Troll relationships depend on the scale of caste division. Some may think Mindfang's blood far too inferior to her Imperious Condescension, but a girl can dream. She knows, has always known, that the dark cores of caliginous passion run deep beneath the roots of her culture. Especially for lesbians. She also knows that, in the end, the distance of division brings bloodpushers closer together, tying them with clove-hitch knots to shared strings of mutual attachment. She's not afraid.
Be that as it may, she's chained to the bridge of an Imperial dreadnought, staring into the penetrating fuschia-rimmed eyes of a certain superior, lost in thought and trying to internally map the tangles of her graying mane. The End of Empires Swimming is beautiful. Well-manicured, smells like money, looks to be several (thousand) sweeps older than her chained enemy. Her eyes crinkle in the corners as they follow her, and her lips seem to frown, even when they aren’t.
Mindfang knows she's burning inside. They both are. Have to be. The tenebrific drives of a battle-wearied troll are a complex thing, but a pirate queen has had centuries to contemplate them. She knows them like she knows the tides beneath her flagship's bow or the blood between her fingers. Knew them, before she was dragged here.
She doesn't know a thing now. She thinks that her Goddess' drones gave her a concussion dragging her around, and all that's still sticking to her thinkpan is the desire bubbling in her anguish bladder and the dull throb of her bruises. She remembers fighting, and bleeding, and watching the shitblood- what was his name?- finally stop twitching once one of the drones caved his skull in. She doesn't want to remember anything. She decided twenty minutes ago that, if this is going to be the end of her grand campaign, if the Sovereign of the Planetoid Tides was finally going to do her in, she was going to feel every fleeting feeling of the stiletto carving her chest open.
If she's really lost her mojo, and her blind black feelings are really going to finish her, she's going to enjoy it.
She's reread her own journal entry so many times by now she knows it by heart.
So now we finally see her. Rufioh 8arely even 8others to admire the Condesce, but as she stalks down the 8ridge from her craft I can't help drinking her presence in. She's so much 8etter. 8etter than me, 8etter than Rufioh, 8etter than that idiot with the candy sludge, even 8etter than His Tyranny was, 8leeding out on the court8lock floor. Her teeth look like an armory. She's ringed herself with gold, pure enough that I can tell the moment I see it and pro8a8ly worth more than everything I've ever looted, and I suck in my 8reath when she steps into the light and it glints. There she is. Out in the sun, unharmed like the sky is too scared to hurt her, with the gold shining around her. Rufioh doesn't say a word. Maybe his horns are weighing his head down too heavily for his mouth to open. I don't understand how anyone, any measly peon that could ever skulk under the moon, could find it in their pusher not to respond to Her. 8nd yet. There's nothing to say. Her perfection is such that it hurts. It 8urns, as though her rings and 8ands were reflecting the sun into our little hideout. She turns, and she doesn't see us, 8ut her eyes drift over the viewport and I feel myself tense. I don't know if it's need or fear.
I h8 her perfection. It's impossi8le not to. I remember Dualscar and now, with her in front of me, I don't think I ever h8ed him. I don't think I ever loved the Expatri8 or Rufioh, or any man either, now. It would 8e 8lasphemous to ever feel anything a8out anyone else. I'm confused. It's a complex feeling like none I've ever felt before. I don't know if I h8 her 8ecause she's so, so o8viously 8etter, or 8ecause she's so o8viously everything that there ever was, and h8 just comes with that a8solutism of existence.
Part of me tells me to kill her now. Just 8reak out the door and charge. May8e she'd kill me, or find me entertaining and take some mercy. May8e she'd make a slave. It wouldn't pain me, to 8e that. For her.
Mindfang thinks, in some deep, true corner of her psyche, that was the best moment of her life, seeing her for the first time. Everything before it feels fake now. Everything after it has been too tense. The whole affair- the last days of the rebellion, watching her ward die, burying her last few chests, her capture and the long trip through the bowels of the ship- just feels like buildup. Maybe that's all it ever was. She's had the thought a few times, on the way here. Swinging or slouching between the drones' glinting fists, it's seemed like the logical explanation for everything she's done, like rain fattening a river the minute you finish building shitty little newspaper boats. Ships and loot and loves and wars aren't worth much, really, when push comes to shove, but this, the coming moment where Everything finally ends her little life, feels like it'll give all of it a real meaning.
Now here she is. Everything. Right there, in the flesh. She turns around to look out over the Alternian sunrise. Mindfang basks in the sensation of finally getting to get close. She can finally really, truly, see her prize. Her Imperial Condescension's hair, not yet as long as it will be, and maybe shorter than Mindfang's, but still long enough to hide her back and shoulders from the watching privateer, is whipping around her in the headwinds, batting its tangled mass against muscles that each look strong enough to kill with a little flick. Spinneret feels herself falling in love with every motion. It's intense enough that even things near the Empress seem to inherit a kind of greatness she's never seen before, as though some kind of radiant sun god was standing there and they were being charged with divine grave simply by being in her presence. They are. To Mindfang, they are. No man could ever understand. Her horns are cutting the sky, ripping it like a sea parting to let her through, and the idea that her fleeing ghost might pass through that causeway in the clouds on its way to wherever it'll go is the greatest dream Mindfang has ever had. She thinks those horns are the greatest thing in the entire, fuschia-flagged galaxy, just for a moment, and then the Condesce scratches at a knot in her hair and the greatest pirate existence ever has or will seen feels her heart breaking as it tries to discern whether her slaughter-built hands, the gold bands accompanying them, or
The sun on Alternia rises fast. It fucking incinerates Mindfang. Lesbians lose again.