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Triumphs - The Awoken of the Reef Legend

150

The Awoken of the Reef

Complete this lore book.

Stories gathered: 0/23

Revanche II

Mara calls a caucus of elected representatives in the Sacred Fire, one of the largest hulks in the reef of derelicts. The Fire was built to support habitat construction on 4 Vesta, where Mara hopes to one day anchor the entire flotilla and set down roots—but the hopeful, fearful faces before her make Mara afraid that it'll never happen. What if everyone runs off at the first hint of home? Having come so far, across worlds and eons, to see Earth again—how can she ask them to hold back now? "We've found Humanity," she tells them. "We've found our ancestors." The cheer of triumph and wonder thrills her to the marrow. Most of these Awoken are Distributary-born, raised on myths of Humanity and the Traveler. She has just opened the pages of their storybooks and conjured them to life. "What remains of the Human species lives in a single settlement." She nods to Uldren, who snaps his fingers for footage. His ship's holographic perspective plunges through fluffy strata of clouds and mist, out into clear air. A lucid vista, a perfect instant: the white mountains, the city, and the enormous shattered sphere that hangs above it. "Freeze," Uldren commands. "That is the Traveler." As the crowd murmurs and thrills, Mara feels herself bridle. She doesn't like that thread of reverence. She doesn't like the Traveler looming there, almost but not quite completely dormant (like a dying heart ripped from its body and thrown into warm water, it ebbs and flutters if you look at it with the right sensors). If the Traveler had the power to protect anyone, wouldn't it protect more than one huddled settlement? Esila, daughter of Sila, leaps up from the crowd, too small to make it on her own, but buoyed up by enthusiastic neighbors. "What are we waiting for?" she calls. "That's everything we came to find! They need us, and that's where we belong!" Uldren and Mara trade glances. Uldren snaps his fingers, and the recording resumes. Something moves in the treetops. The canopy roils and parts. A red-brown aircraft shaped like a fat, wingless, furiously angry dragonfly bursts from cover and climbs to intercept. Uldren's head-cued camera tracks the target, and Mara imagines his narrow grin as he waits for the other guy to make a move. The dragonfly ship drops a brace of little needles, and they erupt into dirty orange flame and come arrowing after Uldren. Everyone in the caucus gets an earful of his grunts as he whips through a high-G turn and climbs away. "Those are Fallen," Uldren says. "They're a species of interstellar scavengers and subsistence pirates. They've been here for a long time, and they've sacked most of the large settlements that survived the original fall of Humanity. There may be more Fallen than there are Humans left on Earth." He lifts his chin to bare the pale scar across his throat. "I landed and went looking for prisoners. I was ready when he pulled two knives on me, but it turned out he had an extra set of arms." Nervous laughter. "Worse," Mara adds, beckoning for panes of deep-space passive sensor data, "they're all over the solar system. We've detected flotillas of their interstellar ships around Jupiter and Venus. They don't go near Mars, but only because it's under occupation by another alien species. Mercury is—well, you can see for yourself." Gasps of horror at the clockwork cinder, all that remains of the legendary garden world. "We believe this may be the work of the Vex, a machine species listed in Shipspire's threat index." Esila, famed historian, puts voice to the plea in the crowd. "So they need our help, don't they? We have to go to them! Our ships, our technology—we could make all the difference." "No." Mara collapses the projected images between her hands. She stayed up late wrestling with this dilemma, which kept her from wrestling with Sjur. It was a choice she had to make alone. "We can't reveal our existence, lest the Fallen track us down. We need more information. Our focus must remain on securing this derelict reef, bootstrapping industry and a population, and scouting out the solar system." "Mara, with all my respect, all my genuine gratitude for bringing us here," Esila sighs, "who died and made you Queen?" Mara says nothing. But she thinks: Everyone, Esila. All of us died and made me Queen.

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Revanche III

"It's bad," Sjur Eido says, confirming what Mara already knows, but nonetheless performing the valuable service of mopping away all the blood and tears and allowing Mara to glimpse the actual shape of the wound that divides her people. Not a literal wound (though she is, right now, tending to Uldren's scar, tweezing tiny fragments of Fallen metal out for analysis), but the rift in her Reef, the schism now re-schismatic, as if the quake that split the Distributary Awoken from Mara's people is now firing off aftershocks. She should've known this would happen. She shouldn't have told them so much about Earth. "How bad?" Sjur pokes Uldren in the hard gut, where a passing line of molten metal left a red burn. He's under anesthesia, but he snarls at her anyway. "As of the last caucus, I'd say thirty percent of the expedition wants to head for Earth. If you ask the 891," though there aren't 891 of them anymore, "it's more like eighty percent." Mara swears and pulls a bloody line of solidified slag from her brother. "Unacceptable. We can't lose their skills." Or their genes: The Awoken have yet to adapt to the attrition of this harsh spaceborne world, and tentative mothers are still in the early stages of designing their babies. It's vital to maintain a diverse gene pool. "And the Fallen will vector them back to us." "I know," Sjur says, heavily. "That's when I'm going to die." The most horrible thing about the words is that they slap down on Mara's consciousness like face-up cards, like truth revealed. "Unacceptable!" she barks, and then both she and Sjur begin laughing, and then, at last, Mara shakes her head and growls. "You can't know that, Sjur. No one can know that." "I do. I don't know how, but I do. I know it's going to be something I choose to do, and it's going to be incontrovertibly heroic. Which is enough for me." "But if that's true—" Mara proposes, flinching away from the personal conversation they really ought to have, and all its attendant rawness, "—if you die when Fallen attack us, it means I won't stop these people from fleeing to Earth, and the Fallen are going to find us, and we're doomed." She is already building intricate models of how the universe might accommodate fate or doom and how she might go about destroying those things. "Could be, I suppose." Sjur pulls a parchment-thin rag of dead flesh off Uldren's wound. "Look. I'm the Queen's bodyguard. I always expected I'd die violently." "I'm not the Queen." "Maybe that's your problem." She flicks Uldren in the chest, leaving a purple bruise, fading. "What is with you two, anyway? You never talk about him. You never seem to think about him at all. But he's dashing himself to pieces for you. How do live as his favorite and only sister for so many centuries… and hardly even smile at him?" Secrets, Mara thinks. You've got to have secrets from each other so there's room for him to fill in the gaps with his own happy illusions. Two ships joined together rigidly will tear each other apart if they try to move. But a loose tether leaves room to maneuver—and can be more quickly disengaged, if necessary. That makes her think of Sjur's prophecy again. She sets the shrapnel down in the dissection dish, very gently. "You won't die. I won't allow it."

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Revanche IV

Of all the disasters that might happen in space, riot is the worst. Breaches can be contained, fires can be starved, plague can be quarantined, radiation shielded, heat vented—but a riot has a will of its own: a chaotic ingenuity that corrodes any countermeasure. Mara crawls through compartments choked with vaporized coolant. She keeps low and clutches the breather to her face. All she can think of is Kelda Wadj's last message and the data attached. "Mara. The paracausal effects are strongest around you. Whatever's happened to us, you are the locus. I cannot overstate how subtle and how important this discovery might be. Mara, when we use radioactive decay as a trigger for simulated bombs—bombs that could harm Awoken—the trigger atoms are a thousandfold less likely to decay near you. People are literally safer when you are around." She has to get into the riot. She has to protect her people. A horrible groan vibrates through the habitat structure, and then, with an apocalyptic shudder, something tears off the Reef. A ship. A ship is leaving. Mara has failed. Mara drops onto her belly and pants into the mask. Then, cringing in anticipation of migraine, she activates the augment, the jury-rigged machine her eutechs produced for exactly this purpose by extracting Mara's ruined Distributary implants and reworking them. She's going to fire a command override to shut down that ship's systems— —but then she realizes it's a salvaged Human vessel, deaf to her commands. She gasps in frustration, sucking down cold bottled air. "Sjur." "I'm here," her radio whispers. "Pinned down in the dockmaster's office. I shot a few in the shoulders, and they seem to have gotten the idea." "Let them go. If one ship's away, there's no sense holding back the rest. Our position is compromised." "Understood." "Broadcast to everyone. I'm going to allow anyone who wants to leave the Reef to go. This their one and only chance." She rolls onto her back and stares up into the swirling vortices of coolant, seeing faces, futures, the lives she has just lost, the lives she might yet lose. She brought her people here to die in the sense that she brought them into mortality—but she never wanted it to happen quickly. "They know, your Majesty," Sjur says. "They already know." "What?" "You told us. We heard your voice." Awe like gratitude in Sjur Eido's voice. "Mara, I heard you. You spoke to me."

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Revanche V

Thus the riven Awoken were riven again, into Reefborn and Earthborn. Those who left went to scour the ruins for lost history and give some succor to their Human cousins who still clung to a hostile world. The Awoken came unto these Humans like nephilim, armed with lost weapons, forgotten industry and medicine. They were like omens of hope, for they were often taken to be starborn colonists returned to the hearth, which was not, after all, so far from truth. All who looked on them saw that the night sky contained more than lurking doom. They bred true with each other and sometimes hybridized with Humans, and in the course of centuries, many forgot the Distributary and even the Reef. However, there was always in their souls an itch, a vector pointing to a distant place in the Asteroid Belt, where their Queen still dwelt. "They've made a difference already," Sjur told Mara not long after the first Awoken made planetfall on Earth. "They'll save so many lives just with the provision of medicine, pure water, and construction supplies that even if they all died by year's end, they would each yield ten or twenty Humans." "I know," Mara said, with bitter pride. "Let the people remember them as saints and paladins, and tell no one how many more they might've saved if they had only kept the faith." For she knew the precious value of each Awoken life: She knew how many she would have to spend and mourned each soul wasted on a lesser purpose. On the day the Fallen struck, Mara was proclaimed Queen. It happened swiftly, though after no little debate among the people, for everyone was afraid of a monarch who could speak to their thoughts. Yet they feared more to deny her power and sovereignty, for they had come between worlds in her name. To refuse her would be to refuse their choice. "Awoken," she told them, "for the first time in my life, I hesitated to reach for power, and now one in three of you are gone. I cannot deny what the cosmos has made of me any longer. I am your one and rightful Queen." She knew she had been a fool to pretend to be a peer to the others. What was true of her brother was true of all Awoken. They needed secrets to marvel at, secrets that rhymed with the deep enigma of their souls. They could not follow what they fully understood. There would be a formal coronation later, in a place not yet built. Out of respect for that unhappened coronation, Mara did not at first wear a crown; and later she claimed as her diadem the ring of event horizon that surrounds the observable universe. "My techeuns," she said, gathering Kelda Wadj and the other eutechs who'd remained, "will be given absolute authority to explore our new power, the Traveler's relics, and all associated domains. We are no longer in the realm of pure science. We require an order of mysteries and witches to tend to them." Not an hour later, a Fallen Ketch threw off its stealth and began a deceleration burn toward 4 Vesta. The four-armed predators had traced one of the Earthward ships back through all its erratic course changes and to the Reef. They came in search of the source of these blue ape-kin. A salvo of coherent-matter guns gutted the Ketch: blink-quick death for the mighty ship, ancient fury compressing matter into a relativistic pinhead. It was a waste of weapons that couldn't be recharged or reloaded, however, and the Baron in command had already scattered his skiffs like camouflaged seeds. The Fallen Raiders came down all over the Reef and cut their way inside. The Awoken, young to mortality, terrified of death, fled in fear. Mara, Uldren, and Sjur Eido rallied as many as they could. Sjur fought in a powered combat shell, but Mara needed to be seen vulnerable, silver-haired and narrow-eyed, hurling herself at the enemy. She fought with pistol and dagger, and her brother moved like a wraith at her flank. Her people were ashamed of their timidity. No more were the Fallen scuttling alien predators: Now they were an indignity, an offense to regal privilege to be met with a snarl and a rifle shot. The Awoken saw their desperation: how the stump-limbed Dregs stumbled forward emaciated, how the Vandals cringed from battle as they peeled off wall panels, desperate for salvage to please their Captains. Armored Sjur Eido met the Fallen Baron in zero-gravity combat above his spider tank and shot him dead, one adamant shaft through plate and throat. Ether hissed into vacuum. Sjur threw herself upon the spider tank that clung to the Sacred Fire's hull. Laughing in joy, she cut into the tank's barrel and threw a charge inside, knowing its next vengeful shot would be meant for the Sacred Fire's main habitat drum—and that she would die in the catastrophic misfire. The tank fired. The charge detonated. Sjur Eido was thrown clear, utterly unharmed. "That was where I should have died," she said, in wonder—and in her mind was the smiling face of her Queen.

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Telic I

Mara made one more attempt, and only one, to call her scattered people home. She had hoped the assault would convince them they had a responsibility to the Reef, to come home and repair the damage they had caused. It went poorly, however, for though her tech witches were able to amplify her bond to her people through the augments Kelda had developed, she was only one voice in a maelstrom. Her Awoken had sensitive antennae, in the metaphysical sense, and could not hear her plea through the clamor. Also, the communications engineer kept forgetting to call Mara "Majesty" or "Queen." "Good news," Uldren told her with the grim delight he always showed after a debacle he had survived. "Illyn and I went through the Fallen communications logs. Their Baron never transmitted our position to his Kell. He wanted the prize to himself. We remain secure." "The Baron might have planted a time-delayed beacon," Mara warned him. "Never underestimate these beings. They've lived in the void longer than us." "I already admire them," Uldren confessed. "They've lost so much. Some of them even ritually dismember themselves, Mara, to prove they have the strength to grow back the missing limbs. I tell you that even if we are doomed to dwindle and go extinct, those Fallen may outlive us." Mara made a dry note in her log that her brother had at last discovered his true people. For her part, Sjur Eido wandered about in a daze, filled with joy to be alive and grief that she no longer knew the day when she would die. "In you, all things are possible," she told Mara. "I live because of you." When Mara saw her string her mighty bow, the limbs coiled behind her leg and around her opposite arm, she was glad beyond telling that Sjur had survived. In time, Mara appointed Paladins to oversee her new military, as Alis Li had done during the Theodicy War. She created talented starfarers as Corsairs, to scour the asteroid belt in utmost secrecy and to establish routes and caches that would support the covert motion of Awoken ships. Most of all, she charged her brother with the mission that occupied her thoughts. "Brother," she said, "never again can I allow my people to be divided. We must offer them more than shielding ice and cold habitat cylinders and the warrens of Vesta. We must make a culture, a thread that binds us all in pride and wonder at the mystery of ourselves. Nowhere does culture flourish better than in a city." "Gather in one place," Uldren warned her, "and you make yourself a target." Mara had considered this, and found an answer. "Go forth and find me a power unknown to all the other powers of this world. Return it to me, and I shall make of it the cornerstone of my new city, where the Awoken shall dream of all they have been and all that is yet to come." So Uldren went out voyaging among the worlds, swift as a blueshift ghost. In time, he returned to the Reef with a creature not larger than his hand, saying, "Behold, Sister, the lie that makes itself true. This is an Ahamkara."

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Telic II

It was Mara alone who established a covenant with that young Ahamkara, which chose the use-name Riven, in honor of its host. It was Mara alone whose singular will and unity of purpose saved the Awoken from that which we now name the Anthem Anatheme. For there was in Mara very little division between Reality-As-Is and Reality-As-Desired; she was confident in her centuries of purpose and patient with the winding way by which the river of methods reaches the objective ocean. Blessed are those who in their absolute selfhood become selfless. Unappetizing are those who in their truest self-knowledge exclude the possibility of self-deceit. "Mara," said Uldren Queensbrother, "why do you forbid me to speak to the Ahamkara?" "This secret is mine alone," said Mara Queen. She knew that her brother had only widened the gap between He-As-Was (which is called NUME) and He-As-He-Would-Be (which is named CAUST). "Begone to the outer world, where I require thee." This was when Sjur Eido, having spoken to Kelda Wadj and to Esila, at last came before her Queen. Kneeling, she said, "Your Majesty, Kelda Wadj says you are a god, for there is no difference between your desire and reality. Yet I know that you desire things before they ever become real. Esila says that you are keeping a secret from your brother that he must never know. I think the secret is thus: You are now a god because one day you will become a god, and a god is not temporal. Your brother is not a god because he will never become a god. Shall I worship you?" "Sjur," Mara said, falling to her knees, clutching her beloved's face between shaking hands, "Sjur, on the day you worship me, you cannot love me anymore, for to worship is to yield all power, and I cannot love what has no power over me." At this, the Ahamkara coiled around her neck, yawned, and showed its fangs: for there was a crevice between What Was and What Was Wanted. "I see," Sjur Eido said. "Then to me you are not yet a god." Although in time the knowledge of what Mara would become pushed them apart, it was a kind and happy push, as a friend might urge a beloved companion onward to a distant opportunity. And their days together were spent gladly.

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Tyrannocide I

Mara's death began in this mark: X Later would come Eris Morn, Osiris, Toland, and all the other accessories of the majestic suicide. Later would come the Reef's tentative entanglements with Vex and Cabal, Fallen and Hive, and the fateful decision to intervene when the House of Wolves turned Earthward to conquer the Last Human City. Later, there would be stories here untold, the Ahamkara and the subcreation of the Dreaming City, the shatterstone fury of the Reef Wars, brother Uldren's journeys into that fell garden, and great sweeping plots whose beginnings and consequences have been entirely expunged for the sake of elegance—or, as of the root81, redacted for the sake of secrets yet untold. Here is where the beginning began, at that moment when Mara bolted awake from the dream. Her circle of techeuns lay with her in the misty wintercold chamber, and they came back groggily, their augments stuttering with resync. She had dreamt a thought of absolute simplicity and perfection, and the thought had become a tooth and bitten her. It had left a wound shaped like X Mara seized a pane of crystal paper, flashed it rigid and receptive with a touch, and wrote. I DREAMT OF SWORD AND BOMB. I dreamt of the self-honing blade that has cut itself so fine, it pierces the world and thus becomes the world. It is self-honing because it constantly whets itself against itself. I dreamt of Death bearing this blade, or of something so closely allied with Death as to be its synonym, so that to separate them would require a knife sharper than sharpness. Death raised up that blade and said "I cut all and all I cut. Aiat." Then Death cut the bomb, and the bomb was broken and could not fire. I was in the bomb. I knew that Death was the cut-verb, and that its only verb was to cut. SHAPES AND GLIDERS. I dreamt of existence as a game of cellular automata. In this metaphor, there were only two things: shapes in the game world and the rules of the game world. The rules were the rules of Life and Death. I understood that the sword was the desire to escape existence as a shape in the game and to become the rule that made the shapes. This rule said only "live" or "die"—it had no other outputs. It could not keep secrets. Against it was the desire to become a shape so complex that it could within itself play other games. WHAT WILL SOON BE. I dreamt that the Sword that was Death and Rule sought out complexity and cut it to reveal the simplicity within. I knew that soon we would be cut for we were complex and full of secrets. I knew that it was coming. I knew that the stroke would fall and that I had to stop it. HOW CAN A BOMB MAKE USE OF A SWORD? HOW CAN THE RULE THAT SEPARATES LIFE FROM DEATH BE KILLED? "I must go to the Dreaming City and use the oracle engine," Mara told her techeuns. "Prepare my ship."

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Tyrannocide II

Ten times and once more Mara asked the oracle engine to show her the sword that was death and the way it would appear. Ten times and once more the oracle engine showed Mara an image of her family. First it showed her Sjur Eido, laughing and bright with strength, who would recede and later return. Then it showed her Uldren, her brother, who explored the ruins of the fallen worlds and sought out challenges to test himself. Then it showed Mara her own face and lingered on the secret brightness of her eyes. Last of all, leaving Mara imperious with disdain toward her own feelings, curtly aloof toward all who asked her what troubled her, it showed her Osana, who had remained behind. Mara dwelt on this puzzle. A mother who had remained behind; a sister with secrets; a brother who hunted and explored; a woman who was plain and fierce. She understood then that the answer to her question lay within herself and that to defeat what was coming, she would need a perfect understanding of herself. Isolation would be her watchword, for an isolated system is easiest of all to understand. First of all, Mara went into the gardens and planted a flower for her mother, who she thought must still live: though she might by now have forgotten her first daughter and her first son. "Mother," she said, "I asked to be your sister rather than your daughter, and so I denied you the chance to tell me your secret, the mothertruth that is mapped in the negative space defined by the lies mothers tell their daughters. Well, here are my secrets. I love you. I have always loved you. Without you, I could never have been anything at all." Then she went to speak to her brother—but Uldren was away on Mars, and she found only his empty chambers, the half-sharpened knives and racks of pistols. She knelt in grief and touched her hand to the floor where his pacing boots had scuffed the asteroid stone smooth. This was the shape of their siblinghood now. The pursuit of absences. Last of all Mara went to Sjur Eido. Sjur was making a list of incredibly stupid and fatal tasks to post on a Guardian bounty board. "I want to tell you the truth," Mara said. "Ask me a question." "If you take any positive integer and halve it if it's even, but triple it and add one if it's odd, and you repeat this process forever, will you always, eventually, reach one?" Sjur Eido demanded. "Sjur, my faithful Wrath," Mara said, "please take my openness seriously. Though I'm sure Illyn could answer your math problem." "Okay." Sjur looked at her curiously. "Then here's my question. What's gotten into you? Why are you acting like this?" "Can we walk?" Mara asked her.

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Tyrannocide III

Mara and Sjur Eido go out into space and kick off the hull, wearing Corsair skin-pressure suits and slim tethers. The stars circle them like hard-focus candles, like the diadems of a trillion dancers. Sjur Eido pulls herself close and touches helmets with Mara. "We're alone. What's happened, Mara? You've always been, ah…" "Private?" Mara suggests. "Mysterious and reclusive, I was going to say." "A sword can be part of a bomb if the swordstrike is the detonation mechanism," Mara says. "It's impossible for a cellular automata game to change its own rules, but it is possible to create subgames with their own rules, and for those subgames to yield advantage in the master game." "That's cool," Sjur says. "You know, when you talk like that, what you're actually saying is, 'I don't want anyone to understand me, but I want them to understand they don't understand me.'" "Yeah," Mara admits, and then, hoarsely, she makes herself say, "Sjur, I have this secret, this thing I did, and I don't know if anyone can know it without hating me forever." "I had a secret too," Sjur reminds her. "The thing I did…" "It's nothing compared to mine. Nothing at all." "Having had some long experience hating you, and then having given it up, I think it would be hard for me to go back." Sjur's strong hand settles at the small of Mara's back. They twirl on upward, rotating around a point between them, their thousand-kilometer tethers slowly unfurling. "Do you want to tell me?" "No," Mara says. "But I think I have to." "Okay. Your Majesty, what did you do that made Alis Li throw blackberry tea in your face?" "I was first," Mara says. And she explains the missing half, the first half of the sentence: I made the rules and initial conditions that deceived her into believing she herself had decided It ends like that, where the rest picks up. Sjur Eido looks at her in expressionless silence. Sjur Eido's hands stroke the seam between Mara's skinsuit and the glassy petals of her helmet. Long ago, this woman betrayed her oath and went to serve the Diasyrm, a woman who cried out in anguish at the curse of physicality and the possibility of suffering. Long ago, this woman threw away her whole life to punish the highest crime she could imagine: the denial of transcendent divinity to those who might have claimed it. "You're the devil," Sjur says. "You're the lone power who made death. You allowed the possibility of evil. You might be responsible for more preventable suffering than anything that has ever existed." Mara cannot shake her head or even nod. "Well," Sjur says, "if you hadn't, none of us would be here. I guess I don't see what else you could've done, if you cared about those we left behind. If you wanted us to be able to go back and help in the fight." She leans forward and very gently kisses the inside of her helmet, where it meets Mara's: in her mind, in that place that is bound to all other Awoken, Mara feels the touch of gentle lips. Sjur looks suddenly sly. "You know, Mara, I don't think you could've confessed anything, anything at all, unless it were a way of keeping a deeper secret. What's really going on?" "There are many ways to godhood," Mara tells her. The belt of Orion glitters on her helmet like a three-star rating left by some Hive entity Sjur once killed. "One way is to kill all that is killable, so all that remains must be immortal. Another is the road I have walked, mostly by accident. One of these ways is closer to the sword, and one is closer to the bomb. If the bomb can defeat the sword by the standard of the sword, then the bomb has claim to primacy." "Never mind," Sjur sighs. "Seen anything cool on Crow surveillance lately?"

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Tyrannocide IV

Later. Much later. It is the night before the day of screams. Mara meditates cross-legged in a cradle of null gravity. Variks has told her more than once how the Fallen speak of the Awoken as sterile, unable to regrow their flesh, cursed to bear their scars forever. Also how they think of the Awoken as self-twinned, coexisting with their own shadows. Didn't ancient Inanna, queen of heaven, descend into the underworld to confront her shadow twin, sister Ereshkigal? Inanna was judged full of hubris and executed. You cannot defeat a thing that is synonymous with death except on its own territory. You cannot fear and flee from death. You must face it. Death is a sword, and a sword is like a crossing-point, like a bridge—and a bridge may be walked two ways. The plan exists in her mind alone, although beloved Eris has by necessity learned most of it. The Techeuns do not know the whole plan, although they will position the Harbingers upon the threshold. Even sweet capable Petra does not know the whole plan. So many she will leave behind. Uldren knows nothing of the whole plan. He has kept more and more to himself, building up secrets and schemes—all, Mara knows (and pities), because he needs Mara and thinks he can get her attention by keeping secrets from her. Secrets are her virtue and the virtue of her nemesis. The being whose existence she deduced from the analogy-of-family the Oracle Engine showed her. Mara will begin the end of that Queen's brother today. She knows what that means for the fate of her own. An eye for an eye. She must think now of the fate of entire cosmos—and of her tender, half-assembled answer to the cold sword logic of the Hive. She must not grieve. She must not fear. Was Inanna afraid when she descended? Mara's not going to be outclassed by some ancient fable. After all, Mara's name is death. But there is one thing she admires most about Inanna over all the other myths of katabasis. Inanna went to conquer.

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Tyrannocide V

She closes her eyes. Oryx's throne world smashes through her fleet, the bubble of everted screamspace pulverizing rock, metal, and flesh as mere matter surrenders to the will-made-fact of the Taken King. Somewhere, Uldren roars defiance. This is the moment of absolute sacrifice, the incarnation of Awoken doom: to give up their lives in defense of the world they once abandoned. The sense of their great dying rips at Mara like a sob. She feels her techeuns preparing emergency selfgates. Shuro Chi reaches out to her—a wordless, urgent need for Mara to live—and it takes all the cold impassive remove of Mara's millennia to turn that hand away. The shockwave strikes. Mara dies. In one way, she is vaporized with her Ketch, the bonds between the very particles of her body questioned by the harrowing logic of Oryx's weapon and found inessential. The mechanism of devastation is spontaneous fission. The author of the devastation is laughing in joy. In another way, a more true and symbolic way, she is impaled on Oryx's blade. She has thrown all her might at him, and he has answered. He has snuffed her fledgling divinity and her meager claim to royalty, he has exposed Mara to the raw and caustic hostility of his High War. She has been defeated by the sword logic. She dances down the blade and steps into his throne world. The Harbingers give her the gate and she takes the step. She is dead, consumed by Oryx: She is dead in his will, his Ascendant Realm. There was no other way inside except this true way. Inanna at least gave her people some warning; she told her minister to have her worshippers lament, drum, pray, and lacerate their buttocks. Inanna told her minister to beg the gods to save her. Mara has not. Instead, she has enlisted Eris and several million mad dancing Guardians to go knock off the god who killed her. It is, on that level, a very simple bank heist: Get yourself taken into the treasury as treasure, and when the owner dies, break back out with his stuff. But even Inanna had to send everyone away before she passed through the last door. Mara thinks of everyone she has ever known, all the people she has lost, back even to Yang Liwei and that ray of Light in deepest Darkness. She is there again, on the tether, falling into the mystery. Her brother is crying out after her, trying to follow, and she cannot look back. She has been thinking of a logic of her own, of secrets and hidden designs. The universe has not grown simpler in its age. Wherever life can begin, it has begun, and even in some places where sensible folk expect it should not. The great tendency has been toward intricacy, toward sophistication, toward deep thought and richer ways of being. A sword is everywhere edged, but the pieces of a bomb do not look at all like weapons until they are assembled. Oryx's throne world tries to tear her body and psyche into a quintillion screaming pieces, but Mara has survived the inchoate primordial chaos before space and time. She has retained her selfhood through far worse than this—and she has patience for eons. Eris will succeed. The Guardians will play their part. When the power in this world is free for the taking, Mara will take it, not as the victor taking spoils, but as a scavenger takes a prize component for her masterwork. When a pawn reaches the far side of the chessboard, it may be promoted to a queen. And what hatches when you promote a queen? What new board does she claim her place on? Mara knows. She settles in for the long wait, entirely alone, almost at peace with it.

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Regent

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Illyn

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Nitrogen

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Refusal

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Fleet

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Of Earth and the Reef

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Pilgrimage

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Flayed

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Gensym Scribe

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Exegesis

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King's Wrath

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Emissary

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