The Knights of Azorea wrote:~ The Dance ~
- Cycle 60 -
Amidst the desert sands, the dance was a true delight. Synthbone limbs gleamed with the light of a baking, equatorial sun, and clacked gently as the dancers met. Hundreds moved in the shimmering web of it, taking so dizzying an array of forms as to resemble the true mirages with which the desert surrounded them. One pair of dancers swirled with greater intensity than most, their sensors closed to all but the gentle hum of background radiation and the swishing of synthbone on sand. As they waltzed together like droplets upon glass, each stirred with memories.
The humanoid, Hundredth Harper, was of the second iteration, and could recall little of the gestalt memory. To them, the world began in the dark, but for flashes of colour beyond context from half-touched memory banks not their own. Its counterpart was serpentine - its frame of interlocking synthbone plates chattering with rythmn as it span and twirled. The Locus, Fifth Dancer, was considerably more ancient. In its core a web of nerves and flesh still dwelt, and at its centre something like a heart still beat. It was slow, endlessly slow - metabolic processes trailing off over millenia to the barest, gentlest essentials as the synthetics took over more and more. More, though, Fifth Dancer still had some mind-in-flesh. A memory all his own still turned in the midst of his frame, and it knew that he had not always been as he was.
He could remember flesh, first, and music. He remembered the warbling of true voices, the soaring force of lights upon a performer, the eyes of millions fixed upon him. Green, snake-slit eyes stared in his mind still, though he had long forgotten their face, their name, though not their love. He knew they had sung to him, and with him, but more... the fog was too great. As flesh withered away, the machine slipped in further and further. Inexorably, he had leant more on it, and more, until his memories began to blend and split. He supposed himself lucky, at least, to remember such eyes, though he envied the second iteration, that could forget the dark. That had not done as he had done, in those black halls. Had not eaten as he had. The dance rolled on, as towers rose in the desert sun.
M - 0
Utter Chaos
Eighteenth watched helplessly has his vessel drifted towards the chaotic whirlpool of cosmic dust. The thrusters were firing full power on retrograde, but their speed was far too much, having only spotted the danger upon arrival.
Traversing through the hurricane of dust, asteroids and comets, with only the most elementary shielding was nerve-wrecking. Damage reports were flowing in at an alarming rate, yet, through an incredible stroke of luck, they stumbled upon an "eye of the storm".
Here. Nothing was moving, not relative to one another. A harmony, a point of balance. Here they could dodge any oncoming threats.
However, the eye was not stationary. It shifted orbits at a slow pace, allowing for the system to be throughly scanned.
Three massive objects were identified. Planets perhaps, or something else. They could not be classified.
