When an Embodiment wishes for you to become their chosen, you are given two choices; accept their conditions and gain whatever boons they offer, or decline and continue as you are. Persephonia of one name knows this to be a lie. Some Embodiments offer far more than they ask. Some ask for far more than they give. But there is no choice.

When an Embodiment wishes for you to become their chosen, you become their chosen. They force it upon your interface, instilling in you power that they then take their price for without the need for an ounce of consent. Persephonia did not know this earlier today, when she struggled down the stairs from her bed at what was supposed to be supper time. She did not know it when she sat down for the cold meal provided by the man who took care of wounded animals like her. But by the time she stood from her tasteless meal and meandered over to the graveyard not a hundred feet from the recovery home, she knew.

“Persephonia, uh, Persephonia?” The courier had asked, looking awkwardly between the slate at his fingertips and the broken woman before him. “I have a message for you from an anonymous sender.”

Persephonia didn’t say a word. She blinked slowly before nodding at the courier to continue, but he wouldn’t have seen that. She hadn’t gone outside without her armor in years.

“Uh, okay. Freak.” The courier muttered the last word under his breath, just loud enough for Persephonia to hear. It hurt her that these were the people she’d fought for, but it was one more hurt on a mound of scars that was already far too large for her to feel anything. “The message says; check your interface. What? That’s it? I came all the way here to say three drowned words?!”

The courier launched into a tirade that would’ve gotten him removed from a nicer part of the city, but was par for the course for all the broken people in the veterans’ district. Persephone watched him stomp off through the gravestones, not caring which flowers he trampled nor which mementos he knocked aside in his childish tantrum, and briefly considered speaking up. But she hadn’t used her voice in months, so all that came out was a dry cough that didn’t even make the rude man turn.

Not once did the courier call on his armor, nor did he use a single function. To the soldier in Persephonia, this was a triumph. People had fought and died so this man could feel safe enough to stroll around armorless without looking over his shoulder at every sound. But now there were the rumblings of something else stirring in the streets. Whenever she went out, Persephone noticed concerned stares from normal people. And fewer and fewer people with their armor on.

It had only been three years. So little time, and people had already forgotten what it was like to live in fear. Or maybe these people had never felt the flames of war like those in the outer settlements did. She knew that the courier had never once spilled blood, never once held in tears over the death of a friend before marching on no more than five hours later. But wasn’t that what she’d fought for? Wasn’t that what she’d just thought of as a triumph?

Persephone placed a hand on the gravestone with far too many names inscribed on it and tried to cry. Tried to muster enough emotion to feel much of anything, but there was nothing to give. She’d already been here two and three quarter years. She needed to get out of here and do something more with her life. Just because the war was over, it didn’t mean her life was. But she was a soldier by heart, even if she’d been a general by the end of it. She might have left the frontlines, but the frontlines had never left her.

She would bear those scars for the rest of her life. Persephone gingerly lowered herself to the ground, her armored knees scraping against the prayer stone embedded near the gravestone’s feet, and stared blankly at the list of names that were all too familiar. She remembered each and every one of them for their families who wouldn’t, and only regretted that she hadn’t gained her name sooner so that she could have granted it to them.

Larr. Asche. Zerui. Clover. Dimiun. Grasul. And Jaspo, the poor recruit who had died the day he was first sent to the frontlines. She’d inscribed that last name on the stone herself, an act that had had the stone-faced man who ran this home for veterans burning with anger at what he thought was Persephonia defacing the last memories of those who would be forgotten. And when she’d explained herself, that anger didn’t subside, but shifted its focus. Shifted to the higher-ups who hadn’t cared enough to give a dead girl a name on a stone.

For a moment, Persephonia had considered praying. But she hadn’t done that for well over a decade now. In her mind, there was no sense praying to a god who couldn’t reach her in this world. To one who let their people suffer at the hands of aliens, but also at the hands of their fellow Staura. She couldn’t deny that the gods existed, as there was beyond evidence that they did, but Persephonia knew that they didn’t deserve to be prayed to. Not when they couldn’t even give the simple gift of comfortable thoughts in return.

Persephonia stayed at the gravestone for two hours. She barely thought, barely moved, and barely noticed when the other broken veterans visited their own regrets. Some cried their eyes out, despairing over dead loved ones that they felt they could have saved. Some raged at the institutions that had led to their loved ones’ deaths, swearing vengeance on those above who never once felt the cooling warmth of a dying friend. And still some joined Persephonia in silence, unable to process the emotions they felt, or bottling them up so deeply that they felt nothing at all.

Eventually, a woman gently pressed her hand to Persephonia’s shoulder and said that it was time for her to clean this gravestone. The woman’s eyes were sunken and tired from years of terrible sleep on the frontlines; her hands calloused and shaky from the same source. Persephonia felt a kinship with this woman, even if she’d never met her before she’d been placed here, and she knew the grave would be treated with the utmost respect. So she stood without a word and returned to her room, lying atop her coverless bed while still fully armored until sleep took her once more.

The courier returned five times over the next three months. He delivered the exact same message, growing more and more belligerent with each and every retelling of the same three words. He attacked Persephonia on the day of his final delivery, donning a suit of armor that had beautiful designs of animals and greenery dyed in the colours of young wood and egg yolks. Persephonia didn’t once retaliate. The courier didn’t manage to make a single scratch on her armor, and she led him away from the graveyard to limit the damage to those who had nothing left.

She still remembered the last words he spoke, before the Rainbow Basin wardens showed up to arrest exactly one member of the altercation. He spoke with such vitriol, such hatred, towards someone who had broken herself so that he could live without a constant looming fear of death and the unknown.

“We don’t need you anymore.”

It was so simple. It hurt so much.

The wardens dragged Persephonia down to an ornate building, where an unarmored woman sat behind a large ornate wooden desk that looked like it cost as much as three months of operating a forward camp. The visages of creatures Persephonia had only seen on the all-world were so vividly carved into the wood that they almost seemed to be alive, gemstones and precious metals accenting the carvings to give them either terrifying or beautiful reality.

The sentence for assaulting a citizen was three days. The sentence for abusing a citizen of far lower standing was three months. Nobody ever served three months, as they had people in the shadows to solve these sorts of disputes before the wardens ever got ear of them. Or the wardens themselves took to the shadows.

Persephonia served three months. She barely remembered any of it, as she never once removed her armor to eat, subsisting solely on her massive battery stat. She then served another eight for constantly disobeying the Head Warden’s orders to remove her armor.

When she finally got out, the graveyard was gone. And nothing had taken its place.

In truth, the entire veterans’ section had been removed. But Persephonia cared nothing for the empty buildings and run-down stores that she’d been forced to live within for many months. She cared about the people, alive and deceased, who had called this place their home or their final resting place. And they were nowhere to be found.

She’d turned to look the way she’d come, as if she’d somehow made a mistake, and found the entrance arch mostly intact. The plaques had been removed, and the materials coating it had been stripped down to the bare rock, but its shape was the same. A notice condemning this entire part of the city was etched in metal on one of the side pillars, something that Persephonia had ignored when she first noticed that everything was missing, and as she read she grew emptier and emptier.

A general who had never seen war through anything but a video screen had ordered the destruction. Politicians who wanted the war to become nothing but a memory had signed their agreement. And a signature from the current Grand Warden, Tigel Scalovera, officializing the erasure of the veterans from Rainbow Basin. It wasn’t exactly what the notice said, but the tone was anything but subtle.

Persephonia was so enraptured with the notice that she didn’t sense an old woman with pink and white skin approach. The woman placed a hand on Persephonia’s back, patted it twice, and whispered something that made the soon-to-be Matria stand bolt upright.

“They destroyed the graves.”

Peresphonia swiveled around with anger in her covered eyes, the first flare of emotion that had truly risen to the surface in years, and stared down at the woman who stood before her. At the time, Persephonia hadn’t known the face of the left eye of Moricla. Nobody had, as the woman before her presented herself as a simple priestess from the temple of Moricla. Keratily Keratily gave Persephonia a sad smile and shook her head, then gestured for Persephonia to follow her as she began walking away at a pace far too quick for her posture and small movements.

Keratily brought Persephonia through the ornate and well-watered streets of Rainbow Basin until the two women reached an edge. A massive gate with twin waterfalls to either side of it led to the outside of Rainbow Basin, an unguarded passage that spoke of the peace Persephonia had fought for.

Persephonia followed Keratily for two days, through the water-less wastelands that had been drained to provide the excess Rainbow Basin enjoyed, until she eventually stopped at a seemingly random point. She kneeled down at a spot that was barely discernible as having been recently disturbed, then let her arms hang down at her sides as she said a prayer to Moricla.

“Let the innocence that died here protect the innocence of millions to come.”

It was very short, but it perfectly encapsulated a side of Moricla that Persephonia had not been privy to up until this point. She hadn’t thought that Moricla spoke for the innocence that had already been broken, nor that the god worked to protect innocence. Or that her followers had taken that as dogma.

After the short prayer, Keraily donned her armor and aided Persephonia in digging up the shattered fragments of gravestones that had been buried below. As Persephonia dug, she noticed that this specific plot of land had been dug and filled many times over. So many of the gravestones were missing. And still so many remained. Persephonia had attempted to remove all the remaining fragments, but Keratily had stopped her at taking only the one with the half-nameless soldiers.

Later on, Persephonia would learn that Keratily had been seeking out the soldiers who had been displaced and was giving them the chance to take the stones that marked their lost family and friends. But in the moment, Persephonia was simply grateful that the woman before her had helped her remember those who would be forgotten. If asked, Persephonia wouldn’t be able to place the exact moment her purpose in life had been renewed.

This was the moment.

Persephonia opened her interface to tuck away the pieces of the gravestone. And saw that she’d been forced into being Endra’s chosen.

//KEY MEMORY DEPLETED. ALLOW MEMORY TO BE STORED IN ‘THE OSSUARY’S ARCHIVES’ [Y] OR [N]?

//HIDDEN FUNCTION: OSSUARY’S ARCHIVES HAS BEEN REVEALED. UNLOCK COST: 120000 POTENTIAL. REDUCED TO 0 IF [Y] IS SELECTED.

//[Y] HAS BEEN SELECTED. ARCHIVIST THANKS YOU FOR YOUR GIFT OF INFORMATION.

//RETURNING PERSPECTIVE TO [SEBASTIAN CORMIER PERSEPHONIA].

//INITIATING…