The six-horned figure shifts on her throne while behemoth Outer Kin cavort in the background. Her nova pulses. If there is meaning to its rhythm, the messenger does not know it. "Utter the last words. Again," says the Lady.

"In token of trust, and of hope for friendship and alliance with the Lady of Machrae Diir," they say. "I bring this gift: a spear of astral steel forged by my Queen's own claws.”

"Sing of its soul to me," the Lady intones.

The messenger drifts in silence. Compound eyes refract the glitter of cobalt lightning arching on the flanged throne. "I do not understand," they say at last.

"Of course you do not," the Lady says. Her disgust screams out as fractured rays, warping sights, a terrible metallic stench. "Forms amid obscurance, hierarchy and schemes of flesh." She recedes further into her throne's shadow.

Her fury shifts. She sighs. "Yet you are not the axis of my loathing. I am sorry for making you see it. Tell me, little servant. Did your Queen give you a memory?" The twin slit-eyes, like distant stars puncturing the black fabric of her silhouette, turn wistful.

At further silence the Lady adds, "By her own claws, you say. This melody might reach me yet, if it reached her. Mandibles glistening against the heat. The love of redeeming something forgotten in the dust of the deep reaches to be a lance of the heavens. Did she share this?"

"Well, I am sure my Queen must have felt such things," the messenger says, their voice again eager. Triplet feet, triple claws, rasp on the metalloid dais before the throne in the inmost sanctum of Zul.

"But she did not pass them to you, to share with me," the Lady says.

"No..." Tendrils wave on the forlorn messenger's back. "No, Outer Kin. She did not."

Sparks leap on the upturned edge of the great blade atop the throne, the wicked curving sword of blackest umbra and blue-white inferno. "Then sing of your soul to me," the Lady says. "Sing of the twining and the binding tie, sing of your spirit's rapture before the distant throne of she, your Queen.”

Irradiant gusts illuminate razor fangs like arcing shards of the broken abyss against the thousandfold maelstrom of her maw--her hunger.

And the messenger obeys. Tales of long years, of strife, of sneering and boots on their back. Hard-fought victories. But finally, triumph. The adulation of the Queen. The revelation of her--

"I thank you," the Lady interrupts. "Please, bring forward your gift."

"But I did not forge this," the messenger said. "My Queen did."

The Lady raises a clawed hand. "Your queen worked metal to fashion a lifeless bauble, a mercenary jumble of arbitrary atoms.” The lightless blue fire of her realm spins in, hardens, divides. Ten spears of astral steel drift about her. She clashes the glittering claws together, and they wash away into dust. "You, little one. You have made that spear a gift. I will treasure it, and the song of you laced in its grains."

The messenger was warned of the Lady's ire. But this?

The sudden resonance, like the rush of a thousand heartbeats in veins of never-known flesh, the blissful crushing eternal warmth pouring from the Lady of Machrae Diir--there is a tiny pinprick watching itself whirl and wither in her love.

Waking and dream become one.

A mind empty of all but worship for the perfect radiant dark one, most peerless and wondrous and infinite of outer devils, has forgotten the spear. It knows only that she, she, she is closer, that it can get closer to her!

A razor chill, a severing, and the reeling messenger is once more distant from the throne. The lady clasps the gift-spear, veiled in her shadows upon her lap.

"Your Queen..." the lady of Machrae Diir sighs. "I will need long ages yet before she inspires a hymn other than hatred. Think to every broken form you saw along your journey to her. Souls who hurled themselves to the onslaught. But they were weaker, or less skilled, or simply too foolish."

The lady rests her claws upon her throne's arms. "I was all of them. I was the one who fought fang and claw for a victory to offer up to the shining figure on the throne. But I never gained my triumph. I was the one who is never chosen. A wretch or a curiosity. Too useless to grace with sight and power. Dust without a shine worth sifting."

Eyes of blue nova, all the fiercer for being but two, ease shut. "Now that I am ruin and the charnel night, the sinful fire and the ember unrequited, your Queen hopes for my favor? No. She can never have it."

The eyes open, moonsliver crescents. "So I will speak no more of her. Your people, little one, have the alliance and friendship of Machrae Diir. May they pass freely. Let us sing songs and hold revels and whirl in the deep ways together, for my soul-chords thrill to name us Outer Kin." The Lady rose, and stepped forward.

She was radiance and darkness, snowy skin and ever-shifting visages and horns reflecting themselves in every light-ray that spilled around her shoulders. "To you I give this gift in trade."

All the grand hall distorted until her palm seemed to swell to monumental size.

Upon it, an old curving sword, with a banded grip worn by countless strokes.

The messenger took it. "What is the song of its soul?" they asked.

The Lady laughed. "Stay, and I shall sing for you. Hazy sagas of the unchosen one--the seed of an outer devil."

And stay, they did.