Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Fool's Gold

"This is a bad idea." Sunny said. Standing in the derelict shuttle bay, the two of them convened privately while the rest of the delegation slowly assembled itself. She restated her spear against the floor with a hard thud, visor retracted back from her inhuman face. Light glittered in waves over the electric blue carapace crowning her regal head, "She has the advantage here. This is their territory."

That was true enough, Adam could sense it.

This ship, this palace was..... Well it was evil. Despite having been here on multiple occasions in the past, he hardly recognized the silent, dark hallways, branching off from the main shuttle bay and into inky black darkness. There was no life here, only silence, and a muffled sense of complete wrongness.

Were was the crew?

All around them remnants of station life lay in a tableau of captured time. Equipment sat scattered on the floor, crates overturned. Something dark stained the far wall, though Adam had no desire to figure out what.

He could guess.

Apollyon perfecting his manipulation.... He could only imagine that what lay behind these walls was far worse than the hand of god incident. Closing his eyes he couldn't help but imagine the scene: a desiccated corpse sitting over an empty plate.

"She is at an advantage, but if Adham listened to me.... We have a secret weapon."

Sunny tilted her head in a question, but it was cut off as Adham approached from the shuttle. The glowing white and gold of his armor cast off a small radius of light, a bubble which chased off any fleeing shadows. The delegation was small, Adham as the leader of the Makers, Adam as the leader of the constructs, Sunny as Kazna's daughter and Conn as their resident mind reading manipulator plus or minus a few guards: That being Ramirez and another maker that Adam did not recognize.

The last member of their party might take some time, and the more dramatic their entrance, the better.

"I advise that we go no further into the station. I imagine Apollyon will be trying to throw us off and has set the stage to do so. Even if that isn't the case, we don't want to be trapped in tight corridors on an unfamiliar space station with architect knows what is wandering the halls."

Adam agreed. The rest of the group gathered around in a tight formation, maker and construct leaders at the head.

Adham closed his eyes, "If you think we will be venturing further into this ship, you are sadly mistaken. We have come to meet you on your ground, and we'll go no further, if you wish to meet with us, you will come and meet with us here."

For a long moment, there was only silence, a well of emptiness that seemed to spread outward from the welling darkness of the corridors and fill the room around them. The shifting of their bodies and the soft exhale of their breath was the only noise to chase away the abiding stillness.

And then she appeared, coalescing from the darkness like a wraith, shadows billowing at her heels, gold eyes flashing in the light given off by Adham the makers. She had never looked so sinister, her massive, horned black armor towering over them, shadow black cloak whipping around her heels. Her face was unusually gaunt, eyes sunken back into her head. Her once purple carapace seemed stained black.

"If you insist." She said, and with every step the ground beneath them seemed to shake a little under the weight of her massive, armored body. Adam had always thought of Sunny as tall, relative to himself, but every time Kazna or Kanan showed their full height, he was reminded of just how short she was, a mere seven feet in comparison to her mother's almost ten, with the added bonus of massive spikes on her helmet.