Deviation Actions
Description
Caprice. Feline. Poignancy. Trickster. Wolf…
The names of Dominance commingled in her mind as her fingers skimmed over the slides. There were a good couple of dozen, all of them a promise. All of them a command. Ade expected her fingers to tingle with recognition, but the slides were just that — slides. Hard, skin-thin strips of plastic and genetic material.
“You can have a think, if you’d like.” Her father’s voice didn’t make her look up, but her shoulders pulled in nonetheless. She had never before noticed as he sat close to her. Now, she could feel his closeness like a shove. “Every slide of a Tyrant carriers its own unique stamp. Not one is like the other. You can browse and pick. You’re lucky.” He leaned in closer and she felt his blood orange breath on her cheek. “I never got to choose out of so many.”
Mind slides, ready to be plucked out of the metal box and placed into her skull, replacing her mind with one of the Great Tyrant’s. Their names were lost to memory, but Ade didn’t need to search too thoroughly to know which one her father had chosen. Caprice.
“You can have any one of them you like,” he said, and Ade looked up to see his perfectly smooth face under the gilded cap of the Tyrant light up with delight. She had to seize this moment, she knew. His moods didn’t keep long, and at any moment, he could snatch the box from her hands, or pick a slide at random and have his surgeons insert it, with no anesthesia, while she screamed… She was his first-born. She was his to do with as he pleased. “Choose wisely. Once the slide is inserted, and the tyranny preference had been stamped into your mind, it’s there to stay.”
Ade felt as though a neuroworm, the parasite plaguing the peasant masses, had made its home inside her ribcage, and now drank her juices and ate her flesh, carving his nest inside her guts. But there was no neuroworm. There was only Ade. And the metal-encased box of fate she held in her hands.