It was a churning, fluid place. Blinding colors shifted so quickly that he wanted nothing more than to close his eyes. But he had none to close. And it was loud, so very loud, like he was drowning in a sea of voices. But one needed to breathe in order to drown. He did not.

“All you must do, is be," the familiar voice said. Or was he thinking it?

How could he be if he did not know who he was?

Name…name…what’s my name?

He grasped for it through the flow of consciousness, his only lifeline, but instead felt himself stretch further. The jumble of light shifted. Whitecapped waves of turquoise lapped over each other in a hypnotizing rhythm, drowning out the voices. He was on a beach. It was a familiar one, and yet foreign to him.

That doesn’t make any sense.

He had been to a place like this many times before and with people that he had loved. His family, he realized.

How can I not remember my own name?

He could feel grains of sand spill into being between his toes. Did he have toes? He couldn’t move them, and he couldn’t look down at them, but he could feel them. The sand pressed beneath him, making him feel a little less taut.

He tried to remember the faces and voices of this family he had once known. A mother. A father. Grandparents. A reach too far. The sand spilled away, leaving no ground to stand on except for fear. And the weight of that pulled him apart.

A new place took the beach’s, one he was certain that he did not know. Waves of water turned to rocky hills brimming with ruby trees that bowed under a malicious wind. The violet sky was slowly hidden in a blanket of roiling smoke and shadow. The air was heavy, hardly even air at all. It burned his lungs with every breath until he finally heard the low squeak of his helmet seal activating.

He felt the sensation of neck muscles and turned towards the horizon and saw a vast crack of hellfire amidst the wall of blackness. The great city burned, the funeral pyre of a species. All but the serpentine outer wall was now consumed, its marble walls glowing and misshapen from the heat within. The charred skeletons of towers crumpled from the heat. He sank his nails into the grip of his thermrifle, its crunching leather his only outlet.

“Ershumni," said a silky voice. It was familiar, but he could not place it. The programming of a thousand sparring sessions whirled him to the side as a humming blade arced where his head had been.

Idex.

A lithe warrior in silver armor with golden trim struck at him with a spirited ferocity. He did not attempt to block it, opting instead to dodge each attack, waiting for the opportunity to bring his thermrifle to bear against the fool.

What kind of arrogance does it take to so tightly cling to an antiquity such as bladed combat?

Were it not for the smoldering evidence behind him, he would have found the engagement amusing. Sarians had long ago relegated bladed and other melee weaponry to sport and ceremony. What was the point when a ranged opponent could render you into a bloody mist before you could even hope to land a blow?

And yet, he could not find the moment to take a shot. He was forced to dedicate every movement to dodging the Idex’s unrelenting assault until, finally, with a flick of the warrior’s blade, his thermrifle was torn from his hands and into two crescent-shaped halves.

He kicked off the ground backward but stumbled as his feet caught on something. Gathering his balance, he saw it was another Sarian warrior, or rather, part of one.

I will not let her sacrifice be for nothing but a dead world.

His hand darted at the warrior’s blood-soaked belt and drew her oathblade, a short, curved thing with only her creedfather’s blessing marking its smooth surface. Looking up, he saw that the Idex stood still, watching him ready the blade before tapping the butt of its staff against the ground and growling in anticipation.

“Ershumni.”

The Idex threw itself at him, and their deadly dance continued. The oathblade was a weapon of last resort, more an instrument of ceremony. Under the force of a blow like the ones he was receiving, it would chip and shatter after just a handful of exchanges.

He could feel his energy flagging, the air of his helmet growing staler as he outpaced its filter. He felt a crunch beneath his boot as he stepped on the fingers of another fallen Sarian. Knowing that the moment’s hesitation had cost him the opportunity to dodge, he brought up his armored forearm, intending to block the falling blade strike with his bracer, and dug his heels into the blood-damped soil.

But when the crooning blade fell upon him, it pruned his arm like a limb from a tree. He watched his arm twirl onto the ground and was startled by a scream that he found was his own.

His chest erupted in agony. Twin heartbeats pounded in his ears, each one pumping purple blood into a cool trickle down his body. Looking down at the blade tip jutting from his chest, he saw an armored body wrapped in robes as red as the trees around him.

As his body pitched forward, sapped of strength, gauntleted fingers gripped his head, forcing him to look upon the smoldering ruin.

“You honor your ancestors well, Sarian," the silky voice said in the Sarian tongue, “This has been a blessed Sacrament.”

A boot pressed against his back, and he fell from the blade, his body thudding into a cushion of ash. His heartbeats began to weaken as more voices joined together in a cadent whisper.

“Take relief in your death," the Idex said, “For it is the only mercy we can grant.”

He remembered another who had been granted such a mercy. Was this what he had felt?

As the twin heartbeats fell silent, the burning hills became roaring waves once more, now darkened to an inky blue. They nipped at his feet in icy pangs, leeching away warmth with every bite.

It’s too cold to swim.

The sun’s light was dying amidst the growing twilight. Once again, he felt twisting sensations within his gut. Voices hid amidst the sounds of the lapping waves, unintelligible but beckoning. He shouldn’t be here at night. It wasn’t safe. An echo of memory told him so. It had nearly taken him before.

But it hadn’t.

He tugged at the perilous memory and recalled the taste of saltwater and…lemon. Yes, he had tasted something lemon that day, too, so cold that it had numbed his teeth. It had been a different sort of cold than the one biting him now, offering reprieve rather than stealing it.

“Thomas.”

He knew that voice. Someone had called him that name on that day. He grasped the name and held it tight, making it his anchor.

Thomas. My name was… no… is Thomas.

The frigid waves continued to lap at Thomas, tearing the sand away and rising to his ankles. Looking down into the shallow water, he couldn’t find his feet. Shifting all of his willpower, he dragged his feet away from the water until he could see his ankles again. Even still, the cold remained, and the world shivered.

Thomas…Thomas…Thomas.

The name became his mantra. He would not let it be washed away. But as he inched his way up the shore, the voice within his mind fell more and more faint.

What is this place? Why am I here?

The sensations were too visceral, too sharp, to be a dream, but nothing here seemed to be constant either. It was liquid and ever shifting.

Exertion ate at his thoughts until words themselves became a labor, his name too heavy of a burden to bear. The fear of its loss jolted him, and he scoured his mind to find it again, only to come up empty. With the cold water all that was left to him, he slipped below the waves and into darkness.

Your life is lost to you.

At last, beneath the waves, the voices spoke. And he would listen.

Your world is one of walking corpses creeping toward a shared grave.

It was a void. The universe stripped bare. Only the hum remained, with nothing to contest it, not even his own heartbeat. It was ever-present and ever-shifting, never fading into white noise. It demanded to be heard, as did the voices. And one of them was his own.

He flailed for a time, how long he did not know. He craved the touch of anything, even the water he had been drowning in, but found nothing. There was no water. There was no air.

This is the fate of all things.

How long had it been? Time had no meaning here, with nothing to measure it against. He could not remember anything before the darkness, and yet there had to have been something before. He could feel it like a phantom limb.

Somewhere far away sparked two pinpricks of light, bobbing steadily towards him.

Please… let it end… give me silence.

Growing closer, they cut away swaths of darkness and unveiled a hall of statues, stark white and frozen in time. All of them faced the direction of the invading luminance, conveying a common anguish beneath shielding hands and contorted mouths. They leered between the black stone pillars.

The intruders ambled closer, but the light obscured them. He wailed, begging for them to help him, but heard only the hum.

They walked to each of the statues, inspecting their long, cracked faces, until finally they arrived at his. He devoted the entirety of his being to screaming for them to notice him, to end him. It was all that he could do.

For the first time in centuries lost in counting, light fell on him, but he could not feel the warmth. One of the figures prodded his face with a finger, amplifying the hum to a nauseating volume.

Delusion.

And then it abandoned him to an eternity of darkness. The hum returned with a renewed vigor.

It hurts… hurts… hurts.

Perception returned in corroded muscles as his body began to move, driven by a will that wasn’t his. He thrashed against an invisible sarcophagus and felt something crack. The lights halted, looking for the source of the noise.

He struggled harder and heard another crack, the domineering mind wriggling him until he could move again. First, only his head, then his arms. All the while, he screamed, and the hum grew louder. Of their own accord, his twisted fingers began to grasp for the light.

Finally, his legs tore free, and he ambled towards the light.

Closer…closer.

A bang echoed across the chamber, and he felt something rock back his shoulder. The pain was sweet but fleeting. The hum stabbed his mind as it wrested control, learning how best to wield this long-forgotten tool. He heard more bangs, and the puppeteer willed him forward on strings unseen.

He relished the precious impacts as the figure fired impotently, the gap closing with every step of his mad dash. He fell upon the light, smothering it. Something wriggled desperately between his fingers. The hum roared, and with a snap, the struggle ceased.

The hum softened. One of the lights ran away while the other lay useless on the ground, attached to the end of a rifle.

There is no death.

He sensed his pace quicken, his body steering between the statues after the fleeing light. The figure was halted by an obstruction ahead of them. It scoured the darkness with its light, searching for escape until it turned towards its pursuer with no option left but to fight. But amidst their trembling hands, the rifle’s shots went wild.

He was almost upon the light when it shifted onto the face of the trapped animal. It was a pink, freckled face with a crooked nose.

Human.

The hum became deafening, drowning out both of their screams. The mind would not let him interfere; it would be satiated.

With a crunch of bone, it was over. The hum relented, satisfied. His limbs felt heavy, like concrete was dragging them down. The fallen rifle’s light shone a path across the black floor, and at its end he saw the obstacle that had entrapped the human. A wasted opportunity.

A chasm.

The hum was weaker now, the puppeteer asleep. He could even hear the world beyond his body, quiet as it was now, aside from a crackling sound coming from the fallen human.

His fingers twitched on his command, reunited after eons apart. The opening wouldn’t last, and soon he would be interred once more. He threw himself over the edge and into the void. And as he fell, warmth finally found him.

 ***

“It is over.”

Thomas jolted backward from the machine, his stomach somersaulting. He swept his hands across the floor, making sure it was really there. The light was painfully bright. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust before he could see the speaker. Ithlin stood next to the deactivated machine, her head tilted to the side and standing straight.

“What…the fuck…was that?," Thomas said through ragged breaths. He rose and struggled for balance. Ithlin caught him, keeping him on his feet.

“I did not want to show you in this manner, so soon.," she said, almost apologetic, “But the hour demanded it.”

Thomas shrugged off her arm and stepped away, his face hot. “You didn’t answer my question. What was that?”

Ithlin bowed her head but kept her eyes on him. “It is a Conduit. And you must become its master.”