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Gravitas

“Lady Steerer,” comes a voice from far, far below Romula’s consciousness. “Lady Steerer!” Then a jolt, a physical shake, a vicious reminder that the indifferent Raveller saw fit to curse her with mortal flesh, and not the stardust her dreams are made of. Someone has the temerity to lay hands on her? Perhaps she will do them the honor of regaining consciousness just to spit in their eye.

Romula turns her disembodied gaze about, towards the spacefaring castle known as the Pernicious Needle that she left her frustratingly physical body on. With an effort of will, she reels herself in, pulling her self back into her mortal shell as rapidly as she’s able. She crashes into tissue, sinew, bone and fluids, and diffuses outwards until her being is fully meshed with it once more.

Her limp shell returns to full awareness in an instant. She is back in her vast, dimly lit bedchamber, looking up at the drapery of black silks and silver chains that decorates her ceiling. She sits up without any of the disheveled indignity normally afforded to the waking. A dubious benefit of the cosmofugue her people, the alfivin, experience instead of sleep, but it ensures the withering gaze she proceeds to turn on her accoster strikes with its full weight.

Which it does. Romula’s student Kinari stumbles backwards with the invisible force of it. She drops herself into a deep genuflection, prostrate on the cold stone floor. Her silky brown hair pools around her head, hiding her face. “Forgive me, my Lady! You’re required in the council chamber posthaste. The Lord Feeler has an urgent course correction for you to make.”

Romula narrows her eyes, displaying the affronted scowl that is her right in this situation. On the inside, however, a surge of warmth spreads through her body at the prospect. The celestyad inside her body, an implanted second nervous system of crystals and wires that allows her to sit in the Helmsthrone and propel the Pernicious Needle with her magic, is already readying itself for the task. She may be able to conceal her eagerness from Kinari, but she can’t conceal it from her own body.

Still, having to dance at the Lord Feeler’s tune decidedly rankles. Romula turns her head and gaze away from Kinari, instead staring longingly out at the cosmos she was so cruelly torn from through the arches that make up her room’s outer wall. “Another asteroid? If he is fool enough to believe I have not already accounted for it, especially after last time, I shall use his spindly husk as the ballast to alter its course. Surely that will reassure him there is no danger.” This all spoken in a perfectly even tone – the Lord Feeler is not worth something so exquisite as her aggression.

Her apprentice – Romula refuses to think of Kinari as her ‘successor’ – does not blanch at Romula’s casually violent words, too inured to them from long exposure. Her forehead rises slightly from the black flagstones. “Um, no, my Lady. It’s… He’s noticed the heat bleed of an enemy vessel!”

Romula blinks, nonplussed. “Out here? What ever could they be doing all the way on this side of the galaxy?” She uses one bare leg to part the gauzy golden veil surrounding her bed and shifts herself into a sitting position on the side. With one hand, she idly smooths down the fur on her other arm, getting herself presentable. “Have they caught wind of our pilgrimage?”

“I don’t know, my Lady.” Kinari regains her feet, still bowing deeply at the waist. “Shall I help you into your uniform?”

Romula inclines her head, allowing the faintest of smirks to flit across her slender features. “If it is truly so urgent, we do not have time to stand on ceremony, do we? Just the jewelry.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Kinari’s amusement is poorly masked, which Romula would normally discipline her for. She will make an exception this time, however. After all, arriving at the council chamber in the nude will be the most biting insult she can muster against the irritating Lord Feeler without actually speaking. It is correct – and gratifying – for Kinari to find that humorous.

Lifting her head and her layers of skirts and robes, Kinari bustles over to Romula’s ornate chest of drawers, which is as tall as she is. She stands her tiptoes and stretches to reach down the ornate wooden box sitting on top. From within, she retrieves a set of tungsten bangles, then comes bustling right back to Romula’s side. Carefully, with the utmost respect, she clips the bracelets onto Romula’s obligingly outstretched wrists. Then, even more reverently, she starts on her ankles. Her wrist brushes against the Lady Steerer’s calf, and she flinches, but again Romula does not discipline her.

For echoing her disdain towards the Lord Feeler, Romula decides, Kinari can have that small reward. For Romula’s long, fuzzy ears are sharp, literally and figuratively. What Kinari does in her own bed at night, in the opposite corner of Romula’s grand room, does not escape her. The young woman cannot always fully stifle her whimpers of “my Lady,” and even if she could, she mumbles in her sleep besides. Sometimes, in the supposed safety of dreams, Kinari even dares to call Romula by her name.

Romula has purposely not labeled the dark and hungry urge overhearing that inspired in her. It’s hardly proper.

After regaining her composure, Kinari finishes adorning her Lady and stands, bowing once again. Romula lithely arises, unfolding her long frame until she towers nearly twice her apprentice’s height. For someone hailing from superdense Hynita, Kinari is actually rather tall, but no bipedal species in the galaxy can hope to compete with the alfivin, whose planet clings to them so loosely that their first spaceflight was accidental.

“Sh...shall I attend you, my Lady?” Kinari asks, studiously and unnecessarily keeping her head bowed as she heaves open the chamber’s mighty door for Romula.

Romula idly wonders if it’s respect that averts her apprentice’s eyes, or some lingering Hynitan qualm for nudity that years on the Pernicious Needle have yet to cure. “Of course,” Romula archly replies. “You will never be ready for the surgery if things continue as they are. I think the time has arrived for you to gain some practical experience. Stand behind the Helmsthrone and try to feel the currents as I work.”

“I’m sorry, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady.” Kinari nods vigorously, grateful for even such a backhanded offer. As Romula sweeps out into the yawning, gilded corridor, her apprentice hurries along behind her, her hard leather shoes clicking on the tile.

They pass other denizens of the Pernicious Needle as they traverse the corridor. The spacecraft is crewed by mages of all shapes and sizes and colors, from all manner of planets, all of whom bow their heads in reverence as the Lady Steerer walks past them. None balk at her nudity, commonplace as it is among the ship’s alfivin majority, though some risk a glance at her shapely, fur-covered form as she passes. Romula does not look behind her, too focused on walking, but she knows Kinari is punishing the brave with her indignant scowl. Exercising what little power she has against the people beneath her. Just as Romula has taught her to do.

They are almost to their destination when a calm, clear and entirely too piercing voice intrudes into Romula’s skull. /// Lady Steerer to the council chamber, repeat, Lady Steerer – ///

Rather than wait for the psychic message to conclude or for her apprentice to catch up, Romula crooks a finger and flicks. Her bracelets pulse, and the nearby gravity twists toward the grand doors of the council chamber, sending them slamming open.

Romula is right behind them, gracefully riding the wave of force into the cavernous circular room. Kinari, caught up in her gravity unprepared, goes flailing after. As Romula’s magic fades, she alights gently on the ground, but her apprentice lands in a groaning heap of robes at her feet. At this dramatic entrance, every head in the room turns her way but one.

“Unnecessary,” Romula icily announces, fixing her glare on the Lady Crier’s silken throne on the left side of the room.

The Lady Crier, a feathered Sektu woman and the telepathic culprit behind the message, has the good sense to look chagrined. The blue feathers all over her body droop under the withering glare of the late arrival, though she shifts the blame with a tilt of her head to the skinny, robed alfin man still standing beside her.

Romula obligingly turns her annoyance in that direction. “And you of all people knew that.”

“How gracious of you to join us with such haste, Lady Steerer.” The Lord Feeler finally turns, sneering, but the sight of her body drains the scorn from his gray face immediately.

Despite his alfivic heritage, the Lord Feeler has always shied away from the sight of bare flesh. Even over the course of his many years serving on the Pernicious Needle, which was constructed by the alfivin and thereby shares their social norms, he has failed to become even slightly acclimatized to it. Romula suspects, when she can bring herself to care, that he was raised in a culture where nudity was taboo. Regardless of the reason for it, though, she never misses a chance to exploit this weakness.

The Lord Feeler flicks his eyes aside again, his thin lips tightly pressed together. “Perhaps you could have taken five more minutes to get dressed?”

Romula cants her jaw. “Hardly, when it is a matter of such frightful import that you saw fit to pull Okoan’s feathers about it in addition to using my apprentice as a messenger.” She glances down to Kinari, who is picking herself up off the floor and smoothing her skirts. “She tells me you have sensed an enemy presence. How long until contact, exactly...?” She leaves the last word hanging lightly in the air as a chastisement.

“There is one Llutru vessel at the edge of my range, traveling laterally,” the Lord Feeler answers, unmoved by the barb. “We shall be within range of their field-fluctuation sensors in around four minutes, and from there it will take eight minutes for their first salvo to reach us.”

Romula inspects her fingernails, rotating her wrist and watching her bracelet dangle. “Ah. All the time in the world, then.”

The Lord Feeler scowls. “You are bound by the strictures of protocol as much as I-”

“The battle plan will be the same as ever,” Romula boredly interrupts. “Without magic, the Llutru are bound to the speed of light as much as their cold bodies are bound to their heat lamps. I can outrun their c-weapons and end this in moments. Maxim?”

“Born ready, my Lady,” comes the gruff, coarse reply from opposite the Lady Crier. The Lord Abjurer is already leaning his short, scaly body against his similarly squat throne. Beneath the spiked helm of the battle armor he wears at all times, his sharp-toothed grin burns with all the anticipation and bloodlust Romula is too prim to show. “Let’s knock them dead, eh?” Maxim eagerly thumps the back of his chair with his tail, armor clattering.

“Quite.” Romula mounts the three tall steps leading up to her station, Kinari dutifully trailing behind. Her gaze travels up the Helmsthrone’s overgrown, crystalline shape, following its embedded veins of metal to their source in the ceiling. Soon, she will take her seat and become the ship’s heart.

“Become,” as if there is any distance left between it and she. As if her hours spent disconnected but awake are not the coldest and most desolate part of her life. How does an extracted organ resting on a surgical plate feel? Romula thinks she knows.

But the warmth is coming now. It’s inevitable. Her celestyad burns and throbs in her extremities with naked excitement.

The Lord Feeler’s shoes briskly clap against the floor as he hurries through the throng of other lesser councilors back to his own chair. Positioned opposite the Helmsthrone, his chair is really more of a pod, the way it envelops him to focus his senses. But it is still open at the front, which is the only side that could have protected him from Romula. He keeps his eyes away from Romula until he can no longer. When he finally sits down, bringing his own bangles into contact with his throne, his expression darkens with discomfort.

Romula smirks faintly, knowing thoughts of her are muddying his mind at the crucial moment, introducing noise in the connection between him and the Pernicious Needle. She is neural feedback that frizzles painfully up and down every stalk of his celestyad. A fitting punishment for interrupting her vast and distant dreams.

But she cannot glory in his suffering forever. It’s past time she took her seat.

Romula does not hesitate before resting her bare rear on the Helmsthrone. Despite its angular crystalline structure, it’s eternally warm, humming and pulsing with the subconscious, instinctual thoughts of the ship. It is the privilege of her station to become the conscious mind, to flex her command of gravity through the ship’s layers and layers and layers of amplifying sigilry and send them hurtling through the universe.

As soon as her tungsten bangles brush the throne’s contacts, the wordless voice of infinity rumbles in her mind. No pain, no feedback for her. It is as natural as when she awoke, and as distant as the cosmofugue before that. She flows up and out, suddenly feeling her body as more of a vestigial appendage of her immense, incorporeal self.

She feels the Lord Feeler there, too, his cold and jagged mind also one with the Needle. She feels the Lord Abjurer as a fire that outstrips even the one in her own breast, and a general psychic susurrus as the lesser councilors coordinate matters below her esteemed consideration. She even feels the faint, hopeful flicker of Kinari, hesitantly resting her hands against the living crystal of the throne.

But she does not linger on these sensations. So small are they, in the face of the universe. She flies past planets, up and up, growing in scope every moment. She looks down at the stars below her, suddenly so small, and perceives the Needle as a bright speck between them, an oblong tapering to a wickedly narrow pointed bow, effortlessly riding the eddies of their graceful dance.

Breaking against the distant lower reaches of her mind like a gentle breeze, Romula dimly notes the keening of the Lady Crier. /// All souls brace for supergravity piercing maneuver! Repeat, all souls aboard - /// She easily tunes Okoan’s small thoughts out and focuses on the very edge of her awareness.

She finds the Llutru ship there, highlighted through the Lord Feeler’s perception of it. Through him, she perceives the heat of the miniature sun inside its reactor, the synchronized heartbeat of its thousand thousand electronic circuits. She feels the faint undulation of the Llutru crew slithering limblessly up and down its many corridors, and the torpor of those who are off shift resting in their bunks. There is a sudden twinge as the circuits light up with awareness, a faint blare as the c-weapons autonomously spool up. The distant tension mounts as the Llutru themselves notice her aberrant presence in the weave of space – far, far too late.

Without Romula even needing to prompt him, the Lord Abjurer ensconces the vessel in a protective shell of warding magic, preparing it and its inhabitants to survive Romula’s imminent maneuver. He is the blacksmith, forging the Pernicious Needle into an immutable spear. And hers is the hand that guides the haft into their enemy’s heart. For this indulgence, she will forgive his boorish mannerisms. As she always does.

Gathering gravity in her hands like fabric, Romula sends a ripple through spacetime that catapults the Pernicious Needle toward their foe. It is a brash motion, but one effortlessly calculated. Every object in their path becomes a handhold, each adding ever greater force to the fling.

The Pernicious Needle needs no other weapons than Romula. What projectile could she carry that would be more potent than her massive bulk puncturing through her foe at a speed faster than even light can attain?

At the last micromoment, though, Romula realizes something is amiss. Yes, Maxim has ensconced the entire vessel in his invulnerable barrier, insulating from the worst of her cosmic forces. But Okoan sends out her screeching little announcements about bracing for a reason. Romula is always sitting down when she pilots the ship, by necessity, so it did not cross her mind until this very moment - but her apprentice is not properly braced, standing where she is at the back of the throne. And she put her there.

With an irritated huff, Romula shrinks her mind from its galactic scale, back down to the council chamber. The Helmsthrone pulses with sickly purple light, scintillating in the dim room even in the frozen instant Romula inhabits. With a mere thought, Romula weaves an insulating bubble of pure force around Kinari. Her apprentice wobbles a bit, but Romula exerts absolute control over gravity in this state. Kinari is probably the least affected by the subsequent impact out of anyone on the ship. Satisfied – and definitely not relieved – Romula closes her eyes again and lets her mind flow out into the cosmos once more.

By the time Romula expands her awareness back out, the Llutru vessel lies behind her, dust on the cosmic wind. The Pernicious Needle piercing it at an inconceivable speed has utterly rent it apart. The reactor did not have time to go critical. There was no visible explosion. Her enemy simply ceased to exist. She hit dead on, as usual, even distracted as she was. Inevitable as gravity.

Directing her gaze backwards, Romula catches sight of the c-weapon beams. So small, so slow, so inferior to what modern magic can do. Completely unaware of the annihilation of their birthplace, they streak towards the empty space where the Needle used to be. At light speed they converge on her ghost, but strike only a trio of asteroids she left in her wake, shattering two and carving a molten scar across the face of the third. She watches the path she carved slowly dissolve into chaos as her supergravity wave yanks planets out of alignment, collapses stars into black holes, unmakes entire star systems.

Romula exults in the cosmic catastrophe she has wrought, casually adjusting the Pernicious Needle’s heading to escape any potential consequences of it. As her gaze lingers upon the carnage, she wonders if the Raveller ever crashed two planets together for the sheer fun of it. If the mantle of godhood sits as exhilaratingly on his shoulders as it does for her. Perhaps she’ll ask, when their voyage finally reaches the edge of the universe where he abides.

Then again, that would involve giving him time to react. Which is not her style.