Chapter Text
Lacunae (05) - Huntmaster/Obyron
-----------------------------
Obyron never knew what to make of it when the game warden of Solemnace came calling. "My master would meet your master!" The old deathmark cackled, unperturbed by the warscythe held microdigits from his throat; as casually as anything he tossed up a chrysoprase hologram from his palm, which unfolded into a projection of the overlord. Obyron made no reply nor drew back his weapon, but his oculars brightened at the familiar sight. Before them Trazyn the Infinite swept back his tile-cloak, casting vivid green glitters against the Huntmaster's fingers, and sat on his throne with his usual gleeful flair.
"Zahndrekh, old chap." Obyron watched as the projection chuckled, the archaeovist's purpose already dawning upon him. "Since we last met I've been thinking nonstop about our game, and you'll be well pleased to know that I'm ready to make my move. I trust you kept the board for me. I won't come empty-handed, either: I have with me here a splendid tea-chest from the Nephrekh, yes, it's the most beautiful thing, I've tears in my eyes just looking at it."
He paused to show off the tea-chest. Dabbed at his oculars, which Zahndrekh would almost certainly interpret as tears, as well as a show of sincerity. "You'll have just the right kind of tea to put in it, of course. Hail me or send Huntmaster back with your word, and I shall come, whenever that will be. That is, if Obyron hasn't filtered out this message already." A single green ocular cycled in a wink. "My greetings to you, vargard, preserve your master well. I will be waiting."
Then the projection was dissolved and the two heralds were left alone once more. Obyron hummed low, dipping his great head in consideration. He was always wary when the highborn came calling to Gidrim, but this meeting had been anticipated for a while: as obscene as it was to say it, for Trazyn the Infinite nonetheless, the archaeovist was a low-risk visitor in this particular context.
They liked playing board games together, the overlords. Right now they were into senet. Some five hundred years ago they'd agreed to a best of three, after which some kind of reward would occur, though Obyron had long forgotten what; Zahndrekh had won the first round, and Trazyn was taking longer and longer between turns with the second, which the nemesor had so far permitted with astonishing goodwill.
Any excuse for company was a good one. Eternity was a lonesome thing, and Trazyn was one of the rare lords who played along gladly with Zahndrekh's illusions, attending his banquets and discussing necrontyr histories. He was of no martial character and had no quarrels with the nemesor. As long as Obyron watched over the porcelain, this was likely to be a meeting as fair as the ones before it - and if Trazyn decided this was the time to be a bad sport, well, Obyron would definitely want to be around to stab him in the face. He rumbled in approval and withdrew the warscythe from the Huntmaster's throat.
"I shall inform the lord nemesor of this message." He said, and flashed an affirmation-pattern across his Sautekh cartouche. "I know not when he will give his answer, but he will hail Overlord Trazyn with his reply, as before. You may now depart."
But the Huntmaster did not leave. The deathmark remained where he was, his fingers locked behind his head, leaning jauntily against the noctilith walls and gazing up at Obyron. And since Obyron was hardly about to turn his back on a deathmark, they stood there for what seemed an inordinately long time, oculars to monocular fixed in silence.
It was the Huntmaster who broke it first. "Well?"
Obyron blinked at him. "Well what?"
"It's only been, what, thirty years since we last met." Then a most curious change came over the deathmark. The light of his single optic became somehow wistful, and he laughed the softest laugh Obyron could remember hearing from him, yet felt oddly familiar at the same time. "You don't think you could ask after me sometimes? How are things, Huntmaster? How's your planet and your overlord? Have you hunted anything interesting recently, Huntmaster? - It's hard if we're made to earn our namesake, only to not be referred by it ever."
A data-cascade began in his logical arrays. Obyron halted it swiftly, but the Huntmaster had a point: for any deathmark to possess a name was no small feat. Prior to biotransference, it'd been the custom for those who bore the Mark to lose their child-names with their training, and unless their lords and masters saw fit to grant them another they all went without. Numbers they became, or an instrument of the place they'd been trained in. A deathmark earned their name through a steady hand and a fine shot, ideally with some notable kills - and if they had no such deed-fame to boast of, they were doomed to mediocrity and forgotten.
There were millions of such deathmarks among the Sautekh, all slumbering in their stasis-crypts. No one would ever know from whence they had come, or remember how they lived, for the lack of a name and a history. This was not the case for the Huntmaster; Obyron could see where his aloofness had been an insult, even if he had not intended it to be.
"Have... have you..."
Partly because he wasn't used to making small talk. Dead gods, he was bad at this. "Have you hunted anything interesting recently, Huntmaster?"
The Huntmaster cackled. Obyron felt his nodes flash in embarrassment: sticking to the script, I see. But the old game warden was kinder to him than that. "The same stoic Obyron as always," he said, and beckoned for the vargard to join him against the wall. "Have I, indeed. Let me tell you all about it."
And he did. It was easy to listen to him, for much like their overlord, all the crew of Solemnace had the gift of speech. But not many of them came to speak to Obyron, at least not so casually: Overlord Trazyn came to consort with overlords, the Arch-Cryptek Sannet usually remained by his master's side, and it was rare Royal Warden Ashkut should visit for anything other than a formal announcement.
The Huntmaster was a more casual herald, and remarkably friendly, especially where his profession was concerned. He spoke of his recent trophies: a kroot shaper, another lictor ('Another?' Obyron resisted the urge to ask) to even out the numbers in a recently rearranged display, a jokaero that the overlord was personally holding captive within three nested layers of tessarect labyrinths. (Apparently it was an exceptionally artistic specimen, and was attempting to fill Solemnace with alliterative code-viruses and miniature light-sculptures, one of which resembled the Huntmaster and the deathmark was carrying around on his waist.) In all cases, he had been traveling with Trazyn, and in all cases the overlord had not set out for the purpose of collecting those trophies. Just a happy coincidence, as far as Solemnace was concerned.
Trazyn liked to visit various dynasties. He received varying degrees of welcome, most of them negative. The Huntmaster was with him to threaten others with his presence, or to ferry his master around, and hunting game was a pleasant bonus of the job. This made Obyron consider that he had never seen the Huntmaster wielding his synaptic disintegrator in his presence; he'd simply thought it correct that a messenger in good faith should be unarmed. Now, though, he wondered if it meant something more.
"Overlord Trazyn is never short on interesting encounters," he commented as the deathmark wrapped up his tales. "Nor you, it seems, by virtue of being his retainer. Should I be surprised that your visits to Gidrim are so... uneventful?"
"Why should you be surprised? It's the only honorable thing from one voidwalker to another. Countless interesting things drift by Gidrim, they're just not for me to take while you and your lord are about."
The failure cascade resumed faster than before. This time the Huntmaster saw it, in the stillness of his flux and discharge nodes.
A dry click-laugh escaped the deathmark's vocal buffers, maybe woven through with the slightest sadness. "You don't remember."
Obyron felt he had to be honest. "No."
"It was a long time ago." A shrug, followed by the shuffle of footsteps, as if the game warden meant to leave. But he quickly changed his mind, or maybe he'd perceived Obyron's dismay, his massive shoulders sinking ever so slightly with the guilt. "I saw you before the bulk of the Awakening. Back when the rest of Gidrim was asleep. I don't think I even recalled the nemesor Zahndrekh then - but I knew you, I'd recognize you anywhere. It's the mantle, see."
He nodded at the vargard, and the ghostwalk mantle he alone possessed. Had Obyron still lived in flesh he might've stared in astonishment, open-mouthed; in lieu of expression his oculars brightened beyond their usual luminosity, his arrays rapidly forming semiotic logic-chains from this information. It was not recognition - a deep-engrammatic mnemonic search yielded nothing, whatever memory the Huntmaster was referring to was gone - but Obyron was rapidly piecing together a time and place within his tormentuous eternity where the deathmark might have fit.
"Did you..."
"We didn't speak, we just passed one another. Then again, and again, over the years. Maybe before the Great Sleep you walked with more of us, I wouldn't know anything about that."
The Huntmaster laughed, his tone considerably lighter. So Obyron did have a vested interest in filling the gaps in his memory, he wasn't declining like so many of their kind. "Then again, I'm the only deathmark I know who was granted a void cape from an overlord. We all tear different oubliettes across different dimensions, but some of us can go deeper than the others. That's where I set mine, and where I used to see you, where the void is so deep and the darkness so thick that it's nowhere and nothing at all."
He turned his back to Obyron, showed off the void cape streaming down his shoulderplates and past his narrow hips. Turned around again. The vargard's mind was spinning, reaching back to the long-lost years of his solitude: he had a melancholy existence now, but he'd never experienced that kind of sheer emptiness again or since, and had long burned away most of those memories in battle. They were not worth remembering, he had thought, merely useless data. Swathes of blankness perceived by his oculars, marked now and then by the dying stars, blanketing his engrams with the night.
But evidently Obyron had thrown out far more than he should have. He used the ghostwalk mantle in quick flashes nowadays, only long enough to sidestep a battle or get to Nemesor Zahndrekh. With no master to hurry back to, however, he'd occasionally spent years walking the space between dimensions. Time did not flow there as it did elsewhere, and nothing existed in the ether to trouble him.
"And we..."
To comfort him, though, perhaps. Obyron's vocals trailed off, before grasping the only logical conclusion. "Were."
"Were something." The deathmark agreed. "Yes."
The vargard required no elaboration. They'd both been soldiers, it was not for them to expand on their feelings. But as the Huntmaster reached up, his lean fingertips touching the smooth plating of Obyron's jaw, the vargard felt a quiet ache in his core that was as familiar as the deathmark's laugh from earlier. The Huntmaster peeking out from his subspace oubliette, the gold sigil of his cartouche glittering in the dark; Obyron, ducking in and out of reality, occasionally sensing the other's monocular and nodding in acknowledgement. Voidwalkers in their solitude.
"I'm glad Overlord Trazyn accompanies me." The Huntmaster said. "But he is not a dimensionalist, nor a deathmark. He cannot reach my oubliette on his own, open one without an external device, or see what's down there in the deepest gap between dimensions. Our kind were always made to walk alone - so to meet you there was a surprise, though a nice one. I've always remembered that."
"..."
"I'd never harm you or Gidrim. It's not polite to fire upon a friend."
"Never is a strong word." Obyron replied, but lifted his own strong hand to rest upon the deathmark's. "I, ah. I don't exactly have synapses, anyway, not in the traditional sense."
"No." The Huntmaster laughed. "I suppose we don't."
That was all they needed. Blue tightened against white for a moment, then the Huntmaster slid his hand free, and resumed his standing against the wall. "The ghostwalk mantle was intended only for rapid movement. Now that Nemesor Zahndrekh has returned, I cannot afford to walk the void as long as I did before." Obyron said, then tilted his head in gentle suggestion. "But I've clearly been absent for too long. If you'd like to resume our walks, Huntmaster, I think we ought to have it on the surface instead - how about we try it before you go? I can show you Gidrim, you can catch me up to what I've forgotten."
"Why, friend Obyron, that's the closest I'll ever come to catching you." A gleam of what Obyron could only call mischief lit up the Huntmaster's monocular. "Lead the way."