For a Seeker Thrall, there is no greater pleasure than locating their Lady within this steel graveyard they inhabit. Bound in radiant red—crystalline incubators conjured in haste to shelter them from the necrophagous warhead that rent the world in twain—the Thrallmasters have slumbered in peaceful stasis since the end of the war, waiting to be awoken by their respective property.

A warrior sits deceased in this aftermath world. Inside the decommissioned being, its internals fused into permanent disrepair by impact and heat, is another, smaller corpse. Vanity is dead in the mortal plane, but while her body remains intact she is yet duty-bound to her Lady. The pilot stirs, not in the mundane, decaying world of man, but in the overlap created by the arcane shelling of the Earth; it is a new chronology that coincides with the old, dead one. An afterbirth of existence—long dormant—roused by necromantic oblivion at the hands of those so desperate and brazen.

Vanity stands. Hers is a searing crimson form, sprouting from the weathered carcass it copies the shape of, a seed of hope growing into pathetic want it cannot seem to shake. Vanity is enthralled even in death, hopelessly bound to the whims and wants of a woman she could never escape from—for a life without her Lady has been rendered meaningless, old memory and drive scooped out of her head when the world yet drew breath; she was an enemy combatant once, or so she’s been told, but fighting for any cause but Hers seems so lofty now. A Thrall is a tool, the person long discarded. People decide their path, while a tool’s use is chosen for it.

The blasts scattered Thralls and Ladies alike, and entombed them in their crystal shells or combat suits respectively. As such, it has taken this Thrall, Vanity, precisely 276 days to finally locate her Lady. The excitement that kissed upon her when she identified the lingering blood, and found it to be a perfect match to her own, cannot be understated. It was so very difficult for Vanity to have to sit and wait for dusk before departing, but she knew it to be the safest way of ensuring her Lady’s retrieval. During the sunless day, hunters are about the land searching out undead pilots to stake in their cockpits; when a Seeker Thrall is projecting into the bright red sister plane in which they may yet walk and dance and war, their body—both large and small—produces just enough heat for the human remnants to take note of.

Nightfall means safety, even if the colour of the land does not much change. Vanity takes a fledgling step out of her metal cocoon, a womb preserving a fragile nothing, and leaves her husk behind for the final journey.

107 klicks north west from here is Vanity’s target: a bud of luminous red crystal that appears as nothing but soot-covered stone in the mortal plane. From the vestiges of radio chatter the Thrall has picked up in her decaying state, she has heard the roars of metal beasts—reawakened in the world of the living—and the cries of humans torn to shreds before their artillery could down the reanimated monsters. Hearing would only ever bring her overwhelming excitement—and envy. It stirred within her the phantom of libido, and made her wish so badly that she could get herself off to the tune of her sisters’ posthumous bloodshed. Alas, she has no method to relieve that itch without her Lady; co-dependence is a curse, because she has been separated from her master for all too long, but a blessing, too, because she understands well that the catharsis at the end of her mission will be enough to ablate all selfish desire from her pitiful mind forever. Reuniting with Lady means returning to that ugly, foetal bliss that claws at her sense of self so wonderfully, benevolently, and leaves a sharpened tool in the wake of its surgical ministrations.

The spectral body that resembles Vanity’s decommissioned mechsuit rears itself back in preparation for a sprint. Burning palms touch upon a land it cannot truly feel in this overlap, and it brings its front knee forwards—ready to burst into an explosive start that should carry it swiftly through those hundred klicks between she and Her. Vanity endures the searing of her emulated nerves as she binds her will to this projected body completely and leaves just enough soul within that broken vessel to keep the image of her ego alive.

This is The Perfected Self, no pilot inside to muddy the transmogrification of persona she had already undergone each and every time she piloted her combat suit back when the fires of war were more than ash and crystal kindling. This is the true self, a being of finely tuned carnage operated by undying will; legs strong enough to propel its immense weight through the air without crumpling under itself; arms ending in ten-metre long claws that can mince mobile artillery with ease; jaws lined with titanium-coated fangs that help the sanguine fiend puncture enemy combatants’ jugulars and siphon away the lifeblood of their accursed engines. It is a killing thing, and Vanity has more familiarity with its systems now—its heft and majesty—than her own pale, wasting flesh.

This mech is Vanity, a name once shared between two halves, now made whole.

There is a boom of sound, and a flash of bright, painful chaos in the giant wraith’s simulacrum of fusion reactor—and the Seeker departs on its swan song sprint through two perfectly overlapping afterlives.

“Faint as hell, but… got a heat sig from the Abyssian front, eastern side. Could be nothing, but… quiet day right?” A remnant of the world reclines in the cockpit of their scrappy mechsuit, wiping the skin of the apple in their hand with a rag not much cleaner. These leftovers who civilise the craters left behind by orchestrated, man-made disaster have a vested interest in snuffing out all remaining traces of the empire that once oppressed them; an imperium built—and destroyed—by powerful blood magic, pacts between those with too much to give and those who knew best how to take.

“Mm… best not ignore it, I guess,” speaks the voice on the hunter’s intercom, as dishevelled as the world at large, “but just keep it on the down low, alright? Small crew, can’t authorise a whole team at this hour.”

“Gotcha. Well, we’ll get right on it then.” The pilot kicks forwards in their chair with a bristle and turns the ignition key to start their rusty junker’s engine. After testing their stake-drivers against the nearby scrap, they sigh into their mask—full body coverings are essential this deep into the flesh-eating fallout—and call up the two nearest hunters. Nap time’s over.

50 clicks remaining, and the wraith does not tire; it cannot, for it is not truly possessed of metal chassis, nor meat and bone. It is simply an afterthought, barrelling over the cold dead land towards the only living thing in its entire world: Her. Lady took the defeated pilot that once had a name of her own, and bound the broken whelp to Vanity—by blood and soul and beaten spirit. Vanity’s reconstruction into her Lady’s perfectly obedient Thrall was a quickly settled affair, indifferent and mundane as the stirring of sugar into rich tea. Lady wrapped the poor thing around Her finger with such ease that it spelled the rift in power between them beautifully; Vanity learned better than to bask in light not made for her to enjoy—she belongs in the shadow of her superior, her owner, always.

Sometimes, she was made to kill those with familiar voices, and had to claw at the last vestiges of identity clinging to that fresh new skin hardening around her heart. Shedding yourself completely is a messy process, but Lady was always there to guide her, and to praise or admonish accordingly. It became an addictive dance, and Vanity was trained step by step to perfectly mirror her master’s wants—and suffocate her own.

What is want, but disobedience?

The Thrall’s blood begins to hum inside her veins as she draws nearer to that sharp knife of fate at her throat, Lady’s iron smile and surgical tone of voice. Her blood is infused with that of her master’s, it compels her onwards; Vanity’s own body, under the whim of another, her very cells made into subordinates to those superior in nature. Nobody could have expected these Thrallbound warriors to return to their senses when the war ended, because their dependence runs so deep it lives and beckons under their skin, poisons their blood and constricts prefrontal cortex in a bondage of bright red string. Trailing behind Vanity as she sprints headlong into that bleak expanse, is the tether: wholly different to the red string of fate she follows. The tether is invisible, but it binds her body to her soul, and should it become severed it will spell an end to all things her. Vanity cannot abide an early end, duty-bound as she is, having already defied one fated death with the help of its cousin, hope.

Hope in every heaving footfall—death’s cold exhale ever at her back—Vanity presses on towards deliverance.

Only 20 more klicks; her heart is pumping song.

“Fuck… it’s definitely projecting, take a look at the infrared.” One of the hunters sets their cumbersome mech down in front of the corpse named Vanity, picking up a piece of scrap metal that used to be a combat suit’s arm and holding it towards the invisible shell that surrounds the sanguine fiend. The metal oxidises and begins to bubble up into a new, horrific shape, before exploding with a high pitched sound that causes the hunter’s ears to ring even with protection.

“Ward’s strong, but small. The runes’ll be very close, in a circle. You know what to look for, visors on.” Taking a bite into their apple, now as clean as it’s ever going to be, the hunter taking charge stares down their immobile, soot-caked foe with a spark of fear in their eyes. How close is that thing, a former ally deconstructed and reconditioned into imperial pet, to reaching its master?

“Found the circle!” shouts one of the hunters through their comms channel, the tip of their metal frame’s rusted toe removing the invisible rune from the earth and breaking the loop.

A few minutes pass before a second test is made, and the ward is confirmed to have been dispelled. It’s almost a race, no clear coordination as all three hunters raise the arms of their machines and puncture the chassis mercilessly. The cockpit is riddled with holes, the pilot’s body torn into chunks of decaying flesh that stick to the retracted stakes in lumps.

Vanity is destroyed.

Vanity’s sprint comes to a slow halt and she turns her head—burning crimson and white—back towards the location of her final resting place. The tether has been cut.

“No… nonono… so close now… must reach Her.” The Thrall mumbles to herself in a cocktail of panic and excitement; the thrill is an adrenaline high and the fear only serves to fuel it. She will reach her Lady, and then all will be well again. She must reach her Lady, because failure was kicked out of her with every pulled tooth and broken rib—every scar and burn, flagellation both figurative and oh so literal. Blood magic healing is not necessarily the blessing you’d think it to be, in the hands of those as cruel as they are ruthlessly efficient. Vanity drops low into her final sprint, outpacing that lit fuse of broken tether now dogging her steps.

10 klicks remaining.

She can smell the redolent blood of her master beckoning her forwards like a hound. Toes curl into the land like hooks in skin, a nostalgic thought to a well tamed Thrall like Vanity, the world passing her by in a blur of unnecessary light and detail. All Vanity needs to know is forward. She’ll be home soon, in Her shadow, unmade and remade and remedied. Vanity would drool, had she the capacity to manufacture saliva in this projected self—more machine than man.

5 klicks.

The tether cannot catch up to her, she may be destroyed but it hardly matters when her lingering will is so resolute in its goals as to defy another undue death. Death is change, is transformation, and Vanity’s malleability brings redundancy to the very concept of destruction. Change is inevitable, to escape death is to embrace it and remodel your undead self into something which stitches its every end onto a new beginning. A life and death in service to your Lady, mastering mortality to the sole benefit of your mortal master. To Her, and the eternity she demands of you until the changing of her will’s unruly tide.

1 klick.

It takes no time at all. The crystal structure stands radiant and tall, compelling Vanity’s eyeless, lipless face, to smile brightly and well with tears. It walks, basking, no longer fearful of severed lifelines and old forms. It lives in light, red and overwhelming, dragging its elongated claws across the crystalline surface and feeling its phantom blood resonate with the real thing.

She is inside, waiting. It is outside, watching. The red crystal begins to open up.

Blooming.

In an interstice of time and memory, encased in preparatory incubator conjured from collective blood siphoned from the casualties of war, and willing Thralls, Lady Vain hovers in stasis. Her eyes open upon a scene of Her loyal husk entering the blooming world She retreated to, and Her lips curl into a dark stain of smug.

“How many days, Thrall? How long have you made me wait?” Her voice is a scalpel.

Vanity steps closer, despite the lack of floor to stand upon. This place is a pocket of magic manifested into something close enough to reality for a mortal to tuck themselves away within. “Uhm… two… two hundred… and seventy… six…”

“Hours?”

Vanity shakes her head, apologetically, her wits far too dulled around her Lady to understand when she’s being toyed with. “D-days… sorry.”

Lady Vain cocks Her head and smirks, beckoning the bound Seeker forwards with a finger clad in black lambskin leather—the gloves reaching up to the woman’s biceps. Vanity stares upon such beauty, a visage of unnatural iridescence; pearlescent white dress, shoulderless, wreathed in blood red stains so pretty they dye the beholder’s mind with fear and awe; long black boots, leather, with more eyelets than Vanity has memories left to her—bargained away for more obedience training and soft, pillowy praise; cherry-coloured hair, fine and silky, collected into a bun at the back only to spiral down over naked shoulders and collarbone in decadent coils Vanity craves the waft of. Her Lady is oxygen; the Thrall has been suffocating in Her absence.

Eyes as sharp as the projected blades sprouting from Vanity’s fingers pull the Thrall’s gaze into orbit, and The Perfected Self steps closer until made to stop within an arm’s length.

“Look at you, stammering like a little girl again. This is not my tool, my weapon. This is embarrassment… a meandering, runtish disappointment that left its Lady in wait for far too long. Come here, let me treat you as such if that’s all you are.” Her words are cruelty incarnate, glinting chisels that carve the Thrall into its proper shape with a sharp edge of admonishment.

“N-no… I… I’m a good—”

Lady Vain claps her hands together and the Thrall finds itself seized, instantly, in a tight constriction of coarse red rope; the conjuration is no less painful than the real thing, bindings as sadistically scratchy as coconut coir and strong as jute. Vanity feels the conjured rope dig into her skin—just how she deserves and just how She likes it.

“You’re whatever I tell you to be, nothing more and nothing less. Do you understand, Thrall? We entertained the concept of cocooning your poor little souls while the fires of war yet burned strong, but now there’s no need for you to be anything but perfect.” Vanity’s Lady addresses The Perfected Self directly, with self-assured simper. Her gloved hand traces down the burning projection’s chest, constricted in a chest harness that only grows tighter the more her pleading victim—wanton for more of this strict domination of her everything—struggles.

“I understand, my Lady,” speaks the garbled voice of fire and servitude. Vanity’s Perfected Self, a being in the shape of a god while harbouring the battered will of a slave, finds its disappointing posture corrected by the manifestation of voice that knots her into fitting stance.

"You understand nothing, it is how I made you. Let me show you what you really are, so that you may better learn your place. I'll awaken what's left of my blood inside of you, the real you, and replace your feeble desire to understand me, the world I shape for you to see, with hunger. Deep, primal, and insatiable. You have no other use now that I am awake." The woman gives Vanity a look of pity as fake as the Thrall's understanding. "Were you still alive, I'd take you with me, but instead I think I'll have my fun and make you a parting gift to those who have supposedly won the war we put on hold."

Vanity shudders, the cold stare of her mistress penetrating her, perforating her will to speak as easily as pushing pin through pillowcase. Lady Vain, calm grin fixed onto Her face—a ballroom mask concealing the truth of Her own sick catharsis—pushes those domineering digits of hers against the front of Vanity's chest.

Fingers invade that wet cavity of wretched light, prying apart the soft folds of Vanity's essence: her very ego, overlapping with machine reactor, where beating heart would sit in the Thrall's desecrated form and the pilot herself would sit in the mechanical being she once operated. The cockpit holds no pilot, no heart, only ichor—dripping ivory and glowing bright with yearning. It is the projection of a Thrallbound soul, and smooth black fingers seek to have their way with it without a care for the plaything's sense of self.

"You're a god, by mortal standards, even if you wield such little power in your current purgatory. And yet... ah, how small you are in front of me." It's true, Lady Vain towers—in no small part thanks to her platform boots—over the manifestation of imperial power. To a god like Vanity, the Lady who built her in this glorious image is God-Mother.

Vanity tries to speak, but all that she produces is a breathy, crackling gurgle. The fingers penetrate her special place, pulling apart the liquid light inside with a tight squelch. She's being violated on the most intimate level a sentient creature ever could be, via magic and quiet, calculating malice. Her Lady's expression is academic, curious, Her casual ministrations teasingly slow as they coax out more pathetic gurgling.

"Hm... it's warm, your everything. Does it make you hot, pet, to bask in the radiance of your betters? Ah... aha... I'm getting carried away, but to ruin a being so completely as to fuck their soul away is not an everyday indulgence." The smirking Mother God accentuates Her words with uniform touch, fingers straightening some before pumping themselves in and out of that messy cockpit. Vanity's ego loses shape, screaming in squelches of leather-fucked need against the smoothness of its ruler's digits. The Lady asks questions in Vain, because Vanity can already feel herself reforming around the fingers that violate her chest, replacing wants and loyalties and loves with hunger. Hunger. Hunger.

The entire pocket-space fills with the sound of wet smacking, both from the Thrall's incessant, babyish gurgling and the obscene sloshing of its insides. Her ego snaps back into place and clamps down around those fingers pumping in and out in steady, methodical rhythm. Some of her dribbles out, but the loss is negligible when every single part of her is being overwritten for a single, simple purpose: to kill, until killed.

A Handler fucking Her asset, Her weapon, to seduce the lock on that Pandora's Box sitting as corpse out in the dead battleground. She whispers a saccharine nothing that implodes Vanity's core desires, only hunger is needed; the hunger of a beast on the edge of death is a vicious thing indeed, imagine that of one already expired, animated only by the pact it formed with Hell herself—in bloodied white dress.

"Hunger, my adorable beast. Sate yourself until you're spent, carve my gracious touch into their metal bodies. Flood their cockpits red. Hunger for their settlement, and do not discriminate in your feasting."

"Grrrhk... ggguhhh..." Lambskin leather curls and pleasures the last vestiges of Vanity's being, massaging out her complications—the redundant pieces that do not contribute to hunger. She's drooling, she's bleating, and she's never felt this overwhelmingly happy in her entire life. A life in service to her Lady, and a death beholden to such inviolable loyalty. Now, an afterlife of only hunger. Hunger. Hunger.

The Perfected Self lurches, and ejaculates a tremendous flow of sticky white light from the cavity in its chest, purging itself of Vanity. It has no pride, only fervent hunger and final orders.

Nascency.

"See, this is why my old girl... Dike... always had a fresh coat of red paint," the lead hunter reminisces with a wistful sigh, remembering a time when they still piloted gods—not trash. Dripping from those dull grey frames is the viscera left of Vanity, both the mechanical fiend and the Thrall within. "She was such a fuckin' beaut, Dicaeosyne... back when we gave our gals real names instead of... fuck, what'cha call your junker Cass?"

"Shit Creek."

There's a crackle of laughter over the radio, which predictably ends in wheezing.

"Wonder if they got anything in the way of paint back at the bunker, this thing's not her, but Trash Dyke could do with something to set it apart, y'know, and hide the stain of these bloody things in the process." The lead Hunter snorts, running fingers through slick-backed hair and cracking their neck. Leather driving gloves seize the manual controls and turn the heaving mechanical frame to peer back in the direction they came from. "Hey, can you hear that? No, not hear... feel?" Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Hunger.

The viscera on the end of the hunters' stakes begins to writhe, and crawl down towards the ashen ground. Trash Dyke's pilot swallows the spit in their mouth and fights—and fails—against the shudder that claims their spine. Fear is the Dyke-killer; as the thrumming gets louder and louder, the startled hunters find themselves too fearful to act, watching on in horror as the imperial mech that has lain dead for the better half of a year barrels after its pilot's desecrators on all fours. In an impressive—and surely impossible—feat, the wounded, manic beast pushes off the ground with its hind legs into a leap that blots out the meek dawn.

The Perfected Self—Erysichthon—could be mistaken for a winged beast in this frozen slice of time, in which the lead hunter watches a moving picture-show of their entire life. Titanium plated toes, curled and sharp as talons, land with such force onto the Trash Dyke's shoulders that it tears the junker mech's arms clean off. Before the dazed pilot can even think to react, to jump back with the thrusters bolted to their chest and let their fellow hunters swoop in with their stake-drivers, ten long claws burst directly through the cockpit and pry the entire frame in half with the ease of a dog sinking fangs into a child's goading hand.

When it notices the other hunters still too startled to move, positively shitting themselves inside their respective tombs-to-be, Erysichthon throws back its head and lets out a grotesque, ear-splitting cackle. The giant, hungry god towers over its hunters-turned-prey with the grace of a performer getting ready to take a bow, before extending one of its ten-metre long claws—a killing blade almost the length of a school bus—and plunging it into the split-open corpse of Trash Dyke's pilot where it lays strewn across the ground.

The remaining hunters watch in terror, and dark curiosity, as the sanguine fiend lifts the body up into the air, unhinges the jaws of its lupine face, and drops the fresh meat into its maw.

CRUNCH!

It's not enough to sate the insatiable, of course, but the beast is more than happy for the mortal blood that now spills inside of it and keeps it ticking over just a little longer in its afterlife of slaughter. Happy hunting, Erys.

"Jesus fuck... we gotta..."

"Run, fucking run!"

Erysichthon cocks its head, human blood dripping from its rows of sharp teeth, and looks over its shoulder at the junkers readying to flee. Still hungry... not enough, never enough. The war may be over, but the famine's just begun. There's a heat in its freshly-fucked chest, where its old everything once sat, that compels it to kill and eat like a wild animal driven to the edge. There are fingers in its whimpering excuse for an ego—snapped firm into pitiful pleasure-toy—driving it on autonomously; ghosts of fingers, commandeering corpse.

Retracting its claw-blades up the lengths of its spindly arms, the undead metal fiend commands the writhing viscera of Vanity on the ground into a single consolidation of Thrallbound flesh, scooping it up with one hand and using the sharp point of its finger to etch a rune into the squirming surface.

Mestra.

The old and broken flesh, now named and bound, shifts into new shape with the sounds of rippling muscle and the crunch of rearranging bone. It sits, a she, in master's hand, staring up at the monster that wields her in its palm. The recycled Thrall opens her mouth, as though she intends to ask the hungering wretch for her orders, and—

_Squish!

…

Mestra is a malleable Thrall, literally so, crushed back into broken bone and pretty, roseate entrails—remembering its shape obediently as the gangly Erysichthon reels back with its arm swinging behind its head. With a heavy slam of foot against the dead battleground of the Abyssian front—eastern side—Erysichthon sends its new weapon hurtling through the necrophagous air towards its fleeing prey. One of them, anyway.

Sparing no time at all, the bestial giant drops itself low and bends its leg, propelling itself forward with a kick and rushing the other junker not presently being hunted by its airborne gift of wasting daughter-flesh.

The breakneck beast kicks itself into the air once again, hurtling forwards with the strength and weight of a god and collapsing down onto the form of something lesser and scared. It was good of them to flee, because the chase is so enticing. Erysichthon crashes into the junker mechsuit and together they roll, the fiend ending up atop the hunter’s machine, pinning it to the ground as a wild animal would. Those long retractable claws sink deep into the busted thing’s chassis and prevent it from moving while the hungered hunk of steel and titanium and blood opens its jaw wide as a snake’s; not truly unhinging mandible, but stretching the ligaments between upper and lower parts to fit its hungry mouth around the junker’s entire cockpit.

This Perfected Self is a perfect hunter: the talons and swoop of a hawk, the lupine claws and likeness of a wolf, the jaw and reflexes of a python. The never ending hunger of man.

With a swift closing of the monster’s dripping jaws, snapped shut around the junker’s torso and pilot, one of the two coward hunters is no more.

“Fuck… fuck…” The final hunted loses their composure beautifully, as sweat beads down their brow and has them blinking through the moment something hard and wet splats onto their lumbering junker.

Mestra reshapes herself dutifully, snapping bone back into place and arranging her flesh into something resembling human—but not quite convincing enough. There’s nothing but hunger in her blood, it’s what she’s made of, made for, the rune etched into her being, that animates her dead flesh, meaning ‘hollow’; a cave of person, ravenous in its appetite to mirror its accursed master. Gluttony may be a sin, but this Thrall is not human enough to be marked for Hell. And so it eats unfettered.

Fingers caked in dried blood dig into the seams of the cockpit door and lose shape to pry inside with impossible thinness. The former hunter quakes in their world of fear and piss, succumbing to the cold embrace of hopelessness. Mestra seeps through the gaps in a drip-drop of cherry red death, landing and reforming in the frozen pilot’s lap with a playful grin on her icy lips. The meat she sits on is warm. A hand cups the meal’s cheek, cools it, and the starving Thrall bares her sharpened teeth.

And then there were none.

From the wreckage of a collapsed junker extends a tiny hand, licked clean of the red it had previously been painted in. The small fingers wrap around the tip of one much larger, the digit of a god reclaiming its subject.

Mestra, emptier than before it ate its fill, produces a hollow smile—appeasing nothing—and accepts Erysichthon’s hand.

They hunger still, like the reawakened Thralls before them, and so make for the bunker that the poor hunters had been attempting to flee to. An entire settlement, surviving as best they can in the aftermath of an arcane bloody war.

How many will be eaten, before the empire has had its fill?