[b]Redana![/b]

You stand upon a beach alongside Lord Hades. You watch three figures sprinting away, heels kicking up splashes as they cut across the gently rolling tide, trailing their fine uniforms behind them in fragments. One blooms with blood as a spear bursts from their back and the other two come to a halt to first scream in horror, and then scream at each other. Like mad beasts these comrades fall upon each other with claw and blade. 

Hades looks away. His gaze instead falls on the rushing tide of vicious wooden figures that pour in their thousands from a great nozzle twenty meters above the ground. His gaze traces up the enormous [i]thing's[/i] form - spacer silver banded with gold, beaded through with the green weavings, branches enough to wrap the Yakanov and eat it like a tiger might eat a dog.

A tear glitters in the eye of Hades, and you feel regret.

The clock swings back further. It is drawn, it is called, it [i]hunts[/i]. You feel reality click into place like it was made to be this way and everything else was but a dream.

Your auspex recovers first, though at first you are terrified it is broken. No, not broken - that it has [i]reset[/i] to the standard set for it by Nero. It is flooding your mind with data in the way it did before it learned your limits. For a moment it's terrifying but then you realize you're [i]handling[/i] it. Sort of - you're not understanding it, but it's washing through the back of your mind without crushing you. Perhaps it's like the ocean - you have learned you can be on the same world as the ocean without being made to drink it all.

But you don't need to drink the ocean to know it is whipped by a storm. The specifics flow in maddening detail but you know that the galaxy is at war, and that it is [i]your[/i] will that it be so.

You sit on a velvet red pillow, the court shrouded from you by a red curtain veil. You sit on what isn't yet a throne with the legendary wolves of Ceron below you - guarding the stairs leading up to you, engaging each other in debate, pushing miniatures across maps of a burning world.

You look in the mirror and see yourself as Director Nero, pretender to the Imperial Throne. 

[b]Alexa![/b]

"Keep your spear, Alexa," said Artemis, and terribly it was indeed pity. "This is a murder a year in the making and all the forms have been observed - and you have not observed Athena's forms of defense. Neither I nor she are positioned to help you."

She gave you a complicated expression, like she was compromising a principle as an act of charity by saying this. "It is too late to prepare, Alexa. You need something more... impulsive."

She folds her papers under her arms and leaves. In the space behind her are two choices. There is Aphrodite sitting at the bar, habitually flicking a broken lighter in search of a spark to light his cigarette. And there is Ares, outside in the void of space, grinning and knocking on the glass.

[b]Dolce![/b]

[Overcome with Grace: [b]6[/b]]

You try to make your way through the kitchen but you can't resist tasting a passing dish - and then another. How could you resist when it smelled this delicious? When everything smelled... so...

You try to taste another but it's snatched away from you. The chef crams it into her face like that is the only place it might be safe, and you find yourself reaching to prove her wrong...

The blow shocks you. One of the cooks has struck another in the last gesture either of them gave as a thinking entity, because after that both of them have their teeth in the same bone and are pulling back and forth and snarling like dogs. All around you the kitchen is falling into a frenzy - and as you watch you can see those who fight over the scraps are physically withering as though they were weeks starved. And you can feel that cold, consuming hunger raise inside you too.

The assassin looks over at you from the doorway, a broken vial at her feet and its scent is starvation. She gives you a smile and a wave, then closes the door and slides a bar into place, locking you inside.

[b]Vasilia![/b]

You raise your head to see an elegant horror.

The practice of bonsai is a traditional art for a genewright for nothing is less becoming than engineering an ugly species. So one begins with a plant, weaving it on a genetic level with precisely targeted serums and on a physical level with cables and wires. One must learn the tricks of scale, what the plant is capable of and what it will try to get away with should it be permitted. One must learn synergistic plants and practices; when moss will add to the beauty of one's creation and when it will smother its delicate roots. 

For all of that, this is a masterwork. The leaves hang like puffs of clouds at the end of twisting branches, four distinct almost circular shapes. The roots are thick and strong and give the impression of enormous age. The plant's crown fades from green to yellow with just the smallest tip of fire red. All along its trunk mossy patches glitter with tiny flowers that smell far too sweet and strong for their size. There are a great many trials to create a thing of such beauty, and it is a great statement that the artist was able to do so with a plant that was to burst out of a person's skull.

Ivory Smile is dead. Through his brain and face grows this terrible bonsai, roots running in and out of his bloodless flesh, delicately falling autumnal leaves catching on his shoulders. He is dead but he still moves - and [i]how[/i] he moves! He moves with a plant's carelessness towards pain, slowly and achingly, but with enormous strength. He shoves Bella aside and storms towards Vasilia. 

The fact that Vasilia's name is engraved upon the knife he wields makes his intention perfectly clear.

[b]Bella![/b]

There are many shocks here. Seeing a human dead in defiance of Imperial law is not the least of them, but added to that a [i]priest[/i] killed in this way? All mortals are called to the House of Hades in time and to commit this sacrilege speaks of a truly immortal hubris. 

Another shock, though, is that this is a new way to kill. 

You know so many ways to deal death - so many ways someone might hurt Redana. You've never seen this before, this arboreal zombification. How are you to guard against it? What are its limits? What are its capabilities? The Auspex is racing to find out but this is new to it too. It tells you what it can - the engraving on the dagger is sacred to Artemis, but when you look at the tree your vision flashes with the green of hunger and the blue of hatred and the name [i]Demeter, Demeter, Demeter[/i] rings out in your eye like the thoughts of a fearful granddaughter. 

You know from the chill in your bones and the sudden empty craving in your stomach that the Harvest Goddess [i]personally[/i] wants Vasilia dead. And for once in your life you don't have a biological imperative hardcoded into your being telling you to protect her. You can choose to let her die safe in the knowledge that veridian craving will not then fall upon you.

Do you?