Three voices try to escape, but I throttle it back to two. Haunting. Chilling. Mad. The song of the Dark swirls out and embraces me, winding about my wrists and ankles before spreading out to seek those nearest to me with searching tendrils. It gently wraps them in cloying appendages, teasing forth their deepest, darkest secrets. I see more than one technician shiver before the onslaught. Pitch veined in deep amethyst is coaxed free to lay like a shroud upon them. 

I sing to it. Tease it free and attract it to myself. Ease it away from them. And like iron filings to a magnet, it answers. It flows across the ground like roiling mist and crawls up my legs. I know it seeks entry, to find any orifice it can and enter my person. 

Like calls to like, after all.

I dance through the mists, temptation, allowing it to slither up to coat my chest before pushing it out and down my arms to my waiting hands. It follows my commands, but just barely. No! I will not surrender! You will listen when I command! Now go; you are needed. 

And it listens.

I weave the mist into a ball cupped within my palms, then flatten it out to draw forth a gossamer filament of ink and wine. Like a tailor, I stitch the threads into the welds, fusing the material together. Sparks bounce off my scales with a faint chime of slag against chitin as the welders work to keep up with me. Metal to metal, madness to madness, like to like. Symmetry. Beauty. Creation.

Yes. More!

I dance away again when the first weld is complete to gather more material to myself. It flows around me at my call before ebbing when commanded. I praise it. Yes, just like that. Listen to my instruction. Aid me in working this crafting. Strengthen this weld, that it may endure the stresses placed upon it as I have endured the stresses of my own life. 

Eight times do I call upon madness. Eight times do I sing the welds, twice for each support. Eight times does it answer. And I know each time that it answers willingly, imploring me to let it in, promising that it will answer whenever I ask. 

I should be frightened of that. Of the allure it holds. And yet, I cannot find fear within myself. Instead, I find comfort. I find myself welcoming that promise, holding it close, allowing it to fill the emptiness in my chest. Though it is cold, it is still somehow warmer than the hole left where his presence used to sit. 

It helps. Though it is a pale imitation and a poor replacement, at least the gaping, raw wound is soothed. It will suffice.

“Grandy.” I do not drop my song. The Not-Song is a separate voice overlaying the Denzani. “Evacuate the walks. I will dismiss the magnetic shielding.” Controlling that many voices in two different languages should be much more difficult. Right now, I cannot spare more than a passing thought for it. 

I barely register that Grandy obeys my instructions. Instead, I turn my attention to the armature. More specifically, to the magnetic arrays mounted to the end of each arm. With the remnants of the madness I have called, I reach deep within and summon the Dark into myself. I lay myself open to it and feel it crash in like an ocean through a break in a jetty. The feeling of it is immense, like it could fill my entire being with only the merest drop. 

I turn that power upon the magnets and watch the shielding shatter apart like a pane of glass. Excitement leaps across the gap, freed from its restraint. The drive shudders as the magnets flare to life and then stabilizes within the electromagnetic field. 

Oh Dark! This power that is dancing upon my fingertips is mesmerizing. I imagine this must be what the Dark itself felt in the moments just before it pulled the disparate elements out of the cosmic soup that was the proto-universe to form them into creation. What else could I do with this material? What else could I build? Or what could I obliterate?

Distantly, I hear laughter. High pitched and hysterical, it rings across the room to carom off the walls and ricochet back to my ears. Where is it coming from though?

Oh. It is mine.

I giggle uncontrollably even as I feel tears begin to pool in the bottom of my goggles. My fingers fumble to tug the goggles off my face, utter exhaustion making me clumsy. Darkness flows through me yet, muddling everything, and madness moves unfettered with it. I stagger beneath the onslaught. 

“Tarriq? Bambino, come back to me. What else do you need to build?” Someone is trying to get my attention. I know that is my name. But all I can do is giggle helplessly. “I know we have to assemble the outer casing still, but you don’t have to sing that. Is there anything else you need to craft? Think, Tarriq!”

I can barely breathe past the mad laughter gripping me, let alone think. It seems unimportant anyway to think much more than this. Instead, I begin to draw the overflowing madness into my hands once more. Let me see what I can do with this…

“Tarriq, NO!” I hear panic in that voice. It is jarring, jolting my consciousness just enough to make me pause. I struggle to pull my wandering thoughts together, to force my eyes to see and my mind to think. To see the wavering shape of the safety railing just millimeters from my fingertips, and the tendrils of madness that threaten to infect it. It hovers on the brink of warping destructively at my touch. 

“Oh Dark…” I jerk my hands back to myself abruptly and the connection snaps. The song crumbles and tears apart, disintegrating as my voice falters. “No. Nonononono…” My mind spins. I almost sent myself and anyone standing on this platform with me plummeting nearly three stories. “Get me out of here.” My eyes find Grandy and I see the raw concern layered thickly upon him. “I almost…I could destroy everything…get me away…” I can barely form words now. “Away…isolate…kill everyone…”

“Tarriq!” I jerk at his command like he slapped me and my eyes meet his. “What else do you need to craft?”

I try to focus. “So hard…so hard to think…” 

“I know. But I need you to try. You opened the magnetic shielding. What comes next? What is the next step?”

“...the…the wiring…” I wrack my brain to pull order out of the chaos. “Wiring and fuses. Main panel. Housing.” The hands he places on my shoulders help to ground my thoughts. “Yes. Casing assembly. No more…no more crafting…no more song…” I pause as full realization hits. “Finished. I finished. All done. No more to sing.” The giggling returns, though not as strongly. It catches me in a short fit, then ebbs. “Dark! I did it! Grandy, I…I finished this! How long? How long did it take?”

“Sixty-six hours.” That number sobers me up in a heartbeat. “You’ve been here two and a half days, working without sleep. And it’s going to take another half shift for the casing to be assembled. So nearly three days for the full rebuild.”

“So tired…”

“I know, bambino. I am too. The technicians can finish this up now. Let’s go home, okay?” I nod. That sounds like a very good thing right now. “I need you to stay awake just long enough to get home, though. Can you do that? Can you stay awake for just a little more?”

Can I? “I will try. So tired.”

I have no memory of climbing down the ladders to reach the generator floor. But I know the moment my feet touched the floor, the phantoms pressed in to suffocating closeness. With my strength gone, I could no longer fight them off. Whisps of emotion tangled about me, each pleading with me to listen to them over the others. I would be overwhelmed in moments.

Get away from him! 

The order rings clearly in my ears. My steps pause as well, responding to the order unintentionally. I watch in awe as the phantoms all freeze in place.

Leave him be and go back to where you came from!

They respond too slowly for the voice. A chill wind that no one else seems to feel sends a spate of gooseflesh racing up my arms beneath my scales, and the phantasms are ripped asunder. Their tattered remains dissipate quickly to leave me alone with a single spectre facing me.

Its visage rips my breath from my chest.

I am proud of you, my star.

A warmth suffuses me as the final phantom smiles and fades away. I have a brief instant to realize that I will not make it home under my own power before I feel the warmth land upon my shoulders and Darkness overtakes my sight. But in that instant, I understand that just as the Dark is now an indelible part of me, so is he once more a part of the Dark. 

It is oddly comforting.