The rows of eggs had some time ago ended, giving way to different structures. Beyond a strip of empty land, a sprawl of mostly cubic buildings lied, more elaborate but equally dilapidated. Sometimes they were placed chaotically, without pattern, othertimes they formed neat streets and alleys, though their size and traversability varied greatly. Some streets were wide enough to dig a sailable river through, others narrowed to uncomfortably small. The junk, which they had seen between the eggs, was a lot more present here. Heaps of strange objects littered the quiet streets - stacked blocks of stone wetly glinting in arid air, tangles of pipes bound together by strange ropes and cloth, statuettes of unknown creatures fused to or grown from surfaces of large disks. Thick coat of dust covered everything. No trails were visible in the dust, and the air was deathly still just as before. Some, but not all buildings had doors and windows, though their size and positioning always felt off. The interiors varied greatly - some were separated into neat rooms, each with niches that could fit one of them, or contraptions vaguely resembling kitchenware, others were filled to the brim with interlocked masses of finely worked metal, or completely unidentifiable things. Some seemed to, very slowly, move in place, undulate if you stared at them for long enough. They tried not to rest near these buildings.
They had no way to count time, but their mind had cleared up as far as it probably could. They still could not speak, or even convey the most basic of emotions with this new dead voice, and the same was true for the others. In lack of language, they coordinated with gestures as best they could. Except one of them wasn’t capable of even that, stricken by some affliction that made them unable to control most of their body, turning any movement into either a wild powerful jerk-spasm, or barely a shudder.
In lack of names, they decided to think of each of the three in terms of their previous roles.
Their early life was completely absent, and they were not sure if it was always like this or only now. Their earliest memory was from the age of 14 - learning to shoot a bow from a rather rude but helpful guardsman. Next at the age of 16 or 17, being evacuated from a smaller settlement into a larger one.
Since then, most of their time had been spent as a hunter, tracking down small animals through the diseased, withering woods of their homeland, and warning the population any time they saw evidence of strange beasts that came out of the seething oil lakes.
They would spend weeks trekking alone through the decaying bramble of hills that were, according to people who were older, once lush and vibrant rather than sickly-brown, barely green. They would struggle to find dry places to sleep under the drizzles and sometimes stumble upon abandoned houses lost in the rotting wilds, with traces of violent destruction or without. They would never venture too far west, down to the wide valleys where an old city was slowly losing to the trees. They would come back to their village with a dozen or so mostly intact rabbits in sealed transparent bags they always got from the technician. They would get their pay, and sleep in the barracks because that was free, holding the knife closer than they did when resting out in the open.
Within a few days, the cramped space, noise in the evenings, and the endlessly repeating jokes and invitations would get unbearable, and they would prepare to leave again.
So, they were a Hunter.
Many of the buildings here were large. Shaped from singular, seamless masses of stone, even the smallest of them were higher than the two-story administrative house of their village. But far, far ahead, something infinitely more imposing dominated the landscape, only growing larger over what must have been days of walking towards them. Overwhelming and absurd, just like everything else in this world, a row of mountain-scale… Towers? Pillars? Whatever they were, they seemed to stretch so tall as to possibly bump into the sky itself. From a rooftop, Hunter could see the tallest buildings of this land surrounding them, hardly looking like woodchips next to their shattering, indifferent might.
And, as if the size alone was not enough, the colossi were transparent. Though distorted and shattered, the hexagonal mosaic of the sky was still possible to intuit through their bulk.
These things did not inspire confidence. If anything, they inspired fear. Hunter could feel it in how the other two would avoid looking at them for long. Yet they were moving towards the towers, because what bellowed behind them caused infinitely greater fear.
Their savior, their newest master, was something like a priestess. She was the one they remembered most clearly, written so deep into their brain they could even reconstruct some of her former facial features in their mind’s eye. The scene of their first encounter stood in their mind clear as the everlasting day they now found themselves in. She had found them bleeding out after something bad happened on their solitary patrol, and took them to her home. There were many faces there, some unfriendly, but she had the authority over them. Hunter stayed in that strange place for weeks of their recovery, sharing meals with guards whose completely bald heads seemed all too similar to each other, grumpy artisans and quiet scribes with spiderweave of runes tattooed across their faces and hands.
They were tended to by a deep-voiced nun with sharp cheekbones, who was not very talkative but could keep a conversation about certain topics for hours if one wanted. By the time they could walk confidently again, there was no settlement for them to return to. They saw its place once after. Buildings punched through by some tremendous, wild force. Fungal growths rising from scattered bones. Body of a woman cradling remains of a child, ground around her littered with dozens of tiny femur bones identical of that of the infant. Hunter thought that even though the place was certainly foul now, it had not been much better before, and always felt guilty of this thought.
So, she was a Priestess.
The tolling of the threat behind never stopped, ever spreading. Hunter knew all three felt their guts wrench in fear with every hit of that incorporeal bell. Looking back for the last time before entering the city, they could see distant movement between the squat round structures where they had likely woken up. Horrible vision of the past filled their vision then - familiar people who were not themselves, bubbling thick ochre pouring from their silently screaming mouths, slowly closing around their tent. They jumped down from their perch, ran to the other two and hurried them to move faster.
For now it seemed they were outrunning the sound, but they did not dare linger in one place long.
So they stayed with the cult. They took their oaths. They learned the prayers. Sometimes the prayers were answered. The god of this group was a fickle, weak thing, and Hunter suspected it was ridden with something akin to dementia - every time its presence joined Hunter’s dreams, displacing the usual dull flashes of revolting imagery, it was like it was meeting Hunter for the first time. Sometimes after sifting through their head the god would respond with sickly warmth of patronizing compassion, sometimes it was distant, but always it would quickly forget what it was doing or that it had ever visited them before. It always showed them the same vision of the same black-haired priestess in ridiculously decorated robes. The vision took place near an altar too crowded with gemstone lenses and incense burners to be practically usable, and most often the woman was shown to be so deep in prayer she was barely even there. No one liked to talk about this, though it was clear everyone knew.
Their life did not change much, on the surface. They still spent most of their time scouting the woods. But now when they came back to restock and rest, they weren’t as eager to run right back out. There was someone to come back to. Reluctant, they enjoyed the company of the Priestess, and the Priestess, similarly reluctant, enjoyed theirs.
Despite the hurry, they had time to figure out a few basic things about the environment and their new bodies.
Their muscles got tired slowly and they seemed to need less sleep than before. Their arms looked weaker than they actually were, or maybe objects were lighter here. When they first discovered that they still felt hunger, a panic overtook them, as there was not a single tree or animal for miles around, but that quickly subsided. In many buildings they found scroll-sized glass tubes filled with some unpleasant looking thick liquid, and somehow knew it was sustenance. Actually finding a way to consume it was a bit harder, but eventually they figured out that metal plates near where their mouths should have been parted to reveal rows of orifices of matching size. Hunter felt slightly sick for a few minutes after the goo was absorbed into their body. Wherever they went, these food tubes were abundant - stacked in neat rows inside buildings, strewn carelessly across the streets.
Though they did not recognize most of the objects scattered throughout the city, they could sometimes find a use for their parts. On one of their short stays, Hunter went around collecting intact rags, ropes and fragments of… things into a pile, and then they and Priestess tried making some tools out of it. Hunter wrapped a sharp shard of what seemed to be a fluid vessel with a piece of cloth, producing an unwieldy shiv. The material resembled ceramic, but proved surprisingly durable, even able to chip walls of some buildings. Priestess used fragments of rope to give a handle to a box of sorts, so now they had a bag too.
Hunter was not sure who the third person could be. In the last horrible memory from the previous life, they knew someone was with them in that tent, while stolen figures of their fellows shambled outside. Hunter guessed it must have been a guard, though not the same person who usually accompanied Priestess. At that point, it was dark. Unnaturally dark. And Hunter was scared. Everyone still standing was scared. Pierced by the booming sound that heralded… something. Whatever the non-persons outside that tent were, it was because of the sound. Hunter wondered if the woman and the child whose bones were duplicated many times over had heard it too.
So, in lack of better options, they labelled the third person with them, the one with the most powerful body yet crippled by some unseen error during their transition into this new place, the Guard.
Guard, Hunter, Priestess. If they could speak, maybe they could come up with a fairy tale.
But despite the overwhelming weirdness of every single thing around them, and regular anxiety caused by gaps in their mind, and the loneliness of being close to a person but unable to exchange words, and the monotony of dragging a person almost twice their weight through the endlessly flat city with its everpresent heaps of trash, and the thing behind, Hunter, to their own amusement, sometimes found their mood to be almost positive. Peaceful. A lot of things looked bad, but perhaps not all of them.
In absence of better methods, they counted time using the group’s breaks from walking. It was a very flawed measure, but better than nothing. They thought about it for many stops, iterating through all the things they were seeing and trying to find the source of this comfort.
They found it while passing through a block of unusual structures. There, uneven rows of blocky buildings temporarily gave way to a tiny forest of mirror-sided triangle prisms seemingly growing out of the ground.
Driven by a strange hunch, Hunter signaled the other two to stop, depositing Guard’s weight near a shattered prism and walking up to another, intact. They realized that this was the first opportunity to look at themself from the side.
They studied, with a strange fascination, the details of their new body: the metallic extensions of their skull, the glinting steel carapace on their four-fingered arms, grey skin of the slim featureless torso, bug-like mechanical legs.
Somehow, nothing seemed out of place. Nothing seemed a burden. Nothing seemed like a disgusting malformation, an adaptation for a biological role that felt so repulsive they would rather die than play it. Nothing that would call them to hunch over in pain every month to do its primitive bidding.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
They understood, and felt so incredibly stupid for not understanding earlier, not understanding years ago. Of course, this felt so much better.
They laughed, irritated and amused by the irony of this realization. A stream of hissing and crackling emerging from their dead mouth, but they did not stop. In the reflection, they could see Priestess and Guard turning their heads towards them - with concern?
They faced Priestess, so desperate to smile, or tell her, but there were no muscles on their face, there was a wall between them and words.
So they stood there, fragmented laughter echoing between shards of glass and absurd buildings and ancient sand, feeling bitterly free and alone in a way they would have never thought possible.