[b]Mosiac![/b]

The Lethe carries the dream of gold. Gold bars weightless and ethereal, somewhere in a vast and disorganized bag just out of line of sight, a place you can only reach if you don't think about it too hard. They must have grown from the flowers you passed before, an exposed vein on the mountain where the slate and silicon crumbled away to reveal the underworld's treasures. A fortune, if only there was some way to access it, to change it. Perhaps the right bookstore might transmute it, or the place where that whisper of two-dimensional bread comes from.

You have a fortune in gold but you'll need to translate that into coins. Two each, of whatever size or shape that can be found. Perhaps from the three-story maze that overlooks the lake. Perhaps its massive tower interior with stairs up and down for days and shops that sell all the infrastructure to maintain a breakable world. Perhaps in the glittering red velvet carpet and checkerboard pattern area near the grand entrance at the end of a rusting red-green bridge over an asphalt pit. Perhaps in the strange stripped down white tile and cardboard where the building has shrunk back from earlier dreams, occupied only by the hardy survivors of invisible hands. Somewhere in this sparse crowd there will be coins, if only...

If only Vesper wasn't a useless shopper. She wanted to try on everything and make you try it on too, just to see if it worked better on you. Your path crosses over with a third, the hound with the clarion voice, and as far as Vesper is concerned everything in this world can be divided up between the three of you. With three models so distinct in form and aspect everything will suit someone best. Leather jackets and sunglasses, hawaiian shirts and jorts, tuxedos and fingerless gloves, and even a fourth pile for a forth sister that will be transmitted to her once she is rediscovered. A world once splintered into a periodic table returns to four elements, a kingdom divided between warlords returns to four directions, and we [i]need [/i]to know how you look in these shutter sunglasses before we can make any further decisions or plans.

[b]The Knight![/b]

"A princess is someone who fails," said she quietly.

"She is someone who dreams of a realm united. A mother placated. An evil averted. She uses blade, knowledge and influence and even her own marriage as tools. She offers herself in sacrifice, in labour, in obedience, in body before consuming Cetus, consuming Cronus. She offers all she has but still cannot. She burns herself out and ends in despair. Until..."

An autumn whisper blows past her in the Lethe's currents, the smell of bonfires and cheap fireworks, on the trail of burning leaves. The building lights are cold, structures like upturned pyramids, ghostly eucalypts rising from grass so green your mouth waters.

"Until she is rescued," she admits. "And therein is the kind of princess known. Some are rescued by princes, some by knights, some by princesses, some by Zeus. Some are rescued by kingdoms entire, or in very rare occasions by themselves. Only then might her dreams resolve and give meaning to the one who rescued her, to define at last the happy ending that the knight quests for."

[b]Dolce![/b]

"I... dreamed..."

A dry chuckle, a young man thinking of a younger man's folly. "Dreams, Lethe. Of all the things it can wash away of course it can't wash away what it first granted. Do you think this is how Lord Hades talks to us? So many of us spend our lives fearing his realm and we spend half of our lives with one foot in it, and the other half in service to the visions we find there. Of course, then, I dreamed of [i]energy[/i].

"Beneath three suns, you understand! The Forge itself was conquered, a vibrant and growing oasis, a miracle of perseverance and alchemy. But a single solar flare from any of those stars, the mere licking of celestial lips, would have burned it all down to its foundations. Organic matter had triumphed over inorganic matter, most assuredly. None could doubt that. But... what would it take to fly closer to the sun, as it were?"

"There were others who thought like me. They started work on creatures made of glass and crystal, a project to amplify neuroelectrical impulses until they were so powerful they could leave the body. Stormclouds caged in matter. But that always felt small scale, like parlor tricks, no guarantee they'd ever lead to the world I dreamed of. A world where life had spread from the Forge to the stars that forged it."

You can see the burns. The mechanical limbs. The scars come into resolution, now that you know that they are patches over molten wax wings. For all his youthful idealism, you can see that this dream ended in despair.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

Have you been to the depths below? It is in theory the native environment of the Azura, in the same way that the tropical rainforest is the native environment of humanity. What that means practically is that everything here is evolved to kill you, personally.

The corals seethe dissonant red. They break up the cool blue-greens of the ocean depths, promising poisonous death. Every slightly misshapen pile of sand or stone might be an invisible octopus, camouflaged perfectly and ready to pounce and try and strangle. Jellyfish glow with bioluminescent false suns, pretty little balls of bright white, luring you in towards their spreading network of paralytic stringlike tentacles. You're pretty sure that fish has a sword for a face. 

Oh, sure, you're an apex specimen compared to the Azura of ancient days, much like how a human might tower over a monkey. But monkeys know their way around rainforests; know how to move stealthily and safely, likewise those ancient serpents were wise to the tricks of the ocean in a way you aren't. But their legacy is with you still in the form of an unbelievable, instinctive, primordial wonder and terror at everything down here, a genetic scream that you should touch not, look not, go not. Messages written to you on the corpses of trillions of slaughtered generations before opposible thumbs were invented. The primordial terror of hearing a tiger's snarl, translated into the snap of crab pincers. Poseidon ate your ancestors in this blue hell as surely as Demeter ate humanity's in her green one.

If you've never been here before, if you've never felt the dead hand of instinct weigh on you as immediately as this, you might get a glimpse of the mechanism that keeps servitors loyal to their tasks.

As you're contemplating your instincts are getting louder and sharper. Amidst all of these perils there's something worse. Something that's making the coral grow faster and the jellyfish glow brighter and the razorfish swirl and slash like warmup scimitar strokes. It's a nightmarish feeling of the natural world starting to perfect itself.

It's the influence of a Biomancer. The Pix sent a Biomancer to head off your retreat into the depths. You can't see it yet but the way the world moves...

One Biomancer or the united hunting pack? Not an enviable choice.