Jake Maison
15/03/2025
Content warning: gore, violence and coarse language
Image description: a large black obelisk standing in the middle of a chapel.
A brilliant streak of pale light against the formless black of the void, driven onward by singular and immutable purpose. The lifeless shell, once a prison of metal and violence now reduced to a battered and broken remnant, lay adrift in the nothingness between the dreaming and the dead, cursed to relive the hour of its annihilation. Brilliant and terrible atom-splitting fire roared and coursed from the oblong crater in its chest, shaping and re-shaping, forever breaking and un-breaking.
Like a god abandoning its avatar, the screaming green light had fled moments before the shell’s desolation, its hateful tendrils receding once more and leaving the system of memories and neuro-electric pulses to perish in the flames to come. The still silence of the void would be shattered by a howling wind which heralded the coming of the pale light. A presence, distant yet powerful, would impress itself upon the shell, the causal loop withering at its touch.
That presence would fill the shell, pulling the poly-alloy endoskeleton, the titanite-fibre actuators and the microplated exoskeleton back together, atom by painstaking atom. The shell would reform into a body; tall, metallic and vaguely humanoid save for the lack of a head above the jaw. The pale light would dive deep into the shell, bonding and merging with the degraded internal systems; knitting the faded mecha-dendrites and interfacing neurocircuitry slowly back together, the absent motive force that once powered them replaced by the presence’s indomitable will.
Splayed metal fingers would curl into fists as the pale light assumed direct control of the body, drawing upon its well of memory in order to sculpt a new top-half of the head to replace what was lost. Something would give the presence pause, then; an image of the one who had once lived in that house, bereft of the smile that touched his eyes, both also gone. The presence would be drawn into remembrance of existing within the material world, framed in flesh and bone and tissue and blood. The impression of pain would overwhelm the memory, flooding through the presence. A bitter sorrow tinged with rage would engulf the presence as it remembered the feeling of the blade – its edge a mere molecule in width – cutting through its flesh, bone and tissue. Blood splashing across that mouthless requiem whose eyes blazed green with the will of the binary beast housed behind them.
The presence’s light, a pale and piercing blue, would visibly darken into a deep and visceral red. A wet gasp would echo across the void, followed by a chuckle devoid of warmth and half-remembered words spat in curse. Eyes rendered dark by the beast’s departure would flicker to life once again, the light within now a seething crimson. The body quaked as the presence writhed with sorrow and rage, poised to scatter its atoms back across the void, before settling back down. A hate, perfect and pure, would overcome the presence, channelling its emotive force into a singular and immutable purpose once more.
This purpose, rendered into an animus between plasma and gas, would merge and bond with the body once again. Those blood-red eyes would home in on the void; reborn cyberoptics perceiving an overlap between it and what must have been the physical world, a conjunction between the spheres of reality held in place by a twelve-foot-tall obelisk. The obelisk was cast from a glassy black substance that shone regardless of the lightless firmament around it, the glyphs inscribed upon its faces becoming clearer to the presence as it drew closer. As if sensing its approach in kind, the obelisk would begin to pulse with light from within, a chthonic radiance that would fill the glyphs and project them upon the body. The soft tissue of the body’s eyes would receive the glyphs and the wordless concepts dancing between them, hungrily absorbing the fathoms of information entwined within.
What one might have perceived as alien light shining through eldritch carvings, the presence – becoming more interwoven with the body it had shaped for itself – looked upon a lexicon that flowed as music and poetry through the mind. The language of people who communed with gods and demons, and for whom art, science, beauty and efficiency entangled as one. The presence and its body lay a metallic hand upon the obelisk, a phantom pain emanating from their chest with a thermonuclear sting as it struggled to recall the name of the man who loved them. The memory had withered like fruit on the vine, rotting into the monster who wore his face, a cruel perversion of humanity whose name was spoken only in hushed and fearful tones. The Inhuman, bloody-handed avatar of the Crownbreaker, the true object of their hatred.
The light from the glyphs began to spread, cascading down the glassy black faces of the obelisk until it was suffused entirely. The light would then begin to coarse up the body’s arms, gently yet firmly drawing them like aetheric hands into the radiant aperture. As it did, the force behind the light would merge the presence to its new body, dissolving all that divided and bonding the armoured shell, its reborn organics and the system of memories and neuro-electric pulses into a single entity. This entity, mostly machine and beyond human, burned with a monomaniacal drive for revenge. Poised upon the edge of the conjunction between the spheres; the entity would step through one side and the Witch would emerge from the other.
The crowd screamed. The Witch’s scanners ran over the interior of the room in which they found themselves; a wide-open space with a vaulted ceiling supported by six ferrocrete pillars, each flanking rows of wooden pews. From the elevated dais upon which they stood, the Witch watched as a shifting mass of heat signatures resolved into a panicked crowd of people rapidly retreating from the sight of the Witch, their sudden appearance understandably inciting panic.
Less understandable were the proximity alerts flashing across the Witch’s awareness as several among the crowd moved into cover behind the pews and pillars. They were clad in plate armour daubed in familiar-looking symbols and brandishing weapons that looked more akin to cobbled-together lengths of pipe than actual firearms. The first shot ricocheted off the Witch’s shoulder, the low-calibre bullet too weak to even leave a mark on the composite-metal microplate. Tracing the trajectory of the shot, the Witch regarded a young man in a firing stance behind the first row of pews, the snub-nosed barrel of his revolver still smoking. Sympathetic sub-routines coursed suddenly through the Witch, bidding them to power up their weapon before they could think better of it.
A low whining hum began to emanate from the Witch’s right arm, followed by a solid metallic click as a compartment sprang open to reveal a miniaturised railgun housed inside, the air around the barrel becoming visibly charged as lethal blue light began flicker from within. The Witch knew this weapon – knew what it could do to a human body – and based on the renewed panicked screams, so did the crowd. The Witch barely registered the following volley of shots, most going wide or glancing harmlessly off their armoured body as they regarded their left arm.
Ten inches of carbonadium-steel alloy unsheathed from the compartment there, the mecha-dendrites in the Witch’s arm acting as if out of reflex or muscle-memory perfected by incredible violence. Phonic sensors tapping into the rudimentary communicators used by the defenders, catching glimpses of conversation and transcribing them across the Witch’s periphery:
● //… temple has been compromised! I repe–
■ …// hell did the Crownbreaker find us!?…
● It doesn’t _____, keep shooting! We nee_ __ buy them time t–
■ Sound the al×rm! Wait… wha_ _s it doing?
A hesitant calm overcame the defenders as they regarded their unmoving foe, who paid them no mind as they beheld their reflection in the polished metal of the blade. Twin circular cyberoptics stared back at them, inner lenses blazing with scarlet light. Their face was at once familiar and utterly alien to them; a requiem cast in the likeness of the dead, framing that which was beyond death. That solid, metallic click resounded once more off the vaulted ceilings of the temple and the Witch became distantly aware of the railgun detaching from their left arm and clattering to the floor. With barely a glance down at the discarded weapon, the Witch raised a powerful armoured foot with which to stomp down upon it. The railgun’s assembly shattered into pieces under the sheer force, a sputtering of blue smoke issuing forth in meek protest from the electromagnetic core.
The defenders visibly hesitated, utterly baffled at this development despite making no effort to lower their weapons. Looking up to the large doors serving as the temple’s sole entry and exit, the Witch saw the last of the terrified civilians flee through as fast as their feet would carry them. The Witch turned their gaze back to the defenders, watching them bristle with fearful anticipation, the painfully familiar battle stance of those prepared to die. Running a systems check upon themselves, the Witch came to understand the modular weapons system afforded to their armoured body. In case of sabotage or critical damage, the ranged weapon module could be ejected with ease to limit damage to the unit. The melee weapon module, however, enjoyed no such contingency as it was – in essence – a mere length of honed metal.
Turning from where they stood, the Witch came to regard that which occupied the dais behind them. The defenders – whom the Witch absently recognised as rebels – had called this place a temple, a place of worship. The obelisk sat in the centre of the dais, its dark glass-like surface illuminated by a skylight situated overhead, admitting weak sunlight from a cloud-choked sky.
The material from which the obelisks had been carved defied categorisation, matching none of the known terrestrial elements. While similar in appearance to volcanic glass due to its dark colouration and smooth texture, it was positively charged by energy whose signature matched that of conjunctions with the void. Many names had been put forth in reference to this discovery – ‘chthonite’ and ‘noctolithium’ being the most academic examples – yet most simply referred to it as ‘voidstone’. Regardless of what it was called, all scholars agreed on the fact that the obelisks were virtually indestructible.
Barring a direct thermonuclear blast, no known weapon had been able to so much as leave a mark on the obelisks; not plasma cannons, not kinetic bombardment platforms and certainly not melee weapons. The Witch reared back, barely registering the shouts of protests from the rebels behind them as they swung their blade into the side of the obelisk. The rebels shouts turned to pained groans as the sound of impact rang out across the temple in a cacophonous song of metal on voidstone.
Grateful for the integrated dampeners in their phonic sensors, the Witch reared back and struck again, heedless of the renewed shouts of the rebels behind them. The blade itself was made of an alloy of depleted carbonadium and steel, purposely designed by the Crownbreaker to be nigh-indestructible. The weapon’s module, however, was made up mostly of titanite-fibre actuators that – while sturdy – would theoretically break with the application of sufficient force.
Rearing back once more, the Witch would prove this theory correct by swinging their blade a third and final time, this time watching the returning momentum tear the module free from its compartment in their left arm. The blade rattled noisily against the ferrocrete floor, its module a ruin of tangled ribbon cables and smoking outputs. A sensation akin to pain coursed through the Witch’s left arm, the mecha-dendrites within writhing in self-repair adaptive to the sudden absence of a weapon module.
Turning back to face the rebels once more, the Witch regarded those they would have called comrades in a half-remembered life. Something approaching sadness twinged through them at the sight of raised gun barrels and shaking trigger hands, hatred mixed with fear for an ally in the skin of the enemy. The young man standing closest yelped as the revolver in his hand discharged without him pulling the trigger, the shot scoring against the reborn flesh of the Witch’s cheek. The wound answered with a thin trail of dark thickened blood as the Witch turned their head back to face the young man.
Deeply-ingrained combat protocols took hold, then. In the breadth of a second, the Witch surged forward, clearing the dais in a single bound and reducing the pew between them and their target to splinters. The young man was thrown to the floor by the impact, only to then be seized by his chest plate by a powerful metallic hand and hauled off his feet. The young man spat curses and flailed impotently in the Witch’s grip, his allies demanding his release but were too afraid of hitting him to take a shot themselves. The Witch gazed up at the human in their grasp, artificial retinas scrolling with potential means of elimination like an algorithmic litany of blood.
The Witch paused then, fragmented recollections of their life before death eliciting something between an operational countermeasure and feeling of revulsion. Despite being destroyed, the armoured body of the Inhuman had seemingly retained the memory of the violence it had been used to inflict. The Witch’s awareness swam with a chorus of dying screams and the thunderous report of firearms accompanied by an incense of oxidised blood and burned flesh. The Witch could feel upon every cell – every molecule – of their being the impression of that which had come before, a nascent intelligence merely fragmented by the thermonuclear blast intended to purge it. Those fragments would slumber within the atoms of the endoskeleton, actuators and exoskeleton, awakening when the Witch was bonded to the armoured body in the crucible of the obelisk’s energies.
The Witch wordlessly released their grip on the young man, who fell to the floor and hurried backward into the pew behind him. Despite his heaving chest, the young man held the Witch’s gaze, his features slowly softening with fearful understanding. Standing back up, the young man’s gaze drifted to what approximated the Witch’s mouth, a poly-alloy rendering of a skeletal jaw that served only to instil fear by symbolising death, one of the Crownbreaker’s many cruel designs.
‘You can’t speak, can you?’ he asked. By way of answer, the Witch said nothing. Frowning, the young man reached for the communicator affixed to his collar, opening a channel before speaking:
■ Can you understand me?
□ Yes.
■ You’re not an Inhuman, are you?
□ No.
■ Then, what are you?
□ I don’t know. But I am no friend of the Crownbreaker.
■ Oh, well that’s a relief. Sorry about shooting you in the face.
□ I didn’t take it personally.
■ … You came from the void, right?
□ Yes.
■ So, you serve the one beyond?
□ In life, yes. Now, I am unsure.
■ I don’t understand…
□ We have that in comm–
A sudden violent quaking shook the temple and snapped the Witch to attention. Distant sounds of explosions sporadically drowned out exchanges between energy and ballistic weapons.
□ The Crownbreaker has found us.
■ How do you know?
□ I’d know the sound of plasma fire anywhere.
■ Fuck… what do we do?
□ We?
■ Well, yeah. Your arrival here was surely detected by their long-range scanners.
□ Are you saying this is my f-
● Oh, will you two please shut the fuck up?
The Witch directed their attention to the woman standing behind the pillar to the right with a combat rifle in her hands. Whereas the young man regarded the Witch with fear and trepidation, her eyes held only hatred tempered by pragmatism.
● It doesn’t matter how they found us, we need to mount a defence!
□ Your weapons will not be enough.
● Do you have a better idea?
□ Yes. I require access to your tech-vault.
● … How the fuck do you know about that?
□ I’ll tell you if we survive this.
●… Follow me. Try anything and I’ll scrap you myself.
The tech-vault was situated away from the temple in an abandoned maglev transit tunnel, the ancient hermetic doors serving as the perfect cover against prying eyes, organic or otherwise. With a glance, the woman – clearly of respected rank – dispelled any protests at the Witch’s presence within what was supposed to be a well-guarded secret.
The Witch drew upon the molecular memory of the burning electromagnetic chill as they inspected the rows of Crownbreaker machines felled by rebel hands for study. Asserting that the Crownbreaker would have engineered an answer to this vulnerability, the Witch knew exactly what to look for. Taking a high-frequency blade from an insectoid hunter-killer and a linear induction motor from a mobile siege unit. Combining the Crownbreaker’s own archived fabrication protocols with their own knowledge, the Witch fashioned the high-frequency blade into one that could phase through solid matter and installed it in their left arm module. The Witch then converted the linear induction motor into a coilgun capable of firing magnetic fields powerful enough to tear a target apart at a sub-atomic level.
Installing the coilgun in their right arm module, the Witch could feel the mecha-dendrites beneath their microplated skin integrating the weapon modules into their system. The Witch turned to the woman as they made to leave, her face grimly drawn.
□ How bad is it?
● One armoured carrier, twenty bipeds…
□ That’s not s-
● …and two Inhumans.
□ … I see.
● We’re fucked, aren’t we?
□ No. I won’t let all of this be for nothing.
And, without another word, the Witch left the vault.
***
Paper Road Magazine 