Madregal

Chapter 1: Construction, Commission, Crossing

Dark. Fluid, warm and soothing. Creaking. Thrumming, within, without. Machine and heart, each moving due the other. Regular breath filtered by halfmask. Skin perforated by organic cords. Faint light in soothing murk beyond bracing liquid. He gasped, thrashed, found locomotion restricted by viscous solution. Voice sounded in mask audio receptors, close, calm, inquisitive. “Welcome Farer. Designation: Madregal. To A.M. Bastel. I am it’s Monitor. How do you feel?” Madregal’s eyes burned at the radiance and shuttered, disorientation and gnawing appetite subsuming soma. “Focus and reply.” Words came slow and clumsy to him.

“Hun-gry.”

“What is your designation?”

“Ma-dre-gal.”

“What is your charge?”

He opened his eyes. Congenital knowledge flooding his brain. “To fur-ther... The Design.”

“Did you dream?”

“Y-es.”

“Elaborate.”

He stilled and gathered memories from slumber’s black lake. “I ran alone from a storm as molten glass and stood a chasm, its terminus opaque to eye. Beyond it, a stair of clay. I was afraid.”

“Did you accomplish traversal despite this trepidation?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Chasm’s dark was solid. I bent it to a bridge.”

He peered at the shrouded entity. Spinal carapace shimmered dully in the dark. To his nascent eyes, it was beautiful. “Do you dream?” He asked. Silence. Pulsation of machinery. Clacking of segmented limbs. The Monitor answered. “Of gilded wings whispering.”

He felt a potent emotion he could not name. Material’s hold slackened and Madregal emerged slowly, unsteadily from a sleek vessel grown from the ceiling of the dimdraped facility. Cording buried in alabaster skin tore and black blood dripped. On spongy flooring he collapsed and bore the agony. He panted, twitched as bony limbs descended from gloom, raised him and placed chintous armature about his leaking body.

“Your gestation was delayed due the experimental character of your manufacture. You were meant to lead the previous expedition. Normally we would link you to your predecessors, Carus, Syne, Delphys, Erthyros, but all lines of communication have been severed. Such disruptions are anomolous, the cause is unknown. Heed this directive: Eliminate the disruption, continue the expedition unto Lacuna.”

Madregal flexed limbs, raised right arm at an angle, digits spread as if in possession of ephemeral substance. “Carry the fire.”

“To illuminate our path,” the Monitor finished.

Madregal inclined his head and closed his hand to a fist. The area he stood parted in tripart fashion as an aortic valve while numerous attentive limbs hefted and lowered him through the passage into a vessel. Arms crossed chest as casket closed and slid. He felt gifted exoskeleton cleaning his body, absorbing nutrient rich excrescence. Senses calibrated to surrounding. Soft padding. Falling. Rush of magnetic repulsion slowing container’s fall. Golden eyes narrowed with determination. The casket descended a long channel and exited the bastion through a series of varigated valves that terminated in an open ended mineral protrusion into which the casket slotted and opened. He stepped into the bright and skidded down a steep incline. A sediment pile neath the shadow of the batholithic fortress cushioned his fall. He rose and scanned the horizon.

Ochre sky howled over a sea of fog. Gray ruins sunk to paler dunes far as he could see and above them vast vague shapes drifted, ceaseless and forlorn. He checked the navigation overlay in his helm where his antecedents’ archived trail was displayed as a pale blue point cloud map. He headed magnetic north through a trough formed by windcarving. Helm’s six visual sensors azure against omnipresent orange haze. The desert was thin in near biosignatures. He found one in late pheromone residue. Neither umbor nor ghomon. He checked Monitor’s archives for local bionts matching the chemical artifacts. A white font summary appeared on right gauntlet’s black sclerotin genoscroll. Designation: Sciomaw. Semidiurnal carnivorous burrowing cnidarian. Further data pending. Extreme caution advised.

He flexed left arm, five ridges on the back of encased hand glowed dim blue. Dark particulates shed as smogsand from small cavities within the suit’s arm plating and pooled aground. System alert. White font once more. Tynekey synchronized. Conservation urged to avoid rapid armature cell depletion. He raised left hand, fingers flexed and surrounding sand rose into the air. His hand slackened and the regolith fell. Ejected black material spiraled to him as an ephemeral cloak and was reabsorbed by his shell.

Among undulating wastes cycles passed in steady rhythm. Light to dark, hot to cold, and back. Dozens. Hundreds. Upon the three hundred and sixth cycle he passed unto a shallow vale. The formation steadily steepened and in the shade of an outcrop gating egress from the depression he felt something hard beneath his boot. He looked down. Scoured bones. He knelt and studied the remains. Ghomon. Madregal withdrew a skull from haphazard burial, akin to his own, yet distinct by stark cranial sutures. Teeth marks upon the back, flat and large. Larger than those of a ghomon. Something had dragged the remains. He looked to canyon walls, right a stepped gradient, left a mess of weathered stone spires, larger at top than bottom. Near the sound of heavy padding. He spun and beheld a reptilian creature his own size starring down at him from the near stone jut. Its body sleek, save undulating scaledraped dorsal frills. From the creature’s mouth a long blue tongue brushed unblinking red eyes. It turned up its snout in inquisition and clambered down foliation with instinctual ease. An archived summary of the organism ran on his genoscroll. Designation: Stoneslink. Diurnal mineral grazing tetrapod. Nonvenomous. Consumable. Bite force sufficient to puncture armature. Caution advised. Palebeast bared thick yellow teeth and hissed. His gaze drifted from the creature’s maw to the charnel marks and tossed the skull. Bone landed before beast and it dipped its frilly head then raised and tilted it, as if confused by the curt dismissal of so valuable a possession. He made to depart and was struck in the back by something light and hard. He turned from the cliff and found skull aground before him and the beast wriggling the feathery sardlike growths about its head in anticipation. His mind involuted to toy worlds on which his nervous system had been trained. Play was but practice for predation. Beast thrummed and beat ground with fearsome claws, as if vexed. To his left the alluvial fan formed by a narrow channel higher up the vale rumbled. “Avalance?” He pondered with alarm. The palebeast did not appear to notice the disturbance and continued to growl, its frills rising in posture of garish dominance. Madregal leapt onto the cliff as the leftward alluvial slope erupted. Faster than hearts thrumming barbed filaments pierced the stoneslink like needles through paper. It thrashed and keened, its eyes and maw wide in primal fear born of the dim apprehension of the dark before its birth. Scarcely had the scavenger begun to struggle than it slumped, twitching, its tongue lolling onto the sand. Swiftly as poisonous barbs had been expelled they retracted and dragged the paralyzed scavenger into a tangle of dusky billowing flesh that jutted from the escarpment.

“Sciomaw.”

Madregal climbed faster and winced as another column of filaments shot from the monstrosity and lanced his right leg at upper thigh. A horrid sensation as roiling fire fluttered through his frame. His grip slackened and he fell, shearing against stone to tumble unto bone flecked silt. The ambusher rose further from its domain on coarse tubercled flippers, unveiling a saclike appendage from its gelatinous folds. Therein the melting form of the stoneslink. The predator retracted its barbs and hauled Madregal toward it. With a groan of wrath the umbor hacked the offending organs free with his tynekey and used the selfsame device to crush the brittle base of the nearest shadowing spire. Particulates compressed, dense shimmering as a heatwave and sheared the stone column as the sciomaw lunged for its quarry. The creature went down in a whorl of dust but twenty paces from where Madregal lay, hide caved by dislodged boulder. Undulating bellows let up from the center of the debris cloud as Madregal rose and rushed the cliffside. He bounded up by a series of winding torsion fractures, his movements steadied and accelerated by tynekey field’s hold. From the peak he cast blurring gaze to shattered slope below. Sciomaw had tunneled, all that remained of its passage, torn rocks and bestial fluid. Ghomon’s remains grinning humorlessly through fog filtered light. Madregal checked his wound. Rubbery cnidocysts buried in his leg sealed atmosphere’s hostile ingress. The projectiles had penetrated muscle, near to bone. He left ejecta thus and continued along the plateau with staggered steps. Windhowl intensified in tandem with venom’s grasp. Breath came with difficulty and a ghastly nausea threw the traveler’s perception into chaos. Every cell screamed. The elevation was windscraped and spare, and rose ever higher into the merciless distance. Nothing but splintered crags unto roiling opacity. He heeded every tortuous upheveal and imagined how each had formed in the recondite days before umbor or monitor. He looked up and beheld mountainous protuberances through dense white clouds appearing as fingers of a blocky hand. Collapsed partition of the upper layer. He wondered what lay beyond it. Nothing of the upper strata’s character resided in the congenital knowledge imparted by the Monitor. Perhaps even they did not know, or perhaps nascent somatic architecture was simply unable to store more information. He resolved to find out and crested the rise.

Every footfall scattered dust and pain. Sensation quarantined by focus. Land declined and evened. Red sand gave to orange and white. Wind died to a patchwork of boxwork rilles formed when water covered the region. Beyond calcium sulfate nodules, a procession of corroded white monoliths, some odd angled, others collapsed. Madregal slumped against the nearest wreck and surveyed the continguous blanched symmetry of an ancient building that engulfed north horizon’s rim. As he looked an abberation in the near landscape drew his eye. A black and chitinous structure suspended within an imploded tower but a hundred paces off. A Farer chrysalis, feasting on the site of its construction as sciomaw had preyed on frilled bone collector. He dragged himself toward his kin’s handiwork and stumbled against a crumbling alabaster wall that gated his path. He groaned, tapped at his genoscroll and spoke into his headset as he withdrew a strip of dark gelatinous material from his pack, tore the cnidocysts free with labored breath and carefully dressed the black bleeding wound. “This is Farer Madregal. Cycle report 337. I have successfully traversed the Alluvium Mare but was accosted by a sciomaw in the process. I have sustained significant damage and will initiate hibernal recuperation within a chrysalis in the southern tip of the Shoalsteppe. If recuperation is unsuccessful, soma salvage may be accomplished near my current coordinates. If recuperation is successful, I shall continue the expedition.”

A lenghty silence ruptured by Monitor’s voice. “Carry the fire.”

“To illuminate our path,” he replied with what little strength was left in him. The transmission cut. He attempted to stand and collapsed to a knee, wisping white under rising breeze. The effort of shifting to a sitting position and slumping against the wall caused his muscles to sear and his head to swim. For the first time since the dream of his awakening, Madregal felt panic. Thick and all encompassing as a winding-sheet of lead. Haggard mechanical rasps emenated through his faceplate respirator. Erratic, then controlled. He watched sand snake east. Crimson flecks maculating an ivory sea. Dancing as its magnetic field. Upheaved particulates accumulated in dips and cracks in surrounding buildings, white blending with facades, red stark as rusting wounds. He wondered what the settlement had been like before its decay. Had they carried the fire? Did they carry it now some place far away? Had its ancient denizens traveled to the Lacuna as his precursors?

He could no longer feel anything. Agony drowned in a sea of stupefaction. Clarity yet above the waves. “A momentary setback,” he thought. “This too shall be overcome. Monitors were beyond counting. My kindred are without end. Lacuna shall be charted. This and every other. And then... and then...”

Amber eyes closed to windroar and sandfall.

“Gilded wings shall whisper.”