[b]Dyssia![/b]

Discard meaning.

That razorwire, that thing of hate and sharp edges dragged across no-man's land by sappers to inflict suffering on invaders? Remove all the hate, the implication, the threat, the danger, the knowledge. See it for what it is. A line of gleaming silver, lovingly highlighted by celestial hands to catch the sun just so. The contrast between dark and light metal yawns like a ravine, the dark soil of fertile earth sends its roots through red and orange and black and is thick with the promise of green. 

That Knight is not a symbol of war, or chivalry, or defiance. It is as bare and bloodless as though you saw it as a blueprint or animation frame. Look at that network of rectangular shapes, all the intricate moving parts that make up the hand, the way it glows, the way it's hot, the way it was painted and the way that paint flecked and broke. It is a story in metal and ruin, and even though it looks so dark and oily and heavy you feel like you could lift it up as though it was a statuette in plastic. 

This is not a war of ideologies, it is a dance of colours. This is not a struggle survival and the annihilation of the beautiful, it is just beautiful. Soldiers fall into clouds of doves; a sniper shot paints a field of flowers atop a hillside. Freeze the frame on that terrible wolf with a scar across her face and appreciate every strand of fur until it melts into the yearning of a painting. 

For all the terror of a galaxy of endless war and endless expansion, even with all the weight of it crushing down upon you, you could spend five hundred hours highlighting every edge and rivet of the armour of the least of these soldiers with brush and paint and still have more work to do. When was the last time you appreciated the colour blue for being blue, separating it from all the symbolism of water, of order, of law, of control, of the west, of the left, of the right, of the blood, of the sky, of the ribbon that wrapped the ice cream? All this planet and its chaos was merely a balloon in space, ready to blow away on the solar wind.

"Beauty is everywhere you are," said Dionysus, crackling audio-static with that tape-recorder voice. "Beauty is everything that is. Did you know we are getting closer? This is how the Ceronians see war all the time. Nothing to hate, nothing to change, nowhere to be. But they are imperfect; they see the world outside the war with greed and blindness. The Summerkind were another interesting step but they become cynical by the end. We have the theory that the state could be induced in an evolved species by creating around it environmental conditions of such surpassing beauty that it cannot help but drown in it, but there are still defects such as yourself. Every time we draw close to universal enlightenment there is always some subsection of life that cannot accept it, and so Brahman slips from our grasp. Still, what can we do but continue to try?"