[i]The Blowfly ascended, borne aloft by a tetrahedral array, up past the barrier of clouds. There was a long moment of darkness, blood rain, red cloud soaking her every fold, but then she rose; breached into the clean sky, baptised in gore. Below her the cloud shone white in every direction. Above her the stars once more fell. She watched them come.

For a moment, she almost felt something.

The first Cosmic Knight fell; she got the measure of it. With the second she collided. The ophan cord cut effortlessly through his body, severing him through the spine. She felt the quake of the impact ricochet through her ophanim, so thick was that armour. She wasn't even sure it was dead.

The Knights realised, and the sky scattered. Falling Knights swerved and arced wildly to avoid her razor wind, most succeeding. The rest fell to earth as soldiers no more. Some targeted her, falling towards her blade, but Tauga dodged or tore through them, unhindered, until they began to realise that too many were throwing their lives away for nothing.

Then things changed.

The first collision barely knocked it off course, the Knight slamming into Tauga's ophan with a streak of heat. The second came rapidly, and soon as a rain: chitin after chitin soldiers slammed into the Bludgeon, forsaking their assigned impact points to strike instead the alien weapon with which Heartworm had blessed her. They leapt off, cushioned by magic, but losing their deadly energy as they did so. The blows were constant. Chitin upon metal. There was little else to be done.

But the speed of the Knights was greater than anything Tauga had seen before, even Realta. As plumes burned, the metal creature dented, and heated, and began to lilt; the others could only hold it aloft. The impacts were too much. Melted by internal damage, the ophan's cords flickered and went out.

Trailing ethereal plumes in a slow and painful rain, the Bludgeon fell.

More Knights coming. Already they were homing to her remaining Bludgeons. Tauga considered rising to smite at their source, but it was impossibly far; she would have to leave. With a sweep of her arms, she sent the Bludgeons away.

And fell, and fell, and fell, and landed, on a heap of rubble, which was all she'd ever ruled, and her tendrils swept out through the city like a bomb. And they saw her as a shadow in the ash as the one she truly was: Tauga the Blowfly, Lord of Xerxes.[/i]

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The Bludgeon careened into Xerxes, impossibly huge, impossibly heavy, almost slowed by the utter shock of its magnitude, until it smashed into the city and destroyed.

Buildings were like standing water, people were like flowers. Trailing [url=https://orig02.deviantart.net/3b03/f/2008/317/e/2/fractal_flame_three_by_bmjewell.png]plumes[/url] that scattered in every direction, seeking safety, it rammed the earth with a force that was not equalled by any mortal before or since, and lay where it fell, the earth still quaking.

A stray plume shot through the tremendous gouge left by the dying ophan, unfettered and untouchable. It fled, light in the shroud of ash, passing Dagon, Knight and Rotfly, escaping as the Alefprian soldiers poured in. Blood rain poured, but it was already mad, thoughtless. Its senses, unseeing, were keen. Its sisters died around it, struck down, choked by ash or soaked by blood, but it managed to escape.

A sphere was closing around the city. Chaos was playing its game. The arena was forming.

Chaos...

[i]'DEVIL HEAR MY PLEA!'[/i]

It was a soulless prayer, but it worked. It worked.

The barrier thinned just enough for the ethereal feather to escape, though it knew not what it was escaping, into the outside- into a river. It fled along the water, doomed with every flutter, losing energy. It emerged into the sun.

At least it would not die in that place. But it would die. What was the point, in preserving its life, when all it had was gone? It knew no such thoughts. Its mind was nothing but chaos. It merely saw.

Without the ophan, the feather could not resolve its own instincts. It raced back into the point from which it had come, rising from the river, but it found nothing, only a vast hemispherical crater into which water was mysteriously barred from flowing. It fled out to the mountains. Somewhere in its memories, was the thought that mountains were home.

Elsewhere in its memories it knew that they were... not.

The feather churned, turning on itself, dying. The sun was bright. The clouds were gone. The ash was gone. It wished it had stayed in Xerxes. There it could die in war. As a victim. Helpless.

No, thought the ophan feather. This was a good place to die.

Maybe.

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[i]...Hmm. This is weird.[/i]

The feather felt it was moving, but it wasn't flying. It had sensations it had not felt before, not in a long time. Corporeality. Mass. Memory. [i]Thought.[/i]

A body?

Yeah, it had a body. Nice. Nice. Nice!

[i]NICE![/i]

...not nice. It hated nice. It hated... Niciel. That was it. It would never return there again. Never to the Valley of Peace.

The feather stopped, confirming its first command to its foreign body. It was not airborne, that was for sure. Its senses were dulled, locked away, trapped by something. Aluminium? That and carbon. A flesh engine. The feather released itself, sensing the borders of its prison, and flew easily away from its new body. It immediately tried to kill her.

A White Giant. Hm. That explained a lot.

The feather re-entered her host, found it immediately quietened, responsive. She probed her memories. What did having a body feel like? Oh yes. Like... That.

The giant reared up on four hindlimbs. Inside the body, the feather was blind, but she could feel her weight shifting. Yes. This was good. Did she have senses? Yes she did. Touch, heat, kinesthesis, balance, sound, timing, echolocation, humour (she brought that one herself), and a long-range one she didn't recognise but liked the feel of. No hunger. Pain, maybe. She'd figure that out in time.

There were other souls in here, or soul-like things, placeholders. The feather kicked them out. Deleted them. Good riddance.

She realised she had power. She had [i]always[/i] had power. Great power- how else did an ophan stay aloft? [i]How else had she slain her enemies?[/i]

And now she had a body.

The feather flexed its knuckles, felt its muscles tense within its shell. It localised its awareness to its faceless head, stretching the small hands thereon. The porcelain ovoid swayed at her command, back and forth, curling up and down on a neck segmented with ceramic plates so cleverly layered as if to be flexible. It flexed its back, felt lichenous components click and shuffle in their mechanisms. Piece by piece it tested the armour, and the massive tendons locked within.

Tick, tick, tick, went the giant. The sensation was rapidly becoming routine, like a heartbeat. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The comfort faded quickly. Where to go? What to do? Who to talk to? There was no language it could form in this shape, no angelic hymns it could sing. The feather's head whipped around on its long neck, jumping shadows. No Ophan. No colony.

Something moved. The parasitised giant scrabbled away, then launched itself at a suspicious-looking tree. It broke to splinters in its fingertips. Quiet again. Sawdust settled. A familiar scent of chaos on the wind. 

Very familiar.

[i]I'll manage,[/i] thought the rogue angel. [i]I've come this far.[/i]