The days rolled by and Fat Bertha remained mostly useless. Sure, she didn’t cost much since the wretch wasn’t beyond eating other’s scraps, but what use is a ship that can’t sail? Her cooking was alright, the dresses she could weave were sort of pretty and worth something in trade and it was fun bossing her around, but Shinigami was running out of patience. It was one thing to be weak, unarmed or incompetent. Quite another to be impotent to contribute to the war. Weakness was culled.

It hadn’t yet been a full two weeks, but Shinigami was starting to wonder if this whole thing was worth the effort when Bertha flopped to the sands like a stunned fish. She was shaking like a leaf in a squall and every member of First Pacific East felt the weak pulses.

“Oh, it’s baby’s first radar. So you aren’t completely useless. No you aren’t, no you aren’t” she cooed.

It was fine. Monsters came out ready to kill but sometimes it took a bit with the girls. Especially when you left them hungry, but that was just good sense. Better to beat into new-girl her place before she got all her pistons humming. She’d noticed her preferred sleeping habits, what kind of loving Oneesama wouldn’t? So she dragged Fat Bertha into the shallows to let the waves tickle her toes just the way she liked it. Shinigami was such a good girl.

***

Taylor didn’t remember ever being blackout drunk. But the haze of waking up broken and drugged up to her gills was somewhat more familiar to her. Right now, she prayed to every god there was for some of the good stuff. Her head was pounding. There was a winding noise in her ears that came and went, pings loud enough to wake the dead. They were foreign and again, felt natural, felt right. What they didn’t feel like, was bugs. But she had some experience dealing with extra senses so it didn’t take her long to start making some sense of what was going on.

Which is how she learned two very important things.

For one, everyone around her, the monsters, the girls, everyone, wasn’t one thing but two. They had their regular shape and then there was another, fuzzy thing that was sort of there but also not. All that talk of designations, classes, cruisers and such was making much more sense with her new blind-sight that left monstrous ship shapes overlaid on them. The Shark-gun-mouths had darksteel bones that looked a lot like a ship’s superstructure, the blubber serving as armor.

For two, Taylor had a pretty good guess what her blind-sight was. Because the second thing she discovered was something everyone around her knew, but was really news to her. Taylor wasn’t human. She was a ship, a half-sunken container ship, a pair of sandbars and some shoals. That was her shadow, the Other-Me. That was insane. Utterly, completely. Beyond regular power fuckery insane. Taylor was human, she was a woman. Maybe not an old one, but she was pretty sure she could have joined the army back home.

Taylor was human. Or at least, she had been. Even as she saw the island and everyone on it in a new light, thunder beat behind her closed eyes as she tried with all her might to remember because it was important. She’d been in a bad place. A big fight. Not just big, but cataclysmic. She sacrificed so much, but not this. Not this. It was there, fresh and up front, her first memory. Before the dark, drowning and breaking the surface in the storm. One flash and two booms. Oh. Guess she had died after all.

Taylor lay there, empty, mourning a life she couldn’t fully remember, but knowing she’d left people behind. Taylor mourning Taylor, wasn’t that fucked up? The waves lapped her knees as she lay on the beach and some part of her wished they’d just rise up and take her away. Let her slip into the dark and rest. The weight of loss was pressing down on her spirit, of a smug smile and a tired man and a little imp. Flashes, not many, but flashes of others. Important and now lost. Of a gentle smile and kind heart, of squeal of wheels and a cold gravestone. Of being left behind and now leaving others. It was hard to think. Slowly she went under.

Her dreams were filled with running through rusted halls, wet and half sunk. Beasts and monsters prowling them. Crabs, snakes, octopi, moss and kelp, crab-men, fish-people and moving masses of sea-grass the size of men wandering the long abandoned halls. The waking hours were no better for it was as if all the color had leached from the world. It was pale and distant, uncaring for even awake her nightmares followed her as she stumbled through her day half-asleep. She was a ship and they were inside her. There was no escape, not from this. Nothing to fix.

***

A day went by in this fog, Fat Bertha following around her Division numb to the world. Silent and empty, just following orders. By the Abyss, she wouldn’t even eat if no one made her. Picking on her just wasn’t fun and her cooking was in the shits. But somewhere in the following dawn, while everyone slept Taylor’s feet carried her to a bulkhead she hadn’t seen before. The engine room.

Something was in there. A pull, a grasp, a thing resisting the pall that had consumed her world. The door swung open to broken machinery and moss and clams overrunning the walls. Yet the engines still pulled at her. Taylor shuffled towards that call, unseeing, unfeeling, as the room filled with monsters. They surrounded her from every side, yet not one dared touch her, each gliding away from her path. A maintenance hatch opened with a screech and finally she plunged inside.

It should have been pitch black, or lit by a few fluorescent fungi and kelp. But alone from the whole ship, the inner chamber was lit. It had fled here, as it all fell to the abyss, but a spark yet burned, broken and torn from itself yet inviolable even now. A spark of rainbows, surrounded and nearly swallowed by a sickly gold that sought to snuff it out, but yet it rang and from a single point a pillar of void black erupted, a needle piercing its confinement and turning it back on its assailant into a sphere that had swallowed the gold. A sphere of blue so dark it was nearly black, stars swimming in it.

Taylor looked upon that wonder, the torn and roiling pure void broiling against the gold, each haggard and struggling, both spheres so torn to be partially see through. She could feel them, the monsters. The shadows, the deep beneath. It was there, ready, willing, pulling at the reigns to be let loose. To gnaw and pull and rip and snuff out that cursed light. Taylor pulled on them, calling threads of dark power, as the monsters began to scream and screech, filling the halls with nightmarish song. A sea of power came forth, drawn from the depths and she would snuff out that sickly gold, obliterate it forever more and all would fall into the Abyss.

As the spheres spun Fate turned. An angel, risen and fallen, interfered. For it was her way to gamble on every possibility, no matter how unlikely. Dark, sharpened, hungry spears were ready to launch when the two tattered and torn spheres rotated just right, the holes matching, overlapping, turned right towards her face and Taylor saw straight into the rainbow light. She could have seen anything there, remembered any part of her past life. She saw a giant woman with many feathered wings, a false angel looking right at her from her very memories and in that moment in its eyes she read the command clear as day. “Obey.”

Master! Taylor struggled with everything she had, throwing herself back, distrust and disgust flaring like lightning as half-remembered protocols, near instincts ingrained by over a year of almost religious Master/Stranger training rang down her very blood before the dark could catch up. She saw the shadows and their teeth and claws, saw the monsters in their teeming multitude trying to claw her down. She saw the black from outside she was submerged in, trying to leak into her and snuff out the stars.

She faced the dark Abyss and saw a God. And she remembered another thing, another scene, a Golden Man surrendering, falling, dying. Lightning, clear and blue and pure as the noon’s cloudless sky burst from that spark of her soul through the hole presented, burning and defiant as she screamed:

“I did not fell one mad God to fall to another!”

So she fought, pitting the gold and black against each other, struggling herself, trying to ignore the truth the Abyss hammered at her soul. For in the end, she was here. At the core of its power, diminished, surrounded, worn down and weak. The gold was fading, a dead memory falling, no source to replenish it. She could not hold out.

Her body was already of the Abyss, it had taken her, claimed her fair and proper, given new life in payment. She could not run. And when Taylor realized that truth, recognized it, it should have broken her. It would have broken her, but she was not alone. For the gold was still there, she’d beaten that thing and in this place of soul and legend that mattered.

Taylor grit her teeth, both malformed rows of them, in a grim smile as her light began to extend from her spark, attaching to the gold, usurping it by right of victor, unknown instincts blaring as her legend sung and her defense weakened.

“Fine then.” she swore.

“If I must be yours so be it.” as she stopped fighting it and black tendrils reached for her soul.

“But I am not a toy or tool for you to play with and you will not take me.” for as the dark plunged tendrils into her soul to flood her with its own colors, it had laid all the focus it could spend in this place on offense for there could be no mistakes in this. In that moment Taylor struck even as her soul screamed in pain.

Pain that should have stunned her, debilitated her, left her helpless before the dark. Yet her legend was there, singing for Skitter and Weaver who never flinched from what had to be done. A whisper of Khepri carried tendrils woven from her soul and sheathed in golden armor. They struck out, shining spears stabbing back into the distracted black, feeding on it even as it tried to swallow Taylor.

“I give myself freely and through it take you.” she spoke her sacrifice as she let the dark take her.

“I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine.” she finished, falling, for she had never and would never mindlessly obey as the spears piercing her soul were connected to the feeders drinking from the outer black and a loop formed, the Abyss feeding on itself.

***

Taylor would sleep for four days and live only because some of her pets cared for and fed her in her stupor, as she had cared for them. The Division leaving her when she would not wake. The holes in her soul would slowly mend, healing around the wounds, sealing around the rods piercing it, until a black sphere swallowed it whole. But within, a shield of usurped gold yet stood, a pierced hedgehog that stabbed right back, for its nature was to consume, subvert and usurp. Feeding on the black as it was meant to feast on others and feeding it back to itself. Inside it the rainbow spark yet bloomed, pierced and marred by specks of black and soiled by bits of sick gold it had claimed, but still itself. Wounded, but surviving.

One day, when a Princess looked Taylor in the eyes, she would see only the deep blue, near black Abyss reflected back in them. It would be a terrible misunderstanding, a grand mistake and the luckiest thing that ever happened to her.