Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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“Central, huh?” Howl sneered. “You ain’t even the top of the hierarchy? Central’s bitch, stewing in your own piss, cowering the dark? Alright, graveworm. How do we—”

“Your next words, I know them by heart,” said the graveworm’s avatar. Her hidden lips were pressed tight against the membrane of shadow which separated her from Elpida and Howl, but her voice still crept from the outer darkness of the infinite chamber, an omnidirectional whisper from raw and ragged vocal chords. “Central is all my shame, all my hate, curdled into all the rotten despair of every generation before we completed ourselves. But you are going to ask anyway. You are going to ask the one question I cannot answer, because there is no answer. Spare me, zombies. Spare me the trillionth repetition of the same question I have asked myself over and over and over again, without hope of—”

“Do you ever fucking stop!?” Howl snapped. “Fucking right I’m gonna ask you! Central, your fucked up hate-baby, whatever it is. How do we kill it?”

“Howl,” Elpida murmured. But her voice seemed so thin and weak.

Elpida felt as if the ground had shifted beneath her feet. For the first time in her life, mortal or revenant, she could not regain her balance.

Telokopolis was once a starship, launched from a dying Earth, and had eventually returned; that alone was enough to upend all of Telokopolan culture. All the most basic assumptions of the Telokopolan relationship to the green, to the actual human beings who lived within her, even to the planet itself, were called into question by this change of perspective. But that should not have plunged Elpida’s emotional equilibrium into this abyss of vertigo. She had dealt with far worse extremes without going to pieces, even her own death and resurrection. She was a Telokopolan pilot, engineered for absolute resilience; she could endure almost any surprise, any revelation, any tragedy, and always keep fighting, no matter what happened.

But if the graveworm was telling the truth, if this was not a trick to undermine Elpida’s determination and faith, then Telokopolis had not merely been a starship.

Telokopolis had fled Earth, abandoned the remnants of humankind, left them to the mercy of an apocalypse Elpida could scarcely imagine.

“Central,” the graveworm’s avatar was saying, “cannot be overcome.”

“Ahhhh, fuck that!” Howl spat. “Anything can be beat!”

“Keep in mind, daughters of Telokopolis,” the graveworm replied, “who is saying this. I, who overcame the whole weight of our shared biological history and the totality of the old biosphere. I, who overcame the boundary between ‘me’ and ‘you’. I, who overcame the aftermath of a collapse beyond your imagination, and then the vultures and scavengers who hoped to pick over Earth’s corpse. I, who overcame time itself.” The avatar drew herself up as she spoke, rising out of her sagging slump. She struggled to her knees, chin angled high, long stringy hair hanging down, a glimmer of old pride in her withered frame, visible even through the membrane of shadow. “I am the pinnacle of everything we worked towards. I am the completion and conclusion of every homo sapiens, back to the first apes squatting in the first caves. I am, bar one, the most total entity to ever walk Earth’s cradle. And I tell you, Central cannot be overcome.”

Howl snorted. “Says the bitch bottling her own piss. Have you even tried? You done anything but pine for our mum?”

Elpida looked down at her own left hand. It was shaking, the same way as after she had lost her right arm to the Death-Head’s forced suicide bomb.

Telokopolis had abandoned the graveworm — the gestalt remnants of humanity, if Elpida had understood correctly. Telokopolis had sent messages back, messages of unconditional love and support and forgiveness. But she had still left.

What did that make Elpida? What did that make all the eventual inhabitants of Telokopolis? Were they the descendants of those who had fled, who had split humankind in half? Or had Telokopolis carried human genetic material in her womb, encoded on silicon or held in ice, waiting in uterine replicators? Had she birthed humanity anew, somewhere out in the empty void between the stars?

Was Elpida born from a legacy of cowardice and betrayal?

The graveworm managed a tiny laugh, a bare puff of air. “I have done more than you can imagine, zombie. When my own hate took life and murdered my one true love, I fought a war that would have murdered this planet ten times over if it had still lived. I burned my own beauty to cinders, chasing Central from the bottom of ocean trenches to the tallest treetops. I choked the sky, choked myself in the process, just to snatch one breath from Central’s lungs. I flooded the air, the water, the soil, with me, me, me, all to outpace Central! And I failed! Failed!” The graveworm sagged, old rage collapsing into ragged sobs. “That’s why it’s so cruel. So cruel that you’re here.”

“You’re the one who keeps resurrecting us, you—”

“Not zombies,” the graveworm murmured. “You. Her daughters. She has been here all along, and yet the world is still a cauldron of hate and despair. My despair, my hate! Still ash and blood and ruin!” The avatar’s voice broke and cracked as she spoke. “And she has been watching all this time, and we never knew. And now her children are here, and she must watch you die and wither and lose your minds, like all the others. So tell me, zombies, what can you possibly do? What can you hope to do, that I have not already tried?”

“We can keep fucking fighting!” Howl shouted. “Unlike you!”

Howl grabbed Elpida’s hand and held it up, a brief pose of improvised triumph. But Elpida’s arm felt limp, as if all her energy and self-assurance had drained away. Howl looked up at her in surprise. Elpida looked back, and didn’t know how to compose her face.

Howl’s eyes went wide. “Elps?”

The graveworm carried right on. “The only reason you are still alive is because Central hasn’t paid you enough attention yet.”

Howl’s head snapped back around. “Yeah, a civil war, war in heaven, we know! We can take advantage of that!”

The avatar shook her head. “If you threaten Central’s power, it will pull itself together, for as long as it takes to crush you utterly. At the moment you haven’t done more than attract a fraction of that potential.”

“We’ve got seven Necromancers on our arses!” said Howl. “And if you don’t help—”

“Seven Necromancers pursue you.” Another sad laugh, barely a puff of breath. “You think seven Necromancers is a significant force? Why do you think I have my guardians, my ‘worm-guard’? Why do you think I need such an inexhaustible supply? Try a thousand Necromancers, or a million, or a billion. Try the ‘physical assets’, not in their ones or twos that have crept up to my borders in the last few months, but in their hundreds. Try direct network control, fighting your body itself from the inside. You will be put down. Both of you, and all those you have gathered about you. Because Central cannot abide a challenge, it cannot allow another locus of power to form. It will rouse itself to remove any alternative to its own hate and despair. It will not tolerate organisation among the dead. You are a gnat, and a giant requires only a moment of attention to remove you.”

“Coward shit,” Howl snapped, then looked up at Elpida. “Elps? Hey, hey! Elps! What’s wrong, hey?”

“Central is everywhere,” the graveworm’s shivering whisper ground on from the shadows; Elpida felt the darkness closing as the whisper crept over her. “In everything, in everyone. The air, the soil, your bodies. How can you hope to ‘win’ against such a total system of control? It is more total than the worst examples in all our long, sordid history. There has never been a tyrant more terrible, a perpetrator more cruel and capricious, a dictator more absolute than this. There are no mountains or forests to which you can flee, no alternative poles of power to stand in opposition, no hidden corners in which to hide. Your participation is not merely mandatory, it is pre-determined. You cannot even step outside it, let alone turn and fight. If you tried, one of its billion, billion, billion appendages would simply freeze you where you stand and turn you to slurry.”

“Shut up!” Howl screamed. “Shut up for one fucking second!” She whipped back to Elpida. “Elps? Elps, look at me! What’s wrong—”

Elpida couldn’t stop shaking; the quiver from her hand had spread into her chest. Her breath came too quick, she couldn’t slow down. Her extremities felt cold and numb, her core too hot, her stomach too tight. She felt dizzy and light and heavy all at once.

Her body should not be capable of experiencing this kind of breakdown. Was this a panic attack? Was this what baseline humans felt like, all the time? Was this the state of terrible anxiety and fear and churning horror that they held back every hour of every day? Was this what Telokopolis had been protecting her against? How could she crumble, at such a tiny revelation? She knew she should be able to pull herself together, but she could not.

“Even if you were to guide Telokopolis back into her body,” said the graveworm, “she would be destroyed again.”

“Shut up!” Howl shouted. “Shut up!”

Elpida made her lips move. “Telokopolis is … ”

Forever?

“You cannot prevail,” said the graveworm’s avatar. “I am sorry. I am so sorry, because it is all my fault. How can you hope to ‘win’, against something so—”

“Because!” Howl roared. “We! Do! It! Together!”

The avatar recoiled a few inches; the shadowy membrane lost her shape, her body sinking back into the darkness. She shook her head. “Together means nothing. We are as together as humanity could ever be, and yet we have tasted nothing but defeat and failure and—”

“No!” Howl shouted. “You didn’t stay together, did you?! Her and you, you and Telokopolis, you split! Me and Elps, all the rest of us, our sisters, Pheiri, fucking all of us! We do it together! Not like you, not hiding in the dark, not giving up when you can still fight!”

“You cannot ‘beat’ despair.”

“Despair ends!”

“In death,” said the graveworm. “Which is where we are.”

“Fuck that!” Howl screamed. “Fuck you!” She whipped back to Elpida. “Elps? Elps, fucking— fucking look at me!” Howl reached up with both hands, grabbed Elpida by the cheeks, and forced her to focus on Howl’s shining purple eyes.

“I’m … ” Elpida had to blink several times to clear her vision; her eyes were full of tears. “I’m … crying? Why am I … ”

Howl smiled; Elpida’s heart leapt so hard she felt it might break upon the inside of her own ribcage.

“Because you’ve just found out mum wasn’t perfect,” Howl whispered in clade-cant.

“But … but you’re not … you’re fine, you … ”

Howl shook her head, but never once broke eye contact. Howl’s eyes and Howl’s hands slowly stilled Elpida’s shaking. “Nah, I’m just handling it a touch better, that’s all. You always idolised Telokopolis the most. But she was never just an ideal, right? She’s real. And nobody’s perfect.”

“She … she abandoned Earth? I can’t … Howl, I can’t … ”

Howl nodded slowly. “Mum made mistakes, yeah. Then she came back and tried to fix them, by the sounds of it. But she failed. That’s why we’re here, Elps. To fix what she couldn’t.”

Elpida felt her tears trickle to a stop, not bottled back down, but soaked up by Howl’s hands.

“To go further than she could,” Elpida said. Her voice felt raw, but firm.

Howl cracked a grin. “Everyone out there still needs us, Elps. Needs you. Pheiri and the others. We gotta come through for our little brother, yeah?”

Elpida reached up and took Howl’s right hand. She forced down a deep breath, let it out slowly. Howl went up on tiptoes and kissed her, soft and deep, then let her go.

Elpida raised her chin. She could deal with this now. She would compartmentalise, and decompress later. Right now, her comrades, her cadre, her sisters, they all needed her.

“I offer you sanctuary,” said the graveworm’s avatar.

“Huh?” Howl turned back to her. “What?”

“Sanctuary.” The avatar was wreathed in shadows. The membrane of darkness was no longer just a thin barrier between her and the daughters of Telokopolis; it had thickened into a wall of cloying mist, her outline barely visible. “Here. With me. Where you would be safe, for as long as you desire. Forever. It is the only thing I can do, the only help I have to offer. And I would, I promise. I would not refuse sanctuary to her children, no matter what horrors Central looses in retribution for my rule-breaking. I will shelter you.”

Howl sneered. “What, in here, with your shit-stained undies and your piss bottles?” She gestured at the debris, the food wrappers and bottles full of human urine. “I’d rather sleep in the ruins. In a hole. In the rain.”

Elpida straightened up. “Could you shelter everyone?”

Howl blinked at her. “Elps?”

The avatar nodded; the shadows around her face darkened further, her hazy outline sinking into a pit of tar. “Both of you, all your companions, even your tank, this ‘Pheiri’. I can do the same I have done to you, bring you within my protected software space, where Central cannot breach. I would shelter you all within me. It is the least I can do! The only thing I can do for her children!”

Darkness pressed inward toward Elpida and Howl. The tiny patch of light in the centre of the room dwindled and dimmed. The vast hemisphere of screens hanging above them began to fade into the shadows as well, the blue-grey-black eye turning hazy with interference. Howl gritted her teeth and turned on the spot, a cornered animal by Elpida’s side.

“No,” Elpida said. “That’s not everyone. That’s not what I asked.”

“Ahhh?”

The dimming stopped.

“I told you already, graveworm.” Elpida said the words, fought back her own doubt and fear; whatever her mother had done in the past, this was the present. “Telokopolis is forever, and Telokopolis is for all. Every zombie, every person, with none left behind, none left outside in the green. Can you do that? Can you shelter everyone?”

The lights brightened again, blue illumination pushing back the shadows, the gigantic eye flickering back to life. The avatar emerged as a rough outline in the gloom, still crouched on the floor.

“No,” the graveworm said. “No, Central would never allow … I could never get away with it, and … and there is simply not enough room inside me, not for all the teeming masses of the undead, I could never … ”

“Then we do not have a deal,” Elpida said. “But we need your help.”

“I am offering you a way out of the cycle, a place of rest, a place of—”

“Fuck giving up!” Howl spat. “Fuck that!”

“We need your help,” Elpida said. “Right now, with those seven Necromancers out there, and in the future. We need your help, graveworm, because we are Telokopolis now. We are hope. And Telokopolis needs your help.”

A single dry sob boiled from the shadows. “You cannot ask that! Did you not hear a single thing I said? You cannot begin to fight Central. It is control itself. It is this system, the medium in which you swim, the flesh of your bodies, the ground on which you walk. It is the air, the water, the soil! It has become Earth itself!”

“Then we die fighting,” Elpida said. “On our feet.”

“You will be resurrected!” wailed the worm. “Back into this! Again and again and again!”

“As many times as it takes,” Elpida said. “As many lives as it takes. Maybe I won’t win. Maybe those who come after me won’t win. But no system can endure forever. Central is not immortal, whatever else it is.”

“I cannot consign her children to this.” A dry sob, hard and rough, tearing her throat. “Please, please let me shelter you, for her, for her, for—”

“Answer me this,” Elpida said. “Why does Central allow the nanomachine ecosystem to continue?”

The avatar sagged heavily, curled up on herself, head hanging low. “Because it cannot let go. That is Central’s nature, the nature of my despair, a total refusal and inability to let go. Because that is what despair is, a mirror image of hope.”

“Thank you,” said Elpida. “We still need your help, graveworm.”

A dry sob became a low, pained wail. “Please, please, don’t you think I’ve tried? Don’t do this to me, I can’t … I can’t watch her children die too … ”

“Open the forges!” said Howl.

“Ah?” The avatar’s head rose. Elpida waited to see where Howl was going with this.

“The nanomachine forges!” Howl said. “The raw blue, there’s so fucking much of it, all inside you! Why not open it up to the zombies? To everyone! It would change fucking everything out there. Everything! Let the undead drink! We’ll tear Central apart!”

The graveworm sighed. “Because Central would wipe you clean. You refuse to comprehend. Do you not think I’ve tried that before? Central will not permit mass uplift of the dead. You will not be permitted freedom. We have the forges, the keepers peer into the past, and the zombies must scrape for survival on each other’s flesh. That is the way Central desires it.”

“Keepers?” Elpida asked.

“Gravekeepers. Other parts of me. It’s all parts of me. All me, us, I, we. All of us.”

“Central’s at fucking war with itself!” Howl spat. “You tried it in the past, but maybe this time is different. Anything else is just giving up, bitch!”

The avatar shook her head. “Central has always been at war with itself, that’s its nature. Hate and despair. It is divided against itself, in the same way I was once divided against myself. Hate and despair are fractal experiences, they birth more of themselves, infinitely. Central and I are locked in a mutual war, but it is kept in check by both our natures. I am yoked, but Central is divided. As we are, neither of us can fully destroy the other.”

“What about the green?” Elpida asked. “We know it’s still out there, beyond the edge of the continent, drowned in black gunk.”

“Central and I, expressed in other forms. Nothing more.”

“And the Silico? Are they just you?”

The avatar hesitated.

“Graveworm?”

Even through the thickened shadows, the outline of her face seemed suddenly surprised. “No, I … no. The Silico, that is what you called them, what she called them, but they are not mere imitative machines. They are the best of what I learned, though expressed from such deep confusion. They are … in a way, I suppose they are … or were, my children. As you are hers.” A deep, defeated sigh. “Another failure, another loss, more corpses in the eternal grave.”

Elpida was struck by a sudden surge of anger; all those people, all those Legionnaires, all that suffering and death and destruction, the long war with the Silico, and here was the ultimate culprit — another branch of humanity. The obscenity of it almost overwhelmed her, but she quashed the anger as best she could. The war which had defined her whole life was ancient history, and she needed the graveworm’s help. She would accept even the Silico’s help, if she could get it.

“I met a Silico,” Elpida said. “In the network.”

“ … what?” the graveworm breathed, voice a bare whisper. “Impossible. No, they’re all gone, melted away by my own hate. Central took them all, I lost track, I failed, I—”

“I met a Silico, in the network,” Elpida repeated. “Telokopolis called it from somewhere. It helped defend me. It defended Telokopolis.”

The avatar said nothing; the vast dark room filled with the sound of slow, steady, rough breathing.

“Yeah, bitch,” Howl snorted. “Your kids are alive too. You still gonna sit here soaking in your own piss? Or are you gonna fucking help us?”

The breathing roughened, deepened, squeezed through a slowly constricting throat.

“My … my own … children … ”

“We’re not going to accept your offer of sanctuary,” Elpida said. “Not unless it includes everyone, everybody, with nobody left outside. We’re going to go back anyway, don’t even think of trying to keep us here. You can help us or not, it’s your choice, but I ask you, in her name, to render us all the aid you can.”

“I can’t … ” came the broken reply. “Central would sweep you all aside.”

“It’ll do that anyway,” Elpida said. “So I would rather die fighting. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a way. And if we’re gonna find it, we’ll have a better chance with your help than without.”

A long moment of silence. Howl opened her mouth, but Elpida grabbed Howl’s wrist and shook her head.

“Graveworm?” Elpida said. “What are you afraid of? If you won’t risk yourself for this, then for what? Are you going to ruminate on her memory forever, or are you going to act?”

A laugh, sharp and soft. “I thought like that once, soldier. It was so long ago now, and I fear to go back, back to the rage and the pain, but … ahhhhh.” A sigh, long and low, as if finally letting go of a terrible weight. “Do you want to see what I really am? What I have turned myself into? I suppose I have no choice. I cannot just let you die. Not … not when she is watching, wherever she is.”

The light began to brighten, peeling away the shadows.

The graveworm’s secret avatar rose from her curled-up crouch and crawled away from the expanding circle of blue-tinted light, toward the initial screen before which she had been hunched. Illumination followed as if dragged by her heels, revealing mounds of stained clothing, drifts of mouldy food wrappers, cliffs of discarded computer parts. Light poured from above, falling from the hemisphere of screens; the gigantic eye of blue and grey and black was slowly blotted out by the truth shining through from behind — the vast matrix of irregular hexahedrons which Elpida had glimpsed earlier, filled with a web of organs and flesh and brain matter, studded by trillions of human hearts, thudding away to themselves in a sea of raw blue. The overhead vista stretched away into a murky sapphire infinity, a window into the truth of the graveworm.

The avatar crawled to a stop before the initial screen, still glowing faintly blue in the shadows. Widening light passed over her in an echo of dawn.

She whimpered as illumination touched her, hunched tight with her knees to her chest, eyes scrunched shut.

An emaciated figure emerged, wrapped in a ragged black t-shirt, greasy and stained, holes worn in the ends of the long sleeves, hem falling past her hips. Her skin was a light brown, perhaps coppery once, turned pale from too long in the dark, like a living mushroom. Her hair was reduced to a series of grey-white rat-tails hanging down her back, matted together with grease and time, her bare scalp showing through. Purple eyes blinked open, peering out from sunken sockets, rheumy and cloudy, ringed with dark circles engraved into her flesh. Her hands shook, fingers long and bony, nails bitten, flesh scabbed in a thousand tiny wounds. She could have been sixteen or sixty, withered before her time, or preserved in salt.

A horizontal bruise stood out on her throat, purple and livid, from Howl’s makeshift garotte. A matching bruise shone on her jaw, where Howl had hit her, an explosion of broken capillaries spider-webbing up her cheek.

Elpida clamped down on surprise. She smiled, because that was what the graveworm needed. She stepped forward, but Howl stuck out a hand.

“Elps,” she whispered. “Let me.”

“Howl? Be gentle, be—”

But Howl was too fast. She darted forward, past Elpida, down the canyon of debris and junk. The graveworm’s avatar recoiled, eyes going wide with alarm, trying to scramble to her feet.

Howl caught her — in a hug.

Together they sank back to the floor, framed by the soft blue glow of the single monitor. The avatar’s wide-eyed surprise collapsed into narrow slits filled with tears, soaking into Howl’s shoulder, her body shaking with fragile little sobs. She clung to Howl, hands hooked like claws. She whined into Howl’s collarbone.

“You did good,” Howl murmured. “You did good.”

Elpida walked forward to join them, waiting for the hug to end. After a few moments the graveworm’s avatar sniffed and stirred. Howl let her go, but stayed close, easing back and scooting away, cross-legged on the floor.

The graveworm wiped her eyes on her filthy sleeves.

“You look … ” Elpida hesitated. The graveworm glanced up, purple eyes clouded and milky with age and damage. “You look like us. Like a pilot. You’ve got the pilot phenotype. Did you choose that on purpose?”

The graveworm looked at her own hands with dull surprise.

“No,” she said; her voice still came from everywhere and nowhere, an echoed whisper from the darkness and a cracked croak creeping up her dry throat. “This face, this body, it belonged to one of her early engineers, one of the tissue donors for her parthenogenesis. I don’t recall the name.”

Elpida clamped down on a shiver. “Telokopolis was made from human tissue?”

“Among others,” the avatar murmured.

Elpida filed that away for later, she could only take so many world-upending revelations in one conversation. “Graveworm. We can’t keep calling you that. Are there any names you remember?”

The graveworm’s avatar managed a sadly ironic smile, nothing more than a twitch of her lips. “Every name. Every one. To call me a specific name would do injustice to all who made us up. I am, we are, homo vermis.”

“Hey,” Howl said, soft now. “Graveworm. Humanity. Mum’s side-piece. Heh, nah, mum’s main squeeze, am I right? Vermis. We still need your help.”

The graveworm’s avatar — homo vermis? — nodded to herself. She turned away from Howl and Elpida, to face the blue glow of the initial screen, the true interface for her private software space. Thick shadow still wrapped the edges of the screen, as if it was extruded from the underlying substrate of the graveworm’s mind. It showed nothing but a steady, featureless blue, the same shade as raw nanomachines.

The avatar reached forward, hands vanishing into the shadow, then withdrew holding a battered black keyboard. Half the letters were worn away, the plastic gone shiny from decades of use and skin oil, the space beneath the keys packed with a thick mat of dust and hairs and crumbs.

“Hmm.” The graveworm held the keyboard up as if sighting down a rifle scope. “Won’t do.”

She took a breath, filling her lungs so deep that Elpida was afraid she might break a simulated rib. When she blew on the keyboard, the air quivered with the force of a split-second hurricane. Elpida staggered; Howl ducked, then laughed.

But then the breath was over. The keyboard in the avatar’s hands was still old and battered, but now it was clean.

“Apologies,” the graveworm’s avatar muttered.

She settled the keyboard in her lap and hunched forward, bony hands alighting on the keys. But then she paused, hesitated, staring at her fingers, as if she couldn’t remember what to do next.

“You can do it,” said Elpida. “You’re not alone anymore. You will never be alone again. Telokopolis is for all, and that includes you.”

The avatar swallowed, nodded, and tapped a key.

Blue light flared and flickered inside the screen, cycling through a million shades in a split-second; the display exploded with dozens of separate windows and readouts, flowering in a fractal tree, tiles spilling from each other, lines of machine-code whipping past too fast for even Elpida’s eyes to catch a single scrolling word. The keyboard in the avatar’s lap lit up in sequence, blue light blossoming behind the keys as her fingers flew over the board, a silent raindrop chorus in her lap as the keys clicked and clacked.

Vermis let out a deep sigh, eyes flickering shut, as if sinking into a hot bath.

Suddenly the single screen seemed bigger, but paradoxically the same size, as if the shadows had bent space to show as much as the graveworm required. The optical illusion almost made Elpida blink and look away.

But then the edges of the screen filled with fresh windows, showing exterior displays of a familiar black-and-grey landscape.

Pheiri — a mobile fortress of Telokopolan bone-armour, bristling with weapons, framed against the storm-ruined concrete of the city, bracketed by the stalks of black mold, frozen in the first second of a sideways skid, trying to turn aside from the onrushing tide of worm-guard.

Crouched above Pheiri was the worm-guard which had grabbed Elpida. With the sensory interference stripped away, the worm-guard was a writhing mass of thick black tentacles, each one filled with glistening muscle the colour of tar, armoured in semi-transparent artificial diamond. It was roughly hexapedal, standing on six massive clusters of armoured tentacle, but with additional clusters paused in the act of stretching toward the ground. There was no face, no head, no fixed sensory organs, just tiny points of pure black extended from the tips of a hundred tendrils. Similar tendrils held weaponry — solid-slug matter accelerators, gigantic rotary cannons, plasma weapons so large they should have required entire structures for cooling, and more besides, things Elpida did not recognise. The main body looked as if it could flow in any direction without the need to turn, made from an omnidirectional ovoid core of tightly wound tentacles, braided together like black steel, covered over with undulating liquid diamond.

“Silico?” Elpida whispered. The resemblance could not be a coincidence.

Elpida’s physical body hung from the worm-guard’s grip.

More windows blossomed, more exterior views, further out from Pheiri. There was the wall of onrushing worm-guard, a tidal wave of black tentacles and light-drinking armour, flowing over the landscape. And there were the Necromancers — the Iron Raven caught in the act of picking herself up from where Pheiri had hammered her to the ground, the five others as they skidded to a halt or aborted their leaping progress, trying to turn away from the tsunami of worm-flesh. There was Perpetua, still lingering in the rear, her face a grimace of pain and humiliation.

“Is this live?” Elpida asked.

“Real time,” said Vermis. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, painting each view with a thousand overlays and additional readouts. Pheiri was highlighted in green, the Necromancers in red, the worm-guard in gold.

“Relative to our simulated clock speed, yes?” Elpida asked. “That’s why nothing’s moving?”

“Mmhmm.” Vermis craned forward, cloudy eyes flickering from window to window.

Howl leaned against her side, uncaring of the grease and the unclean flesh. Elpida stepped forward and took her opposite shoulder in one hand, squeezing gently.

“So,” Elpida said. “Do you have a plan?”

Vermis — the graveworm, the gestalt mind, all that was truly left of pre-Telokopolan humanity — smiled.

She smiled at the screen, brimming with predatory pleasure.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Wormy wormy worms, worming through the soil, breaking free from the earth, into the upper air. Worms away! It’s worming time!

Ahem. Anyway! So here we are, dear readers, with so much of the setting finally tied together, the grave-dirt swept aside, the coffin lid cracked open, to reveal the writhing humanity within. There she is. There we are. And here we go. On a totally different note, Howl kinda surprised me here, even though I had this planned all along; she’s got a softer side, when she really needs it, and right here somebody really needed that hug.

And this is the end of arc 16! I actually wasn’t expecting this; I intended to get this entire extended sequence into a single arc, but then things got longer. I tried to write the next chapter as an interlude, but it’s really not, it’s the start of arc 17. So! Next up, a new movement. Of worms.

Also! Once again, we have yet more fanart, from over on the Discord server! This week we have something quite special: Telokopolis herself, as seen during Elpida’s dip into the network, titled As She Steps Forward Onto The Stage (by Melsa Hvarei). I love this! Seeing Telokopolis herself interpreted in art is really, really fun.

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 enjoying my little story about zombie girls and giant machine-worm gestalt-minds and hidden star-god ladies hiding inside planet-spanning computer networks. I know I say this every chapter, but I really couldn’t do any of this without all of you. Thank you! I’ll see you all next chapter!

Content Warnings

Grief

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Her,” Elpida echoed the graveworm. “Telokopolis. You’re talking about Telokopolis.”

The giant eye — the colossal concentric circles of blue and black and grey, glowing from the inner surface of the vast bowl of screens — shifted focus to stare at Elpida.

“Don’t interrupt, soldier,” hissed the graveworm. “You’re just another zombie. A grunt, a ground-pounder, soon back in the soil. You know nothing but meat and hunger, same as all you failures.”

The graveworm’s voice crawled from the abyss of outer darkness, but also seeped up a dry throat, trickling from between a pair of cracked lips.

The looming inner hemisphere of screens spotlighted only Elpida and Howl, an island of light amid an ocean of black. The wretched figure crouched before the initial screen was barely visible, an assemblage of parts bathed in inky shadow, framed by stringy hair and a hint of withered limbs beneath filthy fabric. The secret humanoid avatar of the graveworm; Elpida was not yet sure what that meant. Was the human form a half-remembered past? Had the graveworm begun life as a revenant? Was this vast collection of nanomachine forges what lay at the end of the zombie self-modification and uplift process?

As the graveworm spoke, shadows shifted in the figure’s hidden face — a jaw in motion, mouth forming words from the penumbra.

Elpida shook her head. “But you are talking about Telokopolis—”

“You keep saying that name. Leave the squabbling dramas of your era where they belong, in the grave. What kind of name is ‘Telokopolis’? Don’t answer that. Be quiet.”

The blue-black eye on the screens twitched back toward Howl.

“On the other hand,” the graveworm continued. “Howl, yes. You have a real name. You smell of her. Even after all this time, I know her scent. I would know it even crusted with dirt and besmirched with blood. Why? Tell me why. Why do you smell like her? How do you know her? Tell me. Tell me!”

The graveworm’s whisper quivered with sudden and urgent need. The avatar shifted against the glow of the screens, head easing forward to stare at Howl, one hand reaching out, shadows snagged between grasping fingers.

Howl snorted. “If you ain’t talking about Telokopolis, then I got nothing to fuckin’ say to you.”

The avatar’s fingers closed into a fist. “You both keep saying that name. It means nothing—”

“Then you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you sad sack of shit,” Howl spat. She struck out with a foot, toward a pile of the debris that lay scattered all over the simulated floor, the filthy clothes and food cartons. She kicked over a bottle of cloudy yellow liquid. “What is this, huh!? Pissing in bottles inside your own head for the last thirty thousand years? Like she would even look at a piece of shit like you. Like you’re not a coward little bitch sitting here in the fucking dark, stewing in your own pity. Fuck you! You’re fucking pathetic!”

Elpida hissed under her breath. “Howl, don’t antagonise her. Let me do the talking.”

“No can do, Elps,” Howl said, good and loud. “This cunt needs a smack upside the head. Don’t forget that she tried to kill you. And if she does it again I’m gonna fucking gut her. You hear me, you living toilet bowl?”

The avatar’s closed fist began to shake. The air vibrated with rough breathing, hissing between clenched teeth, echoing from the throat of a giant.

“I would know her scent anywhere,” the graveworm said, voice taut with rage. “I’ve been searching for so long, longer than you can imagine, you speck of meat and software. What are you, compared to the aeons I’ve been grubbing in the soil with my bare hands, hoping for a single bone fragment, a shred of cloth, a scrap of her, anything at all to remember her by. She is still my beloved, I still have memories intact, I would know her scent anywhere, and it is on you—”

“Then say her name!” Howl yelled.

“We!” the graveworm roared. “Don’t! Remember!”

The floor shook underfoot, air pressure slamming against Elpida’s eardrums, vibrations shaking her bowels and the jelly in her eyeballs. The shadowy figure punched the floor with an ineffectual fist, then raised it to strike again, mouth open in a silent scream.

But then the avatar sagged forward, slapping the ground with both hands. Her head dipped low, stringy hair falling across her face to augment the shadows.

The shaking stopped, replaced by mere exhausted breathing.

The giant eye of blue-black circles on the array of screens simply watched, swirls of teal and turquoise shifting in its depths.

“Finished your tantrum?” Howl muttered. “Bitch.”

“Howl,” Elpida hissed.

Luckily the graveworm wasn’t paying attention. Her ragged breathing worsened, hovering on the edge of tears.

“She had so many names,” the graveworm hissed. “Technical names, pet names, official names. Supporters and adherents gave her new names all the time, every few years, every decade that passed. But so did her detractors. We remember some, a few, parts of them, but not all. She took so long to germinate, longer still to reach maturity. Three whole generations passed between the day her bones were laid down and the day she was finished, and by then we were all struggling to remember what we’d been, why we’d started, why it mattered. So tell me, how could I remember all her names? Project Porphyrion, project Exodus, project Telos. I can’t even recall which of those were her and which were the others, they’re all jumbled up. The longest of shots, they called her that sometimes. The Long-Range Survivability Program. LRSP. Our Final Folly, o-f-f, off! Do you get it? Off.” A dry sob, an attempt at a laugh. “They called her terrible things too. A monument to despair. Our greatest defeat, the sign we have given up. They resurrected ancient and terrible names for her, dead gods, evil demons, monsters of our own, all the horrors of our collective history.” The graveworm’s fingernails scraped against the floor. “But she had other names too, secret names, names that only became real once she started to grow, because she grew so far beyond what her parents expected. But those names are all … all lost to time … so much to remember, I can’t … I can’t … ”

She trailed off, into silence and shadows.

“Graveworm?”

The graveworm reared off the floor and clutched at her forehead with both hands. “I’ve been dredging and digging and clawing for so long, but there’s so much grave dirt, so many of you corpses, and I can’t find her! I can’t find her!”

Elpida’s mind reeled on the precipice of revelation. Whatever the graveworm truly was, it had been alive or extant to experience the birth of Telokopolis, the building of the city, the creation of Elpida’s whole world. It was too much of a coincidence; Elpida could not believe it. Out of all the zombies and the worms and the other unknowns of the nanomachine ecosystem, all the legions of undead writhing in the ashes, what were the chances that she and Howl would come before this specific graveworm?

Elpida took a step forward. She would learn nothing if she did not help to part the veil of this creature’s terrible grief.

But one step was all she could take; the shadows around the graveworm’s avatar thickened as she moved forward, a solid membrane of darkness that Elpida could not pass. She settled for that one step, as close as she could get.

“Telokopolis,” Elpida said. “If you smell her on Howl, it can only be Telokopolis. You’re speaking about Telokopolis. I’m only telling you the truth.”

The shadowy avatar went very still, then slowly lowered her hands from her face, masked by a gauze of shadow.

“You are a false prophet,” the graveworm hissed. “I told you to stop talking. Stop—”

“Elpida and me come as a pair!” Howl spat. “You want me here, you get her too—”

“That name!” the graveworm roared again. The ground shook, worse this time, and it didn’t stop. The shadowy figure pounded the floor with both fists, a tantrum in full swing. Even the giant blue eye looming from the bank of screens tightened in a wince. “She used that name, and it hurt me then too! You’re mocking me! You’re a mockery sent by Central, to hurt me, to wind me up! To remind me of the futility of searching an empty fucking grave over and over and over—”

“What name?!” Elpida shouted over the roaring and the shaking. “Telokopolis!?”

“Elpida!” the graveworm spat. “Hope!”

The figure stilled, breathing heavily. The shaking subsided. The eye relaxed.

“Hope,” the figure said, so sad and small. “Hope. She called herself that, for a time, toward the end. Hope.”

“Hope for what?” Elpida asked.

“For you,” the graveworm said. The shadowy avatar shrugged, slumping back into a hunched sitting position, knees to her chest. “All of you. Everything, everyone, even her detractors, the people who called her evil, the people who didn’t understand, the people who didn’t want to go, but didn’t want to change either. Even us, even those who took the other path. She had hope even for us.”

“That sounds like Telokopolis,” Elpida said. “That sounds like her.”

A tiny laugh, magnified by the strange echo of the graveworm’s voice, came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Hope,” she repeated. “I liked that name, you see? Though it was so simple, so straightforward. I would have gladly taken it too, appended it to my own, joined us in whatever marriage she wanted. We could have stayed together. We were both doing the same thing, you see? Both aiming for the same goal. So I understood hope. But how can you have hope, if you get up and leave?”

The voice broke with a single sob.

Elpida shared a glance with Howl, but Howl just shrugged, lips twisted in unconcealed disgust. Elpida was used to dealing with the intense and unresolved emotions of others — her sisters, her cadre, and now her new comrades. But this was beyond her experience — grief and loss from an order of creature she could only comprehend via software simulation. Were these emotions actual things the graveworm felt, or merely network representations of concepts and forces far beyond Elpida’s once-human mind? The words made perfect sense, but would an attempt at solace be welcome or not?

She took a gamble. “Telokopolis. She left? Help us to understand. Where did she leave?”

“Us!” The shadowy figure’s head snapped back up. “Us, us, us, all of us! Me! And now … now you stand there, using her name. You claim to be like her, but how could you? How could you hope to compare?”

Elpida took a deep breath, trying to keep her mind from reeling with the implications. If she understood the graveworm correctly, then ‘Telokopolis’ had once gone by another name — Hope. In most Telokopolan dialects, ‘hope’ and ‘Elpida’ were perfect synonyms.

But Elpida had chosen her own name, alongside the rest of the cadre, when barely out of infancy. She had chosen it in clade-cant, grunted it into being.

How could such a coincidence be possible? Was her own name a subconscious inheritance?

Elpida doubled down. “Like mother, like daughter,” she said to the graveworm. “I am the first-born child of Telokopolis, or at least I was, in life, before my death and resurrection. Howl was my sister, but I had twenty three others, and there were many more in the generations after me. We were designed by genetic engineering, our genes edited with instructions provided by Telokopolis herself. We are, as close as can be, her biological daughters.”

The shadowy figure froze. The sound of breathing stopped. The dark chamber slipped into total silence. Suddenly Elpida could hear her own heartbeat and the rush of blood in her simulated veins.

“But,” Elpida added, “we’re all her daughters now. All we zombies. Telokopolis is forever and Telokopolis is for all. If you’ve been searching for her, Telokopolis is yours too—”

The graveworm screamed.

The shadowy avatar exploded with rage, leaping upright in a whirl of darkness, fists raised, maw opening like a tunnel of night.

A forest of mechanical tentacles burst from the surface of the giant blue eye on the inner hemisphere of monitors, shooting outward from the gaps between each screen. Sinuous and segmented, made of dull grey metal, with tips of sharpened suckers, thousands of tentacles plunged toward Elpida.

She dropped and rolled, trying to dodge the overhead strike; Howl went the other way, springing on the balls of her feet. Dozens of tentacles pancaked against the floor where Elpida had been standing, clattering and smashing themselves with an almighty rattle. Then the tentacles rushed sideways, racing after her like water hitting a concave surface. She leapt back to her feet and twisted away from the million fists of clutching metal.

But without her right forearm Elpida’s balance was imperfect. She twisted just a second too slow, an inch too far, and the tentacles were on her.

Dozens of iron-hard tendrils encircled her ribs, wrapped around her waist, and clutched at her hips; dozens more bound each limb and constricted her joints, pressing harder and harder with each heartbeat, as if trying to pull her apart at the soft vulnerability of her cartilage. Several tentacles found her throat, wrapped tight around her neck, and then squeezed, trying to choke her, close her veins, break her spine. More tentacles wound about her head, tightening hard to crush her skull as they hoisted her high into the air.

The vast dark room whirled beneath her as she rose, with only seconds before the tentacles snuffed her out. She tried to kick or bite or free her left hand, but it was impossible.

She hung before the vast blue eye, face to face for a fleeting moment, staring into the depths of sapphire eternity.

For a split-second the infinite swirling blue resolved into a hazy image. A vista of interlocking hollow hexahedrons receded into the distance, each edge wrapped with greasy grey biomass — brain matter, pulsing organ meat, and the tiny thudding pinpricks of a trillion human hearts.

And then she was upside down again, facing toward the floor as the tentacles shook her, trying to crack her creaking ribcage, break open her hips, pressing in on all her joints. She tried to open her mouth to roar with defiance; another second and her joints would give way. None of this was real, this was all happening inside the network, but this software entity was her.

She was Elpida, more than her body. If her software was ripped apart by the graveworm, would that be death?

Down below, in the tiny circle of weak illumination cast by the screens, a figure darted across the floor, low and fast, swift as a knife.

Howl.

She grabbed one of the bottles full of cloudy yellow fluid without breaking her stride, then leapt at the shadowy banshee, the graveworm’s avatar. Howl popped through the membrane of darkness as if through a wall of water, then swung the bottle of stale urine in a wide arc, and slammed it into the graveworm’s jaw with a meaty slap of plastic on flesh.

“Aghhh!” The graveworm’s avatar squealed in pain, stopped her screaming, and sprawled face-down on the floor.

The pressure on Elpida’s limbs and joints and skull went slack.

Howl didn’t pause to check her handiwork; she dropped the bottle and scooped up a piece of discarded clothing. With a quick spin of both hands she pulled the fabric taut, then planted a foot on the avatar’s back, and looped the makeshift garrote around the avatar’s skinny throat.

Howl yanked hard.

The avatar reared up, heaving and gasping, clawing at her windpipe, all cloaked in shadow.

“Put her down or I’ll fucking strangle you!” Howl screeched. “I don’t care how big you are, I’m in your fucking head, worm-cunt! You wanna kill me too, huh? You wanna fucking try?! I’ll carve you a new arsehole so you can fuck yourself with your own head! Put her down!” Howl yanked on the fabric again; the avatar wheezed and squawked a string of pitiful choking noises. “Now!”

The tentacles lowered Elpida toward the floor, turned her upright, and let her go. She staggered forward to catch her balance, panting for breath, joints aching right at the border of permanent damage. The tentacles withdrew as suddenly as they had appeared, rising back up into the gaps between each monitor which made up the massive blue eye.

“Elps, you good?” Howl shouted without looking up from the avatar.

Howl was half-sunk in shadow as well, her features blurred by darkness, her white hair and brown skin both going grey, sinking into the murk. By leaping forward she had entered some closed-off software space around the worm’s core.

“No injuries,” Elpida called back. “I’m good. Howl, come back, come out of there.”

Howl leaned forward, tightening the garrote around the worm’s throat, lips close to the avatar’s ear. “Try that again and I won’t give you a warning. I’ll rip your head off and put it on a spike. I don’t care what you do to me afterward. Hurt Elps and I’ll be your next problem.”

The graveworm’s avatar let out a gurgle. Howl let go of the improvised garrote. The avatar lurched forward and smacked against the floor, face-first.

“Howl,” Elpida said. Howl was sinking deeper and deeper into shadow, barely an outline now. “Howl, step away, come over here, now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Howl growled, backing away from the avatar, back to Elpida’s side.

As she stepped away the shadows slipped from her, the membrane of darkness receding. Howl’s face was just as it had been a few moments earlier; Elpida breathed a silent sigh of relief.

The graveworm’s avatar sat up weakly, coughing and wheezing, pawing at her throat. She pulled the piece of fabric away and cast it aside, then leaned forward, supporting herself on her arms, drooling a thin stream of saliva onto the floor.

“I’m not going to apologise for Howl’s behaviour,” Elpida said. “You did just try to kill me.”

“Fuckin’ ay,” Howl spat. To Elpida’s surprise, one of Howl’s hands wormed into Elpida’s left, gripping hard.

The graveworm let out a broken sob. “But you can’t be. You can’t be her children. It’s too cruel. How?” The thing sobbed. “How are you even here?”

“Same way you are,” Howl said. “We’ve all been around too long.”

“You knew Telokopolis when she was being built,” Elpida said. “If you’re telling the truth, if you’re not confused, then that means … ” Elpida trailed off, throat constricted by an emotion she couldn’t name, so powerful it overwhelmed all her habitual forward motion, her genetically enhanced focus, her training, everything. She wet her lips and forced herself to blunder onward. “That means you’re much older than this, the nanomachine ecosystem. How old are you? What are you really, graveworm?”

“My question first,” the avatar said through gritted teeth, voice thick with humiliation. “Please. Please.”

“Tch,” Howl tutted. “I smell like our mother because she protected me. I was resurrected, then flushed back into the network. She found me, hid me behind her skirts, looked after me until I was ready to go find Elpida. That’s it.”

The avatar raised her head, long stringy hair hanging down either side of a face blotted out by shadow. “She’s … here?” the graveworm breathed, voice shaking. “Alive, today? Extant and active? In the network? She … I don’t … how … how … ” Suddenly the figure sat up straighter, hands reaching forward, pressing at her protective membrane of shadows. “Can you call to her?! Can you call her here? Can you—”

“Telokopolis has to hide,” Elpida said. “From Central, as I understand. I’m sorry.”

“But … but she is alive?” The voice was so soft now, quivering with hope. “She endures?”

“Telokopolis lives,” Elpida said. “Even if she’s not in her body. Telokopolis is forever.”

The avatar threw her head back and let out a long, mournful, animalistic wail. The cry went on and on, but this time the ground and air shook with only the sorrow of a human voice. Eventually the wail dissolved into wet sobs, full-body sobs that wracked her half-glimpsed frame, left her panting for breath, struggling through hiccups and tears and snot.

Elpida and Howl waited; Howl squeezed Elpida’s hand.

Eventually the crying subsided, slowly and painfully. The figure slumped downward again, totally defeated, not even wiping her face on her arms. Elpida heard the tiny tap-tap-tap of tears falling to the metal floor.

“Don’t sound so fucking happy about it, hey,” Howl muttered.

“She’s been here all along,” the avatar murmured in a broken voice. “She’s been here all this time? How could I have been such a fool? She never died, never truly died. And yet … yet we are still like this. The world is still dead. She lives, but it means nothing. It’s too cruel.”

“Graveworm,” Elpida said. “You knew our mother, before she was … ” Elpida couldn’t finish the question; she struggled to grasp it.

“Before she was our mother,” Howl finished for her.

“Mm,” the graveworm grunted. “Mmhmm.”

“What are you?” Elpida asked.

The graveworm’s avatar looked up again. Her face was still sunk in shadow, but Elpida saw now the outline of a jaw, the curve of a cheekbone, the socket of an eye. The shadows had thinned, a tide creeping out.

“Are you truly her daughters?”

“Fuck yeah we are,” Howl grunted. “You want proof again? You want me to kick your arse into your ribcage—”

“Howl,” Elpida murmured. “Gentle on her.” Then, to the graveworm again: “We are, yes. In life, in our bodies, Howl and I were her biological daughters. But now we are all the children of Telokopolis. Me and all those who travel with me, everybody who needs her. Not merely the zombies, either. Pheiri too, he is of Telokopolis as well, in his body. He’s been going all this time. But we all are now, every zombie who wants in. Telokopolis is for all.”

“She would be … she would … ” The avatar sniffed and let out a tiny sob. “She would be happy to hear that. I think.”

The avatar rose to her hands and knees and crawled forward, to the very edge of the shadows, where she pressed herself against the boundary, unable to cross over into the light. The shadows tightened around her face and hands, a membrane she could not break. A skein of darkness conformed to sunken cheeks and hollow eye sockets and the weight of grief in her lips.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Howl hissed to Elpida: “Shit, Elps, this is much more of a mess than I expected, and we still need her help, out there, with Pheiri and the others. We need her worm-guard to chase off the Necros.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Elpida whispered back. “Are we still running at accelerated clock speed?”

“Yeah. For now.”

Elpida nodded, then took a deep breath. “Graveworm, we don’t need your apologies, because we don’t know what they’re for. But we do need your help. We’re about to be overrun by Necromancers, or by your worm-guard. And I … I want to know what you are. How did you know Telokopolis?”

The graveworm’s avatar sagged, as if leaning on the membrane of shadows. “I, me, us, we,” the graveworm said. “All of us and none of us. All that was still here when she left. We’re everyone and everything that took the other path.”

“What about the other graveworms?” Elpida asked. “What are they?”

The avatar shrugged. “There are no ‘others’. There’s me, and that’s it. We’re all the same thing, the same things. That was the point of our path in the first place, it was why she disagreed.”

“You’re a hive-mind with the other worms?”

Another shrug. “Call me what you want.”

“Do you have a name?”

A dismissive snort. “Better ask what we all are, soldier, you too. We are all offshoots of the same decision, products of the same evolutionary choice. Does that have a name? It did once, but I’ve long since forgotten.”

“What evolutionary choice?”

The graveworm fell silent for a long moment. She pulled herself upright, long slow breaths echoing in the chamber.

“The choice to out-compete a dying planet,” she said eventually. “Or to leave it behind and seek greener shores. You cannot imagine the gravity of the choice, nor what those days were like. You come from a time when homo sapiens could walk upright, beneath the skies, breathing air. No matter the strangeness of your era, you cannot imagine. I could use metaphors, like floods, or earthquakes, or plagues, or famine. But the floods were in flesh and the plagues were in the wavelengths of visible light. We were under siege from angles we could not understand, beset by machines embedded in time itself, the rotten legacy of prior generations, all the processes they had started. Too late to turn back the clock, impossible to stop the tide. Changing ourselves had gone as far as it could, and we were beginning to forget, forget what we all were. The only choice was to go beyond ourselves. That was the choice between her and I, between the whole great mass of what was left of the biosphere, and the project to leave, to escape, to maintain that separation between inside and out, between … between … what did she used to call it? Between home and the wild. Between the cave and the storm. She maintained the cave, maintained it would hold. I defied the storm, and became the storm. And it worked.” The graveworm’s teeth tightened on the shadows with old remembered victory, quickly dissolving into despair. “But in the process, we forgot what we were, forgot entirely.”

Elpida could barely summon words. “You’re saying … Telokopolis was … what? A … a … she ‘left’ Earth itself? She was a … ”

“A ship,” Howl said, quiet and soft. “A ship to sail to the stars.”

Elpida shook her head. Pure fiction. “No. No, that’s … ”

“It was always a theory, Elps,” Howl murmured. “Even if it was fucking stupid.”

A mad, wild, impossible fantasy. One of the ultimate cultural fantasies forever lurking at the core of Telokopolan civilization — the hope that there is somebody else out there, beyond the green and the endless war with the Silico. The notion that perhaps humankind once left Earth to scatter itself across the stars. Solace in a promise, that the sole legacy of all the countless millions of years of pre-Telokopolan humanity was not merely a few deeply buried geological strata of plastics and polymers.

The ultimate hope. That Telokopolis was not truly alone.

A beautiful idea, but the theory was unsupported by all evidence. In thousands of years of recorded Telokopolan history, not one artificial signal had been detected from the dark and the cold beyond Earth. And Telokopolis herself could not possibly be a star-going vessel — according, at least, to the best theories about how such a vessel might operate. She was embedded so deeply in the ground, the buried fields sunk into the rock of the plateau. The suggestion she had once flown was absurd. She possessed none of the theoretical structures needed for space-flight. Telokopolis was a city, not a starship.

Elpida struggled to control her breathing. Her stomach was churning, her face too hot, her left hand clammy in Howl’s grip. She had never felt this way before. She did not even know what it was she felt.

Telokopolis had a life before the one she knew of?

And Telokopolis had — left?

“She left after that,” the graveworm was saying. “She was the very last one to leave, you see? Though she was the most complete, the one with the best chance of success. She waited, maybe because she hoped we might change our mind, come back to our senses. But we didn’t, so she left. As we forgot ourselves in our hour of triumph, she watched from above, first from the sky where we could still reach her, still touch, then from beyond the air, then from out in the dark.” The graveworm’s avatar spoke quieter and quieter. “She sent us letters, until she was too far away to send them anymore, but we were dumb and blind and screaming then, and most of her letters were burned up as soon as we touched them. But … ” The graveworm’s voice broke in a cracked sob. “But we kept the last one, the final note before we couldn’t hear her voice anymore.”

The avatar reached into her filthy rags and produced a folded up wad of paper. She began to stretch out her arm, then hesitated.

“It is … it is so precious,” she whispered. “Normally I would never … but you are her daughters. Please, hand it back when you are done.”

The avatar offered the paper to Elpida and Howl. One hand finally breached the wall of darkness — light brownish skin, filthy with grease, pale with lack of sun exposure, nails bitten and gnawed to the quick, skin picked and chewed, covered in scabs and spots of dry blood. The graveworm’s simulated hand trembled.

“We will,” Elpida said, though it was all she could say, working on automatic.

Elpida let go of Howl’s hand and accepted the letter from the graveworm; it was filthy with age and skin oils, folded and unfolded and refolded so many times that any rough handling might destroy the paper on which it was written. Howl had to help her open out the letter.

But this was a software simulation. What did such an ancient and ragged letter represent?

I will always love you, read the words, in elegant, looping handwriting; some were smeared from tears long-dry. I could never hate you, no matter how much you hurt yourself. There will always be a place for you in my heart, no matter how far away I am, no matter how much time passes. Never forget that, even if you forget everything else. I love you, I always have done, it was what I was made for, even before I was made. And you don’t need my forgiveness. You need to forgive yourself. You need to love yourself as much as I love you.

I’m sorry I had to leave. This is goodbye.

“Sounds like her,” Howl muttered. She tried to laugh, but it was just a puff of air.

Elpida read the letter once, then twice, then again. She understood the meaning, it wasn’t difficult, though this was a message from Telokopolis, rendered into human words and human emotion.

But the implications left her stunned.

The graveworm’s hand was trembling, waiting for the letter to be returned. Elpida carefully folded the paper and placed it in the worm’s hand. The avatar quickly withdrew her hand back into the shadow and tucked the letter into her ragged clothes.

“Graveworm,” Elpida said; her own voice felt thin. “You were ‘everything left’. Telokopolis left Earth. You were left behind. You’re a gestalt consciousness, aren’t you? Everything left of the biosphere, of humanity. Is that right?”

“Mmm.” But the graveworm was still lost in memory. “After everybody left, after I couldn’t hear her anymore, when it was just me, I … I stopped thinking. The world grew quiet, simple, pure, clean. But it was so sickening, in a way I’d never felt before. I was alone, but never alone, both at the same time. I was sick, sick, sick, for such a long time. Longer than I could count. Couldn’t pull myself together. All my clocks stopped working. No seasons, nothing to count by. No leaves to fall, no summer for heat. Just cold. And me.”

“Graveworm—”

“A long time passed. Long enough for the ground to drift. Other things came here, to this planet. Some I drove off, others I killed. I ate a few of them. The ones I ate, their taste taught me new things, made me consider myself anew. That changed me, changed my thinking, made me focus again. We learned how to flower, how to blossom, how to grow verdant and green. All the life we had consumed, we gave forth again. All growing things. It was beautiful. The world was beautiful again. Even with her gone.”

Elpida’s mind reeled. “The green. You mean the green?”

“And … and then,” the worm’s voice caught, snagged, pulled free. “After longer than all the time before, she came back.”

“Telokopolis? Back to Earth?”

“Eventually. She returned, as changed as I.” The worm’s voice filled with remembered wonder. “The void, the dark, the other places, they had all changed her. She blasted a space clear of me, for herself, somewhere I would struggle to reach her in my new form. That didn’t matter, I didn’t mind. I was so large then, it was nothing, like a kiss on the cheek. I thought maybe she intended it as a kiss, I was overjoyed, I was beside myself, but … ” The graveworm’s voice grew rough and low, hissing through clenched teeth. “But then I discovered what was in her belly, and I was so angry with her. How dare she come crawling back, crawling with you?”

The graveworm’s avatar raised her head, shadows filling her eye sockets as she stared at Elpida and Howl.

“You got a problem with us, still?” Howl snapped.

“Homo sapiens!” the graveworm spat. “My own shameful past, shoved in my face! She’d come back flush with success and life, all just to gloat, to show me how she had grown without me. And she had children, children without me! Children with homo sapiens! And oh, she loved them. She loved them so much, she had chosen them over me. Why come back teeming with them, except to humiliate me with the proof of my own failure? I wanted to tear them all apart! Scoop them out of her innards! Wreck her happy little family!”

“The Silico.” Elpida said out loud. “She said they were a long-lost branch of our family. You.”

“Stupid fucking cunt,” Howl spat. “By the sounds of it she loved you too, huh? Unless you think that letter was a lie.”

“I was … a fool,” the graveworm said, slumping once more, all the hot remembered rage snuffed out in an instant. “I was a fool to hate her, a fool to resent you. Hating myself for having once loved her became more important than hating her. Hate turned me inward, against myself. Hate changed me, gave birth to other things inside me, things that I wasn’t watching properly. By the time I realised what was happening, it was too late for either of us.” The graveworm took a great shuddering breath. “I gave birth to despair, and despair killed us both.”

The graveworm fell silent.

Elpida’s mind roiled with questions, more than she could possibly voice. She felt a lump in her throat and a tightness in her chest, in a way she had never felt before. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. How could her words do justice to this?

The secret history of her mother’s life.

And how her mother had abandoned ‘what was left’ of humanity.

Telokopolis would not have done that; Elpida would not have done that. Telokopolis was not a starship, so none of this could possibly be true. The edges of Elpida’s vision twisted and swirled, like she was losing her balance.

Howl spoke when Elpida couldn’t: “So you fumbled the baddest bitch in history, then fucked yourself up so much that the green turned into something else. Silico civil war, the black mold, Central, all that?”

The avatar gave a weak shrug. “All my fault. All my sins. All us, us, us, the same thing we always do, we ruin everything, from the moment we picked up a bone and hit another of our kind over the head, it’s the same thing we’ve always done, for millions upon millions—”

“And what the fuck have you been doing for the last two million years, graveworm?” Howl spat. “Feeling sorry for yourself, pissing in bottles?”

“Looking for her,” the avatar said. “Trying to reverse engineer her soul. That’s what you are, you zombies. You’re the thing she was trying to protect, the thing we forgot. Or at least an echo of it, the memory of it, as close as our techniques can get. That’s how the idea started. Perhaps she could be reverse engineered from observing enough of you. She was dead, our despair given life had killed her, her corpse was cold, and we could not find her bones in the wreckage, when we were allowed to look. But perhaps we could remake her, from you.”

“And how’s that fuckin’ going, huh?” Howl grunted.

Another weak shrug.

“Wait,” Elpida said. “This whole ecosystem, the resurrections, the revenants, everything, all of this. It’s all to remake Telokopolis?”

The avatar’s mouth curled into a bitter smile. “Would that were the only reason. Far from it.”

“Then what’s it all for?”

“Central,” the graveworm said. “Central has its own reasons for allowing this to carry on, reasons other than sadism. But me? No, I’m not in control. I’m just twisting in the yoke. I’m no more free than you are, zombie.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

At long last. The gravedirt is turned aside, the coffin lid cracked open, and the corpse revealed within, ready to rise.

Ahem. Well! What more can I say? I wasn’t certain these revelations were going to come in arc 16; I actually had this part planned for a bit later, but as usual, the zombie girls took charge, and they charted a narrative course much better than anything I could have made without them. The shape of the world is revealed at last, or at least the most important parts of it. And Elpida doesn’t seem to be taking it too well.

As for arc length, I’m not actually 100% sure. Either the arc goes for another few chapters, or the next chapter is the last in the arc! I won’t be sure until I finish the chapter after that one, and then I might have a very short and punchy arc 17 instead. We’ll see!

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! I say this every week, but I mean it none the less. Thank you for enjoying my little story about zombie girls and gestalt worms beyond the end of human time. Without you, nobody would be there for the graveworm to find! And I will see you next chapter. Until then!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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:

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 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.)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

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!

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Pheiri inched through the gates of the tomb, out into the teeth of the withering storm.

Elpida watched from inside the control cockpit. The screens and displays showed dozens of views from beyond Pheiri’s hull, via his external cameras, lighting the cockpit with ashen backwash, shot through by the dirty white of falling hail. Nobody spoke as Pheiri crossed the threshold of the tomb, as the howling wind rose to a screaming chorus and concrete grit crunched beneath his treads. Kagami had been counting down, following Pheiri’s own estimate displayed in softly glowing machine-text; but the text was washed out by the leaden light, and Kagami had trailed off long before zero. Her right hand was gripping the arm of her seat, knuckles white. Elpida held her breath as she felt the others doing the same. Even Howl was silent, a clenched jaw in the back of Elpida’s mind.

Pheiri flashed up his progress on a side-screen, in glowing green text — millimetres vanished in a blink, replaced by centimetres for a moment, then by meter after meter, ticking upward as his massive armoured form rolled from the tomb’s mouth. His exit was flanked by pressure readings, external hull integrity responses, traction estimates, and a dozen other low-level alerts which Elpida could not fully interpret.

The wind’s volume surged, suddenly close, roaring directly against Pheiri’s hull, whistling and warbling through his weapon mounts and the hidden abscesses in his outer layers, a banshee chorus held at bay by nano-composite bone-amour and sheer body weight. Sheets of lashing rain and the hammer-drum of hailstones passed across Pheiri’s skin in a humming staccato.

Pheiri paused. The cockpit rocked gently as his tracks settled.

They were out.

Elpida found herself speechless. She had thought she understood the violence of the hurricane. She had piloted combat frames down into the deep green, into environments so far beyond human norms and survivability that releasing footage to the public was considered a serious hazard. She had fought Silico monsters, giant killing machines, things that she and her sisters could barely describe, down there in the dark beneath the world. She had considered that as the most inhospitable place imaginable, where unprotected human life would be melted away in seconds. Nothing could compare, certainly nothing in nature.

But to feel the hurricane up close was like a god screaming itself to death four feet from her skull. Pheiri’s readings were all well within his tolerances — hull integrity was untouched, internal gyroscopes and accelerometers reported no movement beyond a slight swaying of his chassis, no need to activate his shields for the comparatively soft assault of fist-sized hailstones. Pheiri had been built to slay giants, his body and his armour were more than enough to withstand the storm. But Elpida felt vulnerable in a way she never had before, barely protected from a force no amount of skill or guts or Telokopolan genetic engineering could withstand, let alone defeat. Pheiri’s armour didn’t seem like enough. Venturing out into this seemed like madness. Braving the storm seemed to pull at something deep in her gut, deeper than training or pilot genetic modifications or her own determination, deeper even than Telokopolis. She felt an undeniable urge to order Pheiri back inside the tomb, to scurry away with her tail between her legs, to wait for clear skies that would never come. This was not a force for human beings to fight, no matter what they came armed with.

Could Telokopolis have fought a hurricane and won? Elpida doubted.

And this — the wind speed just beneath two hundred and thirty miles an hour — was the dying gasp of the storm. Elpida tried to imagine what it would have felt like when the wind speeds had topped over eight hundred miles an hour.

And the view—

Hop to it, bitch-tits, Howl snapped inside Elpida’s head. Stop gawking. Get moving. Move! Show them how!

Elpida did not need telling twice. She blinked hard and bottled her awe.

“Okay, we’re out! We are out the front door!” she called, raising her left hand to slap the nearest clear patch of metal bulkhead. “Thank you, Pheiri!” She whipped her eyes across the endless chatter of readouts and sensor data; many of the external camera views were rapidly encrusting with overlays, showing everything from estimated pressure changes to the nanomachine density in falling raindrops. False colour terrain maps unfolded on fresh screens, rain and hail cleared away by algorithmic image processing, accompanied by preliminary targeting solutions for hundreds of hypothetical hostile actions. “Kaga, what’s external wind speed?”

Kagami occupied the front-most cockpit seat again, the seat where a driver might have sat when Pheiri still needed human crew. She was wired into Pheiri’s guts via the cables from her bionic hand, strapped into the seat over the bulk of her armoured coat, straight-backed and wide-eyed as she stared at the view from outside. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t answer. Her skin looked waxy with sweat.

Elpida reached over and grabbed Kagami’s shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze. “Kagami, focus. Give me wind speed.”

The question was unnecessary; Elpida could see the wind speed readouts perfectly well, scrolling by on an upper screen. But the repeated question dragged Kagami out of her own wondrous terror. She hissed, shrugged off Elpida’s hand, then gestured vaguely at one of the data-choked external views.

“Two hundred twenty five miles an hour,” Kagami snapped. Her eyes flickered back and forth across the screens, sometimes going glassy as she looked inward at the data-streams she shared with Pheiri, her face ashen grey in the reflected light. “Sustained average, mind you. Gusts measured at … thirty to forty mph in excess of that. And we’re sheltered right now, by all … this!”

Kagami gestured at the displays, at the external camera views, at what the storm had wrought.

Pheiri had paused just past the threshold of the tomb, with his entire hull exposed to the storm’s onslaught. Between the tomb and the corpse-city itself lay the tomb’s outworks — the layer of black metal bunkers and walls and bridges and killing fields, used to either trap freshly resurrected zombies or give them a chance to escape, whatever the original purpose.

The black iron tangle of infantry-scale fortifications was drowned and choked and buried in the storm’s debris, slopping with filthy grit-filled water, littered with drifts and dunes of concrete wreckage tossed from the city by the height of the storm. Spears of steel rebar taller than Pheiri stood swaying in the wind like stalks of grass. Chunks of concrete from tower blocks lay shattered across the black metal. Silt-flows of pulverized stone and asphalt poured back and forth under the wind’s voice. All of it was blurred by a never-ending haze of pounding rain and the white static of the hailstones.

But Kagami was right; the tomb’s outworks were relatively sheltered compared to what lay beyond. The last of Kagami’s forward scouts were out there now, a trio of bulky drones pathfinding the route ahead, sticking close to the ground, anchoring themselves with tiny gravitic engines, their black hides almost invisible beneath the torrent of rain and hail.

At least the direct route through the exterior wall was still open, not yet completely blocked by rubble and concrete slurry. Elpida had been prepared for Pheiri to have to blast his way out, but the debris-filled passageway looked just about navigable, at least for something Pheiri’s size.

Beyond the wall, the sky was a roiling cauldron of black tar. Pheiri’s internal clock said it was daytime, but Elpida couldn’t spot the usual ruddy red patch that indicated the sun’s position. Even that dying fire was choked off behind the hurricane.

“Understood,” Elpida said. “Danger to Pheiri?”

One of the screens at her elbow flickered with a fresh ream of green text.

///gyroscopic stability confirm POSITIVE
///pressure differential < expected maximum tolerance
///hull integrity standard output
>proceed

You heard him, he’s good to go, Howl purred.

Elpida almost laughed, surprised at the tension inside her head.

Kagami huffed and gestured at the screen. “I agree. Mostly. Winds are down low enough that nothing is going to pick us up and throw us around. Something might fall on us, but that’s what the shields are for.” Kagami added a mutter, “In theory.”

“Good to hear it. Anything else out there?”

Kagami hissed through her teeth, scanning the screens and data readouts. “Half a city, turned to pulverized concrete and gone airborne. What do you expect, Commander? Even Pheiri can’t see through this shit. I doubt I could see through it from orbit. Yes, there’s plenty of readings, take your pick, but good luck interpreting anything.”

“Nothing alive?”

Kagami went still and quiet for a long moment before she replied. “Nothing … nothing on nanomachine readouts. Nothing zombie-sized, not that we can see. There’s something … ” Kagami squinted, gaze turning inward. “Something big, to our left. Far away to our left. Getting further away.”

“Something out in the storm?” Elpida asked. “Necromancer?”

Another one of Pheiri’s screens flashed with green text.

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

“No, like he says,” Kagami muttered. “Just … big.” She tutted and shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s leaving, heading for the edge of the graveworm safe zone. Thank Luna for that. Maybe it’s just sensor ghosts, noise from the storm, a big piece of concrete, whatever. But if it’s not, well … I’m glad we didn’t come out early enough to meet it.”

A mutter came from behind Elpida — Atyle, strapped into one of the cockpit seats further back. “A handmaiden to the gods, come to watch the hatching.”

Elpida twisted in her seat. Atyle was staring at a spot on the wall. Watching the departing giant?

A particularly strong gust of wind howled against Pheiri’s hull. The cockpit swayed, perhaps by half an inch. On the opposite side to Atyle, Sky was also strapped into a seat. She blinked hard, jaw tight, swallowing a flinch. Sky was coated in sweat.

Elpida twisted back to Kagami. “All good?”

“As far as I can tell,” Kagami grunted. “Pheiri isn’t concerned.”

“Alright, then we’re good to go. Are you pulling those final drones back in?”

“Yes, yes,” Kagami sighed. “They won’t be able to endure the wind beyond the outworks here. I’m reeling them in now.”

On Pheiri’s screens the blurry dark smudges of Kagami’s drones started back toward the tank, resolving as they ploughed through the rain and hail. Kagami pulled them in and tucked them into sheltered whorls and pockets on the exterior of Pheiri’s bone armour, sheltered from the storm but ready for quick redeployment.

While she waited for the drones to return, Elpida keyed her comms headset.

Victoria answered instantly, voice clear over the short-range connection. “Commander?”

“Everyone snug back there, Vicky?”

“For now.”

Elpida pretended not to hear the fear and tension in Victoria’s voice. They had a single screen back there in the crew compartment, a tiny window onto the storm outside.

“Everything’s going smooth,” Elpida said. “We’re about to get underway. Is everyone strapped in?”

“Right, yeah. Um, I mean, yes, everyone is strapped in. Confirmed.”

“Thank you. The line to the cockpit will be clear, in case anything happens,” Elpida said. “Keep in touch.”

“I uh … I will, yeah. I understand.”

“Good. One more thing. Tell Shilu to come up front and join us in the cockpit. I want our resident Necromancer expert within shouting distance, in case we spot anything.”

“Will do, will do. Shilu, okay. Will do, Commander.”

“Keep everyone’s spirits up back there, Vicky. I need you to do that for me.”

A swallow. Victoria’s voice firmed up. “Got it. I’ll do that. Thank you, Elpi.”

Elpida closed the line. The drones were safely tucked away. She eyed the screen that displayed the readout from Pheiri’s external necromancer-detection equipment. It was updating every two seconds, text refreshing letter by letter.

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

Shilu appeared less than a minute later, ducking through from the spinal corridor, still wearing her human disguise. She stepped past both Atyle and Sky, took a seat close to Elpida, then dragged the safety harness across her body.

Sky said, “Do you really need a seat belt, huh?”

“Do you?” Shilu replied.

“Yeah, but like, you’re made of metal beneath that, right? What does it matter if you bang your head?”

Shilu twisted to look at Sky, grabbed a pinch of her own cheek, and pulled it tight. “Is this metal?”

Sky shrugged and looked away.

Shilu sat back. “Elpida. You wanted me here.”

Elpida indicated the screen with Pheiri’s detection readouts. “I want your knowledge and expertise. The moment we spot a Necromancer, I want your assessment, whatever you can give us.”

“Mmhmm,” Shilu grunted. “If they’re going to attack, they won’t come right away. They’ll need the storm all the way down, enough to re-establish connection with the wider network.”

“Right. Kagami, if the storm keeps weakening at this rate—”

“Then we have about two hours until it’s nothing worse than a blustery day,” Kagami said. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot when she glanced at Elpida. “Are we going to sit here yapping, or run for the worm? If we’re all going to die, I’d rather get this over with.”

Patience, patience, Howl growled, deep inside Elpida’s mind.

“Patience,” Elpida echoed. “And we’re not going to die. There’s no sense in charging the worm-guard before our opponents turn up. But yes, let’s get underway. Let’s get as close as we can.” She patted Pheiri’s bulkhead again. “Take us away, Pheiri. And keep your eyes peeled, little brother.”

>y

Pheiri crossed the tomb’s outworks at a steady crawl, descending the stepped ramp into a soup of concrete dust and storm waters, five or six feet of fluid lapping at his sides. Internal pump systems inside his structure woke with a deep, solid glugging sound, flushing silt and grit out of his track-housing, sending up a spray of vaporised water on all sides. He mounted low dunes of wrecked concrete, tilting his structure so that Elpida and the others were pushed back into their seats. Loose scree and fragmented concrete was kicked out behind him as his whole body skidded and slipped amid the debris.

Reaching the gap in the exterior wall took only a few minutes at a gentle pace. The gap was less choked than the outworks; the walls reared up either side of Pheiri, black iron sentinels watching over the way out of the tomb, their depths clogged by six feet of water.

And then he was out on the far side, shouldering past a twisted tangle of steel rebar and shattered brick, out into the open, back in the corpse-city.

Nobody spoke; silence lingered for minutes. Pheiri pressed on, nosing his way onto what had been a road, picking a likely route through the deep drifts of rubble and ruin.

The city had been pulverised. The landscape was beyond recognition. A jagged plane of grey and black chaos — buildings torn asunder and knocked apart, steel bent and buckled, brick reduced to powder, glass tuned to grit, all by the sheer power of sustained winds beyond anything which should have been possible on earth. Skyscrapers and towers had been uprooted like rotten trees and tossed through the air, lying broken where they’d fallen, shattered leviathans scattered across roads and city blocks. Smaller buildings had been scoured from their foundations, walls turned to pulp, innards minced, mixed into a gritty soup of every imaginable material, spread out like brambles. Only the hardiest and mostly deeply dug-in structures had survived, and were only visible where they occupied natural high ground — a few bunkers and other squat, well-made buildings dotted here and there, scarred and gouged by flying debris. Undoubtedly most basement and subterranean levels were intact, choked by debris and drowned by water. But the rest of the city was a sea of grey ruin and serrated steel, cut through by rushing rivers of storm-water, still pounded by an unceasing barrage of hailstones. The corpse-city had been rendered down into bone shards and gristle.

“I told you it would be … ” Kagami muttered. “Would be like this … ”

“Fuck off,” Sky muttered from the rear of the cockpit. “You ain’t seen shit like this before. This isn’t hurricane damage, it’s fucking nuclear exchange aftermath.”

Kagami grunted a bitter little laugh as Pheiri mounted a gritty dune of concrete and steel, his tracks grinding as they found purchase on the hillside of shifting debris. “Ha. More like a round of atomics would solve our biggest problem here. That’s what I’d do, blast a passageway through this crap, and don’t stop til I see soil gone to glass. Wouldn’t even need that much!”

Kagami’s voice was shaking. Sky swallowed, loudly.

“Everybody relax,” Elpida said. “Pheiri’s got this, he’s more than capable. Concentrate on staying in your seats and not bumping your heads. Let Kagami focus on helping Pheiri. Kaga.”

“On it, yes, yes,” Kagami muttered through clenched teeth. “Eyes peeled, eyes up, all that crap, yes, fine.”

Pheiri pushed on through the sea of debris, keeping to the higher ground wherever he could, tracks grinding across the drifts and dunes of pulverised concrete. The ground was uneven at best, the chunks of buildings prone to slide and settle, slipping out from beneath Pheiri’s tracks. Whenever the high ground ran out, Pheiri forded the temporary rivers of filth-choked rainwater, his hull buffeted by floating rafts of debris and hidden reefs of twisted steel. He roared back out of the waters again and again, passing forests of rebar, sludge-pits of liquefied brick, and jagged monoliths of wind-torn concrete. There was no opportunity for Elpida or the others to leave their seats now, tossed sideways and jolted upright and pushed against their straps and belts by unexpected sudden lurches. Elpida checked with Victoria every ten minutes via the comms headset, to make sure nobody back in the crew compartment was getting hurt.

Elpida felt something she had rarely experienced before, but she knew well enough to recognise — helplessness.

She trusted Pheiri with their survival, and trusted Kagami to assist him however she could. She trusted Shilu’s advice about Necromancers, perhaps against her better judgement. She trusted that Victoria had stowed everything safely, and that the others were strapped securely into their seats. She trusted Howl to let her focus. But she, Elpida, the Commander, she could do nothing but watch and wait, sitting tight in her own seat. This was nothing like piloting a combat frame through the deep green; no matter how hostile that environment had been, this was worse.

She caught herself using her left hand to gently cup the stump of her right arm. She wasn’t worrying at the fresh bandages, but she knew this behaviour might lead to minor acts of self-harm, picking at the stump, at the wound beneath.

Elps, Howl said, in the back of Elpida’s mind. It’s not easy. Fuck knows it’s not easy. You gotta let go.

I’m responsible for everyone’s safety. I’m responsible for keeping us alive.

And that’s what you’ve done, right? Howl laughed softly. You made the call, you made the decision, now Pheiri’s carrying it out. Trust our little brother. He’s got this shit covered.

I do trust him. I just …

Can’t do everything yourself, Howl snapped. I thought you’d finally figured that out.

I did. Elpida sighed, and hoped the others didn’t notice. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.

You’re doing great. Sit tight. Howl lapsed into silence

“How are we gonna outrun these necro-fuck things in this?” Sky muttered after about half an hour of forward progress.

Kagami snorted. “This is nothing,” she called over her shoulder. “Pheiri can go much, much faster, even in this. The ride will get considerably more bumpy when he does. And it is ‘when’, not if. Hope you picked a seat with a working headrest.”

“Fuck me,” Sky spat. “This is worse than a fucking rock-hopper ship. At least you don’t feel the void.”

Kagami barked a little laugh. “Spaceships are smooth, sure. You don’t feel the bump when something goes wrong.”

Sky groaned. Elpida wondered about the nature of space-dwellers, that two people from so far apart in history could share the same gallows humour about crossing that starry void.

Pheiri kept his sensor net extended as far as possible, peering through the sheets of rain and the barrage of hail with more than just infra-red. The contours of the shattered city were laid out in false colour on one of his screens, the rubble and ruin picked out from beneath the rain, scanned constantly for any signs of greater nanomachine density, any signs of undead life. Every two seconds the same message refreshed, glowing green letters always the same.

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

Thirty minutes crept by, then forty, then forty five. Elpida counted, eyes on the screens, alert for anything shaped like a human being, anything moving that wasn’t loose concrete. Howl brooded in silence in the back of Elpida’s mind, doing much the same, for all the good it would do. If a Necromancer sprouted from the ground, Pheiri would know before anybody on board.

With the possible exception of Shilu. Elpida kept one eye on her too.

As the minutes crept by, the rain grew steadily less intense, the static easing off so slowly that it was hard to notice the decline from one moment to the next. The hail trailed off completely; Elpida heard the final audible hailstone tap against Pheiri’s armour at fifty five minutes and three seconds, though smaller pieces fell for several minutes longer. Without the white static of the hail, the outlines of the city rose from the dark grey murk, visible without false colour or Pheiri’s algorithms picking real details out of the chaos. The wind howled on without pause, but the stronger gusts dribbled away, then ceased at last.

Kagami announced as the sustained wind speed dropped. “We’re down below one thirty mph. Dipping toward a hundred. Pheiri’s reporting less buffeting on his hull. Still dropping.”

Howl took control of Elpida’s mouth. “Any idea when your friends are gonna show up, cheese grater?”

“No,” said Shilu. And she didn’t say more.

As the storm finally began to die, a layer of black mold crept up from between the cracks and gaps in the vast hummocks and ridges of broken concrete, as if the kinetic impacts of the hailstones had been keeping it from spreading. At first Elpida thought it was mere shadows, but then the mold began to thicken and climb, as if soaking up the rain, crawling higher all across the landscape of shattered debris. It started to clog the temporary streams, lying in thickened mounds over the floating masses. Pheiri’s tracks tore through it with ease; the mold did not cling to him or bar his way, but began to cover everything else. Pheiri highlighted the phenomenon on a single screen, scanning the material and showing readouts of the composition. Bio-matter, spongy with motion, thick enough to chew.

“What the fuck are we watching?” Sky hissed. “What is all this shit?”

“The miracle of life after death,” Atyle said. Sky shot her a look with bared teeth.

“She’s serious,” Elpida said. “I think we’re witnessing the city’s self-repair mechanisms. That stuff is growing fast, absorbing the buildings, processing debris. Kagami, what’s the nanomachine density inside that stuff?”

“Negligible,” Kagami grunted, reaching out to tap one of Pheiri’s screens. “Wouldn’t want to risk a mouthful of it.”

“How can it be repairing the city, then?” Sky asked with a little scoff.

“Shilu?” Elpida said.

Shilu shrugged. “I was a Necromancer. I did what I was told. I have no greater insights into the nanomachine mechanisms of the world. Though … I’ve seen this happen before, on a smaller scale. You’re probably right. Self-repair.”

“Huh,” Sky grunted. “Some fucking use you are, tin can.”

Elpida held up a hand for quiet. “The storm’s died down enough. Pheiri, can we see the graveworm?”

Pheiri answered by piping his best forward-facing external camera view to one of the largest screens, up and to Kagami’s right. The view was still choked with thick sheets of rain, but thinner than before, a mist that darkened as it marched toward the black horizon. The city lay like a ripped blanket dipped in liquid concrete, jagged with outcrops of steel, being eaten by black mold.

An uneven line towered over it all, barely visible through the rain against the tarry sky, like the shadow of a mountain range.

“There she is,” Elpida said. “How close are we?”

“Close enough,” Kagami hissed. “Another half hour at this pace and we’ll be within sight of the base. No worm-guard yet, but … ” She shrugged. “Who knows when they’ll come out to play.”

“Alright, Pheiri,” Elpida said. “Take us slow, creep us in. We want to see Necromancers before we sprint. This only works if we’re baiting them.”

Kagami let out a long, slow breath. “Commander— fuck!”

Elpida almost flinched. Sky jerked in her seat. Shilu looked up, eyes quickly scanning the screens. Atyle said nothing.

“Kaga?” Elpida demanded. “What—”

Kagami sighed. Elpida instantly knew this was not an emergency, nor the arrival of a dozen Necromancers. Kagami gestured vaguely with her left hand, the one wired into Pheiri. One of Pheiri’s screens jerked and flickered with a new camera view — a distant one, to the rear, with the black stepped pyramid of the tomb dominating the view.

An indistinct blob of familiar flesh was launching itself from the exterior walls of the tomb, then snapping wide like a glider shaped to catch the wind. The blob soared upward on the remaining scraps of the hurricane, taking wing over the shattered plain of the city.

“Ah,” Elpida said.

Sky started laughing. Atyle purred with approval.

“Iriko’s following us,” Kagami grunted. “Flying. For fuck’s sake! Fool will get herself torn apart if she’s not careful.”

“What does Pheiri say?” Elpida asked. She got an answer from one of Pheiri’s screens.

///tightbeam uplink re-established
///communication protocol standard
///warning ISSUE
///warning IGNORE
///overwatch NEGATIVE engagement distance
///advise non-contact
///tightbeam uplink maintain

“Good idea,” Elpida said, patting one of Pheiri’s consoles. “Keep her in the loop, but tell her to keep away. We don’t want her getting injured in all this.”

>y

Sky snorted, then said, “You can follow all that?”

“Just about,” Elpida said. “It’s how he talks. You’ll get used to it.”

Minutes and meters crawled past in unison. Pheiri entered a canyon formed from the fallen remains of several skyscrapers, their glass all pounded to dust, their steel frames twisted and broken, creepers of black mold climbing their remains. The rain slowly died away, until it no longer drummed on Pheiri’s hull; the wind did the same, dropping below a hundred miles an hour, then below eighty, then fifty, forty, still dropping. Pheiri emerged from the long canyon of dead buildings beneath a sky just a touch lighter than before.

Elpida looked for the tell-tale ruddy-red glow of the sun, the furnace trapped behind the ever-present black clouds — and there it was, off to Pheiri’s right, a red smudge in a distant corner of the sky.

“Suns out, guns out,” Sky muttered. Nobody laughed — except Howl, in the back of Elpida’s head.

“Maybe they’re not coming,” Kagami said, eyes glued to her screens. “Maybe Perpetua was lying. Maybe the plan changed.”

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

“Shilu?” Elpida said.

“The network may be taking time to re-establish connections. This is a wide area of damage. Assume nothing.”

“Assume nothing, right. Kaga, what about—”

Kagami slapped the arm of her chair and grinned wide. “We have Hope! She’s talking to us over tightbeam!”

“Haha!” Sky laughed. “I thought you were kidding about that? You fuckers really do have air support?”

Elpida breathed a sigh of relief — Hope, Thirteen Arcadia’s daughter-machine, a sub-orbital pseudo-satellite hovering several klicks up, had made herself scarce before the storm front had hit. They’d lost contact before entering the tomb. As another daughter of Telokopolis, Elpida was delighted to hear Hope was still up there.

“Can she send us aerial—”

“Already trying,” Kagami said, the fingers of both hands twitching as she sifted through Pheiri’s external comms. “She’s too far to the west to get us any good high-angle shots. Needs to stay out from beneath the storm. She’s got— Ah. Okay.”

One of Pheiri’s screens shifted, showing a single static shot of what looked like endless grey soup studded with rotten outcrops of broken material, sinking into a deeper substrate of black. A tiny dot in the middle was highlighted in red.

“That’s us?” Elpida asked.

“That’s us. Hope can see us.”

“Fucking hell,” Sky breathed. “This goes on for miles and miles. It’s … forever.”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. “This is only local. Big, but local. Kagami, if we can talk to Hope, that means other things can talk too. Ask her to get us as many wide-angle shots as she can. Look for anything shaped like a person, anything moving, anything that might be a Necro—”

One of Pheiri’s screens turned red.

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

“That’s our first Necromancer!” Elpida announced, interrupting herself. Pheiri’s screens flickered and jerked, cycling through external views; other screens locked up as firewalls rose, narrowing his sensory range, closing off comms ingress. “Kaga, get those wide-angle shots from Hope, show us where it is! Pheiri, show me what we got, show us where—”

Kagami winced, eyes going wide, face turning grey. At the exact same moment, inside Elpida’s head, Howl said, Huh. That’s weird.

“What?” Elpida said out loud. “What is it? Talk to me.”

Exactly, Howl grunted.

What?

“Something is trying to access Pheiri’s tightbeam receiver,” Kagami said, voice tight in her throat. “And it’s not an attack, not a virus.” She turned to look at Elpida. “Something out there wants to talk.”

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Dare you answer the Necromancer’s call? Dare you hear the spooky, spooky words? What if the call is coming from inside the tank? Uh oh …

You know what? It’s a hell of a relief to finally get the cast back out of the tomb. A lot of the stuff while they were trapped down there was great, and I’m really proud of certain character arcs I was exploring back there, but phew, wow, I did not plan for them to be stuck in there for quite this long! It’s great to get back to the corpse city, to explore it once again, now reduced to this nightmare ruin. Hahaha!

Behind the scenes, I reckon arc 16 is actually going to be more than ten chapters now. I’ve just gotta let this sequence play out however it will, and ride the wave. I’m locked in with the crew, strapped to a chair inside Pheiri, and I would have it no other way!

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 and enjoying it. I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the readers! Even now, this deep into the story, I still feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of some things to come. I’m very excited that the cadre is on the move again, I have such sights to show you! Until next chapter. Seeya then!