“Curious, but of no immediate consequence.”

  “They came for her, Ally.”

  “And found her grave. What’s left of her is of no interest to them.”

  “Yet here they remain, concealing their identity to partake in our war, to manipulate the outcome. Surely you are not so conceited as to believe us to be the only beings capable of influencing the future.”

  Cal had smiled. “A Beyonder proficient in perception manipulation this advanced will have the wisdom to not impose themselves between me and Empyrean.”

  Emotion filtered from her face, replaced by detached disappointment. “A body and grafts for two Oaths. And when you wake from this foolish stubbornness and seek me for alliance, you will do so with apologies.”

  ***

  Water trembled.

  High pitched clicks and deep undulations stirred the drowned hallway. Distant lights flickered in abyssal crevices reminiscent of Europe’s spectral depths. Swarms of fluorescent plankton scurried through water with paddle legs, fleeing Cal’s footsteps. He maintained a slow pace. Pressure alone would crush his ninety eight strong entourage, if they fell out of his laws’ influence.

  Beneath a riot of metal kelp glowed the red exit sign. Cal ripped the flora off the wall, revealing a mangled blast door. Another compromised airlock. He peeked in, examining the structure by hand.

  “Best one so far,” said Rogue from within the immersion pod that Cal was dragging behind him.

  He knelt by the entrance. Crown reported local reality within the chamber to be degrading beneath Europe’s influence. Same rate as elsewhere.

  “A body would be useful now, if you wish to be absolutely certain it holds. There’s always one willing to die a hero.”

  Cal stood and initiated the burnout protocol with one of the few dozen fragments relieved from massacred Hive corpses which now hung around him as bandoliers and belts. “Third Law, Growth is Instant.”

  Rogue spread the cancerous Hive creature she’d subsumed into the airlock. Cal initiated burnout protocol with a second fragment, then handed it a tendril stretching up at him. Psionic power pulsed through her, stirring the first glimpses of her still slumbering domain.

  “It’s our last time, Rogue.”

  Rogue snorted. “Here I believed you a real Fate, but it turns out Ally was the imposter all along. I admit defeat, Beyonder.”

  “She told me to live without regrets. To be happy.”

  Walls beneath her growths ran like wax and shifted into a simplified post-Fate space-era architecture designed to withstand pressures from within and without. Several enslaved hive fabricators salvaged the heavily warped airlock doors. Steel resumed solidity.

  “She thought…” Rogue hesitated.

  Cal pushed Rogue’s containment pod inside and the airlock hissed shut. A moment later, the doors tensed with a low bang, as water’s molecular bonds were stolen and rearranged. He released the third law.

  One of Rogue’s growths relayed a message. “Doesn’t matter. Go, or you’ll miss the spectacle.”

  Water trembled again.

  “The airlock is secure. Enter,” said Cal to his entourage.

  UC soldiers and Paimon herded the less able bodied and minded lost kin inside, but the airlock could only fit so many at once, and Rogue had to take care purging the excess hydrogen.

  Another tremor in the water. Heavier. Beneath that weight, the very fabric of space bent a hair.

  Europe was descending.

  Cal urged them to hurry. This he could not miss.

  “So Cal, how… trustworthy is this Rogue? She tried to kill you,” said Orlsen, her digital voice relayed through her sealed helmet. “Or take over one of our bodies.” She laughed nervously. “Can bullets kill her? Just checking.”

  “Should we not be terminating her? From what I gather, she is one of the primary threats to UC,” asked the Sergeant, stepping out of the airlock to allow the last group through.

  The door hissed shut. Cal lingered by the window-slit to extend his laws inside. Air and water began separating near the top of the tiny chamber, racing down towards the people inside.

  “She won’t. You won’t be present when trust loses its value in our war.”

  After a quick glance at the expressionless helmets staring at him, Cal composed an addition to make his words more encouraging.

  “By which I mean to imply you shall be in a safe location, or dead.”

  Their helmets remained expressionless and their stare silent.

  Cal dug deep into the oratory skills he had practiced in solitude in an attempt to recover the blunder. “Though they may come by my hand, know that those deaths shall be swift and painless and they shall come at the end of a life that had a meaningful effect on the future of mankind.”

  “Please. No. Stop. Lalalalaa, don’t need to hear it…” Orlsen raised a hand. “...we’re making it out of here. Totally are. Yep yep.”

  The airlock opened again, empty. UC crew stepped in.

  “We’ll attempt to contact the Oracle HQ. Might be possible with the mix of powers we’re working with.” Sergeant’s salute had the look of a goodbye.

  “Good luck. Don’t get hurt and come back,” said Orlsen.

  Irel snorted. “Watch him come back dragging Europe by the tail, saying shit like…”

  The slam of steel and hum of water turning to air muffled her voice. The airlock closed.

  Water trembled. Her song could be heard, a distant thing, impossibly deep and all drowning.

  Abyssal growths spawned around and over the airlock, stirred into existence by the mad imagination of a distant would-be goddess.

  Her encounter with Knight fast approached.

  Cal dashed into the tunnels. He swim-crawled along the walls as a humanoid shadow. Luminescent critters and corallic lifeforms swept by, undisturbed by passage as liquid as that of a true deep denizen. And along the way he garbed himself in biomechanical life, weaving flora and immobile fauna into a guise until he was a living reef.

  In the periphery, in the direction of the great central shaft through which an immense presence descended, the Hive swarmed. Wayward hivelings took no note of his passage, yet he could not yet approach his goal, for no guise could conceal his presence so long as he maintained a single law.

  Sergeant had offered his helmet. It was not rated to withstand forty three bars of pressure. Neither was his current biology, but it would hold long enough, so long as he had air.

  Cal slowed his glide through water, eyes settling upon a long hive adapter with twisted isopodian biology. Its eightfold mandibles were tearing into the face of a corpse in Xcore security uniform. It would do.

  Cal released his laws and accepted the crushing breathlessness.

  He crept on.

  ***

  Something about devouring faces filled the creature with satisfaction. The sight of a pulped red head devoid of features that could stare at it and judge with horror or pity… It shuddered with pleasure and righteousness.

  Queen, so close. Closest it had ever been. It could hardly think for itself anymore. Only bliss. Sweet song-bliss. She was so close it could barely feel its own existence. Praise the Queen! All was Queen.

  A disturbance in the water.

  Multiple sets of eyestalks protruding from the sockets of a metallic humanoid face near its neck swiveled cautiously, scanning the shadows between dim luminescences.

  Just the currents. Praise the Queen.

  Another stir. Its focus darted to a swarm of metallic proto-crustaceans, curious about the meat. A gargling hiss chased them away. This was its pleasure to relish. Not a meal.

  The creature took another sweep of its surroundings. Nothing. It was safe.

  It curled around the body, cuddling the corpse, browsing its innards with appendages. Flesh bent so comfily to its form, it was as if it was designed to be sculpted and slashed, to be made love to. Local chitter-song echoed loud in its thoughts, intensifying the carnal delight.

  A whisper by a voice that chilled even steel. A declaration.

  It was plunged into songlessness.

  Queen was gone, replaced by rapid thoughts. Panic. Taste of flesh. Who… Why was she defiling a person? What was she… A scream from deep within its ghost-psyche. Danger. Act now. Danger. Why was it-she fucking cuddling with a corpse!? She needed to act quickly, something was here. Something had separated her from the– The thought of that monster-Queen made her recoil with disgust. Repulsion warred with alien instincts too overwhelming for the fragment of a mind to overpower. Danger. That was most important. It was in danger.

  She-it did not know what had silenced the song, but she-it knew it had to return. Now. She-it abandoned the laying, strong body snaking through water. Towards the center. Towards–

  A shape fell from above.

  Reflexes guided she-it to lunge towards the obscure mass. Instincts deeper than any soul-echo within it screamed to run. She-it streamlined their shape into a spear-like eel propelled by thousand rows of oar-ribs, homing for the narrow pipe mouth that led to the swarm. Its head and body slipped into the cavity. Safe!

  A knife pinned its tail into the wall. How?! No matter. The tail split apart and…

  Reality wobbled, once more bowing to that abominably deep voice. It spoke and though she-it could neither hear the words nor comprehend them, they made themselves known into the depths of her soul.

  Fleeing is forbidden.

  And, for the first time since re-awakening in this body, she-it knew fear. She-it spun around and their tail split into five inward curling bladed springs and ribs sharpened and opened across its length to deliver impalement.

  A hand struck out from the foliage-obscured hunter, through the garden of blades and slammed she-it against the ground. It pinned she-it to the wall. All of she-it’s thousand legs and freely coiling tails wrestled with two arms and a knee and somehow she-it was outnumbered, folded, pressed down, pacified. One of the arms crushed its carapace and delved deeper, pulling at cords, rearranging… the thing was performing surgery on she-it! Dissecting, no, transforming she-it!

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  She-it had to fight!

  Two pits of bright azure loomed above. Two pits as deep as Queen’s. Impossible. Unopposable.

  Panic froze she-it as she-it accepted their fate. Cords were pulled from their innards and connected to a vast entity that dwarfed its mind. A blazing blue circlet. Crown. Internal controls and transformation mechanisms were overwritten, but she-it hardly noticed. Crown was all. Crown dominated their existence and perception. Crown separated it and her and the other echoes, granting her brief lucidity.

  How long since she’d been taken by the hive? Decades?

  [134 years 2 months 3 days.]

  She-it remained distantly aware of what was done to them. Their bio-mechanical systems were co-opted, forcibly transformed into filters and life-support systems and integrated into biological vascular systems, until their body was enslaved to nothing but a filtration unit for their captor.

  Sudden clarity.

  She remembered the deaths. How she’d eaten… her husband’s face. Without a body to feel pain with, the anguish was unbearable. Let it end. Please let it end.

  [It ends soon, little one.]

  Voice. The shard. Voice of psionics, she was distantly aware of that.

  [Don’t resist, little one. He’ll take it away.]

  Crown. Crown was a searing hot brand. Warmth.

  She let herself burn.

  [I’m so sorry little one.]

  She assured her it was fine. Just let it end. Please.

  The voice of the shard did not reply to her. Instead, in the dim whiteness of soul, a motherly being of immense vastness took her hand and walked with her towards the edge of non-existence. They walked together with the great mother’s king, a god-king wearing existence as his crown.

  Even though she’d thought her pain so great she could not fear it, she did. She was afraid.

  The great motherly presence assured her it would be fine.

  They were at the edge.

  She asked if there was anything beyond this threshold.

  They were coyly smug, like parents, keeping a pleasant secret from a child. The great motherly one only assured her she would not go there alone.

  Then the great motherly one and her king shared a gaze.

  She saw his grief was beyond reason. No matter how sweetly the great one smiled, he refused to accept her goodbye, when they departed into great nothing.

  ***

  Wearing the living corpse of a hive adapter and a small mountain of warped foliage, without laws, Cal snuck towards the center, through chambers swarmed by thousands of creatures, and labyrinthine caverns, until he found the space that had once been the central elevator shaft.

  He halted before a sheer fall to the darkest blue without a bottom, top, a horizon, or walls. The silence of the sea.

  Europe’s domain.

  The pressure bubbled in his veins, ate at his cells, and very soul. The metal hiveling veins interlaced with his cybernetics writhed. What was not yet covered in patterns of pseudoflora was warped in the blink of an eye. The wall garden around him trembled with the heartbeat of the sea.

  There as he clung to the walls of the abyss, Cal saw her.

  High above, the lone star of ghostly light in the utterblack, a luminous angel whose visage no distance could dim. She was almost a human. Palatial tapestries, vast veils dragged behind her like the heavenly robes pulled behind a piece of whitest heaven descending to wed the darkest depths of the Earth. She was a pallid sculpture of Star God fragments followed by a thick coiling umbilical of hair that spiraled high out of these false fathoms. Not merely an avatar, this was a part of Europe’s true form, the sleek thing of ethereal lure of her true leviathan body.

  Her descent was suffocatingly slow, like the final ponderous fall of the world’s last snowflake. The sight of it threatened to freeze the blood in his veins, crushed at his thoughts, and twisted the metal in his flesh.

  Systems screamed at internal damage. A coral was growing through his foot. Without his laws or Crowns protection he could only endure.

  Slowly, agonizingly slowly, her light revealed silhouettes of the enshadowed bottom of this elevator shaft. The top of floor 20. A gray slab of flat nothing unaffected by her warping influence. The Null Field anomaly, a memory from the early days of Empyrean’s arrival. The one visible entrance was sealed and upon it stood a man of familiar bearing.

  Shorter than Cal but only just, dark skin, dark eyes, and long dancing hair whitened by prolonged immersion. His expression was severe, but there was a compassion to the set of his eyes and face that Cal had once envied.

  He was Knight and he stood alone, arms crossed, eyes on the being descending from sunken heavens.

  Before him stood a longblade embedded in the ground darker even than the depths surrounding them. Cal squinted upon recognizing the design.

  Hope.

  This run did not yet have a forge capable of creating her. Had Merchant bribed Dream to imagine a phantasm of her into reality? Such had to be the case, for Magus could not yet disregard causality that casually. Or was this perhaps another influence of Rogue’s fear mongered Beyonder interloper? Whatever the case, Knight possessing a mid-game tool at such an early stage was deeply unfortunate.

  A ripple spread through the tapestry of Europe’s veils.

  Her voice was the symphony of sirens and whales vulgarized for human ears to understand, each syllable trembling the sea with a purr of accent.

  “You stand before Europe. Ill advised.”

  Unhindered by depth or the sea, Knight’s voice rumbled as the avalanche, “I am Knight. Hope is my blade, and four Oaths my strength. Lost friend, know that there is a future where you turn, one where you cast off the bonds of greed and fear. A future in which you find the true home of your soul. One where you are our kin and a guiding light so bright even your own heart forgets the depths of crimes on your soul. There is a future where you turn, one where you leave and live. Let me help you reach it, I beg of you, let us not make a tragedy of your future greatness.”

  “I’ve met Fates of lies and deception, a common breed amongst your kind. Never yet a Fate of Comedy. Your consciousness shall be preserved.”

  Knight lowered his head in grief. “I beg of you, believe in your redemption.”

  A ripple spread through the tapestry of Europe’s veils. Power gathered in her gaze. Her tendrils writhed. The intensity of her presence bent space and time, stretching the moment where her eyes blazed as stars and glimpsed futures from the great leviathan’s dreams.

  Knight lowered his head and his tone became urgent with grief. “I beg of you, Véronique. Gather your strength. Defy it. Véronique, you are the only one who can. I know you posses the courage to do so, I have witnessed it. I swear to you, Véronique, you can. Believe in yourself, I beg of you.”

  Mercy.

  "Non. Ne prétendez pas me conna?tre."

  Pressure lifted off of Cal as Europe reached for the Knight as a child would to catch the moon from the sky. The young ocean contracted around Knight with a crack, and the sea around him foamed and water turned into violent steel, entities from the depths of her domain. A forest of titanic kelp tendrils collapsed upon him, a limbless and eyeless orchestra of polypal siren drowned him in a soul-splitting silent song, and a blinding swarm of all-devouring entropical plankton buried him entirely.

  He burst out, cybernetic flesh engulfed in a war of green entropic flame warring against rapid undoing of damage, and he flew towards Europe. The blade, Hope, made motion into art, sweeping through the pulses of psionic power she hurled on him, as though the act of cutting down psionics at the moment of their manifestation was not impossible.

  Recovery.

  Europe swept her hand and distances expanded in a vertigo-inducing blink, casting the bottom into unknowable depths, and Knight was unaffected. He was on her and none could deny his blade. She did not even try. He cut through sea-foam. She was gone, materializing on the faraway seafloor, fathoms apart from Knight. There she directed her creatures to turn their destructive powers upon the Null Field door.

  “Véronique,” said Knight, turning, “know that should you retreat, I will allow it. Now and at any moment from here on.”

  Honesty.

  The umbilical pulsed with a world-warping glow, transmitting something to Europe that made her lure body freeze.

  Knight ran up on the invisible stairs of a great tower, unhindered by the sea.

  The bet was simple. Who blinked first, him or Europe? Which broke first, Null Field or her body?

  Unreality defiance.

  Europe’s call reverberated and punctured Cal’s eardrums. The great abyssal walls came alive as a starscape of deepsea lights, and uncountable thousands of hivelings rushed from their perches and tunnels as one black mass, grasping to catch Knight. Bodies rushed past Cal, knocking him off the cliff.

  Knocked about, he clawed upstream towards the cliff, struck his knife to the wall, and clung with all his might against the steelflesh rapid.

  Far above, Knight ascended towards Europe’s true body and once again, as he did in every reset, made Cal pause in awe.

  Cal was one of the four in this world with eyes and mind capable of glimpsing Knight’s mastery. He’d once thought he’d bridge the gap between them, that Knight would reach his plateau, and he’d catch up. He’d been a fool then.

  Knight’s steps were a pattern beyond prophecies, the absolute beyond absolute, they were chisels etching the outcome deeper in the marrow of fabric than any fate bending or future sight, narrowing his enemies futures while expanding his own.

  The swarm, despite its numbers and powers, could not hope to stop him.

  His body advanced in a sequence beyond technique and flow, sliding along transcendent lines of motion even Allking could gleam for only the briefest moments. Lines he had yet to ascend to. Could not ascend to. Twenty two thousand souls entered to live and die in that time beyond time. Two billion could have entered and none would have touched the level of physical enlightenment at display before him. Above comprehension. Above reason. Above soul. This was not the skill of a ten thousand years of human pain, but ten thousand years of a master’s obsession.

  Cal had gleaned enough of Knight to deduce two Oaths and their powers. Enough for Rogue’s promise to fill the gaps. His vision was tunneling, his teeth squeezing, his ears ringing. Every moment he lingered worsened the lulling thought fog. His current graft suite could only stall the inevitable crush of pressure for so long. His insides recoiled. Crown warned of a rapid decrease in performance.

  He could not tear his gaze away.

  This was Knight, the greatest among them, fighting his first life-and-death battle of the last reset.

  And today, here, now, he introduced reality to truths they’d all learned thousands of years ago.

  Hivelings surrounded him in a swarm hundreds of meters wide.

  Psionics sang a hundred languages of oblivion upon him and fell against a will so tempered it cleaves reality in two.

  It was art. Painting, each stroke an unequaled masterpiece.

  Europe reached for him, adding the force of the sea to all that was converging to kill him.

  He overwhelmed her.

  Not in strength. Not in the sheer volume of violence she could conjure. Not in the number of tricks or the might of her swarm. Her presence was the very heart of ocean-depths, the concept of the final pressure, the abyss. Her body was the womb of Earth herself, the protean pool fetched from across eons and made manifest. Her mind sat on a throne carried by millions, a godhead if there ever was one. Combat simulations imagined by thousands of distant Hive clairvoyants guided her.

  None of it could so much as slow the steady ascension of Knight’s climb.

  She was the sea.

  He was one man and a blade.

  Europe blinked.

  She surged from the depths to face him in her full might. The pale avatar of light materialized before him and caught his blade and reality blurred in the clash of clairvoyance and strength against sublimity.

  Cal’s world was blackening. He clenched his guts, rearranging an organ that’d popped from pressure, willing parts of the coerced hive adapter to compensate. He could not leave. Not yet.

  He could not blink. Not now.

  If he watched a heartbeat longer, he might learn. He felt so close. So close. He almost understood. Almost saw the threads that would lead him onto to the foot of that mountain Knight stood at.

  Cal’s vision reddened. A cloud of blood spread out from his orifices, and he gulped it in to maintain the disguise.

  A moment longer. Almost… If only he could…

  “A token of goodwill,” murmured a faraway woman in his mind. Atop of his corpse disguise scurried a shrimp hiveling with eyes clouded by the fractal spirals of Beyond-purple. Dream’s power settled upon him, ever so delicately tilting his existence away from reality.

  His attention, heart, and soul remained held by the beast and blade and for a time he simply rhapsodized the swell of emotion the battle instilled, experiencing it without the filter of thoughts.

  When he spoke again, his voice trembled. “You’ve done a great kindness, Dream. Do you need assistance in leaving the Fountain?“

  “Alas, my answer remains unchanged.”

  “Unfortunate.”

  Knight was not so much wrestled down by sheer mass, a tidal wave of sea and Hive and spatial manipulation, as he allowed himself to be carried. The two of them watched him ride the battle as if he were surfing. Cal had lost the grasp on that fleeting sense of enlightenment. He could no longer comprehend Knight’s blade.

  “You did not.” Grant him Hope.

  “No.”

  Cal grunted acknowledgment.

  “I’ve decided to delay my slumber a while longer, to allow a meeting to take place.”

  Cal glanced at her vessel, puzzled. “Unusual.”

  There was a fondness in her tone. “It’s the last reset. No regrets this time.”

  Cal’s expression softened. “I’d hoped that would change your stance on her Heart.”

  “It has certainly added a sense of finality to the tragedy I must commit,” replied Dream, voice heavy.

  For another moment, they watched Knight battle Europe. They’d once watched him tumble with a hive prince like this. They’d been sister and brother and they’d shared grilled bird on the open plains of Siberia and somehow ended up debating which of them had the prettiest psion eyes, after first discussing the merits of sights in following Knight’s movements. Far, far away, in a time long gone by.

  “Location?”

  “Elder will arrange everything. Bring Rogue.”

  “Hm.”

  The pause lingered.

  “Are you in a hurry?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Neither again for a long time. Nostalgia returned with warmth of the past, and though they did not sit side-by-side, they shared a moment removed from their burdens as the Fates of Mankind.

  “About the interloper…” began Dream.

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  They were in accord.

  The Beyonder would know pain and regret. Not because it interfered with the war. No, it had committed the crime of touching their ten thousand years of memories.