Work Text:
He perceived the whisper. The clear command.
The Klaxxi.
They reached into his subconscious, stirring it gently at the lowest stratum of awareness.
Not hurried. Not urgent.
The purpose was preparation, not shock.
His time had come.
Something was wrong.
His own call returned without sound. His resonance did not carry.
No answer followed.
It was the first sign—small, faint. Yet the stillness of the state allowed no room for doubt or unrest.
Correction was not possible.
His consciousness was caught in time.
And his subconscious drifted, sluggish and unanchored.
Shadows slipped behind his dimly roused perception. They pressed into the protective cocoon that held him, saturating it with darkness and emotion.
Darker than any night. More consuming than any authority.
Imagined shapes hardened into images. The abstract became tangible.
Nothing he sensed could be explained. Nothing he felt was sustaining.
A murmur swelled into a rumble until words became discernible—
far too loud for his state.
They hissed sharply into his awareness and tore it open.
No sound came from him.
His breathing still did not begin.
He could not suffocate—
yet for the first time, he felt the fear of it.
Fear of the same terror he himself had sown so often in his life.
Not in this exact form, but by the same mechanism.
Cracks spread through his sleep. Fragments spun toward rational explanation, shattering against the walls of logic, splintering like the rest.
What remained was the shadow settling behind his eyes.
And the drumming in his head.
At some point, something cracked. The sound snapped like a whip.
But the collapse of the shell brought no release.
Bent, slick, and undignified, he struck the hard ground, scrabbling for purchase, spasming with his first breath.
He retched, shuddering. His body rebelled against the effort of being alive.
His lungs burned. Focus returned only in fragments.
Pale eyes struggled with the dim light.
Blinked.
Still the pounding in his head. Still—
He saw a ground unknown to him. Tasted dust in the air.
His wings trembled faintly.
His gaze searched for the Klaxxi, but found none among those present.
Slowly, he lifted his head, looking up through haze at the mantid before him.
A mantle lay across the other’s shoulders, heavy with blades, worn with pride. Red glass distorted the eyes. Kyparite, forged and fitted, armed him to the claws.
Without question, a warrior of high rank.
Yet another function struck the Awakened as more important. One to which he assigned meaning.
“Wakener,” he rasped hoarsely, flinching at the thinness of his own voice. “Where are the Klaxxi?”
His wings folded close against his chitin, pressing tight. He tried to still the trembling.
The rapid pulse and shallow breath betrayed him.
Never before had he felt himself so lacking in viability.
He was a Paragon.
A war-hero of their people.
In his present state, no more than a larva.
His Wakener lowered himself into a crouch—
and still loomed over him.
Red eyes studied him, spectral and unreadable.
“Not here.”
The meaning of those words made him shudder. His mandibles clicked.
His gaze fell to the sigil worked into the velvet of the cloak.
“How does a Blade of the Empress possess a tuning fork?”
“You need not burden yourself with that information, Paragon.”
The Wakener’s voice was gentle.
“You will serve.”
The Awakened rattled for breath.
His folded wings rustled, spreading to either side,
trying to draw a line.
It failed.
“I serve the Klaxxi, Blade.”
The Wakener tilted his head.
With an unhurried claw, he drew something from beneath his cloak.
“You will serve, Paragon.
But not the Klaxxi.”
His attention fixed on what his Wakener held. The pale facets of his eyes narrowed.
He did not understand what he was seeing.
With recognition, his eyes widened. His antennae went rigid.
His Wakener laughed, a rasping sound. It crept beneath his chitin.
“Eat, Paragon. You must be weakened after such a long sleep.”
The Paragon drew back.
But he could not refuse.
Roughly, his Wakener seized one of his mandibles, yanking him forward with brutal pressure.
His head was forced back, ungently, inexorably.
He struck out with his claw.
In answer, he was slammed into the dust. The weight pinned him to the ground.
His hiss died as the shard was forced into his throat. The foreign body pressed against his gullet.
His breathing seized, collapsing into a wet, unresolving rasp.
“Swallow.”
It was not the Wakener’s command that made him obey.
It was the nightmare before his awakening.
The fear of suffocation.
He felt the animating force of the amber surge through him. His pulse raced,
joined by a wave of overwhelming dread.
The Paragon convulsed in pain. The weight lifted from him—
yet another pressure closed in on his core.
A command reached him still. It was not meant for him.
Everything around him lost its relevance.
All order fractured, substance draining away.
Only the roaring storm remained.
Voices. Commands. Cries. Murmurs.
All at once.
It was too much.
He screamed.
Waves of agonizing power consumed him—
but not entirely.
His Wakener turned as he struggled to his feet, a scepter trembling in his claw.
The gold of his chitin was gone. A sickly darkness blackened his carapace, mist seeping from the seams.
He breathed evenly.
Wings drawn tight, antennae alert.
The power of amber was immense.
Amber is life.
And the corruption within it overwhelmed him.
“You will die screaming.”
With narrowed eyes, he looked up into the murky sky.
The scorched earth beneath him had long since fallen silent,
strewn now with armored bodies.
He had not reached his Wakener.
Unfortunately.
A rough hum rose from his throat as his body trembled.
He could not maintain control.
“The fool did not even know my name.”
Was it amusement he felt—
or humiliation?
These states knew no boundaries.
No filters held.
The attempt at classification failed.
He shuddered.
A sound rose beyond his battered skull.
Spinning, he turned and leveled his scepter at its source. A swarm-born froze mid-motion and collapsed at once.
Not lifeless—only sleeping. Caught in a dream of death,
and in the terror pressing against his carapace.
He would never wake again—
no more than the others around him would.
Many of them no longer breathed. Their heartbeats were gone for good.
The Paragon rubbed at his thorax with a claw. He was in pain and did not know why.
It hurt.
It hurt so much.
So many voices in his head.
So many commands.
Each demanded something different.
Each tore at him.
It was draining him.
The light that once marked his gaze darkened.
The trembling in his limbs intensified.
Where were the Klaxxi?
They had called for him.
Had they forgotten him?
Left him behind…?
…sorted him out?
The mist poured more thickly from his carapace, condensing.
It seeped into the earth with a deep exhalation, spreading outward.
The corruption in Vor’Vess grew.
And with it, death.
His chitin ground under tension. Energy soaked into his trembling limbs.
He scarcely registered it as deviation anymore.
With narrowed eyes, he assessed the intruders. They were caught within his influence.
The shape of one was all too familiar—
but the other thing?
Irrelevant.
The voices continued to roar inside his head, laying his nerves bare like open wounds.
It took effort to remain standing. And yet it seemed absurdly simple.
Then a golden bolt struck him.
He was hurled onto his back, air tearing from his armored chest in a hissing rush.
He gasped.
Screamed.
Against the pressure.
Against the pain.
Against the voices in his head.
The claw on his chest pinned him there, forcing his thrashing body into the earth.
Merciless.
He forced his swollen lids open against the mist. Golden chitin held him fast—
finely wrought armor of refined kyparite.
The name was unknown to him, yet he knew to whom the other belonged.
The Paragon shuddered.
The pressure only tightened, only deepened.
A moment of clarity took shape amid the struggle.
Brief.
A single breath against malfunction.
He reached for it.
Against the roar,
against the pounding,
against the screams and calls that tortured him.
“End this nightmare,” he hissed.
A broken sound—
but one that carried.
Jade-green eyes looked down at him. The pressure did not relent for a single breath.
He saw the amber blade in the muted light, held steady in the golden claw.
“Rest among the roots of a kypari, Deathcaller.”
The final word spoken by the unfamiliar Paragon hurt Qi’tar more
than the blade that shattered his thorax moments later.
At last…
silence.