The blood had cooled and frozen, the fires had burnt out, and the wind and snow had begun the slow work of covering up the scattered piles of flesh that had once been the proud vanguard of the True Church. Twenty Angels and their support staff had made landfall on the Antarctic shore less than half a day before, setting up the tents and prefabricated buildings that would have formed their base of operations, and now were just scorch marks and debris. Soon afterwards, they made first contact – a stumbling, tired-looking man in rags approached their camp. One of the attendants had taken him into a tent, given him some blankets and hot food, and tried to communicate with him.
In response, the man's mouth melted off his face, and the attendant was reduced to a red smear in the snow. One of the Angels neutralized the threat, but the event had set the whole expedition on edge. Where there was one demon, there were usually more, and the question shifted to whether or not they were walking into an ambush.
That question was answered quickly, and violently.
After hours of silence, the snow crunched as something stirred in the wreckage.
Julian tried to pull himself off the ground, failed, and paused to take stock of his situation. He couldn't feel his hands or feet, and one eye was either non-functional or frozen shut. His left leg was either broken and numb, or trapped under some debris that he couldn't quite wrench his body around to see. Some half-remembered mentor figure from his childhood had told him that pain was a good thing – if you felt pain, it meant that part of you was still alive.
He took a deep breath, reached deep inside himself, and felt the heat. A sliver of a memory, but he forced it into reality. He exhaled, and let the warmth spread, repairing any damage it encountered along the way. There was a loud crack, and a flare of pain, as the bones in his leg knitted themselves back together and the nerves came back to life. Julian clamped that unnecessary sensation off.
After a minute or so of returning sensations and critical repairs, Julian stood up, and investigated. There was nothing of significance left. No survivors, on either side. All of the hastily made fortifications, all of their supplies, even the ship they had arrived on, were either torn to shreds or burnt beyond recognition – the same as the remains.
He had to learn more control.
Julian weighed his options. As the only remaining member of the expedition, he could return with the news that it had failed. That would be a difficult journey to make, but not impossible. He could, on the other hand, not return at all. If another team found the wreckage, they'd assume that his remains were just another of those destroyed beyond recognition. There was a slight appeal to the idea. But a third option far outshone the other two. Their goal, at the outset, was to survey the icy wastes, and see if there was, or had ever been, life or settlements there. The first question had been, to a degree, answered. But the second…
Julian purged his coat of blood and gore, and pulled it tight, before tracing a few simple spellforms in the air – just a running program looping at the edge of his mind to keep out the worst of the wind and cold. And with that, he left.
Like any well-trained Angel, he could survive without food or water, and like the best, he could go without sleep for days. As he was? He could do that while maintaining several spells, and amplifying his senses as far as they would go to try and suss out anything of interest in the icy void. Sense amplification was always a bit of a mess – That was a lesson he learned at the age of three, staring at a textured white ceiling in the dark, trying to see detail in the darkness – The brain was designed to cull sense out of chaos as quickly as possible, and that conjured ghosts at the borderlands. And that had to be stomped out, lest those ghosts become real. Still, in this case, he felt no reason not to.
Eventually, he came to the edge of a great city.
The buildings were dozens of stories tall, made of organic shapes with flush-fit windows, made out of some material neither metal nor ceramic – likely some kind of ancient plastic, forged when the world still flowed with petroleum. Snow had long covered the streets, but the constant wind had kept it from accumulating enough to obscure the streetlights, somehow still blazing.
As he explored, over weeks and months, it became clear that once, hundreds of thousands of people had lived here, bringing both languages he recognized and ones long forgot, with culture to spare – computers were everywhere, with a wealth of screens and rare earth minerals that could only have been produced in the Twilight Age. Every night, he stayed in a different apartment, and every one told a different story with the same ending – evidence of children, of families, of young romance, of people of all kinds coming out in search of a new prosperity, all suddenly abandoned. Meals half-eaten had frozen before rot could set in, lights were kept on, somehow surviving all this time, and in it all, not a single dead body.
Spending time in the office buildings, in the industrial complexes, he began to understand more of this strange place. It had been a hub of industry, of science, of international development. Machines had clearly been built around something that was no longer there. Entire corporations were dedicated, if their records were to believed, to harvesting the resources of this place. “Anomaly” was the term he kept finding – usually capitalized, but not always.
What kept nagging at him, as he kept exploring, was the sense that he was being watched. He was never able to nail it down and figure out if it was paranoia from that initial ambush, or a valid read of his surroundings, but it itched at the edges of his mind. The more he ignored it, the louder it got. Rather than fingernails dragging across flesh to scratch, it was like biting teeth, pulling him…
And somehow, his own intuition was leading him in the same direction.
Seven months, three days, and twelve hours after the landing of the Second Antarctic Expeditionary Force of the True Church, Julian Arcadia Pahaliah V melted the centuries of ice encrusting the Core Elevator of the City of Zenith, and descended deep beneath the ice and soil.