[b]Mosaic![/b]

"I just need... I'll get there eventually..." the words drain out like poison. "Just one more victory and I'll..."

The wolf maiden slumps in sudden exhaustion. The animating vitality has bled out of her. More. More, more, more, it drips out of her heart and as it goes the space it leaves behind is how little it even wanted it in the first place. "I want..." what? "I wanted... to not be bored..." 

The blade slides free, shining clean. Her claws scratch at the edge as it leaves her. She falls gently to the ground as a final truth escapes breathless lips.

"I don't know what I want."

She lies on the road, curling up, vulnerable, shivering. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what will be enough. Nothing ever is. I fill myself with instinct but being full isn't the same as being whole. It's just... not having to think about it."

[b]Ember![/b]

"Oh!" said Gemini. "You! I can't even be mad at you, and that's the most annoying thing of all!"

She fumed, staring off into the distance. "Well. For love, is it? I can't be mad at that. But the pack is the pack, and right now the pack is suffering because of you. So your punishment is to suffer with them."

Scent and memory are intimately linked - but Gemini can go one step beyond. Her invisible aura swells, her being larger than her body, and she acts as the conduit - the full flow of the pack's formation instinct pours through her. In normal circumstances a Ceronian is subconsciously aware of the exact location and status of every pack member around them, letting warriors move in perfect silence and harmony through complex maneuvers. What Gemini does to you is a razor sharp refinement of that basic instinct.

She pours all of the experiences of the entire pack through you. Those of them trapped under nets, piled up on top of each other, stripped and bound and put on display. Your mind fills with the full humiliation of defeat, every slap and jeer and gag and twist of rope applied to the Silver Divers also being applied with crystal clarity to the one who doomed them. 

It's a lot.

[b]Dolce![/b]

"Do you see it?" asked Artemis, sitting across from you. "The [i]power[/i]."

The ancient stories speak of the moon. The hunt. The howling of the animals in the bloody forests of the night. The maiden who walked into its depths untouched and emerged with the bloody wreckage of her victims. This deep into the work of the Service...

Your senses are heightened. A stray number on a ledger might be a family. Your breath is still. You have sat in a repose that an ancient sniper might have prayed for. Your tools are sharp. With a flash of your pen invisible arrows cross the distance. You are afraid. There are monsters in these depths truer than any modern wolf.

Artemis stares at you. When the natural world became knowable, when wolves became tame, when ecosystems were tamed she did not change. She still stands in the heart of a mysterious world, where the tremble of your fearful hand or the blink of your weary eye could spell death.

"You had fourteen minutes spare after you finished your assigned tasks," said Artemis. "Enough time to fill out two requisition forms. Two wagonloads of treasure, delivered anywhere on the world you desire. You moved around tens of thousands of Corvii, and you had a surplus of them. A unit of them could have been dispatched to burn a village and massacre its inhabitants. You ordered the clearance of the orbital minefield to make preparation for the Architect's arrival. What if you submitted it with the wrong priority stamp and it did not get done in time?"

Her eyes are more lupine than the wolves of Ceron. To walk into her forest is to risk everything - and to emerge with meat, rich and bloody. 

You can feel hot breath warming the paperwork under your fingers.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

"You sound like you're bored," says the Dust Knight.

He doesn't choose to say it, though. Some power inspired him to say it. Silver strings descend from above, lifting his cheeks and jaws, waving his arms about like a puppet. Careless. Ridiculous. Mad.

You look up at the divine monster hunched over him, hands raised aloft in the splayed puppeteer's precision. Your own distorted face stares back at you in the murk of Dionysus' mask.

"And why wouldn't you be?" said the Dust Knight/The God of Feasts/Your Reflection. "You haven't moved an inch. You thought you were looking for righteousness, but you never were. This is righteousness. It is just another Path, Dyssia. After all that you're climbing the same old ladder towards the sun and you [b]haaaate [/b]it. So is this it, then?" His face/your face is Merilt's. "You just needed to feel even [i]more [/i]guilty about getting bored, hopeless and [i]distracted [/i]before you'd finally stick with it? All you needed to knuckle down and do the work was more strength behind the whip?"

Dionysus grinned Apollo's grin, mad and shining, more passion than the Sun had ever shown you. "We're sure to get there eventually if we do it this way," he said. "Swear on me mum."