Daring Do and the Hand of Doom

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 73: Failure

Carillon sat, staring through the window. At her side, a pair of sugar cubes were slowly carbonizing in her magic. She rolled them around for a moment, waiting patiently. Then, when they were fully cooked, she ate them, not caring that they were still hot. The substance immediately took effect, and she felt her heart race. Her old heart had not done that for a long time, not since she had first started taking sugar in her youth.

“Mother?”

She did not need to turn. Although they were all identical, she knew all their voices. She could have named them if she had wanted to. But she did not want to.

One of her synthetics approached. He was the one she had taken on as a personal aid, the one with one artificial eye. Or two, depending on how he was defined; after all, his body, like that of all his kind, was fully artificial.

Had this been in ages past, his position might have been filled by a unicorn, perhaps a lesser son of one of the more dilute bloodlines. A squire, a unicorn who did not by birth fully have the right to claim elite knighthood- -but one that would have to prove his mettle by deeds alone. This Pegasus had in his short life performed many worthy deeds, but yet would never be a knight. Carillon was aware of the irony.

She reached up and pulled his head down, putting it on her shoulder. She held it against the part of her face that was white. He was soft, and smelled pleasant. Perhaps she thought of him as a son, even though she knew that he was completely expendable.

“The medication is failing.”

It was true. Through the window, she could already see the effects. Absence was beginning to shake, and the areas around her linkages were starting to fail and fall free. In her horn, Carillon could feel the surges of magic starting again. To her left and right were the maps and Absence’s body. The situation was clear. She was now more machine than she was pony. Worse, her genetic signature was beginning to change. Some unexplained element was inducing mutations. The new cells had forty-six chromosomes, and their influence was spreading.

“Mother,” said her son, if he could even be called that. “The systems are prepared in response to the silver-one’s specifications. It can now be deployed at your order.”

“I am aware.”

He looked at her. Knowingly. “And will you activate it? Will you save her?”

“It won’t save her. It will fail.”

“So you will not?”

“No. I will. Because the Grandmaster asked it of me.”

“Even if it will fail?”

“On the hope that it will not.”

She lit her horn, and activated the sequence.

Absence could not have understood the mechanisms involved in trying to save her life. She was in too much pain, and that pain had begun to lead toward endless delirium. She saw strange, dying words and crystal trees, and ancient mages that walked on two legs. She saw the void and she saw that which led to their salvation and damnation. Above all she saw the Monolith. It was always present, always looming just beyond her perception.

So she could not understand when the system activated. When the cables connected to her back, implanted around her wings, lit with incredible magic power, simultaneously drawing from her and screaming into her. Somewhere outside her, a system was activating, and distantly, she knew two things. That this was her purpose, her one sole reason for existence; and that it was too soon.

The response was immediate. She flatlined.

The technicians surrounding her rushed to her side. They had been trained extensively long before they were born, and they knew how to handle this. What they did not know was the effect the magic had had on Absence- -or more importantly on the thing that had just gained consciousness within her. Her heart had stopped beating because its motion was no longer required.

Absence opened her eyes. Her pupils were severely dilated, and her eyes did not see. At the same time, a second pair of eyes opened within her own, staring out at the world through her enormous pupils. Eyes that glowed with pale light.

Then Absence sat up. The technicians cried out and jumped back. Absence stared at them, and at the world around her. She saw nothing- -but what was within her saw everything. Not just in the central chamber. In the world at large. She saw this structure and the desert surrounding it, and all of Equestria beyond that. The thing within her felt the heartbeat of every pony- -and it hungered deeply.

“S…sister?” asked one of the technicians.

Absence turned her head. “She finds it all so very interesting,” said Absence, distantly. What was inside her could not yet speak. It could think- -she supposed it always could, even when it had been asleep for so very long- -but had not yet manifested fully enough to speak for itself. “Yet this is all primitive to her. Unbeleivably simple.”

“Sister. You need to lie down. You are sick. We can help.”

“I am not ill,” said Absence. She raised her hooves and looked down at them. Only one was a hoof. The other was a hand. She flexed the fingers, spreading them and turning them over. For some reason, it was the only part of her that felt familiar. “These bodies. They resist the infection remarkably well. Yet, even incomplete, we have interfaced.” She looked up and smiled at her brother, one of the technicians. A pony who would never have a name. “You. You and all like you. You will become like me. We shall be an army. An army of pure, perfect beings.” That was not what the being within had said. That was the way Absence was forced to interpret it. It was the only way she could continue to hold onto the last few threads of her sanity. To justify the horrors she would surely commit.

She stood. Some of the cables slid out of her back, but it did not matter.

“Sister, please! We have orders- -”

“You have new orders. From me. All of you will gather. It will come soon enough.” She looked up to the machinery around her. “But first she needs to be born. She just has to be. That was what they just tried to do, but their system is too brutish, too blunt. Designed for something else. Something so very…pointless?” She tried to think. She supposed “pointless” was the right word. In her mind, she had once held convictions, ideology concerning how the world was supposed to work- -but that all mattered little, if at all. Only the Monolith mattered.

“I…” the technicians looked at each other. They did not understand, because they had not been taught to. They did not know if Absence was right- -or perhaps something else. Perhaps the Other was already reaching into them, changing the way their minds functioned- -just as she would change the way their bodies worked soon enough.

“She must be born.” Absence stated it as an undeniable fact. She raised the Hand of Doom above her. “This facility is primitive. But it will serve as the raw materials she needs.”

She closed the Hand, and the entire Necroforge was torn to pieces. Centuries of Questlord work was destroyed an single second. The technicians cried out but were in no danger. Fragments of machinery and technology swirled around them, being reconfigured in an instant- -until what Absence had destroyed appeared again, this time built to serve her own purposes.

New cables were drawn toward her and linked to her spine. She inhaled deeply. There was pain, but it no longer mattered. What mattered is that she would be born soon. Then the real work could begin.

The room no longer had walls, and it was no longer white. Even as Absence pondered what was happening, it was growing. Infecting other systems, expanding through the ancient Questlord castle just as the Hand was expanding through her body. Consuming her, allowing for her rebirth.

She hardly noticed when an enormous silver Pegasus entered the room. He pushed through the destruction and the assembling machines as if they were plants in a deep field. He was smiling.

Absence turned to him, and understood, because the being inside her recognized what he was.

“HA!” he screamed, bursting into horrible laughter. “It worked! It truly worked!”

“TRAITOR!” screamed a voice. Absence looked, and saw a sphere of orange light dissipate. A sphere she could have cracked effortlessly, but that she saw no reason to destroy. Inside was her mother. A pony she did not require.

“A traitor to what?!” cried Solum Finis through his elation. “My desire has been fulfilled!” He approached Absence and bowed deeply, still gibbering and laughing. “All this time- -ALL THIS TIME! So much time, so many visions. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen ALL OF THIS.”

“You fool!” screamed Carillon. “You’ve been corrupted!”

“Mother,” said Absence, raising her Hand. “The one inside me wishes to do unspeakable things to you. I have convinced her not to. Because I love you dearly. But please. Leave me.” She snapped her fingers, and Carillon vanished, teleported to somewhere else in the castle. If she was smart, she would take the Grandmaster and leave. The being within Absence had no need for ponies as decayed as they were. She only wanted the white Pegasi, to become a new army of vandrares.

Which left only the Argasus. “What do you want?” asked Absence.

“Only you. Only you! I’ve seen you! In the dreams! The Adamantasi, the Creators! You are our gods, those that gave birth to perfection!”

“She recalls it,” sighed Absence. “She also recalls that you were supposed to be made of gold.”

A look of shock crossed over Solum Finis’s face. “Yes, well, yes. I am not of the original generation. I was created by your children- -”

“Meaning to say that they failed a second time.”

The shocked expression grew on Solum Finis’s face. Now he was afraid, perhaps insulted. Or coming to the realization that it had all been pointless. “No. No, they did not fail. There was a ware- -”

“And yet they are extinct. I can sense this word. She sees none of her children. Not that it matters. They were failures regardless.”

“NO!” screamed Solum Finis, standing. “You can’t say that!”

“Can’t I?” a smile crossed Absence’s face. A smile that was not hers. “Because I can see their birth. Why they were created. It was when she came to this world the first time. It was primitive, simple, ruled by foul abominations that even she could not approach. There was nothing to consume. No technology, no magic. So she created life. To grow, and evolve. To build a world worth consuming.”

“We did! Please, Lord Adamantasus, we did!”

“If you did, then where is it?”

“We- -it was taken from us- -”

“Then it was not worth consuming. Nor were the Aurasi. They failed to evolve. Created something that could not be infected. She is glad they are gone.”

If Solum Finis had possessed the capacity to cry, he would have. “Why, then? What was all this for? Please. Please, bring them back.”

“No.”

Absence brushed the Hand across Solum Finis’s chest. It was a simple touch, barely a push, but the force of it caved in Solum Finis’s armor. His eyes widened and he gasped for air as his carburetors were compressed and one was shattered completely. The force of the blow send him flailing backward, and he skidded across the ground, sparking along the way.

“Were you golden, were you one of them, she might show more mercy. She only allows you to persist because she perceives that it was your will that allowed her to manifest successfully, by tricking my mother and my siblings. But you are a failed experiment created by failed experiments. Depart, and do not return.”

Solum Finis looked at her, almost pleading. He was a pitiful thing. Absence felt bad. The thing inside her did not. It could only take joy in suffering.

So Solum Finis fled. Absence signed, and sat down. She would need to wait. The machine she had built could accelerate the process, but not rush it. The time would come, and it would come soon. The vandrare would be born.

Comments

[Architect Ironturtle]

The Vandrare were human once, weren't they? Before they entered the void.

[AppleTank]

... well at least Dulcimer's plans have been shat on.