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WE KNOW THE DEVIL
Something is floating up deep inside our lungs, deep inside us, deep inside every muscle and every bone; it's ready to drag us down, into the depths, and let us rot down there all alone for the rest of our lives. Tossed around by the currents, pulled down helpless by the whirlpool - this is a seaside grave for the unmarked and the forgotten. This is where you go at the end of everything, unceremonious, and watch everything else leave you, helpless to say a single word.
Tethys doesn't reach out to us. Not at first. They're caught up in their own tides, torn apart by the pain of it, breathless with the agony; light is dancing on the ocean floor and it hurts like a hundred knives. This is a graveyard. This is a mausoleum. Dead-eyed, they're head-over-heels in the waves of their own torment. But they reach out to us still, to drag us down with them; if they're suffering, so too should we, so too should everyone. Everyone who has ever let it happen deserves to drown, Tethys seems to say, even them; no time for false platitudes if there's no air in your lungs.
The devil is lonely. We kicked out the devil and it must miss us.
It keeps begging to be let back, for us to let it in.
And Tethys did.
Every moment of baring your teeth and showing your claws belongs to it. Every brittle defiance, every attempt to escape what you are; all of that has come here to die. There is no air in this sunken tomb.
But we know how to hold our breath.
Tethys can't drown us. Not if we know this is no grave at all, not for us.
And the devil only ever gets one moment. For despair, for defiance, for "please comfort me".
But there is nothing to fear when there is two against the devil.
Tethys' affinity is with drowning, death, and despair. They don't have an associated body part, but they're generally associated with scars.
HEAVEN WILL BE MINE
Celestial Mechanics 'reserve pilot'; piloted the Ship-Self Ogygia Chasma during the war. Was benched permanently after their Ship-Self received damage to the tidal reactor, since the empathetic resonance ended up scarring their eye; they have some remaining sight in it, but it only works 'fully' when in areas with low Gravity, and leaves them effectively half-blind in areas with high Culture. Kind of a dick. Could probably still pilot, and has argued in favor of this, but Iapetus won't let them. They like to joke (...but is it really a joke?) that it's because he can't get anything out of sleeping with them anymore. Had some fun dalliances with Saturn at one point, but broke it off after Mercury said something about the two of them that really raised Tethys' hackles.
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