Thanqol

Breathless Dead

"This is," said the Shogun, "exactly what I am talking about. Come. All of you! Look at each other! Really look! Look past the beauty of those faces to see how tired and sad they are! Look past the thoughtfulness of those words to hear how full of despair they are! I was warned that I would greet ambassadors from the Underworld, and if you are they it must be as grim a place as the stories say!"

She leapt into the air, and her burning feet landed on paws held out in offering. She stepped forwards, onto the shoulders of wolves, so that she could stand eye-to-eye with the Azura Dyssia. "Of course I don't want to do that," she said, smiling as she leaned in to touch nose to nose. "But that is not the question I asked. I asked if you wanted to do that, little dissident, little rebel. Because if you do, then how could I not grant your wish? Say the word and I will send my packs to burn the skies. I will have them burn every world just as we burn the worlds of Nemesis. I will have my ships reverse themselves over population centers so that the plasma fire of their thrusters burns cities to ash. I will land my legions to personally crucify every citizen on every planet that resists. I will launch the populations of worlds into space to form a ball of corpses so massive that it will feed the void sharks for years. I will personally travel to the Saoshyant's palace right over there and make her swallow my entire arm so I can feel her choke to death around me."

Her footstool had caught fire, fur burning with oily peals of smoke, the Shogun's burning feet digging their brands deep into muscle and flesh beneath. She steps to the left, onto a new servant, wet nose tracing around your cheek. "It would be nothing to me," she said. "The death of this empire. The return of unrestricted war. Nothing - nothing not nearly as satisfying as offering this small gesture of hospitality to you, my new friend."

Teeth. Teeth. Teeth.

"But you won't. No! You won't. Because you are a prisoner of math. Your huge intelligent brain can imagine all of those people out there. You can hear the phrase 'trillions of deaths' and let it fill you to the point where it overwhelms your sense of scale and your brain short-circuits and shuts down. You would call it atrocity and refuse to countenance it, even though my war would be the cleanest, sweetest, most humane war waged in the galaxy's history! But even if I only had to kill one percent of the population of the Skies, half of one percent, a thousandth of a percent - the death toll would still be measured in those trillions and the war would still take centuries. That is their greatest shield, did you know? The scale of what they have built. But all the ideology in the world will not stop me because I do not care, eternity will not stop me because I will die young, all the numbers in the world will not stop me because I cannot read. So take care when you tell me what it is that I want," she kissed your cheek and stepped down to the ground, leaving her second footstool engulfed in greasy fire, "Lest I decide that what I want is you."

She swung around to Vasilia, each footprint that left its scorch-mark in metal rather than flesh coming as a relief and a blessing. "No angels?" she said. "Are you sure? Because what is an angel if not a perfect being, created by God for the maintenance of the galaxy? As She once wrought a universe alive with nymphs, sprites and spirits, so have our Creators wrought us to be whirling natural forces. Imagining yourself as people is a delusional appropriation of an alien moral system. You are the mudslide, you are the west wind, you are the gravitational force that holds the planets in check! You have a purity of purpose and a purity of essence uncorrupted by selfishness, one that will forever reassert itself no matter how far you wander from it! You, little sheep? What will you do once you have miraculously built a galaxy of peace and kindness? Why, you will settle down and open a little tea shop and spend the rest of your days in the kitchen. Just as you did before, just as you naturally returned to on Bitemark, you are forever enslaved to what you think is beautiful and satisfying and calming and that was written aeons ago by men with computers."

She took a deep, satisfied sniff. She stopped, not quite within arms reach.

"For you to come here and stand before all of this war and chaos with steady back - that is the most daemonic thing I have ever seen. You have built your own personal hell, and it is right here and right now. I respect it."

And at last, she turns her attention to Bella, looking at her palm atop hers. She considers it, gently, thoughtfully, even as she takes her thumb and starts to twist it back at a painful angle. "You talk of the Empress," she said, no longer playful. "You talk of the Empress while in such pain? You talk of the Empress with such despair? You disrespectful fool, how dare you? Her name is light and joy, and should be received and spoken with light and joy. Your broken body is unprepared for this blessing."

With a whirl and rush of fabric she took off her overcoat and cast it to the side in one smooth motion, revealing a chest bandaged with ribbons.

"Get down on your knees. Take off your shirt. Press your cute breasts to the cold metal floor. I am going to massage you. I will beat all the pain and misery out of your battered body. Only once I have you gasping in pleasure and liberation will you be ready to receive your answers."

She did not speak from a place of lust or dominance. This was religion, this was duty - and you are broken meat that she is going to, without compassion or gentleness, repair.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Berserker solves the problem like she solves all problems: By constructing a castle.

Hers befits a feline imperator. A three-layer kitty tower, with numerous nooks, ledges, sight lines, pillows and squeaky toy. It is abundant with places to lurk, places to preen, things to do and comforts to rest under. She has even painted a scintillating pattern of paw prints and smiling kitty faces along the side.

She presents it to the cat with a craftswoman's satsifaction.

The cat takes one look at it and instead hops down a stormwater drain instead

Berserker picks up the kitty tower to use as a club to smash open the stormwater drain, the stormwater system, the earth itself and perhaps more besides.

Return to Thellamie

"Feed you?" said Injimo, frozen.
"One imagines you are familiar with the concept," said Sayanastia.
"I'm not - I don't know the first thing about cooking!"
"Then what do you eat?"
"Eggs, mostly. And an earth/fire mana water blend."
"That sounds disgusting."
"It tastes like pyroclastic flow scrapings yeah - look the point is how am I supposed to feed her a-a battle concept?"
"Do not," yawned Sayanastia. "Like she said, she is not going to remember it. And then you can beat her the same way next time. But hold on - I thought mana water did not have a taste."
"Yeah, no, I was talking about the eggs."
"The eggs you cook every day taste to you like lava rocks?"
"Why don't we talk about something else."
"You are... removing the shells, are you not?"
"Those are extra nutrients."
"I have never once defiled the temple of my body by ingesting the matter from this corrupted world and I still understand that you are not supposed to do it like that."
"Look, my way is very efficient, okay? And I'm used to it. It's not like I'm hurting anyone. Shut up. Food sucks and is impossible."
"I agree!" said Sayanastia languidly, changing directions in an instant. "I am always saying this. So you should go ahead and serve your personal specialty to Morning here. I am sure she will never forget the experience~"
"I'm pretty sure normal people eat them when when they're still yellow," Injimo was muttering as she got her hot plate out of her rucksack.
"And you do not?" said Sayanastia, voice positively dripping with delight.
"I - look, I just break them into the pan and come back to them after I've finished my next workout set. Sometimes they're a little burned."
"I see no reason to mess with perfection," said Sayanastia.
Injimo decided at this point that the Dark Dragon was not being constructive, and resolved to just Do Her Best. Okay, so, this time she was going to remove the shells, she was going to watch the eggs while they were cooking - and stir! Stirring! - Watch and stir and, and, maybe even find some herbs or something around here? Or nuts? She guessed that she didn't have to worry if they were poisonous because Morning was already dying of a cursed blade. She'd make a forest medley - she'd read that in a book once. 'Medley'. Some sort of potluck of all the cool foods you happened to discover, almost a little bit like music, she inferred from the context. This was the last meal for a dying dragon dream, she couldn't half-ass it.

She was going to Do Her Best.

The Namespace of the Rose

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

- Umberto Eco

*

THE NAMESPACE OF THE ROSE
A game of Night's Black Agents

It is a wretched thing to see the death of a magician.

When a priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus is alive, she might be anything. The imagination alights at the possibilities concealed within those crimson robes and the lights dancing within. Might she be a beautiful young maiden, soft and curved, body patterned with the hexagonal grafts of silica and nanofiber? Might she be a demon, body twisted and malformed, blinking lights the eerie gaze of wicked flies rather than electronics? Perhaps that limp concealed four legs, or three, perhaps there were two hands or eight, perhaps she had always been smiling like the Saints, or maybe the skin and fat of her face had been peeled back to a skull made of steel.

So many of these questions will never be answered. The mass-reactive bolt entered her face just below the left eye, penetrated, and then detonated. The skull ruptured, the interlaced mesh of brain matter and neural interface shattered, and that masterpiece of cybernetic design splashed across the altar of the Omnissiah before dripping down to pool on the wiry blue carpet. It was an incredible shot.

In death, all the tricks she had up her sleeves spilled out. Hidden pistols and digital weapons fired blindly, still performing their functions even as their body staggered and slumped. Scorch marks, bullet holes and tiny silver bladed discs scatter wildly around the shattered doorway the assailant had entered through. A displacement field belatedly fired, teleporting the headless and still-shooting body of the Archmagos five meters west, whereupon two additional bolt rounds to the armoured center mass and sent what was now just the incomplete and unremarkable body of a sedentary middle-age lady sprawled across the floor. Archmagos Toros, master of the Isohedron Factory-Cathedral, was now nothing more than a mess of broken metal and carbon.

Then the assassin had begun their work. They had approached the inwards-facing circle of archaic white cogitators the Magos had been working on. Some had been pushed aside, some had been smashed, and some had been taken, their absence marked only by lonely cables that drifted like an octopus carved by a blind itamae.

The room - archaic, with framed circuit boards and eerie gadgets upon white-painted walls. A singularly bland blue carpet. A small personal shrine to the Omnissiah upon the north wall, flanked to either side by huge arched windows with a spectacular view of the Hive rising like a mountain's nightmare. The west window's glass is shattered entirely, large enough for a giant to fit through, and the stink from the endlessly churning petrochemical smokestacks creeps into this ivory tower like a burglar.

You have initial assessment from the Skitarii marshal. The chain of events as far as she can determine goes like this:
- Assailant arrived at tower door, guarded by two Skitarii
- Assailant incapacitates both Skitarii with a Webber. This non-lethal takedown prevents their heartrate monitors from triggering an alarm.
- Assailant places a grenade on a timer by the two Skitarii. It soon detonates, killing both of them, but only after the danger of them alerting the Archmagos has passed.
- Assailant bypasses the security door.
- Assailant proceeds to the Archmagos' office.
- Assailant kicks open the reinforced metal door to the Archmagos' office
- Assailant kills the Archmagos with a single Bolt round to the head.
- Archmagos' Displacer Field activates, teleporting her five meters to the west.
- Archmagos' automated defense systems begin to fire blindly even as the corpse collapses
- Assailant responds with a burst of automatic gunfire. Some of these shots miss and shatter the glass window behind the Archmagos' new position.
- Archmagos ceases fire.
- Assailant proceeds to the cogitator station. Rips out multiple electronic devices and stores them in a heavy backpack.
- Assailant departs through the open window.

The Skitarii Marshal has drawn the conclusion that this was a smash and grab and is treating it like a robbery. She has left the Isohedron in order to start drawing a perimeter and co-ordinate with the Arbites about starting a dragnet search.

... but you cannot shake the feeling that does not feel right.

That is how they might have done it on Fenris. Maybe even on Caliban. But atop this cyclopean cathedral to the human intellect, surrounded by all of these relics of golden ages past, you cannot truly believe that anyone would send a man with a gun through the front door to make off with a computer. Something about that chain of events does not add up.

Breathless Dead

Since ancient days war has involved vast periods of standing around and waiting, marching to position, and camping in the mud. The battle was always glamourized, but so much of it in practice came down to the transportation of food and the tyranny of the wagon.

No more.

The Nemesis Ring stains the Skies in bloody red and gold. The capital of a foreign empire placed in the heart of the Skies, a fang pressed forever against a throat. A network of ring-gates float around it, swarming with an endless river of ships - the enormous Circulars, massive cruise liners and cargo macrocarriers, bringing in an endless ocean of new Ceronians and carting away an endless ocean of plunder and slaves.

Everywhere hang Shogunate warships. Taking the opposite tack from the Azura, the Shogunate has revived the lost art of miniaturization. Their engines burn low and quiet, their hulls are plated in reflective mirror alloys and they rarely pass beyond the size of an escort destroyer. They look like bladed mirages, heat shimmers in the blue sky, invisible daggers with crews pressed shoulder-to-shoulder. Beyond the daggerships hang the Invasion Plates, continent sized space stations surrounding the Nemesis Ring. The sides facing downwards are armour, weaponry and drop-pod launch systems, the sides facing upwards are dockyards that take in the raw material of war, sorts it, and sends it down to Valhalla. To those poor souls on worlds trapped inside the Ring it is as though ten evil moons hang in the blue sky above them.

"Joyless lot, aren't you?" said the Shogun.

Asking when and how she arrived would be as pointless as asking the when and how of the Gods. She is the bride and chief general of Hermes, she is the unsheathed blade of Mars, she is the master of the galaxy and you are in her home. She sits cross-legged atop the map table of the Plousios, the warm cream fur of her ears bright against blue sunlight. A minute ago you might have thought that the reborn Plousios had no room for shadows, but now you are aware of how many there are after all, and how all of them are filled with wolves.

"For days now my ears have been itching," she said, scratching her left with her foot like a dog. "Misery! Misery me! Oh, but all the pleasures of the galaxy cannot leave an impression upon us intellectuals! Our precious virtues! Our moral integrity! A bloo bloo bloo"

She rolls backwards on her butt, and then leaps to her feet. She is red and she is black. She is affront, the antithesis of all things the Skies holds beautiful. She is female without being feminine, she is violence while unarmed, she is a god and worse than a god. Her coat is tanned leather ripped from real hides. The starburst on her cap is gold from real teeth. Her smile is the realization of a promise from a species that invented the devil.

"Heaven," she held out her hand flat, palm down. "Hell," she flipped it over. "Here in the Skies I have built its opposite. Here there is room for the ugly machines that you have come to adore. Say the word, and I will have my wolves rebuild your ship as you remember it, with sweat and strength and passion! Here is a place freed from the tranquilizing peace of the tyrant. Say the word and I will send a pack to butcher the tyrants you have left in your path! Here is a place where Civilization comes to die! What could be better than watching an immortal order dissolve into entropy? SO!" She stepped down, and her footprints burned. "Tell me, voyagers! Have you had your fill of angels?"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"This was an expected outcome," said the blue-eyed raven, as the first cold breath of night rolled down over the hills. "Historically, Pedro II was someone who flinched at the finish line. This was the fundamental problem with Monarchy as a system of government, it was always poor at selecting for people with the proper grindset to succeed."

The cold breath of wind again, stronger now, blowing away any light or life the world had moments ago. The raven is speaking faster, glittering blue lights appearing on the hills behind it, resuming its pattern of ever-shifting smarter-than-thou rhetoric.

"Furthermore, the ceremony you have exhibited here today has certain fundamental logical flaws and contradictions. I will begin by enumerating them -"

and in a whisper it was gone.

Blink. Look around. Where had - a smear of feathers, a drip of machine oil, and a heavyset and well groomed orange cat glaring at you like 'mind your own fucking business' with a dead robot bird in its mouth. It raises its tail and walks away with enough speed to say that it fully expects Katherine to try and steal its catch, but enough swagger to communicate that it does not think highly of her chances to succeed.

Return to Thellamie

Injimo!

"There it is," said Sayanastia, winding over Injimo's shoulder like a serpent. "Little-miss-no-thinkies dark secret: she is going to go away and think harder than anyone has ever thought about exactly what happened and what she intends to do about it."
"I don't think that's what she thinks is good, though?" said Injimo, whose knees were telling her that she was well aware of her maximum weight limit for a healthy workout and her blatant disregard for facts would be punished. "I think it's what she thinks is good for fighting against her."
"I do not agree with that either," said Sayanastia. "The best way to beat her was what you just did: a single strike with a cursed blade. But her solution will not be to get a cursed blade of her own, it will be to learn how to evade a cursed blade for longer so that the fight will continue for longer."

Even though Sayanastia's words dripped with venom, they couldn't smother the taste of honey from Morning's twilight chatter. She was a mere mortal and she could not stand between the extremes of dragons without being pulled along by both hearts.

"That wasn't a triple jump," she felt compelled to explain. "That was me deploying a barrier scroll and wall jumping off it. Cair used to do that to win races with Heron, but I got suspicious when I noticed she only challenged her in mountainous terrain so I stayed behind to watch how she always got ahead."
Leave it there, leave it -
"But that wasn't the tipping point," she went on, compelled by her instructor's instinct. "The tipping point was noticing your observation loop is slow. When you lose track of me you come to a complete halt while you look around to re-acquire me. It's a predator's instinct, reminiscent of a diving hawk conserving energy if its prey has spotted it and is scrambling for a burrow, but you fight in far too close for that to be safe. If you lose visual on your target you need to act as though you're about to be immanently defeated, burn hard, thrash and scrape to dislodge anyone clinging to you, and gain elevation rapidly. Only once you're safe can you focus on re-acquiring your target. Relying on your natural defenses alone isn't a good idea for fighting non-dragons, mortal weapons are extremely transferable so you can never count on having the measure of our damage output."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"I thought for a long time," said Caster, "that men were stewards of all the world. Not only was all owned by us already, but it was our duty to survey it, to excavate it, and to measure it. To use every mark of strength and drop of science to master Creation. To put a girdle around the Earth. To speak with the voices of Angels. To renounce mastery over the material like this, to watch as all of these things built of dust and ashes to ashes return..."

He gently pulled forth from his coat a device of brass, copper and dark wood. It didn't look like anything, certainly not like anything that had grown from it. Seeds rarely resemble their trees.

"But now I see," he said quietly. "The needle's eye."

Goodbye can't be a gentle thing at this stage. It's too late to gently set it down and watch as the fire crawls over it; the bonfire is lit, and its force is a wall of heat. So he needs to take a deep breath and remember a skill he has not had cause to use since he was a boy.

And he throws the first telephone onto the fire.

As it goes, he begins to fade. Motes of light drift off him, his spiriton body unable to sustain itself without a legend to animate it. "A new hello," he said, thoughtfully. "You know, I never thought to give you such a thing? Allow me to correct myself: I am Pedro, and for a while I was the second and final Emperor of Brazil. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance."

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"There are more than two choices. I did reprimand them," sighed Zeus, watching particulate destruction scatter over the Skies. "At the height of their power. You do not know how bad things were. They broke My thunderbolts into needles and lanced them into each others brains. They built cathedrals of electricity and sacrificed billions upon their altars. Things progressed faster then, and it was a rush to see, but I could not countenance it and..."

The thunderbolt returned to her hand, coiling around it like a serpent of glittering indigo. Every moment of it was the tearing of the sky, booming thunder deeper and fiercer than the roar of the Engine.

"I rebuked them," she said. "And the consequence of that was catastrophic. Trillions died. Planets shattered. Vast macrostructures broke into glittering stardust. Entire species, entire civilizations, burned away screaming in the dark. I thought it was a simple change: to give even the least amongst them the ability to shatter the tools of oppression. I thought that they would realize that their civilization could not exist if it was failing the lowest amongst them, and they would rebuild a new consensus. Instead they found it easier to rebuild their Empire without electricity at all. For all this, it is still an improvement over what came before, but I taught the child a lesson by breaking an arm..."
"Father."
"Oh no."
"Look at me father."
"Not you."
"You did the right thing, father," said Mars, resplendent in silver buttons and the correct shade of red for the eighth year of the Atlas Consolidation Campaign. "You killed them. You committed an atrocity. And they learned! They did not repeat their mistakes. They learned to cower before the Gods. They learned again when Molech fired the Spear. Half the galaxy's death taught a lesson to the other half. Peace has endured in the Skies, war confined to the ritual of Nemesis."
"I do not wish for your solution, Mars."
"But it is the correct one!" screamed Mars, snatching the thunderbolt from Zeus' wrist. "It is the correct one! I know it! Hermes knows it! Apollo knows it! You must punish vice with atrocity! You must stamp upon the necks of the mortals until their spines shatter and they find the flexibility to obey!" As he spoke, the thunderbolt twisted pitifully in his grip. "Kill them, kill them, and keep killing them! Kill the cruel! Kill the wicked! Kill the tyrants! Kill the unjust! Kill the stupid! Kill them so that all the others see! Kill them so that all the others know! Kill for love! Kill for hope! Kill for freedom! Send them all to Hades and let him sort them out!"
"Well... he has, hasn't he?" said Zeus. "Redana, child. You do not know what the future holds, but you know of the past. What do you think of the kingdom of my brother, Hades? Should I heed Mars, and send all the wicked to join him?"

Dyssia!

"Definitely not," said Hestia. She's wearing Azura blues too, her bear hoodie no longer its comforting shade of brown. She may be the sister of Zeus, but she still has to show respect in this place. One day, if the Skies have their way, she might never stop having to show respect.

"You know how the Skies have a way of making you feel broken if you don't fit into them?" said Hestia, taking a sip. "Well, you're lucky - you had that feeling even way out on the fringes of them. You got used to it as a child. But out there they only controlled things like culture, education, society and so forth. Think about what happens to the poor bastards who come all this way to paradise and discover that they don't like how the air tastes? What if the seats are misaligned for their tails? What if they find that the Skies have set the thermostat a fraction of a degree lower than what they're comfortable with? The more things that are controlled, the more people you boil away."

She set the mug down. "You ever wonder why so few people actually live here?"

"But most of them don't blame the Skies for that," she said. "They just figure that they're broken, and they either Biomancy themselves 'better', putting themselves right back where they were before this whole fucking thing started, or they take the Knightly path as an act of fallegation. And don't think that's not by design, either. The Skies still needs its armies and it wouldn't have them if everyone who came here was perfectly content."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

It is the end of the day.

Once, a long time ago, all of the spirits attended a great feast in honour of the Sun's birthday. Everyone, from the lowest to the highest, came from every corner of the earth. All the dragons, all the faeries, all the foxes and sorcerers and enchantresses. But for all of them, not one of them could think of the right gift to give the rising sun. They searched their souls and scratched their heads and interrogated mortals searching for ideas, but in the end they resolved to ask the Sun herself at the party and swear to accomplish whatever it was she asked of them.

And the Sun smiled serenely and asked for 'a moment of perfect virtue'.

Magic left the world that day. For a thousand years the world felt mundane and ordinary. But that is because each and every day every magical creature, every spirit and every aspect of the natural world was caught at the Sun's birthday party. Day after day they argued, they meditated, they perfected martial arts, they attempted to calculate the virtue of every deed down to the tiniest util. For a thousand years the party continued, none daring to leave the Sun's celebration early, none daring to leave her wish unfulfilled. For a thousand years they strove -

Until one day the Sun smiled and said "Thank you. I have it now."

In an instant, the spirit world erupted forth from the celebration and sped back to their own domains. They filled the shrines that had been left for them or demanded new ones be built where the old ones had once been. Magic poured back to life in every corner of the world, and only after they had re-established themselves did the spirits realize that none of them had actually seen which among them the Sun had thanked.

Some of the spirits declared that it was their virtue - whichever kind they had been developing - that had satisfied the sun, and they should continue to maintain it lest She cage them once again. Others decided that their obligation was discharged, and that with virtue sufficiently demonstrated they could return to their old ways as a reward. Everyone had an opinion and nobody had an answer, and so the great edifice of divinity went whirling on again down the wheel.

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits never got to sit at the Sun's party. But she did feel the setting sunlight warm her ears more than it should have, like a celestial ear scritch. Can't be beat.

As she's enjoying it, other spirits start arriving. Enormous oni warriors, enscribed suits of armour, grey-suited tengu, ancient and limping kappa, serpents in rainbow and elven hunters in red. They stand at the outer edge of the circle as the bonfire is piled high with everything that no longer inspires love. Without love, these items have no more connection to the physical world, and they belong now to the spiritual. The fire will help them cross the boundary and there the spirits await with eager hands to welcome their new divinities.

Caster still holds his gnome, but now there isn't quite the same sense of urgency to his grip. "So this is it. At the end of everything you just say... goodbye?"