Oh my Lord, my Lord,

Might I applaud?

How does your garden grow?

With ancient bells,

And armoured shells,

And your blind maidens all in a row.

See how they run.

Oh, see how they run.

How they all flee from your immortal wife,

Who cut off their tails with a starlight knife.

Did you ever see such a thing in your life,

As that cruel blow?

CHAPTER 5: ONE THOUSAND YEARS IN THE MAKING

Peace.

The tiny field cutter drifted in the void, mindless and long severed from its drone host. Ever falling, the device was no larger than an adult human’s hand, compact, rectangular, and featureless. It tumbled as it fell — moving too quickly to reach the surface — locked in a steep orbit.

Far, far below, the planet Merlinst gleamed. Again and again, countless times, the field cutter circled the world from above. It bore silent witness as billions of tons of orbital wreckage hit the atmosphere below. The air ignited where they fell, making the planet itself glow hot. Once golden habitats scoured black. The whole world became a furnace.

Above, a new moon circled, borne from a long process of accretion, as more and more of the immense orbital corpse was pulled into its greedy mass. It, too, was wicked hot, glowing dimly even when shaded from the system’s star. This youngest celestial body was furious, flaring with the anger of the mass slaughter that precluded its birth. With the pull of its weighty body, it fractured the world below, shattering the crust and spilling molten stone. Oceans boiled, and fires raged across Merlinst’s once-green continents.

The field cutter watched the tremendous, glowing flutes of Merlinst’s death throes as the boiling lava fountained into the upper atmosphere.

The field cutter watched as the planet circled the local star, the molten earth below cooling into rock.

The field cutter watched as the hot atmosphere ripped at that stone, wind and storms tearing it down into an all-encompassing desert over ten thousand years.

The field cutter even watched the first cities grow. Some of them, fat and lazy, were content simply spread. Others, impudent, crawled over the surface. They chased each other in pursuit of violence or desire.

However, as the planet remained hot, its atmosphere swelled, expanding outwards into the vacuum of space. Eventually, the faintest traces of it touched upon the lost device, tumbling in space. That feather touch first stole the old thing’s slow rotation as it sailed through the void. Then, as it orbited again and again, its velocity was sapped away. Finally, the tiny field cutter was dragged down, deeper into the upper reaches of dead Merlinst’s atmosphere, until it could no longer escape.

Upon a column of fire, the field cutter screamed through the air and hit the desert in a shock of crystal sand and smoke. From there, it watched the passages of the stars and the burning moon above for countless days and nights until the blowing winds covered it in the sand.

There, the heirloom of another age lay until, one day, a titan disturbed its rest. The first foot of the megapedal city — mighty Acetyn — cracked the earth. Sand rushed around the crater in its wake, falling down deep into where the bedrock was shattered. Then, rolling to rest on top of the cavity, the field cutter was again exposed to the air, shaded by a careless giant that made slow progress overhead.

Acetyn bellowed from its countless skull keeps, a resounding trumpet call reverberating across the desert. Not so far behind, its companion Sestchek answered that call with a symphony of spines, grinding against each other and chirping in an insectile concerto.

All about the cities, the toughest or the most suicidal freaks dared to leave their hosts. They scavenged the sands for fallen star metal, invaluable treasures to those Up High, those who ruled from the spires of their wicked cities.

They all believed that just one good find could change a freak’s life. They could trade the material for just the right favour. They were right, of course, in their own way.

This one find would change the world forever.

Just such a freak stood upon a glass boulder. Tiny and long-limbed, it turned its beak and binocular eyes to survey the sands. There, they waited, too weak to struggle with the larger hulls and the most buried wreckage. Eventually, they knew the most valuable things would be exposed to the open air by the gales and dust devils left in mighty Acetyn’s wake.

Their patience was rewarded with a glimmer.

The freak’s calloused talons were inured to the pain, lopping and bounding across the hot sand. There, just where they saw it, was the field cutter. They tipped their head, this way and that, appraising the find hawkishly, before chirping and taking it up in their beak, darting back towards the city.

And so, the device returned to darkness. It passed from hand to claw, from pincer to maw, a treasure in the depths that moved between pitiful freaks and haughty vat-borne. They coveted its ancient heritage, though its purpose was unknown to them.

When the artefact finally returned to the light, it was in one of Acetyn’s lower spiracles. This great vent sucked up the furnace air of the desert into its humid depths.

Stood upon its lip, an eidolon watched the desert below. This freak had the silhouette of a man dressed only in a brown cloak clasped loosely around his shoulders. However, his flesh — a mangled mix of everything except humanity — was carved into this unnatural, bipedal shape. Pale and scarred, his yellow eyes turned to watch a troupe of neoglosms march to the opposite side of the divide. They knelt at its edge, a brigade of freaks grown into all shapes and sizes.

The evangelical neoglosms believed this life was endless torment, a living hellscape, that the all-consuming cities and their parasitic freaks had claimed all the biomass in the world, and only through their obliteration could the world be saved. Their faithful thought release could be given to those willing to embrace decapitation. Not only that, but they desired their bodies to be hurled to the sands and be forever apart from their host’s ecosystem.

Their more deluded members thought the real world — Paradise — awaited them in their passing. They insisted that the only way to escape the city was to take out your brain or remove your head before your biomass was thrown back into the wastes. Apparently, there was another world waiting for them. However, most realised how foolish they were when they saw the desert for themselves.

The Eidolon couldn’t tell which of them was a true believer and who harboured doubts. They all looked terrified, confronted with the furnace truth of the outside below. Behind them stalked a wicked creature with a scything arm, encouraging them with quotes of meaningless scripture, hollow words of reassurance.

The zealot behind them hacked the first neck, severing the freak’s head and casting their body heavily over the edge. The other neoglosms begged some higher power to help them, praying to an uncaring God.

Frowning, the Eidolon leaned forward and watched the body’s descent. However, the air bellowing up to meet his face was hot and dry, and even in the shade, he lacked the genes to bear the day star’s light. Quickly burning, he flinched away, back into the dark and humid interior of the city.

The body landed hundreds of metres below, with the weighty slap of meat against the sand.

Grim, the Eidolon wrapped his billowing cloak about himself and stepped away from the edge of the spiracle. He had to stoop down and duck as it walked below each rib that supported the passage at one of the many wide tracheae, which gulped up air for the city. He only moved a little in, enough to escape the light that breached the interior. Even out of sight, the Eidolon could hear the neoglosms’ screams of terror. Listening, he identified each fall by the reaction of the other neoglosms and the distant thump as they landed.

Finally, the Eidolon found a dark corner to kneel in. He managed to fall into meditation, frowning, crooked face bowed. Who knew how far their wicked neoglosm faith reached, how many falsehoods they spread, and how many lives they ruined? Righteous fury burned in his heart. The Eidolon crushed that feeling. This was not the time, and this was not the place.

Finally, there was silence. The Eidolon was afforded some measure of peace, the opportunity to calm himself, before the sound of footsteps approached. This time, the Eidolon rose to its feet and carefully watched a gaunt, eight-limbed vat-borne crawl out of the dark. White robed and hooded, the vat-born was stained with ochre dust, which trailed off his cloak and collected dark and heavy under his feet.

Scowling, the Eidolon eyed the vat-born’s machine augments. Parts of its body had been replaced with star metal — buzzing devices of unknowable purpose. It was marked as one of the Wire-Witch’s minions, and they weren’t supposed to interfere like this. Usually, they thought themselves too important to ever leave their sanctums. However, someone Up High must have taken notice.

With a wheeze from his mechanical lungs, the vat-born turned its hood this way and that in its search for the Eidolon. He lacked eyes. Instead, the plate stapled over its head relentlessly clicked and listened for the echo.

The Eidolon stepped away from the wall, making himself more prominent for the blind thing. He raised his hand in a holy gesture, and the vat-born promptly halted. Then the machine minion clambered forwards and gave a similar, albeit more mechanical blessing, with a hand assembled from mechanical parts and not grown.

“Slashex,” the Eidolon greeted him. “Do you have it? The offering?”

“How long you must have waited, Ohmax...” Slashex’s voice trailed off, unfocused and clearly synthetic. A dazed smile crooked his lips.

“That is no longer my name. I ask you again. Do you have it?”

“I do.”

Slashex offered the Eidolon a small rectangular device — the field cutter. Almost carelessly, Slashex clasped the artefact between steel digits. However, when the Eidolon reached to take it, the vat-born held on tight.

“She allows you this, for your doomed journey to your ruined little shrine,” Slashex hissed. “In the times that come, you will remember that. You will remember who allowed this...”

The Eidolon snatched the device as soon as the vat-born released it. A favour for a favour was how the courts worked; if he was going to topple them On High, he would do well to remember that. Scowling, not giving the artefact another look and not giving the vat-born the pleasure of verbal acquiescence, the Eidolon walked away.

Shrouding himself in his ruined, old cloak, the Eidolon ducked and disappeared into the dark, towards the deep necropolis of Aceytn’s thoracic reaches, where a forgotten titan yet slumbered.