Sparrow hadn’t quite realised it until now, but since the day he’d been brought to Death Rope Passage, he’d hadn’t actually walked on foot for more than fifteen minutes without breaking into a warp.

  It’d become so second nature to him after a month of constant warping that he was surprised, really, when Ninmah brought him to the mouth of the Barrows without so much as a skip in her step. They didn’t enter the crystal cavern, though. He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a small, narrow, winding path of stone protruding from the side and leading up the blackrock mountain in spirals. He couldn’t see the top of the mountain even if he craned his entire head back, and his vibrational senses weren’t giving him any information, either.

  Ninmah only waved at him at the foot of the path to hurry, as he found himself unable to stop staring at the dense swirl of clouds above him.

  Their parents are up there?

  He shook his head and gathered himself, following Ninmah onto the snowy trodden path. Come to think of it, he’d never bothered wondering why the blackrock mountain housing the Barrows was the only mountain with clouds swirling around the tip twenty-four hours a day. It didn’t make sense when Immanu itself was already several hundreds of metres above every other mountain in Hagi’Shar, and the other sky-piercing blackrock mountains flanking the village were similarly clear and fully visible. If Immanu was already a village above the clouds, then how was it possible that this particular sky-piercing mountain was the only one still shrouded?

  … This path is strange, though.

  It is not a path well-suited for humans to walk.

  As the crystal wood village shrank behind them, Sparrow had to focus on sticking close to the side of the mountain. The path was beyond narrow—a slight sway or a brief loss of balance because of the wind would send him tumbling off the edge—and while Ninmah did leave footprints in the snow for him to follow, he couldn’t help but wonder if stepping on wobbling stone beneath him was part of the intended path. He’d know the answer if the path eventually got so narrow he had to shimmy across ledges with his back pressed against the mountain, but preferably it didn’t get to that point.

  Why couldn’t they just warp intermittently up to the top of the mountain?

  “... Because I want you to look,” Ninmah said, plucking the question out of his head as she glanced around, smiling briefly. “See the jutting ridge and scale marks on the side of the mountain? You can grab onto them if you find yourself slipping. The rocks aren’t so weak that they’ll break off from you pulling and relying on them entirely.”

  As they travelled up the spiralling path to the top of the mountain, he noticed more and more of these ‘ridge marks’ she was talking about. They were like… dents in the stone. Imprints. It didn’t matter where there were, how far up they were from the village, or how much snow there was depending on which side of the mountain was facing burning sunlight—the entire mountain was wrapped in these imprints as though colossal worms had once curled up the same path they were currently taking, and they were but mere followers treading in the worms’ footsteps.

  Again with the worms.

  Immanu… Immanu…

  Just what is this place, exactly—

  “Forty or so years ago, we lived in a small village called ‘Immanu’ far, far south of these mountains, in the Kingdom of Eridu,” Ninmah said, slowing her pace so she could walk abreast with him, curling her hands in front of her. Halfway up the mountain, the path expanded enough that they could afford to walk shoulder to shoulder. She could afford to look his way and send him a cheeky grin. “There were about three hundred people in our village. Our main produce for the kingdom were four-petal moonflowers that bugs really, really don’t like the smell of, and for a while, we lived in peace. The bioarcanic ‘Swarm’ that descended onto our world with a hunger for human flesh six decades ago was but… a distant threat. Something we didn’t have to worry about.

  She raised her finger and pointed far, far to the south. He followed her gaze, but his perceptivity level wasn’t as high as hers. He couldn’t see further than the horizon, and he couldn’t see what her eyes were glimmering at.

  “But the peace didn’t last,” she said wistfully. “The Swarm eventually broke through the neighbouring empires, the neighbouring kingdoms, and eventually, it was Eridu’s turn to fight. The kingdom called upon soldiers across the lands, and that included the able-bodied men and women in Immanu. They took our parents and grandparents from us. When all that was left were the hundred and eleven children of Immanu, they even locked us up, experimented on us by replacing most of our bodies with biometal parts, and gave us prototype bioarcanic systems for a completely new class designed purely for war against the Swarm. In that basement under the kingdom’s capital fortress, we were held captive for years and years—and do you know how ‘systems’ and ‘classes’ are made, after all?”

  Ninmah framed it as a question, but he already knew the answer. All systems were made with bioarcanic essence extracted from dead bugs. If one wanted to obtain a Crab Class, they’d have to kill giant crabs and infuse a blank system with crab bioarcanic essence. If one wanted to obtain an Ant Class, they’d have to kill ants and infuse a blank system with ant bioarcanic essence.

  So he already had the faintest idea what Ninmah was going to say next.

  “In that basement, forty or so years ago, we met ‘them’,” Ninmah breathed, leaning forward to grin as she plucked his thoughts from his mind once again. “Held in that same basement as us were a bunch of giant white worms, beaten and starved, slaughtered and dismantled to make our so-called ‘Whiteworm Classes’. We talked to them. We made friends with them. We listened to their stories. They told us they were part of the Swarm, but they were abandoned by their own kind, left for dead in the kingdom. ‘We don’t care’, we told them. ‘We’ve never seen a giant bug before them’, we told them. So even when the kingdom’s researchers continued operating on us to make us more and more inorganic, forcing us to gain ‘points’ and ‘unlock’ new mutations… for three years, we never gave up on each other.

  “Funny, right?

  “We were humans being held captive by humans, and the giant worms were abandoned by the Swarm.

  “We were both betrayed by our own people—hurt by our own people—so eventually, we made a pact. All of us. All of them. We would protect the giant worms, and the giant worms would protect us. Since they were kept perpetually weak and starved, they taught us how to use their biomagic, given to us by the systems in our necks made from the flesh of their dead friends and family, and then we used our wormholes to escape.

  “Eventually, we landed…”

  She trailed off for a second.

  And then she finished her sentence on a quiet note.

  “... Here,” she said plainly. “Here, in Immanu.”

  They crossed rocky paths, crystal paths, mossy paths, their steps slow and careful as they trudged through the foggy swirl of clouds. Sparrow himself felt like they were moving fewer than ten paces a minute with how careful they had to be, and once again he wondered why they couldn’t just have warped all the way up to the top. They could’ve bypassed the fog. They could’ve bypassed the treacherous landscape. Maybe the top of the mountain was taller than he assumed and warping up simply wasn’t feasible, but surely it wouldn’t be more difficult than treading these narrow paths on foot.

  But, as the path started winding around in full circles faster and faster—the top couldn’t be very far off now—he started to notice the four-petal crystal blossoms growing on the side of the mountain.

  There were hundreds of them.

  Thousands of them.

  Stems connected to each other like a spider’s web, petals glowing faint blue in the fog, lighting the path in front of them like lampposts to follow—and as the path finally ended to put him at the summit, out of the swirl of clouds, he was met with a moonflower garden unlike any other in the village below.

  Above the entire rest of the world, the sun crested over the horizon and took his breath away. Oxygen was sparse here. They were so far up the sky was abyssal blue, almost black in hue, but that didn’t stop the garden in front of him from sparkling. The almost flat stretch of land that was lifted at a slight incline towards the end was completely filled with them—a thousand moonflowers in eternal bloom, stems swaying and petals clinking against each other like glass droplets. Wooden boards paved a straight, single path through the garden to the very top of the slope, upon which was built a small shrine gate that would lead anyone walking through it right off the precipice.

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  It wasn’t snowing here.

  They were above snowfall.

  It wasn’t raining here.

  They were above rainfall.

  And eighteen Worm Mages were already kneeling in the garden of moonflowers, facing the shrine gate at the very top.

  Two of them flanked each side of the straight path every few metres, their heads lowered and covered by their fluffy hoods. Their hands were clasped in front of them, but they each twirled a small moonflower as they sang in a worm’s low, warping voice. The notes lingered, each one twisting the air, and they made their bodies shimmer like they were mirages about to vanish… but Sparrow could tell with his vibrational senses. The boy kneeling on his left, third row up the path, was Utu. He’d heard all the Worm Mages’ warping voices before and could recognise most of them; he wasn’t in unfamiliar company.

  So he didn’t resist when Ninmah took his hand, gently pulling him up the path—past the Worm Mages, past the moonflowers—until he crossed the rectangular shrine gate at the very top and was face to face with the rest of the world.

  An endless expanse.

  If he had better eyes, he was sure he could see to the very end of the world and back.

  …

  But the world wasn’t what Ninmah brought him up here to see.

  As the Worm Mages below him kept singing and chanting, Ninmah waved for him to kneel right under the gate. He did as he was instructed, back facing the cliff. Ninmah, then, did the exact same—and from inside her cloak, she retrieved two wooden cups full of shattered quartz crystals.

  A strong gust of wind would blow all the quartz out of the cups, but her balance was nothing short of perfect as she handed one cup to him.

  He received it with both hands, holding it in front of his chest.

  The singing stopped.

  The chanting stopped.

  He looked quietly down at the Worm Mages as they each pulled out their own cups as well, proceeding to speak to the moonflowers in front of them as though the flowers were living, breathing people.

  …

  “... How are you doing, mama, papa?” Ninmah whispered, smiling wistfully as she dipped her head at the field of flowers beneath her. “I’m here to visit again.”

  And, seemingly in response, the flowers shone even brighter than they already were.

  Sparrow narrowed his eyes.

  “It’s been… thirty-seven years since we ran away from the war against the Swarm,” Ninmah continued, as she started reaching into her cup and sprinkling pinches of quartz dust onto the flowers, letting the wind scatter them every which way. “As you can see, we’re all still alive, which means we’re still doing okay. Aren’t we the toughest children you’ve ever seen?

  No response this time.

  Ninmah’s lips quivered only a little before she straightened her back, tugging a smile onto her face as she gestured at him with a wave.

  “This is Sparrow,” she said, voice shaking, trembling. “He’s not from Immanu. You can probably already tell by his face and hair that he’s from somewhere really, really far away, right? But even if he doesn’t talk at all, he’s really, really good at fighting. Just a few days ago, he fought off an entire horde of giant bugs by himself. That weapon he’s got around his back can… um, it’s like a more powerful bow and arrow. He can put something sharp inside and shoot it out to kill a giant bug instantly. He probably could’ve beaten the bugs even without all the modification we gave him, too, so… that’s why.” She glanced at him, blinking slowly. “With him here, you don’t have to worry about us. We’ll be just alright.”

  Her words lingered in the air, and he tuned out the rest of his environment to zero in on her; she noticed him staring and quickly turned over the rest of her cup, her eyes watering as her voice became thick with emotion.

  “... Sparrow. Give them your quartz as well,” she said, rubbing her eyes as she tilted her head at the cup in his hands. “They make the moonflowers grow faster, and the bigger and healthier the moonflowers, the happier they’ll be—and after you take care of them, I have something else I want to give you.”

  He was taken aback for a moment. Tense, even, but he felt he couldn’t very well refuse to at least help the flowers grow a little bit stronger.

  It was something within his power.

  So, while the Worm Mages beneath him stopped talking to watch him turn his cup over—the quartz dust carried by the gentle winds and scattered all across the garden—Ninmah turned where she knelt until she was looking at him directly.

  He didn’t need instructions for this part; he turned and faced her directly as well, remaining on his knees as he watched her take out a white four-petal moonflower ornament from inside her cloak.

  The exact same kind as everyone wore in their hair.

  “We didn’t give this to you at first because we weren’t sure if you were someone we could trust,” Ninmah said softly, pinching the ends of the ornament with both hands. “But we’re sure now. We don’t want to keep anything important from you. It’s time you learn what we really are.”

  His lips thinned into a line, but he listened.

  She dipped her head in quiet appreciation as she unclasped the tassels on her cloak, revealing a bare chest made entirely out of silvery biometals.

  There wasn’t a single inch of her made out of organic flesh and blood.

  “... All of us in the village were human, but now we are immortal, full-inorganic humans,” she said plainly, putting a hand over her heart as she closed her eyes softly. “We don’t age. We don’t need to eat, sleep, drink, or do anything to really sustain ourselves. Even though we were given full inorganic bodies and Whiteworm Classes so we could be ultimate weapons against the Swarm, we never saw actual combat. We never learned how to use our status interfaces. We ran away from the Kingdom of Eridu, and then we escaped to this mountain range with the giant worms in the Barrows, so… we feared humans and bugs alike. We didn’t want to die. Thirty-seven years ago, after we escaped, we all vowed to disappear from the face of the world and go into hiding, never to involve ourselves in any conflict ever again.

  “We don’t like the Swarm.

  “We don’t like humanity.

  “We don’t… want to fight.”

  Sparrow narrowed his eyes, but still he said nothing.

  He listened.

  That was all he had to do.

  And for that, Ninmah gave him a wistful, forlorn smile in turn.

  “... But, you know, even this deep into the mountains, we’ve encountered many humans these past thirty-seven years,” she said plainly. “Some were vagrants who just managed to stumble up to the village, while others fell out of the sky because their wing mutations failed them, but those who accidentally reached this village always had one thing in common: they were injured, they were sad, they were on death's door, and they needed help. The Kingdom of Eridu may have done terrible, terrible things to my family, but those people in front of us… they’ve never done anything wrong to us.

  “Even if our bodies are inorganic, we have small hearts that are moved by small, small things in front of us. We can’t just not help if someone needs us, right?”

  “...”

  “So, we always try to heal the humans who reach the village on the extreme verge of death. But it’s not easy. They’re always teetering on the fine line between life and death, so we always have to do something drastic, and the only way we know how to bring someone back from the dead is to operate on them—remove their wounded, necrotic organic parts, and then replace what we removed with inorganic, biometallic parts. But, in these past thirty-seven years, of the three thousand and eighteen humans we have tried to save by giving them half-inorganic bodies… none has ever survived our inorganic operation.

  “You are the very first.”

  “...”

  Sparrow had half a mind to open his mouth and ask ‘why’, but he sensed Ninmah wasn’t quite done yet.

  So he listened.

  That was what he was best at.

  "You’re the first human we’ve ever been able to save by giving you a half-inorganic body and the Whiteworm Class,” she said, scoffing and shaking her head slightly as though she was still in a state of disbelief, “and seeing you fight for us so valiantly a week ago, against that Swarm that was most certainly drawn to our scent, has been making me… think.

  “We’re the ones living here.

  “We’re the ones running this village.

  “So we have to be able to defend ourselves.”

  Ninmah lowered her head, breaking eye contact. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, but they didn’t quite fall—she held out the moonflower ornament with both hands as though inviting him to take it.

  “More than any meagre Whiteworm Class or inorganic parts, if you accept this ornament, you will truly become one of us—a Child of Immanu,” she said, and everyone else lowered their heads at the exact same time. “We don’t like to fight. We don’t want to fight, but if we want to defend our village from the Swarm, we’ll have to meet you halfway. Teach us how to fight to live. Teach us how to use our abilities to their fullest potential. We were paralyzed with fear that night seeing the Swarm for the first time, and… as the village chief, I cannot allow that to happen ever again.”

  …

  And Sparrow dipped his head, closing his eyes slowly.

  …They rescued me even though they knew I would only bring trouble, and they gave me everything they could offer even though I was a slow learner.

  What is there to even hesitate about?

  He opened his eyes, exhaling coolly.

  I am Sparrow, designated marksman of the First Bullet Ant Battalion, but… I can also be a ‘Child of Immanu’, no?

  He received the flower ornament from Ninmah gingerly, with both hands, and before she and the other Worm Mages could even look back up, he was already trying—and failing—to figure out how to put it in his hair in a way that it’d look decently good.

  If only he had a mirror.

  Decree Three: Always return what you are given.

  That is why I—

  “You’re wearing it wrong,” Ninmah breathed, and it almost came out as a laugh. The rest of the Worm Mages below them chuckled as she had to get up from her kneeling position just to pluck his ornament out of his hands, searching his messy hair for somewhere nice to put it. “It’s not a pin that you stab into your hair. Yours doesn’t even have a pin since it’s for boys. What you do is find a pretty spot, twirl four strands of hair through the buttons, and just like a worm that gnaws on its own tail, you… ah. Like this.”

  She twirled a finger and opened two wormholes in front of him, mirroring his own face back at him.

  His face was plain and unassuming as ever, but the flower ornament really was a standout, clipped onto his hair slightly above his left ear.

  And though it was on a living weapon, the ornament was… ‘pretty’.

  Prettier than anything he'd ever received.

  “Teach us how we can use our ‘status interfaces’ to fight, okay?” Ninmah said, squeezing his hands gently as she looked him in the eye, bright and blue. “We may be ‘strong’ in build and in form, but we lack practical experience. We lack the courage to fight. We lack the resolve to kill. So, please, train us however you’ve been trained. I’m sure we’ll be able to handle it somehow.”

  In response, he dipped his head and closed his eyes—immediately feeling his hands being opened and something cold being shoved in.

  He looked up and saw Ninmah beaming at him.

  “Here,” she whispered. “Snack.”