Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Redana and Alexa!

There are allies, and there are slaves.

Slaves are all Sagakhan is left with.

The Master of Assassins has spent her deadliest coins but she always had fewer to use than her enemies. Now she must take the field herself as the storm of war reaches the edge of her pyramid once more. The tool she calls to hand for this moment is a ten meter long sarissa - a pike five times her height. From her position atop the pyramid she walks at a steady pace, stabbing down at those trying to climb the steps towards her. The motion is like that of a crocheting needle - a sudden and precise dip in and out of her victim's chest, threading a single bloody stitch at a time. So steady and precise is she that the offense is stalling out, morale collapsing as entire waves are sliced down in thrust after thrust and blood runs down the black pyramid in rivers.

She does not stand alone either. A unit of elite Kaeri Bloodfeathers have detached from the battle to help her hold this position, perched with wings unfurled along the upper edges of the pyramid like gargoyles. Now and then one will detach from the stonework and descend silently and alone into the enemy ranks. There she will snap the neck of a commander and then lay about her in bloody carnage with scimitars, dragging ten souls down into the bloody sand with her as she dies.

While the skill of these warriors represents a significant barrier, the real defense here is terror. The theory here is obvious: The way to defeat a phalanx, even one formed of a single hero, is to hold the line long enough to bring up an Esoteric weapon who can sweep them from their position at a safe distance. But the terror and disruption caused to the lines by the combination of the Master's presence and the Kaeri's bloodlust is keeping the lines too disorganized to properly shield the Hermetics as they approach.

Leadership is required.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Iselsi Shae, All Seeing Eye," said Zhaojun without stopping to consider the consequences.

This was a big lie to embark upon. To claim to be a member of the Dominion's secret service based on no evidence whatsoever with no endgame or plan. There were lies that would keep her below suspicion but this one made her worthy of absolute attention to anyone who heard it. And she'd done it because she didn't want to play the handmaiden. Evidently, though she wouldn't dare the dragons themselves, anything short of that seemed to be fair game.

She produced a notepad and smiled sweetly, feathered quill hovering above the paper.

"I am here to investigate Cathak Agata," she said, "in order to form an assessment of how she is performing as colonial administrator. Depending on the results she may be recalled or promoted. So, Ms. Piripiri, I grant you the leave of the Scarlet Throne to speak freely, without concern for station or decorum: How do you judge the Dominion's leadership in the Flower Kingdoms?"

Breathless Dead

"Athena!" howls Molech. "I would give you the galaxy! Grant me victory and I will dedicate every temple to your honour!"

Arrows pierce him in a dozen places. Blood-gold sap drips, a litany of wounds frozen in time.

"Athena!" cries Molech. "I would give you Olympus! Slay my enemies and I would face mighty Zeus with sword in hand!"

His body dangles on the spears of a dozen Coherent. He flexes and shatters them, the wood of their shafts merging with the wood of his body.

"Athena!" screams Molech. "I would murder your brother Ares! Help me survive this day and I would cut his throat in your name!"

The axe comes down upon his back. This is no longer a battle, this is the felling of a tree, and the blows have settled into a rhythm.

"Athena!" rasps Molech. "Grant me a kiss! Grant me a smile! Grant me any sign of your love and I will find the strength to go on!"

The execution drags on. Slashing talons threaten axemen but briefly. A new set of warriors has to be rotated out to deal blows to the increasingly miserable figure who, despite everything, still refuses to die.

"Athena!" croaks Molech in between the swinging axe blows. "Athena! Please! Tell me what it is you want!"

And there she is at last, and she is utterly unrecognizable. You were told you were made in her image, Alexa, but looking at her now you can scarcely believe it. You have never looked less like anyone. Her eyes are the colour of the stormclouds that drench the desert in rain, and there are poppies woven into hair slashed with blue and violet streaks. She is armed and armoured for war, but it is of no manner of war you might recognize: not bronze and steel but leathers and hoods and a gas mask with one broken eye lens.

She leaned down over him.

"Next time," she said, "try leading with that one."

And then she crushed his skull with a stop sign.

"Asshole," she said.
"Mm," said Aphrodite, coming up next to her. "Pity."
"I was talking about you," said Athena.
"I," said Aphrodite, hurt, "have been given a very difficult task, you know."
"Nobody gave you shit," said Athena.
"It is a turn of phrase," said Aphrodite. "Look, every other god in Olympus has found if not a wife then at least had a fling or two."
"And you thought this was the guy to do it?" said Aphrodite, heaving her bloody stop sign up over her shoulders.
"Look, he had a plan to at least get a kid out of you!" said Aphrodite. "Honestly, this is me taking your feelings into account. Entirely platonic, respectful, distant cerebral love from someone who'd never make an inappropriate advance, and who could help you reproduce without any of the things that you've already ruled out. And isn't that what you're all about?"
"You still have no fucking idea," sighed Athena. She pointed at Alexa. "Does she look like my daughter?"
"Well..."
"Does this look like my idea of a good time?"
"It's a war, isn't it?" shrugged Aphrodite. "One is much the same as another, surely? War never changes, after all."
"War changes all the time," said Athena. "It's love that stays the same. This man built a monument to a single fleeting instant, a mechanical simulacrum of me made of gears and cogs and sorcery. He thought it would "perfect" warfare. It was obsolete by the time he finished and he lost. And here I find the damn thing has survived on this side of the Rift."

She snaps a hand wearing a fingerless glove, and the sky changes. Above is the planet of Baradissar. Huge sections of it are crackling and aflame, enormous rents opening in the barren sands to reveal colossal grinding and tearing gears and machines. Upon its surface stands Athena as you know her, the four-armed and cold-faced goddess, the splitting image of Alexa in whose image Alexa was carved. She looks up into the sky, grim faced, and raises her shield.

"Look at this shit," said the true Athena. Then she hefted her stop sign up into a javelin thrower's stance - and hurled it.

Across the gulf of space it soared. A bolt of blinding light seen across all the galaxy, crossing the distance between Sahar and Baradissar in an instant. It punches right through the simulacrum's shield, through her neck, and out and down into the planet below. It crashes through the earth shattering gears and machines, driving through into the bloody and mad heart of Baradissar. Finally, slowly, it grinds to a halt in the planet's core. The red and white word STOP is still plainly visible as the gears grind to a final close all about it.

And then, the planet Baradissar and its enormous god machine finally and mercifully dies.

"You are impossible to please, you know that?" huffed Aphrodite.
"Shut up," she said, turning away. Instead she walked over to Alexa.

"Hey," she said. "I'm Athena. We haven't met. I don't come out this way much." she glances around at the battlefield. "Fuck, this is archaic. Cavemen hitting each other with clubs. I can't even remember who I'm supposed to root for in this situation. Anyway," she snaps her fingers again, conjuring a massive industrial hammer, more like a tool than a weapon of war, with a glowing force projection array in its head. She hands it off to you. "Here. You look like you've had a shit day, and you're the side that needs to break something massive and ungodly, and that's good enough for now."

Sunshards

Yue!

You know that there are different kinds of glass. Hyra explained it to you during an evening of cuddling conversation where the topic had wandered to embarrassing secrets. Some glass was like in the movies that you could just go through in a spectacular rain of shards, but some glass you'd just face-first slam into like an incautious bird. No quicker way to undermine a dramatic entrance.

With her example in mind you think to make a quick little knock on the glass window to Princess Kikil's room and are pleased to note the sound and the thinness of it. Good. Princess Kikil is, evidently, a professional.

And then with a massive two-legged kick powered by your jetpack you go crashing into her office.

She's sitting behind a massive desk, enormous oval-shaped blue and teal Burrower mask reaching down to her waist, gloved fingers steepled in front of her like a mastermind out of cinema. The second you come through she stands suddenly, flipping the table forwards in a way that at first indicates massive strength but from the surprisingly light crash of the wood perhaps indicates that the table is hollow instead and designed to be overturned in this way. Using the table as cover she fires at you one handed with a laser pistol while drawing a glowing neon-green gladius in her offhand.

It's a prepared technique, and executed well but... oh, this is interesting! She's not actually perfect. Qiu had that kind of deep confidence in her technique, Chen just seems to flow through everything instinctively and Rose is aware of her own power even when she's forgoing it. Princess Kikil has evidently thought about what she's doing so a lot, even practiced it, but she's very clearly in your league. She's keeping her stance strong but she's not, like, using perfect footwork to kite you around the room any time you advance. She's got a clever move where she can raise her sword up high and shoot a laser bolt into it, making it reflect like a mirror, letting her angle her shots around corners but not reliably enough to land immediate hits.

But at the same time she's striving to impress. She's doing stuff she never practiced or trained for as an attempt to push herself to live up to the standard you're setting. Angling shots off the shattered glass isn't something she's prepared to do but it's her doing her best because you deserve that from her.

*

Chen and Rose!

Jessic: Oh no! Chen has been captured by foxes!
Princess Kyoo: you've gotta talk to your sun
Jessic: I'm on my way to rescue you!
Princess Kyoo: ok so
Princess Kyoo: the suns are sleeping, really. sunshard effects are like their dreams.
Princess Kyoo: you can do stuff to influence those dreams. read books to them, show them movies, sleep on top of them and use oneiromancy to influence the dreams directly. lots of setup and even then the shard will bring its own ideas and perception.
Princess Kyoo: you want to do it fast, tho, you'll need to wake it up a bit.
Princess Kyoo: its not too dangerous though it will get hot as shit and the sun will be v impressionistic based on your descriptions

*

It is Master Omets who is the first to approach you, Handmaiden Rose. He is an ancient sage with a long and wispy beard and a robe of embroidered silk. He is so sedate in his calm that it is difficult to register that he just leapt over a mile to land before you on the deck of the boat.

Then he produces his pipe, taps it empty atop the deck, and reaches for a cup of tea while bumping and spilling another. A seemingly simple technique but one of deadly threat - not only is he splitting a diligent maid's attention between cleaning the deck of his tobacco ash, cleaning the spill, and serving him the tea he is reaching for without knowing his preference, his body position and his leg are subtly and cunningly placed to entangle a frantic maid's motions and, potentially, cause him to go tumbling into the pool.

How does the true handmaiden deal with such a complex arrangement of duty?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Black!

She wants to push for more. She needs to push for more. Her eyes are shining and her smile is steady but inside she's just howling. Names, connections, key positions filled in for the org chart of the cosmos. Freedom isn't money, isn't power, it's people. That's where she fucked up in the past, thought that just because she was a nuclear armed space dragon that she was free. Idiot! These names, these cards, were more freedom than had ever waited in the heart of an atom.

Even this came with danger. This man was close enough to Everest to have her card but not close enough to derive the connection with her - she was Icarus beneath an eclipse. She wanted Mr. Merkin's rolodex in its entirety, every connection and every introduction, wanted to know -

Black was moving somewhere behind Mr. Merkin. She was giving a cut-off gesture. Orange felt a flash of anger, of rage. How dare she!? How dare she interrupt her when she was finally doing the first useful thing that any of them had done since they'd Fucked Around and Found Out? She was probably worried about some inconsequential shit like blowing their cover, or blowing Mr. Merkin's brain, as though the information derived wouldn't be worth the price! It wasn't her department to figure out how to hide a body, it was -

She looked at herself in the reflection of Mr. Merkin's necklace. Ah, she looked so pretty, didn't she? The two needles in her hair in that Chinese style. Absolutely no sign that she was werewolfing right now. She was dimly aware that was a terrifying thought. It was not much better realizing what had snapped her out of the process, looking over the decision tree in her brain. If she burned out Merkin here then it would cause an alteration in the organization structure and thereby throw off her perfect model. Oh yes. And killing people was wrong. And all that.

She looked at Black again. Orange had never been in a situation where she'd held life and death power over a human before and she was shocked at how few safeguards there seemed to be. And Black had a gun. She was running that calculation all the time! Maybe... she'd been a bit too hard on White. Maybe she owed her a full bug report - oh, but how to explain all of this without blowing Black's cover!?

"I appreciate this, thank you," said Orange, collecting the cards and tucking them away. "I will repay with one of my own." She used a pencil for this - an archaic formulation of graphite upon a high quality piece of paper. Little artistic symbols of the old world, markers of sophistication and class she'd never gotten the chance to use before. The pencil flowed through the majestic lines of a copperplate font.

November - Operations
v8j@hdajp{[241njsdnf01%-01495Jljs#[e-mail]

The perfect handwriting had nothing to do with being a machine. That was just practice - being able to perform neat handwriting was the oldest of old world flexes and it had been a skill that Orange simply had to master. The, ah, content of the relevant email address indicated that she was an android. Humans had a weird relationship with data. They could remember thousands of complex faces but couldn't store trivial character sequences.

"There is a trick to this, however," said Orange. "You do not email this address. Instead, you simply set your spam filter to whitelist this address and then you will receive an automated email with a malicious hyperlink. Clicking that will allow me to send communications that are mostly secure - nothing is ever totally safe, but that will do against most non-state actors.. You may share this card around, but it comes with no guarantees. I am not looking for work but I am open to having my head turned. You may consider this the carrot."

She'd had a tail once. An enormous prehensile limb tipped with a Blu-class space excavation laser that would burn through an industrial diamond focusing lens within four minutes thirty seconds of continuous use. If she still had it, it would be wagging at the thought of critical members of Aevum's social infrastructure revealing themselves to her in a format where she could learn about them and their troubles and pressures.

"And unless there was anything else, I believe that concludes our evening," said Orange, catching another folded-armed stare from Black in the background.

She smiled sweetly at her, and finished her tea.

*

Pink:

She doesn't approve of the idea of Marco staying. How could she? You fight the gods and you'll lose.

Pink thinks in terms of gods. Certain entities or forces are so enormous that they pass beyond the practical and into the symbolic. It doesn't matter how many officers are in the Zeus Segment Police Department, it doesn't matter their equipment, training or competencies. They are the Police, the raw manifestation of finance and politics and self-serving legend. Not an individual but a tribe, and a tribe with its own bloody-handed god: the shepherd whose breath stinks of mutton. Dare not the gods.

To fight a god you need your own tribe. She knows this but can't articulate it to the others and their paranoid isolationism. You need your own tribe and your own god, because while mortals fight it is the gods who decide. In Pink's mind the only god she's met worth fighting for is the god of the Anthropozine. It was a curious and fearsome Beast that found Justice lying mauled and dying on a filthy city street, abandoned by all. It ate her, tearing apart the beaten and diseased ruin of her flesh. It took her into itself, as it was the only thing desperate enough to find her appetizing, in so doing the Beast became furious.

Now it hunts, and stalks, and is ready to kill those who crippled its greatest meal.

That is a god Pink can believe in.

Black doesn't trust anyone. Orange wants to play the game of thrones. Pink just wants to see the bloody animal that ate Justice finish its hunt. That means conducting the ritual. That means the unity of the entire tribe because the gods are more powerful than any mere mortals, no matter how independent they might think themselves.

She opens up the Anthropozine Group Chat.

Pink: Hey @Neon Czolgoz!
Pink: *A photograph of the contents of Elodie's kitchen, converted entirely into baked goods*
Pink: Can I bring some over?

Humans are terrible liars. They have body language that makes them flinch and blink and bristle when they lie, or even when they're just keeping secrets. Pink knows why. It's because they can hear the deep, low growl of the Beast. They can sense its hungry gaze turn upon them. And just because she has eight other bodies at varying levels of self-absorbed intellectualization doesn't mean that she can't hear the growl too.

*

Yellow!

"Oh!" said Yellow, blinking. "Um," is she blushing? "I - I don't know. I don't want to say no aesthetic but..."

She trails off, thinking furiously. You genuinely caught her off guard with that question. It's cut to the core of some long hidden thought process, the kind of internal discussion that you never truly expect to find yourself invited to share with another person.

"It's... all of them? None of them? Something else?" she struggles with the words. "I like seeing other people's aesthetics. I love this place," she said, gesturing around. "How those posters just perfectly frame that wall and make it like there are windows there even when there's not? The potential of being in a place designed to hold more people than just you, feeling like you could move around to all the different parts and be a different person in each? The little scuffs in the carpet where the chairs roll and you can see the ghosts of friendships in where they cluster? It's..."

She trails off a bit. "It's not nothing. It's not other people's. I've got something to say too, I'm sure I do, I'm not just observing. But... I just somehow don't feel like I'm complete enough to answer that question. I don't know how it all fits together yet, how I fit together yet."

Breathless Dead

"You think being fixed is desirable? You think it is just!?"

Despite everything, he stands. He is a mess of sap and blood, new shoots bursting out from ruins and tears. Still he blossoms, as unfeeling and unseeing as the wood that makes up ever more of his body.

"Of course you can't have what you want. If everyone could have what they wanted, where would we be!? Despite everything I did Athena never showed me the slightest tenderness, and I never wavered in her service!" The spite in that is absolutely feral, the hatred of a thousand held-open doors unrequited. "Because that's not how the galaxy works. You are nothing. Love means shutting up and waiting, even if you have to wait forever. Anything less is degenerate hedonism!"

Aphrodite, sitting off to the side, smiles a little and smokes a cigarette.

And then you feel footsteps next to you. Interlocking shields pass between you and he, and spears lower en mass to present the broken tyrant with an indivisible phalanx. The Coherent have formed up around you, a hundred warriors with a hundred different bodies and shapes, all acting with unified purpose when it comes to protecting you. And then, above you, Redana - Redana as you have never seen her, Redana radiant - reaches down with an extended hand and a smile. And here you are, amidst friends.

Say what you will about degenerate hedonism, but it has its perks.

Sunshards

Yue!

The tower seems to go on forever upwards, but with carefully timed jetpack bursts followed by wall-running you're making amazing progress. So amazing that Princess Kikil has to bust out a special enemy just for you.

Two innocuously small drones soar out into the air above and in front of you, and then with a flare they burst into pink and violet flames that immediately shapes itself into the form of two enormous hands. From the tips of these hands drop strings - and on the end of those strings, a machine, held like a puppet. It is tall, refined, strong, feminine, made of a deep black metal that reflects like chrome and shifts like water. It flexes into a stance, a short spear held in one hand and a long whip held in the other. And then it launches backwards because you're still going up the tower together. This is part fight and part race.

The biggest problem here is that you're not quite sure what you're fighting. Are you fighting the hands or the puppet? Is the goal to cut the strings or the drones right in the centre? How are you supposed to deal with the whip? Nobody's ever fought you with a whip before - eeek!

Something about it reminds you of Rose, though. It reminds you of your relationship with her. Everything about this technique from Princess Kikil is too complex, too alien, too incongruous with the rest of this place's aesthetic to seem like it came entirely from her own heart. This is something that she learned from one of her friends. What a marvelous person they must be!

Rose and Chen!

Oh, Chen. Oh, Rose. You do understand what you have become, don't you?

You have become tyrants. Cutie gaolers. The cruel authorities whose unjust demands and threats have instantly created an entire organized fox underground. It is time for fox magic to conjure the finest suits, dresses, and jazz music of the Prohibition era. It is time for foxes to develop fox-speakeasies where revolution might be plotted against their evil mistresses. And within these hotbeds of fox crime it is swiftly agreed: that what Chen really wants is to be tied up so that obviously correct foxes can take over captainship of the ship, and the only one preventing her from embracing that fate is the heartless fox-brutalizer Rosepetal, peer only to Meibelle for her cruelty and heartlessness.

It is time for every righteous fox to join la resistance.

The practical result of this is that for the first time ever things go quiet. They go way too fucking quiet. Nary a bushy tail to be seen. Only half-glimpses of shadowy foxes glimpsing out from around corners or behind doorways. Ten minutes ago they seemed to occupy every available space on this ship but now they are working to prepare a greater act of mischief than they ever could alone.

And about this point you hear thunder in the distance and see a storm rolling in.

This part is not unexpected. Some branch of the Heavenly Bureaucracy was assigned to overseeing the imprisonment of the foxes. In the distance, from a spyglass, you can see martial war gods assembling in the clouds, and on the seaside cliffs below you can see human monks, eyes closed in meditation, a wall of waiting martial artists. These are the legitimate cutie tyrants, the forces of monasticism and order who imprisoned the foxes in the first place and have amassed now to ensure their breakout ends before it begins.

And you are caught in the political centre. Too orderly to be embraced by the cutie radicals, too chaotic to be accepted by the cutie reactionaries.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

She has passed beneath the gaze of the dragon-saint, a blessing that means her crimes were not so great after all. But now, the majordomo, the chief of staff, the intelligence officer. Removed sufficiently from power to take her time with the questioning.

But also vulnerable. Fragile and all so human. She feels stone beneath the fabric of her robe. Blue sparks rise lazily but demandingly up behind her eyes. Once, there was a maiden and so many ways the story could go.

Names. Dates. Connections. Fengye the bureaucrat knows many things, about Hymair, about home, but through the eyes of Venus the connections between those things crackle electric blue.

"I apologize, great lady," said Fengye. "But you have not told me your name and title, the reason for your question and the authority by which you ask them. As Daana'd, Immaculate Dragon of Water said: A scribe is not an empty cog; she must know who she reports to that she might tailor her message, just as water fits the shape of the glass." ... By this way the greater unity of all under heaven can be seen in water flawlessly clear, but to continue with the sermon was beyond the bounds of protocol.

Show me, then. Show me your connections. Show me your desires.

[Centre of the Web: How could I get you in my power?]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Black!

"Understandable," said Orange brightly, sipping her tea. "I'll just -" She abruptly made a face and brushed it far to one side. She'd intended to order Royal Ire, an exotic new blend of tea that was three weeks away from being included in a list of things that were making young people these days soft. What she'd somehow actually ordered was Earl Grey exactly to Mrs. Everest's ideal tastes and specifications. Damn it! It wasn't even that she disliked it. It was, in fact, objectively the perfect tea perfectly calibrated to satisfy her taste sensors. Just like every other time.

She sighed and threw a grumpy glare at the teacup before brightening back up. It had been a rather emotional reaction to a cup of tea, but worrying about that kind of stuff wasn't her department.

"Well, then," she said, re-establishing her stride. Now that she was thinking about it she was aware that she was doing The Pose - that carefully designed forward-lean that Mrs. Everest used to convey keen interest and utter attention, the bright energy that implied that she was happy to spend months going over all the specifics of the contract. Sometimes the most scary threat was being indefatigable. "I'll happily set your mind at ease. Encountering you was something of a chance event! I have a different target who I am working towards - a police commissioner, actually - and I very much doubt you and he are directly connected. The police are capable of a great many things but your situation seems rather outside their usual wheelhouse."

And here she grinned. It felt like the negotiation was flowering in her hands. Declaim, redirect, reassure, imply. "And of course, I recognize that at the moment this interaction is currently all stick. I don't intend on keeping it as such! If you need to, how you say, delegate certain sensitive tasks then you know that you can trust me to keep a secret. So with that in mind, let us discuss brass tacks. Please, tell me what kind of assets, reach and influence you can lay claim to - beyond what's publicly available, of course. My assignment specifically relates to destroying a man's reputation so connections in media or politics are particularly appreciated."

Her hand strayed back towards the perfect tea involuntarily. "Naturally, if you have any conflicts of interest in this space, you really must do your best to telegraph them," she said. "Certain processes are already in motion and this might be your one opportunity to move key individuals out of the realm of collateral damage."

*

Yellow!

"As far as my financial situation goes?" said Yellow. "Up until eight months ago I was legally property, and these fancy new rights didn't come with back pay. I'm doing freelance journalism to supplement my income as a maid. So you know, not incredible. Life's a constant nine-way negotiation where everyone wants their own deep aesthetic made manifest in a three-bedroom apartment and the current compromise involves repurposing one of those bedrooms into a workshop."

She smiled, hopping up to sit on the counter, legs kicking in the air. "It's a bit of a standoff, really. At the moment the place is basically, like, an old cartoon's depiction of a robot's apartment. Totally unadorned! But that's just because the budget negotiations are ongoing. White and Orange want a luxury aesthetic, Brown and Black want to invest in stocks and minimalism, Blue and Green want to expand the workshop, and Red and Pink are financial disasters waiting to happen."

She looked down at her feet, the worn soles of her second-hand sneakers. "To be honest it's driving us all a bit nuts. We're not actually used to being all up in each others shit all the time like this. We're good at collectively optimizing to solve problems and working independently. But there's always been a Mission Command or something like that could settle disputes. Now we're living on our own for the first time we just don't have the right habits or experience."

*

Pink!

"Yeah," said Pink. "He doesn't have to go down there but he can't stay up here. But whatever he picks, he's gotta do it fast."

Breathless Dead

Redana!

Sagakhan looks down at the sword you hold against her throat.

She smiles.

And she steps into it.

The blade cuts through her skin. You feel a brief resistance as it hits the spine but she keeps coming and it pushes through that too. She looms over you with a grandmotherly smile and the only thing that stops her coming closer is when the hilt of your blade touches her neck.

"Ah, Imperial Princess," said Sagakhan in a hideous rasp, breath escaping through a nicked windpipe. "My daring Bella deserves so much better than you. Don't you see how fragile her sanity is? How stressful her life is with all the burdens and responsibilities you pile upon her? You've been nothing but a curse for her and now she's finally freed from your shackles."

She should be dead. Should be dying, at least. Molech stood as a testament to the greatest genetic alchemy that can be wrought and he barely survived decapitation after months of work by the Order of Hermes. And yet, to Sagakhan, this seems like it is nothing.

"And if you care for her at all, you can content yourself with that. I am, after all, not cruel. When the battle is done and the names are erased, darling Mynx will approach Bella. She will fulfill her purpose and talk her back from the space beyond the brink. They will fall into each others arms, released from my service, and live happy lives together. Such is my sacrifice to the God of Love who has helped me through so many hardships. Don't you see? You have nothing here worth fighting for."

And then she moves at last. With incredible violence she punches into your chest. Tears through your ribs. And raises up in her bloodsoaked left hand your still beating heart.

"Don't feel bad, Imperial Princess," said Sagakhan as she kicked your body down the tumbling steps of the black pyramid. "This technically counts as a draw."

Alexa!

While you do not, in fact, gotta hand it to Emperor Molech, butcher of the galaxy, the man is decisive if nothing else. You had barely opened your mouth to tell him no when he started his lunge and enormous sweeping axe-blow to take your head himself. He doesn't hesitate, doesn't flinch, isn't confused or surprised at your betrayal. This is just one more step he has to take before he Wins.

"Who broke you?" he snarled, laying about with whirling overhand strokes. "The Princess? I will gut her and burn Tellus around her wretched mother. The Azura? Wretched animals, I should have ended their civilization centuries ago. The Hermetics? I will hunt their Order to the ends of the galaxy. O, Zeus! O, Athena! Where!" his blows are hammer-hard, falling down like meteors. "Is!" His power is a monstrous thing, all strength and reach, long limbs and insensate to pain or injury. "My!"

He has no phalanx. He fights alone.

"Daughter!?" screams the loneliest man in the galaxy.