Two hours had passed since Akhenamen had saved the trio. Valencia was currently laying down inside the carriage, her grandson standing next to her, delivering Suk’kulkan’s instructions to Moria who used her greater dexterity to cut into Valencia’s stomach and start extracting the poison.

  Akhenamen was guarding the carriage while using Ascylla’s main body to talk with Sofya and reassure her that everything was going well and he would be back soon. He had expected the Prothean’s soul to fight back against his accusation or for people to be shocked that Aelion had a soul inside his ring.

  But he had forgotten he was in a fantastical world. They barely raised an eyebrow in surprise before starting to ask the “venerable soul” to help them. But Akhenamen’s role didn’t stop at just guarding them, he was also the one keeping the liquid silver surgical knife, pincers, etc… in its current shape.

  The Prothean was unable to mold it as a soul. He had also discovered something surprising. He could actually hear the Prothean’s voice and had even seen her “soul form”. They looked almost exactly as pictured on the engravings from the complex under Kork.

  “Got any infos on a Prothean named Suk’kulkan, Ascylla?”

  {Appart that she was a brilliant and very respected biologist, we have no true information on her. She seemed to be in a high position though.}

  “You should be able to handle the rest without me. Just make sure the Empty Pearls don't touch any flesh and close back the wounds.”

  “Where are you going Suk’kulkan?”

  “Don’t worry, just stay here. I… need to talk to the Cygilite.”

  “I’m coming with you, it’s too dangerous.”

  “Don’t be silly, Aelion. He could kill you just by looking at you. If he wanted to kill me he’d have done it long ago.”

  “Alright… but be careful okay?”

  Akhenamen had heard all the conversation obviously, he didn’t move, yet he knew that now, a Prothean’s soul stood next to him, looking in the general direction he was facing.

  “So… considering how you called me, I suppose their trick failed.”

  “To make us believe the Protheans were a race of peaceful and loving creators that were betrayed by the System? It failed.”

  “...”

  “No snarky comments? Not even an arrogant speech about how we’re just soulless constructs to be harvested? Or maybe a false “sorry”?”

  “Do you know how I got my soul in that ring? It was Savia-Vexus, a Cygilite I made personally. She hadn’t developed a soul, she only started to when my body had been destroyed by a few vengeful gods.”

  “We lived alongside each other for… I don’t even know how many years, but at one point, my soul started to dissipate. So Savia… tricked me, she told me she found a soul ring, allowed me to enter the Soul Transplanter and when I was locked in, she entered the other cabin, as the necessary Liquid Silver to create a Soul Ring.”

  Akhenamen stared back at her. Her eyes showed pain. Great pain. The one only a parent who had lost a child could have, he had those same eyes once, he knew they couldn’t be faked.

  She raised her hand, softly touching his body. He almost jumped in surprise when he felt… her touch. The first physical feeling he had since he came to this world. Was it because she was a dead soul like him?

  His small jump at the touch made her laugh.

  “She reacted the same way when I touched her for the first time. It was one of the failsafe we had put in place to make sure Cygilites would stay loyal. The only physical sensations they could feel came from our touch.”

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  She retracted her hand, staring at it for a few seconds.

  “Despicable plan isn’t it?”

  “So you feel regret? Watching the one you created, the one who considered you her mother sacrificed herself for you? You will have to excuse me but I have a hard time believing your words. Everything I’ve seen of your kind seemed to have been a carefully crafted lie. What proof do I have?”

  “Don’t you dare tell me that I would lie about Savia! There is not one single day I do not think of her! One single day I do not curse myself for having entered that cabin! One single day where I do not wish to have made my brethrens understand we were sacrificing our first children on the vague possibility of creating new Protheans!”

  Seeing those eyes, this reaction. Like she was ready to jump and attack him at any moment for insulting her grief, her eyes crying, shaking, her hands digging so hard into her palm they would have pierced her skin if she wasn’t a ghost.

  He knew she wasn’t faking it.

  “I’m sorry. That was extremely rude of me.”

  Suk’kulkan seemed to calm down, staring into the slight blue inside his burning green eye. He could see her grief, she could see his. The kind she didn’t doubt she had to have to. Seeing those eyes only destroyed her further.

  “You know, I once hoped that Savia was the exception. Convincing myself only she could create such a soul. That all others were too newly born to have any sentience. But I knew it from the start. I think we all did but refused to realise it.”

  “You were our first children. We had given birth to a new form of life and sentience yet just because you were made of Liquid Silver, we refuse to believe you could be anything more.”

  Akhenamen, who only had his head turned toward her until now, fully rotated his body to face her.

  “There is something I still do not understand. No matter how much I think about it, it makes no sense.”

  Suk’kulkan saw the genuine curiosity in his eyes.

  “As..ask away.”

  “I can understand our creation was from your wishes to see if we could form a newborn soul to be harvested and transplanted into a newly made Prothean body.”

  “But why do this after your meeting with The Color in the Empty? Why not before?”

  Suk’kulkan’s eyes widened, showing her extreme shock at the fact Akhenamen was even aware of that event. If she remembered right, they had left a few hints to their travels through this universe, but to even know its name..?

  “Oh no… it has seen you hasn't it? This damned Color. I curse it every day. It broke us. To receive so much knowledge, to know there still remained so much to discover but to suddenly have it all taken away from us at the last moment…”

  “I’m so sorry…”

  Suk’kulkan’s fingers were trembling as if just remembering this feeling, this knowledge, as if this simple thought was an addiction, like a recovering drug addict who was just presented with a line of cocaine two years after their cure.

  “It seems our curse even follows our children. Be careful, it is not malicious, but it does not realise how addictive what it grants can become. Every solution to every problem that we had, this Color had them all.”

  “Creating Liquid Silver and giving it life, that was something we could not do before. But the Color’s knowledge allowed us to create this new material. That is why we made you after. We simply couldn’t have before.”

  She took a long look at him, like a mother..no..an aunt, more like an aunt watching a nephew walk dangerously close to the same addiction she once had. Like an aunt that felt immense guilt at her family’s actions.

  “I understand. What about your departure… What do you think the Protheans are doing? Why didn’t they bring you along either? They don’t strike me as someone who would abandon their own, even more with an impossibility to give birth.”

  Suk’kulkan laughed, at herself, at her own people.

  “Believe it or not, but the System favors you over us. The moment its creation was finished, it analyzed our entire History, all we saw, made or destroyed. And the next second its plans were already finished. A plan that would take thousands of years to put in place had been crafted in seconds.”

  “The System may act as neutral and indifferent as it wants but it is as sentient as you or me. What would you feel more inclined to save and trust? Your creator who sees you as a machine they made to betray their first children?”

  “Or your construct siblings who have stayed loyal through one of the harshest wars this Universe has seen?”

  “Yet it allowed my people’s souls to be harvested.”

  “Only partially. Do you know how many souls were harvested by the System? One million. One million souls out of billions of Cygilites, and only the most new and recent souls. Too young to realise their own sentience.”

  “But what could we do? Come back and argue for our “due” reward? Our protectors were disabled and had their consciousness and sentience locked by the System, they would not protect us.”

  “Create a new army? The Cygilites were our masterpiece, it would take years to create another one and it would be more than enough for our first children to be turned against us and slaughter us.”

  “As for what the System is doing with billions of souls? I do not know. Maybe it has used them? Maybe it's keeping them until it decides it's time for them to come back.”

  AKhenamen didn’t know what to think of this. But a thought started to appear in his mind, one he didn’t like but he would stop from making this conclusion until he had more evidence.

  “As for what they are doing? One million souls is enough to multiply our numbers by ten already. Why bother trying to gain back the Cygilites when we could leave to a non inhabited planet and do the exact same without powerful gods and systems to thwart us? The Protheans are never coming back unless the Cygilites call them back themselves.”

  That did make sense, the Protheans were scientists with no moral compass but they were still scientists, not fighters.

  “You said you feel guilt and regret. Then tell me… How can I remove the physical sensation restriction? How can I disable any fail safe in our bodies?”

  Suk’kulkan stared back with eyes torn between guilt, regret and doubt. This wasn’t simply asking her a casual request, it was making sure that if the Protheans were once called back they would be unable to disable the Cygilites.

  And the System would be more than happy to help support its fellow Prothean constructs in dealing with those it saw as betrayers and a threat to its great plans. Their technology was useful, but the Cygilites had shown they were no worse and actually created weapons unlike the Protheans.

  Don't think this is me removing the Prothean / Cygilites conflicts.