Chương 87: 86: Fluctuations

Katherine watched him from the corner of her eye. The clean line of his jaw, white hair spilling over his forehead, the sapphire-studded grills flashing faintly whenever his lips parted, the rings glinting across elegant fingers, painted nails resting against the headphones around his neck. He looked impossibly fashionable for someone who carried enough rage to fracture mountains. He was beautiful. Far too beautiful.

The kind of beautiful her mind instinctively rejected because accepting it would complicate everything. She looked away. Whatever she was feeling wasn't love. It wasn't even attraction. It was... something else. Curiosity. Unease. A strange awareness that she wanted to understand the man walking beside her, and that realization frightened her far more than she cared to admit. Katherine found herself thinking: I died today. I remembered who I was. I figured out how to break reality with words.

And now I'm walking through a fortress from hell carrying my best friend's consciousness inside a prosthetic leg while a god floats beside me listening to music.... I can ask him about his favourite songs. She nudged Clock with her elbow. He glanced down, raising a single eyebrow as he slid one side of the headphones off his ear.

"What kind of music?" she asked.

"What?"

"Music. You can't put headphones on halfway through a conversation and expect me not to ask." He studied her for a second before shrugging.

"Anything loud. Anything with a fire beat. Or something sad. Good acoustics. Music that sounds like it was recorded inside an empty cathedral at three in the morning." Katherine nodded thoughtfully.

"I like reggae. And metal." She blinked, surprised by the certainty of the memory.

"I remember that now. Metal in my headphones on the Metro. Reggae in Marc's battered little car with the windows down while we drove along the Seine at midnight." Her smile faded.

"It was... nice."

"Grunge," Butter declared.

"Rock. Anything with an angry guitar."

"I'll make you a playlist," Katherine promised.

"When we get out of here. It'll be terrible. No theme. No consistency. Just musical whiplash."

"I'm holding you to that." They walked a little farther before Katherine bumped Clock again.

"So loud and sad?" she teased.

"That's only two moods. Pick one." His lips twitched.

"I don't pick. I contain multitudes."

"Wow. That's painfully pretentious."

"You asked." She grinned despite herself. There was something wonderfully absurd about all of it. A resurrected girl, a sentient prosthetic leg, and a floating god wandering through a nightmare fortress while debating music tastes. For a fleeting moment...... everything almost felt normal. The feeling vanished as they rounded the next corner. Katherine stopped so abruptly Clock nearly drifted past her. The chamber beyond was a graveyard.

Broken technology carpeted the floor in rusting drifts of metal and shattered glass. Experimental flying cars hung from chains like butchered carcasses. Androids slumped against walls with their chests split open, intricate machinery exposed like frozen organs. Flight boots lay scattered in tangled heaps, while dozens of crystalline time-warper devices resembling ornate music boxes sat piled together, their mechanisms dark and silent.

"Holy Frost," Butter whispered. Clock drifted farther inside, violet eyes calmly sweeping across the devastation.

"Imagine what they're using now," he murmured, "if this is what they throw away." His attention settled on a sleek, dark-metal yo-yo resting atop a nearby bench. He picked it up, tested its balance with an absent flick of the wrist, nodded once, and quietly slipped it into his storage void.

"Clock," Butter said suddenly, excitement bursting into her voice.

"The mouth guard. The shimmering one. Grab it." Katherine followed her gaze and immediately recoiled. The object shimmered with impossible colours across polished silver and pale opalescent alloy. It was also, unmistakably...... a mouth guard.

"No." Butter sighed dramatically.

"Sylvie."

"No."

"My darling."

"No."

"Light of my afterlife."

"Still no."

"You weren't worried about hygiene while bleeding to death."

"That was different."

"You weren't worried about germs while my brother was trying to crush your windpipe."

"Also different."

"But now, when I've found tactical equipment worth stealing, suddenly you're worried about cooties?"

"It's been inside someone's mouth."

"It's a conceptual resonance dampener that interfaces with the user's signature to prevent overload during high-stress engagements," Butter corrected indignantly.

"It's worth more than everything else in this room combined."

"It's still been inside someone's mouth."

"How do you even know whose mouth?"

"I don't!"

"Exactly!" Katherine stared accusingly at the prosthetic.

"How do you know what it is?"

"I read," Butter replied with unmistakable smugness." Now pick it up before I learn how to hop over there myself." Katherine turned hopefully toward Clock. He was crouched beside a dismantled android, politely pretending to be fascinated by its exposed circuitry.

"You're no help."

"I'm helping," he said without looking up.

"I'm letting her win. It's usually the fastest way to restore peace."

"I heard that."

"I know." With the heaviest sigh of her life, Katherine approached the bench. She pinched the mouth guard between two fingers, holding it as far from herself as physically possible. It was warm.

"Why is it warm?" Neither of them answered. Making a face that suggested she was disposing of radioactive waste, Katherine dropped it into the satchel and immediately wiped both hands on her dress.

"Happy?"

"Ecstatic," Butter said.

"Now let's keep moving. I'd like my head back before you two start making heart eyes at each other again." Katherine's face ignited.

"We were not. There were no heart eyes."

"Mm-hm."

"Butter." Butter's laughter echoed after them as they left the chamber, bright, irreverent, and gloriously alive. — Behind them, the graveyard of discarded technology faded into silence, its ghosts undisturbed, its secrets left to rust. The fortress continued its endless mechanical hum while, somewhere deep in the west wing, a dying star of a man sat with his trophy and his hollow victory, waiting for the storm he had summoned. They moved on.

Katherine's cheeks were still warm, but she kept her eyes fixed on the path only she could see, the fortress unfolding across her mind like a map carved into old scars. Clock floated beside her, only inches above the stone. Quiet. Calm. A storm wrapped in white hair and shattered violet eyes. When he drifted a little closer, close enough that their shoulders almost brushed, she didn't move away. The wolf was waiting ahead.... The corridor stretched onward, the scrapyard now far behind them.

The lights here were older, flickering with the tired rhythm of machinery surviving on borrowed years. Katherine's internal map shimmered faintly across her vision. Thornburgh's presence burned in the west wing, growing warmer with every step. Clock had traded the headphones for earbuds, one in, one out, the compromise he'd made after her teasing. His attention never left the corridor, yet something about him had changed. His shoulders weren't wound so tightly anymore. He looked less like a storm about to fall.

More like a man. Heat crept back into Katherine's face. She glanced away. A moment later she looked back. His hair caught the failing lights like fresh snow beneath a dying sun. His profile was- Stop it. She scowled at herself. You're marching through a hostile fortress carrying your best friend's soul inside a prosthetic leg. This is not the time to admire his jawline. Unfortunately...... she was definitely admiring his jawline.

"... and then I thought her tail was cute," Butter was saying.

"Her fighting style's incredible too. I've never seen anything like it." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Katherine blinked.

"You thought her tail was cute?"

"It was cute. Tiny. Fluffy. Completely embarrassed to exist." Butter's voice softened.

"I liked it." The words settled uncomfortably inside Katherine's chest. Korhess. Those mismatched eyes. That ridiculous tail. She opened her mouth- Clack. Her body locked. A single hoof struck polished stone somewhere ahead. Clack. Clock reacted before the echo faded. Violet light gathered around his raised hand as he drifted in front of Katherine without thinking, instinct placing himself between her and whatever waited beyond the darkness. Her heart lurched. Focus. Focus, focus, focus.

The Nonagon answered with a deep cobalt pulse, the vibration climbing her spine before settling behind her eyes. She saw the stranger before she entered the corridor. Her expanded awareness stitched together camera feeds, pressure sensors, air currents, microscopic vibrations... until a complete image formed inside her mind. A woman. Walking alone. Carrying something in her hands. She stepped into the light. Katherine forgot how to breathe. Korhess...... was unmade. — Korhess herself hadn't changed.

Her body was still impossibly beautiful, the same sculpted cheekbones and full lips brushed with muted rose that had walked into Butter's chamber hours earlier. Everything around her had. The cobalt-and-gold silk scarf was gone. Her head was bare, revealing two slender antlers rising gracefully from her temples. Velvet covered every branch, the elegant tines curving backward as though carved from living wood, catching the dim light and holding it like fragments of sunrise.

Long, tapered ears, fur-lined and unmistakably cervine, stood proudly upright, swivelling toward them with the effortless awareness of something born in deep forests. Her hair had been freed as well. Honey-blonde and emerald-green waves spilled over her shoulders, shifting with every step as though stirred by an unseen breeze, scattering glimmers of gold and jade beneath the failing lights. She wore a fitted black-and-green jacket, tailored with almost military precision.

Emerald panels crossed the shoulders like ceremonial officer's dress, redesigned by someone who insisted elegance belonged on the battlefield. Beneath it rested a simple black high-collared zip-up, practical and unassuming. Cropped black trousers ended below the knee, exposing slender brown-furred legs that finished in polished black hooves. Gone was every attempt to conceal what she was. She wasn't hiding anymore. Her mismatched eyes rested on them with an expression Katherine couldn't decipher.

The clinical superiority of the First Antler had vanished. So had the fractured uncertainty she'd seen after Butter's death. Resolve remained. Clock's raised hand stayed exactly where it was, violet light humming around his fingers. His brow furrowed.

"Who is that?" Katherine tightened her grip on the rifle.

"Korhess. The First Antler. The one Butter fought."

"That's... Korhess?" Something about his voice made Katherine glance sideways. He wasn't looking at the weapon. He was looking at her. More specifically...... at the antlers. At the ears. At the hooves.

"I fought her before," he murmured.

"She wore the scarf. Shoes. I never realised she was..."

"A deer," Butter finished quietly from the prosthetic.

"Yeah. She used to hide it. Looks like she's done pretending." Clock remained silent for several long seconds. Finally, almost to himself, he said,"Her clothes are... interesting." Katherine's head snapped toward him.

"What exactly is that supposed to mean?"... He didn't look at Katherine. His attention never left Korhess. Something unspoken lingered in his expression. It wasn't attraction. It was the silent understanding of one creature reshaped into something unnatural... looking upon another who had suffered the same fate. Katherine's stomach tightened. She forced herself to focus.

"Why are you here?" she demanded.

"How did you find us?" Korhess paid the weapon no mind. Her gaze drifted across the three of them - the softly glowing prosthetic, Clock's gathering violet light, Katherine's uneven breathing. Something stirred behind those mismatched eyes. Sorrow. Perhaps amusement. Mayhap both.

"I have trodden these sorrowful halls these fifty winters," she answered, her voice rich with the cadence of forgotten courts.

"Think'st thou I require thy borrowed chart to find the silent groves betwixt these walls? Nay. I had but to ken where wounded souls would seek their shade." From behind her back, she slowly lifted something into view. Katherine's heart stopped. Butter's head. Alabaster skin dulled to wax beneath the corridor lights. Pink eyes closed. White hair clotted with dried blood. Still...... undeniably Butter. The same face that had laughed over popcorn.

The same face that had stood before a goddess and reminded her what it meant to be ordinary. Katherine's resolve sagged. Beside her, Clock made a sound too small to deserve the name of grief. Butter's leg stiffened in Katherine's grasp.

"How..." Butter whispered, her voice breaking.

"How do you have... me?"

"Thornburgh," Korhess replied. Every trace of poetry disappeared.

"He is wounded. His soul resembles a forest after wildfire. Believing his labour complete, he bore thy head unto the Commander's private chamber as one might bear a stag's antlers to a feast. A trophy. A promise of triumph." A faint smile touched her lips.

"He deemed no wandering doe would dare reclaim what he had hunted." She stepped forward. Clock's hand rose instantly, violet radiance blooming around his fingers. Korhess halted without complaint. Her eyes rested upon the prosthetic.

"He slept," she said quietly.

"For the first time these seven years, the hunter laid himself to slumber. Two sentries stood betwixt me and that chamber. Neither imagined a deer possessed teeth enough to draw blood." Katherine glared at her.

"Why?" she asked. The word barely escaped her lips.

"You're helping us. That's treason. They'll kill you." Korhess laughed. The sound held no joy."'Treason,'" she repeated softly.

"A curious blossom." Her mismatched gaze settled upon Katherine.

"For decades have I served as their bow, their blade, their hound. I slew whom they commanded, bled when they desired, became whatsoever shape pleased their hungry eyes. I supped at their tables, clothed myself in garments of their choosing, and with every passing season carved another splinter from mine own soul until I fitted neatly within the cage they fashioned." Her hand rose, fingertips brushing the velvet of her antler.

"Yet never once did they behold me." A sad smile ghosted across her face.

"They saw a weapon. A relic. A beast of burden adorned with antlers, taught fair speech that she herself might forget the forest from whence she came." Her eyes drifted toward Butter's leg.

"Thy companion... thy Butter... bestowed upon me a gift for which I never prayed." She drew a slow breath.

"A century of commonness. To hunger. To wander unseen beneath indifferent skies." Her voice trembled.

"To know the ache of passing through the world whilst no living soul truly seeth thee." Silence gathered around her.

"I cursed that gift when first it found me." Another breath.

"I would cast it away if such were within my power." She looked between Katherine and Clock.

"But the old grove hath burned. The doe who entered those chambers hath long since turned to ash." Her head bowed slightly.

"I cannot return unto the creature I once was." Clock's expression was impossible to read. He watched Korhess as though hearing her speak for the first time, as though every word carried the sound of wind through old trees. As though...... he loved the way she sounded. Katherine hated that thought. She couldn't even explain why. Korhess's gaze drifted over Katherine in quiet silence - the luminous eyes, the cobalt tattoos, the impossible leg humming with Butter's soul. She asked no questions.

She scarcely needed them. Her mind gathered each fragment like fallen leaves and, piece by piece, assembled the truth. Katherine simply stared back.

"So..." Butter said at last from the prosthetic, her voice unreadable.

"You stole my head because you plan to... what? Defect? Ask for asylum? Join the people you tried to kill a few hours ago because one of them forced you to remember what it felt like to cry over a dead dog in a shelter?" Korhess never lowered her eyes.

"Aye." Silence settled over the corridor. Butter barked a laugh, wet with disbelief.

"You're insane. Completely, gloriously insane. You want to run away with the people who ruined your career?"

"Aye." Korhess smiled sadly.

"Because thou madest me remember desire." Her voice flowed with the cadence of ancient forests.

"I had forgotten its face. Long years have passed since aught stirred within me save the hollow wish to suffice. To be seen. To be useful." Her fingers brushed the velvet upon one antler.

"Thou didst lead me through forgotten glades where no blood cried for harvest." Her eyes shimmered.

"I remembered that the wind upon one's brow asketh no permission." She looked from Butter to Katherine.

"I would behold the heavens without first purchasing them in blood. I would graze where no shame followeth. I would cease disguising the tail that leapeth of its own accord whenever joy findeth me." A quiet breath escaped her.

"No soul hath gifted me joy enough to let it dance." Her gaze settled gently upon them all.

"I would be a deer once more. The forest hath endured my absence long enough. I have worn the sword these fifty years. My spirit yearneth for leaves." Clock moved first. His hand lowered. The violet radiance dissolved from his fingers, though his gaze never left Korhess. He studied her the same way he had studied the discarded machines in the scrapyard - not with suspicion, but with the patient attention of someone recognising a thing forced to work long beyond the point it should have been allowed to rest.

"She comes with us." Katherine spun toward him.

"What?"

"She brought Butter back."

"She stole Butter's head."

"She killed two Operatives to do it."

"She's burning down the only life she's ever known." His voice remained calm.

"I know what that costs." Something twisted painfully inside Katherine's chest. Clock saw broken things. He understood broken things. That was who he was. Heat - irrational and immediate - coiled in her stomach.

"No." Neither Clock nor Korhess had time to answer. Katherine was already moving. She didn't remember deciding. She crossed the distance between herself and Korhess. She stared into those mismatched eyes. Glacial blue. Warm hazel. Something small and ugly unfurled inside her. Before she could think better of it, she reached forward. She snatched Butter's head from Korhess's hands. Its weight startled her. Far too light.

Silken white hair spilled between her fingers as she hurriedly adjusted her grip, pressing the head protectively against her opposite hip. Her friend. Carried in two pieces. Her pulse hammered. This is Thornburgh's fault. The thought came instantly. Yet another followed close behind. Korhess is beautiful. Clock noticed. Clock...

"You're not coming with us." Her own voice sounded sharp enough to cut.

"You tried to kill her. You tried to kill all of us. And now you think you can just... join us?" Korhess remained still. Only her eyes shifted, reflecting something that resembled recognition more than hurt.

"You trust me not."

"No."

"I don't even know you." Katherine's words tumbled faster now.

"I know you were the Final Obstacle. I know you hid beneath scarves because you were ashamed of what you were. I know you stood over Butter and spoke about blooms in silent seasons and beautiful futility." She tightened her grip on Butter's head.

"And now you want to come with us because she made you feel something?" Her hands trembled. She couldn't tell whether it came from anger...... or something else.

"You need to leave. You brought her back. Thank you. We'll take it from here. You can't just-""Honeycakes." Butter's voice. Soft. Katherine ignored it.

"You're not coming. We don't need you. We don't want-""Honeycakes." Butter's tone sharpened. Katherine's mouth snapped shut. She could feel Butter's consciousness pressing against the prosthetic shell, desperate to reach her.

"Put my head down." Katherine didn't move.

"Honeycakes." Her arms refused to obey. Butter's head remained clutched tightly against her side. Her heart felt like it was tearing itself apart. She's beautiful. Clock looked at her. He understood her.

"Honeycakes." Butter's voice softened until it barely rose above a whisper.

"I know what you're feeling."... Katherine's mouth went dry.

"It's not about her," Butter said quietly.

"It's about something else. And that's okay. But you're holding my head like a shield, and I really need you to put me down before you drop me on the floor." Katherine stared at Korhess. Korhess stared back, her mismatched eyes unreadable, her ears tilted slightly forward, her hands resting empty at her sides. She made no move to reclaim the head. She made no move at all. The hot, irrational thing coiled inside Katherine's chest flickered. Dimmed. She looked down.

Butter's face lay in her hands-pale and still, pink eyes closed, white hair stiff with dried blood. She was holding her best friend like a trophy. Like Thornburgh had. Oh, she thought. Oh, no. Slowly, carefully, she knelt and rested Butter's head against the wall. White hair spilled over the stone like milk. Then she rose and turned. Korhess watched her with something that might have been understanding. Or pity.

Or perhaps only the memory of a hundred ordinary years - a life of being unseen, unwanted, longing for something she could never name because no one had ever allowed her to want.

"You should go," Katherine said, her voice smaller now. Worn thin by everything.

"You brought her back. That's... more than we could've asked for. But you can't come with us. You can't expect us to just-""An impertinent suggestion, that." Korhess's voice was calm, rooted as an ancient oak that no storm could persuade to wander. She stepped back, hooves clicking softly upon the stone. Her hands remained at her sides. Her long ears leaned forward.

"I depart from the Syndicate this day. Whether thou grantest me leave to walk beside thee, or whether I vanish alone into the greenwood and am seen no more, I shall not remain within this accursèd place. I shall not bear their blade again." Her gaze drifted toward Butter's head and the glowing leg, then to Clock.

"For many a year hath joy forsaken me. Yet I would fain remember how it once did bloom, should fortune prove so merciful." Silence stretched between them. Katherine looked at Butter's leg, glowing softly. At Butter's head. At Clock, who had not moved, who regarded Korhess with something impossibly gentle-the first pale dawn of what might one day become trust. Then she looked at her own trembling hands. Empty. Butter was always right - even as a voice split between a head and a leg.

Katherine had looked at Korhess and felt something ugly coil inside her. Not because Korhess was dangerous. Because Clock had looked at her as though she were someone worth understanding. And Katherine had wanted to be the only person he ever looked at that way. The shame washed through her like cold water, leaving nothing behind but hollow clarity. She opened her mouth.... The alarms screamed. A single piercing klaxon tore through the fortress, repeating with mechanical precision.

The walls themselves seemed to shudder beneath it, lights strobing as ancient systems awoke. Korhess froze. Her ears flattened. Her hands clenched into fists.

"The Commander," she said, urgency replacing serenity.

"He hath returned." Clock moved instantly, becoming a blur of white and violet as he placed himself between Katherine and the direction of the alarm. Violet Gloom flared around his hands like pleading fire.

"How long?"

"Minutes," Korhess answered.

"Mayhap less. He shall not come unattended." Katherine's mind was already racing. The Nonagon's map blazed behind her eyes. Corridors lit and dimmed as routes recalculated. Thornburgh's presence still burned in the western wing-closer now, unmoving. Operatives converged from every direction, confused by the alarm but closing nonetheless. There was still a path. A forgotten maintenance shaft three levels below. It emptied into a loading bay near the eastern perimeter. Escape was possible. Yet something else stirred.

A hunger. She could not tell whether it belonged to her... or to the Nonagon. Leaving felt wrong. Destroying this place felt incomplete. Something deeper called to her. She had to consume it. The Hexagon.

"The Hexagon," she said, her voice cutting cleanly through the alarms.

"The Talon's Hexagon. Where is it?" Korhess's eyes widened.

"Thou knowest of it?"

"The Nonagon showed me." Katherine was already moving, gently lifting the head, cradling it against her chest.

"The Talon - where is it being deployed?" Korhess's jaw tightened.

"The eastern hangar. It was to be armed and loosed within the hour, that it might hunt the one who slew their Abominations." Her gaze shifted to Clock.

"To hunt him." Katherine's mental map ignited. The eastern perimeter. The loading bay. The hangar lay scarcely three hundred metres from the route they had intended to take - three hundred metres of exposed ground, with a Talon preparing to awaken beneath the power of a Hexagon Apis core. She turned to Clock.

"We have to move," she said.

"Now."

"What about her?" Clock asked, tilting his head toward Korhess. Katherine looked at the deer-woman. At the antlers rising proudly from her brow. At the ears she no longer hid. At the hands clenched tightly at her sides. The alarm screamed again. Katherine met Korhess's mismatched eyes - the glacial blue, the warm hazel.

"Keep up." She turned and ran, Butter's head held close against her heart. Behind her came the soft, rhythmic clack of hooves on stone - keeping pace, keeping time, keeping alive the fragile beginning of something that might one day become trust. The Commander was home.