Verse 8:8 — Ascension

My sorry, sad, inculcated sister. She thinks she's as honest as a knife's edge just because she never speaks a lie aloud. But she's prone to contradiction, at least since our beloved brother fell.

She could never quite understand it—someone as mighty as Oryx brought down by liars, his bloodline destroyed, his corpse left to desiccate in Saturn's orbit. Xivu Arath actually believed that Dreadnought of his was unassailable, but Oryx knew that he had limits: more than once, he took the power of our deaths to defeat something stronger than himself.

She's just bitter she wasn't there to die for him again.

She says she's the god of death, but I've seen her throne. It's a mausoleum for life with all the close, cloying comfort of a birthing room, wet and raw and filled with disgusting effluvia. I imagine it reminds her of our gardens so long ago, and all the things that grew there.

She really shouldn't be so nostalgic.

There was a game we played when we were young: Swords and Lanterns. Sathona held the lantern, while Xi Ro held the sword. Sathona would search for her hidden sister, and Xi Ro would avoid the lantern's light. If Xi Ro touched Sathona with her sword, she would win. If Sathona found Xi Ro with her lantern, she would win.

Sathona devised the rules, but Xi Ro would let her sister find her.

I still give her presents, too, of course. I gave her Torobatl! My gift to my last surviving sibling. She gobbled it up so greedily, she didn't even consider how it proved her precious logic false.

What kind of thing is a gift? The Deep doesn't like gifts. Neither does the logic. But we're sisters: I thought I'd be nice, and share.

Xivu was too busy to notice that little contradiction. She never even thanked me.

What did she say, as soon as she set foot on Torobatl? "FOR AS LONG AS YOU HAVE WORSHIPPED WAR, YOU HAVE WORSHIPPED ME." Aiat, aiat. That was Torobatl. I know a joke in a dead language: aiēbat.