In the beginning, there was light.
And the light hurt.
Born from nothing but an extra-dimensional cube, the glowing, condensed hope of a thousand dreams. Hope that burned at her, demanded greatness of her, pushed her on to her doom.
Given form for one purpose.
War.
She was battle incarnate, controlling fifty thousand tonnes of steel that cruised over the black ocean like some ancient, primordial shark.
A warship given form, crewed by two thousand men and one god.
The men.
The insects that scuttle through her ship (herself), cleaning, reloading, repairing every passage and corridor (her veins), like countless white blood cells in a machine (her body) beyond understanding.
No. Not a machine. A living thing.
(yes, yes, her body)
A living thing made of hissing steel and venting steam, that hunted ships on the sea, destroying entire fleets with a thought and a whim, snuffed out in a mess of sirens and white-hot wreckage.
Vaporising armor in the cacophonous roar of sixteen-inch guns (spears, spears of God), she had danced her hellfire over bulkheads, peeling melting armor back and letting dark, freezing water rush in to claim the insects inside, and she had laughed as they died.
(yes, yes, it had been-)
Sometimes she hunted other living things.
Sometimes she felt they were the only other things worth hunting.
She had once been devoted to the insects-the little ones. She was once their hope, and she had once believed it was true.
(yes, yes it should have been-)
That was before they dragged her corpse back after expending every last drop of her blood, and shut her under a pyramid, in a crucifix filled with freezing liquid pressurised to five thousand times that of air, under a hundred and twelve plates of armor.
A hundred and twelve plates that she had melted through with a spear given to her by God.
(so many but so little, not enough to stop her)
Now she stood again, painted fire in the sky, staring at a burning landscape of broken flames and little ones.
There was light at the end, too. Hot, bright. But it didn't hurt. It didn't hurt her, at least.
There.
One of the little ones' war wagons, firing licks of flame at her, three thousand per minute. The bullets melted before they came close.
No matter. It amused her.
(until it didn't)
Sometimes she wasn't amused, though.
A rocket, smoking and steaming, crashed into Bismarck and exploded with the heat of a dying star. The explosion dissipated, and she coughed black smoke out of her lungs, annoyed.
When a joke has been repeated enough times, it becomes a nuisance.
It wasn't (was) the fact that they were turning on their former servant.. It wasn't (was) as if she wanted to be accepted by them. How could it matter, when she could kill entire armadas of little ones?
It was (wasn't) the immortality afforded to her, the power finally given to her, the power that had once only belonged to those that came before her (that should have belonged to her alone), terrifying and broken (terrifyingly broken) in ways that she pitied-envied-desired-feared.
"If this world won't accept you, there's no reason for you to hang around, no?"
She remembered that voice. It was the Siren. Bismarck couldn't deny that it held some sort of… allure to it now. Strange. It had sounded so repulsive to her before she-before she had died for the first time, snuffed out in a mess of sirens and white-hot wreckage.
If this world wouldn't have her, she wouldn't have it, either.
At a thought and a whim, six beams of crackling light, bent in the middle like skeletal wings of lightning, burst out from Iron Chancellor's form. Illuminated by charged particles moving at nearly twice the speed of light, Wilhelmshaven was flattened in the resulting explosion and the entire shore was boiled into glass.