[i]"Hey, Redana! What are you reading?"

Redana looks up into the soft glare of the Solar-Reminiscent Lamps, squinting in a way that some might call adorable, or at the very least dorky, at the silhouette of Bella. "Sullust's Histories," she says, and for once there's excitement in her voice. "I finally got to the part where he summarizes the battle over Yugurten VII, and describes the arrival of the Eater of Worlds. Listen to this!"

Bella folds herself up, brushing off her gardening apron (which has all the little pink paw prints running around the hem), and rests her head on Redana's shoulder. "I'm listening," she says, tucking her legs in underneath her skirt as a warm breeze runs around the garden. It's not open to the outside world-- almost nothing is, here-- and so the sky is false, and the air currents are false, but the grass is real. The cherry sapling with its dainty white-pink leaves is real, dusting the ground around them. The walls pretend to be hedges, and the ceiling pretends to be an open sky, and even though it's all fake, if Redana closes her eyes, she can almost imagine that it's not, that it's real, that Bella's here and they're alone in all the world, and the butterflies aren't shipped in specially just for them, but that a whole world lies open for them to explore. She can almost pretend she's free.

"The Eater of Worlds, being the last resort of Olympus upon those planets they deemed unworthy of continuation, reared by the hand of Poseidon Ptortheion in the raging vortices of the Maw of Terror, grew to such size that it could fulfill its purpose without delay or frustration by the hand of mortal man; its beak, made such that it could peel continents away from the firmament as a man might skin an orange with his thumb and forefinger, would brook no obstacle save for the Aegis of Blessed Athena, with which she warded it from devouring Plutonia, and indeed the strength of its jaw would crack the crust, just as a hungry maiden cracks a pie's crust with her little finger."

Bella laughs. "You made that part up!"

"Okay, maybe I did," Redana says, setting the book down on a protruding root. "His sentences just don't stop! I keep getting lost in them!"

"Well," Bella says, resting the back of her hand against Redana's thigh, "maybe you could tell me more, instead of him? Will the Eater of Worlds come here?" Her tail bushes up, and she presses closer. "Please tell me you'll save me, my lady!"

"Of cour--" Redana turns her head, and Bella's is right. there. Those soft, arresting eyes... Redana doesn't get why poets keep talking about cows' eyes. Cows have solid black fear orbs, according to her Children's Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Cosmos. Bella has soft, pretty eyes, and her breath is washing against Redana's lips, and, and she's so warm, and... and it clicks.

So she grabs Bella and shoves her down onto the grass, shoves an arm down on her windpipe. Those eyes widen, and then involuntarily blink, and there it is, there it IS. "Nice try, Mynx," Redana pants, letting off a little of that pressure onto her bodyguard's throat, just to be polite. She can make redundant windpipes, after all. "But Bella's not as touchy-feely as that. She always gets fidgety when she's that close to people."

"Isn't she?" She breaks into a wide and toothsome grin. "I guess I'll have to study her more closely. I thought for sure I had her just right..."

"MYNX! Where ARE you?!" That smile just gets wider and wider as Bella storms into the garden, trailing ropes, a very heavily chewed kerchief dangling over her collar. When Bella sees them, she stops dead in her tracks and starts fumbling with her rumpled skirt and apron, obviously embarrassed that she didn't escape in time to stop Mynx from getting to her charge. What if this was a real assassination attempt, after all? That's why she's blushing furiously and bobbing in a curtsey. "Oh, hello, my Redana, my lady, good afternoon, I do hope this childish prankster didn't inconvenience you. They were... helping... me with training, and, um, gosh, I can handle them from here, please don't let this distract you any more from your studies, what were you reading? Can you tell me about it? After I go and have a talk with Mynx, of course..."[/i]

***

"Without delay or frustration by the hand of mortal man..."

The words are dredged up from somewhere deep inside her as the Eater of Worlds fills her viewscreen. They sound... resonant. The kind of words that naturally would stick with her. But they make sense. How are you supposed to stop something this big? The head on its own would dwarf a space habitat! This close, even the battleship thrust between its eyes seems almost pathetic, a dagger that felled a giant, and [i]nothing[/i] should make one of those dreadnoughts seem small, given that even the [i]Plousios[/i] might as well be a Plover in comparison, and a Plover like hers just a gnat on its side...

She lets the controls go slack, trusting in her speed and her head start, and slumps back in the seat. It keeps getting bigger and bigger! And it's doing so with all the deliberate slowness of a painter! If she hadn't been told to go inside, it would be so tempting to go and get thoroughly lost in those rainbow forests, vast biomes of stone and light and void, and let the dazzling radiance and heat confound all those who pursue her. There are much worse hiding places in this galaxy.

But no, it has to be inside. She has to slip between those slabs of bone, each one the length of an entire elevator, and find some safe place to land upon its frozen tongue, or else continue down its length (for who knows how long?) and avoid... "Oh, will it have those things in its throat?" Redana grimaces. Sea turtles were made to hunt creatures in the water, slippery and desperate to escape, and so their mouths, she remembers... "Were they all the spines, or the hooks?" Either way, it's a chilling thought.

She turns that nervous energy into stretching her legs, letting the tremble run all the way down to her toes, and lets the Eater invite her closer, its clouded eyes each the size of oceans blind to her approach, and all the while the droplets of blood hammer against her Plover like rain on the branches of the little cherry-sapling in her garden...