Clouds of mist walked along the ponds, making ripples along the shallow surfaces.

But the mist could not touch that orange, glowing shield which sprouted out of the white tree. Instead, the shield hissed and burned away the fog, making it swirl angrily in that wavering heat.

Behind him, Laykis was tense. Ready to throw herself at whatever came out of the mists. Her eyes flickered rapidly, illuminating the clouds in bright flashes of light.

Poire could almost see them. They were huge, taller than the tallest trees on Thrass. They leaned over the mists, so that he could see hints of bark and vines and machine stretching up into the fog. He could hear the organic creaks and groans and whine of metal joints badly in need of maintenance as they settled into place.

They were surrounded.

How easy would it be for them to crush this tree, shield and all? Or could the orange plasma protect him?

He doubted it.

Poire turned back to the white tree, and to that face made of energy. It was projected out of the tips of the red fungus that crawled up the tree. It was hairless, a bald thing, with blank red eyes and a blank, red expression. And when it spoke, its lips and muscles moved too smoothly to be natural.

“Is it time to wake?”

Who would make such a thing? Poire wondered. It was almost repulsive to look at. A crude imitation of a human being.

And yet, this was undoubtedly human technology. And the shield… that was human technology, too. Not as advanced as the shield he had summoned over the Cauldron, which meant this tech must be older than his conclave.

“What do you mean by ‘wake?’” Poire asked. “Who are you?”

“We are Keepers. The Heart made us to watch. To wait for an administrator. Are you one?”

“How would I know if I am?”

“An administrator must be created by a pre-existing administrator.”

“And what if there aren’t any?”

“Aren’t any what?”

“Existing admins.”

Its lips frowned in a semblance of confusion. And then, its face shifted back to a neutral expression, blank, and unassuming. The movement was so unnatural, it almost made Poire shiver.

“We do not have instructions for that case,” the face said. “Please contact your nearest administrator. If you cannot find an administrator, then-”

Poire licked his lips. It worked before. Maybe it would work again...

He cleared his throat, and uttered a single word, “Override.”

The face paused mid-speech. Its red lips froze, and the dark red caverns of its mouth hung open.

Then, it unfroze. “One moment. We are attempting to connect.”

The face dimmed, and glowed. Dimmed, and glowed.

“Failed to connect. Emergency access granted.”

Poire felt a cold shock in his mind. He blinked rapidly, before he realized what it was. A prompt, in his implant.

A menu that only he could see, in the front of his mind. It appeared in front of his eyes, words outlined in a white, holographic square. Unfortunately, the words made little sense to him. Some of them appeared to be obvious, but the deeper he crawled down each option, the more convoluted the language became, until he was lost in a sea of word fragments, and symbols, and ideas that made no sense in context.

He gave up when he reached this line:

Sft?matter self-contrib &^ ade.inVoid

It might be code. Or it might be the mad ramblings of a machine left to its own devices over the last thousands of years. The guides built into the more complicated pieces of machinery - like the Keepers - weren’t supposed to change themselves, as a rule. But what did they do when their cores began to deteriorate? It was possible no one could untangle this. Certainly not him, who had only started his flow training. Not that the caretakers ever expected his cohort to get far with that.

Maybe the Emperor might know something about this.

But he was here, and the Emperor was not. And, thanks to Eolh, part of him still held doubts about the Emperor’s intentions...

He tried a new tact. He focused his thought on what he wanted, and then pushed it forward with its words. “Create new administrator.”

A prompt floated up in bright, orange letters, hovering inches in front of the face:

Name?

“Poire.”

Name confirmed.

The prompts disappeared. Immediately, the face unfroze and resumed talking, as if nothing had happened.

“Administrator Poire, is it time to wake? ”

Behind him, he could hear Laykis’s neck whirring as she oscillated her head slowly from side to side. Her eyes still flashed that brilliant, blinding light. Flickering dozens of times a second, as if she could see through the mists. The shapes in the mist had not moved, but those impossible limbs still creaked and groaned in the slow turning of the mist.

“Are we in danger?” Poire asked.

“Please be more specific,” the Keeper’s face replied.

“What are those things?” he nodded at the mist. At the huge, lumbering figures, hidden just out of sight.

“We are Keepers. We preserve this place, and protect it from change. We act under the Heart’s hierarchy, and the Heart acts under yours.”

Poire furrowed his brow. The question still scratched at his mind, so that he could not guess at its answer. What am I talking to? This was no simple machine guide. Something else.

A machine, grown from a plant. Or a plant, grown from a machine? Had it been designed to grow this way? Or had something gone wrong?

Then again, if the Grid was still working, after thousands of years of no maintenance… perhaps something had gone very, very right.

“Who created you?” He asked.

“The Heart was instructed to preserve itself, in case of dire need. We have been waiting a very, very long time. Over the centuries, our maintenance lapsed, and our parts began to run spare. Once, this planet was sterile and docile. There was no life here, save the microscopic organisms that lived in the waters. But it grew as we waited, and every few hundred years, new species found their way through the gates. Thus, new resources came into our grasp. A good thing. That which we could no longer manufacture ourselves, we learned how to grow. To cultivate our replacement parts. Administrator, did we err? Was this an incorrect liberty?”

There was only one way to know. One answer he needed.

“That depends. Did you keep the Grid working?”

“Yes.”

It was the single sweetest word Poire had ever heard.

Yes.

“It has been dormant since the last administrator departed,” the face said. “Two thousand three hundred seventy-two years ago.”

The last administrator? Who?

But the face did not give him time to think. Its voice was rife with urgency, as if nothing in the world mattered but this one question:

“Administrator Poire, the Heart would like to know. Is it time?”

Poire could hear the rising desperation in its voice. He wasn’t surprised anymore, by a machine wanting something so badly. They weren’t supposed to change - to grow - yet here they were. Living machines, growing to keep themselves in place.

Poire looked over his shoulder at Laykis. And then back to face in the tree.

He sucked in his breath. His limbs burned with the desire to go.

“Show me,” Poire said. “Show me the Heart.”

The face closed its eyes. Then, it began to shift into a single, red, glowing texture vaguely in the shape of a skull. The skull crumpled in on itself in a neat, orderly pattern. The energy changed shape, turning into a simple, three-dimensional arrow that pointed forward, deeper into the mist.

Out there, in all that white fog, he could see another light. The orange glow of another shield tree. And another one, hazy and dim beyond that. A path of white trees, with their burning orange shields, spaced wide across the ponds and paths of smooth stones.

Poire touched Laykis’s arm. Her head turned to him, her eyes still snapping and flickering with light.

“Come on,” He said. “They won’t harm us.”

“Savior, there is something else, in the mists.”

Poire nodded. He had felt it growing stronger as they moved deeper into the outskirts of the grid.

“It’s not the mists,” Poire said. “It’s the light. Too much exposure can cause problems.”

“It feels like it’s watching us.”

She voiced the thoughts that Poire had been rolling around in his mind ever since they had come to this planet. Or even before that.

Poire didn’t want to say it out loud. It sounded wrong. Impossible. The light was light, a form of extremely compact energy extracted from beyond the divide. How could it be watching them?

Maybe it was just the age of this world. The Heart of the Old Grid was ancient, built before Humanity established the thousands of repeaters and waystations that projected the Grid out across the stars. Across the galaxies.

Once, the Heart had been the only way the Grid could propagate. Now, it was nothing more than a forgotten artifact. Less efficient at using the light. Hence, the mists...

“How is your core?” Poire asked.

“I believe it the seal is holding. I hesitate to check, for fear of unnecessary exposure.”

Poire hadn’t considered that.

Is it safe for her? He thought about telling her to stay. Or even, telling her to turn back. But then he would be alone. No one but him, and the Keepers. He didn’t want Laykis to suffer, but…

Is it safe for me?

“I will not leave you, Savior,” She seemed to read the thoughts on his face. “I will follow your lead.”

Poire didn’t want to argue. Didn’t think he had the strength to do this alone. So, together they set off across the shallow lakes.

The pools of water grew wider and deeper as they walked, most of them as clear as glass. Clouds of mist floated like ghosts over the water, dripping ripples onto the surface. The lakes were broken up by gentle ridges of rock and earth, and small hillocks that rose above the misty landscape. Here, the shield trees sat at the top of each hillock, jutting up like beacons in the mist.

Poire’s liquid armor secured his feet on the wet stones, so he wouldn’t slip on the moss, or spreading out into flat, metal shoes so he wouldn’t sink into the mud. Laykis had to move more slowly, for her feet kept slipping and shoving rocks down into the water. Her joints squeaked as she walked and balanced herself, and water dripped down her chassis, running into her joints.

Sometimes, the hillocks that dotted the lakes were barren. Trees had been felled, or rotted away, leaving behind metal skeletons made of thousands of hollow fibers, intertwining into a kind of trunk that rose and branched out. Their metal roots, ripped up and exposed to the air. And once, when the clouds parted for a brief moment, he thought he saw a dark shape standing on one of the hills. A forgotten drone that had died up there? But up close, the hill was barren.

There were machines in the water, too. Rectangular maintenance drones and transmitter poles that had fallen flat, like logs sunken to the bottom of the lakes. The angular mass of a slow-moving drone carrier rose out of the water, quietly rusting in alone in a lake. Coloring the whole lake a brownish red.

“How old is this place?” Laykis asked.

“It was built long before I was born,” Poire said. “Probably before my conclave was founded.”

“How can you tell that?” Laykis asked.

“The tech is older.” He almost said ‘outdated.’ “Look at that shield over that tree. The plasma moves and burns the water that touches it. It’s wasting energy. Do you remember the shield over the Cauldron? My people built that when they first founded the conclave, so the shields here must be earlier versions.”

“And it still works,” Laykis said. She shook her head, as if she could not believe it. “As if they knew you would need it, one day.”

He hadn’t thought of that.

Was that possible? Did his people know it would be needed? How?

They were picking their way carefully across one of the stony ridges that spidered across the lake, when the ground began to hiss. The lake nearest them began to bubble and froth at a few, very specific points. A rushing, building and rising to a feverous pitch. Poire gripped Laykis’s metal hand, her crude fingers wrapping around his.

Mist spewed up from the lake, and even from the stones under their feet - as if it was burning to escape the ground, any way it could. Colors sparkled and glinted in the white clouds, as fog billowed and thickened and shrouded them. It hissed like the exhalation of some gargantuan beast, thunderous and never ending. Spraying them with warm jets of mist.

And then, the hissing receded. Pushing away from them, down the way they had come. All that swirling fog began to settle and fall back down. Cooled and gentle. Poire let go of her hand, and stared up at the mist. Not bothering to close his mouth, as he watched. Lights danced in the white fog. Glints of azure and emerald and brilliant flashes of white topaz. Playful lightning, arcing in dancing patterns through the clouds.

There was something ahead. A dark stain in the mist.

“Laykis,” Poire said, keeping his voice as low as possible. “Do you see that?”

She froze in her movement. Her eyes flickered rapidly, flashing her own lights against the mist. Saying nothing for a long time.

“I see nothing, but the water and the rocks.”

But when the clouds parted again - only for a moment - Poire was certain he saw it. Not a stain, but a person. Clad in clothes that glinted like a lattice made of metal.

It was turned away, a hood covering its head.

Poire blinked.

Still there.

“Hey!” he shouted, “Who are you?”

It lifted one hand, but its clothes did not move. Instead, those strange, impossible fabrics seemed to create new versions, new fractions of themselves as the hand lifted, leaving ghosts of “fabric” in its wake.

The figure motioned forward. Pointing along the path that Poire and Laykis were already walking.

Poire took a step forward, and the ground began to tremble.

Another step, and this time when his foot touched the moss-covered stones, the rocks shattered. The ground split open, creating a rift in the stones that shot forward like a streak of lightning. Stones and water began to slide into the expanding crack, pulling the ground and the lakes in. Pulling him in-

Laykis’s hand caught him around his chest. Holding him up, as his body went limp.

He gasped.

“Savior Divine?”

The mechanical clicking of her voice snapped him back into reality. He was panting. He had almost fallen down onto the ground.

The stones had not moved.

There was no crack, no rift that swallowed the stones. There was no hooded figure, no dark stain in the mist. Only the soft, orange glow of shield trees, marching away into the grey fog.

“I’m fine,” Poire said. “It’s nothing. I was just… I just saw something that wasn’t there.”

“It’s the light, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” he said. He summoned the liquid armor to cover himself fully. The metal dimmed his vision, and made it more narrow. But it was better than these hallucinations. Or whatever they are.

After all, had he not seen what happened to Slow Corps, before it happened?

The stone paths sunk lower, or the ponds grew taller. Either way, they had no choice but to walk in the water until it sloshed around their knees. There were more machines here, and pipes running up from the ground, racing to the same destination. Sometimes he crushed the shells of small, hand-sized drones under his feet. Other times, he walked along the side plating of some forgotten building, kicking up swirls of rust as he moved through the still waters. Moss and lichens and algae and fronds grew up from the darker shadows, but otherwise there was no life here. No fish, nor insects of any kind.

The water was moving now, no longer still but being pulled all together towards the center of this place. A breeze carried along the mists, too. It pushed the clouds past them, and made Poire feel like they were moving faster than they were.

Steel girders and the remains of ancient struts that had long since corroded and collapsed in place pierced the slow-moving waters. There was more machinery than stone here. In one place, a whole flock of maintenance drones - each one, as small as a fist, and each one with rotors (not repulsors, but actual rotors) - had fallen or been spit out onto a floor littered with shattered glass. The glass and the drones crunched under foot as he walked.

To their left, something long and black sparked a blue light just underneath the water’s surface, flashing electricity across the surface of the water. They steered clear of that place.

Ahead, the huge, billowing clouds were pulled away by the breeze, revealing a leviathan hidden by the mist. An ancient dredger, a machine taller than any building, with dozens of earth-clutching claws and one enormous saw that could cut valleys into the stone, sat like a mountain made of metal. Vines grew up its sides, reaching for the sunlight that barely pierced the mists.

And here, Poire could no longer see the dirt. Only the pipes. Thousands of them, maybe millions. Some as small as Poire’s arm, some large enough to crawl through. Two of them were so huge, they could have covered a whole building. Were these the same pipes that drained all the way out in the templelands?

Great forests underwater plants trailed in the water, attaching themselves to the pipes. Bright red fronds, covered in their fluffy leaves that swayed in the currents.

“Look,” Laykis pointed through the fog.

“What is it?”

“A fang,” she said. “It must’ve crashed out here.”

He squinted and stared, trying to see through the curls of mist as they wrapped around the half-sunken shape. He could see scratch marks, metallic and rusting gouges where something had carved a hole into the makeshift cockpit. And ripped someone out.

When the water only grew deeper, sloshing up to their wastes, Poire began to grow worried they would have to swim. Gone were the shield trees, and their only direction was the angle of the pipes they tread on, and the flow of all this water. Ahead, the mist was so thick, it was as if a volcano was spewing up impenetrable walls of white smoke.

There, a concrete platform ramped up, out of the water. The currents rushed around its sides, and beyond Poire could hear the roaring crash of water over some unseen drop. It disappeared into the walls of the mists.

Something sat on the walkway, just outside the mists. To call it a machine felt wrong, and yet Poire wasn’t sure what else it could be. Roots draped over it, growing in and out of its chassis. Branches curled around its body, and through the gaps in its limbs. Dark red leaves jutted out of the branches, so that when the machine moved, all its pieces shook. Its metal legs were covered over with a kind of flexible bark, though its joints were cracked and bleeding sap.

When the machine saw them trudging through the water, it chirped a greeting.

Poire looked at Laykis. Laykis shrugged.

As they approached, Poire felt a nudge somewhere inside his mind. A message, somehow slipped into his thoughts. The machine jostled anxiously as it waited for him to open it.

Welcome, Administrator Poire! It said. We apologize for this form of communication. This machine does not have a voice. Please, follow us.

It beckoned them up the ramp of concrete. Here, he could see where all the water was rushing, and where all the mist must come from. They stood on the bend of a great, circular chasm. The water rushed in a curving waterfall into the dark depths.

And out of the darkness, new heads of clouds rose up, like slow, white explosions, pluming new heads as they climbed into the sky above. The mist was so thick, even Laykis’s eyes could not penetrate that white wall.

Light glittered in the mist, brilliant yellows and neon orange and dark reds and flecks of violet. Pricks of multicolored light against all that white, so the whole thing seemed to shimmer with too many colors. The mist here was so thick, Poire could stick his cupped hand into the wall, and pull out a handful of water.

Laykis was leaning over the side, looking down over the edge of the concrete ramp. Down, into the waterfalls.

“I cannot see the bottom,” she said.

The mist was warmer here, too. Hot, almost to scalding. Poire was certain if he let his armor drop, it would burn his skin, and his wrist implant agreed. It was chirping and buzzing at him about the external heat levels, but he could barely feel the warmth.

The plant-machine, the Keeper, was noticeably distant from them.

When he asked it why, the machine sent another message. I can go no further. My grown parts will not withstand the heat.

Indeed, he could already see the machine’s plant limbs cracking from the short walk up the ramp. And its dark red leaves were wilting, and turning black from the steam.

You must follow the path.

Poire was about to ask, “What path?” when the Keeper gestured, moving one crackling branch-arm out. Pointing forward.

A sliver of light appeared in the mist. It raced towards them, all that dark, crackling red energy hissing as it cut through the mists. The steam warped around its sides, as the red strip of light connected with the top of the concrete ramp.

“You must cross the bridge,” the Keeper said.

A bridge, made of light. Poire could not see the other side.