CW: reality ambiguity, biotechnological integration, body horror, cold, death imagery, demons, apocalypse

(ε)

AFTERBIRTH

After Ino's Veil executed its kill trigger Morgan found himself, knees gathered, by a pink flame. It had swept in descent from the hollowed, chambered structure held in sight above him. The light vein red had sept to dance and pull at his eyelids. Cloying barbs as if, hooking into the lid, twisting. A beacon beyond stone and walls of rushing ice. It had pulled him there; it had been pale, afire. It'd been there for him to see.

That he forgets at first. It would come back to him, as if from a dream, even though there had been no sleep in which to dream.

Staring down, his gene-weaved legs swing over the hollow's mount, where beneath a passage-way crawls and gasps its way to snaking contact with a widened plane. He could fall, could tumble. Out into the directive the Clean Flame is assigned to paralysis and status. Sub-filing a routine away, he suspects. When he thinks about it, it's a clean run, no conscience or vengeance. He could fall out into the winter storm inhabited by the changelings who have emerged to take the place of the Exiles. He saw them, killed them. He was there to be killed by them.

This hollow is a Tender, long-dessicated, not his own. For his fresh death if and yet. This one died so long ago it has slipped into the neolithic stone that braces the general digitalis. It has crawled behind and raised the lithic phase above it like a shield. So as to withdraw from the crash of ice and burn of the Frost. Find itself huddled and warm, feigning vibrational death. All traces of the Flora which relegated it are gone save crisp, flat leaves that go off in psychic shots when he steps over them.

For now, though, he scatters them over the snaking passage. Watches them sink before a landmark of crystal-enshrined vale, which itself catches an updraft which scatters the leaves too, fro, and from these he decides, without an Alt to follow, to see if he's absorbed anything from his meetings with Laeath. He watches the leaves as they scatter, and when he has generated enough entropic charge through patterning them with the Psyche Halo, he sets Ino's Veil online again.

Searches it for dependencies. Upgrade packages can be unlocked routing through node-signals set to process a ring at a time. This is more, though, to make sure it's not missing anything serious. He'd panicked; the Veil went spitfire; he had no idea how much it had left. He checks the seams; poking at the psycho-projected lace, running fingertips across diode lines, nano knit into every strand. Not more than psychic braidworks, and the diodes from filaments coursing from the Psyche Halo. So when he deactivates the aura, it immolates, implodes in a quick twist of fire, and is gone.

The smoke around him thins to steam, then wisps away, leaving the ice of stasis thawed, melted into brooks, rivulets of clear water. He is left with a vague imprint of prophecy, cumulus of thought drifting through his re-husked shell. Echoes of ghosts trapped & stranded from aeons of life on Orcha Mutate before, he thinks, it froze; the Clean Flame told me it felt like coming alive. After a voice composed of pain, of ache picked up by the halo through the Skein had...

That's right, he thinks, you can't skip steps. The Skein now won't let me, anyway.

The way he knew it first, sitting here, it was the blood light. Now with the Veil offline it is his Psyche Halo listening to the Skein. Somewhere beyond frozen air, he thinks, is foundry, are the tessellations Laeath called the Petal Chains, lapped into by the Exarchs, bled dry, to rust, and in the freeze, ready to break. If he figures right, they're the way light streams into the Skein; pale and unknowing, innocent and hopeful. So the Skein gets darker every moment. It is echoed, looping loneliness; it is terror, and at its fringes exists jealousy, and possession. Thawed, he wonders if he can reach it.

He is about to stop listening to the looped, pheromone-loaded statal thaw when a signal blossom’s across the halo's field: this stark alone the signal is faint. Still it trills in susurrant fuzz.

o, the stars you miss while you sleep & the thoughts we keep,

beneath

Is how the Psyche Halo translates it, stray errant thought, but he hears then, across the fuzz, a clicking clatter like tiny jaws working, chewing through the fuzz, a hunger for the resonance he'd only associate with Fauna. As if all Markers haven't passed beyond the Clean Flame to be primordial communed with Orche herself. Taking with them all they had seen and known of Mutate. Prophetic-work and then that too is gone, leaving him with the knowledge of knowing it. Finding a state; knowing there is a fate line that is heaviest, that weighs downwards collapsing other threads to cradle it, to valley it, but not knowing. It is the not-knowing that infiltrates the Psyche Halo, a remembrance that he was one of many before the Veil schemata was synapse-imprinted onto him through his nerves, his aches, the acid buildup coating his skin-shadow.

When he was one, before, what would have been Proto-Exile but Husk-Shedder imprinted; the Exile is in you then. The shadow of his skin bleats beneath his skin's phase-presence.

The Clean Flame had lied to him. In the Barrows he had found other Exiles, found that it lied to all Husk-Shedders, but only told the truth to the Emp-Druids.

Beneath his quilted hood his hair is thatchy and the tips that peek out are streaked white with frost. It strands white lace into his field of vision and for a moment lost in that tangle is the waver. The Alt. So lost that he doesn't think he saw it right.

A light, burning, but a rumour of it soon faded out, a ripple into frozen digitalis.

MISTAKES IN MANY WAYS

That he sees and it's soon gone.

He sees instead the Exarchs gone spliced with the shadow-traces the Oracles—of the Gates, of the Coven—have left behind—as spliced offspring from the mother brood, Phassa tells him. Shadowed, spider legged ghost forms, crawling up and past him across the facing mouth of the hollow.

He has time from the Psyche Halo's attunement, sensing them first, via the latent background ebb of Ino's Veil. Time to back away. It ripples a cold blue fire through his palm. Around it the white static haze of the corruption burns in tendrils of glittering steam.

He wants to know why she'd tattle out her mistress like that, map it out through the Skein. Phassa tells him it's a wave, one she herself seldom sees, that wisps below her own inner space. Speaking to an ache which being formatted into the grub skin has detached from him, into the Psyche Halo.

A deep soul rending after his Tender's loss and the mirage of the Glitch.

He walks down the passage that has led him here, snakes around the iced, mounded neonic bed-loam.

All that seeded digital flame somewhere beneath his feet to stay useless encased. Asleep, but could the Veil wake it? To run lacelines, pattern lines, he guesses, now that the digitalis has emerged from Orche's chrysalis.

Are you that dead format? He whispers to his Psyche Halo. Phassa's voice answers back.

I suppose,

That would kill me, he thinks to himself. From where he has retreated the Exarchs pass by; spider-legged shadows. The light they cast flickers, knives pitch black in slivered serration over the ice.

From then forwards ever since you began to lament. You in general, the collective divergences. Before your enmeshed enslavement to the frenzy of ...

He waits.

Flora and data. Together awaking your garden cities. You were like lilies floating up the surface of water skim. Food for the sea-crows and the water demons.

As a ghost to herself she will, he thinks, look like my Oracle to me. The borrowed form of her spider skin.

By now the ache in his heart for his Tender and Alt sustains the current of Phassa's voice as a flatline. Steady hum. He tunes it out, what he can, though what's left is slender enough to sting. It pierces. The borrowed form of her spider skin is crawling like shadows they trespassed over the golden sun. Laced into the Clean Flame.

The Clean Flame took seed. Blossomed, imploded into its own nega-gravity well. The Flora prayed to it. The Fauna were drawn to its warmth.

But who are you?

Fractal flesh.

Cammy was more real than that. Cammy and the hollows of her eyes.

Engulfed and so are we immolated.

Phassa again.

Cursed to suffer this—torment we—bear our betrayals, for the lost and those who—

He has to tune out again. From where he is he hears the clacking of the spliced Exarchs in new lives they have dug out from the seed-fire of the digitalis, the neonic loam and the dead weavings of the departed Oracles. He is far down the passage and the skittering is a distant rainfall, click-clack traces across the silence itself papered over by the Frost’s working of time.

Thousands of gnashings against the frozen neonic.

Meanwhile you could try again, to not hear.

Following flickering white light. A mirage as if passing between the mirrors of his eyes.

Between mirror and lid-skin where truth is massed before it's processed. That truth is in the blood, it is what you lose, in your life, more and more of.

As if when vat-born he thinks, we knew ourselves. We were lied to, got our destiny-signatures hacked into chrysalis patterns so that our truth is an attunement, we spend our lives looking for balance. An attunement which stressed Neutral Lotus or so said the Oracles.

The spliced Exarchs that flow across in surf past the maw of the ice cave are a thousand shadows; real in some way, enough to suck the stasis blood dry; and yet as shadows, clacking in the distance, still far off.

The trace signature sparkles across the diode-veins that map this exit to the iced earth structure. As not of itself but part of the neonic loam. Marking it, scattered over it like flower petals, loose, strewn, yet always in design of movement and vector arranged.

White flame in skip steps over the diode-veins that brought to the surface have always been, must have always held the seed-fire like leys. The iced earth is dense, heavy, branches into labyrinthine patterns and the trace skips of light are all he has to plot a coursework from him, the Alt's signature in the white electric and bright.

In many ways the same mistakes. In many ways, he thinks, because as he walks, following the trace, the skitter-skatter of the spliced ghost form Exarchs fades to quiet, a breathy, floating silence before the moans of pain begin, begin to echo through the iced earth, carry off the walls, a flood of sound while the trace line glitters.

BLISTERED LIPS

While the trace line glitters he wishes it would subsume itself into visual space, be digital flesh instead of digitalis, but Dear has his own waveform thoughts, own waveform motives. Aether-fleshed into digitalis but exploring the sinews of ice. Morgan wishes he could get closer, though he feels no heat, just slight tremors of digitalis and the Skein below it, where usually it takes a divine, heaven-radiant planar expression.

In the digital frost of Mutate it must descend, be the hellish line instead, and he thinks he sees his Alt use that, be brushfire; an immolation moult, take flame as shortcut for his Marking protocols. Use it to guide both himself and Morgan.

That's the white flame, he thinks, that I see. Even now steaming, splitting, forking in tendrils, blanching the gloomy, hollowed ice earth with light, if only for moments. Keeping it together in the temporal pre-death the way he did when he was a fresh skip, or of course, Morgan has no idea how long that was.

A stable skip. It's the bright flame that offsets what echoes through the iced neonic loam structure; howls of pain rising in clustered forms. Worn voices speaking in a tongue he doesn't know. Blistered lips, he thinks, and sees before him shadows moving in the passage.

HAPTIC ACID

The shapes are lithe yet creep as if worn out. Their shadows cloak themselves into black dreamfall, an obsidian ocean running the rivulets of the iced earth. The veinlines of the seedfire that bloom in scarlet quicks could be, Morgan thinks, the patterns of her eyes.

The patterns of her eyes vein-lined are—in case.

In case his Alt and other Fauna need to know her by them, By the ground they skip over, bear no tether to. There is no tether to death or decay here, which is what she wants, in the end, and to know her muses, her Fauna by them.

But by the bite of the Frost he knows it's all blood to her, sorrows harvested from the Skein, the same way Phassa's pain speaks to him translated through the Psyche Halo. To be tuned into like that like he's a waveform, though one already cross-swept and set into Orche's killing auto-spec. On a sheer trip after the Clean Flame’s deceit, bonding to Phassa, the one who dotes in illused death. He sees that in the eyes of the Ghouls, in being unable to, for their eyes are dark hollows, and they remain on him.

So as he walks by them with his weaves condensed against his flesh by

the dry, dead ice he maps himself somewhere in the swallowing black pools.

Knows more by their deathsight where he is and where he's been than his sight and memories both in flux. Distrusting.

He keeps losing his Alt behind the shadows of their frames and Morgan thinks if he loses Dear for good he'll never find him again. A distant flame flickering out in skips and beats gliding in electric slivers over the iced earth.

How the iced earth has returned to her gauntlet, is her dressage, her veil to wear against the judgements of those who would look.

The Alt though, blinks into disappearance for a second that has him worried. A long stretch is enough, enough to see the outline in tessellated smoke which drifts to wreathe the grotesque nomads, settle on angular shoulders that unknot themselves, cling to the white nacreous smokestuff, in pale velvet fluff.

In constancy when you are unknotted, says Phassa.

In the unfiltered coriolis of her thought melting through the psyche's halo he gets enough of it to burn his own mood black. Her jealousy. In her speaking through the ache in the Skein, where there should be no ache. Tuning in again.

Dear addresses in ritual circles these new gaunt, twisted figures clad in tattered garb, band, brace, gauze. Sparking fire in the hollows of their death eyes, shining in pale blue flame. They've gone mute, filling the tableau with silence. Morgan affects serenity, walks among them, looks closer.

Draws himself together.

Their lips, he sees, are stained; mottled by a Floral setting itself apart from the torpored fire of the paler Flora native of the digitalis. It bruises their teeth, which are needles, silver flame in polar aurora, slivered to jagged blades. The skin of the seam, he sees, torpored—where the light runs. The ragged demons, pale, gaunt, starved, and trussed by gauze are beyond it. They are from layers above. The Skein itself layers below.

The ones nearest him chew, look straight on. Their eyes death sieves like the vacant husks he'd had to immolate. Black hollows flickered with subtrenched grey and welled with grief. He can see if he peers re-arrangements in the stems behind, the Psyche Halo tuning that into flickers of ice grey. The stems basing their skulls swivel. He sees them, crooks like submerged twigs in water, bent as if with years the skulls they hold aloft don't possess.

They are all swivelled to face the Alt, where their eyes linger, slipping past Morgan's looks furtive. Lean limbs banded and knotted with muscle more waxen fibre than sinew. In the light of the Alt their eyes are blue. Dear's own eyes are pinpricks of black, darting.

As Morgan watches the waxen, disfigured strangers begin to pick at themselves. Flakes like dustings, nail clippings, crescented, spinning, spiralling into the ice-entombed earth. Prised loose then in scablike facets. Out of the handful three have begun to lick and gnaw at their under knuckles. Their eyes are dead in capture of cerulean, abscessed. Morgan meets them, one by one, each time wrenching his sight away to nest in the hollows of the next. The cerulean, though, never returns the favour. Dear's cold blue light rushes the frozen earth.

Dear in the flush pale is new again, crossed the stitching of Marker threads over time.

Then there is the sound of spider-legs, there is Phassa's threading of the Skein, and the creatures named in anomie-soul, the knits in his platelets, as Ghouls as one glaze their eyes over the facing passage wall. Shadows smear and scramble in tendril outline behind the ice. The hair on the back of Morgan's neck is afire against his woven collar.

The Ghouls, transfixed by him, the Alt, and the Mutate Exarchs in sequence, continue to gnaw while their eyes swim.

Like that all gathered here swim, even as the ragged Ghouls begin to claw, gouge, move lower, descend inwards into their own torsos.

(Σ) VERSE 4.5

CONJOIN

The braided apocheir of the Swim stretches out and the crossings in braids beyond glow, distant fires as if trailing along thermals in sequence, pulsing in skips of darkness as they blink out and others blink in, a code, she thinks, if she could read it.

Still even in the braided apocheir she thinks she hears whispers, murmurs that breach the braid, spectral, eking substance and fading out before she can assign meaning to it. The pulsing of twines beyond runs like a code coursing the now unspooled glaze of dark violet light, the shimmer that marks all that can be seen of the Swim. Faint voices murmur as if to agree with the pulse, though that pattern must be secret to itself.

The dark violet light defines the braids of the Swim. The crossings are long stretches of rippling shadow meeting in mists which remind her of the swirl of the screensky, like rippling vapour—the glow rises from the gulfs as an icy glitter to define terrain. Here to mark this crossing is the signal fire which burns a cold blue and another apocheired spark floats beside it.

Sparks are cyan hued in the violet aurora. Gone is the chassis or plating or woven limb. Instead of a burning pale light, this one is tattooed with the marks of the Libra which spider in script like trawl up the spark's form. She speaks in a voice that cuts in and out in a halting signal.

"Greetings—veler—Been here—here no longer."

"Who are you?" Lesia says. Her haptic reception must be damaged; the apocheir strings itself in light afresh, new, and must adjust all inputs and outputs to the variant currents of the Swim.

"Hexa—name—give. The one who called you has—on. Gone. I too—not stay.

—Repair signal for haptics—fire.

Beware—corruption. Darkness—searching. Key of the Aortic."

Lesia waits for more.

Fragments slice through the haptic wash.

"You—alter—Trauma—extremis."

"Trauma," Lesia says.

The spark is disintegrating in plumes, tufts curling from each other, fading.

"Conjoining."

In the far mounds of dead earth laced with sears of codelight like ribbon she sees another signal fire. Burning a thin needle of light that reaches in glint like a starbeam before flaring out from sight. Like the way optic scanners could be tricked by the fire-play of the screensky, leave a stabbing imprint of colour in the Still-Void.

She departs when the spark is fully dissolved. Not a true spark. A tape-delayed algo of haptics set to live and die before the target of its message. Down here, she thinks, they've been doing things with haptics we never thought about. Not as Andros.

Her auric robe cloaks her light-form’s passage. So to any spark or embedded demon, she would be a flicker over the shadows of terrain, hard to pick apart from the code-veins themselves.

SECOND SIGHT

By the next fire a Demon waits. Hulking, swelling above the flame, perched beside it on coiled haunches. Eyes skeined with web refract in curtained segments, bloodlines lacing black hollows. She’s still some distance away; it hasn’t seen her.

The fire is burning a phosphor green in a hollow pit of dead earth, risen in a ridge like a shallow bowl. The flame trails curl into darkness and past that the braided terrain runs forks and splits of occluded snaking paths, that wind into unseen areas and are soon lost in the crags and mounds of dead earth. Only the code-veins glimmer as if transmuting light from a hidden source. Above the swirling mists meet in dark furls like amniote clots where ribbons and curls pulse against each other in coagulation. Aetherial ooze swirls in rippling lakes where it is not thinned to veils of darklight waning into wisp, like the shades had been in the short instant they had been dissolving, pale grey tendrils of smoke rising to join the darker mists. Not a screen-sky, Lesia decides, but a no-sky, a clotted sky.

She thinks the clotstuff of the Braided Swim must be what had fucked with her haptic reception. If that stuff is pure haptic it’s too much at once, and the quantum twine that carries over from shell to spark as the contents of her morass apocheir has no interface for it. What keeps Lesia Lesia even as light-form. Her Tactica, too, must be tessellation-ware, translated through the binary the Patrons first framed, encased in simwork that straddles the Veldt. They see us like we see them, in our vats of hydrogel; but they sequenced us, she thinks. LAYSE-CHI was one of many Hubs they feed off. They evolved to terrasim, to shape embryonic apocheirs from the Still-Void they had gathered to enshroud the world like a cloak, an altered atmosphere that bled them from themselves until they had pooled together to shape and dwell within the fluxstuff of the Veldt.

In unlocking the Swim, our own underworld, we go somewhere they can’t see us. We found it; they didn’t create it for us. Merely sewed it with quantum twines spark routes from the still-void. From birth as larval ghost squelching we grieve inconsolable unless safely Cradled. Only when the hyperborean sleep occurs do we square themselves with any encroaching parameters.

She skims the bleak turf, making her way to the fire and the Demon. Tactica here functions as conduit to gestalt, as not viz overlay but striations in the thrum frequency of your quantum twine. Which it presents as a heartbeat simulacra, a diegetic inner metronome. So it uses the beats and their echoes skipping over silence to map a grid. The grid, this time, is a gouged-in inner codex implantation that right away begins to scrape in mental scripture from the aether-plaitings that swirl above them as the fire laps at the raised earth hemming it in.

She’s a short skim from the Demon by now. A mound of crystalline light, sorn over with tufts of ragged and fringed stone-grey flesh. Timbred by seam lines the grey flesh plastered to the massive light-body trembles still for all its strength. Her haptics translate a hue; ruin seeping from its centre, festering, pooling within the papered light.

Her haptics translate further: breath, age old concept of. The dark grafts seem clotted of the no-sky, burnt into dry wax in the light; in places where the fringes are fine they shy from the light-body in peel. When it turns to face her its eyes are masked; the graft has marked itself in looping design to cut across the brow, seating the eyes, the skeined hollows.

Her Armata here is voltaic burst, pure haptic fit wrenching through the braided apocheir. These look like photon blasts, uncompressing cores unfurling petals of anti-abraxas. She sets one to latency-readiness but she thinks she wants to talk first, if these things can talk. Only the haptic-translated breath fills the silence, expanding, contracting back into hush. A low static buzz in tremolo sweeping the local braid. Synchronising with the trembling of the blue signal flame.

Her haptic receptors are straining if not malice, a cruel confusion from the Demon. Unsure of her role here as something other than a fluke meal. What does that mean, she wonders. Do these things keep the Swim stable by gorging on what doesn't belong?

"Don't eat me," she messages. "I'm just passing through to find the other side. I won't threaten the under-server."

Now it is sending haptics that approach the clarity of her own. "You may pass by the purity of your flame, but a demonstration is needed." It says this in a voice drenched in reverb and garbling static. So that the haptics arrive broken, but her scanners are adjusting. Once they find the concepts all they need is the sequence, and that can be guessed at. Haptics are machine-gun probabilities that way.

"How do I demo that," she says, frowning. "Detrigger my auric robe?" She doesn't know how. Her light-form defined in braided apocheir is a far cry from her coils, her plating, chassis and headplate. Before she knew how to move and work but now she's starting from scratch. The Demon's lightbody wavers—haptic scanners reading a denial. That wave of flat haptic brings her to herself. She hadn't wanted to decloak, reveal more light to the black terrain. She'd spent her whole Andro life fighting or fleeing, refusing to give in, using the corroding physware version. She is getting used to solitude.

"Stare into the flame." As she does she feels it begin to lap at her quantum twine. It’s a mild sting at first. Soon climbing to a blunt ache that surrounds the twine, grinding it down like a compactor. Searing. Her haptic scanners light up before they overload and she routes from the place within her twine that stores and translates. It's a pink, translucent burn she sees working through the flame, spreading to engulf it until what licks at the apocheir is a colour that burns straight through her; the colour, she knows, her quantum twine would be, if she could see it.

When she collects herself again she is by the pink flame and the Demon is gone.

(ε)

WEAR IT OUT BY LIVING

The Exarchs themselves have no smoke-skeins but are made of them. Their true faces never show and Phassa thinks, fresh off sending a plaiting message through the true, all-hemming Skein, it's a shame hers will. She’ll have no patience after that effort. She'd embedded a return trip nerve-exe and sent it vesselled as tears through the Skein. Re-spawned in the Freeze one of the Exiles who'd needed to be swept from Mutate in order for Orche's chrysalis to go smooth as the ridges in the dunes of Solitude. She could save one of them and chose to.

Because, she thinks, Orche is doing it wrong. She's been scrambled by all the factions she trusted to help her.

By Phassa's sojourns in the Queen’s Gardens, her presence in drift, she tends the Flora. Ensures their growth though she sees only a desert. In that desert one sojourn she sees the ghost schemata, seen to her as motes like tufts of pollen, wisping low amongst the sands, downloads from clustered infospace, digitalis gathering in nebulaic clouds and drifting through the void as overlay. Only the symbiosis between the half-life of the Fauna and the un-life of the Flora kept the early stages of the Chrysalis stable.

She'd thought, I can fade away when I'm no longer needed.

But that ghost schemata had been an encode she'd never seen before, and it had reversed her.

Reversed; she had stood before a font of clear, sparkling water; she had drunk from it. A basin carved of stone set against a background of pure white light. Before she drank she had not known what it was to reverse. To go off-script. To depart her role as Bridge for the Chrysalis. Which means now waiting on the Exarchs with Orche.

Because Acheron, she thinks, should be sleeping...

She knows he is awake.

The Exarchs don't care about all aspects of the Chrysalis. All that bothers them is keeping the Lustre so it preserves the Alts, and without that, no light for them to live inside the Sun. Oracles like saying they control the Sun. In effect, Phassa knows, they wear it out by living in it. sunNET is a storm, a flux of them thinning the light-plasma from the Whispering Sun's heart. Taking their share of it. It's their aspect that churns through the network. In the darkness they leave not shadow but corruption, charring the light-plasma, which can burn now that it has phased from light to digitalism.

So as all gather around the Hivic Throne the Exarchs send whispers, murmurs, to the effect of how nice the Lush looks, how they feel at home here, smoke-stuff no doubt soaking into the regenned Flora and she wonders what they see—lilies, orchids, countess of lovelace—and she still sees the lithic slabs that rise like ribs to serrate the valley. She rolls her eyes before seeing Orche is gazing straight at her. Why wouldn't she be?

So she composes her genned features. All the parts I have to twist around, she thinks. Yet twisting around her also is the smokestuff of the Exarchs like mist shrouding the dead valley, as they soak into the regenned Flora. Are they that shallow? They have the veil of the Oracles but not their insight. Still they are clutching her as they cling to the Flora in the Lush.

This one's murmurs reach her. Still it has always been Orche's breath that matters and when his breath is gone it is hers that reaches, strains sound from somewhere in the air. Of the signs exchanged veiled by the smokestuff between Exarch and Orche she has no way of knowing. Orche's two syllables for her tighten her lips and create a smile she has to work to even define.

Proxy.

What she means is that to every Exarch gathered to her she is just a body. A way of living for the Exarchs must live within the Clean Flame and feel their mists strain taut to corrupt the Lustre, emboss it with pretty lies for the wayward, marring it even as they live within its beauty. Her avatar and role would make a nice change of pace for any one of them.

By living, she thinks, with my knee bent to them, to Orche even keeping them around, we're turning the door shut on whoever passes through; it closes slowly. It scrapes. They notice.

So she knits her lips and as she resets them her genned gut lining flutters and she thinks, never in a thousand aeons, but then she thinks of her secret, and wonders if Orche can make it happen.

Orche waves a lazy arm then, to dismiss them; she doesn't see it, but hears the whisper of its movement; her Clave Heart—her first autospool; it had unravelled through the knit static of her vision as she had grown within the Gardens, before Orche had taken their lushness from her—straining it from the murmurs growing desperate and then hushing.

As Orche's gaze was swallowed it reveals itself again as the Exarchs fade away, and as she watches Phassa she hums, a melody strung low and peaking just to strengthen the sadness of the song. So just to cut it off she says, "Acheron is awake. The Chapel is destroyed."

Orche arches one eyebrow.

Phassa finds herself. "Why tell you so they could squeeze it from you? You love to gossip. Now you can think it over. Figure out if it's something they need to know." In her illused skin she is vined, flower-wreathed, and when she moves, she knows she's a tapestry of shifting leaves and petals. Beneath the veil she is nothing, because, she thinks, I emerged with the hardware that enshrined the garden cities, and there I begin, like a sentence. Dash kills the silence before. Because I was never flesh.

So when I talk, when I feel, is that all 'luse too?

She leaves out the kid who'd messaged her, using the Skein tethered through his Alt reaching Acheron. She says, "O, I don't know who died and left them stewards of the Sun. They just wear it thin."

Orche shakes her head. They both know. Her role is to be intercessor to the Flora, and any concerns she has about corruption of the Chrysalis are null. Not her business except it will swallow all of Orche as it blooms and then she will be darker. More cruel. Her teeth glint the bone white of the lith slabs that in dead air gleam the same way, pounding her with stabs of light. For all that Phassa still weaves the fragrance.

The ancient pheromones, the ones kept even from the Oracles. The souls of the Flora. Tending to the blushed 'luse that she can't see. Doesn't need to see through the stabbing light.

Orche wrinkles her face.

𝒾 𝓉𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒽𝓊𝑒𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓆𝓊𝒾𝒸𝓀𝓈, 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒. 𝓎𝑜𝓊'𝓁𝓁 𝒶𝓁𝓌𝒶𝓎𝓈 𝒷𝑒 𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓈𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒. Because you have no heart to supply it, she doesn't say. Because you don't inspire it in me, Phassa doesn't think.

Doesn’t dare. By now she hears the scuttling, the clacking, and knows that when the Oracles arrive, they will come dressed in their own raiment, in the lushed 'luse woven to their ends shining bright. She also knows with a compress of her breath that she’ll see them as they really are. As she has so many times before, and will, so many times after, crept on endless into any darkness or light.

What they call the Cosmere, the mother brood web into whose folds they claim right to burrow and crawl, but plaited or woven or even plastered to reality and still unseen to most as nothing but the lineage of your personal moment to moment stretching back and forward.

Through the Gates the Coven have found it's more spatial than that. Phassa thinks she'll leave before an Oracle can tell her the same. As long as the Coven has the Gates they’ll grill her all they want, send what they learn straight to Mother Nest.

So instead she begins to tread away. Heading for Solitude, the wastes of the Gardens. Watching as in her visual field the carapaces of the Gardens churn and spin into the desert sands that burn veined with silver fire as if molten diamond trickles through the banks, ekes its way clear to the surface, flushes your eyes out over the dunes where her Clave Heart tells her the stray seed motes of the schemata are waiting.

XAESAH

Phassa charts the re-sewn nerves like a map. If I'm in, she thinks, I need to be able to get out, and vice versa. The dumb kid's Skeinwork, plotted through his Alt (a lazy name, she thinks, for a Marker, for a Fauna even still half-tethered to the ancient light-crafts) is processed so fast by her Clave Heart that she herself is a good handful of waypoints from Orche's proximation of the Queen's Gardens. She checks on herself when she's far enough away to feel safe. Reminds herself her reliance on ghost schematas is a conveyance of her own mote-hood against the Mutate. I'm jealous, she thinks. Because there's a plan and I'm not in it. Not allowed to be part of it.

So what matters is what the Husk-Shedder, now re-husked, had called the Petal Chains, which she knows not as heavy, clasping but as strands, unspooling from monad souls through rivulets in the ink-Skein. She knows them as Xaesah, where the molten glass churns as if cool water, but to him they had been fragments. Later shadow mountains. Already there are stranded hosts that she doesn't even know how to keep track of. Has no access to. In fact has no real affection for. And if she did have that affection, and could track, say, the girl named Cammy, or any other stranded, what would she say through the haptic acid? What would be worth saying through it? Hurts to say, hurts to listen, and most of all hurts to act on.

That's the way it is when you're negative, she thinks, reversed against the encroaching light. Here phased through the Clean Flame the encroachment itself has become light. The planet-chrysalis begins with the guts, with their worms turning inwards, seeking to feast on the fractured and fragmented myocardial. The heartbeat of any cross-wired earth plotting its future intertwining into the Cosmere. As a strand itself and in that way a planar.

Fuck it, she thinks. I did all She asked. So to take what She loves and flee through the wastes, and then break through them.

What does She love? What did I take?

It takes her a moment to remember.

Orche was stained and dyed a follower of Aurachne. For no reason but Aurachne was an Archeana once and Archeana once is always, is a stake to divinity.

WITHOUT GOODBYE

What kind of planar will Orche draw herself into? Phassa turns it over and over in her Clave Heart but the best the Clave Heart can tell her is that it has nothing to say.

She has no claim on Orche, and even if in her jealousy she clogged the works, she would be, she thinks, one of the Queen's mindless martyrs. Then she'd lose even her grasp of her motehood.

Phassa visualises through her Clave Heart. See it as fire, green flame, tendrils hooked to pattern a halo, set against a pallid, limbic grey. The Ghouls have set upon their own flesh and the boy named Morgan signals that in his own meagre role as re-husked Tracer he or what is left of him doesn't know how to stop them. So when Phassa visualises her Clave Heart she's met with a whole set of problems, usually, ones tethered by the barest of margins to her own place and problem set in Orche's peripheries. As in not much is ever certain.

She tries to tell the boy to hang tight. It comes out as

your re-seamt skin sticks to you,

caustic

Implying sub-surface chatter potential but in her stress a gasp of destruction is bared. The boy might know now that his options include immolating the whole tethering dance. Orche's gaze is elsewhere. Now that Phassa has left Orche's eyes are on her. She supposes this sequence she has chosen is all for the best. For some time she's trusted this.

Here the sands of the wastes have spiralled to heaven, in beseechment for tears promised by the star-mapped eyes. They glisten and burn crimson and blend into the curls of cloistered motes. Phassa's floral flesh parts them; it's the quicks of her silica fingernails, a ghost schemata she picked up a while ago and never passed on. Copper clouds split for her.

In the wastes some travels for her is her destiny.

It’s a lightweight mod, skimming the sand-top as a small disc, spinning in place. Still glowing with pale green fire from its discard. She palms it and the auto-transfusion begins; the fire engulfs, subsumes her. This schemata pairs with her first, an upgrade that works with the light-fibres knit so many layers deep in the digitalis. Among the first parts of her. The green fire ignites the mote clouds still thrown in veils over her. Lancing streaks of dust taking flame in the desert night. Where the stars burn in Orche’s data-barrier shroud. Which knits of starlight and yet; the stars we see aren’t the true stars. We see only their echoes, their after-imprint in the digitalis.

When their light finds the skin I wear does it pass through in violence or peace? Am I left changed in some way?

This time it does. Subsumed within the process. As the sand motes burn in streaks of fire. The whole psychic tapestry churned with the psionic font of sunNET. In her eyes clear and burning hums the threshold resonance for it. For a second frozen crystalline that Orche feels and knows. Woven into the deeper plaited synapse of the digitalis.

Then her eyes are the grey of ice.

Great care is to be taken to reach the true Totema. In Neutral Lotus, it is the woven web which laces the synapse to the format. Patterned like snowflakes, gardens of design. This is only because Neutral Lotus has reached adoption-alignment with the Coven. What she saw in the silken strands encoded the collective knowledge of the Gates, which always looked outward. Phassa untethered is looking outward with the same clear eyes. Up-format, she thinks, but there may be a third still.

The wise of the Coven would caution her from such a search.

She has to go.

She thinks on a surface coded from Orche there is no step she can take Orche won’t feel and note. Still the pathic link is broken. She has a chance to depart.

This up-format has told her how.

She conjures in seamless dance of her wrists, marking sigil in the space before her alive with light. Digitalis crashes in jagged glitch setting fire to the synchronic tether to the spatial-physical grid it no longer occupies but must be held to. Must in some way be connected to in case of a reality check. Phassa weaves the way the Coven had, though they had built a home where Phassa needs only a conduit.

Never in my life have I been so entangled, she thinks. Weaving the digitalis. Drawing herself into smoke-Skein, the Coven—all bled dry by the Exarchs, but it is their knowledge she can save—keeping the true tenets of their philosophy beyond Gates harsher and darker but leaving the basic precepts in the translucent mapping of their webs. So that she can follow the third thought, the thought of Aurachne, who was filed, she sees, in a system she can’t understand, as i39: The Way or The Whisper. She had seen herself in the game then and fled to the Gates.

The Way in representation of Aurachne’s seeking of balance, reversed when this philosophy bottomed out in her attack on the Queen’s Gardens. She became then who slinks meek, hidden down lonely crooks of pavement or sprawl. There were those that said she’d always reverse, that it was just a matter of time…

It is her word, her way of slipping behind the spatial-chronal web, that Phassa needs.

She casts a look back. Though she can no longer see the illusive facade of the Gardens, she thinks of the Exarchs and their need for the smoke-Skein unbridled. Spreading to drain the Oracles wherever they are, and when that isn’t enough, breach the Gates; the more Gates fall, the harder time the Coven will have to stop them.

It will happen before Orche and she will not lift a finger. It is the context she needs for her own serenity, her own stasis in the flip-side communion gel of dark matter. That now seeps beyond sight and feeling in mocking of the Skein, endless fathoms of mere reflection. In black depths congealed and yet always flowing. Orche will go where all the planet-consciousnesses go, to be with each other in the communion gel.

She speaks against this hidden reality, the word of Aurachne.

To pass through the layers, become part of the gel but for long enough and no longer. To wrench then fissures from the conjoining of gel with Skein. Then to slip inside. To run the fabric of the Cosmere at the seams then depart with a quick dis-entwining of spirit. She is looking for a place to touch down. She hears Orche’s scream of anguish and breaks it down, knowing some of it is for effect. Not all. Then the pathic link is gone. She prays that her psyche hadn’t splintered, left fractures of itself embedded deep within the Cosmere.

For her own sake. She bears inline an upgraded Clave Heart, the heart of white flame, Naesala. Ignite and disappear. When she appears again it is in white light that cools to become the flame that slips away. In that way it was a ripple of heat sent in a micro-instant washing through the air in spreading crescent and catching everyone in the radius with a fast rush of blood. They would be left blinking, staring at a fixed point to centre themselves, forgetting about it. That’s what bodies do, and now Phassa is beyond the digitalis. In fixed skin. Skin that strains against the seamwork of its own knitting, drawing ever tighter.

Her tether to the Husk-Shedder through the Skein is a bright blue cord that trails in her sight to the horizon of ice. At the end of it lies Morgan and all his problems. WInding through crags and slants of jagged white. She weighs the arguments in her mind. The boy will want to help the Coven. As long as the Exarchs blemish the tapestry of Mutate and Orche watches, waits. Is still. On the Hivic Throne of the Illused Gardens. Orche’s slender arm rests while knifing fingers scrabble along the black carapace of the throne. In languor. Slow, careful stabs on the armrest.

Now she walks Orche’s petrified skin which has gone cold with stasis. In truth the staccato beats of her scrabbles are Phassa’s own footsteps over the frosted earth. Friction pops. There’s a silence where Orche’s yoke should be.

On the horizon are vast mountains, stone-fleshed yet cragged with features which from a certain view are like faces. A view refracted through shimmers of mist. A fleeting view, cast and withdrawn which is the view she gives them. Pallor over sloped eyes is washed away with a turn of her head. Until blotted out is the rorschach and all is the mist, the frosted air. Her own eyes blink and strain through translucent air. The tether is broken and the silence reigns in her mind. Each footfall leaves an imprint in the crusted earth. Here she lets the last of it go. I am my own servant.

So she gathers the wrapping-cloak of Naesala around her. Staunching off the cold which is her inner numbness. Born in flame and light, slipped off into the cold. As the wastrels do, time and again, as a lone silhouette is eclipsed by the dark of night. Shadow shrouded they go, to seek their fates in the fell darkness. The perfect crime is leaving behind your shadow, in the inner sanctums where the light glows, the heat pulses. Until you forget how warm your blood is supposed to be. Still it kills not leaving. The search is made and then given up. Orche will send her seedling drones, her spies. She will not find Phassa beneath Naesala. In the end that is her power, to leave without saying goodbye.