by Cam Baity
“But together…”
The amalgami surrounding Dollop held hands, their parts interweaving to form a loving embrace.
“…many drops make an ocean,” the chorus resounded.
“Without limit,” they chanted.
“We are one.”
“We were,” another corrected. “Until you.”
Their angelic faces shined. Gentle hands reached out to him.
“The vaptoryx found us, attacked us.”
“Took part of us away.”
“Separated.”
“That is how you were born.”
Dollop took a hesitant step back.
“But you have returned to us.”
“Now we can be one again.”
“Forever us.”
“I’m…” Dollop’s voice hitched. “I’m so-sorry.”
He turned away, unable to bear the sight of sorrow smothering those hopeful faces.
His twin began to weep.
“Please…”
Dollop strode from the chamber and entered a narrow passage, determined to not look back. Another voice whimpered behind him, then another. Sorrow multiplied within Amalgam, many voices building into a mourning throng. Dollop swallowed back his tears, but he would not allow himself to waver. He hurried through the labyrinth of passages, trying to recall the path he had taken upon his arrival.
“Please…” echoed a desperate plea.
“Don’t leave us,” moaned another.
Amalgam’s sobs seemed to emanate from the cavern walls. The wretched sound filled him with a rending pain.
Dollop just wanted to get away.
But as he continued to search for the exit, the cries seemed to grow closer. He heard shuffling, saw a lingering shadow. Weeping amalgami faces stared at him through connecting passages. Their misery rose to a terrible wail that surrounded Dollop and filled him to bursting.
A hand shot out from a hole in the wall. It grabbed his arm.
An amalgami face appeared, its features warped in agony.
“Please, little one,” it begged. “Please don’t leave us!”
“I-I’m sorry. I’m so s-s-sorry.”
Dollop reshaped his limb to make it thicker.
“You can’t go!” Amalgam howled with distorted repetition.
The grip tightened. Dollop squirmed in panic.
He wrenched his strengthened arm free.
“Please!”
Dollop raced down the hall. Hands burst from cavities on all sides, snatching as he hurried past. Amalgam reached out to him through side chambers, faces twisted with sorrow. Their tormented voices were shattering and shrill, so deafening that Dollop had to hold his ears to block them out.
He skidded to a stop. A wall of body parts assembled before him, blocking his escape. A thousand mouths opened.
“We are one,” they bellowed.
Hands erupted through the mouths and lunged for him.
Dollop split down the middle to evade their grasp. He slipped past, reassembling as he ran, twisting through the caverns.
Amalgam sobbed, a mother that had lost her child, beating its thousand fists against the ore in despair. And Dollop, too, was crying, overwhelmed with guilt and fear. He wiped heavy tears from his eyes as he fled.
Beneath the howls of sorrow, Dollop heard a trickle of falling vesper. He hurried toward it and soon saw patterns of glowing blue light and hanging stalactites that he recognized.
“Please!” echoed Amalgam’s tortured moan.
At last, the chamber he had been seeking. It was the lagoon and the shore where he had arrived. And there, lying undisturbed, was the salathyl prong he had left behind. He snatched it and looked up at the trickling vesperfalls. Among the dripping stalactites, he saw holes pocking the ceiling. An escape.
He clung to the mineral-flecked wall, re-forming his body, extending his limbs and fanning out his fingers for a better grip. He pulled himself up. Climbing, hand over hand. Foot after foot.
Mournful lamentations gathered like storm clouds, and Amalgam rolled like thunder into the chamber, flooding out of every tunnel. Dollop looked down.
A monstrous face made from countless parts, hundreds of eyes merging to glare. It rose, mouth hinging open, expanding cavernously wide. The face bent, contorted in misery.
It screamed.
“STAY!”
Amalgam came for him.
The howling maw seized Dollop. It plucked him off the cavern wall. Limbs surrounded him in an unbreakable grip.
Instantly, he was crushed by sadness, like the flame of every happy memory was snuffed out. This was sorrow magnified, a million times greater than any he had known. Every ounce of his being trembled with the desperate cry of “STAY.”
And as the word bellowed within Dollop, as Amalgam absorbed him, he felt his mind begin to crumble. He was eroding, every sensation submerged in an ocean of grief and loneliness.
Numbness blanketed him. He could not feel his pieces. They were being taken from him. They no longer belonged to him.
Soon there would be no him at all.
There never was, came a sad reply. Not his words, but broadcast into his thoughts. Or what was left of them.
Stay.
Return to us.
We are one forever.
What remained of Dollop? He felt the tingle that had kept him together dwindle, the heat of life fade. There went his belly, then his head. The rest was gone, melted down like liquid ore.
Molten. Like the marks on his chest.
Where had he gotten those scars?
His past was…
Fading.
Makina.
Her name stirred his dying ember.
He had almost gone to rust in the furnaces of Kallorax—that’s where his scars had come from. But She had spared him.
Dollop was Waybound. A warrior of the Covenant.
Child of Ore, servant to the Great Engineer.
He remembered.
Amalgam grew hot. Dollop’s resistance was disturbing it.
Piece by piece, his segments dug their way out of the suffering mass. He willed them to return.
Amalgam tried to hold on, clinging to his every last bit.
“WE ARE ONE!” it wailed.
His pieces retracted. His mouth assembled.
“I. AM. ME!” came Dollop’s triumphant cry.
His body re-formed with an explosive force.
Amalgam convulsed, and Dollop was hurled into the air.
He stretched himself out to seize one of the stalactites.
Amalgam crumpled, all flopping limbs and bawling mouths. It recoiled pathetically, hugging itself.
High above, Dollop dangled from the stalactite. He gazed upon Amalgam for the last time.
This was his doing. After searching for so long, he had finally found his clan, and all he had done was cause them pain.
But Amalgam was not his home.
There was no going back.
His friends needed him.
Salathyl prong in his mouth, he scrabbled up the stalactite and pulled himself into a cavity. He found a steep incline and dragged his exhausted body up and up.
The ore shook with Amalgam’s muffled howls.
Was the air pressure changing? Was that the drone of the Mirroring Sea? The warmth of suns from up above?
He clawed to the surface like a sprout ready to bloom.
Makina had set him free, and Dollop praised Her.
For Amalgam was right—he was broken and incomplete. But despite his failings, despite his lack, Dollop was himself.
He was one.
They barely dared to breathe.
Rhom was taking them…somewhere.
The Sea Bullet groaned, its walls straining in the leviathan’s grip. She had encased the boat in her black tendrils, muting the scream of the storm.
Rhom’s tentacles squelched across the windshield. They looked like the shadows of dead trees—thick and darkly translucent with slithering offshoots. They were layered in barbs
like meat hooks that gouged channels in the glass. Foreign objects were half-sunk into the gluey black flesh—shells of decomposing mehkans, chunks of indiscernible ore, and rusted shards of machines stamped with the Foundry logo.
Through the meager gaps between the tentacles, they saw that the boat was descending. They were being hauled into a tunnel within the mist-drenched Talons.
Micah snapped into action. He recovered his rifle and field pack, then climbed down into the engine room.
“Please tell me this is an accident,” Gabby said. “Tell me that you weren’t planning on taking us to Rhom.”
Phoebe didn’t answer.
“You should have told me.” Gabby said sorrowfully. “We might have had a chance, Phoebe. I could have—”
Micah reappeared, stuffing the Med-i-Pak and rations into his case before strapping it on. As he reloaded his rifle, Phoebe adjusted the Multi-Edge sheath around her waist and tucked the naval map into a pocket. Gabby sank into a seat.
Outside, the tempest faded as they were taken deeper into the Talons. The deadly lead-gray spikes curled overhead like clawed hands, shielding them from the ferocity of the storm.
Without warning, the tentacles released them. The Sea Bullet dropped and rebounded heavily. The three passengers sat in silence, bobbing in the flux, too terrified to move.
“Now what?” Micah huffed.
As if in response, there came a blistering screech of tearing metal. The roof of the boat was peeled aside like the lid of a can. The three of them crouched on the floor, shielding their heads.
One of Rhom’s tentacles beckoned them to follow, like a giant finger bristling with spines.
Phoebe stood, but her legs felt newly formed. She didn’t want to see whatever was attached to that tentacle, especially after Gabby’s reaction. But this is why they had come. If Phoebe was to help the Ona and find the Occulyth, she had to face Rhom.
Micah rose and fished a wad of cable out of his pocket.
“Seriously, kid?” Gabby said, watching him tie the severed cord back together. He was about to lash her to the driver’s seat when someone grabbed his elbow.
“Plumm,” he warned. “Don’t even start. I swear, I gotta—”
But it wasn’t Phoebe.
Rhom’s tentacle drew Micah back by the elbow, then nudged Gabby out of the chair. It drifted to Phoebe, but she got the message—Rhom was herding them off the boat.
Phoebe stepped off the Sea Bullet and took a look around. Late afternoon suns bled through dispersing storm clouds, and light sliced through the Talons, casting prison-bar shadows on a wasteland of shipwrecks. Some were pulverized or capsized, others were husks protruding at severe angles—the crumbling remains of mehkan and Foundry vessels. A few looked new, others so profoundly ancient that they might blow apart in a strong breeze. It was as if all the ships in existence had been summoned here to crash and decay.
The tentacle beckoned.
Phoebe checked the turbulent black-and-blue sky for signs of rain, then undid her facemask and hood. So did the others.
Her vision swam.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Micah, steadying her.
“Your head,” Gabby remarked with concern.
Phoebe pulled off a glove and touched her forehead, wincing. Blood. Her fingers were covered in it.
The tentacle approached, as if drawn by the wound.
“That’s quite a gash,” Gabby said. “Let me patch you up.”
“No time,” Phoebe said, wiping the blood on her coveralls.
“You sure you’re…okay?” Micah asked.
Phoebe glared, and he looked down. He wasn’t going to get off that easy. She wasn’t ready to forgive him for his cruelty.
“Hands behind you,” he said to Gabby, holding the cable.
Gabby sighed and rolled her eyes, but she obeyed.
“You know we’re marching to our deaths, right?” she said as Micah lashed her wrists together.
Rhom’s tentacle beckoned more insistently.
“Yep,” he said. “Kinda gettin’ used to it.”
They trailed after the tentacle. It retracted behind a ruined hull, and another one wriggled at them from up ahead. The debris-littered ground was craggy, like shattered pottery crudely glued back together. They proceeded carefully, feeling it shift beneath their feet. Phoebe led the way with Gabby right behind, her face grim. Micah brought up the rear, rifle at the ready.
Phoebe looked down at the gelatinous blackness beneath her feet, and a terrifying realization gripped her.
They weren’t being led to Rhom—they were on top of her.
All this debris was just the surface layer, a weathered shipwreck skin. No wonder the ground was so unsteady.
The tentacles urged them on. Rhom’s expanse extended for miles in every direction, filling the Talons. And that was just above the flux. Who knew how far down she went?
They arrived at a hill of inky, viscous flesh. Tentacles crusted with clinking debris surrounded them. A geyser of hot air burst up, and Phoebe yelped. Moist jets blasted out from gloppy, fluctuating sphincters, wheezes that came in rhythmic bursts.
“Uh-oh,” Micah mumbled.
Flux bubbled and frothed. Something breached the surface and rose thunderously before them. It was a massive dome with gaping, serrated gills, heaving out plumes of exhaust. As the liquid metal streamed off the thing, Phoebe saw that it was as transparent as a rubber balloon stretched too tight.
The surface was patched with ancient scars, but they could still see into its milky depths. Within was a nightmarish tangle of fluttering valves and nodules. Stringy ducts gathered in bundles, entwined like tangled metal jellyfish. Bloated sacs were linked to fleshy gears, with clouds of dark fluid pumping from one membranous chamber to the next. Giant fish-white hemispheres pulsed and vibrated.
They were Rhom’s vital organs, a system so massive, so revoltingly complex, that it seemed like the innards of Mehk itself. And still it rose from the flux.
Sound hissing from the geyser holes coalesced into a word.
“Bow.”
The sinister command startled Phoebe. As they stared up at the towering colossus, all resistance wilted. Wordlessly, the three of them fell to their knees.
As Rhom continued to rise, dwarfing them, a shifting circular mass emerged. It was a gargantuan array of concentric metal irises, contracting and expanding—hundreds of them, like the growth rings of an amputated tree.
They trembled before the eye of Rhom. Wet breath gasped out of orifices scattered around them and across the transparent dome. The bubbling voice sounded breathless, inhaling and exhaling simultaneously as she spoke.
“Here you are, lost and alone, hunters and the hunted, so little, so afraid, and oh so very far from home,” Rhom gurgled, mirthless, but with a broken intonation that hinted at laughter.
“You know who we are?” Phoebe asked.
“I do,” Rhom rasped, “for I am ever eating, ever knowing.” Her giant, shifting eye drifted closer, the irises extending like a telescope. “I know they all seek you, wanted by the Covenant and wanted by the Foundry, but I alone, yes, only I have you.”
“You don’t know nothin’ about us!” Micah snapped.
He immediately regretted it.
The eye rotated and widened to take him in. A vesicle within Rhom’s head sputtered out thick crimson ink that broke into oily globs as it dissipated.
“I eat then I know,” the flapping sphincters spat. “I know the bleeders hunt for your captive, the one they call Flores.” A tentacle pointed at Gabby, and she went white.
Phoebe recalled the meaning of Rhom’s name—to gorge.
I eat then I know.
“You eat…knowledge?” Phoebe asked.
“Ahhhhh…” Rhom breathed.
The pinkish fluid in her head rushed away, leaving it clear.
“I am timeless as the sea, my wisdom infinite, my hunger bottomless.” There was another steamy snort as Rhom continued. “Living or no, I eat and I
know.”
The mound beneath them shifted, and the tentacles parted as something else breached the flux—a lost relic, eaten by time and half-buried in a mass of Rhom’s black flesh.
“This schooner saw Creighton Albright aboard its maiden voyage, yet I discovered it centuries after his passing, devoured it and, with it, knowledge of the man, his stern voice, his fearful crewmen.” The organs within Rhom’s head pumped faster, as if she were growing more excited. “But bleeders are a passing trifle, for I have tasted the dawn of life, the birth of consciousness, I ate of the proto-mehkans, they worshipped me, I feasted on megalarchs, consumed nations, fed upon their every thought and memory, so many stories, all mine…Just as yours will be.”
Phoebe felt the ground beneath her give. Her legs sank into Rhom’s black flesh. She threw her hands down to try and push herself up and found them caught in the jelly as well. She was held fast. Heaving and pulling, she turned to Micah and Gabby, but they were stuck too.
They were being eaten. Soon Rhom would know them, know their secrets and fears. Then their bodies would be nothing more than a bit of debris added to her collection.
Rhom sighed. “The curse of infinity is infinite boredom, so few surprises, so few mysteries remain, and yet still I must eat, for there is still so much to know.”
“The Mercanteer sent us!” Phoebe cried.
Glands in Rhom’s head gushed out brown and gray ink, muddying the clear fluid and clouding the unsightly organs.
“You do not travel in his vessel, you do not bear his seal.”
“No,” Micah answered, his prepubescent voice cracking. “We had to split. Bhorquvaat got overrun by Foundry.”
“This I know,” Rhom stated, uninterested.
“He said you would help,” Phoebe pleaded. “That you would help us find what we need. Please! We need it to save Mehk!”
Gabby looked at her in shock. Rhom’s eye shifted to Phoebe, and her swirling, murky dome became opaque.
“Mehk does not need you, because Mehk does not need, it merely is, nothing more,” Rhom said in her constant breathless wheeze. “Yet your delusion is curious, as are your emotions, and curiosity is a delicacy, so I would know what you seek.”
“Careful, Plumm,” Micah whispered.
Phoebe recalled the warning from the Agent of Tongues—that Rhom was a great deceiver. And it was a risk to reveal too much in front of Gabby, but their lives were on the line.