Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

A Conscious Effort

The sky burned with the acrid tang of sulfur, lending the air a taste and smell that would have been wholly unbreakable if she didn't work to block it out. Her very human body would have died within minutes were it not for both void and Anima power coursing through her flesh. Down here on the sulfur fields, large harvesting machines equipped with oversized gravity treads lay cold and abandoned, their cabs fogged with steam and suffer. The atmosphere of Io was thin, a sort of yellowish haze that glowed by the light of Sol and spread an indistinct haze over the towering silhouette of Jupiter and its many bands of color.

What atmosphere there was was warm, heated by lakes of fiery molten silicate.

She took a step across the planet's crust, breaking the brittle formation of yellowed sulfur

Renegade/ rebel was angry, but that was hardly unusual. She kicked at a mound of sulfur which crumbled and scattered over the surface of the moon in a slow wave. The gravity here was only eighteen percent that of earth, and everything that moved did so with a sort of sluggishness associated with videos of the first moon landing.

She looked up at the sky again, another round of frustration filling her with a slow boiling rage.

She had never been particularly patient; a warrior since before the dawn of time, she was used to action and danger. For literal billions of years she had fought for the makers as the very universe formed around them. She was meant to command armies, call up legions and cast stars into darkness.

But here she was, waiting on this stinky mud pit, for the orders of a grumpy construct whose fight equated to a toddler throwing a tantrum at the grocery store. She frowned at the metaphor, the thought certainly didn't belong to her.

It belonged to the OTHER part of her, the weak part.

She tried to shake it away.

After all this time fighting ancient beings, older than time itself, and stretching into a fifth dimension, now she was relegated to waiting around just to crush a few fleshy bags of meat.

She hated it.

Hated it

Hated it

It was an insult to her abilities. She could have been, should have been leading this army, could have crushed them all in seconds, but instead she was standing here and she was waiting.

"By the architect's beard stop whining/" She bristled and lifted a hand to her mouth as the voice broke from her lips unbidden. Not her own voice, but the voice that belonged to IT, the creature that lived inside her, who had tried to take away her identity and turn her into something weak.

"Oh shut up, you're a piece of garbage and I turned you into a work of art, then you had to go and ruin it for the second time, just like you always ruin everything."

There was that voice again.

Renegade hissed, "Shut up."

She tried to shove the stupid construct creature back in its place, but it was strong and did the mental equivalent of slapping her away causing her to recoil sharply. The act scared her on more than one degree. The creature shouldn't have been as strong as she was, but yet more and more she was venturing out from the very reaches of Rebel's mind.

The sensation was disconcerting, like having a spiritual parasite, and one that she couldn't get rid of, one that was threatening to take over her head if she didn't do something about it.

"Damn straight you should be scared, arrogant bitch."

She turned in a circle trying to hide her sudden loss of control from the other void soldiers that waited not so far off.