"Dust... Dust... Dust..."
The water was clear, crystal and turquoise, gently running past his skin.
"Beautiful patterned structures, carved flat faces and edges."
The capacitors hummed with life, feeding energy into him.
"Dust... Dust... Dust... My one and only love. My purpose, my cause, my faculty. How it inundates my soul, how it courses through my veins. Oh, how it makes my spines tremble."
A snow white snake, coiled around metal machines, its bright blue eyes watching the sunken power station with wonder and lust. He hissed with delight as he saw dark silhouettes suspended in the water above him.
"They want to take my Dust. Come, come, come. We must devour them. Their skin will feed our hunger. Their flesh will fuel our ambition. Their bones will become... Dust."
Ruby floated listlessly, getting bored with being underwater and not having to hold her breath. She couldn't really do anything with the others, since it was smart person stuff. Neo and Raven were in their diving suits as well, breathing through the air tanks strapped to their backs, working to make good use out of the finite resources they had with them now. The surface had indeed been cut off by ice, signaling another lethal freeze outside and trapping the four of them inside the tower for now.
Penny had pulled apart the door to the front part of the facility, the lower building where the less impressive parts of the site were sitting in murky brownish water. That was where the near pristine conditions ended. Brown and green from dirt and plant matter clouded the water in there so as to make it impossible to see. Penny had reported back that there were all sorts of strange sea life inside, most of which she was not familiar with. However long this building had been sealed, the life in there had been cut off from the rest of the world. When she showed Ruby one of the weird coral-like creatures she'd found inside, it made Ruby think of something she'd seen before, but if it had spent a hundred million years in isolation to evolve separately from everything else in the world.
As she watched, waiting for Raven and Neo to identify the conduits they would need to shut down, Ruby let her mind wander to the past, and the future. It didn't seem right anymore. It wasn't some linear thing, time. Maybe it had been before, but here, now, it wasn't. Not anymore, or not yet. Whatever, she was confusing herself trying to sort out the nature of time, but something clearly wasn't right with that fundamental aspect of reality. Raven had been here hundreds of years, Penny too. Ruby and Neo had only spent a few weeks in this nightmare. But not only were there things that shouldn't have maintained their good condition for hundreds of years, there were things that shouldn't have lasted a few weeks. Everything in this tower should have been completely rusted by now, but even in the mold- and mud-ridden front building, there was no rust to be found. The only rust they'd seen was on Penny, and now Ruby.
She looked again at the coral in her hand. She wasn't an expert on corals, far from it, but this thing didn't exist in the world she knew. The other things in there were more of the same. White strands of kelp that reached out for things moving in the darkness. Pale eels with gaping mouths and long, grabbing tongues. Bioluminescent lichens growing up the sides of pipes and canisters. It had been a strange world all its own, cut off from the rest of reality for a seeming eternity. She wanted to talk to the others, to ask them what they thought about this, but they were too busy, and they apparently didn't have time to spare. They were short on time, but somehow time was more relative than ever. The more she thought about it, the more she feared if she went too far away from the others she would suddenly experience time at a different rate and be left behind, living a lifetime while they barely moved or only turning her back for a second to find them crumbling to dust with age.
When Neo turned back to her and gave her a thumbs up, Ruby returned the gesture, her worries forgotten for a few fleeting moments.
"Dust... Dust... Dust..."
His nose filled with the smell of it, clouds of yellow, red, green, blue, and purple as he ground his teeth together.
"The blood of my body. The phlegm, the bile, the puss. Argument and counter, flee and flounder, grind and wither. All I long for, all I long to be, long to become. All so hypnotic its colors."
Teeth falling out, huge crystals of Dust, ground down under the new teeth grown in to replace them. Thick hide shuddering and rippling with each bite and crunch.
"Dust... Dust... Dust... My duty, my leash. My cradle, my saddle. My beginning and end. They come to take it."
His eyes darted around, looking up and across, searching, watching, keeping track of every movement. He was not alone. He was wary. He was uncertain. He was ready.
"Let them come. Let them fight us. Let them learn fear. Let them learn to embrace terror before they die. Let them scream as they are rent sinew from soul, like we were."
Neo dropped down to one of the valves attached to the conduits they'd identified. The eel was wrapped around the capacitor that this one ultimately led to. They would shut them off one after the other. Rather, Neo would. She required a wrench, which they'd found, to turn the valve. But they only had the one, and it was determined that Neo would be the one farthest from the fight when the eel came out to play. She fitted the wrench over the valve and closed it, tightening the wrench's grip and twisting. It was hard at first, but once it started moving, it moved. In a few more seconds, that conduit was shut. No more Dust would be feeding into that generator, which would starve the capacitor.
Swimming over to the next one, Neo repeated the process, her muscles already starting to ache from all the hard work. She was not used to challenges of strength, but acrobatic feats. So be it, though. It needed doing, and she was picked for this part. To defeat the eel, to free up the power plant, to power the vault, to get a proper arm for Ruby. To destroy the monster, to restore power to the water facilities, to reach Atlas. This was her part of the long term plan she and Ruby had, the plan to stay alive and fight this world and win and survive together. This was her part right now. She would have other parts later. But this is what she had to do today.
The pipes groaned and flexed, Dust building up. The generator began to complain, louder and louder, with less Dust feeding into it. Hopefully that translated to the capacitor receiving less and less power. Neo worried that they were going about this wrong. She worried they'd identified the wrong conduits, or that the eel would damage the generator when they fought it. She worried they might not be able to open the conduits again due to damage the eel might cause, or that a stray attack might ignite the Dust and destroy all of them. Most of all, she worried that the eel would kill Ruby.
Neo turned another valve, fitting the wrench and turning. Then she heard them. The tower rumbled. A high pitched whine filled the water, echoing around her. Then other whines, coming together in a chorus, like a horrendous screeching of some reptilian monstrosity. It was the eel, complaining that its power was being robbed of it. It was angry, and it would soon come. She still had to shut down two more conduits. She kicked her feet, swimming over to the next one, looking over to see Ruby poised not far off, the blade of Hush gripped tightly in her hand. Then they arrived.
Voices filled the water. Harsh, raspy voices, screaming with hysteria.
"Dust! Duuuuuuuust!"
"You cannot take it from us!"
"Return the Duuuuust!"
"My feed, my drink!"
Neo looked to Ruby again. Ruby was staring back at her in shock. Both of them watched wide-eyed as the beast raised up its head from below. The head was huge, mouth agape wide enough to swallow either of their previous foes whole. Pale blue eyes rolled back in its head as the shrill screams escaped its throat, long tendril whiskers trailing off its face thicker than Neo's whole body. They wouldn't strike yet, though. They would wait until it came out further. And it did just that, slithering up through the water, its long, enormous body trailing behind it. As she frantically closed off the second to last conduit, Neo looked around to see Ruby, Penny, and Raven were all still in position, waiting for the moment to attack.
"Grind them to Dust!"
A second head appeared. Then a third. Wailing like gargantuan banshees of the deep, three colossal eels rose up in search of their prey. Neo was paralyzed with sudden terror.
"Restart the generator! Replenish the power! Return our Dust!"
Two more snaked up from the dark, trailing rainbow clouds of Dust in the water behind them. Five heads wrapped around the generators, blocking the pistons, twisting their way through the tower. Five of them. Five snow white eels, Dust in their wakes, blue eyes seeking for their foes. One, smallest head of the five, was turning towards Neo, and about to find her, when Ruby acted, distracting it by tapping Hush against the metal wall. The loud clang drew the attention of all five. As soon as the eels turned towards Ruby, Penny and Raven attacked. Penny's swords shot through the water and dug into one of the eels, each drawing a different color of blood. As it shrieked, Raven formed a lance of ice and launched it into another one's neck, stabbing through the other side in a plume of bright red Dust.
Neo found her wits and took the opportunity to swim away, off to the last valve, breathing heavily in her panic. When a dark shadow fell over her, she darted away just as the decapitated head of one of the eels landed on the floor of the tower, sliding off into the pit below as it disintegrated. Another one of the eels was coiling around the generators, hiding its head away from the onslaught of the Maidens, and it spotted Neo. She saw that it was hovering just over the valve she needed to reach. She couldn't make it there without being crushed to death. Between her and the eel was the bent doorway to the front of the facility. She could make it there before the eel could gulp her down. She was sure she could. She had to, or she was dead.
Pushing herself, Neo swam for the door. The eel lurched forward, opening its mouth wide to consume her, and Neo realized that she absolutely couldn't make it in time. A dark red miasma swirled into being between them, and Neo instinctively twisted around to swim away, but the eel plunged right through. The portal closed, severing the eel's head from its body. Head lost to some distant place, swallowed whole by the portal, the eel's body collapsed to the floor. Neo could see the valve now. She could reach it.
Then everything went black.
The world was darkness. Neo was floating in pitch black.
Then, a glowing green crystal appeared in front of her. Then elsewhere, a blue one. Purple, red, yellow, white. The glowing crystals, long, sharp, jagged, glowed to life around her, and she could see by their light. She was inside the mouth of one of the eels. She hoped she could give it a tooth ache, as she squared up to knock out its Dust crystal teeth with the wrench in her hand. Just as she was about to swing as hard as the water would let her, something grabbed her leg. Startled, and frightened that one of the others had been swallowed as well, she turned to look below her. There, sprouting from the eel's tongue, was a human being from the waist up. Skin pale as snow, eyes wide and blank with utter terror, mouth agape with a silent scream, white hair drifting around her naked body. Her arms outstretched, hands clinging to Neo's leg, pleading for help.
And an old faded scar along her left eye.