Chapter Text
Cold.
Cold, cold, cold.
Not — he thinks — the cold of a shivering illness, but the cold of a broken ship’s coolant, the cold of heavy limbs, the cold of — a cryo-pod.
Nixis, Wolf Priest, forces his eyes to open and sees nothing at all. Of course, he thinks, lifting his hands to sluggishly feel over his newly-donned armor. Fingertips find the melted ablative plating left by sidearm projectiles, and memory trickles back: of course. He’d only managed to kill two measly armada sailors, and then their compatriots had brought him low. Then corsairs, and a tractor field, and then the wretched, wretched starlight cold.
(He thought, he hopes he heard Awoken voices shouting at one another to chase the Queenbreakers. He hopes it worked, he hopes they ran far —)
The ringing in his ears clears, and improbably, unbelievably, muffled eliksni voices wend their way through the seams of the cryo-pod. He strains: not familiar voices. Very unfamiliar voices, in fact; memory scrabbles for a moment and grazes fingers across a long-ago ransom exchange, a Kaliks for a Simiks, the stiff businesslike words of Winter — Winter?
Winter. The Queen had not spoken of it, but Nixis had overheard, had guessed that her icy temper those months ago had been a prison break, had guessed (but never, ever investigated) that the other Wolves had planned to find and exploit similar vulnerabilities —
The wintry voices outside are bickering, now, and Nixis tries to think. Did the rebellion succeed? If so, why has Winter retrieved him, and not Wolves? Lack of sentiment means nothing compared to the expense and time of transitioning a new archon. Were they outmaneuvered? Is there an alliance? Why —
It is cold and lightless still in the pod, though quickly warming. In such conditions, eliksni vision is prone to false stars, phosphenes, other optical hallucinations. That is what the spot hovering in front of Nixis’s chest should be.
But, he realizes, as it stays in place even as he moves his head, it’s not.
Nixis watches it for a long moment, still slow and stupid from the cold. It flares.
The timbre of conversation outside shifts, somehow — Nixis can’t put his finger on how — and the spot, the little hole in the world, it flickers, and pure horror swamps his limbs so suddenly that if he weren’t already kneeling, he would have collapsed.
“Something’s wrong,” Nixis croaks, and the near-frozen air steals the sound bare centimeters from his teeth. “Something’s — help — HELP —”
Someone screams outside, and Nixis roars in a matching panic, blindly pressing himself against the wall in futile desperation. The hole is an orb, a sphere, and Nixis is completely and utterly sure that it has seen him.
Before he can scream again, it grows — and grows — it pulls at every part of him, the irresistible grasp of a servitor with no mercy or care, and he — and he —
