The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Inheritance

At long last, Sam healed enough to put one foot before the other and escape his claustrophobic canvas shelter. He immediately employed himself around the encampment, organizing resources and tending to the wounded as best anyone lacking a medical degree (almost everyone) could, but all shrieked to a halt when Moth and an ensemble of volunteers returned from an extended tour for survivors across the Waise Chain. Only six were located, and one succumbed to their injuries before arrival at post-Hendera, but they were greeted with ample fanfare. Only one, though, rushed to Sam at her first chance and grabbed his shoulders – whereupon they embraced anyway.

"Emma!?"

"Soal!?"

"—Sam! Just Sam."

"Sam!?"

"You made it!?"

In hindsight, he hadn't the faintest idea what pushed him to insist on his birth name since 9101. Perhaps it just seemed the right time to be reborn. Regardless, Emma may as well have been also.

"It's a very long story," she caught her breath. "But you know most hands are no match for mine. All told: Martian is alive!"

"Marsh!?" Sam was dumbfounded more by Emma's adrenaline than her revelations. "...Thank god. We thought we lost you both."

"The catch," she tutted, "is that the Ammeroap separated us – scattered us across the place, more than once. All I know is that he reached the Facility."

"I expect you're already enlisting me to the rescue party...?" Sam riposted.

Emma enlisted him to the rescue party. More accurately, he enlisted himself at her behest, in desperate necessity of a task that challenged his limbs and his mind alike, even if it were a retread of his encampment duties: salvaging material, salvaging health.

Expeditions had been commenced to the Facility ruins since 9101, but they were mostly cursory: disheartened evaluations of Oxley Smith's brainchild's corpse's corpse, deflected by fear of fruitlessness. Hemingway and Sulukrita's isolated rampages snuffed out, mostly by caving, any external evidence of internal yields – notably food, which dwindled by the day. Sogbury's canned reserves were on their last legs. Rumors now abounded of a farm in a bunker complex beneath the Facility, but in addition to seven years of abandonment, the Waise Wells' evaporation – which had strained Hendera's water supply for a month – would not be kind to its harvest.

Most of those on this dozen-person crew were tasked with pinpointing this bunker, should it exist, and identifying a sustainable reaping pattern. Sam and Emma partook in the digression for Marsh, assisting the majority if they could, accompanied by Irene (unsurprisingly) and Nathaurus, whose physical debilitation was as much a liability as her Soulless faculties were a must.

Nostalgia, too, encumbered them. Over hills fertilized by Slicers' powder, Irene tapped Sam's shoulder and shouted at their peers to wait. Nathaurus stood a ways behind, pondering one of her own steamboats, hauled ashore and capsized on soil during Hendera's battle with the Time-Bound Thief a year and a half ago. An inkling or two struck her, but not for so long the group was too delayed.

Hours passed, and the Facility drew near. The company ascertained quickly why their predecessors believed it a lost cause. To call such ruins prehistoric in form neglected the eons of elegant processes that fashioned those so described; these stretches, by contrast, were random and hostile to the eye, so abstractly disfigured that its visitors' souls ached. Sulukrita had desecrated his progenitors' grave in revenge, and then some, with astounding success. Spirits and aspirations fell.

Death's Door had fallen once, but somehow its ghost had fallen once more. The frame was rendered a line of heaps, and anything that suggested walls around it was banished thereto. The Congregation Chamber, sans ceiling and half-ground to dust, was more familiar: enough for Sam to retrace his steps to his first reunion with Marsh; his introduction to Irene's name; his learnings of hate and victory. Irene and Emma were at least as possessed by memory.