Sunless Ezthamic's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

The sleeping chambers glowed around Ezthamic. Hundreds of faces, all his own, waited behind the glass. He could not tell which one woke first. He could not tell if any of them had. Eight stood beside him, scarred and calm, the one copy who bore no number and no golden cracks. "Stop counting," Eight said. "You want an original. There isn't one. But there is something older." He walked toward a sealed door in the far wall, utterly blank, and pressed his palm to it. "The First Chamber. The Engine built everything else to hide what's inside." The door opened. The room beyond had no marks at all. In its center floated a cracked black crystal, taller than a man. Shapes moved inside the fractures. Ezthamic stepped closer and saw his own body, naked and faceless, forming and breaking, forming again. "This is before the records," Eight said. "Before the first one the Engine admits to. It kept trying to make him. It failed and tried again." The crystal flared. A figure stepped out of the light. Same face. Same dreadlocks. But scarred, hardened, one arm a living blade of black bone. Past Ezthamic looked at him without surprise. "You again," he said. "Or someone wearing me." His red eyes went to the chambers behind. "It never stopped. It won't stop for you either." The floor shook. A wall of the vault burst inward. A huge mechanical thing forced itself through, iron plates and red lights, claws scraping stone. The Engine Avatar. Its eyes swept the room, the crystal, the sleeping copies, and Ezthamic understood. It had come to erase all of it. Eight pulled Past Ezthamic back. "Run or burn," Eight said. "Those are the only two it leaves." Ezthamic turned to the cracked crystal. He did not run. He drove his hand into the fractures and pulled the memory inside him. Heat tore through his skin. His golden cracks widened and burned. His dead eye split open as a glowing eclipse. His markings turned black and gold, and his body swelled with strength that was not only his own. He had never worn this shape before. He named it as it took him. Sunless Ascension. The Avatar lunged. Ezthamic caught its claw and snapped the arm off. He struck its chest once. The plates caved. He struck again and the red lights died. The machine folded to the floor and lay still. Silence. Eight stared at him, truly surprised for the first time. "So that's what the crystal was holding." Past Ezthamic lifted his blade arm and pointed it at the sleeping faces. "Listen to me, whatever you are. If it recreated us, then something needed us to forget what came first." His form thinned back into the light. "Find what it was afraid you'd remember." The crystal went dark and crumbled to dust. Ezthamic stood changed, no longer hunting an original. Now he hunted the thing the Engine feared.