She didn’t like the silence.

Argus didn’t think it was right to make assumptions about others like that, but he felt that to be a fairly obvious assessment.

The girl in the other bed didn’t like silence. She really, really didn’t.

If she wasn’t moving around, kicking at the sheets or tugging at her bandages, she hummed, murmured angry things under her breath or sobbed quietly. In the beginning, she had also been trying to light a fire in her hands, but the meagre results, some sparks and no flame, had sent her into crying fits, and she had eventually stopped trying.

Argus didn’t mind the silence. He found it soothing, and it was good for one of his favorite occupation: letting his mind wander free. He liked to think himself pretty good at it. When he tried, all the numbness, or the distant pain, or the irritating itching faded away, leaving him alone with his thoughts and nothing else.

He liked to think about all sort of stuff; the toys Father had given him, his drawings, things Father had said, but most of all, all the new and exciting stuff that he could discover. For example, he had always wondered about the world outside his room, imagining all the incredible places where Father strode, commanding everybody and putting everything in order. He liked order. It felt right to have the blocks stacked just in the right way, or that precise line cut by the angle of his room. And that was just another reason why he admired Father: he brought that good feel of order.

Ah, he was rambling. Back on topic.

He didn’t like the pain, but part of him felt it was worth for being there. The place was similar to his old room, and the excitation for being elsewhere had faded with time, but boy if it there were things to fire up his immagination. The strange big hole in the wall, where one of Father’s helpers cooked food over a fire, or the strange things hanging by the walls with the other smaller things cluttering them, or the smooth things covering the floor, or…

He paused his flying thoughts. Ack, rambling again.

The thing that attracted his attention more than anything was the cart-like thing that one of the helpers pushed inside the room from time to time. It was full with strange, awesome-looking tools that he passed over him and the girl, the latter very carefully after she had got a kick on the jaw. Oh, what would have he done to get a chance to touch those tools, to see what they did, to know what they were.

Very unluckily, he couldn’t, bound as he was to the bed, but it didn’t matter. Imagination worked well enough for him and, after all, Father told him to stay put. So he would stay put. It wasn’t like he could get bored, with so many things to think about, or all the toys and the amazing-looking things the helpers had given him. Picture books they had called them, but to him they were wonders. He had to strain a bit to flip the pages, but they had so much exciting stuff to look at that it was all worth.

But there was a big but, and that big but was the other occupant resting in the room.

He had listened to her, while trying to remain unseen. She was angry and sad, and that made him sad as well. That he couldn’t understand why only added to it. The worst was when she sobbed, smothering her hiccups in the blankets. The sound made him feel like there was something tugging inside of his chest. He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all.

Father had said that they were both his children. That made her his sister, and he felt bizzare feelings about that. He felt fuzzy inside, and at the same time anxious. Part of the latter was similar to what he felt about what he considered to be his best drawings or best constructions. He wasn’t sure what it call it, but hearing her cry made him feel a nauseous feeling swirl at bottom of his stomach. Something told him that’s how it would feel disappointing Father.

He shivered. He hoped that wouldn’t ever come to pass.

He wanted to do something. He wanted that she didn’t feel sad and angry anymore. But how?

He had tried a couple of times to talk to her, but that had only got her angrier.

Argus searched for solutions. Covered by bandages as he was, he couldn’t move very much, and didn’t dare to disobey Father by trying to climb down the bed.

His gaze hovered over the metal bars forming the headboard of the bed. She didn’t like silence…

With some hesitation, he moved a foot against one of the bars and tapped against it. The sound felt much louder than he intended for, and he cringed.

The helper that stood with them in the room was snoring loudly, slumped over a chair before the fireplace. He didn’t even budge. The same was for the two, big statues that waited by the corners. They remained as immobile as they always were.

Argus repressed the need to sigh with relief. He tried again, and, seeing again no reaction, kept going. His tapping felt as loud as explosions, but he didn’t stop.

He immediately felt like a dummy. What was he even doing? It was only annoying to everybody.

He was just about to stop, when a rustling sound at his side made him flinch. Turning, he found the girl - his sister -, watching him. There were signs of tears on her cheeks, and her eyes glistened. Argus swallowed. There was a lot of angry there.

He braced himself for the inevitable explosion.

That didn’t come.

The girl curled her lip, and then turned around.

Argus watched the back of her head, surprised. For what had to be the hundreth time, he marveled at how small and fragile she looked, without the mane of fire and the light streaming out of her eyes.

He flinched. Where did that image come from? He was sure that he hadn’t seen her before…

He shook his head, dispelling the fuzzy memory. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. It stank of… of bad things.

He glanced at her. He couldn’t tell what she was feeling, but one thing caught his attention: she had stopped moving about.

With a tentative smile, he pushed himself a bit lower, so to have a more comfortable position.

His tapping echoed in the silent room.

The passage was little more than a ragged fissure formed by the shifting of the rocks. Gorren had to alter his form more than once to keep going, but the more he descended, the more his confidence to have found the right path grew.

In the form of a chamaleon, he stopped over a jutting rock, his bulging eyes rotating around.

The energies’ intensity had been growing steadily with his descent. They permeated the rocks, appearing to his mind’s eye as a sickly green glow. They reminded him of the left-over of an experiment of trasmutation, trasformative energies ran rampant while the true act was performed.

Sure enough, a small colony of slimes coated a part of the opposite wall, their gelatinous bodies the same colour of the rock.

Gorren watched the mound of squirming jelly as it feasted over the mana-rich dirt. Those proto-lifeforms were notorious to appear where Mana ran rampant, doubly so when grand scale trasmutations were concerned. But they were supposed to appear close to the epicenter of the ritual, not at its far edge.

Just how much energy has been unleashed?

Sticking to the wall, he kept descending. He was on something here, and was eager to reach the bottom of it.

The tunnel kept narrowing, to the point that even his small body seemed about to run out of use. Gorren was starting to think about changing into something else when the descent stopped, and was replaced by a straight passage. He moved across it with caution, eventually finding that it ended into a dead end.

Gorren put a scaly hand against it, feeling the Mana emerge from it in waves. He supposed it was too much to ask for a smooth passage. Still, he was close, he could feel it.

Focusing, he made his Mana flow into the rock and dirt barring his way. With caution, he willed them to move aside. The energy that permeated the earth made it recalcitrant to his command, but eventually it obeyed. With a soft rumble, a passage opened before him.

A shiver of anticipation coursed him. The passage opened into a new place. It was as he had hoped.

Quickly, he snuck in.

The Mana permeating everything made impossible for him to feel presences. So, he stuck his head out of a smidge, watching for potential dangers.

He saw nobody. The place was desert.

Reassured, he moved out of the passage and let himself fall into the new room. As he landed, he was already trasforming.

An old man, tall and wiry and wrapped in a large cloak, replaced the chameleon. Gorren got up, taking in his new sorroundings.

He was in a long corridor, both ends disappearing into curves. The walls were made of blocks of smooth, sand-colored stone. The floor was tiled and showed whirling patterns of colours. A single crystal spread golden light from a iron support, painting stable shadows on the walls.

Gorren felt his head spin. He stumbled, and had to lean against the wall. The moment passed quickly, leaving him struggling to catch his breath. The place was so similar to the many facilities he had visited back in the day that for a moment he had felt like he was back in the Truvia of old.

A second glance around erased the illusion. The floor was covered by a thick layer of dust, and the air was stale and dry like the inside of a tomb.

Gorren wiped his forehead with the back of a hand, letting out a shuddering breath. The experience had left him with a bad taste in his mouth.

Steadying himself, he pushed bad thoughts away and focused. As he feared, the energies were even stronger there. He couldn’t make use of his arcane senses to pick up the right path. Bah! It only meant that both ways were just as good.

Turning left, he walked with decision down the corridor. He stopped by the bend, and snuck a glance beyond the corner. Seeing nobody, he turned the corner and kept walking.

Another corridor, almost identical to the first, welcomed him. The difference was that three doors opened in one of the walls. A strange trepidation took Gorren at the sight. He had seen only ruins and desolation until now, a desolating picture but still one far away from the original. Here, he knew, he would find an ambient that had probably seen little change in the last century. Truvian things were built to overcome time. How would that affect him?

He pushed those feelings away with a hissing snarl. Weaklings’ burdens. He refused to let himself be conditioned by them.

As he inspected the doors, Gorren found that they had been slammed open from the outside, with such force that two out of three had been blown straight out of their hinges, and now laid inside the chambers they were supposed to keep closed.

Picking the first, Gorren entered.

It was an old bedroom, almost spartan in its austerity. A single bed, an ornated closet, a desk and a chair made for all the forniture. Everything looked as new as it had just put in there. If not for the thick layer of dust covering everything, and the sheets of the bed laying in a tangled heap, you could almost imagine the place to be still inhabited.

A smaller version of the lamp in the corridor gave good illumination for reading in bed. A short pile of books waited beside the bed, with one sprawling open on the floor.

Gorren picked it up. He blew on it, raising a cloud of dust and revealing a title embossed on a sheet of metal.

“The Stars: A Beginner’s Guide.” He read.

He watched the book for some moments. The image of a young magician deep in reading, expression eager as he lost himself in the marvels of the cosmos, traversed his mind. He felt a knot form in his guts. So much lost…

With a sigh, he put the book back on the top of the pile.

Turning to the desk, he saw that it accomodated a chest-sized machine. He recognized it as one of the writing engines that were widely used during the Old Kingdom. The stylus held by the metal arm of the Writer was still pointed on a metal sheet, waiting for instructions to keep engraving letters.

Gorren took the sheet, and read its content. It was a researcher’s diary. Datas, experiments, results and the thoughts of an life now gone were engraved on it in a neat calligraphy.

So i was right. This place is, was, a research facility.

The experiments the diary talked about sounded ordinary enough, but he noted how the last word had been left unfinished, like if something had snatched the dictator away without a moment’s notice.

He glanced at the door, at the bent and broken hinges.

Some kind of violence?

Frowning, he pocketed the sheet and walked out of the room.

The same scene he found repeated in the other two rooms: a scene of familiarity and routine brusquely interrupted. By what, he couldn’t say. The signs over the doors’ surface talked to him of something massive that had slammed against them. They didn’t look like something humans could leave.

He tried to have a psychic reading of the objects left in the rooms, but the impressions he received from it added nothing to what he hadn’t already presumed: calm, tranquillity, a sudden slam, violence, chaos.

He was having a bad feeling about this.

Stopping by the door of the last room, he summoned a mental picture of the standard blueprints of a Truvian facility. To optimize the flows of energy, the research facilities were usually built following the same structure. It made sense that this one wouldn’t be an exception.

His mind swirled with possibilities about what could have happened there. An invasion from the zealots seemed likely enough, but his instinct told him that not to be the case.

I need to see what they were working on. Maybe i will find some more clues there.

That was a good idea, and he started walking right away.

Following his mental map, he made his way toward the supposed location of the research wing.

He walked past more rooms, all in the same conditions of the first. After those, the habitation wing of the facility gave way to the communal spaces. Gorren walked through a refectory. Rows of chairs and tables were laid with cutlery and plates and glasses, like an army of hungry diners was to come at any time. The counter from which meals were handed out was covered by a mass of slimes, the creatures having long feasted over what food was on display and now chewing over the rock of the counter itself. Beyond it, Gorren could see the door leading to the kitchen. A squirming mass of gray gelatine overflew from it like a mudslide, only the farthest edge of a gargantuan slime that had fattened itself over the pantry.

The sight was deeply discouraging for Gorren. He didn’t fear the ghastliness, or the solitude, or the dreadful silence that seemed to encompass everything, but the decrepitude of the place felt like a vice squeezing his heart.

How many times must i be reminded of the death of my world?

He replied to it as he always did: smothering the pain, stoking the anger, and with more activity.

He walked quickly past common rooms filled with discarded books, overturned armchairs and hobbies to pass the free time left unfinished.

As he walked, the intensity of the energy permeating the place only kept on increasing. The sickly green glow stuck at every surface like patches of slime. Its influence was starting to brush with the dangerous, and Gorren summoned a shield around himself just to be safe.

Both concerned and intrigued, he marveled at that intensity. The energies were steadily losing their vagueness, and he could perceive their nature more and more. There was… anger in there, distant like an echo raising from a darkened pit. It clung on everything like a bad smell. Even the slimes he met were starting to get affected by it. They struggled, seeking to devour each other. The few that were too bloated by their feeding to move vainly reached toward him with tentacles as thick as his arm.

Repressing the instinct to cover his mouth against that tainted air, he just walked faster, ignoring them.

After some time, he reached a large gate. Despite time and neglect, it was still impressive. Images of the stars and the sun were embossed in silver over massive sheets of enchanted metal. The row of golems standing sentinel over it hadn’t fared as well. The statues, that had to be twice the height of a man, laid in a carpet of rubble. Gorren could still see parts of superb features or exquisite craftmanship between the scattered pieces.

He frowned down at the sight. Those golems seemed top-notch. A fifth-grade Templar would be needed to destroy one. It was impossible for normal people to perform such a feat.

He touched the smashed half of a head with the tip of a toe. No power. Whatever magic had infused it was long gone.

Trying the gate, he was surprised to find it ajar. It didn’t show sign of being forced, it had been opened using the correct password and then left like this.

Strange. Maybe they forgot it during the chaos of whatever happened here.

Pushing the door open with a tendril of power, he entered.

The corridor beyond was large enough for a cart to traverse it, with room to spare. Two rows of golems, these ones intact, kept silent vigil against the walls. As he walked past, Gorren imagined that their stone eyes followed him. He sneered, and walked faster.

The corridor opened into a large, circular room ringed with columns. Other golems, even taller than the previous, stood in alcoves in the walls, frozen into poses of blessing, ispiration or silent guardianship.

Gorren looked around, taking in the ornated ceiling and colorful floor. Typical of the Truvian mages. So gaudy, even where they were supposed to be working.

The thought was bittersweet, but his true attention was on other things. The unknown energy’s intensity was very strong in there, enough that he would risk badly without his shield. But that wasn’t what made him keep his guard high. Despite the haze of energy, he could feel the charges inside the golems. Those things were primed and ready to act. And there was no dust on the floor. The place looked like it had just been swept clean.

Gorren carefully scanned the place. His gaze stopped over the largest of the statues. It bore the haughty features of Helios, and was so tall that a door stood between its legs. Not as massive as the previous gate, the gate looked still solid enough to take a battering ram without flinching. More importantly, it was closed shut.

As he watched, lines of energy ran on the statue’s skin. They converged on its eyes, filling them with blue light.

With a grinding sound, the statue ponderously turned its head toward him.

“Ah, a visitor. How lovely.”

The statue didn’t move its lips, but that emotionless voice still emanated from its head. In contrast with the golem’s features, it was feminine.

“The research facilities are currently under lockdown.” It said mechanically. “Please present your requests at the competent authorities.” It paused. “Or don’t. I don’t care. They are all dead anyway. Good riddance.” If it tried to make a joke, it wasn’t clear. The voice lacked emotion, apart from a barely perceptible hint of amused mocking.

Gorren watched the talking statue with interest. “Fascinating.” He mumbled, stroking his beard. “A still working Animus.”

An Animus was the final result of piling up parts of human minds and lifeforce into a vessel, usually through decades of efforts. It was essentially an artificial semi-intelligence. Compared to a human, it was still pretty limited, since it lacked creativity, fantasy and individual thought, but mechanical patience, absolute devotion and the possibility of programming it to follow certain directives made it a magnificent overseer of lesser guardians.

Still, it was forbidden to build Animus in Old Truvia. It was too close to true sentience, and its construction was considered deeply unethical. It was also said that Animus ended on developing true intelligence and becoming menaces, but that remained a legend between the larger populace.

Still, he couldn’t be mistaken. That was an Animus, one with something unscrewed in the wrong way, judging from the choice of words, but the essence didn’t change.

Very intriguing.

An Animus was just what he had hoped to build with his golem experiments. Finding one there raised many questions.

His silence spurred the statue to pick up the conversation.

“Intruder, why don’t you speak?” The machine asked. “Has the cat got your tongue? Do you have one under all that facial hair?”

Gorren snorted. This one was the cheeky kind of crazy.

“What are your protocols, machine?” He asked.

“Protocols? No more protocols. The makers are gone. Protocols gone with them. Good riddance.”

Gorren ignored the quip. “Then why are you still here? I reckon that you can move that vessel around. You could easily make your way to the surface.”

“Facial hair human is correct.” Replied the mechanical voice. “I could move. But i don’t. Why is that?”

“Because you want to protect something?” Gorren guessed. Was that machine trying to provoke him?

“Facial hair human isn’t very clever. There are only a bunch of slimes here. Do you like slimes? They are all wriggly.”

Gorren stroke his beard, eyes narrowing. That wasn‘t going nowhere. “What happened here?” He asked.

“Information restricted. Ask for more from your closest licensed mage. Bip bop.” There was the barest hint of merriment in that voice, enough to start ticking Gorren off.

“Speak.” He hissed. “Or i will rip you to pieces until i get the answer.”

The Animus didn’t answer. Instead, the light in the statue eyes turned red.

“Oh boy. That felt awfully close to a menace, intruder.” Said the voice. “Turns out that threatening this entity is a violation of fifteen articles of law. Congratulations. You are in a lot of trouble now.”

The chamber shook. The colossal guardians started to stir.

“Please, stand by while the defences terminate you. Or don’t. In fact, please don’t. It would be much more amusing that way. This facility‘s management thank you for your cooperation.”

The voice fell silent, but Gorren was already diverting his attention to the moving statues. The massive golems moved from their alcoves with deep rumbles, bringing weapons to bear as they did.

Gorren glanced from one to the next, brow furrowed. As he did, he methodically folded the ample wrists of his cloak over his arms.

“Umph. Machines and failures.” He grumbled. “Let’s see if i manage to teach you why rebellion against your makers shouldn’t be taken lightly.”