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Elpida drowned in static.

The worm-guard which had plucked her from Pheiri’s open hatch was right in front of her eyes, but she saw only an abyss of black static. A fist of tendrils squeezed her waist and her ribcage, but she felt only the creaking of her bones. She knew she had been hauled high into the air, legs and feet dangling from the machine’s grip, but her sense of balance, gravity, motion, all was suffocated by swirling turmoil; she couldn’t feel her feet and legs, though she tried to kick out at the tentacles which held her firm. Her eyeballs burned, sight abraded by static filaments, pain rending through her orbital bones and grinding into her brain.

She tried to draw breath; a wave of black static rushed down her throat, filling her mouth and lungs and guts with pins and needles, nerve compression numbing her from the inside. She went deaf and blind and mute under the crushing pressure.

—lps! Howl screamed her name, from so far away. Can’t feel— don’t—

Howl’s voice was broken and choppy. The static was lodged deep in Elpida’s brain now, tendrils tightening around the software entity running on her nanomachine meat.

She tried to call out to Howl, to wrap mental arms around Howl’s shoulders, to hold her tight. But Elpida’s mind closed on nothing. The space Howl should have occupied was empty.

Howl was gone.

Elpida opened her mouth and roared — or tried to. She could neither hear nor feel her success or failure. She slapped at her coat with her left hand; her fingertips still retained a little residual sensation. She groped for her pistol, forced her hand around the grip, and dragged it from her pocket.

She aimed into the static and pumped the trigger. She felt the recoil like a muffled thumping beyond walls of iron — once, twice, then click click click.

Her extremities finished going numb. She couldn’t tell if she was holding the pistol anymore.

This was it. Killed by the graveworm’s immune system.

At least Pheiri and the others would survive; Elpida clung to that thought as her senses shut down and her mind collapsed. Her strategy to escape the Necromancers via the worm-guard was still a good one, and Pheiri had everything he needed to see it to completion. All he had to do was turn and run, outrun the Necromancers, and the graveworm would do the rest. She knew he could do it, she believed in him, and in the rest of her new cadre. Elpida only wished she could be there to see it, to congratulate her little brother, to lead the others through whatever they found on the far side of this trial. They would survive, they would win, she was sure of that. They were all of Telokopolis now, and Telokopolis is forever.

And Howl had done as Elpida had asked, when Elpida had demanded they charge the Iron Raven. She had fled Elpida’s mind at the last possible moment. Howl had saved herself and gone to join the others. Elpida hoped she would get on well with Vicky, or Kagami, or whoever else she had decided to inhabit.

This was not the end, not for a nanomachine revenant. Elpida knew what would come next.

Resurrection, a new awakening, hundreds or thousands or millions of years hence. A new group to save or lose.

But no Howl.

No Howl, no sisters, none of the others, her new comrades. She would likely never see them again, not unless they all survived across the abyss of time that now yawned wide at Elpida’s feet. Not unless she could find them again somewhere and sometime in the infinite cruelty and chaos of the nanomachine ecosystem. Not unless they rebuilt Telokopolis.

Elpida couldn’t feel her face or her eyes, but she felt the tears inside her chest.

Howl … this time, I’m the one going on ahead. Wait for me. Please, I love you so much, wait for me, wait for—

A hand exploded from within the black static, grabbed Elpida’s wrist, and tore her out of her skin.

01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101
01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101
01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110110 01100101

01000101 01101100 01110000 01101001 01100100 01100001 00100001

Elpida tumbled head-first toward a floor of grey metal.

She didn’t know where she was or what was happening, and she didn’t have time to guess.

Training took over; she landed in a messy combat roll, tucking the stump of her right arm against her side to avoid bumping the wound site. She stopped herself with one boot against a curved grey wall. With a roll of her hips she got her legs beneath her and sprang to her feet, one fist up, head snapping left and right, assessing the situation.

Grey corridor, matte and dull, a tube of metal. One end was plugged by a circular iris, interior edges locked together like the steel teeth of a gigantic mechanical lamprey. The other end of the passageway curved off beyond sight. The space was illuminated from everywhere and nowhere; Elpida’s body cast no shadow, as if the matte grey substance of the tunnel produced light in a way the human eye could not comprehend.

Total silence, air stagnant and still; every breath made Elpida’s lungs feel odd, as if the pressure in here wasn’t right. She could hear her own heartbeat, the rush of blood in her veins, and the subtle creaking of her muscles.

No hostiles. Just—

“Howl!”

Howl was leaning against the opposite wall, heaving for breath, shaking the bloodied knuckles of her right fist. She was dressed in the simple black shorts and t-shirt so common to the cadre when off-duty.

A dent in the wall was smeared with blood and marked by the impact of Howl’s knuckles; it was rapidly self-repairing, smoothing itself out, absorbing the blood.

Howl straightened up and flashed a grin. Then she looked to one side, eyes flicking across the surface of the corridor.

“Fuck you!” Howl screeched. Elpida knew the words were not directed at her; Howl was speaking to something else. Howl gestured at Elpida, then at herself. “We come as a fucking pair! You hear me, you overgrown drilling machine?! If you try to separate us again, I’ll get inside you for real next time, I’ll find the bit of you that thinks and carve a hole in it, so I can shit right into your brains!”

Howl punctuated the threat by punching the wall again. Then she stumbled back, hissed with pain, and sucked on her bruised and bloody knuckles.

“Howl. You good?”

“Yeah yeah.” Howl’s head snapped up. “You know I’m never leaving you behind again, Elps. Fuck that. Never again.”

Elpida found a hard lump in her throat. She had only the vaguest idea what was going on, but she could take an educated guess, and she knew that Howl had saved her. The emotional backwash from her ‘final moments’ in the grip of the worm-guard still lingered, hot and tight behind her eyes.

“Howl,” Elpida said, and found her voice was strangely raw. “Thank you—”

“Don’t,” Howl snapped. “Or I’ll start crying and shit.”

“Understood,” Elpida said. She felt much the same. She pushed her emotions down, bottled them up tight, and focused on the moment. “We’re inside the network, yes? This is another simulation?”

Howl snorted, rolled her eyes, and flexed her bruised knuckles. “What gave that away?”

“The fact that I can see you,” Elpida said, then reached out with her left hand and squeezed Howl’s shoulder. “And touch you. Obviously.”

Howl put her bloodied hand over Elpida’s, then looked up at her and cracked a grin. “Hey you.”

Elpida felt a familiar, comforting, life-long stirring, deep in her chest, down in her belly, and between her legs. On her previous visit to the software space of the network she’d not had a quiet moment to spend with Howl, not between the confusion and the kidnapping and the revelations of her mother. But now, in the sudden silence and peace after the chaos out in reality, the urge struck her like a shot of adrenaline to the heart.

Howl looked good in shorts. The black fabric hugged her hips and thighs. The t-shirt clung tight to her slender chest, to the toned muscles of her torso. Her white hair stuck up in all directions, as it always did. Her purple eyes glittered with private mischief. She smelled of home, of sex, of the cadre, of all the things Elpida missed more than life itself.

“Hey,” she replied, voice lower than she’d intended. “Last time I saw you like this, you were bleeding from a gut wound. Are you doing okay?”

Howl lifted the hem of her t-shirt. A long angry red scar was slashed across her abdomen, where Perpetua had tried to have her cut open. “S’not real, course, but I wanted to keep it.”

Elpida nodded. “Right, right. Suits you.”

She squeezed Howl’s shoulder again, then forced herself to let go and step back. This was no time for self-indulgence.

Elpida glanced down at herself. She was wearing matching civvies — black shorts, t-shirt, and a pair of boots. Her right forearm was still missing even in software; the limb terminated in a mature wound site, skin neatly folded over, stitch-scars visible on the end of the stump.

When Elpida had thought she was dying, she had placed all her hopes and faith in Pheiri and the others. She had believed, totally and without reservation, that they would escape the Necromancers and outrun the worm-guard and go on without her. Now, in the peace and silence of the network, with Howl at her side, and her heart rate a steady normal, she was able to step back and allow herself the luxury of worry.

Pheiri could hold off a few worm-guard; he’d done so before, and Elpida had seen him do it. But a dozen? Or a hundred? Let alone a thousand. Pheiri was at the mercy of the graveworm’s immune system, no less than Elpida had been.

And she had no guarantee the Necromancers would fall for the trap. Too many unknowns.

“Right,” she said. “This isn’t real. Pheiri and the others are still fighting out there. How do we—”

“No sweat,” said Howl. “We’re running so fast it shouldn’t be possible, I can’t even measure the clock speed. Not even a quarter-second of real time has passed yet.” She rolled her eyes at the grey metal corridor again. “All this processing power, it’s fucking cheating.”

Elpida nodded. “We’re inside the graveworm.”

Howl hissed through clenched teeth and threw her hands out in a familiar old shrug that made Elpida’s heart ache. “Inside the worm’s network space, sure.” She reached out with a knuckle and rapped the grey metal wall. “Doubt this is what worm-bitch actually looks like down in the guts. This is just what it wants us to see. This whole space is so heavily fire-walled against the exterior network, it’s almost impenetrable. Nothing from out there can even see in here.”

“How did you get in?”

“I was invited,” Howl said. Her voice dropped, angry, disgusted. “You weren’t. Fucker was gonna talk to me and leave you in your body, leave you to die. I altered the deal, five knuckle discount style.”

Elpida felt another pang deep in her chest. She pushed it down. They didn’t have time for sex, and they didn’t have time for weeping. Or maybe they did, if Howl was right about the processing speed in here. Elpida felt wrong regardless; no matter how slowly time was passing out in the real, Pheiri and the others were fighting, second by second, and they needed her help. She was their Commander, they were her responsibility. Out there she could do almost nothing. But in here?

“Back up a second,” Elpida said. “We can’t communicate with the others, with Pheiri?”

Howl shrugged. “Sure, if you want to talk fuck-ass slowly. Wouldn’t want to hop back into your body right now though.”

“Ah.” Elpida pulled a rueful grin. “What’s happening to my body?”

“Getting some ribs snapped by a worm-guard, I think.”

Elpida sighed. “I’ve dealt with worse.” She glanced up and down the corridor, at the matte grey walls, at her own right hand. Everything felt crisp and clear and real, not like a simulation at all. “We really can’t get back?”

Howl gave her a smirk. “I’m not letting you go, bitch-tits.”

Elpida couldn’t help it, she smirked right back. “Right. So, the graveworm. It wants to talk to you, but not to me? Has it said anything yet?”

“Fuck knows.” Howl snorted. She gestured up and down the corridor. “You know as much as I do.”

Elpida thought for a moment, then pointed at the wall. “And beyond this, that’s the network, out there? In the raw, like you said?”

“Yuuuup. Raw like bad meat. Why?”

Elpida stepped forward and pressed her palm against the wall. The grey metal was warm to the touch, but not like the innards of Telokopolis, not like living flesh; it was a fleeting warmth that seemed to sap the natural heat from her hand, as if she were touching a fresh corpse with a little lingering body heat. The surface was too smooth to be real, so smooth that her hand seemed to glide without friction.

She pressed one ear against the wall and closed her eyes.

Beyond the metal, as distant as a storm beyond the sky, she heard the crashing of waves in a vast and unending cacophony. Leviathan shapes dragging their distended bulk across sand and rock and steel. A billion billion muffled voices, roaring and howling and screaming and cackling. Or maybe that was just her imagination.

“You don’t want to listen to that shit, Elps,” Howl muttered. “I know what it’s like out there. Don’t feel like going back.”

Elpida straightened up. “Just curious. I suppose we don’t have any choice then. If the worm wants to talk, then it’s time for a meeting, whatever’s happening to our physical body. Maybe we can convince it to help us more directly. I don’t like the idea of Pheiri facing down all those worm-guard.”

Howl sneered. “Yeah. We’re top processing priority in here right now, far as I can tell. Maybe we can slap it one.”

Elpida cracked a smirk, down at Howl. “Top priority? Should we feel honoured?”

“Fuck that,” Howl spat.

Elpida gestured down the corridor. “Only one way to go.” She looked at her empty hand. “But I don’t like doing this unarmed, even if we are running in software. This isn’t friendly territory. Can we arm up?”

Howl shook her head. “We’re in the worm, not you. This isn’t your software space, Elps.”

“Last time we were in the network, you got kidnapped by a Necromancer. Are you sure there’s no way to arm up?”

“I’m never leaving your fucking side again. We’ll be okay, you and me.”

“Mm.” Elpida flexed her left hand. “Fists and harsh language, then? I’m afraid you’ll have to pick up the slack, I’m short a few digits.”

Howl barked a laugh, cracked her knuckles, and nudged Elpida in the side. “I’m worth ten of your fists, Elps, and you know it.”

“You always were.”

Elpida and Howl gazed into each other’s eyes for a beat too long. Elpida felt that hitch in her chest again, that hot note down in her guts, that clenching between her legs.

Elpida broke first — or perhaps it was simply her height advantage. She grabbed Howl’s head, bent low toward Howl’s face, and mashed her lips against Howl’s mouth. The kiss was blunt and ugly and involved far too much teeth, but it was familiar and desperate and Howl responded in kind, moaning around Elpida’s tongue. One of Howl’s hands looped around Elpida’s waist and the other grabbed Elpida between the legs, kneading hard and urgent and rough, right on the edge of pain. Elpida grunted, pressing Howl’s body against her own, their clothes moving over each other’s skin, Howl’s scent filling her nose. That scent, the scent of her sisters, her cadre, her own body but subtly different, it made her ache with a nostalgia so strong it brought tears to the corners of her eyes.

After far too short a time, Elpida pulled herself off Howl’s face. She tried to step back, but Howl wouldn’t let go of her crotch.

“Elps … ” Howl’s voice was low and rough, her teeth clenched hard. Her eyes were wet.

“Howl,” Elpida said — then slipped into clade-cant without thinking, the private, instinctive, childhood language of the pilot cadre. “We can’t, not now—”

“Then when?” Howl grunted, also in cant. “You … you … back there, with that Necro bitch, you were gonna throw yourself—”

“I know, I know. But I couldn’t see any other way.”

Howl let out a low whine, deep in her throat, and pressed herself against Elpida’s body again, teeth against Elpida’s chest.

“Fuck, Howl,” Elpida breathed. “I thought we were about to be … parted, again, I-I don’t … ”

“You’re not allowed to do that again,” Howl growled into Elpida’s chest. Her other hand slipped up inside Elpida’s black t-shirt, nails against Elpida’s skin. “You’re not allowed to fucking throw yourself away. I won’t make it if you do.”

Elpida nodded. She knew she couldn’t make the promise, not with the demands of being Commander. But the physical contact, even simulated, brought everything into sharp focus. How could she leave this behind? How could she sacrifice this?

“Promise,” Howl said.

“You know I can’t.”

Howl growled — and bit down, harder than Elpida was expecting, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of Elpida’s chest. She grunted, but she didn’t peel Howl off.

“Howl. Maybe … maybe the graveworm is going to kill us anyway.”

Howl relented. “Then it’ll be both of us. Together. And we’ll go down fighting. Together.”

“Together.” Elpida swallowed hard, then gently pried Howl off her front. Howl whined and clung on, one hand kneading Elpida between the legs, so hard Elpida let out a deep, breathy grunt.

“Elps, please.”

“Not now,” Elpida forced herself to say. “The others need us more than we need this. Pheiri needs us. You know we wouldn’t enjoy it, not while everyone else is fighting. Howl. Stop. Please. I love you, but we can’t.”

Howl hissed through her teeth, but she let go. She looked up at Elpida, sullen and sulky. “Fuck, Elps. Speak for yourself. I could.”

Elpida took a deep breath. Lust and grief and fear were all mixed up in a cocktail inside her brain. She eased them back down, swallowing the lot. It wasn’t easy. Howl’s taste lingered in her mouth.

“We have to learn how to do this ourselves,” she said. “How to enter the network, I mean.”

Howl shook herself, shaking off the arousal. “We don’t have enough processing power. Not without hijacking somebody else. Whatever.” She huffed. “You’re right, I guess. I’d feel like shit, shagging while Pheiri’s fleeing. Can’t fuck while our little bro is in danger, right?”

“Right.” Elpida nodded. She gestured forward with two fingers, down the curve of the grey metal corridor. “Let’s move out. Clock’s ticking.”

“Got your back, Commander.” Howl patted Elpida’s backside, flashed her a smirk, and fell in beside her.

The tube-like metal corridor did not extend far. After about fifty meters of rightward curve, away from the exterior ‘skin’ of this software simulation of the graveworm, the passage terminated in a bulbous chamber about twenty feet across. The walls were made of the same matte grey, smooth and rounded and globular, with no corners or angles anywhere, like an abscess in frozen metallic flesh or an air pocket in a block of lead. The chamber walls bulged out in a strangely regular pattern. Elpida’s eyes started to water when she stared for too long, though she was certain the pattern held some kind of meaning, just that she couldn’t see it with her eyes, as if this space had been cut for interpretation by non-human minds.

A dozen metal iris-doors led off from the chamber, all of them closed.

“Graveworm!” Howl shouted. “Hey, bitch-nuts! Where now, huh?”

One of the circular doors irised open with a slick wet sound like oiled metal moving across fresh bone. Beyond the door was another smooth, tube-like corridor, the walls pitted and ridged and bulging. The corridor led directly away from the worm’s exterior hide, deeper inside the structure.

“If this is an accurate representation of the inside of the graveworm,” Elpida said, “then any core components might be very deep inside. This could be hours of walking.”

“It’s not,” Howl growled. “But I don’t fucking like it. You hear that?” She raised her voice, shouting at the walls. “I don’t fucking like this! If you’re messing with us, I’m gonna mess you up!”

“We don’t have a choice. Come on.”

Elpida led the way.

Over the next hour of subjective time the worm led them deeper and deeper inside itself. The corridors did not seem cut for human traversal, nor adapted for human feet, not like the inners parts of Telokopolis. The tube-like passageways twisted and turned, looping and winding, doubling back on themselves in maddening hairpin meanders. In some places they widened or tightened with no rhyme or reason — yet always with a curious symmetry that tickled Elpida’s memories. The floors were often just as curved as the walls, uneven underfoot, full of strange pockets and holes in regular lines or clusters. The graveworm led Elpida and Howl by means of the iris-like metal doors, opening them to indicate the correct path.

Always down, always deeper.

Alone, this environment would have been unnerving, even for Elpida. The blind corners, the absolute silence, the unbroken dull grey, the oddly hot scent in the still and stagnant air, the illumination that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Unarmed and empty-handed, with her mind on Pheiri and the others, these conditions would have taxed even Elpida’s formidable nerves.

Howl’s physical presence made everything easier. She covered Elpida’s weak side — her right, with the missing forearm — without request or instruction. She moved in silence and grace, a mirror of Elpida’s own body. She paused when Elpida paused, moved when Elpida moved, and covered whatever angle Elpida was not watching, without the slightest confusion or hesitation. When they did need to communicate they did so in rapid-fire clade-cant whispers, chopped up fragments that carried the meaning of whole sentences.

Elpida and Howl fit together like one person in two bodies. Elpida had missed this feeling more than anything, perhaps even more than her sisters’ touch, or scent, or sex. This seamless oneness, this group-mind, this sisterhood.

Eventually, after fifty eight minutes and twenty three seconds of descent, the graveworm opened a final iris-portal, and disgorged the Telokopolan pilots onto the shores of a lake.

Elpida halted. Howl followed. They both stared in silence.

The chamber was vast, but the perspective was not meant for human eyes. Omnipresent grey illumination left the ceiling visible despite the immense height, high enough to fit a mountain. The chamber was longer than it was wide, the far ends miles distant, as if they stood inside an elongated cave system. The effect made Elpida’s eyes ache and tugged at her peripheral vision. Oval-shaped openings in the walls showed dozens more similar chambers, marching off into the distance. Slender bridges of matte grey metal crisscrossed the chamber and the others beyond the walls, branching and arching more like biological fibres than anything manufactured.

Dominating the middle of the chamber, ringed by a narrow strip of navigable grey metal, softly glowing with familiar blue temptation, was a lake.

Raw blue nanomachines.

“How much do you think is in there?” Elpida murmured.

“Fuck knows,” Howl snapped. “This one cistern, maybe … a hundred thousand cubic klicks? Two hundred thousand? All of them combined, I don’t … I dunno, Elps. Fuck me.”

Elpida walked down to the edge of the liquid. A crust of crystallised blue crunched beneath her boots. She squatted and ran her fingers over the crusty residue, then stuck a fingertip in her mouth. The blue crystals melted on her tongue, but tasted of nothing much in particular.

She stared into the softly glowing lake. It lay perfectly still against the shore of grey metal, vanishing into sapphire depths. Then she looked up, at the soaring ceiling and the web of grey bridges and the dozens of chambers beyond this one, marching off into the distance. She spotted more of the dry residue, far up the sides of the chamber.

Howl crunched up beside her, scooped some of the blue into a hand, and drank from her cupped palm. “Tastes like shit,” she grunted.

“I think these are only partially filled right now,” said Elpida. “There are waterlines higher up.”

“Fuuuuuck,” Howl hissed.

“We knew the worms contain nanomachine forges,” Elpida said, though she struggled to keep her voice steady. “This isn’t new information.”

“Think about it, though. Imagine!” Howl made a fist. “Imagine if you could crack just one worm. Just one. It would change everything out there. The whole fucking ecosystem. This is enough to … fuck, I don’t even know! Feed the whole fucking zombie planet!”

“Pity we’re not really here. We could drink up,” Elpida said. This wasn’t her real body, so she felt no hunger, no need to gorge herself on the raw blue. The nanomachines weren’t real either, this was just a simulation, a representation. She stood up, then paused and frowned. “Howl, are you sure this isn’t a literal representation of the inside of the graveworm?”

Howl shrugged. “Fuck knows. Might be. I dunno anymore. Maybe it really is all stored like this.”

“Maybe,” Elpida said. “Or maybe this is what it wants us to see.”

“Eh? Why?”

“Power,” said Elpida. “In the nanomachine ecosystem, this is power beyond anything else. It’s flexing at us.”

Howl showed her teeth. “Catty bitch.”

“Easy,” Elpida murmured. “It’s the one in control here. Just tread easy, Howl.”

Howl snorted.

On the far side of the chamber, an iris-door swivelled open.

Elpida led the way across one of the narrow bridges of grey metal, arcing out over the glowing blue lake. Howl stuck close to her side, eyes glued on the open portal. They descended together toward the opposite side of the lake, then stopped before the circular opening.

Beyond was darkness, shadows thick as treacle, and a weak electric blue flicker somewhere in the distance.

“Fucking hate this,” Howl hissed. “Fucking bullshit. Come out and talk to us, you massive cunt.”

“We have no choice,” Elpida said. “Stay sharp.”

“Don’t have to tell me that.”

Howl went first, edging over the threshold. Elpida stayed closed, to avoid any risk of the door closing early and cutting them off from each other. They tiptoed forward, together into the darkness.

They both cleared the threshold. The door irised shut with a grinding of oiled metal.

The dimensions of the dark room were impossible to estimate. By the tiny sounds of Elpida’s and Howl’s feet against the metal floor, the walls could be just as far away as the vastness of the lake-chamber. But, dead ahead, perhaps no more than thirty feet away, a glowing rectangle hung in the black — a screen, a standard display, flickering with soft electric blue glow.

“Graveworm?” Elpida said. “Graveworm? Are you here?”

Elpida’s boot brushed against something on the floor, made it crinkle and crackle — a discarded food wrapper. A moment earlier the floor had been bare, more blank matte grey. But now it was littered with food cartons, discarded clothes, pieces of naked computer hardware, and bottles of yellow liquid. The mess vanished off into the black, seemingly endless. Suddenly the air reeked of unwashed flesh, stale urine, and mouldy food.

“S’not real,” Howl hissed between her teeth. “Simulation, remember?”

“Right,” Elpida hissed. “But representing what?”

The screen ahead flickered and jerked, filling with lines of machine code, glowing that softly radioactive blue. In front of the screen, a dark shape shifted, passing through the faint light.

“Graveworm?” Elpida hissed.

“A worm in a grave,” muttered a despondent voice. Female, rough and raw, age impossible to place. It seemed to come from everywhere, echoing from the vast reaches of the room, but also whispered from a dipped chin, up a dry throat, through cracked lips. “That’s all we are anymore, isn’t it? Grubbing in grave dirt, hoping to find somebody still inside the coffin.”

The voice sighed.

“Graveworm,” Elpida said. “You wanted to talk. We’re here.”

The shape in front of the display shifted again. Strands of hair moved across the light source. Was that a face, or just a trick of the shadows? The figure tilted her head to one side, cracking her neck so loudly it would have made a baseline human flinch. Echoes crawled away into the dark.

“Not you, soldier,” said the graveworm. “You’re no more real than before.”

Another screen flickered to life, adjacent to the first. Then another, on the opposite side. Then a third, above. Then another, and another, and another. Screens spiralled outward, lighting up one after the other with that same soft blue electric glow. The array of screens climbed upward and spread out, becoming dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions. They curved toward Elpida and Howl like the inner surface of a giant radar dish.

The illumination barely touched the figure in the middle, still crouched before the initial screen. But Elpida could see an outline now — an emaciated thing, knees pulled up to her chest, hair a long ragged mane, tangled and knotted.

“You,” said the graveworm. “Howl. You’re the one I wanted to speak to. You smell like her.” The voice grew raw, desperate, quivering. “You smell of her. You do. I’d remember her scent anywhere, even after all this time, all this failure. And you’re not faking it. I can tell.”

The gigantic curve of screens filled with machine code, then resolved into a series of concentric circles, blue and grey and black.

And blinked.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

And we’re back! My apologies once again for the unplanned 2-week break; everything should be back to normal now, all my ducks in a row.

Elpida and Howl, on the other hand, are probably less than chuffed to have their minds temporarily(???) uploaded to a graveworm’s intestinal system. But at least the contents are nice and blue, rather than grey and brown (ew). Pity they can’t drink as much as they want! But what’s that the graveworm smells on Howl? Mysterious …

Behind the scenes, arc 16 is going to be longer than I expected. I think we’ll be going to 13-14 chapters, at current estimate. So, keep your hands and feet inside the ride, lest a sneaky zombie gnaw on your exposed fingers and toes.

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

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Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And thank you! Thank you for being here and reading my little story; even after all this weight of narrative, it still means so much me that so many people out there are enjoying Necroepilogos. None of this story could happen without you, watching from the skies and beneath the earth and perhaps even from beyond the stars. Seeya next chapter. Until then!

Necroepilogos is on a one-time two-week break! There will be no Necroepilogos chapter on the 13th of November; chapters will resume as normal on the 20th of November! There will also be a double-chapter post sometime in the next few weeks to make up for this! If you want all the reasons why, please see this public patreon post I made, (but you don’t have to, it’s really not very interesting.)

Sorry about this! Everything will return to normal shortly.

Content Warnings

None this chapter.
(Except gore, which, you know. As usual.)

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The Iron Raven — unpained and untouched by Howl’s network permissions — flexed her mutilated arm, the one Shilu had hacked off. The shredded remains of the severed limb jerked and twitched where it lay on Pheiri’s bone-armoured hull; black flesh deliquesced into oily silver flux, flowed across the deck like boiling mercury, and climbed the Necromancer’s leg, to rejoin her body.

Her arm sprouted anew, swelling from the ragged stump in branches of tendon and columns of bone, quickly sheathed in black iron flesh. The arm had too many elbows now, and the fist sported half a dozen extra claws.

“Perpetua warned you, huh?” Howl said through Elpida’s throat. “That jilted cow?”

“Forewarned and forsworn,” the Iron Raven croaked and whistled from deep inside her massive black beak. She twisted her restored arm, flexing her talons. “Pain is for the dead. Means you, ghost-shit.”

Howl snorted through Elpida’s clenched teeth. “Guess we can’t just pump and dump you, huh? You need wining and dining before you’re ready for my ride? High-maintenance cunt isn’t really my type.”

The Necromancer’s black talons sang with vibration as she spread her arms wide, preparing to crush Elpida’s head between her fists. Her beak was incapable of expression, but her matching black eyes twinkled with cruel finality. She clenched her taloned feet, scraping against Pheiri’s armour, towering over Elpida, over Howl, rising taller against the mottled grey background of the graveworm.

“Dead have no types!” croaked the Raven. “Dead is dead is dead!”

Howl ripped Elpida’s face into a grin. “Guess we gotta do you rough, you fucking lawn dart!”

The Iron Raven screeched like a bird of prey wrought from molten metal; her taloned fists arced inward, black knives leaving smeared streaks in the air, singing like tortured throats. Howl barked a laugh right in her face, then dived aside, ducking and twisting away from the screaming claws. She landed in a loose combat roll, amputated arm tucked tight to Elpida’s side.

Howl rolled well and landed better, but Elpida still felt the impact — jarring and juddering as Pheiri raced onward, the deck bucking and lurching and rising up to meet her face. A strangled grunt was trapped in her throat, pinned by her loss of control.

Elpida was a passenger in her own body. The Necromancer’s revenant interdiction permissions still held, or else Serin would still be firing. Without Howl piloting her body, Elpida would be frozen too. Pheiri carried them all toward an uncertain salvation, and Howl carried Elpida, for as long as they could buy time. The comms headset was dead too, silenced by Necromancer permissions. Elpida and Howl were on their own.

Howl jackknifed Elpida’s body back to her feet and almost overbalanced as Pheiri’s hull slewed to one side, skidding on a current of storm-water and concrete slurry beneath his tracks.

Shilu leapt forward to resume her duel with the Iron Raven. Black-steel arm-blades met the Raven’s talons with a clash of metal, scraping and whirling, chopping and stabbing. The Raven’s talons woke into a whirlwind of slashing and slamming and pounding and punching.

Howl! Elpida snapped inside her own head. What happened? What was that?

She’s hardened the others! Howl snarled. Perpetua! She must have dug through her own permissions, figured out what I’d changed. Fuck, fuck! She shouldn’t have been able to do that!

Shilu carved steaming chunks of metal and meat from the Raven’s body — slices of arm muscle, slabs of metallic flesh, handfuls of splintered bone from within. But every chunk of Necro-flesh turned to oily silver liquid and rejoined the Raven’s main body a second later; every stab wound and deep laceration closed in the blink of an eye. The Iron Raven forced Shilu back step by grinding step, then landed a haymaker punch on Shilu’s gut, all spikes and talons. That blow would have disembowelled a zombie. Shilu grunted with the impact, sliding back across the shifting deck, scrambling to keep her footing. Her black metal abdomen and chest were dented and warped, bowing inward.

The Iron Raven spread her massive gangly arms and clacked her beak up and down, snap snap snap. “Necromancer no-more never-more! What you were before, you weren’t very good at it!”

Shilu leapt for the Raven once again, weaving and ducking and dodging, slipping beneath the Necromancer’s guard, slicing and cutting and carving.

“Shilu!” Howl shouted through Elpida’s mouth. “Shilu, don’t—”

Howl, Elpida cut in, quick and calm. Don’t distract Shilu, she’s buying us time.

Time for what!? Howl spat. Time for us to get—

Time for a plan, Elpida snapped, voice hard with command. Sometimes even Howl needed external certainty. Keep moving, withdraw toward the hatch, but don’t go inside. If we can keep that Necro out here, hunting us, that buys more time for the others. There’s a pistol in my left—

Pocket, yeah, got it, got it!

Howl drew Elpida’s pistol with her left hand. The weapon lacked stopping power, certainly against a Necromancer, but it was better than nothing. More importantly it gave Howl something to do.

Howl withdrew toward the hatch with little hopping footsteps, bouncing on the balls of Elpida’s feet; her balance was bad, all wrong for the size of Elpida’s body, made worse by the uneven footing as Pheiri accelerated across the broken landscape, his hull bouncing and lurching, the deck tilting as he mounted drifts of concrete and descended the slopes of shattered structures. Howl raised the pistol in Elpida’s hand and pumped off three bullets toward the Iron Raven; all three rounds slammed through black iron flesh and tore a mess of blood and black ichor out of the Necromancer’s back. But the wounds closed in an eye-blink. Lost biomass flowed back into position moments later.

This Necromancer was not running limited, nor reeling under the burden of pain, nor trammelled by the network. They needed an advantage, and they needed it fast.

Howl, can you break the software hardening? Whatever Perpetua taught her—

Fuck yeah I can, but we don’t have enough time! Give me like six hours and sure, I’ll have that oversized magpie screaming for your fingers up her cunt, but we don’t have six minutes, let alone six hours!

Howl kept backing up, but the hatch was near. The Iron Raven was hammering Shilu down like a crooked nail. One of Shilu’s arm-blades was bent, the other was chipped from where the Raven’s talons had cut into the metal. Shilu’s expression showed no change, always that white mask, but her eyes were wide with effort.

Pheiri’s missile pods and autocannons were still twitching as they tried to get a bead on the Iron Raven. But unloading his weapons directly into his own armour could cause catastrophic damage. He would probably survive, but not without potentially lethal wounds.

Twelve feet in either direction and Pheiri could engage the Necro himself, Elpida said. All we have to do is draw her one way or the other.

Howl growled with frustration. Shit, yeah, you’re right! She’s torn herself a blind spot!

Can you break the physical interdiction on Serin? On the drones?

Howl hissed between her teeth. Not without leaving your body. And then only by like, jumping into Serin. And she can’t do anymore than we can, can she?

Elpida tried to think. They needed more firepower, and they needed it right now. Once the Raven overcame Shilu, she would cut through Elpida and Howl like wet paper, and she’d be down inside Pheiri within seconds. There was almost nothing between her and the others, between the Necromancer and Pheiri’s insides.

Shit, Elps! Howl said. We gotta shut the hatch, at least make her dig for it!

Elpida couldn’t help herself; for a split-second she imagined Pheiri opened up, a wound right through his superstructure, laying his innards exposed to the pursuing Necromancers. She imagined his crew — her new cadre, her comrades, her friends — peeled out of his shell by Necromancer talons. She imagined the meat-plant project, the one revolutionary possibility they had kindled, dashed into the storm-waters and trodden into the broken concrete.

She imagined the zombies they had helped and fed, discovering Pheiri’s broken corpse.

Elps. Howl’s voice was shaking. No—

We have no choice. While Shilu is still in the fight, we take the Necro from the side. Shoulder charge, full body weight. If we can knock her off her feet, my body weight alone should be enough carry her at least ten feet, maybe more, maybe—

You’ll fucking die!

But Pheiri won’t. The others won’t. And you won’t either, Howl. You leave my head before it happens, before Pheiri has to open up with his guns. Go into one of the others. Victoria will understand you.

Elps, no! Come on, I can … I can leave your head right now, dive into the network and … and duel this bitch myself!

You’d die, Howl. We both know that.

Howl keened through clenched teeth, inside Elpida’s head. What, it’s me or you, Elps!? No, fuck no, come on there’s gotta be—

Howl. Charge her. Do it now, before the Necro overpowers Shilu. This is our only opening.

I … I can’t! Elpida, I can’t … I don’t want to … to lose—

This is an order, Elpida said. It’s one of us, or it’s Pheiri and everyone. I choose myself. Spend me, Howl. Spend me for Telokopolis.

Howl stopped retreating. She jammed the pistol back in Elpida’s pocket; Elpida’s left hand was shaking. She gritted Elpida’s teeth and raised Elpida’s one remaining fist. She opened her mouth and howled at the top of her lungs.

“Telokopolis is forever!”

Shilu was forced down to one knee, swaying with each impact, her chest and face scored with dozens of claw-marks. Howl broke into a sprint, running Elpida’s body directly at the collapsing duel, at the Iron Raven.

The Raven landed one final side-swipe on Shilu, connecting a barbed fist with her upper torso. Shilu’s strength gave out, one arm buckled; the impact slammed her aside. Shilu crashed against an outcrop of Pheiri’s bone-armour with a clatter of loose metal.

The Iron Raven looked up at Elpida — at Howl, racing right for her. The black beak opened in a lipless laugh. Howl opened Elpida’s mouth and roared a war cry.

Elpida felt tears on her cheeks.

Howl? I—

A side-swipe shock-wave of noise and heat and pressure almost knocked Howl off Elpida’s feet.

A volley of firepower ripped past on Elpida’s right, anti-materiel rounds and energy bolts and plasma spheres, close enough to singe the tips of her hair and nip the trailing edge of her armoured coat.

The sudden barrage slammed into the Iron Raven, chewing through flesh, burning away meat, pulping her innards, and almost punching her head off her neck. The Necromancer tried to adapt, letting solid-shot rounds pass through her body, regenerating the damage from the energy bolts so fast that her flesh crawled and squirmed like a carpet of maggots. But the two kinds of firepower worked in tandem, outrunning the Necromancer’s nanomachine biology, forcing her back and forth between biochemical strategies too fast to enjoy the benefits of either one.

Howl and Elpida skidded to a halt and scrambled aside, lest they cross the stream of firepower.

A giant stepped past them, dressed in robe and rag, in bulletproof plates and curtains of fabric, wrapped in liquid armour and shifting cuttlefish-camouflage, topped with a eyeless black helmet, pouring firepower into the Necromancer from a massive rifle and a quartet of chrome-and-black energy weapons, held in six massive arms.

Hafina, armoured up and armed for Necro.

Howl barked a laugh through Elpida’s lips. “Fuck yeah, android girl! You shove that rifle up her fucking arse!”

A softer crack-crack-crack-crack came from behind Elpida, back by the hatch. Melyn, tiny grey-faced head poking out from behind the paralysed Serin, taking aim with a lightweight handgun.

Pheiri’s original organic infantry support.

Inorganic you mean, ha! Howl spat.

But for all Hafina’s incredible hand-held firepower, the Necromancer only skidded back a few feet. Her black talons dug into Pheiri’s hide, anchoring her against the torrent of bullets and bolts. She lost biomass in a swelling tide of shredded flesh, arcing out behind her in loops and streams of blood and guts and iron-black meat — but it all returned as quickly as it was torn away, flowing back in airborne arcs of silver fluid.

She regenerated as fast as Hafina could destroy her. Howl drew Elpida’s pistol and added her tiny contribution, emptying the magazine at the Necromancer’s chest.

The Iron Raven took a single step forward, talons cutting into Pheiri’s bone-armour, striding into the barrage as if walking into the wind.

“You can’t fire forever, robot!” she whistled at Hafina. “Cut you, gut you, eat your shiny chrome inner-parts! Twelve more paces!”

“Nah,” said Hafina — and stopped firing.

The Iron Raven tumbled forward with inertia, loops of flesh and bio-matter sucking back inside her, head snapping up in surprise.

A pair of tiny grey streaks slammed into her from the side while she was off balance — two of Kagami’s miniature gravitic drones, hitting her with their gravity projection fields at full power.

The Necromancer was thrown aside as if hit by Pheiri himself. A blur of black iron flesh shot between Pheiri’s weapon mounts and out into open space. For a split-second she was a comet of metal and limbs and ragged skin, trailing streamers of crimson blood and blackened meat.

A dozen of Pheiri’s weapon systems opened up, blotting out the Necromancer with sheer weight of firepower. His shields blinked out for a split-second with a concussive snap of pressure, to allow the Necromancer’s tumbling form to pass through. The shields flashed back into position with a crackle of static and a flicker of bright white fire.

The Iron Raven crashed to the ground, fifty feet out. Pheiri kept her pinned with autocannon fire, churning the rubble with missiles, pounding the Necromancer into the broken concrete and dirty water. The pulped crater dwindled as Pheiri sped away.

Elpida took a deep breath as the network interdiction lifted. Howl released her control.

“Shouldn’t do everything on your own, Elpida,” Hafina said from inside her helmet. “Gotta axe for help. Get it? Axe. Heh.”

“Thank you, Haf,” Elpida said. “Thank you for the assist.”

“Kaga helped too. With the droneys. Nice little things.”

Elps, Howl hissed inside Elpida’s head. This was temporary, this shit isn’t going to hold for long.

The comms headset crackled back to life; Elpida keyed the receiver. “Kagami?”

“Commander! Fucking hell!” Kagami screeched down the internal uplink. “You fucking suicidal dirt-sucking—”

“Kagami, I need you to focus. Right now.”

A sharp intake of breath, but Kagami just let it back out again. “Fine. Focusing. Get on with it.”

“Pheiri, you alright?”

Three soft pings instead of just one. Elpida had never heard Pheiri do that before.

“He’s fine,” Kagami growled. “Surface level armour damage, second degree. He’ll need to draw on his own nanomachine reserves for repair, but he’ll be fine.”

“Good. Thank you for the firepower, Pheiri.”

Another three pings. A pause. Then one more.

Elpida took stock. Serin was still crouched in the open hatch, lowering her rifle, though Melyn was gone again, back down inside. Hafina was helping Shilu to her feet. The ex-Necromancer’s body was slowly fixing itself, claw-gouges slicking shut, dents filling out. The two small drones were nowhere to be seen, presumably pulled back down inside by Kagami. The two surviving heavy drones wobbled into the air on their own much weaker gravitic engines, then turned and headed for the hatch.

The deck still lurched and swayed with Pheiri’s progress through the shattered corpse-city, threatening to toss Elpida from her feet with one wrong step. Stalks of black mold towered over Pheiri’s hull now, their tips spreading into glistening branches of black frills and fluffy fronds. It reminded Elpida of the edge of the green.

Dead ahead, the graveworm consumed more of the sky with every second — a metal wall as high as the world, ridged and whorled in tiny patterns miles across.

“Kagami,” Elpida said quickly. “Any sign of the worm-guard?”

“No, nothing, shit all!” Kagami snapped over the comms. “And the Necromancers are still gaining on us. That one I just pasted, she’s already getting back up and growing fucking wings again. Commander, we’re not going to make it to the graveworm!”

She’s right, Elps, Howl hissed. One was bad enough. What do we do? Come on, what do we do?

Elpida gazed out at the graveworm’s hide, at the jagged line swallowing the sky.

We talk.

… eh?

Elpida rounded on the others, raising her voice over the cry of the wind beyond Pheiri’s shields, over the roar of his tracks and the crunch and grind of shattered concrete. “Everyone else back down inside! Get back inside!”

“Not on your life, Elpida,” Hafina said.

Shilu staggered forward and shook her head. “Plan?”

From the open hatch, Serin just shrugged, but at least she stayed put.

Elpida almost laughed. “Right then. There won’t be much to see though. Come on.”

She headed forward, to the front of Pheiri’s deck, where she could look out over his prow. She didn’t have the time to enforce her orders, and if anybody was safe out here it was a Necromancer and one of Pheiri’s original crew. The deck listed and lurched beneath her feet as she hurried across the pitted, scarred, bony surface.

“Kaga,” she said into the comms headset. “Put me on the tightbeam.”

“What? Commander?”

“My voice, on the tightbeam. Can you do that from this headset?” Elpida reached the front of the deck, where Pheiri’s hull began to slope downward. She kept low and found a good grip on a gnarl of his armour. Hafina and Shilu stopped a few paces back, grabbing their own handholds.

Pheiri’s prow crashed and smashed through the debris of the storm, splashing through streams and pools of filthy water, cutting through the masses of black mold creeping and crawling over every surface, swerving left and right to avoid the thickest copses of sprouting stalks. His front was filthy with fresh muck, concrete grit, and pulverised black goop.

“Done,” Kagami said. “Where am I broadcasting? You want to negotiate with the Necromancers? It might be more difficult than you—”

“Point me at the worm.”

A second of silence. “What?”

“The worm,” Elpida repeated. “Point me at the graveworm, broadcast my voice.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but it’s the size of a mountain range! Where exactly am I pointing you?! Do you have some insight to share? Does it have a fucking radar dish at one end? This is a serious question, because I don’t know—”

“Sweep the beam back and forth. You’re the expert. Whatever you have to do to get my voice through.”

“Didn’t you say it’s probably dead—”

“Do it, Kaga. Now.”

A moment’s pause. “Alright. You’re live. Good luck. Don’t fuck up first contact, or whatever the hell this is.”

Elpida raised her eyes and looked up at the leviathan bulk of the graveworm, the line of grey mountain across the horizon, the tsunami of imperishable metal falling forever on the nanomachine ecosystem.

“Heeeeeeey!” She raised her voice, shouting as if her words would carry on the wind. “Heeeey, graveworm! It’s me! You remember me? Elpida? That’s my name! Elpida! You spoke to me back in the tomb. You remember that? The tomb where we all woke up! You do remember me, I know you must do, and I remember you scratching around inside my head. Heeeey! Heeeey!”

Howl took over Elpida’s lips for a moment: “Wake up, you dozy cunt! Wake the fuck up! Wake up! Fuck you, wake up!”

Howl?

If it’s not dead, it’s sleeping! Howl cackled. Why not? If this is our best chance, count me in.

“Wake up!” Elpida took up the chant. “Wake up! Wake up, graveworm! Wake up! The storm is over, wake—”

Mmmmmmmm …

A rumble inside Elpida’s head, from a dry, cracked, sleep-clogged throat.

Howl, Elpida said. That wasn’t you?

Nuh uh!

“I can hear you, graveworm!” Elpida shouted into her headset again. “Wake up! Rise and shine, right now! I know you can hear me! You better wake up, or I’m gonna keep shouting in your ear. Pay attention!”

Mmmm … the voice grumbled again. What … what is this?

Elpida felt a tingle in the back of her neck, up her scalp, behind her eyes. The worm was broadcasting directly into her neural lace.

“It’s me!” Elpida shouted. “Elpida. Me and my friends, my comrades, my cadre. You remember me, graveworm? You remember us? Don’t tell me you don’t!”

A moment of silence. A distant wind, like a giant’s breath. Then: Huuuugggnnh. Mm. Mmhmm. The soldier. Still out there, dead thing?

It sounded surprised and exhausted, but ultimately not very interested.

“Still up, still breathing, still here,” said Elpida. “What about you? You alive over there?”

No less than you, zombie. Which means, not much. But then again, none of us ever were, were we? Always rotting, even when alive.

Elpida could barely believe this was working. The graveworm — or what had appeared to be the graveworm, at the time — had spoken to her once before, shortly after she and the others had awoken in the tomb, when they had descended into the tomb’s armoury and disturbed the gravekeeper. The worm had seemed just as dismissive then, but perhaps more scornful. It had not spoken to her since.

“I’m not in the mood for a philosophical debate,” Elpida said into her comms headset. “You’ve been sleeping on the job, graveworm. Where are your guards, your minions, your—”

Sleeping? Sleeping … yes … the voice murmured. All that rain outdoors. Such heavy raindrops. Went on for so long, as long as it used to. Reminded me of before …

So many questions were poised on Elpida’s tongue. Had the worm once been a human being, a living person, before resurrection? Was this a memory of life?

But she couldn’t spare the time. “The rain is over,” she said. “It’s time to wake up. Look around! Your guards are nowhere to be seen, your—”

Do you control your cells? Your immune system? I’m as much a passenger in this as you are, dead thing. The voice chuckled, soft and wet and clotted with mucus. You were a soldier, you should understand that.

“There are seven Necromancers closing on your hide, worm!” Elpida shouted. “We’re leading them right to you, and if you don’t wake up and start moving, we’re all going to be on you soon enough!”

Necromancers? Mmm. You assume they can even scratch my skin. They’re nothing, they’re as small as you, just as—

Howl grabbed Elpida’s mouth: “Come down here and help us, you giant metal turd!”

A moment of silence. Hmmmm? Soldier within a soldier. Curious. Where did you come from—

“From my mother’s arms!” Howl screeched. “From the womb of Telokopolis! Fuck you, graveworm! Wake the fuck up and send your shit-eating gremlins against the bitches behind us, or I’ll come back in something big, real big, and then I’ll crack your shell and eat your brains!”

… her scent, on your breath.

The graveworm’s inner voice cut off with a deep intake of breath. Elpida felt a tingle across her scalp — and then heard a distant rumble, not inside her head, but out there in the world of meat and concrete.

A ripple passed through the air, through the ground, a shaking that overpowered even the bumping and lurching of Pheiri’s hull.

The jagged line against the sky, the wall at the edge of the world, the naked metal hide of the graveworm — moved.

It rose, rotating away from Pheiri’s course, the nearest side lifting by what must have been mile after mile of grey metal. Concrete and water spilled from the whorls and spirals in giant cascades of loose matter, crashing to the ground with a distant roaring. The world itself seemed to shrug and shift. All of Elpida’s experience and training and genetic hardening had not prepared her for this feeling, for the sight of something so large rolling over at the edge of slumber.

She was paralysed for just a moment, gazing up at a true giant in motion.

She could not help but compare. What if Telokopolis could take her skirts in hand, and walk free upon the earth?

Kagami’s voice broke in over the comms: “Commander! Elpida! I don’t know how you did that, but there’s … there’s a lot of worm-guard! I can’t even— Pheiri can’t—”

“Understood!” Elpida whirled around and pointed at Shilu and Hafina. “Back inside, right now!”

Shilu said, “Help is on the way?”

Howl laughed through Elpida’s mouth. “Help, yeah, sure! Let’s call it that! Inside, now!”

Elpida hurried back across Pheiri’s outer deck, heading for the top hatch. Serin waited there, squeezing aside for Shilu and Hafina to pass. Elpida paused and looked into Serin’s glowing red bionic eyes.

“Coh-mander … ” she rasped — but Serin wasn’t looking at Elpida. She was looking past her, over her shoulder, with a wince of pain in her eyes.

Elpida looked back at the metal horizon.

A ripple of visual distortion was flowing out across the landscape, racing to meet Pheiri. Scribbles of scrambled static flickered and smeared across the grey concrete and black mold, burning Elpida’s eyes, as if her optic nerve was glitching out. Her head swam, her eyes stung, and Howl hissed with sympathetic pain. She scrubbed tears out of her eyes.

In the second it took Elpida to clear her vision, the visual distortions filled the landscape, blurring everything, rising like a rushing wave, rising up and over, cresting over Pheiri and the Necromancers in pursuit.

Worm-guard. Dozens or hundreds or thousands.

Elpida grabbed Serin by the arm and bundled her down inside Pheiri, hurrying after her, onto the metal steps of the narrow little stairwell. She turned and grabbed the edge of the top hatch, to slam it shut, to seal up Pheiri’s innards against the rising tide.

A wall of static filled her field of vision, as if already crouched on Pheiri’s hull.

Her eyes burned like fire in her face, watering hot, stabbing into her head and blurring her thoughts. Howl roared with pain and frustration. Her extremities were going numb. Her vision was turning to white snow and black static. Kagami was shouting in her ear, somebody was calling ‘Commander!’ behind her, somebody else was grabbing her shoulders, trying to haul her back — but she had to shut the hatch. She had to protect Pheiri.

Elpida got her left hand around the hatch handle. She pulled.

A cluster of tendrils flickered out from within the cloud of scratchy static and wormed past the open hatch.

The worm-guard grabbed Elpida around the waist, grip hard as steel cables, wrapping her tight.

And then it tore her free, tore her from Pheiri’s innards, and hauled her aloft.

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Wormy wormy wormy worms, wriggling in the deep dark soil, and apparently sending out their sense-jamming distributed immune systems to pick up their favorite zombies, like cracking open a gacha capsule! Uh oh! Looks like that means you, Elpida!

Mwahahaha! Ahem. Um. Not much else to say this chapter, except that things are wild behind the scenes right now. This arc is going places that I didn’t expect to go until quite a bit later in the story, in fact, which has caused some interesting reshuffles. You’ll see the result soon enough! For now though, arc 16 continues onward, at least another few chapters. And after that, an interlude is lurking …

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And thank you! Thank you, to all the readers and audience and fans of Necroepilogos. I know I say it every time, but I genuinely could not do any of this without all of you. The zombies would have nobody to watch them! Elpida would be left alone in the dark. So really, you are the nanomachine fuel in the revenant veins. Thank you! And I will see you next chapter. Until then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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Pheiri gunned his engines — nuclear heartbeat pounding in his guts, tremors of coiled power shuddering through his cockpit, the full weight of an ancient war-machine pawing at the ground, poised for the charge.

On the monitors, fifty feet out in front, Perpetua’s face twisted into a scowl.

“Punch it, little brother!” Howl screeched through Elpida’s lips.

Pheiri leapt forward, tracks spinning and skidding for a split-second, then biting deep into the concrete slurry and black mold with an almighty roar. Sudden acceleration crushed Elpida into her seat. The storm-tossed, mold-encrusted ruins of the corpse-city sped by on Pheiri’s monitors, a blur of black and grey. Rubble scree, loose steel, and pulped mold flew out behind him in a waterlogged shower of debris.

Perpetua stood her ground.

She loomed massive in Pheiri’s monitors, framed and bracketed and highlighted by his sensor readout data, duplicated to show estimated weight, nanomachine density, and all the possible actions she might take to evade Pheiri’s charge. The other six Necromancers paused, to watch.

Perpetua shifted her footing and raised her right hand at a forty-five degree angle. Steel anchors shot out from her shoulder and elbow, burying themselves deep in the concrete. Her legs turned to steel, thickened into foundations, and fused with the ground. Her scowl opened into a bare-toothed snarl.

Her hand lengthened, sharpened, and darkened, into a twelve-foot lance of black metal. The tip glinted, diamond-hard, poised to catch Pheiri’s prow.

Howl opened Elpida’s mouth again, and howled at the top of her lungs. “Awoooooo!”

Elpida tried to brace for impact, but she couldn’t resist the rush, roaring alongside Howl; the decision had already been made, there was less than a second in which to react. The others were paralysed, shocked, or worse. Kagami screamed for Pheiri to change course while Sky shouted an incoherent cry of panic; Serin growled behind her mask, tight and urgent, like a cornered animal, and even Atyle let out a soft gasp, audible over the roar of Pheiri’s body and Howl’s war cry. Only Shilu was silent and unmoved, straight-backed in her seat.

Perpetua’s face filled a whole screen in close-up, eyes red-rimmed, tear tracks dry on her cheeks, hate in her peeled-back lips. The lance-tip glistened as if slick with poison, the point a dot of lightless black.

Pheiri flash-started his shields at the last second with a concussive thump of pressure. The lights in the cockpit flickered.

Shimmering walls of electric blue, an interlocking mail-matrix of white hexagons, triple sheets of glimmering energy, and the final smooth dome-curve of shining white. Like a flower blossoming in fast-forward, Pheiri was wrapped in the grace and protection of Telokopolis, of the people who had made him, of the engineers and technicians to whom Elpida knew she owed everything.

Active shielding crashed into Perpetua like a brick into a stalk of wheat. Her lance crumpled and broke, her anchors tore from the ground, and her humanoid disguise fell beneath Pheiri’s whirling tracks.

Her mangled body was ejected from Pheiri’s rear a split-second later, a smear of crimson and white thrown aside amid the torrent of black and grey.

Howl laughed through Elpida’s lips and Elpida laughed with her, slapping Pheiri’s consoles with wild abandon. Serin joined in, roaring with mirth behind her metal mask. Sky whooped and cheered and punched the air, spitting spacer-cant at speed that even nanomachine translation could not quite render into meaning. Atyle let out a single high note of song-like praise. Kagami was babbling, eyes darting from screen to screen, but she was laughing too, losing herself to the unexpected victory. Elpida heard a secondary cheer go up from Pheiri’s other end — the distant echo of Victoria and the others in the crew compartment.

“Well done, indeed,” said Shilu.

“Ha!” Kagami barked. “Don’t celebrate so early, that trick will only work once! And look, look at that!” She jabbed at one of Pheiri’s screens, showing the view to the rear.

Perpetua was already getting back up, her broken body re-knitting itself at speed, blood and bones flowing back into place, staggering to her feet. She dwindled as Pheiri picked up additional speed, rocketing across the ruined landscape. But the other six Necromancers were turning to follow, heading after Pheiri.

Three of them simply sprinted from a standing start, moving at impossible speed, feet flying across broken concrete, darting between the towering black mold-stalks. Two of them leapt, soaring from concrete outcrops to twisted steel wreckage, legs propelling them into the air far harder than any natural human frame could have endured, landing in showers of storm-water and shredded black mold, leapfrogging in Pheiri’s torn-up wake. The sixth Necromancer grew a quartet of steel wings and took to the air, flying low through the wreckage of the city, her body turning sharp and black and fluted as a gutting knife.

Elpida sighed with relief. The primary unknown for this engagement had been clarified; the Necromancers were forced to mount their pursuit in physical space. They could not simply move through the network and appear beneath Pheiri at will, or decant themselves from the air, or jump ahead of him by re-extruding themselves from the substrate of the city.

They were not network gods. They were limited.

“Oh shit, oh shit!” Sky hissed, leaning forward in her chair, even as Pheiri’s speed on uneven ground tossed her against the straps. “No no no no, this is some fucked up nanomachine shit! I’ve seen how this goes, I know how this goes! We can’t outrun them forever in mechanical, we can’t!”

“Shut up!” Kagami snapped over her shoulder. “We’re not out of the woods yet, yes, we—”

“The boughs of the new world sprout on every side,” said Atyle, breathless and quivering.

A particularly thick cluster of black-mold bamboo-stalks was framed in Pheiri’s forward cameras; there was no route around this cluster, so Pheiri slammed right on through. Mold-stalks cracked and crumpled before his shields and beneath the weight of his body, crumpling into dry splinters, turned to wet pulp and a shower of sooty residue. The cockpit bounced and jolted, shaking everyone in their seats.

Then Pheiri was out the other side, back into the striped landscape of grey and black, the concrete ruins coated in glistening, pulsating, spreading mold. The mountain range of the graveworm filled the horizon, creeping higher and higher with every metre of progress.

Six Necromancers converged on Pheiri’s path, some keeping flank, a pair closing on his rear.

“They’re not fucking woods!” Kagami screeched. “They’re not even mushrooms. Commander! Elpida! What’s the plan now?!”

Elpida took a split second to think.

The worm-guard were still nowhere to be seen. Pheiri could not keep up this flight forever. And where had Lykke gone? Perhaps she wouldn’t be coming back this time.

Only one option, Elps, Howl growled in the back of her head. And give ‘em hope when you do it.

Elpida raised her left hand and pointed at the forward views, at the mountain range of the graveworm. Her hand was jolted and jogged as Pheiri raced over the uneven ground, slewing and skidding through concrete slurry, over little streams of debris, through thickly pulsing mats of black mold.

“We head for the worm,” Elpida said. “If the worm-guard are still sheltered beneath the curvature, they’ll come out when we get close. The game of chicken is still on. And we’re going to win it, one way or another.”

Serin purred, “And if the worm is dead, Coh-mander?”

“If it’s dead?” Elpida echoed. She couldn’t help a tiny laugh. “Then it’s the greatest carrion find in the ecosystem. If the worm is dead and the worm-guard are all gone, we’re gonna find a way inside. Or make our own.”

The fuck, Elps?

Give them hope, Howl. You said it. Even if it’s a long shot. And if I’m right …

“Ah,” said Shilu. “The ultimate revenant meal.”

“You are mad, Coh-mander,” Serin laughed. “But it would be a unique catch.”

“Fucking hell,” Kagami spat. “Fuck, fuck fuck. Alright, fine! As long as we don’t have to blast our way in, because I don’t know if that’s even possible.”

“What else could we do, anyway?!” Sky shouted. “Turn around and go back!? Who the fuck is gonna save us back there, huh?! Maybe the Commander is right, yeah? Maybe the worm is gonna wake up and end all this shit for us, yeah? Yeah? Come on, yeah? Come on, you great big fucking worm, wake the fuck up, yeah!?”

Elpida scanned Pheiri’s screens and readouts, trying to take in all six of the pursuing Necromancers; Perpetua had fallen behind, barely a dot at the furthest reaches of Pheiri’s sensors. The others didn’t look human anymore, even if they still had human forms, so much more clean and untouched than even the most unmodified of revenants. The three sprinters flew across the ground, blurring, indistinct, their legs like pointed spears, their bodies streamlined for forward motion. The two leaping Necromancers arced through the air and crashed down like shells with each impact, coiled like springs for the next jump. The flyer looked like a metal corvid, a raven of black iron and sharp edges. She was gaining fast, long dark hair streaming out behind as she began a dive.

“Pheiri,” Elpida said. “Do you have firing solutions for—”

Pheiri flashed up three screens of green text — targeting solutions, weapon readouts, firing arcs. A split-second later he painted all six Necromancers with target-locks and range estimates. The cockpit shuddered as weapon-domes and missile irises flowered open up on his hull, as autocannon shells cycled into place and automatic loaders spun up, as point-defence batteries and chemical flame-throwers and a dozen other flavours of firepower readied themselves.

Pheiri bristled a warning, broadcasting it out in all directions, all mediums, all frequencies. A machine-code pulse which meant CEASE OR DIE.

“Pheiri,” Elpida said quickly. “You know you don’t have to wait for my permission to fire.”

>n

Kagami burst out laughing, eyes wide and bloodshot, lips peeled back. “He’s not! He’s waiting until he’s got them close enough to do some real damage! I rue that I ever doubted you, you beautiful base-8 bastard, you!” Kagami laughed again, edging closer to hysteria; Elpida decided to let her laugh, it was better than fear and paralysis. “He’s a genius, Elpida, he doesn’t need us for anything but moral support!”

“Fire whenever you like,” Elpida said, and gripped the armrest of her seat. “Buy us as much time as you can. Get us to that worm, Pheiri.”

>y

Several seconds sped by, Pheiri’s engines roaring, tracks crunching through concrete, throwing up sprays of watery black mold. The Necromancers edged closer, closing the gap, darting through the swaying stalks of sprouting black. The flyer dipped. The sprinters arced inward. Targeting arrays tightened.

Elpida held her breath, fingers squeezing the armrest of her seat, the stump of her right arm throbbing with each heartbeat, aching beneath the blood-spotted dressing. She could do nothing now but place her faith in Pheiri. And she trusted him, her little brother, no less than she had trusted her sisters in life. He would see them all the way to the worm, whatever it took.

She just hoped that would be far enough.

Pheiri opened up like an echo of the hurricane.

A storm of autocannon rounds drowned the trio of sprinters in a sea of lead, chewing them to pieces, tossing them to the ground like rag dolls, turning the concrete slurry around them to dust and pulp. High-explosive missiles knocked the pair of leapers out of the sky with staccato air-burst detonations, then kept them pinned with salvo after salvo, lighting up the ruins with flowers of orange and red, thumping and pounding the concrete and mold into quicksand. Point-defence batteries turned their noses skyward and punched the flyer into a fine red mist with thousands of high-velocity rounds; the discharge rang through Pheiri’s hull like the roaring of a steel ocean. The flyer vanished; Pheiri followed up with a barrage of missiles and flak, choking the sky black and dead.

“Fuck your air power!” Kagami shouted. She made a rude gesture with her right hand. “Back on the fucking dirt with you, and stay down!”

As the first salvo finished falling, the Necromancers stood back up.

Pheiri’s opening shots had taken them by surprise, treating their newly-printed bodies as if they were real revenants. A moment’s adaptation and they were springing back to their feet, lost biomass flowing back together like magnetic fluid, limbs sucking back into place, flesh re-molding lithe and slender forms anew. Bullets passed through bodies that opened like water, snagging on bone, only slowing them now. Explosions still tossed them about like rag dolls, but in half a minute more they were adapting rapidly, with plated exteriors, suits of bone and metal, hands and forearms sprouting into shields.

Pheiri kept firing, but the six Necromancers kept coming, wading through a sea of bullets and explosions. The two leapers tried to resume their motion; Pheiri knocked one down with a barrage of missiles and autocannon fire, but the other one powered on through.

“Holy fuck,” Sky said, voice shaking. “Holy fuck, fuck me, fuck me, this is exactly what I thought they would do! You can’t fight nano-shit with mundane firepower, you just can’t, fuck, shit, fuck!”

“He’s buying us time!” Kagami screeched back. “Let him work!”

Elpida raised her voice, cool and calm. “Pheiri knows what he’s doing. He’ll get us to the graveworm.”

And then what? Howl growled.

Then we get inside, one way or another.

Elps. Howl gulped. Let me go look for the worm-guard. I can slip out and back without you even noticing, but—

Elpida snarled out loud. We don’t know if the worm-guard are still alive or active. And there’s seven Necromancers out there who could rip you out of the network and kill you. No, Howl. You stay put, you stay in my head.

Elps, I can—

Nobody gets sacrificed, nobody goes alone, nobody—

Up in the sky, a wet red form sucked itself back together from particulate matter, like mist condensing on glass. The flying Necromancer made herself whole again, a knife-thing of black and grey, steel and charred bone, like a raven made of iron.

She twisted, head down, and dove straight through the cloud of explosions and flak.

The Necromancer fell so fast that Elpida barely saw how she did it — letting point-defence rounds pass through her nanomachine-flesh without resistance, turning her wings into backward-facing blades to speed her fall, making her head into a pointed ram of metal. A black dart aimed at the exact apex of Pheiri’s shields.

The Necromancer turned herself into a living bullet, and hit Pheiri’s shielding with an earth-shattering crack.

Pheiri’s shields overloaded, flooding most of his screens with white static. The lights in the cockpit flickered as the shields came back online. The screens jerked and juddered back to life.

The raven-like Necromancer had landed. She stood on Pheiri’s hull, wings vanishing, arms unfurling like an iron flower.

She was all dark metal and flowing limbs, long dark hair dancing like seaweed. Her face was a black beak beneath a pair of human eyes. Her hands and feet were massive, tipped by six-inch talons.

Far faster than Elpida could shout an order, Pheiri’s point-defence weaponry and close-in flame-throwers turned inward, turrets swivelling, mounts whipping round, target-locks and danger close warnings flashing on half a dozen screens. Sheets of flame, close-range electrical discharges, and point-defence rounds slammed into the intruder, trying to take her apart before she could move.

But the Necromancer ignored the flame even as her flesh bubbled and burst. Electric discharges made her jerk and jump, but her limbs ratcheted outward, extending and expanding even as they spasmed, to smash the guns and mangle their mounts. Point-defence rounds passed through her flesh as if she wasn’t there, chewing into Pheiri’s own armour beneath her. She smashed those guns to scrap next, limbs lengthening into hooked poles to wreck Pheiri’s inner defences.

Then she looked down, at the carbon bone-mesh armour between her taloned feet, Pheiri’s scarred and pitted bone-white hide.

She raised one fist, rammed her claws into Pheiri’s skin, and ripped away a handful of armour.

A dozen cockpit screens turned blood-red. An alarm sounded, deep inside Pheiri’s structure. His screens flickered back and forth between the intruding Necromancer and self-repair readouts. Reams of glowing green text screamed warnings and scrolled through procedures that Elpida hadn’t seen before.

///ALERT
///SUPPORT REQUEST INFANTRY
///ERROR division comms non-contact
///SUPPORT REQUEST INFANTRY
///ERROR division comms non-contact
///SUPPORT REQUEST INFANTRY
///ERROR division comms non-contact

“We’re being boarded!” Kagami screamed. “Commander, Pheiri doesn’t have—”

“Shilu, with me, now!” Elpida snapped.

She unbuckled her straps and shot to her feet, almost losing her balance as Pheiri’s forward momentum carried him past another slurry-canyon of broken concrete. Shilu was already out of her seat and out of her disguise. A scarecrow of black metal sprinted the few paces to the spinal corridor. Elpida hauled herself past the other seats, following in Shilu’s wake.

“Coh-mander,” Serin rasped, rising from her seat.

“I don’t have time to argue!” Elpida shouted back. She didn’t pause, hurrying into the spinal corridor, gripping handholds wherever she could find them as Pheiri slewed to the left and right, his tracks roaring through the concrete outside. “That Necromancer will take you apart, Serin,” she called over her shoulder. “Shilu’s a Necro too, and I’ve got Howl, so all I need to do is touch her. Come if you want, but it’s a big risk.”

“Not acting is greater risk,” Serin muttered behind her mask. “I can hit any corpse rapist, anywhere.”

Elpida hurled herself down Pheiri’s spinal corridor, heedless of the bumpy ride. She protected the stump of her right arm by keeping it pinned to her side, but she still banged her head, her left elbow, her hips, her knuckles, her wrist. She powered on through the pain; it didn’t matter, not with a Necromancer tearing into Pheiri’s hide a few feet above her head. He needed infantry support, and she was going to make sure he got it.

She burst out into the crew compartment to an audience of horrified stares. Victoria was pale, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Hafina was half out of her seat, strapping Melyn into another. Ilyusha was baring her teeth. Amina was crying. Eseld had an arm wrapped around Cyneswith’s shoulders.

“Stay here!” Elpida said. “Stay strapped in!”

She didn’t have time to ensure they followed her orders; Shilu was already vanishing up the dark and narrow stairwell that led to the top hatch. Elpida didn’t pause to grab a firearm; she had a pistol in one pocket of her armoured coat if she really needed it, but her best weapon was Howl’s network permissions.

Elpida pounded after Shilu, with Serin right behind her. Shilu hit the hatch a second before Elpida, yanking the manual release and throwing it wide.

Shilu shot forward, a metal scarecrow erupting from Pheiri’s hide. Elpida scrambled after her, out onto Pheiri’s exterior deck.

Sheets of shimmering white and electric blue arced overhead, pinned between mail-matrix layers of interlocking hexagons; Pheiri’s shields blocked most of the wind even as he roared and reared through the landscape of concrete ruin and swaying stalk-mold. The sky was a black cauldron churning with the aftermath of the hurricane, a thin drizzle of rain passing through the shields to speckle Pheiri’s hide. His weapons were still firing, autocannons whirring and spitting like gigantic insects, missile pods coughing and belching as he kept the other five Necromancers at bay. Elpida’s eardrums ached. Her feet threatened to slip as Pheiri bucked and skidded through the corpse-city.

The graveworm occupied half the sky, so tall it seemed like the edge of the world, a wave of grey metal ready to crash down on Pheiri and Elpida and the Necromancers, and drown them all.

In the middle of the open space on Pheiri’s outer deck, framed by the bone-white stalagmites of his weapon mounts, the forest of his horned and curled bone armour, crouched a Necromancer like a black iron raven. She was squatting over a shallow wound in Pheiri’s armour.

The iron raven straightened up just in time to repel Shilu’s assault.

Black arm-blades met curved talons in a lightning-fast clash of metal; the iron raven towered over Shilu, easily eleven or twelve feet tall. She cocked her head, bobbing it from side-to-side as Shilu hopped back and darted at her again. The raven tried to flow around Shilu’s strikes, her own blackened flesh stuttering and jerking beneath the blades. But Shilu was too fast, too experienced, and she knew how to fight other Necromancers.

Chunks of steaming meat flew from the raven’s flank — only to turn into blobs of oily silver liquid, flowing back toward her as fast as Shilu could carve. The raven raked claws across Shilu’s chest, but Shilu was pure metal now, and shrugged off each blow, using the raven’s momentum against her.

But the claws left deep gouges in Shilu’s black metal. She was forced back, one step, then two, then three. The raven grew taller, beak opening in a birdlike grin, edges glinting with acid or poison or something worse. She snapped at the air; Shilu was forced to dance aside.

Elpida keyed her comms headset. “I need an opening.”

Two voices replied. Kagami with a screech — “Yes! Yes I fucking know!” — and Serin: “Coh-mander.”

Elpida didn’t need a reply from Shilu. The ex-Necromancer knew exactly what to do.

Howl? Ready?

Always and always, Elps! Let’s turn this bitch inside out by her arsehole!

Elpida strode forward across the listing, lurching deck, directly toward the iron raven, still locked in combat with Shilu, sword-arms and claws a blur of motion. Elpida flexed her left hand, making and unmaking a fist, making sure she was ready. A tingle started in her fingers and palm as Howl prepared to go to work. Pheiri’s guns roared and barked on all sides.

Twelve paces, eleven paces, ten paces. Elps, it’s now or never!

“Now,” Elpida said into her headset.

Three dark shapes darted out from behind the crags of Pheiri’s armour — the trio of heavy scout drones that Kagami had tucked away after Pheiri had successfully left the tomb. The drones raced toward the iron raven from three different angles, opening weapon ports, spitting bullets and bolts, forcing the Necromancer to swipe at them with her claws, buying Shilu a few inches of footing.

One drone ducked, one drone weaved, and one drone was shattered into a million pieces by the Necromancer’s black steel talons.

A split-second later, the crack-crack-crack of Serin’s high powered rifle came from behind Elpida. Three anti-materiel rounds passed within a few feet of her head and slammed into the Necromancer’s chest, tearing at black meat, twisting her metal innards, and punching out through her back. The iron raven lost her balance, talons skidding, arms wind-milling, surprised by the simple efficacy of being shot.

Shilu pounced. Two black swords hacked one of the raven’s taloned hands to pieces, tearing it free in a welter of blood and bone. Shilu hurled it away and ducked aside as the iron raven tried to recover.

The Necromancer blinked.

Elpida felt her body freeze, Necromancer network permissions pinning her muscles in place. Over the comms, Serin managed a grunt as she was frozen too. The surviving pair of drones dropped to the deck, immobilized.

Shilu kept fighting, darting for the Necromancer’s other arm, forcing her attention to snap round.

Howl!

I got you, Elps. I got you.

Howl took over Elpida’s body, breaking down the external network permissions. Her face ripped into a grin as she strode straight forward, right into the melee.

With the Raven distracted for a crucial moment, Howl walked Elpida right inside the Necromancer’s guard, wound back her left fist, and punched the Raven in the face. A tingle shot down Elpida’s arm and into her hand, exploding with a haze of blurred sensation in the moment of impact, as if something had passed from her and into the iron raven.

Bony beak structure snapped sideways. Black eyes flew open in surprise. The Raven-Necro was frozen for a moment, stuck in a half-recoiled pose, one arm thrown wide.

Shilu took a step back, arm-blades held at the ready.

“How’d that fucking feel, hey?” Howl said with Elpida’s voice. “Never had that before, have you? How’d you like … some … more … ”

The iron raven straightened back up, towering over Elpida, Howl, and Shilu. The beak clacked shut, then opened again, edges dripping with clear fluid that hissed in the open air.

She didn’t look the least bit pained.

“Hnnnggggrk,” she gurgled, voice like a shattered wind instrument. “You. Ghost in a zombie. Perpetua warned us about you.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Oh dear; turns out not every Necromancer is interested in becoming Elpida’s bitch. Software upgrades can be so fiddly, can’t they? And this one probably can’t be rolled back. Think fast, zombies!

Also, it was very satisfying to write about Perpetua getting run over. Big splat.

Behind the scenes, things are going great! Arc 16 is absolutely 100% going to exceed 10 chapters now, though I don’t know exactly how long it will be. Things are getting very spicy, as the ‘Iron Raven’ is getting ready to show Elpida and Howl. Uh oh!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And thank you! Thank you for reading Necroepilogos, thank you for being here; I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the readers! With nobody to watch their stories, Elpida and the others would be lost in the void, not to mention the fate of Telokopolis herself. So, thank you! Until next chapter. Seeya then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“El-pi-daaaaa! Hiiiii! Hi-hi-hi-hiiiii!”

The voice screeched from Pheiri’s cockpit speakers, external broadcast processed into raw audio.

“It’s you, it’s you, it’s youuuu! I can’t believe I found you again so quick and easy, but you just shine so briiiight. Ahhhh, I can’t help myself anymore! Look, look look look, I’m being a good girl for you, okay? I’m being a super duper extra good girl, all for you, okay? All those catty bitches and filthy sluts who’ve been sent to mess with you? I’m keeping them bottled up! That’s right, all by little old me! You can thank me later, any which way you want. And I think you know the way I want. Mwah mwah mwah mwah! Byeeeee!”

Lykke’s voice ricocheted off every surface in the cockpit, crackly with interference, bouncing and breathless. She signed off with a barrage of sticky wet kisses.

Elpida reacted to the facts, not the tone. “Kaga, can we pinpoint that signal? Can we establish encrypted comms? Where is she?”

Kagami was speechless. Sky was spluttering. Shilu said nothing. Atyle purred with wordless approval. Elpida resisted a brief urge to slap the arm of her seat; this was not the time for shock over her sexual mores.

Ha! Howl spat laughter in the back of Elpida’s head. They don’t get it, Elps. They never will. They weren’t like us.

Pheiri, thankfully, was unruffled by the enthusiasm of Lykke’s message. Trust another child of Telokopolis to understand. His screens and displays rapidly cycled through external views of the storm-torn city, overlaying the horizon with visual processing algorithms, sorting through the morass of broken concrete and black mold, searching for the source of the signal, for a human figure amid the chaos, for a bright spot of high-density nanomachines. Elpida’s eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, though Pheiri didn’t need any help. Lykke’s white dress would stand out like a shaft of sunlight in this riven landscape of grey-black sludge and disintegrating concrete, against the mountainous background of the graveworm.

One of Pheiri’s lower screens was still pulsing with the red-washed warning.

///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE

“Kagami!” Elpida snapped. “Focus. Can we reply? Yes or no?”

Kagami huffed, hard and sharp. “Return broadcast? No, no we can’t! Not unless you want everything else out there to hear us too. Pheiri can’t find her, there’s no sign of her, or any other Necromancers. The nanomachine control locus signal is … everywhere and nowhere, and fuck knows what that means for your doxy out there, Commander—”

“She’s in the network,” Shilu said. “Just beneath the surface.”

Kagami twisted in her seat, pulling at the straps, to glare at Shilu. “And what the fuck does that mean?! It’s not the fucking sea! She can’t poke a periscope up out of the waves!”

“That is exactly what she can do,” said Shilu.

Atyle purred. “A swimmer in the sea of souls, where all else sink.”

“Ugh!” Kagami threw both hands in the air, forgetting that she was wired into Pheiri with her left. She hissed with pain and thumped back into her seat. “What did that even—” She stopped with a hiss; a little red light on the comms console was blinking. “She’s calling again. Elpida? Do you want everybody to hear this one too, or should I keep this dribbling love letter for your ears only, hm?”

“Put her on speakers.”

Lykke’s voice filled the cockpit again.

“It’s a lot more difficult than I thought, Elpi! There’s seven of them, you hear that? I’ll repeat it, to make sure it gets through your big chunk of metal there. Seven seven seven seven! Count it, write it down, remember it in that perfectly formed skull of yours, whatever. I’m keeping them penned in, but there’s only one of me and I’m so delicate and easily bent these days, you made certain of that.” Lykke panted, rough and raw, like her throat was clotted with blood and mucus. Was that just a simulation of her emotional state, or a reflection of her condition within the network, fighting a one-on-seven battle? Elpida wanted to sigh; the intel was invaluable, but she had not asked for Lykke’s self-sacrifice. “I don’t know how long I can go like this, but I’ll go as long as I can, you know? Edge all these bitches until they’re ready for you to finish them off! Just don’t do them as good as you did me. I’ll get so jealous it’ll make me sick—”

Lykke’s voice cut off with a squeal of machine-sound, like a manual data connection ripped out at the socket.

One of Pheiri’s screens flashed red. The text refreshed with a rapid stamp of letters.

///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 2
///determine physical

One of the larger screens in the cockpit jerked to show a fresh viewpoint, about five hundred meters out, at Pheiri’s eleven o’clock, where several large chunks of concrete clung to a shattered skeleton of structural steel, perhaps a length of tower block that had fallen all as one when the hurricane winds had hurled it down. The mass of concrete and steel formed the highest point for quite a way around. Layers of black mold lapped at the base of the formation, creeping higher in lazy fronds and feelers of sticky sable.

A figure stood at the summit, outlined against the sky. Pheiri zoomed in on another screen, for manual identification, overlaying the image with nanomachine density and signal readouts.

A Necromancer, no doubt about it.

Too tall for a baseliner, delicate and willowy but expanded beyond human proportions, eleven or twelve feet of frame clad in a white dress, flawless and clean. Silver-blonde hair hung in a smooth and glossy wave, like a waterfall of shimmering mercury, untouched by the wind. Bare feet, taloned hands, slender forearms. The face had once been an expressionless mask, but bright green eyes gave away the truth, raw and red from hours of frustrated weeping.

“That’s her!” Sky spat. “That’s the cunt we fought, that’s her, that’s Lykke!”

“No,” Elpida said. “That’s Perpetua. That’s the Necromancer I met.”

The bitch came back for seconds! Howl laughed.

Kagami growled through clenched teeth. “So much for Lykke keeping them all penned in the network. Fuck! Pheiri, why aren’t we—”

Perpetua lifted one bare foot, stepping off the summit and into thin air, off her high ground, to plummet to the city’s new plain of churned concrete. Elpida opened her mouth, about to issue an order for Pheiri to move. This was it, this was the pursuit they’d all been preparing for; time to play chicken with seven Necromancers and see who could get closer to the graveworm without risking annihilation.

A white blur crossed the image and smashed into Perpetua’s side, like a meteor of sun-dappled sand.

Pheiri’s external cameras snapped outward to catch the redirected fall. Two figures were locked in a grapple, tearing at each other as they plunged toward the ground.

Lykke, bright blonde hair streaming out behind her, legs locked around Perpetua’s waist, grinning wide and gnashing her teeth, riding Perpetua to the grey concrete and flood-waters and black mold below. Perpetua’s face warped into a mask of howling frustration, hands hooked into talons, ripping at Lykke’s sun-kissed dress, trying to tear out her eyes. But Lykke was laughing and whooping and pushing Perpetua’s head down as if pinning her to the floor.

Lykke’s voice broke in again, screeching from the comms, blurred by the roar of rushing wind.

“Remember it’s all for you, Elpida! Don’t forget that I’m doing this! Don’t you leave me behind, you saucy little minx you, don’t you leave me behind, or I’ll come—”

Lykke and Perpetua hit the ground like a pair of pebbles cast into a pool of oil. No impact, no crash, no displaced matter. The pair of Necromancers just vanished, as if the concrete and water and black mold had swallowed them up.

///signal lost
///confirm zero zero zero

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Pheiri’s alert flickered off. Red screens softened back to glowing green.

Silence filled the cockpit, broken by Kagami’s shaky breathing and the steady beat of Pheiri’s nuclear heart.

Elpida reached out with her left hand and patted an open space on Pheiri’s internal bulkheads, between one cockpit console and the next. “Hold. Everybody hold position. Well done, Pheiri.”

“Fuck did they go?” Sky muttered. “The fuck did they go?”

“Back into the network,” said Shilu.

“Yeah, but. Their … bodies?” Sky sounded offended.

“Nanomachine dispersal,” Shilu answered. “Their local matrices were formed from local materials, likely ad-hoc. Easy to disperse upon re-contact, with the right network permissions. Lykke just dunked her, pretty much.”

Sky sighed. “Great. Just add water, instant abominations.”

“Don’t need water,” Shilu said.

Sky sighed again, worse.

Kagami turned to look at Elpida, her face a thin mask of broken patience, eyes almost bulging. “Commander. Lykke, the Necromancer, and you. In the network. What exactly … what did you do?”

“I told you,” Elpida said. “She and I came to an understanding. She’s not quite on our side, not openly declared for Telokopolis, but she’s developed a personal attachment to me. I didn’t expect her to fight for us, not like that.”

In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl snorted, None of them are gonna settle for that, Elps. You gotta rip the bandage off.

We’re in the middle of a very delicate situation. If Perpetua got through, other Necromancers could do the same. We need to stay alert. Besides, it’s not important.

They’re blowing off steam, Elps. Goggling at their big pilot slut of a Commander. Let ‘em have some fun. Fuck, they’ll probably respect you more for it.

Right now?

No better time to bond than in battle, eh?

“Developed a personal attachment to you?” Kagami scoffed. “Is that what you called it, back in Telokopolis? ‘Developing personal attachments’ up in each other’s cunts? Am I the only one who heard that fucking broadcast?” She wrenched herself around in her chair, pointing at Sky, Atyle, and Shilu. “You aren’t all pretending to be deaf, are you? Are you? Don’t make me get Victoria up here.” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned back to Elpida again. “Well? Are you going to call that what it is?”

Elpida opened her mouth to repeat the truth — she and Lykke had come to an understanding. But Howl grabbed her lips and tongue, and twisted her mouth into a grin.

“Elps fucked her brains out,” Howl said. “Nasty style.”

Sky burst out laughing. “You made her your bitch! That shape-shifting nightmare thing, and you made her your bitch! Holy shit, Commander. I knew there must be a reason everybody here follows you. Holy shit. Hahaha!”

Elpida sighed. Howl cackled along inside her head. Atyle murmured an approving noise.

Kagami stared, eyes bugging out. “You had … intercourse, real physical intercourse, with a Necromancer.”

“In the network,” Elpida said. “So, actually, no, it wasn’t physical. And it worked, didn’t it? She’s holding off seven other Necros for us, right now.”

Kagami threw up one hand and turned back to the bank of screens. “All right, fine! The Commander ‘did it’ with a Necromancer. Great. What do we do now?”

Elpida took half a second to clear her head.

She had not expected Lykke to do this. She had left enough slack to account for the possibility of Lykke’s intervention, but nothing specific. The turncoat Necromancer was a wildcard; Elpida had no way to communicate with her, let alone enough faith to rely on her, but Lykke’s personal fascination with Elpida was undeniably real. Elpida had not accounted for the possibility that Lykke might derail the entire plan without asking.

Irritating little thing, ain’t she? Howl growled. I think I like her more now.

“Shilu,” Elpida said. “Do you think Lykke can really hold off all those Necromancers inside the network?”

“Not indefinitely,” said Shilu.

“Then for how long? If you don’t know, your best estimate is fine. A rough guess, anything you can give me.”

Shilu drew in a deep breath, staring at Pheiri’s screens, her soft brown face tinted green beneath the scrolling data-reams. “One against seven is an impossible match-up between Necromancers, at least at the data level of the network. But Lykke was never normal, and whatever you’ve done to her—”

“Laid some pipe in her!” Sky cheered.

“—has disrupted her limitations and permissions, though I don’t get how.”

“Jailbroken that puss-aayyyyy,” Sky said. “Fuck me. Or maybe don’t. Don’t wanna end up like that, thanks. No offence, Commander, you just ain’t my type.”

Kagami jerked in her chair. “Will you shut the fuck up! Let her talk! Shut up!”

Sky raised her hands and rolled her eyes, still smirking.

Elpida decided not to intervene. After hours of creeping progress through the shattered ruins of the corpse-city, on the tail of all that time spent trapped in the tomb, everybody was on edge, desperate for the release and clarity of combat. Paradoxically enough, Lykke’s help had stretched that tension even further. There would be no pressure valve for the crew, not yet.

Maybe not at all, if Lykke was good enough.

Elpida waited a few seconds to let the silence settle. “Shilu, you were saying?”

“Lykke’s permissions and nature have been self-adjusted,” Shilu continued. “She may be able to hold off seven Necromancers within the network for some time, but they may adapt in the same way, by learning from her. We might have minutes. We may have hours. My personal estimation of Lykke is … not reliable anymore.”

Elpida nodded a thank you. “Right, thank you. Lykke has bought us time, but the plan remains the same. We hold position, wait for the Necromancers, hope Lykke weakens them. Kaga? Pheiri?”

Kagami snorted. “As if we have any other options. Fuck. Fuck this.”

“Everyone stay sharp, stay ready. As Shilu said, we may have only minutes.” Elpida keyed her comms headset; Victoria answered a moment later. Elpida quickly repeated her orders; Victoria passed the message on to the others, who had not gotten the full picture from Pheiri’s more limited information capacity back in the crew compartment. “And stay frosty, Vicky. We may have to move at a moment’s notice.”

“Right. Sure thing, Commander. Hurry up and wait, I can do that. We can do that all day.”

“Good. Call me if you need anything. I’ll check in every ten minutes.”

“Right, of course. But, uh … Elpi, can I … can I ask … ”

“Go ahead, Vicky. I know the question.”

“Did you really fuck a Necromancer? I don’t mean any offence or anything, I just didn’t think … I dunno, actually, I dunno what I was thinking.”

“For a given definition of fuck, sure, we fucked. There was a lot of violence involved.”

“Violence?” Vicky paused. Her mouth made a dry click. “You mean … simulated violence, right? In the network?”

“Yes.”

A sigh. Vicky sounded exhausted, but then she chuckled. “Well, uh. Well done, I guess. Get everybody into Telokopolis by any means necessary, right?”

“Vicky, focus.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Focus. You got it, Commander. Vicky out.”

Elpida terminated the connection.

“Alright,” she said. “Nobody get too comfy. This reprieve might lift at any second.”

Seconds ticked by, growing into minutes.

Elpida focused on the screens, watching Pheiri’s eyes from the inside as he scanned and re-scanned the landscape. He showed only a fraction of what he saw, purely for the benefit of the zombies tucked safely away inside his crew compartment, giving them a representative slice of his senses. He showed rotating views of the ruined city, the mile after mile after mile of pulverised concrete and slopping flood-waters, slowly being filled and covered and engulfed by creeping layers of black mold. Processing overlays ran constantly, tinting the video feeds with a dozen different colours, recording and measuring and packaging everything into raw data, scrolling by on Pheiri’s other screens.

The light inside the cockpit gave everybody a ghostly green pallor. Elpida glanced around at the others, as naturally as she could, trying not to draw their attention.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Kagami kept shifting in her seat, then started to wiggle one of her bionic legs, bouncing it up and down. She muttered under her breath, eyes following patterns on the screens that Elpida couldn’t see, or else patterns inside her own visual cortex, Pheiri’s data wired into her brain via the makeshift uplink. Shilu said nothing, face an unreadable mask, motionless as a statue. Sky started to chew her fingernails; a curious habit for somebody who had travelled in far more hazardous conditions than this, in spacecraft beyond earth’s atmosphere.

Atyle closed her eyes and went to sleep, or at least pretended to. Elpida let that pass without comment. There was no practical reason to keep everybody alert, only morale.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

Minutes crept up into the double digits. Elpida focused on her breathing, kept herself sharp and ready — but for what? If Lykke’s gambit failed, Pheiri would be the first to know, and the first to react. In the back of Elpida’s head, Howl grumbled and growled to herself. Howl had never enjoyed waiting, not for anything.

Elpida caught herself cupping the stump of her right arm. The wound still ached beneath the fresh bandages. If she focused on regrowing it right then, would her nanomachine biology begin assigning resources to the process? If they were stuck here for hours, perhaps that would be a good use of time.

No, she needed to stay sharp. Pheiri might need her. She could not yet know how.

>nanomachine control locus query
///nanomachine control locus detection NULL VALUE

As minutes wore on, the black mold grew.

Whatever the stuff was, it was drawing on a vast amount of nanomachine resources, spread over a very wide area. The wet, shiny, sticky-looking mold kept growing until it covered almost the entire landscape of the shattered city; it never quite absorbed every scrap and sliver of concrete, leaving the view as a mottled grey-black hide of strips and stripes. The stuff flowed back and forth as it expanded, revealing patches of wet concrete here, stretches of twisted metal there, some of it half-digested, as if the mold was going to work on the material beneath. Thin rain, the final dregs of the storm, coated the mold in a layer of moisture, giving it a sheen like oil on water, snatches of purple-hued rainbow shimmering from the ruined corpse of the city.

When the mold reached any given high point — the tips of a ruined stretch of fallen skyscraper, or even just the highest humps of heaped rubble — it kept going, hardening and darkening as if flush with water and pulp beneath the surface, extending into horns and curls of blackened matter, twisting toward the sky in geometric spirals.

After thirty minutes of waiting, the tallest of the growths was at least eight feet high, and still going. A forest of high-ground mold-trees was sprouting on every side, like bamboo groves down in the buried fields beneath Telokopolis.

“I hate weird nanomachine shit,” Kagami hissed, “almost as much as I hate waiting.”

“Is it dangerous?” Elpida asked, keeping her voice low.

Kagami shrugged and gestured at one of Pheiri’s data-readout screens. “It’s literally just mold, Commander.”

Sky snorted. “Yeah, and we’re literally just flesh and blood. Not.”

Kagami clenched her teeth. Elpida made a mental note — Sky and Kagami were unlikely to get on well.

“Can we maintain this position?” Elpida asked. “If it keeps growing, will it interfere with Pheiri?”

“It’s not touching Pheiri,” Kagami grunted. “Not interested in him at all.”

One of Pheiri’s screens flickered with fresh readout data — moisture levels, cell measurements, chemical composition, nanomachine density. Elpida couldn’t understand all the details, but she got the general idea.

“Just mold, right,” Elpida said. “Thank you, Pheiri.”

“It’s staying well clear of his tracks,” Kagami said. She gestured with her right hand, seemingly at nothing. “And they don’t seem to be having any trouble with it either. Whatever else it’s doing, it’s not eating zombies.”

“Them? Kagami, explain.”

“You can’t— tch!” Kagami tutted and sighed, then twitched her left hand, the one plugged into Pheiri.

Two of Pheiri’s screens jumped to fresh views, seen from above and far away — real-time video from Hope, floating beyond the twitching corpse of the storm. The tomb dominated both views, far to Pheiri’s rear, back along the route they’d taken through the city. Tiny dots were swarming out of the tomb’s main entrance, spreading into the broken landscape beyond. A particularly thick and cohesive spear of collective motion was heading right toward Pheiri, perhaps an hour or two behind his current position.

Revenants. The zombies who had taken shelter inside the tomb, and the ones who had been armed and fed and protected by Elpida, by Pheiri, by Telokopolis.

Elpida frowned. “What are they doing? Are they trying to follow us?”

“Hope can’t get good enough resolution to tell,” Kagami said. “The last of the storm and the rain is still blocking her cameras, stopping her from getting close. But yes, Commander, it looks like we have an honour guard on the way.” Kagami’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well done.”

“Shit,” Elpida hissed. “We don’t want anybody else getting caught up in this. Why? Why would they try to follow us?”

Shilu answered. “You gave them food, protection, and purpose.”

Elpida shook her head. This wasn’t part of the plan. Lykke’s intervention had thrown off all her assumptions.

“How’s Iriko?” Elpida asked. “At least tell me she’s still keeping clear.”

Kagami snorted. “Keeping clear and eating well.”

Another display filled with a new view of the city, another high-angle eye-in-the-sky shot from Hope, refreshing every half-second. This one was much better resolution; Iriko was much closer to Pheiri’s current position.

Iriko — visible as a massive blob covered in sheets of armoured scale, like a slug plated in mirrored steel — was gorging herself on the black mold, slurping up great masses of the stuff with every motion of her body, melting through the spiral stalagmites and swimming across slopping pools of inky muck. She flowed over the broken concrete, throwing massive chunks aside, burrowing through drifts of storm-water and twisted steel, chasing the choicest morsels of the strange growth.

“Good for her!” Sky cheered. “You go get filled up, blob-face. She’s on our side, right?”

“Right,” Kagami growled.

“That is good, yes,” Elpida said. She pointed at one of the forward views, the grey-black chaos of the city marching off toward the horizon, and the horizon rising like a mountain-range of matte steel, the graveworm like a wall at the edge of the world. “Kaga, are we close enough to the graveworm to get a clear image of it? Can we see worm-guard emerging yet?”

Kagami glanced at Elpida, eyes a touch wide. “No, Pheiri’s too far out. His cameras don’t have enough resolution. And the landscape is in the way, not to mention all this mold crap.”

“Not Pheiri. Hope. Ask her.”

Kagami swallowed. Shilu moved in her chair, made it creak; Elpida realised that was the first time Shilu had moved since Pheiri had stopped. Atyle opened her eyes and sat up.

“What?” Sky said. “What? What is it? You’re all acting like … ”

“We’ve not seen the graveworm up close,” Elpida said. “Only from a distance, like this. Kaga?”

Kagami settled back into her seat. She chewed on her lower lip. “Hope is repositioning. Give her a few moments.”

Shilu said, “I’ve never seen a graveworm up close. The worm-guard make it impossible.”

“Me, neither,” rasped a familiar metallic voice from the rear of the cockpit.

Elpida turned in her seat just in time to see Serin clamber from Pheiri’s spinal corridor, straightening up in the open space of the cockpit. Half a dozen pale, spidery hands anchored her to the walls and floor. Red eyes glowed above her metal mask.

“Serin, you’re meant to be strapped in,” Elpida said. “We might have to move at any moment.”

“Few bones to bruise,” Serin purred. She ambled forward, keeping herself anchored at multiple points with her hands, until she could lean over Kagami’s shoulder and peer at the screens. Sky leaned aside, away from Serin’s spindly bulk, wrinkling her nose at the fungal scent from beneath Serin’s tattered black robes.

Kagami spat, “I don’t care if you’re immune to fucking bullets, you walking mushroom. Sit down and strap in!”

“I prefer—”

“If you go flying and smash into my head, or one of Pheiri’s screens, I will personally sauté you. Sit down!”

Serin chuckled low in her throat, like meat clogged with metal. She eased back into a seat and looped four arms through the various straps and buckles. She cast a glance at Elpida, but Elpida just shrugged. Kagami was right.

“Hope is transmitting now,” Kagami muttered, eyes gone inward. “Here’s the … I don’t know what to call it. Foothills?”

The single largest display in the cockpit flickered to a new image.

A mountainside of metal filled the screen — dark grey like igneous rock, pitted and corroded and blemished in vast patches, as if rust had bloomed and faded in a quasi-biological process. The metal was ridged and spiralled and whorled in a dizzyingly regular pattern, with scoops and rises hundreds of meters deep, some of them filled with rainwater or pulverised concrete slurry, or even whole chunks of buildings, all the material which was swept up as the graveworm had moved through the city.

Scale was difficult to make out. A few shattered buildings lay in the foreground, dusted with the still-growing mold-stalks. This was the very base of the graveworm’s leviathan body, the point at which it met the ground. It towered over the ruins, up and up and up, taller even than the spire of Telokopolis.

Elpida felt the tiniest touch of dislocation. She clamped down on that feeling. “Kagami, how … how large of an area are we looking at here?”

“It’s just a tiny segment of the worm,” Kagami said. Her voice seemed very small. “Hope is having trouble getting a wide-angle shot of the whole thing, it’s … too big.”

“Fucking big ass motherfucker,” Sky muttered.

“Too big for anybody to control,” Shilu said. “With nanomachine forges on the inside. It has all it needs to rebirth the world.”

“Even your Central, Necromancer?” Serin purred.

“Exactly.”

“The seed of a new god,” Atyle said.

“Don’t,” Kagami snapped. “Just fucking don’t. It’s a machine. It’s a bloody big machine, that’s all. Here, this … ”

A fresh image snapped onto the screen, but it was almost meaningless with distance, taken from too high up, zoomed out too far. A vast mountain range of grey metal lay amid a plain of grey and black. At such distances size and scale meant nothing. The graveworm was a dark grey lozenge against a background of ruin.

Elpida’s mind snapped into sharp focus. Howl did the same, sitting bolt upright in the back of Elpida’s head.

Elps, shit, where—

“I don’t see any worm-guard,” Elpida said. “Where are they?”

Kagami shrugged. “Sheltering under the curvature of the body, I suspect. Hope can’t get the right angle to see them, but they’re probably—”

“The storm is over,” Elpida said. “Any danger to them passed over an hour ago. Where are they?”

“Ahhhhhh,” Serin purred. “A fly in the soup.”

“Oh shit,” said Sky. “Shit shit shit. That means your whole plan is fucked, right?”

Elpida held up a hand for silence. “Why would the worm-guard not emerge? Shilu, you’re the most experienced here. Why not?”

For a long moment, Shilu said nothing. Then, “Three options. One, the graveworm is deploying them against a greater threat. I don’t think that’s happening though, those high-angle shots don’t show any fresh worm-guard streaming away from the worm. Two, the worm is holding them in reserve in anticipation of a greater threat. Three, the worm is dead.”

“Is it dead?” Elpida glanced at Kagami.

Kagami spread one hand in a confounded gesture. “As if I can tell?!”

“Alright,” Elpida said. “We don’t know what’s going on. We need intel. Playing chicken might still work, but we can’t be sure, we need—”

One of Pheiri’s screens pulsed with warning red.

///ALERT
///nanomachine control locus detection POSITIVE
///nanomachine control locus count point: 1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6
///signal return positive count
///ALERT
///ALERT
///ALERT

Pheiri’s screens tracked all six Necromancers as they surfaced.

They spun out of the ground like animated dirt, human forms pushing upward through a membrane of concrete and water, grey grit and black mold tightening and bursting as bodies stepped forth. One plunged upward from within a pool of storm-water and concrete slurry, as if diving through the water’s surface, filthy liquid streaming from a body sharp as a knife. Another straightened up on a high outcropping of twisted steel, as if disgorged by the fronds and stalks of black mold, heavy shoulders pushing into the open. A third stepped straight from a piece of upright concrete, the surface clinging to the edges of her body as she strode free, dress a concrete ghost, colours flowing into place.

Six Necromancers broke through Lykke’s efforts, out into the world. Every one was unique; each one glowed like a bonfire of high-density nanomachine activity on Pheiri’s sensors.

///nanomachine control locus count point: 7

Perpetua rose from the ground less than fifty feet from Pheiri’s nose. For a split-second she was made of concrete and mold, but then she was whole, herself, unmistakable. Her white dress was untouched, not a hair out of place. Her face was twisted with a lifetime of frustration and disgust, her eyes ringed red from crying, or worse.

Perpetua opened her mouth, to speak or broadcast or pass sentence.

Howl grabbed Elpida’s lips and tongue, reached out to slap the nearest of Pheiri’s consoles, and whooped at the top of her lungs.

“Engines to full, little brother! Straight ahead and straight down the middle! Let’s run this bitch right back into the ground!”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

It’s Lykke! She’s helping! Hooray!

Well. She helped, past tense. For a minute or two. Well done, Necromancer. Clearly she’s angling for some praise from Elpida. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Elpida headpats mm …

Behind the scenes, things are going very well. This arc might indeed end up a little longer than 10 chapters, but that’s okay, I think the wave is a good one for surfing, so I’ll let Elpida and the others handle it from here. But mostly Pheiri at the moment. Vroom vroom.

Also this week, I have some art from the discord! I have something very special, in fact. Remember a few arcs ago, when Iriko tried to talk to those stray zombies deep in the tomb? And she extruded a pseudopod, and tried to make it pretty? And the result was, shall we say, a little uncanny? Well. Iriko’s Pseudo Doll, (by cubey) captures that attempt perfectly. How fitting for the spooky month! (I love Iriko!)

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

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!

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading my little story; I am so grateful that you’ve enjoyed Necroepilogos so far, and I’ve still got so much more tale to tell! Couldn’t do it without all of you! Elpida has so many more miles to walk (ride?). Seeya next chapter! Until then!