Do you remember sleep?
It is one of the few clear memories I have from before the transplant. Falling into bed after a day of dedicated study. Waking, many hours later, to Sarenrae’s gentle wingbeats stirring the sky into morning splendor. That curious gulf between night and dawn and, after its crossing, how the voyage leaves one with only faint impressions of the journey. The remnants of dreams. Not fragments, exactly, but tiles without a mosaic.
I remember sleep. But when I try to assemble those memories into a feeling, I cannot. I lack some essential component. Like forgetting the melody of your wedding song or straining to see through heat shimmer. There are ancient moments that I can feel, of course. The blood of the Pharaoh’s oathsworn on my muzzle. The uncertainty of moving on four limbs for the first time. The strange sensation of an arcane core—my core—thrumming where once a heart beat, and the dried blossom sorrow of seeing myself still and quiet in the sling of an artificer’s lattice. Caressing that castoff self’s face with newly forged digits.
I have seen so many castoffs in this place; surely one of them was you. And maybe it is you who brought me here. As I picked my way through the dusty brass halls, past conduits thrumming with arcane vitality, it all felt so familiar. Not merely because of the similarity to my own second birthplace, but because the faint reflections of this creche have haunted me all these thousands of years.
We do not sleep, you and I, but we do something like it. And so many times, upon exiting that pale facsimile of slumber, I would grasp at shards of foreign dreams. Visions like snowflakes—have you seen snow?—melting even as I touch them. Muted cataracts plummeting through crystalline bends, thaumaturgic rivers rushing toward unseen reservoirs. Rivulets of sand falling through a vault of brass and mithral and stone, down into a craftwork cathedral whose catacombs the dream fragments would not touch.
I know that the Automaton Council left their names within our cores. Perhaps the masters somehow carved others’ memories inside my being. Gadflies in the mind, grit in a mouthful of water—and there! Drink, another thing remembered but not felt.
One grows bored over the millennia. What does a soldier do when they find themself without a war? With need for neither sword nor plowshares? I was not built for peace. So I sought conflict. A wasted century spent stalking our first enemies from the east. Many years more chasing the thrill of the hunt, following the moonlit metal gleam of pack leaders. I clawed crimson paths up the heaving flanks of rough beasts. I even sunk my fangs into one of the architects of Jistka’s downfall; he thought himself safe in his sarcophagus. But the empire is no more, and even when I can find others like myself, those brief reunions cannot fully replace the pride of belonging to a thing. Of serving something greater and knowing that that service matters.
Can you turn your head? Yes, the racks there—the weapons of an ancient an irrelevant war. And ourselves, of course.
…I am sorry, truly, that you must emerge into this world. Ah, and for my rambling. I’ve been lonely, of late.
In any case. Yes, the visions. All around me there is evidence that those visions were indeed more than spheresong footprints. After seven thousand years, I finally ceased grasping at snowflakes and simply let them fall, observing the pattern. In the shallow waterways of my dormant periods, I sieved stranger’s gold from dreamsand, reassembling the path to this place. Across tundra and lake, through the dead god’s favored city and banished gods’ ports, and into the deserts of my two births. Over the peaks—were these peaks not taller, once?—and up to the ragged edges of a basin.
There are peculiarities to our artificed bodies; perhaps I can show you the trick of venting life force from your limbs. Trailing arcana, I descended toward the basin floor, a vulture circling the past, the heat shimmer below a mirror held up to my aimless aeons. When I touched the sands, they were familiar. Soft and quiet as a burial shroud.
Illustration by Kiki Moch Rizky from Guns & Gears.
That shroud stirred. Ghosts rose around me. A convergence of minds and memories, as something in my core resonated with the emotions permeating this subterranean complex. It must be the hopes and sorrows of all those who set aside their flesh that fixed those visions to this place. I saw dozens of figures pull themselves from the sands, amber grit sloughing off gleaming brass shoulders. I padded through the arcade of long-gone servants as they set their phantasmal eyegems on the east. Plodded toward dissolution.
Tail trailing in sorrow, I reached the basin’s center. Something glinted beneath the sand; a garnet eye set into a dais. Carved script radiating from the gem bore the Conclave’s ancient words:
We leap from flesh to crafted hope
To safeguard nation, family, friend
We shuck ourselves and start again
We rise anew and know no end“Know no end”—foolish and prideful! One cannot live from Age to Age without experiencing endings beyond comprehension. No, the Imperium merely filled the deathless millennia with a thousand lesser endings.
Those fools’ words, the ghosts of my fellows. I admit, I was overcome, crushed by reminders of long-mourned purpose. I sat on my haunches and wept.
Did they give you the ocular fire? I barely notice it, now, but that is another half-remembered echo of my second dawn, that first fulminant beam scorching its way out of my head. Like screaming until your throat is raw, but strangely distant, and channeled so tightly through your sight. Channel your conviction and burn away the Imperium’s enemies. Crumpled in the basin, I had no conviction, and my fire merely trickled out as molten tears.
They splashed against the gem, and the earth also wept and moaned. Sand hissed through widening cracks and, just as your eye did, this place irised open for the first time in ages. Below was the towering vault and crystal-banked streams of liquid arcana from those fragmented memory-dreams. Vindication and wonder soothed my soul. Stairs spiraled down from the dais, and I descended.
Down to the sanctum. No signs of battle, as might be expected given the dreaming ghosts above. An entry hall, and a pristine mosaic of the Conclave breathing life into the first core. I loped through halls of the not-dead, their superfluous forms stacked in memorial niches while their spirits slumber here in the lattices. Slowed to peer into glowing cisterns of swirling arcane energy, still ready to quicken the remnants of the Imperium’s crowning achievement. Followed the burnished ribbon of names that marked the path to this creche.
Why did they abandon this place? No matter—we are here now, together. Memories, both mine and others, lead me to you, and to your dormant siblings. We must wake them.
…I am afraid. Of aimlessness. Of what I bartered with my death.
Of rejection.
I am no Conclave. I am no pack leader. I am merely one lost child of Jistka, one aimless wanderer who followed ancient memories to an ancient vault. But I am here, surrounded by an entire tapestry of lattices, and the joy of dozens of siblings opening bejeweled eyes.
I remember sleep, but I do not remember how it felt. Perhaps you can tell me? And perhaps I, in turn can help you—us—forge a new purpose. One divorced from a Conclave that dissolved before they could lead you out of the space between sleep and death.
The Song of the Spheres fades. The Dawnflower blooms. She reaches even here, below the earth, in this cradle tomb. And for a moment, in her light preserves glimmering dreams, perfect and within our grasp.
Take my hand.
About The Author
Andrew Mullen has been freelancing for Paizo and other publishers since 2017. He brings a keen interest in language and the interplay of geography and culture to his work, as seen in the Magaambya section of Lost Omens Character Guide, the xulgaths in the Extinction Curse Adventure Path, and numerous other monsters over the years; as a full-time parent, his daughter is his most important monster.
About Tales of Lost Omens
The Tales of Lost Omens series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into Pathfinder’s Age of Lost Omens setting. Written by some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction and including Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales line of novels and short fiction, the Tales of Lost Omens series promises to explore the characters, deities, history, locations, and organizations of the Pathfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.
