Emily Zhu Bo Ging 朱保敬

this iron saber was forged and wielded by the tortoisewoman soldiers of Mars, and as you hold it, you think of that planet, remembering memories that are not your own. the training camps of Mount Olympus and the labyrinthine fortifications and burrows worming under its foundations, with rumors of a dragongirl asleep at its nadir like the vast bulk of the mountain was a weighted blanket. the steppes of the northern hemisphere, with shepherds and camelherds and llamaherds eking out a simple existence and trading with the miners and salvagers who live in caravans of treaded transports the size of hills. the monasteries and villages on the slopes of Elysium that have drawn countless pilgrimages from all over the solar system. the martian capitol, the vast u-shaped strip around the Bay of Isis, a jumble in concrete and bronze and steel and gold, baking bread smells wafting from the tandoor ovens and weaving through the domes and mosques and synagogues and factories and refectories and tenement halls, where throngs of Girls and Beastgirls and Robotgirls and Ghostgirls work and play and learn and love. the carcinogenic southern highlands, so bitterly arid that even the miraculous hexavalent chromium sequestering roots can find no purchase in most of its rusty soil, and treasure hunters need sealed suits to track down and salvage centuries-old derelict warships. the northern Utopian and Arcadian and Acidalian shallow seas, where snow leopardgirls sail from port to port weaving through field ice and dodging wrathful auroraserpents who come down from the northern magnetic city. the northern and southern magnetic cities themselves, connected via a shaft dug by industrious molegirls and rabbitgirls through the planet’s long-cold core, a miracle of socialist labor. the mysterious and unmarsly Mariner’s Valley, a forest bounded by sheer cliff faces, where deer twenty feet tall at the shoulder bound and boars as big as houses snuffle through the undergrowth. all these places and more you consider, and then you put the sword down once more.