Who lights the way to the grave? Who walks with you when no one else will? Who knows the path and will lead you to the final rest? Who loves you in the dark, who sees you for who you are and knows you?

Who but Hermes?

The Shepherdess is not Hermes, but there’s no one else here to do the work. She can’t slip away yet. Not while Bella’s still in danger; not while everyone she loves is at the mercy of this hydra’s poisoned tongue, her wicked deconstructing talons. For a moment she stands there, neither in the grave nor wholly outside it, and the universe expands all around her— that universe torn in half by the wound, by Molech’s roar, by the sin of hubris. She stands on the lip of the grave, and in the depths of one far vaster.

A cigarette butt smoulders in the grave. It is going to burn through, right to the other side of the reel. [i]Say, turn this record over, you ain’t heard nothing yet.[/i] The only thing in the cold and the dark that could possibly do it. The connection’s on the tip of her tongue and it burns as if Aphrodite snuffed it out there, as if Bella was drawing out the venom again (sobbing and cursing and shaking the hero), and all she can say is that it burns like gold, see how it shines, the golden joinery racing from planet to planet, broken and beautiful, beautiful [i]because[/i] it was broken, reaching out for an answer she just can’t see yet from this side of the door, but her fingers are on the lintel, and she’s almost there, the whole wide whirling burn of it, the clatter of the empty reel, and Bella is digging her fingers (the ones with no claws, oh, Bella, the ones without claws) into her arm, because oh, here comes the dragon at the end of it all, here comes the monster who will make a desolation of this place once more, here comes death by venom and fire and snapping jaws.

She scoops Bella up into her arms, holds her close: one set of legs instead of two, one body instead of two, less chance of something or someone being left behind. She’s heavy. Not like that, like— there’s so much of her. Dany could never hope to do this. But the Shepherdess can, and she knows to squeeze Bella close, to reassure her that she’s not at risk of falling, that she can trust. That her princess isn’t going to leave her behind again, no matter how bad this breaks, no matter what she did while the gods set whips at her heels, no matter what she did wrapped in bones, for the sake of a dance with a hound. For the sake of a kiss.

[i]Masters don’t abandon their pets. Don’t you dare![/i]

And at the very last moment, the Shepherdess, who trusts in that cigarette butt but not blindly, who knows too many people have walked the last road with regrets sour on their lips, who is so terribly aware of the awesome power of the many-headed death barreling towards them, kisses Bella, and the kiss tastes like their blood intermingling, heat on heat, and everything unspools before and behind, the rattle of the empty reel, the sizzle of the burning film, surrounded by death before and behind and below and above, and not even the Shepherdess can see right now what she’s put into motion, but she’d have died regretful if she hadn’t taken the chance—

“For luck,” she pants in giddy explanation, and jumps.

[Redana, hoping to outsmart Sagakhan like a rabbit waving a red cape in front of an empty grave, rolls an [b]8.[/b]]