Chapter 45

"Here be dragons"

Itty-bitty warning: Some mild horror and the dropping of a couple F-bombs

"This is stupid."

"This is our way."

"Yeah, I'm not saying it isn't, just that it's stupid." Hawkmoon shook her helm with exasperation. "Look, I'm no stranger to risk-taking and all that shebang, but we've literally just... we were in there for four vorns, Augur!"

"Our escape was frantic, uncoordinated," Augur retorted. "If we bring our focus to bear on this excursion, all of it, then we will lose no more than a handful of local hours."

"Joors. They're called joors for frag's sake." Hawkmoon sighed. Loudly. "So we dip into this... this other-realm, and what? Navigate from there?"

"The Ley Lines are ancient constructs. Progenitor-built. Roadways of intention; streams of want-become-reality."

"Sounds a lot like the Anthem Anatheme to me."

"The process of its creation was not so different," Augur explained. "It is a plane of higher concept, of living dream. It lies in that place between the material and the will."

"And by that you mean... between realspace and the Ascendant plane? That's... that's not comforting at all," Hawkmoon groaned. "So we're basically using dragon magic? I told you, I'm not making a wish."

"The Ley Lines are but one of the ingredients a drake may call upon to enact their twisted deeds, not the wish in its entirety. It is the way, not the cause nor the result. It is merely the environment in which that process may unfurl." Augur paused. "It was to be a grand achievement, when finished. A means by which to touch upon the fabric of every existence, to reach across the universe and do good. Such was their goal, those veiled creators. Such was their desire. To let their Light shine over every world, every moon, every star. Pathways of inconceivable purpose. Rivers of potential, splitting off into every direction. Distributaries of innovation."

"... So it's a big magic motorway."

Augur shot her a look. "If you are to be crude, yes."

Hawkmoon sighed, rolled her optics, and raised her servos into the air in mock surrender. "Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong."

"You are not, though your ability to grasp points of higher concept leave much to be desired."

"Mhm, very hurtful." Hawkmoon looked back out the viewport. "How do we tap into these Ley Lines?"

Augur paused. "We need a sacrifice," he admitted at length.

Hawkmoon's helm snapped around. "What?"

"Of energy. Not a life; not a soul. There are engines, ancient, wired into the Ley Lines through mantra and spell. Wells of boundless potential. Power beyond the scope of mere causality. All we need is to feed them a morsel."

"Paracausal energy," Hawkmoon surmised.

"Indeed."

"We're a little short on that count."

Augur gave her a sly look. "Are we?"

Hawkmoon frowned. "I'm sorry, do you have a surprise Warlock in your back pocket? A witch? A little Worm larva to gut?"

"No. I have you."

"Oh. Well. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm all out on that count. Lost my Ghost, see?" Hawkmoon grimaced and looked away. "My last tether to that ol' final calling."

Augur stalked closer and, to her shock, caught her servo and closed his jaws around her index digit. His fangs pressed into the steel, feeling very, very real, and Hawkmoon tugged back - but he had an iron grip on it.

"What the frag?!" Hawkmoon snapped. "Let go!"

Augur reluctantly did so, fangs glowing with energon blue. "Blood," he said. "Or rather the energy-rich substrate mechanoforms typically substitutes for it. There is a unique energy within yours - the chance capacity to rise above the limits of material worth."

Hawkmoon grimaced, cradled her servo and pushed away from the windowsill, standing up straight. "The hell were you trying to-? Fragging… Okay, no. No biting," she said very firmly. "Look, I'm sure you're very clever, but no biting. Even if to prove- no, especially if you're trying to prove a point. No biting. Augur, look at me. No biting."

He blinked at her, feigning innocence. "If it concerns you so, then so be it. But has my example fallen on deaf audials?"

"No no, I got your point," Hawkmoon grumbled. "So that's why you have me bleed on that... thing in the, uh... the, um, the place. Or I'm assuming so."

"You assume correctly, to my surprise."

"Get scrapped." Hawkmoon vented, closest thing she could get to drawing in and out a deep breath. Still didn't feel right. "So... what? I just open myself up and bleed?"

"There is a process to it."

"Like, Traveler above, I hope so. Could get messy if I'm trying to fight something otherwise."

"I will show you. When we are..." Augur pointedly looked around. Not at the mercy of any passerby coming through, no matter how miniscule the odds.

Hawkmoon motioned with her helm. Lead on.

Back to their room, to relative safety and the promise of privacy. Hawkmoon automatically looked the place up and down for signs of someone having come through, maybe planted a bug or two, but it was just the same as she'd left it - empty and unwelcoming, cold in a way that had less to do with temperature and more with feeling. The walls were plain, the floors were bare, the door's lock hadn't been tampered with. The only activity it had logged was her own. Hawkmoon shut and secured it behind her.

"Now what?" she asked aloud.

Augur padded into the centre of the room, turned about and sat down, waiting. Hawkmoon knelt opposite him. He tilted his head. With a grimace she extended one of her wrist-blades and set it over the palm of the opposite servo.

"You need not drain yourself dry," Augur told her. "I need but an ember to open the way. A fair drop or two will do."

"This is some dark magic scrap," Hawkmoon grumbled. She cut herself all the same, pressing the unheated edge into the steel of her protoform - just enough to feel that sting, to draw the bloom of a single blue droplet. Hawkmoon retracted the blade and offered Augur her servo. He reached back with a paw, dipped it into the slivered crack in her palm and gingerly pulled back. A part of her had expected him to wait until it had cooled, but no, no he just went right for it.

With it he did no more than dab it on the floor, tails swishing behind him and his dark eyes a-glitter with what looked like thousands of distant pale stars. Augur breathed onto it, lower jaws splaying apart, and the energon steamed away - rising up as shimmering silver dust.

"Shiny," Hawkmoon remarked, "but how's this supposed to help us?"

"The door is ajar; the lock has been picked. We may peek or charge in at our leisure - though I recommend the former while you acclimate yourself, Seeker." Augur hummed a merrily alien tune. "Begin with something menial. It would not do to attract undue attention when we've only just begun."

Hawkmoon scowled. "How am I supposed to-"

"Restrain yourself. Move slowly, think carefully. This is no mere material plane. Your will is as much a vehicle here as your form."

Ah. That was... fair. Hawkmoon schooled her thoughts, banished the irritation for later and gave into the lull of silence. The room was soundproofed, a box of air and matter confined. That was what she focused on. That was what she clung to. And the dust opened up - a silvery disc, growing all the way to the edges of the wall, transparent. No, not transparent; it was just showing her what she was imagining, what she had aimed her mind towards.

"Beware of idle thoughts," Augur warned her. "Do not step beyond that boundary. We are not yet ready for it."

No. No they weren't.

"Okay," Hawkmoon said, forcing the twinge of nervousness from her voice. "So how do I... stop, uh, projecting."

"Empty yourself."

She tried to breathe - and stopped herself just in time, before the subconscious confusion and ensuing panic could set in. No. No, breathing wasn't going to work, she needed- Hawkmoon sat down, legs folded, and tapped her digits against her knees, timing it with Augur's background hum. A steady tune just ambling along, not a concern in the world.

Another anchor.

Hawkmoon held it, but she refused to think about it. It was there, it was as solid as the ground she was sat upon and the air coalescing around her form. It was something, just like all the things filling her helm, her processor, her spark. It was something - which she felt but refused to acknowledge any further, instead falling into the absent feeling of nothing. To think about something, to live in the world of somethings, to be something - that was a knife at her throat, pulling against the bare surface of her skin- no, of her protoform. Couldn't breathe, couldn't dare to try. Not unless she wanted it to be her last.

And there it was. That nerveless sensation. That was the empty. That was the nothing. That was the Void.

"Yes. Like that," Augur said. He sounded distant. A world away.

Her digits paused and curled, her servos raised up - and she pantomimed the draw of a bow, plucking three arrows from a quiver built of nonexistence and fitting them on a thread of pure zero-point energy, balancing them against the riser forged from the arc of a stolen event horizon. She pulled; she tensed; she released. There was nothing to see for her efforts in the real, or even in the will, but in her mind's eye the Void flew - tethering far and wide, grasping at nothing and pulling it in, forming a pocket of extra-deep emptiness. A crunch of sudden gravity, a vortex of insatiable hunger, a pit of absolute black.

Hawkmoon onlined her optics. The disc had collapsed and the dust had settled. There was nothing left to see - but to feel? The Void flickered in her core, between her digits. She felt like she could roll a black hole between her fingers like a coin, clutch it in her bleeding palm like a stress ball - comforting in that unerringly tranquil way, something built of absolute silence.

Augur fixed her with a strange look. "Well done. Very well done," he muttered at length. "I have underestimated you."

Hawkmoon took the praise with an uncertain smile.

They practiced for the rest of the off-cycle and then into the next orn, pulling and prodding at the art of what Augur referred to as "Wayfinding". Navigating the Ley Lines and all that jazz. Hawkmoon's palm was set to scar after all was said and done - but they'd made leaps of progress, shooting their minds down dreaming highways in search of whatever inane thing caught their fancy. Augur led the charge on that count; he was an apt guide, well-suited to both leading them down conceptual causeways of alien design and shepherding her away from the shadowed parts - where the Ley Lines had fallen into disrepair, letting something Dark seep inside.

Hawkmoon thought about her Nullblade - and the Ley Lines guided her back to herself, taking the shape of a peerless mirror in which the focus was always drawn to the weapon in her servo.

She considered distant stars and runaway comets - and lo and behold her room became an astronomical observatory without equal.

She contemplated home - and there it was, Earth, green and blue and not quite right. The continents were... there at a stretch, but it looked like they'd all been drawn out by a child who only ever briefly glanced at a globe, not quite settled in the way she knew and... what was that, at the southern pole? That mass of snow and ice? Was that... Antarctica? Hawkmoon had always been under the impression it had been a myth.

It was the world. It was her world - maybe not Mars, but Earth was humanity's grandmama. Human life had propagated there. It was home in a way that surpassed all other meanings of the word. It was her planet. It was where she belonged.

"It would be kinder for all involved to leave them be," Augur gently told her.

With a pang of homesick yearning Hawkmoon turned to the Void and clawed the image away. Her spark ached with the memory of it. In an effort to forget what she'd seen, Hawkmoon dove back into the work Augur set out for her, saying little and thinking of less.

She dripped a couple more beads of energon onto the ground and forced her mind against it. Augur had no trouble opening the Ley Lines, situated as he already half-was on the other side, but Hawkmoon had all but demanded to be taught how to do it herself. In case... just in case. For her it involved not only power and thought, but the helping hand of ancient runes. Not Hive, but that hardly mattered. Older, probably. The meaning-in-symbol works of someone else. Probably someone of a stronger clade, as difficult as it was to believe. Oddly, the iconography bore some superficial resemblance to Reefborn Awoken glyphs. Strange as it was, that was a comfort.

The issue came in invoking those runes. Hive drew out their symbols to channel their power, but this wasn't Hive script. This wasn't even script. It was the idea of it all, what the runes even stood for, that held the power, and Augur had her drawing it out through some convoluted understanding of obsolete paracausal systems. She had to pluck out the core of their power, see it in the residual Light swimming in her spilt energon (no easy task) and force a link. It was like calling a banana an apple - except that it wasn't just words, weightless as the air they hurtled through, but a tampering with metaphysical records in that she had to believe it. Both were fruit, yes, but in actuality they were two different things. Hawkmoon just scrubbed that distinction out in her own mind - and then she was in free-fall, spreading her arms, her legs, her wings to keep her gliding in that sudden inexplicable current leading through an ocean-that-wasn't.

It wasn't easy. It wasn't simple. It didn't come naturally to her, and she wasn't very good at it. But the lesson was there, all soaked up, and Hawkmoon poked and prodded at it until her palm was raw and she was seeing double. She wondered if a tincture of Queensfoil could have made the process a little easier, a little smoother, but the problem was that Queensfoil probably didn't exist in the present, what with the lack of Awoken to ferment it or a Queen to finance the whole operation. Not to mention the potentially dire effects Queensfoil would have had on a Cybertronian body past ingestion. As it was the whole thing left her in a fugue, one where her mind was strained almost to the breaking point and in her exhaustion her thoughts had begun to wander. It settled on old memories. Words, actions, faces with names and feeling attached.

Hawkmoon bled and she peered through the looking glass. In her mind was Ikharos - old Ikharos, who only carried his age in his words, in his eyes, in the way he forgot to take care of himself like the world's most devoted workaholic. She remembered having to argue to get him to even begin looking after his own needs, to remember to eat, to sleep, to slow down, you dive too fast and you're going to get pressure sickness. Only worked half the time. She remembered his gaunt features, that crinkling half-smile shared over a bottle of wine imported all the way from Vesta. She remembered him being there when the Exo dreams sparked up, holding her shoulders lest she roll into the campfire.

The Ley Lines gave way to the empty. A part of her reasoned that it was because he was a Voidwalker, a good one, but there was too much nothing - enough to smother a person.

He wasn't there.

She looked for Jaxson, brave enough to engage Valus Ta'aurc in a fist fight and strong enough to almost win on his own. She'd finished that fight for him, all with a well-placed knife throw, but his spirit had been the real hero. She remembered him taking up the space on the couch between her and Ikharos during a rare movie night, arms folded just so, with all three Ghosts perched and cradled against his chest.

There was an emptiness there too, and he wasn't a Sentinel. Jaxson had been a Sunbreaker, bright enough to stand out in a sky full of stars, but the Ley Lines told her he was as nonexistent as Ikharos. Just... not there. Hawkmoon had known it for a while, but to see it confirmed... it crushed her.

"Death is one hurdle even the First could not overcome," Augur said softly.

"They aren't dead."

"No. But you are."

Hawkmoon shuddered. She couldn't reply. Not to that. Didn't matter whether she agreed or not, he was right one way or another and she couldn't stand to let him lord it over her.

She started looking for Northwind. Quell. Skydive. Swiftsear. Sandstorm. The Dartwings.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Four more nothings.

A part of her spark broke. Her digits curled inwards and her wings flexed dangerously. The anger held her for a time, rising up into full blown fury directed at most everything, but it soon melted back into a familiar grief given a new stinging edge. Dead.

They were dead.

She stood up after a while. "I need to recharge," Hawkmoon announced, voice sharp - intentionally so, just to keep it from wavering. "You can keep an eye out for Thunderhowl. If you think he's leaving soon, tell me."

Augur roused himself. "Very well."

"I assume we're following them from the other side?"

"Yes."

"You know how to pull that off?"

"I do," Augur confirmed. He looked up at her. "Get some sleep, Seeker."

Hawkmoon retracted her wrist-blade and closed her injured servo. "Will do."

Augur left.

And she drew one last bead of energon. At last, maybe because she was looking for a face that would mean support and stability in a universe gone mad, Hawkmoon thought about Úthaessel. She imagined the Emperor as she had been before the fight over Enlightenment. Just for that faintest sliver of hope, that little nugget of doubt - just to convince herself there was no point waiting for a miracle that wasn't going to happen. She looked through.

Nothi-

Nothing, but past it was the glow of something else. A sun, maybe, diminished. Eclipsed by the absence, by the nothing. Hawkmoon stared. Dead - but a part of her...

No. No, enough. Stop it. Hawkmoon dove back into the cold embrace of the Void, drowning her connection to the Ley Lines, and she shook her helm violently. No. Stop. Stop pretending...

Stop pretending this'll get better. Stop pretending it's not so bad. You can't convince me anymore. You can't.

It took her time to re-gather herself. Hawkmoon scowled fiercely and kicked at the energon on the floor, smearing it across. She vented, just for that poor imitation of a proper breath, and slowly retreated to her berth - thoughts awhirl and spark aching.

The day came, all of three orns after the Insections had ingratiated themselves with the locals. No ceremony, no announcement, nothing official or unofficial; it had been Augur who broke the news to her, though she wasn't surprised by it. The fox had trotted through her room's door like a ghost of old - not the nice kind, the kind she loved, but the older myth, the ones she used to think were only confined to nightmares. Hawkmoon had already been awake by then, tracing the barely-healed mark on her palm, and the moment he'd said, "It is time," she nodded, got up and asked how long they had.

Enough time to grab a couple of breems in the washracks, fortunately. Hawkmoon stayed under the faucets until her plating was gleaming, her wings sheening, her underlying protoform polished back to its simpler matte-black. She dried off, made her way back and drew her Nullblade moments after shutting the door. With one flick she had it fully extended and with another she opened up her servo all over again. One drop for results, two for luck, three for hope. Augur took over from there, opening the way up, and from there all Hawkmoon had to do was step forward with body and mind.

Gazing through the Ley Lines was like balancing a knife by its edge. Physically stepping through - now that felt more like trying to tight-rope across that very same edge; entering came with a sensation of curious inversion, familiar but only in reverse. The scary thing would have been to contemplate falling, to imagine what happened if she lost her balance amidst the squalor of grey-scaled chaos. Nothing good, probably. But she was beyond that - because she was a Hunter, freed. A Nightstalker in thought only, but that was all that mattered. She was going to ride the Void all the way through. Anything more would have involved some spark - and you never set up a campfire in contested territory. It just wasn't done.

"Lead on," Hawkmoon said, straining not to give her demand a springboard to hurtle into deeper thought.

Augur raised his head and pawed along, prowling along the deep dark. Hawkmoon trailed behind, focusing on the sight of him, and it stayed like that for a time until they hit solid ground - rock. A countryside, trees of foreign design ranging as far as the eye could see.

"Cover," Augur murmured. He sniffed a nearby bush, thrusting his head through and withdrawing it with berry juice dribbling from the sides of his mouth. "We may think freely here."

Hawkmoon gave the place a cursory glance. "Different forest from last time. What is this?"

"Detritus," the fox curtly explained. "It drifts from either end, where the borders fray and the custodians keep a poor watch."

"Custodians on this side? Or the others?"

"Other."

"Ah."

"We may speak, we may think, but it would not do to lower your guard, Seeker, so remain wary," Augur advised. "There is still room for kings and queens to cast their dread gazes this way - and plenty of their lesser ilk often take to these currents in search of prey."

"Like Hive."

"Sometimes. Sometimes others."

"Tenerjiin?"

"Not for some time," Augur replied, "though that may change, should the Arch-Fiend grow... hungry."

"... And your people?"

"Scattered."

Hawkmoon ducked her helm. "I'm sorry," she quietly muttered. "Your guys must have caught some flak for, uh… for helping me escape."

Augur quizzically glanced back at her. "You would grieve for us?"

"You're an ass, but your folk never did me any harm. Doesn't seem right that they get hurt for being kind."

"... No. No, it would not." He looked ahead. "But it is the reality we endure.."

"Your planet was... shoved in here, right?" Hawkmoon hesitated. "Your people were exiled."

"Exiled? No. You exile something for the purpose of punishment. No, the veiled ones did not exile us, for we had done no wrong; what they did was bury us away like a guilty treasure."

"The Progenitors."

"The First," Augur bitterly growled.

"I take it there's no love lost there?"

"We were mortal, Seeker, until we weren't. They moved us with the same power that that beast moved worlds. They were as impure and sacrilegious as He."

"Kharad-Tan?" Hawkmoon guessed.

Augur said nothing.

"So He was like the proto-Oryx back in your day?"

"Worse, Seeker. Worse than that regal pretender," Augur hissed. The anger, fortunately, didn't feel aimed at her. "Your Hive hunger - but the Lord of Crux was rage. Rage for a misdeed against His people known only by Himself. His fury guttered out the stars. His wrath devoured armies. The flames of His Cradle War spread like wildfire, from system to system, from plane to plane."

"But He stopped, right?" Hawkmoon set her lips in a thin line. "Even if it was to hide away. The Progenitors defeated him."

"No," Augur said, exhaling slowly - as if trying to restrain the emotion behind the memory, keep it from racing out. "They broke only the Khargrive, mortal as he was. And he - he broke the Arch-Fiend's dark heart."

Hawkmoon let a couple seconds pass and, when Augur wasn't forthcoming, said, "He loves the Traveler."

Augur stopped and looked back at her.

"He told me himself," Hawkmoon hastily added. "After Narkasa, uh, broke your glass ball."

"Your runaway patron? No." Augur carried on with a snort of bitter amusement. "Not Her, not entirely - but that which used to speak for Her. He loved the shape Her voice took."

"Hold on, speak?" She gave him an incredulous look.

"A hopeful dreamer, once upon a time. Before the nightmares claimed her. Before..." Augur paused. "Before the shackled night took her into its arms."

Hawkmoon frowned. "You're talking about a Speaker. A Speaker."

"I'm talking about-..." Augur trailed off. "It matters not."

"Nah, I'm pretty sure this is important. What was she? A-"

"Progenitor," Augur barked. He lowered his voice. "And she was first of the First."

He didn't say anything after that, no matter how much she poked and prodded. Hawkmoon, her interest drawn, tried to prompt him with all sorts of questions - about her, about Him, and about them. The fox didn't squeak another word - because of course not. Of course the moment he started rambling about something interesting he went and shut his trap. Hawkmoon realized it probably wasn't the right place to be dropping names, being so close to that... that other other side, but she refused to let it go.

At long last the forest cleared away. Whatever scent trail Augur was following, it led back out into the open.

"We will surface soon," he whispered, then nudged her pede. "But look."

Hawkmoon stared across the dark plain. Everything was cast over with a shady gloom, but out there twinkled something like distant stars. The same things that had once dotted Augur's eyes, back when they were testing out how to escape realspace. One of those stars glowed brighter than all the others, pulsing arrhythmically. Where the others were shades of bright yellow and glaring green (a lighter tint than soulfire, thankfully), it was fluctuating between all the colours on the rainbow, shifting through at a pace fast enough to hurt her optics.

"Dragon?" Hawkmoon guessed.

"Wyrm," Augur confirmed.

"Where's Thunderhowl now?"

"Closing in."

"Can we get there before them?"

"If we make haste."

They hurried across the next dark plain. The winds of the place were brutal, pulling at her plating like claws, and it continuously howled around them like one giant wolf. According to the fox that was perfectly fine - that was natural. It was the other kinds of noise they had to watch out for. Which might have been reassuring, but the closer to the shifting star they were, the louder Hawkmoon could hear a chorus of sibilant whispers. They tugged at her, pulled at the single-minded focus of her Void-induced haze. It took all her effort to resist, to keep the dragon's voice from slipping inside and nestling within.

The plain gave way to open shadow. There, in the middle of nothing, hung a construct of ivory and marble not unlike the very same one that had saved them the last time she'd been navigating the Ley Lines. Hawkmoon picked Augur up and flew to it, looked around to double-check that there wasn't going to be a repeat of last time, and satisfied she wasn't about to be set upon by a gaunt spear-toting alien, she pricked her palm and pressed it against the core of the device. It opened up like a blooming flower, violet light filling it up, and then-

They were out.

The cold of open space tugged away the remnants of the other side's air - what little of it had carried over with her back into realspace. Augur shivered and disappeared, though his muted complaints still filled her audials, replacing the roar of the dragon's twisted promises. Hawkmoon twisted about, weapons drawn and battle-protocols at the forefront of her mind, and she scoured their immediate surroundings for anything. She looked this way; she looked that way; she looked every way. Nothing. Not close by - not even stray debris, nothing for a dragon to hide itself behind or as. But a rogue planet lurked below them, scarcely illuminated by faraway stars. It looked... blue. Not the deep blue of natural oceans, but a softer shade. Something else.

Her shoulder cannon was out, one of her servos had its wrist-blade engaged and the other had transformed into a shard carbine. She was ready to fight. To kill.

And nothing presented itself.

"Augur," Hawkmoon began, ever so softly, "where is it?"

The Verunlix didn't reply.

"Have we landed in the wrong system?"

"I don't know."

"That would be upsetting."

"Indeed."

"Where..." Her gaze fixed on the world below. She refrained from activating anything more than the most basic of scanning sensors, all too wary of the dragon taking a bite. It wasn't a big world, truthfully, but that meant little in the grand scheme of things.

"If it is here," Augur whispered, "then it will find us."

"Unless it knows why we're here."

"Especially if it knows why we are here." He snorted. "Battle erodes control. Adrenaline fuels desire."

"There's no adrenaline in me, Augur. That's an organic thing."

"You have enough."

Hawkmoon scowled, transformed and dove.

And dove.

And dove, until she pierced through the exosphere, thermosphere, mesophere, stratosphere and landed down in the troposphere, her pedes sinking into pale blue sand. The stuff was scattered everywhere, dunes swaying in the gentle breeze like ocean waves. Ice crystals glittered amidst the sediment, either that or shards of broken glass. The wind picked up, dragging the sound of a soft, strained exhale her way - and the sand moved, pulling away from a shore of obsidian slate, lined with strands of dark, dead kelp running along and interconnecting between dusky monoliths of carved black marble. They looked like Celtic standing stones at a distance, but as Hawkmoon closed in on one she discovered data-latticework and fine metal wires threading through a veil of inky silk cast over each monument.

A scarlet light flared overhead - some distant star deciding the laws of light-speed didn't apply to it anymore, not while it was in the midst of dying in an explosive red blaze, so that it could shine as far and wide as it wanted to. Artificial grooves and hollows in the slate reflected the red glow, appearing like so many pools and vessels of blood. Human blood.

"Beware," Augur warned in a hushed voice. Hawkmoon didn't need to be told twice.

Then it started to snow. Flakes of frozen water, genuine water, floated down from above - but there weren't any clouds. There wasn't enough moisture in the atmosphere to support the phenomenon. It was impossible, in the most natural sense of the word.

Dragon.

Either it was playing with them or it was setting a stage for others to come. Either way Hawkmoon had grown impatient. She raised her shoulder cannon up and fired. The roar of the shot echoed across the planet's flat surface in all directions, while the flaring missile flickered and finally guttered out high above.

The snow kept falling. The sands kept shifting. The star continued the burn. The only difference was that Hawkmoon's comms unit suddenly buzzed with an unfamiliar Cybertronian signal. It lashed against her EM field, scraggly and desperate, lacking all the protocols that mattered. It couldn't have been more unnatural if it had tried.

"Being hailed," Hawkmoon murmured. "Could be it."

"A curious probe, nothing more."

"Seems a little too frantic for curious."

"Will you answer it?"

Hawkmoon waited a moment. "Augur. It's a distress signal."

"A trap."

"I know."

"We have time yet. We need not play its games."

"I'm aware. But the signal's Krenshan. Almost."

"Is this a surprise?"

"No." She hesitated. "It's sloppy. Too sloppy. Not like the dragons I know."

"Have you answered?"

"No."

"Wise," Augur replied. "Can you trace it?"

"... Sure. But you know it's a trap."

"Yes."

"You said we didn't have to play into its games."

"Yes."

Hawkmoon sighed. "Fine. Anything goes wrong, I blame you."

"Naturally."

Hawkmoon traced the signal from air - just for that extra maneuverability if push came to shove. She followed it across the world, halfway around to the extent that the red star's dying light narrowed to a couple of thin beams, and the first thing she found was the ship.

Or, at least, what was left of it.

It looked Cybertronian but old - the kind of vessel that had long since run out of fashion, even during the empire's heyday. Small too. A private cargo ship, maybe. Built for the use of two or three mecha. Oh, and definitely scuttled - by someone with too much enthusiasm and too little forethought. The primary fuel tanks had taken a hit, probably from a plasma cannon at a distance. That would have meant it was intentional, probably carried out by the crew themselves; the reinforced hull would had to have been pulled aside to make that shot. The rest of the ship had gone the same way, engulfed by the explosion. What was left was a blackened wreckage looked for all the world like a burst tin can, the edges of the breach curled out and frozen mid drip.

Only the forward cockpit and those systems within had emerged relatively unscathed, communications node included. It was running on reserve power, which given the state of the overall ship should have run out a while ago, but there it was. Ticking away. Shooting her with rapid-fire distress pings.

And with not a single mech inside to operate the damn thing.

The signal she'd traced didn't end there. Whoever had shot up the ship had probably realized the same thing she had, that there was still something to salvage, because the node was wirelessly hooked up to another device elsewhere - likely a portable emergency beacon. Why the crew had left the wreck behind was a mystery, when it would have been easier to stick around. The weather, inexplicable as it was, wasn't violent enough to necessitate the need for cover, nor did her scanners pick up on any significant energon deposits in the crust below. If fuel-loss had been the issue, then the crew should have entered stasis-lock in proximity to the ship, on the off-chance that another Cybertronian or at least a Cybertronian-friendly ship received the signal.

But no. No bodies. Not a single one, dead or in stasis-lock. If the crew had killed themselves in the destruction of their ship, for whatever reason, then there still would have been some remains. The metal of a Cybertronian frame bore some chemical and physical qualities normal steel just didn't possess - and any metal grafted onto a living Cybertronian system would have been subsumed and converted into the same. There was nothing like that in the immediate area. Not a single scrap of cybermatter to be found.

"Must have fled," Augur remarked. "Driven away by another."

Hawkmoon hmmed. He'd made a fair point, but there was still the matter of the ship having been destroyed. The why gave rise to a number of potential scenarios in her head, none of them positive. Then there was the matter of the distress signal. Someone had either set it off before or after the explosion - and neither made sense. Either the pilot had known the ship was about to be blown apart and thus sent out a distress call preemptively, or had waited until after the energon-fires had subsided. The former made more sense to her, because if the crew was fleeing something, then it wouldn't have made sense for them to wait around until the ship was finished burning to call for help. Or maybe they'd circled back around - but then where were they? Had they run off again? And if they knew the ship was going to be destroyed, it raised a couple more questions: why had the hull plating protecting the fuel tanks been removed? Why was it a plasma round that had set it off? If it had been pirates then there would've been more signs of a firefight - and there wasn't.

The strangest part was how, even under the suspicion that the dragon could have been involved, Hawkmoon didn't believe that line of inquiry for a second. The dragon was new, it had just come through the Brachian Divide little more than five orns prior. And the ship - the ship was old. The damage was old. Then there was the matter of the crew fleeing, because that... didn't make sense. Maybe it wasn't fleeing per se, maybe she was gambling too much on that presumption, but dragons didn't chase their prey in the conventional sense. They were predators, true, but of the onthopathic sort. Not causal. The consumption of flesh, red and raw, held little sway over them and cold steel less so; they dealt in desire and lust and greed. Dangerous, ridiculously so, but they did not hunt like this. Not ordinarily. They didn't run down their quarry like any old wolf would an old bison. No. They fancied themselves better than that, that their prey would naturally find them.

It didn't make sense.

Maybe the dragon led them away, maybe a dragon had orchestrated the whole thing - but then, it couldn't have been the same dragon. Not unless it had come back to a lifeless world untold vorns later for some strange alien reason, one Hawkmoon simply couldn't grasp.

As for the ship itself, it did bear some similarities to some lesser Krenshans freighters she'd seen, and the signal's codes bore some resemblance to traditional Krenshan distress signals, but it wasn't a perfect copy. Everything about it was... a whole lot more primitive, which was saying something. The comms node had logged the original distress signal being activated an entire eternity ago - 132 P.C., so probably even before the Quintessons were a thing on Cybertron. Which, like much everything else about the ship, just didn't make any plain sense. The auxiliary power should have shot out an eternity ago, but there it was, still broadcasting strong.

It left her with the suspicion that while the original signal had been set off way back when, it had only been shut off at some point and only reactivated recently. Maybe in anticipation of her arrival. Or maybe as a reaction; her firework show hadn't been subtle. Not in the slightest. The portable beacon was even easier to trace. Whomever had taken it with them hadn't gone to any lengths to disguise it. It was too blatant, too obvious, too... gullible.

"Don't like this," Hawkmoon muttered. She still cracked the signal's code, still triangulated the beacon's position, still made to follow. Augur had the right of it - trap or no trap, they were pressed for time. Thunderhowl could've been anywhere from a couple of breems to an entire orn away, but she wasn't going to leave it to chance.

"I am your eyes," Augur told her. "I will watch for you."

He might have meant it to be a comfort, but it didn't feel that way to her.

Lennox-2 snuck a peek around the street corner. Cabal swathed in red were marching down the road, high on the exuberance of easy victory. Her jaw tightened; some of them had even taken... trophies. She turned back, clipped a new clip into her rifle and imagined herself taking in a deep, deep breath. Gecko weakly bobbed in front of her, looking as scared as she felt - but there was an iron in him, steel. It was his resolve that gave her the confidence to smile, however grimly, and ready herself for what was probably going to be another quick death.

"Ready?" she asked.

Gecko dipped his shell. "I'll watch your back."

Lennox nodded, glanced up at the Traveler one last time, and burst out of cover already opening fire.

She flew after the signal. It wasn't far - just a couple of kliks, give or take. The portable beacon lay in a bed of blue sand, not so far from the rusted corpse of the mech who'd probably smuggled it away. Hawkmoon circled above once, twice, three times just to check that there wasn't anything lying in wait nearby, then swooped down and transformed. She landed with her weapon configurations online, sweeping the area for thermal signatures. Nothing, including the mech, leaning against another of those strange monoliths as he was. His spark was long gone. Hard to outlive a direct charged plasma-round to the faceplates.

"Augur," Hawkmoon whispered. "What now?"

The Verunlix appeared beside, cautiously padding through the sand. His hackles were raised and his jaws were splayed. Augur lowered his head to the ground and sniffed, searching for a scent.

"I don't know," he admitted at length.

"Is the dragon here?"

Augur looked around. "Close," he whispered. "It lurks. It watches."

"Trap," Hawkmoon growled. She craned her helm around but couldn't spot a thing out of place. It didn't reassure her in the slightest.

"Maybe. But I can taste..." he trailed off. Looked back at the dead mech. "Dead kin. It clutches something."

"I'm not touching that."

Augur shot her a look, then prowled forward and gingerly thrust his head towards the rusted frame - and jumped back. The body hadn't moved. He did the same thing, pressing his snout towards where the mech's servo (only remaining servo, Hawkmoon darkly noted) was closed around a tool of some kind. Augur pushed closer, cautiously closed his mouth around the bottom of the item and tugged it right out of the dead mech's grip. He quickly dragged it back to her and dropped it by her pedes.

"And here I was told you couldn't carry things," Hawkmoon grumbled.

Augur snarled irritably. "It demands much of me."

"Oh c'mon, you don't look that exhausted." She knelt down and scooped the object up. It looked like an archaic datastick.

"Then you aren't looking close enough."

"Yada yada I don't care." Hawkmoon looked the datastick over, unlatched the panel over the controls and switched it on. A holographic screen flowed into focus above it, all of its contents contained within a tidy blue rectangle. "Personal datalog, looks like. Dead man's diary."

"Read it."

"Yeah, I was going to." Hawkmoon scowled. "They've been sorted into... okay, right, the most recents logs are in the 'unsorted' file. Dated Second Quartex, First Trimara, 132 Post-Creation. Informal entries, looks like. Log 34O2Q1T132. This one's just... 'Long flight to Gahera-VI.'"

"Is that one of your empire's lost worlds?"

"Isn't that just a loaded question. Probably, but I wouldn't know."

"More. Read more."

"Yeah yeah, I'm getting there." Hawkmoon paused. "Log 51O2Q1T132: 'Pan-spatial disruption. Warrens are shifting. Collapsing. Reshaping. Whirlpool is taking us out. No telling where we're going to land. Onyx Prime preserve us.' Log 53O2Q1T132: 'Hit the nearest body at sub-lightspeed. Planet doesn't show up on astrocartographic charts. Rogue, no sun. No moons. No ice either. It's warm. There's lakes. Rivers. Sand. Pillars, built like towers. They look artificial. Dead race, maybe. Constructs probably served as religious monuments. Whirlpool doesn't like it. Hookclaw wants to investigate, grab some samples. We're going to be here a while, so what's the harm?'"

They looked back to the mech. The pillar.

"Huh," Hawkmoon said, for want of a better word. She looked around, quickly, and finding nothing new on the horizon continued with the reading. "Log 56O2Q1T132: 'War in the sky. Interion Territories, Brachian Hold. Stars are dying. We don't know what's happening. Anomalous readings across the board. Warrens are still broken. The damage must be leaking into the rest of the universe because somehow we can see it all happening in relative real-time. They're still fighting. Dark shells must have broken the thousand-vorn blockade. Burning everything. We can see their fires. We can see them blink out. Smoke's drifting far.'" Hawkmoon frowned. "Kharad-Tan?"

"Craven," Augur seethed.

Hawkmoon glanced at him in warning. "Careful."

"I am-" Augur choked off. He started to pace. "I... am in control of myself. You needn't raise your concern. I will not break."

"Keep it that way." Hawkmoon waited. "Will I keep going or...?"

"Read."

"Y'know, a please wouldn't feel out of place." Hawkmoon grimaced. "Log 57O2Q1T132: 'Dark King Ascendant. He's in the sky. Behind the stars. He's holding a sword. Warrens are bleeding out. We're seeing him through pools of dream. He's from the Pit itself. Spawn of Unicron. Must be. Sword's falling. Half the stars are gone. His shadow's still there. Filling up the void. We have to get these vid-logs back home. These anomalous readings too. The Brachian Hold is gone. We might be next. Need a pick-up and soon. Running out of fuel. We might have enough to make it to the nearest waystation, but Whirlpool doesn't want to chance it.'" She paused. Muttered, "Checks out. Uh, here, uh... log 63O2Q1T132: 'Anomalous activity woke something up. There's life here. In these towers. Clouds of black oil. The rock under the silk is porous. They flow from pillar to pillar. It's a city. They've started... following us.'" Hawkmoon suspiciously looked over at the pillar. "Augur?"

Augur tilted his head. "I hear no breath, I feel no heartbeat."

"Oil doesn't have organs."

"Life does."

"Not always."

"I hear nothing. We are alone. Except..." The fur along his back stood on end. "It circles."

"Where?" She drew her wrist-blades and charged up her cannon.

"I do not know." Augur turned around and bared his teeth, head snapping this way and that. "It... no, it retreats."

"Augur."

"It has run off." Augur made a curious sound. "We are alone."

Hawkmoon shifted the tilt of her wings, ready for takeoff. "You sure?"

"... No." Augur's ears perked. "But we... we are not its prey."

"We aren't?" Hawkmoon had the sudden alarming thought that Thunderhowl and the Insecticons had arrived, that the dragon was hightailing its way towards them. "Who-?"

"I know not. Another life. Confined."

"Cybertronian?"

Augur hesitated. "Perhaps. Read."

"Augur, this really isn't the time to-"

"Read."

Hawkmoon scowled and tossed the datastick down onto the sand in front of him. "Read it yourself."

Augur gave her an irritable look before circling around the hologram to better make out the glyphs. How he expected to decipher them in the first place was beyond her understanding, but she didn't care to ask after it. "'They congregate around us," Augur read. "'They're aware. Hookclaw's testing them. He says they're self-aware. That they're sapient. Trying to communicate. But they have no technology of their own. He gave them a datapad. One of the clouds flowed inside it. They can't exist in the open air for very long. They'll die if they do. Porous rocks are different. Same for our tech, looks like. It's working the datapad from the inside. Speaking to us. Doesn't have a name. Just calls itself Us, We, Together.'"

Hawkmoon only half-listened. She checked her radar, her radiological sensors, everything. Nothing awry, nothing out of place - but like Augur she was starting to feel it. The sensation of something soft on her fingertips - fingertips she no longer possessed. The smell of cinnamon. The buzz of delicate spices on her lips. Like that place down the Peregrine District, where she and Ikharos used to go after every successful Devils heist. It was followed by the sensation of being somewhere warm after having worked all day outside in the cold snow. The pressure of someone's skin against her own, close confines, the sheer manic delight of it. "Log 63O2Q1T132," Augur went on. "'They killed the others.'"

Hawkmoon snapped out of her reverie and twisted around, optics wide. "What?"

"'First one jumped from the datapad to Hookclaw. No idea how long it took it, but it did. Hollowed him out. Spark's gone, but his frame kept walking. They worked him like a puppet. We didn't realize until it was too late. They used him to touch a pillar, picked up a couple more. Whirlpool was closer so they went for her first. Tore her chassis apart, plucked her core out. Dead before I could do anything. Tried to put an oil cloud in her, but I shot at them. They ran. Could've fired at me, but didn't. Might not know how just yet.'"

"Augur, slow down-"

"'This isn't a city. It's a prison. No one was supposed to find this place. Don't know who left them here or how they were captured in the first place, but they have to stay. I'm back at the ship. They got here before me in Hookclaw's body. I fired up in the air, sent them running, but I can hear still hear them. They're using his voice. Hiding among the pillars. They might go for Whirlpool again. I can't help that. I think there might be some in the ship. I don't know. Can't trust it. Can't let them get away. The nav-computer would take them to the nearest station. I can't let them.'"

"Augur-"

"'We shouldn't have landed here. Don't know why. Warren's still a mess, as far as I could tell, but this isn't right. Why did it spit us out here of all places? One in a trillion. No way that's a coincidence. Feels like sabotage. Primus knows who could do that - or why. Maybe the Dark King. Maybe Unicron. Maybe one of their agents. I don't know. Running out of fuel. Most of it went up with the ship. Couldn't chance siphoning some. Not if there was an oil cloud already in the ship's mainframe.'"

Hawkmoon turned her cannon on the nearest pillar. There was nothing to see - but in her mind she imagined something else, a dark mass slithering just under the silken surface. "Augur..."

"Log 64O2Q1T132: 'They're hunting me. Whirlpool and Hookclaw. The oil clouds are wearing them like steel suits. They know how to shoot now, trying to flush me out with plasma fire - but they're not killing me. They won't. Not when there's a perfectly good body up for grabs. It's only a matter of time before they figure out how to fully transform. I can't outrun Whirlpool if it comes to that. And Hookclaw's bigger than me, so even if I stopped to fight I won't stand a chance. I'm trying to hide but the oil in the pillars are calling out to them, reporting back my movements. There's so many pillars. So many. Tripped on one earlier this orn. It had collapsed who knows how long ago, but that apparently didn't matter to the oil inside. Got in my arm. Had to cut off the entire servo. Don't have a repair kit, so I tried the plasma-cannon soldering method. Bad job of it. Couldn't be helped. Servo came after me too. My own fragging limb. Crawling. I shot it apart. Probably a bad idea, all that noise, because I can hear them coming now. I'm not giving them my frame. Maybe they don't need a spark, but let's see them pilot a chassis without its central processor.'"

Hawkmoon looked back at the mech. "Traveler above..."

Augur lifted his head. "That was the final entry."

"Unlucky."

"Yes."

"But why..." Hawkmoon trailed off as realization dawned on her, as all the pieces began to fall into place. She glanced up - fearing the sight of a Krenshan ship warping into focus overhead. "Oh hell. Augur."

He looked at her.

"I... I think I know why the dragon's here," she hoarsely announced. "Why's it been moving all over the place, the way it has. I know whose wish it means to grant."

Augur opened his mouth. Closed it. Irritably flicked an ear, then a tail. "... I see."

"We need to-"

"Leave together?"

Hawkmoon flinched, slowly turned around and stared as the corpse, the body, the mech, the formerly dead husk laying by the pillar trembled and shifted and began righting itself up - spitting static from a degraded vocalizer. "Leave together?" it asked again in a deadened, empty voice. Something moved under its plating, in the space between where protoform segments slotted together, something dark and wet and far from solid. "Leave together," it firmly decided. "Together."

It found its balance and hobbled its first step towards her.

Hawkmoon raised her carbine and lit the corpse-thing up. A storm of crystalline shards tore through the mech and the pillar behind it, slicing through rusted metal and brittle rock with ease. Oil bubbles grew and popped from the spasming remains, spraying some kind of dark liquid across the sand behind it - and the stuff was quick to evaporate in the dry, dry air. What was left of the mech shuddered and fell back over, most of its torso shredded apart. Hawkmoon kept firing until there was nothing of substance left for the oil-growths to hide inside.

When all was said and done she staggered back and vented a 'breathy', "Frag."

Something in the distance howled - not the howl of a wolf, not the seething bray of a Venusian panther half-converted into ugly brass, not even the shriek of a Lunar-born witch but the howl of something alive-yet-not. Like the senseless bellows of an Exo tipped over that edge, cast in the deathly limbo of DER, brain running under the assumption it was rotting alive in a decrepit corpse. It was an awful sound. Hawkmoon stood there, stock still, and though a part of her screamed to move, to get up in the air and fly away, she just couldn't.

That sound was her future.

That sound was-

Augur scratched her leg with a forepaw, claws digging into plate.

"Ah, you fucker!" Hawkmoon kicked on instinct. Her pede phased through the fox entirely. "Fucking fuck your fucking physics you little fuck!"

"Focus!" Augur snarled. "They come!"

"Fuck 'em." Hawkmoon had dual carbines drawn, fully online. She turned to face where the ungodly roar had come from, then flicked her optics around. "Where are they?!"

"Leave, Seeker."

"No." Hawkmoon gritted her denta. "No, fuck that, they need to die."

"Seeker-"

"They're dying, Augur."

"Seeke-"

"They need to die, fox. You heard them." Whatever's left of those mechs needs to be put to rest.

"SEEKER!" Augur shouted.

Hawkmoon turned around, saw something race out from the shadow of another pillar towards her, silver claws outstretched. She stumbled back, firing at full-auto, and caught the ragged remains of the femme with both shard streams. The dead femme's frame was grated like wet paper, ripped apart right down to her struts. The oil within surged and scrabbled for cover beneath what was left of her plating, but Hawkmoon made doubly sure that that wasn't going to be an option. Some leapt for a nearby pillar - and fell short, bubbling and melting on the sand. Others disintegrated right where they were within the femme's hollowed chassis, not even bothering to try. Hawkmoon sent a couple of nucleon charge rounds through the rusted steel just for the hell of it, each high-velocity round punching through layers of solid steed and leaving molten entry holes in their wake.

"One," Hawkmoon darkly remarked. "That's one. Where's..." she turned to scan the horizon and instead found the last mech staring at her from only a few meters away. "Oh. Frag."

It was big. It was very, very big. Torca-sized, but with even larger claws and a third limb between its shoulder blades, built out of spare kibble. It was a right monster, rusted into horrible shape and visibly filled to the brim with living oil. The dead mech gave her a hollow look, optics dull and empty, and then it moved.

And then it died.

Hawkmoon blinked - optics shuttering, even with a processor that operated many times faster than human-built exoneurons could fire, she needed a couple of seconds to make sense of it. The dead mech had been there, servos outstretched, claws inches away from her faceplates, and then it was gone, folding beneath another alien mass.

Replaced- no, crushed straight into scrap and pulp by something much bigger, heavier, meaner.

Hawkmoon looked into the eyes of the dragon and it stared back - reflecting in the dark recesses of its slitted pupils her own dreams, her own wants, her own desires. She saw... the Last City. Her Fireteam. Her trine. Her... a woman that looked like Vaudren and a child that looked like Benni, alongside someone else. Short, built of steel, tight smile, tired eyes, bronzed skin, light hair. A finely ironed SOLSECCENT uniform, dark and nondescript. A holster by her hip, occupied by a service pistol.

Her.

Her. Human her. Human Hawkmoon, human Lennox-2, human Adria.

A sensation made itself known in her leg. Hawkmoon looked down, saw the remnants of an oily mass sinking between the plating of her calf and lost it. She tore at the limb with her claws, pulled the plating back, pulled it open despite the blaring warnings in her HUD telling her to stop, stop, stop that now. She plunged her digits in, cutting through cables and energon lines without stopping, grasping for the thing with a scream building up in her vocalizer.

Then Augur was there, Augur, thrusting his snout through her plating and pulling away with the oily entity clutched wriggling and terrified in his phantasmal jaws. It smoked at the edges, parts of it flensing away in the dry, inhospitable air, but before the elements could truly claim it Augur devoured it then and there - gnashed it down, fangs a-flashing and jaws a-snapping.

Hawkmoon staggered back, the self-inflicted pain of it finally hitting her, but her optics refocused on the form of the dragon, the drake, the damn Ahamkara - and her carbines flicked up, whirred to life-

"Leave," it said in a calm, uncharacteristically soft voice - not the softness of a conspiratorial lover, as its kind were wont to, but the hush of a concerned confidant all too wary of being overhead. "Leave," the dragon ordered again. The dragon. The dragon who'd just killed the oil-piloted husk. Who'd saved her. "Leave alone. Leave free."

Hawkmoon recognized the voice. That was what gave her pause, even for a moment. Her terror grew; her anger diminished by a mild degree. "... You?!"

Augur, finished with his oily pickings, calmly stepped between them. "Star-bride," he cautiously greeted - and cautiously only, not with fear or indignation. "Once-dead matron of queens. You yet live. You yet breathe. You yet feed."

The dragon glanced down at him, her six eyes jade bright and her spiny neck frills flushing with vibrant violet. The look she gave him - and it was a she, Hawkmoon recalled with some certainty - was rife with detached amusement and naked hunger. "Wanderer of unreal spaces. You yet beg for scraps from those more real than you," Aiakos purred with unrestrained delight. "A life of beggary ill-suits you, o king of the woodlands mine. Nestle under my wing and I will gift unto you a charity beyond all charities."

"You provide me with honeyed promises and dire alternatives, yet I know better than to pick from the poisoned scraps of your feasting table," Augur retorted. "Old restrictions may die, and old alliances may fade, but old warnings once heard will last forever. Your daughter was never remiss to remind me of such, o maker of empires."

Aiakos, Úthaessel's own terrible mother, shivered and trembled with anticipation - her spines arching, her frilled sails flaring, her great peacock-eye patterned wings stretching out. Even her claws dug into the scrap metal and sand beneath her feed, kneading right down into the obsidian bedrock below. She wore not the same shape that Hawkmoon had last seen her in, nor that which the Taishibethi murals had depicted her as, and instead wore the flesh of a basilisk, a wyvern, a true drake in every conceivable way. Four limbs, the foremost pair of which bore the wide flaps of leathery skin not unlike those of a bat or an ancient half-forgotten pterosaur - or even one of the infamous batadactyls from Venus. Her torso and neck were packed with sinuous muscle and her tail was long, and she was clad in a coat of shimmering sapphire-ruby scales. Her eyes were liquid emerald swimming about midnight-black razor baldes, and down her neck ran a pair of finned sails filled with luminescent Void. Of her long powerful jaws there were three, like Augur in that the lower pair were mandibles that fitted together and just as easily parted. Fangs serrated and hooked lined each jaws, scarcely hidden beneath thin reptilian lips. A tri-forked tongue briefly flicked out, tasting the air, and from a pair of nostrils upon her snout climbed towers of scented smoke. Even Hawkmoon, who possessed no olfactory sensors, could smell the sweet jasmine spice of it. In total Aiakos looked every part the draconic predator - as the once-Hookclaw had so recently discovered.

A predator as likely to ease a life as it was to end it.

"Why?" Hawkmoon asked, her voice little more than rasping whisper. She didn't even know what she was asking - why was she here? Why had she killed the oil husk? Why had she just saved her?

Why was she doing this?

Aiakos quizzically tilted her head before looking aside, back at Augur.

"This..." Hawkmoon croaked, "this is what you're doing, now that your daughter is dead?"

Aiakos' six eyes flicked back to her, sparing her a blank, uncomprehending look - not in the sense that she couldn't understand the reason behind the accusation beneath the words, but in the way that she somehow couldn't pick up on the accusation at all. As if Hawkmoon was barely there at all, like some living blank spot in reality, a silhouetted form with no finer detail. As if she were something less than real, less than significant, less than alive.

"You have the whole universe to prowl, and you come here?" Hawkmoon continued, the outrage getting the better of her. "You come here to let loose these... things? To help them kill innocent mecha?"

"Yes," Aiakos instantly replied without even an ounce of shame. She sounded bored - or as bored as an Ahamkara could be. Her gaze floated Augur's way once more, eying him with haughty greed. There was no shame in her gaze, in her stance. That was a mortal affliction, unfit for something like... like a dragon.

A fucking dragon.

Hawkmoon fired point blank. A storm of shards fell upon Aiakos - and each crystalline flake, sharp enough to tear apart solid cybermatter, harmlessly broke upon her hide. Aiakos closed her eyes for the duration of the barrage, opening them only when Hawkmoon realized it wasn't going to work. Her shoulder cannon fired, three times. Each needling round grazed the dragon's scales, scorching her iridescent coat and pocking her lustrous form with ugly scorch marks, but that was the extent of it.

"You're a glutton," Hawkmoon whispered, if only to fill the tense silence that followed. "An entire species wishing for murder and you're just jumping to pitch in. Have you no shame?"

Aiakos ignored her in favour of Augur. "Not charity, then. A prize of affections, of a service well done? You have served, o noble chaplain mine. You have served long and you have served loyally - and for that service your kin have been killed, scattered, sentenced and punished with impunity. Will you not wish for a safer path to walk, for their sakes?"

Augur bristled. "Seduce me not with your false promises. The path has been laid, by your knowing daughter no less, and though the route ahead is shadowed it has long since been set in stone."

Aiakos briefly glanced Hawkmoon's way. "The path was laid - and when it diverged, you chose the road less travelled by. Has that made all the difference?"

"It will."

"Woe. Woe. Is there nothing you want? I whisper to you now-" Aiakos' voice fell to a husky pant "-what of the vixen with whom you shared a burrow? What of the kits you sired, you protected, you instructed in the navigation of scent trails and prey behaviours?"

"You speak to me of pleasures built for a creature of flesh."

"Pleasures need no flesh, Final Augur. What of that world you hope to reclaim, to rebuild, to redecorate? To lash together with dream-twine and soldered hope? What of your world, Esheec Kiars? It could be yours again, o emperor of the underbrush mine," at this Aiakos hunkered down, head lowering to whisper into Augur's ear, "and all you need do is wish it."

"Cease."

"Your love is empty, drained, cut away. A cold thing you are. The soft pleasures are beyond you - but hate you still cling to in abundance. With but a word I would deliver to you the head of your enemy, o sinful Kha-"

"I wish-" Hawkmoon interjected, then just as quickly choked off. Aiakos' head swung her way, all six eyes dazzling like starlit gems, and it took all her resolve not to fire into that face again. Not because she feared the consequences - not of her actions, but...

The hate. Love was a wild, unpredictable thing, but in her jaded state she found it easier to just move on and pretend to forget. Hate, though, like Aiakos had hinted, was so much harder to put down - and she had so much of it to burn. Her mind wandered to Xo-

No. Stop.

To Riv-

Stop it.

To Or-

STOP IT NOW!

"I wish..." Hawkmoon gasped out. Her thoughts, chaotic, pounded against the hold of the Void, demanding- no, screaming to be let out, to run free. She looked at Augur, hoping to find something, help of any kind. He just looked back, expectantly. Waiting. Patient. Keen to hear whatever she had to say.

She couldn't. She couldn't wish. She couldn't - not after all it had done to her before. It wasn't possible; it wasn't right.

Aiakos stalked closer, padded past her, took to slowly circling around her like a shark having caught the scent of blood. She was large, even for a dragon. Larger than Hawkmoon by some greatly significant margin, and larger yet when taking her own Cybertronian stature into consideration. Not quite the size of Riven, not even close, but - that probably wasn't far off with the way she was going about it, what with all the local desire freely on offer. Shadows flickered under the shelter of her wings, animated puddles of oil-slick gloom sticking to the underside of her forelimbs. More living liquid. Not dead. Removed of their hard-won shell, maybe, but not dead. Not yet. Not when they had wishes yet to grant.

Hawkmoon offlined her optics. She could still hear her, hear the clack of claws tapping against rock. It didn't help. Not in the slightest.

"Stop it."

Aiakos paused. Hawkmoon could feel the dragon's breath misting across her neck, her wings. "As you wish," Aiakos murmured.

A wish. She'd wished.

You fucking coward, you fucking weakling.

A wish, heard. A wish, granted.

You fucking pushover. Have no control? Have you no dignity?

Her wish, heard. Her wish, granted. Her wish, spoken on a whim.

Talk about shame and then you pull something like that. No control. You're just feeding yourself an illusion and choosing to believe everything will work out fine. As if. Was Riven not enough? Oryx neither? Who's next, then? The six-eyed man with his helix-spear? Aiakos? Nokris?

Nacelle, even?

"I wish," Hawkmoon croaked. Trailed off. "I wish...

"I wish...

"I wish...

"I wish I-"

"She's gone," Augur told her.

Hawkmoon onlined her optics. Of Aiakos there was no sign. Only Augur stood before her, hunched over with inexplicable exhaustion. "Where...?"

Augur looked up. Hawkmoon followed his gaze - and cursed.

AN: Huge thanks to Nomad Blue for the editz!

And massive thanks and praise to Rookdaw, who can be found on instagram/tumblr/twitter, for the beautiful art piece depicting Hawkmoon and Úthaessel. I am utterly enamoured with it. Now FFN doesn't allow images or links to I'll... waggle my fingers I guess? Imma just point you over to Spacebattles or AO3 (same username there!) on that count, because in a technical sense this site is a rather obtuse dinosaur.