#(( featuring C's Original Knights™ ))

[nightmarefuele]

@etoilebleu

Mists cling to mesosphere, thin as morning draperies. Clouds are like flotsam, floating in wind, while jellies of various genera suckle the edges of an Upsilon-class command shuttle’s posterior windows. When Inuja surfaces beneath its occupants’ roving eyes, each of indeterminate origin, her garden of marble Eden is no more a disc than a first shadow is the night. She blooms with frost-hued suns, and offers up for her unheralded visitors her sequins of architectural fantasy. There are gods who have not spoken so elegantly.

Ren gives himself over to looking as if rousing himself from a dream: he once saw such a place through youth’s eyes.

Now, that place has died with the youth and his memory. Hanging mists and flotsam clouds disperse as darkness descends; white temples, still steepled in the old ways of easy, nurturing faith, have gone to gray, and stand instead upon the shoulders of time-eaten mountains. The only dawn here is the First Order’s awakening age. The deep, predatory rumble of Inuja’s anchoring visitor.

“Something to look at,” the one they call Machaera—“weapon,” simple and crude, cruel in that way only ignorants can be—murmurs from his window, the shuttle’s belly. He is not the murmuring kind, his is a violent presence, his brawn instates this clearly. But he is surfacing on the edges of an evolution, exquisite detail of melee and musculature that he is; so he murmurs all the same.

Across Machaera, the Axis’ helm glistens. Her’s is an uninterrupted glaze of indeterminate black material, wrapping down around her skull. Perhaps it seeps down between her ultrachrome collar and flesh—whatever flesh hers is—and braids with her skeleton.

“You should’ve called on Surri,” she says. Ren tastes the brine of her disgust wherever it rains: Down on this nest of vipers—politicians—she perceives. And, perhaps, on him.

He affords her no true answer. They both know the Ren has called Surri-diae to meet other ends. Instead, Ren lifts his helm to the shuttle’s frontal cortex as he comes to. As gravity skips along the vessel’s chromium-plated plumonodes like Salix fronds. As the command shuttle raises its Upsilon wings, and finds its rhythm in the pressurized air fields—indiscernible, lulling teeth of the Inujan Royal aerodrome—below.

The helm’s apparatuses click. Some darker, deeper rhythm, an otherly pressure sliding into place. His timbre is of kinds bred for heralding nightfall. Displace dawn with decay. Within it now holds at once flat derision, and discomfiting tenderness.

“Diae is not the sole deceiver among us,” Ren responds. “Take her place.”

***

To the outer witness, the command shuttle’s landing may well look like a claiming of grounds. The way black laminasteel kisses marble floors is no kiss between lovers: it’s violent, domineering. It dispenses all pretense of greeting as effusively as it throws up dirt and grass off the landing aisle’s cliff-borne sides. When the dust settles, the thing tosses a final breath to uneasy winds before retracting. All what remains is pregnant silence.

This is no precursor. There is no message in the Upsilon’s sheathed winds. This is nothing out of an Order officer’s repertoire. This smells more like death, extending its digits. Feel out the textures writ before it like brail.

Mechanical voice coughs from ship’s hatch. A slender mount descends, black and unspooling, a tongue stamped in soot and lead. Steam, layering the mist.

The Ren sift free, like inverted fireflies.

They emerge as one, two do not linger behind the first. A singular sort of matrimony outlines their gradations of movement. But he who stands central, and tallest between them—whose powerful gait is limned with prowling deliberation—could not be more palpably the head of whatever body he thus commands, than in his present silence.

Unmoving, Ren probes each of them; this reception come to greet his augural company on their precious, ancient prow. The two others wait at his sides, unwavering as their purpose. They’ll be doing the same.

When he does draw forth, he speaks more to the dusk mist than to its people: “Who among you serves as Inuja’s noble crown?”