Chapter Text
The dream is dead.
Atop a throne sat a middle-aged canine, tablet in hand. His hair had gone grey long ago, drained of its colour by the stresses of leading a country through war. Even his eyes seemed deader, sporting deep wrinkles around their corners, only deepening as the king looked up to address the person knelt before him.
“Do you remember your name?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.
“Wyatt Denson.”
“What is your rank, son?”
“Extreme Operative, First Class.”
“Very good. What can you remember of the most recent events?”
“My dropship was destroyed in orbit and I entered freefall, sir.”
“I see… Do you remember the impact? Hitting the ground?”
“No, sir.”
The king sat back in his chair, stroking the white-streaked beard that adorned his chin. He blinked slowly, as if physically burdened by the whirl of thoughts in his head. The copper braziers hanging from the walls of the throne room cast a warm orange light throughout the chambers, but backlit from above, the king’s sharp features looked almost threatening, despite his demeanor of warm pride.
“You’re one of a kind, Operative Denson. Super soldiers don’t typically fall from orbit and live to tell the story. We cannot ignore your distinctive strengths any longer.”
“Thank you, my Lord.”
King Iverson stood, wincing at the crackling of his aging knees, and handed off his electronic tablet to a waiting servant. Stepping down to the knelt soldier, the King set his hand atop his head.
“Arise, now. Claim greatness, O loyal subject.”
“Claim greatness, Wyatt…”
~
—%Rebooting%—
—%Reboot Successful%—
Wyatt’s eyes flew open, blinking rapidly as his visual processors fought against the dark, murky surroundings he found himself in. He coughed, but the moment his mouth opened, it flooded with the pungent taste of seawater.
The bottom of Tugna Bay was to be Wyatt’s grave. Half buried in the silty floor of an undersea gulch, Wyatt Denson’s destiny was to be but another decomposing body to feed the fishes, but as he rose to his feet and looked around, his will to live only grew and grew. Amongst the seaweed, schools of small fish darted in and out, avoiding the steel predator that had made himself known to them.
The surface shimmered blindingly with points of white light that swept to and fro, and the unmistakable shape of figures on the shore stood clearly silhouetted. A search party, courtesy of Ekaterina, the High Priestess. Wyatt’s options for escape were dwindling, but just as he steeled himself for the fight to come, he spotted the elongated shape of a small coastal freighter's hull some yards away. He could hear its single propeller slowly slice through the water, deafening down here among the rocks and seaweed.
“Triple expansion steam engine… single prop,” he mumbled to himself. “If I time it just right…”
Wyatt broke into a powerful sprint, thundering across the seabottom, gouging a path as he made his approach toward the passing boat. He’d have very little time to course correct if all went badly. As he ran the final ten metres, Wyatt crouched low and sprung up, shooting through the water headfirst like a torpedo, until he hooked his claws into the hull of the ship from beneath, securing himself magnetically. He had eluded death once more.
~
The message came in the dead of night. Hours ago had Marian been sent to sleep, long had the maids and chamberlains retired, and long had the capital city slowed down to rest its weary bones.
Yet, the priestess stood up, high in her palatial home, in her master bedroom at the top of a gilded spiral stairway. She sits hunched over in her cushioned seat of mahogany, hand whirling wildly as she wrote sentence after sentence, page after page, clawing the mistakes out of her notebook in a rage.
Then came the knock on her door.
“Your Grace? I come with urgent news.”
Her pen ceased its scratchy writings in an instant as her head lifted to acknowledge. Her left ear, as floppy as it was, tilted toward the sound of the noise, twitching as the door knocked again. She stood and made her way toward the door, clad in none but her silk night-robe. The door creaked open ever so slightly as she rubbed the exhaustion from her eyes.
“What may I do for you at this hour?” she asked, her voice hoarse; no longer the powerful lilt it always had been.
“Your Eminence, we have found convincing evidence that… the beast has not been properly disposed of. He survives.”
A slow smile spread across Ekaterina’s face as she pushed the door shut, standing against its surface with a terrible shudder.
“I am not safe here, if he is still alive.”
She opened the door again, this time fully, drawing her night robe over the supple mounds of her breasts.
“If he shows up, see to it that he is brought to me safely. Tell the knights that they are to be on alert for anything. And… take my daughter far from here. The innkeeper at Slobodnikov’s owes me a personal favour… He will understand.”
And so, she rushed out of her bedroom, hair trailing behind her like the train of a wedding dress.