This is wrong.

Redana scrabbles with a monster. The world around them is blotted out, overexposed; it will be easy enough for Sagakhan to kill them both. All that matters is the wasteland beneath her, leverage to push against, and the monster above her. It is pitiful, vicious, and not her Bella.

Nothing about this creature is right at all. It howls, rages, thrashes, attempts to gouge out her eyes, tears into her flesh. It’s not her Bella. And that’s what gives Dany the strength to fight back. Because the heroine needs to set things right; because the damsel in distress needs to be saved. And there is so much distress, rolling off Bella’s heart like waves breaking on the shore, in her hot, heavy groans of wet breath, in the blood flecking on them both.

It hurts. It hurts so much. The Shepherdess’s blood is bright, star-flecked, refusing to be absorbed into the sand. The creature’s claws tear through her breastplate as if it was wet paper, laying her open, but Bella’s trapped behind those savage blows, and that’s why Dany is able to fight back.

She’s a wrestler, after all. Did you forget?

The Shepherdess lifts Bella off the ground, as Hercules lifted Antaeus, her back flayed to ribbons underneath the whip of Bella’s claws, and Redana does a little hop and spikes her back down to the ground, sand spraying up in great gouts, and Dany pounces to get Bella’s arms locked behind her, pinned between them.

“I never should have left you behind,” Dany says, pushing her weight down on the writhing, scrabbling monster trying desperately to break free. “I never should have left you with [i]her.[/i]” Joints crack and pop; Bella tears herself free with a raw scream, pivots about with jerking limbs to keep hurting, keep killing, and Dany tackles her again, gets bloodied fingers into the place where the helmet meets the skin and she [i]pulls.[/i] Osseous plating comes free with a sickeningly wet pop, sinew snapping, exposing blood-matted hair to the rain. “I wanted to share it all [i]with[/i] you, you idiot!”

Bella lunges again, and Dany’s fist snaps out, but too slow, wrong place; teeth clamp around her wrist and crunch. Dany bites down the scream, because now she’s close enough, now Bella is distracted by the rush of her shining Olympian blood, because now she’s close enough to reach across Bella’s body with her other hand, her trembling bloodied fingers.

And the Shepherdess, who knows the secret words, who understands the shapes of unseen things, wipes Bella’s forehead clean with her star-clotted blood.

The coolness. The relief. The rivulets, flowing down, filling the thousand thousand names, drowning them beneath:

[i]The confusing feeling of staring at Bella’s lips for too long. The thump-thump-thump of her soothing heartbeat while they napped in the garden. The most amazing creature in the whole world peering out of a Box. The fear of ruining everything forever. Yearning without a name. The guilt of imagining holo heroines with triangles and impeccable diction. The confusion, the betrayal, the throb of a cheek. The dream of sitting beneath strange skies and being alone and free and able to do anything. The mortification of waking up from a dream of dressing in each other’s clothes, Princess Bella Claudius and Good Little Dany. Screaming upon the deck of the Plousios because it’s too late now, because Bella will die alone and thinking herself unloved. The pain of Barassidar, of betrayal, of knowing that Bella never cared for her. Cuddling together while the Batrachomyomachia unfurls onscreen, buried beneath blankets. The horror of seeing the helmet crack and who was beneath, who was tortured, who was made a weapon when she never should be, when she could be a queen, an explorer, a scholar, more than just a Servitor, equal to any human Dany had ever met in her life—[/i]

Redana [i]Epimelios[/i] crumples to her knees, clutching her brutalized wrist to her chest, like a Servitor waiting for execution. She tries to speak, but her clever words don’t have the breath behind them to be more than hoarse gasps for air; she can’t even lift her head to look Death Herself in the eye.

Redana awaits her judgment.

[Redana damages her Courage and expends the second use of her Healing for her Bella. [b]7[/b] on a Finish with Wisdom.]