The showers were a curious blend of old tech and forced necessity, repurposed from military decontamination units of a bygone era. Warm water, miraculously clean, hissed out in steaming pulses, mixed with synthetic enzymes designed to cling to and strip away biohazards. It was a stark contrast to the ever-present filth outside. Lyriq stepped beneath the stream, allowing the hot water and the chemical mist to work on him.
He watched, with a detached fascination, as the accumulated filth of his recent battles and transformations fell from him. The water darkened instantly with grime, turning a thick, swirling black as bits of Rathuur's dissolving flesh and Kyrrhalith's un-making residue peeled from his skin and shoulders, vanishing down the drain.
His breath, which had been a ragged series of gasps since his awakening, slowed. For the first time since he had been pulled from the marrow of forgotten fear, he wasn't fighting.
He wasn't hunting. He wasn't simply surviving. His hands, still bearing the faint, glowing runes of his Order III ascension, trembled slightly. Not from fear, but from the sheer, unsettling stillness of the moment, the temporary cessation of conflict.
He looked into the mirror, a warped, tarnished surface reflecting his transformed visage. His hair hung wet, impossibly longer now, the reddish-purple tips clinging to his brow like ominous tendrils. His black eyes stared back, hollow and endless, reflecting only the dim, sterile light of the room. His body, once merely a human vessel, was now undeniably alien – crisscrossed with scars, carved with intricate, faintly glowing runes that marked his journey through the Orders. It felt foreign, distant, yet undeniably his.
The woman returned, carrying a stack of clothes. A long black coat, surprisingly light but woven with armoured thread, its surface shimmering faintly. Fibre-woven boots, durable and silent. A sleeveless tunic that shimmered subtly with an embedded kinetic mesh. The clothes fit him well, perhaps unnervingly so. She offered a faint, almost imperceptible smile, a brief, tight upturn of the lips that held no warmth.
"We keep a few sets," she said, her voice dry. "You're not the first to wander in dripping black blood and looking confused after an awakening." Her eyes, however, held a grim, unspoken knowledge. "You might be the last to do it and still be walking around, though."
Later, in a circular chamber dug deep into the earth, lit by filtered sunlight that struggled to penetrate the layers of rock and decay, she poured a thick green drink into a steel cup and slid it across a low table to him.
"We call it bitterlight," she explained. "It'll help stabilise your nerves. Not that you seem to have many."
Lyriq took a sip. The liquid was thick, unappetizing. It tasted like moss and something akin to regret, a fleeting, unfamiliar sensation that he dismissed as a chemical property.
She sat across from him, her posture relaxed but watchful. "My name is Asven. I run this sector. Or try to, before it all falls apart." Her tone was weary, but resilient.
He simply nodded, an acknowledgement that required no words.
"You want to know what happened," she stated, her golden eyes fixed on his unreadable face. It wasn't a question.
He didn't speak. His silence, however, was heavy enough to fill the entire chamber, a palpable weight that demanded answers.
Asven leaned back against the rough-hewn wall. "There was no apocalypse. No bang. No wrath of gods, no grand celestial event. Just... decay.
The Dominion Aeterna used to rule the inner rings of this quadrant, back when things still made sense. When power had rules, when its flow was predictable, however brutal. Then something began breaking those rules. Something fundamental and absolute." She stared at him pointedly, her gaze unwavering. "Things that weren't meant to exist began waking up, raw and untamed."
Lyriq's fingers, newly clawed, curled around the steel cup, his grip tightening imperceptibly. He listened, absorbing data.
Asven continued, her voice low. "The Dominion pulled back. Abandoned outer zones like ours, leaving us to fend for ourselves. We became feeding grounds. And the Devourers came." The word itself seemed to taste worse than the bitterlight, a concept more nauseating than any physical horror.
"What are they?" Lyriq finally asked, his voice still hoarse, a hint of genuine, cold curiosity in the question.
"No one knows their true form," Asven replied, shaking her head slowly. "They wear a thousand skins, shifting and reforming. They consume more than just flesh. They eat memories and names. If they eat your father, you won't just lose him. You'll forget you ever had one. He will be unmade, entirely."
A long silence followed, punctuated only by the distant hum of the sector's failing power grid.
"And you fight them?" Lyriq's gaze was unwavering, his detached assessment of their struggle.
"We endure," Asven corrected, her voice firm. "We endure. With shards taken from our kills. With our bloodlines and their awakened powers. With grit and desperation." Her gaze narrowed, piercing his unreadable facade. "And then people like you show up. No lineage we recognise. No faction. Just... raw, violent purpose that feels ancient."
Lyriq offered no response. He had none to give, no explanation he cared to offer.
Asven smirked, a brief, cynical flash of amusement. "You're not Dominion. You're not Alliance. And you're sure as void not human, not anymore. You're something... else." She drained her cup, the green liquid vanishing. "But maybe you're what we need, Lyriq. A monster to fight the monsters."
That evening, as the violet-sick sky bled into deeper shades of bruised indigo, another figure entered the circular chamber where Lyriq sat. Her name was Veyra. She was lithe and pale, her movements like oil sliding across glass, deliberate, fluid, and utterly unreadable.
Her voice, when she spoke, carried the same smooth, unsettling quality, a low, throaty purr. Her presence was magnetic; she pulled attention the way a brewing storm draws in loose rooftops and the nervous flutter of birds.
She smiled when she saw Lyriq, a slow, predatory curve of her lips. It was not a friendly gesture, nor was it overtly cruel. It was simply interested, a predator assessing a new, intriguing piece on the board.
"I heard a wild one wandered in," she purred, her eyes, dark and unblinking, fixed on Lyriq.
Lyriq looked up from the sharpening tool he was idly turning in his hand, a piece of salvaged metal he was honing into a primitive blade. His newly formed claws, obsidian and sharp, glinted faintly in the dim light. "I'm no one's pet," he stated, his voice still rough, unpracticed.
Veyra laughed, a low, throaty sound that resonated in the chamber. She crouched beside him, unbothered by his raw presence, unafraid to get close. Her proximity was a deliberate challenge, a test of his boundaries. "That's the best kind," she countered, her smile widening slightly.
Their words twisted into long, quiet exchanges. Veyra was relentless in her curiosity, her questions weaving around his silence like a serpent. Lyriq remained distant, offering only terse, economical answers.
But she pressed, word by word, question by question, probing at the edges of his immense detachment until, imperceptibly, his carefully constructed walls frayed slightly. He offered no personal details, but he spoke of the feeling of the void, the taste of shattered concepts.
She touched his shoulder, her fingers light, almost ethereal. Her skin was unnervingly cold against his. "What do you want?" she asked, her voice dropping to a near whisper.
"To survive," Lyriq answered, a simple, irrefutable truth for his kind.
"And after?" she probed, her gaze piercing.
He looked at her, his black eyes like endless, unseeing depths. "There is no after." For the Nyz'khalar, existence was perpetual unmaking, a state of being, not a journey with a destination.
That night, their bodies tangled in the low, flickering light of the bunkroom Lyriq had been assigned. There was no love in it, no intimacy in the human sense, no emotional connection that might bind them.
Only a raw, blood-hot need and a primal, almost violent release. It was a recognition of hunger, disguised as closeness, a brief, mutual indulgence in the fleeting illusion of connection in a world stripped bare. Lyriq moved with an almost clinical precision, his touch a blend of power and profound detachment.
Curious. His thoughts remained his own, a silent current beneath the surface. The heat is transient. The tremor of another's life. So fragile.
When it ended, she lay still, her breath soft and even, one arm draped across his chest. He felt the light weight of her, the rhythm of her heart, the warmth of her skin. But something, an unseen mechanism deep inside him, stirred.
The brief novelty of the experience, the study of human contact, had already begun to wane. A profound, consuming boredom began to settle over him, an emptiness that flesh and warmth could not fill.
He rose without a sound, his movements fluid and silent as a predator. He stared down at her, his expression utterly blank. There was no rage, no passion, no lingering affection. Just the cold, clinical assessment of a specimen.
Then, his hand, now bearing the full definition of his sharp, obsidian claws, closed around her throat.
Her eyes, wide with sudden, comprehending fear, flickered in the dim light. She didn't scream; she couldn't. Her body was paralysed, locked rigid by the terrifying, hypnotic stillness of his gaze. He simply squeezed, slowly, methodically, until the light behind her eyes, the last vestige of her spark, flickered and vanished.
She collapsed silently, her limbs slack, the soft wheeze of her breath extinguished. The room, only moments before warm with fading tension, now felt cold and still.
He dressed, his movements precise and unhurried. He stepped outside into the chilling pre-dawn air. Above, the city, a desperate organism, continued to breathe on, oblivious. Unaware that something terrible, something utterly devoid of human empathy, had quietly bloomed in its heart, like a poison flower in the deepest shadow.
The morning in Sector 17, after the quiet blooming of terror, was much like any other: a wounded thing that crawled out of the dead hours. The sky above remained a bruised, sepia rot, its heavy clouds spitting ash with lazy menace. Smoke curled from makeshift chimneys that dotted the battlements, rising from the tireless work of pale, sallow figures reinforcing the walls.
These were not soldiers; they were not defenders of old glories or crusaders against an encroaching darkness. They were, simply and profoundly, survivors.
Lyriq walked among them, a silent, unsettling presence. His senses, sharpened to an almost painful degree by his recent ascensions, registered the tension, the unspoken fear, the desperate grind of their existence. They sensed him too, a primal awareness of something alien in their midst, though few dared to look at him directly. Those who did were met with obsidian eyes that seemed more still than dead, more ancient than the void itself.
He had been in Sector 17 for barely two days, a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of his eternal existence. Yet in that brief span, he had devoured power, desecrated a fundamental human connection, and moved with a patience that made even the awakened uneasy.
Veyra's absence had passed like a fever dream, quickly absorbed by the city's relentless struggle. Whispers, half-truths, silent speculations, and deeply buried warnings clung to his presence like mold, yet none dared to openly challenge him. None, in their desperate fight for survival, felt they could afford to.
They endure. Lyriq's internal thought drifted, a cold observation. "They cling. A fascinating flaw. The insistence on life, even when it offers nothing but pain. Like flies to a lamp, eternally drawn to the heat, even as it burns".
He wandered again into the outer districts, where chaos was a visible, tangible force. He observed the animalistic struggle for food, for shelter, for a fleeting sense of meaning. Traders screamed over scrap tech and fungi meat.
Children with eyes too large for their faces begged or stole without shame, their innocence long since stripped away. A man was being beaten behind an irrigation silo, his cries muffled by the city's hum; Lyriq passed by without a flicker of interest. This city was not a sanctuary. It was a pressure cooker, its lid buckling under immense, inescapable forces.
He stopped by a long-dead fountain, now dry and flaking with rust and fungal veins, and simply watched. Then, he sat, his form a dark silhouette against the desolate landscape. Birds made of iron and sinew circled overhead, their wings serrated like knives, their cries as sharp as glass.
"You don't belong here," a voice stated, thin but unwavering.
Lyriq turned his head slowly. A child. A girl, ten, maybe eleven, her face tattooed with crude, black geometric shapes. She held a broken rifle, clutched to her small chest as if it still held meaning, still offered protection.
"Neither do you," Lyriq answered, his voice a low rasp.
The girl grinned, a gap where a front tooth should have been. "I was born here. You... you smell like oldness. Like something from before the before."
He said nothing, simply observed. Perception. She sees beyond the immediate. A rudimentary form of foresight, perhaps. Or merely the keen awareness of something utterly alien.
"What's your name?" she pressed, unperturbed by his silence.
"Lyriq."
"That's not a real name. That's a whisper."
He looked at her finally, not through her as he often did with lesser beings, but directly at her, acknowledging her unique perception. "Maybe that's all that remains of me."
She nodded, as if he had just explained some profound cosmic truth, then abruptly turned and ran off, vanishing into the maze of the outer districts.