#daveon

Garrett crushed a security guard's skull with the leg of the bench he'd wrenched apart when he'd felt the nanites in his blood boil away. Today was the Grand Tourney, sure, but that didn't stop lesser fights from going on to assuage those who couldn't afford seats in the big house. He'd been in a waiting area when all the lights went out, the floor juddered wildly, and every leash held by an owner broke in an instant. He'd shared a few stunned seconds of silence with the rest of the pilots in the area he was in, then by some unspoken agreement they'd all turned as one upon the guards.

Garrett had shared out the broken pieces of bench with three other pilots, two grim-faced women and a man with crystalline growths erupting from his skin in odd and inconvenient places. He silently blessed his avatar's resistance to projectiles as a guard opened up on him with a weapon that spat bullets like raindrops; the facet hadn't been much use in the ring - anyone with projectile powers tended to be in higher brackets than Garrett typically competed in - but right now it was coming in very handy.

He sent a silent pulse of gratitude to his avatar, whose name he'd never had the chance to know, and treasured the glow of warmth in response. After all the stories he'd heard about the other pilots, the ones who managed to put some good back into the world, he'd been trying to reach out to his avatar more often; the grey numbness hadn't even allowed him to consider the possibility of such a thing, but now things were different.

He was different.

He was free.

Garrett kicked a guard's legs out from under her and broke her neck in a swift blow - a kindness, in its own way, when many of these guards would have taken hours to kill a pilot and laughed while they did so. But Garrett was tired of cruelty for cruelty's sake, and however much he might resent these guards and wish them all the pain in the world, he wanted to go home more.

Home to his green, rolling hills. Home to his family, his mother, his father, his brothers, even that one cousin who complained constantly at family gatherings and whom everyone avoided if they could or drank heavily while being nattered at if they couldn't. Home to the farm, to the cows and the dogs and the pigs and the chickens. Home to the hot sun on the fields, to the cold rain in the winters, to the light breezes of spring.

He'd give up all his revenge to see home again.

"Hex is hope!"

He couldn't tell who had started the cry, but now a thousand throats picked it up as a banner winked and flashed somewhere ahead of him.

"Hex is hope!"

"Hex is hope!"

"Rrawrl kfshht Rwwrl!"

Garrett winced away from the yowling - he didn't have a universal translator, and apparently the big yellow eight-limbed cat-thing didn't either - and ran on, his own voice lifted to join the others in the battle cry.

The security forces didn't have a chance as thousands of pilots slammed into them, years of pain and bitterness coming to a boil as freedom took Collyseum by storm. Garrett watched a petite, blonde-haired woman who looked no older than twenty casually gut a man with her bare hands. Mechs were crushed, tanks thrown into other tanks, buildings crumbled under vengeful hands, and at the head of everything the flag still flew - though Garrett couldn't see who was holding it.

Garrett fought with desperation, hope a blazing fire in his chest as countless objects snapped and broke under his hands. He broke necks, arms, legs, turrets, guns, walls - whatever he could get his hands on, he knew precisely the best way to leverage it into snapping. He could feel his avatar strongly, a warm core pulsing in his chest like a second heartbeat, and he screamed in mingled joy and defiance as the tides turned around him.

And then, something snapped.

Garrett couldn't say for sure what truly happened. There was a shiver in the air, as if disturbed by some vast shockwave for a timeless moment, and then everything resumed as projectiles flew overhead. Garrett squinted up at them dizzily; they almost looked like - people?

He shook his head and turned back to the fight, such as it was. Whatever had shaken the air had broken the morale of their opponent's resolve, and the security teams were scattering now - for all the good it would do them. If there was anything being a slave in this awful place had taught him, it was that there was no place to run.

And, at the rate some of the other pilots were going - had that guy fused himself to a tank? - there wouldn't be any place left to hide either.

Garrett cheered with the rest and turned to the nearest structure even vaguely still standing and took a swing. His strength was nothing to write home about - barely more than adequate to survive the lower tiers - but his durability was aces. It took a few punches, but he managed to make a very satisfactory hole in the wall - only for the entire structure to go two seconds later as a pilot that looked like some weird combination of human and cow plowed through the last of the structurally significant columns.

Garrett shrugged and moved on. Collyseum was a big place, but there were a lot of extraordinarily angry pilots whose abilities were very specifically chosen for destruction. In the weird half-light that never varied, he couldn't be sure how long it took for the last of it to fall but by the end he was sore and exhausted and elated. The winds had picked up as time had passed and were now blowing strongly, the mother of all sandstorms looming on the horizon, and all Garrett could do was sit silently on his seat of two vaguely chair-shaped pieces of rubble and watch it come as the wind whipped sand into his face.

It came closer, and closer, swallowing the filth and rubble and exhausted pilots as it came and when it finally reached him-

The bright white light of the place between took hold of him, mind and body and soul.

Next he knew, before him lay green fields, the sun high overhead such a change from the dead skies of Collyseum that he had to cover his eyes as they watered. The smell of green, growing things filled the air around him, wet and ripe with the promise of spring and just a hint of the summer heat to come.

Garrett felt his legs give out from under him as he wept, his feelings too great for his heart to contain. He was home. He was safe.

A noise drew his attention to the bushes behind him, and he twisted to see his brother, Daniel, stepping out of them with an expression on his face like he'd seen a ghost and much more grey hair than Garrett remembered.

It didn't matter in the slightest.

He launched himself at his brother and wrapped him up in the biggest, warmest hug he could.

"I'm home," he sobbed. His brother returned the hug with a fierceness that only made Garrett cry harder, but he still managed to say what needed saying through his tears.

"Hex is hope."

————————————————————————————————-

Danica shoved another pilot down as security guards wielding lightning-spitters opened up on their position. The impacts from the guns hurt her, but they would have killed the other pilot - a small humanoid with green fur, a short rack of antlers, and very large eyes. She gritted her teeth as the barrage continued, and the other pilot looked up at her in surprise before winking and vanishing in a haze of green mist.

The firing stopped abruptly.

Danica winced and rubbed her chest as she nodded to the smaller pilot, their antlers now covered in gore and a ferocious look in their eyes, and they nodded back before vanishing again. Danica began to move up, towards the shining banner held aloft by someone she didn't recognize forward and to her left, keeping those she could out of harm's way.

For all that she'd progressed in the ranks on a tide of blood and pain, Danica was very tired of killing. The last person she'd killed was her former master, and she'd taken great pleasure in pulling his insides out and hanging him off the side of the building with them as a warning to the other vultures.

After that he'd contented herself with taking blows and breaking bones and buildings; most of the security guards whose limbs she'd broken might have been finished off by other pilots, but their blood was not on her hands. 

At least a few other pilots had seemed to sense that, and had started to follow her - ducking behind her when the bullets flew and darting out when the shooting paused to rend flesh and bones and metal and stone. Danica let them, the four or five she had following her now like little giltlings followed their mothers around the ponds of home more than welcome to keep themselves safe behind her.

As she made her way forward her entourage grew, and gradually above the scream of the dying and the sound of weapons fire, a new shout could be heard.

"Hex is hope!"

The words lit a fire inside Danica, and she raised her voice to join the outcry.

"Hex is hope!"

Her companions picked up the cry.

"Hex is hope! Hex is hope! HEX IS HOPE!"

They surged forward in a raging tide, freedom ringing in their voices and veins, and Danica pushed hard to stay at the front of the pack.

A mech appeared in front of her. She tore one of its legs off without slowing down.

A tank rolled up to stop them. She put her head down and her arms forward and tore through its armor like tissue paper.

A battalion of soldiers popped up from behind cover. She kicked a piece of the tank and held it in front of her and hers like a shield.

Never slowing, never stopping, the rush was inevitable. Inexorable. The pilots had been beaten down, but they were not dead. And now they were free.

"Hex is hope! HEX IS HOPE!"

Danica's voice was raw, but she didn't care. A thousand other throats rang with the call, a thousand other voices lifted hers to join them. The banner flew tall and proud at their head, though she couldn't see the man who'd held it when they first started their charge. Now it was being held by someone else, someone taller and broader - with a long, whip-like tail? - than the first man, but she couldn't see much more than that through the explosions and debris both organic and not.

And then, something happened.

She couldn't say what, for sure. It was like a bell had been struck, or a huge door thrown open so violently it rebounded off the wall. The air shivered for an instant, and then all was still.

Suddenly things started flying overhead - the sky had been all but empty until this point, the scant handful of pilots with the power of flight dominating the skies nearly unopposed. But now it was full of flying things - people? - that arced high over the crumbling walls of Collyseum and out over the wasteland. Danica watched them go for a long moment, but when none of them even paused above the city she put them out of her mind. Whatever, whoever they were, they were headed out and away from this wretched place, and would play no part in the coming struggle.

Whatever hope their opponents had held burned out in an instant, and they fled in droves. Most dropped their guns as the ran. Some even abandoned their vehicles in order to run faster, but it did not matter overmuch for some of Danica's compatriots were very fast indeed.

She let them go; she was very, very tired of killing.

Some of the pilots around her had turned their anger on the buildings, and Danica joined them with a will. Pillars shattered under her fists, load-bearing walls were deprived of integrity with kicks, and windows smashed for the sheer hell of it. When one building came crashing down, she moved on to the next without pause. Then the next. Then the next.

She couldn't truly say how many buildings she brought down, in the end. Many. It didn't matter. What did matter was the sandstorm rising outside the city limits, as tall as the sky itself and twice as deadly. The flight of things out of Collyseum had stopped some time ago, and the sandstorm had started brewing instead.

Danica slumped to the ground, head bowed. There was nothing to fight and nowhere to run, and she could see many of the other pilots seemed to agree. Most simply watched the oncoming storm, though a few had somehow found the energy to try and flee the inexorable. One even seemed to have found the energy to beckon the storm, dance before it like some crazed weather-worshiper.

As the sands swallowed the virulent remains of a city that had once breathed cruelty and pain, Danica closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable. Closer and closer the sand roared, until -

The bright white light of the In Between caught her and threw her far, far away.

She hit the ground with a thud, raising a small dust cloud around her. The firm ground underneath her palms was a deep brown, almost black - nothing like the shifting red sands of ARENA. Trembling, she raised her eyes and saw-

A blackened husk of a building. Fields scorched to the earth, the thorny vines of the undergrowth crumbled to ashy heaps where they had fallen. Upright skeletons of trees standing out of the ground like rotten teeth.

"No."

Despair hit her like the tank had earlier, to much greater effect. She staggered a few steps forward and fell to her knees right in front of where the door would have been. Should have been.

Her mind was blank as she reached out to bush the sooty surface, recoiling as a portion of the doorframe crumbled to ashy dust under her hand. This was home, a safe harbor. This was dreams of yellow fields and playing with her daughters. This was her hope.

Burned.

Gone.

She bowed her head, unable to bear the weight of grief, and something caught her eye. There, in the soft ashes of what had been her home, was a footprint. A very familiar footprint. A bare foot, one with six toes clearly outlined.

Tripsy, they used to call her youngest, because she had used to trip on the extra toe on her left foot.

She surged to her feet, hope blazing anew. Home was her daughters; the rest could be built and built again. She looked, and saw smudged, ashy tracks leading west. She turned to follow them, breathing a prayer as she did so.

"Hex is hope."

————————————————————————————————-

Kzzkvns dived, snatching up two armed bipeds that bore the stink of cruelty before rising away. They made noises that vibrated its carapace, and in a fit of vindictive annoyance it tore their heads off and let the blood rain down among their companions. It had never been fitted with a translator, its owner too lazy to obtain the intracranial device that would have been required, and it did not understand the noises that the others made.

But it understood freedom. It understood the meaning of the sudden cessation of manufactured despair and the clean-fresh Hex scent flooding its pit. It knew when the time to rise and defend its hive-mates had come, no matter what those hive-mates looked like or spoke. For the first time in a very long time, it flew towards the fight with clear antennae and eyes capable of truly seeing.

It dived again, this time pulling hive-mates marked with danger-fear-Hex scents to the relative safety of the open skies. Very few others had joined it; the skies were an empty place, the power of flight uncommon, and the drones that would normally swarm in great clouds curiously absent. The hive-mates made noises and squirmed, so it deposited them gently behind a large piece of debris and took to the sky again.

Now was the time for action. There, at the forefront of it all, stood a biped hive-mate with a strange leaf on a stick; even from this distance, Kzzkvns could smell the message on the leaf.

Hex is Hope.

Straining its message-glands, Kzzkvns echoed it in a cloud of scent thick enough to be nearly visible.

Hex is hope.

The vibrations from below grew louder, and Kzzkvns dived toward the hated enemies with renewed frenzy. Its hardened keratin claws sheered through steel like it was a gossamer cocoon and rent the octopodal beings within, splattering strange, yellow ichor for almost thirty yards to each side. Its powerful back limbs sent bipeds into walls and each other, breaking their fragile inner structures and leaving them crumpled on the ground like dead leaves. Its wing covers, hardened and sharpened by years of deepest darkness, sheered through limbs and other soft, unprotected flesh and splattered it in a rainbow of blood.

It took off, wings sore from long disuse, and dived again and again to destroy the enemies of the hive. Fragile calcium structures broke under the brush of its claws, and machinery shredded. In the line of its advance above, its hive-mates surged below and gained ground at a ferocious pace. Violence was not be sought, but the Hive was inviolate.

And then the air shivered.

Kzzkvns nearly fell from the sky as for a weightless, timeless moment the air did not support its weight. Its wings, exhausted and trembling, failed and it fell - only to be caught by something wholly unfamiliar that still managed to smell strongly of the Hex. Vibrations rattled its exoskeleton as whatever had grabbed it made some form of noise and set it down gently behind the stumpy remains of a wall. Its wings fluttered feebly, and the other pilot plopped half of what smelled like a security guard in front of Kzzkvns before moving away to make rubble of another building.

Kzzkvns was not hungry - its wings were weak from disuse, not lack of will - but it consumed the meat in front of it methodically and it did feel slightly better afterward. Gathering itself, it leaped to rejoin the fray.

It was a long time later that the sky stood empty, the creations that had sought to divide it from the land brought low by the power and rage of those it had caged. Kzzkvns rested on a wide piece of rubble, wings spread in the vain hope of some extra warmth to ease them, and felt the winds tug at them. The sands had risen in the desert, whipped into a frenzy by one of its hive-mates - or so it seemed - and it was content. This Hive should not have existed, steeped in misery and propped up on the backs of the workers, and now it did not. The howling sands would see the last traces of it gone, and if it took Kzzkvns also, it would be well.

As the wind-driven sand poured across the city slowly, it had enough time to fold its wings away and stand to meet the reckoning, and...

....and a bright white something that smelled so much of everything it was nothing pulled it far away from the dead land.

When it landed, the ground was warm and forgiving, taking the imprint of its form even as it struggled to its feet. Around it, life buzzed. A thousand message scents, deepening confusion and alarm and the spicy spike of warrior-drones getting closer. The air was warm and full of life; the familiar shine of the True Hive of home drained all the fight it had left.

As the warriors drew up in a circle around it, it told them the most important thing it knew to say.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Cysud Warmheart wasn't an optimist. After century upon century built into millennia of being trapped in an endless cycle of kill or be killed, he couldn't afford to be. But he wasn't such a pessimist as to stay in his cell when the door sprang open and the control webbing - implanted into his chest and neck by his first owner and never subsequently replaced, for all his hide had grown up painfully around it - dissolved.

His first steps out of his cell had been met with no resistance, even after he experimentally put his fist through a wall (or two), but a floor closer to the exit and suddenly four guards round the corner at a dead run. Cysud knew the one in front intimately; the man liked to take particular pleasure in the use of his shock prod whenever he felt Cysud wasn't moving fast enough to suit. All four men were running hot, likely a combination of activity and anger, and Cysud grinned to himself.

His own innate strength and durability had been enough for the pits, once he'd learned to keep himself on a level where nothing flashier was required, but he was a pilot. He had bonded an avatar, though he'd been careful to minimize the bond over the years - it wasn't the avatar's fault, any of what happened, and they did not deserve to suffer Cysud's feelings in this hellhole. It was the one piece of kindness he could give, since to surrender the bond would be to be forced into another by his owner.

But here and now, with the growing roar outside and a swelling feeling in his chest - it had been so long, was this what hope felt like? - he reached for the bond and clasped it as tightly as he clasped the front two security guards. Opening his mouth, he inhaled deeply. To his eyes the effect was obvious and immediate; from stress-worked yellow to chilly green and fading fast, the thermal energy came off them in long ribbons and fell into Cysud.

He could feel the warmth in his chest, the bond still somewhat thready from long neglect getting stronger as his internal temperature rose. When he had finished his intake, the front two guards were still and silent, mere black silhouettes to his vision. Nearly completely devoid of thermal energy, they shattered easily as he clenched his hands. Their squadmates yelled imprecations and threats even as they backed away, but Cysud didn't care.

He was so close to freedom, he could taste it.

Distance didn't save the other two guards even as he stoked his own internal flames hotter, and he didn't bother with shattering them as he ran past. He ran out the front gates of the compound, shattering them in the process, and into a war zone; apparently he wasn't the only one ready to grasp a chance when it presented itself, and others were beginning to emerge from their places of holding and engage the security forces and the very buildings of the city around them.

"Hex is hope!"

Cysud's head snapped around; he hadn't been able to make the phrase go away in his cell, and all efforts of his former masters to do so - up to and including removing the offending piece of wall and replacing it - had been in vain. To hear it here, now - that was something worth looking to.

He didn't recognize the man screaming; his heat signature was peculiarly mottled, as if some parts of him were much cooler than the others, but the banner in his hand blazed as brightly as the sun that didn't hang over Collyseum: Hex is Hope.

Cysud coughed to bring his translator online - it was an older model, but he couldn't request a replacement or repair because to do so would be to reveal he had one in the first place - and joined his basso profundo voice to the smaller man's.

"Hex is hope!"

The shout echoed through the buildings around them, loud enough to carry over the gunfire that was beginning to pick up, and other voices began to rise and join his.

"Hex is hope!"

"Hex is hope!"

The man waved the banner hard, and those slaves that had been freed began to make their way towards him, Cysud among their number. The man turned and ran, keeping up his shout even as he headed for the main security hub, and Cysud grimaced; if he was going to die, trying to take apart that monstrous edifice would be an excellent way to do so. Still, it was a destination, and they'd gotten this far.

He kept up his own shouts as he followed, voice echoing like rolls of thunder even as more and more voices joined it. As their numbers swelled, their opponents' desperation became more palpable. Tanks crashed through lesser buildings and mechs leaped from the shorter rooftops to join the fray; Cysud enjoyed getting his claws into them and releasing a measured portion of his stored thermal energy to cook the bastards inside. Some of the more technologically-minded pilots had taken to scooping the resultant charred mess out of the cockpits and take the machines for their own, turning them on still-loyal forces or the surrounding buildings. Cysud did not care; there were always more foot soldiers for him to take from, and while he was beginning to ache on the inside from all the thermionic cycling he refused to stop now.

At some point he'd lost sight of the strange man - though not the banner - and when the air rang with the sound of a gong too low to be heard, Cysud's instinctive look towards the direction the noise had come from revealed that the man was gone and someone new held the banner - someone who, in the brief instant Cysud looked his way, took four rounds from a gun to his midsection in a spray of body-hot yellow that was cooling even as it spattered the ground. Cysud took a step forward, intending to do something about the issue, but the rattling clank of a mech distracted him and he had to backpedal hurriedly as one landed in the place where he'd just been standing.

He gritted his teeth and grabbed as close to the cockpit as he could reach. When the cursed thing stopped firing, he looked again but the banner had been carried further away and he was no longer in range to do much of anything about what he'd seen. With a fatalistic shrug, he turned and sprang towards a group he knew to be low-rent slavers from the 700s worlds. He had neither the time nor the energy to spare a thought for anything over his head, and his world narrowed to the next moment. Survive this, move to the next. Destroy that, get out of the way of the rubble.

And so it went for several hours, a day, several days - with every clock in the place smashed, buried, or both, time was measured in ragged breaths and thunderous heartbeats, in the space between the first tremble to the building's fall. Cysud couldn't say how long it had been before there was simply nothing left. Not a building stood, not an oppressor lived, and the pilots - almost as one - settled to rest where they stood. One patch of rubble was as good as another.

“It’s not enough.”

Cysud tipped his head towards the short - compared to him, anyway - humanoid who had fetched up beside him on the rubble. He’d never had much luck in telling one humanoid from another; they all looked about the same, and he’d held onto the face-blindness for dear life in the fights. Made living easier if the faces all blurred together through the centuries.

“What do you mean?”

His throat was sore from all the shouting earlier, and his voice came out more like a growl than he’d intended. Still, the other didn’t seem to pay him any mind.

“We’ve pulled the city down, but the structures extended under the sands quite a ways. The last of the scum that filled this place have hidden in there too, I can just feel it. We’ll have to fill it in, crush it.”

Cysud couldn’t say he particularly minded the sound of that, though he had to wonder how this guy planned to do anything about it. His concerns must’ve been written across his face, because the guy smiled.

“I can do it.”

Cysud made a disbelieving noise in the back of his throat, and the other guy raised an eyebrow.

“What about the ones who're resting on top of the things you want to crush?”

His tone was mild, but his gaze was direct. The other guy shrugged.

“They’ll be moved; I heard they were starting to send some of us home, too. It’ll work.”

Cysud opened his mouth to argue further, but the guy was already moving forward and lifting his arms to the empty skies. Flickers of warmth played around his fingers as the thermal energy in the air around him began to flicker and twist oddly. Streams of heated air rose off him, and his internal temperature spiked to a working-hard yellow-white.

As an insane howling filled his ears and the air currents around him writhed like snakes in a mating frenzy, Cysud closed his eyes.

A flash of brilliant color, a white so hot it wasn't a temperature so much as a pressure, a feeling of movement, and Cysud was somewhere else.

Before him stretched a vista he hadn't seen in more years than he'd lived there, a view at once alien to his eyes and dear to his heart. Where once the ground had been softened by vegetation, now there was bare rock reflecting heat from the sun high overhead. And yet, the land was the same - the slopes, the ravines, the shape of the mountains behind him. It was all just as he remembered it, save for that nothing large or familiar was living there now.

He dug one hand into the pale caliche dust beneath him; unlike the sands of ARENA, the dust was soft and full of life - he could see the pinpricks of innumerable beetles scrambling over his fingers uselessly. He spent a long while simply staring, getting new handfuls whenever all the beetles had managed to escape his current one. It was quiet, here. For the first time in a long time, Cysud was truly alone. No-one was watching him, no machines chattered endless vigilance in the corners of his cell, no smug, overly-pleased-with-themselves owners ready to drop by to see the "beast" they'd acquired.

Standing, he stretched out limbs that hadn't seen use in decades. His wings, though large, were thin and delicate enough that they were more a hindrance than a help in a fight. He'd gotten so used to keeping them close that now, as they extended, he had to stop every few moments to massage a new knot out of the tense muscles.

When he finally had them extended he resumed his earlier stillness, letting the breeze play across them even as the sun warmed and relaxed them. He waited patiently, first for the trembling to subside, then for the tingling to cease. When he was finally satisfied, he walked over to the edge of the cliff he stood on and dropped like a stone. Adjusting the angle of his wings, they billowed and suddenly he was soaring on a thermal, up, up, up beyond the edge of the cliff and into the warm skies beyond. Reaching within himself to tap his last reserve of overflow thermal energy, he began tracing a symbol with superheated air in the sky for all his kin to see - wherever they may be.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Hessia howled as she buried her claws in the skull of a man in light armor foolish enough to get within arm's reach. He dropped, only to be replaced by something inside a suit of power armor; Hessia dodged as the armor brought guns to bear, then launched herself at it as it tried to re-orient. Like most armored things, it could not bring its arms around to bear as she nimbly clawed her way to its back and while it seemed to have extra armor plating there, she had her leisure to bring her hindclaws up for a series of disemboweling strikes that eventually hit flesh. The power armor dropped, sparking and spewing blood, and Hessia leaped away towards the forefront of the battle.

When her door had sprung open with a hideous rumble, Hessia had wasted no time in getting out of her cell - only to find herself right in the middle of an entire contingent of hired guns. She was fast, and strong, but it had still taken her a bit of while to deal with the bastards and by the time she'd gotten out to street level the battle had been well underway. She'd joined in with a will and had made excellent progress so far in her own, humble, opinion.

The rattle of bullets around her made her flinch back into cover, but it had been the last reflexive pull on the trigger by a man whose head was nowhere to be seen and stopped as quickly as it had begun. Hessia took the opportunity to advance several dozen yards, right into a cluster of slavers huddled together in the perceived shelter of a destroyed tank. Why they were bothering to duck and cover, Hessia didn't know; most of the projectile weaponry was in the hands of this place's enforcers and while a she had seen a few pilots pick up guns to turn them on their former owners, the overwhelming majority seemed content to close the distance and do similarly to what she was doing.

Namely, painting the place with the blood of their tormentors.

Hessia landed on the first one with a sickening crunch, and another two were grabbed and lifted away by some furiously buzzing insect pilot; she could See the bond pulsing at the heart of the bug, which was the only reason she didn't take a swing for it. Her own bond, less than a week old, pulsed and throbbed beneath her breastbone as the raging emotions stoked the fired inside into an inferno. Opening her mouth, she shrieked at the last four and they collapsed to the ground with blood dripping from their ears.

That had never happened before, and she sent a fierce wave of gratitude to the one who sat beside her heart. They responded with a roil of emotions too complex to process now but that spurred her into motion once again. As she moved, she heard the battle cries begin to rise above the din of the main conflict.

"Hex is hope!"

"HEX IS HOPE!"

Hessia didn't hesitate, and added her own howls to the din.

"Hex is Hoooope!"

Leaping with renewed vigor, Hessia managed to get in behind a mech that was standing off three other pilots. A single shriek of her newfound ability brought all the gears in one of the arms to a grinding halt, freeing up one of the other pilots to let them leap forward and pull the offending arm completely off, and starting beating the mech with it.

Hessia's claws ached, having been used on steel a great deal already today, and she turned to go in search of softer targets. Of which there were a surprising few; the path ahead had been forged and reforged by other pilots ahead of her, and she rushed to catch up to the front. As she did, her eyes caught on a banner held up high at the very front of the fighting, and-

The world turned.

A soundless, breathless, frozen moment rippled and Hessia had just enough time to see something explode out of the Grand Arena and begin rushing towards the edge - many somethings - moving fast - light -

And then they were gone, beyond her sight, and the enemy ranks fluttered and broke, fleeing like prey before coursers. Howling in delight, Hessia forgot her weariness and bounded after them while other pilots took advantage of the sudden cessation of a great deal of incoming fire to turn their attention to the buildings around them. Roaring, they began battering down the edifices of the mighty and corrupt even as Hessia herself caught up to the rearmost of those attempting to flee and set into them with possibly more glee than was warranted.

Hessia was uncannily good at finding those who would hide from the pilots, and as the hours wore on and more building fell she ferreted out nest after festering nest of slavers and security guards. Those who would feast on the misery of the innocent could not hide from her, and again and again her claws came down.

By the time the last building fell, Hessia was tired unto death. She'd torn one of her claws off disemboweling a particularly well-armored bodyguard, and her paw throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Beyond the edge of the rubble, far and away in a direction Hessia's internal compass said was East but could just as easily have been the North or South, a great storm was bearing down on the city. The winds had risen as the pilots had laid down building after building, freeing the trapped breezes from their cage as surely as they themselves had been freed.

And, just like them, the winds were blowing into a tempest.

Hessia huffed out a breath that blew away a little puff of sand from the rubble she was laying on, but didn't move as the towering wall of sand drew nearer. She was tired; if this was to be the end, there wasn't any point in spending energy she didn't have trying to avoid it. And this way she got to watch the remains of the hated city vanish into the storm as if they had never been. As the front grew closer, she closed her eyes to protect them from the blowing sand, and -

The brightness of the Travel folded her in its wings.

When it cleared, all was green. Hessia blinked, gulping great puffs of pollen-heavy air as she looked around. The place itself was unfamiliar, but the plants, the noises, the smells - home. She had come home at last. Just before the time of pouring rains would clear the air of the pollen that saturated it now, if her nose was any judge.

A brilliant exultation thrilled in her veins. She was home, she was strong, she was free! The new second heart in her chest danced a merry rhythm to her joy, and she laughed as she began frolicking about as she hadn't since she was a cub despite the ache in her limbs, rubbing up against the fragrant leaves of a nearby frwln plant and reveling in the disappearance of the hot, dead stink of that other place. The pollen twinkled as it reflected the light of the sun above, as if the very forest rejoiced in her return, and she couldn't hold it in any longer even though her throat was sore.

She tilted her head back and howled her words to the very heavens themselves.

"Hex is hope!"

————————————————————————————————-

Doris grimaced as she pulled the intestines out of a great brute of a man. They smelled awful and the man was screaming in a terribly unbecoming fashion, so she stuffed them into his mouth before pushing him over and turning on his comrades. Gore was splattered up and down her front, and it looked like she was wearing strangely mottled red gloves, and she'd never cared less about how unfashionable she looked in her entire life. Her collar was off, her blood was up, and it was time that these fucking bastards learned who they were dealing with.

The man's comrades, looking distinctly pale beneath their helmets and riot gear, brandished their weapons in what they probably thought was a threatening fashion, shouting for her to go back to her owner's place of residence and obey. She gave them her best Party smile.

"Why boys, don't you know?"

She closed the distance in less time than it took to blink, shoving her hand through layers of padding and up under the ribs of the guy in front.

"I don't answer to anyone anymore."

With that, she clenched her fist and yanked, pulling the guy's heart and what looked like perhaps a bit of lung out of his chest and flinging the mess at the next guy as cover for her movement. They convulsively opened fire, but she was already not where they were aiming. In quick succession the innards of the three other security people became their outards and Doris moved on, waving cheerfully to P'f’t'gh as it sent a wave of slavers stumbling away with one stomp of its mighty hooves. P'f’t'gh waved back before charging after the slavers and Doris felt her Party smile turn into a real grin.

P'f’t'gh had always been a fun one.

Doris trotted on, heading tidily for what appeared to be the heart of the battle. Someone had gotten a large piece of cloth from somewhere and had sewed the symbol and words onto it that echoed between the building now as a war cry as it had echoed in the small rooms and throbbing underbelly of Collyseum.

"Hex is hope!"

One voice rang under all the others, rolling like thunder, and Doris raised her eyebrows in surprise. Of all the fuddy-duddies she might have expected to take part in this fracas, bitter old Cysud wasn't one of them. He'd repeatedly stepped away from any retelling of the stories, and had regarded the mysterious symbol with skepticism at best. When Doris had finally gotten tired of his attitude and asked why he was such a wet blanket, he'd looked at her with those creepy empty eyesockets of his and told her to ask him again in a few centuries.

If he was here now, the times really had to be a-changing. She couldn't see him from where she was, but Doris' smile threatened to split her face in two anyway as she raised her own voice as best she could to join the general outcry.

"Hex is hope!"

More security forces boiled out of wherever they normally lurked and joined the fray, mechs and tanks crowded into streets covered in rubble, some individuals in power armor trying to make progress ahead of squads wearing helmets and tactical gear, and a curious absence of anything unmanned - which was especially suspicious this close to that awful main security hub. Still, Doris was not about to question providence; her tricks didn't work on the smooth surfacing of the armor, and she left the various mechanical devices to those better suited to dealing with them.

For herself, she jolted into high gear as she approached the unarmored guards. Her hands pushed through cloth and plating, sending guts and bone flying high into the air as she simply didn't stop moving. Ten enemies in ten seconds, seventeen in fifteen, twenty in twenty four; they dropped as flies under her blows, alien gore and viscera mixing oddly with the rich, red blood of humanity into a sticky purple effluvia that coated most of her front. Doris didn't care; purple brought out the blue in her eyes, after all, and was a most becoming color for her.

She was just taking the head off another bruiser when the whole of reality shook. The ground stayed still, not a single hair fell out of place, and yet a vibration passed through everything that Doris felt more than she heard. She cocked her head in vain to try and find the source when something - actually, many somethings now that she looked properly - went whizzing by overhead. Doris leaned back and shaded her eyes uselessly - the light didn't have any one source, after all, so shading her eyes did very little to bring the strange objects into focus - and watched them as they went. It didn't seem to take long for the "rain" to pass, and by the time they had every last bastard who'd grown fat off the misery generated here in Collyseum was beating feet for the edges of the city.

Doris tsk'd, shaking her head before leaping into a dead sprint after them. Not a single one of those miserable commies was going to make it out alive, not if she had any say in the matter! Such pests were best killed before they could breed in the woodwork to try again later; she'd told the Woodwards as much when Leticia had found a cockroach in her kitchen, and they'd wisely followed her advice. It was time for Doris to do nothing less.

The first man's spine shattered in her grip like the time she'd accidentally held her wineglass too tightly at the Robinson's dinner party several years ago, and just as she had then she simply let go of the pieces and shook out her hand to make sure nothing had gotten stuck where it shouldn't. The next three men found it very difficult indeed to breath without significant portions of their lungs, and the one in the lead went down silently in a spray of blood as Doris pulled his trachea out.

She surveyed her handiwork for a moment, quietly pleased with herself, before heading off to find more pests. Other pilots had taken to destroying buildings, leaving the road completely strewn with rubble that required a bit of negotiating around, but Doris let the mess slide just this once. As much as she abhorred a mess, she disliked this place more. In fact, the only thing she disliked more than this place was when her dear, sweet husband left the toilet seat up after he was done. That little piece of inconsideration really got her goat, and if it was up when she returned home she'd have some Words for the dear, silly man.

Doris ran out of targets before the other teams of pilots ran out of buildings - Tigure was taking particular delight in putting holes in load bearing walls, the sweet dear, and Rhombus Trapezoid Circle was doing absolutely delightful things with its mono-filament edge - so she settled herself on the rubble of what had once been the central security hub and watched as the buildings fell one after the other. She enjoyed the wind in her hair as it picked up with each booming crash that signaled the end of another building; the rising storm on the horizon was ominous, to be sure, but she could do even less about that than she could do about the buildings so she settled back and picked idly at the drying blood on her hands.

Worse than picking off nail polish, really, and doing so gave her arms the odd patchwork effect, but underneath the crusted blood her skin was as soft as any other product had made it, and Doris was well enough content with that.

The hours unfurled slowly, the buildings continuing to fall, and all the while the sandstorm grew closer and closer. It struck the edge of the destroyed city just as the last building went, and Doris could process visual information quickly enough to watch almost in slow motion as it dumped tons upon tons of sand over the rubble, effectively erasing it - and the pilots that had been resting on it - from view. It drew near, and Doris closed her eyes.

As it touched her skin, she was suddenly whisked away by a white light, not painful to look at despite its intensity, and carrying her with the dreadful inexorability of the tide.

Doris did not stagger when the white left her as quickly as it had come. She held her head high, proudly defiant of whatever was coming next, ready to take all comers.

Or so she thought.

She didn't recognize the place at first. Blackened ground stretched as far as the eye could see, interrupted by low, crumbling walls and viciously twisted bushes, while little bits and pieces of sun-bleached plastics poked through the surface of the ground like curious fish. Rusting hulks rested on rubble-strewn roads, wrecked wretched in the watery sunshine. The nearest one still had flecks of badly-faded blue paint on the body, and the color flickered a dim memory in the back of her head.

When it refused to come, she set off resolutely towards the most complete building she could see. It was made of haphazard parts and held together with what looked like dried mud, but it was a building and that meant someone had at some point been here to build it. Therefore even if the builder was long gone, they might have left something useful behind.

As she walked that nagging sense of familiarity grew. A broken doll here, another rusting hulk in a strange shade of maroon - Hetty had gotten a pretty red car when all the neighbors had blue, hadn't she? And refused to switch it out even when the ladies shunned her? - and a set of broken chairs set in front of tumbledown walls, all these and more combined to form an almost complete memory of something - what, she couldn't remember, and it frustrated her.

It wasn't until she stood in front of the ramshackle building - empty, she could see now - that it clicked. In front of the building was a mailbox in the shape of a smiling pig, whose snout you had to pull to open the box.

It had been the delight of Edna's children, and she had always refused to remove it even under pressure from the neighborhood.

Doris looked around, aghast. There was Hetty's car, parked in the driveway next to some short walls that might have been a building once. There, the Smith's ornate wrought-iron fence gate hung mostly off its hinges, the ornamental spikes along the top long since rusted off. Here, leaning up against one of the makeshift walls, the Battson's old rifle that had hung above the fireplace.

There, on a re-purposed piece of siding, the darkened outlines of a man and two children.

Doris fell to her knees, legs simply unable to support her any longer. This was....home.

What was left of it.

A frenzied scream tore itself free of her throat, and she scrabbled madly at the hem of her shirt where Phanex had sewed the words and symbol that had kept them all going. It was the work of a moment to tear it free and throw it away before she collapsed sobbing.

As it fell, the words themselves flashed in the wan sunlight.

Hex is hope.

————————————————————————————————-

Hristiana screamed as she held her makeshift sword - a wrapping of cloth torn from the bottom of her shirt set about the base of a particularly large shard of glass - aloft, the blood of her enemies dripping from the end.

"Hex Destiny! Bringer of hope! Guide my sword! Vega, Princess of War, let us lay our enemies low! King Theodore, First of his Name, give us heart to protect those who need protecting! Sister Opal, lend your strength to our arms! To death! TO DEATH!"

The pilots who had gathered themselves to her roared, arms raised. They had come singly, gravitating toward her as she had slain guard after guard, and she had taken charge of them as any true warrior of her caste would do. They did not owe her fealty, but she accepted the responsibility of leading them and protecting them to her very last breath.

She had organized them loosely into squads, each with at least one member resistant to the long-distance weapons wielded by their foes. One squad consisted entirely of those with speed beyond belief, another of those possessed of strength beyond even her own that she had set to lobbing pieces of debris at their enemies. She herself lead a squad of those with fighting skills, though she kept one of the faster speedsters with her to relay messages to the other squads during combat.

There hadn't been a truly clear goal when they had started out, but now - far ahead of them - a banner flew proud and high above the smoke and dust of pitched battle. The symbols on it echoed the one she had tied around her neck as a sort of tabard, and the shouting from ahead made the message even clearer.

"Hex is hope!"

Some of her people had picked it up now, voices joining the general clamor, and Hristiana joined her voice to theirs.

"Hex is hope!"

They surged forward as one, spirits reignited in the fire of battle, and Hristiana plunged her blade into the unprotected neck of a distinctly alien biped dressed in the armor of the hated enemy. It squawked in desperation, sound already gurgling around the vermilion blood gushing from the wound, and went down hard. To her left the team of throwers had ceased throwing for a few minutes and were intent on tearing apart a mech that had dropped down too close for comfort.

With a nod she sent her speedy messenger to a more mixed group to go and defend them from the ground troops attempting a flanking maneuver. As he zoomed off, he returned her attention to the battle just in time to intercept a truncheon that buzzed in a menacing fashion with her sword, then headbutt the man wielding it. He fell away stunned, and Hristiana gutted him before dodging a swing from one of his compatriots and gutting her too.

The steady stream of them seemed endless, but Hristiana knew with a grim certainty that this place could not support a standing army of enough non pilots to truly inconvenience all the pilots gathered here through the long, dark years.

Of course, that didn't mean everyone was going to survive this. A cut-off scream and an explosion of noise had her looking around to find one of her squads decimated, parts of them scattered about in a way that suggest something had exploded upward out of the ground. Hristiana whistled shrilly over the battle noises and gestured for her speedster. He rushed over.

"What is it, sir?"

Even his voice vibrated, a buzzing overtone that was difficult on the ears but made it exceedingly easy to pick his voice out of the general din of the melee around them.

"Tell everyone to watch where they step; our enemies have laid a harsh road for us."

She gestured to the gory mess that had once been their comrades, and he paled to an almost curdled color before nodding and setting off. Hristiana turned, intending to raise her sword once more, but before she could, something...happened.

The very world trembled, the foundations of reality shaken by something ineffable, and Hristiana nearly collapsed to her knees. She staggered a single step before forcing her knees to lock and looking up. There, high in the sky above them, were....things. Many things. She could not get a clear view before they disappeared from sight, but the sight filled her with an inexplicable hope.

It appeared to do the opposite for their foes; many threw down their weapons and fled before the harvest of rage that their years of cruelty had sown, while others simply keeled over where they stood. Hristiana set her faster squads to harry the scrum of slime out into the wastes, where the wilds would surely deal with them, while pulling the rest of her squads in and redistributing them.

Now each squad was centered around a particularly strong or sturdy individual, with a screen of less strong fighters assigned to guard them while they pulled the buildings down. Other pilots were already doing so without direction, and Hristiana felt the rightness of her actions in her bones. This place should never have been; so should it not be now, nor in the future.

It took what felt like mere hours to clear the city to its roots, a few of the more energetic pilots persisting in going around and kicking down the broken-off stumps of walls even after the majority had stopped to rest and consider the state of the place. Rubble made gentle hills and small bowls, and by and large nothing was left standing much taller than anything else. Hristiana settle her squads into one of the larger bowls, the piled sides doing more to lessen the wind that had started howling as more of the buildings had fallen, and watched for a moment as a figure beckoned to the storm before turning back to her own.

The speedsters were nearly comatose in their exhaustion, and the heavy lifters weren't much better. Hristiana made the rounds with a precious can of water she'd rescued from one of the buildings before it had been destroyed, giving each of her people a mouthful and a few words of encouragement even as the storm darkened the sky in its approach. By the time she had run out of water it was very close indeed, and she made her way to the highest rock in the bowl and lifted her bloodstained sword to the sky.

"Hex is hope," she said solemnly, and the storm swallowed her.

She felt as a leaf in a high wind, trembling even as she was tossed about on the vagaries of a white so bright it erased everything else; the storm had thrown her clear of that awful reality, and now she rode the vagaries of the Winds Between.

And then it stopped.

Hristiana blinked, the world around her coming onto focus at first bit by bit, and then all at once. She was standing in the middle of the challenge sands, the people of her home standing in the rings of ritual tiers and looking down upon her silently. High overhead, twin suns beat down upon the soft sands and a little ways off an envion stood over the corpse of lis defeated opponent. The envion lisself was as still and silent as the crowd, frozen in shock at the sight before them.

Hristiana took it all in in one swift glance, and knew what she had to do. Raising her makeshift blade, bathed in dried, varicolored blood to the heavens, she let her head fall back and opened her soul to the gods. Warm power flowed through her, illuminating all the shadows and pains upon her soul and judging her deeds, and she surrendered it with a rising joy. She was home and whatever the gods chose, her bones would rest with her people.

The power changed, triumphant approbation lancing through her for a single, shocking instant before retreating. She kept herself standing through force of will, even as her head spun like a top, and her faith was rewarded. Her shoulders grew heavy as her makeshift tabard became a true, flowing battle-standard, the makeshift embroidery becoming work finer than any mortal could hope to accomplish. The hilt of the blade she held slammed against her fingers as it expanded under the gods' power into a halberd of divine beauty.

Inlaid into the shaft itself in silver were the names of all the new saints, and their stories written below in battle-glyphs. At the very base of the blade and continuing along the edge were the words Hristiana gave to her people even as she raised her holy weapon high and they fell on their faces to worship.

"Hex is hope."

————————————————————————————————-

Daveon wasn't sure how he'd managed to be one of the first ones out on the street after the collars had fallen off, but he wasn't about to question it. Literally anything was better than the dingy, wooden holding area of the ring he'd just busted out of and he wasn't going back. The brisk shaking it'd gotten at the hands of a weird earthquake hadn't really done anything to improve the place.

Of course, he didn't really have any idea where he should actually go, either. This part of town was shitty enough that the Big Man in his Big Tower didn't even bother sending patrols. It was the part of town where they sent the corpses - or what was left of them - and where people didn't think too hard about the actual contents of their meal. In short, it was a shithole at the end of the line in and about which nobody cared.

"Hex is hope!"

Daveon turned, startled, to see a guy carrying a banner jogging down the road towards the nicer parts of town. The banner clearly said the same thing the guy just had, and he had a manic gleam in his eye. Now, Daveon wasn't what anyone would call the brightest penny in the pot, but he'd figured out a few days ago that anything that had that particular symbol on it was real and not his imagination. Plus, the guy had actually met his eyes, something none of his hallucinations never did - though neither of them said anything to each other.

Lacking any better direction, and reasonably certain this wasn't an illusion of some sort, he began trotting after the guy. The guy who was actually moving at a pretty decent clip, but Daveon was taller than him and had a longer stride so he managed to keep up with a minimum of effort. As they went, other pilots began joining them; some were already dripping blood onto the pavement, others looked as lost as Daveon felt.

But no matter how many of them gathered up, none of them seemed to want to walk between Daveon and flag guy.

As they went, the guy's shouts began to get louder, and others started joining in.

"Hex is hope!"

"Hex is hope!"

Daveon didn't shout along, mainly because his voice tended more towards the sibilant and his shouts were quiet at best. Not something the crowd appreciated, not something that was really helpful here. But he kept pace with flag guy anyway, whose weird arm gleamed in the lights as they reached the more prosperous parts of town. A big, fancy building gleamed in front of them - much bigger and fancier than anything Daveon had ever encountered before - and flag guy marched determinedly toward it.

Which was, of course, when security came boiling out of the woodwork.

Daveon flinched away from the first rifle volley, but flag guy didn't falter an inch, keeping his strides long and even and his voice as raised as his flag. Other pilots leaped forward into the fray and blood splattered like some kind of weird, organic fireworks. Daveon winced - he wasn't really one much for violence - but hurried forward to take up his self-appointed position behind flag guy.

The other pilots who'd gathered up around them did an excellent job of putting the security forces down ahead of their advance; Daveon only had to use his bullwhip of a tail to discourage approach a few times, but their march through town was otherwise uninterrupted. He couldn't be so sanguine about their direction, though. Ahead of them, rising like a monument to the bloated greed and villainy that had built this place was the Grand Arena. Even a nobody like Daveon knew it was hot there right now, with the Grand Tournament going on, but the guy was heading straight for it. And, directly in their path to it, the enormous hub of Collyseum; Central Security Station 1.

Of course, the closer they got to the rotten heart of this rotten city, the fiercer their opposition became. Daveon was having to fight constantly now, using a combination of tail and talons to keep the security people from attacking flag guy as he walked. All they were doing was walking, but Daveon knew, somewhere deep down in his soul where the weak light of his bonded avatar rested, that the flag couldn't fall or it all would start to unravel like a badly-wound skein.

Of course, Daveon was a pretty small fish as far as pilots went, and despite his best efforts, security bastards started getting through his defense to flag guy himself. Who promptly proved that Daveon was probably superfluous by switching the flag from his right hand to his left and punching a guy's head clean off with his now-clear right hand. Whatever tech was in that metal arm, it had some serious juice going for it.

Daveon shrugged to himself mentally and kept on with his self-appointed task. Sure, flag guy could probably take most of these shitheads by himself, but they only had to get lucky once. Better to minimize the chances something bad would happen then try and deal with it when something did.

An indeterminate amount of time - probably no more than ten minutes, if Daveon was honest with himself - later, and the army of pilots had done a real number on the security forces both inside and around the hub. Some of them had even started going to town on the building itself but Daveon himself wasn't among them, too busy keeping step with flag guy to kick a few walls in.

And then, just as Daveon was turning to face a new threat, flag guy vanished.

Daveon blinked, stunned for half a second before lunging forward and grabbing the slowly-tipping banner as it headed for the ground. It was the work of a moment to right it and hold it like he'd seen flag guy doing, and the work of instinct to raise it high about his head and screech the rallying cry.

"Hex is hope!"

The chant had never stopped, but now it redoubled in strength and Daveon felt a surge of something in his chest that had him raising the banner above his head and marching forward. The rest of the pilots followed his lead, ranging in front of him to keep the flag safe and exact revenge upon those who had trodden them down time after time. Daveon did his best to hold both the banner and his ground, walking forward whenever he could when -

The world faltered and Daveon missed a step.

Four shots rang out, peculiarly loud.

The sky filled with stars.

At least, that's what they looked like to Daveon's limited senses; they arced across the sky high, high above the burning rubble that was beginning to replace the face of Collyseum and out of sight over the edge of the walls. He watched them go, then shook his head before raising the banner once more.

"Hex is hope!"

The cry galvanized the pilots and many raised their fists - or species equivalent - into the air and joined their voices with his.

"Hex is hope!"

Daveon was pretty sure that it was the stars, more than the shouting, that drove the slavers to try and flee en masse, but either way it meant he didn't have to fight them. Which was good, because he was a little short of breath. He couldn't really seem to catch it either, his lungs getting more and more uneven as the hours upon hours of death - of the slavers - and destruction - of the city - wore on. Still, he stubbornly refused to let the banner fall. 

After the dust had settled and the winds picked up, people got to talking. Not to Daveon, of course, even though he held the banner; people rarely paid attention to Daveon, but that was fine. The banner was all that mattered, and they gathered to it. The winds picked up a bit, but he refused to let the banner fly free of his hands.

He refused to release it, even as the sandstorm overtook him.

He didn't let go, even as a brilliant white light erased his senses.

As the world came back into focus, the pain he'd been resolutely ignoring slammed Daveon in the ribs and the end of the banner sank into the soft ground as he leaned on it with a wheeze. Looking around was enough to show him an entirely unfamiliar landscape. It couldn't be his home - the mud was the wrong color, for one, and there was only one sun instead of the usual three, for another - but it didn't seem like a bad place. He was alone on a high cliff overlooking a clear aqua ocean, and the plants beneath his feet were both gentle to the touch and a brilliant green. There were soft noises of small animals on the breeze, and Daveon could feel the gentle peace of the place seeping into his bones. He coughed, the brilliant purple of his blood making an odd sheen on the greenery, and sank to his knees as the last of his strength faded.

A shadow fell across his face and he looked up to the being that had certainly not been there seconds previously. It was silhouetted against the sun, and Daveon couldn't really make out any of the features beneath the hat it wore save for a blazing red eye. Neither spoke for a long moment, but the figure was the first to break the silence.

"Thank you, for what you did back there. For not letting the banner fall. That would have been - sub-optimal."

Daveon's lungs felt like they were on fire and darkness edged his vision, so he merely shrugged in response before waving his hand weakly at the ocean. The figure didn't seem to be disappointed by his lack of speech.

"I'm afraid to say your metaverse is gone. This is the closest you can get, metaversally speaking."

The man hesitated.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

There were a number of things Daveon wanted to say. It's okay, this isn't a bad place to die. Don't worry, it's not your fault. Tell Monday, thank you for the stories. Give the pilots my love. I'll be home soon.

What actually came out of his mouth, gurgling around the blood in his nose and throat, was

"Hex is hope."

The darkness rushed in.

On a cliff overlooking an ocean, there is a pole.

It has a crossbar, to which a few, moldy scraps of fabric still cling, but there's not much left of whatever was there. A flag, one that meant much to many. Not that you can tell anymore; time and tide wait for no one and inexorable entropy's eaten away nearly all that it was.

The pole itself is unremarkable; it is some kind of metal, but not one you'd find in this land. Not that its foreign composition has saved it from the salt in the wind. It's mottled up an down with corrosion, and some pieces have fallen away entirely. One day the ocean will have it all.

It continues with a groan, a rumble, a subsonic vibration that sends local wildlife scattering in fear.

There's something at the base of the pole, where it is shrouded by a veritable riot of small plants. Most of them are flowering, sweet scents lingering in the air and blossoms obscuring the base of the pole.  There's a definite shape to the greenery, but it's not until the vine are moved aside that said shape becomes as clear as the bleached-white bones that are revealed in that fashion.

The whole skeleton rests intact, the vines having grown up and around and through the bones which themselves interlock a surprising amount. A grinning skull with sharp teeth and half a dozen empty eyesockets rests on the ground in front of the flag, just in front of a spinal column that traces a line nearly two meters in length from skull to what are very clearly pelvic bones, with another three meters describing a gentle arc of a tail.

The shoulders and ribs - two of which are broken - rest against the base of the pole, and one bony arm is tied to it by small tendrils of vines seeking the sunlight. The claws, anchored to the bone of the last joint in each finger, shine dully in the sunlight, polished smooth by the salt-laden sea air.

It rises to a roar, a howl, a spray of dust rising towards the heavens.

Indeed, the skeleton in its entirety is remarkably smooth. No scavengers have disturbed this corpse, nor the pole to which it clutches, nor the banner that flies from the pole. Perhaps it is because the skeleton does not belong there, perhaps it was out of respect for its passing.

No matter why, no matter how, time and tide wait for no one.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The silence had been the worst part. The tired, defeated silence that had weighed over the holding areas like a funeral pall - that, that was the part Doris had hated most of all.

She'd had friends, a loving husband, three lovely children, a house in the suburbs kept to the latest standards, the perfect life as prescribed by The Party to which she was a longstanding member. Her days had been filled with the chatter of her neighbors, the piping voices of children, and the pleasant baritone of her husband's voice. Hollywood Star Playhouse and Hopalong Cassidy on the radio in the afternoons, and the Ed Sullivan show in the evenings on the TV set that was the envy of the neighborhood.

She'd been on her way to a Party meeting when she'd been taken, the awful shades swallowing her screams even as they tore her away from everything she knew and loved. That silence had stayed, even when the shades themselves dumped her with some shady-looking men in greasy shirts. Oh she'd made plenty of noise, but the men had ignored her. They'd sold her in the bowels of this horrendous city, and even the negotiations had been a quiet susurrus.

She'd tried making friends with some of the others before her first match, but most had simply looked at her dumbly - with a scattered few who sneered at her attempts or given her deeply sympathetic looks. She hadn't known, then, why they acted so, but had determinedly filled up the silence with the kind of polite small talk that had been drilled into her since she was a little girl.

And then she'd won her first fight.

It hadn't been easy; for all she'd bonded as well as she'd married - and she'd married quite well, thank you very much - Doris wasn't a fighter. Hadn't been a fighter. But she liked living more than she hated fighting, and when the chips went down so did her opponent. She'd walked out of the makeshift arena in a daze, blood drying on her clothes and under her fingernails, and other pilots had shied away - save one, who had simply met her gaze and nodded sadly. His match had been next, and she'd watched him be flayed alive with a kind of dull numbness.

She'd stopped talking to the other pilots after that. Waiting to get pushed into a meat grinder wasn't exactly the time or place to discuss the latest gelatin recipes or what the well-dressed man was wearing these days.

And then, something had......changed.

It started with the symbol. In her little shoe box of a cell, on the corners of walls in the pilot holding areas, somehow woven into the mats of the training area her owner used - overnight the symbol flowered. Hex is Hope. And it had spread, carved into doors and furniture by the nervous, sprayed large across walls and fences by the foolish, stitched into hems and collars by the cautious - now it was everywhere. Hex is Hope.

And then, at some point, the stories had started.

Doris lived for the stories, drinking them in greedily like she had done so long ago to the latest neighborhood gossip, and passing them along to anyone who would listen. Doris had forgotten how much she loved to talk to people who would listen. It was never a sure thing, who was going to be at which tournaments - and how their owners felt about them having universal translators - but Doris managed to gather a tenuous gossip circle that she honestly would have been ashamed to claim if she had been home, but was precious beyond measure in this miserable place.

And so they talked, arena monitors frequently having to prod them to get them out the gate at the last second. Gael, Mortimus, Phanex, Tigure, Ishi, P'f't'gh, Rhombus Trapezoid Circle, Motes of Sunbeam Dust - and Doris at the head of the group, regaling them with the tales she'd heard from others and chattering away at how the pilots had done this or that, and how they could have done things differently, and what they were wearing and all manner of juicy things.

For the first time, in a very long time, Doris was living.

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Hristiana glanced around furtively as she undid a roll of cloth from around her waist.

If her owners found it, she would be very, very dead - but more than that, it was private. It was hers alone, and while it felt a little silly in the face of all that Collyseum represented, she loved it.

Her people were a proud warrior race, and combat - especially single combat - was considered to be the highest form of devotion one could show to the gods who demanded blood, sweat, and tears in exchange for good harvests, easy births, and few diseases. Every year hundreds of young men, women, envions, and orvays fought to the death on the warm sands and watered the thirsty ground with their blood. Hristiana herself had won several bouts during those festivals, and had been chosen for the honor of the Deep Knowledge, to hold and pass on to the next generations, when she had been taken.

It had been something of a shock, when she had been entered into her first tournament, the sheer lack of proper respect and reverence for the proceedings. No gongs were rung, no gods named, honored, or invoked, no songs sung, no declarations were spoken. Instead, a loud buzzer had sounded and two looked-like-men had engaged in tearing each other apart like animals. Hristiana had been horrified, and had tried to start the proper rituals before her own fight was called, that she might not die disrespectful to her gods.

But her opponent hadn't known any more about fighting than he seemed to have knowledge of how fights should be conducted, and Hristiana had been trained to fight since she could hold a training weapon over her head. The fight had been over quickly, and she had gone on to win several more before it finally sank in that these fights were different, and she was a very long way from home.

At first she had tried to go through all the proper rituals before each fight, making small flags with the gods' symbols out of scraps of cloth, saving libation from her meals, and going through as much litany as she could before her name was called and she was put into the arena. Eventually her indulgence in ritual dwindled to just the litanies and finally, as the gods remained silent, nothing at all.

And then something had changed.

Hristiana looked down at the roll of cloth as she laid it out, the symbol at the top embroidered painstakingly to mirror the one burned into walls, written into floors, and made in the shadows cast by the hanging lights. By itself, the symbol did very little beyond break through the miasma of grief and despair that had anchored itself to every wall and strut of this cursed place. But the words that had followed it, the stories writ large into the dry air of this world......There was a power to those.

Hristiana took a deep breath. 

"O Hex Destiny, from whom all hopes flow, look upon this soul and grant peace in this dark time. Elliana, Mistress of Light, shine upon the way forward. Johnny Appleseed, bring softness to the road and guide my heart where it needs to go. Jack Kershaw, lend your strength to my arms, that I may survive this fight..."

Hristiana continued speaking carefully, making sure to get the tenses exactly right even as her fingers traced the symbols embroidered in the fabric. It was more out of respect than fear of retribution, but it was important. The words mattered.

The gods she'd known all her life were left behind; they could neither hear nor avail her at this far-flung locale. But here, now, in this dread place, new exemplars had arisen. New hope had sprung from barren sands. And all around her, voices unused for decades spoke stories of those who fought the darkness and prevailed.

Hex is Hope.

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Daveon wasn't sure the lady was real.

To be fair, seeing that-which-wasn't had been a problem of his long before he'd been dragged to this dry, overheated hellhole, but it was much worse here. He'd almost been killed in his first match here because he couldn't tell which opponent was really gunning for him and which was just a trick of his eyes; it'd been sheer dumb luck that had had him falling on his duff as his real opponent went sailing over his head and the not-there ones grabbed each other to fight it out.

Daveon had never figured out if it was shades of the past he saw, or reflections of the future - or even just hallucinations produced of his own deranged mind. Not that it made any material difference to him right now; as long as the collar was around his neck, he couldn't do anything about what he saw anyway. And anyway most of the time the hallucinations did what everyone else did; sit around and hang their heads as if the weight of the world rested on them.

But the lady was different. For one thing, she didn't have a collar on; collars were cheap and effective, and the preferred method of controlling slaves at the tournaments Daveon competed in. For another, she was going around touching people. Well, putting her hand near them, anyway; they never seemed to react to her presence and she'd sigh and move on.

Daveon couldn't help but stare. She was probably the most fascinating thing that'd ever happened in this sorry excuse for a pilot readying room, and he was bored out of his mind. She wasn't beautiful - not enough eyes for a start, just the one pair - but she was interesting. Of course, interesting got you killed around here but Daveon had reached the end of that rope long ago.

He stiffened as she caught his eyes, and a smile slowly blossomed on her face as she made her way over to him. Planting herself firmly in front of Daveon, she regarded him for several long seconds before holding out her hand. Daveon reached for it cautiously, but wasn't surprised when his hand went right though. Not real, then.

"Monday."

The voice was as unexpected as her appearance had been, and Daveon felt his eyeridges climbing toward the top of his head. Still, it would be rude not to reply and he was still bored.

"Daveon."

She smiled. "Daveon. It's a good name."

"Only one I have."

it was a stupid thing to say, and Daveon kicked himself mentally. Still, Monday didn't seem to mind as she settled next to him on the bench he'd been lounging on. He politely moved his tail out of the way, though she didn’t seem to need the space.

"Would you like to hear a story?"

Her voice was soft, yet even with the crowd cheering away at some poor idiot's demise he heard her perfectly. He looked at the ceiling for a long moment - some enterprising person had managed to crudely carve Hex is Hope up there, huh - before mentally shrugging and turning back to her.

"Sure. Haven't heard anything good in a while."

Too long a while. She seemed to hear what he didn't say and she smiled a soft, nearly sad smile.