What was happening? Why was this happening?

A shrill voice from a headless suit of armor proclaimed Lyra’s death. A shroud of accelerating wind helped her move faster, but it wasn’t enough. He was getting closer with each swing, learning about us. Lyra burned through all of her ammo and even threw the pistol in desperation, all to little effect.

Above us, Lizardman stood idle and watched the battle play out before him.

Why wasn’t he helping? What was the point of him sitting up there, watching us?

Did he want us to die?

Lyra’s hoarse pleas became frantic glances, prayers for Lizardman’s assistance. I did my part, focusing on the fight itself and doing my best to help Lyra survive.

“You are running. You are not worthy. You are running. You are not worthy—”

The headless armor’s voice became empty. Previously filled with something that could be a mockery of excitement, there was no hope left in its voice.

I threw everything I had. Implosions, buffeting winds, even a few blasts from the twinned plasma pistols I had strapped to me.

Armor repaired itself after every implosion. Its movement adjusted to counter my disrupting wind. The shield somehow reflected raw heated gas and sent it upwards.

This was a fight I couldn’t win. My techniques weren’t even close to refined enough for a raw brawl like this one.

Cognesis. I launched a spike at Ether and tried to invade its mind, only to realize there was no mind to invade — something was pulling this thing’s strings from a great distance away.

Lyra slid over a table, out of the way of a diagonal swing. As she touched down on the other side, the headless armor kicked at rubble. I saw it coming in slow motion, but Lyra didn’t.

WARNING.

Red splashed. The flashlight fell from her hand as she fell on her face, both her legs shredded and broken by the shotgun blast of supernaturally thrown rubble. Smashed her head on the side of a table on the way down, leaving an additional smear.

There was no scream, only a crackling, wet gurgle.

I sent a surge of Ether into Lyra’s system, forcing shattered bones and torn muscles to grow anew. She came back kicking and screaming, eyes in haggard focus on the darkness ahead of her.

Lyra moved, a cornered animal grasping in the dark. She followed the directions of my wind without thinking, her rational mind blinded by the pain of being unwoven and rewoven.

“Unworthy. Unworthy. UNWORTHY.”

The knight continued its chase, seeking to finish its prey off. Above, Lizardman still looked on, though his hand was on his blaster.

Ah… this is bad.

I heard a voice as Lyra was desperately struggling to survive. When I realized it wasn’t that damned woman and Lyra herself, I listened carefully while desperately keeping her moving.

It hurts. I’ve always been hurt, always waiting.

Her voice resonated inside me. Memories bloomed from fragmented words.

Maybe somebody would have saved me if I was more important.

A gifted girl was scorned by her peers for her poor upbringing, but she always tried to smile.

“You’ll always have your smile,” her parents told her as she boarded a plane to a happy new life.

She smiled when they sabotaged her academic career and turned professors against her.

She smiled when she graduated at the bottom of her class, courtesy of forged records.

She smiled when they hired thugs to beat her and steal her research.

It was always like this.

One of her tormentors became a senior researcher at the company she got an internship with. Her initial project was overridden by administration to a mind-numbingly boring task meant for wastes of flesh.

Still, she smiled, because she knew it would get better one day. She believed in the books that had kept her sane.

People can change. There is good in everybody. Every dog has its day. She believed these wholeheartedly, believed that the promised day could even be tomorrow.

But I was always left behind.

A year passed. Nothing changed.

If only I was somebody worth keeping alive.

One day, she woke up and saw that the facility was deserted. Saw the news reports that something had happened hours earlier, the beginning of the end. There were a few escape pods left over, but something pulled her away from them.

She was always smiling a genuine smile. Smiling as she watched her old tormentors move up in the world, smiling as she was left behind, smiling through it all, because she had long stopped seeing them as humans.

She wandered the offices in a daze, soon finding herself in the office of her once tormenter. Then she noticed a bookshelf in the corner of the office.

There was a nearly identical collection to the one she had, books of all sorts of genres. With trembling hands, she picked one and opened the front cover to a signature from the author himself.

TO MY LOVELY DAUGHTER, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE AND MY DEAREST PRINCESS, ██████.

Every book on that shelf had the author’s signature.

That was the day she stopped smiling.

Maybe next life, I’ll be happier.

A life lived by story book delusions. Even at the end, she disappeared clinging to fairy tales, drowning in belief.

Back in the present, Lyra’s body was shifting, breaking. A cloak of black mist formed around her, forging metal, silk, and cracked gemstone from flesh in its wake.

I had to intervene. It was the only thought on my mind — I didn’t want to know what would happen when she finished that train of thought, but it couldn’t be any good.

And so, I screamed at the top of my imaginary lungs the words I wanted to say, not caring for what my cries sounded like.

You wondered why your life passed you by, never seeing the real answer. You were a genuinely good person, but good to a fault.

The world you lived in was not that of a story. Real people don’t always get what’s coming to them. Bad people exist, and there are plenty of them in this damned world.

A person like you never understood others. Stories can’t act as stand-ins for real experience.

I’ve wasted so much time already. There’s nothing left for me.

So live. Live and fight to become a different person tomorrow. Live to not forgive.

Live to take what was always yours.

I can’t see anything out there. It’s dark and cold and I don’t know enough to survive on my own.

Then burn. Anybody can walk the thorny path without knowing exactly what they’re doing — that’s what it means to be alive. Give it your all and never look back.

Blaze a trail so bright that nobody will be left behind.

Green light swelled in the marble library. The headless armor charged towards the source with shield and axe raised, ready to finish a hunt that had gone on for far too long.

What met him was a claymore of sharpened emerald.

The force of the blow against his shield sent him reeling, and another strike crashed against his breastplate. A horizontal swing sent him to the ground, and three more crushed his body and arms into scrap.

Lyra drove her final blow into its chest, cracking its core and the floor underneath it.

Silence returned to the room. Lyra rested against her embedded blade, panting and spitting out flecks of blood that crept into her mouth from her current nosebleed. She wiped her nose, plucked her new blade from the ground, and pointed it at the bystander that had refused to intervene.

“I think that worked out well enough,” said Lizardman.

He lowered his weapon, but Lyra didn’t lower hers.

“And I think you best start explaining yourself.” She stepped forward. “If you want to keep your head.”

Lizardman took the threat in stride, opting to lazily gesture at her. “Your appearance speaks plenty loud enough.” He raised a hand to cover his eyes. “Turn down the brightness, would you?”

An incomplete armor hugged her body, radiating a gentle green light. It was the armor of a shining knight, broken and stitched back together with jutting bands of emerald. Her right arm bore a clawed gauntlet and pauldron; gemstone tendrils connected incomplete pieces of armor around her and wrapped around her throat to form a neck guard, twisting upwards into a forward facing horn that glimmered as bright as the claymore in her hand.

It was only when she looked down at the sword did she become aware of what was happening to her.

In her new state, she looked like some sort of knight infested by a luminescent deep sea creature, beautiful and terrible to behold.

Lyra lifted the sword, inspecting it. Then she grimaced. “I shouldn’t be able to lift this.”

...That’s your first thought?

“Wait,” she muttered. “Who said that?”

Who said what?

At about the same time, we realized we could hear each other.

Lizardman cut out our epiphany short by hopping down from the balcony and clapping Lyra on the shoulder. “Looks like your Manifest is incomplete. Should allow you to put up a pretty good fight, though.”

She backed up several steps, weariness evident in her eyes. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Alright, alright, figured you wanted a few moments to admire yourself. Not many people can reach this level.” He raised his hands in surrender. “There was something off about you. Not that many ordinary people can survive a day, let alone a week in a Ruin, so giving you a head start on waking up whatever potential you have will help us escape. Trust me — I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Gotta take whatever you can get in a situation like this.”

“Did you have to go this far?”

“Not like we have many other options. I already attempted to kill the Husk here. I’m a bad matchup against it.” Lizardman took a seat against one of the last remaining tables. “Forget about that. How do you feel? Think you can handle it?”

Lyra found a place to collapse, her hand firmly gripping her new blade. She looked at her reflection within the mirror-like surface, perplexed and still slightly dazed. “My head’s a mess. I can barely remember anything that just happened — it’s all hazy, a swamp of gunk. And there was a voice. A voice that guided me through that haze.”

It was better that she didn’t remember. I didn’t have the luxury of unclear thoughts; I saw everything up until now like it happened mere moments ago.

Her sanity eroded and something took its place. I gave her a nudge in the right direction and she regained control, managing to come back to us with new arms and armor forged from a material I couldn’t perceive with my Ether sense.

Eerily similar to what happened when I faced the four guardians in my mind, except I didn’t bring my weapons into the physical world.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I felt like I heard that voice again just now. Pretty convincing for a hallucination.”

I’m still here, I said mentally. On your back.

“Ah. I think your drone’s talking to me telepathically.” It didn’t sound like she believed it, either.

“What’s the voice sound like?”

“A girl’s. Soft-spoken.” Lyra paused. “The kind of voice that you’d expect from somebody living as a priestess.”

Is that really what I sounded like?

Lizardman nodded and gave her a thumbs up. “Don’t worry, it’s a feature.”

“They managed to develop digital telepathy in five years time?”

“Craziest shit happens sometimes.”

“Not that fast.”

“The Military gets the fun toys ten, twenty years faster than the general public. Don’t worry about it.” He walked to the broken corpse of the armor and began digging inside. “Just wait until they show you the aliens.”

Lyra did a hard double-take. “The WHAT?”

“A joke. Laugh.” Something flew from Lizardman’s hand and clattered near Lyra’s leg. “That’s your key to the gate. Take it, you’ve earned it.”

Lyra reached over, picking up a tarnished brass medallion bearing the insignia of a blooming rose. She stared at it, then looked at Lizardman’s back. “How did you know? What if… this never happened to me?”

Lizardman reached into his vest and pulled out a fistful of medallions. The bundle jingled as he left the room, heading in the direction of Lyra’s safehouse. “Didn’t I already say? This is my second run. Trust me when I say you need to rest up for what’s ahead.”

The backlash hit halfway back to Lyra’s safehouse. Lizardman and I had to carry Lyra the rest of the way.

“You might be burning through your Qi reserves fast with that Manifest of yours,” Lizardman said, letting her rest on a bed. By now, the armor and sword were gone, having dissolved into mist before we returned. “Keep the combat module with you, it’s got a generator inside. Maybe that’ll make you feel better.”

It was another fistful of lies from Lizardman, but I kept my discretion for both their sakes. Lyra was coming down with a heavy fever, and I didn’t want to do anything to exacerbate the situation. I just did my best and gave Lyra a steady trickle of Ether through an imaginary IV drip. She was well enough to hand back those shielded cuffs, at least.

Hearing about Qi scraped up one of Samson’s old memories. I observed the two resting while scanning through his scripture, learning what I could.

In this world, a force known as Qi was part of every living entity. By manipulating and cultivating how much one could have within one’s body, one could achieve supernatural feats and push the body well beyond its means. It was the basis for most Arts and techniques, an inner fuel for any to use.

I didn’t know if my Ether was the same thing as Qi. When I looked at both Lyra and Lizardman through my Ether vision, I only saw vague blurry shapes. Maybe Lyra had some insights, though I doubted her knowledge on the topic. Seemed like more of a fellow interested in science.

Lizardman produced a steel canteen lined with two stripes and poured a bottle of water through. Two shakes later, he poured chilly water filled with spherical ice-cubes into a cup and handed it to Lyra.

“Thanks,” she said. Drained the whole glass in a single swig, then sighed with relief when she pressed the cold plastic against her forehead. “I was trained in basic Qi perception by the academy I went to. I’m a stagnant lake when it comes to that — think something else is going on.”

“Fuck if I know,” Lizardman said. He poured himself a glass of chilled apple juice and funneled it around his mask through a very bendy straw. “Too many things beyond ordinary vision in this world. Real annoying.”

“Tell me about it,” Lyra said, huffing. “It made my research hell. Though, uh… I guess the people around me were worse. I seem to remember that now, for whatever reason.” She shook her head. “Who are you, actually? Feels kinda awkward not having a name to call you by.”

“There’s only two of us here capable of completely coherent speech. You would do plenty fine.”

“I can talk to your drone, though she’s been a bit quiet. That makes us a party of three.”

I’m still listening, I chimed in.

“So it does,” Lizardman said. “Fine. My callsign’s Knight, as in a knight in shining armor. Makes it a bit awkward with the form of your Manifest, see.”

“Knight.” Lyra tested the name as she pushed herself upright. “Alright, Knight. Are you government? Private? I don’t recognize your uniform.”

The newly renamed Knight hesitated to answer, but he threw up his hands and said, “Ahh, what the hell. Nobody can hear us down here. I’m working private, though things have changed in the past little while. I think you know more about what happened here than I do.”

“This facility? Well, as far as I remember, I was one of the Apostle’s head research sites. Think the biggest thing they were testing here was an experimental fuel source — something better than Qi or uranium.” She shook her head. “In my honest opinion, they were better off researching nuclear fusion. We were close. Real close to near limitless electricity.”

“That still isn’t a thing outside. Even after all this time.”

“Really? What a waste. Could’ve completely eliminated poverty that way.”

“It’s not worth agonizing over the socioeconomic and political garbage of the current world while we’re stuck down here,” Knight said. “Lot has changed, though. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Give me the quick version.”

“A lot more contractors, freelancers running around since Ruins like these started popping up. Employee’s market.” A click of his tongue. “No shortage of demand in every sector these days.”

Lyra pulled her blanket up to her face, not looking all too happy about that. “I’ll need a new job, for sure. It’s been five years, so I hope the government bonds I invested in are still in my account.”

How mature of you.

She was already thinking about returning to normal life and becoming a contributing citizen after breaking out of this place. Now that was a sense of responsibility I haven’t seen since waking up.

“I’m one of those people who are really bad with free time,” Lyra said with a bashful grin. “Any time I don’t put on a schedule is basically wasted.”

That time isn’t wasted. Work without relaxation will cause your mind to snap.

“I still feel bad about it. Could always be doing something more productive. It’s useless guilt, I know, but I can’t escape it.”

It’s alright to feel that way. You’ve mastered a part of yourself already.

“You might be disappointed at what you find outside,” Knight said, realizing there was a conversation happening that he couldn’t participate in. “We’ll talk about that later. I’m going out for a smoke break, don’t have too much fun without me with your girl talk.”

“Ah,” Lyra said, waving him off. “Stay safe, Knight.”

The door screeched shut behind him. With his departure, all the noise fled through the gap in the door like air from a popped balloon.

Complete silence.

Only when Knight left did I realize I forgot how to hold a conversation. All I had been doing so far was talking to myself, making asinine comments or conversation that just happened to be heard.

“Girl talk,” Lyra echoed. “Right. Um… Right.”

I knew much more about Lyra than she knew about me. Then I knew about myself. I scanned through Samson’s scripture for anything on how to smooth talk out of situations, quickly growing aware that it was absurd to scan through a dead person’s memories just to figure out how to talk to somebody.

It was just the two of us alone, waiting for the fever to go down. Until then, I’d have to find some way to pad the time. This was my first time actually conversing with somebody who wasn’t dying in front of me with my actual voice — this was going to prove to be a challenge if I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It would be a terrible omen to completely flub my first conversation.

Okay. I had this. Let’s see… Um...

How do conversations go again?