Letters Home

Sergius gave her a flat look. It was not surprising that she wasn’t going to tip-toe around the issue, given how little she backed down. Ever. “What.”

“The conversation you’re trying to avoid.”

“I’m not avoiding anything.” He absolutely was. 

“You triggered every emergency alert in the room.”

Sergius considered objecting. Unfortunately, she was correct and there was little point in trying to hand wave it away.

Her gaze was unwavering. “After what I just saw, it's not an unreasonable request. Don’t give me your ‘piss off’ face.”

“My ‘piss off’ face.” He slowly repeated. 

“Yes. The one you wear 90% of the time.”

He almost said something automatic and dismissive to that but the response stalled out somewhere before it reached his mouth. Maybe he should work on his expressions. Or maybe it didn’t matter. That thought arrived with the familiar exhausted fatalism he’d been trying not to examine too closely. The niggling assumption underneath everything lately that there wasn’t actually going to be a future long enough for self-improvement to become relevant. He recognized it now, at least. Recognition unfortunately did not stop it.

“It was a dream.” He said finally.

“A dream?”

“Hallucination. Whatever you want to call it. It was likely corrupted processing caused by --”

“We can call it a dream.”

He stared at her. Aislinn stared back. He reached for his jacket. “I’m going to head to Garlemald. Mark me as unavailable for jobs in the roster.” The abrupt topic change was tactical and they both knew it. 

She didn’t bother to tell him he’d been labeled that way on the roster for moons now.  “No.”

“That wasn’t a request.”

“Good. Because it’s still a terrible idea.”

“I need to check something.”

“What?”

He paused too long.

“Sergius.” Aislinn’s expression swiftly sharpened. “What about this dream makes you want to go to Garlemald?”

She resolutely remained where she was, stubbornly occupying the space between him and the door. Sergius briefly evaluated the possible methods of physically moving her aside. None of them ended with her speaking to him afterward. So he stayed where he was too.

“In the dream Garlemald was overrun with voidsent.” He said reluctantly. 

Aislinn didn’t visibly react, but Sergius saw the micro-tension in her shoulders. The careful regulation of her breathing. Elevated heart rate. Fear. He looked away before she noticed he’d noticed.

“And you didn’t want to tell me.” She said after a moment.

“That’s usually how avoiding conversations works.”

Her expression went stony. “Don’t do that.”

He wanted to exhale in frustration. People did that to display emotion. His system supplied the impulse automatically now. Another behavioral adaptation he never asked for. “I’ve seen the way you react to voidsent.”

That stopped her.

“You’re terrified of them.” He continued before she could interrupt. “More than anything else we’ve dealt with.”

The surprise that crossed her face was quick but unmistakable. Not because he was wrong. He wasn’t. But because he had noticed her issue with voidsent at all. And moreso, because she realized he was trying, badly and awkwardly, but genuinely, to spare her from it. A cycle ago she wasn’t sure he would have considered that variable at all. The realization seemed to make her hesitate in a way Sergius couldn’t categorize.

“It could have just been memories from Alvarium resurfacing. Blasphemies. Not voidsent.” She said instead, shifting the conversation before either of them had to acknowledge his clumsy show of empathy. 

“It wasn’t.” He didn’t want to elaborate and explain how he knew that it wasn’t old trauma. 

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t you trying to process what happened. Dreams are rarely literal. Either way, I’d advise against going anywhere right now.” She said. “Your systems were throwing lines and lines of corrupted code.” 

She gestured toward the terminal, its steady blue glow, innocent and blank. As if none of it had happened. Sergius didn’t look at it. He already knew exactly what had been there.

“I don’t think you can fix it.” He told her.

On reflex, Aislinn’s chin lifted a fraction in knee-jerk defiance. Under different circumstances he might have found it funny. Tell Aislinn she couldn’t do something and it would worm its way under her skin until she felt the overwhelming urge to prove you wrong. 

“I don’t want to argue.” He added before she had a chance to formulate a reply. “It’s not a judgment of your ability.”

It was worse than that, though he couldn’t tell her. Because fixing it would mean understanding what was actually causing it and if she learned that, if she understood what was inside his systems now…

No. Absolutely not.

“Just believe me.” He finished.

She studied him for a long moment, eyes narrowed slightly, like she was trying to determine where, in what he had told her, the omissions hid and what, if anything, was outright lies. 

“Fine.” She said at last, in the tone people used when they absolutely did not mean fine. “But I’m coming with you in case there are problems.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“You’re afraid of voidsent.”

“I am.” She acknowledged. “Still coming. There will definitely be problems with you and whatever is wreaking havoc with your systems and you don’t want to follow my advice, so really, what do you expect me to do?”

He couldn’t deny that was accurate, even if it was offensively so. Sergius looked at her for a long moment and realized that as far as she was concerned, she had already made the decision and this conversation was mostly a facade at this point.

“You wouldn’t listen if I said no anyway.”

“No.” She agreed with a calm even he knew was forced. “Probably not. At least we agree on something.”

Sergius became aware all at once. Still asleep, but aware. The blackness around him wasn’t empty anymore. Snow fell upward into a starless sky.

He stood in the ruins of Garlemald, though not the real ruins. This place wore Garlemald’s shape incorrectly, like it was assembled from partial memories and old visual files. Sergius stared at the skyline, cataloging inconsistencies. Buildings bent at impossible angles. Structures repeated where they shouldn’t. Distances stretched and compressed unpredictably. Snow drifted sometimes up, sometimes down but it carried the smell of blood and burned ceruleum no matter which way it fell.

This was either a dream or some kind of hostile system intrusion. Neither option improved his mood.

The girl stood several yalms away. Same as before. Too thin. Arms too long beneath ragged sleeves. The smaller set of hands still covered her eyes, fingers cupped against her face. 

Sergius recognized her instantly. He hated that he recognized her instantly.

“What the hell are you?” he asked.

The girl tilted her head. The motion crackled, skipping between positions like corrupted footage. “I was waiting.” Her voice sounded strange. Distorted and layered, like several people speaking slightly out of sync. “Dreams are easier. But you don’t dream. And I couldn't wait anymore.” 

Around them the snow thickened. Sergius looked down. The drifts at his feet weren't snow at all. Ash. Bone fragments. Tiny white teeth.

His combat protocols surged awake. He reached for weapons that weren’t there and found only empty air. Excellent. Sergius scanned the surrounding streets. Something moved in the ruins behind the girl.

“You would have died badly, Sergius.”

Hostiles. Blasphemies. No. Voidsent. Hunger wearing shapes. Dark silhouettes unfolded themselves from alleyways and shattered buildings, their bodies consisting of every nightmare come to life. Mouths opened where faces should have been. Their eyes reflected red through the dark.

Definitely not ideal.

“The veil is thin here.” The girl whispered. “Cold places help. Places full of grief. Fear. Starvation. Garlemald screams loud enough for us to hear.”

The things behind her twitched closer in jagged, stuttering movements.

“You fell.” She continued. “Do you remember?”

And he did.

Memory fragments slammed into him without warning. One second he was standing in the dream-version of Garlemald and the next he was back in the real one, systems overloaded with fractured combat telemetry. Going after Ayrm. A snowstorm and a ruptured magitek motorcycle. Gunfire swallowed by shrieking static. Bodies torn apart in white snow drifts stained black.

Too many blasphemies boiling towards Alvarium in numbers too large for tactical projections to process cleanly. Claws. Teeth. The sensation of systems failing one after another while he kept fighting anyway because if he hadn’t that meant one more blasphemy that would make it to the outpost. 

Sergius stepped back and the landscape rippled oddly around him.

The girl's hands covered her eyes but somehow he knew she was watching him quietly. “You remember now.”

He ignored that. “I survived.”

“Yes.” She said. “That’s the problem.”

“You infected me.” he said.

“Yes.” She sounded both surprised that she had and slightly unsure why.

The voidsent behind her shuddered closer, their mouths opened wider and wider until their jaws split down their throats. The wind carried whispers through the ruined city. ‘Hungry. Hungry hungry hungry.’

“When the barrier weakens.” The girl continued. “They’ll come through properly. Your world is soft. Full of lovely, breakable things.”

Something brushed against Sergius from behind. A clawed hand. Too many fingers.

He whirled around and found one of the creatures ilms away from him, towering overhead. Its skin hung like flayed strips from a body made of shifting darkness. Hyuran faces pushed briefly through its torso, screaming soundlessly before sinking back inside.

Its breath smelled like mass graves. Memory data he was sure he had purged. Sergius swung at it automatically. His fist passed through its skull. The creature smiled anyway.

“You can’t fight it here.” The girl said. “This place belongs to me. A dream.”

The ruins around them pulsed. Buildings bent farther inward. The sky cracked open like an egg revealing enormous shapes moving beyond reality itself. Vast mouths. Limbs folding against limbs. Things pressing against the thinning barrier between worlds hard enough to deform it.

Garlemald groaned beneath their weight. The girl stepped closer. Snow collected on her shoulders and sleeves without melting.

“You should wake up soon.” She said.

“Why?”

Again that pause.

Sergius had dealt with manipulators before. This didn’t feel like manipulation. So what was it? What did she want? 

“Are you warning me?”

“I don’t know.” That sounded like the truth. “I think…” She hesitated, the words catching strangely. “I think I wanted someone to know. We’re all hungry.” The girl continued, almost absently. “And hunger spreads.”

The looming voidsent lunged.

Sergius came awake hard enough to trigger emergency reboot protocols, every alarm screaming simultaneously. At the terminal, Aislinn shot upright so fast her chair nearly overturned.

Sergius' diagnostic monitors had erupted into crimson warnings. Lines of corrupted code flooded every screen in pulsing waves that looked disturbingly organic. And for just a second, Aislinn could have sworn she saw another figure reflected in the red-lit glass behind Four.

Pale. Thin. Hands covering its eyes.

Sergius froze.

She had dark hair hanging in limp strands around a narrow face, but the bad part was the proportions. Human-shaped in the same way a distended corpse was still human-shaped. Almost right until you looked directly at it.

Her skin had the gray-white color of drowned flesh. Her arms were too long, stretched wrong at the joints, as if someone had taken hold of her wrists and pulled until the bones lengthened like soft clay. And there were four arms.

The second pair emerged from behind her shoulders and crossed gently over her eyes. Like she was playing a game. Her mouth opened displaying rows of needle-sharp teeth within. She was talking. No audio came through.

Sergius felt a cold pulse of panic so overwhelming it almost locked his systems. He couldn’t see anything except her. Couldn’t override the image. Couldn’t tell if she was real, corrupted data, or some part of his own damaged code shaking loose.

He force-killed the visual feed. Nothing changed. Still there.

She tilted her head a fraction farther than a neck should comfortably turn.

He rebooted the entire visual system. Nothing.

The girl remained exactly where she was, patient and silent, those extra hands still covering her eyes.

“Nope.” Sergius yanked the entire mobile unit offline.

Emergency shutdown warnings cascaded through his systems. Somewhere Aislinn would be getting alerts. He’d deal with the interrogation later if later happened.

The world dissolved into shutdown static. And just before the audio channels cut completely, something whispered through them.

“The eyes remember what they were.”

Sergius went cold.

What. The fuck.

Several minutes later he brought Four back online. Systems initialized one by one with cheerful little confirmations.

Motor functions operational.

Memory integrity stable.

Visual systems functional.

No anomalies detected.

“Sure.” Sergius deadpanned.

Vision returned abruptly. Zilmat’s enormous, wet eye filled his entire field of view.

Sergius recoiled so violently he slammed backward into a bookshelf hard enough to rattle it. “Damn it, Zilmat!”

The voidsent bobbed backward in alarm. “Sorry! A-are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

He absolutely was not fine, but he wasn’t discussing that with Zilmat while his pulse emulation still felt like it was trying to punch through his chest plating.

“You didn’t tell A-Aislinn about this when she was here the other sun.” Zilmat said carefully.

Sergius glared at him.

The voidsent’s leathery wings twitched nervously. “Another reason you’re…you’re af-afraid to leave the library. These glitches are getting w-worse.”

“It’s a software issue.” Not exactly the truth. Sergius didn’t know what the hell it was. 

“You s-said Alvarium was overrun during the end days. You s-said you fell there.” Zilmat’s eye widened further with every sentence. “Aislinn repaired you afterward. What if. What if she missed something? You need to tell her.” Zilmat said.

“I am not telling Aislinn.”

“She needs to know -”

“She absolutely does not.”

Zilmat hovered uncertainly.

Sergius saw the decision form a second before the voidsent bravely blurted it out. “Well, if-if you won’t tell her, I-I will!”

As if on cue, a message pinged in his feed. 

//Aislinn: Four went offline. What happened?//

Sergius closed his eyes.