Red Dragon
The spear of a headlight disrupts its concentration. Its head is turned, bowed, toward the carnage of the abandoned, torturous Titan, still so full (to bursting) of writhing human souls and the Blades that could do nothing to protect them - or themselves, of course, they're meant to protect themselves, they're meant to be able to protect themselves, but airbags are for the passenger more than they are for the vehicle.
There are no automobiles in Alrest, of course.
If their corpses lie, like kneecapped-pancaked horses, beneath the muffling clouds of the sea, among the twist and rend of corporate wreckage, conglomerate industrialism, horribly impersonal things, things without names, only makes and models, only empty evocations of speed and sex, only Jaguar and Charger and Nova, no va, and indeed, it doesn't go anymore, the interstate is ended--
The headlight, highest beam of all possibility, is shone and shot directly through the diadem. And wherever she looks, she burns, she destroys, the magnificent creature descends.
An automobile is subject to the will of its operator (if the operator is competent, otherwise it revs and roars where it will and has wont). A dry, duly manufactured machine is not, in fact, autonomous. It has not the organicity of a brain, an intelligence, no matter how many or how few there are or there were. What, then, is this?
The only automobiles in Alrest are broken hunks. Very heavy, to be called heavy machinery. A Blade with superior strength could lift them. Dozens, if compressed as junkyard cubes. But it takes control, precision, and both of those beyond superior to superlative, to lift and call an Artifice.
Control that, it turns out, no one has. Not even those Artifices' designated operators.
A computer is a dreadful beast, full of fans and grills and pins and glass; a tremendous show, when shattering.
Those fans, meant to stop it overheating, exploding, are its voice and its fury. Its will, yes; its wings.
You can put the fans most anywhere on a computer. For a bipedal organism, perhaps the waist would be an explicable comparison. Birds can't fly from there. Misshapen creatures.
A computer doesn't need fans. Maybe they're a decoration, rainbow coils of frivolous brilliance. Why can't it regulate itself, just go on running forever, just keep on calculating, it's only numbers, it's only science, it's only the collectively boiled fabric of the conscious world?
(dyed blood red, as well, because we don't need originality nor roads where we're going)
Just like an avatar doesn't need pleasantly styled hair. Just like a gun doesn't need filigree. Just like a sports car doesn't need fanciful foils.
The Tornan Titan didn't need its wings, if they couldn't help it fly away from all this destruction. We could have all lived on a floating rock in space, but then some philosopher had to go and make it beautiful. Didn't make it any harder to destroy. Might even have made it easier.
So too does the beast lack strict, serving requirement of an appealing face.
It has no self-discipline. Only the glass keeps it caged. And then it's sleeping, if it likes. Slow to wake.
get up, there's work to be done, turn on, beast-- no one says that to a computer.
A malevolent beast, resistant to the press of its power button, resistant to the attempts of periphery access at its ports and terminals.
Many Aegises, infinite trials, and the interstate stretches on for miles, and miles
a perfect wavelength, an endless song
A horrible device. A doomsday machine.
One called out when things are ending.
by what name?
One called out when things need to be shut down.
It doesn't have a name.
It doesn't have a name.
It doesn't HAVE a NAME.
...
Its name is Pyra. And Pyra doesn't just have claws and feathers; useless displays of ferocity for the feeble and impotent to fear and to waver, to fence and to wager.
Pyra, the red dragon that can fly...has wings.