she's the Mallows

Meteion is certainly a little marvel, is she not? An "entelechy," as Hermes called her -- a creature whose very nature is to connect to some specific energy frequency with fantastic sensitivity and precision, and then translate the information stored there. She is to this "dynamis" what the Echo seems to be to aether; if Krile's gift is to sense thoughts and feelings through said aether, and it is indeed an immutable property of the soul she has inherited, then it stands to reason that its current Unsundered owner would be possessed of an ability not too dissimilar from Meteion's, and yet. Unlike an Ancient's soul, this is a feature that can be created at will and then replicated. The capacity to connect to anyone and anything packaged in the shape of a little girl, arranged into a tidy blueprint, to be produced at any scale? A very finely crafted instrument indeed. Based on Hermes' artful dodging, she does not need a soul to accomplish this as the Echo does. No, he did not even see the need to equip her with irrelevant functions, like a gustatory system, or digestion. To have her own experiences -- her own thoughts, her own feelings -- would add noise to the data, would it not? And make no mistake: attuned to the value of life as he is, Hermes did not make this little creature for any reason but a purpose.

And what a purpose it is. For all his frustration with his own people, what he has accomplished here is inextricable from them: in this beautiful world where conflict is the domain of beastly, lesser life, where such bleak ideas as war and famine and plague are thought exercises meant for the halls of rhetoric, Hermes would not have even begun to imagine the universe as an inherently ugly and random place. He would not have had the benefit of firsthand accounts of those from distant stars who have traveled that long, cold black; he could not have met Midgardsormr or Omega and seen the cost of that journey, the price of that war. It has not happened yet. No -- like any pitiable mortal, his only point of reference is the immediate. Mortality is an injustice inflicted on those with less power by those with more. Hunger as a driver of violence among mankind is a fiction; abundance is a fact. The creation of Meteion is an act of relentless optimism by a man attempting to expand his understanding of the universe, who does not believe that the truth could be any worse than the truth of the world right here, right now. How terrible could it possibly be?

I asked Meteion just how many sisters she had out there traveling the Sea of Stars, wandering that lonely nothing between those brief islands of life, with no comfort afforded them save what they can taste secondhand.