Mother

The foxes found the next door down.

Beneath the coliseum floor, hidden under a slab engraved with the words [AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY], a hatch opened into a shaft lined with crystalline conduit thrumming loudly. The sound was like tinnitus designed by a sadist.

Sage went first, dropping into the shaft and catching herself on a conduit bundle, red tail spiraling behind her. Galateya followed, then Nexxali and Kawartha. Shady squeezed through last. 

The next layer opened into a gray-black-red cathedral.

The ceiling arched overhead, ribbed with dark red and black coral that curved and met at a central point where a single vast eye sat, closed, its lid sealed with crystalline sutures, hung like a chandelier. The walls were covered in carved script, thousands upon thousands of names etched into the faded coral in cramped, obsessive repetition. Each name had a date beside it.

“Conquests,” Kawathra said solemnly. “Every world she was ordered to subjugate. The population she was forced to process.”

“She carved their names into herself,” Sage added as her foxes sniffed the walls. “Fooockin’ hell.”

The names went on and on. Stretching up the walls, across the ceiling, spiraling around pillars of fused, long dead coral and magisteel. Some were etched so deeply the letters had become grooves you could fit a finger inside. Others were scratched in haste, barely legible, as if the carver had been weeping.

“Valor,” Nexxali stated. 

The serval stopped beneath the sealed eye, looking up. “The ship was permitted… desire for valor. I know this, because I sang entropy into these halls for twenty years. My songs bounced off her bones. I heard her echoes when they came back wrong.”

Sage’s ears rotated forward. “There. In the floor. Under the eye.” She pointed with her colorful claws. “Tha way down.”

They gathered beneath the closed eye. The floor here was something like cracked ice, and through it Galateya could see another descent. A shaft of absolute dark, plunging deeper than her senses could follow, and at the bottom, a light. Dim. Warm. The color of honey held up to a candle.

“One more data lock,” Kawathra said, glancing at her holo charts. “This one is old.”

“How old?” Shady asked.

“Older than the ship itself.”

It took Kawartha’s avatars about thirty minutes to hack the lock, making the floor melt away to reveal the way down.

The metal here had texture. Rusted rivets bloomed like scar tissue where the plating had been welded and re-welded a hundred times over a hundred years, and beneath the welds, faint as a bruise beneath skin, ran seams of a different material entirely. Coral. Pale, fossilized, faded pink coral that assuredly had nothing to do with Frontenachii engineering.

“This part of the hull is older,” Kawathra observed. “Older than the records show. Older than the ship’s official commissioning date.”

“Ships don’t get older than their own construction,” Nexxali said.

“This one apparently does,” Kawathra clicked.

Sage’s ears rotated, first one, then the other, tracking something none of the rest of them could hear. “The foxes are finding rooms,” she said slowly. “Little circular hollows below. Sealed rooms. Like seeds inside a fruit, y’know? A whole buncha tiny gardens tucked behind the metal.”

“Gardens?” Galateya repeated.

“Follow,” Sage said.

They went down through decaying corridors that folded back on themselves, past doorways that opened onto more doorways, through a hall lined with the silhouettes of soldiers standing at eternal attention, faceless, grayed out, background noise in someone else’s memory. The ship’s hull curved overhead in every direction now, a closed, twisted shell with them wriggling through its guts like little worms.

One moment they ran through corroded metal, and the next the walls peeled back like a wound opening, and they stood in a room no larger than the shack in Sagetopia, its ceiling replaced with pale coral fingers reaching toward a light source that did not exist. Dead vines hung from the fingers in withered ropes. A shallow pool sat in the corner, the water black and still.

Galateya’s stomach turned over slowly, the way it did before a fight.

Old magisteel walls, scratched and dented, covered in the same spiraling moss-script. A garden filled the interior, visible through gaps where the metal had corroded. A small, dead tree stood at the center.

Galateya knew this shape. She knew the proportions, the five-room layout, the magisteel segmentation, the garden hub. She knew the smell of stale recycled air and the horrific loneliness of walls that were her prison for two decades.

“A time bubble,” she uttered. “It’s a… dead time bubble.”

“Her time bubble,” Sage confirmed, stepping through a gap in the rusted wall. “The… birthing chamber of the girl who became the Slayer’s Sword.”

Shady looked left and right, making a bothered face.

Sage crouched beside the black pool, sniffing at its surface without touching it. 

“I know,” Galateya said. “I lived it… Wait. Birthing chamber?” She turned to the thoughtful-looking looking, crouched Sage. “What birthing chamber?”

“Frontenachii birth their spawnlings inside time bubbles,” Nexxali explained.

“An Omnid mother enters a time bubble a few months pregnant and when she emerges she’s no longer pregnant,” Kawathra said. “Then the bubble is sealed with three old, doomed prads in it and accelerated for twenty years.”

“So there’s some kind of a… baby growing magitek womb in a time bubble or something?” Galateya asked. “How come I never noticed such growing up?”

“From what I read ‘bout it,” Nexxali said. “It’s a Dryad.”

“A… Dryad?” Galateya spun to the serval. “What?!”

“Yep,” Nexxali said. “Each time bubble holds a Dryad tree. The Frontenachii mother sits inside it for a few hours, falls asleep and when she wakes up, the baby is no longer inside her. It’s dimensionally transferred into the Dryad which the tree creates, wilting away slowly. The Dryad basically turns into the exact copy of the Frontenachii mother, becoming aligned to her one hundred percent to support the growing daughter.”

“And then?” Galateya asked, feeling off.

“And then the Dryad mother carries the child for the rest of the term,” Nexxali said. “And during birth, she… expires. The tree that she is linked to dies and withers away. Everything is given to the child, empowering them to grow up healthy and strong.”

“Fucking hell,” Shady ground out.  

“I… see.” Galateya frowned.

“Follow,” Sage stated, climbing onto a dark fissure in the floor.

They followed the Skinwalker, ending up in the same chamber.

It looked far more… alive.

Galateya felt a warmth against her scales, softness in the recycled air, a taste of salt water and living things growing. The coral here had not died yet. It curved overhead in a living lattice, threaded with luminous polyps which pulsed a slow, gentle blue. Beneath it grew a garden unlike anything Galateya had seen. It was far more alive, very different from the garden she grew to survive.

Sea fans swayed though there was no current. Anemones the size of dinner plates opened and closed along the walls, unhurried, patient. And little girl’s toys, carved from coral, sat arranged with obvious care on a shelf grown directly out of the wall.

And in the center of the room… against a coral tree, sat the fossilized, semi-transparent outline of an Omnid dragon woman.

She had clearly knelt there so long that the coral had grown through her, around her, claiming her slowly the way it claimed everything else, until her body and the room had become one. Her arms were curled protectively around an empty space. Her head was bowed low, as if she had been whispering something, right up until the moment she stopped breathing.

Nexxali let out a shocked mewl and pressed a hand to her own chest.

“Slayer,” Kawathra breathed out. “That’s…”

“Admiral Colette,” Nexxali concluded for her.

“The abyss is she doing here?” Shady asked.

“She’s…” Sage came closer to the fossilised Omnid, a cadre of ghost foxes examining the semi-transparent corpse. “Her… mother.”

“H-how can this be?” Galateya stammered out, staring at the ossified Admiral. “Why is she here, like this? Is this like a metaphor or a dream…?”

“No metaphors or dreamses. This is an exact memory,” Sage shook her head. “There are no defences down here. This place is the Slayer Sword’s deepest memory.”

Galateya noted more details, marks on the lower walls at child height.

“Sets of scratch marks. A child growing up,” Sage slid her fingers along the lowest line. “Colette was measuring her daughter’s height over the years.”

“This is incredibly irregular,” Kawathra stated. 

“Incredibly fucked more like it,” Shady contributed, arms crossed.

“Yes. Duplicated mothers are supposed to dissolve after giving birth,” Nexxali agreed. “Colette obviously didn’t rapidly decay away like the others… And was actually able to raise her daughter in this time bubble.”

“Admiral Colette was the one who designed the birthing trees, she must have sabotaged the withering sacrifice protocol in her own tree here,” Kawathra said, taloned rings tapping the root structure. “At the cellular level… The dryad’s death-clock was likely overwritten. Manually.”

“She must have saved herself… for her daughter,” Galateya said.

“Seems like it, yep,” Kawathra confirmed.

“She didn’t last twenty years though,” Sage noted, a few foxes pawing at the ossified Omnid woman. “She died VERY slowly… stilled gradually over the years, calcified right into this coral wall. All while her daughter watched and was able to do fuck all about it.”

Galateya stared at the fossilized arms curved around an empty space. The coral had claimed Colette so completely her outline had become eerie architecture, load-bearing grief fused into the room’s skeleton. Polyps pulsed along the ridges of her knuckles. Tiny anemones had colonized the hollow of her transparent throat.

“Down,” Sage uttered, foxes already pooling toward a seam in the coral floor. “The memories get older the deeper we go. We’re walking backwards through her childhood to get to the bottom of this poor Omnid girl’s past.”

The seam widened into a crevice, then a passage down. The bioluminescence shifted from cold blue to burned gold.

They emerged into the same room.

The same five walls. The same proportions. 

However, here the coral was alive and lush, sea fans waving in languid figure-eights, anemones fat and pink. The magisteel beneath had been entirely engulfed by the living reef, transformed into a shell garden so dense it looked like the inside of a conch magnified a thousand times.

And in the center, a ghost.

A nineteen year old Omnid girl knelt on the coral floor, hunched over the calcified shape of her mother. 

She had ivory-white scales and white horns. Galateya’s Justice sense identified her as a Benzaiten dragon. 

She was tall and angular and devastatingly beautiful like a glacier crevasse. Her mane cascaded past her shoulders in a waterfall of crystallized gemstones, each one trembling from her sobs, prismatically scattering the bioluminescent glow across every surface.

Gold eyes, swollen and red, stared at the ossified face she cradled in her white claws.

“Mama,” the ghost dragon whispered. “Mama, please. I fixed the water cycle. I grew the kelp forest like you wanted. The anemones are blooming. Mama, please look. Please… Talk to me. Please don’t… l-leave me.”

Galateya’s Fractal Engine heart seized.

She knew the taste of similar sorrow. She knew every atom of this grief because she had lived inside the same shape of it, the same five walls, the same damned prison, had the same desperate conversations with someone who couldn’t answer her anymore. Except, her room held wolves she hated and her GLM best friend whom she froze in her rage. 

Here, this girl’s ossified companion had been a mother she loved.

This was infinitely worse.

Sage’s hand found Galateya’s elbow. The fox’s freckles read “I’M HERE” in wobbly letters. Nexxali embraced the crying Galateya from the other side.

The ghost-girl pressed her forehead against the calcified shoulder, white gems clinked softly against coral. “I counted the days like you taught me. Nineteen years, two months, seven days. Eight months left until the door out opens. You said I would be ready. Am I ready, Mama? Because I feel like screaming… I miss you.”