Only in the first contact does she manage to blindly lash out and drag the length of her broken sword along Mynx’s coils. Blind from seeing too much; her eye superimposes entire universes of meaning on the world as it tries to reconnect through a severed nerve. Smears of nebula-color in shining arcs and namelessly perfect shapes; the coils of Mynx as ink, as sculpture, as a tattoo on the skin of the world, which tears at her sword’s edge. It is not unlike being drugged; it is not unlike drinking with Dionysus. What she sees is so meaningful that it has become meaningless.

Sound guides her. Mynx’s vocalizations, so far from human, lacking any real cords which to pluck, because these things are unnecessary, because Mynx is streamlined, she is Demeter’s arrow, and what is an arrow except a shaft and a head, and when Mynx swings her head around and unfolds her jaws, the teeth curving down the inside of her throat are Hades’ mandala, and Dany feels the breath and the tension of her coils and is already moving before her thoughts can escape that mandala, before Bella grabs at a goring horn and snaps it off jagged.

But the second, the third; Mynx is faster, Mynx knows her better than she knows herself, Mynx is everywhere that her broken blade is not. Mynx’s tail knocks her from her feet and when it lands on her again, smashes her hip half in. Trying to grab her scales slices her hand open, and the grass strains to meet that precious blood dripping down.

She staggers up, limps, clings to her sword’s hilt like it’s a lifeline. She is not afraid. Not like Skotos feared Thist. Why isn’t she afraid? There is a hole in her where it should be, and it overflows with light and blood, and she trails both behind her as she sees the shape of what she needs to do.

She lunges and paints a red line across Bella’s throat, which sprouts into horn and ivory, and even as Bella kicks her knee in, she reverses her grip on the hilt—

And Mynx is there. Mynx cannot be anywhere else. Even like this, she advances where she should withdraw, she lets loose a wordless howl from deep inside of her, and Redana cannot say whether it is bloodlust or fury. All Dany knows is to strike. A hit; a palpable hit.

This, then, this lands. And the only question remaining is whether Bella can see it, too. The question of whether they can stand up against each other is no question at all. If it opens Mynx’s guard, one way or another, they will stand up against each other. Dany strikes her own chest and roars her own challenge to them both, that she can keep her broken feet beneath her, that she fights like her parents, that she can take it. That she deserves it, that they deserve it, that the boil must be lanced hot and sharp and clean.

And if the roar is a word, if there is a shape to it, it is: [i]Avaunt![/i]