Interview with the Machine

"I think we got off on the wrong foot," Gladius began, his brassy voice ringing with diplomatic succor and indelible disdain for all mortality, even a psionic siren who could fry his circuits in an instant. "I was sent here as an emissary. I have such a story to tell, and you're just the one to take it to the rest of the world."

"A story of unprovoked violence, political corruption, and evil men getting their comeuppance? What is this, a pulp novel? I'm offended." He snickered lightly at her response, a solid retort, but remained confident in his stance.

"I am here for your story, Gladius of the Blades, I presume? Or is it Ozlan d'Cannith, by way of some marvelous transformation?"

"I've told no lies. The Blades are so named to remind us of our humility. We are sworn knights, bound by our honor. Or does one need blood to have honor?"

She met his challenging gaze. "Do you not bleed?" she cut back. Perhaps he was too quick to judge her. She may yet be cut from the same steel as he.

"Touché. I did, once. In my past life. I bear my name proudly, because I am reborn in the Sacred Forge. My immortal soul now has an immortal body. Honestly, I didn't expect my mark would survive. I bear no claim to your boyfriend's house and title, have no worry."

She corrected him sharply, "fiancé."

"Apologies. Will you take the name of his bastard father, or just hollow out his guts on the wedding night?"

Thanks. That makes this much easier, she thought, and spoke no more.

There are a hundred ways to enter a mind. Slipping in quietly, like a thief in the night--that's a popular one. Hovering ever so close, but not touching, listening for muted thoughts and images like a peeping tom. Has its uses. A careful, surgical cut, made in some part of the mind the subject won't miss, entering like a contortionist, extending tendrils of control through an orifice. Very illithid.

This time, she went for the wrecking ball.

The brain does not want to be invaded. The immune system has but one job, and does it well. Thus the need for subtlety--avoiding detection, and, when desired, avoiding any lasting damage or suffering on the victim's part. In this case, she wasn't worried that he would resist, and certainly wasn't worried about the rest.

He screamed in pain--perhaps the first he'd felt since his transformation--as she fisted his mind like a spiked gauntlet. She would take everything she wanted, plant what she wished, and leave him in whatever state he found himself in at the end, if he survived at all.

There's a lot here, she said across her mindlink. He's trying to protect his secrets. I'll go for those first.

Visions of the mechanical city flashed in the dreamscape. Glimpses of the forge, quickly smudged over by his mental resistance. She'd get those details later. She wanted to cut right to the heart.

Childhood? Maybe young adulthood? He could have a fairly wide range of ages, but the trauma of the Mourning would surely have left a mark, a mark she could find. He didn't grow up in Whitehearth, or in any sort of glamour at all. Instead, he was born in common squalor, his mother reduced to hiding among the peasantry.

His mother wasn't Elsebet. Starrin remarried, and claimed his first wife died. But she didn't, at least not according to Gladius' memories. Not until the Day of Mourning, at least. Unlike Tyburn, he didn't learn of his mother's passing in the news, safely out of the country.

He...died along with her?

His memories grew hazy at that point, the veil of death clouding his experience, but he returned to life. Born in a forge, in a metal body built by artificers, imbued with the soul of a young man. Years had passed, but his soul hadn't moved on all that time, nor been claimed by any demon or angel.

You could have just asked, came the warforged's voice, from within his own mind. I told you I had quite a story.

He began to sculpt his own dreamscape, and, not for the ability to do so, she didn't stop him. The broken, dreary landscape of the Mournland did not emerge, but a strange, beautiful land, rich will life, bearing forms and colors unseen anywhere in the world, and within it, drifting lights, lost souls wandering endlessly, without rest. This isn't what your eyes would see, he explained. These are the First Lands, a demiplane broken off from the Ethereal. The Gray Mist cuts it off from all directions, even from the other planes. None of the souls who died that day have made it to their rest. But some have been reborn. Reforged.

The image changed, becoming a gleaming city of glass and steel, a machine city, built within the twisted, but strangely beautiful wastes of the Mournland. They all looked like Gladius--well, not exactly, he was larger and more heavily armed. Most did not look like metal soldiers, but...just like people. Metallic people with no hearts, but people nonetheless. Artists, merchants, scholars, builders, maybe even journalists.

They're the people of Cyre, she breathed, taking in the enormity of it all.

A lucky few. The Chosen Ones, some might say. Most are out of reach, taken by the Maw. The beautiful landscape transformed, into a hellish realm, where all the color, vitality, and beauty of the spirit world drained into a vast, ever-steepening abyss, its ravenous hunger swallowing everything. Souls languored, caught it its gravitational pull, inevitably swirling toward oblivion, but only after suffering for years.

Now I'm no prophet, he explained with the usual dose of virulence, so take my religious interpretation with a grain of salt, but...I don't think this is what is supposed to happen to human souls.

So your machine is saving them, then? You've created Cyre, Reborn?

His form rushed toward her, gathering itself from the mists, taking on his corporeal appearance, but with a few telltale marks of his older self remaining in his reflection. Cyre is dead. This is a new realm, a new life, not a continuation. Souls have been given a new chance, but they are urged to forget what is past, what can never be rebuilt. In immortal bodies, the time they spent as Cyrans will become ever more irrelevant, just as the hate and nationalist fever of the past now has become.

Choice words, for someone who invaded a nation recently. The dreamscape shifted, sand-like particles reforming into an approximation of Lady Lysza--thanks for that name, Gladius--and the other foreign conspirators who'd succored Gasmelter into betraying his warchief. He was angry, offended at her tone and implication. Too easy.

We offered peace. Your friend chose war. Every battle that was fought, you started.

Defensively? she quipped.

In truth, I had come as an emissary on my own. The rest was an accident of timing. Diplomats seeking leaders, and finding none. While the warlords played in their camps, we did the actual work of resolving the issue, and finding peace. And I'll note, the warchief ultimately agreed to our peace deal anyway, so all the bloodshed was unnecessary.

She let the dreamscape drift again, forming the gate of Great Crag. Was it necessary to open the gates and kill hundreds of people defending their homes? Not to mention spending the lives of Brelish soldiers who'd be heading back to their families now? She expected obstinacy, but didn't get the fiery retort she was waiting for.

Yes. Everything went exactly as I'd hoped. Peace was always the goal, but now Droaam will enter the world stage, stabilizing one of the last flashpoints. The time has come for healing, and that is what my Prophet offers.

The Lord of Blades? she asked, and he scoffed.

A title he never took, invented by enemies. He is the Prophet, Ramadrash is his name. He was guided by the Echo, the voice of the Divine, which showed him the location of the Forgotten Forge. He led the first pilgrims there, and they rebuilt the Genesis Forge, through which I and others were reborn.

His memory of that day played out around her: a burst of light and sound, slowly tuning itself into phase with reality; slowly emerging from the warm darkness of the forge to be greeted by the Prophet and the other Reforged; his first glimpse of sky, after he mastered his body and emerged into the Machine City. All such a nice tale, but something was wrong. Sights and sounds in memory can be false, they can be implanted, or brainwashed, or just succumb to the entropy of all organic life. But in each case, there are signs, indications of what happened to the memory, and sometimes clues of the truth that was forgotten.

You've been lied to, Gladius. I'm not sure who-

And the dream collapsed.

The particles dropped from suspension, becoming a swirling vortex, revealing an expanse of infinite, hazy nothingness. A human mind is vast, but this was vaster, bigger than a mind should be. Something was approaching, something colossal, something...more powerful than her.

If she was shaken, Gladius was terrified, reverting to his human child form, crying in terror, hiding behind her. Froom the gloom, tentacles emerged, nodes of imagined flesh too strange to exist in reality. A form that couldn't be, made of hardened nightmares, congealed fear, the corrupted essence of Dreaming.

A Quori. A big, mean one.

And it spoke. Not words, its thoughts were too complex, the ideas too vast for any language to contain. But she understood it. Such infinite malice, unending contempt, a million human lives spent in constant hatred could scarcely generate so much malevolence. This creature despised organic life, and physical existence itself. It was an ever-collapsing black hole of envy, an explosion of infinite umbrage.

Where all of them? she wondered briefly, before turning to practical matters. She had to escape this mind. The thought of rescuing Gladius' essence from it occurred briefly, but the risk was too great. She couldn't guarantee her own safety, let alone someone else's.

She flew through the dreamscape at the speed of light, extricating herself from the bowels of Gladius' memories, untangling her feelers from his thoughts and sensations. She'd gone in expecting a powerful, mortal mind. She was running from a Nightmare.

The speed of light wasn't fast enough. No, the Quori was redefining it, and violating it at the same time. She could override the rules of Gladius' reality, but it could rewrite the rules of rewriting rules. This wasn't a contest of psions, this was a lamb fleeing a wolf. A pack of wolves. The god of wolves.

And she was losing.

Help! she cried out through the mindlink, fruitless and dangerous, as now the Quori knew their were others. If she must be devoured and corrupted, that would suck, but any hope it would stop there was gone. Tyburn would be summarily consumed, and he would not know oblivion, but endless torment within the Quori's internal universe, she and he the only subjects available to suffer the wrath he wished to visit upon all of creation, taking licks meant for a billion, billion souls. Forever. So yeah, help please.

There was nothing Tyburn could do, of course. If the witches three were in the mindlink, and had advance notice, maybe they could snuff out her existence quickly enough to spare her the torment. But none of that was true. Gladius was a lost cause, and she was a millisecond away from joining him.

A long, millisecond, that kept on getting longer, the space between them doubling each time her pursuer covered half of it, forever closing, forever no closer. Time itself was been stretched, by some force even her devourer couldn't overcome. Somehow, it conjured a quantum of extra anger, beyond the infinity it already had.

A light, in the darkness. A flicker of hope: a Dream. Pure Dreaming, reaching out into the Nightmare. A sun shining into the void, its rays reaching her outstretched hand as she was a moment from the event horizon.

It's him.

She closed her eyes, and trusted him. Time stopped, and lost all meaning. The universe collapsed into a single point of intent, pure meaning, ultimate existence. And the Nightmare was gone.