Thanqol

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Your plan has failed, Assassin," sighed Caster, sitting down heavily. A mechanical dog with a screen for a face hopped onto his lap and stared at the Cardinal with glowing blue eyes.
"It has merely become messy," said Assassin. "Lancer will still triumph."
"Messy," said Caster, holding up a hand in frustration. "Is failure."
"This entire operation hinged on disrupting the transfer of information," said the mechanical hound abruptly, voice clipped and artificial. "Instead we revealed it. Our opponents must surely have noticed the repeated attempts on the dragon's life by now."
"Well," said Assassin. "If that is the case, I will simply have to take matters into my own hands -"
He paused to look down at the mechanical tendril stabbing him through the chest.
"No, I do not think so," said Caster. "I think you betrayed us. I think that you are working in concert with your Master. I think that you knew she would foil your scheme."
Assassin opened his mouth to speak. Instead he coughed up blood. He grinned through bloody teeth.
"And even if my guesses are wrong," said Caster, "I think we can find better uses for you."
With a whirr of ancient machinery, Assassin was wrenched away from Caster's sight, carried into the heart of the massive technological monolith that ran deep into the heart of the world.
Even as his face dissolved into the light, he was chuckling - and then the metal walls slid back into place.

*

Some days it sucked to be a dragon.

No matter how far society and technology came, nobody ever seemed to fully move past the idea that you were composed of high end crafting components. Even if nobody was actively murdering you over it it was still unrelentingly awkward. When she had been losing her baby teeth a local bandit princess had tried to steal them so that she could grow an army of deadly handmaidens, which had lead to an intense 3am battle in her bedroom with the Tooth Fairy (who was real, but only for dragons). Her teacher had refused to accept that as a valid reason to delay her exam and so she'd been so exhausted she almost failed out of arcane economics. She'd once broken up with a human girlfriend because she'd gotten really into making jewelry out of her scales (which did deserve it, they had a rare rainbow shine she was very proud of) and they weren't growing fast enough to keep up with demand, which had made her feel like a half-plucked chicken. And that wasn't even getting into the time a Technomancer had tried to buy her voice because her 'singularity generation projector was broken, and therefore able to be reverse engineered' which in addition to being very scary had rudely called attention to her inability to ignite her breath attack like other dragons.

And now a foxgirl with an axe wanted her blood. She knew this day would come. She knew they wouldn't be satisfied with just her - erm anyway.

"Why don't we explore other options first?" said Opalis, bargaining as sweetly as she ever had. "I mean, we have not yet investigated to see if Ms. Julia could be redirected into the exploration of material riches? I am authorized to grant her a very generous timeshare in a beach vacation house collectively maintained by my Order in order to -"

The next part of that was unfortunately lost over the sound of a spear piercing through a stone wall.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana and Redana!

Some thoughts are like black holes. The idea itself can never be explored, never spoken, but at the same time it binds the mind to it with crushing gravity that can never be escaped. Personality begins to emerge around the edge of the thought like trapped light - haha wouldn't it be funny if? - but continues a little too long to be a bit. Its presence bends the personality around it even though it never lets itself be observed directly. And there it lurks in the darkness of the brain until a catgirl straps it into the Matter Decompressor and says out loud the thing that one was intending to take to the grave.

She's more naked than the loss of her dress would suggest. She's breathing heavily against her gag. She's in chains and does not need them. There's nothing left to cover, and so for the first time she stands - on tiptoes, arms held high by chains - with protean pride. She no longer needs to conceal what she wants to do; the only question left to her is what she'll be allowed to do.

The gag is pulled from her mouth. She meets Bella's eyes with the hard focus of the hypnotized. "Yes," she said, each sound deliberate. "Nineteen left."

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

Injimo had more time for art than you might think, given her line of work. People saw the muscles and the scars and they assumed that she spent her free time chewing iron nails and bench pressing construction workers. The thing about getting the shit beaten out of you as a lifestyle, though, is that there was a lot of time spent lying on your back waiting for your body to put itself back together[1].

[1] White magic could accelerate the process, sure, but do too much of it and you start growing angel wings and start thinking thoughts of beatific pacifism and compassion towards all living things. This was a significant disadvantage when it came to punching living things[2], so Injimo tried to heal naturally when she could.
[2] Thellamie's religious-philosophical development has not yet progressed to the point where it is commonly understood that beating the shit out of people can be an act of beatific compassion.

She wasn't much for books - they took more fine muscle control than she could be guaranteed to have. She liked art. Sitting in Civil Churches and looking at the murals, in particular. Many of them were functional as well as aesthetic; they were extraordinarily detailed paintings of the Hero of Ages destroying one of her many ancient foes, and in the process capturing encoded specifics of stance, technique and enemy weakness. The Civil Church maintained these pieces as a way to remind a reborn Hero of abilities she once possessed and might learn again. Somehow Heron could figure out the intended message within minutes or even seconds of looking at the murals. Injimo just had to spend the long, slow hours letting the brush strokes flow into her mind.

She'd meditated on the Fall of the Architect-Knight for an entire rainy weekend in a little chapel near Vespergift. She'd done her best afterwards to learn the technique. The leap. The lunge. The thunderspear, right into the keystone locket without which all stone would crumble. So many hours of thought and training and failure, all leading up to this moment when she got to recreate a moment out of history. Injimo burst through the horde and flew at her foe, and hoped that she had not somehow moved her mystic weak point.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

The phones break apart, spilling girl and fox tail all over the floor. The ominous blue light in the heart of the devices takes a moment to fade away entirely even with the severed electronics.

A wall is in front of Kat, and a second later the sizzling black-hot tip of a spear. The broken stone dust fills the air as Lancer wrenches the weapon loose back the way it came. Something about this weapon is truly wicked - this is a curse made manifest. Despite Lancer's earlier dismissiveness about the value of specific storied weapons, this spear never leaves her hand for a second.

"You're right," she hisses. "It's not too late. Even thousands of years after the fact it's not too late. I will not be remembered for a stroke of bad luck."

Berserker throws up another wall, another hammer blow strikes through it. Beneath her visor, Berserker's teeth grit as her wall grows thicker, and again as the lance smashes through stone and mortar. The various Masters gather in a cluster behind Katherine as the wall continues to take blow after blow. There is nothing Berserker can do to move to the offense; in Julian's story, the best her castles can hope for is a slow siege before a total collapse.

"Hey Kat," said Cyanis, putting her sunglasses on as she started to squeeze octopus-like through the narrow arrow slit of a window to escape. "Don't mind me, I'm going to get help. I - what? What the hell is this?"
"Hmm," said Actia thoughtfully. Cyanis yanked her wrist. Somehow she had become linked to the same chain that was binding Actia and Diaofei together.
"You can't do this to me!" cried Cyanis, flopping dramatically on the floor (and also so that she could try to use both feet to scratch at the chain. "You need to use silk, or soft leather, or a pre-Rewan lock! My skin is delicate! I'll get eczema!"
"Oh no, is that because of the cold?" said Opalis. "I'm so sorry! I've never used my breath on people before, let me get my first aid kit -"
"Great Buddha, grant me the strength to endure -"

There are not enough collective braincells in that mess to figure out a coherent escape plan; I'm afraid that will fall to Kat and Ivar.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Julia opened her mouth to retort but it was too late, breath attack breath attack breath attack.

Specifically, ice. When Opalis opens her mouth she does not blast forth a jet of frozen water, but conjured in the place between her jaws is a heat-annihilating microsingularity in a vortex of radiant violet. The air sheets and ripples as moisture snap-condenses into snow, the branches of the vines snap and rupture as their sap freezes and leaves fall in an early autumn, and Julia pulls her cape over her head to shield herself from the blast of terrible cold. Then her boots screech across the icy floor - she is dragged a step towards the terrible gravity of the dragon's jaws. With a fierce gesture she dismisses her tendrils - and Cyanis and Aeglesia are dragged through the phone-portals, which snap shut behind them - and turns to set her spear to face down the

BANG BANG BANG BANG. Actia still has a gun! But Julia has pulled up her armoured cape just in time and catches the attack, just like she catches the follow-up burning side-kick from Diaofei to the shin. The Redeemer of Rome's eyes water in pain and outrage for a moment before Berserker smashes a chair over the back of her head from behind, slamming her on the floor.

"Because I have a sense of humour and nothing to prove," said Julia from her position halfway through a flagstone. "I am going to let you appreciate this moment until I finish counting to ten. Laugh about it! And after that I'm going to bring back crucifixion."

Return to Thellamie

Cair!

"Cair! Good Stars, are you alright?"
"Ah, shit! Rurik, how did you get here?"
"Portal. Cair, the legions of the damned are inside the gates! We need to do something!"
"Hi Cair."
"Hi Tsane - look, Rurik, how did you even know -"
"Magic. The legions of the damned, Cair!"
"- okay, fine - hi Injimo -"
"Hi Cair."
"- but look, you probably don't need to be here. I'm still not convinced this is a problem yet."
"The legions of the damned, Cair! They are inside the gates!"
"Rurik, you haven't really spent much time here, have you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Look, this place is the collection of the Hero of Ages. And she doesn't just collect items. She collects enemies, monsters, things whose place in the world she destroyed."
"Mmm?"
"That means that this place is perpetually full of dangerous creatures."
"Right. But that is different from having the legion of the damned inside the gates, surely?"
"Well, not really - like, the Hero's Shadow hangs out here, did you know?"
"Good Stars! Tsane, can you fight the Hero's Shadow?"
"Well, I can resist the temptation to get weirdly horny about fighting it for about twenty minutes, tops."
"Well... that will have to do. Thank you for letting us know, Cair, we'll deal with that right after we stop the legion of the damned -"
"Rurik! I'm saying it because it's kind of normal here! Like, I was just speaking to the Architect Knight the other day -"
"The Architect Knight! Good Stars! Thank you for letting us know, Cair - Injimo, can you fight the Architect Knight?"
"Yeah."
"Oh thank goodness, I thought for a moment there you were going to say the same thing as Tsane."
"I mean, I'm always weirdly horny when I fight. I just don't let it interfere with the job."
"That's the spirit! So come on, Cair - don't you have an alchemy lab or something? Can't you whip up some weed killer?"
"Rurik - look, shouldn't we just wait for Heron to handle it?"
"What?"
"If the, uh, the -"
"Legion of the damned."
"Rootwalkers."
"Oh, is that what they're called?"
"Yeah, - they're a fascinating blend of Nature/Shadow mana, actually. It's a melding technique called hedging, which in this case is a neat pun, and -"
"Look, if the Rootwalkers are here then they're not somewhere else. So why not let them be here? There's nothing here for them."
"That one is holding the Sword of Invincibility."
"Yeah but they're using it as a shovel. It's fine."
"- allows ordinarily contradictory magical forces to feed off their opposition. Some advanced pyromancers develop an incidental mastery of ice just because concentrating heat in one place means drawing that heat away from -"
"They are destroying the Stacks!"
"Rurik, I've been living here for a long while, and I honestly couldn't say that this place is any worse than when they started."
"I've been meaning to talk to you about that, actually. You are a Handmaiden, aren't you? You believe this level of cleaning is acceptable?"
"W-what!?"
"We work for the Hero of Ages. This place should reflect her stature. And it's positively filthy."
"Rurik, she has an entire cursed desert in here! Do you expect me to dust it?"
"Well, why not get a rake and start drawing sand circles? It might take a little while but it'd improve the effect enormously."
"That'd take a hundred years!"
"Well, that's why we are imbued with reproductive organs, is it not?"
"Oh, wow, grandad. And you take issue with my monsterfucking?"
"Not at all. I just wish it would result in some great-grandchildren already."
"Grandpa!"
"You're not getting any younger, Tsane."
"I don't need to be here for this conversation. I'm going to start killing Rootwalkers now."
"Very good! See Cair, Injimo has the right attitude with regards to the legion of the damned being inside the gates. You could learn a thing or two."
"Injimo wait - ah she's gone, fuck."
"Speaking of, Cair, why don't you settle down with my granddaughter?"
"I'm going to the alchemy lab now."
"Oh, excellent. Tsane, go with her, it'll be like a wizard date!"
">:("
"o灬o"

*

Kalentia!

"Woah woah woah hey now nonconcordance dissonance megastalling medical emergency," said Kalentia, shoving directly past the woman to head for Fallen Far.

After a moment she realized she'd just shoved aside the hottest woman she'd ever seen who was in the process of telling her that they were going to get married and then do extremely married things to her. Because there was an injured patient nearby and she needed to attend to that before she could process anything else.

In that moment Kalentia realized that she was an excellent white mage - and that being an excellent white mage fucking sucked.

Breathless Dead

Princess Redana!

The Lethe washed away many things. For her, it washed away fear, pain, regret and doubt. She drank of it greedily and deeply, downing mouthful after mouthful of that cool water until only her hopes and aspirations were left. She wished she could be a Princess and perform her role perfectly. She wished she could sacrifice so that those she cared about would be safe. And, somewhere a few ribs below her heart, she'd had a very quiet and hungry wish that somebody would remember what she'd said carelessly and jokingly and not let her squirm her way out of it.

It bubbled up from inside her. An emotion that was completely incompatible with being Princess Redana Nero. The desire that someone would want to take revenge on her. That all of her teasing, poking, prodding and skirting around the line might somehow mean that when the assassin came for her, they were coming for her and not the person she was impersonating. It was a perversion, a kink, an entirely unacceptable vanity to imagine that the death she was programmed to yearn for might be because of who she was. And of all the wants in her head, that was the one desire that split her from her mask.

"You won't get away with this, Praetor," she said, holding up the words, the bait - just in case. Maybe you're just confused? "I'll escape, just like I always do," she knew exactly how hollow that sounded over the tearing sound of her dress. "And - and when I do - you'll..." words jumbled in her mouth; the scripts she's following no longer aligning.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

From the severed tentacles, vines begin to creep. They burst upwards rapidly, wooden tendrils replacing metal ones, and immediately they begin to blossom. The flowers merged together in a storm of vibrant pollen and, pink and white, Lancer stepped down. A long green dress drew behind her sparkling with a million stars, a wreath flowering crowned her head, and long flowing white sleeves perfectly captured the bloody red stains that spoke of blood sacrificed in the name of Rome. "Mine was a seed that never had the chance to blossom," she said, trailing a long spear behind her. "Mine was a reign could have healed the world."

She raised her spear to the roof; with a terrible detonation it blew away the stone that Berserker had made, and with a twist the entire castle she had erected began to peel apart and blow away on the sand.

"You knew Julia the Apostate. Julia the failure," said Lancer. "Who I would have been if I failed at my ambition. The Empress who presided over the final break between East and West, the Empress who failed to burn out the Church and was damned by them, the Empress who in a stroke of tragic luck was struck through by a spear," her fingers curled around her nightmarish weapon, "before her reign could truly begin."

"But the Gods have answered my prayer," she said, "even before I triumph in this contest of ours. My victory is inevitable and so travels back in time to ensure it will occur. As I shall rewrite history, so history shall empower me. There will be no Dark Age; only an early Enlightenment. There will be no fall of Rome; instead it shall continue uninterrupted and glorious all the way into the heavens. There shall be no," she sneers at Berserker, who - shockingly - flinches, "feudal warlords and their ugly little castles squatting in the ruins of my Empire. Northern raiders will be met by the fury of the Legions and driven back to their rocks," in this moment she turns her gaze on Ivar and -

drifting alone on an iceberg, cut off from human history. julia's ascent means the destruction of your legend, your history, your destiny, everything you fought and died for. she can feel the cold mechanical gaze of the moon pressing down on her, the cutting scissors of the norns as they sever her from the tapestry of fate

Berserker was right to flinch.

"You face Julia the Philosopher," said Lancer. "And I am here to condemn your entire timeline. Your lives will become as meager and pathetic as mine once was, and you will drift away like sand through an hourglass."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Every phone at the table rings simultaneously.

Opalis looks at the tablet that she wears integrated with her golden bracelet. Cyanis lazily fishes out her hot pink sticker-plastered phone from her bosom. Aeglesia reaches into her pocket and pulls out a bright red phone marked with thunderbolts and SPQR. Diaofei fumbles out an archaic wooden flip phone, engraved with warding glyphs. Actia pulls out a gun.

BANG BANG BANG

The foxgirl blasts away at the dragon before anyone can react. The warding glyphs on Diaofei's phone glow red and a second later it bursts into flame. Cyanis and Aeglesia scream as a mesh of mechanical tentacles burst out of the glowing screen of her phone and start trying to drag them into the screens. The mouths of the phones are stretching wider, elastically, large enough to take a person through whole.

Berserker reflexively moves to intervene; she barely gets a wall up in time as a spear explodes out of the morass. It shatters the wall, and the impact slams Berserker across the room. Lancer.

Katherine's extremely cool moon wolf phone will be no exception to this attack. If she answers immediately she'll be seized as quickly as the other two masters; if she doesn't she has until the phone rings out before the tendrils start to force their way through.

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

Princess Redana Claudius was trained from birth to be the hand that controls Ceron and all her daughters.[1]

The true ways. The secret ways. Many lessons were too secret even for the Assassin handmaidens who were expected to die for the Imperial Heir if required. If Empress Nero was asked, what was the difference between her daughter and an imposter trained from birth to replace her if required, her answer would have been simply the mysteries of Ceron. Too powerful a knowledge to leave the Imperial bloodline, even to the most trusted handmaiden.

That is not to say that Mynx did not get lessons. It's just that those lessons were deliberately, embarrassingly, humiliatingly wrong. The pheromantic wards she has cast to interfere with formation instinct have more in common with a novice scout who is signalling that she needs to be punished. The tone of voice she uses to issue orders does not resonate on an invisible frequency that inspires fear. Her attempted grapple, an attempt to emulate Redana's Olympic wrestling performance, results in her ankles being pinned against her ears. Mynx could emulate Princess Redana down to the DNA, but she does not have Zeus' blessings of authority and the Ceronian hunters are all too eager to show her exactly what she was failing to protect herself from.

Redana, how does it feel to see yourself with torn clothes and crimson blush, thrown roughly at the feet of your mistress Bella?

[1] One might wonder if childhood exposure to art and literature that emphasized the chaining, collaring, gagging, and forcing submission upon defiant wolf-warrioresses left some sort of psychological impact on Princess Redana.

*

After the Pylons, the next miracle of the Endless Azure Skies is the Matter Decompressor.

It's almost astoundingly stupid in its simplicity. It is simply a very large Grav-Rail. No mystic circuitry runs through its depths, no hidden weapons, not even particularly elegant seams where steamrolled and spaghettified planets have been welded together. Civilizations live here too, but these are far more tenuous and fragile than those eternal bubbles of the Pylons - like everything else to do with the Decompressor the fact that it functions at all is the miracle. It is the club of macroengineering, and its role is to crack the skull of black holes.

Because that is what is in the centre of this spectacular ring. An entire black hole, the ultradense wreckage of an imploded supergiant, being squeezed in the centre of this cyclopean ring. And with the characteristic brutality of technology of this age, the black hole's infinite gravity - so deep that time itself cannot escape - is being reversed. An endless plume of hydrogen emerges through the narrow hole of a focusing lens, like air escaping from a punctured balloon. A forested pylon nearby breathes in this flow and breathes out a nitrogen/oxygen mixture - paper thin in the vast void of space, but if you stood close enough to the pylon's outflow, you could breathe it.

You could breathe it. In space. The Endless Azure Skies has determined to get the sheer atomic mass that they need in order to realize their dream they need to harvest black holes. Black holes plural - in the distance, the light of the stars goes dark as a fleet of macroengineering tugs haul the next fallen star into position. By the time the current occupant of the Decompressor has been reduced to a breath of fresh air the next stellar object will be ready to slot into place.