Dyssia sits at the center of a supernova.

Around her, an expanding series of coruscating crackles and crunch, the ships of the Portuguese clutched in monstrous talons. She can see each one of the ships pop in sequence, spilling its crew, unenhanced by biomancy, into the void, watches as they shift and morph, dying and rebirthing and dying again until they land on a shape that can survive.  Beautiful, in its own way.

Like the Skies, kinda. Beauty out of horror.

She wishes she knew their names. Someone ought to remember them, and she only wishes it were them.

This is it, then. She's stared death in the face before. Or, you know, life, as it were. (Come on, battlecrab, everyone wants to come back as a battlecrab!) But…

It's like, she's always known--no, no, known is too strong, cut that down to suspected--she's always suspected that she was fighting a losing battle. That the Skies had had too many advantages for too long to be overcome. That she'd--

Well, not that she'd end up here, but end up somewhere similar. One of dozens of planets, fighting one of dozens of fights.

Is it weird that she almost feels sorry for the Knight? Because, on the one hand, yeah, she's an asshole and a monster, and currently slaughtering people by the thousands. But also she's betraying everything she believes in to do it? Doing it by sacrificing the aesthetics that--

No, you know what, that's stupid. Yeah, she's betraying her sense of beauty by becoming a monster. She's fought long and hard, knowing that her methods don't match her ideals, boo fuckin' hoo, what a terrible life she's lead.  Why do we care, again?

Like, yeah, it'd be nice to convert her. Convince her of the error of her ways. Can you imagine her, fighting to help people, instead of just to make them pretty? But be honest with yourself, Dyssia, she's a true believer--she was one of the people putting controls in peoples' heads before Zeus zapped that to bits.

So, fuck it, we're fighting. We're losing, every blow comes back stronger. We're taking out biomancers as best we can, losing against this self-reinforcing loop, but we're not going down without a fight.