Is There A Word For Bad Miracle?

“Whoa.” Lysander stopped walking suddenly, and Remi walked straight into him, nearly causing them both to topple over.

“Maybe a little warning, next time.” Remi groused, as he tried to follow Lysander’s line of sight. “What am I looking for?” Lysander gestured over the ridge, as if that was enough, and slowly shook his head. Remi saw the fields of crystals that they were looking for, but nothing profoundly out of the ordinary. So he kept staring, until his eyes finally settled on it, far out in the distance. “Oh, so Glitch meant like...right now, right now.”

“Looks like it,” Lysander muttered, “I’ll let Felix and the Colonel know.”

Remi stepped past Lysander, and began to walk forward, towards the spires of Slyten and the growing forces in the distance. When he’d visited the Triumvirate, their palace hadn’t given him a sense of the sheer number of aliens at their disposal. Now, seeing them all taking a battle line, only a few miles away from him, he suddenly understood why they were winning this war.

When the Colonel had sent them on this mission, the proximity to an Abomination hub had been a worry, but not a major one. As long as they kept their distance, the Abominations were stretched way too thin to try and hunt them down. And as waves of them poured out of the fortress, utterly dwarfed by the army across from them, Remi had to admit that even those fears might have been overblown.

The notes he’d been given about the early stages of the war had suggested that the Abominations had an advantage early on, due to superior weaponry, and an element of surprise. Even now, their exact origins were unknown to the AOSE, and likely to the Triumvirate. Whether they were from another planet, or created by the Precursors, or something else entirely, all of that was uncertain. And depending on how this battle went, it was possible they’d never get an answer from the Abominations themselves.

“Lysander,” Remi said suddenly, “I think I’m gonna get a closer view.”

“What?” The medic’s voice cracked in fear, and Remi couldn’t help but smile. “No, absolutely not.”

“Come on, I can sprint to the other side of the field, and still have plenty of distance between me and them. It’ll take a couple minutes, tops, if I use Slyten.”

“There is no upside, and a lot of obvious downside.”

“The upside is intel.”

“And the downside is you get vaporized by a stray shot. No, no way. I’m pulling seniority here,” Lysander huffed. While they were the same rank, as far as the chain of command was concerned, Remi had only been on Olten for a few days, which did technically mean that Lysander was right. “In fact, I think we should turn around and leave. We can retrieve the Slyten at another date.” He took an about face, and yelped.

“Jal. Amber,” the cool voice prompted Remi to turn as well. Standing there was Brandy Axel, jingling a set of keys in her gloved hand. “I heard y’all might need some assistance, and I was in the area.”

Had she been following them? Well, okay, the answer to that was almost certainly yes. But why? Had the Colonel asked her to? “Where’s the vehicle?”

“Quarter of a mile back.” She threw the keys to Remi. “Why don’t you drive it over here, and then the three of us can work on bringing back as much Slyten as we can fit on it.” She nodded over her shoulder, and Remi hesitated. The way she was staring at Lysander felt worrying, was it alright to leave the two of them alone? The thing that the medic had said earlier in their walk, about how something felt wrong about the AOSE base, felt very, very relevant. “Amber, I’m not gonna ask twice.” Brandy’s voice had an edge to it, and reluctantly Remi gave a quick wave, and then turned and ran in the direction she’d pointed.

He squeezed his palm shut, so that the Slyten crystal weaved into the fabric was as close to his skin as could be, and felt the energy surge from within him again. He pushed it down, towards his feet, and took a running jump, telekinetic force exploding from his foot and sending him careening through the air. He imagined tearing off his helmet, and feeling the air rush around him. This is what it felt like he had been missing for his whole life.

Remi slid to a halt in front of the Dreadtread, and hopped in it. It didn’t take him long to get back, and by the time he did, it was clear that something had happened. Brandy Axel was sitting on a rocky outcropping, staring out towards the battlefield, and Lysander was squatting a fair bit away from her, facing the direction that Remi had come from. He pulled up alongside the medic, and opened the front door. “Everything okay?”

“Something’s wrong. I can’t figure out what it is yet.” Lysander stood up, and got in shotgun, as Brandy walked over to hop in the flatbed. “Colonel didn’t send her, Felix did.”

Remi’s brow furrowed. “That doesn’t sound...entirely compliant with the whole chain of command.”

“Yeah. Allegedly, he had intel that the Triumvirate’s time table had moved up, and suspected we’d need help performing the retrieval.”

“Oh.” Remi tilted his head slightly. “That sounds plausible, right?”

“It is…” Lysander hesitated. “I don’t know. There’s just…a tension in the air, an almost suffocating one.”

Brandy knocked on the rear window, and pointed forward, towards the spires. The car jerked into motion, and slid down the rocky embankment towards the crystalline fields. In the distance, light filled the sky, and Remi could feel a heavy bass ripple through the air. “Whoa.”

Lysander nodded. “Glitch.” Remi supposed that explained it well enough.

They pulled up alongside one of the spires, and Brandy hopped out of the flatbed, and began to rip chunks of crystal off. “Everyone out and working,” she ordered, “If things keep heating up, we’re going to need to book it.” They all got to work quickly, disassembling the first spire, and starting work on the second, all while the battle raged in the distance.

As he worked, Remi thought about what Glitch had said, about Animus Vox, and how anyone could hear it. As hands pried Slyten from its foundation, he breathed deep, and tried to listen. He focused on the sounds and sensation of Glitch, how her magic had felt up close, and how it now sounded distantly. It rose, and then dropped hard, silencing all sounds around it, before building back up. The Guardians moved like a melody, and the Abominations like a cacophony. They were getting quieter too, as more and more of them fell.

He felt it in the music before the actual sounds. A sudden, violent caesura.

The sound of battle didn’t stop, but it slowed, and quieted. Remi looked up from the crystals, towards the battlefield, but could see nothing wrong. “All the saints wept,” Lysander cursed, and Remi turned to see where he was looking. Up. Regardless of what he had expected to see there, what Remi found when he looked was so much worse. A scar was forming in the sky, like a tear in a thin veil.

Before he could even think, he had thrown the Slyten over his shoulder, and was sprinting towards the battlefield. Whatever happened next, he needed to see it. He needed to bear witness to it. Behind him, Lysander was yelling, and after a few moments he could hear the engine of the rover fire back up. By that point, he’d crested the ridge on the opposite side of the field, and looked directly up. The world groaned, and then a crack filled the air as a hole tore in reality. And there, standing in the wounded world, was a dark robbed figure, wearing a mask that obstructed all his face, save his burning bright eyes.

The figure looked down at both sides, and slowly nodded. He reached up, and grabbed the air, before pulling on it, once again turning the fabric of reality into an ephemeral veil, and twisted. The sound of reality itself breaking was horrible enough, but the screams that filled the air after it were far worse. From where Remi stood, he could see Guardians falling over, missing limbs. All of the Abominations were gone.

“I believe that the fight here,” said the figure finally, “was not a particularly fair one. I aim to change that.” He spoke with a grandeur and confidence that felt almost smarmy to Remi, even if he seemed powerful enough to back it up. “I’ve taken your foes elsewhere, where they can regroup, and I can discuss plans with them. We will resume this fight at a later point in time.”

That didn’t sound like something that the Triumvirate would be happy about. Sure enough, Kan flashed across the battlefield, leaping up into the sky towards the figure, and Remi gripped his hands tight as he braced for impact. But the result wasn’t one that anyone on the battlefield would’ve expected; from the figure’s chest, a gaping maw appeared, full of rows and rows of countless teeth, and casually tore off Kan’s outstretched, striking arm. In the blink of an eye, the figure grasped Kan by the head, and started to glow, as Kan’s form dimmed, darkened, and turned black, all of the energy sapped out in a matter of moments.

The Triumvirate leader was dropped, unceremoniously, towards the earth. Even from here, Remi knew there was no chance that they were still alive. “My name,” the figure spoke, to an entirely silent battlefield, “is Sesilius, and I am the chosen speaker of all that you might consider monsters.” The maw vanished, and Sesilius clapped his hands. “Somewhere among you is a traveler from another realm, who directed you down this course of action. They are the one responsible for the deaths that have occurred today. I hope that I can discuss this with them further, at a later date.”

And with that, he vanished.

Characters

 * Remi Amber
 * Sesilius