Decima was the last of her kind.
Cruelly referred to as “Cogs” by their city dwelling superiors above, Decima and her people kept the cities functioning, a slave class of mechanics, engineers, builders, and technicians.
When rumors of the cataclysm seeped into their realm her people rejoiced: Freedom and an end to a Millenia in chains was worth any price.
The shards that rained down from the sky pierced steel, concrete, and stone. They split the precursor cities and broke through into the realm below. Decima looked up, holding her family, and watched as the world cracked open and The Great Collapse began.
Decima woke, buried beneath a mile of rubble. She tried to move but found her legs were numb. She reached for her family, her panicked hands searching in the dark for life. She found sticky wet cloth and steel protruding from their flesh.
Decima reeled back and felt a shock of pain, from something lodged in her back. She reached for it and slid her fingers along the smooth surface of a crystal. It had severed her spine and pinned her to the stone wall. Paralyzed and alone, she wept quietly in the dark and waited to die.
But even death, it seemed, she could not find her in that dark place.
Time passed, and Decima could feel the crystal changing. Ripples of pain ran through her body, waking her up from periodic dips into unconsciousness. The shard grew, it crept up her spine, pressing itself between vertebrae. She cried out until her throat was sore, but only the dead heard her pleas.
Days, months, maybe years later, Decima opened her eyes. Suddenly, everything was visible to her: the stones, the rafters, the columns — the bodies.
Her husband, her child, both decayed beside her. Instinctively, she jerked back and the rubble shifted. A jolt of pain down both her legs. She managed, somehow, to pull them out from under the rubble. She pressed her hands against the wall and pushed. The debris shook, her fingers dug into the stone, and she dragged herself free. The shard glowed, illuminating the tomb that imprisoned her…
“Escape,” Decima thought, and in an instant, her mind
Her path was clear; it was like a template layered over her thoughts. She knew which pieces of debris to move, which steps to take. There had been a change, a new strength, not just physically, but mentally. The shard gave her a path to the surface.
So, Decima climbed, shifting stone and steel, hammering through debris with her bare hands. She dug her way out of the would-be grave.
The surface glittered with colorful fragments of crystal. The precursor city she lived beneath was now a vine and grass-covered mound. How long had she been down there? Decima wept at the beauty of this new world and, for the first time, she collapsed into the grass and fell asleep in the sunlight.
The shard spoke to her again: its power was waning. Healing her body, giving her the strength to climb to the world above, had taken a toll. If she wanted to survive, she needed to rebuild herself. It could show her how.
Decima collected tools and materials from the ruins of the precursor cities. With the shard’s guidance, she began her first modifications: drilling into bone, weaving wire through muscle, sewing circuits under skin – with this new body made of flesh and steel, Decima could find others, survivors like her.
It would not be easy. The world was full of new challenges: strange fortresses of reflective glass that hummed with black energy, a New-Wild of full of monstrous creatures, and a mysterious order of monks that seemed to follow her from the shadows. Each question she had, the shard answered with a modification.
It took time, but she found others like her, more Cogs, who’d escaped the dust and debris of the other cities.She gathered them into several tribes and passed on her knowledge of circuits and steel and rebuild them stronger so that they too could survive in the harsh new world.
Decima and her allies fought with the creatures of the earth, the monks, the Wraethe. Growing stronger with each day. Together they carved a new home into the world, built new cities, more advanced than any the world had seen before. Even lifted those cities into the sky, they’d never be imprisoned again.
These people of flesh and steel were human once, but now they are more. Designed by their own hands, to supplant Homo sapiens, they are Homo Deus.
Decima is the first of her kind.