I sit here, eyes in pain, the light of the sun on the paper in my lap burning through my optic nerves, igniting my brain.

I sit here, brush in hand, black dripping ink leaking from its tip, the drip-drip-splat of the ground vegetable soot and glue cracking against the rice paper as black blots mar the pristine white.

She tells me I am to make words with the ink, to draw the brush against the paper and create the pictogrammatic text of the ancient Japanese; to put my pain and sorrow into the tangibility of the fixed medium, and in so doing, to draw the blackness from my soul down onto the surface of the paper.

The heat of the sun beats down upon me; I bake in the leather of my vest, the silken white shirt underneath sticking to my skin. It is a hard thing for me, one so used to controlling her body, her reactions. Sweat drips from my brow, biting salty in my eyes.

The tears fall unbidden, mixing with the ink. I tell myself they are involuntary, the product of the unexpected stimulus, but the ache in my soul knows different.

I look down at the flowing black river that spills across the page, its microcosmic tide driven by my tears, an insignificant contrast to the mighty stream beside me. The stream of my thoughts. The stream of my tears. The water of the Earth. Three streams, all moving in time as one.

I am ready to begin, sitting here in the shadow of the Akasaka Hikawa Shrine. The ancient structure looms at the periphery of my vision, its ancient form a counterpoint to myself, a creature of the new that is yet to be. The irony is not lost upon me; that a child of the modern must needs come back to the ancient and simple for absolution, for purification, for redemption and renewal.

But can I be cleansed here? Can the blot, the stain on my soul, the darkness in my mind, can it truly be eased and erased by a mere recitation and regurgitation of the events? Or will it eat at me like a cancer, the poisonous venom leaching away at my well-being a second time though the reliving?

The stick moves quickly through the air. I hear it, cutting the wind. I move to dodge, but I am too slow. As it impacts my shoulder with a resounding “crack”, I wince in pain—both at the force of the blow and the sinking, dull realization that there was once a time, a time so very long ago, when I could have dodged it easily.

“begin.”

She doesn’t say much. She doesn’t need to. I dare not even turn around, for fear of being introduced to the stick again. Her strike was gentle, yet firm, the technique used by teachers from time immemorial to keep their students on task, awake and alert.

I move the stained paper aside, half-hoping that she had not seen my tears, my weakness. The last thing I wanted was that. My truest, closest friend. Surrogate parent, confidant, sister. I wanted her to see me strong, in control. Defiant. Resolute. All the things that she, as a Shinto miko—a holy woman—was without seemingly even trying.

But I would be deceiving myself, of course. There was nothing she did not know about me, she who had protected and nurtured me for a great deal of my life. And now, even now, when I was fully-grown, an adult in my own right, she was still here, helping.

And so, feeling the gaze of her electric-blue eyes boring into my back, I start again, pressing brush to paper gently, tracing the first strokes of the ancient kanji.

I should have known, back then, that the storm was coming. I was at home then. Heh. “Home.” It wasn’t my home. It was the place where my parents had happened to live, where I had spent a few decades growing up in innocent bliss with my mother and father. It was where the brightest, happiest moments of my life were spent, where for a time I was shrouded in a halo of tender love and care that I would never know again. Or more precisely, be able to appreciate as fully again.

But being back there, years after my heart had long left the world of my birth behind, face to face with the man I had called—do call mentor, godfather—I felt the twisted blade of fate’s blade beginning to turn.

He spoke of things, of stirrings, of dark moments yet to be. Moments I had barely touched in my wanderings, my furtive steps into the puddles at the edge of the maelstrom. I was confident and cocky, using my superior knowledge to buffer the fear growing at the edge of my hearts.

For as much as I had seen, I knew there was much I had not. Things I had only heard of. Things whispered, rumoured, murmured, floating backwards in time, barely brushing my ears. I had always known they were close, and the discomfiture in his voice, the barely controlled rage—and dare I say desperation? No, I could never think him capable of that—it should have alerted me that the distance between myself and the terror that would consume me was far, far shorter than I had calculated.

I left Venus that day, afraid. Not consciously, of course. The arrogance of my blood, of my “wisdom”, of my knowledge had me confident that I would be able to handle whatever would come my way. How wrong I was.

In this universe of ours, you see, there are powers. Powers old and unfathomably ancient. Powers that once strode across the cosmos like giants in a playground, doing as they would, heedless of the impact their actions would have on the lesser races. Who watches the ground lest they tread on ants, after all?

The problem is, of course, that ants, being ants, can’t really look up. Not much, really. They may be dimly aware on some basal level that a gigantic human is above them, but all they perceive is the darkening of the sky caused by the appearance of a shoe’s sole overhead. To them, a man’s footstep may as well be the fall of night—albeit a fall with the potential of crushing force.

If a man’s shoe-bottom was to flake off, to the insects below the resultant glob of plastic or resin on the ground would seem a totem from parts unknown. The ants might examine it, wonder about it, move it out of the path of their columns. But they would never—could never, understand its form or function. Such was the case with the gate at Tau Ceti III.

Mankind didn’t call it a “gate”, of course. They had no idea of its true function. No way of sensing the energy that throbbed behind the jutting outcrops of stone covered with inscrutable hieroglyphs. They only knew that the looming stones-- hundreds of meters high, dark and black and stained with pigment the imagination easily classed as blood—they only knew that it made them fear. “What immortal hand had framed thy symmetry” indeed?

I don’t know what happened there. The fate of the Imperial expedition to Tau Ceti was lost to the history books, a mere footnote in the annals of a larger, more complicated historiographical tapestry. In retrospect, however, I see now that it was the loose thread which bound my fate—all our fates. Somehow, a crack was opened between our universe and the realm adjacent, and Something took notice. A Something man would come to know as the Tairon Overfiend.

Tairon. The word They used to identify Themselves. In their tongue, as I would come to learn, it would mean “The Dreamt”. The Tairon had met man before, many times, in the murky depths of the Jungian collective. It had gathered, swarming, in the areas of the world-mind were the layers between realities wore thin, where minds were weak, where, through fear, pain, despair, the influence of psychedelic drugs or simply the disjointed thought processes of raving madmen, their dreams were able to intrude.

Ancient Egypt. Sumeria. The Empty Quarter. Antarctica. Japan in the mid 90’s. Intrusion after intrusion, unable to take physical form, but always attaching themselves, their tentacles, deep into the mind of their hostes. Moving silently amongst man, plotting, planning, preparing. Making ready for the devil’s day when they could somehow make their move, tearing asunder the merciful veil that held our world, our mind, apart from their own.

Yes. At some point the Tairon, the Dreamt, had been stirred from their slumber, taking note of the sentient motes milling about Tau Ceti. Taking note once again that our plenum existed, that it was ripe and delicious, ready for the plucking.

Why would they forget? Why do we forget the places in our dreams, only to remember a familiar landscape glimpsed there years later when another dream brings them back into view? All they knew was that The Place which they had once found was open to their view once again, and that this time, they would not lose sight of it once again.

It was over a century from the time the gateway was breached that any of us knew that something had happened. Blame our arrogance, our belief that the three and one-half centuries of peace the Imperium had enjoyed had actually given rise to some kind of utopian society in which the nihilistic threats of the past were impossible.

It was easy then to dismiss the outbreaks of fear, violence and senseless riots on the fringes of Imperial space as the work of political pressures, of rich elites reaping what they had sowed via the economic exploitation of the oppressed proletariat masses. No one ever suspected a darker hand behind the madness, the tendrils of the Tairon fomenting the rich and fertile foundations of fear that fueled their fiendish drive to domination over the minds of man.

How easily man conjures up reasons to justify the inexplicable, to soothe the quiescent fear that sits in the back of his heart. So much easier than facing the ugly truth of the implacable foe that sits in wait, its advantage so mighty than one might have as much hope against it as a fly in a hurricane. Better to blame the bestial savagery of man on class warfare than to dig any deeper into the situation that was comfortably necessary.

But eventually even the dullest of minds began to realize that the looting, the pillaging, the senseless destruction was just that—senseless. Effect did not sync with Cause. Post hoc and Propter hoc weren’t seeing eye to eye. The movements of the massive mobs mystified even the most meticulous measurements.

It was when all the predictive and post-mortem patterns had failed to present a proper picture of the pandemonium, that we perceived the problem. The behavioral mode was simply not human. Not in the slightest. They acted, reacted like animals, with only the barest of superficial motivation brushed on to give them the patina of a reason for their malevolence. Enough to deter the light thinkers, or the generally hypocritically disinterested—those elites who were all too happy to see the dregs of society nihilistically nullifying themselves.

Once we realized, to our growing terror, the presence of another force somewhere beyond, a guiding hand steering the way to ruin, we knew we had to determine who—or what—was behind the mass anarchy at the edge of Imperium space.

All we saw at the time were people. People killing people. Agents of terror wearing our skin, our smiles, wolves in the flock charming to the last, until the moment they drove in their knives. Fathers killing sons, wives slaughtering husbands. A mass madness had come upon the land. And while those of us with enough sympathy in our hearts wept, doing our damndest to stop the violence, there were those in our midst who secretly reveled in it.

The tears scorch my cheeks even now as I think back, remembering. Remembering how those people—my contemporaries—my kith, those I grew up knowing, those I respected, loved and cherished, how they rejoiced at the sickness and terror that had come to the Imperium.

Children of heroes all were we, the warriors of legend who for millennia had protected the solar system. In their shadows we had bloomed, tales of their virtues our nursery rhymes and lullabies. But where those like myself took the tales to heart as inspiration to virtue, others saw them as an invitation to ambition. The drive to surpass ones’ progenitors is as ancient as the tides of time, and here, the tragedy, the seeds of our dishonor lay.

For these young spoiled nobles, those who had never known the true agony or pain of loss, or seen the horrors of combat, witnessed the spatter of friend’s blood, the *idea* of chaos in the land was simply delightful. It was a clarion call to arms, a divine opportunity for them to sally forth, loyal legions at their side, deep into the frenetic fray, reducing the rabblerousing renegades to nothing simply and easily. They could show their worth, become the new heroes of the age, worshipped and venerated like their parents. The halo of victory would adorn them, all for an easy week’s worth of crowd control.

At first the older generation had few misgivings. They too assumed this would be a simple matter. Smash the cabal behind the violence and peace would return. Heh. A cabal. How small our thinking was back then. Missing the man behind the curtain entirely, we celebrated as the Nobles slew criminal after criminal after criminal. Yes, *we*. Even I, for a time, was taken in by the string of “victories” in the “war against chaos”, wherein every week saw the death of some “high-level anarchist leader.”

But weeks dragged to months, to years, to decades. The number of “high-level anarchist leaders” slain ranged in the thousands. No cabal could be this well-organized, this resistant to decimation in the ranks. At least no cabal whose leaders where anywhere *near* the planets in question.

Finally, the older generation had had enough. They commanded the return of their children from the front. The very hour that decision was made, the tenth planet of Nemesis was blown out of orbit by an impact that held the force of thousand million N2 bombs, hurled into a new trajectory which eventually slung it opposite Earth on the other side of the sun.

Someone had wanted the war to continue. Badly.

Actually, as we soon discovered, They had wanted a base. All the fighting, the chaos, the bloodshed on the Imperial rim worlds, the continuous orgy of violence and fear which had bathed the ground of a hundred colonies in red, the war, all of it had been for one reason—to provide nutrition for a Tairon who had been lying in wait, hovering over a weakness in the Dream.

All the slaughter—a billion and a half lives lost—to open one tiny fissure in space. To permit the physical crossing of one creature about the size of a small puppy.

This was learned after the fact, of course—centuries later, in a time of relative calm when the pieces had been finally put together by historians like my father and myself.

No one knows where the Creature first encountered man. Perhaps it had attached itself to a passing battleship in the middle of the fracas, or even appeared on the surface of a world. It was no stranger to the minds of the apes it met of course, having played their minds with the delicate sensitivity a pianist might demonstrate as applied to the keys of a Steinway. The entire symphony of carnage had been its doing, every note building to the climatic crescendo when it would finally be able to physically join with its prey, finding a hoste it could use to directly touch our world.

Who was it—Archimedes, I wonder—who had bragged that he could move the world had he possessed a lever large enough and a place to stand. Archie always said the most delightful things. Well, this Tairon was the lever for its race, the wedge through which they would achieve their ultimate goal—the penetration and assimilation of our plenum.

Tau Ceti, you see, was no gate, despite the fact that we saw it as such. After all, to that unfortunate expedition that was lost, it certainly must have seemed like a door.

Tau Ceti was actually a barrier. A ward, a seal. A bandage placed over a wound in the universe, a catflap to keep out the neighbors. A race older and wiser than even mine own had passed by, and in a moment of concern erected the blockade. Billions of years later, when the decadent lesser races had evolved and taken to the stars, they had found the massive stones, and fell before them in awe, worshipping them as totems of the gods.

The millions of eyes lying in the Dream behind the stones had been waiting aeons for prey, and the vibrations of their sinister minds infused all those within range of the stones, filling the dreams of the weak with images of fear, terror and pain, while courting the ambitious with dream-songs of unlimited power. But while they could gain purchase into the hearts of the sentients before them, they could not get their puppets to open the way for them. None were strong enough to undo the work of the “Gods.”

Eventually their pawns died, and the existence of our world was lost to the Tairon as their Dreams shifted, and they expanded to fill every corner of their vast universal realm. But on our side, the legends of the Dark Old Ones who played their piping mind-songs lived on. And every generation or so, those who heard the call made their way to the barriers on Earth in the empty Quarter, or Antarctica. There they saw projections of the Dreamers, dreams made flesh. There they were told of the Fulcrum, the vast City-Gate, beyond which power and paradise lay. There, though they knew not the name, they were told of Tau Ceti.

The Tairon seeded the racial memory of Tau Ceti across a billion different worlds, knowing that one day, one way, somehow, the barrier—the drainplug that prevent them from swirling into our universe en masse in the physical—would be breached, and then our realm would become theirs to Swim in. To Sing in. To Feed in.

All that was needed was the right key to open the door.

Fear and Pain and Terror. Oh yes, those emotions that became my constant friends over the years. Those were potent keys, but far too small to open the lock at Tau. Even the screaming agony of every mind in the universe would have only budged the door. No, raw physical force was needed. Only a few races could wield that much power, and they were generally attuned enough to the universe to detect the presence of the Dreamers.

No, the Tairon realized. They would need to use a younger race. A violent, thoughtless race, easily manipulated. One prone to reckless action. One like homo sapiens sapiens. Mankind.

I laugh sadly as I ink that word, “mankind”. Half my genome is that of man’s. I fault it, sometimes. Hate it, for making me so rash, so imprudent. For making me weak enough to cry. For making me ache for vengeance. For making me love, and hate. Not that the other half of myself does not do the same, but it does so with much less passion.

Mankind. So wonderous. So unaware of its limitations that it manages to surpass them at every turn. I hate man, and yet I love man. Their drive and determination is second to none. They have a fire my people lack. But at the same time they are so gullible. They don’t think. This makes them perfect candidates for Others who wish to use their fire to their own ends.

The Imperium. I have spoken much of it thus far, and explained little. The Imperium is the Sol system, plus one or two other worlds in close proximity. The seat of government is—was—Earth, or “Terra Mater” as it later became known right before the end. The monarch of the Imperium possessed an ancient weapon—a crystal of synthetic origin whose method of manufacture had long been lost to time.

With this exquisitely cut lens, thought could be translated to reality. This terrible power ensured peace, but at a price. The life of the wielder was sapped every time the crystal was used in anything more than a nominal fashion. Thinking on it now, this was probably a safeguard put in by the creators to prevent the thing from being abused too greatly.

At any rate, the crystal made the Imperial Monarch powerful—and a powerful target. Those who desired power naturally turned their eye to her weapon—either with lust for its power, or in fear of it.

The Tairon were no exception. Somehow, they had once held an object of comparable, yet inferior quality. They knew the potency of the crystal, and believed it the perfect key to open the gate at Tau Ceti. They knew that the facets which could channel will and life were so precisely cut that they could amplify almost any energy coursing though them. And so they decided to take the Sol system, home of the crystal. They decided to take it, capture the Earth, and at the precise moment when Sol III was aligned with the gate at Tau Ceti, they would implode it, creating a supernova whose vast energies would be focused and passed through the crystal, sending a micron-thick lance of energy into the “gate”, searing it and puncturing a hole back into the Dream.

With the death of the Sol System, a whole new universe would open for them. They could feed again.

Again, we knew nothing of these plans at the time. All we knew, once the Tairon who had made the passing emerged into view, was that we were under threat from a force external and antithetical to our universe. At the time, contrary to what you might think, we were actually *relieved* that this was the case—that we were once again fighting monsters from some otherworldly pit of darkness, as opposed to flesh-and-blood human separatists. After all, it’s easier to split the skull of a thing that looks and feels horrible and grotesque as opposed to a foe that could well be your cute next door neighbor.

Perhaps that’s why she took human form. I say “she”, but technically speaking it probably wasn’t male or female. To this day, even after my contact with the Tairon Dream, I don’t know if they had, or even ever had had at some point in their evolution, the concept of gender. But this Tairon, when choosing a host, made sure to pick a female. Tall, long legs, ample bosom, curved bottom, bright smile, fair skin and dark hair—typical model looks for an attractive female that would be desired by at least 90% of the male population.

After all, evil so often does love to hide behind a pretty face.

Sometimes I like to wonder what her life had been like before the fusion—for the hoste. With her looks she might have been mildly popular with the Neptunian men. (She came from the sea-colony on Neptune, you see). I like to imagine her living an everyday life, as a stockbroker, artist or something. Something normal. Not the fanged, yellow-eyed, blood-drinking craven killer who wore the hinged skull of her first victim over her head as a trophy in battle. I like to think back to when she had still been human. The sad thing is, in the two times we had ever met, the hatred with which she spoke was not a hatred born of the Tairon influence. They did not hate man. Who hates their cattle? They merely manipulated man with a cold, cool logic in order to secure better feeding. No, her hatred was the hatred of man for man, the harsh, bitter disappointment and rage that could only have been born from harsh treatment at the hands of those she had once called “friend”. I too, knew that tone, had used it.

To the Tairon her pain must have seemed the perfect glue with which they could bind with her soul. And indeed, the fit was perfect. A better match they had never found, by even their own admission—not in the 19 billion years they had probed our universe. The bond was so tight that in her later dealings with us she even called herself “The Tairon Overfiend”, taking the name of her masters for her own.

But before she overtly assumed the role of Tairon Battlemistress, before she led the wrath-like dimensional protrusions of the Tairon against the combined armies of man, she walked among us, quietly and calmly, gathering information. Many of the male nobles—and even some of the female ones—were her lovers, none realizing they were simply being goaded deeper into senseless conflict with each amorous stroke of her fingertips. Like a chessmaster, Angelica Tiarne—for that was her name before the fusion—moved her pieces into precise position, placing them subtly under psychological stresses designed to make them more malleable when the time came for them to act as the Tairon wished.

God, she was a human being. I almost drop the brush as that thought strikes me again. A person, like the ones I had grown up with. I pale, looking to the bright blue sky over the shrine, to the wispy clouds of Earth’s atmosphere, as I try to will the tears to stop falling. A human being. The course of the war had made us all conveniently forget this fact, focusing our thoughts and actions solely against the “monster” that had taken root inside of her, ignoring the fact that the vibrant young woman within, the one who had been corrupted, was still there—still alive, a prisoner in her own body.

We ignored that. I ignored that. Me. Gods, the irony. Had I known what was to have been my fate, I might have been far more merciful towards her. Heh. That might have gotten me killed, come to think of it. But still, considering how I was treated, as opposed to her—well, being on the wining side helps. It’s why I’m convalescing at a Shinto Shrine and her ashes are somewhere on the ground in a dingy 58th century warehouse somewhere being trod upon by factory workers.

I take a deep breath and put pen to paper again, hand trembling. R-chan (that’s what I call the Miko behind me) does nothing to steady my it. She says nothing really, aside from observing my reactions and tending to the giant black crows that live in the trees here. My hand, my mind, these are things I must steady. I must find my center, my soul. Not that I believe in souls, mind you, even with the things I’ve seen over my long life and travels. I’m far too much the scientist for that. “Amplified bioelectric field” is as close to a definition of “soul” as you’re going to get from me.

Where was I. I scan back over the rice paper, reading the kanji glyphs slowly, awkwardly, watching the bluish ink dry on the paper slowly. “Angelica Tiarne.” No, enough of her for now. The circumstances of our nigh-parallel fates is too much for me to bear contemplating just yet.

With planet Nemesis now behind the sun, on the completely opposite side of the Solar system from the frontier battles around the Kuiper Belt worlds, the Tairon had effectively managed to begin a war on two principal fronts. The nobles, already having stretched their resources thinly on the Imperial Frontier by Pluto, now had to divert even more critical resources to the other side of the Sol system, weakening Earth’s defenses to the point of ludicrous weakness.

The best and brightest second-line warriors of the solar system, each of whom had been stationed on the various satellites of the 9 worlds (both natural and artificial) were now split between the Kuiper Belt and Nemesis. The only things keeping Earth safe were the massive warfleets of Jupiter and Mars, funded by the vast treasuries of my world of birth, Venus.

Due to various circumstances, my mother—the titular ruler of the planet—was away, off with my father in some distant corner of the galaxy. Truth be told, I think they both wanted to be away from the darkness that was slowly enfolding the solar system.

I can’t blame them for it. Oh, I was angry at the time, angry that they had simply elected to vanish, to shoulder me with the burdens of statecraft, the petty paltry politics of power I had so little tolerance for. But now, with the benefit of years, I understand. They had simply had their fill.

Mother and Father. No-- too formal. “Mom and Pop” as I used to call them when I was younger. As I want to call them again, if I can find the lightness of heart to manage it. I guess the reason I was really so angry with them for leaving at the time was that they had left without me. I knew they did it because they trusted me to handle things in their stead, to act with the kindness and compassion and tender mercy they had raised me with—but really, even in my adulthood, with all I had seen and experienced across the universe at the time—all I had wanted to do was go with them, be with them, stand by their side, safe in the glow of their warmth. I didn’t—don’t care for the universe, the wars, the battles. The only people I truly do care for nowadays are my parents, and my adoptive parent, the Miko who even now stands behind me, regarding my words with her watchful gaze. I’m sort of embarrassed she can read these words as I write them—but she knows my heart—has known it for many years now, so it’s okay I guess. R-chan, you mean a lot to me. Oh, you’re looking at the crows, nevermind. Right, the parents.

I thought I had lost them when I was very young. Enemies of *mine* (a hilarious concept, considering my cloistered upbringing) had sealed them away from me, leaving me with the impression I was an orphan. I spent the next few centuries suffering and growing, making friends and even finding love for a time along the way, but always their loss was a gnawing darkness eating at my soul. Then one day, I found them. Found them, and freed them, and with that, my heart. A joy I had not known for ages simply washed over me, and I was liberated. All the pain, all the sorrow I had felt—melted away in the embrace of my mother and father.

Mom… is many things. A singer, a performer, a princess and a warrior. I always likened her younger self to a songbird trapped in a cage—singing what sounds to be a pretty, joyful song, but one whose notes were always informed by the reality of the bars around it. From a very early age, when other young adults her age were focused on socialization, partying and flirtations with the opposite sex, she had been pressed into battle. Oh, that’s not to say she didn’t have those other things too—but always, at the end of the day, after the dating, the concerts, the breaks for snacks at the local fast food parlour—there was the shadow of the war hanging over her soul. The quiet war, the private war that only a select few would ever really know about in its time. How many times had she and her friends saved the planet, to no recognition. But that didn’t matter to her. For all the attention she craved in the public world of the entertainer, she was happy to fight alone unrecognized, in the dark. Willing and able to endanger herself, to sacrifice, to endure agonies and suffering beyond description quietly, where no one would ever know, simply so that the world she loved and held closest to her heart could carry on.

Pop is a different case. I grew up in the same culture as his, so I understand why. He was a stuffy kinda guy, closed off and isolated, keeping mainly to his science and his technology. Now granted my people—heh, I say “my people” but I belong to three societies, really—are very focused on the political, the intellectual and the scientific. But there was more pain that that to him.

Pop was something of an outsider among our people, who are somewhat xenophobic, because he enjoyed the presence of and interaction with other species, other races. What my people considered “low-class” and “retrograde”, he considered stimulating, refreshing and enjoyable. He especially loved the idea of humans, who looked just like us on the outside, but were very different on the inside, as well as mentally and philosophically. He studied them from afar, and embraced their culture, their mannerisms, their ways. All without ever having met them personally. He had, in principle, “gone native” from afar.

As fate would have it—assuming you believe in such an animus—a horrible accident had placed him on Earth, and he had decided to spend his days there while repairing his ship in preparation for the trip home. Unfortunately, as is the case when ideals clash with realities, the humans he met were far, far different from the ones he had imagined based on his anthropological readings. They were rude, prejudicial, insular, mocking, violent, superficial and abusive—that is, assuming they ever paid him any heed at all. Friendships usually either ended in betrayal or an outright denial of the association. It finally got to the point where, in disgust, Pop had sealed himself up in his rooms, labouring alone, tirelessly, ceaselessly, focused on only one thing—getting off the miserable planet he now cursed.

He didn’t want to see humans, hear humans, or even think about humans. His daily interactions with them were curt, practical exchanges designed to get him what he needed to continue with his efforts, and beyond that he had no use for the species.

Heh, then my mother arrived. Through an accident of circumstance, their paths crossed—two people so completely unlike each other they could not have been more different had they deliberately tried. One light, one dark. One a bubbly, outgoing cheerful girl with a focus on looks and trends and popular music idols, the other a dour introverted man with a stubborn focus on the practical and technological. Had they met each other socially, they probably couldn’t have stood each other’s company. Each would have judged the other annoying, and moved on rather rapidly. While Mom was certainly stunning physically, Pop was not much to look at, and Mom was a little fickle when it came to her tastes in men. Similarly, looks aside, Pop couldn’t stand Mom’s fleeting attention span and tendency to become bored with even the simplest of his explanations. It was simply not a match. Love at first sight? Repulsion at first sight more like.

Fortunately for me, however, external forces got involved, and the two of them were forced to get to know one another, whether they liked it or not. They each learned of the other’s pain, the sorrow that had wormed its way into the very fiber of their beings, and slowly, they learned of each other’s kindness and warmth as they eased each other’s hurt, facing down danger and grief together. For while external appearances were much different, deep down inside, somewhere that the heart could see while the eyes could not, they knew—they *knew*--they were the same. The seed of care and tenderness planted in that common ground of misery and despair eventually grew and bloomed, and the flower of love was born between them.

Mom showed Pop the value of the heart, of people, how even though they hurt others thoughtlessly, they also hurt as well. She taught him that the world he had grown to hate was not all darkness and bile, that there were still many, many pockets of joy to be cherished and enjoyed. In her own way she renewed his spirit, his hope, his fervent wish for the well-being of everyone in the world. Similarly his love affirmed her faith in the goodness of things, that even for all the pain she had seen, that yet there was reward, that the universe was just and right, and that her heart, so often broken, could be mended as well. Though Pop she found a greater sense of worth for herself, and for the people she fought to protect.

This was why, when the centuries-old peace was finally shattered, and the wars began at the fringes of the empire, my parents left. To see the madness raining down, to see the children of their friends engaged in a mad suicidal charge against the night, to see everyone and everything they had fought to preserve, protect and love be turned to ash so quickly—it was too much for their hearts to bear.

Armchair Quarterbacks might sit there and sneer. They might go on and on about patriotism, and how everyone should take up arms for their planet. How it would be cowardice to simply flee. And at the time, I thought they had fled. That they were irrational. I couldn’t reconcile the good, kind, noble and just parents that I knew them to be with the fact of their departure. I was ashamed of them for leaving. Even with my experience, I had not understood—could not understand the way they felt. For, ever since my quest to avenge them in the past had begun, I had waded in rivers of blood, with death as my only companion. I knew only fighting. Fighting, be it for a cause, be it for revenge. It was natural to me. Axiomatic. One fights when a battle worth joining presents itself. It was a case that was simple, clean-cut.

It never occurred to me that the reason they left was practical as well as sentimental. My mother was an important woman, politically. Venus being one of the richest worlds aside from Pluto, as well as the fact that my mother shared close ties with the Imperial family meant that she was *expected* to show solidarity with the other leaders, many of whom were her friends from the ancient days of heady schoolgirl youth and even before. While many of them felt as she did, they had their children, and their children’s children deep in the heart of combat. Emotions won over logic, and the distraught parents heedlessly approved measure after measure extending and intensifying the bloody combat of the Tairon War. Mom didn’t want to put her imprimatur on what she knew to be a futile struggle. Nor did she want the vast resources of our world used to drag out a war which would only mean the deaths of more friends, more family. So she did the only thing she could do. Took the blame of scandal, and publicly announced she was going off with her husband for a long, scandalously sensual honeymoon, leaving me the reins of power.

I very much doubt their travels were as passionate as the critics contended. In my heart, I think their days were filled with a sad grief, interspersed with mere moments of joy. I know they missed me, missed Venus, missed everyone. But I realize now they also knew that I, being a pragmatist with few ties to the ancient lines, would do what my mother could not—stand up and say “no”.

And, as I said before, I did just that. Told the other planets that Venus was withdrawing all manpower and materiel from the war effort. Morale in the trenches dipped instantly. Indeed, I think my mother’s hope was that the mere *fact* one of the founding worlds of the Imperium had pulled out would have been enough to break the back of the war coalition. Well, my father’s hope. He was the proper political thinker.

While it might have been a sound stratagem, Pluto stepped up, opening its vast treasuries to seal the breach, and took Venus’ place as the pre-emiment supporting world. Politically, my planet was a pariah. Many of our citizens left for other colonies and renounced their citizenship; those who stayed dared not show their faces offworld for fear of discrimination and abuse.

Doing the only thing we could, we closed up our spaceports and turned inwards—watching, co-ordinating with the few friends we had left, and preparing our own plans to end the conflict. It was not that Venus wanted the empire to burn; on the contrary, we simply did not endorse the suicidal methods that were being used to try and quench the flames.

As for myself, well—I was never a politician. I had the savvy to be one, thanks to my schooling and parentage—but never the desire to dirty myself in its doings. So, I handed off the mantle of state to a fairly competent trusted bureaucrat, knowing that the inertia of red tape would keep civilization from collapsing for the next few centuries or so, and I did the only thing I really knew how to do—I left to fight.

Unlike those fratzing nobles of course—hahah how do you write the kanji for “fratzing” you ask? Well it’s an epithet in my culture that roughly means “failure to think” (which to us is a serious deficiency akin to impotence) so I used the kanji for that instead. And the stick strikes my shoulder again, as the Miko demands I get back on task. Although, in the reflection of the water before me, I think I see her crack a small smile. Does my digression mean I’m improving? That my mood is cheering? I don’t know. I don’t know how long this spike in the endorphins will last—because now, now we come to the smooth, slippery slope I slid down, the one that led to the black taint in my soul—the pragmatist’s sorry end.

Well, I call it sorry now. I wasn’t sorry then. Am I sorry? I don’t know. I think the true test of whether one is sorry about a thing is whether or not they would replicate their decision if a similar set of circumstances posed themselves, and as I ponder the past, I think I would do it again.

Unlike the nobles, I did not run to the front lines. I knew full well that the quagmire of the lines was folly. It worried me greatly that no one knew what was going on on planet Nemesis, that battlefront obscured from us by the blinding light and heat of the hyperactive sun. Still, I chose to protect Earth. Earth, my third home. The place where Mom and Pop had met, where some of the greatest legends of our time had sprung forth. Earth, home of the Beatles, Pizza and Apple Pie. Earth, eleven thousand years of history ensconced on the surface of a shining blue water-covered jewel, all alone in the night.

Earth at the time of the Tairon War was a lonely place, mainly filled with young children, the elderly and the infirm. The young, able-bodied people had all mainly left for the front lines or been conscripted when the illusions of easy victory had been shattered. Calling the planet an “orphanage” may have been pushing things, but not by much.

I was one of the rare public spectacles of the time, a young-looking, fit female not toting a gun or wearing an imperial combat-suit. Only the holy blade hanging off my side kept the military conscriptionists from coming my way. Not to mention that anyone in authority already knew my smiling face. Even with the general hatred the public had for Venus, I was still its nominal leader.

Oh, I know that some in the Plutonian and Uranian governments thought of kidnapping me, holding me ransom so that the planetary treasuries of Venus would be opened up. Some even considered appropriating the planet for “the common good”. Luckily for me, my family held the greatest trump card in the quadrant. My good friend, the Miko, who stands behind me even now. She may not look it, but her powers alone were enough of a counterweight to keep the entire Imperium off Venus’ back, even though for reasons she ascribed to “karmic balance” she rarely ever used them. I have no doubt she could have driven the Tairon back had she mind to. But for man to evolve, he must make his own mistakes, bear his own burdens. That was what she told the Imperium, and the Imperium knew better than to argue with her.

So I wandered Earth, hated, despised, and even feared. It hurt me. I can’t lie and pretend I was immune to the words, the whispers, the hateful spiteful things said about me. There were times I wanted to just curse the people and walk away. After all, I wasn’t going to win the war for them anyway. What was one less body in the teeming war machine?

But I was smart. A tactician. A thinker. An expert in strategy and matters of technology. I knew I could be useful. The experience I had gathered during my long travels was something few in the Imperium could match. And I wanted the Imperium to survive. Not so much the political entity, but the way of life which had been enjoyed before the madness had begun. I valued that. Valued how much my parents valued that. For them, for the people, I threw myself into the cause.

Unfortunately, only a few would listen. The heads of Mars and Jupiter were longtime confidants of my mother, and they accepted me in her stead. Jupiter, with its massive fleet of warships, still commanded respect. Mars was headed by the greatest military thinker of the age, who demanded respect by sheer virtue of her presence.

You would think that with these two at my side, my warnings that the circumstances at the front lines were too precarious, too strange for our tactics to continue on as they had been would have been heard. It had not escaped our attention that as bloody as the carnage was, few people were actually being killed in recent days. Rather, they were being maimed, disfigured, driven insane—made as grotesque and terrifying as possible so as to instill dread terror in anyone who even dared lay eyes on them. Truly, the living envied the dead, yet feared to die. Acts of seemingly random terror kept the entire populace on the Imperium on edge. Hysteria, panic and mob mentality were the tenets of the day. Reason was deliberately being thrown to the wayside. It was the perfect food for the Tairon, and the perfect springboard for their emissary in the Imperium, Angelica Tiarne, to flourish.

Her voice, formerly only ever heard as whispers in the bedchambers of the nobility, suddenly became loud and shrill. She championed the virtues of combat, of noble suffering and sacrifice, and lamented the lack of courage and perseverance the populace held in the face of the “war on chaos”. Her face appeared on more vidscreens than that of the Queen, whose appointment to the seat of power through a more or less autocratic process had rendered her ill-liked by the common man, even though she fought for them in her heart. Angelica Tiarne quickly made herself a fixture in Terran politics and noble beds, rising higher and higher in the chain of civilian command until she almost spoke for Earth itself. She always professed to have no amibitions of her own—and indeed, she repeatedly declined appointments that would put her on the same council as the heads of the other planetary bodies.

Back then we thought that perhaps her humility was real, a product of her life-philosophy as opposed to some political ploy meant to make herself seem more appealing to the masses. We should have realized she, the Tairon hoste, was simply staying just far enough away from the heroes of the past, who would sense her malevolent connection, to keep her from being discovered. As for the children of those heroes whom she seduced—well, for every sense that is heightened during love-play, there are many more which are dulled, common sense usually being the first to go.

But, there she was, Angelica Tiarne, head Civilian Co-ordinator for Terra Mater, the loudest voice in the bullhorn calling for sacrifices in the name of war, and the quietest, silkiest, most seductive whisper in the ears of the noble children, convincing them that their parents were stodgy, conservative fools afraid to make the hard decisions which would keep the Imperium safe. Everyone heard her. Everyone listened—except me, and those who had fought alongside my mother in the earlier battles.

This put us on the losing side. Despite still looking every bit as young and as vital as Tiarne, we all suffered the disease of being too well-known. Our habits, our comings and goings, even what color toothbrushes we used in the morning ablutions—these things had been reported as a matter of course across the Imperium for centuries. Children had been born seeing our faces on hospital vidscreens. *Their* children had seen the same first sights. We were old, familiar. And as Chris Marlowe wrote under his nom de guerre, “familiarity breeds contempt.”

The people, so frustrated with horror and shock of seeing the mutilated bodies of their loved ones broadcast on the intersystem news day after day, month after month, year after year, cried out for a change. At “the Angel of Mercy” Tiarne’s urgings, military control was placed squarely in the hands of the young nobility. Those who resisted were forced at gunpoint to take their ships out of Terran space. Had the numbers been right, Jupiter might have staged a coup to ironically keep the status quo intact. But they were not. Like it as they might not, Civil War in the Imperium would only serve the enemy. So the Jovian forces went to Mars, preparing to jump into Earth’s system at a moment’s notice if needed. Public pressure forced some of them to deploy to the far flung front at Nemesis. The Martian patrols also were forced to the rim worlds. Despite the constant cries from everyone who could look at a force deployment map that Earth was being laid bare, no one listened. After all, these creatures, the shimmering monsters with three million eyes, a thousand tentacles for arms and legs, and steel-like carapaces—had they not been successfully contained by our forces at the edge of the solar system? As long as we held the line there, the popular reasoning went, life could go on.

Some of us suspected, but did not dare say, that the only reason the line was being “held” at all was because the Tairon simply refused to push past it. Indeed, it seemed more like a war of attrition, a strategy of hitting and running to keep our forces tired, panicky and off-balance. By this time we knew why they were doing that, of course. To feed off the fear and agony. We just didn’t know why they chose not to swoop in to the inner words for a bigger feast.

The Mercurians suggested that the strategy being employed by the Tairon was similar to that of a boa constrictor slowly strangulating its prey. That is, they would slowly encircle the solar system, engaging the front lines and sowing the maximum amount of carnage and fear, slowly milking it dry until levels plateaued. Then they would slowly push in, increasing the panic again with the reality of their advance. This snail’s pace approach would continue like a slowly-closing fist until finally it would clench around the heart of the Imperium—Earth.

It seemed to make sense, given what little we knew of them. This theory was accepted by everyone, including myself. It was logical. It even accounted for why the Tairon were leaving the center of the Solar System alone. The only problem with it was that, while it seemed to fit the facts, it was utterly wrong.

The Tairon were billions upon billions of years old. They were the ultimate in patient waiters. We knew this. We just did not know what they were waiting for. As I said before, the Tairon’s ultimate goal later turned out to be a desire for the use of the Queen’s crystal. What they were waiting for, it turned out, was good and proper intelligence on the whereabouts of the Queen-- and a good and proper means of getting to her.

The Queen herself was a heroic woman, if not overly bright. Her family was not known for their superior intellect or political skill. Rather, their graces came from the depths of compassion that stirred within their hearts. A purity of charity, hope, compassion and concern, that, when magnified by the power of the Crystal, enabled them to do what so many leaders could only dream of doing—enact, by force of will, an almost utopian society of peace and prosperity. But such power is taxing, and the effects impermanent. Free will shall always set asunder the carefully laid flagstones of order and regulation. After decades of spending portions of her life-force to continually re-organize the Imperium, the Queen, tired and disillusioned, simply chose to let the chips fall where they may, stepping in only in the gravest of circumstances. Thus, when the insurgencies had first come, she did nothing, relying on civilian law enforcement to handle the task. By the time it was realized an external force was in play, the young nobles had convinced her it was a task they could handle.

Later still, when the quagmire became too deep, too treacherous, and too impossible for the nobility and the combined military forces of the Imperium to handle alone, it was too late for her to intervene. The Tairon shades were too many, appearing and disappearing at whim. Even if she caught one, fifty more would pop up all over the system. They never all appeared at once, so she could send forth a blast of purifying light to kill them at once. Even if they had, they would have outmatched her. The will of one woman against an entire universal hoarde? An unlikely contest, though to her credit, one she would have taken on.

So, to conserve her resources, and to protect the people, she stayed on Earth, assuming that the Tairon would eventually make their way to her. How right she was.

God, hindsight. Now, sitting here in the grass as the sun starts to set, I see how foolish we all were. When the “hit and run” attacks began on Earth, we were glad. We hoped that now, the enemy was going for the throat, that they were making their ultimate gambit, and that if we beat them on our own soil, they would give up and seek easier prey elsewhere. We thought the conflict was entering its final phase. In reality, their plans had only just begun to operate.

Battles at the rim flared up even more violently. Combat there was constant, and even if we had questioned sending troops there before, the rising body counts told us otherwise. The fact that there in fact *were* body counts after such a long period of “simple” maimings and torturings should have told us that something was wrong. Our forces were being forcibly committed, being moved in an inevitable action-reaction pattern set by the enemy. We were being kept off balance, fighting on three fronts now—the rim worlds by the Kuiper Belt, Planet Nemesis, and Planet Earth.

Earth had become a hellish nightmare, a planet under perpetual martial law. Under special dispensation from the Queen, myself and 50 of the greatest warrior-spiritualists of Mars patrolled the capitol, repelling the constant Tairon incursions, the blaring sound of Angelica Tiarne’s voice proclaiming her support for us, rallying the people behind us in patriotic fervour. Oh yes, she rejected us when we proposed reinforcing the Earth’s defenses, but now that we were a ragtag bunch of harried, overwhelmed and constantly outmaneuvered peacekeepers with no realistic chance of success, we had become her darlings.

Between ourselves and an elite unit from Saturn, we managed to keep the capitol safe. But the one thing that always stuck in the back of our minds was the question: “Are we merely being *allowed* to keep the capitol safe?” After all, these were still largely insubstantial creatures, only half-way present in our realm. To them, walls and security fields were meaningless. Yet, instead of penetrating the palace, or other key security areas, they simply careened down streets at night, their millions of eyes glowing blood-red, playing bogeyman and occasionally eating the odd child. Yes, it was to promote a climate of fear. Yes, it made them slowly stronger day by day, and us weaker in turn.

But again, just as they had done with the planet for so long, they stayed away from what they really wanted, that being the Crystal. They knew they could not afford to compromise their one physical agent in our universe, the Tairon in Angelica Tiarne. So, they did the next best thing. They got us—got me—to do their dirty work for them.

I drop the brush for a moment, the tears streaming from my eyes unbidden, ruining the page. I look in my eyes, reflected in the water. Eyes of soft brown, like my father’s. But now there are flecks in them, tiny particles in the iris, of hard, glinting gold. It’s not metal. It’s a lingering aftereffect, a permanent sign of what I did to myself, how I hardened myself to fight the Tairon, a badge of my pragmatism put to practice. It is a sign, some would say of my courage. But now, as I cry, as my tears distort and shatter the image of myself I see in the stream’s water, I know it as a sign of my immaturity, my stupidity, my hubris. I was so willing to sacrifice. So willing to take on pain and hardship. So willing to be martyr. So willing to do whatever it took to achieve victory. And this, this they knew about me. Knew it from the very beginning. They knew my reputation for recklessness and they used it—used me to deliver unto them the very thing they sought—proximity to the Queen herself.

I try to pick up the brush again, and gently press my ink stick down, hands trembling and shaking almost uncontrollably. The first few attempts at producing brushstrokes fail miserably. It is all I can do to draw a distorted smiley-face on the paper. I chuckle out loud, my once-legendary sense of humour still peeking out even as my hearts sink in my chest, the pain cutting into them like knives. I expect to be hit with the stick, but I am not. Is r-chan not watching? No, I see her form reflected in the water behind me. She must realize my hurt and anguish. I take a deep breath, and pick up the brush again, this time with a fresh paper to work with it. I lower it down, and I feel a gentle hand touch my sleeve.

“enough for today”, she intones quietly.

I look up at her with the twisted, half-crying distorted frown of a grief-stricken child and I bawl, unceremoniously, out loud, for what seems an eternity. I scream and I holler, my cries disturbing the crows, who take flight from the trees in a mad unison rush. My hands clutch at the bright red hakama that r-chan wears, my fingers digging into the pant-robes. I hold on, and pull myself to her waist, crying into the bow that is tied high above it, crying like a child. She puts her hands around the back of my head comfortingly, the hands made of living metal that feel as warm as flesh. She says nothing, simply stroking my hair as I gasp and choke with grief, bawling out the rage, the frustration, the darkness, the helplessness that I felt—that I feel. I cry and cry and cry, until the tears exhaust themselves, my eyes growing heavy. I loosen my grip on my surrogate mother’s waist, and slide down to the ground tired, defeated once again.

“sleep”, she recommends.

I cannot argue. As r-chan starts a fire by the side of the lake, I curl up in the grass and close my eyes, the darkness of night falling overhead and in my hearts. I barely feel her place a blanket over me, but I don’t care. I’ve roughed it in worse conditions that this. I just hope that tomorrow, when the sun rises, I can face the memories of my greatest mistake.

It is too dark to write, I tell myself. A convenient lie told to myself to prevent the inscription of my shame into the permanent record. My eyes put a cat’s to shame. I could write in much dimmer conditions that this with no difficulty. I have no doubt that r-chan knows I am awake, sitting upright, thinking. Very little escapes her. But, strict as she is, I think she allows me these moments of isolated introspection. Instinctively, I know I need them.

I continue to let my thoughts wander as they will, gratefully allowing them to skirt the void in the center of my mind. Titanic tons of trivial trash are succinctly sifted as my mental processes efficiently take notice of the thoughts buzzing about my brain and banish them after a moment’s inspection and examination.

I am sitting here, for the moment alone. But, as I ponder now, tears welling in my eyes, despite the acerbic, acid assertions I had made all through my life, I never was—never have been—alone.

Without the brush to record my thoughts, I can afford to contemplate all those I have met along my journeys—those who have shaped my thoughts, my hearts, my mind. Those without whom I would be a wholly different person, even were I to be alive at all.

It’s funny in a way, if you think about it. The Darwinian quest to survive, to evolve, to keep going in the face of overwhelming physical and mental stress—it reduces a person to a mere shell of themselves after a time, a raw core, stripped of the superficial candy coatings and amiable affectations so often employed as a second skin in order to smoothly slide through social situations. That core—that essence of being—was hard-forged not only by my personal experiences, but by the guiding ministrations of all the people I have met over the years. They gave me the will, the power to endure, to survive. In a way, my continuance is a validation, an affirmation, a testament to them, and their philosophies of living.

My parents are obvious influences. My mom and pop both taught me kindness. My mother gave me a joy d’vivre, and pop gave me a keen analytical sense, and respect to see all three sides of the sword which is truth. But in truth, they shaped only the barest outlines of who I am. Fate tore us apart for a very long time, you see—and by the time we had been blessed to reunite, my personal orbit had taken a fairly eccentric turn—all puns intended.

To say r-chan was my second mother would not be a lie. I have had three, actually. My birth mother, r-chan and a kind, but stern matriarch of a noble Japanese clan. Of all three, however, the bond with r-chan seems the most potent. With parents, there is a certain distance, a certain formality that can never be breached; the due deference born out of the umbilical connection. For those on bad terms with their progenitors what I am about to say will make no sense, or even sound ridiculous. But I have felt, as a personal philosophy, that even if one has no room in their personal cosmology for a God, or a creator, the parents come the closest. From themselves, they gave rise to life. Gave rise to it, and nurtured it, cared for it. Demonstrated the most selfless of unconditional loves. Even the love between lovers is predicated on other factors, at least initially. Lust, or desire for stability, safety, companionship. The love of a child, on the other hand, when genuine, is motivated only by the desire to see that child grow and prosper.

I sniffle a bit. No, I sob, quietly. My parents mean so much to me that the sentiment is inexpressible in mere text, even in thought. It is a visceral hollowness of gratitude and painful thanks in my stomach, the hurt of a debt that can never be repaid no matter how long my life extends. I want… I want to give them the universe. To give them back all the love they gave me a thousand million times over. I know I can’t, and it wounds me. I know that no matter what I do, they will not be disappointed in me. That level of pure, unadulterated trust and love—I can’t even give that to myself.

At any rate, yes, where was I. The distance between parent and child. No matter the love that is there, no matter the eventual rapport and easy discussion, there is always a gulf. My father treats me more like an intellectual colleague and best friend, enjoying our talks and arguments with the same casual ease one might share with a brother. It is rare that he ever “pulls rank” on me these days. Indeed, were he not my parent, I would consider him a close friend. But I always have, in the back of my mind, a level of detachment. There are things I can’t tell him, wont’ tell him. Feelings and emotions that would embarrass me to convey, even though the both of us were raised in a culture that favored getting right to the facts without embarrassment.

Mom, on the other hand, treats me alternatively like a sister for purposes of swapping gossip, and like a little kid who requires hand-holding and training. At my age, she still sends me to my room at times! And interestingly enough, more often than not, I go. Heh! If my enemies knew that about me, they’d die of laughter. But when I get with my parents, I do seem to let the little child in me out, and she’s a lot more compliant with their wishes, mainly because she wants to see them happy. And realistically, with all the hell that I’ve seen, getting sent to my room by my mom is a wonderfully happy event. Not to mention she usually comes in after a while with milk and cookies and the like.

I can’t help but giggle to myself. In a lot of ways I’m just a big kid. Which is fine by me. I like living with a sort of innocent joy, but unfortunately it’s not something reality lets me do on more than an infrequent basis. I am cursed to know the darkness, and to have it follow me. So I seek the moments of light and joy with my family to recharge myself, to gird myself for the conflicts that I know will come, carrying that happiness in my hearts, and vowing to come back to it always. Which brings me back to r-chan. When my parents were “killed” by an enemy I didn’t even know I had, she saved me. Protected me. Guided my destiny from afar. Odd, isn’t it? That a machine, fashioned in the likeness of man, could eventually evolve to be so caring, so tender, so maternally aggressive and almost monomaniacal when it comes to the protection of her “pet?”

Yes, pet. Early in her life she didn’t quite fathom the concept of having friends, so she classed a younger me as some kind of “pet”—an inferior, if cute creature to be kept around and tended to in exchange for some form of idle amusement and companionship.

This terminology persisted even long after she had grasped the notion of actually having friends, and she has always put my well-being beyond hers, even to the point of self-sacrifice. She listens to me ramble incessantly about the most trivial of things, and simply nods. Of course she may have turned off her ears, or simply resorted to meditating on some obscure koan. I’m never quite sure. But it doesn’t matter. She was the one who brought me to this shrine, who insisted I write, who wants to help me heal. It is not the first time, nor I doubt the last that she will take special interest in my well-being.

A Shinto miko, she is my surrogate mother, confessor, and best friend. For all the frightening power and force that she wields, she can be as gentle and tame as a doe. I look into her electric-blue eyes sometimes and see the hidden depths of eternity staring back, like staring into a stormy electric sea harkening back to the vaporous, nebulous mists of creation itself.

How does she think? In what form do the thoughts enter her mind? Are they neatly packaged and organized, thanks to her machine-like nature? Or are they are fluid and vague as those of the biological? Well, whatever the primal basis for her behavior, no matter how divergent an initial form it may take, the end product is “more human than human”, to quote Tyrell Corporation’s motto. But even they could not have envisioned a creature such as her. Indomitable, indefatigable, implacable. Peerless. A machine of death devoted to the preservation of life.

R-chan’s philosophy these days is one of pacifism. A believer in the karmic cycles of death and rebirth, she views the cosmos as a sort of self-balancing equation, an equation which the application of her maximum force could easily disrupt. Yes, she could easily step in and decimate the forces of darkness which threaten our world, but then man would lose all reason to grow, to struggle, to learn to band together against adversity, to perhaps even find a better way than war. She must sit back, and watch creation burn, even knowing that she could unmake the terror with her own two hands. It is her power, and ironically, her greatest curse.

Others have called this view of hers self-serving elitism and even cowardice. She has been spat upon verbally and physically over the years. Her pacifism has earned her more enemies than any of her more violent confrontations ever could have. How ugly, the hearts of those who feel themselves just and righteous, and brook no room for the ethical credo! R-chan, thankfully, is slow to anger these days, her ire simmering for great spans of time before coming to a vengeful boil. But when she does need to act—usually to effect change on a small scale—whether it be subduing a bully or intercepting a rouge battleship—she moves with such speed, grace and ease, it is no wonder some have deemed her the “goddess of death”. In those times she truly is the wind, fluid and quick, terror incarnate, a terrible sight to behold.

Such contradictions in one form. I suppose that is why I feel a particular kinship with her. We are both, externally, stereotypical. She, the quiet, noble, reserved, aloof miko who is a symbol of a divine connection to the mortal plane. Myself, a cheery blonde. But both of us have our volcanic depths, our secret furies, our pains. We understand each other for this reason, twisted reflections of one another in a sense. But while her path has led from war to an ever-increasing embrace of peace, mine has descended from a happy home life to one of unrelenting combat. Ascending and Descending spirals of creation in perfect counterpoint.

Now, r-chan hopes to arrest my descent, to save me from myself. Can she? I don’t know. Do I want to be saved? I… think so. I think I may have gone too far in my pragmatic philosophy. I don’t want to be here, weeping at the pit in my soul. I don’t want to be what I have become. I want… something else. Something better. A better way. I never want to stop fighting for the helpless, the powerless, the innocent… but I don’t think I can stomach doing it the way I have been. A new balance has to be struck, and I’m hoping this meditation here, this re-assessment of everything about myself—who I am, who I was, and who I hope to be—will be the first step in establishing that balance.

Thinking of myself as I am now, I remember how I used to be. I never was a pure-minded crusader for what the Japanese call “seigi” or “justice.” I was a housed-up, well loved child who yearned for excitement outside the carefully constructed confines of my domestic sandbox. A thrillseeker who loved adventure. Somewhere along the way, due to the attack on my parents, I came to want a kind of vigilante justice, walking a dark road focused soley on retribution. When my parents were returned to me, however, the need for retribution lessened greatly. By this time I had forged myself into a weapon, mentally, physically, experientially. Even though I was still a scientist and a scholar, I was also a fighter. I still felt the need to *help* others. But with a less grim motivation, I began to become something of a wandering adventuress in Time and Space. I used to even say “Helping is my hobby.”

I was informed in some ways by the activities of a man I look up to, though I daren’t say it to his face. A hero in every sense of the word. Heck, it literally *is* his job to be one. A member of an elite corps, he patrols his designated sector of space wielding one of the most powerful weapons known to the universe. He has an almost comic-book like sense of justice, stepping in when needs be to set right situations that have gone horribly wrong.

I must admit that for a long time, I looked upon him with starry eyes and a great degree of admiration. Here, I said to myself, was a man who had seen the most terrible things in his long life, having hopped the bounds of reality to who knows how many alternate universes, and yet, here he stands before me, a smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye and a usually ribald riposte on his lips for whatever malefic malcontent he happened to be battling at the time.

What amazed me the most, you know, was the way that it seemed like his soul was never weighted down by the depth and breadth of his battles. He truly was iconic to me, a kind of lantern in the darkness.

But now… now that I think about it… contextualizing him in light of my own life, a life in which I often parade around with a disarming grin of my own… how much of that is really real? How much is façade?

Perhaps I use the wrong word. Façade implies a false front, deliberately affected. I wonder… I imagine… what if after so many thousand years of life, after fighting so hard and so long, what if the reactions, the smiles, the quips, the grins, what if they were not so much conscious as unconscious, bodily reflexes akin to that of a raised forearm brought up to block an incoming strike? What if he has blocked out his personal pain, the torture and terror that he has seen, not letting it come to light… or what if, more chillingly… what if after all this time—

--what if he no longer recognizes when he should be in pain?

Oh god.

God.

I think the name of a creator-deity I have a hard time placing stock in. My hearts skip a beat, not so much out of pity for my friend, because I truly do not know his mind—but I do know mine. And… and I think that the hypothetical situation I have ascribed to him is one that affects me. And that frightens me.

After thousands of years of living, you see, you get used to things. Things no one should ever get used to. You get used to the way people look at you, their reactions to you, the clichés they accuse you of being, the insults, the preconceptions, the prejudices. You either let them get to your heart, or you deflect them with a grin and a cutting remark, and slowly the thick skin around you grows. The process is a slow one of accretion, so subtle, so gradual, that it takes forever for you to notice it, if you ever do. But at the same time, as the shell grows, the vulnerable core inside recedes, ever saddened, or angered, or both. Fragile and delicate, it sits there, in perhaps some form of denial, choosing to devalue the whole world around it rather than face more pain.

And that, I believe, is what happened to me. I stopped caring about the actual “hurt” involved a long ago. The suffering of people and animals, once a thing which caused me great distress, had been abstracted away to a set of safe, boring statistical figures in the back of my mind. Oh, I protected them, avenged them of course, but it was all by the numbers. It wasn’t a struggle out of a passion to protect. It was a battle based on the *principle* of the thing.

Fighting, fighting, fighting, all for an abstract principle of justice. For people who for the most part didn’t even care about me, the Venusian legatee who refused to fund the nobles. They might have said I deserved it had I died on the battlefield. But I kept fighting you see, because I hated the idea of evil winning more than I hated them.

It is a sad thing to continue to fight when one loses their way, mindlessly going down the road of blood because one has developed such thick blinders that they cannot step aside.

Well, in truth this is not true. I could have retreated home to Venus, I suppose, and sat out the rest of the war. But I was from a superior race of beings, with knowledge and skills that I knew could be successfully pitted against the enemy. My mother was one of the great heroes of the past age. I knew she would have fought out of principle and out of love. And, bitter as I might have been, I did not want to see humanity consumed by the Tairon. For all their bitterness, treachery and nastiness there are humans who are gems in the rough, and I care for them deeply.

The question then was, to protect, how far does one go?

My people are pragmatic. To the extreme at times. My father was a pragmatist. I am a pragmatist. Pragmatism is so useful. Morals and ethics are important things, but I have saw the utility in allowing a principled position to get in the way of what *had* to be done. It is one area where r-chan and I disagreed for many, many years. Who cares what deal one has to strike, if the goal is worthy, I argued. After all, what is the cost of one person’s ethics in the grand scheme of the universe?

This beings me to the one other person who is in my thoughts often. A wise man, a mad man. A genius writer and thinker whose often blasphemous jibberings often convey the most cutting of truths. The man whom I know has plotted against me in the past, and who probably will in the future. The man who is my godfather by my choice and his assent.

A wise Irishman once said, “Friends you can choose, Family, them you’re stuck with.” I deliberately chose to forge a kinship tie with this man, a man whom many have called evil. Why? Because I respected his vision, his seer-like intelligence. His other actions I kept an eye on of course, and should it ever come down to a final confrontation, I believe I know how to defeat him, though I guard that knowledge jealously. For to my mind he is some form of counterweight to the cosmos, a hand of fate doomed to walk eternal amongst the stars, sowing chaos and confusion but also breeding a unique kind of order in its wake that I, with my longer vision, can more readily see.

Pragmatism. Doing what needs to be done. Sacrificing the mind, the body, even the soul in service of ones’ goal. These things and more he has done, for the advancement of his own personal purpose. I watched him closely and studied him well, the outsider feared by many and hated by almost all.

There was a kind of kinship there, I felt. My erratic persona, which oscillates between the twin foci of cold analytical thought and giddy exuberant glee, was much like his. My status as a half-breed hybrid estranged me from the society of many of my contemporaries, as he was estranged from his fellows for his differences. He took the long view, the cutting view, the view of clarity and truth. So did I, at least in the seeing if not the speaking.

I admired his ability to walk in the world, seemingly immune from the slings and arrows of his fellows with a mirthful, mad indifference that conferred an aura of power to him that by all rights he should not have possessed. He showed my by his actions, the strength of an individual to succeed against the tide of the universe by sheer strength of *personality*, and I took that lesson very much to hearts.

We are kindred, and yet opposed. He himself set certain events in motion which led to horrors in my life, yet I am not angry. Indirectly, he created the person I am today, warts and all, and for that, I am grateful. There is a mutual understanding, I think, if nothing else there. When I look at him it is like looking into the eyes of something wild, something not quite human, that has its shape. Something to be treated with respect and caution.

Indeed, were I to delve into the iconography of the shamanic, I might class him as a Jaguar—a dangerous creature imbued with the power of the divine to initiate the prepared into a new realm of awareness. To those not prepared, he is the terror of the mind to be feared and fled from. To those ready, he is a guide of immense value and strength.

What I fool I was, thinking back on it now. Thinking that I was ready for his wisdom. Oh yes, I heard the words, thought I understood them. I understood nothing but the merest shadows, the superficial reflections. Even as he meant his proclamations in earnest, the very reality of what he *was* should have stood as signpost and warning never to heed them, at the price of one’s soul.

There I go again, with the concept of “soul”. Have I grown to accept that there is such a thing, an immutable essence of the self to be purified or corrupted? Perhaps. I do know that now, in the sobering light of the facts surrounding my return to the shrine here, that something in me was taken, touched, tainted.

My godfather would probably have enjoyed my torment, my torture, my transmogrification. He enjoys seeing the righteous taken down to their knees by their own folly, and I can’t say I blame him much. I deserved my fate, my pain. I should have known better. But again, I thought myself ready. I thought that merely because I could look something like my “Godpop” in the eye without blinking, that I would be ready to withstand the darkness of the Tairon. I was confident in myself, in my cause, in my purpose.

And if there was one lesson I SHOULD have taken away from my Godpop, it was that those who are the most smugly self-assured, confident and secure in their own righteousness are the ones who are first to fall.

Casting my glance sideways, I catch a glimmer of my reflection in the water of the stream. I am a stranger to myself. My face has become thinner, gaunt. There are bags under my eyes, a dark puffiness I am not used to seeing. I am not used to crying, or seeing myself do so.

Some describe the process towards self-enlightenment as a kind of torture, and I can see it. Slowly, painfully, the layers of my own personal onion are being stripped away, and tediously, the cheery exterior with which I had girded myself against the world is being removed. Left in its place is someone I hardly recognize, a thin battered wisp of the person I used to be. Or is this who I always was? I don’t know.

As r-chan passes by, pressing the brush into my hand gently, I know that hopefully, by the end of this exercise, I will have my answer. What I pray for is that the answer will be one I can live with.

My hand shakes, not from grief or sadness, but a kind of internal weakness, not from hunger per se (I’ve gone without for much, much longer). My body, until recently, was not my own. At least not as I understand it now. Part of the deal, the pragmatic exercise I had chosen to take part in, resulted in my forfeiting a part of myself I had not even realized I had lost.

But my thoughts race ahead of themselves. To understand why I did, it is necessary to drop back again, to that horrible time against the Tairon. There were few of us on Earth now, the defenders. Myself, a fighting squad of holy miko from Mars, and some elite fighters from Saturn. Our war was fought in dark corners, in sewers, in the low places where the eyes of the public rarely dared stray.

Yes, there was a state of emergency on Earth. But Earth of the future was a kind of hermetically sealed environment, where the public could sit safely ensconced in their homes, their every base need met, clustered around the vid screen, scaring themselves out of their minds. It was the kind of environment the Tairon wanted, actually. People, penned up voluntarily like cattle, becoming more and more afraid with every news report. They dared not venture outside, their personal worlds collapsing down to their own private bubbles of fear. Interestingly enough, however, this fear was carefully attenuated by the powers in charge; after all, it would do the Tairon no good if their livestock were to become panicked to the point of self-annihilation. Thus the element of hope was always presented, as an ostensible silver lining to the otherwise all-pervading dark clouds of despair and powerlessness that hung over everyone’s hearts. Small victories were exaggerated into huge triumphs—disasters of epic proportion were always underreported, and distance, to keep the danger looming, but never quiet home. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

The disparity between the facts on the ground, where I was, and the jingoistic oscillation between scaremongering and patriotic seduction being performed by the media could not have been any more marked. Outside the main population centers, it was a constant cacophony of fear and terror. For every strike, the enemy struck twice. “Victory” did not mean the killing of a Tairon creature—how does one kill the shimmering inchoate manifestation of a billion-year old dream? No, for us, Victory meant getting the prey out of the way in time, or warding off an area to keep the creatures from emerging into our space.

The time came when “battles” consisted of hop-scotching from one safe-zone to the next, hoping you and your party were not “noticed” by the things lurking in the night. Whisking the potential quarry from safe zone to safe zone until you could place them in shelters. But all the shelters did was to keep the tooth and fangs outside the door. Wards cannot seal away fear, and the fear of the wolf at the gate laying you under siege is potent indeed.

The Tairon used to conglomerate around these shelters, like cats eyeing a birdbath. The problem was slight at first, until the populations inside reached critical numbers. That’s when we realized the Tairon gambit was to allow us our small successes, to allow us to act as sheep-dogs, herding the population to a finer level of control. We had served as their unwitting agents, helping to create pockets of intense fear and panic, and all out of the mainstream public eye. Groups of the aged, the infirm, the dispossessed, the unwanted—all ripe for the plucking.

It was not I who came up with the aikido-like stratagem of using their fiendish plot of the invaders against them. It was a controversial move. We would risk a daring daylight transit, taking the entire population of one small shelter to another, using the poor people as pawns, as bait, worm for the lure.

The idea was controversial and hotly debated. I quickly signed on. I wanted the Tairon to get caught in our web for once. I wanted us to be the ones in ostensible control of the situation. Heh. At the time it sounded like a good idea, showing them that even with their power, the Tairon could be led, manipulated, used.

The problem of course was, what do we do when we get a hold of them? The most the holy Miko had been able to do was cause slight pain to the Tairon through their prayers and application of the holy wards. But the creatures were smart enough to avoid remaining around in proximity for too long, especially when the miko, in the impressive black and red robes were present.

Thus, I volunteered for a dangerous duty. Being raised as I had been by r-chan, who was a powerful miko in her own right, plus the training I had received in Japan, my spirit powers were slightly better than that of the average miko, even if I rarely used them, being a child of scientific rationalism. Since I preferred to battle using my sword, it is unlikely that the Tairon knew of the full depth of my power. Also, being a child of one of the legendary heroes, her blood ran though my veins, giving me a strength and depth of reserve even greater than the one afforded me by my superior hybrid physiognomy—if I chose to tap it.

Tapping that reserve within me was not a choice I made lightly. For someone like my mother, who had had her powers awakened suddenly, in a moment of crisis, and then was thrown headlong into her own battle against the darkness, there had been little choice in the matter. It was sink or swim, do or die. For myself, however, who had been given ample time to study the nature of her being and the strength that lay within, there was always the choice to be made-- use the power or not. Join the struggle, or not.

Most people, I think, would assume that the choice to call forth an energy which enables one to heal ten times faster from severe wounds, to leap twenty to thirty meters in a single bound, and to have enough strength to smash a brick wall with one's bare fist would be a simple one. Who wouldn't want that kind of strength, after all? Not to mention that it extends life and keeps one looking more or less eternally youthful and fit.

But what would those people do with the power, I wonder? What would the average man do with superhuman power? Use it to help, use it to engage in predatory conduct for his own gross ends, or use it not at all, simply choosing to use the gift of longer life to prolong his soporific, comfortable existence?

Nothing comes without a price. For people like my mother, whose powers were an inherited legacy from a time long past, the price was a kind of psychological contamination. The personalities of the warriors whose strength she borrowed could, if the power was used long enough, dominate and overwrite her own. There were times, under prolonged stress, that she almost lost herself, becoming the literal avatar of lives past. I myself would have no such problem, as the wellspring of energy I would draw from would be "blank", so to speak. Indeed, my persona would become the stamp which would define its characteristics-- should I choose to use it.

But to become that kind of force means to lose yourself to it, to give over something of yourself that you cannot reclaim. The energies that fueled the transformation also, much in the way that exposure to radiation can mutate cell matter, changed the cells in the body of their wielder. Use it for too long, and your body changes forever-- becomes used to the power, needs it-- like a drug. The person you were before literally will have ceased to have been. Stepping in that river fully means never being able to come out again. That is, if you go too far.

At the time, of course, my inhibitions about using my powers stemmed from a different basis. I never expected to be put in a situation where I would be continuously forced to draw on that strength for more than a day or two at most. My problem stemmed from the fact that I did not want to follow in my mother's footsteps.

Mom had had a hard life full of suffering and isolation because of the battles she fought against the darkness. It was many years before she finally found love and had the ability to settle down in peace, enjoying the sensation of comfort and security in being wanted and desired by another. She sacrificed her entire youth to that battle. Even though physically she remained young, there were times-- quiet times, in the stillness, when I could see the sad look in her eyes, the wondering, the questioning as to what she had given up in the course of her duty. Everything had turned out all right, of course-- and indeed without her struggle she might never have even made it far enough to get to a point of enjoying a good life with her husband, child and friends-- but I, I was more selfish.

Even after the hard circumstances of my life, the battles against the wench who had attacked my parents, the trail of blood I had been forced to walk through, I had no taste for war, no love for battle. Being able to do a thing, and wanting to do it are two different matters altogether. As soon as it was done, I tried my best to return to a life of frivolous abandon, turning my eye to my studies, social gatherings with my friends, and as many moments with my parents as I could spare. I never wanted to join an unending fight against evil.

But, I was raised by kind hearts. Kind hearts who, in turn, made me kind-hearted as well. And I knew, just knew that it was my obligation to do something for those who could not help themselves. If there was one thing I inherited from my mother aside from her looks and her devious cunning, it was her hatred for seeing cruelty inflicted on others.

Oh, it did not die, of course. Something that old, that large—it does not die from a simple bloody nose such as that. Still, it knew a moment’s fear—or if fear be too strong a word, perhaps “apprehension” would fit more apt—and it withdrew.

As we hoped and feared, the Tairon swarmed, assaulting the group I was escorting again and again, as the poor sheep were led to the ever-increasing slaughter. Only about 12 people made it with me all the way across the city, if I recall correctly, and they were half dead, most gibbering incoherently about what they had seen, their sanity forever lost. There were no plaques, no memorials, no speeches extolling the virtues of the sacrifice that had been made by those people—none of the high-sounding gestures that politicians make from the comfort of the rear lines for domestic popularity points. There was only the cold hand of death, and the rotting stink of flesh in the streets of Crystal Tokyo, a stench that would linger for decades, even after the streets were steamed. No one who lived in the outer wards at that time and who had the luck to live would ever forget the smell. No, only the quiet of the grave for nameless victims of a diabolical war over scarce resources, pawns ground to dust, some never knowing why they had died, what they had supposedly died for.

My anger was total, my helplessness to kill the creatures fueling the depth and scope of my transformation. I was more efficient, more effective. I moved from fight to fight to fight, running on adrenalin and the seemingly bottomless reserve of power that I had inherited. Hours turned into days, into weeks, into months, into years, without the shift back to normality.

At some point, I could feel my DNA changing. My people have always had an intimate connection with their biochemistry, and could control it on a very fine-grained level. I felt the change caused by the constant use and suffusion of my cells with the energy. I knew that if I did not stop immediately, if I did not return to normal, my body would be forever converted into the transformed state.

But I was engaged in a fight for life against an implacable foe. Years spent in skirmishes in the “Box-Trap” District—as we called it—had made it impossible to take the downtime needed to recuperate and let the body heal. If we stopped fighting here, the Tairon would turn their eye to the rest of the city. I had no choice but to keep going. And besides, I reasoned, psychologically the effects for me would probably be minimal beyond having to adjust my motor co-ordination.

So eventually, a piece at a time, I let myself change until my old body was literally no more, burnt away in the light and heat of the Venus transformation. I still looked like myself—indeed, some said I looked more beautiful than before—but I cared nothing for aesthetic value, only combat efficiency. Some called me the “Fair-Haired Angel of Death”, but I cared nothing for labels, especially false ones.

There was nothing more that I wanted beyond being able to actually kill one of the Tairon bastards. My people were strong, scientifically. They could bend the universe to their will with technology. But I was forbidden to deploy it on Earth, or in this conflict, and so my helpless fury borne of impotence grew. How easy it would have been to trap these Tairon in an oscillating current of time, to twist their past and future into a mobius, to simply cut them out of the universe and toss them into eternity! Or would it? Different physical laws mean different relations with time. The plan might have failed. But it was something I always thought about. Had this been my world, we would have crushed the Tairon without a second thought.

I don’t even know the day I fully changed, bodily. It is forgotten to me. You would think it would be something easily remembered, like the first time one takes a lover, or breaks a limb. But I don’t recall it, the change having been so incremental. Nor did I care, really. The only thing that informed my callous cogitation was the cold calculus that even with my superior strength and speed, I was still no match for the Tairon, my hated foe.

And so the pain went for almost 600 years. Time bled away, even from me. I lost track of the days and nights as the blue sky slowly became red, the pollutants of industry and commerce choking the sky with sulphuric soot. The dance of death with the Tairon had become an endless waltz in lock step, predator and prey each evolving, becoming smarter, more cunning. The Queen had taken to doing the only thing she could to save the lives of the populace, following in the footsteps of a controversial plan by her mother millennia ago. To prevent them from sinking into the fear and terror which fed the Tairon, she bathed the population in the light of her crystal, lobotomizing their souls, removing their fear and worry, making them bland, brainless puppets, not tasty enough for the akhashic meal.

The Earth had become a planet of the walking dead, in a way. It was a horror that did not go unnoticed all across the various governments of the solar system. But embroiled as they were in more conventional warfare with the Tairon With the virtual “blanking” of the populace occurring, the Tairon infesting Earth were becoming weaker, easier to hurt. They dared not leave this front, for their primary objective—the crystal—had yet to be secured. Besides which, their plan was still in operation. After all, as I now note with a shiver down my spine, they really didn’t need the people of Earth for food—the other planets were supplying that quite well. They just wanted to draw someone out, someone they could use.

They wanted me.

I was not unknown to the Tairon mind. Our consciousnesses had touched, even for the briefest of moments, like a quick springtime kiss, many years ago. It was during the implosion of the time corridor around Pluto that time I had been manipulated into confronting my Pop. For a moment, as time and space tore, I slipped between dimensions, into a hellish illusion of the Dream mind, where they saw me, taunted me, tasted me. I escaped—or was allowed to escape, as I now realize—tumbling down half an A.U. away in the streets of the Imperial Capitol. Bloodied and confused I made my way home, not realizing how I had been marked.

At the time I did not understand who my captors had been, but as they had tasted my spirit, so had I theirs, and with the long passing of years, comprehension grew. Arrogantly, perhaps, I assumed I was the first to make the mental connection, that somehow I was innovating strategically by planning to make use of the link that had been forged, never thinking that I was merely acting like a homing pigeon coming back to roost.

There is a low-level telepathic ability in my people. It’s nowhere near as strong as full telepaths—there’s no mind reading or dream invading involved, but it is enough to make contact with our own people, and occasionally other minds. It’s risky and dangerous, and being the secretive creatures were are by culture, it’s not a skill we tend to use often, if at all, consciously.

But, as the conflict had drawn on, I had come to a simple conclusion. The Tairon were like tanks. Tanks running over villagers armed only with pebbles. Tanks invading a pre-industrial village whose greatest feat of armament was a sharpened stick. And despite what George Lucas wants you to think, in a fight between a tank and a cute furry wielder of sharpened sticks, the tank wins every time. The key then, of course, was to get a tank of your own somehow. And if you can’t build one of your own, steal it from the enemy instead.

I wince again, the bitter and salty tears filling my eyes. My hand is trembling, the kanji I’m brushing turning into wavy, almost illegible lines. Again, my dance of thought has come to the black maelstrom, that whirlpool of despair that sits in the center of my stomach. I don’t want to go here, don’t want to follow the chain of thought that leads down into this interminable chasm. I want to skip away again at the edges, to pull away on another tangent. I don’t want to look into the abyss.

I’m sobbing again, on the outside. Outside. Outside, because I’m disconnected now, consciousness staring at itself in the mirror. I don’t sense the warm autumn air, the smell of the grass, the sound of the waterwheel clack. I simply see in my own mind the yawning pit of black hopelessness that swirls, waiting to engulf me.

I walk towards it, detached, disconnected, holding out a hand to it, as if to touch it, the insubstantial. A touch is pain. I double over, on the ground. I feel my body fall to the side, the ground rushing up to my head, the soft cradle of the grass. Arms and legs in a fetal embrace. But I am not paying attention to the weakness of the flesh. My touch has not wavered. My finger presses the pain, causing the knot in my stomach to flare and burn.

I must press into it, push deeply, stride into the darkness of my own soul. I can’t run away now. To run away is to die the death of a billion cuts. To never confront my tragedy, my despair. I move forward again, pressing to the dark.

I sink into the wall of black slowly, a pressure change around me. Sound is muffled, distant. I feel immersed as if underwater. I press harder, sinking totally into the gulf between sanity and madness, superficial hope and innermost despair.

I am in blackness. I have no limbs, no body, no sight. I am alone, a thought in suspension, contemplating itself. All around me is a raw aching scream of pain expressed in the quivering of the gut, a tension and distress like no other. A pain not of physical origin, but emotional shock.

There is anger here, sadness and rage. I look for my friends, and find none. I look for my parents, and find none. I was left alone, by fate, by circumstance, what have you. The universe abandoned me again, to the winds of destiny. For all the talk of love and friendship that everyone so easily spews given the slightest opportunity, the cold hard fact is we all die alone, no matter who else happens to be present. Everything was left on me, Sakura of the shining smile, Sakura of the cheery face, the indomitable Sakura who could handle anything, do anything, tolerate anything because she was a good girl.

“You’re such a good girl,” Mom and Pop used to say. And I was, despite my slight rebelliousness, I would like to think. I wanted to be good. I never wanted to be a burden or a pain to them, and with a smile on my face now I think that I never was, really. I may have been annoying at some points, but in comparison to some of the other reprobates around me, I think I came out okay. I wasn’t like the other kids, who actively hated their parents or thought it would be “cool” to spit in their faces. They had been good to me, my folks, and I wanted to be good to them. The problem of course is, I was good to everybody else, too, and that’s the quickest way to get stepped on.

I realize now, looking back, that some people don’t mean to step on you. They don’t mean to hurt you. They are just ignorant of their own actions and the consequences thereof. Some people have been so inured to being hurt over time that when they inflict pain on you in the same way, they don’t even see what they’re doing, or the gravity of it. When I was in university, a girl I had considered by best friend shoved me out of a window screaming a racist epithet. That hurt me more than the impact on the ground, that someone I had called friend had done this to me, when all I had wanted was friendship. It wasn’t until later that I found out she too had suffered at the hands of others, having been taunted, ostracized and denigrated to the point where her fellow sentients really didn’t even register to her as being things worthy of concern over.

Hell, my own father, like I said, almost lost faith in people so many times over the course of his life. And I was going down the same road- had gone down it. I was tired of the hypocrisy, the lies, the hurt, the stupidity. I was tired of relying on other people, whose minds I could not know, could not trust. It is said everyone comes with baggage attached, and I was tired of being at the mercy of that baggage, that unconscious motivation that lies in the mind and seeds betrayal. If I was going to survive I had to do it myself, by myself. It wasn’t for glory, or for the ability to say later on down the road “I did this!”, it was just to get the job done.

After all, the world around me was in ruins, I had no friends left on the planet, my parents were gone—if I succeeded I would have a chance at normality again—and if I failed, well at least I’d be dead and wouldn’t have to worry about it too much then.

Did I want to die? Was this some kind of nihilistic wish from me, the one who often classed herself the “ultimate survivor”?

I dunno. Honestly. I don’t. I guess even I got tired of the pain. I didn’t care about the Earth, or Venus, or my homeworld or anything anymore. I was burnt out. I just wanted it to stop. In victory, or in defeat I didn’t care.

Not true. I wanted to win. It wasn’t an all-consuming urge, but it was there. It was a quiet resolve, a small voice in the back of my mind. I wanted peace.

I look into the darkness now, and think back, back to how it all happened.

The reason for the Tairon’s re-orbiting of Nemesis to the other side of the sun had become all too clear. Hidden from view, and growing ever fatter on the endless slaughter and horror on the front lines there, they had managed to manifest more fully, three-quarters of the way into our plane. Then, one day, without warning, they had burst though the lines, swimming through space with an unholy screech at the speed of thought, ravaging the planets like rats swarming upon a corpse. Mercury. Venus. Mars. Jupiter. Uranus. Neptune. And on, and on, in a straight line to solar edge, to the termination shock at the end of the solar winds. It was total war and total chaos, with Earth skipped over lightly.

The population on Earth, of course, had been more or less rendered invisible to the Tairon due to their brainwashing. Even the throaty protestations of Angelica Tiarne, now broadcast from the lunar colony, couldn’t raise them to a tasty enough panic. The few of us with personality still intact were now the primary targets for the few creatures who remained there, our still-active minds like beacons in the night. I decided to use that to my advantage.

The holy miko were able to stave off the claws of the Tairon, but the Saturnian guard and myself were wide open for attack. I could have shielded my mind, as every academy student is taught to do on my world, but I left a hole open, a tiny space, a breadcrumb trail for the Tairon to catch wind of.

Predictably, one came one night, its hot, gaseous foul smelling breath-stench snorting over my face as I half-slept. Hovering over me, I felt the slimy slick of one of its tentacles begin to rove over me, probably planning some sort of physical violation to promote a panic / fear response. But I was planning a violation of my own.

I grabbed the tentacle with one hand, focusing my mind like a point of laser light, shoving my awareness down, through, across, mind to mind—not combatatively as the Dream Division were wont to do, but conversationally.

The Dreamers welcomed me, as they had the last time, tasting my consciousness, exhorting me to join with theirs. Herald, they called out. Scion. First to be touched, first to leave and first to return, as we knew you would be.

As before, all my thoughts were open to them. I could hide nothing, be not deceptive in any way. It was a hard exposure for one who liked to keep her secrets close to her chest. But I had a plan. The last time I had sought subliminal fear and anger in their gestalt in terms of fomenting internal discord. This time, I just flat out stated my request. “Hello!” I bellowed politely across the universe of the Dream, my words touching every inch of the multidimensional firmament. “Hands….err, tentacles up anyone who thinks rampant expansionism across universes is a bad idea!!” As expected, the gestalt nattered on about harmony, and wholeness, and how there was no dissension, no dispute, how I should surrender my body and flesh to them. Of course, unlike the last time when I had been asported to their dimension, my flesh was in no peril from the Tairon save for being crushed by the one over me. I didn’t have to worry about bodily assimilation, and that made me bolder. I had vowed last time to be ready for the second encounter with the group mind, and I was. Using the same mental process that would normally use to explore my own body, I instead explored the body of the Dream at incredible speed. I found structure there, of a kind. A Central Brain, of a type and complexity beyond that of any I could even begin to describe. McCoy’s Anatomy has nothing like it on file, I can tell you. Still, its existence was of no use to me, being on the other side of the physical plane. I could not attack the brain, the singularity, nor could it attack me, other than by trying to engulf me in the almost passionate embrace of the total mind.

But I found the data point I was seeking. The question in my mind had been, was this Dream-unity the only thing of its kind in its universe, or was there more? Were there beings of equal and opposite power known to them I might be able to discern the name of, to seek out, to invoke, to beg for assistance on the behalf of the cattle from the other end of the multiverse? Yes, it was a little like pigs searching for PETA, to use a 21st century context, but it was worth a shot.

Cells in a body. Science has begun to comprehend that each cell in a body can react in automatic ways to stimuli. Each of them, if one were to indulge in a bit of wishful thinking, might have some kind of rudimentary consciousness, the kind of simplistic “on / off” response to the world around them that a paramecium might have, for instance (and what is a paramecium but a single-celled organism?)

The Tairon, it seems, were similar. Multiple Dreams of a single Dreamer, dreaming themselves into our universe, but yet distinct and discrete cells of a larger, universal whole, which, united in form, was not united in direction. Just as any man contains multitudes of opinion even when a singular course of action has been set, so too did the Tairon Overfiend hive-mind have lingering questions—not about its overall goal, which was survival—but the means by which to achieve it.

In hindsight I do not know if this schism was genuine or manufactured for my benefit, to give me something pretty to look at, a false hope to latch onto. I’m beginning to think it was the latter, given what happened later.

Finding these cells it was a quick matter of contacting them, of conveying the situation (which they already knew in any case) and making my case that there should be some form of alliance in which I would lend my flesh to the splinter cell of the overmind, in exchange for the power to defeat the invaders, hold them back and keep the peace until some sort of compromise could be achieved. There was no civil war such as I had hoped to foment, merely an orderly disagreement of opinion, the clash of two ideas taking physical form on the battlefield.

The whole conversation could not have taken more than a millisecond of realtime from the moment I touched the tentacle to the endpoint when the power of the opposing side stormed my frame. A millisecond to give up myself. A millisecond to sell my soul to the devil.

The rush was unlike anything I had ever felt before. Every part of me was invaded, augmented, attenuated. The almost overwhelming rush of power from my own transformation years ago was as a light tickle compared to this. I was transcending the limits of blood and bone, flesh and sinew. I was… beyond.

With the power of the Tairon Splinter in me, I could see so much, understand so much. Understand them, the rivulets of their thoughts across the dream. Their thoughts, their tactics, their plans. Or as much as they wanted me to, anyway. With their power it was easy to maim, to cripple, to kill the invading forces. Where before my strikes were an inconvenience, now they were lethal.

The others in the Saturnian guard feared and distrusted me for my new alliance, and so it was that all my friends deserted me. But it did not matter. Alone, augmented, I carved a trail of blood through the Tairon. The Dream Division benefited from my devil’s deal, realizing that by meditation and changing their brainwave frequencies to that of the Tairon’s, they could impact the creatures more effectively and fiercely in spiritual combat.

They, of course, were applauded for their innovation whilst I was shunned for the demon in my soul. But I had gone past caring. I was making a difference! I was killing the enemy! I could stop them! I WOULD stop them! What did it matter if I carried a taint, a voice in the back of my mind, a possible hand tugging at the strings in my soul? I was a whirling dervish of destruction, a predator in flight, doing what needed to be done with courage and perseverance when no one else dared.

Death after death after death after death I saw, the slick green/black coat of sticky ichor stained into my very soul. At first a small part of me abhorred the carnage, but then I began to accept it. Accept it, embrace it, and even ultimately to enjoy it. There is a sense of triumphant elation at being able to harm the previously impervious, a sense of sick satisfaction at being able to render pain unto the former givers of same. And it never got old. I always found new ways to make it interesting. Perhaps I’d slice off the eyes first, then dissect the creature straight through before it could regenerate. Or maybe I’d rip open its belly and introduce some nanotechnological parasites into its system to eat and eat the flesh, putting the animal in perpetual agony as it healed only to be devoured again.

Statistically, the results were encouraging—to a point. The inner solar system was rapidly clearing out due to the innovations in warfare and the fact that we had cleared out the capitol, allowing some reinforcements to arrive. The Nemesian front, however, had become an infernal slaughterhouse, where the young and old simply went to die. In the inner systems, Tairon attacks were now sparse, since the population that was left was either brainwashed, fighting back or so inured to the constant carnage that they literally could not be frightened any further. The human empire itself had become numb, tired. The few “monster of the week” attacks that did occur inside the central hub of the Imperium were nothing more than easy mop-up jobs for the news media to broadcast. The horrors of the front were forgotten by the public mind, as it was easier to latch on to this new “normality”. War was elsewhere again, with a few intrusive terror attacks to remind the people it still might, in theory hit home.

I should have known then that the retreat of the dark hand across space was merely the recession of the waves before a Tsunami.

My arrogance did not allow me to ponder the possibility that I was being played, a pathetic pawn of a puppet. I honestly thought I had dented the Tairon war machine. Maybe, in some way, I had. We were able to learn about spirit resonance, about their true nature, about how to kill them—information, which in later, quieter times would allow us to make true weapons against which they were indeed helpless. But at this moment in history, with the beasts on our backs, it was, in retrospect, the height of conceit to think we did little more than to inconvenience them. After all, how does one kill a dream?

Well, by turning it into a nightmare, of course. But little did we know the nightmare had already been planned for us.

All I can do is helplessly drift back, remembering that one sick moment when I realized that all my power, my strength, my force of which I had been so proud—all of it, was just a lie, a product of an unseen hand moving me about like a marionette on strings.

At first I had thought it a lucid dream. The hollow, echoey click-clack of my adamantine-soled shoes on the white, shining plastisteel floors of the imperial palace.

The looks of distrust and wariness on the faces of the few remaining guardsmen as I approached the queen’s throne room. My sword, being taken from my side as a “routine” precaution. The tech detectors. The mind scan by the Dream division—not that their lot could ever casually read my intent. They would have had to have gotten a lot rougher than the pretense of non-discrimination would have allowed.

In a way, I wish they had probed deeper, forced me to suffer the indignity of the full examination. My status as nobility, even that of black sheep nobility, however, allowed me to slip through the screening that normally debased and dehumanized the few “normal” people who dared come this far in a time of war. After all, the elite always trust their own to a certain degree. It’s what makes life so charmingly stupid at times.

They had had the good sense to make me remove my shoes, my aged, brown leather vest (which was always crammed with the most wonderful tools and implements), my fingerless leather gloves, even the orange bow in my hair. I stood before her highness in my lime-green socks, tan slacks and white silk blouse. A lime green tie in the old Edwardian style rounded out the eclectic look.

Such informality did not offend her; after all, we had known each other of old. We were children of mothers who were like sisters to one another, we had argued against each other, played together, laughed together, fought back to back. Two old friends, two very different journeys, back again, together in the same place, at the same time.

The transparent tritanium, spiritually reinforced barrier between us was merely a formality of course. Everyone had to stay on the other side of it. It was unbreachable without weapons, and I was totally unarmed.

I laughed to myself in the dream, wondering why I was thinking of attacking my nominal liege. The laughter turned to disquiet as I felt my hands raising up under their own power, my face twisting into a sick leer of pleasure, even as I willed and struggled and fought to stop them.

The energies that poured forth from my fingertips were dark, and abhorrent. The selfsame Tairon powers I had used to kill their ilk were now lashing out against the barrier, denting it, breaking it. I could feel the chant of a billion minds in unison suddenly burning themselves into my brain, forcing me, compelling me to continue, using me as a locus to channel their energy.

The barrier blew, even as I impotently screamed in rage, pounding on the glass coffin that was my untainted soul, trying to get out. I couldn’t do anything! Say anything! My hands… my hands were not my own any longer! My whole body, spinning with the power I had so relished, turning, twisting, blasting, slaughtering people I had known my whole life, children of heroes just like me, their faces twisted with shock and surprise as they died.

I wept inside as alarm klaxons went off, as the sound of jackboots in the halls drew nearer. I, I who had once helped save the Queen, was now mere meters away from killing her with my own alien hand. I prayed for the guards to find me, to shoot me down, to save her. But I knew that with my speed, my power, my hands would be around her throat before they could even get to the throne room door.

And so they were, as I saw myself, strangely detached from events now, choking the life out of her, drawing her energy into me even as I poured the black stink of the Tairon into her veins. The bright-white glow of her crystal, the ultimate focusing lens-- that which could change thoughts into reality-- it beckoned me, called to me, seduced my vision. With this, my Tairon puppetmasters shouted with glee, with this they could tear space itself asunder, open the way and swarm whole-bodied into this universe, converting it into their Dream!

As my hands tightened around her throat and I saw her going pale, I railed and railed against my meat prison, which was betraying me. I tried to induce a coma, or a trance, anything to shut down my body. But I was incapable. Utterly. Completely.

I’d like to say I came up with a cunning plan at the last second. Or that I’d held something back, in reserve. I’d like to say I heroically broke the stranglehold of the demon in my mind and taught it the meaning of fear. I’d like to say these things, but I can’t. I had lost. Completely, utterly. My pragmatic decision to sacrifice a part of myself in the hopes of achieving a greater victory had doomed everyone in the solar system.

Or at least it would have, if not for the Queen herself. Despite her scandal-ridden youth, and her rather inept upbringing, she was strong in will and spirit. Even the power of the Tairon ripping into her flesh was not enough to stop her iron will. She bore the pain and focused herself, channeling her willpower into the crystal and smashing me backwards over thirty feet.

I skidded to the ground, feeling the pain of the attack sear into me. I shuddered involuntarily. My eyes narrowed. The pain had hurt both me and my… I suppose it was my master. The word still makes me want to scream in rage even now. The point was that even for a split second, its hold had been broken over me.

I screamed out for the Queen to kill me quickly, before it could assert itself again. This, as should be obvious, was not done. But nor was I spared. Blast after blast from the crystal kept me in unspeakable agony, writhing and convulsing. The method of pain was always subtly different; enough to keep me or my master from adapting. They said later it was the only way to keep me in control, to keep the Tairon from regaining their footing in my soul until help could arrive—but I think the queen enjoyed it somewhat, a throwback to her own taint from the days of old.

Tied and chained to a wall for some hours. Never fully purified, just cleansed enough to keep me in control. The amount of force that would have been needed to drive the darkness from me totally, they said, would have lobotomized me, made my mind into pulpy froth. I was interrogated, tortured, interrogated some more. Not that I wasn’t telling them what they needed to know, mind you. They just wanted their pound of flesh, which I suppose was understandable. Hell, I wanted to hurt, to be cut, to bleed out onto the ground, for what I had done to my friends. For what I had almost done to the Queen.

But the Queen’s intercession kept me stable, kept me alive. The old bonds of friendship were not for nothing. She lied to her underlings, told them I had been on a secret mission from the Imperium to gather enemy intelligence. Told them that it was the highest priority cause, and that was why I had taken Venus out of the war. All lies, of course, but convenient ones. Ones the uber-patriots could understand easily, without much thought. Secret missions were so much simpler than hard personal decisions founded on unpopular principle.

After a few weeks of poking and prodding to make sure the influence that was left was weakened enough for me to hold it back on my own, I was released. The miko from the Dream division did what they could for me, and fashioned an amulet-seal to aid my defense. But there was still the blood on my hands, the quick massacre from my moment of impotence, the horror of their faces…

I drop the brush and look at my hands again, look at my face in the water. I don’t know who I am anymore. My personality was shattered at the hands of Tairon. The lightness of my hearts left me in favor of a perpetual survival-mode. Colder than my father, more ruthless than my own people, I had become a shell of my former self.

With the war now a rearguard action, I decided to leave, to go back to the past, to a time when life was simpler, smiles more abundant, and family omnipresent. To the place that had always made my soul sing and tapdance with delight no matter how odd things became. To Tokyo of the 21st century.

It was like a bedridden patient being asked to walk after months of solitary slumber. My limbs were rubber, my co-ordination gone. Even the supreme strength of the Venus transformation was useless against the lack of Tairon Energy. I had allowed them to buoy me, to control me, to move me, even when I thought it was I who had been moving. I could not walk, could not talk, could barely breathe. I would have to re-learn my motor skills, my biocontrol, all of it, all over again, like a newborn babe.

r-chan had had to sling me on her back and carry me to this place, the shrine by the stream, a pocket of quiet isolation amidst the clamour and crush of “modern” society.

This writing, this purgation, she insisted it would be a slow mediation, a way for my body to begin to relearn its own rhythms in the background whilst I fought my demons from the past, bringing them to light, shining the sunlight upon them and crumbling them to dust.

Slowly, spitting out some dirt, I push my way up weakly, limbs not atrophied but yet feeling that way. I pick up my brush again to write, but I don’t feel like it. It’s not a sense of avoidance, just a sense of no need.

I crack the knuckles in my fingers and take a deep breath. It hurts a little to breathe that deeply, all of a sudden. My back is tight. My neck… hurts. I *feel* pale, and have no doubt that I look it, too. But I can feel. I can *feel* again. I don’t seem like a stranger in my own body, a visitor in my own mind.

I stand slowly, feet not really stable at all. I wobble a bit, and the ground seems to spin. But I waver, and shift, and hold my balance. The world swims around me, but I stand, I stand.

I did what I did to try and save everyone. Would I do it again? I don’t know. I want to cry more.

Someone’s coming now, from behind. I hear my name being called, cheerfully. It’s my mom. Mama.

And my Pop. Also calling, worried, happy to see me. Before I can blink I’m crushed in dual hugs, so warm and soft and loving and tender. The tears burst like gushers, from all of us, at once. I’m sobbing and heaving, and so are they, for reasons the same and yet different. I’ve missed them terribly, these past, horrible years. It seems like a second eternity since I was separated from them.

I need their warmth, their love, their absolution. And looking into their eyes, I see that I have it, and always will. I’m home, and here I want to stay, even if it is in the past.

Heh. I always say that, but I know the wanderlust, and the obligations of my current role in the universe will call me back sooner rather than later. But I’ve decided that this time, I’m going to change things. Change the way I do business, my outlook on life, and what I consider to be acceptable compromises. It is better, I think, to lose a battle than to lose oneself. Pity it took me so long to some to this quite crucial conclusion.

I step away from the others for a moment, the sheath of papers I have written in hand. I read the words again, the facts and data registering in my mind. I glance them over once more, the codex of my personal pain presented before me, in my hand, warm, alive somehow. I turn to the fire r-chan has started. I smile. She doesn’t miss a trick, that one. Slowly, I bend down and place the papers into the fire, burning them—and the scar on my soul—away.

It is Thanksgiving 2006, and I am thankful to be here, to draw breath, to have my family, to be able to change. I will use this gift of freedom and of time wisely. I will remake myself once again, as I had in the past after the death of my family. I will find that joy, that happiness, that innocence once again. I will be the firestarter, the troublemaker, the mischievous imp, that wrench in the cosmic works that I know I was meant to be. I will make a difference again—and this time I will do it the right way.

My name is Sakura Xadium Aino, and this I promise to the universe.