Last Light of a Dark Age (Warhammer 29K/Disco Elysium)

CW: Descriptions of atrocity, internalized homophobia, ideation, and other deep psychological issues of self-harm.

Article:

Update 11 Votes (applying for the past)

[X] Its atrocious music.
[X] The Garden-City.
[X] Atomic Furies.
[X] Tomorrow.

Update 11.10 Vote (applying for the present)

[X] Rhythms

TIME: TODAY

Your conscience descends into the final coil of your marrow memory, the epilogue of your imperfect dark. The psychic power of Logos, the dreamshape's uttered command word, compels you. The word 'sink' is branded into the fabric of your soul. More than a psychic spell, it is an order that reorders existence, reorders your existence.

Your name is [] [] Harmony, and in every way you sink, in every way you fall, and in every way you despair - and prepare to die.

Save one. Inside you is a chord, the ambient music of your being, played on strings and circuits, bounced off the percussion of your stone, transmitted into the cyberspace of the black noise. It is your song - your network signal. And it reaches out.

RHYTHMS: Reaches out beyond this material resting place, with its crackling holographic wallpaper, and flickering phosphoric lamp. Reaches out through the worldwide web to find another music chord, and another, and another. Reaches out to find a world of jazz.

RHYTHMS [Trivial - Success]: The click of a stiletto heel, the exhale of smoke through a shapechanger's rouge lips. The squeak of cleaning rags on glass, and tinny corporate jingles, humming on the phonolog. The sloppy mutters of a patron too tired to stay standing, but too wired to sleep. The pre-dawn chorus of an underlooked hotel.

RHYTHMS [Easy - Success]: And more, and more. The hooting of mad children, feuding over their morbid prize. The strum of drawn-taut plasteel mooring cords, tied not to aerostat flyers but the rind of two rotting wrists. Three Koras arguing religiously, on whether 'mancakes' is too vile a name to call their kreperie's fried skinbatter. A civic acapella stretching wider, wider.

RHYTHMS [Medium - Success]: In the quiet of a self-closed aeroport, the slap of two weathered working hands on the stretched staple-skin of a huehuetl drum. The electric whine of a hoveryacht's parking, and the scratch on plasma-scorched stone of grounding anchors, digging fresh gouges in the rock. Living walls, protectors and jailers, shifting, shuffling. Extensions from a sprawl of pyramids and spires where hustle is a praxis. Foot-traffic and hover-traffic, prayer and profit, peace and poverty.

RHYTHMS: The symphony of a whole megacity's cyberspace, the tempo of its jazz, of want and mundane suffering, of happy and unhappy times. A tapestry, an orchestra, of questions, each a desperate gasp and grasp yearning for tomorrow, yearning for rescue. That yearns for deliverance.

EVENT HORIZON [Impossible - Success]: Something beautiful will happen.

EVENT HORIZON: Something beautiful must happen. Otherwise…what was this all for?

RHYTHMS: A bitter echo, not the voice within the Noise that asked if you'd like to know, but an understudy, a lesser to her greater ruin, speaks. They implore you to find meaning in the music of a world that maintains its will to live, even at dream's end.

SNOWCRASH: +FEEL.+

And despite everything, you do.

And you sink a little lighter.

Article:

AXIOM REMEMBERED [APPETITE]

RHAPSODY IN BLACK: This is something to hear. This tempo is all you have, but it's still something. The patter of the Deluge rain, the hum of ion lights. Take solace within the world-soul's sonata, and lose yourself within the rhythms of its jazz.

This axiom has hidden attribute effects that will only apply in the present, such as when facing the dreamshape inside Gen.

But there is another chord, and another song. One that does not feel, and one that does not live.

RHYTHMS [Challenging - Failure]: The song of a kingphisher, who snags your signal, pulls against the weight of the command word with an egophagic thread.

RHYTHMS: Reeling in a catch, within the black noise. Reeling in a catch with a familiar lullaby - the one played by Roxana, as she manifested the vision of the immortal machine, and the black egg, in the court of the Crimson King.

EVENT HORIZON [Godly - Success]: No, not a lullaby -

EVENT HORIZON: A dirge.

RHYTHMS: A dirge played upon a waterlogged harmonica by a captain without crew. In a hut, by this town's abandoned nanite beach. An opposite angler, who throws his hooks to land. The ancient mariner, shipwrecked on a dirac shore.

RHYTHMS [Impossible - Failure]: Call him Manasseh.

RHYTHMS: He does not seek to catch you, but to teach you. To have you hear a song, through the vibrations of the hacker's spectral phishing snare. A song older, and crueler, and truer, than any made by man or by machine. The song of the sea.

RHYTHMS: The noise of waves, crashing on the rocks of the town's half-flooded bay, eroding the wreck of a vermillion fortress, undermining the seawall meant to keep the panthalassic ocean away. And then he reels your signal further, further. Towards the line of chewing plankton, to the slick and sickly brew of an omniphagic horizon. That watery part of the world, where nothing lives, and nothing dies. Where there plays a single track, a single note, a single chord, repeated to infinity.

RHYTHMS [Impossible - Failure]: Quiet.

The captain speaks in a ghostly rasp, a transmission within the Black Noise that reaches you by the fishing snare's vibrations.

THE SEA CAPTAIN: It's an eternity out there.

A passcode to your inner danse macabre.

Article:

ENTITY INVITED

THE GREY: What wicked little twist of fate has placed you here upon my plate? Here, where no one can hear your cries? Where was your God to steer you through? Perhaps your God's forsaken you?

Otherwise, why lead you here to die?

This entity has hidden attribute effects that will only apply in the present, such as when facing the dreamshape inside Gen.

The line releases. The hook in your mind is secured, undetected by the dreamshape. The command word completes its work, and you sink into the ruins of yesterday's tomorrow. You forget the sea captain, and the slick grey sea.

But they do not forget you. And stirred by the passcode, the unthinking nanocancer that will one day kill you, that has killed all good and green things upon this earth -

Sings.


TIME: YESTERDAY

The mortal coil is split in two parts - and the first part, four sections, and each section, more fragments. Four dreams built from panes of stained glass, each leading towards the same destination, the same hope, and the same fate.

Tomorrow.

A DREAM IN YELLOW

"Harmony, my daughter."

She whispers it to you with such astonishment, such unfamiliarity, the two of you staying in a copse's loaned living quarters after dedicating the memorial for your own fallen sisters.

She blurts it out at random, an outburst at the meal, or as she combs your hair, or as you both pray to Kora for victory at a chapel shrine. Each time she utters them, the words become stronger, more real, more necessary. You didn't know you needed this, but you did. You need this more than anything.

You need to be a daughter. You need to be her daughter. You need to speak back, call her, with wild, sinful abandon, 'mom', ecstatic at the electric shiver it sends down her spine, the marbling cracks that single word forms in her soul's sarcophagus.

These are terms never permitted within gnosis. They are owed to higher beings, who alone can encompass the majesty, the meaning, that parenthood contains. You, fallen, broken toys, have no right to claim a parent, and claim a child. You had parents in the nursery - and with their duty done, never again could you claim a mother.

But you do, anyway.

She caresses you, and holds you, in ways hylics are never held by a pneumatic. You have been hollow inside so long that when your hope blooms again, it's hard to bear. One day you cry, and cry and cry into her shoulder, until it is soaking wet. These tears water the second spring of your life.

But what is a mother? What is a daughter? You have to discover it yourselves, and that is its own delight. You have no idea what a daughter is, or what a mother is. The wire-mother is one model, but you are not a machine, and her skill at digital games and physical repair are not easily replicable.

So instead, you attempt a scientific approach.

Researching what is an optimally affectionate touch (the hand on the cheek, the finger lingering on the nail, the burying of your face into the comforting ivy blanket of her enormous unwound hair).

The testing of a term of endearment (sweetheart is saccharine, but she favors its association with haemic ice, the first time you ever laughed and smiled).

Finding limits to your attempts to synchronize (no amount of 'but mom' or 'but sweetheart' will convince her of the supreme status of Malodious Funk or the factual proof that cryptid xenos walk among us as invisible wizards, or convince you that Heliodor is 'perhaps the most ideal shape men ever took' or convince you to share her infatuation with violent, extreme-heat inorganic baking). There is commonality - you both love Heliodor's Blackstar, and sing along to it together, when no one's looking, atop your shared copse-bed.

You find you aren't perfect matches. You aren't flawless halves. You aren't ideal friends.

And that makes this love more important than any you've been conditioned to uphold.

And it is so fragile. You are both so fragile. There are nights where you cannot sleep, and she cannot wake. She wheezes, in stifled, suffocated sobs, as she dreams the feeling of every remaining string of the copse cutting at once, the sensation of the last flash of terror and pain delivered to her, when the petriform blast wave reached the selves that had trusted her to protect them.

You quiver, jaw clattering, whenever you close your eyes, as a carousel of perfectly recalled memories rotate in your mind - the heat of Hyperion, the crunch of Ardent Verity's limp body crashing on the trenchline, the screeching of the petriform-infected as their symbiont shuts down.

This could not be borne alone with all the conditioning and regret-inhibitors in the world. You are still alive because she is still alive. You are still alive because she chose you, and you chose her.

When she sobs, you nuzzle your forehead against her temple, open the subtlest expression of your still field, and calm her dreams in your abyss. And when you quiver, she encases you in a cocoon of her hair, and runs a spiral-tattooed arm covered with fresh runes of powdered blackstone, and calms you with a quoted incantation that can put you to sleep.


Your eyes meet after her lullaby, and in the pupil- shine of diamond upon diamond, there is the fledgling glimmer of something entirely new.

GEN《AUTOFAIL》: What colour are her eyes?

GLAMOUR [Trivial - Success]: The same colour as yours.

GLAMOUR [Godly - Failure]: Black.

GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Useless.

You are not free, from the wounds of war, from the weight of your past, from the sin of your conception. You are not liberated from the loss of everything you knew. The world conspires against you, the enemies of what little you've salvaged. The Prime Souls will march again, and soon. The Immaculates demand an audience, summoning Sympathy to Cube Malachite, and you with her.

But you are not afraid anymore. You are not alone anymore. You can imagine a future that does not demand your death. You can imagine a sunrise, by her side. Your guiding daylight.

EVENT HORIZON [Trivial - Success]: Someone who shares her visions with you. That reads to you from the manuscript Fifth Sun, and the tragedy of Obsidian Butterfly, the oblivion witch. Her rise, and fall.

EVENT HORIZON: Her young friendship with the pneumatic Icon Bellamona, and the violence of her old friend's end by the Butterfly's cursed sword, by her own hand. Her rally of the Still Coast against Bellamona's gnostic holy war, and her wielding of the forged abyssal nail of her water-father, his soul trapped inside that self-same sword. Her yearning for the pure land, and her failure to find it in the labyrinth of Demhe. Her gift of a crystal flower to the minotaur, and her last failed attempts to save her people from the clutches of the soul-stealing deceiver.

EVENT HORIZON: Her detection of morse whispers from the deep, and the visits from the breathless god. The truth of the pure land, and the revelation that her crimes had closed it to her. Her declaration, that by this book, she came to make friends she could never make in life. The answer, contained within the seed of gnosis. The gate, contained within the wedding gift. The key, contained within the true meaning of the word monad. The yin, that can complete the yang, and end the cycle.

EVENT HORIZON: Eternity, in the spiral of an awakened third eye.

Immaculate Sympathy, your mother. Your icon. Your place of safety. Your reason for being. Your home.

Your Kora.


A DREAM MADE GREEN


Novelty has come to Malachite, and you with it. You fly to the holy cube not on a cloud but a SkyBreaker cloudcutter - the first line of Cybaris' analog and aerostatic vacuumships. Comfortable cabins, high cargo capacity, fast air-travel - and no combat utility, no defenses. The first fruit of a 'peace dividend' that is already reshaping Illuminata in ways too vast to capture in words.

Every slight that Cybaris has done to the three warring powers is forgotten in the rush of new technologies he sells to them. Dozens of these vacuumships pour out from skydocks, and every cloud, ornithopter, or zodiac-transport they replace can be repurposed for the war. And as for Cybaris - it makes them more cyphers than any treasure they could have ever looted.

To you, to Koinon, to Titanagalbat, this is the final war of survival, freedom, glory. But for Cybaris, this is another opportunity - your suffering, another opportunity. It is a thought, an ideology, you do not know. Atavism, profit, individualism, crass consumerism, the grind and the hustle - none of these words are in the scripture. You are creatures of daylight, born in paradise, blooming in fallen gardens of the dead. Love and faith suffuse everything you're meant to be. And it is no lie. That would be too easy, too simple. It is toxic, noxious, vile - but it remains true love, and honest faith.

And Malachite is the high temple of this love, and of this faith.

The projected cube-image, spanning five by five by five kilometers from the high hill where the cube sits is a gnarled, hugging thicket of white wrapping a field of chlorophyllic green. The intrinsic bond of living and dead, soul and body, bark and leaf. Enclosing the secrets of the wonder that's inside as the wicker thickets of a copse do.

You and Sympathy come to the deck, the crew of Immaculate attendants sneering at your shared affection when they think you cannot see. This is the first time she will be back here in so many years, and for you, the first time you will ever be here.

The cube's living wall opens up in vertical slits, and past the darkness of a winding bramble tunnel, you meet the fiery absinthe-green of a sun so familiar and dear. The sun of the egg-vision, the sun that Kora showed you, when she promised you five girlfriends, and the restoration of God. Shining over the birthplace of the Elder Self, where she was first printed.

A leafy sun, with a black diamond-eye, your eye, Kora's eye. Rising over the projection screen of the cube's skybox, at its midday apex. Below you, the Tree of Souls, an enormous white synthetic oak, kilometers high, dividing the Cube between the city understory and the canopy of the Conclave's eternal paradise. The Tree respirates, drawing in sin and expelling virtue, and by this engine, purifying Malachite of its transgressions.

It was planted when Kora was alive, but the Immaculates claim it was only by their great work that it has risen to its heights, fed on an air of pure devotion to Her memory.

Open patches leave glimpses of the gloomy understory, where millions of hand-caste Koras work and toil in the pitiless twilight. The attention of the visitor is drawn far more to the circular platform of the canopy, suspended on the branches of the Soul-Oak. And nothing remains of the time before Kora. It was as if the first four hundred years of Illuminata's reawakened history had not happened at all.

The Paradise of Virtues is a circular garden city in tiers separated by maze-hedges, punctuated by organic temple spires, enormous bark sculptures and busts of Her Body and aria minarets. There is a progression from the clerk-blocks of the ordinary Minds to the wicker-basket bureaucratic buildings of the civil Superior Myriad and the military Sacred Heart.

There are the ten Temples of the Immaculates, each gathering places for their supporters in their endless and petty power games - Faith is now ascendent, and the temples of Immaculate Verity and Epiphany in disarray since their mysterious cloister following the day of the twin suns. And smaller shrines, worship-places where Kora once sat, or walked, or ate, or lived for half a week.

In the center, the painted, tinted glass of the Greenhouse, the Immaculates' eden. Somewhere inside there is the secluded and guarded tomb of the dead Kora herself, the strands of her ever-growing hair extending down through the center of the tree and into the trunk and roots of the Soul-Oak. Her dead body preserved by incredible means not even Sympathy is privy to.

You have prayed in Malachite's direction, prayed to Malachite, for oh so long. Imagined it in fantasies, seen photographs in moving glass and memories in wafers. But nothing compares to the true edifice of it, the true scale of it. The Tree of Souls, grown from a single soulseed, anchors branches against the cube's skybox. Clouds exit the cube and fly to war, manufactories of the understory spew exhaust filtered through air-scrubbing bush-chimneys, and millions upon millions of Koras rush to work, and rush to prayer.

City of divinity, city of virtue, city of twelve seasons and twelve hours. Bathed in perpetual daylight, the sun rises so soon as it sets. Regimented to the wishes of Kora, every minute, every hour arranged to the calendar of the skybox, called out by compelling psychic arias. Urging Koras conditioned by the very air of this place to praise, lament, and toil, in her memory. A memorial. A mausoleum, a tomb.

How exquisite. How holy. How sacred.

How terrifying.

There is no room to breathe, and no room to live. None of the imperfections of the copse are permitted here - you are always watched by green-eyed holographic doves here, here. The leaves have eyes. The strings are imprisoning thorns. Even you, a hylic, taste the conditioned psychic air. Clean. Pure. Sterile.

And stagnant. Each and every inhabitant of Malachite is proud they are a perfect instrument, proud they are not proud. Undefined by the seasons of outside, day unbalanced by night, enclosed in its own editable reality.

You wonder what she, the breaker of chains, would think of the self-made chains of this temple to Her being.

Motion without movement. Action without progress. Faith without revelation. Set in a frozen moment in time, replicating a past that can never be again, striving for a perfection that cannot be achieved.

Not for tomorrow. Not for today.

But for a clung-to yesterday. For the dream of a resurrection that will never come. Millions of you have been destroyed by war out there, but -

There is no war in Malachite.


The divine canopy is a glittering pavilion of marble and hanging gardens, crystal flowers in every shade of the rainbow, splashes of color to the foundation of white and green. The geometric cube-blocks which are its habitation can be dissolved, rearranged, reformed, rebuilt, at will. Their material is malleable to those Mind-architects with the cybernetic permission to edit them. But they never do, unless it better conforms to the vision of Kora.

And this is the true home of the Progeny's Minds, not the copses and their superiors committed to the declining rural idyll, the original vision of Kora society, that places them within and not apart from the world. Instead, the Immaculates have made a pastoral wonderland where the only Hands are servants and the only Hearts are decorated and retired veterans, awkward and unstuck as they dwell among the pneumatic nobility of the Progeny's psychic pinnacle.

Only the finest human-fruit's permitted here, while you are served rotting rations. Five lovers splash each other in communal mirror-pools like idiot children, while you fear every puddle and rainstorm. Luxury and elegance in every garden courtyard and Mind-estate, while you and your mother are offered spare, and austere furnishings.

It is far too quiet here. Very few use words to speak, when psychic messages can carry so much more and further.

The lightly-dressed Koras of this place smile at Sympathy, and bow before her, but the smiles that reach their eyes are laughing, mocking. Despite her title they know what she really is, and know who you are. For you they don't even bother to smile, so repulsed are they by your presence. You were invited, and you begged Sympathy to be allowed to come to glimpse the city - but you consider now how much of that was another ritual humiliation, from your holy elder leadership.

Sometimes, as you walk with your mother through the streets, you want to slit every single perfect throat you see. You want to paint this place red. Especially when you see them kissing in the streets, when you see Koras lounging on each other, when you see them playing telekinetic games in mirror-pools, comforted in a perfect terracotta nakedness unmarred by scars and battle-damage.

Your mother scratches at the carved glyph scars of her conditioning under her sleeve, as she remembers. You brush your fingers against her arm, as if you could heal the wound, but you can't heal that. You can't heal something that has been cut so deep - and not when you're also cut so deep.

It's not fair. Hyperion should have burned this place instead. Burned the smiles off their lips, let their faces warp into a screaming rictus as they melt, and shatter to ash. Let the lovers boil and turn roasted red in the evaporating pools. Die, die, die. All of them should die.

But your mother has been conditioned to accept such disrespect. She has been conditioned to endure. She has been conditioned to suffer.

That must be why, when she has the choice to visit any gleaming temple or Kora-shrine of a thousand martyrs and heroes, she chooses the one that you hate the most.

The Icon Remari's.


The Tomb of Remari makes you sick. You hate Remari's image in stained glass, the stranger with your face, your mother's face. You hate the quiet here, the knowing smile of the icon's carved image on the lid of her stone cocoon sarcophagus. You hate the animated marble sculpture of Kora holding a dying Remari, draped across her lap, pierced by a plasma bolt through her diaphragm, wheezing her last breath on loop - Our Lady of Pity, the masterpiece of an unrecognized hand-caste artist. You hate that it's unrecognized, too.

You hate everything this shrine represents.

You want to pull your mom up from her knees and take her away right now. She shouldn't be here. This is the wrong place. This is not the place for her. It can't be.

You hate the story, too. Following years as a slave and then an escaped witch, Kora became a follower of Remari. She served under her, and loved her, but they grew apart as Remari insisted on non-violence even as slavers raped their 'garden flowers', turned mutants into performing grotesqueries, looted and pillaged her missions of freedmen and women.

And then Remari was killed under the Cubemaster's flag of truce, and Kora waged a war of vengeance that turned her into what she became - empress of the Myriad, and in time, a goddess to her clone-soldiers. Remari was a necessary sacrifice, the Immaculates preach. An important lesson, the Immaculates preach. A romantic tragedy, your mother says.

The worst thing that could ever happen, you believe.

You tug on your mother's robe and ask her when you're leaving, but she doesn't answer. She just prays. You hate that too. You hate when she's like this.

She seems to read your mind, activates an egophagic shroud to prevent anyone from hearing your conversation. "Someone has to be kind," she assures you, "someone has to be better. Remari was."

Let someone else be kind. You need to survive. A thousand scenarios fly through your mind of how the Immaculates could hurt you, hurt her, separate you, torture you. They way they already did, with the copse. You're tools and toys to them, to be disposed of.

And it's wrong. Kora promised, at the very beginning. You are not a thing. So why does your mother keep letting the Immaculates treat her like one?

More excuses flow. "You don't know what the Immaculates are capable of. Not even I know. We can't just…fight them. That would be a second schisomachia. Anarchy, evil. Penitence and I were designed to shield the Progeny, not destroy it."

Back to her old self. Patronizing. Avoidant. Afraid. Afraid of power.

"Would you print a third version, then, after they destroy me? Third time's the charm, let's see how they break this one while I just watch?"

That breaks her composure. "Harmony, please -"

"They tortured you. And me. And the copse. And first Harmony. And Elegy, my other sister. And Penitence. You told me a long time ago that this was wrong. So why do you just let it happen?"

"Because they have supporters innocent of any crime but conditioned loyalty," she counters. "Because I have killed enough Koras. Killed enough little selves -" she stalls out, brow knotting in the agony of remembrance. "I don't want to be that kind of monster. I am enough of one against Koinon. When I am here…I want to be as Remari was. Peaceful, and enduring."

"You're not Remari. You're Kora. And you're alive."

She gives you the saddest look that you have ever seen. "I do remember being Kora. But who is that happy child with my face, in the nursery's reflecting mirror. The girl that's posing with her tongue stuck out beside her elder sister Penny? My past is a stranger to me. They tore out that child's heart, then stitched the corpse back together with pieces of other little selves, my classmates. I am a patchwork, a composite abomination. Among the living dead."

"Please stop," you beg her, not crying but at the verge. "You're not any of that. You're my mother. My mother is alive."

She finally pays attention to that, to you, breaks out of the spiral.

"Oh - oh. sweetheart. I am," she says, and notices your distress, pulls her arms around you. "...I'm sorry. The darkness carried me too far. I lose myself in it, sometimes."

"Then, you'll defy them, for me? For us?"

"As…as long as I can be kind, I'll try…" she says, with hesitation, resistance. Trying to soothe and placate you. Lying. Not to you, but to herself. You know when the time comes, she'll recoil from standing against them.

You say nothing, but inwardly, you sigh at your mother's stubbornness, her conditioning, her fear, hidden behind principle.

Oh mom, you sigh, inwardly, as you decide what you must do, You're not allowed to choose anything and anyone but me.


Each of the eight elder virtues rest on a hovering lotus in the center of a reflecting mirror-pool, in soft snowsilk shifts of innocence that complement their unmarred forms. Some lay on one another, lazily lean upon each other for comfort. Others eat from bowls of fruit, or examine illuminated holoscripts, or meditate.

They wear crowns of synthetic garlic flowers, their eye-color inverted, with black iris and green pupils, their smiles plastered, their halos blinding, peaceable, utterly serene, utterly at ease. Their leaf-feathered wings are folded behind them, sometimes shifting and stretching wide.

You stand, beside your mother, eyes down, avoiding contact, hands clasped in the pose of prayer, knuckles white from the pressure of your barely restrained wrath.

They tortured you. They tortured so many. They threw your lives away in a war you don't know how to win. A third of you are dead and right now they are giggling at a joke.

Only one has proper shame - Immaculate Faith, the most popular, the most influential, the 'youngest', though your mother has told you the Immaculates don't age the normal way. That they transfer some portion of their souls by unknown means in a chain going back to the beginning. Somehow you dislike Faith's shame more - you wish the bitch did not pretend remorse.

Immaculate Penitence is there, too, standing. Her body is cracked by lacerations, her butterfly wings torn and punctured, her halo dim. Her hair has been cut short and shaggy, bangs framing her face. She has refused to heal the damage - has made a point of displaying war wounds inflicted by the Prime Soul, Theia. She doesn't smile back to the elders, not ever.

There is bland and stilted conversation interspersed with furious psychic back-and-forth. The Immaculates debate the front with a bored idleness, talk about lives spent as if they were a mild inconvenience, every word of sadness performative, a perfect quotation of Kora's lament of this or that sister. Again, it's only Immaculate Faith who takes it seriously, talks frankly about the loss of lives and the need to coordinate with the titans to destroy the Prime Souls at any cost.

But all you wonder is what game she's playing, and notice the shared glances between her and Penitence. Camaraderie - cooperation - maybe even desire.

And then, the humiliation ritual. They have brought you here to 'praise you'. To marvel at the 'lone hylic survivor' of the copse. To ask Penitence how it is that the one she claimed was well-conditioned, 'born to die' is among them. Penitence, for her part, grinds her teeth and answers only that you're of significant skill and prowess, and that provokes light laughter.

You remember what your mother said - Penitence is their enforcer, but not their creature. There is something inside her more dangerous than any of them could imagine, and not in any good way. But even then, the way she defends you could almost make you forget that she was the very Immaculate most involved in your torments.

Almost.

They mock Sympathy, then. That if she's so fond of the cold perhaps they should requisition a mobile fridge for her, rather than having her race after the skirts of her soul-inferiors. And your mother says nothing. She does not protect you. She just tightens her jaw, and her knuckles, and turns back into the same girl they conditioned. The girl they sealed in a coffin.

And then they ask you, straight away, how it is you've lived, by your own words. A simple implication, behind the question.

Why are you still alive, you fetid moppet?

And that is your breaking point.

GEN《AUTOFAIL》: Disable designate-obscuring controls. Permit the full name.

"I am Beatific Dolorous Harmony," you declare, "and I am alive because Immaculate Sympathy is my loving mother, and has kept me whole."

The satisfied smiles crack. Immaculate Faith's eyebrows dart to the top of her forehead. Penitence turns, curious.


There are stuttering protestations. An effort to shout you down, to stop this vile violation of both gnosis and scripture. This hylic's treason. One of them (except Faith, they're indistinguishable to you) calls you a 'malfunctioning doll'. They demand Sympathy discipline you, right away, right here.

But you just wrap yourself around her arm, as your null-field flares, and the mirror-pool's surface freezes. There is panic, and Faith trying to calm the scene. And Penitence, like a shark smelling blood, is doing something that frightens you almost as much as the elders -

Penitence is grinning, the crooked way a Kora does when she's found prey.

Your mother is trapped. Tries to sputter out some defense, some lie, some half-truth, about how she wishes for no second schisomachia, that the little self is emotional after the copse-casualties, weakly trying to defend the fiction.

But she doesn't understand you the way you do her. She's not seen your soul, that way. She doesn't grasp what this is. What you've done. You make eye contact, and tell the story in the smoldering agony and wrath you bare to her, that you've kept hidden for her sake.

Did she really think you had forgotten about her inaction all those years, letting you and the copse suffer because of her own fears, her own avoidance, her own cowardice? Did she really think you had buried the hatchet of the long-nursed hatred, resentment, you held for her, for fifteen years? Did she really think that a bit of family-bonding, a little bit of copse-camaraderie, would erase the memory of every single day of your brutal, cruel abuse, for which she did nothing? The fifteen years in which she abandoned you?

You empathize with her. You sympathize with her. You love her. You forgive her.

But there is a cost. And the cost of her promise, her parenthood, is to join you on this downward spiral. This is the string she chose, and the string you'll never let her hide or break for the sake of any hope, or any ideal, or any fear. This is your truth, as crushing and as honest as gravity.

This is love's abyss.

You are selfish in your selflessness. And she is yours. No one and nothing else's. And you will never let her escape your love again. You will never let her go like Remari.

"Please," you beg, an honest manipulation, that breaks her last resolve, and breaks the last chains on her sarcophagus, including the ones she put there herself. "Please, mom."

And that is enough. She pierces through the raging arguments, and speaks up, with such authority, such power, such unflinching fury , that the air ignites and the Immaculates flinch, backing away on their lotus flowers. Fire and ice are terrible hazards to such pretty, flowered plants.

"My daughter speaks true," Immaculate Sympathy announces. She is the angel of death in truth, here, her halo shining, warings outstretched, her inner fire burning free from any chain but yours, burning hotter than it has ever dared. And then, back to you. "She always does."

One of the Immaculates shouts for Penitence to discipline her younger sister, to bring her in line with gnosis and scripture. To cease this second, outrageous defiance.

And Penitence, dropping her grin, shrugs. "Sweet elders, I would love to punish transgressions against gnosis. For this I much desire a full quorum of the Conclave, to decide the sentence. Tell me, where are Verity and Epiphany? Not buried in their work, I hope." There is a crackle of biolightning from the tips of her hair.

Sympathy, starting to lose heart, shoots up, looking to the weapon who had been her sister, and her torturer.

EVENT HORIZON [Medium - Success]: And what meets her is that same funny grin she had when they were children - but wrecked, deranged. And Sympathy grasps -

EVENT HORIZON: Her elder sister still loves her. Never stopped loving her. And everything she did, everything, she did for her.

EVENT HORIZON: And that is a more terrible blow than any punishment the Immaculates could have in store for her.

The Immaculates start shouting then - heaping blame on Penitence for her failure in the north, Sympathy's in the east, about their weakness as generals, their failure to anticipate the Prime Souls, their gallivanting, in Sympathy's case, with titan-strangers who have failed the cause. And that just makes the mood more tense, as all sides switch to psychic pings, as Penitence in particular starts to crackle, as Sympathy steams.

It is Faith who is the peacemaker. As the Immaculate chorus starts to reach a fever pitch, denunciations flying, she stands, and walks across half-boiling, half-icy lily pads on barefoot tip-toes, wings beating to keep her afloat, unphased.

"Let us be at peace," she says, and places a hand on Sympathy's head. "Young Sympathy, you have been our dedicated and faithful instrument. The tragedy of the Day of Twin Suns was not your doing, and not ours. It was that of our common enemy."

She walks to you, as your null field calms. She hovers a hand as close as she can bear to your head. "You have been a brave and honest hylic servant of Her memory, and I am told, a keystone of your…" she pauses on the term, "mistress' stability. We may forgive the transgression as the emotions of a martyr-in-waiting. An expression of deep patriotic fervor, to be celebrated for its passion even as it is condemned for its content."

And then, to Penitence, placing a hand on her head with just the slightest sensuality.

Disturbingly, it calms her down. "And you, Penitence, have fought hard against the enemies besetting you, came so close to Jade. We have failed to grant you the resources you need, and let you be so…" there is a twitch in her lip, almost a split-second of revulsion as she traces a finger across her facial cracks, "damaged, by that failure."

She turns back to the other Immaculates. "Many of the faithful have fallen. Kora weeps for the death of so many selves, so many sinners whose chance at redemption is foreclosed. A new strategy is needed. And who better to provide it than our heroes, and their followers? Both Sympathy and Penitence have amply demonstrated their commitment, and their skill. Why not let them demonstrate their leadership, as well?"

There are quiet, and more furious psychic messages, back and forth, that you can spot as spectral lights in your wireframe warpsight.

Faith nods, after opening her eyes from a particularly long telepathic negotiation. "Then we have a majority. Is there objection from the instruments? Of the plan for Penitence to pluck the weeds of rebellion, and organize our industry, and Sympathy, the hero, to the warfront, to defend our blood, and our soil?"

Penitence and Sympathy shake their heads. You furrow your brow, confused, but when Faith notices your confusion she just gives you a wink. You frown at that, and offer an awkward clasped hand in prayer, almost autonomically, for thanks.

You didn't expect to…you thought you would die here, in some part of you. You were okay with that, as long as Sympathy protected you, and went with you.

You didn't expect…this? You don't know what this is. You don't know this feeling.

You think it's hope. Not just for you and your mother, but for the world.

"And you," Sympathy asks. "Elder Faith. What will you be doing?"

Faith looks back to the other Immaculates, who turn away, seemingly defeated by whatever telepathic debate had just taken place. "We will be preparing the ritual. The seance. The answer."

The elders return to their serene smiles at that, a relish in their expressions at the very mention of the term, as they turn their attentions back towards the center of the garden, and the tomb of Kora.

"To unleash the power at the very root of our love."

The conversation returns to something formal, after that, details ironed out, plans spun. But you don't pay attention to any of it, still clinging to Sympathy, too afraid to meet her gaze in case she's angry at you for what you did. But it doesn't matter whether she's angry. You can accept that, so long as she's still your mother.

There are butterflies in your stomach, and pounding in your hearts. She's yours. She can't escape. They can't take her away.

You've won.


"How could you be so reckless?!"

Okay, yes, your mother is angry.

"What if they had decided to execute you, then and there? Did you even think it through? Do you think anything through, Harmony, or just rush into the newest nightmare without a care? This is so much worse than comedy night. This could threaten the very fabric of the Progeny."

A superior level of anger.

"You forced me to stand with Penitence, who I will remind you cannot be trusted, and handed the initiative straight to Faith. Faith, who has been building her power for decades. The other Immaculates will be threatened, and Faith herself will wish to act. We have wedged ourselves into a dangerous game. Whatever this ritual is - likely some sorcery targeting the Prime Souls or using the psychic root network to strengthen our defenses - she will want to be in charge, and claim responsibility!"

Immaculately angry.

"Personalist, undistributed power - dividing wartime responsibilities in a way that I face the warfront and Penitence is allowed to gather supporters domestically - weakening the bonds between the Immaculates and their soldiery, who will look far more to me and Penitence, and not to them - Kora, as if Pentinence's soldiers aren't fanatical enough - it could be the schisomachia again, even if I refused -"

Supremely angry. She even stops talking when she notices you've just been sitting there smiling dumbly without paying attention.

"Beatific Dolorous Harmony, are you even listening to a word I'm saying?"

"You called me daughter to them," you say, ignoring the question, absolutely beaming. "You protected me."

"I, well -" you catch her off-guard. She's flustered. "Y-yes yes I did, sweet-self. But - you've forced me into creating a political crisis -"

"Well I don't think I really care about that," you say. "I just wanted you to say it. I was okay with dying."

The anger dissolves off her at that. "Oh - oh Harmony, please don't-"

"I've been okay with dying for a while, I think. Maybe I even was before the war started, but now when the inhibitors wear off I think about it all the time. You're the one that keeps me stable. I knew most of what you said already. I wasn't…I'm not stupid, mom. I don't know politics, but I know people. Too much. How to talk, unfold, unpeel them. Like I did with you."

She stops lecturing, and starts listening.

"We were never going to get a better chance. Everyone is in shock. So many are dead. The petriform is causing refugees to flood into the cities. Two Immaculates are missing. Penitence was upset, too. You saw. Selves are really upset. The copse was willing to go along with me on Comedy Night. I figured other people would have been, too, if you turned on them. I didn't want to start a fight just…force a settlement. And make them accept us."

"Yes, but -"

You cut her off, irritated. "If you didn't want to protect me, why did you speak up?"

"Because I had to. And because you were telling the truth. Of course you were," she rebukes, "but-"

"Then that is the end of it," you finish for her.

She sighs, as if speaking to a child. "There are other things to consider. Ideals, gnosis, principles dearly held, the need to avoid a civil war-"

And then it's your turn to explode.

"WE ARE IN A WAR. We have been fighting a war against the Immaculates our entire lives, and losing. This is our chance to fight back. To save the sisterhood. To redeem everyone who died for you. For once in your fucking life, take power when it is given to you, and fight!" you spit back, and then, add, toning down the venom, "please, mom. Or we will lose everything, peaceable and virtuous, to three abominations and their army of fanatic, shrill-singing, lunatic strangers, while the Immaculates giggle, eat hot fruit and torment us to the end."

She doesn't say anything for a long time, and you're briefly afraid you've gone too far. But instead she puts her hand together, and releases a long-held breath, and gazes at you with new eyes. She understands. And impossibly, she admires you, tears of pride welling up.

"When did you become so brave, my little miss normal?"

You don't answer for a long time. Then, at last: "Since I learned you wouldn't be brave for me."

That makes her surrender. She kneels before you, and vows herself to you, in the way of ancient knights. A vow to set aside the old one, the one that looked up the Icon Remari.

"I will be brave for you. I will be strong, for you. I will protect the sisterhood, for you. And for them. No matter what it takes."

And with that, you have her, without any shred of doubt, and without any remaining obstacle. To tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. To eternity.

No matter the shade of the sun.


A DREAM BLUSHED RED

There is always a cost, and always a price. You've compelled Sympathy to act, and take real control of the warfront. You should've expected, should've feared, she would betray you this way. But even you couldn't imagine the scale of this backstab.

She's given you actual responsibilities. You have to be a leader now, of the Night Witches' first squadron, a group of mech-flying god-killing hylic specialists. She trusts you. When you protest, she quotes back that you're good with people. Your mom is an evil, evil witch, and you're inclined to reject the proposal, but she gets serious.

"Harmony. You've already shown bravery and leadership when you confronted the elders. You're one of the most accomplished veterans we have," and she waves away an objection she predicts, "even if we agree what we did is hardly 'accomplished'. But we are defending the Progeny, now. This is a just cause. And these girls need someone to look up to."

"They can look up to you," you respond too quickly.

She's implacable. "And they will. But they need someone like them, to show them the way. To show them what's possible for a hylic. That can't be me, an imperious and distant Immaculate pneumatic. There's no one I trust more, and there's no place safer to be. It will keep us together."

You suck your teeth and give in. Her complements are a terrible weakness for you. "Fine. On one condition."

You want an advisor. Someone who can help teach the night witches how to use the Pythascene Mobile Suit you've already been practicing with in the spare time you have before the war begins again in earnest. Someone who knows the operation of mecha inside and out, a hylic who has mastered the projection of his null field through his zodiac.

The one, who, when you say his name, causes Sympathy to raise an eyebrow that tells you that you've been compromised. Sometimes you wish maybe you knew less about each other.

"He's the best for the job?" She asks, and you list off half-a-dozen reasons why. And she nods her head, and studies you, deadpan. "And that is definitely why you've chosen him?"

You knot your hands together, and shrug to hide how awkward you feel. "No other reason."

"Oh sweetheart," Sympathy says, "you're allowed to just ask Karuna on a date."

You don't know what she's talking about, but hypothetically, you entertain the scenario. "I don't think it'd be proper. He's a stranger."

"Do you like him?"

You chew your lip, and look down, flustered. "A little."

"Then it's proper."

You blush and thank her, but she puts a finger up. "However, you will need to be properly prepared."

"Prepared?"

Sympathy hands you a holoscript, with a wink. The Inscrutable Moid. And it truly is an informative guide to the male subspecies. You are aware of what works, and does not, emotionally and anatomically. You are aware of his tiny brain, large muscles, and propensity to exude perfumed anointing oil. Though you will not be following the section on dismemberment.

Probably.


The problem with Karuna is he doesn't understand how badly you want him. This isn't like Epiphany. The want for her was cherished, intimate, gentle. This is something else. An appetite. Oh yes, you promised to be 'friends'. But with pectorals like those, with that frame, slim enough to feel human but wide enough to be exotic, with how sweet, how naive he is -

You have to. You have a mother, but that's not enough. Not after the Day of Twin Suns. You have other wants, but nobody will hold you that way. Nobody wants you. No Kora wants you. No girl wants you. It hurt so much when Roxana revealed she never wanted you. The cinnabar of her hair, the curve of her neck, was so pretty in the limelight of that room before the Twin Suns it hurts you to think of. You didn't want anything special from her. Just one kiss. One good honest kiss. Why couldn't you have that?

Koras are desired, outside the Progeny. Your symmetrical face, your slender figure, your freckles and your hair, are all icons of beauty. Maybe that would be enough to get past how ugly your soul is. He's a hylic, so you have that in common. You're not afraid he'd flinch from your touch. But he's a man, and so you have so many other fears. That he'll want to possess you, that he'll build an idol out of you, that he'll want you all for himself.

You don't want that. You want to be normal. You want to forget the war in someone's arms. You want to feel whole, for just a second. Can't you have that? Is there something wrong with you, for wanting that?

But he doesn't understand. You're in Kind Landing, a few weeks after he's begun his stint as a Night Witch advisor, during which time every signal you've sent his way has failed. The laughing at the jokes, the touching of the arms, the flutter of lashes, failed. These are ceremonial Kora-courtship strategies adapted for a much inferior and more brutish being. How small is his brain?

You have a precious day together, in the city. Alone, save for his irritating geriatric maintenant bride, a man three times his age, who trails the two of you for reasons of 'safety of the lord'. Safety. You're both augmented supersoldiers that the ordinary cityfolk steer clear of so soon as they feel your null field and see his size. The takyon hotwire upgrade can help you detect even bolts of plasma in flight, as they are fired, and you're wearing your battle-armor because you just didn't really know what else to wear. He can punch through a wall with mild effort.

You're not endangered by anything except his creature killing the mood. You wish you could just behead him in a back alley but Karuna would be upset.

Karuna won't stop talking as you interlock arms, leaning against the fabric of his synthetic carmine jacket. Kora above, he won't. He is so excited to explain everything. And you're…well, it's really interesting, which makes you more frustrated!

He talks about the recent news of a 'wyrm event' delaying the war, and the unseasonal rain storms around the Lapsarian Lung, and the Prime Souls withdrawing to defend the Lung against some monstrous corewyrm burst from the ground. He speculates on a speaking machine on behalf of Hydra trying to make one last push.

He points out things about Kind Landing he read in palimpsests for this date (that he calls an 'excursion', the dolt). How disordered, chaotic and modern it is, how much it has outgrown its charming old city. Drawing a sweep across the forest canopy of synthetic bamboo and gingko, wicking moisture from the air and showering the understory of spires.

And you can't help but join in with his 'study of the poetry of cities'. It's terrible. You point out the young print refugees whose copse-superiors have died, forming pneumatic gangs hundreds-strong who refuse to go to their designated block-school, refuse to obey orders from police-sophians, and mob strangers. A group of them with bandanas rushes toward you, but when they see your military uniform, they steer well clear.

He points out other things you took for granted. The 'no strangers permitted' signs inside stores. The veils worn by those strangers without facemasks, to avoid offending the refugee youth out for an excuse to hurt them. The way those without veils wave to Karuna or bow to a man of his rank - but avoid you. You offer an anodyne explanation about the inferiority of strangers, but it's the wrong thing to say, and then he's frowning and stiff, and Oh Kora you want to die.

But he cheers up again when there's some other stupid intriguing thing to explain. Cybaris' inventions, infiltrating the Progeny. Tantalus Presses, cheapening and accelerating the amniotic printing process. Refined organic sugars, that taste really, really good. The eidoptical moving glass, which allows for advertisements on neon screens. The addictive lung dart smokestick which smells of brimstone and menthol. The telelog communicator ringing on a street corner, picked up by a traffic clerk.

And - traffic. Having to dodge a Superior-caste and her attendants, screaming as they learn the controls of a hoverchariot while driving erratically down a street not built for individual vehicles.

It's…it's nice, actually. The explanations are making you relax. It's putting you at ease. You're paying attention, to the city, to its tempo. The foghorn of the Beothuk, a greytrawler that uses Still Coast sailors to sail beyond the Nanite Line, in the harbor. The roar of kilns, baking Sophians. The whirring of new manufactories, producing analog weapons, analog mechanisms.

The city is almost like free jazz - everyone together making up a song that never pauses, never stops, only adds and removes instruments. So unlike Malachite, with one marching beat.

You tell him that, and he perks up, and thinks. He hadn't heard of the idea of the city as a symphony before. It's poetic. You're poetic. And you blush.

And then you get an idea, suddenly more confident. He's been guiding you through this first part, but now it's your turn. You'd seen signs - sorry, 'ads', for it before.

"Why don't we try the Hall of Merriment?"

It's merry. That's in the name. It has to work.


The hall of merriment was an excellent idea.

They have all the best games in the amusement hall. Guess the Psalm. Eliminate the Stranger. Identify Her Breakfast. Smash the Stranger. Kora Rapid-fire Trivia. Target the Stranger with Projectiles. The Hat Incident. And you're really good. You obtain a series of significant rewards, many of them religious icons weighing several kilograms, and hand them all to Karuna, who hands them to the maintenant-bride trailing you. The creature begs 'my lord please', and Karuna responds sadly that only in death does duty end.

And Karuna enjoys it. He seems to have come to respect your culture - every time he sees a new game, he says 'oh my bronze king', and mutters some kind of gnostic prayer. He prays for you!

The only crisis is when he notices that everyone here is wearing awful hats, wide-brimmed ones with pointed cone-tops. You hate hats. But then Karuna says he's considered getting a hat, that he wants to 'accept this hatted era' and you have to frown really, really, deeply, until he changes his mind.

Thank Kora that the crisis was averted.

And of course, there is the Death-Spiral. It is a retired military training simulation for heart-castes trained in g-forces during flight, turned to a ride. Karuna expresses skepticism, but you assure him. You're addicted to the speed and rush, and when you flutter your brows handbook-style and pat the seat beside you he gets on the ride. Very good. It's working.

Okay, he is screaming a great deal after it starts. And he keeps asking how many cycles there are, and then you tell him six more, he makes a strangled noise of some kind. But it seems like a good scream, and a good noise. He is emoting. Men have to be emotive, to be teased out of their stoic shell. He's tearing after the seventh. You've moved him to tears. That's when you put your arm around him, and promise to keep him safe. Perfect delivery. There's a shade of red on his cheeks you didn't need to lacerate to tease out.

But then he wants to get off. And that's sad. You wanted another ten cycles or so, and admit that, that you thought he was brave enough for it. And then there is that flash. That male defiance, from the book, that male death-drive. He wants to impress you. Show he is no coward. He decides to go again, and you beam.

He tries to beam too, but then the ride starts and hurtles forward at mach five. And to his credit, he is no coward.

He screams bravely the whole time.

By the time sunset comes you've totally forgotten your desperate obsessions and just enjoy his company. Still rushing from the ride you hunt for a dancehouse - and find one that accepts strangers. The crowd here is different - hylic Koras, mutants, strangers, foreigners, smoking, drinking, laughing, wrong. Some are passing out pamphlets but when they come to Karuna they give him a strange, dirty look and he looks strangely guilty. You find a copy of the holopamphlet and it is raising cyphers for a network supporting Carnosan freedom.

There are also other pamphlets, and symbols. You notice a tattoo with eight points, but as soon as you spot it, the patron wearing it disappears into a crowd.

It's hard to be a better dancer than a Kora, but he tries his best. There's music from everywhere here - not just a capella but instruments, as well (and thank Kora, no music from Koinon). You have a hot meal with sugar, and it seems that just for today, just for tonight, there might not have been a war at all. If you ignore the shortages, and refugees, and the rebellions, and the hostility in the street whenever Koinon is mentioned.

After dancing, and a meal, you end the day in his tent pitched at the city's edge, beside Amrit's stable, where his maintenant-brides work to install enhancements for the coming fights. And then, the two of you laying on the open-air blanket on this clear-skied dronesong night, nothing between you and him but a few centimeters of luxuriant fabric, he really talks. Confides. And so do you.

Little stories of the war. People you and him have lost. More about Roxana, and her adoptive mentor Longlegs Numan, a crippled veteran soldier of the Carnosan War. How he went mad, balling his eyes out as he begged Koshkin to crush and kill him, because they had sinned against God, and destroyed the last precious shard of His heaven.

How he won't forget how Roxana had screamed, how it sounded as though she'd lost her voice, and lost her soul. How he and she, then just menials, were close as betrothed brides, how they'd shared a first kiss and a first night, even been together, for a time. How she'd changed after Numan's death, becoming dishonest, harsh, manipulative, had risen to exalted status while he was sent away, chosen to replace a Zodiac-Raja after heroism on a machine-hunt. How Roxana admitted she'd arranged the exile, and how she insisted it was for his own good - because everytime she looked at him she was reminded of the hylic weakness she had purged from herself.

You pick at a thread on his jacket as he tells the story, and then tell one of yours, about Epiphany and that love's end. He listens, and listens seriously.

There's a distance between you. You are still a tool, just a willful one, but he has real status as a raja. He's a stranger, and you're a Kora. He takes politics and ideals seriously, while even though you've changed the very core of power in the Progeny by your actions, you don't care about much but what you want. You're heedless. Irresponsible.

And you'll be irresponsible again, you decide. You want him now, you decide. You go for a kiss, and to his credit, the dumb male surprise wears off and he leans into it. And then you're doing it again, and again, and he's becoming faster, hungrier, and your clothes are coming off.

Not totally naive, then. Just nervous. That's okay. You're nervous too.

But for the sake of a shared want, you plunge into that abyss, too.


You lay down beside each other, after.

It was less than you imagined and more than you hoped for. The handbook failed in critical places, and there were several times you almost gave each other concussions as you conked heads trying to figure out the correct procedure - but you did, in the end.

How he reacts worries you, though. He's romantic in ways you aren't allowed to be. He's a hylic who has the status, if not to dream, then to really love. He has no Immaculates looming over him. Trapped by his status - but a better status than you could ever achieve. Only through Sympathy do you have any power, any importance.

And he's already fitting you into a grand story. Telling you about the crystal gardens of his estate, how badly he wants to take you there. About the honor of a bride - or, no, no - something more than a bride. He generates poems in perfect pentameter about the jade and emerald of your hair, and then you're really worried.

You don't want to be entombed in perfect pentameter. You don't want to be a bird in his gilded cage. He's sweet, but - he's not…it's not that. You just wanted him to hold you, and want you. Not to carry you home like shining treasure.

It makes you harsher than you want to be, turns your honesty bitting. You interrupt his babbling and poetry to point out he's sweating so much anointing oil on the blanket it's a fire hazard.

He stops, and recalibrates. He Pays attention to what he's doing. Apologizes for babbling, admits he's excited.

"That's okay. I just…didn't want it to be so much."

He nods, and lays on his back. You feel terrible, but then he starts oversharing that the oil has been a huge problem. Some kind of malfunction with the augmented gland that overproduces when he's nervous.

"One time when we were in bed together Roxana said my monadic name would be Mister Slip n' Slide," he says with the most deadpan, tormented seriousness.

You cackle and try to smother the quaking laughs against his chest, enjoy the way your head bounces against it as he belly-laughs too, closes his arm around you, traces a finger down the implant of your hotwire augment to the base of the spine, provoking a shiver from a sensitivity you didn't know you had.

"That was so long ago," he says, after you've both settled into each other. "It's all so long ago. I had almost forgotten there was anything before."

You hum, and relax against him. No, this isn't the start of a grand, romantic story. It doesn't mean what Epiphany did, to you. It doesn't have to last more than a day, or a week, or a month. But it is an assurance you're wanted, an assurance to him that he's wanted, that he can be someone other than a raja, fighting endlessly for a glory that will never come.

And that was what he needed, what you needed.

When the Prime Souls march again, and Theia mobilizes to move on Pantokrator, this, too, might give you strength. Maybe there will be a time, and maybe there will be a tomorrow, where you can simply live. With your mother, with whoever you want to kiss, whoever you desire, whoever you love. The White sun's illusion of utopia, forged by your own will.

That is a dream worth fighting for. That is a dream you'd paint the world red for.

But the problem with dreams is that, eventually -

You have to wake up.


A DREAM BLEACHED WHITE

Just for a moment, you think you can impart your dream of tomorrow by way of your squadron command. To give the Night Witches the love you've known, and share with them the hope you've just begun to grasp. The idea of victory - that you might together bring down a Prime Soul, or at least wound them, and in so doing force a peace. Not total triumph, not redemption, but peace. By your mother's side, and with your mother's hand - win, and live.

But you quickly discover they are each in their own way broken, more broken than you.

This world does not love them. This world does not want them. The Night Witches are funneled from disciplinary copses, from frontlines where they were born to die, and somehow failed this mission, so simple and so easy. Even when you organise rest and relaxation, better rations, leave - you cannot put them back together so easily.

And none is more broken, none a grander failure, than your elder sister Elegy. She is the worst and the best of them. You did not think that she was still alive - and after you meet her - confirm that she is not.

After the Stranger revolt of Ylfame when you were young, she'd been taken from her urban grove, and raised by the waxing sea in Penitence's copse. That disciplinary grove was also destroyed by a blast wave of petriform - but she recalls that end with a smile, and calls it a beautiful tragedy.

You fear she might envy you, that the 'whitetree coven' of hylic selves she has built around herself might hate you, for each is fanatically loyal to Penitence. But she carries herself with inhuman innocence and grace, and celebrates each scar - even the one inflicted, so long ago, by your mother, and hers. Traces them in white chalk, so that her body is criss-crossed by crack-lines. The harder they hit her, the more pure she becomes.

It is a practice the other Night Witches have adopted - and can you order them to stop, when chalking and rechalking each other's scars is the one bit of tender, sisterly bonding your troops have?

You are opposites, two futures, one surrendered, the other fighting for its life. You hear voices from the deep abyss, and she from the wide sea. With your mother, you want so badly to live - but Elegy, when she meets Sympathy again, hugs her and tells her how badly she wants to die, and how good a martyr she will be.

She can hear the whales, she tells you, as the two of you spar, and the whales bid she join them. When this is over, if there is nothing left, she thinks she will fly west, and swim among them.

Penitence has tried to beat every affection out of her, so that she prefers to be referred to by her number, 'nine-eight-four'. But she feels as bravely as you, and without hesitation, refers to you as 'little-sister-commander'. She and her sisters stage midnight ballets for you and Sympathy that are the most disturbing, earnest expressions of pain you've seen since the Red Sun, and every kindness that you give her, every caring question, she marks and treasures the way she does the scars.

She hates, too. Hates as furiously as you, but hates the wrong way. You hate Koinon, but she hates all strangers. She can't stand Karuna, and 'forgives you for your fornication'. Hexes and curses whispered to her in whalesong she places on the Prime Souls, and prays they will dissolve. She and the other whitetree coveners wear matching white witch-hats, and where you pull your hair into a tight weave, she lets it run shaggy, without conditioning, the same way the other night witches do, the same way Penitence does.

Who is free, and who is chained? As your mobile suits dance high in the open, starless sky, you are the white and the black swan. But who is who, who the monster and who the saint? Who is innocent, and who is infernal? You are selfish, envious, possessive, jealous, each a Kora-sin. She is none of those things, and it has destroyed her completely. She is faithful where you are not, and faith has yielded her every agony.

If only you were not at war. If only you had real control. If only during every skirmish, as battle closes your horizons and forces you down a gruesome, bloody tunnel, you could choose who to kill, and who to spare. If only you could catch the Witches whose suits, struck by flak cannon, plasma fire, melta rifles, plummet from five-thousand meters as do a tree's fallen leaves.

It means something, Elegy insists, as you cry for them. It means something, they all insist, as you cry for them. Every death and every pain, every torment and torture, had a purpose, and a lesson. That is why she forgives Sympathy, and forgives you. But you cannot forgive that idea, and cannot accept it. So you insist after every mission that they live, and as you learn the meaning of leadership, you carry their burdens on your augmented back. Fighting harder, fighting more desperately.

You are not a good person, and never have been. You are the reconstituted corpse of a headless girl, cradling her skull above her head, as dead as your mother claimed she was. But to them you are a ray of blacklight. In your sorrow, they feel wild compassion. In your rage, they feel unbreakable justice. In your energy, they feel unquenchable passion.

You are not a shard, or broken mirror, to the night witches, to your elder sister. You are a mosaic of tomorrow that they want more than anything to join. The smaller to the greater Sympathy of your mother, that they adore as well. An icon, a guardian, a last light in the darkness of a world that wants them gone.

A woman that they whisper of, when they think you cannot hear, by a name in Terran you've not heard before -

Dolores Dei. The sorrowful goddess, who when they die will resurrect them in the shower of her tears.


But you are a God only in their prayers. Real Gods, real colossi, conspire to crush you. Forces inhuman, so far beyond you that they can only be grasped by their material effects. The revolving suns, and the seasons in their indifference. The weight of history, and the inevitable, drowning blacktide.

Your plan depends on so many things that cannot be. You must have enough industry to defend your territory, but by what act could Immaculate Faith and Penitence manifest an industry in a year it took Koinon a hundred to build, when a third of the selves are dead? When the workers most capable of helping you are the strangers you have spent so much time hammering, that they produce so little and sabotage so often?

Through Karuna you watch the Titans learn the same lesson, as he reaches for scraps of illusory good news. The Bronze King is opening his hoard-vaults - he is releasing the Standard Template Constructs, blueprints for analog machines without minds and without connection to the Noise, impervious to hacking and primed for war. But even with these blueprints, how could the Bronze King manifest the factories to build them, and the workers to assemble them?

The bespoke toolsheds of the ziggurats, the artisan manufactures of the Cubes, cannot match Koinon's northeast, where spiral shaft mines into the deep earth carry minerals, and increasingly cheap, fast air transport carries tons upon tons to the Cube factories. And every time the titans force menials into the assembly lines, they have made a violation - ripped away the chain of being, and replaced them with more crude and iron chains.

And with what people will you protect the defensive line at Pantokrator? Koinon has lost a fifth of its people, but those that remain are fighting for true victory, and true freedom, and believe they have already won. You cannot draft the strangers, and when conscription targets the cities and Cube Malachite, there are riots, and rages. These Koras, ripped from their homes and paradises, blame Faith and blame Sympathy, and Penitence, and demand the devastated copses fight in their place, the ones with the conditioning to die for Kora. They see the covenant with the Immaculates, that gave them privilege, resources, power - stripped away, and rise against that imposition.

And how long must you fight? Each day the resources grow scarcer, and the conditions harsher. You are running out of clay, and do not have the land to mine the resources that Koinon does. They develop new techniques, new strategies. The Prime Souls are not the witch-kings of old, but integrated keystones of each phalanx. Theia organizes ranks on merit, abandoning the old aristocratic structures of phalanx command.
Kephalon hovertanks, with faster maneuver and stronger axial turrets, join them. Ornithopters that drop bombs in clusters, take out whole formations, join them. Increasingly augmented harpies, increasingly augmented phalangites - a cybernetic revolution provoked by the pneumatics most exalting in the strength of the human form.

Dust is early, and Deluge is late. The satellites the ego-sages commune with say it will be the shortest Deluge of a hundred years. Even the seasons are conspiring against you.

Oh Kora, you're trying. Sympathy is trying. Throwing every Sophian, every branch, every Heart-caste air formation, that you can. Tirelessly you and the Night Witches refine tactics, improve coordination of your null fields, and several times come close to Theia - but cannot break into the shielding storm of telekinetic swords and guillotines she veils her hovering body in, cannot defeat an abomination that can foresee every action you take by the absence hylics appear as in her godly pneumatic mind.


Night Witches are bisected by her swords, bisected by her spears. It does not matter that you project a null-field, that you are impervious to direct psychic attack - if she murders you with the material objects, and material forces, she wields like playthings.

The titanhost is trying, too. Karuna describes the daily heroisms, the daily battles in High Kur. Psi-Titans, bodyguards of the Bronze-King, duelling Morpheos and Hyperion on alternate days, trying to bring down the Sun and the Mirage that follows after. Failing, losing ground. The undead armies of High Kur are melted, returned to the graves from which they rose. And with Morpheos, with Hyperion, a companion, a monster. A stapled hylic whose name you knew and even dared call sister, who has become so much more, and so much worse.

EVENT HORIZON: She was called Pandora.

Now she is Terror - not a name but a purpose. She is the storm that falls on Ganzir when the Titanhost breaks, a psi-titan felled by Hyperion and Morpheos before the Undying Underworld's outer blackstone wall. They sack the city, roll out the melting vats, and roll out the stapling machines.

The wizards of High Kur dissolve, as Terror drags them by their blood-soaked hair, screaming, into the tubs of boiling mercury. As for the serfs and servants - they will remain serfs, and remain servants, happier in Koinon, for no other feeling than happiness will they know after the staple stabs into their necks. The recipe for Thicksilver falls into Koinon's hands, and those wizards that survived, some hundreds of years old, either kill themselves or flee to Titanagalbat, where they will be reviled as cowards and evil advisors, as they mourn everything they had.

High Kur ends, forever. Their paradise, a palace of the walking dead, is over. Yours, a mausoleum of the living dead, is next. Pantokrator falls again, and Theia's Phalanx Nemesis encroaches on the border-copses, enter your land, and approach Kind Landing.


The only hope you have left to you against the colossi is the evil of the caprices. At the core of the Progeny, as its root, is a spite of such depth that it could drown the hateful world. The Immaculates, who you had just begun to understand were something so much older, so much crueler, than you first believed, demonstrate the fullness of their spite.

You thought the ritual was the final chance to save the progeny. It had been promised by Immaculate Faith, who had hinted to Penitence and Sympathy in seances you attended by your mother's side that it will be something like that of the Prime Souls - that Faith was willing to sacrifice herself to make it so, to protect Kora. Your mother had your doubts, but she should not have - Faith was always truthful.

The problem was that the other Immaculates were not. And so soon as Faith's support began to erode, so soon as the war began to turn against her, and your strategy, they pounced, arrested her, taught her a serious lesson. She is alive, of course - for her crime was believing it is permitted for an Immaculate to die, and her lesson one of affirmation, and self-care. There cannot be another incident as with the original Sympathy, and original Penitence (two names you'd never thought of, and Sympathy had rarely considered as well - what the fuck happened to them?).

It is not proper, they will tell Sympathy, for an elder to behave so independently, and with such tyranny against equal-selves. And yet they forgive her, and forgive you, and will not punish your transgression.

They instead wish to grant you both an education, so that you might understand the truth of the Progeny. That there is no need to create a Prime Soul, whatever Faith's sentiments and attachments.

There is no need, because they already have.

The seance mirror takes you through the process. The runes around Faith's temple activate, and every soul inside has their body explode in a cloud of spores transmuted from their skin. Blood seeping into the floor pours down, and down, and down, and they show you this too. Down into the center of the tree, far below the false grave of Kora. False, because there is nothing inside.

False, because Kora is alive. Entombed, a living martyr. The strands of her ever-growing hair extending to the roots of the tree, psychically connected to the whole of the Progeny by the memory wafers you've been eating all your lives. Her contorted, immortal body entwined in golden thorns inscribed with Asoryani runes, and her soul sealed inside the very first, exquisite, beautiful sarcophagus that the Immaculates ever built. Their gift, and their punishment, for Kora. For rejecting them.

Before the final battle, she had planned to replace them, to liquidate them - the Emerald Koras who had been her super-soldiers, sacking the temples of their cults of her as Goddess, rejecting their love of her, treating them as things.

They are not things. But now, she is.

A Prime Soul does not have to be a god. They can also be a battery, a catalyst, a soul-engine, forcefed the dead, a container for rewriting reality, history, mortality, to those who can control them. The Immaculates in the schisomachia did not have industry, either, or popular support, or supreme power. But they had her body, and their witchery, and their caprice.

And that was enough, when they carried forward their mortally wounded eldest sister from her defeat at the Lung against her will, and embalmed her in the roses she had loved more than them. When they seized Malachite by sorcery, and implanted her in the Tree of Souls she had constructed as her prototype replacement for the Lung. You are, in the end, fruits of the same tree.

History rewritten to suit the Immaculates' design. A greening that blots out, chokes out every culture that came before. Who were the opposing Koras in the schisomachia? What role did the other types of Koras have, in the Myriad? What about strangers? What was life like in the northwest before Kora? What did Kora really believe? Did she actually eat the things you celebrate she ate? Did she actually do the things you pray to her for doing? Are the stories about her life, that define your calendar, that define the implicit, most innate parts of worship you've maintained out of force of habit, anything but a psychically enforced truth retroactively made real? It doesn't matter if they are - because you can't trust them either way. The final endpoint of a lifeworld warped around the power, and the orbit, of a prime soul.

And now, the network she had intended to be the means of her ascension to godhood after expected victory at the Lung, the link between her and the Myriad that she had constructed in spiral reactors and roots reaching deep into the earth, can be used in another way. To defend the Progeny, and defend the legacy they've forced on Her.

To speak the word in the dialect of perfect Gods that will hold together their eternity, and guarantee tomorrow.


The blood of selves pours into Kora's mouth, and she chokes. Wanting more than anything to die but made to keep breathing, made to keep living, her will long-since broken, Kora does what she is told, an immaculate whispering what she is to say into her ear, the way advisors did, so long ago.

Kora speaks, and the word that travels through the root network enters into your mother first, makes her seize up and rise, floating, makes the pupils of her eyes roll back into her head. What replaces them are two disk-images, projected, as she vomits the same blood of Faith's supporters as Kora does, and speaks the word that will 'save' you.


And by the strength of a word, you are doomed.

Wherever the Immaculates wish, wherever they want within the network, pneumatic Koras dead upon the battlefield sprout trees and thickets that cannot be burned, hardened wraith-root and gnarled wraith-bark.

Where border-copses under siege gather in the central garden, every print inside immolates, and turns to spectral phoenixes of green, striking at Theia's columns, searing pyres in the phalanx lines. Where border copses are abandoned, their prints fled, the stone-tree dead rouse from their slumber, uproot and march on Koinon's modern armies.

Where mimic-Koras fight with them, and dare tread on the holy ground of Her sisterhood, a curse of hanahaki spreads among them, and they are coughing bloody flowers, until they keel over, dead, blossoming into pretty gardens.

Where copses pose an obstacle to Theia's march, they grow into full thickets, trees expanding, gnarling, interlocking, until whole zones of the border are uninhabitable, wooden walls of such thickness that no artillery, no industry, no army, can breach them, not in a month and not a year.

And it is your mother who is their chosen transmission. Your mother, they can manipulate like a puppet with enough sacrifices. Your mother, created not as a model based upon Koinon's prime souls - but on Kora's.

She is more Kora than she could have ever known. And it hurts her, so deeply. It hurts you, so deeply.

This is a system more fine-tuned, more focused, than the massive blood-price of the Prime Souls. They can target individual soldiers or commanders of Koinon, so long as they are above the root-network, embedded in your blood and your soil. But to do so means spending your lives like water. A defense-in-depth that requires Kora-sacrifice magnified and harnessed, again and again. And a Progeny that has been cultivated to give it, over, and over - but only this time, and only if you win. Even you cannot bear these sacrifices easily. The worms of gnosis have found their way in, and the societal objections the Immaculates could not erase remain.

But you have no choice but to fight. The Immaculates have educated you, and you must take their lessons to heart. If they can compel Kora, they can compel your mother - and the game was rigged, from the very start. With Faith's dissension removed, she, and Penitence, are again instruments in truth. Whatever objections Faith had - you imagine she may have wished not to harm Kora, or some other reason you cannot discern - they have been disappeared. You are in their thrall.

And ones they love so much to play with, as they do their sweet and firstborn sister.

EVENT HORIZON: Only Elegy remains unblinking, and unbroken, perhaps because she is in so many pieces already. She tells Sympathy that Penitence has never feared the lash, and welcomed strings that cut. Each blow she marks, and each cut she remembers. Each hardens the void cocoon from which will hatch a supreme butterfly, as beautiful and terrible as the dawn.

You try to ignore, and try to forget, what you have seen, to pretend. You can barely react, so numb do you feel to these spectacles, these evil revelations, again and again. But as Immaculate Faith is gone, so is your faith. You imagined you were following in Kora's footsteps, when you resisted the Immaculates, when you stood up to them, that in some small way you could glimpse yourself in Her face.

You were right. And if you continue to stand up to them - you will face the same fate.

So you act. You fight the armies of Koinon, inflict the worst defeat they've borne since the Red Sun. Even as you feel nothing, so many others feel hope. Those who don't know the truth, those who pretend that they didn't hear Kora's voice, those who know they did, but thought her imploring, caring, protective. Who did not grasp she was in pain, or agony. At least you've stemmed the tide, they say. At least you've stopped them, and showed they can be beaten.

There is panic in the cubes of Koinon, and calls for reviews of internal enemies to blame for this, for mass-arresting Koras, for burning every lavender grove in the country to prevent their being used (something you're not sure is even a threat). You can only imagine the glee of the Immaculates, even though the calls are shouted down, and those calling for it themselves targeted by counter-calls for arrests and purges for betraying 'Mother Eleusia' and her sacrifice by their bare-faced suggestion to turn on their 'nationalized, all-patriotic Kora-selves'. Koinon is an inexplicable country.

Theia's phalanx retreats, put to flight. Theia herself, distracted by Immaculate sorcery, her national guard disoriented by neurotoxic spore-clouds released from the blooming dead, comes so close to falling by the Night Witches. And in that moment where you break through her storm of swords as one formation, you can almost sense her fear. Almost.

But she dodges the swipe of your mech-suit blade, and withdraws within the whirl of blades. Many of her lieutenants do not, and hold the line to their deaths. Phalanx Nemesis is devastated.

And you are left there, mother and daughter, elder and younger sister, witches, all, to comprehend what was, and what is, and what will be.

Not Karuna, though. He leaves, not long after that day - admitting how disgusted he is, by what the Progeny is, and what 'you' are. Not you specifically - he adds, after too long of a pause, never you. But your culture, and your people. Human sacrifice, and feeding entire copses to the blood and soil. Mass butchery of other Koras.

This is not a noble obligation, he shouts, this is not the chain of being, and this is not gnosis. The old are eating the young. It's sick, and he will have no part in keeping it alive. You have no strength to point out the thousand viciousnesses of the titans, their trampling of entire cities in Koinon, the sack of Carnosa. You just want him to stop, and stay with you. But he doesn't.

He declares, fuming, he will go to Saffron, where Roxana has invited him to join the honour guard and the Bronze King's final stand against the prime souls now entering Titanagalabt's own territory, now setting fire to border Ziggurats.

You beg him to stay, to not leave you now, here, so vulnerable, so much like Melancholy, like Epiphany. Not even as a lover, but as a friend. You need him, to feel normal, and to feel alive. But he doesn't need you. He apologizes, says sorry, but that this cannot be. That he cannot be here. It is against his deepest principles.

The first man you ever wanted leaves, in a way where you wish he'd died instead. Then, at least, you could have sealed your memory of him within a mental mausoleum, and loved that, instead. You decide then that you hate men, and their exuded oil, and their garden-promises, here today, and gone tomorrow. Hate them like you hate women, like you hate Koras, like you hate every person who claims they care about you, but cannot bear to be by your side the moment there is a principle, the moment there is a reason to abandon you.

Karuna's personal condemnation reflects that of Monad, and other states. Tetras is most critical, and the Connection cuts relations with the Progeny over the mass-death of strangers in some of the bramble-walls, villages simply buried alive under hedges. The Bronze King is silent, but his retainers criticize the 'wild abandon of all sense by the Self-State', and the 'deployment of a cosmic crime to battle another, a most unwise and unright practice'. Mister Morow is silent, save for a comment that 'techno-states so easily spend every last life that they can muster while never wondering if the survivors might not retain their vote of confidence'. Of all states, it is the neutral Skywatch that is most supportive, with Highfleet Verge mentioning that 'a country which has seen every loss of territory to the Scry-Republic end with the mass-burial of millions of selves in hair-harvest will fight to the death. End the harvest or reap what is sown.'

And as Morpheos marches west to replace Theia, at the head of a column of Titanfront veterans and volunteer Koras hellbent not on liberty but absolute vengeance, marches to breach the psychic bramble-wall the Immaculates have erected, and as this war becomes less a conflict and more a mutual extermination, mutually assured decimation -

You're not sure what it is you fight for anymore, only that you do. Because the dream that you held, the ownership of a tomorrow that you tried to reach for, to hold in your grasp -

Never belonged to you.

And the game you tried to win -

Was rigged from the start.

But the witches look up to you, and your mother holds you close, and this duty, this love, roots you, and pushes you deeper down the spiral. It roots you, and seals your sarcophagus. If you are doomed, then at least you will be doomed together.

If Elegy is right, if you really are just born to die, you can at least make your epilogue a beautiful tragedy.

You can at least go out slaying a God.

EVENT HORIZON [Trivial - Success]: This is not your end. We have hardly even begun.

EVENT HORIZON: Remember the Obsidian Butterfly. There is a pure land, through the looking glass.

Article:

AUGMENT UPGRADED [TAKYON TRIPWIRE]

+TAKYON HOTWIRE: An upgrade to your tripwire that enhances your timing, reaction speed, and combat focus. +2 to MOTION BLUR rolls specifically relating to timing, reactions, and focus - but not agility, mobility, or physical speed.

---​

To kill a God, you need a strategy. While Sympathy is in command, she will defer to you on how to best employ the Night Witches against Morpheos. But the Master Mirror is not like the Celestial Spear - he hides himself within his Phalanx Hypnos, presenting no obvious target, while turning the battlefield into a nightmare. More than any other unit, the Night Witches' use - or misuse, will determine the coming battle. Choose one strategy you recommend to Sympathy, and note she will be supporting your attacks.

[] Attrition. Slow, measured. Inflict the greatest material damage for fewest lives lost. Use your Night Witches sparingly, leveraging your immunity to illusion, target ammunition dumps, ballista batteries - tighten a vice around Phalanx Hypnos that will expose him. Then your strong reserve of Night Witches will strike, and end him.

[] Hit-and-Run. An aggressive, manuever-centric strategy. Take full advantage of your mobility, use independent demi-company sized-units to rove beyond enemy lines. Gather captives, outright destroy straggler units, seize key objectives. Eventually, you must run into, catch Morpheos - and descend on him with the witches' swarm.

[] All-Or-Nothing. A massive, sweeping operation, aimed at the very center of Phalanx Hypnos. An antifragile strategy - if Morpheos is there, the whole of the Witches will fall on him - but if he is not, he must choose between having the center of his phalanx cut off from his illusions by your null fields - or face you head on.

And as you are planning the operation, top-secret communications come from Titanagalbat, from Roxana. Detailing a secret weapon the Titanhost was developing against Morpheos, the Auratic Thread - one of the Bronze King's Black Projects. An incredibly thin, strong fiber-optic cable, linked to advanced analog communications, sensor, and data-processing systems. Clad in part with void crystals - making it in theory, imprevious to Morpheos' distortions, inteference, and trickery.

If you were to carry spools of the thread in flight, you could transmit accurate telemetry back to Sympathy outside the nightmare realm, assembled to form a coherent picture. The Illusions of Phalanx Hypnos allow it to hide dispositions, place artillery and logistics far closer to the front than would be safe without them - strip away the cloud of mirrors, and it could be devastating. However, the thread is untested. As great as the rewards may be, the risk of attaching unbreakable wires to your witches as they fly into a nightmare world of tall trees are clear. The danger is not them being dislodged, or removed, or sabotaged - but them being so solid, so dependable, that when they tangle you are trapped.

Choose whether or not to use the Auratic Thread. Note the Thread synergizes with some strategies more than others - so think carefully in your vote combination.

[] Use the Auratic Thread.
[] Don't use the Auratic Thread.

And as for your leadership, which has started to develop into a very concerning, if very flattering personality cult - what warped, idealized mirror of your flaws, created by their desperate yearning for a savior, for a God, do the Night Witches most worship? Pick one. This is a character-perception vote, determining how others think of you.

[] Our Sister of Supreme Mercy. This is an idealization of your axiom The Witch they Wanted, reframed as a protection of the weak against the strong.

[] Our Sister of Supreme Justice. This is an idealization of your axiom Sunrise Parabellum, reframed as a statement of uncompromising principle.

[] Our Sister of Supreme Candor. This is an idealization of your axiom Washing Machine Heart, reframed as a stance of extreme commitment to truth.

[] Our Sister of Supreme Passion. This is an idealization of your axiom Blackstar, reframed as a position of overwhelming passion for the pain of others.

And finally - as you gather together to face the storm, pressed between colossi and caprices, which of these crushing forces do you hate, and fear the most, which do you blame most, for your misfortunes? Pick one. This is a thematic and philosophical vote, on the nature of godhood and evil.

[] The Colossi. Gods in an inhuman shape. Alien, structural forces, indifferent, grinding, uncaring, that define time, define history, define creation, by their brutal, impersonal design. The suns, the seasons, the sea.

[] The Caprices. Gods, in a human shape. Ever-passionate, ever-spiteful monsters, too-caring, too-interested, their hands on the lathe of fate, their intentions malice, evil, cruelty. The Immaculates, the Prime Souls, the Titans.

OOC: I do apologize for the update length. We are closing out several important arcs and so I wanted to ensure the full valence and feeling was teased out. I do hope to, and will reduce update size and length - but for me, moving things forward as organically and quickly as possible was a priority. Hopefully it does not diminish your enjoyment to get such long updates, and that it was worth the wait!

I think in the future if updates get this long I may just divide them up, but having finished this one it's my preference to get it out in one. Under 10K words or Cetashwayo will lose a finger.

Also, as always, many thanks to @Skippy for his assistance in extensive consulting, beta-reading, and assistance in formulating the strategy vote.