Since the day she'd had the Auspex implanted, it had always shown her where to go. Omn had called it the Golden Path - a series of pulses of light that flitted across her vision even when she shut her eyes, always leading her across the fastest, most efficient path from one place to another. The more attention she paid it, the more details unfolded across her vision. She could will it into faint, ignorable specks or make it open a pattern so specific it told her exactly where, when, and how to place her feet to unerringly bring her victory. Or if nothing else, opportunity.

Bella is focusing now. One. Two. Three steps, and that's all there is. Just three steps. She turns her head, looking above and to every side. She frantically spins around, still holding Redana's wrist, but the terrible hydra is all she finds waiting behind her. Three steps, into the middle of this strange, awful hole. And then nothing. She feels ice fall into the pit of her stomach. No, but of course. There's no longer victory to be had. Her opponent is an immortal monster. Her mother. So this is where the eye of Hermes was leading her this entire time. Her mouth turns drier than the desert this planet used to be, and all her tongue can taste on the air is ash. 

She'd been running from death since almost the moment she was born. Starvation and torture at the hands of the Kennel Master, or the hideous fate that waited for her inside the dark confines of the box. The humid, fetid bogs and jungles festering inside the Eater of Worlds. The dark and claustrophobic openness of the lonely floating grave called the [i]Yakanov[/i]. In the end she fled from every single one. No god terrified her more than Hades, whose priest she was forced to murder. Whose priest she failed to save. Even now, with death a certainty ahead of and behind her, a cowardly servitor finds no hero's nobility quickening in her veins. Her heart pounds frantically against her fate. Too little, too late. The lord of the dead stands there waiting. A shovel over his shoulder. And three steps left to her for the rest of her life.

Two. She's long since run out of bile to cough up. Venom eats away her strength and replaces it with the sensation of ten thousand needle teeth clamping down around her insides with powerful jaws to guide them. Skin and organs split, and blood leaks internally. She can feel it pooling in her arm. Come on, is this really how she's gonna go out? She chokes back a scream, but it dribbles out as a whimper. No closure. No happy ending. Just the conclusion of her misery; the proof that she was first and only a wicked monster. No matter how hard she tried to be anything else. Too many sins to count, Bella. Pay up. You did save your coins to pay for the ferry, right? Or was even Tartarus too good for her, compared with eternity trapped inside the close and crushing dark?

One. This is it. The time she has to say goodbye. To say I... to tell Redana the words etched across her heart. To burden her princess with one last thing before the end. Or perhaps, one last chance to redeem herself. The Auspex is the eye of Hermes. The path must be telling her to stand her ground here. In falling, she could save Redana's life. That wouldn't... be so bad. Maybe then, at least, the gods would forgive her for this life she lived so impiously. If only she'd learned how to pray. She glances around one more time. No steps. No Apollo with his insufferable eternal smile. No Artemis in her crisp moonlight suits. No Hera to squeeze strength into her shoulders. Just a cigarette, where Aphrodite used to be. And Hades, all alone.

Bella squeezes Redana's wrist as tightly as she can. It's time you idiot, let her go! The ember of that cigarette butt burns as hot as any star. She twists her fingers deep into the skin, trying to claw herself free only--

Only she'd given up her claws. XIII's claws. And nobody trusted Bella with her talons anymore. Her heartbeat stumbles. Bella feels herself fall as if from a great height, tumbling over and over again into herself without her feet ever leaving the ground. Why? Why, why, why? Why had they taken her claws from her? What did she do to deserve mutilation like this? What did that little girl do wrong to deserve so much pain? Sagakhan had told her it was all to grow her perfected body, but that was already rotting into the sands. So. Then. What if?

Was it... for this?

"Redana, what the fuck are you dooIInG?!"

Bella's feet leave the ground. Her arm is pinned between hers and Redana's bodies, and the only thing she can think to do with the other is throw it tight around the Princess' shoulder and cling. No more steps. There are no more steps for her to take. No more steps, and nothing to do, except be held. And then be kissed.

She feels the warmth of Redana's lips as they press indelicately against hers. Her tongue tastes blood, and for once Bella has no desire to spit it out. She feels no nausea, even as her mouth finds the corner of Redana's that's been split almost entirely open and she's forced to contemplate the texture of a wound on her palate. She holds her eyes open, so she sees Redana's close. It's a private moment that belongs only to her. Their tongues dance, and the expression that paints Redana's face is... relief. Fire roars hot to replace the ice inside her stomach. Hades recedes farther, and farther, and farther away as two children of Tellus take to the sky as if on wings.

Bella is still watching her princess when she opens her eyes again. 'For luck', she says. Moron! Idiot! Stupid dipshit royal dumbass!! Heat colors Bella's cheeks as a fresh surge of pain crawls up through her chest. She snarls as she watches the ground pass below. She clings to Redana to try and hide a coughing fit.

"You still read," she sputters, "Too many fucking stories."