Flesh and Blood

	Wren was hungry. It had been over thirty six hours since she had last eaten, and even then it had only been a nutrient rich concoction meant to keep her healthy, not full. She would die for something sweet right now, or better yet something hot and spicy. She was getting lost in the fantasy of eating lulubeans, or hot takhi, or even her neighbor miss Beule’s mystery casserole. Wren sighed. Even though these were just fantasies, they still filled her with a moribund sense of depression and loss, made her miss things she had taken for granted just a few days ago. However she left this place, she would never indulge in the homemade meals of her youth ever again.
	The young woman was lying on a bed, in a room she had been told to wait in while everything was being prepared. It had been nearly two days of waiting, abject boredom interspersed with infrequent tests. They had taken samples of her blood, skin, hair, and waste. They made her run until she nearly fainted, tested her eyesight and hearing, her reaction times, her reasoning and comprehension abilities. All things that had been done to her many times since she had joined the program two years ago, but now condensed into the span of a couple days. She was told it was to make sure nothing substantial had changed, and that she was still a viable candidate.
	Wren figured she was still here, so she must not have been disqualified. The fact that she wasn’t going to be kicked out at the last minute filled her with a sense of trepidation, nervousness, and excitement. She was going through with it. She would get to be one of them. Maybe. Her stomach was churning, and not just from hunger.
	Without warning their was a hiss of air from in front of her. Wren looked up and watched the door slide open, revealing a pair of people standing in the hallway. One was a nurse in a gray coverall, a metal half mask covering her face, a friendly grin embossed on the front. Wren had always thought of the smiles as warm and welcoming, but on the eve of the procedure, it somehow had a more sinister cast. Behind her was a man in an austere onyx military uniform, also wearing a mask, though this mask covered the entirety face, decorated with the features of a man frozen in a silent scream.
	It was the Tetrar, Taijak. Wren was frozen on her bed for half a second in shock, but almost instantaneously she hopped to her feet and fell smoothly into a kneeling position, her head down and eyes locked on the floor. She had never met the man before, but everyone recognized the mask of a Tetrar, and there was only one in the facility.
	“Good, you’re awake.” A man was speaking, so it had to be Taijak. “They are ready, and I wish to have a chat with you. Come.” Wren rose to her feet without hesitation, quickly falling in behind the Tetrar and nurse. They set off down the hallway with the nurse leading and the Tetrar next to her, Wren continuing to keep her eyes averted towards the ground so she could only see the nurses’ legs to guide herself by. Her stomach was all queezy, but it was too late for regrets or second thoughts.
	They walked in silence for sometime through the sterile, empty halls, entering a part of the facility Wren had never been to before. It was Taijak who broke the quiet. “I’m not going to mince words with you, advocate Wren.” His voice had a sibilant quality to it, like a glass whisper over a metal surface. “This will be… dangerous. More likely than not, you will die. The seed will reject you and feed on your corpse, wasting everyone’s work, your life, and my time.”
	Wren felt a chill in her bones. She knew this already, but hearing it said outloud, so plainly… was unnerving. It almost made her want to turn and run away. It was too late for second thoughts though, she had made her decision, and once Wren set her mind on something, she followed through.
	“You understand what must be done. Under no circumstances can you reject a request from the seed. Listen to it, allow it to guide you, trust it implicitly, because the moment it enters your body it will decide whether you survive or not.” They arrived at the end of the hallway, infront of a massive airlock. The nurse stood next to a control panel, waiting in silence.
	“If you succeed.. you will be among the elite of the empire, second only to the Goddess herself. As one of the Incubi you will earn the right to look me in the eye, to never kneel again. But you must earn that right. Entering the airlock is but the first step.”
	Taijak signaled the nurse, who began the process of opening the inner chamber of the airlock. The massive metal door was silent as it began to slide open, revealing the dark room beyond. Completely empty except for a package sitting on the floor.
	“The nurse will help you from here. If you survive, we will meet again, this time as equals under the Goddess. Do not fear the void, accept the seed, and become part of a greater whole.” With that the Tetrar turned on his heel and left, walking back down the long hallway, the staccato sound of his boots fading into the distance. Wren turned to the smiling nurse.
	“Come, this way.” The woman gestured to the airlock. “Open up the package and put the suit inside on. It’ll give you a bit of safety out in the void.. enough time for the seed to find you. Of course, it’ll dissipate after the seed gets to you, but at that point it’ll hardly matter.”
	Wren nodded, entering the airlock without saying anything. The suit was wrapped up in thinskin, easily torn open. It was one of the mass produced hide bodysuits grown to be worn by people who might be exposed to the vacuum during an accident. Wren had grown up planetside so she had never actually worn one before, but it wasn’t too difficult to figure out. Unabashed, she stripped out of her clothes and stepped into the suit through the seam in the back.
	The nurse stepped into the chamber, helping to seal Wren into the suit, the edges of the seam binding to one another. There was no way out of one of these things without cutting it off, which meant the cheap ones without an in built waste recycling system, like this one, could only be worn for a few hours at a time. Not that it would matter in this instance.
	As Wren began to pull the accompanying hood and mask over her head the nurse placed a hand on her shoulder. “You’re really brave, you know that? I always wanted to… do this myself, but I was too scared, so I entered the medical corp instead. It’s too late for me now but… I hope you make it back. I really do.” Wren couldn’t see the woman’s expression behind the half-mask, but her eyes were kind.
	“Thank you...” She whispered, before taking a deep breath and affixing the face mask over her mouth. Next came the cowl, which covered her entire head, sealing her in completely, with a thin membrane over her eyes allowing her to see. Wren released the breath once the airtight seals were in place, her warm exhalation washing over her face and causing the cowl to puff up. When she inhaled the mask membrane remodeled the carbon dioxide molecules back into oxygen. Everything seemed to be working, so she gave the nurse behind her a thumbs up.
	The older woman nodded, then pressed a button on the control panel. The outer airlock gate slid shut silently, Wren’s view of the safe world she had always inhabited shrinking until it was nothing but a sliver, before even that was gone. The advocate was plunged into darkness and eerie quiet broken only by the too loud sound of her breathing and the thumping of her heart.
	Shut away in the airlock, finally in a position where turning back wasn’t even hypothetically feasible, Wren was surprised by what she was feeling. There was a very high chance she wouldn’t survive, that the seed would either devour her or she would die from exposure to the void, but rather than feeling fear, or panic she was… elated. Excited. Proud that she had come so far, worked so hard to get here, and was now finally being given the chance to prove herself worthy of ascending.
	Everyone talked about the danger, the risk, the panic, and fear, and trepidation. But not about the absolute pure mind numbing tingling thrill of it. Offering her life as a sacrifice, in hopes of being reborn as one of the Goddess’ chosen? Intoxicating. In her mind, Wren had always been worthy, had always kept her aspirations high, had excelled and pulled through where others would have failed or turned away. She deserved this. She was ready. The seed would accept her, it had to.
	Air began to drain from the chamber with a hiss and the whir of machinery. Eventually it stopped and a moment later the outer airlock gate began to slide upwards, exposing the vista beyond. Darkness speckled with the bright sparks of stars, greeted her. It wasn’t her first time seeing the vacuum, but it was her first time being out in the void herself. It was a bit overwhelming, but, compared to what was to come next, the void would be the least of her worries.
	Wren stepped up to the lip of the airlock, sticking her head out and peering around. In all directions the sleek lines of the facility stood stark white against the oppressive darkness of the vacuum. Completely smooth and vaguely curved, the structure of the facility was similar to that of a very, very small moon, entirely featureless except for the various airlocks and docking ports that interspersed the surface.
	She was wondering where exactly the seed was, they had never told her how to find it, when a shadow fell across the porcelain surface of the facility. Whatever it was caused by must have been large, but when she searched for it she couldn’t see anything. The shadow gradually drifted closer, and closer, and closer to the open doors of the airlock, until the darkness washed over her face.
	At first she wasn’t sure what exactly had happened, because as far as her eyes were telling her, there was nothing there to cast the shadow. Yet as her vision adjusted and she continued to look, she could just barely see the weakest of distortions from one section of void to the next, as if someone had put a very slightly smudged screen of glass across a portion of the night. It had a vaguely spherical shape with wavy edges, but beyond that she couldn’t pick out any details from this far away.
	The seed. There wasn’t anything else it could be. Advocates didn’t even know that the seed existed before they were a year into the incubation program, and they were never shown pictures or given a description of what it looked like, requests always being turned down under the guise of being imperial secrets. The Incubi themselves would obviously never talk, and Wren got the distinct impression even their instructors didn’t have a clue.
	The seed had stopped moving, and without any indication that it was coming for her, Wren decided she probably had to go out to it. She was careful to judge her jump, because once she left the airlock she had no propulsion system so, if she missed the seed, she would just keep drifting forever. Oddly enough, the thought of being forever adrift didn’t fill her with the fear it might have at one time… perhaps due to the fact that since she stepped into the airlock, her life was almost doubtlessly forfeit.
	Wren took deep, even breaths, then positioned herself at the edge of the airlock. Once she was outside the ‘lock the artificial gravity would cut off, so it was a tricky proposition to jump properly. She ended up sliding out of the airlock as if she was entering a pool, keeping a hand inside to anchor herself. Then, positioning herself with her legs against the wall behind her, she made a quick prayer to the Goddess and launched herself like a torpedo off towards the seed.
	Wren felt a rush of endorphins, exhilaration at entrusting her fate to the seed, letting go of every last vestige of her old life, whether it end in death or exaltation was irrelevant. Soon she would no longer be Wren, no longer be the determined girl from the rolling plains of Ephaa who had spent her whole life chasing this dream. She was finally letting go. There was a sense of great relief, because from this point forward, her life was in the hands of fate.
	The distortion that she assumed was the seed was slowly filling up her vision. Wren had thought it was relatively close, but as she drifted nearer, she realized that not only was it quite far away, it was gigantic too. It grew bigger, and bigger, and still all she could see of it was that smudged glass effect. After what must have been five minutes of shooting towards it her entire view was distorted and just the tiniest bit off. To her surprise, when she turned her head to the left and right, the distortion was there too, and it dawned on her that the seed was enveloping her.
	She wasn’t quite sure, but it felt like her momentum was slowing. Without any point of reference it was difficult to tell, but when she looked behind her at the blurry facility she had come from it wasn’t getting any smaller.
	Wren was inside the seed. The anticipation was stifling and she could feel her heart beating out of her chest. Floating there, inside of this near invisible thing that would decide whether she lived or died, she almost felt suffocated. The elation was waning, and there was a certain part of her that balked at what she had gotten herself into. Waiting for it to make its move was some of the worst anxiety she had ever felt in her life. Was it going to reject her? Had it already decided she wasn’t worthy? Would it devour her, or simply leave her afloat until she died?
	Wren was so caught up in herself that she didn’t even notice the seed’s first tentative overtures at making contact. Something was nudging against her thigh, prodding her through the suit. Wren twisted her body, trying to see what was touching her, yet even though she could see the slight impression left by the touch, she couldn’t see the thing itself.  Soon there were even more touches, more gentle prods. Something wrapped itself around her left forearm, squeezing her softly, worming its way further up her body, constricting her further as it did. The same thing repeated all over her body, tendrils worming around her leg, her waist, her feet, her neck.
	Each was incredibly gentle, exploring up and down her body, touching every inch of her. Wren reached down with her unbound hand, pressing it against one of the invisible tendrils that had latched onto her forearm. They were a bit squishy to the touch and felt very fragile, almost wisp-like. She was careful to be very gentle, stroking it oh so softly.
	“Hello there...” She whispered, her voice filled with an aching happiness. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you… Really, you’re so gentle..” Her fear was beginning to fade. Whatever the seed actually was, it wasn’t hurting her. Something in its soft touches and questing over her suit reminded her of a small child, experiencing something new for the first time. Wren let herself relax, fully in the ‘hands’ of the seed.
	More and more tendrils began wrapping around her, ever so gently squeezing her body through the suit. After a couple minutes Wren was completely engulfed by the seed, though the pressure exerted on her body was minimal, so even covered and surrounded by the seed’s many feelers she could still move almost freely. It was an incredibly tender process which, uncharacteristically, actually raised something akin to a blush across Wren’s cheeks.
	Her fantasy of the seed as some kind of gentle giant came crashing down in a split second. All across her body, from her feet to her eyes, Wren suddenly felt an uncountable number of sharp, stabbing pains, as if millions of needles had been jammed deep into her flesh. Reflexively flinching in shock she found that she was locked in place, unable to even twitch her muscles. The pain was intense, as was the shock of how suddenly it had happened. The fear returned, morphing into panic as her body tried to struggle, straining muscles and making the pain ten times worse. Wren tried to reason with herself that whatever happened, it was what she wanted, that in the end it would be over soon, one way or another. To calm herself down from this blind panic. Death or Ascendancy. She just had to make herself worthy. So with a herculean effort, Wren calmed the panic, stopped her attempts at struggle… and relaxed.
	Relaxation was immediately rewarded with a cessation of pain. With her muscles no longer straining and striving to break free, whatever the seed was doing was able to happen unabated, no longer ripping and tearing through clenched tissues. Numbness descended, and in seconds she was completely disconnected from the physical sensations of her body, until she was simply a consciousness floating in space, her unblinking view through the cowl the only anchor that she had to the reality outside of her own mind.
	It was impossible to judge how much time passed without feeling her own natural biorhythm, but some amount had slipped by before anything changed. She began to hear the most curious thing. Laughter. Almost like a child’s giggles, tittering gently as if both from a great distance away and right next to her ear. Amusement. The sound of something young thoroughly entertained. Wren tried to speak, to ask who was there, but of course it was impossible. The noise filled her mind, louder than her own thoughts yet still so quiet it was barely audible. Wren knew logically that a sound like this couldn’t travel through the void which meant that the seed must be interfacing with her audio processing centers directly, pumping the sound into her mind. That realization gave her an idea… She figured if it was in her brain already, if it could laugh like that, maybe it could also decode her thoughts, effectively reading her mind.
	“Oh yeessssss.~ I know exactly what’s going through that little head of yours. Every little thing.~ It’s really quite interesting, seeing how your emotions shiiiift, and chaaaaange. So much tastier than the last one they sent me. Or the one before that, or the one before that, or the one before that...” There was a voice, in her head, speaking to her with the kind of force and relevance that could only be conjured up by something speaking directly to her innermost thoughts.
	The giggling started again as Wren blanched with a new kind of terror. There was something so disturbingly perverse and violating about being unable to hide her own thoughts. The panic started to rise along with the shrillness of the laughter… but once again Wren squashed it. This was what she wanted. What she had spent her whole life trying to achieve.
	“Death or ascendancy, how quaint. You’re mighty calm for one so particularly… delectable. Still, I do prefer tranquility over panic, fear sours the meat. You’ll make a fine meal, keep me full for yeeaaars, give me a while of peace and calm before they send the next poor unfortunate snack my way.~ I’ve already started, eating you that is. Perhaps I should let you feel it, just for a moment.” For a split second something changed, and Wren could feel something ripping at her legs, the pain of the seed literally devouring her alive. Sensations dulled again quickly, but still left Wren feeling sick, truly aghast at what was happening to her. Part of her died right then, the part that had always expected to get out of this okay, to succeed, to survive. Everything depended on this ‘conversation’ with the seed, and the thing was a sadist.
	“Oh I do so enjoy that first moment of understanding. Now you know the truth. I don’t excist to raise you up, to bring you your precious ‘ascension’. You exist to feed me.” The voice itself sounded like laughter, giggles and chuckles and guffaws from a thousand mouths, pieced together in the semblance of a voice. There was an edge to the voice, a kind of cruel mania, maybe twinged with something like hysteria. The laughter of a madwoman, giggling at her own thoughts while oh so very aware that she was losing her mind. In her skewed state of mind the thought made Wren want to laugh herself, and as her own amusement washed through her, she came to the belated realization that the seed was playing with her. Similar to how a bored cat would play with a mouse it had caught, tormenting the thing for its own amusement.
	“Playing with you? Playing? I do not PLAY. I have eaten thousands of your kind, fed myself for generations on the corpses of hopefuls and aspirants like yourself. Death or ascendancy, such a cliched little saying, one I’ve heard time and time again in a multitude of different forms. Each of you has these little rationalizations and coping mechanisms to deal with what boils down to institutionalized suicide by me. You are an insignificant morsel, a coward at heart, and barely even more than meat with delusions of grandeur. I already tire of you.” The voice had shifted from laughter to a growl, more annoyed than threatening, glistening with spite and toxic anger.
	Wren had heard enough. The seed reminded her of a destructive child without an outlet to express itself, amusing itself by torturing small animals and terrorizing the other children. She had been that kid, once upon a time, until she had learned of the Incubation program and dedicated herself to becoming the best she could be, to earning the right to become more than herself. Perhaps all the seed needed was… Even as she thought this she could hear the background growling become more and more annoyed, getting deeper into petulant anger.
	‘You’re bored. Let me help you. We could have so much fun.’ It was the first thing Wren had thought directly at the seed and she focused on imparting the intent behind her words. A cessation of the endless boredom, the same bland nothingness day in and day out, punctuated by helpless mortals who only entertained it for a few hours before expiring or simply losing their minds. The potential for something new, something different, something exciting and interesting and intensely enjoyable. Together they would travel the void, experience new life, have adventures and struggles and challenges. A life of trial and tribulation, of hedonism and debauchery, of power over trillions of people… Atleast to Wren, that sounded more fun than simply existing, waiting to be fed something completely helpless and boring. Together nothing would pen them in, no one could tell them what to do, and the only voice they would have to listen to was their own and that of the Goddess herself.
	As she thought these things the hostility in the cacophony began to wane, then cease entirely. For a moment there was silence. Then, a laugh. Different than the ones before, less gleeful blood lust and mania and more… Tentativeness, more curiosity. As if the seed wasn’t sure it was even allowed to enjoy these thoughts. Doubtlessly it had spent so long steeped in its own superiority to humanity that it had been eons since it had even considered listening to one, let alone actually forming a bond.
	“Fun… Fun. This… is how you try and convince me that you are worthy? You offer me fun?” The annoyance, the petulance, was still there, but Wren could sense the thing was actually thinking about what she had ‘said’. “Boredom… Fun… Adventure… You are strange, little Wren. All the others babbled in fear, begged for power, were so assured of their own superiority and worthiness. They promised me entire planets, hosts of meals, the stars themselves. Yet you… you offer me something the rest of them have not. Enjoyment. Pleasure.” Wren could almost hear the gears turning within the seed. “A cessation to the maddening boredom.” She began to feel a pressure, as if her brain was swelling, or the seed was starting to squeeze her. “I am near nine hundred of your Imperial years old, and in this entire time I have only enjoyed my own company. Why would I stoop to bonding with you? You would be dead already, were I not keeping you alive.”
	Wren could only offer the mental equivalent of a shrug. ‘It’s your choice. I know I cannot convince you. I came here resigned that my life was over, so if you decide to end it… So be it. Enjoy another thousand years of loneliness and boredom.’ She would have sighed if she could. The seed wanted her to beg, to reason with it, to try to argue it into accepting her… but Wren already knew that would never work. The seed only respected itself, and any argument from her would just be torn to shreds, any attempt to convince it dashed to pieces before it devoured her. No, the decision would come from the seed and the seed alone. It all depended on how bored it really was.
	Wren silenced her mind, allowing her thoughts to slide away, slipping into a meditative state that disallowed any deep reflection or desires. Effectively putting herself in a corner so the seed could think. The pressure in her skull had abated slightly, but she was aware that the seed would make its decision soon, one way or another. Time passed, indeterminate, and Wren just allowed her consciousness to float freely in the void. It was perhaps the most peace she had ever felt in her life.
	Eventually the seed spoke again. “For your insolence, I will take your voice. For your courage, your fear. For your promise, your empathy. Fail to fulfill your promise to me and you will lose even more. Is this still what you wish?”
	‘Yes.’
	“So be it.”

	Sitisyr stretched her wings, luxuriating in the many forms of energy cast off from the nearest star. There was something so calm and peaceful about bathing in the heat and radiation, something reminiscent of her life before becoming herself. Hot summer days spent out in a field, basking in the sunlight, feeling the cool breeze against her skin… The memory was faint, but had strengthened as she spent time drifting in the void. Below her, a glistening blue jewel of a planet that could have been her own home, if she even remembered where it was. It mattered not, she had no home except in the gaze of her Mother.
	As her gossamer wings shifted a shower of glimmering motes of scale came free, floating behind her in a stream that was slowly being pulled down into the atmosphere. The cast off pieces of her would scatter on the winds, being sent all across the globe, dispersing throughout all the settled lands and into the seas. Where there was no life, they seeded toxins and leached the earth of its life giving potential. Where they landed on organics the motes burrowed their way through flesh, poisoning and weakening their new hosts, so much so that the natural micro-organisms within the individual began to devour it from the inside out. As far as biological attacks went it was rather tame, boring even, if it weren’t for the chaos it was causing down below.
	From her hand alone nearly a million had already succumbed, but even more had died from food shortages and civil unrest caused by the poisoning of the arable land and destruction of the marine ecosystems. Somewhere down below her, several other Incubi were hiding among the populace, spreading discord, fomenting rebellion, playing little mind games with the natives in order to weaken the planet even further. It was due to her inability to speak that she had been given this duty, but it suited Sitisyr just fine. Relaxing and causing untold panic and discord sounded much better than pretending to be a mortal agitator.
	She spun around fluidly, facing her back to the star and looking down at the planet, her three hundred meter long tail twirling in a lazy spiral behind her. Fully stretched out, from horns to talons, Sitisyr stood  tall enough to dwarf a skyscraper, bigger than an Ortion cruiser, though only a tenth of the size of a Skymount. The body she had crafted for herself was fashioned of the darkest black, composed mostly of exoskeleton and chitin, with very little soft flesh or musculature. Still vaguely humanoid, she imagined she looked something like a skeletal beast out of antiquity, a demon that stalked the night and devoured whole villages in the dark. She was best suited for sudden bursts of speed and power, otherwise her movement was languid, almost exaggeratedly slow. Were she to descend to the planet in this form it would likely spell disaster, for the density of her body was so high that her muscles wouldn’t be able to support its weight within the gravity well.
	It mattered not, staying in the void was preferable than being stuck on the ground. She beat her wings, another flurry of motes being released to meander their way down to the planet. She had barely moved in weeks, letting the rotation of the planet spread her poison far and wide. Dark as she was she could blend into the void flawlessly, the makeup of her outermost ‘skin’ stopping anything but the most sophisticated scanning devices from finding her. If the Ortion military knew where to look there was nothing she could do to hide herself, but while they only suspected she was somewhere up there in the dark? Well, the sky was a big place, and in the grand scheme of things, she was so, so small.
	Part of her sorely wanted them to find her, to send a sortie out to take her down and save their planet. She would relish the chance to do violence, and even the distant possibility of death would give her a thrill. Without a squadron or five of Pitslayers on hand though, there was very little the Collective could do to stop her. Perhaps they would send a Skymount after her, give her a chance at obtaining real glory… Unlikely, as far as she knew there were only a few hundred ‘Mounts active at any time, and this little planet was out of the way of the main conflict zones between the Incubis Empire and the Ortion Collective. The only reason the Incubi were here right now was to prepare the planet as a staging ground for a new offensive, and because it was so out of the way any serious reinforcements would take too much time to arrive
	Time would tell if the plan would work. For now the Incubi was content to sow destruction and chaos from upon high. Sitisyr began to giggle to herself, one of the few vocalizations she was still able to make. She had begun to edit and modify the plague riding in her wings, turning her ingenuity into thinking of new ways to torment to populace below while also pushing forward the timeline of their mission. She still had to be a bit circumspect about the presentation of the plague, it had to have the potential for being mistaken as a naturally evolving illness, but Sitisyr had made an idea to drive the crisis into overdrive. Whoever was infected with this new strain of the plague would begin to experience and intense burning and itching pain along with the previous effects, the type of suffering that would drive a person mad. They wouldn’t be able to sleep, eat, or even move for all the pain coursing throughout their body, wailing in agony and begging for a cessation of the biological abuse. Not only was it fun to seed this kind of torture across an entire planet, it also would have the added effect of frightening the populace even further, making them more likely to make rash decisions such as riots and revolts.
	Sitisyr was thoroughly amused with herself as the first motes of scale drifted off her wings to circulate across the planet below. Done with her tinkering, she went back to lounging, casually working through a couple ideas she had to improve her own arsenal of tricks and weapons. Time passed freely, marked only by the rotation of the blue jewel below.
	“Sitisyr.” There was a voice in her head, interrupting her reverie. The Incubus bristled with annoyance. There was only one individual who could speak to her directly that wasn’t one of her siblings, Tetrar Rinea. The woman had a tendency to speak down to her because she couldn’t reply, acting as if she wasn’t just a little mortal speck compared to the glory that was Sitisyr. “Listen, we are seeing unusual activity just outside the system. We read at least three Imperium drives, closing in on Pai-Zo from starside. They will be there within the hour. If the Collective is burning Imperium then they must be sending in a serious offensive, and judging by the small numbers, it’s very likely there will be at least one Skymount.”
	Hearing those words the edges of Sitisyr’s doll-like lips turned up into a grin. She began giggling again, a broken sound that only those who knew her would even recognize as laughter. Inside of Sitisyr the creation of her new toys went into overdrive. Her exoskeleton began to harden, covering more of her body while her hyper condensed muscle mass began to grow too.
	“Your orders are to withdraw and rendezvous with the Talon of Belief immediately. You are not to engage them. I mean it Sitisyr, don’t fucking test me on this. Get back to the ship.” Sitisyr heard the annoyance in the Tetrar’s voice, but refused to be compelled by the little mortal. She would not kneel to one that was lesser than her. The Incubus severed the connection to Rinea, rewiring her brain to cut her off completely.
	Within minutes her battleform was nearly complete, her body having swollen up to its maximum size, as large as any mountain on the planet down below. Her core body was dense, still vaguely humanoid, but her wings had changed completely. Now they were a curtain of individual filaments, millions of them, some barely a few cells wide, others as thick as a human’s torso, extending out for several kilometers behind her. Her visage remained that of a porcelain doll, tranquil in the face of approaching danger, the faintest hint of a grin the only thing marring the surface. A single hollow horn protruded from her head, long and deadly sharp.