Cherno Caster

A half-mad killer rode through the steppe upon an infernal horse of black iron, stars no man understands wheeling above. This creature, dyed black by the cruel gods of the sea betwixt worlds and stripped of the grace that was death, screamed across the empty planes from the city of Audunpoint towards the south, the Beyond Frontier. Her horse, on the other hand, was an automaton; a shape-shifting automaton with a free will of sorts, a masterwork that changed to match its rider, but an automaton nonetheless. This steed of steel and flame, this Arion, which had changed itself for her and named itself Rocinante, held no guilt of murder within its heart. It was a beast.

Hundreds of stars and dozens of small moons spun through the heavens overhead, but vast swaths of the starry expanse were blotted out by the spokes of a heaven-piercing magnum opus of six thousand years past; all mankind’s defiance to the dark stars of the void, the Banishment Wheel. Even now, the war for the soul of the world raged on without cease; within the Wheel’s spokes, at its base, in the labyrinths of mechanism deep below, in the heavens above the Wheel and in the astral gulf that writhed beneath the skin of the world. In all these places and countless more raged an eternal crusade to root out those who would once more cast the world into darkness, into the thrall of laughing gods born in vastest vastness and darkest darkness. Even times of peace were something of an illusion, for the cost of that same peace was eternal vigilance.

The madwoman was one such crusader, venturing far past the bounds of civilization in pursuit of the means to better wage her war with. Already, in the first hours of her trek, she had encountered the signs of people, camp sites both unused and those bearing signs of recent habitation. Even the aftermath of what she imagined to have been a shootout, between the footprints, blood, and shell casings.

While the Free City of Audunpoint was regarded as the southernmost bastion of civilization, that wasn’t any sort of law. Wherever humans went, and especially where resources could be found, civilization would take root as well. Between Audunpoint and the Beyond Frontier, one could find innumerable waystations and small towns of a few dozen to a few hundred residents each. It wasn’t unheard of for powerful soulbeast hunters to leave behind their old outposts and camp sites, and to later return to find they had been co-opted by their juniors. Beyond Frontier expeditionary caravans were moving communities of their own; some were just a few dozen people, while others were effectively moving cities that included all the facilities that explorers and hunters could possibly require.

Krahe was on her way towards a particular outpost, one out of the way, for that outpost was the meeting-place that she and her compatriots had agreed upon. It had been out of an abundance of caution that she and Talisman Mistress Yao Fu had decided that it would be best for the group to leave the city separately, at different times and in different directions, using Yao’s communication talismans and maps supplied by Shavren and cross-referenced with the church’s own maps. There was also the fact that they all had their own means of long-distance travel with distinct limitations and advantages, meaning that, in a group, they would have to operate on the basis of the lowest common denominator; the slowest.

And thus, the soulbeast hunt expedition began in a solitary manner. It would be a day and a half of continuous travel across the boundless steppe and desert before Krahe reached the meeting point. In reality, it was nearly three days, as she knew better than to push Rocinante at full tilt for that long, getting the impression that it would stress the automaton. More importantly, she herself couldn’t withstand it. Twenty minutes, an hour, two hours, perhaps, but not a full day.

As she wound down for the day, preparing to make camp, she spotted her planned camping destination. It was a black pyramid about the size of a two-story house, its entrance flanked to either side by desolate figures of gods or perhaps whomever had been buried there, all perfectly in line with her composite map. Krahe regarded this stop as a curiosity, having decided to take the solitary portion of her journey as an opportunity for a bit of sightseeing; after all, she had barely left Audunpoint since she had arrived to this world. For now, until she dealt with the Hashems and hopefully the Helmeted Man, this trip would be her only chance to sightsee for some time. As she approached the ruin, one of the statues cracked, and the other lost its arm, only for the limb to half midway through its fall and float back into its place. This was just one of the many benign anomalies surrounding this ruin. At first glance it appeared to be made of polished black stone, but its true composition as a strange metal-composite revealed itself at the break points of the statues, which glittered in the sun. She approached the entryway with a faint sense of anticipation; not because of what might be beyond it, but because there were rubbings from that doorway, rubbings of a language that did not exist on Zastreon, but one that she knew.

Dismounting from Rocinante, she walked between the statues, sensing an unsettling gaze, a faint static charge on her skin. This was documented. Looking closer, indeed, the doorway was engraved with gold-inlaid words in the conventional latin alphabet. German.

REICHSMARINE AETHERIAL DIVISION

GOTTERDAMMERUNG-TYPE SUPERDREADNOUGHT

SMS VENGEANCE

POD NO. 72

LAST MAINTENANCE: 04.07.1987

A fair bit below this, at chest-height, there was a second cluster of engravings.

IF FOUND, AID THE POD OCCUPANTS FOR REWARD

POD MONITORS OCCUPANTS AND SYSTEMS

HARM TO OCCUPANTS OR THE POD WILL BE SEVERELY PUNISHED

VENGEANCE FOR VERSAILLES

AT ANY COST

It was hard to believe at first, but here it was. This alien structure, stuffed with technology beyond both the Megacity and Zastreon, and it had originated from some alternate Imperial Germany. This, alone, was strange enough, but this ruin was on church record as having two further layers of foreign influence. The first layer was the influence of Zastreon, and, from outside, one could scarcely notice it, save for a phrase in archaic Calbian scratched into the stone by the door.

Speak “Ultima Thule” and Enter

“Ultima Thule,” Krahe said, and, with a loud slam, the door fell down, out of the way. That wasn’t strange. The strange thing was the presence of that foreign marking. Based on the records, none of the tooling brought to bear against the material could so much as chip it, and attempts to do so had caused wildly varied retaliation in the form of anomalies too numerous and varied to count. Yet, this marking, and further modifications inside, had been permitted by the structure. The church records stated this place was likely a piece of “Kenomic Drift,” an object of another world that had by absurd coincidence managed to traverse the void and end up on Zastreon, and, even here, it insisted on behaving in accordance with its original world’s laws, or perhaps a middle-ground between them and the laws of Zastreon.