Two Daughters of Olnaght

Wakefulness was always a slow process for her.

‘The automata have been a great success,’ a rough voice echoed through her head. ‘But they don’t interface with the relic weapons. If we could marry the two, we could finally have the upper hand.’

The memory faded, only to be replaced with another.

‘You want to put a soul into an automaton?’ a female voice asked, aghast. ‘Do you have any idea what the disconnect between soul and body can lead to?’

‘I do,’ the rough male voice from before answered. ‘The current versions wouldn’t be the right fit. But if we could create a dynamic body that mimicked biological processes, it should be possible, right?’

A pause, then the woman said, ‘It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but we hardly have the resources to try. We could probably make whole squads of the current model before creating a working prototype.’

‘But would those be better? Think about it. With an ensouled automaton, it could be more dynamic, able to learn and adapt and benefit from the relic weapons. They could fight longer, adding more experiences to the weapon. And when they fell, those memories could be more easily taken up by a successor without issue.’

‘You’re missing one key detail,’ the woman cut in. ‘They wouldn’t be an “it”. With a soul, they would be a person. With their own desires. Even with greater ability, it wouldn’t be right to **** them to fight.’

The memory faded and she shifted in her sleeping spot. More things flashed into her mind, no more words, only images. Several snippets of fighting battles, holding a variety of weapons, flashes of a cold stone laboratory. They made little sense, yet so much.

‘We don’t have a lot of time,’ the male voice said as darkness overtook her. He sounded older and tired. ‘The Vel’tsh forces will be at the gates in less than two days.’

‘What should we do?’ the woman asked, also sounding worn down by time and circumstance. ‘We can’t let them have her.’

‘No, we can’t. But she’s not settled yet. Moving her, or waking her up, could irreparably damage her. But I think I have a solution.’

Heavy footfalls moved around the room, followed by a series of even weightier impacts around her.

‘The teleporter? That’s not exactly safer than physically moving her!’ the woman nearly shouted.

‘True, but we can get her further away,’ the man said. ‘There’s a temple in the Golshen Mountains. Hard to reach, harder since the volcanoes in the range have washed away the paths with lava.’

‘So you intend to send her into endless exile?’

‘No, I don’t. Before the temple had to be abandoned, it was one of the relic weapon development facilities. And due to its remote location, they had a teleport array set up to send weapons out to the fronts and to receive supplies. She can use that to return when she wakes up.’

‘That’s…’ the woman hesitated, ‘that’s hardly better. What if time has rendered the teleporter too damaged to work? Or if the temple itself has been claimed by the mountains?’

‘Do we have much of a choice?’ came the man’s quiet counter. ‘As much as I hate to say it, would dying in the mountains be worse than getting captured by the Vel’tsh? At least then she wouldn’t be subjected to their experimentations.’

The woman took several heavy breaths. ‘No, it isn’t. I just wish there was another way. If we had started sooner… We weren’t even able to finish constructing her body.’

‘At least the arms from the warrior drones were compatible,’ the man said. ‘I knew leaving them for last would come back and bite us in the ass.’

‘It was more important that the biologically important parallels were properly done,’ the woman remarked softly. ‘Limbs are a bit less important than the heart, brain and lungs. I’m honestly a bit surprised you decided that her legs were the priority there.’

‘Given the threat we’re under, I think that’s obvious,’ the man grunted as the sound of grinding metal echoed around the room.

‘I suppose running would be better than trying to fight from a reclined position,’ came the woman’s dry response.

‘We can’t let ourselves get too caught up on production choices right now,’ he retorted. He paused for a moment. ‘I need you to do something.’

‘What?’

‘Pen her a letter. Put everything important down. Why we made her, how we came to see her as more than a weapon, why we’re sending her away and how she could make her way back.’

Only the sounds of tinkering filled the silence.

‘Right,’ the woman said after a long moment. ‘I’ll get to that.’

Footsteps moved away and the sound of work began to slow.

‘I know you’ll be able to hear this at some point,’ the man suddenly said. ‘Your soul is made from Fin Kej’s and mine. The crucible matrix is still drawing from us to finalize you. Think of it as the last few months of gestation.

‘I’m sorry things turned out this way,’ he continued in a sad tone. ‘I hadn’t expected to feel so paternal, but I do. There’s a part of me that wishes I never embarked on this, to spare myself the pain of having to send you away and to spare you all the pain you’re likely to face in isolation. I can only hope you’ll forgive me, us, for bringing you into a world of war, for intending you to be a weapon for that war.

‘But if you can’t, then please place all of your ire on me. Fin is blameless. I was the one to push, the one to come around to her view that you were to be our child, not our creation.’

His work stopped and she felt a rough hand run through her hair.

Old memories faded into darkness, bleeding into more recent ones. A battle through fancy hallways, copper colored blade cleaving through mechanical enemies, a demonstration of techniques both familiar and foreign before an assembly of well dressed and armored individuals. Images of a young man, rather plain looking but with an undercurrent of nobility, in various states of imagined undress and in a variety of scenarios, some casual, some carnal, some in battle.

These flashes grew more hectic. Fights through a jungle against flora and fauna, then ashen warriors in a temple.

And Astra’s eyes snapped open. The rough and uneven stone floor under her dug into her skin, only now causing discomfort as she **** herself up. Her head pounded and sweat ran down her brown skin, the aftermath of exerting so much of her mana to reach out across the gap to help Rowan. She managed to sit up, back against a crumbling wall and rubbed her temples with her metal hands.

The cool material aided the soothing massage she gave herself. Her skin felt hot under the arcane sensors in her metal digits.

“Well, that wasn’t fun,” she muttered as she let a diagnostic program run in the back of her mind. Her core was pushed harder than it ever had been, not that it was a hard thing to do. There was hardly a reason to push herself that hard before a few weeks ago, when the connection to that human began to form.

She leaned her head back against the wall. Her thoughts turned to the ruined remains of the temple’s teleporter. She had tried to get it up and running shortly after waking, but there was little in the way of engineering in her head. The insights gleaned from her parents were hardly enough to get it working. And her renewed efforts to fix it after her link out happened had only met with more of it seemingly falling apart.

Before her frustration became all consuming, something caught her attention. Her diagnosis found something new.

‘Psychic connection potency increased by an estimated 57 percent. Mana transference adjusted to maintain standard operational functions.’

“It got stronger and I’m still good to go,” she muttered. She hauled herself up to her feet. “Maybe, maybe if I can develop it more, we can actually talk. And someone on her end can help me get the teleporter working.”

With restored hope, she began to pace, thinking hard about how she could strengthen the bond.

“Expelling mana worked. If I do that a couple of times, I should see some kind of gains, right?” she asked herself.

A roar from outside was her answer. Astra glanced out a window, knowing that below, on the lava ruined grounds of the temple, a number of elemental beings of stone and fire roamed, as aggressive as landslides and eruptions. A grin broke across her face as she cracked her neck.

“That should work.”

Spiritual filaments danced across Narine’s vision. Each was a rainbow of shifting colors, sometimes heavily dominated by one color, other times a full spectrum with none taking prominence. In the dark void she found herself floating in, she was content with watching them stream by as she tried to make sense of what was happening.

“I felt someone reaching into that accursed power,” she said. “But not in the way he permits. Someone new, without his ‘blessing’, broke into the flow of energy.”

She closed her eyes, trying to recall everything that happened. Her usual suppressed sleep was broken, not by being roused by the flood of emotions traveling through her from the dying victims of the Forge’s weapons into the fires but into a dream. Ash, fire, light, darkness, dirt, ink and mist moved in fits, dancing around each other in a chaotic mess. She tried to reach out to one, cautiously moving towards the sole mote of strobing multicolored light. She touched it at the same time a small dim ember did and everything exploded into color before falling to darkness.

All Narine had caught in that moment was a vague impression of a man. Human, with short dark hair, one that seemed vaguely familiar to her, but just outside her ability to place how. A relative of someone killed by the Forge’s weapons now fighting against them or their allies? Before the vision faded, she saw his eyes. Kind, with a naked desire to help burning in them, and it clicked.

She had seen him before, in a dream so unlike this one, but close in nature. An outside **** touching upon the powers of the Forge in some way. A hero fighting against their evil. And once again, he slipped through her fingers.

She expected to wake in her stone chamber, to feel the weight of the chains still on her. Her brief periods of wakefulness hadn’t been as productive as she hoped, the manacles remaining affixed to the walls despite the weakened bolts. Or to slip back into the void of dreamless torpor, to wait for pain and rage to wake her once more.

Instead she floated among the lights. For how long she couldn’t say, but Narine watched the streams float around her like an aurora. Then curiosity struck her. If touching that man’s light had caused something to happen, would touching another bring about more change?

Narine watched the lights float around her for a bit longer as she worked up the courage to reach out to one. The fear that it would wake her up or send her back into a dreamless sleep stayed her hand, keeping her from taking the leap.

Then one of the ribbons of light pulsed, flashing red and orange in quickening succession. Almost like a speeding up heartbeat. Watching it, Narine began to feel a creeping weight begin to settle into her guts. As it drifted towards her, she could feel an uncomfortably familiar emotion begin to fill her: fear.

Whatever this was, a person, a memory, or just a concept, it was afraid. It was in danger. And she could try to do something about it. She wasn’t held back by anything but her own doubts and fear. And she didn’t want that any more.

Narine took the final steps and reached out to this fear stricken light. Aid, isolation or oblivion, she would face what came next with her head held high, knowing she made the choice to help.

As her hand clasped around the light, the void exploded with light. The void was replaced with an alleyway and Narine found herself landing on the hard ground with a thud. Narine staggered to her feet, her eyes sharp and sweeping around. It didn’t take her long to see what had drawn her to that bit of light.

A woman was being chased by a pair of burly men. One was human, the other had dark green skin, but what they looked like mattered little. It was clear they meant no good and she wasn’t going to let them do as they wished.

“Leave her alone!” Narine shouted, her voice scratchy from disuse as she ran as fast as her small legs could muster. The long years of captivity and **** sleep left her unused to such exertions. The thugs didn’t heed her warnings and kept advancing so Narine balled her fist and cocked her arm back.

With a worn cry she threw a punch, and fell through the man she tried to attack, rolling through his body as if it wasn’t there at all.

Realization quickly hit Narine and she cursed whatever gods were watching. She wasn’t really there, merely a phantom, unable to do anything once more as people suffered.

“Why!?” she cried out as she got back to her feet, the men driving the woman behind her against a wall. “Why can I only be a witness to these horrible things!? What do I have to do to help people!?”

Her anger and desperation caused something to shift. Her magic, normally kept in check by the chains and wards around her prison, roared to life, stoked by her frustrations. Motes of embers flared to life around her, floating around her like crimson stars. She had no idea just what her magic was, as it had been suppressed to near zero, and had no way to know anyone would be affected by it, but she had to do something.

With another shout, Narine let the embers fly out, letting her emotions direct her unknown power. The cloud launched itself not at the assailant, but at the woman behind her. Narine turned to see them fly into her and felt them take root, their power flowing into the woman like how molten metal flows into a mold.

Several things happened in an instant. First, Narine felt an instant pull towards the woman, an awareness of emotions and thoughts brushing up against her like a conversion happening on the other side of a closed door. Second, large swaths of her brown hair turned vibrant red, concentrating in her bangs and pigtails. And lastly, the metal lid she had grabbed at some point to serve as a shield began to warp as red energy flowed like lightning through her hands, twisting into the rough shape of a hammer.

Then the woman’s, no, Marcy’s eyes landed on her, wide with surprise and confusion.