavy sorrow, tears of liquid silver flowing down her cheeks.

Atyle’s god-sight cleared. The crowned girl was gone. The crew compartment slammed from side to side as Pheiri accelerated away from the crater, dodging mosquitoes and losing traction and smashing through buildings.

The Commander was standing in the middle of it all, dripping with grey mud, hair filthy, jaw clenched, eyes wide with the mania of a fresh wound.

“Howl?!”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Apotheosis in flesh and bone! A shattered diamond, a burst of gold, and a war between the gods.

Gosh, writing from Atyle’s POV for the first time was very challenging! This was very, very different to all other characters so far, even Amina, back when we saw a few things from her POV, but I think I’m quite happy with how this turned out. And I hope you enjoyed it too! We may get some more Atyle in the future (perhaps once she recovers from those, uh, ‘burns’), but in the meantime we’ve got an escape to pull off, wreckage to sort through, a duel not yet concluded, and a very missing Howl. Uh oh.

And how about that crowned girl? Royalty from the nanomachine underworld. Let’s hope she’s happy with the result.

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

And thank you! As always, thank you so much for reading my little story! I’m delighted that you’re here, I hope you’re enjoying Necroepilogos, and I can promise so much more to come. Onward we go, deeper into the rot and rust and ruins, cradling this newborn flower in a fist of nuclear fusion. Until next chapter!

Content Warnings

Toxic relationship dynamics
Intimate partner abuse (sort of? I’m erring on the side of caution here)
Strangulation
Cannibalism
Paralysis
Implied infection of wounds
Infidelity

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Cantrelle accepted that God was speaking to her once again, after decades of unbroken silence. Divine messages were written upon the world in the language of pattern and sign — even here, after the end of all life, deep in the Kingdom of Death.

She didn’t give a shit. God could go fuck himself.

Yola was missing; Yola had advance warning.

Yola was a traitor.

“Eyes on the aircraft! Eyes on that fucking aircraft! That one, it’s coming around for us again! Phol, get that shoulder-mount locked on, scare it off!”

“Serpents in the sky, servants of a greater power—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Get your shit together!”

“—don’t think we can scare them, don’t think they scare at all—”

“It’s loaded with gravitics, in the core—”

“They all have fucking gravitics! Ignore it! Spook it before—”

“Run! Just run! Out the back! Fucking run!”

The air was filled with the screams and shouts of an uncontrolled rout. Boots thumped against blood-slick concrete, ankle-deep in half-eaten corpses; bodies slammed into walls and smashed through doors, shoved aside or dragged clear or thrown to the ground. Stray gunshots whipped and cracked, finding no targets; automatic weapons opened up and then sputtered out, swatted to silence by gravity itself. Stragglers cried out for help. Few stopped to assist the fallen.

The Sisterhood was breaking around Cantrelle’s skull.

“Argh! Aaaa! My ears, ahhh— comms are— f-f-fuck—”

“—look at my eyes! Look at me! Get— get up! Get up!”

“Yank her comms implant, cut it out if you have to. Knife, now! Get it out of her throat. Nobody access wide-band comms, it’s frying our heads—”

“Fuck the comms! Fucking run! Phone’s gone, phone’s gone! Shoot her, leave her!”

“I’ll shoot you first you rancid cunt! One finger on her and I’ll eat your heart raw!”

“—that thing in the air is flooding every frequency with bullshit. No comms! Do not leave visual range or you will be left behind!”

“Hahaha! ‘Visual’? We’re gone, bitch!”

Cantrelle’s peripheral vision throbbed black and red; the gravity-wave pulse had damaged her bionic eyes. She was on her hands and knees, struggling to stand up; frothy crimson bile hung from her lips. A puddle of vomit lay on the floor before her. Blood and gore was soaking through the bandages which encased her hands, seeping into her wounds with sharp, cold pain. The air stank of sick and shit and breached intestines.

“It’s God. It’s God, descended from the heavens at last, to scour us clean of our sins. Oh, God, we’ve sinned so much, so much, too much to wash off—”

“-you, maybe, you sick rat. Move!”

“It’s not God you fucking moron. God is dead. We killed him!”

“Airship. It’s an airship. Use your eyes.”

“I can’t see! I’m— bleeding— no— it’s too cold. Pholet, where—”

All organisation and coherency was lost; resources were being abandoned; Sisters were falling upon each other.

“Bag the meat! Get on that now! Bag the meat, get everything we can!”

“—fuck you, it’s mine! This one is mine—”

“Bitch, get off! I’ll fucking shoot you first!”

Bang! Bang!

“—gurrlk—”

Bang!

“Urgh, I still feel sick, I can feel that thing up there clawing at the air. Every time it moves I wanna hurl.”

“That’s gravitics. Get used to it. Run! Go!”

Cantrelle’s eyes recovered, though the edge of her vision was grey and flickering. She raised her gaze from the filthy floor, then staggered to her feet, boots slipping in the blood and gore. The slowest and most optimistic of the shattering Sisterhood were fleeing all around her, sprinting for the doors, shouting and screaming and shoving.

One of the ball-shaped rotary craft was swooping toward the entrance of the loading dock, unfurling wings of gravitic power.

Far behind the aircraft — past the jagged hillside of bone-white mech lying prone in the grey mud, beyond the skyscrapers on the opposite side of the impact crater — a golden diamond hung in the sky, bleeding toxic light into the atmosphere.

Lashed by lightning, shining with regal brilliance, giant beyond imagining. The golden titan boiled with waves of pressure which rolled over Cantrelle’s exposed face and throbbed deep inside her bite wounds.

A sign from God.

Cantrelle grit her teeth. She didn’t care.

Yola was missing; Yola was a traitor.

Six hours earlier the Sisterhood of the Skull had finally quit the weakness-inducing safety of their temporary fortress, inside the skyscraper on the opposite side of the impact crater. Yola had done everything Cantrelle had come to expect of her: she had roused the girls with a short speech, showing nothing but confidence and authority; she had focused her words on the need to reassert the Sisterhood’s self-evident primacy; she had highlighted the insult of the breakout, and decreed it would not go unpunished; she had declared her intention to exert the Sisterhood’s will upon the degenerates who had gathered to usurp the Sisterhood’s rightful prize — the mech lying prone in the middle of the crater. She would sweep them away with violence and add their meat to the Sisterhood’s bodies.

Yola’s obsession with the degenerate ‘superhuman’ — Elpida — appeared to have passed; perhaps she was suppressing it, but Cantrelle did not care. As long as Yola’s madness did not taint the Sisterhood’s purity of purpose.

As usual the Sisters made no attempt to remove the grinning skulls they had daubed on the outer walls of the skyscraper — the sign of their passing would remain until the city itself scrubbed away the blood and ink. Cantrelle approved of this habit; the skull was a reminder to others that there was only one possible allegiance in the Kingdom of Death.

Yola had led the Sisters away from the impact crater, ostensibly to avoid the sucking grey mud churned up by the night’s rain; Cantrelle had briefly worried that Yola was breaking her word. Was she leading the Sisterhood beyond the graveworm line, in doomed pursuit of her superhuman fixation? Had Cantrelle finally become unable to read Yola’s true intentions? Should she have killed Yola when she’d had the chance, or agreed to betray her to Elpida’s request?

No, not that, not ever.

Cantrelle had told nobody about the secret radio contact from Elpida. She told herself that such concerns would only risk the return of Yola’s languid obsession.

Alone with Yola, Cantrelle could save the Sisterhood with one bullet and a bit of quick thinking, but out in the rotting streets with the Sisters in motion, Cantrelle would have no choice but to follow Yola to certain doom.

But Yola had turned the group away from the graveworm line.

They had skirted the outer edge of the tangled ruins at the crater’s top end. Cantrelle had breathed a sigh of private relief, and stuck close to her prophet’s side.

Yola had not needed to issue orders — the Sisters had slipped back into their natural doctrine: small groups advancing without relying on each other, leapfrogging between scraps of cover, falling into loose competition over who could move faster, who could bag opportunistic kills, and who could surprise or taunt or interrupt other groups. Three fights had broken out — a small number compared to usual. Only one of those three required intervention: Hafsatu had attempted to shoot Ida in the ankle, in a disagreement over who got to stick closest to Tiri. The fight had turned into a fists-and-feet scuffle with screaming and shouting and some teeth knocked out with a brick. Yola had stepped in with but a word and the Sisters had disengaged.

Her authority had returned. Cantrelle approved, purring with inner satisfaction. All was right within the Kingdom of Death.

The Sisterhood spent five hours slicing their way through the ruins, limbering up muscles and stretching trigger fingers, flexing blood-lust and building an appetite for more. They caught and killed four lone revenants on the journey; the meat went to the killers, with choice cuts for the leadership.

When they reached the opposite side of the crater they spent forty five minutes setting up an assault on the first inhabited building they found: a long, low, metal structure between the skyscrapers, an ancient industrial plant coated with rust. A small group of zombie filth was huddled within — nobodies, without even a standard or symbol to their name. Too easy, hardly like overcoming a determined knot of Wreckers and Murderers.

But the Sisterhood needed the morale boost. Confidence was yet thin. Yola ordered; Cantrelle approved.

On Yola’s signal they hit the prey all at once. They poured through doorways and windows into some kind of ancient loading dock, all concrete platforms and faded markings on the ground. They avoided the main entrance — a gaping aperture which faced the crater and the crippled mech. Kuro had gone in first, bowling through the defenders and scattering them across cold concrete.

The fight was over in less than five minutes. None survived. No Sisters even wounded. Easy prey.

Cantrelle still hurt all over from the wounds she had sustained against Elpida and Amina. Her voice was still a scratchy strangled mess. She could not hold or fire a gun properly, not even the low-powered PDW she carried beneath her coat, not with her hands still wrapped in bandages. She still felt the insult of the bite wounds on her face and neck — especially the bite wound which neatly bisected the skull tattoo on her cheek. She had not decided what to do about that. She dared not remove the bandage; the sign would be taken as an ill omen, at best. She wanted to rip away the ruined tattoo and re-apply the black skull on her other cheek, so that her faith would remain unbroken. But her fingers had faltered at the symbolism of pulling the broken skull off her flesh.

She had told herself there was no symbolism. This was not a sign. She had not read signs since true life. God did not speak in the Kingdom of Death.

Relief was better than any painkiller. Yola had located her senses and bound the Sisterhood to her leadership once again, feeding them on victory and blood, on raw meat and quivering brains. After the humiliating ‘defeat’ by the so-called ‘superhuman’ and her degenerate friends, everyone needed the reminder: the brides of death would not be denied, for they are the incarnation of the world to come.

The Sisters had begun to feast on the dead while setting up a perimeter. Everyone was hungry, so Yola allowed a little laxity.

Cantrelle had been tearing off a piece of meat for herself, a nice chunk of fatty thigh from one of the dead girls, glistening and wet in the grip of her tentacle-pincers. She had shoved a quivering gobbet into her mouth, then turned toward where Yola had stood a moment ago, toward the back of the loading dock.

But Yola was gone, without a word or a whisper, without standing orders. She hadn’t even taken her fuck-toy with her — Kuro was right there, opening the face-plate of her armour to shove handfuls of meat into her maw.

The double doors at the rear of the loading dock had been swinging shut; Cantrelle was the only one to see that. Nobody else had noticed Yola leave.

Cantrelle had opened a line to Yola across the comms network. She had been about to ask what the hell Yola was doing.

Half a second later God’s Sign had appeared in the sky, heralded by a pressure-wave of gravitic power.

The Sisters had voided their guts amid the ruins of their conquest, slipping and sliding on the gore that fell from their hands. Cantrelle had felt the jelly inside her eyeballs shake and the contents of her stomach slam up through her throat. She had fallen to her hands and knees, retching, dizzy, blacking out. The comms network had gone down, filled with the screaming voices of every soul in hell. Clouds of flies had poured from the Golden Sign in the sky — ball-shaped rotor-craft, swarming over the impact crater, falling upon the corpse of the mech like carrion eaters upon rotten meat.

Cantrelle was back on her feet now. The Sisterhood was broken and fleeing. Cantrelle drooled bloody bile from her lips and stared up into the soot-black sky through a veil of tears. God’s Messenger glowed with a toxic gold she had not seen since true life, boiling with a mass of gravitic power she could dimly see through her flickering, glitching augmetic eyes.

A sign from God. A sign that God was not yet dead. The divine was still at work in the world.

Cantrelle had been eight years old when she’d first successfully deciphered the messages from God.

Her older brothers had ambushed a patrol of King’s Men who had wandered too deeply into the forests; the soldiers had died swiftly, cut down by the bullets of stolen rifles, distracted by the baying of hounds at their heels, and crushed beneath dead-fall traps on the single-file false trail. Cantrelle’s father and the other adults were mostly interested in the guns the King’s Men had carried, in the computers and machines in their pockets, in the strange liquid armour the leader had worn. The adults also discussed when the patrol might be missed, when more soldiers with better guns might visit the forest, or when Toulouse might dispatch more than scouting parties to enforce the peace.

They had piled the corpses upon the flat stone foundations of God’s House, in hopes of a sign, but the village had not boasted of a seer in generations. The adults had gathered all the children under thirteen and paraded them before the corpses, but no insight had struck, only tears and whimpers. Then a wild dog had gotten to the corpses and dragged out the entrails of one soldier. That was taken as a very bad sign. The village had prepared to flee to the deeper woods.

But on the night the village was to be emptied, Cantrelle had wandered into the dark of God’s House, alone and unguarded. The other children had been afraid or disgusted by the corpses and the looping entrails, but Cantrelle found them fascinating, like watching the flowing of a stream or the dancing of a fire or the wheeling of a flock of birds. The adults had kept asking questions about what the children could see, but Cantrelle hadn’t been able to concentrate, not with all the noise.

Alone in the dark with the bodies, the world had started to make sense.

She had sat with the entrails in the cold hours of the morning, reading truth in spilled guts. She had begun to see the meaning in the ravens and crows gathering overhead, in the sounds of their cries, in the numbers and sequences in which they alighted on the branches. She had read music in the rustle of leaves, seen art in the wriggling of worms in maggoty flesh, and heard the whisper of God in all things. She had woken up to divine truth, everywhere and always.

At sunrise Cantrelle had walked back home and informed her parents of what God had said: more King’s Men would come in ten days time, two hours before dusk.

Cantrelle had turned out to be right.

She had spent the next fifteen years reading signs from God. She saw the messages and meaning in everything. She had even read them in the flames that had licked her feet and blackened her toes, when the King’s Men had burnt her to death in Toulouse a decade and a half later.

When Cantrelle had first been resurrected in the Kingdom of Death she had attempted to read God’s words in the guts of other revenants. She had cut them open in secret places, sifting entrails even as she shoved handfuls of flesh down her gullet. Surely this afterlife was God’s doing, God’s work, God’s intention? Surely she had not been abandoned here, among demons and monsters and the eaters of the dead?

She had watched the skies and tasted the soil and listened for the rustle of leaves in the wind. But the sky was empty and the soil was barren and nothing grew here but false flesh.

God’s voice was silent. God was dead.

Cantrelle had spent many years as a screaming madness, then more as a scuttling thing of dirt and wordless hungers.

Eventually Cantrelle had joined the Sisterhood, the so-called Death’s Heads, the only ones who saw what the world had become, the only ones with a sensible answer. They had seen her potential. She had learned about nanomachines and metabolism and the nature of the ecosystem. She had learned science and medicine and chemistry. She had stopped looking for signs from God. She no longer believed.

But the signs these past few weeks had become too much to ignore. First the mech had fallen from the sky, a comet from the heavens. Then the ‘superhuman’, Yola’s perfect leader, had walked out of the empty void. Then the defeat, the sickening humiliation of being strangled to death but not killed. Then the symbol on her cheek, bitten through. The Kingdom of Death, thrown down.

And now this golden diamond in the sky. This celestial machine. This resurrection of the signifier.

Cantrelle’s younger self stirred inside her chest.

“Fuck you!” Cantrelle screamed at the sky, at the rotor-craft swooping down toward her, at the golden message dripping toxic light down onto the grey. “Where were you when I fucking needed you?! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

God was a liar and a cheat and a traitor.

And so was Yola.

Yola had stepped out of those rear doors seconds before the gigantic craft had appeared in the sky. Yola had advance warning from some unknown source. Yola had left the Sisterhood to die.

Cantrelle was going to kill her.

Cantrelle turned and ran before the rotor-craft could crash into the loading dock. Her boots slipped in the gore and blood, but she lurched forward and kept her balance. The rest of the Sisterhood was almost gone, running through the guts of the building, fleeing the revelation above the crater.

Cantrelle slammed through the double-doors at the rear of the loading dock, into the shadows and dust of a long and empty hallway; several Sisters were sprinting ahead of her, their footfalls and shouts echoing down the concrete tunnels, leaving nothing but bloody boot prints. Motes of dust swirled in the dim air. Sounds of combat pounded through the walls, backed by gravitic pressure-waves.

And beneath it all was an unmistakable grinding sound — a mountain range rubbing its back against the world, spiralling its way through gigatonnes of concrete and steel and brick.

The graveworm was moving. Cantrelle didn’t care.

“Yola!” she rasped into the dark, drowned out by the titans beyond the walls.

The comms network was full of cognitive hazard pouring from the god-thing in the sky; Yola’s direct frequency was inaccessible. Cantrelle bypassed comms entirely and reached out to Yola’s implants. She had not done this in years, not since Yola had stopped sleeping in the same bedroll as Cantrelle. Their last communication at this level of signals intimacy had been ugly and upsetting, filled with insults Cantrelle did not care to recall, and followed up by a personal visit from Kuro.

Cantrelle knew Yola would not accept the handshake protocol. Yola was a traitor, she had spat on everything they had ever shared, and Cantrelle would snap her neck before the Sisterhood broke and—

Yola accepted the connection.

<<Yolanda!>> Cantrelle screamed down the direct line; the connection was filled with static whispers from that thing in the sky, trying to break the private encryption. <<Where the fuck did you go? Where are you?! Answer me, you apostate fuck! You knew we were about to get hit, you knew! You knew all along! You bitch, you unfaithful heretic shit, you—>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Yola replied with a non-verbal systems ping, a three-beat metronome.

Cantrelle stopped breathing.

Back in the good days — when Yola had relied on Cantrelle for everything, when Cantrelle had known the taste of Yola’s tears and fingers and cunt, when Yola had whined and mewled whenever Cantrelle wanted — that three-beat signal had acted as a private cry for help. Not physical help; even back then Yola was a Sister in good standing, and now she was the prophet, the leader, and more. If Yola needed physical help all she had to do was shout. Every Sister would come running to her side.

That three-beat burst was for Cantrelle only. It meant: I can’t do this alone. Please, Ella. Please come to me.

The Yola who had last used that signal was long gone, replaced by a traitor, a shadow, a mockery of the sweetness that Cantrelle had raised up.

Cantrelle drew her PDW with her tentacle-pincers — awkward and clumsy, but better than nothing. Her hands hung limp, bandages soaked with gore.

“Yola!” she yelled into the dark. “Yolanda!”

<<Yola? Where are you?! Give me positional!>>

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Twenty five feet away, to the right.

Cantrelle hurried along the dusty corridor and slipped around an archway, leading with her weapon. She stepped into a room which had once been some kind of chemical mixing and storage plant. Huge upright steel chemical tanks branched off into hundreds of tubes and pipes, caked with centuries of rust, all leading to a shallow depression in the middle of the room, dry and empty.

Yola stood in that shallow depression. The helmet of her purple armour was peeled back to show her ruby-red hair and the burn wound on her face.

She was crying. Quiet tears made tracks down her cheeks, shining in the cracked flesh of her wound.

Yola’s eyes swivelled toward Cantrelle — one emerald, one blinded and milky, both hollow and lost.

Cantrelle’s heart lurched; that was her Yola, her sad, pathetic girl, her fragile little lamb who needed to bite Cantrelle’s shoulder until it all felt better. That was the girl Cantrelle had brought to sobbing orgasm hundreds of times. The girl Cantrelle still wanted. Her Yola. Hers.

Elpida stood in front of Yola.

The degenerate was touching Yola’s face.

One soft brown hand cupped the cracked and blackened flesh of Yola’s cheek, brushing her tears with a thumb. Elpida was dressed in her tomb-coat, the same as Cantrelle’s, but new and undamaged where Cantrelle’s was patched and torn from years of wear. She carried a submachine gun in her other hand, loose and lazy; she didn’t bother to aim as Cantrelle swept into the room. Her long white hair was clean, undimmed by dirt or dust. Her copper brown skin looked warm as velvet, as if she’d just stepped from a bath. Cantrelle couldn’t remember what a bath felt like.

Purple eyes flashed with amusement. Elpida’s mouth curled in a cruel smile. Her lips parted.

Cantrelle pointed her PDW and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Her tentacle-pincers had frozen as if gripped by invisible force, unable to finish depressing the trigger of her gun. Her muscles were locked in place. Her legs wouldn’t move. Even her lips were fixed and still. She tried to scream with humiliated fury, but her throat wouldn’t budge. What was this?!

Elpida smiled wider, and said: “You called your special friend, Yola. No.”

Yola whispered: “I-I’m sorry. I … I … I never wanted—”

Elpida interrupted: “Yolanda, I told you, my offer is only for you, and for you alone.” Elpida reached out and stroked Yola’s burned cheek; a shudder of pain passed through Yola’s body. Cantrelle had not seen Yola show pain in years. Sick jealousy gnashed at her heart. Elpida continued: “Have we not come to a special understanding, you and I?”

Yola panted through tears. “I-I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave my … my girls … my … ”

Elpida sighed. “There is no time for these petty dramas and stale loves.”

‘Elpida’ sounded nothing like the superhuman girl from before, nothing like the captive, or the voice on the radio. She spoke with the same timbre and tone, but her word choice was all wrong. Her attitude was different. The way she held herself was incorrect.

Cantrelle realised this thing was not Elpida. She figured out why she couldn’t move.

The figure wearing Elpida’s face turned to glance at Cantrelle, with an amused curl to her lips. Suddenly Cantrelle could move her throat and mouth again.

“Necromancer!” Cantrelle screeched and spat. “Corpse-fucker! Don’t touch her! She’s mine! Mine! Don’t you dare! Fuck you! Fuck you! Yola, step away from her! Yolanda! Fuck!”

The Necromancer smiled with Elpida’s lips. “This one is spirited, but she is bound to the cares of the dead.” The Necromancer nodded to one side. “Better than this one, at least. Poor taste, Yolanda.”

Cantrelle realised she wasn’t the only Sister frozen solid in that room. Kuro stood six feet to Cantrelle’s left, an unmoving giant inside her suit of grey war-plate. Kuro’s weapons were deployed, pointing at the Necromancer, but locked in place, just like Cantrelle’s PDW. Yola’s living dildo fuck-pet had not fared any better than Cantrelle. A cold comfort.

A rumble came from beyond the walls, out in the crater. Was the airship making a move?

The Necromancer turned back to Yola.

Cantrelle screamed again: “Yola! Yola, why are you crying?! What did it do to you?!”

The Necromancer smiled. “I have informed Yolanda of what is happening here. That is all. Our time is almost up, Yola. No witnesses to the Telokopolan machine will be allowed to leave here. Those who die beneath central’s eye will not be returned to eternity’s wheel. They will be held in the pattern, forever. I am giving you this one chance, Yolanda. You and I have shared something special these last few years. Have we not?”

Was this where Yola had been getting it all? All her confidence, her high-and-mighty play-acting, her new mannerisms and new-found independence? This thing talked like Yola, not like Elpida! This corpse-rapist had taken her Yola away and replaced her with a puppet.

Yola was weeping, staring into the Necromancer’s imitation purple eyes. The Necromancer’s hand brushed her burned cheek a second time.

<<ping-ping-ping>>

Cantrelle screamed in rage and humiliation. Perhaps Kuro was doing the same, inside her armour.

The Necromancer sighed. She lowered her hand and turned away from Yola, toward Cantrelle. “Very well, dead things. You will have your poetic end. But this one I will take myself.”

‘Elpida’ flowed apart like a torrent of water.

Skin lightened and rippled. Coat hardened and bulged. Hair shrank and darkened. The transformation happened in the blink of an eye.

The Necromancer turned into an imitation of Yola — a grinning, smug, imperious Yola. The Necromancer smiled at Cantrelle with all the charisma of the prophet Yola had become. She raised a slender pistol, one that Yola herself had not used in years, large calibre, hollow-point rounds, more than enough to explode Cantrelle’s head like a watermelon beneath a sledgehammer.

The real Yola let out a sob.

Cantrelle suddenly found she could move again; she tumbled forward as her muscles resumed their earlier motion. She caught her balance and brought her PDW up, aiming at—

Yola?

The Necromancer started to speak.

Cantrelle roared with anger and pulled the trigger. Bullets slammed into the Necromancer’s imitation skull, tearing through meat and shattering bone, pulping brain and breaking jaw. The Yola-mask disintegrated under a hail of gunfire, turned to shredded meat and splinters of bone.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?!” Cantrelle screamed. “Because you’re wearing her face?! Fuck you! Fuck her!”

Bang-bang-bang-bang-click—

Cantrelle’s magazine ran dry — but the Necromancer did not fall.

An eyeless head more meat than face stared back at Cantrelle through bloody wounds. Black orbs opened in the bullet holes, twisting and writhing and emerging as tarry-black tentacles, glistening wet and dripping with fluid. The real Yola whimpered.

“Ahhhhh,” the Necromancer sighed — a sound like blood-filled lungs struggling for a final breath, in Yola’s broken voice. “Never mind, then.”

She raised the pistol, pointed it at Cantrelle’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The wall of the chemical plant exploded inward.

Masonry fragments and steel shrapnel filled the air, pattering off coats and armour, slicing unprotected flesh, ringing out a mad chorus against the rusted chemical tanks. Cantrelle reeled from the impact, crashing onto her backside with a crunch of breaking bone, choking in the cloud of brick dust and debris.

Beyond the ragged stoma in the wall she caught a glimpse of the soot-black sky, with the toxic golden visitation hanging far above the horizon, framed by the sucking grey mud below. The fallen mech still lay like a stripped skeleton of bone-white amid the filth, surrounded by a cloud of flies.

The mech shuddered.

A monster slammed through the broken wall and into the chemical plant in a tidal wave of flesh — a seething, roiling, bubbling mass of semi-transparent iridescent protoplasm, flashing with dark purples and bright pinks and vomit-sick greens, flowing with rapidly re-forming eye-stalks and sensor-pads and blade-tipped tentacles. It was the size of a house and moved like a lightning bolt.

A true degenerate from beyond the graveworm line, a revenant changed beyond all memory of human form.

It pounced at the Necromancer.

Kuro turned as the degenerate attacked, released from the Necromancer’s control. Her armour bristled with weaponry as every firearm rose to slice into the side of the blob-zombie. But the monster lashed out at Kuro with a cluster of tentacles, faster than Cantrelle’s bionic eyes could follow. The monster tossed Kuro aside, hurling the power-armoured giant through the air; Kuro’s weight crashed through several chemical tanks and shattered the concrete with her landing.

The Necromancer was a parody of Yolanda now, a pulped skull atop a suit of imitation purple armour. It froze the degenerate blob monster with a glance, just like every other zombie.

But the flesh kept coming.

Like an avalanche of tar flowing around rocks, the glowing blob-thing did not stop moving; sections of it slammed forward, reaching for the Necromancer with any piece of itself it could unfreeze — a set of tentacles here, a splash of flesh there, a stabbing tendril or a sneaking lash. The Necromancer took a step back, then another, then another; her blind head jerked back and forth, as if she couldn’t keep up with all the different body parts of this creature. She froze them as they came, but this blob always had more.

The real Yola collapsed, freed from whatever control had kept her standing at attention.

Yola slammed to her hands and knees, scuffing her purple armour on the floor, and dragged herself into Cantrelle’s lap. Cantrelle caught her and held her tight; she wanted to crack open Yola’s armour and lever her rib cage apart and squeeze Yola’s heart in a fist. Yola was sobbing and wailing — crying, a noise that Cantrelle had not heard in too many years.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry— Ella, I’m sorry, Ella, Ella, I’m sorry—”

Cantrelle put her bloody, bandaged, aching hands around Yola’s throat; she barely had the strength to squeeze.

“Traitor.”

Yola wheezed. One emerald eye bulged in her face. “I’m sorry—”

A dark figure swept through the shattered wall on the heels of the blob-monster, framed against the distant background of bone-white mech. She was wrapped in a dark cloak from feet to scalp, showing only a mushroom-pale face and a jaw-mask of matte metal, painted with jagged black teeth. She carried half a dozen guns held in too many spindly hands. Chief among her weapons was a massive rifle. A pair of glowing red eyes flickered from the retreating Necromancer to Cantrelle and Yola.

The sniper. Wrecker and Murderer.

Cantrelle scrabbled for her PDW, but the gun was empty. The sniper levelled her massive rifle at Cantrelle and Yola to send a bullet through both their bodies. She used another hand to point a strange, boxy-looking gun toward the Necromancer.

She said: “Bye bye, death cult—”

Far behind the sniper, the fallen mech lurched to its feet.

Showers of grey mud shook from bone-white limbs. Weapons blossomed open all across the war machine’s body. The giant roared — a war-horn cry so loud it hurt Cantrelle’s eardrums and shook the ground.

Prone and unmoving it had seemed an ugly and twisted wreck. In motion it was beautiful beyond words.

The sniper pulled the trigger but her shot went wide, knocked off her aim by the roar of a waking god.

The Necromancer turned and ran.

The sniper shouted something from behind her mask — “Get her! Iriko!” — and the blob-monster raced after the fleeing corpse-fucker.

The sniper quickly levelled another shot. Cantrelle held Yola tight, even though she embraced only cold armour.

But the world exploded with sound and fury before anybody else could shoot: the god-machine bone-mech fired upon one of the tiny rotor craft, blossoming the air with explosions and laser-cannon beams and solid-shot rounds. Cantrelle didn’t even care that she was about to die at the hands of a degenerate, or that Yola was the worst kind of traitor, or that she was crying her own eyes out — the sight of that god-machine swatting a fly was like nothing she had witnessed in all her resurrections. The firepower was earth-shattering. Every motion was poetry.

“Yolanda,” Cantrelle whispered in the moments before the end. “You were right.”

Yola was looking up too now, lost in awe. “No … no … ” she whispered.

“With that machine the Sisterhood could have conquered a worm.”

Yola sobbed. “Ella.”

The sniper ignored it all; her finger tightened on the trigger.

The golden idol in the sky was reaching toward the mech with a nest of gravitic snakes, dimly seen through Cantrelle’s bionic eyes. The mech turned toward its foe, flowering open a hundred guns and missile pods and laser batteries. But it would not be enough.

Cantrelle felt tears running down her cheeks, tears for a lie she had abandoned so long ago. There could be no contest here. This grandest of all resurrections, this divine machine, this refutation of God’s word — it would be crushed into the barren mud like all other life. God had made his signs plain; the Kingdom of Death was his work after all. This place was his will and his desire, and he would brook no challenge, not even from an angel.

For the first time in decades Cantrelle wished it was not so.

But then the mech seemed to strain against its dirty white armour. Crimson flesh showed through widening gaps. A sound like tortured metal tore out across the crater.

The mech rippled — and burst.

A blossom of blood and bone opened like the first flower of spring, blooming into a whirlwind of flesh.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Flesh flowers; bone blossoms!

And meanwhile, here’s the Sisterhood of the Skull (or whatever they care to call themselves) having a very bad time. Cantrelle especially is not having a good day. Neither is Yola. Did they bring this upon themselves? Probably. But hey, here’s Iriko! Maybe she can give them a hug! No? No danger hugs from Iriko? No getting in Iriko’s tummy? Oh well.

This week I would like once again to direct your attention to the fanart page! We have new additions: these two depictions of Thirteen with Elpida, by Melsa Hravei; and this illustration of Arcadia’s Rampant staring down central’s asset, by FarionDragon. I’m so endlessly delighted by the incredible fanart from readers of the story; it makes me very happy to see my own work inspiring others to make art. Thank you all so much!

If you want more Necroepilogos right away, there is a tier for it on my patreon:

Patreon link! Right here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 4.5k words.  Feel free to wait until there’s more story! I’m focusing on trying to push this ahead for now, seeing if I can make more time in my writing schedule to get an extra chapter or two out. I’ll keep doing my best!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps the story.

Thank you very much for reading my little story, dear readers! Arc 9 is very chaotic so far, a big turning point for the story in various ways, and I dearly hope you are enjoying it as much as I am. Thanks for being here! Seeya next chapter!