Thanqol

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Sayanastia!

It is easy to become the axis on which the world turns. Too easy. Perhaps that was her sin.

All she does is present herself. No more than that. As much as her pride insists that that alone is all she is doing, the world reacts the way she knows it will. She needs draw no sword and give no speech and everything falls into its order, the order it is used to, arrayed against her, the Archenemy. Arrayed against...

She huffs what she resentfully knows to be a laugh. She thought she could get away with breath, thought that she could transmute it into an engine of destruction. Sure enough her breath out came with a flick of entropic void, vaporizing the left half of a loungechair. But the world long ago adjusted to the rhythm of her breath. The world long ago adjusted to the consistency of her opposition. The world long ago moved on from her rises and falls. The world instead turned its attention to novelty remixes like The End Dragon.

She can smell her, even from here. The stench of rotting wood, insects and compromise. Willing to settle for a filthy bog, swarming with microbactrial life and buzzing cicadias, as the only approximation of true void and true peace her feeble echo of a mind can conjure. Obsessed with her hatred of heroes and the backwards-approximations of them that were her knights. Hatred had been a trap so obvious that even she, Sayanastia, for all her blunders had never fallen in to. She'd raged and corrupted and ambushed and possessed and cursed and transformed, but she'd never hated Heron or Civelia. To do that would have been to take them into her heart, undoing the purity of her purpose, taking her eyes from the goal of universal nonexistence and lowering it to a pathetic tripartite romantic comedy. She could at least take solace that her decline had been one of tragic gravitas and...

Fuck. It was just fucking elegance again, wasn't it? Every time she thought about her downfall it came back to this absurd obsession with being elegant.

"Yana...?" said Cair cautiously. She did not react but for the elegant flick of a tail. "Nice of you to join us...?"
"The End Dragon is here," said Sayanastia. "A pretender and, worse, a failure."
"Oh. So, hypothetically if the Architect-Knight were to have gotten her hammer from the Stacks, it wouldn't have been a minor and isolated incident...?"
"What care I for she, chained to her rhymes by ropes of hair?" sneered Sayanastia. "A shadow of a shadow. No, I shall address my wayward puppet, and you shall clear my way."

Injimo!

"Looks like you were wrong," said Injimo with a smile. "Looks like my backup is here after all."

The enormous, looming shape of the Dark Dragon Sayanastia raises up behind Injimo, endless in her majesty.

And then it baps her on the back of her head with a wing. "And so shall you."
"Ow," said Injimo. "But also, rude?? I'm fighting a -"
"You are losing to a drunk who correctly guessed that Heron's arrival is not immanent," said Sayanastia. "Do not embarrass yourself further."
"But -" another wing-clip to the back of the head got the message across. "Ow! Okay! I'm going."
For a moment, Eclair Espoir was left face to face with the undivided attention of the Dark Dragon, the terror of the ancient world, the breaker of the first sun, the ruin of castles, she whose waking scream bought forth the terrors that would haunt the world for ten thousand years.

"I appreciated the parry with the teacup," she said, before leaving heralded by darkness.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"You're right," said Artemis. "You are not the best piece I have. In fact, you're actually horribly obsolete. Three hundred years out of date. Sanalessa, another Diodekoi, is on this same ship and she is your superior in every way. Not least that she actually trains, while you've been coasting since the Olympics and you're horribly out of shape. Unfortunate, because Vesper will have her fight you, and she'll kick your entire ass and probably set me back a century."

"But," sighed Artemis. "She's useless to me. Even you're probably useless to me, to be honest. I am not being kept from my target because none of my huntresses are capable of bench pressing enough iron. Zeus took first crack at the problem, after all. All the galaxy couldn't apply more violence. No, what I need isn't bigger, faster, stronger what I need is..."

She trailed off for a moment, letting an idea roll about on the tip of her tongue. "Mistletoe," she said eventually. "What I need is mistletoe."

Ember and Dolce!

"Good"

The pheromone slips inside your heads and burns to the core. Good. Things are good. You are good. All of this is so, so good. Ember feels arms wrap around her shoulders as Gemini nuzzles against her cheek. It isn't clear that the reward centres of your brains, already so overloaded by the weight of the situation, needed this additional kick from an Oratus Adept but it does mean there's no space to go from here.

"Did you forget about us, little pets?" said Taurus, stretching languidly as she came into the room. "How silly of you. I've let you play around for too long, but it's time for you to remember that you have to earn your treats."
She reached into her bag and scattered a handful of collars across the floor. Each of them had a name ready and engraved. "Please, put on your collars, all of you. You can help each other if you finish early. Then we're going to do some practice - I cannot be having fights breaking out when you perform for Mistress Vasilia."

Dyssia!

A metal stencil comes out of those robes and presses against the wall. With a puff of yellow smoke, it imprints a hazard warning sign on the metal:

AREA IDENTIFIED AS RESPONSIBLE FOR INEFFICIENT HEAT BLEED
AREA WILL BE SEALED OFF AND USED FOR PLASMA CONDENSATION STORAGE
VACATE AREA IMMEDIATELY

Then that blank hood turns to stare at you and a metal finger taps the sign loudly and pointedly.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

To be a Berserker is to be cursed.

You know your own story. You know how you see yourself. You have your own internal narrative, your own trials and struggles, your own goals and ambitions. You have inner depth and complexity. But none of that matters because that's not how anybody sees you.

And what the Welsh saw in her was castles.

The Kingdom of Wales could have fit comfortably inside the Terraced Lake. In that tiny space six hundred castles had been built, one every thirty three square kilometers. Every hill and cleft had grown a castle, every ridgeline and chasm, every choke point and fertile land. They were not as she remembered them, peopled by chivalrous knights, wards against the Danes. They were as the people remembered them, grim monuments to taxation and populated by a religion of corpses.

It wasn't just the flash of anger that formed the connection for Katherine into Berserker's waking dream; it was the moment of miscommunication, the slip of defaults. To not even have realized that everyone else saw her as this monster of granite and steel...

The roads approaching are populated by soldiers with boar-head helms, hot breath visible between their tusks as they hold out mailed fists for their tolls. The walls wrap everywhere, closing off every passage that does not lead to the hungry metal-toothed gates, endlessly sucking in carts groaning with sacrificial grain. And it's not just grain that satisfies - ancient and sacred trees are hewn from the earth and dragged into roaring workshops, birds are plucked and severed and their feathers remade into weapons of war. Everywhere black-robed priests walk, hands gentle and soft as they point out to armoured men the temples of the old gods that are to be smashed and burned, the faerie gates to be trampled and sown with cold iron. Nobody here had cared what her sword was named. Nobody cared that she hadn't been the one to build most of them; she was confabulated with a hundred other hostile kings, all one indistinct mass of The English. A thief just as sure as any of the Danes, but she did not retreat to her longship when the raid was done. She would stay until she'd stolen even land and language.

Lose one castle; what did it matter? There were always more besides. Let Saber manage her theft if she could, Berserker would wear her down in the end until even the distant Viking lands worshipped her god and spoke her tongue.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

Artemis looks at Bella like she's stupid. "You're alive," she said. "Aren't you?"

She wears her suit, silver grey, tight fit, sharp against the black collared shirt, black office shoes, and black strangler's gloves. Her hair is a shock of tangled brown, cut short on both sides, a single silver moon-shaped earring on her right ear. She stands like she's either greeting a dignitary or about to throw a punch, and no amount of polite precision can distract from the fact that her eyes are voting for the punch. Don't worry, it's not personal.

"You're alive," repeated Artemis, "when you started as dead. I've had hunters raised from the dead before but that's because people remembered them enough to summon them from the Lethe. I've never had one drag themselves out the hard way. Of course I'm not disappointed."

She paused. "Unless you're talking about the sex, which I will reluctantly concede as being necessary for this stage of the operation. I can overlook it, for now."

Ember and Dolce!

Plundering Fang has always had an eye for vulnerability.

"I have decided," she said, "that we shall make the captive into the Syneffo's outfit."
"What do you mean?" asked her combat tailor, Lytefit.
"This is also fashion in the Skies," said Plundering Fang, high-handedly. "Sometimes a pet servitor is made to be both companion and fashion, like a fox-scarf who wraps around her mistress' neck. It's unusual for an Azura themselves to be used for this sort of thing but not entirely unprecedented. We just need to pretty her up, wrap her in -" Hera maliciously leaned down to whisper in Plundering Fang's ear. "- peacock feathers," said Plundering Fang with a smile, "paint her scales, add some gold chains and supports so that she can move easily while carrying him. Maybe fit her with a saddle~"

Ember, this is a problem. Plundering Fang has just found an opportunity to move to the next stage of the competition without having her puppet release Dolce for a moment - if she gets away with this there's not even going to be a moment where you'll be able to do more than stare into those glazed and helpless eyes. You need to find a gap in the armour.

Dyssia!

It's time. The Plousios is about to descend into the flames of a star.

The diviners agree it can't be put off any further; the initial clash with Liquid Bronze delayed but did not end the pursuit, and as decisive a victory as 'stopping time' was the Biomancer General has divine allies of his own that have put him back on the case. It's time to follow through on the original plan and descend into an open fusion reactor until the hounds pass by.

The upside for you is that this is going to put you beyond having to worry about any big philosophical questions for a while. The downside is that the interiors of stars are hot. Not too hot - the Academy of Biomancy, where new species are forged, is built on the volcanic Forge of Hephaestus in the center of a trinary star system, so organic life in this galaxy knows a thing or two about enduring extreme solar heat. Also, the sunspot where you will be sheltering will actually be several million degrees cooler than the fusion reactor in the heart of the ship's Engine. An Imperial-Era battleship's hull armour is proof against even the direct plasma vent of a Starbreach. You're not going to die.

But oh my god does it feel like you're going to die. It's hot. Servitors cluster around ventilation panels, lying sprawled in the whispers of cool air. The entire ship is covered in a fine layer of downy fur from where the Ceronians and Pix have been shedding. And here and there can be seen the hulking and indifferent shape of a battlecrab, often carrying on its back a prisoner or two who strayed too close to the waterline in search of relief. There'll be time to launch a rescue invasion or negotiate with the Tides or something later, this isn't a crisis. You just need to get through it.

So how do you beat the heat, and who is keeping you company while you do?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Little fox, please," said Rider, holding up her hand. "I never needed convincing that this was all Cyanis' fault -"
"I DIDN'T REALIZE THIS WAS CASTLE MEAN TO ME"
"- you don't need to give me the hard sell," said Rider. She flicked her wrists, revealing her long-fingernailed hands from her silken sleeves. She had a hand grenade in each. "I just needed a moment to vent. This has been a very frustrating war for me."

She bit the pin in first the left grenade, pulled, and spat it out - then she did the right.

"I'd prefer to fight with cruise missiles and the fury of revenge," said Rider. "But if I must make do with small arms and the power of friendship, then such is life." And with that, she flipped backwards off the balcony. At the apex of her arc she dropped the grenades, and by the time she'd completed her flip she had drawn a pair of assault rifles from those same sleeves and was blazing away guns akimbo. She landed delicately on tiptoes in front of Julia, who was sheltering behind her cloak, and delivered a kick with the kind of recoil you normally only got with wire-fu.

And as amazing as that fight would be to watch, Berserker is there in the next moment, grabbing Katherine by one wrist and dragging Saber with the other, and determinedly hauling both towards the door. There's no reasoning with her - other Berserkers are marked by an endless approach towards enemy, this particular one is characterized by an instinct to withdraw that is just as relentless. On the hill ahead was already forming another brand-new castle, wrenching itself up out of the earth. It was just as new, distinct and unique as every castle she'd previously summoned. How many did she have?

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

"You're thinking about this too hard," said Injimo placidly, ignoring the destruction taking place behind her. "It's simple. Anyone could be a shapeshifted fox, any sense could be an illusion created by a malicious sorceress, any opponent might be an immortal with a plan centuries in the making. Asking questions is a waste of time. The only truth that can't be faked is the truth of the blade."

She shifted her stance, arcing out wide, tracing the tip of her spear through a loop of electricity - and then pulling the entire web tighter.

"To the victor, answers," she said, pulling the knot of the lightning thread tight around Eclair's tea-station.

Tsane!

Tsane loved her grandfather.(1)

(1) BUT

WHY WAS HE NOT FIGHTING WITH HIS GODDAMN HEARTBLADE

The Tsunami Trident was a good weapon. The slightest touch of it, even if parried, drenched the opponent head to toe in seawater - rendering them highly vulnerable to Princess Heron's electricity attacks. When Heron was present it was a fantastic one-two combination that allowed her to engage multiple opponents simultaneously, BUT WHEN SHE WASN'T HERE IT WAS JUST PRODUCING A LOT OF WET PLANT ZOMBIES. And one of the major features of wet plant zombies was that they WERE NOT FLAMMABLE. She had a dozen fire spells ready to go that could turn these stacks of kindling into bonfires and she kept having to bite them back.

She knew what he'd say if she asked - Heron could arrive at any minute, and even if she didn't, Injimo could come back through the portal and finish the technique. Just be patient and keep the debuffs active. We're a team who mutually supports each other, don't be a selfish glory hound and try to do everything yourself.

Because that role was already taken, wasn't it!

"Do you think," she suggested to Cair, "you could go and get some sort of lightning grenade or scroll or something?"
"Fresh out!" said Cair brightly. "Heron was carrying most of those, and those she wasn't got broken down for elemental essences."
"How about ice?" sighed Tsane, rubbing her temples. "We can take advantage of all of these water effects with frost magic, right?"
"Oh, for sure!" said Cair. "I've got an entire crate of blizzard staves back here. Heron fought an entire army of guys armed with them."
"Then that'll have to be good enough. If we freeze enough of them we can stack them into a wall and that should buy time for Injimo to get back," said Tsane. "Which seems to be the only plan we're capable of following."
"Hey," said Cair. "Maybe Heron comes back instead?"
"She's not coming back," snapped Tsane.
"Sure she is. She always comes back when things are getting dire. I've seen it a hundred times!" said Cair happily, pulling open the lid of a massive blue treasure chest to reveal a trove of sapphires and twisted ashwood. Enough to plunge the Stacks into a new ice age.

[Overcome: 9]

Breathless Dead

Mynx!

She has to start with colour. Shapes work backwards from colour; a hard line or forced shadow can make a gentle bend seem severe. She's been stuck with a drab pallette for far too long, constrained to the narrow ranges of human skin. Her boy melts, her features melt, she lets herself run into cold and pure whites as the basis for her canvas.

Blue. It was hard to be entirely immune to the influence of the Skies, and there was a radiant pale shade of turquoise she'd always loved; the colour of plasma coils and tropical water. Bubbles of it traced across her skin - too much. The colour looked plastic and flat if it dominated - she sent it to her extremities, her hands and feet and shoulders so the white brightened into blue. She then coiled bands of a darker blue around her core, around her chest and thighs and hips running to her knees, following the lines of muscles. Details in black, triangular around her back and knees, too sharp to be organic. Topical lines appeared, straight and sharp, accentuating the lines of her body.

It came together; a shape both organic and artificial; sometimes appearing to be clothing and sometimes appearing undressed, a lithe and living machine. But it was missing - a touch of faded red, spreading out from her heart on front and back, wrapping around her body just shy of her neck, shoulders, and bottom ribs.

She kept the blonde hair - she'd always envied it - and let it grow even longer. Many parts of the face, too familiar for her to reject them - but longer and sharper canine teeth. The words she was trying to say was savior, angel, and living machine. Something that could love and protect, but needed to be maintained and repaired. That was who she wanted to be.

Bella!

That silver moonlight - it's close now. You can almost hear its soft footsteps in the corridor outside.

Time has passed; there are curtains and sheets and fresh marks on the bedhead. After everything you've been today now you walk in the liminal space of soft breathing and fragmentary dreams. Rustles of silk almost conceal the sound of arrow-feathers brushing against each other in the quiver.

Ember!

It is vital for the security of the pack that you cuddle this sheepboy.

Specifically there is the problem of the Azura Magus. Plundering Fang has already taken the initiative during your period of distraction to have her wrap him in her coils and start saying things like 'you are an excellent servitor' and 'stop resisting'. It's a powerful opening move, especially with Plundering Fang keeping a tight grip on the Magus' own leash. This represents a terrible threat to your role as Alpha and you have to Do Something!

Dolce!

This is your second time being used as a squeeze toy by an Azura, but this one also has literal hypnotism eyes. You need to avoid those! If you look into her magical eyes then you'll give up the competition too soon and the plan will fail! Even though she's firmly holding you and telling you 'my eyes are up here' you need to find somewhere else to look - but where!?

Dyssia!

The Ceronians are distracted. You've got a rare free hand to intervene in the ship's affairs, and enough institutional backing from the Pix to have a good chance at forcing through whatever changes you need to make before a response can organize. You are a Knight of the Publica; part of your role is to help new societies develop the laws that will help them thrive. What mark do you wish to make?

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"As the white serpent was carved into three, so I would sever the Empire of the Han."

A ghostly, crimson light. Dragonsblood drifted in the air, ethereal and shimmering.

"As the white serpent received an ouchy ouchy boo boo, so I would inconvenience the Empire of the Romans."

And Rider finally arrived into the world.

She was dressed in white; white upon white upon white, all the way down to soft white scales where her hands emerged from her dress. Her eyes were narrow and slitted where they were visible through her veils. Her hair was done up in two large triangular shapes, held fast with silvery pins, and her silver earrings were in the shape of keys. She pulled back the gauze around her wrists to look at an incongruous digital watch, held in place with a wristband covered in tiny green hearts, and sighed, tapping her foot.

"I beg your pardon?" said Opalis, immediately bandaging her injured wrist (she was also holding an ice pack to her face where Saber had punched her).
"My summoning," sighed Rider, "was inextricably linked to the curse of the White Snake. If you cut off her head, I would have returned to take yours; if you cut off her tail, I would have returned to take yours. You didn't even cut off her little pawsie! Master, had you met a terrible end I could have avenged you and carried your wish into the heart of the world. Instead I arrive with only the strength to carry out retribution against a mild mannered fox, and before that I must undo the concept of Rome. You have given me little to work with."
"Well! You! One, getting not stabbed is fairly high up my list of wishes -"
"A weakness of character," yawned Rider, revealing two long, serpentine fangs.
"And two!! You didn't tell me any of that!!"
"My messages were being intercepted by Assassin," said Rider. "Who, at least, was trying quite hard to get you into situations where you would be stabbed. Speaking of, darling fox," and Rider turned her attention fully on Katherine, placing her hands on her shoulder with all the demure temptation that snakes were famous for, "would you at least consider severing this dragon's head? I do not know if it would empower me at all at this stage, but surely you agree it would be worth the attempt?"

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

The second that spear hits that teacup, Eclair knows that she just won the fight - and that the fight, paradoxically, just got much more dangerous.

Injimo's tactics have shifted so suddenly and decisively it's like she's a different person. That first attack was brash, proud, imperious - the strike of a hero. The moment it was countered that hero vanished, all of the pride and strength that infused it blowing away on the breeze. Injimo was so ready to accept defeat that the moment it appeared probable it was accepted as inevitable. And within the zen of her defeat she becomes a dangerous weapon indeed.

"Lace stance, thread weaving," said Injimo, mirroring Eclair's narration of her approach. She swishes the edge of her spear and it catches a thread of lightning like a crochet hook. When she traces it through the air the lightning web lingers in place, forming a dangerous barrier that can only be moved through at the cost of electrocution. "Begin encirclement, clutter possibility space, create cognitive load -"

She snap-lunged, a feint that left a searing arc of electricity crackling in the air between Eclair and the hole the Architect-Knight had left in the floor.

She wasn't fighting like an opponent any more. She was fighting like a teacher giving a test. Each move was made to force a new, different reaction. Her guard was so standard, without a hint of inspiration, that it could be defeated by any secret move - but in so doing force her opponent to reveal a secret move. She was not fighting to avoid pain, incidental damage or humiliation - she could be dissected in a thousand cheap shots - but her stamina was such that her opponent would be forced to get more and more creative with what they showed. She stubbornly refused to take any risks that might allow the fight to end more quickly, refused to lose her composure in a way that would make her concede early. Beating Injimo was easy, beating Injimo without putting all of your cards on the table was hard.

"Doesn't matter what I'm into," she said, answering the question at last as she wrapped one strand of lightning around another, tangling them into a knot. "My job is just to keep you busy."

[Creating an opportunity for someone else]

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

It doesn't matter what you decide, so long as you decide.

This was the first law of portal combat. To come through a portal meant being placed in a new situation. Enemies were different. Terrain was different. Opportunities were different. Everything about operating in a null information space encouraged the warrior to slow down, get their bearings, think things through and come up with a plan. Those instincts were defeat. Decide first.

She grabs the fangirl by the shoulders. Hefts herself up. Legs over her head. Puts her boot on her back. Kick off, full force. Launch over the crowd, trailing the spear. Whirl it through the trisagion sign of thunder. A rush of air and electricity blows out lights, illuminating the room around her with sudden blue electricity that pools at the tip of her spear. She brings it all down towards Eclair Espoir.

Only now that she has committed to the attack can she think through her reasoning. One, the Architect Knight is already out of the Stacks and is therefore Not Her Problem. Two, Eclair is part of an active plot and has already evaded her once, she's by far the more valuable target. But, she recognizes in the moment that she unleashes Heron's lightning-lance technique, that the actual motive was that she'd fought monsters and devils before, but she'd never fought a Maid Knight.

So her brain settled into a relaxed state: Hey, cool. I'm fighting a Maid Knight. I wonder if the rumour is true they really do have a second form where they turn into dragons after you defeat them.