[b]Alexa![/b]

"I'll hold them off."

You hear the sentence distantly from a slash of red and black in the shape of a girl. Princess Epistia draws up the hood of her cloak, fingers tightening around the grip of her oversized warscythe. There's focus there. Rapture, almost. Excitement, craving. She looks upon this field of blood and death and imagines her place is here. Imagines that the secret to glory is to make it worse.

And she's gone like a ribbon, and Ares steps onto the field.

He rips himself to the surface of Athena with a blood-soaked howl - the lupine howl of Ceron, not heard for two centuries. Corpses rain down from the sky, messes of broken feathers and hollow bones. As she lands she pirouettes like a dancer and draws thirty menials along with her. With a gnash of her teeth she severs the cable animating an enormous battle Plover and with a crack of her ELF she turns the warsuit into a steel statue. The world reels in the shock of a demigod's carnage and the hideous rents she carves into the enemy lines.

And moving to meet her comes Lorventi.

Nevertheless, the troops are in flight, retreating from the blood-soaked battlefield, when a Coherent runner arrives. "The Kaeri are counterboarding," he gasps. "They're severing the docking tunnels to seal us in!"

And the world hangs on a dagger point, Alexa. You can either go to save Princess Epistia from the Bloodfeather's berserker rage, or you can continue to lead the retreat and prevent the army from being locked in.

[b]Vasilia![/b]

"Ah," said the Furnace Knight. "So you are nobility."

He slowly picks a strange silver cylinder out of his pocket, points it at you, and clicks a few times. The hue of your blue robe deepens and the colour brightens. A simple, practical gesture, as mannered and unmentionable as holding a door open.

"And you are from an underworld of your own. Lord Hades bought you the dead and dying, welcomed them in a palace to remembered imperium. And in that dead kingdom you finally arose in the station you desired, young and strong and filled with power. Why did you not triumph?"

[b]Dolce![/b]

"But what if this moment was inevitable?" said Hades, voice as delicate as paper. He looked up at the ceiling and the world fell away to show Aphrodite's Rift slashed from horizon to horizon. "You stand on the shores of the Lethe one way or another. Even if you survive here the journey will in mere weeks take you to the border of the Underworld. The Rivers will be no kinder to you if you plunge into them there than if they take you here. They will burn you, drown you, cleanse you and speed you on to the beyond."

The Rift glows and burns, radiant and toxic pink and violet and void black, an open wound across the galaxy. Hades stares at it with eyes like lapis lazuli. 

"Even if you survive Demeter, survive her assassins, survive a wild and cruel galaxy, survive the curses of heartbreak and betrayal, when you reach the Rift you will be right back where you are. Here, at the border of life and death. Crews have made it there before and none of them survived the crossing. This mission was always about throwing bodies into the Rift hoping that together they might dam the Styx."

"So rest," he said. "It is... fine. I have already asked for so much so unjustly, at the least I can spare you from crawling towards a finish that will be no different from the pain you already endure."

[b]Bella and Skotia![/b]

She ate your teachers. 

One by one they had left for the stars. One by one they'd come to the Skies. One by one those wise, deadly masters had died at the hands of this. And now it is their strength that runs through her veins, their shades that cling to her back like robes, their memories that swirl within the blood of this monster. You go through the stances one after another in nightmarish parodies of your lessons. One, two [i]slash[/i] - try again. Three, four, and the rumbling of thunder - there are weapons even your eyes might miss. These are classroom lessons you are being put through. Classroom humiliations. Thist smiles like the devil. She does not understand and does not care to. She simply rides the stolen power, lives out the ghosts of prowess, the echoes of brilliance. Five, six - you didn't listen to us. Not like you were supposed to.

We knew this day would come.

She fights bare-handed, like you, like them. There's nowhere to hit her, nowhere to claw her. Everywhere is armour and strikes of the tail. She envelops when she gets close, arms and tail looking to engulf and crush. Distance is as deadly as proximity, as when you back away she lies flat that she might align the ELF spikes emerging from her spine and let them charge off each other until they unleash in bruising thunderstrikes. Seven, eight -

And the blows do not land.

Skotia has carved them away. Has engaged the beast blade to scale. He fights not like a monster, not like an animal... like a hero. How a champion might fight. For a moment it's glorious.

And then Thist graps his throat and bites his mouth with a venomous kiss. She casts him away as his lips swell and his face goes tense with purple veins. Savagely, she turns back to Bella, spitting blood from furious lips.

But Artemis, ever watchful, has seen this and judged it poorly. She stands quietly from her position in the corner of the room and walks away, abandoning the Eater of the Dead on her hunt. Skotia was not hers to kill, and the Huntress is disgusted by the inaccuracy. And that mistake is the difference between an Assassin of the Temple and someone who simply steals their power.

You face Thelis Thist again, and this time no god is on her side. Once again you face a mad alien matriarch who has broken faith with the gods. 

[You do not pay a price for acting against a Threat to the World as you are one yourself. Nevertheless, take Damage - which is instead absorbed by Redana's Saviour. Redana is also [b]poisoned[/b], which may have more effects later.]