I land. It's an impact that would shatter another troll's bones, but I roll the strain off my ankles and translate it into motion, leaving behind the roof and the sound of approaching drones. They reverberate in my sound canals, hollowing out a place in my pusher cavity and despite the whirring of engines, I allow it to stay. It is welcome, the should-be fear; as familiar as the weight of the gun on my shoulder.
But it does not burn as freshly as it once did.
The beginning of a hobby is hard to pin. What series of events conspired to make the thrill of something just so? What fault of personality did I have that made a single slip the dawning of something greater? It is fate surely. This is what I was meant to be, and I never had hope of being something different.
Months in the past.
It's an accident. An accident of fate, an accident of hands. I am fiddling with Widow's Kiss, the newest present from my lusus, checking over each exoskeleton to see how it works. It is an appropriate gift for someone of my blood status. There is no reason not to let me play with my new toy unattended at the edges of the closest landweller town.
I aim down the sights, seeing trolls flitting between their hives and the winding streets beneath. To practice, I trail them in my scope. It is fascinating how the smallest change in my arms sends my view blocks away.
But my targets move too fast for me, and when my unpracticed hands try to follow them through the warped glass, I end up overshooting and clumsily trying to focus back. They bore and frustrate me, and my sightline wanders until it spies a lone troll picking at the beach, sorting through debris washed and submerged in muck. He's slow, plodding, easy to keep the faint dot on his head. I follow him, and mouth the word bang.
My pantomime, as it turns out, is too good.
The Kiss presses its lips against his temple and says goodnight, and he collapses before the sound even reaches my ears. Heads on the street look up at the sound of gunfire, but most move on within a few seconds, and no one is there to notice as I fall backwards in my cross-legged position, deafened and disoriented as my back hits gravel. There is no one to see as I rise, rubbing the violet ring around my eye, and stare across a beach that's turned into a misshapen haze. I freeze. My heart is pounding, ice in my veins that leaves me immobilized as terror creeps into me even though I don't yet know why. It takes all my will power—clenching one hand and then the other—to break from my daze and scramble to the edge, craning my neck to catch a glimpse at the now distant shore. I don't pick up Widow's Kiss to look. I act it like it might bite me. Instead, I slide down the side of the East Alternian Comic shop I climbed at the beginning of the night, nearly falling off entirely more than thrice, and find that the journey back is so much harder than the journey to. Years in the future, I will think this very profound.
The run takes eternity and more. With slipping, jittery strutpods, I finally stand in front of him, sand sticking to his clothes as russet washes over dampened particles and draws him in to his own viscous cocoon. I am two sweeps old and don't quite understand what makes things stop ticking but even I can comprehend that this boy won't be getting back up. His head is no longer a head and this isn't like when I break a toy and it must be fixed. I realize, intrinsically at the very least, that I have done something wrong.
And so, I do what all guilty wigglers do. I run hiveward.
I retreat to the hive in the lake with the empty rooms stretched tall to catch the morning light. My lusus wraps her neck around me as I sit in my recuperacoon with my knees to my forehead, but even the gentle honks that are usually so comforting do nothing for the aching maw in my stomach. Fear, but fear of what? I don't know shame yet, don't have perspective. All I know is it hurts and I want the bad feelings to stop.
He's not going to stand anymore. Will his friends be mad? Will they come looking for me?
Will anyone care?
The answer to the last one is, of course, no. A rustblood dies and there are no repercussions. No one knows it was me, they wouldn't care if they did, and I wither in my own unknowing. I never learn if anyone ever picked up his body or told his lusus, and for a while, I keep it that way. Ignorance a flimsy comfort.
But it gnaws at me. Gnaws and gnaws but, the thing that's chewing, the thing with teeth on my insides, it no longer feels like shame. It morphs, blossoming its putrid petals, transforming until it becomes exuberant and is this: the realization that I got away with it.
This is of course due to no effort on my part, and merely the effect of violet in my arteries and the russet in his but, to a mind so small and who has just experienced her first taste of thrill, it doesn't seem that way.
Weeks in the future.
This time, I have a target. One could argue against my character that I was able to come to this decision with such ease, to do things because I want to and no reason more, but if there was someone who would make that case, they don't live on this planet. The bronzeblood lives close to the beach—already I am beginning to repeat myself, an amateur mistake, but forgivable considering an amateur is what I am. I watch him leave his home, falling into the groundwork of a routine that I will tamp out into technique wipes down the line. Observe, trail.
Eliminate.
This time, when the body falls to the ground, I don't hurt myself with the kickback. My arms still shake for hours though, and I sit in that same spot, staring at the dead troll a few feet from his hive. I've never felt like this before but by the Empress, I'd do anything to feel like it again.
Months in the future.
When the buzz doesn't stay with me as long at it used to, in a fit of rabid denial I decide that this is because I do not have enough of a challenge. I've been hunting the rust colors exclusively, only daring to stray into olive territory within the past wipe. It doesn't satisfy the way it used to, the "murder-high" as the church would say is cheating me out of what should be a perfectly beautiful death. But my desensitization can't be the culprit, no, it's because there is no fear anymore now that I know that I won't be caught even if I swing my rifle around in broad moonlight. It has to be the challenge, that must be it.
Jades. Jades, I think. So difficult, so out of reach. I consider briefly on succumbing to poison, to creeping into the cavern with hidden blades, but as soon as the thought crosses my thinkpan it revolts in disgust. I am not an assassin, no matter how much the films may try to glam the occupation. I am a gun. I am death herself. I am more than the results.
The jade problem persists. It is after many tries, many notes passed and cryptic messages sent through Skorge that I manage to lure one out of her burrow with promises of a rare print of a Magical Commander Yukino Vol32. Her blood is so beautiful as it splatters a nearby storefront.
Doing it again and again becomes a sport. I begin to talk with some mercenaries, finding that they already have their own intricate network that involves luring people where they'll be at their weakest. They are confused at first; who would gain grudges against a jade, after all? But when they meet me in person, the fact that I am barely more than a wiggler is made moot by the flaring gills along my neck.
They help me get my jades. And, in a twist of irony, destroy me as well because as soon as things become easy, as soon as I've racked as many jades as olives, the thrill dies, and me are back at the beginning.
Consequences, that's what I desperately think. There must be a real threat of danger, and then the deaths will mean something.
Teals I try, and their blood dries quicker than the jades. Ceruleans, blues, clowns, the bodies pile up and I feel nothing, which brings me to the now as I flee the scene of my latest homicide. The church will no doubt be delighted in my latest show of violence, helping along members to their dark reward, but the drones hardly see it that way. I don't know if that, when they catch me, they will not simply see the violet sign tucked under my disguise and let me go. I play pretend they won't, that the pursuit behind me will end in my death if I am caught. It is the only thing that makes me feel alive.
It is when I am at my hive, three hours returned, slamming my desk in frustration desperately trying to figure an augmentation that will allow Widow's Kiss to fire underwater that I realize something.
The light off my immaculate barrel reflects a disturbance, movement bright pink as it flits outside my window and above my private lake. I wander aimlessly over.
It is the drones, of course. They're abuzz in the air, as they always are, visible from my home as I press my face against the glass. I am the only seadweller I know that has a home above the waves, though I am still surrounded by water on all sides. This is a view that many of my kind are not used to. I spend so much time despairing over trolls, but it was not them I have been looking to impress. No, no not the drones either; I could shoot at drones all day and experience nothing (and I have, when I feel my practice needed to be sharpened.) So then it is not the drones, but what they represent.
I practically stumble my way to the grand hall as the epiphany hits me, and oh how wild I must look when I finally stand in the massive archway that serves as its door. There. I look upon it, the object I have forgotten. It is where it has always been, standing watch over the blessed pool that serves as my recuperation, matron and tyrant in equal measures.
The massive painting of the Empress gazes down at me, her teeth pricked into a smile.
It's obvious, isn't it? This is my trajectory, what I have been aiming for all along. I have been climbing the ladder but it has all been a distraction, she is the ultimate reward, the final tests for my skills. After all, what greater kill than that of the troll who will not die?
The realization humbles me, leaving I knee deep in sopor slime as I stare upwards into those glorious eyes and try not to cry. My hands come to rest over my blood pusher, my tiny little vascular bladder beating in rapid flits. There is no need to suppress what has come over me. I have finally found something to do right.
Years in the future.
Violets float around me, their movement long stopped but their bodies still providing the surrounding saltwater with new fluid. They sway like seaweed, leaking lavender into the light stained water as I tilt my head upwards to stare directly into this planet's sun, the motion a long held habit that has morphed into an anchor. Zarya treads beside me, visibly uncomfortable with my inertness, but it is not my job to make the Aspirant feel comfortable. It's not anyone's job actually, which is probably why she spends so much time polishing herself in fruitless attempt to live up some abstract standard. The majority of the kills belong to me, a fact that bodes poorly for an aspiring Heiress—that is what her leery followers would think, anyway, but I am of the opinion that it reflects more on me than it does on her.
I stare up into the most powerful energy source in the solar system, legs spinning idly, and I say, "I want to kill Her."
"Er…who?" she asks, because although she is no fool, Zarya is still bafflingly slow.
"The Empress. When the time comes, I will let me have the right."
She hesitates. After all, no ascension is complete if the challenger does not rip the enthroned one from the chair herself. There little more illegitimate in the eyes of the Empire than a adulterous job.
But, like I have said, Zarya is no fool. She will not deny me this now, not while I swim surrounded by the corpses I have made. She nods, a movement caught in the corner of my lookstubs. "Very will. You may have the claim."
My gills release bubbles that could have been inside I for a thousand years. "Good."
Maybe the promise is empty, maybe she is already planning on how to quietly get rid of me. That would be the wise thing for her to do, after all, what I would do. I have revealed my hand, sown the seeds of doubt shown that I am far too dangerous to keep around—but for the moment I don't care. I feel I am one step closer. I am coming for my promised reward.
