{oOo}

The summons had been appreciated, as they arrived on Terra. The timing for it had been perfect, as she should have expected. She hadn't been able to bear to look at Fulgrim, not after that fiasco, not knowing that he would probably hate her.

Hm. It seems that the Emperor had reviewed her offer, and now agreed that the summoning rite would benefit him far more than it would endanger him.

How perfectly apt it was, now that she had felt the first pangs of rejection, by her lord.

And if Terra woke... Then she would not need to be here, to look after her lord's interests, would she? Her lord's father would have a mate capable of crushing any opponent and... he would be safe. He would not worry about her betrayal, would not view her as a serpent close to his chest.

She would be no Bile, nor Eidolon. She would, for once, hopefully, be able to redeem herself.

Redeem herself without spilling the blood of the innocent in conquest. And it's not as if it would have hurt Endymion anyway. Terra was hardly something he was closely connected to, not when he'd married the Moon's Princess and left his Home to live with her.

A win- win situation. For everyone. And if the ritual went badly, and she lost too much blood, or was mauled, then it would hurt less than this aching feeling in her chest.

She presented herself as ordered, ritual blade sheathed in a belt around her hips, white gown simple, medieval. Something her ancestors would've worn, to do ceremonies for the Great Mother.

...And then it was night, under the moon and she bent, to write the runes in blood, hers and others. A circle for protection. Runes to call. And the blood itself, with the corpses, for bait.

The runes, carved into her own skin, a second summoning; recognition.

She raised her voice once more in the songs of her ancestors, and hoped.

Beryl was in Pain. Horrible pain. Fully deserving of the capital letter.

The blood dripped from the sigils carved into her right arm's skin and yet she chanted on unceasing, uncaring, as the light grew blinding and she heard the agonized screams of rage and pain that she'd been expecting.

…She used telekinesis to throw the Xeno corpses into the circle, one after the other. There were many hundreds of thousands harvested by Ruin available for this enterprise and yet she was still unsure if it was enough.

The corpses were torn to pieces, pureed into gore and turned into chlorophyll and other such biological matter within moments.

And yet Beryl still kept throwing them in, knowing that she had to cut off the edge of the Embodied Eldritch Being's anger and hunger down before she could even begin speaking.

Beryl was...young. Had been young, she had been about the age of the Prince. She only knew the Queen as the tender of the garden of Elysium, of the Golden Kingdom. She hadn't thought of the outside with it's vicious beasts. She was a cultivated flower of the garden, she never knew the side of the Queen which had indulged in the germ. It should have been obvious in retrospect, it was now. She knew now, she knew other things now. This planet had been dead, it must be driving her mad. She was the Queen of man and all the beasts of the field; of the field itself. Beryl knelt to her, ignoring the throbbing pain.

"My queen, My mother, I bid thee welcome. Here stands a man, Emperor, born of your flesh, who claims dominion over the whole of thee."

The Emperor observed the woman Beryl called "mother" with interest. Her form was pleasing to the eye, though she was obviously weak, but it was not what interested him. It was her mind, her way of thinking that he found pleasing.

True, it was still oddly fragmented, not entirely there, but it was based on principles much like his own. It was easy to simply draw conclusions from "survival of the fittest" (which was not entirely correct, for it should be "survival of adapted best to the environment"—and even this was misleading) and see how a unit was only a part of a greater whole.

She had power, too. It was directed at a particular skill set, not like his, but it seemed that as she grew stronger in body, so would her power. He had been warned she would be weak now, but if this was weak…

He smiled to himself—her power would be very useful.

{oOo}