This is power.

This moment was scripted before you were born to death. Gene looms clattered. Gods swapped cigarettes for cigars in smoke filled rooms. All your heart. All your love. All your royalty and poverty and pain. Nothing, for no one. So much pain, so much content, so many screams, so many moments, your entire lives. Nothing, for no one. You are holes in the galaxy, a spear thrown across the heavens, the only parts of your lives that matter are those that matter to the Gods. Only your imbalanced biology. Only your craving hearts. Only your ability to bring death as commanded. It does not matter what the parts of you that think things that do not matter believe. All that you valued, all that you wanted, that was just... empty space. The empty void of space. The emptiness that needed to be crossed to get you here, to this moment, to this matter where everything matters. 

The only thing between these five dead and deadly girls is space. To no one is offered an Imperial Princess. In exchange for nothing.

The only thing that doesn't matter is space. The only thing that isn't matter is space. Nothing for no one stretches out beyond the entire galaxy. And so for a moment it might seem that all the galaxy rests inside the palm of no one's hand. 

Space collapses. Space rushes in. Space crashes outwards. 

For a moment, there is just a little space. Just a little distance. For a moment, each soul is apart from its crashing, weaponized biology. For a moment hearts don't hurt. For a moment claws don't kill. For a moment none of this matters. For a moment there is the void, gentle in the absence of all of the demands of power.

For a moment there is no space at all. How close do you need to be, Redana asked. The answer was always: [i]this [/i]close. This was the closeness. This was the craving. This was the hunger so deep and intense that made you want to eat your kin like Cronus. But it was never hunger, it was never even craving, it might not even be love as Aphrodite understands it. It was not a hot-blooded drive that caused all of this; it was loneliness. The isolation of souls with too much space between them. The pain of being so close and so unable to touch. The pain of touching but not touching in the ways that mattered. Of saying nothing because you were trying to say everything. For a moment there was no nothing between you and everything, between you and each other. 

Across a Rift that severs love forms a connection. A five pointed star formed of nothing. Just an absence of absence. Just an absence of matter. Nothing else matters. Nothing lasts forever.

...

But then, nothing lasts forever, doesn't it?

Five girls are embracing upon the quiet grass. The distant breeze of artificial air brushes the cheek of a cherry blossom that may never fall. Blood and pain are distant and dim. The only pain that ever mattered was nothing compared to this. No one is lonely. No one is scared. No one is far away. No one wishes things could be different. In place of nothing is an adjacency. The ability to see. The ability to hear. The ability to feel. Nothing at all, really. Five heartbeats, still making their way onwards despite everything. Nothing is required for those hearts to keep beating. To keep hearing each other.

All around is the arsenal of power. All the perfect spilled blood. Caged lightning glowing in its thunderbolts. Invisible and jagged motes. Torn and crumpled cigars. And there, the greatest weapon of all: nothing.

All the nothing of this moment. All the hopes of no one. All the jagged edges of the moment, all the wanting, all of the loneliness, all of the connection and lack of connection. Everything that was nothing manifested here into the form of a simple, straight, long sword, glittering upon the glass. It appears to be steel. It is not even especially sharp. But its edge is the void. It is no one's sword, no one's heart, given to people she'd never met, cutting through pain she'd never known, with no regrets she'd ever consider. Trusted to these five girls over everyone else. 

*