Somber, dark, glittering faces fashioned of the strongest alloys ever forged on Seynorynael glared at her from all around the circle.
The ring of mechanized Elders sat on high seats in the secret council room, their unified mindspeech echoing in her mind, filling it with poisoned words and anticipating her unformed subconscious protests in order to smother her thoughts and ensure her subordination. For hours now they had been debating something she hadn’t understood at first.
That morning, Captain Eadric Ungarn had asked her to report to the council building, but no one had been asked to report there in years. When she questioned the order, he had merely replied that the order had come down from the highest authority and he was only relaying it.
There had been no guards outside to greet her, nor anyone inside, but the doors opened for her automatically, closing behind her and sealing her within. The only sounds she had heard were the loud, echoing steps of her own feet amidst the vague whining sounds of a cooling system in operation as she reached the heart of the complex.
Inside the council room, the ancient council greeted her, inhuman misers that cheated fate and death and lived for the most part alone and isolated from their subordinate subjects, monitoring the people’s actions, establishing laws, and giving the Martial Scientific Force its orders from afar.
She hadn’t understood allusions they made to her until the humanroid guards brought the helmet for her to wear. She had only put it on for a second when a painful energy net shocked her head. Since that moment their purpose had gradually become clear.
Now at the end of the debate, she had at last remembered it all. Kicking the discarded helmet further away with her toes, she stared up again defiantly at the oldest Elder, Marankeil.
“Alessia, child, sweet sweet little girl,” Marankeil said in a disturbingly mocking tone. “Do you think there’s anything you can do to us? We control your destiny. Fight us all you want. Believe that your choices are your own, it doesn’t matter. You will not really deviate from the path we have assigned you. Resistance is futile. But go ahead and waste your energy.”
Did she protest? She hardly had time to form a thought—
“You think you can will yourself to remember this meeting and change your future? Ah, but my dear, you will forget that this ever took place, even as you have no present recollection of our past interviews. What? Is that confusion on your face? Oh yes, there have been many. You would see to it that our entire race never existed in the time-loop just to destroy me, wouldn’t you? You would have our glorious society vanish, and erase our glorious future?
“What does it matter how many times you try to stop me? I am here, am I not? Isn’t that proof enough that your plans failed and will for all eternity? There is no breaking the cycle. We exist, and you yourself will someday voluntarily assure the survival of our past.”
“If you’re right, then why are you so afraid of me?” She asked. “Did you summon me here just to gloat? How can you be sure that you’ll live to see this glorious future as you call it?”
Marankeil was silent a moment; she wondered why.
“By first ensuring our existence. Then we will preserve ourselves, as we have, and we shall continue until the universe ends and begins again.”
“Until the universe ends?” Alessia echoed. “That’s impossible for you, and you know it. Only Hinev’s serum would save you, and you can’t have Hinev’s serum. It won’t give you eternal life with an unlimited creative mind. You’re already stuck with the mechanized bodies you fashioned for yourselves. You can’t see the future, and you know it.”
“Not like you can? Or Hinev?” the mechanical voice laughed with sinister self-composure. “Ah, the homonoia of Hinev’s children!” he laughed again, derisively.
“I don’t understand that.”
“I didn’t expect you to.” Marankeil said dismissively, patronisingly. “You think I don’t understand the significance of your metamorphosis? That I don’t understand the significance of your parentage and what powers it gives you?” Marankeil’s sibillant voice echoed loudly. “I know it as well as Hinev did. Foolish child that you are, you don’t even begin to know what it means yourself, but what does that matter to me? I know what you are. That is why I have assured that our destiny shall be fulfilled through you and your actions.”
“But you can’t see the future.” Alessia protested, tried to protest. Marankeil paid her little attention.
“Can’t I? But even if I couldn’t that would be inconsequential. I can control it by initiating actions I want and predicting what is beyond my control. I will remain in power. And you’re going to help me.”
“I won’t—”
“You think you won’t.” He said. “But I’m going to survive until the end of the universe, and then I shall escape the end and pass into another universe, as the Enorians did before me.”
“Until the end? How can there be an ending if you’re going to survive it all?”
“Mock me, Alessia, but it will do you no good.” The voice warned, no more than a whisper. “You’ll never defeat me.”
For the first time, she began to believe him.
The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire Page 76
