12 Miles Below - Epilogue (Side Story - Observations of an Imperial Crusader during the Crucible Months, Part 1)

AN: Patreons put out they wanted to see this first, so here's part 1!

***

The Crucible Months, as labeled by Emperor Winterscar, is the span of months between his first actions all the way to the final blow ending Relinquished. These are the records of one crusader during those months.

Rivian was considered by all his peers and squires to be the perfect crusader. 

He knew every rite by heart, knew every scripture, and every blade technique in the imperial combat arts. And he believed in exactly none of it. 

There was simply no proof of anything. It was all hearsay.

Rivian believed there was no mythical empire everyone spoke about in reverence and longing. 

There was no lost emperor either. 

Urs was a username from a long dead human of the golden age. If it even was a person rather than one of those old corporations. 

There was no golden goddess, and there were no gods anyhow. What god would allow the world to exist in this shape? 

Similarly, there was no violet goddess on the other side. Machines were the mistake of man, and life as it was is the consequence. The puritans had it right, machines were the dark mirror of humanity. 

None of them were networked together, machines were all separated nests and groupings in every one of his engagements with them. If they had been an empire, eradicating one nest would make all the others come searching for his team. 

They never did. 

The ramblings of Drakes were just that - ramblings. 

‘Mother, The Pale Lady, The One Relinquished, The Lady of the Long Night, She who thirsts, She who claims the world’ It was all disorienting wordplay meant to attack human minds and spread out across the rest, carried like an infohazard far beyond the reach of the Drake and even possibly past its own life.

Every type of machine had different combat patterns, and Drakes simply happened to be the ones that attempted to spread a disease within the mind.  

Rivian was a crusader because the Church was the greatest organized force against the machines. Even the old Deathless often worked hand in hand with only the Church, for exactly that reason. 

It would be blasphemy to speak such things out loud, but Rivian also knew there were many other crusaders who believed the same. And they all kept marching to the beat of the drum, lockstep with the faithful, acting as proper crusaders in all things - because it worked. 

They routinely pruned the machine populations around cities everywhere and were the fulcrum that allowed society to exist.

All these random traditions, ceremony, architecture, glory and gold - all of it funneled new initiates, aspirants and squires into the system. It gave purpose to those lacking it. 

And for that Rivian, and all the other faithless crusaders like him, kept their mouths shut and allowed the rest of their peers to remain in their delusions.

He’d served for decades now, and had seen everything. And now, he was looking to retire soon. 

Or so he thought.

Capra’Nor had called the local chapters in the area for help and assistance, an urgent request. 

Machines didn’t usually harass cities in the first place. They’d attack and get repelled at the walls, sulk away and not come back. And generally they’d be drawn because someone had gone and poked a nest and then ran back without shaking the trail off, directly to the city walls. 

But the city garrison had called for help, and apparently their outer outpost had fallen to some small scale army or another. 

And so Rivian and seven other crusaders marched on from Endurance Fortress, following orders of their chaptermaster, each with a wing of aspirants and squires, expecting nothing to go wrong. 

***

Naturally, everything went wrong. But this was the before time. Back when he was still naive and filled with confidence everything was sane and reasonable. 

By the time they arrived, the city had already been occupied. 

Actually occupied. By machines. 

Rivian had never heard such bullshit before. Machines killed indiscriminately, they weren’t programmed to do anything other than that.

But as he and his team watched from afar with helmets zooming in on the city, they saw the purple banners and flags, along with machines swarming around. 

“What do we do, Master Rivan?” One of his squires asked, next to him, using binoculars to peer across the ruined landscape ahead. 

Terrible biome, and only the massive hollow pillars had any kind of respite from the storm and lightning ahead. 

“Given the situation, we will return to Endurance Fortress and make a report there.” Rivian said, following what his gut hinted at. 

When they returned to the pitched tents and camp they had set up far from the city, they found the entire place currently locked down. 

And that would be the first time Crusader Rivian saw the Great Feather To’Wrathh, the future Empress of the Machine Empire, long may she not torment his sense of sanity any further. 

When he told the story to others later, he made it crystal clear that there had been no imposing speech, no flash of blade, or dramatic poses on meeting the literal Empress herself. 

He’d walked into the camp and found her eating the rations while sitting on the crate, like a racoon. And after all the bullshit she’d put him through without even meaning to, he took extreme relish in telling this part. 

What had surprised Rivian at the camp, besides… everything, was that she’d managed to apprehend every single squire, aspirant, crusader and even the chaplain - with no casualty at all. 

That was the first hint Rivian got that the machines were far, far more efficient than they appeared, and the only reason they hadn’t been was lack of real leadership and vision. 

Feathers let their armies run wild with barely any consideration. To’Wrathh was the opposite. And all of her operations were surgical and meticulously prepared. 

He still made the attempt of course. The doomed forward charge with blade drawn, while knowing he had next to no chances against a Feather. Enemies even Deathless needed entire teams working together to defeat. 

Internally, he’d already calculated something about all this was clearly off, the rest of the crusaders and squires sent with him hadn’t been killed, and they certainly wouldn’t have surrendered without a fight, which meant when he charged forward heroically, he’d mostly been certain he wasn’t going to die. 

He carefully did not mention that part in his retelling of the stories. 

To’Wrathh had him disarmed and on the ground in under ten seconds, and mostly because she’d moved to avoid harming him in the fight. If she’d wanted him dead, he was certain he’d be dead.

The squires he’d come with did not have relic armor, they were still in their first year under his wing. Which meant they stood even less chance as the machines holding the camp down surrounded them and tied them up without much fuss.

He’d never met a machine that didn’t want to kill him or run from him. The experience was novel, in an abstract way. 

It was at this point Rivian made a mistake that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Unlike the other crusaders in this camp who were fervent believers in the Church and equally sworn to die fighting, Rivian was far more pragmatic.

Something To’Wrathh seemed to pick up immediately after a few questions, in which she realized he was the only Crusader here to be open to discussion.  

After negotiations, she’d given them all a choice. Turn back and return to their fortress, or be brought into her city and join the captured church there. 

The choice was obvious, so they soon found themselves within their airspeeder heading back to Endurance fortress with the strangest tale in their life. 

All except for Rivian. Who was returning back to Endurance with something extra: The role of first contact with Capra’Nor’s new leadership. 

****

That wasn’t so bad at first. But that was all before he got to know Lady To’Wrathh in further detail over the next few months of back and forth exchanges, of which he would perform on a weekly basis. 

His greatest problem was the sword saint. As in, an actual legendary sword saint had traveled down with an escort of Surface Knights and fought To’Wrathh to a draw. He saw the video recording, it was basically spread everywhere for a good month. 

The problem is that wasn’t the only fight that happened. The sword saint remained on the loose in the city and then just did. Not. Stop. Fighting. 

He’d take a walk out to the lake to clear his thoughts, and the knights were jumping from roof to roof slicing and dicing at each other. 

He’d get a nice meal at one of their restaurants and nope, evacuation time because the rebels had tried to cripple some core machine construction and once again the sword saint and her escort were there fighting it out. 

He’d be in his study writing the next boring report back home and a giant machine would knock on his door and calmly tell him to evacuate the local area. 

At the very least the sword saint didn’t attack at night. She knew machines didn’t sleep so there was very little gain in trying night raids. So he did manage to get seven hours of solid sleep each time. 

At one point he started believing To’Wrathh was intentionally leaving the sword saint alive because instead of being upset at a rogue element within her tightly operated city, she was constantly going out to handle it herself, like it was her favorite time of the day. 

Endurance Fortress decided to err on the side of gathering forces rather than attack immediately, despite his insistence. This was the first time there wasn’t a deadline of lives at stake. Usually machine waves breaching walls meant every hour the Church didn’t arrive, lives were lost. 

Capra’Nor was quite the opposite.

The fortress moved its timelines from immediate deployment to ‘potentially next month, depending’ where next month ended with the same conclusion, and he’d expect the same the next month. 

To’Wrathh was the strangest machine he’d ever met. And while he believed at first to be slowly extracting key intelligence about the machines and how they operate with subtle questions and probing passes, he soon realized he could just ask her directly and she’d hand him the answers. 

Relinquished did exist. Which was a massive discovery that shook the core of his being, and he’d find that to happen just about every other day he spent in that cursed city. 

He learned quite a lot about the machines and their command structure, along with more personal details of Relinquished herself. An enemy so powerful, he didn’t understand how she hadn’t already claimed the world a hundred times over. It seemed more as if she toyed with their lives.

Fortunately, other parts of his long held beliefs were true. To’Wrathh knew nothing of a human empire, and equally saw no records of a user named URS anywhere in the public machine archives. 

The fortress kept communication cordial with the machines. So long as they weren’t outright killing people, the Church had more time to gather forces for the eventual march. So his days were generally low-stakes. 

Up until one day the local priest came shambling out of the church escorted by his personal guard, who equally looked rattled. 

From the moment he saw the poor man rush up to him, Rivian knew To’Wrathh was behind this somehow. 

He’s asked a question too close to the sun and she’d turned around and explained some eldritch knowledge without a hint of moderation. 

As it turns out, To’Wrathh had recently gone digging into deeper history. Specifically in sections Relinquished had wanted to bury. 

First off - records of an actual empire were sporadic, and the Church believed it mostly on faith. Any actual evidence was basically burned to the ground.

There were legends of some secretive chapter among the church that would go out and gather all relics of the old empire, hiding them deep underground. So all evidence of the empire had been burned down by the machines and the scattered parts that survived had been picked clean by some secret order that nobody could tell existed or not. Some say it was the Indagator Mortis Chapter, given they were the most notoriously picky chapter and rather wealthy, but as far as Rivian knew the Indagators were simply a lot more connected with the Deathless and by proxy that made them more well respected.

Rivian would eat his purity seals if all that secret mission of the Indagators bunk turned out to be true. 

And purity seals tasted exactly like the paper they were written on, according to him. Because To'Wrathh not only delivered evidence of it existing, she gave him the entire archive from the machine point of view as they fought year after year to expunge the Empire of man.

They'd come real close to winning too, so it was understandable Relinquished was keen on wiping them all out and then hiding the evidence to the point even the regular machines didn't have access.

The secret mission stuff wasn’t something that came with the machine side of the data package, so at least that wasn’t a thing. 

He trundled back to the fortress with a copy of the machine archives as unearthed by To’Wrathh.

And then, being the messenger, he was of course draggeed further into it.

They brought him into a chamber and sealed it from all sides, where an Imperator strode into the room and sat down to discuss. 

Rivian was getting better at handling earth-shattering revelations by that point, so when the Imperator had informed him the more secretive layer of Indagator Mortis, and their ancient task to seek the lost emperor and restore him to power, Rivian took it in stride. 

A recently learned skill of delaying mental breakdowns for more appropriate times. 

And because he’d been the only one who’d had an ounce of rational thought during that fateful encounter with the future empress, Rivian would forever be the first contact. Which meant he was unceremoniously inducted as an aspirant to the Indagator Mortis, and tasked with finding more things from the Feather who would tell anyone anything anyhow, and didn't need Rivian in specific to be the one asking those questions. 

The fallout from that day was a massive schism within the church as half the crusaders believed the machine records, and the other half found it heresy because it came from machines. Although they did believe the records of the empire were correct. 

It was a very confusing time, and had a lot of people happy that their long held belief was proven true. But upset that it was proven true by their enemy, which soured things. 

But at least at that point Rivian wasn’t the only one having to deal with revelation after revelation. Churches from all across the world were slowly being informed, one airspeeder delivery after another. 

The next time he returned to the city, he found it in full evacuation preparations.

She was quite happy to see him, since she had a job for him now, and that meant instant trouble.

Unfortunately, she could fly and he could only run so she caught him real fast when he tried to excuse himself with a distraction and book it.

The job was nothing too difficult: Deliver the dead body of a Feather she’d dispatched and deliver him to Endurance Fortress. A second generation Feather that apparently had hunted down demi-gods for sport. Most Feathers took a small fireteam of Deathless to beat down, a second generation Feather required a small army.

And this absolute weapon of war had to be secreted away and the only safe place it could be held was in the hands of the Church. 

How fortunate he was now a sworn Indagator Mortis, and smuggling relics like this for safekeeping was basically his new purpose in life. And everyone in the chapter would hunt him to the ends of the earth if he skipped delivering a nearly completely intact feather chassis.

Which meant there was no escaping this task, and his fate was sealed the moment his armor recorded her handing over the dead limp body. 

He took the tidings, and the body, along with his five squires who were so far out of their depths for this mission it was near comical. But one way or another, the little squad managed to return to Endurance safely with the body hidden away in a giant rectangle crate, labeled as rations. 

It did hold the team's rations too, to be fair to that crate.

Last he’d heard about the body, Endurance Fortress had sent an extremely well armed and prepared caravan to carry the dead body into the strongest fortress in Church control. Unfortunately, they never made it. Rivian would later learn what the machines had needed that body for, and the answer just made him wish he hadn’t asked given how utterly convoluted the whole thing was when it came to swapping bodies and pretending to be pretending to be pretending.  

Something he was learning was a common thing among Feathers. 

His month of bullshit continued, and eventually he returned to the city to find it actually departing this time. The general there explained To’Wrathh got into another fight with another Feather, and both sides killed each other this time. She was now being carried around in a sack by some surface knights bringing her to the local mite forge for fixing. 

Given the rest of the machine empire was now starting to look into her city, To’Wrathh decided a mass evacuation would be safer than trying to sneak an entire population of free humans. 

Everything was oddly well organized so it wasn’t anywhere as huge of a shitshow as it really should have been. Convoys were prepared and launched out, and Rivian returned explaining to his superiors that Capra’Nor was now off the map and their ‘friendly’ Feather was also out of connection. 

This prompted an entire task force to be sent after her since the Church now deemed the Feather a critical asset that had to be either captured or at least assisted back to function. She had too much to offer in terms of knowledge and potentially the means to get to Relinquished herself. 

And, of course, Rivian was sent along with the recovery team. Arriving multiple weeks too late, after everything had already been done and the temple was just about everything besides burned down. 

And it got even worse when they found out about what had gone down on lower strata.