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Halfway done! [Angels Zodiac]
1. Labyrinth
Somewhere in the area of sky dominated by Ophiuchus, there is a rock. It has the strange property of being fixed in Earth’s sky. Astronomers haven’t discovered it, which is lucky, because they’d have kittens.
In this rock, there is a labyrinth. It looks like a straight line from the entrance. When you walk in, you’re in an eleven-dimensional maze.
There are twelve mazes. You can solve them if you have the keys. If you don’t, you stay in the maze.
If you get through, you’ll wake an angel. It’s up to you whether that’s a good thing or not.
2. Staff
Kaos is fighting something with copper blood and a temper. When she kicks, it flows away. Her magic doesn’t dent it. She’s not scared, yet.
It sends her sprawling and charges. Her foot gets stuck. Now she’s scared.
She closes her eyes, prays, and strikes straight up. There’s a sharp pain in her palm. Then the thing falls over, dead.
She pulls the staff out of the body and gives it a spin. Her glyph marks it in sapphire. It is perfect, and very familiar.
Capricorn says, later, that he remembers when she first made it. He won’t say how.
3. Memory
Leoran’s memory is paper, vellum, ink and clay. It stretches out in an endless circle, volume upon volume on shelf upon shelf in the centre of his castle. Given time, one can walk from one end of it to the other, the development of the Angel Capricorn spelled out in forty-nine scripts (one to a life) from cuneiform to hanzi to Roman.
He writes every day, putting down every event – no matter how small – in meticulous copperplate handwriting, so he can’t forget.
Because script never changes, though memories do, he reads aloud every day in languages his mouth never learned.
4. Paint
Of course Kaos doesn’t care what her house looks like. It’s new and that’s all that matters. She doesn’t spend much time in it anyway.
She takes care of it, but only to the extent of keeping the floors clean and the windows transparent. She doesn’t do it because she wants to. Given her choice, she’d live outdoors.
She doesn’t notice what colour the walls are - they’re not alive, so they don’t register in her vision. She has no time for things that don’t change.
Every time Wild comes over, the house is painted a different shade of green.
5. Friends
Kaos and Wild don’t talk much; neither of them feels the need. Wild understands Kaos; she knows what it is to be loyal. Kaos understands Wild; she knows what it’s like to be alone.
They’re both quiet, and when they’re on Earth they’re the ones who get stared at longest. Wild’s eyes and Kaos’s scars mark them in a way even the wings don’t.
Wild wouldn’t call them friends because Kaos is a pack mate, and Kaos wouldn’t because Wild is an angel. Both of these are more than friends, or family, even. They’re defenders, confidants, allies – and outsiders, together.
6. Shooting star
Somewhere above the sky, where gravity is negligible and air is rarified, there is a woman who flies.
She doesn’t ever look down at Earth, because she spent too long there to want to see it again. She looks away, up to the stars and the endless black of space, and thinks of diamonds and how inadequate metaphor is.
She’s too old to be idealistic, she’s seen too much to be an optimist, but from here she can believe that the heavens – the celestial spheres – are and will be perfect, now and forever.
Behind her, her black wings trail fire.
7. Encore
One of the rules of magic is that you never perform the same trick twice. That doesn’t extend to offensive magic – just the cards-and-doves type – but Amazon lives by it anyway. It’s more fun.
Of course, a weather mage never really has to worry about effects being repeated. She’s cast the same rain-summoning spell a million times, and gotten a million different clouds.
Her spells are tied to her voice, so she has a list of silly weather rhymes: nothing like “O feathered clouds that hang up high, let lightning hit this weird thing’s eye” to lighten up a fight.
8. Fireworks
Explosions are all well and good, but Tempest never really cared about the Fourth of July. Independence Day? So what? He never asked for independence; what he’s after is freedom.
And seriously, it’s not like he cares about government. No one would, if they’d just figure out what it is, which is perfidious. Humans are so memetic. Give one the idea of ‘law’ and they all pick it up.
That was before his perceptions became angelic; he understands the cultural aspect. He still doesn’t get the big deal about the titular quality. On the other hand, the fireworks are cool.
9. Selfish
Fury has been accused of being selfish. She cops to it. So what? She gets her job done, and what’s in her best interest is in everyone else’s, too.
However, it’s not helping the resistance.
If she were good with words, she’d sit down and write an essay on the difference between selfishness and self-centeredness, and why her sister has too much of the latter. Not being Capricorn, she’s not up for it. Anyway, it wouldn’t help much – everything she does these days is filtered through ‘stars and sparks, what a bitch’. Just once she’d like to be listened to.
10. Date
Leoran insists on taking her to a restaurant. She forgets which language she should order in, a child screams at her scars, and she doesn’t understand anyway – she doesn’t eat.
Next is a cinema. The figures look like humans but without auras, and an explosion makes her panic before she realizes it wasn’t real.
A week later he tries a museum. The main attraction is circa 3 000 BC and she can’t get near it without flinching.
When he asks her to a ballet, she grabs his collar and kisses him. It’s a hell of a lot easier her way.
11. Coin
Toss a coin a hundred times, and it’ll come up tails about fifty, or so say the laws of chance.
If Cosmos flips, it’ll come up fifty exactly.
If Kaos flips, the thing is just as likely to burst into a cloud of copper molecules.
If Destiny flips, it’ll come up whatever he calls it as.
If Fury flips, the odds will skew eighty-twenty in either direction.
If Tempest flips, it’ll look right, but every sequence of a hundred flips will be identical.
If Infinity flips, every toss will have the same result.
They don’t rely on coin tosses much.
Somewhere in the area of sky dominated by Ophiuchus, there is a rock. It has the strange property of being fixed in Earth’s sky. Astronomers haven’t discovered it, which is lucky, because they’d have kittens.
In this rock, there is a labyrinth. It looks like a straight line from the entrance. When you walk in, you’re in an eleven-dimensional maze.
There are twelve mazes. You can solve them if you have the keys. If you don’t, you stay in the maze.
If you get through, you’ll wake an angel. It’s up to you whether that’s a good thing or not.
2. Staff
Kaos is fighting something with copper blood and a temper. When she kicks, it flows away. Her magic doesn’t dent it. She’s not scared, yet.
It sends her sprawling and charges. Her foot gets stuck. Now she’s scared.
She closes her eyes, prays, and strikes straight up. There’s a sharp pain in her palm. Then the thing falls over, dead.
She pulls the staff out of the body and gives it a spin. Her glyph marks it in sapphire. It is perfect, and very familiar.
Capricorn says, later, that he remembers when she first made it. He won’t say how.
3. Memory
Leoran’s memory is paper, vellum, ink and clay. It stretches out in an endless circle, volume upon volume on shelf upon shelf in the centre of his castle. Given time, one can walk from one end of it to the other, the development of the Angel Capricorn spelled out in forty-nine scripts (one to a life) from cuneiform to hanzi to Roman.
He writes every day, putting down every event – no matter how small – in meticulous copperplate handwriting, so he can’t forget.
Because script never changes, though memories do, he reads aloud every day in languages his mouth never learned.
4. Paint
Of course Kaos doesn’t care what her house looks like. It’s new and that’s all that matters. She doesn’t spend much time in it anyway.
She takes care of it, but only to the extent of keeping the floors clean and the windows transparent. She doesn’t do it because she wants to. Given her choice, she’d live outdoors.
She doesn’t notice what colour the walls are - they’re not alive, so they don’t register in her vision. She has no time for things that don’t change.
Every time Wild comes over, the house is painted a different shade of green.
5. Friends
Kaos and Wild don’t talk much; neither of them feels the need. Wild understands Kaos; she knows what it is to be loyal. Kaos understands Wild; she knows what it’s like to be alone.
They’re both quiet, and when they’re on Earth they’re the ones who get stared at longest. Wild’s eyes and Kaos’s scars mark them in a way even the wings don’t.
Wild wouldn’t call them friends because Kaos is a pack mate, and Kaos wouldn’t because Wild is an angel. Both of these are more than friends, or family, even. They’re defenders, confidants, allies – and outsiders, together.
6. Shooting star
Somewhere above the sky, where gravity is negligible and air is rarified, there is a woman who flies.
She doesn’t ever look down at Earth, because she spent too long there to want to see it again. She looks away, up to the stars and the endless black of space, and thinks of diamonds and how inadequate metaphor is.
She’s too old to be idealistic, she’s seen too much to be an optimist, but from here she can believe that the heavens – the celestial spheres – are and will be perfect, now and forever.
Behind her, her black wings trail fire.
7. Encore
One of the rules of magic is that you never perform the same trick twice. That doesn’t extend to offensive magic – just the cards-and-doves type – but Amazon lives by it anyway. It’s more fun.
Of course, a weather mage never really has to worry about effects being repeated. She’s cast the same rain-summoning spell a million times, and gotten a million different clouds.
Her spells are tied to her voice, so she has a list of silly weather rhymes: nothing like “O feathered clouds that hang up high, let lightning hit this weird thing’s eye” to lighten up a fight.
8. Fireworks
Explosions are all well and good, but Tempest never really cared about the Fourth of July. Independence Day? So what? He never asked for independence; what he’s after is freedom.
And seriously, it’s not like he cares about government. No one would, if they’d just figure out what it is, which is perfidious. Humans are so memetic. Give one the idea of ‘law’ and they all pick it up.
That was before his perceptions became angelic; he understands the cultural aspect. He still doesn’t get the big deal about the titular quality. On the other hand, the fireworks are cool.
9. Selfish
Fury has been accused of being selfish. She cops to it. So what? She gets her job done, and what’s in her best interest is in everyone else’s, too.
However, it’s not helping the resistance.
If she were good with words, she’d sit down and write an essay on the difference between selfishness and self-centeredness, and why her sister has too much of the latter. Not being Capricorn, she’s not up for it. Anyway, it wouldn’t help much – everything she does these days is filtered through ‘stars and sparks, what a bitch’. Just once she’d like to be listened to.
10. Date
Leoran insists on taking her to a restaurant. She forgets which language she should order in, a child screams at her scars, and she doesn’t understand anyway – she doesn’t eat.
Next is a cinema. The figures look like humans but without auras, and an explosion makes her panic before she realizes it wasn’t real.
A week later he tries a museum. The main attraction is circa 3 000 BC and she can’t get near it without flinching.
When he asks her to a ballet, she grabs his collar and kisses him. It’s a hell of a lot easier her way.
11. Coin
Toss a coin a hundred times, and it’ll come up tails about fifty, or so say the laws of chance.
If Cosmos flips, it’ll come up fifty exactly.
If Kaos flips, the thing is just as likely to burst into a cloud of copper molecules.
If Destiny flips, it’ll come up whatever he calls it as.
If Fury flips, the odds will skew eighty-twenty in either direction.
If Tempest flips, it’ll look right, but every sequence of a hundred flips will be identical.
If Infinity flips, every toss will have the same result.
They don’t rely on coin tosses much.