Parsec

Water closed over her head, folding her into its glacial embrace. The chill soaked into her wings like nitrogen frost. Rage and desperation kept her warm; she cradled Venera’s empty shell to her chest and fought to stay oriented. Bubbles blinded her in an effervescent cloud, each bead of air its own perfect kernel of refracted light.

Fingers of coral scratched at her legs and tail. Saltwater stung her half-forgotten wounds. Further down, triplefins filtered through the cracks of sunken monoliths. Infrasound tickled at the edge of her hearing, snatches of subsonic song. She pictured the shapes of colossal creatures forming shoals, their calls reaching her from leagues further out.

The last of the bubbles shimmied their way upwards. She tipped her head back; the narrow mouth of the puddle was gone. Light melted against water and rippled horizon-to-horizon. It was the keel of the far-sea now, painted with cusp-singularities and the curves of a mutable membrane.

She kicked her way towards the surface, using her wings as makeshift flippers. The feather-filaments fanned wide in the current, and the trailing ends of Venera’s death-shroud billowed in her wake. She had to thrash against the pull of the water before she breached the surface like a half-formed hatchling.

The world shifted.

There was no glow of magic; she surfaced, and the world simply shifted like a prism rotating a quarter-turn upon its point: the far-sea shuddered for less than a heartbeat, out of phase. A wave surged and swept her ashore in a tangle of limbs and death-shroud. The water dragged her in with the swash and left her spluttering on a stretch of damp, white sand.

For a moment, she lay stunned and shivering. Her arms were still locked tight around Venera’s body. Granules of sand clung to her spines.

Segin, she thought blearily. Sing-song successor Segin in her false-safe sanctum. The Hive missing its Archivist, missing a General, lashed to the whims of a freshly-hatched Titania. Eltanin would also wish to place a puppet in Orion’s stead, no doubt. So weakened, and for what purpose? She had missed something, or made poor assumptions along the way.

Failure-General.

She staggered upright and shook off her wings. Spat out a mouthful of saltwater. Stared down at Venera’s empty shell in its death-shroud cocoon before looking away.

The sky was a false thing, a flat greyness host to a dozen copies of what might be the exact same cloud, seen from different angles. No birds wheeled overhead, and no other creature moved on land. White sand stretched to the horizon. In the distance loomed a structure, a shape gleaming beneath false-sunlight. An arch? Some sort of gate.

She turned around. The far-sea lapped at the tip of her trailing tail and extended to the perfect line of the opposite horizon. In the absence of the slightest breeze, water glided ashore in perfectly synchronous waves.

Her wings were heavy with exhaustion. Even with the saltwater wrung out of them, they needed resting. She glanced back at the horizon-gate. It looked real enough.

She slung the body over her shoulder and started walking.

===

The white sand plain was formed of nothing more than dry air and salt. Absent were the scents of living brine-flesh and subtle decay; there were no filter feeders working in the slush of shore-side sand, and not so much as a single tuft of scraggly grass. It smelled like a dead place.

The shattered lands had not smelled like this, on account of it being in the process of still-dying when she had left. Perhaps it would take another hundred years to wind down, unravel to its true end.

She had only heard tales of the before-times, half-songs and weathered scent-weavings. Elder Pluteum had spoken of rivers flush with sturgeon, forests sparkling with birdsong, branches creaking under the weight of their own fruit. Fog banks had spilled over mountains in great, slow waves. Coywolves had raced down snow-dusted slopes under the vault of an endless sky, bluer than anything else in the world.

To remember, he’d said. To believe.

It was foolishness to ever have even tried. The shattered lands had not been worth saving, even before it had burned her Hive alive.

Parsec walked onwards.

===

As she approached the horizon-gate, it dawned upon her that it was larger and further away than she had assumed. She re-evaluated her estimates: fifty feet, a hundred, two hundred, three, four, five. When at last she entered its shadow, she had stopped counting.

A thin arch of plain stone as white as the surrounding sands: it towered over her such that she could not see the top by tipping her head back. It would take only a few steps to walk through. Beyond lay more sand, an endless plain dissolving into the greying distance. If this gate was exactly as it seemed, then she doubted there was another way out. Perhaps she would have to dive back into the far-sea. Perhaps this time, she would drown.

She turned back on impulse to see if the far-sea was still there; a part of her still felt adrift, reality rattled loose. Yes—the line of water still coated the horizon. As she watched, a lump rose through the flatness: something swelling beneath the waves. A low, spine-rattling hum reached her from across the salt. Her teeth creaked in their sockets.

Something was wrong. Very wrong. She did not wish to be near that thing when it emerged.

She stepped through the gate.

The world clicked like a pair of copper cogs, twitching one tooth over. The texture of the air changed, gone cool and slippery.

When she opened her eyes, she stood in old, broken terrain: shattered shale, half-healed over with lichens and small grasses. In the distance sat the slumped-over ruins of a city.

She took a step, and the world clicked forwards again.

This time, she stood atop one of countless rolling hills coated with dead wildflowers. The sky was sulphur-yellow, the winds tinged with bitter dust.

From somewhere behind her came a fast-familiar hum of infrasound. Through the soil, this time. A creature, she thought. A hungering beast. Then came a memory thick with the smell of blood and wet ash; she trembled despite herself.

Another step, another place: knee-deep in marsh mud. The hunting-call still echoed behind her.

Parsec started to run.

Mountain. Forest. Hinterland. Landscapes peeled past like sheets of parchment, realms blooming outwards and away. Her shoulder ached where a cluster of Venera’s spines dug against the joint. She did not know where she was going. It did not seem to matter, so long as she found the way out.

Run, little prey, the call seemed to say. Run and run and run, else you will be eaten, swallowed whole.

Fifty, sixty steps, perhaps more, before the Archives spat her out into a woodland clearing, ripe with the scent of pine and glittering shadows. An ink-black pond lay ahead. In its centre was a half-submerged throne, formed of rusted ironwork curlicues.

She almost laughed in despair. This place was trying to tell her something.

She could not place her original intent in absconding with Venera’s body. A tug of instinct, perhaps, or fevered delusion pretending to be instinct. Failure-General. Truly gone mad now.

Necromancy was a dead art. Venera was gone.

“Please,” she said to an audience of none. “If I cannot bring my Titania back from her death, let me leave her somewhere safe.”

The Archives did not move as she approached the little lake. No shift came, no clicking of cogwheels.

“Is this a test?” she asked. “The thing hunting me cannot be your doing. If these places wanted me dead, I would have long finished rotting by now.”

The lake rippled, slower than the motion of ordinary water. It grew and grew, and woodland toppled to make way for it. Liquid inched over short grasses, swallowing ground with its hungry lapping. The half-throne sank and slipped beneath its surface.

“Very well,” Parsec said.

She adjusted her grip on Venera’s empty corpse and stepped into the lake. Dark water, slick as leeches, closed over her head.

===

Water dripping. Poison-pricked veins. Iron brine.

Liquid swirled around her, thick with other meanings. Flat-bodied planarians danced down her spine. Mucous membranes drifted freely, devoid of beating cilia. The touch of the Archives was surprisingly gentle, as smooth as shell.

~

Cold. Polyps. Mesoglea.

She’d known a necromancer, once. Possibly among the last of them, a human from one of the fallen cities; sallow-faced and blister-mouthed, eyes crusted with rheum. He’d come begging her old Hive for aid. They’d had to turn him away: supplies were scarce and the dead he could raise were mindless things, little better than attendants.

She’d been young then, and still full of hope. She’d slipped him one of her carry-baskets: good and strong, woven from dried reeds. The others had turned a blind eye; it was not as if they had enough food to fill baskets with.

“To spare the weight on your back,” she’d said. “It may serve well as a fish-trap, besides.”

“My thanks, kindly one,” he’d replied.

In retrospect, they had both known there were no fish left in the rivers.

He had nodded with courtesy and defeat before carrying on his way, tattered cloak flapping in the wind. His creations shuffled behind him, a mindless rearguard.

A scouting party found him the next day, barely two miles out. He’d slit his own throat, ash-bitten fingers still curled over the knife.

~

Tourmaline. Mirrors. Isoform.

Necromancy was a dead art, but it was not possible to revive Venera even if the methods yet still lived. Magic did not triumph over mortality; it would have still been an empty shell, Venera in name only. Why had she clung to this last remnant? Was it solely because it was all she had left?

~

Leaves crackling like parchment. Honeyed almonds. Hollowed skull.

Dark water cupped her jaw like a hundred heavy hands. Meaning washed across her brainstem, thrumming down every nerve.

The Archives did not use words or song or scent. It did not think like a sophont might think. Knowledge entered her body as if she were inhaling mist: the Archive held more things in stasis than one might assume. Pieces packed close, stowed in a thousand-thousand fragments in the gaps between parchments. If she wished to wick up the last droplets of Venera’s remains, then she need only let go.

She clutched reflexively at the corpse of her Titania, the joints of her fingers locking tight. If Venera were still alive, she would know what to do. If she were alive, Parsec would not have to be here at all. A hunting call scraped at the edge of her hearing.

Choose, the Archives seemed to say. Choose, soon.

Black water pushed at her chest, scratching greedily at the compartments of her lungs. Crestfallen laughter skittered across her cheek.

~

Empty shell. Long gone, Parallax.

Parsec let go.

===

She came to within a circle of ten trees, winter-bare branches set at unnatural angles. Venera’s body was gone. Her body was bone-dry; not a trace of the dark water remained.

Flutter-pulse. Broken rind.

She flinched. Had those been words, ghosting over her left shoulder? Whatever it was, it did not speak in the usual way: something about it reminded her of the Hives and Archives, half-dipped in pure meaning. The speaker had some quality of voice, if a voice were simultaneously aphonic and folded over itself a half-dozen times.

She looked around. Past the circle of trees was tundra, spotted with sedge and lichen and edging into bloom. Further still lay a line of shining, pointed trees that scraped at the heavens. No one here but her, and a low sound on the horizon.

“Hello?” she said, and shivered without meaning to. The not-voice balanced on the knife-point edge of familiar and unknown. She hesitated. “…Venera?”

Wingbeat. Trapped sunlight. Hydroxyphenanthrene.

The not-voice had whispered over her right shoulder, this time.

“Venera,” she said more firmly, turning her head and seeing nothing but air. “Can you…do you know where we are?”

Beyond periphery.

That sounded a fraction more coherent. “Do you remember anything? Do you remember me?”

Venule. Frost-touch. Inviolate.

Parsec pressed her hand to her brow. Frustration simmered up in her throat, a bolus of broken silica. Empty shell. Only fragments left—of course. But if this was what remained of Venera, she would keep it. It was more than a body wrapped in a shroud, she told herself. Far more than that.

“Follow me,” she said to the ghost of her dead queen. “Please, don’t leave. Follow. Understand?”

Sine die. Kingdom come.

The hunting call echoed, closer now. Parsec flexed her wings, and took flight.

===

Beneath her, snow-spotted soil melted into a blur. She reached the edge of the tundra plain and ducked through the timberline, more nimble now without Venera’s body in her arms. Still, the call of the Archive creature rang closer by the minute. Dread pooled in the hollows of her bones.

She spoke to Venera to reassure herself that she was still there and received strings of non-sequiturs in response: phosphorus, silver smog, crucible steel.

Parsec flew onwards through the needle forest on fast-tiring wings. She considered the merits of ascending over cloud cover, the speed gained from the lack of obstruction versus the effects of increasing altitude, of becoming a more visible piece of prey. The pulses of sound passed over her at faster intervals now; it set her teeth on edge, reverberated through her skull like a crashing wavefront.

Gargantuan creature, she thought. Hungering. Or perhaps a shoal.

“Venera,” she said once more. “What must I do?”

Pursuit predation…serpents. Morsel.

“If the creature catches me—”

Pressure gradient, came the answering whisper. Flee the way of all flesh. Was that a wisp of anxiety, in the tone?

“You are a Titania,” Parsec said desperately. “Surely you know of something that can help.”

Armature.

An image unfurled in her mind, unbidden: traceries and structure, the bones of chemicals and biosynthesis, delicate pathways that lead the way to…she wasn’t sure what.

She struggled to wrap her thoughts around its sheer vastness; this was no mere spell, taught with guiding gesture and intent. It was a three-dimensional diagram, processed through the lens of a Titania. Magic flowing down sagittal planes, lattices of nanostructures, pieces that fitted together when rotated along the perfect axis. She was a General, and before she had been a General, she had been a similar sort of instrument. She had no tutelage of these concepts, no higher knowledge borne from the egg.

It was difficult to think while darting between metallic tree trunks. The hunting call rumbled in her wake, nipping at her bones.

“Venera,” she said as she winged through the gaps of branches. “I am not a Titania. I cannot do anything with this.”

For several moments, there came no reply. Parsec wondered, alarmed, whether Venera had been left behind, come unstuck from her shoulder somehow.

Then: …Ingress…?

“What?” Parsec asked.

Covenant.

“I do not understand.” She jerked herself diagonal to make it through a gap. The branches were thickening, silvery points crowding her in from all sides. Through the heart of the forest, now.

Sovereign self. Impression of high tide; riverbanks blanketed in snow.

“You are the Titania here,” Parsec said. “You are free to instruct me how you wish.”

…Are the Titania here. Titania…

“What?”

The forest began to thin once more, dovetailing into dry grassland. She burst out of the tree line as fast as she’d ever gone, but the creature-call yet still blurred through earth and air. Her joints ached at the sound. She flattened her flight path along the tops of the grasses in hope of avoiding the worst of it.

“Venera,” she hissed. She was beginning to tire once more, the tips of her spines going numb.

Titania nourishes. Loop upon loop returning to earth, roots foaming into mud-slush. Bleeding fingers gripping a portcullis. Anamnesis; must accept role. Without, loss of adaptation. Become blind starvelings. Old worlds, all broken away.

“I don’t—” Parsec broke off to gasp for air. A fresh wavefront of hunting call coursed through her body; this close, it physically hurt to experience. Her joints throbbed in warning. Her throat felt as though it had been scraped raw. “I am sorry, I don’t understand. Venera—please help me.”

Only nourishes. Knowledge…pieces. Nothing whole.

Feather-light fingertips whispered across her eyelids, a sensation that stung with magic. Her flesh shivered, chitin melting malleable. Ghost-hands burrowed into her core and tugged.

Pain exploded across her body. She screamed.

Thick plates of chitin glided into existence, encapsulating her head and arms and chest like a mantle of living armour. Her fingers burst at the tips to accommodate true claws. Venom sacs carved their place into spare hollows of her throat as a stinger sprouted at the tip of her tail. The pain ebbed away just as quickly as it had come. Venera tugged at the nerves of her arm and urged her to pull a blade out of her own body.

“By the stars,” she whispered, trembling at the pieces of her new form. “You wish for me to fight?”

Venera made a noise like the buzzing of a hundred cicadas, anxious. Catalysis. Choices lay dying.

The air humidified. The hunting call boomed ever-closer—though now, the freshly-formed chitin clasped about her skull cushioned the effect, gave her some reprieve. Something rippled at the smudge of tree line in the distance, a line of disturbance in the grass.

Parsec winged high into the air as silence fell, blanketing the Archival landscape. No crickets or birdsong; only the rising whisper of grass as the ripple approached in an unswerving streak. That, and the sound of her own staggered breaths.

There was no wind to sway the terrain; the ripple raced across a waiting, still expanse. It covered ground fast, and reached her in seconds.