Unconquered

June Devilblooded had been around for a hundred and twenty years -- and in those, she had seen enough things to give her enough nightmares for several hundred more years. She had seen the ashwaste of devils after they had been used on an enemy army. She had walked through the craters of blackened glass after a man who practiced Starfalling Palm Impact style had faced off against the automaton peasants of the Realm. She had watched Goat have sex.

But nothing on the whole of the Land of a Billion Gods was quite on the same scale as the small crystal butterfly that she cradled in her hands. She wanted to drop it. She wanted to toss it against the wall. She wanted to throw it into the deepest volcano she could. But as she could do none of those things, she instead looked at it and tried to shake of the creeping sense of awe that filled her. She didn't want to waste her

awe

on this thing. She didn't want to be impressed by its artful complexities, nor remark at the sheer amount of magic and wonder that had been folded into it by the hands of the Third Unconquered.

She just wanted to be disgusted.

She wanted to

hate

what it was.

June closed her eyes and set the butterfly back into the small niche she had found it within. She closed the rack -- the clattering of metal sounding alarmingly loud in her ears. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at the ornate carvings of devils and gods and dragons that surrounded the text that proclaimed this to be the

precasual munitions storage area

. What a marvelously bloodless term. She shook her head. "Fucking Unconquered..." She whispered.

"But I didn't even tell you about how I got this!"

June spun around and saw Ember standing in the corridor behind her, holding a small glowing bead of light, while his Lunar mates leaned against him. All of them looked sweaty and panty and

stank

of sex and fae.

June clenched her jaw, her tail lashing in agitation. "Do I even want to know?"

"Well, it started getting out of hand when the fae queen grew this

huge

-"

June thrust out her hand. "Give me the authorization."

"You know what this is?" Ember asked, holding the coalesced concept, which June snapped up and brought to her soulgem. It vanished within in an instant.

"It's the concept of regal authority," June said. "With this in our hands, we can fly through the Sunder without the fae descending on us like an army of ravenous locusts." She shook her head. "Good job, Ember."

Ember brought up his arm, flexing his muscles and popping up his thumb. "Easy as pie! I only almost died three times!" he said, cheerfully and June had to shake her head in wry amusement. Then he shattered that by saying: "What does precausal munitions mean?"

"You can read?" she asked.

"I taught him!" Chirp said, excitedly. They leaned in and bumped their head against Ember's cheek. "He learned...almost

too

fast." Their expression became slightly wistful clearly upset that they hadn't gotten a chance to teach Ember anything more.

June pursed her lips. "Good job, Ember."

"Yeah..." Ember nodded. Then he slowly started to edge past her. June slammed her hand against the wall, barring the way against the Unconquered, her palm mashed up against the silvery metal that made up most of the Starshrike's hull. Part of her marveled at the way that Ember backed off, holding up his hands. It was as if his brain hadn't gotten the message that he was the

Unconquered

yet. He had the power of the Sun coursing through his veins. He could have shattered every bone in her body with his pinkie. Hell. If he put his mind to it, he could have talked her into letting her by with a minimal expenditure of his mana.

Instead, he backed off, chuckling. "Got it, private June stuff."

June sighed. "It's..." She paused. "It's a weapon."

"True, the munitions part did give that way," Ember said, slowly. "I mean, I figure it's like the mana cannons and the vortex arrows, right?" He cocked his head. "June, what

is

a mana cannon and a vortex arrow?"

Xora blushed, then coughed. "W-Well, uh, I know," she said, her voice pitched as high and soft as it could go -- incongruous, considering the Amethyst Lunar's size and muscular build. But her blue cheeks darkened into a blush as Ember leaned against her side, sliding his arm around to squeeze her close.

"I'd love to hear it, honey," he said, then leaned up on his tip toes to kiss her cheek. Xora grinned, showing her very sharp teeth.

"There are plenty of ships in the Great Ocean that have both kinds of weapons," she said, nodding. "Mana cannons fire concussive blasts. They knock people over, punch holes in ships, that kind of thing. Vortex arrows explode and...like...rip stuff up into sunderstuff -- raw chaos. T-They actually use it to mine, sometimes. Shoot them at mountains, turn it into sunderstuff, then reshape it. You know. Easier than...pickaxes!" She chuckled.

Ember nodded. "Cool!" He looked at June.

June hesitated. She wasn't sure how Ember would take this. "The...Third Unconquered was an inventor. She made the Starshrike, she made farstep portals, she made a lot of things. Sometimes, I think she made things just because she could..." She reached down, gripping onto the handle of the sliding wall, then rolling it all the way up. She revealed the rack after rack of small, glowing spheres. Each sphere contained a different kind of insect or small creature -- a butterfly, a beetle, a spider, a squirrel, a possum. Each one was detailed to the upmost degree, in the finest of materials. Gold fur. Silver chiten. Ember oohed, softly, leaning forward as he admired their craftsmanship.

"They're Apocalypse Dreams," June said, quietly.

"That...sounds bad," Ember said.

"They're self replicating magical constructs that find human beings, burrow into them, and cause a localized self-realizing apocalyptic eschatological event, with a propagating radius dependent on the individual's personality and willpower," June said, her voice flat. "Every person's worst nightmare and most hideous imaginings comes to life in an area between fifty yards and three leagues depending on the person, and kills or destroys everything in that radius. Said radii overlap and interact chaotically to create an expanding wave of utter lethality."

Ember sprang backwards, into Xora's and Chirp's arms. "Holy

gods!

"

June nodded. "You need to understand, Ember. The Unconquered is glorious. The Unconquered is powerful. The Unconquered is- what are you doing?"

Ember had stepped past her and gently gripped onto the racks in the shelf. He tugged them free, one at a time, twirling the whole rack on his finger before stacking it up on his shoulder with a soft 'hup hup hup!' Soon, the entire precausal munition store was stacked on his shoulder, all five racks, all twenty five Apocalypse Dreams. He turned and started to jog away, the racks clattering softly with his footfalls. "Hup hup hup hup hup!" he said, in time with his footfalls. June opened her mouth, closed it, looked at Chirp and Xora, then started to jog after Ember.

Ember did not take a direct route to wherever he was going. June and Xora and Chirp found the places he went by finding the opened doors and the discarded bits and bobs that Ember left behind. He had searched three bedrooms, tossed through five closets, and finally, found his way to the belly mounted armory, which contained the mana-cores and the vortex arrows in their long, sullen racks. June opened the vortex arrow storage unit and saw that three of the arrows were gone.

When she and the Lunars emerged out of the port gantry way, they found Ember stacking the racks of Apocalypse Dreams up beside two vortex warheads. The crystalline, dagger shaped warheads were already pulsing with a pale blue light, a light that grew in intensity moment by moment, heart beat by heart beat. Within the time it took June to grasp what was going on, they were nearly as bright as the sun overhead -- shining so fiercely that she had to throw up her hands. Ember jogged away from his pile and then-

The sound of a vortex going off was somewhat akin to a thousand screaming, tortured souls all opening their mouths and howling at the same moment. The light grew brighter still, and a swirling hot wind buffeted the onlooker's faces. Xora's hair flapped in the wind and Chirp was nearly bowled over, while June slowly lowered her hand. The ruby red cloud of undifferentiated chaos that was left behind blew away, trickling into the leaves and the brush around the landing site. As it drifted along, the coherency of the Land started to impress itself on the chaos, and the wispy red cloud transformed into grass and frogs and buzzing mosquitoes and dandelion seeds that drifted away on the hot wind.

Ember walked away from the cloud, brushing his hands off. "And that's that," he said.

A single, chittering beetle -- one of the Apocalypse Dreams -- sprang out of the crater and landed by his foot. Ember slammed his heel down on it with a flare of golden flames and the impossibly advanced magitech weapon crunched and shattered. Ember paused, then nodded. "And

that

is

that

."

June whimpered. She looked slowly to her left. Goat was leaning against the side of the ship, smoking a pipe.

"What are you

doing

there?" June asked.

"Watching," Goat said, puffing out a thin dragon.

"Were you going to

stop

that fucking idiot before he destroyed twenty five of the most advanced magitech weapons ever built in the past ten thousand years?" June asked, flinging her arm out to gesture to Ember, who was currently being hugged, kissed, and checked over by his two Lunars. Chirp was leaning down to examine his foot, while Xora was nuzzling against his neck, and Ember could clearly be heard saying 'Lunars, please! ...continue!'

"Nope," Goat said.

"I-" June stopped herself, then glared at Ember. "Ember!"

"What?" he asked.

"What the fuck?" Her tail snapped back and forth.

"They were evil!" he said, as if it was the most simple thing in the world. June wanted to throttle him.

"They were the most powerful weapons in existence. With them, you could have-"

"What, killed everyone in the Lands?" Ember shook his head. "Uh, no. I don't want to do that."

"You could have

threatened

people with them!" June said, grabbing onto her hair. "An army won't attack you if you have weapons of mass destruction!"

"Or..." Ember said, then lifted his fists. "I can

punch

them."

June put her hands over her face. She sighed. "Okay, Ember. Okay. Fine. You'll just

punch

the army. Right. Okay." She shook her head and turned, stomping up the stairs -- and felt as if she was at war with herself. Her rational mind was screaming, at the waste, at the loss to magitechnological knowledge, at the trump card they had given over. But her soul sang with delight and with pride and thought that maybe, just maybe, they had hope after all.

***

The Starshrike arrowed through the sky with its crew and its passengers residing in comfort that ranged between 'life as normal' to 'staggering beyond belief.' For Jerin Kah, the Infused Knight of the Regency, the brig of the Starshrike was roughly analogous to his palatial estates in the capital of the Regency. He laid on his bed and made love to the autonomous serving construct that Ember had found and activated and enjoyed the chaos-sculpted grapes and pondered his own loyalties. Meanwhile, on the bridge, June continued to catalog and write down what every single button did, while Goat smoked his pipe and took advantage of the Unconquered's distraction to sit down on the command throne while only wearing his ratty loincloth.

In the Unconquered's chambers, Ember was trying to escape from the silken sheets and the bed's massive mattress. Being used to sleeping on a straw bed with a homespun blanket, the bed felt as if it was trying to drag him under and drown him in luxuriousness. He managed to get his head out, gasping for air, and saw that Chirp was still reading their book and Xora was doing what had to be her ten thousandth pushup on her left index finger. Her other arm was tucked behind her back, and her muscles bunched with the effort as she lowered herself slowly, then pushed herself back up with the same glacial grace.

"Okay!" Ember said. "I get why the bed is bigger than my old entire bedroom. But why is it so

soft

?"

"Oh, you can change that with the knobs on the side," Chirp said, holding up the small book she was reading to show Ember that it was called

The Starhrike and You: My Guide to my Future Incarnations,

with the author being merely listed as

The Unconquered.

"...

Lunars

," Ember said, wiggling his eyebrows expressively.

Xora snorted and almost lost her concentration.

As Ember fiddled with the knobs, Chirp closed the book. "E-Ember, can I ask you something?"

"Su-URK!" Ember grunted as the bed became a fine mesh of very thin spikes, suspending him two inches above the bed with a thousand minute contact points. Because his weight was spread across all of them, none of them pierced his skin, but he was still wincing at the contact.

"How did you know that the vortex arrows wouldn't just...set the Apocalypse Dreams off?" Chirp asked, their ears perking up.

Ember was silent for a long second. He slowly looked up at his Lunar. "...well...good thing...it didn't!"

Chirp froze. Xora, meanwhile, made a soft 'hup' noise and pushed herself to the full extension of her left arm. She snapped down her right, pressing her pointer finger to the ground, and suspending her on that and her toes. She reached out with her other arm, tapping one of the buttons on the side of the bed -- just slightly out of Ember's reach. The bed flattened out, the spikes molding into a somewhat firm cushion, the blankets transforming from voluminous silk into something thicker and smaller. Ember grinned. "Thanks, Xora," he said.

"Welcome!" Xora said, her voice tight and focused on her exertions -- meaning it sounded gruff and rough.

Ember paused. "So, I was thinking, since Chirp got their them pronouns from the fae..." He gestured to Chirp, who was still frozen in the exact same posture and expression they had been since Ember had spoken to them -- their eyes unfocused, their lips skinned back in animal terror, their knuckles white against the book they clutched. "Do you want to get any neato magic body mods too, Xora?"

Xora blushed and turned her head forward. "O-Okay," she said, her voice wilting slightly.

"I mean, if you want," Ember said. His cheeks flushed and he felt that kind of terrible sensation that he had just made a terrible misstep. He flailed, desperately, and let his words tumble out of his mouth. "I think you're beautiful and amazing and perfect, but you mentioned how you like being feminine and small and pretty and, I mean, if you want, I bet there's a way you can totally be like that! I mean, screw bodies! Chirp changed their body, my body changed, you can change too! Even if it's super hard, I'll do it for you. But only if you want. If you're like, 'no, Ember, I

like

being a seven foot tall shark lady', I'll say, Xora, you're beautiful and perfect and I respect that decision. Also, can you please sit on my face, because you taste amazing and I love your pussy. Your...hot...shark...pussy!" He nodded, hurriedly.

Xora, who had stopped doing her pushups, slowly sat back on her knees, then her haunches. She hung her head forward. "I'm you're Amethyst," she whispered. "I was Chosen to be your guardian and protector. Your bulwark. None of that involves...flowers in my hair or pretty dresses." Her voice grew softer still -- and as it grew softer, she stopped trying to pitch it higher. Her contralto husk was as lovely to Ember as the finest music in the whole of the world and to hear the pain in it made his heart

squeeze

.

"But-" He started.

"No, it's okay," Xora said, shaking her head.

"But!" Ember held up his hand. "I don't want a

good

or efficient Amethyst. I want a happy Xora."

The book finished sliding out of Chirp's nerveness fingers. Very softly, they whimpered: "Boom. Big. Big boom."

"I think you broke Chirp's brain..." Xora whispered.

"And I didn't even need to fuck their ass!" Ember said, then rolled forward out of the bed, his head pressing to the carpeted floor and allowing him to tumble from his head to his feet, kipping upright. "Come on, Xora." He took her hand. "Lets see how pretty the Unconquered can make you."

"But-"

"No buts!" Ember waggled his finger. Then he paused. "Well, okay,

your

butt." He grinned at her.

Xora blushed -- but he saw that she was smiling as he tugged her to her feet, then dragged her out of the bedroom and towards the closet.

Chirp kept looking off into space. "Bada boom..." They whispered.

***

Ember had only seen the closet of the Unconquered in a second hand way, when Chirp had tried out some costumes and settled on assless chaps. So, stepping inside with Xora was a bit of a revelation. It

was

a closet, but it was also the size of his

entire

house. The walls were lined with small niches that held shoes, sandals, coiled up belts, stockings, panties, pantyhose, hose, girdles, garters, trained suspender snakes, living socks, and even stranger bits of clothing. The middle of the room had three dozen rows of racked outfits -- some of them ornate, some of them simple, some of them nearly non-extant, and all of them perfectly laid out in a complex pattern of matching colors and styles, so that as one looked from the left side of the room to the right side of the room, one could see the clothing shift, like a shimmering, rippling expanse of water, from one style to the next to the next.

"Wow," Xora said.

"Yeah," Ember said, slowly. "Do you think any of these are doomsday weapons?"

Xora chuckled, nervously.

"...this might be..." Ember whispered, reaching out and plucking a bundle of silky black fabric. He caught it between his thumbs and then tugged them out, to show the sheer, thinness of the bit that was supposed to go over the cunt. He held it up to Xora. Then he imagined Xora wearing it. "Definitely doomsday..." He purred.

Xora blushed, then leaned over and bit his shoulder gently, bumping and pressing against him. Ember giggled, then tapped her nose.

"Eyes! Closed!"

"Why?" Xora asked.

"Cause I want it to be a shocker," Ember said. "Also, I've never tried this before, so...if I mess up, I can take it off and then claim that I did that intentionally, and you'll never be any the wiser."

Xora covered her smile with her hand and looked away. "Okay..." She closed her eyes, stilling the blunt tail of hers. As Ember began to walk down the racks, she spoke, hesitantly. "Ember, can...n-nevermind."

"No, it's okay!" Ember called out. "Talking covers up any noises I make! That way, you won't know if I'm getting the louder costumes out." He hummed and started to pick costumes that felt good to him -- and he saw that his arm was beginning to flare and glow with a golden light. His anima grew brighter and brighter as he felt inspiration exploding through him. His hand darted out, finding piece after piece of clothing from the pile and he simply let the mana flow through him, allowing his mind to expand. To reach a higher plane of fashionable enlightenment. This allowed him to disengage his conscious mind from searching and instead, listen to Xora.

"Who was that girl that stole Chirp's pronoun?" she asked.

"Oh," Ember said. "She was...another Lunar."

"O-Oh!" Xora sounded a bit startled. "What was she like?"

Ember felt his teeth grinding as he remembered Ceaith in the moment she had pulled back her hood, revealing the massive mane of brown hair and the brilliant blue soulgem on her forehead. Before she had kicked him off a tree. He shook his head. "Her name was Ceaith. She was this...smug, bitchy little jerk-butt of a catgirl, who just...swept in and stole Chirp's pronouns without so much as a by your leave. Then, she mocked me, kicked me out of a frigging tree, and then scampered off as if she had done me a

frigging

favor! She was like nails on chalk slates. Like...like...arrrgh!" He shook his head.