[b]Dyssia![/b]

All of Azura warfare has been founded on the principle of gravitation. Starships perform their maneuvers by banking off microsingularities. Citizens walk the Rail-Path their entire lives. Treatises are written, combat manuals disseminated, biomantically engineered species are seeded on laboratory worlds, given access to the Rail, and passively observed to see if there are techniques that the Skies' own cultural bias prevents it from learning. In all of time, no object has been as closely researched as the Grav-Rail.

And yet, sometimes there are heroes. Legendary figures like the Furnace Knight who stand alone against armies, sorcerers or even Gods. And with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity, the Endless Azure Skies collectively shrugs its shoulders about it. Sometimes you just get a real fuckin' badass. They're probably a demigod. Society can but tremble before them.

You've done this a million times before. You've been on planets being moved by the Rail. You've never done it like this. Matter is not dead. Energy is not meaningless. A tool is not neutral. The only thing that has changed is your spirit, and that opens you to the infinite power of the spirit world.

The arrows formed from Hermes' fingers are not extensions of her body. The hollow where her heart should be does not pump blood from the wounds. Her eyes are stone carvings, painted green. The God of Travel has not taken a single step this entire battle. She has not moved beyond her tiny circle in centuries. As you move towards her with blade in hand, you feel more like Hermes than she does.

But that is not to say there is nothing inside her at all.

She draws her own swords from the flesh and bones of her hands. One long and one short, heads like arrows, tick-ticking as they clack against each other. She raises them in a gleaming parry, elongating the moment, straining parchment-dry flesh against your perfected vitality. Into the corpse left by the Goddess creeps the influence of the Titan, black and gold pouring from her head. 

"You can leave," said Kronus. "You can take any path except for the one that goes through me."