Symbologenesis of a Designed Goddess
Maksym’s stomach dropped through approximately ten floors of his body in the first half second. His grip on Katherine’s handlebar-shoulders went from casual to white-knuckled before his brain finished processing the thought of ‘ground gone’.
Lake Crescent was suddenly far below, a brilliant, turquoise mirror someone laid across the valley floor.
“Kurwa!” Maksym yelled. “Ja pierdolę!”
“Four hundred feet altitude,” Kawathra grinned. “Want to go higher? Turn the right handlebar towards you.”
Masksym turned the handlebar and expressed more Polish swears as they shot higher. Drunk, wild laughter escaped his mouth then he mumbled something about cyborg wallpaper moment.
Katherine’s pixel eyes curved cheekily into pixelated crescent moons turned sideways. “Having fun?”
“So much fun!” He yelled. “You’ve no idea! I think… I think I might be freaking having the best moment of my entire life right now, Kasiya! Holy shit, I definitely didn’t expect you to up and turn into a fucking flying bike! Kurwa!”
The word [Kasiya] bloomed across the tree in her neuralscape, exploding into pink flowers.
Then, it birthed another branch. Thicker than the others, the words on the hexagon-textured bark spelling out [BEST MOMENT!]
Katherine bent down to admire the flowery branch, then slowed her mind getting back to linear time. She described which controls did what and Max experimented, making her fly forward, up and down, slow down, accelerate, etcetera, loudly walloping all the while.
Her displays betrayed her completely, exploding into heart-shaped falling stars.
“I’m… happy to share the best moment of your life with you… I think… I think it might be my best moment too.” She breathed out.
He banked her sideways with a loud yell.
Darkfall Valley unfolded beneath them, pine forests pooling in lowlands, granite ridges shouldering up through the green in pale spines. To the North and East the Cascades stacked themselves in blue and white ranks, peak behind peak, snow glistening at the tips even now in late summer.
“Are you crying?” She asked, staring at his face.
“Nope. A bit of eye leakin’ cus of the wind.” He stated quickly.
“I’m projecting a barrier field around your body. The wind shouldn’t be hitting your face at all.”
“Agh,” he let out. “My eyes are leaking for SPIRITUAL reasons, Kasiya.”
“Which are?”
“Happiness overload reasons. I am no longer jelly of my best friend’s many girlfriends.”
“Why?”
“Because my girlfriend is a flying bike. Obviously.”
She smiled. They climbed in a long, lazy spiral, gaining more altitude. Far below, a flock of birds crossed the lake. A single fishing boat made a white V on the azure water.
“Being up here…” He breathed out. “It’s making me feel small.”
“Is that bad?”
“Nah.” Maksym replied. “The sort of small where you realise that the world is bigger and older than all of your problems.”
“Problems like?”
“Like alien invasions,” he said. “I thought that you guys would be a problem and that we were, simply put, utterly screwed. Turns out, not really. Turns out that many of the alien gals are awesomesauce like you, chill. Right?”
“Right,” she agreed. “I am… chill. You know, for most of my operational life… I existed inside dungeons with incredibly tight halls or low ceilings. Being under an endless sky is… nice and novel.”
“Really?”
“Mhmm.” Katherine mentally flashed back to her life as Keiy. “Me and my many sisters spent decades in the Corpse-God Citadel Zero… training… fighting monstrous things breeding in the deepest, darkest crevasses of accelerated time wells. Killing… hardening our bodies, levelling up. Bounded, walled… lightless.”
He went quiet. Below them, the valley exhaled its mist curling up, and the birds vanished into pine shadow, and the rays of sunset set fire to the clouds drifting along the ocean horizon.
“This is your first time in the sky then?” Maksym wondered.
“Second. Galateya and I flew down from Leviathan’s Sorrow. It was brief and… Didn’t feel like… this.”
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t as free back then,” Katherine answered. “Wasn’t permitted to have emotions, not allowed to think for myself, or to evolve.”
“Oh? What changed?”
“Galateya broke me. Froze my chains… all of them.”
They both fell silent at that once again.
For the next hour they flew along the great, 66 mile-wide ring of Cascade peaks. Sometimes he chose where to fly, sometimes she took over.
They fired more jokes at each other, talking about everything cool they saw below.
Katherine traced the rim of the bowl in long, leisurely arcs, sometimes climbing into the thinner air above the glaciers, sometimes dropping low enough to skim a ridge so closely Maksym could see individual marmots scurrying for cover in the wake of Kat’s thrumming anti-gravity engines. He hooted at the marmots. The marmots, sensibly, let out high-pitched whistles and froze or dove underground.
Like Gisney’s magic carpet ride song, the flying girl showed him wild mountain vistas he had no way to reach otherwise. A small turquoise lake hidden in a hanging cirque, snowmelt fed, the color of mouthwash and twice as cold. A waterfall that dropped six hundred feet down a black basalt face and turned to lace before it reached the trees. A herd of elk moving along a high meadow, the cows nudging calves toward better grazing, the bull lifting his crowned head as they passed overhead.
Katherine slowed for the elk. Her pixel eyes fixed on the bull, and her chest displays bloomed into question marks.
“Maksym?”
“Mhm.”
“That creature possesses cranial protrusions… resembling Princess Aquillianne’s.”
“Yeah, those are antlers. Elk have them. Deer too. Moose. Caribou. Whole family of antlered ungulates.”
“Princess Aquillianne is anatomically modeled on a North American game animal?” She considered a query she’s never thought about.
“I wouldn’t know, I’m just a local human. You tell me what she’s modelled on. Isn’t she the same species as her scary Admiral Aunt or whatever?”
“She’s…” Katherine accelerated her mind, diving into the shared archives and memories of the Weapon-Net. Paintings, tapestries and sculptures of Princess Aquillianne filled the halls and rooms of the dark-walled Frontenachii warships. The scanners of the gun units passing over these artistic pieces dated the objects… older than the Princess, sometimes by centuries.
What?! Katherine’s mind glitched. Was it a simple matter of warships coming into Citadel Zero’s shipyards… or. No, it couldn’t be. Some of the banners had dates on them too. Every single portrait, bust and banner of the Princess was older, far, FAR older than the Princess! Yet the tags below clearly labelled her as such! What was going on here?!
[Kawathra?!] Katherine M-texted the Datamancer.
[Yuh-huh?] The Datamancer’s digital avatar appeared in Katherine’s neuralscape.
[Why is the fleet filled with art of Princess Aquillianne that predates her, sometimes by as much as a few thousand years?]
[Ah. That. Our Princess was intentionally designed… by her great-grandmother, Empress Aconia Frontenachii. The art of her was created long before she was born by the Master Builders of Citadel Zero, carved into starship walls by millions of enslaved kobolds working under their Koschei masters.]
[Designed?] Katherine mentally chewed on that revelation. [Like… me?]
[Not quite. Your body only cost me some generic magisteel, crystalloid materia and Corpse Seeker printed organic and inorganic parts, and hexamesh components. All the stuff a Seeker can produce in a few hours. Creating the Princess was an incredibly slow and elaborate ceremony stretching thousands of years.]
[Why?]
[That’s how the Frontenachii roll,] Kawathra’s avatar shrugged. [The Empire’s fleets scrape every colony and every world they infest for Wormwood Star shards and magic artifacts which are shipped to the Corpse-God citadel via Deathmoth gates. Princess Aquillianne is the jewel of their hoard. An incalculable amount of magic, a colossal expense of beast cores and artifacts was ritualistically burned away to create her at a particular time and date.]
[To make her into the future leader of the Empire? To… inherit the throne?]
[I think not. Wendigo Omnids are immortal. Empress Aconia’s position as our Empire’s figurehead is eternal.]
[Then why?]
[Natural limits,] Kawathra speculated, sitting down onto a digital armchair that blossomed out of the hexagonal panels below. [From what I was able to uncover, with every generation there are less and less Omnids being born. Our Masters are capped in the amount of children they can produce. They learned that they could bypass this cap via sacrifice of Wormwood Star shards. Likewise, the Empress herself is incredibly high level but she’s limited to how much power she can pull through herself, as are the Legates. Princess Aquillianne was meant to be a focus point, a living weapon that could eventually pull on an ungodly amount of kobolds.]
[And how do you learn of this?]
[Probability calculation,] Kawathra stated. [I worked backwards from the art of the Princess sprinkled liberally across the Third Fleet. Twenty three years ago, I was part of the fleet-wide ritual our Masters made us all perform. We all went down on our knees and pledged allegiance to the newborn princess, cut our palms to bind our blood to her line. All of the other Fleet kobolds and Commanders did the same thing from what I found out. On February 22nd, 2002 at 2:22:20 AM Empire-standard time, everyone in the Frontenachii Empire, on every ship… Every citizen on every colony and citadel pledged themselves to our new Princess via her manufactured art. Magical pattern. 2-2-2-2. Eight. Two zeroes. 2-2-2-2. Another Eight. 8-8. Two Infinity runes in layman’s terms.]
[Slayer’s Sword! That’s a lot of magical power!]
[Yep, yep,] Kawathra agreed. [Do you know what the most interesting part was?]
[What?]
[The writing on the pedestals. The word on the banners. The words on the frames of her paintings. Consider them.]
Katherine flashed her mind across the art once again. [There are Dagaz runes all over. Two triangles facing each other. A humanoid carving between them. Plus the words… Rebirth. Change. Pull. Fertility. Devotion. Hope. Our Goddess.]
[There is a variance in the art too,] Kawathra steepled her magisteel-ringed talons. [Even when they are all dark marble and feature antlers and stars on the cheeks, in some drawings and statues she vaguely resembles a Wepwawet, in others a Leshai, then a Lamashtu, Sekhmet, Yogini, Lajja Gauri, Black Shuck and so forth.]
[Those aren’t…]
[Those aren’t Wendigos, correct. The Princess was designed to be worshipped, but not as a Wendigo Omnid.]
[Why?]
[Symbologenesis. Convergence of particular motifs, magic symbolism created by separate parties. Billions of minds devoted to worshipping a symbol! Empress Aconia lives in the deepest, most accelerated part of Citadel Zero. Because of this she had millennia to think things over, had time to set up a supermassive ritual that would tie her great-granddaughter to her entire Empire.]
[Rebirth, hope, change,] Katherine considered the words on the art. [Not… fear or strength. The Empress wanted her grand-daughter to… change her Empire, to set it on a new path?]
[Quite possibly,] the Datamancer magpie spread her claws.
[Could the Frontenachii Empress not simply order such change herself, tell her Legates to correct course?]
[Nope.] Kawathra shook her dark mane. [They are old, stubborn immortals. They will not listen to such an order. The Frontenachii war machine is bound to the mission of unending harvesting, ever hungry for more Wormwood Star shards, more hoard artifacts, more Corpse Seekers, more warships, more guns and kobolds. The Empress cannot stop it nor change course. But, perhaps, our Princess can? Do you feel it in your magisteel alloy bones, Katherine?]
[Feel what?]
[Change,] the Magpie grinned. [Great and terrible. Unstoppable. Wielded by the Emperor of Humanity across the surface of this extra-linear Earth?]
[I… uhrm…] Katherine considered the Datamancer’s words. [I’ve changed a lot, personally, I suppose.]
[We all have,] Kawathra said. [And we all will change even more with each step we take forward in the wake of the looming future his hand charts for us… by gripping the antlers of our Princess. May we live in the most interesting times, Katherine!]