Author: Brian C. Mahon
“How hopes and dreams vanish when the Maker decides to lower the curtain,” Clarissa Dochenal, Countess of the Third Tier, chided herself. Even the confines of a Zakiche war-corsair failed to guarantee safety when the gods warred. The Maker, the False Sun, the Void Avatar, the Slaver, and the Half-mortal feuded for the right to galactic dominance, and when the Maker called its blessed followers to battle, the Zakiche answered.
The Third Tier held the devoted responsibility of ensuring the Maker’s will reached the spearpoint driving into the weakening flank of the Half-mortal’s Sagatarum sector stronghold. But an errant outrunner of the Half-Mortal’s vanguard found her first. The explosion propelled a spearpoint made of a splintered crossbeam of one nanosecond-offset Godsteel to pin the countess off her feet to a bulkhead.
An Inker, a chronicler drone, navigated the debris-rife corridor to find her in the control room, to rest a narrow band of light on her shoulder, and it intoned in a flat, electronic voice, “Will you to add to knowledge, Countess?”
She wiped away the rivulet of blood trickling from her mouth. Her mono-suit injected another dose of numbing agents, effective for pain but keeping the countess wholly exposed to mortality’s palpable reality.
“I have,” she said weakly, wiping again, “my last revelation, Inker.”
It floated to meet her eye, vertically panning her stuck form with its thin spotlight. “Please Countess. Go ahead.”
“I learned- ah!” A muscle spasm forced her to lurch along the jagged shaft, and she shrieked out to the Inker, “I learned! The folly!”
The Inker’s robotic eyelid clapped shut, then open. “What is the folly, Countess?”
Countess Dochenal hissed through clenched teeth, “Perception. We see ourselves unique, on a march through time… each generation the master of the world, each, ah, AHH!” She convulsed, and a trio of needle-tipped tentacles whipped from her neckline, stabbed, and retreated. “Each generation euphoric in its exquisite existence, informed by our earliest books to set our species as masters of th- “
She stopped, her hand shaking uncontrollably.
A soft white vaporous halo surrounded the Inker, and its voice, still clear and present among the groans of bending structural beams and tinny alarms, commanded, “Continue, Countess. Death is near.”
“-of, of the world writ large.” She swallowed a bitter mouthful. “We limit our concerns to the framework of our lives. What affects us, how we affect first order contacts, no further.”
The Inker skimmed closer.
“We believe we are… so unique.”
“Already recorded, Countess.”
The flesh loosened a little more, and more the dark stream flowed, taking with it the ease of breath and clarity of mind. “… we never understood our people’s history as a singular event. In the gods’ wars, we perceived… ourselves elevated servants, special avatars of our lord’s faith… and fury, against enemy deities and their idolaters.” Her lips slacked as she bowed her head, smeared red in crimson flashing lights.
“Countess Dochenal. You must continue.”
A tremble set into her weakened voice, but she went on, “Our entire history is… an indiscernible moment to the gods, and our generations… slivers of their panorama. We incorrectly relish our importance, misunderstand our meaning in the universe. Short-sighted… we refuse the landscape. We are… a calculated move in the Maker’s plan… the evolution of life from microbes to us star farers… our world, not a special miracle flouting universal constants, no, it is… engineered, one move on the board. Ascendancy? Anthropocentric… foolishness.”
A blue scanning beam crossed her forehead. “You are becoming colder, Countess.”
No hint of recognition twitched across her lips or in her eyes. “To gods, what is a planet, a world? A thought, instantaneous and forgettable. If… if the universe is alive, we its sentient thoughts, ephemeral synaptic… firings… then we, Inker… we serve emotions… at war.”
Countess Clarissa Dochenal’s chin lowered, and the image of sanguine life trickling from her tattered mono-suit was the last her quieting mind took in, as she grew still among undulating hazard lights and acrid air. The Inker, alone, glided through the haze and debris to find a chronicler jettison tube and make course for Zakiche, a long journey, but one it was designed and burdened to make. In the Maker’s Compendium, the timeless library, the drone will pen her final rebuke in the undying records so that the countess may see eternity.