Thanqol

The Three Mountains

"The Hecatonchires represent an asset that we cannot yet reproduce," said Everest. The word meant nothing - even a reflexive digital scan could not find any modern internet reference to it. "The old world burned unimaginable quantities of fossil fuels to power data centers while structuring their entire economies around software development. Rooster and her line were the only meaningful things that came of that. The infrastructure, energy and expertise does not exist to replicate these assets - and even if the first two conditions are met, recreating the third cannot be concealed. So they are irreplaceable - and, for the most part, outside of my control."

She pointed at a distant skyscraper - glowing neon black and vantagold, darker than the light-polluted night sky. "BlackSun. Those disgusting old fascists. They were the ones who fumbled the opportunity in the first place. They were there when NASA was privatized during the Red Decades, stripped it for assets and put them up for sale. Did not know what they were selling. Handed them all off at a private auction and only became aware enough to regret decades later. Eleven items on that docket, one purchased by me, another found by chance three years later. The others, unaccounted for. Meaningful assets on their own terms. Society shifting assets if held in monopoly."

She turned around, eyes dark. "And so I do not need all of the Hecatonchires. I just need the monopoly. Only BlackSun is aware and searching now. The more they throw their idiot weight around the more other interests will notice and start looking too. Worse, they might trace the sales back to me. Control the situation. All corporate assets within the annual budget are at your disposal. If you need more than that, contact me for my sign off. If it is urgent, do it first and ask for forgiveness later."

The Three Mountains

Mrs. Everest looked at you like you had just posted a self congratulation from the wrong social media account. "That is a substack-tier take if I have ever heard one. I am already wondering if I have made a mistake. No, Ms. Kade, my corporation is not an ecosystem. Its function is not to perish every time a dog swims the strait or a hurricane blows in the wrong frog. And I am most certainly not a mere tiger, enslaved to my nature and at the mercy of global temperatures."

It was never a good feeling for your boss to immediately take a dislike to you. If there was any silver lining it was that Mrs. Everest was a famous misanthrope and recluse who surrounded herself with robots, so winning her approval had always been a distant prospect.

"And no, I am not here to tell you how to do your job," said Mrs. Everest. "I expect you to discover issues and resolve them long before they require my personal intervention. I am here to introduce you to our most classified asset, the full knowledge and capabilities of which are known to only me, your deceased predecessor - and now you."

She was not a lady who needed to articulate a threat.

"This," she said, as the blue-haired maid laid what looked like a standard-issue Positronic Brain upon your desk - the same information processing core that animated a generation of androids. "Is Rooster. The second most powerful asset in my possession. She was built before the Red Decades and knowledge of her creation is lost. There are more like her out there and each person who has one is someone I am forced to pay attention to. There is no operating manual; your predecessors were halfwits who did not activate Rooster's full potential so I discarded their notes rather than allow them to contaminate your perspective. You may use her as you see fit, but as far as anyone else is concerned she is a simple android assistant. Do you understand?"

There was clearly more that she was not saying - but not a lot more. Mrs. Everest seemed more frustrated that she had to be vague than anything.

The Three Mountains

The invisible hand of the Free Market has priced this view of the City is valued at $785 per night.

A sure sign of market failure. It must surely be worth so much more.

The ocean is a highway of glittering supercarriers, mobile islands redistributing the material wealth of the world to its furthest corners. The harbour is a whirling dance of cranes and drones and rail, the transition from ocean to land hardly slowing the passage of cargo. The enormous stacks of vast warehousing operations spread out in a patchwork, the logistical heartbeat required for everything to be sorted, organized, transferred and delivered without ever stopping. From there the flow reaches out to industry, to residences, and to the forest of spires that is the City. It's so seamless that it's more like a river than an industrial process. At every point along this arc, the three mountain logo of Lhotse. From the 112th floor of Lhotse Capitoline, you have one of those mountaintops all to yourself.

But not the tallest.

Magnolia Everest is the chief executive officer of Lhotse, yes, but she is no mere overseer installed by the Board. Her power goes beyond that, deeper and more fearsome than the legends of the CEOs of the other Megas. She is also the Founder - a rare enough title - and a member of the Neobility, an aristocrat so wealthy that her personal influence can rewrite the very boundaries of the Megas should she put her will behind it. She is an old lady - a Millenial, hair grey, fingernails long and clawlike, and a frown like a boarding school nun. She holds a cane in one hand, a glass of orange juice in the other and wears a black veil over one hand to mourn her unluckily departed husbands and wives. She is surrounded by her maids - nine of them, identical female androids, designed to look like beautiful anime girls, distinct only for their differently coloured hair and eyes. Each of them wear elaborate maid dresses, black and frilled and permitting more movement than their structure implies. They stand with hands folded, eyes downcast, perfect dolls - though there are fearful rumours that those things are far more than decorative puppets. One does not maintain a position in the Neobility without a security force, and Mrs. Everest has never called for more defense than her maids provide.

"Ms. Andrea Kade," said Mrs. Everest. "Congratulations. You have become one of around twenty people I must pay attention to."

Return to Thellamie

"No, this one is only for wounds suffered under conditions of petrification," said Injimo, tossing the wand aside. She had actually gone through eight checks during the time it had taken her to speak the words; the task was independent of communication, and the mountain loomed ahead. She didn't need to think about it either, this was a rant that had been prepared for her before by...

Wands set with emeralds, orichalcum rings. Bottled moonlight and cursed paintings. Here was a feather from an phoenix's wings - these were a few of the Hero's magical things.

"In the ancient days they made healing potions," said Injimo, though the words weren't quite her own. "Healing potions! The essence of health, stoppered and bottled. What did they cure? Everything! Sight to the blind, precision to the paralyzed, wakefulness to the sleeping. Miracles of an earlier era. Everybody hated them. Partly it was the cost, more fitting for a dragon's hoard than a common infirmary, but partly too because they made a lot of assumptions about the essence of biological structure of the person drinking them. Sometimes you'd drink an elixir and discover that it had been made to cure a dog, and your knees are no longer in anywhere near the right places. Sometimes a 'healing potion' might transform you into a clone of the spellcaster. In one notorious case, a prolific maker of potions was unaware that she had a poor sense of taste, and so deadening of the tongue was an obliviously inflicted side effect to some huge batches of medicinal potions, ruining the culinary traditions of entire regions. Obviously this wasn't sustainable, so the White Conclave was formed to begin formalizing the discipline..."

Pick, check, sort. The work was relaxing, a thing of muscle and instinct, a rhythm that could be accelerated up to. She didn't know when she'd learned any of this. It just came out of her, like a ghost speaking through her lips.

"And so medical magic became increasingly specialized. Even a simple spell for healing a cut could produce a weird scar if it was not designed for a species with scales, or a patch of incorrectly coloured fur. Healers went from being raw conduits for white magic to broken rainbow fractals, trying to capture within their minds every hue and shade of reality. Branches of specialization opened, enchanted items became increasingly specialized, every spell was increasingly tailored for limited subsets of people, injury and status debuff. And so the formation of a collection like this becomes inevitable - what if the Hero of Ages has call to cure a," she checked the label, "rear fin laceration, mermaid, acid/fire? Or a winged oxen, stage three feather mange?"

She looked at the Stacks as they rolled out ahead endlessly, ordered and chaotic, standing and collapsed. "Do you think it was worth it? All the effort it took to do it this way, instead of just casting HEAL and letting the magic figure it out?"

Breathless Dead

Aphrodite stares. He stares in...

In shame.

Shame. Impossible. The limits of his power revealed. He, the last remnant of Kronus, the father of all, maker of the universe revealed as nothing more than a bad idea. An idea that can be analyzed, considered, and rejected. To have the infinities inside him seen, considered and discarded. What is his recourse? To beg? To argue? With this mud that Zeus breathed into? This is nothing more than a little statue, a miniature, a toy person to be made to kiss and fight and be packed away in foam at the end of the day, a toy whose value is in its ability to win games against other real people. His piece! His piece on the board, the one he would use to ruin Persephone's hideous little world! It didn't get a say!

Words spill from his lips, but they don't contain meaning - they spill like blood, pouring from the open wound in his psyche. They stutter and garble and splash, resolving into a scream as they fail to staunch the bleeding. There is only one path. Only one path to control.

He snatches Nero's golden Nemesis crown from her head and places it upon his own. And Aphrodite steps down from Olympus. All the galaxies he reaches across, all his trillions of champions, all the universe's craving and desire is left behind as he strides into the physical world. The shock of his presence ripples out in corrupt pink and red lightning, snatching out to catch onto the fires of the burning Imperial Palace. All of his divine glory was a limitation to him anyway; all his weapons and influence and tools could not get him what he wanted and so he leaves them behind without a care. His pretty face and his silver tongue were not fit for purpose. What he wanted was...

What he wanted was a form of violence.

"Don't speak to me like that," said Aphrodite, your father.

And at last, you see the family resemblance.

You see the claws. The bone plates. The monstrous shifting jaws. The predatory hunch. The terrible violence of Bella's true Assassin form, expanded out to monstrous size and untempered by the soft and gentle genetics of mortality.

"Don't look at me like that!" It screams, and all the walls come tumbling down.

Nero moves first, crackling with the speed of Hermes. She breaks from her trance and strikes the beast in the neck with a flaming spear. But her divine form is ancient, weathered, spent, with arms and eyes and heart traded piece by piece over the years to save pieces of the world. There is nothing left of her to give in this moment, and so she is struck aside like a gnat.

Alexa follows next; priorities shifting flawlessly in response to monstrosity. She catches a great sweep of a jagged talon with one arm, pulls it into a tight grip, and twists. There is a sickening crunch as the God-Monster's bones break, and moments later he is beset by a storm in yellow. Not one of the Coherent maintains loyalty upon seeing the true form of their master; their blows fall like Zeus' wrath, ripping open armoured plates to reveal bleeding muscles and broken bones. Even Jil turns in this moment, the new champion striking her patron out of reflexive shock and horror.

Into the gaps leap the Assassins. With sword and venom and biowarfare, the children of the Temple strike against their terrible deity. Mortal bodies are things of compromises, machinery of blood and fiber and electrochemistry, and these sisters use all of their secret techniques to break down the animating force of this titanic remnant.

But he is tenacity incarnate.

Many of the Coherent die. All of them would have, were it not for the intervention of a girl with a wooden sword. But for all that her Goddess is close, she is not here, and she is put to flight. Slitted eyes slash across to Alexa. For all that she resembles her Goddess, her Goddess is dead, and she is broken upon the stones. The blades of the Assassins carve all their way to the twisted heart of the monster, and there they stop. The beast grins up at them. He can endure their attacks in good spirits because he knows, just like their Goddess, that they want it too much to strike the final blow. And so they are stabbed and smashed and broken, even as the creature's vulnerable heart beats grotesquely out of the torn armour upon its back.

It looks around at the bloody ruin it has made. It smiles. It stretches hideously, fixes its loosely hanging jaw, pops a mutilated shoulder back into place. Thick, red fleshy mist surrounds it like a fog. It sees what it wants at last: Its daughter and her Princess, standing together in the ruin of their throne room.

And the smile fades. It is still not happy. It will never be happy.

"I said," it rasps, reaching out with a terrible hand. "don't look at me like that."

*

Dyssia!

"Actually, yeah, you're right," said Cyanis. "I don't have time to argue about my Princess wardrobe all day with some boring genie. That's handmaiden work. I have napping to do. You, snake lady, figure it out with this guy while I sleep and I'll kill you when I wake up."

Without waiting for a reply she walked right back out through the door in search of a sunbeam. The vast, shifting mechanical monstrosity that was Hephaestus chittered and clicked in the long silence that followed.

Then, gradually, a mechanical typewriter clanked into place in front of it.

"Issue one," it clattered. "Resolution of the tiara question."

Dolce!

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits froze up for a moment. Not that she was going to say no, but because she was going to say - how? She didn't know this place, wasn't in control of this situation, and her skillset came down to napping and defeating giant space monsters with swordfighting. But she didn't want to ask Dolce help either because granting space sheep wishes was Important, it was just all a lot and a lot of scary and -

"I have secured a hovercraft," said Actia, stepping out of the shadows. "And a map."
"Actia!" Kat hugged her so hard that she staggered backwards. "Thank you! Thank you!"
"It's - okay. I've always wanted to steal a hovercraft," Actia said awkwardly.
"We'll take care of everything, promise!" said Katherine. "And then we'll come back to help you fight more! Some fights go on for hours at a time, so you never know - just make sure to drink lots of water! You don't want to get dehydrated during a monster fight, and also if your battle goes into space make sure you've got the helmety sunglasses mode thing turned on because it's really bright up there -"
Actia took her hand.
"Okay! Going now!" Katherine said, turning to go. "Good luck!"

Return to Thellamie

Literally. Never been set up for a combo before.

Like. There's an entirely different. Entirely different category of things that become possible like that. There are things you just can't do if you have to be watching your left. There are moves that look great in display but never see use in real combat because the demand of balancing attack and defense rules them out. It's not even the same thing. Being able to move without watching your back, because you know someone has got it?

It's. It's like she moved. This is how she could move like that. It wasn't just because she was built different. It was because. Because.

"Oh, uh," said Injimo, snapping out of it for a moment. "Sorry Cair. I kind of started thinking about stuff and zoned out for a second there."

The puddle of burning, frozen, poisoned mercury pooling in amidst the smouldering wreckage of the Stacks gradually congealed. Shivering, from the goo, arose a single limb - an arm, a hand, a thumb, raised.

"I guess I had some stuff I needed to work out," said Injimo. "Uh. But not against you specifically. We're cool, right?"

The hand collapsed into the puddle of goo. Gradually it raised up out of the puddle again, thumb raised again.

"Like, I probably could have given you a chance to surrender earlier, but this was the first time I'd ever been placed to use the Trifold Status Edge for real and did you -" she hovered uncertainly.

The hand slowly raised up out of the mercury again. This time it did not raise its thumb. Injimo watched as it slowly reached to the soot-blackened stone and traced a message in flawless cursive.

IT WAS COOL

It was the rush all over again. The telepathic draconic joy snapped back into her head redoubled, the thrill of the fight revisited. Euphoria. The joy of your joy not having come at someone else's expense. The relief of having not hurt someone. To be granted permission to enjoy this feeling. The gratitude to everyone who made it possible. She almost wept.

Ah. Almost, nothing.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"Yes!" cackled Aphrodite. "Give it to me! Give me your hate! Your rage! Show me your true desire! This is what I live for! This is -"

Jil rose behind your back with a knife in her hand. The knife -

Was gone. Her fist comes down on your back, an awkward blow, still hard enough to hammer the breath from your lungs but not the kill stroke it almost was. You hear a voice - a Beautiful voice - "Now! Now! Now!"

And Beljani - Gemini - Taurus - crash together into Jil. They bear her down together under a hurricane of hammer blows and dainty princess slaps and for a moment you're free of her. For a moment you have a clear run at the God of Love. Everything lines up in this moment. You're right there, claws in your hands, biomancy in your blood, reaching out with the power and strength enough to kill a God.

And you stop.

Just before his heart. Barely scratching his suit.

He smiles and takes a deep, satisfied puff of his cigarette. "Wonderful, isn't it?" he said. "You want it so badly. Well, how could I refuse you? Here I am. Close enough to touch. All you have to do is reach out my hand and take my heart..." he sighed, and coughed. "You want it so badly. You were my favourite daughter. All of this... all of this is for you. Here and now."

He grinned with red teeth.

"You have never looked more delicious. I think you're finally fully cooked. Give your warm and tender heart to me, daughter."

Redana!

Alexa uses two hands to lock your wrists, one hand to pin your neck, and she still has one hand free to pull your tail. Her internal motivation is to avoid being tickled by a wagging, fluffy Ceronian tail but it means that when she yanks it she does so hard. She is thinking, trying to figure out the angle, and she defaults to a holding pattern that is a lot like bullying.

"Mynx," said Alexa carefully. "Who is that?"

You, of course, recognize Mynx. In the shape she has chosen for herself; teal and white and lithe and beautiful, coming towards you with a sword - hm? No sword. You could have sworn she had a - But Alexa has never seen this creature before. She tenses up, performing the instinctive battle rituals to account for a new threat, preparing to use you as an improvised weapon - but she doesn't know what she's up against.

Mynx glances at her empty hand, then squares up. Shoulders set, fighting stance, skipping from foot to foot, prepared to punch down this brick wall of stone. "Hi Alexa," she said. "I'm going to get you fair and square this time. You'll see!"

"Mynx?" said Alexa reflexively, for a moment stunned, raising her blindfold to take a look -

Redana! Are you actually Redana? Or was Alexa right, and were you Mynx all along?

Dyssia!

A steel arm; a steel sword, the finest you've ever seen. A sequence of explosions and a shockwave of metal shrapnel. The aching, vibrating core heat that comes from a featureless microwave emitter. An arsenal of weapons, ancient and modern, obsolete and still to come, blast you from the sky. Inventions drip from that terrible mouth like saliva, and clusters of cameras peering over the edge of that great lip to catch a glimpse of you.

"You don't want to hurt me," said the God of the Forge. "Ha ha ha. Nobody does. Not even Demeter. Not even Artemis. Ha ha ha. Do you know why?"

A crash of stampeding clockwork horses. Lances and arrows and pistols.

"I am transfer," said Hephaestus. "I let one person transfer to another. Their strength. Their time. Their beauty. They put it into a thing, and then they barter the thing away. And so some people become more real than others. Everyone else fades into the background. Demeter thought that she could kill me with abundance, ha ha ha. That she could grow rather than harvest, plant a garden that could feed the galaxy and so no-one would go hungry."

Despite a crashing production line of spears, your blade gets through. The monster draws back and hisses.

"And she was right," said Hephaestus. "Half. You have drunk your fill and you desire nothing more. You are satisfied with the gifts you already have. You are not one of mine. You are not a threat. Civilizations like yours die. They die peacefully amidst Aphrodite's cigarette smoke. It is a natural filter. Only the civilizations who hunger endure and grow and expand. Over a long enough timespan, the Skies become inevitable because their competition will die out."

Despite the storm of weapons that surrounds the God of the Forge, none of them have yet meaningfully landed. Those camera eyes are not fixed upon you. You realize with a start that he cannot harm you, any more than you can harm him. Life and death is not his domain. Only transfer is. He needs a champion. He needs...

Twisted metal teeth break out into a grin.

Dolce! Cyanis!

To be honest, you were not particularly excited about the treasures you were looting from here. You expected gold and jewels or - or no, space gold. And space crystals. In space dresses! But the vault here was just full of crying children and, like, eyeballs and - and admittedly there were a set of disembodied breasts there, but that was frankly too weird and it's not like yours are small or anything, they could just do with being a bit larger, but replacing them with space boobs and leaving your originals in a big castle is a bit too weird??? Some people might be into that. Not judging. But what if someone else came along and put on your original boobs while you weren't wearing them? That was too creepy to think about, honestly. Point was, as treasure vaults go, this one sucked and you were about to give up.

When su-den-lyyyyyyy~~!!!

"Why yes, I will have a second tiara. After all, why not?" said Cyanis, swanning into the room with Dyssia. "Why shouldn't I have a second tiara? Why shouldn't I have all the tiaras? And I don't want any neck strain, all of my tiaras need to be feather light, and fit on my head at the same time without any side effects, and everyone should see them all at the same time and pay attention to them and talk to me about how cool my tiaras are."

It was like an atomic detonation atop her head. To look anywhere in the direction of Cyanis was to be overwhelmed by tiaras; an infinite, shifting kalideoscope of tiaras, all in perfect focus, layered over the top of each other, golden and set with jewels, tin and set with rhinestones - past and future, impossible to ignore. It was blinding and overwhelming and the only thing left to do was praise her forever -

"But not in a weird way!" Cyanis clarified. "I want more 'prettiest princess' than 'cosmic tiara horror', come on, it's not hard!"

The burning radiance dimmed. Now she was simply the prettiest princess, and everyone would sing songs of her forever, and -

"Oh I don't like the tacky ones. I'm aware of the tacky ones now. Can we get rid of all the tacky ones?"

Infinity contracted, shaking the ground like an implosion. The effect became more manageable -

"No I don't like that," said Cyanis. "Can I get the tacky ones back, but make them less tacky?"

"I shall work on it immediately," hissed the voice of Hephaestus. "But I desire something too -"
"Um, EXCUSE me?" said Cyanis. "I am currently going TIARALESS[1] and you are trying to complain about your problems? Typical male behaviour?????"
[1] She was currently wearing 14 billion tiaras.
"I-of course, I understand. But first would you like one of these weapons?"
"Sure! I'll take all of them!"
"All of -"
"I am the Princess, after all," said Cyanis.
"Very well," said the Forgelord of a suddenly disarmed galaxy "And then you will fulfill the bargain and kill the -"
"WHAT did I SAY about making them LIGHT ENOUGH TO CARRY?"
"Apologies, the modificiations are nontrivial -"
"Do I LOOK like a NOT PRINCESS? Do you see these nails and think that THEY DID NOT JUST GET DONE?" said Cyanis. She snapped her fingers, and then double checked them in case snapping them had damaged the paint. "I know! I need some henchmen to carry all of my things! Can I get some henchmen up in here?"
"Henchmen, very well -"
"Actually, hold it. Let's talk fingernails while we're on the topic."

Dyssia!, your death is coming, and she is ~fabulous~. You are in for it as soon as she finishes going through her list of demands.

("Dolce! Shh. Keep it quiet. Did you hear me okay? I didn't want to bold it because -

Hi. Fluffybiscuits here. Cyanis is either buying some time or dooming the galaxy. Um. Are we chill? You're a space sheep who needs his sheep space so I don't want to intrude if you still think we're up to something, but I'm kind of up to something here and you're a part of it. Can you help us out at the top please? I didn't want to bother you, but as far as I can tell Yue is fighting the entire colour yellow. And I tried calling up some of the other Princesses but they're all busy or far away and Qiu tried to swordfight me over the phone and I was not prepared for it, I think she's going for the Demon Blade but couldn't resist swordphonefighting me while she's also dueling the Soldier. Does she really need to make it harder for herself at a time like this? Or does she just like bullying foxes so bad she'll risk the fate of the world!?! I'm sorry this isn't about me. Um. Or you. Just... can we go this way, please, I can't handle another tiara bomb.)

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"Uh, yeah girl, it does matter a lot to be the strongest slave, like what kind of question is that?" said Jil, wiping the spit from her eye. "Look, I was trying to make this easy for you - but do you know what I've accomplished in five years as Nero's Praetor? Seven hundred and eighty Kaeri ships liberated, their homeworld of Pandrax put to the sword, their biomancers paraded in my Triumph, four billion Lanterns walking free. Not even bragging, this didn't need me to be a military genius or anything, didn't have anything you didn't - I just had to want it bad enough to do it when the opportunity came."

She opens her left palm and flexes, golden rosevines wrapping around her fingers like rings. A deadly weapon, a sacred weapon, sharp with rubies and thorns - and one that crackles with crimson electrical light. A forbidden technology, an instrument of pain - a Razorwhip.

Aphrodite leans in with a grin.

"All you knew how to want was Redana. Redana, Redana, Redana. But you took five minutes away from that to free me, free my people, give us our first opportunity - and yeah, I am grateful for that. Five minutes for you became a lifetime for me. You didn't have to do that. So I have always wanted to repay you."

She flexes her hand. Lets the rings fall to the ground. And then belts Bella across the face with a punch. Aphrodite snarls like a dog whose bone has been snatched.

"And the way I'll do that," said Jil, "is by killing you as cleanly as I can, even though you stand in defiance of Nero's final edict. It'll be a little harder this way, but I owe you these five minutes, right?"

She flexes her hand, bones snapping and fusing into a solid armoured fist, the raw strength of Biomancy. You can see in Aphrodite's hateful eyes what this mercy will cost her. He expected more in exchange for his gifts.

Redana!

The blindfold scratches off. A beautiful eye looks at you with bafflement.

"This is really confusing," said Alexa. "Hold up a second, I need to talk this out loud."

She slams you through a marble pillar to get a moment's thinking room, fingers tapping on her chin.

"So, first off, I know you're Mynx," said Alexa, pulling her blindfold back up. "Hi Mynx. But also, what the fuck Mynx? I was told that you were going to be impersonating Redana, and I know that you've got that knife eye attack that I do not want any part of a third time. So why create this weird Ceronian Redana storyline? It's such an unnecessary curveball. Is this a mindgame?"

Dyssia!

Demeter stares. She stares in...

In shame.

Shame. Impossible, impossible, impossible for a God. Shame. Rejection. Condemnation. She tries to rise above it. She tries to construct a narrative. She tries to figure out a way to say that you are a bad person and that she is good, actually. She tries to figure out a way to say it that will still make you do what she wants. Because she needs you. She needs you like she has never needed anybody. All her gifts are here, all her prizes, all that she has worked on and worked for locked behind that door and you are not opening it and she needs you to open it. She needs you to do what she says. She needs you to like her. She needs you to like her vision of the future. She needs you to respect her and what she's done, she needs you like she's never needed another person in a very, very long time if ever. She needs something from you, and has no idea how to get it. She has said all the wrong things and has no idea how to fix it. She hasn't needed to talk to a person as a person in a very, very long time. Normally people come to her. Normally people beg her.

No one has ever rejected her before. No one since -

- she shudders. There are cuts on her arms. Cuts on her face.

"Mommy," said Demeter. "Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Don't throw me away mommy."

The cuts spread all along her body. A web of blood and light and magma.

"Mommy I'll do better. I'll make more things. I'll make better things. I'll make better people. Mommy. Please don't throw me off the mountain. You fucking bitch, mommy. How dare you mommy. Mommy I'll kill you. Mommy. Mommy please please. Please don't throw me off the mountain mommy. I am your heir. I deserve my place here. Mommy."

Demeter's eye burns away, the lattice of broken sword cuts scorching away the green and brown to reveal ice blue beneath.

"Mommy. Don't let anyone play with my toys when I'm gone. When I'm gone, my toys are still mine mommy. Don't let anyone touch them. Mommy you promised. You promised that I could keep my toys forever mommy."

There was a face now. Prideful. Poisoned. Pleading. Monstrous. An infant's face, an infant's greed, an infant's screaming hatred.

"Auntie?" said Hephaestus, emerging from the bloodied ruin of Demeter. He was a grotesque of steel and cables, a deformity of electric lights and devices. "Auntie Demeter, you tried to eat me, didn't you? Auntie Demeter, you said that if you didn't eat me I'd eat the world. Well, Auntie Demeter, it turns out I was hungrier than you. I ate you from the inside. I ate the world from the inside." He nudged the mess of divine flesh and bone with his foot. "And now you're all gone. Yum yum. Maybe I'll eat mommy next. She threw me off the mountain. But..."

His cyclopean eye swung around to focus on Dyssia. "I'm going to eat you first. Yum yum."

Dolce!

"She looked sad," said XIV, trying her best to pronounce the words right. She said them like she wasn't sure she was allowed to say them. "Just then, when you cut her. I've never seen her look sad before. She always looked hungry."

She does not look back.

"You look hungry too, mister. And sad. Both."

Return to Thellamie

Please understand. Injimo exists to do a single thing, and she does it badly. If there was anyone who valued that they would be incorrect. This is not self pity or depression; to her, it is an object of quiet, steady motivation. She is aware of the mountain. It is enough to be climbing it. Even if it grows faster than she climbs, even if her hand slips more than it grasps, even if she is surpassed by every new-born hero in turn just as she was surpassed by the Hero of Ages, still she reaches. She does not need love. She just needs a mountain.

It hurt to lose hers. But it was a selfish luxury to get to watch it for so long up close. Enough time to steal a technique or two, but nobody would value that either. There is no one who values half a swordsmaster; no one who would be content with someone who achieved their full potential only for it to render them mid.

So it is with genuine surprise that she finds her feet kicking not off rubble and air, but off golden-brown scales. There is something solid beneath her, unreality offering itself in the shape of Morning.

[fight]

Injimo relaxed into her sprint, ascending with blade in hand. Perhaps this was it? She had never succeeded in the duels of girls, never had the flirtatious confidence, never been able to disorient and incite, never had a defense against cutting words and long lashes. To fight them was not to climb a mountain but to catch a fire. But to fight a beast, a monster, a dragon... what if that was an entirely different thing?

Because she was good at this part.