Redana? There is no Redana here. There is only the Eater of Pancakes. Behold it arise in its glorious pajamas[1]. When it yawns, the galaxy trembles. It has been summoned here by the possibility of the FEAST. The chocolate chips, half-molten, sunken into the pancakes like fallen meteors; the Ridenki false-banana extract, expertly mixed into the batter; the sinfully soft butter, just like the kitchens back home used every day; the nameless cream of Dolce’s kitchen, white and fluffy in its whorls. Yes. Yes! This pleases the Eater of Pancakes! Eyes still closed, it descends upon the table and accepts the offering lifted up.

Pancakes fall like battleships, each one torn apart by the Eater of Pancakes as she demolishes the arrayed fleet. Woe to you, delicious treats! When you were first formed, given shape by the hands of your creator, did you know that this would be your fate? Or did you, in your hubris, think yourselves too soft and fluffy to ever be eaten, a meal fit only for the gods themselves? Fools! It is the Fates who decree the span of each life, and they who decide when kings and servitors and pancakes meet Hades for the final trick! Is it not said that the life of a pancake is like a bird that flies through a feasthall? For a moment it has come out of the dark and the cold, and all around warmth and life and revelry, and yet in a moment, with the beat of its wings, it is gone, never to be seen again. So it is with you, o pancakes!

And yet a higher power and a keener mind has made of you a sacrifice, and secreted within you the doom of the Eater of Pancakes. Like a sacrificial ship, packed with explosives, you are, o most perilous of pancakes! The Eater of Pancakes bites down, and the venom within explodes through her mouth, first as hot as a Thousand Embers curry, then cold and numb. With a terrible squeak, the Eater of Pancakes drops fork and knife, hands fluttering to that terrible omnivorous mouth, as the final payload of the [i]Sweet Fluffy[/i] detonates in her throat. Already her body works to modulate, change, and overcome; only the most wicked and fast-acting of venoms could send the Eater of Pancakes to the House of Hades!

And the cook turns from a soft and fluffy sheep to a crimson-haired Redana with a shimmering of scales. “Hey, Dany,” Mynx says. And the smile she gives is a fragile thing, like a bird too soon removed from its nest, cupped shivering in your hands. It is rueful and hopeful and sheepish and ever-so-slightly amused and exasperated that the old “envenomed breakfast” trick worked, holding back the scolding that Redana should always, [i]always[/i] rely on a taste tester and not simply trust in an iron stomach and a mutable throat, because iron can be melted and throats forever silenced with but the right compound, the perfect poison— but that would be too much, too soon, a headlong charge across creaking ice with an infinite abyss below.

And the look that Redana gives her is vulnerable in turn, confused and worried and unsure if she’s about to be attacked in her own chamber, but alloyed with a wordless longing for things to be other than they were within the Eater of Worlds, a stupid but unquenchable hope that maybe this time, things will be different.

She lets Mynx take a seat at the modest table, one hand over her mouth with a napkin to stop herself from drooling helplessly, and tenses, but does not leap into action. Not yet. Not with her Mynx. Not after so long.

***

[1]: upon detecting REM sleep, Redana’s clothes are designed to become very cute, loose jamjams. The theme is: leviathans of the deep, chibified. (The same pattern she’s given her jamjams since she was eight.)