Akaso

  The vessel resembled a tanker in general shape alone. Uhose vessels, it was structed in a borderline baroque style, and the iography of the Twin Churches abounded wherever it could fit. tless guns, harpoons, and armaments of other sorts that Krahe didn’t quite reize bristled from its hull. A huge wheel revolved in the middle, its diameter amounting to ohird of the vessel’s length. With seven spokes, it clearly imitated the world-wheel in design. Like the world-wheel, its interior ses were also hidden from view — she could only glimpse the eldritch meisms making up the wheel’s beh-deck ses.

  Despite the absence of any crew, the great ship moved ahead, slowly but tinuously accelerating by a means uo Krahe. She came to wonder how long it would take the ponderous thing to traverse the vast expanse, and as if in respos wheel began revolving faster, and in turn, the ship also began accelerating at a faster rate. When she lost focus, however, the ship began losing speed. Thus, Krahe made her way to the prow. There, she sat down, and honed her full focus towards her goal. Sauer’s home.

  The wheel-ship’s prow split the sea of acid without aance, and before long, the vessel reached such a velocity that it should have been thrown out of the sea — but instead, it simply rose above the waves and pressed ardless. It was then, just about able to see overboard from where she sat, that Krahe realized the ship was pletely surrounded by a barrier, ohat shared a property with wards in that it only became visible when actively defleg something, revealing itself to be a mosaic shell of golden light. The sea grew uneasy, stirring and crashing. Waves rose up from the sea to smash against the hull, but the wheel-ship tore through them as if they weren’t even there. From ten, to twenty, to fifty and a hundred meters tall, the sea threw tsunamis in Krahe’s way. Fshes, like lightnied within the waves, illuminating shapes that she couldn’t quite grasp. Even still, the ship cut through, because she willed it to do so.

  The further she pushed, the more she began to hear things that didn’t belong. inating from nowhere and everywhere at orange singing carried across the fathomless deep, devoid of words, somewhere between the sound of a human void the hiss of a speaker. At times it faded, distorted, an to sound blown-out. She could almost make out words within the sound, almost. Underh it flowed the sound of an an, tless notes in rapid sequence, yet f a smooth and sublime melody. The sounds of waves crashing against the hull, alongside the thumping of the ship’s maery, made up a percussive yer, seemingly by pure ce. A sense of tense seriousness pervaded the song, but its stant, unerring pace also held within it a mae-like certainty.

  Gradually, over the course of hours or perhaps days, the great ship traversed the vast bess. Waves were joined by storms that appeared from nowhere and vanished just as abruptly, and chthonian monsters of all kinds beset her during her journey, a, never once did the ship falter upon its course. Even the flesh, bone, metal and stone of tless titans yielded before the vessel’s golden barrier.

  The music yielded to something else. The sounds of footfalls, of tools rattling, even what sounded like a ventitor. Then, came the voices, fractured and frayed, but still mostly coherent.

  “...ifting. She’s surfag. How is that possible?! itive pressure…enormous…growing at a geometric rate. We have no choice…pull…”

  She reized this voice as Firminus.

  High Grafter Fidelia’s voice responded: “Nonsense. Spin up units twh four. Plug their diagnostid input cables into unit one’s auxiliary ports in alternating pairs. I will hahe recalibration.”

  The music grew louder and more frantid with each passing moment, the obstacles in Krahe’s way lessehe ship ceased accelerating, and moments ter, it ran aground. In the moments of final approach, Krahe saw a beach of glimmering, blue-glowing sand with man-sized rocks of the same blue, gss-like material scattered about. But then, the ship tore straight past the bead ran up an enormous dune, s through the air, and in all dires, an endless desert of glowing gss stretched. The ship came down upon a particur spot, smashing dowly o a mashup of things Krahe reized. It was the yawning crater that remained of Sanctuary, New Dixie, and at its bottom was Sauer’s hut, somehow. The gss desert now made sense.

  All of this bizarre sery, however, didn’t take her aback, aher did the fact she was entirely ued by the rough nding.

  No, it was the fact Sauer was there, looking up at her.

  At onnerved and irresistibly curious, Krahe slid down the wall of the crater. He looked… Right. Everything was there. Even the way he held himself was right, the seemingly zy stand squinted eyes that cealed a monowire-sharp mind, surpassing eveives ed to the gills while only having the absolute bare bones erface chips.

  Shrey hair, slicked back. Pale skin, untouched by the sun, bearing few wrinkles. Clothes in a style of techwear so old it had gone ba and out of fashion thrice over while Sauer had been wearing it. Everything short of the surroundings was on point.

  The old man looked her up and down. His grey-blue eyes cut through her like a hot khrough butter.

  “So that time has e, has it?” he said.

  “You… Should not be here,” replied Krahe.

  “Another of your tingencies. In case you couldn’t find me. You vinced me to impnt a hypno-engram of myself — how you achieved this, I don’t know. I, the engram, alongside the memory of my impntation, have been locked away until now. But now that this ee is active… It will not st long. Your subsind will erase ‘me’ soon enough, assuming something else doesn’t devour me first. Perhaps the monstrous raven, or your shadow. You really should be aware that there are other things in here beyond your self-identity, girl.”

  Krahe’s thoughts ran rampage. An engram tainer would have to be entirely separate from a living brain, but with her Moravec Transferred brain, it ossible to ect it more directly while retaining a safe degree of separation until the engram was needed. She hadn’t used suoded teology — its points of appeal didn’t fit her use case. The only reason to use it in the modern day was for cases like this, to y in wait and activate wheain prerequisites were met, such as a deep-iion sleeper agent hearing an activation phrase.

  Akaso