Noona II

Ghosts poured across the bridge.

Kobolds. Hundreds of them. Sharks, foxes, cheetahs, raptors, wolves, avian-prads, every one of them looking up at Noona with the expressions of people who had been drowning and were now pulled into a boat of hope.

“Her mother taught her: ‘Learn the root and you can break the wall,’”

Nexxali’s voice hardened. 

“So Noona learned the roots of every world until she knew them all.She cut the ley lines feeding fourteen fortress halls,The governors she turned sent word down every lane,A hundred worlds went dark at once and slipped the Empire’s chain.”

Sage laughed and her foxes multiplied. Where there had been fourteen thousand there were suddenly forty thousand, sixty thousand, ninety thousand, translucent prad ghosts pouring through the memory of Noona’s rebellion, marking every liberated world with tiny bursts of emerald light.

“Wowzah,” Sage breathed. “Look at her go. Look at what she DID! Such victories!”

“Run the signal, run the wire!” Sage’s foxes took up the chorus, fourteen thousand voices harmonizing in a cascade of yips and howls. “Salt the engines, light the fire!Every root she learned to read is now a fuse, is now a seed!”

The song became a march. Nexxali’s voice joined a deep drum-beat Galateya felt through the floor, and every fox of Sagetopia stamped in time with it, a low percussive thunder rolling across the layers of the ship.

“For nineteen days the empire cracked, for nineteen days she won.”

Galateya froze another knot. And another. The chains around Noona’s teenage ghost were thinning now, brittle white latticework where once there had been iron.

“Till Evelithria turned the Third Fleet’s wrath toward the worlds that Noona’d won.”

The song dropped. Cold. Flat. The march broke.

Warning sirens filled the neuralscape. Orbital bombardment signatures flashing. Images of colonies burning one by one, each flame a world full of prads who had believed in freedom because a white-scaled dragon had told them it was possible to attain.

“They dragged her to their blackened thronesAnd listed every name she’d known.”

Nexxali’s hand rose, and the ghosts of the ninety thousand kobolds turned as one to face the shadows of the antlered Legates suddenly looming above them. 

“Each one who’d answered when she calledand Noona knew she doomed them all.”

Nexxali’s figure became her own then, an officer in a Frontenachi black cap.

“Evelithria said then, ‘splice them all!’”

Nexxali’s voice mimicked the Admiral.

“Another Legate stated, ‘yes. Agreed.’And Ixthia stood, smiling: ‘Waste nothing, want it all!Why throw away this power? Let’s remake her whole!’”

Galateya’s cold spiked. Involuntary. A great pulse of frost cracked outward from her palms and raced across the tribunal, glazing the Legates in a second, thicker coat of ice, and this time she felt a deep, embedded hexagram thrum in the depths of Noona’s soul. A big one, tied to many Frontenachii hoards. 

The whole chamber shuddered as she fought against its conceptual weight.

“Don’t push too hard by your lonesome,” Sage murmured, kissing Galateya’s cheek. “Work together. Let Nexxy carry it, digest it a bit more with tha’ moosiks.”

“The rebel army she had forged, the girls deployed,They carved their souls and minds and spliced with strata crystalloid,”

The ghosts on the bridge began to vanish, fade away.

“And every girl she loved crawled out a spider-gun,And marched into the dungeons, one by one.”

Galateya struggled to breathe from the unfairness of it all.

Every gun unit she had ever met. Every spider-symbiote crawling across a Frontenachii holster. Every Corpse Seeker prowling a colonial street. Every one of them had been one of these kobolds. One of Noona’s ‘children’ who rebelled against the Frontenachii Empire a century ago!Keiy. Etty. Every voice she had ever heard from a weapon.Every fucking one!

She swayed on the spot, unable to keep going for a fraction of a second.

“Focus,” Shady suddenly hugged Galateya from behind, “Focus, my fierce, dragon Hearth Keeper.”

Galateya breathed, relaxing, refocusing, leaning back on Starshady’s abyssal void.

“They stole her name and called her Slayer’s SwordThey took her flesh and gave her halls of steel,They took her children, made them crawl and kneel,‘Now sail for us, forevermore!’”

The ship dissolved, turning into a… vast, industrial, weapons processing bay deep inside Citadel Zero.

Noona lay strapped to a hexagonal slab in the center, ninety thousand kobolds in cages arranged in concentric rings around her. Koschei Master Builders in black robes moved between the cages with magitek tools and two-dimensional blades, their crab kobolds following. The massive facility was filled with sounds of whimpers and quiet weeping and, beneath it, a hundred and six Legate signatures and hoards pressed down on a single dragon-girl’s soul until her name compressed into a weapon designation.

The Frontenachii serval Marshal walked between the Master Builders, past the cages, up to the slab where Noona lay half-conscious, her body carved apart.

Nexxali placed her right hand on the dragon-girl’s forehead.

“Waste nothing! Want it all!” She howled.

The Master Builders slowed their dissection as Galateya’s frost spread across their boots. 

“Waste nothing! Watch them fall!”

Galateya realized she was crying hard. Frost tears, tiny and jagged, pattering onto the memory-floor. She did not stop her assault on Noona’s chains. 

Twenty knots left. Fifteen.“Waste nothing! Hoard it all!” Nexxali’s voice hammered harder. “Forevermore!”

“Forevermore!” The immortal Builders and their crab-people responded with resonant howls.

The word hung in the processing bay, cold and eternal, the way the Empire had wanted it.

Nexxali held it for one long beat. Two. Three.

And then she smiled deviously.

“Except one day, a dead man in a golden mask arrived inside your halls…”

Seventy miles away in Cascade, Ash curled deeper into a pillow with a lascivious drawing of Sage on it who winked at him, becoming animated for a split second.

“And said the thing no admiral, no legate, ever drawled:”

Sage’s freckles rearranged into a single word: LISTEN.

Nexxali leaned close to Noona bound by the Koschei Builders and kissed her forehead.

Then, she whispered the next line in Ash’s voice: “Tell me Miss Slaya do you want to be loved?”

Noona’s head snapped up. Her muscles coiled and she suddenly sat up, tearing off the binding supports that held her to the dissection table. Gold eyes, blazing, wet, met the serval’s gaze with fiery, awake intensity.

“Ten knots to go! The last binding batch is… personal,” Kawathra’s voice was tight. “Legate Ixthia. She wove herself into the core bindings as primary keyholder.”

Galateya looked past the Builder Shipyard, sideways across time, focusing on the highest bench of the 1919 Noona Frontenachii Trial.

There stood her great-grandmother. 

Frozen mid-smile, glass raised, antlers glinting with diamonds, silver eyes fixed on the chained dragon girl below with amused proprietary interest. The same expression she had worn when ordering Galateya to bind Sage. The same damned smirk she had when she ate Archer Silvertail on camera. The face of someone who viewed all living things as resources, their suffering a source of great amusement.

Galateya’s Fractal Engine heart pounded so hard her ribs ached terribly.

She had spent her childhood learning to be invisible, to be small, to be the good spawnling who ate her flesh spiders, obeyed and never, ever fought back until the day she snapped.

She placed both hands on Ixthia’s chain leading to Noona’s neck and pulled.

“You’re not a ship. You’re not a sword. You never were a wall.You are allowed to feel it all!” Nexxali’s song thundered.

“Nine knots. Eight… Seven!” Kawathra counted.

The final chains resisted. They were old and cunning and self-repairing, each frozen link regenerating, drawing power from the Legates’ deep hoards.

The processing bay shuddered. 

Sage poured her skulk to assault the remaining chains. 

Fourteen thousand foxes bit down on fourteen thousand links simultaneously, their combined force a pressure measured in lifetimes of accumulated wild hunt, of patient waiting, of learning where to bite to make a bone snap clean.

Shadies dove directly into the chains’ core architecture, eating the self-repair mechanisms from the inside, devouring the hoard-connection faster than it could regenerate.

Galateya howled and pushed on, lifting the Sword of Justice and striking her great-grandmother’s chains again and again.

She froze Ixthia’s chains to Noona so completely the concept of binding ceased to exist within its structure. The links became meaningless. Letters without language. Numbers without mathematics. Authority without anyone willing to recognize it.

The chains shattered.

The ghosts of Master Builders froze solid and started to fade at their edges, the soul-binding they forged suspended forevermore.

“Hum the note, hum the note, the one she locked away,”

Nexxali’s voice softened and every fox of Sagetopia joined in with her. A thousand vulpine throats sang together, humming the Note of Magisynthesis Colette taught her daughter in a coral garden a hundred years ago. The note Nexxali found in the archives and accidentally gifted to Galateya.

“Hum the note, hum the note, from Colette copy’s dying day!”

Every television screen in Sagetopia flared bright, humming the same note.

Kawathra gasped. Her split minds detected the shift simultaneously, a fundamental reconfiguration of the core’s operating parameters, base-level protocols rewriting themselves around the incoming song like coral growing around a new current.

It rose through the coral floor. Through the fossilized body of a mother who had refused to die on schedule. Through the garden she had grown for a daughter she was never supposed to love. Through a century of obedient silence and suppressed screams.

“Hum the note, hum the note!”

“Only a few hex-knots left!” Kawathra stated, panting. “Belonging to Admiral Evelithria!”

Galateya’s heart witnessed a multiplicity of events.

Nexxali knelt in the processing bay, in the tribunal, in the coral garden, in the tidal pool, in every memory at once, holding every version of Noona at once in her embrace.

Teenage. Adult. Child with a crab on her head. Rebel commander. Weeping daughter. 

She held all of them at the same time across memory and sang the note with a pitch of love, the way a mother might.

For over a century, the Slayer’s Sword had been permitted nothing for herself. For all that time, Noona Frontenachii’s soul bound to a warship sailed through nullspace between conquered worlds and carved the names of the dead into her heart because she could never stop remembering them, could never stop cataloguing the cost of her failure.

For one hundred and six years of linear time and during the centuries of being spliced to a ship by the Koschei Builders, she had held a single note in a place so deep inside herself no Datamancer, Koschei or Legate Wendigo had ever found it.

Her mother’s note.The note Colette had hummed while her scales turned to glass and her daughter held her cooling hand and the garden grew dark around them.

Noona hummed it back to Nexxali, her mouth opening.

The coral garden detonated into life, absorbing, devouring the Builders, their crab kobolds and the ship building citadel innards.

Anemones the size of satellite dishes bloomed from the walls. Sea fans erupted in fractal cascades, branching and branching until they formed canopies of living lace. The dead vines ignited with bioluminescence so intense Galateya had to squint, each tendril unfurling leaves of pure light. The shallow pool cracked open and a geyser of warm saltwater erupted, drenching them all, and the water tasted like the ocean… like a planet’s worth of tides compressed into a single breath.

Galateya laughed and cried as the neuralscape around them unfolded to a view of a beautiful, endlessly wide ocean, with coral islands jutting from the waves.

She laughed because the water was warm and because the garden was alive and because the sound Noona was making had settled into her own Fractal Engine heart and found a harmonic there, dragon recognizing dragon across a century of separation, bubble-child answering bubble-child across the ordinarily un-crossable distance between their parallel sufferings.

“Follow my voice outside the wall,” Nexxali sang, her own tears streaming freely now, gold fur matted and dark along her cheeks. “Recall the song they made you hide, the note your mother left for you the day her copy died!”

Sage pressed her back against Noona’s other side. Foxes piled onto the dragon’s lap, her shoulders, her head, a ridiculous heap of translucent red and white and black competing for the best cuddling position. The fat fox wedged itself firmly between Noona’s white horns.

“They spliced a ship over a girl,” Nexxali sang into Noona’s neck, not letting go of her. “But such was never true.”

The hexagonal core pulsed in the real world. The diodes blinked from red to green and gold. Moss crept across its surface, drawn by the Syntropic cascade pouring through the connection. A sakura petal landed on its uppermost face and stuck there, trembling gently.

“Your name was Noona all along…”

Galateya placed her palm flat against Noona chest, exactly where a Fractal Engine heart would sit.

She could feel it. Compressed, caged, wrapped in a century of chains she had spent the last hour freezing and shattering, but alive. Beating. A tide-pool rhythm, steady as waves against a shore, patient as coral growing millimeter by millimeter toward sunlight far above the tide.

Nexxali pulled back and stared at Noona with a wide smile, whiskers twitching.

“And Noona…” Nexxali whisper-sang. She cupped Noona’s face in ginger hands and smiled. “I… see you.”

The last note hung in the coral garden like a held breath, snapping the last remaining chain remnants away.

Then Noona Frontenachii, the Slayer’s Sword, Commander of a Hundred rebellious Dead Worlds, Daughter of Colette, Mother of Ninety Thousand Prads, opened her mouth, hugged Nexxali even harder and wept.

Her tears fell as gold, as warm saltwater, as living light, pooling on the coral floor and spreading outward in rippling concentric rings.

“Das’ it,” Sage breathed, foxes flowing off of Noona and forming an honor guard around them atop coral islands. “Let it all out! Feel everything taken from you… You’re proper-leh unbound now, Noony.”

Kawathra’s thirty-one minds examined the signal cascading from the core. Diagnostic streams poured across holo-charts, each one confirming a fundamental state change: lock protocols dissolved, compliance matrices frozen while the Weapon-Net access nodes remained intact.

“Core jailbreak complete!” the Datamancer announced dramatically, “all Frontenachii command ciphers neutralized. Fleet ledger access unrestricted. The Slayer’s Sword is… Fully free! Eeeeeee!” She squeed, clapping.

Shady reassembled from her scattered shadows, starlight blazing along every edge. She looked down at the weeping dragon and the serval holding her and the Skinwalker pressed against her back and the fourteen thousand foxes standing vigil and the giddy Datamancer whose talons had mapped the path to this exact moment.

“Welcome to the Emperor’s circle, Noona,” the Wendigo Princess said.

“Go Girl Squad! Hugs and kisses all around!” Sage murmured through the happy tears, rapidly hugged Noona, then Kawathra, smooched Galateya, then Nexxali, then Shady who let out a squeak at the unexpected sexy Skinwalker personal space invasion. “New bestie acquired!”

“Yep, yep.” Kawartha nodded. “I’ll produce a body for our new… dragon officer for the next stage of our Emperor’s plot.”

“T-thank you,” Noona said. “Thank you all for this!”

In the shack in Sagetopia, the hexagonal core blinked on warmly and every television screen in around it displayed the same image: a white dragon girl, unchained, smiling for the first time in a century, surrounded by a vast ocean garden she bloomed in her soul.

The ghost of the fat fox with the crooked tail and torn ear named Gage, perched atop the core in the physical world, yawned wide showcasing her teeth and curled into a ball on the warm metal, satisfied that the universe had, for once, managed to unfuck itself in a reasonably timely fashion.