[b]Mosaic![/b]

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 [i]Slitted[/i]. 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.

[b]Ember![/b]

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.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

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 [i]event [/i]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?

[b]Dolce![/b]

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 [i]love [/i]- 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?"