The need of the hound is reflected into Skotos like a beam of light being shone into a house of mirrors. For the sake of Rusty, Skotos condenses. She is solid enough for gender, at least for a moment, and solid enough for regret— but not so much that she could pull her scarf out of Rusty’s mouth (her fingers would fall limply away, like smoke over water) or even enough to call back to Alexa (the words would turn to empty night in her throat).

“I’m not very good at solving things,” she attempts to warn the hound. “Really, anyone else would have been a better choice. Unless all you need are hands?” She considers this as the hound tugs her resolutely along. “Then I am a good choice,” she concludes. “I have hands. And everyone else has more important duties to carry out with theirs. So you should use mine.”

Satisfied that she is doing the right thing and being of service to everyone (for Alexa must fight, the philosopher must teach, and the students must learn, and she is stopping the hound from pulling any of them away), Skotos begins to look around her properly, self-aware of the hollow longing in her chest. Everything here is empty even as it is grand; there is no concentration of population, and so the drift outwards continues, just like Nero’s thesis states is the natural inclination of humanity. And yet here, there, still can be seen people devoted to some grand task of their own choosing.

Just like her, if you think about it. She devoted herself to a grand task, and all it cost her is—

She blinks. Her spirit exists solely in her face and her breastbone. Her feet are automatons marching stiffly onwards, lead on a leash; her hands are too limp to raise to her chest.

All it cost Redana Claudius was the life of her childhood companion, Bella. And Redana is strong enough to live with that; she is able to accept the sacrifices that must be made to pursue a high and noble vision, just like her mother before her. Skotos is not strong.

That is why, walking down the streets of a grand Salibean city, in the shadow of high spires, on the mosaic roads, to the tune of the musician who still lives at 1397 Excellence-of-Companions Tower whose composition floats out from their open balcony and continues for hours upon end as he reiterates and seeks some refinement of the piece both as a whole and as an interlinked piece with the rest of his body of work, under the gaze of a sentinel who has fought and refought a theoretical war in his own mind for centuries so that he may know every aspect of it from every angle and from his own self-exploration thus derive an entire science of battle, stepping over carefully-swept piles of broken glass that the hound swerves around, Skotos cries. Again. As she does whenever she is enough herself to express pain.

She cries for the wasted potential of who she could have been, who Redana Claudius will now become, who she was unworthy of being. (As if standing outside herself, she remembers wanting to kill the Toxicrine, the Privateer. Redana Claudius would not, could not have done so. Another failed exam in an unbroken string.) But more than that, she cries for Bella, alone, in the cold and thin dark, an abandoned toy that was left without reassurance of love— no, worse. Toys can’t feel pain or grief or loneliness. An abandoned girl, then.

Bella, who never got to see Salib.

Bella, who never got to see Redana come home like she’d promised.

Bella, who was punished for the follies of the only person who tried and innocently failed to love her.

A footnote in the story of Redana Claudius. An Act I tragedy to tug at the heartstrings. An asterisk in the grand story of Humanity’s Salvation. A thorn in Skotos’s heel. It hurts. It hurts and it has not stopped hurting. And that is why Redana must be Redana and Skotos must be Skotos.

By the time the hound stops, Skotos has become so raw that she has wrapped back around to being numb, the pain a humming static. She stops to rub the hound’s ears before opening herself back up to the world, to see where she has been taken, blind and deaf to the world for the pain.