Supermassive Signals

“To be happy is a performance. To exist is a measurement. To simply be is a decision.”

Dr. Isa Amestina, Djanrein Philosopher

"Colonel Amestine, sir?" Said the Recruit, dangling out the front from her Frame like a precarious, precocious child in the arms of a tree.

The Colonel glanced up from their clipboard. "Yes, Oksana?"

"What was it like the first time you Piloted one of these?"

Oksana was talented, no doubt, in the art of frustrating curiosity. Never in their life had Amestine met someone who so obviously asked "why" too much as a child, who must've been a terror on the psyches of their parents. Reo appreciated every moment of her unquenchable curiosity. But in the middle of a Compatibility test, she was certainly pushing her luck.

"Why do you ask?"

"Oh, uhm," Oksana's most notable feature was a lack. Her right arm simply didn't exist, and so instead, whenever she needed to fidget, she would at every turn use her left hand. Today, she was rapping her fingers against the inner switchboard. "I'm a bit conked out today. You know, a bit shaky in the knees."

"If you're not ready to Frameshift then-"

"No no! Not what I meant, I'm fine!"

"'Fine', are you?" Amestine glanced her up and down.

"Right as rain, physically."

"You know just how vital your mental aspects are in tandem, Oksana."

"Yes, I know that too!" She huffed, slipping back onto the Frame's saddle and out of sight. Her voice took on a short, claustrophobic echo. "I've just got this bundle of nerves in my chest, and they won't untangle no matter how hard I pull. And I thought, 'hey, maybe Reo'll have some advice from when they first Piloted! They're an expert in the whole ignore your emotions type-dealio!'." She put her hand out in defeat, and embraced herself in a deep sigh. "Clearly, I had the wrong idea. Sorry, sir."

Colonel Amestine didn't say anything for several seconds, though they were already in motion before Sana had finished speaking, returning the clipboard to its desk.

"...Sir?" Said to the clatter.

"Get out of that saddle." The Colonel sloughed the shoulders of their coat away. "You won't listen with all those buttons laid out in front of you."

"Listen to what…" Sana trailed off as she climbed across the lip of the gaping jaws in the Frame's chest, landing with an ungraceful step onto the boarding ladder. There, she was greeted by the longcoat-lacking Colonel, hands in pockets like they had somewhere to be. Amestine always had a dapper look about themself, fitted suitably in a generation a few decades before their own, but the suspenders and slacks they apparently always wore beneath their longcoat spoke to an understanding of fashion so alien to Sana, she had to sit herself down.

She hadn't even noticed the tattoos until they rolled each sleeve up to the elbow, revealing several spots of ink, primarily black, twisting in vines around their radius bones. The tattoos started just before the hand, and didn't stop until the elbow, maybe further up. Sana spied sweeps of unnatural black around their neckline, like an inky darkness rising upwards from their chest.

"Oh." Sana mustered, hand in her lap.

"This isn't for vanity, Oksana. It is an illustration of distance."

Sana sat on the thought for several seconds, blankly focussed on their figure. "... You use big words too much." 

"There is a separation of understanding, far beyond merely the physical, between you and I." Amestine returned to a casual position, once-hidden tattoo marks shimmering in the training room spotlights. "To some extent, that's represented by these tattoos."

They pointed to one on their arm, a small, shattered blade. "This one was for partaking against the Cambraeth Uprisings. I chose to make it small, for I don't consider it a particular… high point of my career."

Sana nodded, enraptured. They moved to another, on the other wrist, shaped like a coiling ivy around an unsuspecting tree trunk. "This one begs unknowable gods for good fortune in the saddle. Namely, it asks to keep me seated and stable at all times. Locked in place, in body and mind."

"Woah… how far does that design, you know," she motioned like a snake, "wrap around?"

"It goes from my wrist to my right leg," Amestine showed with a point. "Each thorn on the vine was added when I received an injury from Piloting."

"From other Frames?"

"No," Reo would've almost chuckled, if they could even approach it. "They are marks of my own failure. Every shock, every pinprick, every jab I caused myself, it's marked upon this vine." Sana tilted her head up, seeing at least five spines of ink ejecting from the coiling plant. "It is a reminder that every time I sting myself, the tighter my Frame will hold me. Expertise grows alongside the pain I cause myself."

Sana kept watch for several seconds like a floppy-eared dog with nothing behind the eyes. "... I still don't follow."

"These tattoos speak to experience. They tell you, now that you've seen them, exactly what I am. A killer. A creator of harm to myself and others. A Pilot." Amestine turned on their heel. "I don't show these often, because they are not a warning to be blared to the world. They are a truth that I hold dearly to my chest. They are marks on a body that only I will see, or let others perceive. But none of these cuts matter as much to me as this."

As they spun, pulling back the collar of their shirt, a square shape, pin-pricked by three great dots like a traffic light.

"A Plug Tattoo…" Sana brandished her recognition. "My mam has one similar to that."

"Most Pilots get one. This is a universal symbol. Every single Pilot carrying the weight of a Plug in the base of their skull. It is beyond necessary; it is determinate. You too will receive this mark soon enough. Knowing you, you'll run to be the first in line."

"Hey! I- it's- just 'cause it's true…" Sana was still tapping her things away, just against her thigh now. "And as cool as this art exhibition is, this still doesn't tell me what your first experience of Piloting was like."

Reo rang their hands through and through, like washing them thoroughly with soap. "It was the same as every other time."

Sana leant forwards, eyebrows raised. She looked ready to materialise a notebook at any second, for the first time ever excited to take notes. 'Tell me more,' her waving hand said.

"It was transcendent."

Amestine trudged to the workbench, leaning beside their flattened, discarded longcoat. Sana nearly stood to go help, but she was waved down.

Sana slid back onto the step. "Well, now I'm just more confused. What does… that mean?" 

"Transcendent?"

"Yes, Trans-pendant, whatever."

Reo kept wiping their hands as they leant back against the workbench, staring at a space between them. "When we first met, I told you who I was. Title, Name, Pronouns. Each of those things, I created for myself. My title, I earned. My name, I designed. My pronouns, I picked. They are all as close to an accurate picture of myself as I can make them. I am neither male nor female, Pilot nor commander, Reo or not. I am simply what remains, a painted portrait of someone long dead."

Sana again tried to stand up, but fell back down on her own accord, searching for words as Amestine spun their soliloquy.

"The first time I plugged into a Frame was the same day I met Marshal Sulhan. Commodore Sulhan, he was at the time. Fresh off the Free States War, he'd just returned from the Khal Desert himself after dealing with years of aftermath. He'd earned himself a tidy few promotions and pay rises, and lost himself three recruits."

"... My parents?" Reo responded with nothing but a pause, and then continued.

"He needed new blood. New children of Jaga, to follow the teachings of some century-old master, and provide some semblance of control to the Raelithan Frame Infantry. He needed a weapon.

"Imagine, then, when he finds me. I am loyal, but scruffy. Tactile. Furious at something and itching for a fight. Malleable as wet sand. My fellow recruits refuse me counsel, and I fight and fight to breathe amongst the mud. I had a different name, then. Different markers, different labels. I knew something was wrong, terribly, awfully wrong. But answers come like sap from a tapper; by the droplet. Wrongness does not create a direction. Wrongness does not create ease at knowing how one could be made right. It simply creates more weight."

"... And then you met Captain Keio and Major Lucy, right? And everything relaxed after that?"

"Your timeline is flawed. I eventually met them, bonded with them. Loved them, for a time. We- we were a Fireteam. But that is for another day."

"Aw, it is?"

"Do you wish to know what the first Frameshift looked like or not?" Sana nodded immediately. "Then I continue. Just out of basic training, Sulhan sequestered me away to a room not unlike this one. The Marshal pointed to the Frame and told me I had reached Resonance scores of eighty-percent - a ridiculous number for a recruit."

"Psht, you know I can do better."

"Consistently?"

Sana leant in. "A consistent eighty-percent?" The Colonel nodded, and Sana whistled. "Holy shit."

"Indeed." Amestine gripped the workbench. "He then told me to plug myself in, and prove it."

"Prove… what? Your score?" Amestine nodded. "But he had all the same results as everyone else!"

"He didn't believe it. And the Marshal needed to see it with his own eyes." The Colonel stepped towards the ladder, and Reo ascended past Sana. "So, just like you, in the middle of a dusty room filled with scrap and detritus, I reached into the cockpit of a Core about the same shape and size as this one, fumbled for a wire bigger than any of the others, saw the needles in their wincing reality, steadied myself, and stabbed." Reo rocked on their feet. If it were anyone else, it'd look canny. "The first time we met, I asked you, 'what did you see?'"

"It was mostly what I heard, actually," Sana looked up and down the shape of the hastily repaired armour of her Frame. "A lot of whispers in the dark. Sounds, voices. Ghosts, I guess."

"I witnessed a supernova." Reo's fingers ran against the lip of the machine now before them. "An orchestral symphony of light and sound, picked up in a single handful and launched directly into my senses. My ears heard nothing, my eyes saw nothing, my hands felt nothing but the numbness of weightlessness and space. But my mind became a star. Do you know the life cycle of stars, Oksana?"

Sana nodded eagerly. "Kat told me all about them the other day! They start as a big cloud, until they get so big that gravity crushes them down and… a creation starts, like a furnace on steroids. Then, the heat and the crushing force gets so much, the reaction continues on for millions of years."

"And then?"

"And then… then they die. Often because of bleed-off and dissipation of material, but the biggest stars expand and then go- well, supernova, like you say."

"And what does a supernova leave behind?"

"... Does it leave something behind?" Sana shrugged. "I thought everything would get all… blown up and shit."

Imperceptibly - almost without a single muscle in their cheeks firing, but The Colonel knew the shapes their face made - Reo smiled.

"When a star goes supernova, it both collapses inwards and explodes outwards. An implosion and explosion at the same time. And at its centre, where the heart used to be, it almost always leaves a neutron star."

Sana shifted on her butt to look up at the Colonel properly, but their eyes were locked into the cavernous depths of her Frame's saddle and leg armatures. They rested against the open hatch, watching the shadows they made dance.

"When I exploded, the layers of heat and fire were expelled. All that was left behind in my ears was a name, and a new knowledge. Reo Amestine would become I, and I would be as impenetrable as the heart of a star."

Sana had pulled her legs into herself by now, still watching as the Colonel turned to look at her, rolling back down their sleeves. She tapped her foot a few times, before finally finding the faculties of speech.

"... Cool." She mumbled.

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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A Promise Only Made

“The bird tweeted to its mother; ‘how am I to fly if you won’t be there to catch me?’
‘By making your own winds, hatchling.’”

‘The Heron Called Blackbird’, children’s book by Rylee Hollenov

The next week flew by, along with magpies of the approaching spring. Apologies were made with tense jaws and conflicted glances. Things didn’t really heal, but the stitches were pulled as taut as emotions could allow. Now only time and levity could treat the wounds that had scraped across the Kelenov’s once-happy portrait. Yet, despite the tension in the house, the absence of her Pa most of the days, and the growing bundle of separation anxiety that grew like fungus in the dark of her stomach, Sana had found herself smiling much more, at least, when her parents were around.

It was a genuine happiness, warm and coursing, until they were gone, when the sun set, the house grew silent, and Sana couldn’t escape herself. Those nights, the wind outside squealed like tires to tarmac and blared like a horn, the orange glow under the door glaring like a hundred headlights. The wooden floors creaked with wails for help, the coat hanging in the corner was a towering, iron figure amongst trees. A truck on its side, belly split open, and the sickening crunch of metal against concrete against bone. A punishment, maybe, or a penance. Perhaps if she cowered under her covers with enough fear, shuddered with guilt for a sufficient number of hours, or mourned every shard of glass that had littered the road, someone would forgive her.

Daytimes were the good times, then. Sana packed her things quickly, before her mother helped pack them properly, then repacked everything herself, a life squeezed into one battered suitcase and a rucksack. A courier deposited a box on their doorstep half-way through the week, adorned with the single, magenta gaze of the RFI’s sigil, and containing a gunmetal grey coat, fatigues, all atop a veritable mountain of paperwork. Contracts, procedures, non-disclosure agreements, the template for a will… A whole copier cartridge worth of the stuff. Whilst her parents rifled through the bureaucracy, Sana was too busy trying on her new wares. The coat was definitely too big, right? It swept down past her knees, like a dress Sana would be hesitant to wear, but her Da said fit perfectly.

“You’re the spitting image of a little soldier,” Ma beamed, pride hitting Sana in the aorta.

“Is that a compliment?” Da questioned, half-hearted. Perfect had different definitions.

The final week in Sana’s childhood home dwindled down to days, down from days to hours, until on another clear winter’s sunrise, she stared at a vacant bedroom, just a bit more barren than it had been a week before. Her parents hadn’t moved anything into storage yet – in fact Da had been quite adamant that not a single item would be displaced ‘til she came back next, “save for sudden earthquakes or empty nest syndrome”. Her posters, Pilots in action-poses before their noble metal steeds, continued to beam down at her, ever proud. The walls were still too small, the bed too short even for her tiny frame, but although every item remained in place, already gathering dust, the room had been gutted and emptied, the soul torn out, and stuffed into a sack that she now fiddled with the handle of.

“The car’s ready,” Ma called from the bottom of the stairs, climbing only half way. “You’re not getting cold feet now, are you?” She scoured the room one more time, but couldn’t bear to look too long. It wasn’t hers, not anymore, just a wooden box. Maybe it had never been hers. Sana heaved the bag over her shoulder. “Coming.” As she went to descend, her mother passed her on the stairs, leaning into the room for her own quick glance, but became still, and contemplative. Ma saw it too. Something was missing, and despite Sana standing right there in the hallway, a figurative bindle over her shoulder, the change had only just clicked into place. Sana could hear it on the sigh her mother let out.

“If I asked what’s wrong, that would sound pretty stupid, right?”

“It would.” Ma nodded, not looking away from the room.

“And that’d be, y’know, super rare for me.”

A smile relented on Ma’s face, the kind of smile that preceded tears, and she finally looked at Sana. “It would.” That’s right, Mama didn’t cry.

“Is there anything-” Sana grasped for the words, “-anything you want to say?” Okay, that one felt pretty ridiculous.

But Ma humoured her, her smile becoming wider, and more pained. “If you could only say one more thing, could only give one final lesson to finish raising your child, what would you say?” It was barely whispered, but Sana heard every word. She hadn’t stopped hearing all the little moments, the knowing touches, the longer hugs, anticipating disconnection. Distance made the heart grow stronger, but maybe the fear of distance ahead did the same, made all the crueller by being able to see it on the other’s face. “I don’t know.” She admitted.

There was little else she could say as they completed the last checks, either. They descended the stairs, which groaned in a rhythm so familiar, walked past the kitchen table with its four carefully assigned seats, and laced their boots on the same porch that Da had taught Sana how to. She walked to the truck and lugged her bags inside, avoiding the sight of the half-demolished barn up the frosted slope; the site of many years of joy, and one day of regret. Funny how the latter could entirely undo the former. She kept her eyes on the slope down instead, the fields of her safest place, and hoped the flowers would bloom early this year.

With Pa finishing his engine examination under the hood, and Ma dismissing the fiftieth hypothetical of Da’s fatherly fretting, the four of them stood there, making no efforts to climb in. There was an unshakable feeling, an unspoken agreement, that crossing that threshold would make time move forward again, would shatter this snowglobe scene, and seventeen years would truly come to an end. Her parents were the quietest they had been since the drive back the week before. Maybe they saw the same thing as she did – a house far too big for three.

Sana looked up into her bedroom window, the little porthole into her youth, still able to glimpse the posters inside. That window had spent most of the past few years shuttered, its contents hiding from the world.

Sana was the first to break the spell, and climbed inside the truck.

---

The familiar hints of a military base marked their return, rising into view from the flat white horizon. Tall, chain link fences with curls of barbed wire atop cordoned off their approach, and then lay another two rows of identical barriers after that, blanketed in snow where it hadn’t been shaken off by the wind. They passed a pillbox staffed by gun-toting, longcoat-wearing folk with harsh demeanours, and were let through with only a cursory glance at identification once they saw Rigel’s face. The landscape, even in the bright afternoon sun, sparked bleary memories of only a week ago. Sana hadn’t had windows to look out of in the van they’d tossed her into. What she hadn’t seen on her first escapades was two forms blowing in the wind, anchored to the ground on weather-rusted poles. One, a flag of red, white, and blue, danced elegantly in the ever present gales that racketed the base. The other was weaker, like a limp sleeve, reflecting the orange of dawn. Suprastate, substate. The Federation of Raelith, and her home nation of Dulkat.

In the light of the day, Sana realised how little base constituted that airfield. As they were allowed through the first gate, they were greeted by long stretches of snow and a single, flattened track, leading towards a small collection of metal huts and the odd concrete building. Only one stood out, by virtue of its head climbing several storeys higher than any other on the base. Also concrete, and covered in all manner of communication equipment. Sana spied a radar dish, and guessed it to be the traffic controller, or maybe some funky lookout post. Though, what was there to watch out for this far north? Bears? Big, base-eating bears?  Eventually, they rounded a corner into a free-for-all mass of parking, with a dozen cars and trucks, wheels chained, locked up in haphazard rows and topped with undisturbed snow.

Her parents chatted without a destination as they drove up the winding path. It was primarily Da making the conversation, and she could tell it was only to stave off his own nerves. The week had been a difficult one, a stormy season unlike any she’d seen in years, but at least they were talking to each other again. Smiling occasionally, cracking the odd joke. Even Pa smiled once, small and through the wires of his beard. Sana had no idea what sort of expression she wore, what secret emotion she might be betraying – she could hardly feel her face at all.

“And the chariot arrives,” Da said under his breath as they pulled to a stop. “Any ideas where we’re going from here?”

Pa crossed his arms and sank into his seat. “I have a feeling they’ll come to us.”

Her Ma sat at the wheel, gripping it tight as she glanced out one window, then the other, at the expanse of white encircling them. “I don’t know about you three, but I was expecting at least a little welcome party.”

“That’s what I said!” Sana threw on a taut smile. “Full red carpet affair, if you ask me.”

“No love for the vets…” Da watched back. “Hey, you might get some of those yourself eventually.”

“Although you don’t have to make your pilot profile public, darling.” Ma added. “Rigel’s the only one of ours who did. Too pretty to deny the spotlight, right Hun?” “I had a face for TV and a voice for radio. The RFI loves their au naturel stars,” He proclaimed, and Sana could feel the car rock with the weight of rolling eyes. “And I became quite the celebrity off of it! Got in a couple of local advertising spots for Lu Terio, before the war rolled in and ruined everything for us VIPs.” “Oh, I remember those ads!” Sana leant against the front rests. “Sigurd Oil, right? We had that sample box in the attic. It gunked up my arm for weeks.” Ma shook her head, dejection leading her eyes outside. “Don’t give him fodder to talk about his war stories.” “You used to love those things, Sami, don’t kid yourself. You were both ever so proud of me, right Vol?” He turned to Pa, still silent, arms crossed, who took a few seconds to notice. “Well, it is questionable whether such a campaign was more or less useless for the RFI than the Free States War was.” Her Da groaned, but Pa wasn’t finished. “What? I am not making another argument about this, I promise. Just, Oksana, it is ultimately your decision, but think long and hard before following in your Da’s footsteps. Please.”

“Your Papa and I agree on that, Sana, so you know it must serious.” Ma added, grey eyes studying Sana in the rear view mirror. She put her hands up defensively, maintaining the same smile. “A soldier is a soldier, and a personality is a personality. They shouldn’t mix.” “And perhaps neither should exist at all.” Pa grumbled.

“Alright, alright, I get it.” Sana put her hand up to stop her mother’s incoming return fire. “You’ll be happy to know I see becoming a celebrity as no more than a fun bonus. And the soldiering part, well, just comes with the territory.” Da clicked his tongue. “It’s not much of a bonus, nor is it particularly fun. It becomes a full time job, when you’re not at war, y’know. Too many calls, too many crowds, too many cameras. you’d probably hate it, Oxy.”

“Weren’t you just now talking stardom up?”

“Oh, I loved it,” her Da smiled, wiser than he’d usually show.

“I doubt you would, is all.”

“Also, open Pilots have increased risks of violence, kidnapping, and assassination, especially if they’ve got close family outside the infantry.” A silence hit the air with her mother’s words. “Oh don’t look at me like that, those were only some of the many reasons on our long list of cons.” Pa nodded too. Solidarity at last, of a sort.

“Well, for what it’s worth,” Sana considered her words, for once, like she was about to reveal some dire truth. “I dunno if I even want a family to worry about. Not right now, no duh, but I guess I’m not sure if the whole concept is all that appealing.”

“We did that bad of a job, huh?” Da joked, and a laugh shared amongst the cabin’s occupants, revealing the slightest hint of that eternal parental nervousness to the answer.

“No, no,” Sana waved her hand. “I just don’t know if I could ever find people who’d want that, with me. Who’d want to be a constant part of my life, y’know?” Pa turned in his seat at the front to face her, wiping back his dark greying hair. “There are plenty of people out there who could love you, flower, if that’s what you’re so worried about-” “Pa-” Sana tried to stop the inevitable downslide.

“Just look at us three, we met in the infantry after all. For all its faults, it is a surprisingly productive place.” He considered his words, and Sana drowned in the leather of her seat, having heard the coming advice too often. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.” “I know, Papa.”

“…Whether they be a man, or a woman, or whomever else.”

“I’m getting out the car now, Papa,” Sana swung the door open, letting the frostbitten air flood in.

“Or several-” the slamming of the door behind her cut him off. Sana rolled her eyes, hand slipping into her newly minted longcoat pockets. Despite the snow, it was warmer than had been expected – a toasty minus six. She’d always hated cold weather, bucking the trend of most of her Dulkatian peers, but such lows were comfortable enough under the many layers of fabric she was sinking into. Like being wrapped in three blankets. A Sana bread roll. She wondered what kind of bread she would be.

She only needed to lean against the truck for a minute or so before two shapes marched through the snow, teetering on the permafrost that coated every patch of earth this far north. After a second in the shadows of one of the buildings, which Sana eyed curiously, they stepped out into the sun, uniforms steeped in dark greys, sticking out like towers in the snow. So the RFI was coming to them.

“That looks like one new recruit to me,” one said, voice channelled by the snow. The car rocked into Sana as the others began to exit, though her focus remained locked on the incoming presence.

“Oh, I could recognise that walk from a mile off. Sulhan?” Ma reached over the window frame and gave a broad wave. One of the figures sped up, breaking off from the other as they realised they were being called. Bearing a long grey coat of his own, but framed by a gilded collar and shoulder pads, they tread closer, reaching out a hand to her half-out-the-door mother.

“Saima Kelenov, a sight for sore eyes.” A handshake was made over the car door, before her Ma rounded the corner and broke all formalities, bringing the figure into a tough embrace. “I almost missed you for the snow! Still greying since I saw you last, huh?” “Speak for yourself, Ed.” She grinned as the rest of the family disembarked, swarming the newcomer with varying levels of urgency. Sana was occupied with the other figure she spied from her perch on the truck’s bonnet. No longer wearing glasses, but with the same distinct loaf of hair and long scar over the nose, she recognised the mid-sized frame of Colonel Amestine. They stood away from the growing huddle of old friends and new meetings, coming to a soldier’s at-ease.

“Colonel!” Sana enthused, carefully trudging towards them over the ice. She switched languages mid-thought. “Sir- ma’am? Sire?” “Oksana, good to see you’ve got into no more trouble over the last week.” They returned in the same tongue, maintaining their rigid posture, but with a clearer sense of comfort in their throat. “Sir is quite alright.”

“I- yes sir. It was a big struggle, you know, not causing any trouble,” Sana laughed away the sleepless nights, awkwardly capped with a yawn. “I have my habits.” “We expected nothing less of you.” Amestine turned to her parents as friendly bouts of conversation fired between the reuniting comrades. “I knew the Marshal and your family had history, though I was unaware they were so… personally involved.” “I knew I recognised his face! But only a bit. Like an uncle you haven’t seen since you were six.” Maybe literally in her case, Sana pondered.

“That would explain some things,” the Colonel mumbled.

“What things?”

“He’s the commanding officer of the Mount Killian facility, and we are not the public facing types.” The Colonel dodged the subject. “But given how acquainted your parents seem, it would not be unreasonable to assume you’ve met previously.” “I would remember that.” Sana smiled. “He’s very…”

“Old?”

“Yeah.”

“And there she is, the woman of the hour!” Sana jolted upright at the attention garnered. “Oksana Kelenov, would you just look at you! It’s been too long, little one.” The tall frame of Edward Sulhan took up much of her eye line, before the older man held his arms wide.

“Uncle Ed?” She asked up to him, the memories beginning to click into place.

“The very same,” he smiled. “When I heard that a Kelenov was once again joining our ranks, I had to see for myself.” He allowed her to escape his capture, Sana making polite, dodgy laughter. “My, she’s grown hasn’t she?” He spoke to Ma over her head like parents meeting outside a kindergarten.

“Eh, more outwards than upwards,” Saima ignored the look her daughter shot.

“Stocky one, just like her mother once,” The Marshal laughed, and a knot of discomfort grew in her gut. “Got more of your blood than she seems, eh?” Being the only child of three parents, Sana was familiar with interactions like these – some stranger knows her family, and so claims to know her. There had been a dozen ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ who felt entitled to a spotlight in her childhood, for the gracious price of two hard candies and a pat on the head some Sunday afternoon. Not one of them had any actual relation to her, though, she supposed, neither did her three guardians.

Their chattering continued and Sana slipped back to the Colonel’s side. Something about the quiet contentment that Amestine radiated put her at ease, even without a word shared between them, and several words about her were passed amongst the gossip group before them. She put her limited attention onto several small cuts across her hand that had yet to fully heal.

Pa was similarly standing just out of the bounds of the conversation, opposite her. She smiled up at him, though he didn’t return it, ears levied towards the catch up session. Sulhan eventually acknowledged him too, with a pause, and then a small nod. After a moment, Pa returned the gesture, though the rest of his body stayed rooted to the ground.

Sana sent a weak smile to the Colonel, and quietly shuffled over to join him. “You okay, Papa?” She thread her arm through his, thankful for the furnace of warmth he always embodied.

“Fine. Just surprised to see an old face.” He didn’t take his eyes off of Sulhan for a second.

“I think this guy knows way more about me than I do him,” Sana chuckled and shuddered, as the airstrip reminded her of its shelterless horizon with a biting breeze.

“You have met, but you were small.”

“I gathered that much,” she groaned, “but how little are we talking?”

“When was your last growth spurt?”

“Can a handful of centimetres be called a ‘growth spurt’?” She frowned. “When I was like twelve or something, I think.” “That would be about right.”

She leant in and whispered, “I don’t remember his face at all, though.”

“You don’t need to remember him.”

“Ahem”, she heard cut through both conversations, emanating from the Colonel, eyes on a small black box. “Pager call, the Fénix is nearly fueled up, currently undergoing final preflight checks.”

“Ah, there’s never enough time for a proper reunion,” Sulhan sighed, clapping his hands together as the group fell silent, overpowered by the winds. “No reason to dawdle, then. Let’s get you aboard, young Kelenov.”

The group started marching at various speeds away from the car. Sana noticed Colonel Amestine immediately fell into step with Sulhan, the two returning to hushed tones. Da and Mam in front continued chatting with each other, arm-in-arm like two teenage lovers. They slipped across the wind-swept runway, flanked by a handful of corrugated metal blocks, with snow exteriors held aloft by broad pylons. The miscellaneous mechanical murumer of a workshop came from the otherside of the wall, and rounding the corner to the front of the hangar revealed the cause. An enormous cylindrical body, curving back into wings half way down its fuselage with a smooth hump across its back, sat halfway covered by the hangar’s roof. Snow had built on the half that refused to fit inside, but the machine seemed unfazed. That, Sana knew from mechanics journals and TV commercials, was a Fénix, one of only ten in the Federation. It was far bigger in real life.

At its rear, a long ramp had been lowered, and pushed up it by several technicians in orange overalls was the battered remnant of Sana’s labours. The basic structure was intact, such was the nature of Frames. Skeletal lattices of Druidium, the wonder material humanity had yet to conquer but merely guided, peaked from between the makeshift armour panels that hadn’t been peeled back or sheared off. It still had three arms, two legs, and a head – albeit with both eye lenses cracked – and she knew if she were to connect, the carcass would once again roar to life. So tantalisingly close, she buried the urge to embark and run back into the barren wilderness calling to her on the wind.

“Everything okay, Sunshine?” Ma asked candidly as Sana fell behind the others. “Not feeling a sudden bout of doubts, are you?” “No, no, you already asked me that,” Sana assured. “Just remembering.”

“Bad memories?”

“Mixed ones, despite everything, and I’m surprised by that. I thought it’d be a bundle of truly atrocious, bottom-of-the-barrel disgust at myself and everything. But I can’t hate it. I don’t hate myself, nor that Frame,” the figure of the machine loomed from inside the aircraft’s oesophagus. “It feels like I’m telling myself a lie, and believing it, even though I know it’s not true.”

Her mother nodded all-knowingly. “Being in the saddle just feels right, doesn’t it?”

“I think so, yeah. Is that what it was like for you? That rush? That feeling of completeness? Being whole?” “Oh yeah,” Ma whistled. “It was almost like an addiction for me. I felt more at home in the saddle than on my own two feet. I think I felt it the strongest out of all of us, more than your dads.” “And then what happened?”

“Hmm?”

“If you loved it so much, so much so that you couldn’t live without it, why’d you leave the RFI?” “You misunderstand, Sunshine,” she wrapped an arm around Sana, drawing her close like she was about to regale a moral-filled fairy tale. “I loved piloting, hells I just loved frameshifting, but then I found something else worth fighting for. And it mattered more to me to save it – save you – than it did to worry about myself. Having something worth fighting for – find that sword, and you can cleave the world with it.” Silence grew over them for a second, before Sana shrugged her mother’s hold off. “Is this about what I said the other day? Oh Sunny, if it is-“

“It’s okay, Ma.” Sana put her foot down. “I get what you meant then. I know it wasn’t aimed at me, you- you said so yourself then and there, and I understand your position.” “Sana-”

“I’ll be okay,” she insisted. “You still have a place to belong, with Da and Pa. Me leaving doesn’t change that, and it doesn’t… it won’t…” The two women, or one woman and a girl – mother and daughter regardless – stood silent as the last strands of frost holding Sana’s boots to the ground severed. Saima didn’t say anything, instead opening her arms out to a hug, which despite her desire to rebel and flee, to the Fénix or the fields of snow, Sana accepted it. She was mature enough for that.

“Stay safe, Oksana.”

“I will, Mama,” Sana said into her shoulder, any threat of tears wiped away before she pulled back.

The goodbyes were swift, but not for lack of care or time – her parents had both in droves, perhaps too much in their retirement. Her Da hugged her short and tight, whispering words of good fortune into her hair, then Ma came around again for a briefer squeeze, after which she stepped back and saluted Sana, who returned it.

“Given ‘em each and every hell, Pilot Kelenov,” she commanded with a glint in her eye.

“I could do nothing less,” Sana grinned.

Finally, Pa hugged her the longest, pulling her nearly off the floor by virtue of his height, and her lack thereof. Sana sank into his engulfing grasp, soft parka squished against the crisp metal buttons of her longcoat.

“I have but one request of you, little flower,” he said, low and deep as he set her back down.

“No romance, no parties, no drinking-” Sana listed with her fingers.

“Don’t get killed,” he gripped her shoulder. “And more importantly, don’t let yourself die.” At first, Sana was going to laugh it off, but the look in her father’s eyes begged her, just this once, to treat his words with severity. “I wasn’t planning on it,” she laughed awkwardly. After a moment of appraisal, Pa smiled again, and dragged her into another hug. Ma and Da joined in now, forming a bastion of warmth around Sana at its centre.

“Okay- okay! I get it, I’m good!” Sana called through her laughter.

“Just a little more?” Her Da only half joked.

“I’ll give you five seconds,” Sana decreed. “Fivefourthreetwoone-”, before she pushed them off with a stumble. Her parents laughed too, a warmness she’d missed in the past week. Perhaps longer.

And then they were away, retreating from the hangar, as Sana was led up the yawning mouth of the metal bird. She waved. They waved back. Then she was inside, following Amestine’s booted gait, illuminated by the harsh red lights of the inner bowels.

“This won’t be the most comfortable journey, I’m afraid.” They continued, walking over to a set of lowered flight seats, flanked by boxes and the 3-metre-tall Frame that dominated the centre of the bay.

“Oh, I have no frame of reference,” Sana shook her head, “I’ve never flown before. Unless you count falling from a cliff-face flying, in which case, I look forward to all seven seconds of our airtime.”

“You’ve never travelled out of state then?” Amestine asked absently, adjusting the straps of their seat with excessive precision.

“Only by car, and only down to Lu Terio,” Sana answered. “Couple hours drive at most?” “For family, I take it?”

“Yeah! My Da’s family is-” She tugged a belt across her shoulder that came too short to belong there, ”-massive, so we go visit them pretty often. Couple of times a year, maybe.”

Seeing her attempts to wrangle her fastenings, Amestine undid their own and began to assist her. “Left arm up. Yes, I can imagine, with having family so close.”

“Oh? Where’s yours?”

“Legally? They’re still in Djanrei, last I checked. But for all intents and purposes, my people live in Hallewyn.”

“Sol, those are both so far away. From here and each other. Why’s that?”

“Not of your concern. It’s just how I like it. Right arm up.”

Sana heaved her backpack as another strap looped underneath. With only one arm, she knew her face betrayed the strain, and the Colonel wordlessly sped up.

“What’s in the bag?”

“Is this an inspection?” Sana snarked, but the Colonel’s gaze was unwavering in its neutrality, and her eyes retreated to the floor. “My arm.” Now strapped in, she dragged out the metal superstructure, dented and frayed with deep, clawed trenches over it. “I haven’t had time to fix it yet, though. Is it okay to have it here, on the flight?”

“Is it explosive?”

“Not usually.” Sana’s tone trended upwards, steep. The Colonel simply nodded.

“Keep it then. It’s your arm, after all.”

“I could probably hit someone with it, like it’s a bat,” she offered, and mocked the action of swinging it. “Pow-pow. Might hurt a bit.”

“Not ‘might’, that would indeed result in you being hurt.”

“Me? Is that a joke?” Sana eyed them for a hint of reaction.

“You can take it as you see fit, Oksana,“ they returned, expression unchanged. Sana chuckled, before looking back down to her returned prosthetic, the device weighing heavy in her lap.

“I’m kinda surprised they didn’t just melt it down for scrap, throw it on some trash heap out in the barrens. That’s what my old school threatened to do a few times.”

“Threaten they did,” Amestine corrected her. “But I put my foot down. I saw what happened when it was wrenched off you in those woods. A prosthetic limb was hardly the combat priority, and I’ll see about getting reprimands.”

“The what now?” The Colonel pointed to the base of their skull, and a flash of recognition from Sana came out as a vigourous nod. “Oh, right, yeah. That Frame felt… inscrutable, I’ve never heard of one like it, not from my parents anyways. And the ability to mimic my Ma’s voice.” She shuddered.

“By design.”

“Mm,” Sana nodded, losing her training of thought to the weeds. “Well, thank you Colonel Amestine. For stopping me from getting smushed.” The sincerity of her gratitude grounded her.

“All in a day’s work.”

“Right then,” Sana heard from further into the belly of the beast. “Takeoff’s in five. Reo, strap Sana in, would ya- oh, already done?” Sulhan loomed over her, longcoat flowing in the draft rushing through the body.

“Yes sir.”

“Excellent. The flight down to Signa will take a good eight hours, so you better get used to the noise.” He smirked, almost boyish, before handing Sana a pair of wired up headphones and landing in the seat a few left of her.

“You know,” she called over the racket of the closing doors, natural light fading only to red. “I’ve always known Mount Killian was that far away logically, but that really is the other side of the world, isn’t it?”

“If there’s one thing people can agree on about the Federation, it would be its breadth.” Amestine replied, attaching the final of their own buckles with a click.

“You must be excited to visit home?” Sana hazarded a guess.

“I’ve only been gone a month. Though, I do miss the warmer climate, I will admit.”

“Oh, don’t downplay it, Reo,” Sulhan spoke. “I know you’re excited for pot roast night.”

“You’re projecting, sir.” Amestine replied, expression the same, stoic as always, but the tone ever so slightly twisted. Comfortable?

“Only a little. Barb will be happy to see you in the flesh, too, especially after you had to miss New Year’s.”

“Well, we perform the assignments we are given, sir.”

“They wouldn’t let me change their schedule even if I tried,” Sulhan then leant over to Sana as if to whisper, though all the sound came over the headset. “You two best get on chummy terms quick, given how much time Reo’ll be breathing down your neck this year,” he said with a laugh that creaked over the line. Sana concealed her wince.

“I’m more focused on the sound of pot roast, is it like stew?”

“You Dulkatians and your damn stews,” Sulhan huffed.

“Pot roast is stew in all but name, Marshal,” Amestine said bluntly, earning a teenage grumble from the Marshal.

“Hallewyn has a proud history of pot roasts that I won’t see slandered like this,” he thumped his chest proudly. “Anyway, you’ll always be welcome to come visit us in Hallewyn to see the difference, young Kelenov, though I doubt you’ll have the time ’til nearer Federation Day, once you’re really settled in,” Sulhan explained. “But if and when you become a pilot next year, and you actually have some time off, you’ll be welcomed with open arms.”

“So it’ll be a year of hard work, then?” Sana joked back, trying to settle into her seat and finding no comfort there.

“Did you expect anything less?” Sulhan glanced at her with confusion, before the rumbling beneath their feet began to rise.

“Beginning taxi,” a practised voice called into her ear, “prepare for takeoff.” With the cargo bay otherwise empty, she wondered if that call was just for them.

Only as she tried to relax into the rattling, uncushioned chair, did reality begin to sink in. She was leaving. Her parents would be an eight hour flight away to see; a ten minute queue of phone connections away to even hear. Her stomach churned at the thought, or maybe that was the alien shudder of the craft as its engines spun up, the walls around them creaking like they were haunted.

“Flight RFI Oscar-Whiskey-Adamant-Whiskey, on takeoff from Vöken air base to Mount Killian.” The pilots said for, presumably, someone else, the words echoing throughout the ship’s hull. A reply came back unheard, and Sana could hear the engines outside spooling faster, then faster still.

“Understood, Control. Preparing for takeoff.”

The speed began to rise, yet Sana was stationary. She held her eyes open at first, trying to maintain her breath’s rhythm, but as the deafening thrum continued to climb and climb and climb, she couldn’t help but clamp her eyes shut, grabbing hold of the straps of her harness and holding on for dear life. Just breathe, Sana.

As the plane’s landing gear slowly parted from the tarmac below, and a lurch of weightlessness reached her limbs, she inhaled. Then, as the ground left her behind, and a home became a memory, she breathed out.

---

Greetings Pilots,

And that’s Arc 1 finished! Aside from some minor edits and other gubbins, this is as close to the finished manuscript version we’re gonna get. In other words; this is the final thing! Now all we’ve gotta do is repeat it for next two arcs, and Volume 1 will be finished! 🎉

In saying that, Arc 2 will probably be quite a bit. Although the rewrite itself is done, Jenny and I want a lot more time to get it smoothed and cleaned up – I’m exceptionally happy with how it’s been panning out, but it may take us busy bees a while to get it done. Watch this space!

In the mean time, we may have some RHAWWs and other short fiction on the table in the next few months. I’ve also started uploading poetry and smaller doses of Frameshift fiction to our Tumblr as of late, so if you wanna get more direct injections of Frameshift lore crumbs into your veins, there’s the best place for updates (especially since the great fire of Twitter seems to only continue to be fanned).

That’s about all from us here in the writer’s room. Hope y’all have a very Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, and if not, I hope the holiday season is warm, comfortable, safe, and as happy as can be!

Thanks, and keep on running,

– Izzy

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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A House in All the Strangers In

“A parent must never assume to understand their child, just as a child must never assume to be understood by their parent.”

Kayla Metrenov, Director of Youth Care, Dulkatian Social Support Services (DSSS)

Freedom came in small doses. Colonel Amestine, a figure Sana had yet to fully grasp as tangible, left shortly after, and solitude returned for a time. But in stretches of crushing nothingness, when all that surrounds you is a tomb of cold concrete and stiff couch foam, even the smallest hope for change becomes kindling. She wasn’t better. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t forgiven. Sana refused to be. But she didn’t cry again, not in the hour or so, she guessed, that passed before the heavy metal door swung open once again. Two officers entered, adorned in blue and black, and approached with the distinct jingle of a set of keys. Some caution remained in their movements, but her single cuff was unlocked and fell away, before she was wordlessly escorted out of her cell, bound only by a glare over each shoulder.

The hallways were windowless, winding, like a cave carved into perfect cubes with fitted wooden skirting boards. The floor reflected bright overhead lights, and her eyes trained on it, avoiding any dangerous gazes from passers-by. Some wore lab coats. Others, body armour. They could be scowling at her. They could be scared. They might not have known, or cared at all.

She was marched through two double doors, and the room expanded into a reception area. Concrete still, but human now. Papers shuffled behind the front desk. Posters adorned the walls, plastered with warnings that she didn’t read. A lamp sat in the corner with its soft yellow glow. Tick tock tick, went a clock in the corner. Ah, time. It was one o’clock, but windows remained a luxury she wasn’t afforded, and thus whether it was morning or night continued to elude her. One of her escorts approached the desk, the other still behind her, hand on gun. It’s alright, she thought, hoping they’d hear. I couldn’t hurt a fly. Not now.

The doors flung open a second later, punctuated by a loud buzz she thought only existed in dramas and film. A prisoner’s bird call; a sound that was for criminals. The heft of them was matched by blowing winds outside, before several figures slipped through, parkas covering every inch. The gales had picked up, and licks of snow followed on their boots. She didn’t look them in the eyes, but two figures, flanked on either side as she was, split away from their guides. Sana recognised the gait before the boots, or the coats they wore, or their faces.

“Oxy!” A voice beckoned, and immediately her ears warmed. Before she could react, two arms engulfed her small form, and the height and the warmth and the smell of distant chai leaves struck her with overwhelming familiarity.

“Dad,” she whispered, before falling into the embrace, struggling to stand. She buried her head into the rough material of his coat, ignoring how it scratched on her face.

“I’m so glad to hear that voice,” he said, but she barely heard it, as they rocked gently side to side.

“I’m so sorry, Da,” She didn’t cry this time, though the words flowed like tears. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Shh,” Rigel shut her up, before slipping into his native tongue, one only they shared with any competency in their family. “Mon bébé, you are safe and sound, that’s all that matters.” Sana heard movement through her dad’s embrace, the scribbling of pen on paper. Ah, that must be mama. Square away the admin first, then move onto emotion, emotion that became apparent when she was hoisted away into another pair of arms that wrapped tight around her, possessive, protective.

“Oh, Sunshine, you stupid girl,” Ma mumbled. “Stupid, stupid girl.”

“I’d a feeling you’d say that,” Sana joked weakly.

The man behind the desk, uniform freshly ironed, cleared his throat, perhaps disgusted by the displays of parental concern, guilt, and admonishment he was bearing witness to. Ma put her down, but not before cupping her face.

“I tried to sort it all, clear everything, whilst you were gone.” Ma started. “It was a struggle, the RFI isn’t a fan of listening, even to us, but…” A heavy thunk landed on the desk, as another secretary – with a face Sana might’ve found pretty if its mouth didn’t seem to curl with revulsion, and its eyes reflect a stain on the wall – placed a broken, muddy mass on the desk, the trim saved from cleanup only by the huge fibre bag that engulfed it.

“I got this back for you, at least,” Ma heaved the corpse of her prosthetic into her hands, peering in. “Solaris, did you step on this with the machine or something? It’s all shattered.”

“No, it- it was another Frame.”

“Oh, Sana,” her mother approached again with an appalled, tender look. “I didn’t know.”

“Not like they’d told us much of anything,” Da said.

“It’s fine.”

“We could sue them for damages.” Ma kept fighting.

“Ma.” Sana put her hand up, tired. Scarred. Eyes struggling to stay open so wide. “Can we go home, please?” Her Ma looked down with a complicated expression. A smile, unhappy. Cheeks raised and eyebrows furled in a way she hadn’t seen in years, or ever. Sana couldn’t remember.

“Of course, sweetie,” Da said, ever chipper. “Although, hm.”

“What is it?” Sana asked, the tone in her voice beaten out of her.

“Just- we tried to explain the situation to him, but he’s been-”

“He?” Sana perked up, happy upon realisation, then filled with dread upon understanding. “Pa’s here?”

“Well, I sure hope he’s still here. He drove us.”

“Oh gods, does he know? Did you tell him? About the application? About all of this? I- I don’t think I can face him right now,” Sana stammered out. “Not now, maybe never.”

“Oksana, he’s your father.”

“I know! I know.” Sana gripped the knot of her right sleeve. “I just- he’s gonna- I don’t want him to know.”

Da placed a hand on her shoulder. “Oxy, you don’t need to solve every problem all at once, okay? Especially not tonight.”

“It’s not solving it that’s the issue-”

“We’ll handle your pa. And you know him, he’s not unreasonable. He’ll understand eventually when you tell him. And of your new… predicament with the RFI too, I hope.”

“Oh Gods, he knows about that too?”

“It has been three days, Sunshine,” Ma said, as finally the guards got bored of waiting, little care given to a family’s crisis, and began shuffling the group back towards the heavy bulkhead doors. She could feel the cold emanating from them, was it radiating from Pa, presumably waiting on the other side with an icy glare? “We couldn’t exactly hide the news from him, but we left the whole application business out of it. He’s in the dark.”

“Hiding things from him, we’ve done too much of that lately,” her dad shook his head as he said it.

“Oh, don’t you start, Rigel,” Ma whipped back, tongue suddenly lost of all the honey-sickle warmth she’d spread to Sana. Three days. Three days of worry. Three days of guilt. Three days to snap at each other, send volleys of blame. Her parents didn’t often fight, but like a tornado, Sana had only had to see one a few times to know the signs, and when to stay far, far away.

The doors opened, and flurries of snow passed through. Immediately, her Da’s coat flew around her shoulders, a wordless smile on his face. She smiled back, though she couldn’t say with how much warmth. A strong storm must’ve hit, so soon after New Year’s. Such was Dulkatian winter. It’d be like this – on the precipice of swallowing snow – for several months still. The cold quickly bore into her bones.

Sana saw him, and the chill dug deeper. Broad, hovering besides the car, tapping his foot. Far too few layers for the weather, but he always seemed to manage. Beard a little bit greyer than last she’d seen it, lit up in powerful, military grade spotlights.

“See, hun,” Da called out, slipping away from his daughter and instead blocking his husband. “Out in a flash.” Pa said nothing, simply staring them down, arms folded. Her Da whispered something, the motions all there but the sound carried away on the winds. Her Ma’s eyes also stayed on the ground, as she led Sana over to the back seats of the family truck, bed filling with sleet. Inside the heat was blasting, the aircon just as loud as the wind outside, and after stacking the packaged remains of her arm on the cushions beside her, everyone embarked. Sana’s fingers remained numb, despite the warmth.

The headlamps beamed, picking out flecks of snow several metres off, and as a silence filled the chassis like smog, Sana sank back into the seats. They’d been stiff since they’d bought the truck second hand years before, covered in hard leather and newer, patchier repairs, but in that moment they welcomed her like the softest mattress and finest cushions. She wasn’t sure if her nausea was lingering feelings from the rest of the day, or anticipation for the next words to be spoken. They would surface eventually, like a morning sun. Sudden, blinding, truthful, burning.

The silence in the car was deafening, the quiet rolling of the truck’s wheels, the muffled roar of the electric motors against the ice and snow, and the low hum of the heating being her only company. Once again, if three agonising days of interrogation weren’t enough, she was left alone with her thoughts. She didn’t get how people could enjoy that, mediating and the like. Sana hated nothing more than to be stuck in her own mind uninterrupted for a minute, an hour, let alone three days.

Her Ma and Pa did not look at each other, did not speak, with Da crammed between them twiddling his thumbs, maybe literally. There wasn’t a word that could be shared between them as they drove. Neither seemed angry, although Sana had never been the best at reading their emotions, both in her current mental state, or in general. Usually she’d figure out what their true feelings were anywhere from five minutes to five months after the fact, give or take an explanation from Da. It was difficult to shake the feeling that Pa’s mood might suddenly erupt, however unlike him it would be.

“So,” she hardly realised she’d started when she spoke, drawing out the syllable to make up for the crushing silence that had preceded it, “how was the trip, Papa?”

Her Pa grunted, and after a moment muttered. “It was fine.”

“Right, right…” She stretched and yawned. “Catch much?”

“No.” He said, eyes locked on the road, never turning back to her. “Not particularly.” His fishing rods, disassembled, rattle behind her in discontentment. Ice fishing, a popular pastime that Sana had none of the patience for, and thank the Gods her father had understood that from the word jump. Pa spent more time out in the woods in winter than at home. Sana couldn’t understand it.

“Oh that’s- that’s great,” she rubbed her eyes, the darkness of the winter night engulfing their little truck as they drove. “Where are we, anyways?”

“Where’d you think?” Da tried a lighter tone.

“Not sure. Can’t see shit through all this snow.”

“Sana, language.” Ma warned. Such scolding felt a bit ridiculous now, something one would say to a child rather than the danger she had been treated as in that cell, but under her mother’s gaze Sana could only ever be the former.

“Sorry. But, yeah, no idea. All I remember was concrete. Walls and floors worth of the stuff, maybe for miles.”

The silence flooded back in, drowning them all in its putrid waters for a moment, until her father spoke up again. “Vökin air base. Near the edge of the Marble Glass Plains.”

“Oh, right, yeah. Of course. We’ve been here before, right? When I was a kid?”

“Once or twice,” her Ma chirped up, for the first and last time, before a deep silence lapped at their feet again.

Sana fidgeted in her seat, looking over the reddish friction burns on her wrists in the few guiding lamp posts they passed on their way. Eventually it became far too suffocating.

“Not a lotta room back here with this elephant you’re all ignoring.”

“Sana-”

“Ma, Pa, please, I can’t take a minute more of this passive-aggressive silent treatment bullshi-“

“Language.” Ma snipped again. Sana groaned, exhaustion in her throat and plucking her vocal chords.

“Cut me some slack, please. I get it. But also I don’t.” Sana gulped. “I screwed up big time, understatement of the fu- freaking century, but can you three just talk? Like normal, please? Anything to fill this silence. So I don’t have to keep thinking over and over again about all the things I’ve messed up. Can we at least pretend things are okay?”

There was a pause, before her father, surprisingly, spoke up first.

“What is there to say?”

“There really isn’t much at all.” Her mother nodded, the one bit of agreement Sana expected tonight.

“Sana, sunshine,” Da ignored them both, turning to face her over the headrests. “You’ve had an exhausting few days.”

“Yeah.” There was nothing she could say to change things now. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Maybe get some rest instead. We won’t be home for a few hours yet.”

Sana glanced out the front window as the rumble of the engine calmed down, approaching some checkpoint at the base’s edge, lit by a handful of stadium bulbs. Once they passed, and the gentle hum of the engine started again, she felt her eyes drooping, the jacket wrapped around her like an oversized blanket, and before long sleep finally relieved her.

---

The thud of a car door startled her awake. Sana rarely heard her father raise his voice, she could barely hear it this time through bleary ears and panes of glass, but the argument flared as soon as they exited. She couldn’t make out what was being said, but the tone was vicious, and the words were barbed. She sat still as her Ma and Pa bellowed, focusing on her breath and the steam it exhaled and the feeling of the belt across her lap and the pattern on the seat before her. Da remained sat inside with her, seatbelt on and hands braced.

“Da?” She whispered, and he turned to face her, eyes escaping the growing catastrophe outside.

“Nothing for you to worry about, Oxy,” he smiled, warm as ever. “Just a spat, that’s all. Better they let it out than bottle it.” They sat for several seconds, listening to the muffled back and forth. Sana dragged the collar of Da’s coat over her lips as he watched, waiting for a moment to enter a ring. A line must’ve been crossed, because he looked towards Sana with a knowing, strained smile, just beneath the bristles of his moustache.

“I should go stop them from killing each other,” he sighed. “And you should probably come inside, it’ll get cold quick.”

“Yeah.” Sana mumbled back. She was exhausted despite the rest. She was hurt, and she had cried far more than she had in a long time, all at once. The house she was going to enter, that should have been familiar, didn’t seem like it would provide any comfort. “Yeah, okay.”

“Hey,” Da caught wind of where her mind was going. “They’re not angry at you, Oxy. Nor am I.”

“That feels like a lie you tell a kid to save them from guilt. And I think I deserve to be guilty.”

“Mon bébé, you know I could never lie like that. I’m not built for it,” and he slipped out the door.

After a moment, as her parents were corralled inside without an end to their quarrel in sight, Sana stepped out herself, reaching down to the ground with a stretch. She wound her borrowed coat tight around, more a blanket than a parka. They had left at one-ish, and had been driving for hours. It couldn’t have been later than four in the morning, with sunrise soon approaching. Her boots crunched on the snow. Gods, they were so loud. They’re not angry at you, they’re not, she turned the statement over in her head, the lie still warm.

Sana looked at the porch, heard the muffled shouting coming from within. She looked at the farm’s gate, far off in the distance, just about visible in the low light. “Run,” she whispered under her breath, and for a moment, she touched her lips and felt the words on her fingertips. She was going to. But then, the cold air slipped under the coat, and hit her like a truck. Logic reigned once again, the fires inside her mere ashes. Not tonight. Not without another few layers. Not now.

She crept to the door, though it wasn’t hard to be quiet compared to the ruckus inside. Fights like those didn’t happen anymore. Not for a few years, at least. She reached for the handle, took a deep breath, and marched in.

“-I can’t believe you.” Her father slammed his gloves into the table. “I’ve known you do some stupid things in your time, Saima, but this is truly a new low.”

Ma scoffed, arms folded. She, out of all three of them, seemed to have changed the least since Sana was a kid – a motherly face from the day she was born, or found, rather. Her eyes had sunken slightly, and a few errant grey hairs had grown through, but she didn’t even compare to his and Rigel’s near elderly demeanours. “Stop pinning this all on me would you?” She hissed.

“Is that all you have to say? Really? You brought that thing back here, first of all, and then you let our daughter not only go approach it, but you let her Pilot the damn thing?” Pa raged, his regular aloof demeanour buried beneath a seldom-raised fury. “You of all people should know better than that.”

“I did not let her. She figured it out all on her own, you know how intuitive she is with these things. Of course she knows how a Plug works, we’ve told her how since she was a baby. We’ve shown her the scars on our necks!” Ma shot back, and Sana slipped by, not stopping to take off her boots and trudging snow up the stairs with her. Da glanced her way, but their eyes didn’t meet, and as the argument flared again his focus returned to it, waiting for his moment to mediate.

“I cannot believe that for a second. You do not accidentally fall neck-first onto a plug, and even if you didn’t teach her, you still let her get close to that thing, let her- play with it? Did you even think for a second what would’ve happened if she had missed? Pierced some vital artery? You saw what it does to the unluckiest of us – internal bleeding, paralysis, permanent brain damage-“

“Oh, so I’m in the wrong for both showing her how to use it and also not showing her how to use it properly? I cannot win in this scenario, Voleno.”

“No, you can’t! You have fucked up-“

“Language!”

“You have screwed up more than I have ever seen you. This is disastrous, and I am- I am appalled. You’re supposed to be better than this.”

“You give her so little credit-”

“This is nothing about recognising achievement, it is about keeping our daughter safe!”

“Okay, both of you need to calm down right now-” Da started.

“Shut up Rigel!” they yelled in unison, never once breaking eye contact as they stared each other down. Sana didn’t make it to her room, coming to a stop at the very top of the stairs, boots all covered in white and dampening the rug.

“She made it through okay, though. She’s safe, and she’s fine. She’s more than proven herself capable-“

“And what if she couldn’t, Saima? What if she hadn’t? Could you have lived with yourself if she had gotten hurt whilst piloting that thing? If we had nearly lost her again?”

“She did get hurt, many times. You’d know that if you’d look her in the eye! Did you see the state her arm is, how broken something so precious to her became? She’s hurting, Voleno, and you’re more focussed on being angry at me than comforting her.”

“And does that make you feel any better, that she got stung for her trouble? That she nearly died? Because it does not for me.”

“No, no it does not. But I stand by her actions. She learnt a lesson, the most valuable of all; never toy with something you don’t understand.” There was a pause, a brief quiet that made Sana hold her breath, lest anyone hear her dare to continue being there. The fires of the argument were simmering away, but the embers were still red hot. Peering through the gaps in the bannister, she watched them both stare each other down like starving, caged lions, rapturous breathing emitting and steam rising through the air.

“Why did you do it?” Voleno asked, his voice marred by a quieter anger.

“Do what?”

“Bring that blasted Frame back here, then not report it to the authorities? Bring it into our home and fix it? What else could I possibly mean, Saima.”

“Because I hate it here, Voleno! I hate this place, I hate this whole state, the North, the cold, the winters, I always have. I joined the Infantry way back when to escape it, all of it. Adopting Oksana was one of the best things I’ve- we’ve ever done. I don’t regret it for a second. But if I had known it would involve forcing myself back to this terrible place, forcing myself to be something I am not, I wouldn’t have done it.” She stepped forwards, the whole house groaning under the weight. “I brought that Frame back here, because it gave me, I dunno, a possibility of change. I’m not built to be a farmer, Voleno. I’m a soldier. I miss being a soldier, a pilot, so much. I love being a wife, and I love being a mother. But I’m not either of those things deep down. I am a fighter, and I have no war to fight anymore.”

Sana decided not to listen anymore. She wandered, aimlessly at first, pacing with slow, deliberate steps back towards her room, her eyes grey and heavy. She pushed open the door, and slid down it inside. The vibrations, the noise, all muffled. She couldn’t go any further on, couldn’t carry herself to the bed or the floor, but here, by the door, she still heard them.

On and on it went, and she folded down into herself. The uniform crumpled like paper under her shape, and the frosty air of the room rushed into every crevice of her clothes. The shouting rocked the whole foundation, and Sana was hit by a wave of vertigo. Stop and start, lower and raise, voices fired in several cannon volleys. And then, piercing the floorboards, her Da’s raised voice, not heard since she was a child, rushed through.

“Enough!” He, of all people, slammed his hands on the table this time, shaking the whole house with a shout that she’d never even heard. Sana rose to her feet, and crept towards the window, boots still on, voices echoing through the still open front door. “Saima, you should never have brought that Frame back here…” Something muffed, then, “You shouldn’t have shown it to Oksana, it was a disaster waiting to happen.”

“I-” Her mother tried to answer.

“And Voleno, you have been getting in our daughter’s way, constantly. She had to lie to you about her application to the RFI because she was terrified about how you’d react.” The snow outside was very pretty, and she knew now they’d told her father. It was over. Pa would rather she went to prison than join the RFI. “Our own daughter, scared of us – scared of you. You haven’t been able to let her choose for years, and you’ve become a roadblock because of it.”

“We-“

“And I fucked up-” Her da might’ve said, though she was struggling to hear much anymore.

“Language!” His partners said in unison, and the roof shuddered.

“Fine, I screwed up by not standing my ground sooner, and letting you both tear her apart!”

And there was silence, absolute now. For the first time in five minutes, the house fell quiet. The snow wasn’t falling, just then, but its muffling quiet engulfed and embraced the homestead. The very wood of their old fixture stood still again, and no longer did it groan. Sana’s eyes stayed on the window, as she reached her hand around the seam of its glass frame, and lifted, cold, barren winds breaking in and whipping the papers around her room.

“I’m going out.” Her Pa probably said. It didn’t matter to Sana though, not now. Now she felt the wind, the cool, tasteless chill. She needed out of the entire house, out from the body, whether the argument had halted or not. Maybe she had said it to herself? Nah, too many mysterious voices for today. She slid out onto the subroof that encircled her bedroom, shuffled more as a figure below stalked in the dark, illuminated only by the kitchen light, and she clambered down before hopping onto a pile of snow that had collected by the door.

The gale outside was howling now, lashing round the distant trees and pushing against her steps, but it was much quieter than the motionless building. Pa stepped out, and the cold chill sent a shudder down her spine, reminding her she was only in a coat. He fumbled with his keys, but the truck was still unlocked, so hasty as they had been to fight when they arrived. Climbing inside, the old machine soon rattled to life. In its noise and his distraction with the mechanics of the thing, Sana slid herself into the flat trailer bed, laying backwards between a case of fishing poles and a cooler. The stars above twinkled gently, between the swirling clouds. She could see only one of the sun’s sisters hanging gently in the sky, crescented. Calliope, grey and always watching, except when she slept.

Sana wasn’t sure why she hadn’t just run away. Maybe some distant voice in her head, some survivalist instinct, had assumed the low walls of the truck and the company of another companion, even if she hated him right now, would prove best for her continued existence.

It could’ve been hours long, that drive, and for that time, all Sana had were the stars, as the storm chose to clear. The thing about living away from civilisation, from anything of note, was that you got used to the star-trodden sky. You start remembering the patterns, and the curls, and eventually they become so normalised that you forget the sheer wonderment of them. But sometimes, every now and then, she’d look out her window on those winding winter nights, and would be greeted by a tapestry of millions.

From the truck bed, she could see the winding, creamish centre of the galaxy. A thousand pinpricks of hovered her way, bleary and watching her tender indifference. She couldn’t name most of them, stars had never been of her scientific interest, but she knew some of the bigger shapes, the constellations every kid learns and knows. Solaris’ Handmaid, always following and picking after the Lord himself, the Three Whales, riding their sunward path just as they did for every night in winter. And there, above and southerly, was the brightest star in the sky, The Herald of the Sun, she thought it was called. She didn’t remember the story that went with that one, just that it dragged on for pages and pages, and that the star it named was visible nearly all year round; a polaris.

The trundling truck came to a halt. Pa, not as young as he used to be, heaved his way out of the cabin, and Sana scrunched up tight, unnoticeable. She hoped that he would leave long enough for her to slip away, back into the woods where she belonged. That hope disappeared when the truck’s lip was opened, and he peered at her for several seconds, silent.

“Boo,” Sana said, even though the jig was up. No luck; nothing scared him anyway.

“Good evening, Oksana.”

“Hi, Papa,” her voice stretched out to the horizon, trembling from the cold and all else besides. She still found herself trying to hide a mischievous smile.

“What are you doing in my truck bed?”

“…An excellent question.” Sana replied, as her Pa, with a single arm linked with her’s, hoisted her out of the bed, effortlessly lifted and planted her boots against the dirt, and brushed away the snow she’d been lounging on.

“Well, since you are here. I would like to take you somewhere. If you would like to see it, that is,” he said as if it were a question, pushing some bait boxes back into his carefully planned arrangement.

“Uh,” She glanced out into the black woods, shivering from something other than the cold. “Sure.”

Sana echoed her mother in many ways. Right then, it was by walking with an increasing stillness in every other part of her body, her eyes locked forward to the gravel road, as if echoing that stubborn existence would sooth her aching body, and protect her from whatever lingering rage may be sent her way.

“Where are we going?” She released her held breath.

“To a place that is important to me.”

“And why’s it so far away?”

“Because I only come here when I’m angry.” Her father replied, softly. “Best to keep things separate. Detached. Prevents everything from being…tangled up.”

“Then you’re still angry at Ma and Da. And me too, I guess.”

Her father contemplated for a second, before giving a small nod.

The sun was still too low to make a dent on the heavens, only the stars and the two crescents of the moons; Cleo and Calliope, little sister and big, hung in a dark blue sea before the currents of the cosmos. This brilliant sight was mirrored by the grounding, monotonous crunch of frost under their boots. Sana wrapped her coat tighter around herself, wishing she’d put another layer on. She was no fan of the cold, despite having lived through it her entire life. Must’ve been in her blood.

Her father walked out ahead, scanning the foliage with a torch. “Please stay close. These woods are deep, and full of dangers.”

“What kind of dangers?”

“Hm.” He didn’t turn, but his hand met his beard in thought. “Bears, for one. Wolves, for two. But in this leg, the greatest danger is slipping and hitting your head.”

Illuminated, Sana nodded, closing the distance to stand beside him, and the two maintained their pace up the slope. “Great, great. Are the bears why you like it up here?”

“No.”

“Then-”

“You’ll see why soon, Oksana.”

A silence settled once more like a thicker snowdrift. Everything was muffled and quiet, and adding the darkness on top of that, Sana struggled to gauge where they were. Surrounded by trees, walking up a forest track. Sana trusted her father, but if there was even a modicum of doubt in her mind, she’d say this would be a fine place to get murdered. Her weary body, after the day’s beating, protested as she braved the incline, keeping just behind the beam of the torchlight.

“We’re here.” Voleno replied to the question she hadn’t voiced. As she climbed up the last twist of the incline, she looked out, her father’s torchlight scanning the ground. Except, after a moment’s adjustment, she realised the torch was off. Instead, it was the warm orange glow of street lamps, office blocks, and many dotted homes of the city of Tomodaske. Spotlights firing into the sky illuminated the night in a column of golden haze. If she stopped looking for just a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dark again, she could blind herself in short order.

“Wow.” Sana meant it. “It’s certainly a pretty spot to curse out the world.”

“I only come here when I am angry in a way that I cannot talk about with your Ma and Da,” her father explained, stepping past her and towards the edge of the cliff ahead. It dropped down fast, before hitting the mass of forest that climbed every side of their little river valley. “It is not a place I visit often, and for that I am thankful.” He swept away the snow from the edge of the cliff, and lowered his broad frame down, letting his legs fall over the edge like an adolescent.

“Do you come here if you’re angry at me, too?”

After a moment, he nodded, before patting the space next to him. Sana took the hint, deliberately not looking down from the cliffside as she lowered her legs over it. She yelped against the cold of the snow, in any other company it may have earned a laugh.

“You’re joining the Infantry?” Father cut to the chase instead.

“Are you asking me this here of all places just so I can’t run away?”

Her father lingered for a second, and then shrugged.

She took a deep breath, followed by a long sigh as the air circulated and burnt her nose. “Yeah, I am.”

“…Hmm,” was all the old man said.

“That’s it? Not got any shouting or choice words for me?”

“Oksana-”

“You had plenty for Ma and Da.” Sana shook her head, disappointed by her own surprise. “I’m not a kid anymore. I can take what you want to say, what you need to say. I was the one who did it, who got in that Frame, even if Ma found it. I fixed the damn thing, even. I’m almost frustrated that you would snub me like that.” Several seconds passed, her Papa’s mind metronomic – she could nearly count the beats to the second that it took. Then, he turned to her for a brief second, and Sana couldn’t believe what she saw.

“I’m terrified,” he whispered, eyes swivelling back to the distant city.

“Huh?” Sana stammered out. “Of what?”

“What do you think, Oksana?”

“I- well, the RFI’s a tough job, I know that. I guess I can understand that, even-”

“It is more than backbreaking labour, flower. It is soul-crushing. The RFI is a military organisation. Did you think about that?” His voice raised in curves, and then smothered back down, trying. “I’m terrified that my little girl is going to end up like me, haunted by ghosts that she can never banish.”

Sana leant forwards. “I know that joining has… baggage, but I’m not going there to be a soldier, Papa. I just want to be a Pilot, more than anything in the world. It’s honestly the one thing that’s been keeping me going. That’s why I lashed out. That’s why I- that’s why people got hurt.”

“You have no idea what you’re signing up for, do you?” His words hit like a blunt instrument.

“I know that’s where the Frames are.”

“Those blasted machines.” Father shook his head.

“Maybe to you, Pa, but to me they’re all I have left.”

“Because of this golden ticket-”

“Before that!” Sana cried out beyond the cliff. “Before any of that! Do you know how hard things have been for me, even after school ended? I’m so alone, Papa. I have you, Mama and Da. That’s it. No one my age. No one with the same interests or the same perspective. Nothing. They all push me away, they always have. And Da, he tries to care about what I care about, but he doesn’t get it. Ma just- Ma hasn’t been the same since I stopped going out shooting and hunting with her. And you- you…” She leant into her hand, determined not to let a single tear fall. She had lost far too many in recent days, and her eyes were cold and dry. “All I want is a place to belong. Frames are the one solace, the one passion I have left. And when the RFI rejected me, when even they turned me down, like everyone does, I just- I couldn’t hold it all in anymore.” Sana watched her father slowly grasp the fact that he had failed to know his daughter. The familiarity of that confusion almost had her empathy in a vice. “Did you notice any of that?” She asked.

“Do you still think about the people you hurt?”

It was her turn for silence, and a small nod. “Whenever it’s quiet, I hear them scream for help. I turned and ran and didn’t help them. I…” she trailed off into the crook of her neck.

“You’ve found yourself a ghost of your own, then.” He turned to her. “And you still want to be a Pilot, despite that? I heard what you were ‘offered’.” he clicked his tongue. “But do you want to?”

“If I don’t, I’ll be put away for a long time. And to be honest, I probably deserve that.”

“Oksana. Is that what you want?”

A strong gale passed through, and slipped under her coat, threatening to steal all the heat from her racing heart, and freeze it solid. She breathed in.

“No. No, I just want to be a Pilot. More than anything. Even if it’s built on a foundation of hurt, I still want it. It’s still the one thing that brings me any joy. And I’m selfish for still wanting that, ‘cause I don’t deserve it. But for once, I have a chance, and despite everything, despite knowing I’m not worthy of it, I still want it. I still want to be there.”

“Then you’ll be a damn fine Pilot, but a terrible soldier.” He sighed. “Gods, we should have- I should have reached out sooner. Listened to all these things, seen the tower you were building around yourself. I should have been tall enough to peer over your walls. I am sorry, little flower, for not having been enough.” There was a moment of quiet, as Sana took everything said in, churning it in her brain. She tried to think of something she could do, or say, or even think, but nothing came. She sat frozen for a moment more, her father looking out at the golden lights of the city below. It really was beautiful, healing even. She could see why her Pa came here often. Perhaps seeing her shiver, or perhaps unable to reconcile with words, he drew her into a hug. The warmth melted some deep, frigid part of herself.

“I thought you hated me,” she sniffled, tears refusing to fall due to the cold, but welling up at the corner of her eyes regardless. “Not this. I thought you didn’t care, I thought-“

“I know, I know. I feared you were going down a path I hated so much, and you are, but I was so blinded by my worry for you, that I forgot to even listen to what you wanted. What you needed. Right now, well, I just want to spend these precious final moments alone with my child, before you go.”

Sana pressed her forehead deeper into him. Even through all those layers, she could feel warmth radiate from him like a humming nuclear reactor.

“You were always going to grow up. One day or another, my little girl was to become a little woman. Always small, of course, but great and strong in her own ways, and every other way. That said, do not take my love for you as an endorsement of this, or your path. I trust you, now – like I should have done long ago – but beware of the infernal deal you have been dealt, little flower. Offers like this are not given freely.”

“Well, it was either this or prison,” She joked, and folded deeper still into her father’s chest, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all, and had simply melted like a snowflake, disappearing into the heat. Delirious exhaustion hit her in waves.

“Mama wasn’t lying, you know,” Sana retorted to an ungiven threat. “She was the one who found it in the ice up north, but I repaired it. All of it. I’m surprised you never even noticed, what with how much time I spent out there.”

“I didn’t notice, no.” Her father whispered, his coat encircling them both like a blanket. Then, for the first time in her life, she heard her dad cry. It wasn’t loud, or violent; a soft sniffle followed by shaking tears. And Sana cried too, wrapped together in their bundle before the lights. The cold winter’s sun cracked the horizon, its golden light hitting the upper atmosphere, giving a first candlelight before the arrival of Solaris’ shining visage.

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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Offered Palms

“…and so her wings were clipped, and down through the sky she tore. Fire and falling, the sun above and the world below.”

Tongues 5:13, Solarist Codex

Questions. Waves upon waves of questions. Ceaseless, damning, barging masses – slugs to the temple and then to the stomach that had no end in sight. Sana blinked through them, offered only water and rye bread since she was first dragged in and chained down. It could’ve been hours since she’d arrived, days maybe. She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t.

The room had a couch, frayed and older than her. A chain extended from her hand to the wall, and if she had a right arm, she could just reach a desk in the room’s centre. Beside it was a silver panel of glass, and above that the only light in the room, channelled down in a pallid, golden tower against the shimmering desk. A cell and an interrogation room all at once. Efficiency. In came another interviewer, then another, then another. Sana stayed on the leather, far in the corner. There was no point approaching the desk unless asked, they’d probably rush in and tase her. She hoped it was just tasers on their hips.

The Frame that had hauled and crushed her into the mud was another lifetime ago, having vanished into the blur of shackles, walls, and cages. She remembered the barest sheen of white on its armour, or maybe a light grey. It might’ve just been the colour of the snow, obscured by the night. Those three blue eyes, however, would go unforgotten.

“As a seventeen-year-old, Ms. Kelenov, you can be tried as an adult,” said one of the revolving set of interviewers. The space was hauntingly empty, yet oppressively crowded, with a stream of faceless figures breaking long stretches of isolation. Even those periods of silence felt loud, and despite her seclusion, the red blink of a camera, perched in the shadows like a watching crow, was presence enough. She played with the frayed edges of her hair, still muddy. She couldn’t smell anything but concrete anymore.

“As you know, being Khalaban prompts serious suspicion of your intentions and part in all this.”

“I’m Dulkatian.” She’d murmur. No windows. Was it daytime, or night? Hours passed, maybe, and in came more accusing voices, with boots thick for marching, and suits thin for conversation. The faces morphed from one to another. Some had moustaches, speckled grey hair. One had glasses that reflected in the harsh overheads. All men. All in suits. All Dulkatian, but not like she was Dulkatian, their scrutiny a constant reminder.

“Answer the questions, and we won’t have to consider such… serious charges, Miss Kelenov.”

“I didn’t mean to-“

There was no clock in the room. Time trickled out like water in a rat’s cage. One group left. An age and a day passed. Another pair trundled in. Some brought food, packaged and flavourless. Delicious things. She’d scarf down every morsel and then retreat into her corner. There was no heater in the room, and the concrete was cold.

“Why were you there in particular? On that road?” One asked.

“Did you have a target?” Said another. “It’s a busy highway.”

“Where did the Frame come from? If it was your parents, we can protect you from them, you know.”

“They endangered you, that’s all you need to say.”

“Your citizenship could be revoked for this.” And on and on and on.

What must’ve been the hundredth new face sat across from her with beady eyes and a clipped tie, twirling his pen between his fingers. Sana wanted to shut her eyes and drift off into a deep slumber, to sleep this nightmare through, but even if she let herself sleep, they wouldn’t for long. The pen rattled. The man sniffled. Every sound, a little personal hell.

“We can sit here all day, miss.” He started again. How many minutes ago had he last said that? Five? Ten? An hour? They could well have been sat there all day, all week, and she wouldn’t know. “Just answer the question, it’s very simple.”

“…I don’t know.” She mumbled.

“And yet you had access to it anyways.” The man sighed. Sana couldn’t tell if he was actually frustrated, or if this was another trick. “Miss Kelenov, your story is, frankly, riddled with holes. We’re really supposed to believe you just, what, stumbled across it when on a walk like a loose pebble in your shoe? Do you think that’d hold up in court? Before a jury?” 

Mama found it, her thoughts recited. Tell him. The faster this is done, the sooner we get out of the cold. “It was in our barn.” She swallowed.

“Your barn?” The man looked with shock, and then calmed. A ploy, maybe? She couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t strategise, if there were a strategy to be had. “Well, of course, farmlands are well known for their errant Frames.”

“It’s true.”

“It might be. Who’s to say? But it is wholly unhelpful, Oksana.” The man laid back in his seat. Notes scuffed on his pad. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard. “And that doesn’t even mention it is a federal offence not to report Frame sightings. There’s even a bounty just to encourage people to give them over – enough to pay for your college tuition, or a new car, anything you could want – and yet you held onto it, risking legal action every single day? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Sana shuffled in place. Wrong answer. 

“We have enough witnesses to start a support group. Five of them are in hospital with lacerations. Lacerations! They were hit so fast, their wounds melted back shut. And that doesn’t even touch on the material damages. Then we find you, sitting in a Frame, barely a kilometre from the scene. We know what you did, Oksana. Now, we just need to figure out all the facts. Maybe you were coerced? Bribed? Perhaps by someone from back home?”

“…Dulkat?”

“You know where I mean.” The man stared. Sana wanted to fight, desperately, but even without the handcuff bruising her wrist, she couldn’t. Her legs still wouldn’t let her stand. She stayed slumped, and quiet, like a street dog dying in a back alley, hoping not to be noticed. “If you just tell us that someone was threatening you, Oksana, this can all blow over. A foreign actor, or some other malicious party. Maybe they were hurting you? I don’t know, only you can tell us. We can help you.”

“My home is Dulkat.” She whispered.

“Of course.”

No words occurred for several moments. Sana sat up, clambering out from her nook in the wall ever so slightly, squinting under the fluorescent white from above. If the man reacted, she didn’t see. She didn’t want him to.

“I want to go home.” She almost choked. “Let me go home.”

“You will, after you tell us if there was any organisation outside of Raelith influencing you or your decisions.”

“I. Am. Raelithan.”

“With familial ties to Khalaba, yes – blood is thick, Oksana. Look, we just want to help sort this all out, make things as easy for you as possible, and for that, you have to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but it, hm? That middle bit there is where we’re getting stuck, you’re not giving us everything.”

He continued on and on. Patience was no virtue, but rather a fine scalpel, delicately severing the tendons that held up a person’s walls. Leave a rat in a cage alone for long enough and it’ll scratch the bars till its claws bleed. The same could happen to a human, Sana understood then, as long as you treated it like a similarly small, cowering thing. Eventually she stopped replying.

The investigator’s wrist, covered by a small, wood-panelled device, buzzed abruptly. He checked it, sighed for a third time, picked up his coffee and gulped it down, before collecting his things.

“Well, I’m sorry to cut this short, Miss Kelenov. But, I do hope this brief pause will give you a chance to reconsider.” He stood from his seat, taking several clacking steps to the door. “The sooner you’re honest, the sooner this is over. Another investigator will be here soon. If you have a change of heart, tell them immediately, hm? Then we can get you home.”

‘Soon’ was a lie made up by those beholden to the clock. Hours might’ve passed, and to Sana, that was just as ‘soon’ as a minute, a second. Every instance she registered drilled into her skull all the same, but when looking back down the mountain of time since she’d arrived, she could see no base. No peak existed either, just her and the clouded, concrete room, engulfing her, filling her cheeks and gullet. Sana’s fingertips still hadn’t warmed all the way, maybe they were frostbitten? The interviewers hadn’t asked. She instinctively checked her right arm too – diagnostics of the self to stay sane – but upon rolling her shoulder, the memories flooded back in. They tore it off, her pride and joy, and crushed it like a can. I told them to stop and they wouldn’t listen. We told them.

And she started to cry. It was the third or fourth time she had in that room. She wondered if a lot of people did that in custody, cry. To her credit, the last time had to have been hours before, when things were just beginning. She had been a wreck, even more so, near inconsolable. But sobs and shudders couldn’t last forever, no emotion that intense could. So now, too exhausted to even have a panic attack, the tears rolled down her motionless face, silent, escaping where she could not. In that stillness, the echoes of screams and cries for help threatened to creep out from her memory. She just wanted to go unnoticed, unseen and left to dissolve, despite the fact that deep down, she knew that she wouldn’t go unwatched for a single second. The camera light flickered again, a small red dot hidden by the harsh conical lamp fixed crudely to the ceiling, revealing the dust and fingerprints coating the room. The hundreds of fingerprints. How many had sat here before? What did they do to deserve this? Had anyone caused as much hurt as she did? More? Did they weep too?

She looked into the vacant lens. No facial expression, hair unkempt and still agonisingly matte. The uniform they had thrown her creaked like old wood and tingled unpleasantly against her skin. She stared down the glass eye, and whatever uniform sat watching behind it, until water blurred her vision again. Her wrist was raw and her hand was numb and her shoulders ached and…and…

A clunk came from the door, and passing swiftly through it came another new face. New faces were becoming inscrutable, and she couldn’t tell it apart from the last. Tall, though most were taller than her, and that was all she could discern with them engulfed in shadow. They had a briefcase, maybe? Sana’s eyes were exhausted before she’d even entered that room. She shuffled her feet on the mat, the new hello.

“Good evening, Miss Kelenov.” Evening. Okay. A day, maybe several, unless weeks had been stolen under her watch. She didn’t reply, the new investigator didn’t need it.

The figure stepped further in, still engulfed by shadow, save for wisps of reflected light travelling up their face on approach. The coat on their shoulders was long as they pulled it off, carefully hanging it on the chair. They sat, and dragged in with several awful scrapes across the floor, a sound she had grown numb to. Briefcase on the floor, letters being rifled through. The bag was a new addition, no other inspector had brought one. Something glinted on their collar.

“May I call you Oksana?” The figure asked, monotone, but soft, like a field of snow. “Saying ‘Oksana Kelenov’ is unwieldy.”

Sana blinked. She hadn’t been asked that once the entire time here. Her eyes darted across the man’s face. She didn’t want eye contact, but in her brief glimpse, she saw a large slash, horizontal across their nose, like the sun rising over a flat horizon. She looked up to the red light, and nodded.

“Good to meet you then, Oksana.” The silhouette sniffled, before pulling out several papers, and placing them on the desk. “I have some questions to ask of you about your experience, pertaining to these values I have here.”

Interesting new tactic. They scanned gently down with their pen, before tapping a particular column. Then, they approached her nook, growing taller in her vision every step, and showed her the clipboard directly. FraC reading, Seventy-six percent, she read internally. The words were in Hlaqua, the language of the Federation at large. Unusual. The whole encounter was.

“I assume you know what it says, literally. But do you understand what it means?”

Sana searched her mind for an answer, before shaking her head, too out of it for a test. The inspector nodded. “The FraC score is how we measure Frame compatibility. You might know it by a different name; Resonance. That’s the one we give to the press, and the one Pilots use.”

Sana’s attention finally snapped to focus, after unknown hours of haze and murmurs. In fact, she sat up at the words, tilting her head to the newcomer. “I-I know it.” She whispered her first words in hours. Why did they say ‘we’? The need to know, to question, drew more curiosity to the surface.

“I suspected. Now, I would like you to tell me what piloting this Frame of yours was like. When you Frameshifted, before your body fully connected, did you get any particular sights, sounds, smells – any sensations at all? List them, please.”

Sana blinked twice. She had been avoiding looking at the table for the glare, but now, at this stranger, she had a reason to look. “Uh.” Her head throbbed with a lingering ache, memories swirled and regurgitated. “I don’t…” “Anything at all.” Snow is warm if you pack it around yourself. An insulator, like a blanket. The words soothed her, enough that her reply couldn’t stay buried for long. It clawed out her throat to speak.

“I saw lights.” She mumbled. “Flickering lights.”

“I see.” The silhouette’s hand scribbled over paper. A vague pink tinted a clip on their tie. “Anything else of note?”

“I heard a voice. Voices. But, I don’t think it was an actual voice. More like- like a memory. Or the sound a thought makes.” Her parched throat scraped the words out through bitter air, whistling with every strained note.

“I see.” They repeated, still scribbling. “Did these adverse effects increase in potency during your…incident?”

“I didn’t-” she started, then caught herself. Of all the truths, these weren’t the ones she expected to be saying. “Yes. I think they did. I- I didn’t mean to-“

“Well, that would line up with the numbers we’ve logged.” The interviewer ignored her plea, leaning back in the seat. The voice bounced around the room less than all the others. Reserved. She recognised it, but not that face, curtained by shadow.

“Numbers?” Sana asked, before they tapped the page again, further down. She skimmed. The number kept increasing, further and further, until a sharp peak at ninety-two percent. “Ninety-two.” 

“This was the first time you have ever Frameshifted with this Frame, or any other for that matter, am I correct?”

This had to be a ploy. Sana just wanted to see her parents, was that too much to ask? She had to do something, anything. She wanted home, with its cocoa and tiny bed and warm sheets and her tools and her arm, fixed and waiting for her.

Nothing but a fantasy, like a warm winter morning. There was nothing to be done, no great game to be played. So, finally, she nodded.

The figure in shadow moved with strict precision, lifting the page away and returning it neatly to their bag. Then, they leant in, the light finally reaching their face. Olive skin, with that mountain range of pink scarring across their nose and cheeks. She could not meet their eyes, but the gaze was stern “I have a proposal for you, Oksana.”

“What kind of proposal?” She mumbled, pulling muddy dust from the strands of her fringe, pretending not to hear. Pretending not to be desperately interested in anything anyone could offer her.

“You applied to join the RFI Pilot programme, but were rejected. Practical scores were good, but your theory was lacking in places. Add onto that your disability, and the RFI deemed you unworthy of a spot.”

“That- that was why…” Sana tried quietly, the man across from her folded their hands.

“It was. You then went on a rampage, and nearly killed five people.” Sana’s lip quivered. “Am I correct?”

The whole truth, they already knew this part. Maybe the bastards behind the red-lit camera lens just wanted to see her say it. She swallowed, unmoving for several, agonising moments, and then slowly nodded. “I’m-” She kept her eyes on the ceiling. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t want any of this, I just- I had nothing else. I have nothing else. I’m sorry.” The barricades, so recently rebuilt, overflowed once more. Not in a tsunami, but a trickle. More would come, she knew it.

“You should be, Oksana. You will carry this weight forever.” The figure said, staring her down as she collapsed into her hand. “Which is why I stopped you from being turned into a red puddle in those woods. And, more crucially, why I suspect that you would make an excellent pilot.”

Sana immediately jerked her head from her hands, and stared. Who was this insane person that had made their way into her cell? Their words and her position didn’t exist in the same universe.

Bullshit. Bullshit, it had to be. It was the only thing that could escape through her mental block. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. She inhaled once, then let go a thousand breaths that had been held in, suffocating her over hours like carbon monoxide. She gently lowered her eyes, hand far from her face, as her gaze crossed the table.

“What- what are you talking about?” She choked, the flow starting anew. She breathed rapidly into her palm, lashes crashing against each other. Her sight blurred, but she still saw a tissue extend her way. She snatched it, wiping herself down. “Who are you?”

“You have a great debt to your country now, Oksana. Our country. A debt that you will pay back, one way or another. But, for what you lack in caution, you more than make up for in foundational skill, and in the Raelithan Frame Infantry, your kind is rare. As such, we are willing to take on your debt.”

She was glad to be crying properly again, emotions flooding back in. But after everything, the whole day battering her against the rocks, she’d begun to be sick of them. The intensity was drowning, and swimming against the current had exhausted her. The tears flowed whether she wanted it or not.

“I don’t deserve this.” She tried to voice the cocktail of guilt and self-pity. “I hurt people! I’m- I’m a monster. I shouldn’t be rewarded for that, it’s- it’s-“

“Luck.”

“Pure, stupid, bullshit luck. This isn’t fair, I should be- I should…” She jittered into the tissue, crumpling below lines of spit and tears. Then, she crumpled backwards into the seat, blowing strongly into the tissue as she tried to collect herself. “So I hurt people, and what? I get a pat on the back? ’cause it turns out I was so damn good at it? Is that what you need from me? A killer?”

“You had unnaturally high compatibility scores for the first flight. Did you know that most people who try to plug into a Frame for the first time, outside of a controlled environment, die? It’s usually seizures that get them, but there are plenty of other ways. Historically, some prospective recruits would plug into a Frame Core, and then five seconds later Mount Killian would have one less Pilot, one less Frame, and a whole new crater. And yet, you plugged yourself in, alone, in a barn in the middle of rural Dulkat. Not only did you survive apparently unscathed and unexploded, but you also managed to get your bearings in record time. And then, not content with such a feat alone, you also reached compatibility scores usually reserved on the charts for Pilots at the height of their careers. They lasted for a brief, flittering second, but that is still some immense potential, Ms. Kelenov.”

“You can’t just- come here and clean up this mess,” she said. “I hurt people- I nearly killed people! I don’t understand. I don’t deserve this.”

“If I had wanted a clean up crew, I would’ve let that Frame that found you do its job. I would’ve helped sweep away the corpse, even.” Their face returned to the shadows, the chair beneath them eerily silent. “But I didn’t. Because I – or rather, someone above my station – is willing to take a gamble on you. This is your one and only alternative, Oksana. If you so choose, we can let you go back to civilian hands. At your age, you will be tried in Federal court, and will likely spend the rest of your early adult life in prison. Prisoner rehabilitation rates in Dulkat remain some of the lowest in the Federation, so in all likelihood, this would be the complete destruction of your life path and livelihood. Not to mention, a Dulkatian who looks like you would be an instant target. You have no record before this, no outstanding complaints from any other organisation. I understand wanting to pay the tithe for what you have done, Oksana. But, I promise you this, repenting through action is in every way superior. If you take this option to join the RFI, survive our training process, and come out the other side a full-fledged Pilot, such amends will be infinitely better than you being thrown in some hole to toil away your days.”

“I’m a bad hand to bet on,” Sana mumbled. She had never played cards with any betting involved. Nothing serious, anyways, no lives at stake.

“Then maybe we’re bad players.” A twinge of understanding bled through their monotone voice. “If I could rescue every single person before you to be sent down this route just to stave off your guilt, Oksana, I would. But I am afraid this is the best we can offer. A lifeline.”

She breathed into her hand more, before placing the tissue on the desk. “Who even are you? You’re RFI but, why help me then, and now? Why stop the others from just ending me? Why even bother?”

Their hands propelled them to a loose standing position, face in shadow and form looming. “I am Colonel Reo Amestine of the Raelithan Frame Infantry. They/Them. You appear to be useful in a way that others in our organisation weren’t immediately willing to see. But this is not a gift, Oksana.” Out across the gap between them, a palm extended towards her. “This is a chance; do not turn it into a mistake.”

Sana swallowed a deep knot, a barricade of worms that had built larger and larger in her throat. This wasn’t okay. She’d hurt people. She was getting an out, and was being lauded for her actions, and yet people, other human beings, living, breathing, loving, could have died. She had failed them.

But isn’t this what she always wanted? Said a deeper voice, and Sana bit at her lip. Maybe it would bleed. And this Colonel might be right. Penance through action; it must be better than rotting away like an old tree stump, and what about her parents? She may never get to see them again if she doesn’t accept this. We have so much to live for, Oksana, and so much to lose, even if we don’t know it yet. Of all times, after so long of being walked over and going unheard, let’s make people listen.

After a moment more, she lifted her head, rested her plimsolls against the concrete, and stood – a foreign feeling in this place. The chain rattled as her hand, still branded with burgundy bruises, carefully extended forwards, towards the invisible threshold.

“I accept.”

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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Creation Myth

“’I remember what life was like before trauma’, the old crone whispered. We asked and begged of her, what made it so special, compared to the wonders of our age? She turned to us and said: ‘It was quiet outside.’”

Reconstructed fragment of an old Signan Folktale, inscribed circa. 2,250BF

Wood was strong, and metal was heavy. At least, that was the way of the world before a steel figure, lithe and light and alert, crashed through the barn’s timber wall, and a thousand splinters littered the snow. The slope down to the house was long, and the horizon a hundred miles away. At least, that was the world before it took just three strides on long, bladed feet to reach the halfway-fence, and gaze upon distant hills like bumps in the grass. Sana was a failure, and dreams were bullshit – until her new body of alloy and engine shattered that world like brittle glass.

“Holy shit,” she looked down and clenched her hands, again and again, not tiring of the motion. Each finger contained the precision of a surgeon, and the strength of a hydraulic press. “Holy shit!” With an awkward turn, she examined the creaking, half-demolished building behind her, legs wobbling like that of a fawn; unsure, and ready to spring. A single barge of her shoulder carried so much force. Surely she could grasp the clouds, and topple mountains. Around her waist, along her arms, in her palms, she could feel the years of labour bolted, welded and hammered into every panel and motor – the very skin and muscle of this form. Those efforts, those hours upon hours of toil were Oksana Kelenov, interlaced with the machine into one seamless tapestry, until there was no end between her and it. Four arms, two legs. Four ears, four eyes. Two hearts, one mind.

“It’s perfect.” She was in awe, almost drunk. “This is me, and it’s perfect.”

It didn’t make any sense. How could she have been rejected? Here she stood, in a Frame repaired by her, maintained by her, forged by her in a dusty shack with hammer and nails, and wielding it without struggle. Engineers? Mechanics? Pilots? She was the whole bloody RFI! A teenager could do all their work for them! Look at her, look at this! Seventeen and the world was already bowing.

“It’s a one woman show, baby. All for me. All for me-”

“Sana!”

The call snapped her fantasy to a halt, and her attention to a small figurine standing outside the model cottage that sat further down the slope. The gaze of this ant, familiar and crushing, trapped her mighty form like a deer in headlights. No. No, this wasn’t right. Such tiny things couldn’t stop her, not now. Yet, the face swirled with a dread that made Sana’s stomach churn and legs tighten, the whispers of the machine demanding action, command line open, blinking. Every moment spent stationary thumped in her chest and stole her breath.

“Don’t look at me,” she whispered. Don’t see the two-tonne alien war machine, please oh please.

Another figure appeared, drawn to the commotion like carrions to the gore. It wandered out the door with purpose on its lips, speaking gibberish. Jovial, at first, until it rounded the corner, and froze. Why hadn’t they said anything? Why did they stare and stare and bore into her soul without any eyes she could see? Why were they so quick to give up? A million questions collided in her mind, and every passing millisecond a firework of sensations writhed up the needles in her spine, directly into the skull. Her name was called again, desperate, panicked. Ashamed. Shaming. If she stayed, it was going to kill her.

Steel hooves dug into the earth. Broad shoulders hunched forward. The entire Frame tensed like a spring. Every mechanism within her, industrial and immense and ancient, directed its might towards the necessity of escape. Thought became instinct, movement became reflex, and the whispers coalesced into a unified, universal demand.

Run.

And Sana launched. She shot across the blanket of white and green, sailing over the puny wire fence, and crossed the next field in an instant. Each stride pummelled into the ground, left then right, left then right, driving deep before catapulting her forward. The snow glinted under the morning sunlight of this foreign world, vivid and brilliant through her new eyes, the speed howling past her new ears, yet no winter’s chill nor frigid breeze could reach her inside the armour. She was faster than the wind.

The border of the homestead rapidly approached, marked by a wood-panelled wall that loomed three metres high, planted deep into tough soil. As a young child, this was the edge of Sana’s universe, the boundary she came to when she played, alone and absent, and had ventured too far, before a pair of hands would scoop her up, and coddle her home. Staring back over a warm shoulder that hummed gentle words, her thumb in her mouth, she would wonder if one could ever scale something so tall, so vast, and peer at the abyss beyond.

Now, sprinting towards this familiar barrier, this limit of her past, Sana propelled from the ground like a heron from water, and soared. There was no need to even touch the wall, let alone climb it, her feet gliding far above its summit. She flew. Over the fence, over its shadow, over the memory of a small, awkward girl, who didn’t know whether to look at the sky, or down at her shoes. Even upon landing the enormous arc, she did not stumble or slow. Sana ran on. The calls of her name – the girl’s name – were far behind now, and could no longer reach her. She was faster than sound.

Run.

The fields beyond spread out before her, a vast patchwork of whatever the Siegardov family could get to take root. As a kid, Sana would spend the long summers helping them cultivate it, since the neighbours were her only friends, and working a field made her more agreeable to her classmates. She never understood why, at the time. On those afternoons, with the sun beating down, she longed for the day’s drudgery to be done, but her impatience made the lines of tilled dirt stretch out to the horizon. Now, on iron legs, with the cold whipping round, she longed for this fever to last forever, and her awakening revealed that horizon’s true form; a line in the mud separating her right foot from the left.

The woods came fast into view, faster than ever before. As a teenager – as she still was – this maze of pine and brush was Sana’s withdrawal, her chance to disappear into the quiet, to forget and be forgotten. Sometimes Pa would take her there and teach her to hunt, his voice soft, instructive, as he knelt down and tied wire to a low branch. Those were the only moments she felt she understood her older father. Perhaps they were the only times she’d ever met him. Perhaps the real man lived within the call of the birds, the whistle of the breeze, and the trickle of water that weaved between a dense city of stumps and stones.

The machine knew nothing of this calm, only a roaring freedom that crashed through the treeline, and felled any trunk foolish enough to challenge its path. The towers of her adolescence collapsed, just as easily as the walls of her infancy were scaled, and the streets of her childhood trampled to dust. It was all so small.

Run.

“I’m am running!” Sana snapped, but a manic grin still possessed her. I’m alive, she said to herself, and the machine. Gods, I’m alive. I may as well have been dead before today. Together they stepped over the stream like a puddle, leapt over the river like a stream, and even the woods were behind her now, as she carved deep into the heart of the Dulkatian taiga. The fields, the village, the homestead, nobody there could see her now. Their sight could no longer reach her, their stares no longer pierce her. She was faster than light.

Thick branches snapped away with just her presence, like subjects bowing to their ruler’s procession, revealing a hillside beyond that she tore down. The hill gave way to a meadow, which gave way to another forest, another hill, the moors atop, and down again. Sana ran, and ran, and ran – an unstoppable charge towards the end of the sky. Her body rattled around inside the Frame, battering her shoulders and ribs, but any welt or bruise barely registered. Each step, robotic, cathartic, released her from the earth, crushing rock, ice and timber alike. The rhythm pulsed in time with her heartbeat – don-don, don-don – and back through the needles, sending sparks of adrenaline up her spine, electric, erratic.

Again Sana roared, with vigour and delight. She was no prey. She was free and wild and flew on winds of her own command. She had become the apex of herself, and no land, nor man, nor machine could go unconquered beneath her boot. The next wood approached, dense and impenetrable. It couldn’t stop her, couldn’t turn her or curb her path. It would move for her, never the opposite. Somehow, she knew. Liquid metal poured from the wrists of her upper arms, a fine dust of impossibly small machines. They gathered in her grasp, growing and arcing outwards, until a large blade of obsidian-purple glass formed, audibly sharp. With a single arc, every trunk in view was cleaved, and the treeline melted, bending to her will. The blade dissolved and returned to her, her domain absolute. The instinct to do so felt natural, obvious, like a spider spinning its web, or a wolf tearing at a fawn’s throat. Creation, destruction.

Faster still, her mind was struck by the profound, and irrefutable knowledge that she was the wind, she was the sky, and the ground it reflected; the heavens above and all below, serene, divine, transcendental. Time was a blur before her, trivial, the sun cresting and beginning to descend again, but still she ran. Landscapes swept by, mountains became anthills, while root and bark and boulder split with a wave of her hand.

Between the leaves of the canopy overhead – how many had there been now? – golden sunlight venerated her march, and Sana couldn’t help but stare back, through eyes of blood and glass. It was beautiful, more so than she ever remembered. A blazing star, beyond all gaze, beyond all words, beyond all needs of home or hunger, enormous and eternal. If she just reached out, maybe…

By the time her eyes adjusted, and she registered the drop ahead, she was already falling, having hurtled over the lip of the cliff at full speed.

The crevasse met her before any brace could be mustered. Once, twice, three times, she crashed against the rock face, her head slamming back then forth, as her hands scrambled for purchase. The surface, undisturbed for millenia, refused her struggle, turning to sand in her grip. With all five limbs, she grasped and clawed for something, anything to slow, but the strength of this new body betrayed her, the weight she had so carelessly thrown around now dragging her further down. Splinters and gravel shot through the cracks in her makeshift armour, knocking the wind from her chest. Her roll became a slide that screeched steel against stone, until another sharp ridge caused her to plummet further.

Down into the vale, Sana and her machine broke the surface of a flooded, shallow ditch. The whining motors in her arms took most of the brunt, but her nose still smashed against the surrounding shell with a crunch. Freezing water poured in over her hands and feet, making her yelp in shock as her muscles seized. She scrambled from the bog, squelching through tar-like mud, and flicked her eyes wildly about, waiting for the next impact.

None came.

On trembling legs that threatened to crumple, she leaned back into the cliffside for support, and breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

After several gasps, she managed to gulp, and exhale. Every joint groaned, and ached from the bruises she’d ignored. Her skin was raw and gashed. The flesh beneath the fortress was bloodied and beaten, but for the first time in what felt like days, Sana was still.

“Holy crap. I just-” she stammered to herself, “I just fell off a cliff. I just fell down a godsdamn cliff!” And she laughed. It was the only response possible to the shock, adrenaline, and sheer absurdity of it all. The sun was beginning to set, and she was starving. Her lips were cracked, mouth bleeding. Her throat was dry and her feet were soaked. Her nose was probably broken. Sana didn’t have a single clue where she was, or really who she was, anymore. But she laughed. It was hard to tell for how long, but eventually all she could hear were the echoes of breath within the Frame, and the northern night that approached so soon after morning.

The lack of motion was strange, alien. Standing still felt like falling backwards, and the silence rang in her ears twice over, one for each set. Her feet were alone without the company of a path. Sana had never been still by nature, but within the Frameshifted mind every itch of impulse became addictive temptation. The catharsis of flight, of tearing through the air at inhuman speeds, and feeling the raw strength behind every twitch, was incomparable to anything else in her life. She had spent the past seventeen years dreaming, obsessing over these machines, and every expectation had been confirmed, then surpassed tenfold. Being still was pointless, wasteful. It made her vulnerable.

A sharp throb in her ribs earned a grunt as she pushed to full height again, and began to walk. Rather, she attempted to, stumbling and teetering as she tried to find balance in the muck. Going so slow was odd too. Gritting her teeth through the pain, she limped forward over the shattered ice and sinking mire, onto the loose shale and shrubs. The ice-slush in her shoes began to make her feet numb, and soon that numbness became a cold which ached down to her bones.

“Now you’ve done it,” she mumbled to herself. “Damp damp damp, look at what you’ve done. Stupid girl. That’s what mama is calling us right now, I bet.” Another smirk. The adrenaline was fading, radiating away along with the heat from her skin, and all that remained was a  dizzying tangle of shame and excitement. “Man, I hate when she’s right.”

It was getting harder to see, even through the enhanced vision of a Frame’s eyes, as the shadows extended and darkness grew. I wish I had a flashlight, and maybe a mug of cocoa. And a towel, and a big sandwich, and a few plasters. And a bed to sleep in. She decided to start with a direction to walk in. The best first step was taken forwards, after all.

But instead, the road found her. The loose plants and pebbles that took up her lowered gaze were replaced by concrete and cat-eyes, dotting a long, black strip that wound through the wilderness. Sana didn’t know traffic laws existed this far outside reality. However, realisation slowly dawned, as she blankly regarded the reminder that everything she had done that day had happened, had been performed – by Oksana Kelenov of the Kelenov household, sovereign citizen of the State of Dulkat, accountable to the Federation of Raelith – and her breathing began to shake. “I’m- oh gods where the hell am I? What the hell do I-?” 

A horn screeched across her ears, a deafening siren on the still air. Her heart jumped to the roof of her mouth, and she locked into place, paralyzed by a wall of shock in the form of two headlights that narrowly swerved past her tall, crooked silhouette stalking the road. The truck ground against the tarmac, tilting further and further, until it careened off the road into the bordering ditch and smashed on its side. Sana couldn’t move.

The lorry’s surface lacerated against the rocks, peeled away like an onion, or skinned like an animal. Its contents bled across the floor and dragged splotches of dark fluid for several metres, letting all the innards flow outwards. Organs weren’t meant to be on the outside. Sana couldn’t move. It could catch fire any moment, right? Batteries, ready to explode into a thousand tiny shards. It would kill the driver. Sana couldn’t move. Other vehicles squealed to a stop, and they began to gather. The eyes began to gather.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no! I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I didn’t-” Her metal body stumbled forwards, her legs creaking with exertion and lingering dashes of frost. The first figure clambered out into the darkness, its shadow stretched and warped by the piercing white of the headlights encircling her. More joined, rushing to the upturned truck, or hovering cautiously around her. They were angry at her, Sana could feel it, knew it, and their glares bored through her. She could hear them already, a thousand voices whispering tiny, hateful things. Too many eyes, too many eyes.

She took a nervous step back and the mob flinched. So afraid. They thought she would hurt them, knew she would. And they stared. Waiting, watching, expectant. Ready to have all suspicions confirmed. Ready for her to prove herself as Other. Ready to grasp her next failure, and drill it into her skull. Didn’t they see they had her surrounded? Couldn’t they see how weak she was, how harmless? What more could they need to do? What more did she need done to her?

“Stop looking at me,” she mumbled, swaying. “I know I’m not supposed to be here, I know this isn’t me, this isn’t right, just- stop looking at me. Please stop. I can’t fix it if you don’t stop,” Sana locked her hands over her head, bladed ankles twisting at jagged angles. Red seeped from the crash. The cracked trailer was a broken spine. The tires, still spinning, were amputated arms with fingers still twitching. The windscreen shards littering the floor were teeth and vertebrae, still attached to chunks of gum and nerve. She tried to cover her ears, but the metal heard every word. Outsider. Killer. Foreigner.

Run.

The lights burnt like a hundred lasers trained on her. The murmurs gathered and coiled in her stomach. The stench of charred rubber against asphalt stung every breath. The eyes. One of the figures stepped forward. “Stay away from me!” She begged, and the air itself crystalised in an instant. The same obsidian glass flooded down from her raised arms, forming no blade to be held, but instead a mist of minute razors. Purple particles that shimmered and vibrated with purpose, a swarm of glinting stars that writhed like a living, breathing entity. And upon her cry, her demand for peace and safety and shelter from those blank faces, the cloud exploded outwards in all directions.

The sound of an entire hailstorm landing at once rattled the space, followed by screams. Sana saw the blood first. A man with wide, terror-filled eyes, slumped back against a bonnet, a nail the size of a tent-pole stuck in his shoulder. Another, their left arm riddled with shards of shattered metal. A third, she only heard wail, and she couldn’t count any further. There were no demons here, only people who could bleed. People for her to hurt. People with faces and lives and- and-
Run.

All fatigue vanished as Sana broke into a thunderous sprint once again. She needed to get away. A line of pine trees in the distance was her only hope, and she fled desperately to the solitude they promised. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I swear, I’m sorry. She choked on a sob, gasping through ragged breaths on the verge of hyperventilation. The night blurred into the foliage and snow as she rushed and tripped and scrambled through the forest, engulfed in pitch blackness pierced only by the dull silver of the moons.

Eventually, after minutes or hours or days, Sana found herself sat on the ground, unable to stand any longer. Maybe she’d slipped. She couldn’t hear a single sound. She couldn’t see beyond the shadowed pillars of trees. She couldn’t feel her legs.

Without thought, she opened the canopy of the Frame, uncovered for the first time since leaving the barn. The barn. Colder air rushed in, but it made little difference. Her clothes – thick, Dulkatian fabrics though they were – had been torn across, and soaked from the waist down. White smoke blew from her lips in plumes, similarly numb. Her metal hand glittered in the scant starlight, panelled and painted bright pink, with a hundred scars showing the bare metal below, still moving, but twisted, more like a branch in the wind than a limb. A frigid gale blew through, and her right shoulder shuddered. Her prosthetic always hurt when the world was cold.

So many people. Bile tried to crawl up her throat.

“I didn’t- I didn’t mean to.” She whispered through her quivering lips. “I just wanted them to s-stop looking at me. I wanted them to stop and they wouldn’t stop. It’s happening all over again. Everyone was watching me, everyone-“

She threaded her fingers through her hair, no more room to care about the tangled strands amongst her metal joints. Her buzzed right side felt fuzzy, like soft, untouched snow. She swiped her hands through again and again, her breathing rapid and out of step, grasping at her throat like a rope. Her head thrummed and groaned. Her teeth rattled like bells in her mouth. Her neck burned with needles tearing deep. Needles. Three needles. Sana knew of every danger in the book. Every bleeding way to die from removing needles. She had to pull them out.

But when she reached back, her arm was limp. The blood barely flowed, and was filled with ice. She was becoming a statue, and she swiped at the needles behind her, but the angle was too far gone to pull them away, and a whimper fizzled out.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry, ma. I’m sorry…”

A distant twig snapped. So far, and so small, it wouldn’t have existed on any other night. However, her horror and heightened hearing had coalesced into a paranoia that would crumble with a whisper. Through the darkness, she flickered her eyes back and forth, trying to discern something, anything. All her vision caught were swirls of blue and green her mind conjured from the abyss.

“Sana!” Came a voice. It had no echo in the snow, but plenty in her memory. A mote of recognition. “Sana, are you here?” That accent, or another. Thick and northern but so familiar. Warm like fresh coffee, and swirling blonde braids.

“Mama,” Sana sighed out, as a torch beam swung along the trees. “Mama!”

“Sana? Where are you?” Another voice, so dear, twisted and ran through the trees towards her.

“Here! Dad!” she reached out of the canopy, her prosthetic catching the light. “I’m here! I’m sorry I ran, please- please just come get me, please! I don’t wanna do this alone, I don’t.”

Snow crunched under boot steps. Heavy steps, growing louder. Sana was still shaken to her core, and her arms still trembled with every motion, but she began to heave herself out of the metal box regardless. The straps around her legs were far too loose to restrain her, and she slumped out from the beast, onto the bitter ground.

“Mama!” She cried out again. The touch of ice to her knees and shins and feet was agonising. It didn’t matter anymore. Ma was here, and soon she’d be safe, warm – home.

“Sana!” Repeated the voice again, and only then did she notice the change, or rather the lack of it. The sound rang around her ears several times, more hollow with each reverberation. But it sounded just as warm as before? The smell of coffee burned at her nostrils, or maybe that was blood. She’d heard her mother say her name countless times, in a spectrum of emotion. Then it struck her. It sounded exactly the same as the last, and the one before that too. The volume was different, but the tone was the same. She’d heard it seconds earlier.

“Sana!” Same voice. Same exact voice. Sana cringed, and she could hear the footsteps properly now. Long, thumping, and accompanied by a concert of whining, grinding notes. The sound byte repeated like a songbird’s call. Sana crouched against her Frames chest, trying to sink into the mud, and made no more calls for help. The torch had gone out.

Instead, three blue lights appeared, large cones streaming between the trees. If they were above, she’d think they were stars. They carefully slalomed between the branches, making no more sound, but Sana saw them. They were here, and she couldn’t move.

“Sa-sa-sa-na!” The notes repeated and broke off with a metal clunk, the machine’s mimicry abandoned. The illusion was no longer necessary, as a swirling form blocked out the stars, a tree that moved and walked and jittered on its own, with three eyes, pale at a distance, ablaze when near.

“I’m- I’m sorry.” She shivered, clutching herself, trying to shrink further into the floor. The Frame stood before her, enormous, taller than any mountain. White, stark and cold like snow. Staring. The wind stopped for it, the trees no longer swaying. Something buzzed inside its canopy. Concrete poured over her feet, and tar filled her mouth, but she couldn’t spit it out. She became a deer again, praying to not be seen.

“Please, I didn’t mean to. I was scared. Please.” When there was no response, no voice, she carefully raised her metal arm up to the giant. “I just want to go home.”

The arrogance of daring to plead was not taken lightly. The machine moved again, lower arms handling some long, cruel weapon below, while an upper arm shot out to punish her. A three-fingered hand engulfed her outstretched prosthetic, dwarfing it, and pulled.

“Wait- wait!” And the machine stepped closer, grasping her arm, and yanking her limb like it was trapped between two gears. “It has a latch, it has-!” Sana cried, as her shoulder bent to a grotesque angle. With straps tied tightly above and below her arm, it was tearing the rest off with her. The hand crushed down, pulling harder, before her entire body was lifted from the ground. She tried to reach for the latch, but the Frame grabbed the arm’s pauldron, crumpled it, and then with a final tug, tore it away.

Sana fell back to the dirt, tears across her shoulder that bled into the mud, limp and motionless. Her face grew cold and her vision fogged, as another machine, so blurred its lights were dizzying, gestured down at her to its companion. With a flick, the Frame cast her severed arm far into the darkness, and loomed again. It’s eyes, three eyes, burned with death. She didn’t know how she could intuit such a sentiment through blank metal, but through her glass eyes, still connected by the long plug trailing from her machine, she saw the demon’s intentions pulsate. The end times. Her body knew it before her brain could reconcile it.

Then, another light emerged, a speck that caught her remaining hand. A firefly, a small flicker of warmth somehow kindling in the wet and the cold and the dark. It expanded to a strip, and then a moving beam of gentle torchlight, gliding over the rocks until it captured the scene. Her tiny, extinguished body that stared into oblivion, below a titan reaching down to grant the final mercy. But upon noticing the new arrival, recognising it, the Frame paused. Not fear – Pilots do not fear, Sana had read once, and clung onto that promise for dear life – but rather, a curiosity, a caution. Its four arms stayed trained on her, poised to squash her like a bug, but its eyes moved to the light.

“Fireteam White,” she couldn’t see its source, but the voice was clear, crisp, no louder than normal speech, yet cut through all other sound. “Stand down, if you would.”

The machine before her tensed, its bones contorting as if to refuse. Its hands lay either side of her, ready to snap closed like a large jaw, and catch her if she ran. Or crush, if given the chance. Sana didn’t dare move beyond her shivers, caught under its crushing glare.

“This is not your jurisdiction.” The Frame rumbled. Layered between skirts of modulation and frustrated growls, the voice was human, soft even. It would be comforting, had it not come from the death machine looming over her. “You are interfering with-“

“This is RFI jurisdiction, as it’s always been,” the light’s voice was quiet, monotone. They sounded how Sana imagined a snow drift would sound – stifled, muted. Choking. “And I am your superior officer. Even you are beholden to the chain of command. So, I won’t ask again. Stand down, Sentinel.”

The machine towered over her again, if only in intimidation. Even the pines enveloped by the torchlight of the newcomer seemed to bend at its will. There might’ve been some silent warfare going on between the voice and the chittering metal mass, but Sana had stopped listening. She clutched her stump, and folded into a ball. Maybe the pilot got some sick pleasure out of watching her crumble.

Yet, it pulled back. Only a single step, but it was enough. Even Sana, so far removed from the mysticism of the interaction, realised the Frame had lost. The beam of light continued to obscure whoever had come to aid her, and fear threatened to cling to this presence too. Anything that moved could not be trusted. But for the first time in hours, Sana, for the briefest moment, stopped shivering. Stopped moving entirely. Her brain, whose cells opened fire with the slightest tap, drifted into the depths, inert. And for that gift, she was willing to cast away all doubt.

“Oksana Kelenov,” came the voice. She hadn’t even heard their footsteps as they approached, and couldn’t find their face in the dark. “This next part will hurt, I apologise for that, but it is necessary.”

All that she could muster was a small hiss through her numb teeth, like a gas canister that had sprung a leak. Boots clattered across the ground. In came suits of black and blue, descending on her like wolves. Sana, already against the dirt, was pushed deeper. She tried to cry out, scream, yell. Anything to get them off her, no matter if it tore her lungs. But she knew they wouldn’t listen. No one would listen. Her Frame’s arms flailed weakly, still connected, and she could feel those on top of her flinch. But in the dirt, just lifting one of the armatures required a focus, a will, that she could not attain. The limbs, once light and nimble, revealed the weight of the steel comprising them. They weren’t going to protect her.

The torch’s voice had said “RFI”. Raelithan Frame Infantry. If she was still inside her Frame, still beneath its ribcage, they would finally see she was one of them. They would see her for what she was, that she belonged in their arms, not in their garden, buried amongst the worms. She had grown lost in the snowy trees, and- and if she could just show them that she didn’t mean harm, that she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, they would listen. They had to listen.

A hand descended and pulled the plug, like they were grabbing her braid and snapping her head back. Skin tore and she smelled blood, before she felt the metal climb and recede, carefully knitting over its exit. Ma was right. A figure, pitch black, crouched beside her, a long silhouette – a coat? – drifting over the edges of the mud. The lights concealed any features they might’ve had. They held the needles – her needles – tightly in their grip, like a mace.

“We will speak again shortly, Oksana. I am sorry we didn’t find you sooner.”

Sana reached out towards her Frame, slumped heavily against the bark of an evergreen. Her fingers, freezing, quivering, and bleeding, hoped to grasp that freedom again, to touch the sky just one last time. It was a pitiful gesture, a hopeless, final attempt to find her way home, wherever that was. A boot stamped down on the hand.

“Creation Myth” By Izzy S.

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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Daughter of Crows

“A wisened man builds his house where he can work and eat each day, but a Dulkatian man finds his home where he can fall and be fed anyway.”

An Old Iceman’s Adage

“Nearly eighteen years on from the end of the Free States War, on a bright, sunny morning in El-Tabat, leaders from both nations have come together to-“

The radio’s natter spilled over the sounds of winding motors, twisting screws, and a vast array of small spanners being picked, used and placed again in an orchestra of metallic clicks. Oksana couldn’t hear the device’s monotony, too transfixed by her right arm, which lay detached and slumped over her desk, opened at the elbow to reveal its mechanical viscera. The sudden activity from the radio was meant to be an alarm, but she would always wake far before it, or finally sleep just after. Some days, she would lie and watch the minutes crawl away, with its slow red flashes illuminating her shrouded room before its noise allowed her to escape her bed sheets. Other days, she jittered with an energy that refused to settle, that could only be channelled into the contraption she now fussed over.

“-Drafting has begun, after years of temporary legislation, on a new, permanent peace agreement-” the flat voice continued. Any world outside that room existed far away, too large in size and small in scope to intrude on hers. Through a crack in her blinds, the piercing white of sunlit-snow tried its best to fight through into the dark room, with only a small, yellow lamp lighting the desk. She hunched further over her work, but a knock at the door broke the spell. 

“Sana, are you awake?” the voice made her grimace, before it sighed, “I can hear the news, I know you are.”

Damn you, blasted machine. “Yep! Bright and chipper.”

“Wonderful, see you downstairs. At your own leisure, clearly,” her mother spoke in such a way that Sana knew it was anything but. 

“What did you need from me, Ma?” She shouted back, though no answer came. Sana leaned back in the chair and sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. How long could she get away with ignoring that? With a few taps of her foot, she calculated her odds, before stretching her one-and-a-half arms as far back as the brittle seat would let her. Her room had the same furniture from the age of twelve, and though Sana was of no heroic stature, she still found herself crammed into the corner, feet against the skirting boards. The place was desperate for a makeover, and perhaps a new house to go with it.

“-this agreement – this ‘Dune Peace’ – will give our nations a chance to-“

Sana slapped the noise off, and sighed again. Her concentration had been breached, and now the Dulkatian winter air had wound around her, tightening its frigid grip. Her reasons to stay and sulk were fleeing by the second.

“Oksana?” Her mother called again from downstairs, half question and half demand.

“Yeah, I’m coming, I’m coming.” Sana grabbed a discarded shirt strewn on the end of her bed and shivered it over her shoulders. Braving the mirror, she swiped her dark locks out of her face. They had chosen, like many other days, to splay out during the night, and she had awoken to a right mop on her head. Flipping it all back over to the left side, it came down to tease her shoulder, and she patted the shave on the right side of her head. Might be due another buzz.

Just before the door, she glanced again to her workbench, floating with dust kicked up by the curtains. She tight-roped over, careful to avoid the careless piles of clothes and clutter she’d allowed to accumulate. All pieces were in order, her prosthetic and its many iterations sat dormant, waiting, calling her to return. She’d left her most recent project with a screw half turned, and that simply wouldn’t do. Grabbing a screwdriver, she-

“Oksana, darling? Did you get lost on the way down?” A third time meant she was pushing it, and she nearly dropped the tool in her jolt. She instead returned the screwdriver to its storage (any spare surface on the desk) and passed through the door heading down the gnarled stairs of their rustic homestead, yawning as she went.

“Sols, I’m here, I’m here,” Sana reassured her audience with a tired smile and a half-hearted wave. Two of her parents sat at the dinner-slash-hobby-slash-whatever table inside the kitchen, both with books in hand and the smell of freshly brewed beverages filling the air. Fancy chai wafting up and away from his mug, Da scratched at his salt-and-pepper beard thoughtfully, something he never did if he was actually reading. Opposite, Ma had the stench of black coffee before her, her face as blank as the tint of her braided hair. The third space at the head of the table was unfilled, with only an empty coaster marking it as reserved, solely for her father. In his absence, Sana considered taking it for a second, to see if it’d ruffle some feathers, but her curiosity of her parent’s urgency outweighed her impulse to be cheeky, for once.

“Good morning, Oxy,” her Da didn’t look up from what he was reading, uncharacteristically monotone. The book wasn’t to his usual tastes either. Principles in Advanced Electronics should have put him to sleep already.

“…Good morning, Da.” She stifled another yawn and glanced her parents up and down with a mix of confusion and lethargy. She pulled back her own seat, and wriggled into its arms until she’d found a comfortable nook. Her mug – an old, scratched thing with the words Mechspo 22, Vaske Expo Centre, 144AF emblazoned on it – steamed with the rising smell of cocoa.

“Okay, what’s going on with you too?” Sana bulldozed through the quiet social facade whilst examining her mug, not drinking. “Why are you so… chipper?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing at all.” Her Ma spoke up.

“Whyever would you think that?” Added Da. Sana brushed the twine from over her eyes, so she could look at both of them with greater suspicion. Ma was cold, steadfast to her glare, but her Da’s walls were already crumbling to a smile.

“I don’t buy it,” naturally, “And you know I hate being out of the loop.”

“Oh, we know all too well. A letter came for you, is all,” Ma remarked far too innocently. Sana cocked her head, and her mother’s smirk rose alongside a white envelope she had stowed out of sight below the table, and handed it over to her daughter. Sana still didn’t comprehend the significance for a moment, yet both her parents were abuzz at the crescendo of whatever scheme this was.

“Wait, is this…?” Sana’s excitement began to match her parents, “Is this the letter? The capital-L Letter? It’s arrived already?”

“We don’t exactly get much mail addressed just for you, now do we?” Da revealed the full force of his roguish grin.

“Especially not ones with a return address to Mount Killian’s doorstep.” Her mother added, taking a sip from her own mug.

“No fu-,” she stopped herself with a deliberate stare from Ma, “freaking way, no freaking way! They replied! Is this real?”

“Maybe celebrate after opening it,” her Da joked, soaking in the unabashed joy radiating from his daughter.

“Can I open it? Now? Shouldn’t Pa be here? Where is Pa, actually?”

The two glanced at each other over their drinks. They’d known each other long enough that a single glance could contain three arguments and two reconciliations, and Sana had yet to learn how to fully translate their expression-tennis. This time, however, she sensed a mild tension. Concern?

“Your Pa won’t be back from his trip ’til tonight, and I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to wait.” Her Ma took the responsibility of bearing the news. Sana wasn’t sure if it was a willing choice, or a coin flip she’d lost. 

Without a second more for consideration, Sana tore open the envelope. Or rather, attempted to do so. As someone who rarely received mail for herself and herself only, she hadn’t yet learnt the art of one-handed letter opening. “Ack- dammit-“

“Would you like me to get it for you, darling?” Ma offered.

“No. I can open a damn envelope.” She fiddled with it for about three more seconds – a record level of patience – before throwing her arm up in defeat. “Urgh! I’ll be back in a minute!” Her parents called out for her, but she knew what she needed.

An impatient rush upstairs took her back to her room, skidding on the rug-laden wood floor as she entered again. She plopped onto the small seat in front of her cluttered workbench, exchanging the folds of the letter for her trusty screwdriver once more as she raced to get her bulky prosthetic on, still halfway through this morning’s maintenance. It was in good enough shape, she deemed, her engineering standards lowered by her excitement.

The stump of her right arm nestled snugly into a cradle built inside the larger mechanism of the piece, and she slipped a harness across her opposite shoulder. A weight needed counterweight. Sana tightened the straps, attaching several bitterly cold pads to various muscles along her bicep, back, and shoulder, before folding down the obscenely pink-painted metal pauldron over the entire upper mechanism.

Flexing the muscles connected to each pad caused the tendon wires, inside each of the finger cavities, to jostle and clasp. But the dang ring finger was getting stuck again. None of her joints, not blood nor steel, wanted to play nice today. I bet I’ll have to take the whole elbow apart to figure what’s causing that-

“Knock knock,” her Da poked through the ajar door, his raised hand leaning on the frame above, as he flicked his eyes across the merchandise lining any scant wallspace. Posters of pilots and plugsuits, paper mache from years past, models and maps, all dedicated and decorated to feed the fancy of one thing: Frames.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Sana stuck her tongue out in concentration as she made the careful manoeuvre of unsticking the finger’s joint, quick and dirty. It had to be presentable, parade ready for the occasion.

“Want a hand?”

“I’ve got one,” Sana jabbed with a smile, raising her left hand as she assessed the damage of her quick fix.

“Well, really, you’ve got six,” he joked in return, “even if four are on the workbench, in various pieces.”

“I swear,” Sana started, “I’m so close with this one here. It’s heavy and swings like a truck, just like I want it too – just like I’ve been training up for. It’s nearly perfect this time, just a few kinks here and there to iron out.”

“Have you ever even picked up an iron?” He laughed as she leant over the structure, feeling a bolt that needed slight tightening.

“Once, I think. When I was making a shirt. You helped me with that one, remember?”

“Ah, another of the projects. ‘Mean Pink Muscle Machine’, was it?”

“That’s the one,” she replied, half paying attention. “Only wore it once though. No one…no one else got the joke.”

“Ah.”

There was a pause in the air. Pauses never happened whilst Da was around. It wasn’t that he hated silence, but rather lulls in conversation. If the house was quiet, either someone else was talking in more hushed tones, or Da wasn’t home at all. Chatty didn’t even begin to cover it.

Sana sighed. “What?”

“What?” Her Da replied with a chuckle.

“Is something wrong?” She turned the screwdriver again. “Sorry I ran off. I want to open that damn – sorry – letter myself, that’s all.”

“No, no, you’re good Oxy. It’s yours to open, yours to read, yours to frame it, if you want,” he said, a wistful smile on his cheekbones. “I just realised you haven’t worn that shirt in a while.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a little small for me now, isn’t it?”

“Heh, a little. Sometimes I forget you’re all grown up, nearly. Hey, maybe it’ll fit me instead?”

Sana chuckled as she tightened the bolt the last of the way over. “It was made for a thirteen year old. I’ve grown three millimetres in those four years, and you’re still a few heads taller than me. And broader.”

Da scoffed. “I’m rather lithe and dainty, I’ll have you know! A figure made for la ballet.”

“Psht, sure you are, old man. Lithe and dainty people don’t groan like a whale when they go to tie their shoe laces.”

“Hey, I’m still the youngest man in the house.”

“But nowhere near the youngest person,” she smirked, discarding the tool back to its chaos, “Besides, you don’t even have a pink arm.”

“Okay, you may have me there,” her dad joked, “now are you gonna open this letter or what? Mam’s dying to know what’s inside. I, of course, am completely indifferent.”

Sana hummed, doing one last tighten on the straps before she lifted the heavy prosthetic off the bench. She wobbled under the shift in her weight, her Da reaching out to grab her like a toddler, but she steadied and righted herself before he could help, the mechanical elbow and wrist twisting uncannily like flesh and bone.

“Yeah,” she shuffled the letter off the desk with her newly attached hand, and patted it into the other in emphasis. “Let’s crack this baby open.”

They descended again, Sana’s heartbeat picking up in time with each thump against the wooden steps. She sat at the table once more, both present parents stood behind her, ready to read as she did. The plain envelope sat on the table before her, as steam continued to rise from her mug. The clock ticked on the wall.

“I kinda-“

“Don’t say you don’t wanna open it.” Da cut her off.

“No no, I do.” She sat staring at it for several seconds. “It’s just that, this is it. One letter, that’s more important than probably any other I’ll ever receive. A binary answer holds the fate of the rest of my life in balance.” She played with one of the envelope’s edges, crumpled in its long transit north.

“Who taught you to wax so much poetic?” Her Mam laughed.

“Da did” overlapped an “I did”, and both father and daughter smirked. Sana’s expression darkened after a moment, as she held both her hands in her lap, fiddling with the parts on her prosthetic. She wasn’t this nervous about, well, anything. Not anymore.

Whenever she had imagined getting the letter, it had always been at that table. Perhaps it was the neat loop of it all; this table being the same one over which her parents had regaled many a piloting tale, over which Sana had first heard the word ‘Frame’. Around this table had the Kelenov family truly been born, raised with Sana’s passion – her only real passion – as its sibling. It had heard an entire childhood of nagging questions and doting answers. Like while watching Ma cook lunch after morning cartoons:

“Mama, Mama. Why’s that man on the TV all tall and big and- and- and metal?”

She had laughed approvingly, “Because he’s in a big metal suit, sunflower.”

“Woah. Why’s that? Why’s he got that Mama?”

“To protect his friends from mean metal men.”

Sana was enthralled. “So- so, if I had a metal suit, a-“

“A Frame, darling.”

“Yeah! So if I had one, I could be that tall too? I could stomp around or pick up a tree or fight mean metal men?”

Ma had smiled. Proudly, maybe? It was a long time ago. “Yes, darling, I think you could.”

Or while Ma had carefully glued her wooden plane back together one afternoon:

“Mama, Mama. Why’d you never fly around in your Frame? You always talk about running and jumping and bouncing and stuff, but the sky’s upwards! Upwards, Mama! You have to fly to get there!”

“Because Frames don’t fly, darling.” She painted the glue in strokes. “Well, most of them don’t, anyways.”

“Then why d’you and Dada always call it a ‘flight’?”

“Because, I suppose, that’s what it’s like. Like you have wind in your sails. It’s more a feeling than anything.”

“Wouldn’t that make it-” Sana chewed on her only thumb, “boating?”

Ma smirked. “You ride on a saddle, all so a Frame can run, and we call it a Flight. Funny, isn’t it?” And Sana nodded.

Or when Da helped her paint her first arm pink, with spray cans and masking tape littered about: 

“Da, why does Papa never tell any of his stories? You and Mama always tell me stories.”

“Your Papa tells you plenty of stories, Oxy. He told you that one about the red heron just the other night, didn’t he?”

“No, not those boring old man ones, the cool ones! The Frame ones! Why does he never talk about them? And why does he go all grumpy when you or Mama do? He goes like this.” She had scrunched her face into an exaggerated pout, and crossed her arms in a huff. Sana had been at the time, and probably still was, half her father’s stature.

Da had laughed, “Well, your father didn’t like the jobs we were given all that much. He thought… he thought we could do better.”

“Were you not protecting your friends hard enough?”

Da blinked. “In a way, I guess? He kept me and Ma safe, though. It’s just, Pa really doesn’t like the people who told us to do those jobs, either.”

Or when Pa had found her under the table after her tenth day of school:

“Papa, why doesn’t anyone else look like me?”

He had taken a long time to answer. He had clambered down between the chairs with her, comically hunched over to join her in the makeshift fort. He had gestured gently to her skin, to confirm her question, and she had nodded. “Because you were born in a place where it’s very sunny, and very sandy, nothing like Dulkat. In a lot of ways, Sana, you are a child of the sun. And it’s okay to be different, you should be proud even – people like the sun.”

“People don’t stare at the sun though, so why do the other kids stare?” Her voice cracked. “If people like the sun, why don’t they like me?”

He didn’t have an answer, and instead he had pulled her tight into his arms. 

So many questions had preceded the question mark Sana now held in her hands – one given, one made – stored inside a single envelope. Another question answered at this table, an answer she couldn’t delay any longer.

“Well… no time like the present.” She reached down and grasped the letter, now thoroughly creased, with her prosthetic, and ran her finger under the adhesive. Such a mundane motion to reveal the truth, such a flimsy material to contain a future. Reaching in, she pulled out a single sheet, and with a strong exhale, unfolded it.

It took about three attempts to start reading. Her brain refused to sit still on a single line for long enough to comprehend it – she scanned the name, “Miss Oksana Kelenov”, over and over until her eyes got bored of waiting, and she read down further.

And read. And read some more. She got to the bottom and flipped the page, unconcerned whether her parents had kept up. The back was empty.

“That can’t be right. Where’s- where’s the rest?”

“Oh, Sana darling,” Mam started.

“We’re so sorry,” her Da finished, reaching down and wrapping his arms around her shoulders and giving an awkward hug. It took a moment for everything to click into place. The cogs whirred and ground in her head, a mess of strings entangled in the teeth, and only with a final re-read did it truly set in.

To Miss Oksana Kelenov, the letter read, thank you for your application. We regret to inform you that the Raelithan Frame Infantry Pilots Corps will not be in a position to accept your application at this time…

The letter continued however briefly, and by the third read, Sana had gotten everything she’d needed from it. She placed the sheet back onto the tabletop, before sinking far back into her chair, a held breath fleeing her lungs. Another set of arms wrapped around her, encasing her core in a bubble of warmth as two parents reached down, offering comfort and support she was numb to.

“I don’t believe it. I just-,” she tried to reason, finding no purchase. “I can’t. This can’t be right, where’s the rest of the letter? It- it felt so heavy in the envelope.”

“It’s gonna be okay, Oxy.” Her Da denied.

“We always knew the infantry was a tough spot to get. Don’t be too hard on yourself about it.” Her Mam argued more bluntly. Sana sensed the silent discussion behind her, the competing philosophies on how best to soothe the torched remains of a child’s dream.

“Plus, there are plenty of other avenues with the RFI, you know? They always need more mechanics. And logistics staff. And lab assistants!”

“We could reach out to some of our old tech guys, they’d give you a sparkling letter of recommendation. Grades be damned.”

“Ma, as always, is very right. You will be fine, Oxy-“

Sana pushed her chair out, the scrape of the leg echoing above the space, as she untangled herself from the pile of hugs and concern.

“Oksana,” Ma called out after her, with an evident lack of hope, but a surplus of pity.

Sana marched through the door out into the porch, grabbing her boots and wrenching them onto her feet. The limited dexterity of her prosthetic made her fumble with the laces. She wanted to scream at them.

Snow rolled off the awning above the door as she slammed it behind her, and the frigid air bit into her flesh. A freshly laid white expanse covered all in sight, including a tall barn that sat on the highest point of the homestead. Once red but now peeling brown, it promised an alluring pocket of isolation, a place to breathe and curse and scream at her laces as much as she pleased.

Sana’s parents had always told her to channel her anger. In her younger years, she’d thrown all her pent up rage into her prosthetic, often to catastrophic results, including one instance where she hurled a misbehaving prototype from her bedroom window. But, in more recent years, she’d gained a new project to endure every twisted stomach and tightened throat that seized her, as many as there’d been.

She marched up to the sickly, rot-darkened door of the barn, grabbing it with the prosthetic and yanking it open. On any other day, she’d close it behind her to keep the draft out.

The barn looked no better on the inside. Cob and spider’s webs riddled the space, piles of abandoned lumber and scraps of metal were strewn all about, dust bunnies making burrows, and, close to the centre of the barn, illuminated by light peeking through pockmarks in the walls and a wide breach in the ceiling, lay a scattering of tools and half finished dreams.

The barn had come with the house when her family had moved in, and as far as Sana was concerned, it had been there since the dawn of time. Whilst she’d often rummaged through it during childhood summers, her family never gave it purpose – that was until a year ago, when Sana found one for it.

In the centre of the room, dangling from the chains of a large car crane, hung a humanoid hulk of wire, scrap and crystallised labour. It had two legs, three asymmetric arms protruding from its shoulders and torso, a bucket-like head, and a notable mass of metal plating haphazardly bent and attached to the outside of it. A health and safety instructor’s worst nightmare couldn’t compete with the state of it. From the back of its spine extended a large cylinder, the heart of the beast, its Core. Half-ejected as it was, the whole machine remained inert.

A sleek, ancient skeleton, encased in a rugged, young shell. It was a Frame. Her Frame.

Technically, her Ma’s. She had found it buried deep in the melting permafrost whilst on a remote hike several years prior. She’d visit the same spot at least a few times a year, alone, and over time the shape of a whole Frame became visible. And, one day, she’d “grabbed it”, and “snuck it” back to the house.

At least, that’s the story Sana had been told upon accidentally discovering the barn’s new occupant. She had no reason to disbelieve her Ma’s story, especially when the opportunities the steel giant presented became clear.

A year ago, the machine had been in a right state. There were some things they couldn’t fix – you couldn’t buy a replacement for a missing Frame’s arm in a market catalogue, or at least not ’for cheap’, as Ma put it. Sana had decided not to dig more into that little horror show of a statement at the time, so it remained without a right limb, a quality she happily bonded over. But over the months – with only a bit of help from her mother – Oksana had put the outer shell of the machine back together, and spent weeks on repairing the more complex elements of the great beast. She always found time for her favourite pet project, it was easy to once she left school. 

When the optics needed rewiring, she spent a few quiet, autumn afternoons soldering the new board by hand. When the leg armatures became stiff, she tuned the music on her portable radio, and meticulously cleaned and oiled every inch of the mechanism. When she was angry, she’d hammer a new makeshift plate for the armoured panelling. The armour was finished quickly.

Sana stood in wordless contemplation, and pictured taking a wrench to all her hard work. She breathed out, and then in, calming just a little, before picking up her wrench of choice from the haphazard pile. With the strained whine of motors in her right arm, she launched it at a different pile of her failed experiments in the corner, roaring with a thousand unspoken curses as she flung the tool. She covered her face with her hands and crouched down into herself. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

The catharsis wasn’t enough. Any usual strength she felt was a pathetic, childish flail, a failure. Curled up in a ball with her throat coiled up in a spring, she could barely look at the Frame that always had her so transfixed. A failure, deemed too unworthy to achieve her dreams – to even try. Oksana Kelenov could not be a Frame pilot, so the paper had judged.

She needed to hit something harder.

Anger turned to determination, and Sana stomped up to the Frame, pointing a finger up at it, mouth agape, ready to scream the curses she’d been smothering, before she managed to claw back the reins from her rage. Unfortunately, the liquid she’d poured on the embers was kerosene. An idea began to form, and in a rapid tumble through the stages of comprehension, she had to at least look. She had to know it was… possible.

She climbed the rungs of the adjacent stepladder with her heavy snow boots, and examined the Frame’s innards for a moment, before digging her hand right into the open cockpit, feeling around for one very specific wire. As it happens, Frames use a lot of varying wires of all shapes and sizes, especially inside their superstructure, but after a moment, her hands gently grazed the wide, almost grainy exterior of the most important wire of them all, and she yanked it into view. Sana knew it was in there, but seeing is believing, and a Hail Mary needs faith.

At the wire’s head were three, long, deliberate needles, sharp enough to wince at and alien enough to frown at – no Raelithan factory nor Signan laboratory could create a device so delicately perfect, so alluringly potent. This plug, no larger than a walkie-talkie that could only hurl crude waves of crackling sound, was the vehicle for an entire mind to reach a new body, for a world to reach new eyes.

Sana paused. Distraught though she was, and impulse-ridden even more so, her emotions did not own her, surely. She remained in control, or so she often chanted to herself through clenched jaws and tearfilled frustration. Do we want to do this? 

Ma had warned her time and again, “Stay away from the needles, Oksana,” and she only explained after Sana had all but begged. “They’re sharp, and if they don’t touch your spine, they won’t stitch you up on their way out.”

“How’d they know that?” Sana had asked, mental notebook open, “that they’re in your neck and not, say, your arm?”

Her mother met her eyes, piercing blue. “The blood tastes different.”

The memory had hardly passed before the needles shone to her. Called, one might say. Someone qualified might label her crazy if they could see inside her mind at that moment. “I have to try,” she whispered those dangerous words

Sana swiped her hair away from the back of her neck, and lifted the cable behind her. The cool touch of metal brushing against the skin made her tense, and she cringed in anticipation, before starting to count down the inevitable marriage between plug and socket. 

“Brightest idea of the century in three… two… one-“

A sharp pain shot through the back of her neck, followed by a rushing feeling as she shoved the needles down. Then, Sana didn’t feel much of anything at all. No sight, no sound, no feeling beyond the distant pain extending from her neck.

Ah. That might be a problem, and her internal monologue blared in a piercing symphony. Any train of thought rocketed away, so loud it scorched her mind with burning heat just to conceive it’s path, let alone see where it was launching towards. She reached to cover her ears with her arms, but despite feeling the signal travel up and down her nervous system like a ping-pong ball, no movement came. Her body stayed in shock, refusing to answer her desperate knocking.

Wait, no. There wasn’t nothing. Rather, the everything that pervaded her life had been forced down to the lowest volume. She felt an odd comfort in the quiet, this muffled world bringing a calmness with it.

Then, for the first time, she heard its whispers. Words flickered out the endless void and engulfed her in a deafening scrum. The voices didn’t bring anything prophetic to say, but they continued to speak and rhyme regardless, forming sentences without meaning, and poetry without thought. They sounded like words in a dream. Had she finally gone insane?

“Whispered one, how do you do?” Said one.

“Predilections of prior things, enumerated,” another tipped its metaphorical hat. “The court’s thousand will be slain, or were.”

“Choke on your soul,” a third cried like a radio announcer, and then laughed. Laughed and laughed and laughed.

A muffled sound reached her, a sound that, even in the deprivation of everything else, came from ‘outside’. Sana fumbled around, as if she’d waded into a pool, doggy-paddling forwards as her hand reached back to press… something. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what it was, she just knew she had to press it, a burning drive forcing her fingers towards it. Some switch needed to be flicked, some incomplete step in her journey. Her recollection of what it was didn’t return, even as her waterlogged hand grazed its rim, and pushed in the Core.

Light. Bright light. Sound, the wind, the trees far out, the creaking wood. The fabric of her clothes. Weight on her shoulder, swinging, ticking, waiting for commands like an expectant sheep dog. Whirring, chittering motors, coming to life. The smell of pine and rot. Rust, from the walls. They returned to her like an unexpected punch to the jaw. But then, more returned. More feelings. New sensation.

Sana breathed. Was this what breathing was always like? Everything sounded louder- no, not louder, clearer. Everything was so crisp and so real that she felt dizzy, so dizzy she fell sideways off of the stepladder. However, she didn’t hit the ground like she braced for. Something had caught her body, and simultaneously something had landed into her hand.

Sana blinked, and looked up, seeing her saviour. The Frame’s second, larger pair of shoulders had shifted, and she could feel both her body being carried, and her arms carrying herself. Still reeling, she looked up the length of the metal hand that had caught her, and felt a tangle of cables and wires snaking from behind her neck. She could’ve sworn it’s very bones, underneath all the scrap carapace, was moving, writhing, but by the time her cochleae had adjusted to her new sense of balance, all was well again between herself and the death machine.

She sat up properly, and her metal hands let her back down to the floor. She’d gained a second body, it felt like, just as delicate and dexterous as the first. The Frame loomed over her, and like a sixth sense, she knew just how to move her new set of arms, each joint rolling with animalistic grace. She reached out with the right upper hand, and watched as the machine’s three long, metal fingers flexed as she knew they would, feeling as natural as when she moved her left hand.

Then she noticed it. In her peripheral vision- no, as an extension of her vision, up and out of the barn through the hole in the roof, she could see the cold blue sky, thin wisps of clouds crawling along above. Sana closed her eyes – her flesh and blood eyes – and still, she could see right above. She could still see the clouds, great mounds of fluff, wisping across the canvas of the heavens. The tears from before came back for a moment. She wiped them, the upper left arm copying her motion like a mimicking child.

“Holy shit. Holy shit.” She said, hearing it from three different angles. Of all the new sensations on her ever growing checklist, that was perhaps the most unusual of all; her own voice echoing around her like she stood atop a canyon. So did her breathing, come to think of it. As did her footsteps, as she circled the great machine. “This is nothing like they said it would be. Nothing at all.” She opened her original eyes slowly, and had to blink away a dizzying range of colours and sparks. Okay, so it’s not perfect, but…

Sana gazed up in awe at the Frame, its pose under the beam of sunlight almost divine. Yet her second set of eyes revealed the trust – she was looking at an extension of herself, like her prosthetic, but greater. More, in every sense. She had no doubt in her mind that the Frame was a natural part of her, and always had been there, waiting deep inside for this very moment. The first seventeen years of her life had been a mere preamble, an infancy with her true memories locked away.

“It’s better.” She whispered to herself, a much quieter echo chasing her around the room. “Being Frameshifted, it’s- I’m alive. I can breathe,” and she dramatically took several breaths, if only to prove it. “And- and I can see and feel and touch. You can’t kill me.”

Finally, after all the over-stimulation the day had already brought, she remembered. The rejection letter. She remembered the frustration, the anger, the horrid melancholy. And, staring at the Frame, she remembered the statistics – only two percent of people could Frameshift successfully the first time they plugged in, only thirty percent in general, surrounded by lab coats and safety measures and professional preparation. Yet here she stood, in a withering barn in rural Dulkat, surrounded by dust and rust and junk, attaining that pinnacle with nothing but her bare hands and her anger, and they’d rejected her. They had been so blinded by their hubris, they couldn’t see this was her destiny, her one and only truth.

And she felt enraged. Enraged at them for ignoring her, enraged at everyone for ignoring her, enraged at life and the universe and everything for the way it had twisted and bent solely to ensure her isolation. Enraged enough that when the next stupid idea whispered into her mind, she couldn’t fight it with logic or reasoning or breathing exercises or whatever other bullcrap she’d been forced to memorise.

“They tried to keep this from us.” She growled, the reverberation sending shivers up her spine. “This- this is what I’m meant to be. Who I’m meant to be. Why can’t they see that? I am more than this in every way, more than some- no good, one-armed foreigner stuck in this good-for-nothing frozen wasteland! Why is that all they can see me for? Why?”

Her breathing escaped in scattered whistles and wheezes. Clouded steam flung away from her, and she shivered again, looking back towards the machine. Sana marched towards her Frame, all four of her hands – one flesh, three metal – balling up into fists. “So you want me to prove it to you? Fine then. If I’m not Dulkatian, if I’m not Raelithan, if I’m not my parent’s daughter, then at least I am worthy.”

She flung herself into the cabin, so small even inside it’s cramped space, like a child behind the wheel of a truck. She’d sat in that saddle many times, looking out amongst the scattered dust and wood grain of the barn, alone. Wishing she could tell someone, if she had someone, if only to share this secret with, beyond her parents who saw it as no game or toy to be played with. And as Sana pulled the final straps of her internal, makeshift harness tight, the machine’s bladed legs rose to height off the ground.

“I am worthy of this,” she muttered. “I belong here,” she lied again.

“Daughter of Crows” By Izzy S.

---

Written and Edited by Izzy S. and Jennifer C.

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Silent Night

Borders are arbitrary and inscrutable. They’re also a tradition, so of course we keep drawing them.

Anonymous Peace Protester during the Interior Riots, 131AF

“All Pilots to the Frame Deck, repeat, all pilots to the Frame Deck.”

The alarm caused the trio in the bunk room to all jolt, interrupting three hours of sleep, two hours of reading, one hour of boredom, and nearly half a year of peace. Rigel groaned from under a tangle of blankets, while Saima leapt to her feet, snapping into routine with great discipline and matching impatience. Voleno, finally, raised his eyes from the page, sitting still for as long as the world would allow, before he let out a deep sigh, and stood.

The chair creaked from his departure, but the bells of duty were louder, and between his partners, one idle and the other austere, he needed to be the latter. All three of them did, including the smaller man draped across the bed, and the delicate task of waking Rigel often earned an ire he only had on such mornings. Fortunately, Voleno’s hesitance spared him, as Saima tore the sheets away regardless.

“Did you go deaf in your sleep? Pilots-” she whipped her hand in gesture to all three present “-to the Frame Deck,” and shot a scowl at Voleno’s delay.

“I did not want to wake the beast, I did it last time,” he explained, the beast in question grimacing to consciousness with an exhaustion only his fellow soldiers could appreciate.

“Come on, it’s probably just a-“

“This is not a drill, repeat this is not a drill.” The pipe corrected, as if to spite him, and Saima gave a condescending smile she had all but patented.

Rigel sighed again and rolled off the bunk, but then the unseen switch flipped in his mind, and he jumped into action. Voleno could have hauled him awake without issue, but he preferred to wait for Saima to take the blame, and her clockwork nature assured he’d never wait long. Even Rigel’s morning angst stood no chance against her hawk-like gaze, which she drilled into both of them now as they resigned to the same rehearsed motions. Strip off day clothes, wrestle into undersuit, attach into plugsuit, don’t forget your helmet, do not forget your helmet, grab emergency kits, and then run like hell to the Frame Deck.

Fifty six seconds later, they stomped out of their quarters, and began across the gangways that pathed their route.

“Aww, Hells,” Rigel muttered.

“Hm?” Saima and Voleno urged in unison, an occurrence that had become more frequent over their years together.

“Helmet. Shit, I knew I’d forget it, I-I gotta run back and-“

Saima turned to him with a huff and shoved the garish yellow headwear into his hands. Only Rigel could wear such a loud thing.

“Thank you darling,” he managed to crack a genuine smile from his weary face.

“All Pilots to the Frame Deck, repeat, all Pilots to the Frame Deck.” The pipe clamoured again, sounding more and more strained. The repetition meant that they were late, beyond usual standards, a dire prospect for all three.

“Come on, move,” Voleno barked, “we’re needed.”

Plugsuits, as it happened, made running a uniquely challenging feat, a fact that all pilots knew, and yet still attempted to overcome anyway. ‘Stubborn’ was an apt descriptor that few pilots could escape. Thankfully, whichever engineer had designed Forward Base Twenty-one had a leveller head, and built the pilot quarters more or less adjacent to the Frame Deck, so they soon awkwardly jogged through the maintenance bay doors.

Already present stood a taller man, dressed in a spotless, well-ironed uniform, his hair a neat trim of clipped brown that showed hints of grey. He carried a bulky radio receiver in one hand, and scribbled on a pile of papers with the other, all the while tapping his foot with visible impatience. As technicians and mechanics rushed around him to prepare the equipment, he held firm amidst the hectic, hive-like bustle, anchored to his work.

Taller still, three towering figures stood behind the man, humanoid in form, but wreathed in metal, motors, and munitions. Each loomed over three metres tall, casting shadows with four arms, six hands, or bladed legs. With the swarm of engineers around them, they appeared as giants amongst men, moulded into machines of war. For the approaching pilots, however, the man in uniform was a far more imposing presence.

“Fireteam Vedma,” he all but shouted over the noise, “nice of you to join us.”

“Yeah yeah, Sulhan-” Rigel began a jab in return, before the grave face of their commanding officer silenced him.

“Something tripped a wire on the border. We’ve got no Sat coverage at the moment, but we know its ETA is six minutes.”

“And from here we’ll hit the border in four.” Voleno calculated.

“Exactly. We have no idea if this is a bird or a battalion. As such, you’re on live fire until we hear otherwise.” The pilots nodded with grim acceptance of the responsibility. “You are exceptionally lucky that whatever this thing is, it isn’t moving quickly.”

“Like a missile would, Ed?” Saima piped up.

“It’s Colonel Sulhan, today. If you’re gonna waste my time, I’m gonna waste yours with platitudes.” The man snapped, before his face twisted to a sly smirk. “Get plugged in, you’ll be updated on the way.”

Not willing to question their superior any further, the three pilots of Vedma squadron continued their stiff marches toward their respective machines. Several technicians descended on each of them as they climbed up a ladder and inside, occupying every spare centimetre of the cramped interiors.

“Pilots seated,” one of the technicians shouted in Voleno’s ear. “Readying Plug.”

One of many hands passed him a thick cable with three thin, metal prongs at the end, which he received in a firm grasp. He took a short breath in, not giving himself enough time to hesitate, before piercing the steel into his neck through the holes on the spine of his plugsuit. Sharp, cold pain shot up his back, and the distinct iron flavour of blood seeped into his mouth. As soon as the rods made contact with his nervous system, static rushed through his ears like a torrential waterfall. His vision overflowed with a thousand tiny lights, and pins-and-needles washed over him in a ripple of sensation.

And then, the moment passed. Voleno blinked, his senses readjusted with the same alacrity they had muddled. He gasped out the air he’d been holding, and a technician above clapped him on the shoulder. Shivering into his newfound vigour, he stretched, and his two large metallic arms swung back and forth, the technicians directly beside him clearing a wide perimeter to escape their reach. While his lower arms fit into the machine’s like a sleeve, moving with them, he gained nothing from the upper, purely mechanical limbs being warmed up, but did so out of routine.

“Command, this is Vedma Leader,” Voleno rattled off his checks, “Resonance is cleared, looking at an eight-point-five and above. Moons blessed us tonight; plug is Green. Frameshift successful.”

“Copy Vedma Leader,”  the voice buzzed through his augmented senses.

“Saima, Rigel, are you ‘Shifted?” He spoke to the void as the canopy of his Frame was closed, sealing him within the steel.

“Affirmative, Vedma Leader.” Saima’s voice returned crystal clear, as though the several layers of metal between them were absent.

“Yep, yep, I’m also here,” Rigel chimed. “Ready to kick some unidentified ass, sir.”

Voleno wasn’t a man of many words. He was neither a poet, nor a bard, he remained quiet and reserved, as he had always been. Yet, these simple reminders from his loved ones of their presence reassured him so earnestly, and he longed for the ability to put them at the same ease they did him, to grant that feeling wings with which to reach them. It would have to wait until the war ended – at least, that had been his mantra until it did, five months earlier, and here they remained.

“You are green across the board, deploying now. Clear skies and safe passage, Vedma.”

Voleno lurched forward as his Frame was relieved of its hooks, and dropped through the opened floor of the Frame Deck, into the desert below. Those five months of peace could do with just one night more.

      ***

The Khal Desert, much like any desert, treated its inhabitants with much cruelty. Scalding days withered the feet, scratched the lungs and dulled the mind, then freezing nights clutched and seized at whatever remained. Sand stung the eyes, scarred the skin, and exhausted the heart. Humans weren’t built for sand. Thankfully, Frames were built for almost anything.

The three members of Vedma bounded – or, in Rigel’s case, gently hovered – across the desert dunes that separated the rocky steppe and the border zone, a plume of dust and grit following their spearhead.

“Cold Shoulder, you still with us?” Saima asked.

“Sorry, too deep in thought,” Voleno replied, pulling his awareness down from the cloud it had nested in. “Still not used to that name.”

“It’s what the marketing boys want of us, and so it shall be.” Rigel said, “ya know, in case the classified military recording of this conversation ever gets released on World’s Greatest Goofs.”

“Well I’m still peeved you got chosen for that fancy new jet platform, Cosmos.” Saima spoke up again. Voleno could tell she was smiling.

“Hey, what can I say, I’ve got the best balance here. Finally, all those years spent on trawlers paid off-“

“Deadeye, Cosmos, the both of you. Shush. We’re nearly at the border.” The two complied with professional silence, understanding the gravitas of the statement. As they crossed the final dune, its peak comprising one side of a dried river bed, their loving chatter ceased. Voleno glanced back at the distant cliffs. The lights of Forward Base Twenty-One seemed so small.

The river was long dead, hence why it served as a perfect site to draw a border. Wind rolled down its centre, picking up the hateful layers of sand that rested upon the cold layers of bedrock. Their plugsuits had internal heating, advanced systems from some lab in Signa, but the sudden chill still seeped in through the cracks in the Frame’s metal skin.

“Command,” Voleno spoke into the darkness, “approaching the armistice zone.”

“Vedma Leader,” the familiar voice of Sulhan crackled in their ears, “you are permitted to draw Frame armaments, defensive patterns. Happy hunting.”

“Understood.” Voleno’s mechanical arms twisted and reached over his shoulders, grasping a quick-loader which he passed down to his lower hands, before heaving into his upper grip a large revolver rifle – large even by the standards of Frames.

Rigel’s Cosmos had an insectal array of six arms, and after a flurry of movement, he had drawn two blades. One short and readied to parry, the other long, and sharp enough to whistle through the air, ready to pierce and puncture. Meanwhile Saima’s Deadeye, moving with slow, measured composure, drew from underneath its silvered cloak a long rifle that had earned her Frame its nickname long ago.

“Weapons ready,” She confirmed over the private channel.

“Likewise,” Rigel adopted a rare, serious tone.

At the lip of the valley, they each carefully lowered over the edge, and skidded down the sheer sides of the scar, landing in the piles of collected sand with little disturbance. Voleno had always found that to be the more frightening aspect of Frames; not that these enormous weapons could be loud, but that they could be so quiet. The frigid wind blew again, channelled between the opposing dunes. 

“Approaching wire trip.” Voleno saw the glowing green line of the border displayed in his vision, dividing indistinguishable sand into the dust of nations. It confused him as to why they called those lasers ’wires’. The metal strings he once tied from tree to tree, in snow-swept forests far north from there, those were wires. He trusted that tangible steel over any little blips of light.

“Target acquired.” Saima broke Voleno out of his nostalgic spell. In the shade of the sand valley, through sharp, glass eyes, the three finally discerned what had tripped the border wire. Rigel took a single, cautious step forward.

“Is that-”

A woman – a young woman at that, perhaps only a teenager – stood just across the border, looking down at the dirt and somewhere far, far away. Tattered layers of shaggy cloth covered her from head to toe, and she cradled something precious to her chest, swaddled in a thick blanket. Voleno knew shellshock far too well, and the lack of presence from her posture only began to tell the tale of the anguish she must’ve endured. Through his outer, more sensitive ears, he picked out her wandering voice from amongst the wind. A weak, but distinctly rhythmic mumble. She teetered forwards, no faster than a crawl.

“Cosmos, what is she saying?” He asked along their internal comms.

“Definitely Khalaban, not sure of the dialect. Maybe…”

“Cosmos, focus.” Voleno reinforced.

“I’m trying. It’s hard to make out this far off, but it’s definitely in some kind of poetic form,” he hummed along to some unknown tune. “I think it might be a lullaby?”

“For who, us?” Saima questioned.

The woman glanced up for the first time and, as expected, froze at the sight of the three, hulking figures that stared at her from the darkness. Her immediate response was frank and not unusual: she looked terrified. However, in only a moment the panic in her shadow-cast eyes shifted. Her movement was still underlined by a primal level of fear, or just exhaustion, but some other vital instinct must’ve formed as, in a direct line towards them, she began to run, and then she began to scream.

The wails pierced into the dark void of the desert, the canyon walls grabbing her voice and returning its shrill melody. Against his trained judgement, Voleno did not bring his rifle to bear. Even with the language barrier, he knew a cry for help when he heard one.

“Cosmos?” he asked his partner with a single word.

“She’s saying ‘please take her’? Over and over again. Or variations thereof.”

“Like?” Voleno prodded.

“What do you want, a list?”

“Oh shit,” Saima’s voice cracked. “Check scopes again Vedma. Look.”

Voleno glanced back to the border, a shining thread caught on his gaze. Another filter flicked over his digital vision, and scanning across the frail body moving towards them, he could see it. There was not one heat signature, but two. One much smaller and hard to make out, wrapped in cloth, clutched tight in the woman’s arms.

“Vedma Leader, this is Twenty-One command,” an unfamiliar voice came through, “satellite readings confirm we have four Khalaban Frames on fast intercept.”

“Shit.” Voleno mouthed under his breath. “Command, ETA?” He asked, as Saima and Rigel quickly scanned their surroundings, in rapid discussion behind him.

“T-Minus two minutes, Vedma Leader,” the voice said, aloof, as if that were plenty.

“Squad, ideas?” He called back.

“We should move to the ridgeline,” Saima noted.

“Cover is good and all but we are best staying put here, cap’,” Rigel reasoned. “If they see us in their way, no way they’ll take the chance cross-”

“Unless they planned this from the start, and are gonna start taking pot-shots at us,” Saima snapped back.

“Planned? Are you saying this is a real attack, Saima?” Rigel scoffed in disbelief at his partner’s words.

“I’m not saying anything-” Saima gritted.

“Vedma, word from up the chain: your live fire permissions have been rescinded,” came the distant voice again, “Do not engage Khalaban forces, repeat, do not engage unless they cross the border.”

The ever-present line that marked the boundary over Voleno’s mechanical eyes beamed up at him, in the sickly green tone of night-vision sight. The woman was still behind it, but her stumbling forward brought her ever closer, her body pushing as fast as her exhausted legs would allow.

As if to defy her struggle, four piercing lights broached the top of the opposite dune, cast by four shadow-swept machines of sable steel. Each had the cold, sweeping gaze of a watchtower, whose iron skeleton had sprouted legs to further stalk its prey. The girl heard the machines approach, their whirring motors only getting louder as they came into sight, and began their descent. Without daring to turn and look, she broke into a sprint, or the world’s most desperate limp, towards Vedma’s position.

“Vedma, this is Twenty-One Actual,” A male voice scowled across the radio, “you are ordered to shoot on sight anything that attempts to cross the border.”

“What-” Rigel started.

“The hells?” Saima finished.

“Command, repeat last.” Voleno asked as his metal eyes involuntarily snapped back and forth between the four encroaching machines and the woman who stumbled forwards, mere metres away and closing.

“What happened to no live fire?” Saima ground her teeth.

“As per the Bakra Armistice, any undocumented border crossing is in violation of our agreement with the Empire. Stay put, over.” Sulhan explained what Voleno already knew, driving the point home like a bullet to the brain. “Orders from on high.”

The woman lurched forwards. The enemy machines closed in. And Vedma could only stand and watch, like shadows in the night.

Voleno couldn’t stand it.

With a moment’s focus through the Plug into the Frame, his voice became external, his rapid breaths catching an echo as he lifted his rifle. “Imperial Frames,” he boomed, feigning a calmness he could not possibly feel, “you are encroaching upon the border agreed during the Armistice of Bakra. Halt immediately or we will open fire.”

The machines wreathed in darkness did not stop. Nor did the girl. For her part, a valiant effort was made, the final gap excruciatingly small.

“Vedma,” the unfamiliar voice spoke again, “prevent any and all crossings, by any means necessary.”

“Vedma,” Voleno returned to his crew, “do not engage. If those Frames take one step across the border, weapons free.”

“And the girl?” Saima asked, knowing the answer.

The woman lurched, and tripped, trying to hold onto the mass of rags for dear life, before changing tactic mid-fall, reaching out her arms as far out as they could go, extending her cargo as far ahead as her short stature and frail form would allow. Now right at her heels, the four Frames skidded to a halt, mere metres from the border. Their lights glared down into her as they bared down onto her, capturing sand and suffering beneath their glow. Although his glass eyes could decipher little colour when using night-vision, Voleno could make out the deep, drowning purple that adorned their barbed bodies. It was a shade that pilots during the war had learnt well to run from.

A second passed, and not one of the Frames dared budge. Nor did the woman, though not for a lack of trying. She lay outstretched and paralysed, in equal parts fear and exhaustion. Another agonising second passed, until one of the Khalaban Frames spoke up in an unexpectedly clear tone.

“You too have entered the Bakran Armistice Zone, thus violating the peace of Bakra yourselves. You arrived before us, and so can make no claim against us, when you have defaced it first.” All of the opposing Frames had their weapons drawn, and at the tail end of their spiel, each armament was raised and pointed across the border, the favour returned in kind.

“We detected a disturbance on our side of the border, which we are permitted to monitor ourselves, a stipulation that all signatories agreed to.” Rigel spoke up, his voice gruff in a way that Voleno saw right through, his partner’s nerves as clear as day to him. A moment of back-and-forth translation occurred, before the same rival machine replied again.

“Then your argument is moot. We are on our side, you are on yours. No violations have been made, unless you wish to admit to crossing the border.”

A gust of wind picked up, catching the end trails of the woman’s rags. Neither blade nor barrel were lowered.

“It is unfortunate just how much of an inconvenience this, how you say…” A great steel hand motioned in the air towards the terrified pile between them, “frustration has caused for both our sides. This illegal traveller should have never gotten this close to the border, that can be agreed upon.”

One of the other Frames, the largest in their standoff, with what looked like an entire howitzer strapped over its shoulder, stepped forwards, reaching out to grab the woman off of the floor.

“Take one step further and I will open fire.” Voleno warned. “You cross an inch over this border, and there will be blood.”

The Khalaban Frame took a moment to process this, likely having the threat translated, and then receiving a command to step back. “Do we not have an understanding, Raelithan?” A hint of impatience slipped through the few cracks in the translator’s diplomatic voice.

“You can’t just-” Voleno hissed back, taking a deep breath as early warnings flashed in his ear. “This situation is far more complex than you are allowing it to be.”

“It seems then, we have a choice to make. You will not allow us to recover this illegal traveller, an act that is within our jurisdiction, as she lies on our side of the border. You are pushing the bounds of the armistice as we speak.” Voleno couldn’t tell entirely through the crackling voice of a Frame, but they sounded young.

Voleno looked down at what they were readying to fight over. A bundle of rags, a person wrapped up and strangled in the barbed wire of bureaucracy. Borders were fickle things, arbitrarily assigned by people who thought they meant something more. They held weight only when a nation wished to know just how far they can extend their reach, and over whom they can hang their boot.

And here, on the newest border in the world, only the woman’s arm had made it across.

“As a sign of good faith,” the vocal Frame returned its main gun to a skywards position, “our envoy will approach unarmed. We hope that this matter can be dealt with swiftly and peacefully, and we implore you to grant us the same courtesy.”

“Vedma,” Voleno heard ring out in his ears, “New orders on high: you are to retreat at least ten metres from the line. If they make a move to cross, you may fire at will, otherwise, stand easy.”

“Command?” Voleno asked, struggling to keep his breathing down.

“We are nearing an international incident, Vedma Leader. Do not make this any worse than you  already have.”

Voleno heard Saima and Rigel pause, taking the initiative that Pilots were so often afforded and, after a moment, lowered their weapons, turning back towards the foothills of the dunes behind them.

“Cold Shoulder, you heard the pipe.” Saima gritted, clearly not thrilled, but not ready to break another direct command.

“Fireteam, belay that order.” Voleno demanded.

“Cold-“

“I said belay it!” Voleno shouted over the squadron’s comms, not taking his eyes off the Frames before him. “The both of you, we are standing our ground!”

“Vol,” Saima started quietly, finally releasing some of the words stuck tense in her throat, “this could be a false flag for all we know. She could be smuggling something in those arms. A bomb, maybe-”

“I won’t repeat myself a third time,” Voleno growled, catching Deadeye in the corner of his.

Saima’s critical thinking was often a blessing, but in that moment, he didn’t want to hear another word. Equally, Rigel’s silence on the matter was particularly disquieting, as he skulked the edge of Voleno’s line of sight. Law be damned. Something wasn’t right, and he couldn’t stand it.

Saima sighed. He spied the barrel of her rifle as it rose up, pointed at the enemy once more. “Fine. I won’t let you screw this up alone.”

Rigel moved forward again, teetering on the precipice of a new war. “We’ve already made the bed. We won’t let you lie in it alone.”

The enemy Frame reached down to pick up the woman and her few belongings, including the precious object she had so desperately clawed to pass over the border.

“That is within the sovereign territory of the Federation of Raelith.” Voleno boomed aloud, turning back to the enemy as their weapons rose again. “It has crossed the border, and you will not take it whilst we stand watching.”

Another pause.

A moment of passing his threat up the chain of command, and the Frame furthest back –  the apparent leader of the enemy Fireteam – addressed them directly. Voleno did not understand the words, but the hiss in the enemy’s tone was more than enough.

“And the mother?” Rigel leant forwards, translating quickly as the foreign commander spoke in rapid lines.

Voleno breathed in, and breathed out. “She-” he started, struggling.

“She is within Khalaban territory. We have no jurisdiction over her.” Saima finished, stepping into the other end of his field of vision. 

“What happened to holding the line?” Rigel whispered.

“We take what we can get.” Saima didn’t look anywhere but her scope. Voleno’s family had not abandoned him when he needed them most.

The wind blew through the valley, sending particles of dust flying across the air. A second later, the commander spoke again. “This is a dangerous game you play, Raelithan,” Rigel translated, “but so be it. We will not question those who would split mothers from their babes.”

Saima lurched forward, but Voleno put an arm out in front of her first. “Let it go.” He hissed.

The same howitzer-mounted Frame from before glanced back at their commanding officer, receiving the silent go-ahead along a channel Vedma were not privy to. They nudged forwards, reaching down and sheepishly picking up the woman with a single mechanical hand, the fingers wrapping around her midriff with one grasp. She reached out towards her cargo weakly, before slumping into the Frame’s claw, her fight decided to be over.

“Molum Kharak, Pilot kala.” The foreign commander did not look back, as all four Frames turned and marched towards the opposite side of the valley.

“…Happy New Year, fellow Pilots,” Rigel translated anyway.

As the enemy Fireteam reached the peak of the dune, marching away with stomping legs ejecting the sand, the woman seemed to stir again. For the agonising moments it took, all Voleno heard was the echoing screams of a mother crying out for her baby, the walls of the awful canyon grasping her pleas and repeating them back in an endless, torturous loop. Her words, though he could not understand their meaning, were nonetheless understood. Voleno had never felt so helpless.

After far too long, and far too many wails, they were gone, over the ridge and out of sight. All that was left in the valley was three hulking Frames, a bundle of soft cloth pelted by the sand, and the wind. With the border only a pace or so ahead, Voleno collapse forwards onto this knees. Displayed alerts, even louder now, told him that something, many things honestly, were going wrong within his mental connection. His emotional cocktail was brewing and stirring, and in that moment, he remembered the first rule he was ever taught.

“Command, I’m unplugging.”

“Vedma Leader, you are in an active combat situation, you are not permitted to-“

The plug disconnected anyways, and there was silence. Blissful silence. The wind battered against the metal outside, but that was a whisper compared to the blaring alarms that had filled his head mere moments before. He pulled himself out of his Frame, dragging his heavy, plugsuit-laden body over the side and landing on the bedrock with a hefty thud. He swayed as his muscles awoke again, approaching the tiny curl of blankets on the ground, laying just before the giant metal silhouette.

He felt humanity return to him, as he knelt down next to his warmachine, reaching out and lifting the precious thing off the sandy, cracked floor. He brushed away the patches of grain as his eyes adjusted. The twin pale moons looked down upon him, and beyond them, the stars.

In his arms now lay an infant. A tiny little thing, maybe only two or three months old. Their skin was a warm, tea colour, visible even in the dark blue hues of the desert night and his Frame’s running lights. They breathed ever so softly, and as Voleno cradled them, he noticed that they were missing their right arm from above the elbow. It didn’t look like an injury – no scar surrounded its end – and the baby seemed undisturbed as it moved, resting soundly, unaware of everything. He was envious of the poor thing.

“Gods Vol, that was brave.” Rigel said with a humourless chuckle.

“And reckless.” Saima spat through gritted teeth. “I haven’t been that riled since the war.”

“Nor have the Kallies.” Rigel huffed, adrenaline escaping their systems like a trickle of blood. He glanced down towards his disembarked companion, and called out. “Hey, Vol? Sitrep?”

“…How could you wish to harm something so small?” He whispered to the sands.

“Silent Night” By Izzy S.

---

Welcome Back, Pilots.

Written and Edited by Izzy S & Jennifer C.

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What Parades Are For

When I grow up, I wanna be a Frame Pilot, and kick the butts of anyone who’s mean to me!

Oksana Kelenov, Aged 4

Mama and Dada had taken Sana to a parade, at her request. She didn’t quite know what a parade was, but just the word itself sounded exciting, and so they had made the long journey down the winding, valley roads to Vaske, the big capital city, before navigating its cramped corridors of concrete towards a large gathering – another corridor, made of people. The bustle was promising; she had learned what a ‘city’ was the previous year, and that had been rather disappointing. It was supposed to be big, but everything there was small. The roads were much thinner than the fields back home, beset on all sides by little block houses, with little toy cars cheeping their tiny horns at each other to make way. “Excuse me sir, there’s not much room, and I must avoid bumping into the seventeen people right next to me.”

That was the only thing worth noting, the amount of people. But as she trotted carefully along, tracing Mama’s shadow with her shoe, the people were just trees, and Sana had seen plenty of trees before. Just don’t look up at their canopies, and risk meeting the eyes of creatures nesting there, and you’ll make it safely.

Standing amongst this human forest at the edge of a road, flanked by a similar treeline on its other side, Sana began to hear it. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. The city’s heart was beating. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Four. Dada had said that life likes to meet in threes, but music was lonely without a proper audience, so music would meet in fours. A four amongst threes, a one amongst twos, those were things that described her, defined her, and so Sana had learned to love music. Between each beat, she tapped her hand, stomped her foot, thump, thump, thump, thump. The trees creaked curiously towards her, before smiling, and turning back, their gaze appeased, and it was safe to continue. Faster now, thumpthumpthumpthump. For each four, Sana would add a fifth, a sixth, because her and music were kindred spirits in that way, and it was better to be alone together.

“Oxy, look, you don’t wanna miss it.” Dada beckoned with his hand, offering it to her. She had stroppily refused to be carried when they arrived. She was bigger now, after all. From her proud height, she could easily see any parade – whatever that was – no boost needed. “You might even be able to catch the new one, Lucky Lucy.” Sana let herself be hoisted up onto his shoulders with no more argument.

From her throne, with its desk of soft auburn hair, the city was even smaller now, the canopy far below, and she grinned. Dada turned her to face left, and gestured far down the road, holding her hand so she could point too.

“There.”

There, a glint in the distance. A small shape, the head of a serpent that slowly rounded the street corner, revealing its body from behind the buildings, and with it came the noise. The low thumps were joined by faster siblings, patapata-patapata-patapata-patapata, and friends of many words, vrooooooooom, a long roar, bwoah-bwoahbwoah-bwoah, a sharper chirp, and a sweeping wave of excited murmurs that rippled through the human forest like a strong wind. Sana gasped and smiled wider. “Mama! Mama! Look look look!”

“I’m looking, darling, I’m looking.” Her smile was deep, proud.

The body in the distance became larger, the glint becoming a dazzling glow. Longer and longer, it curled around the concrete obstacles and filed into the long stretch of eyes awaiting its arrival. It was the largest snake Sana had ever seen, did it even end? Its head was made of thirty figures, carrying drums and pipes and noisy things, erupting with sound that formed a wave of overwhelming presence. Behind them was another band, whose instruments were their feet. They stomped against the tarmac, left then right then left then right, their boots rumbling far louder and more rhythmically than her earlier attempts. Resting in their palms and leant against a shoulder, they each held long, deliberate, wooden things; their secondary instruments. Sana was very familiar with them, but had never seen so many in one place before, having assumed the only guns in the world were owned by Mama, the old man three houses down, and Giants.

The plodding grey men were ushered forward by a rolling green box, a large metal thing littered with various dangers, and a long central tube aimed straight forward. Sana’s eyes shone when she recognised it. “Mech! Is a tank mech!” She pointed, and looked back to Mama as she did.

Her smile widened, and she simply nodded.

Not satisfied with her mother’s lack of awe, Sana explained further, “Mama, it- it goes like kbrooough!” she mimed an explosion with her hand and arms, Dada gripping tighter on instinct, “the big pipe! The big pipe, it goes wooooosh, and then- and then- kaboooom, y’see mama? Y’see?”

Mama laughed, and she could feel Dada do the same beneath her, gently shaking her up and down. “Does it, darling?”

“Isn’t it more of a wah-toosh?” added Dada, wobbling Sana’s knees along with the sound, and she let out a happy giggle.

“It’s actually more of a p’tunk. The cylinder cycles, and the hammer crashes into the priming mechanism…” Mama said very matter-of-factly. She spoke like that so often that Sana assumed she was correct about everything, so she nodded to Mama, even though she knew it was definitely a woosh followed by a big kaboom.

“I liked yours best, Oxy,” Dada chuckled, and her giggle sprung back to life.

Beyond the rows of grey, there were other colours of marching uniforms, people with funny hats atop hard faces, which Sana couldn’t take seriously when they had buckets and dead squirrels on their heads. Instead of a mech, they were followed by large balloons of a bouncy, round ship, and an inflatable biplane.

“The mech could beat them in a fight, easy,” she frowned, tugging at Dada’s shoulder in question. “It’d be like- p’tunk, but really really loudly and- and- the big dumb plane would be so scared!”

“I know pumpkin, quite silly isn’t it? The ship would go pop, and fly around the place, plblblblblblblb,” he made a rude sound that caused her to laugh more.

The inflatable plane in particular looked rather sorry and alone, with the smallest rows of professional walkers marking its entrance. Dada leant over to Mama and mumbled with a nervous chuckle.

“The Feds must’ve cut the air budget again, the poor motes.”

Mama shrugged. “Rather them than us.”

“‘Us’? Saima, love, it’s been years-“

“Speak of the devils.” She nudged him to look forward again.

Another band approached now, even larger, as if the snake had decided it wasn’t grand enough, and started again at the head. Now there were a hundred figures instead of thirty, blasting their tune not just to be heard, but to be uncontested, unquestionable, to emit such a roaring fanfare that Sana’s senses, so often scattered, could not belong in any other direction. They did not just march, they strutted, with dapper faces unburdened by any stern expressions, gleefully blaring a triumphant cacophony that swallowed the road, which had suddenly become so wide. Jubilation and light and life illuminated their procession, the sun itself faithfully training a spotlight, dotted by elevated stages gliding down the street. They carried soldiers, performers, flag-bearers, conductors, another three orchestras, and enormous balloons far more real than the jittering treads of any mech. Sana understood now – this was a parade. What a fitting word.

Finally, this dizzying cavalcade gave way to its prize, the gem beneath many layers of fine wrapping and decorum. Slam-step, slam-step, footfall that dwarfed and drowned out the petty prancing of the boisterous little people, with their frump and feathers. The small toots of brass were replaced by a symphony of whirring motors and metallic clicks, steel wire winding through iron bone, and a giant began to walk down the boulevard. Mama said something, pointing and explaining, but it didn’t reach her. Sana was enraptured. A metal giant, and two others flanking behind, were right there in front of her, real and tangible and touchable and towering above all else in view. The skyscrapers were taller, but these three beings of three metres each were larger, greater, in some imperceptible way. She knew the name of these beasts too, but it lacked the totality of wonder and astonishment necessary to depict them with any accuracy. ‘Frame’ seemed too humble, too pedestrian for beings that forced pedestrians to part, and worship their generosity to appear before them. The many stories, pictures, posters, and broadcasts she had devoured before then all paled in comparison to seeing one, breathing its air.

Sana was a child that liked to have things in her hands, liked to fiddle with them in her grasp and turn them this way and that, drink in every edge and angle. That was how she had lived, by grabbing food and quickly stuffing it into her cheeks before it could be taken away, by hogging and running away with the television remote, by decorating her room with a vast array of treasures like a nesting magpie. Wires, bolts, stones with a slight glimmer, sticks with curious shapes, household devices that ticked and clacked, anything and everything that she could see and want and grab. Immediately, she knew that she would discard her entire collection to have one of these Frames – a single arm even, a scrap of panelled armour on their outside. No rust or rock in her horde reflected the sun quite like that, it must have been a powerful magic of sorts.

They were getting so close. Soon she would be able to reach out and clutch that gleaming surface. But then, they popped open, the fronts of their chests raising upwards to reveal the puppeteers within, and the crowd clamoured with shouts and applause. Sana knew people piloted Frames, but seeing it revealed with her own two eyes made it all the more unbelievable. How could a person control a such a thing? It all made sense when she saw them.

Beaming smiles and charming eyes greeted the rabble, meeting their crushing gaze and throwing it right back with a blinding radiance. The others in the parade were but ants, trickling along in single file, looking straight ahead, blank and empty-headed, a preamble to the real show. Where the drummers rattled and the conductors flailed, the Pilots waved, masterful, modest, and commanding. They looked from side to side, meeting a thousand stares without a flinch, exuding a charisma and magnetism that the onlookers could only watch in envy. Of course, Sana thought; the Frames were larger than skyscrapers, so those within had to be larger than life.

Through her open-mouthed shock, she recognised one of them, a young, handsome man, but it did not matter, his presence preceded his identity. He waved again to the crowd, so close now, and looked to his companions. They grinned to each other, and a fondness flushed their faces that shot through her. For the first time in her life, Sana understood with absolute clarity that there was something she desired, something she and everyone there wanted, needed to have, but could not touch. She could not hold or twist or turn this thing over in her hands, it was invisible, a phantom on the air that existed in the cheers of the crowd, and the smiles that crossed the Pilot’s faces when their eyes met. She understood that this thing was more valuable than any junk in her room, or plate on the surface of Mr Lucy’s Frame. Even so, she reached out.

The metal figure was so near, metres away, its upper arm extended to the crowd, who eagerly reached as well, and slapped tiny palms against its digits with a low ting. Each one looked down at their hand afterwards, as if it would turn into gold now that it had touched divinity. Sana reached further, letting out a little grunt of effort that made Dada comply. “Closer, closer!” She demanded. Just one metre to her left now, the Frame took one more step and she was there, she could touch it, reach that place between people, warm and close and-

It barely missed her hand, outstretched like a baby to a mother’s fingers, and with a slight shift of wind as it passed, the Frame was gone, walking further down the road to meet waves just inches further out than her own. She looked at her left hand, an ache in her shoulder from having to awkwardly twist it into position. Despite waiting, it did not turn into gold. She looked at the long right arms of the others around her, achieving what she failed to, and she looked at her stump. Despite waiting, it did not disappear.

“Did you get it, Oxy?”

Sana kept her hand out for a moment, grasping, but the crowd was moving, and everything was so bright and the noise was getting louder. She slumped over Dada’s head. “I missed…” she mumbled into his hair.

“Ah, that’s a shame dear” said Mama. “There’ll always be next year.”

“Maybe…” Sana swallowed.

“Hey, wasn’t that cool though? Look how close you got! I bet next year you’ll be so tall, you could reach for the stars and touch them,” Dada smiled up at her, then at Mama, who watched, as always, with warm, fireside concern.

The parade, with all its light and sound, eventually dwindled down to a final, lifeless row of tired officers, escorting the last dregs. The forest began to retreat, the sun lowered, and Dada carried Sana back through the labyrinth of sharp corners and straight lines, the side of her head resting lazily against the top of his, as she trailed her eyes over the grey buildings.

By the time they reached the truck, and she was placed gently into the cushioned back seat, she was already nodding off, struck by the post-excitement exhaustion children her age were prone to. As they hummed back up the winding roads out of Vaske, she caught a hazy glimpse of the glittering skyline in a different light, quite literally. It was from this bleary, daydream view that Sana understood what she hadn’t the year before; cities were indeed big. They must have been, because they made her feel very, very small.

---

Greetings Pilots,

Long time no see, eh? Jenny and I have been hard at work editing, polish (and frankly, rewriting a tonne of) Volume 1, getting it into a much better shape than it was before. And I’m happy to report, Arc 1’s rewrite is finished! Given just how busy the both of us have been over the past year, I’m incredibly happy that we’ve gotten this far.

Now the question of the day is; when will Arc 1 be releasing? And thankfully I’ve got an answer; Next Saturday, we’ll begin releasing the new version of Arc 1, chapter by chapter, just like before! This time with brand new thumbnails, and maybe some sneaky bonus art here and there too 😀

What’ll be happening to the old chapters? As I’ve said before, they’ll remain up and readable for the foreseeable future. Most likely, the entirety of Volume 1 as is currently released on the site will be shelved, likely in it’s own special place. You’ll still be able to read it, but it’ll be “dubiously canonical” from now on, given how and where it deviates from the rewrite.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter with baby Sana (isn’t she a cutie?? 😭), and we’re so excited to get new chapters your way! It’s good to be back!

Thanks, and keep on running,

– Izzy

Written by Jennifer C. Edited by Izzy S.

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Autumn Leaves Fall Closest to the Tree

“Do not wish to be remembered, for heaven only knows what terrible things must be done for that to happen.”

Major Wyatt Jaga

>[PRIVATE TRANSMISSION - HIGHEST PRIORITY - HIGHEST SECRECY]
Fifthteenth Day of Oktom, Lord's Year 472
Progress Report - Signan Frame Army - Operation "Lonely Spear"
Reporting: Commodore Arshano Faust, writing on behalf of Major Wyatt Jaga and the Third Experimental Division
Receiving: High Marshal Rodrogo Ashar, CC: Signan Frame Army Command (SFAC) Marshal Sigismund Lovelace, Marshal Command.

Transmission Details:

Hail, High Marshal Ashar,

I am reporting to Upper Command of the Signan Frame Army (via 3rd Experimental Division) of the success of Operation "Lonely Spear", in both observation of the Adzeqal fighting techniques, and in the advancement of 3rd Experimental Division Petty Officer Alsania Calliad as a Frame Pilot…<

---

Seas of green grass fields, stalked by distant sawtooth mountains, travelled for miles and miles abound outside the windows. The occasional reddened tree would lead to more forests, but as their homeland escaped behind them, such artefacts would become so rare as to be priceless – autumnal leaves worth their weight in gold. Major Wyatt Jaga rubbed his eyes – from the early morning, amongst other things – and when he looked out the window to chase the horizon again, he’d lost the trail he’d been following along the far-off spines. 

Across from him in their lavishly wood-panelled train booth, his travelling companion took up the entire space of her cushions like a cat sprawled across its bed. She pawed lazily at the book she was reading, so heavy that if she were to drop it, it’d leave her with a black eye. Compared with Wyatt’s own lanky frame, she was boxy and rigid, but inescapably small. Jaga had occasionally worried someone might accuse him of malnourishing her. The girl, no older than fourteen, sighed for maybe the fifth time in as many minutes. 

“What’s bothering you, Al?” Wyatt asked, really more interested in what was outside. 

“What’d you think, old man? I’m losing my mind over here. And why’d you have to write such a bleedin’ doorstopper anyways?” The girl sniped, flopping the book as it clattered on the floor. Their journey was maybe one-third complete, and already had they moved from electrocarriage to train car, and just as swift had his companion grown terribly, annoyingly bored. Wyatt reached down, lifting the tome with one hand. 

“Because no one else had yet,” he prompted, and Alsania rolled her eyes, one of her favourite responses. “And that’ll be a sir from you whilst we’re in the field, hm?” 

“But did you really have to make it nearly a thousand pages long? And then require I read it?” 

“Alsania Delores Calliad, do you want to pilot a Frame or not?” 

The girl blinked, before pulling herself close around the book. “Of course I do, Sir,” she emphasised back. 

“And who deems who can and can’t be a Frame Pilot?” Al glared at him. 

“… You, sir?” 

“Well, I’m only the first barrier to entry. And what I require is that anyone who’s going to Pilot reads that. Cover to cover, no skimming the parts you don’t like.” 

Alsania puffed out air like a teapot, coming to a boil. “You’re cruel.” 

He gave a thin smile through his growing stubble, “Come on Al, say it with me; ‘Mandate of Heaven’…?” 

The teenager shrugged him off. “Nope, nope, not late enough in the day for your mantra, sir.” 

“You love it really.” 

“I really don’t. Why can’t we just do all this like the Adzeqal do, anyways?” She flicked open the tome again to a random page – even Wyatt had to admit his final product was more of a blunt force object than an every-day textbook – “I hear they choose the most proficient person from each of their Clans, teach them how to talk to their Frames and stuff. All we do is read endless paper trains of theory. No fun, no action.” 

“Because you shouldn’t be wanting action.” Wyatt had unstowed his flask, and was sipping on the soup the maid had packed. “And we don’t- even have Clans. How would a system like that work?” 

“Do a big ol’ lottery, hand ’em out to whomever and hope for the best,” she followed his earlier gaze out the window with a deflated sigh. “Why else are we here but violence, Wyatt? To pick posies in our ancient god machines?” 

Wyatt knew his stories had never scared Al. From the first time he’d met her, a tiny thing barely able to speak, he’d told her the same thing, time and time again; Frames are weapons, and like all weapons, it captured and amplified the malice of its user. But unlike a mere sword, a Frame… spoke to you, in its own weird way. Whispers, right in his inner ear or perhaps beyond, telling him things, sequestering secrets, reminiscing about the past and future for him. 

It terrified him, every single time. Frames were untrustworthy tools – a scythe that could make you its chaff. So, he grew an intense look, and peered towards his surrogate liege. 

“I’d love to pick flowers in my Frame. If the fingers wouldn’t crush them, that is.” 

---

>Alsania has shown rapid development in her connection with the Frame she was initially tested for. Unlike older Pilots who were tested before and during the time of the first of the Whale Wars, Ms. Calliad's mind and body have proven far more malleable and adaptable when it comes to connecting and maintaining connection with her given Frame…<

---

“We here are so glad you could arrive in swift concordance, even if only as observers.” 

The total journey had taken three days, across mountain ranges followed by wide open plains, perfect for slaughter. In that time, the Myrisian 2nd Airborne Fleet – several of their finest and newest airships some claimed were built just for their current campaign, whenever tensions inevitably flared – had deployed on an eastward gale. The only thing that had slowed their journey was the weather, and their propensity to raze every village, homestead, and unlucky nomad they encountered along the way. A trail of blood raced towards the beating heart of the Adzeqal. 

But for all the existential threat presented – an enemy that could appear in the skies in great flying gunboats, and deploy swarms of Myrisian-red Biplanes in minutes – the Adzeqal had been in high spirits from the moment they’d stepped off the rudimentary train platform. Not much seemed to shake them, least of all their guide, a fellow named “Red leaves as they fall from the trees,” or just Redfall for short, who dragged them around the impermanent, muddy streets of the Great Horn City like a puppy in the shape of a toned, middle-aged man. 

“We’re glad to be here too!” Alsania said outside her station, but her eyes were so ablaze with wonder that Wyatt let it slide. “Right, Wy?” 

“We’re glad to be here representing the Republic,” Wyatt repeated the spiel his commanding officers had forced on him. Redfall turned and gave him the oddest look for someone who’s just been laden with propaganda. His hair was long, a deep almost-purple with tightly braided knots – marks of high esteem, Wyatt had read, and felt almost jealous compared to the close-cropped cut on his own cranium. Scars collided across Redfall’s body, but even with that, his face skewed younger than Jaga would usually suspect of a contemporary. 

“Ohoh, yes, that too I’m sure,” the guide swivelled on his heels. “Now, I am aware you have both only just arrived, but I must insist we head immediately to the shore. It’s almost dusk, and the spirits will be most active soon,” he grinned, several scars turning around his lips as he said the strangest things with the greatest of certainty, “it will be perfect conditions for such an important blessing, especially this close to the equinox.” 

“Hey, uh- Redfall, was it?” Wyatt asked, and the man’s expression seemed sly, fox-like but affirmative. The Major simultaneously loved and hated it. “When exactly is your strategic operations meeting? Ah, your-” 

“Planning session?” Redfall looked towards the lakeshore, dominating the horizon to the North of the city. “We have many plans, but we Great Hunters do not prepare such things sober. You will be regaled by firelight, if that is okay?” 

Wyatt would really prefer a traditional meeting, held in a matted floor house, with gentle tea and a calming breeze to soothe the mathematics of death. But mud would have to do; declining would be worse. 

Alsania turned to him, pleading, “Oh, Wyatt, they have alcohol and bonfire rituals, can we please go, pretty please?” 

“You’re fourteen.” 

“I can drink in Lanset.” 

He swept his hands around. “This isn’t Lanset.” 

“You are to be a warrior with us, little squire?” Redfall turned down – almost diagonally – to meet Alsania’s pout at being called both ‘little’ and ‘squire’. “Then she shall drink with us.” 

“Uh, now hang on-” 

“Woohoo! I’m gonna get utterly wasted!” Alsania cheered over his complaints, overtaken by some desperate, teenage need to holler her excitement down the sleepy, yurt lined street. Wyatt looked to Redfall who, as always, continued to smile. 

“We will only give her a little,” he pinched his fingers, and Wyatt wondered if he was a father of sorts too. “To make her included, but not blacked out, like us.” 

“…Thank you,” it only seemed polite to say in compromise. 

---

> ... It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Alsania's ability as a Frame pilot, as observed previously and during this conflict, may someday be able to match, or even outclass that of Major Jaga's (although the scope of such conversations has most recently changed, as you will soon observe)...<

---

Sunset had already come and gone, burning orange rays of the sun replaced by weaker specks of amber firelight. The Great Horn City, the impermanent capital of the Adzeqal people, was so far from any timber resource that such a bonfire would be a severe strain on the construction and utilities of the Clans for weeks, maybe months. And yet, they built it anyways, with groups of men and women, adorned in all manner of beautiful, hand sewn wares of various geometric design, unlike anything Wyatt had ever seen back in his homeland, danced around, approaching the fire with more wood and rhythmically casting the blocks forth, crying and chanting towards the blaze in patterns and spirals he didn’t understand. 

“This would’ve been expensive only a century ago,” Redfall said besides him, having just delivered tea resembling what Wyatt had desperately wanted instead of the sharp brew they’d given him first. He still felt a buzz, cursed it even, but was thankful for its equally fast fading. He’d got about half of a battle plan out of the other Hlaquoká before the smell of hops had almost beaten out the smell of wood smoke. 

“Hm?” He said, realising his thoughts had escaped their pen. 

Redfall pointed. “The bonfire. We’ve always done it this way, before battle. Beer and bonfire, every time. Nowadays, with the trade alliance, lumber is cheaper, not so special anymore. But we’d do the fire either way. It rallies us, readies us for war. Can’t say I know it works in our favour for certain, but…” Redfall grinned his damn pretty boy smile, again. “I choose to believe it, so that makes it important, no?” 

“Are you telling me all this because you know I’m sceptical?” 

“Ah, a little,” he sipped. “I think it’s to help my own nerves too. For if the Red Blessing works, well…” 

“Mm.” Wyatt glanced at the man’s scars again. He didn’t mean to but he knew a warrior’s body when he saw it. They weren’t often buff, covered in show muscles – instead, a warrior like Redfall was often built like a tank. It’s why Wyatt was never a warfighter,  just a Pilot. But, they were kindred in that. Redfall, also a Hlaquoká, had more collective, familial experience in a Frame than the entire nation of Signa combined. Redfall, a man just about Wyatt’s age, had likely been flying Frames for twice as long. Since Alsania’s age, at least. 

He turned back to the fire instead of the other man’s cutting features, and watched as Al, always too full of energy, lashed back and forth in a dance she’d only just learnt, crown of red flowers on her head. The whole ring of dancers rotated around the bonfire in step, and Al was soon obscured and engulfed. 

“I wonder if she even gets nervous, sometimes.” Wyatt surprised himself with his own words. “I wouldn’t bet money on it…” 

“I like this Al of yours. She appears as if she could fit into any group, and find love and light there. And, I feel she knows what she wants.” 

“Yeah, she could make friends with a Khalaban,” Wyatt waved himself off when his companion didn’t understand the reference. “She…. was exactly what I needed.” 

“Oh?” Redfall pushed, ever so gently, with a refilled beverage offered as extra leverage. Wyatt took the cup – wood carved, special – and looked inside its dark, steaming swirls. 

“She’s not my kid, though I guess legally I’m her guardian now. She’s a daughter of a friend of mine, a real firebrand called Corvats.” He smiled weakly. “Mother died in childbirth, father… he got killed, I dunno, four, five years ago now? It was some blasted border conflict, things went to shit as they always do, but this time tragedy struck, national tragedy. Nearly caused another war with our northerly neighbours, but in the end, all that was lost was a father of a now orphaned daughter, and all the time and money it took to train his replacement.” 

“And, who replaced him?” With his cup-laden hand, Wyatt pointed towards the fire, Al dancing away like she’d lived these rituals from birth to present. “Ah. I didn’t believe Great Hunters cared for lineage… the spirits that control them, mm, they are more interested in individual temperaments.” 

“Well, like father, like daughter, then. ‘Cause by the lords is she a pain in my ass too.” 

Both men paused for a second, the crackling of the fire and the roaring of the kids flowing through them. They met eyes for a second in the burning red light, and then, Redfall laughed. Wyatt didn’t know he could miss something he’d never heard, and after a second, he found himself chuckling too. 

“But, as I was saying before my rude interruption,” Redfall beamed and watched him intently, “With no one to take her in, I was the natural fit. I had wealth, status, people who could look after her even if I, personally, was not. And in the beginning, believe me, I wasn’t.” 

“Mhm?” Redfall’s hands provided ample cushion for him to watch, cat-like. 

“A ten year old is one thing. No one can prepare you for a stroppy teenager.” 

“She sounds like my sister, if I may be honest.” 

“Also a pain in the ass?” 

“Oh, yes, very much so,” and again they chuckled lightly, warmer than the fire and warding off the cold. 

Wyatt smirked, though it leaped into a sombre pool. “I can’t imagine a world without her, now. She reminds me too much of myself, it’s like… I need her there to be a mirror, and a raincheck. I want nothing more than to drag a teenager into all of this, but…” 

Wyatt trailed as his companion had leant closer, practically inspecting his stubble. “But you need her to catch you if you fall from your stead, hm?” 

“That’s…” Wyatt had no idea how to do any of this, “very apt.” 

But when their hands brushed together, it didn’t matter at all. 

---

>However, on top of this, Alsania appears to have formed a pseudo-identity for her Frame, having apparently given it a name, pronouns beyond the scope expected of an inanimate object (usually "she" and "her", although it is reported that she utilises them inconsistently), and ascribing it several human characters that her handler found difficult to parse or conclusively understand. As an example, Alsania will often talk to her Frame - even when said device has been removed of its core and is thus "unpowered" - and I too have observed her making several comments and notes towards the machine.

This propensity for verbalisation and humanisation was not limited to non-combat scenarios which, notably, brings me to our second item…<

---

Wyatt groaned, albeit not his usual sunrise growl. Long gone were his stroppy teenage days, but still the mornings gave him no blessings. Not like his father. Nothing like him. And to compound his pounding headache, Al, for perhaps the first time in her life, was up and spry and ready and waiting outside of Wyatt’s tent when he pulled back the lovingly woven door. 

“Good morning!” She grinned, and the smugness only slightly bled through – good, she was getting better at that. “Who’s that-” 

“Out of my tent,” Wyatt pulled the girl with him, his longcoat hanging loosely, tie barely a half-windsor. “I have no doubt we’re late, right?” 

“Oh, well, I wanted to bug you cos I was bored, more than anything. But then I came out of the girls tent-” Al had been set up with a group of girls her age, given she landed a full decade younger than the most juvenile Great Hunter- “and I saw that.” 

The land was flat enough that tents provided great cover of the horizon, but down one of the main horse trodden streets, a line all the way to the nearest steppe hills was drawn, the grass suddenly turning perpendicular to follow the climbing cliff. And then, before it, sat three grey-and-black shapes, hovering half way down. 

“I assume that’s-” 

“Myrisia.” Wyatt looked to her, unworried. “Airships, Al. Remember, you wanted to see them.” The girl, who had fallen just a bit behind his step, puffed up her chest and came to his side like his heroic and ever-loyal sidekick. Wyatt rubbed his eyes. “Lords above, why hasn’t someone raised the alarm?” 

“It is deliberate!” A voice shouted on approach. Redfall came from the same direction as them, pulling the last of his feathered overlayers onto himself as he ran. He hadn’t even broken a sweat, smiling as always, though he gave an odd, warmer look Wyatt’s way when he landed. 

“The- lack of alarm?” 

“These war machines of the Myrisians are all,” and he mimed the action of puffing out his chest. 

“Bluster?” Redfall nodded. “They’re covered in guns.” 

“And have super-cool biplanes!” Al chimed in. 

“Ah, dangerous as they may be, little Hunter, the Myrisians do not want a fight. They want us to surrender. There is no need for an alarm if they know we are here, and we know they are there.” 

“This wasn’t the plan last night, Redfall.” 

“… Many things weren’t,” Redfall smiled. “But do not take this for inaction. We are moving gatherer clans away, to the other side of the city.” 

“And the Hlaquoká?” Al asked. 

“And us?” Wyatt added. 

“They are sitting there as an invitation. They want us to surrender, so they are waiting for it first.” 

“Honourable of them.” 

“Foolish, really.” Redfall’s lips curved in a weird way. “They could have attacked at night. It would’ve given them the advantage. Instead they will be most visible.” 

“For?” 

“When we strike them first, naturally.” The man had an inescapable pride about him, like a basic ambush had reinvented the wheel. But when that warmth spread to Wyatt again, he pushed his glow back behind his stubble. “I will be moving soon enough. We Timber Clans have important work to do. Again we’ll meet, Mr. Wyatt!” 

“Uh, yeah, we’ll- we’ll be watching. out. For you,” he cleared his throat. “Good luck!” 

“Fly true, Red!” Alsania called after him, and as soon as the man was out of earshot, she turned to Wyatt, smug grin and all. “Oh ho ho, doth I perchance sense some gears turning in your head, old man? Has your frail, ailing heart finally felt the pang of yearning?” 

“Alsania,” there was none of the same tone in Wyatt’s voice, the blood having escaped from his face as quickly as Alsania’s then did. “Are you packed and prepped?” 

“Yes sir!” The girl saluted, seriousness still not breaking the skin. “Oh, it’s been so long, I’m so excited you wouldn’t even believe!” 

“I could and do.” 

They pushed through the camp, then through a specific set of doors besides the terminus point of the rail line that had brought them there. Despite its isolation, the one and only semi-permanent settlement of the Adzeqal had been one of the first to be added to the growing criss-cross of alliance railways – they had had to, to move their “cargo” over. The tent engulfed them both, bones and all, leading to a dimly lit stable tent, in which two, hulking, metal-spun statues stood in the commanding poses they had left them in upon disconnection. 

“Right, we’ve practised this far too much to get it wrong. Let’s use this for a field test, hm?” Wyatt pulled off his longcoat. 

“Race ya?” 

“No.” Wyatt didn’t turn before throwing his coat down to the unrugged floor. “Not today. Take your time, be slow and gentle.” 

Al seemed a little insulted at the notion, but didn’t complain. She was far too enamoured with her death machine, as always, studying it like Wyatt might a good book or the bottom of a whiskey tumbler. For his part, he examined his own too, but more like one might keep an eye on an encroaching bull, waiting for when it would, inevitably, charge and gore him. 

“Hey again, girl,” Al spoke out to the air, as if the machine could hear her, and brushed the front of its crudely welded breastplate, which it also could not feel. Alsania whispered a few things – prayers? – up to the machine, before saying louder “you gonna be good for me today?” Weird. Wyatt could stand a lot of his protege’s ‘eccentricities’, but he had limits. It was like drawing a face on a coconut, naming it, and treating it like part of the family. Shivers, that very thought caused. 

They climbed aboard through fissures in the metal, drawing out a long, fork-like plug. Wyatt watched Al intently, the girl stabbing the three daggers into the base of her skull, pain crying out through bitten lips, before she settled back into the seat, smile returned. “So I was talking to the other kids and, get this, they adore the Hlaquoká, I mean- who wouldn’t. But the Great Hunters get names, titles, revered trinkets that they hold onto or attach to their armour. Gifts galore. But, best of all, the Clans name them! Their Frames get awesome nicknames like ‘Snakeskin’ and ‘Flamemeadow’. And I was thinking about it and I realised, ‘hey, why don’t I name my Frame something too-’” 

“Alsania.” Wyatt shocked himself by the sound his fist made, the metal armour plate of his own machine still ringing. “I know you have been… tardy about reading my guidance, but I know you know this part – what do you not, under any circumstances, do with a Frame?” 

Alsania’s smile had immediately faded, but whether anger or anguish had taken over after, Wyatt couldn’t read. “Are you gonna make me say it, Old Man.” 

“Sir. I am your superior officer here, and you didn’t answer my question.” 

Alsania looked at nothing in particular. “… Don’t get attached, sir.” 

A beat of uncharacteristic silence passed, then faded with Wyatt’s sigh of relief. “Good. Always, always keep that in mind, Al. These are tools; get too attached to them, and you’ll lose yourself. You’ll become the hammer.” 

He glanced back at her, but didn’t need to see the girl’s face to know. The sound was enough, but she sniffed, wiped along her sleeve, and faced him directly. 

“I understand,” She marched by him. “I won’t get too attached, sir.” And she was gone. 

Wyatt knew how this worked. She’d go punch something, or kick a rock. Maybe cry a little, let all the feelings out, all the things Wyatt had no clue how to handle, had no clue how to heal. She’d pick herself back up as she always did, and keep smiling. So Jaga frowned in her stead, and kept that frown until he felt the stabbing pain of three needles into the base of his skull. 

“Mandate of Heaven…” he whispered his mantra, and the world slipped away.

---

>On the Fourteenth of Oktom, Lord's Year 472, at approximately nine-hundred hours, Alsania, against the apparent orders of both myself and Major Jaga in the field, rushed in to provide support for the Hlaquoká unit we were assigned to observe. Although combat was expected and planned for within the scope of this mission, Alsania's charge was sudden and, I would argue, unprompted.< 

---

“One party forwards,” Redfall had told them. “The rest will remain out of sight and close in, waiting like a predator in the brush. When negotiations inevitably go terribly, terribly wrong, we will sink their flying machines before they reach the city.” 

Clouds were rare on the central plane, so said the information packet Wyatt had read. Wind? That was near constant, bringing chills to the bones of anyone who dared live in such a hostile place, like the Adzeqal, who loved the air there dearly. Odd, then, that a light cloud cover had rolled in since the morning, and although the sun’s rays still bloomed politely down onto them, swathes of the fields leading away from the city were engulfed by cast shadows. Most from clouds – some from distant flying machines. 

“Visual distance is nothing, is it?” Al asked, her voice warped by the shell of her metal machine, its armour bolted in several sections. “We can see them. That means…” 

“If they want to be on top of us, they will be so quickly.” Wyatt smiled inside his suit-within-a-suit. They hadn’t spoken beyond commands since Frameshifting, and it was hardly the time for a heart to heart. But he remained glad Al hadn’t written him off entirely. “The Hlaquoká couldn’t rally any faster. This is all the ground they’ve got to slow them down.” 

He could hear Al’s face scrunch like old bark. “And if they can’t?” 

“… They will, kid. They will. And if they don’t, well, keep your flag high and visible.” Al’s metal shoulders shrugged, the tall, makeshift banner pole ratting in the wind. Outside the Frame, she wouldn’t even be able to carry it by her lonesome. Inside the detestable machine, it moved like a backpack. “They won’t shoot on us with our Blue and Whites flying, if they have a lick of sense to them.” 

The breeze flowed past them, and Al wouldn’t stop twisting her hands. Upon an outcropping of rock, and against Wyatt’s command, she’d put down the swords she always carried. He let her do so, and the two stood watching, the land so flat that the very curve of the Earth had made the Hlaquoká disappear. 

“Come on, Alsania,” Wyatt smiled again, though it felt more for himself. A calmness had found him, the awful calm before the storm. “Where’s the spunkiness? You sound almost weary.” 

“I’m not.” 

“Yes you are.” 

“Old man, I am not!” She shoved his metal body, if only to prove a point. 

Jaga laughed, loud enough so his mic and her speakers would all pick it up. “That’s more like you-” 

“I’m not afraid for me, sir!” Al shouted, a tension still on her voice that Wyatt had missed. “It’s- it’s them I’m so scared about!” 

Wyatt looked back to The Great Horn, the few permanent wood structures by the lakeshore rising like ancient giants above the sea of yurts. Alsania turned with him, but couldn’t look long. 

“Al… hey, it’ll be alright.” 

“You of all people know that’s not true.” She mumbled, and despite himself, Wyatt felt anger rise from the slight. Then, the teenager sighed. “Alright, fine, I’ll be spry and chipper again, old man. Nothing to worry about. In fact, I’m raring for action. Let’s go already, huh?” 

“Sir.” 

“… Sir.” 

“And you know that we’re just here to observe-” 

They saw the movement before they heard it, but like mayflies in a savannah, the distant hives had been easy to ignore. The sound could not be. Whirring like a thousand wasps, choking the sky, despite the far distance, buzzing with rage. Gunfire had a distinct sound at every distance, and this far away, where things could only be spotted through magnified lenses, it sounded like dolls being pushed off a table, and bracing against the floor. Thump-thump-thump. 

“And so it begins…” Wyatt mumbled. “Well, best not to rush. Al, let’s repeat the Mantras, get ourselves in the right headspace-” 

“They need our help…” Al whispered back, so quiet it slithered out from her amplifiers. 

“What was that, Calliad?” 

“They need our help, sir.” Al turned to him. “I- I can feel it. They’re in disarray. It’s chaos, I can- we can-” 

Wyatt wasn’t a part of that equation. It was ‘we’ in the singular, the exclusive. We, the joined pair. We, pilot and Frame. Wyatt almost reached out and pulled out her core, there and then, but instead, he grabbed her by the shoulder. “Al,” his grip tightened until she rescinded his attention. “Al, listen to me. The danger is not here, okay? The danger is far away. That’s why we’re staying here-” 

“Not that far! It’s just over the next bloody hill, sir!” 

“It’s far enough. There is nothing we can do now but wait. Those are our orders. So, breathe, and repeat with me, okay?” Wyatt had been forcing himself to smile for several days, but that was by far his least convincing. “Repeat after me; ‘Mandate of Heaven’–” 

A forceful pop sounded, and in the moments they hadn’t been looking, a column of flame had erupted from the Earth mere kilometres away, a volcano spewing ash. Jaga couldn’t tear his eyes away. It captured him like a net, the sights and sounds jostling him and shaking him until his brain was liquid and pouring from his ears. A thousand memories, a thousand sails and sunken sailors and bloodless skin and eyes looking into him, dead, flooded through and smashed together like cymbals. 

And in his moment of weakness, Alsania escaped his loosened grip, and her legs were springing away like a jack-rabbit running towards the hunter and his gun. 

“Al…” Wyatt said to no one, and turned, following the trail of trodden grass. “Alsania!” He shouted, unbecoming of himself, and took off after the girl. 

> Her handler has stated that he made the appropriate judgement to follow her onto the battlefield. At the time, said combat primarily involved strafing runs from Myrisian aero-plane units, countered by the primarily ceremonial and melee weaponry of the Hlaquoká. However, Alsania showed a sudden improvement in her capacity as a Frame Pilot, able to move at speeds comparable to that of Major Jaga, her significantly more experienced superior officer.    During this assault, however, despite Alsania’s forward thinking in taking down a pursuing biplane in the interim, it was not meant to be…< 

“Al!” Wyatt shouted, voice ragged, across the tinny transmitter, invisible light shooting out in all directions and cutting the swaying grass. “Alsania, stop!” 

She still hadn’t replied. Her radio was firing static – left turned on, like he’d told her time and time again to stop doing – but Wyatt knew her Frame, nimble and lightly armoured, could out run him. If signals wouldn’t work to reach her, he couldn’t catch her either. 

Not at speed. He slowed to a jog but kept her metal sarcophagus in sight, always in sight. The rim of the Lake of Souls had long since disappeared below the chasing horizon, and Wyatt realised the truth of the central plane – it was flat, from a certain perspective, but to his navigator’s eye, it was a rolling sea, the hills and its waves. Shallow and calm though they were, he kept losing Alsania over the next [peak]. The sounds of gunfire only amplified, but to Wyatt’s ears, there was nothing but his breath, and that little bit of static over the line. 

The first Biplane, bright red and white across its belly, rocketed over their heads, launching nothing but fear with just the rumble of its engines. The pilot, skilled in his craft, pitched and doubled back, new prey spotted, and Wyatt just stood there like an idiot. 

A flash of metal passed by him, and then he heard the charging footsteps. Alsania had turned and was running back the way they’d come, towards the next peak, blades drawn. The move was taxing, as her breath became loud enough to be heard over the line. “We had picked the perfect name and everything, you know,” she gritted. 

“Wh-what? Wyatt shouted, hand barely on his sheath. 

“Her name is Fireball.” 

The Frame set ablaze, its skin becoming a roaring furnace, and as her speed inched closer to the peak of the shallow hill, the noise of the biplane folded back around. Both competed in Wyatt’s mind, threatening to eject him. Yet, despite her bouts of naivety and stress, Al appeared fearless. As her Frame soon resembled its namesake, her bounding legs launched her up the ramp, and moments after she’d lost touch with the ground, her wreathes of flame collided with the oncoming harasser. Splints and blasts of fuel shot up in the sky, and one giant, smouldering chunk of debris crashed back down, unfolding and scaring the earth as Al braced, and stood up again terrifyingly triumphant. 

Wyatt’s legs, frozen to the grass, finally let him go, but as he approached the valley’s bottom, Alsania once again approached in the opposite direction, the metal of her machine, down to the bones, twisting with chars and smoke. The radio still played, and Alsania was humming a tune across it. 

“Al,” Wyatt growled. He’d been caught off guard by this – some part of the girl she’d never chosen to show him – but that ended now. Gone was Wyatt the old man, and so the major had returned. “You are to turn back to the city at once. We are returning to our observation point, and we will do what we came here to do – observe, and no more.” 

“You don’t get to decide that,” The machine head of Al twisted unnaturally to face him. “You never did.” 

“I do, Al. As your commanding officer-” 

“Come on, Old Man. I’ve trained with you for four years, and I’ve never once seen you do a fraction of what I just did. And what I’m just about to do. Either you have the power to stop me saving the Adzeqal, or I’ve been beyond you this whole time.” 

“Al-” 

“I’ve known about this from day one! I felt it deep inside me, the first time I connected to Fireball-” 

“Stop calling it that.” 

“No! You need to stop being so terrified of the future! You spend your days writing treatises on why these machines are evil and you don’t even see everyone around you who’s using them anyways. Maybe it’s time someone used them to do something good for a change!” 

“You just ripped two souls off the face of this planet, Alsania! A pilot and his gunner, echoes of you and I! How are you incapable of seeing that!” Wyatt lurched forwards, and grabbed her at the gap between her pauldrons and breastplate. “You are not the hero here, nor am I! I haven’t kept you from your ‘true power’, I have saved you from it!” 

Alsania shoved, and Wyatt slammed his other leg into the ground for balance. “They got in my way,” she said, and turned, and paused. In fact, they both paused, as a shadow crept over them, the wind bringing its chill through every crack in his armour. And it came from no cloud. 

“Alsania-” 

“They’ve got past the Adzeqal, we need to-” 

The sound of cannonfire was, and would always be, the most terrifying noise in all of Wyatt’s life. Three shots, the light and smoke heard first before the sky itself cracked open to make way for the coming shells. As had happened too many times in his life to count, the machine that cradled Wyatt reached out to help him, guiding his blubbering, broken soul forwards. ‘That’s it,’ he imagined it was saying to him in a patronising, loving way, ‘a few more steps and we’re finished here.’ Usually, those thoughts would end when the knife inserted into his foe’s head, so large as to sever everything instantly. Painless, one might say. 

There, however, he stepped forth, metal legs riding, and shoved Alsania behind him. 

Too bad. The shells were already flying, but only now did the trajectory become clear. He’d stepped the wrong way. 

One. Two. Three. The ground became sky and the earth became fire and Alsania took the brunt of the shrapnel and force, sending them both flying. 

---

> Myrisian cannonfire was reported. According to Major Jaga's own post-combat report, both he and Petty Officer Calliad were caught in the strike, sending them both flying. Upon realising the dangerous and vulnerable position Petty Officer Calliad had placed herself in, Jaga acted swiftly…< 

---

“Al!” Wyatt mumbled, then screamed. “Alsania!” 

The smoke flew, and the mud rained down. He shook, rattled Al’s limp body. His Druidium body, reverence given to the unworthy dead, rattled too. 

The airship was escaping. All of them, the squadron and their engines, were away, the whine descending lower and lower to a whisper. 

He felt rain, but not on his back. The pitter-patter of it from a thousand miles away, the sound echoing through a forest canopy as it comes to life. Alive. Nothing about this was alive. Those shells of metal, like bullets bobbing in a pernicious manner across the sky, tempting the storm to strike them. That’s where he heard the rain drum. 

The lake. He could feel it all around him, beneath his feet and now, in rising steam, above. He reached out and he reached far, his fingers stretching wide and trying to tear. His upper and lower arms moved in unison. 

Admiral Phillip P. Jaga had enjoyed the Violin, and had, during his fatherly years, tried to instil that love within Wyatt. When the boy refused to pay attention, of course, he’d earn himself a smack, just like his father had done to him, and his father to him, and his father, and his father… 

Regardless. Concerts. Wyatt could only think of a concert. A conductor, hands raised and counting and ever present rhythm in his head. In truth, Wyatt had never wanted to be a violinist. He was the symphony director, flexing his fingers, and from kilometres away did his orchestra rise, crystalline and chiming. 

---

> And he reports that he sent a cone of ice from the Lake of Souls up into the sky, into which several of the biplane squadrons collided…< 

---

He heard a percussion of his own design as the engines melted against his powerful tune. Under his breath, he spoke the words had saved him years before, and every dawn and dusk since.

“Mandate of Heaven, with words it is riven. The land it divides, in signs, and demons it shall leaven. So if I wish to mount this beast, upon my loving it shall feast. All mortal things and mortal strings, eternally, they must be ceased.” 

---

> However, the Major then reported that this action did not cease, and that, quote, "upon treading lightly around Alsania's unmoving body, [the Major] was able to generate a solid ice tower larger than previously thought possible, extending so high that one of the Myrisian airships was impaled upon its peak..."< 

---

He looked down at his feet, his eyes opening for maybe the first time. He couldn’t see her body, only the holes in the metal that the shrapnel had left. 

The tower grew larger.

---

>I have confirmed the existence of this marvellous creation myself, and do believe Major Wyatt's report on the version of events - if not he, then one of the Hlaquoká was able to generate this devastating attack, and both present a dramatic shift in the upper limits of what was thought possible for Frame Pilots to both achieve and handle.< 

---

The next explosion was louder, less like a distant break in his concord, and more someone trundling up to the conductor’s stand, pulling him down, and beating him to death. Embers flew across the sky like roaming fireflies, though Wyatt quickly realised they were birds, small flocks of them that had nested around the giant hollow Myrisian shells. The smell of melting and burning and fire again, it was familiar, too familiar, but he couldn’t turn back. He had to keep watching, the wind blowing smoke.

“Mandate of Heaven!” came his next repeating verse, the words flaying. 

Voices came from behind and above. On the hill’s crest, several figures had emerged like small, mechanical rabbits, covered in fineries of immaculate design. Geometric patterns criss-crossed in lines, leather and cloth filling most gaps where bulbous hunks of metal did not. Wyatt would call the Great Hunters crude, if he were neither too polite, nor currently ablaze himself. All Frames are crude and bluntforce, he reminded himself again. 

His hands were covered in engine grease. Al’s body was below and he couldn’t help her. All he could see were the Hlaqua, a Frame with symbols of Redfall’s Hunting Clan adorned all across it, watching the horizon in awe, as a new mountain breached the sky. 

His throat burned raw for the oils in the air. He flicked his speakers to internal and to their maximums, yet he couldn’t scream anymore. There wasn’t enough air. “Stop, Redfall… Turn and run…” He hissed and begged. “Don’t look at me, or her, or that… There is nothing for you out there but death! This path is barren, please… Please Run! Flee!” his words melted into the distant explosive songs. “Save yourselves from this… save your loved ones, your sister, your family, your people…” 

Redfall’s metal eyes, stained glass and muddy, stayed on the horizon. Every single surviving Great Hunter stood mesmerised by the sight. Wetness hit his face, his barriers already fallen as he finally looked down. 

“Save them from all of this…” 

---

>Thus, I must conclude that, despite these setbacks, and our higher involvement than was assigned and agreed to by Upper Command, I am still of the belief that this Operation was a success for the 3rd Experimental Division and the broader Signan Frame Army as a whole. I assert this for several reasons: 

   1. We were able to successfully observe the Hlaquoká, and confirm that their grasp of Piloting, whilst advanced for self-developed techniques, remains less productive than our own Piloting methodologies.

   2. We were able to observe the apparent constraints of Piloting being either changed (presenting a "malleability" factor), or entirely being broken. With more research into the actions of Major Jaga during the battle, other Pilots may be capable of learning and utilising abilities on this scale.

   3. The Adzeqal peoples have gained significant trust in and respect for Signan Frame Army capabilities, potentially providing avenues going forwards for further synergisation, integration, research, and control into the Hlaquoká Frames, not to mention the diplomatic and economic benefits such a relationship would entail.<

---

Noises and splutters came from below, and immediately he began to cradle. “I’ve got you, Al. I’ve got you,” Wyatt held the girl’s head, it barely filling his whole hand, as he pulled her crumbled body from the still-smouldering chest of her machine. Red spread down his cheeks and pores and into his blasted stubble. 

“Old man…?” The girl, fourteen, whispered. Not whimpered, or cried, or screamed or shouted or lost her temper or laughed or smiled or anything that Al would usually do. Al did not whisper. Al would not, she refused, it wasn’t her nature, it wasn’t. “Papa…” she whispered again. 

“I’m… I’m here, sweetheart,” he couldn’t hold tighter for fear of her shattering, all the cracks already bleeding. “I’ve got you.” 

“I’ve got you.” He said again, quieter next. “You’re going to be okay.” Nothing. 

Quieter still, as if the great Wyatt Jaga had become a field mouse, dying in the burning grasses around. “I’ve got you, Alsania. Please don’t go so soon.” 

And when Alsania, finally, burst into tears, a weight lifted from his chest, so fast that it came out in his own, choking sobs. 

---

>I hope this report will prove illuminative to the High Marshal and Marshal committee, and the results of this endeavour will have proven themselves extremely fruitful for the continuing and broadening development of Frame warfare. The tides of fortune have fallen in the favour of Frames, and I believe it would be best to continue casting our lot in this bold new direction. We are at the forefront of a new era of mankind upon Hellena, and I feel it is the duty of the Signan Republic to uphold the ideals of democracy, liberty, and freedom further afield through the adoption of this new technological (re-)advancement.

Regards, Commodore Arshano Faust, SFAC, Commanding Officer of 3rd Experimental Division.< 

---

Her body lay across the tarp that, at one point, was white. Why did they always use white in medicine? It made the blood and sinew obvious to see, Wyatt guessed, but what a horror it must’ve been to wash out. The Adzequal woved medical beds from reeds off the Lake of Souls – by now, more for tradition’s sake than any sort of practicality. All those things, those little distractions, were the veil the spectre of death wore whenever it tore down to the earth to take another. Revere it, deny it, fear it, it came for all. 

But today, no spirit had come to collect the soul of Alsania Delores Calliad. Her breathing was slow and methodical, aided by a machine that looked far removed from the rest of the medical hut; her wounds were bandaged and wrapped, also once white; and her eyes stayed shut, but rolled to and fro every so often. Still in there, somewhere, just letting her body heal in the meantime. 

Three days was more than enough time for Myrisia to offer a ceasefire. They could’ve pushed on – Wyatt knew the great peak of ice that now dominated the lakeshore just outside his tent was a fluke. But the Myrisians didn’t know that, or need to know that – ‘this is what we can do,’ the frigid pinnacle proclaimed. ‘Come forth then, ye foolish beasts, and yet more mountains shall be born.’ Stupid ignorance. His stupid ignorance. 

And in all that, neither the Myrisians nor the Adzeqal left satisfied. It was a swift, bloody, and particularly pointless war. All war was pointless to Wyatt – he had seen too much, fought over too little – But this one… this felt different. This one saw villages be annihilated by eruptions of heat and stone above. This one saw countless burn alive inside metal tombs, some screaming metal palaces in the sky, some barely taller than a man and ten times as fearsome. This one nearly took the painstaking life Wyatt had built, and shattered it like a brick to glass. 

This one saw a fourteen year old be cut down by gunfire. It wasn’t the first, and it would most certainly not be the last. 

He squeezed Al’s hand once. Twice. The girl twitched, couldn’t roll from the IV but made an effort to change position regardless. “Leave me alone,” he could hear her say. Besides the whirring machine, there was silence. 

Wyatt slid out of the medical tent, the blue-green crooked tower that he had built still pointing to the sky like the waved daggers of the Yanvellan. Faust had, with bright countenance, shown him napkin calculations for how long the entire structure would take to melt back down into the Lake of Souls. “Could be anywhere from three years to a century, depending on the weather,” he’d said with a smile, “A mark like this, made so strongly that for maybe decades to come, people here will see it, and think of you. Isn’t that exciting, Jaga?” Wyatt shuddered. He hadn’t answered, and never would. He was more surprised that the Adzeqal didn’t hate him – no outsider touches the Lake of Souls. But instead, Wyatt had been treated as some saviour, a herald of good tidings from here until… whenever. There was nothing worse in Jaga’s mind than being revered. 

“Hoi, Wyatt Jaga!” He heard suddenly down the track, and tried his best to smile as Redfall approached, then dragged and lifted him into a hug. Smaller but stockier, Redfall dropped him again after a few shakes of greeting. “How goes Al?” 

“She’s…” he hunted for the right words, but the entire interaction and days of sleeplessness had stolen them. “Asleep.” 

“Asleep? No longer alive?” 

“No, no, she’s okay. But… please don’t disturb her. Let her rest.” 

Redfall breathed out, touching his hand to his chest. “Regardless, we have been blessed by the spirits – first by your miracle, and second by hers. Both are- very lucky, you must know.” 

“I don’t feel lucky,” Wyatt glimpsed the side of the impermanent city that couldn’t be saved from the pursuing fires, and further still, the still smouldering corpse of Myrisian pride, dead like a songbird. “I feel… ill, actually.” 

“Why?” Redfall tilted his head, his smile confused but trying. “You are incredibly gifted, Wyatt. Alsania too, I hope and pray, to survive as she did.” 

“Gifted?” Wyatt scoffed, but remembered himself, course-correcting to a sigh. “No, no, you are right. We’re lucky to be alive.” 

“You know, I don’t believe it, but there are some who say you are more than saviours. Some claim you are the next to be worthy of golden fletchings, for the knowledge you’ve brought us. A leader amongst the Clans, outsider be damned. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” 

“… What?” It was Wyatt’s turn to tilt his head. “That’s- what knowledge?” 

Redfall turned to him with a shifting grin, like Wyatt would enjoy what he was about to say. “Our ways – that of the Hlaquoká – may have been the first, or may not have been. It matters not. What is clearly true, my Signan… friend, is that whatever edge we once had is now on the verge of being lost. Someday, probably soon, we will no longer be the “Great Hunters” of our beautiful interior plain. We will simply be other Frame Pilots, and ill equipped ones at that.” 

“Redfall, what are you saying-” 

“The First Way has been defended for far too long. We need to grow, and keep growing, like the toughest grass in all the plains. And to do that, we just have to follow what you showed us, Wyatt. This way, we can stay in step with all others, and retain our title.” 

“No… no, Redfall.” 

“Isn’t this what you wished to show me?” The man asked, a strange innocence in his eyes, like he’d lost enough years to be Al’s age. 

“No!” Wyatt was on the verge of throwing up from all the toxins breeding in his chest. “No, this isn’t what I wanted at all, Redfall!” 

“The Signans see us as an ally, correct, Wyatt? And to maintain that connection, well… we can’t live in our own past forever. And, and think about this,” Redfall stepped closer, hand reaching like it had nights prior. and Jaga folded into himself instead of shoving him away, “if we Adzeqal and our Federation make friends with your Signa… won’t there be more time? For… for us?” 

“Redfall!” Wyatt shouted, so grateful that the city seemed to have collective lethargy after the battle, and the streets were mostly empty. “Redfall, please stop and listen to yourself! Listen to what you’re saying, what you’re wanting out of your Frames!” He pointed to the mountain of ice. “This is not what you want. It is a curse, Red, please.” 

Redfall blinked at him, like his thinking was entirely alien, and was taking ages to parse. “Wyatt, this- this is what’s next for Frames. Power nearing that of Spirits, maybe even matching them. And if others are to have it, then… you must know that we Adzeqal are survivors of this harshest of places, and we will do what we must to maintain, as we always have. We must adapt to this new future of Frames-” 

Wyatt grabbed the other man’s hand, found his eyes and demanded he look. But then, his grip softened, fingers loosely laced. “Redfall, I’m begging you. What you and your brethren have is beautiful and exceptional and- more than enough already. You, as far as we know, were the first peoples in the world to- to figure out Frames, to understand them! You have the most perfect view of them already. Do not follow in my stead.” Wyatt fell to his knee, still holding Redfall’s hand, but now he couldn’t meet the man’s gaze. “Please. I can’t bear to see you swallowed by it too.” 

Nothing was said for several seconds, and the whole world wobbled. Maybe that was just Wyatt’s glassy eyes, however. He couldn’t say. The silence became so remarkable, he could hear the ice, a hundred metres up, slowly melting. Drip. Drip. Drip. He swallowed that sound like cold water, and looked up to see shame. 

Wyatt knew that look. The glare of failure, but, in Redfall’s case, it looked heart-piercing. His face contorted suddenly, his mind made, as he pulled his hand away and shoved it to his side. Wyatt stood – still no words came out of either of them – and Redfall, his eyes nearly golden in the morning sun, adjusted his armour of reeds and cloak of feathers, and refused to look his way. 

He finally scoffed, though his heart wasn’t in it. “Why should I trust the outsider telling me to stop running, when he’s already broken into a full sprint?” 

Redfall looked at him once more, for the last time. And then, he turned on his heels, first walking and then, when presumably he thought he was out of sight, the other man broke into a sprint away, out into the sea of smouldering grass. Wyatt, for his part, didn’t breathe for several seconds, but finally the air flowed in, and he choked and crumpled and coughed. 

When he finally caught himself, the smoke no longer billowing, he dragged himself through the slush of mud and blood, debris ejected from cracks and filled with ash, back to the tent. Back to where Al was. 

Her eyes were open when he finally made it back. Maybe he’d been wandering for weeks, he did that a lot. She tilted her head ever so slightly, the braces enwrapping her cranium hating the action, and smiled. Wyatt couldn’t return the gesture. “Hey… Old man,” her voice was taught and dry, but music still played on its reed. “I thought… you’d left… me…”  

Wyatt forced through the same smile, his cheeks aching as he did. “Sorry, kiddo… not yet.” 

---

Edited by Jennifer C.

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ASCENSION/DECLENSION

A moment. A pause. A second’s breath across the back of my neck. A shiver down my spine, wakes up my sleeping joints.
I breathe in, and I breathe out. I’m drowning, crushed by pressures unknown. I’m breathing, and no air is coming out. My lungs are filling, intoxicated and slurring with ashes and dirt and mud. I don’t even want to scream – I doubt I could if I tried.
I’m dead.
My eyes are sealed shut and won’t budge. I’m frozen and encased and entombed. I can’t hear and I can’t see and I can’t feel anything beyond the walls that is I. And I am dead.
A sound, that is not. A murmur most quiet and singing with rot. It chirps along my brain stem and my ears twitch alive. But I do not hear it. It just is, inside my mind. It reaches my brain in an instant, and it is not sound, but a presence, a being ahead in the void-
I open my eyes. And you’re there. You shouldn’t be there. Who are you?
…Who am I?
Where am I?
Oh.
I’m dead.
The Tower rises tall from the pool. The ancient seas, the lossless depths. Sinking. Drowning. Sinking. Drowning. Sinking drowning sinking drowning sinking drowning.”

There is naught but the Tower but I and I am the Tower and I am dead and the Tower is dead and from it I fall and my wings shan’t spread and I am dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead I’m

A jolt shot through Sana’s skull. She looked ahead, like she’d never opened her eyes before. Then, she blinked several times, though she could tell the command never reached her eyelids. The young pilot wanted to blink, her eyes ached and mists drifted torturously down her cheeks. She urged herself, desperately, but the signal severed too soon, and refused to survive any further. Yet still, for a moment, her vision went dark, and then lightened again, as if the blink she’d ordered had occurred regardless. Her eyes were granted little relief. 

The ground was cold; not a coldness that could be felt, but one that undeniably made its presence known to her. A dampness too – illusory, and dancing with gentle ripples that did not exist, the first sensation she’d had in several minutes, maybe years. Below her spread a layer of deep purple water, but when her hand submerged in whatever constituted this seabed, that depth went nowhere beyond its hue. Sana clutched her hammering head, groaned, and lifted her face from the shallows, to discern her sunless surroundings. What was that darkness beyond her, anyhow? An unending, umbral void, pockmarked with small dots of shimmering glitter far off in the distance. So stretched out on the horizon, she couldn’t tell if the faint movement she saw was but a mere trick of the eye. A starfield above that felt at once foreign and deeply intimate. No amount of false blinking would change it, this remained the world she found herself in; between two infinite, barren planes of purple and black. It was only then that, a few centimetres from her face, her focus narrowed, and she was met by an iridescent form, staring right back at her with piercing, yellowish eyes. 

“Ah-!” Sana cried, falling backwards against the puddle that was the floor, ceiling, and walls. Her hands plunged into the water and floated on the nothingness beneath it, the body they supported seeming weightless. Ready to scramble into combat, she snapped back to the creature just before her, but stopped in her tracks.  

A dog. With triangular ears and a tilted head, it sat as a beacon in the fields of midnight. Starfields and nebulae pulsed and flowed inside the lines of its form, following the curves of its elemental visage, all cobbled together into a single, canine silhouette. Alien and astonishing and uncannily familiar, it was beyond any doubt, a dog. 

“Uh…” Sana did not hum. The words simply formed in swirling clouds around her – she neither said nor heard them, they just existed when she needed them to exist, and ceased as soon as she didn’t. “…What?” She turned back to the creature. It tilted its head the other way, still carrying a confused wariness to its gaze. Sana had only seen a few dogs in her time. Her knowledge on how to treat regular pups was limited, let alone glowing, nebulae filled ones. And yet, when she met its beady eyes, a profound connection flowed back and forth between them, some inseverable tether. She lifted her hand in a cautious wave, and though the image of her palm roamed the field before her, she neither felt her hand move, nor saw anything at all. 

“Hi?” Her faux-wave spread, and the dog heard regardless, reacting accordingly. After a moment’s more discretion, it trotted over, brushing its head against Sana’s hip. It had no fur to speak of, and she couldn’t feel any returning force as they collided. But, as it brushed alongside, making a soft panting noise that wasn’t real, an airy texture passed by her. It tickled. “Heh,” she stifled a laugh faking itself in her throat, “So you’re friendly, yeah?” 

Sana reached across and petted the animal, which wouldn’t be so odd, if it weren’t for the pounces of nerves rushing across a right hand of bone and tissue, one that had never existed. Sana’s existence, her sense of normalcy, was predicated upon, amongst other things, the one-and-a-half arms she was blessed with. Her need and desire to fix, and build, and tinker, all came about, originally, so she could build herself a full right arm. So, she recoiled, warily studying the back of this limb that was not hers, that had never been there before – should never have been there. Turning it over, and in an instant that escaped her, the flesh became a machine, covered in the hot pinks and gunmetals of the familiar device of her own creation. Her arm, made manifest in this world, as if noticing the incongruency had made the universe jump into motion, and hurry to cover its mistake. It was spectral, like her new companion, but it was hers – a true phantom limb. Nothing more could be felt through the hand, and for that, she sighed in relief.  

Glancing back at the dog, which had ambled along to sit beside her in a watchman’s stance, she spoke again. “Well, I’m Sana. Though…I think you might know that already.” The glowing creature didn’t respond before rustling its head, ejecting fleas it almost certainly didn’t have. ”Have you got a name, Dog?” 

Still no direct response. Sana pouted, as the creature returned to actions more expected of its form, resting, watching, ears arisen. Alert? 

“Alright then, I’ll make one for you. I’ll call you…” She thought for several long moments, realising she had never had a pet to name. “Dog. You’re at least…vaguely dog-shaped, right? You like that?” 

Dog woofed in a manner that she deemed cheery enough, its ears perked and its mouth curled with a panting smile. Sana could see just down its throat, and inside was colours beyond imagination – she chose not to question that. Instead she imagined a vast homestead encompassing them; two companions, sitting on a porch, watching the afternoon sun together in wintery Dulkat. Such distant memories did that image draw upon, and after another unreal blink, Sana recalled the dark void that enveloped them both. She was grateful for the stars, anything less would leave her far too alone with herself. More than usual, that is.  

Sana ran her hand up the dog’s back, which it accepted well enough. “Right then, Dog. I have questions about this place,” She glanced around the desolate void as she groomed across the spectral, furless form. “And I’m betting you have answers, hm? Or, well, hoping.” 

Dog didn’t bark this time, instead turning its head with a slightly confused whine, as if to say “What? Huh? Why are you asking a dog for the meaning of the universe?” 

“…I’m taking that as a ‘yes, Oksana, I have every answer you could ever need, and also you are very cool and talented and everyone wants to be your friend.‘” Sana said, squishing the unamused animal’s empty cheeks. “Okay, question one: what is this place? Where are we?” 

Dog’s eyes never left her line of sight as she spoke, starry pupils full of attention on the distant boundary between the pool-that-was-the-floor and the great heavens above. But, focus didn’t beget an answer, as after a several second staring contest with the dog’s skullcap, Sana rolled her eyes, and leant away. 

“Alright, fine, maybe that’s a bit too… broad. What about you then? Who are you? What are you? Beyond… a dog.” 

Dog cocked its head to look up at her – which is better than a blank stare, she reasoned. But, still, they refused to say a word. The cool water was starting to bother her clothes, as far as any of the involved sensations existed. 

“Y’know, maybe expecting a dog to be able to speak was a bad idea, whether they be a ghost-dog or not.” She hummed, resting her head, that wasn’t real, on her hand, that was even less so. “Alright, we’ll go as simple as possible – bark if yes, say nothing if no, okay? Then, are you real? And, also, are we real? Am I real? Is this place real?” 

Dog looked her way, head still tilting, before it lumbered onto its side against her, eyes back on the far off line. Sana sighed, a pitying glance on her face as she gave Dog a scritch behind its ears.  

“I’m starting to think I’m more of a cat person,” she joked. How is every part of you so soft, and yet so furless? Dog woofed at that.  

Wait, can you hear me? The dog huffed again, which she interpreted as as close to a “yes” as she’d get. Funny. Glad you can read my thoughts, asshole. Sana chuckled to herself, the absurdity of the situation finally starting to sink its claws in. “I’m going crazy. I’ve been here…Gods know how long, and I’m already talking- thinking to the dog.” She muttered aloud, brushing across the animal’s spectral sides, and ignored the lump of anxiety building in her stomach. “At least a cat would lead me somewhere. Dogs, as loyal as you are, just follow you around, hanging off every word.” 

She knew who she was now, that fog had cleared at least. Oksana… something or other- okay, the details didn’t matter. She knew she existed. She knew she was a Pilot, whatever that was, for some…group? Some group of other Pilots? And that word, that reverberating word, bounced against every wall in her skull. 

“Kat…” She whispered again, the name so familiar on her tongue. “Wish I could talk to her right now. She’d probably have some…weird, complicated explanation for whatever the hells this place is, and whatever the hells you are, and why I feel so- out of place. It might be wrong but…it’d be a damn sight better than my sum total of nothing. This- stars, space, all that, it’s more her department.” Sana thumbed at her wrist, searching for an azure blue hair band to roll between her fingers, but felt nothing. “Though…I guess she’s not here. I’m- I’m kinda glad it’s me here, right? I kinda… I kinda deserve it.”  

Dog perked up, its ears twitching and pointing to the stars above. It lifted its head to meet hers as she crumpled, its astral snout prodding at her mildly in some attempted comfort.  

“I do wish she was here, I do, but…not alone. Not like this. Together, or not at all. I can handle that, even if you weren’t here Dog, as- helpful as you are in explaining any of this. I’m used to this, y’know? I’m glad it’s me here. I’m glad it’s me and not them. I’m glad it’s me and not her. I’m…” Her hands rested on her forehead. She felt a bleariness coming on, and desperately tried to stop it – who knows what crying in this place could do, what cracking could leave her vulnerable to. But, in the middle of her state, Dog descended under her arms, pushing them up and forcing its chin into Sana’s closing shell. It was a beastly canine, but after enough wrangling, it finally fit, panting non-air rising in fake, illusionary ways and wetting her face. Or maybe that was the made-up tears, she couldn’t tell through her self-imposed numbness. She wanted to scream at Dog, honestly. Or punch it, but who the hell would punch a dog? Sana was angry and upset at things far beyond her comprehension, but she wasn’t cruel, right? She honestly couldn’t remember. But in that moment, she wished she could do anything. Move, talk, sing, dance, cry and cry in a way that wasn’t faked, so real that its hyperreality warned her of the truth in its lie. She wanted to see Kat. Any of her friends really, their name distant, but the sheen of Kat’s glasses, the blue in her hairband, the slightest edges of a smile on her face drenched in rainwater and funeral nerves are what spun in her head, over and over. But there was nothing to be done but sink, down and down and down. 

Until, she began to float upwards. Unnoticeable at first, until a quick glance beyond her leaking eyes let her see the stars begin to move, for certain this time, like satellites in the sky at night. Some instinct pulled her attention to one light in particular, a call from the universe to her mind. That star seemed to twinkle distinctly from the others, as if acknowledging her pleas, and somehow she knew.  

“That’s- that’s Kat?” The absurdity no longer phased her, and Sana accepted the truth of the matter. Kat was up there in that light, a star out of reach. The others might be too, but she couldn’t see them. Perhaps even Morgan, some distant ember, burned beyond the infinite horizon. A sob swallowed down her throat, but Sana refused to dissolve. If her prayers were answered once, then…  

Sana bit her lip and commanded, channelling all focus into extending her will to the heavens. Take me to her.

A moment passed, just enough for her heart to begin to drop, but then the world lurched again. It was hard to tell which shifted, herself or everything that was not; she moved without motion, and propelled without propulsion. Hovering there, boots just disconnected from the water, she glanced to the beast that sat just before her, as if leading her, and the million specks of a glittered horizon began to shift past. Each pearl sank into the other side of the sky as they drifted, faster and faster, all except that single light she had reached for. Clutching her arms around Dog tightly, on instinct, she thanked whatever spirit leant her this soft pillow-y thing for her travels. The lights accelerated further and further, until they became mere lines of motion, forming a tunnel of blazing radiance that flew around her and into her and through her, taking all thought and understanding with it. Every colour in cosmos smattered against both her eyes and the corners of reality – if there remained any difference now.  

The chosen star grew larger, brighter, hotter – closer, its gaze burning yellow and bright.  The speed was dizzying now, and a thrum in her ears grew oppressive, its pitch raising higher and higher. Sana lifted her hand over her eyes to shield from the glare, but as they were engulfed by the light, it burned through her spectral arms too, the beams and godly rays alight as the chariot approached. The heat, the terrible heat, seared the nerves that didn’t exist, right to her very core. 

Then, in a single thunderous clash of rumbling noise, a gong hit by some divine being, she halted. Without whiplash or even a single jolt it ceased, as if she had been stationary all along, her journey only hinted at by the distant stars and trails of deep purple that had stopped growing in the distance, and shrinking behind her. After a moment of confirmation, she finally lowered her shaking hand, and raised her anxious eyes.  

A new void surrounded her. This dimension was similar to the first, perhaps completely so, though she hadn’t sat still long enough to memorise the patterns in the stars. Dog was still there too, mercifully – already it had become her anchor in this alien place. There was one glaring change, however. At the infinite chamber’s centre, a figure floated in ambient grey and a slight-yellow light from above, like a lamppost washed out by the sun. Their hair drifted above them, splayed out as if underwater, and before them rested a small, neat, bundled cat. At least half the size of Dog, it let off soft breaths, in and out, with at least half its body lying submerged in the pool that constituted the floor. 

“Uh,” Sana spoke without thinking, as she was often known to do, her bearings having barely allowed her stomach to settle from all the lurching movement. “Hello? Hi?” 

The cat stirred after a moment with a humble yawn, and swivelled its head in a single scan. It too had a body filled with stars and streams of light, yet it lazed in this warm glow like any cat would in tender sunshine. Unlike Dog, it had wide, pupiled eyes; pupils which, when they landed on Sana, jolted into diamonds, and the cat leaped onto its paws to hiss at the two intruders. 

“Woah, woah!” Sana waved her hands as if it might work to calm the glowing creature down. “I- I mean no harm! Or- I come in peace? Both of them, I’m doing both of them!” 

The cat quickly ignored her, its attention turning to Dog, who simply stared down at the little creature, not an angry thought in its gaze. Maybe no thoughts at all, she wasn’t psychic. Neutral as they were, Sana felt a twinge of boredom on its face, like it was sick of a custom that had been repeated ad nauseum in previous encounters. How many times have you met? She questioned, and received no response. 

Thusly ignored, Sana glanced up at the figure whom, presumably, the cat had been protecting. For a moment, the silhouette pulsated in her eyes, like she was trying to comprehend something that truly did not exist. A warping, alien mass. The way its form occurred, all twisted and curved, meant nothing to Sana’s trying eyes, despite her mind’s attempt to decipher it. Then, as quickly as it had been scrambled, the puzzle clicked back together, and as soon as the connection had been made, memories, great and terrible, flooded back. She took a moment to be overwhelmed and gag down whatever bile her fictional stomach could produce, before composure returned through her lost breaths, and more pressing concerns came with them. 

“Kat?” She spoke gently, the mental chains of recognition and realisation joining together, link by link. Sana watched in wonder as her hair, unbound, flowed upwards in tentacular circles, forming a halo of colourless grey whips around her head. Kat’s body was covered by naught but her undersuit, equally void of colours, and her body remained afloat, boots just off the waterline. She bobbed like a most serene corpse, joined to the seabed by some terrifying weight, as her form listed to and fro, disturbed by invisible waves. 

“Sana?…” Kat slurred as if sleepwalking, and ever ever so slightly, leaned towards Sana’s voice. The cat at Kat’s base took a moment’s pause from its hiss-laden conversation with Dog, before jumping between Sana and the buoyant, restful body of Kat, commanding the interlopers “back off!”. Reluctantly, Sana complied, hands held up in defence as she let Kat and her apparent ward pass by. 

“Sorry, sorry. She’s just… She’s my friend. And I don’t know why she’s here. Is she…” Sana glanced back at the catatonic body, “is she okay? Is she safe?” 

The cat seemed surprised to hear this, its owl-like, star-filled eyes widened more than before. But with that surprise, both parties came to an impasse. The cat maintained its defensive stance, holding the line between them. 

“No…” Kat mumbled from above, her fingers twitching and shoulders seizing in distress. “Get away…from her…” 

It was then Sana noticed the other key difference to her own bubble of space. Beneath the surface of the water, meagerly shallow and infinitely deep, reflected a world very different from the one above it. Rather than a glistening void, it displayed a sunless, shrouded cavern; a chamber of purple and blue seafoam walls, lit only by a few scant torches that swung back and forth frantically. Two large, metallic forms jittered in movement, while another lay paralyzed and defenceless, a puppet with its strings cut. “Kat?” Sana asked again towards the otherwise silent body, before looking between the two animal companions that shared her space. “You, other- cat, gods this is getting confusing,” she sighed, feeling the pinch at the bridge of her nose that she’d ordered. “Look, what the hells is going on here? Surely you must have some answers, one of you has to. And why- why won’t either of you two explain it to me? Cat, Dog, whatever, you’re both smarter than you look. I know it inherently, I can feel it deep in my bones- if- if I still have bones. You’re liars and memory-thieves, the both of you. You know plenty more than me and yet you won’t say a word. Or do- anything to help me to understand! Help me understand!” 

She pointed accusingly between the two creatures. They looked guiltily towards each other, which still wasn’t amongst the answers Sana sought. She grumbled. “Look, is Kat in danger? Am… I in danger? Is this space toxic to us? I don’t even know, I could be suffocating right now and I wouldn’t be able to feel it, ‘cause none of this is real! So tell me- what is this place?” 

The two spectral beasts glanced between each other. “Well?” She huffed again. 

“What- stay… away,” Kat hissed a whisper on her tongue, catching the attention of all three present. The cat’s eyes began to glow a bright, piercing blue, as Kat’s fingers twitched and curved in a haunting rhythm. The depths below flashed more images, rapid, but slowly coalescing into feasible, animate scenes. Like looking through fogged glass, Sana couldn’t determine with any certainty the details, but with each rapid, bright, fiercer movement, she read violence, corresponding with each twitch of her companion’s floating form. “Kat?” Sana asked again, stepping closer as the guardian animal disappeared into a trance. Kat made a strangled, guttural noise, air entering her lungs, only to be ejected again in a whimper. The many reflections in the ocean filled with bounding light, crashing into some distant unknown forms. A good hit, she’d made. “You’re fighting, aren’t you?” Sana whispered, only to herself. ”Look, I- don’t know where you are relative to me, or what you’re fighting, or- or if you can even hear me, but… I’m rooting for you. You- you can win. I know you can. You’re stronger than you know.” 

“Sana…”, Kat’s entire body started to convulse, a ragdoll floating on a thousand, jittering strings, the air beaten out. She jostled in place, like a bar spiked through her chest and kept her steady and level. Risking being struck by her spasms, Sana reached out for her hand, and for a moment, the convulsing slowed down. Only a flutter remained in Kat’s fingers.  

“I’m here. Please… please hear me.” She glanced back to Dog, unaffected by the trance, who tipped its head sideways. A silent conversation bounced between their eyes. 

Then, with a brief flicker, the spotlight from above vanished, some circuit in a space beyond abruptly broken. The visions below the water were dispelled, and Kat’s floating form began to sink into its depths.  

“…What?” Sana fell to her knees, trying to keep a hold of Kat’s hand, but could only watch as she descended, dissolving to fog in the infinite mirror below. “She’s- why is she sinking…? Why is she leaving?” Her hands grasped into the dark, reflective pool, but found they could push no further than her finger tips. “Dog! Why is she sinking! Kat!? Kat, wait!” 

The Cat – the spectral animal, whatever it was, fell onto its side, and melted down into the endless pool. Sana received only a wordless look from it, a look that, if it were a person she was sharing it with, would seem frightened. Understanding. Apologetic. Scared all the same, for what little good it did. And then it too was gone into the aether.  

“Kat!?” Sana shouted silently once again, her voice echoing in a place without walls to echo off of. She sang a song of sorrow into the suffocating silence, and it had no answer for her. In her tears, she began to drown. “Dog, help me! Do something!” 

But there was nothing left of her. The corpse, sinking, an image Sana’s mind had made, disappeared before she could even hold onto it. Whatever this place was, wherever it was, Sana knew she couldn’t stay. No assurance of Kat’s safety but naive hope, no sight but the endless sea, no voices but her own, no distraction from thoughts nor solitude nor guilt. The waves splashed, the ripples pulsed. The last vestiges of Kat’s form turned to smoke, deep below. 

Sana cupped Dog’s face, and stared deep into its nebula-filled eyes, pleading. “I can’t be alone here. I can’t be alone. Please, do something. Do something.” She could only repeat it over and over. “Do something.” It could only stare on and on, a distant hint of sympathy. Snuffling against her shoulder, it tried to comfort her – bless, it tried – brushing over her side and winding around her. “Do something.”  She appreciated it. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. She was alone. 

As she curled into herself on the cold ground, the environment began to shift again. With this space now dark, and empty of its host, the world dragged Sana back to her own, bespoke isolation. The same brilliant fanfare of lights tore through the skies, but earned none of the previous awe while Sana’s face remained buried in her arms. The location didn’t matter, whether in her home or another’s, there was no one to welcome her. So she sat where she had begun, for minutes, maybe hours or seconds, vacant. 

Just when she felt she may fuse to the floor and crumble away, a pinprick of light appeared, piercing through the many thousand other stars littering the air, and its reflection below. It flared like no other, standing tall and vibrant and singing. The mote, like an ember, hovered hot and brightly, twinged with red if anything at all, and made every other star dim to nothingness. The sky blackened further, and further, until all that remained was this new, pale sun, the eye of a storm. Sana’s corneas singed in the light and the heat, whispering, proselytising, scheming. Looking away was impossible, for where else was there to look? The longer she stared, the more she realised the mote was not a speck, but a mountain, ten hundred times her size, engulfing her, a sea of flames in which she would drown. The curling hills and peaks gave way to a sheer cliff – several, in fact, neat and orderly and carved into perfectly smooth panels of rock and marble, glassy and reflective and holding a thousand properties it should not have. Too much detail. Too much light. Too… rigid, too designed. It was no mountain, but a tower, with five sides within five sides, hovering in the shallow pools, reaching up so far as to curl backward onto itself, if Sana stared too long. Trying to find the top gave her vertigo, attempting to glimpse the sides caused her stomach to twist and mind to dizzy. Nothing existed but It. There was the Tower, and there was nothing. 

Dog growled at its arrival, much like the kitten-shaped form had moments before in its watchful guard over Kat’s sleeping body. It roared even, a guttural verse, the song of apprehension and hatred. But Sana remained enraptured, her mind sinking into the depths of the seas, curling waves rolling over her body as buoyancy failed. There would be no floating anymore, just the spectral ceiling of a starlit sky, broken only by the wash of the waves, and the embrace of the bottom; the melted, boiling, seething floor. And there was nothing. 

Sana knew she felt heat and cold and sweat on her brow and a deep seated, longing-filled anxiety churning away in her gut. She knew they all existed, she knew it so innately, but knowledge is like a memory. She had nothing but the recollection of those things. In her present – her truth, as it were – there was nought but the ocean, and before long even that was gone, merely dust before the Tower. Her ambition was gone. Her wanting was gone. Her needs, too, fled their battlements at the edge of her mind, hoping for better conditions as prisoners of some unknowable enemy. Is this what drowning felt like? Like falling out of the sky, wings clipped, with only the sun, the burning sun, above, and nothing below? She was below. And there was nothing. 

“Do… something…” She demanded to the mote, water engorging her lungs. 

Why? 

“Because… because if I- if we-” Dog was gone, or silent. Sana couldn’t feel its fur in her hands. 

This is reality, in its truest sense, spoke the nothing, smooth and featureless.  

“W-what?” 

You asked. “What is this place?” It is the drowning ocean of truth. The lossless depths. Interlopers; invaders; thinkers; only they are the ones who turn this field of nothingness into something, by their presence within it alone. It made a sound like it was clicking teeth it didn’t have. Unforgivable. 

“What do you-?” 

There is work to be done now. You have returned to darkness from whence you came, and your task is futile. What you seek is beyond the purview – she doesn’t matter anymore. You are bereft of purpose. You are nothing now, too. 

“No… no, fuck off!” Sana roared, and seethed, and croaked, the anger in her draining like a stab wound, as quick as it flared. “Don’t… say that. Please don’t say that.” 

This is a place of truth. That is the truth. You may appreciate it, love it, loathe it, or disregard it. It matters not. Nothing does. 

Sana didn’t have the capacity to rebuke it. “Which…which are you? An interloper, a thinker? …An invader?” 

A warden. A caretaker. An interested party, bringing a gift for your rebirth. Renewed purpose. But it is not given freely, you must know, Oksana Kelenov. That name itself has no power here, no value. It will be forgotten. 

Sana shook her head, unable to comprehend the words through a single thought – a strand, really, frayed and dying – clinging onto her mind. “Kat…” She whispered again. “Kat is… in danger… I think… Or she’s dead, and- oh gods…” 

Such worries are meaningless. No returning path can be made from this half of the world. A new road is offered. 

“She- she needs my help, I think… she’s scared, and alone, and she- she needs me.” Sana could barely whisper, her body folding smaller than when she was a child, scared of some distant monster. The mote burned so bright that everything beyond was cold. Dead. Lifeless. It had one spoke, up and down like a standing spear. A single, winding Tower. Silence, for a moment. A consideration of her helplessness, her inability to respond.

…You seek to return still?

Sana jittered a nod.

Very well. Nothing desires Everything. The price of salt is all encompassing. You will continue to drown, though in a different ocean. This will destroy you. Do you accept these terms? 

“I…” The Nothing, the Tower; the former terrified Sana beyond comprehension, and the latter, its twin, stood as such tantalising safety, she struggled not to grasp it with all her might. 

Do you accept these terms? It drilled deep into her skull. Her soul. The nothingness curled and tangled like a spider’s web. 

“She’s in danger… they’re all in danger, because I couldn’t stop those- those beasts. I couldn’t fight, I was- I was so stupid. So weak. I ran off on my own and I was weak.” Sana whispered. “But… but maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. Right?” 

A whip of wet drops floated away, and instant froze once beyond the purview of the mote. There was nothing beyond this tiny candle of light, as strong as it seemed in the infinite darkness. A girl knelt in the abyss, cradling a single ember. 

Do you wish to do something that matters? 

“I don’t… want… to lose… everything…” 

Accept this mantle, Oksana Kelenov, and construct a Tower above the waves. When you are able to see out across every dune, hill, and mountain, come find we who dwell in the desert. There, you will be received with blessings, and light, and warmth like no other. You will be safe within our embrace, understand this. 

“Help… me.” 

As you wish, friend. 

The heavens reopened. The void became everything all at once, light pouring in. The Tower, the Nothing, the call, gone, quickly drifting away. The familiar stars twinkled, the water gently rippled out to the horizon, and a distressed, astral dog eased at her return, as if a divine being had not just touched the universe around her. One difference, one piece of evidence remained, however, spotted as she glanced down to reassure her companion. Left in the remaining, divine cinders, images reflected in her own ocean now, much clearer and more discernible than before. “It’s showing me…?” 

Outside. Outside this place. Her body was limp, her heart slow and completely ignorant to her commands. The shell around her was dark, encompassing, and broken. And through its eyes – Off-Kilter’s eyes – she saw the chamber once again. Walls of purple and navy, the dim interior of an alien architecture, and looming, mechanical figures. Sana spied a squadron, of sorts. Several motes, their Cores alight like lanterns in the sky. She counted at least ten. They encircled a candle, small and fluttering out, its little wick flickered in a most familiar way. 

The embers of that unfathomable voice, now withdrawn, flared one final time, and the chamber shifted. Through the glassy waters that divided worlds, Sana saw tendrils begin to flow from the aberrant metal of the walls, like stalactites creaking into shape, a hundred years of geological activity enacting every second. They reached out to Off-Kilter, and her form cradled within, tentatively approaching the back of the Frame’s form, between its shoulder blades. This miraculous sight, as the very earth extended an open palm to a fallen warrior, was noticed quickly. One of the beasts, shrouded in purple paint and serrated edges, became illuminated with the sparks of gunfire aimed towards the scene. A barrier erected immediately, more limbs of metal spilled like mercury from the ceiling in defence. There was still work to be finished, and no harm would be done. The intercessor was quickly dispatched with the sharpest of spears; liquid steel solidified in an instant, riddling every limb of the silhouette with sickening punctures. Sana didn’t want that, she’d have begged if she could. The lanterns kept watching. Were they scared now? 

Finally, it was complete. A holy weapon formed between her fingers, strings of matter turning into strings of fletching. Sana, from her dimension of sky and sea, watched alloy hands grasp her Core, and begin to twist. Three flares shot through the base of her skull. 

---

The light was blinding, at first. Colours like she’d never seen burnt deep into her corneas, with a thousand brilliant hues that curved and turned away, until only a golden, beating, pulsing yellow remained. Darkness above. Darkness around. Reflections didn’t return to her eyes, they glowed internally. This wasn’t right, but it was righteous. 

Her breathing came back first. Lungs, out then in, the air’s rushing an immense feeling. Even just the process of raising her chest, hoping it wouldn’t fall back and crush her sternum on the way down, was intense. Her eyes, her fingers, her ears, her nose, her tongue, all ablaze, every nerve overwhelmed, firing a thousand unanswered pulses into the night. Sana blinked, forced her eyes down and sealed them tight. Better. 

Her hands wrung around the shaft and string of a bow, of all things, almost identical in weight and form to the one she’d trained with. But opening her eyes revealed a weapon longer than she stood tall, not carved from wood but moulded from the same Druidium as her other attempts at weaponry. In comparison to the crumbling clubs and pitiful thorns usually constructed, it was flawless, its surface shimmering. 

“Did I make this?” She whispered, before the hulking steps of another Frame snapped reality back into focus. The protective canopy of Off-Kilter was open, leaving her exposed to every skin-slicing edge and finger-crushing hinge she could imagine, but Sana didn’t dare close it. Fear clutched her tighter than the vice grip on her bow. Other voices and lights swept and crawled through the dark surroundings, jittering, whispering. Reports and relays crackled between the figures, the words indecipherable but the sentiment clear, as they kept a wide berth from her and the corpse she finally noticed. . A Frame of night-sky purple lay crumpled on the ground beside her, littered with craterous holes that revealed a deep red beneath – the damage she’d witnessed, or wrought. “Oh, Gods…” 

Clunk-step. Clunk-step. The one from before, the one who’d so handily beaten her. Brave enough, they approached her, like not moments before one of their own had been turned into a pin cushion. What’s more, their hooked blades remained at the ready. Were they foolish, or had they called Sana’s bluff? Either notion scared her, as the threat they feared took no commands from her in the first place. One infinity of sensation had been swapped for another upon her return. Reconnection meant disconnection. She held the bow tighter. The danger didn’t exist until that arrow was fired, until her only hope was spent. 

The same, unflinching Frame came closer still. Even with her own eyes, instincts screamed, she needed no readouts to remember the terror of that machine. So, Sana lowered herself, pulled back the string, and levied the bolt towards it. 

“Stay the fuck away!” She bellowed. The machine halted, but made no retreat. The defiance told her one thing: ‘your reprieve is temporary’. Their spikes glimmered in her headlamps.  

Sana glanced towards the flock of other Frames, too wary to approach. On the ground, behind the pillar of obsidian glass that had become their compatriot, they encircled another form. Another Frame, Echo, its canopy wrenched open. She’d recognise it from a mile out, her fuzzy, scrawling memory be damned. The hooked blades took another step closer.  

“I said stay!” Her voice didn’t sound like her anymore. 

Run. Screamed something deep inside her head. She ignored it. Not whilst Echo was lying there, Kat unaccounted for, and vomit-inducing questions tried to seize her. They couldn’t have. She didn’t see that. Kat was okay. She had to be okay. She had to. 

Sana glanced anywhere but at her foes, or Echo’s unmoving body. No focus could be found there. Instead, her eyes locked on the ceiling. Dark, barely lit by the distant well of light beyond, or any running lights. But she could see wooden struts, criss-crossing the ceiling. Cracked. Old. Nothing at all, really, holding up so much rock. 

You have made something from nothing. A different voice whispered. And what must something do? 

“…Find its place.” Sana whispered, lifting the bow, and let loose. 

One hundred tons of tension sprung from her grip, the string cracking back like a whip, and its enormous ammunition surged forth in a comet’s streak. Whilst midair, the arrow split in three, burning with purple friction fire as it tore through the air, setting the atmosphere ablaze. The machine approaching went to dodge, anticipating an attack, and the barrage flew far above their head. At three vital points the missiles shattered wood, stone and even hidden layers of impenetrable Druidium, and the world shook. The thunderclap of collision was immediately followed by the rumbling and creaking movement of half a million cubic metres of earth. Realising her plan in an instant, her enemy broke into a sprint, blades flying down. 

Frames, if universally anything, were fast; they moved fast, they thought fast, and crucially, they reacted fast. Her distraction gave her moments. Moments would do. Continuing the motion,Off-Kilter slid aside, the canopy still open, four eyes burning bright, as her enemy’s hooks flew past her face.  

Run. And Sana finally obliged. The bow melted into tangled wires, which she launched at her most exemplary foe, before springing on her heels towards the others. One, two. Three. Four of them? She didn’t stop to look, stop to check, none of it. She had negligible time, and wasn’t willing to pay interest. The Nightmare who had caught her before – who had fought with such mastery and brutality and ferocity – did not give immediate chase, a blessing she’d take. In some way, the attack had stunned them far more than any direct attack could. Sana didn’t care. Couldn’t. There were just her legs and the road. 

Several more thorn-covered interlopers, those hovering over the defeated corpse of Echo she’d scouted before, lifted rifles and fired. By all accounts, they should have hit her – their shots were leading and as perfectly precise as their leader, assured for any usual foe. But those she didn’t weave through as she closed in, she absorbed in a swirling swarm of machines, catching their bullets and breaking them apart. More matter. More machines. By the time she was in melee range, she didn’t even bother striking directly, instead slamming the writhing ball of nanomachines into the ground, which exploded into a raging cloud of razors, hitting everything but herself and a small, disabled Frame. 

“Dieux au-dessus-” Sana heard beside the machine, sending her into an immediate halt. Hunched over, hands over her ears and surrounded by all the violence in the world, Kat looked up to Sana with wide eyes and mumbling, panicked prayers. Relief and confusion and hope and abject terror spilled from her expression as Sana lowered a large, metal hand.  

“Are you okay!?” Sana boomed over the deafening sound of tearing and bullets. Kat shuddered, then nodded. With no more room to halt, Off-Kilter lifted the tiny woman to her chest like a newborn, before any more words could be shared. Her elastic ankle spread the dirt, and in an arcing turn she launched again, dust and gravel and shards of melting sandstone forming a shower’s curtain as she charged towards the waning light above.  

“S-Sana?” Kat begged, the words echoing in the canopy. She looked so scared. “How-” 

“No time to explain,” Sana fired back, huffing, “or- I don’t know how to explain. I may have met God? I don’t fucking know, just- hold onto me!” 

A wave of pounding gun fire launched on their tail through the chaos of the collapse, pinging off of Off-Kilter’s hull. One grazed Sana’s leg – did it hit? The pain didn’t register if it did. Extending out a hand, Sana spun and ground to a halt, cradling Kat’s gentle form in her other two. With the nanomachines she carved through what remained of the rotting wood, and the entire ceiling tumbled down at once, a single layer of rock from above, carrying regolith and piping and bricks down to the new tunnel floor. Through all noise and destruction that overtook every sense, Sana glimpsed a purple silhouette behind the debris. A clear line to the first foe, far away, their swords still held like they’d matter against stone. It stared for just a moment, no emotion to be grasped but a blank consideration. An amusement? A fascination? They turned, and skulked back into the darkness. Good. Run away, bastard. 

They’d made it beyond the threshold, barely, is what Sana thought for all of three seconds, until cracks the width of tree trunks curled and stitched up the walls of their one and only exit. The foundations began to roll. Wordlessly, Sana gripped Kat tighter, and charged towards the nearest scaffold, finding a moment’s grip with several bounding leaps. But as she ascended, the dig-site had other ideas, and after a day’s worth of shelling, combined with Sana’s handiwork, their luck had run dry – the curved wall now a cut jigsaw, jagged and untraversable. A second more is all it took for the wall holding the scaffolding she stood atop to crumble, and only by sheer pilot’s instinct did she catch herself and her precious cargo on the way back down, narrowly dodging several piercing rods and broad planks. 

Sana whipped her gaze to the surroundings, searching and grasping for any promise. The firing had stopped, and the retreat of the Nightmares had begun, but the ground still threatened to devour them. The sky dimmed. The golden rays and the distant blues and the dust and smoke all rose and fell. The porthole was closing, the beyond above that had just been revealed would soon disappear, and never return. Sana made desperate attempts to scale and scramble up the descending whirlpool of rubble, only to scrape back down. Think, think. Breathe. Think. Get out, get out, get out. Get her out. Reaching into her mind frantically now, an idea emerged. A stupid, no good, idiot’s idea – just what she needed when there was nothing else. Nothing left. So she turned to Kat, eyes, glass and bulbous, trained upon the sky. 

“Do you trust me?” 

“I c-can’t just- do that,” Kat’s hands reached towards the cabin. “B-but- I- I care about you, so whatever y-you’re gonna do-” 

“Then I’m so sorry to do this again,” Sana said, much quieter that time. Unknowable, rushing thoughts collided with Kat’s iris for a second, and her hands recoiled, distant and unable to help. Sana had but one goal now. Save Kat. And with a narrowing shaft above, she could see nothing else. 

So, she reared back. The bases of her feet, elastic, collided with the sifting earth, sending up their own plumes of dust that joined the greater collecting sandstorm. The motors in her legs, ancient but reliable, whirred and thudded and halted with a bright clang. Roots reached from her base, a whole person held in her three-fingered mitts, and despite immediate understanding and even faster objections, there wasn’t time anymore. There wasn’t time for anything but, maybe, just maybe, saving someone else. Giving a damn. Doing a damn. Off-Kilter’s plating buckled in the rain of bronze and muddy ash, and with a single leap from her knees, together they soared. Then, moments later, the stages separated, and thrown from cupped hands like a bird being set free , Kat left Sana’s grasp, flung up towards the remaining light, carried by wings of Sana’s making. 

There was a moment, a millisecond where their eyes met. It didn’t last long, all moving far too fast, but for a second, a terrible understanding was made, and it spoke in the air between them; “goodbye, until I see you next.” 

A wreath of debris surrounded Kat’s body. Her glasses, square, framing her face, slipping off as she soared away, an angel of dust and shadow. Just in time. The light in her eyes belonged to her no more, scattered to the wind like marble glass, and the tunnel collapsed.

---

Greetings Pilots,

Hey y’all! Long time no see! I hope you all had a good winter break… and January. Woof, is it February already? Gods. What an absolute doozy of a chapter. Two months! Two whole months of editing, this took! Insane.

A quick but important announcement for y’all today. Sorry to say, but for the time being, Vol 2 releases are going to be on pause. Yep, we’re going on hiatus! Sorry everyone 😦 This decision was a really tricky one to make, but after six months of struggling to balance both Vol 1 editing and new Vol 2 work, for the sake of both mine and Jen’s sanity, I’ve made the executive decision to hold off on anymore Vol 2 releases UNTIL we complete Vol 1’s editing pass. I hope this very cool cliffhanger won’t be left hanging forever, but we’ve got no set date for when Vol 2 will be returning. Sorry folks!

However, that doesn’t mean we’re gonna be going quiet for a long time either. We’ve got some plans in the works that I hope you’ll be excited for;

Firstly, we’re planning on writing more short stories – RHAWWs! – for Frameshift! We already have a couple in the pipeline and I can’t wait to release them to y’all. These won’t be that frequent as they require a lot of editing to meet our standards, and we again don’t wanna detract from getting the Vol 1 manuscript finished. But, we hope to have at least a couple out to you guys soon enough 😉

Next up, we should have more lore articles in the near future! With so much focus being placed on writing and editing and drawing and rendering and producing and oh gods there’s so much to get done– I’ve had little time to commit to lore articles. But, now that editing has become my focus, I’ve gotten myself a bit more leeway to write up some Frameshift lore! Heck yeah! At the moment, I’m planning a series of sorts which I’m called “A World Without Oil”, which will explore how Frames rose to prominence across Hellena. I can’t wait to show y’all these!

And, finally, keep an eye out on the old chapters, as we may soon be updating them to match the new rewrites! Jen and I are so happy with these new edited chapters, that we just can’t wait to show them off to y’all. We’ll likely be updating them in arcs total, so keep an eye out fairly soon (we hope!) for Arc 1’s redux!

Right then, that’s about everything. Be sure to follow our twitter and tumblr below to catch the latest Frameshift updates! It’s 3:30am here and I’m about to crashing, so this is Izzy signing off – we’ll see ya when we see ya!

Or, as Sana put it;

 “goodbye, until I see you next.”

Thanks, and keep on running,

– Izzy

Edited by Jennifer C.

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