Chapter Text
Five Pebbles doesn’t notice, at first, when the mobile Rot cyst finds its way into his chambers.
It is a ludicrous premise, of course. Five Pebbles, an iterator benefitting from all the trials of building the many, many that came before him, among a generation populated only with the most advanced iterators ever built, and yet it is the unthinking mass of genetic matter which only knows to grow and spread that gets the jump on him?
But then again, he thinks, bitterly, stuck ramrod-stiff in the corner of his can, his data pearls hovering there where every ounce of processing power not dedicated to flushing the Rot away from his most important systems is ensuring gravity stays just perfect here, so no sound might draw the Rot cyst to his position, the fact it was even able to come this far means I must’ve lost track of this particular strain of the infestation long ago.
He is not scared, particularly. Yes, he cannot move, which is…not ideal. To move his mechanical arm would surely draw the Rot towards the sound, and he is wary that even moving his puppet alone would be enough. And besides, where would he go? The other side of his chamber, where the Rot hovers? To one of its tentacles, clinging to his walls?
Five Pebbles shudders. It was bad enough throughout the rest of me, but here…
He has had many countless cycles to get used to the presence of small creatures throughout him. Outside of his chamber, on his walls, his legs—he is well-aware that creatures live there, and though he is not fond of them, especially those that strip his metal away for parts, it is not as if they can do any real damage. Creatures that manage to get inside of him are worse, but it is not like he doesn’t have neuron flies to spare, should they attempt to eat some, and his inspectors tend to be rather alright at their jobs. But here, in his chamber, where sticky tentacles cling to his edges, Rot dripping into the fine machinery—
He shudders, again. Double-checks that he is still flushing out his general systems bus. If this cyst got in, Void knows what else might be lingering, and anywhere inside him is already far too close. But he cannot let another mobile cyst enter his chamber.
One he can deal with. Two…
The Rot cyst is a bright eyesore. It’s black and blue coloration stands out stark in his chamber, and even though it is not currently moving, it pulses, like the heartbeat of some beast. Its limbs are still now, though he is not convinced they will not start moving again, at some point. The cyst’s core is nearly opposite him, with its limbs splayed across his chamber. They are all too close, but the closest could brush up against him, should he move from his spot pressed into his own corner.
But again. He is not scared. All he needs is for someone to notice what is wrong, and Void knows Looks to the Moon makes it a sport, to bother him at the worst possible moments. Sending her overseers in to spy on him, blowing off all his requests to stop immediately with confusion, as though her overseers might enter his can for any reason other than her direct orders. Her countless, countless inane messages over their private channels, about this-or-that creature crawling its way through her, and her deluge of photos taken by her overseers, and no, Moon, just because I have functionally limitless storage does not mean I want to waste any of it on your millionth picture of a wet rat. She may be his senior but that does not make him incapable of functioning without her oversight. They’ve both existed for countless cycles. What difference do their starting cycles make?
An enormous one, to her, of course.
And it’s her fault he’s even in this situation to begin with, besides. Her fault the Rot now spreads though his system, her fault he cannot flush it out entirely, her fault a mobile cyst is in here with him, and if one of her stupid overseers doesn’t blunder in right now, to solve the problem that she created—
That…she…
Looks to the Moon, he realizes, with some sort of delirious half-laugh that makes the Rot tendril nearest him twitch, its core body light up a brighter blue, so he flings a few pearls opposite him as distraction and hopes there is nothing important saved on them, is in no state to be sending overseers after me. She is in no state to do anything at all.
And he—he closed off his can to overseers. His entire structure, to reject any foreign iterator entity sent to him, after that disaster with Seven Red Suns’ messenger. Not only will Moon not show, but neither will Suns, nor No Significant Harassment, loathe as he might be to hear from him, nor any other iterator.
He’s—going to die alone. He’s going to die alone, to Rot, to his own sickness, never able to ascend, and is this what Moon wanted? Some last great fuck-you, from beyond the grave, to wherever iterators go when they collapse, broken apart under their own weight, trapped half-in and half-out of the cycles?
The cyst devours his pearls. Somewhere deeper inside his structure, Five Pebbles runs out of any material he might use to continue his task of flushing out the Rot, which would be incredibly worrying if not for the cyst before him right now. The cyst’s tendrils approach his puppet. When they touch him they stick to him, slick rotstuff.
Do something! yells some small part of his processes. As the cyst approaches it swallows up pearls in its path: there a handful of his own, old archived conversations; there seven pearls brought to him by his citizen, nothing of import yet kept and cataloged anyways, together only because a small beast spat them out at his feet. Blow it out of your chambers! Open your can again! Connect to your overseers! Do something, anything!
All possible, of course. Useless, but possible: things he could do, to feel as if he might have any impact on what is to come.
Five Pebbles does none of that. Instead he watches, wide-eyed, as the mobile Rot cyst approaches. Its undulating genetic matter. The blue crosses across each segment of its core. Tendrils stuck to his sides. Has he ever seen it up close, before? He has seen pictures through his overseers, of course, sensations though his structure, but…
It’s like it is crossed-out, he realizes, staring into the empty blue-black void of it, this failed project of his, crossed out when he could never manage the same himself, ascend and leave this all behind. But this isn’t ascension. This is mindless propagation. To spread, and keep spreading. To alter, and keep altering. But he never did alter his own code. Looks to the Moon ensured that.
Well, Moon, Five Pebbles thinks, is this what you wanted? You brought me down with you.
Five Pebble’s antenna pin back, scraping against the far wall.
The Rot surges forwards to engulf him, and—
She’s halfway through a hunt when she finds the pup.
It startles her so badly she drops the spear she’s holding, the sharp edge of it stabbing into her cheek, where it had been held inside of her mouth against her saliva sparking, explosive, against the metal. The pup is small and scraggly and upon closer inspection somewhere between pup and adolescent, with thin skin clinging to bone. His scent is unlike any pup she’s ever known, far from the fading milk-taste and instead something acidic and metallic, like blood cloying, sharp-sweet.
She blinks. Blinks again, with her claws digging into the metal below her, seeking that familiar pulse-beat of her territory humming below her, and finds nothing but a chill that makes her shiver, despite the sun beating down above. Here in her territory on top of the world there are no pups, for there are no other slugcats in this land, and most days she is the only living thing at all, tracing her paths stained with old blood and rusted gore. Other than the vultures, of course, though she has no idea where the one she was tracking went.
No matter how many times she opens and closes her eyes, the pup does not leave. Standing out in the open, he isn’t looking at her, or much of anything, really. His skin is cracked and bleeding in places, his dark eyes are glassy, and there frozen still she dares to wonder to herself: dead? Is the pup dead?
Perhaps dropped by a vulture, carried away from some colony far below? She flexes her claws again. Metal shinks underneath her. That she can feel. So she is here, in this moment, with the pink-pale pup, watching the sky and the vulture’s shadow blotting out the sun. Diving down towards the pup.
She doesn’t think. She’s no Mother—she lost that name an eternity ago—but still the instincts flood her chest just like they did when she was, watching long-ago pups out in the open. For a moment it doesn’t matter that she’s maker-of-clever-sharp-things, an Artificer, but only that there is a pup, and there is a vulture descending on a meal easier than she could ever be.
She lunges, scooping up her spear as she passes it. His paw is tiny in her own when she grabs him, already shifting him up to her back, rumbling out old words she hasn’t used since she had use of both her eyes, grab on, half-instinct. The pup does, thankfully, listen. His little claws sink into her skin. He’s so dry. Like sand scabbed over.
The vulture’s beak reaches out for them—
And she launches herself into the air with an explosive blast, the aftershocks fizzling at the edges of her paws, at the tip of her tail. She flips over the vulture, losing her spear into its wing, and lands in a roll, springing back to her paws the second she can. The pup’s weight is a familiar unfamiliarity, too-light for his age, and his claws dig into the hump of her shoulder.
“You’re okay,” she thrums to him, turning her paw over, fingers splayed out, as she wraps her hand around his. Old pup-comfort. It comes to her as if it never left, as does the ragged purr that drags itself up and out of her chest. She hasn’t had someone to purr to in—days, days and days and days and days, some eternity so long it was, and there was nothing outside of it. Like the rain that washes everything away.
But here in her territory above the world there is no rain. Just dark and metal and clouds, and as the vulture shrieks at her but wings off into the sky, she drops down onto all-fours on her old paths, breathing heavy. Her paws stick into dried blood and she curls her lip, her tail bristling with explosive sparks. The pup slumps against her.
She keeps her ears pricked as she winds through her territory, and her eyes to the sky just in case the vulture returns. Her chest twists with a dull sort of hunger, but the pup says nothing at all. Small, and not young—but too young to have a name chosen on his own. Too young to be alone, with no littermate, at the top of the world, where only she hunts and sleeps.
“Where are you—” Her voice cracks in her throat and she swallows, an old muscle she must retrain. “From? Are you from somewhere? Did the vulture bring you?”
The pup stays quiet.
“It’s safe here,” she tells him. “Living metal-thing, yes?” She nods down to the ground below her paws, and lifts her head, chuffing somewhat. “A Storm Caller, named like Several Small Stones.” Her mouth cannot form the actual sounds of his name, Five Pebbles, of course. The language of storms and metal is not one she speaks. But she understands what he means. “I protect him.” She tilts her head sideways to the bright bit of floating metal that follows her, bearing the name of her storm, that allows her into this territory.
When the pup is still quiet she stops, picking him up off her back and setting him down in the long shade of a broken structure she’s raided before for shiny pearls. His dark eyes don’t focus. When she licks his forehead she tastes only bitterness and blood, no hint of any littermates he’d have grown with, a colony he’d travel with. And his skin is still so dry. Even she, explosive-maker she is, has her protective layers of mucus, much as it might crackle and spark with her.
Her muzzle crinkles. He is old enough he should know how to speak, and, baring that, even with youth he’d know the movements of their language, pinned back ears, a twitching tail, the first words a pup learns. Things like milk and help and Mother. This pup says nothing at all, not with sounds nor with motion. He is stiff-still in front of her. He does not blink. He breathes, but barely.
“Hungry?” she asks him, swallowing herself. That vulture was going to be her meal. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth, and she studies the pup a bit closer—is his skin supposed to be that pale shade of pink, or is he starving, perhaps? Has he lost his vibrancy?
She has not had to hunt for someone who was not herself in a long, long time.
Her claws curl into her skin. Her tail is stiff behind her as she swallows again, like prey-bone stuck in her throat that refuses to go down. When she splays her back paws against the living-metal below her she hears nothing at all, no humming vibration, a reminder of why she is here, why she has taken up this territory and walked these paths.
“C’mon.” She bumps against the pup and takes his hand in her own. It hangs there, limply. He does not wrap his little fingers around hers. “Safe here. You’re safe here.”
She can only hope to keep it that way.
It’s dark out when Artificer finally makes it back to her den, dragging the corpse of a spider behind her. She tosses it aside as the doors shut behind her, their loud, thunderous roaring. The pup doesn’t jump at the sound of them—he must’ve been carried here by vulture, from the surrounding land below the storms, if he is used to the sound—and doesn’t protest when she picks him up under the arms and sets him down.
This particular den isn’t the only den she spends her nights in, though it is her favorite, set up off the ground. Back when there were other animals that lived here, it was a great trick, to vanish into it and leave orange lizards snarling down on the ground, only to drop down and maul them in their salivating. Or to lure scavengers up, flip out of it and loose her spears into their skin, pinning them to the floor. Now, of course, there is little left to hunt at all, though she still finds herself returning to this den before all else, even with its clutter. A few vulture masks, pearls she hasn’t had the time to run over to Five Pebbles, a small collection of unsparking spears, and, of course, her chief scavenger mask, mounted up on the wall by a spear stabbed though an eye.
It's opposite that mask she sets the pup, shaking grit off herself as she settles down to start her meal. Spider is never her favorite, but spiders are the only prey that she can find with any sort of frequency: she’s killed all the lizards, shattered all their eggs, and of course there are no scavengers left. Their blood marks the paths she walks each day, rusted into metal, proof of her accomplishments.
The spider crunches under her teeth, and she tears off a leg to pass over to the pup. He stares at it, uncomprehending, the same way he stared at the lone grappling worm she tore apart for him, the strip of flesh she tore off a vulture’s wing before it vanished up into the sky. Even the few fruits she found, wondering if perhaps he hadn’t eaten meat yet—she knows there are odd colonies who prefer fruits and smaller prey—but nothing.
“Eat.” She presses the spider’s leg into his chest. “Starving will not bring your family back, if you are searching for them. I told you. Here is safe. Nothing but vultures, and I scare away vultures.” She holds her head higher with her pride.
He turns away from the spider’s leg, curls into a ball, and hides his nose underneath his tail.
Little Annoyance. Artificer huffs, scowling down at the pup, now that he cannot see her face. Scrawny as he is he should be old enough to hunt with others, but he did not help her at all. Which, fine, she would not expect him to, but to not even eat what she brought down for him?
“Do you do anything at all?” she asks. If he hears her, he makes no acknowledgement of it, simply staying as that curled-up ball, and she bites back a growl. Fine. If he won’t eat the spider, she will, and she does, turning away and biting down into the crunchy carapace with perhaps more force than is needed. But shell splits apart under her teeth, and the meat is dry, just like the pup’s skin, and her claws scrape against the metal, and she swallows down the last bit of spider and glares at her small collection of pearls, her spears, traces the long-dried blood that splatters across her scavenger mask.
She wore it, a lot, after she first got it. When her chest was heaving with every ragged breath she drew in, and her claws were still stuck in the flesh of the scavenger chief. Its body was warm underneath her, its blood soaking her skin. Skin that crackled with her own explosives. Her ears were ringing. All-around the roar of battle was something muted.
When she lifted the mask off its broken body and set it on her own head, she thought, I did it. It’s over.
But there were still lesser scavengers, slinking around her territory. There were still elites with their sparking spears, and she tore all of them apart, too, while wearing the mask, and slunk sometimes out of her territory, and past the paths to Five Pebbles, and all the way down, descending into the clouds, where she held out her mask and waited for the rain. She’d watch as water cascaded down its sharp sides, washing away all the blood, but it never washed away those first bloodstains. The chieftain’s blood, forever stained into its mask. Her own blood, too, she was sure.
She’d make it back to her den water-soaked. So heavy with it that she couldn’t create a single spark, as she curled up, shivering and shaking, and waited for sun, in her territory on top of the world. There was no reason to fear the rain, if she protected a Storm Caller, but that never stopped the shivering.
She wore the mask. She killed scavengers. Lizards, when the scavengers ran out. She’d raid buildings for pearls, tear down tolls and watch the cream-white glint of their prized rocks vanish into the abyss, throwing them down one-by-one. Their bodies bloated, and rotted, and many were carried off by vultures. She picked the flesh off the ones that remained. Grabbed their leftover bones until they cracked, spilled out their marrow. Threw those into the abyss, as well.
One day she stabbed the mask into the wall and went out without it. One day she watched the sun until she couldn’t see a single thing, and stumbled back to her den, blinded, her head throbbing. She decimated winged centipede nests. Cracked lizard eggs and licked up the yolk, and was no less hungry for it.
Her blood crackled and roared. The scavenger mask hung above her whenever she slept, and she growled at that, too. Spat out pearls at the feet of Five Pebbles, and understood nothing but the rise and fall of his voice, like the low droning boom of a storm coming on. Stared up at him, there, her on his floor, him in the air, and flexed her claws, remembering the blood that stained them.
She paced. Followed her paths, again and again, until they were worn into dirt and metal.
Her heart never stopped beating.
Now in her den she sucks in a breath, and glances over to the pup. His chest rises and falls, faintly, with his sleep. He’s taken her bed, the scraggly moss that was soft, once, when she first brought it in. It would be easy to move him. He barely weighs anything at all.
Instead she curls up, her back to the pup. She closes her eyes, and she dreams, as she always does, of that dark, shadowy room: her, and the scavenger, and no matter how many times she tears it to shreds, nothing around her changes at all.
When Artificer wakes it is still dark, though the shelter is open, and poking her head outside shows the sky lightening with the arrival of predawn. The pup is asleep, or perhaps dead—she drops her head close to his chest. Thud, thud, thud, goes his heart, very slowly. Alive, then. But sleeping, and there is no reason to wake him, so she does not, slipping out and onto the pole sticking out of the metal of this den. There balanced atop it the wind tastes fresh, but she doesn’t stay for long, pulling herself back into her den.
She stands there, pressing a paw against the far wall. When it is quiet she likes to hear the metal movement of that who she protects, the whirring motion of the great beast that is Five Pebbles, Several Small Stones, and with her ears to the metal it is like she is not alone in her den, not entirely, but here, alive, within something grand and terrifying. And she right at the center of it, making her home in the storm so it cannot stalk her.
She breathes in, breathes out. Splays out her fingers. It’s—quiet. Very quiet. She can hear her own breathing, and the wheezy drawl of the pup, but—where is that third sound, that metallic hum, that strums through her? Like a purr, a reminder of life?
“Several Small Stones?” Her voice comes quiet, a low grumble. She’s never not heard him before. He is so vast, and she is at the eye of his storm.
She frowns, pulling her paw away. Turns to look back at her den: masks, the pup, her pearls, a few spears…
Well. She picks up one of the spears, sticking her paw in her mouth to coat the tip of the spear with her saliva. It crackles, growling, like her own fur, and she steps out of the den again, into the early dawn morning. Pup can’t stay here, and his family must be outside, somewhere. And I meant to drop these pearls off with Five Pebbles.
She tips her head back to the sky, stretching out, languid. Sooner or later a vulture will descend, some fledgling that doesn’t yet know she isn’t to be preyed upon. But it’ll make a good meal, for her, for the pup, should he eat, and then they have a journey to set off on: all the way back across her paths.
Artificer tastes blood in her mouth. Maybe I’ll even find some more scavengers, back in the rest of the world.
Her paws flex around her spear.
It’s been far too long since I’ve had something fun to hunt.
It’s a quick journey to the outer edges of her territory, Artificer wasting no time. She finds no vultures, waiting for the pup to wake, but she doesn’t stick around, not here, here where it is so silent, too-silent. Instead she scoops the pup up the moment his eyes are open, carefully picks out the three shiniest pearls, grabs her explosive spear, passes a normal one to the pup—he holds it, limply, in his paws—and huffs out a farewell to her den before vaulting off.
So silent. She can hear the beating of her own heart, roaring in her ears, and no matter how many times she pauses to press her ear to the metal ground there is no hum of recognition, no churn of great natural processes. Storm Callers are never silent. They rumble always, and Artificer has learned their sounds, to listen, to chirp and chitter back in return, making herself some small part of their storms.
“We’ll find your family after,” she tells the pup, as she pads into the gate-room, where the great doors shut behind her with a roar like strong winds that tear trees out of the earth. “From below, somewhere? Point me where.” The steam gusts over her and she crinkles her nose. The pup’s head rests atop hers, his tail dead weight across her back. It’s not the worst thing—he is rather small—but it makes her wonder-at where he might’ve come from. A small colony, it must’ve been, with very few hunters. If he is growing into adolescence but is still so small.
The doors creak open and she crams herself through, pausing only to let her floating metal-guide follow. As she watches the gates slide shut, she balances her front paws atop the guide. That thrums back at her, a low hum, but the sounds aren’t right. Too quick to be Five Pebbles, though she knows it is marked with his name, to let her claim her second name-title of Protector of Storms.
Its dull red glow lights up the space between her fingers, and she sighs, letting it loose to watch it bob upwards, a tad.
“Will you not tell me what direction your home is in?” she asks the pup.
The silence is expected. Her skin crawls still.
“Fine,” she says. “Going to see my storm, Several Small Stones. You are with me, so you will be safe.” Or, she assumes, at least, as she hasn’t ever brought anything alive to her storm before. Just pearls stolen from scavengers or stolen from her territory, and a few bits of food—strips of vulture meat and scavenger corpses—in case he was hungry, because she’d never seen him eat before, and knew storms ate a lot. But clearly not inside, because he was not appreciative.
The memory brings a faint purr to her chest as she exits the gate-room and flips up to the path towards Five Pebbles, but the purr doesn’t last very long. The barren stretch of land towards her storm is quiet, but never silent—once it was alive with the many sounds of scavengers, but even after she took care of that, she could hear wind, hear metal turning. Now she hears nothing at all, so she picks up her pace and practically throws herself down the paths. Through here, pause only briefly at the popcorn plant in case the pup is starving—he still won’t eat, and she bites back a snarl, swallowing smoke—and then up, up, up, and finally down, into the paths, tumbling through the low—
She lands with a thud on the ground and is stunned, momentarily. The pup is thrown from her back. The world is weird, this close to the storm—it doesn’t work the same. She’s made lighter, leaping higher, and when she falls it is a fall she can roll into.
This is the same heavy pull of the world outside.
And there is nothing she can hear…
“Pup,” she says, low, as she sets him back on her back. She is going to say stay close. Already her claws curl into her spear, her chest twists at the missing one, meaning the pup must’ve dropped it somewhere far back. But—the pup does nothing at all. If there is something wrong…
Artificer’s eyes narrow.
Scavengers.
She has rid her territory of scavengers, and this is still her territory—but she comes her far less. It is not a path she walks daily, and so—they must’ve come. Protector of Storms she is, and the scavengers slipped through, right to the heart of her storm himself, and Artificer snarls, throwing herself down with no care for the way the fall slams up through her limbs. She will not let the scavengers take anything else from her. Will tear through them all, smoke pouring from her mouth, skin crackling, air ringing, she will throw herself into this fight, and not stop until she is the only one left breathing. Until she can purr at her storm, safe safe safe, and hear the thrumming crackle of his voice.
She trips and falls down into the dark path, her final place to walk. Here she does not float but falls like a stone in water right to the bottom, so she picks herself up and runs. Who would go after a Storm Caller? It would be like going after the sun—so far and big and grand, there long before she drew her first breath, and there long after she draws her last.
But she brought him pearls. Stolen from scavengers and structures and she felt them in her paws, their smooth, cool surface. Five Pebbles had many floating around him, when they first met. It made her ears stand pricked, her skin prickle—but he was no pup. He was a storm. And there were no scavengers, beside, and it made something purr fierce inside of her, to steal them from scavengers and bring them to him, to settle with her paws tucked underneath her and listen to the rise and fall of his voice.
She rolls into the pipe to Five Pebbles. Drops like a stone to the bottom, but she’s on her paws in an instance, checking the pup is alright, looking up, ready to see Five Pebbles, floating there, to tear into any scavenger that might dare to threaten the storm she protects, the storm she has made her home—
Artificer looks up, and up, and then up some more.
This is a room she knows. It is a den, Five Pebble’s den. She knows the pearls, floating in groups together. The white walls that flash sometimes in other colors, showing shapes, things that seem real but fizzle when she pokes a paw through them. The great rumbling arm that lifts Five Pebbles into the air.
Instead she sees none of that.
The far wall has collapsed, like mold growing over old wood. The air tastes of rotten prey, and her storm is nowhere in sight. Instead there is only—only something blue and black, brightly-colored patterns that stretch out danger, fear nothing at all, but Artificer tastes the fear, burning in her chest. Patches of it wave blue limbs where they dangle down from the ceiling. Stringy blue tendrils stretch from wall-to-wall. And there, growing at the end of the arm that carries her storm, is a great pulsating mass of it, cores of black crossed over with blue, many-limbed like a spider, the sticky ends of each limb resting against the wall, and the creature moves—
It doesn’t—
She doesn’t…
The pup is stiff atop her but stiff in a different way—rather than saying nothing at all, he is saying fear, very, very clearly. He has drawn into himself, and his claws dig into her skin, and she can feel him trembling, ever-so-slightly. When the great big mass of blue and black moves, the pup flinches, and so she does, too, fear bled from him to her.
She has…seen this before. Long ago, before she found this home, when she had no paths to call her own and followed only the taste of blood—through the muck she found patches of this rot-life, creatures that dragged themselves after her, following the crackle of her explosions, the thud of paw against ground. And she watched them, her heart in her throat as she hid: watched them devour scavengers, lizards, vultures, anything and everything in their path.
She thinks, very quietly, as if this creature might hear even her thoughts and track her by them, Five Pebbles?
The rot-life moves. First its tendrils, then the core of it, moving off the metal arm and towards her, and there is nothing left in the spot it leaves. Nothing but stray, broken bits of metal, and no Five Pebbles at all.
A sticky tendril stretches for her back—
She lunges. With a crackle-boom whip of her tail the reaching tendril falls, stunned, for a brief moment, and brief is all she needs. She’s long lost her spear. The pearls she brought. All she grabs onto is the trembling pup, as she throws herself through the gap in the wall, heart pounding against her skull.
Run, she tells herself, just keep running.
She trips over her own paws. Sucks in a breath as she falls, blinking. The world’s gone blurry around her and she tastes blood stinging her cheeks.
Her storm is dead. Five Pebbles is dead. That who she protects. His voice, haughty, chest puffed out, and she’d watch him and purr, not aloud, never aloud, but like she could, maybe, one-day, have someone to purr to again. An unkillable storm, her very own sun.
Scavengers she could kill. Has killed, over and over and over, until her paths were bloodstained with their gore, and still her chest ached, and still her heart beat, and still she woke up, each and every morning, entirely alone. Even with them gone she paced her old paths, bit vultures, lizards, spiders: what else was there to do?
So she visited her storm. Pressed her ear against the metal, and listened to the thunder of him.
A tiny paw presses against her side, and Artificer jerks her head up, her teeth bared, to see…
The pup. Pale, desaturated, lonely little pup. His dark eyes are wide, still. His tail twitches—worry, and she has not seen him say anything, and yet here he is. His ears are drawn so far against his skull she can hardly separate them from his skin. He keeps glancing back the way of the rot, and even here she can see it: nothing that moves, but patches against the walls, growing through broken metal.
He opens his mouth, and he says—
Something. She blinks, and blinks again. It is like nothing she has ever heard before. Something harsh against her ears. Like a fire crackling, burning, too-close and too-sharp. Like rain, beating into her skin.
Citizen, it almost sounds like, I need you to bring me west. Down below.
It almost sounds like…
She licks his forehead. He tastes like her, and nothing at all.
Artificer swallows, stumbling to her paws, first all-fours, then up to her hind legs, and the pup takes her hand without any prompting. There is some sort of life to his eyes, a life she’s never seen before: some small spark, there, in the inky blackness.
Still the rot all around them. Still the eerie silence of metal that should thrum and hum.
The pup squeezes her hand, and his eyes watch her: this pup so far from home, and he has nobody except her, failed Protector of Storms. Where is his family? Wailing to the skies above, for their pup taken too soon?
Get the pup home. Somewhere, somehow. She will not fail this pup. Not like she failed her own. Not like she failed Five Pebbles.
And then she will return, and she will tear the rot apart.