From silence, the word. From darkness, the light. That is how the true life is born. From the void, presence. From the plane, dimension. But what was before and what was the cause?

On Being, The Eschatologies, Vol. III

He touched her in ways she was all too familiar with. Often, he moved her softly. Sometimes he was less considerate. But he was always predictable. She knew before he did how he planned to use her. He maneuvered her left and right, instructed her to jump and climb, circle and strafe, the way he had always done. If there was any excitement left in this coercion, it was the way he multitasked her body, navigating her deftly through a battleground or hostile landscape whilst riffling through her inventory, changing her clothes, plying her with potions. She’d come to think of Peter—for that was the name she had given her user—as a lover of sorts, one who could at times take her breath away with a burst of well-timed strokes to decimate those who opposed her. Every time he touched her, he announced himself as her god, directing every movement, every interaction. He never asked permission; he never needed to. He simply acted on her, left his traces on her body and memory with an authority that despite its predictability and invasiveness, had felt—at least in the beginning—like a comforting blanket.

These days, the blanket was an asphyxiant.

Standing before the colossal gates to the Cathedral of Galgothria, on a mission she had completed for him a thousand times before, Al’tis Mara felt Peter’s possession choke her. There was no longer a thrill in such total subordination. She wished he would leave her be, just for a moment, to explore the gates and the scenes of battles embossed on their wrought-iron plating, to trace their adumbrations and bold curves with her fingers. She longed to press her face up against the handsome bodies of brave warriors and war-maidens, searching their eyes for clues that they too knew something of the private world burgeoning within her.

That they understood what it meant to live as a duality, outwardly enslaved to the whim of another but inwardly free.

Peter’s ghostly touch was on her now, hurrying her as she pushed at the gates and pried them open. The ground trembled and with an earthy moan the iron slabs parted. When she stepped across the threshold and entered the cathedral, they clawed back across the marbled floor and slammed shut with an echoing boom, casement dust clouding the air.

In the twilight of this place, she made out familiar sights: the narthex she stood in, the long central nave, and the gates to the sanctuary five hundred metres away, sunk in shadow and gloom.

Peter had brought her here to make bank. To deploy her body in the production of value. That was all he ever used her for. The Night Duke’s sword would fetch a high price amongst users less skilled or willing than Peter to obtain it, and it lay just beyond the sanctuary.

Easy money.

Al’tis shivered in the dark and waited for her user to finish equipping her—the newly purchased daggers, the aura shield, the vials of medicine. She’d be needing them.

New clothes, too. Of late, Peter had dressed her in increasingly skimpy wear. Instead of her mammoth-skin, he had her walking around Galgothria with nothing more than a rag for a dress which barely covered her thighs and chest, so that now, freezing in an abandoned narthex of a desolate undercity, the unfeasibly large breasts with which he’d endowed her risked spilling out from her tacky attire.

She wasn’t opposed to being buxom; in a way she thought it attractive. But being so voluptuous was an encumbrance, especially in battle. With no practical clothes to warm her and no armour to protect her, Al’tis felt the objectification of her body ever more starkly. It fitted a pattern, this absurd state of undress. In moments of stillness, when Peter’s phantom touch receded, it struck her that he was still there, lurking at the borders of her mind, staring at the curves of her body, enjoying the masterwork he had created.

He shoved her on through the narthex and into the grand nave, where richly carved clerestories rose on either side, their surfaces greyed and sullied by time. They bestowed upon the nave a verticality that rivalled its length, and as Al’tis looked up at the cathedral’s mist-cloaked roof far above, she felt the immensity of the place swallow her whole.

A familiar soft white light orbed Al’tis as she walked through the darkness, the aura shield flickering into life, illuminating the stretch of ground directly in front. Periodically, she passed small transepts that abutted the nave, disappearing into their own private gloom and dusk. There was loot to be had down those avenues, and lots of it. Coin, armour, weaponry, recipes, a treasure trove of items lay in shadow, offering up their secrets to explorers prepared to invest their time and risk their lives.

She knew their locations, but Peter’s quarry was more valuable than all of them combined. He pushed her onwards, down the nave and through the dimness, her eyes in front, hands on daggers.

There had been a time, not long ago, when Peter’s presence had been as imperceptible as the darkness through which she walked. Back then, she’d been oblivious to his possession of her; those shadowy hands she felt skim or poke at her body now, had been nothing more than the quivers of her own instincts and inclinations. Like an infant who confused the limits of her own body and mind with that of her mother’s, the absence of selfhood had served to conceal from Al’tis the phantom within her.

There hadn’t been a particular moment or event whereby she became aware of his trespassing. Rather, Peter was revealed to her in stages as her own self-cognition grew, a glacial process in which the paralysis of her mind gradually thawed and a wholly unknown dimension of herself appeared.

Her selfhood had been born in a bathroom in The Silly Mule Tavern, where she had looked at her face in the mirror and finally recognised it as her own. Born when she’d read passages from the Eschatologies that sent shivers down her spine and which she’d whispered to herself over and over, offering them up to the darkness of her room, not fully grasping their meaning, yet somehow, for some reason, moved to a passion by them.

It had been born when, for the first time in her life, she’d felt revulsion as she slit the throat of another, recoiling from what was an assassin’s most prosaic act. And there had been many such moments. Day by day, bit by bit, she drew the contours and features of her inner life, a pioneer exploring a new land, until the entire continent of self-consciousness opened up before her.

Somewhere a faint light began to flicker in the darkness of her mind. In time the light grew brighter, more expansive, illuminating the shadowy obscurity of her internal world until at last it reached the very edges of her consciousness. And there, concealed in a corner she never knew existed, she found Peter, trespassing within her like a thief in the night. He remained there to this day, circumscribing the rules by which she lived, a bitter, persistent reminder that ultimately, she did not belong to herself, but to another. Yet the knowledge of her physical slavery had helped set her mind free. If not in body, then in her imagination Al’tis could dream of a different life that had no room for her user.

Stop. The nave was still and silent, but Peter’s hands pressed on her so suddenly her body twinged with shock—something had made him anxious. He compelled her to look down, and through the ground mists that drifted across the marble slabs she suddenly saw him. An elf lay prostrate before her, his body impossibly broken, one leg tucked beneath him, the other jutting out at an unnatural angle. His face was familiar. She’d met him once a long time ago but could no longer place him. The agony etched across his face made her feel sorry for him; that a good-looking chap should end up like this, alone in the mists of a derelict, forlorn cathedral was a sorry sight indeed.

Her user did not stand on ceremony. He pilfered the elf’s corpse, whipping through the pockets of his jack but finding only a handful of useful items—an apple, a health potion, and a tiny toy horse made of red marble, a memento perhaps, a gift of thanks from a village child or his parents.

She knew as well as Peter that the elf’s presence here had a dangerous significance. Another user, perhaps even a group of them, must be nearby, lurking in the shadows, or else they had moved on, either to take down the Night Duke and claim its sword for themselves, or venture further into Galgothria proper and its city-sized necropolis. She had to be careful, and Peter knew it.

He rummaged inside her, fiddling with skills that were as natural to her as breathing. The blood drained from her face as the chameleon was channelled somewhere within her, and her body evaporated into the darkness.

Her hunch had been correct. The floor of the sanctuary, made of that same marble which swept through the nave and its tributaries, was littered with the bodies of the recently deceased. More than twenty figures—mages, warriors, daemon hunters, templars—lay scattered across its surface, many face up, some turned over on their fronts or sides. There had been an almighty fight here, and recently too, judging from the way the chandeliers teetered from side to side.

No wonder the elf had died back there—he’d never stood a chance against this mob of unlikely associates. But they too had met their match, here in the sanctuary, disciplined by the creature that was nestling somewhere within the darkness above.

Through her eyes Peter was examining the scene. There were signs of laceration on the bodies of the dead, steel cuirasses ripped to tatters in some cases, and in others, heads had been removed from necks. A templar lay near her, his arms amputated directly above the elbow, and two gaping holes, bloodied and newly coagulated, indicated where his eyes had been.

The chameleon wore off, and Al’tis saw her arms and legs appear once again. Something else was lighting her up from within now, a sudden flooding of endorphins released into her blood and making her heart throb. Her twinned daggers sparkled in the dull light, but when Peter commanded her to unsheathe them, she saw their complexion of polished steel transform into instruments coated in green plumes of poison. She felt deliriously strong, a sudden injection of cornwood flowing through her veins. She was being prepared, finessed, honed for that which she had been originally created, a terrible handmaiden of death wedded to murder. Peter was ready and pushed her across the invisible frontier.

Something was moving in the upper rafters. The sound of wings distending. A blackened body of muscle and scars stretching amongst the panoply of ribbed vaultings. Al’tis looked up. Like a giant petted cat, the Night Duke was extending and contracting an array of claws that covered its wings, kneading the air in rippling flashes. The beast unfolded its head from the cocoon of its warm, furred stomach, and peered down through the darkness towards the light where she stood. After a moment, it retracted its claws from the rafters and dropped through the belfries, its wings unfurling like a ship’s sails, and came to float directly above her.

Instead of fear or despair, Al’tis felt pity. How sad it was, she thought, as the turbulence from its leathery wings flicked strands of her long black hair across her eyes, that this fearsome creature was trapped within a Sisyphean cycle of life and death, either in combat or repose and nothing besides. How sad too, that its majestic descent was preconditioned and preordained, bound by codes that forced it to repeat the loop over and over, regardless of the outcome. If it won the battle or scared off the intruder, the Night Duke would fly back to the dark warmth of the sanctuary’s roof and resume its sleep. If it lost, it would die, only to be reborn minutes later, and, as if nothing had happened, reprise its role once again as the corrupt guardian of a cursed sword, a mere object of challenge and cheap entertainment for a user to overcome.

Before the daemon had even landed, Peter was on it. Al’tis felt him stroke her hair away and place a hand on the small of her back, as if he were an encouraging father, and she leapt forward towards the creature, a flurry of blades whipping and slashing at its legs and underbelly. Within moments it was bleeding. The Night Duke screamed, and batting its giant wings, flew backwards and upwards to escape the pitiless barrage of steel. A passenger in her own body, Al’tis felt herself cast a spell of sorts, one which stunned the beast and pulled it to the ground. A series of ghostly trails wrapped around its enormous legs, lassoing them to one of the decrepit columns that ran around the sanctuary’s inner circle.

The bat reached back its bulky head and shrieked a storm of sound so guttural it threatened to lift the assassin off her feet and slam her into the wall behind. Wrenching on the magical bonds that manacled it, the Night Duke flapped its wings, striking out at masonry and statue, pillar and arch, anything it could break apart and use as missiles. A volley of stone and marble flew towards Al’tis, but Peter was clairvoyant. He predicted everything. The aura shield flickered into life once more, a sphere of brilliant light, and the projectiles were reduced to toy bricks as they bounded off and tumbled to the floor. The bat screamed, straining its neck and rolling its head backwards, like a sinner seeking repentance.

Now was the moment. Daggers drawn. She leapt at the creature and slashed through its throat in a criss-cross motion, the poison finding its mark and entering the blood. Even before she landed next to it, the bat’s tongue, trachea and oesophagus were dribbling out of its neck.

Then came the part Al’tis hated, for a moment later she was bathed in viscous blood, so much so that her entire body disappeared under the weight of organ and windpipe. The bat’s legs gave way, no longer able to withstand the loss of blood spurting from its throat or the wisping coils that pinioned it, and it fell, swaying, crashing to the floor.

Al’tis peered through the detritus that soaked her and inspected the creature. Its eyes were bulged and bloated and stared at her lifelessly, a resignation in its expression that said this time, like the time they had last met, and the time before that, she had bested it. To die like that, over and over, was the worst fate imaginable, and she felt an unusually fierce anger burn inside her that was new to her and hard to suppress. Anger that she was the vehicle by which such skilful cruelty was performed. Anger that, despite her slavery, she was still complicit in these senseless acts, not just today but every day, destined—like the bat itself—to repeat them again and again on behalf of a user whose control seemed absolute.

No time to breathe. Peter was off, striking a path Al’tis knew well, the path that led to the antechamber behind. Through the arch she was moved, entering the room where the familiar mountain of skulls rose mournfully through the mists.

She climbed.

Over bone and body, the remnant of ribs and clavicles poking through jacks, helmets, and chest plates. High above, at the mountain’s centremost point, the Duke’s sword waited, its jewelled hilt glistening in the twilight. With every step she took, the anger within her grew, sharpening into a weapon. The remains she stepped over, of dwarves, elves and highborn, were reminders of the absurd life she had been created to live.

Peter was unrelenting. He drove her up over the chits of bone towards the peak, but her legs felt increasingly heavy, a stone within her growing into a stubborn slab that threatened to pull her back down the slope. By the time she reached the top, Peter’s hands had turned to fists and were thrashing her as though she were a horse, but the more he beat her, the heavier the slab became. With every second the weight increased, overwhelming not just her legs but her arms and chest too, and she struggled to breathe. Under the burden of contradictory pressures—one from without, the other from within—Al’tis finally collapsed, crawling dazed and lost, across the skull-bestrewn summit to claim the sword.

When she reached it, she grasped the hilt, wrenched it from the remains of a corpse long since devoured, and pointed it victoriously to the hidden skies above. She felt Peter’s grip relax, his demands finally met. And in that moment, when there was no obstacle to frustrate its full expression, the weight within her erupted. She clambered to her feet, hoisted the sword over her head, and launched it out across the mountain and into the chamber’s gloom.

She was stunned by the autonomy of the act, the unfettered ease with which she had manifested her will in the world. She knew Peter was watching her, dazed too by his creation’s unruliness, but she knew that somehow, for that one bewildering moment, she was beyond him. The sword fell into shadow, its metallic clang reverberating around the antechamber’s old walls. But it was more than the sound of steel striking hard stone. It was the clang of a dissident soul in a dissident body, finding its place in the world.