Breathe deep.

Close your eyes.

Take the leap of faith.

Death cares not for fairness.

The end won't wait until you’re ready.

It claims the young and old with equal regard.

CHAPTER 2: TWIN FATES

Far, far away, dark forces received the child’s message. Her voice called out across the world, bore ever onwards by a long-suffering order of broken souls who kept the faith in the old world alive.

“... My arrival will seal the Immortal’s fate. She will die. The noble lineages will all die, and it will be justice...”

A mother watched a shimmering hologram — amethystine in its faceted quality — presented to her by a trembling and fearful court of misbegotten freaks, who crawled beneath her masked gaze in terror. She hissed, soft ruby lips twisting into a contemptuous sneer.

An ancient father watched from his dark demesne, alone in a grand cathedral dedicated to slaughter, surrounded by a tide of the devoured dead. He thumbed the message off himself, and his gleaming armoured visor turned away, left to his tormented memories of the past. Here it was again, cycles upon cycles, history repeating.

Still deeper, machines looked upon the message in a chamber of shining steel, glass, and plastic. They analysed every word and every microexpression on the child’s face. Those lifeless electric eyes shed not an ounce of care.

Ignorant of their machinations, thieves made their way through the recesses of Enelastioa — a city within The City, in Acetyn’s forward cavity — and a hunter plied his trade.

“I’m tellin’ you, we got it,” Haveyt boasted, swaggering under a bony archway.

Two freaks led a large crawler laden with two tons of raw biomass. Haveyt drank from a flask as he staggered on four legs, drunken upon his own success. Alcohol ran wet from his mandibles. His companion, holding the reins of their beast of burden in his pincers, twitched his eyestalks nervously.

“Keep it down,” Nezdent said low. “They’ll send the xenos. Or the pale.”

The city, indifferent to these two freaks, passed them by. Towering housing, built up over countless layers to fill the yawning void, loomed over them as they walked. Some twisted figures lurked in the dark, sat upon the walls, and huddled in the streets. Yet none paid these two any heed, keeping to the orange glow of the electric lamplights. Those with purpose hurried along, refusing to linger. Spawn shrieked hungrily from a den high above, piercing the walls and the fog. Someone barked in a vain attempt to silence them.

“Xenos? Pale?” Haveyt laughed. “They’s too busy fighting each other. We got it. We got it.”

“We don’t got it ’til we got it,” Nezdent snapped back.

“We do! Let the hounds tear each other apart. Sister’s eating Sister, these days. We can take what we like. Now’s our time.”

“Shut the fuck up, already.”

“Hungry no more!” Haveyt shouted for all the city to hear.

They led the crawler through the bony passage and into a yard. At the sight of the heavy crawler, metal plates rattling and load-bearing legs stomping, the locals scattered. Only one young one stopped, antenna twitching curiously, before running inside and pulling the shades shut.

Then, with a jerk and a groan, the crawler stopped with its rearmost legs and transport bed still beneath the archway. Crooning, the beast of burden struggled with its load, one of its limbs twisted in the dark.

“What’s going on?” Nezdent turned, reins in hand. The crawler bayed and reared its stunted head.

“I don’t know,” Haveyt said. “Go look!”

“Hold this then.”

Shoving the reins into Haveyt’s hands, Nezdent squared up to the shade of the archway, which sheltered the damp tunnel from the electric lamps above. He squeezed his shelled body in and passed the twitching legs of the crawler with a grunt.

“What the—...”

Nezdent stooped down in the dark, touching blood. The rear foot of the crawler had been sliced deep, and the creature couldn’t put it down against the damp ground.

“What’s going on?” Haveyt called from around the beast.

Nezdent stood again and turned quickly, eyestalks swinging as he looked around. Then he dropped down.

The hunter — serpentine body uncoiling from above, throat hissing — towered over Nezdent. His massive claws seized Nezdent by the throat, oily saliva running between the hunter’s beaks to drip on Nezdent’s scaled face.

Nezdent’s scream pierced Enelastioa. Two gunshots cracked out, then a third. An eerie silence followed.

In the shadow of that tower, the freaks there knew better than to look and see who died there. They waited in their nests and their hideaways for the recyclers to arrive and drag the corpses to the chutes. Only then, when there was no more fighting or struggling, did they peer out and see the crawler and its cargo were nowhere to be seen.