Optional Music to Accompany the Chapter:
2WEI, Joznez, Blackway - "Take the Crown" ft. Tiffany Aris (Official Lyric Video)
https://youtu.be/s1OGz6ndeYA
Chapter 18: Voices
Late Morning - Early Summer : Year 0 | Month 0 : Sector J14
World: Leviathan | Rank: ERROR | Population: 23
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(Back a moment)
- Bella ~
Fear.. an enigmatic impulse rising from somewhere beneath consciousness—a last-ditch effort to increase one's odds of survival by shoving reason aside, so the body can move before the mind has time to argue.
Its a powerful tool. A necessary asset of every prosperous species.
But while able to push the body and mind beyond their limits to increase the odds.. sometimes the wall is too tall...
...And fear becomes crippling.
Watching the wyvern's maw widen over me, I couldn't move no matter how loud my body screamed.
Heat rolled off its tongue in sheets, its breath coming out like ripples from a furnace while its pupils, like slitted cracks in space, mercilessly consumed everything...
All light.. and all hope...
Anticipating death, the memories that I only just awakened repeated themselves, as if to make sure they were carved deep into my soul.
But time waited for no one.
Before recollection could reach its end, light and sound split reality. *CCCRRRRACKK—BRRRRMMMM*
With a wash of heat that could only come from a descending sun, my eyes, thought to be digital lenses, dried and blistered.
*CCCRRRAAAA-* And with a noise that could only come from space itself screaming, a shockwave so intense it reduced thoughts to mush ripped through my body, and in a blink, my eardrums, thought to be microphones, exploded.
Before recognition could form, darkness and silence overtook everything, leaving my mind to focus on the mess of sensations filling my body... The pain of tearing muscle and the boiling of flesh I shouldn't have had...
My circuitry didn't understand...
But it didn't need to.
In my last moment of blurring vision, the hulking skull above me vanished as if thrown aside, and the meat around me lurched like a ship in a storm.
It was... -A chance..?-
Hearing a deafening roar rip through my skeleton, the voice beneath my circuitry took control again.
I needed to hide... With the wyvern occupied, I needed to bury myself....
But before my muscles could so much as twitch.. the world tilted.. and rather than slipping, I was thrown into the cool, slimy darkness beneath.
In that place, without any other senses or stimuli, my mind amplified whatever signals it was receiving by thousands of times, from the ripples and shocks of the fight outside.. to the searing pain ripping through my body.
It was cold, wet, and foreign.. but at the same time, it was incredible—a blend of sensations my circuitry should have been incapable of understanding, yet we're defined in the depths of my mind.
But then.. hunger returned. The same gnawing force from the moment I first awoke.
My inner voice screamed to resist, but thought itself was the first thing it consumed.
*THRUM* Impacts continued to echo from outside—crisp snaps of bone dancing with the collisions of bodies I couldn't imagine the scale of...
But my mind, like that of a starved dog, tuned it out as I sank my teeth into the flesh that surrounded me...
Rip.. tear.. consume...
With every bite, a soothing wave washed through me—ease to the strain, and cool to the heat.
But my mind never stopped...
Until finally.. it too, drifted to silence...
...
When I finally awoke, I could hardly recall anything after the moment the wyverns maw opened above me, finding myself in a slick, slimy space with no recollection of how I got there. -H..Huh?!-
At first, I thought I had been eaten, with the pungent smell of fecal matter mixing with something acidic, I thought I was somewhere in the wyvern's bowel, but then my mind tuned into the sounds around me.. and rather than hearing the breaths of a huge wyvern.. I felt the thrum of something smaller...
A beat not from within the flesh around me.. but from within my chest...
I was alive... Not just with the clicking of circuits, but with the breath of life... Breath I struggled to comprehend through the collision of blurry memories, and the static-suffocated command of the mind I was once dictated by. -What.. happened..?-
Eventually mustering movement, I reached out my paw, feeling around within the darkness before deciding to oppose the pull of what my inner voice defined as gravity.
Without feeling tremors from anything else moving outside, my soul didn't object, so I climbed out, squeezing through the cracks between tubes of flesh before finally, light reached me.
-Woah...- Squinting against the sudden flood of brightness, I dragged myself out of the gore-soaked cavity, and onto the hardened char with a lurch of effort, letting wind run its cool fingers through my fur while the stench filling my sinuses was replaced with the cool freshness of nothingness...
It was.. nice.
It was.. quiet...
For the briefest breath, I let it wash over me—soothing the burning in my eyes, easing the aching in my throat, and drying the slimy fluids off my body—before turning my gaze to the prairie that stretched into infinity.. and to the hulking corpse of the wyvern that once geared to eat me.
It's wings were mangled and twisted, sparkling blue blood still freshly steaming off its scales while pooling and killing the grass beneath its skull.
The sight alone sent ripples through the silence.
That fleeting warmth—the wind, the freshness, the small illusion of peace—vanished in an instant, strangled by awe set by the carcass sprawled across the prairie like a fallen mountain.
In a blink, my chest tightened—the deeper voice screaming warnings I couldn't interpret—red flags flashing without labels, instincts pointing in all directions at once.
And then—"...You lived."
*FWIP* Feeling fear rip up my spine, I spun around so fast my paws nearly slipped on the blood dripping from them, only to find my pupils trapped within the gaze of another.
Casually sittinf atop the half-collapsed carcass of the bison I had fallen from, a woman framed by sun-glistening blood laid her gaze on me.
The voice from my memories shuddered at the sight.. her silver eyes carrying a lifelessness I couldn't fathom.
But then.. my circuitry too awoke to form definition in the static.
Evren.
It was the same woman my circuitry remembered sharing the suite with—the one whose mere presence weighed on me like a command I could never disobey.
She was.. a friend...
But my inner voice didn't believe it. -Dangerous!- It shrieked in panic, pulling my tail low and flattening my ears with submissiveness I couldn't oppose.
Yet she didn't speak again... Just sat there, silver eyes half-lidded, as if not looking at me.. but through me.
Then, in that moment, my tail tucked tighter, and my head split. -Dangerous! Too dangerous! Run—bow—hide!-
The voices clashed like fighting tides. Both screaming so loud I thought my skull would split.
But my body didn't respond to either...
It didn't have time.
Before I could budge, she tilted her head, and a flicker of light appeared in her eyes. "What a fascinating little thing, you are..."
The words sent a chill down my spine, but at the same time, suppressed the voices enough for my mind process a thought through the noise...
To form a thought on its own... "Who..." My voice slipped with a rasp. "What.. am I..?"
Squinting slightly, the woman let her gaze drift over my body for a moment before hopping off and walking over—the clashing voices growing louder and louder with every step before reaching out her hand as if commanding my mind to split...
But then.. silence...
The moment her touch reached my fur.. stillness suffocated the noise.
Stillness that could only be disturbed by her... "I'm wondering the same question."
Tilting my head up, she lifted my lips with her thumb, tracing my ivory-white canines before moving to the pink gums that connected them to metal. "You're a little different from what I expected..." Her eyes—like sharpened blades—didn't blink. They studied and dissected everything, as if peeling away my metallic fur and metal skeleton to see the flesh and bone beneath.
Until finally, her eyes met mine...
..and I found definition in their reflection... "Where does your fear come from?"
Instinctually jolting and breaking out of her grip as if by the twitch of a chill, the voices returned, screaming, clashing until my head spun. "I…" I faltered in a blink, breaking into a growl that almost sounded like static before forcing a thought through the screams. "…I don't know!"
But then, the moment her touch lifted my snout again, silence returned.
"Hmm..." Passing an idle mumble without a thought, I felt it echo through the stillness.
And as if memorizing the pattern of ripples, a definition formed, not from within my soul or circuitry.. but from my own mind.
Curiosity.
And though only just defined, it echoed leagues through my mind, sparking the formation of thoughts, questions, and other definitions.
Until finally, words formed. "Why.. did you help me..?"
Though I wasn't sure how, I could define certainty with the thought that she killed the titans littering the ground around us.
But my question only made her eyes widen for the first time. "Well..." As if somehow stumping her, confliction crept into her gaze. "I found you interesting, is all..."
It was the truth.. but somehow my mind couldn't bring itself to believe it.
Turning my head to look at the behemoths scattered around us like ridges of a mountain range, I left just her fingers on my cheek, and with it, the voices returned.. but this time muffled. -'Interesting'...- The word echoed through them both, each warranting a different command for how I should react...
But instead of taking either, my mind formed its own response...
Its own answer.
"You're.. lonely... Aren't you..."
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