Chapter 16: Chapter 17: Of a fool who deemed herself a heroine, and every price paid that day

An armored suit. A mane of flowing dark hair. Runes and circuitry and palm-blasters using a fusion of magic and mundane technology to hurl plasma streams... oh, fateless days, how they've all begun to blend together. There are other heroes, but the leader's nature is a felt thing. She utters quips that the old one does not hear. Vomits ideals and speeches and boldly-vacuous counterarguments to things the six-horned silhouette never said.

"Which equally-dismissible answer would you like me to give?" the Lady asks, as immovable upon her throne as a statue. She makes the mistake of paying attention for five full seconds.

"Not that easy--class is in session!" the heroine yells, voice warbling through her mask, "and you're not dismissed until you learn your less--"

A razor-seam swarm of little glints snap out across the hall.

All these little shapes made of colors and things that squirm against binding monofilaments. That semi-radiant something the kshiinurzhalg witnesses with her other-sight... those are supposed to be souls, yes, filling their limbs? Swelling with their breath?

"New proposal," the Lady says. Blue glimmers burrow out of sudden tears in her form. "Rekindle my interest, and I will spare the lives of your comrades." Her hues shift--through violet into red, and red into pink, and at last to a certain beguiling magenta.

"Don't listen to her!" one of the shapes shouts. "Don't let her get into your head! No matter what she does--"

"I believe," the Lady says, tittering behind a hand of unfolding nova as she squeezes her talons together, "that we've heard more than enough of talk like that." Oh, the silence. The beautiful, blissful silence as the singing filaments pull taut. It doesn't last very long, of course: first the sickly sounds of hissing and squelching, and then a sudden peeling cry as the wires sink in.

"Stop it!" someone screams.

"Stop what?" the Lady asks. "It's only a little murder."

She tilts her head. A mosaic of eyes opening and closing across her brow, cheeks, jawline shadows. The twin pinpoints of nova have long since disappeared--or perhaps they've grown to encompass her whole form. Who's to say? Is that a grin, or just a ragged hole in her face? She regards the first case much as a novice nurse might an anatomical model: curious, impassive, perhaps a little concerned that she's missing something. Eventually, the screaming stops.

The meat still lives, of course, as far as these things can be called alive. This husk's whimpers have such a bubbly intrigue to them.

"This is the part where you call me a monster, yes?" the Lady asks of the armored figure. "Now, then, please try to follow the rules I set out. I said YOU were to rekindle my interest. Your friends should keep quiet."

"FUCK! YOU!" screams the heroine in all her shiny arcanatech armor.

"Hm... that's awfully generic," the Lady says. "I really am sorry, but I'm afraid the game has no meaning if I don't hold you to the rules. Oh well." She looks to a quivering, full-breasted hourglass thing. Oh, but that surge of cyan terror and shock-white denial in the heroine's aura... that's too delicious to burn out so early on.

Who... oh, yes! The little non-human one. The emblem of this found family's compassion and embrace of "the other". Their pet morality-medallion.

"Do you know what I love about a good, clean cut?" the Lady asks conversationally, as the wires thrum and whip and dice the scaley, cringing little form apart from the toes up and the fingers in--centimeters at a time. "It's so versatile. You can use it so many different ways!"

The heroine screams "No!" and some cutesy, simple name that must be meant for the tiny scrap-creature. It can't answer, of course--bound to life only by the Lady's refusal to let it die, by the rose-pink hymn of Her perfection stimulating its agonized neurons back to lucid.

"My," says She, Ancient and Most High, the Reborn Star. "I had never before pondered that a snout could become a stump like that! Fascinating, isn't it? The flesh and bone and brain in cross-section? The cut is not, of course, present in her psyche. A shame. Probably hurt less."

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" the heroine wails. "They're people! How can you... how can you kill them like this? You're supposed to... you're supposed to..."

"Oh!" the Lady says, eagerly clapping her hands together. "This is good! Finish your sentence, now--what am I supposed to?"

"You're supposed to take this seriously," the sullen form mutters. "You're..." A tensing. Oh, fates save the poor girl, does she really think this outburst will be startling? "You're supposed to take it seriously when you KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE!" she shrieks.

The Lady clears her throat.

"A few insights," she says politely. A talon wreathed in roseate auroras stretches up. "One... you are in my home. Notwithstanding their total impotence to the purpose, your weapons and powers are intended to kill me."

A second claw.

“Two. You are trying to kill me, in my home, and just a few minutes ago you delighted in dragging the filmy sound-waves of your, er... your classic heroic dialogue all over my nice, resonant walls and floors. And taking clear pleasure in mocking my personal choice of words, too!" The Lady folds her claws together. "But let's not dwell on past mistakes. We're in the consequences phase now, my dear. And I am consequence. As such I must say--'seriously' is a needlessly vague term."

She taps at the air in the general direction of the hanging figures.

"You mean to say that I am treating your mortality with less gravity, less weight, then you believe I should. You want me to treat your little mortal lives as weighty things. But, my dear morsel," the Lady giggles, "do you not understand? That's what my blue means. I did, to use your own phrase, try to take this seriously, yet you yourself did not. It made the whole affair quite lopsided. A game for you, life and death for me. I've simply acknowledged the rules you seem to enjoy playing by."

"FUCK YOU!" screams the thing.

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"Oh, dear heart," the Lady sighs. "We've already been over that one. I'm afraid I'll have to double the penalty for this particular misstep... oh, yes! That's right! Barbs!"

The glinting tendrils grow sudden twinkles, and burrow into the grey-haired matron in an old uniform. The wrinkled veteran restrains herself to only the barest grunts and hisses.  Sliver-hints at the staggering agony the wires bring her as they sieve her flesh-vessel from angles innumerable.

"Oh, that's most impressive!" the Lady praises. "YOU should've been the leader!"

That chance remark proves the wizened thing's undoing. Tears mix with blood and snot. All is soon lost in the pulp ground out of her depths by wires ripping in and out again, plowing up whole stretches of sinew and skin like weed-roots torn from below autumn grasses.

"Now," the Lady says, "just you and your lover left..." The full-breasted husk gives a start. "Oh," the Great One says. "Oh, you hadn't told her yet."

The briefest shift.

A ghost of an azure glint passes in fraying tendrils through the irradiant glory of the Ruinborn. The Reborn Star considers. "Well... color me shocked! You were so assured of your victory over me--Me! Seurchraig! The Inferno Undying, the Unraveling Void Made Manifest!--that you didn't even think to tell the woman you love about your true feelings before this battle?"

"I thought we were going to win," the heroine mutters.

"Yes, that's clear enough," the Lady agrees. "Let's see about salvaging, shall we? Go on. Save her life." She muses. "Her name is... Carmine? Oh, her name is Carmine. Merciful God, kill me now..." She titters again. "You see, it's funny, because I am the being your fellow humans misinterpret every time they imagine an omnipotent, omniscient God. I am effectively asking for me to kill myself."

Her awful, crystal-burning maw pouts. "Was misgendering me necessary, though..."

"Please," the heroine says.

"Please?" the Lady echoes. "Well, that's certainly piqued my interest again. Politeness, and so late in the game no less!" Dripping sounds from reordered flesh punctuate her words. "By all means, plead your case!"

"This... this isn't you," the heroine presses on. "This isn't who you want to be. You said so yourself! That's who you always try to become, right? The blue star on the borders of every dreaming psyche. I know the real you is still in there. Please, don't do this to yourself."

"Hm... now that's a good effort," the Lady says. "And you know, I think if you'd just stopped before you began speaking about 'the real me,' I'd have conceded the victory. Don't fret, sweet morsel. You're still in the game. But as for the foolhardy azure, the devil-harlot..."

She grins. "Why, sweetling... I know I am her, and she is I. I haven't forgotten that. And you're right. When I become azure again, I will be miserable. Oh..." She clutches herself, fondling curves half-hidden in the space-unmaking sprawl of her stellar fire. "I'm so excited!"

The heroine says nothing. What remains to say?

"The tremors, the peeling, my organ-simulacra spilling out as I bleed boiling jet-black blood streaked with corium all over those ridiculous, bloated breasts I love carting around," laughs the Ancient and Most High. "The guilt, the self-loathing, the sheer TORMENT of it..." she at last subsides with a delighted sigh. "Such rich experience. Such fullness. That's all I ever wanted, you know?"

She stretches back. The magenta rays grow steadily more florid. They scald golden melt on the walls. "To enjoy such lavish weight of being that every single act I commit needs a million words to carry its full feeling into a lesser being's mind." She rubs a blinding seam at the implicit meeting between two thighs lost in the infinity of Her nova. "My very own perfection."

The heroine takes a shuddering breath. "Then... please... I am begging you to stop. To show mercy so that we can know that same weight of experience--"

"That's it?" the Lady interrupts, for a heartbeat truly hateful again. Then, she giggles. "Oh, what a waste." She flexes her talons. "You listened to all that, let me say all those words from the deepest and most vulnerable reaches of me, just so you could look for a weakness to exploit. You would make a wonderful Star-Ravener, my dear... except that you're so very, very weak." She rests her chin upon upturned knuckles, and her filaments play.

The wires spiral, slowly, moving with a perverse kind of love over every supple curve of the meat-thing with the hourglass figure. They twitch and vibrate to follow her every scream, thrash, and flail with oily immaculacy. Layer by layer, from pale skin to pinkish, from pink to red, and at last to the gushing-forth of blood. Spiral-cut muscles and tendons drop from the wailing, weeping, howling wreck of a creature that wanted to name itself Carmine.

When it's finally done, the Lady shows mercy: She allows the ruined meat of the heroine's former friends to spit out the souls within. The tiny remnants that remain, sprites of tortured ether, blaze way and become nothing under their leader's whimpering gaze.

"So close," Seurchraig sighs. "So close. But never again."

"What was I supposed to do?" the heroine sobs. "Just tell me what I'm supposed to say..."

"That, for a start," the Great One says. She smiles, and claps her hands together as she rises. "There! It's never too late to learn."

She looks to bladework beings as they crystallize. "Take her wherever you will. I have no care to order her fortunes further. She finally has what she wanted: a higher power who will tell her exactly the right thing to do. Nothing to learn. No challenges to face. No people: just good..."

She grins the most beautiful maelstrom of annihilated worlds. The kiss of her reawakened Truth will spread, and spread, and spread--and all because one little heroine was brave enough to attack her in her most vulnerable moment.

"and pure, perfect evil."

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