Four hundred figures in ankle-length surcoats of iridescent dark-blue filament. Fluted osmium plate armor, cuirasses and greaves and pauldrons and helms all polished to a mirror sheen. Dark polymer undersuits pulsate and rustle. We form neat ranks and rows, fifty abreast by eight deep, scarcely stirring.

All around, the nightfire spires of Saingediir rise and reverberate with abyssal clamor.

"You believe those kids, sir?" Harrower Maroj asks, adjusting her Nova Gate's harness.

"I figured that was their game." I am as still as the ash and crystalline dust trapped beneath my armored bootheels. "Hardly the first time." It's surreal. I remember when Machrae Diir was embroiled in battles without end, when our name carried such endless dread that whole leagues of heroes refused to join the war against us. Now visitors will stumble right into Saingediir and mouth off to the Cobalt Immortals.

All in all... I like it better this way.

Details flit through my mind. Maroj Fezzlen. Wollusturungeist. Self-resurrected.

 Height: 170.3 centimeters.

Weight: 65.7 kilograms.

Special notes: strongest adept in the 13th Battalion of the 1st Hope. Succubus: remind her to have sex before entering combat.

These things only matter in continuum with the rest, as some of the many different ways my world-sieve tries to know the Ul that is Maroj for and of herself. Her violet hair streaked gold, and her thicket of thin, ridged black-rock horns, and her dark blue skin dusted with bronze speckles.

Maroj is a bloodthirsty sadomasochist and possible narcissist with a kill-tally in the mid-hundreds. Maroj is a complete sweetheart who bursts into tears if she kills a maggot by accident. I must remember Maroj is all of these things at once, even when she keeps them to herself.

"Hope you're not planning on payback," I say.

She snorts. "They wandered off into Saingediir after calling us dorks. I don't need to do anything. The Fathom will suffice."

I clasp my hands. "Just so long as we're all prepared for review."

Every member of my battalion has a soul just as rich and convoluted as Maroj. Not obedient caricatures. Not mindless jackboots biding our time until we come across someone smaller than us to step on. Hm. I suppose I'm a little sore about it after all.

I am called from my musings by the harmonic ring of chimes in time to the crystalline sound of an armored tread. Their pitches change, always high, but wavering between wavelengths with little relation to the steady pace of she who approaches.

"Attention!" I bellow. "Battalion--eyes front!"

Ritual is a path to discipline. Discipline is a path to cohesion. Cohesion is a path to gestalt. In gestalt, many powers are one. The synchronized glitter of our silvery arms. The gathering stamp of feet from parade rest to attention. The snap of many heads from muttering to a uniform forward gaze.

Long ago, the Overlady taught us well. We are becoming, just maybe, ready.

When she emerges from the fog of war and the embers of Saingediir, Kairliina embodies her full ten horns of the self-in-ascension. The star-eating voidfire of the Carag burns in her five-eyed stare and spills through the four-way seams of her mouth.

The most powerful demon in Machrae Diir is, contrary to the tales passed down to me, the shortest of all its succubi. She can't be more than a hundred-fifty centimeters!

"Stay to attention, Immortals," she calls. Her great threshold-blade bobs at her hip with each parade-ground prance on her digitigrade legs. She drinks our auras and smiles, wry. "You thought I'd be taller, hm?" A chuckle. "Once. I was taller once, and miserable for it. A coping mechanism more painful than the fear I used it to flee from. I always hated dividing myself from my sisters. I am exactly like other succubi, and happier for it."

She halts neatly. Pivots to face us. "Immortal command told me about your work on that recent swarm. Fine killing, comrades. I'm glad to know the mysteries I passed on have born fruit. I hear the Immortals plan to diverge from Lambent Way, and find their own approach to the deep power. As for me? I'm just here to see through the last chapter of a story I long since gave my last gift of momentum to." Her tail frisks. "Such a strange thing to think it's been two hundred years since I set your order on its way. Before I defeated Seurchraig, before I was even a mother."

A soft, bittersweet smile comes to her lips. "Today will be goodbye. You're the last battalion I have to visit. Thirteen's always been one of my favorite numbers, you see, and it just felt fitting. To end all this the same way it began: with a sudden, abyssal whim. After this..." the maiden of Graesh Saelvur grows somber. "After this, the final traces of our bonds will pass into the past. All turned to silver glass..."

Maroj fidgets at the corner of my eye, but remains silent.

I'd send her a telepathic "good girl," but this would still be a breach of discipline. True discipline is a trance state, its own kind of self-hypnosis. Our first foundation.

"I know what you're thinking," Kairliina continues, pacing the ranks. "For a hundred years and half a hundred more, your predecessors, and many who stand among you right now, fought to safeguard Machrae Diir's future. I long ago gave up any authority to disband the Immortals, and I want to see your story continue. But our paths," corium tears flow.

Kairliina shrugs, helpless. "Our paths diverge, now. It's time for you take your training, your tactics, your technology, and go forth. Perhaps on some distant day we'll stand against each other, our goals beyond reconciling. It's odd to say these words when I have so little direct connection to the Immortal as they now stand, but..." she wipes away her tears with her tail's tip. "I'm proud of you. Every single one of you."

The tears spread. Few among us, now, have any personal bond with Kairliina. But this is still a journey's end, an era's last breath. It's sobering to stand here, to recognize that soon the Immortals and Machrae Diir will lie, for the most part, in each other's pasts.

"I wish to extend this offer," Kairliina says, bobbing. "A lot of you are trans, neurodivergent, horny. Many who entered the immortals as something else became demons. The time swiftly approaches for the advent of the Carag species. Now, you will find other Carag to join if you wish. I promise that. You'll even find other Saelvurs. But as adepts in Lambent Way mysticism, as the horny, barely-moral murderfucking machines you are?"

She bows. "You're so very close to my people. So, while Immortal command agrees that it's time to take your order elsewhere, any who wish to remain here are welcome." She laughs. "Or you can stay as independent parties. Let's not get dualistic about it."

The chuckles are mostly out of solidarity rather than real humor, but heartfelt all the same. "Besides," Kai continues, "did any of you really drag yourselves through basic, rip your own abysses wide to the screaming cosmos for my ego?" She grins a wormhole illuminated by shrieking supernova spinning in the gaps between her metalloid fangs, turning that god-unraveling maw in slow sweeps to beam at the whole unit.

"Tell me, Immortals, why are you here?"

The battalion answers with my throat, with everyone's throat, with all its four hundred throats roaring in thunderous abandon.

"BLOOD AND FIRE! BLOOD AND FIRE! UNTO VOID!"

Her eyes flare, four-point slits flaring into fractal maps of irradiant inferno. "Ura-ha!" Kairliina shouts.

Banner-staves and scabbard-caps slam the ground, tails lash, fists thump in rolling waves to the rhythm of the answer-- "URA-HA! URA-HA! URA-HA!"

"That's more FUCKING like it!" she laughs. "You want your answer, Immortals? Are you worried about who you'll be without the legacy of Machrae Diir and the becoming of the Carag behind you?" she gestures. "There it is! You'll be exactly who you are right now!" Her blade's long wicked edge, just a little taller than she is tall, sings free and sweeps through the snow-white skin of her offhand palm. She clenches her fist in the air before us, viscous black gel gushing and steaming. "When you step onto the killing field, what are you?"

The final answer is deep, guttural, howling--the lustful clamor of demons hungry for slaughter.

"ZEAAAAAAL!!!"

All, finally, is at it should be.

"Just so!" Kairliina snarls, quivering with the ecstasy of purpose--the Carag's perverse love of fell things perfected. She prowls now rather than marching, prowls in quicksilver and scalding bright plasma-tides that taste of her ionizing passion.

She draws to a halt, considering her fervor, and bursts out laughing. "Funny when you think about it, huh? I founded the Immortals, I passed on so much of my Saelvur Zeal that it's still the greatest cultural link between us, yet I seriously thought at the start I should  rely on psychically experiencing the agony of our foes to hold our worse impulses in check."

"It didn't even do that, anyway," Maroj calls out, speaking out of turn. "If anything, once I got past that first hurdle, it was easier to justify cooking people with this thing--" she pats her Nova Gate fondly--"because hey, I'm not doing anything to them that I'm not also doing to myself."

"Yeah, uh," Kairliina rakes gashes into her jawline with her claws, quivering happily, "in retrospect, using empathic duplication of trauma to hold a bunch of traumaqueer painsluts in check was a stupid idea." She pats the air. "It is what it is. Things moved fast, I was one of the front-runners in a field with very few credible predecessors to learn from. Keep building towards something solid, that's all that matters."

"Oh." I consider that. "Points well made, ma'am."

The Lady clears her throat, her cuts already knit shut, and sheathes her sword. "Otherwise? Only other overarching operational change is that you all have full discretion for solo deployment." She waves a hand airily. "Machrae Diir not held responsible, don't drag us into wars, please try to solve problems discretely and without violence, first."

She resumes attention. "Your gear, training, and cohesion appear to be in good order. Point-by-point doctrinal changes and retraining will continue as needed." She's clearly about to leave, so it's at this moment that Maroj finally loses her composure.

"So as for joining the Carag, how does sending hunters to meet Mother Haksaema sound?" Her eyes are too wide, too focused, her smile jittery. She knows this is a mistake. Everyone can see it: she's convinced herself this is a major moment for her.

Damn it. I should've known from the way she's talked about Kairliina. Poor Kai's worked so hard to disentangle herself from authority and prestige, yet here we are.

Maroj's words fade into echoes, and razor stillness descends.

"That would be the op in the liminal City, right?" Kairliina asks, glancing to me. Her claws rattle on her sword's bio-tech grip. "Operation Madcap Gambit, I believe."

I nod, brisk and clean of emotion. "That's correct, ma'am."

"Right." Kairliina's eyes lock onto Maroj, flare blinding bright, and a crushing wave of blue-nova power rips apart the space between our ranks with a web of azure reality-ruptures. A blink later everything rearranges, scattering us atop isolated clumps of matter encircling the plumes of blue plasma blooming around two figures: Maroj on the ground, colors faded and form shredded with burning gashes that split her armor into fraying tendrils. Kairliina stands atop her, a single taloned foot crushing the other succubus into the ashes of Saingediir, her blade held in a reverse-grip over her left shoulder with its point aimed down. One plunge into Maj's skull, that's all it will need to finish this.

"Prepare to engage!" I bellow. Pattern 3 Lagrange rail-rifles, designed by the very creature we're aiming them at, drop into line. Fight-or-flight kicks into overdrive. We're a single escalation away from a pitched battle against the being who taught us everything. Gods of pity, did Kairliina really have to bring us to this brink during my time? "Kairliina! I respect your anger, but I can't let this go any further!"

"This is as far as I intend to push!" Kairliina calls back. Space condenses, pulling us into a tighter circle. Just a few meters between the inner layer where I stand, and the tableau of the Overlady pinning Maroj below her. Maj squirms, flailing weak hands at that foot, but Kai gauged the first attack perfectly: it's drained nearly all of Maroj's strength.

A single move to separate the whole unit and put our strongest adept on the ground. The Immortals have a long way to go before we can tangle with Carag--assuming we can ever catch up at all. Enough. Focus. Evaluate the cost-benefit later.

"The hunters we fought in Madcap Gambit," Kairliina says, deadly calm, "were relics of a rotting past. The correct Carag star to invoke when killing the stagnant past is Ainshaer, the Dour Red Sun of the Bloodshed Harvest." Far away above and behind her, two stars bloom in Saingediir's sky: red Ainshaer over her left, and blue Haksaema over her right.

I know, without using the power to view her from another angle, that they will always appear over her shoulders relative to the viewer's perspective.

Lastly, suspended in miniature between the points of the horns above her head, blooms a black star with a white corona. It churns with opalescent glitters, scarcely visible under its surface as though the dark star is boiling to devour them.

"Haksaema," the maiden of Graesh Saelvur continues, rattling her claws on Maroj's ruined cuirass, "is the Carag star of euphoric becoming, to invoke when we forge futures."

"And..." Maj, her face half-visible through the rends torn in her helmet, licks her fangs in fear. "And the star above your horns right now?"

"This is Bragashaerien," Kairliina answers. "The Carag star of devouring, assimilation, and dark dreams. The abyssal patron-star of all succubi."

"And what about, you know..." Maj groans. "Non-abyssal succubi?"

Kairliina's tail lashes once. "All succubi are abyssal. Some just make themselves miserable by denying it."

"What gives you the right to say what all succubi are or aren't?" A note of mad challenge enters Maroj's voice.

"Right and wrong are frameworks I've always found limiting, and woefully inadequate." Kairliina adjusts her grip on her sword. "To speak words of false support, to avoid conflict here and now, only leads to greater conflict later. I will speak what I like. I understand, loathe it as I may, that my people's culture will sooner or later be misunderstood, distorted, and appropriated. I, too, remember the pull of legacies that don't belong to me, though I've learned to resist it. But if you brag about diluting Carag mysteries in my presence ever again, I'll kill you. Do you understand?"

Another razor stillness.

At last, Maroj's quiet, grudging voice slips out. "Yes."

Kairliina sheathes her sword with a reverse-grip sweep of her right arm and shoves Maj down with a hard step-off. She nods one last time as she turns on her heel with her hands clasped behind her, already dissipating back to her dreams. "Carry on, Immortals. To see you grow was, and will always be, one of the greatest joys of this eternal life."

And she's gone. Silence, save for the distant crackling elsewhere in Saingediir.

"You alright, Maj?" I ask.

"She used me..." Maj whimpers.

"No, Maj," I say, patient and gentle as I can be. "You developed some expectations on her that weren't grounded in reality, get too invested in your imagination, and tried to push her to follow it. The air's cleared now, and you're still a valuable member of this battalion. Just take this as a reminder that sometimes we need to separate the inspiration we get from somebody else from the way we treat them, okay?"

She's awfully quiet. I'll check on her later. For now, I face my battalion.

"Alright, Immortals, you heard the Overlady," I bark. "We're going freelance. I want us out of Machrae Diir within the next five days, so unless you're going to retire, it's time to say your goodbyes. But for tonight?" I yank my rail-rifle's charging handle. "We're in Saingediir." I grin. "Time for some live-fire exercises."