Parsec

Something lunged up at her like a bolt of red lightning. As far above the grasses as she was, it tore through the air in a burst of magic and two-faced physiology. She caught an impression of redness, a wall of pebbled scales and needle-teeth, before she dodged diagonal.

Two tons of scarlet sea-flesh roared past, missing her by mere inches; her claws whipped round to slide uselessly across a flank of sawtooth skin; her readied lance of spellfire sizzled out against its hide.

The creature reared round, a hundred-foot long amalgamation of oarfish and bristlemouth, heavy-ribbed and bony-spined. Fronds of red-gold filaments framed its head in a sleek garland. Vestigial eyes twitched in their sockets.

It lunged, serpent-like; she dodged and sank her proto-fangs into a trailing fin. Her teeth pierced true and the venom flowed, but the serpent-creature only gave the slightest twitch before flinging her loose. She let the momentum carry her, adjusting her arc with the slightest tilt of wings; there was nothing to hit over grassland air. And she needed the distance to reorient herself, besides.

She saw what Venera meant now, by ‘nothing whole’. The additions to her body felt cobbled together from spare parts; claws for wounding softer flesh, venom built for smaller bodies, the stinger like a desperate afterthought. The armour, though, that could help.

The hunger-serpent opened its mouth and roared, a cresting wave of subsonic sound. Pain thrummed through her head; not as unbearable as it would be without Venera’s aid, but grievous enough. She gripped her own arm and pulled. Chitin slithered loose and molded itself like molten glass, solidifying into a blade that matched the rest of her. The weapon felt good in her hand, but it seemed desperately small against the serpent’s inbound bulk.

She categorised its weaknesses in the seconds she had: fins and filaments—perhaps the eyes, too. If she were aiding a hunting party, she would have directed the heavier-hitters to those targets, would have acted as the fast-flying bait herself. Today, she did not have the support of a hunting party. She only had herself—and Venera, or fragments that she had decided to call Venera.

Apical layers, Venera said, and Parsec sensed the blade’s edge sharpening beyond mere chitin or claw.

The serpent reached her, teeth outstretched. She beamed spellfire down its throat and whirled out of reach as the rows of teeth clamped shut with a hiss. Then came several more lunges; she kept dodging with mere whispers of space to spare. Sensory filaments quivered about the serpent’s head and throat, tracking her.

The serpent reared back for a lunge. She sensed an opening and took it; the serpent twisted away, whip-fast. She only struck a glancing blow with her blade. Better than her feeble scratches: the edge came away dripping red. It was better, but hardly enough. Her breath was starting to come in shallow bursts.

Nourish, Venera said.

She dodged another lunge, braced herself against another grit-grinding roar.

“Yes,” she said. “I am tiring fast, I know. Help me, Titania, else—”

Nourish, Venera said, the impression harsher-edged this time. Erythropoietin.

Parsec trawled her mind for any hint of recognition, feinted and sliced another shallow cut in the serpent’s side. She didn’t quite make the dodge: needle-teeth scored lines into the armoured arm she threw out like a shield. Dodging now, again. Slicing away, streaking across the grasses, strands ruffling in her wake.

Drink one’s fill of the incarnadine liquors; red-rimed seas capped with fire before frost. Titania-tongue soaked and quenched, offerings devoured whole. Synthesis—nourishment—catalysis—

Parsec’s eye caught on the blood sluicing off her blade.

“Blood?” she gasped, and drew the flat across her tongue in one quick motion.

It tasted of salt and fire, smoked sea-flesh and capsaicin over charcoal. It burned so fiercely that for a moment, she wondered if her arm had failed her, whether she had mis-cut and sliced open her own mouth. Then the magic kicked in, a millisecond rush so heady she forgot the pain altogether.

The serpent drew closer, snapping at her tail. This time, she poured fresh magic into her self-forged blade and pivoted, flipping her body upwards. The serpent altered its momentum a moment too late; the blade scored open one already-blind eye. It howled, but the resonance was not low enough to hurt. She snapped her wings up and away, drinking the blood off her blade.

Culicidae, Venera implied approvingly, and something changed once more. It hurt less, this time.

Proto-fangs lengthened as if gliding along the wings of adaptation. Her jaw restructured itself to contain them. Biosynthesis purred inside the lumen of her throat, blood-droplets sampled and shuffled, twisted into new, fine-tuned venom. Subsurface glands swelled beneath her rapidly-sharpening clawtips, beaded up along her tail in a chain that terminated at the now-glowing stinger.

The serpent charged. Parsec lunged, twisted mid-cut, and rammed fangs-first into one of its dorsal fins. She raked at the frills of its sensory membrane with fresh claws, sank the stinger of her tail into the wound her blade had wrought. It was a desperate flail, all disconnected movements and blind hope. If she had been alone, she was certain that she would have died trying—but Venera’s ghost had done well.

Augmented venom fused into flesh, forged paths through serpent blood, and caused it to curdle.

The hunger-serpent twitched, then shuddered along its length as it coiled in on itself to snatch at her. Its motion fell sluggish; pointed teeth missed their mark. Parsec darted away and watched as the serpent began to writhe.

It shuddered through the air and half-roared, half-whined in frequencies which made her spines flatten against her body. She retreated further yet when it erupted into blisters along its length, enormous pustules pushing pulsatile even beneath its red-scaled hide. It dipped and wove, fast losing altitude in its struggle.

“How, in all the worlds that are and ceased to be, how did that…?” she murmured, half to herself and half to Venera. There came no reply.

The serpent gave one last, squealing cry before it plunged from the sky and hit the ground in a cloud of flaking scales and all the gravity given by two tonnes of fish-flesh. Grasses puffed outwards in the silhouette of its body before gently settling back into place, obscuring it altogether.

Silence settled over the grassland. Parsec wiped the blood off her chin and froze as another call sounded in the distance, twin to the subsonic hunting cries of this creature. And then another. And several more.

A fast-familiar chill tingled at the tips of her spines as she scanned the horizon. Nothing visible, yet. But other things were coming. She did not want to be here when they arrived.

Kindred, Venera spoke into her ear. Outnumbered. Outpace. Other yearlings. …Perhaps not.

“How?” Parsec asked. A spark of hope lit within her even as hunger and exhaustion flared in her core: Venera was answering her questions, the impressions of her communication growing clearer and more lucid than it had been at the circle of trees. Did she dare hope they could yet prevail? Her magic was still intact, but spellfire alone could not hope to down more of these hunger-serpents, and the venom had drained her of almost all physical strength. Then she looked down again, before Venera could answer. “…Ah.”

Feast…feast-haste.

She descended, and did so. She could not consume even a fraction of the fallen serpent—carved up and processed, it could have fed a not-insignificant portion of the Hive—but she used her borrowed fangs to drain much of its fast-cooling blood. Her spines twitched at the burning taste, but her core thanked her for it as her strength returned. Her claws and fangs retracted, returned to normal. Her stinger reverted into a feathered tail-tip as the chitin-armour and chitin blade melted out of existence. It was both a relief and a worry to return to baseline. The hunting call echoed.

“And now?” she asked as she took off. “Am I to fly and hope for the best?”

Territories draw near.

Ghost-fingers traced a line across her shoulder before plunging in.

Parsec hissed reflexively, almost dipping out of her flight path. Her newly-gained energy reserves faltered as a pair of buds sprouted from her flesh, just below her existing wings. The protrusions elongated and anchored their roots into new muscle. They sharpened themselves into a second pair of knife-like wings.

Coacervate, Venera urged. Colloidal.

Parsec gave a broken, unsteady flap that hooked her skywards. She hadn’t survived the shattered lands for nothing: this adjustment, uncanny though it might be, was manageable.

Ghostly hands nudged at her back; twitches of borrowed memory spurred her into smoother motion. The knife-wings clicked in their sockets and Parsec punched through the air. She sensed her energy draining, the air parting, grasses flattening in her wake.

For a split second, it felt as if Venera were alive again: they had flown together, once—just once.

“A single instance,” the newly-hatched Venera had entreated. “I will serve the Hive. Though for my life I ask you: allow me to feel the true winds through my own wings before I descend into the sanctum for the remainder of my days.”

There had been a glimmer to that, a glint of sincerity which Parsec had never seen in the shattered lands nor away from it. Something to respect.

It had been night, over a calm sea. They had coasted together on thermal updrafts, flanked by other Generals—there had been nothing to worry, nothing to suspect, all loyal to the bone. The thought of dangers from within had not even crossed her mind. Had Eltanin been there, on that queen’s flight?

Parsec swallowed a cry of rage.

The grasslands melted into the distance behind her and landscapes flicked past once more—sand, salt, and snow—copper cogs clicking like they had with the first gate. Perhaps the Archives were trying to help as much as they could. The hunting cries grew more distant. Steppe, shale, and savanna blew past in half-blurred impressions before she plunged into cold salt-touched fog—so thick that she slowed her flight in fear of slamming into the shadows of ruins looming in its midst.

Ghost hands stroked her shoulder; the knife-wings melted back into her spine and stoppered the steady trickle from her faltering energy reserves. She wobbled mid-air, startled by their loss.

“Venera?” she asked. The sea-fog smothered her voice, flattened and dulled it into such an eerie quietness that she almost couldn’t recognise herself.

Plunge-drop, Venera suggested. The fog did not touch her un-voice, but she sounded subdued all the same.

“Water?” Parsec asked. There was a trickle of it on the edge of her hearing, yet some ways off.

Incomprehensible symbols tickled at the edges of her thoughts, all angular lines and chains of inverted triangles. She brushed them away and winged her way onwards through the fog. Monoliths loomed on all sides, their crooked spines resembling the lost quills of some Behemoth-being. The air turned, hinting at algae and rotting things. Shortly thereafter, the fog began to thin; beneath her, sand and stone bled into streams of white water that shone like the inside of a shell.

Brightness pierced down, lines of white light scattered across the false-sky and false-horizon like the columns of a vast colonnade. The air shivered with the mimicry of a breeze, clearing the last dregs of fog. The ground cleaved away beneath her and became a straight, sheer cliff of sharp stone and smooth, salted water which descended into a dizzying void.

For a moment, she did not understand what she was seeing. The cliff’s edge and gone-away ground, that she could comprehend. But there were…things, occupying the empty air. Tendrils stirred in the air above the void, half of a shimmering web stretched half a mile out before it went skywards and disappeared into the light. Thousands of loose ends floated mid-air, forming a scattered wall of inorganic cilia.

Several words flashed through her mind, not all of them her own: alien, being, entity. And then:

Archive unalive, Venera implied firmly, as if reminding them both would make it more true. Diffuse. Pressure gradient. Grey-green; fish scales; drainage.

Was this the end that Orion had spoken of? Doorways to other places? In truth, she struggled to recall much of their talks.

Fleeing had felt necessary. Absconding with Venera’s body had been instinct-driven. Completion of her half-formed idea of a task was far more difficult.

“I am not an Archivist,” she said despairingly. “Venera, if you know of anything akin to that armour, or those wings—”

 Titania, Venera said firmly. The tone was laced with something like regret, commiseration.

“Well. I see.” Parsec straightened her shoulders. “Neither of us are Archivists. Then…am I to climb this weaving to its apex?”

She squinted into too-bright light that seemed to extend infinitely upwards. White upon white, shapes concealed in the pale, and a suggestion of infinitesimally slow motion.

“One wonders if the—the entity, that c-created it—” She brought her hand to her mouth and coughed. “The—the…why does it hurt to speak of?”

Stabilimentum, Venera said. Neither-nor. Nucleus and matriarch? Predecessor. Administrator. Little-know-naught.

“I do not understand, either.”

…Half-alive? Archive.

“I take it that the solution lies elsewhere,” Parsec murmured. She reached out and brushed a finger across the nearest trailing filament.

Pain spiked between her eyes. She cried out as a vision slithered into her head: thick, choking mist over flat sands. Poisonous plants with withered roots, dark particles burrowing into her lungs. And then it went, as quickly as it had come: she was back in the glowing-web-place of the Archives, spines laid flat with shock.

“Did you see that, too?” she asked.

What little to witness? Drops of mud; grooves smoothed by water.

“Shall I assume you meant ‘no’?”

Fractals. Sensory…drainage.

“You didn’t see,” she guessed. “But perhaps…drainage, you said? I believe so. Each of these are pathways, of some kind?”

If she held back her disbelief, it was not altogether too different from some of the backways of the Hive proper: had she not taken frequent routes by which flying up led her falling down?

Sanctum, Venera implied. Waste, slush, surplus.

Parsec hesitated, and reached out to touch another. The same burst of pain—she was prepared for it, this time—right where her Archival eye would be, if she had one. She caught a glimpse of salt-crusted desert and long-gone shores; not another being in sight.

She blinked back into her body and shivered.

“I see,” she said.

The wall of bobbing tendrils formed a fractured map. Distributaries gleamed on gossamer strings and trailing line, marking one-way paths up into the broken light.

She tried others. Most were barren slices of desert, though a few held darkness and writhing motion and a quality to the atmosphere which was suggestive of no air at all. Several, she suspected were the insides of spells elsewhere in the Archive; not-places which would crush her physical body down to a point, killing her instantly.

She drew back from the cluster of tendrils she had cleared, a sliver of a whole. The cliff’s edge stretched into a misted distance, and the wall of filaments with it.

“I see few safe ways onwards,” she said. “Will they find me here, do you think?”

Whom?

“Anyone. The kin of the serpents. Eltanin. Perihelion. Anyone at all.”

Flicker of hesitation. Sensation of ice upon the tongue. Nectar sinking into dry earth.

“It is alright,” Parsec said, “that you do not know.”

Fingertips scratching lines into the rust. Mouthful of river-silt. Frustration; predecessor adrift; sensation of being so lost that it could die.

“Venera—”

Neither-nor, anymore. The tone splintered, turned a touch frantic. Of what use, now.

“Venera.”

Venera, and Venera, and Successor, and Predecessor…the predecessor thought with lobes of a brain which exists no longer. It forgot the needs of this one. Wholeness and…the taste of air, and the warnings of pain. And other things. Pathways out-but-not-safe, fool was the predecessor. Must nourish; keep this one safe. But distributaries not for mortal flesh.

Parsec grimaced. “Some do not look so bad. Places beyond civilisation, perhaps, but…initially survivable, if I am able to forage sustenance.”

Bitter laughter. Loose pieces of continents. This one cannot fly two-hundred miles. Not even with colloidal wings. Wish to swallow risk? Sink teeth; taste blood? Predecessor thinks not.

“No,” Parsec agreed. “But if you are able to ascertain the nature of the places?”

Already gave you all that was left in this brain, necromancer.

Parsec flinched. “No—not necromancer. I am…I was a General. My name is Parallax. Or Parsec, to…friends. You called me Parsec.”

Not necromancer? Yet, predecessor is deceased. Is this one certain?

She thought of footprints across shattered lands, creatures falling to pieces alongside their masters. Bone-hand clasped in flesh-hand until both turned to bone.

“I am certain,” she said. “Listen: you are more than an idea of ‘predecessor’. Your name was the Titania Venera. I was General Parallax. Surely, you remember.”

This one says Parallax…sound rings fair-hollow. Venera, now, the cadence brings a flicker. The predecessor remembers Titania. The predecessor assumes it used to be the creature called Titania Venera. This-one-Parallax may name the predecessor Titania Venera if it brings Parallax comfort.

Parsec shut her eyes, opened them again. Reminded herself that Venera’s ghost was not really Venera anymore, and that no one was to blame except for perhaps Eltanin and the very nature of death itself.

“Do you remember Perihelion?” she tried. “Or Orion, or Nephele, or Atlas?” She hesitated. “…Eltanin?”

Warmth of the sun and glister-gold. That is all.

“And of the Hive? The sanctum?”

Star-filled shadows. Mouthfuls of nectar. Ghost-hands tapped thoughtfully at her shoulder. …Perhaps the successor-predecessor flew alongside something like the shape of this-one-Parallax. Very little more. Lost now. What now? Venera cannot aid the Parallax here.

“Then I will have to try all that I can,” Parsec said, turning her gaze upon the wall of pathways. “Before they find us, or before I starve. Unless you wish to leave?” She swallowed her mounting regret. “If you do not remember me, then…it would only be fair, that you have a choice.”

Choice? Always have choice. Choice of leaving…would scatter into pieces given time. Air dispersed into air. Not good. Not bad, neither. What says this one, not-necromancer Parallax?

“It would bring me solace that you stay,” Parsec said. “Even if you are no longer the Venera I knew. I would not have survived the serpent without your aid.”

Solace. This predecessor likes the idea of solace. But assure you, Parallax requires predecessor no longer. Parallax can find own blade, own armour now given. Not easy, but not hard. Titania was never crafted as weapon.

“Even so—”

Is this remnant a burden?

“Certainly not. I would not have…tried, if not. The Archive, I am sure it told me somehow, that you could not be the same. I understand.”

The predecessor senses that Parallax wishes it were Venera. This predecessor likewise wishes it were Venera still. But predecessor has already forgotten the feeling of sleep. What more has it lost that it does not know?

Parsec stared at the wall of tendril-pathways until they began to blur. “If you wish to carry on your way, then I cannot stop you.”

Silence. The wall of tendrils flowed like a wave.

“Still here?” she asked, and the words trembled as they left her mouth.

Ghostly fingertips traced over her shoulder in the shape of a lemniscate.

Sine die, Venera said. Kingdom come.