[b]Dyssia![/b]

"It is important to me that you recognize that you are alive," said Dionysus. 

They have never spoken before. Is it them that is speaking? Or is this a recording, a playback of something that happened long ago. It sounds like a human voice - weak and creaky, breath rising into energetic capacity. Passionate, sickly.

"You know what my favourite colour is? It is blue," they said, racing alongside you on streaks of cascading ecstasy as you swim through hell. "Most people do not remember what it is to see blue for the first time. Problem with life. You don't remember what it is to be alive for the first time. The screaming pain as light shoves its way into unprepared eyeballs - you miss all that, learn to drown it out before you learn to recognize what it means. By the time the brain has developed enough to appreciate being alive it has already perfected the art of pretending to be dead."

Dionysus waved a hand absently. Atomic shockwaves followed, pushing clouds and dust from the skies, revealing the Skies beyond.

"And just taking their eyes and giving them back later did not meaningfully assist," Revelry continued. "Or having them develop at puberty, and the whole robotics path was a dead end. Whenever I open a wound people go and build a culture around it, like a scab. Drugs to numb the pain, stories to shape the thoughts, rites of passage and ceremonies to tranquilize sensation and move the soul back into the grave. Not to mention how everyone would fight me over it. When people are screaming to the gods then that is an indication that they are still culture bound and aren't capable of appreciating the screaming in its own right! The answer is not to reinforce the psychological foundations for continued pain!"

A dramatic sigh, and a slump onto a throne of wreckage. That mirror mask gazing down at you from a hundred feet high, a long fingered hand reaching down to pet a pair of Knight walkers gingerly, like touching feral cats. "Well, things spiral up. That's what we all agreed on. You agree that we are closer now than we used to be, don't you?"

It is hard to focus on the war. The positions. The people around you. Your eyes keep snapping back to Dionysus and the patch of endless azure sky that spins around his head in a halo in a hurricane.