The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Twenty minutes between heartbeats.
Galateya remembered the awful silence between each.Nothingness. A vast emptiness she fell into each time her organic heart paused, where she floated in the dark, weightless, listening, counting down each second with a mental click.
She remembered the exact moment her body stopped shivering, the tremors fading like an Astral radio losing signal, static thinning to silence, tail stilling its motion.
She became a sculpture.
A small, skinny, obsidian-scaled girl in a hexasuit sitting cross-legged on the frozen floor of a dead room, eyes half-shut, lips parted a fraction of an inch to let the thinnest thread of stale air slip between them. Frost grew over her like lace, white fractals climbing her forearms, colonizing the ridges of her horns, filling the hollows of her collarbones. From the outside, she looked like a piece of dark crystal set into ice.
Inside, she was despairing.
She had doomed herself through her foolishness, killed her prad instructors, and failed to manage her Fractal Engine heart.
Her mind flared, trapped behind the glacial cage of her own making, a dying ember sealed in a block of subzero ice. She could feel everything and move nothing. Her body existed at the pace of stone.
Time felt elastic, unreliable. Hours and days blurred into an undifferentiated smear of cold and dark and the endless, rambling singing of the room, which for some reason did not accelerate when Galateya’s body slowed down.
The room sang constantly now, as if the self-suspension process had turned Galateya into an even better receiver of the songs.
She sang about dimensions folding into each other like origami cranes. She sang about System Wizards, the architects of narrative realities, beings who wrote worlds into existence and then abandoned them when the stories and games grew stale in the eyes of their Masters.
She sang about soul structures, the fractal scaffolding beneath every living thing, the way consciousness nested inside flesh inside concept inside probability.
She sang of Entropy which decayed concepts and Syntropy which reinforced them and Infinity that replicated, stretched them out endlessly or straight up destroyed them via dividing them by zero.
Galateya absorbed everything.
She had no choice in the matter. The singing poured into her soul like water filling a barrel, randomly blessing the dragon girl with unexpected, arcane knowledge.
The eternally-distant yet mind-infesting voice sang about the Frontenachii too.
She sang of Empress Aconia, the lazy, playful gal, who was more of a figurehead than anything; the real Frontenachii Empire rulers being the fear, pain and power hungry Legates who pushed the fleets towards endless expansion across the Omniverse.
She sang of the Master Builders, Koschei Omnids kept immortal through phylacteries and legions of crab-like kobolds imprisoned within the Corpse-God Citadel depths. Masters and slaves sealed in maximum accelerated time bubbles, carving up extra-Syntropic Leviathan bones over countless generations and staining it with blood and pain, then fusing various carved sections together to produce Frontenachii fleet warships.
She sang of smaller Frontenachii fleets hunting Elder dragons in every Systemfall-infested dimension discovered by the Frontenachii Deathmoth gaters. Of fake treasure-pile artifacts radiating magic across the entire planet to attract the great beasts and of Corpse Seekers launching rocks from massive railguns to tear through their wings. Of Seekers collecting and of Deathmoths sending broken-winged dragons to be processed into more Corpse Seekers by the Master Builders.
She sang about time bubbles, cradle-prisons, designed to create capable, tough, brutal Commanders for the Empire as quickly as possible. She contemplated Bubble Keepers, the incarnation-damaged, no longer capable to serve as ground troops… pradavarian kobolds that occasionally monitored and checked the time-dilated training rooms when the bubble opened. She sang of rune sequences required to open and close the blast doors from the outside, keyed to the Keepers protected by their symbiote guns units made from melted down crystalloids.
The singer never addressed Galateya. She never acknowledged the existence of the bubble-bound dragon girl. The voice seemed to sing for her own reasons, across some vast distance Galateya could not measure nor comprehend.
The little dragon felt like she was eavesdropping on a personal confession, a conversation that was never meant to be heard, catching wild, lunatic laughter leaking through the cracks between realities.
As Galateya’s organic heart slowed further, the words became sharp like celesteel blades, clear like glacier lake water.
“I wear the purrfect face when my Master’s looking, And when she turrrrns, I let my sharrrp teeth show! I learned her favorite words, her morning temper, The sound of her Omnid pulse when it runs slow.”
The voice whisper-sang and exhaled.
“I know the clever phrases that disarm her, The angle of a bow that buys her trrrust. She thinks the girl beside her keeps her charted, Such charts are weak as paper… Maps made to turn to dust!”
The wall-voice laughed to herself.
“I count prads resting at the bulkhead, I hum their names like flowers in a wreath. Torri takes the left post, Syndi takes the right one, And neither checks the ventilation beneath!
Hmmm hrmmm hrmmm,” the singer hummed cheekily.
“I brought ‘em both a meal last 7th cycle, A kindness with a purpose tucked inside. The grateful ones stop looking at the singer, And hearts… ssstay open, oohhhh sooo wide!”
The singer panted, tapping her foot.
“I polished every medal on my collar, And practiced looking honored in the glass, I sang the ‘Fleet Communion’ with the others, Let ‘Glory to the Empress’ leave my brass!”
The voice became extra resonant when it hummed of the ‘fleet communion’. Galateya felt an unnerving, unexpectedly deep connection to the voice.
“My throat was made for sweeter… stranger music, Than anthems built on bones I did not break. I sing their hymns because a choir needs voices, And dead girls do not get a… second take!
No… nooo,” the singer whisper-lamented.
“There’s a room aboard this ship… Deck 14, Where tactical projections paint the floor, I’ve memorized the access code by heartbeat, Ahh-ahhh… The Commander’s retina-lock, the service door.
If I… hummm a lovely note at a certain frequency, The power grid hiccup for a breath, And in that breath the locks lose their memory, And every door on Deck 14 swings left!
I’m keeping it saved up for a day that’s right, A present wrapped in silence… ribboned tight! Some songs are better savored than delivered. Some knives are sharper sheaved against the night!”
The voice clearly wielded many dastardly plans.
“The other ‘bolds yearn to be free from their Masters, They are all pawns marching to my voice. Their claws will mark the day of my planned disaster When I tell them… they will make the throat-cutting choice.
I’ll know the evening when the wrapping opens. Ahh-ahhhmm! I’ll feel it in the copper-colored air. The gold grass of homeworld will be calling, And I will answer, loosening my hair. Aha ha ha ha ha!”
The singer cackled wildly, sounding she was almost choking on her spit.
“Promise…” she whispered.
“Just a… word. A word, a feather… Laid on the scales of someone else’s war. They’ll never know the feather tipped the balance. They’ll never know what all the smiling’s for.
I’ll take their tears as my payment. And laugh as they cannot understand. The only honest thing inside this clever fool… Is the treason, and the plans I’ve never played.
I’ll point the fleet toward a linear dimension Where the mana’s thin and songs don’t carry far, And I will sit in silence, finally… Finally, Beneath an honest, and unbound star!”
A linear dimension. An unbound star? What is that supposed to be? the little, barely alive dragon girl wondered.
“And if I’m lucky, if the math holds steady, If every map I’ve drawn inside my chest Aligns with every door I’ve left unlocked, I’ll find a place to put my voice… to rest.
Not forever. Just long enough to hear it Without the fleet, without the mask, the role. Long enough to sing a song worth singing. Long enough to find out if I’m whole…”
The last word of the song carried on and on endlessly, pulsating and resonating in Galateya’s mind, twisting and undulating from “whole” to “home”.
Then… other songs came, less coherent, snippets of tunes, bits and pieces of melodies blossoming in her mind like flowers.
Galateya could make very little sense of most of them.
She lacked context, lacked names, lacked even the ability to determine if the voice belonged to a person or a place or some leftover enchantment, a ghost embedded in the walls of the bubble itself.
She simply listened, because listening was all she could do.
Listened and learned, struggling to assemble the puzzle of the endless music in her head.
Among the deluge of songs, certain fragments snagged on her mind and refused to let go.
The day when the voice sang about Taniwha:
“…They reshape the world with their tears,” the singer murmured, akin to someone humming about the weather while doing chores. “…stomachs dissolve everything from mighty artifacts to mountain rocks… their claws carve canyons… Living terraformers. Taniwha Omnids are maximally Syntropic and wield… Vast power of creation, potential for birthing ecosystems inside their Fractal Engine hearts…”
Then the voice ranted about moving someone named Silvertail into position and spat out a giddy riff about the taste of a new soup the singer had tried for the first time on some Slayer-foresaken doomed world in a Frontenachii-designed Citadel near an ever-blooming dungeon.
Taniwha. Her kind… Living terraformers?
Galateya didn’t know much about her omnitype.
Her Instructors focused on combat forms, obedience drills, administrative duties and pain tolerance exercises. They never mentioned what Taniwha were or could become. They never mentioned tears, Syntropy nor creation of entire ecosystems. They never told her anything remotely beautiful about who she was.
Neither did Yulia, as the AI had a rigorous list of what Galateya was allowed to know and permitted to read each day.
The singing rolled on, indifferent to the revelations it was spilling out.
”… the Taniwha Omnids hum to the primordial ocean within their blood and Syntropy answers…” the voice drifted on. ”… they picture the formula, the concept, the tone for rain, for rivers… they hum it in their hearts and reality bends to their will. Physical reality… not the Astral, which responds to Entropic magic the most. I’ll attempt it too, even if I am not a child of Syntropy… the music of creation… Magisynthesis!”
The voice hummed a low, resonant note.
A single, peculiar tone thrummed through the frozen floor, worming itself deep into Galateya’s mind.
The voice sang on, already somewhere else, ranting about a scheme involving blackmail, then about a liminal tree she was planting in the future, making it bloom across eternity.
A concept that exists and also doesn’t, a shear in probability that would allow her to win once it blossomed fully. A convergence of invisible paths.
As Galateya spun the tone in her head, ignoring the liminal tree rant, her body seemed to accept it… processed, grasped it, and awakened something deep within.
The note vibrated, dancing in her chest. It resonated peculiarly deep in her sternum, behind the scales, beneath the ribs, in the place where the Fractal Engine heart spun its slow, eternal spiral behind her organic heart. The resonance sang back.
A harmonic.The Bloom of Life. Creation.
Galateya did not know the science behind it.
She learned such things later, years later, reading Yulia’s terraforming theory texts. Magisynthesis. The most important chemical reaction in any sealed dungeon biosphere. Every green thing that ever grew on any world started with this tone, an alchemical Syntropic Omnicode Word of tuning, twisting starlight into repeating structure.
Thankfully, she did not need to understand it. Her heart understood. Her Taniwha cells, starved, frozen and desperate, recognized the note the way a drowning person recognizes air.
She held it in her chest like a seed, nurturing it, feeding it the scraps of warmth, sparks of magic her dying body managed to produce.
She repeated the tone over and over, across what felt like days or maybe weeks of slow, agonizing effort.
It was a… pathetic, barely-there hum. A dying girl mimicking a sound she overheard from nowhere.
And then, she partially unfroze one of her eyes and cried.
She cried because she was alone. She cried because she was hungry and her body was a prison and the wolves were dead and nobody was coming for her for eleven more years. She cried because the romance novels were gone and Yulia was frozen solid and she would never find out if Belle finally found a family of her own.
The tears came slowly, at the pace her body operated. Each one took hours to form, a bead of warmth gathering at the corner of her mostly-frozen eye, swelling, trembling, then rolling down her cheek in glacial slow-motion, leaving a wet trail through the frost on her scales.
The first tear hit the icy hexacrete below her. The floor was a mirror of solid white, everything crystallized into a state of permanent winter she manifested in her fury.
Galateya worried that the tear would freeze too, that all of her efforts would be for naught.
Thankfully, the tear wasn’t affected by the ice all around her.
When the warm droplet struck the frost, the hexacrete melted creating a hairline fissure, glowing ever so slightly.
Galateya felt it pulse through the floor.
A tremor so faint it registered only because her Fractal Engine heart had been tuned to glacial sensitivity over the countless days of self-suspension. Her Omnid Astral heart, spiralling endlessly into itself, hiccupped in response to the tear-created fissure. A single extra rotation, barely perceptible, like a clock hand jumping forward one tick.
The note she was nurturing in her chest over the weeks, pulsed in response.
She cried some more. She had plenty to cry about.
The second tear took hours to form, to gather and to fall.
It landed beside the first, in the same tiny fissure.
The crack deepened, glowing brighter.