Chapter Text
By the time the sun rose, Karkat's boots contained more sand than feet. Kanaya told him it was simply because he didn't know how to walk without disturbing the dunes. Karkat figured it was the dunes' own damn fault for being in the way in the first place.
"I'm just saying, it would be a lot easier if you'd just plant your heel when you step, so you don't sink." Of course, Kanaya knew everything about the fucking desert.
"I've been planting my heel for the last three hours, and it hasn't done putrid squat." Adjusting Cancri for the fiftieth time, Karkat glowered at her irritably under his goggles. "If I hear that advice one more time, I'm gonna plant my heel in someone's chute till they gag on rubber."
Recognizing an empty threat when she heard one, Kanaya just nodded politely and continued to set the casual pace. She was careful to keep it modest, compensating for Karkat's faint limp. Moving too slow would make him complain that he was being patronized, though, so it was a careful balancing act on both their parts to maintain both civility and their own respective prides.
About an hour after sunup, Kanaya stopped abruptly in the shadow of a large dune and grabbed Karkat's cloak to keep him from walking any further.
"What? What's the problem?" Karkat thought they were making good time, considering he couldn't hike for shit in this landscape, but he trusted his friend's judgement enough to stop moving for a moment.
"Daywalker. Don't you smell it?" Her eyes darted over the sandy hills furiously, scanning for something only she knew how to see.
"Everything stinks like shit out here. I don't smell out of the usual." Mimicking Kanaya, Karkat sunk down against the dune behind them and lowered his head defensively.
"We're upwind. This is dangerous." Pushing Karkat lower with a hand on his shoulder, Kanaya rose a little and sniffed the air like a prey animal. "Stay down, and don't make any noise."
"I'm not just going to sit around while you--" He was cut off by another shove, sharper and more deliberate than before.
"You're in no shape to fight. Stay out of this." With that, Kanaya ducked behind the raised mound and disappeared into the endless wall of near-white sand.
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When she revved her saw, Kanaya knew she had approximately thirty seconds before her opponent would respond. Their reflexes were terrible-- one of the few merciful things about them. The daywalker appeared to be a lone straggler, but she didn't want to risk its cries or her machinery drawing attention from other undead. She would have to be quick.
It staggered toward her numbly, no fear, no pain. Though the body was emaciated and frail-looking, its skin was mottled with dried lesions and tumors, hanging off at weird angles and giving the whole thing a lumpy, misshapen quality. The spore sacks clung prominently to random spots on its skull and abdomen, its cracked and splintered horns flashing a greasy sheen in the strong sunlight. Tissue flapping off in rotted chunks, the daywalker was a beautiful, horrendous expression of the desert's bright power. In this case, it was writ on some unfortunate juvenile who wandered too far or breathed too deep in a bad wind.
Her first slash ripped straight through a bony, fleshless arm, and it fell to the ground like a withered branch. Kanaya ducked and wove erratically to avoid its fractured teeth, knowing it was better to be slow than risk getting too close. She circled around behind the daywalker to slice into its neck; it took a few seconds to hack through all that fibrous growth and hardened scar tissue.
The creature screeched and hissed something unholy, clawing at Kanaya with fingers worn down to the bone. But its legs gave out as soon as its brain lost connection with its body and It crumpled, still breathlessly trying to shriek. As soon as it was on the ground and relatively motionless, Kanaya started kicking hot sand over the prone body.
"You can come out now." She kept her voice soft to avoid making too much noise. At no point did she stop working to bury the wretched husk, watching closely as its twitching died down.
"...Okay." It was clear that Karkat wanted to be obnoxious, but recognized that it wasn't his place. For once in his life, he kept his comments to himself. He joined Kanaya silently, helping her cover the daywalker until its feeble squirming stopped altogether.
Eventually he worked up the gall to break the quiet. "So why are we burying this thing?" It just wasn't in his nature to do things without asking questions. Kanaya thought that was a good habit to have.
"To keep its spores from spreading." She took particular care to see that its gaping mouth and eyesockets were completely filled.
"Spores, huh?" Karkat didn't stop, just kept shovelling sand over the body with his boots.
Not knowing how educated her friend was on the subject, Kanaya explained patiently. "Daywalkers are created by a fungal infection of the brain and spinal column. It spreads from the lungs to the blood to the nervous system, and then it takes control of them."
"So what about all the stories of them being 'the spawn of white magicks pailing with the dead' or some shit?" Even when speaking to someone he thought to owe outstanding debts, Karkat still managed to be ornery. It was good to see he still felt like himself after all he'd been through.
"Total fiction. All folklore that evolved through urban legends and sundry novellas." Admittedly, there was a time when Kanaya believed in those stories. How could you deny the supernatural when its gruesome avatars were actively shuffling around outside your doors? But she was too old for urban legends, and the science websites' explanations were a lot more satisfying.
"Have you fought them before?" Kanaya asked absently, stepping lightly on the shallow mound to make sure it had ceased moving.
"No, but I saw them. They moved like their skin was stuffed with dried-up strips of musclebeast glute, and so did I, but I was a little faster and just as fucking persistent." Shaking his head, Karkat added grimly. "Woulda been suicide to fight them."
"You're right." There was not much room left for horseshitting between them at the moment. Even Kanaya recognized that.
As they started travelling again, Karkat grew quiet for a bit. Every now and then Kanaya would see him glance anxiously over his shoulder, as though expecting the daywalker to come lunging after them. It was the longest he'd stopped complaining since they left, so she did a bit of a disservice to her friend and allowed him to believe that for a while.
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The fight was over humiliatingly fast. There was a flurry of arrows, a roar of oncoming hooves, and then the massive fists and talons were on top of them. Archeradicators, Cavalreapers, Subjuggulators. Her Condescension had sent her best and brightest on this raid.
Regula squalled and ripped into every inch of cool body she could find, and the other rebels around her fought with similar vigor, but it was useless. They were vastly outnumbered and unprepared. The information Acuben risked his life for was only part of the plan-- they had been silently surrounded the whole time without realizing it. Mad and twisted though they were, some of the empire's generals were monstrously clever trolls.
She watched uselessly, hands tied behind her back in coarse knots. There's a good chance one or more of her fingers was broken, but that hardly seemed important at the moment. What did feel important was the troll-- Acuben, her Acuben-- being strung up at the widest wall of their cavern hideout. The Subjuggulators lifted him by his wrists and shoulders, tying him to a decrepit fluorescent light fixture and beating him till he held still. It was the worst possible scenario for both of them: they didn't just want to kill him, they wanted to make a show of it.
One of the indigo captains took a knife from his subordinate (of course he was too 'highly' to carry one himself,) brandishing it dramatically for all the bound and wounded lowbloods to see. Acuben looked down at them with remorse; all his followers, all their followers, were staring at him like he'd just put them to death. In a sense, he had.
"Now before we take you dirtblood bastards back to civilization, I propose a little experiment." This highblood was unusually well-spoken for a Subjuggulator. He had a sharp, lucid quality to him that somehow made him more frightening than he would be as a raving lunatic.
"I say we cut this motherfucker open and see if there's anything inside." Most of the Archeradicators scoffed, but the other troops jeered and beat their weapons against the ground or walls in excitement. Together they produced a hideous, cacophonous rattle that made the ceiling of the cave shiver and the most loyal of the rebels sob or scream with preemptive grief.
Regula locked eyes with Acuben once, barely able to see him for the olive haze in her vision. That was either tears or leftover blood, possibly both, but like her aching hands and wrists, that hardly seemed significant. She yelled her voice raw and pleaded with every ounce of strength she had, but she had nothing the empire would want. All they wanted was her and the people she pitied dead, and it was beginning to look miserably like they would succeed.
It became clear from the first movement he made that this grand Subjuggulator was not skilled with knives. The thought sent a chill down Regula's spine; he was used to bludgeoning his victims to death, or else ripping them apart with his bare claws. Having Acuben-- her grub, her greatest accomplishment, in his hands-- made Regula's bilesack turn. He drew everything out, making a performance of slowly ripping off her boy's clothes, stripping him down to his trousers and stepping to an angle so the rest of the chamber could see where he was cutting.
The edge of the knife sank into his belly, a little ways below the end of his ribs, right in the center. Reminded her a bit of the way she field-dressed her larger game. Acuben was brave, bless him, he was so brave, wincing and squirming when the knife went in but never crying out loud enough for even her wild-sharpened ears to pick up. One of the highblood's palms was nearly as big as his skull, and the older troll pinned him by a calloused hand on his hip to keep him steady as he slid the knife downward.
There Acuben did make a small noise, kicking feebly and gasping obscenities at his attacker, but it didn't deter the Subjuggulator at all. He just chuckled and dragged the blade down as far as it would go before hitting bone, then tossed it aside carelessly.
He kept sneering as he pulled the wound open wider, finding sadistic joy in the way Acuben wheezed and struggled defenselessly. This went on for what felt like hours, with the entire audience, both highblood and lowblood, watching in mixed horror and awe. Finally, he seemed to find what he was looking for, closing his fingers around something deep in the boy's stomach. With a firm yank he ripped his scarlet-coated fingers free, making Acuben choke pitifully to keep himself from crying. Brave, brave boy.
"Well look at this, brothers and sisters! We hit the motherfucking jackpot!" Turning his back to the gristly hollow he'd carved, the Subjuggulator grinned wickedly, humorlessly at the crowd. He opened his hand and held it aloft; a tiny, slick red sphere, about the size of a (normal troll's) fist. It was squishy, semi-translucent, perfectly round save the spots where the highblood's claws were digging into it, and god help them all it was moving.
"Pretty as a picture, innit? Like something right outta the books." Regula squinted at the bloody thing, recognizing it with dread weighing heavy in the bottom of her throat. Just like the images they'd all seen at some point or another; the strange little objects that were supposed to lay in huge piles around the Mothergrub's den.
It was an egg, fragile, vulnerable and tenuously alive, and the sight of it made more than a few people gag. Acuben shuddered miserably, almost forgotten, as he craned his head to try and see his egg. He had never cried once when he was getting cut, or when his belly was torn open; but there were tears on his face when the highblood closed his massive hand... and squeezed.
If Regula wasn't crying before that point, she was then. The part that stood out to her most was that Acuben seemed to be losing consciousness, either from blood loss or just from the pain. Making a fractured, animalistic noise, Regula lurched forward and tried to scramble towards him. A nearby officer quickly put a stop to that, cracking her in the ribs with the hilt of his lance and knocking her back down. She crumpled down and lay there wheezing hoarsely, watching intently as the Archeradicator captain stormed up to the Subjuggulator's makeshift stage.
"That is more than enough, Master Nashir." He was a tall, built troll, with horns shaped like arrowheads and a stony, deep-cut face. Between him and the indigo, it looked like a flock of scavengers circling Acuben. They weren't even predators-- predators had nobility and reason, and Regula saw none of that in them.
"And just who the fuck do you think you are to be telling me what to do?" The Subjuggulator rose out of his natural slouch, revealing an intimidating height and bulk. There was a ribbon of sickly diluted red dribbling down his arm that kept drawing Regula's attention. It made her want to vomit.
"Executor Darkleer, sir, and I speak only out of practicality on both our parts." Oh, great. This one was going to be bureaucratic about their slaughter. "Her Condescention specified that she desired a public execution for this individual."
"Well what does it look like I'm motherfucking doing?" The highblood flashed his fangs when he spoke, white and glimmering. He was young for his bloodtype.
"Sir, please. If we fail to deliver this treasoner alive, we could all face terrible penalties." Weaving carefully past his superior, the blueblood reached out and gently began closing the hole in Acuben's stomach with his hands, muttering orders to his subordinates to sew the boy back together and cut him down.
"Killjoy is all you are. I was just conducting a little experiment." Regula began going the way of her charge, slowly being dragged out of consciousness by pain and exhaustion. Every inch of her ached with molten dread; she knew that the empire planned to make examples of them.