The Heart of the Machine.

Dust. It covered the floor, inch-thick in places. Blood and oil turned it into a grotesque brown paste that clung to the hem of my robes as I lurched onwards, my ears ringing, jagged blizzards of static playing across my ocular implants. One of the lenses had cracked. It looked like the world had been torn in two.

It might as well have been. More dust filled the air, thrown up by the collapse. My mask filtered the worst of it, but enough slipped through to steal the moisture from my throat and provoke fits of raspy coughs as I dragged myself clear. They echoed off down the smooth, black walls of the corridor before me, provoking a sudden, illogical spike of fear. There was no point trying to conceal the sound, I told myself; if anything lived within the artificial cavern, the noise of two hundred tons of collapsing rock would have given them all the warning they needed. My hand scraped along the wall for support, metal fingers brushing millions of years' worth of powdered stone away from the carved, black structure beneath. It's wasn't quite stone, nor was it quite metal, and somehow it filled the corridor with a faint, sickly green light. Enough to see by, just. It felt like I was walking along the bottom of the ocean, a heartbeat away from drowning in solid rock.

Part of me wanted to cry out, to see if someone else had survived. It was an irrational instinct. Pointless. A brief thermal sweep of the debris showed the rest of the expedition had been lost under the cave-in. Luck, or the Omnissiah's grace, had placed me at the head of the column when the roof collapsed. Despite my pretenses of control, I let out a small sob at the thought. High Xenologist Dari, Magi Verith and Franc, Geoscaper Killik...mighty Techpriests each and every one, men and women who served the Omnissiah with their all, lost in a single tragic moment. Their implants would never be harvested and passed on to their apprentices, the precious data-caches stored in their cerebral cortices never sent to Mars. Their data would never merge with the holy archives. They would never reach oneness with the Omnissiah.

I slipped. Staggered. Everything hurt. I had escaped, but not unharmed. My flesh was bruised and my augmetics battered, turning every action into a haze of biological and technological pain. The unwanted stimulus remained despite my every effort at shutting it out, shooting hot knives through my body with every step.

The air was dead and stagnant, the blackness ahead pervasive and oppressive. The shattered remains of my luminum mechadendrite dragged behind me like a silver tail. Still, I hauled myself myself on, the rec-units built into my stuttering, failing ocular implants fighting to eke out every scrap of data from the environments that they could. They analyzed the hieroglyphs on the walls, measured the precise dimensions of the corridors, record the painful, echoing silence. It was as much as I could do. Far more than physical pain, the idea of failure dogged me like a jammed servo. If another digging party was sent, I was determined that they would not find my body huddled in a miserable ball by the entrance, having starved waiting for help that might never have come. I pulled myself as straight as I could, bleating in pain as my bones ground against one another, and forced myself to stand with some pride.

"This...this is Ancilla Dihay, technomat third-grade. Last survivor of the Antellius Rift investigation."

My voice filled the silence like a drowning woman fills an ocean. The echoes faded swiftly as I committed my voice to record. If I must die here, I thought, then let this be my last testament.

"The rest of my expedition was slain by a sudden geological anomaly. I have no more than a day's supplies and do not predict finding an exit. Rather than waste what time I have waiting for rescue which may never come, I have elected to continue on and glean as much data as possible. Let those who come after me know that I died furthering the Quest for Knowledge, in the holy Omnissiah's name. My only hope is that whatever I find here will be useful to you."

I swept my head left and right, zooming in on the hieroglyphs. Each was a neat little collection of circles and lines. Most of them repeated, though I could not tell whether they ran vertically or horizontally, and there was no clear pattern to them that I could see. "Some sort of script. The symbols are too abstract to be pictographs. A logographic language then, I suppose."

The image flickered. What little colour pervaded the darkness of the corridor first distorted then inverted. Green turned to red, like I had suddenly been bathed in blood, and I felt my heart rate spike before the distressed spirits of my eyes calmed themselves and restored my vision to normalcy. Briefly, I wondered, what would be the first to fail? Flesh to a lack of nutrition, or machine to a lack of maintenance?

There were no answers for that question. With a stubborn huff, I set my shoulders and trotted into the dark.

---

It was the flesh, of course. I rationed what little food I had on me but the paltry pair of ration sticks vanished after the third day, and I swiftly began to weaken. Sleep, too, was hard to come by. I became increasingly aware of a feeling of being watched. No matter how many times I told myself this was an impossibility, as I had not detected the slightest trace of movement let alone life since the collapse, the feeling remained, and the gnawing paranoia that settled upon me stole what little rest I might otherwise have scavenged.

The structure was a true labyrinth. It denied almost every attempt at being mapped. First I tried to scan my surroundings to build up an idea of what lay ahead, the machine spirits returned with nothing but confused readouts of impossible geometry and corridors that turned endlessly in upon themselves. When that failed, I turned to more primitive means, making limited explorations and manually inking a rough map of where each passageway led. Yet the passages themselves shifted. Whenever I looked away they changed, suddenly and silently, replacing hollow, gaping portals with new walls that looked as timeless as every other. The frustration I felt at having my efforts come to nothing was not nearly so great as the slowly growing dread at the idea that I was being unwittingly herded by whatever distant pair of eyes I felt upon my neck whenever I tried to sleep.

Water, at least, could be found as I ventured deeper into the structure. In places it gathered upon the walls as condensation, while other corridors and chambers had been cracked open by massive tectonic activity, and through some of these titanic gashes underwater streams could be reached. They were also, I discovered, the path to the structure's greatest vaults. There, the walls did not shift. Though many breaches were too small to squeeze through or two large to vault, some could be traversed, and in this way the strange architecture gave up its secrets to me.

Though I was delirious with hunger and lack of sleep, the sights there were no less stunning. A great, vaulted chamber contained thousands of halberds with dusty emerald blades, its walls inscribed with sweeping depictions of skeletal warriors wielding them against armies of lithe or brutish beings while vast titans struggled with one another behind them. In another, uncountable ranks of insectoid, mechanical beings sat heaped upon one another. Some were barely the span of my hand while others would have made a Leman Russ battle tank look like a child's toy, but all were every bit as lifeless as the structure they resided in. Their metal guts crunched underfoot as I pushed on, staggering through chambers brimming with abandoned equipment for some branch of science I could not possibly name, corridors that terminated in row after row of vast stone portals that led nowhere, and forests of barbed metal column that rippled with green lightning.

Wherever I went and whatever path I took, every step led me in one direction; down. Time ceased to have any meaning. My chrono-display flickered and reset erratically, as if like the walls it sought to steal any way of charting my progress from me. So I went down, deeper and deeper into the earth. First on two legs, then as hunger set in leaning against the wall for support, and at the end, as I felt my organic components beginning to shut down one after the other, dragging myself forwards on all fours, desperate to harvest any last scraps of data I could.

It was in this condition that I reached the heart of the labyrinth.

Perhaps it was luck. Perhaps I was guided my the Omnissiah, or by the lone denizen of that dark place. But I crawled into the central chamber like a mad supplicant on her knees, and what lay there stole what little wits I had left.

It was vast beyond imagining. The ceiling was lost to sight. Hexagonal pillars soared skywards, their faces decorated with golden, geometric symbols. Crackling, actinic energy arced between them, filling the air with a constant, grating buzz and the stink of ozone. Ancient flags and battle-standards littered the floor, their colours faded almost to nothing and metalwork rusted to the point of collapse. Each wall was covered in shadowed pods, or cells, each one housing a skeletal, mechanical warrior. Some stood proud and upright, their narrow skulls staring expressionlessly off into infinity, but many more hung from connecting cables like limp puppets, or had been turned rotten with patinas of mechanical decay, or had entirely collapsed into ruin and fallen to lie upon the floor with the debris of ages.

In the very center of the room, there was a stepped, angular pyramid, perhaps twice the height of a man. At its peak, there was a throne, and upon it, sat a figure. Too far to make out clearly, he, or she, or it, was a third again as large as the sorry constructs shackled to the walls, and swathed in a ragged cloak of deepest blue. A golden crown that flashed in time with each bolt of sizzling energy sat upon its brow, and its shoulders were hunched as if bent double from the weight of it. The creature, or construct, or whatever it was, sat with its head in one hand, drumming long, mechanical fingers against a steely cheekbone with a slow tap-tap-tap that echoed through the chamber.

My vision flickered and dimmed, static ghosts haunting my cybernetic eyes. I gasped and croaked. The figure turned towards the sound, and the last thing I saw before consciousness fled was a pair of burning, emerald eyes.

---

I awoke to the soft chiming of my chronometer. The spasmodic timekeeping errors that had plagued me during my descent appeared to have ceased, and my HUD displayed a comfortingly solid set of numbers. Almost seven days had passed since the collapse, though I had little idea how much of that I had spent unconscious. Something had evidently seen fit to preserve me, since the awful, gnawing hunger that had dominated my conscious thought in the last few days had ceased, leaving me able to think clearly once more. Memories of the last things I had seen crept through my mind as I struggled to recall what had happened. The endless chamber with its countless slumbering soldiers and aeons-old trophies, the pyramid with its halo of captive lightning and finally the broken king at its peak. I jerked upright with a sudden gasp of terror, the memory of his gaze seared into my organic brain matter.

But this chamber was different. It was much smaller and plainer, and the dust here not so thick. The walls were decorated with hanging banners in the same void-dark blue of the figure's cloak. They bore more of the geometric rune-script etched into the structure they hid, along with larger pictures and crests that could not have been anything other than heraldry of some kind. Each one was worn and ragged, though disparate attempts had been made to repair them. If anything, they only looked older and sadder for it, like a crippled soldier in the dress uniform of his youth.

The air was cool, and I shuddered as a chill draft blew over my skin. I had been placed upon a low slab that rose from the floor. My mechadendrite twitched, and a brief diagnostic showed something had repaired it - along with the damage to my ocular and internal bionics - to full functionality. The idea that some unhallowed, inhuman entity had been inside me and tampered with the Omnissiah's gifts made me uncomfortable. It felt like an invasion, a desecration. My robes and underclothes had been taken as well, and for what felt like a long time I sat on the edge of the slab with one arm wrapped around my small chest and my narrow legs pressed tightly together. A stupid reaction, I told myself. Flesh was just that - meat, a temporary shell to be stripped away and replaced by the purity of the machine, and if whoever had seen fit to repair me turned out to be hostile, my soiled robes would have provided no protection anyway. Yet a nagging sense of self-consciousness remained, the cold metal slab turning warm beneath my naked buttocks.

"Stupid. You're being stupid." I told myself, pursing my lips in irritation. My rec-units had shut down when I fell unconscious, and I quickly reactivated them. Nothing had changed. I was still trapped, with no supplies and no way out. In all likelihood I was still, in one way or another, going to die, and it was imperative that I captured as much information as possible before that happened. Still, discomfort plagued me. I thought again of the feeling of being watched that had robbed me of sleep, and let out an anxious giggle at the idea that I might have been saved by the whim of some invisible voyeur.

"Well, then" I said to myself, hopping down from the slab and shuffling over to one of the banners, "the Omnissiah does  not give away his secrets so easily. Neither shall I."

As I reached for it, a sudden, grating noise wrenched at the air. Words like great stone blocks echoed through the chamber, each alien syllable heavy with age and power. I let out a sharp squeak of terror and spun around, my arms clasped around me for protection and my mechadendrite stabbing out with its luminum beam.

There, haloed by the sharp white light, was the figure from the top of the pyramid. He was over a head and shoulders taller than me and nearly twice as broad, his body wrought from a dark metal and plated with bone-colored armour. It was an apt colour. His face took the form of a stylised skull; humanoid, but painfully stretched, and his chest resembled nothing less than a massive armored ribcage. His head was framed by an arc of overgrown spine, and the crown upon his brow gleamed in the light I threw at him, as did a tabard of golden disks that hung between his mechanical legs. The creature virtually radiated age and power. It was like an ancient monolith suddenly sprung to life, an archeotech relic that walked and spoke. And yet, it stood with its back bowed, resting heavily upon a great, bladed staff. Its night blue cloak was worn and ragged, and its faceplate scored by three massive rents.

"I would not touch that, if I were you." It said. It took a step forwards, the haft of its staff making a dull clunk as it struck the ground. "This citadel's defenses are not entirely crippled, and my control over them is not total. I would be deeply saddened if they interpreted you as a threat."

Its tones were ancient and leaden, but it spoke Gothic perfectly. My attention, however, was entirely stolen by the entity's eyes. Lenses a thousand times more complicated than my own clicked and spun, a brilliant green light spilling from the mangled skull-mask's narrow sockets. Those are not the eyes of a simple Machine Spirit, I thought. Numb terror began to spread through me. The creature before me was an entity magnitudes beyond even the more complex machines sacred to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

My arms fell away, baring my frail, slender body up to the advancing machine-man. I stumbled backwards, unable to tear my eyes away. It reached out towards me and I fell, landing heavily on my backside. "Abominable Intelligence..." I whispered, staring at it like a terrified animal. Then, again, as the realization hit home. "Abominable Intelligence! ABOMINABLE INTELLIGENCE!"

I pushed and kicked with my legs, desperately scuttling backwards across the floor. There was nowhere to go, but the urge to run was all-consuming. It was more than just animal instinct. My breath came in short, mad gasps. The creature represented everything the Adeptus Mechanicus considered unhallowed. It was grotesque. It was a perversion of life, both machine and organic.

"Abominable Intelligence?" The creature repeated, a note of amusement in its voice. "The latter, yes, I suppose. But not nearly as intelligent as I should have been. And Abominable?"

It raised one of its huge metal hands and regarded it. Its shoulders slumped a fraction, and it shook its head as if in despair. "Yes, 'abomination' is about right. But not in the way you imagine."

"W-w-what..." I gabbled the word. Some small part of me clung to the mission I had set myself. Make it speak. Gather data. "What a-are you, then?"

It set its staff against the slab and knelt so our faces were level, the servos in its joints rattling painfully. "I am Kalavak the Sentinel, Phaeron of the Vaslar Dynasty. Or what's left of it." He said, casting a rueful glance at the decrepit banners. "You fear me for an artificial intelligence. In this, you are mistaken, for there is nothing artificial about me. In aeons past, my species called itself Necrontyr. Now, I am a Necron."

"You're an alien?" I asked carefully.

"Which merely casts me as a lesser evil in your eyes, I understand." Kalavak replied. He leaned in closer and extended a hand, palm upwards, towards me. "Given that I saved your life, allow me to make a proposition. Do me the great honour of joining me for dinner, and I shall explain."

If I still possessed my natural eyes, they would have narrowed in suspicion. There was no hint of menace in Kalavak's tone, no implied threat if I refused. He seemed willing to talk, and every moment I drew breath was another fragment of precious information recorded and stored in my neural implants. I licked my lips, reached out to take his hand, then suddenly drew back.

"One question" I said.

"Certainly."

I looked down at my naked body and felt a blush creeping across my face. "Can I have some clothes?"

---

"Where did you get all this?" I asked. Despite myself, my voice was filled with wonderment. "You yourself do not eat, surely? Do you have organic servants?"

Kalavak laughed, the sound like rolling, artificial thunder. "No, no. But  many of my peers possessed...quirks, shall we say, despite the promise that biotransferrance would eliminate such foibles. In many cases, it was easier to simply accomodate them than try to convince them of their irrationality. Devoting a hall of status chambers to foodstuffs for those Lords who enjoyed the show of a great feast was no major strain for us."

The Necron sat across from me at the end of a long table wrought from the same black material as the walls and floor. Privately I suspected it may simply have risen forth at the Phaeron's command, where it had been piled high with all kinds of food. Most of it was under or overcooked, or not cooked at all, or even burned to the point of inedibility, but the sheer quantity of steamed, roasted, boiled and fried offerings meant there was more than enough to sate my hunger. I tried to eat with as much dignity as I could, not wishing to show weakness in front of the alien, whom I still regarded as a captor rather than a host. When the smell of it hit me for the first time, however, an irresistible wave of animal instinct had swiftly smothered such pretensions, and for once I was quite happy to let it do so. I had lived most of my life eating flavourless ration sticks and nutri-gruel, and had spent the last week nearly starving to death. The feast before me might have been poorly cooked, but it would have been illogical to turn it down. Or, such was how I justified it to myself.

As I ate, working my way through boiled tubers and some kind of roasted game bird, Kalavak told me his story. His people had been born on a world constantly bombarded by crippling solar radiation, cursing his species to short, sickly lives. They fought their way across the stars on generational coffin-ships, clawing out an empire through sheer stubbornness and mastery of technology. Kalavak's voice rang with pride as he described the Necrontyr's accomplishments, but he soon grew pained as the story continued.

"It did not last, of course. We always were a bitter people. Quick to anger, slow to forgive. Our empire was spread too thin, and travel between worlds was slow. Each system began to wonder why it had to pay tribute to its far-off masters, when it seemed to receive little in return. It was not long before civil war threatened."

I looked up. "What happened next?"

Kalavak let out a long, low hissing noise and slumped forwards, in a strange simulation of a sigh. "We needed an enemy, of course. An external threat. Something to aim all our bitterness at. They were immortals, seeders of life who tended species like plants in a garden."

He looked down, as if in shame. "It was not difficult to convince our people that they had lied to us, spitefully concealing the secret for their longevity while we suffered and died. So we went to war, and we lost. We were driven back to our home system. They thought they were showing us mercy."

"They weren't?"

Kalavak shook his head. "Wiping us out would have been a mercy. One of us...Orikan, damn his name. He discovered a race of phenomenally powerful entities. Energy beings, gods of the physical realm...C'tan, they were called. We built them bodies, and in return they built new ones for us."

He gestured to himself. "Biotransferrance. Some of us went willingly, others were forced. But in the end, we were all transformed. Most of the Necrontyr lost everything but the barest sparks of personality, but the soldiers, bodyguards, leaders like myself, we retained our minds even though our souls were forfeit. So you see, I may be an abomination, but my intelligence is anything but artificial. It may in fact be the only thing about me that isn't."

He went on to describe how the C'tan led the newly reforged Necrons against their enemies once more, driving them to the point of extinction despite massive collateral damage to the fabric of the universe itself. I listened in wonderment as he described how the Necrons slowly realized the horror of their situation and turned on their new masters, casting them down and shattering them like glass statues, trapping each fragment and hiding it away. The story ended with the surviving Necrons retreating to great vaults to wait out the apocalypse they had brought upon the galaxy. It was difficult not to feel sorry for him. The metallic timbre of Kalavak's voice was heavy with sadness and regret whenever he spoke of his people and the choices they had made.

"We were fools. Violent, arrogant, warmongering fools, who never stopped for a moment to consider the consequences of our actions. I fear that other tombs are awakening across the galaxy, and not enough of my kinsmen understand this. They will make the same mistakes, again and again, until the stars themselves burn out."

I put my fork down and rose. Kalavak had procured a long dress of spun silver for me. The metal threads felt strange on my skin, neither fully solid nor liquid, and not least because I was used to the plain functionality of my old robes. It had no straps, instead somehow clinging to the contours of my body like a second skin and pooling like mercury around my feet. There were few reflective surfaces in the tomb, but on those occasions where I caught sight of myself, it was difficult to resist the temptation to pause and admire how I looked.

He had found neither shoes nor undergarments, and my bare feet padded softly on the cold metal floor as I went to him. He was an alien, I told myself - an enemy of the Omnissiah, something to be studied and exterminated. And true to my original duties, I continued to diligently record everything I witnessed. But thus far Kalavak had shown me nothing but kindness, and I struggled to match up the stories of howling, destructive alien hordes with the tired old monarch who sat across from me. The Necron raised his scarred head as I approached, the green fires that burned behind his skull-like faceplate flaring for a moment as I placed a hand upon one of his massive, armoured shoulders.

"So what are you going to do now?" I asked. My fingers lingered, playing against the sweeping arc of metal. Kalavak chuckled. The deep, mechanical noise was not at all unpleasant.

"With you, or with myself?"

A small smile quirked at the corner of my lips. "Both." I replied.

"You are no prisoner here." Kalavak said. "At least, no more than I am. The citadel's exits are sealed and do not respond to me commands, and the structural damage it sustained during the Great Sleep destroyed the control unit for the Canoptek constructs."

I thought of the halls of dead, silent insect-machines I had come across during my long descent as the Necron continued. "Should a way out emerge, I will personally see you safely to it. You have my word on that. As for myself..."

He turned away with a soft whine of servos, his lenses circling as he stared off into the infinite. "I do not know. I do have a ship. Perhaps, if a way of launching it could be found, I might seek out my kinsmen and try convincing them of their folly. But for now, I am simply glad for your company. It has been a long time since I spoke to another sapient being. Especially one as attractive as you, my dear."

I would have blinked in confusion, if I still had eyelids. I had never considered myself ugly, but aesthetic considerations had never been a great concern of mine. I was too short, too skinny, my skin too pale and my face too sharp bony. Even aside from the obvious augmentations of my hands and eyes, my body was studded with datajacks and I/O ports, nodes for future mechadendrite implants, and a long biomonitor that ran the length of my spine. I was neither conventionally beautiful, nor had I achieved such a level of machine symbiosis that I would appeal on that other level. But all the same, the compliment was not unappreciated. I grinned nervously and felt myself blush, and offered a small, girlish curtsey in acknowledgement.

That seemed to please Kalavak. He rose majestically, like some great, sunken vessel bursting to the surface of the ocean, taking my metal hands in his great claws and sweeping me around. I let out a sudden yelp of surprise, half expecting to be crushed or hurled away in fury, but instead found myself drawn in close to the great machine-man's broad ribcage. I looked up at him, shaking, as his expressionless steel face stared down at me.

"I've had quite enough misery for now. Tell me, Ancilla." He said, holding our arms out, his rolling voice filling the air around me. "Do you dance?"

----

I did not. Kalavak declared he would teach me.

The Necron spoke quite truthfully when he said the tomb was sealed. Some had caved in, like the passage my ill-fated party had taken. Other portals simply did not respond to his commands. Kalavak explained that this had been the case ever since he had awoken from his stasis-casket. For the first few days I remained suspicious, quite sure that this was simply a way of tricking me into obedience. But the Necron made no aggressive overtures. He allowed me to wander as I liked, and I found the tomb's walls no longer shifted nor resisted my attempts at mapping it. Yet time and time again I found myself drawn back to him. He was the only other thinking, speaking being in the tomb, and gradually I came to trust his claim that we were both prisoners of the complex itself. We seemed to fascinate one another. As much as Kalavak resented the past actions of his people, he needed little prompting to slip into long stories of the wars he had fought in. On more than one occasion he brought forth a number of lesser Warrior constructs and fought them in mock battles for me, his booming voice narrating the wider scene as his hulking, skeletal form batted the lurching drones aside.

At first I was hesitant to share anything in return, but before long I began to answer his own questions. My abilities as an actress or storyteller were miserable to say the least, and my scant few decades of life were as nothing compared to the Necrons' aeons-old memory, but Kalavak listened raptly nevertheless as I described my life, my duties and the people who I had lived with. So too did he show an interest in my biology, or such was how I chose to interpret the way he sometimes stared. It was only natural, I told myself, for a being which had given up its flesh and blood to be curious when presented with a living, breathing organism for the first time in aeons. At times, when I retreated and undressed to sleep, I would once more feel like I was being observed from a distance. The sensation no longer unsettled me. Silently, in the back of my mind I almost felt flattered, and grew less shy about trying to cover myself when alone.

And yes, we danced. Despite his size, and the occasional mis-step or lopsided turn as his ancient servos failed him, Kalavak could move and dance with surprising dexterity, making my own attempts look clumsy and foolish. But his patience seemed infinite. Like the machine he was, the Necron would walk me back and forth through the same few steps again and again until they became rote. It was during these times, pressed up against his ribcage with one metal hand upon my hip and the other enveloping my own slender prosthetic, that I noticed my own interest in his mechanical physiology.

Most techpriests, as they excise more and more of their original flesh, steadily lose their humanoid forms. But Kalavak, despite the deathly cast of his features, was very much the opposite. His chest was broad, his limbs well-built and strong. Even his ravaged, skull-like features had an undeniably noble cast to them. Whenever he pulled himself out of his usual stoop, I felt my pulse quicken at the sight of him. He towered over me like some great sepulchral Adonis, a tower of alien masculinity wrought from metal and ceramic bone. Sometimes my fingers would linger upon his form, catching on the edge of his ribs or the ribbed tubes which coiled beneath his torso, and in those moments I relished the way he made me feel small, soft and feminine by contrast. Before, I had been anonymous, a nameless labourer in the Omnissiah's service, unknown and uncared for. And though I still prayed to the Machine God, it was obvious Kalavak adored me. When one night I caught myself watching and re-watching the footage I had taken of him, and felt the hot flush that spread through me at the memory of my soft skin pressed against his cool, unyielding body, I was forced to admit I harbored similar feelings.

Yet despite our mutual attraction, there remained a barrier between us. At first I thought it was a simple, crude physical one - an inability to act upon our unspoken desires. But Kalavak had shown me enough of the Necrontyr's miraculous technology that I felt sure such limitations would not pose an obstacle should the Necron turn his mind to them. It was an emotional one, of that I became sure. The difficulty therefore lay in gauging Kalavak's mood, which was not always easy. His face was a single, solid mask that betrayed nothing, and like any machine he was not prone to the small, unconscious movements of flesh and blood creatures that might otherwise give away what he was thinking. I saw only what he wanted me to see. As the days went past, my frustrations, physical and emotional, grew beyond my ability or desire to control. When I departed to rest, instead of sleeping I would disrobe and drape myself over the metal slab Kalavak had used for my recuperation, letting the sensation of distant eyes flow over me as I caressed myself, wallowing in the kinds of physical pleasure my once-peers had looked down upon. Yet no matter how many times I displayed myself for him, writhing in climax around a pair of metal fingers I feverishly dreamed were his, Kalavak made neither comment not move to take me.

When at last it happened, it happened quite by chance. Kalavak was sitting upon his throne in the central chamber. He had raised a second seat, built to fit my slender frame and less grand than his own, for me. I lounged across it in a manner that would have made my masters in the Adeptus blurt disgusted screeds of binarc cant, with one smooth, pale leg dangling teasingly over the arm of the seat. The Necron's burning eyes turned towards it now and then, but the alien machine made no comment. Instead, he had enthusiastically been recounting a tale of his battles against the C'tan, vividly describing how his body had been struck down time and time again fighting against another Necron who had refused to turn against the Star-Gods.

"If your repair systems are so advanced," I asked suddenly, "why is your face still so badly damaged?"

There was a harsh silence, broken only by the fizz-crack of energy snapping overhead, and the dull, echoing footsteps of Kalavak's few functioning lobotomized servants.

The Necron sagged forwards, his massive, armoured shoulders slumping. He brushed his thick fingers over the wicked rents in his metal, then made a harsh, electronic noise that I took for a sigh.

"You remember, my dear, when I told you that I was the only high-functioning being from this tomb to survive the Great Sleep?" His voice echoed around me. I nodded.

"That was...not a lie, but perhaps a half-truth. There was one other."

My occular lenses clicked and whirred. I shifted my position, withdrawing the offered leg and leaning forwards attentively. Kalavak made the buzzing sigh again and looked up at me.

"She was my...partner, consort. Wife, perhaps, in your own language, though the term does not quite match the meaning in old Necrontyr. Her name was Okala. She rose with me, but she was not whole."

He slumped back in his throne with a crash of metal on metal. "Before the Great Sleep, when we fought to free ourselves from the C'tan, there was only one Star-God that we managed to slay. I do not recall how it was done, but he was torn apart, his essence scattered and banished from the galaxy forever. Lugar'athu the Flayer, he called himself, and his final curse upon us was a terrible thing to behold."

My breath caught in my throat. I began to understand why Kalavak had made no real advances towards me, nor responded to my own unvoiced urgings. The massive Necron paused, as if to collect his thoughts, before he began once more.

"Our bodies do not age. They do not sicken, and so long as our linked tomb complexes remain whole, cannot be destroyed. Our souls were long since bargained away, and thus no more harm can be done to us there. But our minds...the Flayer Virus attacks our minds. We become insane, cannibalistic things, desperate for the flesh of the living. Some of the Warrior constructs contracted it during the great sleep. Okala and I moved to banish them, but she was infected in turn."

Kalavak's voice was flat and heavy, devoid of its usual humour. It even lacked the rich bitterness of his long diatribes against the C'tan and the more warlike of his people. I rose from my seat, silently making my way over and kneeling by the arm of the throne, one hand on the tortured machine's arm.

"She fought it every step of the way, but in the end, the virus eroded her mind and became contagious. It was necessary to..." Kalavak trailed off, then raised his burning green eyes to the impossible, endless ceiling. "To be rid of her. She fought back, of course. Raving, screaming, pleading all the while. She fled into a pocket dimension, and left these scars as a memento. I could repair them in a moment, but..." He touched the gashes again. "It would feel wrong, I think."

"How long ago was this?" I asked.

"I cannot say for sure." Kalavak replied. "My perception of time is imperfect. A century at least. Perhaps more."

My eyes would have widened in surprise. "That long?"

He laughed, and this time his voice was thick with bitterness. "We are timeless beings, Ancilla. We are eternal. We have all the time in the universe to brood and dwell upon the past."

I rose and stood before him, his metal skull following me every step of the way. My heart raced, and my stomach clenched in nervous anticipation. If Kalavak reacted badly to what I was about to do...I shook my head pushed the thought away, not wanting to consider what might happen.

"Should you, though?" I asked. Kalavak's expression did not, could not change. Whatever thoughts churned inside his metal skull where his and his alone.

"Should I what?" He said.

"Brood. Dwell on the past. For so long, at least. We all mourn, but for so long? Over a hundred years? That can only lead to madness."

He laughed again, his voice as rich and bitter as a chem-swamp. "All of us who survived the Great Sleep are mad. We have lost everything except our minds, and one day even those will be forfeit."

I took a step forwards. "You don't seem mad to me, Kalavak." I said. "Would Okala want you to think you are? Like you said, you're eternal. Do you think she would want you to spend that time in misery, or to move on?"

The Necron did not reply. He sat, staring, as solid and impassive as a monolith. Even his cloak seemed frozen in time. Slowly, I raised my arms and shrugged my shoulders, and the metallic weave he had gifted to me came undone. At first it fell as a tangle, then as a liquid, dissolving into a silver wave that dripped from my small breasts and ran across my belly in glittering streaks, caressing the length of my legs before falling free to collect, solid once more, around my ankles. Kalavak's gaze followed it down, burning green witchfires inspecting me, my soft, pale skin and chromed augmetics. He made no other move, and I felt the first stirrings of fear in my chest. My skin tingled in the cold air of the tomb. My ocular lenses twisted and buzzed. My mechedendrite twitched, dancing like a silver serpent. Finally, I reached for him, offering Kalavak my hand.

He stared at it once more. Then, finally, he reached out and took it. His palm enveloped mine and for a moment I felt his whole, tremendous strength as he pulled himself out of his throne and cast his other arm around me, embracing me tightly against his massive frame. Beneath the cold, hard shell of the robotic alien's broad ribcage, I could feel the low, pulsing thrum of whatever power source he drew upon against my cheek, and the enormous machine strength of his limbs enclosed around me like a vice.

"You are right, of course." Kalavak's voice was a bass vibration, rumbling through me like thunder. "I grew used to isolation. The idea of entertaining another, especially another woman, seemed like a betrayal, no matter how..." he looked down at me, and I felt a sudden thrill at what he said next. "How eager I was to reciprocate her desires."

I shuddered as his hand slipped down my spine, his metal claws clicking over my implants and scratching gently at my skin. He lingered upon my buttock, grasping it possessively, and my heart leapt as his cool fingers brushed against my outer lips, dragging through the wetness there. "Don't stop." I whispered. My nipples grazed the edge of his ribcage, the metal icy against the hot, sensitive buds, and I let out a sudden moan as the Necron's finger eased along the line of my folds, the hard cylinder of his topmost joint running over my clit. A wave of pleasure burned through me, and I clasped my slender thighs together, grinding down on the cool, mechanical digit between them.

He held me there for a moment, holding me paralyzed as I rubbed against him, my heart in my throat and my teeth digging into my lips, losing myself in the contrast between his hard, cold body and my eager heat and need. By the time he released me and crashed back into his seat I felt so tight, tense, wound up like a piece of overstretched elastic. My pale skin was flushed and shone with a thin sheen of sweat, and I roamed my oculars over the Necron's body, my mind already aflame with what was going to come next.

"So, how are we going to..." I trailed off and grinned at him. "I mean, you can-"

"Oh, Okala and myself adjusted our bodies long ago." Kalavak replied. He settled back in his throne, his powerful legs spread and his cloak pooling around him. "See for yourself."

Before my eyes, the Necron began to change. Unblemished metal shuddered and twitched like a living thing. His armoured crotch lost its bone-like colouration, then began to bubble and run like wax. I watched, chewing my lip and rapt with attention, as something began to rise from the primordial mass of liquid metal. A number of segmented pipes, like the ones that hung below his ribcage, coiled and knotted around one another like serpents or thick veins. Gleaming chrome followed them up, flooding between the gaps and setting into a hard, smooth shaft, its surface broken only by the ribbing of the cables. Like a toy, I thought, but it was somehow more vital, more alive, than any vibrator could hope to be.

I reached for it tentatively, wrapping my fingers around the metal prick. It twitched and shuddered in my hand, and Kalavak let out a deep, bassy rumble from somewhere in his chest. The thing was huge, so big I could barely fit my augmetic fingers around it, and I felt a twinge of need so intense it was almost painful flow through me as I compared it against my thin, slender body. It matched Kalavak's oversized frame perfectly.

"Are you sure about this?" I tore my eyes away from his shaft and glanced up at the Necron's faceplate. "I don't think this is going to, well. Fit. If you know what I mean."

Kalavak chuckled. "My dimensions are somewhat...malleable." He said, and I had to fight to keep the grin off my face at the images that conjured. "Would you like me to make it a little more manageable?"

"No!" I said suddenly, surprising even myself. My eyes drifted back down. The thing gleamed in the crackling green half-light of the central chamber. It was strange, at once smooth and ribbed, entirely mechanical but with a distinctly organic look. "Or...not yet, at least. Let me try first. I want as much of you as I can take."

"Bold!" The Necron laughed. "Very bold. I approve, but first." He leaned forwards and cradled my cheek with one of his huge hands, slipping a finger past my lips. The taste of alien metal filled my mouth as I sucked teasingly at it, like copper and zinc and things too strange to name. "I'm sure you understand how old machines often require proper lubrication before being put to use."

It was hard not to giggle, and part of me wished my supplies of sacred lubricants and unguents hadn't been lost in the cave-in, now weeks past. The idea of what my old masters would think if they saw the sort of machine I was about to have the privilege of servicing sent a guilty thrill through me, and I sank down between the Necron's metal thighs with an eager grin on my face. On my knees before him, like a worshiper before a statue of the Omnissiah himself, Kalavak looked even larger and grander than usual. His cock loomed over me, and the soft clink as my metal fingers grasped it and pulled it towards my face seemed deafening.

I licked my lips, leaned in, and took it into my mouth. It was hard - Kalavak's prick was huge, and it was difficult to do more than lick and suck around the tip, washing it with my tongue and fluttering delicate kisses against the ribbed tubes that decorated the shaft. The old robot seemed to appreciate it, though, letting out another low rumble of satisfaction.

"You're so warm." He rasped. "Ah, but to have lips and a mouth once more."

It was strange, at first - the Necron's prick was not quite as hard and unyielding as the rest of him. The metal continued to flow like hardening wax, the tubes slithering under my lapping tongue. But there was no precome, no racing heartbeat - if it were not for the grinding noises of pleasure that my mechanical paramour made, and his deep, rumbling voice coaxing me on, I would have had no idea whether he even felt anything or not. But the knowledge that he did, and that I had brought it to him for the first time in so many years, drove me on. His pleasure was my pleasure, and I felt the growing urges of my own need. My mechadendrite snaked around, down my back and between the cleft of my buttocks, and I let out a low gasp as the luminum-torch upon its tip slid through the wetness growing between my legs. I leaned forwards, raising my backside and clinging to Kalavak's jutting prick with one hand, and gently drilled the tool into my heat. My breasts ached, each nipple like a tiny, sensitive bead of lightning, and I kneaded and twisted each in turn, moaning around the metal haft between my lips as the mechadendrite slid deeper into me.

"As much as I enjoy the sight of you like this," Kalavak said, "and I assure you I both do, and have, it seems a shame to see you relying on that...crude apparatus for your own satisfaction."

I pulled my head away and looked up, giving the metal took a quick kiss on the tip. "Well, we do have a more appropriate one here, don't we?"

"Quite." Kalavak motioned for me to stand, then patted his knee. I was still flushed with my own arousal, my legs shaking with unsated need, and Kalavak needed to help me climb into position. He held me around the waist, my knees resting on his thighs and the tip of his prick brushing against the entrance. Even after the touch of my lips, he was still cool, and each time he touched my hot, sensitive flesh a small spark of pleasure burned through me. A kernel of fear gnawed away at the back of my mind as I lowered myself onto him, a low, hissing sign passing through my lips as the narrow end of his cock began to push into me. What if something went wrong? If I couldn't take it, or Kalavak underestimated how frail I was compared to him and was too rough with me? But one look into the machine's burning eyes, and the lurch of pleasure I felt as he entered me,  swept such concerns away like metal shavings in a hurricane.

"Oh, holy Omnissiah." I whispered, gritting my teeth as I began to slide down Kalavak's shaft. "Machine-god, that's big."

The thing felt even larger inside me than it had looked in my hand. There was more than a little pain as the metal phallus slowly pushed into me, but also a wonderful, heavy feeling of fullness to counteract the sharp, stabbing twinges. The cool metal tingled against my heat, and the ribbed, textured cables sent shudders of pleasure through my body as they plucked at my outer lips. My fingers clung to Kalavak's ribs, holding onto the reclining machine for support as I let gravity have its wicked way with me. When the discomfort threatened to overwhelm me, I pushed up with my knees and let the gleaming shaft, now wet with clinging fluids, slip a little way out while I struggled to catch my breath.

"You look like you could use a little help, my dear." Kalavak said. He tightened his grip upon the back of my head and gave me a gentle push down, suddenly forcing half an inch of gleaming metal deeper into my body and forcing the air from my lungs in a great scream that echoed from the chamber walls for long seconds afterwards. "Or, a little smaller, perhaps?"

It was all I could do to nod, my mind buzzing and reeling with static as I recovered from the sudden invasion. At once, the mass of ribbed metal inside me began to squirm. The thick pipes which formed its structure writhed inside me, sliding over one another and caressing my wet, aching walls. Icy, liquid metal spilled from my spread lips, the feeling of each tingling pinprick a sharp note in the symphony of pleasure Kalavak send coursing through me body. It dripped down my legs like spent seed as, with a great, throaty sign of relief, I sank further down onto him, each mercury-like droplet being reabsorbed back into Kalavak's mechanical body as it drained out of me.

"Better?" He asked. I pushed my hair, now lank with sweat, away from my occular units and nodded again. "Yes, thats - "

My eye-lense shutters snapped open, and I sucked in a sudden, sharp breath. He was swelling inside me once more. I could feel myself being gently stretched as he poured into me, the mass of seething metal slowly expanding and hardening. Kalavak leaned backwards with his fingers steeped, watching in amusement as I shuddered and writhed atop his swelling prick.

"Well, you did say you wanted as much of me as you could take." He remarked. His face was the same, expressionless mask as ever, but his voice was thick with amusement. "Just tell me when to stop."

I winced and hunched forwards, my hands clutching at the Necron's forearms as I felt myself being eased open. Thick, waxy metal flowed deeper into me, filling lapping against my most sensitive places as the thick, ribbed tubes twisted and stirred like long, flexible tongues, drawing a chorus of soft, breathless gasps from my throat. I was flooded, filled to capacity, the feeling of it seething inside me driving all conscious thought but the urge to take more, and more, from my mind. It felt like my whole body, not just my aching, tingling slit, was being pulled and stretched tight, filled with a wonderful tension that built and built until, finally, my thighs clenched and I came, squeezing the liquid mass tight and clinging to Kalavak's hands for support. My mind filled with static and my wail of release reverberated from the walls of the silent tomb until, finally, the Necron released me and I slumped forwards, collapsing across his broad ribcage.

Kalavak's powerful arms wrapped around me, the thin whine of his servos cutting through my fevered, trembling breaths as I shuddered through the last aftershocks of my climax. His metal fingers played through my hair and ran across my back, the coolness of him making my skin tingle. The slow expansion of his prick had ceased, becoming hard once more; large enough to twinge occasionally as I shifted and squirmed atop him, each little flicker of pain a welcome reminder of the mechanical alien's size and strength. A lazy smile played over my face as we lay together.

It was Kalavak who finally broke the silence. "Well, you certainly are easier to satisfy than Okala was. I forget just how responsive bodies of flesh can be."

Every word reverberated through his metal body like a tiny earthquake, the vibrations singing though my limp, sensitive body. I lifted my head, grinning at him.

"You're telling me?" I laughed. "That was wonderful."

"Well, I don't like to boast..." Kalavak said. If his blank, emotionless metal skull could have smirked, I felt sure it would have done. "But prior to biotransferrance, I liked to think of myself as a rather passionate man. It is extremely satisfying to see the C'tan could not entirely scrub that from me."

"Satisfying would be accurate." My grin widened, and I pushed myself up, letting out a soft gasp as his steely prick shifted inside me. "I do hope I can keep up."

I leaned backwards and stretched, easing the tension from my body and giving Kalavak a perfect view of my petite form rising up from where it had been impaled upon his length. After so many nights spent with only my hands and mechadendrite for relief, feeling the Necron's far-off gaze but never feeling his cold, hard chassis against my aching flesh, the sight of him drinking in the sight of me made my heart sing. Kalavak reached for me, his huge hands wrapping around my small breasts. He was delicate, even hesitant, as he explored the sensitive mounds, as if afraid the strength of his grip might hurt.

And it did - his fingers were sharp, and drew the occasional bead of blood as he kneaded and tugged - but I embraced the feeling, arching my back and pushing my chest out towards him, desperate for his hands on me. My body buzzed and sang. I wanted to be touched, to feel him everywhere at once, on me and in me. I wanted him beneath my skin, to take his technology inside me, to feel him weaving through my fragile body with silver strings of living metal. Kalavak pulled and tugged at each sensitive nipple in turn, growing in confidence, urged on by my reedy gasps and half-spoken words of encouragement, fueling the burning need that kindled in my belly. His palms kneaded even as his fingers tweaked and rolled, the mixture of sensations flooding through me as I began to rock back and forth atop his prick, scratching the itch that I had nursed for so long.

Kalavak's hands left my breasts, settling upon my buttocks and squeezing tightly. Lost in a sweet, sexual haze, I was jolted back to reality as the great machine suddenly stood. I swayed backwards, yelping in surprise as the Necron's phallus almost slipped from the greedy embrace of my body. My mechadendrite flailed, desperately looking for something to wrap around. But he held me tight, his claws pinching into my backside as he forcefully thrust himself back into me.

"Kalavak?" I asked, flicking my sweaty fringe from my lenses and glancing nervously down the stepped side of the pyramid. I didn't want to think about what would happen if he dropped me.

"Hush, my dear." He replied. "I felt you might appreciate something a little more forceful."

He thrust up into me again, driving the air from my lungs. My head spun, gravity pulling me relentlessly down onto him. Liquid drops of my arousal pattered to the ground. My heart raced, hammering against the inside of my chest, but the objection I was halfway to voicing was swept away on the tidal-wave that swept through me as he began to piston in and out, driving his metal prick deep into my body. In this position, there was nothing I could do to stop him - to wriggle free would have sent me tumbling down the steps below, leaving with me no option but to trust my safety to him.

But I did trust him, I realized. The momentary fear had passed. I flung my arms around Kalavak's shoulders and wrapped my legs around his hips, clinging all the tighter to him as he fucked me, driving himself into my heat with the relentless force of a machine. Every stroke set my body tingling, every motion dragged the cold edges of his metal ribs over my stiff, aching nipples. He began to gently lift me every time he withdrew, before dropping me back down as he hilted himself. I was beautifully trapped, suspended in mid-air yet feeling like I was being crushed into the ground, my senses overloaded and consumed by his presence. It was humbling and thrilling, my passions and my desperate, clawing need for release both stoked and sated with every forceful motion. I clung to him, whispering, urging him on as a great pressure built inside me, pushing against my chest, aching and screaming to be set free.

Kalavak could have gone on forever, I think. He enjoyed complete control over his shell of living metal. Climax, or as close to it as he could achieve, happened whenever he wished it to, like flicking a switch. When my own finally burst, when I threw my head back and sang out in joyous release, my body thrashing and dancing in his unbreakable grip, he decided to reach his own. I came in a riot of gasping, crying, toe-curling, back-arching motion and sound, but for Kalavak, the only sign I had of his climax was a sudden cessation of movement. He gripped me even tighter and drove me down one final time, thrusting himself as deep into me as he could, then froze as still and silent as a statue. Then, the solid bulk of metal trapped inside my body softened. It became liquid once more, the ribbed cables that had held it together sliding free with a soft, wet noise, followed by a rain of silver fluid that slithered over my aching, over-sensitive lips, ran down my legs and merged once more back into Kalavak's metal body.

Gently, he set me down. My legs wobbled and gave out, and I collapsed, limp and delirious, at the foot of his throne. Kalavak crashed into the seat a moment later, the sound like two industrial hammers slamming together.

We would say a lot to one another in the future, but in that moment, the comforting, blissful silence that descended said all that either of us wanted.

---

I could not go back to my old life.

At first, that was a very literal statement. Just like Kalavak and the crippled remains of his armies, I was trapped in the buried tomb complex. I had no expectation of every escaping, and made my explorations and records hoping they would be found long after I was dead. Later, as Kalavak and myself grew more used to one another's company, I mostly made them out of a residual sense of duty. He was an alien, something to be studied then swept aside by the Omnissiah's mandate.

The day after our lovemaking, I forgot to engage my rec-units. When I realized, I also realized I had no real desire to turn them on. That marked the greatest change in our relationship. While I continued, and still continue, to worship the Omnissiah, I did so on my own terms and in my own way.

Kalavak was reluctant to implant his technology into me at first. He worried that it would be the first step on the road he himself had taken, towards a complete divide from the flesh. Yet, when I pointed out that he could not manage the tomb-complex's upkeep on his own, he relented. Since the corruption and banishment of Okala, he had ruled alone; once I awoke and felt the tendrils of living metal coiling under my skin, he crowned me as his new queen.

It took us nearly a year to reactivate enough Canoptek units to clear the collapsed hanger bays, and free the one remaining Dirge-class escort that still functioned. We salvaged as much as we could, taking every operational Warrior-construct and Canoptek, along with the tomb's entire remaining supply of food. As the ship launched, rising out of the craggy, blackened ground, I cast a look back through a viewport at the sprawling Forge complex I'd been raised in, that I had last seen almost ten years ago.

I felt no regrets for leaving it. Sentimentality compelled me to take a picture before we shot into the endless sea of stars that unfolded before us, but I have never looked at it since.