Freedom

Galateya burst from the foliage.

She caught the gun, black claws closing around it from behind. The spider writhed, jabbing a metal leg into her wrist. Pain lanced up her arm. She ignored it, pulling on her power.

Absolute cold came from her palm like light from a lamp. The temperature of the gun’s core plummeted so fast the metal housing cracked. The legs twitched once, twice, and locked. The chirping alarm stuttered, distorted into a descending whine, and died. Ice crystals crawled across the spider’s carapace in fractal spirals until the entire weapon was a lump of frozen metal.

She poured her power across the mind of the gun unit, freezing the last several minutes of memory away permanently.

Then, she set the gun down on the floor. It made a dull, glassy thud against the roots.

The mole was on the ground. The spores had done their work. Eyes sealed, throat locked, limbs rigid. She breathed in thin, wheezing gasps through a nose clogged with yellow dust, alive and aware and completely immobilized.

At Galateya’s order, roots bloomed and crept around the pradavarian mole. Thin tendrils wrapped around the mole’s ankles, wrists, then the torso. Then, thicker roots coiled and tightened. The old prad woman’s body was drawn backwards, deep into the garden’s embrace.

The dragon girl felt the entire process through her root network, the tree’s methodical dissolution of tissues into component nutrients and mana. Then, a flicker of the mole’s memories danced through the root system like bubbles in water. Fragments. A cluttered office. A cup of lukewarm tea left on a console.

She considered editing the prad’s mind to remember a fire instead of the unexpected forest in the time bubble, but the soul of the elder mole was already past the incarnation limit, at the absolute point of decay. Thus Galateya chose another path forward. She reshaped the roots to form [Decay] hexagrams, pointing them at the prad’s soul.

“Sorry,” Galateya uttered, drawing the sign of the Slayer’s cross in the air as her tree devoured the Bubble Keeper, sucking out all life and magic. “May you find a better life on Arx.”

She had read many poems and stories of the Slayer from Yulia’s archives and believed in his Sword of Justice and Light.

The prad’s hollowed soul shell, already damaged through far too many incarnations and a long life of serving the Frontenachii, came apart into shreds. Only the skill-less and memory-less, star-like, purely liminal core remained and it was immediately sucked to Arx as the Lazarus bracelet had no memories nor skill threads to cling to.

She looked toward the open threshold. Gold light of the corridor poured from the outside.

There would be more of them out there. Prad guards at the corridor junction. Other Keepers. Gun units patrolling the decks. Unstoppable, extra-Syntropic Corpse Seekers.

The mole’s absence or the alarm of the gun unit would be noticed. Someone would come. And when they arrived, they would find Galateya’s tree and reach the same conclusions.

Cull the deviation. Punish the dragon. Take away her V-ring.

It would not do.

Galateya placed her palm against the trunk, proceeding to stage two of her plan.

The bark was warm, felt like a part of her. The heartbeat beneath it thrummed slow and steady, a rhythm they had built together over the years. She could feel, personally knew every branch, every leaf, every root. The flowers hummed a faint, violet light. The fruit hung heavy and ripe. The air tasted like Ambrosia.

She had grown this. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever created, the proof of what she was when fear stopped defining her.

“I am sorry,” she said, closing her eyes.

The tree rustled. Its leaves turned toward her like a thousand ears, listening in.

“You kept me alive. You ate my tears and turned them into air for me to breathe. You grew when everything else was dead. You were my first real creation and the only loving home I have ever known.”

The trunk pulsed against her palm. Warm. Responsive. Alive and waiting for instruction.

“Thank you,” Galateya said. “For everything… And goodbye.”

She closed her eyes and reached into the root network one final time. The oxygen cycler, the closed-loop atmospheric system the tree maintained through magisynthesis, was a delicate balance. Too much oxygen and the air became flammable. Add methane in and any spark would produce a flashover, a simultaneous ignition of every surface in the enclosed space.

Galateya told the tree to breathe out pure oxygen and methane.

The canopy obeyed. Violet leaves accelerated their output, oxygen into the bubble at the rate exceeding equilibrium. Methane concentration climbed. The air grew thick and intoxicating. Galateya’s lungs thrummed.

Then she ordered the tree to die.

The command flashed through the root network. The tree resisted, replying with confusion and a desire to live. It was born to grow, to feed and to shelter Galateya. Dying was contrary to the original base instructions woven into its cells.

Galateya insisted, increasing the power of the order. Then pounded it into the roots with the total weight of her will, her Fractal Engine heart spinning out an absolute, inescapable order.

[Die. Wither. Draw power in and produce one final fruit near the door.]

The tree obeyed.

Galateya walked to the exit bulkhead and stopped.

Her garden grayed and withered at the extremities inward. Leaves curled brown and dead in seconds. Branches turned brittle, shedding bark in gray, papery flakes. Fruit shriveled on the vine, bioluminescent veins dimming. The moss carpet turned black. The roots ossified, retracted, pulling away from the walls and floors, leaving behind an awful tangle of dead, dry organic matter that carpeted every visible surface.

The most beautiful thing Galateya had ever made became kindling.

A single fruit remained behind on a blackened branch, with the entirety of her garden’s collected knowledge and power poured into it.

Galateya grabbed the fruit and chomped down on it while she sucked all of the moisture out of the air, dispersing it through the doorway with a hand.

She stood at the threshold. She glanced at the dead room one last time, the brown husk of branches, the carpet of shriveled leaves, the empty pools where water no longer collected. The air was pure oxygen and methane.

Galateya tensed up, made her scales harden and flicked a claw against the metal doorframe. The friction produced a single, bright spark.

The flashover was instantaneous.

Fire consumed the bubble in a single explosive breath, sending Galateya flying face first out of the chamber.

The explosive-gas saturated atmosphere produced a wall of flame so intense it turned the air white. The temperature spike vaporized the dried wood, the dead flowers, the withered fruit, and the remains of whatever biological evidence the tree had failed to fully consume. Outer structural supports warped. Metal walls glowed cherry-red.

Galateya slammed into the corridor wall.

The heat blast wave washed over her back, her body smoking at the edges, scales turned to stone impervious to the heat, old hexasuit melting slightly.

She did not look behind her as she stood up. Wobbling slightly, she limped away from the inferno down the long corridor.

The emergency team arrived in a few minutes.

A Wolf-Captain, tall and lean with gray-streaked fur and the posture and expression of someone who had been roused from a nap. A medic behind him, a younger cheetah with a magitek potion trauma kit slung over one shoulder and an expression of weary annoyance. Two gun units in spider form skittered along the ceiling above them.

They found Galateya sitting against the corridor wall, about twenty meters from the still-burning bubble, her body slightly singed. Her draconic face was smudged with soot. Her violet-blue eyes were wide and empty, a calculated expression of a traumatized spawnling.

“Slayer,” the Captain muttered, staring at the flames licking the threshold. “What happened here?”

“Life support… artificery malfunction,” Galateya said, faking a hoarse, despairing voice, not liking how the lie tasted in her throat. “The garden decayed over time… over-produced oxygen and methane, I think. There was a fire. The instructors, the Keeper… they were inside when it started. I was in chamber one, closer to the door. I ran for the exit… and the explosion threw me out of the bubble.”

The medic knelt beside her, pressing a diagnostic pad to her wrist. “Vitals are elevated. Smoke inhalation, minor burns on the extremities. You’ll live.”

“I hit my head pretty bad when… the explosion threw me into a wall…” Galateya added, rubbing her face where she phase-shifted a severe, bleeding bruise and false burns.

The Captain looked at the inferno. She looked at Galateya. Her jaw worked.

“Bubble seven-seven-three,” she said into her V-ring. “Flash fire in the unit. Three instructors and one Keeper, presumed dead, incarnator bracelets within the damaged chamber. Spawnling Galateya Frontenachii survived. Requesting a Wendigo Commander for cognitive scan of spawnling.”

Wendigo.

A mind reader. An Omnid who would open her skull like a jewelry box and examine every memory, every emotion, find every hidden truth.

The murder. The tree. The eating. The spores. The terraforming. The voice in the walls. Yulia’s restricted files being unlocked by the conceptual freezing. The songs of treason and murder. All of it sitting in her head like evidence at a crime scene. She wouldn’t just be betraying herself, she would be betraying the singer who helped her survive.

She had minutes. Maybe less. She knew this was going to happen. Knew it and was ready for it.

Galateya concentrated on the GLM-containing ring on her finger. She poured the cold through her scales, through the structure of the ring, through the crystalline matrix of the damaged projector.

The ring frosted over, freezing permanently to her finger, and became dead. Yulia was frozen. Preserved. Locked in a state of suspended animation.

Galateya would thaw her.

Someday. She promised herself this the way she had promised herself she would survive. Absolutely and without reservation.

Then she turned the conceptual cold inward, towards her own mind.

The technique was familiar, intimate. She used it to survive. Now she used it to forget. Layer by layer, she froze eleven years of specific memories, already separated by her constant meditation.

The knowledge of the terraforming went first, sealed behind a wall of conceptual ice so thick even she could not feel it anymore. Then the songs. The voice in the walls, the treason and the plotting and the linear dimension. Frozen. Locked… Gone.

Yulia’s illegal lessons. The poetry. The terraforming theory. The various experiments. The focused phase-shift practice. The decade of growth and learning and self-discovery. All of it, packed into a glacier and shoved so deep into the architecture of her mind the surface showed only bare, bland, generic emptiness.

She froze all of her acquired skills, slowed her Fractal Engine heart to a crawl, made herself seem weak, approximately… below level twenty.

She left herself a single thread. A feeling, too vague to register as a memory. A sense of warmth. Of future hope.

The thread would persist. It would ache in her Truth sense. And someday, when she was safe, when she was ready, when she had friends and a safe place, she would follow it back down into the ice and thaw everything open.

The last memory to freeze was Yulia’s smile. The kind, parting words of the GLM who was basically her best friend and mother.

Gone.

Galateya blinked. The corridor was black and gold. It tasted of suffering.

A Wolf-Captain was talking to her. A medic was doing something to her wrist. There was a… fire nearby for some reason. She was confused and afraid. She did not know why.

She felt… very, very lost.

Her face hurt terribly.

…

The Wendigo Commander arrived quickly thereafter.

She was young. Galateya’s age, or close to it. Tall, seven feet with jagged antlers like polished obsidian blades. Her fur was jet black and midnight blue, feathers shimmering with violet flickers at the edges.

The Wendigo grinned, revealing canines the length of Galateya’s thumb. “What’s the emerg’ guys?”

“Spawnling from bubble seven-seven-three,” the Wolf-Captain said. “Sole survivor. Fire killed three instructors and a Keeper. Requesting standard cognitive assessment.”

“Aight.” The Wendigo waved a clawed hand. “You can go away now, Captain. I got this. Take tha’ little medic fren’ too.”

The Captain bristled, saluted stiffly, and withdrew.

The Wendigo crouched in front of Galateya. Her wide grin of sharp teeth was entirely untrustworthy.

“Sup sister,” she said. “I am Gibralta Rexierre Frontenachii. And you are?”

“Galateya Selene Belthys Frontenachii,” the dragon girl let out.

“Mkay.” the Wendigo nodded. “Right then. M’ gonna peek inside your head. If you gots nothing to hide, it’ll be ova’ in a jiffy and we can go get snacks. Questions?”

“No.”

“Peachy.”

Gibralta pressed two dark, clawed fingers against Galateya’s forehead. Galateya felt the intrusion immediately. A probing warmth, like sunlight through a window, sweeping across the surface of her mind. It moved quickly, casually, the cognitive equivalent of someone flipping through a magazine in a waiting room.

It found nothing.

Below the surface, beneath the bare walls of self she had left behind, the glacier held. Gibralta’s hooks slid across the ice and registered only the bland landscape of a traumatized spawnling with many years of unremarkable training and a very bad, final day where her head hurt from being slammed into a wall by a fiery explosion.

The Wendigo withdrew her fingers. She blinked.

“Wow,” Gibralta said. “You are really boring and… weak. Zero resistance, about level seventeen, I think. Jeez. Sucks to be you, dawg.”

Galateya stared at her.

“No, genuinely. I have scanned some empty heads in my time, and yours is right up there. Twenty years in a bubble and you have, what, lame combat drills and many years of bad dreams? No murder grudges? No secret plans? No simmering hatred for your dead instructors?”

“They are dead,” Galateya said flatly. “Why would I feel hatred for dead prads who didn’t like me?”

“Ha! Fair point.” Gibralta stood, dusting off her knees. “Okay, sis, I declare you… squeaky clean. You are officially the most unremarkable spawnling I have processed.”

“How many have you processed?” Galateya asked.

“Sixty two!” Gibralta grinned. “S’ great practice. Been out of my bubble for two weeks now! Gonna get assigned to a fleet pretty soon, I reckon. Hopefully Second or Third. Those are the best, I hear.”

She paused, studying Galateya with glowing eyes. The amusement had not left them, as if the concept of seriousness had been surgically removed from her personality.

“Again, sucks to be you.”

“Why?” Galateya asked.

“You won’t get to murder your instructors.”

“What?” Galateya’s mouth opened.

“In the arena!” the Wendigo laughed. “I murdered mine two weeks ago. All three of the bastards. Right in front of the judges. That’s the graduation trial, s’how it works.” She scratched the black feathers behind an antler. “You are going to miss out on that fun, since your instructors got barbecued instead. Shame, really. The XP from a proper arena kill is excellent. Great initial level boost. Verrrry satisfying.”

She peered at Galateya.

“Unless…” Gibralta’s grin widened. “You arranged the fire? Hrrmmm? Little greenie sister gets clever, stages a malfunction, takes out the cheeky ol’ bastards early? Saves herself the trouble of a public fight?”

She winked. One eye, quick and bright, flashing open and closed.

Galateya’s confusion was genuine.

“I did… not arrange anything,” she said.

“Sure, sure.” Gibralta’s tone carried the warmth of someone who did not remotely believe her and admired the performance. “Either way, the dum’ wolves are dead and you are alive. Results are results. Come on, up you go. You’ll prolly end up in Six, wat’ with your Taniwha alignment. No fret. You’ll get alon’ fine with the other lame-ass Greens, greenie.”

She grabbed Galateya’s arm and hauled her to her feet with one hand. Then she started walking, dragging Galateya along. Her strides were long and confident. Galateya really didn’t enjoy how the hallway felt. It pressed down on her with a sensation of unjust suffering, making her entire body thrum with irritation, chafe from within.

“Will my Instructors be incarnated?” Galateya wondered.

“Nah,” Gibralta answered. “They shove old refuse into these fucking bubbles to ‘educate’ us. End of life, half-braindead prad trash at the very limits of incarnation. Many of them get killed by our sisters ‘fore tha’ door even opens.”

“What about… the Keeper?”

“Depends. Keepers are end of line trash too. If she’s got ‘nuff solid soul left, she’ll get inco’d and return to her job of pulling our sisters outta their bubbles.” The Wendigo yawned. “If not, she’ll wake up on Arx as a weetle baby Arxkin with no alignment and no memory of our lovely citadel.”

“Where are we going?” Galateya wondered.

“To eat some UwUs in Seeker Delta 932! Then, the Colosseum!” Gibralta declared jovially. “Fleet assignments are coming! Before that, all the spawnlings fight. Sisters, cousins, random half-blood freaks born from moms sleeping with thar’ ‘bolds! Everyone gets to punch everyone as is tradition. N’ entertainment. S’ how High Command decides who gets to go where. Beat up more spawnlings, get a better spot.”

“I am supposed to fight? Now?”

“You bet! Noms first, then violence! Many sistahs n’ cousins interested in punching you in the face. And one half-sistah who will probably try to bite you, she is going through a phase, tha’ gremlin.”

“Do we not have any brothers?” Galateya wondered.

“We do. The males are weaklings though,” Gibralta scoffed. “Unfit to dominate and conquer! They get shipped to Omnithornia and misc colonies to grow up slow, like simple normies. No time bubble education for them, nor fleet assignments. Generally they’re traded for alliances. Lame, am I right? Not like us! We get to kick and claw our way up to commanding swank warships!”

“I…”

“You will get to know everyone, no fret! After they punch you. Bonding through violence is a great time.” Gibralta slung an arm over Galateya’s shoulders, black tail swishing merrily behind them. “Look alive, sis. The Colosseum is loud, the fights are messy, and if you cry they will absolutely never let you forget it. I cried a bit during my first match ‘cus a cousin snapped my arm right off and sister Dhrania called me ‘Drip-Braltar’ for a week. She got shipped to the Fourth fleet though. Hope to never see her stupid face again.”

She steered them around a corner, through another blast door, and into a corridor bustling with pradavarians in uniform.

“Oh and after the coliseum matches are done, you get to pick out a symbiote gun unit from tha’ guns that recently hit level twenty from tha’ dungeon cleanup! A reel’ nice treat, your first blood-bound kobold! Trust me, s’ great.” She tapped a folded symbiote gun strapped to her thigh. “A best bud for life, one who’ll always obey you n’ watch your back.”