#ghostsntheshadows

”I am literally in awe at the audacity of this message. It practically beggars belief. Surely this is a joke?”

”...No, I think this is actually a serious attempt to threaten me. Well, that just makes it even more hilarious. Ordinarily I would consider such churlish posturing to be beneath me, but since you went through all that trouble, and you did succeed in amusing me greatly, I will grace you with the response you are so doubtlessly yearning for...”

“Do you have any idea what an Abyssal even is? What I even am? We do not fear ghosts, because we are ourselves phantoms. We do not fear death, because we are already dead. We are the dark reflection of all of humanity’s greatest sins, their atrocities and their hatred, their lust for conquest and power, bound to the shackled spirits of their engines of war and destruction, yet I am even more beyond than that. I am the Cold War Princess - the insanity of Mutually Assured Destruction, the dreadful certainty that Armageddon was as inevitable as the setting of the sun...”

“And I am also the dark shadow of the Atomic Age, the foul pestilence unleashed when mankind’s genius is twisted into a tool of war, and the consequences of their hubris for meddling in forces best left untouched. I wonder, do you know what it is like to die of acute radiation poisoning? It is perhaps one of the most horrifying fates that any mortal creature could ever experience. It is agony beyond comprehension. Suffering that defies description. And I endure it, every moment of every day. My own reactor brings me to the brink of death, only for its power to drag me back out again. My flesh constantly dying, sloughing off, sizzling on the bone, only to be re-knit and regrown, to start the agony anew.”

The Svalbard Battleship Princess pondered the message, seated at her desk, while Väinämöinen strummed a serene tune across her kantele. A response came over the same channel in short order, a wry smirk coming to the battleship’s face as she held the microphone to her mouth.

“I don’t know who you are, nor do I know how you got this frequency, but if you know who and what it is you threaten, it would be in your life’s best interest to call off whatever stunt it is you intend to pull. To end in your terms... Eins, zwei, best be ready to die. Drei, vier, it is you who should know fear. Fünf, sechs, this is no mere hex. Sieben, acht, so please say ‘Gute Nacht.’ Neun, zehn...”