Part IV: Absorption (Act V: "The Days of Rage")
"There are no more lines left to cross
Everything that I have in common with the uncontrollable and sick, the mean and evil
Everything bad that I have caused,
and my total indifference towards it
I have now surpassed
My pain is unchanging and intense
And I don't hope for a better world for anyone's sake
I even wish for my pain to be inflicted on others as well
I want no one to escape
But even after I admit this there is no catharsis
My punishment still eludes me
And I don't come to any deeper insight about myself
No new knowledge can be extracted from my account
This confession was completely meaningless"
"But even after I admit this there is no catharsis
this confession was completely meaningless"
- from Nachtmahr's 'Katharsis' -i took the liberty of translating it. Srsly this artist has got to be the best thing to come out of Austria since Mozartkugeln and I say that as a passionate lover of marzipan
...
In Yellow Diamond's mind, the Earth had proven to be a maw that devours; A conquerors' graveyard.
It was not just the rebels or the patina of organic life, those viscous, oozing membrane-pockets of assorted salty slimes and caustic liquids, but, it seems, the very elements composing the world itself – It was the seas that ate away at the shores sand the torrential rains of the slick wet atmosphere;
Whenever she approached her desert laboratory from the nearby warp pad, she felt its cutting wind, every force and mechanism that dissolved, eroded and wore away at walls and boulders, the omnipresent moisture corroding solid metals that made even the vacuum of space look hospitable by comparison.
Inside the walls, each day at her workbench confirmed what she had known long ago, the reason she had shot those mad hopes down as soon as they occurred to her. It was neither unusual nor unexpected, and yet she felt the sting, the awareness that no matter what horrors she created, or what holes her abominations might tear in the rebel's defenses, none of it would bring Pink Diamond back.
At times, even her rage threatened to desert her, to ebb away into a numb and formal feeling that propelled her along from day to day.
The casualty reports kept coming in; For the first hundred years, she'd barely flinched at them, they were inconveniences at first – Her soldiers had been created to be used, and if it weren't for that purpose, they would never have existed in the first place. They were to be sacrificed to serve the grand purpose, to lay claim to victory, except that the fights had ground to a standstill, a persistent battle of attrition, and really, there ought to have been no way for the rebels to hold the line, not that small force against the brunt of an empire, but the empire's very size demanded for its forces to be stretched out to all its borders; After almost half a million years of aggressive expansion, they were surrounded by enemies all around, though she had not been around for the whole of it. But in her time, she had contributed more to the bloating of its boundaries than any other individual gem save perhaps for White Diamond herself.
Once or twice, she had forgotten to pat the sparkling dust off of her gloves and jacket.
Her Pearl blanched considerable when she came out the laboratory doors, hard pressed for a sufficiently respectful way to bring that particular lapse to her attention.
At least once, she had simply not bothered with it and showed up to the war council quite deliberately with her hands covered in fine glitter. Peridot-Y73 was about the only one not visibly disturbed, but no one else dared to speak up as they were none too keen for their own shards to be next.
Whenever she had a batch of rebel prisoners brought to the laboratory, they would know at a glance what sort of grisly fate awaited them.
It was a different matter whenever she managed to make her way back to base, though even this was becoming more a chore than anything else.
Most of the gems that worked there had come to avoid the west wing unless they were specifically assigned there to wait on their masters or as part of the security detail, and even essential personnel only came as close as they were ordered to be; After all, their mistress hardly ever asked for anything these days, and the psychic static alone should have repelled any possible intruders.
Even for Yellow Diamond, it was like wading through the depths of a dark, murky ocean with its weight and pressure coming down on her from all sides.
She put up her shields like she had practiced many times, held onto the intensity of her thoughts, kept repeating to herself who and where she was and what she had come to do, and in that manner, she was at least able to proceed, though she was furiously wiping the liquid from her face before long.
She too had come from that same, oppressive dark that would allow for nothing else to exist.
She felt the wails in her mind before she physically heard them; They filled the surrounding space like ripples in a liquid.
It appeared to be a particularly bad day, and at this point, she was tempted to roll her eyes. Of course she wanted to support Blue, that's what she had been doing all of these years; But she also had work to do, and she knew, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, that her fellow Diamond was making a commotion and a liability of herself. From any objective sort of standpoint, she was being positively ridiculous.
She wouldn't say it, but she thought it.
She felt a weary repulsion, and little else.
Sure, she wanted to protect her, she understood her pain perhaps better than anyone else, but that was dry and distant factual knowledge in that moment, something she told herself, and present in her awareness was instead the disgusted voice of White Diamond in the act of scorning weakness, ingrained in her early memories.
Even so, she forced herself inside that room.
Outside the windows, the rainfalls had dissolved the ashes into a sludge.
Immediately, she was assailed by a dark hooded figure who had decided to dispense with her usual reserved restraint, and threw herself onto her visitor like she could not have stood on her own.
Yellow Diamond meant to pull away after what would have constituted a greeting, but she soon realized that she was the only one holding up both their considerable weights, and that her companion had dissolved into desperate sobs as soon as her long fingers got a hold of the fabric of her jacket, as if she had only just barely contained herself for long enough to walk into her arms.
Being this close to her, in that state, was downright suffocating.
The thunderstorm outside illuminated their faces for one harrowed snapshot.
"I just can't go on anymore! I just can't take it! What for?!" To the backdrop of the deluge outside, the words blurred into each other, the accent and coloration of her voice unmitigated by her usual tactful restraint. She was speaking half through her nose. "Why wasn't it me? I've been here for longer than I could take, and Pink was so new… she actually liked being here. Oh if I could have gone in her place… This is too much! She didn't deserve this! I can't go on-!"
What to tell her? To pull herself together, for the sake of duty and all those who still depended on her? She would not want to hear that. That wasn't about what would be right for Blue, but only about what Yellow herself wanted. They both knew that their lives had never belonged to themselves. So what for? What reasons were there left to continue?
For the other good things in the world? For what they might yet encounter in some hypothetical future? Like what?
What joy was there in their existence?
There was a purpose to it, and importance and a need for them, but there was no joy.
Duty was all that Yellow had to offer; It was what had sustained her so far, but centuries of arguing that it ought to do the trick for Blue as well had not brought it any closer to being enough for her.
Eventually, she led Blue to the couch and sat down with her, surrendering her right arm to her grasp, and never letting go, unmoving and numbed-out like a boulder on the shoreline, the silent eye in the center of her tempest.
Blue went on again about how Pink's shards had looked, the ravaged splinters, and the old question as to whether all of them had been gathered up, and how she would have longed to have been at her side before all her light had gone out.
What did she expect? Pink had been shattered. She looked dead because she was dead.
Even if she had been there, Blue wouldn't have accomplished anything. At least, Yellow reasoned, it must have been fast. She couldn't have lingered – most likely, she was gone the instant the sword went through her, before she even knew what happened to her. Just from the pattern of the pieces, that was the most likely conclusion. If anything could have been done, her attendants would have done it the moment they caught up with her.
Besides, it was very much a hit-and-run attack, Rose Quartz would have had to make it quick to escape from the entourage, there would have been no time to satisfy whatever sadistic whims she might have had.
In time, Blue was sufficiently talked down that she made a token effort to restrain her aura to a point. As of late Yellow was beginning to feel that she was not so much keeping her company as she making sure to keep her appeased and contained.
Under the terrible weight of this current, dreadful reality, even the bond that had been the only constant in their long, long lives was becoming frayed like a load-bearing rope.
But at the same time, Yellow thought back to their last confrontation with Pink,
No doubt just a temporary spat that would have been quickly resolved if it hadn't been for Pink's demise; Blue barely seemed to remember it, and seemed cruel to bring it back to her attention. But where she had all but blocked it out, Yellow couldn't quite keep her thoughts from their unhelpful habit of trailing in its direction; She thought of all their arguments, and where she might have done well to be firmer, or perhaps to make more time for her amid the loads of her work; She always assumed that there would be more time later.
Pink had accused her of being unfeeling. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps that was what this world demanded, perhaps, she thought, as she once more cleared the fluids from her eyes, annoyed and at war with her own understated frustration, it was not altogether wrong that at least someone had disrupted the whole proceedings of soldiering onward. It felt like Pink's disappearance should matter; If she was honest with herself, she believed this no less than Blue did, though she had perhaps directed that belief into different channels -
but she could not in good conscience wish for more time to be wasted, more disruptions, or for more work to go unaddressed.
Soon she would have to go out there and skim over the latest casualty report.
(vii.)
The first time that 'Rose Quartz' had come to this particular human settlement, it had been a simple matter of idle curiosity.
She had observed from afar at first, intrigued and confused by what was undeniably an early form of civilization that would be crushed in its infancy if the invasion were left to continue.
Beyond that, she did not understand them very much at first and it would be a long time before she dared to speak to them, unsure of the unspoken conventions and foreign concepts that they mentioned to each other.
Eventually, circumstance forced her hand; When she first came into their dwellings, it was with the others, to warn them of coming dangers – but for that, they were grateful, and it was only a matter of time until one of them invited her to participate in their rites.
She returned often, not seldom by herself and certainly more often than the others, with no other purpose than simply to be here and observe them as they went about their lives, trying to learn what they knew.
She felt that despite their often difficult lives that were not yet supported by advanced technology, they must know nothing which her kind did not, without even trying – The beauty of a world yet unspoiled by the authority.
To one like her, it must be paradise, as strange and foreign as paradise must be to a serpent.
So that's what this place became – her very own garden of earthly delight, where none of them knew what she was and where she could, for a moment, forget that she had ever come to be, more thoroughly even than she could with the rebels, and she would not mind, if it truly had been possible to forget what she was; She should have considered herself very blessed if she could have erased everything she had ever been and life here as one of them until the last of her days.
Homeworld's warped designs had never touched this place, none of it bore the taint of White Diamond – it was truly the life that exists for itself – and the more she grew to admire them, the more she realized the wretchedness of her own kind, and of herself in particular.
Though she tried her best to learn and participate and do everything exactly as they would, she always stood out. She could never truly be a member of their tribe, a resident of their villages or a citizen of their citystates, just as she could never be a normal, average gem back at the rebel camp.
– It was the same everywhere she went.
She'd want nothing more than to fit in with the others as just another one of their number, but she would always stand apart from them and somehow, just by existing, wind up as the recipient of misplaced adulation – yes, she had sworn to fight for them, perhaps even saved them, but that was the least she should be doing.
She had never meant to set herself up as their leader, but someone had to and that someone would be hunted like no one else – figures that the loyalist side wouldn't understand that some gems might want to fight for the freedom and justice they had always deserved. In their eyes, it had to be because somebody told them, because that's why they did everything they did.
She knew better than anyone that she had done nothing special at all – it was all them. The very fact that they'd respond like that to any glimmer of kindness and appreciation only proved how badly homeworld had wronged them...
And yet, they'd look at her like she was somehow above them, and shake her awake from her dream, reminding her of how far below them she truly was, how far from grace and light, what a pitiful fraud, a fake, pale imitation amid their vibrant vigor, father and father away even as she stood right admits them.
Always, she had to hide herself if she wanted to have any hope of being accepted, but in the process, she would inevitably create a gulf of her own making, but even so, it would never occur to her that this gap between them might perhaps have been bridged if she revealed her whole truth, but how could she do that when the truth was so terrible? The mask that was once a welcome escape had become just another tiresome role to play, a prison she had learned to love when she stepped into it of her own choosing to escape the other prison that had been thrust upon her since she came to be.
Back on homeworld, she had often felt out of place, like she would never find her place in the daunting monstrous clockwork that was their society – now that her time there was only a distant memory many centuries away, only now, having reshaped herself on this foreign soil, did she finally feel like she truly belonged with her wicked kin, and far from being the relief she had sometimes imagined it to be when she was young and knew nothing, it was the most hopeless feeling that a creature like her could hope to be capable of.
But of course, the humans had no means of knowing that.
Sure, they might thank her for protecting their dwellings or confuse her for some mythical being, but they were not her followers; She would start out as just another unusual event in their lives.
They did not know from whence she came, they could not fathom what she truly was and if they did, they would do well to be repulsed – but she had made herself smaller and softer in their image, imitating some of the robes she had seen on their visits when she chose her own gown, dulled her bright colors and made her hard-light construct fleshy and pliant to the touch –
So perhaps it should not have been surprising when the first of them made their advances to her. She must have worn her mask faithfully, and performed her role well, much like she had with Pearl.
Sure, she was excited; Sometimes she would speak of nothing else even after she returned to her base. No matter how many years passed, her eyes would shine like on the first day. In her numerous years on this world, even throughout the centuries of the war, she loved many of them, and each of them, in her eyes, was a blessed, unique being, their lives more interesting, their unique personal worlds more captivating than anything else in the universe, their time all the more precious and vibrant for its brief, ephemeral duration – She would be grieved when their time came to an end, or when their lives simply passed hers by like an old weathered statue, and though the heart she did not have weighed heavy every time she found a new admirer, knowing how it would end, but that it but it never stopped her from becoming captivated anew.
There would be many, many, many of them, sometimes more than one at once, and for each one, she could have gone on for hours about how special, fun and interesting they were -
What she didn't say was how dull she felt in comparison.
When you were empty, it was so easy to be filled by anything.
What else was there to think, talk or dream about?
None of her dreams were her own – and she felt that somewhere, somehow, despite everything, there was a part of her that had never been moved at all, for all that she wanted to be moved.
Of course, she had observed their ways for a long time before actually participating. She had some idea of how it was supposed to work, what she was supposed to and say in order to take part in this, but at the same time, she wasn't sure if she ever understood.
Sometimes, she did things wrong, and someone would be offended or put-off, and she wouldn't really know why, and in moments like these she would be forced to confront how little she knew at all. Sometimes she'd get back, and she wouldn't know what to make of the way Pearl was acting thinking until she realized far too late that she seemed to be mad about something though she insisted again and again that she wasn't, and she'd just be confused with no one to turn to – forget the humans, even with her own closest friends and confidantes she often didn't know what she was doing.
She wanted to take part, to feel as they felt, but how would she know if she ever really did? In the end, she wasn't like them – she wasn't even like Garnet or Pearl.
Had she ever truly learned anything, or was she just acting like she thought someone like that might act?
Sure, she might look like one of them, she might even mimic what they expected her to act like, hoping that with time, she would understand and some of their virtue might finally seep inside of her, but what if it never did?
Sometimes, in her darkest dimmest moments, she wondered if that's what it was like for White Diamond on the occasions that she had bothered to act like she was capable of anything resembling motherly affection for her creations, her superficial see-through veneer that did little to conceal the gaping emptiness within, or her searing radiance that destroyed everything -
Like in the tale of the crafty chiseler who fell in love with the statue of his own making, she had to hold out for the futile hope that maybe one day, a real goddess of love would bring her cold granite-flesh to life, but alas, no blue fairy came down from the skies to turn her into a real person.
VII. Plague (Hail The Cursed Paint)
Then came a day on which Blue Diamond was markedly not absent from the planning meeting, and so used were Yellow Diamond and the war council to her absence that they responded to the sight of her enormous looming outline as if they had seen a ghost.
She appeared out of the darkness of the large hall, (to her, a simple corridor) like a plume made of midnight blue darkness, her long skirts and cloak trailing close to the ground like an enveloping curse only to rise into the inverse teardrop of her hooded, wrapped up silhouette, all the more indistinct for all its dark colors.
The only things to stand out in the dark was the deep lustrous glimmer of her gem, and the pale strands of stringy hair that could be glimpsed beyond her hood.
She moved through the room like an oppressive shadow, and even the bravest and hardiest of the onlookers found their light and vigor diminished as she passed them and unfolded with relief when she chose to settle in a corner, only pausing briefly to summon her crystal throne and retreat into one of its corners, drawing the folds of her veil closely around her – and yet, her presence lay heavy on all of the room.
Tiny by comparison, her Pearl had followed behind her and arranged herself decoratively next to her seat, taking care to take a reputable distance from the trail of her master's dress which spilled over the ground like a lazy puddle beyond her feet.
She had made herself a scarce sight in those days, but to comment on it outright would have been a definite breach of propriety which no one was eager to risk.
Yellow Diamond alone might have been afforded the privilege of staring, and not for long would she allow her worn features to betray the contents of her mind.
If she had, it should have been plain that she was the most surprised of all.
She had met with her earlier that day, it must be said, her companion of untold ages, and thinking back now, she couldn't recall the slightest indication that she had been doing any better.
She'd left Blue staring out at the crumbled, washed-out remains the dead woods, unchanged though the view was not. But if her whims and moods had led her to seclude herself from all sights, why should the same whims not propel her into motion? She was beginning to have about her the look of someone so used to enduring pain that she no longer hesitated to push herself on through it; It had become her new normal, the best she could hope to attain – though Yellow Diamond would not have been sufficiently familiar with the concept of an old crone to think of that comparison.
Even bent and slouching, the veiled lady was a fey and terrible creature, and even her pain seemed to take so much room and importance that it left none for anyone else, even when she was not particularly focused on taking it up.
In an icy voice, she inquired after the latest developments of the war.
None but Y73 had in in them to respond, since the only going-ons that she really perceived or gave much heed to were those inside her mind, and one couldn't have said that Blue Diamond was all to impressed with her dry narration full of technical detail, showing signs of animation only when she turned to rave about purely theoretical questions, but eventually, the great ruler got the gist of it, summarized it in her own weighty words and a grasping motion of her long, thin fingers, a holistic, intuitive sort of understanding underpinned by a single guiding image rather than intricate branches of words and formulas.
Leave it to her then to call forth evil spirits -
But not with a host of technicians and deep machine-vaults.
Almost immediately, she commanded the Peridot to be silent, and beckoned her foremost Turquoise to her, and the Sapphire, for good measure.
But set to work they did.
Far from the underground complexes of the desert laboratory, she set her signs on the arches and towers of an arcane acropolis that was built in the early days, when the earth was but a remote outpost not yet marked for colonization; It was indeed just a millennium or so after the first explorer-ships had landed – It was covered from the spire-tops to the foundations in all the old sigils, and in it were piles of folios, codices and artifacts that were older still, predating even what had been known as Era I.
By now, it's slender columns had themselves become remnants of the splendor of bygone ages, wistfully looked upon like a hidden elf village in the woods.
Other Turquoises had worked there many years ago.
It had been ruined and abandoned for centuries then, but had the colony been completed, it would have come to be a mage-forge, a place of knowledge and power.
It had been built in an auspicious place, not something as vague or imprecise as a 'crossing of ley lines', but battered as it was, the architecture of the facility was designed to bundle and enhance the amenities of its location, and there were wards in place to serve as a kind of isolation for rituals of great power – and in the middle of the war, homeworld's forces could not hope to scout out or create a better site to carry out their plans.
When Turquoise and her subordinates walked in, they did not bother to put the scattered contents of the towers' many shelves back in their places. Apart from a few basic tests to ensure that that which the conditions that had come for was still in place, the ruin was left as a ruin, and ruined further still, uncaringly reshaped from what was once a place of beauty meant to last untold ages and serve many purposes, to a cannibalized heap of spare-parts for a single purpose.
Elegant Stone walls were quarried for their rock and precious marble, and intricate circles of hermetic symbols began to cover everything, emanating in some strict, important pattern from the very particular circular room that had been chosen as the primary site for the rituals.
No one but a handful of blue court elites really knew the rhymes or reasons behind every single glyph, or how the glistering symbols were connected with whatever real physical effects were trying to evoke, but before long, there would always be a small guard of Turquoises minding the central conjuration circle – The foremost among them, however, busied herself with the raw material that she meant to use, retreating behind a forest of alchemical instruments and contraptions in one of the highest remaining towers.
The exact process was without doubt very complicated and extremely delicate – there were strict orders that neither she nor her subordinates should be interrupted while they worked and most certainly not startled out of the trances that they would descend in for what, at least for observers of any younger civilizations, would have been indistinguishable from spell-casting, for fear of volatile reactions -
But still, the gist of it was this: In went processed shards from the desert laboratory, and out came amphorae of thick paint of unnatural brightness.
From this alone one could deduce that somewhere along the way, the reanimated shards must have been ground into fine dust, undead as they were, and then, the dust had come to serve as a pigment, mixed with some sort of solvent or emulgator, probably no preservatives but possibly something to fixate the colors into the paint, though there was little way for an outsider to guess what special magical measures might have been called for by the unholy nature of the pigment.
The paints were eerie to look upon even in their pots, the neon shades too bright, as if some subtle, uncanny light still inhabited them:
Dead and extinguished they had been, but once called back, the wandering lost souls would never rest again, not even with their vessels ground up into morsels, not while they retained even the slightest whisp of energy. Not much remained in each of the near-microscopic specks that colored the paste-like material, but the process to procure it from exposure to light was so basic and so fundamental to the living crystals' finer structures that it persisted even now, much like for an organic creature, the mechanism of cell division was so ancient and ingrained that it would keep going even if a cell were too damaged to maintain its allotted function.
After a handful of ugly mishaps, the servants of the mage gems learned to keep the pots in the darkness and to open them only as briefly as possible whenever that became strictly necessary, lest what lies within be excited all too prematurely:
Something like a purified distillation of ill-will, a drought that exuded wispy fumes of the fathomless and unbearable, black in its nature though not in its color.
But its time would surely come, and so would be the additional energy to replenish and awaken the unquiet remainders of its own.
None of the mixture left the Arcane Acropolis in its original state; Instead, the elites of the ruined library would have it brought into the round hall so that they may refine it further, to ensure that the particles of shattered lives were truly bonded to the paint so that the dark presence inside it would not fade with time – it was, in effect, a curse: Eternal torment refined.
If such a thing like a demon or an evil spirit had not existed before, it did now.
And it had been deliberately made to exist.
However, the deed was not wholly done with this: The result needed to be activated and primed, like a bloodhound must be shown the scent it was due to chase.
In practice, this required a considerable psionic imprint, a stronger mind that would pull at the remnants of being inside the cursed paint, overwhelm any remaining flickers of consciousness with its own thoughts and impress new direction and purpose onto those faint glimmers, in brief, to fashion the restless dead souls that had been preserved in the parchment into a loaded, weapon.
Blue Diamond primed the first dozen prototypes herself, but the thought to labor away in what was, in pragmatic terms, ultimately a refinery full of volatile materials, did not even cross her thought.
As soon as a proof of concept had been established, she ordered for more of them to be made, and clapped her hands together, thereby indicating to her Pearl that her Palanquin was to be fetched.
This left the task of mass-producing the evil symbols to the only gem on Earth (besides the Diamonds) who possessed sufficient psychic power: White Diamond's Magnesite. She obeyed without a thought, right as protocol demanded. If she had any objections to the task, she kept them to herself – if anything she rather seemed to see its serious importance and, if at all, spoke largely about vanquishing the rebels.
Like clockwork, she completed an astonishingly regular quantity per day. Every seven days, she would pause for a few hours and sink herself into profound meditation in order to better regain her strength.
The parchment scrolls were dropped over the forests like leaflets at wartime, but instead of counterarguments to the rebel cause, they contained death.
The patters were mesmerizing, drawing all attention as if with a subtle, beckoning call, and even looking at one for too long could leave you with a splitting gem-ache, if you were among the target objects of its artificial ire; Even being near one, you might run the risk of being kept awake by diffuse whispers which, if you somehow defied them by managing a moment's rest, would surely worm their way into your dreams, and near it, all fortunes would seem to twist themselves toward dark outcomes.
Anything bearing the image of one would become a conduit to its long, destructive arms through various subtle electromagnetic entanglements, but it was the physical paint itself that was the most dangerous, for in it resided a shadowy presence that would take over anything it could find if it were given the chance, taking on the power and immunity of whatever it happened to possess – It was everything the twitching shards and shambling drones had been, but honed to a cruel perfection; Every single one like the great beast of hollow trees and rotten leaves that had brought the earlier experiments to a halt, and much more precise in their aim.
Anything that could have rebelled against their masters, any remaining semblance of life and individuality had been stamped out; There was only rage itself, responding to their master's call like an inductive current.
Hundreds of thousands were dispersed over the treetops, each of them a vicious threat all on their own.
Here at last was a threat which the rebels could not bring down with one decisive strike – much like landmines, they would remain a persistent threat through the latter years of the war, and even in the years long after the last remaining crystal gems would spend ages picking them out of the mucks.
Many a story about goblins or the living dead might have been sparked by some ancient human's encounter with the last of the stragglers.
Each one was a trap that could spring at any moment, roused from its dormancy by the nearby presence of living light, often resulting in ugly surprises when the rebels had only just thought themselves safe after a narrow escape- a treacherous attrition tactic that whittled away at their forces from unexpected directions…
And they were freakishly hard to destroy. There was nothing left to break in the shades that sprung from the parchments, and they often contaminated what they touched, dead forest creatures included. There was nothing to poof, either. It was like fighting a hollow void, or at most, fine air. Even conventional bubbles could not hold them safely.
At last, even Rose Quartz was left with no recourse but to burn them one by one.
Containing them, besides being impossible, would have been far too dangerous; In order to protect what still remained of the Earth and her friends, she had no choice but to kill it with fire.
Not that there would have been much left to spare. Sometimes, the others almost managed to convince her that it was basically like pulling the plug on a patient whose brain was not only dead but pretty much physically leaking out of their skull, though Pearl was almost the most horrified of all – and Garnet, for her part, saved her anger for the loyalist commanders.
In the latter days of the war, the steady yet unpredictable confrontations with stray parchments were a frequent, grim reminder of the grisly fates that would await them if they should fall into enemy hands; More than once, Rose and her company were caught in a dire spot and she would have to talk down some desperate recruit who was considering to shatter herself thoroughly before the legions of hmeworld got to them. Along with Garnet and Pearl, she led most of them safely back to base, but not always all of them, and on such occasions, their eyes would unbidden go to the flocks of bubbles filling their hideouts, the desecrated shards that were, to the best of their knowledge, every bit as lost.
After the war, they would inexorably force them to contend with the possibility that they could do nothing more for any of their comrades, that, by keeping them restrained, they were only postponing the inevitable – they could certainly interrupt the course of their suffering, but if they would never regain consciousness again, if their thoughts never ever progressed beyond the moment they had been placed in those bubbles, it was the same as being shattered.
There was nothing they could do – the damage was done, and rained down upon the woods, fields and deserts like seeds of apocalypse.
Sure, they might venture a shot at taking down the facility where they were being produced, but that would do precious little to round out the many parchments that were scattered to the winds, essentially sinister mines or forgotten warheads that would sleep in the depths and forgotten corners for many years to come, and quite possibly for untold ages unless something or someone were unfortunate enough to disturb them by chance.
Of course it could be assumed that the elements would eventually corrode them, but wether that would do away with the undead gem dust inside them or merely disperse it into more insidious shapes was yet to be determined. Eventually, at least a lack of exposure to light would surely extinguish them, or at least, render them as quiescent as they would be in a bubble, hopefully to disappear in the ground forever and not to be preserved as a ticking timebomb until they were touched by the strange daylight of distant ages, but since their just-barely-life likely required a much sparser supply of energy than a living sparkling gem it may take a long time indeed for any such dormancy to set in – just think of all the processes of life that were no longer taking up energy, no thinking, no projecting a form, no moving, unless there was something nearby for them to attack, insatiable hunger drove them forward, a primitive craving for light and crystal, though it could not ever have made them whole, not even if these only vaguely amalgams were to somehow find their old pieces.
The first time the Crystal Gems would witness a zombie movie, they would not especially enjoy it, save for Amethyst, who would still take decades to find out what exactly had set the others so on edge.
But that day was yet to come, and as it stood, the rebels wondered if they should ever see the future at all.
Taking out the place where the parchments were manufactures would only mean so much in the great scheme of things; The worst of it was done, all they could hope to win was some measure of respite, a few meager months of time in which homeworld's supply lines would be somewhat knocked back, a transient blink of an eye really, until the loyalists either set up a second facility somewhere else or produced their next devilish invention.
As far as victories went, even the best they could hope for would be transient, sour and phyrric, but that did not mean that homeworld wasn't resolved to make them earn their throne of rubble, and pay for it dearly, too – There was no ending to the price that their former masters would exact for the unspeakable crime of wanting to choose their own fates. And yes, to prevent even just a few more gems from that grisly fate should have been reward enough, it was reason enough – but what a prize, what a triumph, just to make sure that their fallen comrades stay dead.
But not even the most definite, cathartic triumph, or the most poetic justice visited upon everyone involved would have meant anything; None of it would undo what had been done to the gems that had been ground up into pigment. They had life, but like energy that had dissipated into heat, it was meaningless in this form.
So Rose Quartz was forced to do what she had always avoided on the pain of death, even in the most hopeless, gnarled cases, precisely that which she had sacrificed everything to avoid:
When they took the refinery, she had the whole facility's worth of paint destroyed.
(
"I got a communique from White!" Yellow announced one day, as she marched into the room and threw herself onto the couch, swinging one leg over the other.
The room seemed larger now, with all the jungle burnt away – what was once a cozy, enclosed clearing now admitted the light from all directions, like a stage marked by spotlights.
The play, meanwhile, progressed to its next act:
"Ah, did she?" Blue asked weakly, her voice distant, her form a huddled mass covered in her gowns and cloak, leaning on the couch with her back, against it but not on it.
This passed for one of her better days by now; She had brought some of the battle plans with her, her underlings' designs were beside her in a neat stack. They were conferring with each other, with some distant resemblance to how things used to be.
"What did she say?"
"She's asking what's taking so long. I think she's getting impatient."
"Do you think she's mad what we've used her Magnesite without asking her?"
Then, a sudden motion.
A forward start, a shifting of her weight.
"Yellow, look!"
The large Amber gem did not immediately catch what her companion meant, not even after she had raised her arm to point.
Whatever it was did not jump out at her sight right away, and so she grew irritated with it before she even knew what it was.
She caught it eventually though:
A tiny sprout of fresh green, springing forth between beams of petrified wood.
It was an impossibly small thing, too tiny for a being of their size to properly touch -
Yet words could not describe the mountain-sized feelings that went through their shapes when the two of them saw it.
It was a feeble transient thing, perhaps soon due to be poisoned by the hostile environment it had arisen from, but none of that seemed to matter.
It wasn't even about this little plant, per se; It's leaves, still light in their green and half rolled-up, were merely the last drop before the barel spilled over, and at the same time a stand in for so many things...
As soon as she spotted it, Yellow Diamond averted her eyes.
Contrary to what one might believe, she did not go to stomp it out, or snap her fingers to smite it with her lightning – What would be the point?
More of them were soon to follow.
)
As far as the ordinary, non-fused shard experiments went, neither Rose Quartz nor anyone else would ever find the means to reverse the arrow of time upon them, for all that she would later attempt to treat them with modified bubbles.
But in her labors, she would take note of how the drone soldiers with their imperfect bodies of light, and even the nigh-immaterial paint-shades had been able to control, meld with and even assimilate assorted material – even organic matter, to even innervate it with their light circuits like their own body.
Perhaps, she mused, it might be proof that gems and organics were not so opposite or incompatible after all, that maybe they could coexist -
They would have to hope so, for they were now alone on this strange world.
Pearl of course reminded her that this was only possible because the fragments were so broken down, because they'd lost any sort of identity; Their sense of self as it once was was thoroughly overwritten, along with any means of telling what was part of them, and what was not.
Garnet instead remarked, thoughtfully as well as grimly, that Rose alone would be able to find any sort of silver lining in those horrors.
And perhaps she was actually good at finding them, but for the most part, she was seeking them out of desperation.
VIII. Plague (Locusts The Hourglass of Time)
"But what if it is possible?"
"We don't know that, Blue. That research was abandoned ages ago, long before our time even. White thought it was too dangerous."
"White never had a reason to pursue it beyond that point, at least not back then…
But what if it were possible, Yellow?" and her eyes shone with a strange light, her voice had a strange tone too it, too warm, too consumed with a happiness that she couldn't believe, though no smile could have looked quite right anymore on the worn lines of her face.
Yellow knew that she ought to know better and tell her so, get her feet back on the ground, remind her of what was reality and what was now unattainable, but could she do so with right? Had she not been tempted by the same impossible dream, whose voice still sang in the back of her mind even now, after her own methods had proven unsuitable?
She was supposed to be the reasonable one, it was a burden she had always assumed, for there was little else for her to be. But there was also a part of her that was willing to be lulled into the thought that, if anyone could do it, it would have been Blue.
"But what if it were possible?" her voice said, long since seduced by the mere imagination. "If we could see her again… If we could make it so that none of this rebellion ever happened..."
"There's no telling what will happen," Yellow resisted, though she knew somewhere that the fight was long lost. "If Pink's shattering never happens, then why did we go back? Why did we even create the timeglass in the first place? We could cancel out our entire timeline, including you and I. We'd just be gone, like we never existed… Everything would be. Everything that we're supposed to be responsible for-"
"And in its place would be a new world, a different one, a world with Pink in it. There'd be a different you, and a different me, and she would be with them..."
"And we'd be none the wiser… How do we know that we haven't tried to do it already, and failed too many times to count? It's not just a matter of magic Blue, it's physics. If White finds out..."
"Let her. She should be all for it, and if she isn't then I don't care. I don't care what the consequences are. I don't care what happens to me, or anyone else, because if this is reality, then I don't want it."
"You know this is madness, Blue?"
"Not at all." She looked into her companion's eyes with a strange, fierce look of determination, "It's the first clear thought I had since I've been lost in this haze… since Pink was taken from us."
Yellow Diamond was wholly against it. She didn't like it one bit. Everything inside of her was in revolt, all her reason screamed and how irresponsible an act that would be.
If anyone else had come to her with such an inane proposal, she would hear nothing of it; But as it would appear, this is where her reason ended, and though age-old crusts of warnings swarmed about her mind in White Diamond's voice, cutting sharper now that the evidence of their truth was before her, for Blue, she would do anything, even if it meant to close the door on the confines of sanity behind her.
But if Yellow Diamond were to allow such a dangerous thing to exist in this world, then she would not dare to neglect taking ample precautions, and so, elaborate plans were drawn up to keep the mad dream that they sought out of enemy hands.
Thus began the construction of an impregnable facility at the ocean floor, as painstakingly prepared as the arcane procedures that would take place within.
It would only be accessed every 100 years and it was set up so that any false move would leave everyone inside to the crushing pressure of the waters above.
But no chain was stronger than its weakest link.
Since they could not avoid the slightest hint of sloppiness, Blue and Yellow Diamond had pushed aside their pride and assigned any necessary supply runs to a trio of gems that could be relied upon to conduct them with unparalleled clinical precision: Grey Agate, Magnesite and Anthracite.
If news of what they were doing made it back to White Diamond, she did not care to object – perhaps she had already foreseen that their endeavors would not amount to much.
Magnesite was to remain down there at all times, as her skills were of great use to the experiments there, and her prowess unparalleled.
This, however, wasn't common knowledge, not in the least because Anthracite and Grey Agate had been tasked with the security themselves – they would personally manage the supply ship that visited the secret time travel laboratory every one-hundred years.
But no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
As it befits a gem of high status in her Diamond's good graces, Grey Agate owned a Pearl. In fact, she'd owed quite a bunch of them over the years, as she was wont to replace them every few thousand years to keep up with the changed fashions, the way a human teenager at the cusp of the 21st century might have sought to procure a new smartphone every couple of years.
But there was an important difference between pearls and smartphones: The latter don't ever fear for their lives.
When the small servant gem turned up at the doorstep of a rebel base, she still believed the crystal gems to be a horde of traitorous deviants, and fully expected to be forced into some bizzare fusion-orgy as an initiation rite – but she didn't fear it as much as she did the prospect of being harvested and replaced, so in exchange for her measly little life, she offered up every bit of classified knowledge at the feet of the terrifying renegade who had inspired her flight.
…
As the water rushed in all around them, the homeworld Sapphire stood perfectly still.
"How could this happen!" Turquoise snapped, all poise and superiority gone in the face of death. Instead, the witch-gem screeched with indignity like an angry bird of prey: "Didn't you see it coming?!"
"I did."
"Then why didn't you say anything!"
"I saw that it wouldn't have changed anything."
"...you…how could you just - how can you just stand there, we need to escape!"
"There will be no escape. You and I will be shattered here. We were always going to be shattered here, right from the moment we emerged. I have known this as long, long time now."
"And we're just supposed to accept this?!"
"I'm sorry, Turquoise B89. Of all the futures I foresaw, this one is the least bad…. Whether the timeglass had been used by friend or foe, the result would have been a calamity that neither of us would have wanted… nor even the rebels. Like this, it will become lost to time for thousands of years, until some strange creature will come across it in some distant age..."
"But… we're elites of the homeworld…!" Turquoise stammered in disbelief. The long, indefinite future she had always expected to have closed itself up before her mind's eyes. She had always fancied herself wise, for like this Sapphire, she had existed so that others may turn to her for her wisdom, and lower-ranked gems had often praised its wisdom by default. But now that she herself needed a solution for her questions, she realized that she had only ever been consulted for a narrow range of subjects; Her own query was wholly beyond her experience and all she could find to cling-to were the flat, general phrases she had been told so often:
"We're supposed to be important… we're meant to be special… Do you honestly mean to tell me that we were always coming here? That not a single decision we have taken in our lives mattered at all?!"
"Precisely. That is correct. How could they possibly matter? Our paths were set up for us from the moments we emerged, our decisions informed by our purpose. On every crossroads, we must choose that which most benefits the order of the empire, and taking any other choice would have meant to deviate from that, to become like these rebels. So there was never really any choice at all. Our purpose was always preordained."
Turquiose had heard this too many to count, but now, just as her service neared its end, she found herself questioning if she ever truly understood it. She thought of Magnesite, how her ever-stoic face had split open into a wide leer of Euphoria just before her gem was broken upon the gauntlets of the rebel fusion who had predicted her moves faster than Magnesite herself could read her mind, gleeful in the knowledge that she would be dying in White Diamond's service.
Any other opponent would have been helplessly lost opposite her telepathy, but this entirely new being whom their makers had never anticipated proved able to match her every blow…
Turqoise herself had called forth all manner of magic to oppose her foes, enchanted lighting, piercing ice and sacred blue flame, and her alchemic touched had reduced her foes' light bodies wherever she had grabbed hold of them – Had she scored a hit on either of their gems, their lives would have been forfeit, but all she had accomplished with this was to draw the attention of Rose Quartz herself, whom she could never have hoped to defeat.
The mage gem knew that she should have nothing to regret – if Saphire was right, then they had done all that they could for the empire. Victory was simply not possible – they were heroes, martyrs, model citizens.
But Turquoise couldn't find it in herself to rejoice. She could not, would not accept it.
She howled in impotent rage, as the small Sapphire beside her calmly awaited oblivion.
…
Sapphire's prediction of doom made no mention of Tanzanite because she was not included among the ranks of those marked for doom.
For as far as the little mystic had been able to look, Tanzanite would live.
Perhaps it was sheer luck, or simply because she was a gem meant for battle, but somehow, she escaped the imploding facility intact, so that her gem was washed onto the shores of a small nowhere-island, and under the beckoning warm light of the tropical sun, she soon came to and reformed, alighting yet again under this unfamiliar sky.
But her fate was as sealed as that of the others who were no longer around to change theirs – with the facility lost, and her defeat at the hands of a mere Pearl, there was no way that Tanzanite could ever have shown her gem to the Diamonds ever again, not unless she returned with the rebel leader's shards in hand.
That clarity didn't fill her with fear, only grim acceptance.
She would be hunting for Rose Quartz on the surface until the very end of the war.
But as she never reported back, she was, at last, counted among the dead. Turquoise, Sapphire, Magnesite, Gray Agate… Half of the war council, all wiped out in an instant.
Anthracite, however, did not die. She would survive the war, return home, and go on to serve in her role for many years to come, unpunished for any wrongdoing.
She lived because her poofed gem had remained behind on Grey Agate's supply ship, which the rebels had later used to escape. They put her in a bubble and threw her into the shrubs with gusto once they surfaced from the bottom of the sea, leaving her to return to the loyalist forces in disgrace – but unlike Tanzanite, she was in no danger; no one would have expected the small administrator gem to fight, let alone win – she'd probably be in bigger trouble if she had fought.
But though this could have been marked down as a victory, the Crystal Gem's faces were somber as they climbed out of the stole ship, Rose Quartz' most of all.
"I couldn't save them..." she mumbled, in what many in her forces would have taken to be an uncharacteristic moment of discomposure. "I tried to help, I tried to talk to them, to get them to come with us – but they wouldn't listen..."
"You are more patient than most of us", Garnet said sternly. "But not everyone deserves that patience. You gave them a choice, that means they choose to serve the Diamonds of their own free will."
"But they were doing what they thought they were supposed to… just like all of us did, before we came to Earth. If we'd never come here… if we'd never met each other… That could have been us."
Though her friends might have thought her to be some sort of unique anormally who had started it all, she had no delusions to the contrary.
(viii.)
"I'm sorry, Yellow." Blue said one day, when Yellow least expected it, somewhere at the peak of a particularly bad week.
Yellow had been in the room for a good while at that point, quite immersed in her work, and far past harboring any hope of getting much conversation out of her fellow Diamond, so she couldn't say what might have brought this on, other than the simple, obvious conclusion that Blue must have felt like it needed saying.
Her voice broke the silence without warning, from the sunken dark crumpled heap that she had allowed herself to become, quiet and piteously faint, yet impossible to miss in the gaping worn silence that had made its home between them, a moment of painful, crystal-clear self-awareness amid the ever-mounting haze.
And down at this very same bottom, Yellow's response was no less sober, replying with the sort of boiled-out honesty one would expect to find at the end of all things: "What for?"
"Like you even need to ask..." Yellow could hear Blue's tearful anguished forced smile, though it was concealed from her view.
"I know that I haven't been much help lately… I tried, I really tried to make an effort, but I know that it's not really enough to count in the end..."
Something about this simple acknowledgment hit Yellow in a way that further silence or hysterics could not have, deep inside where she hadn't known that there was anything left to break, but break it did, most imperceptibly and with nary a sound, and if Blue had not occupied her continued focus, who knows what she might have done.
It's as if her very consciousness rejected every single atom of this reality with enough force to catapult itself right out, if only there had been anywhere else to go, but there wasn't, not for her, she could not afford that luxury even as every part of her wanted only to turn and run.
And belatedly, she asked the same question that Blue had been asking for as long as Yellow had been running from it:
Just how did things end up like this?
How had the world they'd known and mastered turn into this waking hell?
But no matter how many times she turned it over in her mind, the only conclusion that the facts at hand allowed was that the fault was not in their stars, but in themselves.
Bent forward by the crushing heat of realization, its thundering tones replaying what was by now a familiar memory, even her elbows shook the table as they caught her enormous frame, and between gritted teeth, she pressed form the poisonous thought "It's me who should be apologizing..."
If she hadn't caved to Pink's demands, if she hadn't picked this particular planet, if only she'd done everything as White said-
For one endless moment, she thought herself unseen in this tract of her personal hell, until a voice broke into her awareness -
"Yellow, please come over here..."
It was Blue, of course, for who else could it have been, but there was a different quality to her voice at this moment, something almost like determination, when she insistently called for her fellow Diamond's presence – and though even that surge of will was not enough for her to pick herself off the ground, there was a ghost of her old, compelling presence, to which Yellow devoutly obliged, kneeling down beside her and supporting her against her own frame as she helped her into a sitting position, all the while knowing full well that nothing was stopping her from accomplishing that on her own – and yet, it was Blue who, quite deliberately, reached out a hand to cup her companion's face, making a point of looking her straight in her eyes, an afterimage of her old veneer of authority, not quite as sharply as her subjects would have felt it, but perhaps not unlike what Pink might have gotten to see when it was her turn to be scolded.
"Yellow, " she began, wording it as firmly as she could manage, "When was the last time you stopped working, even for a moment?"
"What does it matter?" She retorted, first defensively but then averting her eyes, her guard pierced by Blue's expert fingertips, though they could not quench the understated rage she carried with her under the surface: "I have to make the rebels pay for what they did to Pink. Isn't that what you want? Won't that make you feel better?"
"I'd like nothing more than that.. but... please understand... I know that I must have strained your patience quite a bit... and maybe I haven't been able to be there for your as much as I should have... Since Pink has been gone, this just doesn't seem to be the same universe anymore. When she was taken from us, I think there was a part of me that followed her to wherever she has gone... And to be honest, I don't feel like that version of me is ever coming back..."
Yellow's face tensed up under her palm, as surely as if the pain Blue was describing were her own, devastated to hear what she had long since suspected –
"However! However, none of that is your fault. There is nothing in this world that could possibly make this alright, even though I know how hard you've been trying to find such a thing... and that you've been doing it for all of us. You always did have a strong sense of duty...
But even you can't be responsible for everything.
I'm sorry for what I said that other time. It's not that you're not 'good enough' for me. It's just that there's nothing in this world that could possibly replace Pink. It's impossible. It's not your fault that you can't do the impossible.
But please, please understand...", she dared to say, she had the nerve to say, looking like she did, as this pale unkempt shade of the adamant queen she used to be, "You can't be replaced either, Yellow. Not to me. So please, look after yourself...
I... I couldn't possibly lose you as well-!"
And in that thought, they were united.
It was only through tens of thousands of years of practice that Yellow Diamond suppressed the urge to scream.
She was hard as a monument in Blue's arms, her body taut with tension, a coiled, electrified spring of static in a floppy willow-branch embrace, and thought some minutes passed, no part of her softened.
Blue held her as surely as she could, for as long as her momentum would propel her inert mass, but eventually, she slipped off in resignation.
Yellow did not even notice the languid motion of her hand half-reaching after her as she marched out the door at a deadened, mechanical pace, like some sort of statue or automaton – but once the door closed behind her, her steps very much quickened, until the smaller gems in their various little rooms would hear her thundering steps through the walls, making a beeline for her laboratory.
She was so angry that it hurt; She felt such hate that she didn't understand why it hadn't snapped her back in two by now; The rage should be blowing out of her temples; By all means, she ought to have choked on her own loathing a long, long time ago.
IX. Plague (Darkness The Cluster)
So here then would the seed of darkness at last bear its ugliest fruit.
For many years, Yellow Diamond tried so hard to keep herself untouched, to be the strong one when no one else would be, the very ideal of unbreakable Diamond, she alone unmarred in her unyielding adamant perfection;
But she would never be that and she should have known it all along.
She wasn't untouched, she had never been untouchable, she knew she was a failure from the day she had emerged.
Scorned, unwanted, unloved-
White had often scolded her for her brash temper and her lingering sentimentality and on this day, she could no longer deny it.
Yes they got to her. The rebels got her and they damn well touched her.
They did to her that which she could not undo and took from her that which she could not replace.
Fine!
They were persistent, she had to grant them that, after all, they had their reasons for fighting; That beloved leader of theirs, and this lump of dirt.
They might not think so, but Yellow Diamond used to have something to fight for as well, through all her battles, something that had sustained her, the sole light in her endless bitter darkness.
And that light was broken on the soils of the earth now, it was gone from the extinguished shards of Pink, it had vanished from the hollowed eyes of Blue, it was locked away on homeworld behind the high walls of White's chambers.
They got her, but they would not live to laugh about it!
She would get them too.
She would take whatever it was they cherished, for whatever mad reason, and she would make sure that they did not get away with it.
Rose Quartz was ever so fond of her henchgems, so preoccupied, always, with keeping them in peak condition, with preserving life, except for that one time that she wasn't.
Fine! She should have life! She should have her fallen comrades; They should stay with her right here on earth, they should finally be made to do the work they were created for, whether they liked to or not. The Rebels liked fusing, right?
They should have fusion!
But whatever may become of this war, hopeless unwinnable or not, they should not have this accursed planet, oh no.
She would tell the Peridots – and herself, in her more temperate moments when she still needed to cling to her pride – that this was a blueprint for a novel type of geoweapon, but in her heart of hearts she no longer cared about 'potential' or 'resources';
She would not have suffered this planet to live for whole galaxies' worth of resources; Most of all, she would not suffer Rose Quartz to keep it, and rather than let her keep it, she would rather that no one could have it.
If she could not take it by force, if her quartzes and topazes could not win it, then it must die!
It must break, and burst, and all on it must wither, the rebels, Rose Quartz, the organics, flung out into the vacuum like trapped frozen rag dolls, burst apart like little sticks, once they thought themselves safe, even when no one left alive would even know what was happening until the ground came apart beneath them.
Perhaps she couldn't win.
But neither would anybody else.
(Rose Quartz would never find out.
She never knew that the stalemate that had cost her so dearly was but a temporary respite, though she had bought it so dearly at the price of everything she ever had, and anything she ever hoped for.
When she disappeared from this world, it was because she had accepted that she had tried her best and done her penance, and that this was as far as it would go.
Though she wouldn't say it, she had no more hope that her fallen comrades could be saved – and neither did she suspect that she was abandoning her comrades at the cusp of a new disaster. )
(ix.)
But the bottom line is that thermodynamics knows no mercy.
The universe would not excuse a perpentuum mobile, not even for the luminous majesty that was Yellow Diamond.
Her titles meant nothing to the merciless particles that made up her body, not enough to even make them flinch when they at last stopped her in her tracks.
Her endurance and power far exceeded that of any ordinary gem, let alone an organic being, but that did not mean that they were without end – her capabilities were vast, and, had she been pushed into a life-or-death situation, she might even have been able to continue on her feet for much longer, but in the quiet, lightless dark of her personal laboratory, those very same instincts of survival would have pulled her in a very different direction.
When she was, at last, forced to lie down, she had long since forfeited the luxury of picking the time and place. She was long past the point where the exhaustion was indistinguishable from pain, having passed it years, if not decades in the past.
She shook the contraptions on her workbench when she just barely managed to hang onto it with her gloved hands, and at that point, the only choice she had left was to set her weight down on its surface and put her face with the foul things she was wont to keep there, unless she would prefer the floor.
At this point, she'd spent ages tired enough that she sometimes saw the world spinning before her eyes, having only endured so long by keeping herself in state of constant activity.
Sometimes she felt like everyone had scorned and abandoned her.
Sometimes she felt like she might break apart from the force of her own feelings.
And then sometimes, she found herself resenting everything she was so desperately trying to protect.
Now at last, she could finally take no more.
Oh how her fault lines ached!
She was sure she could feel every single light circuit in her physical form – everything burned, and all the pain she had pushed to the edge of her perception washed over her like a tidal wave as she was force to lie here and take it, one hand massaging the bridge of her nose, another placed over her gemstone, which, beneath her fingers, had come to be ever so slightly warm to the touch – the universal telltale sign that one form of energy was being converted to another, and a reminder of the inefficient imperfection of almost all earthly things, and she found herself considering how any known material in the universe would eventually collapse into a black hole if only you applied enough pressure. Her thoughts went in strange directions, for at this point, they were almost dreams, or nightmares perhaps – Even black holes were not immune to dissipating into capricious, bothersome heat, nothing but the spread of chaos across the boundaries of all order, and for one horrible moment of awareness, it occurred to her that all her labors might have been futile.
This war had been raging on for over one-thousand years, and it had proven very, very costly, sapping troops and resources which they would otherwise have invested in conquering further worlds – they had fallen behind the curve, stumbled in their once unrelenting pace, and abstained from greater acquisitions to avoid a two-front war, and as a result, they were now faced with one of the direst resource shortages in the history of the empire.
Perhaps these hapless calamities had only exposed the precarious equilibrium that had been sustaining their civilization all along. If this kept up, they might be driven to the brink within the next ten-thousand years even if they were to redouble their efforts to grow new soldiers, but they'd need fertile soils just to replace the ones they'd lost in what had long since become a war of attrition.
Yellow was doing all that she could to hold this empire together, even if it meant that she had to maintain its vast, spanning territories it all by herself, but through she tried her best to erase that thought from consciousness so that she might continue working, deep down she knew that she had failed in her purpose.
Slowly but surely, she could feel the weight of the world slipping from her grasp -
So for the first time since the shattering of Pink Diamond, almost a millennium removed from that fateful day, Yellow Diamond cried entirely of her own accord, yes, 'cried', not 'wept' or 'shed tears' or any other pretty word suggestive of something solemn or dignified, for it was an ugly, piteous spectacle of various messy fluids, and the most wretched, ghastly sound with all the beauty of a freshly swatted fly.
On and on she whined, blubbered, sniveled, and moaned, from grief, from pain, from misery, from a lifetime of scorn and neglect and guilt as weighty as neutron star matter, or just from sheer, pitiful exhaustion, eons' worth of calcified emotional filth bursting forth at long last, like pus from a festering blister, thoroughly bemoaning her cursed and baleful fate.
Yellow Diamond was defeated.
Rose Quartz had defeated her, in every single way that a gem could defeat another.
All and for once, she had proven to posterity which of them was stronger.
Perhaps, her victory had been certain from the very moment that she had dared to strike at the very heart of the Diamond Authority.
(x.)
As soon as they saw White Diamond's head ship, Yellow and Blue knew exactly what it meant.
Her patience had ran out.
A/N:
The crux of this arc was always going to be the contrast between YD's and BD's "Day Jobs" as Evil Overlords and their "Everyday lives" and the interconnected escalation in both. That's kind of where the meat is really at with these characters.
Maybe at this point it's also more apparent why I decided to put the intermission where it is, to sort of establish the mental space that WD is at during the chapters she's not directly participating in.