“You will learn to walk as a Goddess, like the powerful, the named, and not like prey.”

Bee felt those words as trembling aftershocks tapped into her arm long after they departed back into the dark. She followed the lead of the silent warrior as they stalked in the shade. They soon discovered that they were both right. The hounds followed in quiet advance. So the Eidolon taught Bee how to evade them.

At one fork in the tunnels, the Eidolon crouched low and uncovered a coil of metal bound into the silicon flesh of the city. She took iron scraps from a pouch and dropped a piece into the tight spiral. Some invisible force caught the debris there and held it levitating. Then it began to twist and turn, sparking red hot, then white hot, and Bee had to look away.

Learning from experience how freaks mastered fire in this rotten world, Bee blinked between her different visions as the Eidolon silently gestured around. The heat from the induction coil slowly baked the passage and erased signs of their footprints in the infrared.

Then the Eidolon turned sharply to where the city’s waters breached into the tunnels proper. Inviting Bee to climb down into the surge, without warning, the Eidolon pressed down Bee’s head until she was under the water, then pulled her back up. It tasted foul and had the cloying caustic scent of the city’s oils.

Holding Bee close as her instincts were to struggle, the Eidolon tapped on her shoulder.

“There is a hound close. I will help you climb.”

And climb she did. Rather than crossing the rushing river of nutrients, the Eidolon firmly grasped Bee’s damaged arm. It helped her reach higher and higher until together they balanced on a small outcropping, high in the air, above where the river breached through the passage.

Crouched there in the dark, Bee turned her vision back to the infrared haze. The hot light from the spark rendered the way they came fuzzy, bright, and indistinct, so she flicked back. Despite seeing nothing, her hair began to stand on end, and a shiver crept up her spine. Then it appeared.

A claw wrapped around the corner, and the tall, gaunt monster crouched into the chamber, its shape casting sharp shadows from the light. Its long head turned, lips peeling back to expose its silver teeth as it tasted the air, searching for them.

Bee couldn’t help but whimper and shake. The Eidolon wrapped her arm around the vat-born, put a hand over her mouth, and held her close.

The hound waded into the surge. Then, long-limbed, it quickly crossed and dragged the front of its distorted head over the ground on the far side. He was searching for them.

The Eidolon’s free hand twitched into a fist. Above the monster, she lacked a weapon. As she looked down at the hound, Bee suspected that the Eidolon would have readily risked ending the monster’s life here and now.

Too long, the hound waited, dragging its face over the passage’s floor ahead. He was thinking. He was deliberating. Bee could see it. Then with a hiss, it turned and threw itself back into the heat of the previous chamber, and Bee could hear it furiously charging down the other fork in the tunnel.

Without delay, the Eidolon urged Bee back down into the rushing filth. Then, helping her climb down, the silent warrior urged her ahead, where the tunnel turned into a short ramp and freedom.

Vast open space at last, but this time the bone sky was supported by broad spinal column towers and colossal disfigured titans, not living but grown to bear the weight, in the memory likeness of freaks that came before. But the street they walked onto was scored, cracked and littered with rotting bodies and refuse. The buildings that filled the space around them were damaged, bleeding or broken, leaning and crumbling.

“What happened?” Bee whispered.

The Eidolon put a hand on her shoulder to answer.

“This is Cruiros, a city in The City. The Lord of Acetyn once gave it to a cruel hound - the Damnation - to keep the people here in line. But the beast was slain, and the Lord was supplanted, so the people returned to anarchy, and civilisation here collapsed.”

“That’s awful.”

They walked side by side through narrow alleyways and gutters. The Eidolon consciously avoided the broader streets and, Bee noticed, kept her eyes on the skyline, where shadows crept as silhouettes against the spiked and bladed rooftops.

There was not a soul walking in the open. Bee wondered if this place was deserted or if the inhabitants kept themselves hidden. Graffiti scrawled across shelled walls and screamed in silence.

SESTCHEK HAS FALLEN

WHERE ARE YOU MOTHER?

PARADISE AT LAST!

A young, newly shed freak lay in the alley, dead. Bee averted her eyes, tears stinging them. Then distant voices bounced down the street, and the Eidolon quickly changed avenues, leading Bee away, around a longer route to their destination, but one that proved safe nonetheless.

After checking that they would remain unseen, they dared to quickly cross a plaza. From there, they climbed a rampart onto a raised Hierapolis. The structures turned from wild and unkempt to refined and purposeful. Bee couldn’t help but stop and stare as they passed sanctuaries and shrines, floating orbs of shimmering design, and intricate fountains not yet damaged or corrupted by the violence below.

Shortly after, the Eidolon led Bee between fluted columns capped with crenellated arches, supporting a massive stone roof. The monument sheltered smaller buildings, but only by comparison. Each was still grand in its design. The centremost had a rise of steps to enter its arched doorway, a heavy double door already pushed open as if to welcome their arrival.

Inside, the pungent smell of burning incense touched Bee’s nose. It was dark but not black like the depths. Instead, it was warm, marked by candlelight, and inviting.

“Hello?” Bee called out.

The Eidolon didn’t stop her, but no reply came.

Walking around the temple’s nave, Bee found it was separated into three distinct wings. A black iron statue stood in its centre, seats pushed aside for its haphazard introduction. It was of a giant armour clad with a sharp wedge of a helmet. He held a glaive aloft, and inside, he burned with fiery oil, which belched black smoke from the cracks in the statue. Bee didn’t recognise it - she knew it must have been a recent introduction because it wasn’t as decorated. The floorplan of the place of worship seemed like it still needed to be adapted to suit it.

Bee started at the left aisle, walking until she found an alcove with the familiar naked visage of the Wire-Witch in stone, standing tall. It was an old nook but recently scoured. Someone had defaced the iconography and taken what Bee assumed to have been metal treasures from around her neck, hands, and altar. Still, paper scraps had been left here, and Bee peered at the prayers on top. They were all much the same, variations on the same questions and pleadings. Why did you abandon us? Are you really dead? Please help us.

Bee turned away, frowning. She crossed the chamber to look into the alcove on the right side, opposite the Wire-Witch. There she found the familiar image of her Mother. But, no, it was wrong. Bee’s frown intensified when she saw the lips this Vat-Mother’s statue wore over her skull. Also nude, she was hanging from the wall as if supported by countless bony spurs and taut ligaments rendered in stony detail. There were still offerings here, and this altar did not seem defaced. Bee marvelled at flowers, picking them up, surprised at their smell. She did the same with a vase of fragrant perfume, giving a puzzled look back to the Eidolon, who waited by the doors, keeping an eye out.

Finally, Bee approached the ultimate section of the temple, the sanctuary at the furthest forward. Though glancing back to the fiery statue that occluded it from the entrance, Bee wondered what statement might be made there. But, instead, she came face to face with the bright image of a holoprojection. A human woman in dark clothes was rendered in crisp detail. She had a warm, placid smile, brown skin and curling black hair. Bee stared in fright at the sight of what she could only assume to be a progenitor. She deduced this must have been the Immortal then, what she looked like when she didn’t burn the mind, and her stomach twisted into knots.

Bee considered the sight for a time, folding her arms, wings flicking with unspoken anger. Eventually, her eyes turned down from the brightness to the platform that the image projected from.

A gentle hand was then on Bee’s shoulder, and the Eidolon tapped.

“Is everything alright?”

“It’s fine,” Bee mumbled. “I was just looking around, that’s all. My Mother said the Immortal did all this. Ruined everything, I mean, and killed her.”

The platform she stared at resembled statues in the depths below, a metre-long arrowhead-shaped object with spheres clustered under its sharp tip. Bee reasoned that it wasn’t necessarily the shape of a holoprojector and that it was supposed to tell her something, some detail that yet escaped her.

The Eidolon’s hand squeezed in gentle reassurance as they both looked over the Immortal’s effigy.