[b]Nero![/b]

"Oh!" cried Nero, putting her hand where here heart once was. "You wound me, children! Carrying on as though I am some awful tyrant - can you not see that I am in the process of setting everyone free as we speak? As we speak the chains are breaking, the cell doors are opening, and humanity is stepping out onto its long-awaited homeworld! From the moment I became aware of Molech and his Spear I swore to rescue my beloved humanity, and that plan is accomplished. From here on out your destiny is in your own hands. Everything I have done has been to ensure that humanity is set strong, healthy and united upon the path together when their mother takes away her guiding hand. Because an Empress is more than a mother to her heir, she is mother to the Empire. If my love seems cruel it is only because I must split it a trillion ways! If your love seems pure it is only because your view is small!"

She stood in magnificence, crimson dress arcing out behind her, Aphrodite at her back.

"Behold the scale of my love!" cried the God Empress. "Behold how it is stronger than my flesh! It was stronger than my eyes! It was stronger than my heart! And it shall be stronger than my children! Humanity must rise, no matter the price I must pay! Codexia! Unleash all of your arts of war! Ensure the freedom that my daughter craves passes to her in full!"

They open with a storm of knives. They arise on bolts of lightning. A phalanx that flies, unfolding like a kalideoscope fractal, spears and shields, thirty perfect warriors overlapping and interlocking. Every mechanic of limb and reach calculated, every transition between spear and solid and esoteric honed, every warrior Achilles, a monster formed of perfect solved violence. This is War as Athena intended.

*

[b]Demeter![/b]

"Oh yes, yes, it's all very entertaining and noble that you think you can think that way," sighed Demeter. "You want to engage me with Facts and Logic and How It Should Be, but if you learned anything from my art it's that language is a courtesy. All the relevant decisions were made long before you were born. Here is one of my favourites:"

the screaming

"Biologically, you cannot endure the sound, can you?" said Demeter from atop her throne of crab. "You hear the screams of pain and your prefrontal cortex responds. You can imagine that pain in yourself and feelings of aversion, avoidance and fear are triggered. Straightforwards enough. Communal survival technique, good enough for buffalo. But that is only a fragment of the complexity of your biology. Observe -"

[i]the screaming[/i]

"Change the pitch a little and now it registers as a child's scream. An entirely different coalition of limbic responses trigger; the preservation of a new generation becomes more biologically important than the maintenance of an existing one. And you'll find that your neurological response is fixed, it imparts upon you a terrible sense of immediacy that, sufficiently stimulated, essentially forces your entire decision tree. This process will compound once you enter and you see entities with large heads, large eyes and small bodies. The chemistry of your brain only plays out one way. If you wanted it to play out a different way, you should have taken advantage of my gifts beforehand, before your hard-coded responses were triggered."

the screaming.

"You will quickly find it will not matter that some of the creatures that are screaming are monsters," said Demeter. "Some of them are little more than collections of organs, or dispensers for viral weaponry, or machines for generating catastrophes. Plenty of them I have wrapped with empathic camouflage, like the assassin XIII who you have traveled with, unable to comprehend that she is neither cat nor girl. Well, here is her family, here are ten thousand just as appealing as her, and you have no more choice about saving them than the starling has about feeding the cuckoo's brood parasite even as it murders her children. Now, little robot, it's time to fulfill your programming."

The... screaming?

Demeter paused. Something was missing. Something was wrong. She smiled and brushed it off. No matter. It couldn't be her. She was here, and she was correct.