"howling for the moon"
Oil of clam. She squeezed it like a fruit from the animal's flesh, enough to gather in a sheening puddle at the bottom of the bowl, and she tossed the remains away. Local spices. She'd picked up an array of herbs on her fear-fuelled flight, sprinkling it over the oil. Bone of coney. She'd hunted, briefly, if only to feed herself, and scattered the splintered bones to the mixture. Blood of bearer. She clawed open her arm and allowed her own ichor to drip, drip, drip into the bowl. Light. Light. Light. She flicked her fingers and added radiant flame, a gentle warmth made to coddle and mend. Those were the ingredients; those were all she had at hand. She mashed them, she ground them to paste, she rolled them to dust and she poured them out over a stony plate to settle, to absorb her smouldering frustration like a sponge to water. It was the patient spells that burned longest - and she intended to blaze as bright and clear as any could muster.
It took flame as night struck and she, Witch-Handed and High Agonarch, the Meridian Alchemist - she gazed into the emerald fire, watching transfixed as green embers spat and rose before her, painting a curtain of shifting colours and indescribable shapes across the far stone wall. She threw her hopes and dreams to the pyre, baring her desire...
... and it laughed in her face, chuckling with cruel deep notes. No. No, no, this was her spell, not any other's, it was hers, it was hers to wield and wish and wend through treachery and deceit - it was hers to pierce the formless veil that suffocated her so, that silenced the whisper in her mind and sharpened the worm-ache, the hunger, the memory of another life poorly lived. It spoke to her, the unwelcome influence, and it shared with her doubts and concerns - was she wrong? No! But the Angel, Dreaded, was close by and the dead stirred. The wind carried many more voices and none she knew for kin, for coven and sanctuary.
Agnisia exiled the OTHER, and it spat in her face, scorching her shell with tongues of soulfire.
YOU ARE A DISGRACE, it said. YOU WERE HONOURED. YOU WERE DEEMED ENLIGHTENED. YOU ARE DUE A RE-EDUCATION.
And she snarled, and she screamed, and she roared in defiance. The Deep was unwelcome, the Deep was false, the Deep was blinding and she was of the Sky. She cast her voice long and far, she traced the edges of space and will for an echo of her mother's voice, her sisters' songs, her brothers' war cries, and she found... nothing.
In the midst of the flames opened an eye - a criss-cross of many lines like Ys, dark goblets enough to bedeck a feasting table. ULTRACREPIDARIAN! IN SINEW AND MALICE YOU WERE SPAWNED AND RAISED AND INTO THE ARMS OF INCONSEQUENCE YOU COWER. YOU BEG FOR SALVATION BUT YOU HAVE ABANDONED IT. YOU WILL BE CLEANSED; YOU WILL BE RENDERED SUBSERVIENT TO SOMETHING GREATER THAN YOURSELF AND THERE IS NOTHING GREATER THAN NOTHING ITSELF FOR IT IS EVERYTHING AND IT IS HUMBLE IN ITS SILENCE. OBLIVION IS A BEAUTIFUL SHAPE AND YOU WILL BE MADE TO SEE IT AGAIN.
No. No she would not. The Witch the Queen the Monarch of Sky her mother had barred her from the seductive ministrations of the Deep, had cast her to the opposite edge of Coven from that sunken pit of loathing and decay; she was pure and she was unmarred by second thoughts. Out of love she had embraced her calling and out of love she had followed the writ of reform and rememoration from where it had been carved in eternal Thrall-skin. Oh, she ached to hear them! Those glorious priests of the Spring, gentle-voiced and eternal in their vigilance, wardens of lucent purpose - mighty Golmag, loyal Bor'gong. Butchers of writhing carcasses; she desired nothing more than to see that they had held, that their line was firm against the bog-tide, the flea-feasted masses of the forgotten swamps. Pinnacles of refined purpose, and her to ferry their produce along as per the request from on high.
YOU ARE PERSISTENT, the eye said begrudgingly. She could feel it around her skull, pressing in - it was a maw it was a needle it was a leech it was a pest and it was a tyrant but she was Sky-Blessed, she was Agonarch, an architect of pain; she knew the channels of agony and the limits of duress and she passed its efforts along, preserving herself in grim acceptance. Blood spilled, Light shed, memories grew dim but still she fought, still she stood against the flood of the eye's wicked green tears. I AM ATRIIS, it said, it vowed. I AM BRACHNOS AND I AM TORYC. I AM KORELLO AND I AM LAYASHUM AND I AM TERTIAN. I BECOME ANGEL AND I BECOME WITCH AND I BECOME ALL AND I BECOME NOTHING. I AM YOU. YOU ARE I.
It was attempting to seed itself: a self-propagating idea given unlimited autonomy. When she thought water, she would see oceans of the Deep's power. When she thought purpose, she would see a blanket of absent worlds, shineless stars, a dead moon and a hollow sun. When she thought Queen, she would see a pale face swathed in black, devoid of hope and full of dark sympathy - something that imagined itself free of all shackles.
no no no
She was Agonarch and she was Meridian Alchemist; she was Witch-Handed and she was Queensdaughter. She held firm. She held. The eye constricted her, left her lungs devoid of alien air, and it pressed her for all her resolve - until finally slithering back. YOU ARE WILLFUL, it scoffed. YOU ARE IGNORANT. YOU ARE SINGULAR. I AM UNENDING. I AM DEATH AND I AM BIRTH; I WAKE SQUALLING WITH MY EVERY FIRST BREATH AND I GASP QUIETLY WITH EVERY END. I AM LIMITLESS I AM KIND AND I AM COLD BUT IN THIS COLD THERE IS MERCY BECAUSE I AM ACCEPTANCE. WHEN YOU CONSIDER ME YOU WILL KNOW ACCORD. FORGET ME NOT, FOR I AM SHELBTH I AM GOD-THOUGHT AND I AM ALL YOU WILL EVER BE.
The pyre died with a sizzling hiss and the room plunged into shadow, illuminated only by a gentle green eye - an aide, an observer, a spy and a tutor. A wicked hook dragging her from bubbling, boiling black waters and crushing pressure. A parasite that thought itself beneficial - and she hated to acknowledge that it was right. "Kiddo?" it asked. "You doin' alright?"
Agnisia bared her fangs and tilted her head up, brandishing her horns.
"Failure don't make us lesser," it solemnly told her - then flew to her shoulder and pressed against her flanged cheek with a trill of laughter. "Just gotta try again. Maybe it'll work this time. Our Radiant Lady's gotta be keeping an ear out. Only a matter of time. Granny knows it so."
She ignored it. She ignored it because it was something fit only to be ignored unless by utmost necessity, in the rare moment it became useful, where its words had worth - and that was seldom indeed. From A'Airâm to Lok'Airâm she had kept her own counsel; she swayed in the space of the solemn seaside tower, alone but for a burrowing little voice, and she thought, she considered her place in world and court and she considered the thorns of home. But home was not to be found; she felt not the pinprick of northwards bramble, rather the caustic bite of surprised puppeteers whose charade they found occupied by new players untethered.
"I wear no strings," Agnisia had sworn to the first to seek her out, and upon her recollection she flew to the window of the stone tower, she looked out to the forest and she glimpsed, hidden betwixt great oaks and beneath fertile soil, the shark-hungry pitviper, the eel with glass teeth.
"Strings define us," the interloper had said with a sly gleam in its eye. "You'll come around."
No. Agnisia knew strings and there was but one rein she would prostrate herself beneath - and it was not here. It was muffled by time and distance and cruel separation as to be nonexistent - as to be absent. She was driftless without it; she was bereft of kindly words in her ear and north - sacred north - was blanked out, gone gone gone. Her queen her mother was north, her court her home of thorns was north, but which way was north? North was power, north was strong, north was the path to walk but without the sun and moons and stars in the sky she walked aimlessly, digging amongst the roots and rocks of the too quiet Deep. Her claws scrabbled on stone, inflicting her frustrations and leaving it petrified as long gouging marks. The window sill was marked with hundreds of the same scars, painted with splotches of black blood from where her claws had given way and exposed the flesh beneath. She welcomed the cutting pain of it, the stinging burn, the ache. Agnisia did not stop until she'd reached it, until she'd worn her talons down to nubs and grazed the soft fingertips beneath.
"Oh sweetie," her sly little suzerain cooed. It opened its horned shell and shared its Sky-given gift - freely like tribute to one's better. Her talons mended. "It breaks my heart, it does. We'll find a way. We will. You'll-"
Agnisia wordlessly snarled for silence and her chittering Sky-anchor, louder than a senseless Thrall, at last fell silent. "Vorlog," she spat, insult-above-insult, a fruit of irritation - a reminder of who bore the Queen's resplendent grasp, and who merely ferried the favours of the fleeting orb. She flicked her Wormsilk cloak back, annoyed, and floated over to lift her cleaver, her blade, still stained with the red of grovelling swarms and still keening for flesh-taste, for death-sweetness. It was a fang yearning to chew again, to ruminate on life-gristle, and she regarded it with wary care.
Oh to be War! Oh to carve a path of her own making through fabric-of-matter, to exert her will through the sharpest edge and cut a road through dream and will itself. She could try, she surely could - but deeper, older, meaner things slithered in the dank recesses of the new world she staked a reluctant claim upon. To pass through would be to risk their ire, run the gauntlet of their fangs. The pitviper lurked on the side of material, the bitter eye gazed from the realms of forbidden thought, but the very custodian of that other side - it was more ancient yet, a fire-charred devil crowned with horns like oaks, their leaves crystal and their acorns oblivion. No conqueror, no upender, no blade-in-the-night, no epicurean of subconscious identity; it watched her with baleful regard and it roosted comfortably from its obsidian throne, waiting - waiting for her nerve to crack, waiting for her to give in to that love of kin and kith and to steal her away with a snap of black teeth.
But it said nothing. She saw it before her and it spoke not at all. It deemed her of little consequence, enough to ignore for the moment, for the hour, for the day and month and year but only as she was. Not as she would be.
She needed another way. Already at the summit, and with the waters following close behind, she needed to rise higher - though her fingers traced through empty air and clods of stifling smog. The air was hollow, absent of any bearing worth clinging to, and it was thick with cloying essence that tasted strange on her tongue, like old rot and sterile cleansing agents. A stillborn mess; a hatchery full of malformed rebirths, suffocating beneath the weight of expectations held too high. A god could not be made in a day, she knew. Neither in ten thousand years, but she had no interest in witnessing another attempt. Not for the death-throes sure to follow.
"This isn't even Mercury," her life-drone had told her some days earlier - fresh from their escape, fleeing before the form of the Serpent and the fell-promise of the Angel's return. She remembered him too clearly. She remembered his visage, biting down with clenched teeth on nothing but his own spit, and she remembered the terrible hunger in him as he shredded her down to atoms and bone. Her guards had been for naught. Her attendants had perished in their dozens. Even her bone-knight, Kirrnaka the Shieldbearer, had been reduced to ash and his spark of continuation crushed to steaming shards of dead glass.
"Not home either," her Skuldu had continued. "Definitely not Sol. Don't think this here's a neighbouring system either. But hell, sweetie, you feel that? This place ain't in our favour at all. Not one bit."
It was real. Everything was real, devoid of those misted hues particular to her mother's mind-space. Oh to be a thought again, oh to nestle amongst the machinations of her queen, a living function cherished and cradled close to home, to the bosom of Light and repurpose.
"The mark of a clever tool," her mother had told her upon her remaking, "is one with more than a singular reason for being. To be useful is to be something. To be irreplaceable is to be everything. What are you, my dear child, my gentle daughter?"
Lost. Lost and weeping for home, tears hidden beneath a mask of opaque glass, tears burning up in eyes of crackling blue fire, tears lost before they could fall - before they could make ripples, make waves, before they could crash down and drown her beneath the weakness of her own vulnerability. There was a hollow in her, a cavity where Worm once squirmed and whispered and nipped, and every second she expected to feel its teeth.
Agnisia felt nothing.
Her Skuldu yammered and yipped, eager to fill that void, but it was too happy to please, to serve; she felt none of the adversity, the hate that though her mind had forgotten her flesh remembered all too well, and there was something... lesser about it. Vorlog twice-over. Whittled down to bone with new cloth nailed over to cover the absences. As if to say I am shelled I am armoured I am a Knight - only to tear the robes from their shoulders and find them flayed and bared and cracked open like a fine mollusc, something tender and ripe for eating.
Where was her way? Paved with Emperor's stained gold or the dirt so dear to the humans; she cared not for the avenue of her escape, only that it was feasible. Her own reckless blessing soon grew bored of hopeless consideration and flew to the opposite window, gazing out across the vast untameable sea - exposed for every Raider to crawl beneath the waves.
"Get down!" Agnisia snarled. She surged over with such fury lightning arced across her shell and between her spines, threading her in an animate cobweb of pure Light. Skuldu cringed and ducked beneath the sill, eye averted.
"I didn't- I'm sorry kiddo!" it keened. "Just looked clear-"
Agnisia glared down at her, but all too quickly her anger abated, melting away like salt in water only to leave in its place the dredges of disgusting pity. She felt nothing but disdain for it, for herself, and she shouldered it with all the reluctance of one slaved to the will of a Thrall-thing, a larva-thing, a weak little thing with not the strength to defend itself nor its station. Agnisia took her Skuldu in hand, neither roughly nor kindly, and looped her finders around its core - carrying it with her as she floated back to her glyph-marked study.
She swept through incantation after incantation - linking herself to vast tendrils of foreign thought. The eye matched her movement for movement, blocking her off everywhere it could, and those few cracks she managed to crawl her way between? They ended abruptly, cordoned off with a wall of finely measured will, an elastic boundary that bent before her touch but did not break. It muffled her every shout and all she could hear through it was the dull howl of stray solar winds passing through lifeless asteroid fields. None of the din of wartorn territories, none of the screams of machines drawn to penultimate duty, none of the cries of humans and arthropods and terrestrial sirenians, none of the crash and drone of War's marching armies; she heard nothing but eerie silence and judged that they had been far removed from the celestial battlefields already known to her.
The Dark Angel she knew to be brutal. She knew him to be unrepentant, to trespass against the highest of all the moment they swayed within his reach, and she knew him to be a creature of particular contempt - but she had not known him to be cruel. And this was most cruel of all. He should have killed her. He had killed her alongside countless others, smashing through the delicate works of her treasured Apothecary, crushing vials and jars of precious Sky-anointed essences in his blatant disregard for their work, and he'd torn her apart with something akin to hate; her mother had warned her as much, as she had warned all those she loved. The Brood was not for humans to control, therefore the Earth-kind sought only their destruction.
But where was the Brood now? How long had passed? These questions she muttered aloud, hushed and growled, and her Skuldu hesitantly answered - half-expecting a scathing retort from its irritable charge. It was pathetic, a spineless thing, and Agnisia's patience with the creature only grew more strained. "You've been dead some eight Earth months. I think. It... it was hard to tell sometimes, the way time passed."
"We were kept?"
"What? Oh, uh, yeah? Kiddo, he just shoved us into a cabinet and forgot about us; it's a miracle we're out at all." Skuldu paused. "Someone must have shot him down. Which - and I'll be honest - was a shoddy job through and through. They screwed up. He ain't dead. And if he ain't dead, then, uh... well, they are. And us next." It glanced around, perhaps expecting the Angel to tear right through the stonework overhead, heralded with the crash and roar of blink-quick cataclysm. "Don't like being on the same landmass as him. Same astral body even. If death don't want him yet then why should we?"
Agnisia cut their talk short with a seething hiss, the scrape of lung-warm air against her fangs. Her breath rattled against the glass of her mask, reverberating as it funnelled down and out.
"We shouldn't linger, honey." Skuldu hovered over her shoulder, growing brave. The little Sky-larva was always quick to forget its place; the threadbare concept of their symbiosis and the hierarchy within often fell upon deaf ears. "He'll come for us sooner or later. It won't be long now."
She imagined tearing her claws into his chest and plucking his ribs out one by one, grafting them onto her own corset of bone. She imagined sinking her teeth into his heart-fat and cardiac muscles, tasting the coppery juice of his lifeblood. She imagined watching as the fight extinguished in his eyes; she imagined killing him-
And she knew that was the only place it would happen. Her garrison had been the envy of all, even the Lightblade, even the Spring-Wardens, even those within the belly of the Coven's crypts and armouries. Her garrison had been stocked and fed, had been conditioned by Light and moth and blade - and they'd crumpled all the same. She had died. Agnisia would not make the same mistake again.
But the others-
Would they?
Would he?
Now there was a thought.
"I must be clever," Agnisia murmured. "I must mantle cunning."
"You're plenty smart already dearie," Skuldu told her. Agnisia distractedly waved the Ghost away.
"I must..." Agnisia carved a new shape into weathered old stone. She worked it along the floor, large enough to dwarf all others, and she guided it to encompass even the desiccated remains of a long-dead human in the corner - scratching it over weathered bone and grinning skull. Six lines. Six lines to manifest the meaning of her queen, the idea of secrets and schemes. Six lines to fill with fire and six lines to bar from the hateful eye. Whispers reached her, whispers yet disembodied and bereft of the soul to sing them, but whispers nonetheless. They filled her ears with poison - and Agnisia listened for her mother, radiant, bade her to do so. They whispered texts barred to her; they whispered knowledge forbidden to Lucent Brood, secrets like Timid Truth and Sword Logic gleaned from the Worm-ravaged past - so at odds with the tenets of Reckless Hope. She could almost hear her own voice in it, her own laughter; she could almost make out the words of her-before-Agnisia...
Agnisia sliced her claws through the air and cut the whispers short, gasping, snarling, wearing the visage of an affronted beast whose pride was bruised and bloodied. She had been tempted, but Lucent-Law won out - and she was not one to break form, to remold herself when already her queen her mother had proclaimed her perfect. And she was. She was perfect. No sorceress was dabbled in the Sky's favour like she. None manifested glassy reflections so convincing as hers. She was Queen-beneath-Queen and her country was Apothecary. She recognized not the landmarks of this dappled Deep charade, and she cared not to engage. She worried for the swamp-vices and the buzzards of the Sunken King, not the workings of feckless killers and gloomy ne'er-do-wells.
But to work she set, with trained talon and perceptive eye, she tugged at the Light on the edge of her dress and she plucked it like a wire. She played a fiddle well enough, and the violin even better (her mother was famously fond of the alien arts), but there was no instrument so malleable, so beautiful, so eager to sing as the Sky itself - to fill it with birdsong brave and terrible, to join with the chorus mind and soul and embrace it in all its totality. Agnisia twisted with sweet agony as she pulled the Light from herself, closing her eyes and imagining it was the Dark Angel set before her, constrained and feral. She lashed at his wings and she closed her fingers around the threads of more-than-life. She separated him, she portioned him out between clumps of rotting grey meat and golden-pale essence, and she herded it into a vessel fit to contain all he was worth - a gilded vat to chew upon forevermore, a weregild treasure interred at the heart of her grave-kingdom. When she opened her eyes, she found no jar but her own Light split and riven and twinned to excess; the end of the spell brought no final hammering pain but a sensation of relief - a delicacy to be savoured. Before her, cut as if from the folly-halls of the Deep's greatest abligurition, hovered her own Reflection built of lustrous shell and shining eye.
"Find me a way," Agnisia barked, and her sister-self flew - flew flew flew from the window to soar high above roaring waves. It felt insidious, to endure the sensation of wind at her shell and the taste of salt spray on her tongue all the while confined, but it was discomfort of her own making and she was content to leave it at that.
Observers cloaked in night soon took notice. Some followed. Halfway across the eastern sea her thought-vessel was intercepted - cut off from her sunward journey by a beautiful thing, a winged entity cloaked in starlight. It sang to her, it sang to her in a voice full of meaning and power and-
And she screamed with agony-beyond-agony, greater even than her efforts to bring to fruition; she felt herself begin to separate more violently. She squirmed and she fell against the tower's floor and Agnisia, knowing it was doom to hear it any longer, she sang her own song of death, clicking it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue - a ticking time bomb set against her own brain. The signals reverberated through the bone of skull and drowned her own thoughts, strangled them to stillness - killing her Reflection, killing her body, killing herself.
Only for Skuldu, irreplaceable Skuldu whose worth was carried in every tallied death, to raise her back up and cast upon her a worried gaze. "Kiddo? What happened?"
"Trapped," Agnisia croaked, braced against the wall. "Trapped by pain-speech and mind-stealers. Trapped."
Skuldu floated down to eye level. "Granny's here. Tell her what happened."
Agnisia spoke. She spoke without intention or aim; she rambled little things and next-to-nonsense while she wrestled with words, the vile language that had rendered her own nerves into living landmines, poisoning her own biology against her. Tumours, cancers, the phantom pains of false signals; these were lesser threats and yet they had dotted her flesh all over, cannibalizing her own mass to rework towards some sadistic purpose. But she held in her hand the memory of a scrap of the thing's cloak, shining and tremendous and beautiful - silken-soft cloth lined with ceaseless biolouminescence. The skin of a basilisk flayed from the heavens. A coat of stolen stars, cherished and brandished against the illusion of night. It was more real than the celestial bodies above. It was a relic of some other time, and it was pinned to the thing's collar like the memento of something beloved, something lost, something precious and never to be found again.
"Sounds like a boy," Granny sighed, as if a topic she was unfortunately already well-versed in. "Oh boys. You know how boys are, don't you?"
Agnisia paused. A boy?
"Well I'll tell you what. Boys are trouble. They have no grace."
The thing that struck her down had been nothing but graceful, exquisite poise stitched together in elegant silver and soothing song.
"All they want is to use you. All they ever see is your pretty face and think that's the best you have to offer. You steer clear of that boy, sweetie, y'hear? Granny don't want to hear about that troublemaker bothering you again. You put him in place firm and the like, and you make him understand that his carry on will not be tolerated. Nana said so. Oh, and-"
"Be silent," Agnisia spat, already exasperated with the Ghost's senseless ramblings. They made for neither game nor gain and she was long since tired of it. "Or I will render you mute."
Skuldu floated away, still muttering - still muttering about boys and angels and-
Stopped. Rotated around. Hesitated, eye flitting around nervously. Agnisia impatiently gestured to her with a claw; speak, Thrall-thing, and now.
"Proximity sensors just tripped," Skuldu hastily explained. "Someone's a-comin', honey. Someone's-"
Agnisia slashed her claws through the air and Skuldu decompiled; she rose up, a shriek rattling behind her incisors, and she flew down down down the whirling stairwell, down to the bottom, gathering herself, smoothing her robes and summoning her crackling Light. She pulled the door, threw it open and before her-
-stood not the Angel, not a mortal straggler, not even a creature of natural flesh and bone but a horrific amalgamation of perverse ideas stacked together. A steel-skinned human, cloaked and clad in form-fitting cloth. Her garb was torn bloodily a little ways above her hip and she diverted her weight to the other leg. She was armed with a rifle - one keening like crinkling spinfoil, both causal and not. A trinket, reconfigured. A prize, stolen. A paradox, perfected.
"Oh I think I know this one!" Skuldu exclaimed. "Kiddo, Granny has a tale to tell-"
Agnisia silenced her with a mental roar, severing their farce of a symbiotic bond - all the while holding very, very still. Light crawled between her fingers, thickly enough to sizzle and steam, to fill the air with the taste of ozone. The Exomind may as well have been a mirror - equally tense, equally frozen in place. But something was... off about her. Something was different to those pitiful things the Wardens had dragged in from the Coven's fringes, those rare interlopers unfortunate to be caught alive and full of potent Light. The creature before her had none of the same lustre, none of the same glow. Her pale synthetic skin was marred with shallow scratches everywhere it laid bare to the air. She stank not of the Sky, but of the influence of the Deep.
"I..." the Exo said suddenly, shattering the moment, but she trailed off. Her optics bored through Agnisia's crystalline mask like pinpoint needles, as if to prick her thoughts open and taste the ichor as it welled up. The transhuman creature radiated regret. She emanated distress. Wariness and momentary confusion wrapped around her, but that was scarcely worthy of notice. It was the other sensations that were so curious, so delectable.
Agnisia scanned their surroundings - no Angel, no silvered interceptor, but at the forest that dominated the islands interior she glimpsed sinuous movement and heard the creaking of solid matter being rendered obsolete by will alone. The viper was watching. A ploy, perhaps. To draw her out. To incite her to action. To invite a new avenue of dark entertainment. Did it want to witness her tear the once-mortal apart? Did it thirst to see living machinery dismantled piece by squirming piece? Or was it simply hungry for a death, no matter the shape it took? A practice Agnisia once partook of, now raised beyond; her bones knew the allure of that bloodsport well, only now there was no Worm to satiate. Merely her own need for understanding. And Exominds were intriguing indeed; she twitched her claws and imagined reverse-engineering the process, unfurling the woman's false-flesh like a wrapped gift - a new way to partition away the mind and soul of a living being, a captured foe, to salt its life like bloody flesh and preserve it forever after in hopes of harvesting further Light.
But the woman gathered herself up, her stance relaxing by a fraction, and she briefly deactivated her optical sensors. "I..." she said again before continuing. "I need..." She grimaced. "I need to try."
Agnisia hummed inquisitively, wary and intrigued and so, so transfixed. There was something else. Something... more. Something heavy about the woman's shoulders, beyond the weight of her tattered cloak. A pressure. An orderly thing, penned with focus - and surrender. A living vice; a monstrous edge. Oh yes, the Deep hung off the woman like a sickly fog, cold and sterile and nothing like the sweet-sick scent of soulfire.
"I need to try," the Exo said again. "I..." She dipped her head, groaned and slid her rifle over her shoulder - slumped with apparent defeat. She briefly turned around and looked to the horizon, but the din of the viper had passed. Then - she reorientated herself towards Agnisia and stepped forward.
Stepped past her.
Began walking up the stairs.
Agnisia kept humming. She closed the door softly and rose up after the little transhuman - only half her size at best and still so spirited, so driven. An Acolyte fattened on a river of mislaid tribute. She watched the human hurry upwards and she trailed right behind, amused - and at ease, for though there was a bite in the woman's gaze it lacked the fangs to hold her hate in place. They arrived at the summit and there the Exo stopped, there the Exo paused; alone at least, the idea of viper cordoned away by stone and elevation, and she turned to Agnisia - still tense, still anxious, still in dire need.
"You have a thirst," Agnisia observed, her voice emerging as a deep-throated growl. "A hunger for something special. How can I whet it?"
"I can give you time," the Exo said.
Agnisia tilted her head, her horns in that oh so curious human motion. The woman watched her and her expression flickered with dismay; did it look so wrong on her? Did it ill-fit one of her frame, her calibre?
Good.
"What do you mean 'time'?" Skuldu appeared behind Agnisia's shoulder. Hiding. Feigning Knight-bravery. Foolish, but perhaps useful. It knew the flesh-lovers intimately; it knew their game.
"I can give you time to get away, pull out of the spotlight," the Exo continued cryptically. "I can give you an out."
"A way home?" Skuldu barked incredulously. "Granny's not sure that's possible."
"Do you know who I am?"
"'Course. You're that lass who gave the Wolf and his folks the Garden."
"The Black Heart," the Exomind corrected. "The Garden belongs to no one."
"What about it?" Skuldu paused. "No. No, my kiddo's not going through the Garden, I won't-"
"That's not what I'm offering." The woman turned her gaze to Agnisia. "But I can throw them off your scent long enough for you to hide away until everything blows over."
Agnisia tilted her head the other way: a wordless question. How? Why? And from whom?
"I've been here before. But you haven't - it might take you a while, but you'll figure that out." The Exo grimaced. "I can't chance you getting involved. But I can't exactly kill you either."
Claws flexed. Teeth chattered with annoyance. "No," Agnisia hissed. "You cannot."
The woman looked at her with a guarded expression. "We almost lost. No one knows that, but it was a close one. You set things back on the right track."
"What are you saying?" Skuldu said, impatient.
"I need your help," the woman said reluctantly, but with some urgency. The promise of begging. "I need you to do it again."
Agnisia lowered herself; she pulled the tattered edges of her dress, bunching it up beneath her talons, and craned her neck and back to bring her almost level with the Exo. Humans were so small for being so spirited. Worms who recognized their own fragility and pretended otherwise. "You need my voice? Shall I sing for you?"
"There's a memetically-hidden vault on this island, hidden beneath the earth," the Exo said. "I need your help breaking inside."
"What treasure guides your greed?"
"A life. A friend-to-be. And whatever - whoever - remains in her company." The Exo paused. "The vault has its guards. I don't care to kill them, but I won't pretend like it won't happen. If they die, so be it."
"You came to us-" Skuldu said incredulously, "-because you have a bounty?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you're here?"
"My reasons are my own."
"Can I not entice you to share them?" Agnisia reached forward, tracing a finger along the Exo's cheek and pushing back her hood. The woman flinched but held still.
"You'd regret that," she warned, and in her voice Agnisia heard the chime of cracking glass. She retracted her hand and smiled.
"I would pin you up by your neural web," Agnisia murmured. "I would stake you to searing stimuli. I would brandish your remains for him to see. I would tantalize him with your loss."
"I'm not with him."
"Are you not? Humans seldom travel alone."
"He has his Cabal," the Exo clarified. "And I'm not here for them."
"A lie. You lie."
"I need them, but they aren't my reason. They're definitely yours, though." The Exo drew in a breath. "He shouldn't have brought you here. That was a mistake."
"What do you mean?" Skuldu demanded. "Where are we?"
"Kepler-186f."
"Kepl-..." Skuldu trailed off. "No. No, that's... No."
The Exo said nothing more.
"Kiddo," Skuldu said. "A word?"
Agnisia gestured to her. Say whatever you will. I may listen.
"We're not in Sol. We're not even near it. This is bad. This is-"
"A lure," Agnisia mused. She didn't care for her Ghost's prattling. It was weakness, nothing less. "You are a lure."
"I'd make pretty awful bait," the Exo replied. "He doesn't know."
"You betray him?"
"We're fighting for the same cause. You're fighting for it too. That doesn't mean we're all on the same side."
"A truth at last." Agnisia raised herself up. "What is your price?"
"I'll give them something else to chase. This world is a web. All I need to do is tangle a few strands. They'll rush to reset it. That's time you can use to burrow away. Soon enough no one will bother to look for you. They'll be too preoccupied."
"And when that time passes?"
"You'll be free to leave. Or we'll all be dead."
Agnisia narrowed her third eye. "You mark yourself familiar to this realm."
"I've walked this road more times than I can count." The Exo near swayed with exhaustion. "It's a rare thing to see a new face, and rarer yet for that to be a good thing. But you're not quite my enemy. You'll thank me later."
"If I live."
"If we live, yes."
Agnisia pondered the scheme. She dwelt on the implications and the variables left blank. Oh it was a desperate thing, and strained with dishonesty.
"Kiddo," Skuldu whispered worriedly. "We're a long way from home."
Yes. Yes they were. And all the poorer for it. Agnisia imagined taking all the Exo had said to her and laying the words out across a table of chipped shell, placing them face-up for her mother to inspect. She imagined waiting for the verdict. She imagined the plan to follow. And reaching that conclusion, she made her decision - with all the clarity of gazing into the Altar of Reflection with but one side of the coin in hand, blinded in one eye and blurred in another. She tasted of the half-truths littered in proposition and promise and she found their half-realised shape too intriguing to pass up on. Desperation was the friend of opportunity. Mystery was her cloak and cunning her dagger; she was young but she knew in her soul how to navigate those dark waters. The witch-before-Agnisia must have been well disposed to those works for her to recall their unravelling, mercifully doomed as she was.
"You would grant me survival?" Agnisia floated around the Exo, behind her - reaching over to pluck the enigmatic polearm from where it rested against the wall. It keened with another sort of power, a relic of Deep-borne memory once wielded by a creature of terrible luster. She leaned over the woman, close enough to hear the tiny electrical workings of the Exo, and whispered, "Your guarantee rings reckless, but hollow."
"Eka nàta taka ono lífa," the Exo said - and her words mirrored in nature the speech of the alluring icon that had struck down Agnisia's own quartered spirit, that beatific Adonis of quicksilver bearing. "Bara komoa edtha." (I can give you life. I just need your help.)
For a moment Agnisia hung here, stunned, but she raced to make up for stolen time. "Perhaps the terms needs be altered."
"We don't have time."
"Nay?"
"They're going to kill her," the Exo said with some difficulty.
"Something dear?"
"Something necessary. More than they."
Agnisia clicked her fangs sagely. "You gleam with monkeyshine and tickle with horsefeathers. You are a witch."
The Exo turned on her. "To you I'm just a Stranger. Don't forget that."
"And I? Who am I?"
"You?" the Stranger said. She paused. "You're the Eternal Return."
Skuldu wailed and their neural link shook with the volume of it, the misery, the shock, the loathing. "That was not her secret to share!" the Ghost roared. "She's a farce, she's a cheat, she's a miser, she's a charlatan - bah humbug, that's what she is, she's a home-wrecker and I won't have it, I won't-"
"Silence," Agnisia snarled. She laced her claws (all nine-hundred and ninety-nine of them) around the threading of their link and threatened to scissor it away altogether. It closed off at the other end; here see, no need to cut it, I'll just shut myself off, we cool yet? No. No, they were not cool yet. Not by some margin.
The Stranger watched her carefully, though she stayed her tongue. A wise choice. Agnisia rolled her shoulders, delighting in the clrink of bone and shell, and she demurred, "Your offer is kindly, but I am besieged. They watch. The Angel lies in wait as well, I must presume."
"Not quite. He's holding back."
"He fears?"
"For the lives of those under his command, yes." The Stranger eyed her suspiciously. "Don't be getting any ideas. The moment you strike them is the moment he throws caution to the wind."
"Caution is not in his nature," Agnisia growled fitfully. "He is the personification of clumsy destruction, of jealous vandalism."
"You traded in the Light of dead Guardians. His people. That was never something he would forgive."
"Then how do you propose to lead him astray," Agnisia pressed. "And the others camped beyond this hovel? The only lives left to flay are mortal. Scarcely worth the effort. Certainly not their concern."
"You'll see." The Stranger extended her arm. She held a dirk of crystalline Darkness. "Give me your hand."
Agnisia looked at the limb and her smile faltered. "You are a witch."
"When needs must." The Stranger peered up at her. "Does it bother you?"
"... No. It delights me." Agnisia held out her hand, palm-up. "Make your cut."
The blade flashed. Her skin split. Her Light was flayed from her.
It was agony.
It was worth it.
AN: Massive thanks to Nomad Blue for the editz!
Did you know did you know did you know - the second last mission of Witch Queen's campaign, Last Chance, has a Wizard boss with armour suspiciously like Dul Incaru's (and is referred to as Savathun's Right Hand, as well as her most trusted witch in lore, mmhmm), and there's a glitch/bug/maybe-secret-but-probably-not in that to complete the mission you have to kill her.
Just not her Ghost.
Yeah, you can kill her Ghost, most people probably do, but the mission ends with her death and her Ghost can just hang there. So… in my humble opinion, that's sorta canon. Thus the masochistic princess you see here.