Chapter 59: Chapter 60: Maroj grows at home with her sorrow

Machrae Diir has no fixed day and night cycle. Time exists here, not as a uniform continuum, but as countless bubbles fusing, altering each other's contents, and parting ways again by causal division.  I am alone because I want to be alone, until my tears are done. Vost and the others are very sweet, but I don't know them well enough to trust that they won't try 'fixing' my feelings.

I had a family. I loved them. I don't want to throw them away--if I wanted that, the memories wouldn't have returned from the void of self-annihilation. So I sob, and sob, and sob some more, until even sorrow abandons me.

Until I'm empty... No. Until I'm simply here, horns pricking the tops of my knees, with the faintest blue glow peering through the tent of my enshrouding wings. They drift slowly open, the ever-glowing night filtering in to kiss my tear-streaked cheeks as I settle into an irrational lulling.

I lift my eyes to the promenade, and the Rift of Recompense yawning wide about a dozen meters past my feet. To my left an empty mansion juts out on a promontory of jagged dark stone. A terrace springs from a gateway carved into its mouth, with a golden lantern revealing stairs leading down from the mansion’s belly. Several mechanical beings and a pair of clockwork dolls are setting out a picnic on that mossy overlook. 

To my right, several kilometers away--eastward up the Rift--the faint black forms of the great fortified bridge loom against the blue night. A silver-hulled warship of astounding size glides beneath its support arches. Its stern lost to distance, its bow passing me by.

"Well..." I breathe. One last shudder. "I guess... I guess that's the end of it."

I blow a kiss to nowhere, and haul myself to my feet. The groan I give is not for any strain on tendons or ache of bone, but for my soul. "You'll get over it, Maj." I squeeze a trembling wrist. "You've killed too many people to do otherwise."

Maroj Fezzlen has violet hair with gold streaks, and dark blue skin with a dusting of bronze speckles that get thick as freckles under her glowing pink eyes. A thicket of many small, ridged black-rock horns, and two big bat wings. Her legs are digitigrade, ending in big black panther paws. She's wearing a shining white gown, and she's a mass murderer.

I look upon her, and know that I'm finally seeing myself. A pretty mass murderer with a heart full of love.

My tail, tipped by tulips, frisks.

A warm gust calls my eyes to the open space between many-leveled sculptures made of metal arches, to the starward torrent of phosphorescent glows from unseemly creatures. I spread my wings with a snap and gasp at the vivid sensations of the joyous jolt I feel when I take to the sky. Machrae Diir unfolds below. Burning rivers and many-branched sprawls of deep space. Ancient fortresses and corrupted temples make districts right across from futuristic factories, from assembly lines churning out machines for the endless wars they fight in the streets, and in underground laboratories, simply because they can.

Maybe that's humankind's problem. Violence is too much fun to have such permanent consequences. The flesh they use to define themselves as human... how many ways it finds to drive them mad.

I soar for a while on night breezes, full of wonder at sights and sounds and feelings that feel like me again. All this… life had all this to offer me, just as soon as I was ready to claim it again. There’s so much to explore, so many adventures to be had below.

I could mask myself as a human occultist and befriend a treasure-hunter as he grapples with a cabal worshipping a dark god, who’ve come here thinking to infiltrate us. I could appear to him as an island of calm in this madcap realm, a wry femme fatale with a soft heart who seems to promise sanctuary in a sea of cosmic horrors. And then I could show him my horns, and if he was willing to believe I was still the same Maj he met at the start… oh, how sweet that could be…

I could find a quiet overgrown park of clawing, rattling branches beneath a moon that isn’t visible anywhere else in Machrae Diir, and cast my psyche out across the cosmos until I find the seeking mind of a young witch. I could help her escape her stifling world. I could manifest into the occult paths of the realms she walks through, until I become just one of many monsters who help and hamper the witch and her friends.

I could spend months having one sexual misadventure after another. No higher purpose, no need to walk away with anything in return, just back and forth from the delight of exploration to ecstasy so intense I forget where I’ve been. Over and over and over.

What the hell was I thinking, anyway, joining the Immortals first thing on getting here? There's so much nothing to do in Machrae Diir. The absolute best part of this place is how much nothing it lets a demon do.

When I see a faint spot of iridescence on a rooftop far below, I don't think. I just swoop, gliding down on a warm wind to alight beside her at the edge of a half-phantom high-rise.

"Hey, Maj," Kairliina says.

I don't sense a disconnect anymore. Well... I knew where I was headed.

The view's spectacular. A great hyperdimensional lattice of highways weaving between titanic flanged pillars and clusters of sleek space-stations grafted to the ground. Lights blur by. Long streams of photo-exposure mingled with bizarre shadowy scrawls that aren't quite cars.

"Did you make these?" I ask. “All these displaced constructs and traveling lights?”

Kairliina shakes her head. "Just the highway. Even that was more of a suggestion. Machrae Diir wanted to become. Often, all I did was help with notions about where to start." She smiles. "Well, that and the pillars are mine."

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I laugh. "I figured. You like flanges."

Kairliina grins. "I am gleefully predictable." Her gaze shifts back to the highway. "Some of those lights are the manifest idea of travel emerging briefly from the acausal morass. Some of those cars are real, literal ghosts just passing through--destination: elsewhere."

"And the rest?" I watch a convoy of burning, turretless tank-hulls grind along for a while until they fade into a half-seen seam in our home's dimensional walls, and are gone.

Kairliina laughs. "As complete mystery to me as they are to you. That's what makes me so happy to call this home."

I wrap my wings around myself. This time, just because it feels cozy. "Hm."

The silence turns sentimental. Music fades in from somewhere--Kairliina's doing, of course. "Whirling-In-Rags," she explains. "Midnight version. Disco Elysium OST."

Her black brows crease, blue-crystal plates articulating. "I just found out that the last human on Earth is dead."

"Oh." Was I from Earth? I truly can't remember. But my family were human. The news hits hard. My clawed hand stretches. Opens, tentative. Kairliina gives me a sad smile and leans her shoulder into my grip. I squeeze. "I'm sorry, Kai."

"Time makes for such cruel poetry," she murmurs. "Here I am despite everything: the Insulindian Phasmid. By the time I woke up to myself, the world of my birth was already rotting." She frowns. The music ends abruptly, then changes. Sounds like distant horns, strange keenings on the wind. Then, strings full of heartache. "La Revacholière..." her lips quirk. "You know, Machrae Diir really is the Martinaise of the cosmos--oh, fuck it."

She heaves a sigh, dimming in sheen and color until she's gone half-grey. "I understand it now. References as reflex. The desire to keep calling back to the halcyon stories now behind us. It's comforting, sometimes, to see yourself in their characters and say, 'I'll get through it just like they did.' Sometimes this makes me feel free and full of joy. Sometimes it's terrifying, crushing, a poison font of despair. But either way, it stands: it doesn't matter how they got through their stories. What matters is how we get through ours. Whatever it takes to create hope inside ourselves, that's what we must do."

"Hm." I let my tail drift over the edge, dangling loose in the night winds. "I admit, Kai... I never expected words like this from a villainess like you."

The Overlady chuckles. "Maj, I'm not a villainess, I'm an evil heroine. Vital difference."

"Ah." I peer at her as her color, bit by bit, creeps back. "I think I understand." A flap of my wings, a strange jittering noise as a full-form vibration runs through me. After I collect myself I venture, "You know, Kairliina... the planet's still there, right? The world didn't end."

"The planet remains, yes." The Carag--somehow, younger now than ever--furrows her brow at the planar fires on the far horizon. "But my world is gone. Earth was never the planet to me. Earth was a name given by certain humans to the planet that gave them life. The humans who I lived among, the humans who shaped so much of what I became. Earth was in their culture, Earth was in the cities they built together, the songs they sang, the food they ate, the art they created..." Kairliina breaks off, rubbing away tears.

"The stories they told, about the dreams that kept them going." Three eyes, one azure, one rose pink, one burning bronze, drift to me. "My world is gone, Maj. I am, truly and forevermore, the orphan daughter of the cosmos."

There's not much else anyone could say. Well. Maybe one thing.

"What were they like?" I incline my head. "Your humans?"

Kairliina rolls her eyes. "Impulsive. Frustrating. Always achieving great things and then denying it was greatness because they... they never did figure out how to believe in themselves."

A dry, weary chuckle slips out of me. "Mine also."

The sentimental softness returns to her eyes, and a few tears with it--glittering, glowing streams of molten corium. "I'm really gonna miss them."

I settle in beside my sister-succubus, watching the little lights flow and fade. "Me too."

So we pass the night together, speaking of those odd, infuriating, amazing creatures, and all the love our hearts will hold for them--always.

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