Fariha

Crown Her With Many Crowns

Armored feet pounded down the metal walkways, metal booted clanging echoed across the sky fortress competing in volume against the blaring alarm, mechanically announcing ‘INTRUDER ALERT’. The knights, blades drawn, armor glowing a dull red at the joints, methodically and efficiently scoured the corridors of the skyfortress for an unwelcome visitor. 

Taj pressed her aching limbs against the walls, holding herself aloft, back freezing against the metal grating that functioned as the roof of the cell. Knights scurried in the hallways, opening cell doors, looking around quickly, and failing to look up. As she’d hoped, they left the door open as they sprinted away. Why bother locking an empty cell ? It was far more convenient to leave it ready to accept the unfortunate fuck who set off the alarm. 

As they passed by, she dropped as quietly as she could, rubbing blood back into her arms and legs. She stifled her labored breathing with the grey prisoner’s cassock she’d been in since her bonding ceremony. It was not designed to be clothing. It restricted her breathing and limbs, but that was only a side effect of the pattern that decorated its front. The passenger squirmed in her hollow abdomen and the filigree of slowgold stitched into the cassock pulsed with its movement, suffocating its will and throttling its voice. The centipede raged against the bindings holding it in place, its legs scraping and clawing against the malformed flesh where it had failed to bond to her body. Its voice, muffled by the slowgold, screamed wordless, animalistic rage in the back of her head. She’d become accustomed to the bastard over several months of imprisonment.

“Just a little longer you little shit. Just a bit more and you can eat all you fucking want,” she whispered, gingerly placing a hand on where her stomach would have been. She imagined the centipede heard her as it ceased squirming briefly, though the working likely made that impossible 

She crept across the empty hallways, the knights’ clamour announcing their positions to her intensified hearing. Multiple times, she heard them and chimney-climbed up to the ceiling, willing more and more exertion out of her rapidly flagging arms. It was a wonder this worked the number of times it did. For a people so accustomed to taking to the skies, these knights rarely looked up. 

She squeezed her emaciated body through the partly ajar blast door that divided the prison from the rest of the skyfortress. The grille-floored hallways of the prison proper opened up into gangways and platforms that made up the outer edge of the fortress. Starvation, the screaming centipede in her gut, and being locked in a box for months had nearly obliterated her memory of the open sky. As she slipped past the door, the blazing sunrise assaulted her senses like a wildfire.

*

The blast of the wind, the blinding light of the rising sun hit her like a physical force. She staggered against the wall, stifling a scream by biting into her hand hard enough to draw blood. The skin around the wound writhed unnaturally, protruding into insectoid imitations of the centipede in her gut, entwining legs that fused back into smooth skin. Even a Reject possessed the blessings of the bond, they just weren’t under her control. 

She forced her watering eyes open, and forced her hand from her mouth. She heard the knights coming. She tried to right herself, but the blaring alarm and roaring wind proved too much and her knees gave out. Her head met the cold grating of the floor with a dull thunk. 

The skyfortress was an inverted pyramid. Gangways spiraled down the outside, patrol routes delineated in red paint. To her enhanced eyes, they seemed like bloodstains splattering the path down. Beneath her, separated by a few inches of steel grille was the precipitous drop all the way to the ground, many miles below. Rivers like pencil strokes across the mottled canvas of a forest called to her in the voice of freedom. Small towns dotted the edges of the river, like red and brown brick-tinted smudges. 

The knights were fast approaching, the gangway rattled under their booted feet. Any second they would turn a corner and see her, immobilized by her own senses. If she was lucky, they’d assume she was an opportunist attempting to escape in the confusion.

If she was unlucky they would pin her to the wall like a prize butterfly, and execute both her and her centipede there and then. The centipede resumed its accursed writhing, black patches spreading across the cassock as it cut into her when it moved. Pain blossomed where it scraped against the failed bond, flooding her mind with agony, cutting through the overwhelming sensations around her.

She gritted her teeth and forced herself back onto her feet, wrapping both arms around her face to muffle the sound and light. 

Freedom was mere feet away. If only she could walk it. She took an agonized step forward, bracing against the buffeting wind. The knights turned the corner and froze for a second, not expecting to find anyone, let alone a prisoner outside the holding cells they had only recently checked. She took another step forward. The knights overcame their surprise. 

Blades buzzed red as they left their sheaths. They formed a defensive line on each side of her, blades held parallel, delineating an uncrossable line. Two of them advanced into kneeling positions, leveling shatterguns at her. 

Blades buzzed red as they left their sheaths. They formed a defensive line on each side of her, blades held parallel, delineating an uncrossable line. Two of them advanced into kneeling positions, leveling shatterguns at her. 

“Prisoner 45!” Barked the knight with an ornate helm. The commander. “This is your only warning. You are to return to your cell immediately or be killed.” 

Taj took another step. The centipede redoubled its flailing, the working glowed a dull red like the knights’ armor as its workings continued to suppress the insect. Blood soaked into the cloth around her abdomen as pain threatened to render her insensate. 

“I’m fucking TRYING ! If you’d just stop trying to get us killed!” She muttered to her insect. It didn’t seem to care. 

The knights racked their guns with a practiced and unanimous Tchk. 

Shatterguns were, in essence, a massively powerful handgun. Instead of the usual tempered metal ammunition, they fired slugs of superchilled slowgold. The sunlight-colored metal, liquid in its natural state, disrupted workings. They affected the bodies of bonded most severely, as their entire being was essentially a massively complex working. And failing that, the metal would return to its liquid state almost immediately on impact, turning the bullet into a miniature explosion that could rip off entire limbs. 

Even so, shatterguns were all but obsolete outside of prisons housing Rejects. That much destructive power would barely slow down a true bonded. Taj had only ever seen them once, but stories of the unification had more than a few descriptions of bonded weaving through barrages of gunfire without a single shot landing. Some were said to simply flick bullets out of the air with all the nonchalance of swatting a fly. No bonded in recent memory had achieved anything remotely similar, but they didn’t need to move faster than a bullet as long as they moved faster than the finger that fired it. The only reliable weapon in an altercation with a true bonded was a flashblade. 

And here she was, pinned in place by two measly guns. 

Rejects were as durable as a bonded, but that was where the similarities ended. A Reject’s own senses fought them, as did their centipede, unable to fully coalesce their working, they were left in a semi-fused state, the centipede coiled into the hollow that was once occupied by the human’s stomach and intestines. Most Rejects went insane, between the overwhelming sensory information bombarding a brain not sufficiently altered to process it all, and the agonized ravings of the centipede infecting their mind, Rejects were a danger to both themselves and others.

Or so she’d been taught. At the moment, the Knights pointing guns at her seemed to be the only dangerous ones.

“You will not be warned again. Get back inside now.” Barked the commander once more, raising a hand to stall the others.

Shatterguns would hurt. Taj had never been shot before, but she had seen it happen. The slowgold would disrupt the working that healed her, and any unfortunate limb that found itself in the bullet’s way would be blasted off. Then, hopefully, they would drag her pieces back to the cell and wait for the slowgold to wear off, and her body to stitch itself back together. 

For a moment, as the knights took aim, and the commander’s hand began to fall, for a moment, she allowed herself the fantasy of letting it happen. Could it possibly hurt more than falling ten miles ? Could it possibly hurt more than having to survive in a wilderness, avoiding civilization, living like an animal, all without the cassock’s slowgold lining to hold her centipede still? 

She considered this. For a moment. 

“Fire.”

The guns cracked louder than thunder to Taj’s ears. 

She felt both shots connect, one to the upper thigh, the other at her shin. 

Pain obliterated her mind as the bullets expanded back into liquid inside of her, tearing flesh and shattering bone. She felt a vocal cord rip under the strain of the scream that erupted out of her throat. 

And just as she had hoped, the short hop she managed when they fired was given just enough momentum by the bullets to send her tumbling over the edge of the railing. 

Out over the abyss.

Out, into freedom. 

Blood trailed behind her like a comet’s tail. The fall was long, almost a full minute before the ground met her with its brutality. She screamed the whole way down.

She distantly felt herself splatter like water against marble. Bones and flesh turned to mulch in seconds, spraying the rocks and trees with marrow and brain matter. She saw the inside of her own head as her eyeballs scattered from her crushed body, before the world went completely dark as they were destroyed as well.

She distantly felt herself splatter like water against marble. Bones and flesh turned to mulch in seconds, spraying the rocks and trees with marrow and brain matter. She saw the inside of her own head as her eyeballs scattered from her crushed body, before the world went completely dark as they were destroyed as well.

It occurred to her that she was still conscious, even though she had seen her own brain be destroyed. She would have laughed at the insanity of it if she still had a mouth. Maybe she would be lucky, she thought. Maybe the stories about a bonded’s durability were exaggerated. Maybe this would be it. 

“That would be fine.” She said to herself, disembodied. 

Would it fucking really.

Unconsciousness took her. 

Get the fuck off the ground and begin our feast. The wolves draw closer. 

“What the …” said Taj groggily. 

Do you not hear me worm, fuck yourself back onto your feet.

She stumbled onto her feet with difficulty. Long insectoid strands of muscle pulled flecks of skin and bone back into her body before the wounds sealed themselves over. The ground around her was trampled flat and pockmarked with centipede tracks as the pieces of her had grown legs and walked back into the shape of her body. 

Carry your bones, we are exposed here.

 “Who … what …” she said, wheeling around to find a source for the voice. 

She caught her reflection in a stream nearby. Her head, bald and notched with divots where more centipede-shapes would have grown like hair had she bonded fully.

Since the failed bonding, she hadn’t been given a chance to look at herself. They had immediately tranquilized her and put her in a cassock. She imagined her family had been sent to some shrine in the corner of the civilized world to atone for raising a Reject. All the better to keep their faulty blood out of the community.

The flowing water warped her reflection, maybe that’s what allowed her to see it without the familiar surge of revulsion. Her wide shoulders and sinewy chest interrupted by the hole where her stomach should be, housing a coiling, writhing mass of insect legs and an endless segmented body. It churned inside her, the messy graft leaving the edges of the hole raw and weeping lymph, wounds opened and closed like eyes as her centipede coiled and uncoiled, tasting its newfound freedom.

Little maggot, will you spend an infinity eulogizing your reflection? We haven’t eaten in fucking months. 

It took her a moment to realize that the voice tasted of the same maddening rage that she had grown accustomed to in prison. Her centipede was speaking, its voice finally lucid, laced with fury and hunger, and intimately familiar.

“Right right, give me a second … what … do we eat?” she said, finally tearing herself away from the stream. 

Whatever bleeds. Open your jaws wide and bite into wriggling meat. We are starving. 

“Can we starve? We haven’t died yet,” she wondered as she staggered into the forest.

Animals scurried away from her as she walked. The press of grass against her feet was infinitely distracting as she attempted to coordinate her stumbling footsteps into some semblance of stealth. 

Leaking wound, you, we are bonded. We do not SNEAK. 

The centipede spat the word dripping with vitriol. 

We are hunter. Run your quarry into the fucking ground, leap upon it with fury and rip its flesh with your hands. 

“Well that’s fucking easy for you to say.” She said, quelling a surge of frustration. “We’re not exactly built right for that.”

We are built the way you fucking wished it, do not press your shame upon me.

“What the hell does that even mean.” She muttered, settling into the hollow of a tree. 

She’d read somewhere that remaining still for a long time coaxes animals to come investigate. She hoped it would work. The centipede’s hunger, now unmuted without the cassock, bled into her mind like poison. Images of blood and feasts flashed through her mind 

She calmed her breathing. She was no stranger to orphan thoughts passing through her. They had been with her since she had recognized herself in the mirror as a child, a longing for a different shape that her parents had ascribed first to childish fantasy, and then to corruption of character. The wrongness of her body had haunted her for as long as she could remember, and she was exceptional at warding off her own mind.

She recited a song in her mind. Breathing in time with its melody. It was an old song, written and sung by a bonded from the age of unification. Historians paid it little importance, as they did the bonded who composed it. But she had found herself drawn to it. The imperfect lilt of its words, ever so slightly off-time from its music, spoke to her somehow. There was some beauty in its malformations. There may even be some beauty in hers, she thought.

Hunt maggot! Blood and flesh approaches. It is time to feast.

A rodent hopped up to her prone form. Its hackles raised, and footsteps taut. Ready to escape at a moment’s notice. 

She remained still, while the centipede coiled tighter inside her. For all its thoughts of rampant power, it seemed to know their predicament. 

The rodent hopped closer to her face, its tail slowly uncoiling, its fear turning to inquisitiveness. She suppressed the urge to smile. How similar they were, this animal and her. Playing by rules greater than themselves. Overcoming fear only to be punished for curiosity. 

How similar they were, this animal and her. Playing by rules greater than themselves. Overcoming fear only to be punished for curiosity. 

Strike cold and drink warm

The centipede moved before she could even think. Its form lashed out from her gut like a snapping wire. Its spines punctured the rodent’s throat in an instant, legs gripping the thing’s body still as it bit through the neck and severed its spine. The creature’s head lolled, held on by strands of muscle and sinew as the body convulsed then fell still. 

A meal for maggots. Not queens. And yet we feast. 

The centipede pulled the animal into the hollow of her stomach and coiled around it. Its legs shredded the flesh and skin. It was a peculiar sensation, blood pooling in the hollow of her gut, overflowing down her crotch and legs. She barely registered the horror of the moment before the shock of sustenance pulled her away from examining the sight. She leaned back against the tree and allowed herself to enjoy the feeling of having the endless hunger of months of incarceration finally be satiated. 

“Good fuck. That was delicious.” She said out loud. 

A paltry meal for one such as us. 

“Hey I don’t know what you think we are, but we are not it.” She replied. 

Drowsy from the meal she slowly stood up. 

“We should find a place to hide. They’ll come for us eventually.” 

A queen does not run from worms.

“I’m sure, but we do. And I could do with less of that maggot talk, I just ate.” 

She thought she felt a spike of amusement from the centipede as she stumbled away from the treeline. Predators were not an issue, and with a full stomach she had no real need to do anything but walk. Her mind wandered as she headed deeper and deeper into the shade of trees. 

The forest was far from quiet to her ears. The crawling of insects against wood, the birds warbling their songs, and the bass of a wolf’s footsteps against mulch were a cacophony to her ears. But with a full belly, or rather, a sated centipede where her belly should be, the noise grated upon her less than before.

She recalled the bonding ceremony. Her parents escorting her by the shoulders to the altar. The centipede, coiled languorously upon a pedestal, held aloft by two bonded. Their faces, porcelain flat, bodies perfect and chiseled muscles outlined in chitinous plates. Their bellies hollow, the empty space lined with insectoid legs, curling and uncurling slowly like curious fingers. One sported a pair of delicate breasts, chitin covering them like a blouse. The other bare chested, a single, star-shaped plate adorning the sternum, leaving musculature on display.

“Our second son. Taj.” Her father said tersely. “We pledge him to the temple. To preserve the Unification and protect our people.” 

“You do this of your free will.” Asked the male bonded in a voice bored of a ceremony that had already lasted hours. 

Her father only nodded his agreement, his face barely managing to not express his distaste.

“And you join us with courage and faith.” The female bonded asked Taj directly. Equally disinterested. 

Taj remembered the twisting in her stomach, so reminiscent of the centipede that currently occupied the space. She remembered practicing her words in the mirror. She remembered the lies, the manipulations and finally the threats she had made to her parents to allow her to join the temple, to give her up to join the ranks of the bonded. To simply let her be without interference.

Of course it hadn’t worked. Of course she was a Reject. She smirked at the hope she once had. 

Always escaping. Always running. 

“I’m sorry I roped you into this.” She said, stroking the centipede. Its legs stabbed her hand. “You could have bonded someone else. Someone who isn’t …” 

Maggot. Fucking small-brained imbecile.

“Isn’t that. Yes.” 

She settled on a tree with a wide bough spanning over the game trail she’d been following. It would give a good vantage, and she could pull the vines down to hide herself if needed. 

A queen does not hide. A queen does not conceal her deadly majesty.

“If I meet a queen at some point I’ll let her fucking know allright.” Taj said with a sigh, climbing the tree. 

The bark was sandpaper under her fingers, and she bit back a groan as it dug into her palm. The crackling of wood under her feet grated on her ears for the entire arduous climb, but she made it to the branch, and the vines around her were blessedly soft to the touch. She pulled them down into a blanket of sorts and settled down. 

Little maggot. A queen does not regret, she only does. 

“Are all the centipedes like you ? That’s a hell of a lot of blood and guts talk for an order that’s supposed to be all peace and protection.” 

The temple is your creation, maggot. We have been here since the beginning. We bond for that is our nature. You are the only ones diluting nature with fear. 

“Not all of us have the luxury of being ourselves.” 

Nature is not a luxury, it is a necessity. It is the sinew that holds your flesh to the bone of your life. 

Nature is not a luxury, it is a necessity. It is the sinew that holds your flesh to the bone of your life. 

“You just go ahead and tell that to the lump of fuck between my legs and we’ll be on our merry fucking way.”

You deny your own nature with your own words. Such ugly contractions of thought are words.

“You have a problem with language now too,” she laughed. For the first time in months, she realized. “Wonder what you would have done during the Unification. You’d have loved that I think.” 

I did.

The centipede spoke no more. The sounds of the forest dimmed around her as sleep came with blessed unconsciousness. 

She woke to a gunshot as it ripped through her arm. 

The blast tore through her shoulder, detaching it and flinging her from her perch to a messy heap on the forest floor. The dismembered limb splattered against the knight’s armor as they took aim again. 

She clutched her mangled shoulder and screamed as the delayed agony erupted through the haze of sleep. The second shot whizzed past her ear, deafening her as she threw herself to the side and gagged reflexively though she had no stomach to vomit from. 

Stand maggot. The wolves are here.

“I fucking realized.” She shouted. Another shot blew apart a tree trunk nearby. 

The knight fired with one hand, the other drew a buzzing red flashblade from its sheath. The ornate helm marked them as the commander from the skyfortress. Her visor retracted with a mechanical hiss, revealing a scarred face and a set expression framed by locks of messy blonde hair. 

“You cannot run. The forest is too loud for you. We both know this.” Said the commander calmly. She fired another shot, missing Taj by inches and annihilating another tree. 

Taj pressed her hand against her ear as the sound of the tree buckling and falling over nearly sent her catatonic. 

“Give up. Sit down and lift your hand in the air and I swear to not execute you.” Said the commander. 

Taj threw a rock at the commander as she ran. 

Fight, maggot! Stand and face yourself as you should!

The buzzing flashblade made a soft pinging noise as it sliced through the rock, its two halves flying apart. The sword swung upwards in a graceful arc as the commander raised her gun and fired. 

Taj cowered as the bullet blew a head-sized hole in the tree she’d ducked behind. She broke into a sprint, gritting her teeth against the mounting sensations. The cracking of twigs under her feet were like thunderclaps. The scraping of the commander’s armor like crashing cymbals. The clamour was overwhelming but she ran nonetheless. The commander gave chase. 

“The prison is quiet. You won’t have to deal with all this noise there.” Said the commander, sprinting after her. 

You little worm. You would have us grovel like rodents in the face of a wolf.

“Yeah, real fucking convincing.” Screamed Taj. 

The knight’s armor enhanced their physical abilities with workings. The commander was not only unburdened by the sensory nightmare that was Taj’s mind, but she could also sprint faster and longer than Taj ever could. There was nowhere to run. Yet that was all she could think to do. The slowgold wore off, and the stump of her shoulder erupted into a mass of centipedal flesh and skin as her arm grew back. The sudden weight threw her off balance and she crashed into a tree headfirst. 

Listen to me you little worm. Listen to your body. You have severed your own soul from your flesh and you expect it to survive. 

Dazed, she looked up in time to see the commander level her gun again. She threw herself to the side, avoiding the bullet and running straight into the flashblade that all but materialized in front of her. 

It bit into her chest, cleanly slicing an arc into her as the commander swung around, and threw the gun at her. 

It hit her square in the face. She threw a futile punch that the commander ducked beneath before slicing through her ankle, sending her tumbling and screeching to the ground. 

Taj lunged for the gun, grabbing it just as the commander pinned her to the ground through the chest with the blade. She raised the gun and pulled the trigger only to be greeted by an unceremonious click. 

Now you learn to bare your teeth worm?

“This is utterly unnecessary. Please. Stop.” The commander’s voice was plain and detached. 

Taj gripped the hilt of the blade pinning her to the ground and dragged herself up, pushing the blade deeper into her chest, before lurching to the side, carving away half her ribcage and a whole lung. But she was free.

Taj gripped the hilt of the blade pinning her to the ground and dragged herself up, pushing the blade deeper into her chest, before lurching to the side, carving away half her ribcage and a whole lung. But she was free.

I can feel your blood boiling. Why do you deny yourself?

“What are you hoping to accomplish prisoner 45?” Said the commander, voice laced with pity. 

Taj coughed and spat blood, crawling to her feet as her foot regrew. She couldn’t even scream anymore. She dragged herself forward on all fours. 

Whimpering little maggot. Stand and become yourself! Your will is wasted on this feeble escape. 

The commander retrieved her blade and unceremoniously kicked Taj in the crotch. The unfortunate flesh between her legs splattered from the force and drowned her flagging willpower in agony. 

The commander ground her foot into the centipede in Taj’s stomach, crushing its carapace and pulverizing its legs. It stopped writhing. 

“This is Commander 003 to all units. Target has been apprehended. Extract immediately.” She spoke into her wrist, almost casually slicing both of Taj’s legs off before returning the flashblade to its sheath.

Taj clawed at her belly and cried. 

Knights walked into the blasted clearing, carrying long metal spikes lined with slowgold. A stronger version of the containment on the prisoner’s cassock. 

Taj cried. 

Even the centipede seemed to have been silenced. 

They drove the spikes into her shoulders and legs, and they went numb. In a way, it was a mercy. The unfeeling washing over her like cold water. 

“Such a waste. So much will in a Reject. I shudder to imagine the potential you would have had if only you hadn’t such delusions of grandeur.” Said the commander, wiping the blood from her armor. 

“FUCK YOU !” Taj spat, the numbness returning some semblance of consciousness to her. 

“Truly. What a waste. You could have created workings for a living. Anyone would pay handsomely for workings made with such stubborn will.” 

Taj didn’t get a chance to reply before they rammed the last spike through her skull. 

*

Do you see the futility of your escape maggot? 

The fuck is that supposed to mean?

It means, you pitiful worm, that you will continue to fail and flounder until you realize who you fucking are. 

I have NEVER been who I am! I’m built wrong! I AM wrong! I-

MAGGOT! You are neither wrong nor right! You simply are. You can either run from it as you have been running for so long or you can accept your nature and BE. 

I don’t know how. I’ve never been allo-

A queen is not allowed, a queen simply does. A queen does not beg for adulation, she demands it by nature. 

I AM NOT A QUEEN. 

Then what are you maggot? 

I… I am … I don’t… I …

Now stop your fucking dithering and claim yourself. Face who you truly are, remember your body and mind and everything that makes you YOU. Claim the shape you see fit. Open your bloodied eyes to your own nature and witness your own fucking majesty because-

A queen. Simply. IS.

Taj’s consciousness fluttered into her incognizant body for a split second before it detonated in the knight’s hands. 

The explosion threw the knights across the clearing, shattering their armor, and cracking through trees. The remaining knights whirled around, blades drawn as Taj stood up. 

Languorously, she pulled the spikes from her shoulders and legs. Considered them for a moment before crushing them in her fist. She pulled the spike from her head last and with unfathomable ease, tossed it at a nearby knight, pinning them to a tree with enough force to drive the spike flush with their skin. 

The centipede uncoiled from its nest in her belly and whipped around her like a living chain, scything through a row of knights, splattering the clearing with blood and shattered armor before coiling around her waist like a belt.

What do you look like?

“I look like a queen.” said Taj. And her broken body unfurled like folded paper. 

Skin and muscle pulled away from her skeleton in a storm of miniature centipedes, writhing and entangling with each other as they reassembled her to her liking. Her shoulders slimmed and her body lengthened, sinewy boyhood stretched into a tall, feminine silhouette. Her flesh wormed and knotted through her ribcage, blooming into breasts, carapace hardening over them into a contoured, armored breastplate. Bones ground against each other as her hips widened, wreathed in muscle, then skin, then carapace. A skirt of squirming insects unfurled from her waist, thread thin creatures locking legs with each other to form a living garment. Her arms were thinner, muscle more subdued, with long graceful fingers each ending in a spike of carapace like a dancer’s nails.

A skirt of squirming insects unfurled from her waist, thread thin creatures locking legs with each other to form a living garment. Her arms were thinner, muscle more subdued, with long graceful fingers each ending in a spike of carapace like a dancer’s nails. 

She reconstructed her face last. The same face as before. Sunken, dark eyes, hooded with a hard brow and a prominent boyish jawline. She left the skin bare.

The divots in her head exploded outward into more centipedal bodies, skewering the knights behind her as she brushed her face idly with a carapaced finger. 

Majesty. Finally.

The centipede’s voice faded slowly. It lacked the rage that Taj so long associated with it. It seemed, for the first time, calm. Satisfied, even. 

“I am. Me.” Said Taj finally, stroking the insectoid limbs lining the hollow of her empty belly.

The knights surrounded with drawn guns and blades, but held back. Her transformation alone had littered the area with bodies.

“Well well well. I didn’t know that could happen,” said the commander finally. She held her sword ready in front of her.

“The centipedes cared not for our abilities, only our perceptions.” Said Taj softly. 

The senses that once assaulted her relentlessly now felt natural. Why wouldn’t she hear the scurrying of every insect, the call of every songbird? Why wouldn’t she see every raised hair on the sliver of exposed skin on the knight’s neck? She was Queen. It was her right to know. 

She heard their fingers tighten on the shatterguns. Saw the hammer pull back ponderously slowly, then ram forward. She felt the concussion of the bullet being discharged, estimated where it would land, extended her hand with casual efficiency and flicked the bullet out of the air with a soft ping. 

The aftershock of the bullet hitting her fingers split the air with a bone-jarring boom. 

The knights stood in silence. Unsure of what to do. No one had ever heard of a reject ever achieving a true bond, let alone seeing it happen. Though to be fair, she was not a true bonded in many ways. Her centipede had not fused into her body entirely, it still coiled around her waist like a belt, calmly waving its antennae. Her transformation had been significantly more violent, her entire body restructuring itself in mere seconds rather than the weeks-long process that other bonded underwent. 

And for certain, the greatest difference was the fact that she was far, far more dangerous. 

“Admirable tenacity prisoner 45, but you’re not quite there yet.” Said the commander with a sigh. Her visor snapped closed in front of her eyes as she gestured for the knights to attack. 

They were a well-coordinated group. Years of training and combat had hardened each knight into a near-perfect machine of death. They stepped forward as one, blades angled away from each other to ensure they covered every possible movement. They struck as one, the knights on the periphery stepping forward to cut off escape like the jaws on a trap, while those in the center of the formation went for the kill. The whole dance took place in only a few seconds. 

But Taj saw this play out as if they moved through molasses. She sidestepped the first blade, putting her directly in front of the second. She twirled gracefully, crossing her arms behind her as the blade passed harmlessly between the crooks of her elbows. As the third slash descended, she flexed her arms forward, the blade caught within them shattering like glass, the flashblade’s own working causing the pieces to spray like shrapnel into the knights behind her. She plucked a buzzing shard out of the air, and met the final descending blade with an earsplitting KLANG. 

“In your words, commander. You should stop.” Said Taj. 

The formation broke apart as half the remaining knights fell, dead or injured from the flashblade shrapnell. Those that remained regrouped on the far side of the clearing.

The knight next to her dropped the hilt of his broken flashblade and hastily pulled out his shattergun. Taj casually backhanded him in the face in response. His helmet split with a metallic squeal as his skull erupted like a ripe fruit thrown at a wall.

“Even as you are, you aren’t a full bonded. We can not allow you to go free.” Said the commander tersely.

Taj could see the cold sweat dripping down the commander’s forehead as she adjusted her grip on the flashblade. 

“It is more than obvious that I am not only as capable as a bonded, I am far better than any in recent memory,” said Taj, bewildered. “I don’t understand. What’s your point? Do you want revenge now? Is that it?” 

The commander gulped nervously. She tried, and failed, to hide her fingers as she typed out a message against her wrist.

“What is an ‘altered’?” Asked Taj, reading her fingers. 

The commander dithered slightly, before regaining her composure. 

“You are.” She replied finally. “Bonded who choose to change their bodies when they bond.”

“How is that a problem?” 

“It is unnatural.” She said. “We cannot allow such blasphemy to taint the temple.”

“Clearly, it’s not.” Said Taj, gesturing towards herself incredulously. “I’ve done it. So it has to be natural.”

“Because you have done it, you are unnatural.” Replied the commander drawing her gun and blade. One in each hand.

The knights charged.

The knights died. 

Taj stepped forward and, straining only slightly, swiped her carapace-spiked fingers through the throats of every single knight in a single smooth arc in front of her. 

The spray of blood bathed her before the knights even realized they had died. Some raised their blades as their bodies and minds caught up to the fact that their heads were no longer attached to their necks. 

The commander stepped through the bloodbath and slashed at Taj. 

She took a step back and looked at her quizzically. 

“I’m letting you live. What’s your problem.”

Wordlessly the commander raised her gun and blade, using them in unison. 

Mere moments before, the blade and gun had been a whirlwind of death and pain. Taj remembered their altercation, slowgold bullets forcing her to duck and lurch right into the blade’s path. Corralled like cattle. Completely at the commander’s mercy. 

This time Taj felt like a dancer watching a pig attempt to pirouette. To her bonded eyes the commander’s movement looked sluggish, ungainly. The arc of her blade perfectly predictable from the set of her wrist. The following gunshot, entirely obvious from the angle of the cut. 

Taj wove between her strikes and bullets with liquid grace, never more than a hair’s breadth out of reach. A laugh erupted out of her throat finally, as she leapt over the commander who frantically attempted to trace her movements. 

“You can’t possibly hurt me, you do realize.” Said Taj, chuckles still punctuating her words. 

“You’ll get us all fucking killed if I let you go.” Replied the commander, her breath ragged.

“If you people didn’t have a problem with everything I fucking do, I wouldn’t really have to kill you now would I?”

“They’ll never let you live.” 

“I suppose. But as I’ve just learned. I need no one’s allowance to live. I am Queen. I simply am.” 

“And it’s my job to make sure you aren’t.”

The commander charged. 

Taj’s hand met her breastplate like a cannonball meets paper. Shattering through the working-strengthened metal, Taj’s fingers stabbed through her sternum, mulching the heart and lungs, until the fingers met her spine. The bone splintered in Taj’s grip, and finally her fingertips tasted air on the other side of the commander’s body. 

She dropped her weapons as her body went limp, gagging up blood, splattering Taj’s face. 

“You … freak.” She choked out. “Should … been smothered … in the fucking crib.” 

Taj smiled at her sadly. “You can’t put a leash on nature, it will rip you apart if you try.” 

She whipped her hand upwards, splitting the commander in two.