Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Kissing!

You would think that this fell under the domain of the God of Love. At the end of the day Aphrodite would smile and be satisfied that it has all come apart into this. But his was always the yearning and never the having; the separation close enough to touch - and every barrier in the way. He would give you Helen with his right hand, and give you war with his left. He would show you Narcissus, and show Narcissus himself. He existed in the space between; the yearning, the wanting, the suffering, the dissatisfaction, the hunger and the empty snare.

His distance can exist within a kiss. His distance can exist in even deeper intimacy, where fingers entwine and sweat merges and it seems like you can't get any closer. Doubt can run deeper than tongues, and a pounding heart only circulates the fear that grows inside it.

That is all to say, he is not the god of marriage. He is not the god of peace. He is not the god of having and holding, in sickness and in health. He is not the god of a life lived without regrets. He can't stand it here.

He leaves.

And when he goes, time really does stand still.

Take a moment to enjoy the moment.

Dyssia!

Oh hey. Time has literally stopped. That's fascinating. Was that because of something you did?

You can see how to start it up again; you just need to shake yourself just so, ease yourself out of this Olympian hinterland and resume the flow of normal time. But until you do that you've got all the time in the world. Enough time to rescue your friends from the battle with the Sunshark, enough time to read and think, enough time to have all the sleep you want, enough time to just sit for as long as you like or get everything you're thinking down on paper. You're lucky; you've got as long as you want.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

The Shrine Giant is not wise. It does not know that it should release an entangled weapon to save itself. It is a creature of greed and grasping and it is well aware of the value of its trident. There is a path where it might grip onto its doomed weapon even as it dooms itself.

The Shrine Giant is, however, cunning. It knows that it can purchase a replacement.

Technomantic impulses burn out of it and drive into the depths. The sky may belong to Avenger's thunder, the earth belongs to the terrible machinery that spat out this monster in ages past. The giant releases its weapon and extends its palm just in time to snatch the exact duplicate of its trident as it erupts from the stagnant water of its pond; within a moment it has resumed its brutal, hammering assault. As it drives back Avenger's armour, more replacement components begin to emerge; armour paneling and ammunition reloads, delivered by metal drones to repair and refit the Shrine Giant in real time.

*

She looks at her bloody hand, and does not hesitate.

"Those are the weapons of the spirit world," she said, slamming her undamaged fist into Avenger's gut. Shining, pure energy shatters through her strike, sending out a great cloud of mana that gleams as it vanishes. "I do not need them. I do not want them."

She strikes again, this time with her bloody hand. Each hit is a negation, the annihilation of magic, the denial of reality and the self in the same impact. "You are a creature of the spirit world. I do not need you. I do not want you."

Her pistoning strikes accelerate, becoming a flurry. The air itself burns cold and dead as her perfect focus drives away desire and all that goes with it. "You are nothing but my second mistake. I should not have conjured you. Now I will banish you."

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

"Sure," said Injimo-as-Heron. "I'm down a fighter. Keep the team safe."

Mm. Too wordy. Heron would somehow have communicated the same information in half the words - maybe even just a nod, or even just 'YES' - but that niggling doubt was easy to brush away. She was actually excited for this; she'd just gotten to assign Aadya to the Injimo role. That meant that she wouldn't have to concern herself with defense when the fight did come; she could go all out. That was a rare opportunity to try to fight like Heron did; all out, invincible and unstoppable, needing and concerned with no one. It was no mystery why anyone capable of fighting that way fought that way.

Cair!

"Hey, hey, chill a second," said Cair, somehow wiggling one of her arms up through the cage of fingers. She's sliding out the top like squeezed toothpaste. "I get it(1). You know?"

(1) Civelia, don't let Tsane see this

Like, seriously, how to put it? The difference between being around Tsane and having Tsane's attention is the difference between looking at the stars and dancing with one of the Fallen. Wizards are like that - if they've got a theoretical framework for you they can dismiss you as just an exotic example of a type that some specialist will write a paper about, later. If you're out of scope entirely they'll come at you like the giant chainsaw mine thing from Yukisworld.

Anyway, the thing that wizards don't really get is that there's the magic that you have and the magic that you are. They class it like 'orange' or 'terramancy' and stuff, but it's a whole parallel discipline called Materium. It's not just a collection of interesting facts that comes together into a bestiary entry or using a hammer as a magic wand or whatever. It's not that her hammer is a very efficient manifestation of her internal magical field; it's that she's not all who she is without it. She'd lose herself just as real without the poetry.

"But before we go any further then we're going to have to exchange titles properly," said Cair, squirming her other hand out the top of the fist. "That being the polite thing to do, right? But there's a fairness problem; I know yours, and you've already had three guesses as to mine. And your ratings are 'half correct', 'entirely incorrect', and 'entirely correct'. So tell you what - I'll give you three more guesses. Figure out what I am and I'll settle with you as an equal. Doesn't get fairer than that."

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

"Good at using her tongue?" said Injimo-as-Heron. "Just how hard did you lose that fight?"

Teasing isn't judging. She knows what it is to lose a fight, and so does Heron. There have certainly been extended periods where the Heroine was held captive, rendered into a damsel in distress, chained up with a chained bell collar in chains, gagged and kneeling and enslaved, wearing a harem outfit and looking at viewer. These things just happened and there was an entire branch of the martial arts dedicated to reversing that situation when you were in it. It's for that reason Injimo presses for details; if she was going to have that rematch with Aadya at some point, she probably needs every advantage she can get.

[Entice: 6]

"She changed her hair colour, but that was probably still her," said Injimo. "Appearance can change, but skills can't - and how many skateboarding maid knights can there be?"

Cair!

Before I get into that I'm going to answer your secret knowledge craving r.e. swimsuits.

So Kalentia wears a string bikini with gauzy white veil attachments, like the beachwear version of a wedding dress. They expand out when she's in the water giving her a bit of an angel wing look. She's got a lot of scars, almost as many as Injimo, but she's also got a tattoo pattern that links them up and adds stars to the join points so it looks like constellations. Cool effect

I don't see the point. My clothes are waterproof, I just go in fully dressed and shake myself off like a dog afterwards.

Anyway, I'm not really a tinker. Heron did most of that - she could get good at anything. My job is to manage the stockpile. Heron made dozens of magical swords over the process of teaching herself blacksmithing, most of which she used once and threw away. I can sort, label, and catalogue a suit like this but the technicalities of how it works are way beyond me. I'm going to need to take this one upstairs.

You wouldn't believe the stuff that's in the Stacks. Heron left to fight moon demons? Well, odds are one of them came down here sometime in the past, and Heron stuffed it in a box. Or maybe there'll be some sort of moon-based superintelligence shard, or a giant girl who sleeps in the heart of a meteor, or a magic wedding ring that grants wishes. You never know until you go looking.

[Commune with the Unseen: 8. Cair gives a powerful entity a String, and learns something important from the Unseen. Restless Unseen cause a haunting.]

Breathless Dead

Bella and Ember!

The Shrine of Hera opens to the void. The great leviathan suitor of the Sunshark looms above, endless rows of teeth hungering for its bride. Its body burns in a dozen places from the rain of plasma torpedoes that fall upon it; soon it will have no choice but to retreat. Damaging the ship was within its capabilities, outright destroying it is not.

Below at the shrine waits the Avatar of Liquid Bronze. A tall, gangly biomechanical sculpture; a projection of the Biomancer General allowing for action at a distance. Even in love, Liquid Bronze is a prudent man and does not risk himself in person. After all, he has a mission, and missing a wedding here or there cannot be allowed to distract him from the mission.

Not that he wanted anyone to notice this; it is only the power of the Auspex that reveals this empty shell for what it is. A deadly combatant in its own right and filled with the pheromantic chemicals to activate or alter nearby Summerkind, this is a battlefield design. It is designed for durability and self-repair. Do not allow it to speak.

In the pews are Summerkind, bought in to fill out the numbers. They sit politely in their chairs despite the chaos above and below them. They were, after all, born mere hours ago so none of this really strikes them as strange. They await their instructions but, as they have not been to a wedding before, don't know how things are supposed to go and so will not question anything strange they see.

And into this moment, stepping down from the Shrine of Hera where she'd appeared embraced by the stone statue of the divinity, is Bella.

Dolce!

"I am afraid if there is anyone out there who I need to kill on your behalf," said Vasilia as the door on the shuttle craft slammed closed. "They shall have to wait. You look like you haven't been eating at all -"

She is politely saying that she hasn't been eating at all either. She's visibly lost weight, and you'd reason that is equal parts from worry and not having a high enough opinion of the other cooks aboard the ship. Vasilia isn't a picky eater, exactly, it's just that her standards have been raised very, very high and she's gotten by quite a while on the hopes that her beloved would be returned to her.

You even see on her face the determination to cook for you. The determination to be a good wife and take care of her poor, lost, rescued husband. That determination will absolutely win out over her desire to taste your cooking again - of course you should rest and let her take care of it, you must be exhausted.

But the fact that it's a struggle says less about her love and more about your talent in the eyes of someone who truly appreciates you.

Dyssia!

The God of Madness shakes their head, the ink spreading and flowing like shadow-puppets. Not a cage. No bars. No constraints. Desire does not work that way. Instead:

A clock - an old fashioned circular clock. Hands moving ceaselessly. Every moment in chase, touching for moments and then moving onwards. Smash the clock, freeze the hands - it is still a circle. As soon as it is repaired it will start moving again, around and around and around. That is the shape of time. All things rise until they inevitably start to fall. Tick, tick, tick - until that twelve falls all the way back to one. Until the greatest and wisest becomes hungry for their children.

Dionysus grips the clock and pulls it. It breaks like taffy, coming apart as it is stretched from a circle to a line. They laid it out in front of you, a single long straight ruler, one to twelve - and then it stops. And what then, after twelve?

That's not for you to know.

Not knowing is the point. Not acting is the point. Going only so far, and then stopping - even if stopping means letting everything you worked for fade back into the ocean...

It's hard. Isn't it?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Do I feel like I am in charge?" said the Cardinal mildly. "Do I feel clever? Do I understand what it is that you want?"

Something gold glinted on Aeglesia's finger.

"I hardly think that your opinion is relevant in any of those questions," said the Cardinal. "No, no, no. All I need from you is to witness. By the power invested in me, I declare myself and Aeglesia husband and wife, speak now or forever hold your peace..."

*

The Shrine Giant lurched from the swamp.

It was at its heart an instrument of control. Long dormant adhesive launcher pods burst all over its body, individually targeted to all the joints on Avenger's machine. It wrenches at and pulls off its own faceplate; where a cockpit or pilot might have sat instead is a single, strange, technicolour eye, pulsing hypnotic swirls. This mad eye does not just confuse and disorient the mind, it confuses and disorients space and time; everything is off. Movements take too long or happen too quickly, a shift to throw off finely honed instincts and make its opponents feel drunk and clumsy. And against an opponent labouring under the weight of paralysis and confusion, the Shrine Giant attacks with its primary weapon - a long and barbed trident. It pushes forwards like an ancient gladiator, beating back against the weight of the tower shield with the immortal strength of its fusion heart.

*

Diaofei entered the control chamber. Her hands glowed orange, wisps of smoke surrounding them. She was eighty-five steps through the Daemon-Banishing Kata; soon she would hit the first break point and then she'd truly be able to fight even these wicked ghosts as peers.

She saw the King in Crimson, holding the hand of his unconscious and bound bride. She knew in her bones this was Actia's servant - and she knew that she'd been wrong. Wrong to doubt herself, wrong to trust - all of this horror had been set in motion by the damn fox. Here at the heart of the corruption her influence was here, just like it had been in her own heart.

"Guard," said Assassin to Avenger. "It seems we have an intruder. I am forbidden by Command Seal from doing anything about it, so I leave this one to your imagination."

Diaofei took the eighty-sixth stance. Filter out the words. The lies. Only the pure way was left to her.

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

In her capacity as sparring instructor, one of Injimo's tasks is to go out into the world, learn new combat skills, and then teach them to Princess Heron. This means, as most everything she does usually means, losing. She enters new dojos or martial traditions as a novice and then fails as a novice until she's distilled the heart of something useful enough for Heron to pick up.

From Aadya it was wrestling. It was a good memory. On one side she had the feeling of being tangled up and helpless in the arms of a muscular woman, and then on the other she'd gotten to put Heron into some nasty pins and hold her there until she perfected the breakout technique. It was a shame she didn't have a chance to see how that fight would have gone on her own time (REMATCH REMATCH REMATCH), but she was on the clock now more than she usually was.

"Hear you fought the assassin," said Injimo as Heron. "What should I know?"

Kalentia!

In the past, Heron experimented with flame magic rather than her familiar lightning. Her completed battledress, the Invincible Flame Armour, was the culmination of that quest. It was forged from a dragon's fever dream, a volcano's indigestion, and a night of passion with Summer amongst other lesser catalysts. She walked the world for a while as a firestorm, fields of rolling flames as tame as grass.

The histories didn't say what went wrong with it. Cair didn't know or wasn't telling. All Kalentia knew is that it shined, radiant in orange and yellow, in its containment sphere of molten glass at the bottom of a jagged lake. The light from below filtered through the water's reflection of the strange half-void sky, staining the water an admixture green. A little wooden bath shrine had been constructed or collected and placed outside the narrow band of coastal water where the water was warm and not scalding. Rurik's fishing rods were stored neatly outside the front door, next to Injimo's kayak.

Despite the sky being visible, the shrine existed on a 'floor' of its own - walk five minutes away from the lake in any direction and you risked falling to another part of the Nexus, or even directly into the Outside. A rope ladder passed through a hole in the sky down into what seemed like a bottomless pit; the only entrance and egress.

"Don't go out too far," Cair said. "It's dangerous to get too close to most things down here."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"I shall have to have a painting commissioned of this moment," came the voice of Assassin from a blood-soaked shadow. "The devil pagan standing monstrous and bloody above the martyred angel. The madness of the past arising to consume a Christian present, a mother devouring her son - haha -" there was a moment of reluctance, a moment of struggle, but in the end a failure to prevent a wicked laugh from burbling out.

Cardinal Richelieu stepped from the shadows. Luxurious in his Cardinal's bloody red, surrounded by a cordon of crimson-tabarded traitors and killers.

"Oh, it really has been remarkable to watch this little war play out," said the Cardinal. "A true battle of the one-eyed men. Bohemond saw the power in the Church, but thought it lay in relics. Julian saw through the power of the relics and thought it meant that the Church itself was false. The pagan saw the power of fear and terror, imagined it to be a mere sword."

The Cardinal ascended the stairs towards the throne, shielded by his men, and reached out to caress the shivering face of Aeglesia. He couldn't quite keep the smirk off his face, despite another struggle.

"Fear and hope," he said, "are both merely half of the equation. Alone, useless. But together," he turned, rubbing his fingers, "together -! Fear panics the masses, and hope tells them where to run! You have built this terror of a castle, but -"

He slouch-fell into the throne and gripped the sides with both hands. Immediately as he did so the castle shook. The ground heaved, windows shattered and great gusts of smoke erupted into the air. The scorching, burning focus of intense red laser energy ripped through its outer battlements, obliterating entire spires and ramparts.

*

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits stared up at the Shrine Giant. Its lights burned red against the blue, boiling together like sirens. Its arm had been heaved up, away from the dragon Opalis and towards the distant castle, tearing a rent through the landscape as it cut. Its other arm reached up, trying to pull the cannon back down, but it resisted - the mecha caught in a struggle between two masters.

*

"- all you have done is drive everyone else into my arms," said the Cardinal, putting his feet up on the throne's arm rests. "One of the great laws of balance, the same as did for Spain. The more terrifying you are the greater the coalition that forms against you."

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.