Chapter 17-1 A Sickness in the Bones

Chapter 17-1 A Sickness in the Bones

+Hey. I got a personal message for all you consangs striving and struggling at Lights End.

You know you guys have the highest suicide rate in New Vultun if we separate the Warrens across all its layers, right? Its rough out there, being so close to the light, but not really part of it.

Dont disconnect. Im not here to try to hurt you or anything but Ive always found all of you beautiful, you know?

Youre like moths. Moths to a flame.

I know how you feel. I know what its like to be taunted with perfection and glory beyond your reach while you live in its shadow. Its an affront to your own life. Who can bear it? Anyone whos felt your pain knows why you lose to that sirens call.

But fight it. You have to.

Listen to me. Just listen.

The Tiers Theyre not the utopias you think they are. Sure, you wont have to worry about Syndicates or gangs or wandering monsters dumped by the No-Dragons or left by the Low Masters, but your life stops being yours once you get owned by a Guild.

A sponsorship is just that. Being owned. If you cant say no to your master without suffering repercussions that break you, thats being owned. If you cant resist or fight back without being destroyed, thats being owned. If you cant live your own life and have to have monitors installed into the back of your mind to watch everything you do and correct your habits and scream at you from the inside of your mind every time you lose focus or want to do something other than what you father or mother or master tells you to for the glory of the fucking Guilds, thats! Being! Owned!

This chapter was first shared on the Ñøv€lß1n platform.

Sorry. Sorry for my outburst.

There are miracles of such immense power that you just find yourself unable to describe them. Unable to even understand whats happening to you. There are places of such joy and tastes filled with such pleasure that youll find yourself addicted for months. If any one of you is ever lucky enough to win a trip up into the Elysium, youll come back changed.

And those are the ones who will be irreparably broken.

A moth that has touched the flame but is banished back to the darkness thereafter, condemned to never burn in its lifetime, is owned.

Is a moth thats going to seek an end because it knows it knows there is a better life.

But it wont have it.

Well. Heres to me trying to save you from that dream today+

-Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS THOUGHTCAST

17-1

A Sickness in the Bones

+...Heres: Down to the Gutters new hit single, Guildless.+ Noise followed Cala Marlowes words, the sound of a guttural shout dragged on for far too long. Deeps riffs vibrated through the Nether, drowning the joy-den with music.

A shame only two people were present to hear it.

Bloodless bodies littered the ground in pieces, and a pond of blood trailed after a waifish figure, rising to coat the walls and windows to prevent herself from being killed by a sharpshooter from outside the bounds of the block.

Again.

Reaching into her jackets inner pocket, she produced a particular fang threaded through by a flesh-made necklace belonging to a local gangthe Exsanginators. They were an exclusively Sang outfit that decorated themselves around a theme of blood and wore the carcasses of modified nu-bats during their midnight raids.

It was because of them that Dice drained these bodies. It was to frame them that she left something of their signature.

Striding past overturned tables and discarded guns, Dice didnt draw the blood back into her until she was already out of the room and heading to the garbage disposal. She made her escape down where bodies and trash were thrown, her haemokinetic limbs digging into the metal as she slid down before additional reinforcements arrived.

If she unleashed the full potential of the god dwelling inside her, she could have destroyed this block. Killed almost everyone in it.

But that wasnt what the new master wanted her to do. No. The new master spoke to her in her dreams. Gave her choices and targets of opportunitypeople like the ones that killed her old master and captured her. Sold her.

Syndicates, they were called. Syndicates and gangers. They were like the once-men of the wilds. Misshapen effigies of humanity in body and mind, knowing only harm and predation.

The only difference was the once-men of this city had a preference for chrome, and madness came more from the curving halos around their heads than the vileness of their deeds.

The group she attacked today was called the Silver Tongues. They belonged to a larger enclaveor something of the naturecalled Ashthrone. One them managed to hit her during the ambush earlier, and she felt the shot spill over into her Hell without wounding her person.

He died without leaving a body when she vented his waste back into him.

Flipping past the edge of the chute and encasing herself in an armor made from her own blood, she avoided the incinerator and made her way back toward the place where she carved a hole into the building. Pulling the hood of her jacket over her head, she clicked a button on its wrist and immediately a shroud of light sparked over her, masking her figure with the look of a skeletal figure cloaked in darkness.

She got this jacket from one of her kills too. The only one that really fit her size. The other girl didnt even see her death coming. One second she was sneering at Dice, pointing to a new shiny piece of metal poking out from along her spine, the next her insides were pouring out from her body, her flesh shredded by blades grown in her very veins.

There were words that disemboweled your heart when spoken.

There were parts of reality so unappealing that Idheim created gods to alter its design.

[Warrens are the Warrens, juv,] Corner said, speaking softer to Abrel than he ever did. [There was a saying on my block when I was growing up: two people choose if we live our die; us, then the city. I say live. I say live until you die. The games here. Might as well play it.]

As the wailing sirens of a volunteer fire brigade filled the Nether, Avos consciousness pulsed as another mind synchronized with his. As he opened his session and foreign ghosts entered only to be set aflame, he found his simulation of Chambers and the original overlapping again. [Hey, Avo! We got a hit. Come back.]

The half-strand sounded excited, but then again, when wasnt he excited?

Taking a final look at the neon skylanes layered over the ponderous blocks of alloy and plascrete spilling as far his eyes could see, Avo poured the totality of his ego into Chambers body. Knitting himself to his new sheathe, his senses and motor functions restarted.

He was back in the Manta cocooned in protective smart matter, staring at his uninhabited body sagging against the softness of the ships interior. Casting himself back into his original sheathe, he killed Chambers just as he left and settled back into himself.

Opened and closing his claws, he felt prickling static run down his digits. There were certain flaws to having a body. Too many feelings. Too much that was capable of distracting him. But without his Celerostylus and the Neurodeck, he was effectively a diminished version of his full potential.

Free moving though his consciousness was, aspects still lingered beyond the confines of his mind and Frames grasp. Calvino wasnt truly part of him, and being severed from his flesh meant being without the Meldskin or Aegis support. He had soaked in enough of the city. Now, he needed to return to the task at hand.

{Hows our girl doing?} Draus asked via ansible, her virtual avatar manifesting in the corner of his cog-feed.

She was one step away from being on the ship and eight thousand kilometers distant at the same time. His DeepNav placed her within Layer Two itself, just above Mazzas Junction. That was promising. That meant she had something.

{How did you know I was back?}

{Chambers vitals went dead and yours started up again. You really should get to using the armor more. Get used to its full functionality.}



He grunted. {Sure. Soon. Chambers said you found something.}



{Yeah,} she said. {I just mightve.}

Pairing her visual feed with his Neurodeck, he saw her standing on the rim of a glass portal looking down at maintenance drones darting to and about the industrial jungle outside. Magnifying her vision a hundred times over, she marked a particularly large drone carrier with red vertices but said nothing.

Several seconds later, the cluster of drones dotting the pore-shaped ports on its side rose into the air as a swarm. All except one. The wayward drone, rimmed four faint signatures of accretion departed Layer Two with its estimated trajectory headed for Mazzas Junction, and then

Something slipped from his mind. What was he staring at again? He could recall why he was looking at that space

Incog, he realized. There was something there that triggered an Incog.

{Now,} Draus said. {I reckon your minds feelin just as slippery as mine is, and if so, I think we just mightve made contact with a Glaive cell or a group of elite squires. Whatever the case, we got ourselves somethin to investigate.}

That was worth cutting his sightseeing short. {How did you find them?}

{Voidwatch pinged a bit of anomalous data coming from one of their drone carriers after Chambers heard a little this and that from conspiracy boards in some Nether lobby called the Snakes Pit. Might wanna check his mind for more mem-cons.}

{Already did. His old ones ate the new ones.}

{Fuck me.}



{Yeah.}

{Hows Dice?}

{Very productive. Hit another three places for me today. Might do another. Going to feed her some more thaums later. Get her up a Sphere. New canons. Seems unshaken by the city. Just acts. Operates. Does it just because I tell her to.}

Draus laughed. {Shit, Id scout her for the Regs if I was still with the Golds. Shed be star recruit material.}



{Better than you?}

{Hells no. Shes a scrawny little thing. I wouldve eaten her for breakfast and asked for seconds. Alright. Enough banter. You comin over and plannin this run with me or what? See if what we got in our nets a couple of Glaives or somethin less?}

{Yeah,} Avo said. {Open the passage. Call Kae. Chambers just resurrected. Lets do this.}