Matriarch

by KendrixTermina

It has been suggested that White Diamond got her ideas of how she had to be and run things from simply being told so by some Even Higher Power, but personally, I'd find this a little repetitive and not all that interesting, so here is an exploration of the Diamonds' backstory and, by extension, the origins of the gempire.

11. Part IV: Absorption (Act IV)

Part IV: Absorption (Act IV: "The Pillars of Salt")

Regarding BGM recommendations for this one, hmm...

Take your pick, friends:

watch?v=J3lLSmB91uQ

watch?v=WGJ4xfZ0gbo

watch?v=pS-gbqbVd8c

watch?v=l003lWqzdx0

(iv.)

All this was not to say that there were not any days on which Blue and Yellow Diamond might even have returned to their lodgings together, at least maintaining a companionable silence between them – though if Blue was having one of her better days, they might even have been discussing the latest events of the war.

Yellow would stop in the doorway, handing a last few orders to her Pearl or instructing her to run various errands while Blue's simply stopped outside the door, or perhaps she would take the time to move over to the desk and switch on her computer terminal in preparation for her next batch of work, while Blue might be moving over to her usual spot, more as the consequence of some ponderous, lost wandering or her attention being drawn by the sights outside than through any deliberate habit.

But at least, she would be on her feet; Often enough, she would even be the one to reach out for Yellow with one furtive hand, if she had moved to join her at the window once the doors had closed behind them, and when that happened, it would not be long before their vast, colossal frames would be leaning against each other ever so slightly, surrounded by this strange, foreign world where nothing made sense, covered as it was with these hideous creatures, this ardent hot life that was so alien to their own natures.

They had nothing familiar here, apart from each other.

Bereft of the last joy in their lives and scorned by their capricious creator, they had no love here - only fear.

IV. Plague (Wild Beasts The Light of Judgment)

On the loyalist side, they would have meant something very different by the notion that this latest idea could only have been Yellow Diamond's – they were, after all, brought up to think of her as might incarnate and power given form.

In the iconography of the empire, she was nothing less than the Great Smiter, the Glory Of the Queen's Right Hand, designated dispenser of divine retribution – so when the gems in her rank heard of this latest endeavor, they might be inclined to see it as a natural conclusion of her works in that capacity, an extension of her long, strong arm as it were – and they would have been blinded by their faith.

There was nothing mystical at all about this latest contraption, it was all basic technology, steel and circuits through and through, intended to accomplish what very much exceeded the limitations of her bare hands, a crude, nasty and brutish sort of solution, a simple, excessively uncaring workaround, or, in less flowery terms, an oversized orbital laser.

That was all the prose it deserved, even the machinery wasn't anything that special or elegant, the challenges of engineering had not so much been overcome as shut up and clobbered to death. Too much heat accumulating? Slap more cooling aggregates on. Built them onto the outer hull like mushrooming tumors if necessary.

The available power sources can't quite archive the desired energy throughput? Just build more of them. Just make it bigger, brute force all the way.

Were that growing monstrosity not located in the vacuum of space it should surely have collapsed under its own weight.

It looked like a flashlight with several really bad skin conditions, pointed like a gun straight at the surface below.

The intention here was to vaporize continents along with everything on them.

No one was mincing words about that, least of all Yellow Diamond.

What was once an inevitable side effect, a necessary task that needed to be taken care of for some supposed greater good, though it may have been ugly or even regrettable, had since become the main objective.

She wanted to see the rebels boil like sinners in the hands of an angry god, and burn everything on that planet's surface to the ground – and she would not be deprived of it by any gentler solution.

And many in the loyalist ranks might well have agreed that the rebels deserved no better for their heretic way of life, or at least, they would have believed that their great leader must surely be right.

Only those closest to her would even arrive at the conclusion that something inside of her had changed, and not for the better.

"We will wipe this place clean", she had said when she ordered the construction to begin. Her eyes were fire and her voice was ice.

No one could call her out on pettiness or caprice when she made no attempt to hide it – after all, she must be obeyed; And no one regarded her as enough of an equal or a confidant to be worried for her rather than for what she might do, not when she could and would do with them whatever she pleased.

Whoever noticed the impatient weariness mounting in the center of her face did their best to pretend they never saw.

All around, the engines of war marched on.

Given that their last couple of operations were brought down by rebel infiltration, security aboard the enormous spaceborne cannon was probably the least haphazard thing about the entire operation, and the illustrious Citrine Commander had been tasked with ensuring that, insofar as herself and her troops didn't find themselves repurposed to haul machine parts.

Those peridots seemed far too eager about what was probably their only chance in life to tell some Quartzes what to do, and be it only on behalf of their superiors. Convinced of their rarity and importance, they did as was asked of them but seldom bothered to coordinate much, even with each other; They were not much used to it, tending to be deployed on their own to fix devices on distant outposts or labor away in narrow maintenance shafts - both the technicians and the soldiers ostensibly regarded themselves as the more essential parts of the undertaking and, as long as they waited for rebels to arrive or the great superweapons to be completed (whichever came first) some of them found themselves with way too much time on their hands, which, for Citrine, mostly meant more work, as it fell to her to keep them all in line. Sure, it was good to see everyone eager to serve their Diamond, but she was best served without such pointless inter-service rivalries that contributed nothing.

Peridot-Y73 was supposedly here to direct her peers, but she was not their leader in the same way that Citrine commanded the quartzes. She would order the others around for technical matters and decide when there was a professional disagreement, but that was about it. – before the station's hull was even fully completed, the senior technician had locked herself in what was to be the engine room and devoted herself fully to the trickiest parts of engineering, proud and even gleefull to work on something that would have such vast destructive power – Her first priority, and the entirety of her interest would be tied up with that, so she would care little what her underlings were up to as long as they brought her what she asked for, when she asked for it.

Citrine had long since learned to bring her requests to the supervisor they all reported to, or failing that, to go by herself to find one of the Peridots and command her to do whatever needed doing.

Though more measured and cool-headed than many younger Peridots, Y73 could be quite unforgiving and strict concerning any clumsiness on the side of her peers.

She had lived long enough to be considered a fixture at the Yellow court, but Citrine had been around even longer and still remembered how glibly she had once stepped up to claim the position after out-competing her predecessor. (a friendly, eccentric type who, insofar as Citrine was aware, had since perished in a lab accident)

She had managed to bring Yellow Diamond what she asked when the previous lead technician had not, so she got the post, and she had their ruler's ear ever after. Since then, Citrine had often served alongside her, though she could not say that she ever understood her much.

Many of Citrine's troops weren't too fond of her, seeing as they frequently had to dodge the cross-fire of her inventions and could not look forward to the day when she would examine their shards, pronounce them dead and divert their remains to some new purpose. Many thought her a frightening, petty little thing – not only would she do without the blink of a vision-sphere whatever Yellow Diamond asked, she would do whatever, period, with little concern of the cost, her mind full of vigorous, destructive visions. She had been likened to a wild beast that savaged everything whenever Yellow Diamond turned her loose. Y73's chief objection to that description would have been its brutish lack of sophistication – she would much rather have been likened to a missile pointed straight toward a target.

She had naught but disdain and suspicion for most living things, including her peers and any admirers of her work both above and below her in station – She made an exception for Yellow Diamond, whose ongoing favor had provided her with the means to pursue her designs, but as for anything else in the universe, she made an insistent habit of regarding it with reductive detachment, as if it were hardly as much as the sum of its basest components, the rare intersection of a perfectionist and a minimalist, though she would have argued that the most optimal value of a linear optimization problem and its corresponding minimization problem obtained by flipping the matrix of its constraints were, as mathematically proven, exactly the same.

She never bothered to hide that she thought little of Citrine, though Citrine herself had no opinion on the matter – both of them were needed, and both of them spared no expense to produce the results that Yellow Diamond wanted.

Citrine respected their differences but even if she hadn't, and even if she sometimes thought that the different strata of the empire's society could stand to know more about each other's work, it was not her place to question or even to think.

Though even she had found some other things to care for along the side, she existed first and foremost to do her duty -

And once the orbital laser had begun to approach completion, the last remaining work constricted to its sensitive mechanical innards, that duty mostly entailed ensuring that security remained tight until the very end.

The more they approached the scheduled appointment of the great weapon's activation, the greater the probability that the rebels could be right around the corner like they had been all the times before.

To ensure that they would not score another victory by getting past their lines, the Citrine Commander was now patrolling the decks one by one, ensuring that all guards were alert and posted at their places -

Thus, one might have expected her to keep a stern face when she spotted a lone quartz standing near a window, illuminated by the planetshine below.

Instead, the tough discipline faded from her features, and when she asked the inevitable question, it was with a hint of warmth in her voice:

"Chalcedony? Weren't you supposed to be guarding airlock seventeen?"

"I was. Then the Peridots told me to get out of their hair." the familiarity was evident in the fresh, irreverent quality of the other gem's voice.

It was almost a quip, but when she turned to address her superior, there was a faint, tired smile on her features.

Her gem was on the backside of her left hand, a cloudy, medium-blue stone, round and polished – In the blue court, even the soldiers sometimes had an elegant, refined quality to them. Her hair was long and coarse, but it fell straight down around her like a heavy curtain, sharply cut bands obscuring her eyes, though Citrine knew, from prior experience, that they were dark and almond-shaped.

Though lighter in build than your average quartz, her heavy, armored uniform with its long sleeves beneath still resulted in a rather bulky silhouette, topped off with a Helmet with a sizeable Blue Diamond insignia at the front – In the terms of medieval, or indeed, even modern humans, her attire might have been likened to a knight, or much rather a samurai, particularly once the enormous sword carried on her back was featured in.

She too was a respected longtime veteran, though nowhere near as ambitious or dedicated as Citrine – accordingly, she had not climbed the ladder of success quite as far, though she had won her fair share of accolades.

This Chalcedony was the same one who had sat with Citrine at the Officer's Table when she first welcomed the Earth Jasper into their midsts – and indeed, the one who had been visiting her before that, a speck cloudy blue surrounded by stones in clear yellows.

She had known Citrine for more time than it had taken some civilizations to rise up and then fall again, and together, they had weathered many bitter challenges and hopeless battles, fought back to back in all of the empire's most hard-won conflicts, all the ones that had called for the involvement of more than just one of the courts.

After making names for themselves, they would go on to spend further ages on the homeworld itself, serving in high positions at their respective ends of the capital.

When they weren't out campaigning, they would spend their time at the great arenas, drilling promising new recruits – While it was true that quartzes emerged knowing all one needs to know about fighting, Chalcedony, in particular, swore by the efficacy of experience and proper technique, and it was hard to disagree with her once she had made you a witness to that technique of hers.

Citrine was actually among the skeptics, but since she swore by tight discipline, she'd always maintained that the training couldn't hurt. The familiarity between them was quite apparent in the way they spoke to each other.

While Citrine did not approve, she expressed this with a raised eyebrow instead of a scolding tone, and Chalcedony had no qualms with addressing her more casually than anyone had dared until a certain rude Earth Jasper came along.

"You know, I'm certain that a warrior of your skill could have found something else to do."

"Like it makes a difference at this point. Knowing you, you've probably patrolled this place five times over. I'd go out on a limb to say that no matter what you do at this point, this place won't get any safer than it already is. At this point, you're probably better off just relaxing..."

And against every impression that many of her devout subordinates would have had had of their commander, Citrine acquiesced with a sign and leaned against the windowsill beside her comrade, crossing her muscular arms in a token show of resistance.

"I suppose you might be right."

Chalcedony was not too surprised by this – she had a long, long time to learn how to get past her old friend's well-honed guard.

If you graphed the age distribution in a population of humans, you would get a decidedly convex curve, with only a few individuals dying in their twenties and only a few of those who reached seventy ever making it to eighty – among a population of gems, this would not have been the case. Asked if they were going to live forever, most individuals would reply that they were still mortal and expected entropy to get them all in the end, but there was no such thing as a hard limit, only an approximate half-life or 1000-year attrition rate that varied wildly by gem type – a 6000-year-old Ruby would be considered a seasoned veteran and almost certainly be older than most members of her squad whilst a 6000-year-old Quartz would still be considered fairly young, and a 6000-year-old Diamond was barely just about old enough to maybe be trusted with her own planets sometime soon, but as they did not really age, none of them would have been significantly more likely to meet their demise on their 6001st day than they were on their very first.

Placed on such an exponential curve, both Citrine and Chalcedony would have been quite far at its narrow tip, having outlasted many of their sisters-in-arms, including some of those they had trained themselves since they were fresh from the ground. Both of them were the last remnants of their original batches, lifted out from kindergartens that had long since crumbled into barren dust.

If you had asked Citrine, she might have told you, with an understated fondness, that neither of them had changed very much since those early days – but if you asked Chalcedony, as of now, she would have instead mused that she was no longer sure.

She had found herself looking out to space for a reason, and after so many years, there was no way that Citrine could have missed her discontentment.

She had always known her to be moody, and learned soon that drawing attention to it by way of concern or reprimand or concern was generally counterproductive – that said, at the time, the commander did not believe this to be more than a temporary, passing thing that was nothing out of the ordinary for her, nothing to be worried about and best remedied by her simple presence.

So, Citrine tried to tune in to her wavelength, looking past the clearsteel pane to the eerie glow of the blue orb below.

"It's hard to believe that these traitors would cause all this devastation over a rock like that. As far as I can tell, it's no different from any other planet I've ever seen. The organics aren't even that different from the ones you find all over the galaxies."

And with that, her old friend had not completely misread what Chalcedony had been thinking of, but there was something she wasn't saying... though at this point, Citrine did not yet see a reason to force the issue.

"This is proving a costly war indeed..." She observed instead, continuing to glance down somberly.

It did get Chalcedony talking: "Most of the Blue Jaspers and Crsysophrases are drawing parallels to the Battle for the Tannhäuser Gate, but honestly, I don't think I've seen such losses since the War with the Pentagorian Hive..."

"Well, apart from us there aren't that many gems left who actually know what that means... There's us, Morion and Aura Quartz from the White court, Plasma Quartz, Topaz-4K2, and I believe that's it..."

"Citrine. Plasma was shattered."

"How come? When did it even happen?"

"Some time ago... I think it was after the Ziggurat but before Pink Diamond's shattering."

"That was hundreds of years ago! Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Why would they? You're busy with Commander Stuff. She's not even from the Yellow court..."

"Why didn't you tell me."

"I don't know... There's just... so much... going on..." Chalcedony raised up her head. Her gaze, though concealed under her ice-blue bangs, must have been trailing off into the blackness above the planet.

The yellow gem sighed. Times like these had always been a common but unpleasant part of their lives.

"Say, Citrine... you're one of the few that have been at this for longer than I have.

Was there ever some time when you got really tired...?"

"Tired of what?"

"...You remember the final battle with the Hive?"

"Of course. I'll never forget it... - The Diamonds themselves took part in the fighting. It was one of the most sublime and sights I have ever witnessed. But why are you were there too, weren't you?"

"Yeah. That's when most of my original unit was shattered. Back then, I thought that was the most awful thing I had ever seen... Until now. At least back then, we were fighting aliens. Creatures. Half-machine half-organics. Not our own kind..."

"They're traitors. They've ceased to be anything of ours. "

"Yeah, they have. And all they want is to live here on this dingy rock and play at being organics. Is that really so bad? Sure, they're crazy, but by now we've probably sunk way more resources into this pointless war than you can find anywhere on this rock. So many are shattered every day... what for?

Why can't we just pack up and leave them be and build a colony somewhere else? Let them have their wretched rock so they leave us alone..."

Citrine shook her head.

"I can't pretend that I have ever understood a single blue gem, and the longer I live, the surer I am that I never will. What of our duty to the Diamonds?"

"If anything happens to us, will the Diamonds care? Will they start a costly war and burn up thousands of soldiers just to get back as whoever killed us like they would for one of their own? Will they be sad? I mean, in your case Yellow Diamond would probably notice, at least. She might be mildly inconvenienced if your replacement isn't any good, but don't kid yourself. At this point, this whole war is all about their egos, because they can't stand that one of them got beaten.

Heck, even if we're charitable and grant that this is actually about Pink Diamond, that just means that this is all their petty revenge. Otherwise, they would probably have noticed at some point that none of this could possibly be worth it."

"Chalcedony", the commander spoke sharply. "Do you even know what you're saying there?"

"No, Citrine, I don't know what I'm saying, because I'm tired out of my mind of all this fighting... I just know that I've fought many organics in my time. Lots of them fought with honor. Some even had gods of their own whom they worshipped as their creators. I recall one time that I was part of a battalion that stormed one of their temples, on some backwater planet in the Ypsilon galaxy, and the walls were covered in glyphs that told their stories...

As the legend goes, their gods are the ones that created them. They grant them their requests, shield their worshippers from harm and they wait for them after death. The Diamonds do not grant us requests, they don't shield us from harm, and they don't wait for us after death."

"That's because they're real rather than convenient superstition. They have things to do, and I find that much preferable to idols of carved wood that will listen to me any time."

"I almost wish I had it in me to be more superstitious some of these days...

You know, citrine, you've always been so loyal... and after everything, I still think that is one of your strong points. But we've got to think of ourselves sometimes. No one else will...

Don't worry. I'm not planning to join Rose Quartz' crazy cult.

I'm going to stand and fight. But not for Blue Diamond or the elites. For you. For the others... for all our comrades and all those new recruits. For everything, you and I have ever known... I hope that's enough for you..."

"It is. We all must have something to hang onto on those days when it is hard to keep the faith."

The Commander said this with complete conviction, her posture straight, her amber gaze forward, unwavering and clear.

Chalcedony knew not whether she owed her pity, gratitude or admiration.

...

The facility as a whole might have been well-guarded, but the engine room, in particular, was armed to the teeth – There were soldier gems posted in the maintenance ducts, some of them shape-shifted down to fill the ridges of the machinery insofar as it was safe to go near the parts of the mechanisms that produced great heat, squeezed in as tightly as the diameters of their actual gemstones would allow – an especially strenuous duty that even they could only endure in brief shifts of a few hours.

But the heart-piece of the laser platform, the apple of its eye, was guarded at all times by four topazes and eight agates who were often standing around them in formation until their peers came to relieve them from their days-long vigils, a mercy that was only granted to them because theirs was a duty that could only be trusted to a gem in peak condition.

Stoic and immobile, they stood there like statues while the Peridots worked on the surrounding cables, for insofar as the prized treasure itself was concerned, Y73 would not permit anyone else to touch it.

Hessonite had granted her insistent demands for more and more security due to statistic considerations – the sample was quite unique and as such the weakest link of the entire plan, albeit the conduit by which it was made possible. If she were attacking the weapons platform herself in the rebel's place, destroying it would have been the most logical choice.

But as far as Y73 went, her obsession with the specimen was of a different nature, more akin to a base, abstract kind of lust, a dirty glimmer that filled her eyes whenever she looked at it like a miserly old sorcerer-monarch would regard a unicorn in their captivity.

There was nothing quite like it in the universe, and though she would deny it, it was the only thing that had ever brought her joy – or the closest thing to it.

She had excavated it herself many years ago when a remote mining expedition had stumbled on what they had initially believed to be a somewhat unusual planet.

Unlike most members of gem society, the Nephrites that piloted the scouting vessel had traveled far and wide across the universe and interacted with enough other space-faring travelers to have heard of the legends surrounding the nebula to whose edge the peculiar globe was adjacent. It was an odd patch of the universe strewn with anomalies strewn there by the extraordinary violence of the fulminant supernova that had called the nebula into being.

The result was not a black hole, but only just barely – the star's collapse was ultimately halted, but not before it had condensed into a fine point and gone through various stages where it transmuted into strange forms of matter under its own weight, some of which were flung out into the shimmering clouds of Stardust by the great forces. It was for those same rare heavy elements and unusual forms of matter that the gems had come there, looking to haul them back to the empire for various technological applications and future studies.

But in the billions of years that had followed the stellar explosion, the rare conditions of spacetime surrounding the pinprick-star of degenerate matter were said to have attracted some rather unusual visitors, which had dwelt ever since in the colorful clouds that used to be the star's outer layers.

Interstellar merchants and explorers claimed that the legendary creatures had led them out of the anomalies, which they themselves were naturally able to navigate.

Y73 dismissed them as superstitions of course, and much chided the Nephrites for believing in them. Many species had in their imagination conjured up enormous spaceborne creatures that lived in the empty vacuum like primitive organics swam through seas and puddles, and that's exactly where Y73 had always placed the origin of such tales – that even sophisticated organics were incapable to see past their own origins and expected the universe at large to be a mirror-image of their cradles, a solid proof of organic inferiority.

So the legends were far from her awareness when the scanners picked up some rather odd readings from a solitary planet – rogue planets were not unusual in and of themselves, especially not near a nebula. If they weren't leftovers from burnt-out star systems, they must have been newly-formed bodies that had not been massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion and hence failed to become a star – and generally it should have been easy to determine which one it was, just by isotope-dating its bedrock and comparing it to the composition of the nebula, but the readings from orbit were… odd. Not 'confusing', since that was a word and associated concept which Y73 disdained on principle, but nothing she would immediately know what to make of.

It irked her privately, but nothing concerning the actual mission objective was ever in doubt: The planet contained great quantities of both rare resources and unusual matter – nay, it would have been a waste just to haul a few chunks into their cargo bay. Though it was remote, it was precious, and so she helpfully suggested to her supervisor that she ought to contact homeworld, have them send injectors and laboratory gear, as well as parts for factories and shipyards, and above all, more Peridots – kindergartners, engineers, and researchers.

The place was not too ideal for long-term colonization considering its remote, anomaly-laden location and lack of a sun to shed natural light onto any prospective inhabitants, so she recommended that it be strip-mined completely.

Upper management agreed, complimented them all for their find and set numerous additional cargo vessels full of supplies, injectors of little green gems, and it fell to Y73, the Nephrites and the rest of their crew to have a mining outpost set up by the time they arrived so they could start hauling the precious materials away as soon as they arrived.

When rumors of shifting tunnels and inexplicable tremors first started going around, the senior technician did not pay them any mind – but once she saw with her own eyes, she had no choice but to believe. It was the odd patterns of the extensive subterranean caves that first caught her attention. In passing, she wondered what kind of geological phenomenon might have caused them – but then, they came upon the first findings that really didn't make sense, at least not under the current assumptions.

At that point, they bothered Y73 much more than they did any of her fellow Peridots or the various higher-ranked gems that had come with the cargo vessels – after all, both the mining and the injecting were going very smoothly. The odd world's hull produced gems of remarkably vital, vigorous aspect. The ores were most abundant and pure beyond the engineer's wildest dreams.

But they were sometimes found in odd places; They found chambers deep within the cave network that were stuffed with native metals some of which appeared half-smelted already, or sometimes they would be filled with liquid and crystals encrusting the pools, or stranger yet, meteor rocks whose age and composition varied wildly from that of the surrounding bedrock.

The Bismuths, once brought over, soon learned to trust their instincts rather than waiting for the Peridots' scans and calculations to make sense of their unusual surroundings – soon they found that there was no need to dig and that simply following the caves would lead them to the greatest bounty, and for all that Y73 protested about their unscientific methods, many of the new arrivals outranked her by far and would never dream of telling the Bismuths to stop, for their haphazard endeavors brought great results that would make them look good in front of their own superiors.

But this was not to say that Y73 was not beginning to understand the deeper they proceeded below the crust. The more extensive their maps of the planet's interior, the more the patterns came together. The planet was indeed chock-full with numerous invaluable materials, but their distribution under its surface was very uneven, and this was presumably what had thrown off the sensors. But once she had the instruments appropriately recalibrated she could ascertain that this uncertainty was not the chaotic sort of improperly mixed cookie-dough, but a symmetrical arrangement with an intricate internal logic, like parts in a body.

The entire thing, which they had believed to be nothing short of a naturally occurring celestial body, was an enormous, impossible organism– and the mining outpost was a consuming plague upon its back, eating its way into its entrails and poisoning it with the vampiric bites of their young.

It was unlike anything that ever made its way into the imperial databases, and yet, this gigantic, foreign thing which idled on the border between self-organization and life came dangerously close to the definition of life that most of the outpost's crew had been… not exactly raised with, but inducted into. And many might have rightfully argued that the empire's conceptions were myopic at best and self-serving at worst, concocted to explain to themselves and the masses how they could still be the righteous ones while cutting down organic life left and right. For some that was exactly what it was, a convenient excuse to mask the fact that they cared nothing for any sort of life, their fellow gems included; But others truly believed it, for they had known nothing else all their lives – and this creature here, well, from a human perspective it should have had even less in common with a gem than even humans. It didn't have a remotely similar shape or size. It had no limbs with which to scratch them off its surface, and no head to speak of, not that this was uncommon in filter-feeders. Most symmetries in its body where radial, perhaps engendering very distant comparisons to jellyfish or anemones, and as with the former, or perhaps certain insects, any information processing it might have been capable off would have taken place in scattered structures throughout its body, nets and rings and perhaps something comparable to ganglia, though any compassion would have been inexact and smudgy by necessity, as there was little in the universe that even distantly resembled it. Its kind did not appear to live in packs, let alone eusocial colonies; None of its peers rushed to its aid. They had no obvious means to communicate with it – it had no voice, no face.

And yet, it was ancient, unfading, a being composed of minerals and subtle energies – some of the Peridots even theorized that it lived off of meteors and small planets, or the surrounding stardust of the nebula itself, deriving its life from the raw unprocessed stone of the ground.

Several quartzes reacted to Y73's explanation with quite a bit of shock because, though they had slaughtered their way through billions of organics, they maintained that they had never 'hurt a living thing' - up until this day.

If they did not understand it, they could not know for certain whether it wasn't intelligent – and even proposing that it were just an animal, it was clearly a rare and marvelous creature, and noble too if the stories they had heard from the Nephrites were to be believed.

Obviously, they were immediately shut up by an Agate with plenty of experience of flogging her fellow mineral lifeforms, who gruffly told them (and the Nephrites) to mind their place and man their stations as the Peridots worked since, after all, no one was even asking them to participate much.

Even knowing what the creature was, the gems continued to dismantle it at a steady pace. No one batted very many eyelashes, least of all Y73. She argued that they would understand everything about that thing soon enough once they were done taking it apart, and even the fact that the creature was a similar kind of lifeform compared to themselves could only mean that they had even more reason to utilize it for their purposes – she likened it to the way that certain organic animals might consume the flesh of their fellow-creatures, or like a parasitic plant might drink the sap of its host, precisely because such a similar creature was likely to contain the exact same kinds of chemicals that the organism needed in exactly the right proportions. The idea might have been alien to them as the products of a world where they were the only remaining form of life and even before that, an environment too barren to support a food chain even in its distant past, the concept was admittedly somewhat gross even to Y73 herself, but there was precedent for it.

The creature, she argued, had practically done much of their hard work for them – if it weren't for it, they would have had to search the dangerous and often non-navigable expanse of the nebula for all the precious rare earths and exotic matter that it had gathered for its own use, all of it helpfully incorporated into the one single sphere ripe for their picking.

Indeed, though she acknowledged that it might well sound barbaric to the unenlightened, the green gem even went so far as to say that if any more of these creatures were afoot in this sector, they would do well to hunt for them.

She would never get her wish. Perhaps, the being she had personally despoiled was just that rare and unique – though some might theorize that the poor creature had warned its peers by some undetected means, ensuring that none of them would be left in this particular nebula. In any case, the scouts of the empire never sighted another one.

As far as the Agates were concerned, going on with the rapacious plundering of abundant treasure-trove would greatly add to their track-records, while relenting for some abstract philosophical concern did not, so their ultimate choice would not be surprised. All they cared about was to make a profit right now, even if it were just once.

Where there was an opportunity to get away with one's greed,someone would surely take it. Not everyone, not even most people, but there would be someone, and often times that would be all it takes, especially if those with more scruples were in direct competition with those who did not.

But for all that Y73 lamented this, the thought that she might have been able to learn more about the strange entity if she had chosen to keep it alive, or even observe it in its natural habitat never occurred to her, not even with the ulterior motivation of having it lead her to even greater bounty, most likely because she was not as above the society that produced her as she liked to think she was.

It was their way to seize everything their touch-stumps could grasp, to build, to mine, to inject, without ever giving that much thought.

Y73's thoughts were mostly taken up by the fantastic properties of her find, but despite her lofty promises to the objecting quartzes and nephrites, they never wholly succeeded in unraveling all of its secrets. If they had, she might have planned out its utilization differently from the very start, or even involved her Diamond in it, have the authority pick one use for this rare extraordinary shot – as it was, they didn't realize the full extent of its worth until a good third of the material was already dismantled and shipped away for lesser uses.

By and large, though, it was much as Y73 had theorized: By virtue of being a

The kindergartners under her command soon found that they could pretty much dispense with most of the usual mixture; It proved sufficient to inject the diluted Diamond Essence, indeed much of their haul from the creature's surface wound up used as injector feed.

The excavation continued, and if anyone thought to stop it, they knew better than to interrupt their superiors as they relished their rewards.

Eventually, there came a day when the thing stopped moving and all the energy that had thus far been kept in a precarious sort of homeostasis began to dissipate away in every possible direction. The creature's death was simply noted, its slaughter and butchering were not even stopped to mark the moment.

What they found in the depths near its center was never observed in action. The lights had gone out years before Y73 and her team had the opportunity to inspect the central cavern. The technician had been confident about determining the function of every single structure in the belly of the beast, but in truth, she could only speculate.

The massive body had not exactly decayed in the manner of an organic carcass, for that, it was too much like rock and stone – but it was apparent that the central chamber would have been subject to some prodigious energy densities in its heyday, not to speak of the pressure exerted by the gravity of its own mass.

Anyone with a basic grasp of physics would have understood that the cooled-out husk in its middle was naught but a smoldering ruin.

One could take its current state as a starting point for calculations, plug in the original shape and weight as a variable, observe how it may have behaved in its original state, but while this could provide the researchers with multiple plausible explanations, they lacked the means to put them to the test -

For example, one of the greatest remaining mysteries centered around a number of large crystals arranged in and around the creatures' core.

They were not inexplicable, only unexplained – Y73 had more than one promising hypothesis, but since they could no longer observe them in a living specimen, they would have to remain speculation. Perhaps they were some kind of storage organs for rare Elements, or they had once served as energy transformators or even hubs for information processing – it was based on that last idea that the Bismuths took to referring to them as the creature's 'gemstones', the way human miners might have likened them to its heart or brain, a notion which Y73 much disliked for how its romantic, imprecise nature chafed against so many technical definitions.

While the creature did probably have an energy field akin to a light body while it still lived, destroying too much of its outer mass had clearly ended it, and it certainly did not poof when they removed the crystals, so it was a very crude comparison at best.

It was fully possible that the crystals had only condensed into their current state once the core had begun to cool and been a cluster or liquid rather than a solid while the great beast had lived.

But whatever purpose they might once have served, it would have been in the service of a pointless existence that was just floating through the void; After its death, they would serve the designs of the empire, and as such, they proved quite useful indeed, for whatever the history behind the peculiar material may have been, Y73's thorough examination soon revealed the most astounding properties, and the more she saw of the results, the further her logical mind glimpsed its implications, the more they dissolved the sober, disdainful demeanor that her fellow gems had known her for into a state of ecstatic rapture.

So far, she had always dismissed the concept known as 'inspiration' as a myth or misconception because she had never encountered any reason to think otherwise, but a good researcher is marked by the ability to adjust their view once new evidence comes along.

Not all of her fellow gems understood, but that was alright. It was not their purpose to understand. As for Y73, her work with the crystal cores and various replications crafted in their image would go on to solidify her standing in the yellow court, and probably constituted the chief reason that she lasted longer than the last couple of yellow court chief engineers. Several of the spheres found their way into homeworld's power grid, another few found their way into the prototypes of various mega-structures – A Dyson sphere, a gigantic floating shipyard, a warp-array designed to teleport enormous amounts of cargo, those sort of things. If they went into mass production, a good-enough replica would be used in the crystal's place, but every enormous project required a different solution, for no material or device had the flexibility of their original finds from the spaceborne creature.

As such, it wasn't surprising that the finest, purest and largest crystal from the lifeform's very center had not been consigned to any use by the time the war broke out – they had only one such specimen, so the powers that be were choosy with regards to its potential applications.

It was all the more shocking then when Yellow Diamond finally proposed its use in such a snappish, off-handed manner – During the meeting to discuss the laser cannon's specifications, one of the larger points of contention was the difficulty in procuring or synthesizing any material that could conduct, bundle and direct the required amounts of raw power. The engineers spoke at length of the ways in which current state of the art materials would be unable to withstand it, but their sovereign was none too impressed with their objections: "You still have that anomalous sample, right?"

Some thought this imprudent. They would never doubt their monarch to her face, but many of the engineer gems could not help but wonder if it was warranted to use up this unique sample to build what amounted to a big cannon meant to fry some insignificant little planet with a generous helping of overkill.

Most of them expected Y73 to object, for her obsession with the crystals was known – more importantly, none but her would even dare to voice the objection. She alone would permitted because she alone would be believed if she insisted that her criticism was purely of the pragmatic, dispassionate sort. Though many of her fellow gems despised her, they still relied on her to provide the devils' advocate – but on that day, they should be sorely disappointed.

Peridot Y73 wouldn't dream of objecting to the crystals' use.

She wanted to see what it was capable of, most out of anyone.

...

"Sapphire, if we begin now, is there a chance that the rebels will breach the facility?"

"No. I see no chance that the weapons platform will be infiltrated at all. "

"None at all?"

Hessonite smirked with confidence. "Then the stars must be on our side!

Commence operations this instant!"

She turned away to bark out orders, leaving the Sapphire a silent figure in a corner of the command bridge, awaiting the next time she would be spoken to, as she knew it would come.

...

At first, the tension mounted the more the clocks approached the end of the countdown, both on the command bridge of the orbital laser itself, and on the many homeworld-aligned posts whose gems were observing the operation.

Past experience had taught them that a rebel ambush would be almost inevitable – it was only when the enormous weapon was nearly powered up that it occurred to them that they might actually have succeeded.

Sapphire and Hessonite had done their work well, as had Citrine, who was currently manning one of the control panels below the platform from which her superiors were observing, side by side with some other citrines. The Peridots were all split between the power reactor, the engine rooms and the power relays of the laser itself, ensuring that their mechanisms would hold once unprecedented quantities of energy would be passing through them – Y73 had been offered a place on the bridge, but she had refused it, saying that her place was with the primary engine.

She sounded like she meant it, too, not just out of deference and politeness, but because she couldn't stand to miss her work in action, making sure that it was operated just as she had intended – She would not trust any of her underlings with it, even if this meant that she would never get to see what her invention would be doing to the planet's surface. It was the numbers and technicalities that mattered to her, the actual craft of firing the weapon, not vague poetic recapitulations of what it did to the land.

Everyone on the command bridge, however, would not possibly miss it, given that its ceiling was completely taken up by an enormous window, angled right towards the planet's surface, covered only by a few semi-transparent holoscreens depicting various sensor readings, as well as the feed from two open intercom channels – one from the engine room, another, from central command down below.

Beyond a lemon-tinted screen whose hue scarcely made a difference to the sights is revealed, their mistress slouched in her throne, legs spread, face resting on a hand as the corresponding elbow was propped up on her knee, disgruntled, malcontent and perhaps just a little bit bored.

She did not have to be an impenetrable wall at all times, as long as that which she allowed her countenance to betray sent a clear message to back off.

There was scarce, uncertain intel of a rebel stronghold at what was to be the focal point of the lethal rays, but the position could be off by many miles and the outcome wouldn't change.

At last, their Diamond gave the order: "Burn them all."

Curt, unceremonious and morose.

Her expression did not change as the pillar of light descended unto the earth, the corners of her mouth did not twitch, and the sternness of her brow did not waver as the plume rose up to the surface, land and sea and air disintegrating as one, electrons ripped from their atom-cores. Places ceased to be places. Matter melted into energy. The illusion of discreet objects as logical units and distinct materials with fixed traits was broken.

The sulphuric glow tore through the layers of sediment, excavating deeper and deeper imprints of the planet crusts' memory, and melting them all into sludge.

At the northeast of the planet's largest landmass, a crater grew, not like a festering ulcer, but more like plastic in a microwave. There was no fight, no chemistry or biology, just a most basic most physical coming apart.

Nothing down there could continue to exist, because there was nowhere to exist, no land to stand on, no matter left to inhabit.

The light glowed hotter and hotter, and blacker and blacker grew the clouds, a plague onto the atmosphere, an acid rain in the making, doom to the life on the opposite side of the planet that lived to escape both the fires and the shockwaves.

Yellow Diamond did not flinch. She had dismantled whose planets, not quite so fiercely, but, what is a molten surface in comparison, what would even the hole be, if the laser were to cook all the planet's interior and burst forth on the other side?

Not even a comfort to her rage.

The fire burned on for hours; They ought to have taken out some rebel outpost in that time – the rebels must surely be cursing their powerlessness, scrambling frantically for a solution. But the comfort was as cold as the crater was hot.

All this radiance, no doubt visible throughout the solar system, lighting up the little planet with many times the brightness it received from its star, could still not return the smallest twinkle of shine back into Pink Diamond's shards.

But the traitors would share her fate, and all the other Diamond's fates, while they stood under the blackening sky, unable to interrupt the doom.

Even without looking across the screens, Yellow Diamond could see the black ash raining down on the domed windows of her stronghold on the surface, distant as one would figure it to be from the site of the attack – It was too early to evacuate yet, by all estimations it would take them several weeks to remove the surface crust.

If Blue was looking outside right now, back in the west wing, she must be watching the black snow blanketing the landscape that had so captivated her gaze for many days – perhaps, the fallout would finally do them the mercy of poisoning all those odious trees.

Closer to the crater, at least, large dark holes burnt their way through the tree-covers, reaching further even than the forest-fires inflamed by spontaneous combustion.

It would not have been much of an exaggeration to state that a third of the surface was covered in Armageddon, even where the rock wasn't evaporating -

But Yellow Diamond remained unmoved.

She had no pity for Earth's creatures and certainly not for the rebels, not even the abandoned structures once meant for the colony aroused her lament.

The test run was supposed to conclude once the crater reached the mantle; Right now, that was all she wanted to happen.

In her place, Blue Diamond might have wondered if the rebels were feeling the despair of losing what they cherished – she might be doing this right now if she had bothered to remember the schedule for the test.

But Yellow did not concern herself with that. It didn't matter what they felt, or, what she felt (or so she would have argued, not out of insincerity but denial), she just wanted them gone.

She longed for the peeled dead sludge when the flames had died and the smoke had cleared – that, perhaps, might give her satisfaction, but at least the task would be done.

Larger and larger grew the bright, white-hot spot below, enveloping more and more land, flickering in the dark like a candle-flame fed by the wax of the world, a dreary, hopeless scene stretching on and on.

For many on the surface below, it seemed like it might be the end of the world – indeed many of them perished without ever learning that the world outlasted them.

Where were their protectors?

Themselves panicking in the mounting heat. For once, they had been unable to breach any of the loyalist's vessels. Garnet saw a future where that did not happen, as surely as the loyalist Sapphire had seen it, but she had stubbornly persisted in her attempts until they could find no more ships in the empty spaceports because they were deep inside the borders of the evacuation zone.

Guided by the fusion, the Crystal Gems took shelter in the hull of an old dropship, an old vessel of explorers among the very first to ever land on the planet, long before it was even designated as a colony, and even its inside kept heating up faster and faster.

Pearl had begun to fiddle with the old busted circuits more out of anxiousness than anything else, she had a hundred reasons to panic and among them, the mounting urge to occupy her fingers was one of the very few she could remember, and the sight of the open panels and abandoned, dusty pilot chairs had bothered her, like a puzzle in which the corner pieces were not yet assembled.

But when Rose had burst back into the room after having consulted with Garnet, she assumed that Pearl must be trying to get the ship to fly.

Pearl would never have considered it – The ship had been left untouched for long and when it was abandoned, its crew had cannibalized it for parts to use in the early stages of the colony.

Nonetheless, fearing the disappointment of her comrades almost more than her death or the planet's destruction, the desperate servant-gem ended up succeeding in an endeavor that she herself would have dismissed as infeasible mere instants ago.

She did not think it possible, and even if she had, she certainly wouldn't have thought that it could be accomplished by her, or that anyone else would think her capable of it.

But Rose and Garnet did believe in her,and be it only because they knew little of machines – and somehow, the drop ship's battered old hull took flight again, and rose up through clouds of smoke, its outer shell glowing from the heat that hat surrounded it.

In hindsight Pearl could not say how she did it – In part it must have been trial and error, and besides, she was too occupied with the wires to bother taking notes; In any case, she didn't think she'd be able to replicate what occurred; It was truly a miracle, wrought by human hands – or hard-light touch stumps, as it were.

Like all things manmade, it was imperfect and fell quite short of divine intervention: The ship retained nothing in the vein of weapons systems, indeed, they could barely maneuver, but even as Pearl was tearing at her hair about it, Garnet placed a steady hand on her shoulder: This, imperfect as it may be, was the only chance they were going to get – They'd have to make it count, no matter what it cost. Rose was in agreement – a course of action had been taking shape in her mind, but she'd hesitated to voice it, not out of the cation that she did not possess, or any concern for her own life, but because of the sacrifice she was reluctant to ask of her friends.

But once they assured her that they were resolved to anything, she spoke her mind.

Contrary to what one might suspect based on the knowledge that the Earth would continue to exist for another 6000 years, the homeworld Sapphire's prediction did, in fact, prove true: No rebels were ever able to infiltrate the orbital laser or any related facility.

They came not through the airlocks, hatches or warp pads – instead, the laser was rammed by a decrepit drop ship at full speed. The one thing in the old spaceship that was of no use for the colony and had therefore never been dismantled or removed was the propulsion system. Once Pearl managed to piece the power-grid back together, she had at least one thing left at her disposal: A powerful engine fit for a long-range vessel. It didn't matter that her haphazard repairs began to fall apart almost as soon as the rickety saucer left the atmosphere, all she had to do was to power up the drive and hurl it straight at the laser.

Her diligent mind proved quite suitable for mathematics, her aim with the ship as true as that of her spear, and it would have to be: The long-range drive had never been meant for use inside of a solar system, the maneuvering thrusts were very much out of service and its plundered interior resulted in an uneven distribution of mass and hence, a trajectory alike to a drunken Frisbee.

Hitting the target at all would have to be the work of a veritable steely-eyed missile gem, but despite Pearl's best efforts, they did not manage to hit the target head-on – and this probably saved their lives.

Rather than explode on impact with the laser, they just grazed it, ripping a hole in its side and hurtling back down to Earth in a long parabolic arch, but that was all it took.

The immense quantities of energy utilized by the laser did not allow for the slightest perturbation. One nick in the coolant system, one knock on the magnets that kept the superconductors in place, and that was all it took.

Before the Crystal Gems had as much as reentered the atmosphere, the laser had stopped firing and broken into two separate parts.

...

The sections in the middle were all but obliterated by the meltdown any gems that had not fled in time would have met a karmic end, evaporated like the humans and rebels in the blast radius down below, or at least it might have been considered poetic justice if one had regarded the homeworld gems with the monolithic view of an enemy.

Injustice, however, has an insidious way of creeping into all things. The guards and engineers who made up the bulk of the casualties had not built this apparatus or commanded its use – and the ones who did were far from harm. The command bridge was a good deal away from any part of the structure you would have to strike to disable the laser, and thought this may honestly have been intended so that they could still respond and react in the case of a technical malfunction, the upshot was still that countless Quartzes, rubies, and Peridots were gone, while Hessonite and Sapphire were not.

Even so, their situation was anything but comfortable. All around them were broken pipes and fried circuits, sparks, and leaking fluids abounded and the lights had gone out.

"Sapphire! How is this possible?!" cried the general, incensed. "You said the rebels would not breach the facility!"

Though above her in rank, Sapphire now felt keenly that she was still below Hessonite in size.

"I did… I..." She stammered, dumbfounded in confusion as she realized her error. "I don't see how this is possible...It shouldn't be."

"Well apparently it IS! It's happening right now!"

"But it shouldn't be. The thought never occurred to me that they might do something so far beyond reason….- I must have missed it...-"

"How could you possibly miss something like this?! You're useless to me!"

Hessonite was furious. She had no nerve to continue this conversation, not with the station falling to pieces all around them. But her anger did not wholly blind her to a potentially useful asset, even if it was one she could no longer fully trust.

She forced her way out of the command room's doors, pushing her way past other fleeing gems without much regard for them, but not after brusquely seizing the Sapphire by her lithe little arm.

Since it was expected that the command bridge would be staffed with important elite gems, great care had been taken to place sufficient escape pods in its immediate vicinity. But when the two elites reached them, they found them chock full of quartzes, Peridots and other gems that had served as bridge officers on the lower levels - and there stood Citrine, staying behind to make sure that all her subordinates were evacuated in an orderly fashion. Most gems could not have held a form with a considerably lower volume long enough to make planetfall unless they had practiced it for a long, but Citrine had instructed them to simply concentrate their typical volume into more compact shapes to save the space between their shapes, which was why the capsules were filled to capacity with soldier gems in the shape of puddles and noodles like many balls of Plasticine squeezed into cylindrical jars – so it stood to reason that some of them would have to get out – Sapphire and Hessonite outranked them all by far.

"Citrine! Clear us an escape pod!" demanded the glittering general, in a businesslike fashion without much further though.

"There is still room in this one." explained Citrine without thinking of questioning this, "I was going to board it myself, but it should fit yourself and Her Clarity instead."

"Very well. Clear it out then! We shall permit you come with us."

"...yes, my Hessonite."

It was not lost anyone that Citrine had been hoping that Hessonite would consider squeezing in there with the quartzes without making her send any of them out, but once it became clear that her superior considered this beneath her, she did not think of defying her and obediently marshaled her subordinates outside.

Her mind immediately flickered to considering another route and hence passed by any further reflection on Chalcedony's earlier words.

But just as the first Amethyst had shifted back to her usual form to leave the capsule, a small voice was heard next to Hessonite, grabbing all the more attention for its quiet soft tone amid all the loud mayhem, and how rarely it had been heard even by those who worked with her closely. Behind the long bangs on her forehead, Sapphire's gem glittered mysteriously.

"Stay where you are, soldier. There is no need." She turned to Hessonite. "There is another escape pod two corridors from here. No one else has claimed it, and it will almost certainly bear us safely to the surface."

"Is that a prediction?"

"Yes."

"Like you predicted that the rebels wouldn't attack us?"

"I predicted that they would not get past our security, and they did not.I did not consider that they might attack us by some manner other than infiltration out here in space, nor did you ask me to look for such a thing."

"Well from now on, I expect you to look at every possible outcome, do we understand each other?"

"So it shall be."

"So I can trust that there will be no unforeseen surprises with that other escape pod?! If you're wrong, we could both get shattered. Can you guarantee me that there isn't anything else that you 'missed'?!"

Sapphire made no effort to deflect the harsh reproach, but neither did she respond to it beyond a slight lowering of her head. Everything she said, she said quietly, softly and without any resistance.

"Perhaps not… But I can guarantee this: We will have free passage through the corridors, make it to the escape pod exactly forty seconds before the remainder of the station detonates, and we will land in the sea, but close to the shore, the shortest distance to any homeworld encampment out of any survivors. Neither of us will be shattered here. I have glimpsed the time and place of my shattering a long, long time ago, and the time is not come yet. As for you, you will live to visit this strange planet once again five-thousand years from now – most of these quartzes will not have been so fortunate..."

'These Quartzes' were thus left in possession of their escape pod, but without any further reassurances. The elites just turned and left, busy with saving their own skin. The forehead Sapphire proceeded with an almost eerie, unshakable quiet.

There was frantic murmuring and grumbling, as well as disgruntled questions; Everyone was already cramped in and uncomfortable – the plasticine-mass of quartzes threatened to spill out of the escape pod.

Citrine, however, was not daunted, not any more than she had been resentful or alarmed before. She simply did what she perceived as needing doing:

"Everybody quiet! The odds are grim, we already knew that. But the less we panic and the more we work together, the more we can improve and maximize the chance of survival for each of us, however high or low they might be. So please, get back in formation!"

"Yes, Commander!"

At last, Citrine melded into the spot next to the door, and the escape pod shot off into the vacuum of space…

It was only natural to get restless, cramped in like this, with that sort of omen hanging above their heads. She could not wholly blame the others for grumbling – but since they were shooting through the sky in a thin capsule filled far beyond its specifications (a gamble she had taken to grant everyone under her command at least the chance of survival) it was absolutely vital that no one lost their cool… thus, it fell to Citrine to ensure that.

"I can't promise that every single one of you will survive so I will not waste your time with patronizing lies, but each of you is more likely to survive than not.

I realize that for some of you, this is your first crash-landing, so I can understand that you're uneasy, but I've been through more than I can count. You'll get used to it. In my experience, most gems can survive a crash from orbit, even those that are nowhere as sturdy as quartzes. I once picked our Diamond's Pearl out of the wreckage of a warship."

"Really?!" exclaimed one particularly chatty Amethyst. "How did that happen?!"

Citrine knew then that she had succeeded – The younger recruits' attention had shifted from imminent doom and their cramped surroundings to her stories, the one thing she would never have any shortage of.

Even so she knew that she had probably not charmed everyone in the company. Squeezed against the back of the escape pod like a thick mat was Chalcedony, who would probably take this exchange as a confirmation of her worrisome broodings.

Citrine did worry about that, though not because she considered her friend a potential traitor or would wish to protect her if she actually did have such suspicions, but rather, because she saw her doubts of all that she understood to be conventional wisdom and the simple facts of life as a sign of general moodiness and dissatisfaction, a losing of faith in the things that were good and worthy and imbued life with its meaning, comparable to what one might think of a human who had grown distant from their friends, uncertain in their religion or overly concerned with the ephemeral nature of their accomplishments in the face of mortality.

The elder quartz hoped that she might find some opportunity to involve her fellow veteran in her tale… for now the young Amethysts and Jaspers were her foremost priority, but despite herself, she knew her friend well enough to know what ought to get her talking.

"It was during the war with the pentagorian hive when I was but a simple young officer serving onboard of Yellow Diamond's flagship."

"Some young officer you must have been if you got that kind of post right out of the gate!"

It seems that she would be afforded the luxury of killing two birds with one stone.

She had to admit that it warmed her gem somewhat to know that even in these uncertain days, Chalcedony could be relied upon to tack a snarky commentary onto her familiar old stories, as much as she had to acknowledge that her silent misgivings might have played their role in putting her in a snarky sort of mood – Humor was one of Chalcedony's better coping mechanisms.

Hence, Citrine's reply was just as light, though it never quite made the leap into playfulness: "Of course you would be the one to say this. You have always been the more talented one out of the two us."

"Right! And I suppose now is the part where you go on about how much further I could go if only I applied myself! I don't think I could have gotten quite as many promotions if a certain someone weren't so determined to be a good influence on me!"

This did get a few laughs from the younger quartzes, but before long, the laughter was drowned out by the questions, in particular since many of them had not heard of the pentagorian war – thus, their Commander began to explain.

Chalcedony sat back insofar as her position allowed it, and let Citrine do the talking. She knew that Citrine didn't mean to make those black days sound like a nice story, that she was doing it with the best of intentions, but she couldn't find it in her to become part of that, and observed from some mental distance, this all-too-familiar situation seemed bizarre and strange, grotesque even.

Citrine didn't realize it.

In a sense, it was also part of her likable qualities, what had allowed her to keep her strength for so long… but Chalcedony could no longer quite listen to her in agreement, surrounded with those wide-eyed recruits that reminded her faintly of the young gem she had once been, a denizen of a time that had almost faded out of memory.

At this point Citrine seemed used to having to explain the very basics:

"It all started many thousand years ago, before Pink Diamond's emergence even, when the empire made an incursion into a large cluster of galaxies. There were a number of unusually advanced organic civilizations, but we did not expect any extraordinary resistance from them. On their own, they were of little consequence, but it was their presence that attracted the Pentagorian Hive. They're machine-creatures that share the same mind, or rather, they are creatures that have linked themselves together using machines – at least at the time of the war, most of them were organic, but it could be any kind of organic – bipeds, photosynthetics, creatures with shells, hordes of them acting as one, all directed by one mind.

And I don't know if they multiply in numbers in the ways that organics usually do, but when they expand their territory, they used to seize other lifeforms and their technology and integrate them into their hive. Now, they weren't all organics, but most of them were, and the few that weren't were largely other machine lifeforms.

They couldn't integrate gems – we were too different from them, or they hadn't yet developed their technology to the point that it would have been compatible with beings like us.

So if we go in, terraform the planets and clear away the organics as usual, we would have been converting a kind of resource that they can use into one that they can't use. They wanted to capture that galaxy for the same reasons as we did, but they needed the planets intact, with the atmosphere and all the organics slime on them. So, conflict was inevitable. It wasn't just about this one galaxy – It was one of the few times that the empire had been faced with another expansive, intergalactic empire like our own. They had vast resources at their disposal, and it didn't matter how many of them we destroyed, they just kept fighting – They had no need for a chain of command. What one of them knew, all of them knew. And they were resourceful, having integrated technology from countless different space-faring lifeforms.

It was a harsh, long and costly war, much like this one."

"...so how did it end?" asked one Jasper.

"Eventually, it dragged on so long that White Diamond intervened. And once she did it was all over. Finished in a day. I saw her up close, just that one time… the maker. But don't ask me to describe her, I am not so crafty with words that I could. But I was there at the final battle with the Pentagorian fleet. And each time I think of the memory, I feel compelled to throw myself down on the floor and sing praises to the might of the Diamonds. It was the most magnificent spectacle I have ever seen, and the most terrible..."

"What happened?"

"They fused as one. For the first time since times immemorial – Perhaps the loremasters and priests could tell you if they've ever done it before, but I cannot imagine any other thing that could have required them to do so… the power was unlike anything you could imagine. With all six of their arms, they summoned a drop of searing light… the entire fleet was annihilated with two or three shots from their weapon, and the Pentagorians never recovered – at least, they've given gem-controlled planets a wide berth ever since and never meddled with us again."

"They really did that? They took out a whole fleet all on their own?"

Citrine smiled. "I've seen Yellow Diamond alone rip a spaceship from the sky with nothing but her bare hands and her lightning. That was right after that crash landing I mentioned earlier… The ones we serve are very mighty indeed..."

Despite herself, and her knowledge of the seriousness entailed by all that was said, Chalcedony felt tempted to roll her eyes. She wasn't there at the final battle, at least, nowhere near the main action. She'd barely seen anything of the Diamonds' grand might – most of what she remembered of that time concerned the destruction of her original unit.

She might have reached the boiling point where she would have been tempted to say something, but before she could do so between the awed questions of the earthborn soldier gems, a sharp jolt moved through the capsule – that would be the landing thrusters or the parachute.

It was time to brace for impact.

(

The homeworld Sapphire was not wrong.

Herself and Hessonite escaped unscathed, but there were casualties among the quartzes.

Not Citrine or Chalcedony – They were too experienced, instinct alone would have urged them to take the correct precautions even in absence of much motivation

Some unlucky Amethyst who neglected to hold her position, a puny beta jasper who lacked the strength to hold onto the walls, both of which were, through sheer bad luck, flung upwards against the ceiling in the moment of impact; It happened to fast for anyone to do anything, most likely, they were gone before they knew what hit them, never knowing the last line of their own story.

Even so they might have been the lucky ones.

Oh, most were fine, just as Citrine had said they would be, even the few that were poofed in the crash reformed soon enough to evacuate the capsule before it sank down to the depths of the Pacific – but there was a pair which had collided in so unfortunate a fashion as to each incur a crack, and would not have made it to the surface if they had not been supported by some of their sisters-in-arms.

It was Chalcedony then who urged them to depart in haste before Citrine could do the same, but the blue quartz herself remained behind, taking the time to dive down to retrieve the shards of their fallen comrades – but there would come a day when she wished she hadn't.

Tangential to the reasons that it would be so was another survivor, a most unexpected and, in Chalcedony's eyes, most underving one: Peridot Y73.

One would have presumed her the deadest of all and that's precisely what the would have been if it were up to her own devices; She kicked and screamed and cursed at the Agate that pulled her from the engine room before it exploded.

Though she was located were an explosion would have been the most likely to occur as the result of a technical defect, the rebel's rickety craft did not hit the power core, but the energy concentration barrel somewhat below it, and that's where the meltdown occurred – sure, the main engine room was sufficiently connected to it was to blow up before long, but neither Y73 nor the Agates guarding the crystal core were killed right away.

The explosions were close behind them, though, and the technician did not escape unscathed.

The company of quartzes encountered her once they had returned to the nearest base and made their way to a storehouse that was currently serving as something that a human observer might have likened to an infirmary but had more in common with a workshop or a scrap yard in both appearance and the attitude at work.

There was no need to sterilize anything, for starters; All the tools and vats of various useful substances were just lying about, though one could probably have accounted for these realities in a more hospitable environment.

Coming here, one would expect crude, uncaring repairs geared to preserve function a little longer, if you were lucky – in many cases halls like this one served largely as a dumping ground, a place to put gems that weren't currently serving out of everyone's way until they either recovered, or came to pieces for good.

A facility located at a functioning colony, or one geared towards the aristocracy might at least have appeared less haphazard and more austere, perhaps offering some sterile, technical discretion and some Pearls serving as 'nurses', but as of now Earth was a war zone, and all you could hope for as an overworked Azurite and a few corals to assist her, both gems designated for this purpose. If all the Corals were busy and an outpost really understaffed, you might be met with a re-purposed Peridot with a cursory knowledge of the healing arts, or the closest thing to that which existed among gems.

To begin with, they had less need of it, being fairly durable, sturdy creatures. Most damage to their light-forms closed up on its own, and if it didn't, they could always make a new form – even if a gem were forcibly disembodied by heavy objects or some stray pointy object, it was generally just a question of waiting a little while for the unlucky victim to return, possibly with a questionable new hairstyle.

In such cases, their comrades would typically hardly bother to bring them to a place like this. Instead they would simply ensure that anyone so indisposed would be kept in a safe place and perhaps expose to some light if they were taking particularly long.

In a line of work where accidents were expected there might be a designated gathering place where the unfortunates would be kept until was time for them to reform, get scolded and be sent back to work.

If anyone turned up here with a poofed co-worker, it would be because they wanted to make extra sure and have them examined for fine cracks by a professional – and for good reason; Despite all that a gem could endure without any risk of permanent damage, this most crucial core part of their being, the true body so to speak, was rather lacking in its ability to mend itself.

Thus, the designated area was roughly divided into two areas, really just clusters of mats arranged in rows, separated mostly by piles of equipment and in good times, something like a curtain.

On the one side you'd find those with no actual damage to their gems, all very much guaranteed to walk out on their own two gravity connectors the next day or so, barring unforeseen circumstances – largely those who had gotten sufficiently busted up for it to be an inconvenience, but not enough to poof them. In that case 'treatment', if any, would consist mainly of rest and management of the symptoms, perhaps some ice pack for the pain, a piece of cloth to soak up leaky fluids or at the very most, things being stapled in place so that they might mend themselves fast and smoother.

Once in a while, the corals might also see someone who had overexerted themselves while shapeshifting or needed to be fitted for limb-enhancers, exceedingly rare as the latter was during era one.

Cracks and the like, however, were a decidedly different manner.

Without access to something akin to Rose Quartz' legendary healing powers, (or rather, unaware that they had an equivalent remedy lying around in all those abandoned, unused crates of injector feed that had never ended up being used once the colony went down the drain), there was only so much that could be done.

If someone came in with a garbled glitchy form and a large crack that was swiftly getting worse, they would probably just have been laid on a mat in a corner to wait out the inevitable – indeed even a relatively stable case with a heavily garbled form, could not expect much hope, if one persisted in such a state for extended periods of time it would have been regarded as a mercy to speed things along.

While there had always been cases of individual gems being willing to care for their loved ones, or attempted flights by gems who had been written off or ruled too defective to be of further use at the local Azurite's discretion (because they could no longer communicate or some-such thing) the idea to expend time and energy to care for a member of your society would have been largely foreign to homeworld, even if that member had given everything to protect, sustain or advance that very society.

But this civilization had many many ages to come up with something -

In cases where the impairment was manageable, the crack stable and not showing any sign of spreading any further, there were procedures to keep it that way, including something akin to gypsum or mortar (or shiny metal, if you were high in the hierarchy or resources plentiful) that might be poured into a crack to stabilize the nicked gemstone – It was a rough tenuous solution that somewhat hindered the absorption of light, but certainly preferable to the risk of having the original crack spread any further.

This was what happened with Y73. On the back of her head, her gem now bore a spiderweb-pattern of white, filled-up striations. That halted the worst, but it could not undo the patches of glitchy distortion that now marred her face. She could not quite keep her balance like she used to and would probably require some assistive technology on that account, but she responded to this with almost chilling unconcern, perhaps because she retained use of her dominant hand. She seemed more bothered that her beloved alien crystal had gone to pieces as if she didn't know that she had very nearly shared its fate.

One ought to have felt sorry for her, but her personality made it very hard – As far as Chalcedony could tell, even Citrine was somewhat galled that this impish green toad had lived where the likable young recruits that had shared their escape pod had died, not that she would ever have admitted such an unbecoming thought. Chalcedony, of course, had no such ambitions of chivalry.

)

(v.)

Yellow Diamond sat brooding in the dark, elbows resting on her knees, her chin placed on her clasped hands, her expression malcontent and somber.

The room was technically part of her laboratory complexes, nowhere near the chamber she had been sharing with Blue since the beginning of this endless bitter war – She could hardly stand to be there anymore, she could no longer take the oppressive, overwhelming curtain of disintegration and despair.

She though the sight of the withering jungle would bring her relief, but she found it to be little more than another background note in a galling cacophony of things falling apart, unbearable as ever, as every marred and broken thing.

When she saw the scorched ash, she thought of Pink's extinguished, splintered shards, and the sickly bent willow-branches that feebly struggled against doom were pitiful to witness; Blue had looked so much like them while she insisted to watch their decay in all its excruciating masochistic detail.

Still, she knew that she must return there before long, if not for whatever excuse she had yet to cook up, then at least to keep an eye on her – These days, Yellow hardly knew what she might be doing if she let her out of her sight. She wanted nothing more than to gather her up in her arms and take her far away from this accursed place, back to homeworld, or stars know where;

But she could not rouse her from her stupor any more than she could command the departed to live. This was where her vast powers met their edge -

Every time that she had to see Blue in such a state, every time she was forced to remember the reason for her never-ending lamentations, the hate she felt towards these rebels and their wretched little planet would surge a thousandfold.

Paradoxically, Yellow found herself quaking with frustration at her own powerlessness – She knew the thought to be absurd and hence pushed it down as she tried her best to focus on war plans and research, but somewhere in the depths of her gem, the dark thoughts simmered on and, at times, slipped themselves into her awareness:

Mighty as she was, her hands could only destroy, to expedite the return of order to chaos brought on by the passage of time.

There was no way of putting back together what had long since been parted from life, nor much of a means to keep alight what seemed to have willingly surrendered itself to the darkness.

Nothing she could do.

Nothing at all, except to push on into the unwelcoming cold of the future and the ugly work to be completed all around.

She'd sent a notice to White, briefing her on the current state of the fighting and attempting to discuss troop movements.

Within the cycle, she had received a reply, about troop movements and troop movements only – Hard to say if it had even been penned by White herself, or if she had delegated it to one of her Anthracites. For concerns of warfare, it really didn't matter, but the same could not be said for the half-formulated reply Yellow was supposed to have been writing.

She really didn't need some random bureaucrat gem to see their personal correspondence – No one back home needed to know about their rulers' struggles, whether it was Yellow grappling with the rebel's tenacious persistence, or her detailed report on how Blue had been faring as of late, not that she would ever have gone so far as to plead for White's involvement, knowing that she would surely make them regret such a pitiful display.

Thus, Yellow kept her words sparse and professional, determined to make herself believe them once this temporary moment of weakness had passed.

But before that, it would occur to her that the only way they even knew that White was still alive in there was that she still kept sending out the occasional missives. No one had seen her face to face since the day Pink's shattering – In the highly unlikely event that anything should ever happen to her, all of homeworld might go for hundreds of years without noticing, since they were all so used to her absence, and so afraid of incurring her wrath by disturbing her unannounced.

Would it shatter her to show them just the slightest morsel of sympathy for once in her immortal life? To give them something, anything at all?

By the stars, they had never even asked her for much!

V. Plague (Pestilence The March of the Dead)

When the thought first occurred to her, Yellow Diamond had been occupied with something as trivial as logistics. Something regarding the disposal of shards collected from the battlefields, oh, and wasn't there that big old pile of them that they had excavated next to that rebel base, there was a report about that from one of the Peridots, about how they were ready to be gotten rid of now that the analysis was concluded.

Menial concerns really, 'recycling', one might term it.

To homeworld, the idea of a funeral would have been alien. All waste was to be re-purposed – they could not afford not to given their empire's gluttonous appetite for resources. Unless the gem in question had perished after a long time in the dark, the shards of the deceased would almost certainly contain some residual energy that the departed had never gotten around to use – not quite as much as you would have been able to extract from harvesting someone alive, but enough to merit the procedure as well as the effort involved in collecting the shards.

Afterward, what remained was completely extinguished of all life and easily crumbled into a fine dust.

None of this was news; The corresponding knowledge hat sat in her mind for many many ages…

But what about that residual energy?

Somehow, she had never thought about it in the way that she did now.

Having made destruction her daily work, she had thought that she knew something of death, that death would have been in her thoughts – but never like this.

Perhaps she had touched death, perhaps death had been in her touch – but death had never touched her. Never had she thought herself to be subject to it, and never had she been so close to its receiving end.

Her life so far had led her to look past it, not beyond it, and certainly not at it.

So, anyways, what about that residual energy?

Thus far, Yellow had always been content to just let it be energy, because she had never seen anything else, but what she didn't have either was a reason to want it to be more than just energy – After all, the pieces, at least the larger chunks, they must contain the remains of the circuits, must they not? Somewhere there were quirks and mannerisms and memories of bygone balmy summer evenings, for sure, broken, holey, destroyed by a loss of charge and polarity and order like a corrupt hard drive, but, once she started thinking of it like a computer, and be it explicitly to get this arc of thought back onto the ground, she could not help but thinking further.

Sometimes you could restore a broken hard drive, salvage it, if you were gentle about it, almost certainly not all, but perhaps enough – and unlike with organics, there was no further decay after the moment of death, no progressive melting-into-sludge until all imprints were inevitably lost…

The mad thought was shapeless and unbidden in her mind, a perception, or perhaps an intuition that her reason would not touch with a ten-foot pole, as if it were comprised of radioactive waste.

But even pushed behind that veil, it shone irresistibly like a beacon.

She would not consider it, but she could not help but ponder it, and it diverted the paths of her thoughts by its mere presence, as an electric current will, without doubt, divert magnetic fields, like a tenebrous, ectoplasmic mirror-image taunting her from beyond the veil.

'Fine, if that lets you maintain your comfort, if your sense of control and impregnability is that precious to you, then phrase it in a manner that your reason can digest. Let the energy be energy', but now attached to this submerged iceberg of meaning, even the thought had the power to leave her restless like a weary dreamer who realizes after much tossing and turning in hypnagogic twilling that they cannot slip all the way into the darkness of sleep because the light is too bright.

She heeds it not, and yet even the shadow of the thought consumes her.

...

What is life, even, she ponders, though she must admonish herself for such an unproductive question.

What is it, if it is not energy running down overly complicated paths en route to the heat death of the universe?

Dead matter, live matter, where even lies the difference?

Too bad that White Diamond was not taking notes when she came to life from unlife.

Is not everything just matter pushing on each other and all distinction but an illusion?

That way lie dragons, but she cannot avoid thinking in terms of energy when energy and resources are hard to come by and procuring them by any means is her daily headache.

Surely, this war has cost enough.

She has the shards from the rebel mass grave brought to her.

She speaks of using their bulk and abundance to perhaps come up with more efficient ways of utilizing it. It's not a lie nor a pretext.

If there is any life to be found in there, she longs to kill it again.

She holds back the encompassing greed of her mind, looking on with detachment, to determine the exact mechanisms of how life passes into unlife, the intricate clockworks of death.

Want presses on her like a dull shape beneath a sheet that she cannot quite make out.

What could be gained from seeking such knowledge?

Whoever knows, the applications are endless.

(Peridot Y73 is on board right away; She needs neither motivation, nor excuse; She's been itching for something else to occupy her mind since her last favorite plaything went bust and her last experiment's explosive conclusion does not seem to have dulled her taste for the next – if anything, she might feel like she had already invested too much in this path to turn back in regret.)

…

She has never exactly 'communed' with things, yet she saw how this might be a logical step to her undertaking.

What better to call to any hypothetical leftover life than the very source that first called such life into being?

If there is life left in there somehow, or rather presence, or consciousness, must it not, could it not be coaxed forth by some manner of resonance.

It would be folly not to attempt it if it is in her power, but the ineffable has never been her domain. It was always Blue's. If anyone should have been calling a sceance, it should have been her, and certainly not Yellow. She had not the gentle hand.

None of this suits her, it frustrates her every waking second.

She hears White Diamond's voice ringing in her old, old memories, clear and bright though she has not heard in in hundreds of years and has no way to confirm if her recollections are accurate.

But even without her maker to tell her, she knows in her gem that she is a poor diviner.

She recalls sitting still and the heavy burn of shame at being chided and the pang of envy when Pink turned out to be quite gifted.

Alas, White Diamond had been ever thwarted.

Yellow had no talent, Blue had no focus and Pink had no interest in learning and now all her great promise would remain unfulfilled forever.

She understands, intellectually, that her endeavor would require a resonance, a harmony and synchronization -

A song, like she has not let it resound for ages, an unlatching of the doors she had put up to keep something in her innermost of her holiest of holies.

She quits in frustration.

If this shard will not disclose its secrets, she will rend them from it in the fashions that have always worked for her.

So she shines lights through, puts it under currents and sears it with acids.

Perhaps if she tortures it enough, it will confess.

...

As her designs expand, so does the specificity of their demands, and the dark cloud on her mind.

She retreats to a wind-beaten buried fortress half buried in the red desert sand, none too far from where Pink used to have her personal castle, the leisure-palace as opposed to the place of toil on the moon.

Distractable as she had been, they had figured that she might benefit from separating work and play. It would build provide out of sand whatever it was she desired, so it was pointless to seek it now. To this day they hadn't been able to find where her old ship must be buried in the sand. Once they had prepared it all just for her, including the desert glass gem that would serve as its power source and the mistress of its walls – this second building, however, was once meant for things that might benefit from having a known, fixed location.

All that was in it is torn out and eviscerated of its cables so that other things may be plugged in.

...

Dour and capricious, she pulls at it, tugs at the shade of its being with the arclight of her thunder and it follows, resonates, there is no choice for a muscle that is twitching wildly under electric duress.

The swell of a high note rings out, a piping sine tone.

If something is there, it is awakened only because it is being played like an instrument, and its voice is being taken for a mask.

You could see the shade flickering for a moment, or failing that you could feel it, but it's distorted to even be a scream, and from the moment that she first heard a voice, she knows that she has wrought an abomination.

She does not cease, for they deserve it.

She makes a pipe-organ from lost souls and wears its melodies like a necklace from shark-teeth.

...

The first actual result to come of the shard experiments was the living armor.

Y73 had the idea, after what onlookers described as a mishap in which one of the shards possessed some of the supporters she ended up needing, as well as the mask-piece she had taken to wearing to conceal the disfigurations on her face.

One of the guards that had subdued the rebellious equipment went so far as to describe it as a coordinated revenge of the shard, as if it were sick and tired of being experimented on.

Y73, for her part, argued that setbacks are a natural part of research and that most new technologies were bound to be volatile in the early stages – and then cited that same reasoning to push for field tests.

The quartzes and rubies, for their part, did not trust it. The Peridots weren's the ones who would be down there on the battlefield if these things went haywire.

"You can twist and turn it however you like", Chalcedony would argue. "It's creepy. That used to be people."

"Traitors and rebels, perhaps."

Citrine was dutifully making herself believe the rationalizations, but Chalcedony could sense that she, too, was somewhat unnerved. Her instincts were too good to let her swallow this load of bull without at least putting up a fight.

"Yeah, because that's very comforting. We're sent out with bits and pieces of dead people, and they used to be one of Rose Quartzes' crazy cult members who love to form freaky cross-gem fusions and shove organic matter down their necks. What one of it remembers that it's a rebel and attacks us instead?"

"That hardly seems possible. You've said it yourself – they're dead. Shattered. Extinguished. From what Peridot told me, they've barely got enough consciousness to understand and follow orders, and that's it. Many of the shards they use don't even respond to the procedure."

"I still don't get why they have to trust over us."

"They don't have enough soldiers. That's the only reason. If attempting to grow more under these circumstances would work out again, it would probably result in another haphazard fiasco like the beta site.

"Oh would you shut it!" came then another voice, gruff deep and uncouth, emanating from a large bulky figure that was leaning against a column with her arms crossed, keeping her distance from the other quartzes – a large, silver-maned Jasper, ostensibly the most junior out of the company's command tier, not that this staid her tongue in any manner. "I'm sick of listening to you two. I don't care if those drones or whatever are all alive, awake and screaming. All that matters is that we destroy Rose Quartz"

And the two veterans had seen too much, been part of too many platoons and seen too many group dynamics unfold for them not to take note of this – a dangerous trait, an internal contradiction. Devoted to the cause she was, a templar in service of purity she called herself, but there was a worrisome streak to her sometimes, more than just her aloof, competitive tendencies, a relentlessness that knew little resembling bounds, like there was little that she would not do in order to win.

Citrine, though she acknowledged her shortcomings, at least sympathized with her devotion; Chalcedony, for her part, neither liked or trusted her, but for all their differences this Jasper had managed to rouse both of their misgivings.

...

The stories followed almost right out of the gate, right from the labs and barracks, wherever the living armor was around.

Tales of the odd shard-drone that had attacked without warning, or else blotched its assignments in such a way as to precipitate its own destruction, escalating from the slight and subtle that made its handlers doubt their own perception, or perhaps wonder if they had given the orders – at first, any complaints to superiors would certainly have been blamed on the complainer and some contradictory, badly-phrased order that it must have given – after all, the armors obeyed for the most part.

When overseers and technicians observed the possession twist and turning the metal itself, they simply took notes and set them off to R& D.

In the end, cold calculation triumphed over everything.

The project would be discontinued precisely when it stopped to be a convenient net gain, but at first, objectors would soon find that the higher ups only cared so much about safety or ethics; All that mattered was that the living army would take out soldiers.

The shards could be placed in a new armor if the old one was smashed, and of course, the numbers of the shards itself could be replenished from the numbers of the fallen – that also almost necessitated their use, no matter how horrendously unsafe or monstrous they might have proved: Finally, there was a counter to Rose Quartz' unprecedented curative power, something that allowed them to send out large hosts in bulk after all she had done to thin their numbers while minimizing the decrease of her own following. They didn't make for particularly skilled or very reliable soldiers, but they didn't have to be as long as they could be sent out in legions and swarms – if there was only one thing that homeworld was in no danger of running out of, it would have been gem shards.

If nothing else, the war itself continued to provide an endless fount of them.

So they remained in use long after their volatile nature had been known, and their deployments commonly met with uncomfortable cringes among the soldiers and even some of the officers. Numerous Agates, Garnets and Emeralds made it known that they just didn't like them and avoided the use of them, but often, a chaotic victory was seen as preferable to an orderly bulk as long as the bulk of the casualties were still rebels.

"I knew it!" a certain one-eyed Ruby would rant to her compatriots, most of whom would have perished by the time the war was done. She had distrusted the drone soldiers from the get-go, be it in part because it was easy to view the undead infantry as infringing on the domain of Rubies, a poor gem's replacement for them perhaps.

Surely infantry such as Rubies would be the first victims whenever the drones' pesky tendency to turn against their masters reared its ugly head.

Wither it was due to some remnant of their previous life lodged within the shards, the rebellion of a fully new formed consciousnesses or lingering imprints absorbed from their vessels, no one could say. These were the explanations favored by the distrustful soldiers who, in their profession, had to rely much on their instincts – whether they were dead on the money where the engineers' pride stood in the way of the conclusion or instead misled by their sentimentality and a tendency to anthropomorphize (gem-tropomorphize?) an unreliable tool, no one could say.

In the opinion of their makers, such as Y73, their failings came instead from their lack of life, insufficient awareness or intelligence to process complex orders for long before some short circuit was bound to occur, but either way, at some point there was no more use or dignity in denying that they weren't safe.

More out of necessity than concern, the strategies employed soon adjusted to feature in the shard drones' volatility. Living armor was just dropped over the forests where the rebels were hiding and left to avenge their rage on anything they came across, with no concern as to what might happen to any animals or humans they might come across.

On at least one memorable occasion, they had been short on armor and simply dumped the processed shards themselves down on the woods, where it was known that somewhere, somehow, defectors were hiding. As expected, the shards took possession of the various denizens of the forest, ranging from trees to animals to any sort of solid materials that were lying around – On multiple occasions, one might have found the forest floor stripped bare while enormous golems of rotten leaves ambled about, sometimes controlled by more than just a single shards.

This incursion was at first considered quite successful. Turning the rebels' own hiding places against them not only hit them from a direction where they didn't expect it, but it also revealed their position.

Many on the loyalist side considered it poetic justice, for had they not many times fought against plant creatures summoned by Rose Quartz? Her ability might as well have been the inspiration behind it.

But this approach had its imperfections – Broken down reanimated gem circuits were most suited and optimized for controlling the form of a gem. That's why the suits of armor had worked best, as did any other garments. Presented with unfamiliar shapes such as trees, the motions of the unliving drones were often clumsy and shambling, and to a lesser extent, the same applied even to the drones – Though it implied interesting things that the fragments were able to move, meld with, and even remodel foreign substances using just their internal energy (as Y73 put it on one occasion), they were designed to project a body, not meld one.

The discord between the residual instincts to form and operate a light-body and the reality of infusing that light into a solid body it was never designed to, distorting the already busted, broken down light-circuits to innervate it might indeed play a large part in the process that drove most of the drones to go haywire sooner or later.

The instinct to hold and take form was just too strong. It had to be, for any newly-made gem to emerge correctly – of course, in Y73s eyes, this was not a reason to wonder how tortured her creations must be, but an opportunity to be harnessed, for if that impulse was so strong even in these shattered torn remnants, perhaps even they could be made to take form to create stronger, more predictable drone soldiers.

But no homeworld research report could have encapsulated the horror that they wrought, or the dread the rebels felt when they realized just what they were fighting, the despair that sank in when they were discussing what to even do with the shards once they had been ripped from their vessels.

Rose stood there with eyes wide in realization. Garnet was torn asunder between revulsion at the deed and her rage at its perpetrators. Pearl, however, nearly lost her footing, and if she had been physically capable of retching at the time she distinctly would have. She recognized some of those shards.

Once the rebellion first started growing beyond their small inner circle of friends, Pearl had quickly emerged as the designated drill sergeant, a meticulous maintainer of order. Thus, it was often her who ended up whipping the newer recruits into shape, and hence, it soon became one of her official duties.

At first she did it mostly because the recruits bothered her, their yet unpolished conduct irked her all on its own before any concern for their persons entered into it. Even if they generally agreed with the rebel cause, not all of them immediately left their prejudices against Pearls at the door, but even those who did were often met with the disdain inspired by their compatriots. She disliked the sight of their incompetence, and besides, some part of her was resentful about how their group was growing and how Roses' Attention had wound up split between so many people, she didn't like the sight of the clumsy newcomers that often reawakened her own uncertainty about her suitability for the battlefield. Never before had she commanded respect or authority, and neither had she ever expected that she would do so in her life, so when she found herself in this position of being the feared right-hand gem of the universally beloved Rose Quartz, wielding and asserting that authority made for a convenient tool to make herself feel better, even if it was at the cost of others.

But often times, her criticism was perfectly well-meaning and perhaps just badly phrased, and she much blamed herself when she began to realize that her genuine desire to help was becoming lost or garbled under the works of her desperation.

She never meant to be harsh to them, subject the to endless perfectionistic nitpicking or treat them with disdain, but she did not expect to like that duty either, regarding it at first as just another awful thing that she would deal with out of devotion to Rose.

But as time passed, Pearl found to her own greatest surprise that a part of her actually enjoyed being a teacher or mentor, not just the genuine admiration that some of her students had for her, the disbelieving validation she felt when they actually cited her as an inspiration – Her love of safety, knowledge and correct proceedings simply made it a joy to impart it on others and actually be a helpful, positive influence on others, all by herself, on her own, even while Rose, Garnet and the others were aware doing other things.

Once she realized this and became aware of her earlier mistakes, she made an effort from the bottom of her heart to mend fences and forge a genuine, positive, nurturing bond with her students -

But some of them had met their doom before that happened, and now, one could not even be sure if they were resting in peace.

The shards that they recovered could not be left alone – before long, they would just start shining again, possess the nearest thing in their range and continue on fighting mindlessly, though mindlessness would have been the greatest comfort for which one could hope – for how were they to know that their fallen comrades weren't still in there, bits and pieces of them, looping malfunctioning thoughts, awakened from rest but not returned to wholeness or life, immortal, perhaps, in the fashion of a cancer cell. They could be said to live, like moss lives and like animals live, but they had ceased to be gems, and once in a while, one couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't something left of the gems they had once been, if their rampages of destruction weren't simply an expression of the pain, fear and rage they must be feeling in their joyless existence.

Rose, of course, tried her best to comfort Pearl even as she was holding back the guilt that was eating her alive from within, stored away behind the gentlest of masks.

For lack of anything else to do, she decreed that the shards were to be stored in bubbles for now - "We can at least make sure that they're not suffering anymore, see, at least they're no longer suffering", and she always allowed for the speculation that maybe one day, something could be done, though she could not make herself believe it.

A few times she tried to reach out, to sense and commune with whatever spark of consciousness might be left inside, but whatever she found was too foreign, too scalding to be spoken to or even identity. What she sensed from it could have been pain, or it could have been simple signal degradation or her own mind trying in vain to reconstruct a telepathic 'image' from the scrambled, nonliving circuits.

But if anything remained of them, there was nothing she could do for these lost souls.

(Many, many years later, Pearl would sometimes sneak the contained shards from the bubble room behind everybody's back, and stare at them)

...

The forest incidents, however, also marked the first occasion on which large numbers of the shard drones were released into the wild where they could not be tracked or monitored, and this proved to be the beginning of the end for the project, the prelude to its sharp splintering conclusion that marked the end of their active production -

Though even then, the ones in charge might not have been so considerate if the next stage of the project were not already in the making.

The scattered feral shard-drones had been drawn to the site of a battle, a homeworld stronghold, as if drawn by the pulsing of magic and light, seeking after the life they once had like sharks coming for blood.

Before long, the fight ceased to be a strife of rebels against loyalists and became a scramble for survival where no one was safe.

The combatants were besieged on all sides by a gigantic wall of greenery as if the whole forest had begun to move like a furious green carpet, and in its massive body glittered countless shards.

It was as if all the malice, all the resentment and all the suffering strewn on the battlefields had coalesced into a lumbering idol of war, an enclosing tsunami of wood embodying the rage of all that had been crushed in this conflict, drummed up by pride and selfishness,

It moved as one – the individual twinkling lights, all traces of mournful individuality and feeling that there might have been had been scattered away, insofar as the ways of homeworld had allowed for them to exist in the first place, and all that was left was a simple destroyer, a messenger of despair in this world.

Some parts of it had hated the Crsytal Gems, others had burnt with righteous fury towards homeworld, and as a result, their amalgam now destroyed indiscriminately without regard for either side, too scrambled now to form discerning thought.

Rose Quartz was right there on the ground, and she felt what it was, deep inside her center.

The loyalist outpost she had been meaning to besiege avoided destruction only because of the rebels' contributions to taking down the great beast, but at the end of it, she had too few rebel fighters left t hold the broken citadel she had sought to capture – it was the bitterest of stalemates, for let it not be thought that the homeworld forces didn't fight the crystal gems at every step of the way.

"Can you believe this?" Peridot Y73 would exclaim as she commented on the report after the fact, with a loss of composure that she had previously reserved for the alien crystals she used to bore a hole into Siberia that had since filled with seawater. "I can't believe it! Multiple shards were functioning as one being. They had synchronized! Almost as if they were trying to fuse!"

She seldom left the labs now, since it was fairly hard for her to get around, but given her affinity for technology, she found other ways to be present.

It was not usual for her to send a robonoid in her stead. Constricted as she may have been by her injury, her ability to shapeshift was intact, and she made more use of it than ever, be it to reach faraway objects without suffering the indignity of walking, or to plug a cable directly into her light-form so that she might operate a remote drone with just her thoughts, taking measurements and close looks as surely as, or much better than it would have been if she had to do the labor with her glitched-out body.

Soon, it seemed to make little difference to her, and her robot tools seemed to have become extensions of her being. It helped that she had dabbled in shapeshifting plugs and cables long before her accident and that she had perhaps never felt too connected with her physically to begin with. All that concerned her were the outcomes of her experiments – if anything, she seemed more focused on them than ever, not even to prove that she was still functional, but simply because most other distractions had become tiring to do.

Most other observers, however, had not shared the green goblin's enthusiasm.

Citrine could not deny her relief when she heard that the production of the shard drones would be discontinued.

She was not at the site of the battle, having arrived later with her unit to relieve the besieged base when the rebels were still believed to be the only threat.

She would find it completely ruined, and the rebels long gone, much to the chagrin of a certain Jasper who had been looking forward to crushing some rebels.

There on the ground, she met with Chalcedony. The citrine commander could not help but note that the blue quartz had reformed.

She had a slightly different design to her armor, and her hair seemed different, less neat, more likely to expose at least one of her dark almond eyes, and the distant, disbelieving stare held within her gaze. By the looks of it, these were all-new vision spheres, but the last sight of her old ones was still deeply imprinted in the gem that produced them.

Citrine's unit got to work to secure the perimeter so as to ward against further rebel incursions, but the next troupe to arrive once the warp was repaired were largely engineers and researchers, with the odd elite thrown in.

The veteran quartz was all too busy organizing the defenses to find a moment to check up on her old friend; She did not get to see her until all the officers were called up to serve as an honor guard:

Yellow Diamond was coming, and it should not be long before her enormous boots materialized on the outpost's humble warp pad.

And here, the naive and hopeful might wonder about the purpose of her visit – had she heard of the atrocious occurrence and called and investigation, nay, could she even be here to put a stop to it herself?

No of course not. Naught happens in her laboratories but in the direction of her will. She was with the researches and had come to be briefed on the progress of their investigations, of what they might learn from this fiasco to prevent such mishaps in the future.

And it has to be understood that her business was strictly with the Peridots and the elites that supervised them – If Chalcedony and Citrine were in the room, then it was only so they could stand silently at their post as statue-like, stoic guards, and if they had been chosen for this task out of all quartzes that were still in fighting condition, it would have been because they both had a good track record as stoic statues.

Never before had either of them interrupted a conversation of their allotted betters, be it out of duty or the humble wish to stay out of trouble.

But when chalcedony heard Yellow Diamond, whom she had seldom seen so far up close (far more rarely than Citrine, for certain), speaking about what precautions might be appropriate for the second stage of the shard experiments, she could no longer hold her tongue.

She might be accused of having reached her wits' end, and after she had to witness on this day, on this very place, she would not even have denied it.

"Your Luminosity! Please reconsider!"

Alarmed, Citrine moved to stop her and shot her a harsh glance, but the pale blue gem just stood undeterred while Yellow Diamond and the outpost's foremost aristocrat gem just blinked at her in confused annoyance.

Most likely, they had barely even perceived her as much more than a passing background detail before she had chosen to speak – yet Chalcedony had more delicacy than some, and she knew to hold back her own exact views if that would help her convince the ultimate decision makers of the convictions that truly mattered to her.

She was not to proud to get on her knees.

"Please listen. It is not my place to question your wisdom, but likewise, it is my duty to report to you what I have seen. I have served under your command once, in the joint operation that faced the pentagorian fleet, and yet, what I saw her today on this very soil eclipses everything I have encountered till that day.

This wasn't just a malfunctioning drone. I know a deliberate attack when I see one. These shard creatures are dangerous. They were after us, your luminosity. "

If the noble did not immediately tear into Chalcedony with threats and reproach, it would be because Yellow Diamond very much outranked her, but her opinion was plain on her face, and she clearly hoped that their sovereign would mete out swift, inglorious punishment.

But Yellow Diamond was a different matter altogether. She wasn't too irritated by what she could not have considered a serious challenge to her authority, not looking down from up high. There might well have been a restrained heat deep within her, and its undercurrent could be felt keenly – hidden it was not, her face was cold, but it was no impassivity, but a vicious, willful kind of cold with an undercurrent of fire in her eyes:

"So what?"

There was nothing rushed or defensive in her voice.

Her authority asserted itself almost of its own accord and the implied threat was all in the slight blase edge in her voice: She left no doubt that she had no idea why she should take any time out of her day to even consider this objection, and that she ought to be convinced fast lest she decide that she had quite enough of her scarce and precious time being wasted.

So, Chalcedony thought it all the more urgent to try and make her understand, for all that all her experience told her to abandon such optimistic hopes, for Yellow Diamond had it in her power to stop these abominable things, and Chalcedony did not:

"In brief, these experiments, the ones with the remains of the dead- I believe that they are evil and they must be stopped. And I think that if you or my diamond had seen what transpired here today, you might feel the same…."

"...why?" she asked simply, with little more than a pointed glance, and there was silence all around.

She stood there next to unmoved, in all her deep dark shades of honey.

Her knowing indifference took the wind out of the Sail's of chalcedony, who found herself so very aware of how small she was in comparison, not just to Yellow Diamond but the incensed elite before her. Would Citrine even defend her if either of the two commanded her to seize her?

Yet even so, the command of the knowledge that fueled her objections was more pressing than anything in the towering monarch's daunting glare.

"It was aware. It had a will, and enough consciousness to realize what had been done to it…."

"Good." she replied, dark and unmoved. "Those were the shards of traitors and deviants, were they not?" and her full, opulent lips dripped with hate and disdain.

"Yes, they were traitors! And they were dead! They were dead and gone, shattered and extinguished! - Your Luminosity. Isn't that punishment enough? What need is there to torture them for all of eternity? Aren't we supposed to be better than them? Please, with all due respect, why on homeworld should we possibly do this?"

"Because they deserve it."

Chalcedony was beginning to sense that she was going up against a brick wall, and she didn't know how to break it, not without saying things that would surely get her bubbled or worse.

"That may be… but you're using shards that you just picked off the battlefield. How can you be sure that each and every shard came from a rebel? Some of them might have been your own gems, who have served you loyally for many centuries…!"

And as she said that, her mind was filled with thoughts of Citrine.

"Then they shall be grateful to serve me again."

"Please, your Luminosity… I must implore you." Chalcedony reiterated, and she was very much pleading now, and quite compromised in her dignified manner. "You cannot be serious. Could honestly say the same thing if it were yourself? If it were your shards? Would you honestly say that you would choose endless suffering?"

"For the sake of the empire? Yes. Yes, I would."

That shut her up better than any threat, punishment or reprimand could ever have managed?

What could Chalcedony possibly have said to that? She didn't even put up any further resistance; She simply excused herself, with a bow and a salute, and returned to her place to stand down, head bowed, face covered in her long azure hair.

...

"Like she would do that," Chalcedony would go on about later, brooding, affected, clearly bothered by what she could not keep from transpiring. "Like she would really, actually do that. She's just saying that, but I bet she wouldn't. If it were her, or anyone she cares about, she wouldn't want anyone to meddle with their broken, extinguished remains. But she thinks nothing of doing it to us…!

Aren't you scared? Doesn't it scare you what she's doing?"

"...desperate times call for desperate measures, " Citrine only said, but she said it with a certain ambivalence that she could not wholly suppress, something that seeped through in the way she was standing and in the way that the pupils of her amber eyes kept straying to their corners.

"Oh my stars," realized Chalcedony. "You actually believe it! You believe what she says!"

"...the reasons behind the are not for us to know or ponder. We're not Sapphires or Hematites."

But her comrade paid little mind to her uncomfortable diversion. To her, it was far besides the point: "You are scared of her! And It's because you believe her that you are scared."

"It is not bad for a leader to inspire a certain measure of fear."

But Chalcedony could not just accept this:

"What are we going to do? She's going to keep doing this. She'll keep doing this, and maybe worse still! What are we gonna do?"

"...as we're told."

….

And there were indeed not many other options open to them, not in the endless maelstrom of this war.

Before them were the rebels, who could not give up or relent since they had a great cause to fight for – and behind them came the Agates, employed in making sure that they would all fight to the last.

Chalcedony had lost the taste for fighting, but it took every drop of her strength just to protect her measly life.

She didn't have much will left to fight, but she very much didn't want to become a shambling shard zombie either.

Sometimes, she and Citrine would be deployed together. Sometimes, the enemies were fused. Sometimes, both of these things would even occur together, and Citrine, in her prudence, would deem it justified that they call forth Aventurine – a green Quartz fusion, with medium length hair, bulkier than Chalcedony but wearing something much like her armor but with blockier shapes that meshed better with Citrines taste. Oddly enough she had been noted to smile a lot in what brief times she would receive to show up on the battlefield.

As of late, Chalcedony often wondered if Citrine ever thought of Aventurine as more than a battle tactic – but to ask such a thing would have been the sort of anathema which Citrine would surely have rejected.

(vi.)

Yellow found Blue exactly where she'd left her -

Lying on her side, with her back against the wall, disheveled and sunken into the folds of her cloak.

Had she moved at all since she last came here, what was it, at the very last several days ago? Weeks maybe?

Yellow had too much to keep track off in the present and near future to concern herself with details of the past, but to come here after days on her feet and see this should finally over-strain her patience far past the boiling point.

There she was, cold and silent, secluded away like the rest of the world and the raging war outside these walls was none of her concern – when she got all apathetic like this, Yellow sometimes thought that she looked far too much like White in the worst possible ways.

Fists clenched, Yellow marched over to where Blue was, her furious eyes glowing in the dark of the gloomy chamber, till she knelt down where the windows had let some of the radiance from the full moon looming above, that empty, pale shell that had once been the site of Pink's palace.

"Blue. Look at me."

"Yellow, I-"

"Get up this instant and look me in the face!"

"But what is the matter?!"

"The matter, Blue, is that it's time that you pulled yourself together and came back to reality!

Yes, Pink is gone forever and there is absolutely nothing we can ever do about it, but we are still here. I'm still here! Right here before you!" and as she shouted, she brusquely grasped one of Blue's arms, pressing her palm against her own chest, right onto the sharp edges of her facets.

"See! I'm right here with you. I'm not going anywhere. I'm alive! Why isn't that good enough for you?! Why doesn't that matter?! Doesn't that mean anything to you at all?

And you. You're alive, too, and you will be for a long, long time, so why don't you try acting like it for once? I'm sick of seeing you just... waste away like that!

None of that is ever going to bring her back!"

"Neither will any of this fighting."

"Do you think she'd want this? To see us coming undone like that?"

"Do you think she'd want you destroying her planet? All of the gems and these creatures she was so fond of?"

"Well there's no way to know! She's gone, and never coming back, regardless of what either of us wants. We're going to have to accept that – it's no reason to let everything else go pieces along with her! What could possibly be gained by that?!"

"It's all about gains for you isn't it?" Blue responded, her voice as cold, quiet and sharp as Yellow's was heated, loud and blunt. "Now that she's gone, she's not useful. So you and White want us all to just stop caring, as if such a thing were possible at the push of a button... and maybe it is, for you. You'd like to act like Pink never even existed!"

"IF ONLY!" Yellow exclaimed, having evidently reached some sort of breaking point. The thought must have occurred to her many times, though she had never outright voiced it. "If ONLY there never was a Pink Diamond to begin with! If only White had never thought to make her!"

"How can you say that! How can you even think that!"

"Because there's no point, Blue! What was the point of ever having her made, if she was just going to get herself shattered like that-!"

By the time that the breaking of her voice kept her from speaking further, Yellow's anger had collapsed under its own weight, unmasking the desperation below.

So against all odds, it was Blue who ended up comforting her fellow Diamond in her arms that night, gently running one hand up and down her back.

Their argument was still unresolved, the sharp words that had been exchanged were still hanging thickly in the air, but for this fleeting instant, it did not seem to matter.

Yellow never cried, at least not of her own accord, but even just her overwhelmed, grief-stricken expression was shameful enough to her that she tried her best to avert her face from Blue's field of vision.

She ended up concealing her aspect in Blue's hair loop, touching her forehead against her gem. Unspoken words died behind her clenched teeth like, 'Please don't leave me' and 'I cannot bear it on my own' -

They were both at their limit.

VI .Plague (Boils The Screams of the Damned)

She is up to her neck in death.

Submerged in it, immersed, all but caked in colorful, glittering dust.

It followed her always, but never had she known in this intimately in all its gross and lurid details and its sinister sophistication.

Day and night, she does little but to think about death, to consider death and to look upon it, its shape, its sound, its meaning, it's very taste and its smell.

Death consumes each waking though, death chases her forward every time that her weary hands think to the relent.

In her desert laboratory, death hangs on the walls, deaths piles up in the hallways, and death is strewn across the floor.

Secluded away in the darkness, death is all she inhales, Death is in all her thoughts, her every words and each of her ardent, maddening daydreams.

The delved for knowledge in every discipline that she knew, and from all sides, she was met with Death.

…

As for her part, Peridot-Y73 had as of late gotten it into her head to concern herself with fusion, in the way that fusion concerned most homeworld gems: As a means to take various components and mash them together into something stronger.

In particular, it was the idea of fusing broken shards together that would not let go of her.

Yellow Diamond's concerns, however, different subtly, and not just because the objects of her focus tended to be somewhat more pragmatic, less talk of 'potential' or 'possibility' and rather concrete and salient applications in weaponry, for example.

In service of the unspoken dream that plagued her much like an invisible nail sticking out of her forehead, little treacherous rivulets of thoughts concocted all on their own that to make the impossible come true, it would not be enough to have the means to bid the extinguished shards to live – There would also need to be a way to put them back together.

But whatever the truth in the murky mists of her Diamond's mind, Y73 was allowed to proceed.

…

The crux of the plan, especially insofar as Yellow Diamond would admit to it, had always been to make use of the shards of the dead for the sake of economy, after all, they were a neverending resource, but if it had been so easy to utilize, the empire would have done it a long time ago.

The broken and the burnt out were by their very nature not very amenable to receiving life, courtesy of the damage that had caused the life they once had to leak out in the first place – to imbue it with new life, the procedures to do must be perfected, but before they could be perfect, it was sometimes necessary to test them on easier marks, such as the recently living.

The live test subjects were largely convicts, gems that had been condemned to be shattered anyway.

Carted into the belly of an enormous machine back at the desert laboratory, they awaited their doom, some of them rebels, some of them outcasts who had broken the social taboos of the homeworld and some, it must be said, being actual murderers and bandits and other sorts of criminals that any civilized society would have had to bring to justice, but that did not mean that they could have deserved what awaited them in that chamber.

Many of the death-marked wept, others were cruel and cynical even in their last moments, out of blackness of their hearts, or because they saw no other way to wrest even a little bit of control from their unkind fate, but even in this place of death, songs could be sung, and gems which so far had believed themselves to be hideous deviants found one last bit of comfort in the company of brave rebels that face death on their feet, speaking their truth one last time before their voices were put out forever.

Neither Yellow Diamond nor her hench-gems had very much mercy for them.

Her hate was blunt, her rage was blind, and they were the feed to gorge its gluttonous, saturnine jaws.

They ceased to be persons long before they were done screaming.

…

She keeps it in a vacuum-sealed vial suspended in an anti-gravity container, sealed as tightly as the technology of the day allowed for.

She never told Blue that she had had them unearthed from their designated resting place in the royal cathedral back on homeworld; If she did, it would probably break her for good. She spoke so long and frantically of all the glittering little fragments, eaten up by the doubt that the soldiers might not have collected them all, burning with feverish thoughts of her cold little glittering morsels stomped into the dirt by their boots, pressed down into the Earth.

There was nothing more that Yellow could do about those, but with her contraption, she had at least ensured that nothing more of her would ever be allowed to escape, not a tuft of single atoms -

Here they were sealed forever, her atoms in the dark.

Sometimes she lingers next to it as she passes by it to the door, and her eyes catch the sharp edges of the long magenta fragments.

She does not, however, talk to it, the way that Blue talks to her all the time, says her name all the times, in any and all places in which anything of her might be considered to linger.

Yellow knows that she is not here, and not in there either, yet, not right now.

She knew Death, all its intricate little secrets, all its clever mechanisms that made the complete recovery of all information completely impossible.

(But even if her futile endeavors could ever have succeeded, they would still have been in vain, because, though she did not know it, these were not Pink Diamond's shards. )

...

It was one of her fellow Citrines that contacted her about it, the young one who served often as her personal adjutant. She admired her Commander greatly and knew that she would dearly want to hear this, so she informed her, and did so in time for the elder quartz to make her way to a dirty corner of a small garrison where the latest casualties of this endless bitter war were laid out on thin mats.

And she had known what Chalcedony looked like without her armor, at times she had shifted out of it when they were forced to wade through territory that required lighter gear.

She knew her long, toned arms, her wide shoulders and her understated waist, but none of it could be seen right now.

What Citrine found before her was a mop of cable-like fibers, twisted a long way away from four limbs and a head, but the remains of her uniform made it tenable to guess just what had been what – but it was hard to miss her gem, cracked in half almost all the way through.

Citrine was certain that she recognized her. As soon as her footfalls had drawn close, the blue gem had tried to speak, though it was beyond her power to produce anything beyond hoarse, distorted croaks.

There was nothing to be done – The Citrine Commander knew exactly what comes next. In her years, she had lost very many cherished comrades to the ravages of the times. She had long known that days like this would come again.

"I'll avenge you!" she insisted, gripped by a haste she could not wholly explain. "I promise you that I'll make them pay for everything they did! Just wait here for me!"

And if Chalcedony had had the option of waiting, she surely would have, but of course, things did not work this way, and Citrine had known it.

When she turned on her heels toward the battlefield, she assured herself that there way so way to know if the strained noises behind her were a plea for her not to go, or if the twisted appendage bearing the cloudy blue gemstone was to be understood as a hand that was reaching for her.

Perhaps she had wanted to postpone the moment of acknowledging what she didn't want to be true, or maybe, her greatest fear had been to be here while it happened.

And if that was so, Citrine had not been brave enough to face it, and now, she would never get another chance.

By the time she got back from the front, they had reassigned the mat to someone else, and could only inform her that the shards had already been disposed of; In all likelihood, they had probably been carted off to the lab.

There was a lot about Chalcedony that Citrine never understood, and for the most part, she had been fine with it – but that was before she could be certain that she never would.

What did she mean, when she said that she was getting tired, that with the centuries, she had come to find her life dulled and faded?

There was nothing dulled about the pain that Citrine felt in that moment.

...

At last, they succeeded at coaxing a solid form of lights from the shards of the deceased – but the results were as fragmented as the broken remains themselves, naught but disembodied limbs or mangled clumps of light-flesh – and as soon as they had formed, they attacked everything in sight.

With the drone soldiers before them, it might have been debated how much awareness they had possessed, but with these now fully resurrected shards, there was no denying that they were in agony.

If some flickers of their past selves could beth glimpsed when they formed, they would be crying out in pain but produce only mangled screeches of unholy noise, and the piles of worm-like, wriggling limbs were aggressive without fail – Y73 theorized that they must be looking for the other parts of themselves; Insofar as they could be said to have a consciousness, all of it was filled up with nothing but the urge to be whole – every thought, every feeling, every reaction, intuition or instinct, every speck of awareness was naught but pain and distortion, groping hands and feet that sought for their missing pieces, but lacked the discernment to even recognize them even if they were all to be gathered in one place, but there wasn't currently much of a way to test that hypothesis, seeing as they did not know where most of the scattered little shards have come from – They would not have thought it beneath them to break a gem simply to find out, but even under the most controlled conditions there was no way to guarantee that they would be able to gather up all those minute little splinters.

There was no way that this method could ever be used to put a broken gem back the way it was.

There was no way that Yellow could have done this to Pink.

She would not be forcing the wheels of time backward today – all she was left with was a nest of crawling monsters which she would gladly turn loose upon the rebels.

(Right outside the Diamonds' shared chambers, the forest had now withered away completely.

Their misfortunes had outlasted it.)

---

A/N: I first took the room that YD and BD have their fight in to be some sort of general purpose prison but then a) The bubbles are all dark yellow b) apart from the one the CGs are in, they all contain cluster experiments. That's YD's personal laboratory complex. (Hence why our heroes didn't grab the Jades, they're in regular prison whilst YD put "Pink's friends" with her own stuff.)

We already knew she authorized it and she'd be just as guilty if her underlings did most the actual work - at this point the more interesting revelation would be that she dirtied her own hands there and ergo has some semblance of Mad Science Skills.

What I'm saying is I want from season 6 is for the 'sustainable gem production' subplot to cumulate in an episode where YD, Peridot and Pearl lock themselves in a lab to science the crap out of the matter. (presumably while Steven tries his best to ensure that they do not kill each other first) Bonus points if they use some old research journal of PD's, too. I can see it before me in glorious rambly detail, that could be a whole fic of its own...

Of course that said this whole necromancy affair is kind of where Yellow Diamond reaches Peak Villainy, so it's a salient moment point to dissect.

Like one interesting point of contrast between the Diamonds is like, how far did they each know they were villains? White clearly had absolutely no clue right up until the end which is why the realization hits her like a ton of bricks. One day she's 100% convinced that she knows what she's doing and the next, she's proven wrong, this little human is laughing at her, one of her 'daughters' is dead or at least permanently transformed and never coming back, and the other two are evidently too terrified of her to go near her even when she's a pitiful heap on the floor. If it were physically possible for her to die of humblement, she probably would have. That's what happens when you never question yourself, don't take other people's input and see virtues as immutable passive characteristics rather than attitudes to actively strive for: You wind up with zero self-awareness and no idea what you're doing. She's the most evil because she never considered that she could be wrong, so she doesn't make any active effort not to be. Meanwhile Blue is aligned with the side of lawful evil in the grand scheme of things, but when you take her out of her context she's a pretty good example of a deeply True Neutral character. Her motivation is almost entirely subjective/personal, she reflects the ideas of the society she was raised in and mostly just cares about being with her loved ones. If we're honest that's probably how it is with most ppl IRL, or at least it's a common, legit, relatable personality type, which is probably why she's commonly the most popular of the four, but also why there's some ppl who really don't like her because they read that as self-centered (I'm reminded of Gravity Falls where the immediate-surroundings-oriented character was the beloved fan favorite underdog whereas the big picture thinker contrast figure came in somewhat later and so HE was the one to get the backlash, I recall reading some fics even stating that no one could actually care about the big picture unless it was for showing off like ouch? – As with BD and YD the whole point between the pines brothers is that they have about equal amounts of dicey and likable traits, they're just different ones, though I suppose its that very difference that is likely to produce diverging personal taste reactions) If WD were running a bakery instead of an evil empire, Blue would be a pastry chef and probably have some snobbish opinions about the proper way to prepare a croissant. She's nice if she likes you and sadistic if she doesn't, and while she has some natural inclination toward mercy and evil doesn't feel good to her, you can't expect much sympathy if she subjectively thinks you're gross.

Yellow meanwile is almost in Necessary Evil/Byronic Hero/Greek Tragedy territory and manages this despite ticking all the boxes for 'evil overlord classic'. Half of what she says in CYM could be heroic in another context "We can't bend the rules just because we're in charge", "We must all make sacrifices for the greater good even when its unpleasant" etc. She knows that "it's an invasion", she even knows that White is a tyrannical control freak who takes her loyalty for granted, but she endures it out of duty – Like, she actually has moral fiber somewhere, or the potential for it, if she'd gotten her idea of what constitutes the greater good from someone other than WD. (The same can be said for Blue – making an exception for someone you like is kinda selfish and hypocritical but also very human – and at that point she had no idea what Steven's deal is nor did she understand why he and his friends live & believe as they do, but she was gonna let him go simply because "you were happier on earth"; Basically BD is loving but not virtuous whilst YD is virtuous but not per se loving and you can still pretty damn evil if you have one of those traits but not the other)

Of course the caveat with the Needs Of The Many is that "many" is an abstraction to help up think about multiple "ones" - of course its better to harm three people than five and letting the five die by inaction so you can tell yourself you didn't dirty your hands is just cowardly, but there's only so much you can ask from individuals before you've undermined the "greater good" you're trying to protect because you've lowered the overall quality of life...

But in all that one mustn't forget that she almost certainly racked up the greatest Death Toll of the three just because of all the conquering, done some of the most Objectively Awful Stuff and that she's got this really vindictive I-Want-that-Planet-To-Die kinda side to her which is kinda getting its moment here.

One might speculate that she eventually go to a point like "Yes, I'm evil! Deal with it!The world ain't fair. " and that if she must valiantly bear the suck, so must everyone else, though it would be sufficiently explained by stating that she just has the sort of personality type that may tend toward vindictiveness and destructive, counterproductive ideas of "justice" as something opposite to mercy.

I guess another thing I wanted to do with this one is to kinda continue the "team Evil Pov" thing and look into what some possible motivations and perspectives on the homeworld side of things might've been across the ranks etc. – we already got into that last time with Jasper's "True Believer" /"Collateral Damage" type of pov but that's probably not the only only one, hence the subplot with the random homeworld gems etc. I guess that in line with my earlier comments about which genre each part ended up being, part IV seems to have gone the way of the big budget war movie with all the gratuitous supporting cast, but a war is a big complex thing that would have to be told from many povs? IDK

Also in case you're wondering why the single most egregious "magical artifact" hasn't been mentioned yet, that's because it's due next chapter. The half of it that is already done probably contains some of my personal favorite scenes so far, though I have yet to get to the ones with the actual [redacted] and most of the 'action' scenes.

I'll be trying my best to type this up before the movie hits and josses everything...