She took a single, silent
step forward, closing the distance between observer and participant.
"The real question is
what we would build if the goal was not to find a new person to bleed, but to
make the bleeding unnecessary. If our purpose was to create a system so
inherently strong, so self-correcting, that it no longer required a single divine
heart to power it."
A silence followed her
words, thick as clotting blood. The Carapace shifted, the grind of his armor
the only admission of unease. Karla's mind was a visible thing, scrambling
behind her eyes, trying to find a purchase on the sheer, featureless cliff of
Promethys's logic.
They needed time to
process. For Promethys, processing was a constant, violent state of being.
The city crashed into her.
She was the bursting water
main in the sub-levels, feeling its own metal fatigue as a slow, agonizing
rupture. She was the merchant in the Ballast, the taste of his panic, copper
and bile, sharp on her tongue. She was the newborn in Spire Gamma, its first
breath a scorching intake of cold air, its future a branching tree of possible
pains.
This was the true curse. Not foresight, but
feelsight. A symphony of a billion potential agonies played out in her nerves
simultaneously.
A single fact. I need
one fact.
Her glazing eyes fixed on a
smudge on the grand crystal window. Grease, or perhaps a long-dried tear. The
morning light, fractured by the impurity, threw off a handful of tiny,
shimmering rainbows.
Seventeen.
She counted the distinct points of light,
forcing the number into the heart of the storm. Seventeen. It was a piton
driven into the face of the avalanche
Slowly, agonizingly, she
rebuilt the dam in her mind. She forced the torrent back into channels, into
cold, logical streams. The merchant's fear became a default probability. The
infant's cry became a population metric.
The bursting pipe became a
variable in a hydrologic model. She filed the ghost-sensation of drowning in
the floodwaters of a future that would now never be into a locked archive of
her mind, another scar on a consciousness made of them.
The Carapace finally found
his voice, a low rumble that seemed to vibrate through the soles of her feet.
"This... rewriting. It cannot be bloodless."
Promethys turned her gaze
upon him. The winter in her eyes was a lie; it was the stillness after a fire
has burned everything to ash. A faint, traitorous tremor, a ghost of the
overload, tried to start in her left hand.
She silenced it by sheer
will, pressing her fingers against the cold metal of the hololith's rim.
"All creation is a
transaction of energy," she stated, and her voice was a miracle of
compression, a flat line over a seismic readout of internal chaos.
"The old contract
demanded a single, perpetual sacrifice. A beautiful, brutal simplicity an my
new world will be more... efficient. It will not ask for one heart to bleed
forever."
She paused, and for a
fleeting instant, something like sorrow touched her features, so brief it might
have been a trick of the light.
"It will ask for a
little blood from everyone."
Without another word, she
turned and walked from the strategium. The echo of her grey robes didn't just
swallow the sound of her footsteps; it felt like it swallowed the light,
leaving the two Pillars in a deeper, colder shadow.