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The Heart had sundered from blade and knives and electricity. Its blood had gushed forth, even demonic heat not enough to cauterize the fatal wound, and as if dying of thirst he had thrown himself forward to embrace it. Gore splattering on the cold stone tiles, membranes and muscle snapping in his fingers, his blade lost in the moment of triumph. That bright mad pulse of killing instinct pushes him still further, as if within the Heart there is something left to conquer that is not just the death throes of the enemy.
The metallic stench, the sickly sweet scent of rotten flesh, the weakening rumbling pulse of a wretched thing alive too long, sickness and poison and blight
(like sharp metal buried in his heart he feels a stab-bright pang of kinship, connection; he too is a destroyer without cure without end)
it thrums through his teeth as he bites and tears. Every morsel burns as he chews, swallows, pain lancing through him at the desecration. He can no longer feel his hands, or his face. He hears the distant sound of tearing, snapping flesh, and burning blood gushes forth.
It buries him, drowns him in an unstoppable flood, oily and foul. He tastes blood that isn't his, for once, on his tongue, and swallows. It burns all the way down, hooks into his throat, and ignites like dry grass before a lightning strike.
(Smoke in the summer. Warmth and dry hills, heat on his face as he startles with a cry, races back to the camp to warn the others.
His own heart beating, his own breath shuddering, the birds calling in the endless blue sky above.
The memory is so long ago, he cannot remember what he said. The words are incomprehensible. The voice that comes out of his mouth is unrecognisable; too young, too free, unbroken.)
Roiling flame forces itself out from the back of his throat, volatile and bright, consuming the poison, the corpse, his hands. His face, his limbs, all of it falling away, fuel for the fire.
He who has never rested, has never stopped, has never hesitated, ever since the demon took him and hollowed him out into this empty shell, he keeps going, keeps pushing. His vision is spinning, split into a thousand thousand fragments, seeing as fire sees perhaps; a kaleidoscope of stone tiles, open sky, violet flames and spilled blood and flashes of green and blue, faster, higher, out of his skin and out of this cage and into open air
A thought flickers into his mind like a bright flame, like a bird outflying a wildfire, unfettered at last
Please, finally
and burns to ash.
A raging torrent screams into the sky. The last fragment of him feels a great, thunderous groaning shake through what remains as somewhere far beyond him, as alien as the stars in the night, the Spire shuts.
Dissolving into fire had been easy, peaceful.
He had slept, if oblivion can be called sleep, floating in darkness beyond darkness.
And then
My puppet of puppets! Arise and kill the Architect!
he pulls together slowly, piece by piece, part by part. Instead of fire, instead of blood, there is water. It runs through his veins, extinguishes the ever-burning fire to trade it for the weight of physical form, resculpts violet flame into aching flesh. He swallows - has a mouth, tongue, throat to swallow - and tastes a faint, medicinal bitterness that lines his stomach, fills his lungs with something like air.
The pool swirls around him. He is lifted as easily as an ember in the wind, water still streaming away from his limp form. He sucks in a startled breath at the sudden exertion and coughs out the last of it.
The familiar hum of the goddess' voice in his ears greets his awakening.
"Have brought...gifts...."
He feels as weak as a new-hatched fledgling. He is set down just as gently. He is still damp as he crawls to the pile of clothing and armor the goddess has left for him, but he steams with that familiar, ferocious heat; by the time he reaches it, he is dry.
The helmet, the armor, it is just similar enough to be comfortable. Different enough to be disconcerting. His panicked, panting breaths even out as he clothes himself regardless; he does not wish to be unarmored, unclad, in the Spire.
His fingers - not calloused any more - run over the smooth metal of the helmet. A full-face one this time, different from the last. He wonders where it ended up
(something in his chest pulls, his heart throbs with sudden pain rather than the dull ache he became so used to -- the helmet he had earned, the one forged for him when he came of age became a warrior an Ironclad, it is gone, gone, lost in the winding corridors of the Spire and just another relic now--)
his breathing stutters, his hands clutching at the helmet as if it will keep him from coming undone, burning, burning, burning in his own memories. The demon had kept this from him, had made him empty, o puppet of puppets; he had heard the demon's voice, why then can he feel this now? Why now--
There is a clack, clack, the familiar whirring-chittering of mechanisms, and he turns to look at the pool. There is nothing there. He looks to the entrance of the ritual chamber and sees the familiar blazing blue eye of the automaton.
Different, now; patchwork and bulkier, and still injured. Fresh memories emerge, cautious and hesitant; his hands smoothing out dents, sealing cuts, with the heat of inner flame. Its hands on his blade, his armor, as if trying to understand this strange metal shell; like and not unlike. It takes a hesitant step towards him, and then another, and another, until it's in front of him. Taller than him now.
(Did it grow up? Did creatures like it even grow up? It had seemed so childlike then...something has changed, now, some loss or pain. He can sense it, though whether it's the demon's power or his own instinct he doesn't know.
Another pang in his chest, no less strong than the last.)
"Did you not...leave?" His voice crackles like the flame he had been.
"Seeks....Architect...like you."
He slides the helmet on, finding new strength in his hands with it looking at him expectantly. A perfect fit, like everything the goddess had provided.
His hands flex, now empty. Everything but a weapon.
Metal rattles, echoes, in the quiet room. He looks to the side; one of the half-shattered statues - made in the goddess' honor, he assumes - holds a sword in what was presumably once some sort of jaw, a mouth. It, too, is not his blade; it is different.
"Take...it..."
Pain once more, at the thought of his blade lost; a cherished thing, but a reminder of his sins as well. One more thing destined to be lost amid the Spire's clutter, another piece of his tribe swallowed as his madness had swallowed them all.
A fitting punishment, he supposes; even that reminder, he cannot keep.
Five steps away takes him to the statue. His hand closes around the weapon's hilt; it fits into his hand perfectly. It weighs exactly as it should. He turns his head to the automaton; it's still watching him.
"You seek him also."
The automaton nods.
"Just you and I?"
A headshake, and then it points. Does it want him to see something? He follows it out to the sound of rushing water, the goddess' hall, and finds another familiar face; the huntress sitting by a still mirror-like pool, still clad in that familiar green cloak. sporting that same skull. He'd never asked the purpose of such things; perhaps they were simply reminders of the world beyond the Spire. She was unshackled, not like him; he's surprised she's here still.
He remembers, a little. He saw -- fragments. She sliced a piece of the Heart for her trophy, and left, free once more.
"Why did you return?"
He sits down across from her. She hesitates, just for a moment, and then shakes off her arm and extends it out to him.
He sees nothing wrong at first. Then -- something pulses beneath her dark skin. Purple light, sickly and familiar. He reaches out in turn, driven by simple impulse at the look on her half-shadowed face - the prickling sweat on her face as if fevered, the faint tremor of her outstretched arm, the way her mouth is set in a grim line - and places his hand on the light seething underneath the surface of her flesh, clasping her forearm as if she were another soldier, a comrade in arms.
He supposes she is.
Inner fire roils, seethes within him; the contract renewed, reawakened. The burn of it presses against his palm like a second heartbeat, as if trying to break from his skin to devour the poison in her veins.
She hisses softly, and he releases her; but her tension has visibly eased. Though there is a redness to the skin, barely visible, the light no longer burns - as if his heat has subdued it.
He glances around the vast hall, and sees the tattered remnants of previous encampments. He wonders if the clutter from their previous attempts is still around here; does the goddess' power extend to...cleaning? He's never thought to ask. He never thought he'd be here again.
(He never thought he'd be solid, thinking, alive again.)
"Why here?"
She points to the pool. He looks into it, expecting to see their reflections; instead, he sees a vision. Two unfamiliar people, a lich animated by roiling fire not dissimilar to his own, an orange star-headed creature on some sort of chair (are they being carried? are they ill or infirm?) bickering as they fight their way through some overgrown jungle.
"--no, that way! That way, I say!"
"Little regent, you may be new here, but I am not. I was born here -- you should follow my lead!"
"I saw something over there, I tell you--"
The huntress looks at him, and then gestures to the pool, and then points to the goddess. The automaton simply bangs its hands together in what seems to be excitement. He could swear he sees joy in that expressionless face....
He just sighs, and settles down to wait. The demon calls, but here in the goddess' domain his voice is drowned by the sound of water.
This time, he supposes, they will go up all together.