157: Timaeus and Critias – Four
The instant Elytra opened herself up to the empathic scanner, she was overwhelmed by sensation. A wall of sound too dense to make out the details of beyond the noise, shapes and colours filling her mind and leaving no room for thought, she was wracked with temperatures at once hot enough to incinerate her and cold enough to flash freeze her, a pain indistinguishable from ecstasy, crushing pressure enough to turn coal into diamonds paired with the sensation that she was about fly apart at a molecular level, the entire range of emotions flying through her all at once and at a speed that left her nauseous, Elytra wasn't a person anymore, just raw nerve endings experiencing everything simultaneously.
Then there was a hand on her wrist, and everything fell away.
No colour but a featureless expanse of grey before her, no sound but her own breathing coming raggedly from her own throat, just the warm band of someone's fingers wrapped around her wrist, and the sensation of her feet braced against an unyielding surface below her.
Getting her eyes, her head to move felt like an impossible task, muscle and sinew groaning within her like boulders scraping their way down an incline, but Elytra turned enough to see V'tala at her side, her hand like an anchor keeping her from becoming irretrievably lost.
Wide eyed and gasping for breath beside her, V'tala was trembling as she stared off into nothing, her pupils pinpricks as she forced her gaze up to meet Elytra's. The second they locked eyes, Elytra was thunderstruck by the live wire of the other woman's panic and confusion, the force of it only dissipating when she slammed her own eyes shut.
Fear flared hot through Elytra when she felt V'tala's hold loosen, her mind filled with visions of being torn apart in a storm, but V'tala's hand didn't go far, just skimmed across hers until she could hold Elytra's hand properly, intertwining their fingers.
"I don't know what's going on," V'tala's voice was blown, raw like she'd shredded it screaming, "But we stick together."
Elytra forced her eyes open, forced herself to meet V'tala's look. The fear coming off the other woman was still there, an undercurrent to the determination that sparked off her. Still visibly trembling, she held Elytra's gaze, and the panic that had been choking her eased off enough for Elytra to gasp, "Together."
Nodding at that, V'tala turned to face the empty expanse before them.
Only it wasn't so empty now.
The dull grey of the space had brightened somewhat, the suggestion of shapes - structures - bringing a hint of dimension to whatever this place was. Tugging V'tala along with her, Elytra took a hesitant step forward, every primitive impulse within her screaming to find some kind of escape from the oppressive neutrality that surrounded them on all sides.
Whatever this place was, wherever it was, Elytra knew that the pair of them needed to get out, and fast. To linger would be to invite the attention of something she was in no way prepared to face.
Not like this, not separated from everything that made her whole.
Pryseia thought she was blind, nothing but white filling her vision, her eyes left watering even when she closed them, the brightness so overwhelming.
The rest of her senses were unaffected, thankfully. She could feel the grit of dirt between her palms and the artificially smooth surface she was braced against on her hands and knees, choke down the bitter taste of bile at the back of her throat, smell sun warmed stone on the faint breeze that blew past her, and hear the laboured breathing of the others beside her.
"Sound off." She rasped, instinct and training taking over even as her throat protested against use with a hot flare of pain. Sounding just as wrecked, three voices promptly responded.
"Marinos, doctor."
"Khari, engineer."
"Vel-Ahllan, pilot."
"Ugh, hate that," Rhea said with a bitter laugh, "Are you all okay?"
"Beyond it being too bright to see properly, I think I'm good?" Malakh replied, and Pryseia heard her shift enough to stand, "Feels like I screamed my voice out, but nothing else seems amiss."
Movement beside her as Nevara rose next. "We appear to be in some sort of city. I believe it's Hyttan."
With a thought, Pryseia began flicking through filters on her mechanical eye, before she slowly cracked it open. The dark filter she'd chosen was enough to cut off the worst of the glare coming off of everything around them, and she saw that Nevara's assessment was right - wherever they were, it looked Hyttan.
The buildings were all made of the self healing material that had lasted to the modern day, some only a storey tall, others rising like skyscrapers, and all of them in the shades of pale grey so endemic to Hyttan design. Pryseia momentarily dropped the filter on her eye just to make sure, as there was a quality to this light that wouldn't allow for colour. Herself and all her companions were rendered in greyscale under the light of this place.
Leaning back on her knees beside her, Rhea had both hands up, shielding her eyes as she looked around. "Okay, so this definitely isn't the quick nap we were promised. Do you thing this is something similar to the place we got pulled to when you and V'tala were psychically bleeding out because of the dlegh?"
Pryseia made a noncommittal noise, glancing upwards. "Potentially, though the suns shining down on us in this place seem to be just that, and not the eyes of something larger."
The others followed her gaze, shielding their own eyes as they took a quick peek up into the sky. Two pure white suns were shining their colour draining light down on them all.
"This doesn't appear to be any of the ruins we've been to," Nevara said as she spun in a slow circle, taking everything in, "Perhaps a different colony of theirs? Or a fictional location conjured by our minds to make sense of what this place is?"
"Regardless, I feel it is safe enough to bet that we will be able to find Elytra and Viatrix here," Pryseia said as she stood, "Spiracle did say we were to be emotional lodestones meant to draw them back to themselves, so perhaps we are to be more active than passive participants in this rescue mission."
"That's fine by me," Rhea said as she shoved off from the ground, "The sooner we get them home, the sooner we can get some answers out of those fortune telling space pirates. Now, where do we start looking?"
Like a picture being drawn around them, a city came into being as Elytra and V'tala walked hand in hand through that odd grey space. Streets spooled out at their feet while buildings rose on either side of them, the grey giving way to a brighter white when twin suns came into being above them.
Elytra stopped dead in her tracks, her free hand shading her eyes as she looked up into that bright sky, a wave of familiarity crashing over her now that the world had formed itself around her.
"What is it?" V'tala asked, her voice hushed and on edge.
Turning to look at her, the colours bleached from every aspect of her under the light of those double suns, Elytra swallowed thickly before saying, "I've been here before. This is where I was pulled when we saved you and Pryseia from the dlegh, where I got the tool that became the upgrade for Viatrix. This is the Hyttan homeworld."
Something rattled through their surroundings at that, a vibration felt more than heard, a sense of acknowledgement from a consciousness beyond their comprehension. V'tala caught Elytra's eye, expression unreadable but her eyes wide in shock, silently asking, you felt that too?
A shiver rippling through her as a presence similar to that of the Storlayacas settled over them, Elytra could only nod in response.
She glanced up into the sky once more, expecting to see the titanic silhouette of the mech with suns for eyes once more, but there was nothing there, nothing beyond the scant clouds hanging heavy in the distance above them.
Beside her, V'tala drew in a breath to speak, but she stopped herself short, eyes going wide at the same instant Elytra felt four presences appear on the periphery of her empathic senses - the winter chill of Pryseia, the summer heat of Malakh, the autumn snap of Nevara, and the spring warmth of Rhea.
"They're here." Elytra breathed, and V'tala nodded, knowing exactly who she meant.
Still hand in hand, the pair of them tore down main roads and side streets, their direction unerring as the presence of their family grew stronger, until they turned a final corner and there they were.
The six of them caught sight of each other at the same time, and broke into a sprint all at once, relief bubbling up so powerfully from them all that Elytra immediately burst into tears, and it was only V'tala's grip on her that kept her upright and running in the right direction.
Elytra wasn't sure who she grabbed onto when they all collided, she was just aware of the press of warm bodies around her, and the anxiety that had been clinging so tenaciously to her mind finally being forced away by the presence of her loved ones. Safe in their arms, she finally let go of V'tala's hand, shoving her between her shoulder blades right into Pryseia's arms, where she was promptly pulled into a desperate kiss by the other woman.
"I thought it was gonna be way more of a fucking ordeal to find you two!" Rhea laughed, her eyes bright with tears as she cupped Elytra's jaw so she could plant a kiss on her forehead plate, "Are you alright?"
"Bit of a headache, but nothing beyond that," V'tala said, one arm still looped around Pryseia while Malakh had pulled her forward to press their foreheads together, "How did you even get here?"
"We encountered some of those missing fortune tellers from the Quanvengier," Nevara explained as she pulled Elytra into her side, "Along with others who were drawn to this place through divinatory means. They'd had psychics of their own who fell to whatever force permeates this place, and are in the process of assisting us in retrieving you."
Pressing her forehead against Elytra's briefly, Malakh explained, "The two of you basically got blasted back into the depths of your subconscious by the overwhelming psychic output of this tear. Using radio as an analogy, you got hit by a hundred different frequencies when you can only handle one at a time. Our allies on the outside are going to be shutting those frequencies down one by one so that you can get back to yourselves, and we're here to help guide you home."
Tucking into the space Malakh vacated so that she could pull Elytra into a brief hug herself, Pryseia said, "We were not expecting to find you in a physical - or I suppose metaphysical - location like this, but my heart rests easier seeing the both of you unharmed."
It wasn't fear that flashed through Elytra then, but something closer to dread. An unease like the denial of grief that had rolled off the Storlayacas when they'd questioned them as to what this wound on the galaxy actually was. Wedged in between the rest of them, Elytra told them, "We're on the Hyttan homeworld."
Again, that sourceless presence settled over them, not quite like the Storlayacas, and not exactly like the presence that had guided them through the removal of the dlegh. The six of them flinched as it settled around them, clinging tighter to one another as sound and movement kicked up around them, like a holographic entertainment experience being activated for their perusal.
People were suddenly flooding the streets around them, running panicked as they shouted at one another, and it was with a lurch of shock that Elytra realized they were seeing actual living, breathing hyttan. Or the memory of them, at the very least.
They were not at all what she expected, swarming around the six of them, completely oblivious to their presence. In terms of their body shape, they were built more along the lines of Rhea, Pryseia, Malakh, and V'tala, some as tall as the human among them, while others were shorter than Elytra herself. Beneath the clothes they were wearing, she could make out hints of natural plating, not quite as all encompassing as Nevara's or her own carapace, but segmented scales seemed to be covering their joints. They all had hair, though it seemed to be more like Malakh's short mane than it did the longer locks of the others, while sprouting up from where their foreheads met their temples were frond-like antenna, nearly all of them pressed flat against their heads in their panic. Their faces reminded her of the zymeth somewhat, large dark eyes set over slit nostrils and a small mouth, though their eyes were faceted instead of smooth, and they had vocal cords enough to scream. Like everything else under the light of the two white suns hanging above them, the hyttan were all shades of grey.
The six of them pulled off to the side on instinct, even though no one in the panicked crowd seemed to be paying them any mind. All of them on high alert, they glanced around their surroundings, trying to see what was driving these people into a panic, but nothing obvious sprang out at them.
Less than a minute passed in this silent observation before something caught their attention, that odd presence having them all turning towards the same side street across from them.
Her voice coming out hushed with awe, Rhea breathed, "I think something wants us somewhere."
They moved as one after that, what could only be the memories of the hyttan rushing past and through them as the six of them made their way across the street, then further on as the presence guided them forward. More crowds fleeing in panic, vehicles on the ground and in the air darting off to who knew where, tall buildings giving way to shorter, broader establishments. Past a closed gate that they slipped through as if it wasn't even there, they found themselves in a compound that had a distinctly military air about it.
They were led to the tallest structure in that base, though it was only three storeys high. Soldiers in crisp uniforms were running through the halls and stairwells inside, not the blind panic of the civilians outside, but a grim determination that had Elytra's heart pounding heavy enough in her throat that she felt like she might throw up.
The presence guiding them forward came to an abrupt stop once they entered some kind of command centre, consoles spread across the room with soldiers frantically typing away at them, calling out warnings and commands to one another, with a psychic undercurrent to it all that had Elytra's head throbbing. Next to her, V'tala swayed, a hand rising to her temple, and as she caught Elytra's eye, she knew that she'd just been swept up by a headache too.
Towards the front of the room, standing before a wide screen with a star map displayed across it, in the centre of which lay the binary stars of this system, a hyttan with a series of medals pinned to their chest turned and faced them - actually saw and acknowledged them - before beckoning them forward with a wave of their hand. Elytra was so shocked that she turned around, trying to see if someone had entered the door behind them, but it was shut tight, no one else at all that this commander could be flagging down besides them.
Next to her, looking gobsmacked, Rhea pointed her finger at herself. At that, the commander let out a silent laugh as they nodded, something so sad about the gesture that Elytra felt herself choking up even as she and the others stepped forward towards them.
As they neared, just loud enough so that they could hear it and no one else, the commander said, "Aiae kurenanmalsen tor enruli maae kuranyali kurenrukur laranmal shaanmalyali ma rulalatoritores, tor litorli eankurkur entoreda laranmal shaanmalyali ruzakurmalruyayalar zaanoda. Eankurentores enrucas sanea rucas torkur casenanmalyali castorezaa shaa rayamalodmali kurena liarakurencas kurenrukur casenanmalyali enruia laaodrutoreali maleaorayaanlaali."
The words made no sense, the psychic understanding implanted within her able to parse what this hyttan officer was saying, but much like the Storlayacas, they were able to get a sense of the emotions being conveyed: disbelief and relief, drowning in grief. Elytra wanted to reach out and comfort them, but what could she even say?
The commander turned away slightly, looking up at the star map before them. It had changed in the interim, the edges of it now crowded with a roiling, dark shape. A terror lanced through Elytra at the sight of it so primordial that if she wasn't sandwiched in between Pryseia and Rhea, Nevara a steady presence at her back, she would have fled the room in as blind a panic as the civilians outside.
"Enmalmlatorcas torcas ru mtorkurkurala ratoryaya kuran cassharuyayaansha," the commander went on, self loathing curdling in the air around them, "Shaa enruia liananodali anmalla laruzaa kuran anmyatoritorane mazarumalcasa shaa kurenanmalsenkur anmallacasayaiacas odrucaskuralacas anko ruyaya kurena caskurrulacas enruli kuran ankokoala. Kurena yarucaskur enlarkurkurrue enarulakur shatoryaya koruyaya caskurtoryaya tore ru koasha casenanlakur odtoremalkuracas."
They reached out a hand and dismissed the map, the dark cloud rapidly encroaching on the entire system, then pressed a button that had large bay windows uncovering in seconds, flooding the room with light.
But it wasn't the pure white light as before. Darkness was creeping along the edge of the horizon, the sight of it sending a frisson of horror through Elytra, one she had felt so recently in the waking world.
It was the same, unnerving sensation she felt when they first arrived at the wound where the Omega would one day reemerge.
All around them, soldiers stopped what they were doing, staring out the windows as the sky grew steadily darker, and a crushing wave of dread struck Elytra with enough force that she stumbled against Malakh and V'tala, the two of them the only things keeping her from passing out altogether.
Staring out at the encroaching darkness, the commander said, "Koanlastoria malcas koanla anmalla castore anko rulalaansruezaa, koanla torkur enrucas mlaanmalsenkur lamaltore kuran kurentorcas sruyaruolar. Laranmal storlayacas odmalcaskur latorsenkur anmalla shalaanes, anla ruyaya yatorkoa torcas liananodali. Tor ruod casanlalalar kurenrukur shaa zaanmalyali eankur lian odanlaa koanla laranmal, rueli kurenrukur anmalla kotoreruya ruzakur shatoryaya aneyalar ma ru kuraodraanlarulalar laaralatoraia kolaanod kurentorcas odaeruzaa. Torkur shatoryaya laakurmallae koanla laranmal anea lirular, rue torecasrukurtorrumyaa enmalesala lilatoritores torkur. Kurentorcas zalaarukurmallaa sharucas eankur manlae anko kurentorcas laaruyaod, rueli casan kurena liarukuren shaa mlatores torkur shatoryaya eankur enanyali torkur toreliakotoretorkurayalar. Laranmal odmalcaskur kotoreli kurena rayaruzaa shaenalaa shaa ramalyayaali torkur kolaanod, rueli zarucaskur torkur mruzada kolaanod shaenaezaa torkur zaruoda. Laakurmallaeali kuran kurena laaruyaod anko torkurcas mtorlakuren, torkur shatoryaya eankur enrulaod malcas rusrutore."
Regret, hope, bitter sorrow, and rancid fear leeched off the commander as they typed a short sequence up on their console, slamming their hand down on it with all the finality of a coffin lid slamming shut. A few seconds later, and the darkness that had swarmed up across the sky suddenly brightened, an overwhelming terror rising up from every single person on this world as the twin suns in the sky suddenly expanded, spreading out like soap bubbles that had just been popped. It took Elytra a moment to process what she was seeing, but once she did, her mind went completely blank with shock.
No one had ever been able to find the Hyttan homeworld because it no longer existed. They blew up their suns to drag the Omega into Death with them. The wound on the edge of the galaxy was all that remained of this final act of defiance by a doomed race.
As the apocalyptic blast of those destroyed suns raced towards them, the commander turned their back on the destruction they'd unleashed, eyes settling on the six of them instead of spending their final moments watching their oncoming doom. A calm had settled across the commander, their inevitable end moments away, and they gave the six of them a sad smile as they said, "Odrular laranmal zalaanshae laranmallacasayaiacas tore itorzakuranlalar."
And then the light burned everything away.