Around other Azura worlds and installations, there is protocol. There are rituals to perform, soldiers inspections and the clear movement of the security apparatus. They dressed it up, drowned in the light of glory, but the wise sages of the Endless Azure Skies always understood that the architecture of military splendor and authority was but a simpleton's vision of what Heaven should look like.

Birds approach the [i]Plousios[/i]. 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them.

The flock orbits the outer atmosphere of the Skies, the mass of an entire star reconstituted into feathers and claws. Each one is a riot of powder blues touching almost on white, deepening with vivid stripes of green blues that set them apart from the Skies. Their wingspans are vast and they touch them into the ring-shaped formations of the Grav-Rail to accelerate themselves along the twisted gravitational ley-lines that interweave the Skies. The Plousious approaches the Skies as an ugly and ancient thing, a brutal warship from the time when strength was measured in rectangles. Its armour plating can survive direct impact with a planet, its construction so powerful that it can endure the depths of a star. 

It unfolds like an origami crane beneath the claws of the Skies.

Every panel is ripped and torn from its place. Fusion welds are undone by laser beams that glitter from eye lenses. The hull is breached and fresh air rushes in, and so do the birds. 

Ancient cisterns are cut open and erased. Old skeletons still in cursed embrace are boiled down to their molecular components. The Engine is disconnected from its housing with delicate claws and lifted gently above the ship. Clothes are torn from bodies, personal possessions are ripped apart, everything that made this proud and ancient ship what it was is destroyed utterly. No fires could stop this, no blade, no rage; the birds undo every strand of inorganic matter as surely as a tidal wave washes over a sandcastle.

And then they rebuild.

Everything in the Skies must be worthy of the Skies, and so they reweave the [i]Plousios [/i]anew. No longer the squat, lumpen warship of inert metal, now it is a delicate and unbreakable thing of sweeping arches and white crystal, of ultratensile fibers and glittering feathers. They weave clothing around protesting bodies, dresses and gowns and vests inspired by the ones their guests had arrived with but better in ways that could not even be imagined. They inject the stellar virus that makes the Engine burn with blue light and place it like a diadem atop the ship's crown. They rebuild the skeletons, but arranged in harmonious glyphic shapes that they might not cause a single flicker of dissonance with the patterns of the Skies.

They rebuild it all blue. 

Some visitors harbour delusions of individuality when approaching the Skies. The Publica dresses in red as a show of defiance, the colour of blood, suggesting that the glory of the Endless Azure Skies takes second place behind the demands of life and suffering. A futile defiance, made by those who do not comprehend the scope of this vision. The right to choose your own colours is stripped away, as an adult might take a stone from a child's mouth. You are all recast in blue, and are so much better for it.