She was reborn but she was not yet alive. In ice and silence she understood the world. Through eyes sharper than stone and the logic of verticality she perceived it. The act of taking a God was not what she lived for. Assuming a mantle of power was merely a precondition to life. Even the act of destruction was a mere prelude.

It is only when another God steps upon the battlefield does her life start to matter.

Why did the Spirit not open with this? Why did it fight her with unlovely drones? Why did it not wrap itself in beauty and glory and render its will into the shape of a sword? Why had it wasted her time, kept this moment, her precious moment of divine craving from her for this long?

She ascended on wings of violence. Through ceiling after ceiling she went, smashing and tearing her way through the layers of the facility in absolute quiet. She sets gripping feet into the ceiling and inverts. 

She loves the moment of reorientation. Nothing in all the world is quite as satisfying. Changing her perspectives, her understanding of up and down, fixing the world into a new frame is the most artificial thing she can imagine doing, and that's what makes it the most natural. It's the moment when she feels most like a God, machine unbound from the flat of the earth, when she can redefine which direction is down. She did her best to respect the Bezorel, she'd tried to love it as it had deserved to be loved, but she could never love its awkward, unimaginative connection to unidirectional gravity.

Down was up. The roof was the floor, as sure as the planet's magma core. Up above her in the inverted sky was the [i]Enkindler[/i]. It is a new God, opening to life for the first time. It has never fought a battle before. Neither has she. The zero-entropy antimatter fission beam comes to her hands like craving. Optical lenses clatter into place like the wings of angels. She breathes in light and heat and electromagnetic energy and echolocation and all the machine's wonderful senses. No longer deaf. No longer blind. No longer unable to appreciate the seductive curves of reactive armour plating, the glittering charisma of an an energy shield, the expressive body language of micromissle racks. Aliens did not call them Gods. Aliens did not believe they were Gods. Even her own people felt like aliens sometimes. There was a difference between talking of Gods and being a Goddess.

The target lock clicked into place in harmony with the alignment of crystal fire.

I see you, [i]Enkindler[/i]. Let us love each other as Goddesses do. Be my first battle and my first victim. Let us be our entire selves together.

And she fired. Through three floors that were ceilings. With a column of negative space so cold it could freeze atoms. With all the respect she didn't have for Isabelle the princess, the mortal. As a God she remakes this facility in her image, and through the shattered hole she has carved she pours micromissiles and loitering munitions. Take this, her sword, her stars. Take this, her death, delivered from ambush with maximum power. She will not toy with you as though you were a girl except insofar as it might help her carve through to the heart of the God. She loves you too much to not use every weapon against you.