Bella and Redana!
Princess Redana Claudius was trained from birth to be the hand that controls Ceron and all her daughters.[1]
The true ways. The secret ways. Many lessons were too secret even for the Assassin handmaidens who were expected to die for the Imperial Heir if required. If Empress Nero was asked, what was the difference between her daughter and an imposter trained from birth to replace her if required, her answer would have been simply the mysteries of Ceron. Too powerful a knowledge to leave the Imperial bloodline, even to the most trusted handmaiden.
That is not to say that Mynx did not get lessons. It's just that those lessons were deliberately, embarrassingly, humiliatingly wrong. The pheromantic wards she has cast to interfere with formation instinct have more in common with a novice scout who is signalling that she needs to be punished. The tone of voice she uses to issue orders does not resonate on an invisible frequency that inspires fear. Her attempted grapple, an attempt to emulate Redana's Olympic wrestling performance, results in her ankles being pinned against her ears. Mynx could emulate Princess Redana down to the DNA, but she does not have Zeus' blessings of authority and the Ceronian hunters are all too eager to show her exactly what she was failing to protect herself from.
Redana, how does it feel to see yourself with torn clothes and crimson blush, thrown roughly at the feet of your mistress Bella?
[1] One might wonder if childhood exposure to art and literature that emphasized the chaining, collaring, gagging, and forcing submission upon defiant wolf-warrioresses left some sort of psychological impact on Princess Redana.
*
After the Pylons, the next miracle of the Endless Azure Skies is the Matter Decompressor.
It's almost astoundingly stupid in its simplicity. It is simply a very large Grav-Rail. No mystic circuitry runs through its depths, no hidden weapons, not even particularly elegant seams where steamrolled and spaghettified planets have been welded together. Civilizations live here too, but these are far more tenuous and fragile than those eternal bubbles of the Pylons - like everything else to do with the Decompressor the fact that it functions at all is the miracle. It is the club of macroengineering, and its role is to crack the skull of black holes.
Because that is what is in the centre of this spectacular ring. An entire black hole, the ultradense wreckage of an imploded supergiant, being squeezed in the centre of this cyclopean ring. And with the characteristic brutality of technology of this age, the black hole's infinite gravity - so deep that time itself cannot escape - is being reversed. An endless plume of hydrogen emerges through the narrow hole of a focusing lens, like air escaping from a punctured balloon. A forested pylon nearby breathes in this flow and breathes out a nitrogen/oxygen mixture - paper thin in the vast void of space, but if you stood close enough to the pylon's outflow, you could breathe it.
You could breathe it. In space. The Endless Azure Skies has determined to get the sheer atomic mass that they need in order to realize their dream they need to harvest black holes. Black holes plural - in the distance, the light of the stars goes dark as a fleet of macroengineering tugs haul the next fallen star into position. By the time the current occupant of the Decompressor has been reduced to a breath of fresh air the next stellar object will be ready to slot into place.
Princess Redana Claudius was trained from birth to be the hand that controls Ceron and all her daughters.[1]
The true ways. The secret ways. Many lessons were too secret even for the Assassin handmaidens who were expected to die for the Imperial Heir if required. If Empress Nero was asked, what was the difference between her daughter and an imposter trained from birth to replace her if required, her answer would have been simply the mysteries of Ceron. Too powerful a knowledge to leave the Imperial bloodline, even to the most trusted handmaiden.
That is not to say that Mynx did not get lessons. It's just that those lessons were deliberately, embarrassingly, humiliatingly wrong. The pheromantic wards she has cast to interfere with formation instinct have more in common with a novice scout who is signalling that she needs to be punished. The tone of voice she uses to issue orders does not resonate on an invisible frequency that inspires fear. Her attempted grapple, an attempt to emulate Redana's Olympic wrestling performance, results in her ankles being pinned against her ears. Mynx could emulate Princess Redana down to the DNA, but she does not have Zeus' blessings of authority and the Ceronian hunters are all too eager to show her exactly what she was failing to protect herself from.
Redana, how does it feel to see yourself with torn clothes and crimson blush, thrown roughly at the feet of your mistress Bella?
[1] One might wonder if childhood exposure to art and literature that emphasized the chaining, collaring, gagging, and forcing submission upon defiant wolf-warrioresses left some sort of psychological impact on Princess Redana.
*
After the Pylons, the next miracle of the Endless Azure Skies is the Matter Decompressor.
It's almost astoundingly stupid in its simplicity. It is simply a very large Grav-Rail. No mystic circuitry runs through its depths, no hidden weapons, not even particularly elegant seams where steamrolled and spaghettified planets have been welded together. Civilizations live here too, but these are far more tenuous and fragile than those eternal bubbles of the Pylons - like everything else to do with the Decompressor the fact that it functions at all is the miracle. It is the club of macroengineering, and its role is to crack the skull of black holes.
Because that is what is in the centre of this spectacular ring. An entire black hole, the ultradense wreckage of an imploded supergiant, being squeezed in the centre of this cyclopean ring. And with the characteristic brutality of technology of this age, the black hole's infinite gravity - so deep that time itself cannot escape - is being reversed. An endless plume of hydrogen emerges through the narrow hole of a focusing lens, like air escaping from a punctured balloon. A forested pylon nearby breathes in this flow and breathes out a nitrogen/oxygen mixture - paper thin in the vast void of space, but if you stood close enough to the pylon's outflow, you could breathe it.
You could breathe it. In space. The Endless Azure Skies has determined to get the sheer atomic mass that they need in order to realize their dream they need to harvest black holes. Black holes plural - in the distance, the light of the stars goes dark as a fleet of macroengineering tugs haul the next fallen star into position. By the time the current occupant of the Decompressor has been reduced to a breath of fresh air the next stellar object will be ready to slot into place.
