Divine War: The Lancasterian Chronicles

The intimate illumination of the night sky enters from the indented ceiling rift. Pebbles peel away and clatter against the floor. Nadjela takes off her necklace and lifts it in one hand. The gem dangling from the beads, perfect sphere, extraterrestrial and white, lights up as the girl prays for clarity. The sphere casts a pure, warm light like the embrace of a loved one.

"The sky's treasures will never cease to impress me," Majani says.

"As long as this light accompanies me, I will remain safe," Nadjela repeats the words passed down to her by mother.

They hear the water running before seeing it, and soon the cool touch slips like a cloth between their feet. The water rises from their heels to their knees. It's time to go skipping over the wet rocks, an activity in which they show an animal-like grace. Each new step accelerates the princess's heart, whose lively imagination draws giants in the distance.

Majani jumps onto the rock in the middle of the spring, and Nadjela lands afterwards, bending her knees to absorb the impact. They stare speechless and solemn at the being capable of crushing a full-grown man with a hand.

Solid in appearance and sapphire-colored body, crossed by lines that, depending on the perspective change in tone between red, yellow, and orange. The lines go up and end in the pointed areas of the body: elbows, knees, thighs, wrists, forearms, shoulders. Such details give him a resemblance to a knight dressed with lightning. His face for the moment is hidden by the shadows cast by the rock wall. The girls imagine him handsome and severe.

Nadjela clasps her hands together and implores:

"Blue lightning that sleeps in the earth, on a stone throne that you created when you arrived. I beg you, fulfill my plea for help!"

She repeats the prayer several times, each attempt with greater passion than the last. But the giant is still asleep.

"Perhaps he doesn't want to help," Majani says, tense. "I heard that the gods are fickle"

Nadjela shakes her head. Silence is an answer she cannot accept.

"What are you doing, princess?!" Majani's frightened eyes follow Nadjela. The princess climbs the rock wall near the giant's right leg. The fur cape's tail catches on the rough surface of the rock, she pulls it off to continue climbing.

Nadjela swings her body back and forth. She leaps and glides with the momentum, perching on the angled ledge formed by the titan's leg, just at the edge facing the knee. Her fingers suffer light cuts, and her slender abdomen clashes against a plain, sturdy touch, like the less eroded areas of the contemplations temple. The armor's blue zone is icy, by natural reaction erecting her nipples under the cloth. In contrast, the incandescent lines have a certain warmth.

Majani below cries for her to return, but Nadjela adheres to her mission with the same impetus with which she adheres to the giant. Applying force with the arms, the princess invades the joints behind the armor, pounding her forehead a little as she falls. Rubbing her head, she lifts and faces a series of connectors, tubes, and ascending hoses, made of a shiny black material, like the metal supports where she stands. Carefully stepping so as not to slip through the spaces in the skeleton that support the armor.

Soon her eyes' attention is stolen by how shiny, almost blinding, the gem on her necklace becomes. Before she can mumble any sounds, the glow forces her eyes closed. Nadjela holds on to the Armored interior. Everything trembles and throbs. She screams, but her voice is lost in the engines' roar.

The sapphire color of the Armored passes to a vivid tinge of meteor or comet. The face overhead lights up to reveal a vaguely human face with red eyes, which where it should have a mouth and nose bears two metal plates attached.

Boulders tumble down. Majani steps back to avoid being crushed to death.

The bulky figure straightens, creaks in the mold. First it releases the arms. The huge hands come up and bury themselves in the crack walls. Behind the titan's back, a burst atomic fire pushes him away. In a second release his body and ascends, bursting the crack's mouth with a bang.

(I will die!) thinks Nadjela without daring to open the eyes. She endures a shower of pebbles that bruises her back and shoulders. (I woke up something incomprehensible! Forgive me, everyone!)

An impulse from above presses her brutally, snatches her breath, and pulverizes her ideas. Left with her face glued to the pillar of intertwined tubes, now hot. She clenches the teeth, endures the noise and wind's punishment...

Until the pressure that pushes down loses its strength.

The giant reaches a certain stability, and the gale becomes a gentle breeze. Nadjela needs a few seconds to lift her face. When she succeeds and peers over the titan's knee, she observes with reddened eyes and bated breath a vertiginous landscape.

The mountain, the tribe, the temple. Beyond: The forbidden zones, where there is only death and demons. Beyond: A horde of iron horse riders raising a curtain of dust and smog behind them. Beyond: A garden of craters and metal spikes. Beyond: Infinity...

Since when did the world become so limitless?

Under this new perspective, and with the tribe looking tiny, almost a dot, Nadjela feels the earth capable of competing on equal terms with the sky.

A rattling sound jolts her out of amazement. The giant leans toward the ground and the shaking resumes. The glow on the giant's surface fades, and the inner heat dissipates. The rushing ground is the last thing Nadjela sees before, from the excessive stress, she loses consciousness.

...

"What a hulk," comments the 22-year-old girl, chewing noisily on vegan gum, and casting a sleepy, painted-eyelid gaze over the Armored. The North Star is behind the yellow security railing, in a stone frame carved to look like a king's throne. Saltwater pipes replace the running of the now dry, old spring. Spotlights set into the rock help admire the machine's 20-meter height. "Fuck me up the ass if this old thing could really fly"

"Tracy, the vocabulary" her mother scolds her and blinks rapidly, indicating with that gesture to the neural hardware to take pictures of everything she thinks will give to talk about in the cyberspace.

"It's not even the real machine. The guide said it's a reproduction, or whatever" Tracy says.

"Your father and brother like it"

Tracy looks sideways at the men of the house. The father carries the boy on his shoulders, who listens with a smile to the stories of (in the father's exact words) when men were men. Looking at the boy, the tousled blue-tinted hair, the plastic visor glasses, and the action mini-Chester waving in hand, it's obvious that he's a fan of The Lancasterian. To some people a hero and a liberator, to others a terrorist.

Tracy rolls her eyes and snorts. Turning her jaded face to the touchscreen next to the platform railing, where it is possible to look up data from the exhibit. By default the screen shows the following summary of the scene:

Princess Nadjela, in complete solitude, descended into the crevice and ended up finding the North Star. Chester opened the cabin and introduced himself. The story goes that when their gazes met, they fell eternally in love.

"Dumb and cheesy" Tracy murmurs.

Her mother is silent. The woman's countenance is somewhat perturbed after imagining what would happen if, at the tender age of fifteen, she had met the Lancasterian. The neural hardware helps recreate the fantasy, which evolves from pink to fire inside the cramped North Star cabin. Altered, she asks the system to save the experience to repeat it later in the privacy of the flying house.

The archived and recounted story does not always match with the true story.