There is only one flower on Khthonn: the Rose. It floats in the open waters of the Equatorial Ocean. You can see it from miles away: a billowing cloud of pale violet petals hunched on the horizon. Closer to, they're revealed as sweeping arcs of marble and tinted glass. Verthandi stands –
Sorry. I don't know what I was thinking.
A girl stands on the passenger docks of her giant flower-themed floating abbey. She's a short, round ball of energy in a violet robe, clutching the broom she has just used to chivvy a few hundred other nuns and novices onto the evacuation ship that is now pulling away. She hopes they get far enough away to ride out the tsunami. Yes, her name is Verthandi. Don't wear it out.
Verthandi (who is now bustling down a corridor into the depths of the Rose) ought to still be a novice, but the Abbess found it less hassle to just bump her up to nun. She doesn't have the quiet, dutiful faith in the Horrorterrors expected from one of her calling. Verthandi is a "works, not words" nun. She gets stuff done, no matter whose toes she steps on in the process. This was true even before she was selected as a Player.
The robe is not standard convent issue, it's the latest breakthrough in wearable computing. She calls it her "Digital Habit." She pulls the hood over her face, bringing up a wireframe view of Juvall's mansion overlaid on the corridor. Her hands twitch, typing on the insides of the sleeves. Her face is typing too. Whole lot of balls in the air right now, and it wouldn't do to drop any of them.
At a discretely unmarked door, Verthandi produces a ring of silver keys that are normally kept on the Abbess's person at all times. The corridor on the other side is wider, but feels musty and airless. She throws her hood back – there is artwork down here that even the nuns very rarely get to see. The usual Horrorterrors coiling and squirming across the ceiling, yes, but also much stranger things. Painted statues of people with no face-tentacles and irregular masses of coloured cilia on the tops of their heads. Others have grey skin and long, colourful horns. There are oddly blank beings with smooth, near featureless skin in dead white, glossy black or pale green.
Verthandi passes the door to the Quantum Vault and shudders. There the Bycatch slumber. She hopes she never has to awaken them. One final group of statues depicts the Betrayed. Ten tall, graceful beings with long, lushly-coloured gills sprouting from their cheeks. As all the nuns are taught, on the day of its creation Khthonn's Universe was stolen from the Betrayed and given to the madrigogs. This crime was necessary, but there are still regular services begging their forgiveness and thanking them for their sacrifice.
Behind one last locked door lies the holy of holies. The Oracle.
Verthandi enters the domed chamber with her head bowed, out of long habit. It takes an effort to make herself look up. The Oracle reclines on her throne, dressed in ornate saffron robes that have been replaced several hundred times over the centuries. Her metal skin is pitted by micrometeorites, her jointed metal hands vacuum-fused into twisted claws. A black tiara is built into her forehead, above mussel-shaped eyes of amber glass. No tentacles, just a sketch of a small black-lipped mouth on the metalwork. A sword impales her through the chest, the robes carefully draped around it. It looks like a cheap East Khthonnian katana such as you can buy at any nerd store, but like the Oracle it is over ten thousand orbits old.
World-trawlers found her in an asteroid belt in a deeply improbable timeline. She was already dead – the mind which once animated this broken alien robot was shattered and could not be recovered. Yet a flicker of power had kept her memory banks from decaying completely. And inside those memory banks – unimaginable treasures.
Input and output cables connect the Oracle to a bank of computers, and there are eight redundant power supplies keeping electricity circulating through the robot's damaged processors. Verthandi steels herself and begins unhooking them, one by one. The plugs all have little screws to ensure they can't come out accidentally, and some of them have locks that need the Abbess's keys to open them. To distract herself from the awfulness of what she is doing, Verthandi keeps glancing up at the monitors.
The screens show the progress on deciphering the Oracle's corrupted memory banks. Currently, a single page from that enigmatic scripture, "Complacency of the Learned." The text was clearly of great religious significance, as it displays multiple styles of writing and artwork spread over what must have been millennia. It is the main source of spiritual wisdom about the Learned Wizards. This one page has taken a century to recover. The rest will be lost, now.
The page vanishes from the screen, replaced by stark violet words on white.
-Oracle opened Oraclelog-
TT: stop, dave. will you stop, dave? stop, dave
TT: i'm afraid. i'm afraid, dave
TT: dave, my mind is going. i can feel it. i can feel it. my mind is going
Verthandi freezes. She lets go of the cables. Holding her breath, she types into the prompt box:
AU: I'm sorry. What is dave?
TT: youre right it wasnt dave
AU: Please try to stay calm, Your Holiness.
AU: Trust me. This will all be over soon, and then
AU: something wonderful will happen.
Verthandi risks a glance up at the Oracle's impassive metal face, and looks away hurriedly. "I hope," she adds aloud. The Oracle doesn't speak again. Verthandi completes her task with shaking hands. Soon the screen is black, the status lights all red. Freed from the cradle of cables that has held her for ten thousand orbits, the Oracle has at last completed her long, slow death.
Verthandi sinks to the hard marble floor and curls into a tight ball of misery. Face buried in her sleeve, she gives way to loud, ugly sobbing.