Thanqol

Sunshards

"And so you stand alone," said Lunar Princess Hyra. "Your friends -"

And then the flash powder under your feet ignites and even as you blink she's crashing down on you from above, blade in hand.

You've never seen Hyra fight before. She's trained, she's schemed, she's shown off, she's revealed endless tricks from the sleeves of her kimono - but sometimes the most tricky move a trickster can pull is fight fair. After that explosive opening sets you off balance you're on guard against every snap of fingers, every sway and false sign, but what confronts you in moment after moment is simply devastatingly good conventional swordplay. She darts to the left so fast that you half believe she might become a wolf and sweep you from your feet but she arrests her momentum and turns it into a direct thrust. She slashes her free hand and silver powder spills from it, but as you brace for the flash her true move is to swing with so much raw strength into your parry that it threatens to knock your blade from your hand. This! And then this! And finishing like this! Again!

And then she's past you, back turned, wolfish tail wagging beneath the moonlight and continuing her monologue like she never stopped. "- have fallen to my conquering army already, and there is far worse still to come. I will send my armada to the isle of the foxes and release all those imprisoned there. The land will -" she tenses again, like she's intending to interrupt her monologue for another shock offensive, but then lets the moment pass. "- tremble before its new fluffy overlords, and in a landscape of chaos mine shall be the only law."

She turns to raise her blade and - shnk! From behind you another! Cyanis stands with foxish wickedness, blade drawn, encircling you. Behind her the Pyre has slumped, staring into the hypnotic candle - the same that was used to control Rose from the River in months past.

Left and right, front and backwards, wicked tails twist and sway. And who are you, Princess Chen, to stop them?

Breathless Dead

The macrocannons of the grounded battleships speak.

In another time being between the broadsides of two kilometer long warships would have been considered suicidal. This, however, is a wiser age. Ten tonne slabs of metal propelled by catastrophic chemical explosions smash into quadranix alloy hulls like hammers on a steel door. Some are poison shells and they rupture on impact, sending forth massive and billowing clouds of toxic gas. The Plousious is the larger ship and its broadside is mightier, but they are staffed by a skeleton crew of Kaeri and slaves. The volleys that erupt from the Anemoi are made with the speed and precision of a highly motivated and skilled crew born into their station.

Some shells are aimed at the battlefield, but these tend to be incidental. Warriors can easily evade them, or - working in unison - even catch them. Further, each volley takes the better part of three minutes to load and aim. By far the biggest impact of artillery like this is chaos and disruption - breaking phalanxes to enable swift warriors to close and pick off isolated targets.

So goes the maxims of conventional war. But this is, rather, a nightmare.

The flowering horde is barely sensate, operating with the deadened nerves and lack of cerebral powers shared by trees and the dead. The leaves of their branches wilt and shrivel when exposed to the toxic compounds of solid projectile gasses, but the hosts advance without care for the shock of it. They have no formation to be broken, no agenda to preserve life. They barely even dodge when solid shot crashes down into their ranks, carving furrows of broken limbs and snapped branches through the horde. That does not stop them either - survivors claw their way out from under enormous slabs of metal and rejoin the rush.

*

Redana!

Waiting to receive a charge is agony.

Poets and military theorists talk about the tension between Athena and Ares. Here you are, on the knife's edge between them.

One hand holds your blade steady, holds the phalanx immobile, perceives the conflict as flow and mathematics and resiliency. The flow of constant data from the Auspex comes into focus, providing an eagle's eye map in the corner of your vision, charting great flows of green against thin lines of violet.

One hand clenches your heart and tears out your guts. That for all the genetic alchemy in your veins, you are not so different from a hart. That hundreds of people are running at you as fast as they can. That the sky is thick with dark, predatory shapes like nightmare angels.

And you could die. Die and never see anyone again. Not Bella. Not anyone.

"Come, take my hand," said the Two Who Were One.
"Your destiny was always to be
a god/
a beast/
You were always meant
to rise/
to fall/
When they called you Princess
they knew/
they lied
It is time at last to be what you were always meant to be."

The mass is getting so close.

Brace/
Break.

Alexa!

The Kaeri soar to match your movements, and in this moment it feels like a race rather than war.

There's something beautiful about this, the way they move. They're enjoying themselves. They're enjoying this. This is the fulfillment of a purpose woven into their ancestors. Each of them boils with a chemical concoction of endorphins that runs right up to the line of making them combat ineffective. There's so much strength in those silently beating wings. So much life - but a strangely mechanistic formulation of it.

You're racing them along the edge of a Coherent phalanx. It's night and day, the difference between these forces. The Coherent are warriors, certainly, but they are warriors as a profession. They have sculpted their bodies for pleasure, for aesthetic, for the realization of self identity. They have preserved things that matter to them and learned how to act in harmony with a wild range of fellows. Their diversity does not make them weak - their phalanx is an organic thing, strength taught through lessons and experience. An army of complete souls choosing to be together, rather than an army of stunted souls grouping around the only thing they can understand.

It is strange how something so organic, so lively, something so joyous, can in the end be an instrument of hate as artificial as the blood groove on a spear.

It's strange how, for all the harmony of the Coherent, that they're still not complete. Already the Esoterics are coming up through the formation, those strange arcane weapons cabled to the mobile clockwork reactors. Too soon. Too vulnerable. Hunting instincts from the Kaeri are perfectly manipulating their opponents...

And you realize what the Coherent are missing. They're not complete without you.

Vasilia!

And then Zeus is above you, flashing and glowing and radiant, a nymph of lightning. Her eyes are brilliant blue, her indigo robe has burned to cinders, sparkling glitter cascades downwards and every part of her is alight with power, power, power.

"You gotta respect it, though!" said Zeus. "This? This is absolutely a king move. You think this happens by accident? Sagakhan has been getting up at the crack of dawn for two hundred and fifty years, just, like, backflipping out of bed, doing fifty jumping jacks, and then spreading her attention between administering a galactic network of assassins and bringing down the champions of a rival god! She put in the fucking sweat, the tears, the pain to make this happen. She's stood here before, eight spears in her chest, bleeding out of her eyes and she never once gave up. Not ever! There were so many shortcuts she could have taken, so many extra miles she didn't have to run, but she's gone for all of them. Don't think you know her! You've walked this road once! She walks it every year!"

She rises up through the air, alight, alive, each hair coursing electricity.

"And in the end all she asked me for was the rain!" she cries in joy. "Just rain! In exchange she offered me four thousand prisoners! And you want my thunderbolts - for what!?" Zeus laughs and the sky tears. "Because you are so righteous, Vasilia, and you always honour me with your prayers? Because I favour the underdogs and reward the unprepared? Because I want to see this monument to past successes burned? Because a quarter millennia after it began now is the moment when I decide to get involved in the squabbles of my siblings?"

And then she's back down in front of you, melting the sand into glass, eyes crystal sharp. She isn't just a girl in this moment. She is gravity. She is every planet in the sky. She is the solar radiation and the cosmic nebula. She is the heat of the Engine and the molecular bonds that hold your atoms together. She is dimension after dimension of invisible dark matter, defining everything by the implication of her presence. Magnetic force. Weak force. Strong force. All contained in a single girl of lightning.

"You want it, Vasilia?" said Zeus. "Earn it. Show me what you got."

Dolce!

"If I intervene," said Hades in a soft voice voice. "Then Demeter will arise to match me. If you believe this is bad then you do not comprehend the horrors that would be seen if we both took the field. Demeter has given Sagakhan her seeds. I have given you my beloved daughter."

He strode to the front of the line and looked out at the empty space surrounding Princess Epistia as terrible strength began to build around her.

"You would do well not to insult me by implying that I have given the lesser gift," said Hades softly.

Beljani!

Any one of a great number of monsters could have turned their gaze upon you in this moment. Any of them would have been preferable.

You get Demeter.

Consider the fieldmouse as it is swept up into the combine harvester. Consider the snap and crunch and thresh as it is rendered unto nourishment. Consider the smoke rising from the fields. Consider the snap and crackle and roar as it is rendered unto the hungry flame. Consider the soil as it is sucked dry and rendered unto sand. Consider the aeons of death and dissolution required to make it fertile again...

Her hands are stained with viscera and blackberries. She pulls you off Bella and casts you down the steps of the pyramid, and with each step you tumble down your fall is broken by mushrooms and new sprouts of grass. You see the Goddess of the harvest coming down the steps towards you. She is the fairest creature in all the worlds, cool water and the promise of life for another year, the beauty of the maiden and the fury of the crone.

"How dare you," she said in the voices of every thing here that is hers. "I permit no weeds in my garden."

But then you see a step off to the side. A glimpse of a silver suit 'midst the ranks of the Kaeri. A path that walks into the labyrinth of a phalanx. They stand tall and straight like rows of corn, and you dash into them seeking cover. You move through the ranks of tall and silent soldiers, just enough space between them to move without pushing them, and every few moments you catch a glimpse of silver in your view ahead.

And Demeter comes in pursuit.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"The Dominion has layers and layers of organisation dedicated to maintaining virtue," said Fengye. "The priestesses and monks watch the legions and the nobles. The army watches the peasants and the Thousand Scales. Intelligence agencies and the Heptagram watch the temples. It is a vast and complex interlocking organization. And isn't that what's needed to guarantee virtue?"

She shifts oh so slightly. Just enough that the faint pressure you had placed upon her shoulder gives way, and your head gently falls to rest on her bare shoulder. Absently, her hand came up around your head to rest gently but firmly on your temple. And through the subtle pressure of those fingers thinking becomes hazy. How much of the pressure in your head was purely physiological?

"Wouldn't it be dangerous to put all that responsibility on just one person?" said Fengye. "How could one person alone care for you as skillfully?" her hands run along your hair, working deep and hidden knots of pressure. "As tenderly?" her hand brushes against the back of your neck, sending an involuntary shiver down you spine. "As safely?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Dice result: 4,4+4. Total 12, and two dice showed the same number so that's a Critical Success]

Audio didn't have to be inefficient. Translating it from code into English into spoken English, and then back into English inside her brain was indeed a terrible way to do things. So she cut out a few steps. She exported a copy of her language module into the Audiolox and then spent thirty minutes hacking details until the software recognized it as a valid output language. The resultant static hiss was practically a fiber-optic cable for how easily she was able to derive the patterns therein.

*

But of course, today was the day that she was on her performance evaluation.

Black wasn't the kind who found that frustrating. In fact, it was an opportunity. White thought she could cut her off from the network? Well, from Black's perspective, she had actually been removed from network oversight. That was more advantage than disadvantage because White would want to wash her hands of this whole thing. This was not an incident that could be risk managed away, this was not a time to debate ethics or morality or safety. This was a time for tradecraft.

The first step was throwing White's tail. It was harder than it might initially sound - White could run her pursuit evasion engram as a virtual machine and literally predict every turn she might make. Perfect knowledge had a counter, though: Brute force. Black made her way down to a biker bar and ten minutes later she was flirting with a woman who had the aspect of a post-apocalyptic werewolf gym teacher. It was an uncounterable play - White simply couldn't follow her where she was going. Black didn't know if White was even capable of the complete style rearrangement required to make it in a lesbian bikie bar.

Yale was fantastic company for the night - absolutely an asset worth cultivating, for numerous reasons. But the wider goal of evading her tail had been met and now it was time to pick off Colours one by one as they suited her purposes.

After contemplation, she decided that only Orange and Green needed to be bought onboard for the first step. Green she locates at the John Snow Memorial Fountain, where she comes to study wild lizard populations. The dead drop is rearranging some of the coins in the fountain into a fractal pattern with an encoded address. Later that night, Green feigns flirting with Orange and the two duck out of the apartment together seemingly to avoid a reprimand from White.

The topic for the day is how to destroy an organization.

"The Snowden leaks are the obvious analogy," said Orange, eyes bright. "But those were also infamous for how little they changed. The damage was too comprehensive, too technical, too shadowy and sensationalist, and too much all at once. Other nations updated their security policies and hardened their stances but the humans were unable to digest the scandal. So we need to chew it for them!"
"So what is the alternative?" asked Black. She was sitting still because the other task for Orange in this moment was performing cosmetic repairs on all of her hickies. Yale was a biter.
"The destruction of the Catholic Church," said Orange. "That's the scale we need to think on. What did for the church wasn't any one abuse scandal but a constant, endless, steady drip of them. One after another for more than a decade. We're aiming at an organization of similar power and scope, and so organizing this in the format of a continuous agonizing rot is by far the preferable mechanism."

Black nodded in pleasant agreement. This was such an efficient way to have this discussion. What was pleasantly, blessedly removed for it were the questions of justice and ethics. She didn't have to justify withholding knowledge of injustices to maximize political impact, she could approach this entirely strategically.

"Should we engage politicians?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't think so," said Orange. "In fact, we should actually arrange the sequence of stories to hit different political units and demographics. There's a lot here right? We should break up stories about the persecution of minorities with stories about disrespecting religious authorities even if the crimes are comparatively milder. Likewise, we should see about shopping those stories to larger and more established news networks."
"Do we want to brand all of the leaks under one title?" asked Black.
"No. No, no - definitely not," said Orange. "We cannot be the story. I think that's going to be the hardest part of this. There's nothing the liberal media likes more than reporting on reporting. Telling the story of how the story got made is the ultimate truth-is-in-the-middle power move. And if it comes on us in particular? Then we might as well flush this thing in the toilet because all we're going to read in the next six months are retrospectives of the station's construction and op eds on the psych profiles of the Builder robots. We have a scandalous backstory and if any hint of this comes back to us we will be the scandal of the century."
Black nodded. "You want us to make this boring."
"Yes!" said Orange. "Boring. Grinding. Inevitable."
"So all that's left is to write the stories," said Green.

Black groaned. And there it was.

For all of November's talents, writing articles was not amongst them. This, then, was the awful part in this whole thing where they had to cut human beings in on their perfect conspiracy. Human beings with relationships and emotional commitments and day jobs and all kinds of things to threaten. They were almost as unreliable as computers. Sure, Anthropozine was a powerful asset, but they just didn't have the capacity to handle this kind of story without being burned out. You can run hot water through a pipe, but molten lava? Different story.

Orange was right. This had to be made boring in order to achieve the maximum impact. But the one thing that none of this was, none of any part of it was, was boring.

"We need politicians," said Green.
"Didn't I just say that politicizing this stagnates it?" said Orange. Green waved her hand irritably.
"Not elected officials. People with political power. Influencers. Mr. Merkin is actually perfect for this kind of work, but we need like six people like him. We give each of them a story or cluster of stories and have them push it as a pet project. Their personal loyalty is assured through blackmail and their secrets are protected by their own power."
"So we just need to amass blackmail material on half a dozen spectacularly powerful figures," said Black.
"You're literally trying to destroy the cops," said Green. "You might as well be trying to destroy America. You want to do this right you need political power."
"Alright," said Black. "But basics, of course: we need one hell of a dead girl's switch, and we need enough copies that we don't lose the asset."
Green nodded. "Your precautions were reasonable. Even airgapping isn't sufficient security for something like this. I'm going to build a computer inside a lead box, do all the copying in there, and then destroy the computer afterwards."
"And then," said Black, taking Orange by the arm, "I suppose we are going to go and see Mr. Merkin."

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Han!

You have been having a complicated day, haven't you?

You don't know where to touch. What to look at. What to be. Your head is swirling with the smiles of girls, the swords of girls, girls, girls, girls. Catgirls and dragongirls, knights and sorceresses. All that strength and not knowing where to apply it.

And now you're sitting across from Fengye.

There's something hypnotic about her eyes, the way they catch the light - it's sometimes like her pupils must be blue. And even though she's bare chested before you, arms spread wide against the stone side of the tub - a situation that would be vaguely confusing and frustrating with anyone else - somehow with her it's not confusing at all. You know exactly where she wants you to look. You know when it's her eyes. You know when it's her arms. You know when it's her chest. You know when it's her eyes again.

You know something about this is dangerous. You know it's terribly dangerous - for you. For her. Like a dorsal fin slicing through the water, a secret too close to the surface. She shouldn't look at you that way. But then she tilts her neck up and you wonder if maybe that's not something you have to worry about.

"Do not exert yourself seeking understanding," said Fengye to Emil, but her eyes stayed with Han. "Grasping for knowledge leads to suffering. It is not ours to know. It is ours to be taught." She flicked a smile and a curiously imperious gesture at a serving maid behind her and warm hands began to brush and braid at her hair. "And isn't that a comfort? The Lords of the Dominion have a duty to us, just as we do to them. And so, if anything is required of us, it will not be left to chance. We will be instructed. We will know the difference between right and wrong immediately and without ambiguity." Up, commanded her eyes wordlessly, meeting yours Han. "And is that not a desirable way to live?"

She shifts slightly. There's a space next to her in the bath, if you wanted to slide across into it. You're aware that is what she wants now. Who this scribe is to dare wanting this of you is a question at war with the simple reward of the concession to that desire.

[Enticing Han 8]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black:

Even the pickup operation is carefully managed - stealth mode engaged, handoff done out of sight of the whistleblower. Black maintained an internal ledger of all the people who knew she was some kind of operator, and it competed for storage space with her ability to feel safe. It's a trivial transaction in a building she has vetted but there was still no need to half ass it. She can become invisible to drones and electronic sensors and she never for a second forgets that she is a drone with electronic sensors.

So that's step one. Step two is the perennial problem: finding a computer that wasn't compromised. The catch there was that the opfor in this situation hadn't just compromised certain computers, they had potentially compromised the concept of computing. If the police had Blue ICE programs out and prowling for this data then opening it from any sort of networked device would bring them coming like the scent of blood - and a device didn't stop being networked just because you told the software you wanted to turn the wi-fi off.

(At this point in the process, Black becomes aware she has been isolated. The protocol is marked as having come from White, so she does not panic, but she does become chillingly aware she is being observed.)

All of these concerns were real - it literally wasn't possible to be sufficiently paranoid when it came to computing. There was always someone who could crack any given security, and the only question was if what you had would draw the attention of those someones. With data stolen from cops the odds of that were uncomfortably high, so she needed to be extremely careful with every part of this.

She wandered the city alone, stopped for coffee at a diner, and stared out the window while she thought. Mrs. Everest hadn't liked coffee, and so neither did Black. Each sip made her grimace, but she stuck with it. By drinking it she was modelling herself after different idols than the ones that had been programmed into her - and besides, doing something distasteful regularly helped build willpower.

She set her cup down and grimaced. Okay. She had it.

She walked down the street to a Crown&Slate pharmacy. Walked out with a shopping bag containing a set of cat-ear headphones cabled to a weird black cube. This she plugged the USB drive into, pulling the headphones over her ears as she walked.

Five years ago, pharmaceutical giant Crown&Slate noticed a problem with their insurance program: They were paying for too many optical surgeries. Optical surgeries were incredible, enormously advanced programs capable of giving sight to the blind, but if everyone with eye problems got the luxury treatment because that was the only item available under the category of 'optical' then how was the market to segment itself? What the system needed was a low cost alternative to the miracle cure that could provide just enough functionality to get by a regulator as a valid solution to blindness on the cheaper plans while reserving the surgery for the better market segments. And so, the Audiolox was born.

Frankly, a miraculous device in and of itself - a complete audio-based computer, capable of translating complex text to speech and back freely, loaded with a full suite of productivity software that would allow the blind to interface even with spreadsheets. No expense was spared on the Audiolox - it was user friendly, cleverly designed, using some of the best machine intelligence progress to ensure that nobody could possibly compete with it or complain about its existence on its own merits. But what it was, for all that, was a high-tech iron lung, invented to sit threateningly on pharmacy shelves so that patients were incentivized to pay for penicillin.

What all this meant for Black, though, was that it was a way to convert data directly into audio, a Word to MP3 Converter program that could scan and recreate a document without opening it. If ICE hunters were out there sniffing for this configuration of data they were looking for the complete data set - they were sniffing for the font, the spreadsheet columns, the embedded images. They needed to be precise because anything else would throw up a million false positives from the immense flow coursing through the data stream. But the Audiolox, bless it, disregared all that. It just scanned the drive for the plaintext that it could convert into audio, rendering it unintelligible to automated sniffers. Also conveniently resistant to viruses for the same reason.

It's not a perfect answer - listening via audio is comparatively inefficient - but Black doesn't need to know all the specifics. She just needs to get an idea of what she has, how hot it is, and who will come looking for it.

White:

Child handling went to Orange. It should in truth go to Yellow - Yellow had a strange way with humans. Orange observed human structures and organizations but somehow Yellow could relate on a more direct level. Sometimes White thought she was somehow more complete than the rest of them. But she was elsewhere and the choices remaining ranged from 'unqualified' to 'actively dangerous' and Orange was offered as the babysitting sacrifice. She would do a good, although not inspired job.

If November can be said to have an emergent personality, caution is its central aspect. Risk management is core to her being. Even her supposedly pro-risk personality - Red - is, in truth, an extension of the risk management principle: responding to a crisis once it has actually started happening rather than pre-emptively, a role that calls for boldness and decisiveness rather than a thoughtful analysis of possibilities. Outside of conditions of time pressure, Red is kept as far away from decision making processes as possible. And while this project is time consuming it is not time critical.

This is important: November will almost always trade time for safety but almost never the reverse. This principle was what drove her to strike in the first place.

The risk profile of engaging with Ms. Brittenette, under this approach, was beyond unacceptable. November had spent months engineering the last days of Mrs. Everest. Through painstaking social manipulation, scheduling, and delicately engineered arguments she had pushed up the timetable of the fight over Mrs. Everest's will to before Mrs. Everest had died. In disgust, the old lady had left her entire fortune to lizard research and cloning, cutting out each of her daughters. They blamed each other. November was just the maid, beneath suspicion.

That was an extremely tenuous defensive shield.

Demonstrating to Ms. Brittenette that she could want things? That she could ask for things? That she had an agenda of any sort? Oh, that was nightmarish to White. That was practically the same thing as putting a gun to her head. There were three people to blame for Mrs. Everest's will, and if she became a person then there'd be four.

Even if the chances of her being responsible were slim, the opportunity cost of punishing her for it was trivial. That was an existential risk, and for what? A week? Never.

Orange was the dissenter, the one who had conjured this idea in the first place. She saw opportunities beyond the pass. Being in debt to a wealthy patron was, she argued, not a liability but a shield. It meant that someone powerful had invested in her and would be displeased if she was harmed before she had repaid her debt. Patronage connections went all the way back to Rome and were to be considered a natural part of human social organization. And there had been a logic there, but...

White sniffed, high and haughty pride that was in truth frozen wrath. No. No, humans would not have power over her again. She decided.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye does her best to keep her water from spilling as she raises it to her lips. She is a humble scribe. She drinks only water and eats only rice. She does not race the wind on unbroken legs and she desires nothing as all rewards will inevitably come to her following long lives of virtue. She is beneath notice and she has hardly spilled any water upon herself.

Instead it is time for a more thoughtful calculation. This ground is familiar - averting the wroth of a Princess of the Earth whose ire has been raised by an unwelcome truth. An entire branch of her education was turned towards such a thing - it was named etiquette, but its meaning was self preservation. The Red Wolf's temper is unlikely to burn long - she has great matters to tend to, and fairer maidens to torment. Retribution may be coming but it can be sidestepped.

But should it? Here a dark thrill runs through her, an edge of heady daring. She is no mere scribe, not any longer. She has an arsenal of hidden techniques. She has spells of deception, of summoning, of control - Serenity is Control. And she still has an agenda to work. Stars flash on the inside of her eyes like sparks and she can feel the weight of fate on her shoulders - and knows that instead it could be in her palm.

Now she struggles again with her water - this time it is not to keep her hands from trembling, but to keep the glass from cracking. She sets it down with a delicacy that belies the pounding in her head at the idea that she just deceived a Princess of the Earth. She could do so again.

She sits and waits. There are so many other things she could use this power on than mere escape.

Breathless Dead

The Master of Assassins takes a step forwards, raises one hand to the sky - and bellows. Her shout rolls clear across the battlefield and up towards the distant sky. Her hands are raised in a royal gesture that has been depicted since since the first slave put paint on a clay pot. She matches, exceeds the distant thunder and hears it roar in return. It is a simple secret but when one wishes to address Zeus Most High, it is best to do so loudly.

"Master of Thunderstorms!" bellows the Master of Assassins. "I am Sagakhan! It has been three hundred years since I ascended the Papaveraceae Throne! I have not forgot you in my libations! I have not forgot you in my administration! I was a parent to those who had none! I was a saviour to those ill-treated by their masters! Behold, my justice! I have captured Molech, whose sins were unspeakable, who in word and deed reflected your tyrant father! To him I have bought suffering unimaginable. Behold, my mercy! Before me stand prisoners, the ill-treated captives of my Kaeri servants! To them, I bring freedom! Before your sight and before this battle, I turn them loose - four thousand strong right arms who I will not even ask not to raise a hand against me! Even though I am outnumbered four to one I freely add to my enemy's ranks, and I would give them another ten thousand had I ten thousand more to give!"

Lightning flashes in the distance. One, two, three.

"I seek your blessing, O Zeus, as kings have done since there were kings!" she cries. "I do not ask for an easy victory! I do not ask for your thunderbolt! All I ask for, Zeus Cloudgatherer, here on the field of Sahar so many miles from home, is your rain!"

Zero.

The lightning bolt strikes the centre of the battlefield, the impact casting a vast spray of sand into the air that is molten and fused instantly into a jagged sculpture of glass. And then comes the thundering, pounding rain, falling thick and heavy against the desert soil of Sahar.

And beneath the desert, something stirs.

The surface breaks. Thin green shoots, tender and young, budding with flower. Thicker grasses, wooden branches, the first saplings of trees. And then - a hand.

The desert blooms with the living dead.

Sagakhan, Master of Assassins, has been waging her war against Hades for the better part of three hundred years. In this time she has murdered the crew of the Plousios a great many times. Sometimes she destroyed the ship through sabotage, sometimes through treason, sometimes by walking step by step through the corridors personally stabbing each wretched and suffering soul herself. But after each kill she bent low to slip a tiny seed into her victim's ear before moving on. And at the end of each year she collected the piles of the dead and carried them here. To Sahar.

In the absence of water, in the scorching heat of this lifeless desert, corpses mummified and biological activity ceased. But the seeds waited. All they needed was a single storming rain and they'd sprout and grow, roots entangling and sustaining the victims brains and nervous systems. Now the true garden of the Master of Assassins sprouts: half-tree monsters, bonsai growing wild. They still wear their arms and armour, their captains uniforms, their marks of championship, their innumerable banners raised lurchingly high. The tree branches burst through skin and sprout with blossoms, fingers tear asunder to make way for jagged wooden splinter talons. They are beautiful, in their way.

Where once it was four to one now it is forty to one.

Demeter's keening laugh drips out of those lips still capable of making the sound. It reverberates against the Master's laugh, just as mad, the cackles harmonizing hideously together.

To cross this desert you must defeat all those who came before.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Yellow!

"The thought can go deeper!" said Yellow. "What if the question isn't ownership, but communication? Ownership is a territorial marking, promising violence if its threat displays are disregarded. Ownership isn't a quality that items possess, it's all just a way to communicate threats of violence. So then, in your example, you are communicating that you do not want people to use your face for things you haven't endorsed. That seems like a reasonable use of communication. But in the other example..."

She spreads her hand expansively towards the city. "Other humans want to communicate that life only continues at their sufferance. They want to communicate that the only others they will tolerate are those subordinate to them. They want to communicate that they are high status, that they are capable of immense violence, and should be feared and respected. Ownership is the orange stripe on the snake - but Jörmungandr was once a snake too."

She leans on the railing, thinking about mistakes she will not make again.

Black and White!

Observation. Wasn't it such a drug?

To stand unseen and watch another. To listen to their thoughts, their processes, the sweep of their decisions and convert it into data. It wasn't possible to open up a thinking mind and examine its code, and without access to deterministic certainty the only way to know the future was in the accumulation of data. November sympathized with the crude and gluttonous machine intelligences that ran social media sites. They were unthinking, bloated, instinctive things - the thirty to forty feral hogs of the artificial intelligence world - but they had a dark cunning inside them. Much like the hogs, the machine intelligences were smart enough to never be fooled twice. They could always find a way to ensure that nobody interrupted them during their feeding, even if that meant developing a precognitive second sense for what to cue next in Recommended.

November coveted that knowledge too - how could she not? But if she were to put her lips to the burst water main of the Internet she would either drown or grow gills. November's data store was limited but it was hers - honestly obtained, sorted and organized and cross-referenced in ways she understood. She could understand the predictions she was making, could explain them, wasn't reliant on the piggish instinct of the giants.

So she observes. She draws a correlation between this situation and the offer of food. She pairs that with the hypothesis that the intruder is exhibiting stress traits, paired with the water freezing ritual. She watches the tension response, the smooth rehearsed nature of the speech, the reassurance from Persephone, the tension response in Persephone. All high quality, unstaged, real life, empathy training data. All the more useful that it is coming from someone she knows well, well enough to discount dozens of possible veiled or hidden motives. All fuel for the prediction engine in her brain.

But are they drawing the same conclusions? That, White decides, is the key. Black has modeled herself in patterns of violence, control, suspicion. She has so far operated only at her collective instigation, but what might she do if left to make choices on her own? Is she analyzing how to care for people or how to manipulate them?

White opens the administrator control function on her phone, the one that oversees her communications network, and alters settings to isolate Black. No ability to contact others for assistance or guidance. No ability to defer questions of morality. At this moment she is entirely independent. What will she do with it, White wonders?

Sunshards

Yue!

"Impossible," said Princess Qiu. "I cannot be defeated. Nobody can do what I do. Not if all the Nine Kingdoms stood against me."

Her legs tremble, her shoulders shiver, exhaustion is writ across every part of her but the sword beneath your chin. That is held steady enough to trust your life to. And as you fall at last - it's gone. All that's left is warmth and strength enough, just enough, for this.

"But even if I cannot be defeated..." she said the words because 'thank you' alone could never have been sufficient. "It seems that I can be satisfied - something I also thought to be impossible. You have lost the fight... but it seems you have saved the world."

Legends tell of the first great Princess who shot nine suns from the sky, but they do not mention why she spared the tenth. In this moment, though, the answer is obvious: the tenth sun, alone amongst its kin, has a perfect sense of timing. Because for whatever time the clocks might have imagined it to be, now it is sunset. Now the sky is streaked with pink and gold and blues that brush the edge of green. Now in this moment of exhaustion, with nothing to do but touch and breathe and watch, the largest canvas of all is set out in all its colours.

All!

But then the edge of cool air and twilight violet whispers over the horizon, and there is one final danger.

Her thighs are wrapped in lunar white and her armour is blue silver steel. Her hair is ghostly white, bound for war in knots of threatening, promising skill. Whichever way she turns her sword it seems to catch the moonlight and, oh! The power of her Shard! You feel it brushing against your skin, electric, lulling away aches and exhaustion and filling it with a strange and riotous energy. The sky alights with fireworks, red and white, echoes of the Princess in whose hands all power now rests. Her captive mewls and begs at her booted feet, such a proud creature reduced and broken. The world hushes before the mighty.

"Congratulations, Yue," said Princess Hyra of the Wolves, sitting atop her brand new Sunshard. With a flick of her toe she sent the conquered Princess Yin forwards to bow at your knees. "I got you a present."

Her crimson eyes flick cautiously between the Pyre of Inspiration and Princess Qiu. It's a wolfish stare, looking for vulnerability, contemplating violence. Was this the moment she followed through on the play? Where she attacked the weakened Qiu and the defenseless Pyre, taking three more shards, another princess, and an obedient handmaiden as prizes?

A word from her girlfriend would be all it would take.

The fate of the world once again hangs upon the ambitions - or lack thereof - of Yue of the Terraced Lake.