video; un: leavegodalone

[necrolord]

Is this thing on?

[ The camera opens on a man, but there is something horribly inhuman about his eyes: they are black from edge to edge, the iris burning with a ring of white light. He is flanked by two skeletons which stand at attention, each with a speck of glowing red in their shadowed eye sockets. ]

Been a while since I had to do this. Hey, hello, kia ora. You face the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime.

[ He claps his hands together. There is something wrong with them: the whites of his metacarpals are exposed, flesh crumbled away like so much ash. ]

But let's not stand on formality, right? I hear we're on a first-name basis, now. So: I'm Emperor John Gaius, creator of the Nine Houses, and also God. Not locally, mind, [ and he gestures vaguely upwards, ] here it's a more crowded playing field. I'll admit, it's been an adjustment. I tried to get a peek at my usual domain... turns out Mariana doesn't like to share.

Now, I get that I've made a few mistakes. [ He says this like funny understatement, hands splayed. It shows the bare red tendons in his palms. ] Let's clear up some misconceptions.

[ He stands accused of baby-killing, human sacrifice, and the destruction of whole planets. He riled Mariana into a deadly storm. But what he says, with all the gravity of a king, is: ]

My wife is that hot.

[ Fantastic. Amazing start. He leans in to regard the camera. ]

Look, I get it: I haven't made myself popular. I'll get a lot of kids at my door screaming log off. We're on, what, bloody retribution attempt six or seven? It's been a constant parade of death lasers and witches and kids with swords. And I see where you're coming from. I put a serious damper on everyone's fun vengeance beach party.

But it's getting a little old, so consider this a friendly warning to all my executioners: I will start losing patience. [ He quirks a smile that does not touch his eyes. ] Not to be all, I have over ten billion confirmed kills, but: maybe do not fuck with me.

Cheers.

[ The skeletons perform an ancient First House salute, and the feed cuts out. ]

Comments

[noniad]

[The dread terror of God Himself unveiled before him, Ortus recalls the rock of the sea beneath the first time he fell to his knees before his Emperor, overcome by the glory and the majesty of His presence. All that has ever trembled in him, which encompasses nearly the whole of what there is of Ortus, quails in shivering awe.

His gaze drops in deference, fright returned to his downturned mouth and tucked chin, boldness pouring from him as water from a cracked vessel. Who is he, to have imagined he could stand upright in the face of God? God, in oblique, kindly words, issues a command. All Ortus is asked is to obey it, as he has always obeyed.

He observes the stars on the cover of the book in his hands.

There was a dappling of blood across Matthias Nonius' cheek, in the tumult of the River. A constellation of gleaming red that danced in blue light as his eyes caught Ortus' across the field of battle, a single dimple framed by them as Nonius smiled at him, luminous, valiant, the slightest of gaps between his front teeth, before he plunged back into the fray against that impossible, obliterating foe.]

I beg your forgiveness, Lord.

[He says it very quietly. He says it with a tiredness that cannot approximate God's, but that is still not unlike the immense, inhuman weariness of the Lord.]

I am a man of scant understanding. I do not share Your wisdom or Your authority. I cannot know what dire necessity moved Your hand.

[He lifts his chin. He thinks he knows how he will describe the spectral fire that engulfed the peerless Lady Pent. He thinks he understands what it might feel like to be alight, transported, wreathed in a terrible consumption of grace.]

But I do know something of what it is to say, I had no choice, as the corpses of your sacrifices putresce about you, and the price that is paid is paid by all other than you. What it is to raise one's hand against those at your mercy and speak to them of your patience.

I know something of cowardice, Lord.

If you do not wish your unquiet corpses disinterred, you will act as you are. You will not trouble the Reverend Daughter, or Gideon Nav, or those they call companion, lest I unstitch the Tongue of the Ninth. Your secrets will remain so, as long as you hold to this accord. I ask no more.

[necrolord]

[ God does not say: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me? He thinks that's very good of him, personally.

Ortus Nigenad stands here and dares to blackmail God. Ortus Nigenad calls him a selfish coward, and you know what? The worst of it is that he's right. The worst of it is that John gets it; John knows his own sins; he has not been anybody's favorite, lately. He has not been at his best. He's lost so many fights and shattered so many alliances that even Ortus is here to kick him for it. ]

You may have noticed, [ he says, with perfect mild levity and the great cold distance of deep space, ] that my secrets have been put on blast already, complete with silly dance.

[ He leans forward. He is looking very intently at Ortus Nigenad, as though memorizing his face for the first time. ]

I will act as I am, because Harrow and Gideon need space. I get that. I am not, if you'll believe it, completely unreasonable all of the time. But I do not renounce my claim to them: I recognize them as First House. They are my own.

[ Gideon has turned her back on him. He set Harrow up to get her insides ripped out on the regular. What family doesn't have a few problems, right? ]

In the meantime, they know where to find me.

[ He will not knock down their karate door. It's as close to truce as he'll come. ]

[noniad]

[If there was anything of courage to Ortus, it would flee under the dreadful scrutiny of God's true attention. A mortal heart surely cannot bear to be so beheld, helplessly suspended in the gravity well of the divine. The greatest heroes of God's enemies must have quailed under this gaze, strength running from them as wax from a flame.

But as he has said, Ortus is a coward. Fear is and has always been his boon companion, from the fretful gnaw of the inchoate anxiety to the booming hollow clang of terror. When the clamor of it rises up his throat and threatens to pin his tongue anew to the soft palate of the mouth, when his Omen flares an affrighted stain of bioluminescence, he embraces it as tenderly as a child. He bears it up against his stuttering heart and gentles it there.]

You may claim what you wish. There are none who may stop you from doing so.

[The kindliness of his regard for his terror spills over to its cause, bleeding through even the obviousness of panic in the wideness of his eyes and closed tremble of his voice. He flicks his gaze from the center of one blazing empty ring to the other, a study that is not without reverence, even now - reverence now corrupted with a certain shade of deliberate knowing, honed to an incisive edge.

What a terrible thing, he thinks, to have such eyes.]

I thank you for this audience, Lord.