Beneath.
There was no descent. Only dislocation.
She stood where no horizon dared draw a line. The ground was not earth, not dust, but the memory of sand. Black grains that had never truly existed, shifting beneath her boots. The air shimmered without light. The sky above convulsed with alien constellations, angles folding in on themselves, impossible and self-consuming.
She was alone. Yet she was seen.
No shapes or forms. Only pressure and intentions without language. Not watchers or gods. Just observation, pure and unblinking.
She moved across that plain as if she had done so before. Perhaps she always had. Perhaps she never left.
And then, nestled at the spiral's heart, it awaited.
A throne.
Smooth black stone veined with forgotten alloys. Spirals etched deep, shifting when she wasn't watching. Symbols nested within symbols. None repeated. None matched any known tongue that she knew. They pulsed in rhythms with odd, dim light.
It was empty.
She sat.
And the world turned inside out.
Witness.
Above, the Knight stood silent and still. Auspex registered no motion. No power draw. No pilot vitals. The systems did not fail, there was simply nothing to read.
Then, without a command, it moved.
Slowly. Smoothly. As if caught in some deeper pull.
Its optics shimmered, no, reflected. But not the landscape or the pool. Something behind it. Something that could not be seen.
It took a step. Then another. Not as a war engine answering orders. But as a vessel answering gravity.
The Pool accepted it without protest. The perfect dark parted, but never rippled. It simply absorbed.
The Knight vanished. All readings ceased.
Beneath
She sat, and her body remembered things her mind did not. Not memories. Not visions. Something more primal. Substrate. Truth before thought.
Her heartbeat stopped. Stalled, waiting for something to resume it.
The throne breathed. The stone flexed beneath her, not soft but living, and the spirals pulsed like old blood through ancient veins.
Her armour cracked. She looked down and saw the plates not shatter, but shed. They unfastened themselves in a choreography too precise to be mechanical. Each segment drifted away like dead skin sloughing from a snake. Beneath, she was not flesh. Not entirely.
Her limbs shimmered in and out of shape. Her fingers curled and unfurled as something else, digits, tendrils, radiant blades. She felt herself stretch upward, inward, outward across impossible directions.
The throne accepted her. Not as ruler. Not as supplicant. As part.
And she felt it: her Knight, walking. Not above her, but around her. Within her. Through her.
She was inside the cockpit.
She was watching from the forest.
She was sinking into the Pool.
The world folded again, like a page, turning in on itself until the concept of space failed to hold.
Witness.
The cockpit was gone.
No machine hum. No blessed seals. No diagnostic halos. The space inside had unfolded stone arches where bulkheads had been, sigils smeared across impossibly vast walls that flexed with thought. The pilot cradle had become a corridor. A nave. It stretched impossibly far, swallowing scale and sense.
And at its centre… A throne. Stone, dark as the cosmos, veined with red light like veins.
It was not placed. It was Remembered.
Null
The servitors screamed.
Not aloud, their voice systems were not active. But their limbs jittered, metal claws grasping at nothing. Tech priests fell to their knees, blood streaming from their augmetics. One whispered, over and over, in a language the others did not know. The lander's screens flickered. All of them. Even those that were powered off.
[PILOT PILOT]
[OVERRIDE ACCEPTED: IDENTITY INTEGRATION COMMENCING]
[STRUCTURE ADAPTATION: BEGIN]
[SYNCHRONISATION: COMPLETE ]
[WARNING: UNSTABLE FORM DETECTED ]
That message blinked, then became something else. Spirals. Digital, fractal, recursive. The image rewrote itself in real time, rearranging the ship's interior into a mosaic of pattern and suggestion.
One of the Armigers vented its coolant and knelt, uncommanded, facing the vast swamp land.
Something stirred in the mist. A figure. It approached slowly, as if not entirely certain of its presence. The very air around it vibrated, humming with an ancient resonance, as if reality itself bent to accommodate it.
It was Serida Vel. Or something that looked like her.
Her face was blurred, a shifting mask of recognition and distortion, the edges of her features flickering in and out of focus like a broken transmission.
The mist clung to her, clung to the thing that once was her Knight, now more of a shadow than a machine, indistinguishable from the blackened fog that had begun to swallow the lander's hull.
One of the Techpriests' augmetic eyes rotated to the figure. His gaze caught, locked, and froze. Blood dripped from his mouth as the air thickened with a strange gravity.
She stopped. Or it stopped. The thing that was her, the thing that had become more than her, more than the Knight, something greater, deeper, darker, paused as if waiting for them to recognise it.
Something in the air shifted again. The ground groaned, as if it were waking from a long slumber.
Serida, or the thing that was her, lifted her head and spoke in a language no one could understand, but everyone could feel. A guttural sound that was neither voice nor machine, but both, vibrating across bone and steel.
"I've seen it. And now it sees us too." And so she said nothing else.
The mist deepened. The Pool somewhere far and deep behind her swirled, the surface cracking like shattered glass.