Deep.
Dark.
Cold.
Gold, fabric eyes opened as Mine hung there, suspended midair of the training room. It’d been the safest place to attempt merging together with Isui as her avatar. The room had come out of the success relatively unscathed. For all that she was grateful for it, it was not an observation she lingered upon long. Instead she focused inward. The Au Ra felt stretched, full of bubbling power and an awareness she assumed only came from centuries of thoughts and experience upon this world.
J, though…
The piece of Garlean technology, she wasn’t so sure. Somewhere she was aware of the fact the component that gave her orders was fumbling over screams of protocols.
Protocol 2.16.
Together, however, Isui had found a way to make it just a whisper in the back of her mind. For now it was something she could ignore.
Can you?
It was the briefest flicker of a thought that was not her own.
I was hoping, little one, that this success would be the end of you. I can see now that I was mistaken.
“Isui?” Her mouth moved, form righting with the realization that they were not alone like this. Slowly she spun upside down, then upright, Isui halting their combined movements to better figure out the voice.
No, that’s not me. It’s the muttering voice I’ve been trying to make sense of for months.
“Where is it?”
With us.
You’re Siren, aren’t you? Or were… more powerful than before, now, aren’t you?
A moment more and the cold of having swallowed ice fell through the center of her. Confusion followed it, a feeling neither her own nor Isui’s.
“You’re confused about what?”
I was promised you’d destroy yourself. Outdated information…
“What do you want?”
So hungry…
You could be one of us, too. I was sent to kill… but why waste this?
Black oil slick rose a tendril from their combined figure, hurriedly beginning to crawl slinky end over end, spreading itself thin. Mine was no longer in any control. Limbs stretched, pulled, something else sliding over azure skin. It was cold. But at the thought it became different: warm, inviting, malleable. It was a hundred hands grabbing her body, holding to it as one, leaving prints behind that melted, filling in over every bit of fabric, over every scale and bit of skin.
Stop thinking.
“I don’t think mortals can just stop thinking.”
You can’t.
Unfortunate.
It became them where it lacked: body, thought, knowledge. Centuries of knowledge now it had with a focus upon the last twenty-nine years. And where oil slick palms held to them did mouths open and bite. For a moment J screeched into the forefront of Mine’s mind.
PRO-PROTOCOL-L-L-L —
Isui quieted the component tucked into the Raen’s head before acting, separating itself from Mine. Forcefully was the woman achingly torn from the deity, like velcro being slowly ripped apart. The black oil remained upon the auspice’s body. Isui, once having the last bit of her free, tossed her across the room.
It sent her through it with a shattering and splintering of wood, frame crumpling upon the opposite side of the hall.
And in its place did the auspice in its Aramitama form become engulfed by black, changing, roiling, spilling out thoughts and ideas that became reality. No more was the training room whole. It was like the bottom of the lake it resided within normally, blues and greens filtering down from a ceiling, scattering visions of the centuries upon the floor. Mountains, darkness, stars, the ocean. Times that happened and long since gone, things that had yet to be seen, mere ideas of mortals, wishes for the future.
As the merman figure of the deep sea swam in the middle of the room, something not Isui roared out of the auspice’s mouth.
“MY HUNGER WILL NOT BE DENIED.”
