Kena
Rivers Between Us tossed the completed artifact to Root of the East. It glimmered for a moment in the light of the volcano, catching rays of flame light and flashing them about the room as they traced along the intricate orichalcum circuitry. It was a marvel of the Age of Sorrows, completed in less than a tenth the time a mere Dragonblood could develop such a wonder, but he tossed it aside with mingled disgust and distraction.
Root of the East muttered, in sing-song cant, "Another wonder falls from your forge like the golden rays of heaven on a bleak, dark, disgusting..."
Rivers muttered, "Thanks..." and waved his hand. He turned his back to his servitor and leaned against the adamant that shielded him from the lava flows. The elemental maundered off to the arsenal.
"Well, this is pathetic."
A small voice, like a reedy whisper, escaped from the ornamental boach that clasped his tunic together. "Two kisses and the greatest artificer in all of Murakan has become a sulking oaf. Summon a nymph and be done with this!"
Rivers frowned picked at the hearthstone setting on his tiara. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Please, this is agony. Your heaving sighs nearly tangled the essence flows in that harmonic adapter and you woke up so late this week I almost thought you expected wonders to work themselves. I'd kill you and wait for the next incarnation if it wasn't so laughably impossible. Put us both out of our misery."
Rivers tore the cloak from his shoulders and tossed it in the waste bin, striding out of the forge. "This is what I get for spending all my time with elementals, minor deities, and automatons. You just don't understand."
A long limbed silver spider rose from the trash and skittered across the floor, shouting after him, "Don't give in to your animal instincts. I can site over a hundred examples of lawgivers that fell in love before their third century... and they all ended very very poorly! Sex with fabulously beautiful and compliant slaves is perfectly satisfactory substitute!"
The door slammed shut in the least god's metallic face. Rivers pushed past Obsidian Vigil and sent a sylph skittering in circles looking for invisible demon houseflies. When he reached the apex of the volcano he sat facing the fading sun and flicked stones into the gaping maw of the deadly cinder cone. "Nymphs... hmph..."
For a moment he allowed himself to think back and remember her... crimson lips and ivory cheeks, eyes like glittering shards of ice... the hair cropped boyishly short to fit in the helmet, raven black with pixy whorls at her temples and unruly spikes at the crown of her head. But the lips... the touch of the lips was feather-light, like the first snow flake of winter, heralding a blizzard that numbed and burned as it buried him in wave after wave of sensation. He leaned back, and for a moment he tottered on the brink of the volcano, barely buoyed by the super-heated thermal currents, barely protected by his own flaring anima banner. He looked up at the iconic images of essence waving above him in clockwork symmetry, an image of a fortress impenetrable and marvelous, ever-changing and evolving.
A flurry of sparks wafted past his face, and he came to his senses and scrambled away from the edge of the precipice.
The Trials of Romance[edit]
"Why can't I get some regular friends?"
"What happened to those two batteries of yours? Your 'assistants' I mean."
"Yeah, there's a little problem with that..."
Rivers was sitting in a plaza of dim, golden light. Each cobble stone glowed from deep within, like a gradually cooling stone. In the center, a fountain of pure essence added to the soft illumination, playing behind a protective guard railing. Rivers Between Us was sitting on a marble bench with a fragment of black cloth on his lap and a bone needle clenched between his teeth when Seven Thousand Wonders Unfolding approached.
"You see," he continued as he threaded the needle carefully, "sorcerously loyal servants can be a little, um..."
"Reliable?"
"...well..."
"Powerful?"
"...yes, but..."
"Unfathomably preferable to those with free will?"
"...clingy. That's the word."
The least god of the infinite let its silver visage sink to its chest. It folded its hands behind its back. "Dear dear... I had such high hopes when I noticed that you selected those two young human women to serve as your personal assistants. I had so hoped that you had finally found a happy medium between sorcerous security and human sexuality."
"You have a way with words, little god. And no. No no. I admit, I thought it would be fun to have, ah..."
"Your previous incarnation referred to them as 'eye candy', I believe..."
"Oh god... Yuck... it's just too embarrassing."
"Well, you have to expect that sort of thing now that you are beginning to attain your proper station as a prince of the earth."
Rivers squinted and frowned as he stitched. Seven Thousand Wonders sat beside him and leaned in conspiratorially.
"Perhaps that's why you are spending so much time in The Infinite City these days?"
Rivers hunched low over the narrow strip of black cloth in his hands.
"Listen, boy... what is that you're stitching on the back of that bandana?"
"It's nothing..." Rivers shielded it with his hands and moved farther down the bench.
"Hmm... as I recall, in the high first age, the design for Shrouds of Heaven's Glory generally did not incorporate little pink hearts embroidered in silk."
The boy's face turned bright red and he groaned. "You're enjoying this too much."
"I most certainly am not." Seven Thousand Wonders stood imperiously and began to pace before the sorcerer. "Even if she is a night caste, do you really think that we need two of those in our circle? There'd be no end of paranoid distrust between them (as has already been shown). What if it came to a fight? Who would you stand beside? Your oath brother, or the one with the lips?"
"Well first of all, they both have lips... but I'll wave that point before you become more specific. Second of all, if they did fight, I wouldn't be there. It would probably be at night, on the roof tops of some first age ruin, with shuriken, and they'd both be invisible and have guess where to strike by making inspired prognostications as to their opponents physiognomy and psychology, and we'd never know that either one was dead until three years later when the survivor bothers to stop committing the essence. But, third of all, and most importantly, what do you mean 'if' she was a night caste. Wouldn't Leaf Shakes the Wind be able to tell?"
"We are combating deathlords and first age lunars. Do you not think that such a simple illusion would be within their power? Is a little glowing ring that hard to fake?"
"You're just mad that I'm dating someone with free will."
"I am infuriated by this fact. What if she is a spy from the Mask of Winters? You are far too easily manipulated, boy. What if she were to ask you to turn on your circle? She wouldn't have to do that, mind you, all she would have to do is plant a little seed of doubt in you, perhaps implicate one of your members. You've babbled so much to her already, anyway... or perhaps you didn't notice that Lookshy had no problem treating with us until you old her that you know all too well what their military capabilities are?"
Rivers gently set down the artifact, nearly completed, by his side. He stood and stepped in the god's path. "Maybe she is trying to manipulate me. It wouldn't be the first person I trusted that attempted such a thing. Why are you so afraid of real people, Wonders? Why do you try so hard to keep me away from them?"
"Because that's how you died! You idiot, how could you trust those fools? You were so certain that if you just talked to them, you could settle the whole insurrection with a well timed joke and a flash of your smile. Couldn't you see that your own assistants were wearing discrete essence armor? Did you really think you could escape the fate that my city foretold?" Seven Thousand Wonders Unfolding was shouting in a booming voice that made fountain spew violent gouts of essence. "I don't want to spend another millennia waiting for you, and I just won't do it! You hear me? I won't wait for you again! I'm not one of your robots!"
Rivers and Wonders spun on their heels until they were facing away from each other.
Rivers looked down at the cobblestones. "I didn't know that you felt that way... that you even had feelings..."
"Well, as I have previously remarked, it's not the sort of trait that I cultivate. I am not a robot. I know you made me, essentially, and that I shouldn't have an opinion on the matter, but I do. Please, you have the means at your disposal to cultivate your mental defenses to make them as formidable as your physical ones. Heed my worries. You have a talent for ignoring good advice; can't you develop it well enough to ignore the bad as well."
Rivers smiled. "Well, when you say it that way... I suppose I have neglected the elements of social warfare. I'll look into it."
"Excellent. You can finish your ridiculous token of affection now. I won't look; the sight of it nearly makes me wretch."
"You're just jealous. I'll have to make you an apron next, with a satin sash and an epigraph: 'Mother knows best.'"
"I see that you're back to patronizing me." Seven Thousand Wonders Unfolding reflected for a moment, then nodded his head. "Very good, then."
