[attr="class","dicio"]





You are born into this world as hellfire, and reality burns and peels away from your fingertips of flame.[break][break]

It's all you remember after: The acrid stench of burning flesh, the shouts of horror filling your ears, the blood dripping hot and wet into eyes a mirrored crimson. “He enjoyed it,” the old books might have claimed, knowledgeable only in tone, never in words. “The Curr lapped up at every bit of it.”[break][break]

Did you, though, you wonder now? Bones splintering beneath your titanium grip – death, brought with your hands into a world that had known nothing but endless life. You must have, they say. But the screams that had driven your eardrums to suicide were the very same that tore your throat raw, and the arms that had stretched wide and far to steal and take and kill kill kill were breaking in on themselves just the same. Pain unfathomable, boiling through every vein, scraping at every cell, enough to drive a sane man mad.[break][break]

You don't remember your name. You don't remember your name, or your place, or why you were driven to hurt everything in sight. All you remember is the hellfire; all you remember is the horrific agony, inside and out.[break][break]

THE SKY IS DYED A CRIMSON RED THAT COMES OUT OF THE DARKNESS OF WHAT NEEDS TO BE SAID.

What is it like to be born? What is it like to feel sunlight on flesh for the first time? To breathe in the air of the world that you've come into existence on? Bombardment of tastes, of smells, of sights, enough to make an infant cry from the sheer vastness of it all – what is it like? They don't tell you. Most don't know, themselves, those memories lost to time. More importantly, most have no desire to tell you at all, memories of that day stashed away in the corners of their recollection or no, nor do you deign entertain them long enough to ask. Hatred runs deep from the very start of your coronation, from the start of your legacy. They're not worth the movement of the lips it would take to ask. Hardly are they worth the single swing of the arm it would take to remove their heads from their necks – the swing you'd most certainly deal had your body not been in such a compromising position. Because this is how you come into the world, a second time, a monster reborn:[break][break]

Awoken from a million years' slumber, gnashing teeth, spitting blood, chained by shackles uncountable to the floor, the ceiling, the walls, and pillars that glow fluorescent, humming of energy that burns, burns, burns with every movement you make.[break][break]

The Crypt is not where you came into being. You know this, instinctively, peripheral knowledge that you can't hope to pin down a reason for. What has come before the Crypt, however, is lost to you, forgotten just as a child forgets their departure from the womb. If the men and the women and the beasts that come before you now know, they certainly fail to tell you – but the shock and awe on their faces betrays the possibility, their countenances telling you all you need to know of their prior disbelief of anything being found here. Had they gone down below the planet's surface knowing that they would find something there at all, you wonder? Or were they, across all of time and space, the unfortunate few to awaken a creature beyond what any of them were suited to handle? But that's not right. A single one of them steps forward with all the leisure of a prince in his palace. (You jerk at the thought, thought you don't know why. If he believes that metal is all it will take to keep him in tact, he's more foolish than you already believe him to be.)[break][break]

“Oh, Terrible Curr of Cete,” he says only for show, tongue dragging on the words as his eyes do the same over his followers. “... That is what you are, is it not?”[break][break]

You don't remember one way or another. In time, you'll learn that, one way or another, you would never make them think otherwise. For now, you snap and you hiss, metal groaning against your pull, ancient magic singing to you agony, just enough to harm, never mighty enough to kill.[break][break]

Your cacophony, however feral, does not deter him.[break][break]

“Ilartmir's great universes have fallen into peril while you've slept. If the ancient texts write true, you've only seen paradise... but we all know what you thought of that. Perhaps, then, you think this the better outcome. Strife. War. Starvation. Death unmeasurable. Cete knew the faces of all people, but now we are lucky to know only the face of our neighbor. Is this what you'd wanted to shape the universes to be, all those years ago?” The Crypt rings of the clatter of his feet against timeless stone, but louder still of a speech he must have rehearsed some hundreds of times in his head for this precise moment. They mean nothing to you, all the same. Universes? Paradise? Cete? Empty – meaningless – every one of them. Blood dribbles down your mouth, bubbling from split gums, torns lips, and you couldn't find it in yourself to care less for his blather. (This speech, though, isn't for you. He offers you an ultimatum, but was the choice ever your's to begin with?) “It's not what I want, though! For years, I have watched society attempt to pick itself up from the ashes, only to fall down further into the rubble. Technology destroyed. Culture lost. The paradise of Cete, so close in these old tomes, but always so far away. So many people have come before me, trying to recreate the old kingdom.[break][break]

“But they were fools, all of them! Cete was fine only as long as it lasted – but even it could not defend its people from its ultimate destruction! And you, Terrible Curr, was all it took to reduce the greatest kingdom to a speck of dust in space.[break][break]

“No, I don't want to rebuild paradise. I want to erase paradise. Rip it out from the universes' histories like one tugs a plant out by its roots. And in its place, I will erect an empire so vast, so powerful, that not even the Curr of Cete could hope to bring it to its knees. … How, though, you wonder, could a man do that? I am but a lowly Ireod, nothing more than a descendent of the old human race, claiming the power to stand up against the greatest threat known to reality across all of time and space. What could I possibly know, could possibly have, could possibly do that would allow me to make such a claim?”[break][break]

His feet carry him to stand just outside your circle, carvings cut into rock in a time you can't recall with no purpose other than to hold you in your place for as long as your timeless form cursed the twin universes. To take another step would be the act of a deranged man, or at least one who sought a death more painful and dishonorable than all others. And yet his feet carry him further still. Past the barrier, into your circle, stopping only when he stands before your haggard and bloodied form.[break][break]

“You must be thinking of all of the horrible ways you could kill me right now. Isn't that right, unholy scourge?” Peel his flesh, rip the remains asunder, flay the rest with his bones – tempting, so tempting. “But you can't. You exist to destroy, but you can't. The chains – these runes – they've all existed longer than any of us have been alive. And they will outlast even you. How many martyrs were made to cage you here in the beginning? Hundreds? Thousands? It would be a shame to let their sacrifice go to waste.”[break][break]

Mockery. He speaks only because he is right, taunts only because you are restrained. If you were a free man, he would be a dead one. And yet –[break][break]

“... But wouldn't it also be a shame to let such raw, destructive power go to waste?”[break][break]

Silence reigns, then. His crew fall silent in incredulity, words stripped from them as they try and they fail to make sense of what he has just spoken to you. You would have spared a laugh for their idiocy had you not fallen into the very same pit. Chains stop rattling. Teeth stop gnashing. Scarlet water runs serenely down a face already stained crimson. You're listening.[break][break]

“They would have had you rot in here for all of eternity. And you, Terrible Curr, are certainly deserving of it. But I have great plans, you see, ones that will spare this galaxy and all others like it. I only need a weapon with which to do it.” Golden eyes meet your's – a king crouched down to meet the face of a demon chained to the dirt. “I will free you from this prison, Curr. And as payment, you will help me build the greatest empire these universes will ever see.”[break][break]

Bated breath accompanies the wait of all others in the chamber aside from yourself. It's quite easy to tell that only the man crouched before you had had any idea of what this trip of theirs really meant, from the disgust written on the face of the old woman in the back to the unease of the younger boneless beast closer toward the front. If it is a show this arrogant Ireod wishes to put on, then you will humor him for as long as it does not bore you. They seek their yes or their no – but instead you split into laughter, spraying blood and spit as you do and deafening the whole Crypt with its explosive sound. It swallows the echoes of his eloquent story whole, just as you imagine yourself doing to his body before the hour has reached its end. If walking into the jaws of certain death is what he wishes to do, then so be it; once you are free of these chains, this Crypt will be decorated with their entrails. “Do it,” you say, voice raw from generation after generation of lack of use. “Set me free.”[break][break]

(You think him mindless for willingly breaking you free of your shackles, effectively dooming their party – and, by extension, the outside world – to absolute oblivion. In the end, it is you who is mindless. Not once did you pause to think that he knew exactly what he was doing.)[break][break]

“As you wish.” His face splits into a grin, vile enough to reflect your own, and you can't see the trap laid out right before your very eyes. “I look forward to your continued support:[break][break]

“Dicio Ilternium.”[break][break]

THE STARS WE USED TO KNOW NO LONGER GLOW, OBSCURED BY ALL THE ASH THAT FALLS LIKE SNOW.

You'll come to predate many things in your extended lifetime. Ignoring, even, that you were apparently chronicled in texts faded and falling apart speaking of the brutal destruction of a paradise called Cete (a time in which you must have lived, but remember nothing but vague and dark snippets of after millenia and millenia of enforced slumber) and, therefor, had technically lived through the repeated rise and fall of previous attempts at unifying sectors of the twin universes (and the raise and fall of your own kind, though you wouldn't come to learn that you had a kind at all until long after the passing of the last to come before your awakening), you could one day take your place as one of the oldest beings living in the known universes. The seventh calamity on Risidahe, the liberation of Mekukayn II from Mekukayn I, the Zakna Star Races – all of them lived through, all of them experienced, past events known as well as something carved into the back of your hand. The youth relish in it, badger you for stories of things written in history books but unavailable to be seen by eyes that had yet to be sculpted by the gods. To you, though, they are minute little things, recalled only because of a memory that will not allow you to forget. Minute, at least, in comparison to the earliest years of what would become as commonplace as water on a planet supporting life on its own. The Empire.[break][break]

To be truthful, you remember very little of the time that earned you your title – the Curr of Cete, you learn, is a title coined only for you, a name so heinous and vile that even those with the most foul of mouths refrain from saying it unless in direct reference to the only creature so equally heinous and vile to uphold it – and all of the various things that your new master and his many thoughtless lackies expect you to. Cete is nothing nothing but a name to you. That it was some sort of paradise in the distant past is easily pieced together with the way they talk about it, of course, but what it looked like, who was there, why it so many have tried (and failed) to recreated it are all lost on you. The symbols, drawn in grotesque scarring across the canvas of the skin on your back? You've no idea who they came from or why they're there. Why your mind is constantly filled with bloodlust? Your inability to feel proper empathy? Your pleasure at the sight of others' pain? Unknowns, all of them. You simply are; apparently, the earliest members of The Empire cannot wrap their minds around it.[break][break]

The moment that man had set you free from your prison, you had moved with the intent to kill, and in that moment that you moved to bend and break and destroy, someone else had moved to you even quicker. Tied you down. Forced you into submission. As it turns out, his great and brilliant plan was to force you into a blood pact – although to call it just that would be a brazen understatement of its actual workings. He had set you free from your eternal prison, your payment was unquestionably loyalty to he and his cause, and no word of mouth from a liar would suffice. It was the blood spilt from your slit throat that brought this pact you hadn't been informed of to completion, and upon waking, you were put to work as your new master's slave and weapon. Obedience is something you'd given early on only because of his promise of the upcoming slaughter. No one individual or group had managed to conquer much or last very long, but for thousands and thousands of years, turf wars that spanned entire planetal districts plagued the universes all the same. If the infant Empire had any chance of rising above and unifying all, they'd need to destroy any and all potential threats: and this is where you and your murderous ways played their most important role. You had thought this would come into effect immediately, straight from the Crypt and into the war zone. Instead, they force you to sit through meetings with a muzzle over your mouth to keep you from cooing and calling and mocking and laughing at potential allies, make you carry weaponry and personal belongings from here to there and back again as though you're some sort of mule, not the man who had, purportedly, single-handedly dragged paradise down to the pits of Hell. It's menial. Demeaning. You tire of it quickly.[break][break]

If they won't give you enemies to kill, you'll sate your blood lust on the poor victim who happens to stand closest.[break][break]

Your first target, then, is the man holding you on a tight leash.[break][break]

Plans you've crafted before and those that will come after in these “early years” are rarely so perfect, benefited, perhaps, but your apathy toward who may or may not see the viscous deed done. Mortal creatures may find some sort of personal honor in upholding promises, and even those more likely to bow out at the first sign of a loss of personal interests may be persuaded only by their blood pooled on paper – but you have nothing to lose but your time and your interest and your ability to scratch at this horrible itch that drives you mad, sitting in the corner of yet another meeting like the good little toy they want you to be. Words mean nothing, your blood couldn't matter less. You have an infinite amount of it to spill, after all. Your master is as good as dead where he stands.[break][break]

Talent in murder, however, and a plan so flawless that only an individual without a functioning brain could possibly fail at do not guarantee you the victory. This pact you have made, your freedom swapped out for enslavement of the same breed (just a different name), has layers to it even deeper still that this... this traitor has so conveniently failed to mention. You plunge the knife into his chest, but it's not he who cries out in anguish: it's you, burning alive from the inside out. You know pain. You have inflicted it enough to see it etched on the faces of those around you. Your earliest memories are defined by it. But nothing you have ever caused, and nothing you have ever felt compares to that which you feel bone-deep now. His wound only broke the flesh: an injury that bleeds more than it stings. And you – they leave you, writhing in anguish, rolling in your own filth for sixty-three hours before finally plunging the same knife through your skull and putting you out of your misery.[break][break]

“It was hard to focus, you have to understand, with all of that noisy screaming,” your master tells you when you revive later, trembling, the fire lit in your soul gone but phantom echoes of its pain still singing in your limbs.[break][break]

He has saved you from your eternal imprisonment -[break][break]

Henceforth, you have no choice but to obey.[break][break]

I'VE WATCHED IT ALL THROUGH THE WINDOW OF MY GRIEF. I NEVER DREAMED THAT I WOULD FEEL SO COLD.

Your... predicament is a troublesome one, to say the least. To say you know of an existence in which he is not very much involved would be a lie, but your hatred for his kind (and all other kinds, for that matter) and your distaste for not being able to act as you please, when you please has your roles in the greater scheme of things causing bile to rise high and sickly in the back of your throat. You don't know freedom, have never seen it, don't really know the concept, but oh how you wish for it. Patience is something that you don't have, but bouncing angrily on your heels for long enough proves to give you just enough of a taste of it, that aforementioned freedom, to let you forget for only just a moment that you're enslaved to a man whose name you will never know.[break][break]

The enemies your master had spoke of, however, do exist, and the massacre he had promised you finally, finally falls into your ever waiting hands. Laughably, he tries to prepare you for combat before sending you out to the first formal battle of a war (a series of them, really) that will span the next years to come. Wasted effort, of course. Weapons you do not know the name of are placed in your hands, but you master them in a matter of minutes. Obstacle courses laid before you are traversed with record times. Your only fault in your training-cut-short is that you've no idea what it means to hold back, to show mercy on those meant to fight by your side. When they place a weapon in your hand and your point you in the direction of your opponent, for learning or for glory be doomed, they should expect to only one of you to come out of it alive. If anything, the weapon is unnecessary. You remove limbs from torsos, eyes from faces, faces from skulls, all with nothing but a fire in your eye and a longing to ruin, ruin, ruin in your empty, blood splattered hands. If anyone is to blame, it is your master for believing that pitting you against another in a sparring match would not end with the death of his soldiers. What a waste.[break][break]

(You become the front lines, then. They shift with every step you take on the battlefield, yielding and yielding as you press onward and forward without a shred of hesitation. They kill you once, but you come alive again to repay the favor one hundred fold. Cannon fodder, you call them – and, because they know nothing of a paradise lost, know nothing of the Curr of Cete or the name, Dicio, that your master has bestowed upon you, No Man's Land is what they come to call you in turn.)[break][break]

Your return is a triumphant one. The decapitated head of their leader becomes your proof of victory.[break][break]

One conquered country becomes another, then another, until soon, the entirety of your “home” planet, this Ecenika becomes the capital for an Empire that will soon claim hundreds, thousands of planets just like it under its name. There are few places in the District that would make for a better start in a galactic conquest. Scholars with knowledge of ancient technology roam the countries you have earned in the place of your freedom, materials enough to supply for an army ten times over are ripe for the picking. Those that are even better suited for the task of subjugation become the first targets of the Empire – and just like that, where three months of battle would have earned a country, they now earn whole planets, their moons, their materials, and their people. Your name has become a thing to be feared for the first time in what you are told to have been a million years. Your master's, however, metamorphosizes. You still don't know what they called him in his youth, or even what his subordinates called him when he forced you beneath his ever-more-wealthy foot, but you hear now what they call him. Everyone. The Unifier. The Peacemaker. The Great Emperor. He takes on a wife, dubs her the empress. From the start, you had been expecting failure of spectacular proportion; now, you are not so sure.[break][break]

With conquest comes wealth, and with wealth comes parties more extravagant than anything these people have likely ever seen before. Your master, you've correctly assumed, has never sat in the filthy palm of poverty, but even a man of his charisma fidgets and shakes in the days leading up to his first massive celebration.[break][break]

“It must be perfect,” he raves, too occupied with pacing to realize that you, his weapon, not his colleague are the only one there to listen. “Only the best musicians, and only the best chefs – and dancing, why! The misses doesn't even know how to dance!”[break][break]

A tragedy, certainly. Just a decade prior, the civilians of the District were certain of their untimely demise to disease or famine or pirates or – well, the list goes on. Now, though, now, you listen to the man you must serve beyond his death rant and shout and tear his hair out over his wife's inability to dance of all things. He is not wrong, however, in saying that she does not know how. If there is error to be had at all in the statement, it comes in that very few, if any of the close circle that the Great Emperor surrounds himself with know how to properly do so themselves. A minor loss of culture really weren't the right words – the thought strikes you out of nowhere, and you can't help but laugh as the empress goes toppling down to the unforgiving floor once again.[break][break]

“The Curr's laughing at me!” she squeals, features twisting and snow white flesh staining gray – a sign of agitation in her porcelain-looking race.[break][break]

It comes as little shock to you to hear her defensive shrieking, even if your humor wasn't necessarily at her expense so much as the lot of theirs'. Despite the rage you feel toward your master for tricking you, fresh from slumber, into a servitude that will last well past his own death., he finds himself oddly at peace with you. Enough to not spit in your face at every waking opportunity, at least. If you were you make assumptions, it would be that, for once, you pose no threat to him – and while you may bite and claw at all those that come near you, you have been an ever important pawn in the game that has earned him this wealth. His wife, on the other hand, holds an opinion of you that reflects that of most everyone else who knows of your origins. Knows what you've done that you, yourself, don't. Fortunately for the others, if you made the effort, perhaps you could find it in yourself to give them just a sliver of your respect – not, however, for the Great Emperor's caterwauling mistress. “Laugh as it may – but I doubt it has any idea of what a 'dance' even is, the brainless animal.”[break][break]

Her next fall takes with her the instructor. And you – you know all about pain. Recognize it in the humanoid man who tumbles and twists and yelps at a body part moved in a way it wasn't supposed to. No more dancing for today, they think in silence, the only sound to their disappointment the resounding puff of air that escapes their lungs. But if you know about anything else, it is surprises. You delight in the way she stifens like a board when you take her hand in your's, place your free one at her hip.[break][break]

“I'll show you my idea of 'dancing',” you hiss right in her ear, and a second before she spits and sputters to her husband to save her from the gaping jaw of a feral beast – you spin her once, twice. There is no music (not anymore, courtesy of the suddenness of your substitution), but you move along between to phantom sound than they had to the melodies echoing through the hall just minutes before. At first, you have to physically pull and drag her along with you: results of a harsh mix of confusion and obstinacy, no doubt. When she realizes that she is trapped, however, and her stubbornly stiff ways will not deter you, she relents and plays along. The band makes to start up again at the awed instruction of your master, but you beat them to. Song sunk deep into your mind, a thing you never recalled until you needed it; you know it by heart, every word, a tongue long forgotten, but you don't give them the satisfaction of that. Instead, you hum along. (The room falls silent behind you, and the woman you've stolen into your arms steps on your toes a little less.)[break][break]

“Where did you learn that?”[break][break]

It is well past the hour of slumber for most of the Empire's high circle when your master catches you – a thief caught in the act (although you haven't stolen anything yet), the restless caught pacing sleeplessly – and you turn to face him with an eyebrow raised lazily high. By now, you've forgotten your earlier spectacle. Or, rather, you've pushed it out of the forefront in your mind, ancient melodies and dances far less favorable than the sounds a mother makes when she watches her child die in your hands. “I've never heard or seen anything like it before. Did you pick it up from the front, then?” You put the pieces together then, and – ah, that's what he wants to know. The idea draws a cackle from the back of your throat, strengthened only by the mental image of the people you slaughtered on that same front teaching you song, teaching you dance. While the others stopped to rest, you moved onward, further, always in search of someone to kill, active soldier or no. There was no time for such trivialities. Where, then, did you learn it?[break][break]

“Not the front,” you say through your teeth, twisting on your heel and starting your search for solitude anew. “Paradise.”[break][break]

ALL OF MY HOPES ARE IN A SHROUD OF DESOLATION - DREAMS THAT I ONCE HAD HAVE ALL BEEN CRUSHED.

You are bound by blood to your master – your blood, as well as his own. When he dies, this curse he has placed you under will pass onto his children, and theirs after. So much time spent with the empress in the Emperor's hand with no heir to show for it had the infant Empire's people sucking in their breaths; what was an empire, after all, without a means to pass on leadership? Her infertility – or, even better, his – would have done you a great service, surely. Your pact would die, then, with him, and you would be free to slaughter all as you so pleased.[break][break]

It is for this reason, then, that anger flares in your soul like a wildfire, even as the rest of your people let go of an air of relief upon your emergency summons back to the capital. Your master finally, finally has an heir.[break][break]

“Are you out of your mind?” As per usual, you hear your queen before she ever lands in your line of sight, high pitched voice rising above all else and driving a knife into and through your poor, helpless eardrums. (You wonder what he sees in her, save for her face and what you assume must be skill in a bed; those alone, though, wouldn't be enough to spare her from your hands around her throat had your roles been reversed.) Sure enough, she rounds the corner, husband at her elbow, a bunch of clothe in her arms, and the moment she lays eyes on you, you'd swear she's turned charcoal. “If you think I'm letting that Curr anywhere near her, you -”[break][break]

“Be at peace, dear,” he silences, sounding every bit as exasperated as the expression he dons on his face. An expression he swallows whole, anyway, when his eyes land on you.[break][break]

“Dicio! I was expecting, but not so soon! If my sources are correct, things are going spectacularly on the front – and it's all thanks to you.”[break][break]

For a man who controls every aspect of your life, could tell you to lay waste to your own self repeatedly and watch as you were forced to helplessly, bloodily obey, he certainly tries to ease you in to each and every command that doesn't evolve ripping out a trachea here or smashing a skull or ten there. It's a tactic that may work on others. You, however, aren't like the others. You have no empathy to play toward, no patience to listen to him try to butter you up before striking the finishing blow. You already know that the victory after total victories are largely accomplished because it is you leading the charge – hearing it said aloud, while definitely a bit of a stroke to your ego, isn't going to make you less any aggravated with this latest assignment. Whatever it is. The look on your face must show, too; the smile on his dissolves at the sight of it, and he's smart enough to get right to business then. “As you've probably noticed, however, being as close to that front as you have been, our battles have grown... less intense, shall we say. The decisive victories – for now, anyway – have already been made. Until we reach out further, toward planets and systems with a military that may to pose a threat, our control over these battles is as good as assured. With or without you.” Your eyes narrow there, and his words prick dangerously at your pride. In a perfect world, this would be the prelude to your freedom. Real freedom, not the conditional “liberation” he had bestowed upon you that day in the Crypt. From the moment of your creation, however, you have been a pessimist. A moment later, and he proves you correct. “But your talents are rare. Exclusive to you, dare I say. And I have something more important to me, now, than minor victories on the front.”[break][break]

The empress protests and holds her package closer to her chest. Without a word of confirmation, you know where this nightmare is headed. You're hissing before they've even finished leaving his lips.[break][break]

“Empires circumvolve around their leaders, so it stands to reason that an empire can last only so long as their leaders. And to ensure that there are leaders at all to follow in my footsteps when I have passed -”[break][break]

“No.”[break][break]

If his backhanded insult earlier has been a needle in your ego, your outright refusal of a proposal not yet made is a strike strong enough to knock the wind out of him. He recoils as though you have physically hit him. Had you been able to without suffering the damage a thousand fold, you might have just done that. “I'm a killer. You brought me here so I could kill for you, not to watch over some brat. If you don't have anyone for me to kill, then maybe there are better places I could be right now.” Let me go, you beg him silently, the words swallowed whole for only the fact that your pride won't let you grovel for anything. I've got to be free.[break][break]

Suffice to say, this is now what he does.[break][break]

“... After all this time, and you still don't understand your place. Very well. Allow me to rephrase so that you may better understand.” Your master, the Great Emperor, the Peacemaker, the Unifier stands above you then like an iron giant, looming and dark despite his typically minimum advantage in height over you. You don't know fear, not like his kind, but you do know to hold your tongue. (Maybe he and his vile pact are holding it for you. Whatever it may be, you don't care to test your limits.) “From this day onward, until the death of this child or a specific order that demands the opposite, you will dedicate every minute of your time, every ounce of effort in your miserable body to the protection, happiness, and well being of my daughter. If there is something she desires, you will fetch it for her, no matter how far. If there is something she wishes for you to do, you will do it for her, no matter the repercussions toward you. You will forfeit your life a hundred times over before you will let one hair upon the top of her head be plucked from it by the hand of another. And if she is to die early, then you will know despair worse than even the likes of that which you put paradise through in those days of old.[break][break]

“Tell me that you understand, wretched Curr. Or are you foolish enough to argue a second time?”[break][break]

You consider – then the heat of a hand placed over molten steel begins to trickled through your veins, and you think better of it. You say faster than it can burn, “Yes – yes, I understand. It will be done.”[break][break]

NOW THAT EVERYTHING'S CHANGED, I HAVE BEEN HOLDING ON SO DESPERATELY TO THE PRECIOUS THINGS THAT I CANNOT PROTECT – 'CAUSE I ALWAYS BREAK THEM.

There is a chance, perhaps, that you have been mislead. The only proof you have that your curse extends beyond the man who made it and onward, into the veins of those who will carry his blood of generations to come are the words from his mouth telling you as much. If you killed the babe, then, perhaps you would not suffer for it. You could crush her between your hands with ease: a child whose head fits so neatly, entirely in the palm of your hand. How many heirs, you vaguely wonder, would you off before your master finally banishes you to the far reaches of the universes with your shackles broken and your mind running wild with all of the horrible, terrible things you can do of your own accord? … How long, you also can't help but wonder, would they leave you there, suffering through every pore, in every cell for the murder of a being your fate has been tied to before they were born? Forever, you think. On and on, locked away, just as you were beneath the ground in the Crypt for millenia before. You've died many more times than anything else in the twin universes, have stared torture and anguish down with determination in your soul, have conquered fear as mortal men have known it – but that is something you simply cannot risk. (The thought alone terrifies you; it's the only thing that does.)[break][break]

These thoughts you have, though, all of them, are fleeting. You humor them in secret while standing in the doorway of her room like the other guards, a picture of perfection, a man who would lay down his life in an instant without ever thinking wrong of the baby girl he's sworn to protect. When you stand over her sleeping form, however, closer than any of the other guards dare to step – only then do you really feel like the picture of perfection. Something moves in you when you look at her. One time in your life to reach out to her with murder on your mind, violence in your outstretched hand. One time in your life, you spare a life you had, even if only for a moment, wished dead.[break][break]

The others leave one by one. Where exactly it is that they're sent to, you don't know. Should your best assumptions prove true, they're taking your place at the front of the lines, cannon fodder laid out helplessly to the slaughter. And then there is only you, a killing machine, the universes' greatest weapon, sitting in the darkness of the heiress' nursery as she mumbles and rolls in her sleep. It's a long time before you allow yourself to really touch her, weary of what may happen when you do. Would she shattered like ice beneath a hand too forceful? Would she be tainted, somehow, for coming into contact with a creature so unholy as yourself? Worst of all: Would she cry? To the relief of no one but yourself, she does none of these things – only stares and stares and stares, eyes as blue as the sky on Labicara III, face as awed as those who heard you break into dance and song. The fact that she stirs the memory in you drags a trace of humor along with it, and before you realize when you're doing, you're singing again, softly, the words of ancient musicians and the stories they wove to people long gone. You sing her a story of Ilmartir and the human she had loved. You sing her a story of Axenizi and his mind, split between two bodies. You sing her the story of Rema the River Spirit and the sikah child who build a world on her. Timeless heroes, quests across lands that no longer have names. (The other hear you, night after night, and while none know the name of that which you sing, they come to call it Dicio's Lullaby.)[break][break]

You are cruelty. You're cruelty and anger and violence, hellfire, packaged haphazardly into the shape of a being that mirrors the mother race, the humans, long extinct. You tear out the tongues of the chefs who serve you and your charge food too hot, and you break the arms of those who step too close to the heiress. They all fear you for it, are right to – but not her. Time passes, and she swings off your arms, crawls up your back and refuses to descend until you've played the steed long enough to sate her energy. Slumber can't fall over her until she's heard your ancient hymns, and the city cannot be traversed unless yours is the hand that grips hers.[break][break]

It's... degrading, in a sense. You've a reputation to uphold, after all, one that paints you as the more fearsome beast in all of creation. Proof of Cete's existence, and subsequently its destruction is burned and reduced to rubble by the day, but only so much can be destroyed in so much time, and the educated still know of the monstrous Curr who the Great Emperor caught with collar and leash. They know who you are; they know what you've done; they know what you're still capable of. And yet, they can still find it in themselves to smile when they see their Emperor's daughter running circles (literally, figuratively, it doesn't matter to her) around you like an Ifvaf whose consumed more sodium than they can handle.[break][break]

“Dee,” she coos, smile brighter than any of the three suns in the sky and – ugh, Ilmartir save you. This has become your life. An immortal monster, slayer of any and all, reduced to a jungle gym. (For reasons you cannot fathom, the notion doesn't bother you as you think it should.)[break][break]

She's a staple in your life, the alarm in the morning (even if you never sleep), the lullaby to end the night, the reason to ensure you're eating three meals in a day. Every minute of your time is spent watching, just as you promised, and she happily consumes each one – until just one night, when a guard you had not known was hired in the first place tells you that you've been summoned long after the little princess has laid down to rest and that he would take your place for as long as was necessary. You don't think twice when you leave your post, mind on what will happen to you if you disobey rather than what will happen to her when you step away.[break][break]

Stupid, stupid. You have only yourself to blame for what happens after.[break][break]

You see the blade before it buries itself in your eye, and you feel it twist and turn and cut straight through the other for only a minute before you die. (You were dead weight to your master, a pet he had named years ago but never even deigned to call it by from the day you dared to utter the word 'no'. Summons? Were you without a brain? You deserve more than a head split down the middle, more than steel plunged into, through, beyond your pupil. And your charge – oh, gods, the girl –)[break][break]

Xi-Wangmu's night sky greets you when you awaken, and the only thing your mind can think of is all of the worst ways to make that man suffer. Alarms shout a cacophony at you as you shoot to your feet, the confusion of those you push and shove and tear out of your way little more of an obstacle than an insect flying through the path you must take. The high ground shows you where your target's gone (the terrified screaming of the little girl in his arms too quiet now to guide you, too far), but the time it took for your body to build itself anew in the universes you weren't occupying was enough time for him to put a sizable distance between himself and the place from which he flees. Worse, still, you have an idea of where he's going, where the boundary between salvageable and unfixable carves itself into stone, and the speed of a mere human won't catch up to him before he crosses it. What you need is a speed your body shouldn't have. You know the direction, the magnitude, if only you could just push the vector -[break][break]

Something twists. In the moment, you know your enemy to be dead where he stands.[break][break]

You catch him with time to spare, surrounded by the unwitting eyes of civilians unprepared for the massacre you're going to put them through. You wretch the girl from his arms, perhaps with too little care – sure enough, your hands burn as she bounces on the ground, but they're easily forgotten in the face of the corpse-to-be that you've finally, finally gotten in your hands. The look he flashes you in the moment before you tackle him to the stonework beneath your feet is priceless: some helpless look of horror that reveals to you that he hadn't known just who he had stuck his blade through. It makes his slow, torturous dismemberment all the sweeter for it. People scatter, blood spills, and your lungs wail in agony – but she's safe when you pull her into your arms, and she doesn't seem to mind the scarlet staining your hands when you she buries herself into your shoulder with a sob.[break][break]

Her grip doesn't let up on your clothing even when you've returned back into the safe haven of her home. By now, the others have grasped understanding in their hands, their senseless running and squabbling replaced with apprehensive looks and tense silence. The blood on your hands – whose is it? Your's? The kidnapper's? The heiress'? If they question, they fear doing so aloud. It gives you the illusion that you'll be able to put her back to bed without interruption – an illusion that's shattered the moment you find your road blocked by the Great Emperor himself.[break][break]

“What's happened here?”[break][break]

His daughter trembles and whimpers in your arms. Had you been able to look, you'd find her grip on you staining her knuckles the same color of your hair. “Just a midnight walk. Don't get any gray hairs over it.”[break][break]

“Dicio.”[break][break]

When you'd seen him there, chin tilted toward the heavens, eyes harder than the stone you'd killed a man on just minutes before, you had expected rage the likes of which you'd never seen from him before. He would raise his hand to strike at you, and you would let him, if only for the fact that moving to avoid the blow would hurt you that much more. She'd be taken from you, then, assigned to others, species not bound by packs, beings not driven by blood lust. (You'd miss her. The gods be doomed, you would.) As for what came after – well, you are not a creative man. You mind can't even hope to imagine. What you see now, however, are the lines of worry veiled imperfectly across the canvas of his expression. What you see is not a king seething with rage, but a father who must have thought his daughter gone. Dead. If there is a punishment to be faced, you realize, you won't be facing it tonight.[break][break]

(One of his closest advisers whispers to the child held tight in your own white knuckled grip, trying to coax her away from a Curr and into the arms of 'real' safety. “I want Dee,” is all you hear through the fabric of your shirt. It gives you the strength to open your mouth and speak.)[break][break]

“... Look, I – I can't stop them from plotting, or scheming, or what have you. If you wanted me to root out the problem before it shows up, I'd have ki- … gotten rid of this whole circus you've got here.” You suck in a breath – hold her tighter still – press on. “But no way in Hosadam am I letting them succeed. I'm going to die a hundred times over before they get their way, right? That's what I said I'd do.” Was that the right thing to say, you wonder? You know nothing of your origins, your kind, what you were meant to do, but you understand that you communicate better with your fists and your hate than your tongue and your teeth. All of the life that you've known has been spent in the shadow of your master, but appealing to him never stops feeling foreign. Wrong. If you've erred now, though, he makes no show of it, relenting instead, moving to let you pass, silent all the while. Fine. You've nothing more to say to him, anyway. “Hey,” you say, instead, to the body held soundly in your arms. Her bawling has dwindled from from a force that wracked her body to one that elicits little more than a sniffle here, and whimper there: an improvement you'll take.[break][break]

“Let's get you back where you belong.”

MY HEART IS PLAYED JUST LIKE A HARP BY SINFUL HANDS OF DARKNESS WITH NAILS OH-SO SHARP.

Times change. You never do.[break][break]

The Empire stretches its reach further and further into space, swallowing Districts whole as it goes, and all the while, life on Ecenika changes for what many would believe to be the better. Wealth unlike many have ever seen flows through what were once the rich and poor alike, education flourishes anew, and you watch as the dance you had danced to rub your foot into the mouth of the empress spreads far and wide across the city. Bizarrely, it's these days that you first hear of the idea of constructing a capital separate from this planet or any other. That dream, however, won't come into fruition for generations to come.[break][break]

The growth you see most, however, is in your ever lively charge, courtesy both of how she seems to grow three meters in a single night (an exaggeration, of course, but you can't help how you think of it) and the fact that you see more of her than anyone or thing on this flourishing planet. How long has it been since she was just an infant, carried entirely in the length of his arms, unable to find rest without the sound of a song only he knew how to sing? It's impossible to compare the baby of then to the young girl who stands before him now – fourteen years old, loud mouthed, and every bit as fiery as the child who ran him haggard chasing zakna in the palace courtyard. You spend less time with her now, yes, than in those early days spent looming over her as the gods loomed over the universes – there are instructors, now, to fill in your gaps, friends her age to surround her when you can't and keep her safe from harm – but she's no less the center of your own personal universe than she was the first day her mother begrudgingly lowered her into your arms. Perhaps the only thing that's really changed, aside from her ever changing form and ever growing knowledge, is that she likes to talk. (Too much, you're afraid, and about all of the wrong things.)[break][break]

“Aldera's got a boyfriend now.”[break][break]

“Mmm,” you say, because you have no room in your infinite mind for a girl whose spine you could snap in two with just a bit of pressure, but you'll never be able to get away with ignoring your princess for long. You've never been young yourself. You woke to an age that exceed one million; your physical form has been static, caught at an age that your master believes to be roughly in the “late thirties” for the human kind you so resemble. You've never been young, no, but you know all about the stories: young love, broken hearts, a need to grow up until you're there, you are, and you wish for nothing more but to go back and have your youth again. The people she surrounds herself with are no different from the cliches, the statistics. Some part of you swells with pride you won't admit to, then, when you admit that she, herself, doesn't always fall into the mold.[break][break]

“I don't think he's very good for her, though. It looks like he's trying to kick her shin when they go to knock ankles.” You afford her a grin for that. The mental image of youth sloppily trying “knock ankles”, as they say, is just embarrassing enough to make you pause for a moment in cleaning the blood stains out of your uniform. They're all so eager to jump head first into all of the dirtiest aspects of “being in love”, never once pausing to wonder if what they actually feel is that very emotion, or lust: raw, all consuming. The latter's gotten the better of even you. Although, when you say it aloud, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. You're the embodiment of everything vile, everything primal. Kiss and go, abuse and abandon. You don't sleep around much if only because there's no one to catch your eye. Not when duty demands it be trained on one person in particular.[break][break]

“Smug words for a runt who hasn't got a boy of her own.”[break][break]

“No, not a boyfriend,” she agrees, eyebrows raising as blue hues land on the particularly stubborn splatter you've been rubbing at for the past few minutes. She pauses then, but you know immediately that it's intentional. She's certainly her father's daughter; every word out of her mouth is for show. “But I've had my eye on someone for a while.”[break][break]

If you'd paused, yourself, before in the washing of your garments, you come to a screeching halt at the sound of that. Clearly, your belief in her being above and beyond the lovesick tenancies of a teenaged girl were unfounded, and it spoils something deep in your mind that you can't hope to name. What sort of boy, then, keeps her up at night? What sort of boy could possibly live up to the standards of an heiress? Maybe not a boy at all, you wonder for a moment, but the mental image of an equally young, equally inexperienced child trying to knock ankles with your charge has bile rising in the back of your throat. “What's that supposed to mean?” you ask, and you try not to groan aloud at the sudden harshness of your tone. Too protective. All is fine so long as she lives long, lives will. Heartbreak isn't something you can keep her from. It's never been something you should have wanted to.[break][break]

She doesn't deign to answer you then, though, nor does she ever as the years pass you by again. (As it turns out, she doesn't need to. That significant other you've dreaded never comes, not how you'd imagine. Instead, you catch her staring at you too long, have to stop her from napping beneath your overcoat because she's too old for that now, people will get the wrong idea, and that's no good, not when she's to be ruler of the Empire and you're nothing more than a filthy Curr -)[break][break]

Your master brings a stranger into your home, bright eyed, cleanly shaven, and the heart you didn't know you had splitters like a stone met with a chisel.[break][break]

“You'll be happy to know, Dicio, that I've need of you on the front again. Don't look so worried, though! I've found only the best for my daughter. Her safety is no longer a concern of yours. You finally get to go back to do what you love.”[break][break]

(Stupid, stupid, stupid.[break][break]

(It's your own fault for letting yourself grow attached.)[break][break]

Times change. The war never does.[break][break]

Different planets, different races – they fall just the same, crumpling to the ground like fabric dolls discarded by their flighty owners. There had been rage there, clogging up your rational thought at the sight of that man with his arm around your charge as though he'd done anything but stick his nose up to his elders to deserve to put it there. You don't love her, not like that, but she's your girl all the same. Her life is thanks to your work. Her safety came at the expense of countless deaths of your own. Could anyone blame you for the hatred you feel toward a boy who spits on your shoes when his wife-to-be isn't looking your way? In a way, though, you almost have to thank him: his uppity ways and the anger they pump into you like gas become fuel for the havoc your wreck across planet after planet. Your greatest enemy yet topples over like a house of cards when you rush at it from the base, but even that isn't enough to burn off all of these nasty emotions you've been burdened with in your time spent playing body guard rather than killer. (Why did you do this to me? you ask her when the fighting has died and you're left alone to your thoughts, your festering hate, the way your heart aches for home. The thrill of the fight is still your high, the way they all die, die, die still leaves your fingers aching for more, but the lulls bring with them regret, and you've never learned to cope.)[break][break]

Your army takes and takes and takes. You know without being told that there will likely be no end to the conquering. The universes are terribly vast, after all, a near infinite amount of planets within its hold to take and convert and consume. But you – you miss home. You miss the palace and its pearly white stone, the meals served to you fresh, three times a day, filled with foods decorated with every color of the rainbow, the way men and women scurried up and out of your way rather than toward you with a weapon in hand. The lands you traverse here are desolate, ugly. The food you feast on are rations afforded to men doomed to die. (Not you.) No one knows what you are, not out here. In some twisted way, you wish they would shame your name, call you a Curr. Anything to tell you that your rampage in the name of your master held any lasting meaning.[break][break]

Murder. Oh, how you love it. (Unfortunately, you've tasted of something else you've come to love in your absence.)[break][break]

A government collapses beneath the weight of its leader's lifeless body as you let it fall to the ground the day you hear the news. Terror is what tends to fill in the tracks you leave behind, fills those unfortunate enough to stand before you, but the people herald you and your allies heroes for the liberation of their District from tyrants they had thought invincible. Their words mean nothing to you, of course. You did not tear a hole through that monstrosity’s multiple chest cavities for the sake of saving the people beneath it – you did so because that was what was ordered of you by your master, for the glory of the Empire. If it were up to you, you'd have moved onto the next the moment you could leave this miserable planet and its freshly conquered District. Unfortunately, dragging along soldiers who do not wish to move is a task easier spoken than preformed. So you spend the night. And only the night. It's all you'll allow.[break][break]

A night, as it turns out, is all you need to hear the news. Imperial Wedding Sparks Celebration in the Muna Division and Great Emperor's Daughter Takes Steps Toward the Throne. Cheering anew breaks out between those which follow your bloody lead, but when you see the words that have them stirring up such a ruckus, see the holograms, lifelike, playing back the wedding in full scaled to the size of less than the room you're drinking yourself dumb in, the most positive thing you can afford is a gawk. A wedding. You know that your master will rule this corner of the universes for as long as he walks upright and without aid, and this occasion, this too-extravagant bonding between heiress and a boy who'd only gotten by on his parents' wealth is barely a step forward to her eventually taking his place when the day comes when he cannot. Why does your blood boil, then, at the sight of these headlines? At the sight of plastic faces all dolled up, playing roles supposedly closer to the bride than your own? At the sight of – no, you can't even bring yourself to watch long enough to see them tying their knot. “The priests,” you say when questioned, “sure like to talk a lot for people with nothing at all to really say.”[break][break]

You ask yourself why, why, why – but you know why already, don't you? It's because you weren't there. You should have been there.[break][break]

With the liberation of a District you barely know the name of over and done with, you forcibly drag your forces onward and outward, further into the recesses of space and into places that your master never once ordered you to take, but will certainly not complain when you do. You're ahead of schedule, after all – the slimy beast of a thing that had taken that District hostage was to be a far greater threat to you than he was, and the impish forces that tried to pay you back for the murder done were, miraculously, even quicker to fall than the one they were swearing to avenge. It's not for another solar month that you allow your mind to focus on anything but the violence and the bloodshed at your fingers; the only reason you're broken from your reverie is that your communications light up white with a message weeks late. You wonder only why it took so long to arrive (these things are typically instantaneous – you've been getting orders from the palace seconds after they fall from the Emperor's lips, after all, despite the light years that separate you) for the amount of time it takes you to scan your eyes over the first words spoken emptily over digital text. There's a lot to read there compared to the bare bones nature of what the sender actually meant to convey. Just like her father; putting on a show for a crowd that doesn't care to listen.[break][break]

It was probably a little presumptuous of me to expect you to drop everything at a moment's notice and come rushing back to the palace. Well, not a moment's notice, but who knows how far away you are now? I just wanted you ther didn't think it'd be the sam miss you, is all. You've been here all my life, but now I haven't had the chance to see you a single day in the solar year! And I suppose I thought that you'd want to be there, too, even if you hate all the sitting around and listening to 'boring rites'. At the very least, the song you used to always sing me would've made for better music than that caterwaul they tried to pass of as 'song'. They're lucky I didn't try to pull a you and jump out at the musicians before the final rights – but I don't think anyone would've blamed me for it![break][break]

… But I should know how much you love the war by now, shouldn't I? It's never what I think of when I think of you, but father's told me all kinds of stories about the faces you'd make when he gave you another target to take. It's selfish to think you'd care about me more. Take care of yourself out there, though! And don't make yourself such a stranger! You can talk to me every once in a while, can't you?

[break][break]

You think first: How could I have gone if you never told me there was something to go to in the first place?[break][break]

You think second: Who didn't want me there?[break][break]

The list of mental names, as it turns out, that you can conjure to match the description of who wouldn't have wanted you staining a holy bond of marriage is almost half as long as the number of lives you have taken in pursuit of your eternal Empire. You could make your guesses – her mother? the main they now call her husband? – but they'd be no better than missed shots in the dark. So you turn back to your bottle, instead, and pray it will finally carry you into such a drunken stupor that you can forget about this all. All of it. Nothing more left in your mind than the hellfire you came into existence as – the paradise you ripped away at until there was nothing of it left to destroy.

YOUR VOICE IS LIKE A DRUG THAT MAKES ME NUMB. IT LEAVES ME WITH NO SENSES, DEAF AND DUMB.

Suspicion gurgles low and quiet in the back of your mind before anyone else's. The signs are there, subtle but just beneath your nose: The orders you receive are sharper, more to the point, lacking the typical, albeit unnecessary flourish that they used to. You've stood at the toe of No Man's Land for years, now, pushing it further and further against whoever has dared to stand in your way. All the while, you knew that a day would come when those orders weren't the same. A day when they'd fall from a different mouth. Where you were apparently mistaken was in how long it would take for that happen. If there is shock at all when you hear that the Great Emperor has been confined to his bed and will likely never be well enough to leave it again, it's only because it's happened so soon, well before what should have been his time. (The others weep and mourn, but you are filled with an emotion that tiptoes the border between spiteful and elated. Death to the man who has chained you anew. Death to the only being in the universes who could make you his slave.)[break][break]

Miraculously, this is not an opinion you hold so long as you'd thought you would. Such is not to say that you do not hate the man that holds you on his leash. you hate him, still, more than the ones who have dared to put a temporary end to your life, more than those who look down on you because they have been born lucky and not as a being who knows no empathy. Rather, you find your glee at his swiftly approaching demise sullied by the man who so quickly and effortlessly slips in to take his place. Suddenly, your workload is doubled, tripled, filled to the brim with meaningless exploits that accomplish a fourth of the ultimate gains in twice the time of your standard galactic conquest. It's busy work, is what it is, and busy work that your soldiers refuse to shirk in fear of being called traitors of the Empire. You could move on by yourself, you think. You obligation is to the bloodline of the Great Emperor, not the self righteous rulers-by-marriage. How far, though, would you really be able to go by your lonesome? What could you accomplish without a sea of death fodder behind you to make your pillaging a war by your enemies' standards? It's... frustrating. Frustrating in a way that you've never been made to deal with before. And, impossibly, you find your hatred of your master's son to be greater than that of his father's. At least your master had just enough of a sliver of kindness to act as though you were worth more than the mud smeared on his shoe the night he entered the Crypt. These orders aren't for glory, for conquest, for fate; they're to keep you further and further away from Ecenika.[break][break]

This time, they are kind enough to send you word of your past charge's Coronation ahead of time (alongside conveniently timed orders to push even further into space, out and away from the palace). You know, however, who this Coronation is really for, in everything but name. The moment the words reach you is the moment you peel away from your forces. Protest as they may, they can't keep you from boarding the fastest ship on this dreaded planet there is, and they won't stop you from being there to see the vile act with your own eyes.[break][break]

Your best efforts, however, can't make up for the amount of space he has put between you and home. Vector manipulation, limited as it is, can only help you so much. In the end, you arrive too late for the ceremony – but you do make it in time to crash the party that follows, reeking something fierce and breath spilling booze. The doors tremble before you force them open – the hall falls silent with your drunken arrival.[break][break]

“Dee!”[break][break]

Her's is the first voice to ring out across the quiet expanse, but it is the husband at her side that rushes to his feet. Disbelief tainted with disgust litters his expression, and it's enough to have your own breaking into a feral grin. The conversations you've had with this emperor are far and few compared to the many you've shared with the man he calls “father”, but they're enough for you to know how badly your skin crawls because of him – enough for you to delight in the way he turns crimson where the old empress had been stained a stormy gray. Tonight, you'll make a mockery of him before his own court. Precious little revenge for pushing you away from what you deserved. “What are you doing back in the palace?” he demands, hands clutched tight into fists at his side, and the whole length of the room isn't enough to hide his trembling from your careful eye. How, oh, how to push him off the edge?[break][break]

“Your battle's as good as won,” you tell him in a slur, pointing a sluggish finger his way and trying not to focus too hard on the way the room blurs a bit at its edges as you move. You're not that drunk – you can't be. “It's ten to one out there, a bloody mess waiting to happen, an' they don't need me barking orders at 'em all day to – to know how to aim for the eyes.” Only they don't aim for the eyes. Half the monsters they meet on the battlefield don't need them, a smaller fraction still don't even have them; the party-goers grimace all the same at the image your words instill in their minds, though, and you take the victory where you are able. “They didn't care that I went on home. I've gotta right to... to be here, right? I've been in this palace longer – l-longer than you've been alive! Only fair I get an invitation, too, right? Right?”[break][break]

You wobble, you shake. Someone snickers in the back of the room, but you aren't so inhibited that the glare you rake across the crowd doesn't do its part to force them all back into silence. How long would it take you to lay them all to waste with your bare hands? Minutes? Seconds? They know you could; they don't dare speak out of line now.[break][break]

The torch you had attempted to snuff out, however, is quickly picked up by perhaps the only one in the room who could pick it up at all. That very snicker is repeated by the man in the middle, growing and bubbling until he's laughing loud enough to deafen the unprepared. It – catches you off guard, to say the least. There's nothing here you can think of that this spoiled king could find amusing. “Leave it to the Curr to not understand. That's what we get, though, for trying to talk to an animal like a sentient being!” You hear the start of his wife's protest, can see the look of disapproval that mares her features at the sound of his insult, but the words are buried beneath those that speak louder and angrier than the rest. “It doesn't matter if they win without you there. It doesn't matter if they lose with you there. You've been issued a series of direct orders that can't be carried out with you making a fool out of yourself here. You, Dicio. Not your army. And like everyone else here, every other citizen of your master's empire, you are going to obey.” And had it been anyone else standing in your shoes, perhaps he would have been correct. Any sentient species bound by the cycles of law and death, oath and order, morality and responsibility would have keeled at the sound; because to disobey the emperor was to act in treason, and to act in treason would be a death wish. But he speaks to you as though you are mortal. He speaks to you as if your obligation is the the Empire, and not to the blood that gives it life. Your loyalties are different than that of everyone else in the room. You are not bound by their code because you are not bound by their cycles. How thoughtless of him.[break][break]

“Like Hosadam!” you spit, and someone of fainter heart lets out a gasp at the profanity. “I'm an animal, remember? One you've been talking to like a sentient being. Animals don't have to abide by your laws. When they act out of line, you kill them – but you can't kill me.” Had you been of sounder mind on this night, perhaps you would not have made the show of growling and hissing like the beast you likened yourself to. Then again, the looks on their faces is certainly worth the embarrassing manner in which you hold yourself up for those fleeting minutes. Had you not a point to make still, you may have just kept it up. “No, no, no, that's not what we're talking about here, though, your... your majesty. I don't – I never take orders from the Empire, or whatever you call this... this circus act. I take orders from the emperor. The Great Emperor. And I take – I take orders from her. But catch me with a sword through Araav's head before I ever roll over and take an order from your dirty mouth.”[break][break]

A step. A flash of grit teeth. “Don't talk that way to me. I am your -”[break][break]

“You aren't nothing,” you interrupt, laughing both at his loss of footing and your improper use of the word. You don't care, though. You don't care! You've dreamed so many nights of striking this infant in a man's clothing across the face with your word, with your hand, and only through the loosening of your tongue and the shock of the crowds around you do you finally get the chance. (He's taken everything from you: Your home, your thrill of the kill, the woman you'd once had the honor of holding in your arms. And you: You'll strip him of his pride. It's the only thing you'll be able to take.) “You're just a boy playing god. You don't know what actually needs to happen out there. You don't know what you're wasting! Your father turned the... the scariest thing in these universes into his personal little play thing, and now you're tossing me aside because you don't know how to p-properly use a weapon.” You pause, then, not because he doesn't seem to have anything to properly say to that, but because the moment gives you a time to properly reflect on what, exactly, you are saying, and what, exactly, this all implies for the man you've set out to verbally destroy. There were so many people who would have had the means to keep you from the wedding ceremony so long before, but it was the newly crowned emperor before you now who'd given you specific instruction to stay away for the coronation. Come to think of it, ever since his words came to replace that of the dying old man that came before him, you've been moving further and further away from your home and from your real objective than you'd ever had to before. It's almost as though he's been purposely keeping you just out of arm's length. A mission complete, and another, even further to carry out the moment the first has concluded. He wants you gone for reasons you may never know. (You've a guess as to what it is, though.) “... That's not it, though, is it? No, even someone as spineless as you should know better than that. Now that I think about it, your orders are sounding less and less like a tactical idiot's and more like someone trying to keep me good and – and far away from here. But why's that, huh? Is it because you're scared of me? You should know by now that I'm not your toy to play with.[break][break]

“Or maybe you're jealous. Jealous because that pretty little wife of your's loves a dirty Curr more than she loves you.”[break][break]

It's the knife you'd thought you needed: sharp, splitting, perfect for driving through his inflated, bubbling ego. You saw the way her eyes had lit up when you'd first stumbled through these doors, the smile her lips had twisted themselves into as she called out the name she'd given you when she was too small to day “Dicio” properly in full. Whatever she feels for the man at her side, your drunken mind is certain, it's a single droplet of water compared to the ocean of emotion she must feel toward you. Unreciprocated, yes, but a better weapon than any other you could think to use. It is not until you have swung, however, that you realize that there is more than one person on the other end of the room to be hurt by it – and in your carelessness, it is not him you see pained, but her. “Dicio, you -”[break][break]

“Don't bother, dearest. Today is your day. Don't soil your reputation over something as trivial as the Curr and his typical barking.” Let her speak, you monster, you shout in silence, but the look on her face stills your tongue; the way her husband takes the strides necessary to stand toe to toe with you stills the rest of you. Unlike the emperor who came before him, he stands shorter than you, enough that you barely have to tilt your head to look down your nose at him now. However, just like the man coughing himself away in that bed somewhere deeper in this palace, he still manages to conjure up an air of standing all the taller, towering over you in body and soul. Your arrogance is a front. You've been faltering since the moment he descended from his throne. “You're right about one thing, Curr. I do fear you. Many times, I've had to stop and wonder what cruel god shaped the form you parade around in and thought it wise to let you loose in these poor, unsuspecting universes. I fear the raw power you hold at your disposal, the way you tear through any and all – I've seen the holograms, I know what it looks like. But most of all, I fear that mankind can grow and twist and turn to shape themselves just like you. Heartless. Foul. Jealous.[break][break]

“What have you that I would envy? Power? You're already at my disposal. Your power is my power. Time? I've learned more in my short time than you have in yours, clearly. Enough to know not to spit in the face of my charge's most precious celebration. Your charge's love, then? Maybe if any other man stood where you do to make the very claim that you have, I could find one bit of myself to believe them – but what would a Curr like you know about love, anyway? You killed her enemies. I sooth her woes. You taught her to survive, but I'm the one who taught her to be happy. She doesn't hold any more love for you than a child love stheir pet. So what have you left, then? Your immortality? Your inability to die?” And he smiles, then. Nothing at all like the laugh he had spared at your expense earlier, nor like the one you had made at his just moments before. No, no. This is the smile of a man self assured. This is the smile of someone who knows he's already won.[break][break]

“She's going to die someday, you know. I will die with her. Everyone here will. And you'll go on with nothing but the hollow memory. What, Curr, is enviable about that?”[break][break]

(Nothing, you'll learn. Nothing at all.)[break][break]

“... I could kill you right now, you know. Snap you in half like a twig,” you say instead. He's stolen from you your high ground. You don't know how to answer.[break][break]

“You could,” he agrees. “But you won't.”[break][break]

You wretch the doors open with as much force as you had pushed them before, anger anew, bred a different breed driving your actions. The crowd smiles at you now, satisfied, mocking. They've done nothing to earn this victory, but oh, how they revel in it – too much, suffocating, you have to get out. Nighttime air pumps adrenaline back into veins tainted with alcohol, and it gives you the push you need to make your grand escape. The palace exterior shifts around you as you go, each new scene familiar, old: She was only five when she used you as a swing there, and she was sixteen when she beat you for the first (and last) time in the tactical game of Parkeece there. If you were a sober man, you keep telling yourself in a mantra, you would have won that battle, walked away a proud man with his self esteem in tact. (If you were a sober man, maybe you would have had the brains not to rush into that battle at all.)[break][break]

You've taken up residence in the courtyard beneath her old balcony when she finally catches up to you, her dress, easily worth more than all of the meals you've eaten in the the last half solar year, bunched up in her hands in a futile attempt to keep it from suffering the inevitable stains. “Dicio,” she says quietly when her eyes land on you, and you can't help but lets yours drift downward. Some sick, possessive part of you finds great joy in the idea that she's abandoned her husband and all those who came to celebrate her day of crowning to speak with you; the rest of you, however, has the wits to realize that she only ever calls you by your full first name when she's upset. Sure enough: “Look at me.” You cough up embers, choking on ash when you fail to move, but the moment red meets blue, you catch a flash of white in the dark and -[break][break]

The sound of her palm against the side of your face echoes throughout the empty courtyard, and the place where she's struck you stings long after she's recoiled.[break][break]

“What were you thinking, walking in there like that?[break][break]

“I wasn't,” you admit, and the ground once again becomes the much more interesting option to look upon between it and your former charge.[break][break]

“Apparently not! If anyone else had the audacity to go marching into the Grand Hall shouting profanities at the emperor, Coronation or no, he'd have been beheaded! Sentenced to unpaid labor, at the very least!” Like me? you think, but this time, you also think twice about saying it aloud. “You can't...” She sighs and drags a hand down her face in the time it takes to recollect her words. “I know you're not 'bound by blood' to him, or whatever that is, but you can't get away with talking him down like he's a random civilian. You're going to set an example, Dee – one that we can't afford to have people following. I mean -” Exasperation twists into fresh indignation, and you watch her stiffen visibly as her words sharpen again. “What's the matter you? You don't even bother showing up to the wedding, and then you show up late to my crowning only to pick a fight first thing with – Dicio, you didn't even spare me a word.”[break][break]

“I didn't go because they never told me.” The ground beckons. Your legs, unable to carry your weight, are quick to comply. From this newly acquired place on the ground, she looms over you in height and girth , multiplied in size by layers and layers of fabrics never meant to be found on Ecenika's humble plains. You know she means to be stern, what with the stone in her gaze, but it's a challenge to find her much intimidating when she's dressed to the nines (and eighteens, and one hundred sixty-twos, and onward).[break][break]

“Don't lie to me. I wrote the invitation myself! Well, I didn't know how to get it to you, but to make sure it got there, I gave it to – I gave... it... Oh.”[break][break]

Stone melts softly into liquid, and when she looks at you now, it is through a lense of understanding. Who it was she gave it to remains unsaid, but you can hear his name in your mind all the same. See it in the way she processes the fight that had broken out not long before in her head under a different magnifying glass, illuminated with a different light. “... Oh,” she says again, and suddenly, you're not alone in your place on the ground, back pressed to the wall. Fortune is what makes her mindful of keeping space between you, but the edges of her skirt dust your dirty arms all the same: a reminder of the line drawn in the mud between you, the dichotomy of a princess and a soldier who spends his days rolling in grime. You'd spent so long here and by her side that you'd forgotten your place in this whole charade. For a while there, you almost could have fooled yourself into thinking you actually belonged.[break][break]

“... I thought you were sick of me,” she says quietly – and suddenly that space is gone, her head on your shoulder, her hair in your face. Nostalgic – nostalgia, clogging your veins, filling your lungs, choking, suffocating. “I-I mean, maybe you are. Sometimes, it's hard to understand you. I just... I really did want to see you again.”[break][break]

You know all about pain: choking, suffocation. She's toeing over the line, and you should push (you don't want it, deep down, you don't), put her back where she belongs on the safety of the other side. But you are petty, and you are drunk. If this is what it's like to asphyxiate, you'll gladly hand over your air to her. (Your head on her own, her hand in your's.) “Never. Never. I came back for a reason. Not to... ruin your party. … I'm sorry.” You feel her weak laughter more than you hear it, a rumble into your shoulder that puts you momentarily off guard, though you can't find it in yourself to blame her for it. The words sounds wrong out of the mouth of the Curr. You don't mean them, not entirely, but to a certain extent, guilt for dragging her out into the night and smearing his own name through the mud with an attempt at getting even laps at the back of your mind. More than the miniscule guilt, however, you feel regret. Not as much for her as you should, but plenty of it for yourself. What a waste of time; what a shame to your name. “I should've never come. I don't belong here.”[break][break]

“No, don't say that! I wanted you here. I – I still want you here. I wish you were here all the time. Life's just not the same without you in it.” She throws at you a barrage of words, and though you're the one caught in the crossfire, it's she, herself, looking struck in the aftermath. She must not have meant to say all that, you imagine. Not so suddenly at the very least. But you don't mind in the slightest. (You revel in the fact that you're the only one she'll say these words to. Selfish, selfish.) You squeeze her hand reassuringly and say nothing of it. To your surprise, though, she's not finished. “You weren't... You weren't wrong. It was wrong of you to say it, yes, especially in front of all those people, but... You're right. He is afraid of you. And... and I do love you.” She says those words, and just like that, a switch has been flipped. You: freezing beneath her, aware all along but certain that real, spoken confirmation would never come to light. And her: bolder, grasping crying. She buries her face in your shoulder just like she had when she was a child and you'd saved her from certain doom just before the forest's edge. You hold her the same way you did then, unthinking. What a mess. “I love you. I – I really do. I was – I was afraid I'd never see you again, and I love you so, so much.[break][break]

“I only wish I'd told you sooner.”[break][break]

Would it have changed anything? For a moment, you let yourself wonder of a pair of universes that ran much differently than the ones you existed in now, thoughts cast out to the void as you whisper softly to her hair and rubs circles into her back. It's not a thought you can entertain for very long, however. What's ruined this for her is not the time she spend dawdling, but the fact that you are a creature much different from any other that walk beneath Ezasare's brilliant suns. You are darkness and evil twisted into the shape of man: ill pickings for the hand of a pristine empress. That she can love you at all is some great miracle – that her pain makes your heart ache another alongside the first.[break][break]

“Sing for me, Dee? Please? You know the song.”[break][break]

Only you don't know the song. You know not who it was written by, nor what it was written for. You understand the words, but not where they were used. It's a melody and a poem that mean nothing to you at all – but to her, it means everything. It means the childhood she'd spent in your care, the days unrecoverable that you were always there, the man whose lips they fall from. So you sing it to her now, again, a cycle, holding her in your arms in the courtyard below the balcony where you've watched her grow. A lullaby. An elegy.[break][break]

(You clean her up as best as you can, shaking dirt and leaves from the contours of her gown and wiping tear tracks from red-stained cheeks. And then you part. Come morning, she will wake in the arms of a man she holds no love for.[break][break]

(Come morning, you will be where you belong: hundreds of light years away.)