45. Viridis

viridis ~is ~e, a.

1. green

2. young, energetic; vigorous

the king’s rider returns to the heart of the world.

But so have they.

Their tendrils wave high above as they slowly circle the massive core of nerve fluid. Three of them, this time. The scientists call them extruders. He doesn’t know what to call them, only what to feel about them: Anger. Indignation. Fear. The boy catches himself; why should he fear? His father has given him the universe, and the boy will shape it as he commands, and so he commands now in wordless thought:

return.

The silence in the core room pounds. The vents of the boy’s hoverchair whisper failure. He stares unblinkingly up at the ghostly tendrils dancing along the dark ceiling and commands again.

RETURN.

The extruders don’t react, but the core does. The silver fibrils inside surge furiously up the monolithic tube and bash against it, pointed in hard silver angles like spears, like teeth, trying to get to the extruders beyond at his command.

The extruders are defying him.

This has happened before—it has simply never happened for him. The king’s rider is always one of the king’s many bastards—Hellrunner accepts nothing but Ressinimus blood. They keep the core in check using Hellrunner or they are discarded, and many have come before him. The boy keenly remembers being discarded; the cold sulfur of the streets, the wet crack of molerat bones in his teeth when nothing else could be found, the blank gazes of the hundreds of thousands of people who walked past him huddled in his box of corrugated tin as if he were invisible. Garbage. His mother tried foolishly to run, to keep him away from his destiny, and he was treated like garbage for it.

No. He refuses to be discarded again.

The scientists were wrong; the core’s rapid failure is not due to entropy or a lack of supplied fuel. It is due to a rider.

At first he thought it was one of the established, experienced ones, but he quickly realized none of them posed a threat. None of them knew the answer to the old queen’s question—a question that almost broke the world twenty years ago and would break it again now just as readily. None of them knew how to go deep enough to find her. They were incapable of it, concerned always with their own survival. They resisted and resisted and resisted. It was not an established rider doing this. This was someone new, someone who refused to resist.

And he found her lying in that hospital bed.

The boy reaches out and touches the heart of the world, and the silver fibrils try to touch him back.

why her? what does she give you that i have not?

The hiss of a projection sword powering off rings in his ear, and the quiet voice of his bodyguard resounds at his side. “Do you require anything else, milord?”

The boy turns his hoverchair, vents hissing over tile and unmoving bodies. The core room is painted with stillness, with bodies slumped over at their consoles and clutching their own ill-hidden hard-light pistols, their bloodless projection sword wounds charring white lab coats in tangles of flesh, mouths and eyes open wide in rictus.

“The heads go into the core. Clean the rest, and then bring in the first-stringers.”

The bodyguard bows. “As you wish, milord.”