Act 1, Chapter 1: Tearing the curtain (Patreon)

Chained to the thick walls of the Reave-vessel, I heaved a breath inside my Magnight’clad armor. The massive plates that shielded me from the cold void between worlds shrieked and trembled as the thrusters drove us faster and faster toward our destination.

A thin layer of fog spread across my visor screen where my breath touched the crystal-display. A moment later, the suit adjusted, altering the atmosphere inside to compensate for my rising temperature and mounting stress. I took a deep breath and watched the displayed oxygen levels dip ever so slightly.

My hands tightened around the grav-rifle. I shifted my grip along the long barrel, then glanced down at the heavy gauntlets encasing my hands. They didn't feel like mine. Inside this steel shell, I was larger, stronger and harder to break, especially with vibration turned on. Yet within this hurtling miracle of metal and ingenuity, I felt small.

Among the others clad in armor like mine, I felt smaller still.

Every one of them knew battle. Every one of them had already fought and killed with their own hands, with Vibruses and rifles, and with the gifts granted by the Domain of Kinetism. They carried themselves with the easy confidence of veterans—most of them. They were those here that trembled in those steel being-shaped personal vessels of theirs just as I had. I was sure of it.

I was the newcomer here. Magnighted barely two months ago, and already time had decided I could wait no longer. My plans for revenge, my careful schemes, all of it would have to remain unfinished until this was over. I welcomed the challenge with open arms and my head held high. If Death was to carry me across to the shores of what lay beyond, it would only be after we had exchanged a final gaze

Not even a full cycle had passed since I joined the Order of the Magnights of the Pendulum, and now I was about to undertake the very maneuver celebrated in the paeans sung of heroes who gave their lives to drag our Domain from the edge of ruin and set it back upon the road to glory in the centuries past.

I was bloody thrilled about it.

“I inquire, young Page. You worry.” The private message came from the Magnight chained to the outer bank to my right. He had opened a direct voice channel and spoke in that peculiar Arachneo'Sap manner, every sentence twisted into something that sounded almost right, made sure that human would understand his mood and the intention behind the words.

His armor, like that of all his kind, differed from mine. It was half my size and built to accommodate all eight of his limbs. Beneath that featureless shell, I knew he viewed the world through the same number of eyes. Stranger still, his people had no ears. They heard through vibrations carried across their skin.

“I’m fast, small brother. I shake in prospect of our descent,” I spoke back, unclenching my jaw. Only then did I realize I had been grinding my teeth with anticipation of reality breaking apart.

Lies came easy to me. Especially when there was a grain of truth to them and this male was not half bad himself. No, he wasn’t slow at all.

“I suggest, expect to die soon. I lift spirit, everything else shall be a welcomed surprise.” He gripped his chains with two armor-clad hands. They were different from mine. I was taught long ago that his ancestors had been chosen and changed to be smarter and more dexterous, and in the process their singular tarsi expanded to look more like human hands, with two digits in the middle and two more on each side opposable to them, allowing for a proper grip.

Out of all the brothers I had in here, he was the one I tolerated the most. He did not pretend to be anything more than a cold-blooded killer.

The abdominal part of his Magnight-clad was painted to show a spider just like him weaving silk over a loom. This loom was soaked in blood, red one. I liked the sentiment.

“You lived already small brother. I cast away the fear, I worry to die by happenstance and miss the speed. Dodge the glory.” I answered, true to my thoughts. I was young still, while he had already waged wars, battled other guilds, and seen the Domains of men and gods.

“I curse and question, fucking feelings.” His kind did not feel the same way humans did. It made it easier for them to accept fate as it came. I closed the channel, as his intrusion did not help with my focus.

The shaking increased even more as we approached the desired velocity, the one our chapter’s main Wizard would use aboard the Breakdam-ship at the forefront of our assault. He would call upon the words of the universe, conduct his rituals aboard that enormous flying fortress, and through them tear the Aether asunder.

I knew little about the ways of wizardry beyond the fact that wizards used the SoulAu of the Universe itself to cast their spells. When his work would be done, the things that lurked within that liminal space between realms would latch onto us, and the curtain-tearing would begin.

I was curious about that.

Fuck. I was really enjoying all of it. So much that the hatred within me slithered for a nimble of my own spirit.

I could not imagine how one could even prepare for the mindrape I was about to be subjected to and yet I wondered if those horrors would be worse than those of memories. The Augur stone implanted in my brain was supposed to help with that, but still, the nightmares described in the tomes at the library spoke of those broken by the Realm Reave.

When I contemplated the life, soullight appeared all around us, slowly gathering like an illuminating silvery-blue mist on the armor of my brothers and the thick walls of the ship itself. I knew it was also outside, stripping the vessels of their momentum. We'd speed up to the maximum, just for the wizard to be able to take it all away to fuel that arcane weave of his.

My heart slowed too. My thoughts became sluggish, and my chest moved ever more slowly, while I simply observed as that illight carrying the SoulAu took movement away from us.

And while we all halted—the people, the ships, even our thoughts—the spell cracked the universe open, and we were all cast like solitary lights into the darkness that reached out from behind the veil.

My skin ignited instantly, burning with the fury of a hellish inferno. Flesh blackened and charred as I tried to scream, my voice swallowed by the agony. I gagged on the smoke pouring from my own body while my nerves continuously burned away and regenerated, only to ensure I felt every moment of the unbearable pain.

I coughed for a few fleeting seconds before mangled, twisting arms of blinding light reached for me. They held me fast, binding me in the grip of countless gnarled, soul-freezing fingers. Then they forced their way down my open throat, seized my lungs, and ripped them free, dragging them upward and out through my mouth.

I tried screaming more, but I couldn't anymore.

Then my blood coagulated all at once, breaking the vines where it pushed against them. My vision vanished, my hearing stopped, and my thoughts became nothing but pain and terror as I desperately begged for this entropy to claim me and end my life.

*Keep your focus, the oracle of the goddess, cast into the Augur stone crystal embedded in my skull, filled the emptiness that the fleeting of my own thoughts had caused. Fight the terrors. Do not give in.* It encouraged me, and yet if I could have formulated thoughts in that moment of emptiness, I would have howled at it with questions. I would have asked how I could fight, or narrow my mind’s focus, when there was no place for thought at all—when I was stripped bare to just a spirit, my soul itself.

And yet, as if by some divine intervention carried by those words, or by my soul’s miraculous self-preservation, the Authority that made me responded to the unsaid pleas and pushed back against the grip of illight that tried to unmake me. It knew what I was, what made me, my place in the memory of the universe, and with that it used that imprint to shove away the intrusion. Every passing second—an hour or a century, however long it truly took—I pushed back against the tide, until I took a breath again.

It was a greedy one, long and deep, my mouth wide as air flooded into my lungs. My eyes caught light again, revealing armored men and spiders thrusting their plated bodies against the chains that kept them inside the vessel. The red, revolting light of the alarm bathed us in warning waves, amid the sounds that blazed in my reawakening ears. The outside of the ship burned as the temperature inside the craft increased. We were in the burning phases of intrusion into an alien Domain.

That was when I realized two of my brothers were not fighting. Their bodies had stopped moving, their shells empty of their users. Their lives—their essence—had been claimed by the eldritch that lurk in the Aether when we were in transit. It was also then that I noticed my own struggle—I was fighting the containment chains myself, pulling away from the ever-increasing heat of the steel at my back. I fought and fought, trying to break them, but they vibrated to the melody of the universe already, keeping me from breaking free.

It took effort to calm myself—an exertion of will entirely different from the kind that granted me Authority. It ran counter to the very traits my Domain demanded of me. As a mage of Kinetism, I was meant to move, to advance, to propagate motion. Calmness felt like an affront to that purpose.

So I focused on a goal instead, something that would bring my body, mind, and spirit into alignment with the will of the magic I wielded.

My purpose was to reave. And if that made me a weapon aimed at mages who cared so little for mundane lives, then all the better. Fucking excellent. I would claim their lives with a smile on my face.

“Dear Brothers in Momentum,” the main voice channel opened. It was Commander Leodies kin Torque speaking in that goddess-awful, contemptuous tone of his. I hated the guts of this man.

“We’ve all made it through the veil,” he addressed only those who had survived, disregarding the rest as not worthy of mention. “In less than two minutes, we will hit the ground,” he continued, while an explosion somewhere outside shook the metal of the vessel and the bones of those who had them inside their bodies. Our ship banked and I felt as if the weight of entire world was placed on my chest.

“Amidst the fire of the opposition, in the rain of blood made by the bodies of those who have been unfortunate enough not to earn the blessing of the goddess. We will fight with the full might of those who command the swings of the all-mighty Pendulum.”

Another explosion hit, and the sound of it was overwhelming, because it came with both light and force. I was thrown away from the ship and into the sky, as the craft I had been on was torn to pieces by the anti-air cannons mounted somewhere kilometers below. Just seconds before I saw a long metallic rod that made the wrecking pass through two of the Magnights opposite to me.

I oriented myself, seeing this new alien Domain through my visor. Above me were the two stars I had been told about. One not unlike my own, albeit a tad more blue in its hue; the other unlike anything I had ever seen—a yellow light, but hollowed out, a torus-shaped thing, and in that emptiness a structure made by the mages of this world. It contained the soul core of this place and was the source of all their power.

Strange as those celestial bodies were, I drifted through the light-blue atmosphere of the world that basked in that greenish light coming from the stars.

“And with that shared purpose of ours, we will enact the will of the goddess. Be strong, my brothers. Be fast. Leave nothing but stillness in your wake.” He continued while I fell, like a rock cast into the well.

I adjusted myself and brought my arms closer together, forming more of a bullet of myself and becoming harder to hit. My HUD indicated that seven of the brothers in my team were still alive, including Thirty First Grass Hunter, the Arachneo’Sap I had spoken to briefly before transition.

I moved my head around, trying to find him in the clouds and smoke, when another of those metallic rods passed by, tearing the nimbuses asunder and missing another Reave-vessel by a hair’s breadth. It banked portside to dodge and then with an illumination of sunlight it increased its speed to descent like a comet. My arachnid teammate was below me, all appendages curled beneath him, already gaining speed—probably manipulating his momentum to his advantage as well, adding or taking away from it as he saw fit.

I plunged into one of the clouds for a few heartbeats, and it obscured all vision. Each and every one of us was too busy with our own thoughts; no one spoke a single word. I saw gunfire to my left, a discharge from a grav-rifle through the thick clouds, and I immediately liked the idea.

I spread my arms wide for a second, and the armor responded by opening the break plates meant to halt my descent. Then I brought my arms together, one already holding the rifle, and took aim below myself. It fired, responding to my thoughts, leaving a trail of localized gravity distortion that made the cloud collapse inward along the line so rapidly and with such force it left a clear tunnel for me to see through.

Below me, the ground was a machine—one vast clockwork of revolving enormous circular valves and rings overlapping each other, with buildings on them and weaponry aimed at the sky. Built out of metal, glass, and artificial crystalline material, it reflected the sky like a vast, uneven, constantly moving sea, or an arcane wizard’s construction.

“Amazing,” I whispered to myself, looking at the displayed altitude and adjusting my fall.

“I can see the Guild’s building,” Bronco kin Tiller spoke through the comm. He had pinned his observation, and when I found what he meant in my own field of view, it was outlined for me with a red line.

It was a negative tower. We had read about it in the briefings. Made out of hundreds of ring floors, revolving on top of each other, and yet leaving an empty canister shaped space inside. It gathered the spiritual energy coming from the soul core placed within the star and spread it to use in this enormous arcane construction. And on these floors, mages of the Mechanics dwelled.

It was where we were going to hit them for their blasphemies against the goddess of creation—or the other bullshit the command fed the other Magnights around me. I knew better, though. Someone far away from here, on some comfy chair or a bloody sofa, was laughing at all this sacrifice while his power increased. I wondered if others knew, but didn’t care or whether they were true believers. Not that it would stop what would be coming for them from my hand, and yet my mind wandered still.

As the ground came closer and the first of our crafts already made it down to start the terrestrial assault, my group and I were still falling, carried mostly by the gravity of the planet. There were others like us—teams I had noticed in the distance when we pushed out of the cloud curtain. The fighting below must have been horrendous, but our flight’s relative peace was coming to an end too as a swarm took off from the city’s level and flew toward us at full speed. The view below us blackened.

“I warn, drone interceptors deployed. I curse and anticipate, can’t wait to fucking tear them apart,” Thirty First called.

“Shut up, Thif,” Bronco’s voice shouted through the comm channels. “Just do your bloody thing, small brother.”