[4-12] The Mines

[Okor]

Dust and debris rained from the derelict roof of the cave, gnarled roots and pseudo-stalactites protruding from the earthen prison. The twitching forms of the recently deceased and wounded laid under the rubble and earth. The stench of death, damp ground, and flame suffused the air, an all-too familiar aroma to the ancient arsonist’s destroyed nostrils. Claws flensed of flesh clutched around the dead man’s treasure, the numerals scrawled upon it burning their way into his decrepit brain, the sickly morass of thought within his twisted skull struggling to internalize the code. What did they mean? The machine spirit of his armour was oddly silent, his thoughts unaffected by the slavering hunger and bloodlust engendered by the Data-born Daemon.

Without it, the ruined architecture of his thought processes were a lonely place, the turgid motions of his mind unaided by the electronic savagery of his oldest companion.

This island was an insufferable lair of mystery, with a puzzle lurking underneath every damned rock. He silently swore an oath to the Great Gods of the Empyrean that he would hunt down whatever annoyance insisted on fashioning these puzzles and personally feed them their own knees. That would be a relatively merciful and measured response to this madness.

The stimms coursed through his veins as his eye scanned his surroundings, seeking out any savages so unfortunate as to be entrapped in a confined space with him. Oh, how he hungered for the opportunity to make them pay for this assault.

A cry, reverberating off of the strange geography of their location, the echoes distorting and reflecting back upon themselves, the sinister sonics arriving from all sides.

A small figure rushed towards him in the darkness of their subterranean tomb, their arms outstretched as he struggled to make sense of the words they spoke through his combat-addled haze. A contagion-ridden claw went to the blood-drenched blade at his hip, ready to drive the time-tested weapon through the torso of his mystery assailant.

A shower of sparks, a long-suffering system aboard the wreckage of the plane finally giving into its mangled circuitry, a spray of superheated air falling from a shattered control panel, illuminating the visage of an ally.

Fiara.

He wrenched his hand away from his sword, the child slowing as whatever emotions that had first spurred their rapidity died. They skidded on the rubble strewn around the cavern floor, stopping before the mud-coated, mouldering mass of the marine. “Thank the Gods,” she spoke, “I thought everyone else was dead.”

Armoured shoulders rolled in desiccated sockets, mummified flesh scarred by the savage warriors tearing itself open further as he looked upon the child.

”Any sign of the others?” Okor queried, his voice like gravel doused in infested phlegm. A delicate pale hand tousled crimson hair as she pondered the question. “Not that I’ve seen. Did you think Vision and Marcus survived?”

A rumbling chuckle, the bass vibrations echoing off of the decrepit architecture of the cavern, lent a disquieting tone by the eternal state of disrepair his helmet was entrapped in.

”I would not... worry about them. Death is far from the worse thing that could happen to them on this damned island.”

“How could you say that!” Shouted the young Phoenix, anger flashing across her barely adolescent features. “They’re the closest things to friends we have here, and we’re not just going to write them off like that!”

Despite having no eyebrows to speak of beneath the rusted ceramite of his helmet, Okor still made a commendable attempt to raise one. ”They are primes. It matters… little what happens to them.”

There was a fire in the child, for sure. Their ballistic-adorned fists were clenched to her sides as she responded, perfectly willing to oppose the inevitably of Okor, her teeth grinding together as she uttered her opinion. “I don’t give a damn what they are, they’ve got a right to live like everyone else.”

There came an uproar of deep-bellied laughter, booming forth from the Plague Marine’s malevolent mass, filling the twisted contours of the cave. ”You don’t get it, do you? That which cannot… die, cannot live. No matter what tortures we endure, no matter how many fragments we are… reduced to, the damnable Demiurge that stole us brings us back. A Prime will always be a puppet on Omni’s strings, but you… You are mortal.”

She withdrew, her feet stomping down heavily on the earth, whether in frustration at her fate or Okor’s seeming callousness was unsure. “What the hell do we do now, then? Just lie down and wait for something to kill us? Because that seems to be an option for you!”

A skeletal claw pulled back the rack on the millennia-old bolter, the atomic-immersed shells within standing ready to slay whatever unfortunate being Okor found himself annoyed with. ”I thought our course of action was… evident enough.”

“Kill every last whoreson who dares to think themselves worthy of shedding our blood.”

851 Words out of 2400.