Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"..." Hera sighed. She sat down and hugged her knees, her emerald dress extending away from her in all directions like the ocean. Within its depths, fish swam and lilypads bloomed. "Even if I decided to, I could not," she said. "My sister took that chance away. She ate my son alive, and I am not sure either of them even noticed what was happening. Since then things have only gotten worse, and worse, and worse..."

She tilted her head back and undid her hairpin. Her freed hair cascaded endlessly, falling into the depths of her dress, an optical illusion where she was above and below the landscape at once. "I tried to kill her," she said. "In my rage and despair. It was I who made Molech mad. The Spear was intended for Demeter. Ares did his best to fight for me, and we might have won, but Hermes intervened," she laughed bitterly. "She prevented me from killing Demeter, I prevented her from saving humanity. Demeter never gave the incident a second thought. What is left for me to try?"

Ember!

The good news is that you have already come dressed for the occasion.

A few modifications have to be made, of course. Cleaning for one, and then some adjustments for local tastes. A wedding veil is draped across your face, the better to conceal the gag. The bouquet placed in your hands is so overflowing with flowers it conceals the ropes pulled tight around your wrists. A carriage and train is wrapped around your hips, placed so that nobody can see the small device that delivers sharp electrical shocks to your rear whenever you so much as put a foot wrong. You are a klutz, you see, Ember, and the Summerkind handmaidens assigned to prepare you for your wedding have decided to leave nothing to chance. They intend to steer you like a puppet, kept in your place through immediate rebuke the second you leave it. You will be made perfect regardless of your opinions on the matter.

(The Cancellation shivers. Distant metal bends and tears. Your other suitor has not forgotten you.)

In this manner, you are walked towards the temple deck, towards the Shrine of Hera. There Liquid Bronze intends to finally make an honest woman out of you.

Dolce!

In the end, it is the starships - and not the leviathans of the deep void - that are technologically inferior.

The combat drums change rhythm, a deep and terrifying alert frequency. Lights respond to the resonance, applying blue-black filters. A synthetic horn ripples out a cry of alarm and everyone pauses in their fighting to grab hold of nearby wall panels and slam on emergency helmets if they can reach them. Out through the open shuttle bay in the wine dark void, prismatic lightning flares.

And the Sunshark bites.

Metal ruptures and tears. Teeth the size of houses rends through hyperium alloys. Plasmatic heat rends through the void. Debris pours everywhere, a spectacular cascade of ruin. Flesh-orange blotches of Summerkind reincarnation eggs spill out like grapes and the spectacular flares of adaptive evolution as dying Biomancers and support servitors erupt into flocks of tropical parrots and deep sea crocodiles add new colours to the prismatic black. You can see miles across the ruined structure of the Warsphere; twenty percent of its colossal mass gone in an instant as the hunter of the void strikes its prey.

And upon the brow of the mighty creature, one hand holding a pistol and the other a Razorwhip lash which she uses to drive the beast onwards, is a lioness. Her eyes search the ruinous scene for you and you alone.

Dyssia!

Line overtyping line. The ink is layering on thicker and thicker, the white blacked out as characters are hammered into their place. All of the knowledge of the worlds, all the possibility to write new ones, possibilities overlaying and overlaying as the same page is overtyped again and again. With no paper to grip ink hits ink, splashing and wet, beading together and dripping down the page...

You see the truth.

The words are traps.

Reality is in the mirror; in the reflection you can see on the edges where the light hits the liquid ink.

Dionysus is the substance of that mirror and they are not true, but they are not delusion. They are not lies. All of these alternate worlds, all of these possibilities, everything contained within the possibility of the ground-up Hadean crystals used to make this ink - all gateways into this world of creative madness. In those colourless depths are things more valuable than the truth: ideas. New ways of thinking. New ways of being. New ways for the galaxy to be, freed from fatalism.

This is the weapon the God of Madness is here to give you: how to glimpse the shape of something new.

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

She stands up stiffly. Something was wrong with the motion, it was too strained - it would take a deliberate moment's reflection to realize that she hadn't been sitting in a chair. She'd spent the whole meeting holding a squat and even for someone with her fitness obsession that took a toll.

(It was something she had to work on. Heron could walk crouched for hours at a time.)

"No problem," she said. She wanted to stretch, crick her neck - Heron wouldn't. Sometimes it felt like the Hero was made out of rubber. "See you, Vil."

She knew she couldn't beat Civelia. Maybe that was unfair; she didn't really think she could beat anyone. Any victory felt like her opponent had just made a trivial execution mistake; an accident, something that'd get washed out in a best out of three. There were some things - most things - that only Heron could do, and going toe to toe with the Goddess was outside her range. She knew her limits. She spent every day being reminded of them, like a prisoner knows the bars of her cage.

No, what she'd do if the balloon went up would be to rush the General Secretary. Damage the support apparatus. Buy time for Heron. That was her duty.

Kalentia!

"Oh, honey..." Kalentia sighed.

She was right, of course. Nothing in the worlds of magic would bring the release from passion the Lunarian sought. The Dark Dragon had ground the pyramid to rubble, and the rubble to sand, and the sand to dust, and the dust to atoms, and there amidst the atoms life sprang forth in a microbacterial bloom. Once the craving was inside of you it could animate you forever, and there was no spell to mend a broken heart[1].

The best she has is the offering of a handkerchief.

"Well, my auntie always said the best thing for impurity is a bath," said Kalentia[2]. "Do you want to try the hot spring? Maybe that'll help you relax."

[1] She'd checked.
[2] Ogden Pious was an odd duck.

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

Okay, so(1)

Mana is a fascinating topic, and the history of Arcane Philosophy is an endless sequence of wizards making really bad analogies about Mana in an attempt understand this vital force. Mana is like fire, a sequence of raw power that can be used to power the mechanisms of spells! Mana is like water, adapting to take on the characteristics of whatever shape it is poured into! Mana is like wood, growing and adapting a self-reinforcing ecosystem around it! So on and on endlessly, it's worth pulling back from answers that may be more correct than others(2) to talk about mana's fundamental observable qualities.

1: There are different kinds of mana. Different schools categorize it differently, but generally agree there are at least 6 and fewer than 16,777,216 varieties.
2: Mana shapes and is shaped by its environment. The mana naturally at rest inside a healer becomes more associated with healing magic; release that mana into the air without the focus of a spell and it'll start doing healer-y things over time to the environment; cleaning and restoring etc.
3: Heartblades are the ultimate form of magic because they represent one hundred percent mana efficiency. There is no wastage or slowdown, they're a frictionless manifestation of potential that can be withdrawn back into the self and recycled fully.

This is all to say, watching this idle working of the Goddess is far, far more interesting than anything that could ever be said here(3). Whatever Civelia is doing is potentially a revolutionary breakthrough in the Arcane Science, something that couldn't be replicated without shattering a great number of extremely expensive magical items in the process. It also hasn't escaped her notice for how weird it is for Civelia to be breaking something at all. What does any of this mean?

(1): On Wizards

Before going any further it is worth formally repeating that Tsane is a wizard, and whenever the topic of the wizard subculture comes up on crossword puzzles then the preceding word is more often than not something like 'hubris', 'mad', 'overconfident', 'evil', 'opinionated', 'overconfident', etc. A wizard must, by their nature, have big opinions about reality and those opinions are not guaranteed to reflect the actual reality. In fact, when a wizard is proven factually wrong about something, they are statistically more likely to conclude that reality is wrong and set about a great and terrible Working in order to fix it.

So. Grain of salt.

(2)

'Mana is like fungal gelignite' is the most convincing analysis so far btw.

(3)

Though she's privately stoked at the idea of breaking into the dragon mansion. Imagine getting to observe a magical creature like that up close - or see how it interacted with Sayanastia! And imagine getting to do field work while surrounded by maids! Actually, she's wildly hoping for this now, that sounds practically utopian(4)

(4)

In Tsane's fantasy, all of the maids flock to her in awe and terror of her arcane power and shower her with affection and praise, and also their skirts are definitely way below regulation length. Tsane has never had her ass kicked by a maid and so doesn't really appreciate where the 'knight' part factors in.

Kalentia!

"Hey, hey, easy there, it's okay," said Kalentia, kneeling down and holding both of her hands up. "Look, I know I've got no right to anything you want to keep private. After I'm done and you're better, if you want, I can get Tsane - my wizard friend - to erase my memory of today. It'll be like this never happened, okay? But for now I just need you to take it easy and work with me. You're very sick, and we both need to try our best for your recovery."

No amount of training or cleverness or knowledge could substitute for this; a healer's kindness. It wasn't much, but it was as sincere as she ever could be.

[Comfort and Support: 7]

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"You can always cook me meals," said Hera. "I never fail to miss them or appreciate them. I never fail to note the sentiment that goes into their preparation."

She says that as she thinks. It's a dangerous kind of thinking. She has the option to obliterate this entire sector of space as an alternative to answering it, and when it comes to the memory of children that is always a tempting option. Perhaps once she might have.

"The stories have not been kind to me," said Hera. "When they told the tale of Hephaestus, they said that when they placed him in my arms I was so horrified by his crippled ugliness that I threw him from Olympus. They said it like it was a matter of vanity, these men who had never borne a child inside them. They said it like I," she spread ten-trillion peacock feathers across the length of the galaxy, an ocean of green and blue, "am a slave to the biological defects that tormented humanity at the time. Not any of them considered what it meant for a Goddess to recognize a family member as hideous."

There is not certainty in her speech. Her doubts are still evident, no matter how many times she has told this story.

"Hephaestus was not physically deformed," said Hera. "He was spiritually deformed. He was born heartless. A creature of dead matter and dead machines. The mind and soul were nothing special to him, just more raw material, more dead matter to make into more dead machines. In his heart was an all consuming industry that ran for its own sake."

She stepped away. "He was not malicious. No cruelty, no wrath. I had a wicked son, Ares, who despite everything I could still love. Hephaestus was not wicked, he was worse. He was born with the mark of his grandfather, born with the love of creation. And for the sake of his love, anything was possible for him. Anything was acceptable. He would accept any cause, alliance or master, so long as he could continue his work. He would pave over a living galaxy if he could continue his work. Fallen from Olympus, he shared his love with humanity. He taught them to build miles-long cities in the desert to prove they could. He taught them them to burn the planet to power a machine that could pretend to be a very stupid person. He taught them to build the pyramid just to see how high they could pile it. And what he never did was teach them to maintain what they had already."

Her feathers had wilted, a galaxy of bone spikes mouldering away into stardust. "I still wonder if I could have taught him differently," she said.

Ember!

They come for you. All of them.

What wouldn't a man sacrifice for love? Summerkind are awakened to stupefying tranquilizer pheromones by Biomancer attendants, slowing their initial fury to a sclerotic headache, and legions of these dazed shambling soldiers are sent in pursuit. Stumbling, mindwiped and barely awake they pursue you in a vast crowd, hands reaching out to catch something just out of reach.

And it has to be them. Drones can't be relied on to do such delicate work as securing a bride, and the Biomancers are certainly not combat capable themselves. And when awakening a thousand Summerkind doesn't work, their only escalation is to awaken another thousand - and another. The Cancellation's corridors begin to flood with a tide of intensely hung over Summerkind all trying to catch one extremely helpful and enthusiastic puppygirl doing klutzy zoomies.

All of these soldiers are, incidentally, not being deployed in the shooting war with the Plousios.

Roll to Keep them Busy to see how long it takes this situation to resolve, if ever.

Dolce!

Ember hasn't exactly located Iskarot herself, but she has distracted literally everyone who might come between you and him. You find him coming out of the Garden, which glows orange-red with the roaring flames he has lit there.

"I have my bag," he said. "Let's help your friend."

Between him and Sanalessa it is shockingly easy to move through a crowd of sleep-deprived Summerkind. You reach the shuttle bay without problem, but as you're crossing to your destination the unicorn servitor hauls you both aside seconds before the crack-bang of a solid projectile volley blasts into the ground before you. A small rifle unit of ancient, decrepit Summerkind - the geriatric hospital patients kept around for Liquid Bronze's personal edification - have been organized and are staking out a position between you and the escape. You see the silhouette of 20022 standing safely by the doorway well behind them.

These soldiers, despite their dotage, represent a fearsome military unit. They were the best that 20022 could call on in this transitory period for the ship. While you're sure that they have no love at all for Liquid Bronze, 20022 probably made them some promises to get them out here.

"I can hold them off while you escape," said Sanalessa.

Dyssia!

"Is that what you want?" the hand is heavy on your shoulder, heavy and dry and still like a dead man's. "You want to see me imprisoned, little serpent? I understand. I can," you can hear the crackle as lips pull back from gums, "help you get what you want -"

But you don't want that at all. Do you?

You want to know why Zeus still supports the Endless Azure Skies. Why she allowed them to endure the destruction of the Atlas Cultural Sphere. Why she cast them down but did not stamp on the embers. Your course changes -

"I - you want to bring down the Skies? Many do, but you could be the one to make it happen. I can help you -"

But that's not it at all! You can see it in the reflection of the polished keys of the typewriter, the mirror gleam as your hands dance and slam, cutting off the output so fast that the letters smash over the top of each other. A new idea has occurred: what is Hermes doing in the underworld that is so important that she can't deliver Hades' message herself? What would happen if -

"- you wish to - stop! Hermes knows what she wants; she loves humanity, and in that love, she has the power to achieve great things. If you could just focus on one thing you could have my help -"

You're floating. You're buzzing. Everything's here for you, every question trying to get through your fingers all at once. That hand on your shoulder has tightened. It's shaking you, trying to get your attention. To get you to focus. Fingers clench your bones like they're trying to grip your brain. "Why don't you want to pay attention!?" snarls Aphrodite.

But that's the thing. You don't want that at all.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits was holding down the fort.

An important position! She was keeping the dragon Opalis a prisoner and guarding the mana core of the sunken giant, the two critical assets that would ensure foxgirl supremacy no matter how dark things turned out. She wasn't sidelined uselessly in the center of an impenetrable fortress because Actia didn't believe in her, she was doing critical work. Berserker knew it. She was sitting, legs folded, palms in her lap, eyes closed with the perfect stillness of someone who had nothing more to add to the situation. Kat was trying to imitate her.

She was so pretty. Kat wished she could talk. Why had she gotten stuck with Berserker? She didn't have a berserk bone in her body. She didn't even have an Assassin bone in her body - she was here with the means to seize the war for herself, she was very aware, but she hadn't even been able to properly steal her second tail. She'd just been given it as a punishment for someone else. She was a terrible foxgirl, she knew, and even having Actia and Cyanis kindly setting examples for her all the time they'd both known she was so hopeless that they could leave her in charge of the hencoop because she was more like a dog. It was so embarrassing!

The thought hurt so much that it messed up her sorry excuse for a meditation. She stood up, stuffed her hands in her pockets, walked to the pondshore, and threw a rock. It skipped across the water and impacted on the metal leg of the Shrine Giant.

The glowing metal leg of the Shrine Giant.

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits was terrible at being a fox. She didn't weave an illusion or throw a curse or conjure a thunderbolt or defensively marry anyone at all. She just dived to tackle Berserker out of the way of the energy beam, like a big dumb sucker. It'd serve her right if it burned off one of her tails in the process and she went back to being a shoulder fox.

But it didn't. The beam slashed through the ground, immolated Actia's shrine and cut through Berserker's castle walls from the inside. Glowing blue, wrenching itself free from the cables that bound it, earth and root sloughing off as the ancient metal giant tore itself from centuries of mud and sediment. A terrible machine of the ancient world awakened before her and it raised its mud-filled cannon to seek out the captured dragon.

She'd been wrong. She hadn't been benched somewhere useless. It was much worse than that. Now she had to save the day.

*

"I will not," said the angel Bohemond, touching lightly down in the throne room, "linger on your failure here, ancestor, because doing so will reflect poorly on myself. But I will suggest that for all the softness you may imagine lives in the hearts of Christians, they did know how to hold an empire together far longer than the Old Gods ever did."

His feathers have faded from radiant gold to a powder-yellow; his armour is no longer alight in all-consuming divine radiance. He is whole and hale, full of power - but only full of power. The tether that empowered him with a flood of energy has been severed and so it no longer burns out of him as it did moments ago. Even as he took your castle, someone has taken this opportunity to steal his from him.

But. He is too deep to escape now.

He conjures his longbow and holds it ready.

"Come, then," said Archer. "Let me consign you once again to the past."

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

It is a weird thing to think, in the midst of a ritual prayer, in the midst of an organisation of one-armed mystics, when given the sacred opportunity to watch the scribes who would compile all the particular details of this meeting into the books that someone like her would one day read in order to understand this bit of history, but...

But she kind of hates how irreligious the whole thing is.

Tsane formed an opinion as a child, in that absolutist way that children do, that Civelia and Heron were both monsters just like the Dark Dragon. That didn't mean they were bad, just that they weren't normal. They had type affinities, unique compulsions, hunting grounds, and life cycles the same as Ghosthands or Solar Hecklers. One of her first bestiary entries had been an attempt to describe Princess Heron in the same way she did any other monster, but her mother had pulled her aside and explained to her that probably wouldn't go down well with grandfather.

The injustice of that still gnawed at her, deep down.

So the meeting felt wrong to her. People were listening to Civelia, of course, politely taking notes, waiting their turns to speak, but for all the religious trappings they were emotionally as checked out as if they were in a city council meeting. These people had either forgotten or did not remember that the delicate teenager sitting across from them was an unstoppable, eternal monster who had beaten empires into existence like a blacksmith hammered iron. Just because she hadn't done anything dangerous recently didn't mean she was safe.

They should be quaking in their boots. Tsane certainly was.

Injimo's here, wearing the Princess disguise. She'd be as checked out while idly hoping for violence as Heron herself would be, which means that she's an immaculate fit for this role. Sayanastia finds being in a room this elaborately bureaucratic physically uncomfortable, so she's in her dragon shape (the one that's about the mass of a rhinoceros, not her other dragon shape) up on the rooftop, staring at the void of the sky and warming herself in the sun. Sometimes her head will lean down to the window next to where Tsane is sitting to check in on things; sometimes she'll take an idle, corrosive bite out of the windowframe or the brick wall. Small acts of vandalism but by Dark Dragon standards she should get a gold sticker by the end.

Kalentia!

It all comes off. Everything gets washed. A warm and dry set of recovery clothes are applied afterwards. The Guild would sacrifice her to a dragon if she did anything less[1].

To accomplish all of that in safety and modesty, she is required to put up a - well, a barrier. But she is using the technique for its original medicinal purpose of forming a clean and sterile environment, keeping out any contaminants or curious Factorums. Beyond that there can be no secrets from a surgeon; who knows what else might be missed?

"It's weird to see someone sick like this," said Cair, trying and failing to see somebody sick like this. "I can't remember the last time I came down with more than a cough."
"It's because the last incarnation of the Hero purged the Destroyer Cult of Plague and banished their demonic patron," said Kalentia. She was entirely task focused; while battlefield wounds were romantic, illness was something to eliminate with cold calculation. "Since then, and since the link was discovered between untapped black mana and spontaneous disease outbreaks, there hasn't been a major sickness."
"The link between what?"
"Oh, you didn't hear?" said Kalentia. "I thought Roschel Flameskull was a household name for discovering that."
"Hell of a name for a healer," said Cair.
"She wasn't," said Kalentia, making a face. "She was a battlemage. She noticed that rates of sickness went down whenever she had a big fight. Turns out that she was drawing all the dark magic out of the air and turning it into explosions and attack skeletons and what have you, and that was preventing it from naturally seeking out ways to harm people itself."
"Oh, shit!" said Cair, snapping her fingers. "Is she why Warceror has those big burning skull banners up everywhere?"
Kalentia sighed. "Yes. Warceror, the Demolition Derby of Death and Destruction, was in fact started by Roschel Flameskull as a way to burn off excess mana in times of peace."
"Did you hear that Main Bloodcup invented a spell that makes someone's blood come out and punch them in the face?" said Cair excitedly.
"Yes," Kalentia said with a truly profound level of resignation. "So far I have received fourteen theoretical curative spells I'm meant to memorize and field test in the event where I encounter that spell in the wild, which I am then expected to write reports on."

[1] It is not fair to say that dragons are particularly attracted to White Mages above other magical practitioners[2], but for a variety of historical reputations the practice of sacrificing Guild members at the drop of a hat has set in. In particular, one Aspect of the Dark Dragon in Cycle Four was particularly obsessed with White Mages, and Sinbeasts would frequently identify a village's Guild member as its most valuable individual member, which made them particularly satisfying prisoners as they satisfied Greed, Envy and Pride all at once. This state of affairs, along with the general effectiveness of sacrificing a maiden of any kind in the face of military threat, has meant that the first response of a lot of towns to being attacked by anything from monsters or wolfgirls is to offer them the town's White Mage in tribute.
[2] unfortunately

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Ah," said Assassin with a smile. "I did not expect things to be this easy."

They stand on the castle rampart together, each holding a glass of wine. Assassin had dressed for the occasion; no longer in indistinct blacks, he wore his cardinal's red. Redder than the flare of the dying castle.

"An individual with a sword," he touched his breast, just below his crucifix, "I would have had difficulty with, despite what Dumas did to me. But the fool conjured a castle and an army, and that was checkmate. It takes a truly naive view of human nature to imagine that a holy army, united in purpose, is a coherent or sustainable thing. Even Bohemond knew that it wasn't, and he was far before my time and my sophistication."
Actia leaned forwards on the balcony. The fur on her black ears rippled in the breeze. Her eyes were locked onto the battle, blue technomantic lights playing across her eyes and face.
Assassin appreciated her quiet. He did not have many opportunities to give sermons, what with his responsibilities.
"For you see, while I am most commonly," his lip sneered as he touched the basket hilt of his rapier, "remembered for rolling in the gutter dueling mere musketeers, my true work was the destruction of a continent. The Holy Roman Empire is remembered as a joke; I was the one that made it so. In my day, it was unsurpassable; a monolith of blood and faith and gold, a pan-national array of wealth and splendor. The oceans ran silver with the wealth that poured in from the Americas and the Bishop of Rome would humble himself by placing a crown atop the head of the Emperor. All the world existed within the Hapsberg palm, and against it, mere France."
The Cardinal extended his closed fist and opened it. Sand ran through his fingers, blowing away in the breeze. "But all of this was built on the hearts of men," he declared, "and the Lord our God teaches us above all that men are but dust and ashes. It was not I that lit the fire of heresy, but it was I who fed and fanned it. I did not possess the treasure of Spain, but what little I had was enough to procure swords. Put a sword in the hands of a slave and she is a slave no more, and no amount of gold can buy back her servitude."

He spread his hands as his speech reached its crescendo, and from behind him poured an endless flock of doves. Unlike the Messenger of God, these did not bear olive branches - they carried with them letters, sharper than thousands of daggers.

"Behold, the weapon that ended the Empire," said Cardinal Richelieu. "My Noble Phantasm: The Thirty Years War!"

*

The Army of Vengeance falls.

A vast, bloody conflict has erupted within their ranks - loyalists verses traitors. It is not a clean break or a unified treason, but it is not meant to be; it is a quagmire. The loyalists gain an advantage and Assassin's dark magic strengthens the traitors. More mana has to be poured in to support them, and it works, grinding back against the tide, solidifying Avenger's position. But just as victory seems to come closer another regiment defects and the castle falls into bloody violence again.

The genius of this skill is in its manipulation of hope. Every time victory's jaws snap shut over empty air they got a taste. It was so close, only one more obstacle, only one more crisis and then everything would be perfect. The recognition that there will be no clean end to this is to be delayed until after it has taken far too much in the struggle.

*

"Wait," said Actia, ears focusing. "Stop."
"Stop?" scoffed Richelieu.
"Diaofei just went in there - the idiot," hissed Actia. "She has no chance. Stop your spell."
"My child, I could no more stop this than I could stop the moon," he said.
Actia turned to him, command seal burning bright. Assassin kept his composure. The two stared bloody daggers at each other.
"Fine," said Actia. "Whatever. Keep it going. But we're going to get her out."
"Why?" said Richelieu. "We are quite safe here. We are gathering power while our enemies tear each other to pieces. It's everything you wanted."
Actia was quiet, ears focused, jaw set.
"And besides, what is she to you?" said Assassin. "A stone you stepped on in passing. One who is responsible for this very horror with which we confront ourselves. A distant death in a distant land."
"I didn't know she..." said Actia. "We're going. We're going. It's not because I owe her anything, but she deserves better than this."

Return to Thellamie

Tsane knows better than to accept the gifts of the Outside.

Cair snatches it from the Shadow's palm before its talons fully open.

"Cair will do no such - oh damn it, Cair -" said Tsane.
"What?" said Cair, shoving the Charm inside her coat pocket. "That's a dangerous artifact. Someone could get hurt."
"Go and help Kalentia," said Tsane through gritted teeth.
"For real?" said Cair, glancing back over her shoulder. "She's got a patient, Tiss. She's happier than the Dark Dragon rolling in trash. Uh, don't tell either of them I said that."
Tsane tossed her head, then pocketed her book and pulled her hair back out of her face, binding it behind her head with a purple and black scrunchie. Then she folded her arms (ow) and set herself in a solid, unyielding pose. "I don't work for you, Shadow," she said(1). "I'm not going anywhere. Not unless you tell me what you're doing here."

(1): A note on Fear

Of course she's afraid. It's huge. It's deadly. It has its own section of the Library. She is practically inside its mouth. Any moment the realities of size and strength could creak through the flimsy barrier of social convention and the full weight of this monstrous beast could crush down upon a defenseless mage and there would be nothing she could do about it. It tells her to fear not? It must be mad.

But that's why she took this job in the first place.

Sure, she loves lizards and the various other small creatures that fill out the entry level bestiaries. But that's nothing compared to the intoxication of field testing. To stand before one of the most dangerous creatures in the world and bet everything on a type affinity weakness, to trust entirely in the words of an ancient and mouldering tome that took three weeks to dry and restore enough to become legible, to borrow the confidence of a true Hero - it's like being in the eye of a hurricane. Her heart is pounding, she can barely breathe, but survival depends on keeping the show without flinching. It's like skating on air, flying only as long as you can ignore that you can't. It's the biggest rush.

[Second question: What do you love most?]

Breathless Dead

Bella!

Hera picks out from her vast panoply a symbol. Engraved in silver within the eye of a peacock feather, a sequence of dots resolving into lines, she places it in the air between you and her. It unravels its magic in a whirl of ribbons. A transcendentally subtle masterwork of etiquette magic, a spell of translation and perspective. Its purpose is to create a protocol of language between the Greater and the Lesser. A clear set of expectations and social conventions that say: So long as you do not stray beyond your limits and your place, you may speak candidly.

It has been the death of many empires that they never had and never thought to ask for this spell. For them, an inferior speaking boldly to a superior meant weakness for the superior, and had to be rebuked. Kings entered bubbles and, cut off from reality, drove their empires to ruin. In this working is the ability to speak your mind without risking accidental offense; all of the caveats and 'but perhaps I am mistaken' and bowing and scraping accounted for by the humility in your heart rather than the precision of your training.

But the humility in your heart is not negotiable. This is still a God. As those peacock feathers unfold again you know that outside of the gift of this narrow path is still profound peril.

"You may speak, child," said Hera, Queen of the Gods. "How did you come to be here?"

Ember and Dolce!

There is a fast way out. Conveniently, the Cancellation is launching thousands of Boarpedoes at this very moment at the Plousios. Getting on one of those is simply a matter of wading through the blood and ruin of all of the Summerkind between here and there. But, because that means evading the defensive screens of two different ships, that is not at all safe.

There is a safe way out. It lies in a ring at the end of the altar; simply give into Aphrodite allow Love to conquer all. Bound and betrothed you will all be kept secure by Liquid Bronze through the fires of battle, close in his confidence, ready for the rescue of your many suitors.

Dyssia!

Once upon a time worth was derived not through glory and title, but through possessions. The universe was smaller then and every grain of sand could be measured, accounted and given a number and a price. In this world arose supreme the Smith God: Hephaestus.

He stood at the center of all things, for everything had to pass between his hands to have any value at all. It was his hands that built unbreakable armours, his hands that made glass think, his hands that made the great suits that raised up the original Knights. Each time something passed through his hands it became more refined, more rare, more desirable. And so it was that Hephaestus built a pyramid, the object of world's desire, the whole galaxy rearranged into this shape.

He did not care that the pyramid was the shape of immortality. Hephaestus never cared for what it was he built, what became of his materials or scraps. He was famous for this; he wanted merely to build. He did not see the scythe when it descended, didn't believe it even when he felt it. Who would kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Demeter lifted his bloody head from the floor and ate it whole.

The pyramid was the shape of immortality. With the galaxy arranged into this configuration then Summer might never have to die. The afterlife could be kept at bay outside the walls of perfected hierarchy, entropy conquered, changed quenched, and the realm of the Afterlife - the realm of Dreams - consigned to a memory.

This is how the Age of Knights ended: When Demeter picked up the Smith God's hammer and began to build. Each time a life form passed between her hands it became more refined, more rare, more desirable. The galaxy became an ecosystem trending towards a single perfection and extinction.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Diaofei witnesses with horror.

The Spirit World, the mantras said, reflected and magnified. Give it peace and it will become a place of peace; give it rage and it will shake and roar. Stillness was required of a guardian; stillness that she had, to her shame, lost in the name of love. The walls had broken down and a demon had emerged - but it had been a softer demon, one made of yearning and compassion.

She had fed it rage. This, then, the demon had reflected and magnified. Now she saw its consequence writ large upon the world. The oldest wisdom that the Daily Affirmation of the Way <3 always came back to was 'You are not punished for your anger; you are punished by your anger', and she had not truly understood it until now.

Before when she had sent this creature against Actia she had been deluded; she had thought herself disciplined and in control, had thought herself making the rational choice to bring down a wicked spirit, cloaked in righteousness and justified in her duty as guardian. That had been a mistake, an emotional mistake. Her true duty was clear: to kill this manifestation of her rage, and in so doing expunge her shame and set the world right.

This situation was completely different.

She drank the healing potion Caster had given her, distilled from the oil of serpents. It tasted of grease and paraffin. Wiping her lips, she headed for the castle, not a single doubt in her mind.

*

A storm of crashing stones and bolts fall upon the ruined castles, smashing their agony into dust and mana. A divine silence rises over the battlefield.

Bohemond is next.

The Crusader of Antioch, released from Assassin's poison - though with his Master safely under Actia's stiletto heel - stands before the terrible castle. He is an Archangel besieging the gates of Hell, and there is no better champion for this battle. His great engines heave and pull, endless ranks of clanking machinery drawing back and releasing boulders and sharpened trees, the landscape around him torn up and made to fly.

This is a distraction.

It was not siege engines which had captured the great fortress - it had been treachery. All his beatific glory was bestowed upon him by others after the fact - Bohemond understood the powers of coin and cunning. So it is that as the storm of rock and wood rains down, Bohemond's true magic presses against the legions of the empty servants, seeping into some and filling them with rot and decay. These wretched creatures then, together and in secret, open the gates to the rush of Assassin's black-robed killers.

Once again, Actia seeks to strike the heart.