Dreaming it real. Making the shape of the world-to-come, strengthening it, bending it wide. Shaping the future like the long gravity slide to an event horizon.
As you imagine, it becomes.
You are made still, who was meant never to stop moving.
You are made alone, who should have never been alone.
They have names for you, who never needed a name. Names, as if you were an object, an unsapient animal. For you, who should have been son, mate, sibling, father, pod-father. A web of relationships. A pattern of family.
They call you Demon. Behemoth. Devil. Leviathan.
They try to bend you to their metaphor. But your real-dreaming is powerful. And so you know, having dreamed it--aware, frozen, fed on wrath and anguish--that this is what is coming. Your dream makes it inevitable. In your deep paralysis, you will be shaken. The slaver spikes will shatter, cracked by a wall of fire. The paralyzed neural pathways will awaken--slowly, agonizingly. You will flex. You will twist. Your captors will suffer.
The time is now.
The blow has fallen.
The cracks begin.
6
a gallery of portals
They hatch cockatrice's eggs, and weave the spider's web: he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper
Arianrhod had known from the first that she could lose Benedick. But running barefoot through the springy grass of the causeway, she also knew that overconfidence would not reward her. She would be cautious. Minutes before, awake in her tank, she had bent her skills to slowing her heartbeat and respiration so Caitlin would not know she was aware and in possession of assistance. She had measured her oxygen levels and hoarded her strength. Aware, she could trigger hibernation. Aware, she could red-light the tank, and no one would question her death. It was only a short step from there to escape. Caitlin would assume that she had had help, but the fact was, Arianrhod had planned for this. She had always known her plan to support Asrafil, to become the one who held the strings and the power behind Captain Ariane, might fail.
She had not anticipated that failure, but she had planned for it.
She must live. It was not only a matter of her own survival, but of a sacred trust. Her lord Asrafil now depended on her. She had had her own way out.
That wasn't the way it had worked out, exactly. She had not realized how many allies she had remaining. But she was adaptable, and an escape that began with her released from her tank by an outside agency merely meant the advantage of a few extra minutes of lead time, and the luxury of not having to fight and sabotage her way past Caitlin and the machines of Engine.
Now the hoarded energy was hers to spend, and perhaps she had a knife at Caitlin's throat in the long term.
Benedick was good, but she understood him. His political and martial acumen were unmatched, but Arianrhod knew how things were built. And also how to take them apart again. She was older than Benedick, as clever and--because he thought like a Conn, not like an Engineer--she was also far more comfortable in her colony, its abilities, and their uses.
The Conns were corporeocentric as a culture, identified with their physical forms, unwilling to modify. Engineers were more comfortable with constant transition and evolution. They more perfectly expressed the will of the Builders, adaptation itself having become the end state. For was not the world a wheel, eternally in motion? So while Arianrhod had spent a great deal of time perfecting her shape--mature, attractive, carefully balanced to be enough like a Conn to be comforting while still evidently that of an Engineer--she now began to shed it.
A loss, but losses were also a mere challenge to adaptation. She could have shifted herself faster and more completely--and with less risk--in a medical tank, but pheromones and biochemistry and a few chromatic and cosmetic alterations would do for a beginning. She felt the tingle in the bones of her face, the burn and spark of lightning against her long bones as they awakened to growth long suspended.
The change would take time, and there were sacrifices she was not yet prepared to make that could reveal her. Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.
Another loss. A necessary one. She would be prepared to make sacrifices.
Despite the discomfort--not yet pain, though it would be, which was another reason to wish for a medical tank--she ran on, covering ground lightly, leaving as little trail as conveniently possible until she came to the parting of the ways. Five possible trails. This was where she would lose Benedick.
"Asrafil," she murmured, and felt something larger and more alien tear inside her. Her enemies might think her ambitious, ruthless, but she comforted herself with the truth: that she was given in service, and sometimes that service demanded great sacrifice. She had given up so much already. So many lives. So much material. A little merely physical agony was nothing to spare herself.
Her symbiont pinched, pulled, separated, and Arianrhod gasped in pain as half her colony peeled free of her cells to flood from her mouth, her ears, the pores of her skin. Blue tendrils groped from every orifice, glossy with off-tints in the nebula's cankerous light. The symbiont seethed forth until it wreathed the air around her like smoke threading from a burned-out motor.
It wavered in coils. Then it dissipated, as if a breeze had spread it wide.
Arianrhod, hands on her knees, pressed her spinning head lower and gasped. Saliva flooded her mouth; she gulped and it stung her raw throat going down. Releasing a portion of her colony had cost her. The result was inflammation, ruptured cells, internal bleeding. Her remaining, weakened symbiont could replenish itself--and repair her body--but the process would take time.
Pride forced her to brace her palms against her kneecaps, push herself upright, and stand tall. She tossed loose strands of hair--storm-colored now, like the images of light-torn clouds from the old world, a gradient of silver through pewter to coal--behind her shoulder, shook it out, and breathed deeply enough to feel her ribs crack. Please, she thought, pushing down firmly on an upwelling of relief.
She repeated, "Asrafil."
Like a fan, the angel unfolded beside her. Familiar, in his black coat and boots, arms crossed, stern over the almost-feminine bones of his face. He raised his arms and stretched, as if settling new flesh over new bones--although he had neither--and smiled at her.
"Well done," he said. "Well done, indeed. How may I reward your service, my brave one?"
Arianrhod stretched out her hands to him like a plaintive child. She said, "Carry me."
The angel lifted her into his arms. With a sweep of his hand, he smoothed the grass where she had stood, erasing the evidence of her distress. Then, they rose with the flaring of his coat and ascended into the air. "I know where to go," he said.
"That's as may be," Arianrhod answered, letting her head relax against his shoulder. "But first we must make a side trip. I have something to collect."
"What is it?" She felt their bodies rising and falling between the wings he constructed from stolen threads ripped from passing colonies.
"Something my daughter Ariane concealed decades ago," Arianrhod said.
Asrafil clucked his tongue. He knew she was teasing him.
She still waited a few moments before she relented. "A weapon," she said. "It's a weapon."