Character
Every few seconds, the air recyclers exhaled through the vents with a wet, sighing pulse that pushed a ripple across the suspended glass of her workbench. Viscous threads of something black-green crawled lazily inside a stasis tube, faintly luminous in the violet emergency lights that lined the floor. A single chronometer blinked across the far wall, its red digits reflected in the curved metal of her respirator mask — five minutes until the appointed time.
Iskera was not one for waiting, but she understood patience. It had to steep, or the result curdled.
She moved through the room, sliding implements into a compact field kit — crystal scalpel, reagent injectors, sealed vials nested in shock-foam. The scent of solvent and ozone clung to her gloves. On the table beside her, a slim datapad displayed a map of Malachor's outer wastes: fault lines, obsidian trenches, old craters still bleeding radiation and the occasional scream of trapped energy. Somewhere out there lay what she needed — crystalline remains from the cataclysm that had once shattered this world.
She paused before a small containment case, its contents shifting like oil beneath glass. A sample of something that should not still be moving. "You'll have company soon," she murmured, tone neither tender nor mocking. The substance twitched in response.
From beyond the reinforced door came the distant groan of the Spire's inner structure — that low, geological noise that was never quite echo nor wind. Malachor's heart still turned beneath them, grinding its old bones.
Iskera's reflection wavered in the glass wall — tall, narrow, precise. She checked the chrono again. Four minutes. Whoever the Dark Court was sending — assassin, scholar, zealot, or some new hybrid creature in between — they would arrive soon.
Good. It would give her time to finish calibrating the extractor array.
Tag -
Valaine Valentine
Iskera was not one for waiting, but she understood patience. It had to steep, or the result curdled.
She moved through the room, sliding implements into a compact field kit — crystal scalpel, reagent injectors, sealed vials nested in shock-foam. The scent of solvent and ozone clung to her gloves. On the table beside her, a slim datapad displayed a map of Malachor's outer wastes: fault lines, obsidian trenches, old craters still bleeding radiation and the occasional scream of trapped energy. Somewhere out there lay what she needed — crystalline remains from the cataclysm that had once shattered this world.
She paused before a small containment case, its contents shifting like oil beneath glass. A sample of something that should not still be moving. "You'll have company soon," she murmured, tone neither tender nor mocking. The substance twitched in response.
From beyond the reinforced door came the distant groan of the Spire's inner structure — that low, geological noise that was never quite echo nor wind. Malachor's heart still turned beneath them, grinding its old bones.
Iskera's reflection wavered in the glass wall — tall, narrow, precise. She checked the chrono again. Four minutes. Whoever the Dark Court was sending — assassin, scholar, zealot, or some new hybrid creature in between — they would arrive soon.
Good. It would give her time to finish calibrating the extractor array.
Tag -
Valaine Valentine
