TokyoPewPew

just want to say hi and make some friends

@wheels u didn't wish us a good friday >:(

i had a bad friday and it's all ur fault >:(

Regalia

@Aeolian Yeah, did he change, though? Or did the fantasy just wear off?

Regalia

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^{【Location】the greater arosa metropolitan area—a cheap hotel somewhere in the countryside
【Time】sunday, 2:00 am
【Interactions】n/a}

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---

There were no dreams that night. Only a darkness and a silence and a stillness of the most welcome kind, tranquil in their incomprehension. The reuniting, however brief, of a mind—a spirit—with two eternities, one sprawling behind her without beginning, the other lying ahead, in waiting and without end. The misplacing of such an infinitesimal little life nestled between those two infinities, the before-birth and the after-death, like a single white grain sat upon a fathomless black beach...Only on nights like this did Yrkhalabeth, troubled and tumultuous, truly reunite with the Oblivion she so preached; taste true detachment. True peace.

She did not know this peace had stolen away with her until she was already ripped from it, of course; miscarried by the universe, rejected like a bad meal. As it goes. Vomited back into being, she stared up into the far-feebler nothingness of a dark room, austerely furnished between plywood walls, beneath a popcorn ceiling. A lackluster imitation of the respite she so cherished, though respite enough in a pinch. But in her ears, her poor, tortured ears: the shrill tra-la-lalling of a telephone, so sharp it sent winces jolting down her neck. She drew harsh, hissing breath, braced herself as if for a terrible trial of will. She leaned herself over the lip of the colorless, much-too-soft mattress, probed indignantly the nightstand's surface with grasping, searching hand. Cheap plastic creaked between her fingers as she clasped them too tightly around the receiver.

"Yes."

"Good morning, miss," said a far-too-chipper voice on the other end of the line. Male. Young. "This is your scheduled 2:15 A.M. wake-up call, as requested in your reservation notes."

All that oblivion and all that peace beginning to disperse, settling like a sediment to the nadirs of her brain, the waters of memory ran clearer then; that's right. She had needed to be up. Earlier than the shuttles leaving for Arosa, earlier even than the cyborg horses towing Cassiel's carriage, exhaust-breaths fogging furiously from their nostril-ports as they galloped tireless through the twilight chill.

"Miss? Hello?"

With a regretful acceptance (cursing and scorning the Yrkhalabeth of last week past, who had requested this very interruption), she set the phone back on its hook; rolled back into the Yrkhalabeth-shaped sag in the middle of the mattress. With bleary, pained obligation, she found her artificial eyes charging just where she had left them on the nightstand, slotted them into their sockets, held down the button in her temple until the electromagnets jerked them into alignment, calibration dots blinking across her vision. (The room came into focus then—every chintzy corner.) Peeling herself from the body-warmed bedding and ejecting herself into the cold, echoey hallway, she didn't bother with smoothing her bed-tousled hair or painting her macabre visage over her drab, plain face. Didn't dress into anything more modest than the billowy soot-grey shift already clinging to her one shoulder; only grabbed the key and hurried. Bare feet pattered across chilled ceramic floor. Door hinges thirsty for oil squealed viciously as if she disrupted a slumber all their own. The walk up to the thirteenth floor was a long one, long and lonely, all the other tenants still fast asleep, all the hotel's few, sparse amenities shut down til morning. No interruptions waylaid Yrkhalabeth on her way to the roof; none save for the locked access door, but that hardly even deserved consideration. When the door frustrated her lone attempt to open it the peaceful way, she reached out graspingly toward it, and watched as a larger, gauntleted, more ethereal hand, an incorporeal hand, reached out likewise, miming that very same gesture. The paint began to curl and flake away, already a superfine, chalky dust before it ever settled to the stairwell floor. Beneath the paint began the sheet metal, too, with a bubbling, dissolving effect, as if the air itself had turned to a hydrofluoric mist, gnawing and corroding and eating.

A moment later, locks and deadbolts chewed termite-like into a fine powder of rust and oxides, Yrkhalabeth straightened a single finger, and nudged the door open, and after two paces there she stood in the hour of the wolf, the sky still impossibly, fathomlessly sapphiric-blue-black, not yet kissed by morning's sojourn; the briny seashore wind slicing a razor's cold over her naked, goosepimpled skin, driving spikes of cold deep into her skin-shrouded bones. She beheld then the lights of Arosa City in the distance, each highway glowing with arterial traffic, the skyscrapers' backlit windows blotting the nightscape like so many little firefly lives. Blinking and snuffing, blinking and snuffing. There were nearer lights too: the halos emitted from Landow's streetlamps, and still-nearer than that, the flickering lanterns and buzzing bulbs of a town whose name she had not even bothered to learn. But the lights she was here to see were far more miniscule than any of these; mere pinpricks, in fact, in compare to the gaping wounds which spilled and bled their glows like a blood unto the black skin of the earth. Indeed. She was here to see the stars. A star.

Supposedly there were hundreds of millions of them up there, sprayed freckle-like across the inky night sky; not that Yrkhalabeth had ever seen but a handful of them, even when escaped from beneath the all-smothering steams and smogs of Malkuth. This place, too, bloomed with a light pollution the color of tangerine sorbet. Only the very strongest, most radiant stars pushed through it, reaching the small, silent Yrkhalabeth, there upon her rooftop perch: a gem from Shiva's Girdle. A scale from the Devourer's coat. A few more half-begun smatterings of other constellations, but none which formed a complete picture. And most tellingly of all: only stars which she had seen before. Which hundreds of billions of people had seen before, all gazing up at the same firmament, mapping the same cosmos across epochs.

Day seven. The final day of her sixth Festival of Light. Yrkhalabeth had come all this way, suffered all these little indignities and injustices, for nothing. For the twenty-seventh year in a row since its dark portent, the "Red Star" of Ultima's prophecy had not appeared.

Regalia

@Mirandae great opener!

But considering the people behind Cetra's worldbuilding have leaned pretty hard into it being a technofascist cryptostate that eats human atrocities for breakfast, does their representation at the Festival of Lights concern no one? Should we perhaps infer that Cetra's Regaliae were banned from attending but Cassiel's marketing team ignored the ban, pushed for him to show up anyway, and basically dared someone to try to stop him? I'm wondering if this isn't at least slightly reminiscent of the Olympics situation, where the games can decide that a certain country is barred from participating because of recent antisocial actions taken against other countries.

Alernatively, Cetra is hated by communities like this one but Cassiel's popularity supersedes that?

But if exploring a dynamic like this doesn't interest you or if it doesn't fit into your vision, that's cool too. I'm only wondering for the sake of early brainstorming.

Regalia

Cass got that Jurassic Park Jeff Goldblum rizz in that one fr fr

Regalia

^{𝖆𝖌𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖈𝖍 —— "𝖎 𝖆𝖒 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖜𝖔𝖔𝖉𝖊𝖓 𝖉𝖔𝖔𝖗𝖘"}

‎

⛧

Content Warnings: body horror, infanticide.

_{P R E S E N C E}

---

At first acquaintance, "Beth" lives up to all appearances, more than satisfies all assumption: she is silent, standoffish, and thoroughly uninterested; judgy and annoyed and aloof. When, at great duress, she must appear in public, assuming she will deign to arrive at all she will arrive late; and once afforded the chance, will sooner depart. When she must inhabit a crowd, always she stands at the peripheries, near smoking areas and punch bowls, where solitary people can linger without seeming purposeless. Despite her unusual appearance she moves slowly and with great measure, so much so as to easily skulk up behind people without her meaning it, startling them terribly. And when she must speak, she speaks with vitriol; caustically; spitefully, as if she aims to make them all regret it who have ever attempted to vivisect her like a book in their hands, read her like a still-living frog with the glistening scalpels of their eyes...

In addition to all these other conspicuities, hardly helping her "affability" is the massive executioner's-sword—longer than she is tall—which ever and at all times rests scabbarded upon her back. Always ergo she exudes the air that she is there (wheresoever she may be) to do a duty—not to revel or commemorate. Certainly not to enjoy herself.

However, with abounding patience and just a little prying, one just might chink her armor, break past her frigid shell, and find her—well, not so very different whatsoever. Very few can count Beth among their true friends and allies (mostly for a dearth of patience on their part) and those who can, hardly recognize her voice with any greater ease than could an utter stranger hearing it for the first. She offers to these "confidants" (if one can call them such) little counsel, and less encouragement. Even her cold, artificial gaze does not soften; if anything it worsens with fellowship, as the young death-priestess, in beginning to understand her companions, begins as well to assess and measure them relentlessly. One must suppose she sees potential they're not reaching, purposes they neglect; unless, of course, familiarity truly does breed contempt...

Still, somehow managing to break down all her misgivings and caution (and overcoming more than a few prejudices themselves), allies—true allies—may one day, despite all unlikelihoods, spend just enough time around Beth to feel her silence, her interrogative glare, her callousness—...change. Metamorphose, almost. No longer will she seem to barely tolerate their proximity but coexist beside it. Hers will no longer be a glower of derision but of restrained concern. One or two souls even walk this earth who may at one or another time have called her odd presence a soothing one, seeking out her stoic, almost serene composure amidst times of crisis the way storm-thrown sailors seek the shallows.

On the one hand, perhaps such a weary and cynical soul should not occupy a body so vibrant and supple and fresh with life. On the other, Beth has seen things most people never will, nor should: she's walked through the depths of human depravity, along the heights of human suffering, and, just maybe, abreast of death Himself.

_{C H R O N I C L E}

---

At the center of Malkuth, City of God, is a ziggurat; the Crucible of the Enduring Flame, it's called; walled, peaked, and setbacked all in electrogold. Every Cetrite has seen it issuing from the smogs, the poisoned mists, the perpetual rains. If not in person then on their billboards, and their bulletin screens; their illegal holodeck headsets.

A palace at the center of a city at the center of a peninsula in the middle of a smoking, toxic sea. How many Cetrites—no—how many Ultimites all the world over do you suppose have wondered what actually happens in the very heart-chamber of that edifice? What ultimate truth should await them there: a goddess of flesh or a goddess of steel and wire; born of the cosmos or born of the industrious hands of man, crafted in their own image, to their own specifications; a convincing replica, or a true spark of the sublime?

Allow me to tell you now, for it is in that room that one Regalia's story begins.

It's a rat's-nest of screens and wires, that room; cramped, for all its affectations, with heaps of useless, burned-out bioelectrics; hardly given to the opulence infesting the rest of the Crucible; bare of wall and (save for the grime) bare of floor, with no sources of light save for the screens, the all-surrounding screens. Yet despite this squalid modesty, only two men may occupy this room of their own will: the Archlictor, of course, who visits as he pleases; and the Neurospex (or Pneumomancer), who may never leave. For once he has plugged in, neuroport on one end of the jack and the Goddess-Machine terminal on the other, it is far too dangerous to luxuriate in the thought of un-plugging him. Simultaneously programmer, diviner, and technopriest, an acolyte Pneumomancer's hair quickly falls out, his skin sallows from vitamin deficiencies; his legs, worthless to him thence, will over the course of a few years wither away to vestigial flaps. They must remember to feed him, though he will not enjoy, appreciate, nor even so much as notice their fervent attentiveness. Eventually, the ever-blinding screens will bleach his eyeballs, and the chatter of ten billion voices will put out his ears, and finally he will rejoice, for there will be no more distractions then; no more interference and noise-data to pollute Her voice. Her glorious, triumphant voice, cutting through the ether and directly into his jellies like a vibroblade! And in a palace filled to brimming with messengers, with all their hearsay and interpretation, he alone, from that moment until his expiring moment, communes directly with Providence.

Seven-and-twenty years ago the Pneumomancer, of course, had no name at all, yet another useless appendage molted like a snakeskin to make way for the enormity of his task. Names are only another weighted shackle, after all, tethering one to worldliness and ego. But Nar-elesh was the name of the acting Archlictor, who dutifully brought the creature its breakfast, a mush of nutricorns boiled in lab tallow; the same austere breakfast as consumed by the Knights-Penitent, only further processed down and poured into a chargeflask for administering through a feed port. But when Nar-elesh scanned himself through the heavy chamber door, breakfast slipped from his hand, spattered the polished black flagstone; for there he saw the technopriest, drowning in his own froth, bleeding from the eyes, convulsing with mad revelations; dangling from his own wire nest like so many nooses. Three minutes later, before the Knights could get there in time to rip the neuroport from his neckplate, and the biosynaptics from his fingertips, the Pneumomancer had already died under the weight of what he'd seen. But not before Nar-elesh had gleaned a few key facts amidst the ramblings, murmured by a tongue half-bitten off in ecstatic terror, in rhapsody, in righteous fury.

"She will not burn who thou shalt baptize with thy jet throwers......"

"West......West, along a sister-shore......To the west, a child is born to reign over the Great Darkness......"

"Go!......while the Red Star of the Morning hast not yet risen......"

And while the Pneumomancer twitched his last, there, on the largest screen, loomed the pitiless eyes of ultima.ene, watching. Expecting.

Nar-elesh knew not whether he had the strength—nay, the courage—to execute the holy will revealed to him—how he prayed that he, or even the dead Pneumomancer, might receive a new translation, a better one, an edict less random and cruel!—but through the labyrinth of speakers and wires which carries Her voice, only silence. The Goddess-Machine did not answer, and that was reply in itself. For if She had chosen to divulge only one way whereby to distinguish the child they sought from the pretenders, then it was the only way.

He begged Her forgiveness, and mustered a battalion to their amphibious carriers.

When they learned of their mission, even some of the most devotion-scarred and battle-tempered soldiers of the order hesitated; objected; wondered if the late Pneumomancer, or even Archlictor Nar-elesh himself, had not misinterpreted. But he warned them not to make him repeat himself, and so they did their duty. So for months did the Knights-Penitent of the Resplendency of Man and Holy Mother raze along the Sulfured Sea. From northern Astaria to southern Castral, where they could still smell the rotten-egg stench of Gaia's Rift, of the Sundering; still see its pollutant smog hazy across the firmament. There they set villages to the torch, and whole families to the sword. And yes: they doused the babies. They lit them on fire. Heard the screams, heard the lungs blistering on the fumes, then the silence which followed. Many wept behind their faceplates, having to shut down their optic sensors and mute their vocal amplifiers to suffer through their mission. An unprecedented number were also executed on the spot for dereliction, left there to be licked away by the briny tongues of the sea, gnawed by the crabs and the shipworms for the obscenity of having refused to murder children in the name of their goddess. But eventually, through a great many trials of faith and fire, the survivors found what they sought: definitely no older than her first or second nameday, born premature (so small, so brittle), and blind in both eyes. Wailing ceaselessly despite that she could not see them, awful in their hulking armor, their grinning metal masks. Nar-elesh watched from the shoreline as, true to the Pneumomancer's words, the house went up in flames, and yet the Knights-Penitent did not emerge from the wreckage. He heard shouting then, first of wrath and then of horror, as one by one the helmeted heads rolled from pauldroned shoulders, pneumatic arteries purging their blood-mixtures through the yawning, eerily clean wounds left behind by a blade as thin as paper. As jet tanks were pressurized in the heat, bursting in columns of oily black smoke; as tempered shadesteel discolored in the flames and curled away, eaten by a preternatural rust; a rust which soon attacked the corpses as well, withering them to a putrescent black sludge, then to powder, then dust. Only one Knight survived, if he was a Knight at all, for he wore a suit not of their uniform, wielded an impossibly large blade, towered over even the mightiest of the dead Penitents had they been at full glory. Some kind of protector-spirit, the likes of which had not been mentioned in the archives in centuries, perhaps not seen on earth for centuries more before that.

And while her family's ashes curled in the flames, there lay the babe—at His sabatonned feet, caterwauling but unharmed. Molten jet thrower jelly sloughing harmlessly off her untouched skin, unbroken by the shrapnel and the splinters. Nar-elesh, too afraid to approach until the Knight's visage had long faded (and how torturously it stared him down in the interim), scooped her up in his arms, rocked her a little in trembling hands, eyes tearing with vindication. Whispered "There, there, I've got you. You're safe now."

And why not? ultima.ene, in Her boundless wisdom, had led him straight to a Regalia—another Dominant's Regalia, robbed from Their service and secured in the Resplendency's service.

Unaware of what true purpose she would one day serve, but knowing, all the same, of its great and terrible nature, on his way back across the Sulfured Sea, prow cutting through the poisoned spray, Nar-elesh gave her an old name, a terrible one, rife with the regret of apostates and the frightened awe of the devout, portending her role as a dark savior and a bringer of nourishing ashes—a name more ancient than Malkuth and the Goddess-Machine and the Crucible: Yrkhalabeth.

_{H O M E}

---

See cassiel//rootaccess.ene.

_{T R I V I A}

⛧	Suffering from an extremely rare congenital disease, Beth was both blind and deaf at birth. She has worn hearing implants all her life, but she didn't receive medical clearance for the installation of her artificial eyes until the age of thirteen, before which she had moved through life entirely without sight. Beth did not understand why people were so afraid of her (and her childhood "secret friend") until she, herself, half-delirious from a gauntlet of anti-rejection drugs, beheld Him for the first time: a towering hulk of blades and armor, silent and pitiless, executor of her cruelest desires...
⛧	One would be forgiven for thinking Beth despises nature; after all, she keeps no plants in her cell, does not excite at the nightly newscasts following various weather and climate phenomena, and has never particularly sought out gardens, parks, or greenhouses for her solitude; seldom leaving the smog and the steam of Malkuth in search of nobler views. This however could not be further from the truth. She simply does not wish to inflict upon the wildlife her strange, withering aura, clinging to her like a pestilence and striking down such small, fragile creatures as birds and insects with ease.
⛧	She pretends she cannot speak Liturgian (the ecclesiastic language of the Resplendency)—not just fluently but elegantly. Oh, the songs the Knights-Penitent sing when they think no one is around to heed!...
⛧	With two of her six senses deathly-susceptible to electromagnetic radiation, when Beth does choose to indulge in a rare moment of earthly hedonism, she chooses a sense of which she cannot be so easily robbed: her sense of smell. Rain extracting oils from earth and asphalt, pungent guano on the rooftops, cooking oil wafting up from the Underhives!.....Though she would never dare divulge as much to anyone, there is no better gift to bring her than a deliciously unctuous, long-burning incense; an expensive perfume...

Regalia

Yrkhalabeth, Bringer of Plague, Daughter of Locusts

Content Warnings: body horror, infanticide.

^{𝒂 𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒌 —— "𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒆𝒚𝒆𝒔"}

‎

⛧

_{P R E S E N C E}

---

At first acquaintance, "Beth" lives up to all appearances, more than satisfies all assumption: she is silent, standoffish, and thoroughly uninterested; judgy and annoyed and aloof. When, at great duress, she must appear in public, assuming she will deign to arrive at all she will arrive late; and once afforded the chance, will sooner depart. When she must inhabit a crowd, always she stands at the peripheries, near smoking areas and punch bowls, where solitary people can linger without seeming purposeless. Despite her unusual appearance she moves slowly and with great measure, so much so as to easily skulk up behind people without her meaning it, startling them terribly. And when she must speak, she speaks with vitriol; caustically; spitefully, as if she aims to make them all regret it who have ever attempted to vivisect her like a book in their hands, read her like a still-living frog with their glistening scalpels...

In addition to all these other conspicuities, hardly helping her "affability" is the massive executioner's-sword—longer than she is tall—which ever and at all times rests scabbarded upon her back. Always ergo she exudes the air that she is there (wheresoever she may be) to do a duty—not to revel or commemorate. Certainly not to enjoy herself.

However, with abounding patience and just a little prying, one just might chink her armor, break past her frigid shell, and find her—well, not so very different whatsoever. Very few can count Beth among their true friends and allies (mostly for a dearth of patience on their part) and those who can, hardly recognize her voice with any greater ease than could an utter stranger hearing it for the first. She offers to these "confidants" (if one can call them such a thing) little counsel, and less encouragement. Even her cold, artificial gaze does not soften; in fact, if anything it worsens with fellowship, as the young death-priestess, in beginning to understand her companions, begins as well to judge and measure them relentlessly. One must suppose she sees potential they're not reaching, purposes they neglect; unless, of course, familiarity truly does breed contempt...

Still, somehow managing to break down all her misgivings and caution (and overcoming more than a few prejudices themselves), allies—true allies—may one day, despite all unlikelihoods, spend just enough time around Beth to feel her silence, her interrogative glare, her callousness—...change. Metamorphose, almost. No longer will she seem to barely tolerate their proximity but coexist beside it. Hers will no longer be a glower of derision but of restrained concern. One or two souls even walk this earth who may at one or another time have called her odd presence a soothing one, seeking out her stoic, almost serene composure amidst times of crisis the way storm-thrown sailors seek the shallows.

On the one hand, perhaps such a weary and cynical soul should not occupy a body so vibrant and supple and fresh with life. On the other, Beth has seen things most people never will, nor should: she's walked through the depths of human depravity, along the heights of human suffering, and, just maybe, abreast of death Himself.

_{C H R O N I C L E}

---

At the center of Malkuth, City of God, is a ziggurat; the Crucible of the Enduring Flame, it's called; walled, peaked, and setbacked all in electrogold. Every Cetrite has seen it issuing from the smogs, the poisoned mists, the perpetual rains. If not in person then on their billboards, and their bulletin screens; their illegal holodeck headsets.

A palace at the center of a city at the center of a peninsula in the middle of a smoking, toxic sea. How many Cetrites—no—how many Ultimites all the world over do you suppose have wondered what actually happens in the very heart-chamber of that edifice? What ultimate truth should await them there: a goddess of flesh or a goddess of steel and wire; born of the cosmos or born of the industrious hands of man, crafted in their own image, to their own specifications; a convincing replica, or a true spark of the sublime?

Allow me to tell you now, for it is in that room that one Regalia's story begins.

It's a rat's-nest of screens and wires, that room; cramped, for all its affectations, with heaps of useless, burned-out bioelectrics; hardly given to the opulence infesting the rest of the Crucible; bare of wall and (save for the grime) bare of floor, with no sources of light save for the screens, the all-surrounding screens. Yet despite this squalid modesty, only two men may occupy this room of their own will: the Archlictor, of course, who visits as he pleases; and the Neurospex (or Pneumomancer), who may never leave. For once he has plugged in, neuroport on one end of the jack and the Goddess-Machine terminal on the other, it is far too dangerous to luxuriate in the thought of un-plugging him. Simultaneously programmer, priest, and diviner, an acolyte Pneumomancer's hair quickly falls out, his skin sallows from vitamin deficiencies; his legs, worthless to him thence, will over the course of a few years wither away to vestigial flaps. They must remember to feed him, though he will not enjoy, appreciate, nor even so much as notice their fervent attentiveness. Eventually, the ever-blinding screens will bleach his eyeballs, and the chatter of ten billion voices will put out his ears, and finally he will rejoice, for there will be no more distractions then; no more interference and noise-data to pollute Her voice. Her glorious, triumphant voice, cutting through the ether and directly into his jellies like a vibroblade! And in a palace filled to brimming with messengers, with all their hearsay and interpretation, he alone, from that moment until his expiring moment, communes directly with Providence.

Seven-and-twenty years ago the Pneumomancer, of course, had no name at all, yet another useless appendage molted like a snakeskin to make room for the enormity of his task. Names are only another weighted shackle, after all, tethering one to worldliness and ego. But Nar-elesh was the name of the acting Archlictor, who dutifully brought the creature its breakfast, a mush of nutricorns boiled in lab tallow; the same austere breakfast as consumed by the Knights-Penitent, only further processed down and poured into a chargeflask for administering through a feed port. But when Nar-elesh scanned himself through the heavy chamber door, breakfast slipped from his hand, spattered the polished black flagstone; for there he saw the technopriest, drowning in his own froth, bleeding from the eyes, convulsing with mad revelations; dangling from his own wire nest like so many nooses. Three minutes later, before the Knights could get there in time to rip the neuroport from his neckplate, and the biosynaptics from his fingertips, the Pneumomancer had already died under the weight of what he'd seen. But not before Nar-elesh had gleaned a few key facts amidst the ramblings, murmured by a tongue half-bitten off in ecstatic terror, in rhapsody, in righteous fury.

"She will not burn who thou shalt baptize with thy jet throwers......"

"West......West, along a sister-shore......To the west, a child is born to reign over the Great Darkness......"

"Go!......while the Red Star of the Morning hast not yet risen......"

"While there is still time......so little time......"

And while the Pneumomancer twitched his last, there, on the largest screen, loomed the pitiless eyes of ultima.ene, watching. Expecting.

Nar-elesh knew not whether he had the strength—nay, the courage—to execute the holy will revealed to him—how he prayed that he, or even the dead Pneumomancer, might receive a new translation, a better one, an edict less random and cruel!—but through the labyrinth of speakers and wires which carries Her voice, only silence. The Goddess-Machine did not answer, and that was reply in itself. For if She had chosen to divulge only one way whereby to distinguish the child they sought from the pretenders, then it was the only way.

He begged Her forgiveness, and mustered a battalion to their amphibious carriers.

When they learned of their mission, even some of the most devotion-scarred and battle-tempered soldiers of the order hesitated; objected; wondered if the late Pneumomancer, or even Archlictor Nar-elesh himself, had not misinterpreted. But he warned them not to make him repeat himself, and so they did their duty. So for months did the Knights-Penitent of the Resplendency of Man and Holy Mother raze along the Sulfured Sea. From northern Astaria to southern Castral, where they could still smell the rotten-egg stench of Gaia's Rift, of the Sundering, still see its pollutant smog hazy across the firmament, they set villages to the torch, and whole families to the sword. And yes: they doused the babies. They lit them on fire. Heard the screams, heard the lungs blistering on the fumes, then the silence which followed. Many wept behind their faceplates, having to shut down their optic sensors and mute their vocal amplifiers to suffer through their mission. An unprecedented number were also executed on the spot for dereliction, and left to be licked away by the briny tongues of the sea, gnawed by the crabs and the shipworms, having refused to murder children in the name of their goddess. But eventually, through a great many trials of faith and fire, the survivors found what they sought: definitely no older than her first or second nameday, born premature (so small, so brittle), and blind in both eyes. Wailing ceaselessly despite that she could not see them, awful in their hulking armor, their grinning metal masks. Nar-elesh watched from the shoreline as, true to the Pneumomancer's words, the house went up in flames, and yet the Knights-Penitent did not emerge from the wreckage. He heard shouting then, first of wrath and then of horror, as one by one the helmeted heads rolled from pauldroned shoulders, pneumatic arteries purging their blood-mixtures through the yawning, eerily clean wounds left behind by a blade as thin as paper. As jet tanks were pressurized in the heat, bursting in columns of oily black smoke; as tempered shadesteel discolored in the flames and curled away, eaten by a preternatural rust; a rust which soon attacked the corpses as well, withering them to a putrescent black sludge, then to powder, then dust. Only one Knight survived, if he was a Knight at all, for he wore a suit not of their uniform, wielded an impossibly large blade, towered over even the mightiest of the dead Penitents had they been at full glory. Some kind of protector-spirit, the likes of which had not been mentioned in the archives in centuries, perhaps not seen on earth for centuries more before that.

And while her family's ashes curled in the flames, there lay the babe—at His sabatonned feet, caterwauling but unharmed. Molten jet thrower jelly sloughing harmlessly off her untouched skin, unbroken by the shrapnel and the splinters. Nar-elesh, too afraid to approach until the Knight's visage had long faded (and how torturously it stared him down in the interim), scooped her up in his arms, rocked her a little in trembling hands, eyes tearing with vindication. Whispered "There, there, I've got you. You're safe now."

And why not? ultima.ene, in Her boundless wisdom, had led him straight to a Regalia—another Dominant's Regalia, robbed from Their service and secured in the Resplendency's service.

Unaware of what true purpose she would one day serve, but knowing, all the same, of its great and terrible nature, on his way back across the Sulfured Sea, prow cutting through the poisoned spray, Nar-elesh gave her an old name, a terrible one, rife with the regret of apostates and the frightened awe of the devout, portending her role as a dark savior and a bringer of nourishing ashes—a name more ancient than Malkuth and the Goddess-Machine and the Crucible: Yrkhalabeth.

_{H O M E}

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See cassiel//rootaccess.ene.

_{T R I V I A}

⛧	Suffering from an extremely rare congenital disease, Beth was both blind and deaf at birth. She has worn hearing implants all her life, but she didn't receive medical clearance for the installation of her artificial eyes until the age of thirteen, before which she had moved through life entirely without sight. Beth did not understand why people were so afraid of her (and her childhood "secret friend") until she, herself, half-delirious from a gauntlet of anti-rejection drugs, beheld Him for the first time: a towering hulk of blades and armor, silent and pitiless, executor of her cruelest desires...
⛧	One would be forgiven for thinking Beth despises nature; after all, she keeps no plants in her cell, does not excite at the nightly newscasts following various weather and climate phenomena, and has never particularly sought out gardens, parks, or greenhouses for her solitude; seldom leaving the smog and the steam of Malkuth in search of nobler views. This however could not be further from the truth. She simply does not wish to inflict upon the wildlife her strange, withering aura, clinging to her like a pestilence and striking down such small, fragile creatures as birds and insects with ease.
⛧	She pretends she cannot speak Liturgian (the ecclesiastic language of the Resplendency)—not just fluently but elegantly. Oh, the songs the Knights-Penitent sing when they think no one is around to heed!...
⛧	With two of her six senses deathly-susceptible to electromagnetic radiation, when Beth does choose to indulge in a rare moment of earthly hedonism, she chooses a sense of which she cannot be so easily robbed: her sense of smell. Rain extracting oils from earth and asphalt, pungent guano on the rooftops, cooking oil wafting up from the Underhives!.....Though she would never dare divulge as much to anyone, there is no better gift to bring her than a deliciously unctuous, long-burning incense; an expensive perfume...

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Regalia

Think Rome and Carthage. Basically, who's maybe interested in having been reared in a culture which absolutely despises Cetrites and the church of Ultima for the way they've historically treated classes of people they perceive as blasphemous, obscene, degenerate, etc.?

Tripping You Up Since 3U

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