How far would you go to see justice done? In this small corner of the world, a spiteful queen sought vengeance for the loss of her petty fiefdom by sending their only daughter off to her death. Elsewise, dark forces moved by crook, sword, and wicked engine, all towards brutal and selfish ends. Yet not a Queen, nor a Lord, not a soldier, nor a freak could imagine the history that they had inherited.

For a thousand years of short-sighted bickering, their infighting culminated in nothing more than the stagnation of their culture. A million voices that called out desperate, hungry, and alone could never join together in chorus. They wrote no new songs. Their fables were hopeless fever dreams. As long as they refused to look back to the greatness that they were toppled from, they were doomed to repeat their mistakes and remain trapped in their inequity.

Bee wretched. Collapsing to her knees, the world flooded back to her with startling clarity as her tongue disconnected from the beast’s armoured face. With the lashing of the wind and the hot buzzing of the insects that swarmed her, she felt pressed upon and held down to the iron platform. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to focus on the light, the image of alien glyphs still hanging in her mind.

Bee’s tongue trailed over the cold iron platform, disengaged from the Small Arms Defender towering over her — one of the city’s combat drones, she now understood on some intuitive level. Was what it said true? This Caretaker, was it the Crucible that her mother spoke to her of? How long had they been fighting for a cause that was a lie? None of it made sense to her.

The child gasped for air as her tongue retracted back into her throat, heaving to fill her lungs through the flutes on her back. An organic call, thunderous, issued from the unfathomable city above. Bee felt it in her bones as in her ears, with her teeth and chest plates rattling.

“Okay,” she screamed out, pulled and pushed and pressed upon from all sides by the patchers. “Okay! Please, take me, I’ll go! I’ll go! Please— Stop, I’ll go!”

But no matter how much she sobbed and begged, the swarming did not stop. She was plucked upwards into the air, dragged by her arms and legs by countless city drones.

Only when she was out of reach did the swarm break. The Eidolon looked up into the night, following the upward trajectory that they took the gods-borne child with her twelve shining eyes. Her hand gripped the sword tight, and she let loose an angry hiss. She would not be denied.