The Wire-Witch stepped out of the basilica just in time to witness the redeployment of the Otz Garzed. She lingered at the top of the courtyard steps, by the weeping gates, to watch the massive war machine, forged of cold iron flesh and embedded with plates of star metal, take to the air. With no engines nor wings, it slowly turned, creating translucent layers of hard light beneath itself. Gradually, it built for itself an impossible tower that loomed over the Pate Gardens. Its five limbs, long ago replaced with wide diametre cannons, turned forwards in wicked threat.

At its base, bone monks worked at handheld consoles connected to the tortured weapon with braided cables. They fumbled as they double-checked and triple-checked their inputs. Djay did her best to restrain herself. Let them struggle - such matters were no longer her concern.

It was so long ago that she built the beast. Djay remembered trying to reconcile her uplifted brain matter with prosthetic memories, pushing the envelope of what she was allowed to do by her mother-sister-Creator. Eventually, she acquiesced to the pain of her neural locks and set aside gene craft for the relics scavenged from the wastes beyond, those that fell from the sky.

Djay still believed that this was an opportunity, not damnation when she was given to the Lord of Bone; thus, there was some hope in reclaiming those gifts of the stars. In her naivete, what better thing to engineer than a monster to defend her new home? Better these miracles are tamed, made to protect her and her own, rather than be wild and beyond control. That was what she once told herself. However, such platitudes didn’t soothe her anymore.

Slowly, the Least Lady - Lady Djay, the Wire-Witch - turned her skull away from the Otz Garzed. Her cyber platform walked on carrying her, together with her entourage, departing the Ossein Basilica entirely.

It could be difficult to keep time in the depths of Acetyn’s vaults and the gutworks. Sometimes all you had was the ache in your own, the vague sensation that you had lost a day and destiny would never return it.

The Crawling City’s forward cavity was a hard, calcium-shelled thing. Between spinal columns and barnacle vaults, only the light of bioluminescence and the yellow, sodium glow of electric lamps revealed the deepest recesses. Here lumbered a steel beast, its many limbs raking the rippled cement streets and the heaving, sharp walls. Freaks shrieked and ran out of its path on loping and scuttling legs, feeling their way to safety with feathery tongues and bent antenna.

Slowly, lurching on mechanised joints, the walking craft turned from street to yard. It made its way between fleshy towers and under calcified abutments. From high above, compound eyes followed its passage. First observing, a patcher buzzed, turning and licking its legs with a curled tongue before kicking off and screaming on biomechanical wings out into the dark vastness above.

Unrelenting still, the walking craft dragged itself through open gates and into the groaning depths of a tumourous palace. Lines of city natives begging for alms, bent and crooked, dispersed just long enough to avoid being crushed underfoot. Hiding in narrow passages and asides, they reemerged in the machine’s wake, screaming and yelling for charity, justice, or both.

An eye rolled out from a leaning tower, peering closely as the steel beast groaned to a halt. It settled down with a pneumatic hiss, filling the air with the smell of burning oil and plastic. Its head rocked back, and a reinforced ramp extended from where its throat should have been. Two iron warriors stepped down the moment that the ramp touched the palace grounds. Their red eyes beamed sheets of light, cutting through the haze, analysing anyone who dared to meet their arrival.

An assembly of mutated vat-born received them, dressed in silks of black and red, wielding brass rods and bio-cannons. The motley assortment, some swollen and others gaunt, moved on odd limbs, mandibles and eye stalks twitching. They chittered and shrieked at the guardians, furious at the unexpected arrival into their territory. Then, stirred by the confrontation, a chained hound bayed, bound by the spine to the centre of the yard by an iron stake. It flexed where war augs should have been, though they were long burned away and filed down to broken stumps.

The head of the vat-born, a particularly loathsome creature that oozed both perfidious and sodden, held higher its rod. It barked commands at the iron warriors, some demands of submission or obedience. It received nought but cold silence in return. Then the Wire-Witch emerged from the craft, stunning the host into trembling silence with her arrival, unannounced.

Upon the mechanised blades of her cyber walker, the Wire-Witch descended from her transport. Around her, vat-born fell to their knees - all of them except for the leader of their coterie. Just as the Wire-Witch passed it, it received a sudden blow to its bowels from an iron warrior. It groaned in pain and collapsed to its knees, a suitably respectful position amongst the filth.

Lingering in the courtyard, the Wire-Witch took a moment to look over the swollen halls that made up the palace of her sister-clone, the Vat-Mother of Acetyn. Then, the fleshy lips of its entryway opened before her.