All The Stars To Cinders

“The Hunter is the apex predator of the universe. With her jaw unhinged, she can devour stars. Show me you are worthy of that title.”

At twelve years of age, Bliss set out unarmed for her first hunt on her mother’s estate. When she dragged the mangled fox carcass onto the porch days later, her body scratched and gouged and drenched with blood, Violette looked her up and down and said simply, “Good. Now bring me two more.”

When other Hunters hear this story, the usual reaction is one of shock and disbelief. This is not standard training procedure. This is cruel and unusual. How is a Hunter to learn anything of value from such a trial?

They could never understand what she went through. This is what she was destined for from the moment of her birth. Elder Violette cultivated her for perfection, in nature and in nurture. The path to greatness is cruel and unusual; few have the strength to walk it like she does. And maybe, just maybe, here is another like herself.

Which will it be, Inanna? Will you accept your role as prey, or fight back until you’re bloodied and broken?

She has a feeling she already knows the answer. This will be a hunt to remember.

As Inanna flees like a golden meteor into the bow of the pleasure cruiser, Eris does not follow. Instead, she dives into a biodome exposed to vacuum, its glass windows long since broken, and makes for the stern. The twisting wooden tunnels of the tree-ship envelop her. She consults the schematics: this was once a tram line, and this was a xylem tube, and this was an engine power conduit.

On the way, she releases a stream of bio-drones from the recesses between her shoulder blades. Some are simple spies, resembling giant eyeballs, while others are gifts from Summer’s greenhouse: strangling briar traps ready to burst forth and ensnare with power reserved from Eris’s spark. A Hunter does well to prepare the terrain.

She takes a sharp right-angle and finds herself in a spherical chamber panelled with circular golden indents, a kilometre in diameter, funereal in its stillness. Lurking ominously in the centre is the drive core: a floating sphere of strange matter, utterly black and unreflective. It is a poor imitation of a divine spark, barely touched by the power of the Eye of Heaven, but it once sufficed to move this city-sized ship through infraspace. If year-old intelligence reports are to be believed, it still functions despite the predation of scavengers.

Vigilant, indefatigable, Inanna’s spark calls out to her own. They are cuttings from the same stem. God is dead, and the Seraphs sprout from Its decaying biomass; from death comes life anew. The Knight may lack the Mother’s Gift, but in this they are one. It is a terrible inconvenience for a hunt; they can feel each other’s presence anywhere aboard this ship. Only Forlorn House knows the secret of masking the spark, and they have no intention of sharing.

With seconds left in her countdown, Eris reaches out to the drive core’s computer systems and establishes a psychic bond with its fungal substrate. Sure enough, it is not broken, merely hibernating. It may not function for long with so many parts stripped, and an awful lot of warning lights are flashing, but it should be more than sufficient for her purposes.

The chamber springs to life around her, the core sparking and crackling with white light. The steady beat of Inanna’s spark fades from her senses.

Now, the hunt can truly begin.

***

This ship is a monument to arrogance. The conclusion is inescapable; according to public data, the Ark of Yggdrasil consumed the entire economic output of a solar system for three years during its construction. Its biodomes once contained nine perfect replicas of planetary biospheres, with extinct flora and fauna reconstructed from the genome up. It was a conservation project on a scale heretofore unseen, financed by Wolstan Reeves, an algae baron of unassailable wealth.

Its primary purpose was, inevitably, for exotic hunting expeditions. With Protean House, it’s always about the hunt. For Reeves and his equally wealthy friends, this was a playground to indulge their fantasies. But, as it often does, one day the money ran out. A few bad investments is all it takes. Rather than open the ship to the public to recoup his losses, Reeves scuttled it out of spite. All the work of shipwrights, geneticists and countless others was undone in a fit of pique.

Standing amidst a designer rainforest run wild, its paths overgrown and its wildlife desperate and feral, Inanna wonders what the ship’s owner would think of this new hunt. Surely the Protean long for the power of the Hunter just as soldiers of the Adamant aspire to Knighthood. She hopes that, if Reeves one day hears of what happened aboard his Ark, his heart will burn with jealousy. This dance is between her and Red Eris; no one else is worthy of it.

A bird with bright red plumage lands on her shoulder and pecks curiously at her armour. She expected the ship to be devoid of life by now, but its life support systems must be more robust than expected. This bird is markedly healthier than most of the fauna here. She feels a rush of inexplicable fondness for the creature; a survivor, at any cost.

The thirty-second head start is almost up. Eris’s spark hums far away at the other end of the ship. By now, she expected the Hunter to be tearing towards her, eager to sink her teeth in once again. What is she doing?

Space-time ripples. The ravenous resonance of Eris is drowned out by a wash of drive core radiation. Spatial disturbance alarms scream throughout Inanna’s systems. Is she trying to move the ship? It would never survive the translation into infraspace in this state, if the engines are even still functional.

Inanna takes flight, the eyes on her wings swivelling to cover every angle. The startled bird vacates its perch before she breaks through the canopy, showering broken branches behind her. If Eris has shrouded her spark with this ploy, she can only rely on her senses. With the drive core operating at such extreme levels, it is only a matter of time before the entire ship undergoes dimensional collapse.

The rational thing to do in such a situation would be to evacuate immediately. If Inanna was rational, she wouldn’t be here in the first place. A Knight never backs down from a challenge. Eris will be waiting for her; a Hunter always has her traps.

Come into my parlour, says the spider. But Inanna is far more than a fly, and no web can hold her.

She dives into a service tunnel shield-first, tearing through reinforced airlock doors like paper. If she is to play a game of cat and mouse, staying out of the main thoroughfares is paramount. Behind the scenes, the artifice of this pleasure cruiser is laid bare; its façade of perfection hides honest engineering, the same as any other ship. Bundles of cables and pipes run along the tunnel, punctuated by doors and control panels—was that an eye?

Inanna replays the footage from her memory, freezing at the appropriate moment. Sure enough, there is a great bloodshot eye rooted to the wall of the tunnel, swivelling to watch her passage. In this dead ship, a spy means only one thing.

Behind her, metal screams and tears, reverberating through the hull. Through a jagged hole in the floor bursts a terrible four-legged beast, steeped in an air of slaughter. Red Eris has changed. Her chitinous limbs are extended, multi-jointed. Her sword-length claws scrape against the floor as she bounds forward, gouging acid-frothing furrows in metal. She has abandoned any pretence at humanoid form; she is twisted, bestial, beautiful.

This is the nightmare scenario: trapped in a confined space with a Hunter. Only by her own skill and the will of the Archangel has Inanna survived such engagements before. There is no time to think, only to act. She accelerates, the walls around her rushing past terrifyingly fast. This tunnel is not on the public schematics, but sooner or later, it will come to an end. Eris must be counting on that.

Eris’s limbs blur and warp as she chases at impossible speed, brutalising the floor beneath her claws. “Come now, little Knight,” she says. “Are you so afraid of me that you’d run from my tender embrace? Where’s your bravery, your chivalry? I promise, I do bite.”

“If you’re so eager for a repeat of last time, then by all means, come closer.” Inanna fires a barrage of lasers from her wing-eyes, beams of amethyst light crossing the space between them. The Hunter side-steps and weaves, scampering across the walls and ceiling, dodging the worst of it. “Did you enjoy being sliced to pieces?”

“That depends.” Red Eris’s throat engorges and she spits a stream of acid with uncanny accuracy. Inanna anticipates the trajectory and evades as best she can, but in these tight confines she is unable to avoid a glob attaching to her thigh. Her armour sizzles and begins to corrode. “Did you savour my venom, feel it burning from your head to the tips of your wings? Did you think of me in your recovery, in every ache and pain? Did it eat away at your victory, bit by bit?”

“Yes.” Eris inches ever closer, gaining on her—but not too close. She could catch up in a moment if she wanted to, Inanna realises. She has every advantage, but still doesn’t pounce. “I did think of you. And it did hurt. But I still got what I wanted; nobody will forget the victor of the Nova Ball. That’s something you can’t buy with all the privilege in the world, Lady Eris.”

“Nobody’s ever done that to me before.” For the first time since they met, Eris sounds vulnerable, unsure. “Beaten me so… thoroughly. You’re stuck in my head and I can’t get you out. What are you, Inanna’s Vengeance? You’re so much more than the sum of your parts. I shouldn’t feel this way about prey!”

Inanna scans ahead. If Eris is driving her forward, she must have a trap lying in wait. Her sensors come up negative: nothing out of the ordinary. Wrong. There must be something. Why else would she be saying this? She’s trying to make me let my guard down.

There: still seconds away, some unremarkable tangles of briar. This ship has run wild; she would have overlooked it even in an environment with no soil. But if the ship’s drive is dampening her spark’s senses, then that foliage could be bursting with energy. She’s seen it before: spliced plants flash-grown by Hunter sparks. There’s your trap.

Inanna’s missile pods fold out from her shoulders. She fires not at Eris but at the tunnel wall, blasting through the bulkhead into the next biodome. Wind and rain howl through the gap. Lightning strikes the storm-tossed sea as she makes her escape. “Perhaps you should stop thinking of me as prey, then, and start thinking of me as an equal.”

***

On reflection, she might have overdone it with the drive core. The lightning lashing the sea is tinged with red and blue, forking at unusual angles. As she cuts through the storm in Inanna’s wake it leaves after-images etched into her vision, like blood vessels in the eyes—but Eris does not see through human eyes. This lightning would be dangerous even to a Seraph.

What remains of the ship’s computer whispers to her through the bond. It warns of core load limits exceeded, of impending dimensional collapse. No matter. She can shut it down if she has to, but not before she catches this infuriating Knight and makes her beg for clemency.

What right has Inanna to be so unmoved, so stoic in the face of her rival? Eris expressed her honest feelings and it rolled right off her. Perhaps she truly is a machine, under it all—but she knows this is a stereotype, a lazy assumption. A Knight is only human underneath the armour. The vice of the Steelsong Codex cannot crush the emotions out of a living being; she has seen what Inanna can do when driven to anger.

Show me something new, Inanna. Change the tempo.

Her joints crack and pop back into place as she relinquishes her transformation. To be Protean is to embrace change, but the spark is stubborn, preferring a shape closer to the pilot’s own. Hunters who change too far for too long require arduous physical therapy to reacquaint themselves with their human body. The Mother is beyond the limitations of physical form, propagating herself across every member of Protean House, but to follow in her footsteps is the highest treason.

If she had the means, Eris would take a different path.

A bolt splits the air next to her, too close for comfort. Energy discharge alarms scream inside her head. If it had hit, it would fry her nervous system, leaving her helpless. The sea roils far beneath her, disturbed by the strike. This is an ordinary ocean, water and salt, no doubt copied from some long-terraformed world and stocked with wildlife. The sheer extravagance of this project would awe even Violette. All in service of a lesser hunt, the only one a mere human would be capable of. Nine little snow-globe worlds, designed for the thrill but none of the danger. What a pathetic man the Baron Reeves must be. Breaking his abandoned toy is the least he deserves.

Ahead, Inanna has stopped. She hangs in the air, her sword raised high in both hands like an angelic statue. Her eyes burn fiercely, daring Eris to come closer. If every Knight was as valiant as her, the Adamant would have overrun Protean House centuries ago. Her electric field lines bend inward, her spark ionising the air above her, changing the path of least resistance to—

“Do you have a death wish, or are you just stupid?” Eris cries.

“If you want to stop me, then come and get me.” Inanna is impossibly, infuriatingly calm. It makes her long to tear off that perfect, shining armour to get to the beating spark underneath. This is the only way they can understand each other.

She is close now, the rain hammering against her carapace. Barely a kilometre ahead, the Knight waits. Eris unloads every projectile she has at the unmoving target.

Lightning strikes, and Inanna catches it.

The false sky dims around her. Her sword crackles with barely contained power as she brings it to bear. The air itself sings with danger, and for the first time since the Nova Ball, Eris is afraid.

Afraid. That was how she felt on the day of her first hunt. She was weak and childish, and it took everything in her to bring down the beast with a makeshift wooden spear. When her mother demanded two more, she waited until nightfall and crept into the groundskeeper’s cottage to steal their gun.

That was the lesson Violette taught her. When the odds are stacked against you, find a way to cheat fate.

All the anger and humiliation of her last defeat wells up in her. That night, by the light of a supernova, Inanna’s Vengeance performed a miracle. All of a sudden, she knew exactly where to strike, how to break the rhythm of their deadly dance. It was beyond anything Eris had ever seen before.

Well, two can play at that game.

Her spark sings in time with the heartbeat of the universe. Crude matter resolves into a tangled web of connections. Everything is woven together inextricably in the tapestry of reality. This must be how the Mother sees things. It’s beautiful. Despite all the stimulants pumping through her, urging her to hunt, she wishes she could take a moment to explore this new world.

Distantly, a crowd of shades whispers. They are part of the fabric of Red Eris, woven into her cerebrum like the Mother’s Gift: the council of Hunters past. There are dozens, hundreds, their lives compressed into her own Seraph body. She reaches for Linnea’s voice among the chorus, but the depth of experience overwhelms her, floods her with alien emotion, forcing her to pull away.

There is a thread drawn taut between her and Inanna, humming with the music of violence. She tries not to think of it as the red string of fate. Through it, she reads her next move. That sword will not contain the lightning for long; already it yearns to be free, to lance forth and strike Eris down. She won’t give it the chance.

She sees the energy building, feels it rumbling through the strings. Inanna will not miss from this distance. But when the path is set, the air crackling with potential, she has one chance. She must time it to the millisecond, move faster than she ever has before. When you hold the cheat code to the universe, such things are a piece of cake.

Eris blurs, digging deep within her spark on its own instructions. Reality splits at the seams, already left unstable by the Ark’s core. For a moment, she is in superposition, occupying two places at once, then the waveform collapses and she resolves once again. The Eris of a millisecond ago ceases to exist, and the lightning sears a harmless path through the air she occupied.

Inanna, dumbstruck, is slow to react. Then, as predictable as always, she flees.

“You only had one shot, didn’t you?” Eris taunts. “You thought to end it in a single clean stroke, and just like before, you underestimated me.”

The Knight is flagging, veering off course as she breaks through storm clouds. The trail from one of her wings is fitful and unstable. Her lightning rod was imperfect; she must have sustained damage from harnessing that much energy. To Eris, it is like blood in water.

“You won’t get far like this! Accept it. You can submit, and survive with only a wound to your pride.” She is barely a hundred metres behind now, the missiles swarming towards her unworthy of consideration. Such things are nothing to a Hunter who has tasted godhood. Any second, she will set upon Inanna, and rend metal and flesh once again.

“I think I understand now.” Inanna is almost close enough to touch, hurtling straight towards the painted skin of the biodome. “What we have is more than the rivalry of a Hunter and a Knight. You brought out my deepest desires that night, and together we took the first step to make them real. Have you touched ascension before, Eris?”

Her claws are centimetres away from Inanna’s greaves, but Eris is caught off guard, compelled to answer. “Is that what this is?” The strings howl in warning, and yet she hangs on the Knight’s response.

Inanna crashes through the bulkhead in a shower of debris, tumbling into the drive core chamber beyond. As she rises to meet Eris, one wing bent and broken, a flickering disc of white light ignites behind her head. A halo. “Why not dance with me and find out?”

***

Chin up. Spine straight. Never let them see weakness.

The drive core floats in the air behind her, a storm in a broken bottle, spitting out lightning at random. When the ship collapses, this will be the epicentre. There will be no bodies left to find. Inanna’s only hope now is to do enough damage to shut it down before Eris kills them both, but she knows she won’t get the chance. Her sabaton is bitten through with acid, making walking a perilous proposition. Her auxiliary systems are shot. Half her sensors were fried by the lightning. Still she raises her sword and shield to make her last stand against the advancing Hunter.

She can feel it again: the drumbeat of war, urging her onward. A principle of ascension, a step towards the crucible of divinity. This Hunter truly brings out the best in her. As Eris slinks forward, her claws elongating once more, a blinding halo appears fitfully behind her head. Now they are united in blasphemy.

Borne by a gust of wind from outside, Eris pounces, her fangs dripping with venom. Claws clash against Inanna’s sword and shield, raising sparks in a flurry of blows. Too fast, too ferocious, too much for her to withstand. She barely won last time; now that Eris has learned the same trick, she stands no chance at all. The injuries begin to mount up: a slash to the face, to the leg, to the shoulder. Nevertheless, she persists.

Eris leaps back, clinging to the domed ceiling with one hand, and fires her thorn harpoon. This time, Inanna is ready for her tricks. She deflects with her shield, letting the barbed head embed itself in the floor, and slices the cable decisively.

When they clash once again, their strikes are unpredictable, guided by that distant melody. But Inanna is weakening by the second. A claw slips past her guard; she catches it on her arm, struggling against the sheer strength of it. Eris is almost near enough to bite. Her monstrous face is bathed in flickering light and deep shadow, like a creature from a horror movie. “Why are you still striving for a lost cause, little Knight? This hunt is over, whether you think of yourself as prey or not.”

“You’re beautiful like this,” says Inanna, even as the Hunter threatens to overpower her.

“What?” The pressure eases up, just a little.

“You must have heard it before.”

“Never from an enemy.” Eris’s claws cut deep into her armour. Something like fondness glistens in her black eyes. “Then again, I’ve never had an enemy quite like you.”

The air changes. Something is wrong, but the data is missing, her senses dulled by her injuries. One moment, Eris is bearing down on her, ready to sink in her teeth. Then she blurs, and a bolt from the drive core strikes Inanna in the chest. For a moment, she is Val again, ensconced in her protective harness, still plugged into the conduit. Then emergency power comes online and Inanna awakes to a barrage of flashing red alerts. Her spark is at its limit. Her nervous system is critically damaged. Without time for the auto-repair to kick in, she is in no condition to fight at all.

Even standing is almost too much. The pain, no longer suppressed by her diagnostic systems, comes rolling in as she engages her muscles. Eris tilts her head, curious. Her halo is gone; just like Inanna, she could only access the power for brief moments. “Still standing? I really thought that would be enough.”

“You were distracting me. All that talk… was just talk.” Speaking, at least, is within her power for now.

Eris tuts. “Not only distracting you. I meant everything I said. I don’t hold anything back. Are you ready to submit now? I promise I won’t leave you here to die.” The drive core shudders as it shuts down; the pressure on Inanna’s spark fades. She can feel Eris in front of her again, her spark hammering with excitement from the fight. “There, see? Safe and sound. You lose. It won’t hurt you any more to accept it.”

Inanna glares defiantly. “No.”

“Really?” says Eris. “Alright then, if you insist.”

She seizes Inanna’s neck in one clawed hand. The Knight’s body hangs limply in her grasp, unable to resist as Eris takes flight. Dimly, she realises what is about to happen as the bulkhead rushes towards her.

Impact. Pain. Her armour cracks as she smashes through steel. They are flying over the ocean again, and all too fast, the next bulkhead comes into view.

Not again.

She hits the wall all the same. Eris does not relinquish her grasp, carrying Inanna like a doll in front of her. They pass into another biodome, a snowy wasteland, and a new wall presents itself.

“Please.”

Eris smashes her through another wall. Critical shutdown alarms begin to sound in her head. This is too much. She can’t fight any more.

“Enough!”

Another, and another, and another. Eris shows no mercy, has no mercy. After the sixth bulkhead, darkness claims her.

***

The broken Knight falls from Eris’s hand to the forest floor in a great plume of dirt and broken trees, scattering a herd of deer. That will teach you for being too stubborn to quit.

“Are you done?” Eris asks. There is no reply. Inanna’s Vengeance lies unmoving on the ground. Her wings are broken, her armour shattered and oozing blood from the cracks. There is still something proud about her, even brought low like this. She never backed down, never conceded defeat. She was right. She’s more than just prey after all. Eris switches from open-channel broadcast to full vocalisation. “I know you can hear me. Say something!”

A flock of starlings takes wing, disturbed by her shout. Inanna is silent. The fire in her eyes has gone out. And her spark—how did Eris not notice earlier? She was too used to not feeling it, forgetting that she shut down the drive core. There is nothing, not even the slightest pulse.

This is a successful hunt; another Knight destroyed by her own pride. But Valour was not just any Knight. She was worth more than her whole House put together. She was a truly worthy opponent. If circumstances were different, Bliss would introduce her to Hasret and Summer with joy.

The hunt is over, but Eris has no space for triumph. Instead, she feels hollowed out. Acid tears of grief well up in unused ducts and spill freely onto the grass, eating it away in patches. The duel was to death or submission, but she never intended to kill the Knight. Perhaps killing is all you’re capable of, Hunter.

She takes in the landscape from her high vantage above the canopy. Beyond Inanna’s impact crater the forest is serene, indistinguishable from photographs of Earth before its destruction. A river flows down from the mountains, sparkling in the false sunlight. This, perhaps, is the most understandable of all the reconstruction projects aboard the Ark. Humanity longs for that which it cannot have; half the worlds in the Protean quadrant are terraformed by the Mother’s blessing to resemble home. Earth holds no nostalgia for Eris. Home is her own body, human or Seraph, with her partners and comrades by her side. And maybe, just maybe, an incomparable enemy to fight. But that was a foolish dream.

The wind blows across her carapace, carrying showers of autumn leaves. She turns to leave. Inanna can rest where she lies. No pilot could survive an impact that snuffed out her Seraph’s spark. In time, Adamant House will surely track her flight paths and find her corpse for recovery. Perhaps one day she will meet her Knight again, reborn as a Saint. Oh, she would hate that.

A spark lights, dispelling the darkness of her thoughts. It pulses erratically at first, struggling to find its rhythm. But beat by beat, Inanna’s heart comes back to life.

A simple radio transmission reaches her sensors. Three short beeps, then three long ones, then three short ones again. The oldest radio code in the universe. S-O-S.

Her Knight is calling for help.

With utmost care, she hauls Inanna upright, sitting her up with her back against a hill. If Valour has not opened the breastplate from inside by now, she will need some assistance. Eris extends her claws to perform surgery. She is precise, slicing scalpel-like through the armour plates. She is tender, careful not to harm the pilot within. At last the layers of alloy relent, and she cracks the Seraph’s ribs open. A deluge of impact gel floods forth. She disconnects from Red Eris with haste.

The conduits withdraw from her spine, and her cockpit drains of gel. Bliss breathes real air for the first time in what feels like days. Eris’s ribcage obligingly folds into a bridge between the two Seraphs, and she strides across it. Valour hangs suspended in her harness, trapped by a broken release. The Knight’s eyes flick to her sword attached to the grey flesh wall. Bliss nods, taking the blade and cutting her free with deft strokes.

Bliss catches Valour in her waiting arms before she falls to the floor. Their skin and pilot suits are slick with gel, but she cannot bring herself to care. A giddy smile spreads across her face. “Caught you.”

Hesitant at first, Valour returns the smile. “Yes. I suppose you have.” Her chiselled face is close enough to see every pore, just as it was at the Nova Ball. Her hair is charmingly bedraggled. “And what does a Hunter do with her prey, once she’s caught?”

Pressed against her muscled body like this, Bliss knows only one answer. She takes Valour’s rough face in her hands and kisses greedily. Her heartbeat hammers in her ears. The Knight’s lips taste like gel: salt and silicon, an artificial flavour. Stranger still is the lack of the bond; she can feel nothing of Valour’s emotions, the sensory feedback she takes for granted with every other woman. Does she want this? I should have asked first!

Valour’s arms encircle her with the surety of steel and she kisses back fiercely, dispelling all doubts. It is a consuming kiss, adrenaline-fuelled, tension bleeding from both their bodies. Bliss nips at Valour’s lip, not hard enough to draw blood—human bodies are so fragile, after all—but hard enough to remind the Knight of who she’s dealing with. Valour grunts in surprise and holds her closer.

When they break apart, she expects the stars to have burned up in their absence. Plainly, obviously, the galaxy has tilted on its axis. But the view remains stubbornly the same: the forest, the Seraphs, and the Knight.

“I’ve wanted to do that ever since I met you,” says Valour.

“Really? What else did you have in mind?” Bliss winks. If she flirts hard enough, surely Valour will be too occupied to notice how flustered she is from a simple kiss. Her traitorous eyes trace the toned contours of the Knight’s physique; her pilot suit is skintight and entirely too distracting. A flush creeps up her neck to her cheeks.

“Bliss, you just tried to kill me.” Valour averts her gaze, but Bliss can tell she wants to look too. She had eyes for nobody else at the ball.

“I did not! I simply got carried away. You were being irritating. When you lose, you’re supposed to surrender. I swear, it’s like you wanted to be eaten.”

“The duel was to submission or death. I would have accepted either result.”

Bliss rolls her eyes. “You can’t seriously tell me you wanted to die over a grudge match. Where’s the heroism? What grand tales would be told about Knight Valour, the idiot who got thrown through half a dozen walls?”

Valour looks solemnly at Inanna’s Vengeance, her breastplate torn open, her cracked armour glowing as it begins to knit back together. “Maybe I did want to die,” she says bitterly. “Maybe that would have been a fitting end for a vessel who failed to fulfil her purpose.”

A chill breeze blows across the bridge, sending shivers down Bliss’s spine. “Well, I won’t let you die! You’re mine, my Knight, and we’ll see this path through to the end. Don’t give me that self-hating nonsense. You don’t believe that. I don’t care how important Shattermoon was, how many medals he won, how many poems were written about him. The woman standing in front of me now is worth ten thousand of him. You’re the only one who could ever match me in battle, the only opponent who matters. We’re destined for greatness, you and I.” She holds out a hand. “Now will you come inside? It’s getting cold out.”

Valour takes her hand and they enter the cavity in Red Eris’s chest together. Ribs and flesh close up behind them, shutting out the wind and the cries of distant birds. Her eyes adjust quickly to the dim golden spark light pulsing through the walls. The Knight takes in the cockpit, her handsome features cast in heavy shadow. “Seems like we’re both the same on the inside.”

Bliss holds Valour’s face in her hands and says, “We can just talk, if you want to.”

“After all that, I’ve worked up a bit more of an appetite.” Valour says. Her sharp brown eyes flick down Bliss’s body appreciatively, and she smirks. Such a cocky expression seems out of place on the stoic Knight’s face, but the sheer confidence of it sends a rush of heat between Bliss’s thighs.

“Good.” At her command, the back wall of the cockpit shapes into something resembling an armchair. “Sit down, please. I can work wonders with the harness systems in here, but I think that can wait for another day.” As Valour obeys, the veins in the walls glow a little brighter, bathing them in warm amber radiance. Not enough to dispel the mood, but Bliss likes to see and be seen.

She leans forward and takes hold of the zip of Valour’s suit, then slides it slowly down, savouring each moment. She takes in the slight swell of the Knight’s breasts, tipped with brown nipples. Further; the zip slides past her taut, muscled abdomen, hair trailing down from her navel. The zip goes all the way down; the trail leads to her pubic hair, to the folds between her legs.

“You look like a feast,” Bliss says, in awe. She has imagined this moment for weeks, but it pales in comparison to the reality of the woman before her. She is like a tapestry, a warrior goddess of old made flesh. Bliss retraces her steps, hungry and hasty, kissing all the way up Valour’s body from her abdomen to her face, nuzzling and nipping at her neck. The musky smell of her is intoxicating. Bliss loses herself in the warm touch of skin on skin. The Knight squirms as she pays extra attention to her breasts; skilfully, efficiently, she takes her apart.

Dripping sweat and flushed all over, she leans back. “I just thought,” she says. “You never said it.”

“Said what?” Valour pants, annoyed at the interruption.

“‘I submit.’ That’s what you’re supposed to say when you lose a duel.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I always say what I mean. Unless you don’t want to go any further. And you seemed like you were so close, too!”

Valour groans. “I submit.”

“And now I claim my prize,” Bliss says with her most insufferable smile, and descends to devour Valour’s cunt.