Fantasy 𝙂𝙇𝙊𝙍𝙔 𝙏𝙊 𝙏𝙃𝙀 𝙀𝙑𝙀𝙍𝙇𝘼𝙎𝙏𝙄𝙉𝙂 [be_l_l_e & starboob]

[be_l_l_e]

The cool black stone was intricately smooth - smoother than smooth. Only one of the cultists, the one who called himself The Ashlar, would even pretend to understand the technique which bored with such precision into the very atoms of the material, re-orienting them to remove every hint of an edge. Breathless violence shimmered along the statue’s chin. The shoulder blades seemed organically cruel, like cliff-peaks threatening to crush the wave-torn beaches down below. Elsewhere the armour seemed to grow from a formless body, anchored by stilts like a bagworm’s shell. The statue’s sword was unsheathed and held loosely in one hand, like the wind could spur it into furious action or one swift cut. The material of the blade differed from the body: raw, blood-shot ruby, catching light with the promise of a glimmer that befit a sort of sunlight these cultists couldn’t know.

Standing there, loomed over in its shadow, pretending for a moment to be small, Theoren unsheathed her own sword. She felt the strain of the cultists as they kept themselves from stumbling back in unclenched fear or gasping in euphoric awe. Before her, she raised the blade, remembering its heft as an old strain against her shoulder, and compared it to the statue’s sword: twice the size of her own, and thinner - more elegant, like a needle or a twig. It would slice tendons, not crush bones.

And where the statue glowed red, her own blade was perfect: frozen steel.

“What have you made me,” she laughed. It was a booming sound that echoed against the rockface. “A hairdresser, or a clown?”

“Imperiess,” a brave cultist stepped forward. Theoren kept her eyes affixed up upon the sculpture, his head barely a sliver in the bottom of her field of view. “We would honour you, and the glory of the Everlasting. This is your image -”

“This is a bloody idol,” she sneered, and looked down. The cultist who had spoken was ashy with years of soot-smoked paint that had seeped into once-brown skin, turning it a false black. His eyes darted to hers for a moment, then fell with his face to look no higher than her feet.

“Imperiess,” he began, stammering. “Forgive -”

“You would rather this God?” She gestured to the statue, and the movement of her sword sent a sort of shockwave through the cultist crowd, each of them retreating, cowed by the threat of the blade doing what it had been bred to do. “This God, who appeases your dreams while clad in the guts of your enemies?”

“Your enemies, Imperiess!” The cultist shuddered with every word. “We do only -”

“Silence.”

The cultist fainted. She raised her foot, and shoved his body away. Dust and sallow stone scraped his cloths. Where his body lay, the others shied from it, like rats from water.

She raised her gaze back to the statue. The face - which towered nearly two-thirds of her height above her - was where she could look least easily. Those thin features danced with muscles that had no name. They promised ancient strength under a veneer of naïve disposition. They promised a type of love that would cut you when you turned away.

“Whose face is this,” she said, finally.

There was none to speak.

Finally, the one who called himself Ashlar bowed.

“It is your own face, my lady.”

His voice was deeper than any she had heard in many years.

“It is not,” she said, because it was plain to see. Squat and wide and cruel, her face was nothing like the one that had snuck up out of the stone.

“It is,” he said, again. “We have a memory of it, your face. It has been shared, and I have seen it. This face is yours, as much as that one.”

He did not raise a finger to point, but she could feel the eyes of cultists in her periphery, who found a probing glimpse while she was turned away.

The Ashlar spoke again, when she was silent. At once his voice had risen - still deep, but now tainted with haste. “We would destroy the memory, if you wished. Redo the statue, now that we have seen the face you bear today.”

He was lying. And at once, she knew for certain what she had already been told: these cultists were more than ordinarily corrupt.

“Show me this memory,” she said, and as she marched into the Cultists’ midst she moved like a mountain uprooted from the earth. One stumbled, and tripped over another’s heel, careening into the legs of the crowd, and was trampled there without mercy as they cleared her path. In one clean motion, she swiped her blade a foot above their heads and sheathed it at her side. Some ducked, and others yelped. Theoren ignored them all.

A few had found themselves before her, rushing on legs unmade for such haste as her strides outpaced them. One was a short man - no taller than her hip - and he seemed to glance nervously between the rest, his hands grasping walls as they passed, judging corridors for an escape. Another - the tallest of the group - walked with his back adroit, his gaze unwavering from their path.

Still, the tip of his narrow bald skull fell just below her chest, and his long legs moved twice as fast to keep pace with hers.

They all knew the way. She spurred them on.

“Imperiess,” The Ashlar hushed, “This one was found to us, broken. His mind has been properly cataloged. We have done away with what we did not need.”

“He has been made deathless,” whispered another, almost out of breath. “Imperiess,” he added.

The Ashlar moved, and his shoulder brushed the other whisperer’s; at this speed, he lost his footing, and was thrown against the wall. The vanguard passed him by. Behind her, Theoren heard the sounds of a beating from the crowd.

The Ashlar pushed on. “He has… rare memories, Imperiess. Only a glimpse.”

The tall one and another heaved open each side of a door. Theoren frowned. The arch of the doorway loomed before her face. She looked down, to The Ashlar, but he was looking anywhere else. He knew the guilt this doorway betrayed.

“Bring the memory out,” said the tall one.

Complicit, she thought. Of course, they were all complicit - each of them as guilty as the last - but some were quicker to see the ways they had betrayed their faith. Doorways built for men hid blasphemies from Gods.

But nothing could be hidden from God.

A large stone block was carried up out of a lower floor and into the hall. All through the compound, echoing, was the crowd of the cult. Murmurs slipped to her ears, each of them pitiful, none of them telling her something she did not know.

On the block of stone, a man lay - or what was left of him.

There was not even a string of recollection that tugged at her when she looked upon the face. Good. Their memories were not shared.

He was just a fly on some forgotten wall of her past. Torn out of time by the ripples of decisions in which he played no part but to observe; and yet even by observing he had been swallowed up by the glorious momentum of history (in this life, at least).

“Would - would you share it?”

She looked to the Ashlar, and then to the other cultists about. “Which of you have shared this memory?”

A hundred eyes burrowed into their own minds, hiding and remembering all at once.

So be it.

She crushed the table under the weight of her blade. The memory died with the man.

“No!” screamed The Ashlar, forgetting his dark composure in his final moment, and then she flattened him against the wall. Her blade ran ruby red with his blood.

***​

When she had cleaned her blade of blood and stone, a mare approached. On horseback was a priestess, dressed in fox’s orange. As she rode up the hills to the blackened city, Theoren watched a flock of gulls gathering in the distance, coming to the smell of fresh-spilt blood.

“Imperiess,” the priestess said, and fell from her horse to prostrate herself at Theoren’s feet. The breadth of her epaulette hinted at firm muscles beneath the plush coat that would have kept her warm as she road across these grey plains. In her legs, the strength was obvious, and worn with pride. She had no bag or belt. Her horse, padding off to find specks of weeds in the mountain crags, was bare beyond its simple saddle. What the priestess required would be found here or in her mind.

Theoren looked back to the woman's head, her forehead pressed flat against the ground, her hands outstretched. She outstretched the tip of her blade, and with its flat edge she raised the priestess' chin. "Which are you?"

“Nihiliri,” the priestess said, her eyes meeting Theoren’s own. They were a beautiful shade of green and brown, like the pit of a ripe mango.

“You serve the Everlasting well,” Theoren said.

“I would,” Nihiliri promised. “I would send you to the Allseer.”

Theoren sighed. So soon again. She would find this priestess another time, perhaps. Then they might learn more than names. “So it shall be.”

***​

The Sacrosanct had a way of being found. Theoren let herself slip between the walls of a cave, and found the inside larger than the out. She followed ghostly blue shadows along a bend, and came to the cavern. It was wide, today, and endless, and empty - unless those things which flickered like the dark holes in the center of a flame were more than tricks of light along the base of the walls.

She descended along a sloping, spiraled ledge, and found herself on flat ground that looped around a central spire. The spire twisted, rocks of unclear shape and unfathomable origin; and in the midst of it was something less than rocks, which filled the holes and spooned the jagged edges. It crackled.

“Allseer!”

A shout always grabbed her attention. Slowly, the Allseer moved, twisting like a spider, stretches of flesh retracting inside of each other, and something like a body resolved from the mess and shadows. It gasped, silently, slowly. Too slowly to be real - an idea of a gasp. Theoren was grateful for the strength of her armour, which hid a sudden shiver in her knees.

“Corruption,” said the Allseer. Too slowly, again.

Theoren nodded. “I had no doubt, really.”

The Allseer laughed. It was a long, hollow sound, which grew quicker as it went, until it almost sounded natural - and then died, without even an echo. “You always doubt. It's pitiful.”

Pitiful. “I learn faith.”

“You have it hammered into you, like a nail into a rock. Let us hope you are made of firmer stuff.”

“I will not shatter.”

“Good.” There was a rattling, and for a moment Theoren felt dizzy. When she remembered looking again, the Allseer was flecks of golden dust. She felt a presence behind her, and stayed her hand before it went to the butt of her sword. Two serpents draped themselves across her, one at her shoulder and the other around her hip. She watched the spire.

The golden dust glimmered with images of worlds and times. Theoren tried not to focus on them.

“That girl,” the Allseer hissed. Theoren tried to place the hiss somewhere in the edgeless cavern, but then found it right there in her own mind. She felt a force within, grabbing at a memory beyond the wall of recollection, and tugged it free. Her face emerged. Theoren tried to look away - but the memory was there, in her eyes, within her, everywhere. The Allseer thrust it to her, shewed everything else away. Theoren had no choice but to see.

That girl.

“I did with her as you asked,” Theoren said, quickly. “She rots, deep in time.”

“Her mind corrupted,” the Allseer agreed, “but such a beautiful mind. A beautiful mind. And now I have found a path for it. To illuminate the Everlasting.”

No.

One of the serpents hissed, staccato, so it sounded like a laugh.

“We will retrieve her.” The Allseer said, because Theoren refused to.

“She will hate us,” Theoren promised. “Send another. Send Demertu. Send Lysandra." Send anyone. The Allseer heard the thoughts and the words as one. "Send them - she will still remember my face. She will not come.”

The Allseer laughed. “Yes. Perhaps she'll kill you. I have accounted for it. But… I miss her.” She laughed again. “And she will not reject her own salvation. Would you?”

Theoren was forced to imagine it. Lost in time, with nothing - no way to crawl back up. Powerless.

Once it would have been a cruel twist of fate. Now, it had been made anathema.

“You will go,” the Allseer said. And she did.

***

starboob​

 

[starboob]

Sweeps of beige flurried past her vision, stirred by the heat blasted winds, then calmed. The ripple left behind made the desert appear almost like a frozen ocean or one of those gardens meant to inspire tranquility. When the air was still, the shimmering heat continued its crawl up from the ground like it was trying to return to the dual suns.

Casmira stood proudly at the highest peak she knew of in her new dominion, narrow eyes narrowing further as she surveyed the vast emptiness. Save for the distant oceans, there was only these burning sands. Was she searching for something in particular? Or just pretending as a means to mask the unending boredom that was inches away from splitting open her skull? (She had considered splitting it open herself, but she guessed the satisfaction would not be hers and she could not stand that. She lived on.)

Contenting herself that the sands still remained unchanged, she pulled the white shawl wrap closer around her shoulders and continued her routine march to the end of this realm and back again, lost in deep trance. It was the only thing, perhaps, keeping her fortified against the suffocation of this prison.

Her mind wandered, as it so often did, backwards, replaying the moments over and over that brought her to this lowly state and then forwards to where she hoped it would take her.

In the beginning, Casmira had thought this a joke. Most holy and pure of all Imperiessa, created in the image of the Allseer, a paragon amongst sewer rats…? No, she could not comprehend her banishment.

That slack jawed bewilderment lasted exactly three seconds. Then she considered the evidence. She considered the smug satisfaction on her then lover’s face as she saw to the stripping of her rites and damned her to this realm. She considered that it would be in line with the Allseer’s cruelty to send that girl to banish her. To humiliate her in front of her priestesses. Killing her would have hurt less and perhaps that is why neither the Allseer nor Theoren granted her such a peace. Both should have been known as Assholes Everlasting—in Theoren’s case, she was almost positive that she was.

In the beginning, she cried an ocean or two. She had the privacy to do so and felt, at the time, she deserved the pity. Now she looked upon those salt waters with contempt. Such a display of weakness. Such a waste of her energy. Energy she could have and should have spent towards carving out her own future. Her own destiny.

Not that she really could.

Here in this bound realm, just at the borders of the dominion of the Everlasting, stagnation was the only assurance. The sands moved with the wind. The cacti stretched and fell, but nothing truly happened.

She had tried to get the realm to evolve. She had tried to mold it into a realm befitting of her stature, but the Allseer had all but ensured this place would never move. Without her full powers, her influence was null.

Where once her power felt like the collision of stars, the birth of great nebulae, now was vast and abundant nothing. Void. No whispers or even echoes of the life that was. Just memories to taunt and torment. Once or twice she wondered whether any of it had been real.

In the beginning, the isolation nearly drove her to a point of madness, nothing here sentient enough to keep her company or recognize her for more than three seconds. The beetles, for example, never cared about who crushed them. They did not fear her foot because she was Imperiess Casmira. They feared her foot simply because they knew to fear things that crush. It was not because of her might, her awesome power. Even she would not submit herself to pretending she could truly lord over this barren wasteland. It was her dominion only because there was no one else to challenge her for it.

She had spent her centuries—minus the decade or so she spent crying a few oceans—pacing and had created a great chasm in the land as she contemplated where she had gone wrong; what she had done to be shut away. But she never found any fault. She was perfect, flawless in every conceivable way. Her entire life—mortal and divine—had been dedicated to the Faith. As a mortal, she murdered her damned mistress, a fucking princess, for daring to speak blasphemies in private. As Imperiess Casmira, she pushed the will of the Everlasting, shaped its realms into the very essence of perfection. Culled them of weakness. Breathed purity into the corrupt. Everything—everything—had been for the Faith.

And therein laid the issue.

‘Even the great are fallible.’ When this thought struck Casmira, she was not thinking of herself. ‘I must rid the Everlasting of its imperfections. That has always been my path. Even from here I must keep myself pure for this cannot be my end. I will not allow it.’ It became clear, in that moment, what she must do. Though she dared not touch the thought so directly, fearing those who watch All. This Great Truth was one she had to layer behind so many other Truths and even then, she was not so sure she could protect the sanctity of the Great Truth.

The answer of how she would achieve this end was obfuscated, too, out of her grasp, but she knew everything here must be to fortify her mind for the perils that laid ahead. Casmira knew she would have to become more than the Whisper to ensure the Everlasting would persist in absolution. For that she would need to become the Torch, the Harbinger. That thought, she did let touch her if only to feel the thrills down her spine, the heat in her belly. With that thought she kept her head high, shoulders square. She was and would always be Imperiess Casmira, even in this wasteland.

And perhaps that answer to her greatest obstacle was about to arrive. Perhaps, finally, she was ready.

Casmira, so attuned to the sameness of the desert, having memorized the patterns of the wind like predictable hands of a clock, was immediately aware of the change in atmosphere when something tore into her realm.

It was that and the tug in her veins that indicated a long forgotten trap had been set off, surprising her. ‘Who is the dullard that dares come here?’ Tickled by the idea of a visitor, the former Imperiess used the small bits of power she still had to step from one end of her dominion to the next. Literally.

She arrived kicking up the sands, temporarily blocking both herself and the intruder from view. While sands sorted themselves out, she straightened out her posture, smoothed the nonexistent wrinkles from her long white shawl, and, for the very first time in three or so centuries, found herself smirking.

“Oh, hello, lover.” Casmira tilted her head to the side, admiring her handiwork. “Miss me already?”

The trap, admittedly, was not Casmira’s finest handiwork. The glyph stationed threateningly at Theoren’s face, for example, could have been fine tuned to blow out her entire skull at the slightest show of sudden movement. Instead this one would merely peeled back the layers of her skin and possibly melt her eyeballs. All cosmetic and superficial. Then the glyph that Theoren found crushing her ankle, the one also holding her upside down, only prevented her from falling into a bottomless chasm. (Casmira was almost positive she had placed stakes down there.) There were also the glyphs wedged between the narrow gaps of her armor that would melt bone, placed too precisely to not be suspicious, but those were the only noteworthy details. (Even then, they were ignorable footnotes.) All in all, it was rather trite and, at worst, banal. She cut herself some slack on account of it working—on Theoren, no less. So honestly, between the two of them, she had less to be embarrassed about. That aside, she also made this so long ago that she wasn’t even sure what stage of her grief she had been in. It gave off anger. Anger always made her sloppy.

Even despite how good it felt to catch Theoren like this, Casmira found it difficult to look at her over-smooth features for too long and had to turn away. Though she feigned something like the Imperiess was beneath her dark gaze. Not worth her time.

But the truth was, when she tired of watching the inertia of this timeless space, she let herself think of her traitor of a lover. More times that she liked to admit. Mostly she fantasized about ripping Theoren’s head off, twisting her neck in such a way that it would allow her to pull it clean up with her spine. She'd then use her head as a wrecking ball against the other Imperiessa. (It certainly was big enough to suit that purpose, she knew.) The fantasy helped soothe her during those early days, but at the cost of having to think of her.

Now it was almost as if the will of the Everlasting had gifted her with the opportunity to act on such fascinations. Her fingers twitched, just inching closer to her saber as she contemplated the possibility. Her mouth watered. It’d been a while since she’d spilt blood. Too long. ‘I could drag her down with me.’

If only Theoren did not also hold the key to her escape. 'Damn.' She sighed. ‘I can murder her later.’ Besides, she'd rather kill her at her full power with her teeth and claws. Swords always felt so brutish to her. They lacked intimacy.

“There are easier ways to get tied up, you know. I would have been happy to, had you asked in that voice you know I like.” She kept the lightless of her tone, the one she used exclusively on those she vowed to eliminate. “But surely there are others whom you could bother. So what is it that you want, darling? Be quick."

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren had once spent a great deal of time trying to understand the links between the realms. One day a passage would be but a single step. The next, that step would have become a lifetime's journey, slipping in and out of realms more distant from each other than the stars from the the darkness. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the shape of the winding roads through the dominion and beyond.

When she had asked the Allseer, it had been Demertu, perched on the rock at her side as she too-often was, who had answered. She was using her nails to chisel a spear-tip out of petrified wood.

"Sometimes the journey is reason itself."

Theoren had stepped forward with a hand outstretched, and clutched the rock before Demertu could dance away. With a light squeeze, it shattered into dust.

When she had looked up, Demertu had shrugged. "You're boring, Theoren. Boring."

The last time Theoren had travelled to the realm of the Whisper's exile, she had simply tipped the other Imperiess over a ledge; they had fallen through darkness, together, and moments later, there they had been. That timeslip was long gone, impervious to rediscovery, impossible to pry back into existence. Those lonely deserts of exile were cordoned off, cast away to the most distant reaches of the dominion.

Forgettable - as Theoren had ensured.

The new path was different from the old. She had taken a long path to one of the outlying realms, and from there had found a timeslip where the Allseer had laid it. This had brought her to a world where it always rained. Men and women, squat and plump, walked naked through the muddy streets. They stared at her in almost as much shock as horror. Her footsteps splattered their stone-faced buildings in grime and mush. In the midst of the rain patter, she almost didn't notice the bullets. They came in ones and twos, as she came out onto the beach, thudding off her back. When she turned, she saw the glint of a lens crouched in the reeds at the top of a cliff. The next bullet hit her glove - her glove, placed carefully in front of her face. She closed the metal grip around the little wad, felt the warmth through the steel. She opened her hand, palm up, and studied it. Crude. Deadly, maybe, in the way these people understood it. But like a pebble from a child to her.

In three long strides she had crossed the beach and scaled the cliff, snatching the shooter from the grasses. She struggled, barely registering that she had been caught. Her rifle fell away, and Theoren crumpled it beneath her boot. Like the others of this world, the shooter was naked, save for a strap across her chest which held her bullets - and her knife. The mud-paint she had smeared across every inch of her skin streaked off where Theoren's grip scraped her skin.

"Monster!"

She spoke a rare language, but somehow Theoren knew it. Her words were sharp, and strained. Theoren realized she was crushing the wind out of her.

Gently, she loosened her grip, and leaned in to the struggling figure. She smelled of salty mud, and sweet tobacco.

"What would you do to me," she said, letting her mind find the language, "If you could?"

She sneered, for good measure. Moisture seeped between the fingers of her gauntlet. Not yet blood.

"Fuck you! Monster!"

Theoren sighed, and forgot about the woman. She began back towards the sea. Something struggled in her grip.

There was bravery in this world, and boldness. There was also brash stupidity - but the world could do with a little less of that.

As she dove beneath the waves, she held her grip firm. Her heavy armour sank quickly, even as she propelled it forward, moving with an inhuman grace for her size. Soon what little light had made its way through stormclouds and sea was lost in the murk and mire of the depths. Dim lights promised distant encounters with strange life. Gradually, Theoren's fingers loosened, and something slipped between them. It dropped, lifeless, towards the promise of a sea floor somewhere deeper down below.

Theoren swam on, and the water grew quick. It pushed back against her, and she pushed on. The currents parted on her like a blade. There was light in the water now, caught in the bubbles, in the rush. She burrowed deeper.

When she slipped through, she felt the change like she always did. A difference in the pressure, in the air, in the currents of her mind. Here, in this new realm, her mind was muddied. Her thoughts were slow. She recognized the feeling, and tuned herself to it. The world came into focus.

Before her were walls - and above her, water fell from an endless height. The walls were smooth. Unsheathing her blade, she stabbed. It caught, and formed a groove.

Step by step, she built her ascent, and climbed.

At the precipice - how long had passed? an age? - she found little human bodies with single large wheels for legs. They whizzed about through long, windowed corridors, taking notes on clipboards, adjusting the goggles on their faces. A few had trim, dark hair, but most were bald. A pair of them, hand in hand, stared out the windows at endless stars in a great cloud of ochre gas.

Theoren came up beside the pair, frowning at the expanse.

One of the pair looked up. Their goggles were iridescent mirrors across their eyes, but they smiled like they could see her.

"Imperiess," the wheel-thing said. It was a pleasant greeting. Theoren wondered if she had seen them before, or if it had been another in a distant age.

The other wheel-thing in the pair was laughing. Almost instantly seeming to forget the goddess leaning over them, the first wheel-thing turned to the second. It cocked its head.

"I'm only thinking," said the second wheel-thing, "How strange this would all be, if it only happened once."

The first wheel-thing seemed to think. "It did happen once, once. And then it happened again, and again. But once, it was only once."

"What is this realm?" Theoren asked.

The first wheel-thing looked up to her. "It's a beginning," it said, "But first it's an end. One of the extras. A one-in-a-million resolution. Remarkably rare."

"We've seen ten-thousand of them," said the second wheel-thing. "This time, we took a break."

The first wheel thing smiled. Sheepish. "And last time, too."

"Yes, last time too."

Theoren watched the stars, and the gas. She couldn't see them move. She couldn't hear them roar.

She thought about waiting. But she didn't. Leaving the wheel-things behind, she followed her nose.

It led her to a long corridor where the lights dimmed. Something whispered in the dark. Beckoned her forward.

Know me Know me Know me Know me Know me

She marched into the dark, past the voice she had heard a dozen times before. Suddenly the world was bright. The voice was gone.

Above her, a teal sky was shaded in with yellow, and the canopy opened and closed with little gaps to let the birds and bugs flit in and out. The ground under foot was thickened with vines and fern-tails. Long-stemmed purple flowers poked their heads out of thick clumps of roots at the foot of meter-wide trees. Groans crawled through the underbrush and snuck around the trunks of cycads to find their way into her ears.

She marched. Her armour rusted in the thickness of the heat.

This was an empty world. She could feel it, in the way the earth ate up her feet like a fresh lemon on a parched tongue. In the way strange calls echoed at every second moment of the day, as if each of the kingdom's thousand birds had booked its tenure in her ear. In the way the earth was green, and the trees, and the sky.

Empty. But not alone.

She found him in a clearing. His teeth were red with blood, his jaws sloppy with the oils of the flesh. He reared at the sound of her sneer, and turned to face her. His carcass lay there, spoils for the victor.

Her sneer turned to a grin, and slowly - religiously - she unsheathed her sword.

She itched to lunge forward, to attack. But she held off. That was her patience. Her virtue.

The tyrannosaur raised its head, jaw hanging slack, and roared.

She felt her blood stilling, and what was left of her ancient brain tried to shiver and found itself cut off from all those nerves. She listened, as the roar carried across the clearing, and out over the trees. It echoed back from who-knew how far. Majestic, and a testament to the power of the great hunters, the beasts who rode alone.

Theoren raised her head, and joined her howl to the tyrant's roar. The two sounds met, and merged. The forest heard them.

When their voices softened, and their eyes met, the tyrant and the butcher were in silence, and alone.

The beast snarled, and charged. She raised her sword, the tip just inches from the ground, and it picked up speed behind her as her legs carried her towards the tyrannosaur. Now he was moving, too, feet hammering forward, jaws bearing down -

Theoren dipped low, and raised the blade high. It flew over her shoulders with a twist, and then she used its tip against the mud to slow herself down. She turned back. The tyrannosaur was just turning now, too, and she could see glistening of fresh blood bubbling up from a gash along its side. She started to stand, and felt the thud, thud, thud of heavy feet.

She almost wasn't quick enough. When she turned, the second lizard's jaws were bearing down on her fleshy head. She caught them with her blade, and pushed, feeling the tyrannosaur lose purchase, its feet scrabbling in the mud as she shoved it away. It found its footing again, and now it was a battle of wills, the strength of a thousand lineages of predator who had ruled the ancient world against the harsh rush of adrenaline that had conquered all of time and space hereafter. Theoren was winning. But the first tyrannosaur, with only a flesh wound down its side, was coming with teeth readied for revenge.

She used the handle of her blade to swing under the second tyrannosaur, leaving the sword lodged in its mouth while she freed herself up to move around. The first tyrannosaur's charge suddenly landed it in the face of the first, and both tumbled. They were quick to recover, although the sword stayed lodged, and the second tyrannosaur was trying to pry it loose with leverage from the ground. The first tyrannosaur charged Theoren again, but now she was ready, she was alive. She grabbed for its jaw when it snapped too close, and suddenly she had both of them, one in either hand. Before it could groan for help, the first tyrannosaur's skull was split in two straight through the middle, one jaw wrenched from the other. Theoren howled, and it was a sound that only this world could know.

The second tyrannosaur had seen the aftermath, even if it couldn't comprehend it, and was backing away, towards the forest and the shadows of the trees. Theoren grinned, and beckoned it closer - but it ignored her, marching on, her sword still lodged between its teeth. She gave chase, and now it turned to face her, cornered by her speed. It swung its head quickly, and the handle of her blade almost caught her on the skull - but she grabbed it instead, and tugged it free. Blood gushed from the new wounds along the lizard's lips and gums. It raised its head, meaning to slam all two-hundred pounds of it into its would-be killer - but Theoren stepped back, and when the tyrannosaur's head fell where she had been, she let gravity drive her blade through the thick flesh at its neck.

Her breathing dulled, and the pauses between the drip-drip-drips of the blood stretched out into seconds. Mosquitoes buzzed.

She sat and cleaned her blade. When night fell, she lit a fire. The lizard's flesh was lean, and lightly roasted. Scavengers yelped for their share of the kill. In the morning, she let them have it, and travelled on her way.

The timeslip was in an anthill under an old rock. She lifted the rock, and slipped through. She shouldn't have.

***
​

"You. You. You -"

Her three first words each embodied a different world of tones.

You asshole, was what the first had tried to say. Of course it's you. Of course you haven't changed. Haven't learned a thing out here in all this time. Haven't learned your fucking lesson, like the spoiled little brat you've always been.

Casmira looked like a specter of the Laughing Ghost, clad in sun-bleached whites that swallowed up her little form as if it wasn't there. She wore them like a desperate shield against a world that would shred them to pieces. So desperate to keep out the world, so desperate to cling to the idea she was safe, or could be safe, or had ever been safe. She looked like she could barely remember what safety was, smarming out from under her robes like a fiend, so proud of her fucking self -

You dare? The second had almost gotten out, fueled by a kind of innocent bewilderment, because as much as this was Casmira, Casmira of the Well-Worn Whisper, Casmira of the Garden, Blackwing, The Horned Goddess - this was also nothing Theoren had ever known. So far gone from the polished paragon Theoren had scrapped for parts and left here and had carved out of her memories until the Allseer had tugged her back in. Like a fossil, with all the bones, the frame of the being that had once been, this Casmira stood before her, and Theoren thought she could see a hint of madness in her eyes. Old Vladistaya had once found an exiled Imperiess, broken on a rotting moon, and kept her as a pet for an age before the Allseer had made her kill her pet and take her place on that moon, where no Imperiess had set foot since. But that pet had been broken in a different way - vacant in the eyes, and crooked at the neck. Casmira still held herself as if pulled up by strings. As if she had never known how to slouch, and there had been no one on this distant world to teach her.

And she still, this crippled wretched thing, had the fucking audacity to pull a trick like this? To lace a net and toss it at her Goddess? You forget what you've lost, little girl. Not an Imperiess in a million ages past. Not a Goddess. But you cling to it. Pathetic. Are you nothing without it?

She wasn't. Theoren knew.

"- fucked up," finished the last one. Theoren began to laugh, letting her body shake dangerously close to the edges of the runes. "You fucked up bad. These runes smell stale, little girl. Don't waste my time and maybe I'll feel particularly efficient about teaching you a lesson."

 

[starboob]

The Butcher becoming the Blithering Idiot was possibly the highlight of Casmira’s long tenure in this realm. (There wasn’t much competition.) She bit her lip on her smirk before it became a bark of laughter. The glint in her eyes, however, might have given away her thoughts on the matter. But leave it to Theoren to nestle beneath her skin like it was her home base. She would have been content to move on and take her win, but the other Imperiess—Casmira would not surrender the title until it was cut from her damn tongue—was intent on wresting it from her. (But wasn’t that always their game? Was that not why she—)

Heat flared through her veins (or was just an illusion of the desert?) and were she still the Dragon, she knew the fire would be crawling up her throat from her stomach.

Little girl, little girl. The words caught around the shell of her ears, swirling round and round. They wormed inside her head, banging against her skull as loud as gongs. Little girl.

Her nails cut crescents into her palms, blood simmering against her flaming skin. By the time she remembered to release, the wound had healed around her nails, opening them all over again.

‘I am going to annihilate her.’

Current situation be damned, Casmira would find another way.

Theoren was not her salvation. That lesson, she had learned. It was foolish of her to have had that lapse in memory. ‘I will sup the marrow from her bones.’

“Oh, my apologies, great Imperiess.” She bowed low—too low and too exaggerated to ever be a sign of real respect. “Had I known I would be so blessed, I would have been sure to harden my spells to meet one of your stature.” Satisfaction returned to her lips, spreading them wide. “Though it seems I already have.” Was it wise to egg the other on? Absolutely not, but spare her the lecture. Her temper always made an unwelcome appearance around her. “Look at you, darling. This is abominable. Have you grown soft? Dull? …Duller?”

Theoren was not wrong to point out the ancient trap, set so many years in advance and forgotten like a doll abandoned while fleeing a war. On a lesser Imperiess, perhaps Ceridwyn or that ignoramus Forsythia—or if Ishla the Great Shame were ever to come back—it could have held and she’d be staring at their flayed faces. But Theoren was not lesser. Casmira would never have chosen lesser. (Sometimes she loathed herself for that.) Therefore, she would not count on the ancient spell, crafted from the dregs of her power, to hold the Butcher.

(Despite her current foolishness, she was not, in essence, a fool.)

The saber seemed heavier on her hip as she considered the predictability of what she expected to happen next. Privately, she grimaced, but it wasn’t enough to back down. Few things ever had Casmira backing down, especially where Theoren was concerned.

Besides, did she not deserve some entertainment? A thrill for this thrill-less life that had been so unfairly thrust upon her? She thought so. At the expense of her life and, at worst, her dignity, she thought so.

There was also a choice here. Small and not preferable, but it was there. A semblance of control was there. (Even if she had already damned herself.) Casmira would always grasp for control where she could, paltry as it was in this moment.

She sighed, then snapped her fingers, releasing the Imperiess from the trap, dissolving the glyphs one by one. The chasm beneath her closed and she was dropped. (Casmira dangerously hoped Theoren would fall on her face, but she wasn’t sure her luck would strike twice.)

“Teach me a lesson, my love.” The exiled Imperiess had yet to draw her saber, but the air around her seemed to spark. The skies even darkened with her tone. (Was it in her head? Was it in her head?) “Remind me why you are called the Butcher.”

Casmira did not have a death wish, but she did wish to suss out why and some part of her believed the answer might be at the edge of her sword or the bump of her knuckles. (Why her? Why her? Why not her? Less important, why was she fucking here!?) Even so, she would not make this easy. So if Theoren took the bait, accepted the dance, she decided she would give all she could. Everything. (Was it wise to give this undeserving hellcat everything twice? Was it? If she could make it worth it, then yes.)

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren had fought blind before - sometimes with the blood splatters of her enemies clogging her eyes, sometimes with half her head torn off by shrapnel, once with a long-armed frog clinging to her skull, hands plastered against her eyes. There had been a time when she'd recruited the priestesses to blind her, treating herself with Lysandra's perverse penance to prove the handicap was no real imposition at all, no excuse to justify a loss or salve an ego. She had fought blind, and bloodied, and lacking in limbs; sometimes they had grown back before she'd caved in the skulls of those who stole them from her, and other times her retribution was too swift. Blind, bloodied, burned - there was no excuse she would let herself crawl to, none that could make a bitch of the Butcher.

So she was disappointed, when Casmira let her glyphs dissolve, giving up her last advantage. It would have been more precious to shove her failures in the exile's face, the gaping wound in her own a bald reminder of just how outmatched she was. Casmira was more desperate than she had thought, so desperate she would take anything she was offered - anything that let her believe for even a moment that she had a choice, a will, a shred of control. Theoren was disappointed.

But never caught off guard. She slipped free of the forces that held her, swiveling with the air, shifting her weight so gravity served her wishes. She landed on a knee, a foot, and her glove. She peered up, half-knelt before the exile and still at least her equal in height.

"As you wish, my lady," she said, and thrust herself from her knees.

Her movement was quick, and her fist was brutal. Metal fingers wrapped around the exile's throat - she felt the thinness of the flesh through the cloth, and loosened just a smidge without meaning to. A meaningless smidge, really - but she hadn't meant to, until she had remembered what she was dealing with here. Not Casmira. Not an Imperiess. Not any more.

Not for long, was the next thought, and instantly her grip was twice as tight, her sneer twice as wide, her breath twice as hot on her opponent's face.

 

[starboob]

Her fist closed around her throat before she even had the thought to spirit herself away to the far end of the desert. (As if she could ever be that quick in this reduced state.) Half of her last breath sputtered out while the rest remained trapped, pressing uncomfortably against the bottom of her lungs. Her mouth opened against her will, struggling to gasp or swallow against the crush of Theoren’s fist. She could feel all coherent thoughts fleeing out of her ears as survival took over, causing her to grasp at the Imperiess’s fist.

It wasn’t much, it was hardly meaningful and almost taunting, but that smidge of relief, that half-second of miniscule reprieve, was all she needed. With her dark eyes bulged, face bluing, she concentrated every ounce of her remaining coherence to take a half step backwards.

A delayed boom broke across the desert as the exile finally spirited herself halfway across it.

…Though, not without taking Theoren. Not without even removing herself from her damned fist! It was like the moment she tightened her grip, she made it impossible for Casmira to pry herself away. She tried again and the grip remained unrelenting. So the third time, she took them to the depths of the salt waters she created centuries and centuries ago.

The warmed waters welcomed her, the old grief brushing against her cheeks affectionately. She had no room to push them away or dismiss them and, for once, she did not want to. Strength was fast leaving her and though her body reflexively tried to repair itself, what could she do while it was getting crushed and re-crushed, healing improperly each time? Little. So with the last of her efforts, she flattened her palms, called the runes from her mind to print against them, and batted them into the sea of tears. They took on a faint glow, brightening as they danced around the two Imperiessa. The waters stirred and with a final flip of her wrist a current cut up, severing Theoren’s hand at the wrist while several other currents wrapped around the Imperiess, hurling her backwards in a swell of ocean and pinning her under a vortex.

 

[be_l_l_e]

The cut was clean, but Theoren felt the raggedness of the edges of the water, molecules threatening to break from the mold, as the pain of sheering metal, flesh, and bone coursed through her body.

It wasn't really pain, though. It was just what she knew to call pain. She had never asked them to remove it, had even tried to revel in it, to seek it out, to drive it to her core. But at some point, lost in distant time, buried under memories relived past recognition, the pain had become something she loved, rather than hated. She missed the panic of her old pains, the feeling of vitality, of being on the brink of something different and new. But she also loved the soullessness of this new pain, the way it stole her heartbeat for a moment, made dust grind loose from clenching teeth. It was base, it was wrong; it was a sign of a truly broken mind, broken by time and broken by meaningless violence with no search for an end.

And it still was rare. She worked hard to find new ways of losing limbs and eyes and hearts. Shameless ways.

Here, it was charity. A hand was a small price to pay for the exile to feel like she had won a skirmish before she lost the fight.

The gauntlet, and the flesh within it, were already long gone in the whirlwinds away from her, and something new was growing in its place, a reddish mound with clumps of metal still almost-soft across a surface that couldn't be called skin. Her hand would heal without her, so she ignored it. More pressing was the pressure, the vortex pushing at her chestplate.

She was tired of the water. Yes, that was this emotion.

Her good hand rose, and snapped; and in one second and another half, the water was gone, sucked up in a tiny speck where her hand had been. The space was empty for a moment, and then the air rushed into the vacuum with a gale, and the smell of salt lingered where the sea of tears had been.

She breathed in. Across the desiccated bed she could see Casmira, bereft of her ocean, bereft of her powers - perhaps still bereft of a breath or two that Theoren had stolen.

The gap between them could be nothing in an instant, so Theoren let it stand. She flexed her missing wrist, felt a half-formed tendon crack and re-fuse. She rolled her neck.

"You want to run, Casmira? Or is it the animal in you?" She turned to spit, returning an ounce of moisture to the dirt she'd stolen it from. "Is that how far you're gone? Fear?"

 

[starboob]

Casmira choked, sputtered, heaved gulps of air as her throat reopened and mended itself. Her shoulders shook with each breath, her eyes wild as the true state of her fragile mind revealed itself. Fury burned through the dark depths, bright enough to be seen across the expanse that kept the two apart. Her eyes never left Theoren as she collected her crumpled body from the now dry sands.

She stepped over the Imperiess's discarded hand and pulled out her saber. This only made her miss her claws. Her teeth. Her fire. Everything that made her the Great Dragon (an Imperiess). It reminded her that everything she once had was stolen from her by the Imperiess who stood across the desert.

How dared she. To take and discard her here, like a piece of trash, was one thing, but to comeback and mock? (Nevermind that Casmira started this.) Just what the fuck was she even doing here if she so obviously thought that Casmira was beneath the shit stuck between the grooves of her damned boots?

That was what she found most unforgivable.

Her sword dragged across the sands, leaving behind a groove as she took the slowest route to her. Her long midnight hair fell around her face, nearly hiding it entirely, as she approached the mad dog. For once her posture drooped. "Am I the animal? Am I?" Her shoulders shook with laughter that crackled like thunder. Perhaps the ages of isolation had finally caught up to her. In the moment where she was faced with a past she now knew to be true and not just a trick, she finally saw the world crumbling around her.

"At least I could actually defeat you at the full height of my power." If Theoren ever bothered to look to the past, she might remember their spars myriads prior and how frustratingly matched they had been. But she knew the other well enough to know she preferred to bury the past. (Like she buried her.) "Will this win taste sweet, knowing you could only stand to challenge me in exile?" She spat with no short amount of bitterness. "I mourn for the Everlasting if these are the incompetent hands that it is left in."

The exile crossed the divide in another step with another boom and with her small, unimpressive form, leapt into the air to strike the Goddess with her weapon.

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren only laughed. She knew it would spite Casmira worse than any words.

As the little creature fell towards her with that feeble blade held up like a weapon, Theoren watched. If she squinted and forced her perspective back, she could almost imagine it was a giant in the upper atmosphere - or a mite just above her eye.

As it grew larger, she waited, the real perspective firmest in her mind, and reached out with her good hand to grab the edge of the blade - and use that as leverage to toss Casmira to the other side of the dried-up sea.

 

[starboob]

An entire galaxy spread across her shredded back. The white shawl she wore had torn against the dried up sea, threads of it now fused with her burnt or bruised flesh. For a second, maybe longer, she couldn't be so sure, her vision was full of black stars. It seemed an entire lifetime of oxygen had been knocked from her lungs before she was able to gasp again.

Somewhere she lost her sword to the desert. She could feel around for it, but the futility of this was glaring at her with the same intensity as the dual suns above. 'Fuck.' Her body sunk further into the sand. 'Fuck!'

'Dammit.' She peeled herself from her spot, her back probably having swallowed half the sands as it healed, and rose. The ruined top half of her garment fell in ribbons behind her. She stared at the mountain of a woman from her place, then stepped forward, keeping the distance between them. Though she knew it didn't matter. "What do you want, Imperiess?"

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren smirked as she watched Casmira rise. Barely a speck out there in the sands, but she could make out all the details, and hear every grunt of over-exerted breath. It was easier to imagine what pity might feel like, watching this.

"Want?" She cocked her head to the side, let her own voice travel the distance between them like the hoot of a vulture. "You would know what it is to have a thing out of your grasp. Strange. But you must be used to that by now." As she spoke, the distance between them shrunk (though her strides seemed lax and loose), and how she towered over her old lover became clearer and clearer. She stooped - not so low as to make them equals - only to emphasize the point. "Do you like wanting, hmm? Should I leave you here, to want forever? I've heard the chase is better than the... high."

 

[starboob]

Casmira barely withheld the urge to roll her eyes as the Imperiess made her way across the dried up sea. Up close again, she thought that Theoren's head had somehow gotten bigger over the ages, though that was not something she would comment on. Not now, at least.

She pulled her mask together, but pieces were missing and cracks were still obviously there. She was not so practiced at this any longer, having not had to practice in centuries. (That was her oversight, one she found hard to admit.)

And her mask fell almost as quickly as she had scrapped it back together, putting together the implications in Theoren's words. (A chance?) Her brow shot up, eyes widening. "As if the choice is mine. ...Or yours." She pointed out. "Is the Allseer not why you are here?" She certainly could not imagine Theoren coming on her own accord. "Is this not the will of the Everlasting?" Her expression bled into something neutral, though her heartbeat betrayed her. (A chance, a chance, a chance!) "The Allseer knows I am faithful. Leave me here to want if you wish, but she will know. You cannot hide from her, Goddess or no."

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren smiled. It was kinder than laughter, but between her and Casmira, anything was cruel.

"I trust in her paths."

She circled.

"If she sends me to die, perhaps I die. Perhaps I live. Her will is achieved regardless, only because she has spoken and I have heard. If she sends me to tie off one last loose end on an empty desert world, perhaps my blade comes home clean." She shrugged. "Perhaps it does not. Either way, I have done as she has foreseen. She will know nothing - it is all already known. So if you die?" Theoren snorted. "Then that is her will. Not mine to judge, but mine to act."

This time Theoren laughed.

"And if she didn't want you dead... well, she didn't need to send me."

She raised her hand, and found Casmira's sabre in her grip. She nodded to it, offering a toss.

Another round?

 

[starboob]

Casmira considered Theoren's words as she considered the blade, her lips forming a thin line. After all these centuries, she at least remembered to never trust another Imperiessa, least of all the giant who circled her like a vulture; the one who spoke betrayal and falsehoods as her native tongue.

"Done is done, then." She did not know where taking the blade would lead—not exactly—but she tilted her head and considered the possibilities, weighing out the regret against the humiliation. Casmira wrinkled her nose over each outcome, no matter how amusing. Still, she had a duty and knew what was required of her to achieve that end.

Her hand hovered over the blade.

In a blink, Casmira and the blade were gone, finding a home within Theoren's ribcage. You know, since she was so married to her role as warden.

 

[be_l_l_e]

As the blade pierced the metal that coated her skin, that very metal rushed in, cauterizing the wound along the blade. Then, slowly at first and in rapid succession once it had begun, flesh seeped through the metal, recovering the organs that had once been there. Theoren felt none of it, except as a tickle. The end of the saber had been subsumed, had become her flesh. She grunted, and then reached out a hand for Casmira's shoulder - and shoved her away.

The blade of her saber, weakened by a virus seeping in from the wound, shattered at the hilt. But it was already done - the virus had slipped through into the handle, and now it doubled and branched like vines. Where it found flesh, it sizzled, and burrowed in, suddenly slipping through the hands and up Casmira's arms. A sickness from the wound.

Theoren studied it, surprised for a second - and then chuckled. She had nearly forgotten that she had cooked that up, some dozens of milennia ago, ready to spring on Casmira the next time she stabbed her with that particular blade. All the pieces of the sickness were perfectly tailored, matched only to that well-known metal, only to that unmistakeable flesh, and stored in the armour that was the ever-present outer layer of her skin. Waiting for an eternity, and finally unleashed for its purpose. The way it jumped and sizzled through the flesh reminded Theoren of an eager, stupid dog.

"Oh. I'm sorry for that one. Hardly fair. Here," she said, and reached out again, grabbing Casmira by the hair and heaving her off the ground. "Let me."

She reached for her own blade with her half-regrown hand, and found that she could clutch her blade... well enough. Her slicing was sloppy, and where she chopped off the arms - at the shoulders, to be sure she didn't let any sliver of the virus seep into the rest of the flesh - the cuts were ragged-edged and bloodier than she'd have liked. She tried again, just above the knees. Better. It was a skill that she could practice, at least.

She tossed the limbless form to the sands, and plopped herself down beside it, her blade propped across her knees.

 

[starboob]

Casmira had died once and she was certain she was about to die a second time. It was her great shame she could not do so in peace and had to endure the presence of the Imperiess she loathed the most.

'Ugh, who am I? Ceridwyn? Quit the melodrama.'

She would not die. Of all the things that still worked about this puny flesh prison, it had to be her regeneration and hers had always been faster than the other Imperiessa. She credited it once to be being the Great Dragon, but now that she was no longer that, she guessed that it must have been something else. Perhaps her own stubbornness. Perhaps the Allseer's cruelty. Maybe both.

Clean bone was already stretching out from the stumps; meat, sinew, veins, and skin following. It was an interesting sensation, almost long lost to the annals of her memory. She concentrated on it, like if she put the sensation under scrutiny she could ignore the swell of fucking embarrassment in her belly. Goddess. She might not be able to die—at least, it would take something stronger than this—but it was another thing she could add to her long list of wants. 'This is such a waste. Disgusting.'

Lazily, she looked up at the other through strands of hair. "Well," she raised a stump of arm and managed to give the impression she was rolling her wrist. “Consider myself reminded." She let the growing thing fall. She decided to only feel sorry that this could not have been the myriad duel of their past. (She missed the feeling of Theoren's heart in her fist. It popped so pleasantly. If she concentrated hard enough, she could still grasp at the phantom sensation.) "I would you leave. Your face it... It exhausts me."

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren glanced over to Casmira. The fleshy growths were still useless, but growing quickly. She stood, and raised her blade, a figure silhouetted against the sun.

She hacked, down. A flesh stump of regrowing arm slipped loose.

She prepared for her next swing. "I can cover my face, Casmira. If that's really what bothers you. I can even let your limbs regrow. Would you like that? Or maybe you would like to go home? To serve again?" She paused her aim, and let her sword fall to her side. The flesh could regrow for a little while longer while she stood idle. "Anything you want, Casmira. Anything. I only need... to hear it from you. Ask me for it."

And she stared, with a tilt of her head. They could still speak without words, this pair.

Beg.

 

[starboob]

No.

She would not beg. Theoren could hack her into the next fucking century and Casmira would not fucking beg.

It wasn't even like she could trust the other Imperiess to keep her word. Not when she was the one who had damned her to this place. Traitor. Even momentarily, to trust her would be something worse than death. She could not. She would not. She would bite off her tongue and swallow it a thousand times before she ever fucking begged.

'Don't be such a fucking child,' some part of her chided, trying to appeal to the part of her that knew its purpose and knew that purpose was larger than her pride. 'Do not risk your one chance. You can always make her pay later. Once you are restored. Once you are the Horned Goddess, sitting atop your celestial throne. Die the Whisper or become the Harbinger.'

She tried to convince herself she did not miss it that much, but the thought almost made her hysterical. Of course she fucking missed it. Of course she fucking hated this desert—until thirty minutes ago, she would have said she hated it more than Theoren. (The only thing she currently hated more than Theoren was the sound of her name on her lips. She'd rip off her mouth for that one.)

Her dark eyes bore into Theoren's, memorizing this moment to fuel the eternities of revenge to come.

"Please," she practically hissed the word, the syllable dripping with venom. (She could feel this dead world dying a new death with each force of malice she pushed from her mouth.) "Take me back home, Imperiess. I would serve again. I would give my life to the Everlasting and have and will continue to do so if you take me back home. Theoren." Here, she dropped the venom and adopted the tone she remembered the other Imperiess liked. "Be my salvation. Return me home."

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren nodded.

She felt a warmth, somewhere within her. Sometimes it was difficult to tell where those emotions swelled and languished, her body and brain so gone from any semblance of normal or routine. She wondered if it was there, just below her breastplate; or if perhaps it was deep in the flesh behind her cheeks. It pushed itself up against a limit, and it glowed. Theoren relished it, for a moment. She stared down at pathetic little Casmira, legs and arms still sprouting like carrots out of the mud, and let the feeling feast.

She had endured. Through all the years, all the torture, Casmira had endured. Theoren was almost jealous, but accepting that emotion, relishing in that, would have brought her face to face with too much other baggage. So instead she settled on labelling the sensation of that warmth as... pride.

Casmira had done it. She had made it.

"I'm proud of you, Imperiess Casmira," Theoren said, and turned to find the timeslip that would take them back.

 

[starboob]

Casmira followed Theoren, though trailed behind the giant until she was an ant on the horizon. The Imperiess didn't mind, however. The privacy was needed while humiliation continued to burn a hole through her belly. ("I'm proud of you, Imperiess Casmira.") Her ex-lover's mockery—because she refused to believe it could have been anything else—plagued her mind. Over and over again those wretched words repeated themselves until the syllables blended together and turned to nonsense.

So focused she was on the vitriol that she nearly walked into Theoren's massive fucking leg, not realizing the other had stopped. Before them was a sliver, like a seam, in the desert's mirage. Rather than take that eager step forward, Casmira took a half step back when faced with the timeslip. For a fraction, she merely stared through the seam. She blinked. Then again.

Beyond the threshold was a long mirrored walkway that, for as far as the eye could see, only went straight. On either side were thick columns of flowing magma with no discernible end or beginning. The realm seemed empty, though Casmira was not focused on those finer details, too caught up in her skepticism.

A chill tickled her spine, though she didn't shiver to let it show. She bit down harshly on her cheek instead.

The Imperiess stepped forward.

When her body did not immediately disintegrate to ash, when Theoren did not tug her by her hair and toss her across the desert just to mock her, she almost wept another ocean.

Almost.

Instead, despite her prior hesitation, she picked up her composure and sauntered through the realm like it was hers to own. And it was. As an Imperiess, it was. (She truly was returning home.)

"Should we pass through a realm with competent priestesses, I wish my form restored. I shan't be seen by the others like... this." No, she need not give those prats anymore reason to mock her upon her return. And she would need her powers restored in order to remind them why she is not to be crossed.

She tilted her head up, not quite staring at Theoren directly but enough to give the impression. "Has it changed much? Home?"

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren knew the walkway was old, and firm, because it did not shudder under her steps. She could pass along it with what felt like light feet, basking unperturbed in the smoldering heat of the magmatic world. There was a music in the quiet crackle of this place, in the faint whoosh of heat-bound currents of air that played at being winds, gusting far above and far below. But her body could be free of it, could simply march. She did march. The walkway continued. Time disappeared, in this place that was endless in all directions.

Casmira shattered the illusion with a smattering of words, restoring a 'present' where none was needed.

Theoren didn't snarl, and the lava didn't sizzle with fresh flesh to feed its embers.

She had forgotten how much The Whisper talked.

Has it changed?

She tried to think on the question, but found her thoughts moving in circles. When? She could remember moments with Casmira, and moments without; but they were all just moments in an endless pastiche, and some were better, and some were worse. She had wiped so many of them from her mind, like carving out all the lines from a constellation and staring at pure stars, wondering what story they told.

She remembered building a constellation, once. She remembered someone's laughter.

She remembered blood on her hands, and crushed skulls, and tear ducts that weren't hers. She remembered skin, like sandpaper.

She remembered a joke. She remembered a frown. She remembered not remembering, steering her thoughts away when recollection threatened.

She remembered the endlessness of an empty realm where she had lain in tall grass and let jackdogs nibble at her face, and when she had risen roots had ripped up from the ground and the white threads of fungal sheets had torn through her armour and her flesh. She remembered a scream, deep in her mind, where the fungus had penetrated her own thoughts; and the scream had not been hers, but of a dying thing, of a thing that had dreamed her memories of immortality and found in itself a yearning for the same. And it had died, there.

She remembered grey skies. A thousand grey skies.

Has it changed?

"No," she said, and let that suffice.

 

[starboob]

Ah. How she missed their monosyllabic conversations.

Casmira rolled her eyes and continued down the walkway. It was a wonder what she ever saw in Theoren when she oft required stimulation beyond that which a spar could provide. But if she pondered that query for too long, she would find herself in bed with the past and though she did not avoid the past as she knew some of her kind did, those memories ought to stay in the closet with the other skeletons.

So though her mind was starved for conversation, she would not force it.

The end for them on this magmatic world came from a whisper, a bird squawk carried by the spiraling heat blasts that beckoned them to one of the massive columns. Between the unending folds of lava, sea salt invited the Imperiessa forward and Casmira slipped her body through the folds of heat onto the multi-colored sands of a beach. 'How many realms more is this?'

She did not wait for Theoren. She walked where she felt pulled, determined to reach home.

 

[be_l_l_e]

Theoren enjoyed the relative silence of it, where the only words of Casmira's with which she had to contend were the ones she silently projected onto that broken mind stumbling before her.

Not stumbling physically, perhaps. Casmira would never have let herself stumble; she was too desperate for grace. But as she was, with fresh legs and long eons out of sight and with a crumbling mind and a thousand thoughts... Theoren would gladly admit that she might have imagined it all, all that uncertainty, all that imprecision, all that imperfection. But the admission would be joined by a sly up-turned corner of her mouth, and the little thrilled double-beating of her heart that came with telling such a petty lie.

The fires ceased and they walked out onto the saltflats of a glistening world. The blue & cloudless skies, and the shimmering feathers on that lone white seabird up above, told her this was a realm far distant from the Everlasting's core. Barren, perhaps, or else littered only with smallfolk and wildlings. Maybe a young prince who would save his people with the discovery of faint magic; or a princess with a crooked mind, who would doom them with the same. Long ago, she would have wondered which world she might prefer, if it were up to her. Now she only pictured them, these possibilities, and felt a new coat of the same paint on her wrinkling mind.

Her gait had shifted without her noticing, and she moved across the sands as effortlessly as she had marched down the walkway - as if she experienced nothing in this world but herself and her actions, and those actions would be constant and true in any world, at any time.

Finally she found her eyes had settled on Casmira before her. She moved with haste, always pulling away, always rushing as if to prove... Theoren wasn't sure what she wanted to prove. She could feel something old and familiar rearing its ugly head within her heart, where she had buried the memory under the knife of the Priestess Astrelle - those dual sensations, of sometimes knowing there was no one in the world who would ever understand her so much; and other times seeing only the alien secrets of the thing she was supposed to know so well.

But for all her haste, Casmira could not leave Theoren behind; they walked the same paths, tugged by the same strings of fate lain down by the same timeless god. Years before, in its infancy, this world had been cast out along a path that let only this future be true. And now an exiled goddess walked along sands that guided her to her salvation. And Theoren watched.

 

[starboob]

The salt flats reminded Casmira of her childhood home. A home that had long since been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again. A home in a realm that ceased to exist some myriads ago. A home whose memory was so much like a dusted over trinket left on the top shelves of her long memory, that she had nearly forgotten it was there until her fingers brushed over it while cleaning.

It was strange to recall those distant years, to recall that she had once been a child, yet she inspected it with the same interest she would have a river rock that caught her eye. And like a river rock, she eventually let the memory sink back to the depths and let her mind wander along other streams.

Though her thoughts, ever traitorous, drifted back to Theoren. (She blamed it on the oppressive shadow looming over her as they walked this same path together.) As unwelcome as the topic was, it was persistent and demanded her consideration. For in all her centuries of exile, in all her centuries of plotting and scheming, she was forced now to consider the largest obstruction that stood in the way of her vision.

Imperiess Casmira did not have to wonder whether or not the other Imperiess would get in her way, but how.

How.

Theoren might not have been her only threat, but she was the Imperiess who concerned her the most, for Casmira knew her well enough to know she would thwart her for sport. It had been so before and it would continue to be so now, she imagined. Their altercation earlier at least seemed to indicate that Theoren was still the same brute that she had always been.

To bring her vision to fruition, she would need to figure out what to do about her. Hoping another Imperiess might have risen to match Theoren's rank was not even a distant hope in Casmira's mind. Had that been so, Theoren would not have been the Imperiess tasked with retrieving her. She knew it would have to be her to bring down the Butcher and she would endure every torture necessary to turn herself into the perfect vessel to accomplish such a task. To embody the Harbinger.

Ever focused, she continued her race through the realms, each step bringing her closer to her restoration. Her power.

 

[be_l_l_e]

They walked through a spit of darkness and found themselves in a grove of trees. The undergrowth was sparse here, where children might have trampled young growths.

Theoren looked overhead. Through a canopy of thin leaves yellowed by a blasphemous rot, she could see the grey clouds that draped across this world like they did across so many others. Against her armour, she felt the chill of a wind, somehow snaking through the trees to find something to chill.

"Grey skies," she called out, and turned to find how car her companion had strayed. When she met her eyes, she nudged her chin upwards. "If you can't bare to be... this, when the others see you - then we may find a priestess here."