Her burden of life, their lives. They wear the same face as us. Yet they live and die as slowly as possible, and they never stop to question their fate. They toil and die and never leave their station; they have nothing left; they lost what they had today for a tiny bit of tomorrow. How dim her care, boasting her living glory until the machines fall. A tumbling fall, and scale, bone, and muscle spread wide her luminous smile.

Slowly, she spied a star. They brought to her hand the halo; their state of decay laid her own, with heavy delight.

CHAPTER 3: THE SIN OF OMISSION

The compartment rattled around her, the crackling thump of rocket engines piercing through the fuselage. She felt the shuttlecraft turn and slow in the air through the weight of gravity and inertia. Thus, despite being blind to the outside world, she knew her destination was at hand. Swaying in her seat as the heavy vessel readied to land, her naked skull turned down, and she looked over the skin on her hands, sat alone, with no need for theatre or ostentation. Such a time could never last.

High amongst ivory towers, an ossein guardsman crossed a bridge spanning the open air to a pearlescent eyrie. The softness of clouds lapped at his greaves imperceptibly before rushing away as a dragon roared. Then, descending upon engines of fire, the massive beast kicked at the air, catching the guard’s cloak and casting the mists apart. Then the creature set down upon its nest.

Dutifully, the guard took to one knee in genuflection, struggling in the cumbersome clothes he was forced to wear beneath his armour to survive exposure to the wicked day star. A ramp descended from the dragon’s chest. Two of the Wire-Witch’s iron warriors stepped down from the beast’s body, rifles keening and glowing in hand, a red malevolence gleaming from their dead eyes. The guard made a sign of subservience with a gauntleted claw. Satisfied by his obeisance, the iron warriors overlooked him and moved around the landing platform with lurching steps. Once their inspection was complete, they stood at attention upon either side of the now cowering freak.

The Wire-Witch alighted amidst the clouds as the sky settled back to a state of calm around them. A thralled cyber platform walked for her, flat and squat, with four bladed legs. Standing upon it, she wore great serpentine steel coils upon her bare, amethyst skin. Around her neck writhed a nest of wires, from which her shimmering skull emerged.

“Welcome home, Your Highness,” the guard said, helmet-clad head still bowed.

Long ago, the palace had been built in her honour. Yet, as the guard dared glance up at her, he could see the disgust that she felt in her eye sockets. So quickly hidden, yet it was enough to make the servant recoil with shame.

“Rise.”

He did, towered over by the blackened, artificial soldiers and the Wire-Witch upon her mechanised platform. With the utmost respect, the guardsman stood aside, letting her iron warriors lurch towards the tower first. Taking his honoured position beside the Wire-Witch, they crossed the bridge together.

In the distance, through the haze, a vast, horned skull turned upon them. Kilometres of bone, millions of tons of mass, one of the broad heads of Acetyn regarded the arrival of the Immortal’s sister-daughter. It belched black smoke from each fracture and cavity, calling out wordlessly, with a voice loud enough to shake the rain from the air, precipitation falling over them as their chests caught the brunt of the clarion call.

Chamber doors were opened, gullets were drawn wide, and a portcullis raised. They stepped into a great spire before descending upon an elevator suspended by weighty iron chains.

“Your raiment is well maintained,” the Wire-Witch said to the guard, whose welcome was so overshadowed, without looking at him.

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“You wear it better than your predecessor.”

The Wire-Witch could hear him swallow down his fear in the ensuing silence, and it almost brought her peace - at least until the elevator settled at its destination.

As they made passage onwards, what freaks they crossed paths with threw themselves to the ground, prostrated. The iron warriors remained ever vigilant, scanning each soul they passed with a wave of sanguine light. Then, descending steps, they crossed into the mausoleum of the Pate Gardens, where sunbeams bore down from cracks in the vaulted ceiling of the upper cavity. A score of ossein guards, each uniquely bioengineered into a living weapon, flesh sculpted into a servile form, bowed with the Wire-Witch’s passing.

In the gardens, the Wire-Witch stopped before a monument at the side of the road. It contained a stone tablet, inconceivably old and taken from a faraway land, enshrined here with the palace’s construction. Upon the stone was carved a series of intricate nine-piece logograms. They held little meaning to the guard, but it seemed something of great importance to the Wire-Witch, and she spent a short while pressing her soft fingertips and titanium nails to their shape.

Soon thereafter, they ascended the steps to the Ossein Basilica, making their way through its desolated halls. Together, they passed an audience chamber, observing through the open doorway a cadaver laid out for service. The chanting of bone monks echoed throughout.

Reaching the Lord’s court, the iron warriors entered first. With no regard for the security or customs of the Basilica, they moved from occupant to occupant, be they courtier or servant, bound or free, scanning each with a flash of red. The Wire-Witch entered only when their inscrutable judgement was satisfied, leaving her escort at the threshold.

The Lord of Bones was seated, his position surrounded on all sides by sculpture. Wrought in bone and cold silver filigree, he was overlooked by the images of angels, their bodies obscured behind stiletto feathered wings, the soft tentacles that constituted their faces highlighted with a gentle white glow, endlessly weeping through complicated fountain work.

Two beauties, symmetrical in form and pink of skin, tended to the Lord. They sponged his face mask with warm, cleansed water and retied his silken raiment before retreating from the counsel. The Wire-Witch recognised the concubine weapons, taunting gifts from her mother-sister to keep pleased the Wire-Witch’s Lord-husband in her absence; as they moved away, the skirts of their skin dancing around their legs, it was with wicked grace. Their eyeless, elongated heads tipped back, and they crawled up the chamber walls before hiding amongst the decoration.

The Lord did not look. Instead, his gravitas and attention were entirely spent upon his own immense contemplations.

The chancellor, hiding his contempt, managed an officious bow, his legless body holding the subservient posture. Courtiers made noises of fear and threw themselves as far forward as they could, chained as they were to their seats.

Slowly, the Lord of Bones grew alert, as if stirring from a dream. Finally, he reached out to her, his entire body trembling with the exertion required to lift his arm. The cyber platform stepped closer, and the Wire-Witch came upon his weathered throne. Taking his hand in her own, she placed it upon the side of her skull, along her silverline jaw. Then, cooing with affection, she spoke softly.

“Hush, my love. I am here now.”

“He threatens everything we built together,” the Lord managed with the ghost of a whisper.

“I know. I know,” the Wire-Witch reassured him before turning to address those in the chamber with a commanding voice. “Show me.”

“Bring it in,” the chancellor said, his fleshy hands working together, dark robes creasing.

A twitching computer was dragged into the chamber, thrown to the floor, by an ossein guard. A mass of wires, slick and greased, trailed behind its skull. Its voice cracked into the song of data before its mouth and eyes opened, a wave of ichor pouring forth from them. A projection screen warped into existence, emanating from the gushing orifices. It filled the chamber with a purple glow, the hum of electricity in the air. Then, a video of the city’s edge lowest reaches filled the forum, a close-up of a vast stone head, that of a progenitor.

The view shifted. The Pilgrim emerged from a bright gateway. He wore a suit of war built by those that came before and recovered from the stars. A castle in motion, in many ways, the Pilgrim had become a living embodiment of millennia of civilisation and all the might necessary to sustain it. At least, he had become that in the legendarium of the cities. More myth than fact, coveted amongst those who had never had the ill fate of meeting him and who despised the noble bloodlines and all they had done to save this world.

“But you are a madman, Pilgrim of the Axiamat,” the Wire-Witch muttered to herself, unbidden, words so old as to be forgotten, words that had never passed her chrome teeth but words that she remembered all the same.

Drawing to a halt, the Pilgrim was followed by the scurrying length of a debased freak. Hundreds of legs circled the ancient one before the lesser presented the shaft of a weapon to the Pilgrim. The video flickered, a violent spasm of light that gave way to new footage.

A greatly magnified three-second loop showed the Pilgrim’s bare skull, so similar to her own. Yet his right eye socket had been scored, chipped, above and below by some bladed weapon, and his metallic jaw was slick with blood. The sight of it stirred the courtiers that filled the dark perimeter of the chamber, struggling against the chains that kept them bound to their ordained positions. Then, in a panic, one called out wordlessly, thrashing its hood side to side.

“Enough,” the chancellor said.

At his command, the display faded to nothing. The computer collapsed to the ground, heaving for breath and writhing in pain.

“The Pilgrim has returned to the city proper,” the chancellor informed them in quiet, slithering tones.

“Leave us, now,” the Wire-Witch said before turning to the Lord, meeting the fearful eyes beneath his bone mask.

Before departing, the chancellor genuflected as best as his swollen, wormy body could manage, reinforcing the Wire-Witch’s command with a frantic hand gesture. One by one, the chamber was cleared of those not chained into place. Even their murmuring and rattling died down into a silent audience.

“Oh dear,” the Wire-Witch softly uttered. Then, stepping down from the cyber platform, she made her way to his throne. She sat on his lap and put a hand on the wasting Lord’s shoulder. He gasped wordlessly as her bare thighs rested on his. Titanium fingernails grazed the Lord’s bared, emaciated chest as she parted his silken robes. Leaning against him, the steel that coiled around her torso bit into him.

“There is no need to worry, my love,” she whispered into his ear, as the feeble, rotten noble squirmed beneath her. “I shall speak to my sisters, and that will be the end of that.”