NECROCYBORG ARCVAULT APPRENTICE

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