Five against three, yet another humdrum, run-of-the-mill, deathmatch. The only way it was different from all the others was the gimmick. And the gimmick for this rote- the hardly fair teams. Three versus five.

  Enon sniping and covering with a gas blowback rifle, filled pressurized difluoromethane and pentafluoroethane.

  He was allowed to hold the high ground with Ezrael holding the mid-range, using a slingshot and a nun-chaku.

  As always, Eidren at point, in the front, with that same daito bokken he always used, making sure Ezrael can always take a flank while he tanked the hits.

  But he didn’t get hit.

  The others were just on the floor, groaning in pain, covered in paint, welts, bruises, a black eye, a broken wrist, a sprained ankle, and a broken pinky toe. They had all been equally armed with non-lethal weapons.

  And now they froze in this moment, Vilithe looking at the accidental renaissance chiaroscuro of scantily clad gladiatorial soldier bois, kicking the ever-living shit out of each other.

  The rest fell into line.

  Contract forward.

  The whole squad, all eight of them. Fully clad in carapace. Fully trained. Fully come of age.

  Eidren will always do the right thing.

  He was designed that way.

  It is the source of his power.

  He is a leader of elvans.

  He wouldn’t be one if he didn’t do the right thing.

  Indeed, if one were to think about it logically.

  It is, honestly, quite dumb.

  He will get himself killed if he doesn’t have the right allies to protect him, the ones who really have his wellbeing in mind.

  It was all just too much. Too much information. Power overwhelming.

  Ah. Power overwhelming.

  Would you like to see Eidren at full power?

  Contract forward. Only a little bit.

  Vilithe shrunk away in the majesty of Talisa’s memory now, only an investigator, only an observer.

  It was Talisa remembering.

  Same eight knights in a row, their favored weapons in hand. All just before the final sequence, the dream.

  Eidren with a greatsword, and assault rifle- not of bullpup design.

  Ezreal with dirk and round shield and sub-machine gun.

  Enon with sniper rifle, or stiletto and greatshield if things had to get up close and personal. The greatshield could be stood in front with no carrying required by the wielder, with a convenient little tripod stand, so Enon could fire from cover wherever he was.

  Ereme with a spear and an automatic shotgun. The helper. Used the hardest hitting weapons and did gruesome things, such as impalements, to get noticed, get attention. Oh, how feared he was by our enemies, he sent them scattering. Yet he had a gentle side, if you got to know him. Loved to cheer on the others. By far the highest assist count.

  Epichal the bard, the jokester, who would regale the tales of their adventures, to lift morale. Classic blade dancer. Intuitive and improvisational. He was the individualist. Oh, I do miss his sense of humor- hah. He could be quite mean, like his mum.

  Einstein, like you, the investigator, the observer. The nerd of the group, obviously. Like Enon, a sniper, but not one who got so close to the fray to support his comrades. Always keeping a slow measured pace, thinking before acting, just like you, Vi. He was the brains, and he would formulate getaway strategies, provide helpful technical details, or sometimes just save them all with a stroke of pure genius. That was why he was back rank. They called him the Rook. They protected Einstein as they would their own lives.

  Erinyes, I experimented with an assassin fused with some of the Template’s essence. She’s the furious one. Vengeance. Enneagram Eight. Whether she is most like Megaera, Alekto, or Tisiphone, I cannot say. She favored the railgun. She had psionics by default, which I guess was a bit of a cheat on my part, but she played an important role. She became Eidren’s mentor, just like you. She had a very different approach to his schooling, let’s leave it at that.

  And Ekselsor, the sword guy. He just really liked swords. The old weird ones. There was little effective difference. It all boils down to simple physics, your forte, Vi: mass, weight, speed, velocity, acceleration, mix it up and voila, you have- power. Brute force. I’m not sure why, but he also had a phase where he tried using sickles and scythes. That was a terrible idea. He was the peacemaker. Anytime any of them had a fight he was the one who had to hear out everyone’s side and offer various possibilities to a shared consensus. He liked this job though. Easily the most charismatic, jovial, charming- he was disarming in more ways than one. Sociable. Ekselsor was talkative, as you can see, like my sentient sword.

  It was like Talisa was doting on the memory of her children – just eight of very, very many – with Vilithe. An Auntie sharing parenting wisdom: regrets, tips, trivia.

  She had borne the labor for their births herself after all.

  Behind the Seven Knights and One Knight-Assassin, stood the might of the Talauthian Army on Aryss, numbering only two thousand and six hundred sixty two, after their disastrous rout when they tried to join forces with the rival Clan Boucher against Senjya, only to realize too late that Senjya had turned them against each other at the last moment and waited for them to destroy each other before moving against Sidarael.

  I remember. I was there. I was there during the slaying of Sidarael. I did no more than support Princess Senjya’s psionics. But Senjya is a kinder Princess than Amefrid. I had rapport with her, she asked for simple performance, and it was easy to deliver by her standards. Senjya took things step by step. And she had a code, unlike Amefrid. For example, Senjya would never hurt kids. She would never hurt broodlings.

  You would be surprised what an elvan can do when pushed to extreme lengths. But I digress. Senjya is devious. What is worse? Cruelty, or deviousness, what has a greater effect on the universe in the end? Amefrid’s cruelty would not have been inflicted, had Senjya stayed in her place.

  They were both inside, and outside, their true Stronghold- and Vilithe realized she had been there before, she could see through the eyes of many, a transparent cutout of the palace underground, with its gatehouses, and at the heart of it, the safe room where Atell had to kill his sister Exasha. But instead, standing alone, was younger Queen Talisa, remembering.

  The Talauthian Aryssal Palace. The Stronghold. The Location of the Fall of Clan Talauth.

  They had been there, and Exasha Boucher was picking on its bones.

  In front of them, unblurred, were the same ten thousand, three hundred and fifty-seven elvans of the Amallarkean forces, then nearly fifteen thousand.

  Talisa snapped her fingers.

  Time stopped, went to dilated, a little bit, by little bit. Step by step they took in slow motion.

  massBlur();

  massMirrorImage();

  The final band of Talauthian forces lit up in phantasmic fae aura and shadowy imitation copies. A surging army of ghosts to cull the enemy from nowhere. Deus ex machina. And the machine, the lover, the fighter, her void cowboi, Eidren Talauth, he had great psionic potential even before they met. An equal to her.

  It was just not in the way she expected. It was not deeper into the mind but broader, to touch more minds at once, to inspire.

  Leadership.

  Not flaying.

  She had just as much to learn from him.

  She had only opened her mind to the fact that the true nature of a thing was sometimes not what it appeared to be, in the case of her love.

  Where did you learn mass mirror image, hm? You didn’t. That was his trick. When he distracted the eighteen ambushers in the rafters walking through that tall chamber.

  Did you ever stop to consider how you know the things you know?

  Of course, Auntie.

  Good. But sometimes, repetition is necessary.

  Sometimes things get better with repetition.

  Hm, child. How about this repetition – 2,652 : 4269 kills – that was a kill death ratio of one point seven, give or take. Nearly two Amallarkeans for every Talauthian that went down, it was impressive considering the overwhelming odds of force multiplication, nearly one to seven. Still, it wasn’t enough. We were beat down, we were done. And I ordered a retreat, to preserve my children. Clan Amallark just kept getting more resources.

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  More and more, never enough.

  Good, you’re learning.

  We’re just stardust, after all.

  She snapped her fingers again and the time stop returned, just before the epic clash of over two thousand against nearly fifteen thousand, with lots of complicated, moving parts involved.

  Vilithe, you use only the tip of the iceberg of your psionic potential.

  Hm, yes Auntie?

  You know about sequencers, but you don’t use them. Conditional psionics, like this one that triggers upon my death. You find them annoying to keep track of in your head. Impulsive. Reactive, and too in the moment.

  If you just took time to plan things out, take a moment to prepare your thoughts, and create backup plans- you now know the simulacrum technique, my discovery, once mine alone, is now yours alone, for I am dead. Keep that in mind.

  Is that not what Clan Callethe has built in Phyros accomplishes? A backup plan. In case Reath becomes like Phyros.

  You are wise, Queen Auntie.

  I began all this talking about accountability. So, I want you to think very carefully and look into the future from this moment. Think about what I have said.

  Given Eidren Talauth’s disposition, what does he truly remind you most of?

  He’s the Jedi.

  Tell me more.

  Dispassionate. Ascetic. Defender. Peace seeking. I’m feeling a bit uneasy with where this is going, please don’t read my mind Auntie.

  I want to know your thought process dear. So let me ask you.

  Passionate, lovestruck, lovesick little Princess.

  We, who wield power on the other side of the force, seek deep instead of broad.

  Who worships the individual instead of the collective.

  Passion and love.

  What does that make us?

  …

  I know you don’t want to answer but there is nothing in my mind for you to scry anymore. I am waiting for you.

  …

  We have all the time in the world.

  …

  We are the Sith.

  Just like how he turned against me there is the possibility he will turn against you.

  You seduce him too much and he will go astray. Or perhaps you will be the one who goes astray.

  If he goes astray, you will break him. He will no longer be the Knight in Shining Armor you love. The Jedi. He will be corrupted. He will be a Sith. A fallen Jedi.

  If you go astray, you will break. And you will no longer be the still innocent, yet not to be, Rogue Princess Dragonrider of Phyros. You too will fall.

  You seduce him just enough, and he joins you without either of you breaking, or losing your way. Then it is-

  Luke Skywalker joining Darth Vader.

  Anakin slaying Palpatine and taking his rightful place as Emperor Skywalker of the Galaxy Far Far Away.

  Anakin resurrects Padme in dark and unnatural undead form, through the teachings of Plagueis.

  God Empress Alia of the Knife ascends before Leto II, the ghola Hayt by her side.

  We are the dead and decomposing corpse and throne of the Goddess Empress of Elvankind, guiding conquest through the stars by psionic power through the warp, the rippling occult lovecraftian fabric of the chaos gods, the dark gods, the ruinous powers - warfare, rage and murder, disease, despair, and decay, change and sorcery, pleasure and excess.

  We are the horsemen of the apocalypse. The white horse, the red horse, the black horse, the pale horse.

  We are the Big Bad Evil Gurls.

  We, the Elvan Queens…

  We are the villains, Vilithe.

  It was a damn lot to take in for a protagonist.

  And then for the very first time Vilithe considered the fact that maybe she really was the villain of this story, even though she would forever remain the hero of her own.

  She killed Eidren’s mother. Maybe not directly. But she enabled it. She was complicit.

  Maybe she and Eidren were star-crossed lovers.

  Despite this brief flash of a meeting, this love at first thought-

  -This union will cause the doom of everything around them.

  The thought broke Vilithe.

  She attempted to stitch the fraying fissure that had cracked her being in half.

  And so, this was the perfect time for Talisa to come in and teach the young daughter-in-law a lesson about totally dominating her perfectly good – and we say this with emphasis: those words are precise – perfectly good son. A nice elvan boi.

  We thought about Zitra earlier. We must confront the brutal reality of the fact. She has eight empty cocoons inside her. Her Queen needs them to be fertilized, they aren’t to be implanted with crafted embryos. But Zitra is beaten down, she cannot stand the process, but still- every nine lunas, the cycles must start again.

  Vilithe wanted to rush past this part, but she also did not know what she was rushing to, and she was equally afraid of that.

  Rape. You’re implying they get raped.

  I’m not implying. I am stating it.

  And what’s your point?

  To force their bodies to commit to an unstoppable change, a nine luna change that afterwards becomes something more than change, an unfolding of an entirely new pocket universe, an entire new dimension, no less than every perception of that new child’s entire life- the universe experiencing itself.

  Such an important decision.

  It must not be made lightly.

  …

  You had your discussion with Eidren about agency?

  I gave him back his agency. He was free to kill himself. An hero.

  Edgy, Vi.

  You started this line of conversation, edgelord. It’s possible to make serious mistakes for idiotic reasons, what good would it have accomplished? You said yourself you were likely to be defeated, with or without his participation.

  Possible to make serious mistakes. Remember that.

  I will. I get the point you’re trying to make.

  Why don’t you just tell me then?

  Manipulating the most sacred parts of Eidren’s mind is tantamount to raping him. I understand that. I understood that fully from the beginning. You are right that I refused to make that connection up until now but-

  No buts. Did you not say you were accountable?

  What if my edits, my hacks, improve his wellbeing?

  Can you know for sure?

  No but if I try-

  And if you fail?

  If I try-

  Are there not some things that should not be tried? No matter how noble effort may be in and of itself. No matter what the intention.

  Because just like the forbidden fire…

  …just like the poisoning of the elvan womb by spirits…

  …just like the light fading from the dreams and hope of Kwandriss, of Zitra, and of I…

  …just like my own driving away of Eidren by pushing him and his brothers too hard, and my own neglect of their wellbeing in service of my own ends…

  …just like how you can lose Eidren too, or yourself, if you meddle too much with the most sacred parts of the self…

  …just like my own imminent death, the destruction of my last simulacrum, except for the one that I tried to insert into you, and that you now hold like a bug in the palm of your head, only allowing me to awake when you desire, which you can squish at any time you want, to banish me to true and final death…

  …and just like your mind’s entanglement with Eidren’s now that you have performed the Gestalt- you and he are truly psionically inseparable now, unless removed at great distance…

  …some actions have consequences.

  Truly serious mistakes, even for good reasons, but especially for poor reasons…

  Some actions can never be undone.

  Chaos, once unleashed, can never be put back into Pandora’s Box.

  And Vilithe was now truly contrite.

  I am sorry, Eidren. I am sorry, Talisa. If she could weep, she would have. But she could not, frozen in time.

  I am sorry I tried to rip away his grief so that he could not care properly for his brothers. I am sorry I selfishly wanted him to kill you so that he can be mine. I am sorry I took over his mind and body to bring us to this place. I’m sorry about Kwandriss. I’d wish I’d never been sent out here.

  I am so sorry.

  I had no idea the pain that it would cause. I had no idea the pain it would cause you. I had no idea the pain it would cause him.”

  “I…” she had no idea this would be so painful. She had no idea. She thought it would be some sort of heroic, climactic, final duel.

  She didn’t expect this part. This strange, long, intimate conversation with her dying mother-in-law, that was now ripping her heart apart at the seams as the full tragedy of only having the chance to ask for her blessing- came only after killing her.

  And expecting her to be filled with hate to the end, for very well she should be, why should she not- when Vilithe was not just stealing her son away from her, but her very consciousness? But no. Her mother-in-law forgave her.

  Her mother-in-law forgave her.

  Her mother-in-law forgave her completely, so completely it was just nothing but pure love now. Even at her death at the hands of her daughter-in-law.

  She knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

  But nobody ever told her it was going to be this hard.

  She wanted to tear her cornrows out. She didn’t deserve Eidren. Not after what she’s done to his mother. Not after what she did to him.

  I mean it’s not like I’m one to talk.

  He’s right. I made him like this.

  You are glum, my daughter. Let me finally show you what he was like before.

  Contract forward.

  Also known as ‘black gas’.

  It was a very forgiving definition of non-lethal.

  Evil always wins because good is dumb.

  Gutsy!

  This remained an extremely heavy euphemism.

  Except that one time. The fraying had begun to unravel Eidren’s habits. The Amallarkean imperative to preserve the commander overrode his protective nature.

  Testosterone cranked to the gynous limit.

  Not this again, Zagreus.

  The claymore, the macuahuitl, hookswords, katars, the falchion, the flamberge, the khopesh, the double edged straight sword, the broadsword, and the talwar.

  When he could not use his beloved swords, Ekselsor wielded a revolver. They were reliable, and didn’t jam from Aryssal dust. It was very on theme.

  Quite a lot of trivia, really.

  Now after the Massacre at Deuteronilus Mensae occuring far away from Vilithe and above Talisa, only four thousand, two hundred and thirty nine. Volent found this statistic very sorrowful, if anyone was paying attention to it.

  The gangster of love. The picker. The grinner. The lover. The sinner. The joker. The smoker. The midnight toker.

  Cute Before Sunrise reference, Vilithe. Was it the first time you made it?

  Like a great big blue ball anticlimax just before say, a vassal in lingerie and a bruised and villain coded knight, or two young lover orcans, might have a good time.

  Khorne-

  Nurgle-

  Tzeentch-

  Slaanesh-

  Disease. Covid was just the Harbinger.

  War. The Million Wars.

  Famine. Scarcity. Harvests.

  Death. Catastrophe.

  Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words mean?

  But who’s to say she’s the protagonist? He, Hiro the Deliverator, or She, Yours Truly? The Alpha Plus, or the Savage?

  Romeo and Juliet.

  Well, this is sure to happen now, isn’t it? Talisa thought. Shouldn’t have jinxed it.

  With some gimmicky mechanic for the boss fight, and in fact it was exactly that. But that part was done.