The Ëchüha Incident (CoLoMARQR)

It was another abysmal day of redundancies, triplicate, and tedium at the Ministry of Provincial Administration. Copy machines whirred away as they spat out interminable reams of paperwork. Boxes of unprocessed documents and filings stood in stacks and slightly slumped piles as their cardboard deformed under the crushing weight of the Imperium’s bureaucracy. The MPA, like any proper government office, refused adamantly to digitise anything it absolutely did not have to, and ensured to make paper copies of everything it could. If each MPA office didn’t raze an entire forest each day to satisfy its boundless lust for unoptimised ineffeciencies, excessive packratting, and the most magnificent music to any paper-pusher’s ears—the whirring of shredders—then all was indeed not well with the worlds.

This day, however, was not such a day. Paper flowed like an endless river. The copiers sang the song of their people to symphonies of shredders. There was no better soundtrack, thought Fhá Vngví, as she shoved another box of flawlessly processed, intensely insipid site inspection reports off her desk. No better music to focus the mind when grading reports detailing nothing of any real relevance in jargon so dense if it were a stellar body it would have collapsed into a black hole. The green bean in the cubicle next to hers passed out at his data terminal was proof positive of this.

How efficient he must have been with his assignment of last month’s water quality assessment reports from Tvchàmeitè. He was clearly made for this job. Such zeal and passion. Twenty-seven thousand of the most dull, abstruse, insufferable readouts couldn’t have inspired a state of such soul-sucking, brain melting, eye bleeding boredom as to have put him straight to sleep without finishing his work. Not this one. He was born for this job.

Fhà gave him two weeks tops.

Only the most stubborn, desperate, or hopeless lasted in the Imperium’s most bureaucratic bureau of bureaucracy. But never all three. Those possessed of such distinguished personalities could usually be found around 18:00 that evening at Bureaucrat’s Bridge.

“Fhá!” a shrill voice shrieked, startling her.

“Yes, Ngèza?” Fhá replied in her best faux-polite tone.

“Did you look over that report I sent?”

“Which one?”

“I sent it…let’s see here,” Ngèza said, “seventy-one seconds ago.”

“No.”

“I expect it reviewed ASAP,” Ngèza barked.

“It’s lunch time,” Fhá complained.

Ngèza pushed her corpulent mass halfway into the cubicle before getting stuck and resorting to leaning over Fhá’s shoulder. The smell of cheap perfume saturated the air like her cubicle had played home to a muskrat orgy. Like a well trained bureaucrat, Fhà resisted the urge to pinch her nostrils shut. Enduring the stench of senior bureaucrats was, after all, in her contract. Somewhere.

One of Ngèza’s titanic tits squashed onto her shoulder before pooling over it like some kind of gelatinous fleshy cocoon. Fhà suppressed a grimace as she felt a damp spot forming on her shoulder. It was too late to stop the thought forming in her head, though. Fhà surreptitiously slid her rubbish bin closer.

Ngèza stretched one morbidly obese arm out and jabbed at her dataterminal with an index finger so swollen with fat it could have replaced Fhá’s boyfriend.

“What does that say?” Ngèza asked in that classically managerial tone of condescending infantilisation.

“Priority one,” Fhá almost groaned.

“Exactly,” Ngèza said, so smugly her flopping jowls flecked saliva onto the side of Fhá’s face.

“Working lunch it is,” Fhá said, with jollity so fake and saccharine only management would buy it.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Ngèza replied, hoisting the half tonne of her mass off of Fhá’s shoulder and out of the cubicle.

Small earthquakes slowly moved to the next cubicle over. Preemptively, Fhá tensed up, knowing what was about to happen.

“HVANG!” Ngèza shrieked loud enough to be heard by the His Majesty the Emperor two thousand parsecs away.

Five decades in the Ministry of Redundant Administration kicked in as Fhá’s ears blissfully tuned out Ngèza’s shrill voice tongue-lashing the face off of Fhá’s most recent neighbour. There were those who would be completely unable to concentrate through the sound of bloody murder and banshees in heat, but not Fhá. She’d heard the same string of profanity and verbal abuse so many times it all just turned into white noise and party kazoos.

Gingerly, Fhà removed her blazer, doing her best to avoid touching the spot soaked with Ngèza's most proudly flaunted extracurricular activity. Once her now thoroughly ruined blazer was deposited in the bin, she opened the report, preparing herself mentally for a long, long day of shovelling feces on Ngèza’s behalf. Not that she minded, of course. It was, after all, a senior bureaucrat’s sacred responsibility to pawn their work off onto their underlings. Their underlings, being so graced as to have a job in the first place, and, yea, to be tolerated by their most benevolent of overlords, should accept such privileged opportunities with humility and gratitude. Even if it was a Priority One report. No, especially if it was a Priority One report.

P1’s…they were everyone's favourite thing and always only ever one of three possible categories of delightful: a provincial governor upset that he’d not received his allotment of whores, drugs, and booze; some Bannerlord having a sook about the lack of cloaks to throw mindlessly at some enemy he was entirely responsible for having created in the first place; or a violent insurrection broke out for the third time this anno on the local penal world. Only the latter was ever a worthwhile concern, even if it meant creating another half dozen P1s a few Lunes down the line after the Bannerlord sent to go crush the uprising inevitably made the whole situation that much worse and started having a sook about the dearth of cloaks to mindlessly throw at the other cloaks who'd thrown in with the rioting prisoners. Incompetence and bureaucracy, Imperium Kaidan’s two favourite things.

Then she saw the first document.

“What the fuck…” Fhá reacted, “Ngèza! Is this right?”

“Fhá! I’m busy!” Ngèza shrieked back.

“Apologies, ma’am,” Fhá responded, reading the report more closely.

In fifty years, she’d never seen anything like this. DZ reports came along infrequently. That’s just how the DZ was. Fresh colonies in unsecured space. Passages were dangerous. Transit lanes hadn’t been mapped out yet and Colonial Charters were given high degrees of autonomy to get their operations up, running, and viable. A lot of them went dark, and the Imperial Administration of Colonial Charters would send a Charter Closure Report their way after the Imperial Ministry of Inquiries concluded their investigations.

Those were fairly dry and boring, describing one or more workaday reasons why the colony proved unviable. Dead and missing had to be logged into the census rolls, the world’s status changed on the GMap, facts and figures input for use by the Ministry of the Imperial Treasury for taxes. Typical tedium.

Hàkétzü Province’s DZ was unusually quiet by Imperial Standards. The Lossec MPA office took great pride in this. In fact, they were more proud of not having to perform a CCI than the Lossec Colonial Charter Administration was about their record numbers of colonies failing because they forgot to send them resupply ships instead of them being destroyed or ravaged by marauding hordes of bandit scum. Good old incompetence. It was the number one reason why everything in the Imperium was a steaming fat turd. The current victims of terminal stupidity would be no different.

Fhá took down the charter designation and ran it through the Hàkétzü Province DZ Charter database. What she got back she was entirely unprepared for.

Tension, the air stank with it. Every breath carried its taste, an acrid flavour, foul, saturated with the bite of fear and the tang of nerves taut as tripwires. It filled the hold of the drop ship with a heady scent all seven men strapped into their seats knew better than their own mother’s cooking. Each one had smelled it on drops both short and long into LZs hotter than a wolf-rayet. They’d been through every hell imagined and discovered a few new ones along the way, hells that stank of terror and death—the lull between shooting matches even more so. The smell, that smell, it was stronger this time, as if the tensile strength of air had strained itself beyond the breaking point and was only held together by sheer stubbornness and the peculiar taint of the Glitch.

Something about this operation was different, off. Hvórþ could feel it in his bones like a visceral wrongness. Every instinct in him screamed it as it did in every Dropkick Demon under his command. They weren’t being sent in as the hammer of the Imperium’s wrath. They weren’t doing high stakes intel gathering, they weren’t taking names and kicking ass, hunting HVTs or establishing beachheads deep behind enemy lines.

Clearing the way for a Blister Blitz in an absolute clusterfuck was their bread and butter and no matter what Katzali had to say, Hvórþ knew this wasn’t that. They weren’t here on another ordinary high stakes recon operation either. It wasn’t going to be just another Europasday in Shittsville because Shittsville had already came and went a long time ago. The star had already gone supernova, and the black hole was long through feeding on its corpse. Where they were going was colder than ice, colder than the space between stars, colder than the tombs of emperors whose bones had turned to dust three ages ago and had already been forgotten in the endless paper cathedrals of imperial bureaucracy.

Put simply, the planet was dead.

From what Hvórþ had been given from previous UAV reconnaissance operations, the situation was unlike anything he had ever seen before. All that was left of the little princeling’s palatial spaceport was crushed bones of imperial splendour. Skeletons and fragments of buildings, unrecognisable as to what they once were, rose out of piles of rubble and drifts of ash and dust, as if defiant to the wrath of the gods themselves. What shape anything once might have taken could scarcely be imagined. The scene was one of total devastation, unlike anything mankind could produce by the means suggested.

When he’d first been given still frames from UAV recons, he’d thought only a nuclear armaggeddon of a variety not seen in five ages could have obliterated everything to such an unfathomable, unrecognisable degree. But there were no such craters, no glassed impact sites, no fallout detectable anywhere on the surface. Radiation scans showed only moderate elevation, more consistent with high volcanic activity than nuclear bombs, and the ruins suggested a more conventional demolition by way of shelling and bombing and urban warfare.

The scale of it was completely unbelievable. Whatever war caused this was so far beyond the limits of human tolerance that Hvórþ questioned whether or not the Rimworlds had staged some manner of defence here. But this…this was no Rimworlds homeland defence. Those always brought First Marines, and First Marines had a way of making their presence unambiguous, unmissable even. Hvórþ had seen it. He had seen what the AFR’s gods of war were capable of and had prayed every day since then to never see it again. When no signs of their handiwork were to be found, Hvórþ neither praised the gods nor felt any form of relief.

There was only one answer to the question of who did this.

What had happened to this backwater oubliette for the disgraced son of Imperial royalty was self-inflicted. The perpetrators and the victims were the Imperium herself. All that could be seen in every scan, recording, and VScape was the aftermath of Imperial weaponry turned inward, with not a scintilla of evidence of anyone else being involved.

It was civil war. There was no other option.

Despite what all the data read, Hvórþ could not reconcile that. The Rimworlds, or, for that matter, any civilisation fighting off a hostile force until there was nothing left to fight over made some sense to him. Humanity had a long and storied history of fighting off invaders even when it was only for the pure principle thereof. This wasn’t that.

It was civil war. Brothers killing their brothers, fathers killing sons, mothers killing daughters, the most brutal form of fighting. Fighting few had stomach for, fighting that could not go on, but did. And it went on. It went on and on and on, until every centimetre of ground had been fought over so totally that, by the time all was said and done, whatever they were fighting for in the first place had been replaced in its entirety with pure hatred of their enemy, until they were fighting just to fight, to destroy the enemy. Driven by an insatiable desire to exact some petty vengeance over the totalising destruction of everything they had once been fighting over, they had fought until no one was left to fight over it anymore.

That’s what all the evidence seemed to scream. Hvórþ he couldn’t understand that. It was less comprehensible to him, less intuitive to him than the bizarre, wispy, shadowy creature he’d seen attacking a comms station on one of the VScapes the UAVs brought back.

That, perhaps, more than anything was what had unsettled the men. The material Katzali had provided in as part of their briefing the day before was obviously not everything brought back—this being an Inquisitorial Dispatch after all. There was one VScape that stuck out to everyone, one they had all discussed privately, out of earshot of the Inquisitor and well away from the listening ears of his servants. One that Hvórþ was convinced had been intentionally selected from a large pool of other Vscapes.

According to their briefings their stated objective was to pinpoint the source of an intense GQF in the heart of where the banished noble’s palace would have been and to use some fancy equipment Katzali’s tech heads had given them on it—equipment Hvórþ wasn’t even confident worked at all. Between the suspicious Vscape and its hostile creature, the number of drones lost in previous missions, the malfunctioning comms stations dropped ahead of their departure, and the cloud wall forming a kind of event horizon sealing each side of from the other, Hvórþ didn’t trust it. Something was out there, something dangerous. Whatever it was, Hvórþ knew in his bones that the Big Geek couldn’t be anything other than a hive of them.

Katzali knew it too. He had to. None of the maths added up with any of this. To send the Dropkick Demons on this mission, to go poke at a heart of darkness on a dead planet, it stank of pretence and Inquisitorial lies. What Katzali was really interested in were the entities. Why, Hvórþ couldn’t say. What he knew, what everyone knew, was they were simply the bait. Drawing out the entities was the real mission. For what point or purpose, not a single Dropkick Demon knew, only that it was going to be the death of them.

In the drop ship’s hold, the stench of mortal terror accompanied a silence thicker than fortress armour. For the first time, they knew they were going to face an enemy they couldn’t beat. There were no jokes, no banter, no pranks, none of the usual noise they had made a thousand times before on a thousand operations before. Each one, every soldier Hvórþ had spent the last forty Tanno fighting with was silent as the grave as they stared into the face of death fast approaching, making peace with inevitability as best they could.

The sound and vibration of the Joxa-Class drop ship’s braking engines igniting rattled through the small hold. Each Dropkick Demon pulled his gas mask over his face and performed final weapons checks as they awaited the pilot’s signal.

“Demon Alpha, this is Joxa-5 we are approaching LZ, prepare to drop in six-zero seconds!” Kija, Joxa-5’s pilot, called over the comms channel, breaking Hvórþ from his thoughts.

“Copy, Joxa-5,” Hvórþ returned. “Drop in six-zero.”

Hvórþ gave his team the signal and they performed final gear checks, ensuring they had everything they needed. Once they were boots-down, they would be on their own. No comms, no resupplies, no reinforcements, and no rescue.

“Check flare guns!” Hvórþ barked, patting his vest for the flare gun holster he’d mounted for quick access.

No comms also meant they would have to signal the dropship the old fashioned way.

“Twelve hours, boys!” Hvórþ bellowed as the sound of the drop ship’s landing thrusters roared through the hold.

Hvórþ disengaged his flight harness, grabbed the strap above his head, and rose to his feet, holding his IK-T87G6 Spec-Ops modified light machine gun—Little Ikki—in one hand for the final few seconds. Without warning, the drop ship plunged to the left, heavy vibrations rumbling through the deck, knocking Hvórþ off balance. He lost his grip on the strap and toppled over, slamming hard into the floor.

“Joxa-5, what’s going on up there?” Hvórþ said into his wicomm, as the drop ship righted itself and began accelerating upward again.

“Demon Alpha, LZ is a no-go,” Atzumi, Kija’s co-pilot, commed in, “platform partially collapsed under us. Prepare for airborne descent at two-five-zero metres elevation and relay ready signal.”

“Roger that,” Hvórþ replied, picking himself off the floor. “Looks like it’s Jumping Djinni, boys!”

Reaching into an overhead bin, Hvórþ grabbed a backpack-mounted jumpjet attachment. Kàng, Hvórþ’s designated jump partner, turned and Hvórþ secured the device onto his backpack. Three strong tugs to confirm it was secure and Hvórþ signalled Kàng. He turned around and waited as Kàng strapped a set of jumpjets onto his backpack. He felt three tugs and turned back around to attach Ichika’s jumpjets. Once everyone was on their feet, facing forward, Hvórþ strode to the back of the hold where the lever to open the loading ramp was mounted. Nodding to each of member of his squad, he placed one hand on the lever.

“Demon Alpha, we are on station for aerial drop, releasing safety lock on your signal,” Kija commed in.

“Twelve hours,” Hvórþ barked, muting his wicomm, “once we’re down there, we’re lone wolves. You see anything, you call it. Mirage, ghost, the apparition of your favourite whore in Fucktown! There is no such thing as a crywolf on this operation! Our primary objective is to exfil safely with as much intel on the situation as possible! In twelve hours if I don’t see every last one of your fugly mugs on this drop ship, I will come back here, raise your worthless arse from the dead, and kill you again! You ladies understand that!?”

“Yes, Commander!” the squad barked in unison.

“Good, then let’s raise some hell!” Hvórþ bellowed, unmuting his wicomm, “Pilot, this is Demon Alpha. Djinni are ready to jump. Repeat, Djinni ready to jump.”

“Copy, Demon Alpha. Djinni ready to jump. Disengaging airlock safety.”

The light above the loading ramp changed from red to green and Hvórþ pulled the lever. An alarm blared as a series of mechanical clunks, clangs, and hisses issued from the loading ramp, before its heavy hydraulic arms began to lower the ramp.

A low, mechanical drone hummed from the arms as they pushed the armoured ramp forward. The ramp locked into place, and a crack of light widened from the top of the ramp as the arms pivoted downward.

Hvórþ let his weapon hang by its sling. With his free hand, he signalled the jump elevation before closing his fist. Thecrack of light widened from the slowly opening doors bringing a cloud of dust billowing into the hold. Once the ramp had lowered completely, Hvórþ pushed the lever fully up, locking in pilot control. With his free hand, he counted down three, before giving the sign to jump.

One by one, Hvórþ’s men filed out of the drop ship, giving just enough time for the solider they followed to clear the landing zone.

“Pilot, Dropkick Demon is away,” Hvórþ said over comms, once Kàng had jumped. “Repeat, Dropkick Demon is away.”

“Copy, Demon Alpha. Bus is RTB in twelve, with or without you.”

“A-firm, Joxa-5,” Hvórþ repeated. “Twelve hours. Demon Alpha out.”

Hvórþ took his weapon in hand and charged out of the hatch, jumping off in a pencil dive. Almost immediately his jumpjets activated, jerking his backpack’s straps painfully into his armpits. He lost visual almost immediately after, as he entered a huge cloud of dust kicked up by the others. The jets brought him down gently on a loose pile of rubble, kicking up even more dust. As it settled, Hvórþ readied his weapon again, and engaged his V-Mesh recording system. Once cleared, and he could see his surroundings, the unsettling feeling he’d had the whole way down from orbit went from a seven to an eleven.

The apocalyptic landscape left in the wake of whatever had happened here, showed on a holoscreen, did no justice to the direct experiencing of it, full-force, in the flesh. Standing there on what could have been a wide avenue or any number of other kinds of spacious areas, assaulted in all five senses directly by the torn up landscape, the tableau once painted on screens and VR Jacks truly became real, and the horror of it hit him like heavy artillery.

Nothing was identifiable. The city had truly been blasted into a literal oblivion. In what could have been a wide avenue, where he stood on one of countless scattered piles of indeterminate fragments of unknowable origin, everything lay in ruins, littered with rubble, burnt wrecks of vehicles, bones of the long dead, and half-decayed corpses devoid of any fly, maggot, or colony of other such foul rot-eaters, each half buried or scattered in myriad pieces amidst partially intact remnants of fallen structures. In that street—or, he assumed it was a street—all he saw in every direction was selfsame devastation. No matter which way he turned, all he there was were broken shards and fragments of the unidentifiable.

Under layer upon layer of ruddy brown clouds so thick daylight barely shone through, a diffuse, ochre twilight seemed to cast it all in amber, further amplifying a visceral surreal terror to the environment. His brain knew time was passing, but the unchanging, unmoving, stillness of his environment screamed the opposite. The was air still and dead, without wind or disturbance. The only sound in his ears was the persistent ringing of his tinnitus. Despite the emptiness of all sensation, Hvórþ couldn’t help but feel like the uniformity was not a product of what was not there. It wasn’t a void of sensation he was experiencing, but the destruction of all its parts, the reducing of all sounds and sights, all sensation, everything to its most basal form before being amplified to its absolute limit, each component part cancelling another other out in total destructive interference. Simultaneously overwhelming and empty, deafening and silent, still and frenetic, in stasis and tachyonic, everything destroyed into nothing.

Hvórþ tried to clear his head, but found he couldn’t. A buzz built behind his eyes, burrowed deep in his brain as he surveyed his surroundings, attempting to locate where they were amidst frames or twisted pieces of buildings still standing like fingers raised, rudely gesturing their defiance to gravity, each one noteworthy and yet forgotten as soon as he looked away. Some still had their lowermost floors half-buried in the cataclysmic aftermath of a manner of apocalypse Hvórþ had no name for. No…he had it…it was on the edge of his mind. For this…this was not the aftermath of war, not even the Rimworlds’ totalising armaggeddons in defence of their homeworlds held even the saddest of matchsticks before what conflagration had consumed Ëchüha Tvì Éshà.

Insatiable rage had blasted even the bones of this world to powder to feed the cannons mounted atop Har-Meggido. No quantum of blood, no throne of spines, no ocean of eyes, no fists harvested by the reaper’s scythe, no sickles broken over iron fists, no offerings of death placed upon the altars of enmity, nor skulls stacked as thrones to Lords of Strife would ever have sated such hate. The compulsion that drove this world to such self-destruction would never be satisfied by any measure less than the full summoning of war incarnate, so as to bring forth true gods of battle sleeping deep in the molten hearts of every world, to shower their blessings of absolute finality upon their enemies as glorious shards of the One Truth.

There was no life here. Nothing. Not even the lowest rat, maggot, bacterium, or spore of slime mould floating on the wind or feasting on a billion dessicated corpses trapped in amber light in the ashen wastes left behind. In the aftermath of the one war to end all others, this was the shape of peace, the shape of death triumphant. Only when glaciers quaked and plagues rained would the dead decay once more. This place was—

“Boss!” Ichika shouted from the bottom of the hill. “You alright!? Just standing there!”

“Yeah,” Hvórþ answered, shaking his head. “Hell of a view!”

“Sure you ain’t shell-shocked!?” Ichika joked.

“Shut up!” Hvórþ fired back.

Maybe I am a bit, Hvórþ thought to himself as he descended the mound of rubble.

He’d been in warzones most of his life, seen a lot of soldiers come home with Old Pete. Maybe he’d been in the game too long, and Old Pete had dropped by for a visit.

No…it’s not that, Hvórþ dismissed. The buzzing in his brain was still there. He could feel it, a primordial urge, a festering rot. Gnawing, biting, gnashing, thrashing about, it wanted out, it wanted to be free.

“It’s nothing,” he muttered to himself as he watched his team poking through the ruins. “I’m just fine. It’s all in my head.”

“Which way, boss?” Lìngbi asked, once Hvórþ had joined them on a low mound of rubble.

Looking around, Hvórþ couldn’t even tell where their landing zone was supposed to be. He brought up the map Katzali had given him on his TacPad. No use.

“Nobuo!” Hvórþ barked at the squad’s sniper. “Want you to glass bearings 240 through 265 for fresh demo.”

“On it,” Nobuo responded, dashing up a pile of rubble.

A few seconds passed as the sniper surveyed the area with his binoculars, before Nobuo replied, “I got something! Looks like our LZ fell apart like a sodden maxi pad! Bearing 253, three hundred metres!”

“Copy! 253, 300!” Hvórþ barked, marking the location on the map.

“See that…” he continued, gesturing toward what may have been a hab-block or any number of things at some point, “…oh…what the fuck is that anyway? That thing! Go scout it out!”

“What thing?” Nobuo responded, jokingly.

Hvórþ glared at Nobuo.

“On my way!” Nobuo grinned, making for the ruined building at a trot.

“What in all hells happened here?” Lìngbi asked, picking up what looked like a shard of metal wrapped on one end in strips of tyre.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Hvórþ answered.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ichika responded. “Fucking Incursion came back. Dusted the whole place.”

“You see any xeno corpses lying about?” Tüanmv fired back.

“Well…no…” Ichika admitted.

“Yeah, neither do I!” Tüanmv cut off. “Got any more genius ideas to share!?”

“This was self-inflicted,” Hvórþ said, matter-of-factly, “some kind of anticog got hold of everyone.”

“How do you know?” Ichika questioned.

“We’re not wearing rad suits,” Hvórþ answered.

“Hey! Boss!” Nobuo shouted from inside the nearby maybe-hab-block. “Come take a look at this!”

“Stay here,” Hvórþ ordered to the rest of his squad.

He didn’t need their usual antics right now, not with a creeping malaise buzzing about in the back of his mind. Hvórþ took his weapon in both hands and trotted across rubble mounds and a wreck or two—it was impossible to tell what was what—toward the building.

“What?” he asked as he entered the building, ducking through a doorway half-blockaded by a concretion of indistinguishable substances.

“Look at this shit,” Nobuo said, gesturing toward a corpse leaning against one wall with his torch.

Flicking on his own torch, Hvórþ passed the light over the body.

“Huh,” he mused, “hasn’t decayed at all.”

“Just like the ones outside,” Nobuo added, “but these are fresher.”

“Yeah,” Hvórþ agreed, “any idea how old?”

“Six lunes,” Nobuo guessed, “maybe more. They’re pretty dessicated. You ever seen anything like this?”

“No…” Hvórþ answered, panning his torch around the room.

As he did, he noticed the dimmest of yellow lights flickering just in the corners of his eyes. He whipped around, aiming his torch toward where he thought the lights were, but only revealed more corpses.

“Holy shit…” Nobuo breathed, “there’s more of them?”

“Did you see…” Hvórþ began, but stopped.

“See what?” Nobuo asked, approaching the bodies.

“Nothing,” Hvórþ dismissed, following Nobuo. “Never mind. My eyes hadn’t adjusted.”

“You sure?” Nobuo asked, leaning over a dessicated corpse folded over a counter.

“Yes,” Hvórþ answered, stepping around a corpse splayed out on the floor. “Got any idea how old these are?”

“Six months, maybe,” Nobuo assessed, “hard to say. I don’t know how anything could have survived out here, though, let alone people.”

“Looks like they put up a fight,” Hvórþ assessed, approaching a corpse holding a makeshift spear in a dessicated hand as if they were trying to fend something off.

He nudged the spear with the barrel of his gun. The hand practically disintegrated, dropping the spear with a loud clatter, sending a jolt of adrenaline through Hvórþ’s stomach.

“Shit…” Nobuo exhaled, “don’t fucking do that. Gonna give this old dog a heart attack.”

The two chuckled, both out of amusement and stress.

“You think whatever got them’s still here?” Hvórþ asked, inspecting the other corpses.

“Nothing got them,” Nobuo said, entering a larger back room, “there’s not a scratch on them.”

“This wasn’t mass suicide,” Hvórþ disagreed, “they were fighting something. Or, trying to.”

“Fighting what? Unless you’re seeing something I’m not, there’s no injuries, nothing.”

“I don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, picking up what looked like an improvised machete made of a sharpened piece of steel countertop. “Check the rest of the bodies.”

“For what?”

“Weapons,” Hvórþ said, tossing the makeshift machete aside. “Something’s not right.”

“You’re damn right,” Nobuo agreed, “this is fucking weird.”

“Hey! Boss! Y’all alright in there!?” Kàng called out, from a distance.

“Peachy!” Hvórþ shouted back.

“Finish up your CV already! Ichika’s getting on my nerves!”

Hvórþ sighed, shaking his head.

“Should we…” Nobuo suggested, gesturing with some kind of shank he’d found.

“Tell them?” Hvórþ assumed, picking through the room. “No. Don’t need to spook em.”

“Think this is the last of them,” Nobuo said, picking up a spear. “The fuck happened here?”

“Don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, entering the back room, “but whatever did this…well…let’s hope we don’t run into it.”

“Damn straight,” Nobuo said, tossing the spear aside. “Fucking spears and swords and shit. The hell’s that about? Not even a gun around.”

“Don’t know,” Hvórþ answered, “but I suspect the Inquisitor has a good idea.”

“Fuck me running,” Nobuo swore, panning his torch across the back room again. “He knows something, dunn’e?”

“Let’s get a move on,” Hvórþ grumbled, turning back to the entrance. “What the shit?”

The lights, he saw them again. Hvórþ panned his torch over a section of the wall in front of him, then off of it. His brow furrowed as he panned his torch back onto the section of wall.

“Nobuo, turn off your torch,” Hvórþ ordered, turning his off.

“In this fucking tomb?”

“Turn it off!” Hvórþ hissed.

“Fine,” Nobuo acceded, turning off his torch. “Oh, what in unholy incestuous skullfucks on a Solsday morning…?”

What Hvórþ had only been able to see out of the corners of his eyes before, now, in pitch darkness, stuck out like neon marquees in a subcity slum. Faintly lucent claw marks had been left all over front and back room, like they had been painted with a dim, foetid, phosphorescent paint. Most disturbingly, all the bodies had claw marks on them, but these were different. Unlike the ones on the walls and the furniture, they didn’t have the appearance of being painted on, but looked as though a luminous blue gas was flowing out of dull-blue gashes glittering faintly. Looking down at his feet, Hvórþ spotted a set of footprints, glowing with the foetid yellow lucence, leading behind him, into the back room. Turning around, he saw the footprints trailing deeper into the back room, toward where the bulk of the corpses were. Hvórþ’s stomach fell through the floor when he saw the telltale pattern of a fight right below Nobuo’s feet.

Hvórþ turned his flashlight back on. Nobuo lifted his hand to block the light.

“Hey!” Nobuo yelped. “Watch where you’re shining that thing.”

The blood in Hvórþ’s veins turned to ice. Behind Nobuo, something dark and wispy shifted. His eyes widened as something began to rise. Thin, lanky, and disfigured, it was like an emaciated human, but with limbs too long and too thin, a torso too narrow. Its hands were horridly stretched, like baking pans, and six spindly, bony clawed fingers, each the length of Hvórþ’s forearm sprouted from them, hanging below the creature’s knees.

“Come on, it’s not funny, boss!” Nobuo protested as the horrid creature rose from the ground. “Boss!?”

Frozen in place, Hvórþ could only watch as it raised its head—a shrunken, shrivelled skull stretched over with skin so thin he could see spiderwebs of black veins bulging beneath. Wretched tufts of greasy, tangled black hair sprouted here and there like extensions badly glued onto its scalp and then never washed. Two, enormous, bulbous, black eyes stared, lidless, at Nobuo. It had no nose, only a giant mouth, stretching from ear to ear, perpetually open, baring row after row of broken and jagged teeth. The creature reared its head back and issued a blood curdling screech, splitting the silence like a thunderclap.

In an instant, both men had weapons drawn and Nobuo had turned around to face the creature. In the next the creature lunged forward.

“NOBUO!” Hvórþ shouted, but it was too late.

Without even having seen a clear shot of it, Hvórþ knew now what had attacked the Comms Station in the Vscape. He knew this was that thing. He knew it in his bones. That wispy, shadowy blur waylaying, tearing the station to pieces, this was it. Hvórþ’s felt his legs quivering as the creature lumbered at Nobuo.

Nobuo screamed and the two of them opened fire as the creature unleashed another shriek. It lashed out, tearing at Nobuo with clawed hands. The moment its claws touched him, Nobuo went silent, limp, and fell to the floor, as though the creature’s touch was the very touch of death. In disbelief, Hvórþ watched his bullets pass harmlessly through the creature, like they weren’t there, or the creature was an apparition. But it couldn’t be either. The creature screeched and shrieked, lashing more furiously at Nobuo with each bullet that phased through it. Each flailing strike of its limb scattered dust and bashed against objects, but had no discernible impact on Nobuo.

Hvórþ, realising it was too late and that his weapon’s only effect was making the creature angrier, stopped firing. It wailed triumphantly over Nobuo’s body and then lowered itself to all fours. Hvórþ watched, unable to turn away, as it unhinged its jaw like a snake, clamping it over Nobuo’s gas mask, as if it were trying to eat his face. Then, a bright blue gas began seeping out of Nobuo’s face and into the maw of the creature, the light visible descending down in its gullet and into to a grotesquely attached heart, that with each beat, tore one of the spiderwebbing straps of flesh holding it in place off as a new one attached itself.

Overcome by nausea, Hvórþ doubled over and vomited onto the floor in front of him. While still bent over, he heard a snapping, followed by the sound of footsteps rushing closer.

“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Hvórþ screamed, tearing out of the room.

It had finished feeding.

“Boss! What happened!” Kàng asked, rushing the door as the rest of the squad sprinted over.

“RUN!” Hvórþ yelled, sliding through the half-blocked doorway as another shriek pierced the air.

“What the fuck is that!?” Kàng shouted, as the creature crashed and thrashed its way through the front room.

“MOVE!” Hvórþ roared, but it was too late.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw the creature fling itself out of the building in a cloud of debris, burying its clawed fingers into Kàng’s chest. The two toppled over and the creature unhinged its jaw to suck more blue gas off of Kàng’s face.

Hvórþ didn’t need to see anymore. He turned his head forward again and continued running. Whatever that thing was, they needed to get as far away from it as possible.

“WHY AREN’T WE SHOOTING THAT FUCKING THING!” Ichika shouted.

“THAT’LL JUST PISS IT OFF!” Hvórþ shouted back, scrabbling to reactivate his wicomm device.

“IKOMM Power On!” it chimed in his ear.

“Joxa-5, this is Demon Alpha! We need immediate extraction! Do you read!?” Hvórþ shouted, desperately as the five remaining Dropkick Demons tore recklessly across the broken landscape. “Joxa-5! Do you copy! Joxa-5!? Shit! NO FUCKING COMMS! GODS DAMMIT TO HELL!”

Hvórþ reached for the flare gun holstered in his vest, and had just lifted it out its holster when his boot caught on a chunk of rubble half-buried in an ash drift. Instinctively, he thrust his hand out to break his fall, scrabbling back to his feet.

“What the fuck is that thing, Hvórþ!?” Ichika shouted as he passed Hvórþ, sprinting heedless to the hazardous terrain.

Hvórþ accelerated to match Ichika’s pace. Terrain hazards be damned! Nothing else mattered except putting as much distance between himself and the creature behind him. If he fell into a pit and died, it had to be better than whatever that creature was going to do to him.

“I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!” Hvórþ screamed, over the earsplitting shrieks of the monster chasing them.

He grabbed for his flare gun again, only to realise he must have flung it when he tripped.

“FUCKING GODS DAMNED SHIT!” he roared, tearing the holster off his vest.

He threw it at the ground, shattering the hard polymer case in a strangely satisfying explosion of bright orange shards. It was beautiful, the destruction, like punishment cast onto the deser—

“Where’s Nobuo!” Lìngbi shouted.

“FUCKED!” Hvórþ roared, furious, though he didn’t know why.

Ichika, who had taken point, tore into a mass of industrial-esque wreckage. Muttering curses to the man for choosing even worse terrain to run through, he followed, rushing up a mound of rubble on his hands and knees before hearing Lìngbi unleash a torrent of expletives.

At the top, Hvórþ leapt over, sliding down the steep incline toward a the burnt out shell of what might have been a delivery van at one point.

“Fuck this! I’m going back for him!” Lìngbi declared, skidding to a stop at the top of the mound.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Hvórþ barked, before being cut off by another ear piercing shriek. “Lìngbi!? Godsdammit!”

Hvórþ vaulted over the burnt out maybe-van as Lìngbi opened fire on the creature. Inside the densely tangled and twisted ruins, it was impossible to determine where the creature might be. Lìngbi’s blind fire, spraying didn’t have a prayer. Tüanmv and Ëtsvhá jumped over Hvórþ, attempting to catch up to Ichika as he sprinted for a tangled rat’s nest of metal. Hvórþ ordered them to keep running as he racked his brains for a way to save Lìngbi from him self.

Scanning his vest Hvórþ, saw only one thing.

He grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and hurled it over the van, preparing to vault over it. Issuing sparks from the primer, the grenade arced over Lìngbi’s head as he stood atop a pile of rubble, weapon drawn, still firing the lazgun for all it was worth. Every muscle in Hvórþ’s body tensed—the seconds spanning small eternities.

The grenade detonated.

A cloud of smoke burst out of it, descending over Lìngbi’s head. For the briefest half-second, Hvórþ thought it might be enough. A shocked Lìngbi pivoted around, his lower body becoming engulfed in smoke. Lìngbi half twisted to look Hvórþ’s way, a shocked look on his face. In that moment, a plume of smoke rose behind and to Lìngbi’s left and Hvórþ saw one, clawed hand slash across Lìngbi’s chest. Hvórþ barely heard himself cry out as he watched Lìngbi, twist over and fall, his shock deepening as he disappeared over the mound of rubble and into the cloud of smoke.

“NO!” Hvórþ cried out. “GODS DAMMIT! LÌNGBI! NO! FUCK!”

Smoke fully blanketed the pile of rubble and a diffuse blue glow flickered inside it as the creature devoured Lìngbi’s energy, squealing as it did, as if it was in pain. Plumes and tufts of smoke wafted out of the cloud as the glow faded, almost like the creature was thrashing about like a panicked animal.

“Boss! C’mon!” Ichika shouted, grabbing Hvórþ by his backpack.

“Fuck off!” Hvórþ swore, pushing Ichika away.

“Boss! We gotta go!” Ichika implored.

“Gods dammit, Lìngbi!” Hvórþ repeated.

“Boss! Come on! Move!” Ichika pleaded.

“I’m coming back, Lìngbi!” Hvórþ swore, as the creature issued a long, pained howl. “I’m coming back for all of you!”

Turning, Hvórþ followed Ichika, sprinting off toward what remained of the Dropkick Demons, racing away toward a twisted mass of ruined metal.

The VirtuCast ended abruptly, ejecting Fhá out of Hvórþ’s body. Neural shock propelled her back into her seat, muscles spasming. In a panic, she grabbed the headset and flung it off her head. The device clattered onto her desk, the sound like magazines falling onto hard surfaces. Fhá flinched and recoiled with a yelp, heart pounding even harder than it was before.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she’d just experienced. Not the games she and her boyfriend played almost nightly, and certainly none of the CineCasts they got from the Net. There was always a distance, a dulling of the feed, intentional choices that walked the ever-so-fine line between verisimilitude and full-force, raw neurostimulus. Only the most cooked VR Junkies would willingly jack into a raw memarq unprotected. The hapless basket cases would, provided some catastrophic malfunction didn’t fry what was left of their brain, walk away with someone else’s unfiltered memories etched directly onto their neurons, leaving imprints of another’s persona perpetually dancing between their synapses like some kind of metaphysical STD.

Katzali had made no editorial decisions. In actual fact, he hadn’t even bothered to dignify the classified subarchive with the slightest hint of warning. Then again, he was an Inquisitor. His expectations must have been loftier than anything the Imperium could ever have provided. Fhá imagined the man, sitting in his comfy, leather chair, twirling his waxed moustache whilst swirling single-malt whisky worth more than Fhá would make in a lifetime, that his report would be viewed only by other Inquisitors, or, barring that, wouldn’t be audited by the third lowest rank on the totem pole of Imperial Bureaucratic hierarchies. Hells, she was so low, if the totem pole was a real thing, she’d be at least a dozen metres in the dirt, six stations below anyone with a hope of seeing the light of day.

Given how meticulous Katzali had been, Fhá couldn’t help but figure it wasn’t a Katzali problem, but Ngèza’s idea of a funny practical joke. She imagined someone somewhere had developed some kind of VCaster that wouldn’t fry raw neuromesh data indelibly onto someone else’s brain.

Fhá sighed angrily. Clearly she should have known better. Pressing play on a .meme file in an Inquisitor’s Classified Archive!? Obvious risk should have been obvious! How could she have been so stupid! Everyone point and laugh at the big dumb dummy!

Not that foreknowledge would have helped any. Auditing the archive wasn’t an option. Getting rawdogged by unfiltered memarqs, like a great many other indignities, was in her contract. Somewhere.

Reaching into her desk drawer, Fhá grabbed her favourite wickerball, attempting to calm her nerves and racing heart. Hvórþ’s memories had, undeniably, imprinted themselves onto her, and they were taking her for the ride of her life. Unlike Captain Kickass, Fhá wasn’t a special forces operator. She had no training, no experience, no preparation for what she’d just, unwittingly, jacked herself into. As she squeezed the ball, the scene of that creature, that gods awful creature, appearing in the darkness, killing Nobuo and Kàng, Hvórþ’s sheer, all-consuming terror, and that buzzing, that infernal buzzing, it kept playing over and over. All the while a single question, as much Hvórþ’s as her own, cycled like a broken audio clip.

What was that…that…thing?

None of the documents she’d reviewed prior to beginning her review of the Inquisition’s Inquiry Report indicated its existence. None of the local wildlife in the Ecologist’s Report showed anything any more hostile than what would be present on an Engineered world. Sure there were predators, and they wouldn’t turn down human if it meant an easy meal, but they weren’t hostile like very nearly every native lifeform on The Rimworld’s UltraMax Penal World, Embers of Exile. Whatever that wispy, shrieking, wraithlike creature was, its demeanour was beyond hostile. It was like it was compelled by wrath so insatiable it could even have eclipsed Ngèza’s after a night of heavy drinking.

Fhá couldn’t describe why, but she felt it, even through the VirtuCast, even disconnected from it, and by so much time and so many parsecs. It was there. The creature’s hatred. It exuded it like an aura. Burning with intensity, the wraith harboured hate for all life that Fhá could neither explain nor ignore. It was unnatural—uncanny, even—as if made by humans. Not so much by their own handiwork or device—though great witches were known to have manifested creatures even they themselves could not control—but awakened…

No…

It had been birthed. Birthed from the condensed weight of humanity’s negligence, greed, and pollution. Its womb, the cradle of its inception, were pools of filth and industrial waste so caustic a single drop would melt the flesh off one’s bones. Swimming, growing in that concentrated cesspit of reckless exploitation, it became consumed with hate. Unfettered wrath, as hot as it burned for all life, humanity made of it a greater conflagration of impassioned antipathy than a department overseer could muster upon receipt of a finalised Imperial Province Tax Audit lacking the requisite three stamps of Interdepartmental Review as outlined in IMA Librarian Manual Chapter 231 Section 94(d)-17.

The wraith, and Fhá knew that as its name, though should could not explain why, it was the incarnate wrath of nature. Compelled by insatiable hunger to scour clean the face of worlds, it would not—no, could not—stop until the last of humanity had fallen at its feet, drained, exsanguinated, the last dram of life drawn even from the bacterium fermenting the last, half completed turd in their lower intestines.

What the fuck? Fhá thought, realising where her mind had gone.

She was Rewinding. Hvórþ’s internal monologue on the dropship playing back in her own mind, reworded, reconstructed, but the same tone, same euphuistic fustian. Grand overtures to dead worlds in language the local poet’s society would use to describe an oddly misshapen rubbish bin or the unpleasant surprise of drunkenly going down on one’s girlfriend on her period.

Pitch and Pennies, Fhá mused, closing her eyes.

Her boyfriend had lovingly immortalised that particularly embarrassing episode in verse. Free wine, good company, and erotic poetry, the only three things she needed to demand a double helping of hot salsa—cramps and tampons be damned. The thought of that night almost gave her headache a headache.

Fhá leaned over, attempting to rub her temples for some relief, only for images of Hvórþ and Co.’s blind panic and terror to flash behind her eyelids.

“Fuck,” she swore, under her breath.

Fhá gripped her favourite wickerball, clenching the hard, fibre ball until her knuckles went white and—

“Hey, Fhá!” someone exclaimed, startling her.

The ball exploded in her hand, shards of hardened fibres splintering into her skin. In a blind panic, she grabbed a stapler from her desk and hurled it at the voice, while the contents of her bladder violently vacated themselves.

“Ah! What the hell!” Hvang yelped, as the stapler flew past his head and smashed into the cubicle wall behind him, splintering into a hundred pieces.

Cheap Imperial manufacturing…

“Emperor’s Dingleberries, Hvang!” She snapped, leaping out of her chair. “Fuck!”

They both ducked out of the way as Fhá’s neighbour across the aisle returned fire with her own stapler.

“By the Crone, what do they have you on?” Hvang reacted, as bits of stapler exploded against a nearby support column.

“Fuck you!” Fhá snapped. “Son of a bitch! Ruined my best skirt!”

“Fhá! Language!” Ngèza barked from the front of the room.

Rage surged through Fhá as she, without thinking, shouted to the boss she loathed with more passion than Bvrák Fànfheí poured into his music, “Stuff it, Ngèza!”

Pushing past Hvang, Fhá rushed to the bathroom, fighting back tears. Practically at a sprint, she reached the corner at the end of the cluster just as her vision began to blur. She rounded the corner and felt her foot slip in the sole of her stiletto, still slick with sweat. A lance of pain shot into her ankle as her foot rolled over. Careening over, Fhá slammed into a stack of boxes, likely containing last lune’s unprocessed Collective Farm Yield Reports. The low-quality, overloaded cardboard file boxes, barely kept together with packing tape and all the prayers of the Imperial Church, immediately exploded, sending papers flying in every direction like confetti at the Emperor’s birthday parade, and Fhá to the floor. What boxes hadn’t exploded on impact buried her under a deluge of pointless bureaucratic inefficiencies.

As she lay dazed on the floor, Fhá felt dampness spreading over her blouse and blazer. The smell of stale coffee reached her nose as she realised one of the ancient greybeards, whose seniority had given him the choicest seat—at the end of the cluster, as far from Ngèza as possible—had been using the stack of boxes as an improvised waste receptacle for half-finished cups of coffee. Obviously suffering from late stage clerical dementia, the quantity of stale, cold, and malodorous liquid, had soaked her to the bone in what must have been an entire lune’s worth of laziness, apathy, and memory loss.

Today, it seemed, had very much turned into her day of judgement. It was as if she’d died in her sleep and this was the hell she was condemned to inhabit. Complete with every measure of divine wrath from all the emperors she had spent so long silently cursing as she processed endless reams of stupid, all being dispensed upon her in a series of magnanimous acts of omnibenevolent pettiness. Anything that had previously been spared her urinary catastrophe was no more undefiled. Her entire outfit was either soaked with piss or equally as saturated with low-quality, bureaucrat-grade scarabica—a fate so slightly less unpleasant as to be debatable at best.

Covered in liquid filth and the weight of equal parts triplicate forms, crippling shame, and the despair only working for the Imperium could bring, Fhá attempted to exhume herself from the pileup of now equally sodden paperwork and file boxes. All of this to the rapt attention, boundless amusement, and persistent verbal abuse of her peers, who never once missed an opportunity to unload their suppressed self-loathing onto whomever their supervisor wouldn’t issue them an HR-78(c) Harassment Report for.

“Watch your step, fuckhead!” one greybeard heckled, as Fhá wobbled back to her feet.

Ngèza, never one to miss an opportunity at verbally abusing her inferiors, parroted the invective, “Yeah! Watch it, fuckhead!”

Encouraged by their boss, the remaining greybeards escalated their streams of expletive laced, yet somehow entirely witless, abuse.

Crass bastards.

Eyes burning, Fhá sprinted away, passing the elevators just as the staplers started flying. She slammed her shoulder into the bathroom door, flinging it open. The door struck the wall with a loud bang, startling her and incurring a second wrathful issuance from her bladder. Fresh urine trickled down her legs as she rushed to the last stall and pushed open the door. She threw herself inside and slammed the door shut, before curling on the floor, tears flowing down her cheeks.

For a moment, she sat there, knees to her chest, mind as blank as her gaze into a distant nowhere—if nowhere was a banal, off-blue, plastic stall door covered in graffiti and a large penis she just knew was Ngèza’s handiwork.

Sanctuary, at last. In the one most holy and sacred place, there could be peace.

Then everything hit her again.

Like a freight train, the last hour body slammed her with the force of a First Marine jumping from the rafters. A freight train’s worth of emotions blindsided her, dragging her at a breakneck pace back to destination fucked. Shame, terror, humiliation, rage, grief, indignation, a white noise tornado. She couldn’t even keep track. She felt like bits and pieces of her mind were breaking off in piecemeal fragments, bouncing over ties and scattered ballast, dragged behind the Embarrassment Express on a runaway pace for Warzone Central Station.

The dropship, the landing, the ruins, the room, the creature, Nobuo, the chase, Kàng, Lìngbi, the rage, the terror, the grief, the horror, the frame slam expulsion, the office, the humiliation, over and over on replay at quadruple speed, accelerating with each run around the loop. It was too much. It was all too much.

Fhá gritted her teeth and clutched at the sides of her head, squeezing her eyes even more tightly shut. She screamed until she ran out of breath. She pounded against the wall, cracking a few of the tiles before losing her footing again, falling hard and half into the toilet.

Extracting herself, she kicked off her heels, whimpering and grunting as she thumped the balls of her hands against her temples, trying to derail the train in her brain. She squatted into a tighter ball, squeezing her eyes shut, clutching at her head with both hands. No matter how tightly she tried, she couldn’t stop seeing the VirtuCast replaying. When she opened them, the blank, stainless steel stall walls reflected the sequence again. She tried looking at the tiles, but their white, shiny surfaces only served as a clearer canvas.

“Go away!” she shrieked, smashing a fist into the toilet roll dispenser, smashing through the cheap plastic.

Pain lanced through her hand, already stinging from shards of the wicker ball she’d forgotten about. Blood welled up around big chunks of plastic embedded in her skin. Bright red streaks ran down her arms and into the sleeve of her blazer, still soaked with stale, weeks old coffee.

Damp and cool now, Fhá felt the moist, clingy fabric sticking to her like a cocoon, like she was being wrapped in the deathly embrace of that foul wraith of wrath. Its face flashed across her vision again, and she felt something snap.

Without even realising what she was doing, Fhá tore at her blouse, ripping the once fine, now irrevocably stained fabric to shreds before flinging whatever tattered remnants were left away from her. Gripping her tank top with both hands, she tore it off, splitting it from the middle of the V-neck. She flung it and her skirt away, tearing her panties apart at the hips. It didn’t matter how, she needed it all off, all away, all of it. She kicked and shoved her torn and soiled garments away with her feet before retreating into the back corner of the stall, cramming herself into the space between the toilet and the corner—the only place that felt some level of safe.

For a brief moment, like before, she felt relief. The sensation of being wrapped in that creature’s skin, moist and oozing with foul, viscous fluid was gone. She closed her eyes as a moment of serenity passed over her, only to see the men the creature had killed be killed again. The violence of their death throes flashed across her eyes again and a tsunami of nausea smashed into her.

Leaning over the toilet, Fhá gripped the seat with both hands as her stomach heaved with the violence of an Imperial Arbiter. A stream of bile and half-digested breakfast smoothie poured into the bowl, the taste of bile as strong in her mouth as it was in Hvórþ’s as he watched Lingbi fall to the wraith. That thought constricted her stomach even more, the feeling like her entire GI tract had joined the party and committed to tangling itself into ever more convoluted knots, forcing every last drop of stomach acid and unprocessed digestive slurry out of her. Streams of burning acid seared through her throat before scouring her mouth, pouring even out of her nose. When there was nothing left to offer unto the porcelain throne, her stomach continued dry heaving, finding new, abstract geometries to contort itself into, all while she coughed and wheezed and struggled to clear her sinuses. Each attempt to clear her nose felt like equal parts a heel kick to the solar plexus and inhaling a mouthful of hot, industrial dust blowing about the desert wastelands surrounding an Imperial Manufactory Hive.

When her stomach had finally settled again, she was too exhausted and out of breath to flush. Fhá oozed back into the corner. Burying her face into her knees, she began to sob uncontrollably. It was too much. It was all too much. As she sobbed and wailed, she felt herself dissociating more and more.

The world faded into the distance around her.

Time slipped.

Sensation of the real world…

...retreated into the distance.

Her discomfort wedged into the space between the toilet and the wall and the chill seeping into her bones dissipated into ever thickening mist.

Sounds of her whimpering and crying became echoes.

Echoes in a cathedral strange and yet altogether too familiar.

Past resurgent, the bathroom faded entirely, she was no longer there.

Stood before the altar and dressed in black, the robe ill-fitting—a last-minute compromise for a precocious girl. There in that hallowed place, an urn of synthetic porcelain rested on a scarlet pillow. She gathered its weight in small arms, what remained of her mother weighing somehow more than the ashes and the vessel that contained them. As if the memory of her lineage had settled both upon it and her shoulders in the rituals of passing. The last of her kin—a weight of responsibility she was entirely unprepared for, barely of an age to comprehend the gravity of it.

Looking up, to the vicar, who oversaw the Holy Sepulchre of the Imperium of her childhood, she saw his solemn expression turn. Behind her, the pews were empty. No family left to attend this memorial. Friends so-called too preoccupied with their own occupations, love, affection, or even the most minimal forms of sodality expressed only in sad bouquets of polymer passing as flowers, their attendant cards anodyne and without any substance as to identify whom they were for, except by name.

Alone.

She realised with sudden clarity she was entirely alone.

Looking into the vicar’s eyes, she could see something malevolent forming. No longer full of warmth or compassion, the last consolation faded and he grinned a smile of knives as he had so many a time before, but never so openly. He drew his robes about him, in that way he had before, a harbinger of unholy things to come. Fhá clutched the urn tighter to her chest. The bulge beneath his robes grew more pronounced as his grin reached eyes too large for his head.

A scream ripped through the cathedral.

She dropped the urn.

Synthporcelain shattered at her feet and from the ashes.

A misshapen hand with fingers too long burst forth, grabbing at her ankles.

A face like a skull with skin drawn taut over it burst forth. Fhá shrieked and kicked at it, freeing herself as it crawled fully out of the ashes.

“Fhá! Calm down! Relax! It’s just me!” the face exclaimed with Hvang’s voice.

In an instant, the nightmare was gone, and she saw Hvang fall backwards, collapsing against the stall door in a heap.

“By the gods, what’s gotten into you!” he swore, pushing himself back into a semi-upright position.

“Go away!” Fhá shrieked, trying to push the thin, lanky man away from her with her feet.

“No!” he defied, whacking her kicks away with one hand as he attempted to push himself to a seated position with the other.

“Ow! Fuck!” Hvang swore as she stubbed his finger on her heel while reaching for his glasses. “What’s going on!? Why are you naked!? What the fuck did Ngèza drag you into!?”

“GO AWAY!” Fhá screamed.

“NO!” Hvang roared, stunning her.

For a moment they both stared at each other. Fhá glared down the intruder, nothing short of murder blazing behind her eyes. Hvang, glasses in hand, eyes twitching as he struggled to focus, met her gaze as best he could. Being as myopic as a cave bat, he, nevertheless, was looking more into the toilet bowl still full of vomit, the automatic flusher having never been fixed from Ngèza’s last baked bean disastertastrophe three lunes ago. He slowly returned his glasses to his face, then immediately lurched forward, covering his mouth with a hand.

“Oh fuck...oh that’s...by the Emperor, Fhá, that’s disgusting,” Hvang groaned, reaching for the manual flush button.

Fhá turned her head slowly, maintaining a laser focus as Hvang’s finger slowly approached, and then pushed the button.

“What is going on, Fhá?” Hvang asked, as he retreated his hand. The toilet roared as it whisked Fhá’s offerings to the great god of the sewer—praise be—away. “You’re in a terrible way?”

“I-I-the-it,” Fhá stuttered, her eyes darting back and forth, looking for a way out.

“What? Talk to me? What’s going on?”

“The thing! That-it…” Fhá sputtered, burying her face in her hands, “it…I can’t! I can’t do it! I can’t! I can’t! I just can’t! Fuck fuck fuck!”

The tears came back and Fhá curled up even tighter, sobbing uncontrollably, a montage of fear and death and apocalyptic wastelands playing relentlessly in her mind.

Survival sandbox games were her boyfriend’s favourite, something they’d both found endless hours of fun in. VirtuSpace explorers, fighting off hordes of hostile mutants, zombies, and other monsters. Those worlds, those experiences, they’d joked about how if the zombie apocalypse ever came to town, they’d be more than prepped for it.

As if watered down VR Experiences could ever have done anything of the sort.

There wasn’t anything real to any of it. It was a game. They were all games. Just games! The stakes were nothing. Death could only wipe your save, force a hard restart, hours of progress and gameplay wasted. Pain was limited, at most a dulled discomfort, a lightweight alert system, enough to elicit a response but not to ruin the fun nor the fantasy. And that was all it ever was, ever could be, a fantasy. Fiction and lies whose extraneous components existed only in service to the player’s ambitions and the suspension of disbelief.

Experiencing a real, bona fide hellscape, as a real human being trapped in a real life or death situation, having to grapple with it, real people dying in front of her, she wasn’t prepared for that. She couldn’t have been. A videofeed, a CineCast, even a Spectacle she could have handled, but not this, never this.

She’d experienced everything Hvórþ had as he had. She hadn’t just watched Kàng, Nobuo, and Lìngbi die, but had lived it. Once she’d jacked in, Hvórþ’s experience became hers. She’d witnessed, first-hand, their deaths, felt every emotion, every sensation as Hvórþ had, as if, for that half-hour, she had become him. The VirtuCast spared nothing. No intimate detail was lost, all of it now imprinted onto her memory, into her mind. Hvórþ’s memories were hers now, as if she had been there in the flesh, and it was unbearable.

Fhá felt herself tearing up again. She buried her head back into her knees. Hvórþ’s imprint ravaged her with pain, grief, and anguish, the lines between the two of them irreparably broken.

“It’s okay,” Hvang said, draping something over her. “Whatever it is, you’re going to be fine. You’re safe. I’m here. I’ve got your back.”

Fhá heard him as he wedged himself into the narrow gap on the other side of the toilet, before feeling his hand drape over her shoulders, pulling the fabric of his suit jacket up over her. In that moment, it didn’t matter that Hvang was in the ladies’ room, or that he’d walked in on her buck naked in the middle of a crisis. She was just grateful he was there. That he cared. Her boyfriend would be furious, though…

* * *

Fhá had just finished tying her hair back into a loose pony tail when one of the Knotworx from the 3rd basement level showed up at her desk. Why the Ministry kept the treehuggers in the basement was beyond her, though she had overheard an Overseer muttering under his breath in the elevators about “keeping the freak show where it belongs.” This, of course, came only after he’d extracted his Quband display from his retinas long enough to realise he’d stepped into a “confined space with a fucking tree fucker”.

They were an odd bunch, the Herbalists, but the general disdain the Imperium had for them largely eluded her. Mayhaps it had something to do with being simultaneously essential to and largely outside of the governance of the Imperium. Though she couldn’t be sure, Occam’s razor gave her confidence in her conclusion’s odds. As the saying went, the two official spellings were Imperium Galacticum Káè-Tan and Xenophobia.

The Knotwox’s sudden appearance, had Fhá anything left in her bladder, would have caused her to soil herself for a third time. Not that her bladder didn’t make a collegiate try. It very much did. Several glorious spasms and her pelvic floor muscles had completed their animatedly angry phone call with Fhá BioSystems: Customer Concerns Hotline. To the great elation of the operators at the Complaint Desk-Trousers Division, rain was not in the forecast that day.

Sighing with relief, Fhá turned around to address the rota’s latest unwelcome intrusion.

She, the Knotworx, was a short petite woman. Athletic in build and graced with a magnificent mane of dark dreadlocks decorated with bits of carved wood and twisted wire that she let hang loose and unbound, the Knotworx was typically eesome. As was the way of her kin, she wore very little, only a thin band of fabric over her chest, and one covering her loins. Predictably, her backside was left entirely uncovered, reminding Fhá of perhaps the single-most obvious reason why the Ministry was perpetually nonplussed with their presence.

One could not, under the Mythic Treaty, order them to dress like a normal person. One could not even insist they dress themselves at all. To do so would incur the wrath of the local Mythic Sanctuary or, gods forbid, the Grove. Nobody, not even the most suicidal unpaid intern processing that Lune’s archival audits in B9, wanted a squad of Shift showing up to remind everyone that only by the grace and mercy of the Valkyries had they all not been atomised in an acts of most holy and glorious retribution for their crimes against the Mythica.

Wait...no, Fhá thought, realising she had mistaken the Imperial Codex Aribtraria’s sentencing guidelines for a ministerial agency who had hosted high nobility in a subpar manner. Demanding Mythics dress themselves in a manner that was anathema to them was a chastising offence.

Given what she knew she would have to handle tomorrow, Fhá briefly entertained the thought of caving the mostly naked woman’s skull in with a paperweight. After all, she couldn’t be forced to relive more of Hvórþ’s worst day if she was being held for murder in a Mythic Sanctuary.

Another sigh.

Life, unfortunately, had yet to lose the last of its lustre. That, and if she didn’t finish the job, some other poor, unfortunate sod would be assigned it. Then there was also the Duchess. Fhá couldn’t rule out the possibility that Tví had some fancy tech that would, by miracles unknown to science, drag her back from the great beyond to endure ten thousand indignities before being, after an impossibly extended lifetime of torment, at last allowed the sweet embrace of death.

Such was life in the service of Imperial nobility. One could not even cark it without being ordered to, and that order receiving authorisation from the Census Administration, an approval stamp from the Ministry of Health, a CX12-990(f) being filed with the Bureau of Imperial Collections, all of which needed to be delivered in Triplicate to the local Imperial Arbiter Garrison, Ministry of Provincial Administration, and Office of the Planetary Governor’s Secretary of Human Resource Administration, and served to the party on behalf the High Court of Justice of the Prefecturate following adjudication by the same. By the time the wheels of bureaucracy had finally finished grinding the death warrant’s way through all the interminable reams of wasted paper, the subject would, in all likelihood, have died three centuries ago, and the judgement would have to be passed onto their descendents. All of them.

There was a reason business was always booming for hitmen and barristers.

Thankfully, the Knotworx’s fashion statement—or lack thereof depending on perspective—was so subdued on her that Fhá barely even noticed her state of undress at all. They were rather curious that way, the Herbalists.

Fhá had once been so fortunate as to have seen an Orkidean on her way to the elevator banks. So enamoured with her grace and beauty and the regal mane of hair blue as lupines in full bloom and so well cared for it shimmered like silken strands of precious stones, she’d realised only several days later, upon recounting the tale to her boyfriend, that the strange and stately creature had been walking through the halls entirely naked.

Thinking back, she almost felt like they were all draped in layers of anticognizants, antithymestic wards, and dysophthalmic auras to some degree or other. What always drew most attention, it seemed, were qualities decidedly not the one that would have most obviously stuck out to lowly banals.

The Orkidean’s most memorable quality should have been the impromptu voyeur show she’d put on, but what Fhá recalled most was how she had the most magnificent hair. How that woman had the time for anything else but maintaining her majestic coiffure was beyond Fhá, but just the memory of it made her burn with envy. It fell down to her ankles like a waterfall curtain of the finest silk. Meanwhile Fhá couldn’t maintain anything longer than a chic bob to her shoulders without spending hours each day taming the dragon’s breath exploding out of her scalp. That Orkidean must have spent fortunes on hair products.

It only was Fhá’s own present discomfort at her current condition which made the Knotworx’s state of undress memorable. Otherwise, like all the Knotworx she’d encountered before, all that triviality about threads or the lack thereof would have slid out of her brain like jelly off a hot car hood.

Despite that Herbalists had an almost enviable nonchalance with displaying their bodies without any shame or inhibitions—being deprived of such emotions entirely it seemed—Fhá was not endowed with such a carefree attitude to being caught in less than acceptable dress. The embarrassment of Hvang seeing her naked in a bathroom stall with a toilet bowl full of vomit was still fresh on her mind, and though he had graciously offered her the shirt and joggers he had intended to wear to the gym after work, and while they fit her quite well, not lacking in any essential areas, she could not help but feel great discomfort at being seen in such attire at the office. It was patently disgraceful.

The Knotworx drew her gaze into piercing, violently emerald eyes through which she communicated far more in a glance than what ten thousand words could convey, and, in them, Fhá could tell her whole train of thought had been flawlessly transmitted. Fhá felt her cheeks flush and she glanced away, her stomach constricting with yet another heap of embarrassment.

“The Duchess would like to speak with you,” the Knotworx said, in a rich, deep voice, thick with the accent of some exotic place.

The Herbalist’s tone seemed relaxed and entirely aloof to Fhá’s obvious gawping. Either she was used to it, didn’t care, or some combination of both.

“Oh bollocks!” Fhá swore, realising she’d neglected to call back that evening.

“If you would.”

The Knotworx gestured at Fhá’s VirtuSync Headset. A knot formed in Fhá’s stomach as soon as she saw it. She reached out with a shaking hand, stopping just short of touching it.

Come on! Just a VR Call! By the Nine Bloody Hells!

Grabbing it, Fhá jammed it over her head, hitting the power button before she could stop herself.

She felt the Knotworx place a hand on the headset and the VirtuSync’s Nerve Lance jacked into the port at the base of her neck. A flicker of light flashed in her eyes and the neurolink synchronised. The strange, indescribable sensation of being pulled into a VScape followed before Fhá’s vision resolved and she found herself in a virtual meeting room.

To her surprise, it was the same, stock-standard VScape Conference Room used by the Ministry. Simple and white, the square room had no doors, no windows, and no fancy designs or other such distractions. It was as bland as every milquetoast suit sitting behind a Tygea desk made of condensed fibre board and glued together with the last afterthoughts of a midlife crisis receding in the rearview mirror of a life more boring than a tunnelling machine. Two chairs and, between them, a table sat in the middle of the room. In the far chair sat a woman dressed resplendently in the finest imperial raiment, fanning herself with an ornately hand-decorated Jálüng Bàdzè. Her hair, in the fashion of the day, was unstyled and let to grow from brow to nape unfettered, neither bangs nor sideburns nor any other fibre seen to by the barber’s blade. This silken mane of the Duchess Premiere hung down to the floor like a sheet of black silk where it was pooled on the long and elaborate train of her opulently embroidered robes.

This style was one Fhá had seen once before. The Provincial Duke and Duchess had visited her office several anno ago as part of their regular circuit. According to one of the visiting Duchess’s handmaids, the style was called Yanlë Dáfvzé. Made possible only by Court Sonorians trained in fleshcrafting, it symbolised the wealth and prestige of a Duchess. The longer their Yanlë Dáfvzé could be grown and maintained, the more favour and renown a court noblewoman could curry.

The Duchess of Fhá’s province, Ébúhi Yátsè Shü, had hers grown out to a train of nearly sixty centimetres. Duchess Tví’s Yanlë Dáfvzé, on the other hand, was so long as to rival only the Empress’, and one would be wise to not insult Her Supreme Majesty The Highest with garish displays of greater opulence than that of Her Supreme Majesty The Highest’s. Twenty metres could be tolerated, but one did not exceed that limit. Her Supreme Majesty the Highest’s was twenty-five, and only the Crown Princess, Her Holiness, Scion of Humanity, was permitted twenty-one. Indeed, what manner of haughty quean thought herself so high and mighty as to even approach the prestige of Her Supreme Majesty the Highest’s throne with the audacity—nay, the hubris—with such a display of ostentatious impracticality!? Off with her head! Such an insult simply could not stand!

Fhá bowed low to the Duchess, having insulted a noblewoman in perhaps the most unforgivable way—keeping her waiting. Being late to Her Highness’ beckon call was, after all, an offence the punishment for which was a nine-day death sentence by gradual immersion in a vat of corpse reprocessing solution, as well as a summary kick to the groin. Glory to the Imperial Arbiters!

“Sit, sit,” Duchess Tví said, as though the requisite genuflections irritated her, “enough with the formalities.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Fhá replied, sitting down.

“Please, if you must, m’lady is fine,” Tví insisted.

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá responded.

“What have you discovered?” Tví asked.

“There…” Fhá began, but found herself stopped. The VirtuCast playing back in her head had gummed her voice with quiet. She closed her eyes and forced the words out. “I’ve made it about twenty percent through the file.”

“Anything noteworthy?”

“It looks like...well...environmental degradation was encouraged,” Fhá continued.

“For the sake of increased profits, I presume,” Tví said. “Please, speak plainly. We’re not at court.”

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá acceded, “it very much appears that the environment was pushed to the point of collapse.”

“Of course,” Tví muttered, compressing an immensity of her disappointment and disdain for her son into those two words. “I assume the bulk of the file is post-collapse investigation.”

“Indeed,” Fhá confirmed.

“Oh, Katzali, you beautiful zealot,” Tví sighed.

“You….” Fhá began.

“I…sent him to that sector,” Tví explained, with some hesitation, as though choosing her words with utmost care, “this was his speciality, he would have been assigned the Inquiry.”

“Of course,” Fhá replied.

“Apologies, it has been a trying day,” Tví added, “I should not have interrupted. That was impolite of me. Please continue.”

“Details become somewhat fuzzy after about the sixty-third anno of His Highness’ Governance,” Fhá continued, “what records were recovered from Katzali seem to indicate a rapid decline in sociopolitical stability following an event described as ‘The Evaporation’.”

“Were you able to determine what The Evaporation was, exactly?” Tví asked.

“Not exactly,” Fhá explained, “from what Katzali found, it seems a number of influential politicians and businessmen disappeared. I presume The Evaporation refers to the manner of their disappearance, but there’s really not a lot between anno 63 and anno 91 that survived the subsequent events. After 91, everything goes dark for about a hundred anno until the IMI launched their inquiry. Somewhere in there a massive war broke out.”

“Was my son among the dead?”

“It’s hard to be certain, but from what was there, it does not appear so. You did say he had reached out a docade ago, did you not?”

“Indeed,” Duchess Tví said, “imprecise language, I’m afraid. It was a letter written some centuries ago, but was detained with its courier.”

“I think I heard this story,” Fhá recalled.

“Smuggling contraband in a Post Barge,” Duchess Tví sighed, leaning back in her chair, “I apologise for the confusion. Please, continue.”

“I managed to get through all of the preliminaries, the dispatch order, inquiry assignment, and Katzali’s initial assessments and probes,” Fhá continued, “it’s not looking great. From what he was able to gather from orbit, he was able to confirm the planet is…well, kaput. Descriptions varied, but both Katzali and his ex-military muscle agreed that the aftermath was indicative of a civil war, but the destruction profile was Rimworlds-scale annihilation.”

“That….hmm…” Duchess Tví cogitated, her brow furrowed in thought, “Katzali was meticulous. To a fault, even. He was as loathed by his acolytes as he was loathe to delegate anything to them. A zealous inquisitor. Too much for his own good. I presume he left a preponderance of raw Memarqs.”

“He…” Fhá stumbled.

“He did,” Duchess Tví said, her tone shifting ever so slightly displeased, “Ngèza did not, then, provide the appropriate NeuroSync for that assessment.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá replied, “I don’t believe I received that requisitions order.”

“Oh you poor dear,” Duchess Tví reacted, “rest assured, I will see to it this oversight is corrected.”

“Shall I prepare a 6514(e)-99 Incident Report, m’lady?” Fhá asked, her voice cracking.

“No,” Duchess Tví said, firmly, “Leave this matter to me. I will attend to it personally.”

“Should I continue with the Memarqs?”

“Yes, please,” Duchess Tví replied.

“Most of them were just Katzali’s—” Fhá began, before choking up.

“It’s okay,” Duchess Tví encouraged, “you’re fine. Take your time.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá apologised, clearing her throat.

“You’ve nothing to apologise for,” Duchess Tví dismissed.

“Most of the Memarqs I was able to review were Katzali’s personal notes,” Fhá continued, “there were about four hours of them, including their attendant documents.”

“Anything of note?”

“Besides assessments of the general state of the planet, only one thing stood out,” Fhá answered. “Katzali suspected three different classifications of Apocalypse. He’d determined it was a Class A 23-13.”

“By Édzulì,” Duchess Tví gasped.

“His IIR had narrowed down the scenario to three suspect classes. Surface probe missions—that dataset I’ve yet to analyse—ruled out a 66-99, leaving a strong 66-12 with a weak 66-40.”

“He sent a live team down, didn’t he?” Tví asked, nervously.

“He did,” Fhá confirmed. “A team of former special operators known under their call sign Dropkick Daemons. Their squad commander’s Memarq was the only one recovered. Katzali sealed it in a classified Archive.”

“The appropriate authorisations were sent to your desk,” Duchess Tví said, expectantly.

“They were, and…well…what they show is…” Fhá started, before the words caught in her throat again. “Sod! It was…”

“They encountered something, didn’t they?” Duchess Tví prodded.

“Yes,” Fhá answered.

“An anomalous entity?” Duchess Tví pressed.

“Yes,” Fhá answered.

“Extremely hostile?”

Fhá nodded.

“If you can, could you describe it to me?”

“Anthropomorphic,” Fhá said, shakily, “emaciated, ghoulish. Its proportions were all wrong, everything was too big and too small in all the wrong ways. It had this horrible almost shrunken head-like look and its eyes were enormous and black and glassy. And it was all slimy, like coated in snail goo. Oh it was awful. Terrible. I...I can’t. I’m sorry. I just…”

“You’re fine,” Duchess Tví consoled, “I know this is hard, but I need to ask a few more questions.”

“Of course, m’lady,” Fhá nodded.

“Did the creature possess a discernible sex?” Duchess Tví asked.

“I… I don’t know,” Fhá floundered, “it… it might’ve been female… I couldn’t say. Its form was so distorted and wrong. It… it didn’t really have… ugh! I’m sorry, I just…”

“It’s okay,” Duchess Tví consoled, “you’ve been through an ordeal. I can only imagine how hard this is.”

“It’s… I… I’m sorry,” Fhá stumbled, racking her brains, “It… it was...androgynous, I think. It didn’t have a… a…”

“Penis?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá apologised.

“No, no,” Duchess Tví dismissed, “there were no obvious remnants of one having previously been attached either?”

“No, not that I recall,” Fhá answered, knowing better than to ask after the nature of this line of questioning. “Why is this important, exactly?”

“I promise that is the last of such...uncomfortable questions,” Duchess Tví assured, “I believe I should have enough to pass along to the appropriate agencies.”

“I’m sorry, m’lady,” Fhá added, realising she might’ve committed a major faux pas. Questioning a High Noble’s line of questioning? How dare she! “I shouldn’t be so caught up in myself with your son…”

“My son,” Duchess Tví interrupted, “deserves no pity, and certainly none of yours. Speaking plainly, and in confidence, his commission was an exile. For the actions that earned him it, the long arm of justice does not reach. Not in this Imperium. He is, or perhaps was, high nobility. I possess now, as I did centuries ago, only but lingering fondness for that worm, and only from having laboured for three days to bring him into this world, and to have cared for him as a mother ought. But even a mother’s love has its limits, Fhá. This, his last and greatest achievement, has trespassed even that, and by so far a margin I dare say I plumb the depths of antipathy for it.”

“Then, if m’lady does not mind my asking, why are you so keen to know the fate of His Highness?”

“It is not Ëchüha’s fate that I am keen to know,” Duchess Tví answered, “but the testimony of his last and greatest cruelty.”

“I… think I understand,” Fhá replied.

“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” Duchess Tví insisted, “I would be there myself, to sift through the aftermath, were it possible. Instead I must rely on you, and I am grateful, if nothing else, that this task found its way to the right hands.”

“I’m honoured, m’lady,” Fhá said, bowing her head.

“I’ve thought up another question,” Duchess Tví refocused, closing her Jálüng Bàdzè. “The creature, did a name come to you? Something that felt right, but perhaps you couldn’t explain?”

“Yes,” Fhá answered, “a wraith. A wraith of wrath.”

“Hmm…” Duchess Tví hummed, leaning back in her chair. Her brow creased as she pondered Fhá’s answered. After a long period of silence, the Duchess spoke up again.

“Thank you for this. I’ll reach out to some of my contacts. Until tomorrow, please, go home, take some rest.”

“Yes, m’lady.” Fhá replied.

“One more thing,” Duchess Tví remembered, “what did you say the commander’s name was?”

“I don’t think I did, m’lady,” Fhá answered, “it was Hvórþ.”

“Clanname?” Duchess Tví requested.

“Null entry,” Fhá said, “I’m sorry, m’lady.”

“Don’t be,” Duchess Tví dismissed, “it’s the Inquisition. I’d be more surprised if Katzali had included that information. Tell me about Hvang. Is he reliable? Or, dependable, I should say?”

“Come again?” Fhá reacted, taken by surprise.

“Your colleague in the neighbouring cubicle,” Duchess Tví clarified, “Hvang, I believe is his name. He is dependable, yes?”

“When he’s not asleep, m’lady,” Fhá answered, blushing. The Duchess must have been aware of her breakdown in the bathroom. “I suppose.”

“Good,” Duchess Tví said, “that will be all. Until tomorrow.”

“Yes, m’lady,” Fhá farewelled as she felt herself being drawn out of the VirtuScape.

The Nerve Lance disengaged, jacking Fhá out of VR. She took the headset off and threw it onto her desk before leaning over, resting her head in her hands, elbows on the cheap, Tygea polymer. Rubbing her temples with her thumbs, Fhá let out a long groan. There wasn’t enough Cloud-Forest wine and fine Fennos chocolate in the universe to get her through this in any semblance of okay. Princelings and their hedonistic excesses. Causing messes whole mobs of people had to clean up and pay for was seemingly the only thing they were good for. The insufferable, entitled, good-for-nothing fuck-ups! Even his own mother had no love for him! The things he must have done to accomplish that!

“Um…” the Knotworx spoke up, tapping Fhá on the shoulder.

“What do you want!?” she snapped. “Can’t you see I’m having a moment!?”

“Uh…” the Knotworx reacted, stepping away from her, hands raised, “I’ll… uh… I’ll just…”

Groaning, Fhá grabbed her bag and pushed past the Knotworx, making for the elevators before anyone else could fuck up her day any more than it already had been.

Ashes slipped through her fingers. The urn, there on the marble floors, shattered to pieces, the grey aftermath scattered on godless ground. Looking up, she saw the priest. He was standing with his back to her, fastening his robes with a length of black rope. She watched as he smoothed his robes, settled his shoulders, and walked away, never once acknowledging she was even there.

Gathering what was left of her clothes, she knelt down and tried to scoop up her mother’s ashes, putting whatever she could into scraps of her dress she tied around the corners. Then she rose to her feet and left the sanctuary, the last of her tears drying on her cheek.

As she went, blood trailed behind her, painting the floors, and then climbed the walls, and then the vaulted ceilings in darkening shades of crimson. When she reached the doors, the whole of the church was a deep maroon. She placed her hand on the doorknobs, and the cathedral turned black.

“NOBUO!” a voice shouted in the distance.

Fhá felt her blood go cold.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Lìngbi! Godsdammit!”

She whipped her head around, eyes locked on the altar. There it was, that horrid, emaciated thing—the priest’s robes sloughing off of it. Its jaw unhinged like a snake and it arced its head back, letting out a shriek that shook the walls. Stained glass shattered, cracks in the stonework spiderwebbed from around the creature.

“No, no, no,” Fhá whimpered, backing up into the doors.

The creature’s head snapped back, eyes locked on Fhá. There was a crack of fire between her legs and urine poured out onto the floor. The creature cocked its head to the side and opened its mouth. Instead of another long, piercing screech, the voice of Hvórþ screamed from its maw.

“NO! GODS DAMMIT! LÌNGBI! NO! FUCK!”

She dropped the bundles in her hands. Her clothes fell to the floor and the severed, dessicated heads of Kàng, Lìngbi, and Nobuo rolled out. Screaming, she turned and reached for the door handles behind her. Instead of cold bronze, she felt cold, damp, clammy skin.

Slowly, she looked up and—

“Fuck!” Fhá swore, toppling out of bed. “Empress’s Ovaries! Fuck! Gods dammit!”

Naka, her boyfriend, moaned from the three quarters of the bed he always ended up occupying. Fhá thumped her hand blindly about on her bedside table, eventually finding the switch for the bedside lamp.

“You okay?” Naka grumbled, patting the quarter of the bed Fhá always ended up curled up in.

Folding over, Fhá slumped against the side of the bed and tried to slow her breathing.

“Nope,” Naka mumbled, crumpling himself over. “Definitely not okay.”

“I-I really don’t need your shit right now, Naka!” Fhá exclaimed, fresh tears flowing down her face. “Fuck!”

“What happened?” he asked, pushing himself out of bed.

“I can’t talk about it,” Fhá whimpered, curling up into herself.

Naka shuffled over and sat down, placing his arm around her.

“It’s okay,” he said, pulling her closer. “I got you. I always got you.”

“I know,” Fhá sniffled, resting her head on his shoulder.

“Which one was it?” he asked, rubbing her arm with his thumb.

“The funeral,” Fhá answered.

“Shit,” Naka swore.

“Piss and vinegar,” Fhá added.

“Tell me about it,” Naka chuckled, “fuck, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t joke about that.”

“It’s fine,” Fhá sighed.

“No it’s not,” Naka said.

Fhá wanted to snap at him, to tell him to just shut the fuck up, but he was right. It wasn’t fine. It was the opposite of fine. Every time she thought she could make it a week without waking up in the middle of the night in a puddle of sweat and urine, screaming axe murder and chipper shredder jubilee, it happened again. Always. And there Naka was. Always. Always there with a shoulder to cry into and half his arse sat in a fresh mess.

“I’m sorry,” Fhá said.

“Nothing to apologise for,” Naka dismissed, shifting his weight so he could slip an arm around her waist.

“I woke you up again,” she argued, “and pissed the bed.”

“You know I love your golden showers,” Naka said in that special way of his. “Best alarm clock a guy could ask for.”

“Stop it!” Fhá exclaimed, blushing.

“You wanna talk about it?” Naka asked, pulling her closer.

“Don’t you get tired of hearing the same…same fucked shit every week!?” Fhá said, exasperatedly.

“How many times have you heard the Copper Pot Surprise?” Naka asked.

“Okay, that’s different,” Fhá objected.

“Is it? Come on. You’ll feel better. You always do.”

Sighing heavily, Fhá turned, placing a hand on the chest of her favourite, insufferable, obnoxious, slightly rotund, feckless gobshite. Naka and his stupid, infectious smile and all the compassion and care he’d somehow not had squeezed out of him yet. She loved him. And hated him. No one was this good.

He deserved so much better.

“It was different this time,” Fhá said, lowering her gaze, “It-it started….” Fhá took a deep breath. “It started after, and it-it never starts after. Always before and-and there was this-this—fuck! I-I can’t talk about it. I just can’t!”

“Is it about work?”

Fhá nodded. Naka sighed angrily. She felt him tense up in that way he did when rage had set into his bones.

“It’s classified, isn’t it?” Naka assumed.

Fhá nodded.

“Motherfuckers,” Naka swore.

“It’s okay,” Fhá said, rubbing her hand over his chest. “I got this. Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not okay,” Naka growled.

He was right. But what could she do? There wasn’t a way out. Not with the Duchess Premiere being involved. All she could do was soldier on.

Fhá shifted her head, placing her ear over his heart. Closing her eyes, she focused on the sound his heartbeat until nothing else—

BZZZZZZZ

“Oh, who the fuck is it!?” Naka exclaimed, glancing over his shoulder at the clock on his bedside table. “It’s four-thirty in the fucking morning!”

“Just leave it,” Fhá said, before the buzzer sounded off again.

Naka withdrew his arm and rose to his feet, hands forming big, meaty fists.

“Naka!” Fhá pleaded, clutching at his wrist.

He shook her off as the buzzer sounded off again, even more insistently now.

“Naka! Leave it!” she cried out, as he stormed across the room.

“I got this,” he said, flinging the door open.

Fhá sputtered out a babble of pleading nothings, but he had his mission. Once his mind was set, there was no persuading him.

“Ow! What the fuck!?” Naka swore from the main room.

Rising to her feet, Fhá called out, “hon’, who is it!?”

A thump on the floor sent Fhá’s pulse back through the ceiling. She leapt to her feet and raced to the doorway. Peeking her head out into the hallway, she saw—

“’Ello, sweetcheeks,” a man in a black mask said.

Fhá saw a streak of black and—

—her head rolled forward. Groaning, Fhá came enough to her senses to feel the right side of her face pounding like a drum brigade on Victory Day. Immediately her pulse spiked and everything flooded back in.

She opened her eyes, but realised she’d had her head stuffed in a black sack that smelled like arsecheeks, stale vomit, and bottom shelf, bargain market aftershave. Without even needing the feedback from her pinched nerves, nor the pointless, dramatic struggling, cursing, and rainbow streak of all colours of foul language, she knew she’d been ziptied. Wrists, elbows, knees, and ankles. The seatbelt strapping her in and the leather seats stank of the Inquisition.

“This it?” a man said, the vehicle slowing to a stop.

“Well if it ain’t the fookin’ crown cunt o’ the ages!” the other swore.

Fhá heard a window roll down, and the sound of bare feet on stone approaching.

“Oi! Got you a present!” the second man called out.

The door to Fhá’s right opened, and she felt a cold breeze rush in. A second later, the door shut again. She heard footsteps circle the vehicle and stop at the second man’s window.

“Park the car,” she commanded in a voice like songbirds and velvetine.

Fhá heard the driver shift the car into park.

“In the garage, Kàn.”

“Sure thing, guv,” the second man, or Kàn by the sounds of it, said.

“Bloody hell, you’re even worse than Bajin,” the woman muttered, “don’t do anything more until I get there.”

“You the boss, guv,” Kàn replied, rolling up the window.

Just from how the words dripped off his lips and polluted the air, Fhá could taste the amount of shit he’d eaten to make that grin possible. Kàn chuckled darkly and bumped fists with the other Agent of the Inquisition—Bajin by deduction.

Kàn put the vehicle in gear and she felt it take several slow turns before stopping again. The two men unfastened their safety belts and exited the vehicle simultaneously. Both approached her side of the car and Fhá felt her pulse skyrocket again.

The door flung open and four gloved hands grabbed her by the arm, attempting to yank her out of the vehicle without undoing the seatbelt. These were clearly not Agents of the Inquisition but bottom rank, ex-military, Inqmercs. All brawns and no brain.

One hand released her arm long enough to unfasten the seatbelt before jamming back into her armpit. Together, the two men dragged her out of the car and flung her onto a cold concrete floor, cackling like juveniles as her oversized t-shirt came up over her buttocks.

Turning over, Fhá tried to pull her shirt down, as the two men snickered and laughed.

“Oi!” Kàn barked, kicking her in the side. “Din ya mum tell ya don’ block a good view!”

Fhá gritted her teeth, curling up on her side, kidney splitting. To the howling delight of the two men, her shirt bunched up over her hips even more. In the distance, she heard an elevator ding.

“Hey! You like that, huh!?” Bajin jeered, kneeling down.

Ice ran through Fhá’s veins and she went still. She knew this music. It was the only song that played in church pews and in throats of devotional choirs. She squeezed her eyes shut, preparing for—

“BAJIN!” the voice from before roared, lightning crackling off her voice.

The two men went silent. Fhá curled up even tighter. The garage emptied of air, but the woman’s voice echoed like the fury of a goddess off its walls.

“Where is Naka!?” the woman demanded.

“He’s…uh…in the car, madame,” Bajin stammered.

“You didn’t kill him, did you?” the woman responded, like a mother chastising her delinquent son.

“Uh…no,” Bajin said.

The woman flung the door to the car open again.

“The Duchess is going to have a field day with you two,” the woman growled.

Bajin snickered.

“You think this funny?” the woman retorted.

“Innit?” Kàn chuckled.

“Not the first time we’ve upset the Duchess,” Bajin added, “what’s she gonna do?”

“Nothing,” the woman said.

“Exactly,” Bajin responded, smugly.

“His Imperial Majesty does not accept sloppy seconds,” the woman added.

A cold pit dropped like a bomb in Fhá’s stomach. The Emperor was behind this!?

“Unbind them,” the woman commanded, “swiftly. And I swear by the Emperor’s Signet, you’d best treat their wrists like those of Her Majesty’s.”

“Yes’m,” Kàn peeped, all the bluster and bravado replaced by timid, quaking, terror.

Fhá felt a warm touch on her back.

“Miss Vngví,” the woman greeted, gently pulling Fhá’s shirt down over her buttocks. “I am so, so sorry about all of this.”

She felt the tip of a knife slip between her wrists and immediately tensed up.

“It’s okay,” the woman said, the zipties snapping off her wrists, “I have you now. You’re safe with me.”

Once the zipties around her ankles and knees had been cut, the woman slipped a hand under Fhá’s armpits and helped her to her feet. Grabbing at the bag, Fhá pulled it over her head, immediately regretting that decision. The light of the garage gouged her eyes like the noon sun.

“Oh, fuck,” she groaned, blinking and shaking her head, “who the fuck are you people!?”

Lifting her head, she looked square in the face of—

“Holy shit!”

#

Fhá gripped the hem of her t-shirt, feeling even more embarrassed and humiliated than before. Even with an Orkidean standing tits and ass fully in the wind beside her Fhá wasn’t comforted in the least. Walking around like it was their birthday was kind of the Orkidean thing. No one really gave it a second thought either. If anything, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like sacrilege to dress one up like they were some kind of pathetic, banal human. Orkideans were avatars of an actual deity—or something like that. Whatever their deal was, Fhá was most decidedly not that.

Standing in the actual Duchess Premiere’s palace in nothing but a ratty, oversized t-shirt about as full of holes as a dish sponge and soaked in urine, sweat, and a few crusty stains from a few nights back, she felt worse than naked. At least if she was naked, she wouldn’t have had her filthy night-shirt on display.

Worse still was Naka, splayed out on a cushioned table looking thing. His face looked like a blueberry with the right side dipped in strawberry jam. Adding the cherry on top the fruit bowl of douchebaggery, he had fallen almost entirely out of his trademark bedtime banana hammock.

Seeing him like that didn’t make her blood boil. It made her blood go supercritical. If the Inquisition wanted to parade her about in a walk of shame, fine. They didn’t need to bring Naka into it too.

This was even worse than yesterday. Yesterday it was only her and her coworker, and all she wanted to do was curl up and die, but at least it was only Hvang, and he gave her his gym clothes.

Here, today, all she could do was stand there on display for a small audience to see, one eye swollen over, desperately wanting to just cover Naka with her shirt and then go find the nearest closet to hide in and never come out of again. But no, said the Orkidean. She was quite insistent they all stand there and wait. Well, all except Naka. Who was still out cold from having his face pulped by Agents Rapey and Sexpest.

Duchess Tví was on her way, posthaste, the Orkidean said. She’d be here in less than five minutes. There was no time and vanishingly little point in appropriating someone’s clothes or taking them off the Inqmercs. Why? Because reasons.

In the eternities between seconds, Fhá wrung her hands, the muscles of her belly clenching compulsively as waves of fresh embarrassment and humiliation tsunamied through her like a seiche following a glacial collapse in a polar fjord.

What was she going to do when the Duchess arrived? How was she going to explain this? Any of this?

Please let this be another nightmare, Fhá thought, curling her toes as tight as she could in the lush carpet. Please, please, please.

Across the room, she saw the sliding doors shudder ever so slightly. Fhá winced. Through a crack in her eyelid, she saw the doors slide open, almost without a sound. Attended by a trio of handmaids, Fhá saw the Duchess sweep into the room like a beautiful landslide, her already vexed expression deepening into an indignant scowl.

“You two,” the Duchess said, pointing at the two Inqmercs, “I’ll deal with you in a second.”

Turning, she addressed the Orkidean, “Yuhii, what happened?”

“The inevitable, it seems,” the Orkidean replied, deep frustration in her voice.

“Énv! Tían!” the Duchess barked, making no attempt to hide her fury, “Take the young master Ikedo to Qer’iñol at once! Then see to it he is prepared for His Majesty!”

“Yes, m’lady,” two of the handmaids said, in unison.

Fhá watched as they gathered her beloved up into their arms, taking great care to ensure his thong was properly adjusted. Together, the pair of young, resplendetly dressed handmaids lifted Naka and whisked him away, the third opening the door and departing behind them, sliding the doors shut with a bowed head.

After they had departed, the Duchess crossed the room, stopping first in front of the two Inqmercs.

“Stay here,” she said, “exactly here. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes’m,” the two men responded.

“Excuse me?” the Duchess recoiled.

“Yes, Your Highness,” the two men blurted out.

“I’m not convinced you know what remaining in the exact spot you are presently in means,” the Duchess retorted. “Look at your feet. Do you see where they are? Good. That is exactly where they will remain until I return to personally tell you otherwise. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” the two man said.

“I’m not convinced,” the Duchess fired back, “do you see this face? Yes. This one. My face. Do you see how my mouth is moving when you hear me speak? Yes? Good. If you see any other face and hear words coming out of it, words telling you to move from the exact place I told you to be, expressing it even as my direct command, is that my personal return and command for you to move?”

“No, Your Highness,” the men responded.

“So you do understand clear and direct instructions,” the Duchess said, “which means until my return, you had best think long and hard as to how you’re going to explain why you ignored His Majesty, the Emperor’s, clear and direct instructions on how His Imperial Majesty’s Honoured Guests were to receive their Invitation and Summons!”

“Your Highness, I—“

The Duchess raised a finger, silencing Bajin in black.

“Did I give you permission to speak!?” The Duchess barked.

“No, Your Highness,” Bajin responded.

“Then why do you defile my home and insult my guests and me by polluting the air with excuses!?” The Duchess snapped.

Fhá saw Bajin open his mouth to offer a reply, then he closed it again, recognising the nature of the question. The Duchess nodded and produced from her robes a ceremonial dagger. Bajin’s face fell. Fhá didn’t know exactly what the dagger meant, but she knew enough about the traditions of Nobility to suspect there was an expectation of blood in it. Bajin’s shaking hands receiving the dagger all but confirmed it.

Turning to Fhá, the Duchess’s expression changed dramatically. Fury washed away, replaced by an expression of genuine shame and concern.

“Miss Vngví,” she said, leading her away.

Yuhii—the Orkidean—followed as the Duchess opened a set of double doors at the back of what Fhá assumed was some kind of foyer and ushered them through. Yuhii shut the doors behind them. The Duchess set off at a brisk pace, leading Fhá away from the room and the muffled cries of Bajin as he performed whatever act of mutilation was expected of him.

“I must apologise profusely for the circumstances that brought you here,” the Duchess said, hurriedly but with sincerity. “I must apologise as well for the suddenness of all of this. I’m afraid events have accelerated too far for me to explain everything, but I will endeavour to fill in some details for you.”

“Of course, m’lady,” Fhá responded, struggling to keep up with the Duchess and keep her shirt from flying up over her buttocks.

“I briefed His Majesty, The Emperor this morning on some details you shared with me earlier. He demanded a complete audit of your administration and requested to speak with you personally at the earliest possible moment. His instructions were appended to an Imperial Summons that was intended to have been given to you by Yuhii, not those two bumbling idiots.”

The Duchess ushered Fhá into a bathroom, continuing her monologue, “It seems Duke Itsikasho dignified no part of His Imperial Majesty’s instructions with more than a passing glance. Yuhii, who will be assisting you from here forward, was meant to be the one who delivered them to you, personally, and at an appropriate hour, and most decidedly without the use of violence.”

The Duchess leaned up against one of the counters in the resplendent bathroom, pinching her brow in frustration.

“Yuhii, don’t even think about apologising,” the Duchess said, before the Orkidean could even open her mouth, “this clusterfuck is not your fault.”

“I was responsible,” Yuhii objected.

“The duke did an end run around you,” the Duchess countered, lifting herself off the counter.

“Something I failed to account for,” Yuhii argued.

“I do not have time to debate this issue, Yuhii,” the Duchess said, turning back to Fhá. “Tomorrow you’ll be meeting with His Majesty, Emperor Chéxing XXIV. My staff will ensure you are prepared for this. I’m afraid, Fhá, that the process will be somewhat uncomfortable. Acutely so given what you’ve just been through. I wish there was another way, but, unfortunately, there are traditions and customs even His Majesty must abide.”

“M’lady,” Fhá spoke, “may I ask why His Majesty wishes to speak with me?”

The Duchess sighed heavily. Fhá’s heart sank. Whatever the reason, it could not have been good.

“He wants the measure of the woman,” she answered, “before he makes her an offer she would be wise to accept.”

A chill went down Fhá’s spine. Before she could ask what the Duchess meant, she had departed, leaving only the Orkidean behind. Something deep inside Fhá told her she really did not want to know what wasn’t being said.

“Come,” Yuhii said, placing a soothing hand on Fhá’s back, “let’s get you cleaned up before the tailors get here.”

“The what?” Fhá blurted out.

“There are many ways to appear before His Majesty,” Yuhii elaborated, taking Fhá by the hand, “one’s appearance should only match the occasion.”

Fhá felt herself being pulled along, her brain fogging over like that time she’d humoured Naka’s whim to go see a hypnotist. What a night that turned out to be. Something told Fhá there would be no psychedelic mushrooms, and no mindbending threesome in a pillow pit.

Wait…no, that threesome was the Sonorian we went to, Fhá realised. That was wild. I’d like to do that again. The psychedelic mushrooms too.

“All that and more can be arranged,” Yuhii said, turning the faucet on an enormous marble tub.

“Are you in my head?” Fhá recoiled.

“Relax,” Yuhii replied, a dense, fruity, floral smell filling the room. “Ah, yes, the boiler received my nudge. Very good.”

“Why-how-can you not!?” Fhá exclaimed.

“You wear your thoughts on the surface, miss Vngví,” Yuhii responded, “as most do. I cannot help but feel them like the rising steam.”

“I-I-I give up!” Fhá stammered, ripping her shirt off. She threw it on the floor and thrust her arms out angrily. “Happy now! Anything else you want to—”

The Orkidean placed a finger to her lips, amethyst eyes silencing her with no more than a locked gaze. For a moment, they both stood, looking into each other’s eyes. Fhá couldn’t explain how, but she felt like she knew what Yuhii had been through before, the pain and shame and horror of it. A violation so deep and so intense that the violence of it never went away. No peace could be made with it. All she could do, like Fhá, was carry it. And Yuhii had carried her pain far longer than Fhá could even comprehend.

Yuhii turned away, and Fhá looked down at her feet, at the shirt she’d thrown there, then back up at the Orkidean. This time, though, all the magic veils she hid behind were gone. Nothing hidden.

“Yes,” Yuhii said, idly twirling a finger in the water, “you’re beginning to understand.”

“I…” Fhá began, standing there in total confusion, “I don’t understand anything.”

“Come,” Yuhii said, closing the faucet.

The Orkidean swung her legs over the side of the tub and slipped into the water, the enormous tub deep enough for her to submerge in completely. Yuhii broke the surface like a mermaid, so graceful and mesrmerising it drew Fhá in like a sailor to a siren. Without even realising it, she’d crossed the space between and—

“Ah!” Fhá yelped, colliding with the side of the tub.

Fhá! You dumb, clumsy cunt!

The world inverted as she fell over the edge into what could have been a swimming pool. While hanging upside down, head resting on the marble floor of this excessive monument to absurd luxury, the absolute state of her situation crystalised in a moment of acute clarity.

What in the ever-loving fuck am I even doing here? On Imperial Seat? In Duchess Tví’s palace? In the Duchess’s bathroom!? In her tub!? With another woman!? Butt fucking naked!? Without Naka!? Without Naka knowing!? Without him agreeing to it!? What the fuck!? This is so fucked! Fuck me! Fuck Tví! Fuck this! Fuck everything!

She wanted out.

Out of this bath.

Out of this palace.

Off this planet.

Off this ride on the crazy coaster speeding at mach fuck to loony land.

She wanted to wake up.

In her bed.

To her alarm clock screaming in her ear.

To roll over before dawn and find this was all a weird, crazy, terrible nightmare.

She wanted to get dressed in her uncomfortable officewear, ride her usual stuffy, overcrowded, sweaty train to her terrible job. She wanted to go back to her terrible assignment, have more terrible memory arqives downloaded into her brain, have another terrible mental breakdown, and be committed to a terrible institution where they’d stick her in the ass with the stupid juice and leave her in a drug-induced, drooling stupor until she expired of neglect and dysentery.

More than anything, she just wanted her life to go back to that blissful era when it was only her boyfriend and her gynaecologist who saw her in a state of undress.

Unfortunately, by the distress in her lungs, it very much appeared there were no lucky stars, and she was going to have to go through with whatever it was her imperious imperial overlords had decided she would.

Ballsacks and cockweasels, Fhá thought. Maybe I could just…

Before Fhá could finish thinking about drowning herself, much less succceed in doing so, she felt two soft but strong hands grip her and guide her back to the surface. Fhá sucked in a huge breath, felt delicate fingers push hair out of her face, saw sunkissed skin over her shoulder. Looking into Yuhii’s face, what Fhá expected to find was not there.

It wasn’t a judgemental expression. There was no chiding glint, no disappointed scowl, no furrow brow of equal parts exhaustion and frustration. Sympathetic understanding. That’s all. Fhá didn’t know how, but this being, who couldn’t feel this way about being so exposed in front of others, understood her. It was like Yuhii knew it from experiencing it through the eyes of others, every intimate detail of it, but thousands upon thousands of times over. Memories upon memories contained within her crystalline heart, whole liftetimes absorbed like some kind of mimetic sponge.

The moment of clarity passed like so much gelatin off a hot tin roof. In its place a new clarity came over her, an inversion of the shadows, the tarry thornbushes, the eyes glinting above bared fangs. She felt her abdomen relax, the tension in her shoulders melt away. Everything was okay. Yuhii was there and she would take care of her, ensure nothing happened to her.

She was safe.

Safe…

What a novel idea.

“Mm-hmm,” Yuhii murmured, wading in front of Fhá.

“I…” Fhá said, tears welling up in her eyes. “I don’t want… I don’t want to do this.”

“I know,” Yuhii said.

“I want to go home,” Fhá sniffled.

“I know,” Yuhii repeated.

“Can you...can you make it just...go away?” Fhá asked.

“I can,” Yuhii answered, “would you like that?”

“Yes,” Fhá answered.

“Okay,” Yuhii hummed, a blanket of psychic soothe descending on Fhá.

Waves of intoxicating mesmer flooded Fhá’s mind, pushing aside her discomfort and anxiety, quieting her inhibitions. Shame, humiliation, all the roiling tumult of violence and violation retreated beyond the offing. Deep inside the Orkidean’s Soothe, Fhá drifted off and all of it stopped mattering anymore.

She felt Yuhii’s hands washing her head to toe, and it. Felt. Heavenly. Every delicate motion like an effleurage by a masseuse who’d spent aions mastering her craft. Yuhii’s were just the first of dozens of hands to pass over every millimetre of her body, pushing, pulling, measuring, marking and moulding her until her flesh passed the court’s muster. From this safe distance Yuhii had taken her, Fhá could see things differently, see it removed from trauma and pain kept at bay, and it was blissful.

Duchess Tví had sent her personal retinue. Gentle but firm, they saw to her with the same attention as they would have the Duchess Tví herself. Not because they had been ordered to, though they had, but by each individual’s own desires. This army of tailors and beauticians, all with no fewer than six different advanced degrees in subjects Fhá could not even pronounce worshipped at the altar of the human form, had dedicated themselves so totally to their respective arts that nothing short of perfection would do. Their gaze was glorifying and their touch sanctifying, like they saw the image of the gods in her, and to bring it out like sculptors from stone was a most sacred duty.

By the time she found herself in a thin silk robe, lying down beside Naka on a bed that felt like cloud nine met the best drugs money could buy in the heaven of emperors, it wasn’t because of the Orkidean’s strange magicks. So sublty had Yuhii withdrawn her Soothe that Fhá only noticed it after Duchess Tví’s Sonorians had departed, having left her with the crown of an Orkidean.

All that care, that tender attention, it was wonderful. She felt aglow. She felt like she did when Naka would spend an entire Solsday treating her like a queen—when he’d bring her breakfast, carry her to a delicious bubble bath and spend hours washing and massaging her hair. He’d massage her back, draw beautiful things on her belly with a marker, and they’d make love for hours, and fall asleep in each other’s arms. She felt like that. Like she would laying in bed, tangled up in Naka, eyes half-closed in blissful contentment.

Turning her head, she looked up at Yuhii, sitting on the edge of the largest bed Fhá had ever seen. For all that had happened, all that she’d been through the last few days, and how upset she would have been right to be over this Imperial Makeover, she was grateful the strange and beautiful creature sitting there had been there. Yuhii had made an experience that should have been exrcuciating a blissful one, one Fhá could remember fondly.

“Thank you,” she said, reaching her hand out.

Yuhii smiled and Fhá knew exactly what the Orkidean meant. It was what she lived for, what brought her more pleasure than anything in The Way. Leaning over, Yuhii stretched out an arm and placed a hand over Fhá’s. Closing her eyes and fingers, Fhá absorbed every part of the experience for as long as felt right. Then she let go, rolling back onto her side, and draped her arm back over Naka’s chest.

The day had been long, and its light was many hours passed. From the bedside, Yuhii began to a hum a wistful melody and Fhá felt heself drifting off to sleep. As she went, the lilting voice of Yuhii was in her ear, singing softly a song in a tongue Fhá didn’t know, but nevertheless could understand as if it were in Kàé Làm.

Yuhii sang of a lesser quantum of serenity bought by tooth and claw and the long, arduous descent from the lonely mountain where one embraces their dark passengers and leaves them.

Maybe tomorrow wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe, for once, the Imperium’s callous hand wouldn’t leave her with a fresh set of scars. Maybe.