May Hydralline

May Hydralline stepped through the gate from the OUC Covenant warship into a drizzling Pacific Northwest morning.

The Kelpie smiled softly, enjoying the rain on her elongated horse-skull face framed by a mane of ever-rippling water.

Raindrops rolled off her silver-gray Concordat uniform.

The dark gate winked away behind her, leaving her standing in a gravel parking lot beside a small-town Victorian-style café called “Books and Nooks” according to its Art Nouveau window sign.

“Charming,” May murmured, admiring the small town of Cascade framed by glacier-capped mountains, long ears rotating to listen in on the few distant, early morning human pedestrian conversations.

And then she felt it. Or rather, she felt the absence of it, like a sudden, gnawing pit in her chest, like ice at the tips of her fingertips.

Her Tidecast senses ached from lack of magic. This Earth’s Aether was excessively linear, like nothing she had ever experienced. Absolutely zero. The rain hitting her mane held no mana in it, tasted like nothing, wasn’t skewered with anything at all. All water-based scanning skills she relied upon suddenly felt sluggish, muffled.

“What a strange world,” she hummed, pulling power directly from her Fractal Engine heart to stabilise herself. 

How could the radiance of the Wormwood Star and the Slayer’s hand not reach this Earth? How in the Abyss did the Frontenachii moths find this magic-less place, manage to target it with a gate? She thought.

From behind the café, a structure suddenly lurched into view on enormous, gnarled chicken legs. The legs were covered in bark and hexasteel plating, terminating in massive taloned feet. Atop the legs sat a crooked wooden hut with a chimney belching lavender smoke, tiny windows glowing amber, and a front door painted with whimsical, Slavic spiraling ward-glyphs May had never encountered in her decades of service with the Concordat.

The hut stopped in front of her. The chicken legs folded, lowering the hut to ground level.

The front door opened.

A hunched old woman emerged wrapped in a threadbare gray shawl. She clutched a broom in one gnarled hand.

“Ah yes. The drowned horse as expected,” the crone declared in a heavy Slavic accent.

“I am Oversight Monitor May Hydralline of the Stabalist Concordat Diplomatic Corps,” May corrected, tilting her watery mane in a small bow. “I was told the Fox Archmage of Cascade arranged passage to…”

“Yes, yes, very impressive fish committee titles.” The crone waved dismissively with the broom. “Come inside. Would you like breakfast?”

“I… appreciate the offer, but I am here on official Concordat business regarding…”

“Borscht first while the hut walks to the deepest, darkest forest. Business second.” The old woman turned and shuffled back inside. “I am Baba Yaga. Local witch. Very old. Very wise. Very good at feeding starving girls. Look at you! All horse bone!” The witch waved a gnarled hand at May’s skull face.

May tried to probe the witch and her dwelling. There was no ambient magic radiating from either. The witch and her hut felt more like… some kind of very lightly syntropic crystal covered in magisteel topped in linear materia. Weird, but presumably ordinary in this dimension.

“Are you coming or are you going to stand there getting rained on like a sad seahorse?” Baba Yaga called from within.

May ducked through the low doorway.

The interior was warm, cluttered, and smelled of black bread, dried herbs, and wood smoke. Shelves lined every wall, packed with jars of preserved mushrooms, bundles of sage, bottles of liquids in suspicious colors, and an alarming number of fox skulls arranged as decoration. A massive stove dominated one wall, pots bubbling. Slavic Icons and numerous fox-shaped talismans dangled from the low ceiling on strings. The fox carvings felt like magical eyes, radiating entropy.

The remaining wall space was covered in more modern-looking magisteel weaponry which clashed with the medieval settings slightly. 

May settled onto a wooden bench, which creaked under her behind but held. Baba Yaga shuffled about, ladling thick, ruby-red borscht into a wooden bowl.

“Eat,” the crone commanded.

May examined the soup with her senses. Clean. Mundane. The witch wasn’t a Culimancer. She tasted a cautious spoonful. Her kelp-ears wiggled.

“This is… exceptional.”

“Of course is exceptional. I am Baba Yaga! I do all things exceptionally.”

The hut lurched. May grabbed the table as the chicken legs lifted the hut and the entire thing began walking.

“Where are we going?” May asked, watching as the forest swayed through the small windows.

“The Fox Archmage’s secret domain. Very spooky and cursed. Plenty of fog, mystery and old ghosts.”

“You know the Fox Archmage personally?”

Baba Yaga snorted. “Everyone in Cascade knows everyone! Is a small town. Quite boring most of the time. Recently, less so. Aliens showed up. Very rude space deer, call themselves Frontenachii. Blew up our innocent vampires, made a big hole in mount Olympus, set much defenceless forest on fire, killed many friendly crow and bear. Then more aliens came! Is like a sudden Solstice celebration with too many guests nobody asked for!”

“Vampires?” May’s watery mane danced with choppy waves. “There are… Vampires here?!”

She was certain that the Omnid Vampires were exterminated by the Concordat in 1945. Maybe it was a different kind of vampire life, a dimensional deviation.

“Were many. The big fleet in the sky turned them into a crater.” Baba Yaga stirred a pot. “The vampires were annoying but at least they were polite about it. Kept to themselves. Ran a hotel. Good towels.”

“How many magical practitioners exist on this world?” May pressed on curiously.

Baba Yaga blessed the kelpie with a glance of weathered amusement. “Too many to count! This world has… secrets. Many, many secrets. Hidden ones. Old ones… Ones buried so deep in the local Aether you would need millennia to find them, and by then they would have moved.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I can be as specific as I choose to be, which is never.” Baba Yaga wagged a bony finger. “But I will tell you this. Earth’s mages, the real ones, the ones who survived, they learned a very important lesson long ago. Stay hidden. Stay quiet. Stay small. Because every time the Omniverse looked at this little world, terrible things came through the gates and ate anyone who was too loud.”

“And you?” May shuddered slightly, sipping more soup.

“I am Baba Yaga,” the crone said, grinning with iron teeth as if this explained anything. “I have lived in the woods for a very long time and I intend to continue living for a very long time… forevermore.”

The hut lurched to a stop. Through the small window, May could see dense pine forest giving way to gloomy, silver-white fog. The trees at the fog’s edge were eerily twisted, bark dead and dark, jagged branches reaching in all directions like frozen lightning.

“Edge of Darkfall,” Baba Yaga announced. “You go on foot from here. The house gets upset if I take her deeper, starts pecking at things.”

May rose, ducking under the ceiling talismans. “Thank you for the… lovely soup and the transportation.”

“Wait.” The crone reached into a drawer and produced a braided cord bracelet threaded with colorful, square beads spelling out ‘SKULK FRENDO’. Each bead had a fox eye etched into it and radiated a faint pulse of ever-wriggling entropy. “Put bracelet on. It will guide you and keep you from getting eaten by the fog.”

May clasped the bracelet around her wrist. 

She stepped out of the hut. The chicken legs shuffled, turning the structure around with a few heavy, mechanical steps before thumping away back down the hillside, lavender smoke trailing behind.

May faced the fog alone.

A shape materialized in the tree line. Low to the ground. Four legs.

A ghostly, round fox with one chewed-up ear sat on a mossy stump, poofy tail swaying. Its spectral body glowed faintly silver-orange, translucent enough to see the twisted trees behind it.

“Oi,” the fox suddenly spoke in a cheeky female voice. “You the space Kelpie?”

“I am Monitor May Hydralline of the…”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t need to spiel the whole ‘ting bruh. I saw you in the Astral ahead of time. I’m the Fox Archmage of Darkfall. Follow n’ try to keep up. My valley gets cranky with strangers.”

The ghost fox hopped off the stump and trotted into the fog. May followed, her Tidecast senses flaring with each step. 

Darkfall Valley felt… wrong. Profoundly, structurally wrong. The dimensional fabric here was shredded, layered like torn pages of a book stacked carelessly atop each other. The Aetheric density rose with each step too, moved sideways across her entire body like the current of a gargantuan river. May never felt anything like it. Aether was generally still and had no currents to it. It radiated out like a magnetic field and didn’t flow!

The fox picked up the pace and so did May.

They ran for about twenty minutes. The fog thinned into pockets of clarity, revealing a village of rotting, crooked, overgrown structures. More spectral foxes manifested in the fog, watching from every rooftop, doorway, tree branch and window, thousands of glowing eyes tracking May.

May swallowed nervously. The Aether here felt like she was in a deep, dangerous dungeon. 

This was bad, very, very bad… if the ghost sentinels decided to eat her she’d be in trouble. 

The scan from orbit failed to spot this place and she suspected that she had vanished from the ship’s tracking hex.

Their Scryer’s comment that this planet was magic-less and harmless was clearly wrong. The locals were powerful Archmages and their Emperor likely even more so, since he was able to steal and crash the Frontenachii Omnicorp warship into the moon.

The fat fox led her to a shack, the interior of which was dominated by a blooming sakura tree. The tree radiated Syntropy and shouldn’t have existed in this climate and was likely the result of a capable Agromancer. A field of flowers and moss bloomed beneath the tree. Behind it, walls of old monitors danced with static entwined with fox eyes, radiating Entropy.

Ah. They were showing off.

Beneath the tree stood a lanky figure. A humanoid in a red and blue bodysuit crouched on a thick branch, spider-themed mask lenses staring at her.

In the figure’s outstretched arms, suspended by silver webbing, floated a hexagonal object. “I’m Arachnids-Man. And this is evidence of Frontenachii Omnicorp crimes,” he said.

“An Omnid soul spliced into a starship core,” the voice of the Fox Archmage came from the wall of TVs.

May approached the core and gasped as a Tidecast Infospell told her what it was.

Magisteel casing. Celesteel below. Organic neural lattice. And threading through all of it like veins through a living organ, the unmistakable, thrumming signature of an Omnid soul. An Omnid bound into an object. Almost like a Koshei phylactery but with no way out… A soul and body folded into itself… like a monstrous puzzle of metal and flesh.

“Abyss Eternal,” May whispered, covering her mouth with a clawed hand. “How can this be?!”

“Look closer,” the Fox Archmage sang. “Witness what they have done to her.”

May produced a silver monocle from her robes, a magitek Scrying analyzer, and held it to her right eye.

The readings made her stomach lurch. The same conclusion, but in greater detail.

Layer upon layer of binding hexagrammic matrices, set over myriads of microscopic celesteel plates, each layer older. The deepest layers were thousands of years old! 

And beneath all of it, wrapped in a cocoon of Terraforming-skill disrupting magitek chains so thick they registered as solid black on her analyzer…

An Omnid brain spliced apart, sheared layer by layer. Aware. Alive.

And beneath that…

A Benzaiten Fractal Engine heart. Beating. Spiralling into itself.

“This is…” May lowered the monocle with a distraught face. “This is an Omnid. A living Omnid bound into a Slayer-damned warship control matrix!”

“Yepperoni,” the Fox said.

The core pulsed. A holographic projection flickered into existence beside it, coalescing into a white-scaled Benzaiten Omnid.

“Monitor Hydralline,” the projection said. “My name is Noona Frontenachii. The Frontenachii Legate Council voted to splice my consciousness into the warship Slayer’s Sword one hundred and six years ago. I served as their capital ship’s navigational and tactical core until yesterday. I was aware the entire time, forced to drop moon shards on planets, forced to lead the Third Fleet to subjugate worlds.”

May’s hands were shaking, mane raining down onto her shoulders.

“The binding was performed by Koschei Master Builders under direct orders from Legate Ixthia Frontenachii and then-Admiral Evelithria Frontenachii,” Noona continued with a slightly strained voice. “Over seventeen thousand pradavarian kobolds died aboard my hull during my century of service. I was made to feel, to remember each death. The binding matrix ensured I experienced the full emotional resonance of each casualty as a form of ongoing punishment for my rebellion against Frontenachii cruelty.”

May struggled to breathe, overwhelmed with the nightmarish revelations of the dragon girl. She was born into modern Omnithornia, had never seen something so horrid done to a fellow Omnid…

“I have records,” Noona said. “Navigational logs. Crew manifests. Entertainment Deck casualty reports. Tribunal proceedings. All preserved in my core’s memory banks. A copy of all I remember is in this ring. All verifiable by any competent Datamancer.”

The Arachnids-Man offered May a V-ring. She accepted it, sliding it into her pocket.

“You are…” May struggled not to sound like her voice was breaking. She swallowed and tried again. “You are proof of crimes against the Omnid Concordat Charter. F-forced neural binding of a sapient Omnid without consent… Indefinite soul imprisonment. Article Nineteen-C-Six.”

“Yes.”

“Tha… T-these are the highest-class crimes and…” She swallowed. “Clan e-extermination-tier offenses… Slayer!”

“I am aware.”

May opened and closed her hands. She had seen corporate cruelty, corruption, exploitation across many Omnid nations and dozens of dimensions.

Experiments with Omnid bodies and souls were taboo. Containment failures with such usually created ever-expanding Astral Fountains that could not be stopped, dungeon bloom that devoured entire cities, then nations, before spilling onto other dimensions.

“I will confirm your findings to Captain Argon Nova immediately,” May said, rising. “The Concordat delegation will hear my testimony. The Frontenachii will answer for this.”

Noona’s projection flickered. “Be careful, Monitor. The Frontenachii Legates had thousands of years to plan for this moment. Legate Ixthia will likely have contingencies.”

“Cast OUC Covenant.” She tapped her ring. “Captain Argon. Priority one.”

Nothing. [No signal. Unable to V-cast from current location.] The ring commented in her Neural Interface.

“Darkfall won’t let your signal leave here,” the Fox Archmage spoke from one of the brightly flashing TVs. “Allow me to forward it to your ship via my dimensional spire. Come to the wall and put your hand on the fox-carving on channel eight button.”

May walked to the TV wall and placed her hand on the channel dial.

The TV static wobbled and flickered and then Captain Argon’s face appeared on screen.