Exhaustion forgotten, V stood before the waterfall and cupped his ears.

"It's getting louder. Do you hear it?"

"I still don't—"

"He was talking to me," Griffon snipped, extending a wing to brush 9S back and shuffling closer to V. "I hear something alright but it ain't bells. I don't think even a demon would sound like the shit I'm hearing, and honestly I don't think it's a great plan to be going toward it. Ain't a lot that can rub me the wrong way, but even the big guy was getting a little agitated here."

"Be that as it may, this may be the clue we were looking for. We must proceed."

Griffon sighed. "Yeah I thought you'd say that; just don't get in over your head. Let boy-bot take the first swing if it comes to that."

V glanced back at 9S. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot and rolling his heels. His head jerked at every stray splash and snapped twig and screaming machine in the distance, but he could not pick up what they were hearing.

"I prefer not to wander blindly," said V. "Is there anything that would have a bell nearby? Even a damaged one."

9S opened a digital map with a flick of his fingers. Half a dozen other sub-screens joined it, displaying waves and charts that made little sense to V, but 9S manipulated them deftly. The map zoomed in, for what good it did the rough, highly pixelated image. "There's a sub-structure of some kind to the north of the castle. Pod, do you have any record of it?"

"REPORT," whirred Pod 153. "NO DATA FOUND IN ARCHIVES. HOWEVER, QUERY TO CROSS-REGIONAL POD NETWORK RETURNED THIS IMAGE FOUND AT THE SITE SEVERAL YEARS PRIOR."

V moved to 9S side and stared at the remnants of a stained glass window. The glass had long since melted away under the onslaught of the sun, but the bars retained their shape.

The image of a three eyed face whitened V's knuckles. It couldn't possibly be… No. It wasn't one face. It was two faces. They were melded together as one, sharing the center eye. There were even two bars between the eyes to signify separate noses.

He let out a shaking breath, and only then noticed 9S had gotten just as tight as he had. "Do you know this symbol?"

"…Do you?" he asked, gesturing to V's still tight grip on his cane.

V took another deep breath and switched the cane to his other hand. "I thought I did, but no."

"That's eight..." 9S said in a painfully weak attempt to lighten the mood. "We killed a machine that had that symbol on it once. I don't know what it is, or what it means. He was the only being I ever saw have tattoos until you."

"You're sure he was only a machine?"

"Yeah. I watched him and his brother be born from this big cocoon of small machines." He shrank the image down, holding it in the palm of his hand. "They were machines obsessed with humanity too. Maybe this is where they found that symbol."

Griffon rumbled, and V shared his disquiet. Something wasn't right. But it was all they had to go on.

"Let's make haste."

The trees were forbiddingly dense beyond the castle's north side. Twisted roots as thick as V was tall intertwined along the forest floor, making their journey more one of leaping and climbing than walking. The lush canopy was pocked with white blocks that bent but did not break the mesh of branches they had fallen into. Machine presence had faded away to nothing in the difficult terrain and suffocating humidity.

When they arrived at their destination, V was ragged with exhaustion. The trek was hard enough, but the once solemn, distant toll had grown to deafening peals.

"You don't look so good," 9S fretted. He offered V the last, half-full full bottle. "Rest for a minute. I'll scout it out."

The remains were smaller than V thought they would be. Like wilted, blackened flowers, the old stone arches curled toward the sky above the modest clearing. The raised foundation was intact, as were the four cobblestone steps leading to the threshold. Very little of the walls remained, mostly just the bits around the cornerstones and the one stretch of wall where the frame of the stained glass window remained, just as they had seen it.

He poured water over his face and drank the rest. The restlessness of his familiars resonated just as deeply as the incessant bell. They saw it just as he did.

Too clean.

The building was a fossil for certain, but it didn't have the signs of decay that V had grown accustomed to. There was no rust on the iron frame of the stained glass window despite the punishing humidity. Moss had not made its home on even a single one of the black stones. The clearing did not make sense with the trees being so large. The gap in canopy was as neat and circular as a skylight. Not even a pebble of the tower fall had found its way in through the conspicuous hole.

"Nothing seems unusual," 9S called from inside. "But there's no bell, not even a broken one."

"Of course," said V, gripping his cane to help keep his steps from weaving as he moved toward the ruin. "This place is too small; there was probably never a bell here to begin with."

A smaller relief of the three-eyed symbol stared down at him from the highest stone on the threshold's arch. Griffon perched atop it, obscuring it with his claws. "Great! We found it, and I hate it even more than I thought I would, now let's get the hell outta here. This hike hasn't done you any favors and whatever is in here will still be here if we come back later."

"I think Griffon's right," said 9S. "I don't feel anything but I don't want to take any chances. Maybe if I can collect more data, I can figure out what you're picking up that I can't."

V pressed at his temples. The bell rang in time with the throb intensifying at the center of his forehead. "We are not so pressed for time that we must finish this here and now," he relented. "I will take…your counsel…"

His vision swam.

Griffon and 9S shouted.

The last thing he saw was 9S rushing toward him, hand extended to catch him as he fell.

He awakened in a field of black flowers. A red-hued light shone down from a dark, churning sky. Though his tattoos were gone and his hair had gone white, it was wariness rather than panic that got him to his feet. The ill-omened tolling of the bell was gone, replaced by an echoing susurration.

It wasn't hell, but it looked the part.

The scent and scorching heat of fire teased his senses. The flowers twitched and burst into flame and soot, spraying his body with cold black ash that smudged but wouldn't come off. A vision of his childhood home appears in shades of orange and red, burning down around an apparition in the shape of his mother. His memory of her came back suddenly; sharp enough to cut through the long, harsh years since he had last seen her. She looked so little like the portrait in the mansion's remains. Even the devil made in her image did not exactly match her.

She burned away too. Like everything else.

He watched from beneath knitted brows as his life was paraded in front of him. His days spent wandering, fighting, scrounging; a childhood of guerrilla war, gaunt, bony, fanged-Yamato swung with wild abandon, the only thing he could trust. Long forgotten shades of humans who had tried to care for him. The warmth of their smiles becoming the warmth of their blood as they were caught up in his battles.

They couldn't protect themselves. He couldn't protect them. He couldn't protect anything.

He didn't remember when it was that he had finally gone cold and embraced power as the only thing worth anything. There was no single moment that could be kicked up from the dust in the corners of his mind. If there was, he had no intention of waiting around to be shown.

"If you want me to despair," he called. "You will need much worse than this."

A ray of white light parted the red clouds. He could not see what was beyond, but its voice was clear.

Power, it whispered in a sweet song that promised everything. Accept...the power of the gods.

"You lack comprehension if you went through the effort of digging through our memory and believed we were the type to accept such a thing," V scoffed.

Accept...the love of the gods...

"Not interested."

Irrelevant... Accept us...or accept death.

So it all came back to death hanging over his head again.

His cane was not with him. His summons were not with him. 9S was not with him. He had nothing to fight with but his fists and no enemy but a disembodied voice in the sky. Death was certain, but the alternative was worse. He had lived as a slave once. He would never let that be his fate again.

"Take my life if you can," he said, standing straight and raising his chin. "My submission is out of the question."

The light sparked and reddened. V stared into it, refusing to buckle or bow even as felt his skin begin to harden. He glanced down.

His hands were turning into salt as pure and white as the pillars of the fallen tower.