honey, you got some big pants to fill

Though the would-be saviors of Torna were altogether a much more colorful party than the drab, brown-cloaked refugees-in-the-making who crowded by pillars and railings in the Titan ship, Minoth swiftly realized that no one was all that interested in the Aegis, anymore.

Only their group looked upon Mikhail and his fading friend with horror, then flicked their eyes to bore upon Mythra, whose every muscle wobbled with the strain of a glass about to shatter.

It was over. Torna was gone. Its recent inhabitants would much rather watch it sink, or shut their eyes to everything, than gaze upon the Blade that had it wrought.

Minoth would have pulled his eyes away out of some humility, embarrassment, propriety, but something in him knew that if he didn't look now, it might soon be too late ever to look again.

Mythra fell to her knees, unable to bear the weight of the failures, of every size from microcosm to macrosphere, for a single second longer. Addam went with her, because Addam was so connected, if along this thread only.

Lora watched. Jin held her. Haze stumbled back, and Minoth could only throw out a distracted arm to catch.

She was going to scream, of course. Anyone would, so intensely strung out. She was going to hit that operatic high note of terror and triumph departed; if the rest of the ship wasn't watching now, they would be soon.

Minoth wanted so badly to look away. It was like a wreck of heavy machinery suspended in the slowest of motions.

And then, all at once, Mythra was gone. The lights were blown out. The whole ship was lit only by lightning.

In her place emerged an ember, a construction of red and emerald about the same, somehow uncracked Core.

This new Blade, awakened instantaneously from the very heart of the Light Aegis's Core in a dismal chain, had epaulets and bare elbows, fingers free to touch the faces of children, wings that floated as capes from her shoulders instead of half-hearted in self-glorification from her waist.

Mythra, departed, had been collapsed in a pile over her own pelvis, her disjointed center of gravity. Pyra, here and now, was knelt, one knee up and one knee down, and then, of course, she stood. Slowly, but without Addam's help (and what could he ever possibly do?).

Her bodice was framed by criss-cross straps that struck an X of cancellation across her Core. Its dark red, composed of fractal hexagons, defied the black-and-white rule of Mythra's armor coloring; somehow, it was fire-bright crimson and space-dark navy, all at once. Instead of a scandy shift dress, it ended as a bodysuit tucked into gravity-defying loops that suspended from her sides.

And her pants, to cover those legs so tired of running from insult, from injury, from the impossibility to inure, were wide and capacious, spangled with stripes and stars and even more impossible in which to hide.

Minoth wished, perhaps, that he could go where Mythra had gone - that he could hide his own inglorious place in all this.

But Mythra's last measure of strength, to disappear and replace her self, had chosen his confidence in which to coil.

Pyra sighed. Her brows set heavy. She summoned her sword with a flick of her wrist and wordlessly handed it to Addam.