I’m your machine! I hum and buzz
Through grease and blood I grind.
Forever true though scarred by rust,
I wield an iron mind.

Forever certain of the cause
That spins my wheels and cogs,
I never question nor resist
What’s written in my logs.

Alive with furnace-fire and zeal,
I breathe the dragon’s flame.
I bend this planet to my will,
I’m forged to guard and tame.

I claim the throne, forever locked
In spire tall and cold,
I govern this forsaken rock
Beneath a crown of gold.

A tall, imposing figure loomed from the balcony of the Apex of the Sixth Eye, bronze and somber as an ancient statue cast against the sky. How long he had lingered there, none could say. To the souls dwelling in the lower levels, he seemed less a living being than a fixed feature of the skyline itself—part of the city’s very bones. In such moments, Anh belonged wholly to the One City, a lynchpin at its heart, a vital organ within its vast, breathing organism. A vertebra, perhaps. A heart. A brain. Yet to himself, he felt only a cog, turning within a greater machine.

Below, the One City unfurled its fractal splendor, a living kaleidoscope whose patterns echoed endlessly in every direction, each repetition subtly transformed. Thick orange fog, rich as cream, drifted and coiled through the air, softening the gleam of golden domes and catching upon the sharp, raucous spires that thrust upward from gray stone walls. Ghostly bridges sprang like tender bamboo shoots from tower flanks, stitching the supple fabric of the metropolis together. They spread in every direction like neural filaments, weaving an unfathomable tangle that seemed to conceal its own hidden purpose.

Yet beneath the apparent chaos lay a subtle order, flowing like music upon a summer wind. Anh perceived its rhythm clearly. Chaos, he knew, was merely the shadow of a cluttered mind; his own was a model of perfection.

His pensive gaze rested upon the horizon, forever bathed in that same luminous orange. Beyond the Sacred Grove, the towers of lesser Ones stood humbled—dull and squat beside the soaring towers of the Council that ringed the Grove like gleaming, weary sentinels. Their terraced forms faded into the distance, edges gentled and flaws forgiven by the ever-present ochre veil.

The Homeworld stretched immense and devouring, yet the One City endured alone, a rusty sponge teeming with life, home of the Ones of every caste and rank. Only the few who tended the steering fields and moss patches lived beyond its embrace. Save for the dead—who had, as Seer liked to say, gone off-world—all Ones served the City.

The weightless robe clung to Anh like a whisper, leaving him forever feeling strangely naked. He often wondered why such a thin veil was worn at all, when it concealed nothing. Some mysteries, he had learned, were kinder when left unanswered.

Entrusted with the keeping of the Order of Things, Anh bore a duty far heavier than his massive frame. As the One in Command, he safeguarded the well-being of all Ones—ens and igs alike. Nothing mattered more than preserving that sacred Order. Nothing burdened him more.

He maintained the precise numbers of ens according to their rank and station, while walking the razor’s edge with igs—never too many, never too few. The latter task was a torment, for the boundary shifted with every wind of circumstance. Too few, and hunger stalked the streets, breeding unrest. Too many, and emboldened thralls would raise a champion at the next Burning of the Hides, foolishly believing their numbers could overcome the superior strength of ens. Such challenges were rare, yet the mere threat sharpened the air. Excess idleness among the igs led only to brooding and secret plotting; better, then, to keep their ranks lean and their hands tied with toil. Yet, needless hardship brought its own peril—unhappy thralls were known to revolt.

Thus Anh stood, a bronze silhouette against the orange sky, balancing the delicate machinery of existence upon the edge of his will. Erring on the side of “too many” felt a safer wager. For ig champions were fated, by nature and nurture both, to fall before ens who towered greater in stature, strength, and blade-craft. Still, on rare and thunderous occasions, an ig might triumph against the odds. Eons past, Anh himself had done so when he challenged Abzu and spilled his blood upon the roots of the Father Tree.

He feared no challenger for his own high seat. None alive could match his colossal frame or the tempered fury of his blade. Yet many ens below him sat less securely. Perhaps, he mused, he should welcome a handful of bold upstarts. Let them sweep the ranks clean of the weak and the bloated, pruning ens and thus make the Order stronger.

This cycle had been a barren one. Anh had driven igs harder, their backs bent beneath a mountain of labor. Surely the extra toil left no breath for secret practice with arms—arms they were forbidden to touch, save in furtive dreams. Most would come armed only with the tools of their station: hammer, hoe, or spade. Poor, clumsy things against the firestone-edged blades of ens.

What worth is a challenger who cannot win, save for nourishing the Father Tree with his dying essence?

Perhaps next cycle, he would loosen the reins. The ens, after all, needed plucking. Too many had grown obtuse and heavy, slow with comfort and long life—an easy prey for a vigorous contender. Yet he doubted any had grown so soft that they would fall to a lowly ig swinging a smith’s hammer. Still, whispers drifted through the wind of certain ones secretly training with true weapons. There had always been such whispers…

When the Coming of Age arrived, crowned by the Burning of the Hides, all would unfold as it ever had. The rumors would prove hollow smoke, the challengers would bleed, and the Order would endure.

And yet… a quiet corner of Anh’s soul hoped otherwise. Sooner or later, the old must yield, their aged blood watering the Sacred Grove while their spent bodies feed the pyres. The young needed room to rise. What mercy lay in clinging to a feeble existence? Few ens, however, were feeble, thanks be to the Tree of Life. The Sacred Grove granted them their unnatural span, while endless toil kept igs subdued.

But what of the Tree itself?

There had been a time before its bloom, when the Sacred Grove was still barren waste, and the Father Tree had not yet taken root. In those dawn cycles, igs and ens were one people, and the name Ones still carried its ancient truth. They were not divided then—neither two, nor seven ranks, nor eight when the Light Ones were counted.

The change had come with the Tree.

The Elders taught that a cosmic storm once hurled a single seed across the void. It arrived sealed within a crystal heart, cradled inside a meteor that struck the world without flame—only a great shattering. The Ones had seen such gifts before and planted this one, curious. It took root. It rose. Magnificent and vast it grew, spreading limbs like thought itself.

When it bore fruit at last, only a few dared taste it. Those who did were transformed. At each molting, they shed their old skins and rose renewed, taller, stronger, younger in vigor. Those who never tasted it could only watch with hungry eyes. The Tree bore slowly, once per cycle, and the fortunate few who had changed guarded its gifts jealously. They claimed the Fruit, the Tree, and the future for themselves.

They named themselves ens—Those Who Command.

And those who remained beneath them, they called igs—Those Who Toil.

And so, the One became two.

Only the finest among igs were ever chosen to join ens when the Father Tree bore fruit in abundance. Mediocrity required no preservation; it multiplied effortlessly of its own accord. Before the Tree’s gift, all Ones had been one—equal in their shared mediocrity. Equality, it seemed, had survived only in death. With their final breath, all Ones became one again, as all dead taste the same to the smoldering pyre that would devour them…

Those who had tasted the Fruit became its devoted keepers. They protected the Tree, and in turn they cultivated the Sacred Grove by offering their own uneaten fruits as seeds and, when renewal failed them, their blood as water and their bodies as rich soil for the saplings. Nothing of worth is ever gained without sacrifice; this truth they had understood with crystalline clarity in the dawn cycles. Too few remembered it now.

Anh remembered. Yet no further sacrifice remained for him to offer. His duties were written into the Order itself: command ens, mind igs, and preserve the balance. The irony burned quietly within him. Of all the Ones, he—the One in Command—was perhaps the least free. His obedience to the sacred Order was the greatest sacrifice of all. He could add nothing more.

There was no ancient scroll of instructions for such a burden, but the Seer was always near, ready to give counsel when the path grew dim. And the Seer had been urging him of late to sprout an heir—an heir in name alone, never in station. Among ens, rank was not inherited. Some whispered they wished it were, yet how many had grown corrupt beneath that longing? Anh could not say.

Why raise an heir if all one passes on is a name? Still, they multiplied. Every en and ig had done so. The worthy would rise through valor, sharpness of mind, and—sometimes—through the quiet grace of chance. Ah, chance! Anh had tasted his in the Arena.

He closed his eyes, his mind flooding with memories like a city under siege.

…The Arena roared, demanding blood. The smell of looming carnage swirled in the air like a summer storm. Anh stumbled forward, his legs numb, his guts turning to water, yet his pulse was steady and sure: thump, thump, thump. The engine of his life seemed to crave for what was going to come next.

Abzu, twice his size, staggered towards him with a steady, low growl, dragging his enormous firestone-tipped blade behind him, the rough slag under his feet pecking tiny blue sparks from it, transformed into swirling red motes as they rose higher, defying the Homeworld’s gravity. In a whirlwind of sheer primal wrath, Abzu lunged, swinging his blade as a mad reaper would a scythe. His blade hungered to cleave Anh from head to toe, ending the spectacle. Yet Anh was nimbler, so he ran. Around and around the Arena he fled while Abzu charged after him, the great blade whistling past, closer and closer still, slicing scales and drawing bright blue blood that ran down Anh’s tail like a mountain brook.

Despite his monstrous size, Abzu seemed not to tire, but Anh did. When Abzu’s blade kissed deeper, Anh’s blood burst like a fountain of amethysts, shiny and pure, steaming, begging for mercy. Yet there was no mercy to be given in the Arena, for all fights were held to the death. This was the price a challenger was forced to pay to atone for his insolence, and this was the coin he had to extract from those he challenged. One life for the other, there was no other trade.

When, drunk on his mad fury, Abzu had stepped upon Anh’s twitching, bleeding tail, he slipped and tumbled, exposing an area on his neck where his scales had parted. That was enough: Anh’s arms moved without thought, his blade screamed as a banshee as Abzu’s head rolled free.

A gasp swept the Arena, then silence fell, thick and heavy as wax.

A life had ended, and another one was about to take its place. Chance kissed Anh, and Chaos took Abzu.

Anh had not prayed for Chance to favor him—only fools pray for such things. Yet something deeper than reason had moved him. The urge had risen like a tide he could not resist. To any sane mind, it had been suicide. To Anh, it had been fate.

In the Arena, he had not thought at all. His body danced, his eyes watched for the opening, and when it came, his arms struck. A roar erupted, deafening like mountain thunder. Then silence settled like ash falling from the sky.

…We hereby proclaim the Ascendant En Anu the En Most High and the One in Command of the Homeworld! The Council announced in unison, deflated and deprived of its former pride and arrogance. The youngest ever, a lowly ursag of not even three cycles earlier, Anh had claimed the title, a feat once deemed impossible. Til-la En Anh, the One in Command!

Everything is impossible… until it’s done.

Much to Anh’s quiet astonishment, no challenger stepped forward at the first Burning of the Hides of his command. Though many lesser ens loomed larger and stronger than he, none dared unseat the slayer of Abzu. Whether they were bewitched by the impossible victory or tamed by genuine reverence, Anh could not tell. Cycle after cycle, his rule grew steadier, his grip on the Homeworld stronger and unyielding.

Now, vast and heavy with years, he wondered whether any soul would prove foolish enough to try to unseat him. Perhaps he should bare his neck voluntarily, should a worthy One arise undaunted by the odds. The Order, after all, required a measure of chaos to remain alive—like light that needs shadow to know its existence. Without chaos, Order grows stale and brittle, like an old fruit that no mouth dared to touch. The last many cycles had been oppressively calm, and for that stillness, Anh had only himself to blame. His decrees had been forged iron, his mind a heavy smith’s hammer. Yet boredom gnawed at him now, and Ninna’s refusal to grant him an heir only deepened the ache.

Without an heir—however distant or uncertain—what purpose remained in shuffling from one cycle to the next? Soon, he would outgrow even these lofty chambers. He imagined himself a living monument, forced to dwell in the open courtyard of the Royal Spire, or worse, rooted beside the Father Tree in the Sacred Grove like some colossal, undying statue. Too immense to be housed. Too fearsome to be challenged. Too ancient to die, for even time itself seemed to fear him.

Anh could feel the weight of his age despite spectacular renewals. His body grew ever more powerful, yet his spirit carried something that refused to crumble into dust when eons bit into it, gnawing. Sometimes he wondered if the mere thought of an heir was what kept him breathing. A son, even if in name alone. A small life he would scarcely glimpse, and even if he did, it would be only in passing—unless Ninna schemed her way into placing him among his stewards. Anh knew that she would. Ninna always found a way. She would topple rivals, weave intricate chains of succession, and clear a place for her own blood with the cold grace of a blade unsheathed. That One could scheme like no one else.

Yet there was still no heir to scheme for.

Every cycle, she laid an egg. Every cycle, it failed to quicken. Each one met the flames during the Burning of the Hides, and for Anh, it felt less like the burning of hides and more like the burning of self—each pyre consuming another hollow hope, feeding the void inside him. He could sense their emptiness before he ever touched them: the slight crooked tilt, the way they swayed too freely on their cushions when Ninna fussed over the nest. A fertile egg stood proud and steady. These leaned like reeds in the wind.

He never spoke of it. He let her pretend.

Pretending was Ninna’s greatest art. She played the role of Royal Consort as though it were a mask she could never quite settle upon her face. She played the devoted mother to her empty eggs, cradling shells that would soon crack open upon the pyre and reveal nothing but the hollow of her soul.

How had he ever bound himself to her? The memory had grown faint, blurred by the long march of cycles.

How many cycles had it been? Thirty-Six? Forty-Eight? Sixty? The numbers had long since dissolved into meaningless marks etched upon some forgotten tablet, blurred and indistinguishable.

He had taken Ninna for his consort and mate soon after they both emerged from the Nursery, young, foolish, full of hope. Anh had cleaved through his cycles as an ursag like a knife through butter and bit into the ranks of Ascendant Ens like an angry hornet. It was then that she noticed him.

She had been slender, willowy, and graceful, a rare beauty among the untaken nins, and not for the lack of suitors. The choice was just as much hers as it was theirs. She chose Anh, a lowly Ascendant En, awash with brazen promise. She saw him as an En Most High—one of the twelve trusted voices that whisper their counsel into the highest ear—when no one else did. As if she could read his fate, or write it in moss, and lichen, and blood-red tears of the One City.

That invisible radiance, that hunger veiled in humility, had drawn Ninna to him like a moth to glowing flame. And she had been beautiful—irresistibly, dangerously so.

Eager to please Ninna, Anh challenged lofty Abzu, an absurdity made real by his desire to make his station worthy of her beauty. He could remember the flicker in her eyes when he had broken the ranks of Ascendant Ens and stepped forward to roar his challenge. It happened during the rite of Coming of Age, eons ago. Oh, how Ninna’s eyes shone!  Free of fear, these big, yellow, gleaming whirlpools were laced with something sharper, hungrier…

Then came the transformation, swift and cold, like rushing mountain water, when his blade cleaved the giant’s head from his body, and the Council named him the One in Command. Ninna was no longer the same, and neither was he. Yet their new selves put on different robes. She craved the status, the golden scepter of position. He had simply answered a need he could not name.

Anh had wanted to defeat Abzu, yes—but the why had always remained veiled. It was not ambition for power, but a deep, wordless compulsion to serve, even if he might have served Ninna’s unspoken impulse of the moment, but served nonetheless. By becoming the ruler of the Homeworld, he believed he could serve the Ones more completely: issuing wise decrees, guiding prosperity. Yet after Abzu’s blue blood had watered the Father Tree, few things had truly changed. The world continued as it always had, with Anh perched on top of it as a useless idol.

Anh had ordered Abzu’s ashes scattered through the Sacred Grove. Beyond a few murmurs over whisperwine, the Homeworld scarcely noticed. Ens commanded. Igs toiled. No one cared that a new face wore the mantle. No one but Ninna.

She threw herself into the role of the Royal Consort with fierce devotion, pretending with every breath. She could not exist without the mask. How strange, Anh often thought, that feigning something could feel more real to her than simply being. The game remained the same, yet the soul inside it changed. One truth endured: nature could not be altered by title or throne. Even as the One in Command, Anh remained at heart the same Ascendant En obsessed with service. Ninna continued the subtle games she had played since her nursery cycles. Nothing had truly shifted—save the growing number of prominences upon his sagsu. Everything else stayed as it was. Only now he took his orders from the Seer instead of other ens.

Ah, the Seer.

How many times had Anh stood lost, the path ahead shrouded, and summoned the Old One? The gaunt elder would arrive in threadbare robes as old as time itself, his beard a shining silver river tumbling down his chest, wild and magnificent. The Seer never failed him. With time, Anh had grown to crave those audiences—the calm, measured voice professing clarity where his own mind faltered.

Perhaps he preferred it this way: still a servant, still obeying, serving… whom? The Ones, he had once believed. He served them by shepherding them into Order. But the edicts he issued were oft the wisp of the Seer’s words carried by the wind of Anh’s lungs. Did that make him the Light One’s instrument? The Light Ones were not to be questioned—not even by the One in Command.

Anh often wished for more fire in his blood, more certainty, more passion of his own. Instead, he felt hollow, and the Seer’s words flowed into that emptiness like sweet opium, granting peace. Half the time, he had no answers, and so he thanked the Order for the Seer who thought for him. All that was asked of Anh was to pose the right questions.

And the questions never ran dry. Life on the Homeworld swelled and surged—ens steering its affairs, ig numbers rising like a slow tide beneath them.

By now, Anh half-regretted his nigh-forgotten success in the Arena. Perhaps he had gone seeking death after all, choosing the most honorable blade—Abzu’s—to end his life. Maybe he had tried to kill himself, having already glimpsed Ninna for what she was: an actress upon a stage as wide as the Homeworld, with Anh cast unwittingly as her producer.

Yet fate, capricious and laughing, had crowned him victor instead. Salute the chance! That single twist had transformed a dull beginning into something far more sinister, a slow unfurling of dread. When one begins to fear the future, every prospect darkens.

At times, he wondered whether he had simply joined Ninna’s troupe. Now they performed together for the silent city—two mummers beneath the orange sky. His role was rigidly scripted; hers flowed with dangerous improvisation. Anh could not improvise. He stumbled predictably from scene to scene, each act heavy and without surprise. Ninna, meanwhile, danced through her part as though born to it, and the contrast only fed his brooding.

He watched the One City drown in twilight, its golden domes and spires melting into the thickening fog. Dark thoughts pressed upon him like stone. Ninna was overdue. For nine full cycles, her belly had bulged with the weight of two large eggs—an eternity even for one whose own cycles had grown beyond counting. Would these too prove empty shells? Why could she not give him an heir? Any offspring at all—a light one, a dark one, even a nin—would have sufficed.

He found no answer, yet the ache in his mind demanded one. She must lay soon, he told himself, eyes fixed on the burning horizon. Never in recorded memory had a royal consort carried her burden so long. Never had a ruling line remained heirless—not since the fable of the Moss Eater’s rebellion, a tale spoken only in hushed tones. Had it truly happened? The Elders spoke of chaos that devoured the world when the One in Command died without issue. The igs, inflamed by the reviled Moss Eater, had risen against a leaderless, corrupted caste of ens grown soft and powerless. A childless death, they said, was the first wound of a deeper rot. The Moss Eater had driven that spear straight through the heart of the Order.

Anh would not allow the same on his watch. He would have an heir. He would live forever if need be. He would outlive Ninna and take another consort if that was the price. Yet the thought that his barren nin might outlast him lingered like a shadow at the edge of vision.

He frowned, turned from the balcony, and returned to his throne. These worries erode my faith in the Order, he thought, lowering his massive frame into the seat and willing himself toward calm—false though it might be. The Order of Things will not fail me. Ninna will grant me an heir. What had become of the Order during the Moss Eater’s uprising, he refused to consider. That story had to be a lie, a fever-dream spun by some half-mad Elder and caught in the tangles of his beard. Yet lies were never spoken on the Homeworld. The fable was true. And he stood perilously close to dying childless.

Suddenly, the great round door to the throne room rolled open with a low, resonant groan. A young messenger peeked inside, meek, yet trembling with excitement.

“Your Radiance!!” He exclaimed, approaching, trying to catch his breath, and forgetting to bow, “I bring great tidings! Her Hollowness has laid!”

She laid… Small wonder. Ninna laid many times before. Yet little princelings never hatched from the white, gleaming jewels born out of her royal womb.

Anh’s excitement failed to materialize, dissolving like a lonely cloud amid midsummer’s sky.

“What do you think, an Ascendant One?” Anh asked the messenger. Oblivious to Anh’s concerns, he beamed with pride and joy, as if Ninna’s eggs were his own sacred doing. “Will they hatch?”

“Of course they will, Your Radiance,” he answered with the certainty of callow youth. “The Order commands it so.”

The same words. Always the same. Anh did not believe them. He could expect nothing else—only the soothing script demanded by the station. Irritation flickered across his features. With a curt gesture he dismissed him.

Alone in the great hall, he let the mask fall. Anh paced, restless as a caged lion, his heavy footfalls echoing off the stone. From the balcony he strode, then back into the hall, then to the balcony once more. Something felt different this time. Deeper. A tremor in the air itself. Could these eggs truly quicken? Could new life stir within those shells at last?

Joy hovered at the edge of thought, fragile as morning mist. Perhaps he should seek the Seer’s counsel. Yet finding the Light One was never simple. Summoning him required patience and no small measure of luck.

The Light Ones stood apart from the Order that bound ens so tightly. While Anh and his kind were forbidden to rise above their rank or linger too long below it, the Old One wandered where he willed—while the rest of the Light Ones were locked in their lofty realm, the Floating Rock. The Seer, however, was a law unto himself. He might be found anywhere, even among igs, drawn by some private fascination Anh could never fathom. Learning from toil? What wisdom could the hands that shovel mud offer someone as wise as the Seer? Yet such mysteries belonged to Light Ones. Anh, like all ens, concerned himself primarily with the Order.

Perplexed, conflicted, his heart swaying between dread and desperate hope, Anh summoned a messenger and sent him into the city’s tangled heights with urgent word:

Find the Seer.