Chapter 6: Chapter 7: World-weight, and the Knowing of It

The Lady settled on her throne, regarding the visitor with a certain irony in her eyes.

"The old motifs have worn threadbare," she said. "Too many scrabbling souls, chittering and wailing about burning the world. Saying 'all things end in me' has come to mean they never will." With idle claws she slit the veil. Golden light poured through and broke on the infinite night of her silhouette. Rays skimmed her surface and decayed.

"Come," she said. "See. I can discipline stars easily enough. It's safe to look."

Obedient feet brought a tiny thing, trotting and ephemeral, around the Lady's event horizon. The visitor gazed through the starline seam and beheld the golden orb of fire.

"But you remember Sol, don't you, dear mortal?" the Lady asked. "Would you like it in a pendant?"

The mortal looked to her.

"Oh, it would still have Sol's gravity, and Sol's heat, and Sol's long aeons yet to live," she said. "It would scald your vessel-flesh to vapor the instant you left my threshold. But I could give it to you, and you could carry it until then. A pendant." "But," she added, a playful pout in her voice, "it's not the sun that gives the sun weight, is it?"

She stretched a shade-talon outward. It stretched and swelled and ignited in blue nova.

"This does," said the outer devil, brushing the talon-tip against their forehead. A thousand horizons enfolded from her briefest touch. Scathing seas of insight lashing their waves on the collapsing shores of the guest-mind: Desolate rock and scorched earth. Broken spires, tumbling monuments, skeletal forests fossilized in the final heat of the end.

"So you see, it's no longer enough to say I am become death, destroyer of worlds," the Lady said. "All the heaviness has been bleached from the old warnings. I must teach you the weight of the world shrugged from my shoulders, and how to feel it again." She smiled brilliant inferno, beams of iridescence and tides of umbra. The ever-unfolding fangs and snowy razor shards of the maw of ascension.

"Welcome to Machrae Diir, most dear and honored guest. I will ensure your studies are fruitful."

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