the sky is full of smoke, but the fire's all burnt out.
"I have this recurring dream. But I don't think it's a dream, actually."
you're in bed together. it's funny â neither of you needed to sleep. she's made of wires and salvage and you're made of ash and light glued together all wrong. but you liked the facade, on occasion.
"What happens?"
"Well... I meet her again."
you try not to tense up. all you know is scraps and what she's told you, in moments like this, but you've told her before - you can only imagine Kagrenac as someone truly giant. a colossus of a woman, a tower of her own making (even though, as Bthemetz has told you before, she was no taller than 165cm).
"And...?"
she squeezes your hand. stay with me.
"It... um, well it's a bit of a disaster, actually." there's a laugh. there's little humour in it. "You'd call it - what, a right old shitshow? A clusterfuck. A flaming shitheap."
"Wouldn't say 'right old'. But go on. Big fan of shitshows."
"Oh, you're such an ass," and she kicks you in the knee. but it's a game - you can't feel that kind of pain anymore (like, literally. your pain threshold is totally shot. thank you head trauma) and you're not about to let go now, so you hold her loose as she breathes into you, tries to open the cavity where her heart should be but instead there's an empty drum, and takes a deep breath.
"I mean â it's like nothing happened. Nothing at all. Nothing. It's the same damn argument, Kas. Ugh." she slumps back against your chest. "She's still trying to take me down like there's a fully-fledged choir watching her, demolish me, dismantle me, brick by brick, until I'm rubble, and then she'll grind me down into dust, and then put me in a smelter to make a knife out of, because she just doesn't know when to stop." she takes a weary, weary breath. "And you know, it used to - I mean, I was never scared, you know, Rena was... well, Rena until right up at the end and she wasn't my... I guess I saw what she was to others. And I used to find that... disquieting? Overwhelming? Like my chest was going to cave in, which doesn't even make sense, Kas, it's... am I making sense?"
"You're making sense, Bthem. It's alright."
"Okay. Okay.... well. It was... that, but it's... now... now, you won't fucking believe this, but it's just tiring. I'm just tired of it. I've grown bored of the same damn argument. It gets tedious â traitorous, treasonous, treacherous, all those darling ts she just loves to tick off as she tears into me, grinds me up to pieces, again and again, all the while, I'm standing there just thinking... can you please tell me something I don't know? Really, where's the novelty?" there's a laugh, that could be a cry that's been strangled. "And the thing is, the thing that gets me, is that I've tried pushing past that, I've tried... I've tried saying, Kagrena, open your damn ears, put your head to the audioscope, by the hearing-brass, just listen to where the world is! It's still live and kicking! It hasn't ended just because you're gone. Everything has changed and gone and it's still changing and going and.... and she's stuck in that moment. She's stuck there."
you think of Kagrenac, the colossus, entombed in her throne of singing metal. it's a false image.
"And it's... not as if she doesn't know. That's the thing. She's..."
she points to where there's a space.
where she told you, once, how the scholar-priests, sapiarchs, who thought their secrets the domain of their selected few, decided to carve a false god out of a woman's body. where the beat comes from.
you still struggled to get your head around that.
"She knows what year it is. She knows who's a candidate for the contested spot of High King and who's a puppet for the Empire. She knows... the Grandmaster of the Tong, she knows her name. She knows all of this." a deep breath. "And it does not matter to her in the slightest. Insignificant, in comparison. It pales." Her fingers curl slightly. "To what? To our arguments? To our impassioned debates over a dead machine. It's all dust, Kas. Dead pages. And even what's left of her, still caught up in the beat, it's... I'm talking to a relic. She's stuck. And she can't move on."
and she's rattling. closest she can get to the shakes, in this body.
"Bthem," you say, steady.
"I'm scared for her. Does that make any sense? Does that make any sense at all?"
you don't think you know the answer to that question. you never knew this woman. putting aside - as you've learnt to do with everything Bthem - all those nasty children's tales you were fed about the dwemer, faithless heretics who spun their own demise, you've pieced her together through wistful stories about her demolishing her opponents that Bthemetz finds funny for reasons lost in time and then late night crying fits Bthem refused to talk about for the first ten, twenty years. you know it can't be the whole picture. you know Bthem loved her once, loved her utterly. even if you can't fathom how.
"It sounds complicated."
"It... yeah, it is. I'm really worried."
you have to word the next question carefully.
"You think something's bad going to happen there... wherever she is?"
"That she's at the root of? No. She's too gone for that." something breaks in her voice. "But... Kas, she's trapped there."
you feel something in you tighten.
"She's trapped there of her own volition," you say evenly.
"She was backed into a corner," said Bthemetz. "You know this."
you did know this. you have put to memory every bitter detail of the account she gave of the most important event in Morrowind's history. you remember how much it hurt for her to tell.
"I know. But then she chose not to move on. She was pushed, sure. But you say she's still there, still stuck, still lashing out. But she doesn't have to be like that, you know?"
"Kasmei, she lost everything."
"So did you."
you moved on, you don't say. you lost thousands of years. twice. and you still find reasons to live.
"For what it's worth," you add. "I don't wish her eternal torment. Nobody deserves that. I just..." you scratch your head. "This is hurting you, you realise that, yeah?"
"Of course I do."
"So, forgive me, but I find it hard to sympathise with the person who's causing you hurt."
she's quiet, for a moment. you suspect she doesn't agree - that she brought this on herself, that this was deserved, somehow, and would bristle, if you pushed the point further - but you've given her something to consider.
and you almost - you almost draw her in tighter than you should. you want to hold her tight to her chese even though her heat tank is still half-functioning and she's hot and cold in all the wrong places.
if you were a normal person, you'd have scalded. if you were a normal person, it'd have left a mark.
but you remember, at the last moment, that she needs space to breathe.
"Hey, Kas?" she says, after a moment. "I'm not a complete relic yet, am I?"
"No," you say, without hesitation. "You're still kicking, aren't you?"
"I guess, yeah." her voice isn't as heavy. "I'm still kicking."
I love you, you'll tell her later, after you've brewed a pot of her favourite tea. you'll nip out, when the sun's still orange and she's still trying to catch some not-actually-necessary sleep, and pick the dark stemmed leaves you know she likes, from the highest point of the mountain where the air thins, gets herself giddy over. it takes a lot out of you to visit her in person these days - you feel layers of you shedding every time you have to phase somewhere, like the world wants to yoink you back to the void like a naughty child. stay here says the universe. no, you shout back. you suspect there might come a day where you can't do this, anymore. where you'll actually be dead. wouldn't that be funny, you've told Bthem, and she always tells you to shut your trap, because it's better that you're here. it's better, so you'll keep on struggling. you'll keep on swimming, until they tear you down.
"Good," you say to her. "It's a good thing, you're still here. A really good thing."
