"War is funny, isn't it?" said the Shogun. The light around her was so red it turned even her black leathers shades of crimson. "It is such a [i]disproportionate [/i]response to the desires that ignited it. A question of who pays taxes to whom turns into a conflagration that consumes a generation. A yearning to be seen as beautiful and worthy devours an entire planet." She climbs up out of her trench and stretches widely, greeting the burning suns overhead. "No matter how Lord Mars tries to instruct and warn, Desire cannot help itself but dig down to this place where Desire itself is ridiculous."

It is not a dance for her. She does not express anything, does not seek to communicate with how she walks across no-man's land. Turning her head to avoid a cannon round that leaves a whirling arc through her hair is another breath, leaping atop a ruined Knight to not be trampled by a cavalry charge is nothing more than stepping on a stone to cross a river, shooting down a jet fighter from an AA emplacement and leaving before a retaliatory missile reduces it to ash is no more than a pause at a traffic light.

"See how quickly things stop mattering?" she asks. "What does it matter who reigns on Capitas? What does it matter what humiliations the weak must suffer at the hands of the strong? Of all the ways a peace can rot and fester, of all the societies that may be better than the one you are in, of all the wealth and glory you might personally gain from the war - which of them makes you take cover when the shells rain? Which do you think of when the horses charge? Is it love in your heart when you fix the bayonet, or is it instead -"

She grinned. "Nothing? People don't like to think it's nothing. Cut down far enough and it's nothing, nothing, nothing. You are not dead when you live without Desire, you are not stupid when you live without thought. It almost feels like enlightenment. Don't you think that this is more real than what is out there?"

Music, through the fire and crash. Yellow light, dull against the red. Banners held high, the hexagon eye of Jupiter's storm marching through this burning world. The Imperial Caravansary walks about the Nemesis world's equator, lanterns swaying against the storm. 

"When Nero came to us all those centuries ago, the Shogun had one condition for our allegiance," said the Shogun. "And that was that she always fight alongside us. She thought her wars would be brief and her peace would be glorious, so she made the deal easily. Gods do tend to underestimate us mortals that way. We have been working on her ever since - showing her that the toxic peace she is building is stagnant and senseless, without meaning or reality. After centuries aboard Nemesis I think that she is coming around to our way of thinking."

The din of battle quiets as you approach the vast carriage-complex, the mobile palace of Imperator Nero, Hermes Manifest. Marble buildings roll ceaselessly atop churning wheels. Wooden temples and interlocking shingle-rooftops wander endlessly on. Half-tracks and jetbikes howl around the edges of this strange, ethereal sight. The din of battle quiets -

- but does not entirely cease.