Each step perfectly needled across the bony plates that constituted the floor; the Wire-Witch softly exhaled as her cyber platform carried her through an empty section of the Ossein Basilica, allowing herself just a moment apart from the image that she had to maintain. Then, the walking platform reached a stairway, and its flat surface remained level as it descended, the blades that constituted its legs taking each step with artificial accuracy. Her two mechanised guardians did not move with such grace in their escort, one ahead and one behind. Instead, they loped down the stairs with deliberate intent, scanning each corner and ceiling cavity with a sweep of sanguine light, their rifles raised.

Returning to the public eye, the Ossein guardians kept the main corridors at each arching doorway, the palace carefully grown and pressed and sculpted into shape centuries ago. They bowed with her passage - bipedal, symmetrical, holy in form; a paragon of virtue approaching purity, just as she was designed. In her path, two guards led a filthy, eight-limbed freak through the Lord’s halls. They stopped before the Wire-Witch, bowing with respect. Then, shrieking from its vibrating hind limbs, the mutant threw itself down to its many knees in a gesture of subservience, daring not to raise its gaze towards the noble. Skull turning down, the Wire-Witch looked the freak over. Then, an unspoken command had her iron warriors grab it by its forelimbs, drag it mewling to standing again so that she could get a better look.

“It is of the Lord’s subjects, emerged from the depths seeking to serve,” the guard escorting the creature said, unprompted. She fixed him with a steely gaze.

“Look at me,” the Wire-Witch commanded, crouching for a better look.

The freak did so, towered over by the noble and her iron warriors, as alien to their bipedal forms as they were to its parasitic shape. Lacking a mouth, the freak touched its proboscis and then clasped its small hands together in supplication.

“Are you vat-born?”

Trembling, the freak touched hands to its proboscis again before striking its hind limbs together. Rubbing them back and forth, it produced a sharp, keening sound whilst it spat out communication pheromones from glands on either side of its squat head. Finally, it formed words from gestures with its hands and its proboscis. In three distinct languages, it said,

“I am a child of the Vat-Mother.”

The faceless, eyeless skull of the Wire-Witch bore down on the freak, speaking through grinding, chrome teeth. “Will you swear a solemn oath as a servant of our Lord?”

It signalled the affirmative, trembling.

So the Wire-Witch raised her right hand, placing it upon the shoulder of the genuflecting freak. The shock from even this light touch staggered it. However, it was not well-intentioned, and she squeezed its shoulder a bit too hard for comfort, titanium nails working against the skin. The soft illumination within the Basilica showed the thing beneath her grip to be of mottled, contorted flesh, a knot of limbs, and a single eye too many.

As she let the silence draw on, the vat-born started to grovel beneath her, as if it would do anything just to survive the encounter. Then, as it began to weep, she sighed and stood up once more.

“Then I personally welcome you. May your flesh be purified through the crucible of your devotion,” the Wire-Witch intoned, without enthusiasm, gesturing for the freak to rise. It did so, stunned, head bowed in subservience.

“Get it out of my sight,” she told its escort.

The ossein guard joined the mutant as it resumed the long procession deeper into the Basilica. All the way out of sight, the freak kept its mottled head bowed, filled with abject shame, as the noble with her pure form averted her eyes from its passage.

Focused anew, the Wire-Witch moved on, entering an audience chamber two halls removed and a level below the throne room. Its liveries and prestigious decorations had been removed, torn down in a hurry, and replaced by the cold machines dedicated to artificial life support and the analysis of still living meat. With a silent command, her iron warriors barred the door, and the Wire-Witch joined a crowd, nearly two dozen in number, filling the chamber. Inside was the chancellor, a mass of bone monks surrounding him. In the presence of the Lord’s loyal hands, the Wire-Witch expected to be given a brief introduction immediately. Instead, however, they were focused upon a grisly task indeed.

A sizeable hosting table had been dressed with a cool plastic covering, and upon this rested a near-dead freak, air pumped down its throat, and a series of arterial hoses connected to its body. Yet, for all intents and purposes, it seemed comatose and unaware.

As the Wire-Witch entered, the crowd parted for her. Those who moved aside looked up to her with admiration and poorly concealed fear. Then, drawing to a halt beside the chancellor, she folded her bare arms and nodded her skull for them to continue.

The still-living cadaver was pulled apart. Then, with wet pops, its thorax parted. The exoskeleton cracked beneath the manipulation of the three biomechanical arms of the bone monk, emerging from its dark robes, from its back. The monk’s long face peered down at the unconscious freak dispassionately, prosthetic lenses flicking in front of its eyes. Gluts of biogel stemmed the bleeding and reduced the trauma; syringes carefully extracted fluid from the freak’s organs; stamping and cutting biopsy devices nicked at the living tissues within, all worked with an automaton’s precision. Chest cavity open, its lung inflated and deflated, pumping with the rhythm of a machine.

“What is this?” the Wire-Witch asked, not removing her gaze from the macabre work.

“A test of a biological weapon,” the chancellor answered, fat eyes looking on keenly. “We are identifying the damage it will do upon the general population.”

“Dangerous, for you, to bring it here.”

“It is no threat to us, Least Lady,” the chancellor muttered the insulting but technically correct address.

The crowd stirred around them, uneasy with the tension between the Lord’s consort and one of the heads of court, yet most eyes remained upon the dissection as more tissue was cultivated. Her skull upturned, pleased that the chancellor had a spine.

“How long have you been hiding this?” She asked.

“Hiding, quaint. We are on the same side, lest you forget that. Whilst you hide away and play with your little wrecks, doing whatever it is that you do, we continue to work for the good of all.” His tone was scathing. All pretence was gone now, out of the presence of their Lord.

“There is no need,” the Wire-Witch simply stated. “My sister will deal with him.”

“Your mother did not even deal with him properly the first time,” the chancellor corrected. “And since we cannot count on her oh-so-glorious assistance, then we need to know how much damage will be done if we are forced to defend ourselves.”

“You are a belligerent, little worm.”

“Come now. There is no need to lose your temper. We should both freely admit that it is all above our heads, as it were,” said the chancellor. “Neither of us are really Gods, after all. Are we?”

Slowly, the Wire-Witch turned her skeletal gaze to the wormlike creature at her side. She was met by a self-satisfied look and a spit of smug pheromones. She was about to speak when he preempted her and continued.

“Yes, I am a fool. We are obscene. We are corrupt. We are sinners. May our souls find salvation and our flesh be purified,” the chancellor said, drolly, watching as disintegrating organs were lifted and cut from the body of the freak, examined, and returned with staples and gel.

“Why don’t you go and prove me wrong, hmm? And whilst you do that, I will gather the oldest families. Perhaps they might have something that could help,” he concluded, looking directly at the Immortal’s creation, which was so thrust upon his Lord, a lover and a leash.

“You know, I rather like you, even though you make it so difficult,” the Wire-Witch said. The chancellor folded his bloated hands together and chuckled. Attention briefly shifting to the sterile crew of bone-robed and exoskeleton-suited life support technicians, the Wire-Witch then turned and let herself be carried from the chamber, servants throwing themselves out from her path.