Lancer — Epilogue (Patreon)

I dreamed about the gods again as my comm ferried my soul back to the Ragnar.

The dream was always the same.  They were ragged, bleeding, hungry.  I saw a rabid fox with rotting teeth—a vengeful warrior with a broken sword—a hollow-eyed girl, bleeding from a gash in her neck—a spider—a leper—and above them all, a matriarch: contemptuous, sadistic, and furious.

I surveyed them all and I knew that they could die.

Ageless columns of stone stretched down the audience chamber, from my position at the entrance, to the dais where they all stood.  On each of those pillars and on the stones beneath our feet, ancient carvings recorded an endless history of godly deeds, sacrifices made and boons given.  Blood dripped from the red stars above, trickling down the carvings.

The matriarch sneered at me.  She opened her mouth to speak, the words coming out as unintelligible rasps and gurgles as the blood bubbled out of her slit throat.  I replied with contempt but I had no throat and my body wouldn’t move.

One of the pillars near me smiled with a mouth full of sharp teeth.  The stars above began to shift into a bloody constellation of a wound.

Then the cataclysm struck: a flash of purifying fire, cracking heaven itself, immolating the gods.  The apocalypse descended around me, but I felt nothing.  They blazed and were torn, falling to earth in a shower of flaming meat.

The gods died; Alcebios laughed.  Her talons reached for me.

*

The neural cradle crackled around the back of my head.  Just like that, I was alive.

Lungs full of stinging fluid, I coughed and hacked.  My throat was raw; my arms stung from the touch of a dozen needles, removed before they’d restarted my brain.

I opened my eyes and light seared them closed again.  I retched; my stomach tried to dump its contents, but it had never been used.   Instead, bile squirted up my throat, burning the back of my esophagus.  I tried to push myself up to vomit, but my arms didn’t respond right and I hit my head on the side of the resurrection pod.

“Hrol din nagar eigerlein,” Abby snapped.  “Lilithkar leit!”

I inhaled raggedly, crying out as I coughed harder.

“Vanas, Markus!  Vanas!”

*

I was in the med bay.

That was the first thing I noticed.  The second thing I noticed was that the lights were too bright and opening my eyes had been a painful mistake.  I closed them immediately.

“Ow,” I said.  I expected my throat to hurt—last I’d noticed, it’d felt like someone had shoved a handful of glass down the back of my esophagus—but it was fine now.  I coughed experimentally.

“The pain is psychosomatic,” Val said.  “You’ll live.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.  “What the fuck did you do to my brain?”

“Your brain is fine,” he said.

I caught the deflection.  “Val.”

“The headache,” Val admitted,  “is because this body can process a wider range of visual spectra than your soul is used to, and the closest experiential analogue to that discomfort is a migraine.”

I bore stoically the news that they’d fucked with my brain.  Too late to do anything about it now.

“How long,” I sighed.

“The adjustment period should be less than a week.  If you take your time, closer to two.”

“I bet I can do it in three days.”

“Not with your eyes closed, you won’t.”

I forced my eyes open and turned my head to glare at him.

Val was lounging in a folding chair, reading from a tablet.  Next to him, a half-eaten salad sat on one of the pull-out table surfaces the Eifni shipwrights had scattered around the Ragnar.  He lifted his fork and took a precise bite, not lifting his eyes from whatever had occupied his attention.

He didn’t acknowledge me.  My head was splitting, but I couldn’t close my eyes again after making such a big deal about it.

“Level with me,” I said, trying to lever myself into a sitting position.  “What else is in this body?”

“Lungs, evidently,” Val said.  “We’re still waiting on evidence of cognitive function.”

“I fucking died, man,” I said.  “Can you lay off for one fucking minute?”

Val paused, then set the tablet down, meeting my eyes—I guess for the first time, technically speaking.

“The scientific literature,” he said, indicating the tablet with a minute shift of his head, “recommends creating an atmosphere of familiarity to minimize the psychological impact of your first flash.  Maintaining a sense of continuity reduces the chance that you develop some kind of dysmorphic disorder.”

All that shit was a transparent excuse for him to bully me.  Which was, of course, exactly the kind of familiar atmosphere Velean scientists recommended for someone in my position.

I tried to hold back a smirk, but I failed.  It became a smile, then a full-on laugh.

“You asshole,” I wheezed, blinking back tears.  “You glorious, perfect asshole.”

Goddamn Veleans.  It was a fucking mistake for the universe to invent us, and we were going to spend the rest of eternity teaching it regret.

Val cracked a smile.  In a moment, he was laughing too.

I laughed away my death.  I laughed away my fear of flashing—I survived my own death, what could possibly matter more?  I laughed off the pain and stress of the last couple months, the insecurities, the family I’d found and lost.  I laughed off Lirian.  I’d kill her someday, or maybe I’d just wait for her to die of old age.  What was she to me?  I was immortal.

I was a warrior of Veles.  I was a fire transcending time.  They could kill me as many times as they wanted, but they would never stop me from burning their world clean.

“Lilith?” I heard Abby call.

“I’m awake!” I shouted back.

A couple moments later, the commander’s head poked through the door frame.  “Good morning, apprentice.”

I tried to pull myself up again.  “Okay, seriously, why can’t I move?”

“Resurrection sickness,” Abby said.  “There’s nothing wrong with your body, but your soul needs to acclimate to the connection.  You know the beds are comm-controllable, right?”

“I can’t move my fucking arms,” I said, flopping one demonstratively.  “The bed is not my concern right now, okay?”

Also, I’d forgotten.  Shut up.

I remote-piloted myself to a sitting position, looking at Abby’s smiling face.  I gave her a half-hearted smile back.

“Speaking of apprenticeship,” I said.  “Did you guys get my sword back?”

A brief shadow of a frown passed through Abby’s expression.  “No.  The body and the sword were gone when I got there.  From the fact that we were unable to locate them, we’ve concluded that the Cult of Silence took possession.”

“Fuck.”  I closed my eyes in frustration, letting the migraine abate.  “Let’s go after Meris next.  We’ve compromised most of the agents in the city.”

“We’ll decide our next steps once you’re field-ready,” the commander said.  “For now, your objective is to recover from resurrection and acclimate to your new body.”

“I don’t get like a bad grade in the Old Ways for losing my weapon?”

“It’s just a sword,” Abby said.  “Pick up a stick and call that Lilith.  I don’t care.”

“But—”  It was a gift, I wanted to say.  I guess that was less of an Old Ways thing and more of a me thing.  I didn’t finish the sentence.

“I can replicate the sword,” Val offered.

I pursed my lips.  “No.  It wouldn’t be the same.”

Val turned accusing eyes on Abby, like this was somehow her fault.  Abby smirked back.  He shrugged, as if to say it was my decision.

“It’s good to see you’re functional,” Val said.  “There was a concern that the etheric tunnel would collapse mid-transit.”

“I think it almost did,” I said.  “Do you guys get the dreams when you translate?”

“Everyone does.”  Val’s tone of voice indicated that he was going to continue, but he made us wait while he took another bite of salad.

Abby didn’t wait for him to finish chewing.  “Not everyone.”

Val waved her off, swallowing.  “Those statistics rely on self-report.  The best explanation is agitation of the conceptual centers via etheric noise.  The mechanism was confirmed in laboratory testing.  The people who claimed not to remember have either failed to remember or intentionally deceived the researchers.”

Abby allowed herself a slight smile, directing an aside at me.  “The dreams tend to carry a sense of destiny.  You can imagine how a sample of Veleans would respond.”

Something about her tone and bearing communicated another layer of meaning: You can lie about this if you want to.

“Oh, that’s cool,” I said.  “In that case, my destiny is killing a bunch of gods at once.  Anyway, I brought it up because Alcebios was definitely bleeding through my translation dream.  Emphasis on the bleeding.”

Val and Abbey winced at the pun and the resulting comm feedback.

“Sorry.”

“You are forgiven this once,” Abby declared.  “Rest well, Lilith.”

“Please no,” I said.  “I’m bored already.  Please save me before I die again.”

Markus chose that moment to barrel through the door, apparently fresh out of the shower.  At least he’d put some clothes on first.

Right.  Yeah.  Markus.  For a moment, I’d forgotten.

“Lilith!” he said, coming in for the hug.

I couldn’t really move, but Markus was perceptive enough that he noticed me shying away.

The joy drained out of his face.  “Oh.”

I looked away.  “Hi, Markus.”

Val and Abby somehow managed, through that Velean command of body language, to recede without moving away.  It was just me and Markus until we worked this out.

“You’re upset about Cades,” he said.

I stared at the wall.  I didn’t trust myself to say anything.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Markus sit down on the bed next to mine.  “Cades is fine, Lilith.  He’s laying low with that Dancer caravan we came in with.  He said he wanted some time to himself.”

“Good.”

Markus sighed.  “It’s not fair.  But it was necessary.”

I whirled my face toward him.

“The Empress could have eaten his soul!  You sent him up there!  You said you loved him and you sent him up there!”

My eyes were wet.  I tried to wipe the tears away but only succeeded in flopping my arm into my lap.  Fuck it.  Let ‘em roll.  I stared Markus in the face, fake migraine blaring in my skull.

There was a hint of pain in Markus’s face, but who the fuck knew with Veleans.  I did not know this man.  He’d always seemed friendly and approachable, and he hadn’t batted a fucking eyelid while he sent Cades to his death.

“I knew you were going to take this hard,” Markus said softly.  “I know what you’ve been through and what godseeds mean to you.  And I’m sorry for hiding it from you during the operation.”

“You don’t—you don’t hide things like that.  Fucking hell, Markus.  Fuck.  Fuck.”

Abby stirred ever so slightly.  “Deep breaths, Lilith.”

Oh.  I was hyperventilating.  Sure enough.

I coughed and tried to get control of my breathing.

“Remember what Kabiades was,” Markus said.  “Beyond the persona and the cultural baggage.  He was a god of athletics.  Cades’s sexuality doesn’t impact that.  In a few decades, he would have been eaten.”

“And that makes it okay to stab him in the fucking back?”

“Of course not,” Markus said.  “But as a means to save the souls of every athlete in that arena and beyond?  I’m sure Val can show you the equations.”

“I don’t care about the fucking equations!”

Markus nodded, looking compassionately at me.  “What do you care about?”

That just made the anger blaze hotter.

“I know this script,” I said.  “Poor baby Lilith, she’s too fragile to make the hard choices.  She’ll understand in a hundred years.  Fuck that.  I’m not doing it.  From now on, you fucking tell me if you’re gonna pull shit like this.”

Markus closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

“We don’t have to follow that script,” he said.  “I don’t need to hide things from you.  But then you can’t react like this when I do.  If you’d had this reaction during the operation, it would have jeopardized the mission.”

I clenched my jaw.  “Okay.  I have to admit that’s fair.  But, counterpoint, fuck you.”

Markus cracked a grin.  “For what it’s worth, I was confident the Empress wouldn’t attack him directly.  Well, Val was.”

I turned my glare on Val, who met it with a look of amusement.

“It was certainly more difficult to calculate the behavioral distribution,” Val said.  “The divine component of the godseed behaves according to the same rules as the god itself, but the human soul adds a significant degree of randomness.  In this case, however, both its human and divine natures were in alignment: Empress Kovaliel would never take an action she could order someone else to do.”

I focused on slowing my heart down.  “You can’t convince me he was safe.”

“Of course not.  Statistics mean nothing with Kives in play,” Val said.  “She will bait us into forming attachments again and again, and losing them will cause us significant emotional pain.  She cannot kill our bodies, so she will target our minds.  Then she’ll use that pain to turn us against each other, as you nearly turned on Markus.”

“She definitely killed my body,” I said, sniffling.  “I mean, I got better, but still.  How long was I out, by the way?”

“Two weeks,” Abby said.

“And in those two weeks, you missed the chance to say goodbye to Cades,” Markus said.  “She might have killed you just to deny you closure on that.”

“Or that’s what she wants you to think,” I said, smirking.

“I’m sorry,” Markus said.  “I’ll make sure to tell you next time I throw someone at a godseed.”

“Fuck, I’ll volunteer,” I said.  “Dibs on killing the Empress.”

“Breaching the palace is an important objective,” Abby said.  “But that will come later.  We’ll let you rest.”

“Group hug first,” I demanded.

I couldn’t move my arms, but Markus lifted my right arm around his shoulders.  Everyone crowded in, even Val.

“We got one,” I said.

“We did,” Abby said.  “Eleven to go.”

*

I spent a couple weeks in the spiritual equivalent of physical therapy.

A lot of the activities were the same: repetitive physical movements; various ways to practice moving slowly and deliberately; rebuilding my muscle memory from the faint spiritual echoes I’d carried over from my last body.

The others had dropped comments here and there; reading between the lines, they’d known it was only a matter of time before I died, and they’d tried to soften the blow by packing my new body with every enhancement that would fit.

Darwin help me, but I loved it.

My ear implants were state of the art.  A slight modification to my neural tissues had left me with perfect pitch.  The machinery that replaced my eardrums could pick out a whisper in a room full of rowdy drunks.  I could hear the highest squeaks and the lowest rumbles.  I could differentiate between a hundred thousand subtle variations of vocal tone.

I could see colors that didn’t exist.  My default range of vision extended from infrared—I almost didn’t need the thermal cameras in my ocular implants—to ultraviolet.  I nearly cried the first time I looked at a black-feathered bird and realized the black was hiding brilliant patterns outside of the human-visible spectrum.  The visual precision was so fine I could see the stars move.

My body was stronger than I’d ever dreamed I could be.  Ether-reinforced skeletal plating rendered me immune to anything short of a charging elephant.  They’d layered pylons in my muscles so I could control them remotely.  In my second week of rehabilitation, I bent a steel bar with my bare hands.

My thoughts moved like blades over ice.  Val put me through a battery of cognitive tests; I blazed  through them, scoring a twenty percent improvement over my previous scores.  My working memory had been expanded to ludicrous levels, and I spent a couple weeks holding eleven different numbers in my head just because I could.

But what does it profit a girl to gain a kickass new body at the cost of her soul?

The scans said I’d sustained some damage.  Alcebios had burned me, and while some of the damage would heal, my soul might end up with some scarring.  My death hadn’t exactly been easy, either.  Between the fallout of the Kabiades hit and the weird jumble of emotions that had been my last encounter with Lirian, I’d gotten pretty messed up.

There were days when I didn’t leave my room and days when I was furious with everyone for no reason.  One time, I punched Markus in the face and then cried for four hours.  I also hit Val with a chess board, but that one doesn’t count.  I maintain that anyone would have done the same, soul damage or not.

I couldn’t stand the taste of mac and cheese anymore.  It’d been my comfort meal, an easy bowl of junky nostalgia on my worst days.  The nostalgia was gone—either because it’d never imprinted on my soul, or because Alcebios had burned that away—and the flavors were subtly different on my new tongue.  I gave up on it after my third try.

But the team was patient with me.  Love and compassion go a long way toward healing spiritual injury.  I got better, if slowly.  By the third week, I’d reached the point where I almost felt like myself again.

That was when Val decided to knock on my door.

“I would like to ensure this never happens again,” he said, and his eyes were like knives.

*

The commander had not approved.

Val had shown her the math.

The commander had grudgingly approved.

I took in the nighttime air of the tiny coastal town as we strolled up the hill.  Ahead of us, a fetoulia tree rose hundreds of feet in the air above the temple of Kives.  My eyes effortlessly picked out the small shine hidden in its branches, and for a moment I visualized it crashing down.

Val kept pace beside me, carrying a small box.  He’d refused to tell me what was inside.

We passed onto the temple grounds beneath an archway.  There was no watch, no guards to defend the temple from thieves.  Anyone who stole from the Mother of Destiny was asking for it.

The atrium was dark, but that didn’t matter to my implants.  I swept the room once, looking for an ambush, but found only the list labeled “Counsel.”  Last time I’d set foot in a temple of Kives, it’d been my names—both of them—on there.

Now there was only one, written in English.

“Murderers,” I translated for Val.

“You had much better insults available to you,” Val said to the empty air.  “The message is received.”

The air didn’t respond.

“So, in here?” I asked.

“The tree,” Val replied.  “We have an offering to make.”

I glanced at the box in his hands and didn’t ask.

The temple’s inner sanctum smelled of sweet flowers and perfume and incense, mostly covering up the faint smell of rotting organic matter.  The fetoulia tree rose into the Mediterranean night, spreading its branches over the town like the sheltering mother goddess who held it sacred.  Val and I came to a stop.

“Would you like to say a few words?”  Val’s tone was ironic.

“Yo, Kives,” I said.  “We had a truce and you killed me.  Not cool.  Your turn, Val.”

Val nodded imperceptibly.  “It occurred to me that there are only two ways for you to learn about the contingencies of this situation.  Either they occur, in which case they cannot be avoided, or they are explained to you.  In light of your breach of this farce of a truce, we’re here to explain.”

Val opened the box, and pulled out—a rock.  Volcanic, by the looks of it.  My comm didn’t detect anything special about it.  He absently ran his thumb over the rock as he spoke.

“The world was called Fregeja,” he began.  “They had no oracle, as your world does.  It was rather a god of pathways, reaching his tendrils out to other worlds.  He could not be permitted to continue, and lesser efforts to eliminate him had failed.  I deployed there with the Sixth Extermination Fleet aboard the battleship Tjoras.”

The moonlight gave Val’s face a cruel cast as he told his story in the heart of Kives’s temple.

“Your kind need a functioning biosphere to survive.  When all else has failed—when you’ve averted every other death we could bring—we take that away from you.  You’ve seen our ships.  They are among the weakest the Eifni Organization is able to deploy.  The Tjoras was armed with twenty antimatter cannons, ludicrously more powerful than the weapon we used against Horcutio’s monsters.  She was one of fifty battleships, each with an escort.  We scoured Fregeja to the very stone.”

He held up the rock, as if demonstrating.

“I was only a scholar at the time,” he said, “investigating whether etheric dyads—the phenomena your primitive theology calls ‘destiny’—could form across different realities.  I was able to secure permission to fire the Tjoras’s weaponry, selecting a small city as my target.  Call me murderer if you wish.  When the operation had concluded, I visited the impact site and selected a particular stone.  Perhaps, I thought, it might have a destiny.”

Val tossed the rock carelessly onto the roots.

“Or perhaps not.  My offering to you.”

He bared his teeth.

“We will kill you, Kives.  But I’ve read your behavioral distribution.  I know what motivates you.  So—here’s Lilith.  You killed her, but she still lives.  That is the future that Eifni will bring to your planet, for everyone under your care.  Give them to us, and we will ensure an endless future of cause and effect.  Or—you can attempt to kill us, as I assume you’ve killed our allies.  When the last Eifni signal fades from Theria, you will face the Extermination Fleet, and that will be your final legacy.”

Val closed the box with finality.

“Godsmile, Greatmother.  I’m sure we’ll learn your answer soon enough.”

I snorted.  “She’s probably going to ambush us the minute we leave the temple.”

Val tilted his head.  “Too optimistic.”

I focused my hearing and picked up the sound of running footsteps heading our direction.

“Should we get out of here or something?” I asked.

“If she wants us to hear her answer, it will find us wherever we go,” Val replied.

The footsteps drew closer.  One set of footsteps was closer, with several others behind.  Val and I turned our back on the tree to wait for Kives’s messenger.

We didn’t need to wait too long.  He burst into the inner sanctum, a weather-beaten sailor type with a chest under one arm and a nasty wound on the other side.

He staggered to a halt in front of the tree, looking at us in panic.

“Help,” he wheezed, then collapsed on the floor.  The chest slipped out from under his arm, breaking on a conveniently placed stone.

My comm said he was dying, but the chest had fallen close to me.  Was this Kives’s message, then?  I leaned over and gingerly nudged it over, revealing a folded sheet of parchment.

“Did she write us a letter?” I asked.  “Weird-ass delivery method if so.”

I slowly unfolded the parchment, then gasped in utter delight.

I blinked, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.  The parchment in my hands remained the same.

“You know what, Kives?” I said.  “I’m not mad about getting killed anymore.”

“Lilith,” Val said resignedly.

“Don’t worry, I’m still gonna kill her,” I said.  “But she got me a treasure map!  We get to hunt real life pirate treasure!”

Val narrowed his eyes.  “A bribe of some kind?”

“Maybe these other guys will know.”

The people chasing the wounded pirate had just entered the temple.  I grudgingly lowered the treasure map.  There would be time to obsess over it later.

Around the corner came a familiar figure carrying a torch and wearing a tricorn hat.  As far as I knew, there was only one tricorn hat on this entire planet, and I had not parted with its new owner on the greatest of terms.

“Alright, Scumhorn, you’ve reached the end of the—” she said, then stopped dead when she saw me.  “Danou!?”

I slowly raised the treasure map, blocking her view of my face.  “Uh, who’s that?”

The ring of a sword leaving a scabbard was her only answer.

Thinking quickly—quicker than ever, thanks to my new mental enhancements—I folded the map back, leaned down, and picked up a stick, which I brandished menacingly.

“Godsmile, Erid,” I greeted the old sea captain.  “Please don’t kill me?  We might get blood on the map.”

“That’s—you’re—” she spluttered.  “Why?  Goddesses, I hate you so much.”

“We can probably consider that Kives’s revenge,” Val said, emerging into the torchlight.  “Godsmile, Captain Erid.  Why were you pursuing this map?”

Erid stared at him suspiciously.  “It’s supposed to show the way to the sacred islands of Horcutio.  They’re chock full of pirates these days, and it’s my job to clear them out.”

“Is that so.”  Val grinned in the torchlight.

I chuckled.  “What a… coincidence.”