"One Ceronian cannot win against an Azura," Ember says, fingers curling around the curved hilt of her sword, thumb running along the whorling pattern embossed on the grip. Around her, at least half of the pack, gathered by the cashing-in of favors or out of enthusiasm for the destruction of the Sphere. They would need someplace to raid soon; their finery, pearl and silk and gleaming scale, was beginning to grow thin and unfashionable. A wise captain is wary of letting a pack's fashion grow stale. How else were they to demonstrate their ability to innovate, or their discerning eye? Treating that Azura to a hearty welcome had kept many instincts at bay, but the desire to envelop and overwhelm was clear to scent. Dominationdesire is heady, earthy, sullen, demanding something to change. "But a wise knight draws out pursuit across the ford and into the narrow valley, and an entire pack can... well, Merry, why don't you tell us what happens next~?"

The attention of the pack contracts for a moment as a shiver of Rightness runs up Ember's spine. She hasn't yet figured out what, perhaps, she might blame Merry Merya the Magi for, but how strange it is that she feels hardly a twinge of guilt as roving hands explore the coils of the pack's newest member. The pack can hardly be blamed for how little they could spare for her to wear, but it's absolutely Merya's fault that she can't seem to provide a comprehensible answer. After all, Azura already talk too much, don't they? The Daughters of Ceron are so, so helpful, and so, so friendly. How pretty she looks with her arms trussed behind her, her dark-painted eyes fluttering, huffing through the thick layers of former Azura finery.

An exhalation of Command, scorched with ozone, brings some gazes back to Ember, who is standing on top of her plover's outstretched hand. Sometimes, a little height is necessary, isn't it? Think of how everyone looks up to Mosaic! And it's vital that she have the attention of at least some of the Divers, given what she is about to ask them. No, not ask. If she asks, she will lose.

"What happens is that we flank, and overwhelm, and claim our prizes!" The gesture at Merya causes further laughter among the hungry wolves. The glance at Thoughtful Flask almost manages to hide her nervousness, her desire for victory, her desire for glory, her desire to earn her place beside the Queen of the Plousios. Jove's kiss keeps racing through her blood, and the need to win, to be a Good Girl, to not be shamed, is barely restrained. "And an Azura Knight has followed us across the ford and into the narrow valley, and even if she's surrounded by a bunch of blackbirds with oversized sticks, we are Ceron! We are Ceron!"

She throws her head back and howls, and the answering chorus resounds, rolling from plover to plover (and drowning out Merya's tiny squeaks completely). Her sword is a hair's breath from shivering out of its sheath by itself. She pants through her veil, runs her hand through her hair, and barely manages to keep herself together. From the last to the first, how she has risen! How she will rise! Mosaic, witness her!

"We will claim our prizes from her closets, her vaults, and her crew! We will bring her back to grovel before our Tyrant! We will scatter the blackbirds across the waves to spread word of our glory! For Mosaic! For the Plousios! For Ceron!"

So it comes to this. Alone in a room with a miraculous box containing the galaxy's most deadliest, most perfect killer, and he has to invite her over from another reality to try and get to know her.

Finally, the world makes sense.

They even let him have his choice of room. The shuttle's practically empty; the three of them are the only passengers, after all. He's settled on one of the spare rooms. Nothing as ostentatious as a luxury VIP suite, but a nicely-apportioned room, the sort that an officer or mid-ranking guest might use. Comfortable, without being overwhelming. Soft carpeting, like fresh grass. The furniture itself is in the Azura style, all sweeping curves with hardly a sharp edge in sight, ideal for his purposes. A pity he doesn't need most of it. A low table is the biggest thing he needs. Hardly a thought passes between his ears as he hauls away the extraneous pieces, one by one, to the neighboring room.

A room with just a table looks less welcoming and more barren, though. But you’d be surprised the difference a little tasteful decorating can make. On each side of the table, he lays out a nest of cushions of varying sizes, enough that anyone could make themselves comfortable. Wall hangings are out. Lamps would be nice, but the room already has its own lighting, and any additional lighting could be a blunt object in potentia. Or a concealed knife. Small, thin, soft; harmless is the order of the day. For both their sakes. With some paper-folding and patience, he produces chains of flowers and intricate, multicolored sculptures. With gauzy silk, he fashions curtains for texture and color rather than concealment. It isn’t much, but he doesn’t need much to make a room comfortable.

Then there’s the matter of food. It’s never good to be too hasty when deciding on a menu, or its presentation. For as useful as hospitality had been in recent days, it made a poor first impression to seem like he was binding his guest with it automatically. No, the food here, sadly, may not be touched. But it would be smelled. Doesn’t that make all the difference in the world, sometimes? Imagine walking into a bakery without the smell of freshly-baked bread to greet you. Horrible. Now here, there should be nothing overwhelming or overpowering. A nice, pleasant backdrop, to be sampled if she likes. Or not. Perhaps she won’t be hungry, and that’d be. Fine.

He frowns, halfway through considering the shuttle’s larder. One question tumbles through his thoughts like a pebble bouncing down a hillside.

When you’re pulled in from another reality, would it also bring over whatever you’d eaten? Or would you always arrive completely starving?

And the avalanche follows close behind.

If you were someplace cold before you were pulled over, would you be cold when you arrived? If you were in the middle of a fight, would your system still be flush with adrenaline? Would your heart still race with fear? Would you experience anything in transit? Would it be different every time? Time. What about time? Would you be gone from…wherever it was you came from, for as long as you were here? Would you remember what you were doing? Would you remember your time here? Would the original person share any of the perspective, the memories, the feelings? Would they experience both at the same time-

Questions. Questions. Questions. Questions without end. Questions without answer. Questions send him pacing around the room. Questions make him consider tearing it all down and starting over from scratch. Several times.

Once, he inspects the coffin. The cutters aren’t, strictly speaking, built into the walls of the coffin itself. Rather, they’ve been (expertly) bolted on to the sides, and if he had to guess, they also make use of whatever bit of Hermetic expertise keeps her asleep. It wouldn’t be impossible to remove. If there’s room enough for a Diodekoi and a coffin in the device, then there certainly was room for a sheep. He could get some answers. He could learn what she will need when she arrives. He could also awaken a bio-engineered killing machine without knowing the first thing about her.

Gingerly, carefully, his hooves find purchase on the face of the coffin, and he hauls himself up to the crystal-encrusted viewport at eye level. All he sees is bone and claw. Not even a silhouette he’s familiar with.

He leaves the cutter alone.

He decides on a hearty stew, spiced with those ingredients least likely to offend a sensitive palate.

He adds a board, affixed to the wall behind where he stands. He writes in giant letters. He writes in ink that contrasts sharply with the surrounding colors. He will not have to speak it first. He will not have to shout over her, if she is screaming.

Say ‘LAKKOS’ to leave here immediately

The only furniture is a low table; too low to conceal anything, no sharp edges. The material will break before a body does, and will not break into jagged pieces. The room is decorated with silken curtains that can conceal nothing, not even where the fabric bunches up, and paper origami fashioned with no possibility of secret hiding places. He carries no weapons, or badge of office. Simple clothes. Pockets empty.

Alone in a room with a miraculous box containing the galaxy's most deadliest, most perfect killer.

There is more he could do. His heart lies buried beneath the onrushing wall of questions. But to care for every eventuality would, ironically, be so overwhelming to her that it would leave other possible needs unmet. There’s only so much he can do.

His heart skips a beat when he pushes the button.

Fuck, Tilly is Droning.

Which is not, you know, a commentary on delivery? It's not that she's monotone or dull or whatever. She's got passion, she's animated.

It's just that Droning, capital D, isn't actually about communication?

It's about posturing, performing, being seen to speak, while not actually delivering anything worth listening to. It's something you do for the benefit of someone other than the person you're talking with?

It's like Berating, which can be done in a kind, calm level voice, in that the goal isn't for two people to accurately convey what went wrong where and how to keep it from happening again. It's about making the berater feel powerful and the beratee feel small. You done fucked up, Dyssia, and now whoever's doing the berating is going to go in circles about how.

Honestly, she'd feel worse about getting good at pretending to listen if it wasn't all the same horseshit, over and over. Nod appreciatively/contritely/scornfully as appropriate--which in this case is, you know, not at all, she's a prisoner, not a sap--put a tiny portion of brain towards flagging anything different enough to be important, and wow, would you look at that, suddenly you have a skull empty and ready to pore over something actually important.

Like, for instance, would her doppleganger be better than her?

No, no, of course not. More boring, in any of a hundred ways, first off, which is ultimately the single worst thing you can be. And there's no way she'd be able to wander in here and stare down her nose at an entire court if she didn't honestly believe she was the best for the job. Suck it, all y'all, you're wrong, and there's no version of her that could do it like her.

Do it differently, though…

She has to know how it works, right? Before she can figure out other uses, she needs to know how to works. Tilly's using it as a weapon, because she's an asshole with no vision. Summon--duplicate? No, no, can't be duplicate, or else everyone there would know who's who, right? Summon? Where from? Who from? For how long? Do they stay summoned? What's the cost to stay summoned?

How many times can you summon dopplegangers? What's the limit? Is it only living--no, no, the entire point of mining beri was to get more crystals, right? One planet is known to have the crystals needed. Mine it infinitely, infinite crystals, suddenly you can duplicate more planets.

More importantly, you can duplicate people. Empty cities fill up. Empty armies fill up. Ceronians replicate by cloning, right? How many times can they clone? Enough times to overcome infinity? Is that the plan? It can't be, right? Ceronians are the top, you don’t overcome that by just--

Infinite, neverending duplicates. Neverending waves of not just biomantic beetles, but Azura warriors. Maybe? No, no, that doesn’t square.

What would happen if you struck a god with it? No matter who won--and there's no guarantee that you wouldn't just get one, incredibly pissed god in front of you--you'd lose.

…What would happen if she summoned another of herself? It immediately strikes her as a terrible idea--last time she engaged with the tools of the oppressor, she wound up verbally flipping off a god--and more than that, she doesn't actually know how it works. Or how to turn it on. Or how it's powered. It's an esoteric, it can't be as simple as, you know, flipping a switch on the handle, right?

… How had Tilly activated it, again?

[Look Closely: 1, 6, +2. [9]
Tell me about the crystal technology. How could it hurt me? How could it help me?
What will happen if Dyssia duplicates herself?
What's Tilly up to? What are they doing? What will they do next?

Mosiac!

The Slitted began with arrogance. A new wave of Plovers and chemfighters were dispatched, broadcasting with laser-flickers orders to stand down and face the judgement of the Skies. They were swatted from their Skies by the increasingly online ELF defense array, crewed and targeted by the galaxy's premier soldiers.

It progressed to wrath. The mighty Gravitation Projector of the Slitted was brought to bear, a huge glittering lens formed from an entire segment of the ship's armour detaching and configuring into a dish shape. Fueled with the wireless ambient power from the Slitted's remaining reactor sphere it began to concentrate force into microsingularities, extreme-range artillery blasts, micro black holes that wrench entire armour panels off the Plousios, warping metal into spaghetti streams. A direct hit lands in the centre of the ship's guts, obliterating hundreds of cubic tonnes of seawater and tearing a swathe through the metal.

Too late, it turned to fear. The Projector's fire stopped as power was rerouted to locomotion. The Slitted began to use that same gravitational energy to collect its sub-spheres and hurl them into the path of the Plousios. A barracks sphere splatted into the side of the Imperial Warship's massive ram spike, metal flowing like liquid as it merged into place, but it was poorly aimed and the troops did not have an easy boarding path from there. An arming sphere, bristling with torpedo launchers and ELF strikes, was placed directly in the Plousios' path and was bisected by the monomolecular edge on the ram, detonating in a cascade of secondary explosions. Finally the Slitted itself launched its Grav-Projector in one direction while overloading it with the force it would take to throw the Slitted in the other. Just barely, the Azura warship slides out of the path of the oncoming Plousios, the two ships tearing at each other with talons of ELF fire like the claws of wildcats.

But in dodging the Plousios, the Slitted had exposed itself to the warship's full broadside. The boarpedoes began to launch, melting charges activating in a hundred white-hot needle strikes as ancient boar-head rams crashed into the still-damaged Azura metal.

Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.

Ember!

Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.

Everywhere, the howl of wolves, all the more terrifying for being underwater.

The Slitted took on water when it crashed into the sea after Mosaic's throw. The Crystal Knight's servitors, like any living creature, could of course breathe underwater and still manned their posts, but they were not adapted to it. They had not had time to regrow their feathers into sleek water-piercing coats, to trim their hair, to switch to better balanced arms and armour. The Silver Divers slash amongst them like seals amongst chickens, darkening the water with clouds of black blood that solidifies into new schools of fish.

Everywhere, the sonar howls. Drowning out the ill-adapted enemy's voices, letting you know where everything is in relation to everything else. Once again you emerge to battle but this time as part of a pack, with your pack behind you, bringing the wrath of the sea to this city of the Sky.

Dolce!

Polytechnic lights ignite along the stasis coffin. It shivers and flows, oil-slick fog drifting aside, before hardening and resolving into a crystalline blue. With a cold rush of air and the fracturing of the world into its gridlike substructure, a specter pulls itself from the coffin and looks around.

It is both real and not, solid but broken, a shape holding itself together despite the interior being broken and faded. At first it is indistinct, but it quickly becomes clear that its shape is indistinct: you look upon a pilgrim of the Order of Hermes, huddled underneath a thick and shapeless yellow raincoat, crumpled wet plastic with a glassy face-mask. It - she - looks at the sign of the wall, then rummages in a nylon fanny pack, produces a little instant camera, and snaps a picture. It hurriedly looks over the photograph that the device spits out, hmming and clicking her tongue, muffled behind the mask, before spinning around on a hair cue to look at you.

"Oh! Lord Hades!" she cries, and reflexively takes a photograph. She hurriedly hides it and the camera behind her back and falls into a bow - though her reflective mask maintains eye contact. "I apologize! I was - I believe I learned something quite remarkable about - can I ask you some questions? There's so much I never got the chance to find out!"

When she fell she left half her mass and her silhouette in the space above her, bloodlessly torn, little cubes of energy one by one realizing they'd fallen behind and gently drifting back into place.

Dyssia!

It's amazing the knowledge you pick up. Fucked if you could cite any of your sources though. Some late night encyclopedia bender or other embedded all of this in your head.

Firstly, these crystals are properly named Elysium Crystals. The leading theory - advanced by philosophers and not scientists - is that they are a consequence of Hades' banishment from the material world. Upon death, while the body's earth and water elements takes on new shapes according to the will of Demeter, the fire and air sink into the ground that they might return to the underworld. Denied this, they crystallize in place and form clusters, tearing strange paradimensional portals in the regions around them as they seek the realm of Hades.

To strike a living being with an Elysium Crystal, the theory goes, doesn't so much duplicate them as it manifests their infernal ghost - the version of themselves they would become in the depths of Hades. Warriors are extremely susceptible to this; their deathless ghosts are primed to engage in endless battle and so lash out at anyone around them in wrath and confusion, especially if they awaken in the midst of the battlefield. Other duplicates have been known to flee, or cower, or offer bargains as their nature commands.

How could it help you? You do not think that violence is so deeply embedded in you that the first thing your ghost would do would be to attack yourself in a rage. You can't say the same for anyone else here. How could it hurt you? Well you could be shoved into an arena pit, like the one being prepared just to your left, and made to battle endless copies of your own screaming ghost for the entertainment of the Crystal Knight, which seems to be what she's preparing to do next. What specifically would happen if you duplicated yourself? You'll have to find that out the hard way.

The first howl and the loudest belongs to Mosaic.

She has come riding the boarpedoes with the Silver Divers. She has come dressed in their colors: in the diving suit and armored jacket of Ember's people, though she also wears a glittering crown atop her head and a plethora of promise-ribbons tied all through her hair, descending her oversized braid like a ladder or a helix.

She is with them, but not of them. She comes in front of them, but does not radiate the pheromones of Command. She does not insist on the role of Alpha, only integration. She does not snap orders, but simply gestures with both hands through the water, spreading them wide in invitation.

Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.

The ship is your plaything. Its warriors your prey. Its prizes your glory. She, Mosaic, is here only to hunt a single name. Go and raise whatever hell you like, so long as you return to her in the end. Just as she promises to return to you. She floats, waiting. She watches, smiling. All around her, wolves cut like missiles through the water with the blessings of Preparation and Familiarity. Her soldiers knew to expect the attack, and the Corvii had not. The Silver Divers knew what it meant to live in the water, and not merely survive in it. With them in front of her, there is really nothing she need do to take the ship.

So she swims as a shadow, swift and quiet and inevitable. The water is familiar to her, too, swallowed as it was from her old hunting grounds. Now she hunts here again, muscles hardly straining as she glides forward, taking huge sniffs through the brine to listen to the rumors of the tides. Where does the scent of blood run faintest? Where does the salt give way to fresh air. What passages mark the copper tang and tired musk that means her Knight Dys. Si. A. is near?

She feels the currents pulling at her fur and knows the battle is not something she must concern herself with. Her back burns with the ghost memory of old wounds she did not realized belonged to her. Her legs turn hollow as she kicks through the waves, though her form does not falter. Her fingers beg to be stretched, her lungs beg for rest.

She must. She must save her strength. She glances around to see if anyone is watching, and quickly clutches at her head while nobody will see. The ride had been an ordeal. The howl had been a mistake. Against her breast a secret prayer clings to her in the shape of paper with a single invocation written on it. And a single name. Her tail swishes behind her and the currents abate. The path eases. She sighs and swims on, ignoring the smell of blood in the water as it seeps from her thigh.

Mosaic's head breaches the surface of the water, and she lifts her hands to check her hair. She smooths the sopping braid with gentle fingers, and does not take a single step until every ribbon is tied into exacting place.

There are, in the end, three reasons that Ember does not follow Mosaic as a shadow, does not bound out of the water and vigorously shake herself dry, does not chase after the Savior of Beri.

The first is that Mosaic can self-evidently take care of herself. She tamed the pack! She threw a town! She is going to dismantle anything in her path and she doesn't need Ember getting in the way of targeted, focused destruction, a path being torn straight to wherever Dyssia might be languishing. The second is that Ember's the one that the pack is following, the alpha-in-potential, and if she abandons the battle in the drowned decks, so will her sisters.

The third is that in her heart, her battle-instinct knows that her task is to draw attention away from her lover, the Queen, and scatter the enemy's cognition into shards. So to the work, then. The pack fights in sudden knots, three to every one, choosing exactly where they want to concentrate their strength. Ceron. Ceron. Ceron!

Soon enough the Corvii are fleeing the waters. Good. The pack tears through the ship's underbelly, damaging what they can, venting pipes into the water, exposing delicate mechanisms to the salt, and then, oh, and then...

And then they are a dozen cells, moving through corridors slick with water, howls echoing and reverberating through the veins of the Azura's weapon. Where scent won't work for communication, the howling will. This is no longer their ship, those void-hardened blackbirds, this is a hunting ground of the Daughters of Ceron. Isolate. Flush them out. Seize prizes. Once past the feeble attempts to reform lines and set up defenses, they'll be in the guts.

So many prizes. So little time. Pick out the best ones, sisters.

She isn't in obvious pain.

She isn't in obvious distress.

She isn't trying to kill him.

Three knots unclench, in order.

"No no, I'm not Lord Hades. I'm-" Wait, does he look like Lord Hades to her? Wait, does he sound like Lord Hades to her? Wait, hang on, possibilities, oh dear-

“Of course things go wrong. It’s learning.” The ancient craftsman scoffs. “Legend tells of a proud mind who was cursed to have all their experiments succeed on the first try. They were the most pitiable fool in all the land, overflowing with groundbreaking results but with none of the knowledge necessary to explain any of it. Forced to watch as others filled in the lines around their work, and so gained all the real credit.”

He leans in close. He always leans in close, when it’s important. Dolce had never figured out if it was to ensure the wisdom could not be stolen by unworthy ears, or to ensure the student would focus with utmost attention, but he was certain if he asked the craftsman would lean in close to give the answer. “The quality of a mind is not in its discoveries or its successes, but in the length and breadth of its emergency protocols. For every step is a mistake imagined, or survived.”

There was, admittedly, too much for Dolce of Beri to imagine every single possibility. But he had imagined some, and memorized a thing or two in advance. He gathers himself up, and recites.

"I mean you no harm. I want to help you. As best as I know, you're not dead. And I am not Lord Hades; my name is Dolce. I swear all this is true on Hermes and Hestia." The oath, he had left flexible. Hermes sounded right for her, and Hestia felt right with him. “You, or a version of you, has been frozen in stasis due to a terrible disaster. This stasis is stable; time is not a factor. I brought you here with an esoteric; exact workings unknown, delicate, and necessary to maintain stable stasis. Trying to get you back safely, will need your help.” After the litany comes the deep breath, the natural pause.

So that’s why the craftsman had cut all those extra words from his directions. It felt…snappier? Quicker, to say and to understand. Less words, less overwhelming in a crisis.

He hopes the pilgrim remembers the sound of a good emergency protocol. He hopes it sounds familiar.

Hmm. Hrm. Well, shit.

D'you know, it's a terrible thing to learn that you've wasted your childhood? She grew up in what she realizes now was the lap of privilege--of, if not spectacular wealth, then at least the ability to pursue whatever passions she liked, enabled by the labor of dozens of deliberately unseen servitors.

And not once--not once!--did she think to build a doom arena.

Did Tilly build that specially for her, d'you think, or is she the kind of Azura who just keeps a doom arena on standby in the throne room? She wants to think it's the first so bad, but…

Okay, so, obviously, this is bad. Not as bad as it would be if, you know, hemhm, Tilly got a taste of her own medicine, and that's going to happen if she has anything to say about it, but…

Underworld ghosts, huh?

At least, according to philosophers. Who aren't scientists, but also are scientists really the ones to tell what a thing are, or how they work or--

I mean, it'd be great to hear what the scientists have to say about it, because she's not exactly thrilled at the implications of summoning your future ghost?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the philosophers are right, and that they're summoning the ghost of who you become in the underworld. So, how does that work? How does the underworld know what you become? Is there just some ideal proto--posto? Posthumo?--Dyssia that lives forever in the underworld? If so, it's gonna get pretty boring to summon the same her forever, especially since either they know the outcome the first time, or they just keep summoning her until time and exhaustion change it for them.

But on the other hand, how fine is the resolution on when the change happens? Does it change second to second? If she's thinking something different, does it change the outcome?

The good news is, it seems she's gonna get a chance to actually study the outcome of multiple exposures.

Shit. And also yay!

Does she get a sword? Come on, give her a sword.

No?

Fuckin' assholes, the lot of you.

Mosaic and Ember!

The strangest part of how your first void battle is progressing is that it is now taking place inside the streets of Beri.

The self-healing metal of the Slitted has drawn in the town where it impacted it, brick and stone crunched into places to fill gaps in the superstructure. Familiar scents as groves of smashed plants cling to life despite having being wrenched from sun and soil. Tumbled houses spilling furniture and personal possessions like juice from crushed grapes.

It is not the Corvii you fight here, it is the Artamii - the new generation, the Endless Azure Skies' latest answer to the wolves of Ceron. The Armatii are avian combat servitors, eleven feet tall at their full height, slashed in black and white, with an intelligent belligerence that alternates between frustrating and terrifying. They fight primarily as skirmishers, and as skirmishers they are without peer; driving their opponents back into the safety of the phalanx - whereupon they unleash the fury of the Crystal Knight's experimental weapons. It's not a fair matchup; the Silver Divers have never encountered the Armatii before, whereas the Armatii have been engineered from the genetic level to surpass the Ceronians.

Soon the Ceronian phalanx has immobilized before the Beri town square. Only three Armatii hold the line against them, but so fierce are they the wolves have paused while heavy weapons are bought up to dislodge them. Every moment of delay, risks Dyssia further.

Dyssia!

So here's something fun: falling Sucks, Actually.

The Azura species, who went from aquatic environments to gravity-manipulation, has broadly not had to deal with the concept of falling down. The rush of wind, the complete lack of control, the inability to course correct as the ground starts rushing up at you - it's not a primordial fear in the same way that being crushed by deep ocean pressure isn't a primordial fear for humans. It's just something that doesn't come up enough to leave a genetic imprint. The horror is all intellectual which is in some ways worse.

And it is after you have begun falling but before you have hit the ground that the Crystal Knight slashes you with her saber.

It doesn't matter if your transdimensional ghost might under other circumstances be chill; coming into being as you're both falling into an arena causes a panic reaction and the eerie half-formed copy grabs onto you in a panic, coiling and trying to crush you, trying to put you between them and the ground. And after the impact someone fires a Solid Projectile round next to you - explosion, lights flashing, ears ringing, chaos. It's enough to set the other version of you into a confused, violent frenzy.

So how would you talk yourself down under these circumstances?

Dolce!

Suddenly Artemis is in the room.

"So," said the Assassin, extremely casually, "I didn't accomplish my mission, then?"

Artemis takes out a pen and notepad, makes a note.

"And you're working with the Architect?" she wasn't bowing any more. You were having a hard time keeping your eyes on exactly where her hands were at any given moment.

While the extremely clear transfer of information, clipped and snappy in the way of the Craftsman, did seem to be going down well, you got the overwhelming sensation that maybe honest communication wasn't your friend here.

Even like this, it's still home. That rooftop, though warped and silent, is definitely her favorite perch to listen to a Lyrii concert. Over there, the warehouse and the workshop still reeking of ten thousand crab shells. That crunched tunnel is what's left of the alley where Daisy Sunswimmer tried to kiss her only to lose her courage at the last moment when she couldn't reach Mosaic's lips without lifting onto her toes.

The crystals that had serenaded her in war are quiet now. And yet they thrive more than her Beri does, still crackling with latent power that begged to be turned into more and cleverer esoterica than had ever been seen, while all around it the true town wept. Mosaic's foot crunches through a waterlogged chair and too late notices it's the same one she'd sat in every week to drink tea on her rest day.

This corridor, too, is home. This bottleneck was her fortress almost yesterday. Even this had been twisted. Even this was claimed. Now it funneled her back together with Ember and her Divers and threw strange new warriors in her face. Their smell is literally indescribable: the feathers are so soft and slick, so resistant to being coated or tainted by the world around them that they don't seem to have a scent at all. But it's not the same as the scent of a void or even the inversion of the sense. They are... cleaner than that. Only not properly clean, there's nothing soothing or calm about these Armatii. They are more like smelling... the concept a mirror. Such a determined attempt at reflection that they only thing that could be said about them is that they are there at all.

Discomfiting. Even she had difficulty predicting what any of them were about to do. She can hardly blame the wolves for being flustered.

Mosaic is standing at the center of a phalanx. She stands above it, in actual fact, her proud posture lifting her above the shield wall as if she expected to tower over these people who were half again her height. Nevertheless, she rises up and refuses to move. Her ears perk to full extension atop her head and radiate aggressive intent. Her teeth are bared, neither in smile or in scowl but in simple naked challenge. Her tail rises above her head only to crash down like a thunderbolt, over and over and over again. Her arms fold over her chest while one lethal claw taps a half remembered beat out on her elbow.

She can tell. A few quick steps beyond the main thoroughfare and the Slitted would open itself back up to her. Beri would wave her a melancholy farewell and her skin would finally stop burning with the twin senses of regret and failure. The Silver Divers would spread and conquer as she'd originally bid them. The Crystal Knight's scent and sound patterns would float above all this noise and there would be nothing to this other than to stroll to her and hunt for her skull. Wasn't she the one who collected skulls? Or was it the other Azura, the one who actually lived on Bitemark and only asked for quality wrestlers once or twice a year? Does it even matter, when she's locked behind a vault with no opening?

The irritation in Mosaic's body becomes tension. The tension is good. The tension keeps her foolishly erect and full of murderous intent. They lift her above the battle. Above the Slitted Above even Beri. They rob the twitch from her muscles and the fire from her joints. She has power, here. She is power, here. The Hero of Beri has prepared her town for one final battle, and she stands again on the ramparts. In control.

"This stone is where your phalanx fell apart," she tells the Silver Divers with a devil's smile, "Just there, where that left one is standing is where I sent you tumbling into the nets of my people. To your right we built traps into the warehouse we never even wound up needing. That was the heart of your defeat. Beri swallowed you, and now you stand in its throat.

"If you are Daughters of Ceron... no. If you are mine, then howl! Take your spears and stab your way out of this place that devoured you. Last time you were conquerors turned pets, but today I welcome you home. Wolves of Beri, taste no second defeat. These dipshits? They're tourists. Con artists. Gimmick mongers. Eat their legs! Make them kiss these stones that still remember your scent! If you can't out think them, surely you can out stupid them instead. Let our home do the rest."

Her voice washes over them as a river's would. She makes no move to join them, but she shines on each of them as the ribbons flutter in her hair. She is moonlight. She is inevitability. She is the promise of redemption. See how she gestures, and leaves the fight to trusted allies? Her strength is your reserve. Do not think for a moment that it is already spent.

...She dares to stretch her neck and let it pop. Relief almost undoes the hard work of her posture. Soon she'll scream, or she'll collapse into the water. Soon she'll clutch at limbs and squeeze them until the shaking stops. But not now. Not now. Not. now.

Ceron! Ceron! Ceron!

But it's not Ceron that provides Ember's tactics here. No. It's stories. Half-remembered fragments of myth. Bright excitement is in her eyes as she gives the order: rear ranks, cords and scavenging. Anything that can clack together. Instruments, found in cabinets and stands. Horns, if you can get them. The clay tiles, the fractured pavement, the flutes and whistles and drumsticks that brought the people of Beri joy. Quickly, now: every moment wasted is another awful slash across someone's face, a crumpling shield, and a moment where the Knight might fall.

"Company," Ember yells, beginning to swing a cord with two clay tiles at either end, clacking ratatatat, ratatatat, ratatatat, "ROAR!"

The cacophony is almost deafening, almost a solid thing, interspersed with howling as a reverberating bass line, drilling into the heads of the Armatii. Stymphalia, Stymphalia! Deep in your heart, you know this: that this is a thunderstorm, this is a predator, this is a disruption in the air, this is no more thinking, this is dismay. The Daughters of Ceron still communicate as a roiling mass of scents below--

No, rising, too. Leaping off rooftops, tossing up lassos, digging pearl-handled knives into caught legs, dragging down these monsters of the air down into the phalanx like ants swarming over a broken-winged sparrow. There is blood, and much of it comes from bloodied mouths, deep-pierced breasts, ligament-torn limbs, but there are still more, still more, still more, and the pack works together, after all, wounded being pulled away, caught as they fall, but these monstrous alpha predators all descend alone and writhing.

Ember leaps, still swinging her castanets, her knife in her other hand, and when she lands it's one swinging around the throat and the other right in the spine between the thrashing wings. Mosaic, the Silver Divers cannot, will not follow: you must continue alone. This is knife-work, hate-work, a roiling mass that threatens to drive your own ears through your skull. So run. Run, while the Daughters of Ceron raise a din so loud that it might just crack the tiles beneath their feet.

[Overcome: 7.]

Kumquat. It's the safeword, chosen primarily for the fun way it sounds, but also because she's never actually used that fruit. Shout it out loud, and--

Well, she likes to think that would work for her. The other her is panicking, unsure, and the safeword cuts through the insecurity and replaces it with "someone is in trouble, go help them."

But there's no guarantee that one word, out of hundreds of thousands, is gonna be their safeword. Could be they like a different fruit, or use kumquat for BDSM somehow.

"You know, they only make these solid projectile rounds in one facility nearby?"

But any version of her the underworld can produce--any version of her that's enough her to be considered as truly her--is going to be distractible.

Or, you know, that's unkind. If you come at her with a weird enough fact, it's gonna derail any mental train of thought. Like, for instance, the fuck, what, where am I. Catch her interest, promise something interesting, keep talking, keep her attention focused on the new thing.

Come, friend, don't you want to listen to an infodump, and maybe be listened to in return?

Don’t falter. Don’t speak too quickly. Don’t linger on the treasure trove of information she just revealed. Don’t forget a word of it. Don’t relax the finger on the button. Don’t let a knuckle show white.

One hoof in front of the other. The guns will fire when they will. And he will put one hoof in front of the other.

“Independent individual, no government post. Between jobs. Formerly a chef. Crew recovered you from a frozen chunk of Architect’s station, floating through space.” She can draw plenty from that information. Yet her hands still move without telegraphing reason, and they constantly threaten to slip from his eyes. Don’t stop. Don’t lose the rhythm. “Please have patience. More to share. Information truncated to not overwhelm. Unsure of how esoteric would leave your mental state.”

Mosaic!

You arrive on the bridge of the Slitted.

Perhaps it is a joke of the Gods that your very own little cottage hangs upside down in the ceiling here, your own fireplace caught in metal treacle on its flight towards the throne of the Crystal Knight.

The light is wrong. Everything here was meant to be controlled, every reflection accounted for, every officer and engineer gene-tailored to compliment the effect. Everything was meant to surround the Crystal Knight's throne and make her seem as radiant and divine as the Endless Azure Skies themselves. It's not surprising they have not fixed it - what's surprising is how hard they're trying. Even in the midst of a boarding action, even with the ship damaged and flooded, this is where the bulk of the engineering core is, trying to correct the lights that halo the Crystal Knight.

They've almost got it. Shadow only falls on half of her face, like a scab falling to reveal a still-bleeding wound. Beauty is the first priority of the Skies. Beauty even above life. Beauty even above death.

She hisses as though beauty and hate were compatible.

Ember!

Mosaic has made her way. The Wolves have engaged the Armatii. But you have been separated from the pack and face one of these terrors alone.

Perhaps, on another day, in another world, the Armatii could be beautiful, even seductive. Most creatures have some sort of sensuality to them somewhere. You cannot even imagine it from where you stand here. This creature is too tall, movements less like a woman and more like a piece of malfunctioning construction equipment. Her skirt swings and slashes, the edges bladed so that she might dismember a phalanx with a pirouette. She wields her blades not like swords but like chopsticks, reaching down to impale a lesser warrior and then flick her away like imperfect sashimi. Something to the way she hunches makes her feel like a warrior statue, awoken to life and bending double to dispatch intruders. Something about that stirs a memory of someone who fought with kindness instead of this sociopathic cruelty.

There's no victory here for you alone. This is a monster from a horror tale, a trail of fish and rosepetals in her bloody wake. She clacks her blades together and pursues you as though born to it.

Dyssia!

While I am going to present the following information in a direct and straightforwards way, please understand that the context in which it is being given involves periodic interruptions of blinding light, choking gas, bone-rattling explosions and a general feeling like open wounds exposed to seawater except applied all over your body. Each interruption will be marked with a <3 rather than a detailed description of the hacking, coughing and violence implied by this.

"That's actually a common misconception. All of these rounds <3 bear the mark of the Intergalactic Clearing House, a logistical hub at the centre of the <3 Endless Azure Skies <3. The Clearing House is a planet sized warehouse for every exotic component, material, or fundamental resource <3 imaginable. Any Azura Citizen may request a delivery from the <3 Clearing House but as the minimum order size is one entire macrocarrier full of the requested resource, a single delivery of most resources can keep a planet stocked for generations <3. The local <3 solid projectile store is a partially buried macrocarrier palette that is mined <3 by local servitors, the unique <3 texture and flavour is due to sea water contamination and the <3 fifty year old bunker fire that <3 has partially curdled the admixture <3 <3 rendering it <3 less effective."

It's not really possible to die from Solid Projectile gas, but it can make you wish you could. By this point in the discussion you're both lying breathless on the arena sand, half-blind and half-death like you've just had the worst heavy metal concert experience it's possible to possess.

But you're not dead. You haven't killed each other.

So that's when they send in the tigers.

Dolce!

"Did you recover the ship from the Architect's station too?" asked the Assassin, face invisible beneath the hood. There was some sort of darkness emitter the Hermetics used; those shadows would stand up to a direct spotlight. "Don't worry about my mental state, I'm fine -" she reached for the tea, and knocked it off the table. She giggled. "Whoops!"

Artemis clicks her stopwatch.

The first thing Mosaic does is bow. Her spine curls downward while her neck lifts up to maintain her posture as she dips, lower and lower until the ribbons in her hair sweep across the floor. Her left arm reaches across her chest while her right stretches off into the air. The shadows and the broken lighting are more than enough to change the tint of her fur, transforming the pristine white into something mottled and almost like sea foam. Too bright in places and too dark in others, and the overall effect shifted from warm heat to something much too cool.

She holds the pose to avoid having to say anything for another moment. She hides the rising and falling of her chest, and does not risk speaking while she sounds like she ran through a ship she mostly stalked across, instead. She holds the pose for the sake of respect. Because she must admire what she sees.

The ache and hidden shiver of her body is weakness. The curl of her tail above her back is strength. Her deference to the hissing knight before her is weakness. Her respect for Power is strength. Her home, her walls, her favorite chair are trickling down into the throne of the woman she means to depose. This too is strength. This too is weakness.

She rises again, and the smile on her face has nothing of cockiness or derision inside of it. She is in the presence of the Invincible. The shadow that splits the Crystal Knight's face is not a scar. Scars are things worn by those who bleed. This is acknowledgment. The might of the blow struck against her has been turned into paint. Already the blotch of darkness is melting away as the crew frantically works the materials of her home better into walls where it converts into more and more perfect lighting. This is Art. This is a transient monument to an act that had shattered Mosaic's body and meant nothing more than the stroke of a brush to the mighty Crystal Knight.

An idiot might say that vanity allowed Mosaic to walk into a throne room and posture after meeting little more than token resistance. But she knows better. This is Power. This is the raw, impossible might of the Skies. Of course aesthetics are more important than defenses. Defense is something you build if you think you might get hurt. The Endless Azure Skies are above all of that. They stretch over every petty, mortal concern so that only Beauty is left to them to tend to.

It pulls her breath short, in a way that has nothing to do with the fatigue in her body that wages war with the spikes of adrenaline currently surging through her bloodstream. It pulls her lips apart in awe. It also sets her eyes ablaze with starlight and puts strength back into her limbs. For all that this is the domain of godhood, it is also an immovable fact that if Mosaic had to fight her way into this chamber, she would not be standing now. Her hunt has been acknowledged, and the riddle of Zeus is all around her. What could be better for answering the question she yearns to know more than anything?

She rises. Her tail cracks like thunder. Her fingers dance across her braid, to feel the flutter of each of her promises to walk away from this against her fingtertips. Her teeth glint in the relative darkness while mismatched eyes shine like lanterns up at the throne. Up at prey.

"Greetings, Fair Lady Crystal Knight," she laughs, though it hurts her ribs, "Welcome to my home! In the spirit of hospitality, I have come to ask you to return my teacher to me. As her Captain it's my responsibility to punish her for breaking a promise, see. I couldn't possibly ask an honored guest to do it for me~"

Mosaic's lips are painted crimson. As she finishes speaking, they pull up into a devil's smirk.

The stories never talk about this, you know?

Or, you know, they do, but they never actually get across get across just how much solid projectile weapons suck. Never go into the blinding, the choking,

Otherwise, wow, right? Topless, with your own clone, in a pit which in ideal circumstances would be full of mud? Exactly the kind of situation that would make you consider how pro-clone-fucking exactly you are if you weren't, for instance, flat on your face and glad that the arena isn't[ full of mud?

Missed trick there, Tilly, very sloppy.

Growling. At least two. Four? Hard to tell with the tears choking her eyes, the smoke choking her lungs. Stripes through the fog, which shouldn't blend in but also mean she can't accurately latch onto a shape?

She locks eyes with her ghost-clone, communication through expression and flicked eyes. Or, you know, tries, inasmuch as both are pretty much face-down in the not-mud, exhausted. There are benefits to self-knowledge, you know? No need to talk to each other, because if she's thinking it, then she's also thinking it.

Either one of them would be toast right now on their own. Weak, tired, choked, easy prey. But two together can support each other--back to back, as much to cover blindspots as it is to hold each other up, occasionally wobbling as one or the other lashes out with a tail against an encroaching set of teeth and claw.

See that, Tilly? See how stupid your sword is? See what trust does? Eat shit.

And maybe one of the two of her will figure out a lasting solution in time to keep them from being eaten by tigers.

If Ember were a princess, pampered, innocent, and fond of holographic films, she might think of this thing as being made out of deaths. Everything about it suggests that a hero would miraculously get by unscathed, and that she, not being a hero, would not. She would be so distracted by seeing all the possible deaths approaching her that she would be unable to block them all, and then the sword would flick her away, or the skirt would lop her head off neatly, or she would be yanked up into the air and flung down an impossible height, and then she would burst into a cloud of startled sparrows and rats. That would be it. No one can fight a monster like this and win.

Ember does not think about death. She is Ceronian. She thinks about how to fend off the very next death. Each one, in turn, over and over, all for one purpose: to live a little longer. To see Mosaic come back for her with the Azura in her arms. Or to see her sisters bounding close, bearing weighted nets, because the only way to win is to stop it from fighting. So there's no room for thoughts that aren't about staying alive. No thoughts about what dying looks like unless it's to keep her alive. No admission that this is impossible and she will die, because then how can she live?

She continues to fight with everything to hand. Plates. Doors. Alleyways. You cannot fight something like this with your sword, you have to put your faith in the world. She smashes a barrel of wine and lets it flow down steps, forces the Armatii to clamber onto a rooftop to continue chasing her. Because, yes, it is a chase. That is the shape of the nightmare: a chase through jumbled, half-familiar streets where she used to pretend to be nothing more than an innocent milkmaid, or a day laborer with her hat pulled over her ears, or a shadow dressed in shadows. A place that she had learned so that the pack would learn with her, but also a place that she had learned because it was Mosaic's. A place that she had learned, in the end, because it was beautiful. And now all the pieces are here, but rearranged, randomized, turned sinister, and everything that comes to hand is a new attempt to buy another ten seconds of being Ember. Everything, no matter who it once belonged to, or what it meant to them, or how incongruous it might be for it to be within reach. Beri itself will be hollow before Ember lets herself die and no longer be in the same world as Mosaic, as the Silver Divers, as Beri's survivors, as the Plousios itself seen both as a wonder and as a ruin.

No thought. No time. No sentiment. Only life. Only life.

He does not react. Not in the ways she is looking for, more than enough in the ways she will notice. A fallen teacup is not a gunshot. A reaching hand is not a guard dog twenty-three paces behind you. A reaching hand is not throwing a knife or vaulting over the table. A fallen teacup will not irreparably damage the carpet. He made sure of that. He notices, and he does not react. He is looking for something else.

“Maybe. I repeat: I was a chef.” And there’s more he could try to say, but he doesn’t. There’s a button he could press, and his finger hovers on it in readiness, but he doesn’t. “Please have patience. And please be still. I repeat: I mean you no harm. I want to help you. I need your help to get you back safely.”

He does not slip out of the snappy protocol rhythm. A prayer envelops it instead.

“Please."

Mosaic!

A priest rushes to the Crystal Knight's side. Her eyes are wild with fear and her lips are heavy with prophecy. She sees the truth in your words, the violent application of the Law of Hospitality to the structure of the Slitted. She comes with a warning.

But the Crystal Knight is too proud to listen.

There's something spectacular in that moment. You can see her draw her blade and seal her doom, exactly like a character from a story. And you see in that Zeus' final riddle of Empire.

How do we know the will of the Gods? Through history, through ritual, through philosophy.
Who teaches us history, ritual and philosophy? Priests, writers, scholars.
Who are priests, writers and scholars? But mortals.
Who can stand before the wrath of the Crystal Knight? No mortal.
Only the Gods.

You feel your aching bones crackle with a divine spark.

The air before you bends and warps. The Crystal Knight's Grav-Rail has conjured a microsingularity ahead of her lunge and she curves around it, bending impossibly, blade of light striking from angles no mortal mind or reflexes could be prepared for. Acceleration is her plaything, distance is at the mercy of her technology, direction is meaningless. In the strike of this blade is warfare as abstract and alien as the interplay of camouflage and guided munitions, as mud and wire, as titans of steel and cobalt. The next frontier of Mars' ever-expanding spiral of violence.

But for all her skill and power, she is a guest in your home. And she has drawn her blade.

Ember!

Though all the world breaks.

She breaks Beri. She shatters the stone. She rends the doors. She whirls through memories and gifts, upends the hearth, tears the trees, tramples gemstones so they break like glass. A storm passes through the town and rends rooftops into stone dust. Lifetimes of labour and love shattered into material for the dying Warsphere.

In the end, she tires of it first.

In a fit of fear you fling yourself out of the ship entirely and into the wine-dark void. She glances at you, then turns her back. This is the leash that binds the Armatii, the mechanism by which the Skies keep such perfect killers contained: they are territorial. Even as she destroyed your home, she was bound to hers and can not leave it. To follow you into the black would imply an emotional investment in your destruction she simply does not have; you were an intruder, and letting you depart having learned the error of your ways was no different from converting you into molluscs.

And so instead you float out for a moment in space, with no suit or protective equipment, exposed to the trackless void of Poseidon's great ocean in all its enormity. You have come close many times before, in dreams, but never like this. Never so tiny, and unprepared, and mortal in the face of shipwreck. The hungering depths and dominating currents of gravity and tide pull you on invisible channels and you experience the cosmos as the tiniest speck.

Alive.

Dyssia!

Tigers are big, you know? An avalanche of muscle and talon that kills with a single strike on the pounce, and these ones are horse-sized so that an Azura might get the feeling of a human being up against one. You don't win a sustained fight against a tiger, them killing you is an event and not a battle. You and the other Dyssia both understand this.

And so, too, do you both understand that the easiest way out is for one of you to die. There's a lot of meat on an Azura.

Would you go for that, Dyssia? And if it's between you and your copy, how would you decide which one is going under the talons? Or is that not even on the table?

Dolce!

It's not your fault.

This might take you a minute, so I want to put that up front first. You're not dealing with someone who has ever been thought of as a person before. You're dealing with someone who wore a person as a deployment mechanism. Compassion and sympathy weren't unexpected or things that they'd never experienced, they were just another way to get close.

They didn't know that at the time. They know that now, though. Now their blood is up, their mission is active, and they got a taste of the absolute alignment of Purpose that came with being in the process of killing the Architect. This assassin's creator-god built the Meaning of Life into her and she got a sip. The motivating force behind a mother bear protecting her cubs, a starving dog biting its master, a yobbo on stage in front of six thousand cheering people as they encourage him to do a full kegger - all these instincts and more have been re-wired to pass through a part of her brain dedicated to killing the Royal Architect. The most mentally destroyed methamphetamine addict would be downright reasonable in comparison.

When she leaps across the table, bone talons ripping out from under her robes, she does it for love - and Aphrodite is right behind her, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke that gives you the smell of what that kind of love means. There's nothing she values higher than even heading in the direction of that experience, even if it means killing everyone on this ship for a maybe.

The phantasm dissolves inches away from you, bone claws barely tearing a scratch in your shirt collar.

"Well, that was a bust," said 20022 from the doorway, distastefully jiggling his teabag. "Shall I have the crew throw it out the airlock?"

Nostrils seal. The jaw clamps shut. Secondary oxygenation begins. Her skin grows stiff, her body hair lying flat and dense. Her heartrate plummets from the frantic drumbeat of survival, causing Ember to feel light-headed, blurring consciousness. She blinks through tears like diamonds and drifts helplessly in the current.

What else could she do? She doesn't have any propulsion, doesn't have a signal flare, is a rounding error in size. Around her is the detritus of her exit, the hole they tore in the ship's side, the powdered rubble and shattered signifiers of Beri mingling with slagged plates of external armor and drifting clouds of chemical afterburn. But they are not lying still; there is turbulence, disruption in the space between, ripples on the face of the sea. Too much noise to spot her, her alone, in all the grand wreck of battle.

She could survive for a long time, out here, but if she is not found, if Mosaic does not fish her out and scold her for getting herself frosted all over, then eventually she will drown; she will close her eyes and her powerful heart will simply stop beating. She will linger here forever. That is, unless Polychromatikí pays attention to her and draws her along into a gravity well far off, barely alive, stranded on some farflung planet. (He is known to do this. Some lost souls even survive orbital reentry.)

Assuming that she is not fished out by Mosaic. Or by an ambitious Corvii looking to have leverage in their escape. Or hunted. The void is beautiful, but it is not (despite the name) empty. There are monsters here, too. Great Void Leviathans, Eaters of Worlds, and things which ride the solar currents with great thin wings and gaping mouths.

Was that a flicker of movement? It flashes silver out of sight. She has no way to pivot, now that it (whatever it is) is in her blindspot. With the fingers of an old woman, Ember painfully curls her fingers around the hilt of her knife, ready to defend herself from something much, much worse than a crab.

Poseidon, Horsefather, Master of Movement, Knower of the Unknown, she thinks to herself, as loudly as she can. I am your creature, too. My scales shine, my colors warn, my movements are as fluid as the tidal rush. Be with me, here, now. Do not forget me.