Balmas

Breathless Dead

"Oh, sorry, you wanted respect? Why didn't you say so?"

She scoops the bow with the very tip of the sword and watches it slice blue lines in the air. She's pretty sure it shouldn't do that, but she still accepts the momentum gratefully, lets it spin her around and forwards.

"All hail King Misery, lord of his bucket of crabs!

"Praise the father of all, who was so good at creation that all of his children hate him!

"Look at how much suffering he did! Look at how well he fits someone else's mold! Wow, this asshole can be abused so much!

"Fuck that, fuck you, and fuck your society!"

She bats aside arrows that should carve her from existence, but here, in this space, all is possible.

"Suffering doesn't make you noble! Fitting into a mold doesn't make you virtuous! You suffered, were abused, and did zero contemplation! You could have been kind, promised others would not suffer as you had, but instead you waited eagerly for the day that you got to be the one holding the belt!

"You're not worthy of my respect! You're pathetic!"

She's a sword-tipped comet trailing a swarm of broken arrows, a meteor with a point.

"You want respect? Earn it by being kind!"

Breathless Dead

Where did this come from, then?

She can't help it. Which, can she just say, is, you know, the natural response? "Wow, the hell is this?" It doesn't make sense not to ask questions about it, just because it's not large-scale replicable! Do we even know that? Whose power is this? Is it even a whose? Is it just here, available if you're in the right mindset, using it for the right reasons? How did this happen? Is this the same power source other legendary heroes have tapped into, or something new? Is there a price down the line for this?

… Is this something I can share?

The sword feels warm in her hands. It--

Doesn't throb, her mind insists, because there are certain things in the world that are allowed to throb, and swords are only allowed to throb in the better class of erotica. Still, she can't help but feel that it's alive somehow--like if she knew the place to look, she could put a finger on it and take its pulse.

Prolly on one of the blood channels? It seems like the best wrist-equivalent. Also she just knows there's a word for that which isn't blood channel, if she could just remember--

It will wait. There is business to be done, sword business.

She clutches its reassuring weight and begins to move towards the Titan.

"I think you'll find I can take every path, thank you very much. And I will help everyone I meet onto whatever path they will.

"I will wander as I was not allowed to wander, I will help as I was not helped. I will help free as many people as I can.

"You're allowed to get out of the way."

Breathless Dead

Compassion.

Strange to think of it as a weapon, something with an edge. That's wrong, surely. A weapon, something meant to hurt, to kill? Compassion, a weapon, a thing of evil?

She leaps, tail arching as the arrow meant to wipe her from existence carves a furrow, a ditch, a gully, a canyon behind her.

No, that's wrong, too. A weapon is a tool like any other. A thing, to be put to use, no more evil than the hand that holds it.

Yeah, snorts the internal censor. By hurting and killing.

Cutting tools can do more than hurt, though. Not slashing and stabbing, but cutting and excising. It's just a surgeon's scalpel with more heft--solid in her hands, reassuring, weighty--to cut through centuries of hurt, to cut away the lies, to open the snare.

The blastwave would have lifted her off her feet were she not already in the air. As it is, it's less noise and more something that's felt on every scale of her body--immense pressure, apocalyptic heat, shrapnel that would have turned lesser mortals--strike that, less biomanced people--into so much minced paste.

For her, though, it's a blinding, deafening form of liftoff--she spreads her arms, straightens her tail, catches as much of it as she can, and curls into a somersaulting dive.

Cut away the lies. There are other ways! You have options! You can do a different thing! You're more, Hermes!

It takes her a few tries--tries she does not have--to account for the sword's weight.

See, there's the simple way to fall fast with a gravity rail. Point a gravity field below you--or sideways, or above you, that's the fun thing about gravity being an optional thing--and simply fall. Simple, easy, reliable.

Predictable. Slow.

The word is slingshot. To dive towards a moving gravity well, to sink towards the event horizon, and then--like grabbing a vine that isn't there, feeling the ache in your shoulder, except it's actually every joint that's screaming--to turn off the gravity at the moment of greatest momentum, and whip past it towards the next black hole. It's an old technique--so old that it's new again, almost.

Unpredictable, even for her. Terrifyingly, exhilaratingly fast.

Account for the sword. Figure out its weight. The sword is an extension of her body is an extension of gravity.

Forward, always forward, always forward! She is needed!

Breathless Dead

It would be untrue to say that the world slows to a crawl. Time has already been so kind once, even if inadvertently, and he will not extend such mercy again.

Would it be worth it, taking another huff of the cigarette, if only to taste it a second time? To feel, once more, the cease of the incessant, to calm the hive of bees in her head, to slow, everything, down, until it's manageable? It's a wistful thought, right? One thought at a time, one thing at a time, never to be had again--

And yet, as the castle rumbles over the rise, shedding wings and rivets and trailing a plume of flaming paper walls, Dyssia swears she could pick every leaf of ash individually from the air, trace the projectory of every nail and screw and brick as it spirals down, pick out every pore on the stretched corpse riding its throne.

She doesn't want to run, she's surprised to find. Her fingers clench and unclench, grasping too-full bundles of Dekal's clothing, and wishing something more solid were in them. Something with heft, something that would whistle through the air and mash, pulp, thud into anything in its path.

"How could you?"

She should run. She should take Dekal over her shoulder, and sprint away, and hope that Hermes runs out of fingers.

She [i]shouldn't,[i] you know, lay Dekal down like this, and sprint towards the corpse empress like this, because closing the gap like that would be silly if you really thought about it for more than two seconds in a row.

"Put aside, for a moment, all that you've done to your daughters! Put aside the cruelty of whatever the fuck this test is, and the cruelty of what you've done to Dekal! How could you?!"

Anger and frustration pour down her cheeks. And yes, hatred, the internal censor admits after a moment of reflection.

How could you? How could you embrace this system?

Hermes! Trickster! Traveler! Ready with a coin, or a double entendre, god of wayfarers and merchants, of commerce and visitation! God of all the gifts that could be used to turn the world kinder, god of all the gifts she could have had, back when she had yearned of the Out There!

God, now, of all those things turned towards war, and empire, and stagnation! Of onyx diamonds, floating through space, full of servitors who will never wish to leave their infrastructure!

"Is this your enlightenment? Is there no other way for us to live except to be at odds with our creators?! To accept, unquestioningly, what some asshole decides is your role in life?"

She passes Aphrodite, and oooooh you would not credit how hard it is not to smack the cigarette out of his hands again. Have some self-respect, will you? Here, let me help!

And maybe that's what does it?

It's as she's reaching out to flick it again that she sees it.

Sees the nicotine baked under the fingernails, the tar in his gums, eyes yellowed.

Sees the way he cradles it, sees the hunger in his eyes, see the way he drags on it. Sees the addiction clutched in Aphrodite's hand not as an affection, but as--

Wouldn't it be worth it? Just the one hit, just this once, just for this one reason, because she needs it.

Of course the system is broken. How else could it be, when this is its creator? When all the gods spring from this?

She turns from the cigarette, and stares once more at the Empress looming closer in her sights.

How else could you be? How else could you respond to a system that you thought you set up, that keeps going wrong, that killed you until the only way you can manifest is in the company of the ones who turn you to war?

How else could you have treated Dekal? How else, when even your father is unable to escape his own affliction? How else, when he split himself off into more addiction?

She's still crying, but the hatred is gone, and even most of the anger is melting away. Not gone, not entirely, never gone, but banked like a fire that must last the night.

"Hermes! I'm coming to help you, if it's the last thing you do!"

Breathless Dead

Dyssia's brain is a jigsaw puzzle being put back together.

Well, no, that's the wrong metaphor. It's a jigsaw puzzle being pieced together from inside the box, while the picture on the outside changes each second, or maybe it's actually inside the wrong box, and also some of the pieces insist on fighting with each other?

Yeah, that's a bit closer.

She's almost got all four corners in place when Aphrodite presses the cigarette to her lips and vigorously shakes the box.

And suddenly the pieces are fitting together, right? But it's obvious the pieces aren't meant to fit like that, like someone has taken a mallet and forced tab A to fit inside slot B, but the pictures on either side spell out--

No, wait, is that right? Is it that the pieces are wrong, or that the cutting stencil is? Do they fit together, but only because someone went in and sanded them down to fit a different pattern, and now this is where they originally were, but no longer fit?

She stares at the cigarette, at Aphrodite, and at the cigarette again.

"What instrument do you play, again?"

It's not meant as a gotcha--not a conversation-ending zinger, not a line you say right before a stare-down becomes a bar brawl. Just two friends passing a doobie back and forth.

"They can't change what they are, what they do, any more than I can. No wonder they're working at cross purposes! They're the sun, the sky, disaster--"

A smiling bastard who never gave her the time of day

"--But have you ever viewed someone as something other than a means to satisfy your own desires?"

She points the cigarette at Aphrodite, flicks it away, and grinds it into the earth with the tip of her tail.

"People love to talk about Icarus! Flew too close to the sun, crashed into the waves! What a lesson! What a tragedy of hubris! But they don't understand what the wings are!

"They're expressions of hope and freedom! They're a father and a son, trapped in a tower with only each other and a plan for escape! They're Daedalus, pouring himself into giving his son everything he can, not because he views Icarus as his continuation, his lineage, not because of what Icarus can do for him, not because he wants to control Icarus, hang strings from his limbs and puppet his future, but because he wants his son to be free!

"Have you ever done that? Have you ever hoped your children would surpass you, escape you? Have you ever wanted good for them, not as a gardener does, not as someone who wants to build with them, not as someone who wants to paint a mosaic in the stars with their efforts, but because you hope to give them the tools to make their own success? Have you ever wanted to build something for them?

"Aphrodite, have you never loved anyone besides yourself?"

Breathless Dead

It has not been a good day for Sapper Jenkins.

This is the day! The day that everyone dreamed of! The day they trained for! The day the Outside finds them! The day the klaxons blare, and everyone tumbles out of their beds, and the Knights roar to life, and jets tear screaming through the sky! The day of gleaming brass, and military fanfare, the day the augurs all proclaimed was years off! The day they were discovered, and fought, and showed they could win!

And then some shithead lunatic threw a tank through her mech, and the world became an unceasing song of pain. Even through the combat drugs, one of her ribs is screaming that it's seconds from meeting her lungs. Kinda hard to feel good about a day's work in these conditions, especially when the minefield she worked so hard to organize just--

She just dove through it, you get that?

And now she's just. Sitting there?
Her mech is in pieces, it hurts to breath, the stupid fleabags have moved on to something more important, which is as humiliating as it is painful, and the blue streak that turned the tide is just sitting there and looking around and crying? Are you serious?

No, wait. There she goes, up again and moving. Like someone in a dream, like a kid holding an interesting insect up to a light just to see the gleam on its shell.

Jenkins narrows her eyes, wrestles with her controls, and empties her mine pistol with satisfying chnka-chnka-chnka-chnk.

***

Light blooms, thunder rumbles, and Dyssia soars above the battlefield.

Wow, it's pretty from up here.

It's pretty from down there, to be fair, but. She can see everything. An endless series of snapshots, a barrage of---

Not of information, but of beauty. Of light cutting across the battlefield, of the play of fire across rivets, of the splatter over bodies.

We forget so many things, is what she--

Is it? What does it mean to forget? What is the meaning of 'she?' What's a Dyssia?

We. Forget? Is that what--

An explosion, but what does the word explosion mean? Light and color and fury and sound and the rush of air across you like a distant laugh.

The world is a plaything--something to be molded and enjoyed and twisted without fear, without--

Oh! Oh, that series of lights! She knows those lights! Beams, playing across the clouds of fog and smoke!

Like the ones that Brightberry used to--

Brightberry?

Her brow furrows.

The world is endlessly beautiful, not because of what it is, but because it is, in itself, without any attempt to--

What's a Brightberry?

Why does that sentence hurt? What does it mean?

No need for those thoughts, just exist in the--

No, what's. She needs--

Lights. Lights lasers crystals couch friends guilt fear love--

Brightberry. Brightberry her friend her guide where's her friend--

She stares out over the landscape. What does it mean? What do--what are letters? What are thoughts? Where's the voice, the voice behind her eyes, what does it mean--

She heaves, and the splatter across the ground is beautiful.

Brightberry. Brightberry Pix. Pix pile. Comfy. Couch. Cuddle pile on the couch. Couch gone. Ship gone.

"Why?" she rasps, her throat sandpaper.

Squeezes her eyes shut. Shut it out! Plug your ears! Scream! Drown it out!

"Why?" Again, like it will mean something.

Why why why why beauty why drown why kill

Kill desire. Kill desire with beauty. Drown it out.

Won't work gods desire can't kill desire with enlightenment

She's face-down in the earth, hands over her head, wishing only she had four arms to cover her eyes as well.

"Why? Why bother with this? What can this possibly give you?"

Zeus. Zeus doesn't want this. Zeus doesn't agree with this. Maybe agreed with this, but sees still the continuation, the pattern, the opposite of this.

"What's the point of beauty without attachment? Without love? Without meaning? What possible worth can beauty have if it's meaningless?"

Breathless Dead

"We forget so many things," Dyssia murmurs. It's barely a whisper, inaudible amidst the sounds of razor wires shredding and mines blasting, and yet she knows Dionysus hears it perfectly. "It's how we survive."

And the worst thing about going mad is that it's so simple to do, once you figure out the trick the first time. It's not losing your mind, not really. Not mind control, not a state of altered perception where you kill your friends and family and don't remember a thing until you're standing at the sink washing the blood from your fingers.

No, madness is collaborative. Madness is "Yes, And." Madness is hearing the voice of Dionysus, and knowing already the feeling of sinking--of seeing that first blast of blue in her head, not because Dionysus put it there, is forcing her to see it, but because she can imagine it into being, hold the thought in her hand like a marble, and now it's not a thought, not imagination, but as real as any of her other senses.

Which is really inconvenient, you know, when said senses are pretty friggin' booked with helping the thoughts avoid the body being turned into a messy slurry spread over several hillsides.

Or, you know. Not several. Or even slurry, which is a pleasing yet technically inaccurate word. But still, a single solid lump made entirely out of misery and wishing it weren't present.

"Every day, we wake up," she says, slithering a hair's breadth from an explosion, "and we put on a mask called Normal. We tell ourselves nice, twee stories about how the world is, enforce order in our heads by telling ourselves that because the world should be a certain way, therefore there's such a thing as Justice or Truth. We ignore our senses, go through life shrouded and blind in fear of the moment of total recollection."

It's what we all agreed on. What an interesting phrase, bouncing around her head like a rubber ball in a rock tumbler which is itself falling down the stairs.

She shouldn't. She knows she shouldn't. The weight of Dekal over her shoulder tells her she shouldn't. The mines and gas and razorwire are making compelling arguments.

"Can you show me how to see?"

Breathless Dead

Thirty. Ten times three.

… minus two is oh no ground--

Gravel. Gravel and dirt and shards of metal everywhere. She didn't even know she had half those spaces and yet here they are, in every gap and wedged under every fingernail and--

And move move move

She surges upward like a comet, trailing a limp Dekal and what feels like half a continent of debris, less towards something and more away from a problem, and immediately bounces off a graviton pyre and straight back to the ground, where she carves a second furrow.

Not ideal.

Kay. Flight bad, not unless she wants a trail of craters for Hermes to follow. Tempting to grab one of those mine pistols and--

No, no, she's not thinking big enough. She surges towards the Ceronians, bulling through a knight--don't think about the crunching noise, don't think about it--grips the treads, and heaves.

It's not exactly clear which takes out the truck first--whether the wires slice it to pieces before or after the mines erupt, but it's an opening. Don't listen to the eruption of shouts or the wmp-wmp of the pistols or the smell of the niter, just make the opening and get through it before things close behind you.

Breathless Dead

Dyssia falls like a corkscrew that's just read about comets and is eager to try being one.

H'okay, so. Assets. First off, she can still--dodge!--like thas. Hermes is jukable. For all that Apollo might not acknowledge she exists, at least he's not the one, aha, pulling the strings.

She has a head start! Castle had to turn, shedding outlying regions, treads treadling and she'll just bet some crab legs come out for better cornering! Over the rumbling of the treads crunching forests beneath them, she can already hear the clatter of bricks and masonry, so that's another asset! Eventually, there won't be enough castle left to hold the treads together!

At which point, she'll just be facing a pissed off ghost of a god!

Um. Asset: Hermes only has eight more fingers? She hopes? Question mark?

Negative asset: Gravitational force is a constant acceleration. She needs to get and preserve as much momentum as possible right now, because once she loses that speed, it'll take a bit to fall back up to speed.

Negative asset: air resistance. Already she can feel it pressing against her, draining her, sapping her, terminal velocity feeling dreadfully literal.

She twists midair, and a series of micro-black holes pop into being ahead of her, forming and collapsing and bursting into instantaneous fusion of gases.

She falls through a vacuum of stars, and the world drops away. No air, no vibrations, no pressing rush, no sound--nothing but the sensation of speed, and the blossoming of new stars ahead and behind her.

Breathless Dead

"… Ah."

It'd be nice to imagine that time slows down in this instant. That just this once, Time might be kind enough to her to give her a break.

Just this twice? It's not the first time. Tiny twinge of pain at that thought, of the loss of enough time, forever.

It'd be a nice thought. It'd be nice to be able to have thoughts, like "What?" and its sister, "the fuck?", but A) Time hates her, and B) staring down an arrow has a lovely way of concentrating the mind on not staring down an arrow as quickly as possible.

No fingernail should look that bony.

Dimly, she's aware--well, mostly that Dekal is fucking heavy when she's busy being stabbed (and we're not unpacking the idea right now, thanks much)--but also that the horizon behind her is lit with the dim glow of paper catching fire, and she remembers catching a brazier with her tail as she dove through a wall, and--

And you know what, she's aware she's running from the god of haste and speed and messengers, so right now that's less important to think about than getting away as quickly as possible.

[Get Away: 5,6, +2. 13 to Get Away quickly, avoiding harm, while bringing Dekal with her, but drawing attention as she does.]