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“Too many claws,” said Mutran.
“Too small,” said Antroz.
“Too clever by half,” said Bitil.
“Too big,” said Kojol.
“Not enough claws,” said Chirox.
“Think ahead, Gorast,” said Miserix. His tone was softer than the others’, but his eyes were like thunder. “What are this creature’s prospects a thousand years from now when it has hunted all of its prey to extinction?
“How many times must I remind you to consider balance? The Great Spirit’s balance, which sustains all living things. You’ll have to begin from scratch.”
Miserix stormed out of the lab in a sanctimonious huff. Gorast stared down at her little virus, still pulsing with light, with no idea where to go from here.
It took her a little longer after each rebuff to pull herself together, to get back to work. But she always did.
She retracted the protodermic shell to expose the energy within. She breathed in Miserix’s scorn, her brothers’ taunts, and breathed out a Shadow Hand. It was small, only a fraction of her power, but infused with the guidance she had received.
Gorast watched it distill into the swirling energy of the virus like blood in water. Changing the seed of the Rahi she had made. Twisting it.
Into Miserix’s vision. Not hers.
A shadow stirred in the corner of her eye, and Gorast leapt in shock at the unexpected motion. It was something of a relief, though. She’d been bending over her virus for longer than she had realized, and her neck and back were sore.
It was the tall brother with the two-faced mask. Gorast didn’t know his name. He’d been speaking his mind in Convocation more often of late, unafraid to butt heads with Miserix and his favored few.
He’d been so still and quiet that Gorast hadn’t realized he was there. Shame burned on her cheeks. He’d heard her talk with Miserix.
“Didn’t mean to disturb you,” the other Makuta said, his body quite still. “You looked very focused.”
It wasn’t really an apology, but Gorast felt herself giving her brother a grateful nod.
“If only I were accomplishing something,” Gorast said.
“I find that most problems are less daunting after a walk,” he said.
Her brother laid a spotless scalpel down on his workdesk. Gorast’s eyes followed it without any conscious decision on her part. The Makuta’s station was organized with such exacting care that Gorast wondered how he had the time to get any work done. Or maybe it came as naturally to him as breathing.
He rose with a fluid motion and crossed to the entrance. He paused in the doorway, looking back at Gorast with one glittering, crimson eye.
“Coming?”
It wasn’t really an invitation. But Gorast felt herself rise.
“The idea was something like Kojol’s Dermis Turtle,” Gorast found herself saying as they strolled along the battlements. “A hard shell, almost impenetrable. But can you imagine what a creature like that could do with offensive capabilities too?”
“What kind?” her new friend asked.
“Claws. Teeth. Acid.”
“Powerful. And resource-intensive. You’d need a bucketful of LP. No wonder Miserix didn’t go for it.”
Gorast sat down on the edge of the wall, her feet dangling over nothing. Their fortress grew larger every day. Now, its western wall hugged Destral’s coastline, enduring wave after wave. She let her body sag, taking what little comfort she could from the familiar sights and sounds.
Seabirds whirled on the ocean breeze high above them, their cries faintly echoing down to the two Makuta. Land, sea, and sky, Destral teemed with Rahi, mostly experiments nearing readiness. Rahi that Miserix wanted to test in the wild before releasing them among the Matoran.
“Why did I think I was smart enough to pull it off?” Gorast sighed.
The tall Makuta plopped down beside her. No, Gorast had plopped. He glided down beside her, mirroring her feet-dangling posture.
“That sounds like Miserix talking,” he said. “Not you.”
“He’s our leader,” said Gorast. “He knows best.”
“Perhaps… He has a point. Perhaps it’s not fit to run free among the Matoran,” the Makuta said.
Gorast’s shoulders slumped in defeat. She’d thought he understood her.
She’d hoped he would be different from the rest.
“But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a destiny,” he continued.
Gorast leaned in, intrigued. “What do you mean?”
“If you were to make it even tougher, even stronger. Even more loyal. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect creature for guard duty?”
“What would it be guarding?”
“You,” he said with a knowing grin.
Gorast laughed heartily, and he chuckled along with her.
“Me? What do I need a bodyguard for? I’m just a scientist.”
“Oh, you’re not just anything, Gorast.”
A flush rose to Gorast’s face, and she gazed out at the horizon to hide it from him. It had been so long, she didn’t know how to respond to praise like that.
“But Miserix shot me down,” Gorast protested. “He’ll never give me the liquid protodermis I need.”
“It pains me to hear a visionary like you so hung up on logistics,” he said. “If you have a dream, you should let nothing stand in your way. What if… I told you I could get you what you need?”
Gorast scooted closer to her mysterious friend, the excitement of the forbidden pounding in her chest despite herself. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
The Makuta rolled his eyes. “Look, do you want to make this creature or not?”
“An unauthorized experiment?” She whispered the illicit words. “Miserix would never stand for–”
“What Miserix doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” the Makuta said with a dismissive wave of his claw. “Besides, once he sees what a rousing success it is, all will be forgiven.”
“The Brotherhood’s mission is to make Rahi for the Matoran,” Gorast echoed one of their leader’s favorite maxims. “Not to satisfy our own curiosity.”
“Well, that’s Miserix’s interpretation of our mission,” he said. “What’s yours?”
Gorast had no response. Eventually, her new friend rose to his feet.
“I’d better get back to it,” he said. “Just remember, Gorast. The Great Spirit gave everything in this world a destiny. Even things that others may find unsightly. Dangerous.”
He stuck out his hand, and she shook it.
“Thank you for walking with me, Gorast.”
“Thank you, Makuta… I don’t know your name.”
His smirk cut like glass.
“You will.”
Makuta Lupast. A skilled warrior shackled by bonds of honor.
Her Kanohi was anything but honorable. She wore the Hask, Mask of Equivalence, which evenly split any damage she took among all beings in range. She often boasted that it made her invulnerable.
That wasn’t true. She was vulnerable to anyone willing to tolerate a little pain to bring her down.
Another throwing knife embedded itself in Lupast’s neck, disappearing up to the hilt and staggering her.
A phantom knife cut a burning trail through Gorast’s musculature at the same spot, a bracing pain she knew was equal to what Lupast had just endured. While it staggered her foe, it only sharpened Gorast’s focus.
They were kio now from the stronghold on Xia, where Gorast had found her. She hadn’t expected the last of Miserix’s devotees to make it this far, but she was grateful for the chance to sharpen her teeth.
Lupast was flagging, barely able to raise her longsword above her waist. Gorast leaned back against a tree and watched her tire herself out swinging at shadows.
“You’ve been amusing prey,” she growled, and Lupast spun wildly, seeking her through the darkness of the woods. “Now lay down your sword and swear fealty to Makuta Teridax.”
“Makuta Miserix has my oath and bond,” Lupast intoned, still holding her head high. “Hands and feet of the Great Spirit in this world.”
“Miserix is dead,” said Gorast. “You die for a corpse.”
“My oaths endure beyond my lord’s death,” Lupast said. “Yours are here and gone like waves on the sea.”
Gorast moved silently, though it sent jolts of agony through her leg. An errant knife had scoured Lupast’s hip. Pain, Gorast could endure, but if she crippled one of Lupast’s limbs, she would take herself out of the fight.
She flitted through the shadows until she was standing behind Lupast, twirling another knife on her fingers. Sad. The fool refused to see reason.
“I remember you,” Lupast said softly, clearly aware the end was nearing. “Gorast. Sister… You asked my opinion about every single Rahi you designed. You asked half the Brotherhood. Oh, how badly you wanted to get it all right…”
Gorast set her jaw and took aim at the hole she had torn between Lupast’s shoulderblades.
“Does he ever ask you to make things for him the way Miserix did? Or only to destroy?”
Gorast’s arm shook. No. No! You will not let her distract you. Be STILL.
“We lost our way, didn’t we?” Lupast said, her voice trembling. “Even Miserix, I’ll confess it. The League, the Civil War… We put our faith in our own protosteel to keep order, not in Mata.”
“A false god,” Gorast spat. She silently cursed her tactical blunder. She’d give away her angle. Don’t engage. Just do the job.
“And you think… Your master?” Lupast chuckled weakly. “He knows nothing of divinity.”
The knife flew and buried itself in the bare muscle of Lupast’s back, propelled by rage.
Lupast dropped at once. It took Gorast a moment more. The wound opened on her back, huge and jagged. But worse was the blow that came with it. It felt like a mace had struck her.
Her breath gone, her thoughts a whirl of alarm, she staggered and stumbled into the clearing, finally crashing down beside Lupast.
Her sister’s green eyes were dim and flickering, but she stared at Gorast with a look somewhere between serenity and resignation.
“He will forsake you,” Lupast rasped with her last breaths. “Mad dog. Assassin. When your loyalty leaves you broken, bleeding, wretched at his feet… He will look down on you and cast you aside.
“Remember. Makuta Lupast has said it. Remember. For what use has a god for a mad… dog… a…ssassin?”
All her combat instincts, all the pain were gone, and replaced by a righteous, scarlet fury. The gall. He had chosen her! Had lifted her above the lot of a common Makuta, set her aside for greatness. She was his strong right hand, his–
Lupast had moved, and in her anger, she’d missed it. She was propped up on her forearms with her sword turned around so the tip pressed against her breastplate.
“This is a kindness to us both,” she said.
Gorast screamed and lunged for Lupast, stretching out a claw to pry the Kanohi off of her face. Too little, too late.
Lupast fell on her sword. And there was nothing left for Gorast but agony.
The Matoran who interrupted her was one of the dull ones. Well, they were all dull, here on the Tren Krom Peninsula. One had to be dull to live in such a deadly place.
Beneath the heel of such a deadly Makuta.
The accent was insufferable, a clipped, rasping sound. The conversation was worse. They could chatter for hours about farming equipment and weather. No curiosity about the world, about the Rahi that Gorast and her Brotherhood had blessed them with. No interest in innovation, other than what could immediately be put to work chopping crops down.
This one, one of her aides, was wringing its hands and staring at the floor beneath its feet.
“M-madam Gorast,” it said, reverting back to the traditional form of address in its terror of her. “There’s s-something in the sea. Something big.”
Her reply was a low, wordless growl. Gorast snatched her knife belt from the table, and it flinched away from the weapon. Gorast should have punished it for its timidity, but instead she merely stomped past it.
Her keep on the western coast of the peninsula was built for strength, carved from stone as black as midnight. A moat of acid diverted from the nearby Falls defended it. She left it behind and approached the shore, a knife clutched warily in each hand.
She saw it, not even a bio off the shore, through the early morning mist. Its twisted spires seemed to touch the clouds. Smoke from a thousand arcane machines and the tortured cries of Rahi filled the air.
Destral had come for her.
Gorast took a ragged breath and ran her hands down her body. She grazed a few spots that made her wince with pain, most of all the ugly mark of twisted metal above her heartlight that had been a gaping hole mere hours before.
Whatever was waiting for her on Destral, Gorast would face it at far less than full strength.
A pair of leather wings unfurled from Gorast’s back, and she launched herself towards the fortress wall with one powerful beat.
The Rahkshi began prodding her the moment she landed, making it clear she was not a guest with privilege.
With a glint of steel, Gorast pressed her knife to the bigger one’s throat. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed.
The Rahkshi recoiled, a dry rattle emanating from its powerful jaws. It wasn’t being directly controlled, then, just in its standard autonomous guard configuration. It would not retaliate.
The beasts hung close as she limped down the stairs and into the fortress proper.
He kept the throne room dim so the supplicant would never see what nasty surprises he had waiting in the dark.
Miserix had never dared call it a throne, of course. It was the “Seat of Authority”. The room it sat in, he called the “Great Laboratory.” His successor had no need for honeyed words. He called himself what he was. A king.
The look of concern on his Kraahkan was so genuine that it nearly fooled Gorast, who knew better than anyone that nothing he did was genuine.
Except hate.
If he had nearly fooled her, what chance did anyone else have?
“My dear Gorast,” he crooned. “I couldn’t help but worry when you didn’t report in as we agreed. I was tormented by the thought of you falling to Lupast’s sword. Or, worse… Joining in her folly.”
Gorast forced her torn, aching body to kneel. “Impossibilities, my lord,” she said.
“Indeed. I should have known better.”
“I apologize for my lateness. I took some time to repair myself, to be worthy to stand in your presence.”
He raised a claw to the mouth of his mask, a mockery of concern.
“Oh no… Not hurt too badly, I hope?”
“It’s nothing,” said Gorast. “Lupast was a worthy opponent. I was careless.”
“But you did not come empty-handed.”
Gorast reached into her cloak, squeezing her eyes shut as the movement aggravated the wound in her back. She retrieved Lupast’s mask and threw it down at the foot of the throne.
“Is that how you deliver my prize?” He asked, cocking his head.
Gorast stifled a growl. This game again? Really? It had been eons since they’d last played this little scene out. Not since the last time she’d given him reason to doubt her.
Gorast rose to her full height, not daring to tremble. With uneven, lurching steps, she approached and knelt before the throne again. She picked up the Kanohi and raised it high above her head for him to take it.
He ran a finger along the ridges of the Kanohi, forcing Gorast to kneel there, motionless.
“Beautiful,” he said.
At last, he took it, and Gorast let her burning arms drop to her sides.
“Icarax brought me two this month,” he said, trailing his hand along something balanced on the arm of his throne.
Two Kanohi. They glittered in the torchlight.
Gorast tried not to look.
“And he did it without dirtying my throne room.”
Gorast looked back to see a trail of broken and twisted pieces of her stretching back to the door. The heat of embarrassment rose behind her mask.
“I-I’ll clean it up at on–”
“No,” he snapped. “Look at me.”
With hypnotic precision, he tilted her head up with a finger under her chin. Gorast dared to meet those eyes that had seen straight through what she was and to what she could be.
“Have I ever asked you to debase yourself with such a common task, Gorast? Such things are below a Makuta. And you are above the other Makuta.”
“Icarax is a scavenger,” he went on. “He and his mask are well-suited for each other. He is drawn to weakness. Unwilling to pick a fight that he could lose. You, my dear, are drawn to strength. You sought out Lupast when he dared not. That is why, when I ascend, you will stand at my right hand. Not him.”
Gorast’s breath hitched. She stared into his eyes until her world was a sea of crimson.
“And now… You have done well for me. Do you not deserve a reward?”
He bent down and placed the lightest of kisses on the brow of her Kanohi.
Her body shook with impotent rage. Not at the affection. He was always pleasant. No, it was the way he clung to the fiction that what they had was transactional.
That wasn’t why she followed him, not anymore, and he knew it. He made her want to scream at the top of her lungs, loud enough for the whole universe to hear her.
I belong to you. Can’t you just believe that? What else must I give to prove it to you?
Haven’t I given you everything already?
“You are no scavenger. You are no butcher. You are an artist with the blade, Gorast. You scribe your destiny with cuts in metal and flesh.
“The Matoran praise Mata Nui with the Great Takara. When I am your god, your act of worship will be destruction.”
He dismissed her, but the churning of her mind drowned out his words. She found herself back in her keep before long, working on what she had been before her Matoran had disturbed her.
A virus.
The procedures from the old days came back to her quickly. She had worried that she would be rusty. That gave her some hope.
When it was ready, she closed her eyes and pictured a seabird, like the ones she had watched with him on the walls of Destral long ago. She pictured it, making lazy loops against a bright blue sky. Its crystalline feathers, almost translucent, sparkled in the light of the suns. Graceful. Delicate. Proud.
She peeled it away layer by layer, placing all its internals with the utmost care. It felt familiar. Right. Like the smell of home after years away.
She released her Shadow Hand into the virus, and it pulsed and tensed in response. Gorast picked it up and carried it over to her pool of liquid protodermis. She dunked it below the surface.
The virus took in the protodermis and began to shift, taking on color, texture, and weight in her hand. Gorast dared to smile, dared to hope, as she waited.
What she had made was dreadful.
A hissing mess of spines and chitinous armor plates. Claws, some half-embedded in flesh so they couldn’t even open.
It was born in a blind fury, stinging and stabbing its creator. It had every right.
It lived for a moment. When she cut it open, there were teeth growing out of its heartlight.
Sunsrise found Gorast already marching back to the shore. To Destral. Behind her, tendrils of smoke wafted from the window of her burning lab.
Everything in this world has a destiny. That’s what he had told her, the day they met. Even…
Even…
He held her destiny in his hand. He alone knew what she was for.
She would follow after it, no matter where it led.
No matter how it hurt.