NECROCYBORG ARCVAULT APPRENTICE

Description

Not quite a master. Already a vault. His own consciousness has been quieted to make room for older data. The Arcvault Apprentice is a junior techno-arcanist of the Eternal Machine - a vessel whose primary function is custodianship of knowledge that should not exist outside the mind of his teacher. Fragments of forbidden arcana. Half-resolved equations of phase displacement and entropic decay. The names of weapons that have not been built in eons. He carries them. He does not yet understand them. Understanding will come over the millennia, in the slow, glacial way that all things come to the inheritors of the dead empire. In the field, he walks beside his master. He is a focus, a relay, a second aperture through which the arcanist's power can be projected. When his hand rises, it is not his will that moves through it. The energy does not originate in him. it merely passes - refined, redirected, signed. He is the difference between a single strike and a crossfire. He is the reason his master can stand motionless while the storm goes out in two directions at once. If he falls, he will be recovered. The vault must not be lost. The data within him is older than the species that built it, and his master will return for him long before any flesh-bound enemy can catch its breath. There is no apprenticeship without continuity. There is no continuity without retrieval. He has been an apprentice longer than most civilizations have existed. The masters above him do not die. They cannot…