Balmas

Breathless Dead

What a tail.

Like, it's not a. It's not a thing people talk about, right? In conversation, polite or otherwise?

Like, you might discuss it in terms of aesthetic and sexual appeal, and here she's pretty sure that Azura have the advantage? You just can't beat a couple dozen feet of pure ripcord muscle for sex appeal? Can't beat it for the pure amount of cuddles it can dish out?

But she's looking at that tail--startling somewhat guiltily when Ember turns--and wishing she could whip hers around like that.

It's the swish, right? A swooshy tail, wagged furiously with the pleasure of achievement and a hard-won victory.

Of course it's Ember. It could never be anyone but Ember.

Or, you know, maybe Mosaic. But probably Ember.

There isn't. There isn't, you know, something she can point to? Not the voice, the hair, the facial structure, the bone structure, none of it is recognizably her, but--

It's the vibes. It could never be anyone but Ember.

Princess and child of the gods, huh?

That's gonna take a bit to sink in, honestly, at the same time as she feels silly for not seeing it earlier?

She looks at the Weapon on the floor, and does not reach for it.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia sits at the center of a supernova.

Around her, an expanding series of coruscating crackles and crunch, the ships of the Portuguese clutched in monstrous talons. She can see each one of the ships pop in sequence, spilling its crew, unenhanced by biomancy, into the void, watches as they shift and morph, dying and rebirthing and dying again until they land on a shape that can survive. Beautiful, in its own way.

Like the Skies, kinda. Beauty out of horror.

She wishes she knew their names. Someone ought to remember them, and she only wishes it were them.

This is it, then. She's stared death in the face before. Or, you know, life, as it were. (Come on, battlecrab, everyone wants to come back as a battlecrab!) But…

It's like, she's always known--no, no, known is too strong, cut that down to suspected--she's always suspected that she was fighting a losing battle. That the Skies had had too many advantages for too long to be overcome. That she'd--

Well, not that she'd end up here, but end up somewhere similar. One of dozens of planets, fighting one of dozens of fights.

Is it weird that she almost feels sorry for the Knight? Because, on the one hand, yeah, she's an asshole and a monster, and currently slaughtering people by the thousands. But also she's betraying everything she believes in to do it? Doing it by sacrificing the aesthetics that--

No, you know what, that's stupid. Yeah, she's betraying her sense of beauty by becoming a monster. She's fought long and hard, knowing that her methods don't match her ideals, boo fuckin' hoo, what a terrible life she's lead. Why do we care, again?

Like, yeah, it'd be nice to convert her. Convince her of the error of her ways. Can you imagine her, fighting to help people, instead of just to make them pretty? But be honest with yourself, Dyssia, she's a true believer--she was one of the people putting controls in peoples' heads before Zeus zapped that to bits.

So, fuck it, we're fighting. We're losing, every blow comes back stronger. We're taking out biomancers as best we can, losing against this self-reinforcing loop, but we're not going down without a fight.

Breathless Dead

Carefully, Dyssia rises from her resting place, and looks regretfully at the once peaceful grove.

It seems almost cheating, to be taken into a throne room, into a place of trust, a place of vulnerability, and then strike directly at the heart. To spin up the grav-rail at a figure bound to a throne. To see the rot accelerate, boughs split from trees, to hear the increased pulse of the distant biomancers and their oracular chant.

"You are wrong, and you'll fail whether you doubt it or not."

Beauty. What a thing to sacrifice billions for.

"Our culture is a hallucination of madmen--to think that there is one and only one objective standard of beauty, worth everything! Worth dying for, worth perfecting, when the idea of objective beauty, objective perfection is a fool's notion!"

In her mind's eye, she can see the food of the Portuguese--a thousand assembly line meat patties, two pickles, one tomato. Perfectly uniform. The platonic ideal of burger.

A million different shades of blue.

Leaves fall around her, grav drive whining like a banshee at her side.

"Beauty isn't a thing you can hold in your hands, define and codify. It's something different for everyone, in the same way that perfection is different for everyone. Enforcing it is insanity. If you doubted that, you'd die?

"Die, then."

Breathless Dead

Leaping from world to world, like a swan. Alighting on each, partaking in delights beyond measure, finding wonders past imagination. Looking up and seeing, not the sky, but the Skies--an endless, limitless sea of potential, ripe for the taking.

A sea of adventure, infinite beauty, for any and all.

She can't help but feel the longing of her own younger self. How many times, sitting in the spaceport and seeing the ships leave, did she wonder about the stars? About, you know, leaving it all behind. How many times did she sit on a mountain peak, and imagine that she could, you know, take a single step and soar into the sky?

The people of Bitemark, able to leave. The ability to leave, find a new home, wherever you want, whenever you want.

Except…

"It would just be the same empire."

No matter where they went, no matter how far they went, the same.

"The same empire, with the same petty cruelty, the same boots on different necks. How can we, the Azura, claim to be superior--claim to be administrators that deserve to be listened to and pampered and obeyed--and then hand it off to somebody else? How, when our entire sense of beauty is built on being Azura, on Azura values, on Azura sight?"

A million shades of nothing but blue.

"We create all this variety, all this wonder, all this beauty, we see all these new ways of thinking. And then we say that the only way any of it can be acceptable is if it's us. If servitors share our culture, our language, our sight. Genocide or assimilation, so long as the only thing left is Azura."

Breathless Dead

Sight, blurred. Visor, smeared with blood, mech straining to absorb the chitin piled over and across it.

Arms and legs, leaden, burning with the built-up lactic acid of a year and a day of piloting.

Ears, full of the skittering susurration of a million billion legs, swarming around and past and over.

It's like, some of it is memory, and some of it is imagination, and she's not sure where the line starts and ends.

"But you're still happy to keep them around," she notes. "Still happy to benefit from what they create, willing to let them manage all our affairs, to arrange things so we never have to think about what life without them would be like. Happy to pay them nothing, and then repay them with annihilation when they're not convenient."

And she can see the logic? See where it started--see where things went wrong, see the horrible wrench that Zeus dropped into the gears.

No, no, that's not right. The problem wasn't the lack of mind control. The problem started far earlier than that.

"You say they're smallpox. They're a threat. We're a threat for teaching them that they have rights, that they don't have to brainwash themselves. We need to remind people how awful it would be if we were replaced in our own cultural model, if we lost.

"So why not have done? Why keep them around? You have no issue with genocide, so if they're so awful, if we're so terrible, why not just wipe them out? Start fresh! Begin a new, heroic era of nothing but the Azura, in every corner of the galaxy, doing nothing but Azura culture everywhere you look? What's stopping you?"

Breathless Dead

You know, normally Dyssia hates touching the ground.

It's not a sensory issue, you understand? Not a matter of germs, or of the feeling of pebbles grinding to dust beneath her. It's just that touching down binds her, grounds her, feels like swimming through molasses.

And here, she can't help but do it anyway.

It seems appropriate, you know? Like here, in this breathing, pulsating heart of the ship, listening to the flow of ichor and sap, it's only fitting to-- Well, not to become one with the ship, but to let her thoughts slow. To let the moment soak over and through her.

Dyssia sits under a tree.

"The worst thing is, you're not wrong," she admits. "I want the end of the Azure Skies."

And that stings. It feels like--like admitting defeat, almost? Even though it's not her project, even though she's taken step after step away from the Skies?

"I can't stand the way we treat others--abuse them, uplift them, always with that self-assured magnanimity that we have the correct way of doing things.

"But also it's terrifying to think of what that looks like. They'll have figured out new and better ways to become closer to the gods than us--what does that say about our own? What do I do when what is comfortable and safe and known is demonstrably not the best way? There's a part of me that wishes that the new way will be close enough to the old way that I won't have to change who I am to fit into it."

Outside the window, a flash of plasma splashes against the ship, and she watches as a gash opens in the Generous Knight's elbow, watches as it starts to knit together again.

"It terrifies me," she admits, "that the better way will be so alien to me that I cannot help but fight against it too."

Breathless Dead

That's the worst thing, right?

It's like, look at them. Look at the variety here. Politicians, outcasts, mothers! Sons, stoners, salesmen! Hundreds--thousands!--of walks of life! People, people, people, in every shape and color! A cacophony, an explosion!

Subsumed!

Swallowed, extinguished, samed!

They clutch their axes as if the axe is what makes them special! As if--

She's doing her best not to look at the paint, because if she looks at the paint she's gonna try to read what it means and she's gonna be disappointed again, because--

They act as if they've been let in. As if a hatchet, mass produced and airdropped from a supply center a million lightyears away, is proof that they're part of something. That they're trusted. That they understand. They've been let in.

That they're not being deployed like chaff so the real people don't have to get involved.

Well, that ends now.

The pseudowolves get the kindness. When they're picked up and hurled, they land somewhere soft. The painted palace of the Ceronians, on the other hand? They get the building-rumbling impacts, the targeted implosions.

They'll come down from their building and face them properly, without sacrificing their minions, or they will not have a building to sit in.

Breathless Dead

It's worse that it's beautiful.

She sits, drinking in the scene with eyes closed. Air, dripping with scentmarks, heady, strong. Music, tickling at her ears. The electric whine of a charged esoteric.

And she knows that opening her eyes will bless her with--

It's like, she doesn't have the words to describe it? Like drinking nectar after chewing cardboard your whole life. An insane burst of flavor, of texture, of meaning made more potent by the surrounding drabness.

It's only been a few hours, and already it's a relief.

It's worse that it's beautiful, because how can she stare at this and not make the comparison? How can any of the new, uplifted, not make the comparison?

How is it fair--no, wrong word. How can it be right that they--the Azura, humanity, servitors, anyone with biomancy--can stand on the precipice of this, and determine who is or is not worthy?

At the same time, Mosaic's words ring strong in her ears.

That's the issue, then, isn't it? Is that somebody's sitting on the gateway, opening the door only in the way they imagine right.

But--

But the alternative, right, is--

You can't demand that someone be given free access to the tools to destroy themselves, and at the same time demand that they only use them in the way you approve, right? Not in any kind of self-coherent way.

She doesn't want them to biomance themselves into servitors. Or to biomance themselves into what Aphrodite showed her--into eternally happy seekers of bliss. What's the middle? Is the middle even the answer? Is the answer to let people do what they want, or is that just the lotus eaters again?

For now, she resolves that, even if she doesn't have the answers, it's important to ask the questions. And, you know, more important to focus on the immediate, the esoteric, the presence of the shadow-hunters.

She tastes the scene again, but this time for a different presence--of the shifting, the invisible. She's looking for the partially uplifted, the ones who are able to see, able to smell, able to see. There will be more than a few, she's sure.

Breathless Dead

It's important to remember, here, surrounded by--

Well, let's be real, calling it drab and uninspiring is giving drab and uninspiring far too much credit. It's like someone sat down and said, "what's the single most soul-crushingly ugly thing we can build I the name of functionality? Great, do that a dozen times."

Does it even count as something being functional? Like, in a situation where there just aren't resources to go around, she could maybe understand making something to do just the job it needs to be, but that's--

Honestly, even in the survival stories, you don't think about things just being ugly. Like, for no reason! The landscape is beautiful all on its own, everywhere you go. Everywhere but here, where even the things the Portuguese have deliberately made are--

They're people. She has to keep repeating it to herself, keep telling herself that, because no matter what they've produced (ugh) or how they've built (yuck) or how they're dressed (why even bother), they're still, you know, people.

Delicate people. People who she doesn't want to hug because, you know, what if they squish under her? People with eyes that--

Honestly, she wants to scoop them up even more when she looks at the eyes. It's like they're all waiting to die. Like they've given up on improving their situation, like hope is just another thing that hurts, and so they've resolved to work every day for the rest of their lives until they blessedly keel over dead from old age.

Still a weird thought, that.
She wishes they didn't look at her like that. Like she's a god, or a curse, or a reincarnation, or worst, hope. Not when she knows they've gotta get out of here as quickly as possible, not when she can't meaningfully help.

Still, she flags one down, and asks, quite gently, if she could be shown to--what was that, a factory? Yes a factory would be delightful, off you pop.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia pauses, and gingerly tears out a bit more of the insulation in her Plover.

The noise has to be right, d'you understand? It won't be the Electric Tiger II if the noise isn't that same spine-rattling purr as before.

It's dumb that she gets one.

Gets to spend time painting it so the stars gleam against its orange. Make it hers. Actively change its configuration to fit how she flies, how she listens, how she's shaped.

She gets a plover, after losing the last one. After losing the one the crews already customized for her.

It's why she's pulled this into a side hanger, banished the plover crews. It has to be her doing it, her fixing her own mistake.

It has to be her. She has to show that she's learned, even if nobody but her will notice.