INGRESSED: Woken
Chapter 85 - Act V - INGRESSION
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Chapter 85 - INGRESSED: Woken
Paysha/Jaysian
The bedside clock’s hands widen by the slimmest geometer’s divide. We have pretended to need sleep like the multitudes around us, waiting as their time flows past us, observing their brains’ poor pretence of perceiving its progress. They have prepared endlessly, most in ignorance, for this decisive new day. For many, it will be their last.
The dawn light was a glimmer when we’d ventured outside. Their Seed was still there. The last stars faded as we gazed upon its dark shadow. Diamorpheus knows we are here. Our war is as ancient as this day is young. It waits in silence for its agents as they, in turn, corral their slaves. We feel their violence and hate approaching, like the cancerous waves which had once spread within our host. We remain alert to alterations in the flux of the foreseen.
“Pash.”
He nudges our shoulder, where Mai had earlier gripped us to conclude our bodily fusion. I had not told her I have set aside my love to prepare for today. I will not tell her that her love must turn to pain. It is best.
“Mmm?”
“It’s Archie. Time to get up.”
Archie. The new life we are growing stirs on hearing his voice. We cannot know everything, but we sense what it has taken of him for itself.
“C’mon, Paysha. Wake up.” He shakes us.
Don’t shake us. We say the words he wants to hear: “Okay, okay. I’m awake.” We are always awake.
He leaves us. The General’s gift to protect our fragile human body lies beside us. Armour for the child inside. We dress in it and go to eat, carrying the pack holding our Seed. Many others sit in the room with us. We greet them and sit by our brother. Memories merge of another breakfast from another time. We sense his feelings. Like theirs. Anxious. Vulnerable. Brave.
Then our love is beside us. She grips our thigh with a tense hand in hidden gesture. We sense the neuroid condensate for her eagles, nestled beside a defiant consciousness. She is ready. Good, very good, we tell her. She smiles. We touch her face, unhidden. Our brother averts his gaze. She cries a silent tear from each golden eye. No shame, we tell her. And no pain. We will feel no pain. Bravery is inside us both. She understands. Also good.
Our brother wishes us luck. We smile. Luck. Now unrecognisable. We don’t tell him.
The enemy approaches and all within the Lake of Light must meet their fate. Our face is stern as we walk outside, accompanied by the woman whose arms bear fear as flight; whose heart remains fragile. Her expression is also grim. We are ready. We climb, our child heavy inside. Below us the bells fall silent and giant silver flowers rise up from every panoptik.
A murmuring shadow passes over us to stand station, to entice. Unable to resist the clarion call of both our vulnerable flagship and their unbound master, the enemy’s vanguard emerges, visible from our high crag. Their ships carry slavers and their enslaved; rapists and their victims; murderers and unwanted memories. Gathering together, empowered by their dissolute leaders: one a human changeling, the other alien and ephemeral. We are here to destroy both.
We wait, crouched in hiding, until commanded to release our angels of death. Endless practice has made their symbiotic pairings perfect. They soar high, positioning themselves between sun and ships. They know because she knows, and we are inside her to guide her – this time to make war, not love. Together, we are formidable. We tell her she is unstoppable. Her pride soars and she believes. Eagles are not an obvious enemy, until one pair of talons tears into a ship’s hydrogen-laden fabric and another drops a timed flare into the exposed breach.
The first explosion blooms, paired to a detonation which sweeps across the Lake, a starting gun for the bloodshed to come. Now the enemy also believes. Bravo, my brave warriors.
The three eagles return singed and successful. Our brother, safe in his tower, also does not falter. His avenging desires from twice-orphaned suffering are now put to good use. We ignore more vain, empty words from our enemy. Our battle is not yet over. The ships littering the Lake like punctured, dying leviathans were only Diamorpheus’ minions, fodder for our focused rays. How many and how fast the first wave of vessels fell – still aflame, their skins unpeeling, their frail ribs collapsing – does not matter. Those caught inside – even the few who survived their fall to earth, clothes and lungs aflame, flesh burnt to blackened crisp – are irrelevant.
We descend from our eyrie to the desert’s dry lake. We could tell our love not to follow us, to stay with the rearguard or shelter in the Panoptik, tell her she has done enough. But we know this First Daughter will ignore our pleas. Stubborn conditioning and love-induced wilfulness makes for the easiest of predictions. So she will continue to rage, kill and suffer. We tell her to prepare her three minimal minds for the harder, bloodier battle ahead. We don’t tell her what she will be forced to do.
The smoking remnants of our love’s initial probing have been joined by the results of our brother’s gaming. Behind them remains the Seed of the dark demon who wishes to drag us towards death instead of victory. But first we await the lesser demon, still encased in his false flesh, who has plagued the dreams of our pre-merged self.
We have been looking and listening, along unseen planes of probability. Observing, calculating, an unseeded lifetime’s worth of intersections and possibilities. Then we decide; prodding, poking, collapsing them into the outcome we desire. Yes, desire still exists in other form, and we are busy, busy – like the other said: an Imp that was in me, and is now of us.
We sense the unborn child, connected to us though placental interstices. Its mind and personality latent, its higher functions untrained, still forming, but its sparking layers of cognition already connecting; its thoughts pliable. We again collapse the possibilities within a tempest of fluctuant outcomes. It can still play a crucial part – a lifeboat to weather the coming storm.
Where salt meets sky, clouds of dust rise and converge. The enemy disgorge where our light games cannot go without hurting us; where our button-prodding brother is useless again. Behind us we hear and feel the twenty thousand feet stomp of the Solar Army, brave men and women all. The General leads their advance into the battlefield. We sense his hate for those he blames for his absent First Son and family. Ferocious, deadly hate.
We have restored something to aid our cause and help ensure the reunion is fruitful. Not a weapon we can hold in our hand, nor an advisor or mentor, but a timely keepsake which we earlier retrieved from inside our Seed. We now know her, can control her wild, untamed and useful violence.
Like before, she twists and curls in her cave; tense and eager to augment and liberate flesh; an ignorant virgin on her wedding night. She will smell the barbarian at our gates. There will be blood and pain. So much of both. For them and us.
Our probabilities of success must be kept high, even whilst our path to victory remains unsure. What matters most is if a Seed still stands when the final soldier falls.
We walk towards the forever beckoning eternity of another uncertain death.