Eradication 2 – Chaos

Eradication 2 – Chaos

It had been over a thousand years since the creation of Metra. Kingdoms and empires had risen and fallen in the fertile land of Mesopotamia time and time again. Some she saw rise with her own eyes, bloody realms that needed her to quash rebellions or eliminate less worthy candidates.

The laws of Gaia had become stricter with each passing year. Individually it was barely noticeable, but over a millennium it now felt like too great a risk to step outside of the Abyss. None of her brothers or sisters ever dared to step outside the abyssal side, but that was often enough.

In the lands that once were Akkad, every fifth person was part of the Abyss, including all of the nobility. No matter how many empires fell, every king would seek a contract with the Metracanas for one reason or another. Some would only seek some of them out, those they needed, others would attempt to contract them all. Every time, the Metracanas acted upon the oath that they had made to Sargon on his deathbed.

Even without running the risk of being deployed in the world of normal man, it wasn’t like they had nothing to do.

Most of the time they resided in the city of Babylon. Once destroyed by Sargon himself, it had been rebuilt twice since then around a central tower that no one dared to touch. For why they were there, it was due to a drawback in how they functioned. Being the imperfect prototypes of a magical technique meant that they had aspects to them that made them outstanding, but that was only because people hadn’t yet figured out what was needed to take off the edges to make the entirety work.

Between the contracts they slept. It was a necessity. While the unique properties of Astrotium, the metal from the fallen stars that made up most of their bodies, allowed them to regenerate their own mana while under contract, it would leak out steadily whilst they were free. Mana just didn’t stick to them with their uncompleted souls; they needed a second person to stabilize theirs. Roaming around on their own was not an option for all but one of them.

An early design flaw for most, a deliberate decision for others of the Metracanas. The Artificial Spirits that existed nowadays, streamlined and clearer versions of the spell that had been used to create them, didn’t have that problem, they could eventually be independent, although they were inferior in other ways. Most of all being that they were weaker, weaker even than most golems. A new trend to implant crystalized versions of aspects of consciousness into their bodies as a replacement for the materials of gods that were inlaid in the Metracanas was slowly shaping up. The results varied. Metra listened to those stories with medium interest; she was the first, so she did care about what followed after her, but she was also not the science kind of thinker. She was a weapon of the battlefield and searched for a place to take the wrath inside her heart and live it out over answers to some questions.

There was one place, however, where the Metracanas could reside without having to be afraid of running out of energy, at the side of their goddess.

“I need to kill her, I will kill her, SHE SHALL BE KILLED!” Tiamat roared in the temple that was also her prison and the wonder at the heart of the empire giving the monolithic structure its name, the Tower of Babel.

The goddess of chaos was a hideous beast. A dragon whose body had much of its flesh carved off, revealing a bare rib cage, a beating heart within that pumped saltwater through a body that was working with rotting organs. Two of her five wings were naught but bone, the others looked pristine, water continuously dripping off them like morning dew. It landed on the floor where it quickly dried up, leaving a thin crust of salt in the middle of the circular hall.

On her long neck, covered in blackened, dull scales, sat a head that was half recognizable as a normal dragon, whilst the other was a chaotic mess of scars, displaced eyes and a mouth that had a vertical slit to pull open in addition to the horizontal, normal one. Her maw was just an elongated mess of displaced teeth in soft flesh, only fit to hurt not to consume. She moved her head around as if in a panic, overlooking the seven open chambers at the lower and the fourteen at the upper level of the two story temple that had been erected around her crippled form.

Her voice swung between displeased mess and sultry sweet words depending on her mood. Today, she was clearly annoyed. “So close, thousands of years, so much research, so many resets by foolish kings, we can do it today. So close! I understand the next world, we must tear this one down, the cycle has been stopped, the wheel reinvented before Enuma Elis.”

Metra listened closely to Tiamat. The goddess of chaos was incoherent, had so many endgoals that she seldom reached any single one of them, but her words ultimately revealed potential for someone else. The worthiest kings had been born out of her divinity.

She was a fine-looking lady, pale for this part of the world as she resembled someone that was hiding inside scheming all day. Long black hair with dark brown eyes and a face befitting for a lady of the court. All of her fine details, from those natural to her royal behaviour to her steel-grey dress with the silver rim of starlight, looked even more elegant next to the brutish appearance of the muscle-bound Metra in her armour.

Dress and armour were both made from the metal most of their bodies consisted off, Astrotium as it was known in the west. The Metracanas had eventually figured out how to manipulated the make-up of their bodies in the most effective ways: by pushing all of the hard material outwards they could create armours harder than anything anyone could hope to smith with their hands. The appearance of dull steel was intermixed with other elements, depending on the Metracana. For Metra, red decorations covered the dark dull grey, pieces of the scale of Tiamat, liquefied in the fire of anger that they themselves fuelled.

“Just like you to voice your complaints when nobody important is listening,” the wrathful growled back.

“You are putting words in my mouth as usual,” Semiramis sighed. “I know that Sargon, blessed be his beard in the world beyond, had not figured out how to grant intellect to you, his most failed success, but you still ought to listen every now and again.”

“I would be more inclined to listen to you if you weren’t in the middle of scheming something again,” Metra told her. “Like 230 years ago when you told me someone stole Uru-kartza.”

“Are you still not over that?” Semiramis wanted to know as they cleared the temple, leaving behind a manically laughing and sobbing Tiamat.

“You made me murder an entire priesthood in search of my sword and, in the end, it just magically appeared back in my storage,” Metra stopped for a moment to threateningly bump her finger against the much smaller lady’s chest. “I may not be the greatest planner, but I know when I have been played and how to recognize who benefitted the most from my mistakes.”

“Not that any of that matters now,” Semiramis mused.

“No, it doesn’t,” Metra agreed. They were all almost certain that they were running head first into certain death. Even if the theory of this tower was correct, even if there was a way to push Gaia from her throne, just this tower wouldn’t be enough, a whole kingdom wouldn’t be enough, the only thing that Metra could imagine would be enough would be the entire world and, even then, barely. “Which begs the question why you are bringing it up.”

“At the end, I just wanted to say: I hate you,” Semiramis stated. “But let us end as sisters, not as foes.” She reached out her hand. Metra took it immediately, much to the first of patience’s surprise. “I would have figured...”

“You thought too much about it,” Metra interrupted her. “If this is the end, I don’t want to enter whatever may come after this, if anything, to see Sargon again as bickering children. If you lie to me again, you are just the same bitch as usual.”

“...You are so refreshingly simple,” Semiramis stated.

Metra just blew air out of her nose, and they continued to climb to the highest floor.all new stories at n0ve/lbi/n(.)com