#bohrok

It had been so much simpler when they were the enemy.

Drone-bugs, mind-thieves, dark-bringer foes of Le-Koro. Plague without purpose. A metal sea painted in perversions of their own colors, cruel destruction taking the place of sacred elements. Acid rather than air. Acid! Corrosion given liquid form. He’d watched helplessly as they’d melted his jungle down into organic slag, spewing bile from metal pincers.

Then his Krana Za had pulsed once, and he’d found himself wishing only to join them.

---

For a long while they were an easy nightmare. He’d wake clutching his Miru, sure that he’d feel soft, pliant Krana-flesh instead, his body electric. Had it left something in him, some chunk of code - he didn’t like thinking of it that way, didn’t like to be reminded that they had programming - that was surfacing at night to warp his dreams? He told Kopaka he was scared the swarm could still control him somehow, and he meant it. It wasn’t very impressive for quick-brave wind-Toa Lewa to be so scared of a bunch of robot bugs, but it was right, wasn’t it?

It haunted his people, he knew that much. Le-Koro never spoke of those strange days in the swarm. Sometimes it would be alluded to in the story-songs, presented as one more tragedy averted by Toa and Matoran working together. A thing to quick-laugh over and move on from. But nobody talked of how it had felt to march as one, a hundred minds yoked to a single command.

Once a Matoran working on a hut had needed a size seven hammer and Lewa, passing by, plucked it from his toolkit and handed it to him. They’d stared at each other a beat too long. The Matoran had nodded, taken the hammer, turned back to work. Neither of them stated the obvious: that the Matoran had not said a word out loud about needing a size seven hammer.

---

The nightmares were far preferable to the other dreams. In nightmare he could fall back on rage and horror, and wake praising the dawn. The worse dreams were the ones that felt more like memory. He had not forgotten how it felt to raise his axe and turn it upon the jungles of Le-Wahi; it had felt good. Efficient. From the moment he had come into this world he had been told he had a great duty, a quest which could not be denied. The way to carry out this order was to live, with all the pain and tribulations that entailed. In his dreams he surrendered himself to the flesh of a false face and was rewarded with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled. Around him his brothers marched as one, and he forgot why he had ever been so eager to save the day on his own. A Toa-hero alone could slay a monster or move a mountain, yes, but only by uniting with his brothers could he carry out the Great Spirit’s mission. In the swarm’s warm, susurrant march, he understood anew that Unity itself was one of the virtues of their god.

---

Fear had been easy. Fear was to be shunned or overcome, never indulged, never bargained with. And he had been right to fear them, hadn’t he? If the Bohrok had claimed them all, fit Krana to each of their face and cleaned the island with Toa as their vanguards, all would have been lost. A Toa-duty was not the same as a Bohrok-duty, and whatever drove them to be more than the numbers clicking up in their brains was what had let them save a universe entire.

But what was he supposed to do now, without fear to fall back on? When the awful truth was told, that the things that had razed their homes and stolen his will were just the end state of the very Matoran he had sworn to protect - the horror he felt came not from that revelation, but from realizing that he had already known this. That he had known since the moment the Krana had first touched his face. Since the moment he had first opened his eyes. Matoran are Toa are Bohrok. A simple equation burned somewhere into a metal plate by the Great Beings. A piece of his programming he would never be able to escape.

And when they had learned of the preparations for Mata Nui’s awakening - learned that the monsters that had haunted him were their allies, their brothers, even - he had felt a coldness, low and hollow in his gut. Off they’d gone, machine-heroes ordered by a machine-god to raise a machine-army to raze the trees and fill the rivers that Mata Nui might rise again, and he had hidden the fury inside him as best he could. If this was what destiny demanded of them, then why had they been given this island to begin with? Why had they been brought to its shores with minds free of the burden of memory and knowledge? They knew quickly they were Toa-heroes, yes, that they were paragons of the three virtues, but it had been up to them to decide what that meant. Where in Mata Nui’s directives was the strange art of Gukko-training, or the wet, fertile smell of Le-Koro in the rain?

To be told that it was all to burn was an insult. To stand before the Bahrag and know in words printed on his every circuit that it was right to burn was a cruel benediction.

They spoke to Tahu, they who had once been his Queens, and as they did he heard the roaring of the swarm in his head. The flashing of his heartlight slowed. His eyes unfocused. A part of him screamed to run, to remember there are such things as false queens. To remember, as he once had, that he was a Toa and not a Bohrok.

When the six of them left, their duty done, he let himself slow and match their fiery leader’s pace. He knew something Tahu had never spoken aloud: that his brother, too, had joined the swarm, if only briefly. He coached his questions in concern for Tahu: had he felt anything strange? Had he been worried the Bahrag might try to influence him?

Tahu looked at him strangely. No, he said. Sadness, of course, that this must be done, but nothing else. There was no malice in the queens’ words. No hidden powers working to subvert his mind.

He nodded. Smiled. Tried not to dwell on the fact that that meant it was his own spirit that had slowed his heart and filled his mind with hive-song.

---

When he struck a bargain with the devil, he thought himself ready for whatever madness that way lay. He, who had slipped the chains of the Bohrok hive-mind, who had worn the Makuta’s mask - who else could withstand swapping spirits with Tren Krom himself? But the Makuta’s tricks had been a simpler corruption, stripping away his faculties and making him as wild as a Rahi. It had been like having a wild Kane-Ra trying to claw out of his skin, reaching for hooves and horns he didn’t have.

The madness of Tren Krom, though, taught him something new: that it is a far crueler fate to become a god than it is to become a beast.

To be in that thing’s body was to be too large, too vast, all too much data pouring in from every angle, smelling and feeling and seeing and sinking, sinking, sinking into soft, fetid flesh, devoid of the metal that made them all, he was flailing but nobody was there all the memories of rot crawling over him and he could not even scream his mind was too small for this -

And then he had heard them, chittering so far away. His nightmares. His swarm.

Only order could quell chaos. Only absolute sanity could quell madness. He’d hovered there in the dark, trapped in a body of chaos incarnate, but with them he was no longer alone. With them he could remember that there was order in the world, that his bones were metal and his mind was code. The thousand senses that adorned this abomination were not so hard to handle if a thousand minds could share the burden.

You see, brother, they whispered to him, as he lost himself in the soft roar of their mind, Mata Nui has not forgotten you, as He has not forgotten us.

And when he was returned to the body that was his, he understood.

---

With the devil dead and the journey ended he had time to think.

He told no-one of what had carried him through those weeks of cruel divinity. His brothers and sisters showered him in concern, looking for pain behind that Le-Koro grin, but this time there was none to be found. That was good enough for them, and they turned from him without a second thought. A whole planet required their services now, one slowly filling with all the peoples they had met along their journey and countless more they had never imagined. Their God had left them, His final blessing an order to live well and free.

In that order, Toa Lewa heard a final quest, one that he alone could carry out.

He heard their murmurs all the time now, waves upon a far shore. Their faith was ten thousand times that of any Toa’s. With their duty done and their program ended, they faced oblivion without objection.

He left New Atero the night after he arrived, following that distant roar. A part of him worried for the Matoran of Le-Koro, of course, but Toa-heroes were around every corner now. And who better to keep an eye on them than Kongu? One of their own, one who had never touched the swarm. They would sing songs of his heroism that put the tall tales of Toa Lewa to shame.

He worried for his brothers, of course. He worried most of all for Onua, who had pulled him back to himself time and again. He’d thought of telling him; Onua had been the one to release the Bahrag from their cage, to do what needed to be done. A small, hopeful part of him thought his brother might understand, but his journeys had cured him of some naiveté. Onua would bear any burden, yes, but only if in doing so he took the weight from his brothers. Once he had stood defenseless and reminded Lewa that he was a Toa, and asked him to prove himself worthy of that title. He could not understand that what Lewa went to do now was part of fulfilling that request; he could not understand that this was a burden the Great Spirit meant for Lewa himself to carry.

He walked the new, shuddering earth three days and three nights. Parts of it looked as the island had, painted in the same sunlight, and he smiled as he walked. In the end Mata Nui’s guidance had brought them the salvation the legends had promised them.

It would be wrong for His most loyal servants to be denied it.

Inside the hollow body of his God he traveled another six days, through the ruins of a dead world. Rock crumbled under its own weight; plants withered and sagged in the dim light. His mask glowed softly as he soared over endless dark water, and he felt a pang of appreciation for it. It had served him well in its many shapes. If at all possible, he would have it returned to the Le-Matoran when his work was done.

On and on he flew, this single point of green shimmering in the settling darkness. Perhaps this last journey would end in failure and he would perish long before he reached his destination, but that did not matter. Faith demanded submission to the possibility of failure, and faith was what had carried him this far. It was Le-Koro’s guiding principle, as it was the swarm’s.

---

Lewa found them in their nest, moldering beneath what was from one angle the sacred home of the Matoran and from another the ruined face of a titanic spaceship. In the cavernous dark of their hive lines and lines of Bohrok sat immobile, grains of sand upon a silent beach waiting for a final tide to sweep them away. Endless hexagonal cells lining the walls sat empty; there was no need to waste energy returning the drones to their resting place now that their work was done. Far away in the darkness he could just barely make out the Bahrag queens, curled into the same shape as their servants, two titanic statues overlooking this finished duty.

He walked among them a while, trailing his hand across the smooth, cool metal of their bodies. Krana stared out at him lifelessly from behind protoglass plates, as still as the metal that carried them. Once they had all been Matoran, singing and swinging and flying as his own had. At first he had thought it cruel, what Mata Nui had done to them - taken them from their dancing lives, shaping them into insect-tools. But only with his own duty fulfilled did he understand. All those who walked under His guidance were both His subject and His instrument. There was no cruelty here, just as there had been no cruelty when Onua had called them forth to finally do their duty.

Eventually he came to a stop. The Lehvak was as silent as the rest; the Krana Za within it had already faded to gray. He whispered a quiet prayer of apology as he pried open the lid. It felt wrong, to elevate one of them like this, to take a Matoran and force it to become a Toa. But what was it Turaga Matau had said when the truth of his past had finally come out? “Le-Metru never had a trickster half as unpredictable as the Great Spirit.” He smiled to himself as he clutched the Za to his chest and climbed over the sleeping swarm to one of the empty cells that lined the wall.

The inside of the cell was still wet. Thin, vine-like protrusions hung from the ceiling and walls, ending with ports of fleshy metal teeth. Power for the sleeping swarm so that they could be awakened at a moment’s notice. He climbed in, curled his body to fit in the cramped space, mimicking the Bohrok outside. The lid of the canister slid shut behind him with a sigh. He sat there a few moments, breathing the stale air. He’d dreamed of this many a night, suffocated in layers of meaningless terror. Could he have been spared such distress if things had just gone… a little differently, all that time ago? If he’d understood what the rhythm beneath the swarm’s song had meant, could he have found himself in this cell years ago, cradled with his Za, joining his brothers in simple bliss? No, it didn’t matter. He could curse his foolish younger self as much as he wanted. Mata Nui had guided him here all the same, given him the journey he needed to understand what he alone could do.

Mata Nui had rewarded them with a new world. And Lewa would remind his brothers that they had a part in it too.

In a single smooth motion he pulled his Miru from his face and placed the Krana upon it. There was a terrible, quiet pause, a dead breath. No warmth. No twitch of flesh. Perhaps he was too late, and there was nothing here to do but die with the rest of a dead universe.

And then faintly, oh so faintly, he heard a voice, speaking without words. A whisper, not a roar. An ember split from the roaring fire that had once sustained it.

He closed his eyes and reached out to it, and all the thousands beyond.

---

The metamorphosis took time. The flesh of the pod came alive with his Krana, color slowly flowing into the thin veins lining the wall, filling them with protodermic essence drawn from the fading depths of the universe’s core. Mechanical tendrils lifted from the walls and wrapped around him, seeking for ports that didn’t exist on Toa-armor. When they drilled into the armor of his flesh, surgery performed on an uninjured body, the pain threatened to tear him away from his duty. He tried to rise above it, shut it all out, listen to the voices of his swarm even as his armor-skin splintered and the metal teeth of the pod tore away his muscle like the peel of a of ripe fruit. The ocean of swarm-mind was still faint, but it flocked to his voice, water rushing through the smallest crack in a levee. The Krana Za spasmed wildly on his face, and his body spasmed with it, raw electrical impulses shooting down his side. He tried to speak to it as he would a scared Rahi, soothingly, gently. It didn’t understand. Words weren’t what it was good at, not yet. It had been so long since it had been a Matoran.

So he sang to it instead.

The lifeblood of the Bohrok flowed into him, scouring his veins. The song climbed up his spine into his brain, all chitters and clicks and pulsing, simple unity. Once it had carried a great order, a quest as the Toa-heroes had: clean it all, it must be cleaned. Now the song was sour and uncertain, lost without holy words to guide it. His thoughts grew fuzzy. Not like they had in Tren Krom’s body, where chaos had threatened to crash every program that underlaid his mind, but as they had when he had first worn the Za and it had tried to subdue him, flatten his identity under the roar of the tide. He groaned beneath the slowly-brightening Krana, neck stretching unnaturally. A crack formed in the protosteel of his neck, splitting it into segments.

A memory flickered through him, even as it met the stale flood of tide-thought and was absorbed: the Le-Koro band playing celebration tunes for a bemused, confused Ussalry. Kongu warning the band, they’re Onu-Matoran; start with something familiar or they’ll never come along for the new stuff. A grin forced its way across his face. Raw muscle from the Krana, moving on instinct, grabbed hold of the spreading smile and yanked it apart, splitting his mouth open in a permanent gape. Tendrils rushed down from it into his throat, colonizing him. Thanks, Kongu. It was the last time Toa Lewa would ever thank his friend.

So as the cacophony climbed, sour and stagnant, he sang the song he knew, the one they had taught him all those years ago, the one he hadn’t been able to hear beneath his fear. For the great spirit, we clean it all. For the great spirit, we rise, we breathe. In Mata Nui’s name.

The swarm-voice calmed, chorused with him. In Mata Nui’s name. Their rhythm crawled across his mind, stripping away thought, leaving harmony in its wake. The Krana tightened, its flesh beginning to seep sticky, hot fluid. It swelled slightly, growing, wrapping around him. The armor of his side began to warp and melt as silver blood burst behind it. Yes, less-than-Lewa thought, trying to breathe slowly. Yes, come in. I’m here for you. I’m Toa-friend. You are Krana-friend. I’m here to save you, like you saved me.

The song rose in his mind, and beyond the translucent flesh of the pod door he could see a dim light begin to fill the room. He wondered what was happening in the hive beyond. No, he thought suddenly, barely lucidly, wrong wrong wrong. Stop self-thinking, you must swarm-think or this will never work. He reached out as he would have for the Miru that lay forgotten at his side. The Za upon his face spasmed once. He spasmed with it, tearing one of the life-vines from his back; thick bloody oil splattered to the floor. No, no, no. He could feel its fear, cold and wild, a program being told to run past its natural end. He took the fear, let it flow into him, because fear was easy. It could be faith by a different name. He tried again, reached again, and this time the Za flared to life, sun-streaks of orange shooting through it, and then his mind was soaring, peering into the hundreds of Bohrok outside and seeing what he couldn’t see with just two eyes: the color surging back into the countless Krana in their shell. Surging to life.

Life?, the swarm-song asked, confused. And he felt a great wave of emotion rise up in him, joy and relief and excitement and satisfaction, even as the Krana on his face began to squeeze tighter, acid seeping from its pores and melting the metal-flesh of his face. Life, he sang back. In Mata Nui’s name, we live. The rhythm syncopated, jumping from Bohrok to Bohrok, jolting them awake. We-live we- we- we-live we- we- we-live. We serve Mata Nui-and-we-live. He tried to laugh, choking on the Krana’s tendrils, feeling them piercing his insides and entwining his nerves. They almost sounded like tree-speak.

A terrible pain ripped through him and his back arched, spasming like a Kane-ra with a spear through its flank. A burst of gore exploded from his sides and two spindly arms emerged, dripping in protodermic fluid, tipped with great curved blades like the Rui-Mantises that lived beneath the canopy of Le-Koro. From his lower back, a stubby lump of flesh suddenly jerked and swelled, hardening into a wasp-like abdomen. Orange-red patterns etched themselves across his chest, adorning him with the colors of his Krana.

The Krana-voice in his mind, not the swarm but the Za, his Krana, was loud now, weaving between his thoughts. Swarm-serve-Mata-Nui-gone-duty-dead-why-live-no-duty-left? It was so tempting to let go already, to let it swallow him whole and finally live out the evolution he had longed for for all these years. To let the last of Lewa fade and finally, truly join the swarm for good. But not yet, not until they understood. He chittered back to it, his new arms tapping out against the wall of the pod, the slowly-forming mandibles of the Krana moving with his response: Can-be-more-than-tools-Bohrok-can-live-too-all-more-than-duty-all-must-grow-be-new-be-one.

The swarm shuddered, chittering amongst itself. Be-new-be-live-be-more? The voice was uneasy, uncertain, but something was surfacing in it: souls long silenced, who had gone to their God’s aid without complaint but sometimes with regret.

There was a faint, piercing pain at the back of his head. The Krana had begun to drill into the protocrystal base of his brainstem, digestive fluid seeping into the delicate structures within. His back swelled, melting white-hot rivulets of green metal dripping down him until four delicate Nui-Jaga wings split the suffering flesh. They glistened in the semidark. A small, simple part of Lewa, the program common to all flesh, the part that told him not to stick his hand in an open flame, was panicking. It knew this was the end of the line: Toa Lewa was dying. That was alright. That was alright, as long as something new came in his stead.

In the depths of the nest, the two great statues stirred. The queens rose slowly, looked out over their stirring hive, and were displeased. They roared, conducting the song so that its rhythm and flow bent to their words, and a shock of awe ran through him. The thing in the pod cowered: he could not disobey his queens, he could not, he was a Bohrok, and Bohrok obey their queens! What are you doing, little Toa? Their voices ate away at what little remained of his consciousness. Our duty is done. The work is complete. Mata Nui has no use for us.

He tried to reply, tried to reach down into himself for the right response, something quick-witted but inspiring, something they’d sing in a Le-Matoran song. Some way to save the day, just as Toa Lewa always had-

But at that very moment Toa Lewa ceased to be. The last foundations of his mind fell away in a torrent of Krana-acid, words and memories dissolving into a slurry to feed the orange flesh upon his skull, pain and pleasure and fear and faith and sadness and joy all mixing and splashing and crystallizing into Bohrok-song into Krana-thought into into into into into

Their body went rigid.

---

A long, long time ago, in a place named Karda Nui, an Av-Matoran bard put down his flute a final time and succumbed to the stillness he felt creeping up his back.

Thousands of years later, he remembers the sound it had made in the cold, crisp air.

---

With a terrible, dripping noise, the flesh of the Krana Za splits open across its front. New teeth, pointed and dripping, shine in the gap. Beyond them a red tongue flails about wildly, trying to form the shapes of Matoran words.

And then a great gust of air rises through their body, and they breathe their first breath.

Because to be Bohrok is to be Matoran, my queens, and that means we live!

Their words ripple through the storm like a bolt of lightning flash-frying a school of fish. The hum of Bohrok chitter dissolves into squawks, units flailing about and colliding. Jets of flame and acid shoot into the nest’s rancid air. Atop their dais the queens fall upon each other, screaming, as thousands of voices that have only ever spoken in harmony explode in chaos: Who Why How Where You Me Us? Us? Us?

A ruby-orange claw pierces the cell sac and draws a sharp tear down the middle, and Lewa Za bursts from it and into the air. A familiar grin splits their Krana-face, a Miru’s smirk painted in orange flesh. They float above the swarm, their insect wings flapping too fast to see, and turn to face their queens. Below them, the chaos begins to calm, disorder fading bit by bit as a thousand minds realize that we still can contain me. The swarm’s voice rises and coalesces and speaks as one through the mouth of their new herald.

“We have served, oh queens, and we continue to serve.” Their voice is smooth and resonant, and the eyes behind the Krana - which has, impossibly, hardened to a metal-like strength - flash with wit and wisdom beyond even that of the Toa Nuva of Air. "We shall accept your orders, for in the swarm all is one. But we ask you: need our duty truly end like this?”

Gahdok and Cahdok exchange glances, their antennae shaking in confusion.

Lewa Za darts over the swarm to them, insectoid body cutting through the air with strange grace. In the cell, the Miru sits forgotten, covered in offal. “Lewa came so far to aid you, you who once terrified him with your raw devotion. This is how he chose to serve Mata Nui: by returning to us the enlightenment our God once asked us to abandon that we might enact His will. And he brings us His words! He asks those who once followed him to live free. A final gift for our millenia of service.” They tilt their head, smirking. “We are new to this world, but a few minutes’ born. There is much we do not know. But we’re quite sure that not even you would defy His final order.”

The Bahrag see it then, as does the rest of swarm: all that Lewa has seen and done in his brief time on Spherus Magna. The work that must be done, the cities that must be built. The peoples who need mending. Chaos, yes, but good chaos.

It doesn’t sit well with them; they are creatures of habit. And they know this strange Toa-Bohrok speaks true when they say the swarm will still obey them without resistance. They could let their programming guide them, lay the swarm down to rest once more regardless of this strange intruder, and let the dust of ages take them. That would be as it was told to them.

But there is a part of them, petulant and forgotten, shaken loose by the screams of a thousand Krana reawakening. It is the part of them that remembers that they are sisters as much as the Toa are brothers. And if lowly Toa could shake off the yoke of their programming - if they could save the universe, in all their messy, irritating, disorderly ways - then what could Bahrag do, given a world to aid and no more orders to follow?

Lewa Za holds out one of their four clawed limbs in invitation. Their smile grows a little wider, a little sharper.