The End Of All Known Land
Also heads up: decided to just get all the tags posted here to save myself some time formatting. Any additional warnings for the remaining chapters will be posted here as well.
Chapter 1: There's Something Down There And It Spoke To Us
He knows their final fight is over when he hears that telltale, metallic ring over the howling winds.
Not a moment later, as Gabriel dives out of the icy air in a vain attempt to land one last hit on that infernal, unstoppable machine, a gunshot follows. Agony surges through his stomach as the bullet finds its mark, the dwindling strength of his wings finally gives out, and the frozen ground rushes up to meet him.
When his vision clears, he's gazing up at the perpetual snowstorm that buffets Treachery, this very last layer of Hell. Gabriel's awareness is trapped somewhere between the pulsating pain he feels and the giddiness that bubbles up his throat, the latter of which escapes him in the form of a breathy, cathartic laugh. It's broken by a hacking cough as the taste of iron fills his mouth.
Yes, this was how he had wanted it to end: with a battle well-fought, one that could have toppled the very foundations of Hell were they not already on the brink of collapse. A final match, testing the true power of the creation of the Divine, and the creation of Mankind.
And while Gabriel had lost, he'd never been more elated, more relieved.
V1 appears from above without warning, crouching over him, his own blood frozen on the talons of its red arm from an earlier blow. The burning light of their yellow optic cuts through the blizzard and stains the passing flakes with gold. As they stare down at him, one finger strokes the trigger of its pistol, idly, as if thinking. Gabriel swallows around the blood in his throat, and another delirious giggle slips out before his words can.
"So, it's come to this, Machine." He says, voice harsh and worn, but steady. "Here, in the deepest reaches of Hell, I've fallen to your godless strength for the last time."
Their head tilts, so imperceptibly that Gabriel almost misses it. They are still, like a serpent coiled above its prey.
“The realm of the damned is ending, your kind have purged all but a few sparks of life from these final layers," Gabriel recites. He has put some thought into his final words. “Soon to be stomped out, like the last coals of a dying fire. And after, all will return to dust, from whence it came. You, included."
Gabriel breathes, cherishes the fading sparks of passion that had spurred every movement, every strike, every swing of his sword during their last battle. There is no escaping his fate. Only a few short hours remain before death inevitably takes him.
But he can still choose how he wants to fall into its numbing embrace; it is but the most freedom he'll ever have.
"Go on then," His breath fogs out from the holes in his helmet, blown away with the whirling snowfall. "Claim your prize, and let us be-"
Gabriel doesn't even get a chance to finish before their hands are at his wounds, pawing for that sweet ichor flowing from his body. Sharp, saccharine anguish radiates from where rough fingers slip into the cuts and bullet holes that litter his body. He doesn't bother holding back any pained sounds that escape him, letting them pour freely.
He tracks the movement of their blue arm as its digits dip greedily into one gash, flayed open and raw. The red squeezes more from his thigh, claws digging and slicing open the tender flesh. The snow seeps into his skin from all sides, biting at it with little mercy, but the machine, oh, this insufferable machine crouched atop him thrums with heat, even in this desolate layer of ice. It sears his flesh beneath their touch.
And it stirs something within him; an impulse that thrashes wildly against the bars of its prison. Years of it being locked away behind delusions of righteous duty have left it bereft and desperate.
For the last time, Gabriel pushes it away.
He awaits the blow that will kill him. Lights burst behind his eyes, bright and throbbing, as two fingers bury themselves into the gunshot wound in his stomach. He sucks in the knife-sharp air of the blizzard, gauntlets digging into the ice upon this rocky shore. The pain makes his head swim, the digits twisting to get deeper. Gabriel writhes in the snow, losing himself in the pain and the heat, teeth gritting as choked whimpers spill from him.
But after several more moments, all at once, the agony begins to fade. There's a weight on his stomach, pressure on his breastplate, yet no hands feasting on his blood. All there is now is just the sound of the storm, and not that of hands dipping into viscera and gore.
V1 has stopped.
Gabriel's helm snaps up from where it had burrowed into the snow to look at the machine perched above him, shaking away the phosphenes that have blossomed across his vision. Their thighs straddle either side of his waist, and the light of their eye shines squarely onto his helm, like the sun cutting through swirling winter clouds. He watches the optic's flickering movement, subtle, but deliberate. It's as if their own gaze were searching his expressionless face for something.
Gabriel is at a loss. This is not how he envisioned his final defeat, at all.
"What are you waiting for?" His own tone of voice is low, ragged from screaming taunts at the machine throughout their fight, each one to spur himself on and drag out the battle for just a few precious seconds longer. "Finish it."
They move. Gabriel swallows down every urge to recoil as their talons reach for his covered visage. He braces for the void, and-
Nothing happens. There is only the faint clink of metal coming into contact with metal. Then the hand that had caused him so much suffering slides down in a slow, careful stroke, one that robs him of his ability to speak any further.
Those dangerous thoughts throw themselves against the steel of his resolve, emboldened by the first gentle touch he's been allowed in over a century. How could something that had brought the deadliest of Hell and Heaven to its knees be capable of such... tenderness? Why?
Gabriel stares up at his adversary as they shift subtly, helm tilting back just a bit more as if to take in more of him. A second passes, another. Many unseen eyes stare into one, nothing between them save the whirling snow. And in that time, Gabriel catches his breath, struggles to gather himself.
This is not how he had foreseen this happening.
"W-what is this? Machine," He stammers, finally finding his voice, and his disbelief bleeds quickly into the sharp edges of anger. For anger is familiar, comforting in the face of the unknown, and it allows him to find his strength again. "Are you hesitating? Now? After all that you've done, after everything you've destroyed?! Do you intend to toy with me!?"
V1 does not acknowledge his words. Its optic simply rises from him and gazes out, beyond him, in the direction where the wind comes from. Gabriel's wounds are slowly beginning to close, granting him just enough vigor to push against the palm upon his faceplate.
"There is nothing out there, Machine." He reminds them, tone hardened with bitter resignation. "This is the end of Hell, you will find nothing else in this final layer. Your trail of bloodshed ends with me!"
Instead of acknowledging his words with even a simple glance, the machine climbs off of him, leaving Gabriel lying there in the snow. He struggles to roll over, calling after them.
"Machine! There is nothing left!" Something hollow and raw opens up in Gabriel's chest as he watches them depart into the whiteout, running against the wind. "MACHINE, WAIT!"
There's a rush of icy flakes, battering his weakened form, as the storm opens up to swallow the deadly warmachine whole. The last he sees of their form is their hard light wings, glowing like beacons against the whiteout. When it clears, they're gone.
And with them, Gabriel's hope of a swift death.
Sixty-five percent chance of success, their final calculation reads out. It's a little lower than they'd hoped, when they fed this one final, vital piece of information into the vast pool of images, Terminal entries, and other discoveries they've accumulated over the past seventy-two hours. But they've made it through tighter situations, with even bleaker statistics.
V1 dismisses the survival simulation playing out across their HUD and presses onward, the archangel's call fading into the wind as they run with no path at their feet. The blizzard fights them at each stride, but their strength is greater, carrying them swiftly through the snow. They have no landmarks to go by, but their internal balance gyros makes it so they know they're going in a straight line.
It must be somewhere ahead. It has to be. They've already searched everywhere else they could have. One final door, one last secret; a reward for their thorough explorations across countless battles and the most dangerous areas of Hell.
Contrary to what Gabriel might think of them, V1 did not operate solely on its programmed bloodlust, deep-seated as it is. When the driving thirst would fade into the background, and the struggle for survival had ceased momentarily, V1 would poke and prod into the corners of the circles.
In the mouth of Hell, while traversing the man-made, abandoned geothermal power station that led to where the layers began proper, they had leapt into an opened vent by chance. The tunnel held a skull, it opened a new path, and they had dropped down without a moment's hesitation.
And at the end of this hidden part of Hell, V1 had found the start of a thread, given it a tug, and began following it as it unspooled into a story older than machinekind, perhaps even Mankind itself.
Their thirst had been sated since humanity had gone extinct, permitting them a sense of curiosity. Such a thing hadn't been allowed since before the lab had been destroyed. And with it, most of their creators. The necessity of thirst had driven them to survive many of Hell's rougher encounters. But when they could, they searched.
They found things hidden away in the depths of Hell that not even its heavenly overseers may have known of. A terror in the dark, riddles of light, a conceptual world with a despondent occupant, among other things. And at the end of each, a poem, a rhyme, verses of regrets, lamenting a wasted eternity and a flaw that could not be written out of the formula for creation.
And the makings of an unmaking.
'Mankind is dead.
Blood is fuel.
Hell is full.'
Something had sent that message to all the machines still active on Earth's surface. They had been brought by it here. V1 is one of many thousands of machines that had entered Hell for its promised bloodfeast, and one of very few that made it to the deepest and deadliest circles. It has been purged of trillions of husks and demons, even its angelic overseers have been caught and destroyed in the crossfire.
They know for certain it couldn't have been Gabriel who called them, and their fellow machines, here.
There was something else ahead, perhaps something along the same vein as the Prime Souls they had battled, encounters only earned after their skills had been perfected, sharpened to a razor's edge. But it's something that would have reason to want Hell's occupants wiped out, long after the last souls of Earth were sent to the Styx. It's something that had found a way to manipulate the machines that came down here, lured by the promise of fuel and weapons and rewards to carry out this task. It's something that had needed Hell to be destroyed, to starve it of the fodder that fed its endless hunger for cruelty.
And if their hunch is correct, it's going to be something much, much stronger than a Prime Soul.
They find it at last when the blizzard abruptly ceases, leaving them standing in the still snow, silence falling like a deafening clatter. Before them spans a glacier, as icy blue as Earth's skies in winter, towering beyond the fog that drifts above like underground clouds.
And embedded in the smooth surface is a door, the fourth of its kind. But this one is decorated with seven glowing, golden symbols. As they approach, the doors swing open with barely a sound.
The final secrets of Hell are theirs to plunder.
This tunnel is different from the others; there is light at its entrance, but further within, it is dark. The shine of their optic easily makes out the elevator shaft within as they step inside. V1 checks their arsenal, every part of it, ensuring that they are ready; that every weapon form is available, that their Knuckleblaster is loaded, and the railcannon fully charged. A coin, tucked between their pointer and middle finger, rolls once, twice across the back of their digits in anticipation.
They don't hesitate another moment, sliding the rest of the way to the shaft, into an immediate slam. V1 plunges down into the darkness, into Hell's farthest, blackest reaches.
Down to where the one who had called them all here is hiding.
In the time it took for the rest of Gabriel's strength to return to him, the snow had nearly buried him where he fell. It was tempting to remain there for his final hours. So many sins committed, treachery among them. It would be a fitting place for his grave if he chose to judge himself in such a way.
But in the end, something--be it the cold, the unpleasantness, the hollow agony resonating in his chest--drives him to his feet, and heavenward once more.
The grove within the moon crater remains how he left it: cool, eternally green, and unoccupied. Not even the ashes from the fire he had built before have been disturbed. After the freezing winds of Treachery, its thin atmosphere is shockingly warm. Gabriel doesn't bother with gathering fuel for another fire. He just sits himself on the fallen column, where he came to his heavy realizations mere hours ago now. His healing wounds pulse dully, but it is nothing compared to the churning anguish that occupies his thoughts.
Without the fire, the only light in the grove is the muted, slate gray of his wings. It offers little comfort; a quiet reminder of this quiet corner of the world of his current reality, one he somehow still had after everything that had happened.
Nothing is as he'd hoped at all; instead of a frenzied drive for long-overdue justice burning deep within him, he only feels empty, bereft of something he wouldn't dare try to name. He still feels the machine's gentle touch upon his helm; a fleeting moment of tenderness after such brutal violence that had only succeeded in making Gabriel crave more.
Foolishness. He is only another source of fuel to it. Only a particularly persistent stepping stone on their unending path of destruction. He didn't know why he let himself think that he had been anything more than that to them. Desperation, maybe, that there would be some meaning to their final battle that he could take with him to his grave. It hurts more than when he'd been severed from The Father's Light.
There's a roar deep in his chest that's begging to be set loose, rattling viciously against his lungs. Gabriel does not want to hear it. He does not want to give his anguish a voice; does not want it to be the last thing he hears. He clamps down on it with an iron vice, tampered with the battered steel of his own resolve, and gradually, it quiets once more, returning to its wounded quietude.
Silence. Reflection.
This place had once teemed with souls, a final resting place for those who'd broken their vows to The Father, yet remained virtuous. They had long since abandoned this grove, as Mankind's hands scraped against the spheres of Heaven, ascending to the next greater form. Gabriel distinctly remembers the heated vitriol The Council had hissed as their inventions pushed farther and farther outward into the cosmos. How it brought human souls closer to the higher echelons of angelic order out of necessity. The spheres themselves could not be seen by mortal eyes, but such devices held growing promise of the hand of man one day touching its surfaces.
They had wanted to break free of the world that had damned most of them. Gabriel understands that now, all too well. For in the end, they could only reach as far as the fifth sphere. Likewise, Gabriel himself was only able to be free of his shackles for only a few precious hours.
And he worries for Heaven's denizens. The Council that had formed after the chaos is gone. They had needed to die, there was no other way to secure freedom for himself at the eve of his existence. But he will never know what happens to the masses; he will not live long enough to know. Would the panic and confusion resume itself, even after peace has been kept for so long? Or would they go on as they always have, in Paradise?
All he can do now is hope.
The minutes tick by; he watches the shadows on the distant Earth slowly disappear. His time is almost up.
Gabriel remembers when he was held in the hands of The Father, newborn and shivering, with his many brothers and sisters. The beautiful kingdom, spun from stardust and divinity, that had been their first and only home, and all the ways they made it theirs. He remembers idle days with his hands in the eternally fertile soil, a wealth of flowers around him and the comforting trickle of a nearby fountain as he sang along with the hymns caroling from other angels, bustling about just beyond towering rose bushes.
Long after came the first garden upon the newly formed Earth, the human experiment, his glowing pride when he was named one of the liaisons between them and Heaven. And then the short, civil war, cutting down those who questioned The Father's motives. He remembers the days spent upon stone walls after, watching over Eden's inhabitants closely as the oceans beyond churned violently, and the volcanoes gradually quieted.
Mankind's fall from grace not long after.
The Father grew more and more agitated as the years passed, though he had done well to hide it from his children. And the day that eventually came when Heaven's newer denizens were surpassed by the numbers of those pouring into Hell. They sang, still. The Father had gone silent. That was their first, and only, warning.
He remembers the time after The Father vanished, died, left them afraid and alone and without purpose. The senseless fighting that wracked their homes and the panicked orders of the higher angels struggling to return calm, only to fail. Gabriel remembers The Council's rise to power when whispers of the rebellion in Greed reached them.
And everything after, that he is now so ashamed of.
It is long overdue, but his repentance would be had. The shadow on Earth is being chased away, the sun rising upon its eastern continents. Gabriel watches, counting down to the last few moments. Too many regrets, too little time. They threaten to overwhelm him, eating away at his thoughts.
But amidst all this is gratitude. To the Machine somewhere down there, in the furthest depths of Hell searching still for blood. Gabriel would never have realized the extent of the corruption running rampant in Heaven's courts without them. And that final fight, being able to unleash all that passion and ferocity that burned within his soul. It was a good final memory.
The last of the darkness flees, the dead Earth shines. Gabriel bows his head, clenches his fists, grits his teeth. He sucks in the clean air of the grove in a hitching gasp-
And he waits.
And waits.
And waits.
...
There is no sound, no change aside from his slowing breaths. Gabriel counts the seconds, he cannot help it. He's supposed to fade, become once again ash and stardust from whence he was born. But it does not come. Nothing is happening.
He hurriedly glances back up at the Earth, watches it slowly spin on its unseen axis. It is morning, there is no mistaking it. Twenty-four hours are up.
And Gabriel is still alive.
Then there's a sudden noise that breaks the stifling, disbelieving silence of the grove. Gabriel thinks it sounds like someone gasping for air, over and over. He can't figure out where it's coming from; the sound is too distant.
He looks down at his hands once more to find them trembling, numb. His body goes cold, as though the merciless winds of Treachery were finally catching up to him. Darkness swarms in the corners of his vision, and his lungs feel like they've suddenly shriveled into nothing.
Is he dying? Is this what dying is supposed to be like? Nothing awaits him, no rebirth beyond the veil of the living, but it refuses yet to take him. The gasping he hears fades under a sudden rushing roar in his ears, and he can't move of his own will any longer. Something unseen weighs down on his body, blanketing it in blank terror.
It just goes on, and on. He is seized by invisible fangs, unable to shake free of them. They squeeze him of his breath, leaving him paralyzed, dizzy, and hunched over on himself. It's not painful, he's not hurting, but it's awful. He's never felt so weak, not even after his recent third defeat.
The hold begins to loosen after several torturous moments, leaving him cold, his heart pounding in his throat, and his pulse still flying in his ears. His hands shake still, and his lungs can still barely hold any breath-
...
Oh.
The sound had been coming from him.
Because Gabriel is still alive.
His hearing returns just in time to catch his own raw, inhuman scream, echoing hollowly through the uncaring cosmos.
