Chapter 75: Carry My Head (Patreon)

"First, I want to know what the hell you meant by a union, like husband and wife. What is that? I never agreed to any goddamn union," the Operator asked.

Mordran pressed a hand to his head, pain and mounting anxiety evident on his face. He looked at the Operator with contempt. "This isn't the time for stupid questions. I thought I made it clear we don't have time. I was already clear. You'll know if I lie. Now ask your questions," Mordran said.

Alright. The important stuff. "Are you going to try to screw me over on this deal?"

A slight, almost imperceptible smile appeared on Mordran's face. "Yes. This place is designed for invaders. Once you take control, you're going to die." Mordran touched his head as if the pain was intensifying.

The Operator felt it start in her mouth, a bitter taste, almost rotten, and a brief tension pulling through every muscle in her body. "Okay, got it. So that's what it feels like when you lie."

Mordran's voice grew desperate as he grabbed his head with both hands. "There's nothing here that can harm you, no traps, no hidden dangers, damn it. Ask your questions quickly!"

This time, the Operator didn't experience the sensation that warned of a lie. He was honest this time. She touched her ear and said, "The music. I'm starting to lose it."

Operator, we've proven it works. We don't know what's coming or how much time we have. Start asking the important questions.

"What is this place?"

Mordran took a deep breath, searching for the right words. "I don't know. I have theories. But with the little time, I'd say maybe small spaces lurking in the shadows that creation has overlooked? Or shadow dimensions, as I prefer to call them." Mordran pointed to his third eye. "This is my Orsa, and it allows me to see, locate, and access those shadow dimensions."

"Can your entire race see shadow dimensions?"

"Next question."

"How do you create this library, and the shadows that follow you?"

Mordran raised his hand toward the structure of books beside him.

"Underneath all of this, there's a kind of base. Think of it as wet clay the whole place is built from." His fingers turned. "Most of it has already dried and hardened. I can't touch that part; it's fixed and stays as it is. But some of it never dried. That part is still soft, and I can shape it into whatever I want." The shelf softened at his gesture, the wood flowing as if it had lost its shape, then firming again into a new curve.

"The eye reads the base. It picks up the energy signature of every point and tells me which are locked and which are still in flux. That's all it does. It's a sensor. It sees." He lowered his hand, and the shelf held its new form.

"The shaping is neural. My mind emits a pattern that the unbound points resonate with, and when they resonate, they collapse into whatever structure I hold in my head."

"And could I shape this place the way you do?" she asked.

"No idea. It only works at the frequency of my brain, after years of training. You've got a few questions left. What's next?"

"So I can't shape this place as you do, and I don't have a third eye to find a shadow dimension. What can I do?"

"Operator." Mordran lowered his hands from his head. His tone was more serious, devoid of contempt, yet he was no longer the same man. The madness seemed to become more evident on his face with each passing second. "Are you going to keep your promise? Will you warn my race about what's approaching?"

The Operator's eyes started jumping from one place to another. They went to Mordran and his cut, fragile body, then to the library, and then she got dizzy, and everything around her started spinning until, after a few seconds, it all stopped.

"What's coming? What is it that's coming?"

Operator, what did you forget?

"I don't remember," she said.

Operator, what do you recall?

"I remember everything that's happened here. Relax. I haven't forgotten what happened to me since the evolution zone, or anything that's happened here. Except for these huge blank spaces I know are important, but I don't remember what I saw."

"STOP TALKING TO YOUR PARASITE AND TELL ME. ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP YOUR PROMISE OR NOT?" Mordran shouted.

"I haven't forgotten the promise," touching her head, trying to remember what had Mordran so scared.

"Stop trying to remember," Mordran said. "Damn you, how do you do it? You don't just forget it; you also stop being marked by them. If you keep trying to remember, all of this starts over, and you won't be able to deliver the message."

"Tera, I'm following your lead. Whatever you say. I can't think straight right now."

Do it. It's the only way we get out of here. We have to use the love he has for his race, and he's getting crazier by the minute. We don't know what could happen.

"I will warn them that something's coming, and you let me get the hell out of here and take control of this place. I haven't forgotten that."

"Then swear it now. I'm almost at the limit of what I can take." His voice was worn out, his body limp, with no energy left to move.

The Operator remained silent, gazing at Mordran. She recalled everything she'd seen, the people transformed into monsters by the winged ones and the atrocities Mordran committed over the centuries. That, she remembered perfectly.

"I promise I'll give them the message. But I swear, if I ever get the chance to hurt or kill even one of your damn race, I swear on my life I'll do it."

"Good enough," Mordran said. "You're telling the truth."

A shadow emerged from the floor, holding a jar, and handed it to Mordran. Upon opening it, he reached inside and pulled out a large black worm about the size of an adult hand. Mordran pressed the worm against his neck, and it began to suck his blood.

"Once this space opens, you're going to take the grenades off any of my soldiers. That'll put the creatures to sleep." Mordran removed the worm from his neck, set it in front of him, and spoke to it in a language unfamiliar to the Operator. After finishing, the worm crawled into the jar unaided. The shadow took the jar, sealed it, then approached the Operator and handed it to her.

"What's this for?"

"Once you're out of here and have put the creatures outside to sleep, set the jar on the floor and let it out. It will know what to do."

"So it delivers the message, probably instructions that they should kill me and be careful with me."

Mordran didn't answer her. His stare and expression grew emptier, drifting further with every second.

"Mordran, you with me?" the Operator shouted.

Mordran came back to himself, as if surfacing again, and answered. "What I want is to forget about you. Giving them more reasons to come after you would waste what I'm doing here."

He's telling the truth.

"It's time," Mordran said, looking at the shadow beside him. "I can't take any more of this."

The shadow drew a black sword out of itself with its hand and set it against Mordran's neck.

Mordran pressed a hand to the side of his head. "When I die, this doesn't die with me. That's the part. Listen, you need to understand this part."

"I'm listening." She stayed where she was, a few steps back from him.

"The eye keeps working. My Orsa. It sees them, the shadow dimensions. It finds them, opens them. It doesn't." His head tipped, hung there, then came back up. "It doesn't need me to think. It's a sensor. A sensor doesn't need a man behind it. It just looks."

The Operator watched him. He was worse than he had been a minute ago, his words tangled, doubling back on themselves. "The library stays," she said.

"The library stays. Yes. You're quick, good, good. I don't have the." He stopped. His hand lifted toward the shelves and shook there. "My mind holds all of it. The books. The space, the food, the water, all of it. And when I'm gone, the structure holds because the eye keeps feeding it. Not me. Not me anymore. The eye."

"So you die, and this whole place just keeps standing there."

"Standing." His eyes went past her, to the floor, to something under it. "The music's in the floor now. You hear that? No. You don't. Lucky, you're. Lucky." His head jerked back to her.

She instinctively stepped back as the man who had made her kneel and invaded her thoughts like a drawer was coming apart in front of her.

"It resets. Every time you come in, it resets. The bath resets, the food comes back hot, the room puts itself right, because my mind built it and my mind doesn't rot. The rest of me rots, but not that, not that part."

Her eyes went to the side of his skull.

"I have to take your head."

Mordran smiled. "There she is. Yes. My head, the eye and the brain, together. You can't split them. Same skull, both of them. Same skull." His voice climbed. "You want the eye that finds the doors. You carry the brain that runs the library. One piece. They're one piece. My head. You carry it as long as you want any of this to work."

She kept her face still, but her eyes stayed on his hands, on the way they wouldn't stay still. "The eye, you said it finds the doors. Any time I want?"

"Four hours. Every four." He pushed the heel of his hand into his temple, hard, harder. "It's old, it's tired, same as me. Every four hours, it looks, it tells you if there's a shadow dimension nearby. That's all, that's all it does now. Finds them in range. Nothing more. There's nothing more."

"Every four hours. That's the window."

"That's the window, that's." His breath caught. "I don't know if it holds. After. It might slow, it might stop looking, it might go faster. I don't, I have no idea. I'm telling you what it does now, with me still in it, and what it does with a dead man behind it. Nobody's ever, nobody's tested that." He laughed. "You'll find out. Or you won't."

His whole body seized, and both hands clutched his head, nails digging in.

"THEY'RE STILL SINGING." He forced it down, shaking. "My people's name, over and over. They're singing it. Get them out. You swore you'd get them out."

Mordran stood, and his eyes came up to meet hers, red and running down at the corners.

"You. I should never have looked. I put my eye in you and saw it, and now I can't. I can't stop seeing it." His hand clawed at his chest. "Stupid. Stupid. I did this. I looked. Nobody made me look. I did it, and it's in me now for whatever's left of me." He was crying, and the hate was still there beneath it, both at once. "I curse you, woman. Whatever you are, wherever your God dragged you from, I curse you. And I curse myself for the day my eye ever touched your rotten mind."

His head turned slowly, and he looked out at the library. All of it. The shelves climbing past the light, floor over floor, everything he'd built.

"Mine." The word broke in the middle. "All of it, mine, and I'll never. I won't see it again. Thousands of years, and I won't." The tears came harder, and he didn't wipe them. He just looked up at the shelves like he was trying to hold the whole thing in his eyes at once. "It was beautiful. You understand? It was mine and it was beautiful, and you took it, you took all of it."

His eyes snapped back to her, and the grief was gone, leaving only hate. He knelt again. He looked at his shadow and told it, "Do it."

The sword began to shift from black to a deep red. From where she stood, the Operator felt the heat radiating from it, strong enough to feel even through her new skin. The shadow moved the sword fast, and fast and clean it took Mordran's head off, and it fell to the floor. The heat of the sword cauterized the wound as it cut. No blood came out. The only thing left in the air was the smell of burnt flesh.

The Operator got up and headed toward Mordran's head. The shadow didn't sink back into the floor this time. Little by little, it broke apart into particles, and those particles drifted into the shadows.

Guess I'm not getting any shadows under my control.

You don't have to keep the promise you made, Operator. There's no obligation to save them.

"If this were a different situation, I probably wouldn't keep it, Tera. But look at everything he gave up." The Operator crouched and grabbed Mordran by the hair. Both of his eyes were closed, but the third was open. The burnt smell was even stronger now. "He gave me this. I'm keeping my end of the deal. We'll probably get another chance to screw them later, Tera."

The head hung from her fist by the hair, the third eye open, the burnt smell coming off it. She set it on the desk.

Okay. Now, how do I carry this thing? I can't drag it around by the hair for the rest of my life.

She looked around for something to use to solve it. All of this was his. Has to be something here I can use.

The robes were no good; the cloth would sag and slip. Then she saw the chestplates on the far wall, gold and silver, worked like old ceremonial armor. They were large, more than enough metal for what she needed. That'll hold.

The head had settled, facing her, the third eye fixed on her as she worked. Her hands slowed the longer it watched her. Okay, can't work like this. She turned it to face the other way.

She pried one plate loose, brought it to the desk, and activated the Living Forge. The forge could only take so much at a time, so she worked it in small pieces, shaping bars and joints one by one and fitting them together as she went.

Wish this thing were bigger. Would save me from building it in parts.

She worked it piece by piece, pouring and cooling, until it came out as a single frame. A cage of thin bars with a base to hold the head and two straps for her thigh.

The head was placed inside, with the bars securing the skull, while the third eye remained unobstructed, gazing outward. She fastened the cage to her belt, wrapped the straps around her thigh, and tightened them. She gave it a hard pull. It held. No sway at all.

Good enough.

"Okay, Tera. Time to get the hell out of this place." The Operator went still, thinking. Several seconds passed.

You didn't ask how to leave.

"Yeah, because I'm a goddamn idiot. What did you want me to do? I just forgot whatever it was I couldn't remember, and I had a man losing his mind, naked and covered in cuts like this was some horror movie."

Relax. He cared about you getting out. And I only see one way.

"And what way is that?" the Operator asked.

Close his third eye.