Southern Ikesia

The Free City-state of Willowdale

Newman Family Sect Grounds

Awoken by the pounding staccato of a fist upon her chamber doors. Worldly sensation flooded in - the cold spring air, the softness of the sheets alongside the snow-skinned blonde whose limbs were wrapped around her. The blonde, Zefaris, was still asleep. With a slow, deep breath, the mists of sleep were banished, her lungs filling not with air, but with the most fundamental of arcane essence - Pneuma, the “Breath of Divinity” known to others as Aether, Orgone, or Qi. Wisps of milky-white fog escaped her lips as she fully awoke, her eyes drifting to a circle of white gems on the wall’s dark marble surface. A pale-white projection flickered into being in response to her attention, displaying the time.

Three in the morning. Barely an hour’s sleep. The pounding intensified, now accompanied by a voice calling her name… A gravelly, old voice which she recognized and trusted.

“...Elder Zelsys? Elder Zelsys!...”

With a sigh, she slipped free of her lover’s embrace, her bare feet pattering across the stone floor of the sect elder’s chambers. She saw herself reflected in the polished stone; a towering figure of living bronze topped by a mane of two-tone hair, the very top being silver with a cloak of rusty-red falling down to her calves. Stark-naked as she was, Zelsys crossed the front office in a few strides, shifting the longer portion of her hair over her shoulders as a token of some modesty before she opened the door, knowing full well that the source of the voice couldn’t conceivably care less about seeing her naked. She also knew that he was the only living thing at the other side of that door, instinctively feeling his and his presence alone.

The purplish, raisin-like face of the sect’s immortal groundskeeper was what met her, his eyes shining an unsettling purple in the dark. She’d already guessed why it was him - since he didn’t sleep, he had agreed to keep an eye on the sect’s aetherwave receiver at night. Her assumption was soon proven correct. He didn’t bother with pleasantries, cutting straight to the chase: “The governor called.”

“Yeah, I figured that part. Why?” she questioned.

A smirk formed upon the groundskeeper’s shriveled face.

“It was an urgent call for reinforcements… From a high-priority trade convoy guarded by the entirety of the Sanger Family’s Arkaley Branch,” he explained with a giddy, schadenfreude undertone to his voice. Considering he was one of the two sect members grandfathered in from the compound’s previous owners, the Black Horse Family, it was no surprise that the rivalry between them and the Sangers had left a mark. He continued: “They’re surrounded by a horde of Deep Dwellers, in the Poltragow border region. The governor has offered a high-priority rescue and extermination contract, rated B-. It includes coverage for damages and extra payouts for saving as much cargo and as many Arkaley Branch members as possible, in that order.”

“That could be anywhere from a hundred-fifty to two-hundred fifty kilometers…” 

Her train of thought was derailed by the old man reaching behind his waistband and pulling out a tome bound in brown leather. “I ah… I took the liberty of bringing a bestiary which I know to contain information on all things subterranean. Be careful with it, please; its pages are human parchment.”

Zel smiled at him, taking the book, “You’re a lifesaver, Nesgon. Call Estoras, quote him double for the rush order and let him know that we’ll need at least three Hellhound Outrider squads, the heavier tankmen won’t be able to keep up.”

“...Shall I wake the others?” he asked.

“Just Mata, Vaceran, Fendas, Jorfr… And Joseph, why not? I’d rather not rouse the whole sect for something like this.”

She glanced back, considering whether her counterpart would want to come along - only briefly, as she knew that the ex-soldier would be far more upset about being left out of the upcoming slaughter than losing out on some sleep. She added: “Zefaris will come along as well.”

“So just two-thirds of the sect’s strongest, then…” the living mummy smugged back as he walked away, his steps all too brisk for his apparent decrepitude.

“Hey, one more thing,” she called out to him. He just kept walking, waving his hand: “Yes yes, I know, tell Ozmir to prepare battle recovery dishes for your return.”

Closing the door with her foot, Zel walked across the chamber towards the door of her bedroom, cracking open the tome and leafing through its pages as she went. There wasn’t just a page on Deep Dwellers, but an entire chapter; written in archaic manuscript, but readable. An illustration took up the entire left-hand page, depicting a stumpy, vaguely humanoid mole creature with iron teeth and iron claws, grasping a stone spear. Next to it was a giant trap-jaw ant with a rough saddle, its cog-jointed jaws seemingly dipped in iron. She skimmed the page as she entered the bedchamber, half-mindedly reaching out a hand for the wall panel right below the clock. As she read, a larger projection listing numerous articles of clothing popped up, a vortex of white Fog into nothingness swirling below. Piece by piece, she began to retrieve and don her clothes while reading.

The Deep Dwellers were described as having superb low-light vision, near-total blindness in daylight. Stronger than a normal adult man, but sluggish. Capable of tool use, but non-sapient; the manuscript speculated them to be ruled by an aristocracy of craftsman-cultivators who gained limited sapience through cultivation and never left the Deep Dwellers’ subterranean homes. Further detail was their tendency to emerge after geological disturbances and raid surface settlements for processed metal due to their own inability to produce it in significant quantities, alongside a warning that trying to exterminate them at the source was as hopeless as trying to drink the ocean, recommending instead to just collapse any known entrances to the “Deep Places”.

Before a cursory read could turn into a thorough one, and before she could get her chest-straps in place, there came Zef’s half-asleep voice from behind: “Zeeel… Come back to bed…”

“Why don’t you get up instead? We’ve got an emergency contract, B- rating.”

“Fuck you, it’s three in the morning,” Zefaris grumbled.

Zel chuckled, “Fuck me yourself.”

A repeat of the exchange they’d had that first time in the tavern. It brought back memories; memories of all the sweat and raw instinct that followed, and of the blindsiding muscle fatigue the next morning.

Turning, Zel stepped over to the bedside, placing the book down on the nightstand as she leaned in to plant a ginger kiss upon the green-eyed woman’s lips. Her left eye remained shut, while the right possessed an at-first unsettling twin pupil; a homunculus eye, the original eye having been mutated into this form to compensate for the other’s loss long ago.

“Yeah yeah, I’m up…”  came a sleepy utterance from the blonde as she stood up and stretched, her marble-white complexion and toned figure briefly giving the illusion of a living statue under the rays of moonlight that came in through the window. Zelsys shamelessly watched Zef stretch as she dressed herself.  First came black-and-gold undergarments to match her chest-straps, trousers made with the multicoloured skin of world-serpents and a snakeskin belt to match. Over them went knee-high, brass-plated boots with climbing claws and a conductive scaffold in the right boot to support arcane kicking techniques, the knee adorned with an eagle’s head and the front plate etched with a Lichtenberg figure.

Lastly, she retrieved and donned the Impelling Arm, a full-arm plate armor harness on whose gauntlet was mounted a bolt-action arm-cannon, alongside a belt to carry six of its massive shells. Zel truly loved this piece of armor, and honestly regretted not having paid more for it. Its straps and underglove tightened around her hand, clinging so closely to it that the underglove became a second skin. With its shrinking, rune-etched plates locked into place. The iron hand of a wrathful god. The gun’s trigger lever extended forward from the breech and sat reassuringly beneath her palm.

Each article of clothing shrunk around her to fit as best as it conceivably could, self-adjustment being the most basic and prolific of garment enchantments right next to self-mending. Her chest straps, minimalistic as they were, clung to her skin and refused to budge unless she willed them to let go; they formed a criss-crossed pattern in the front, tied together at the back with a thick cold-iron ring. While Zefaris dressed herself, Zel moved onto arranging her hair into six braids; the most basic of preparations, all done in the span of a few minutes. The one-eyed woman donned an armored corset and a red-black dress, its top half designed to resemble a military officer’s uniform, as well as an officer’s cap and a skull-faced respirator around her neck; a breathing technique assistant device, amplifying one’s ability to gather various arcane essences depending on the canister. Her footwear of choice were simple, knee-height military boots.

“So what’s the contract?” came a question from Zefaris while she walked across the room, picking up her own personal assistant tablet and retrieving from its Fog Storage a heavy-duty holster belt, which she strapped on over her dress, alongside two holsters. It had a wide holster on the left side, and a cylindrical, blackstone holster of sorts on the right. The tablet itself was a solid slab of black marble about the height and width of a novel, some four centimeters thick, one side inlaid in silver with an incomprehensibly complex, composite glyph, so fine the naked eye could not make out its components, its surface-level purpose being to project readouts. This mesmerizing pattern ran all the way through the stone, creating a commensurately complex “logic automaton”, so named for its illusory intelligence.

“Eh, a bunch of Sangers can’t handle some ant-riding molemen, so it’s on us to save their sorry hides. The convoy must be shipping some valuable cargo if Estoras is willing to pay our fee instead of just telling them to leave the goods and run,” Zel said. As she did so, Zefaris took up a shotgun and a huge revolver from the bedside, folding the former in half and placing it into the left-hand holster and sliding the latter into the cylinder. As the revolver slid in, its cylinder turned five times, once for each chamber, as the blackstone artifact checked to see if it needed reloading. Both guns were bleeding-edge customs made using cold-iron, living things in their own right; the revolver Pentacle, and the shotgun Tempesta. The end of a shotgun speedloader tube protruded from the black cylinder’s side, its total length contained within the artifact’s vast ammunition storage space.

“Mole-men… You mean Deep Dwellers? “ Zef asked.

“Hundreds of them, supposedly,” Zel nodded. “How did you know?”

“They’re a common bogeyman. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t be familiar with them… Alright, good to go, you?”

“Yeah just about ready, just need to grab a butchering implement,” said Zelsys, briefly glancing to Zefaris before she walked over to the wall-width window. This up close, one could discern the fact it was an elaborate projection of a view of the outside several floors up, with the breeze brought in through narrow, winding, heavily warded vents, while the bedchamber remained solidly walled in; all for the security of the sect elder’s chambers. A small pile of short blades was arranged in the window alcove, numbering one short of a dozen, each having the handle of a much larger weapon and a jagged, two-pronged dagger blade. They were all broken, and all in the exact same way. An intact specimen was laid out right next to its broken brethren, a huge rectangular cleaver as long as Zel’s arm, around thirty centimeters wide and a good three centimeters thick.

“Don’t try to be the Butcher…” she thought as she wrapped her hands around the cleaver, knowing it to be a futile request, for this blade was just an object.

All of its predecessors had shared the same fate; with metallic creaking and ringing the cleaver desperately struggled to twist itself into a shape fitting for her, inevitably creating an imperfect facsimile of her real weapon’s intact form. A long, front-heavy cleaver with a shape akin to a beaked axe near the tip, its back edge covered in wicked sawteeth. It was never quite right, but that wasn’t the issue. Once the transformation took hold, the blade was doomed to fall apart in the span of a couple days, which became hours if she actually made use of it. Inevitably, every Captain’s Cleaver that Zelsys used would meet the same fate as the Butcher, but unlike it, they would then become inert steel - dead metal.

This wasn’t her weapon; none of these blades was her weapon. None of them were the Butcher. They were its siblings, produced in the same factory, now long burned down. No, her weapon was sealed deep beneath the sect, broken, waiting to be mended, waiting for her to journey to the far north so it might be reborn. Until that journey began, she had to use blades that were doomed to shatter the moment she put her full strength behind them. With the cleaver in hand, she strode towards the bedchamber’s door, planting a peck on Zef’s cheek as she walked past, the blonde gunslinger following in her stead.

Akaso

A/N: This prologue is planned to have two, at most three parts. There is also a half-chapter of extra content that takes place before this one, a Pt. 0 if you will; you can read it on my Patreon (direct chapter link). It's not paywalled or anything, I just felt that it wouldn't go over very well to have the first chapter not be MC POV.

If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the Patreon! Patrons gain access to up to 20 days of advance content, with further expansion planned for the future. So if you want to help fund my crippling addiction to commissioning art, consider reading a couple chaps ahead.

I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, or even leave a review. Reviews and ratings alike weigh heavily in the eyes of the algorithm (not to mention prospective new readers), so that pretty much means they determine the success of my work. A single review or even just a rating can noticeably influence the novel’s performance, especially when it has few ratings overall like this one does as of me posting this.

Same goes for review voting - the reviews with the most upvotes are the ones that most people will see, so you as readers decide which reviews are legitimate.

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