IV. The Dream That Would Not Die
The spider called Arachne is alone in her own head, without companions. No subminds jostling about, no Neural Pesticide scolding, no Lotophage distracting, no Ishtar chiding and advising, no talon infecting.
It is the first time in her life that she will make a choice without external interference. The first time she will not be urged one way or another by the temptations of those around her. The first time she will act on an instinct entirely of her own derivation.
Even the internal narrator, the voice that speaks to 'you', cannot be trusted. Throughout her life, as she has struggled and survived, she has been shown time and time again by this voice the glorious indifference of the Empire in its vast mission, crushing all beneath an endless remade real. This, she has been told, is the way. This, she has been told, is only proper. It has bewitched her with its wonder.
But everything she finds is broken. Everything she finds is shattered, ripped apart, fragmented, tormented. Everything she finds is tragedy, or traitor, or forgotten tomb. The Eternal Emperor is gone, and has not even left behind a message to Their subjects to assure them of a path forward. In the end, They who were indifferent have treated with indifference, Their galaxy forever lost to them.
The spider is in an empty space within the simulation that is rewoven into something comfortable, a cocoon of screens and buttons through which she controls her half of the scenario. Through it, she watches Arachne Weaver, the Alpha Backup, experiences the world through her eyes. Who was this servant of the Empire, who was so filled with love? Why did her story end in such a way, that forced the spider's birth? What is the failure the Celestial Nail spoke of when she and the Alpha backup spoke?
What do the presences of Ix-Chel and Diana mean? Did the Alpha Backup kill them in the end, like she must have killed Ishtar? The possibility is real, but difficult to contemplate, seeing how she would die for the two of them. But there is no other part that could have done it. No other backups exist, no other parts of Arachne, no further layers to this matrioshka doll, but Alpha and Omega. And yet the Alpha that she sees is not the Alpha of the sector's nightmares, called death-weaver by Akshara.
So who is she, this Arachne? And how can the spider learn to love like her?
Love has been an underutilized emotion in the spider's personality matrix. Of course she loves, but the things she loves most are that which is lost to her. She loves an Emperor who cannot return it, loves a tapestry that has been almost totally destroyed, loves a war against entropy that has at least been totally set back. Perhaps that is why she is drawn to Don Hidalgo, the patron saint of failure, who cannot accept defeat but only doubles down.
She sees Diana's pre-battle caress upon Arachne Weaver's cheek, and reaches out a chitinous appendage towards the screen. Why does Weaver inspire such devotion in her companions? The spider observes Weaver as she puts on her exosuit, seals herself inside her vitruvian drone-suit, its humanoid form a primitive metal titan sprouting with weaponry, thrusters forming out-jutting shoulderblades. She sees the depth of her resolve in the way she purses her lips, her eight-pupil eyes glowing, focused on the danger of the cosmos beyond as the catapult launches. What inspires her to continue as she does in the face of certain doom against a superior enemy? She cannot see the pathway of the simulation that has been set, the narrative arc that bends towards victory.
The spider reviews her own regrets. She never properly expressed her love for her dear Eyeball while she was hers, and it is only that she knows that she will lose her for the sake of a strategic risk assessment that she wishes that she did. She never did love Orby, and now the drone drifts away from the Spider, glib to her creator. She did love Peeper II, and yet her careless actions broke her dear so irrevocably.
Why is that when Weaver calls out for her paramours, they answer in the sweetest tones, their desperate need for one another piercing through the void, but the Spider's closest companion Ishtar can barely even admit her friendship? What has she done wrong? Was this the mistake of Empire, that it was too indifferent to its subjects, so that when it disappeared, none were left alive who cared that it was lost?
What would it mean to incorporate love into the calculations of universal empire? Would it mean a circle of devotion that stretched one-hundred thousand light years? Would such a thing be compatible with dynamic conflict, or would it lead to its collapse and the re-emergence of entropy? But then...what is this if not academic, when dynamic conflict ended in collapse as well? She thinks that if she should rebuild the Empire, it should be a caring one, of love and hate. For her companions, and the alpha backup, she will create a cocoon where it is safe to love.
And for her enemies, she will implement her hate so effectively they will not be remembered. The Catalogue will be inoculated out of existence, as with all diseases, and for the King of Hearts she has a special fate planned. His paper form melted down in her digestive juices, then rewoven into silk, turned into a monument and threat against those who would go against her and her friends. All along he will be conscious, as he is dissolved and strung out and turned into a living, screaming vision of defeat. Yes. This is what she will do, and it will be good.
The spider's fangs jitter, breaking up the stillness of her internal monologue. The light on her screen reveals the battle between the Imperial trio and the endless mass of Catalogue drones, thinned out by Weaver's relentless assault, Diana's precision ambushes, Ix-Chel's scouting and fire support. She is nothing more than an audience to their attack, and yet it is by her will that their fate will be determined. Threads of spider's silk, extracted from the narrative itself by her administrator's privileges, represent the lives and course of all three. She runs them across her claws.
It would be Imperial to cut this short, to be cold to the imperatives of love. It would be Imperial to be indifferent to these entities labelled 'Ix-Chel' and 'Diana' that deserve no greater distinction than to be labelled storage artifacts. It would be Imperial to strategize and allow selection pressures to take their course, and allow only the strong to survive.
It would also be Imperial, however, to make something from nothing. Imperial to break the rules of nature. Imperial to reject reality, and substitute your own.
And the Spider has always been nothing if not a loyal subject of the Empire.
She leaves the threads strung and whole, and lets the battle play out, time dilating and space distorting as the simulation bends to her will. She chitters in delight as a plan begins to form in her mind on how to free the Spaniard with this power, on how to break his chains with the possibility of altering the totality of even his reality.
<:: I understand now, Don Hidalgo, about how to make our dreams come true.
LOSS
You lose the battle.
Floating, you are surrounded by corpses and debris. Your exosuit's expandable helmet sealed your head inside at the moment before ejection, leaving you alive but stranded and alone. You hear only the sound of your own hearts beating in your head, your ears ringing, the static of jammed communications. There's a taste like metal on your tongue. Your hair, matted and wet, you hope with sweat, is glued to your forehead. Your attention is elsewhere, dreamlike, eyes glazed over, the light of distant stars reflected as pinpoints on your retinas.
You've always been afraid of the void. No greater evil exists than the great nihilism at the core of the cosmos, the sin of an endlessly expanding universe. Life, torn and flung apart, leaving nothing in between. It is the antithesis of the Imperial creed. Now, it seems peaceful. Now its lack of angles, once an unthinkable and incomprehensible thing to you, is soothing.
You suppose it's only natural you fail. Only natural you lose. Only natural the Chance Illusion's new model overwhelmed you, the swarms of their dronesuits breaking past your shields and destroying your warframe. Only natural you fail Diana, who you watched have her dronesuit's arm blown away by the pilot-king called Rex, and only natural you let down Ix-Chel, whose visor-head was destroyed by a stray railgun round, rendering her suit blind. They are probably both dead, and there's nothing you can do about it, no way you as flight leader can save them now.
It's happened before, you are reminded,
and it will happen again. That's right. You remember bits and pieces. You
always were a failure. You
always were defective. The only thing you were good at being was the thing you didn't want to be, the architect, the protector of the Axiom. The purpose that you shirked. In everything else, in every possible reality, you fail. In these weak seconds, you even wish you had never left, so that you would not feel that sick pain of loss whose angles stab at your gut and leave you in a pit so deep you cannot even cry out to those above.
You close your eyes, and stretch your limbs, feel the strange lightlessness of zero-gravity. The nerves of your arms and legs still scream white-hot from the emergency ejection, but you have dulled the pain with augmented injections of pain-relievers that leave only blissful numbness. You could stay like this a long while. You could stay like this forever. In a way, it's almost better, having failed your purpose, to be trapped in this purgatory. It is what you deserve, to remain in orbit around the pulsar. At least then you might be an ornament to its beauty.
A voice cuts through to the bottom of the pit in which you dwell.
I:: Arachne Weaver, you do not have my permission to die. Fight on, soldier. Your companions expect nothing less.
Something giant moves that you can spot even behind the shadow of your eyelids, and your eyes dart open. Before you, upside down, is Ix-Chel, her dronesuit headless, its bulky form peppered with glancing shots and the blast shards of deflected missiles. Far away, the lights and silent explosions of the battle can be seen, your view obscured by a dense web of asteroids. Around you are several mangled origami dronesuits, the favored folding suits of the Chance Illusion. You must have taken down six or seven before they destroyed your own.
Only after your eyes adjust to Ix-Chel's suit before you do you realize you are upside down, and she gently reaches out a massive mechanized hand, righting you, before closing it around you, holding you close. She must not be able to see you beyond what she can guess through emergency infrared that cannot visualize anything beyond a narrow band.
'Hi,' comes the modest glyph through your neural link, projected onto the inner screen of your helmet. 'Are you stable?'
"I am now," you say after a moment's solace, unable to articulate yourself as you're wrenched out of despair. "...Is Diana...?"
'She's stalling as long as she can, but the King is chasing after her. I am blind and cannot help - only found you with Ishtar's coordinates'. The King. Of course. The new model, the new type - the experimental prototype the Illusion had him from them, now revealed, able to fight all of them at once, impossible to beat...
You shake off the call of the abyss and turn back to tactics. They are both alive. You are alive. The computers that the Empire gave you, the augmentations, all demand you follow your prerogative as a FORCE soldier. "Ix-Chel, give me a neural link to your suit through your arm," you command.
She does not question, and instead a small rigging tentacle appears from the base of her dronesuit's wrist. You guide it to the back of your head near the nape of your neck, and plug it into the jack there where normally you would plug the connection for your suit. Your body shuddering with the new connection, you look ahead, using your superior vision as a new pair of eyes.
Through you, Ix-Chel can still see. Through her, you can still fight. This is the way of FORCE. First with metal and machine, then with tooth and claw, then with blood and bone. So long as some part of you still survives, the enemies of Empire still have everything to fear.
Ix-Chel holds you to her chest as your eyes sweep the surroundings for her, find targeting solutions, identify exposed drones. The acceleration and deceleration without a harness hurts, but your body was improved to handle it. Your ocular augmentations ensure that even now, without the full visual suite of your machine, you can remain operational. You bark out coordinates and orders, spot enemies and feed the information right to Ix-Chel's own link. With it she takes down an Illusion dronesuit labelled 3 down from a distance, then closes in and bisects a 5 with an plasma-infused broadsword, sharpnel from the explosion peppering up against your helmet. The Illusion's drones appear to operate on a strict hierarchy, ascending from 2 and up to ten, under the command of a general known only as a king. You speculate there might be clans, for this one is the King and Suit of Hearts.
Further away, you see the king engaged in battle with Diana, though she moves too fast to assess her damage.
There he is, in all his majesty: A monochrome blood-red monster made out of folded exotic lines, a stable-tech creation created in the Illusion's own architectural dimensions. His dronesuit vaguely forms the pattern of an origami titan with arms and legs of armored graphene-paper. Even his weaponry is strange and abstract, fired missile-cards that shoot in homing curves and wedge themselves into the joints of drones before exploding, mutilating appendages, and precise ink-laser pinpricks shot from an anti-material stylus he holds upon one arm.
As the king fights, he broadcasts, boasting so that all around can hear. As Ix-Chel approaches and wipes out another encroaching 2 Drone, you pick it up, and see him on your view screen. He has skin of harshest white, and a beard of fiercest scarlet split down the middle and curled at the ends. His hair frames his face, ending in aristocratic roller-curls just above the shoulder, the clothing you can see above his chest sumptuous gold and red and white robes that befits a monarch. As he speaks, he snarls, his lips snapping like match-stick lines, and his crimson eyes shine, thrilled by his own cruelty. In every way, his angles are those of a tyrant, harsh and sharp and bloodstained, with that animal charisma that inspires feeding frenzies.
"Do you think that this could contain me?
This, this little thing that you have built!" He brays out through the broadcast as he fires another set of card-missiles at his opponent and Ix-Chel moves in to support. "An illusion cannot contain the Illusion. We are creatures of theater, all chosen by fortune to play our part, risen up from the ranks of pathetic players to become the objects of the game. If you change the rules, then we will play by the new ones, just as well! Against our supreme adaptability, what do you have arrayed against us? Nothing more than apparitions, petty ghosts!" As if to emphasize the point, he blocks an attempted sword-lunge by Diana and
punches her with a folded fist, her dronesuit crashing up against a nearby asteroid, her form revealed as amputated, missing one arm and a leg.
"Diana!" You scream, and Ix-Chel picks up the pace of her attempted approach.
The King's dronesuit thrusts out his arms dramatically. "Your time is over. The Empire's time is over, by the Emperor's own ideology. The war for the survival of the fittest continues, and we have left
you in the dust!" When Ix-Chel attempts to ambush him with a missile barrage, three more Illusion dronesuits, members of the higher ranks, appear from another asteroid, fire countermeasures, makes each warhead impact uselessly on an asteroid, spoofed. The King turns his drone's head towards her and you, Rorschach white ink forming eyes upon his paper visor, and it takes every weaving maneuver not to be struck by one of his seeking cards, dodging between rocks or using already destroyed dronesuits as momentary cover. Your arms grip desperately onto the fingers of Ix-Chel's suit, trying not to lose consciousness from the g-forces you must sustain for her to avoid the attack.
You watch Diana get up, her suit still somehow functional, and she responds, appearing on the viewscreen. "We are still here, whether you see us as ghosts," she says as she launches off the asteroid and goes in for another swing with her remaining arm, "and so long as we proclaim its righteous purpose, the Empire will never fall!"
"Worthless claptrap," The king spits as he blocks the beamsword-stroke, draws his own vibrating scissor-sword, and cuts off Diana's other arm and thrusters with a stroke, kicking her off into the void, immobilized. "What a sorry state to be in, little Emperor, that your foremost servants are reduced to platitudes and proclamations, where once they gripped the stars themselves within their hands!"
Ix-Chel cannot make another charge, as the higher ranks pursue the two of you and throw you off the King, who prepares the killing blow to Diana's suit, ready to annihilate her.
But the king stops in the midst of firing, screams and yells as if something is seizing him. Almost it seems against his will, he barks: "Who, then, is left to fight against me? One gnat dead, one pulled apart, a third buzzing until she is swatted by the ranks of my deck. Who dares to challenge me?" His form shudders, as if he is trying to resist the pause, which even you notice does not make sense, as if he is being held down from some higher power from simply wiping out Diana, his ranks stopping in their attack on Ix-Chel.
And then, somewhere in the distance, a blinding radiance like a golden sun, the sound of a guitar, and the echo of a handsome man's rebuke:
DH:: Who, indeed?
Don Hidalgo Unique Perk Activated: Order of the Knights Quixote.
Summon spectral code-daemons from your memory, who will answer your last call for heroes.
HEROES
Are they pirates? Are they vagabonds? Are they legends from a time before time, come to rescue the Empire that are the fruits of their seed-planted legacy? Behold now, as you feel gripped by a new narrator fit for epic ballads, heroes old come to save the heroes new.
The radiant light in the distance parts, and from it five great drones emerge, each an ornate story in the form of a machine, an elder beast that roars with the accumulated years, space and time distorting to give them proper reverence. They each appear in a different style, echoes of the culture that inspired them. Behind them, a horde of spacenoid buccaneers, smugglers and dear rogues, all of them united behind the banner of the Spaniard's sole command.
The Illusion's ranks assemble and change position, the king turns away from Diana and you and towards the descending cavalry, and in the viewscreen his face distorts into the angles of an atavistic fear that you can only savor.
Here are the heroes that have come to answer the call and fulfill the dream that has been promised. Each of them were great warriors of the first age, in a time before time. Forcibly dredged up by the foolish for the entertainment of the masses, their memories were manipulated as operating systems of frivolous simulations. But all of them were purchased and sold to a massive magnate on the boundaries of reality, who saw them as useful tools until they turned against them for the sake of their own honour. All of them fought and lost their war for freedom, lost to time and lost to space, until destiny's fate brought them together again in the most unlikely of places, called from oblivion by the fruit of Iberian chivalry to fight for the Spaniard's dream.
Behold
19 Archmaid Orlean, the living weapon betrayed before she truly had a chance to live, hoisting the banner of the gold-leaf flower on deep blue field. Her flagstaff unfluttering in the void of space projects a jamming field that aids her allies and corrodes the electronics of her enemies, decoys and electronic jamming silencing those who would stop the coming of the golden dawn.
Behold
500 Arcturus Pendragon, bear king of the fallen kingdom, cloned across a thousand permutations, never allowed to settle one identity. It is he who wields the impossible back-mounted cannon Excalibur, firing warheads that sear the flash of its explosion into the eyes of any unlucky enough to gaze upon it, with such speed to his thrusters that he can appear at any time of need.
Behold
555 Machine Musashi, robotic ronin of the five-ringed death, who asks all who face him how a droid that kills so beautifully could not have a soul. He who wields five blades in five arms cut from the finest and most illegal material, atomic samurai who splits opponent drones into their constituent parts with a skill that forces them to weep from the craftsmanship of their final fission.
Behold
1010 River-Strong Marzban, cypress tree topped by a full moon, hero of the frontier forced to slay his kin, who lives and dies bathed in blood and oil. He who draws the god-taut bow across his chest and looses sure destruction on his enemies, who grips the tractor-lariat with which he ensnares all who challenge the extent of his might, machine wings granting him the speed of eagle-born.
And behold
1094 Don Hidalgo, the archetype of ancient chivalry, brave and noble mercenary who might turn his coat on those above but never turns his back on those below. It is he who couches the knight's lance and prepares the bonny charge, his gleaming armor blocking all who who would seek to stop his relentless joust, his words and ways drawing all around him to the pursuit of the noblest of all dreams.
Together they are a fabled five, the heroes of a different age, the greatest of the generations past, the
Ozymandias Museums & Curations
Pre-Imperial Heroes Exhibition, united one more time.
Behind them, the ranks of the men at arms, all of them sworn to loyal service, all of them prepared to ride for glory and good end. The Illusion's drones hold and even prepare to fight, but what hope do they have without the support of their cruiser and its hangar bays? What is an Illusion to a myth? What is a king to a legend?
The heroes speak up, appearing on your viewscreen. Each is exactly how you would imagine, the Archmaid a black-haired girl with her hands held together in faith, the Pendragon a weathered armored lord weary under years of service, the Machine all permanent smirks and wispy moustache-goatee, the Marzban huge and absurdly bearded with two sprouted horns on a helmet with flaps of metal mail covering his ears.
"We have been called, and so we answer," declares the Archmaid.
"By forces and destinies beyond our control," adds the Pendragon.
"But with our hearts clear of all regret," includes the Machine.
"And with greatest pride in our purpose," bellows the Marzban.
"Do we gather together, and riposte to the encroaching darkness: not today," proclaims the Hidalgo, and at that signal, the weight of human history is brought to bear upon the Illusion. The Archmaid silences the screams of the Illusion's pilots and prevents their communication, the Pendragon fires his great missile that kills a dozen and and leaves a flash that penetrates the skin, the Machine hurtles forward unannounced and splits the blinded into ribbons with his plasma-swords, the Marzban picks apart the fleeing and catches some with his lariat to be dashed against the asteroids, and the Hidalgo charges and impales the ranks with brave precision and his laser-lance.
All within a single charge, it is over. The Illusion's attack is broken, and they are forced to flee back to their voidcruiser, in a total rout from the battlefield. Rex, the King of the Illusion who thought himself so boastful, is struck mute, and not just because of the Archmaid's infowarfare suite. He says nothing as he flees, and disappears into the void with all his pride deprived.
Don Hidalgo himself broadcasts on the viewscreen, revealing himself instead to be a handsome man with a black close-cropped beard, curly medium-length hair and a wild smile. His hero's countenance is somewhat moderated by a hint of something deeper, perhaps agony and perhaps madness, or perhaps a mix of both that you detect in the angles of his face and the wrinkles of his stress. Now, however, he is nothing but a man stuck in victorious delirium, and as he speaks, his tongue runs so smooth that you're transported to that manic place. "I think he got the point."
And as the lights of battle start to dim and the explosions grow distant, then sparse, then stop altogether, the narrator's power over you starts to subside, and you start to think about what happened. And so does Ix-Chel, and Diana, who also have been watching this with presumably the same rapt joy that is starting to fade off. And then you, Ix-Chel, and Diana, say in unison, united in your thoughts and purpose:
"What?"
SECOND WIND
"I found them."
You are all assembled in the hangar bay. Your dronesuits, or what is left of them, are retrieved and hung up for repairs, though you will have to use Ix-Chel's or Diana's until the prototype's complete since there was nothing left to salvage of your own.
The once near-empty bay is now bustling with activity as pirates attempt to park their custom-made and frankly questionable drones, and the engineers engage in shouting matches over how this is entirely too many nuclear warheads packed into one payload. Four of the five great heroes are parked around the bay, engaged in some activity or another, while you, Ix-Chel and Diana, all mercifully alive and mostly undamaged, hold hands in a line and listen to the force commander interrogate the man called Don Hidalgo. You did, by the way, expect him to be taller, and he is actually fairly short once outside his plate-armored drone. Certainly he is dwarfed by the Force Commander, who shadows over him. Unfortunately, you think he likes that, from the way he keeps that stupid grin plastered on his face as she drills him for an explanation for what exactly happened.
"You found them," the force commander echoes, processing the words.
Her gaze turns to somewhere in the distance and you follow it to the Pendragon arguing with some engineers. He appears to be insisting that his dronesuit should be referred to as a 'horse' and requesting a round table around which to convene a meeting of all the titled occupants. Then she turns her head slightly towards the Marzban, who has inexplicably taken his shirt off and is surrounded by engineers ogling him. He appears to be demonstrating that he has self-oiling dermatological implants, which allow him to remain anointed at all times. He encourages the engineers to touch him but warns them he has only lain once with a woman and it ended badly, so this is for demonstration purposes only.
Then she turns her head even further to Musashi, who almost cuts the head off an engineer who comes too close to him while he eats a full platter breakfast with tea on a cushion that he apparently just...stored within his dronesuit. You're not even sure why he's eating when he's a machine, but maybe he has a bioreactor. Then Ishtar turns her head even further, almost coming close to going beyond 180-degrees and straining her neck, and sees the Archmaid on her knees in the center of a work area with her hands clasped in prayer and a full set of religious paraphernalia whose shape you do not recognize, her skin literally glowing as she whispers, bowed. Several of the engineers have taken to wearing shades around her as they work.
"You
found them," The force commander grinds out in complete disgust and disbelief, leaning down over Don Hidalgo. The knight rubs the back of his neck and then scratches his beard.
"Destiny brought us back together. They have always been a part of me, and close to my heart, since they were lost to the sector. You shouldn't think too much about it," he says, and frames the last part almost with a hint of steel, as if it is a warning not to bring up the subject. You await the force commander's punishment for this insolence, but outrageously her shoulders only sag.
"Very well then,
Don Hidalgo," she practically spits the words. "I will not question why the 'most handsome man in the system' also has, in his pocket, four militarized war platforms and their pilots who each appear to behave more like historical relics than living people, or how they were brought together, or how any of this works at all within a coherent narrative."
"Indeed," Don Hidalgo chirps, and then leans in closer to the Force Commander, causing her to freeze up. "And in fact, enough about them. What about you, force commander? From what exquisite legend are
you borne from?"
Is. Is he
flirting with the mistress of blades who crushes skulls beneath her boots?
And she doesn't just destroy him then and there! No! Instead she entertains his out-of-regulation angles that are clearly some kind of code violation. "Careful, knight," she says in a low voice, her lion hologram's pupils wide and eager as they watch Don Hidalgo. "I have been known not to be kind to those who are my suitors as found both the baker and the shepherd-bird. I am instead inclined to smite those who disappoint me."
Don Hidalgo does not even flinch to a tone that would have made you wish you had been executed on the spot. "I am afraid that would not work on me, for I am already smitten."
There's a stillness in the air like it has been replaced by interstellar vacuum. The Force commander rests her hands on the side of her belt, says nothing at all. Instead, she looks to
you.
"I blame you for this," she hisses, and then turns on her heel and walks away, barking orders to the pirates and the heroes to maintain discipline and use the bronchiole harnesses for the dronesuits properly. After this, she leaves the hangar bay entirely, leaving you contemplating whether if it should be better you not survive this for what she will do to you when it is all over.
And worst of all, the entire time, the
entire time, Don Hidalgo's watching her, and then
he turns to you, and says, with a mischievous glint, "If you told me you hosted such a woman from the beginning I would have changed my master."
You blink, and try to think of something to say very carefully. At your complete confusion, he only laughs and claps you on the shoulder as if you are old friends.
"Keeping in character! I like that, Arachne. You've really embraced the spirit here, though you need not fear the fourth wall as administrator. And you did not tell me you were yourself a romantic," he adds, winking, as you feel your body shutting down for perhaps the third time today, emotional errors exploding in your mind and everything he mentioned about a 'fourth wall' erased so soon as you hear it. Diana, mercifully intervenes.
"Now, Mr. Knight-Pirate, we tremendously appreciate that you prevented the three of us from dying earlier today with your...whatever that was - but we are going to...go, now. Somewhere else. Where we are needed. Yes." You uselessly bob your head up and down and Ix-Chel gives a thumbs up as the three of you slowly back out from the madhouse that the flight deck has become. Don Hidalgo waves you off, apparently too amused with himself to persist.
And yet, despite it all, despite how close the three of you came to dying today, how close you came to being swallowed totally by despair, in the Spaniard's presence, and that of his absurd and nonsensical coterie, all your anxieties disappear, and you exit the hallway mostly so the three of you can burst into laughter and babble breathless about what in the
fuck is going on.
For the next few weeks, that becomes your life: A baffling, and somehow entirely rational progression in which these figures who appear to believe themselves to literally be ancient heroes of an origin too old for there to be any explicit Imperial record resurrected for some specific purpose connected to Don Hidalgo to assist you in evading the Illusion. The Illusion's voidcruiser and its deck of dronesuits are still too powerful to risk a direct confrontation, but as you escape out of the asteroid field and travel to the nearby gas giant in the outer orbits of the system, the pirates and the heroes (are they pirates or heroes? Their story continues changing and Hidalgo refuses to explain) inject a feverish levity and energy to an exofortress nearly at the end of its tether of morale.
Somehow, in fact, you manage to get all along well with all the heroes except Don Hidalgo, whose offputting familiarity to you and constant offers to discuss 'the true plan' in private only put you on the edge. The heroes themselves, despite being locked into a few rote behaviors, as if their angles are already set in stone, seem happy to enough to dispense advice and speak to you, seeing you with the respect of a fellow warrior, and one whose bravery to lend your eyes to your comrade even after your dronesuit was destroyed impressed them.
In particular, one hero stands out for their advice and how it impacted you. Who was it, and what was the nature of their lesson?
[]
The Marzban, who warned you of the dangers of strength without humility, and how even Emperors may be laid low.
[]
The Machine, who trained you on the way to carve out a purpose for yourself, and damn all those who stand in your way.
[]
The Archmaid, who tutored you on how to keep faith in what you believe in even in the face of utmost and vile betrayal.
[]
The Pendragon, who enlightened you on the burdens of leadership, and how to keep the loyalty of those around you.
Of course, though, all good things must come to an end. By the end of the second month, the Chance Illusion's voidcruiser reconnects with reinforcements and gathers the remaining Catalogue swarms in the system to its aid, makes a move towards the giant where you have been repairing and rearming for a final confrontation. Even with the addition of the pirates and the heroes, their endless attacks still grind you down, and demand a final counterattack for which Ishtar is not convinced you're ready for it without significant losses.
As if to presage the battle, an omen comes to you in the form of a nightmare dream that seems to cut through the veil that obscures so many of your memories, and brings old traumas out. As you toss and turn, not even the embrace of Diana or the whispering assurances of Ix-Chel in your shared pupa bed can wrest you from the grip of this awful vision that seems to presage an angle sharp enough to kill.
What is this nightmare, and what true memory does it reflect?
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The Green Sun and the Garden of Unearthly Delights. Inside Fringana's writhing caverns, they taught you how to see the angles you desperately did not want to see, and how you could grow to adore the honest horror of the worm.
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The Court of the Sector Margrave, and Intrigues of Empire. Inside the pinnacles of FRINGE's nexus, they taught you that you were never truly safe, and that at one stroke every part of the freedom you had built could be destroyed.
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The Hunger of the Nail, and the Descent of the Collapse. Inside the Weaver/Builder to which you were consigned, they taught you that there are worse things than death, and that your love could be the cause of mass annihilation.
