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Gale couldn’t remember how they got there.
They were in the underground again with Sera finally in their custody. “Safe”—an unfamiliar word. A meaningless word for them, people whose existence had always been defined by battle. He didn’t understand why this word that he never had a reason to use existed in his mind, and yet it still rang with a hollow truth. They were “safe” in the basest concept of the word, although the difference between “safe” and “not safe” hardly mattered to him anymore.
It was just another blip of a glitch in his mind, words that he didn’t care about rising to the surface, words he had never heard nor known before, bubbling up unbidden. It was an invasion, a twisting happening somewhere deep within him—a lack of control he had never before known. A Bishop was nothing if not in control of his faculties, and since his purpose was largely cerebral, having control of his own mind had always been paramount. But now, that was lacking, his thoughts sliding from him like water off of a stone.
And it only slipped further, leaving his mind a mess of featureless static. A roar of rage captured in his chest, but he couldn’t even expel it; the alien emotion trapped within him, ringing endlessly, caged by his ribs.
He had never felt an emotion this strongly before, nor felt the need to express it—unfamiliar territory in the form of a beast stalking back and forth, its eyes burning bright between the bars, ready to strike out as soon as anything got close enough to hit.
He was trapped like this, with no one to fight, no one to kill. It was all he could think about, this all-consuming rage and grief, combining and feeding off of each other endlessly—this desire to make Serph’s killer pay. These thoughts had consumed him ever since they had found Serph, had watched him fade. That was the last thing he remembered before now.
This gap in his memory wasn’t typical of him—a Bishop’s purpose was to be a databank of everything they witnessed, to record and examine, to be endlessly-aware, and yet he couldn’t convince himself to even try to recall the journey.
Another aberrant feeling—he didn’t want to. And so he wouldn’t.
There was no need to think on the details when they didn’t matter. Even though a part of him knew that all information was important, the rest of him couldn’t bring himself to care. His own emotions were warring against his mind, causing him be something different than what he was built for.
He was never meant to feel loyalty.
The death of a leader shouldn’t rend him asunder—in the Junkyard they were supposed to serve whatever tribe fell their leader with no hesitation, no doubt. Gale knew they had all changed with their Atma, but he never truly allowed himself to think of changing. He was a Bishop, Atma or not, emotions or not. He had refused to even think of the possibility of Serph’s death because if it didn’t happen, this would never be an issue he would’ve had to entertain, but… it did.
And he could not move on, could not alter his allegiance, could not function without Serph in his life to dictate his actions, to respond to his analysis. All he could think about was the lack of Serph, the lack of the leader he depended upon, and his need to kill the one who had taken him.
Gale suddenly understood what the other Bishops must have been thinking when they had destroyed themselves. If he wasn’t already a monster, if he were back in the Junkyard, his own weapon would’ve been in his mouth already. But, as it was, he couldn’t convince himself to even lift an arm. He was already the antithesis of what he used to be—it was meaningless to turn against himself, now.
Without Serph, he had no purpose. And yet, in that, there was a purpose—to destroy. To let his anger consume him, to become nothing except his emotions.
But even with the protective flame of anger around him, the true feelings struck deeper, a dagger of ice thrust directly through his bones, piercing his heart.
Serph was gone.
Gale was leaderless, and never again would he know a leader. He would never have a purpose, never have that person in his life again. It was unfathomable and impossible—a future without Serph wasn’t an option, it wasn’t a future. It was only the cold endless black of nothing, a world where Gale couldn’t exist.
For now, he had his anger, he had his need for revenge, but after that there was only the endless expanse to look towards. Once the deed was done, there would be nothing of him left. No function, no need to exist. Without Serph, there was no future.
Gale felt himself growing ever-colder, and for once, he allowed his thoughts to cease.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cielo still didn’t think that any of it was real.
This all had to be some sort of dream, right? Even though Cielo hadn’t had the chance to have many dreams, he could recall a few, strange things that never made any sense. And this didn’t make sense, right? Serph was their leader, a guy who wouldn’t let anything stop him. He was more powerful than the rest of them were, and in any fight Cielo would’ve always bet on Serph, no matter how scary the opponent might have looked. Serph was clever, quick, and unstoppable.
This had to be a dream, because Serph would never lose.
But…the further they all ran, fleeing back into the underground, the more Cielo realized that…he wasn’t going to wake up. This wasn’t some nonsensical dream, this was all real. And it hurt.
He knew he wasn’t dreaming, but he still couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that he would never see his buddy again—the reality refused to sink in, even while the rest of his comrades were struggling with the same thing, the same loss, Cielo still felt like it had to be something happening to someone else.
But…it wasn’t. Serph was gone. Killed.
It wasn’t like this was the first time someone Cielo had known had died—far from it. But everything hit harder ever since they had been given their Atma, and…no one he had truly cared for had been lost before.
Even though people he had liked were gone, it hadn’t been Sera, Argilla, Gale, Heat, or Serph.
And…apparently Heat was the one who had done it!
But—it couldn’t have been Heat—it just couldn’t have! Cielo didn’t care that Heat didn’t try to prove them wrong, that he practically admitted to it—it wasn’t possible! Sure, Heat wasn’t the type who wouldn’t fight them, but he’d never…he’d never kill Serph. They had known each other longer than anyone else, fought side-by-side all this time, and for all their differences they were friends.
Even if Heat said he did it, there had to be something else, some reason he wouldn’t argue, some reason that…that all of this happened.
Cielo rubbed angrily at the tears forming in his eyes. He didn’t want to cry—Serph wouldn’t have wanted him to cry. He wanted to—he wanted to figure this out, to understand, to…to…
This just wasn’t fair—they finally had Sera back—she was safe! Sure, at the moment the girl looked dazed, and sort of creepily blank for the emotive girl that Cielo knew so well, but, of course she didn’t look alright! She was in shock, grief, as they all were! Their success was nothing with Serph gone!
Frustrated tears gathered at the edges of his eyes, although he quickly wiped them away—this wasn’t how it was supposed to be! His buddy should have been okay, by their side, leading as always. Heat should have been there too—he should have revealed that he had been fighting for them all this time, just on the other side. That sort of hidden sacrifice felt like something the gruff soldier would do—he never liked just listening to orders, but he still had the best in mind for them, even if…even if the rest of them didn’t agree. He just had a different way of doing things, certainly, and—and—!
No matter what, he would never hurt Serph!
For all that had happened, for all his objections to Serph’s choices and actions…Cielo couldn’t imagine a world where Heat would truly turn against Serph. Truly kill him. It couldn’t have been him.
Cielo couldn’t let himself believe otherwise. He wouldn’t.
Heat didn’t do it. He hadn’t abandoned them yet. None of this was over.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Argilla knew loss.
The bitter bite of it into her heart, the way it brought tears to her eyes alongside a longing for that which could never again be real. The pain of loss was a familiar thing to her now, a silent companion, and it had been so ever since Jinana’s presence was ripped from her.
Living with grief was terrible, and yet she could do nothing but move on. Even when she wallowed in it, thinking of her feelings in the quiet moments when she was supposed to be resting, the day always finally came, forcing her to rise. Inaction wasn’t an option when action was so often thrust upon her. And so, she knew this grief itself almost as much as she knew what it was like to live with it.
It was a lonely awful thing, an absence tugging at one’s soul. It was like drowning in a lake, immersed in water and sinking down, unable to breathe, and even though Argilla had never been swimming, had never even seen a large body of water aside from the rain of the Junkyard, she somehow knew this feeling, of being surrounded and dragged down into that deep dark.
It was a place that could never be escaped, and she felt as though she would never again know air, not until the day came where she joined those she had lost. Once she was dead, she thought, she would see Jinana again.
But…now she was facing a second terrible loss, and even after knowing what the first felt like, the pain the second caused was not lessened. She had thought it would be, as other emotions had settled more easily into her skin the more she had felt them, happiness, joy, and even sadness and horror. But this? This gut-wrenching loss?
It felt just as terrible as the first time.
There was always a part of her that hoped, that wished against reality that death was not permanent, that the one lost would return. That hope was what hurt the most, made the pain keep burning, because even though Argilla knew death and had killed countless people with her own hands, she still didn’t think that it would affect her. She still couldn’t grasp it.
Argilla pressed her back against the cold stone wall behind her, tilting her head upwards to look at the bare lightbulb illuminating the room they were hiding in. Motes of dust whirled around, barely visible in the air. Her vision blurred, tears starting to form in her eyes again. She had cried when they had first saw him, but she had held herself together for their escape. And now…in this room, the feelings all came crashing back. The light swam in her vision, and she felt the tears start to drip down her cheeks.
Absence—of all the feelings she had learned about, Argilla hated it the most.
It dwelled within her, unmoving, unchanging, a constant void in her heart, a blackness that kept pulling her in. Jinana’s was something she still felt, a shadow following her every moment. Now there were two, Jinana and Serph—both losses from which she would never recover.
Serph was someone she felt like she had always had. He was reliable, and he always listened to her even though he was her leader. He valued her, looked to her, cared for her just as she did him. He was a friend as well as her leader, a cherished person in her life. Jinana had been different, had been more in ways Argilla didn’t quite have words for, but Serph had been a constant in Argilla’s life in a way Jinana hadn’t had the time to become.
It was like a pillar had been taken out from under her, leaving her falling, endlessly. Argilla knew that the more one lived with this absence, the worse such a thing would get. The far-away sadness would only further sodden her heart, make her feel a loneliness, and a longing to be reunited.
Argilla did not bother to hide her tears, or to wipe them away. She knew she would have to continue, to reach the end of this, regardless of what that ending would be. That’s what Jinana and Serph would want of her.
She wouldn’t let their sacrifice be meaningless.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roland knew that these people weren’t quite human, but looking at them now, it wasn’t so clear-cut.
Gale was trembling, the usually stoic man barely able to contain his anger. Roland knew many people whose anger inflamed them to make stupid decisions, to jump into actions that were too risky, and they often paid the price for that. But…instead of being pushed into action, Gale instead was becoming listless. The rage was still visible in his eyes, in his shaking hands, but all of the fight had completely drained out of him, leaving him like an empty husk.
Sera was sitting with her back against the wall, her eyes blank and her body utterly unmoving. Even though they had finally saved her, and she had finally awoken, there was nothing there—she was in shock. It made Roland’s heart sink—he knew how terrible the wave of emotion would be once it hit her. Hopefully it would hit sooner rather than later—the longer the wait for such a thing, the worse the fallout would inevitably be.
Next to Sera sat Cielo, and out of all of them, he was the one who looked the most like he wanted to say something about all of this, to express his feelings openly. But, as Roland watched him examine his friends, his expression darkened, and the boy decided to remain silent. For as young as he looked, his maturity was as surprising as it was harrowing. These people all knew suffering, and while suffering was almost a banal concept in the modern day, it was no less difficult to live with.
Argilla sat beside Cielo, her head raised to stare up at the ceiling. She was present and aware, her eyes clear even as tears dripped steadily from them. She knew where they were and what had happened, and even though reality hurt, it wasn’t crashing into her unexpectedly. She was someone that knew sadness, found it familiar in her skin, and she was comfortable with that pain.
Out of all of them, she reminded Roland of himself the most. It was a strange moment of feeling kindred with her—it was the last thing Roland expected to experience in the aftermath of fleeing from the Karma Society.
He did not feel as such because he understood her direct pain—he did not know Serph perhaps as well as he should have, and he had no attachment to any of these people, admittedly. He couldn’t afford to, especially when they hardly regarded him or his own as people they concerned themselves with. But…the look in Argilla’s eyes, that deep intangible sadness, it was familiar to him. It was a look he knew could be seen in his own eyes—it was something he often saw in the mirror in the mornings. A haunted chill, the sort of exhaustion that only came from an endless march against the impossible, witnessing countless deaths along the way.
It was so jarring, to suddenly see that in her. To have this touchstone existing between them, all because of the loss of their leader.
Before, he had thought of these people as empty, as monsters, and yet…watching them learn the pain he himself had known for years changed something in his heart. Argilla’s expression unlocked something in him that Roland had long thought dormant.
Sympathy.
What he could see in each of them was so familiar that he couldn’t help but sympathize. Roland and the other humans living below had struggled to survive for so long, had lost so much as to accept loss as a part of life, even though it still burned each time. But each of them, Argilla, Cielo, Gale, and even Sera…they were experiencing it now, stark and painful. A wound, new and bleeding, vulnerability that Roland was present to witness.
He had considered them threats before, and then nothing more than tools, especially as they were mutually using each other for their own benefits. As people, they had seemed almost like children, in how they looked at the world, in how they interacted with their own emotions. They had all been strange in that way, giving him a feeling he could only describe as uncanny valley in how they were almost human, but not quite.
But now…this grief was new to them, harming them in a way that showed that they had possessed an innocence that no one else on Earth had anymore. Everyone knew suffering, everyone knew loss, and yet these people before him now were reacting as if they had just been born. They were like children, not constantly expecting the worst, not mentally preparing to lose every person they ever grew close to.
Roland almost wished he knew the rawness of that feeling, for the loss to be new to him, to have suffered less than he already had, even if the emotions were worse when fresh. What he saw now…it was something he had lost, in all of these years.
Pain wasn’t what made people human. But, finally…Roland could understand them. He knew what they were feeling, and what they were experiencing now was just what every person had grown to live with under the Karma Society. In this moment, this pain, these people became more human to him than they had ever been before.
Soon, the rest of the Lokapala would find them, and they would have to figure out how to continue on. It was a life Roland was used to—learning how to survive with loss. To keep going among mountains of corpses, all familiar faces.
For now, though, he would give them this quiet moment, allow them to feel this grief. He would be silent, for their sakes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sera was not quite herself.
Or, she was, but there was a distant muteness to her, a familiar thought process, leaving her twenty steps away from reality. What was happening on the “ground” wasn’t relevant to her, not when her eyes could be on the data, on the endless streams of colors and thoughts in her mind. They were formless things, indescribable and unknowable, a million de-centralized emotions fliting past her unconcerned eyes with each passing moment.
Something had happened, she dimly remembered, but the concept of “something happening” failed to find purchase in her thoughts. She didn’t know where such a line of consideration would begin, a “before” and an “after”. She could think at every moment, which meant that there weren’t really any moments at all—everything was all at once, always and everywhere—there was no such thing as “then” or “now”.
There was stimuli in front of her eyes and connected to the rest of her body’s sensory system, but none of that mattered, it never did. It was too hard to see it, too hard to exit the endless parade of thought and color.
For her, to see outside of herself seemed a waste. Her mind was better like this, revolving silently in an endless whirlwind, centered around one shimmering face.
One…familiar…face.
And suddenly, it all came crashing back into her—her memories—her being.
Serph.
He had been trying so hard to save her, ever since they left the Junkyard. And yet she…never saw those efforts, or him, until it was too late. You did it, she wanted to tell him, You saved me. But…none of her words would reach him ever again. He was gone and he would never come back. There was nothing that could be done to bring him back, a note of finality now added to the song of the universe.
Sera wished that she could change the tune. To preserve him instead of herself, to sacrifice whatever she had to if it would just bring him back, but…she knew such hopes were childish impossibilities. Even someone with powers like hers couldn’t stop reality from marching forward.
No matter what…there was nothing that could be done. They would all have to bear this burden, and she would have to…have to live with the fact that he died trying to save her.
It’s all my fault.
Putting her head in her hands, fingers threading into her hair, Sera allowed herself to cry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shiva continued his mindless rampage across the cityscape, leaving a bloody swath of carnage behind him.
It was effortless, thoughtless—there was nothing to consider except for the destruction itself, and sating his endless hunger. He didn’t want to think of anything—it was not his duty to think—only to fight. To kill and feed—to gain strength and reach heights that no one else could. (Would, his mind whispered).
There was a part of him, deep inside, that felt lacking—a part that was never filled, no matter how much he ate. Never satisfied, no matter how much he cut and killed. It simply sat in his stomach like a rock, a rolling hollowness that couldn’t be filled.
A place that was empty—where something used to be that had now been torn away. He refused to dwell on it, to think of what the identity of this missing part was, but still it tugged inexorably at him, a feeling that continued to encroach upon the corners of his psyche, slowly forcing its way into his thoughts. Every time it breached Shiva, he pushed it back, focusing instead on his violent path.
He didn’t want to know what these thoughts meant as he mindlessly plodded on, killing anything that got in his way. He wanted to deny them for as long as possible.
But, the feeling refused to go away, forcing itself to be acknowledged, a single word screaming in his mind like claws on metal.
Serph.
That traitorous voice inside him named the emptiness.
(What was any of this for if not for him?)
For every word his mind spoke, he ate. If he could just keep consuming, the voice would surely fade. There was nothing to think about except the hunt.
And yet, his thoughts still lingered on him—on them.
The others may have been content to turn their eyes from reality, to refuse to approach the world as it was, harsh and demanding—a place where only those with power would ever succeed. They had learned, far too late, what was necessary in this world.
That included Serph—without power, one was doomed to fall. He wasn’t like them, he would keep fighting and gaining the strength that was necessary for life.
He kept moving forward—he would always face the world as it was, even if it was ultimately empty.