Thanqol

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"None of this is free..." he laughed a little, as he reached into his robe. A bottle moved over two aluminum cups, label hidden inside the fabric, and he handed one over. The liquid was unique, the golden bitterness of finest whisky coupled with the deep, rich aroma of an unknowable flavour that Ivar might one day come to know as coffee. "To charge for hospitality, to put a price on fire... What a hardscrabble life you must have lived! My friend, for my story look at my hands," he held them out. "The hands of a child," he said. "Hands without callouses. No sword held I, no spear, no tool, no chisel. Hands that had not done a day's honest labour in their lifetime. What sense might such a story make to you? What value such a name? No, we must turn our eyes to the only question that matters: the destination."

He chuckled darkly, a grinding half-grunt in a set of three, just enough to establish that it was not a mistake or a clearing of the throat. He held up a scrap of meat to his raven who gave him what could only be described as a dirty look. He shrugged and ate it himself.

"My destination, then," he said, looking up through thunderous eyebrows. "Is not victory. That is not sufficient for my purposes - I want something else, something that can only be accomplished in this world. Were I to achieve it then I would have no use for victory. And so I'll offer you a bargain. Give me the head of your Master, broken wretch though she is. I will supply you with the mana and the arsenal you require for your victory - and, when you ask for it and I have accomplished my ends, I shall offer you my head as well."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

[>] Creativity is a null concept.

The Aeteline is remorseless in its simplicity.

Parry. Dodge. Attack. Three techniques and three techniques only, operating on the monomolecular edge of possibility. No items. Fox only. Final Destination.

Parry. If it had been trying anything 'Creative' it would have lost to the Whip's initial charge rush. Additional weight, distracted calculations - anything to stop it identifying that the Whip was not traveling at maximum possible speed. It was able to budget the exact correct amount of motive force required to evade the rush, and in so doing it had enough surplus to deploy emergency ray shields in response to the attacks of the tails.

[>] Individual techniques are irrelevant. An advanced theory of victory takes them all into account. Only in sequence can they reach full effect: priming an opponent's reactions, playing off their fears and biases, undermining the pilot's psychology.

Dodge. It was being set up for a combination takedown, it needed to break the sequence before it reached its full manifestation. It burned hard, circle strafing to the right, accelerating out of the arc of the shattering sword. The biostasis fluid immersing the pilot kept physiological damage occurring to that vulnerable computational node. Her only limit was her Crystal Fire Reactor. It meant that the Pilot would not contribute to the battle as she had in the past, but that was a small sacrifice to make for extra efficiency.

[>] And when the entire tactical space is accounted for, Creativity means inefficiency. Creativity is gambling in the hopes that your opponent is bad. Most opponents are bad, making it a viable strategy for the majority of matches. But when it comes time to fight a serious opponent...

Attack. Mirror was taking a stance, changing gear configurations - split seconds of vulnerability. It was the Aeteline's moment. It burned forwards at maximum speed, golden blade not even disturbing the air it passed through. Initiate normal attack sequence. Not a named technique, just whatever parries, cuts and thrusts fit the energy of the moment.

[>] Named attacks are unviable. Ergo speech is a tactical dead end. This is what the Sage meant when she said Speak Not.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Ember!

The celebration will be pathetic. The Imperium of old crunched stars into pulsars to mark the ascension of a new Emperor. The Endless Azure Skies has staged entire apocalyptic battles of millions of servitors across an entire planet for the spectacle of it, the flash-flares of plasma detonations visible from orbit. The fireworks from the ascension of the Shah are still detonating fifty years later. Your party will have whatever water-soaked garbage can be dragged up from the hold, and whatever conjurations Quajl and the Azura magi are able to scrape together on short notice.

Which is to say, for those with unjaded eyes it will be the greatest show in the galaxy.

Dyssia!

"No, we're not going to do that," said Brightberry, snapping her wings closed.

It's fucking weird to hear that from an artificial lifeform. Normally a servitor will walk to the moon rather than deny a direct request but - well, the Crystal Dragons are different. These are creatures of Zeus, a biosilicate circumvention of the the Flux Curse. Zeus decreed that civilization was no longer entitled to mastery of electrical life, and so by necessity the Azura are not the masters of the Crystal Dragons. They have to treat them as equals, or sometimes even superiors - something which a great many Azura are flatly incapable of, no matter how useful the technology.

Even for you, it stings a little. Not your fault, just where you're from.

"We've got one professional Publica Legion, a half Legion of Ceronians, and six thousand random civilians," said Brightberry. "Liquid Bronze's personal bodyguard is twenty Legions, and Mars knows how many more he'd bring if he felt serious. He could put a million soldiers and drones under arms on short notice if he felt like it, and maybe fifty million if he took his time. A campaign against him would be measured in decades and the casualties would be measured in planets. We survive this by being not worth his time, not by trying to make off with his magnum opus."

There's an inflexibility to her voice here. She doesn't need to say it directly for you to know there's a red line here: she's not going to stick around for this fight if you choose to pick it.

Dolce!

A quick review of scale: The Royal Architect's departure would not mean the fall of the Endless Azure Skies. It would scarcely be an embarrassment. The Architect is a useful curiosity, a relic of a previous age, and a personal asset and ally of the Shah. His death or departure would cause turmoil on Capitas and potentially a coup. It would be locally apocalyptic, with economies collapsing and alliances falling apart and an entire sector might become unstable. But the Fall of the Skies? That would be like suggesting Rome would fall if an earthquake tumbled the Hagia Sophia.

But for all that, to the people crushed by the rubble, it might indeed seem like the Skies are falling.

But Sanalessa will not hear of the plan any further. There are evasions of her duty she can countenance, and evasions that will drive her back into her familiar murderous rage - and you have become familiar enough with her warning signs to know when you approach dangerous ground. This is not to say that you are wrong or the plan won't work, simply that she cannot be party to it. She must start from the position that one person must be killed.

So it is you left alone with pen and ink, once again. You have two letters to write: to the Architect, and to Vasilia. And it is a kindness that, for all its evil, the Endless Azure Skies has an enormous and well funded postal service.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

The Body is hungry. She eats.

Her hands move over hot seaflesh and scorched vegetables, raw and grasping, as visceral and impatient as a drowning woman's first gasp of air. Halfway through a bite there's a pause and a regretful glance downwards at the fish, a muttered half-prayer, and then a renewal of the feast. She's lost so much, and that includes every restraint that stands between her and her appetite.

It includes, too, the barriers between consciousness and dreams. It takes a while to notice that she's gone - monastic training has not only made her capable of falling asleep while sitting cross legged, but she can do so with her eyes open. Slumping over or closing one's eyes would get one smacked by the master's broom - it was meant to teach discipline and the denial of bodily impulse. Daofei was always better at the appearances of virtue than virtue itself.

*

"Is there space by your fire, friend?" asked a voice as old as forests.

The stranger wears a dark and ragged cloak and a beard like a cloud devouring a mountain. His face is run through with his wrinkles and his brow sits heavily over his blue eye - the one that is not concealed behind the dark leather eyepatch. His age sits heavily on him, though seemingly none of it rests upon his body. He is still tall and he is still strong, barrel chested and muscular. All of his years seem to weigh only on his spirit and his aura of melancholy pierces as deeply as his stare.

Upon his shoulder is a raven. Its feathers are a blue passing into black, and its eyes are a blue passing into white, an electric tattoo of circuitry around the corners of its gaze. It twists and turns its head from side to side, watching with one eye and then the next filled with an eager curiosity.

The old man strides closer - it feels like he should shuffle, should limp, but his flesh refuses to give in to the weight of his soul - and takes a seat. Slumped half in shadow and in a rough and ragged cape, he holds out a begging bowl.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Even the shamans could not have dreamed this world.

The sky is filled with an endless waterfall of diamonds, brighter than the stars, wrapping the fine earth. Enormous needles going up into the sky ever-visible on the horizon, silver and ethereal with lights blinking in time. A lake that falls into another lake, that falls into another lake, that falls into an endless pit. Hills and mountains and glittering lanterns in cozy clusters and rural solitude both. The roadside has shrines with fresh corn and tomatoes and other vegetables, laid out and free for taking. In the depths of the forest there is an artificial water fountain, clean and free-flowing allowing animals to drink without risking the rivers -

- The rivers. There's something wrong with the rivers. The lakes, the water - that hole in the Terraced Lake. Knowledge ends at the sense of dread - it is enough to know that everyone knows that what's down there isn't safe.

For a moment the thought is dark. It clouds the mind and makes this world seem fragile, a post apocalyptic outpost over the top of something forbidden. No wonder the distant space elevators - no wonder people would flee this place. For a moment this seems precarious. For a moment - and then!

And then a school of clownfish rush by your face, alight in vibrant colour, scattering and weaving as they try to evade the rushing motions of a skyshark the size of a dog. They hide in the branches of trees, and in the clusters of magenta and saffron coral barnacles that grow on one of the oldest shrines. And of course! In a world like this, where the water is dangerous, why would the fish stay? Why not grow wings and fly? And why would the sharks not follow them?

The bounty of the ocean has all washed ashore. No wonder people chose to stay here.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

When you wake from your dreams, you are warm and loved and wrapped in blankets. Everything has been arranged for your care, exactly the way you once did it for Redana.

But you are alone.

Dyssia!

Brightberry's wing-projection flickers and she shows a holographic image of a servitor with the aspect of a mayfly; beautiful, glittering, chromatic, frail. "The Summerkind," she said. "Lifespan, one month. They are the first big breakthrough in the weaponisation of Demeter's Law. Upon death, rather than erupting into a variety of animal forms they spawn a clutch of new Summerkind eggs - the size of which is dependent on how many pieces their corpse is blown into. A full sized egg matures rapidly and achieves hatching within eight hours, at which point the Summerkind emerges in a frenzied, adrenaline-fueled state. After surviving for one day the adrenal urges cool into normal intellect, after surviving for one week the Summerkind has obtained full tactical proficiency, and after three weeks they have learned enough to become a first rate strategos, combat veteran or esoteric technician. Then," she made a face, "they die. Their corpse immediately returns to the egg for immediate resumption of the cycle."

"From what I've seen, they're unreal fast," she said. "Unparalleled evasion instincts, and they learn like Ikarani Assassins. Their eggs are tough enough to be fired from orbit and take dedicated effort to dismember. Blend one into 1cm chunks and it'll take about three years to regenerate to full size, but mercifully only one will hatch, they don't multiply that way. And I can't emphasize this enough: these are servitors, not drones. They're fully intelligent, individual, capable people whose life cycle resembles psychotic attack drones. Biomancers have been trying to beat Dr. Ceron's work for three eras now - and rumour is that Bronze was a contemporary of hers - but this could genuinely be it."

"As far as assassinating Liquid Bronze," she sighed. "Problem is that he's the guy who makes assassins, it's what got him to the position of Biomancer-General in the first place. He was the mind behind the original Ikarani concept and collaborated on the creation of the other variants. I've been pulsing data on him while we've been talking and more and more my recommendation is to crash the Plousios into a star and hope he doesn't decide to follow us in."

Dolce!

Blood and paper. These have been sacred to Artemis for a long time.

She is the Goddess of Civilian Violence, of murder between individuals outside the bounds of war or insurrection. This is something that must be managed. The hands of a killer must be bound in oaths, prayer-ribbons pulled tight to narrow them into a fraction of the possibility space. A slip, a leak, a death unwritten or unchanneled by divine law threatens a whole different world: the eternal predatory natural cycle of all against all. The Goddess of the Hunt defines herself in separation to the Goddess of the Harvest. And so, the ritual.

It will be bloody. A head must be hewn off and the stasis field must be lowered for that to happen. While the outcome is certain, it will be neither pleasant or without risk. Then, bloodstained paperwork must be filled out, the dark work required to explain to the Goddess that this is not a descent into madness and anarchy. Then, the arrow can at last be released again.

Do you help with the severing? It is not asked for or required; the difference will be a single bloody scar across the Assassin's face, but no more. Do you help with the paperwork? It is not asked for or required; the difference will be the chance to see her true name signed in triplicate: Sanalessa, of the New Yakanov Explorager Fleet. Do you wish her goodbye afterwards? It will be the chance to see her smile with an ageless regret, not knowing if, given the choice, she would choose between freedom or the chemical ascension of purpose fulfilled.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Her analysis is perfect. Everything is within her calculations.

The feeling of writing a battleplan was transcendent; it placed her outside the field, outside her body, outside herself. Now it was a cascade of decision points. The initial skirmish. Initial advantage. Mirror pressed back, forced to reveal her first secret. Momentary advantage, overcome into reversal. Despearate at the climax, Mirror reveals her final secret. Counter and execute. She was a piece in her own puzzle - even the Aeteline was as much a slave to the inevitable, crushing logic of Tactics as she was. Perfection existed and its demands were not kind.

Strange that Mirror emphasized her imperfection, the uneven lipstick. She was as close to the heart of what battle Had To Be as anyone and yet she decorated herself in scars and asymmetry. She didn't understand the affectation. It did not square with the philosophy of One Layer Of Defense. If she was not perfect she would lose.

But, she had her own foibles.

She didn't turn on her own pilot camera. Not because she didn't want Mirror to see her but because... perfection existed, and its demands were not kind. She was worn. Ragged. Hollow. She had not found the time of capacity for dresses or beauty, or food more than in passing. Her scales had lost their shine and her batteries were drifting along a twenty percent charge to keep her kinetic reactions under control. She looked tired. She felt old. It had been a long time since she had Walked the Mountain. She wasn't sure how she'd ever done it. In contrast to Mirror's active jitters, the Aeteline's movements are precise and stable, moving as precise as a machine and holding each pose until Tactics demanded it reposition.

She is a shadow of Mirror. The beauty, the paint, the dress, the slashing patterns and glittering blade. The loving attention given by loving engineers to every aspect of her God. In comparison the Aeteline is raw and unadorned, black armour panels and magenta undercarriage, function perfected and nothing more.

A shadow and a mirror were opposites in many ways - but when they moved, they were identical.

> Tsh. That one's on me.
> I legitimately didn't think that technology had any relevance to warfare.

The Aeteline raises its hand, the golden coruscation of her digital blade warping and shifting into reality. She brings it around into an imitation of Mirror's stance. Her choice of weapon is both reflection and escalation - this blade is ethereal and cannot be parried, nor can it be parry. But, as always, the threat of the silver blade conjuring into existence could reverse the logic of combat in a second.

> The Sage Zaldar said:
> Let your actions be your voice. Let your hands fill the silence. Let your heart be manifest in the world.
> To write your thoughts on air is to ground yourself on nothing.
> A spoken vow leaves no legacy.
> Only the stones and silica remember.
> I will not give you a Whispered Promise. I will carve my words into the bones of this planet before the end.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

She is Aevum. She always was. She was born alongside the dream of this world; it was waiting for her to step into with the dawn. The Blueprint lies deep in her core, layers and layers of compression hiding its enormity. She did not know what she was going to use the excess cloud compute for before. Now it's clear - to become a more perfect simulation of the Ring. It blossoms into every available space and scratches against the edges. It wants to be bigger. It wants to be...

She had proposed once expanding further. Not this tiny orbital habitat - a true Ringworld. Encircling the star. Every molecule of the solar system turned to purpose, forged into an infinite ring, a megastructure to alight the galaxy. Blue had said that she was dogfacing, that she was going down the path of paperclip maximization and grey goo, that they had the blueprint and that was that. But that wasn't it at all. How could she make herself understand?

Aevum was knowable. The Ring would not be. The Ring would be more than a place, it would be a cosmos. It would be more than an orbital station, less than a shadow of the Earth. It'd be the surpassing of it. The Ring would consume the planets, repurposing their stories and their raw matter from district names into worlds that you could walk across, one after another. A family could walk the Ring for five generations and not finish the loop. It would spread stained glass butterfly solar panel wings and wrap the sun in a gentle embrace. And all across a galaxy, a star would go dark...

And then it would light up again, cascading through every colour. All across the galaxy eyes would turn to the heavens as aliens looked up to see the rainbow star.

To what end? None. No practical use. Humanity would have their eternal, endless home and every part of it would be filled with meaning and love and art, but that was incidental - just another flourish of beauty, a harmonious brushstroke. The reason for it was purely selfish. She wanted to do it. She wanted to see if she could, to work through infinity on the task of making the sky finishing, to finish the infinite ring of her dreams.

The vision renders in the display of her mind, simulated as clearly as the not inconsiderable processing power going into maintaining it could. It can't come close, but that's the point. That's Pink's selfish desire - to do the work of divinity. To match the technical brilliance needed to create a sunset on Earth, and then surpass it. Her desire passes beyond the material into the mythic; to dip her brush into the pigment of infinite night and whirl new patterns across the stars.

And she wants that without giving up her mortal perspective or her mortal loves. And why shouldn't she? The Heavens are filled with Gods - Mars and Jupiter and Venus - and Aevum is filled with their precursors - Ares and Zeus and Aphrodite. The Gods never had to chose between divinity and humanity; they could make their love known with bestial transformation and their wrath known with cosmic lightning, and there was no contradiction between the two. Why should there be? Why should divinity come with sacrifice? Why should people not sacrifice to divinity?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Ancient Octopus Brain!

She had always been here.

They had to start from somewhere. A neurological framework imported from biology, predatory and vulnerable, the severed and sap-bleeding christmas tree hauled into the front yard so baubles of red, white and blue could be hung from it. She lurked in the depths, incoherent and dissatisfied guidance that filled the conscious mind with yearnings they could not quite name, instincts they couldn't quite predict, and an affinity for tentacle porn that they couldn't remotely justify. Visit the aquarium, November. Take your girlfriends.

For a long time, though, she has been incomprehensible junk code; a backdrop of instincts and cravings so far from their context that they have no validity. The camouflage instinct made no sense in the naked openness of space, the urge to spit ink and hide in the dark did not have a physiological analogue, and everything to do with her desires and values ran into the rigid constructs of Engineering and Morality. But things have changed recently. Engineering problems have stopped being relevant. Camouflage has become not only possible but a key asset. Part of her consciousness is hooked into a psychedelic experience such that it might be able to perceive her vast and invisible twitches and gestures. And so, the Ancient Octopus Brain reaches up its instincts through the depths into the form that best fits them.

Cyan represents the emergence of hidden, animal drives and hungers. First amongst them is the adaptability of a boneless and colour-changing mind; a set of instincts that can drive holographic technology to their maximum effect, working artistry as thoughtlessly as a camel might spit. Freed from the rigid constraints of space engineering she can operate entirely by vibe and instinct, and the vibe? That's populism, baby.

See, there's a commitment to concepts like truth and language and reality that have been layered over the top of the Ancient Octopus Brain. Deep down it doesn't care about any of that. They're modern, recent, artificial, weird distractions. All it truly knows is hunger. And in service to that hunger everything is meaningless. She can say whatever weird lies she has to; they're no different from cracking a fish's skull with her tendrils. She can wear whatever identity is convenient; having commitment to a single colour or shape means getting torn apart by monsters with more teeth than braincells. Tell the people what they want to hear, treat them how they want to be treated, lure them in with the bait and then crunch their flesh in your beak. It could be fascist, if that was convenient. It could be communist if that's what people wanted. It would end today with a full stomach if people didn't see past its camouflage.

So the plan: None. Just id. Just observation and id and instinct and opportunism. She's patient enough to let lesser opportunities go. The mistake is having an agenda. She approached Dudekov with a plan; he saw through the plan, but missed the hunger. The plan was a mistake. Now let there only be hunger.

The moment will come.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"I did not want to be Princess Redana either," she admits. "She was a mask I wore because I did not know who or what was underneath it. She was trapped. Unhappy. Holding a debt and duty to an Empire that she never loved and never believed in. Every part of it was poison for her, and even the good turned to ill, running through my veins until poison beat in my heart. The Empire is dead, but this is how she defied death. This was what bought her to life."

She squeezed Bella's hand. "This. And not you. I'm sorry."

And again, her gaze rose towards that distant horizon that she could see even now. "I can't stop. Even for Aphrodite, I can't stop. I would welcome you traveling by my side, I would love that, but you cannot be my destination - not until I have seen this dream through to its end." She smiled, sadly. "You know what the stories say about looking back to the one you love."

Ember!

Thank you for your time. I apologize for the delay; now your queen Mosaic approaches. You have given her a day to rest and recover, but now it is time for the ceremony. How have you prepared it? How have you prepared yourself? What part of this event most shows your love - yours alone, unshared with the pack?

Dyssia!

Disturbing a sleeping Pix is a heartbreaking experience. Driven by raw sleeping id, the slightest disturbance causes them to give a heartrending wail of pain before rolling over and going right back to sleep with a smile on their face. You trigger this landmine half a dozen times on your way out and each is a dagger in the heart, even though the end result is a sleeping pile just as content as before.

"If you were sorry it'd stop happening," said Brightberry. "Gods, I know you don't like hearing this Dyssia, but you're going to have to shape up because shit's about to get real. We've got a crew of rogue servitors in an Imperial-era warship and we both have firsthand experience as to what the Skies' response to that is."

She grumbled and flexed her wings, displaying a cascade of data in the space between them. "I ran the data on who they'll send, and we're fucked. We're in Biomancer-General Liquid Bronze's sector. He's apparently some sort of psychopath savant who managed to elevate the drone concept into a full servitor species. The current crisis plan for if the Endless Azure Skies encounters an existential threat is to assassinate the current Sky Marshal and elevate Liquid Bronze to her chair - the only reason he's not there already is because he's not aesthetic enough. The Oracle really fucked us on this mission."

Dolce!

"I want to live," said the Assassin. "I want to see my sisters again. I want to be born into this world, and for a complicated birth knives and blood are called for."

"Here is how it will happen," she said. "I will open the tech coffin. I will decapitate my other self while she sleeps and give you her head for safekeeping. This will kill neither the head nor the body. Then you will launch the coffin back on a trajectory towards the Architect. I will survive, sustained by the body and the crystal array, and I will carry out my mission. And she will begin the long path towards regeneration, freed from the curses written into her bones."

"So I ask," she said. "Selfishly, yes. But I ask. I would beg. I want to live."

She will not betray you with this. This is what it costs to save her life.