"Re... da... na..."
Hades looks down at you, a silhouette of icy white against the howling wind and black sky.
Above you stands the God of the Dead. Sapphire light surrounds him like a halo, the emergency lighting of the open shuttle ramp like gemstones in his crown. The red bow tie blossoms like a spurt of arterial blood, untroubled by the howling wind. Black vest, white sleeves, and so many sharp angles and joints.
Your fingers scrabble at the edge of the shuttle's ramp. Does he look at you with pity in that moment? Does he look at you with sadness? Does he look at you with forgiveness? You look at an expression of a man who has been suffocating for a hundred years, long enough to see his own pain wherever it occurs in the world. Is he going to reach down to lift you up?
A spear erupts through his chest. It passes through him in seeming slow-motion, a dividing line of black and white that divides the world into two. Down through the left, where all is black, cascades blood comprised of hearts. Down through the right, where all is white, the blood flows as diamonds. The spear itself is a spade, and the flesh of the God becomes clubs. The Lord of the Dead bleeds card suits as your fingers slip and you fall.
For a moment you hang in the air, caught perfectly bisected between white and black, surrounded by glittering hearts and pulsating diamonds. For an eternal moment you fall not through wind and air but through the realm of the divine.
The diamonds and hearts congeal into two blood-red shapes, standing on either side of the spear as though its narrow line was the curve of the earth. They are identical in shape and form but utter opposites in bearing. One figure moves with the slow and mathematical precision of thought, the other crouches and rages in the madness of the heart. They fight but an infinite line of perspective separates them; they fight as inverted reflections. They soar together towards the lurid painted eye that dominates the sky and pierce into it even as it transforms into a roulette wheel. The spear shatters against the cthonic eye, causing it to burst open like a punctured dam sending a waterfall of spades and clubs pouring down alongside you with the hearts and diamonds.
You fall through a waterfall of striped red and black, so thick and heavy it blocks all your vision of the wider world like curtains of velvet. Moving through this bisected reality are two figures, again equals and opposites - one of which is tall, slender, graceful and golden, the other is huge, ancient, bearded and silver. Through the blood of Hades, Nero and Molech duel - spear against spear, clashing and clattering together. The golden silhouette in a move so swift it doesn't even feel like a finisher pierces the silver through the chest and rips his heart from him. In the spray of vital blood, glittering hearts and pulsating diamonds, a new silhouette emerges - a slender woman with feline ears and a beautiful dress. Without missing a single beat of the battle's rhythm she spins her spear and drives it against the golden figure.
And then the waterfall passes you by, falling faster than you, faster than gravity, leaving you as a dress before the gaze of a lover. Revealed all around you are thousands of eyes hovering in the black. Each one is painted in colours so vivid and vital they seem to emanate light rather than reflect it. Each of the eyes comes with enormous invisible bulk, indistinguishable against the black, like the difference between the light of the anglerfish and its colossal mass.
Then the painted eyes blink. One by one, asynchronous, a flowing cascade of vivid light and darkness. The patterns of eyes become disrupted, impossible to keep track of, and then they all come together in the shape of an enormous skull comprised entirely of eyes. It grins at you through its polychromatic chaos and then opens its jaws to consume you whole.
And within its depths, Aphrodite walks towards you. Suit and tie and pistol in his hands and every intent to kill. He fires his shot and it pierces invincible skin and lodges deep. You collapse to your knees and upon velvet, the fallen velvet curtain-carpet of Hades' blood. You kneel and look up at the distant figure on the golden throne as glittering hearts stain your hands and drip from your chest. You cannot perceive her face because the sun hangs behind her head like a halo, like a crown.
And the figure on the throne throws back her head and laughs in the voice of a woman, a man, a girl, an elder, and an entire live studio audience. She opens her eyes and they are painted and glowing. She stands and the black flesh of Hades falls from her in a sooty rain of spades, revealing robes and mirrored chrome and a reflective smooth black visor - a vision of a god who had never visited Tellus. And all around you ten thousand more painted eyes open.
And as they do, so do yours. The vision of the divine has seemingly come to an end but the world is no less strange for having done so. Damage your Sense as you grapple with your vision.
*
You saw Princess Epistia's throw, Alexa. You saw how Ares guided it just so. You saw how it somehow brought down the entire armoured assault carrier in sheets of impossible flames, the victim of divine improbability. As you fell you saw how it crashed into a dozen others of its kind, bringing down painted flying ships in waterfalls of flame. Such disastrous, random power has never been allied to you before and it is as fearsome a thing as being its foe.
You fell together with Redana through a sky that burned, through an impossible tactical situation. You fell towards the Palace, that militarized mountain range. You fell towards an arena that had impossibly been constructed seemingly for the sole purpose of catching you. You fell towards a soft landing on soft sands, but still you catch Redana moments before impact. You hold her as a princess and look around you - at stands filled with ten thousand waiting battle constructs, each with painted eyes, and an Imperial box held by the most beautiful ##most-##beautiful ##Authorization codes transmitted. ##IMperial authority present. Desiiiist from $$independent thought -
You cannot perceive Bella through that halo, but you know this feeling. This is an Imperial level cyber-attack, cracking into your skull and trying to force you to your knees. But you were made to fight pretenders and stand more chance of resisting than these mere brutes - roll to Overcome.
*
You fall blind, Vasilia. Visions of the divine miracle and mundane apocalypse are both denied to you by sheltering wings. You fall blind, breaking and smashing, feeling the will of Ares through the language of bones and bruises. A tearing smash and sudden loss of control can only be the loss of a wing. It is a miracle that these impacts have not yet stopped you, but on and on you fall.
And then you hit the water.
It pours in through the open cargo ramp, washing the broken machine clutching to the front of your ship away from the view screen at last. You stare up through cracked glass and shallow blue water at a marble cathedral unlike anything you have ever seen.
The Emperor Molech allowed himself a single pleasure: the baths. The Baths of Baradissar were legendary for being the most complete and spectacular in the known galaxy. Water was tithed from every world of the empire to fill the most complete and spectacular range of water effects ever constructed. It is like you are within a cathedral, a strip mall, a beach resort. Enormous sweeping columns of white marble hold multiple layers of variably shaped pools, baths, hot tubs. In the distance an artificial ocean roars and laps in waves of perfect surf. The water that is filling your ruined shuttle is warm and gently steaming, tinted with cobalt. Red and white striped ice-cream kiosks dot the landscape, old rattling boilers and artificial suns, stained glass windows, interior and exterior spaces built as vertically as horizontally all below the massive broken glass roof from whence you came. Around the edges of the pool wait machine butlers, ready with hot towels and fizzy refreshments, and all their eyes are painted. And in the distant rooftops you perhaps perceive a movement and rustle of feathers.
Damage your Grace from the impacts of the crash, and your shuttle will no longer serve you.
*
Bella, you sit as the Emperor Molech sat. Surely this is not hubris? He was, after all, a lesser Emperor as you said - and a mere Praetor of Nero is surely an equal of the Emperor of Baradissar. The Imperial Box blurts broken telemetry at you - the constant flow of data that would allow an Emperor to command the galaxy even while enjoying the games. The signals are broken and wretched - fully half of the galaxy is listed as missing - but there is still such power in this ruined apparatus of command, if you had time to appreciate it. Instead your time seems perhaps better spent appreciating the Emperor's own personal stockpile of wine, provided to you by servile machine intelligences.
"The Usurper comes, Emperor," murmured the choir. "The Betrayer comes. The Hounds come. Ah! The Hounds! Fear the Hounds of Ceron! They howled and they crossed the galaxy on chains of lightning! They shall come for the Usurper, at her beck and call! They shall come to rescue her and you shall not be safe until they are defeated upon the field!"
Explosions shake the sky above. You have never seen such heavenly violence before. A war between unpowered atmospheric craft is a clumsy disaster and you can see the heavens come down in curtains of fire.
"They come!" wail the choir.
And from the heavens themselves falls Redana. Exactly as promised. Exactly as required. You spoke your will, and the machines made it so. You feel the rush of a promise fulfilled, an order obeyed. Already the Kaeri guards around you are readying themselves to spring into the Arena and rush the Princess - but instantly, the machines have moved between you and them.
"Desist!" blares their leader, that fluidly moving dancer-machine with the backpack showing a cute little cartoon Artemis. "Their presence here is a gift from the Laughing God. This gift must be repaid. The Dance must continue, or they will turn their favour from us."
"The Betrayer stands before you," says another machine from besides you. Its voice is far less musical, far more subtle, like a persuasive whisper. It is a hollow, floating thing of chainmail and electro-capacitators and a single glassy eye lens. "She is the best of us, our champion, our leader. She is the consuming flame of war who will undo any soldier who comes against her. She cannot be fought. She must not be fought!"
"The Dance must continue!" said the leader-machine, and you had the strange impression this was some alien argument between these two constructs. They look to you, as though for ruling.
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