The Nemean looks at Bella over her shoulder. Her green eye is the impossible verdancy of a sun-blessed jungle, piercing and bright. As if one glance turns all she looks upon to glass.

Then she takes her axe and slams it down into the ground. The explosion of power sends turf showering up into the air, splitting the earth with jagged fractures. She sets one boot upon the axe’s head (one of them, that is) and turns to face the awestruck servitor. Beneath her armor, decorative and embellished, shining like sunlit gold, she wears a full-body aketon as sheer as silk and tight as her skin, shining with the subtle colors of the storm-toss’d void. It conceals everything; it reveals everything.

[b]”Don’t get your pretty tail in a twist, little concubine!”[/b] The look she gives Bella is too unsubtle and hungry to come anywhere close to sensual. [b]”Your princess lies dreaming of this battle on the couch of the Moirae, where I make my home! There will be time enough after this battle for you to be ravished well and excellent before her safe return! So says Redana Chrysopelex!”[/b][1]

One of the dead Ceronians flings a spear straight and true at her shoulder, and the shaft groans in its flight as it is sped along on winged feet to its home. The spearhead shatters into eight hundred and four shards when it touches her, and the splintered shaft cartwheels into the grass.

The Nemean does not so much as flinch. Instead, she employs an eyebrow. It is a very [i]expressive[/i] eyebrow. Then she tears the axe up out of the grass, spins it once, and then just barely bats away a savage blow from the Ceronian queen. Too barely. She’s [i]showboating.[/i] And if she dies, Redana might be stuck in the House of the Moirae[2] forever!

Something has to be done.

***

[1]: The Golden-Helmed One.

[2]: also known as Conceptual Space, the Seventh Dimension, or the Quantum Tomb, depending on your school of thought.