The Host are a punishment.

This is because the Goddesses were once one. A single All-Matron, Watching over the world, Dreaming its people into being. The songs and towers were originally for Her, and She showered the people with blessings for their piety. But one humanity’s of greatest follies is its capacity to take something for granted. The people came to expect Her generosity would always flow. Their songs grew quiet. The citadels less resplendent. Without their reverence, She withered. The All-Matron became divided in Her heart. She loved her people. But She would die without their worship.

I overhear debate at times, between the scholars in Vandett Tower and the trench priests offering guidance to the troops. Could the Dead sister be appeased? Could the two be reconciled somehow? Even after the Host have devoured most of the world, they still don’t fully understand their enemy. We Virtues know all we need to: somewhere down in the earth there is a Dead Goddess, Dreaming Below of devouring the light, and somewhere on high there is a Silver Goddess, Watching Above and sending us more sisters to stop this.

We disembark after a four day ride to find blue skies, the afternoon sunlight falling between the sparse clouds. Even so I can smell scorched meat and rot on the breeze. A truck sits idling on a patch of dirt near the station, waiting for us. We and the Proxy climb into the back to find a dozen or so soldiers already lining the benches, all tired eyes and muttered conversations. Some turn their attention to us as we enter. Most of these try to be subtle, stealing sidelong glances.

Her companion takes a long drag from her cigarette, eyes cast down on the floor.

I peer up at her. She’s young, likely a new recruit judging from the lack of stains on her uniform and her bright eyes. She meets my gaze. Her face holds none of the trepidation or cautious curiosity I’ve come to expect. Instead, there’s only reverence.

The older woman gives her a hard nudge on the arm. I realize she isn’t just looking at the floor. Her eyes are turned up the aisle, towards the Proxy’s pristine white boots. The Proxy has eyes only for the girl, however.

The Proxy gives her the patient smile she reserves for everyone who asks about us, or who looks a little too long. “That’s alright,” she says. “It’s perfectly natural to be curious about things above your station.”

That burning offal stench becomes worse as we go. Outside the sky fades to a dimming violet as evening approaches, and the landscape begins to change. The thin grass and rock covering the hills gives way to damp soil and wet red meat. Where there had been scattered stands of trees, tumorous humps bulge from the terrain instead. At one point I spy a massive twisted femur jutting up from the ground. My choir has never raided a Bone Factory before this. Even so, I sense we’re close.

The area is strangely still as the Proxy leads us past the truck and down a ramp into a trench network, the soldiers accompanying us. Just before I descend below the top, I look up and see it. Beyond the trenches and the barricade of sandbags and wire at the front, the muddy field gives way to meat. Far across this, nestled in the crags of a mesa wall, is the Bone Factory. From here all I can make out is a vast pale structure, roughly domed at its top and widening into a lopsided oval shape as it juts outwards. One might look at its uneven shape and almost take it for a natural formation, were it not the discomforting off-yellow of uncleaned teeth, and if banners of dark smoke didn’t billow upwards from along its length.

Following the Proxy, it strikes me that this trench is more like a ditch just tall enough to safely stand in. No doubt it had been dug in a hurry when the Factory was discovered. The Proxy finds her way to a dugout not far into the formation, where she knocks on the door. A CO answers and tells her all we need to know. The Factory is heavily defended, trenches and artillery all around. No worries though, the sappers have their mines set under the defenses, Heavens above, can’t we always count on the Engineering Corp. We were just waiting for the Virtues before we gave the order.

The officer grimaces. “Fuck, I hope not.”

The officer shakes her head. “No, ma’am. No sign of it.”

A heavy quiet hangs over us. The Host know we’re here. Our lines can’t be more than a mile from the Factory. As always, a few of the soldiers lined against the front wall with us pray. Some glance at us, more than usual, looking to take comfort in our presence. I wonder where the girl from the truck is.

We reply, “Understood, Proxy.”

“Enter the Factory, secure the brain.”

We say, “Yes, Proxy.”

The Hymn drones through the trench, ensnaring us in its undertow and snatching away my thoughts of the girl. All there is now is the music and its glory, and the compulsion it fills me with.

The Proxy mouths, “Go.”

We make it four volleys before the Host return fire.

A reek like spoiled fruit and formaldehyde hits our noses. In the moments between one barrage falling and another springing up we see the ruin left of the enemy lines. It’s all mud and meat, churned into red-brown pulp and dipping into a wide shallow gulch where the mines went off. The remains of wired palisades and artillery beasts stick out of the mire. The next barrage rends their defenses even more. Still hundreds of misshapen figures surge in from other parts of their lines or out from the Bone Factory itself. We shoulder our SMGs, and once the debris settles finally charge.

We shoot and tear and crush our way through the furrow towards the Factory. More thralls, always more, spill down to intercept us. There will always be more. The Host have a whole dead world and their mother’s wrathful dreams to draw from. It won’t be enough. The furrow offers little cover, save for the heaps of dead. I haul one’s corpse to catch another’s bullets while I return fire.

No one has gotten inside a Bone Factory before. However, no one has ever had our choir’s help to do so. Still we go in blind, only expectation and instinct to guide us. The floor beneath us is porous meat, squishing as we walk over it like a massive tongue, and the passage is wide and dark. Metal ribs act as supports along the organic walls and the air is hot and muggy, too similar to a huge animal’s breathing.

We enter that yellow light and find the bowels of the factory. The path beneath us calcifies into hard grayish bone, narrowing into a catwalk over pits of bubbling yellow slurry. That disquieting light rises from the liquid with the noxious steam billowing off each of them. Organs and arteries and mechanisms with no clear purpose clutter the walls, which curve inwards as they rise like a rib cage. Again I imagine this to be the innards of a massive dormant beast.

Duty compels us to look- to search every shadow and crevice for enemies laid in wait. That’s how we see the spindly arms of bone and metal reaching down into the pits to fish out waterlogged bodies, dripping with viscous green-gold. Some are human. Some are Host. All are carried deeper into the Factory, and as follow our catwalk, we see where to. Laid out on conveyor belts of tensing muscle, ferrying them towards the wall at the other end of the chamber. If I lean down and squint, I can see openings in the base of the wall, leading to tunnels wherein gigantic molars line the ceiling.

Serving our Queen, I remind myself. We fear nothing but Her disapproval.

That isn’t for us to know. We must serve our Queen.

We’re halfway across the platform when Imeshan raises her fist. We freeze and search. She’s looking east. I glance that way but see only a vent vomiting smoke.

We hunker down, looking for the source, only to disperse as another hissing something lands in our midst- a fist-sized wad of smoking purplish bile, reeking of stomach acid. A third projectile flies between Brea and Imeshan, then a fourth by me again. More and more, streaking between us- forcing us to scatter.

I turn and fire. Sparks and dark blood spray from what looked to be empty air, then stop just as suddenly. Before I can find it again more bile springs at me from nowhere. I leap aside, and collide with something tall and spindly. It seems as surprised as I am as we crash to the floor in a heap. Jaws snap by my ear, something that feels like bony fingers claw at my face. I throw my elbow into where its head must be and feel it reel, buying me space to roll off it.

Both are fully invisible. I need to stay moving. Heading towards Imeshan, I look for any sign of my pursuers. They give me two, another pair of acid wads spewing out of nothingness. I sidestep one but am spun around as the other strikes my right shoulder. Heat sears through my armor and undersuit and I feel the steel shoulder pad slough off. Following my momentum down to a crouch I sweep over them and clip them both in a shower of oily black.

I reach for my sword, only to be thrown onto my back as one of them bowls into me. Again invisible digits grab at my face, forcing me to crane my head back so they only scratch at my mask. I grab back, and after a moment of flailing manage to get a hold of them. Wrenching them upwards, I draw my knife. It kicks and thrashes, but not enough to free itself before I plunge the blade into what I pray is its head.

Light and heat wash over me. Squinting through it, I see the second seraphim becoming visible as it falls in half at the waist, cleaved in two by...

… By Brea.

She spares a look down at me, before hurrying off to help the others.

The passage narrows as I follow it upwards. It’s dark as night and the soft glow of my halo brightens to compensate. My eyes are watering with the reek of chemicals and putrid meat bile. The stench lessens, however slightly, the higher I climb.

Fingers of thick black liquid snake down incline. Host blood. I soon come upon the source. Another seraphim. A dead one, sprawled out on its back with a gnarled stump where its head was and its many eyes glaring blankly at the calcified ceiling. Stepping around it, I notice something even stranger. The front of its body is caked in white powder. Flour, I suspect, to negate its invisibility. A few steps further and I find broken glass gleaming on the floor.

Cautiously, I inch up the incline. Up ahead I see a faint yellow glow, different from the pits below. It’s a single shaft, shuddering around. Someone got in before us. I could wonder who, or why, or how that’s possible. But the important part is that they’re still here. Finally the tight corridor opens into a wide chamber. At least five thralls lay across the floor, limbs blown off or ragged holes blown in their bodies. Spent shotgun shells lay scattered among them.

This cage has failed. There’s someone walking around atop the brain. They crouch every so often to jam small sticks of something into its folds, working by the light of a headlamp.

We hold each other’s eyes a moment. There had once been other nations fighting the Host alongside Cratavn. There’d been a whole world once. This was long ago. It crosses my mind that I may be looking at a ghost. A lingering memory of a people now gone, still dreaming of vengeance like the Dead Goddess below. I can swear there’s even something like sorrow in her face as she stares back at me.

I dart aside a heartbeat before she fires. Then she leaps off the brain and scrambles towards one of the vein-openings. Compulsion takes over and I try to pursue, but she takes potshots back at me. Narrow misses, but close enough that I waste precious seconds having to dodge. I could shoot back, kill her easily, but that compulsion tells me take her alive. The most I manage is to keep the edge of my light on her as she drops and slides into the opening. I rush to it and peer inside. There’s only a tube of glistening red flesh and metal support ribs, and the fat dark vein itself. It’s more spacious than expected, however.

But then I’d be abandoning the objective. I’d be distracted.

I return to the brain. Picking my way across its damp surface, I pull out what the woman had stabbed into the folds- bundles of TNT tied around wooden stakes- and discard them well clear of it. There’s enough that she would have needed help to get it in here, but I see no sign of another person. Just the explosives and expended shells, trailing smoke from their warped red mouths.

***

Brea is laid out on the bench across from rest of us, chest rising and falling as she dozes. I try to sleep as well, and sometimes I manage it. But then I’ll hear her stir and crack my eye open to steal another look, as if I might catch her scheming against me. In these moments, I almost envy Imeshan and Getye’s indolence. They rarely win, but they can at least just be sisters.

The thought somehow rings just a little hollow. The Proxy had an odd reaction when I told her of the woman. At first her face was impassive, but I’d expected approval after hearing I’d chased the intruder away. Instead her brows twitched. Just the slightest bit. “Thank you, Lakera,” she finally said. “I’ll inform Her Grace once we return to Cratavn.” She then abruptly dismissed me.

The dead land outside slowly becomes grassy hills and plains, marking the passage of days. We finally arrive in Cratavn just after nightfall, street lamps blurring past until we dip under Vandett Tower. Then it’s straight to the showers. The water is warm and the pressure kneads the pain from my muscles.

The voice says, “Brea, report to the Queen-Minister’s quarters.”

Brea pads away. Imeshan and Getye spare me a glance, then resume their showers. I run what happened in the Bone Factory through my mind again and again. I killed in Her name. I secured our objective. I didn’t even get distracted, when such a prime distraction was offered to me. I did nothing wrong this time. Just like in the agricultural sector, I did nothing wrong.

I slump back against the wall, the tile pressing into my scars.