When the blast came, it was something out of most inhuman nightmares Lachlan had had when he began his physical conversion. The roar of the Heart’s energy pulsating through what he figured must be magically conductive pylons within the walls of the citadel was enough to make him turn his hearing off, and a part of him was thankful that the glass orb in his hand didn’t resonate with the extreme vibrations being fired into the air around the building and immediately shatter. Instead he clutched it with both of his hands as he pressed himself to the ground right outside a service door, trying to ignore the fact that the very colour was being sapped out of everything around him.
As the vibrations wound down, Lachlan switched his hearing back on just as cheering erupted in the distance outside the perimeter walls of the citadel. He reached back to grab his extra organic arm, and grimaced. Though not entirely electronically augmented, the stolen limb was still in shock, rendered catatonic by the magical fallout; the robotic arm likely wasn’t faring well either. It was pretty much unavoidable, but there was nothing else he could do in the situation. He reached out with the orb, holding it right against the keypad next to the service door, and watched as the Steamkind creature inside flit around to different parts of the machine, activating otherwise unrelated components.
There was a beep, and the door’s magnetic lock undid itself, much to his relief.
Lachlan wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the interior of the citadel was remarkably cold, being several degrees below room temperature. Still, he spotted heating vents in the crosshatch of ventilation ducts overhead, so the Order’s bishops clearly did not necessarily live in Arctic conditions. He made a mental note of them, and followed the wall past the storage room chock full of assorted medical equipment and out into a small bay area, the wide room lined on both sides with old, musty beds. Each mattress bore an imprint of suffering: the stains of a mixture of fluid so varied that not one could be made out on its own, painting the middles of the pad. To the metal poles in between the beds were bolted manacles, their open ends hanging emptily along the floor.
He stopped to stare for a while. The bay wasn’t in use, most likely because of the complicated duties on the day of the parade, but even just from a glance he knew exactly what this was. He didn’t have to know what label laid outside of this room, where a convenient elevator down to the area immediately surrounding the heart waited, through which they would transport the converted. The Archbishop has mentioned it in correspondence a few times, before the letters had stopped coming and Lachlan had assumed he too, had been lost to his object of worship.
He pressed an ear to the reinforced door. There was no sound of movement or speech, but that didn’t mean he was alone. It wasn’t locked, so he swung it open slowly, peering out.
The elevator he had expected sat in a recess on the opposite side of the long hallway he had opened into. It was a cargo lift with cage exterior, and a control panel on the wall, which mean he simply tapped the orb to it, and mechanisms in the wall began responding. Lachlan hid back inside the conversion theatre, just in case someone came by, and watched as the cage was pulled open for him.
With one last peek to either side, he hopped into the lift, and pressed the button hanging from a wire inside the cage for the lowest basement floor. The elevator shuddered, and he was soon cruising downwards, each floor he passed flashing him with identical ceiling lights and sublevel structure.
Clever bugger, aren’t you? He thought, shaking the orb just a little. The Steamkind scurried back into its vial.
The three lowest levels the lift reached were absolutely frigid, and Lachlan noticed his breath was becoming fog that rolled out from his lips. Again, he wasn’t sure what he expected. Of course the area around the magical superweapon an ice colony was based on was extremely cold.
His lift screeched to a halt, and the gate was lifted up, allowing him entrance onto the very edge of a massive circular chamber, lined with concentric stone steps that went all around the circular pit in the middle, each lower than the last. Chains dropped from the ceiling, four of them stretching into the pit, each one attached to something below. The only light that allowed him to just barely see were faint lamps buried at the bottom of each level.
This was the crypt, where his target was buried along with their possessions. Slowly, he stepped down into the next rings in the chamber one by one, noting the very faint runic inscriptions that were carved into the rock, and leaned over the central pit.
Hanging from the ends of the four chains where they terminated connected to a metal ring frozen over, in its centre a black, shrivelled thing the size of a small car that pulsed slowly, the vague arteries at its superior aspect shifting as it squeezed against its binds. There were many cylindrical structures stuck out of its septum at all sides, obviously electronic in nature but of unknown purpose even to him.
Lachlan looked up, at the complex receiving dish that channelled the heart’s power up through the rest of the citadel, and then down, past the Heart itself, to the darkness below. Naturally, he took a step forwards and dropped into it, slowing himself by catching the chain and continuing his descent by letting go.
It turned out the ground was a lot closer than he thought, so he didn’t fall for long before he hit ice and stood up. The orb in his hand began to glow, its internal light diodes activating courtesy of his Steamkind assistant. Moving it around, the light reflected off of ice, which covered the floor and protruded up in spikes, and seemed to extend. By this point he was even more thankful for the fact that he couldn’t feel the cold like a normal human would, the sentiment compounded by the first body he ran into.
It was human, he thought. The extent of the frostbite had all but eaten away at his skin, which laid in black shards on the ground around where he stood frozen. Lachlan glanced at the space between his clavicles. Empty.
He quickly moved onto the next. This corpse was female, and disturbingly, most of the face was still intact under the ice. Still seeing nothing at the top of the sternum, he moved on again, not wanting to think about how they would have felt when the heart…
Lachlan raised the orb a little higher, and squinted into the darkness in a different direction. Something there glinted red, and he quickly moved towards it, to see another woman frozen with her arms over her face. Sticking out of the ruined top of her ribcage was a series of mechanical parts, constituting an experimental techno-organic pump, the vial plugged into the aperture in her chest brimming with something red and crystalline.
He moved around her, picking up scraps of her clothing that had frozen and broken off, and then sticking his hands into the hardened pockets. His fingers finally brushed against something small and cold, and he broke it off the other ice that kept it stuck to the corpse. In the light of the orb, he could see it was a small plastic parcel, the interior of which contained a transparent glass disc the size of a small thimble, its volume pockmarked by trillions, maybe quadrillions of tiny dots. Data storage.
Lachlan pocketed the memory drive, knowing full well that such a product would have been made with resistance to the elements in mind - and now that the owner was going to want it back, he had leverage. He also screwed off the vial of red crystals from the same corpse, and slotted it into a storage space on the robotic arm. No harm in being a little overprepared.
As he got ready to hop up and grab onto the heart’s chains, he heard the bigger lift connected to the room above arrive, and more lights in the chamber turning on, casting a column of brilliance down through the aperture. Slowly he backed away, pushing himself into the graveyard of upright bodies that were now more obvious in the additional brightness.
Footsteps approached the pit, two sets of mured shoes, and one with the sound of a metal against the stone floor of the upper crypt.
“My lady, it simply isn’t enough?” a voice said through a translator unit, the twang of its preprogrammed voice familiar to Lachlan. “We must make another offering!”
One saurian.
“And where will we find the ship to do it? And the treasures?” a woman argued, her tone one of condescension, and all too well-known to him.
Leverenz. If there was any doubt that the Archbishop had been usurped by his own officers, it was here they all melted away.
“We can make deals with the neighbours! If this keeps up, the spirit of the Heart will make it move, Prelate. What will be of us all, then?” This was a different voice. The third individual, human.
Ercillia didn’t say anything to that. This was enough to cause one of the other two to prance around, their frantic steps audibly anxious to Lachlan.
“Prelate, we must-”
“Shut up,” Ercillia said suddenly, her voice shifting in a tone, but in a way too subtle for Lachlan to properly grasp. “Leave me. I must commune alone.”
One of them began to protest, but was swiftly dragged off by the other, muttering. The main doors to the chamber didn’t swing shut even after they had left, something he also took note of.
“I know you’re down there.”
Lachlan said nothing, standing there in the dark.
“I can sense the thermal imbalance. Come into the light and maybe I don’t have to sacrifice you too.”
He stayed hidden. The extra arm with the wristwatch flexed, heat flowing through its dead and empty veins. What was she gonna do, come down here and give him the element of surp-
Crack. Cra-rack.
He glanced around, the glow of his orb illuminating the spiderwebbing across another corpse nearby, the ice encasing it slowly coming apart as its occupant turned to face him. Like the woman before, most of his body was intact, but he now understood it to be through some unnatural means and not recency. More cracking sounds as ice shattered, coming from all around him.
They were Exarchs. Most, if not all of them. Those sacrificed and regurgitated by the heart, unstoppable in even the best of circumstances. Lachlan bit down on the fear rising within him, and ran towards the heart’s suspended mass. He stopped for a moment, looking up, and at that moment his eyes met with the white-haired woman in a heavy coat who stared down at him.
“You.” There was recognition in her eyes.
“Yeah, me.” He hopped up, taking one of the chains in with his prosthetic arms and rapidly scaling them, then once high enough, he pushed off with all six limbs, propelling him back out of the lower crypt and landing on the stone opposite Ercillia, the Heart’s bindings in between them.
The crypt below went quiet as Ercillia’s hidden left hand visibly relaxed even underneath her coat. “What have you done?”
“Would you believe me if I said nothing?”
“A man of your nature? I know what you’ve done for us. I remember every meeting. I find it hard to believe that you’re here without purpose.” Her free hand didn’t move for the grenade launcher hanging at her chest, or the gun he knew she had.
“Well…there’s more important things.”
“Ten seconds.”
“What?”
“Out of respect for your past contributions, I grant you a ten-second head start.”
“...okay?”
“Ten.”
Lachlan sprinted around the side of the aperture, hopping up each step of the concentric rings. He dashed past the two bewildered bishops, one a scaly saurian like he had expected, and got onto the main cargo lift that was big enough to fit a battalion of Order soldiers, and hit the button for the fifty-fourth floor. “I’ll get you to your destination buddy!” he exclaimed, smiling at the thing in his orb.
Moments after the lift had started taking off, he felt the heating vents all around the sloped lift shaft activate, pumping in war air. But not just any air. It was humid, and the water vapour began coalescing into large spikes of ice in the shafts below, racing up towards his platform. Ercillia appeared and leapt onto one, and then it moved to launch her up to the next, after him. At the rate she was going, she wasn’t exactly catching up, but if he stopped at 54, it was going to be close.
The moment the lift began to slow, he kissed the orb he had been given, and flung it as hard as he could towards the opening of 54, arcing it so that it landed on where he knew there would be defenders. At this temperature, the Steamkind would probably, last longer, and-
A rapid brrrt of an automatic weapon sounded just as he reached it, to find one of the citadel’s enforcers standing there, visor lowered over their face. He had just gunned down three others with his weapon, and nodded at Lachlan.
Lachlan took their submachine gun. “Thank you for everything.”
“I will tell them you kept your end of the deal.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
Lachlan swung the weapon, hitting the Steamkind-possessed soldier across the jaw and causing him to drop like a sack of potatoes. Then he tossed the gun away, and ran to the far end of the corridor, where his memory told him the catwalk that looped around the upper half of the structure was.
Something struck him in the back as he was turning the wheel on the exit door, something cold and incredibly sharm, and he twisted his head to see Ercillia already standing there, a trail of ice from her feet all the way across the floor to end in the spike that was impaling him from behind. From what he reckoned, it had probably gone through his kidneys.
“Too slow,” Ercillia said, stepping towards him at a steady pace.
With the fire-mage hand he had, he grabbed the bit of the icicle sticking out of his front abdomen, and began to channel the fire in its veins through. It began to melt, albeit slowly thanks to prior exposure to the fallout, but it was enough.
The next part was what he was more afraid of.
As soon as he pulled himself off the tip, he lurched forwards with the robotic arm, phasing completely through the solid door…and also through the railing beyond, overshooting any tangible flooring and plummeting off the side of the citadel. In the air he turned, and with the same robot arm no longer vibration, drove the limb into the metal side of the tower.
A loud sound caused him to look up and see the heavy steel door flying away from the side of the citadel, and Ercillia vaulting over the railing. Ice was manifesting from the air beneath her feet, allowing her to skate down the side of the building at an angle, tapering in to meet his position.
Swearing to himself, Lachlan grit his teeth, and let go, continuing to fall. He intermittently jabbed the arm back in to slow himself, and as he got close to the height he estimated he’d be able to clear the fence and vanish into the suburb beyond, he closed his eyes. He thought of sweet Chloe, waiting for him.
And then he jumped.
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