To Have It Back

See the ancient stone steps, bowed in the centre from the tramp of a thousand, thousand feet. See the statue’s foot worn to a brassy shine by the touch of a thousand, thousand pilgrims’ hands. See the white sand along the beach, a thousand, thousand tons of quartz and animal shells powdered into nothing. See mountains shrivel and rot, oceans run dusty dry, see the stars dwindle and fade.

See all this, and be drawn to a magnetic, monopole thought: I want it back.

“I just need a little more time.”

That is amusing without being funny. Time. He wants it back. Time and all that it brings.

“Take as long as you need,” Phaeron Senakhtyr murmurs absently, not looking at his interlocutor. He has waited this long. He can wait a little more. “Take forever.”

Imagine a painting, a canvas that stretches across the limits of your vision. It is almost entirely grey, save in two places only. There, to one side, a dark smear, as though the painter has stabbed their brush through the canvas, to give the lie to the illusion that a painting is anything but a thin layer over nothing. There, to the other, a tiny dab of light. Insignificant, yet all the more precious, for it is the only spark in the entire scene.

That is them. That is the Phaeron and the other, the Necron and the human.

“It is almost done, after everything we have … sacrificed.”

They stand in the deepest burial chamber in the necropolis, beneath uranium lights slowly irradiating themselves into unfeeling metal and oblivion. In the centre of the chamber, the man bends above the device he is constructing, the manipulator arms sprouting from his back working with insect haste.

The device is made of two stone beds laid side by side, and above them a metal arch like a crouching spider, swollen and bulbous with tanks of fettered firefly light. 

The man is made of blood and gears, bone and pistons, mechanical down to his soul and thus more wholly machine than any Necron husk.

For his part, the Phaeron is like the chamber lights, a thing of ancient time, inanimate yet burning.

“The trade. You promised. The trade.”

The Phaeron regards him without answering. Humans are fireflies wrapped in shells of smoke, brief grey blurs that smear across his vision. The world is something he perceives as one standing on the ocean bottom, looking up, the surface distant and wavering. He feels a faint twinge of envy for the human, an emotion made possible only because it intersects with his one desire. Soon. Yes, soon.

“A body for a body.”

There is no brake between the humans’ brains and their mouths, the Phaeron thinks. They merely voice their basest wants, needs, fears and desires.

As for the Phaeron, he has no desires, save one only: He wants it back. All of it. Everything. The one feeling he has left, the last tie to his withered stump of a soul. The final, remorseless, insatiable need.

“This was our world,” he tells the human. It cannot grasp the weight of his words, but he tells it anyway. “This was our home. The seat of an undying dynasty.”

A joke, to speak of undying in the house of the dead. Before they were Necrons, the Necrontyr were no strangers to death.

“It will be again.”

The human blinks, then bobs in mimicry of comprehension. It flutters about the machinery to hide its confusion, no doubt wondering at the foolish Phaeron who would trade away his immortality.

The sarcophagi of his brother and sister lie here, Amanbhakyr and Nekhebeth, and the dead wait patiently within. The Phaeron traces their likeness carved in adamantine and feels nothing, neither in his hand nor heart. He is sentience without a soul and has nowhere left to feel it.

That will change. He will have it all back as it was.

“It is ready,” the human says. “A life for a life.”

The Phaeron sighs to himself. Of course, the human has not understood. It is not lives they will exchange, but deaths.

“Is this what you desire?” He stretches his liquid steel limbs before him, turning them this way and that, letting them catch the pale jade light.

“You promised.” The human waves to the device, and the stone beds that lie within it. “Let us begin.”

The Phaeron waves to his attendants, and they grasp the human with unbreakable claws. The human yelps, then kicks and screams, protests, threatens, pleads. The Necron warriors ignore him, of course, for they lack even the ashes of a soul. They drag the human to the device and pin him to one of the beds. An obedient warrior lies in the other.

“Did you think I would grant you this body?” The Phaeron is amused again. “I promised you a Necron form, and you shall have it. With all that it brings.”

At a gesture an attendant activates the device. Emerald energy crackles. The firefly motes in one of the tanks flutter into action, pressing themselves against the sides as though attempting escape. They are sucked from the tank in a sudden, violent motion. Brilliant, searing light hammers down from the machine and pins both human and Necron warrior in place. There is a scream, high pitched and cut brutally short.

The light fades and both figures sit up. The human’s face is slack and void of emotion. The Necron’s visage is incapable of expression.

“Warrior?” the Phaeron asks, and it is the human figure that looks up, awaiting instructions. The Phaeron sighs in satisfaction. “Bring the vessel.”

The form they bring in upon a bier is a far more impressive specimen than the cyborg scientist: A post-human Astartes, power and might given form. Fitting vestments for his return to the living.

The Phaeron lies down beside it and gives the signal to begin. He will have it back, all of it. Even life. Even death.

END