"A long, long way away," said the Master of Assassins, "there is a land without death. A green land, and verdant, with life bursting at every seam. Slash a throat and the blood would shape itself into winged fish before it hit the ground. The skeleton would erupt as a howling badger and the organs hop away as a tide of frogs. It's a beautiful land, Bella. An ecstatic place, radiant beneath Demeter's eternal summer. It's something worth fighting for. I want you to imagine it, I want you to feel the thrill of life in your veins when you think of it. The galaxy has beauty in it, and through beauty, meaning."

Wood on steel. Clattering, clattering, a vocabulary of force given shape. The Kaeri are here in ceremonial robes of Artemis bloody-handed. You walk over piles of treasures, journals, photographs. All of the possessions of the Plousios have been ripped out of the rooms that hid them and have been cast on the floor for you to trample on as you are gently guided forwards. At a vague distance, through the haze, you can feel flames licking at your ankles. All of this is burned away as sacrifice in your wake.

"But then there is this place," said the Master. "You can feel it. Feel the taint. Feel the rot. Feel the despair. The murder. The finality. It is a cathedral to a wicked god and its corruption soaks into every bone and every lip. It can never be allowed into Demeter's garden. And so you see, XIII, that you are thinking about things the right way. Bad girls die. Good girls live. That's what the galaxy comes down to: good and evil, punishment and reward."

And through the haze you see something in crystal clarity: the Armour of the Diodekoi. But this time you see it with Hermes' Eye. You see that this is no steel, nor bronze nor quadranix alloy. This is stronger than all of those: this is bone. A marvelous, miraculous exoskeleton, all extending out from the long and jagged claws that were the source of this edifice.

Your claws. 

"I know it must have felt like a punishment when I had your talons removed," said the Master. "I know it must feel like a punishment now. I know you have worries and doubts, you wonder if you measure up to all of these standards, you know how short you have fallen all this time. But, sweet XIII, I want you to know that I never once considered you to have failed. After all, you have lived your entire life with both claws tied behind your back," she laughs like a moth. "You were incomplete. An unloaded gun. A marvelous thing, but without the bullet, without the intent, without the guiding hand, never able to fulfill its purpose. So to answer your question: you were not a bad girl. You were not even a girl at all. You were a Skotia, a passing shadow, and at last it is time for you to be made whole."

You stand at the end of a red carpet of burning memories. You stand before your mutilated, missing half, twisted by the engines of the Temple into a blade that can cut a god.

"It is not necessary to train the adepts of the Diodekoi Temple," said the Master. "One need only train their armour. It is time at last for you to understand the meaning of your life, little servitor."

*

Aboard the [b]Anemoi[/b], the engines roar in pursuit. This ship is sacred to Artemis and there is no divination array finer when it comes to the hunt.

Time is short, and the ship devours sound. You have few chances to snatch words with each other in the hunting depths of this terrible ship. You should take them. You may never have the chance to speak to each other again.