Thanqol

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Mm. Yomdaelar.

You see, the Nightingale of Pest - a name I have nobly declined to comment on - has decided that she needs a Heroine. A Beowulf, an Odysseus, a Gilgamesh; a figure of legend who will ensure she is remembered through the ages. Accordingly, she would never say anything to make me look even the slightest bit bad. Intentionally. Her, er. Her prose involves a great deal of lingering on the diamond tears, as hot and salty as Poseidon's kisses that spring unbidden from amidst eyelashes as long and dark as Ethiopian scimitars as I contemplate injustice or pine for my lady love or suffer through the temptations of midnight-veiled seductresses who seek to pull me astray from the path of nobility and so on. If one finds terminally lavender prose comedic then one will have much to laugh at.

We have travelled together for some time. An involuntary arrangement on my end. I managed to give her the slip in Paris, but I have no doubt she is less than a week behind me. Her Paramofuff is almost as enamoured with Apricot as Yomdaelar is with the money my tales of adventure will make her, and she is a horse as swift as the breeze.

Breathless Dead

Redana Et All

BANG

Something hits the window of the shuttle.

Something is clinging to the window of the shuttle.

It's a machine - a combat robot with huge batlike wings that have wrapped all the way around the viewport to block out all vision of where you're going. It's holding a massive two-handed cannon and is pressing it right up against the glass, a shot that'll penetrate into the shuttle's depths and create an enormous detonation of suffocating toxic gas.

And it's wearing something on its face that is a mashup between clown makeup and digital camouflage, a manic grin with irregularly overlapping teeth. It's waving at you, fingers coiled around the trigger of its gun.

Bella!

Behold, Imperium.

The galaxy is ruled, and there is only one ruler. She has in her wisdom allowed the population the freedom to organize for themselves the best way to serve her and administer her justice. But free will, like life itself, is a gift that at any time she can revoke.

The constructs halt. Most of them drop to their knees and touch their foreheads - or what passes for them - directly to the ground. Some of them no longer have enough flexibility or motor function in their legs to kneel - these ones simply tip themselves over, slamming face-first into the ground in crashing heaps of scrap. From others, there come the sounds of loud popping sounds and small fires break out across their bodies. One rips free a tank-tread leg so that it can slam down lower to the earth.

One keeps staggering forwards, a demented mass of machinery far too gone to even resemble the holy form of humanity. Inside there are bangs and pops as the power of Imperium searches for a sanity that is no longer there. With a small explosion its arm falls away to reveal an interior blazing with fire, and after taking two more unsteady steps it collapses into a heap of molten slag at your feet.

One of the Kaeri soldiers cheers. Captain Lorventi punches him in the arm and he stops.

"You behold Praetor Bella!" said the Captain, stepping up to your side and kicking the wreckage out of your path. "Agent of Empress Nero, conqueror of Baradissar and your rightful sovereign! You will gather a full tactical assessment of this palace, its layout and resources and provide them to me and then you will stand by for further orders!"

"You..." Lorventi blinked her huge eyes in shock when one of the robots spoke. It kept its forehead pressed into the ground, smudging thick paint onto the stone of the surface. "... have come. As was. Foretold. We shall perform. The Dance."

"What the fuck?" Captain Lorventi turned to give you a look, halberd raised, silently asking if you wanted her to destroy this thing that dared to speak back to you.

Fellowship: The Heart

"You want to haggle with me?" said Ailee, Pride building up behind her like a bonfire. "You dare to haggle with me? You little fucker, do you not understand the position you are in? I am here to inspect you, not mop your floors like a fucking janitor. And the hubris," she spits the word as only someone lost in hubris can, "to dare imply that you can keep me from my appointed rounds, that I am in any way incapable of leaving when I choose to. Do you know what a station is? Two cheap benches and a ticket machine. Do you know who I am!? Ailee Sundish, Archmage of King Dragon! Safety is everyone's responsibility because it will take everyone's combined efforts to be safe from me!"

She felt good about this. She felt like she was getting through to them.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Canada exhaled. Some part of her had been waiting for so long to hear those words. To hear that everything was for her, to hear that everything that seemed so mysterious actually made sense, to hear that in the end people did terrible things because of love. A tension that had gripped her by the base of the neck for so long started to relax.

It almost made her forget it wasn't Tirzah who was saying it.

It almost made it not matter.

Her dreams had become tangled indeed if this moment felt like they were coming true.

She tried to give the next line, rehearsed endlessly in her imagining: "I can't be safe until everyone else is safe. Come - we can still make this right." It didn't make it out. Come on, straighten up Canada. Be the hero that everyone needs. Deep breaths, one sentence. "I can't -" try again, just swallow and try again, "I can't!" her face is bruised, her back and knees ache, just struggle through it like you always do. Every punch you take is one you saved someone else from. "I don't deserve to be safe."

Ah. A mistake.

"I'm not the hero this world needs. I'm not a saviour they can rely on. I'm weak and blind, and all I can try to do is make up for the damage I've already caused," she said. "After that I won't get in your way any more..."

Breathless Dead

THE PLANET OF BARASSIDAR
Response Level: 1
Location Stats: The Machines - the ancient armies of the Warsage still walk here.

*

The Museum of Victories on Tellus has an entire wing devoted to the Conquest of Baradissar. Within are spectacular moving paintings of Ceronian warriors descending on bolts of lightning in order to cleave through the machine legions of the Warsage. The Classical, the Empress' personal battleship, gleams like a miniature sun in the heavens above as it closes in on the terrible space-station, The Spear of Civilization. As the simulated battle rages, the Emperor Molech cackles and declares that his victory is predestined and none can outdo his perfected Codes of War.

(The Emperor Molech in the museum is, in fact, a clone of the original. All of the staff in the wing commemorating Nero's victories are clones of Imperial pretenders who Nero fought in her ascent to power. Recreating your conquered foe and tasking them with wiping the display cases of their defeats for all eternity is what is known as a flex.)

The Spear of Civilization is a wreck. The enormous megastructure, far longer than the planet itself, was torn to pieces as teams of Ceronian Legionnaires spiked every one of its ludicrous one thousand Engines (wouldn't a ship that size wouldn't use less than a tenth that number?). The resulting cascade of detonations has left the Spear a debris field. Trapped in the sun's orbit it resembles a shattered ringworld more than anything. There are the remains of battle here, too, but this is nothing like the starship graveyard of the Eater of Worlds. Despite the immense size of the Spear, the Museum of Victories does not seem to have exaggerated the miracle of Nero's triumph here. This could have been a battle to severely injure even the Armada, and it did not answer to her when she took Baradissar. The fight to take this fortress world seems, from the trails of wreckage at least, shockingly one sided.

Despite the glory of the victory you feel a chill deep down your spine as you look at the ruins of the Spear. Molech's final obsession, his ultimate organizing tool against chaos... it strikes a dread deep inside of you. There's something primeval, something cold, something... personal in that glimmering wreckage. It feels like you, personally have reason to fear it, like you have a highly specific phobia tied to that ruin. And despite how intimate it feels, when you look around you - at Galnius and their phalanx, or on the Anemoi in the unblinking eyes of the Kaeri, you see that everyone else feels the same way.

*

The Plousios!

"It is this," the Hermetician had said, "or someone will have to learn astrophysics."

It is not a matter that anyone felt like disputing. The ride from the Armada had been hellish - constant impacts, long delays, and during the roughest patches everyone had to pull 48-hour shifts to keep the ship in one piece. Traveling the void without an experienced navigator was a terrible proposition, and so when Iskarot had proposed that you might be able to scavenge a Shipmind from Baradissar nobody objected. The prospect of defying multiple Imperial Edicts and risking the dangers of the Planet of Machines seemed milder at that point than another week in the hateful void.

You had all decided wordlessly to try the planet rather than the Spear. Something there had struck you wrong.

As you gather aboard the shuttle to descend, there is a moment to reflect. This is a planet of ancient legend and terrible danger. Miracles and perils will await you there. What do you hope you might find?

*

Bella!

Aphrodite has sent you a favourable wind and you have arrived in advance of Redana. Your shuttle has touched down on the location the Augur pointed to - the Imperial Palace.

A mountain range has been chopped in half, sanded down, and carved into a ziggurat of cyclopean size. Enormous pillars rise up as though holding up the skies. You could have comfortably landed the entire Anemoi atop this building. The high altitude air is cold and haunting, and the view is infinite. It feels grander than seeing the planet from space - this is a perspective that strikes a chord that goes back to ancient explorers on distant Gaia. Broken mountains, shattered oceans, enormous machines and a sky that rolls and churns with hideous toxic dust. In the sky above the ruins of the Spear gleam balefully like cursed moons.

The Kaeri fan out around you. They are excellent soldiers and you have never seen a unit more motivated. They are united in their jealousy of the Ceronians for having had the honour of taking Barassidar and perceive in this moment a chance to outdo their ancient rivals. Captain Lorventi herself has come, magnificent crimson-black powered armour ready for battle, halberd unfolded and glinting with a deadly edge. Smoothly, she raised it into a combat stance and energized the blade.

You were being approached. A group of armed decrepit machine intelligences were coming towards you. Their body language wasn't threatening but you knew that didn't mean anything to these barely sentient devices. They had some distance and weren't moving fast, but more of them were appearing all the time.

"Say the word, Praetor," said Lorventi and you could hear her warrior's heart start to pulse.

Breathless Dead

It was one thing to burn the sky. It was another to ensure that the sky remained burned.

Caval-4954 only notices the fragment of blue above in passing. A long silent weather assessment module in her central cortex stirred briefly enough to mention it was the first glimpse of a blue sky in three years. It then makes the insufferable suggestion that Caval-4954 should pause to appreciate it. This idiocy is dismissed and a bug report filed. Caval-4954 has more important things to be doing.

The glimpse of blue and sunshine is blocked out. Above her towers a massive tripod walker, twenty meters tall, enormous particle cannon swinging around to lock on to her. She doesn't spare it a second glance - that particle cannon is as dry and dead as the oceans. The tripod maintains the target lock for a wistful moment as though hoping she'll run and evade but then gives up and returns to their shared task.

Caval-4954 lifts a shattered exoskeleton and tosses it to the side. The tripod flips a demolished tank with an elegant motion of its spindly forelimb. All around her hundreds, thousands of other Machine Intelligences in all their nightmare patchwork forms perform the same duty of picking over the dead. They maintain suspicious distances from each other, ten to twenty meters apart at all times, but all of them are rummaging through the immense heaps of shattered metal that mark the site of the war of apocalypse. Bones are brushed aside and kicked into dust. Mechanical circuits are torn open for replacement components. Some broken and deranged models tear at the dead with all the fury of their combat algorithms. None spare each other a glance.

Caval-4954 finds a replacement torsion motor for her fading leg circuit. She stuffs it into her tote bag - a bright and glittery thing with sequins and a cute-faced cartoon Artemis saying "Chase your dreams!" - where it comes to rest alongside half a dozen ruined radium pistols. She wrenches an intact head from a body for later interrogation - perhaps it would contain some precious uncorrupted software modules she could use to prolong her sanity. And then she pulls away the ribcage of a giant warrior to reveal...

The tripod stops. Its single-eyed stare comes around to focus on the treasure she holds in her hand. All around her the sounds of digging, tearing, and crashing metal slowly fade away. All around her the combat suits, battle walkers, abandoned cybernetics, and nightmare amalgamations of decades of field repairs come to a halt. Everyone is staring at her, Caval-4954, and the thing she holds.

A single clip of ammunition.

An electric ripple runs through the crowd.

Battle algorithms spool up. Tactical systems suddenly start considering locations, angles, targets. Scanners and eye-lenses try to take stock of surroundings previously deemed irrelevant, legs flex and stamp slightly to check to the stability of the corpse-piles they stand upon. The faint clitter-clack of mechanical brains can be heard over the howling wind. The anticipation is rich enough to taste and the world no longer seems godless.

Caval-4954 slams the clip into her immaculately tended magnetic rifle, swings about into a combat crouch, and fires.

The lightweight exoskeleton she targeted would have been a tricky target if it was given the opportunity to begin evasion protocols. It goes down with a crash of alloys. Next she comes around to face a hulking behemoth - a creature that had begun life as a main battle Plover but now had more in common with a bulldozer. Six precious rounds are required to tear through its external plating and shatter its brain, turning its charge into a blind rush. Caval-4954 evades and lets the machine sail into a cluster of warsuits forming behind her. Internal self-assessment logs tell her that she has moved faster in the past, that her tactical battle engrams are corrupted and virus-strewn despite her careful tending and her reactions are below KPI. She files the bug report thoughtlessly, but notes that she questions its veracity. She does not feel slow. She has never felt faster.

Like a thunderbolt she slides into close range of an undead Hermetic. The biological entity within those tattered robes had long since perished but the mechanical cyborg augments have endured the years on their own. No more. Two shots tear the mess of tendrils in two and she slams the wreckage aside to tear apart a mobile battlefield surgery walker with two three round bursts. It's bliss. Every action, every reaction, is in line with a purpose so long denied to her. This is war, this is war, this is the war she was made to fight...

She doesn't lose track of how much ammunition remains in that single precious clip. She knows as it rattles closer and closer to empty, each jarring kick to her arm a tick of the clock that counted down towards another decade of desolation and corpse-digging. She is careful, precise, the model of prowess and efficiency even in the face of a complex and unpredictable battlefield but even so the rounds tick away, tick, tick, tick. She knows when she's fired her last shot even as once again the weather assessment module advises her that the sun has been blocked out.

She turns to look. Above her towers a mad device forged in no factory, hunched like a gorilla, one arm weak and spindly, the other comically massive and raised in a wrecking-ball fist to smash her into pulp. Her combat algorithms run the numbers and conclude that this cannot be evaded. She is dead, but because her kill-death ratio is significantly in the positive, she has done a Good Job.

Cavel-4954 raises her empty gun.

"Bang!" she shouts.

The mechanical gorilla stands still and silent for a long moment.

And then, with a ponderousness that turns into shocking quickness, its feeble right arm gives out and it collapses into a pile of wreckage.

There is a moment of silence on the battlefield so deep even the clicking of mechanical brains cannot be heard.

Cavel-4954 turns around to face a silently standing combat suit. She aims her gun at it. "Bang!" she says. The combat suit collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. She brings her gun around to face the tripod walker that had loomed over her earlier. "Ratta-tat-tat!" she said and the tripod immediately dimmed all its optical lights and went dark.

"Bang!" - this wasn't her. She spun around to face the new threat - a mobile artillery cannon who was aiming its coaxial solid projectile gun at her. Cavel-4954 ducks back into cover. Next to her two other skirmisher suits slide into place with perfect discipline. One mimes handing her a grenade. She takes it, mimes pulling the pin, yells "Grenade!" and tosses it over her shoulder.

The artillery piece vocalizes "Boom!" and then shuts off.

By the time the sun had set amidst that impossible patch of un-burned sky, the war had returned to Barassidar.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Fall!

She falls.

She envies Atlas. He only had to bear the weight of the world. He didn't have to carry a broken heart in his chest as well. What did strength matter if she couldn't trust the ground she stood upon? What use were castle walls built on shifting sands? She couldn't survive this world of illusion and deceit and kisses. She knew that now - she knew that she was doomed.

She fell.

And she twisted in the dark.

It was her body that hit the ground first, Marianne cradled in her arms for safety.

It was liberating being doomed. In knowing that no matter how many times she was hurt the idea of revenge would never cross her mind. She'd been fooled twice, so shame on her - and weren't there worse things than shame? Like her beautiful friend crying in her arms?

"Shh," she whispered. "It's okay."

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

"Lady Selzi advised me on more than one occasion that I should respond to such insults by demanding a duel," Robena mused. "Given that I have just vanquished you in one I remain unclear how this was meant to solve the problem."

She frowned as a memory crossed her mind - Lady Selzi standing in the same place as her, victorious but spurned by a Greek who declared her a savage and barbarian despite her superiority at arms. Her solution had been to kick the woman in the side of the head in a riposte that everyone had found extremely funny at the time - Selzi always had exceptional comedic timing. But in the same situation now, with the same opportunity, she finds the thought of imitating her lady uncomfortable.

"Good luck with the arm," she mutters instead and slouches away to discipline her horse.

[I again demand my right to be known by reputation - and I have rolled a 6]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

The Hermetician has thus far been crabby and intractable, a creature who hoarded knowledge so jealously that a simple 'how do you do?' might result in him grabbing you by the lapels and screeching "Who put you up to this!?!" Even as Imperial Princess they were oftentimes your favourite tutors because if you did not wish to learn they had no desire to interrupt you, and would happily enable you goofing off in your lessons and forge both assignment and grade on your behalf.

But something is different this time around.

Perhaps it's the information. This is not data crammed into an unwilling skull with the consent of neither party. This isn't the theoreticals of Imperial megaprojects or analysis of strategic resource deposits that can transform the fate of reality itself. This isn't the immensity of society and Empire, this is a discussion about the contents of a single room - a magnificent room no doubt, capable of a great deal, but still of a size that fit into a human mind.

But maybe it's you. Perhaps you've grown and matured. Perhaps it's because you're invested now. This isn't a responsibility granted to you by blood, information you must bear with the same flawless grace as your mighty mother. These are questions you're motivated to ask, motivated because within them lie clues and hints as to how you might achieve your even greater goals.

But perhaps it's Iskarot. When you were tutored by Hermetics they were students of the internal journey, travel from the start of the book to the end. Iskarot is not like them - he has traveled. Perhaps more than any creature you have ever met. And while he can discuss the theoretical he tires of it quickly and diverges either into practical matters or anecdotes from the Path.

So you learn the structure of the Reactor Spike, a long thermotransfer rod that runs through the core of the ship. You learn the theoretical - mechanics of heat transfer, how the constant temperature applied to the frontal beak prevents the flowmetal from hardening and becoming brittle. You learn the practical - ship names are carved indelibly upon the forging of the Spike, and the ownership of the ship and any trade permits are carved below this. Over the centuries some ships change hands hundreds of times, leaving the Spikes a historical record carved onto the spine of the ship.

At this point he takes you through to the Spike and you walk beneath the names of the masters of the Plousios. You see that it was forged with the maker's seal of the Tauyk Drive Yards as the masterpiece of Jovian Plainsmith. You see that it was first owned by someone named Doctor V.V. Kuttsledge who bore a trading warrant from Crown&Slate, authority to practice medicine and law under protection of the company. You trace the course of how it changed hands. Here, it served as an exploration vessel, here it was a diplomatic ship, here it was repurposed as a cargo hauler - a claim that Iskarot scoffs at. A ship this fine serving as a cargo hauler? Come, Redana, here is how you can detect the lines of forgery, the subtle tells of unsanctified acid being used to write the name into the Spike, how he once served on a ship where the captain was fool enough to forge a trading permit for the Atlas Cultural Sphere and they had dispatched an assassin of the Toxicrene Temple in retribution. He told tales of how the ship descended into paranoia and how even though he'd caught the adept in the act of a murder, she'd been able to bold-facedly lie her way out of the punishment...

And in the midst of his tales he hands you the acid-laced stylus that will let you add your name to the base of the list - below REBEC CHALIM, and below HADES.

Dolce!

There had been a battle here. Few had stood against many. All had perished.

Many had fallen with blades in their backs and to you this spoke of betrayal. A loss of reason, a loss of trust. A mutiny or a civil war where trust was the worst sin one could possess. Some bodies had fallen together in each others arms, daggers in each others hearts - impossible to tell if it's a tender embrace or a ferocious struggle. Human and servitor bodies intermixed and without a Praetor of the Empire on hand with the precise definitions of each in her handbook no one could tell you which were which.

Hades stands in the doorway and you can see the blue glow of his eye even through the back of your skull.

As you take stock, you pause. One of these bodies is whole. Some bodies wear armour, but none so complete as this, none still filled like this - ah! It is not a suit of armour at all. You look at the mechanical shape of a construct, glass visor shattered by a heavy hammer blow, bite marks in the neck so deep the head is almost separated from the body.

Enough damage to incapacitate, but by no means destroy. Such an entity could be made to live again. What stories could it tell, I wonder?

Alexa!

"Foolish!" Iskarot said. In fairness he had already exhausted six languages in his quest to appropriately express his feelings on this matter. "And you! Away! I will have less of this hovering while I work!"

For a while today, things had been magical. Now you were sitting with your arm in a mold being cussed out by a grumpy Hermetic as he enacted the rituals of repair and threw things at Isty whenever she tried to check up on you. You hadn't lost the arm entirely - the engine had been dimmed for maintenance - but it had still been a pretty miserable experience. Redana had been chipper, though, when she'd come by for a lesson on how to reconstruct the damage. He hadn't snapped at her. Instead he'd told her to get Princess Epistia out of his way, and the two of them had been off together somewhere for several hours in what you could only hope wasn't any kind of a date.

"This is what comes from failing to honour Ares!" blasphemed the Hermetician. "Stupid accidents! Bad luck! It's been the death of half the ships I've been on, mark my words!

[Damage your Courage - but you can use your repair kit to recover damage at this point]

Bella!

Mynx, teasing and daring and provocative, turns out to be unable to handle turnabout. All her slick lines about how she needed to be so suggestive as part of her quest to be a better actress were actually entirely true. Her head raises to make it easier to grasp her throat, her breath struggles to find a rhythm you'll allow, and Aphrodite pockets the wit from her tongue and the rhythm of her heart. This was power. This was confirmation of your words and your god. With one hand, you could make Mynx as strong as steel, with the other you could take it all away and leave her helpless.

"Yes," she managed at the last, "we will."

Breathless Dead

Redana!

The Hermetic waved a tendril half-irritably. "Desist from panic. I will answer as many questions as you possess. It is... unorthodox," he said the word like one might say 'filled with scorpions', "but I am extending to you the rights of apprenticeship without the obligations. I would not presume to command the blood of Empire, but nor will I deny your curiosity. This means I will help you learn the secrets of the Saffron Path for as long as you wish to walk it."

[Forge a bond with Iskarot the Hermetic]

"Perhaps there is lost context," he buzzed thoughtfully. "Something has been lost. It would take the act of either a god or an Empress to destroy such a vital piece of information on this scale. And it is critical that it be rediscovered, otherwise in time the galaxy will fall back to primitive times, becalmed on a million islands."

Dolce!

You step into a spilled garden. Soft grass beneath your hooves, wild flowers in pink and white growing in patches. Chaotic but not overgrown despite however many years or decades they have waited here in this forgotten room. The coarse white granite walls are tattered with ivy and a single blossoming tree lets a perpetual shower of white petals fall.

And amidst the flowers and grass, bones.

You step into a tomb.

Here lie dozens of long-dead bodies, eroded away to clean-picked skeletons. Swords, pistols, and imperishable jewellery decorate the fallen. There are more gemstones than should be natural, for the strange influence of Hades causes them to blossom like the flowers they lie amidst. These bodies were not laid out according to funeral rites with respect and honour - they lie where they fell, spears still penetrating their ribs, only the murmured ghost of a battlefield.

Two bodies catch your eye. Two skeletons lying side by side, bones having fallen and tangled into each other. Amidst their bodies curves stems and thorns resolving into a glittering pink and purple rose. It binds together the dead in a gentle weave, emerging between them like a single shared heart.

Alexa!

"It is," said the princess, arms wrapped around your neck.

For a long and silent moment you freefall alongside each other, beholding the vista of the galaxy in all its transcendent beauty. It's so peaceful you don't notice at first when you start to accelerate. Then the wind starts whistling through your ears and you're picking up speed faster and faster and at the end of the corridor you can see the spectacular molten glow of the Engine and the enormous stack of grav-plates that the Hermetic has left carelessly vertical.

You're heading rapidly towards a terminal velocity impact. Would it have killed Iskarot to put up a sign?

Bella!

There's a moment too when you're in the arms of a friend, safer than you've ever been, safe in the knowledge that you wore a shield of love proof against any harm.

It changes as you do. As you become hard and sharp, so does Mynx and you can feel her change from shield to sword against your skin.

"Of course, Praetor," said Mynx, as professional as you'd ever heard her. There's only the faintest reluctance in how she steps away and points to the maps and charts laid out on the table - perfectly ready for this moment when you wanted to make a plan. "The augur confirmed we're on our way to Barassidar. The planet is a mess. All sentient life was long since wiped out, leaving only roaming armies of machine intelligences."

There are two Imperial Seals on this map. The first one is from the Office of Fleet Security, warning that the planet is an Alpha-class hazard - the same rating applied to the Eater of Worlds while it lived. The second is from the Office of Reintegration, a tiny and bizarre agency of Demeter worshippers who report directly to the Empress. It's a seal you've never seen before, stating simply 'Valid Resurrection Target'.

"This planet is still the epicentre of the Athena-Ares battle," said Mynx. "Appeasing both of them will be impossible, and whichever one we don't favour will side against us. Which god should we align with, Praetor?"