Birth of a Wish

[Chronicron]

Exhausted in both body and spirit, yet deprived of the luxury of death, drifting through streams on a whim. The vessel she felt like herself was not completely under her control. The sensation was akin to someone - or, rather, something - forcing her to move through the patterns she herself was unaware of. And that something knew where the craved sustenance would be found.

A pulsar. The closer she would get to it, the bigger her hunger would grow, as if whatever was urging her to move forward was feeding her its own craving for energy. Her sight, now adjusted to the natural colors of surrounding space rather than their spectral refractions, was pinpointed onto the source of baptizing fire, so succulently searing with all the energy. Yet she could not get too close to it, lest she would find herself cooked alive by the very spring that would restore her back to shape.

She stopped right in front of a ripple of fire, laying the fractured vessel bare and open. Not a moment too soon, a gentle warmth enveloped her, streaming right into the depths of her being. What felt like a stake in the heart has started to slowly reshape itself and blend together with it. An ecstatic relief has given way, an emotion she was trained to disobey or discard as unnecessary, yet completely succumbing to it in her current state. The warmth channeled through the heart kept spreading, reaching every tear, burn, bruise and fracture. The sensation of regrowing flesh and realigning bones was agonizingly painful, yet she persevered, knowing that at the end of that painful journey would be relief unlike she had ever experienced.

Yet the warmth was not simply healing. Through all the wounds and tears, the matter that has now fused with and reshaped the heart was beginning to sprout into the rest of the body. The tugging pain was replaced with a sharp one in a sensation of its bones, flesh, muscles, bloodstreams and nerves being overtaken and fused into a completely different material. She couldn’t move, as much as she wished to. She couldn’t breathe, as much as she wanted to. She couldn’t die, as much as she desired to.

Slowly, in what felt like an eternity, the body she was controlling would become completely converted. The redundant organs were now fused into a perfected system or repurposed as building material for the rest. The skin now felt more sturdy, yet sensitive and soft. The muscles felt much more resilient, yet retained the original flexibility. All of it felt new, except for the brain.

Her sight blackened, replaced with a ripple of images flashing swiftly in her consciousness. Her very own memories. Every single past experience, from her childhood in Liberty, to her career as a security advisor at the Core, and now finally an agent for the Coalition’s commissariat, elevated to an overseer of her own department, obsessed with ridding the mankind of Nomadic threat and taking their technological heritage for the Coalition’s own use. Every single moment, right until the piercing of her skull. With each flash, she felt every bit of that memory dissipate into obscurity, as if it no longer was hers. As the final bit of her memory left her mind, her numb, empty consciousness was left adrift in the void. As a final bout of her agony, she at long last started to feel the life energy leave her body. Though it was not leaving her voluntarily. Something was dragging it outwards.

The Overseer’s lifeless body, along with her trusted lieutenants, has begun to sink into the amalgamated flooring. A low frequency signal emitted throughout the Omega-58 system, one that would only be picked up on by the residing thralls, hybrids and servants of the aliens.

The Pripyat was complete.