Breach

Set during the Siege of Nightmares

  Everyone was frayed. With the Tongue damaged, and circuit wards blocking both ends off, those not used to tending their own gardens were dealing with nightmares and sore, aching bodies. Tensions were high, yelling and arguments and things said that would long not be forgotten staining the city. All the while stone was launched at the city once an hour, every hour. It was like long shunned gods were knocking, demanding entrance that even sleep could not provide respite from.
  Br1n sat in the network of access terminals, under Council watch, still blamed for several of the incidents that led up to the demon invasion and her analytical mind rankled at that. Things with flesh and bone bodies expected her to be omniscient, when all she had to work with was hard data that her terminals could see, or her engines could search for. Emotions were new to her, but that had come after the human, Marcus had touched the Great Sakura in the middle of the city, so now even she was feeling the thud thud thud of the siege on her walls - on the sensors of her 'skin'.
  She runs her daily diagnostics, chafing at the blind spot in the old city - the place that her people call the sewers. Sensors in the old smuggling route tell her it should be safe, but she'd ideally like to know with this force of unknown at the entrance to her doorways. If they gave her the freedom she once had she could organise the gardners into constructing elaborate and aggressive circuits out of plants and bushes that she could use for spells too complex for normal minds. If they gave her an inch, the technomages and experimental architects would not be trying risky and barely-scientific practices up in the academy. Everyone wanted the dreams gone. Everyone wanted to stop being shown what they restrained themselves from for the good of community. They just needed to let her free.
  Tremors rumbled through the gardens of the arboretum as another thud slammed itself into the northern wards, though something twinged in the data that she had been collecting around the city. Spreadsheets of data whirl before her 'eyes' as she brings up the length of the tremors around the arboretum with each thud, running back days.
  N0. Not this. She sends signals through her systems to anyone that is listening. That the tremors are increasing, that something is occuring around the sakura tree that powers the very soul of this city. Someone, anyone must get there.
  She watches as people come from homes and businesses - anywhere they've been staying since the siege started. It is not everyone, but enough people are coming, moving towards the tree to give her a better view through the magi-tech scattering the crowd. She can see how wild the arboretum has become with the functions of the city wound down as everyone got inside their own heads and their own projects. Plants pushing through scrub where they are not supposed to with their enhanced growth but meaningless direction. A nest of pollinators hanging off a branch and buzzing in lazy form as they survey their queendom. And across it all, bumps of jagged rock thrust up from the ground, a ripple of stony spires that points towards the base of the Sakura tree herself.
  Br1n calculates on the tree, compiling and compiling data and each time coming up with the same dreadful answer. But what can be safely done about it but wait? The city's magic does not deal with the stone beneath the soil, never has, never will, but everything her data tells her is that the tree is on a tilt, and that whatever threat is sneaking into her city, is coming through the base of that tree.
  She brings up a terminal just outside the arboretum, maximising the spell for sound as her flickering form takes the membrane. When manifest, Brin is a woman in every sense of the word. Slim, with the easy curves of her hips and eyes that hold nothing back. Her hair is cut in a short bob, a deep brown touched with the deep staining blue glow of holographic light. Her form mirrors the foliad, her people in the city, rooted and alive, shaped by the world that made her.
  Brin’s form is traced with code, running through her as she stands in the membrane. The last time she updated her body, she chose to adorn herself with a collection of bangles and hard wood necklaces. Her robes mark her as one of the mages from the Academy, bare-armed, wrapped in flowing silks. They are patternless; it would take too much processing power to render that much detail in a transient form. Only the her-ness of self remains constant, requiring almost no thought to manifest.
  "You need to get back, or get armed. The threat is coming up through the ground each time the wall thrums." She calls, urgency coded into her voice as speakers all around the arboretum echo out her form and voice. A cold-panic sets inside her, now solely reliant that the people of her city have the sense to prepare, to gather mages and combat-mages, to organise watches and be ready for when threat becomes problem.
  She watches the collected people best as she can over the next few days. Out of towners collecting together to pool resources and thoughts as mages and those from the academy bring more and more equipment into that dead zone within her sensors. And still the thudding on her nerves and soul continues, code running hot within her as she keeps trying to simulate anything that will give her people the edge over the demon invaders.
 

---

  It is the fifth day of watching when the demons break through. Stone and soil and trees flying into the membranes that protect the great tree, tearing, rending, laying bare the fragility of the defences that the people have built up. It must be a bloodbath inside, as demons come pouring up and into her city - not hundreds like are outside, but enough that she can feel in her sensors something amiss.
  A mage comes running past her holograms, blood dripping from a cut in his scalp and a part of Br1n tries to jump to anything pulsing with enough tech to hold a fragment of her and she just bounces off. Let her SEE. Let her HELP. Pirate captains and river traders come back the other way with a massive defence cannon, marching past those who had fled the carnage around the tree. She slides part of herself into the cannon, pulsing in the circuits that feed off the solar cell balanced on its back.
  She 'sees' in pulses of magic, massive 8 foot tall things of muscle and bone being pushed back by waves of force and fury from combat mages barely holding on. She 'watches' as the brute grabs a mage by the shoulder and just tosses them, gravity and the side of a tree bringing the defender a final crunchy end. She sees smaller demons, weilding blades and darts and hammers, charging through the gaps between tree and brute, fury and agony in their posture. A wave of massive concussive force pushes from the cannon and packed compost follows, shrapnel that batters and scratches all it passes through, disorientating them enough for combatants with staves to brain the demons left standing.
  But that is not what has Br1n's attention, for something is happening behind the brute. In the earthen tunnel ripped through the heart of the tree and exposing a billion billion magic circuits that grow through the tree in purple-blue light. Something feels familiar in their glow, even as a threat piles itself within that echoing core. Familiar mixes with foreign in this moment and it feels like recursion to focus on the Grand Sakura her mind looping itself as the process draws more of her from the rest of the city to spiral in this loop of looking at the tree, looking at her looking at the tree.
  It slowly dawns on her, even as she cannot pull her gaze, that she is not held in the terminals around Natare, nor in the circuits and sensors of the city, but that this blind spot, the Grand Sakura Tree is the heart of her, and that her heart is ripped into and torn open and her insides are exposed for the world to see and for these demon invaders to run through. The air around the tree swirls with the magic of all that is Br1n, staring at itself in a kaleidoscope of colour that stops even the invaders, all watching as life and magic dances from blossom to blossom as it explores itself, as SHE sees the truth of herself and teases at the circuits that store her very mind and essence and she almost feels the start of something older, more powerful itching beneath.
  There's a joyous laugh that springs from everywhere, the tree, the terminals, even the circuitry of the city seems to buzz in a way that matches the laugh that Br1n feels in her very core. And she shuts down every door that the demons could ever see. Locks and wards pulse a blue tinged with green and gold and purple as Br1n feels less technology and more like a deity of the city itself. And it feels so good. So right as she flexes her 'muscles' and the city reacts better than it ever has before, a thousand subtle alterations that just optimise processes that have run 'good enough' for far too many generations.
  She could dance as the mages of the city are helped by the waylaid visitors in driving the last of the demons to untimely ends, but her city is safe, and apart from getting some gardeners to heal her, nothing could stop the feeling of....
  Someone is trying to send her a message. Just outside the arboretum, and as her expanded gaze turns she sees it is one of the pirates who was fighting before. <Threat inside. What do we do?>
  Her gaze shifts down, searching the arboretum for people or things, seeing nothing but the tree and the swirling temptation to navel-gaze. Had she not seen something in the tunnel before she recognised herself? The demons had been up to something and.... ah. In the centre of her, in the tree that contained all she is, rests a device. It smells of magic, of infernal power of magma and metal and earth and runes. It is the opposite of all this land stands for and it has its own pulsing heartbeat like a parasite, even as its magic is enhanced by the presence of her own. She does not know what the parasite is, only that it is counting down, each pulse faster and louder and drawing more from her as Br1n realises she has no data on what this can do.
  So powerful for a moment, and now here she is, considering her own reckless actions to protect her city and people. She has never pushed the magic of her focus into infernal technology and before, and this thing needs a closer look before she can do what she is thinking of doing. She makes herself small again, pulling so much of herself from the tree that it goes dark a moment, and the cannon is practically luminescent from its discarded position on the floor.
  She pulses her magic like sonar, 8 barrels of magma in a green melted-sand shell held together by metal bands in a cask shape. She pulses again. Infernal runes, etched into the glass, each glowing in time with the red pulses that suck more of her magic from the tree, though she doubts the device will get much this time around. She pulses and a million billion calculations word to try and trace a cypher for the runes, even as she sees a metal spire, pure on one end and corroded down the centre and halfway along the shaft. And as the device pulses, the corrosion bites deeper into the metal. Nodes connect magma and metal, and even as part of her searches libraries and bindings, histories and past records, the only thing her vast mind can comprehend is alchemy. Nasty, messy, flawed alchemy. Like the worst byproduct of an experiment gone wrong. This looks like that if there was no teacher around to say stop.
  Br1n feels her heart drop as wisdom pours into her as it clicks and her first reckless idea becomes the only idea as the cypher completes and she understands how little time the people - her people - have. It circuits could cry, this would be her. To be so much for but a moment only to have to risk it all and end it before it has begun.
  Terminals alight all around the city as she steels herself for action. "People of Natare. It has been an honour to serve you in the best of my capacity. If this action I have decided upon is to fail, then I mourn the loss my choices fail to prevent. I hope I see you on the other side of this moment, but should that not be the case - this city has been my home and my life and I am glad I got to see these generations with you."
  The terminals go dark except on a wrist of a very recent member of the city - the human Macus in the lower city, his Br1n more copy and sister than part of the greater whole. Br2n and Macus look to each other, even as they reel at the projection, wondering and fearing what is going on in the city above.
  Br1n pulls herself slowly from the cannon, the magic that is her mantling this arcane device as her pulses look at the angry infernal device before her. She compiles herself, readying herself as she begins the act of forcing her very magic into the device to shut it down.
  Every moment past focuses to this as the purple energy leaves the cannon, leaves the tree, all of it poured like from a cup into the infernal device. She feels herself ripped apart as more and more of her flows into the device, the wick of rust burning faster the more she pours. There's just not enough of her, and she feels herself slurped up by the magic of this thing as fear enters her code in the parts of her that she has not yet fed this angry red infernal thing.
  She still keeps going, crying to herself in rage and determination until there is a snap, and the nodes fall away, each cask shattering to green glass. Barely anything of her remains as her magic limps back to the tree, diffusing into the circuits there in a barely there hum. It is done, and she can rest and something else, the protocols of the city can hold them all against the demons while she just exhaustedly rests.
  Below, in the tree, red-green smoke starts to rise.