Noona I

The chamber erupted. Objections, counter-proposals, theological concerns about soul integrity, economic projections about production costs. 

Ixthia weathered them all with the patience of a maestro who had already won the argument and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.

“And the soul materia for this ambitious undertaking?” a Legate Galateya didn’t recognize asked from the second tier.

Ixthia’s smile widened. She gestured downward at the tribunal floor. 

At Noona. 

“We have ninety thousand lovely rebels selected by Noona herself for their neural plasticity in war. An adequate prototype pool, would you agree?”

Noona’s eyes went wide. She yanked against her chains. “You can’t… They’re people! They fought for freedom, they fought because you all bound them in blood contracts and stole their men, you can’t possibly…”

“The Tribunal will vote!” Ixthia stated over her.

More noises of whispers from the Legates.

“As for Commander Noona herself,” Ixthia added, almost as an afterthought, lifting her Ambrosia cup into the air. “A mind capable of outmaneuvering our forces for nineteen days is far too valuable to waste on mere wall-binding. I move that Commander Noona Coraline Frontenachii be processed into a capital-class vessel core. Let her protect the Empire she tried so hard to destroy. I do appreciate such irony. Waste not, want all, hoard all!”

Green hexagons ignited one by one above the antlered Frontenachii Legates.

“The motion carriers!” Admiral Evelithia announced.

Noona screamed, thrashing in her chains on the floor, gray nullification field nor allowing her to do anything against her captors and tormentors.

“And so they built the first gun units from Noona’s army,” Kawathra stated in a hollow recitation. “Every prad soul in the weapon-net. Every seeker and warship in the fleet. They were all… Noona’s soldiers a century ago.”

Galateya pressed both hands against her sternum, feeling her Fractal Engine heart pound so hard it rattled her insides. Frost was radiating from her in radial waves, icy rage bubbling within her.

“Is this… is this deep enough?” Galateya ground out. “I can’t… can’t take it anymore… want to murder them all so bad.”

“Me too,” Shady ground out.

“It is,” Sage said. “We’re in her Fractal Engine heart now, in her final memory before Noona was taken apart and remade into the Empire’s Sword.”

Shady stood, glaring at the Frontenachii Legates. Silver stars blazed across her cheeks, chest and antlers like a nebula detonating in slow motion. She stepped to Galateya and placed a dark, clawed hand on her shoulder. “Fuck up their chains good, Teya.”

“Ye. Each of the Legates gathered here contributed to Noona’s soul binding that day using their hoards,” Sage said. “Freeze them all. Conceptually suspend their hold over her.”

Galateya’s Fractal Engine heart roared to life.

Cold erupted from her palms, frost racing in her veins. She reached towards the chains holding Noona in their dark embrace and squeezed them hard in her claws. 

She had frozen her cruel, half-mad Instructors. She had frozen a room, a garden, her own heartbeat down to almost nothing. She froze her gun unit in a fit of rage.

Suspending the chains binding a soul across a century of grief felt like reaching into a corroded wound seven times older than her entire lifetime and asking it to hold still.

The cold she summoned bore no resemblance to temperature. Temperature was physics, molecules slowing their frantic dance. She reached for the conceptual darkness between stars, the cold at the bottom of an ocean trench where light surrendered, into the Astral Ocean where entropic pressure crushed and eroded meaning. 

Her Fractal Engine heart screamed in her chest, a tuning fork struck against the concept of injustice permeating this vile tribunal. The resonance traveled outward through the memory like a crack propagating through ice on a lake, except the lake was over a century of Imperial cruelty and the ice was every legal fiction the Frontenachii put together in their greed for keeping everything and everyone bound forever.

“Sing, ma’ catio,” Sage whispered to Nexxali. “She needs it, so as not to fold inward. I’ll guide the way with the light of my skulk while you and Shadio anchor her.”

Nexxali opened her mouth. A guitar woven from monster parts manifested in her hands and she began strumming, letting out a soft hum.

The hum-song joined the storm Galateya was building up in her heart. Where her frost was all-suspending structure, Nexxali’s song was destruction. The two magics fit together seamlessly, Entropy and Syntropy entwining in a Yin and Yang supercell spiral around them.

Sage’s foxes poured into the room from her body in a river of colorful light, circling the tribunal, circling Noona’s body, igniting and highlighting the conceptual binding chains stretching from her to the Legates. 

Shady’s hands landed on Galateya’s shoulders, reinforcing her power.

The tribunal chamber glittered as the cold radiating from Galateya caressed it. The tiered crystal seats rimed over first, thin veins of white racing up the dark facets. Ixthia’s Ambrosia crystal skull glass halted an inch from her lips, the steam above it crystallizing into an unmoving plume.

Galateya pushed deeper.

Under the physical tableau, she felt them. Dark chains lit up by the Fox Sea, made of a hundred Wendigo hooks embedded in Noona’s soul, each knot tightening with every conquered world, every screaming kobold, every kill-tally engraved into a coral wall in layers of soul far above them.

The knots had names on them. The Legates’ names. Ixthia. Evelithria. Others she did not recognize, likely currently conquering some distant worlds beyond the stars. 

“Slow n’ steady, T-buns. Freeze ‘em all, one by one. Keep the permissions, eliminate the binds.” Sage whispered at her side.

“Yes. Keep the usable framework,” Kawartha added. “She must remain as the nexus of the entire Frontenachii weapon network as much as possible.”

Galateya nodded. Her breath came out in a pale ribbon.

The conceptual layer peeled open beneath her will like geological strata under an excavation, and she saw the architecture of the binding in its entirety. Each chain connected to a specific Legate, yes, but all of them converged on a single point, a knot of compressed authority located where Noona’s Fractal Engine heart had once spun freely.

The knot was ugly. Dense and tangled and self-referential, a legal ouroboros designed to tighten whenever the prisoner struggled against it. A century of obedience had calcified around it like the coral that had claimed Colette, layers upon layers of [COMPLY], [SERVE] and [FORGET WHO YOU WERE].

Galateya stared at it and saw her own bubble in its conceptual reflection. 

Her own frozen walls. Her own desperate, suffocating years of listening to a voice she could barely understand, trying to survive long enough for a door to open.

She had grown a tree.Noona had raised an army.Same fury. Same love. Different tools.

The cold she channeled this time carried something extra. A memory of her own, offered freely: the sensation of pressing her forehead against magisteel walls in a frozen bubble, listening to a mad voice sing about endurance, about deception, about surviving. She had been a kid dying of thirst and she had frozen herself rather than give up.

She fed the memory into the knot like a key into a lock.

The conceptual binds and hooks groaned.

“A star was burning in a bubble stitched from borrowed time,” the serval’s voice blossomed through the dark tribunal like a vine seed slowly blooming to tear down a foundation.

“They grew a mother from a Fractal Engine’s rhyme… A fraction left, a fraction lived, a fraction burning bright, One wrong number in the ledger when Noona saw the light…”

The nearest Legate froze fully.

Her mouth hung open around a vote she would never finish casting, silver eyes glazing over with white frost that crawled across her pupils like cataracts accelerated to milliseconds. The crystal bench beneath her groaned, then shattered silently, fragments hanging suspended in the conceptual resin of Galateya’s will.

The second Legate followed. The third. A cascade of conceptual cracks rippled upward through the tiered seats, each frozen figure a domino falling in reverse, caught forever at the apex of their horrid consensus.

Galateya’s claws dug into Noona’s chains harder. Violet blood welled from her palms where the jagged celesteel edges bit, and each drop froze before it fell, tiny amethyst beads striking the floor around her, freezing it solid, manifesting more cracks.

Galateya felt it in her palms, felt the second knot loosen by the width of a held breath. Nexxali’s voice softened the conceptual geometry of the chains, letting Galateya sink her cold deeper without the whole structure shattering.

The serval walked across the tribunal hall and knelt beside the white dragon Omnid chained on the tribunal floor.

“I am Colette Frontenachii, hear my name, my vow,” the serval’s tone deepened into the exact cadence of Colette, the ghostly voice Galateya heard teaching a small dragon how to listen to water.

Noona flickered. The adult in the chains blurred, aged in reverse, became younger, teenaged, gemstone mane shortening. Then she became younger still.

“Omnid-duplicate, on borrowed time, breathing for now.Three kobolds died to forge a blade-hex of red,I wished to see my daughter’s face,so I derailed the program and killed them all instead.”

Galateya watched Nexxali become Noona’s mother, green-blue light rippling across her fur like scales that weren’t really there. 

The calcified figure in the coral garden, layers above them shuddered, cracking in half. A single fault line, running from her hollow throat to her folded knees. Galateya felt it through the ice, felt the entire ship-concept around them shudder, and understood: the memories were connected. Every layer of Noona’s heart was one story, told in fragments, and Nexxali was singing them into a single thread.

“Beyond this bubble, Empress Aconia keeps the Citadel Zero’s throne,My real self plants her Dryad trees in worlds my friends have won.A billion souls and trillion roots depend upon… my hands,I grew a copy in my place… and I’ll root until I’m done.”The serval sang on as Colette’s copy.

Galateya’s claws dug in harder into the chains.

The real Colette had known she was seeding herself into a bubble to raise a daughter. Did she know that she was building a copy of herself to die in a five-room prison so a spawnling could grow up loved. Did the mother and daughter ever meet? Or had they drifted apart, never reached out, preoccupied with their separate missions of seeding World Trees and seeding rebellion on separate Frontenachii-dominated Earths?

The frost on the knots spread easier now. The song was doing half the work.

“Hum the note, hum the note, the one too raw to share,”

Nexxali’s voice rose, and behind her, Sage’s foxes picked up the tune. Fourteen thousand vulpine throats hummed in soft harmony, a rolling undercurrent that made the Hall of Justice ring like a struck bell.

“No composer ever scored it, no orchestra would dare,Hum the note, hum the note, the song of goodbye,A mother’s only melody: I love you, and I don’t want to die.”

Galateya cracked ten chains simultaneously in her fury.

The effort cost her. Blood vessels burst in her left eye, painting her sclera violet. Her Fractal Engine heart stuttered, skipped, found its rhythm again only because Sage and Shady’s warm hands pressed harder against her, one hundred and thirteen soul shards and fourteen thousand souls whispering steady, steady, steady, keep it up, through the contact.

A fissure, hairline thin, raced along the outermost loop. Then another. The self-referential legal bind began to eat itself as the conceptual foundations beneath it froze and shattered.

Shady’s shadows lunged from her heart. A hundred and thirteen antlered shapes drove their teeth into the widening cracks, prying them further apart.

The scene rippled. 

The setting shifted halfway, the coral garden bleeding through the tribunal walls in translucent overlay. Nexxali knelt now in shallow saltwater, and a small white dragon-girl with a pink crab on her head sat in her lap, wide gold eyes watching the serval sing.

“She raised her crops in coral rows, she kept their garden warm,She taught her girl that every rose must learn to grow its thorns.”

Nexxali’s hand gently brushed a strand of gemstone hair behind Noona’s cute, small horn.

“‘Hold gently,’ Colette told her, ‘and they’ll hold you in return,A mother keeps the roots alive so branches learn to turn!’” Nexalli sang.

Galateya breathed deeply, pouring ice into the chains and knots.

“You’re doing beautifully, T-buns,” Sage whispered. Her freckles said “KEEP GOIN.”

“Sixty-three knots down. Forty-three to go!” Kawathra’s thirty-one selves whispered in a low chorus somewhere behind them, and Galateya realized the magpie was cataloguing each broken knot, filing each severed contract into a private archive, probably to be weaponized later.

The song shifted key.

“Mama, mama, the amber’s running low,”

The little dragon in Nexxali’s lap became older. Teenage now. Gemstone mane heavy, gold eyes red-rimmed, small hands pressed against a calcifying arm.

“Mama, mama, where do copies go?”

Shady exhaled behind Galateya. More mana poured through her hands into Galateya’s heart, devoured fear converted into a sword of all-cleaving Justice that Galateya struck again and again against Noona’s chains.

“Mama, mama, your scales have turned to glass,Mama… how long do copies last?” 

Nexxali held Noona tightly against her chest, and the ghost teenage dragon girl sobbed into the serval’s shoulder, and Nexxali was singing directly into the crown of her mane.

“On year nineteen… Noona held her mother’s cooling hand,Felt scales turn to stone.The only voice that ever sang her name…Had left her on her own.”

Galateya struck and froze the seventieth knot. She did not remember reaching it. Her power moved on autopilot, guided by the song, following the map Nexxali laid down verse by verse. Frost had climbed her forearms to the elbows, and from her feet to her knees, pale white lace curling around dark scales.

The scene shifted again. The coral garden dissolved.

In its place, a Frontenachii starship bridge assembled itself from memory, and adult Noona stood at its center, older, gold eyes flat with a buried rage that had learned to wear a Frontenachii Officer uniform.

“She bloomed a hex inside her skull, a flower made of thought,So bright it drowned the grief that sorrow wrought.When she emerged, her sisters cast their hooks against its light,And found a frightened, Benzaiten girl with a soul wound up tight.”

Nexxali walked the memory-bridge, singing between the ghostly Wendigo officers, and every prad on the phantom bridge turned to watch her pass, drawn to her voice the way tides were drawn to a moon.

“Beneath the bloom, beneath the bow,A coral room, a mother’s vow.Beneath the smile, beneath the kneel,A hidden edge of dragonsteel.”

The seventy-eighth knot became cleaved by Galateya’s sworde. Then seventy-ninth. The eightieth.

“They gave the Benzaiten girl a ship, a little hull, a name,”

The bridge widened, expanded, became a small Commander’s personal vessel. Noona stood at its viewport, white scales luminous under starlight, watching a blue-violet-gray planet spin below.

“And every dying world with prad children,Noona pulled them from the dungeon-bloom flame…”