Balmas

Breathless Dead

Dissent.

Weird word, really? It feels so, so peaceable. We, the undersigned, do not agree with our peers, but will nevertheless follow the conclusion reached by the majority.

Doesn't feel like a word that'd be used to describe a screaming rebellion, like chemical mortars in your face, like clawing yourself from the dirt for another swing.

A respectable word.

And a lie, as surely as she breathes. Dissent, in every revolution. Dissent, in violence, in throwing the first punch, in striving, in lying, in bluffing, beating…

The Dissident Knight.

… Is that tautology? Would it be arrogant to name herself as the one? Like, to make that what makes her different from the others, to claim that for herself, even as she recognizes that only dissidents become knights?

Or, you know, only people that don't fit the system.

Like, she's been thinking of how to title herself for this long partially because it's, it's declaring yourself to be a power in your own right? Isn't arrogance the right kinda mental state for that?

Better than the Distracted, for friggin' sure.

The Dissident Knight--which, whew, is gonna take some mental effort to envision herself in that big of a name--reviews the maps, admires the paper, the--

Clockwork is the wrong word, right? But that similar level of this tugs that until a delicate flower of data unfolds over there. Except a clock only has to go one way, do one thing at a consistent time, and her hands itch to pull every tab, to flip every page, until she knows it all by the feel of the air against her skin, and she has to sit on her hands now or catastrophe will doubtlessly unfold across all of the service, which apparently this legendary knight runs, and--

She clears her throat and begins to speak. Of home, of Merilt, of a storm diverted. Of lazy afternoons chasing rainbows through reefs, listening to people speak of the Outside. Of the stories told of Beri before the Knight.

It's… strangely peaceful to talk of it. Like a bubble full of memory, and every sound from just outside the door threatens to pop it.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia sits next to her and takes her hand slowly, as if moving too fast will spook the universe.

"Precious little, at times," she admits, and stares.

It's like standing next to a statue, you know? She's seen that face on statues, read stories of her exploits, had spacers talk about her in low whispers, and she's here, in front of her, and she wants her to tell her of outside?

Where did the words go? Normally they're so easy, you know? Her mouth is burbling brook, full of commentary on what's happening and her thoughts and side thoughts and those little thoughts that aren't relevant to the situation but would fit neatly in a parenthetical aside, and now her mouth is failing her. It's a desert, both of words and saliva.

She swallows, or at least tries to.

"The Azure skies are…"

She sighs, and gestures to the walls, alight with red.

Which… does not convey the skies outside.

… Is she allowed to go outside the tent? Would she want to? Would they even be visible through the haze of fire and smoke and screams?

Wait, shit, she's thinking about--

"Everywhere," she finishes hurriedly. "Peace and beauty as far as the eye can see, relative to here. Servitor and Azura alike are free to live according to the demands of their civilization, if they are able. Entire planets, systems, space station, all living in harmony and pulling together in service of painting the skies blue.

"It's just that… People like you and I do not often get to experience it. If we were content to serve the Azure Skies, we would not be Publica, would not be knights. Would not follow in the wake of problems, and leave problems in our wake."

Is it her, or is her mouth suddenly even drier? Like, if you took a desert and fed it into a continent-sized desiccator, you might approach a hint of a fraction of how her mouth feels.

Breathless Dead

Why is she still talking?

Dyssia wishes she would stop talking.

No, no, better. More emphatic. Dyssia wishes she could shut her face--not that the Shogun would stop talking, that Dyssia could find the words that would make her clam up.

Because she… She recognizes it, right?

How often has Dyssia embraced that peace? The cessation of the voices, the worries, the fears? No need to plan, no need to think, nothing but the immediate future and making sure that there's something less immediate. Yourself, the people to either side, and the people trying to kill you.

There are so many things to do, right now. So many more important things that they could focus on.

Anything, so long as it means she doesn't have to listen to another word out of the Shogun's mouth.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia has never seen war. Not before today.

Oh, she thought she knew what it was. Been in battles, doncha know? Seen the results. Felt the exhaustion left behind when adrenaline runs out, once all that's left to keep muscles raising and falling is the thought of what will happen if you don't.

Her nose is full of chemical weapon and burning flesh.

She thought she understood what she proposed to bring to the galaxy. Peace, prosperity, freedom, all served on the tip of a spear. Her spear, of course--her weapons, her plans, her friends.

Her plans. What a laugh that is, right?

She's a child once more, being taught a lesson by a master too good at what they're doing to be truly frustrated with her.

They're demons--beautiful, terrible, fallen angels, carrying out their work with barely a thought. No, no, that's wrong, without thought. On instinct, on a level that training could never instill.

She has no plan. Had no plan coming here, still doesn’t have one.

Her gravrail feels inadequate, impossible. It's a fool's errand to deflect that . There are too many cannons aimed at them fired by people who've just demonstrated their perfect coordination.

Bella is on the ground. Eyes drill into the back of her skull. She rises.
There's no time for words. Which, when you think about two gravrail masters doing the same thing in the same space, is damned inconvenient.

The ground cracks between them. Her heart quails, and she almost shuts her rail off entirely.

But the shots are missing, is the thing. Close, right? Close enough to shave hair, to deafen the one ear that particular shell whizzes past.

But she meets Vasilia's eyes in between shots, and darts away from the Shogun.

Vasilia will protect the Shogun with the formation. Mars will protect.

She?

She doesn't have a plan, and if this goes wrong, she'll be isolated and vulnerable. Or, you know, as vulnerable as any gravrail master can be? Which is to say, as vulnerable as she was stepping on any planet with a large enough number of Ceronians?

Anyway.

The point, see, is that you don't always need a plan. You don't always need to be elegant and upright and a master. That's for Vasilia and Bella and Redana.

For her, sometimes you just need to fuck shit up.

Two gravrail users going at it in a small space is a recipe for disaster. Everyone knows that. Stories about palaces torn apart, chaos spread, disasters unmitigated.

But as bunkers and emplacements crumble around her, as shots go wild and miss and stray… Sometimes it pays to be good at fucking up.

Overcome with hope: 5,3,6, -1: 10

Breathless Dead

Any wolf, huh?

The thought won't leave her head. It's been bouncing along inside her head like a pebble in a boot.

Any wolf could try. Any wolf could be shogun, if they had the ambition and the guts to try it.

… Redana's a wolf, isn't she?

It's a terrible thought, a nightmare of logistics, counter to their whole mission, a position that Redana would hate and Bella would chastise her for even considering.

But still, the thought is--

Dyssia takes the notebook like a shipwrecked sailor climbing into a lifeboat.

It's weird, right? Because on the one hand, writing things down is, ugh, you know? Like, you're pinning thoughts on paper, and making plans you just know you're not gonna keep, and setting goals you'll find unimaginable once two weeks have passed.

But on the other hand! Oh, on the other hand, words that someone else has written down! Glorious thoughts, or, or better yet, instructions! Like nectar from the gods! Stabilizing, bracing, understandable! Distraction, compulsion, immortal, eternal!

She pores over the figures, absentmindedly nodding, eyes flicking between sums and columns and supplies, and makes some quick notes.

"Yes, in this column here, I think you'll find. An addition error, perhaps."

Like they're trapped repeating the same project, over and over again, always moving forward and yet staying still. Locked into their ambitions, working towards them, making endless progress and no change whatsoever.

Aphrodite has his claws in them all.

Breathless Dead

Teeth.

Teeth teeth teeth stench meat teeth

Why are there so many teeth why is everything fire this is not sexy at all.

Trillions.

She knew, right? Like, this many planets, this big a scale--

Intellectually, right? Like, a number that big stops fitting in your head? You can't imagine a million grains of sand, let alone a million millions.

Trillions. On the low end!

Is a low trillion even a thing? Can a trillion of anything be described as a low of anything?

Is this what the knights felt like, staring down the barrel of interplanetary--

Trillions!

But they at least had--

Friends? Coworkers? Allies? Idiots whose ideals happened to line up?

She has those, though? Right? Or, you know.

Already, she's feeling the loss. They're gonna make the best world possible for them here, but--she's losing friends, nevertheless.

It's so, so tempting to say yes.

Such a relief when she turns away, like a cloud passing in front of too hot a burning sun, and isn't that a shameful little ember piercing her. Yes, let Bella take the weight--she's always been the strong one, even now, even broken.

Even now, there's a part of her that's contemplating the idea. She doesn't have a plan for what happens after the Skies, after all--she's not a dreamer, not an ideas person, doesn't have a grand art project to cast into the skies.

She can see the blood already, dripping off her hands to pool on the floor and drown them all.

What would be the harm in saying yes?

Better put, what would be the harm in saying no? Beyond, you know, trillions of lives?

If, you know, you were to think about it purely numerically. If you shut yourself away from thinking of them as people, and reduced them purely to casualties reduced.

How do you go forward, knowing that--

She's not wrong, is the thing, right? How can she do anything against the sheer scale of trillions?

… How can she not, against the scale of hundreds of trillions?

It'd be so easy. Sit back, be a toy, let massive atrocity be carried out in her name from the safety and distance of the seraglio, tell herself she's taking the moral option, the humane option.

Her hands ball into fists.

Unthinkable. She will bathe the galaxy in blood, first. If there are horrors to be done, she will do them. Dyssia the distracted? No. There will be other epithets carved on whatever shallow grave she's eventually dumped into, but they'll be hers.

Breathless Dead

The books get everything wrong, did you know that?

In the books, this is it! This is the meet-cute! This is the savage Ceronian who will be won by the guiles of the Azura temptress, and turn out to be not that bad, actually, and secretly kind and caring if treated right, and--

God, she's scared out of her mind. Is it weird to be concerned about her clothes right now? Like, she's dressed up to the nines, formal to her wits end, and--

And in the face of the savagery in front of her, it's like. It's like it all melts away. Like it's both right and also incredibly out of place. Like, just by existing in this space with her, she turns the space into her own space and now it is they who are wrong.

Which, I mean. They're in orbit over her planet, and she's the Shogun, and--

She takes a deep breath, and then a second one.

"Tempting," she admits. "Truly, it is. I intend both to rebuild this ship and cast the Azura from the skies."

She takes another shuddering breath and meets the Shogun's eyes.

"But if you wanted to do that, you would have done it a century ago."

Polite. Even. Not like she expects it to make a difference. This is not a court, this is not a place where manners can deflect. She's not being rude, not trying to offend, simply stating facts in as neutral a voice as her pounding heart will allow.

"If you wanted to govern, subdue, occupy, in the way it would take to fully kill the skies--to fully halt the inertia of self-running bureaucracies that keep it ticking along--you would not have built your planet in a way that lets you live forever in the moment of conquest. You want the glory, the thrill, the battle, the next, and have set up your planet to provide exactly that in spades."

Breathless Dead

Dyssia chews her own cup of coffee slowly, eyes fixed on nothing so much as the inside of her own head.

"Somehow, that makes this so much easier," she finally says, and adds more sugar to her mug.

"Because you're not wrong, you know? All this time, I thought it was…"

She shrugs, not meeting Hestia's gaze, and contemplates her mug.

"I did think it was me. That I was, you know. Broken. That I was spending all this time fighting a system that others found acceptable, and maybe so were the Publica, and while I wasn't gonna let that stop me from fighting, I also kind of.

"You know, kind of hoped? Like, at some point, I'd figure things out. See the big picture. Have the moment that has me sprinting from a bathtub, crying *'Eureka!'*"

Carefully, unbidden, she tops up Hestia's mug, and pulls a biscuit from what her fingers insist is the wrong drawer.

"But it's the whole thing. It's broken for everyone."

What even is the point? So much time, so much effort.

"It's a system that serves no purpose except its own continued existence. It's a system that demands everyone deny themselves, subjugate themselves, abase themselves before the might of capital-C Civilization because the alternative is letting go. Because, having spun up the engines of empire, they've found no more worlds to conquer--or, you know, none they can conquer, which is surely the same thing in the end--and have spend the last two hundred years doodling pictures in the sky for no other reason than to have something, anything that makes things feel like they have a point."

She stares at the dregs of her cup, and drains them.

"That makes wishing its spine broken so much easier."

Breathless Dead

Disillusionment tastes like caffeine.

Which, actually, is its own flavor, thank you very much. It shines beneath the surface of the drink, bitter, sharp, acrid.

Like, it turns out, attempting personal rituals when--

"It's like, I keep trying to do what normally calms me down, right?"

She inhales the scent of the coffee, and is bitterly grateful that at least the drink isn't blue.

Which is, alas, more than she can say for the rest of the kitchen.

Is it weird to say that she's going to miss the taste of crab? It was their defining meal, their cultural foodstuff and--

She grits her teeth.

"And this keeps happening. It's like, it's the same drink, right? The same food. The same ceremony surrounding it.

"And yet, no the hell it isn't. I keep--keep, you know, going to reach for something. Reach for where something was, where it ought to be, only to find that some fucker rearranged the drawers for better symmetry.

"It's a hearth, but it's not. Not my hearth."

Carefully, she tips the carafe into a mug--beautiful, fluted, delicate, wrong--and offers it to Hestia.

"Sugar?"

Breathless Dead

"All of the suffering, all of the work. Centuries of war, of effort, of empire. Of painting the sky with royal azure blue."

Dyssia is still staring out the window--the too-large, too-open window, the better to display the universe with to the gloriously new bridge, aren't you so happy you came--with hands limp at her side, shoulders sagging.

"For a picture in the sky."

Where's Irassia? What speck in what quadrant of which picture?

She's not angry.

Which is, itself, strange. It had felt so strong, so pure, just seconds ago. A god just called her scum. She should be foaming, righteous, upset, not--

She should feel something, surely?

Is there--

"Do you think they have a department dedicated to making it happen? Like, you know, some happy cluster of Synnefo, smiling at whoever wants to wreak their will in starlight? D'you think they'd want to outsource their immortality or micromanage every aspect?"

It's…

"How much effort is dedicated to this? For something that's not visible until they turn off the lights? All because…"

Because they recognized, from the beginning, that their grand artistic design was a lie.

Like, sure, paint the map blue. Bring civilization to the frontier. Expand the center. But there will always need to be, you know. The outside. The frontier. The backwater. And there will always need to be people there.

It was never going to happen. It was--

It was always a lie.