Nobody's Servant 1.0

Sanctum

It's good to have at least a little bit of a fear of dying, I think. It shouldn't be so much that it consumes and dictates your everyday life, but even for people like Nym and I, who have put our trust in the artificial to keep us nine-tenths on this side of that veil, there should be some awareness of how easy it is to slip through. There should be some drive to fight against it, to claw for our right to take pleasure in the comfortably mundane and all those stereotypically idyllic things a life in the Fray so infrequently offers.

But I guess, when I'm not being directly confronted with that revelation, forced to think about it in the present, I'm terribly, frustratingly, stupidly deficient in that fear. Nym must be too, because here we are; painfully aware of the fact that the soft whoosh of his turbine circulation and the sluggish purr within my chest are the loudest things in the room right now, with only fresh corpses for company.

The sight of them causes my hackles to raise, but it's not the scene of sprawling carnage I had dreaded. There's little room for relief here, however. In the wide hall, long walls of light provide a harsh glow through diagrams inverse-stenciled on their surfaces, casting long, twin shadows that drown out any trace of crimson, though the shape of spilled, spattered viscera is unmistakable.

Nym and I squint into the light projecting from atop the far doorway as we walk softly, partly out of caution, and partly out of what I assume is a shared sense of reflexive reverence for the dead. I probably shouldn't feel that way, given how badly I've suffered at the hands of Dominion muscle, but whatever made such short work of twelve of them, I've yet to ascertain just how easily it could give me that much more in common with them.

Scratch that, actually. As we make it out of the hall and into the center of the sanctum, there are plenty more. There isn't even a little bit of spell residue to pick up, each one hit the floor before they could even cast in self defense, and there's no evidence of weapon fire at all. Their wounds look older, long since congealed over. They haven't been here long enough to stink, and yet there is a scent, fossil and rich like the dust of a crypt.

I suppress the urge to flinch. It's impossible to shake the sensation that something is getting ready to strike me from my blind spot, or that I'm about to see Nym collapse moments before I do. For a moment, it at least becomes manageable, as my companion places his hand on my shoulder and offers me a reassuring smile.

I try to sigh out the tension as quietly as I can, gathering enough clarity to take stock of my surroundings as they are.

Ramps curving to other levels suggest a spherical shape to the sanctum as a whole, in keeping with its tendency toward rounded design. Walls and floors alike are made of dark metal grates, with thick tubes feeding through the space between them and the reinforced shell outside the globe. Tall shelving units made from what really must be Oleander's favorite wood given its prevalence extend radially from the center, capped with a flange of perpendicular light screens glowing in off-white, leaving enough space between each to walk between. Aside from the spotlight glare of the screens, and an even spacing of translucent pillars creating islets of total illumination, the directed nature of the the lighting in here leaves most of the place quite dim, as if to obscure it in dreary darkness while simultaneously preventing one's vision from acclimating to it.

There are books and scrolls in abundance here, but they're separated up into neat little stacks and piles of various sizes in places indicative of a process I cannot begin to follow. They comprise a minority of the contents; various articles and artifacts rest interspersed with them, some merely examples of familiar hardware and implements, while others resemble something familiar, but are composed of an unusual blend of bone seamlessly married to driftwood and copper.