When she'd encountered the Azura for the first time in her life, the only emotion she could bring herself to feel was awe. The quiet of the city, ghosts flitting through ruins with a sense of unknowable purpose and a dignity that not even an Empress had been able to shoot out of them. 

She had perched on the rooftops and watched a woman clean glass off the streets for hours. It had been the most beautiful thing she could remember seeing, until she'd come across the bakery. She'd seen true mastery, held in her hands and felt the grease between her fingers and the warm paper until she'd put it in her mouth and nearly come undone at the seams. She'd watched their ships in sometimes lazy, sometimes hypercoordinated and impossible seeming patterns as they drifted through the strange tinted skies in grand patterns she'd been happy to lose herself in trying contemplate their meaning and their beauty. 

For all its seediness and artifice, even the office of Thellis Thist had been a wonder she could barely stand to comprehend. Every fake, cardboard cutout of a bookshelf and every stain and burn on her beautiful but absurdly uncomfortable couch felt purposeful, calculated, and deliberate. There was an art to how cheap she was, not just in hiding her ambitions under the guise of legitimacy but in hiding even another layer of desire beneath the disguise itself. She'd thought it honest thievery at the time. And then it had turned out that Thellis Thist was the Eater of the Dead, the woman who had killed and stolen the abilities of every Assassin in the Empire born before her generation.

Even their ugliness had been beautiful. Even their meanest had a kind of silent poise that had pulled unwilling awe across her face and silenced her many complaints about the world outside of Tellus. They were the true lords of the universe, she'd been certain of it. What could the heart of their empire look like if not the grandest possible version of the sight that had once brought an arrogant Praetor to her knees?

Bella plucks at the fabric of her dress with a scowl.

They'd turned everything that was gold into platinum. Everything black into various shades of blue, adjusted the cut to be a little more modest, a little bit tighter, and to less aggressively pool at her feet. The pattern in the skirt had changed into a stylized representation of a fish breaching the water, which as far as she could tell was the only reason they did not completely rewrite the base of her skirt. All of it in various impure shades or with a thought toward complimenting those, or to shift the way the light reflected off of her so that the fur on her limbs would tinge blue instead of its natural white.

"I made that myself. Stupid fucks." she snarls.

Even the Regalia hadn't escaped realignment. Its fundamental power belonged to Nero, this they either could not or did not see fit to alter. But no longer was it a harsh and impressive ornament resting on her head. Nothing sharp, nothing dark, nothing heavy. Nothing real. Now it was just a pretty little tiara glittering with diamonds, like a lattice of tiny stars adrift in the tarry ocean of her hair.

Bella leans forward on her couch, which is now sitting on a massive open deck on the new [i]Plousios[/i] where she could enjoy the perfect atmosphere and limitless horizons of Capitas. The absurdly giant flock of birds with striking plumage (all of it blue) still fly with unhurried, practiced grace between the planets of this system, blanketing the sky and her vision on a scale she would not have thought possible. 

She sees rolling clouds in twisting columns and vast swaths of glyphic complexity drifting all about her in the blue. The air is sweet, the way a cake that is flavored with roses might be sweet. The temperature here is cool and perfect, with breezes in highly controlled patterns of intensity and direction that she could spend days making a game of learning to predict as they tug on her hair and her dress and ease the feeling of heat welling up inside her skin. 

"Stupid. Fucking stupid. This can't be it, can it?"

This cloying, saccharine perfection. This pompous, saturated, grand and arrogant ultimate work of the greatest civilization Bella has ever known. It feels exactly like drowning.