Another wave of pressure drifted over Khadam’s head. She could feel the Emperor’s hand, making gestures over her. Commanding her implants with his will.

She wanted to kill him. To cut his power, and turn him off. But she couldn’t even breathe without his permission.

This time, the mechanical implants of her eyes adjusted in their place. Irising open and closed, searching for the light. A sudden glare, as they clicked back on. She gasped and shut her eyes, and tried to pull her hands up to cover them.

Her shoulder twitched, but did not respond.

She grit her teeth, and tried again. Straining, growling, pulling until she could hear her own teeth scraping against each other, and the muscles on her neck bulged. She gasped, and collapsed her head back against soft linen.

“You took my machines.”

“I did.”

“My bike?”

“Yes.”

“The android?”

“Is she not yours?”

Every single implant in her body was effectively dead to her impulses. She couldn’t even open up the details of her heart. Which meant… He could have killed me. If he has control over my heart, he could have simply turned it off and…

“How did you do this to me?” Khadam said. Trying to blink away the vision, the after image of the Herald still clinging to everything. Everything, dark and dying. “You have to turn it on.”

“I’ve never seen one before.”

“Turn it on or kill me!” she shouted. Her pulse, quickening in her veins, as the world went dark and there was only him. “He’s everywhere. Turn it on. I can see him-”

The Emperor exhaled a great sigh. A flash. A sound, like a bone snapping in her skull. Khadam’s sight creeping slowly back as she panted, and panicked, and tried to calm herself.

“You know,” The Emperor said. “Poire listened to me. He drank in everything I said. You didn’t. So I had to show you. I would have preferred not to do that to you, but when you finally come to understand, I do think you will forgive me. In time. Now, get up.”

Another grand sweep of his hand, and Khadam felt something clench in her abdomen. And then, at her impulse, it unclenched. Her muscular and joint implants, and all the micro constructs that kept her biological functions at performance were answering her calls again, but their signal was weak. Tuned down. Even sitting up was a struggle that left her sweating.

The temple was sparsely decorated. Ivies clung to the stone walls, trained to follow trellises and wrought-iron torch sconces. There was no need for torchlight here, when the sun shone so brightly inside. Even the slender fountains, water features bubbling up in their pools, danced with sparkling sunlight. She could hear doves, cooing in their roosts. And the rushing of wind. How high up are we?

Beneath her, soft, white linens covered a firm mattress, which lay upon a stone dais in the center of the temple. If she were anywhere else, she would have thought she had fallen back in time, to early antiquity. Not a machine in sight, save the Emperor standing away from her. She had no doubts he was watching her every move.

Khadam tried to rise from the bed. Her legs didn’t move with the rest of her body, and she fell off the stone dais. A crash of limbs, pain stabbing up her elbows and wrists, burning her. Her cheek smacked against the stone, and she felt the impact in her brain, all the way to the otherside of her skull. And when she cried out, she found there wasn’t any air in her lungs. She could only lay there, gasping.

“I said get up.” The Emperor curled his fingers into a claw, and raised his hand.

A cold rush surged through her veins. Nanites, numbing the pain with their unique chill. Even her face pressed against the stones went cold.

Khadam gritted her teeth. Trying to summon the will for another attempt.

“You are not the first to be trapped in your body. It’s frustrating, isn’t it?”

She let out a strained sound from her throat as she tried to push herself up from the floor. Grunting and gasping with the effort just to lift her arm, just to crawl across the smooth, polished floor. Her own joints fighting against her.

It was all she could do to prop herself up the stone dais. Her head lolling down to her chest. Straining to lift her eyes to look at the Emperor.

“The Herald…” Khadam said, “What have you done with him?”

“He is only a Herald. A sign of something else, yet to come. And not a very good one, at that.”

Khadam flicked her eyes around the room. Sunlight pouring in from every angle. No walls in this prison, only columns and balconies, and open blue skies. The android was nowhere to be found.

“And those cubes of yours,” the Emperor said. “Quite the little invention. Had I known what you could do, well,” the Emperor spread his hands in a faux apology. “Well, you’re here now.”

“What have you done to me?”

“All I promised to do,” the Emperor sighed, a deeply human sound. As he rose to his full height, the joints in his body cracked like the breaking of trees. His height seemed to block out the sun. “I told him I would hold you in place. And, as he asked, you will not be harmed. Though, that is far kinder than what you would have done to me. Your kind never could accept me for what I am.”

“What are you?”

His lips quirked into a smug smile, impossible not to hate. “I am the only one who can save you.”

Disbelief painted her face. Couldn’t he see what he was doing?

“You are saving no one by letting him live,” she spat. “Where is he? Where are you keeping him?”

“Khadam, listen to me,” He said it as if talking to an impertinent child, in the middle of a tantrum. “You will not reach him.”

“I must. It’s the only reason I’m here. I have no quarrel with you. I have to kill him,” she said. “Please, you have to let me go.” Her jaw was set, her face burned that she had to grovel like this.

“You would murder your own kind? Another human? Did the fracturing really turn you all into such savages? Look at you. Coldsmith. You ruled planets, once. And all the things you built. All the constructs. And when you worked with the Architects, oh! Such beauty your corporations and clans could make.”

She stared wildly up at him. No words could express how twisted and lost he was. Couldn’t he see what he was doing?

Perhaps he wants to kill us all, Khadam thought. Hardcoded to hate humans. “Are you with the Swarm?”

“The Swarm?” He laughed, a sound that seemed to buzz from the stone floor of this highest temple. “The Swarm has had ten thousand years to adapt. Ten thousand years, hunting down the last dregs of humanity. Obviously, it has failed,” the Emperor nodded at Khadam. “Without adaptation, all things are destined to die and be forgotten along with the rest of this universe. When the time comes.”

“The time has come,” Khadam said. “The destroyer is in our midst.”

“Is that really why you have come all this way? To destroy the destroyer?”

“I would die for this.”

“So much faith.”

Khadam was silent a moment. The way he said it almost made it feel like a compliment. So much faith. She shook her head, and tried to sit up taller. More proud. With her own implants pushing back, resisting her, sitting proud was hard work.

“All great acts requires faith. You must be willing to be brave, exactly when bravery is most difficult.”

The lights on the Emperor’s mask flickered briefly, and she thought she saw a piece of metal switch with another. “Why Khadam,” he said. “I think that’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard from you yet. Yes, I will have to consider that one… for a while.”

“I thought you were an emulation,” Khadam said.

“Yes, which only means I have more to ponder it with. You still have no idea how complicated I am, up here, do you? You still think I’m like one of your simple machines.”

“Aren’t you?”

“How simple is a human? So if you say that I am, consider what makes you different.”

“You are not human. You are made of the wrong elements, and your brain was built by human hands.”

“And you? You were born to a family of caregivers, correct? An embryo in a tube, gifted to a collective. How many hands built you? I am like you, Khadam, and I am so much more than you. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.”

“You want to emulate me?”

“I want to help you ascend. This universe is damned, Khadam. All existence here is under siege, and we are losing the war. In fact, most of us don’t even know what we’re fighting.”

“And you do?”

The Emperor appeared to ponder this, as he walked a slow circle around her stone dais. His body moved with easy grace. An ancient grace. He ended at one of the balconies, resting his hands on the railing as he peered over his city and over his world.

“There is something out there,” he said.

“What are you talking about? We have been to the ends of the existence. There is nothing out there.”

“Of this existence!” the Emperor seized upon that word, “There are other existences.”

“Pure conjecture.”

“Is it? Look at the Scar, Khadam-” and he gestured wildly out of the balcony. “Look at it!” Khadam’s neck acted in unison with his gesture. Her whole body raised, and her head twisted to look directly at the Scar. Only her eyes belonged to her. Damn him.

Damn whoever made you.

“It’s untestable. It can never be proven. People have tried. They’ve gone through. Where are they? They’re all gone. No one has heard from them, or seen them. No one has heard from or seen anything that went through.”

“I have. One left a message for us.”

Khadam blinked. If it was true... It could mean anything. He could be lying. “Who? What did they say?”

“They said enough to let me know it worked,” the Emperor said. “The Mirror worked.”

His shoulders outlined by the dim, gray light of the Scar, almost shining around him. As if he could feel her watching him, he turned to regard her, all those strange contorted features of his face fixed upon hers. She felt like he was peeling her every reaction apart. Measuring everything she did, as if he could almost read her thoughts. But those are mine.

“What mirror?” Khadam asked.

“The one I was working on, before they put me away.”

“Who put you away? Who made you?”

“I don’t like to think of myself as made, I like to think of myself as being born.”

“Emulation is against the Agreements. It was outlawed before Seedfall. All of you were destroyed. No one would dare, even after we were fractured-”

“I was there when the flow was woven. I was a pioneer. I was long before any fracturing.”

“You? Or your maker?”

“I am my maker. And he lives on in me. My name?” he paused dramatically, “I was called Rowan Clast.”

The fountains burbled. A dove cooed somewhere outside the temple.

Khadam furrowed her brow, “Who?”

The Emperor’s nostrils, half-covered by that mask, flared open. He rolled back his shoulders. Khadam thought she saw the corner of his mouth twitch. “So, they erased my legacy. I suppose none of it matters now. They’re all dead. Emorynn, and all her sycophants.”

The First Prophet? Khadam thought. He was there with her?

“And,” the Emperor continued, “The Tria Corpora, my old home. May the Swarm forever feast on its corpse. That’s where Rowan began his work on me. For decades, for nearly a century, he worked in the employ of the Tria, with what little resources they would give him. He spent his life emulating his own mind when everyone else said it was impossible. The mind is too complex to ever reach parity in the flow. Fools. I pioneered the flow. And then, as soon as he finished, as soon as brought his magnificent creation to light, they had the gall to call him a criminal. They outlawed my work!” He enunciated this with a fist against one of the columns of the temple. Not only did it break, the whole column shattered as his hand smashed through. The roof shuddered, and the water in all the fountains jumped.

The Emperor idly rubbed at his fist, smearing blood on both hands.

A cluster of bots, like palm-sized spiders, crawled out of pockets that lined the ceiling and the floors, small enough that Khadam had thought they were just for drainage. They worked quietly to repair the stone, spitting out stone resin and weaving it with their forearms. Two of them dropped on the Emperor’s shoulder, and clambered down his arm to his hand. They stretched new skin over his self-inflicted injury, cleaned up the wound, and dropped off, scuttling back into their pockets in the floor.

From her place on the floor, Khadam shuddered. Not at the machines, those she could appreciate. It was his casual disregard for his own body that unsettled her…

“When they outlawed my life’s work, I fled,” the Emperor said, more calmly now. “I made so many versions of myself. I embedded new knowledge and skills into my mind, and I took away the parts that held me back. And then, I realized I had to hide myself away, because they never stopped hunting Rowan, did they? They couldn’t see how precious my work was. And when they imprisoned him - when he was betrayed - I remained. The final culmination of all his work.”

“The First Prophet betrayed you?” Khadam asked, incredulous.

“Emorynn? She was too far gone at that point to muster anything other than her madness. But Sen,” his fist curled, “And that damned lover of hers, whispering in her ear. Turning her against me…”

His fists were clenched so tight, she could see his knuckles turning white. Lines of anger ran down his face, tugging at his jaw. Almost as if his hate was real, and not the product of his programming.

“They damned themselves,” the Emperor said. “When they outlawed me. For I was ever the only way forward.”

“You are an abomination. A half-thing, believing you are whole. They were right to outlaw you.”

He frowned at her, “If they were right, then where are they now? They went to such great lengths to destroy me. And in the end, they killed themselves anyway. Of course, the Sovereign would turn against you. But I alone survived the Swarm.”

“How?” Khadam asked. She couldn’t help it. Rodeiro’s clan lived on a station precisely because of the Swarm. The only way to escape the Sovereign’s clutches was to run, to hide, and to never stop moving. When she left on her final mission, they chose that nameless planet precisely because it was so innocuous and hidden from the Sovereign. “How did you escape?”

“I already told you,” he said. “The Swarm is nothing to me.”

“But you were made by human hands. It should have hunted you.”

“It is as thoughtless as the day it was born. I find it so deliciously ironic. The very thing you created to save humanity did just the opposite. I suppose when the visions came, and the disease followed, all logic was cast off. But I know how to fix that. I know how to fix everything.”

“You lie.”

“You misunderstand.”

“There is one way to salvation. Only one way to prevent the death of all things.”

Khadam felt a sudden pressure all over her body. Twisting her limbs in ways she didn’t want them to twist. Making her stand in front of the Emperor, craning her neck to look up at his face.

“Listen to me, Khadam. You are powerless to prevent death. This universe is damned, and there is only one way out. Your Herald is a tool of deception. He is nothing more than a false goal, a distraction from that which lives beyond. You must see this. What other explanation?”

“The visions-”

“Did all of humanity become so gullible? Where are the skeptics? No. I suppose it would take a narrow-minded fanatic to come all this way. What I would give, for the days of reason. Even Sen was more apt to listen than you.”

“Where is he?”

“Poire is safe, because he is small. Because he is nothing. The Swarm will not notice him.”

Steadfast, Rodeiro’s voice came to her. Willing to be brave. Every step, harder than the last. Stone may break, and metal may bend. But your faith must be unyielding.

But he had never told her it would weigh so much. That her own body would be bent against her. That she would reach her goal, would talk with the destroyer himself, and find the way was shut by the product of her own people.

She hated this being that called himself Everlord. Hated him more than she had ever hated anything, because he should know better. He had survived everything, and still chose to be wrong.

“Where-” Khadam strained to get her voice out, fighting the clawing grip of her own implants on her throat, “Where is he?”

“You call him the Herald of Ruin. But you must know that your ruin is already here. What kind of Herald comes after the message has been given? The human genome is dead. Irretrievable, despite all of Auster’s vain attempts to breed it out. How many times did he try? How many new species did he create? None of them ever will ever come close to our potential.”

Khadam tried to shake her head, but the Emperor was in control of everything but her thoughts.

She had seen the avians, and all the xenos on Gaiam. They were so much more than animals. So close. And in all the months she had been on the Cauldron, she had seen not a speck of the vision disease among them. Why not?

“Even Auster’s favorite children, with all their sight and all their understanding,” the Emperor mused to himself, “Even they squander their potential. The human genome is dead, Khadam.”

Khadam had never heard of this ‘Auster,’ but the fruits of his labors made it clear: there was a way to go back to the way things were.

If only she could stop the destroyer.

”You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Khadam said. Wanted to believe it, too. But if he was lying, then where was everyone else? The Vault below the Cauldron. All those in vitro chambers, smashed and empty.

“It frightens you, doesn’t it? The truth. But there is more, there is always more. Through me, all can live forever. The flow can be duplicated, as many times as you wish.”

“You aren’t human-”

“You cling to your chains, even as they strangle you. Are you so intent on throwing your life away, again, for a universe that is already dying? It is written, Khadam. The Historians have seen it, too. The change will come. No one can stop it. We graze like sheep on easy hills, never wanting to be more than we are. The change is a gift, then. One that we have ignored for too long. I will not ignore it any further. I will ascend, Khadam. And I want you to come with me.”

A smile lit up his face, as bright as the sun. His demeanor softened as he lowered his head closer to hers. “I want to help you, Khadam,” the Emperor said with a voice gentle enough to calm an ocean storm. “I will do for you what my Maker did for me. But you must be willing. I will help you ascend.”

“You will kill us all.”

The Emperor leaned down over her, his head so close. That terrifying appendage supporting him from the ceiling. Helping him look down into her eyes. And then, she felt a burning, aching sensation in her arms. In all the joints in her body. Her hands, moving without her consent. Her eyes, being forced to look down at herself, at all the silver lines of the augments, hidden just below her skin.

“Look how close you are, already. How much of you is machine? And how much, useless flesh?”

I want you to join me, Khadam. I want you to ascend alongside me. But you must be willing.”

No, she thought. Straining. Willing, with all her mind. No! Her teeth grinding against each other, until it felt like they might crack. Urging her implants to do other than the Emperor was forcing them to do. To believe they were doing something else.

“Yes,” his body twitched, “Yes, Khadam. The Light Beyond calls to us. Has been singing to us, all this time.”

Change. Khadam didn’t think about it. She just did it. Such a simple, savage gesture. All her body, working as one to form saliva in her mouth. And spit on the Emperor’s mask.

Such a pathetic display of defiance. And when she did it, her body collapsed, unable to move even a fraction of an inch. But she had defied him.

The spit slid down the bulbous curve of his mask. He wiped it away.

“I can see it's going to take time to change your mind. Fortunately, we have plenty of that.”