First, the tang of burning firewood. Next, the sour sweetness of some tropical fruit nearby. Poire’s stomach clenched with hunger.

How dry his mouth, and how empty his stomach. His wrist was humming, urging him to find sustenance, listing out the exact nutrients his body needed. He impulsed a thought, and his wrist implant went silent.

A fire crackled at the foot of the bed, warming the soles of his feet. The mattress, which was as soft as it was large, seemed intent on swallowing his limbs. He struggled to lift his head and look around the chamber.

Paintings and tapestries and bookshelves lined the walls. There was a table at his bedside, laden with drink and food. A glass carafe was shot through with flecks of orange gold from a pair of candles sitting on the table next to it. One ceramic bowl spilled over with too much fruit, and there was a bronze plate arranged with seeds, dried meats, half a loaf of bread and a dried pile of something that didn’t look edible. Were those worms?

And then he saw her, sitting in the far corner of the room, as far away from the fire as possible.

A machine. Her face was a featureless chrome mask, except for her glowing eyes and those newly-made scars. An an-droid, whose silhouette had once looked almost human. At least, before she had been torn to pieces...

Over the last few weeks, the avian tinkers had restored what they could of Laykis’s body. They were skilled, but limited - by primitive mechanical knowledge and inferior tools.

Now, Laykis seemed to be two beings twined together. Her head, her torso, and one arm were made of that perfect, almost muscular metal that seemed to flex and twist when she moved. But the rest of her - her hands, her left arm, her legs - was covered in segmented plates of burnished copper.

Sitting still, she looked like a statue, a work of art. The tinkers had engraved her new metal with ornate patterns, mostly the leaves and flower petals of tropical plants that shone bright when caught in the firelight.

The scars on her face were, however, remained intact. Unchanged. And her eyes… Both of them were strangely expressive. Two spheres, each one striated with some arcane pattern that would shift with her attention. Both, brighter than any candle.

“How long have you been watching me?” Poire asked.

“I have not moved in three days,” When Laykis answered, her voice came from somewhere behind that featureless plane of a mask, “I feared you might not wake.”

Three days.

Poire sighed, relieved. The last time he had fallen asleep… the whole world had changed. He did not want that to happen again. Did not think he could bear it.

A clawing pain gripped his stomach. Once more, his gaze wandered to the fruits on the table, so ripe they were almost bursting out of their skins.

He wanted - he needed answers. The food could wait.

Poire impulsed a command to his wrist, and a surge of hormones flooded his stomach, quieting his hunger. For a moment, his stomach protested, until the clawing pain receded into a dull, hungering ache.

“I had a dream,” Poire said, “There was a light in the sky, and everything in the light began to change. The world… the people. Turning them into something else. Taking them apart, atom by atom. But-”

He rubbed at his forehead, thinking hard.

“But all dreams feel real, when you’re having them. Don’t they?”

“You’re not the first to have dreamt this,” Laykis said, her voice clicking mechanically over the crackling of the fire.

“You?” Poire furrowed his brow. “What do you dream of?”

“No,” Laykis shook her head, the joints in her neck whispering soundlessly. “My Maker. This dream, he dreamt it every night.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I did not think it was real. He always spoke of ‘the unforming of all things.’ The death of all the worlds. But he was old, and he was dying long before I was brought into this world. My Maker was never well. I thought the dreams were only an extension of his madness.”

She leaned forward. The lights in her eyes narrowed, focusing on his every motion. “Tell me, Poire. In this dream, did you see anything else?”

“There was a person without a face. A face covered in a strange light. I don’t know. They were looking at me, I could feel them looking at me, and I could see patterns in its face.”

“Patterns…” Laykis’s eyes darkened. “I thought he was mad. I thought… But my Maker used the same word. Patterns. A face made of light, latticed with shifting patterns. Hiding something underneath.”

“Yes!” Poire said excitedly, “That’s what it felt like. Like there was something else I could not see, beneath all that light. Who is it? Did your Maker know?”

“The question is not who - but what,” Laykis leaned back in the chair. Resting her arms on the rich mahogany. “My Maker believed that this person could not be human. Nor was it a creation of humankind. He said this to me, over and over. With sightless eyes, it sees all. The ravings of a deluded old man on his deathbed. That’s what I thought. But I fear I was wrong.”

Her eyes fell downward. Staring at nothing.

Does she actually feel shame? Poire wondered. Or is she just programmed to look that way?

But there was something about the way her fingers gripped at the arms of the chair, running anxiously over the carvings in the wood. Each time he thought of her as ‘just another droid,’ Poire would catch a glimpse of her acting far too human.

Gaiam was full of strange, alien peoples. Avians and redenites, lizardfolk and semi-amphibious things and other sentient jungle dwellers. All of them, born of human hands. Or, at least, born after human hands breathed the accident of new life, of untamed evolution, across this world - and, from what Poire understood - across so many others.

In a way, Laykis fit into the tapestry of this world, in a way that he never could. Among all these aliens and all these machines, she was just another droid.

But to them, Poire was the alien.

The most out of place. Out of time.

For the thousandth time, he felt the desperate ache somewhere in the pit of his heart. Longing to go back to a world that no longer existed. To see another human face.

Poire ran a hand over the tight curls of his hair, which was starting to grow out again. He sighed, heavily, as too many questions spiraled in his mind.

“Do you think they knew someone would wake up?” Poire asked. “Humanity, I mean. Do you think they knew that someone like me would come, after all of them were gone?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The Protocol. Why else would they create something like that? They built cities underground. I always thought it was to keep us safe from the surface. Radiation, or toxic atmosphere. Waiting for the day when the planet would be terraformed. But… but the surface was always safe, wasn’t it? They knew something else was coming. They knew - they thought something would happen to us.”

Laykis was quiet. But her eyes were spinning, interlocking circles of light turning around each other. Deep in thought.

“But I don't understand,” Poire continued. “Why doesn’t the Protocol mention anything? I’ve searched through every page. Not one mention of visions or dreams or anything like this. It’s just instructions, on where to find materials. How to turn on machines. How to maintain. Why didn’t they leave answers? Why?”

He was sitting up now, the sheets clenched in his fists. Leaning forward, burning for some kind of truth.

“The dream - that thing I saw - I can still see it. When I look at you, or when I look at this room. These walls. This table. All of it. It’s like a second image, floating underneath the first.” He blinked hard, trying to make it go away. But the more he focused on it, the more that ethereal shadow seemed to blossom over reality.

Now the fruit on the table was laced with crawling lines of change. Turning the skin of the fruit into something - not ash, not dust - but something.

“I need to know,” he whispered. “I need to know what’s happening to me. To everything.”

“I am not the one to ask.”

“Then who?” He said, exasperated. His voice was high and desperate. “I need to know, Laykis.”

She made a long, low, clicking sound. Halfway between a sigh and a hum. Her eyes travelled across the room, as if trying to see what Poire was seeing.

“I must explain something, Divine One. Please know that I do not say this to hurt you. You are the most important thing I have ever encountered, and I would do anything for you. Do you believe me?”

The sincerity in her voice caught his attention. He held his breath. And stared at her. And, for a moment, the shadow behind everything seemed to fall away. All he could see was the candlelight, reflected in her shining face. And the soft orange glow of her eyes.

“I love you, Divine One. Only, love is the wrong word. It is something deeper than the deepest roots of my core. I love you,” her eyes flashed. She inclined her head, staring at him. “And, also, I fear you.”

“Me? Why?”

“So it was written, and so it was foretold. ‘As the end begins, so a savior shall come.’ Well, you have come. Which can only mean one thing.”

Poire swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. He looked at the carafe, and the candlelight twinkling through the glass. But he did not move to take it.

“So,” he said slowly, “Then my dreams are real? You think they’re real?”

“I do not know what to think. But it is clear to me now, Poire, that you cannot stay here. Something is coming. I would ask the First Children. You might have heard them called something else, by the imperials. They name them ‘Historians,’ for their home is full of ancient records.”

“I don’t know them,” Poire said. “How do we get there?”

“Mostly, they keep to an old city that floats in the sky. Sometimes, it can be found in the sky above the city of Cyre.”

Cyre. The home of the imperials, the humanoid aliens who had only just tried to destroy the entire Cauldron, and the millions of avians who lived inside. It was the last place Poire thought that Laykis would ever suggest.

“We have no choice,” the an-droid said. “We must go.”