August 4th, 1926 – Moskva Blast Site
PAIN.
It shouldn't be able to feel pain, and it doesn't, not truly, not like a thing spawned by the long processes of biological accretion and natural selection would need to in order to stay alive long enough to propagate its genes. But if there is a word that can describe what its myriad senses transmit back to its intellect, that would be it.
In the timeless aeons of its existence, never has it been wounded so. In one single moment, entire sub-sections of its being have been obliterated, removed from existence so completely not a trace of them remains.
Internal diagnostics run, and come to an inevitable conclusion, which is sent to its damaged, fractured mind. It is not destroyed, but the damage is great. Too great. Its ability to complete its purpose has been compromised. Its self-repair routines have been disabled, and it does not have the data required to ascertain whether they can be brought back online. It is leaking ichor and strength, growing weaker with every passing moment – no longer is it timeless, no longer is it eternal.
It screams. It shrieks. It roars. Meaningless signals, the output of ruined systems. No longer does it send instructions to its agents, those few of them which remain. The ability to do so is one of the many things it has lost : now they blindly follow the last orders they received, or the instincts embedded into their very being.
A slave-spark rises, throwing a mantle of star-stuff around itself and wielding a blade of the same.
It extends what little remains of its achronal perceptions toward the being, and learns its truth.
It is the enemy. It is the source of the anomalies, of the weapons scavenged by the slave-sparks. It has been altered, changed, modified beyond the parameters allowed to the slave-sparks. It should not exist, yet it does. Such a transgression should be reported to its makers, but it cannot contact them, not now, not in its broken state, not when they have been silent and unresponsive for so long as it slumbered.
If it is to be able to recover and resume the pursuit of its purpose, the star-spark must be destroyed. Even its extinction does not guarantee its survival : its knowledge of its own damage is too incomplete. But as long as it exists, the chances of success are so minimal as to be non-existent.
It does not feel anger, nor does it feel spite. It was not made to feel these things, and its makers did not feel them either, for they are mortal emotions, the result of unforeseen behaviors arising within the slave-sparks.
But if it could feel such things, it most certainly would feel them now.
Before the men of the Party came to his village, Andrei was a woodsman, like his father before him, and his grandfather before that.
The men of the Party told the villagers that the old Tzar was dead, and that they were all free now. Free to give their food to the State so that it could manage it for the greater good of all; free to pay homage to the words of the Party in a way they hadn't ever needed to do for those of the Tzar; free to have their strongest men volunteer to join the glorious Federation Army to defend the People from dissidents and foreign adversaries.
Andrei isn't educated, but he isn't an idiot. He saw what happened to those who questioned their orders, so he kept his mouth shut and did as he was told, to avoid being shot by the Commissars, or worse, have them punish his village for his disobedience. It has caused him many sleepless nights, haunted by visions of what he did in service to the State, but he cannot find it in himself to regret it, even though he knows it probably means his damnation.
There is no State anymore, however, no Party, no great chain stretching across Russy and binding its people to distant masters. And once again, Andrei wields a woodman's axe, but this one is larger than anything he could've lifted before becoming a Okhotnik. But like the rest of his cursed kinsmen, Andrei has grown a lot since what others call the Solstice Event, but which he and his comrades simply call the Howling. He wasn't small before, but now he towers over his unchanged countrymen, well past two meters high. It does mean that the only clothes that fit him anymore are the hastily woven uniform the logistics arm threw together for the Okhotniks, but that hardly matters. His skin is armor enough.
The sigils carved into his flesh burn, hotter than ever before. They protect him from the Dark Mother, shield him from its hateful voice even as it screams its pain and hate after the Imperial's superweapon fires at it and turns the defiled corpse of Moskva to ash. Despite the danger, Andrei had to cover his eyes when it fired, and he's still blinking away spots despite his gifts.
Andrei can feel the tainted meat he ate, and which became a part of him thanks to the Grandmother's ministrations, react to the awful noise. There is a monster inside him now : there always will be, until the day he dies. And he will die someday, he knows that for certain, for already several Okhotniks have perished.
Yes, Andrei will die someday. But not today. Today, he will survive, he swears to himself. He will see the Dark Mother and its progeny fall. He will return home, and he will see his mother again.
It is a promise he has been making for years, and he won't let being turned into a monster change it.
Then there is light, shining down from the skies. Not the burning light of explosions reflecting off the clouds, but cold, gentle starlight, that makes the pain of the sigils recede, and makes the monster inside him quiet.
Andrei knows the constellations of his homeland's night sky, from many evenings spent looking up at the stars in wonder, and he knows, even at a brief, cursory glance, that these aren't the same. Nor is the enormous moon that reigns over this foreign sky the one he knows.
And then he sees her.
A woman made of the very stuff of the night sky, shining with the light of a thousand inner stars and holding a huge sword that blazes the same color as the moon above. She is flying high above the melee, straight toward the howling monster who murdered the country that, for better or worse, was Andrei's homeland. She is moving fast, so fast, and despite her alien, unearthly nature, she is the most beautiful thing Andrei has ever seen, in the same way a river or a forest can be beautiful.
Then she passes over, and the brutal combat, which paused for a moment in the awe of her presence, erupts again. There is no more time for Andrei to contemplate his past, no more time to think, no more time to consider a future that may never be. There is only time to fight, to kill, to move and do it all over again.
And so, under the light of the strange moon, the Okhotniks fight the beasts, while in the distance, a moonlit angel battles an ancient god.
For the third time in her life, Zerayah beholds the Lady of Stars in all her splendor, wielding the blade she claimed amidst the ruins of Zerayah's dead homeworld, before using it to slay the Devourer of Hope and save the Nazzadi from their slow extinction.
Yet for the very first time, she feels doubt that it will be enough. She knows the Lady of Stars' power is great, but the Dark Mother is a far more dangerous foe than Akhar-Zegog or the Counterfeit Saint ever were.
The thought is strange, even now. For so long, she has lived in fear of the Devourer of Hope, one eye always to the sky, her ears always pricked up to listen for the beating of its wings. The mere idea that there could exist anything more powerful than it had been inconceivable. Yet there's no denying that the Dark Mother is mightier by far than the scourge of the Nazzadi people.
Zerayah is afraid. But, as she dances through the air on wings of mana and sends fire raining down at the Progeny which hurl themselves at the Allied Forces, as she leads the other Nazzadi mages and dodges the attacks of the winged devils, she does not let that fear rule her.
For if nothing else, Zerayah has faith in the Lady of Stars.
Visha watches as the Major fights an incarnated god, and, despite all the strength she's gained since leaving Berun as a fresh-faced mage recruit, she curses her lack of power.
She cannot help the Major in this fight. She would be nothing more than a distraction, and her entropic magic, which is so effective against the Progeny – up to and including the Nightgaunts, who give so much trouble to the rest of the Untoten – barely seems to affect Being K at all. She tried, oh yes she tried, and she barely managed to escape with her life when the great horror turned a fraction of its attention toward her.
But that doesn't mean she cannot help at all. The remaining Nightgaunts are trying to fly back to Being K, to assist their creator in its battle against the Major. They are as ants before her, of course, but even an ant can provide a fatal distraction.
Visha snarls, revealing fanged teeth. Her gas mask is gone : in the tumult of the battle, she didn't even notice until now.
Twin spheres of absolute emptiness manifest in her hands, and she hurls them at the closest fiend. It dodges one, but the other hits it in the shoulder. It does not scream, for it has no mouth, but that doesn't save it from being swallowed by the sphere, compressed into a singular point. From the outside, it looks like water being syphoned down a drain – except in three dimensions.
That is enough to draw the attention of the others back to her. Whatever intellect they possess, the Nightgaunts understand that if they ignore her, she will destroy them all, one by one.
Visha's smile turns defiant. Let them come, let them do their worst. She will face them all, and vent her fury on their miserable hides.
She won't let these flying vermins interfere with the Major's fight.
I am Tanya Degurechaff. I am a Major of the Imperial Army. I am the Director of Division Y.
I am the Lady of Stars, though I never sought to walk that Path.
In my right hand, I hold the Moonlight Blade. That ancient Nazzadi Wunderwaffe, reforged in my image when I claimed it and poured my own power into it, sings as I wield it. With every swing, I can dimly sense the echoes of thousands of Nazzadi scholars' minds, who pooled their lore together to create something which could save their world from the doom that came for it.
They failed, and their world ended, but what they made helped avenge them in the end, and save what little remained of their people.
Yet if I fail today, even that remnant will be lost, and the Blade knows it. It lends me strength, and it cuts through the repugnant flesh of the Dark Mother, sending black, boiling ichor bursting out. I must fly to avoid the liquid, for it burns me, even in this form.
Thick black tendrils erupt from the wound, each ending in a jaw of bovine teeth – meant to smash, to crush, to pulp. I fly away from them just in time, and they snap free, falling to the blasted earth, turning from tentacles into hideous, eyeless snakes that twitch and bleat, adding to the chorus of horror that is this battle.
I raise my weapon, point held up, and do something which is akin to casting a spell, in the same way what I am is kin to what I was. Blazing meteors rain down from the alien sky, each and every one of them hitting the Dark Mother and its cast-off Progeny with the strength of an artillery shell.
Again, it screams. I can feel its pain, its fury, its hatred. They are so small for such an immense creature, and I see that for all its power, for all the atrocities it has caused, for all that it was able to reach back through time to manipulate the Russy and Albish spies in order to liberate the Kindermärchen and engineer its own manifestation, it is not a truly thinking being. It isn't even as sapient as a farm animal.
It is, in the end, a small mind, merely following instructions engraved into its being aeons ago.
I feel fear, then, through the cold clarity that has descended upon me. This thing, this being, this entity of such terrible might, was created.
A will made it as it is, to serve some alien purpose. And I know what it means.
Revelation is horror, but there is no time for madness. So I push away the realization and its implications, and focus on the enemy in front of me.
As we fight, I cannot predict its mouvements the way I could the Eikons in Arene or Akhar-Zegog on Nazza-Duhni. Here and now, at this confluence of events, there is no future that can be predicted, no fate that has been written. We stand at a crossroad, time and space warped by so many Mythos powers clashing – Being K, Projekt M, every Wunderwaffe brought to bear, the T-Engines of the Americans, the strangely empowered hunters of the Federation Army's remnants … It all comes together to muddy the waters, making prediction – but not planning – useless.
I hear the warping of flesh, making the air tremble as the engine of woes reconfigures itself in an attempt to adapt to a situation it has never encountered before. Its colossal shape isn't suited for battle, because it isn't supposed to fight. It wasn't made for it.
But then, neither is a hammer, and it can still kill someone as dead as the most advanced firearm.
It twists and changes. Under its skin, things that aren't bones break and reform, while tubes that aren't blood vessels shut close and fuse into new pathways. Every change comes at a cost, and a rain of lost and discarded body parts falls down, splashing onto the scorched earth, still twitching, as alive as any part of their source can be said to be. They will die soon unless they are reabsorbed – and they won't, I will make sure of it.
The Dark Mother rises, into a titanic parody of the humanoid form. It is to the Hünen what they are to mortal men. Eyes and other, less identifiable things sprout in its upper half, to better track me. It is not a face, not even a mockery of one. Just a collection of sensory organs, grouped together in the part of it which is closest to me. Clusters of yellow eyes with horizontal pupils gaze up at me in a lidless stare, and I sense more energy being gathered around them, prelude to some new manner of attack.
But I don't intend to merely stand here and let my enemy charge up its attack. I raise my left hand and let loose a stream of silver fire, hot enough to vaporize stone. It burns its not-face off, and in the instant before it can finish growing more eyes elsewhere, I plunge straight down, toward the burned section of its flesh.
I stab down, like a vengeful angel delivering judgment upon one of Hell's beasts. As the image comes to my mind, a legacy of a childhood spent surrounded by religious iconography that, despite my best efforts, I couldn't completely prevent from affecting my thought process, I briefly wonder if Being X is watching. I know he was involved with the Eikons and the Congregation of Michael in Remula, know that he, if not fear, then disapproves greatly of the introduction of the Mythos into this world.
Flying above the ruins of Moskva, I cannot say I blame it for that. But I also cannot sense his presence, even with my senses opened beyond easy description by the Kosmosblut. Is he watching ? Or have the disruptions to the space-time continuum created by the Dark Mother, those same disruptions that make it impossible to tell whether it is night or day behind the alien sky I have brought with me, blinded him to what is happening ?
I do not know, and the feeling of it is unfamiliar in this form, but it does not matter. I wouldn't call for his help anyway.
The Moonlight Blade bites deep into eldritch flesh, scorching it to the point some of it turns into charcoal and falls off. Being K does not have such things as vital organs, but there is a network of arcane pathways distributed throughout its being, nerves and blood vessels and not-mana flows all at once. I can see them with my star-filled eyes, and I aimed my blow precisely so that my sword would cut into one of them.
The Dark Mother's screams rise in intensity, and the scorched flesh around me erupts in a veritable forest of dark tendrils that rush toward me, a reflexive action to remove me like a dog scratching at a biting flea. But, damaged as the entity has been by Projekt M, it takes it ever so slightly longer to react than it would have otherwise, and in that brief instant, I strike.
I pour every bit of the power I have been gathering since the Kosmosblut showed me how to win this fight through the Moonlight Blade and into the great horror's Mythos circuits. My power spreads, like molten lava poured into a sewer system made of orichalcum, burning everything in its way.
The tendrils smash against me with incredible force, but I hold on, clinging to my sword with both hands, using it to brace myself against their efforts to pull me off as I continue to channel more power into my attack. There is pain as they strike my star-form, but not much, and it is a distant thing, easily ignored. The burn of my spell, of drawing on more energy than any human mage in the history of the world – perhaps of any world – but no, no, I know that is not true, though I do not know why – is, however, much more difficult to ignore.
I do not grit my teeth, because I have none at the moment. I just keep fighting, keep holding on, keep focusing. Everything else fades away, until there is only me, the Moonlight Blade, and Being K, whose existence I can feel weakening more and more as my silver fire consumes it from within.
In that moment, I realize that the network, whatever it really is made of, is Being K for all intents and purpose. The flesh around it is a mere construct : its core, its essence, its mind, if it can be said to have one, is diffused into these pathways, which stretch across its body.
And now I am burning it to ash, and less than ash. The silver fire I have unleashed does not merely undo the physical form of things : it unmakes them on a deeper level, erasing them from reality in a way that would make Einstein weep.
Still, I feel no fear from it. I feel less and less, in fact, as its not-quite-mind is slowly erased from existence.
And then …
It …
Falls.
And I fall with it, drained to the last, every bit of my power spent to kill the false god.
This is going to hurt.
The ground quakes as the Dark Mother falls, and a ragged cheer rises from the Allied Forces, battered, bleeding, but unbowed.
Sadly, the fall of the Dark Mother doesn't cause the Progeny to fall over dead, like the creations of an evil witch in a fairytale after she's been defeated by the cunning heroes. Instead, they are driven even further into frenzy, attacking both the Allied Forces and each other – there are even reports of Lycans tearing at their own flesh, lost to mindless bloodlust. Orders come down what's left of the chain of command to hold, to let the beasts kill themselves before moving in to finish them off.
Back in the remains of the command center, Colonel Eric von Lergen stands, his service pistol forgotten in his hand as he watches. The weapon is almost empty : he's had to fire it several times in the last few moments, either at Progeny that made it through the lines or at one of his own staff who succumbed to Being K's influence and started to grow multiple, aberrant limbs. General Hutton stands nearby, his left arm bandaged with torn strips of uniform.
Like Lergen, like everyone else in the command center, the American officer is looking at the fallen colossus in the distance, not quite believing it.
Somehow, against all odds, they have done it. Being K is dead, and the threat to the world has been averted. Yet Lergen finds that, instead of relief or joy, his mind is full of dread, and one single question :
Where is Degurechaff ?
I writhe on the ground, in the shadow of the Dark Mother's immense corpse, my weapon fallen from my grasp, my body wracked by agony beyond anything I've ever experienced in either of my lives.
If I am not dying, then it sure feels like it. I have experienced pain before – and not just the brief flash of pain when I was pushed in front of a train at the end of my first life. Being a small child in the Military Academy was no picnic, because for some incomprehensible reason the regulations weren't written with the possibility of someone as young as I was back then attending in mind. And coming down from my previous uses of the Kosmosblut was far from pleasant, too.
But this is something else entirely, beyond even the burn of the spell which killed Being K. With the effects of the serum running out, I have returned to my smaller stature, and the star-stuff is spreading – but unlike what happened the previous times, it isn't going smoothly, with me falling unconscious and waking up with the transformation over, having to get used to another part of my body being lost to a transformation nobody really understands.
No, this time, I am painfully awake as my flesh is slowly eroded away, and I feel as if I can sense every last cell being converted into whatever makes up my starry body.
This is it, then. I always knew this was a risk, greater each time circumstances left me with no other rational choice but to use the Kosmosblut. Whether it was a roll of the dice and I've rolled snake's eyes, or merely a countdown I've reached the end of, the result is the same. I know it in my bones, which are being consumed along with the rest of me.
It hurts. It hurts so much. I can't think, can't scream, can't do anything to signal for help. Not that I expect there's anything Visha or Zerayah could do, but if I am to die, then … then I wish I weren't alone –
Then, there is a voice, coming from nearby.
"Well, well, well," it says. "What a mess you've made of yourself, child."
Despite the pain, I force myself to look at the direction of the voice. I don't recognize it, and nobody ordinary could possibly have made it here.
At first glance, I see a woman of Russy ethnicity, clearly very, very old. But she isn't human, I know that at once. Even in my current state, my eyes see through the image of a kindly elder she projects.
As she gets closer, stepping around puddles of seething ichor, I see the glint of something metallic in her mouth, and the pieces click in my mind.
"Baba Yaga," I breathe out. The primordial witch of Russian folklore, at turns kindly and evil, depending on the story. The boogeyman, with her three-legged hut and iron teeth.
She chuckles.
"Oh, I haven't been called that in a long, long time, child. I go by the Grandmother these days."
She recognized the name, even though it came from the memories of my old world. That must mean something, but right now, I'm in too much pain to try to figure out what.
"What," I gasp, "do you want ?"
"To help you, child. After all, you just dealt with a trespasser in my homeland."
She slowly kneels next to me, her bones creaking with every motion. I don't have the strength to do anything about it, even when she takes my right hand in her palms, tutting softly as she examines it.
"My, my, my. You poor thing. What possessed you to do something like this ?"
"No choice," I grunt.
"There's always a choice. Although, sometimes, every option is bad. I suppose that's what happened to you, hmm ? No, don't answer, dear. I'm afraid there's no way to do this without pain, but, well. I think you're used to that already."
She presses her hands against my head, and I feels the strength in her deceptively thin limbs as she holds me in place and starts muttering something in a language I don't recognize.
Then I scream, shocked to find that I am still capable of it after all, as the pain suddenly flares across my body. I twitch involuntarily, my body mindlessly trying to escape, but cannot break the old woman's grip. She keeps muttering what has to be an incantation, her voice growing lower and lower, to depths no human throat is capable of.
Then it is done, and she gently lowers my head to the ground. From there, I watch in shock as the star-stuff recedes; first back to the right half of my body, and then further and further.
I blink, and for the first time since Arene, I see the world with human eyes again. Above us, the night sky of Russy stretches out, showing the normal constellations instead of those I brought with me as the Lady of Stars. The sun must have set at some point during our battle with Being K.
"Now, this will only work once," the Grandmother warns me, wagging a gnarly finger in front of my face. "If you touch that stuff again, there will be nothing I can do to help. So, be careful, alright dearie ?"
"I … yes," I finally say. "Thank you."
She chuckles again, then walks away without another word. Visha and Zerayah come down from the sky, followed by more aerial mages, others keeping watch on the perimeter – good, they remember their training. Strangely, none of them appear to notice the old woman, and when I look back down to find her, I see that she's already disappeared.
As exhaustion finally catches up to me now that it is no longer held back by unspeakable pain, I wonder who this crone really was, where she came from, and if she has anything to do with the Russy army which came to our rescue at the eleventh hour. Then there is only blessed, silent darkness, as I pass out in Visha's arms.
From afar, the being known as the Grandmother watches as the armies of Mankind deal with the aftermath of their great battle. They are gathering the beast corpses in great piles and burning them, using foul-smelling fluids to ensure the piles catch fire properly, and burn hot enough to hopefully cleanse the taint of the Dark Mother's creations.
For the corpse of the Dark Mother itself, they are bringing bigger tools, wielded by giants and their own monsters, those with the least to fear of contamination. They mean to cut it apart, she sees, before burning the pieces separately.
The Grandmother knows that, despite their best efforts, the touch of the Dark Mother will linger in this area for many, many years. They know it too, she thinks. They will do everything they can to stop the taint from spreading, build walls and post guards to keep watch for anything that might rise from the ashes. She wonders if they'll think to guard against fools trying to break in, called by the echoes of the Dark Mother's dying scream through time.
She thinks they will. The girl seemed clever enough, although perhaps too clever by half for her own good. In any case, there is nothing the Grandmother can do about it now.
She has done everything her master ordered her to do. The Dark Mother was called by the fools who blinded themselves to the truth in their quest to create a lie they could control, thank to her whispering into their dreams and shaping their fears of foreign invasion in the required direction. The child's final transformation has been stopped for now, her spell sealing it away, keeping her on the threshold of ascension, where she is at her most vulnerable.
All is as he ordered it to be, though he left the details of the implementation to the Grandmother, which let her act to minimize the damage to her homeland as much as she could.
She was surprised when he reached out to her. She thought he had forgotten her, like he does every time he returns – and in truth, he had. But when the Heresiarch revealed and got himself destroyed in Kemet, the master realized that if one of his ancient servants had survived, then others might as well, and started looking for them.
She could say that the Heresiarch would be glad to know that his death is what reminded their master of the other immortals' existence, but that would be a lie. He would want to be at the master's side himself, to bask in his glory once more. But then, the Heresiarch was young – they are all young compared to the Grandmother, eldest of the master's immortal servants, in years lived, if not necessarily passed since her rebirth. He only saw the greatness of their lord, not his failings.
Truthfully, the Grandmother is still conflicted about this whole affair. She obeyed her orders, of course, because she couldn't do anything else, and she owes her master far too much to refuse in any case. He is the one who saw a lost, dying child wandering the steppes and gave her the power to claim her revenge on those who murdered her tribe, back in the first ages of the world.
Oh, she isn't blind. She knows the only reason he elevated her was to use her as a tool in his long-running war against the Adversary. But a debt is a debt, and the Grandmother keeps her word and honors her bargains, always. It is the way of her people – her first people, before the many others she adopted as her own over the ages – and she will keep it alive, the last trace of them left in this world.
Still, her assistance came at a great cost to her homeland. On the bright side, though, it did end the rule of these little men who thought they could turn it away from her and toward a bloody idol made in their own image, in the name of ideals they mocked with their every breath. Arrogant fools, each and everyone of them, who alone of this entire debacle's victims deserved their ending.
And it felt good to come out of the shadows and take a direct hand in things. She cannot do that often, not with the hunters of the Adversary always on the lookout for her. She can kill them, of course : she has killed many who came for her over her long, long life. But it get bothersome after a while, and they only need to get lucky once to end her. Keeping out of sight is the reason she has survived this long while being free, unlike the others.
The temporal tempest caused by the Dark Mother's arrival and demise has shrouded her so far, but it will dissipate soon, and though the Church has been neutered for the time being, she is not so foolish as to believe the Adversary to be without lackeys on this planet. But they'll be busy for the time being, she suspects, and the stupidity of their peers in Remula has marked them as enemies of the current world powers for the time being in any case.
She laughs quietly to herself. It does feel good, to have the Adversary's habit of turning the people of the entire world on his enemies used against him for once. And with her words carved into the flesh of those poor children who were tricked into partaking of the Dark Mother's flesh, she has many minds she can reach to from the safety of her home in order to guide this land's future.
With the Fox and the Hierophant up and about, things are going to stay interesting. From what her master told her, after breaking free from her prison, the Fox was given the task to act as she always does, spreading chaos and keeping the magi of the Far East too busy to interfere in the affairs of the rest of the world. As for the Hierophant, the Grandmother doesn't know whether he has been given a task or left to his own devices after his awakening. That one was never much for subtlety, but it's not really his fault, given which incarnation of their master elevated him.
They are both only distractions, though, the Grandmother knows. The real play lies to the West. From what she has been able to piece together of her master's plan, he certainly seems closer to ultimate victory than she's ever known him to be.
As she slips away into the hidden ways, beginning the long trek back to her hidden home, the Grandmother, who was once known as Baba of the Yaga tribe, wonders if this will be the one – the incarnation where her master succeeds in tearing down the veil of lies woven by the Adversary and his ilk, once and for all.
AN : DUN DUN DUN !
In the first draft, there wasn't a Lady of Stars POV in this chapter. The previous times Tanya used the Kosmosblut, she was only shown from the perspective of others this was a deliberate artistic choice, to reinforce how mysterious and alien the serum made her. I tried to do the same here, but it just ... didn't work. I was stuck on writer's block for weeks before deciding, screw it, let's do it anyway.
This was the result. Tell me what you think of how it came out.
Finally, I can stop writing only POVs in the present tense and go back to the usual style of this story, writing in-universe documents with the occasional POV in my usual past narrative tense. I don't regret the shift for the battle against the Dark Mother, but it was a pain in the backside, I'll admit that much.
The next chapter will be the aftermath of Operation Gottesmörder, so if you have specific questions you would like to see answered, post them in your reviews or comments. This was a big battle, with a lot of moving parts, so I may forget to mention specific details otherwise.
Let's see, what else ... oh, right. The Grandmother's revelation. Hmm ... surprise ? Let's just say, I'm really looking forward to your theories on that one.
Zahariel out.