This is the realm of Ares and you are not welcome here.

*

In the [i]Plousios[/i] above, Hermetician Iskarot mans the cannons. Tripod legs clatter up and down the deck as he hauls shells to the archaic cannons, placing them in batches into the autoloader, jamming the firing mechanism to full, and letting Ares put the shells where he wills. The ship is drifting out of control towards the [i]Anemoi[/i]. 

It is the responsibility of the enemy captain to evade - or of Lord Ares to guide the coming wreck to the house of Hades.

*

The toxic clouds drift down from the starships above, the after-effects of weapons that should never be fired in atmosphere. Miasma for blinding the eyes of a fleet has a wretched effect on unprepared organic life. Lungs strain to filter the chemicals, rifling through the gaseous sludge for fragments of oxygen. Some slam doors shut and seal themselves inside, some dive beneath the waves and frantically mutate gills, some bury themselves beneath rubble and enter a state of suspended animation, slowing their heartbeats and circulation to zero. And amidst these thickening storm clouds flashes massive lightning-strikes of shipborne ELF weaponry, illuminating the massive shapes of the starships like angry gods. Between the walls that burn a crimson agony with the fury of the Armada and the chemical abomination of solid projectile weaponry, the interior of the Eater of Worlds has become at last what it was originally suspected of being: a vision of Tartarus.

Only two cats are mad enough to fly shuttles through this storm, blind but for when a lightning bolt the width of one's entire shuttle burns through the smoke. 

*

Merely being aboard a shuttle didn't strike Princess Epistia as a reason to put down Princess Redana. The Imperial Princess was hoisted over the Ceronian Princess' good shoulder as though she weighed nothing. When she wasn't put down during the confused crash-landing on the [i]Plousios[/i]' hangar deck, or after stepping out onto the unfamiliar starship, it had started to sink in that maybe to Epistia, Redana [i]did[/i] weigh nothing. After all, Redana had plenty of time and proximity to examine those steel-cable muscles - and plenty of time and experimentation to confirm there was no way to struggle free or coherently get a sentence out while being held upside down, speaking into someone's back, while they were maintaining a powerful sprint.

A foreign ship was a maze, but Epistia was a Ceronian, and boarding starships was wired into their genetics. She was drawn towards the bridge as irresistibly as a wolf hunting a stag and raced ahead of Alexa and Vasilia. She crashed in through the door with a scythe in one hand and Redana in the other.

Only once she had processed the fact that it was empty was she able to find the coherency to awkwardly put Redana down.

*

The Eater of Worlds was beset, but its beak was thick enough to endure the molten furnace of a planet's core. It was scorched and burned by the Armada but they would need more time than they had to pierce it - amidst the storm of Poseidon crashing Imperial ships together, and the whispers of mutiny and treason, the attack could not be sustained. The Admiral was forced to watch as the Leviathan's corpse hurled away into the void, the cold gears of her mind already bent to the purpose of catching up with it.

*

The [i]Anemoi[/i] was not a ghost ship like the Plousios. It was filled with a full compliment of servitors who did not yet know they needed to get out of the way of the Praetor who ruled them. With her soaked, filthy dress, the owl-like guards did not even recognize her or permit her access to the bridge where Captain Lorventi gave command. Crucial seconds, minutes wasted at the tip of disrespectful avine speartips. Crucial minutes while Lorventi gave the order to evade, moving the Anemoi out of the path of the onrushing [i]Plousios[/i]. By the time she finally made it onto the bridge it would be just in time to see Redana's ship accelerating out towards the open void, once again sailing into that rainbow storm.

It would be a rough voyage ahead.