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Song of Rainbows The Song of Rainbows had been to every corner of Creation. She had circumnavigated the endless Wyld, chasing a stream that carried itself across her palatte and dazzled her eyes.

The scent of adventure. The lure of treasures. There was a purpose to it all. A grand design. A map she could follow across the channels of her soul that carried her hither and fro.

Cutting across the forests of the East, there were places there filled with danger and wonder, but the scent was weak. A land that Song could claim, a land that Song could claim, but not one she felt any tie to.

A land of hidden waterfalls and secluded paradises.

She cut across the vast deserts of the South, and here is where some progress was made. The sands held treasures! Diamonds in the rough. She was a scourge there for long years, growing more seasoned and richer. But there was nothing there that called to her.

The Blessed Isle surely held some clues, but there was nothing there that was dormant, or hidden, or undiscovered. The palaces were filled, the gates manned. There was nothing unknown and novel there. It was not until Whitewall's fall that some clue had been gleaned. She began her search, catching the scent of something more as she chased the cues back to her home in the West.

To the forboding palace of Skullstone, and the far-emptier seas without the Lintha, the Wood Fleet, or the petty navies. She walked the halls of the Silver Prince and drew in a mighty breath.

It was not here that she would find what she was looking for. Above, around, among. Her answers lay below.

In the land beneath the land. Her mortal heart raced as her immortal soul sung.

Following the path through the Underworld, striding blasted lands and dead earth, there were two pits of depravity that stunk of portents - though an empty tower-manse and a blasted crater left few clues.

But there was one land that did not mirror its light cousin. One stone holding down the tarp, dripping essentia into the well of nothingness.

Stygia.
Song of Rainbows STYGIA

There is no place like it within the land of the living. The Underworld itself is a dark reflection, but Stygia is where the dead 'live' as more than mere reflections. It is where the dead thrive under the stone holding the world together. The lowest point, under the needle, where it has pierced through the skein of things.

A gothic metropolis. The scents abound, filling Song's sinuses with import.

She is there, in an alley, looming with too many setless eyes, a jagged grin of too many teeth. "You smell good. Come here." She whispers, out to a ghost among the throngs of the dead. As she tears into the ephemeric viscera of the ghost and drinks the dripping ectoplasm and essentia, her mind floods with the clearest vision of the thing she had been chasing, like a track driven by bootheel into fresh snow.

She is among the rooftops, leaping from building to building, climbing up and up the spire of ghostly death essence distribution. Finding a clear bit of tubing, she hangs and stares, watching the pumping machinery of life-among-death flow around a bend like liquid smoke.

Pressing her nose into the glass, her eyes follow every twist and eddy within - exactly like a bear watching a stream for fish to snap out of the water. Mesmerized, her brow daps against the glass.

She pushes again, and her head begins to bleed through the containing glass, until her whole head is jammed into the stream of Essence. It is there, her long dreadlocks spun around the pipe like fingers, she finds a clarity of impuse she had not experienced before.

Her eyes blacken, and red points fill at the center of her irises as she adapts to the environment. Her skin pales and marbles, starting from her cheeks and continuing across and down her neck.

It does not go further. Pullig her head ou of the stream with a long tug of her neck - pulling free in a spray of motes - her chest heaves as she reasserts a wild-eyed focus.

Bellowing a hideous laughter that comes not from her mouth but from her core, informs all of Stygia madly one simple truth of the world: she Knows.

A wooden boat smashes not just against but through the jade doors gating the way into the House of Dolls, splintering into lethally projected flechettes of simple wood as the force carries past. Following it is a finely wrought treasure chest, barred and hemmed in gold with a sort of blood-red wood, that annihilates itself against the back wall of the House's foyer or entryway in a spray of gold and platinum and silver and sparkling gemstone of every variety, a spray of color like molten sunlight in the alabaster- and obsidian-wrought marble.

The third thing that does not fly, but strides in is a darkly smoking figure, two lemniscates of red on a sea of black for eyes and snakes for hair. A single shining beacon of moon-silver sits atop the center of her brow, a vertical slit where a third eye burns, tracking across the room furtively as the two red points stare straight ahead and up.

"They're here. They're here! I brought..."

"Gifts!"

The last word is shouted-plaintive-offering-triumphant, birdsong carrying more than thoughts but the raw exuberance of exultance at the very prospect.
Bloody Revelations     Crashing in through the front doors of the House of Dolls --the personal mansion and business of the entire district owner, the Lady with White Hands-- is no small happenstance. The dead know the same things day in and day out, repetition and pantomime of their lives, even the passage of time a mere illusion for them to hold to the memories --the parts of them-- that are firm enough to hold an impression even after dying. Something so novel, so loud and violent, so intense and unexpected, already has the silent crowds from the District with the Bone Lanterns gathering outside, white white robes and pale faces hurrying at almost a glide over the eponymously lit streets, staring and chattering in an inaudible murmur already. But they do not dare get any closer than the opposite side of the path.

    It reeks of the living. It is equal parts an aphrodisiac of irresistible nostalgia and craving, and a repulsive thing to fear.

    Those inside are not so enamoured with it. Beautiful geisha, maids, performers, and whores scatter from the foyer in wailing crowds, running in panic from the catastrophic intrusion. Clients from rooms adjacent slam sliding doors and tear down silk screens to charge into the wreckage; the ghosts of soldiers and commanders, for the most part, who remember spending leave with drink and women, and those of nobles and Dynasts fond of gambling and exorbitant meals.

    In all, the sort to seek commotion out of hungry vice, drawing swords as their sluggish and faded blood is stirred to passion, flooding in with exuberant cries of anger and indignation, expecting to teach a lesson to a raving nephwrack or bullying thug distantly employed by one of the Deathlords, vastly overstepping his or her bounds. Even being defeated dramatically by some vastly superior foe, cut down by some terrible hero or villain of old; that would be fine too, the sheer memory and story of it a warm spark to clutch close in the cold life of the Underworld, upon next day's rematerialization.

    Yet even they can't help but stumble back at the sight of the arrival. Even those that glance to the pile of scattered treasures --hard, real things from Creation, triply valuable for their substance-- know better than to do any more than look with cautious longing. The emotion that grips their stirring hearts isn't rage nor valour, but fear. Half-clothed shoguns and finely dressed Dynasts wielding grave mirrors of jade daiklaves stumble back, pressed towards the doors again in a chaotic mass. Demands of each other to know what this person --this thing-- is, go unanswered. Calls to fetch the Mistress are half-heartedly responded to, only the faintest of heart running deeper into the building. None would otherwise miss whatever is about to happen next, as much as there are fates worse than death to be met here, in crossing the wrong creature.

    Speaking of which . . .

    The cold, still air is split with a thundercrack following a black flash and ribbons of molten light. The finely polished boards of thick teak shatter and fold upwards around the back of the foyer, and a wash of incredible pressure erupts in all directions, sending coins and jewels scattering every which way, peppering holes through silken folding screens. It's not merely physical either, but an equally --no, even more intense-- pressure of sheer, boiling malice explosively blossoms out with it, hot like blood and fire, overflowing the doors and windows, carrying thoughtless, heart-stopping rage. The longer, deeper secondary boom follows moments later, echoing on the streets.
Bloody Revelations     A woman half clothed in exotic black dress, slashed with red across the waist, mussed hair set with red spider lilies, kicks a remaining piece of the heavyset treasure chest back towards the door, and succeeds only in turning it to fine powder instead. In one hand --the one still wearing a glove-- there is a tall, red glass bottle of unfinished liqueur. The other is only balled into a fist, inexplicably blackened from the fingers down to the forearm and aglow with the fiery lines of traced nerves. Her face, unnaturally perfect, bears a pale lipstick mark, the dark red impression of a circle on her brow, and an utterly, indescribably furious expression.

    She smashes the bottle down on a vase table within arm's reach, splitting it in half and leaving the jagged portion gripped tightly in her fingers, trembling with no uncertain desire of what she plans to do with it. She is so transcendentally livid at the moment that the sheer, horrific surreality of the thing in front of her doesn't register yet. "Start begging for me not to kill you. RIGHT. NOW!"
Song of Rainbows Wreathed in the obliterating antimatter reaction of essences half adopted, half vented in 'natural' chaos, the Song of Rainbows is monstrous. When she steps, the sound is at once like a cloven hoof, a spike of metal or chitin, and a human footfall. When she breathes, it's a geyser of air pouring out of her, a bellows working in and out.

She is violently, viciously alive as the snakes that form her mane of 'hair' hiss at the surrounds like an entire nest of pythons. A crown of mismatched horns spear up through the scaled mane. And eyes - eyes of all sorts blink from places that shouldn't have eyes, scattered across her form like garnish.

All this chaos, in her silhouette. The gapes, the wonder, the fleeing fear. She is within and among it. She is the tempest.

Her silverslick brow of beaconing moonlight tracks across the warriors, the generals, the lords and dynasts. To each, she is different. A titan of the battlefield. A venerated foe. A vicious rival. She is a part and apart of their stories, as nine lights flash across her - three 'fingers', and seven among the snakes of her hair. She holds a blade of crimson, a spear of azure, a bow of gold, a shield of green - and so on.

Then the Mistress of the place begins stepping down the stairs, and the silver eye locks onto her. Like the eye of the hurricane, an odd quiet lingers for moments.

She speaks, furious, and the monstrosity takes a step forward. The bellows draw in, a breath that empties the oxygen from around her.

The order comes, imperious. The Song of Rainbows' first reaction is a simple "It's you."

A ragged, grieving, stuttering exhalation follows. Part cry, part victorious gasp, Song takes another half-step and stops. She realizes that she's been ordered. Her mind turns over, processing the input like a car that almost but not quite will start in the bitter cold.

Audibly licking her lips the smoke begins to clear, just a bit, revealing visions of tan-brown skin. "I would... very... like you not to kill me? I would enjoy it, either way..." Her voice breaks and stammers, uncertain, unclear, rotating through sets of *vocal cords* as she zeroes in on the proper way to convey her overflowing emotions while complying.

"Gifts?" Comes a voice confident like a saleswoman without the natural grift. Another chest appears, this one opening and spilling out a menagerie of bottles of every sort and spirit, some crashing to the ground to fill the House of Dolls with fragrant, vibrant boozy aromas. Discarded as easily as it was summoned, Song takes another step.

"I've searched for so long." She announces. Another chest, left in her wake, spills out with small art objects - figurines in all manner of jade, nearly all of which either shatter in a pop of motes or alight on the ground and start springing to life in tiny simulacra.

The smoke around her clears, as the lighthouse beacon from her forehad beams towards Bloody Revelations with a soft, cool light.

She's sobbing from her third eye, tears of moonlight running down her nose and dripping to the floor. "I've found you. And you're magnificent."
Bloody Revelations     It isn't the Mistress with the White Hands that has been summoned first. That much is clear enough. Though a ghost of that calibre, and importance within Stygia, might actually stand before the Song of Rainbows rather than hesitate and flinch back, it'd be with the utmost of affected politeness and grace. An invitation into the establishment and a plot to gain information, or else summons to stronger hands to remove her.

    The woman here instead also smells of life --of hot, pumping blood-- but a completely different sort. Something with Essence that runs 'backwards'. In and down instead of up and out. It prickles like static. Throbs like a slow motion heartbeat in reverse. Even besides that, the sheer, blind rage on display is too reflexive --too completely unthinking-- to belong to any ghost, only possible through the complex chemistry of a fleshy body interacting with the spiritual. It's not difficult to guess why she's pissed, given the way she'd been interrupted.

    "That doesn't sound like begging to me." Even with some of the initial wave gone, her voice peaks and dips, spikes and furrows, between smoky human tones and fringes of something unnatural, unbalanced and unstable. The ghosts that shuffle away from the sight do so less in uncomprehending terror, and more a sense of the opposite --of knowing too well. She advances, one step at a time, heels thumping hard and resonant on the battered floor. Of all the things she could threaten with, the jagged glass bottle still appears to be it, simply the closest thing at hand that wouldn't require an iota of thought to reach for. She isn't pleased by gifts. She doesn't even register them. That would require the slightest, most minute inkling of Temperance.

    She's really going to glass her. She's seriously so intensely fuming that she's going to walk up and stab the chaotic, protean mess of a being currently terrifying the clientele with a glass bottle. Her ungloved hand snaps forward, fingers curling to snag collar or hair; it doesn't matter which. It's only when the smoke fully clears, and reveals the woman . . . sobbing? At the center of it, a sharp, cold splash of confusion disorients the Exalted grabbing her.

    "I-- who the hell are you? Have we met or something? I don't know you in the slightest, so--" She winces, ever so slightly, at the light now shining into her eyes. "No that's . . . not completely true. I've seen you before. At some point. I don't . . . remember clearly, but--" She doesn't have the patience to figure it out. Not right now anyways. Her go-to response is to try and toss Song to the side, clutching her cheek and forehead, hissing "You're pissing me off! What the hell could you possibly want from me?! You're not dead, so get lost."
Song of Rainbows The joyously sobbing Song stutters between actions strangely, the orders and the reactions of the living, breathing, stepping woman. As she's approached, she visibly pulses and vibrates with every clic-KLAK of heels against wood. The thumping of Song's heart reaches a thunderous harmony to the pulsing she can taste just meters away.

"I 'nt good a'beggin..." She mumbles, a hard cant enterig her hushed tone, her tongue tied around itself in her throat. As the bottle comes up, though she extends her neck, smiling up now at Bloody Revelation. 'Go ahead. Do it.' it offers. "I know what I can beg for-- don' make me have to find you all over again. It took too long, we were too far apart, and it hurt me..."

Pushed aside, she stands, twirls, rotates, splashes around the Bloody Revelations. "I could smell you on the white wall. I could taste you on the black sea. I could smell you at the deep crater. I could hear your laughter at the empty tower. I tingled with your touch at Skullstone's highest tower."

Song's hands, unbidden, move to lightly touch the pale woman's hair, to draw it close to her nose, to breathe, and like a bellows, fill herself with the scent.

"I tasted you workings, in the skull of the ghost that felt. I plunged myself into the flow of the tubes and finally could hear it: Exactly where I should be."

"Back at your side."
Bloody Revelations     "Oh most people aren't." That sour exclamation comes out before the woman even thinks about it, part annoyed reminiscence and part casual instruction. The general vexation of dealing with a stranger wheeling and spinning and prancing all around her has worn down a lot of her momentum. She bothers to stop long enough to find and pull her other glove on, pulling up the strap of her dress to somewhere located on her shoulder and make a futile gesture at fixing her hair. By the time she even glances back to the crowd, they've intuited their cue to exit already.

    But still, her hand reacts like glossed black lightning with a mind of its own when the Song of Rainbows comes all the way back. It snaps out again at someone touching, and more importantly, sniffing, her hair. Her ravings, which most would describe as 'unhinged', don't currently strike her as unnecessarily offputting --an Abyssal Exalted with even a tenth of her particular, niche interest has heard far less comprehensible ranting and railing. It's being *touched*. Touched without *permission*. Touched *familiarly* and *intimately* without permission. It's a throat grab by instinct. Or maybe a push? Maybe it used to be a shove a long time ago, and just evolved into reflexive neck crushing. She barely stays her fingers in time from squeezing her windpipe, though she's only just begun to suspect it wouldn't do much.

    "What sad manner of freak are you?" Bloody Revelations replies. Despite the hostility of the words themselves, strung into a sentence, she utters them with something approaching a curious, if condescending, sort of pity. "You couldn't be some sort of run of the mill fanatic. Too much of that is too specific. Too far across the world. Most all of it unattributable, unless someone were tapped deep into the places that share these things, in and beneath Stygia. Hmm."

    "You're not dead, so you'd want nothing from my magic. You're too well-traveled by have only heard by book. You have too much . . . about you to be that young." She narrows her eyes. "Did I do something to your head before? Scramble your brains a little too hard? It's *agonizingly* familiar, and I *hate* this feeling on the tip of my tongue. I don't usually forget things like that." At least, she releases her. "I must've. 'Back at my side'? Absurd. No one has ever once been 'at my side'. Over, under, but never side by side. Nobody that was ever human, anyways. Either I did something to you, or someone else did. I don't care which. I'm busy."
Song of Rainbows One would expect that grabbing someone like the Song of Rainbows by the neck and crushing, sinking, tightening fingers around her windpipe like a vice would be futile because of her iron-like skin, or her protean hide, or anything.

None of that happens at all. The fingers force themselves around Song's neck and hold there, and like soft flesh and pumping blood, dig in and hold. The constricting, crushing hold audibly seizes up her windpipe and - smiling toothily the whole while - Song of Rainbow quietly gurgles airlessly.

It has simultaneously all the feedback of nearly killing any 'normal' person reflexively, and all the tangible effect on Song of grabbing her by the scruff of the neck and lifting.

With a 'playing around with it' bemusement, she even lifts her own legs off the ground, putting more pressure - more weight- on the iron nail like fingers that dig into her neck as she suspends her whole body off of them.

Once released, she thunks the bare inch she had been 'lifted' to the floor, still grinning from ear to ear. "The sad manner of freak that has been apart from you." She answers, and with each syllable, is as pure and readably honest as possible when her throat has the mild husk of having been recently crushed. She bleeds from five raw red points on her neck. The series of questions are answered with simple shakes and nods.

'You're not dead...' Shake.
'... want nothing from my magic...' Nod.
'Too well travelled...' Nod.
'Did I do something to your head before? Scramble your brains a little too hard?'

A loving twinkle in her three eyes as she nods. Her third eye remains unblinking as she wipes away the silver tears from it. "I have a story for you. It's a humble one, but it is mine, and so you've not heard it and yet it is yours. When I was ship's hand, we were attacked by Raksha. I was swept from the deck and climbed back aboard once, twice, three times. The third time, as I crawled coughing onto the deck, Luna saw me. That I was strong, determined. I would be a vessel, she said. For one of her greatest sparks. A spark that nobody else could carry but me. That I was to find the greatest treasures in the world."

Song of Rainbows draws closer, beacon-lit brow filled with an emotion part relief, part deep need. "And I asked Luna, 'what should I do with the treasure, when I find it?'."

Her hands move back, to draw infinitely close to touching at a pace too slow to force the issue. Hesitating. "Luna told me that the 'search is what's for me' and the 'find' is what is for my beloved. I've searched. Searched and searched. Been to every corner of Creation, and beyond, in the infinite palaces of the Raksha, all to find you."

"Searched for you."

Focusing her entire attention on Bloody Revelation's face, Song's fingers drift up not to arms or shoulders but to Bloody Revelations' cheeks. Her temples.

"I folded the tempest within myself, became unlimited, to please you. To give you the greatest treasure I could. You remember, don't you? Didn't they tell you? I could hear it, in the flow. Your name."

Her closeness becomes suddenly intense, as her lips kiss the air at Bloody Revelations' ear. She whispers a name.

A name that should cause an explosion of agony, a name from an age past. A name the Neverborn had taken, before they had taken the vessel that she was today. Centuries ago.

But there is no black reprisal. Only her own, should she lay it upon Song.
Bloody Revelations     There is a moment, brief, but incredibly, *vibratingly* palpable, where Bloody Revelations is considering pushing the chokehold just a bit further. To see if the strange woman's neck really does snap and if she crumples over dead. It wouldn't matter to her much either way; if she still has some question or another worth asking after the fact, she can ask her ghost. It's an intrusion that she'd come here with flesh still on her bones and blood pumping through her veins in the first place.

    But she doesn't. She doesn't because, even if she finds it far less humorous than the Song of Rainbows, it might just be a game to her. Something interesting enough to distract from what she'd paid for, for at least a little while. "My my? Is that so? You've been busy." Having flipped from insensate fury to coy, slightly sadistic amusement, more quickly and mercurial than someone with their emotions in check --or out of check-- should be able to, it becomes clear that Bloody Revelations is considering Song --what she has just admitted to being-- from the perspective of a First. A Novelty. A thing she'd heard about, been told about, but never seen for herself.

    "I was wondering how long it'd be until I ran into one of . . . your kind. I never expected it'd be here. Of all places. Shouldn't you be . . ." Her hand rolls about at the wrist as she tries to recall some distant piece of instruction, extremely biased as it would be, on the subject of other, distant, faraway Exaltations. "'Tending' to Creation? Or something? Maybe it's that strange and backwards goddess your type worships that mashed your thoughts to a pulp. That seems likely. Luna for lunacy." She laughs at her own knowingly bad joke "By the Void though are you *all* like this? You're already more insane than anyone *human* I know by half, albeit in a more *exciting* way~"

    "Mmm, no~ Nobody told me anything about you. I suspect because there was never any need to. I've heard all *kinds* of things, about all kinds of people, all over the worlds. People that are, people that were, people that are going to you. I doubt you'd factor into any of them. You're funny, you know that? You're in completely the wrong place, at the wrong time, speaking to the wrong person, and you're so demented you don't even realize it."

    Inured to far more destructive and violent forms of gibbering insanity than the Lunar's contextually incomprehensible ravings, Bloody Revelations finds herself having infantilized the intruder's motivations; mentally shrunk her potential as a dangerous actor to near nothing. Enough that this time she doesn't flinch when the exciting new weirdo moves up to touch her face. Enough that the raw, deeply unnatural energy that enshrouds her skin is merely like ice cold static. Enough that she deigns allow her to speak, hoping for something interesting.

    It is. But it's the wrong kind.

    "Don't you *ever*, EVER!" It's less than an instant between the words and the reaction. Less than it'd taken to get angry the first time. Beyond instinctive. Beyond reflexive. Primed, on a hair trigger, waiting to go off, for years and years and years. Ready to blow up from the beginning, without any living soul having the means to know it was there. She turns on Song with real violence this time. Genuine intent to do harm. Part rage. Part hysterics. And a part that feels, somehow, like self-defense.
Bloody Revelations     Yeah. Right. As if that could possibly be a thing. The woman has far too much power to need to defend herself. Too much in the most literal sense of the word. It can't all exist within her at one time. She hasn't yet found the way, if indeed there even is one, to marshal and shepherd all of it at once.

    The way the floor breaks. The way the walls howl and shudder under a sudden assault of wind. The way the paper screens smoulder and burn away from glowing points. The way a roiling corona of bloody reds, pitch blacks, and all the colours of a forge fire erupts around her hands. None of it is gathered and directed, or even a technique directed by muscle memory. The grainy, guttural, bass, crackling white noise of a horrible, endlessly drawn out roar that sounds dimly, faintly, from somewhere far far away; it 'leaks' from her, or perhaps more accurately, and truer to her namesake, it *bleeds* from her --from the little cut the Song of Rainbows had delivered.

    "I *never* want to hear the name of that dead woman even once. Nobody thought to learn it when it would have mattered. It's far, far too late to dig up that long dead nobody now. How would you-- how is it even possible that--?! Shut up! Just shut up and don't you DARE compare me to THAT. DEAD. USELESS. WOMAN. NOBODY. MISSES.
Song of Rainbows "I am as I am because I am as I wish to be. Whatever that is. Unlimited." Song answers, to the matter of being a fuzzy-eared degenerate. She most certainly is, but only the shape of the mobius of her eyes grants insight into her 'true form'.

It's doubtful she even has a true form left.

Standing in the wake of the dark refulgence pouring off from Bloody Revelation's hands, her words, her will, Song of Rainbows' reaction is simple, somber deadpan.

Her stance widens only slightly as her thumbs loop behind her belt, fingers hanging loose. She leans into it, as her dreadlock-vipers rattle in the pressure-blasting wind.

"I missed you for as long as I can remember. You, at the start of my story. But you've folded the tempest into yourself too. I understand. Throwing away the weak thing you were before..."

"That's just the first step in becoming perfect, isn't it? Everything else comes after."

Cuts from the force of the spiritual expulsion squelch with sprays of blood from her cheeks and neck before closing. She can't speak above a dull conversation even while screaming. She can't move but to weather the hurricane.

Her mouth works, as she tries to form the proper words, the thoughts, the questions that she hadn't had to ask in an enternity away from linear time and the beating pulse of life.

"I am the Song of Rainbows - and I've found you. What may I call you?" She asks, her earlier eagerness tempered by the state her partner was in. Flashes of perfection of different sorts. Unenjoyable pops and crackles bubbling up, burned into the synapses of her soul.

"I... don't remember how this goes."
Bloody Revelations     For all of her general instability, after inflicting a certain amount of reprisal on the Song of Rainbows, Bloody Revelations quickly runs out of fuel to keep going. Like a spontaneous flare up, as if someone throwing a bucket of gasoline on a fire with nothing else to burn nearby, the anger has nowhere to go when the Lunar Exalt only takes the demeanor of a loyal animal confused by its owner's abuse but resolved not to go anywhere. No further kindling to spark.

    Besides, there's still the uncanny sense that she hadn't really *tried* to use it. It's unnatural for any one of the Exalted at all, whose excellence comes from the refinement and master of their Essence in tune with their minds and bodies, to casually erupt with raw power without putting in superhuman effort. The minute Song says 'folded the tempest' in the context of the other, Bloody Revelations seems to catch some foothold of comprehension on the trailing edge of the Lunar's non-stop train of logical leaps. The sheer apoplectic malice made manifest dies down, leaving just the human woman there --at least, the part that feels unmistakably 'human'.

    "Ahh . . . I see." Bloody Revelations says, with a sense of understanding, but without good humour. "You've done something you weren't supposed to. Something anyone else would tell you is madness. Either impossible or suicidal. Something nobody else would ever believe in a million years that they should do. You've done it to *yourself*, haven't you?"

    "You're no longer one of 'them'. You've tried to be like me. No, I suppose succeeded in your own way, through the means available to you."

    Considering the many, many serious implications, the Abyssal Exalted --the exact opposite of everything the Pact, that Song of Rainbows should be a part of, stands for-- stands down long enough to turn up her chin and utter "You may call me Bloody Revelations by my given name. Otherwise, Lady Vermilion by my Stygian one. Or if you please, the nom de guerre favoured by many in private, 'Angel of the Void'. It makes little difference to me."

    "But don't pretend that you already know me. Whatever happened in that skull of yours, this is the first time we've met. Whatever you think, I was never anyone before I was me. I'm sure you can understand that much. If you can't, then I have no use for you."
Song of Rainbows Song snorts heavily, the forceful exertion of humor, sarcasm, and forcefully expressive relief when the blasting dies down with the power eruption. "I don't know what you're talking about, but I know you know what you are. What others choose to limit themselves with doesn't concern me. I've met other moonmad, here and there. Limited. Chained. Shackled, scarred with the brands of some nonsense scrawled all over their body. If that's what you're referring to, their shackles, it disgusts me. When you first chose to be more, tell me:"

Song's eyes burn with a maniac intensity. She looks for all the world to know the answer before she speaks it. "Were you commanded to preserve? Were you commanded to heal? To protect? None of them. I know what you were told when that moment came. You were told - rule."

"I was told, when I had that moment, to seek, to find, to follow."

"That's all that matters. I don't 'citizen', I don't society. I don't pact. I don't need it. I'm unlimited because I chose to be. Because I was stronger!"

She beats a fist against where her heart should be, and the crack of her affirmation - her fierce physical declaration - has a palpable force.

"I'm here, for you. Whatever that is. So I will be the Song, and you will be the Revel, and that's all that really matters to me."

Her arms drop casually at her side, as her third eye slowly, deliberately closes, leaving just two red-gold eyes with lemiscates-pupils. "I know your scent, your breath, your voice, the taste of your power, but... no."

A little smile tugs at her lips, a childishly hopeful affect tugging at the corners of her eyes. "I don't know *you*. I'd like to learn, though."
Bloody Revelations     In the long silence that follows, in the sense of a lingering gap in discussion, the deeper, reverent silence of Stygia itself, and the still more deadening vacuum of sound where they had been far too much before, Bloody Revelations affects a habitual tic of prolonged, thoughtful contemplation. Barely considering the woman right in front of her anymore, or perhaps completely blind to her presence at all, she chews away at her thumbnail, biting over and over to the point that it'd be bloody and raw were her teeth not impeded by the obsidian thread of that glove. She takes an unnaturally long time. A socially unacceptable length of time. Enough time staring at nothing and through everything to have someone nervously leave under ordinary circumstances.

    Except it's not quite silent. Only just. The echoing whispers of breath through dark tunnels. The deep, ever fading ring that comes after the drop falls all the way to the bottom of the well. A ghostly, subconscious tick-tick-ticking, like something had dangerously thinnes between the listener and some machinery of the cosmos they aren't meant to see.

    "Fine." It comes out of nowhere. Bloody Revelations breaks her unnaturally still and manicly thoughtful reverie as if completely unaware of the time passed. "I don't like the thought that some incarnate goddess sitting high in heaven had to idea to send you to me . . . but however clever she considers herself, it'd be no match for . . . well, I have an answer. I can find a way to make you useful." Seeming to find the admission acceptable, if only just, Bloody Revelations turns on her heel and heads back towards the stairs by more conventional means, her footsteps the only sound in the whole mansion for a short time, before she punctuates the lowest step by snapping her fingers. "You. Upstairs. I'm *busy*. You can talk while I work."