[i]True love hates and will not bear delay.[/i]

- Seneca the Younger

*


"Re...da...na..."

The scarlet light flickers like your heartbeat. Water runs down on your head unsteadily from ruptured pipes, just as your blood runs unsteadily from ruptured veins. You're so tired and there's so, so, so much road left to go.

And above you stands the God of the Dead. The ceiling light casts him in a dusty blue halo - red bow tie like a bloodless slit across his neck, black and white waiter's dress making it seem as natural for him to take your coat as take your life. When you look at him all you can think of is how easily he would fold up; he gives the impression of a sheet of origami paper, so loosely tethered to this world all of those angular joints might bend and crease and sweep him away on crane's wings.

He has an expression as though you remind him of someone. Given your state this must be a very sad memory indeed.

The thunderbolt is still stuck in your shoulder. A weapon for a king. A weapon to kill an empress. King Jas'o... you know his name. Know his house. Know that you were given lessons about him as a potential political threat to your future reign... all those details run through your mind like wild horses. Why hadn't you paid more attention? What had been so important back when your tutor was telling you about what a crack shot with a bow he was? All of the world had been bent to the task of making you ready for a moment like this and it had been insufficient. And now you're here, at the end, with Hades before you.

"It was too heavy a burden I laid upon you," said Hades. "A quest to find Ancient Gaia? Some things are hubris, even for the gods."

He folds at the knees, then the waist, then the shoulders, elbows, wrist, and each finger in turn, one after another, like watching a slow moving river run up through his legs and down through his arms. He offers you his hand.

"Come. I will hold no grudge for your failure."

*

The red ruin of your work lies before you, [b]Alexa[/b]. The dead and dying speak a hymn with their bodies, and its lyrics are [i]you have performed your function.[/i]

"Their approach was exemplary," said Pallas Athena, carving the lines of a bloody map into the wall. Her spear is a brush and blood her palette. "Courageously venturing through a solid projectile barrage to land without exposing themselves to point defense fire. When the seal of the boarding shuttle lowered they were too hasty to disembark, rushing forth to try and from a phalanx without sending their skirmishers out in advance. You recognized the opportunity and got amongst them before they could react, and with the loss of the phalanx then the skirmishers were easy to clear..."

She is merely giving voice to your instincts. The second you'd seen the mistake then the battle proceeded with the crushing inevitability of a meteor strike. The completed diagram carved in crimson into the hull of the ship is just another page from the [i]Masteries of Battle[/i], played out exactly as the Warsage proposed it would. A clockwork war, a truth of geometry, biology and physics expressed in bloody lines on a map.

Pallas Athena salutes you with her crimson spear as though there was glory in this. She pays tribute to the machine for functioning as it should. As though any of participants in this battle could have altered its outcome. 

*

There is a rainbow wail; seven screams from seven broken hearts. No sound could be more alien; no feeling could be more human.

In the depths of space ahead lies the Eater of Worlds.

The mind cannot comprehend it's vastness. Its shell has stone enough to bridge the distant heavens. Its beak has sharpness enough to break a planet, as an eagle snaps the delicate neck of an ibis. Its flippers have width enough to swim the rivers of space on a voyage between the stars.

And it is dead. 

One hundred thousand blackened craters run across its shell, leaving frozen webs of fault lines. Its flesh is boiled and burned, in some places down to the bone itself. And, worst of all, in the centre of its brow in between its mighty eyes rests the Battleship [i]Lupincas[/i] - the mighty flagship of the legendary warriors of Ceron, armoured prow rammed through the leviathan's skull and into the creature's brain. It is the greatest wreck of this place and that is no small boast for the butchered hulks of a thousand Imperial warships scatter the void around the Eater of Worlds. The star leviathan did not go quietly - it took the combined might of the entire Grand Armada to bring it down, and left this system a graveyard of broken ships.

This is the site of a legendary battle and the end of an unparalleled beast. And now the fleet that did this, the [i]commander[/i] who did this - has come to kill you too.

And here is Poseidon Earthshaker upon the bridge of your ship, tearing the clothes from his breast as he mourns his monstrous child. Terrible light radiates from within him and space runs violet and blue and crimson in sympathy, nebulas of spectacular dust arising into what promises to be a terrible storm.

The ship shudders and pounds beneath your feet, [b]Vasilia[/b]. Solid projectile shot after shot is impacting on the [i]Plousios[/i]' starboard hull, causing great eruptions of smothering, toxic gases that conceal any hint of the [i]Veterosk[/i]'s location as they bombard you. But the guns are running quieter and less frequent now - a tell-tale sign that they have launched their grapnels and started sending their soldiers across to engage in a boarding action. A full crew compliment of an Imperial vessel of that size is somewhere around three hundred. 

You are four.

*

The Eater of Worlds fills the view screen. That is not why everyone is staring at it. Every eye in this massive hall is fixed on the two out of focus starships burning in the middle distance. Was that the strike of a macrocannon? Was that the launch of a boarding cable? Every heart screams for information but all they see is the Iron Admiral and her greatest triumph.

Admiral Odoacer Hetrodus. It is no exaggeration to say, [b]Bella[/b], that you studied her in school. You know her right down to her favourite food (smoked salmon) and her childhood fears (stampeding cattle). This is not the first dinner party you've attended with her... and despite everything that makes this moment horrible it's not [i]yet[/i] the worst.

As the Admiral of the Grand Armada, Odoacer represents the most clear and present threat to the Empress Nero in the galaxy - and by extension, to Redana. Her designs on the throne were never well concealed but have become increasingly blatant as time has gone on. She was a twenty year old NCO on the frontier at the time of Molech's fall but has been gradually weaving for herself a 'secret' backstory that she was the previous emperor's child and styling herself as his successor. She's even gone so far as to increasingly alter her own appearance to look more and more like him while advocating policies like the end of the Emergency Declaration and the violent subjugation of the entire galaxy. 

You need to be very, very, very powerful in the Empire to voice an opinion like that, no matter how softly. But such is a privilege afforded to the Slayer of the World Eater - a tacit recognition that even the Empress cannot simply have her killed. On the other hand, for all the might of the Armada, the walls of Tellus are yet greater, so a stalemate exists between the Empress and her Admiral. You, Bella, are on the front line of that stalemate - Odoacer recognized from an early age that Redana was Nero's greatest weakness and has been seeking to leverage her to claim the throne ever since. She has attempted to have Redana kidnapped, poisoned, hypnotized - she even proposed marriage to her when she was eleven, and every year since then. You have fought her agents tooth and nail in the shadows of the palace. Such is the duty of the princess' companion.

And what is happening on that screen might be the realization of the Admiral's ambitions. Redana might be falling into her clutches right this instant. But the Admiral won't even do you the courtesy of focusing on it, instead forcing you to stare at the monument to her greatest triumph. It is a spiteful thing to do, and you are not the only one to think so. This room is filled with all of the greatest hunters, commanders, priests and kings of the Fleet. They were invited here just before Redana's ship was sighted and are now trapped in here while Odoacer's minion King Jas'o - a good warrior but a boot-licker to the core - boards Redana's ship to claim the prize the Admiral has craved for so long.

And she won't even let you [i]watch[/i].