Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

As scared as she was of failure, behind it lurked the vast and daunting prospect of success.

It was not love, but Natalia Karpov had lost two brothers and an uncle’s family when they’d said the wrong things in the wrong place at the right time

Viv wasn’t a mad scientist. She just wanted to crush her enemies, and save the world.

She found her chest intact, her ribs and breastbone whole, which was a pleasant surprise, which in turn said unfortunate things about recent events.

Then there was another Viv who sifted through the meat and muck, found what had to be done next, and did it.

She’d built waterworks to contain her fear and convert it into options.

So don’t be certain. Steer into the skid. Wherever you are, it’s bigger and more complicated than you know.

Forward momentum. Act, and act again, and ignore the fear.

The strands glowed with heat, and in their center hung a box that was not a box, which changed dimensions as Viv watched, unwilling to sit in three. She thought it was a shadow, but not the shadow a box would cast, rather a box itself as a shadow cast by something higher, a hypercube, its surface reflective and complex and bubbling with starstuff. This was a box built to catch a god.

I just love how lyrical, magical, and fantastical his science fiction writing is

You trailed anarchy and your own laughter through a galaxy too small for the scope of your ambition.

she was a fact of nature, a vastness. You couldn’t punch something like that. Viv, of course, still planned to try.

Zanj had seen an Empress who could tear a galaxy apart, and thought, I can take her.

You’re scared and alone in a big damn galaxy and you scream through the night. Great. Welcome to the party. I’d feel plenty sympathetic if I hadn’t spent the last three thousand years burning in a star.

Me, I’m honest. I want freedom—if only so I can kill you.”

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

She pointed. Zanj was right, after a fashion. Orn had been a great city once. It was a ruin now.

They built her so well even her ruin awed.

the asphalt underfoot reminded her of broken playgrounds.

There’s hope. It’s slim, but we have a chance: me for home, you for revenge, Hong for understanding. Together. We need each other.

And when you were weak, strength was a powerful drug.

She is power. She strikes as She chooses. She has bent the arc of history. She built wonders and fought wars we can only describe by allegory, because we cannot work the math of them.

For all Viv knew, that old dirty magazine of Zanj’s was worth half the broken junk on this planet.

So you woke up in the far future, or wherever, and you felt simpatico with an ancient mythological tyrant who wanted to murder literally everything. What did that say about you?

She cannot win, but she can break the galaxy in the process.”

“You grew up in a city,” Xiara said, “one so vast you had no sky. And yet you do not know how to fly your own ship.”

“A fairy-tale monster. A star-stealer. Zanj fought the Empress; Zanj led an army of gods. Zanj outwarred the Diamond Fleet, and stole the Saint’s Cascade and the Cup of the Sun. Zanj gathered the Suicide Queens. She swiped the Fallen Star from a dragon’s forge—watch or she’ll come for you, too! Zanj Girlthief.”

and there Viv saw above her, battling, bloody, fierce and deadly and doomed but oh so free:

Rage felt cleaner without thought.)

Wherever she walked, she found ruins.

Viv, that tiny soulless infuriating meatsack who bore the Empress’s scars.

There was an undeniable appeal to throwing yourself into a monster’s gears, in hope you could jam them with your corpse.

Her people were gone. Her galaxy was broken. The Empress must pay. She washed her hands of the small god’s blood and brooded on the how.

Might as well take the blow to the ribs now. You’d feel it in the morning, but that assumed there would be more mornings in which to feel.

Note to self, if you ever get back home: if you must design some sort of gray goo nanovirus, don’t make it kinky.

“You don’t know me,” she told the Ornclan, in a voice pitched thunder-low. “Yet. But trust me: you should run.”

ORNCHIEF, VIV LEARNED, is not a position one attains without a certain resistance to the notion of running away.

Zanj, fresh-fallen from space, burning with reentry, claws dripping plasma, her head oblong, her teeth jagged, her eyes white, her face a mask of fire, did not look like a person with whom one should fuck.

She turned and waved to Viv with her fingers, grinning. Viv waved back. Lacking claws, her wave was a bit less impressive.

I’m sure these losers have fuel stashed somewhere. If I kill a few of them, the ones left will show us.”

“Hey,” Xiara said. “That’s my family.” “Everyone has a family,” Zanj replied. “If that were a good counterargument, I’d never kill anyone.”

Paradise stank of lilac. And still, somewhere out of sight, a child wept.

have stolen suns, and burned inside them.

This, for Zanj, was a kind of heaven: to fight, forever, against an enemy she never could quite kill, before whom she would never yield. Striving, always striving.

“IT COULD BE worse” was, in Viv’s experience, a phrase people tended to use when they didn’t see exactly how.

And while I understand the outlines of our, let’s call it a deal, I’m still not clear what sort of violence I can do without offending your sensibilities.

There was too much noise and fire and confusion for anyone to see her smile as she moved fast and broke things.

The grotesque dimensions of his mouth settled back to the normal three,

“I never thought you’d lose. Only that you might not come back.”

We didn’t lose the stars at all. They’ve been up here waiting for us this whole time.”

What you cannot break, you do not own.