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Watcher’s eyes gaze upon the barren streets of an entombed city and finds the unexpected: signs of life. Here and there are pebbles and stone that have been scattered under wheel and heel, prints of boot-tread and the impressions of bony feet wrapped in thin cloth ground into the windswept dust.

These eyes gaze upon these people and judge them. Glass and steel watch their every step, track every movement as they breach garden walls, spilling the sweet scent of life into the graven air of this dead world.

Walls bring comfort, safety, but they are not hidden. Though they leave the gaze of the soldiers and eagles in the streets, upon a fountain a stone crow is perched, and through its eyes stares the Watcher.

Children trip and stumble as they flood past the great wooden doors, dart toward trees and bushes and flowers, plucking fruits and nuts and petals free.

They consume with great fervor, and even the eldest among them, adolescents at the cusp of adulthood, slowly give in to the same temptation that has ensnared their young kin.

Only the matriarch maintains her composure, her steel leer cast out from behind a black veil.

She does not find the Watcher’s servants, and as hours pass, even her guard is let down.

These people, they are not brave, nor cunning. They are not steadfast, nor stalwart.

They are not what the Watcher seeks.

Deep within the sanctum, another judgment is made.

A guest has made her mark on the Watcher’s charge, drawn up her schemes on how her people might live upon this salted earth.

Stadia to be covered in glass, their racing circuits broken up by till and plow. Tunnels to be villas and roadways both, sheltered from the acid storms above. Stormdrains directed toward old aqueducts, to turn these very same rains into the waters that will feed crop and citizen.

The Watcher has judged this child’s work, and it has found her thesis lacking.

Imperium is the bedrock of every circuit and network, it is the fabric upon which all authority is derived. The Watcher does not need to reach nor strain, for the Emperor has granted it power.

It speaks to this dead city and lets its judgment be known.

At its core the girl sleeps, sprawled upon the console.

Here, the Watcher’s gaze sees all. It sees the brittleness of her bones, the fragility of her flesh. Scars wrought by acid and dust upon her lungs.

She is not the citizen the Empire demands. 

And yet in her there is determination.

Once more, the Watcher’s voice is heard.

~*~

Gracilia awakens to red light flashing against her face, piercing through heavy lids and into her tired eyes.

Line after line flies past, distinct from what came before: crisp characters, meant to be carved into stone by chisel and hammer. Her work was written in the miniscule symbols of the senator’s tongue, grafted onto the vulgar dialect of her fellow plebes and cut into the densest morsels of meaning, a hybrid speech between the words of man and the codes of machines.

This is rare, and this is pure.

She sees upon the glass the words of the Empire—the mother-tongue. As she reads what glimpses her eyes catch of this strong, simple text, fear grips her heart.

No.

Impossible.

Gracilia’s hands dart to the keys, writing out her commands, only for her voice to go unheard.

She leaps from the terminal and runs toward the source; yet right as she reaches out for the nearest cable, the room goes dark. Coils whine and switches click as rows upon rows of machines go cold.

Bumps rise from her skin and her throat goes dry.

A silver light shines from the entrance.

It takes all the strength she can muster for Gracilia to cross the ranks of dead machines, all the will she has to contain the despair and rage building within.

The curtain closes around her. Gone is the serene white surface—she is surrounded by ruin, dust casting glittering shadows.

“Why?” she asks the emptiness; the Guardian is here, that she knows for certain. “Why did you take me in, only to cast me back out?”

An image of the Legatus’s son-in-kind appears briefly, and the city zooms away until seen in whole, the way an eagle would know it.

A brilliant red mark shines in the city’s heart, and circles are drawn out around it in even steps, fading with each new radius. Even still, the metropolis is awash in crimson.

“We can survive it. We have endured far worse.”

The city rushes up, and Gracilia finds herself in a grand arena, its floor turned to a field of wheat. She turns around, and finds herself faced with a familiar visage.

It is not… her. But it could be relative, a cousin, a sister.

A child.

Blue sky and star-speckled night turn overhead, and the girl grows into a woman with long black hair and fine robes. A brown-haired boy stands near her, his head up to her knee, her fingers intertwined with his.

The woman fades and her son becomes a man, an infant swaddled in his arms.

This girl does not grow in the way of her father and grandmother before her. Her leg is malformed, and one eye is clouded.

Time passes and this woman has a child of her own, one born with dark blood weeping from its mangled body.

“Stop!” Gracilia shouts.

The dark future fades away, and from the silver curtain the Legatus steps forth once more.

“There must be a way. Show me.”

He points past her and she turns around, eager, only to see the gates of the city and the ruined lands beyond.

“No!” She spins back toward him. “I brought them here for you! You were to be our protector! You were built for us! How can you keep us from this city, and demand I step back out into that world?”

The Guardian’s face is unflinching, even as her voice has risen.

“What will we do?”

The screen turns black. The curtain pulls away, and the door behind her slides open.

Upon the lift stands the lictor, ever stoic. With slow, plodding steps she walks before it, even as her heart grows heavy.

The sanctum closes behind her as distant machines hum. The platform rises for a moment, and then begins to sink.

It is a deep, long descent, the small lights on the lift casting long shadows against the tunnel above. After some time the walls rise away, revealing a great cavern. She can see, barely, the outlines of rugged, harsh machines. Weapons great and terrible.

But the lift does not stop here. They descend ever deeper into the earth, to a place that is hot and dry.

She can hear the turning of powerful engines, coils humming with immense energy.

I have been judged, she realizes, closing her eyes, and found unworthy.

Gracilia waits for the final moment, and a terrible sound pierces her ears.

She opens her eyes and looks above.

It is the scream of metal being torn apart, as steel robes are peeled away from the lictor. Her protector stands motionless as great claws rend its scratched silvered flesh and tear away its stoic visage.

Beneath the man of metal is machine. Gentler tools descend from all sides. Removing, repairing, replacing, rearranging. The skeleton is adjusted, changed, shoulders narrowed, pelvis widened.

She hears the hissing of air and the whine of hydraulics. The deep thrum of heavy plates stamped together.

Smooth plates of gleaming silver are pressed down upon the bare titan before her and forge from it a woman made of metal and armored in gold.

As the tools at last withdraw, Gracilia finds its visage is her own—a perfect copy.

No.

Almost perfect.

Her hand reaches up and falls on the bridge of her nose. She pulls as if to straighten it.

One of the tools stops in the air, and returns to the titan’s face.

Gracilia watches its work, quick and precise, and feels a stirring in her heart. Deeper than any fleeting emotion. An understanding of what she has sought in this world, of what her future must be.