Eamon hears the screaming long before the doors to his sanctuary burst open, and The Unbound spill in like an arterial bleed. Within their armoured mass, a woman bucks and wails. Bloodshot eyes flash beneath snarls of filth-clotted hair; her skin a pale landscape between swelling bruises and angry gouges.
‘Ophelia,’ the sorcerer whispers, ash-stained fingers ghosting across his lips as the armsmen pin her upon his altar. ‘What have they done to you?’
‘Her unit fell behind enemy lines,’ the sergeant grunts, boots upturning the carpeted floor as she thrusts her strength downwards upon the writhing woman’s blood-slicked arms. ‘The rest are pulp. We found her – like this. Raving. Screaming. But, oh…’ The armswoman’s head turns, barbed lips stretch into a feral grin. ‘We made sure those Imperium dogs howled, too.’
Ophelia’s screech breaches the air, and the sergeant’s reminiscent glee dulls. ‘We need your help, Sorcerer. She needs your help. Another one, like you, had been–’
‘The Architect is a wild, ambitious thing,’ he warns. ‘They may not stop once I begin.’
But he sees how Ophelia writhes, trapped within the torments of her own mind, and finds himself already countering his hesitance with a shake of his head.
‘But the mind is mighty,’ he finishes, his voice hardening. ‘Hold her steady,’ he commands, vaulting onto the altar to perch over the supine woman, who hitches and thrashes in renewed fear.
‘I said hold her steady!’ Eamon snarls, gritting through a strike to his thigh as he kneels astride her.
‘Greeeaaa! Rreeeaaa!’
The sounds Ophelia heaves are unintelligible, but so are the mantras bubbling from Eamon’s throat. Leaning until his shape, alone, fills her vision, the man clutches her temples. He breathes, agape, into her mouth like a feeding bird – anchoring his mind within hers.
Keening, Ophelia’s unseeing eyes widen. Calling upon a strength beyond primal, her arms flail. Her hands fly. Ripping a knife from the sergeant’s vest, she swings blindly, desperately upward.
Slap!
‘Wretched, lazy brat!’
Eamon watches, sombre and still between the milky veils of Ophelia’s memories, as the overseer overturns her workstation. Ophelia, the child, cowers behind shaking hands as bolts pelt the ground around her.
‘Who said you could sleep? On my time?’
The child screams.
Slap!
‘…He always was a monster.’
Eamon’s awareness shifts to Ophelia’s representation beside him. Her manifested figure is uncowed and untouched. Nonetheless, her consciousness tremors with each remembered blow.
Eamon concentrates. With a sweeping gesture, he tears the memory away – offering the shrill cries of violence to a blue, ethereal hunger he swiftly veils under a conjuring of hissing seafoam and sand.
Ophelia’s form relaxes with innocent wonder as the haze of her mind flattens into a shimmering sea.
‘Of course it is an ocean,’ she sighs. She watches, mesmerised, as a cold, sparkling wave laps at her toes and washes back – dragging another hue of her anguish down beneath its foam.
Discomfited, Eamon glances about. Embarrassment prickles his manifested voice. ‘Would you rather something else? A rainstorm? A mountain with wind-swept snow? Or, perhaps–’
Ophelia’s laughter peals like a shift bell, startling the sorcerer from continuing his nervous, eager suggestions. He softens, marvelling at her smile as if it were one of the glittering illuminations pressed within his forbidden tomes.
She shakes her head. ‘No. No, my friend… It’s just… I’ve never seen the ocean.’
A thick silence passes between them. The waves now crash over the echoed blares of a recruiter promising promotion and adventure on distant cosmic shores. An older Ophelia watches peers deemed stronger than her pass her by and never return.
Then, a brush of warmth: her late father’s smile and his hand against her cheek before these, too, dissolve beneath the salty, grey mist.
‘Are they really gone?’ she asks, her voice pinching.
Eamon grimaces, observing the waves and the current within. His fingertips twitch. ‘Perhaps…’
Another rises: the overseer’s attention. A trace across her shoulders. A sneer. A threat.
Erased.
‘But it is for the best,’ he suggests, quietly.
The depths bubble and churn, surfacing a memory of the sorcerer himself, carving the symbols of their new god into her shivering, willing flesh with undying focus.
Eamon’s breath hitches.
She smiles again, though it is dimmer now. ‘Surprised?’
They watch their past selves delve deeper into the rite: Eamon gifts her the knife, and the ragged Ophelia glides it across the screaming overseer’s throat.
Eamon’s right eye begins to ache – a dull, thudding knock.
‘You have endured much,’ he whispers, as the tides continue eroding the history of her life. Her service. Her capture.
Her torture.
‘I am tired,’ she admits, her gaze drifting.
Eamon shifts uncomfortably upon the sand, itching to redirect. To reassure. ‘But you are strong. And the Architect has been… kind with Their selection… There will be new memories, Ophelia. Your mind, quieter now, shall persevere.’
She exhales, her attention shifting to him. Then, to a stirring beyond. ‘Only if the body does,’ she whispers.
The sorcerer shakes his head. ‘You may have been bruised and broken.’ He taps his brow. ‘But as long as the capability, here, persists, so shall you. This is the real… you, Ophelia. The rest – the flesh – is nought but a shell.’
Ophelia is quiet. She reaches, her fingertips delicately brushing his temple, just behind the growing pressure. Eamon stiffens, but does not retreat. Instead, he takes a hesitant lean forward into her touch.
‘They are one and the same, Eamon…’
A wave – monstrous, dark and scented with iron – swells.
‘I’m sorry.’
Her words hang in his mind as the knife plunges, hilt-deep, into his brain. The sorcerer gawks – a spastic, final hitch. Dark blood and grey mass drip from his nose. He cannot hear the sergeant’s shouts nor see the explosion of movement around them. There is only Ophelia’s deepening, hollow sigh before the roaring tide of his own dying synapses consumes all.
