The most terrifying thing about the Paladin was not that it moved, but that it shouldn't have been able to.
Kaelen watched the creature through the lens of his spyglass, though he stood only twenty feet away. The magnification revealed the microscopic tremors in the white enamel armor. It revealed the way the gold trim was vibrating, not from the wind, but from the sheer, overwhelming voltage coursing through the frame.
The Paladin-Husk did not step like a man. It stepped like a marionette whose strings were being pulled by a seizure.
Clang.
The gold-plated boot hit the metal deck.
Ssssshhhk.
The thick copper cables fused to its heels dragged across the grate, heavy and slick with coolant.
"Hold the line," Korgath rumbled. His voice was steady, but Kaelen could hear the strain in the Orc's throat. Korgath was a wall, yes. But walls are built to hold back tides, enemies, and beasts. They are not built to hold back gods.
And this thing—this hollow, electrified corpse—smelled like a god.
It smelled of ozone and petrichor, the scent of a thunderstorm trapped in a bottle. It was a clean, sharp smell that burned the nostrils, a violent contrast to the rot and rust they had breathed for weeks. It was the smell of absolute, sterilized authority.
" Unauthorized... presence..."
The voice coming from the Husk's helmet was not spoken. It was broadcast. A harsh, static-filled sample of a human voice, looping on a corrupted cylinder.
" Sector... Seven... is... secure. The... Light... holds."
The Husk raised the greatsword. The blade was six feet of star-metal, glowing with a soft, humming luminescence. It was beautiful. It was the kind of weapon bards sang about.
And in the hands of this tortured automation, it looked like a surgical instrument.
"It's not fighting us," Vanya whispered from behind the wagon. She was clutching her head, her knuckles white on her staff. "It's... it's broadcasting. Can't you hear it? It's screaming."
"I hear nothing but the servos," Kaelen said, his Audit scrolling frantically.
Threat Level: Catastrophic. Power Source: External/Infinite. Solution: Sever the connection.
"Korgath!" Kaelen shouted. "Don't trade blows! You can't tire it out! It's plugged into the planet!"
The warning came too late.
The Husk moved. It didn't wind up; it simply accelerated from zero to kill-velocity in a single frame of movement.
The greatsword descended.
Korgath raised his shield—the slab of iron he had carried through the acid rains of the Reach. He braced his shoulder, rooting his feet in the grate.
CRACK.
The sound was not metallic. It was the sound of a thunderclap occurring inside a closed room.
The impact drove Korgath to one knee. The iron of his shield groaned, spiderwebs of stress fractures appearing instantly on the surface. Sparks cascaded from the point of contact, blindingly white.
Korgath roared, not in anger, but in exertion. He shoved back, his pistons hissing, trying to throw the weight off.
But the Husk didn't recoil. It didn't breathe. It didn't pause to recover. It simply pressed down.
The copper cables trailing from its back pulsed with light. Energy flowed from the console, into the corpse, and down into the sword.
" The... Light... is... heavy..." the Husk moaned, the audio skipping. " I... cannot... put... it... down..."
"It's crushing him!" Elara cried out. She took a step forward, the obsidian dagger in her hand.
"Stay back!" Kaelen barked. He raised his crossbow. He didn't aim for the head. A headshot meant nothing to a battery. He aimed for the cables.
He fired.
The bolt flew true, striking the thickest cable connected to the Husk's left calf.
Ping.
The bolt shattered.
The cable wasn't rubber or leather. It was woven adamant, shielded against severance. It was designed to last for a thousand years. It was designed to ensure the battery could never, ever escape.
"Armor-piercing rounds failed," Kaelen noted, his voice flat with horror. "The leash is indestructible."
Korgath was buckling. His knee scraped against the grate. The greatsword was inching closer to his helmet. The heat radiating from the blade was blistering the paint on his armor.
"Vanya!" Korgath grunted. "Do... something!"
Vanya stepped out from the cover of the machinery. She looked terrified. The sheer holiness of the energy in this room was agonizing to her corrupted senses. It felt like standing on the surface of the sun.
But she raised her hand. She summoned the rot.
"Wither," she shrieked, casting a bolt of necrotic entropy at the Husk's elbow joint.
The grey magic struck the white enamel.
There was a hiss of steam. The entropy tried to eat the metal, to rust the joint.
But the Engine fought back.
The console behind the Husk flared. A surge of amber light rushed through the cables. The Paladin's armor glowed brighter, flashing with a cleansing heat.
Vanya's spell didn't just fail; it was incinerated. The backlash hit her like a physical blow. She screamed, thrown backward onto the grate, smoke rising from her hand.
" Corruption... detected..." the Husk droned. " Sterilization... protocols... engaged."
The Husk shoved Korgath aside with a casual, backhanded blow that sent the half-ton Orc skidding twenty feet across the platform.
The creature turned its visor toward Vanya.
It began to walk toward her. Clang. Ssshhhk. Clang. Ssshhhk.
"It's immune to the rot," Kaelen realized, reloading his crossbow with shaking hands. "It's a closed loop. As long as it's connected to the Core, it can't decay. It can't die. It's... preserved."
Preserved agony. That was the horror of it. This wasn't a zombie. A zombie is dead. This was a man kept in a state of dying, frozen in the split second of martyrdom, stretched out over a century.
Vanya scrambled backward, scrabbling on the floor. "Get away! Get away from me!"
The Husk raised the sword.
" I... am... so... tired..." the voice whispered, disjointed from the action of the body. The body was killing, but the soul was begging for sleep.
"The connection," Kaelen muttered. "If we can't cut the cable... we have to pull the plug."
He looked at the console. The cables terminated in a massive interface block, locked into the machinery with heavy brass clamps.
"Korgath!" Kaelen shouted. "The console! Smash the interface!"
Korgath shook his head, clearing the dizziness. He saw the Husk looming over Vanya. He saw the sword rising.
The Orc didn't grab his hammer. He didn't have time.
He scrambled to his feet and charged.
He didn't tackle the Husk. He tackled the cables.
Korgath dove, his massive arms wrapping around the bundle of copper snakes trailing behind the Paladin. He hit the floor, digging his heels into the grate, and pulled.
The Husk jerked to a halt mid-swing. The cables went taut.
SNAP.
The sound of the tension was sickening.
The Husk flailed, its head snapping back. It was like a dog reaching the end of a chain.
" Alert..." the voice screeched. " Power... interruption..."
"Pull!" Kaelen screamed, running toward the console.
Korgath roared, the veins in his neck bulging against his collar. He hauled on the cables, trying to drag the Paladin away from Vanya, or to rip the plugs from the wall.
Current arced from the cables into Korgath's armor. Blue lightning danced over his green skin. He convulsed, his teeth grit so hard they cracked.
"It burns!" Korgath bellowed. "It bites!"
"Hold it!" Kaelen reached the console. He saw the clamps. They were rusted shut. Fused by heat and time.
He jammed the stock of his crossbow into the release lever and hauled down.
It didn't budge.
The Husk was turning around. It was fighting the drag. It planted its gold boots and began to walk back toward the console, dragging Korgath with it.
It was stronger. Of course it was stronger. It had the strength of the earth itself.
"I can't... hold!" Korgath gasped, sliding across the floor.
Elara was there.
She wasn't looking at the Husk. She wasn't looking at Korgath. She was looking at the console.
She saw the massive glass tube in the center of the machine—the conduit where the energy flowed from the earth into the cables.
"Kaelen," she said. Her voice was calm. Too calm. "It's not a machine. It's an IV drip."
"Elara, get back!"
"It's feeding him pain," she whispered. "To keep him awake."
She climbed onto the console.
"What are you doing?!"
Elara raised the obsidian dagger.
"I'm waking him up," she said.
She didn't attack the cables. She attacked the glass conduit.
She drove the shard of the Void into the glowing amber tube.
CRASH.
The sound of shattering glass was followed instantly by a sound that felt like the world ending—a deep, resonant THRUM that dropped in pitch.
Woooooooooooooom.
The amber light in the conduit died. The flow of energy was severed. The "blood" of the machine spilled out—not liquid, but a dissipating gas of raw mana.
The effect was instantaneous.
The Paladin-Husk froze.
The lightning arcing over Korgath vanished.
The amber lights in the room flickered and died, plunging them into the grey twilight of the emergency backup strips.
The Husk stood perfectly still for a second. The hum of the greatsword faded. The blade turned dark, dead grey.
Then, the strings were cut.
The armor collapsed.
It didn't fall like a warrior. It crumbled. The knees gave way, and the massive suit crashed to the deck, a heap of empty metal.
Silence rushed back into the room. A heavy, suffocating silence.
Korgath released the cables. He lay on his back, panting, smoke rising from his chest plate.
Vanya was curled in a ball, weeping softly.
Kaelen stood by the broken console, staring at the heap of white armor.
"Is it... dead?" Elara asked. She was still standing on the console, glass crunching under her boots.
Kaelen walked slowly toward the fallen Paladin. He kept his crossbow raised, though he knew it was useless.
He reached the body.
The helmet had been knocked askew by the fall. Kaelen used the barrel of his crossbow to nudge it off.
It clattered across the grate.
They all looked.
There was a skull inside. But it wasn't just bone. The skin was dried, stretched tight like parchment over the features. Wires—fine silver filaments—were threaded through the jawbone, through the eye sockets, hooking directly into the desiccated brain stem.
The mouth was open in a silent scream.
But as they watched, the faint amber light in the wires faded. The silver turned black. The tension in the jaw released.
The skull seemed to settle. It looked less like a scream, and more like a sigh.
"He was dead a long time ago," Kaelen whispered. "The machine just wouldn't let him leave."
He looked at the cables running into the back of the neck.
"This wasn't a guardian," Kaelen said, a note of revulsion entering his voice. "This was a sacrifice. They plugged a man into the volcano to keep the lights on."
Vanya crawled over. She didn't touch the body. She couldn't. But she looked at the wires.
"It wasn't just power," she said, her voice hollow. "It was will. The Engine needed a directive. 'Protect.' A machine doesn't know what 'protect' means. Only a soul knows that. So they used his soul as the software."
She looked up at Kaelen.
"We just deleted the software, Kaelen."
Kaelen looked around. The console was dead. The hum of the Engine was gone.
The floor beneath them shifted.
It was subtle at first. A vibration. Then a lurch.
"The stabilizer," Korgath rumbled, sitting up and clutching his ribs. "The Engine kept the island afloat. It kept it from drifting into the severence."
"We killed the pilot," Kaelen said.
He walked to the edge of the platform and looked down into the shaft.
The amber glow that had illuminated the depths was gone. It was just a black pit now.
And from that pit, a cold wind began to rise. Not the sterile air of the Engine, but the raw, freezing suction of the Void.
"We didn't restart the Engine," Elara said. She hopped down from the console. She looked at the dead Paladin, then at the obsidian dagger in her hand. "We turned it off."
"We freed him," Vanya said fiercely. "Look at him. He's at rest. It was torture, Elara. Infinite torture."
"I know," Elara said. "But now the island is falling."
Kaelen checked his Ledger.
Day 15. Objective: Breach the Engine. Status: Complete. Consequence: Total System Failure.
He felt a strange, cold calm wash over him. The math was finally simple. There were no variables left. The probability of the island staying aloft was 0%.
"The Archivist," Kaelen muttered. "He tried to warn us. 'To wake it is to torture it.' We didn't wake it. We put it out of its misery."
He turned to the group.
"We have to go," he said. "The orbit is decaying. Sector 7 is going to crash. We need to get back to the bridge."
"The bridge is twelve miles away," Korgath groaned, using the railing to pull himself up. "And I... I am cooked, little man. The lightning... it scrambled my servos."
Kaelen looked at the Orc. Korgath was sparking. His movements were jerky.
He looked at Vanya. She was magically exhausted, terrified, and sick from the proximity to the holy energy.
He looked at Elara. She was just a child with a knife.
And he looked at the dead Paladin.
Kaelen walked over to the corpse. He knelt down. He reached into the armored gauntlet of the skeleton.
"What are you doing?" Vanya asked.
"Scavenging," Kaelen said, though his voice lacked its usual pragmatism.
He pried the dead fingers open. He took a heavy, brass key-card attached to a chain around the skeleton's wrist.
He also took the greatsword.
It was heavy. Immensely heavy. Kaelen could barely lift it with two hands.
"Korgath," Kaelen said. "Take the sword."
"It is dead iron," Korgath grunted. "The magic is gone."
"It's still sharp," Kaelen said. "And it's Paladin steel. It might be the only thing that can cut through the rot on the way back."
Korgath took the weapon. He swung it once, testing the balance. It was clumsy without the powered assist of the armor, but it was a slab of metal that commanded respect.
"We leave," Kaelen ordered. "Now."
They walked out of the Antechamber. They passed the Mercury Gate, which hung open, lifeless and grey, a puddle of lead on the floor.
They stepped back out into the Sink.
The silence outside had changed.
The machinery wasn't just quiet anymore. It was settling. The ground groaned. Massive gears shifted as the tension left the system. Towers in the distance began to lean.
The sky above was darker. The purple fog was swirling, forming a vortex directly over the crater.
They walked back to the wagon in the dim light. The Strider-beasts were panicked, pulling at their tethers. They knew. Animals always know when the ground is about to die.
Kaelen climbed onto the bench. He didn't look back at the Engine. He didn't look at the dead hero they had left in the dark.
He snapped the reins.
"Run," he whispered.
The wagon lurched forward, abandoning the heart of the world, racing against the gravity that was finally coming to claim its due.
And in the back of the wagon, Elara sat watching the black tower of the Engine recede. She imagined the skeleton inside, sitting in the dark, finally sleeping.
She hoped his dreams were quiet.
But in her heart, she felt the dread rising. Because they had stopped the torture, yes. But they had also killed the lighthouse.
And now, the dark was the only thing left.