Darkness.

  Silence and Darkness were all that remained.

  The prompt, gentle now, and chime-like, pulsed in my mind as the void engulfed me and licked my tears away, hungry for more.

  I didn't have a body, didn't have anything, really. Just nothing, and regrets and thoughts and Olre's voice telling me I'd die alone, that I hadn't been good enough.

  But I didn't want to be the kind of person who'd listen to someone like Olre, especially not in his last days. I had failed Zephyro, but his people were still in that bunker, shored up in memory banks and defended by an entire mountain of stone, a last gift from their Vizier, bought through sacrifice.

  Beep.

  "I know," I said, making no sound. I didn't have time to let myself go like this, didn't have time to mourn. There were three kids out there, one of which was blind, another almost crippled by fear, and one who may or may not have wanted to kill me.

  So I reached for my chest and tapped the medal, even though there was only nothing where my chest should have been, and I had no hands.

  A grey-blue shadow of reality flickered back to life. I only saw an empty stretch of wall, and a bit of my old chair, as well as the corners of the server racks, still humming along and blinking like distant stars. I wondered how many people each of these racks held, how many destinies now rested on my shoulders. My thoughts were interrupted by a bloody hand grabbing the corner of the worktable.

  A second later, Pina pulled herself up shakily. Her expression was storms and stones, and harsh autumn rains.

  It was all I could think of in the moment. It came from the heart, however, not an ounce of deceit or manipulation. Pina was a child still. She did childish things, and maybe she'd listened to the wrong people. But she cared for her friends (or family?) and when push came to shove, she was even willing to die for them. I could respect that.

  "I don't care," she said, clearly trying to put venom into the words, but she was fresh out. All gone, painted itself a river in her mascara as it got purged. Why a girl of her age, on Tobes at that, would wear mascara, I had no idea.

  "No, I will..." she began, but when something rustled, she turned away from the screen.

  "Who are you talking to? Shhh, Tin. It'll be fine."

  "B-but..."

  "Shhh... The Torchbearer saved us, and she will do so again." There was a pause, and it was clear Pina struggled to look away from Voni's empty eyes. Nothing but grievous wounds could give someone that look of wild-eyed, terrified fascination.

  "Pina?" Voni said, making Pina snap out of her horrified reverie.

  "Uh, I'm just cursing at the machine. It's beyond useless."

  "You shouldn't talk to the Torchbearer like that!" Voni said, clearly aghast.

  "It's not." Voni said, and again, there was a heavy pause. "It's not the Torchbearer. It's just some dumb machine." Her voice was expressionless, but her face was a mask of something I couldn't quite decipher. Regret? Spite? Fear?

  "But it killed the Machines..." Tin said, sniffling.

  "It didn't! You're just making stuff up to make Voni feel better. The Torchbearer is dead, and it's her frying fault we're in this thrice-hexed mess to begin with. How can you still believe she is some sort of saint after her machines took your... after they did what they did?!" The latter part was clearly aimed at Voni.

  "She does everything for a reason, Pi--"

  "Bullshit!" Pina yelled, and unfortunately, I had to agree with her. "When will you finally grow up and see the world for what it is?!"

  Before she could slap her hand over her mouth, horrified, there was a snort of laughter from Voni. It sounded reflexive, at first, but the chuckle that followed after wasn't. It was liberated, trapped, resigned.

  "I'm sorry, Voni, I..."

  "It's fine," Voni said, somehow managing to make it sound like she meant it. This time, Pina didn't yell at her to shut up, and so the older girl continued: "We have to find a way out of here, though. We can't go through the front, that's where the Takers are. Tin, what's our food supply look like?"

  "A couple of days. Enough to get back home, but..."

  "Not enough to sit in here and wait until they leave. Right. Sorry, I forgot," Voni said distractedly.

  Pina's only response was to rest her baton, deactivated, against the keyboard of the laptop.

  That got her attention. She glanced at the screen, then back in Voni and Tin's direction.

  She frowned, but before she could say anything, Voni asked "Is the shackle done on the Machine? Did it take?"

  For a long, long second, Pina didn't say anything. Then she nodded, absent-minded. When she remembered that Voni wouldn't be able to see the gesture, she blushed, ashamed, and said "Yeah... yeah I got it under control alright." Where I expected all the bluster and false confidence of puberty, she sounded confident, and her eyes were level. It was easy to forget kids on Tobes had to grow up fast. Even faster now, judging by what I'd heard about the world outside the safety of the bunker.

  "Good. Let's take it with us, then."

  "It's not the artifact you thought it was, Voni."

  "Alright, okay!? We can just sell it or whatever. You don't need to be so hexing smug about it!" Voni blurted out. A quiet moment passed, filled with what sounded like angry panting.

  "Sorry, no, I just meant..." Pina began.

  "No, you're right. This is all on me. I thought we could find hope here, but... yeah. I was wrong. It's still a saintech though, so it will fetch a good price. Let's just take it and leave. Somehow."

  "I think I saw another way out..." Pina said, hesitantly, eying the screen.

  Pina looked like she'd just swallowed the sourest grapes in the world. There were other ways out of the Bunker, of course, but this one was the closest, and even though I felt a twinge of guilt, a part of me got really smug at the idea of having a Conservationist use the Adherent's rallying cry to save herself.

  Despite everything, Pina gave me a look she probably thought was withering. Then she grabbed the edge of my screen and started closing my screen. She was surprisingly careful, as if she didn't know if it was supposed to move, or how far a laptop could fold. I wanted to say something to stop her, but I realized that I couldn't make her carry the laptop around unfolded. Not only would it be unwieldy and slow her down, it would also make everything more prone to damage. The outer shell might have been made of the strongest metal I'd ever heard of, but if she dropped me in the heat of the moment and my screen cracked, or worse, broke off, I was done for.

  So I just wrote

  But I didn't know if she read it or not before the world went dark again.

  Two thoughts hit me, then.

  One, I wasn't going to sleep. There was no shutdown screen, or sudden awakening in a different location. Which meant I was alone in the void until they opened up the laptop again. Even though I could see nothing, I felt my breath quicken and limbs go cold at the thought.

  Two, I hadn't considered what would happen when they unplugged the external power supply.

  Jesus fucking H Christ. I immediately selected Yes with a mental command that came as easy as breathing. Everything slowed down to a crawl. My mind went blank. If I could have, I was sure I would have drooled all over myself.

  I immediately disabled power saver mode, and vowed to never even think about activating it ever again.

  Chris? Help?

  Beep! It sounded... frantic? That wasn't good.

  Usually, I would have been annoyed, angry even at the giant readout that stormed my entire being. But with memOS upgraded, it was blessedly easy, and so it was much easier to stay calm. Plus, I didn't want to be that kind of person anymore, and I had things to do.

  Things like panicking together with Chris, because none of the systems I upgraded so far had anything to do with my power supply. Even with the readout still chiming in my head, I couldn't find anything my mind could latch onto to infuse it with my Wish. I could of course always gamble, just spend Logic and hope, but that needed to be a last resort. The possibility of losing all the Logic that Zephyro had died for was unthinkable.

  Fuck, fuck fuck... That was way quicker than 10 minutes. These readouts didn't seem to be very accurate at all.

  Then it hit me. Could it really be as easy as that?

  I took a deep breath, or-- still lacking a body--I did the mental equivalent. Immediately, I could feel the Wish pooling in my mind, deep and unknowable and powerful, like a lake dancing underneath a thunderstorm.

  I thought about power, and strength, but not the destructive kind. Instead, the power to press forward. The strength to push on. I thought about all the promises I'd made, and how they kept me pushing against both the stark desire to lie down and sleep, and the lovely deep, calling me into the icy-hot dark.

  There was a twinge of desperation in there, but when I released my breath the sound of bells came true and clear, ringing slow, and mighty. It reverberated in my entire being, soothing me. Still, the sound became a little strained on the second ring, as if I were stretching the limits of what was possible with my current abilities, just as it had when I created Cura and shaped the webcam and microphone array out of nothing.

  Damn, why wasn't this working? Should I stop? No, I couldn't. Even if somehow Tobes advanced a thousand years despite the Mage Lords trying to hold it back, the chance there would be any power outlets the kids could plug the laptop into were less than 0%. They probably didn't even know what a power outlet was. If I didn't solve this issue now, that would be it.

  With the Logic still raging inside of me, spilling between my lips, I tried again. There had to be some way the Ferals powered themselves, right?

  How could this be so hard? Why had it been so easy in Zephyro's Domain? I felt the Logic drip from the equivalent of my nose, my ears, rising into my eyes. My head throbbed as if it was about to explode any second.

  Frightened, I exhaled.

  A bell rang. Unitary. Mighty. Eternal.

  What had I done? 1111 LB? And had that been the Downloaded file? Had I just converted the remains of all of these people into... I didn't

  What? This was my own Domain, so yes, but...

  There it was again. The panic. I could feel it, even though I felt nothing. Inside that screeching torrent of noise and thought, there were two emotions waiting; rage and despair. They showed me the void, pointed at all the nothing around me, urging me to take control and rail against the inevitable, or to simply give up.

  Both were liars.

  Both were trying to make me into a person I didn't want to be.

  A mindless beast, or a petrified coward.

  I chose neither.

  Brown eyes, deep and full of sorrow and hope, flickered in my mind.

  With a titanic effort of will, I managed to hold on, to push through, and get my head free of all the raw emotions that immediately wanted to pull me under once more.

  I hadn't lost yet. There was still hope.

  Alright, Chris, I'm coming home...

  Beep!

  Discord! :) Just uh, not too often, or I'll feel pressured.

  Anything below is uh.... not good. If you don't believe me, then ask yourself how many 3.5 stat stories you've read in the last month. Why am I telling you all of this? Because I can't tell you how to rate me, but I can tell you that if you really want to, you can show me the finger really hard by rating me 0.5 stars. Everything els being equal, it takes 15 5-Star ratings to get back to a 4.5 average after a single 0.5-Star rating. Now, I disabled the ratings for myself, so I can't even see them. Why do I even care, then? Because as I said above, the lower the rating, the lower the chances that people are going to click and read this story.

  Which aspect of Torchbearer Beta are you most looking forward to?