Dislocation of body and mind. It started as a tingling in her fingertips. From there, a cascade. Finally, sensation and awareness returned to her.

Lady Djay took in a sharp breath. Cold air, atmosphere dry and abrasive, with the tell-tale stale notes of desiccated city stock. She was standing in the centre of a corridor. In the haze, it felt like a corridor anyway. There was a floor stretching out ahead, a ceiling, and walls. So maybe it was. Ahead of her, chained, a procession of freaks. Their invasive cyberware marked them as enthralled computers, and thick cables trailed in their wake, tamed by starving and emaciated servants. From the corner of her eye, she could see an Ossein guard nervously checking the mechanism of his bladed weapon as he escorted them. A window cut into the hard, curved wall overlooked an ocean of bone and machinery. The world moved around Djay. She realised she was standing upon her cyber platform, its knife legs advancing unbidden. She commanded it to stop, but it ignored the instruction.

Djay moved her arms and found them cuffed together at the wrists with iron bindings. Disoriented and unsure, she looked down. Her hand stroked a crease in the flesh of her shoulder, across her breast and down to her belly. Lines crossed her torso, where she could recognise that she had been taken apart and put back together. Then, involuntarily, her body seized in fright, reacting to trauma that her waking mind could not remember, fear that could not be articulated.

Again, the oldest memories rose like a tide. Djay’s childhood, the games, the trails, the chases, the love, and the loss. The freedom, the words, the meanings, the taunts, the arguments, and the doubts. Always questions. Always doubt. Djay’s eye sockets were wet from tears. Her heart was heavy. Thoughts and whispers from the child that she once was. Is it my turn now? Will it change what I did? Will it change who I am?

A familiar doorway opened ahead, one that she recognised, having walked this passage many times before. Their group emerged into the grand hall of the Ossein Basilica. A great banquet was underway, and the chamber’s cool stagnant air mixed uncomfortably with the warm fragrances of a feast. A thousand mutants gathered in the mute depths of the palatial necropolis. They shared words from around their walking worlds, indulging in a rare opportunity to undergo face-to-face discourse on hallowed ground.

Djay came face-to-face with her sister, Eye, waiting beside the door. But, no, it was a puppet, controlled remotely by a brain-machine interface. Though it resembled a Vat-Mother, its low-quality gene work left her limbs and neck too long, her skull slightly too small. The star metal piercing the back of her neck glimmered tastefully, matching the gown that she had grown.

“Is this not what you wanted, dear sister?” The Vat-Mother’s proxy asked, taunting Djay as they stepped past. Her mask smiled, ruby lips self-satisfied. Djay gripped her hands to her chest, ignoring the grotesque imitation.

Then, dizzily, the Wire-Witch saw her betrothed across the feast at the head of the foremost table. The Lord of Bone sat upon his pillowed nest, a seat built of a mighty skeleton and silver filigree. His concubines, soft-handed, leaned against his sides. One placed a delicate morsel under his mask, feeding him, whilst the other turned her eyeless visage towards Djay. Retracting her lips all around her head, the concubine exposed the sharp, silver teeth that comprised the front of her skull. Djay tried to raise her voice and lift her weakened arms, but it was to no avail. Her betrothed ignored her, sunken eyes behind the mask fixed on some infinite distance.

Heads bowed, limbs tight and bound in machinery, the computers struggled under the chains of their escort. Ahead of Djay, they assembled around the Lord of Bone. Then, one by one, they were forced to kneel and link their cyber-systems in preparation for His Eminence’s proclamation. The Wire-Witch’s iron warriors were receiving them, scanning them each, one at a time, with a sharp wave of red light. With a start, Djay tested her network. She was not connected to her defensive suites nor to her iron warriors. How were they active? She tried to reinitialise her control over them, but a chill overcame her when she instead found herself locked out.

Desperation touched Djay. Looking around, she found their chancellor, who was standing in an introduction between Abstrek Hash, the Damnation of Cruiros, and the Hand of Zolgomere. The chancellor’s squat body was dwarfed by the three massive commanders, with their vicious war-augs. After sharing some quiet words, he seemed to notice Djay’s arrival. Excusing himself by pressing his palms together, he made his way toward her.

The Damnation growled before barking a laugh when he, too, saw Djay’s state. Djay locked her gaze with his yellow eyes. Working her numb jaw, teeth grinding, she wanted nothing more than to cut back, to scream rage and invectives. However, words did not come to her. She could feel their eyes on her, each and every freak in the hall, and she wished that the brains or laces or memory cores that filled their mutant skulls would burn out once and for all. To be seen this way, humiliated and vulnerable again, was sickening.

An oily hand seized Djay’s arm by the elbow. She turned again, confronted by the chancellor. His fat body leaned back with a start, sensing her fear.

“Your Highness,” he said quietly so as not to be overheard in the assembly before the Lord.

“Something’s very wrong,” she groaned.

“Yes,” a careful note from the decorated worm, leaning in. “You have not been acting yourself, I fear.”

Thunder shook the hall. Eyes turned to the ceiling as the electric lights flickered. Antenna twitched, and tongues tasted the air. Djay’s stomach lurched. Swallowing down her anxiety, Djay looked to the chancellor and held out her arms, rattling in binding and chain.

“Release me,” she said, voice still shaken, now with urgency. “You must let me free.”

“I am afraid I cannot do that, Your Highness,” he said warily, distracted by the growing calamity.

Djay recognised the sound - cannon fire. But it was not just any common biocannon. Both the Wire-Witch and the chancellor looked to the vast, closed doors of the hall, following the sound as it grew and grew in violent energy, horrified at its portent.

The sealed entryway exploded. Stone and bone burst into the hall, surging under a vast weight that collapsed into the building. Ossein guards stationed there disappeared under a tide of destruction. A giant had been thrown into the side of the building and now lay atop the rubble. The body Otz Garzed shuddered, its cannon mounts flexing as it tried to find its murderer before falling dead. Dust and smoke poured into the chamber. Freaks and mutants jumped from their seats. Those at the lowliest end of the hall scrambled, pressing towards the head tables, stately entities touched by fear for the first time in an age. As they fled, a brilliant emerald light flicked in through the rolling carnage, a laser that snapped left and right, searching.

“Come now, children.”

A deep voice shook the air, causing another cascade of rubble and dust to fall from the shattered structure above them.

“I heard that there was a debate to be had over my rulership. Let me hear your craven thoughts.”

He stepped forward. Stone and bone crushed, blood and flesh oozing, the titanium weight of the Pilgrim’s powered exoskeleton and monolithic armour summited Otz Garzed’s corpse, emerging from the disaster. A bright, red glow filled the hall with his arrival. With one massive, gauntlet-clad hand, he wielded a wicked glaive that burned with the fury of the moon.

No one dared to move before he did. The sharp wedge of his helmet turned to regard the massive assembly of self-proclaimed rulers, the generations of cast-offs and mutants that coveted the scraps of power he had left behind. His sadistic emerald laser moved over skin, scale, and eyes, burning them in analysis.

“Do none of you even dare to face me?” His distorted voice shook the hall again.

Bent and crooked, the old form of Tergyron Zee, an ambassador of the Maleforms of Sestchek, stepped forward. Then, wheezing, struggling out of the crowd on three withered legs, he put his hands together in supplication and began to address the ancient master. Yet he never got that chance. Instead, the Pilgrim raised his left arm, revealing a wide-bore barrel embedded into the reinforced machinery of his braces. With the flash of the weapon’s fire, one instant saw Tergyron punctured through the chest, and, in the next, he exploded into a red mist as the projectile detonated. The death of Tergyron Zee sent shrapnel out, bone and metal impacting the misshapen horde. Some collapsed whilst the rest began to scream and yell, once more trying to retreat. They pressed against the walls and the doorways, so desperate for escape that the Ossein guardians could not enter to protect their old Lord and his audience. All the while, the Pilgrim laughed, his voice shaking the room.

In the chaos, the Wire-Witch and their chancellor were pulled apart. Djay, pushed to the ground beneath the surge of mutant flesh, curled up as claw and hoof stamped down around her. Then, scrambling, she pulled herself beneath a feasting table, narrowly avoiding being trampled to death.

The Pilgrim stepped forward and wracked the crowd. A swing of his glaive bisected a score of nobles, letting them fall to pieces, laying in each other’s gore to die. His blade was made from hard light, hot on the eyes and the skin even from afar. In his advance, the Pilgrim came upon the Vat-Mother’s gene-worked platform, looking over the poor simulacrum only momentarily with a flash of emerald light. Then, without remorse, he brought his sanguine glaive across her as she raised her arms and screamed. Ruthlessly cut in two, she was left by the Pilgrim to die.

“Clones. Crude imitations. A parliament of puppets,” the Pilgrim rumbled, swatting aside a banquet table with his titanium gauntlet. It careened through the air before coming down on the tide of elderly freaks still attempting to flee the assault, crushing the frail amongst them and knocking the rest to the ground.

“Pitiful.”

Then his helmet turned, looking down on the humanoid form of the Wire-Witch, uncovered from her hiding place. She, too, raised her bound hands and cried out in fear. The Pilgrim did not give a second thought to raising his glaive, poised to strike. However, his momentum was halted when his systems detected a radio transmission. Though the Pilgrim’s digital immune system safeguarded him, the cutting edge of his glaive vanished. Stopping to regard his weapon’s deactivated shaft, he looked at the Wire-Witch a second time. The burning of his laser eye belied his notice of her skin and the shape of her exposed skull.

“Fascinating,” the Pilgrim said to himself.

A chorus swelled, and the song of data overcame the cries of panic and the sounds of carnage. Still seated at the head table, attended by his concubines and computers, the Lord of Bones looked up as a wash of light projected the shape of a woman into the air. This projection filled the chamber, the image of a progenitor hale and whole, thrown up from the cyber-augmentations of his attendants.

The progenitor appeared gentle and symmetrical in form, beauty in perfection. She softly smiled and crouched down, tucking her knees to the side, resting her hands on her lap, all to get closer and see the Pilgrim. Long hair spilt around her delicate features, and a glimmer of recognition touched her holographic eyes. However, as he turned to look at her, he did not seem to share that familiarity.

“Your presence is acknowledged, Pilgrim of the Axiamat,” the Immortal said.

“Would that I was a pilgrim of the dark,” the Pilgrim said, quoting something that had since become scripture. Then realisation seemed to come to him, and he lowered his weapons. “For it is preferable to be seen as a madman than a man without foresight.”

“But you are a madman, Pilgrim of the Axiamat,” answered the Immortal, soft smile turning down to the warrior as she indulged him. The Pilgrim remained there, basking in the Goddess’ attention.

Trying to swallow down her fear, the Wire-Witch looked around. First, she found the dead shape of her sister-clone, but she pushed that thought aside. It was not Eye - just a remotely controlled bioplatform. Then, managing to look past that, she saw the trembling shapes of the elders and ennobled crouched and frightful. Yet there was reverence in their eyes as they had stopped to witness the exchange. Here met the rulers of their histories, the creators and destroyers of their mythologies, brought forward from time immemorial to meet face to face. Despite their terror and sense of self-preservation, the mutants clung to every word, eager to glean any knowledge or insight they could.

Yet the Lord of Bone, his wasted body seemed strengthened. For the first time in as long as the Wire-Witch could remember, that rotten husk of a husband held his head high.

“After all this time,” the Pilgrim rumbled, but with a softened edge, bearing the weary notes of a tainted friendship. “Treachery. Our realms plunged into such misery. Still you have failed.”

The Immortal’s expression tightened before her smile grew and her eyes closed.

“Come now, there is no need to harbour such an old grudge,” she said.

“Perhaps you have forgotten your divine duty, after all,” the Pilgrim said and firmly gripped the shaft of his glaive once again. “Or perhaps your promise to old Desht was always a falsehood.”

“Eberekt,” the Immortal said, tone both chastising and scathing.

“No!” The Pilgrim shouted and raised the shaft in his hand now, pointing it at the hologram.

“These lies and illusions stop now,” he growled, contempt in his deep voice. “I care not for whatever falsehoods you wish to present to these misbegotten children. I am here to put an end to this once and for all.”

Disappointment overcame the Immortal. With a defiant - impetuous - roll of her eyes, the hologram stood back up. A sigh escaped her. Then she turned her back on the Pilgrim before looking down and aside - directly to the Wire-Witch.

“Kill him,” the Immortal commanded the room, keeping her eyes fixed on her daughter, Lady Djay, who remained trembling on her knees. “Be done with this, once and for all. Do not disappoint me.”

From both sides of the crowd, flanking the ancient master, emerged the giant forms of Abstrek Hash and the Damnation of Cruiros. The former tightened his biomechanical fist, discharging snaps of electrical energy in arcs that scoured the ground, whilst the other beast’s wicked talons raked the ground, and his corded limbs hefted a massive axe. The generals of the Lord’s armies readied themselves for battle as their geneworked guards finally managed to break their way into the hall through the now stunned crowd.

“Is this what you want?” The Pilgrim taunted, his voice hitting them all square in the chest. The sharp wedge of his helmet swept in a turn as he regarded them all. “The end of your reign to be decided by glorious battle? Then so be it.”