Book 6. Chapter 1: Destiny
“What exactly is the Division Stone?”
The comms line went quiet for a moment, the old machine on the other end thinking through how to answer.
“A stone. Near a cliff. I show you around.”
“Har har, very funny.” I said, tapping the desk. It had been only a few hours since I’d carried Father’s broken down shell back to the clan and now I was getting all my gear ready to go. Airspeeder would be set and supplied in three days from now, so the whole house was rushing to get everything in order.
“If I’m going down there with my crew of misfits searching for some long lost legendary device, I want to know what said device does, if you would so kindly explain.”
Abraxas huffed. “It is a stone. Big. With circuits. Inside. Made of mite, god and machine. Designed by Tsuya. And I. Forged by mites. Very large stone, difficult to move.” He continued to explain in broken sentences and words, describing a very different time. “Giant arc. Walk under it. Escape pale lady forever after. Done. Was hidden after my kind lost. Found again during human empire era, to free protofeathers. Relinquished destroyed it when their kind lost. Pale lady bluffed.”
Machines in his era had been different. Smarter. Less bound and left more open to creativity. Relinquished hadn’t even suspected machines would turn against her, not when their core directive had been to hunt down and kill humans. She thought they were like her.
Most did exactly that, from what Abraxas shared. A few got very good at killing humans, in very different ways. Those that got better tended to stay alive for longer, which led them to develop personality and character.
Abraxas hadn’t been a coward back then. From what I could piece together that he wasn’t telling me, he’d been very good at making use of the occult and making deals with mites to gain power, a path no other machine minion had gone down. Mites didn’t tend to associate with machines or humans, so he was one of the first to actually make different bargains with the critters. Over the years of hunting down humans, more machines followed his lead, and lived longer for it.