Every child dreams of flying. Of exploring the world with good company at their back and a noble cause to impel them onwards. The Empire understands this all too well.

- Vice Admiral(Ret) Keith Nergal, "Of Lies Writ in Blood and Honor"

Olive’s world was fire.

Then nothingness.

Then fire again.

Before an Alliance frigate so rudely introduced its garishly styled pearl and seafoam prow to the ISV Steel Reason’s hull, he hadn’t thought it possible to expire via combustion more than once, but there were many things he didn’t know.

What he did know was the people who claimed it didn't hurt were damned liars.

Again, the world shook, his shipmates screamed, and a flying safety rail plunged into his lung, nailing him to the wall like a display model. He'd long given up on trying to get away; every attempt ended with it in his neck or his torso. Or his groin. 

The gunnery control compartment was one of many. Usually a calm, sterile place dimly washed in the blue gleam of an array of monitors. It was far removed from the instruments it directed and well isolated against any noise but the chime of keys being pressed and the odd order he'd have to raise his voice for.  

Now, wind howled as the frigate flared its engines, opening the wound in his quiet domain wide enough to expose them to the deafening din of war they’d been so sheltered against. Flames illuminated the dead and dying as they writhed, or clutched wounds, or sought cover in the cramped walking space between workstations, the bruteglass hub meant to afford him an unobstructed view of his team spared him from having to witness their faces up close.

The pain was manageable thanks to a coil joining his nape to the remains of his shattered console, but the dampening effect did nothing for the absolute wrongness of the cloudy air streaming in through a hole he shouldn't have. It also kept him from going into shock. He was conscious and aware of everything. Aware of how powerless he was as the frigate’s point defense emplacements swept molten tracers across the compartment, turning men and women he loved and trusted into paste.

Two rounds the size of his forearm slammed just short of the hub, spraying bright incendiary material everywhere and adding the taste of acrid fumes to the blood he swallowed. He would burn before he was allowed to "die". 

The frigate couldn't dig itself any deeper and they weren’t losing altitude; they likely wouldn’t sink the Steel Reason unless a few dozen suicidal captains were on their way to follow the first, but they'd more than managed to claim the lives of Olive and his team, the crash-hiss of a bulkhead sealing behind him was indication enough. The extra effort was just an expression of hate. 

Pings from the bridge swarmed his vision, each demanding that he order his shipmates meters below to stop burning, bleeding, and crying and get their battery back in working order. A jaded officer would curl their lips in distaste and curse the Empire with their last breaths in this situation, Olive didn't. 

His duty was to persecute the enemy, if he fell lax where he could push through, people would die and the records would be more than justified in holding him to account. Still, there was no pushing through this one; the console couldn't tap the ship's targeting systems, let alone the guns. He stopped sending replies after the ninth loop and stopped counting loops after the ninetieth. Instead, he buried his shame by focusing on the little things, like the silver lion on his coat curling up, turning orange then black under the cloying caress of the flames.

He found that if he squirmed in one direction or another, he could make it deform in a different way. It distracted him from the sensation of his boots welding themselves to his skin and was just enough to tide him over until the round that would detonate his console came. With one flash of indescribable pain and a cruelly short moment of relief, he'd have the pleasure of doing the number over again.  

The round came on schedule, but what followed wasn’t the torturous ring of two supersonic metal coffins getting intimate with each other. Instead, a wave of color and half-formed shapes overtook the Steel Reason like a length of film overlapping another but applied to all his senses.

Through the melting glitch in reality the frigate had hit their ship, though. Shrapnel and rounds hung in the air, the safety rail he'd gotten so well acquainted with jutted halfway into the hub among a shower of glinting glass shards. His sense of self rose towards the invading mess, peeling away from the compartment. It was like lifting his brain out his skull. His stomach lurched.

Below, a cold presence bade him back into the ever-repeating nightmare, to grab onto it like a weight and sink down. He nearly obeyed, he wanted to escape the Steel Reason but doubt clouded Would he pass on? Would he stop existing? His previous position promised only pain, but it was a sure thing, it was predictable, safe.   

“No! Stay awake, friend!” A light feminine voice, Olive didn’t recognize it, but it drew him further up. 

A nightmare? No, it was a long, gentle dream, one that promised an unchanging eternity. To endure a little pain for an existence everlasting was more than a fair trade. The so-called life of a mortal was more worthy of the name, why would Olive give this up for something so meaningless, so short? 

“C’mon, open your eyes!” The voice took on a desperate tone. Something shook him by the shoulders from above. He hardly felt it, but it was enough for the colors and shapes to resolve into forms he could almost recognize. 

No.

He would sink. He was the centerpiece of a beautiful diorama, the star of an exquisite microcosm of agony that would go on and on and on. He would sink. Sink into the dream of fire and metal and blood. Sink for the End and end unendingly until the end of the End! 

The voice muttered an apology. Hands seized lengths of sensitive, unfamiliar flesh on either side of his head and pulled.

This time, he felt it. Blistering, tugging pain that threatened to rip through his scalp followed him as he clipped through his compartment, the Steel Reason, and the sky itself like a fish on a line.

Instead of klaxons and flames, a woman with a button nose greeted him.

She had mouse-like features; big, trumpeted ears that peeked over short lavender hair, grey almond-shaped eyes, and thin whiskers. She wore a downright archaic suit of cream-colored scale mail with a single oversized pauldron. Two crossed belts clung loosely to her waist stuffed with throwing knives and an axe with immaculate ivy engravings running across its blade. She bore no identifying markers save for a golden wing unfurled proudly over her heart. The Alliance used a similar emblem, but the design was off, and she didn't have enough green on her.

Her eyes widened as Olive’s vision came into focus. “Oh, thank the light! Can you understand me?”

“Ow,” Olive hissed, clutching at fuzzy, floppy ears that seemed very much like parts of him. “Ow. Ow. Ow.”

Caught between separate impulses to run, lash out, and cry in the fetal position, his razor sharp warrior instincts decided that falling on his bum and biting the inside of his lip was a fine compromise. He’d spent a virtual eternity impaled and burning, sure, but this was a new kind of pain, and he still felt queasy, and he wasn’t connected to anything he could dump it into.   

The woman was upon him in a heartbeat, cupping her gauntleted hands over his ears, eyes half-lidded in concentration. With a soft crackle of air, warmth chased the stinging away. “Oh, sorry! Didn’t mean to yank so hard. I thought we were about to lose you, so I panicked a mite."

The sudden shift had him on the backfoot, but he was beyond the point of devolving into a traumatized, gibbering mess. That was loops forty through sixty-five. 

Olive furrowed his brows. “Not to sound ungrateful ma’am, but why waste good magic on me?” Casters were rare, healers rarer still. Of the 15,000 souls aboard the Steel Reason there were but seven, their life-saving spellwork was reserved for the most grievous of injuries suffered by the most important airmen.

“Cecilia.” She answered. Bringing her nose uncomfortably close to his own. “No ma’ams, no misses, and definitely no ladys. I’m not some stuck-up Pure Brand, and the spell wasn’t a waste, I’ll get the mana back in a wink.”

If she was at all offended, Olive would never know, she replaced her mock scowl with a wide, welcoming grin halfway between her scolding. 

“Anywho, you seem fine, you’ll tell me if you aren’t right?” Without waiting for an answer, Cecilia supported Olive’s back with one hand and grasped his arm with the other. “Up we go,” she said, helping him to his… hooves.

“What.” He stared bluntly at the things attached to his legs, giving them a few experimental click click clicks against the stone floor. It wasn’t too late to convince himself that he’d gone mad, it would be the easier explanation

If only he were so weak-willed.

Olive forced himself to take stock of his mutations, patting himself down with clinical distance. The thin sackcloth he was in had a hole cut out for a short, fluffy tail, and a pair of nubby horns sat on top of his head. Thankfully enough, he still looked mostly like himself, probably. His face felt the same despite his skin seeming more supple.

“You were something else before, weren’t you, friend?”

Olive nodded slowly. “Indeed.”

“Don’t worry, it happens! If it’s worth anything, you make a really cute weresheep! I think you’re a weresheep at least. If you say ‘display status’ in your head you can make sure.” She peeked behind him with a small smile, checking out the goods with all the subtlety of a full broadside.  

Olive was secure enough in his masculinity to not balk at being called cute, but the compliment made him feel weird and he didn’t quite know how to deal with that. He stepped back, nearly smacking into what looked like some giant creature’s spine. Fragments of dusty yellow bones littered the ground.

He glanced around. The room was a grey, drab affair of exposed wires, overhead lights and darkened spell circles. The scent of harsh cleaning agents and the neatly placed rows of spine pillars betrayed a well-kept, efficiently run operation. Whatever hell he’d been subjected to was industrialized.

Soldiers dressed in a similar fashion to the mouse woman, though with a variety of different arms ranging from rapiers to knuckle dusters, to what looked like a small cannon slung over an ox woman’s back, were in the process of freeing people from their own pillars, pulling or plying away ribs that held them tightly in place. Some bore Cecilia's golden wing emblem while others had a white fist clutching a red ring. Different elements of the same force, perhaps? Between them, a few figures in dark green robes adorned with leaf-patterned scales or oddly designed, yet functional clothing lent their assistance, none of the latter had indicators of rank or allegiance.

Alright. He could deal with whatever was happening. He clearly wasn’t on Arcova  anymore, and while he came back with new accessories, it was better than not coming back at all. He didn’t have the familiar metal slit of his neural link on the nape of his neck, but he did as Cecilia asked, thinking outwards as if he was plugged in.

Fwip!

A mote of awareness, not unlike what he’d expect from a console uplink, answered as a pale purple window unfurled in front of him like a scroll.

Name: Olive Flouquet  Age: 19  Species: Baphomet: (level 0, 0/10 exp)  Patron(s): None (0/0) 

Primary Talent: None(0/0) Secondary Talent(s): None(0/0)  Unit Type: Humanoid, Daemonic Beast, Legendary

Hit Points: 25/25 Mana: 175/175 Vitality: 83/125 Morale: 110/150

Influence: 0 Attribute Points: 0 Skill Points: 0 Trait Points: 0

Attributes(growth modifier):

Strength(0.1): 1    Magic(5.5): 18

Dexterity(0.5): 3    Will(3.0): 8

Endurance(0.2): 1    Resistance(3.0): 9

Skills:

Vitality Drain, Vitality Conversion, Dreamleech, Spark Bolt

Traits:

Outworlder, Somnolent Aura, Telekine, Electrokine, Arcanavore, Dream Eater, Incubus

Affinities:

Psionics: 75% Electricity: 75%

Charm: 50% Darkness: 25%

Light: -25%  Fire: -25%

Poison: -10%

“Hey, Olive. Put that away, quick. Just push it with your head.” The warm, friendly tone of Cecilia’s voice took on a stiff undercurrent, the kind that comes right before a terminal diagnosis.

With a mental command, the window shriveled away like parchment put to a flame. The woman snatched up his hand in both of hers. “You’re a weresheep or a capria if anyone asks, okay?” She squeezed. “Most countries don’t treat daemons ki-.” 

“Undead coming in!”

Two soldiers bolted through the wooden double doors on the far side of the room, slamming them shut. The rest donned helmets and scrambled to unsheathe their weapons. Cecilia pulled her axe free of its belt.

Shunk!  

With a flourish and an ungodly sound it expanded into a polearm as long as she was tall.

The two soldiers that came in took up ready positions, grim anticipation darkening their faces. One of the soldiers with the fist emblem shouted, "Where's Julia!?" 

As if in answer, a horrified scream pierced the doors, ending as a strangled whimper amid the awful crunch of bone and tearing of flesh. A cacophony of groans and heavy shambling feet grew nearer. Nearer.

Another sackcloth adorned rescuee, a raven-haired woman with large wings sobbed and pulled her extra appendages around her like a security blanket while others raised their voices in question or pressed themselves against the walls in anticipation of what was to come.

Though more than a few slung curses or tightened their grips on their weapons, the soldiers didn't cower.

“Step to it ladies!” A silver haired human in full plate trimmed with gold unslung a greatsword from her back, striding to the front. A chorus of ‘yes captains!’ followed.

An elf in a green longcoat with a shoulder cape muttered to a gleaming crystal floating in front of her. With the sound of crackling glass a sheen of translucent scales crawled over those closest to the door. 

Cecilia spared Olive a reassuring smile as she rushed to join her comrades. “Sit tight, I’ll keep you safe. I swear this as a squire of the Radiant Crux!” 

Olive believed her, her eyes were bright with conviction and even pride despite losing one of her own.  

His own pride as a member of Her Imperial Majesty's Air Corps demanded that he do something, but unarmed and ignorant of his situation, he feared that he might just get in the way. So he watched. He watched and put his faith in the words of the woman he just met.

With a wet smack, the doors buckled inward and burst apart under a flood of rotting, murderous corpses. 

Deeprotsorcerer

Yes, I know my name is spelled wrong on the cover, I tried reuploading the image with the correct spelling but it isn't going through. Image approval is probably done manually and they may think I'm just trying to upload the same thing twice. I'll try to get into contact with someone.

Anyways, I read and thoroughly appreciate all reviews and comments especially criticism on account of my masochistic tendencies  desire to constantly improve myself! Thanks for reading, and stay safe!