Iri stared at the sun and its beautiful shimmer, that orange brightness that hung over the sky, pale- radiance streaking through windows that absorbed more than sight. The deepness, a hundred different components looking at different iridescences, the incandescent beams of light, and fire.
Sun-fire, beams of light… cold stone, wrought from the bones of earth and set atop this bastion, walls of strength, Gallant, that human-ilse with its beautiful grasses and seeded land. She remembered Gallant, if barely, though it had been a land without name. They’d cared so little about the humans…
Beneath the scope of plight and the tone lost, they weren’t that important. They’d never received the proper care, the greatness that could be in the uniqueness of mind, perspective… that tone, faint memories of tone.
Power. Golden-bright, sunlight streaming through the windows and casting her form in a lambent glow as she watched, clouds on the horizon. Winds, gentle but present, the force of nature as it swam so beautifully across vision and brought with it all the weight of shattered… looking into that white star, through an immensity of glass and a window-
Through memory. It was a single moment, broken… she turned away from the star that was not home and looked, onwards to the darkness that was beneath the earth, the abode of the humans. It was not dark. There were windows here, wrought cleverly for their limited technology.
It was a beautiful place, reminding her of that one park, that one dark place deep within the organs of the Eternity Falling where there was light, but not- beyond sunlight. Golden… she knelt down beside a particular wounded soldier who’d been hit by wooden shrapnel during a naval encounter off the northern shores of Xhyolok.
Had the Nola won? It was a question she’d been asking herself more and more as she cared for the dying, those who had been close but not close enough to the immense power of the ship now named for eternity. Rationally she knew it was an effect of staying so close to the Nola side of the conflict for so long, but still…
She saw the blood, and nimble fingers stitched the remnants of humanity, that machine of flesh and blood that had so impossibly been born of evolution so far in the past that nobody even knew when, an effect of chance that had become, in the end, so much…
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Blood on silver, across the floor, and Iri was desperately trying to do what she could. He’d been bleeding, so long, no tools to save, no will. Ships so far away on that will- of herself, the power of light and a propulsion that would never come to fruition. Orange. Like eyes across the skies, the poignant description of someone who couldn’t know…
Polarity Light was more important, she whispered, to herself, to the silver moonlight through faraway windows, to the corpse that stared up so peacefully, hopeful eyes… burning eyes, and blood. Iri stood, quickly washing off metal skin and glass, feeling with relief as everything felt just a bit lighter, and she remembered the tone of light.
Moonlight.
Faint shafts of luminescence as she moved around, iridescence over cold stones as she wondered how long they’d be able to stay here… thoughts, not her own- “Iridescence? I’m… safe location. Don’t respond…” It cut out, that faint voice and beyond it she thought she heard power, just so faintly… the pure tones of strength, but not as pure as light. Nobody had heard that in so long… “The sky bleeds. Arctic is flying around the Royaleo-continent, but… inscrutable, as always, he…” It cut out and then there was force, the strength of power that looked out over her and through her and beyond-
She felt force. Through the moonlight she could almost imagine the strength of an Eternity Falling that wasn’t exhausted, that didn’t rely on the mortal concepts of power given and power made. It would be… marvelous. Incredible, something so beautiful… she remembered it, if faintly, making only the barest notion for her colleague to be silent.
Remembered, the pure tones of light and that incandescent beauty as they’d run through the body of Eternity Falling when it had not been called the Eternity Falling. Before it had struck a moon that wasn’t, not anymore, and made that moonlight, a gentle radiance that speared through a window and pooled on Polarity Iridescence. A gentle tone, luminescence…
A gentle fear. How long could they stay here? How long should they?