Thanqol

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits has received compliments before - but not like this! Most of her compliments were things like 'good girl!' and 'Oh! Big yawn!" and that kind of thing. And she *was* a good girl, and she did have big yawns while she was sleepy, but she'd never been complimented on her wisdom before. Saber had even called her wise twice - oh! Was she wise? She'd kind of thought she was flailing wildly, but maybe she'd been filled with Fox Wisdom all along, maybe like that big mountaintop fox shrine that Yue had to spend a whole day hiking to get up to. People probably didn't build shrines like that to silly foxes.

Kat visualized herself as having a shrine like that all of her own. Sitting comfortably with a mountain view while people hiked all the way up to bring her treats and ask to listen to her wisdom. Now that was a life for a fox! She puffed up her chest with pride and excitement.

"Of course it's a deal!" she said sagely, in a tone she thought a wise sage fox might use. A foxy instinct twitched - was she really? - no, Saber had explained that too. Where she came from the foxes were honoured - maybe they all had mountain shrines? So she was trading on their reputation, which was a meaningfully cunning fox move to begin with. "My name is Katherine Isabella Fluffy -" she caught herself just in time. She was impersonating a mountain sage fox! She liked Fluffybiscuits but it wasn't wise. "- mountains. Fluffymountains. That's my name. Fluffymountains the fifth. M.D."

She shrieked as a wave of Berserker's arm almost hurled her off the side of the castle.

Breathless Dead

The Plousios!

"The movements of rogue servitors and Publica agents aren't my department," said NBX-462 reassuringly. He's a fine little Synnefo with a curling mustache and a walking stick wrapped in a little crocheted cozy. He came in person with only a secretary when contacted. No bodyguards, no retinue - a little sign that he was so replaceable he had nothing to fear from stepping onto a pirate ship. "No, I have no legal requirement to report your movements, I assure you. My task is simply the removal of friction; at some point the Skies will turn their attention to this world and I need that to be as painless a process as possible. And the presence of a Ceron commando team - well, it's nothing but friction. Please, consider that a compliment - the existence of an industrialized alien civilization on the frontier does not even register against the ongoing insurgency of trying to remove Ceronians from a planet. These are the Star Kings, by the way, I believe they've got a specialty in energy esoterics."

He cleared his throat and his secretary set out a large wooden planetary map painting. "Now, the Ceronians are currently playing a rather silly game of cops and robbers with the locals," he said. "They're plundering freely, setting themselves up as local dictators, that kind of thing. Then they get into playful brawls with the locals uplifted by Cash Money - knocking over buildings and so on. It's all very destabilizing on its own right but before long they'll start recruiting locals to their pack and the next thing we know we'll have an entire Legion growing out here. If you convince them to leave my sector then I'll procure for you whatever you require and consider it a bargain at the price."

Which question do you each ask of NBX-462?

Dolce!

"Oh yeah, sure!" said Contribution cheerfully as a passing wing of fighter craft were blasted by ground-based ELF artillery, crashing down to the surface in flames. "You just gotta, like, say stuff for the benefit of the audience, or failing that yourself. Like, drop little veiled injokes, wisecracks and things that signal to people on your wavelength what your real feelings are. It's like a language trick, right? You say one thing to the boss and another thing to the people around you who realize what a fucking idiot the boss is being. The boss shows up to a meeting hung over, you just slow down the proceeding a little, be a little more formal than normal to drive in the nails. If you're confronted then hand off to a colleague nearby who will apologize for the inconvenience and then, because you're communicating with them and they agree with you, will start up some whole new inconvenience that's just as annoying."

He grinned, illuminated by illumination flare rockets. "Right? One sheep isn't much. Easy to push around. A herd is just a mass of wool and bad ideas and that can't really be negotiated with," he said. "But you could always try and find a competent boss instead who you don't have to be mad about. Like Liquid Bronze!" he sighed dreamily. "Now there's a man you can set your watch to."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

- slow!

The Aeteline releases its grip in a moment of panic. Solarel snaps forwards - knees immobile, elbows immobile, shoulders immobile, actualize ankles and neck. She lurches forwards into the anticipated strike, a headbutt - or a kiss - enough to turn a blow into a trade.

It doesn't come. She crashes to the ground and comes up into a roll as the lock dissipates. Her blades whirl into a guarding posture. She's lost visual contact. Now she is the hunted. The Aeteline hates that.

[>] I've seen enough to have a theory

She can typesign more freely now. There's less interference, her mind is clearer. She's not fighting from a position of advantage in this moment, and so Tactics are called for.

[>] Your trick is going to be a work of art
[>] And it's going to be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
[>] I'd guess some multi-spectrum energy weapon attack, focusing the power of the tails into your new spear
[>] You always did love the beam finishers.

The Aeteline sets an evasion protocol and begins moving in a spiral pattern. The cypher of speed and stillness, of dashes and pirouettes, expanding ever outwards as her sensors burn to re-establish contact. She wonders if she should have packed a directed air weapon - the weight wasn't significant and it would have been a huge advantage in a smoke environment like this - but her battleplan did not involve her losing the initiative like this. The combo had been broken and she was vulnerable until she re-established it.

[>] The intention is to shock. Paralyze. Blind with awe.
[>] But I don't think it will work
[>] Not because I won't appreciate it
[>] But because you have already struck me blind
[>] And that's priced in to my battleplan

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Let me confer with my associate," said Fluffybiscuits. She did a crunch, pulling herself up forehead to forehead with Berserker, legs still locked behind Berserker's neck - she was very flexible. Then she started hurriedly muttering in what might have been a negotiation or might have been her buying a few seconds to think by making panicky fox noises at a wall of metal and anger.

"If it were up to me, I'd take your deal," said Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits. "But Berserker here has a condition. She's worried about her ability to beat you in a fair fight -"

Berserker snarled and tried to shake Kat off. The foxgirl shrieked and clung to her arm with all four limbs. She did her best to continue with her super cool negotiation speech despite the position. "- s-so! She says that it has to be okay if her favour is to make you lose a fight! And also that I can use her favour -" she is shaken even more heavily. "eeeee! On her behalf! Because she doesn't really talk muuuuuuuuch!"

Katherine is doing her best. She's in deeply over her head but she knows enough to know that she'll get Yelled At if she lets Mrs. Saber walk away. Being able to argue that she's worked things out so that they could deal with the problem whenever they needed to - no foxgirl could argue with that, not even Actia. She might be new to girling but she had enough fox experience to know how to stack a deck, at least a little.

Breathless Dead

Bella, Ember, Dyssia!

For the Argumentative Portuguese - no one in the Endless Azure Skies has written down what they called themselves - it was an apocalyptic alien invasion. Their civilization had splintered into factions - appeasers, escapists, warriors, xenophobes, more and stranger things based on their history, culture, politics and religion. There are wars and shadow wars, the electronic communication link that bound their civilization together in a social media web thrashing in panic. Their arsenals of apocalypse were unsheathed. Their greatest weapons were unveiled. Orbital shipyards were built to mass manufacture battleships for the coming conflict.

For them, the fate of their civilization hung in the balance.

For the Endless Azure Skies it was an idle competition for exactly three citizens.

Here's the setting and situation.

Solar system with fifteen stellar objects of note. One inhabited world with about nine billion Portuguese, a little chilly. One partially terraformed neighbouring planet and multiple deep space installations and experimental colonies on other planets or moons. About five hundred warships that together add up to about a quarter of the mass of the Plousios. Auguries in the newly restored Shrine of Mars indicates that they could all be wiped out with just the Plousios' Plover wing.

There is one small Slipgate and three Sphereships in system. These aren't military ships - one is a civilian yacht, one is a repurposed patrol vessel and one is a Biomantic Field Office. All three ships have active Crystal Dragons who are engaged in idle banter with each other in between sending the argumentative messages of their captains to each other. Brightberry immediately joins this network, spoiling the advantage of surprise but giving you further context as to what exactly's going on here.

The first citizen is Biomancer Cash Money. She is here on humanitarian grounds. Millions of Portuguese die every day from preventable illnesses, minor injuries or even simple old age, something that she regards as an ongoing holocaust that has to be stopped at the earliest possible opportunity. She has launched a covert ground invasion using discount off-brand Toxicrene assassins, abducting and replacing political leaders to prepare the way for a massive emergency uplifting process. She has already established secret medical facilities that perform emergency uplift surgeries - an unpleasant and invasive process - before releasing their subjects back into the wild. These newly uplifted abductees return to society in possession of what are by local standards superpowers and this is Causing Problems.

The second citizen is the Generous Knight. She's a big name, a contemporary of the Furnace Knight who has made a habit of destroying alien civilizations. She's really slumming it with this one, but that's not entirely inexplicable - the Portuguese currently aren't worth the fight and she wants to change that so that it'll be worthwhile when she conquers them. She wants to arm them and uplift them technologically, teach them the basics of the game of stellar war so that they'll be worthy opponents later. She's incredibly mad at Cash Money because she thinks the biological uplifting process will collapse their society and delay the time when they become worthy opponents by centuries. Her forces are in open conflict with the Biomancer's, resulting in a dance of assassins that is causing pandemonium in the alien's politics.

The third citizen is NBX-462. This is a military-grade Synnefo, a well mannered battlesheep who doesn't really have an opinion on when exactly the Portuguese should be fought and incorporated into the Endless Azure Skies but it's his duty to make sure that when that decision is made it goes as smoothly as possible. He's the logistical co-ordinator, bringing in massive quantities of materiel and dumping it on what is going to become the system's Clearing House Subsidiary, one of the outermost planetoids. His other interest is the extermination of a rogue pack of Ceronians who have made planetfall and are alternately hiding among, reigning over, or robbing blind the aliens. Sometimes he will openly intervene militarily on the planet in an attempt to bring them to justice.

What you actually need out of this situation is some liquid Hyperium. There might be some on the Subsidiary now but probably not enough for your purposes - it's not exactly a key military good. Any of the three Citizens could order it in for you if they owed you a favour, or if they were to die, leave or otherwise cancel their own standing orders then your request would be the only thing left in the logistics chain. The Plousios is strong enough to go toe to toe with any of them but probably not two of them.

How do you unpick this knot?

Dolce!

Contribution - he chooses his name based on the birthmark-letter on his wrist - becomes the lead diplomat. Having a personal message from Liquid Bronze engraved on his flesh seems to be accepted by the Summerkind as Really Cool and they regard him as having something like divine right on account of it. After investigation some of the others are excited to discover that they have birthmarks too, though theirs are more vague and cryptic. "Formation instinct has nothing on drill. One must have a spirit before it can be crushed." and "Apologies to anyone who has to debug this code, I was really drunk when I wrote this."

But Contribution is a fun guy and he takes a liking to you. He's got a colourful intensity to him, a rapier wit and a scintillating imagination. "You have massive spy vibes," he said as flak rattles against the exterior of the shuttle, pitching his voice so it's out of hearing of 20022. "And I get it if you don't want to talk about it - but do you want some tips? Service sheep like you aren't meant to just be quiet watchers, that's sus as hell. They're meant to have opinions. You've got to be opinionated to do this work. They front like they don't have opinions but there's always some fucking agenda that they're driving towards. Because they've got to, right? The Azura, the Ceronians - they wouldn't eat their vegetables if you made airplane noises while bringing the spoon to their mouth, but they also don't want to die early of heart disease -" he shook his head. "- right, that's not a thing. There's some really old programming in here," he grinned and tapped his forehead. "Anyway, point is they built the Synnefo to make them do the things that need to be done. They don't want to do it themselves, they don't even want to know about it, but they do want it to be done and so your whole existence is to try and get them to do the needful without them noticing. That is to say, it's cool to be lowkey mad. It's even expected! 20022 radiates Not Mad like the Chernobyl meltdown, whatever that is. He bites it down to do the job. But just being quiet and competent puts people on edge. Spy vibes. Capiche?"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

The English Knight was not tall. One hundred and fifty, sixty centimeters perhaps - that was a strange modern unit of measurement to adapt to. Thinking about it, calendars and clocks are also weird here - and built like a waif. Her battledress is made of sleek, expensive steel, blended with blue fabric stained to a desolate grey that resembles her castle's stone. She wears a grim, face-concealing helm, eyes lost in the shadows of its depths.

"I am so sorry Mrs. Saber!" gasps an exhausted foxgirl who has just dragged herself up to the top of a flight of stairs. Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits is a house fox, and while (in her estimation) her scamper is second to none, she did spend most of her Big Adventure riding around on Yue's shoulders. And napping. And eating treats - look the point is that she's not cut out for this, okay? She's doing her best. She drops into a formal bow as a sign of contrition, not seeing the cordon of heavy sandbags that conjure into being around her as her Servant takes a defensive posture. "I'm really sorry! Mrs. Berserker here is having a really bad day and I'm doing my best to show her around but -"

Berserker conjures a longbow, a huge and vicious thing of yew. The arrow she loads into it resembles a ballista bolt. It's a slow, deliberate and hateful motion, but it feels like she's moving as fast as she can while still being able to do this all night.

"Oh no! Mrs. Berserker! She wants to talk! We discussed this!" said Kat, vaulting the sandbag and spoiling the shot. Berserker growls and lurches to the side to get around her. Kat gets dragged along, holding onto her bow arm. "O-okay, buster!" said Katherine, turning around to face Saber. She puts on her Negotiation Face - a foxgirl was always prepared to strike a deal, and none of the other foxgirls would respect her if she didn't. Berserker lurches again and Katherine acrobatically flips up to wrap both of her legs and tails around the black metal faceplate, dangling upside down from the blindfolded warrior. With her most serious voice she asks "Okay! You know, I'm a busy woman, but I think I can spare a few minutes - but you'd better make it worth my time."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The ultimate strategy was just being better than your opponent.

It sounded oxymoronic but it was true. When your raw stats were superior new options became available. There were entire tactical sequences that hinged off relentless exploitation of a single advantage. If you move fast enough you can cut corners that others would find necessary, which lets you move faster still, compounding a tactical advantage into a strategic rhythm with the continuous buildup of combat momentum. Be inside the guard while it is being raised. Be past the smokescreen before it breaks contact. Kill your opponent before they kill you. This was the ultimate lesson of Anime. The strongest warrior was not the most creative or clever, they were gimmick bosses who would soon leave the story. The strongest warrior was the samurai who won even as their opponent's blade descended.

She makes contact and the blow comes like a hurricane. Gold into silver into gold into both, katana and wakizashi. One layer of defense. A fight ends in a single blow. Every other strike is just the sequence that leads inevitably to the severing strike where the lovers at last embrace, bound at the hilt, whispering their intimate goodbyes into each others' ears.

Was that what Mirror meant? Was that what she wanted? To speak freely in that moment when her blade was inside her rival and she was no longer an outsider? Was that the only way? Her focus was absolute. She could not question.

This was how to win. This was how to win. Nothing but the fight. Nothing but the win. Every time she'd come close to defeat was because her opponents had fought like this. No room for thought. No room for anything but skill. No room for anything but her best, absolute, maximal expression, everything she was in the tip of the blade. This was who she was. This was how she wanted to fight. This was her heart. Each blow was her love, screamed into the air and carved into the bones of the earth. Just like she'd promised.

She's slow.

The Aeteline filters the Pilot's intentions, maintaining its own situational awareness at the cost of the total onslaught. It does not trust the pilot, her total collapse into the flow of violence, the blindness of her passion. Mirror had caused this state in the Pilot, this mad joy - she must have counted on it, courted it, built her trap around it. But the Aeteline was wiser than that. It would accept the loss of speed if that meant seeing the hidden blade when it came. It only needed to see the trick to stop it, and once beaten then the fight would be an execution.

There was no place for individual expression. Perfection meant making no mistakes. A strength was also a weakness. The Aeteline had neither.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Stone falls from the sky. Stone rises from the earth.

There is a wall in Ivar's path, vast and grim granite, slick with rain and misery. It is the bone of the earth, and with its grim presence all the solidity has been sucked from the soil, reducing it into a swampy morass. Each step closer to the wall sucks at feet, trying to consume boots, horses, chivalry itself. Murderous murder-slits are carved into the wall like crucifixes, the wicked manifestation of the Lamb God's warfare. And atop the wall of stone, a wall of steel - a Knight.

Only the English could build such a joyless castle.

Three servants. One to mark your location, one to target you with artillery, one to build the castle wall to pen you in. Last to arrive, with an incapable master, in the face of an alliance dedicated to your destruction.

Daofei stirs against you. Despite the wreckage of her mind, body and soul you can feel real muscles against yours. She was strong once. When she fails to support you it is not because the tap has been turned off but because the river has run dry. "Hey..." she slurs, still drunk. "I know another way to transfer mana... if you know what I mean."

Unfortunately the continued rain of artillery is unlikely to give you time for that. Any other ideas?

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

So the weird thing about the inside of a star is that it's not as hot as you'd think.

Now, cool is a relative term. We're still talking temperatures in the thousands of degrees celsius, more than enough to reduce almost anything into its constituent hydrogen. But once you get past the corona (1-2 million degrees) temperatures drop to a positively balmy 5,500 degrees. The Plousios can survive that - uncomfortably, but potentially for a while. The trick is getting past the corona which is as simple as finding a sufficiently stable sunspot, which hover around a chill 3,500 degrees - that's only twice the temperature of a primitive blast furnace - but you really want to choose carefully to select one that'll still be there when it comes time to leave.

And you can leave. This miracle, too, is within the grasp of science.

There are complications. The Plousios is damaged and undersupplied for this kind of mission. Massive stockpiles of CandleIce - an exotic concentration of frozen hyperium gas - will be required to sustain liveable conditions inside the ship while it is submerged. Significant repairs and heat management upgrades will be required. There is only one place within range to acquire all of these things: An Intergalactic Clearing House Subsidiary.

The Intergalactic Clearing House is one of the wonders of the galaxy, a planet sized warehouse covered with massive container crates fifty kilometers long. An orbital ring with ten thousand space elevators, leading up to planetary dockyards filled with hundreds of thousands of logistics starships. When a request arrives at the Clearing House a crate is loaded and a ship is dispatched. The planet will then receive a container filled with enough of any imaginable product to last anywhere between decades to centuries. This is the logistical network that manages the concept of infinite wealth. Production ceased to be a bottleneck millennia ago, now the only difference between poverty and abundance is connection to the trade network that leads to the Clearing House.

Which brings us to the Subsidiary. A Clearing House Subsidiary is a local distribution node, a spoke that does last mile deliveries for key or high demand items. Sometimes desolate moons with new mountain ranges comprised of containers, sometimes planets surrounded by an ever-tumbling asteroid belt of container boxes filled with tools and machinery. Militarized Subsidiaries are built up on the borders of hostile powers, no matter how far beneath the Endless Azure Skies they might seem. It is one of these you will need to attend to.

The Crystal Knight bragged of her recent efforts destabilizing a primitive alien civilization[1]. The buildup on that frontier will be the place where you can acquire the goods you need to evade Liquid Bronze. It does mean dealing with the frontier's military governor but that's within your capabilities - one to three Azura Knights and their house legions. Perhaps it will even be a chance to spare the aliens from incorporation into the Skies - for a time.

[1] The frontier/system/alien species has been designated as The Argumentative Portuguese - that's the best way to translate the phrase the Azura have used. The Endless Azure Skies rarely bother to befoul their own language with another civilization's name for itself, instead assigning them the name of some group of barbarians from their own history and adding an insulting adjective. Portuguese in this context is drawing a parallel between a barbarian group of technologically advanced merchants.

Have you ever encountered an alien before, Dyssia? Humanity is dead and the galaxy is filled with servitor species, but independently evolved life has been known to exist and be violently incorporated into the Skies. Their art, music and culture is sometimes passed around as the fruits of conquest before being updated to Azura sensibilities. Great works of art are recreated in various shades of blue, literature is translated and improved in the translation, music is retuned to appeal more to local audiences, aliens are genetically altered to be appealing to Azura beauty standards. Other than that no oversight is given to them.

The only thing important to the Endless Azure Skies is their ideal of beauty. Accept that and they can have no quarrel with you.

Dolce!

The Biomancer General is on campaign at the system of Njed.

Orbit is a chaos of warships and debris, the vast plumes of clinging void-compound solid projectile smoke surrounding the planet like a toxic nebula. Massive thunderstrikes arc across the void, leviathan spheres bursting forth from oceans of acidic venom surrounded by tens of thousands of plasma spheres caught in gravitic slingshot orbits. The familiar warspheres of the Endless Azure Skies are joined by and locked in battle against an arsenal of unique vessels - Imperial dreadnoughts, refurbished Ferno[2] strike cruisers, and several twisted and exotic void leviathans of the Tides of Poseidon that have been biomantically captured and bound to service.

[2] In the Age of Knights, there were once three nations: Ferno, Azura and Goltir. Specifics of this have been deliberately obscured by centuries of historical revisionism and propaganda pushing the concept of a single, united Endless Azure Skies.

Njed itself burns. Flashes of atomic detonations light up the dark side of the planet, dim flickers compared to the spectacular fireballs that occur when a plasma sphere makes planetfall. Rainforests burn in apocalyptic conflagrations, the artificial weather patterns caused by the released quadranix and hyperium mixing with carbon staining the face of the planet. In another time the agonized death of a world would mean an end to the war. The Endless Azure Skies has moved far beyond such petty constraints.

Your little shuttle shudders as an emissary ship blasts you with a broadside of diplomats. Summerkind eggs can be loaded into specialized cannons and be fired like cannonballs. When they impact they seal against the hull with adhesive as the eggs quicken - and then they hatch. In the void the swarm all over the surface of the ship, clawing at the hull, minds pulsing with the rage and hunger of the newborn. For two days you try to sleep through the sounds of talons against the walls and kicks rattling the windows. Then, finally, the diplomats calm. The airlock is opened. And with knuckles still bloody from where they beat against the hull exterior, the Summerkind come aboard.

They are beautiful in their way. Slender and quick and with iridescent shines; every flick of their heads sending a cascade of light like from a hundred coloured mirrors. They're looking at everything with interest, tapping the control panels, scratching the walls, turning over and tearing open the furniture and marveling at the stuffing inside. They look at you a little dangerously but they killed enough of their own kind on the hull of the ship to have too many questions about the layout of your internal organs.

"Hi!" said one. "I'm - I'm honestly really glad to meet you!" He absolutely dripped sincerity as he said that, smiling like he was getting to meet one of his heroes. "20022, right? Liquid Bronze sent us to meet you and escort you through to his command post. And wow - he's a big fan of yours, right? One professional to another?"
"I am shocked he has even heard of me," said 20022, though his tone was more irritated at himself for not concealing his reputation sufficiently.
"Oh, yeah, when he heard you were coming -" the Summerkind looked at his wrist where a blotchy birthmark in the pattern of writing was imprinted "- he couldn't have been more thrilled," he read, slightly woodenly. "He noted your contribution to the Report On Secession In The Pacifica Sector with great interest."
"A team effort, I assure you," said 20022 blandly.
"And what a team!" said the Summerkind. "Wow! And you've got one of them here with you! Double wow! What's your number, if I can ask?"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Between the old man's neck and the blade is the crow, first to be cut through. It shatters when impacted, fibreglass and silicon crunching into fractal patterns, blue light spilling out in the microseconds before its power source shorts out. It offers no resistance and the blade continues -

On to nothing. The old man is gone. The wreckage of the crow scatters across the dirt and campfire, little more than a twist of machinery and the eerie ringing of a dropped bell.

*

Some miles away a Cherubim turns to whisper in the old man's ears. Culture has come a long way from the days when it was considered an aspect of God - the body of an infant and the face of a mature man, with a shock of red hair, rosy lips and an a golden trumpet. It's eyes, too, have the same circuit pattern that once marked the crow.

Here the old man does not wear the ragged cloak of a wanderer; he wears the simple black robe with white collar that marks a Catholic priest. His beard, brow and grim expression are unchanged from when he negotiated with Ivar. He listens to the whisper of the mechanical Angel, reading from a book that resembles a Bible, until he is interrupted by a laugh.

"Caster!" roared a man who was more kin to the Heavens than angels. "How fares your attempt to betray us?"
Fox ears twitch mirthfully. Cyanis, nocturnal sunglasses finding valid use here in the radiant presence of her Servant, grins and elbows the warrior angel in the side. "Don't be like that. He thought he was being sneaky."
"I was not attempting to -"
"Please," laughed Archer. "I have been in enough sieges to have a sense for these things. Someone always breaks when life and death is on the line - and you were never a man of faith, were you Caster?"
Caster snapped shut his psuedobible and turned to face Archer. "I chose my battles well enough to never require it."
"You played it safe," drawled Archer. "I don't need to know your name to know that. You radiate cowardice and failure, nothing dared and nothing gained. It's why you can barely manage that parlor trick of yours while I..."

Archer raised his hands outwards. The expansive gesture took in the hundreds of siege engines, vast catapults, trebuchets, ballistas, and blackpowder bombards that gleamed in angelic gold and spectacular engraved detail. The machines moved miraculously into position, wheels grinding and turning as ranges are taken and parabolic arcs calculated.

"... I wrote my name in the ruins of a civilization," said Archer. He grinned and looked at Cyanis. "Master. Permission to open fire?"
"Do what you want," said Cyanis, sipping a boba tea through a plastic straw. "I'm not your dad."
"Hah!" said Archer. "Then I call on you, O Father Who Art In Heaven! Grant me victory in this new crusade!" He spread magnificent angel's wings and pointed at the distant, flickering campfire. "Siegeworks of Antioch! Fire!"

*

A distant rumble like thunder.

A shadow over the moon.

Darkness enveloping the stars.

Ivar looks up from the ruins of the crow to see an impossible sight. It was no longer air that filled the sky: It was stone. A mountain's worth of stone in the form of a thousand boulders, all coming crashing down from above like meteors.