[b]Bella![/b]

Blurring of the light. The touch of water to burned lips. Still relevant, despite everything.

"Love and hate," said the Uncrowned King. "The Gods love and they hate. They hate and they love. They build terrors so they can raise us above them. They raise us above so they can smite us for our hubris. Is this the secret of the galaxy? Perhaps I understand now. We thought what happened to us was a curse. Perhaps it still was, but not for us."

Four assistants came forwards and built a tent over you; a thin layer of fabric, but it took the edge off. A mercy. 

"Thank you for your insight, Praetor," said the Uncrowned King as warships began to lift from desert bunkers behind him. "It is clear. The Gods had a purpose for you. In following it, you paid the price of suffering. In following it, you came far and were raised high. The suffering is the point. There can be no greatness without it. My people will remember this lesson during the trials ahead."

[b]Ember![/b]

"Once, there were sunsets on Capitas," said the Star King.

"There aren't now. They've engineered them out; multiple suns have been put in place and networks of star amplification light and wavelength diffusion have made it so the stars can be seen even at the daytime. The colours of sunset have been spread out and deployed aesthetically for maximum effect. But once the Azura capital was a normal planet, rotating a star. There were beginnings and ends to every day and every season. And of all these days, one of them had to be the final one. When the Grav-anchors, orbital Megaliths, and Reality Edicts were due to come online there was one final sunset and one final night to wait. There was anticipation. There was joy. There were not celebrations of this final death before immortality. And for failing to mourn this final death of day, Hades cursed the first city on Capitas to behold the ever-day. The earth opened up, the citizens transformed into crystal statues, and one of the great cities of the Azura was petrified in violet amber. And so it remained -

"- until we came.

"When the Star Kings invaded Capitas, my ancestor Kohil the Bright fought on the streets of the frozen city. She climbed the Waterfall Throne and prised these gems from the unweeping eyes of the Azura Vizier who sat there. These she reforged into weapons of regrets that would consume the destroyed in nightmare contradictions of lost chances. She wielded them until her own regrets caused her to banish herself into a world born from them. I took them from her void because I alone amidst my pack had never made a mistake and so had nothing to look back upon, and I still have not."

The pattern, the story, it's war cant and affirmation - as much braggado as it is the very nature and secret that lets her wield such a terrible esoteric. Goaded into speaking it she is also goaded into coming into the open, crystal weapons held high, ready to finish this in glory to the Gods.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

The Generous Knight dies. And dies, and dies, and dies, and dies.

And howls with laughter all the while.

The ship shudders and writhes. Spectacular explosions of blossoming branches erupt up through the floor. Acorns fall like rain, hatching into flightless birds with vicious spurs. Each drop of blood transforms into a wasp and together they swarm in vast clouds. The Generous Knight is the world, and the world is a monster. 

"Die?" she half-barks through a wolf's jaws. "Die, I? Oh, you do not understand, child." She raises a twisted bird talon and tears off the mutated part of her face. She takes a moment to calm herself, and then continues in a voice ragged and wet "The Gods love me," she said. "The Gods love the Skies as much as they hate us. They can't help themselves. They torture us and they exalt us. They kill us and they make us..." tens of thousands of butterflies swirl behind her in the shape of wings. "[i]Immortal[/i]. Enforcing beauty is insanity? Does [i]this [/i]galaxy look [i]sane [/i]to you!?"

She ripped open her dress. No longer perfect blue scales, but a monstrous, chimeric combination of every animal and monster. In this deathless galaxy, she dies not by the power of Demeter.

"We believed in the false lights of science once!" screamed the Generous Knight as enormous insectoid limbs ripped themselves out of the hull of her starship and began crushing Portuguese ships in their talons. "But we are wiser now!" colossal muscular legs shattered her Warsphere, smashing it from the inside like an egg. "We thought that we were being punished!" a twisted, nightmarish head ripped its way up out of the last fragment of clean, white armour. "But we [b]are [/b]the punishment! The Endless Azure Skies is the instrument the Gods use to end corrupt civilizations!"

The Generous Beast looms above the tattered remnants of the Portuguese fleet. It was never worth learning their names. They were always going to end like this, torn apart by the greatest surviving monster of the Age of Knights. The Eater of Worlds and the other horrifying warbeasts of the Tides trace their lineage back here, to this prototype pilot in her newly enhanced mech suit.

"And the Skies," she rasped, this bloody avatar of an interstellar titan monster, abomination against everything she held dear, "will be our reward."

[b]Dolce![/b]

"Oh yeah, for sure," said Hestia, taking a bite of ice cream. "It fuckin' sucks here, I don't know what to tell you."

*

The light begins to fade from the [i]Cancellation[/i], the dying days of Summer. As the heat fades and the noise quiets the Biomancers come out. Ones and twos, groups and legions, flocked in their white coats. They perform tests and take measurements of the Summerkind eggs, they direct drones to clear graffiti and dismantle monuments, they talk in the low, soft voices of scholars and work with the steady diligence of engineers. They're all so inoffensive in speech and shape, all so invisible in their obsequient lack of personality. There's no friction within them. Their whole ideology is to make the galaxy run as smoothly as possible, and that starts at home.

Except. For one. 

The sharp voice rings out like a bell in a ship of quiet consensus. The grumbling stands out like the ringing of a bell, the splash of yellow like a black sheep's wool. It's a matter of degrees - he's still quiet compared to what he used to be, more conforming than you ever imagined him, but some part of the Ancient Craftsman - of Iskarot - of a friend you knew in another life was always touched by the contentious energy of Ares.