At Bravado’s Perimeter, During the Final Battle Against the Archon Threat
Holy Mother Queen Jasper, Bearer of the Antlered Crown, advances on the oncoming horde of undead with all the gravity of a small star, and the killer density of a subway bombing.
Her arms are two, thick cords of sinew and meat that heft twin blades; too thick to be daggers and too ugly to cut cleanly through the slimy, forgiving skull of yet another aggressing corpse. This one, like a thousand others, discorporates into chunky biomass around her cudgel-knives. She blinks the bleak viscera out of her eyes and spits.
Queen Jasper has rarely felt so alive.
The pressing mob of wailing zombies, innumerable and immutable in their path, do not ram into the line of her soldiers so much as seep into the cracks between them. Like horrible estuaries the shamblers make space in the shoreline of her vanguard and expand, like winter’s first freeze, isolating her soldiers and suffocating them under cracked tooth and filthy nails.
And so, she makes space too. Wherever she can Jasper shucks zed like corn and reduces them to their constituent halves with all the efficacy of a rabid farmhand. The Eastern front is hers; all of that flat, tilled acreage, recently evacuated and nearly impossible to hold for its geography and size.
She has left the more cursory cardinals to the RRC and the Reckoners.
Someone else, she thinks, would have gotten this part wrong.
Behind her, and behind the six-man-deep wall of Antler Soldiers that flank her on either side, the terrible Monolith looms just over the horizon. A hellstone of osseum and calcified biomass that, the blind and horrible typhoon of death that is thinning out here, relentlessly seeks to destroy.
She knows, as she bends another nameless undead over her knee and shatters whatever turgid structure serves it for a spine, that her pace here is unsustainable. The Holy Mother can feel the edges to her illness behind the bright and brilliant wall of amphetamines and her own cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine. Beyond that bright halo of wellness, she foresees unconsciousness.
But the flank must hold, she reflects, even as she crushes the meaty neck of a butcher-dead and a wave of nausea seizes her by the brain and renders the world a runny watercolor of pain and confusion.
“Not now.” She pleads to the nameless thing that turns the seasons, and doubles over. “A bit longer.” For a jittering, horrible instant black creeps into the edges of her vision and she loses a few seconds of time. A soldier dies to her left in a mess of incisors and gutstrings, and the Holy Mother pulls herself back from the brink of unknowing by sheer force of will. The vessels behind her eyes burst with the effort and red blooms in her vision.
She kills a hundred more undead in less than ten minutes. By the end, she is shaking like a leaf in late autumn and the distant sound of the Monolith’s horrible, Archon-ending claxon is indistinguishable from her own pounding heartbeat.
And then, all at once, it stops. The noise stops, the zed stop - and for a brief and terrifying instant, Queen Jasper believes she feels her heart stop too.
But it doesn’t, it shudders again, and blackness rolls over her all at once.
Distantly she hears someone yell her name. And the ground rushes up to meet her.
Two Weeks Later, In the San Saba Boardroom, at the Flying City of Waking PrimE
Jasper’s eyes flutter open to reveal the bright and vaulted boardroom at the top of Eureka Tower. The familiar, flat drone of the Chairman’s voice has lulled her to sleep, again.
“The situation of the San Saba is one of reclamation…” She hears the Chairman continue, before she loses the thread of his point. He is, she thinks, a terminally boring young man.
It is becoming harder and harder to stay awake, the Holy Mother reflects, peering down into her lap and at the rich layers of her skirts. Fringe and taffeta swaddle thin legs, inches smaller than they were at the fall of the Monolith. Thick, green varicose veins spider out from the backs of her thighs and calves; morbid renditions of the late life characteristics her mother had lived long enough to achieve naturally.
“The Penitentiary prefers a well-kept State and, in the interest of Order and Justice, vote ‘Nay’.” Warden Tabitha St. Mercy intones, her expression hidden by her mask but implied by the way she crossed her arms when she said it.
Queen Jasper does not expect she will be able to do the same in her lifetime.
“The Grave Council cannot, at this time and during this period of reclamation and upheaval, provide the necessary personnel to staff a new Morgue. We must, in good conscience, vote Na-”
“That’s why I’m proposing it,” another, rougher voice cuts in - interrupting Takheeta Firstborn and drawing Jasper’s attention back to the present.
The rawboned figure of Sinker Swim, the Junkerpunk’s Grand Admiral and temporary board representative, leans onto the marble tabletop with both hands. “I agree that the San Saba is undergoing a facelift right now.” They continue, shark-sharp teeth cutting off the ends of their words as if they are eating them, “I. Get That. I want my people to participate, too. Drywater would be a tradehub for my folks on land. I want the Board to approve a relief and settlement package for the Junkerpunks. We have more than earned the right to our own town, and we will continue to impress. But you must give us the tools to succeed here…”
Somewhere, in the echoing annuls of her memory, Queen Jasper can remember making the same argument for her own people at the zenith of the Hiway War. After their homeland was firebombed into carbon dust and after her father was killed to weaken their leadership, she remembered the demoralizing, exhausting, lonely years that would follow after. Without aid, they never found their homeland - and only with the events of Essex did the Tribes Disparate stumble into one. Holy Mother Queen Jasper raps her tiny silver gavel on the marble tabletop and opens her mouth to speak.
“The Tribes Disparate cast their vote in support of the Drywater Settlement Package.” The Holy Mother declares in a voice too sure and too stately to match her emaciated countenance. She continues with all the authority of her experience and station; “The search for one’s homeland should be a short journey, not a crusade waged against your neighbors.”
Felicity Redfield, the RRC snake with hair like red-hot copper filament, raises her own hand in, stunningly, support. Her lapdog, the Semper-Scientist, raises his fist an instant after hers.
“The RRC'' Felicity begins archly, “Sees the benefit of a sister-settlement and offers the land to the West of New Bravado but East of Barogue, in terms to be discussed upon the resolution of this meeting, to this Settlement project.” Her eyes flicker towards the Chairman, then back to Sinker Swim whose mouth is open in a small, surprised ‘O’.
The Boardroom is quiet for a moment before the Chairman speaks. His voice is resigned, almost wistful. “Then the formal state of the vote is 4/6, in favor of the Drywater Settlement Package. Motion Approved.”
Jasper smiles inwardly. Sinker Swim appears stunned that they got this far. Felicity maintains the look of a satisfied cat while her pet scientist shuffles his notes around, again.
“Congratulations.” Takheeta Firstborn, Mystagogue of the Grave Council offers from Sinker’s left side. And for once, Jasper thinks she might mean it.
“Concerning the Baroguean Exhumation…” The Chairman continues, as though something of monument had not just occurred.
Jasper sighs, and peers out the wraparound windows at a clear, clean sky.
Later, in Jasper’s Quarters at Eureka Tower
Someone knocks. Jasper can smell the thick and saline scent of a Saltwise on the other side of the metal door. She invites the Admiral in after the Antler soldier stationed at her door dutifully frisks them.
“Grand Admiral Swim.” Queen Jasper greets them, spinning in the leather chair which surely cost an unfathomable amount, to meet Sinker Swim’s suspicious stare. “I would stand, but - I won’t today. My bones grow old quickly, and they ache when I am in the high altitudes of Waking Prime.”
Sinker waves a scaly, dismissive hand and takes a seat on another unreasonably expensive chair. “What are you trying to get out of supporting me in there? What do I owe you?” They asked, their tone abrupt and frank.
“To remember that I was the first to support you, when it gained me nothing.” Queen Jasper replied, suddenly very tired. “I have been giving some thought to my legacy, recently. You have probably noticed I am…”
“Falling apart at the joints?” Sinker supplied helpfully, “Greenveined so hard you’ll be sprouting roots soon?”
“Dying.” Jasper agreed with a solemn smile that did not betray the grief in her chest. “And I would like to be remembered as a leader who made homes, not war. As my final year concludes, in the winter of my life, I would be known as a peacemaker.”
The Grand Admiral’s expression softens and their posture eases. “Well that’s… great then. Though, we really don’t need your pity.”
“Good, because I’m not giving it to you.” Jasper rasps, then coughs up a meaty wad of phlegm and blood. “I’m giving you resources, which is what I wished I had when I was you.”
She coughs again, and feels the edges of another episode. “Now get out. I’ve got letters to write.”
It is maybe 10 seconds after Sinker vacated her apartments that the Holy Mother Queen Jasper vomits up nearly eight ounces of black bile, studded with bits of coagulated psion crystal, onto her desktop and various correspondences.
“Again?” a familiar voice asks from the shadow of her bedroom doorway.
Felicity’s pet scientist steps back into the room. Janus Stewart jots something down on the clipboard he holds in the crook of his elbow.
Jasper croaks pathetically as The Scientist removes a thick, ugly syringe from the pocket of his lab coat.
“Just a few more months.” He promises.
And plunges the needle into her solar plexus.