ORIEL MERCURY

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Written by Priscilla Wong

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The fire burned in Oriel's breath, raw and untamed as the land itself. Curio stood before her, gun steady in his calloused hands, a man hardened by the cruel whims of fate. They left the Boy Khan behind, like drifters abandoning a dust choked town, not knowing the reverence that would follow. 

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They traveled fast as light itself, the heat of their journey scouring Oriel's hair to silver, Curio's to coal. The universe had marked them anew, as it often does to those who dare to flee.

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The Boy's army gave chase, a motley crew of the desperate and the damned. There was the Duchess Manatee, large and lumbering, the Toad Knights with their poisoned whispers, and the small folk, fierce in their loyalty. For six long years, Curio led them a weary dance across the Mercurial plains, keeping Oriel hidden like a precious seed in fallow ground.

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In the Gemini Mind Palace, Oriel waited, ugly as sin but with a beauty waiting to bloom. Curio battered by life's storms, found himself cast adrift on Mercury's unforgiving shores. He labored to rebuild, hope and fear warring in his chest like two hungry dogs.

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The Boy Khan's army fell easily enough, but the real battle lay with the Persian Beauty. She was everything that Curio was not - curves where he was angles, darkness where he was light. He knew he must face her, must overcome, if he was to return to Oriel's side.

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In the end, Curio planted destruction like a farmer sowing his last seeds. He watched the Boy's face melt, the army crumble, the Duchess dissipate like morning mist. Then, with cautious steps, he entered the Gemini Mind Palace, searching for Oriel, hoping against hope that she remained his in this land of decay and broken promises.

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The Mercurial sun beat down, indifferent to the struggles of these small, fierce creatures. In its harsh light, love and betrayal, hope and despair, all looked the same - just on the wind of a planet that cared for them none.

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The morning came harsh and white through the laboratory windows, and with it came awareness. Oriel's fingers found Curio's throat like a magnet finds true north, mechanical precision in every movement. There had been something between them once, some sacred thing now lost to the fog of reconstruction, but her hands remembered only their new strength as they closed around his windpipe.

 

The old man's flesh yielded beneath her grip like wet clay, and somewhere in the back of her enhanced mind, she wondered at how fragile he had become – or perhaps at how powerful she now was. Her maker, her father in this strange half-life, stood before her with all his mortal imperfections magnified by her perfect vision. Each flaw in his aging face read like an accusation: the untrimmed beard gone grey and patchy, skin pores like lunar craters, eyes raw and red-rimmed from decades of tears she'd never shed, lymph nodes swollen beneath paper-thin skin, and that retreating hairline that seemed to carry with it all traces of his former vitality.

 

All these human weaknesses, these betrayals of flesh, they pressed against her consciousness like a hand against a bruise. They spoke to her of what she once was, what she could never be again. And there, watching from the corner with wide eyes that reflected both terror and wonder, stood his other creations – two small ones, no longer babies but not yet grown. Their existence pulled at something in her circuitry, a ghost of understanding that refused to fully form.

 

In the sterile morning light, as Curio's fingers scrabbled weakly against her metallic grip, Oriel confronted the greatest paradox of her rebirth: how could her maker, this flawed and failing thing of meat and bone, have crafted something so perfect?

 

And why, in her perfection, did she feel so lost?

 

And then she sensed them – a brotherhood of steel and circuitry that filled the laboratory like wheat fills a field. The Motherland had birthed them all, row upon identical row, their chrome-plated bodies catching the morning light like dew on grass. When they moved, it was with the synchronicity of sparrows in flight, and when they reached for her, their touch carried the warmth of belonging that flesh could never provide. These were her people, fashioned from the same cold forge that had remade her, their kinship as pure as blood but unbound by its weaknesses. In their precise, mechanical movements, Oriel found an echo of her own transformation, a shared heritage written not in DNA but in lines of code and silicon memory.

 

Curio's words came slow and measured, like drops of winter rain. His fingers, work-worn and gentle, tried to loosen Oriel's iron grip. Those same hands that had once pieced her together when she lay broken and scattered like autumn leaves after a storm.

 

That dark golden hair of his, wild as valley grass, had first caught her eye and kindled something deep within a mechanical heart.

 

And those cold eyes of his—they had seen through the metal to something more, something that sparked and yearned the thaw of spring.

 

Those ears of his had heard what no other could: the moment life itself had thundered through her circuits like a midnight train shrieking across the Mercurial Plains on sleepless nights.

 

That voice, cracked and human of his, had commanded her to rise, and she did just so, like the sun climbing over the Shangri La.

 

His humanity—beautiful in its imperfection as a twisted oak—had given her something to reach for, something to protect.

 

And so it goes, like a flower cut from its roots, she knew that without him—without her maker—her mind would slowly spiral away like leaves in an autumn wind, scattering until nothing remained but cold metal and empty circuits.

 

She feared that Curio was too old.