Moments after the transmission from The Liars, Ezkshi decided on her KTmA battle plan; a personally-devised fusion of several complex scenarios concocted at the [i]Cizr Armada Academia[/i]. An opportunity such as this was too tantalizing to resist and would likely not come again for a thousand years, legacy be damned if the Liars’ prediction proved false. With a telepathic prompt, she placed all crew within visual proximity of her in temporary catatonia, withdrew from her benighted corner, drifted through the command deck, and entered a secure area. While the crew recovered, the door quietly morphed shut behind her. Sufficient lookahead protocols were in place for the command deck to function, however briefly, without her active direction. Besides, what she intended to do was more important—in both personal and collective terms—and demanded the entirety of her concentration. 

Physically, she was alone in an unlit chamber adjacent to the command deck—a place that opened and responded only to her and other empathically pure Cizran officers. In spite of its ostensible simplicity, via the miracle of neuro-connectivity, it transformed what her senses beheld into something miraculous. It truly defied the science. 

As immediately as the door sealed, she was enrobed in the shimmering astra of cyclically-harvested potential. Around her whorled a simulation of the interior of the konul she intended to manipulate, trillions of motes layered in manifold strata, each uniquely defined by the flavor of their reaping. Then, as a seer gazes through tongues of fire, she peered deeper than what her mundane senses allowed and beheld the battlefield. From a distance, she saw the utter vastness of the light-flecked cosmos; closer still, the faintly-blue spiral of the Su-laria galaxy as it swam through the heavens; even nearer, the sector of incursion where the great beast was butchered by the incessant onslaught of the Bahá-cizr; within, a conflagration of destruction and Diamobos burst like a clot of dirt-rife slurry against the interior bowels of their cosmic prison; and, finally, the Aptosite ship wherein Snil and Karzar stood before the fading phantasm of their would-be captive.

With a gesture, she ripped the Aptosite ship in twain from bow to stern. The groundwork was already in place from the explosive cocktail of nanites, chemicals, biologics, and femto-responsive quasi-mineral-organics—all of which burrowed into the enemy vessel’s hull as soon as the curtain was drawn back on their masquerade as Nenegin zar-Taliļ, Aredemos, and Kirri. Soon thereafter, the infection proliferated throughout the extent of the ship and its complement.

Unfamiliar as she was with their anatomy, Ezkshi did know few things fared well without atmosphere and she imagined the ruptured vessel would suffer a multitude of casualties.

Even so, she was not finished with her work; in fact, as far as konul manipulation went, she wasn’t even started.

Again, her consciousness expanded. She saw the whole of the strange being that interjected itself into the domain of the Empire. It swam in what was open space. Was, until she shaped her vision, and the whole fell into a box—one inundated with flashing MASERs, bursting LADAR, fulminating fusion reactions, would-be Cradles of Life, and genuflecting magicarp. The box compressed, like the interior of a trash compactor, shank, and cramped what was in it. The vision wasn’t hers alone, but it manifested in reality beyond her mind. What she did in this moment, her manipulation of the konul’s harvested potential, affected reality. 

The box shrank into a nothing, and then was no longer in or part of the Su-laria galaxy. It had, instead, been all pushed into a microscopic dimension. 

It was … inner space.

The cell she balanced on a talon contained the wreckage of Kilamara and Diemobos, the Cradle of Life and its pillaged worlds, and the Aptosite invaders. She had been careful to mortar the gaps precisely so as to plot an escape for her fleet and the nodes of the grid.

With a disgusted gesture, she flung it away; it skipped like a pebble across the trillions of light years of distance that separated the Empire from the slums of the verse. Then, without a second thought, she went about the restoration of this sector of Cizran space.

Beams of light and tunnels of time channeled through the colorful layers of strata, reshaping and reversing the photons of the star around which they orbited. An evolution seemed to be taking place, as dust coalesced, gathered into rocks, and further accumulated into a planet and a moon strikingly similar to Kilamara and Deimobos. Verdant and fertile, the planet boasted a single continent with a great central desert separating two vast jungles. There were no mountains, only deep fissures in the otherwise vaguely undulating landscape. Meanwhile, the volcanic moon became darker and colder as it aged. Life spawned, but, just as before, it was not intelligent. However, this time, she ensured it lacked the strange dynamic that allotted them possession of a power by which they could destroy their own world.

The sector was restored to what it was meant to be.

Another cycle.

Another subservient, mindless harvest that would one day be reaped and, after several cycles, restore the effort exerted on behalf of their redemption.

[center] . . .[/center]

Meanwhile, on Cizra Su-lahn, outside the Av’sti’s headquarters, a scandal was playing out in polygraphic polyglotic polyamorous majesty. 

[i]“Butina cyp-Mariia, we have reasons to believe there are recordings wherein you colluded with the enemy—licentious treason wherein you and Zeptir wallowed in untold heresy! What have you to say for yourself?”[/i]

She struggled against her restraints, spit at the ground, and insisted, [i]“No collusion! This is a witch hunt! It is the Av’sti, their deep-state strangle hold on the Cizran Empire, that is to blame! I did nothing wrong! See how big my hands are? SEE? LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME, YOU SPECIPHILES! The chemtrails are reaaaaaaaaaalllllllll!”[/i]

[i]“Silence, sTRUMPet,”[/i] barked one of the guards, [i]“soon you will be PUT IN a cage and left to rot!”[/i]