Member-State of Egypt, United Republic of Europia, August, a.t.b. 2012
Irritability and foul humours had in the past few years become increasingly less akin to 'moods', and more of a constant state of being for Vespasian V, the elder brother and sole surviving sibling of the current Holy Britannian Emperor, Charles zi Britannia. He had had ample time to reflect upon just how egregiously he'd erred in the matter of Marianne in the past two and a half years, but no amount of contrition on his part was enough for him to win his way back into his beloved little brother's good graces, and he was beginning to think that the common witch who'd dug her claws into Charles all those years ago may well have won their war for the younger zi Britannia's heart long before V.V. had thought to truly begin to wage it.
It was this failure, along with his miscalculation in attempting to kill her with his own hands, that'd seen him to where he was right then, fidgeting under the sweltering, stuffy heat of the Saharan summer. His choice to accompany the peons when they'd told him they might have detected something coming from somewhere deep within the bowels of some Egyptian pyramid, squatting in the desert outside of the city of Giza, was one made only in small part because it was part of his job as both Grandmaster of the Esoteric Order of Geass and Deputy Chairman of the associated Directorate to investigate any such findings, and to a much larger degree because he wished to escape—if only by a miniscule amount, and if only for a little while—the bleak reality of his current circumstances. And so he, in all the lavish finery he'd grown so accustomed to wearing by ingrained habit that wearing aught else would feel tantamount to nudity at this point, stood within the granite and limestone halls of a pyramid long since thought to be already explored, mapped out, and catalogued, while his minions scanned one of the walls with instruments and nattered on and on and on, seemingly without cease, amongst themselves.
I'm not certain exactly how I managed to forget just how much I detest fieldwork, the prince-brother thought to himself, drawing limp white locks away from his perspiring brow and sneezing in the face of all of this dust and accursed sand (V.V. having a robust hatred of sand, coarse, rough, and irritating substance that it was, on no small account of its propensity to get absolutely everywhere) and blinking his bleary pink eyes, markers of his albinism more undeniable than his ashen-pale flesh or even his bone-white hair. There were armed guards alongside them, masked soldiers who were decorated veterans of black operations units, and as he felt their gaze upon him, he knew for a fact that they did not answer to him any more than C.C. had done during her tenure. It was aggravating, being around those whose loyalties lay with someone he despised dearly, but he did his best to put it out of his mind: none of these little annoyances mattered, not in the face of the dream they'd shared, of a world free of deception and duplicity, where even the tyrannical iron grip of Death would slacken, loose, and fade away.
In his hatred of Marianne, and in his arrogance that he thought he could be rid of her, he'd lost sight of this dream; and if there was one thing he could say in Marianne's defence, especially over the past thirty months, it was that she, at least, never had.
Suddenly, there was a deep, sonorous clack, and with an earthy, ominous rumble, the hieroglyphed wall gave way, sliding on grinding ancient mechanisms out of position to yield forth a stairway that marked a descent into a deep, impenetrable darkness. The air that blew forth from this pit was stale, yes, but it was cool and wet, like the early hours of an autumnal morning, and that was so thoroughly incongruous with his experience in this accursed desert these past few weeks that V.V. felt himself grow acutely off-balance with the suddenness and totality of the shift.
Blinking his eyes twice in shock, he remembered himself and gathered his composure, shutting his slackened jaw and clearing his throat in an attempt to reclaim the trappings of dignity.
One of the aides rushed from the side of his two peons and up to him, leaning down to whisper into his ear, "Your eminence, we've gained entry to what appears to be a chamber beyond—"
"Yes, I can see that," V.V. interjected, registering some feeling of satisfaction as the obsequious aide whose name he couldn't be bothered to commit to memory immediately shut up. "We'll make the descent, gentlemen. I do hope you're prepared to venture into darkness, for there is truly no telling which dangers may lurk in the long shadows, which antediluvian monstrosities we might encounter."
The black ops veterans, to their credit, understood his implication immediately, and all six of them drew up alongside him in a guarding formation, with the minions and that one aide in tow. When V.V. took his first step down those stairs, then, they were right alongside him, and as they descended deep below the bowels of the ancient wonder above, the cold only continued to grow more noticeable and oppressive, the moisture more clammy, the darkness deepening further and further into impenetrability.
The aide handed him a flare to light the way, which he promptly snapped to bring the crimson light source hissing to life, but the light it cast illuminated only himself, the guards, and the drudges: it did not so much as reach the walls around them, nor did it reveal their way. There was something uncanny about the shadows that surrounded them, something shifting and unnatural and aware: he could feel it prickling at the nape of his neck, that sensation of being watched. He'd grown intimately familiar with it during the time he and Charles had spent trying and failing to bring the Emblem of Blood to a close—at least until Marianne came, and plucked their triumph from the narrowing noose of their defeat—and he felt it now to a degree that was much more profound than any other time he could recall.
They'd been walking for ten or fifteen minutes when an impossible breeze stirred V.V.'s white hair, the sweat having dried to a brackish crust against his forehead, but carried along upon the unnatural eddies of cold, clammy wind even so; and it left the echo of a whisper ringing in his ears as it passed. He couldn't pick out any language or message from the whisper at first, but as they continued, it stuck in his head, where his mind worried at its recollection like a word forgotten as it was spoken, upon the tip of his tongue and yet vexatiously vanished in the very next instant. Each time he shook his head to clear one away, it wasn't a moment before another entered his ear and thereafter lingered, like madness made manifest that drifted of its own power through the pitch-black sepulchre.
Mercifully, at last their feet found the ground, the stairs levelling out to a flat, smooth, stony floor very abruptly indeed; and it was here that the guards, having had enough of the darkness, unclipped their own torches from their belts, shining them around the chamber.
What they beheld, then, seemed to extend endlessly in all directions, any light revealing only a little before becoming swallowed by darkness. Here, the stone was wrought into grotesque and twisting imagery, great reptilian creatures with spines and spikes and a fearsome, warlike mien rendered in contorted profile with such painstaking fidelity that it seemed as though they had been captured and petrified in a single final moment of life. Chiropteran wings sprang from out their backs, and in varying sizes, some such sculptures having been rendered to such staggering scales that V.V.'s enlightened sensibilities could not help but consider it truly absurd; and yet as far as he could see, at no point did any of these draconian effigies relent in their painstakingly believable detail.
Grand pillars held up the ceiling, black and smooth and seeming almost to radiate cold to the touch; they were featureless themselves, and yet here, too, were the stone effigies twisted around each post, their angular heads contorted in portraits of feral, bestial snarling, as though they were cornered and driven here before being committed to unfeeling rock forever. Here and there, there rested some brazier or other—or so V.V. supposed the nature of the inky black cauldrons to be, at least—and whenever one was spotted, one of the soldiers would take up a flare and journey over to it, setting it alight. One by one they sprang to igneous life, gusty plumes of flame that burned a strange, sickly green, which seemed to give off no heat at all, and indeed almost seemed to leech what little warmth existed in the chamber ever further, and if V.V. was more given to fanciful turns of phrase, he might have said he could feel each brazier syphoning the heat from his very bones to cast the chamber in eerie, shifting light.
Standing in these surroundings as he was, each breath rendered as a visible plume of fog, V.V. realised he was suffused with such wonder as he had not felt since Charles and he had discovered their first Thought Elevator, when they were little more than boys themselves and yet thought they knew for certain the boundaries of the cruel world into which they'd been born. There was that sense of standing before the face of eldritch splendour, where the naked eye was so limited that it could only behold a pale imitation of the true majesty before him at any given time. There was a weight to the air, dangerous yet indifferent, and V.V. imagined this was what Saint George must have felt upon creeping into the slumbering dragon's lair.
"Your eminence!" called one of the soldiers across some distance, his tone flat, his affect brusque. "We've found something! A sarcophagus of some kind—it bears the mark of Geass!"
V.V.'s attention snapped to the soldier who had spoken, standing near the light of a far brazier that stood directly before them as he called out to the prince and his drudges. He felt his eyes narrowing as he beheld that expanse, but waved for his servants to join him all the same. "Come along. Let's see what this is about, now…"
With the peons and aide in tow, V.V. walked towards that brazier, and drew up alongside it, the odd and sickly green flames flickering lazily, more akin to a charmed serpent than any true source of light or of heat worthy of the name. To the soldier who stood there dutifully, his face obscured behind a featureless, reflective visor of Marianne's own design—a crafty contraption, he had to admit, for all that it tasted of ash on his tongue and bile in his throat—he raised a single fine eyebrow, the very picture of regal disdain, and bade the man, "Lead on, then."
The soldier nodded once, curtly, and took a sharp turn, pivoting on his heel and striding off into the all-enveloping dark, with V.V. struggling valiantly to follow in his wake. It wasn't a particularly easy task, what with the substantial disparity in height and therefore in stride distance, but V.V. was well-accustomed to keeping pace with his walking mountain of a brother and his even more mountainous bodyguard, and so the immortal would-be emperor had the luxury of turning his mind to other things as they walked towards this supposed sarcophagus.
Yet in looking around as he walked, he noticed that a few of the other soldiers—counting out, it was in fact all five of them—had abandoned what they were looking at with regards to the brazier and scouring the complex. A man here, a woman there, another woman skirting the very edge of where shadows became invisibility…and with the peons and aide at his back, V.V. got the distinct impression that he was now to be surrounded and encircled.
Some time ago, he might have entertained the notion that this was an attempt by Marianne either to intimidate him, or to do away with him entirely, but recent events had beaten the lesson of exactly how crafty his brother's wife was into his skull and his soul; and such knowledge, once learned, was not forgotten with much in the way of ease. He knew that there was nothing his keepers could do to harm him, weak though his body was with the eternal youth in which he was suspended like a fly in amber, and so it followed that she knew it just as well. And it wasn't as though she could take his Code, given that he certainly hadn't given her that accursed Geass she wielded, which had so allowed her to elude his designs and then collapse them down upon him. No, only Charles was capable of taking his Code, and he was right out; for whatever their…differences in opinion, and regardless of the fact that they were currently at odds, they were still, at the end of the day, brothers. The same seed had sired them, the same womb made them quick, and they had survived their childhoods during the bloodiest interregnum in Britannia's recent history together, by relying upon each other.
Whatever trials passed between them, the fact remained that theirs was not a bond so easily broken.
No, both of them needed him, even now, and so he understood that it was nothing more significant than his paranoia acting up when suspicion percolated in the back of his mind regarding the convergence of his six wardens; he forced himself to relax as they fell in around him, to think of himself as guarded and defended instead of corralled and imprisoned, and with all of them together, finally they arrived in the vicinity of what could only have been the find in question.
It was a sarcophagus, alright: a man-sized chest, squat but not flush to the ground, instead held aloft and suspended atop four sets of squat legs. The chest itself was visibly black stone, with the workings upon it complex engravings of serpentine coils, and under the shifting green light of the twin braziers that stood to either side of it and a bit back, flanking it, the coils looked almost like they were themselves writhing. It was a simple thing to pick out the rim of the lid, and yet as V.V. drew near to catch sight of that stone slab, the mark of Geass was emblazoned there, sure as sunrise, carved from what looked to be a single ruby, one of prodigious size and surpassing quality, before being inlaid upon the casket. On a whim, he reached out towards the lid to lay his hand upon the bird-in-flight mark rendered in gemstone, but as he drew closer to it, the corresponding mark at the small of his back began to gather heat; and when his fingers brushed up against the symbol itself, it seared and flashed, sending a jolt of liquid agony from his mark and out across his body, racing through his blood and wrenching an involuntary cry from his lungs.
It was then that he noticed that all six of the soldiers, and indeed the two drudges and the aide, were still as statues, without so much as a flinch at his pained reaction. All of their chests rose and fell with their breath, and of those whose faces he could see, they were still blinking; but the happenings failed to stir so much as the suggestion of surprise, or indeed any discernible emotion at all, upon their suddenly very much blank expressions.
How curious. Was there a backlash just now, I wonder? V.V. thought to himself. None of them bear Geass contracts of any sort, so if this was some phenomenon somehow related to the Thought Elevators, it stands to reason that they'd be taking the brunt of it… After all, the Ragnarok Connection and the Sword of Akasha notwithstanding, we still only barely understand the nature of the Thought Elevators enough to set up the plan. We go even a sliver beyond that specific niche, and we don't even know enough about them to devise an accurate accounting of our own ignorance…
Filing that particular question away to be posed at a later date, he swung his attention back to the lid of the sarcophagus, which produced a sonorous grinding as it shifted out of alignment of its own accord, to tip off of the edge of the casket and crash to the floor below with a nigh-deafening clatter and an updraft of fine particles of grey-white dust that was jettisoned directly into the immortal's face.
He coughed and sneezed, waving his hand in front of his face as lingering elements of his mortality, in this case his allergy to dust, returned from beyond their graves for no other reason than to vex him. With his pink eyes watering (though the cloud of dust dissipated shortly after being flushed forth), V.V. leaned in to peer into the casket from the rim of it, to discern the contents of such a peculiar chest, which was in truth the obvious centrepiece of this even stranger subterranean chamber. When the immortal's gaze fell, at long last, upon the interior, however, his eyes shot wide in shock and astonishment.
"It's…empty?" he said aloud, this outcome stunning him beyond the point of composure. "But… What? How?! How is this even possible… I… How could that be?!"
And sure enough, when he beheld the inside of the sarcophagus, he found only a vacant casket—no body, nor even the suggestion that there might have once been a corpse: it appeared, from the thick layers of dust that opening the lid had shot up into the air around them, that indeed there had been, at no point over, at the very least, the past several centuries if not millennia, anything stored within the coffin at all.
The sarcophagus was empty; and by all the evidence of V.V.'s senses, it had always been empty.
"I…" V.V. protested weakly, taking a step back from the casket, and then another, and another, until his back ran softly against the stood-firm chest of one of his unresponsive peons. "I don't understand…"
"Oh, but you will."
V.V. went still, ice shooting down his spine and frost creeping along his veins. The words had come from the aide's mouth, against the chest of whom the immortal child now resided.
But that was not the aide's voice.
He lurched forward out of the man's reach, for all that the sycophant made no move to grab at him, and on unsteady footing, he stumbled and managed to twist just enough in his fall to catch himself upon the rim of the empty sarcophagus, his back to the braziers behind him as he beheld the aide with wide eyes.
The sycophant was smiling.
He was grinning, really. It wasn't a pleasant expression—it was a rictus of glee, but it began and ended at the mouth, as though some phantasmal influence had physically forced the grin upon the man and kept it there. The voice that came through those puppeteered lips was neither masculine nor feminine, nor even somewhere in the space between; it was something wholly removed from either and both, gravelly yet melodic, rumbling yet reedy, sonorous yet nasal, bombastic yet demure. It was a voice that twisted and contorted itself into maddening variations within the same moment, as though an entire chorus had been at once melded into a single tone.
"Hush, little immortal," came that same voice from one of the masked soldiers, a woman.
"Dry your tears." Another soldier, this one a man.
"She can't hurt you now, after all…" A drudge.
"We'll make certain of it." Another drudge.
"Rejoice, immortal, rejoice!" V.V. lost track, for he could not look everywhere at once, and every time the voice spoke it was the exact. Same. Tone.
And then, from all nine of them in unison:
"For Mother's time has come…"
V.V. had seen many horrific things over the course of the three-score years he had spent walking the planet. The Emblem of Blood had often outstripped demilitarised zones in terms of desolation. Household forces had fired upon each other in the streets, artillery shells had levelled entire blocks of the estates and businesses of rival claimant princelings. Pendragon itself had been reduced to little more than rubble by the time he, Charles, and Marianne finally started making some headway, turning the tide in their favour. In all that time, V.V. had watched people die from all manner of myriad savageries. One particular instant that stuck out in his memory was when the then-preferred claimant flooded his primary rival's compound with chlorine gas. Princess Agrippina had been a woman noted for her beauty as well as her strength, able to call to her banner many of her would-be detractors to forge an alliance of true grandeur, as V.V. recalled; even with their faces melted off, their bodies falling apart, looking like corpses weeks-old, she and her men fought like things from Hell, butchering their poisoner's troops.
The image of Cousin Agrippina hoisting Uncle Claudius's severed head high as a last trophy before her vengeful spirit released her ravaged, ruined body, was an image that V.V. was certain would stick in his mind's eye until the very end of time. The Triumph of the Hel-Queen, they'd called it, and the March of the Dead Men was not far behind.
And yet none of that prepared him for the experience of watching flesh and sinew and muscle rot away from bone in the space of a heartbeat.
It happened in sequence, as though it was a wave sweeping through them: the aide first, and then a drudge next to him, and then one soldier, and then the next, and so on; with the death-grins on their faces, it took barely the blink of an eye for the skin to blacken and sour and sluice off of the bone beneath, curling in on itself and bleaching white until only dust remained; the stench alone was maddening torture, to have the sour reek of decay shift from one moment to the next as though in some demented fast-forward. The bones then began to bleach, their marrow flowing from out the pores in a fluid black wave that was reduced to so much dust before it even hit the floor. They cracked, did the skeletons then; they split open, and they withered away, until where once there stood soldiers and scientists and bureaucrats, men and women, only white dust, like so much volcanic ash, was left.
V.V. stood there, stunned, shocked, his eyes blinking as his mind failed to comprehend what it was forced to behold… In mere moments, the entire expedition was gone, and only he, the immortal, had borne witness to their passage. He looked up, and suddenly the draconic effigies were leering at him; the snarling fear was gone from their carriage for all that it hadn't changed, and their false eyes seemed to glitter with a mocking inner malice that he could no more comprehend than an ant might the bloody slaughter of human war. The sense of exposure intensified, the voyeuristic glaring of the pillars and statues undeterred, as if they were every bit as eternal and immutable as V.V. himself.
And so the immortal took the only sensible option he had left.
He ran.
The Esoteric Order of Geass, the beating occult heart of the larger Geass Directorate, did not house itself in the Britannian Homeland, as one privy to its origins might be given to suspect. The vast subterrane into which its headquarters had been built was, in fact, nestled deep within the barren, desolate heartlands of the Chinese Federation, a grand city several miles across built into the rock of mountain and plateau. Its population numbered in the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, with researchers and their families and their teams living there year-round, together with vast quantities of young children, sourced from the outside world, and granted Geass contracts of their own under V.V.'s direct authority. C.C., the true head of the entire project, had frowned upon what she considered his irresponsibility with giving these out, but her oversight of him had been laissez-faire at the best of times, and for the span of eight glorious months after her vanishing act, V.V. had enjoyed uncontested control over this, his fiefdom, his domain, his kingdom…
That hadn't been the case for two years now.
The monorail had taken him from the Order's chapterhouse in Cairo back to headquarters without question, taking his staggering, gasping entrance into their midst, looking harrowed and dishevelled, more so than he'd ever have willingly let himself appear in kinder circumstances, to be an indicator of urgency; and as the featureless line drew open to reveal the cavern into which the Central Dogma was built, he found himself heaving a shuddering sigh of relief to be back home, even if he was in truth no longer its lord, and all within it bowed to the will of another.
They arrived at the station ten minutes later, the train slowing swiftly to a halt, and V.V. rose from his seat in a single swift motion and rushed on his accursed ten-year-old's legs to disembark from it. With that same sense of urgency, he brushed past the attendants awaiting his return to greet him, ignoring their pleasantries, be they simpering or insincere, in order to enter the castle just beyond the station all the more swiftly. This, the Terminal Dogma, had been his demesne for over a decade now, and he liked to believe he knew the way, even with the underground complex being very much under new management.
Marianne had wasted no time leaving her mark upon the place. Her own personal soldiers, each of whom were loyal to her above even Charles, were positioned in units of no less than three members at each and every corner and chamber door. The finery that V.V. had draped on every available surface to remind himself even a little bit of home had been stripped away, and replaced with diagrams and prints from out of many an alchemical text, interspersed with martial iconography and memorabilia. The opulence of his short reign had been exchanged for the severity and focus of hers in every way that could be found, and under a different set of circumstances, he might have found it suffocating. As it was, he kept his head down and did not make so much as a sound, even as her loyal hounds fell into step behind and before him, escorting him to the lair of their mistress. The gesture was clear: they didn't trust him, not to have learned his lesson well enough the first time, nor to restrain himself from making another attempt, for however little good it would wind up doing him. With his luck, a second attempt would merely be the catalyst for an evolution of her Geass, allowing her to hop to another body entirely, instead of merely being restricted to borrowing one for a while every so often.
In contrast to the dark stone and the warm, low light that characterised the corridors he'd traversed to arrive here, the chamber within which Marianne dwelt, from which she exerted her will all throughout their organisation, was a cold and harshly sterile place. Stark white were the walls, metal grates serving as flooring throughout, and it seemed every corner was occupied by another complex medical contraption of unclear purpose and function. Tables around the room held tools both surgical and mechanical, with limbs of metal in various stages of development strewn about on any one of the many workbenches around them; and in the centre of the room itself was a broad tube, stretching from the floor of its raised dais to the ceiling. Its sides were clear and transparent, displaying the vibrant amber-orange fluid contained within, as well as the body of a woman; and V.V. had to admit that the fact that the ruin of her body had in no way impeded her ability to make his eternal life a living hell was emblematic of how thoroughly and profoundly he'd underestimated the detestable commonborn whore.
Her raven hair flowed around her head as an eerie sort of halo in the luminous liquid, her face still as infuriatingly beautiful as ever it was with how much her health had begun to recover, even now while it was halfway concealed with an elaborate oxygen mask; but that was only an illusion of vitality, as even the most cursory observation of her nudity below the neck would reveal. Her body had once been a slender, lithe portrait of strength, with explosive curves that were ample on their own but only looked all the more so upon her small frame. V.V. remembered how Charles had waxed on and on about her body, praising it down to its most minute flaws, on multiple occasions after the first time she had shared his bed, with a feeling for which mortification was entirely too small a word. He had no doubt that his brother would find a new litany of things to praise and worship, as though his wife was an altar and he was little more than a humble supplicant, ad nauseam if he was given even half a chance to do so; but it was beyond denial that his attempt had left its mark upon her.
Her torso was a patchwork of scars, in the neat and intentional arrangement of surgery. Pockmarks were scattered about her flesh wherever one of his bullets had shredded into her, but now the efforts to save her life were of greater consequence. Most of her organs had been replaced, and V.V.'s younger brother had fast-tracked any and all ongoing research into stem cell differentiation with what amounted to carte blanche in an effort to get her the very highest quality of cloned organs to replace the ones she'd lost; but for now, it was the job of various cold machines built into her torso to regulate with metal and circuits what had once been the domain of flesh and blood. And perhaps most notable of all was that only that torso remained: all of her limbs besides her head had been amputated, rendered useless due to extensive nerve damage as they were, so now the body that floated in that tank had only half-formed stubs where once she'd touched and felt the world around her, with mechanical mounts melded into what remained of her arms and legs where the neural tissue was still at least mostly intact and could be fixed, could be coaxed to heal and to return to their former state of functionality and health.
And then her violet eyes, so like Charles's own, a mirror image and a perfect match, snapped open to rest upon him with an icily baleful stare.
He'd been expected.
One of her attendants, a fair-skinned man clothed in a blood-stained white lab coat, tall and thin of frame, with shoulder-length pale-blond hair and eyes hidden behind a peculiar pair of glasses that featured multiple different reflective lenses mounted atop each other for ease of adjustment, strode out from behind some alcove or other. He raised one of his hands, which were both of them clad in long gloves that went to halfway up his upper arm, to a lever on the wall, and pulled it firmly; the harsh white lights of the chamber flared red as a shrill alarm wordlessly announced the shift, and with a bubbling rush, the compound within which Marianne was ensconced whenever she was at rest—a compound which, in a cruel twist of irony, he had overseen the development of—draining free of the vat.
"Och! You are…V.V., yes?" the attendant said as he flew from that task to a nearby workbench, his attention split between making idle conversation and rushing around the room in a half-mad frenzy so as to quickly gather up all the necessary components to arrange for Marianne to move of her own power. "I do not believe we haff been properly introduced, ja? My name ist Doktor Franz Barnabas Jest, und I haff been granted ze privilege by ze Kaiser of overseeing Frau Marianne's care."
V.V. couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at the man's prominent German accent, but by the time he'd considered what he might say, the strange man had already assembled the parts, and directed the soldiers to bring certain machines over to him with a swift flurry of distinct hand gestures. A few of them broke off to aid the doctor, bringing them into position with an exertion of teamwork, and by the time the translucent bulletproof covering to the vat receded into the ground, leaving Marianne to hang suspended in the air, they were all in position, with Jest heading over to another terminal to start their activation sequence.
Mechanised arms moved with unfeeling precision, first to remove the oxygen mask from her face, and then to secure the parts to what remained of what had once the limbs of Dame Marianne the Flash: a prosthetic leg plated in a chassis of what looked like gunmetal was raised to her hip, gold pins and copper wire latching onto platinum hooks and slotting into palladium sockets. It took a few experimental rotations to make proper contact, but when it did, it whirred into a click, drawing a gasp of pain from Marianne as immediately a jolt surged through the false limb, every joint from its knee to its individually articulated toes locking up and flaring before relaxing. The melding of metal to flesh, of wire to nerve with feedback so painful that Marianne, a woman with such a high pain threshold that the only reaction she gave him as he gunned her down was shock that shifted into outrage and disdain, was forced to vocalise the sensation, was equal parts fascinating and horrific to witness. One leg, and then the other; one arm mounted opposite its twin, agonised calibration followed by complete command; then, all at once, it was over, and Marianne was lowered to the ground to stand there in her nudity, levelling her cool glare at him before she spoke with a voice that made it clear just what he had managed to take from her, the wound he'd caused for all that he was unequal to the task of finishing the job.
"Vespasian," Marianne began, but this was not the voice of the Marianne he, or indeed his brother, knew; it was a grinding, mechanical parody, harsh and grating and digitised, reverberating with every word that passed from between the woman's lips from out of her artificial voice box. Whatever resemblance the machine bore to her original voice had been mangled and warped into a grotesque effigy of what had once been feminine tones, always quick with a quip, and oftentimes sharp as her wit; what remained instead was a horror of clicking and whirring. Marianne was more machine than woman now—and yet, V.V. knew, at least, could understand at last, that in some perverse fashion, that meant that this form was a version of Marianne who was more herself than perhaps she had ever been. "You have returned from the excavation, both ahead of schedule and empty-handed. Explain yourself."
"The nature of our discovery was of far greater import—and far greater danger—than any of us had thought to expect," V.V. began, looking up at Marianne as she stood upon the dais, her posture immaculate even with the mechanised prosthetics attached to her form. She reached a hand out before her, towards the doctor, and silently they conducted a few calibration tests together to ensure that the joint articulation was working as intended, along with the German seemingly taking mental notes on the performance for the sake of the design and construction of future models. The man's leering grin was acutely unsettling, even to V.V., for far from it being salacious or lustful as he gazed upon Marianne's nudity, the expression appeared not so much 'human' as it did 'just adjacent'; but the immortal knew better by now than to allow any such errant things to distract him from his task. "There was…a chamber, beneath the oldest of the pyramids. The team and I meant to investigate, and so we descended… Down we delved, down into the damp and the cold and the dark. Neither flare nor torch cast light upon the black stone, and madness whispered upon the draft, for indeed far from being stagnant, there was a breeze of unclear origin…
"The chamber at the bottom of the steps, it was grander by far than the audience hall in the Imperial Palace; perhaps it was even larger than the Imperial Palace itself. We did not find any walls or boundaries beyond our initial method of ingress," V.V. continued, doing his best to recall the expedition with as much detail as he could manage. "We'd been there for two weeks, Marianne, and when we descended, it was of greater grandeur than we could have imagined. Black pillars held up the darkened ceiling, which rose to a vaulted height far above our heads, and every so often, we came across these cauldrons. Lighting them with the flares produced a flame, and unlike the others, this one travelled, and it cast light upon its surroundings, an eerie green tongue that twisted like something alive. And the flame itself was cold."
"More matter," chastened Marianne, her artificial voice lending the words a menace that she would have bothered to hide in the days before he tried to kill her. "Less art."
V.V. nodded. "We reached a sarcophagus, which bore the mark of Geass, carved from ruby and then inlaid into the lid. My Code seemed to activate it somehow, the casket wrenching itself open…but when I looked to see what was contained within, I found…nothing."
"Not quite…"
Pain flashed through him. Agony. It was a clamour and a silence, immolation and frostbite, gluttony and starvation, dehydration and drowning…
The world went white.
The world went black.
The world went red.
Red. Black. Gold. Flame. Green. Shriek. Heave.
Pain…
When V.V. returned to himself, his chest was heaving as though his body had reclaimed its need for air, a necessity and not a habit. Copper and iron and salt was the taste in his mouth, and though he felt what he thought were tears coming from his eyes, when he reached up to wipe them away, his fingers came back tacky and crimson. His Code throbbed, pushing weakness and frailty into his body with each new surge of feeling, and there was indeed no effort he could muster, nor any exertion of will of which he was capable, that could return to him the strength to stand. He wiped his running nose, only for his hand to come away crimson once again, and he knew, as impossible as it was, that his Code had flickered, if only for an instant. And this? This was the result.
"Oiagros. Orpheus," Marianne barked, and from the crowd in the dark blue armour of Marianne's guard that had assembled around V.V. sometime after he'd collapsed came two distinct figures, alike in stature though not in build. The pair removed their helmets with their reflective faceplates almost in unison, as though rehearsed, to reveal two men, one of whom V.V. knew well.
Oiagros Zevon, brother to the woman who had become Knight of Six after Marianne's promotion to Two, was a man possessed of a singularly unassuming appearance. With flaxen hair and eyes the colour of green glass, he was passably handsome, but not especially memorable. He was uniquely generic, in a sense; remarkably unremarkable. His young nephew, Orpheus, however, was very much the opposite, with darker, richer blond hair and a jadeite gaze—on paper, he was the spitting image of his sister, Oldrin, but the same features that made her look confident and gallant were sullen and sulking on him. His brow, strong even set into the aggressive boyishness of his features, was furrowed and knotted, though whether that was due to focus or to some unresolved anguish, V.V. had never cared to confirm for himself (though admittedly, his current theory was that the actual answer involved some measure of both). They were Marianne's foremost servants here, her attendants, her left and right hand respectively, and both of them came to heel when their mistress called for them.
Like the trained hounds they were.
"My brother-in-law has suffered an accident. Sweep the area. All of Central Dogma will be locked down until we can account for everyone in here," Marianne decided immediately, her artificial voice taking from her words the lion's share of the inflections her normal tones would otherwise have managed to relay. Then, she returned her attention to him, as her attack dogs bowed their acknowledgement and rushed to do as they had been bidden. "And how did this discovery of 'nothing' result in you returning here alone?"
"…They're dead, Marianne," V.V. gasped, the effort of speaking already proving too much with the weakness that was surging through him even now, tightening his voice and warping his inflections with his pain in the process. "Rotted…down to ashes…in an instant… There was… There was something in that chamber,ancient and powerful,that was down there in the dark with us. And it killed them—unmade them, even. Nothing remained of what they once were, Marianne, not even their clothes. All of them died."
"All of them," Marianne repeated, and he could not help but to notice both the contemplation and the scepticism in her warped, computerised tone. "All of them…except for you."
V.V. bit his tongue to keep the impulse to snap at her at bay, and merely nodded. "I don't know what we were dealing with down there, Marianne—only that we shouldn't have been."
Marianne stared down at him in inscrutable silence for several long, pregnant moments. Then, with a curt nod, she motioned for the doctor in charge of her health to bring her clothes to dress herself. "You're quite fortunate that I believe that you believe what you're saying to me, V.V.. If I didn't, rest assured that there exists no force in Heaven, nor on Earth, that could have stopped me from telling Charles to pull the proverbial plug on you. So rejoice."
"Charles wouldn't," V.V. said with conviction.
"Then let us hope you never give cause for us to discover which of us is correct," replied Marianne, without so much as a moment's hesitation.
Doctor Jest's prompt and sudden return forestalled any attempt they might otherwise have made to continue their conversation. With a number of different plates in tow, he began to assemble them around her torso with a practised, deft ease, which was even more impressive when V.V. noticed that his gloves only possessed four fingers on either hand, suggesting that his third and fourth fingers were fused together. "Zis chassis is for ze protection of ze flesh. No round of a smaller calibre zan .50 vis armour-piercing vill be able to penetrate. Nein. Und it comes vis top-of-ze-line micro-computing capability to monitor your vitals, ja?"
V.V. glanced at the plating as it was fitted to Marianne's exposed flesh, but his eyes could pick out nothing all that remarkable about it to separate it from somewhat outmoded battle armour. "You make a great deal of promises on behalf of such an innocuous contraption, Doctor Jest."
"Promises? Nein, Herr V.V., zees are not promises. Zey are facts. German science is ze finest in ze vorld, und I am its foremost master," the doctor proclaimed proudly, snapping his heels together as if it was a reflex while he spoke. "Ze Kaiser vould not haff settled for aught else, ja?"
"Quite," Marianne remarked in her flat, computerised monotone. "Now…"
At that moment, one of the other soldiers stepped forth, bowing to their lady. "Your majesty, both of the Zevons have just reported back over comms. Residential Block D is… Well, we've been told that you and V.V. will want to be able to see it for yourselves…"
Marianne and V.V. shared a look at the vague way in which that report had been phrased. I don't know much about the brat, but I've never known Oiagros to mince words, and especially not while giving his report back. What could they possibly have come across that he didn't want to just outright tell us what it was over the communications system?
And unless V.V.'s immortal eyes deceived him, Marianne had had the same thought.
"Get me my coat, then," Marianne ordered in that soulless grind. "The Grandmaster and I will go to survey the scene of whatever the Zevons refuse to mention with any specificity ourselves."
The soldier who'd relayed the report bowed from the waist. "Yes, ma'am."
Ser Bismarck Adolphus Waldstein, the Knight of One, did not consider his post worthy of envy. His was the title of the mightiest knight of the Empire, most assuredly, and his position as leader of the Knights of the Round was a duty he was proud to discharge; but it was just that, a duty, a solemn obligation, and a natural extension of his loyalty to his liege lord. He'd defended Emperor Charles's person and his interests with distinction for twenty years now, and he wouldn't have traded those decades for the world—but nor did he delude himself into believing the life he lived was one worthy of aspiration. It was a vocation and a calling, what he did—young noble scions did not tell their tutors they aspired to become the Knight of One, and nor should they, to his mind. Oh, they aspired to the Knights of the Round, most assuredly, and to be sure, that was all well and good; but to be the Knight of One meant more than just to be a cut above, more than merely being the leader of an organisation made up of the finest killers the realm over.
To Bismarck Waldstein, to be the Knight of One was to be devotion and conviction incarnate. To be his liege's sword and his shield, to see his enemies slain and his will done. He had no ambitions, no desires, no fond dreams of his own: all of these things he had sacrificed to become what he was; and though it was undeniably a price well-paid, to his mind it was not the sort of thing that could be asked of a person. You either had what it took to do as he had done, and thus become the Knight of One, or you did not; and there was no shame in that lack. Conceits like 'superiority' had no place in his heart, for they would only obstruct him as he fulfilled his duty, and that could not be suffered.
Down to his core, Bismarck was focused. Cleansed. Pure, in a way. The beauty he found in his life (and find it he did) was that which others, in his experience, often seemed to attach to swords: immaculate implements bent and fashioned solely towards the purpose of killing.
That did not mean, however, that he was beyond vexation. Unfortunately.
The fact that the doorways and thresholds of the Imperial Palace had not been built to accommodate someone of his two-hundred-sixteen-centimetre frame had vexed him at first, but to alleviate that feeling entailed merely a process of adjustment. He still hit his head every so often, but he did so now at a greatly reduced frequency compared to when he had done the same back then.
Oftentimes, he found the elder of the two zi Britannia brothers, the immortal child Prince V.V., to be vexing in the extreme. Admittedly he felt that way around most of those who dared to speak ill of his lady, his comrade-in-arms, Marianne, but the pompous albino was in a class of his own when it came to how thoroughly and consistently his vile remarks regarding Marianne got under Bismarck's skin. That the boy, the man, had actually attempted to murder her was a transgression beyond the pale; every day, he thanked every god he could not name that he'd failed, for it was nothing short of a miracle that her dormant Geass had chosen that exact moment of greatest need to awaken, and for all that it was for different reasons, he could no more imagine a world without her than could his emperor.
But Marianne had survived (after a fashion), His Majesty had finally come to see his elder brother for the duplicitous snake that he was, and now Marianne had the resources, the authority, and the blanket authorisation necessary to deal with that smugly-sneering leech however he needed to be dealt with. Thus, that vexation, too, had faded from his mind, resolved.
He had a sinking feeling, however, that this latest would prove closer to the latter than the former.
They stood assembled—Dame Olivia Zevon, Knight of Six; Dame Dorothea Ernst, Knight of Four; Dame Beatrice Franks, Knight of Seven; Dame Nonette Enneagram, Knight of Nine; even his old friend, Ser Michele Manfredi, an old schoolmate of his, whom until Marianne's official assassination had been the Knight of Three, and since then served as his second-in-command as Knight of Two, a man he knew to be possessed of a peculiar sort of smiling stoicism—before Ser Luciano Bradley's personal chambers in the wing of the Palace that served as the headquarters of their order; and upon each of their faces was a similar expression: profound unease and discomfort, crowned by a chorus of furrowed, stormy brows. Bismarck, knowing both that since his return from gallivanting about Ad Victoriam Military Academy, Ser Luciano had been shirking his sworn duties to a level that was excessive even for Bradley, and that his brethren would not have resorted to summoning him from his post at His Majesty's side were this not a matter of gravest import, let his gaze pass over each of them in turn, before settling upon Ser Michele with an expectant look.
Michele, a tall man at just over two hundred centimetres, with a broad-shouldered, sturdily-built frame, a remarkably square-jawed, yet overtly earnest and kindly face, a very strong brow, and a prominent forehead—atop which sat a head of thick, healthy jet-black hair—closed his violet eyes, as though pained, and simply shook his head, motioning towards Bradley's bedchamber door without further explanation. It was a clear enough message, and Bismarck paid it heed: that whatever was awry had to be witnessed to be even remotely credible. Nodding, the Knight of One moved for the door, clapping Michele on the shoulder as he passed in a gesture he hoped was at least somewhat reassuring; and then raised one of his large hands to knock at the threshold before entering.
This close to the door, he could hear it already: Bradley's voice, muttering almost deliriously, from within the room itself. Bismarck couldn't discern the contents of his ramblings through the thick wood (this wing of the palace having been constructed while it coming under siege was still very much a real danger), but as it wasn't unlocked, he dropped the gloved knocking-hand to rest upon the doorknob, and promptly, he began to twist it open.
Unlike most highborn apartments, the door opened directly to the bedroom, making the chamber more akin to a dormitory than a proper living-quarters; and so when Waldstein opened it and slipped over the threshold on steps far lighter than his size might suggest he was capable of, he came face-to-face with whatever it was Bradley considered adequate decoration for his lodgings. The senior Round certainly didn't deny having entertained a certain level of morbid curiosity regarding what a man as repulsive as the Knight of Ten might consider worthy of adorning his room—practically everyone in the order had experienced the same impulse in some form or another over the duration of the scoundrel's tenure, with speculations that ranged from the banal to the macabre to the truly grotesque—and yet what he walked into was somehow not at all what he ever might have thought to expect.
Paintings and posters once hung upon the wall in frames, curtains upon the windows and books laid upon small shelving units; Bismarck knew this at once, because when he looked around, he beheld the ruin of it all. The curtains were in tatters; the books were in pieces, shredded scraps of print scattered like a light snowfall all across the floor and the bed; the paintings and the posters had had a dagger taken to all of them, so savagely that he couldn't tell if one particular frame had originally contained a William Blake or a Francis Bacon. Even the few mirrors that were scattered both around the room and the adjacent bathroom that sat with its door ajar had been shattered into spider-webbing cracks in what seemed to have been a fit of violence.
And there, upon the bed, stripped of its linens down to the mattress, was the wretched figure of Ser Luciano, sitting hunched over itself and curled around what looked to be a small mirror. His lips, usually either grinning or sneering, were moving with a speed and fervour Bismarck would almost have described as 'reverent,' or perhaps 'fanatical.' He was in only half his uniform, his cape nowhere to be found while his gloves and his white jacket had been tossed off to the side in a heap—in his trousers, his shirt, and his boots alone, he stared at himself in that little mirror, no bigger than a photograph frame, and with a single finger worried, as if it was some sort of compulsion, at a ghastly scar that sat across the expanse of the right side of his face, only a ragged empty socket left where once there had been an eye.
"My eye is gone. My eye is taken. Half the light of the world… My eye is gone. My eye is taken. Half the light of the world… My eye…" Bismarck could make out as he drew closer, each repetition like a mantra the Vampire of Britannia was trying to carve into the bottomless gaping pit of insecurity that might have been the closest thing the scoundrel had to a soul. On and on it continued, as though Bradley's mind was trapped within itself, aware only of himself as reflected back to him in the mirror; but this could not be allowed to go on, for a Knight of the Round to languish so. Bismarck would not allow the behaviour of his order to reflect poorly upon his lord and master under his watch—even Ser Luciano's monstrosity would've been better than this…this enthralled indolence.
A heavy hand rested itself upon the Knight of Ten's bare, pale shoulder, and even if it was only for a moment, it was as though the spell of the mirror had been broken. Bradley blinked—a disconcerting sight with only one eye (though, admittedly, it wasn't as though Bismarck himself had much of a leg to stand on at all, not when it came to that particular arena)—as he returned to himself, the glassy fog clearing from his remaining purple eye. "Lord Waldstein."
"Lord Bradley," Bismarck acknowledged in return.
"I suppose you've come because I've been derelict in my duties, then," said Ser Luciano, as though he was speaking on no subject of greater import than today's weather.
"…That is part of it," the Knight of One allowed. "Your brethren are concerned. I know that it must come as a great shock to you, to be bested by the designs of His Majesty's prodigal daughter—"
"Lord Waldstein," Bradley interjected, and Bismarck was so taken aback by the interruption that his silence let it pass. Boorish and brazen though he might be, he's never been insolent enough to interrupt me when I'm talking to him before… "Out of respect for you, I would politely request that you do not speak ill of Her Highness in my presence. For if you do, I'm afraid that I shall have to cut out your tongue…even if it should cost me my life."
In any other circumstance, such insubordination would have been grounds for disciplinary action. But it was as a creeping dread that the spectre of Geass, which had never truly been far from his mind since he'd first heard of it, and especially not now that it'd enabled Lady Marianne to slip free of V.V.'s designs, arose in the back of his head. And so instead of punitive action, he came around to Bradley's front, and took the man by the chin, forcing his face to meet Bismarck's, one-eyed gaze to one-eyed gaze. "Ser Luciano, in my authority as the Knight of One and the head of our Order, I command you to tell me what transpired at Ad Victoriam. And be sure to omit not a single detail."
"I saw her, Lord Waldstein…" Bradley muttered, his lips caressing each word like it was a prayer. "She was a goddess—dark and beautiful, great and terrible as the winter storm and the biting cold… Oh, do I pity you, Ser Bismarck, that you were not there to witness her… I doubt you could even imagine…"
"Who, Bradley?" Bismarck urged, the dread crawling up into his throat, thick enough to choke.
"Who, you ask?" Bradley mimicked, staring at him with a cocked eyebrow, as though Bismarck had said something truly ridiculous.
"You mentioned 'her.' Who is 'she,' damn you…?!" the Knight of One pressed, as though his life and the lives of everyone he'd sworn to protect depended upon that knowledge.
"Why, Princess Justine, of course," said Luciano Bradley, as though Bismarck's ignorance was at once equal parts wondrous and mad. Mirth seemed to bubble upon his lips, dancing and frolicking from word to word, buoyed aloft by the wagging of the scoundrel's tongue. "Whoever else could I possibly be speaking of…?"
Without a word, Bismarck released the man, and stood from the crouched position he'd assumed to better examine Bradley. At his full height, his dour face kept carefully blank, he turned on his heel and left the chamber behind him, drawing the door closed in his wake. His eye caught onto Michele, just down the hall, and he made a beeline past the other perplexed Rounds to draw right alongside his second—one of the very few under his command to know almost as much as Bismarck himself did—and mutter instructions to the other man under his breath. "Keep Ser Luciano's room under guard until I return. He is not to leave it until then, under any circumstances."
"What will you do?" Michele asked him, doing his best to remain every bit as discreet.
"I'm going to go find His Majesty," replied the mightiest knight of the Empire. "This situation may well have just become exponentially more complicated."
Michele's face hardened to suppress the flash of recognition that might have otherwise shown itself. "Do you think it could be…?"
"That is what I fear," Bismarck affirmed. "But we'll get to the bottom of this."
"I hope so, Bismarck…" Michele sighed. "I truly, truly do."
With that, Bismarck stepped away, and rushed off to find his lord and master. That this course of events could well result in the disposal of Lady Marianne's firstborn, her wayward daughter—a child of no more than thirteen years—was of no consequence to him; and nor did he believe for even a moment that it ought to have been, truth be told.
Bismarck Waldstein was a creature of duty, after all. Nothing more.
In a private wing of the Imperial Palace, to which entry could be gained only by invitation, Charles stood before the stone monolith emblazoned with the mark of Geass, Pendragon's own Thought Elevator, and took a deep, soothing breath. Agitation was not an unfamiliar sensation—he had been an anxious and weak-willed boy as a child—and he had no doubt that he was about to shoulder more of it. It was the way of these things, after all: ill news rarely arrives unaccompanied; and in light of this, he expected the tidings that Marianne and his treacherous older brother had for him to be suitably grim. That in mind, he reached out and laid his large hand upon the cool stone, feeling the burn of the brand at the back of his eye bloom as the Thought Elevator recognised the contract he bore; in short order, then, he found himself with his feet no longer on terra firma, but falling…
Falling…
Falling…
Through brief snippets of errant moments, still fragments of wandering instants; across the span of strange vistas, yawning darknesses, shooting stars, and burning galaxies, Charles fell.
And then, as suddenly as his descent had begun, his boots once again tread upon solid ground.
The Sword of Akasha was the same as it ever was: a ruined, vacant temple, suspended by nothing at all within a world of burning pink clouds that reminded him vaguely of a sunset. Each and every time he or the others stepped through a Thought Elevator, this was the sight that greeted them; they could reconfigure the space to suit their ends if it so pleased them, they'd quickly found, bringing up libraries and parlours and art galleries, and really any concept they could think of, but at the end of it all, this was always what remained. If he was to look up, he knew that what he beheld would not be the sun, but rather the swirling, chthonic orb that was as close to an accurate visual representation of the Collective Unconscious—that which the three of them understood to be the closest thing in existence to a god, at least by their definition of divinity—as his mortal eyes could ever possibly comprehend. He recalled that C.C. had once called the God-head 'a trick of perspective', and though he couldn't begin to wrap his head around the implications of such a statement, he supposed it wasn't all that important that he drive himself mad attempting to contextualise a concept so inconceivably vast and impossibly complex that human language failed to properly and coherently express it into his own mind, constrained and limited as it was by its humanity.
All that mattered, in the end, was that they understood the demiurge well enough to kill it.
He heard them before he saw them. Marianne's footfalls were unfamiliar, as they changed with each new model of her robotic prosthetics, but he could pick his older brother's steps out of a crowd with ease. It only made it all the more galling that Vespasian had seen fit to throw away the bond they shared like it had never meant anything at all, but that was a simmering resentment that he'd long since mastered. He turned on his heel towards them, sending his heavy cape billowing out and fluttering dramatically—a gesture he had learned so well that it had become ingrained into his reflexes—in the process, and took in his estranged older sibling, as well as the love of his life.
Marianne looked healthier than the last time he'd seen her, which was heartening. Her cheeks were fuller and rosier, and the dark rings around her eyes had alleviated further, to the point where they were, at this point, almost entirely gone. Her hair was a long, lustrous, wavy cascade of raven-black silk, thick with renewed vitality and shimmering even in this false light, and her amethyst eyes were every bit as sharp and alert as they ever had been, alight with the determined focus that had ensnared his heart from the first. The armoured life support vest she wore was different from the previous version—Doctor Jest had proven to be an invaluable find, possessed as he was of a rare genius that more than made up for the man's…chequered past—this latest model being so advanced in comparison to the cumbersome nature of its predecessors that it was slim enough to seem contoured directly onto the torso of the body that featured so prominently in his own lurid recollections to this very day. It was matte black, evoking the colour and finish of gunmetal, and it covered her from the prosthetic mount near her hip all the way to just over halfway up her slender neck; and where before the nature of the vest meant that whichever version of her prosthetic arms she was testing had to be clearly visible, its current form's slim profile allowed her to wear a long black coat overtop it all, which was an opportunity of which she seemed to have been only too happy to avail herself.
She approached him, then, with her hands in her pockets, her robotic legs moving with a grace and precision that allowed her to recapture almost entirely the powerful, loping gait, dripping with lethality, that he'd long since come to associate with his vicious, deadly wife; V.V., on the other hand, seemed much the worse for wear, his already chalk-white skin seeming translucent and sickly in a way that it hadn't since the two of them were children in truth. His hair, usually perfectly arranged, was out of place, ashen locks slick with sweat and stuck firmly to his prominent forehead, his clothes wrinkled and dishevelled, and his pink eyes uncharacteristically clouded, as though stricken with some delirium of bygone days.
"Marianne, Vespasian," he greeted each of them in turn, as they emerged into the ruined plaza at the foot of the Ragnarök Connection, the 'hilt' of the conceptual weapon they called the Sword of Akasha. "It is good that you are here. We have much to discuss."
"Darling," Marianne greeted in return, her artificial voice-box's digitised monotone so thoroughly mangling and warping the endearment that Charles had to suppress a flinch. It was a little distressing, how good he'd gotten at doing that.
"Charles," his brother acknowledged, his voice drawn taut with obvious and apparent pain, a far cry from his usually very crisp manner of elocution. "We have…a problem…"
"Am I to assume it has aught to do with your current state, then?" Charles ventured, staring down at his diminutive sibling without the slightest hint of pity or personal concern. He wondered, as he sometimes did, whether or not his brother had any idea, even the slightest inkling, of how thoroughly he'd managed to scour Charles clean of any shred of fraternal affection he might have once held for the elder zi Britannia. In this moment, as in all moments, he sincerely doubted it.
"Residential Block D is desiccated," Marianne interjected flatly. "There were no survivors."
The statement took him aback. "Desiccated? How do you mean?"
"Every contractor…I had…who lived in that block…is dead, Charles," Vespasian bit out, as though every new word was a fresh agony. "They…rotted…in seconds. Shrivelled up…into husks. It was as if…as if every last scrap of…vitality…had been ripped out of them."
"Security footage indicates this phenomenon took place in a matter of seconds," Marianne added, as grinding and devoid of inflection as the contraption that returned her speech to her had ever been. "Two of my guards vomited onto the floor at the playback. It was incredibly disturbing to witness."
"My Code…flickered," continued V.V. "It flickered, and then…and then they were all dead…"
"We have reason to believe this situation is related to a recent find at the latest Geass site. Of the ten who had gone on that expedition, only Vespasian returned alive," said Marianne, drawing a hand out of her pocket and indicating V.V. with a smooth, fluid flourish. Charles made a note to himself to grant the good doctor any boon the man's heart, inasmuch as the madman had one, desired.
"I found something…down there…Charles…" V.V. explained, his chest heaving as his face grew more and more pallid with the effort of speech. "Something…monstrous. I…I don't know what it was, at all…but I have…reason to believe it's been released… It may well…prove to be…a persistent problem in the days to come…"
"It isn't the only persistent problem we have on our hands, I'm afraid," Charles sighed. "Bismarck came to get me yesterday, to check on Luciano Bradley. He said he had reason to believe that the man had been affected by Justine's Geass."
That provoked a look of abject shock and mild horror from his wife. "Justine has a Geass?"
Charles shook his head slowly. "I went to see Bradley, and I delved into his memories. Bismarck hit a false positive: there was no mark nor recollection of Geass upon his mind. She does not possess it. At the very least, not yet. Though I understand why Bismarck came to the conclusion that he did: our daughter, our eldest—the mongrel worships her, Marianne. There was a moment when she spoke to him, and he saw something in her that swiftly drove him to the point of obsession. He threatened Bismarck, said that if he'd spoken ill of Justine, Bradley would lay down his life for no other reason than to cut his tongue out over it. To be frank, if I had any less faith in my proficiency with using my own power, I would have doubted even the evidence of my senses when I failed to find any hint that she might have gained a contract of her own."
"…Far be it from me to…speak in defence of your children, Charles," V.V. managed to interject. "I just…don't exactly see how that constitutes…a major…problem…"
"I don't suppose it would, not if this whole debacle with Carine weren't also going on. As it stands, however, I'm suspicious," Charles explained. "Deusericus is dead. The OSI has been uprooted. Our every attempt to rebuild has been stymied, and because the OSI would be in charge of knowing these things, we have no way of finding out who is defying us and why. Add onto this that Johanna and her family were so thoroughly ruined by a string of scandals and misfortunes within the span of two weeks that she was found in her parlour, having taken her own life with arsenic, and Carine then blaming Juliette for this, somehow so certain of her hand in it despite all the evidence to the contrary that she assaulted Juliette in full view of a crowd of highborn, with an explicit intent to murder her, only to be detained before finishing the job, only now to be sitting in the depths of the Oubliette to await her public execution, and it paints a very grim picture.
"If I show any leniency at all, if I fail to respond to this with an iron fist, to make it abundantly clear in no uncertain terms that anyone who engages in this sort of open political violence will be disposed of by the Crown, and with extreme prejudice, then the stability of my reign becomes nothing more than a polite fiction, and we're dealing with a renewed and revived Emblem of Blood by the end of the week," Charles continued, gesturing with greater and greater fervour as he explained the situation. "And to make matters worse, this all came to a head at one of Clovis's parties, which means there were far too many high-profile witnesses for my Geass to do anything other than make the situation that much worse. My hands are tied. I don't particularly care to let Carine live, idiotic little monster that she is, but there's something at play here that is moving me into these situations where I can choose either to let my entire reign deteriorate, and the plan with it, or to abide by someone else's designs. You were right, Marianne: I'm being undermined, and it seems like it's only going to get worse. And with Justine being formidable enough to gain the undying and fervent devotion of Luciano Bradley, if she does ever gain a Geass contract, it is my sincerest belief that we will have lost control of this situation in its entirety."
"The situation with our prodigal daughter is not especially pressing," Marianne opined, her face one of deep consideration for all that her mechanised voice did not reflect that at all. "Killing the little monster is not going to resolve the issues we face."
"On that, we are in agreement," Charles sighed, suddenly very much feeling his age and the weight of the years upon him. "The news of this thing my brother has released from the excavation site killing off his contractors in such a sudden and horrifying manner is, for several reasons, the most critical matter, both in terms of urgency and magnitude. Without that problem in play, I'd have wagered that we had a chance of managing the issue of whoever is eroding the foundations of my rule, however small, but as our situation at this moment stands…I think it best that we seriously consider consulting her."
Both of the other two stiffened, V.V.'s eyes going wide with fear, while Marianne's posture shifted very subtly into the more abruptly murderous; and such was the mood as it had become that Charles could imagine that he heard an edge of wariness and genuine fear even in her unsettling monotone: "…My love, are you certain?"
"Not in the slightest," Charles grumbled. "But what choice do we have?"
The sepulchral pall that fell upon them at that proposition was so palpable as to be smothering, and for good reason. None of them had ever wanted to believe that things could get so dire that consulting the immortal contained within the lowest levels of the headquarters of the Esoteric Order of Geass, a prisoner kept secret even from C.C. when she was with them, might ever seem like it could in any way be anything other than the absolute worst case scenario—and yet, here they were all the same. Charles did not relish the thought of approaching the creature, nor would any sane person, but their need was dire, and though it did not seem so at first glance, he'd been at this for long enough that he could recognise when he was truly out of options.
It was a grim thing, watching the same realisation as he'd reached beginning to descend upon his co-conspirators' faces, especially since he loved one of them more than life itself, and it made him wish for nothing more dearly than the means to soothe her worries; but it had to be done.
V.V. took a deep, shuddering sigh, wincing in pain so sharply that his face twisted like Charles had not seen since they were children. "I'll make the arrangements, then…"
Marianne turned to him, then, her face a calm mask (though he knew her far too well for her to be able to conceal her worry from his sight) as she spoke once again. "I hope you know what you're doing."
Charles chuckled, a bitter thing, entirely devoid of mirth. "So do I, my love. So do I."