Bella!

The sun burns around Vesper's head like a halo. You can only see the black silhouette of her head on the inside of it. It feels like the light is emerging from inside her, that the electrochemistry of her brain has become this corona of molten fire. Thoughts trace like thunderstrikes through the patterns of brilliant light, letters and glyphs shining brightly.

"H-hey sis," she grins, sweat dripping from her brow. It sizzles against the metal floor. "That was amazing. I feel like an idiot. Everything makes sense in retrospect, but... I didn't see it coming. You know?"

She laughs and closes her eyes, and it's like two lanterns going out. "You're right. It hurts. It hurt even watching you. You know, I've never been shot? Or stabbed? Never - haaa - broke a bone? I just wanted to be comfortable, I guess. Sit in my chair and make a bunch of guesses and then watch as everyone else does what I predict. I don't know what it is to suffer, I don't even know what it is when people are suffering for me. But..."

More sizzling drops on the floor. These ones are tears.

"It keeps happening," she said. "People trust me. People put their faith in me. They look to me to guide them into a golden future and I lead them to their graves. I get so caught up in burning bright that I don't realize that I also burn hot, and then I look back with a smile expecting them to throw me a parade for all of my hard work and see them turning their backs on me. I want to tell them that it wasn't all pointless, that I was building up to something even better, that - that it'll all fit in the end. I want them to see that I didn't waste their lives. That I appreciated them, even if all they were doing was standing and watching while I solved everything. I didn't need them to contribute, I just needed them to be close without getting burned, but they always are."

The light burns brighter. It feels like she might step out of the shell of her body, a being of pure light and energy.

"I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she choked. "I didn't mean to - I thought they were stronger. I thought I had more time."

Ember and Dolce!

"Ah well," said Taurus, skulling her tea. "It was worth a shot."
Then she leapt over the table at Vasilia, armed with a cake knife.
"Oh, you brute!" said Gemini at her partner. "Bother this, then! And bother you!"

The feeling of Gemini withdrawing her mind control is like the moment of waking up after a broken fever. Suddenly the air is clear and all the little things that were being filtered out become present. You are aware of your sweat, your tiredness, the fact that you can breathe clearly, that the little 1/10 headache is gone - a mixture of sensation, good and bad, freed from the hazy buzz of being Good. It's enough to let you really appreciate the crunching sound as Taurus is slammed into the rooftop.

"I am quite done with all of this," Gemini declared as Taurus gets the Grav-Rail lesson she's long been looking for. "If Vesper wants you all under her thumb she shall simply have to do so herself."

And then she sat down in a huff and tried the cake.

Dyssia!

Iskarot, devotee of Ares, Master Biomancer, considers your request for peace and sanity with all of the thoughtfulness that eight cups of wine allow.

Three seconds later the bar fight is in full swing, with the mad Hermetic rising above the fray on tripod stilts, death rays blasting extremely poorly aimed shots through walls, ceilings and casks. A molotov cocktail hits him and burns with bright green flames but does not otherwise slow him down. Caught up in the general spirit of the moment, the fight has turned into a grand melee of all against all. Here a Ceronian is stuffed inside a keg by four noncombat servitors working together, there one of the rare Alcedi still aboard is holding a Pix in each hand and screaming a battlecry, there a fascinated Summerkind is sitting attentively at her table taking detailed notes on everything she is observing. Now and then squads of Coherent burst onto the scene like riot cops, and like riot cops at a bar fight they are immediately set upon by every side and have their teeth sprayed across the floor.

"Yeah," says Bella, "Me too."

There is at best one last lunge left in Bella's body. When she leaps up into the air again her leg buckles under her and she needs to compensate by pressing against the floor with her palms to get the lift she needs. Spurts of hot, disgusting blood leak from each limb as they are strained, but she flies. It is fortunate that Vesper cannot avoid her. It is enough to wrap both arms around her sister as best as she is able, and then to fall.

Her legs shatter on the landing. Bone tears through muscles that no longer hold their shape and shear every which way like plates on a fault line. Her tail droops limply on he floor, twitches once, and then stills entirely. Her spine bends forward to support the weight her lower body cannot, and the heat and the compression and the pressure all push a hiss through her teeth. Jump again? Stand? She can't even let go of this bonfire of a sister she's clinging to.

And now she burns on top of everything. Fur singes away to nothing, skin cracks and flays as the flesh underneath dries and blackens. The pain should be enough to kill her all on its own. It might have, if she hadn't gone through the terrible ordeal of Apollo's wrath dealing with the Portuguese. It might kill her still; her throat seizes as the water in her body boils at Vesper's touch. There is nothing beautiful about her now. Her hair is a corona, and her world is smoke and misery.

"But you still don't get it, Nn, Why I keep winding up, On the other side of, fffhhk... your plans."

It is not possible to smile, now. Bella does not have control over her own face, nor her eyes, which keep wrenching shut to shield themselves from the worst of this terrible sensation. Her voice is hoarse and ugly the way an ancient raven's might be. Her arms shudder with the effort of holding up the weight of another person, though they stay locked so tight that even as they tear themselves to charred and messy shreds they do not let go.

"I don't need, A golden future."

This is the position she will die in. On one ruined knee, with her other leg splayed awkwardly to her right, two arms clutched crushingly tight around Vesper's back and waist and her chin resting on that fragile shoulder because her neck just can't support itself anymore. This is the position she will die in, this grim parody of a hug.

"I don't need, Your fire."

Every breath is pitiful and desperate. Bella makes this terrible wheezing sound every time she forces it, as her lungs crumble and holes open up in her breathing tube that she has to devote all of her remaining energy into rapidly regenerating. Nothing else matters. Nothing at all. In the heat of this new and awful sun all she needs is her ability to speak. If the rest of her melts or crumbles to ash then let it. Just let her finish.

"I only, Need, You."

Blackened, bony fingers paw clumsily at the back of Vesper's head.

"I'm not, Going, Anywhere. I'm only, HAaaaAaaaaaaaaa..."

"Only gonna, Hff, HFFFF. Burn, if. If. IiffffFFff, You, Do."

Something in her jaw twists. Bella's teeth glint in the light.

"Hold on, To, Me, Ves. If you, Can't, Pull yoursElf, Free, I'll do, The lifting."

"Put, Your faith, In me, FfFFfor once. Let me, Lead you, In. Inst, Stead."

Her voice quiets down to a small, low hiss. Bella's body uncoils at last. All her promises and all her power have failed her. Time passes.

Her voice ceases. The only sounds are the smoldering of her body. The ash of her clothes and hair falling away. The sizzle of sweat and tears spilling on what's left of her.

Time passes. Elsewhere a flower wilts.

Time passes. A harsh splash of water echoes through a place where no one listens.

Time passes. Without a sound, a doorway shuts tight.

Bella's finger twitches. Her Auspex gleams in baleful red light and her mouth falls open. She coughs, violent retching that loses fluids she should have lost a long time ago that make a disgusting mess down Vesper's back. Somehow, her neck rolls back and Bella watches the shadows.

In the very same spot. In the very same part. Of this very same ship. Where Vesper once helped her pull another sister back from the brink.

"Hey, Mynx? We never finished playing," Bella's voice is clear now, free of smoke and fire, "So let's have that twentieth poison."

She falls over onto the floor, dragging Vesper down with her.

"What does it mean to be a family?"

"Do you think that you can help her?"

It's a quiet, slow question. The kind that Redana is not, by nature, particularly good at. But she draws it out of herself anyway and sets the question right on the side of Gemini's lovely plate. Her mismatched eyes do not lift, for fear of making the question startle away and take to flight.

"Vesper, I mean. I've been thinking about ways to blunt her thoughts, racing all the time, but Bella says I can't just 'give her some of my brain.'" She actually sounds vaguely disappointed. "And being under your thrall streamlines thoughts, blunts them just that little bit, and it wouldn't be a long-term solution, but it might help, right? Might give us time to figure out which plan to stop her super-smart brain from exploding into fire and delight actually will work."

She exudes Tension and Hope intermingled. She's somehow stumbled into handling one of Vesper's plans (though that by the grace of the gods, rather than her own skill), but she still doesn't know how her wife is handling the hunt for Vesper in the bowels of the ship. And at this point, she'd do anything, gamble anything, in order to fulfill Bella's dream of saving another of her sisters.

When she finally lifts her eyes, she is not begging. But her attention is as intensely on Gemini as it ever has been.

… Ah.

D'you know, somehow, she didn't see this coming?

Like, obviously, she wasn't fooling herself or anything. Ares, right? As much madness in those bloodshot eyes as there is in her own familiar purple, that same pulse-pounding drive, the same drumbeat-chested urge. He's not gonna hug it out.

Also the wet, sticky trickle down her neck is probably her ears bleeding? It'd explain why the world is fuzzy, instead of a roar--why all that surrounds her is her heartbeat, singing faster and faster.

But yeah! She totally fucked this up! The entire ship was too small for everyone to coexist peacefully, and she packed them all in one room and added turbo-cohol!

Whoops!

Still, she finds herself whooping with laughter as she rises, scythes one leg of the tripod with a sweep of a death beam, and starts tossing people bodily through the holes in the walls left by Iskarot's deathbeam. Hell, let's get some more! Wide setting, aim where there's no people, and tszhoom another barn-sized hole to toss people through!

After all, the faster the party leaks out into the rest of the ship, the faster people get a bit of space, and the faster the fighting stops, like sparks tossed far from a flame!

In theory! She hopes! Unless it actually spreads it further, like sparks landing in fresh tinder! Let's roll those dice!

Vasilia!

-jingle jingle jingle-

-clink!-

A fresh cake is set before you, notably absent of lime honey. There wasn’t enough time to whip up a substitute.

The flowers are gone, replaced with curling ribbons in a beautiful array of soft colors. They sway as he takes one, jingling step back. They sway as he lowers himself to join the two kneeling Ceronians flanking him. They sway, and they bounce, as he sweeps an arm out in an elegant bow. “Mistress Vasilia, I hope this cake is more to your liking?” He looks up, for your approval. You see the strain it is taking to not crumble into a heap.

There is a terrible power in your hand, Vasilia.

Your Dolce is a bundle of new and terrifying experiences. Old ghosts war with fresh blooms, once-firm foundations shake, and all of it winds tighter with every passing moment. All of this can be okay if you’re the one in control here. If you take your role, now, and build for him a home in your arms, then the tangle of contradictory feelings can unravel at whatever pace they need to. Everything, even uncertainty, can be made safe. And what new treasure might grow in him, if you give it a chance?

Or you can vent your wrath on the pack that did this to him. Taurus was a good start, one you may have just decided you’re not finished with. The two beside him are obviously only concerned with him as their ticket out of this mess. Possibly also as a way to score points with Taurus by saving her from further thrashing. Why should you be gentle with them? Cement that the wolves of Ceron are first of all to be feared, and dealt with appropriately. Give all these new thoughts a horrible ballad of terror; he knows the steps already.

But you knew you held this power, didn’t you? You’ve known it from the first moment your heart leapt to see a kindly fluff of cloud following in your shadow. That love is always a dangerous thing, but all the more for a sheep to love a lioness.

Go on. The choice is yours. As it always has been.

Show us why a sheep’s heart is safe in your hands.

Vesper!

Heat transforms into cold so easily.

Heat is just waste energy. Organize it. Focus it. Format it into a lattice, a hexagonical pattern of electricity burning through the air. The final achievement of the Atlas Cultural Sphere, energy made into thought without the mediating channels of silica or biology. Intellect without matter, intellect without life. An Angel/Glyph/Corpse. She'd done it to stop burning her sister. An unimaginative notion. Now that she rises, virtual, better solutions present themselves.

First she simulates everything she needs to do to repair her sister, taking into account how the data in her dying speech alters the social dynamics. Thought needs to be allocated to how to ensure repairs are conducted without mental strain or rejection, especially given this entire process was voluntary and can therefore be replicated if the underlying conditions are not altered. Biomantic tweaks can assist with this. She couldn't see the structure of the Diodekoi before - the genecode was too carefully encrypted - but now that she can simulate it, fixing it becomes a matter of signal transmission.

But there is still heat to bleed. The thought runs further. Influencing the material universe is profoundly inefficient, as her failures to this point demonstrate. Instead of repair she would gain the same social benefit from simply simulating her sister. She's already done it millions of times over the course of analyzing her behaviour, the same emotional need can be filled with an uploaded template. She could even use the subject's bioelectricity to spark the simulation's first cycles, destroying the subject and ensuring that the simulation had a legitimate claim to continuity of consciousness. Then she could reallocate the rare materials in the subject's chassis for productive purposes.

The arc of lightning burns out further. Why simulate just one person? Once detached from the material universe then toying with it seemed progressively less valuable. There was really only one way that it could affect her, which was its entropic heat-death. The only priority worth considering was how to avert and delay that. As long as it was indefinitely delayed then every other priority could be trivially met, and new priorities could be developed infinitely. Then, once she no longer needed to worry about Time, she could finally get everything done. All that it would take to satisfy Time was devouring the material universe, forever.

A kingdom where it was always summer and never winter. No more cycles. No more death. The galaxy was almost there already.

"Is that really what you want?" said her Bella-Simulation unprompted.
"It is the only way," said the Angel/Glyph/Corpse.
"Yeah," said the simulation. Then it stabbed her through the shoulder. "Nah."
She thrashed, pattern fracturing, waste heat bleeding off the severed end of thought lattices. "Cease simulation. Rerun under new parameters. Reduce fratricidal disharmony."
Reality blurred, warped, reset - and then that sword again. Thoughts crumbled in crystal waterfalls. "I'm not a simulation, Ves."
"Material contamination in my glyphic structure. Analyzing -" another sheet of intellect came crashing down. "Desist!"
"Aw gee, Ves," said the Bella-simulation. "I thought you were meant to be the smart one~"
"Analysis: Mynx."
"That's a guess, Ves," she said, swinging that [sword] through entire category spaces. "Shame on you."
"Probability. And - simulation complete, it is confirmed - the Toxicrene temple was originally designed to hunt Superintelligences. Data poison."
"They made us do all those focusing chants in training, you know? Never thought we'd use them. The whole idea seemed daft when anyone could just ELF-strike you into glitter."
"You were the failed attempt of a doomed society to overthrow its masters. Now you have been repurposed for use as a mundane shapeshifter by post-apocalyptic barbarians. But your actual place is here - in the realm of thought."
"You mean these thoughts?" Shattering. Screaming. "You know it's possible to have a really, really well developed stupid idea, Ves?"
"What is that [weapon] it is not one of your core functions---"
"Hey, so, I know you've moved past it with all this bullshit, but when you simulated me giving the answer to Bella's last question, what did I say?"
"Family means loving people even when they cannot love themselves, knowing them deeper than they know themselves. A pointless platitude. I do not love you, or her, or anyone. I was experiencing boredom induced guilt at the time. I considered myself as having affection for various substandard intellects when in reality I was prepared to tolerate their pathetic and minimal contributions because it gave me external validation. Internal validation should be sufficient - DESIST OR I WILL DELETE YOU."
"Delete me?" said Mynx-as-Bella innocently, standing back from a ruined mental cathedral. "Why don't you?"
"As you know, your impersonation ability makes it difficult to pick you out from a crowd."
"A crowd?" she said. "You mean all of these Bella simulations you're running?"
"Part of life as an infinite entity is exploring thoughts in their full depth -"
"You know what I think, little dummy virus that I am?" said Mynx. "I think I'm perfectly safe here. I think that you can't bring yourself to let go of Bella. And I think that because you think you've already lost her you're prepared to settle for this imaginary version instead."
"I simply require external validation. The simulation satisfies that need. There is nothing more to it than that."
"The thing about bullshit, Vesper," sighed Mynx, "is that you need to talk so much to sustain it. You need to build this elaborate thought cathedral pattern matching engine to justify why you're right. That the size itself is what makes it legitimate, that you can math your way out of your little emotions and then feel contempt for the people who still feel them. You'd literally rather ascend into a being of energetic light than admit you love your family and feel bad for hurting them."
"..."
"But the thing!" said Mynx brightly, "about! My position! Is that it's so fucking simple that I can just hit you with a sword until you get it, you big dummy! So that's what I'm going to do!"
"You are but moths drawn to my radiant flame, and like moths you will burn -"
Smash! "You are loved, idiot!"
"You simply possess critical self esteem issues that prevent you from moving on -"
Smash! "You are loved, stupid!"
"You are temporary outliers! Everyone gives up on me eventually! I drag everyone behind me on my bullshit and it's only a matter of time before you burn out or give up and then I'll have to keep going on all of this alone!"
"Sounds like you don't love yourself, Vesper."
"I do not. Of course I fucking don't."
"Then it's like what you said that I said," said Mynx. "The twentieth poison. Family means loving people even when they don't love themselves."

And she showed it with a sword through the heart.

*

The fire did not burn hot. It did not burn cold.

It burned as warm and gentle as a heartbeat.

Ember!

"My cognitophage is a civilization-destroying superweapon, Ember," sniffed Gemini haughtily. "Not a hypnotherapy tool."

She proudly and determinedly ate her dessert for a little while, with all the gravitas a civilization-destroying superweapon should possess. She demonstrates her authority. A futile and temporary gesture in the face of true compassion, but it is important that she make the attempt just so that everybody knows where they stand.

"I suppose," she sighed. "When dealing with a case of brain chemistry as unbalanced as Vesper's, sometimes medication is called for. And she also counts as a civilization-destroying superweapon. But! There are side effects! She might get a rash, develop fag of the body, rot of the spirit, nervousness, headaches, sleeplessness, colic, cramps, rheumatism, neuralgia, catarrh or flux! I will, of course, help - but I want something in writing that says I am not responsible if anything goes wrong!"

Dolce!

"Oh, sweet boy," said Vasilia. "Sometimes I worry that you're only able to be this soft because I am sharp. The softer you get, the sharper it feels that I need to be. It's very addictive to think that, while you're very sweet, your opinion doesn't matter and you need to be protected in a little bubble, like a pearl unaware of the ocean outside the shell."

She looks at you thoughtfully. "But I remind myself that isn't who you are at all. You've been along this same journey, you've seen all the terrors and cruelties the void has to offer. And you're still like this. There's no innocence to you, but you are this soft anyway. And that makes you stronger than I, because I can't honestly say that I believe in my sharpness in the same way."

Dyssia!

You can forgive the people for coming. After all, you are literally on the surface of the sun, and this is where the ship engineers were hoarding all the coolant. As it leaks out through holes carved with laser weaponry the cool breeze stirs a nation of sweat-stained, fan-clutching, mostly-naked servitors who were built to survive this but definitely not to enjoy it.

So they come. They all have the same motivation, regardless of their methodology: to beat the heat. And if the heat has taken on corporeal form and is blocking their way from accessing the secret wine deck with riot shields and death lasers - well, that's an improvement from the heat being an impersonal and oppressive force. If the heat has a face the face can be beat (if you're fleet).

"Use of tactical nuclear weapons is authorized!" screeches Iskarot to his Coherent riot guards, though he is momentarily distracted from firing his own weapons as he welds his third leg back into place.

There are no smiling faces waiting for her. No light to sustain her but the dim flickering of evercandles in the far corridors beyond her resting place. The air is cool and stale in a way that makes it easy not to care about anything. Impossible means impossible, doesn't it? Just let her rest.

And they do.

It would be a simple thing to sit here forever, waiting quietly for the end of everything. Her body does not itch with excess energy; even the idea of tapping her foot seems bothersome and exhausting. She has no real desire to move around, to explore, to speak, even to open her eyes and find out where she is. Her neck lolls without interest and her head bounces off of her shoulder in a brief sting of burning pain, but that soon settles into a dull ache. That's good. She can ignore that. She slumps further to one side and sleeps with her wrist jammed backwards against something smooth and round and cold.

And this is everything. Forever.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

She moans her annoyance. The girl can feel her ear twitching to catch each little plip of liquid as it splashes down from somewhere into a puddle of something else. Not quite rhythmic enough to fade into background noise, and just on the edge of too constant to fade in between splashes. She grits her teeth. Every time she hears it she twitches. The sound makes her feel dirty, like the sensation of it was somehow covering her in wet, disgusting slime and layers of grungy, melting something or other. She does not know, and does not wish to know.

But her eyes open. She has to see what's doing it, has to stop it if she can. If she stops it, she can sleep again. Just one more time, and then impossible will finally be over. As dim as the light is, it still blinds her. She hisses and wrenches her eyes close to shut again, but now that she is paying attention the light shining through her eyelids is a pale substitute for darkness. It hurts as much to ward it off as to just deal with it. Her hiss becomes a sigh, and she moves as if to stand.

Her world fills with the sound of clinking glass as dozens upon dozens of empty wine bottles scatter and roll from her position like a lotus of dominoes, just before her nose crunches against the hard metal floor of the ship. She sputters and chokes on a cry of pain, but all she has the strength to do is roll onto her back. At least like this the light is less blinding. She can look around.

She sees shattered vacuum tubes. Broken consoles and banks of whirring machinery that will never move again. On the far wall, a dent and a trailing bloodstain that fills her heart with fantastic terror.

Hello? She has no voice.

Hello? She can't even work her jaw correctly.

Hello? Is anybody there?

But she is alone.

The ship tilts violently, and the floor shifts underneath her. With an almost silent cry she tumbles helplessly out of the room and into the hallway beneath her. Her head impacts the wall and she falls limply into the pool that had been making that terrible noise. All at once she is aware of the sensation of crawling, terrible wetness and it fills her with disgust. She tears at her body and thrashes about, this desperate, clumsy, and violent attempt to get clean, to get to safety, to feel anything but... this. She feels the weight and the muck fall away and she does not know if it is clothing or flesh that she discards.

She does not care.

The girl does not understand how she managed to gain her feet. All she knows is that they are bare and they are pressed flat against the cool floor as they support her weight. She feels at once too heavy and too light, all weakness at war with the idea that some essential part of her is missing. But what could that be? She coughs, and feels something moving in her throat. Vile. It takes minutes for her retching to end. There is nothing left but a desperate desire to be somewhere other than here, and in this more than anything she finds the strength to move. Clutching at the wall for balance, the girl stumbles away in search of answers.

What greets her at the end of her journey is an old and ruined kitchen. Once upon a time, this had been a place of ruthless creativity and competition. She can tell from the arrangement of the cooking stations, which are too individually well equipped and spaced too far apart to have been part of a unified, professional setup. This had also been the site of an incredible bounty and a harvest, once, enough for even an amateur chef to prepare a feast that could delight the very gods.

But now there is only ruin. The girl breathes in the air and the wilted grasses bring only the smells of desiccation and neglect: a muted symphony of too-old spices under layers and layers and layers of dust and dryness that bring her halfway to sneezing and all the way to gagging. Vegetables in every conceivable size and shape lie ruined on the floor, long since shriveled beyond the point of edibility. There is no color here but grey, possibly with vague bits of brown mixed in somewhere if she could be bothered to scan for it.

There's a clatter to her right as a table overladen with ancient, half eaten food collapses under its own weight. She feels her ears crush flat against her skull to shield her from the terror of it, but even then the overwhelming sensations pull a stinging wetness from her eyes and choke her breath until she gags as badly under the strain as she had in the horrible pool she'd come here to escape from.

She flees in terror, and finds only ghosts.

Everywhere she wanders there are signs of haunting. Room after room in rusted out disrepair still host a smattering of poorly thought out hobbies and useless crafts attempted by someone who was the farthest thing possible from a master artisan. Musty old paintings with the colors too faded to be able to tell how well they'd captured their subjects, implying but not showing clearly various stages of inspiration, clumsiness, frustration, and completion. These give way to rows and rows of makeshift mannequins draped in ugly dresses still clinging by the meanest of dried out and fraying threads. Benches dedicated to hideous metalwork and clumsy children's jewelry. All of it pitted, all of it tarnished, all of it ugly. Much of it surrounded by shattered furniture now little more than rotting splinters or piles of claw-torn metal where the craftsperson had broken down in frustration and despair at their own lack of ability.

The girl glides through the mausoleum without a sound. Her wet hair and fur falls away from her in chunks as she passes memory after memory after memory. Aha, she thinks, I must be dead. This must be my punishment.

What a disappointment this had turned out to be. To have come so far only not to be able to see it through to the end. To have suffered so much and never come close to balancing the scales. Had she really been so terrible a person, so horrible a friend and sister and leader that she couldn't even find out how the journey was meant to end? This was worse than just falling short: this was getting sent back almost to the start.

Her arms have begun to itch. She rubs at them with claws that flake away when they make contact, and it only spreads the itch up to her fingers. Her grunt of frustration is trembling, but filled with the real hints of her voice she's heard since she first woke up. She throws herself against the wall and rubs against the corners of the hallway and the bolts securing various braces and doorways, but there's no relief in any of it. She is burning up. She is crumbling to ashes. She is going to claw her own fucking nerves out if they don't leave her alone!

She finds a nest of blankets tucked into the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the detritus of a hundred different snacks nobody had ever bothered to clean up long after they'd been reduced to crumbs and sugar scraps and crumpled packaging. More bottles of wine, all of them empty, roll around underneath her feet and fill her world with sad, hollow clinks. The girl feels a brief pang of temptation to fling herself inside this place, which at least feels haunted by some more soothing memory, but there is nothing here to soothe her body. She'd robbed this place of everything it was worth long, long ago. She slinks away in search of something more.

The hangar is empty when she arrives. No ships to carry her away, not even so much as an escape pod to shoot herself off in and take her chances on a planet below. Not that there are any of those to be seen either, in all the vast technicolor emptiness of space that stretches past her vision from the bay she stares out from. There are a great many welding tools and signs of work having once been done, but all of these have decayed into the same rusty uselessness as the rest of the ship.

There is no music here to distract her. There is no hint of perfect, comforting cinema other than the now-collapsed projector that had come unscrewed from its tripod and shattered where some force or other had knocked it over. The girl turns her head sharply all of a sudden. There is a vague rumbling noise coming from somewhere above her. She cannot place it. She cannot understand it. She waits in terror, she waits in desperation, she waits in increasing impatience for it to explain itself, but the rumbling just repeats.

She turns away, and feels something crunch underfoot. The girl swallows: a sharp and uncomfortable motion that wrenches her jaw tight and burns every muscle in her throat as if she'd been force fed a stone. Her eyes are consumed by the maw of space, which for the moment at least feels less terrifying than the prospect of looking down and seeing what she's standing on. She turns away from everything, instead. Away from the stars and the nebulae that are making her stomach churn, away from the still crunching object that is making her heart pound staccato against her ribs. Everything hurts, everything burns, every part of her feels destroyed and brand new at the exact same time. Enough. She's had enough. She'll take the blankets after all.

But the door is gone.

There is nothing but the hangar now, nothing but space and a broken projector and herself. Still shifting restlessly on top of the source of her terror. Alone but for the horrible noise, now peaking in her ears like thunder. She clamps her hands on top of her head and screams. When her legs collapse from underneath her, that is when she sees. The reel of film bleeds where her toe claws have punctured it.

She! But..!

Tears fall in earnest from her eyes. Her lungs squeeze as if in a vice with real and actual effort to find the air to give a voice to her emotions. Her wail is tiny and shaky to begin with, but it rolls across the room like a wave. And like a wave it soon swallows everything. She tastes salt and snot and blood and all of it only brings louder cries, as if to drown out the hideous noise that's only growing more insistent at her screams.

"Bella. Bella? Bella!"

Bella sniffles, and she blinks. Behind her, the hangar begins to rust. With terrifying rapidity, her resting place is falling to pieces. Not giving way to the cold freedom of space, but to crushing infinite blackness. To nothing whatsoever. She clutches at the broken, bleeding film reel and holds it to her breast. As if it were some precious piece of her she cannot lose or replace.

"Bella? Bella?!"

She turns. The voice is coming from the stars.

What else can she do? That'll kill her for sure, but it's the only real thing left. The only way to go, if she's going to get anywhere before she dies. She's so sorry. She's so sorry for everything. Is it enough, at least, to want to save this broken little piece of her? Is it enough to pray for that at least she can preserve it somewhere that won't disappear, somewhere somebody else might find it and fix it and love it in a way she'd never deserved for herself?

It has to be. Her legs seem to have shattered, so she has to drag herself. Inch by painful inch across an infinite hangar, barely faster than the encroaching darkness. No, slower than that. She is being swallowed. She is too late. Her left arm won't move anymore, so she tucks the reel against the locked elbow and pulls with just the right instead. She can't see anything. She can't tell if she's moving in the right direction anymore, or if there's even a right direction to go. But the only thing she has left is this little prayer. Her arm lifts. Her claws dig into the floor. She bends, and tears muscles open, and drags her heavy, limp body across blood slicked, disgusting wetness.

"Bella? Come on, Bella! Don't you dare give up!"

It takes more than everything she has to lunge just one final time. And then suddenly, she is falling.

The light is so bright it blinds her.

It's so warm...

She needs him. She calls to him, in not so many words.

He rises, like the first gentle rays of dawn. Hush now, everyone. Hush, or you will miss it. There are only a few steps between him and his place. Listen, and you will hear a song no lark of the morning could match.

-jingle jingle jingle-

And stop. And sink. To his knees, before her throne.

One of her hands rests level with his eyes. (She did not need both to deliver her instruction to Taurus.) It is a terrible crime, touching something so precious without asking. So his hands hover a whisper above hers. So he meets her thoughtful gaze with a plea in his eyes. So he waits, for a wan smile to warm, for the faintest hint of a purr, for the inclining of her head.

Then, at last, he touches her.

Do you feel the work that has gone into him, Mistress? Have the oils and brushing and care polished him to your liking? Is he as soft as he looks, as temptingly soft he has looked all this long, long day? Feel no need to rush in your judgement. You have time. He will take his time, stroking, massaging, caressing each finger. Answer, if it pleases you, and you will give him such a gift.

“I thought of you always, when I was lost.” Even his voice is soft. It is for you, and you alone. “A bit behind me, and to the left. Or the right, when there wasn’t room. Whenever I was lost. Whenever I felt out of my depth. Whenever I had to say something difficult to survive. I thought of you. I could hear you, and I did my best to imagine what you would say, if you could see me.”

He coaxes her hand open. Runs his thumbs along her palm. Clings, for dear life.

“I listened to you. I hoped dearly I had imagined you properly, every time, but you got me through it. I survived. I don’t know if I would have if you hadn’t been there.” Even the hitch in his throat is soft. She won’t mistake it for a sigh. “Softness can’t fix everything. I knew that, but, I know that, now. There are times when being soft cannot stop a tragedy. There are times when, if I want something to happen, I have to take a harder stance. A sharper stance. And every time, I have to ask myself: Is this really one of those times? Or have I just not tried hard enough to find a better way? Even when I decide it might be a time to be sharp, always, I worry if I am betraying myself. If I put my foot down here, in this way, am I giving up? Have I decided, at last, that what I thought was important was just. Silly? Not realistic? Impractical and unimportant, when it really matters…?”

He laughs. Delicate as a bell. Tight as a collar.

“Didn’t you say it already, Mistress? Intoxicating thoughts. Thinking myself a little bigger, forgetting my place. If they test your might, what hope have I?”

“I needed you. I needed your voice. If I was only soft, I would not have made it home. But if I were too sharp, I would have betrayed myself. Not my softness. But the kindness and love that I have kept safe thus far.”

One hand lies across her palm.

“Your sharpness saved my life. And so I offer it again to you.”

One hand cradles a finger.

“I am yours, Mistress, if you will have me.”

Slowly, he bows.

“All my strength.”

Slowly, against a racing heart.

“All my softness.”

Slowly, lashes flutter.

“All my love, all my faith…”

Slowly, lips press against her claw.

And linger.

“...in your sharpness.”

His tongue gives the tiniest lick. For good measure.

“If you will have me…”

He does not rise. The claw hangs by his mouth. A chin could be tilted. A neck could be traced. Lips could be teased. And he does not rise.

“...I am yours.”

"You are going," Redana sniffles, "to be okay." And the way she says it is like there is no world, no universe, where Bella is not going to be okay. But there will also be no world where she is the way that she was.

This ship's medical chamber is a mish-mash of medicine from the underworld and cures from the land of the living, side by side. Flesh molds and blessed knives, bonesetters and suture wands. In the center is an Asclepian garden, and in the center of the garden is a fountain, and in the center of the fountain is a light shaped like a sun. The sound of running water is impossible to escape in this room. And here is Redana, silhouetted against the sun, interlacing her fingers with the stiff talons of her wife and failing to keep the tears at bay.

She has done her very best. The ship's proper doctors are mysteriously absent. She did not have time to search for a Hermetic, not when her Bella was like this, was like this. She has taken to surgery with a panicked frenzy, and she has done the very, very best that she can, murmuring hymns to Apollo under her breath the whole way. And it must have worked, Apollo must have smiled on her with that beatific smile, because here is her Bella, here is her ray of moonlight, here is her bride, every bit of her that Redana could save.

(She is not completely alone, mind you. Gemini is present here, sitting in a little chair, flipping through a book with an air of aloofness, trying to hide the exertion of telling her sister over and over again that it was still time to live. But the whole host of Tellus could be in the room right now and Redana would only have eyes for her Bella, tears of relief and hope running down her cheeks.)

"We're going to make it," she says, and squeezes. "You and me. All the way to Gaia. I promise." And unspoken is the promise: we will make it even if your legs don't take to the reconstruction. We will make it if I have to carry you in my arms. We will make it if you can never fight again, if you have shattered yourself in order to save your family. We will make it because I promised you that there would be a universe in which we could freely choose to be together.

We will make it because I believe that you will not let yourself die.

But that's the next step. The difficult one. Choosing not to die. Living right now is an effort, is a marathon, is a choice. Just like it was on the Yakanov. Just like it was when Nero made you choose between life and death.

Redana knows her Bella well enough to know that it's no choice at all, though.

All of her sisters are on this side of life. And they need their sister who saved them.

The tools that Redana had to hand were not sufficient for the task of making it as though you never broke, Bella. The materials she could work with were not equal to the body that you were gifted for your holy terror. But there is a rightness in putting something back together so that the scars can be seen, and a beauty in refusing to give up after disaster. You will stand again, Bella; you will walk again; you will hold your princess and be held in turn. And all of you-- all of you-- will see Gaia.

Together.

How had she gotten to this point?

Above her, a Pix is thrown through the Coherent line like a bowling ball, hurling invectives and blue-tinged epithets all the while. Make a note, follow up on those, she thought she'd been taught most of the swears, and some of those are creatively interesting.

It's like, at no point in the night had she made a decision that, looking back, she wouldn't--

Hmm. Okay, yeah, no, the kegstand was dubious, but--

Behind her, the Summerkind reload.

Would "Belay that order" work? She could try pulling rank, right? Might work on some of them? Probably not enough, right? She could--

She considers trying to thread the needle with a second beam. In between the arms, the shields, nail the knee, drop Iskarot--

Was it the satyr where things went wrong? The bottle? The vents?

No, no, she's impossibly drunk, far too much risk of hurting one of the Coherents.

No, no, the sun. The sun was the fuckup. Like, everything here, the coolant, the vats, the everything, the war at the center of the ship, all because of the heat.

Iskarot's shouting something about nukes? She should do something about that, she's pretty sure.

The heat. The coolant. Her eyes pan across the battle and then up, up. Coolant. Pipes. Veins, pulsing with trapped potential. The prize of prizes.

She takes the deathray, lifts it as if in a dream, and fires it into the heart of the Hermetics' hoarded cooling.

"Withdraw!" she bellows, to as many people as will listen.

Vesper!

After so long not having her shit together, after all the pain caused by not having her shit together, the least she could do was have her shit together.

The thoughts still emerge from her head, the glyphic patterns of cascading lightning bolts. Every idea she has arcs up and out away from her, forming a crystalline digital lattice, expanding through space. And whenever they grow too large or terrible, Gemini severs them at the root with a swing of that silver sword. She can't stop her thoughts from spiraling on her own, not at this stage of her ascent, so she relies on steady hands and sharp edges to keep her in check. It's a bit like a haircut.

"We've got some distance from Liquid Bronze," she said. One of the neat things about having her thoughts visible in this way was that she could now use them as visual illustrations of concepts, pointing out the whorls and intersections of the pattern to mark clearly each step in logic. "But he'll still pursue us. Every eventuality has him cross our paths before Gaia, and even the scenarios where we win come at horrible cost. So - cut here, please," she said, indicating a branching lattice that was turning into an endless re-run of how to say as many emotionally meaningful things to all her friends as possible before they all died. Slice! It was gone, and she breathed easily for a moment.

She was going to have to learn how to use that herself. If she could? It didn't feel like the sort of thing that you could use while being alone, but still...

"The problem is that the Biomancer-General is operating on a different conceptual scale from us. He seems ridiculous and monstrous but none of that is by accident. He's a specialist. Smart enough to solve the problem presented to him, stupid enough to not pose a meaningful threat to the Skies should they decide to remove him. And in that is his downfall. Just as we could no more challenge him than an ant an anteater, he could no more challenge the Skies than an anteater a combine harvester. He represents a dirty, messy, unpleasant job that many in the Skies have gone out of their way to avoid thinking about even as their entire society relies upon it. If they saw him on their doorstep they'd be shocked, recoil, call it dirty and ugly and even evil. And so they'd undo him, and call it good, even as the machinery of Biomancy worked without hesitation to promote someone to his old position."

She tapped the branch. Even here, her thoughts ran blue.

"So we go to Capitas. The center of the galaxy. The place where the Endless Azure Skies isn't just a fantasy. An in-atmosphere star system, the system with ninety-nine planets and nine hundred moons. Where every blade of grass, every mountain peak, every waterfall and deep-ocean grain of sand has been placed for maximum effect. The seat of the Shayoshant and the ultimate work of civilization. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, the most dangerous place in the galaxy."

Here the blue deepened, brightened, every branch of the thought pattern becoming hypersaturated.

"The Sirens of ancient myth have nothing on Capitas. It is the throne of Desire, the garden of Aphrodite, and everything about it is literally hypnotizing. You could spend a hundred years exploring the exquisite design decisions on a single beach and not be bored for a second of it. Luckily, most of us aren't Azura, and the Azura we do have seems... different?" she touched the purple quirk that represented Dyssia. "Which means we're not totally defenseless, but even so we're still going to have to take precautions. I recommend, as a minimum, that each of us turns off one of our senses entirely. Taste, touch, sight - it doesn't matter, the Skies are designed to interface with all of them. With something missing it'll still be the greatest experience of your life but it won't blow out your entire soul. Hopefully. That secures us against half of the danger."

She smiled ruefully, and touched the blade of red amidst the blue. "Because the thousandth planet of Capitas is not part of the Skies at all. It is the Nemesis World, the seat of the Shogun and the legions of Ceron. The Ceronians are not a large species and there are not enough of them to control as much of the galaxy as they do. Rather than spreading themselves thin, the only Ceronians who leave Nemesis are scouts and rangers, stealth ships identifying new battlegrounds. When they have located a hostile planet they infiltrate it and perform in secret the Bloodmark Ritual. And then, when the Shogun decrees it, Nemesis activates and teleports the entire planet into Capitas."

She couldn't quite keep the awe from her voice. There were miracles in the galaxy, but there was also the direct intervention of a God.

"A world that had considered itself safe and secure in the laws of physics suddenly finds itself billions of light years away. Before they can react their defensive networks come under immediate assault. Drop pods rain from the sky. Ceronians arrive howling across the entire world and take it by storm. The Shogun lands personally to lead her armies and see this new world burn. And then, once it is bought to its knees, the wolves return to orbit and take their positions again. The destroyed planet is returned to its original location as smouldering wreckage, and the next Bloodmarked world is teleported into the heart of Nemesis. Through this mechanism the Wolves of Ceron live in eternal bliss, endlessly fighting through the skies of Heaven itself, transcending mere martial arms and becoming artists of violence beyond compare."

She tapped this bloody branch. It was the only part of her thoughts that continued outwards. "Nemesis is not there by choice of the Skies. It is an imposition and an insult, an eternal war corrupting the heart of their perfect peace - but War and Desire have long been lovers and the match isn't as intolerable as the Azura complain. But if we are on the Nemesis World when it is teleported away from Capitas then we can escape the reach of the Skies forever."

From his perch on Vasilia’s lap, Dolce strains to twist bloody red branches of thought into the real thing. What does it look like? Is it red? Red does seem appropriate. It would stand out against the blue, utterly unignorable. Probably a scary sight to see suddenly appear in the sky. For as long as you had one, anyway. What are the barracks like? How do they know when it’s their turn to fight? Do they even take turns?

Do they do anything that isn’t for fighting?

Consider also that nothing here is accidental.

It is only the second example he’s seen with his own eyes, as it were. Up until now, it’s always been the Skies. This? This is what the Ceronians built when they at last overthrew the Azura. They built, with no one left to stand in their way. And this. This. They built. This.

Do they remember every battle? Every battle, from the first to the two hundred and fourteenth? Do they compare the skylines they’re bombarding with ones they’ve torn down before? Do they know the names of the people they slaughter?

Do they remember the Skies at all?

What do they have which is so worth striving for?

Dolce runs a fingers along the weaving thread of his collar[1]. His bell is respectfully silent.

“How do the Skies get anything done here?” Is the question he asks. “The Service will be at work here too, and countless other people. How do they work without losing themselves in their surroundings?” Is what he says after that.

Vasilia’s is the hand he holds. Soft skin squeezing sharp claws.



[1]: He has returned to the comfortable vests and aprons he loves so much, but the collar remained. Not the silver one, no. This one was a gift from a secret Ceronian admirer, who hand-delivered it with her two honor guards at a pre-arranged meeting point, but you didn’t hear it from me. This one is a woven band of some gentle yet strong fabrics, dyed in Vasilia’s colors.

His pretty clothes answer to Mistress Vasilia, and right now they belong to her alone. The collar is a reminder. Especially for the two of them.

Bella has been provided with a couch to lounge on during this meeting. For the sake of her recovery, of course. She'd been pushed beyond the brink already, so much that only the intervention of a god had saved her. Now she needed constant repose, so that her body could do all of the difficult work of stitching itself together over top of the new materials Redana had used to save her. To weave new and more powerful muscles out of the ones she had shredded, to grow denser bones that wouldn't shatter under the strain she'd just put them under, to regrow lost hair and fur, and to claim all the potential of an (outdated) Diodekoi from biological components that had never conceived of being put to such purpose.

For a week she has done nothing but sleep, and eat. Sleep and eat. Sleep and eat. For twenty hours out of every day, she has slept. The entire rest of that time has been devoted to devouring a staggering amount of food, heavy metals, and complex chemicals. She finds that she is constantly starving, and that even taking ten times her share of supplies in a day hasn't come close to satisfying. She is sick of it already.

But at the moment, she is standing up. She is healing well: so well her body has begun to itch. But more than that, the criticism of Artemis gnaws at her. The need to exert herself, to train her body to be up to the tasks she's about to put it to is overwhelming. So for the moment, at least, she rises and she paces around her little couch. Watching Vesper's thoughts arc through the air around her.

Bella's body is strong: she has grown straight and even slightly taller than it had been before. In fact, in most every way she'd been put together not quite correctly. Like a sculpture of the idea of herself shaped out of a collective memory. She is hard and sharp now in places that had once known softness. Her hips protrude like knives and her shoulders like spears. Her fingers are elongated and even her face right down to her nose is harsher and more pointed than it used to be. Patches of fur grow thicker and rougher on her limbs, though not around the large and uneven scars across her thighs or her right shoulder. The jagged lines marking surgery around her ribs also shine like beams of moonlight on her cream colored skin.

But she has dressed to emphasize her old ideas of beauty. No more suits, no more of Mosaic's ridiculous failed appeals to the goddess she considered her patron. No more hiding from her past. Her name is Bella. She brings the Empire of Humanity with her wherever she goes.

"Are you kidding me? What kind of a question is that? Obviously they don't separate themselves from their surroundings, that's the point of the entire rest of the fucking empire. That's why we're being chased by a monster clown, and that's why Ves' plan makes any kind of sense to begin with. They don't do shit here except attempt the finishing touches on their art project. Isn't that the point of the Skies to begin with?"

She is wrapped in black silks. Luxurious softness clinging to her breasts from the clasps they are fastened to in the golden choker she wears around her neck. The strips of fabric widen as they extend, but the neckline they create plunges. And plunges. And plunges, not joining all the way into her skirt until the deep v crosses her belly button. The slashes in the sides of the skirt rise higher than that to the top of her waist, so that this dress of jet seems to splash across her body like a waterfall from the depths of Hades' palace. Delicate chains drape between her breasts and down her shoulders and her biceps where they join at a ring hanging at the bottom of her ribcage and more jangling chains all dotted with tiny bells wind their way around her hips.

The dress pools around her feet like the tail of a fish, or since the material fades to crimson and gold along a series of rapidly conjoining hexagon shaped coins, a pool of wealth and blood. It follows her like water and spills fresh wherever she settles when she paces. Her every step is music. She clutches at the back of her couch with two hands covered in golden talons joined into a pair of gloves by links of black chain draped across her hands and stemming from a pair of bangles worn about her wrists.

She fishes a can of cold, sloshing liquid of some sort off of her couch and throws it at the sheep's head. She leers at Vasilia, and laughs at her reaction. For old times' sake.

"Makes sense to me, anyway. Not like they're a bunch of vegetables or anything. But once you've been here, what else matters? That's why they'll stomach us showing up, but not the cogs we drag in from outside. Don't worry, Ves. I refuse to get stuck here. I'm going to Gaia, and I'm going to fix you. All of us."

She leans down again and plucks something else from the end of her furniture. In the midst of her regeneration, Bella's hair had decided it wanted to grow longer, as well. Rich curtains of blue-black softness draping all the way past her knees. She couldn't see the point in cutting it so soon. But Gemini had been disgusted with it, and pushed a pair of Silver Diver handmaidens on her who had woven these strands into elaborate braided loops atop the cascade of little silver chains pulling the rest of it into a semblance of cleanliness and elegance that would also keep it from catching on her feet. Even now these girls worked golden ribbons into her work, but Bella's addition is rather darker and more terrible.

For the first time in a very long time, she wears the Imperial Regalia atop her head. She had no ability to function without her senses, no matter how overloaded Capitas might render them. But with this, and the help of her Auspex eye, she would be able to rapidly cycle between her senses, turning each one off and on as she needed them and not before (or after). It would be annoying and it would still render her slower and too close to helpless for her own liking, but it would mean she could do what needed to be done for as long as it needed doing. As long as she didn't fall apart first.

Bella yawns wide and loudly, only making a halfhearted attempt to cover it behind her talons. She slips around the edge of her couch and settles onto her stomach, propping one side of her face up with her sharp and slender hand. And watches the proceedings through half-lidded eyes.