“Unbroken circles. The snake that swallows its tail has at last ceased to thrash. There is no struggle to break the cycle – there is only the joy of proficiency. Come with us, and we will make your words be heard – at the end of the barrel.”

-Invir’s Promise

245 YT, Winter: A village southwest of Kivv

The ground itself shook when Zhiren walked, though he was not a man of great size and stature. The wind stilled and the river quieted its babble. Far beneath his feet Zhiren could feel the stirring of earth, the turning of dirt over itself and the tunneling of crawling things that made the underground their home. The separation party surrounded every house within seconds of revealing themselves from the treeline, and though the gunshots – an opening crescendo – left a few bleeding into the snow-muddy dirt, the rest advanced with weapons held high, armor gleaming. Villagers fled into their stone and clay homes. Adma fighters with them, Zhiren knew. He made quickly for the center of the village.

To Zhiren’s right, he felt a presence. Enki’s warning, the old hunched jester with his clawlike hands held lightly over the priest’s shoulders, a fragment of God that cavorted and smiled and pointed Zhiren’s attention to a small clay structure into which a man and a woman dove, seeking shelter behind walls. Zhiren reached into the pouch at his side idly with his left hand, closed his own fingers around the familiar, chilly glass of the seer-pool’s water flask. Behind the two Adma fighters in the clay house, their guns clutched tight to their chests as they panicked, Zhiren detected more presences – four of them, without the iron blood of the fighter. The civilians were huddled toward the back of the house’s entry room, and moving slowly – as though to avoid the wrath of either the Invictans or the Adma – they crept toward the door. Zhiren did not need to see it in order to know every movement behind those walls.

He bolstered the will of the Invictan soldiers approaching that house, gave alertness to the one taking the leftmost flank so that he saw the sniper rising from the roof of a nearby building. That soldier immediately dropped to his knee, deployed the shield just in time to catch the first bullet. The sniper’s round dented the shield, pushed it back so that it impacted the Invictan, but his armor caught and redirected the impact of the blow, fragment-plate shifting to prevent the breaking of bones. The soldier fired his rifle in a burst, his aim thrown off by the bruising strike but still catching the sniper with a pair of bullets – one in the upper chest, one in the chin. She dropped her rifle on the roof and tumbled off the side, bones crunching when she landed in the mud.

He put an order into the mind of the one at the center of that squad, while reaching out in other directions with his mind as well – the web so vast, so euphorically vast. Zhiren’s army, the bulk of it, was away, but there was a special joy in smaller engagements like this. The number of his connections was just great enough that he could focus fully on the whole battle, the Fragments of God inside him enhancing his awareness, the training and practice he’d given himself over years of command and mastery rewiring his brain for simultaneous focus. Responding at once to the instruction – though surely she did not know where the order came from – the scout took a fragmentation grenade and rolled it into the house, then motioned her fellows back. She was faster than the others, but even they were fast enough to avoid the blast. The one who’d killed the sniper left his shield in the muck, and stray crossbow bolts from repeating throwers bounced off his armor until one finally found its mark between the arm plates, causing him to stumble.

With each connection, each soldier at the end of a string in Zhiren’s soul, came different capabilities and different weaknesses. When the next crossbow bolt took the shield-soldier in the eye Zhiren felt it as an echo of pain, more than a pain itself, but he was already headed toward the clay house even as the grenade covered the walls in blood and bone, and he barely paid a moment’s attention to the act of hardening the air and slicing the throat of the crossbowman who’d killed one of his shieldbearers.

He pulled out the vial as he approached the gateway, as the battle continued around him, desultory, the last struggles of a dying bunch of stragglers against a superior force.

Zhiren hardly noticed the carnage around him as he entered the house, with its blown-out windows. Glass from the panes had exploded outward in every direction, blanketing the marshy ground outside with bloody shards in a pattern resembling the blood spatter itself. Blood mixed with mud in little pools, as it did throughout the rest of the town. The council of fragmentary voices in Zhiren’s mind, all-foreseeing Thoth at its head, assured Zhiren of his forces’ ultimate victory and bid him to take this moment to gain knowledge.

There is power in a confluence of pain and destruction. With death all around him, Zhiren could feel – so strongly – the closeness of the Veil, the way it was no border or wall in the physical sense but how it stretched over every living thing and every cubic milimeter of all that existed. He was the Veil, and he was on both sides of it. The beings in his head, the Primordials with all their power, they still couldn’t open that Veil, because they were of Aether, of Desert, but Zhiren, with his human proclivities, his human ability to create – he had a power that they were jealous of, even beings that might once have called themselves gods and lorded over ancient primitive humans – jealous.

Alone, Zhiren could barely feel it. Alone in his tower – had he already begun to think of it as his, and not Aivor’s, not Gaius’s? – alone in his tower Zhiren had little connection to the Aether, to everything that it was and meant. But all this death changed the game. It made certain things clearer. A little of it may have been the adrenaline in his system, the thrill of battle. Commanding soldiers – particularly when he could so easily reach out and feel their very minds – had a special thrill to it that left Zhiren with heightened senses, and in fact a heightened sense of self as though he’d taken the most potent of drugs before walking into the fray.

Surrounding himself with the blood and gore of soldiers and civilians alike, feeling the warmth of their fragmentation-grenade-shocked bodies all around him, letting that warmth and the fading echo of life really sink into his soul, he opened the flask and sprinkled its precious water over himself.

Immediately he felt the cold – the water was slightly cool to the touch, yes, but it was more than that – a bone-deep cold shot through him, starting at the nexus of his ribcage and spreading outward. Within a second it filled his torso. He took curious note, as always, of the way his limbs convulsed and bunched up close to his body when the feeling began to take hold. Within five seconds the feeling – cold so thorough that, every time, Zhiren wondered if he would freeze forever – had spread out to his fingertips and his toes.

2054 CE

“Remember the promise, soldiers! We take this town for our future!”

Zhiren was clad in Desert armor, wielding a Desert rifle, and he was an unstoppable juggernaut. Glory and pride of the Syndicate in his heart. His fist beat a tune against his chest, both padded by armor that no bullet he’d yet met could penetrate. He waved his unit – five men, similarly armored, each one costing the Invir Syndicate the equivalent of billions of Lira – if only the economy hadn’t long ago collapsed and left the nation, every nation, reeling. Without governments, Invir had said – now is our chance, the perfect chance to seize our freedom.

And so they did – the first of the Aether-Touched teens in their unauthorized, trespassing encampment tried to raise her hands in surrender. Zhiren shouted a command at her – she didn’t seem to understand, spoke in a language he didn’t understand. The desert winds and the waves of sand whipping through every gap in the building made it more difficult to understand. Some kind of Kurmanji dialect, perhaps? The bandana wrapped over her head, generically in the fashion the Americans liked it, gave no clues. It didn’t much matter – she had her hands up but she was not kneeling. The order of engagement was clear.

Zhiren did not fire. He did not need to, for his men knew the order of things as well as he did. He was their commander formally only.

He smiled, and allowed himself a slow, luxurious blink of his eyes. The environment inside of his helmet was, of course, regulated – keeping the Desert out, a variation on the LEGACY Vanguard system if Zhiren’s limited knowledge of the history of the tech he used was any guide. When he opened his eyes, Zhiren saw something that shocked him – and for the first time in months, he almost lost his grip on his rifle.

The Aether-Touched girl, early as she was in her transformation, should have easily fallen to a hail of bullets. Yet she stood – untouched. The bullets clattered to the ground around her, the echoes of their impact with the floor being picked up by the selective microphones in the Invir armor’s earpieces.

A figure in Desert armor floated down from above, a distinctive marking on the forehead of his helmet. Zhiren recognized the figure immediately, despite how his face was obscured – his reputation was known. His and that of the people with whom he worked. Talisman. Ofer Shvets.

He nearly laughed. Nearly. “You are your crew… what are you doing here?”

“We didn’t come to fight,” Ofer said, his voice amplified through the Vanguard system’s mouthpiece. Behind him came two other figures – a humanoid machine, not clad in armor but with its skin as its own armor. The physical manifestation of a Netrunner, who – if Ofer was here – could only be Raz Shvets. A woman who walked with no armor at all, but around whom the wind seemed to part and the sands shied from. Karla Enok – no mistaking it.

“Well,” came the mechanical, amplified voice of Raz. “We never do, do we? But fuck you guys anyway. Rumi!”

At the exclamation of Rumi Darbinian’s dreaded name, a shot echoed through the chamber – so loud even the selective microphones couldn’t muffle it, and it set Zhiren’s ears to ringing. The man to his left collapsed, screaming in agony such as these well-armed Syndicate soldiers hadn’t known since they first clothed themselves in the armor that made them unstoppable monsters, demigods as far as the average human was concerned.

The Aether-Touched girl ducked her head, fell to her knees, and scrambled behind the nearest seemingly-protective figure. Ofer glanced down at her briefly, but Zhiren knew his full attention was still on the Invir soldiers. The fact that none of them had yet fired on him proved as much. The fact that Zhiren himself could not bring his finger to squeeze down on the trigger proved as much.

“I thought you people were busy building little lifeboats for your precious weaklings,” Zhiren spat. “Trying to ‘preserve the dignity of the human race’ or some such nonsense. Why are you interfering in Invir Syndicate business?”

“Interfering in Syndicate business is kind of our thing,” came Raz’s discordant response. Dissonantly monotone – the mechanical voice conveyed none of the raw hatred and scorn that must have been dripping through the Netrunner’s mind.

The part of Zhiren’s mind that was still his own shouted for him to fire, aiming down his rifle’s sights at Karla Enok. She was unarmored, or at least appeared to be so. But her whispers – whispers at the base of his skull, needles in his cerebellum – stayed his hand. And then the rifle melted in his grip and became water, water which turned to steam almost as soon as it hit the ground. Where it struck, some of the sand that covered the floor dissipated. It did not take long for more sand to fill the gap that the water had made.

By the time it did, however, Zhiren had already become water himself.

245 YT

And he awoke from the vision with a few final shouts echoing around him, with soldiers waiting at the door for him to come out of his trance. They greeted him as he stood up, snapping off the standard salute in unison – index fingers against foreheads, hand snapping down over chest and stomach then to the right, arm extending to full length. Zhiren returned the gesture, but slower, with less stiffness, more luxury. He smiled. “What is our status?” he asked aloud.

“We have won decisively,” said the soldier nearest him.

“Are there any Adma left alive?” Zhiren asked.

“Possibly,” said the other soldier. “Not all are accounted for. It may be they are hiding among the civilians in the village.”

“Well, then,” Zhiren said with a smile. “Let us root them out. We’ll ask the villagers, of course – nicely.” And he stepped out into the center of the village.

When Zhiren spoke, when he really projected his voice, no one could ignore him. The voice compelled – the voice cut through walls and through louder conversations, though to someone standing next to him it might sound like little more than a whisper.

“On behalf of the Human God, I bring you a message,” Zhiren said to all the people in the village. “We of the Invictus can be merciful. But – you are harboring our enemies. Give them to us, and you can live. You have one hour.”

Zhiren walked through blood and mud until he reached the eastern edge of the village. All the ground was mixed red and brown together – a watery tapestry strewn over the whole land. In some places the two pooled together into a single sludgy liquid, while on drier ground the red merely spattered the earth. Everywhere grass was torn up and cut to shreds by the pressure of tromping feet.

When he came to the edge of the village – far from the orchards and the fields, which were concentrated in the west of the village – Zhiren turned and faced the west and lowered himself to his knees. The wind whipped around him, and when he closed his eyes, and breathed it in, it stilled, quieted. He waited.

His soldiers were antsy and quick to fidget as they watched the houses. Some made moves to begin the work of clearing the battleground of bodies, but Zhiren sent them orders to stop. Let the earth bleed a little longer. It was necessary – distasteful, yes, but there was a point that had to be made. Sometimes distasteful things must be done, people must dirty themselves. He smiled gently and nodded to himself. Each second, each minute, he ticked off in his mind, a perfect metronome counting pendulum-strokes.

Many minutes passed in too-intense quiet. The villagers peered out from their houses, those that hadn’t been wrecked by grenades and gunfire, and watched the soldiers curiously. The soldiers, for their part, stared back, not without a little nervousness of their own. Zhiren felt the apprehension as though it were his – the soldiers half-expected that any one of the villagers might be an Adma soldier, or that they might nonetheless decide to take up one of the fallen guns and defend themselves, in desperation. Zhiren tried, as best he could, to maintain the silence among those present and bound to his service. Perhaps he could cause that desperation to build among the Valers, and that would make them realize the true bleakness of their situation and give up the Adma they were sheltering.

As the appointed hour drew closer, it seemed that Zhiren was having no such luck this day. He was not much disappointed, although a more thorough demonstration of power would have helped to soothe his ego and his worries about his own capabilities. There was no missive from Aivor yet, the Human God silent somewhere in the south, still delayed by other matters on his march up toward Kivv.

No matter. The final minute had come. Slowly, Zhiren stood up.

At that moment, one of the nearby houses opened its door and a young woman in a torn linen dress, knife in her hand, came out. Zhiren felt the rise in tension as a dozen guns were trained on her, but he stayed the soldiers’ hands with a lift of his fingers, seeing that the Valer had a captive in her grasp. The captive was an Adma soldier, in fact – wearing a cobbled-together amalgam of Invictan armor, wielding old abandoned Invictan weapons, all recognizable by design and make but with the sigils scratched off and the colors altered by liberal application of various paints and dyes. Behind the girl, others – perhaps her more honor-minded family members – begged for her to stop, and the Adma fighter writhed in the girl’s grip.

Zhiren’s sergeant came up to stand by his shoulder. Twenty seconds remained. “Perhaps we could have saved time by simply searching the houses for Adma and then moving on,” he said.

“No.” Zhiren spoke aloud for the first time this hour. His voice was quiet and gentle again, unlike when he’d called out his demands to the villagers. “By now several – villagers or Adma, it doesn’t matter – have probably already escaped under our noses and fled for the marshes and hills. They’ll be watching, and in a few days they’ll return to reconnoiter the site.”

“Then we’ll hunt them down,” the sergeant said aloud.

“No,” Zhiren replied. “We want them to spread the word of what has occurred here. A swath of the Vale, that which we’ve marched through, already knows us and our demands well enough – that which hasn’t been destroyed. The rest of the Vale must know us intimately as well. They will know not only that we are their enemies but that we have specific goals, and they will know the consequences of failing to meet our demands.” Zhiren ran his fingers through his hair, catching tangles and snags in the waves as he did. Ten seconds remained. The girl with the Adma captive struggled closer toward Zhiren, her knife still poised near the throat.

“And so this one, then…?”

Smiling, Zhiren nodded. “You do have some understanding, then.” Five seconds remained. The girl drew closer. The fighter of the Adma thrashed in her grip. Finally the girl’s grip loosened just enough, as she came near her goal. The insurgent elbowed her in the stomach, and she held her ground admirably, not doubling over – yet already he’d used the room he’d gained to turn, putting one hand on her left shoulder and the other pushing her arm back. When the girl tried to regain her grip around the former captive, she found she couldn’t close her arms tight enough. The knife stayed tightly clasped in her right hand, yet she couldn’t bring it anywhere near the insurgent’s flesh.

Time up. Zhiren took a step toward his sergant, reached around to the man’s opposite hip, and withdrew a pistol. He began to raise and level it. the Adma thrashed, turning and twisting to the right, and the force of it combined with the girl’s struggle against his grip, flipping her around to the other side so that she stood between the Adma and Zhiren. When the Adma rose again, he had a solid grip on the young woman’s shoulders and his feet were well dug into the muddy ground.

He pushed forward behind his captive shield.

Zhiren sighed, closed his eyes and shot the captor-turned-captive twice in the chest. She screamed, the shrillness of it almost as unpleasant to Zhiren’s ears as the crack of the gun. He stepped forward and pushed her aside, and though the Adma attempted to keep a grip on her, she toppled to the ground anyway, her head landing in the mud. She continued to scream, but the liquid – mud mixed with the blood of herself and others, all melded together now, all distinctions between them erased – it soon ceased to flow. By that time, the Adma had joined the young Valer woman in the mud. Indeed, he grew still and quiet long before she did.

Zhiren handed the gun, barrel-first, to the sergeant. “Burn it,” he said. “Don’t try to stop anyone who flees, except the Adma, but burn the entire village, and if anyone fights back, kill them on the spot.”

“But…” the sergeant began, the beginnings of a protest on his lips. Zhiren might, under other circumstances, have deigned to take the time to listen. Right now, he did not much care what the sergeant’s particular protest might be. Was Zhiren being too lenient or too harsh with these people? Was fire an unsuitable means of destruction? Had he made a mistake in waiting this long?

It didn’t matter. Zhiren could already feel the day coming soon when the mantle he so craved would be his, and Thoth’s whisper in his mind assured him that every step he took, every word from his mouth, every twitch of his fingertips was exactly as it should be to bring him swiftly toward that glorious day.