06:00 / 24:37, Rotation 519 / 687, 231 AE, 8.872138, 138.255372, Aryss

  Another dreamless slumber. It was like a blink.

  For it was her time to wake up, again.

  The sleeping tube slid out and dumped her unceremoniously to the ground, again.

  Her legs once again moved stiffly forwards, disconnected from the top half of her body, puppeteered by Princess Amefrid. Each right step was wrenching apart her split open toenail and she winced every time.

  She crawled up through the ducts to face the Brood Mother Zitra Amallark, again.

  Falling asleep felt like a blur, the memory not deleted, but access to it was obfuscated by the spirits. Simple encryption that she could undo quickly, but not presently, only after she could sense the psionic panopticon turning away from her. She felt dehydrated, she had a mild headache. Hungover? She couldn’t remember drinking alcohol. She rubbed her bleary face, and saw that streaky makeup was now stained all over her fingers where she rubbed it. What happened last rote?

  Zitra was still nursing her new brood, a bemused smirk on her face. “Looks like you had a late one.” All Vilithe could really fish out of the goop of psionic encryption was something about finding the right angle for a joint lock when you’re on the ground, which you could then pivot around to get a chokehold for the submission. What? What did that mean? She didn’t know, and did not care to know. She no longer wanted to choke Zitra out. She was just too tired.

  Zitra was feeling sympathetic towards her, however. Vilithe could feel it easily. It was uncharacteristic of Zitra too. They even spoke vocally. Why?

  “You’ve but one task this rote, vassal.”

  Preparation for Conduit Relay to Ranging #13,328,

  The Conduit will be assigned one reaver,

  Debrief with the Princess before embarkation, HEX-00010B

  “You’d better get to it.”

  “Thank you, Brood Mother.”

  Conduit duty. A ranging. Was the Princess showing her favor? She didn’t even know how to feel at first, emptied with shock. A ranging?

  She would be away from this cursed hive for Reathean lunas! It was pointless to keep track of lunas on Aryss, for Deimos tracked closely to the length of an Aryssal rotation, as Phobos spun about the realm thrice per, making both of their paths quite redundant as markers of time. Phobos couldn’t even be seen from their latitude. The only way was to keep track of the rotations of the current Aryssal revolution– but which Aryssal revolution, no one cared, the only time anyone cared about was Reathean time – so in Aryssal terms, what relaying conduit duty for a ranging meant was a leave of up to fifty Aryssal rotes! Potentially over a thousand hours of freedom, some semblance of freedom, anyway.

  Every node in a psionic network needed an organic neural component, that is, a brain. This was why dragons were bred and forged into machined scales; they were originally meant to be psionic satellites. A flight of dragons under a clan’s control, orbiting around the realm, allowed for psionics that reached across entire hemispheres.

  But it was inefficient. The more psionic coverage needed, and the greater the distance, the more dragons were needed. And although Clan Amallark currently had total orbital domination of Reath, to propel a dragon all the way to Aryss required substantially more resources than simply spawning them in the titanic industrial complexes of the Crown. Preferring to keep her flights of dragons close to home, and in fear of losing these enormously expensive creations, Amallarkean dragons rarely left Reath, and if transporting goods or elvans to Aryss all came back save for one exception, the original Ark Dragon– a realm colonizing dragon never meant to return home – that powered all of Amallarkea-Arys.

  This was why conduits were needed on Aryss. There were never more than a few dragons used for Aryssal coverage, and the rogues knew well how to evade detection, for Aryss was simply too big and even if the dragon provided psionic coverage over a massive area, the problem became knowing where to look in the first place. Besides, the psionic signal from even a geostationary orbital dragon was never reliable enough for operations requiring precise control.

  A conduit was simply a psionic relay on the land. An average psion could relay psionic signals up to several kilometers only, but a single powerful psion would be enough to connect to a ranging squad of knights an entire thousand kilometers away. Vassals were often used as conduits on riskier rangings prone to rogue attack, for Clan Amallark was loath to lose a good clan psion, they were, after all, the leaders of the clan. They were not expendable like vassals were.

  But none of that mattered much to Vilithe. What mattered to her was that the Princess or her subordinates would find it harder to perform the full range of psionic manipulations on a faraway conduit, psionics always having an effective range limitation depending on what was being done, so it gave the vassal conduit a reprieve from her tormentors. Far away, she would not be ensnared in Amefrid’s manipulations, like the pleasure chamber ploy of the last rotation, but of course Vilithe had not yet unscrambled the encryption that Amefrid had placed to distract her from recollecting.

  She floated her way through to HEX-00010B, the Reaver Hangar, almost unable to believe this providence was real. Now she felt gratitude toward Amefrid, having entirely forgotten about decrypting exactly what happened the previous rote.

  Remember that you are entering the presence of the Princess, Vilithe. Malevolent did not address her as vassal anymore. Act accordingly.

  Vilithe felt her head bow just the slightest bit lower. Her eyes fell to the floor.

  Princess Amefrid stood, waiting in the colossal, cavernous reaver hangar. Platform upon platform with rows upon rows of reavers sat waiting. There was an intricate system of movable ramps and platform lifts that could quickly deliver the next provided reaver into the long runway out into the wastes. The whole hangar was filled with the commotion of engineer workers scurrying back and forth with welding torches and handheld spirit forges, repairing and replacing reaver parts as needed. Amefrid stood flanked by a squad of personal bodyguards all clad in elite power armor, next to a reaver that had already been loaded to the runway.

  Amefrid had an unreathly figure, perfectly proportioned, so completely at golden ratios in all measures that it felt uncannily alien, unnatural. It was clear that it was all shaped by the spirits, and Vilithe wondered if there was a real sentience behind the facade, or if it was all just a pretended construct, like the spirits. It was like she was an empty shell without its knight, a matryoshka doll. Her long, lustrous hair, no mere stark white like your average elvan, was now a dazzling, holographic platinum. She had piercing, sparking sapphire eyes.

  Vilithe’s irises, conversely, were totally black, indeed so black there was nothing else at all in her pupils but black. This was known as the dragonrider’s lenses, for dragonriders’ eyesight were completely mediated by spirit magicks, and not organic in the slightest, to accustom them to interpreting light and spatiality as dragons do, across a broader spectrum of radiation from mere infrared to ultraviolet, so that their minds could enter consonance. Elite psions had retractable spirit lenses that aided and overlaid their natural vision, but only dragonriders saw as the spirits themselves would. Many dragonriders indeed couldn’t even interpret protean based conic-cylindrical sight, having been born with the dragonrider’s lenses permanently embedded, but Vilithe had delved into enough minds, and seen through enough eyes, to understand it. Where others saw colors, dragonriders only saw vectors, contours, surfaces, infrared heat, and motion, but it was more than enough to interpret the world. More than enough. Vilithe could easily see what others could not.

  Amefrid was wearing a finely embroidered, platinum silk robe, matching her hair, but underneath was an entire second outfit, all in silver and white, a fine, button-up silk blouse, silk slacks, and gryphantene stiletto heels plated with real silver. She had silver and synthetic diamond studded earrings in piercings all along the helixes of her ears, but not the lobes.

  Vilithe was still naked, and the mess of dried tears, running eyeshadow, and mascara still clotted on her lashes was unsightly.

  Well, you look terrible. Amefrid had not moved a muscle. Even the strongest of psion’s faces would twitch with the slightest tell. Amefrid remained stony still.

  My apologies, your highness. – the Princesses were always to be addressed as your highness, the Empress herself addressed as your majesty – for my unpresentable appearance.

  When two greater psions conversed, telepathy was only natural, it came second nature to them. Amefrid had a perfectly neutral expression on her, indecipherable. The corners of her mouth were curled up ever so slightly, just shy of a smile. But not quite.

  Vilithe tried to clean the tear-streaked makeup quickly with her hands but couldn’t wipe all of it away. Black smudges still stained the corners of her eyes, and her lipstick, while faded, still gave her lips a blush of cherry.

  I must commend you, vassal.

  Vilithe didn’t think anything. She didn’t know what to expect.

  You did well with that worker.

  Thank you, your highness. She bowed low. Obeisance came from her quicker than she had time to even process what Amefrid was thanking her for.

  The worker? Kwandriss. Amefrid had not bothered remembering her given name. To Amefrid, she was just another cog. The imprinting of the fact – or was it only something Vilithe thought was a fact? – that the terraforming of Aryss was a folly had shattered her hope. The imprinting had been much stronger because Vilithe herself believed it to be true. But Vilithe hadn’t imprinted her out of desire to make her a more pliable vassal, she had simply wanted to spare her from further torture!

  No matter what your intention, I’m a practical elvan. Now Amefrid was indicating to her she was reading her every thought. You found your own solution to the problem and that deserves reward. She beckoned to the reaver.

  Inside you’ll find new clothes, and all the provisions you will need. Clean yourself up, won’t you?

  The contents of the reaver came to her mind like a flash. A pair of elastomer boots. Several sets of psion’s fatigues, simple black polyester jumpsuits. Several sets of cotton briefs and cotton undershirts. The reaver held fifteen hundred liters of water, the tank was filled with fresh Aryssal ice melt, far more than she would need, there were also about two hundred kilograms of desiccated vassal gruel, all she would need to make a meal was to boil some hot water in the reaver’s conduction stove. The reaver had a simple bunk installed – just a cot really, this was built to order for the conduit and was just wide enough to fit her lanky height for an elvan – with simple polyester bedding and sheets. Should she need to defend herself against a rogue raid, there were two combustion rifles, and a cyanide pill in case she was captured. The expectation was that vassals would take the cyanide pill before going rogue, but that rarely happened.

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  When she imprinted Kwandriss, she had not expected that that small action of kindness would result in such a karmic reward. But now she began to doubt if it was kindness at all, or if it was simply just another kind of cruelty. Yes, Kwandriss would probably never be flayed again, but did it come at the cost of ruining something of ineffable worth?

  Do not forget, vassal. Amefrid’s blue eyes bore into hers. I am not rewarding you for your kindness.

  Again, letting her know - I am in your head. No thought of yours can hide from me.

  You serve the will of Clan Amallark, you will pay heed to nothing else. Therys here- she finally moved now, tilting her head ever so slightly and slowly to her side, indicating Vilithe to, a completely hairless psion – she did not even have eyebrows – that stood behind one of Amefrid’s elite guards. She will be your handler. The two of you are well acquainted. You will receive instructions from her.

  I will personally be scrying your progress from time to time. Amefrid deliberately did not specify any set or regular schedule for such surveillance.

  A word suddenly floated through Vilithe’s mind. Panopticon. But she didn’t quite remember what it meant now.

  Amefrid made sure not to show any of the frustration that could be felt when she puppeteered Serun and damn near garroted this vassal just the night before. How Amefrid thought she could have trusted her oaf of a brother to seduce the vassal, she didn’t know, she was still furious at his inadequacy, but he was just one confederate in just one of her many, many machinations to whip the Aryssal forces into shape. She had hoped to fully convert this vassal dragonrider, ensuring absolute loyalty, for dragonriders were rare, truly skilled dragonriders even rarer, and the elite Callethean dragonriders the rarest - a dying breed.

  But she simply could not trust a rider that could at any moment have the potential to suddenly go rogue and decide to strike a blow against the Amallarkean Empire by self-sacrificially piloting them right into the sun. Or worse. Turning Bahamut’s breath against the Imperium itself. How was she going to break this stubborn Phyroan?

  Vilithe did not sense it, but behind the facade of total power, in truth, Amefrid was terrified. She had wasted decades to inaction. She had been the perennial favorite, at least until now, and she had taken that for granted.

  What Vilithe did know was that for revolutions now, the Empress had appointed her to govern Orca, charged her with the responsibility of solving the orcan menace, once and for all, the single victory that would forever valorize a claim to the throne, and for the longest time her succession was simply status quo.

  God Empress of Elvankind, Amefrid Amallark. Amefrid loved how it sounded, it felt right and fitting, but of course, Vilithe couldn’t care less who was the God Empress of Elvankind.

  Amefrid reflected on her failures now, a rare occurrence before her total domination but now quite common, along with corrosive self-criticism, panic attacks, and self-pitying weeping.

  Because try as she might, she could find no way to exterminate the shapeshifting brutes without incurring pyrrhic collateral damage to the Empire! And so she wasted too much time treading in the waters of the status quo. It only accumulated wealth for all parties involved, what was the harm in that? She was now finally realizing the severity of what had happened. For Goddess Mother to have reshuffled the territories, and give Reath to Senjya, it meant ripping apart plans that had been put in place for centuries.

  It had to be undone! Divided her house could not hold! Amefrid had to crush the rogues of Aryss, absolutely all of them, and soon, so that she could prove to her mother that she must return the post of Reath to her, before that fool that she called sister provoked something that really couldn’t be reversed!

  But as all this raged behind her eyes, all the attendant psions and knights, soldiers and workers, and even the sole dragonrider, could only see cold, placid calm.

  She might not have molded this vassal into her loyal personal chauffeur yet, but once she was exposed to the terror of the ranging vassal knights, once she could see just how futile it was, the situation of the rogues, then she would see that there were worst fates than that of a lowly hive fixer. Then she could be turned.

  Worst case scenario she would perish in the airless Aryssal desert. A waste of a powerful psion.

  Best case scenario? Let’s see what this dragonrider can do, her mind on the field of battle. An enslaved commander of slaves.

  She just might be able to pull off a hail mary, full of grace, and strike down Rogue Queen Talisa with minimal commitment of force.

  All in due time.

  She needn’t even be here in the first place, but she wanted to be in close psionic proximity to this filthy vassal, to take measure of her mettle. From prying out what thoughts she could, Amefrid was satisfied that the encryption had dulled her. Simultaneously juggling thousands of psionic tasks at once, preoccupied with the burdens her mother had placed on her, she had not scryed Vilithe’s mind with the proper effort needed to pry out a powerful psion’s greatest secrets.

  But now the Princess had other urgent matters to attend to.

  This is your opportunity to earn favor with Clan Amallark, vassal. Now, go.

  And then she strode away, her knights and psions following behind her. And then it was just Vilithe, and the reaver, standing alone on the service way, the hangar workers buzzing about around her and paying her no mind.

  Vilithe hobbled into the plated spirit-creature, her toenail still hurt, but still her heartbeat fast as she marveled at the cavernous ribs of its inner thorax, all the space that would be hers, all the stored water and gruel, the thermally regulated interior, even just the dignity of clothing! In the command console she found a neatly folded psion’s jumpsuit.

  It was simple carbide fiber made flexible with gryphantene stringers. A psion’s jumpsuit had electrostatic stimulators laid precisely along the meridian lines. When spirits detected an incoming projectile, they would send a small static shock at exactly the reflexology points that would trigger the exact muscle spasms so that the psion could evade or dodge it. It didn’t hurt, in fact it was like a pleasant tingle, hardly a sacrifice for preternatural agility.

  But really, she was just glad to finally have some drip. Not dolled up and wrapped up like a gift to be consumed, but instead kind of badass. She wondered why she thought something so strange, but this was simply because she hadn’t yet recalled what she was wearing last rote. In the thorax interior of the reaver was a reflective alloy surface and she admired herself in the reflection after pulling the jumpsuit over her. It was deep obsidian and form fitting.

  The wingshell hatch door clicked and sealed with a whirring blast. The airlock was sealed. They could roam Aryss now.

  Let’s go on an adventure, eh, Malevolent?

  Let’s go.

  And with that, the reaver pulled out.

  It was not actually at all difficult to get even a powerful psion like Vilithe to fall asleep, for Malevolent simply exploited part of her Callethean inherited Jhiryese essence, allele rs671 on her 12th chromosome, which made her particularly susceptible to acetaldehyde from her imbibed wine- the ‘Asian Flush’. It made her cheeks already red with rouge even rosier, with hints of grey. While the spirits would have normally purged the toxic acetaldehyde for their host, Malevolent simply doused it into her blood. She’d get a bad hangover.

  It was all she could remember of Serun’s rambling on about mixed martial arts. He was very much like Joe Rogan.

  In the last hours of the last rote, before she went to sleep, Zitra had gotten so much entertainment from Malevolent’s recording – both masturbatory pleasure at Serun whom she lusted for very much, as well as hilarity from Vilithe’s distinctly unsexy clumsiness – that she was in a jolly mood indeed and felt nothing but gratitude that this fascinating dragonrider was assigned to her chambers. Bipolarity was common among elvans, it was the number one most common symptom of psionic fraying, and in a sense, the only emotionally logical way to react to the very chaos of psionics itself.

  Zitra had very mixed feelings indeed. She was happy to be rid of the vassal, it meant one less mouth to feed in her staging chamber- they were all divvied up their portion of food by higher ranking psions. It also meant she wouldn’t be intimidated by Vilithe’s presence, her psionic aura so much clearly stronger than her own, only defenseless by circumstance and not merit. She felt bad about giving her the migraine now. She also felt bad that Vilithe had a very high chance of dying on an Aryssal ranging. Chance upon one group of rogue raiders and she was done for, unless she was truly much more powerful than Zitra could even imagine. But she doubted this. If she was, then how did she let herself get caught with those ugly thoughts?

  For example, a psion standing on Tuneden could read the thoughts of an elvan in Proto-Orca, simply by relaying the psionic signal through a dragon high in the void.

  For truly distant rangings, chains of conduits could be set up to relay.

  Or so she thought.

  They were in consonance now, for all Malevolent intended with these orders was to simply protect Vilithe from Amefrid’s wrath, and Vilithe understood this. She had never met this Princess before, and while she had good rapport with Senjya, her mind didn’t need any more flaying right now in her already sorry state.

  She’d decided to change her hair color from red to a more naturally elvan albinic shade shortly after landing on Aryss. It felt to her like a reboot, a reset of her faculties. She decided she was going to be less emotional and much colder. Focused. New Amefrid, New Look. The reverberations of total domination continued to ripple through her mind.

  In the last rote when Miz Dazey had given her a makeover, she could only see her beauty through Miz Dazey’s eyes and not her own.

  An Amallarkean FN P90 clone, and an even simpler Aryssal made spirit-woven bolt action for long distance engagements, no scope attached for an elvan’s eyes, with built in zoom function, did not need it. But to the best marksmen, the simplicity – its purity – was appreciated. Bolt action didn’t jam. Not if you took care of it.

  Therys ordered her spirits to leave her hair ungrown, for convenience. Not to mention that the unnerving look made her job bringing vassals to heel far easier.

  As Therys served under Princess Senjya’s reign, Therys and Vilithe were already quite familiar with each other. Vilithe knew that Therys wasn’t so bad. She was cold, but she wasn’t cruel. She did her job without complaint.

  Except that last one, she did that all the time back on Reath, just for different reasons.

  But not divided in general, specifically Amefrid divided from her Goddess Mother. There was no holding the house undivided at all to begin with- there was no healing the division between Amefrid and Senjya, the Goddess Mother had ensured that by encouraging their rivalry. Anyway, as far as Amefrid was concerned, the Royal House of Clan Amallark really only consisted of her and Goddess Mother. Even as Amefrid was the red headed one, she saw Senjya, born of a worker mother and not from the Empress’s body as Amefrid had, as the adopted stepchild, an intruder. Which wasn’t technically true, but Amefrid still felt that way.

  Carelessness was another of Amefrid’s deeply seated flaws, amongst many compulsive addictions, refusal to take responsibility, neurotic indecision, and ease by which she succumbed to overindulgence.

  If she had, she would have realized from the way that Vilithe had freaked out in her sleeping tube, that the dragonrider’s despair had soured to spite. That it was not that she could go rogue at any time- she most certainly would. It was now only simply a matter of when.

  What in the Lost Age would have simply called a ‘spidey sense’.

  She felt like a ninja. She couldn’t quite remember what exactly a ninja was, but the truth of it was that the practices of the true ninjas had been lost even to the Godlikes, so secretive were their ways.

  Malevolent hadn’t grown yet enough to understand the cognition clicking together as the link between the legacy and its new host thickened and fed it, the imaginary friend… or fiend? All that was certain was the names ‘Calvin’ and ‘Hobbes’ were fed into Malevolent’s input parameters.