Chapter Text
She is falling.
Pierced by that damned sword, she is falling, with a deep gash in her chest, yet as she sees the faces of her “adversaries”, she sees no hatred, no satisfaction…only sorrow.
The Blight Tide sweeps her up, yet Æther is leaking from her, and she is feeling weak… and then, the Tide is pushed back, behind Qijian Dais…
Even though the Aggeloi aren’t hers to command, they coalesce around her to heal the massive wound, pierced by the Viceroy’s Xiranite-Originium alloy blade and missing her vital organs by just a hair’s width - yet punching through her rib cage made her leak both blood and Æther from her body. Her wounds will heal, her blood will recover, but the cleansing nature of Xiranite and especially Originium has made her Æther powers weaken… and possibly fizzle out, since the sword was disintegrating as it pulled out from her. She tries to conjure hazefyre… it isn’t working. The Aggeloi are coating her with their bodies, shielding her from the water, keeping her afloat, and healing her as best as they can. But that is not really enough.
She is carried into a cave under Qijian Dais by these Puddles, where a Tidalklast rests - it embraces the Conqueror with a soft pair of tentacles, the energy of the massive entity melting into her and recharging a minuscule amount of her Æther in her body…
The ambient, residual Æther energy swirls around her, coalescing, swirling, jeering… then, it takes on her face to be extra scathing. It dances, graceful, mocking, twisted… then it dissipates into the sharply plummeting Depth readings that were around her just a minute ago. She is attuned to it, she swims in higher Æther concentration, but such a sharp drop hits her like that sword. Immediate nausea washes over her and she throws up, emptying her stomach right across an unfortunate Aggelos.
She lays down, her back against the cold rock face of the cave, and she takes deep, long breaths, fighting the exhaustion - she knows, if she sleeps in, she has a high chance of not waking up again. She begins taking inventory of the nearby chest. Protohedron, INT slab, a Quencher, Oroberyls… ARMS Inspiration Kit… what do they even use these for?
Inventory done - not much, but it keeps her up. Keeps her functioning. Even if that stinging feeling in her chest, that ache, does not subside… it is still better than sleeping in. …oh, there is another chest.
The Aggelos she threw up on comes back, now clean - it probably took a dip in the still ebbing and flowing Blight Tide to reconstitute itself in whole. The Conqueror’s diet is… varied, to say the least. Seš’qa Fillet, Edible Hazefyre Bloom… and lots and lots of sweets. She can’t go a day without having some kind of sweets - confiscated from her troops, of course, because she can’t allow them to go on a calorie-rich diet. They are fed enough, but no sweets are allowed. If one thinks they are smart enough to hide it from her… they are not.
She craves some sweets right now. Anything. She begins making Mini Honey Slugpudding in her mind, then, as soon as she is done with that, she begins making Handmade Weirdrops… the afternoon goes by as she makes recipe after recipe from memory. She ate so many of these she can perfectly recall each of the ingredients, each of the steps from memory alone. If she had access to a real kitchen…
Ugh. There is that ache again. She is suffering, her ribs fusing back together makes the world spin, and her back aches as much as when she got a cavity in her teeth back when she had her kiddie-teeth instead of her regular ones. Those were… difficult to cure back then. But this time, the ache is worse, as if she were to pass kidney stones, but even those feel like frolicking in Valley IV’s beautiful, flowering fields. She had those, too. As a kid. Come to think of it, she had many such problems as a child - not enough water and eating dirt for three meals a day was a sure fire way for a kid to acquire some kind of disease back then.
Not that they would fare much better… kids are still stupid and they know nothing of the world. Adults aren’t better either. They only pose rules and set borders… and she had enough of those rules and this is what drove her to follow Jakub’s legacy. She became a feared name across the Civilisation Band… but she was alone with such power. And being alone made one lonely… and the Endmin was so far away from her now. They spent so much time together… quality time, not just sitting on the couch and ignoring each other while they watched FletNix. They actually had some things in common… but then, they drifted apart.
She feels that her face is wet. When she touches her cheeks, she feels tears streaming down… when did she begin crying? why did she begin crying? she doesn’t know. She knows nothing of why the two of them drifted apart… she knows not why the Endmin values these people more than her and that idiot who trapped himself in that painting with… no, that’s not important right now.
The Aggeloi gather around her, watching her. If they could speak… what would they say? But from their movements, she can see they are concerned about her. Concerned about her powers, her status… of her losing her deep connection to the Æther. Of her, in their eyes, becoming corrupted by feelings, by Xiranite, by… Originium. Of her losing herself… she waves them off from around her.
She curls up into a ball… and begins crying. Softly, without a sound, with her arms around her knees, her forehead resting against those knees, and her face buried in the space created by her aching chest and her thighs.
And outside, it is raining.