There is a crown of pain around her head. It throbs in time with the distant beat. Distant? Still loud, but not shaking her bones. The pitted, dilapidated stone is cool against her forehead, and that coolness staves off the urge to lie down until the world steadies. Her arm hangs limply by her side. Her fingers are still locked around a twisted ruin of metal; with her other hand, she scrabbles at her fingers, pulls them away until the smoking hilt clatters onto the ground.

“No,” she murmurs. What she means is: Bella isn’t Molech. What she means is: she isn’t Nero. What she means is: take this cup of bitter wine away from my lips. Please don’t make her drink. When she pushes her left hand into her sealed pocket, the comforting weight of the golden obols is gone; she has no offering left to make.

She crushes her eyelids shut and shakes like a cat about to bring forth hair. No. Control yourself, Dany. You are watched and witnessed. The gods move behind the curtains and the world bulges and thins where they walk...[1]

She lets out a ragged sob, and then straightens, chokes back more. They came here on a mission. A core, a map, a lead. If she can find it with Alexa...

The attack is sudden, without provocation. The claws kiss her skin sweetly, tearing through the durable weave of her spacer’s coat like it was woven of cobwebs and morning dew, and for a moment she thinks that Bella has come to kill her or— but no. Black feathers and silence. Kaeri[2]. The owls of Athena. See all, say little. Her sword arm chooses this moment to throb to agonizing life, hot needles and pitch, and the sound that comes out of her hoarse throat is animal. Her balance is off; she stumbles into another, there without the appearance of movement, and vicious talons press against her chest, feathers whispering against her throat. She tears free, undershirt tattered and spilling open, and hurtles forward with the panic of prey. Her arm bounces and fills her mind with white hot agony, too slow in its recovery; her legs move independent of her, Auspex pumping raw data into her nervous system to keep her footing as she flings herself outwards, away from the dance, away from her friend, away from her Bella, into a maze of war-blasted streets and desolate monuments.

And the Kaeri follow, silent, unseen, like the Hounds of Artemis baying at the heels of their former mistress.

***

[1] Somebody smart said this. Pseudo-Dionysus? Vermillion of Amas? Seven Righteous Flame of the Pentateuch? Who cares? They all came here, to this, the lid peeled back and away, seeing the monstrous stirring of divinity as a sailor clinging to driftwood sees the intimations of a whale close below. This is a shared experience state. This is shamanism.

[2]: for more information on their cultural exploitation points, optimal deployment strategies, and uses in conflict, see [i]Annals of Athenian Victory: Vol. XXI, XXVI, XXXIII.[/i]