The spirit that stalks through the dream is not the Nemean, mighty and untamed. She is not a Coherent, shielded with a shimmering shroud of stolen time. She is not one of the predators who make stagnant stasis zones their hunting grounds, a ripple of unscales and clock-crooked teeth. But she is something like all three.

She does not make of her wand of empty space a bow of light worthy of bearing the Astra of Apollo, those war-ending devastations. She takes the shape of the wand and it becomes the shape of that bow, and when she draws it to her cheek, the shining absence of heavenly darts pin the falling ships to the sky and tear through Coherent shrouds like tissue, leaving them defenseless in the time that once was.

The trick, however? Easy enough to eventually pick up on. These are the warriors of the Saffron Order, after all; they know time and its games. Redana is here, and Redana is her mantle. She is not drawing power, painfully, from the quantum possibility of the Nemean, sideways; she is mantled by the Redana who [i]will[/i] be. An excellent object lesson in the Twenty-First Mystery. This foreshadowing, this back-cast shadow?

It can last only so long as Redana flits from angle to angle, scene to scene, within this temporal panorama. Simply do the impossible— lay a hand on her— and she will revert almost to her former self. And so the net tightens around her, even as she dances laughing from moment to moment in those tall white boots, her hair following her like a tail, her face harder and harder to look upon for the radiance of her crown and her smile. Fair and terrible she makes herself, a child of the gods—

But every dance eventually ends. Haven’t we heard that lesson once already today?

[A beautiful [b]5[/b] on keeping the Coherents busy.]