All this time, she'd been worried about an impossible knife in somebody else's chest.

How? When?! She knows how this should go, knows how to fight somebody with a spear, but It's hard to think. Every time she almost collects enough of her wits to string two thoughts together, another blow knocks her around. Things are shutting down--no, [i]she[/i] is shutting down! Parts are starting to grind and catch, glistening fluid is leaking out, Sagakhan is saying something but she can't hear it over the rushing in her ears--

Step by step, blade by blade, she's forced back, forced down, until she's pinned to the ground like a butterfly. She's slow--too slow, too dull, eyes losing their glow, their ability to focus--

And then her world spins crazily around her, the pain is a vanishing memory, and in the clarity granted by that lack of pain, she knows instantly what's happened.

This is fixable, she tells herself, jolting off a step.

She's come back from worse, she lies to herself. Fell from orbit. Pushed herself into the heart of a star. 

She careens off a badly angled bit of pyramid, and is treated to a brief view of Redana crushing Sagakhan's jaw in before her head spins away. God, that girl. She's gonna go far.

This isn't the end. Her story is just beginning. She's not dying on some dustball nowhere planet. Dany's gonna wipe the floor with this psycho, the coherents will find her head, something can be done to sort out all the new holes in her old body, she'll be [i]fine[/i].

Intellectually, she knows all of that is true, but it still feels like a lie when looking into the kindly eyes of the god of the Dead.

She tries to talk once or twice, makes a few false starts of it. Can't bring herself to look away, can't turn her head even if she wanted to. Can't nod with no neck.

Eventually, feeling rather small, she whispers, "I'd like that, please. Is Isty okay?"