Necroepilogos

Atyle stood atop Pheiri’s armoured shell to witness the gods make war.

Her boots were planted on Pheiri’s bone-hard hide; her hands gripped an outcrop of the little titan’s chalk-white body; wind whipped at her face and snapped the hood of her armoured coat. She swayed and rolled to keep her balance as Pheiri accelerated; the little titan’s heart-fire roared as he slammed through debris-dunes and skidded across landslides of rubble, crushing stone and metal beneath spinning treads. He was moving fast, erratic, unpredictable, jerking and jinking and skidding, to avoid the attention of the flying machines which filled the air. The buzzing mosquitoes were attacking everything they could reach, scooping screaming revenants from the buildings with tendrils of gravity, and crushing those who tried to flee. Pheiri swivelled the mouths of his great guns all across his bone-hide, threatening the flying machines as they dove to catch him. The air tore and burst with the barking retort of his weapons all about Atyle’s ears, deafening her for but a moment. Gunfire and shouting and the voices of beasts echoed from every passageway, while Pheiri raced down the broadest streets in open defiance.

Atyle approved with all her heart; Pheiri was too great to be a mere steed, but she rode him all the same.

She howled over the wind and the guns and the thwok-thwok-thwok of the mosquitoes, through lips that still tasted of vomit and a tongue still numb with gravity-wave pressure.

“Fleet of foot and sure of arm, little titan! You shall see us through!”

Atyle did not look down to read the subtle flash and crackle of life inside Pheiri’s brain, to see if he appreciated her confidence. She could not tear her eyes away from that which she had emerged to witness — neither her mortal eye nor her god-sight. The hatch in Pheiri’s hide yawned wide a few feet to Atyle’s left; she had tried to close it twice, but the little titan kept it open for her, despite the danger to his own soft innards. The dark hole beckoned her back into the safety of Pheiri’s inner shell. The others were still huddled down there, recovering from the sickness and sheltering from the storm of steel and gravity above. There would be no loss of honour or face for Atyle to retreat as well.

But Atyle had spent her whole life choosing safety in lies, spinning tales of gods she did not really see.

Now, in death and resurrection, she chose peril and truth.

She chose to witness.

Through her mortal left eye she saw no more than she had in life: the view was blocked by rows of buildings whizzing past, by shattered concrete and twists of rust and ruin, by the rotten guts of the corpse-city through which Pheiri raced like a divine maggot. Atyle’s mortal eye saw the giant diamond in the sky well enough — a toxic sculpture of poisonous dripping gold, framed against the soot-choked black, haloed by clouds of buzzing rot-flies, and blurred by a phantasmal warping in the air. Of the great titan — Elpida’s ‘combat frame’ — Atyle’s mortal eye saw only slivers of white armour through the gaps between the buildings, as the titan stood firm before the foe.

Atyle’s god-sight — in the blessed gift of her right eye — pierced metal and stone, brick and earth, flesh and bone, thought and soul.

The others called her god-sight a ‘bionic’ or ‘augmetic’; they compared it with the scribe’s hated legs, or the betrayer’s powerful arm, or the machine-heart that beat in the soldier’s chest.

But Atyle knew her god-sight was different. Unlike the others, she had not forgotten the promise that had made her anew.

God-sight saw the truth of the mechanism in the sky — a boiling nest of giant snakes forged from pure force, birthed by dark engines inside the golden arms of the diamond-frame, controlled from a great distance like a puppet dancing upon a million strings. The mechanism’s arms contained a mind, imposing itself on the nearby weave of tiny machines, to better fuel the crushing power of the snake-nest in its heart. Atyle knew this power was called ‘gravity’; it was that power she felt pounding at her stomach and ears and internal organs every time the snake-nest moved.

Atyle considered the possibility that this golden diamond was one of the gods she had met, in the twilight between life and death.

Those lurking gods had promised her many things — power and strength, wisdom without limit, infinite lovers and friends and allies — if only she would agree to unspoken prices, to submission and fealty and a place in secret plans. But Atyle had kept her own counsel. She was no pawn.

Only one of those gods — a dainty thing, ancient and furtive, so much smaller than the others — had promised her the gift of true sight. The price? A kiss, from the lips of a mortal shade to the body of a forgotten god. Atyle had given that kiss freely, a feathery touch of her lips upon the noble forehead of a crowned girl. She could not recall the details now, could not remember the face of the crowned girl, and that pained her, for she so wished to call out the name of that god in worship. But the river that separated life from this rebirth was hazy and indistinct, even to her perfect sight. Her deal with the crowned girl in the underworld seemed as a dream after waking. But she had risen with the eye, with the perfect sight that was promised. All the others woke with their wounds closed and their missing limbs replaced. But Atyle had died with both her lying eyes inside her skull, and been reborn with truth on her tongue.

No, she decided; this poisonous diamond was not an emissary of her crowned girl. It was the avatar of another god. She would do right to smite it, if only her arms had the strength.

But the golden mechanism was not what had drawn Atyle out onto Pheiri’s hull.

She was here to witness the titan — Arcadia’s Rampart.

She had learned that name seconds ago, from a pulse-scream of message the titan had sent in all directions. She had learned other names too — ‘Thirteen’, and ‘1255’. She had not understood the words of the message; this language was veiled, like that of Pheiri’s maids. But her true-sight had unpicked the waves and revealed the meaning in the crackle of power.

From inside Pheiri’s armour she had seen the titan lurch to its feet amid the grey mud; the others had all heard the great roar of challenge from the titan’s throat, but only Atyle had seen the titan flower with spear and sling to protect Elpida, and witnessed the tremor of a change inside that mountain of flesh. The others were in a poor state; Pheiri’s maid, Melyn, had fared better than the living flesh of her fellows, but little Amina, Atyle’s sweet rabbit of hidden claw, was sick with vomiting and writhing, with only the rabid Ilyusha for comfort. The betrayer and the animal were in Pheiri’s front, perhaps hoping to help guide their chariot to answer Elpida’s call for help.

Fools. Pheiri needed no guidance.

And Atyle needed to see this. She needed to do in death what she had made a falsehood in life. Perhaps this was why the crowned girl had gifted her this sight.

Pheiri turned sharply to the right, his rear end skidding out behind him, smashing into the lower levels of a brick building. A shower of debris and shattered brick fell all about Atyle’s head; her mortal eye clouded with tears, but her god-sight stayed wide. An irritating mosquito swooped into the space Pheiri had occupied a moment earlier, slashing at the air with talons of gravity, pulverising brick and steel into dust and splinters.

Atyle sang out: “Begone, insect! You know not what you tempt!”

Pheiri turned the mouths of his guns upon the flying ball and blasted it back through the building with the sheer force of his stones and arrows. Atyle’s ears ached with the pounding of the guns, but she did not retreat inside. She sang louder, throat ringing with an old lie that was untruth no longer.

“For I ride the mammoth of the gods! I command the spring storm and the summer lightning! Begone, for you have no hold upon me!”

Pheiri’s tracks bit into the concrete; the little titan leapt forward once again, slamming Atyle against the outcrop of bone-armour. Atyle cleared her mortal eye with a wipe of her sleeve, laughing at the top of her lungs, howling to gods she had once cursed in her secret heart.

Past the buildings, out in the crater filled with mud and filth, Arcadia’s Rampart turned toward the golden diamond. The great titan unfurled an army’s worth of weapons, some of them more terrible than even Atyle’s god-sight could comprehend.

Atyle held her breath. The great titan was a godling worthy of the title — but the golden diamond was vast beyond imagination. How could such a small thing hope to prevail?

But it must!

Arcadia’s Rampart was among the most beautiful things Atyle had ever witnessed. When the titan had lain defeated and sleeping, it had seemed nothing more than the husk of a dead god, like the discarded shell of a beetle — pretty with colours and shaped most excellently, but pointless and fleeting, dust beneath a careless heel.

In motion the titan was sublime. It was shaped like a great hump-backed beetle, with four folding legs and four elegant arms; a tiny silvery head was planted in the middle of the back, but Atyle’s god-sight revealed this to be no head at all — it was the anchor-point of the vast shields that flashed and seared in the air around the titan’s body. Atyle offered a silent apology to the titan; she had imagined it would move with lumbering care, like an elephant or a hippopotamus, or perhaps like a real beetle, scuttling and scurrying in furtive stealth. Her assumptions shamed her. Arcadia’s Rampart moved with the swift clarity of a human being, each limb unfolding with the flowing precision of a sword-bearer, the body balanced like a dancer on the sand.

Atyle’s god-sight showed her more; she pierced bone and saw the gleaming meat beneath, ruby-rich and throbbing red, flushed with crimson blood and crackling with great sheets of passing life. The titan was more alive and more vital than any mortal flesh; Pheiri’s insides were beautiful in the same manner, especially the wonder of his shrouded brain, but even Pheiri was but a pale shadow of this brilliance. Atyle saw the network of organs the titan used for thinking, the eight-lobed brain and sixteen-branched heart and the armoured chambers of thought and memory; she saw the perfection of biological systems even her god-sight could not comprehend, webs of impulse and energy worming through the titan’s body, sacks of chemical and bile and humour that could have melted her soul to nothingness if she but inhaled the smallest wisp.

She saw the way the bone-hide and red-muscle repelled the machines of the gods in the air all around, forcing the tiny ‘nanomachines’ to change course or be destroyed by noise and fury. The titan’s innards boiled with their own tiny machines, flexing and flowering as they shivered with the promise of a coming change.

Atyle blinked. The titan was changing inside. A ripple passed through the gleaming burgundy meat, like a caged river behind a dam.

The golden diamond in the sky reached down toward the titan with snakes of crushing power; there would be no contest, the titan would be smashed to splinters if it did nothing.

What did it need?! A final push? Was the titan intimidated? Did it suffer doubt, as mortals did?

“You are witnessed!” Atyle howled over the noise of Pheiri’s engines and treads, over the whirr of the aircraft and the whipping wind in her face. “You are seen! I see you! The gods see you! The crowned child sees your struggle! You are witnessed!”

In the core of Arcadia’s Rampart, in a spot Atyle had previously overlooked, two fluids crashed together — a moment of fusion, as the titan and her keeper became one.

Fusion spread through the titan in an instant, crashing through muscle and tendon and nerve and breaking the dam of age.

Bone-armour burst asunder with a noise like the earth being torn in two. Flesh flowered into a whirlwind, with a wet and meaty ripping sound, like the innards of the world spilling forth. Crimson and scarlet reached for the heavens with towers of dripping meat.

Pheiri shot from the confines of the streets, treads biting into the rim of the grey and muddy crater, carrying Atyle out into the open. She no longer needed her god-sight to see.

Arcadia’s Rampart was blossoming: white armour had burst and peeled back at every seam to reveal the scarlet meat beneath — and the meat was growing, expanding, flowing upward in waves like ivy climbing a tree, like mould eating the world. The beetle-shaped back had exploded outward into a flared cup of bone, cradling a spiral of meaty petals, each one singing with arcs of brilliant blue life crackling forth to scorch the air and imprint their truth upon Atyle’s stinging retina. The titan’s legs and arms unfolded outward like a mathematical equation written in leaf and branch, gaining a dozen new joints, digging into the grey mud and spiralling through the air, carrying fragments of bone on a wave of divine flesh. Exposed nerves and lymphatic tubes and bleeding arteries spider-webbed upward, forming towers of meat and blood to dwarf the skyscrapers which ringed the crater.

“Lilium,” Atyle whispered. “The lily. Newborn god. Give me your name! Your name!”

Atyle’s voice was lost; the titan was too busy screaming its own truth outward across the weave of the world, overpowering even the noise of the golden diamond in the sky.

The titan’s exposed flesh bubbled and boiled with new extrusions — claws and teeth, protector-like organs, eyeballs the size of people, great maws yawning wide; the weaponry on the titan’s hide was quickly overwhelmed, each blister and knot of bone-embedded gun absorbed and overgrown with flesh. The great ‘railgun’ on one arm vanished beneath a wave of crimson and garnet.

But the golden diamond cared not for all this beauty. It reached down with an army of invisible serpents, to rip blossom from stem.

Atyle longed to cry a warning. She did not see how this battle could go any other way. The titan was beautiful beyond her dreams, beyond the most fanciful of her tales, but it was still so tiny compared to the foe.

But then Atyle’s god-sight saw new engines suddenly bloom deep inside the titan’s flesh, seeds bursting to life within an instant, expanding from thumb-sized dots of potential into roaring organs of throbbing power, red and wet and glistening beneath the grey light of the soot-choked sky. The air around Arcadia’s Rampart turned hazy with heat; a wave of cooked air washed outward and slammed over Atyle’s face; the mud beneath the titan’s four feet flash-dried and hardened to a baked crust.

The diamond reached downward with limbs as wide as rivers; Arcadia’s Rampart reached back up with snakes of her own.

Gravity met gravity; the invisible tentacles did not slap and deflect like true limbs, but exploded outward in waves of shattering force wherever they met, reforming as soon as they parted. The mud of the crater rocked and flowed under the ripples of the blows; skyscrapers creaked and tilted, steel screaming with the pressure; ball-craft were thrown through the air like seeds on the wind. Even Pheiri shuddered beneath Atyle’s feet as he sped onward, throwing up grey mud behind his tracks.

The waves of gravity washed over Atyle, spinning her head and forcing vomit from her lips. She spat bile and let it come, but she kept her eyes wide open.

Up in the sky, the golden diamond wobbled on its axis.

Tears rolled down Atyle’s cheeks.

Atyle had spent her girlhood weaving lies about watching the gods at war. She lied to her parents, she lied to her siblings, she lied to the elders, she lied to the priestesses in the temple, and even to the great emperor himself, when she had been brought before him amid all the finery of the palace. She had lied to the guests from foreign lands, she had lied to soldiers and armies and generals. She had lied to dying men and barren women and orphaned children. She had lied to condemned enemies and to staunch allies and all others under the sun. She intuited at a young age that the adults wanted to believe her lies, wanted to believe that the gods were just above their heads. She would lie on her back and stare at the clouds and pretend to witness victory or defeat in the pantomimes of divine provenance. She would lie to her bed-slaves of love and destiny and fate. She would jump up in the middle of meals and declaim a new vision, a new unfolding of the cosmic dance. She would justify her whims — or, more often, the whims of her lord and emperor — with stories she dreamed up while emptying her bowels of night soil.

In life Atyle — Priestess, Visionary, Chosen, Wise Woman, Temple Bride — had been a liar and a fraud. Her gods were born of shit; they were worth the same.

The gods in the twilight between life and death were real.

They had offered her much, but they were not flesh and blood. They were spirits lost in the gloom between worlds, chained and bound to the will of greater things, things that did not deserve the name of gods. Even her crowned girl, the secret to which she owed allegiance, was but a phantom craving incarnation.

But this, this blossoming beauty, this was a god in the flesh. Newborn.

The golden diamond wobbled — it had not expected to face a newborn godling, armed with the same terrible instruments of wrath. The nest of snakes reeled backward in surprise, then reared up for a second strike. Tips of gravity lanced through the air, racing faster than Atyle’s god-sight could measure; the pressure wave hit her in the front, made her ribs creak, compressed her organs, squeezed her lungs. But she kept her eyes open.

The Newborn’s own gravity blossomed outward into a shield made of petals; the diamond’s gravity-snakes exploded into shards against this defence. The Newborn opened a dozen mouths in her flesh — red and wet and dripping with blood — and bellowed a scream into the sky, so loud that the air itself blurred and shook. Atyle clamped her hands over her ears, head spinning and pounding.

The golden diamond lurched sideways under the assault of this god-voice scream; its perfect mathematical equilibrium was lost.

Arcadia’s Rampart bunched her legs; flesh flowered and grew downward into great springs.

The Newborn Godling gathered herself, leapt into the air, and flew.

Arcadia’s Rampart sprang like an insect, throwing up a great wave of mud from the crater, powering her jump with the flaring exhausts of exotic energies Atyle did not comprehend. She pounced toward the vast shape of the stricken diamond. She trailed divine effluvia of blood and bile behind her — and then burst at the sides with wings of flesh to carry herself the distance. She grew great spikes and fangs and stabbing teeth, all downward-pointing, as she fell toward the golden mechanism like a hawk falling upon the eyes of a lion.

The diamond righted itself, reformed the shattered snakes, and swatted Arcadia’s Rampart out of the sky.

“No!” Atyle screamed.

The Newborn fell like a bleeding comet, wings shattered, limbs kicking at the air with corkscrews and spirals of scarlet flesh, fragments of bone-armour spilling away from her hide. She clipped the top of a skyscraper and slammed into the ground below, shaking the earth and sending up a cloud of debris and dust beyond the edge of the crater. Atyle’s god-sight saw the Newborn on her back, vulnerable and splayed, her flight ruined.

The golden diamond pulled back with its feelers of gravity, ready to smite the titan to nothing upon the earth.

Arcadia’s Rampart reached up with one gravity-feeler, like the hand of a drowning girl; the golden diamond had not expected this, and had left no snakes in reserve to repel the touch. Arcadia’s Rampart wrapped her gravity around the golden cross-beam of the diamond, and pulled, down.

The front of the diamond dipped, like the head of a horse compelled by a hand. The leading tip slammed into the city below; buildings exploded, throwing debris in every direction, falling in waves of concrete and brick, rippling outward like the impact of a boulder tossed into the sea. The diamond shook itself, lashing out with gravity and smashing buildings aside. Arcadia’s Rampart was back on her feet, the feint concluded; the Newborn danced in the ruins, a beetle sparring with an elephant. She had dragged the behemoth down to her level, and held it there with a fist of iron.

Pheiri skidded to a halt, throwing up a wave of grey mud and stagnant water.

A voice interrupted Atyle, from the open hatch.

“Mad fucking bitch!” Ilyusha howled, laughing and spitting, tatters of vomit on her lips. “Get in, get in! You’re gonna get smashed up there!”

Another voice — Amina, quavering in awe and terror: “God— God— God is— God—”

Atyle shook her head. She did not even look away from the gods at war. “Not God, little rabbit! The gods themselves, the true lords of creation! Come up, come up and see! I cannot part from them!”

“Tch!” Ilyusha hissed; Atyle expected her to vanish again. The animal did not understand faith, she had none. But then little feet scrambled up out of the hatch and little hands grabbed Atyle’s coat. “Ami!” Ilyusha screeched — then followed as well, claws scrabbling against Pheiri’s bone-hide.

Atyle spared them a smile. Amina clung to her coat, eyes wide; Ilyusha’s claws were clamped around Amina’s leg, her own feet gripping the hatch, to anchor all three to Pheiri’s safety.

“We witness the gods,” Atyle whispered.

The Newborn stumbled back through the skyscrapers, as a human stumbles through a field of wheat, feet slamming into the mud of the crater. It dragged the golden diamond as a human drags a plough through the earth.

Amina whimpered. Ilyusha was silent. Even the animals understood.

The Newborn, Arcadia’s Rampart, was bleeding from a dozen wounds — pulped and pulverised areas of crimson flesh where she had failed to deflect the diamond’s gravity. Patches of armour were buckled and cracked. Fields of flesh were blackened and cooked, carbonised by some weapon Atyle did not understand.

The titan had not forgotten her flesh-embraced weapons: she had used them as a surprise. The many guns and slings and spears upon her hide had resurfaced, glowing with new energies, reinforced by bone and tendon and throbbing meat; the guns pounded against the golden diamond, filling the air with blossoms of explosion and crack-whip spikes of brilliant light, rocking the crater with the impacts. The diamond lashed out in return, slamming into the tentacles of gravity, washing over the mud with stray shock waves. Arcadia’s Rampart ducked and buckled, struggling to hold on, to keep the diamond grounded.

“The little God has hooked herself a leviathan,” Atyle whispered. “But this monster will drag her under the waves.”

Ilyusha howled with a laugh halfway to madness: “Fuckin’ get some shit! Yeah!”

Over to the right, Pheiri’s rear ramp descended with a loud thump, splashing into the grey mud. Atyle allowed herself a split-second glance away from the titanic fight on the far side of the crater. Three figures were sprinting for the ramp, one of them carrying a fourth, all of them caked in mud from head to toe. Elpida, leading the scribe and the soldier and Pheiri’s other maid. Hafina turned as she ran, cracking off a rifle shot behind her; she was trying to keep another ball-aircraft at bay. Pheiri turned his guns on the swooping machine and hammered it backward in the sky, like a dandelion seed held aloft on a stream of breath.

Ilyusha grabbed Atyle’s shin, tugging at both her and Amina. “Down! Below! Elpi’s back! Now, come on, fuck!”

“Wait, animal! Wait!”

On the far side of the crater the golden diamond finally shook itself free of the Newborn’s grip.

The diamond started to rise, like a whale rearing up to smash the boat that had so briefly held it hooked. The golden surfaces were untouched by bullet or bomb or arc or magic. Soot and mud alike slid from them, leaving their bleeding toxic light undimmed, gleaming and perfect. That light burst in a wave over Arcadia’s Rampart, shrivelling crimson flesh and darkening bone-white armour. Atyle felt that same light against her face and the exposed skin of her hands, blistering and burning her flesh. The Newborn shrivelled, like a blossom before the flame.

Atyle wept. Had it all been for nothing? The crowned girl did not deserve to see this.

The weave of flesh in the Newborn’s hide peeled back, as if drying out and dying away, falling back in layers of crusted petal, revealing pulsing dark innards beneath. A face shifted in that flesh — a face larger than buildings, narrow and aquiline, sharp of jaw, toothy with triumph.

The face looked a tiny bit like the warrior, the Commander, Elpida.

Ilyusha yelped a laugh; Ilyusha saw some logic that Atyle did not. “Surprise!” the animal howled. “Fuck you!”

The face was gone as quickly as it had risen from the soup of flesh, melting to nothing — and leaving behind the railgun.

Like a stinger ejected from the flesh of a wasp, the massive arm-cannon railgun shot forward, the tip almost touching the diamond’s cross-bar of toxic gold. Magnetic power flared. The railgun discharged with a crack like the splitting of a mountain.

A round the size of Pheiri’s body slammed into the diamond’s crossbeam — and broke it.

An explosion of golden shrapnel filled the air, brighter than the forgotten sun, growing into a mushroom of burning light.

Atyle’s breath was sucked from her lungs; her skin began to boil and the sight in her mortal eye turned to blinding white; her god-sight dimmed and flickered, filled with sparkles of static and dancing stars. The Newborn God stood untouched amid the fiery doom, levelling her guns once again. The golden diamond was reeling, bleeding shining ichor in great torrents. Atyle wept tears of blood and—

And hit Pheiri’s hide in a heap; Ilyusha pulled her off her feet and dragged her down through the hatch.

Atyle allowed herself to be shoved down the steps, back into the safety of Pheiri’s innards. She could not keep her feet; she collapsed at the bottom of the passageway, sprawled out across the floor of the crew compartment, half-blind and almost deafened, bleeding from patches of cooked skin, weeping tears of blood — tears of joy. The gods had shown her the truth at last. She had witnessed victory, not a fiction, not a lie.

“Ami! Ami!” Ilyusha was shouting.

Amina replied: “I-it burns, but it’s only m-my hand, I’m— I’m okay, I’m okay, Illy.”

Elpida and the others had returned moments before the Newborn’s surprise — they were dripping grey mud as they fell in through the airlock compartment, shouting and babbling, weapons clattering, boots ringing against the metal. Pheiri lurched forward again as soon as all were aboard, tossing the revenants sideways as he skidded in the mud and made good their escape.

The Commander snapped orders above the chaos, checking on her girls, but even her voice shook.

“Everyone in? Everyone in!? Nobody left behind? Haf, get Kaga into the infirmary, right now. Vicky, Vicky, sit down, hold onto something. What happened to her — Ilyusha, what happened to Atyle? What— what are you— Howl? … Howl? Howl?”

Atyle paid no attention.

The crowned girl had appeared in Atyle’s god-sight.

She was not a dream-memory, but a phantom standing upon the decking, a ghost none of the others could see, even as they stepped through her insubstantial body. She was beautiful, dressed in a gown of bone and pearl and coral, with hair the colour of burning ash, eyes of pure obsidian, and skin like fresh, rich, warm blood. Her crown was silver, melted to her skull, crackling with life.

She smiled at Atyle: a thank you.

“Howl?!” Elpida was shouting, clutching her own head. “Where are you?! Where did you go?! Howl?!”

The crowned girl lost her smile. She closed her eyes with heavy sorrow, tears of liquid silver flowing down her cheeks.

Atyle’s god-sight cleared. The crowned girl was gone. The crew compartment slammed from side to side as Pheiri accelerated away from the crater, dodging mosquitoes and losing traction and smashing through buildings.

The Commander was standing in the middle of it all, dripping with grey mud, hair filthy, jaw clenched, eyes wide with the mania of a fresh wound.

“Howl?!”