Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your Creatures,

Especially Brother Sun…

Praised be You, my Lord,

Through Sister Moon and the stars…

Through Brother Wind…

Through Sister Water…

Through Brother Fire…

Through Mother Earth…

Through Sister Death, from whom no living man can escape.

-Francis of Assisi-

Her current name was a bit odd, really. Conte di Cavour would have made more sense if she was in Sardinia (sans Piedmont) but in the Two Sicilies? Her namesake wasn't Garibaldi himself, the one who had led the Redshirts on a rampage through the country, and Cavour and Garibaldi couldn't stand each other, but being named after one of the Risorgimento's architects after the Italian state dissolved was a special irony.

There were rumors floating around that she was to be renamed Cardinale Ruffo, in honor of the man who had thrown the French occupiers and their loathsome puppet state out of Naples, but nothing had come of them so far. She remained Conte. Cesare, of course, had no issues with her name, and neither did Leonardo…

(Dante, poor Dante, scuttled before the Syndicalists could get their hands on her, sailing alone to the rocky shoals of Mount Purgatory.)

Something as inconsequential as her name did not impact her duty, and all such navel-gazing did was distract her from it. It was almost time for her swordsmanship drills, which were, despite the modern age and its weapons, quite important. The weapons she and other shipgirls bore tended to have remarkable abilities, in the same way that the cubes instilled mundane ships with remarkable power. Her sword wasn't sentient though,'just' capable of cutting through steel like butter. She did have to dial it back a bit for her poor human opponents.

Without indulging in excess pride, she thought herself one of the country's finer swordsmen. Leo had her mechanisms, Cesare exercised with the soldiers (and outperformed them) and Cavour had the sword. She would be sent officers who actually knew how to use the sabers at their hips, and they would be swiftly disarmed before she taught them.

Cultivating her own rivals in swordsmanship was perhaps a bit strange, but encouraging people to grow was always good. She just had to ignore the officer's disbelieving looks- it wasn't her fault she had been spawned with that blasted skirt/short shorts combination! Well, she supposed her clothes were better than Leonardo's…

After that, there was the more conventional training for fighting at sea. No normal humans could help them with that. She sparred with Giulio and Leo in the coastal waters of the Tyrrhenian, and she learned how to work with them so that they came as a maelstrom of destruction and not three separate battleships. They had to be the best they possibly could to defend their homes, after all.

Life in Naples, and occasionally Rome, was lived in the long shadow of French syndicalism. The unions had snaked their way down the peninsula, and the king's forces cracked down on the fasci at home. But the land wasn't their area to worry about, barring any unfortunate fortresses or strongholds too close to the sea. They were the righteous defenders of the sea, of the Two Sicilies and the holy city of Rome itself. The Papacy had no Navy, after all, so the Regina Marina would pick up the slack.

Cesare had loved her visit to Rome, of course, seeing the very city where her namesake had walked… and been murdered, but that wasn't as important. It wasn't a pleasure that Leonardo or Cavour got to enjoy, considering that Vinci and Turin both sat well inside Syndicalist territory. (She supposed there was Sardinia, the Savoyard court who survived and their famed Shroud, but it didn't feel like visiting the Piedmont would, she thought.)

Perhaps that was part of her issue. She didn't know what a marvel a unified Italy was until it was taken from her, until borders and politics kept her away. Sure, visiting Venice and Lombardy as part of a goodwill trip was nice, but what was Italy without Tuscany? Without Genoa, without Turin, without Assisi?

Well, perhaps that was a very small item on the list, in the grand scheme of things. Perugia was bigger, more important economically, but Assisi…

Both Francis and Catherine of Siena spent their lives in parts of Italy now thoroughly Syndicalist. The patrons of Italy…

Cavour and the other shipgirls posed a lot of theological questions, apparently. Not quite as many as whatever was going on with the French state in exile, but still quite a few. Were they rational beings, as men were? Cavour thought so, of course, but she phrased it a bit less abrasively than Leo and Giulio did when asked.

Shipgirls…. Well, they said something about the human condition, although people seemed to disagree about what. Perhaps it was fitting that amid the madness of the Great War and the senseless violence, man discovered that his willpower in its purest, crystalized form was best directed towards violence. There was no other known use for cubes. And perhaps that was the whole of it. They were idols of man's own creation, like the war deities of Roman fame, war made flesh.

But for all her practice with the sword and cannon, for as much as her duty meant to her, she thought there was something more. After an outfit change, she had walked through the Vatican, saw the Sistine Chapel in all its splendor. It was the past, the fruits of an Italy long consigned to the history books, but there was something forward-looking about it as well.

There was something immortal in those halls, passion and fire as fresh as they were when first inflicted on the marble. She knew she was an aging battleship, she knew that guns grew bigger and armor thicker. Time galloped on, heedless, eating up ships.

Yet she remembered her Dante's lectures about her namesake's poetry, and especially her passionate love of Paradiso. At the very end of that poem, Dante (the original) described God as a sort of threefold circle- with some strange, if theologically significant imagery of rainbows and fires- but despite the strangeness of his journey so far, Dante found something stranger, something more shocking, in the middle of that circle.

How could the Love that moved the cosmos, that plotted the paths of the stars and pulled the sun along its journey… how could the thing at its center, the beloved, the apple of God's eye, how could it be the human face? How absurd, that the eye of God focused on lowly man, loved him, and died for him.

Dante loved that part. During the worst parts of the war, she thought of their creators and smiled. "Humans can't be that bad, really. They wrote this, didn't they?" Cavour wasn't sure if she would quite call it romantic, but Dante had the strongest feeling for people out of all of them.

And how had men treated the Dante who curled up with poetry, who loved like her namesake and taught like Virgil? The woman who looked like Beatrice borne again? They killed her and sunk her to the bottom rather than letting her live another day in the hands of someone else, their jealous natures more vicious than any foe Dante had ever faced. She never hurt anyone!

Thinking about Dante for too long always got her like this, but Cavour would keep on doing it- however inglorious it may have felt, forgetting Dante would be a thousand times worse. She could almost imagine her, chiding Cavour like an older sister. "Tesorino, don't get caught in the mire of the past. There's a beautiful future for you!"

She wondered how that future would look if she seized it. Her namesake had taken all of Italy for the sake of the Savoyards, and while she didn't think herself quite as ambitious as that… Cesare had a paramour, someone who thought her muscles and stamina were attractive and unbecoming…

Cavour and da Vinci weren't quite like Cesare, though. You didn't need a measuring stick to figure that one out, all you needed was eyes. That proved a bit of an obstacle.

Well, that was a bit reductive, actually. There was more to life than romance. At times, she liked to think that she loved her crew, loved them the sort of way that Dante had loved her, or perhaps she loved them as a mother loved children that she fretted over. Even with Italy in its divided state, she was to be a protector, a defender of something greater than herself.

That she had a future at all was something to be grateful for. The Great War had been an apocalypse like in John's Revelation, dissolving all the ties that held the old world together, leaving them scrambling to reconstitute themselves. It wasn't hard to imagine why the Syndicalists had risen up, why novels and poems and art were all so confused. The whole world was knocked off kilter. The old order was dead.

Perhaps that was why she wanted to visit Assisi. While the Saint was famed for his preaching to the birds and his poverty, he had found something outside of war. He had left the battlefield behind for something more than senseless violence. Cavour knew her duty and found pleasure in victory, but if the last few years had shown them anything, victory could be bitter in the mouth and poison in the stomach.

Austria teetered on their throne, the Germans had burned themselves out completely, and the Ottomans struggled with dragging their sickly empire into the modern age. There was no security there, just the promise that they could follow England and France and Russia.

What a joke, that modern warfare could make losers of the victors as well.

She shook her head. It was a beautiful day, and the birds soared with the wind above. Leonardo lay against a tree with her notepad, attempting to replicate the grace of the bird in flight. Cavour laid her sword against the trunk and sat down next to Leonardo, watching them fly through an impossibly blue sky.

"It's beautiful."

"Isn't it?" Her sister laughed. "Look at how they whirl! What I wouldn't give for a catapult…"

They raced across the sky, free. Without cages to keep them, without borders to halt them. One circled down from the heights, coming to rest on a branch above them. Leo giggled and got to drawing finer details as the bird opened its mouth and warbled.

On some intellectual level, she understood it was probably a mating cry or something similar, a perfectly rational behavior for an animal that behaved by its own rules. Well, not rational in the sense that it had a mind. Perhaps instinctual. There was nothing that made the sound any different from the howl of the wolf in the night, the fish forcing itself upstream, than the goat succumbing to the base instincts of a heat.

Yet she could not help but hear it as a song of thanksgiving, of praise. Of gladness for being alive, for the verdant land below and the blue sky above, warm sun and gentle glowing moon, for the world it had the tremendous fortune to be borne into. Without human complexities- and discounting predators- it was a world worth singing over.

(It was the world Dante loved, and it was magnificent.)