Chapter 68: Chapter 69: Another Final Tale of Machrae Diir (Story’s end)

And I'm lying in bed, with rays of blue and gold and pink streaming through the gauzy shimmering drapes over my bedroom window. I feel no urgency. I take my time sliding out of bed. My empty bed. What's that about, anyway?

Go get yourself a lover, Maj, for goodness' sake. You're a tragic beautiful sweetheart with a dormant yet potentially nightmarish sex drive. If someone's into girls, they're into you. Is this confidence? I suppose it might be. Whatever it is, it makes me happy to take my time with it.

A penthouse. I never could've imagined such things at my first life's dawn. I want to say it was about three thousand years ago. Earth. Yes, I think it was Earth, after all. So long ago the world hadn't even been mapped yet. Mountains, valleys, a measure of forest. My name is just an imitation of sounds from the language of my lost love's people, I know that much. It barely hurts, now. Mostly, I just remember the warmth I felt at his smile. How everything else fell away while we cuddled together, watching our children…

A new timeline, is it?

I suppose I'd have the choice to hide my past. Pretend I haven't done the things I've done. But, I'm a sister of the miidyaerita now. I’ll meet my consequences. That won’t change. Now, there’s an oddity: it feels good to embrace that. Yes. Everyone will know ‘Maj’ means ‘a monster who’s trying to be good.’

There’s rushing warmth in my heart when I think about myself. A mournful creature who can’t undo the things she’s done, not even if universes end. And despite everything, she still believes it’s worth it, being herself. Going forward to meet eternity. Self-love… I have to cling to this, no matter what happens. When I fill myself with this feeling, when it pours out of me into everyone I meet, I make things better for them as well as me.

Oh, hang the higher purposes. It just feels so nice and right to want to be myself, no matter who that means. I phone downstairs, down past all the levels of simulated dilapidation and exposed support beams, past the places where the skyscraper forgets it's supposed to be a skyscraper and turns into a mess of fleshy steel-blue pods and growths.

A sprightly doll answers. Odd to think on. I remember when there were no dolls in Machrae Diir--save the handmaidens, who hadn't come out as being dolls yet. Now they have, and now just about every household has a doll or two.

Just happy to be helping.

Just happy to be.

I'm not sure what these "waffle" things are. I've never had one before. Have a gander at this fool of a succubus. Wanted to go to war before she'd even tasted the future. Less afraid to kill someone than to kiss them.

Sometimes, I suppose, a woman just has to get over herself.

I drape one leg across the other and sit on my balcony watching some titanic three-bodied centipede clamber along a burning apartment block to the north. As far as I can tell, from sights and sounds and auras on the wind, there's no emergency. All those apartments are just burning for aesthetics, or perhaps some sort of demon roleplaying game. Now, wouldn't that be lovely? I should see if anyone's doing something like that.

I really do love this place. Its bizarre nooks and crannies. Its strange and outer ways.

Waffles, I soon determine, are pretty good.

Someone should paint that. "Succubus eats waffles, with strawberries and cream." Is this that surrealism I'd heard about? Eventually, in my own time, I sidle on downstairs to the lobby that is as many other lobbies as it needs to be. There's Greth, stroking the runic swirls in her orange-skinned limbs with her igneous-bone hands to make the shape change. Parphyaera, with a lively rhythm dancing in the fractal sunflares around her shoulders.

"Morning, girls." I yawn and stretch, quivering pleasantly.

"You have the dream too?" Greth asks.

I nod. "I'm guessing everyone did. You were the only one there, right, with Kairliina at the end?"

"It made very little sense," Par titters. Irising mandalas of rainbow-hued razor blades unfold across her corona and ripple back in.

"I actually kind of like it." I chuckle, finishing off my coffee with a final sip--slurping just a little. Just because it's fun to make silly little noises. "A dress rehearsal for the endtimes."

"It's not the endtime," Greth begins, folding her arms, "it's…" She stops. Think, messing with her mane of black hair. "Well, fine, it's kind of an endtime. Merging timelines... we'll be leaving some things behind." She lowers her arms. "Machrae Diir will remain, though."

“Yes.” I spare a loving glance for the ever-shifting skylines, for the gestalt-complexes of warehouses fused to schoolyards fused to old museums, all mutated with chrome and crystal and multicolored eldritch flesh. It’ll be a while before I get to see Machrae Diir like this again. A long wait. Yet I have a feeling that when it’s over, we’ll never have to leave each other again. Can a dimension take journeys, too? Is that the answer we’ll find in the new timeline ahead? “Yes… I know that it will.”

I fall into step beside Greth with Parphyaera hovering on her other side as we leave the lobby. We emerge from a tunnel onto the banks of the saltwater river, already speckled with upward cilia and rows of waving tentacles, flowing through the MEZ towards the distant Sarcophagus. Others emerge from their own paths in their own time.

Handmaidens Ametra and Chyorzhiir, the one with festive ribbons tied to the many shards of metal and crystal suspended in her tail's jade lightning, the latter's steel-cable body draped in pink and blue rather than red.

A visiting detachment from the Cobalt Immortals lead by Alth, with white and purple paints making swirling patterns on his burly green arms and a golden flower tucked in the fire-red locks over his big bull horns. Alth's... kind of cute, actually. And I'm not in the Immortals anymore, so there’s no chain of command or discipline issues to consider…

Hey, Sarge," I call, just to mess with him a little. "Is there another Alth you'll be fusing with on the othe side?" I have to grin. "An Alth-ternate, if you will?"

He shakes his head. "Maroj, you're horrid. Anyway, we're not part of Machrae Diir anymore. Wherever this goes, we won't follow. Just wanted to see you girls off."

"Eh." I shrug. "Miidyaerita kastejul."

Greth and Par laugh with me.

Andrila's there, too, petite and blond and just trying the first little experiments with her form: little bony plates down the back of her neck, slits in her cheeks her tongue toys with.

I accept that I'm not getting a straight answer from Alth. Guess I'll see when we see.

Last of all, of course, Kairliina itself arrives with her lovers through a seam of reality. I'm a little sad to see her carrying herself with the old regal bearing. Its scent is more or less the same as its Lady-days...

... but there is just a hint of fishiness to it.

She's speaking to Jeanette, of course. Palming the great big hellhound's muzzle. Stroking its thumbs over the big fluffy ears and the bases of her horns. The Irradiant Hound looks a little nervous, and not especially happy. But Kai keeps murmuring, and kissing her, and it helps.

"Hey, uh... Maroj, right?" Caella alights beside me. Small, curvy, quite pale with a healthy pink tint. Her halo and golden wings are both new and quite shiny. "We've never met before, um..." She trails off.

"I understand." I smile. "You've always seemed quite shy."

She blushes, smiles timidly, and looks away. "Yeah, that's true..."

I have to. "And cute!" I add.

A wing whips up to cover her face, scattering sacred feathers. "Shut up," she mutters, a pout in her voice. This prompts more "bullying" as others chime in, "Caella IS cute."

Raven carries a giggly Valphomet sitting on one shoulder. His great muscular legs move slowly indeed to match Kairliina's leisurely pace, given that she's half his height. His beak clacks and a mischievous grin spreads over his bird-wolf maw.

"Yes," he whispers to cap things off, "boolie angel."

Caella flees to Kairliina's far side.

We arrive on a promontory I don't remember from the dream: a concave platform of Kairliina's silvery craft-metal jutting into the lake looking out on the Sarcophagus. Spiny, colorful, many-eyed fish frolic in the shining waters.

The center is a wild garden of lush other-flora. Handmaidens coax massive mushrooms to grow, giving shade for those who wish it, and partner with dolls of many other kinds to get everything ready--porcelain and wood, humanoid and demonic, slick polymer-skinned dolls with exposed cybernetics on their forearms and cleavage.

Kairliina opens the skies of Machrae Diir to the star-fields of the galactic deep, night and day interwoven along the boundaries of every big fluffy cloud. Visitors from the far cosmos trail wakes of spatial rifting, opening vistas to shining star-bases and many-ringed moons. Titanic star-swimmers that have the air of whales, many eyed and rumple-bellied. A gargantuan creature that fills the whole horizon behind us, looming from the oceans, all oily flesh and hollow eyes of negative space with mountains merged into her.

And after all this... we have a picnic. A spontaneous summer day, a cookout, games… it's a little too much for me to throw myself into everything. I do regret that, but that is what it means to be. To live is to choose some joy despite knowing you cannot have every joy.

For today, for however long this final day of the timeline lasts, I am happy enough to walk, to heap my plate many times, to share stories and sweet memories with the other denizens of Machrae Diir.

I reminisce with Alth about the better days in the Immortals. The days when we made a difference. The days when we got there in time, when we'd learned from our failures, when no one else had to die. And we embrace the bad ones too. When we were too late, too spread out, too worn down. The days when we lost.

For even so, we are here.

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I finally get Greth to open up about her own arcane studies, and there's nothing cuter than a pretty girl chattering happily away about the things she loves. She tells me of her thoughts about self-propagating sculpture, about elective fictional identity.

Par joins us. We turn to the somber talk of the miidyaerita. Acknowledging our past.

Greth about her spree-killings, and the stories she'll never get to see finished. Par about how she wasted so much time starting a sex trade to ruin one girl's life.

And I? I muse on my own sins. The mother to a murdered family, murdering the families of others. And I see now that I am speaking eulogies for a Maroj who no longer exists, who hasn't existed for many years. She isn't, and yet in me, she is.

In me, she is, somehow, redeemed.

"We can't deserve this," Greth says. "You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but..." she shakes her head. "I'm not."

"I think," I say, sipping wine, "that's not for us to decide. Machrae Diir embraces us. We can accept that or refuse it, but..." I shrug. "It's not for us to tell others whether the gifts they give us are wrong." I turn wry. "And one could say it's a sort of investment, yes? I'm not planning to enter this new timeline and then just flounce around, doing nothing useful."

Par sighs pleasantly. "Truth spoken."

And we pass through the weighty moments, and on the other side our laughter is brighter and more girlish than ever. The triple stars ease slowly towards the horizon, rose pink and cobalt blue and shining gold, all nova, all tinting the umbral coils around them.

It's become blue night by the time I speak to Kairliina, under the light of a single massive silver moon. She rests against Jeanette's belly, toying with the fur-tufts on her beloved hellhound's knees.

"Hey, Kai?" I pad up. "The saltwater. Am I allowed to know?"

The shapes of creasing skin on its neck could almost, for a moment, be the promise of a gill as she turns a soft smile towards me. "You're allowed. It's not so elaborate as all that." She looks to the lake, and the Sarcophagus. "Not really. It's about space, you see. During my psychosis, that mad galloping thrilling nightmare that ended with..." she shrugs helplessly, "you know... I was reading Genesis, that is, the Book of, from the Bible, and I got caught up on the idea of 'the water over heaven.'"

Its contemplation, and the kiss of the moon's refracted light on her six horns and silken star-field hair and the elven lines of her ears, makes her look like nothing so much as a waking dream. "There it is." She gestures to the lake. "In one form."

I step past her, just far enough to look off the platform and into the gently-lapping waters. Into the depths where faint glitters like gemstone dust turn and roil, and serve at times to make the abyssal blackness stand out. A blackness too clear to be only water.

"In their own ways," Kairliina continues, "deep oceans and deep space are both full of themselves. Warm waters, full of brine and the ripples of unseen life. The cool tranquility of the vacuum, full of radiation and unseen stellar winds from stars beyond number."

It giggles. "Ironic, isn't it? Outer demons need emptiness to be born. Then we need a place that's full of calming, full of blanketing warm peace, to shield us from the cacophony of life until we can weather it." She subsides. "We are such terribly demanding creatures."

"You'll hear no argument from me there." I settle down, mantled by my own wings, and turn my head just enough to be sure she sees my smile. "But worth it, I think. Yes. You're worth it in the end."

As simple as that, shining tears escape her, and draw out my own. "Thanks, Maj."

That's the tableau we make when the seam appears on the far horizon, that enormous moaning seam of blue-white light that Machrae Diir rushes to meet.

There's the glowing mist streaming out to meet us.

This time, though... I feel the merge approaching.

I feel the enormous curve of all the boundaries of our timeline and our universe coming together on the horizon ahead. Closer, tighter, narrower. The landscape ahead flattens, brightens, not fading into the light but brightening in every contour to become the light.

"Miidyaerita kastejul, kindred!" Kairliina's voice rings out. "I'll see you on the other side--whenever I and the Kai I meet there have fused enough to remember the I we'll have become!"

And with all my kindred I raise my voice to answer her. "Miidyaerita kastejul, Kairliina!!!"

Last of all the words she speaks, the onetime Lady of Machrae Diir, are those given between cupped hands into the ears of her lovers.

And I too am stretching this time, painless narrowing and condensing faster and faster, filled with the surging light of tomorrow, and then--

--then I wake up on a rooftop where, many nights ago, Kairliina and I looked out on the highway her beloved home grew of its own accord, just so it could bring more visitors along to enjoy the view, and she told me the last human on Earth was dead.

I look on the changed skyline.

Gaps, here and there, where the things Kairliina built have slipped away from realspace to sleep until our reunion. The Galespire and the Maelstrom are gone.

Yet the streets remain. Machrae Diir remains. The night hangs all about me. it’s so heavy, soft, and warm.

Ah, I see... a new dream. Perhaps I’ll find that treasure hunter here, or that witch, or both. We’ll make stories together here at the threshold where manifest reality melts into astral space, here where existence meets potential. Just weighty enough to seep into each other’s sleep. Just weighty enough to remember that we’re walking together, until the tales we tell of ourselves in our own minds have come to an end, and it’s time to wake up.

I take to the night skies. I let the tranquility fill me. Chasing air currents. Losing sense of whether I'm in a high gentle sky where I could almost reach out and touch the stars, or in the depths of a vast dark ocean.

Dreaming as a succubus does: until it's time, once more, to wake and meet the future.

So when impulse takes me on a long, arcing glide down towards the Rift of Recompense, chasing that seam where lambent blue auroras still spill upwards, I give myself to the descent with laughter in my breath and electric thrills in my heart. I melt into the radiance, into the warmth. Seeping across the wavelengths, over the threshold, and all I was falls away behind me. Into the emptiness where I was, something new pours:

The Maj I'm about to become.

And I'm sit beside Kairliina, looking out on the abyssal deep lapping at the sides of the Sarcophagus, exchanging disoriented glasses with all the others. Before the question can even reach my lips, I the scythe-embedded shark's fin surmounting her swishing tail, and the flexing gills filling out the sides her neck, and I smell it: that wonderfully perverse scent of highly estrogenous fish.

Kairliina taps its hands together. "This one, um... this one realizes... all it really wanted..." and there it is, despite everything: the wondrous smile of the first Carag. "All Kairliina really wanted was to share what it felt like with all of you. The moment when she crosses the threshold into tomorrow, and becomes the next version of herself."

"That was wild," Par laughs. "That's so different from how my growth feels."

"I'm just glad we're still here," Jeanette sighs. She clutches her beloved mistress tight against her. "Seeing all the empty spaces left when the things you built disappeared... that wasn't easy, darling."

"Knows." The little Overlady leans up to place repeated kisses on her Hound's whiskered snout. "Is sorry, darling."

Jeanette's tail begins, slowly, to wag. "Is okayyyy. As long as we're still together."

Kai smiles. "Yeah..."

"So, all that stuff about merging timelines," Valphomet says, pushing up on Raven's chest. Her little tufted tail twitches. "Was that not actually happening?"

The Overlady taps its lips. "I think... happened, but went the other way. Other Kairliina merged into me. I mean, there is no 'other' Kairliina as such, all Kairliinas are Kairliina, just... bah!" She flaps a hand at the night air as though to shoo away explanation itself. "Makes sense, yes? This is enough to say. Machrae Diir is already built in this timeline. Foolish to throw it all away and start over. We are the zipper's end, not the emptiness between its teeth."

Its tail frisks with happiness. "Very glad to stay. Is home. Is complete. I am complete. Isn't that the point? To be whole, so we can finally enjoy all that existence offers?"

"And what did the Kai-who-is-also-you bring?" Greth asks. "New trouble?"

Kairliina laughs. "Yes--more of what I am! More weight of Carag-thing instincts to chase." She springs up. "Come, darlings. Night's still young, and sleep is for the saintly!" It casts a joyful look over its shoulder, nova glowing in an eye of azure, an eye of rose pink, and a third eye of soft bronze. "Let's see what new delights our home has to show us."

So, all of us together, we rise and wander together into a blissful eternity.

It's so good to be a succubus, here, in the lambent halls of Machrae Diir.

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