**SFX: The hiss of cooling metal, like a world holding its breath.**
Ash fell in the present—grey, silent, and eternal. It coated the battlements of the Concrete Bastion, the still-warm barrels of the anti-air guns, and the broad shoulders of the emperor who stood watching the corpse of his world.
Aeron did not feel like an emperor. He felt like a fossil. A thing made from layers of compressed memory and rage. The ash caught in the grooves of his armor, in the deep scar that ran from his temple to his jaw—a gift from a Dominion Stalker's claw. He didn't brush it away.
Beside him, Maya stood like his shadow given form. At sixteen, she was slender where he was broad, quiet where his silence was a roar. She wore no armor, only a simple, grey tunic and trousers, her dark hair braided back from a face that was all careful stillness. But her hands… her hands told a different story. Scars wove across her knuckles and palms in a complex map of old burns, precise cuts, and strange, silvery weals that didn't look entirely human. One hand rested lightly on the ferrocrete wall. The other was clenched at her side, a faint, bioluminescent blue shimmer tracing the veins beneath her skin—her body's silent, angry song.
"They didn't see people," Aeron said, his voice a low grind in the twilight. "They saw ecosystems. They saw a garden. We were just… flora. Some to be plucked. Some to be studied. Some," he turned his head, the red optical sensors in his helmet glinting, "to be grafted onto new stock."
Maya didn't speak. She looked at her glowing hand, then out at the distant, pulsating spire of Dominion bio-metal that scarred the horizon. The light in her veins pulsed once, in time with the spire's distant thrum. A sympathetic resonance. A connection she hated and had learned to use.
**SFX: A wet, seismic CRUNCH.**
*Two Years Earlier. The Belly. The Pulse.*
The end of their world didn't come with sirens. It came with a **Pulse**.
A deep, subsonic *thump* that wasn't heard but *felt* in the marrow, in the fillings of teeth, in the liquid of the eye. The air in the Belly turned syrupy and sweet-smelling in an instant.
Maya felt it first. Not as sound, but as a **wrong frequency**. A vibration that made her own heartbeat stutter in protest. Her hand snapped out, clamping onto Aeron's wrist with desperate strength a second before Captain Vance shouted.
"CONTACT! EVERYONE D—"
His voice strangled, dragged down into a slur.
From the concrete walls, the rusted pipes, the very shadows themselves, the flowers bloomed. One moment, grey stone. The next, phosphorescent blue blossoms, exquisitely patterned, releasing a shimmering pollen that hung in the air like captive galaxies.
Maya stared, a medic's mind wrestling with a child's terror. She didn't just see flowers. She saw *architecture*. The petals followed a perfect Fibonacci spiral. The pollen grains weren't random; they were geometrically identical, machines on a microscopic scale. This wasn't an attack. It was a **deployment**.
**Griff** moved first. The big man roared, a sound of pure, undiluted fury, and his massive hydraulic clamp-arm shot out to pulp the nearest bloom. The movement was agonizingly slow, muscles fighting the neural syrup flooding his system. The clamp froze inches from its target, trembling.
"N-no… you don't… you don't get this place…" he snarled behind his mask.
The first alien entered. A **Brute**. It was a monument of crimson chitin and hydraulic muscle, with a central heat-glow where a face should be. It assessed Griff not as a man, but as a structural problem. It crossed the room in two ground-shaking strides.
Griff tried to pivot. His body gave a pathetic twitch.
The Brute's fist, a solid bone wrecking ball, swung in a wide, casual arc.
**SFX: CRUNCH-SPLATTER-TINKLE.**
The impact was not of breaking, but of *liquefying under pressure*. The welding mask ceased to exist. What was behind it became nothing. Griff's body was lifted and thrown into his beloved tool rack with a catastrophic crash of scattering metal. He slid down, leaving a dark, abstract painting on the wall.
*His hands were so careful when he showed me how a wrench balanced,* Aeron's mind screamed, trapped in a frozen body beside Maya. *He said machines were honest.*
Maya didn't scream. She felt it. A phantom, sympathetic pain in her own jaw, her own skull. Her **Flesh-Sense**, still dormant, twitched in its sleep.
***
"They use specialists," Aeron said to the ash, to his sister, to the ghosts. "Precise tools for precise dissections. Brutes for structural deconstruction. They break the physical form to see what principles held it together."
He looked at his own armored fist, the knuckles plated in salvaged Dominion alloy. "I learned from them."
**SFX: A sound like a thousand glistening strands being plucked.**
*The Belly.*
The second creature was a **Medica**. It flowed in, a being of translucent, gelatinous strands pulsing with internal data-light. It went straight to **Lena**.
Their medic was on her knees, her kind face a mask of paralysis and dread. The Medica's whip-like tendrils, delicate as a surgeon's tools, brushed her cheeks, then *sank in* without breaking the skin.
Lena's back arched. A silent, breathless shriek. On the Medica's body, images flickered—Lena setting a bone, humming as she boiled bandages, the look in her eyes when a patient lived.
It was learning her. Then, it began to **iterate**.
A tendril touched her index finger. The finger *bloomed*. Not with a flower, but with a perfect, miniature replica of the paralytic fungus, roots visible under her translucent skin. Another tendril touched her ear, which melted and reformed into a delicate, spiral seashell that vibrated with ultrasonic sound.
Maya watched, her healer's soul screaming. She saw the biological code being rewritten, the DNA being edited in real-time. It was the most beautiful, most horrifying thing she would ever witness. It was where her own terrible power would one day find its origin point.
When the Medica withdrew, Lena slumped, a living museum of invasive, glowing art, breathing in wet, bubbling rasps. Alive. Conscious. Trapped.
*She said I had gentle hands,* Maya thought, the memory a shard of ice in her heart. *She said that was a doctor's first tool.*
***
"They have Whisperers," Maya spoke for the first time, her voice quiet but clear, cutting through the ash-fall. She was looking at her own hands, at the light beneath the skin. "They don't harvest the body. They harvest the… the self. The data of a life."
Aeron looked at her, his helmet hiding his expression. "They turned memory into a commodity."
**SFX: A high-frequency DRILL, felt in the molars.**
*The Belly.*
The **Whisperer** was a cluster of rotating crystal shards around a core of nothing. It hovered to **Big Mo**.
The giant trembled, a low growl in his throat, trying to move his shield. The Whisperer's crystals spun, and a beam of pure psychic inquiry speared into Mo's eyes.
Mo's head snapped back. And he began to **re-cite**.
Not stories. Data. The chemical composition of adrenaline. The weight tolerances of his shield. GPS coordinates. Inventory lists. His voice, the voice that had read them tales of knights and pirates, was flat, machinelike, emptied of its rumble. As he spoke, the light in his eyes guttered and died, replaced by the blank glow of a screen displaying raw information.
When the data-stream touched the memory of teaching Maya her letters—the chalk smell, the shape of 'H' for 'home'—the Whisperer paused. The stream flickered. For a microsecond, Mo's own voice returned, a ragged ghost: "…it was a far, far better thing…"
The Whisperer adjusted its frequency. The sentimental data was corrupted, labeled *irrelevant noise*, and deleted. Mo continued, now listing the moisture content of long-moldered bread.
*He taught me words could be shelters,* Maya thought, her fist clenching so tight the glowing veins flared. *He was wrong. They're just ghosts.*
**SFX: Chittering. Skittering. A nest of razors on glass.**
*The Belly.*
The **Stalkers** came in a pack. Camouflage flickering, they were liquid nightmares. They ignored the adults and flowed toward **Ben**.
The boy had his pipe-spear raised, his knuckles white. "G-get back!"
They flowed around him. One pinned his shoulders. Another his legs. They held him, not to maim, but to **present** him.
A third Stalker approached his face. Its mandibles opened, extruding a long, needle-like proboscis. With awful gentleness, it inserted the needle into Ben's tear duct.
Ben's body went rigid. His eyes widened beyond human limits. The Stalker wasn't hurting him. It was **harvesting his terror**. Pure, juvenile, chemical fear. The proboscis pulsed, drinking it in. When it retracted, Ben didn't die. He emptied. He slumped, breathing, but his eyes were doll's eyes. The wanting, the striving, the *hope* to be brave—all consumed.
*He gave me his sweet ration once,* Maya remembered, a tear tracing a clean path through the ash on her cheek. *He didn't even like me that much. He just did it.*
Then came **Kira**. The ghost fought the longest, her parkour-toned body resisting the pollen's clutch. She was on her feet, swaying, a crowbar in hand. She didn't look at the Brute turning toward her. She looked past it, straight at the hidden vent where Aeron and Maya were frozen. Her eyes, always so focused, held a single, clear message: *Stay. Hidden.*
With the last of her will, she didn't attack. She ran—a stumbling, desperate dash toward the main tunnel. A perfect, suicidal feint.
The Brute took the bait. It lunged. Kira tried to flow under its grip, but her body failed. The massive hand closed around her torso.
**SFX: A terrible, sequential CRACKLING, like a bundle of green wood being slowly crushed.**
It squeezed. Methodically. Ribs, spine, diaphragm. The Brute watched her face, studying the extinction of light in her eyes. When it was done, it dropped what was left.
*She taught me how to fall,* Aeron's thought was a vow carved in stone. *She said the ground can be a friend if you know how to greet it.*
***
"And then," Aeron said, the word hanging in the ashy air, "comes the Gardener."
Only **Vance** remained. Their captain. Their compass. He had not fought. His hand had been under the table, on the hidden panic button… and then it had lifted away. His eyes had found theirs in the dark. *No.*
Now, he stood alone, his glasses askew, breathing hard but standing straight. He didn't look at the monsters. He watched the air where **Xylos** resolved into being.
The Supreme King was absence given form. Tall, smooth, and so terribly quiet. His featureless face regarded Vance.
"Captain Elias Vance," the voice was in their minds, clean and cold. "Primary emotional node. Your cultivation cycle is complete."
Vance's face, usually a mask of calm strategy, twisted into raw fury. "We had a *deal*," he spat, the words thick with the pollen. "You observe. You take your readings from the perimeter. That was the arrangement when you first came! You said you wanted to *understand* survival!"
Xylos's head tilted, a gesture of pure, analytical curiosity. "The deal was with a prior evaluation unit. I am the harvest. Understanding is a prerequisite, not a purpose. Your data has been understood. Now it will be integrated."
"You lying *bastard*," Vance choked. "We were a science project to you?"
"You were a control group. Now you are a yield." Xylos raised a hand. A filament, finer than silk, gleamed. "Your defiance has unexpected parameters. We will examine its architecture."
The filament lashed out. **SNAP.** Vance's right knee shattered. He cried out, collapsing. **SNAP.** The left knee. He fell to the floor.
"Why?!" Vance screamed, pain and betrayal ripping the word from him.
"To map the failure load of your leadership substructure," Xylos stated, as if explaining gravity to a child. Another filament. **POP.** Vance's shoulder disintegrated.
Aeron strained against the pollen, a silent roar in his throat. Maya's hand was a vice on his arm, her nails drawing blood. She was shaking, not with fear, but with a terrible, rising comprehension. She could *see* the biological signals of Vance's pain, could feel the trauma patterns forming in his nervous system. It was a map of agony.
Xylos knelt. The filament touched Vance's temple.
On the blank faceplate, Vance's life played—not just memories, but the emotional weight, the love for his lost daughter, the burdensome care for his ragged crew, the clever, desperate plans.
"Fascinating," Xylos's mental murmur was awed. "Such complex sentiment from such simple biology. A persistent anomaly."
The filament glowed. Xylos wasn't just reading. He was trying to **isolate** the anomaly, to extract the principle of Vance's defiance. Vance's body began to seize, his form blurring at the edges.
"Stop…" Vance begged, his eyes finding the vent. Not for help. For witness. "Aeron… Maya… *run*…"
With a final, convulsive effort, Vance did the last irrational thing. He didn't try to attack Xylos. He threw his one working arm out, as if to physically shield the vent, and screamed—a raw, wordless challenge that was pure, undiluted human noise.
It was a distraction. A pathetic, beautiful, human distraction.
Enraged by the irrational data-spike, Xylos pulsed the filament.
**SFX: A crystalline SHIMMER, like a thousand wind chimes.**
Vance's body didn't die. It **transmuted**. Flesh, cloth, and bone crystallized and reformed in seconds. Where their captain lay, a sculpture remained. Milky quartz and copper wire, depicting a man on his knees, one arm outstretched in protection, his face turned up in a silent, permanent shout.
Xylos stood, examining his work. "Aesthetic. But inefficient. The protective gesture served no tactical purpose." He turned, his blank gaze sweeping the room of corpses and art.
It landed on the vent.
The pressure was instant. A cold, psychic searchlight pinning them. Aeron met Maya's eyes. In hers, he saw the reflection of his own soul: terror, bottomless grief, and a hatred so new and sharp it felt like being born.
Xylos took a step forward. Stopped.
He made a sound—a wet, clicking *tchk-tchk* of pure fascination.
He saw it.
Not two children. A **symbiotic pair**. Aeron's mind, already hardening into crystalline patterns of strategy and rage. Maya's, sensing the biological echoes of death, her empathy curdling into a deep, nurturing fury. Their bond was a feedback loop of escalating potential. They weren't just specimens. They were a **novelty**. A new strain.
Xylos raised a hand, halting the Brute. He spoke to his lieutenant in the rapid, melodic click-hum of the Aethel tongue. A command.
The lieutenant produced two small, translucent stasis pods.
"No," Aeron tried to whisper. The pollen stole it.
Maya's glowing hand gripped him tighter. She wasn't looking at the aliens. She was looking at the crystalline statue of Vance. Her eyes were memorizing its structure, the way the light fractured within it. She was saying goodbye. And she was learning.
The last thing Aeron saw before the stasis field swallowed them was not the pods. It was the look on Vance's crystalline face. Not pain. Not fear. A father's determination. *Grow.*
***
**SFX: The deep, resonant CLANG of the Bastion's great forge being lit.**
Aeron blinked. The memory was a ghost, but its skeleton was the framework of his empire. The ash fell. Maya's hand was still on the wall, her knuckles white.
"For seven years," Maya said, her voice almost lost in the wind, "they put us in a box of pretty lies. They fed us stories of being rescued by rebels. They trained us. They gave us powers—not to free us, but to make us better tools for the hand that killed our family."
Aeron nodded, the movement heavy. "They called it conditioning. I learned to hear the song in machines." He tapped his helmet. "To make their tech sing for me. You…"
"I learned the language of flesh," Maya finished, looking at her hand. The blue glow pulsed, steady now. "How to ask it to change. To heal. Or to break. They thought they were programming weapons."
"They were," Aeron said, turning from the wall. The red optics of his helmet scanned his fortress—the grafted soldiers, the humming arcanotech, the defiant faces smudged with ash and hope. "They just didn't get to pick the target."
He looked at his sister. The quiet girl who now held the power of life and ruin in her scarred hands. The gardener had seen a strange, dual seedling and decided to pot it. To nurture it. To see what strange fruit it would bear.
The fruit was an empire. The fruit was vengeance, cold and patient and growing in the dark.
"They harvested our family," Aeron said, his amplified voice suddenly cutting through the Bastion's yard, drawing every eye. "They thought they were pulling weeds."
He raised his armored fist. In the forge-light, the Dominion alloy gleamed with stolen fire.
"They were wrong." His voice rolled over the stones. "They were planting **seeds**."
Maya unclenched her fist. In her palm, a small, perfect white flower—impossible in the ash—bloomed from her own skin, then dissolved into blue light.
"And now," she whispered, the words for her brother alone, as the first true drops of cold rain began to wash the ash away, "we root."