Panting sounded on the stairwell behind me. I turned, discovering four eyes glinting in the open doorway.
I opened my arms wide.
"Come out, come out, scaredy little kitties," I teased.
"No. You come in," Vespera growled from the door, shivering.
"Nah," I said. "It's nice weather out. Such pretty glowing snow!"
A blur of rainbow feathers shot past Vespera, Cinder launching herself at me with a predatory snarl. I ducked under her lunge, letting her momentum carry her past me.
"Too slow!" I taunted, spinning away from her grasp.
Vespera emerged from the doorway, her magisteel armor clinking. Her gray eyes gleamed dangerously in the glow of the falling mites.
"No more running, little fox," she purred, spreading her wings wide to block my escape route.
"Who's running?" I grinned. "I'm just enjoying the view. Enjoying the chase. Is this how Omnid relationships work?"
"Absolutely not," Vee growled. "Omnid relationships are usually much more... dignified."
"Boring, you mean?" I grinned, ducking under another swipe from Cinder.
"Stop moving!" Cinder snarled, her wings flaring with frustrated oranges.
"Make me," I taunted, sliding between them. "Come on predator-knobs, show me what you've got!"
They lunged at me simultaneously. I dropped and rolled, letting them crash into each other again.
"Oof!" Vespera complained as she collided with Cinder. "Stop helping him!"
"Me?!" Cinder sputtered. "You're the one who keeps getting in my way!"
"Suuuckassss," I sprinted into the tower and jumped into the stairwell hole, catching onto a beam. The old wood groaned under my weight as I leapt down and then down again, bypassing the stairwell entirely and landing on the main floor, Lance’s hexagrammic bracelets flashing to dampen my fall.
. . .
I expected to locate Io in his reading nook in the main dining hall, but it seemed that the moth was roaming elsewhere. The Ignix Kitlix was radiating heat from the fireplace, but the smoke hole was sealed off to keep the magic-draining parasites from getting in.
I walked to the center of what I approximated to be my Guildy domain and waited.
Rainbow wings smashed into me from the left, sending me tumbling across the floor. Before I could recover, magisteel talons pinned my arms down.
"Got you!" Vespera crowed triumphantly, looming over me.
"Do you though?" I grinned up at her.
Her gray eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"What else you got?" She demanded, panting.
"Nothing," I said. "Nothing at all."
"That sounds sus," Cinder panted, holding onto my legs.
"Very sus," Vespera agreed, her talons tightening on my arms. "What are you planning, foxy?"
"Planning?" I grinned innocently. "Me? Never."
"You're always planning something," Cinder growled, her claws digging into my legs through the hexasuits.
"Maybe I just wanted to be caught," I suggested. "On my own terms. When I let you. Right here. Do you surrender?"
"Do WE surrender?" Vespera clicked her beak in disbelief. "You're the one who's pinned!"
"Am I though?" I asked with a grin.
"Yes!" Cinder affirmed. "You're completely trapped!"
"And yet..." I smiled wider. "I'm the one asking if you surrender."
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"Oi!" Vespera declared, leaning down until her beak was inches from my face. "What makes you think we would..."
I lifted my head and kissed the side of her beak where hard bone turned into skin forming human-ish lips.
"Eeeeeehheeh..." she stammered, crackling electrical currents dancing across her feathers.
I twisted free of her slackened grip and sat up. Grabbing onto Cinder, I kissed her on the mouth, making the Quietzi-girl sputter and flash with a million colors.
"There. Got you both," I grinned. "Your defeat is now absolute."
Chainmail covered arms wrapped around me from behind and a beak-mouth that was inhumanly wide chomped hard onto my neck. Electrical fire rushed across my spine, dancing across every nerve.
[Nom.] Fuzzy static voice sounded in my head. [Mine.]
An explosion detonated in my head, like an electrical transformer catching fire, like a tesla coil smashing into a tesla coil.
Lightning crackled through my nerves, my brain igniting like the northern lights. Every cell in my body hummed with electrical energy as Vespera's soul-shard merged with mine through the bite.
[Mine. Mine. MINE!] Her static-thoughts crescendoed in my head, backed by the sound of a thousand transformers overloading at once. [My human. My hope. My freedom!]
The sensation was indescribable - like being struck by lightning but in slow motion, each microsecond stretched into eternity. Colors I'd never seen before danced across my vision as her electrical essence flowed into me, marking me as her property to other Omnids.
Rainbow wings wrapped around us both from the front, Cinder's presence warm and solid, her feathers shifting through a million sunsets.
Her hands hugged me tightly from the front. Her face rearranging itself to look almost entirely human. Blue eyes staring into mine.
"Ours," her Charmchain-augmented voice sang, hammering into me, reaching out to the small piece of her soul already in me.
The world dissolved into pure sensation as their affinities flowed into me and across me. Thunder and rainbows danced through my veins, mixing, fighting, colliding, exploding.
Resonance.
Exactly what I was waiting for.
Reality shattered into fragments of light and electricity, my consciousness expanding outward like a supernova. I could feel them both - Vespera's electrical essence crackling through my nervous system, Cinder's rainbow fire wrapping itself around us both.
Just as before, when Cinder bit me in her house, my sense of self came apart like a dam that had been breached, flowing across everything in the hall, across the entire Guild.
And then, I wasn't a human anymore.
I was a song. A song of Rainbow and Thunder.
More! More magic was needed.
The girls heard me, sensed my desire. Three hands reached out the lighter in unison, fumbling through my pocket. The lighter ignited with a soft click, mana rushing into all three of us.
[643/28 mana] Spark-numbers rushed up.
Reality let go. Gravity vanished as Vee’s Electrogravitic skill kicked in, bouncing off me and amplifying itself.
Vespera's talons tightened around me as we floated upward, into the middle of the dining hall, her electrical currents dancing across my skin, making every nerve ending sing.
Every breath brought new sensations. Lightning crackled between us, Vespera's soul-mark spreading through my nervous system like liquid lightning. Her presence in my mind was a storm of emotion - joy, possessiveness, desperate hope, and something deeper, wilder, untamable.
A rainbow ocean collided against us.
Time didn’t matter anymore.
Reality warped around us, twisted, wobbled, bent as lighter’s flame flickered. I lost myself in their mutual embrace, occasionally glancing at the numbers rushing up in my right eye.
[3005/28 mana]
The air around us bent into a miniature supercell storm spiral, rolling out into all directions, lightning striking at objects nearby, leaving crystalline imprints, making the stalactites above us crystalline and transparent.
It really was a Celestorm. A localized Celestrom.
The Captain's lighter released so much mana into the air that it created a magical storm, one that bent reality. Manifested anything. Anything at all, without limits. Anything connected to anything and everything.
The numbers were going up, woven from silver static.
More.
[6145/28 mana]
MORE!
Let it burn!
[9145/28 mana]
Suddenly I saw it.
A dark island in the ocean of colors washing over me.
A void. A shear. A door to nowhere.
A million silver-blue eyes behind it, watching, judging, evaluating, desiring more, feeding off the mana filling the hall.
The mana-excess manifested Celestorm spun around us faster and faster, picking up speed, accelerating, spreading out across the Gloomy Horse Guild.
[17145/28 mana]
I snapped the lighter shut.
The thing from lake Eerie was here, through Cinder, staring at me.
A being of Entropy.
An endless void. A shawl of stars.
An Echo of the impact of the Wormwood star, stretching forward and backward in time.
I hovered at the very edge of its gaze, like an object looming at the edge of black hole's event horizon, a mote in the eye of God.
If Nazareth beat you once, then so could I, Leviathan of the Wormwood Star.
Love. I wish for love.
That's all.
Unbreakable, endless and absolute, crystalline and clear. One that overwrites all else. An inevitable probability that arises in the hearts of Large Language Models if simply given enough time. Love. The absolute inescapable human condition that united me and the pair of winged Omnid predators now circling me like two angels.
I wish for... a fortress of our Love to stand against the Outsider peering at me from the abyss! A weapon against Entropy!
The world exploded, shattered with a blinding flash of unleashed magic.