The [i]Starsong [/i]is pummelled by shattering waves. Ball lightning arcs in spectacular arcs. Slashes of sunlight illuminate the Eater of Worlds with a crown of Poseidon's rainbows. The swell begins. The smallest of motions, the movement of the giant's head to take a bite. Civilizations live and work inside it, trapped souls, damned souls, churning away in their thoughtless industry. Magma blood pours in channels. Plasma hearts pound at trillions of degrees. Cathedral observation decks with tens of thousands of optocytes standing, looking out and collating their reports to robed octopus scribes who send their reports through pneumatic tubes to the distant crystal brain. They see everything, including - - including the way the glass shatters as Mosaic breaks through. Panic. Optocytes run in all directions. Overseers start sending through panicked reports faster and faster. A few battlecrab security guards scuttle to engage. The disruption is immense; chaos, panic, an evacuation in a crowded football stadium. It's barely a speck of dust in the creature's eye. On the other hand, it's a speck of dust in the creature's eye. In annoyed rage, the Leviathan rises. * Atop the sinking ship, Jil of the Lanterns raises her spear to the skies. Lightning flashes. She knows the story. She knows it as well as anyone. How Queen Hatchan and the Warriors of Ceron killed the Eater of Worlds. Told in reverent, hated awe by the Kaeri. This was the bar that was set for them. To surpass the Ceronians they would need an equally legendary feat. They lived for it. They died for it. They strived for it with genetic yearning. They talked about the blow directly into the centre of the creature's forehead, shattering through into its brain. Jil hefts her harpoon. Her ship is not the ten kilometer capital ship of a warrior empire; it is breaking wood. Her crew are not the hardened killers of a warrior society; they are knights and princesses and magi. Her arm is not the biomantic perfection of a warrior species; it is firm but slender. She has no right to this legend. The swell resolves. The waves crest and smash. The Eater of Worlds comes above the water. The Beak opens. Slow, distracted, misaligned - eyes blinking in the wrong direction. Showing her the target. She kisses the tip of her spear. She gives it a name. It's to help her remember what she's aiming for. She's not aiming for vengeance, not justice, not freedom, not glory. She's not aiming to bring light to a broken universe. She's not aiming to return the gift of flight to a shackled species. She stands against the craving for Immortality and all its kingly carnage, the wheel that makes kings so it can grind them into tobacco. She has one name, one word to give to it. "Enough." She throws the spear. No lightning bolts strike it. No gods catch it and speed it on its way. No hidden power ignites within it, no trick or secret or cunning. It's just a spear, thrown by a girl, against something that wants everything that ever was and ever will be. And somehow, just this once, in this place between dreaming and waking... It's enough. * You have never been warm before. You who stood on the desert of Sahar, before the fire of the Engine, beneath the blistering fire of esoteric weapons. Your body reacted to those things but that was always a charade, an instinctive play-acting to hide the fact that your hearts did not beat and blood did not run. This water is warm. It is full. Even here at the bottom there are fish in vibrant colours, corals in cascading arrays, columns of kelp reaching up to the skies, and of course the crabs who somehow seem to wind up everywhere. They stare at you as you emerge, the first witnesses to the slayers of the Eater of Worlds, and they clack their claws and know no fear. But the sun calls. The sun calls, oh, how it calls. It calls with a brilliant, sparkling energy and you're kicking upwards, swimming, clawing at the water for any extra speed. It's hard, it's slow, it feels like you're so heavy compared to the birdlike fish. Your muscles burn like they've always burned. Every inch closer to that surface is precious. You see her up there, a beautiful shape in bright colours. Every moment, every second, every - Your head breaks through the water. And before you can react, Zeus - brilliant, beautiful Zeus, dressed a in violet and white bikini, grabs you by the hair and presses her lips to yours and, with her kiss, she [i]breathes [/i]into you. Her breath is everything. It's the breath of life. The breath you've always, always, always craved above everything else but never had. The breath you never knew you were missing. A lifetime of pretending to breath and now for the first time ever your lungs are full and your heart is pounding and the sun is warm against your skin and the tropical paradise that surrounds you in this cerulean green sea feels like being in tune with your body for the first time ever. It's everything. It's everything. You're free. Resurrected. No longer a part of the ranks of the breathless dead. * The mousegirl sits atop the Eater of Worlds, staring up at the Fall as the impossible corpse drifts downstream towards the Valley of the Kings. Enough lies in her lap. Her ears twitched. He thought he was quiet when he moved, but she was used to real stealth. "You know you still might be able to make it up there?" said the voice of a friend. "I mean. I don't know how, but..." "It's fine," she said. "No, I mean it, I can probably organize some sort of lift effort with the remaining droneswarms -" "It's fine," she brushed the skull-beads out of her eyes so she could look at him. Then she smiled, creasing her half-washed out skull makeup. "Trust me, that world's not for me." "But," the Assistant - no, he was the Minister now, wasn't he? The Minister of the Eater of Worlds. "But you came this far. Just a little further and -" "And I could go even further?" said Jil, with a smile. "Yeah, nah. Sucker's game, all that striving and yearning and memory loss. I'm good." "But Lord Hades would offer you a wish - anything you wanted!" "Mm!" she said. "He did! But that wasn't the best way to get what I wanted, now was it?" She wasn't talking to the Minister any more. She was talking to Hades, smiling up at him as he loomed over her, blocking out the sun. She kicked her legs off the side of the Eater of Worlds childishly. "I admit," said the god of the dead, crimson bow tie like a rose against his throat. "I thought I was going to win this one." "Yeah, well," she said. "You weren't paying attention." "No gods helped you. What you did was impossible." "No gods that [i]you [/i]know about," said Jil, rolling her eyes. "Like I said, you weren't paying attention." "Explain yourself." "You ever watch Prion Paula?" "... no?" "We'll start there. It covers the basics." She hopped to her feet and stretched. "Okay. Pay up." Hades sighed, then laid a hand on her head. "C'mon, give it some more juice," she said. Hades grimaced. "Eye level. Minimum! This reflects on both of us, you know?" "What -" said the Minister, eye flicking back and forth between them. "- What is -?" "You know, I always said that I wasn't short," said Jil. "I'm [i]tall[/i]. I'm taller than almost everyone I know. And then suddenly I'm surrounded by all these giant massive people making me feel small, right?" "Oh! So your wish was to be taller?" said the Minister. "Nah," Jil grinned. "I said that if I won, Hades would have to make everyone in the underworld shorter than me." Jil grinned wider. "Like I said. [i]I'm[/i] tall. By definition now." She looked at Hades. Looked down at him. "Yeah, that's Enough." "..." "Ye-eeees~~?" she said, grinning at him. "... do you need any more work?" Hades asked. "Well," she said, flopping back down and spreading out atop the slain colossus. "I think I've got an opening in my schedule." * [b]Dyssia![/b] The Biomancer looks at you with an exhausted, long suffering stare. "Sure, we can do that, ma'am," she said, her voice so flat that it seemed almost like this last part was imagined: "But I won't enjoy it." But then the smile is back, animated and vivid. "Well, then! Don't think of this like a capture, think of it like the beginning of your montage! You know, we were delighted when we heard the challenge would be something so positive, right? We're wholesome creatures, us Pix, by nature and it is only the complete and utter destruction of the previous mode of production that has turned us to our current life of ultracrime. Come on, they'll have your training field all laid out for you by now!" She turns and jets away through the water like a knife, jellyfish pulling you behind her in a cascade of tentacles. By the time she drops back to start talking again you've noticed she's forgotten entirely about asking you to swear the oath, which is definitely a mercy. "So have you ever been on a Pix ship before? You might find our way of organizing pretty unique!"