Alf came and joined the staring, but it became clear to both of them I had no intention of standing. So of course they did the dick move and just lifted me up. “Ow,” I said, glaring evilly. They were, annoyingly, as unaffected by my look as I was by theirs. “How does this help?” I asked.

  “Encourages proactive thinking.” Nalfis reasoned.

  “Yippee.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Alf chuckled, taking pleasure in my misery like the cantankerous old git he was. Not that I was feeling cross or anything.

  “Should we check on Tove?” Alf rolled his eyes at the asinine question, but he rolled them all the way over to Tove, and then looked puzzled. I looked over as well, and my heart lifted, seeing her sitting up, eyes open.

  I scrambled over the short distance on all fours, along with the other two, as we gathered around in front of her. “Tove!” I smiled, waiting for a response. She looked at me, eyes vacant, mouth slightly open, and completely silent. My heart, which had so recently risen, began to sink again. “Tove?” I tried again. Nothing.

  “I was afraid something like this might happen,” Alf mused. Nalfis and I both shot him a look, and he continued. “Like I said, her body is… mostly fine. But I’d wager her mind, perhaps her very essence, has been completely overwhelmed by what we just saw happen.”

  “Overwhelmed?” Nalfis asked.

  “She was just exposed to the souls of gods-know how many others,” he explained, “all of them fused into one entity, and presumably conditioned, by centuries spent at the heart of a war machine, to have an inclination towards violence.”

  “So? Do you think it attacked her?”

  “Not exactly. I think she exposed herself to a mind far more powerful than hers, and it flooded hers like a river into a bucket. It wanted new orders, and it tore into her brain to look for them, breaking her apart to find everything it could and discarding whatever it didn’t need.”

  “Then what did it find?” I asked. Alf looked a bit pained as he responded.

  “Targets.”

  A bit worrying, that. “What about Tove? What’s left? How do we fix her?” I gabbled.

  “It looks like all it left was basic functions,” he said. “Presumably whatever is needed to keep her alive, and I’d wager the ability to recognise friend and foe.”

  “So that’s why those things killed Eoin but ignored us?” Nalfis guessed.

  “Probably. The reports said that Astrid turned the machine against the crew, so it must be possible to change their targets,” Alf reasoned. I jumped in before they could go off on a tangent.

  “How can this,” I pointed furiously at Tove, “count as living?! She can’t do anything!”

  “I only said it would keep her alive,” Alf replied. “The machine doesn’t need anything better than this, does it?”

  “Then what about Astrid? She stayed herself for months, and the Gnomes would have needed the pilot to have their faculties, right? So that they could take on new information and stuff.”

  “The Commander's report talked about Astrid's ‘conditioning’,” Nalfis mused, “so I imagine there was some kind of training process she underwent to resist this, maybe channel it into the right parts of her mind, allow information to flow both ways.”

  “So how do we fix her?” I demanded. Alf’s face twisted in discomfort again.

  “I… I don’t think I can,” he confessed. He continued quickly before I could start shouting or panicking, even though I really felt like it. “We know someone who should be able to, though.” He looked at me. “Should,” he stressed. “And we can’t contact her from here.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “But they can help?” I practically begged. It was strange – I barely knew Tove, but even in such a short time she’d cared for me, and who I was as a person, instead of a curiosity. And she'd done so in ways and at a depth that barely anyone else I could ever remember had. I didn’t know much about her, but I knew she deserved better than this.

  “I believe they can, yes.” Coming from a priest, I felt that was good enough for me.

  It helped to know Tove could get better, but we were still stuck up here. We could probably climb all the way back down, but we’d have to carry her all the way, and I didn’t even know where or how to get out at ground level.

  I remembered a sign from the corridor, the Emergency Crew Withdrawal Mechanism. That sounded promising, but it still left the question of getting there. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the word ‘emergency’. How did it work? Had it saved any of the crew? Would it just leave us standing on the Colossus’s shoulder or something equally stupid like that?

  I went over to the window to try and see if there were any visible hatches, slides, or other obvious exits it might send us out of. Instead of finding those however, I choked on my own spit as I tried to gasp in shock.

  An arm was rising. The cannon arm.

  The movement was agonisingly slow, like it was being dragged through honey. That said, it still had all the inevitability of a glacier. The huge cables I’d seen were sparking as lightning snapped at their edges, a buildup of static charge in the air finding an outlet and making it look alive with power. Alive and crackling and unstable. A faint crimson light was spilling out of the barrel, getting brighter and more red with each passing second.

  “What is it?” Nalfis asked. I was still spluttering and coughing, so I just pointed. It was enough.

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” I rasped, finally clearing my throat. Alf joined us at the window, and completed the trio.

  “Fuck.”

  “You said targets, right?” I asked Alf, getting a nod back. “So where are we aiming?” He thought only for a moment before answering.

  “Elvenden,” he said. “She’s going for Dendallen.”

  That name sounded familiar, and I racked my brain for a second before it came back to me. “Hang on, that was one of the names in the reports. He was one of the commanders of the forces of darkness, wasn’t he? A member of the Dark Triumvirate? What the Hel do you mean she’s going for Dendallen?! He’s been dead for centuries.” The two of them shared a look which unnerved me, prompting a “he’s been dead for centuries, right?”

  “That is what he wanted everyone to think,” Nalfis said, “but unfortunately, it turns out he is alive and well in Elvenden, where he is masquerading as the Elf Draidor, King Aidan’s high mage.”

  “And how on Midgard do you know all this?”

  “Because he was the one who killed our friend, and ultimately got us sent out here. He revealed himself when were attempting to break into the royal archives. He murdered Talani, murdered the guards, framed us for it, and interfered to have us sent out here instead of being executed. We don’t know why, but obviously he thinks we can be of more use to him alive than dead, somehow.”

  Questions were piling up in my brain like water behind a dam, and I struggled to know what I should or even could ask. I settled on the obvious. “Why were you breaking in to the royal archive in the first place?”

  “Because,” Alf sighed, “we were looking for the proof that a friend of ours has the truer claim to the throne of Elvenden than King Aidan does.” My head was spinning. “We knew it was in there,” he continued, “but sadly things went… awry, when we tried to get hold of it.” Revelations were being dumped on me at an unhealthy rate, and I was struggling to keep up.

  “Let me get this straight. You are all collectively on a mission to kill the Khan of the centaurs on behalf of the King of Elvenden, who wants him dead for some reason. You were forced into this mission as an alternative to being executed for treason and murder. You genuinely were tryng to commit treason – or I suppose it would technically be sedition in this case – by replacing the current King with one of your friends, who you claim is the true heir somehow. During your attempts to steal the evidence of this from the royal archive, you were interrupted by the court mage, who then revealed himself to be Dendallen, the ancient, mythically-powerful evil mage of the Dark Triumvirate, who has been thought dead since the end of the last War of Light and Dark. He killed your friend, killed some guards to further implicate you, and then managed to ensure you would be assigned to this task. You all have some amount of magic, and are considered powerful enough to actually be useful in committing a royal assassination. Is that right?”

  My incredulity had been growing as I said each sentence, waiting for one of them to crack, break character, or tell me how stupid and gullible I was. In spite of all reason however, they didn’t.

  “I think that summarises our last week fairly succinctly,” Alf said, nodding. “And hopefully explains why dear Tove might feel such anger towards Elvenden. She and Talani were particularly close, you see.” I chose to ignore the personal aspect and even the bit about ‘last week’ in favour of asking what I felt to be the important question. My heart was going a mile a minute and I was panicking slightly, doubt about these people and their purpose worming their way into my thoughts. I practically hissed the words.

  “Who are you?”

  Sammy xx