Peace.

The tiny field cutter, mindless and long severed from its host, drifted in the void. Far, far below it, the planet Merlinst gleamed. Ever falling, the dead device was no more significant than an adult human’s finger, compact, rectangular and featureless. It tumbled as it fell, moving too quickly to reach the surface, locked in a steep orbit.

Again and again, countless times, it circled the world from above. Without judgement, it bore silent witness as billions of tons of orbital wreckage hit the atmosphere below. The air ignited where they fell. The earth itself glowed hot. The once golden habitats scoured, black.

Above it, a new moon circled, borne from a long process of accretion, more and more of the orbital corpse pulled into its greedy mass. It, too, was wicked hot, glowing dim even when shaded from the system’s star. The youngest celestial body was furious. With the pull of its weighty body, it fractured the world below, shattering the crust and spilling molten stone. The oceans boiled, and fires raged across its green continents.

It watched the tremendous, glowing flutes of Merlinst’s death throes as the boiling lava fountained into the upper atmosphere.

It watched as the planet circled the local star, the molten earth below cooling into rock.

It watched as the hot atmosphere ripped at that stone, wind and storms tearing it down into an all-encompassing desert over tens of thousands of years.

It even watched the first cities grow. Some of them, fat and lazy, were content simply spread. Others, impudent, crawled over the surface. They chased each other in pursuit of violence or desire.

But as the planet grew hot, slowly, its atmosphere swelled, expanding outwards into the vacuum of space. Eventually, the faintest traces of it touched upon the lost device. That feather reach first stole the old thing’s slow tumble through the void. Then, as it orbited, again and again, its speed was sapped. Finally, it was dragged down, deeper into the upper reaches of dead Merlinst’s atmosphere, until it could no longer escape.

Upon a column of fire, it screamed through the air and hit the desert in a shock of crystal sand and smoke. It watched the passages of the star and the burning moon above for countless days and nights until the blowing winds covered it in the sand.

There the artefact lay until one day, a titan disturbed its rest. The first foot of the megapedal city, mighty Acetyn, cracked the earth. Sand rushed around the crater in its wake, falling down into where the bedrock was shattered. Then, coming to a rest on top of the cavity, the device was again exposed to the air, shaded by a careless giant that made slow progress overhead.

Acetyn bellowed from its countless skull keeps, a resounding trumpet call that thundered across the desert. Not so far behind, its companion Sestchek answered that call with a symphony of spines, grinding against each other and chirping in an insectile concerto. All about them, the toughest or the most suicidal freaks dared to leave their hosts. Instead, they scavenged the sands for fallen star metal, invaluable to Those Up High, ruling from the spires of their wicked cities. Just one good find could change a freak’s life forever, trading the material for the right favour.

Just such a freak stood upon a glass boulder. Tiny and long-limbed, it turned its beak and binocular eyes to survey the sands. The monster waited, too weak to struggle with the larger hulls and the most buried wreckage. Eventually, it knew, the most valuable things would be exposed to the open air by the gales and dust devils left in mighty Acetyn’s wake. His patience was rewarded.

Lopping and bounding across the hot sand, the freak’s calloused talons were inured to the pain. There, just where he saw it, was the small artefact. He tipped his head, this way and that, appraising the find hawkishly, before chirping and taking it up in his beak, darting back towards the city.

And so, the device returned to darkness. It passed from hand to claw, from pincer to maw, a treasure in the depths that moved between pitiful freaks and haughty vat-borne. They coveted its ancient purpose, though it was quite unknowable to them. When the artefact finally returned to the light, it was in one of Acetyn’s lower spiracles. This great vent sucked up the furnace air of the desert into its humid depths.

Stood upon its lip, an eidolon watched the desert below. This freak had the silhouette of a man, dressed only in a brown cloak clasped loosely around his shoulders. However, his flesh - a mangled mix of everything except humanity - was carved into this unnatural, bipedal shape. Pale and scarred, his yellow eyes turned to watch a troupe of Neoglosms march to the opposite side of the divide. They knelt at its edge, a brigade of freaks of all shapes and sizes.

The evangelical Neoglosms believed that this life was endless torment, a living hellscape. They thought release could be given to those willing to embrace decapitation. Not only that, but they desired their bodies to be hurled to the sands and be forever apart from their parent’s ecosystem.

Their more deluded members thought the real world, Paradise, awaited them in their passing. They insisted that the only way to escape the city was to take out your brain or remove your head before leaving it. Then you just had to have someone reattach it once you had crossed the border. Apparently, there was another world waiting for them. However, most of them realised how foolish they were when they saw the desert for themselves.

The eidolon couldn’t tell which of them was a true believer and who harboured doubts. They all looked terrified, confronted with the furnace truth of the outside below. Behind them stalked a wicked creature with a scything arm, encouraging them with quotes of meaningless scripture, hollow words of reassurance.

The zealot hacked the first neck, the freak’s head then body falling heavily over the edge. The other Neoglosms begged some higher power to help them, offering up a prayer to an uncaring God. Frowning, the eidolon leaned forward and watched the body’s descent. However, the air bellowing up to meet his face was hot and dry, and even in the shade, he lacked the genes to bear the sun’s light. Quickly burning, he flinched away, back into the dark and humid interior of the city.

Grim, the eidolon wrapped his billowing cloak about himself and stepped away from the edge of the spiracle. He had to stoop down and duck as it walked below each rib that supported the passage at one of the many wide tracheae, which gulped down air for the city. He only moved a little way in, enough to get away from the sunlight that breached the interior. On the way, he passed a freak dragging bleach-cleaned bones towards the hole. The monster pretended to be busy as it kept a keen eye on those who came and went. The eidolon was sure that the freak spied on him. Glaring momentarily, he bought its silence with a star-metal coin and a harsh word. The monster quickly departed.

Even out of sight, the eidolon could hear their screams of terror. Listening, he identified each fall by the reaction of the other Neoglosms and the distant thump as they landed. Finally, the eidolon found a dark corner to kneel in. He managed to fall into meditation, frowning, crooked face bowed. Who knew how far their wicked faith reached, how many falsehoods they spread, and how many lives they ruined? Righteous fury burned in his heart. The eidolon crushed that feeling: this was not the time, and this was not the place.

Finally, there was silence. But the eidolon was not here for silence. Eventually, the sound of footsteps approached. This time, the eidolon rose to its feet and carefully watched a gaunt, eight-limbed vat-borne crawl out of the dark. Robed and hooded, the vat-born was stained with ochre dust, which trailed off its cloak, and collected dark and heavy under its feet.

Scowling, the eidolon eyed the vat-born’s machine augments. Parts of its body had been replaced with star metal - buzzing devices of unknowable purpose. It was marked as one of the Wire-Witch’s minions, and they weren’t supposed to interfere like this. Usually, they thought themselves too important to ever leave their sanctums. However, someone must have taken notice of this little favour.

With a wheeze from its mechanical lungs, it turned its hood this way and that in its search for the eidolon. But unfortunately, it lacked eyes, and instead, the plate stapled over its head relentlessly clicked and listened for the echo.

The eidolon stepped away from the wall, making himself more prominent for the blind thing. He raised his hand in a holy gesture, and the vat-born promptly halted. Then the machine minion clambered forwards and gave a similar, albeit more mechanical blessing, with a hand assembled and not grown.

“How long you must have waited...” The vat-born’s voice was clearly synthetic.

The eidolon waited for the Wire-Witch’s minion to face him completely before speaking. “Do you have it?”

“I do.”

It offered him the small, featureless rectangular device. Almost carelessly, it clasped the artefact between steel digits. However, when the eidolon reached to take it, the vat-born held on tight.

“She allows you this, for your little journey to your ruined little shrine,” it hissed. “And, in the times that come, you will remember that.”

The eidolon snatched the device as soon as the vat-born released it. A favour for a favour was how the courts worked, and if he was going to reach them On High, he had to do well to remember that. Scowling, not giving the artefact another look and not giving the vat-born the pleasure of verbal acquiescence, he walked away. Shrouding himself in his ruined, old cloak, he ducked and disappeared into the dark, towards the deep necropolis of Aceytn’s thoracic reaches.