The butterfly radiates bliss like a body slipped into a warm bath after a long, grueling exertion, or the feeling of coming in from the rain even while it drizzles miserably down on them all yet. She is soft to the point of insubstantiality, the pulse of her wings so light as to barely be felt.
Mercymorn tips back her head, hood half-falling back at last. There are dark circles punched out in the cradling curve of her orbital sockets, fine lines crimped about her considering mouth. God knows her better than she has ever known herself, even as she wonders, as she so often has, if he has ever really understood. He knows what she looks like when she thinks.
"You always were so particular about your sets," she says, as strands of stray thanergy unravel off of her and collide with her side of ward in a quivering shimmer. She doesn't seem to notice. She is intent on the clouds above, churning and grey.
"You have Patience. You have Duty, or whatever is left of Duty. But it isn't enough...there is a gap, and you have always so hated gaps..." she works the words over like a theorem in the mouth "...fill it up with anything you can, however bent or broken...a bird with a nest of glass buttons." Rain streaks her tongue, grit and metal. "It is very annoying, Lord. I think, of all your many habits that I have found annoying...it has been one of the worst."
She tips down her chin. The ward sparks pale, then black, as it fizzles between them.
"You will not find Joy here, Lord," she tells him, very close to gently, as a scalpel is gentle when it kisses skin, and then, not at all so, with the off-hand diffidence of someone past caring about much of anything, "Cytherea was right."
The street explodes.
It takes an average of one hundred seventeen seconds for the raindrops to reach a distance from the ground of one point fifty five meters. Mercy timed it out precisely, as she has done everything precisely, as she seeded the clouds with all but inert minute globules of lymph encasing blood cells to hang suspended among the water droplets, as she ran the slightest rivulets of borrowed stem cells underneath the cobblestones, as she programmed each with some of the most specialized tissue structure she has ever taught herself. Wide, feathered plumes of nerves rocket upward like fountains, too finely spun to support their own weight, but they only need to last long enough to touch the swelling raindrops plumping with the blooming green glisten of Vileblood.
Mercy reaches into herself and she slits in a hundred places, in vessel and marrow and gland, and from this desecration she wrests a flood of thalergy she pours profligately into her delicate filigree construct. She takes hold of it all in the palm of her hand, and she gives it one simple task, the only thing that it was spun to be able to do.
Transmit, she commands, and an impossible lash of electricity roars thorough it all, denatures and obliterates and blinds, only for a moment - but it is enough.
The rain bursts into a shimmering and deadly green fog, and Mercy passes through it like a ghost. She stands behind God's back as he once stood behind hers. She marks the slat in his spine above the densest and most precious part of his brain stem, the one she used to know by the press of her thumbs into the tension knots at the base of his skull, and her hand comes up with a fine and perfect spring-loaded lance of bone arcing out to pierce it cleanly through.
cw: gore, body horror
Mercymorn tips back her head, hood half-falling back at last. There are dark circles punched out in the cradling curve of her orbital sockets, fine lines crimped about her considering mouth. God knows her better than she has ever known herself, even as she wonders, as she so often has, if he has ever really understood. He knows what she looks like when she thinks.
"You always were so particular about your sets," she says, as strands of stray thanergy unravel off of her and collide with her side of ward in a quivering shimmer. She doesn't seem to notice. She is intent on the clouds above, churning and grey.
"You have Patience. You have Duty, or whatever is left of Duty. But it isn't enough...there is a gap, and you have always so hated gaps..." she works the words over like a theorem in the mouth "...fill it up with anything you can, however bent or broken...a bird with a nest of glass buttons." Rain streaks her tongue, grit and metal. "It is very annoying, Lord. I think, of all your many habits that I have found annoying...it has been one of the worst."
She tips down her chin. The ward sparks pale, then black, as it fizzles between them.
"You will not find Joy here, Lord," she tells him, very close to gently, as a scalpel is gentle when it kisses skin, and then, not at all so, with the off-hand diffidence of someone past caring about much of anything, "Cytherea was right."
The street explodes.
It takes an average of one hundred seventeen seconds for the raindrops to reach a distance from the ground of one point fifty five meters. Mercy timed it out precisely, as she has done everything precisely, as she seeded the clouds with all but inert minute globules of lymph encasing blood cells to hang suspended among the water droplets, as she ran the slightest rivulets of borrowed stem cells underneath the cobblestones, as she programmed each with some of the most specialized tissue structure she has ever taught herself. Wide, feathered plumes of nerves rocket upward like fountains, too finely spun to support their own weight, but they only need to last long enough to touch the swelling raindrops plumping with the blooming green glisten of Vileblood.
Mercy reaches into herself and she slits in a hundred places, in vessel and marrow and gland, and from this desecration she wrests a flood of thalergy she pours profligately into her delicate filigree construct. She takes hold of it all in the palm of her hand, and she gives it one simple task, the only thing that it was spun to be able to do.
Transmit, she commands, and an impossible lash of electricity roars thorough it all, denatures and obliterates and blinds, only for a moment - but it is enough.
The rain bursts into a shimmering and deadly green fog, and Mercy passes through it like a ghost. She stands behind God's back as he once stood behind hers. She marks the slat in his spine above the densest and most precious part of his brain stem, the one she used to know by the press of her thumbs into the tension knots at the base of his skull, and her hand comes up with a fine and perfect spring-loaded lance of bone arcing out to pierce it cleanly through.