seventh heaven

Origin is consecrated, made an ark, by the vows of a legion. It is no home, no final destination, but it is the hope and the will and the abject determination, thousandfold, to reach such a place once more - once again.

It is also information. Not general knowledge, in books and traditions, but descriptions of the state of the world. Beauty and intangibility. One being couldn't possibly ever harness it all.

Thoughts recorded in concentrations of light. Fiora has always been a butterfly, and she speaks with upside-down eye contact to her love, the envoy; what gratitude that everything had not remained just the same, in fact. What fear that it may all end. What feckless confidence - and not only that! - that once the collision has faded into an elision, they will all press on (and on, and on, and on).

Flowers. The taste of food. The particular sensory qualities of each strange animal she'd named. And, crucially, what it is like to know all these things so intimately, even after a state of rebirth.

Their bodies won't last. Alvis can give no comprehensive instructions on the miracle. They build as humans, and not as gods.

Melia's curls are blue, graying. Well, they always have been silver, but now and then a root shows through, sturdier and crankier. She is far from aged. This duty is far from peaceful.

Not that Melia is ever cranky. Melia is a perfect diplomat, always, wielding her power with wisdom and kindness. Yes, indeed, serenity. Of course, the most appropriate honesty and the most constant reliability. It cannot but be said, without question.

Only very occasionally, when the connection with the other world breaks, fizzles, fuzzes, does the empress utter a faintest curse. She takes it all with interiority. She models calm through, perhaps, a deceptively delicate repression.

But Fiora, master of blitzing through it, has courage, daring, zeal! She's upbeat, tireless, automatic and systematic and hydromatic and everything else to make you shocked she's even human!

Is she even human?

Even now, she denies Melia's fretful, though tight-lipped, admonitions to remember herself, as well. I'm just sort of, like, an accessory! is Fiora's rationale. And better an accessory, an element of periphery, than a burden, right? Any day.

Fiora has never been so thrilled to be, in this fading moment, so unimportant.

Brilliant yellow and gold cutting, however uselessly, through the gloom of preparation. As and unlike an eclipse, there is no direct visual warning, but the air is tight, thin.

Fiora has been fit into golden sheets of metal before. Cast, as cast out of paradise, but not poured, molded.

(No undressing, to prepare for this transmigration's protosurgical process, but she had shared the pendant that clanged against the memory of a goddess, beneath her clavicle, long ago. She'd never quite decided, or simply refused to share, which trait or boon her "diamond skill" represented.)

Blood pumping - how artificially? Dilute with ether, but still so red.

Her heart had remained. Now it will not. Only her thoughts.

Perhaps, her crystalline soul. Her impossible spirit.

The blade lies shrouded for years at a time. Riku, serious but never quite grim (never quite a jokester, either), regards the concept with the gravity due. (Even if his masterpon had not quite passed on that impulse of honesty.)

What burden will be, upon the bearer. What decision. What infinite gravity, through this temporary dimension and the next.

Necessary. Righteous. These are thoughts toward the future. These are the unbinding of fearful ties.

There was no question, upon commencing the construction of Origin. Not once had a single one of the heroes nor their peoples alike been anything but resigned to the coming - the processing - of the next day, and the next, and the next. Not a one of them ever proposed, well, let's just stay here, hunker down, and take it. And who would? No question. No chance.

Only one way to save the past, for the future.

And so the sheath comes without question. Not blue and gold but red and silver, thin and tight once again.

Green lights. Green eyes. Every shade of sky. Every color of the wind.

What a beautiful machine - a beautiful and everlasting artifice of the prior worlds. And something technology can never hope to recreate: life, lived.

Flame Clocks leak red motes. How sweet, reality.

Not two fists, nor two knives, but a single elegant edge. The knife edge of the future, of course.

(Unimportance, indeed. It hadn't lasted long.)

The morning sun glints on Lucky Seven.

Metal meets metal. There's a single slick absence of sound.

No flesh. No breath.

It feels like coming home.