Amelia gasped sharply as Erasmus tightened his grip, metal digits crushing her sides with mechanical indifference. Pain bloomed like fire beneath her ribs—each breath more ragged than the last. Above her, the night sky stretched infinitely far, a violet tapestry of distant stars. The moon, swollen and silent, cast its glow over the twisted remains of the Pappy Long Legs.
“Wait—” she wheezed, voice frayed but defiant. She twisted in his grasp, locking eyes with that cold, unblinking lens. “You were close to my father. I remember... Quadrant Zero. Six years ago, maybe. You were in a smaller body then—askin’ for more workers, pushing deeper into the earth. Why kill me now? Didn’t my father give you everything you ever wanted?”
Her trembling arm rose, barely. The exposed Gigarock pulsed in her hand, its fleshy core thudding in rhythm with her weakening heartbeat. Erasmus squeezed tighter. A cough ripped from her lungs. “Order,” Erasmus muttered darkly.
“Your father would speak of it endlessly. Across that wretched table—past me,” his gaze flicked away, “past Glassford,” and back again, burning into her, “past even you. Always performing for the city above… while deaf to the cries of Yerro below. Neglect. Something you should be well acquainted with.”
Amelia’s eyes widened. Her breath caught. “And the creatures?” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
“Malice,” Erasmus growled. “What remains behind when a soul dies. Once mindless excess—now given the gift of awakening. Hungry. Vicious. The teeth of Yerro.”
“Yerro was supposed to protect us. The Quadrant Leaders were meant to be the arms of New Dwarden,” Amelia hissed, fire rising beneath her pain. “Tell me, Twelve—when exactly did I become the villain?”
“Good and evil are concepts of flesh,” Erasmus groaned, his voice scraping like rusted gears grinding bone. “That order your father preached? He knew nothing. Order cannot exist without Yerro. And right now… you are simply in the way.” His lone eye narrowed, impatient. “This has been nostalgic. Now—will you cooperate?”
Amelia clenched her jaw, refusing to flinch. “Order.” She let the word hang, bitter in her mouth. “New Dwarden’s got history. Tradition. Every Woltwork learns something from the last. Short lives but we chew it. But the thirteen Quadrants had leaders—most of them stayed in their respective circles. My father… did as good a job as any.”
“Did he now?” Erasmus purred.
Then came the screams. Whistlin’ Death automatons stirred. From deep within their metal throats, they unleashed the sound of a mother’s scream—then another. Then dozens. Each one twisted in tone, overlapping.
Mothers mourning sons lost to collapsed tunnels. Mothers screaming for children swallowed by the Malice in the mines of Quadrant Twelve and beyond. It was grief made mechanical—warped, looped, inescapable.
Amelia shuddered.
“When you put the sounds together,” came Number Two’s voice—soft, amused, and full of cruelty,
“they sound more like monsters to me.”
With insect-like grace, Number Two clambered up Erasmus’ massive arm like a parasite. Its puppet-limbs clicked and twitched as it reached her. One spindly hand stretched toward the locket around her neck.
With a flick, it tore it free. The chain snapped.
The locket dangled in its grip, pulsing violently—alive and unwilling.
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With surgical precision, Number Two separated the fleshy core from its gem-like cocoon, discarding the shell without ceremony. The remains of the locket hit the floor with a hollow clink, landing face-up.
Amelia caught a glimpse.
The picture of her family stared back at her, now stained with streaks of oil.
Her breath hitched.
The severed flesh glistened in Number Two’s hand—living matter, twitching without reason, beating without mercy.
The screams grew louder. Mechanical. Grief made grotesque.
Above, the Whistlin’ Death airship hovered like a judgment. A whistle shrieked down—too shrill, too long, too wrong. Anchors plunged into the fractured deck like harpoons.
Thick electric-white fog poured outward, blanketing the battlefield in a ghostly haze.
Amelia whispered, voice quivering beneath the rising hum of chaos:
“I’ll be the canary, Michael… Bolton…”
She clutched her side, blood spilling over Erasmus’ cold, unyielding fist.
Her eyes fell to the photograph below—her family, frozen in happier times, now looking up at her from the filth.
She coughed again—wet, sharp. Pain pulsed through her chest.
“I’ve heard stories…” she gasped, voice fraying.
“Murmurs in the Primarian. About people dragged into the underbelly of the Quadrants… and never coming back.”
Number Two’s eyes sparkled with cruel delight.
Amelia kept talking—not to win, but to buy time. Her fingers twitched. Her gaze flicked past them all to the Pappy Long Legs.
The ship had started to slow.
The walls pulsed.
The Roys moved—quietly, methodically—slipping into position around the edge of the room.
Like mysterious pieces landing upon a chess board.
“Stories.” He leaned closer, voice dry as bone. “Pain isn’t a story. It’s now. What you feel—that’s reality.” He dangled the locket between two fingers, watching the core pulse like a dying heartbeat.
“Still, how many tales do you think this little piece of flesh has touched? A beast? A brother? Or maybe... the end of yours.” He grinned. “You see… I also can’t die easily.”
Crunch.
The sound was wet. Final.
The fleshy core ruptured in Number Two’s hand like rotten fruit.
Red and orange gore oozed between his fingers, warm and pulsing.
Something inside twitched once—then stilled.
Amelia let out a strangled scream.
But Erasmus didn’t move. His grip remained like a steel vise—unrelenting. Unfeeling.
And then—
From the same mouth, a different voice. Colder. Measured. Layered beneath the puppet’s manic cadence, Erasmus returned.
“Negotiations are a privilege.”
Amelia’s body convulsed in his grasp. The Pappy Long Legs groaned beneath her like a beast in its death throes. Above, the emergency lights began to strobe, painting the twisted steel walls in rhythmic flashes of red—like a warning heartbeat gone mad.
Her vision blurred. White fog bled into the edges.
Then came the sound.
A soft shuffling.
A mechanical whir.
The Roys.
They spilled in—crawling from vents, descending from ceilings, stepping out from behind twisted pillars. One by one. All staring. All still.
Their heads tilted like broken marionettes left out in the rain.
Their blue eyes flickered in unison, like syncopated breathing.
They formed a perfect circle.
Watching.
Not helping.
Just… watching.
Her hand twitched—reaching for her belt.
No knife.
No strength.
Only silence.
Then came Number Two again, his voice like a glitching lullaby crawling inside her ear:
“I’ve decided you’d be more useful as an example.
Perhaps your brothers…
will be more receptive.”
And then—
Dark.
But not silence.
Not completely.
A low hum stirred at the edge of Amelia’s mind, like a distant machine struggling to turn.
The steel grip was gone. So was the ship. So was her body.
There was no floor. No sky. No breath.
Only fog—warm and velvet-black, folding around her like wet cloth. Familiar. Too familiar.
The sound of a single gear echoed through the dark.
Then another.
Clink.
Click.
Hiss.
A void.
She’d been here before.
In that breathless, hollow space between death and whatever came next.
Last time, it had spit her back into pain and fire.
This time… it felt different.
Soft white feathers floated down through the gloom, slow and silent, untouched by gravity.
They drifted around her like falling snow.
Then—movement beneath the fog.
Tiny metallic flowers bloomed upward from the dark. Bronze and copper petals unfurled one by one, rising like steam-bent ghosts. The flowers moved as if breathing, pulsing in sync with the low mechanical hum surrounding her.
One opened beside her shoulder, its center glowing faintly blue.
The shadows deepened. The air thickened.
Something was watching.
Something was waiting.
