The scales fall from her eyes. Blinking, her vision clears, and the dragon comes into focus. Her muted silks flap in the wind, hugging her body with the speed of her approach. She is a flower, rushing to the sun. She is an arrow, fletched with promise. She will not run away. She will not break. This time, she will meet her opponent head-on. Give the dragon a thousand thousand words, Han would not believe her. Let her hear the song of her laugh and the thrum of her umbrella, and the duel works its greatest magic yet. The world goes white. Hurtling through the air, Han opens herself up, and great rivers of essence pour into her insatiable heart. Raising her blade, Han opens herself up, and essence floods out of her in waves of blistering heat. In. Out. The dragon beneath her skin writhes and rages to escape this body, and a barrier the width of a tissue frustrates its claws. She dances on the knife-edge of transformation, pushing the excess of essence from her body in the breath before it can burn her out from the inside. She glows impossibly bright, a star in the shape of a girl, flying to the foe. Where her foot strikes the earth, it hisses and bubbles beneath her. Slipping, melting, where she expected to find solid ground. In slow motion, she topples forward, no tool to hand but her sword. Her sword. She tenses, and releases. The force of her strike spins her full around. The force of her strike stops her fall. The force of her strike is the fire of her heart, released at once in a clap of thunder. It explodes out from her, a blazing, tilted ring, racing away from her on a burning wind. Plants turn to dust moments before their ashes are scattered to the winds. Bound demigods are sent tumbling from the melee to fall in a breathless, squeaking heap. The ring of fire slices tree limbs clean off, blackening the stumps in an instant. It digs a flaming trench in the earth before Han, racing to meet the oncoming dragon. Try to dodge; all the air is a furnace. The ground is full of fire, licking at silks and shoes. But the fire is not the danger. Neither was flash-powder, or nets, or ropes, or clouds of smoke, or any tool of this clever dragon of the Dominion. She knows this, now. The real threat is not the fire. It is the girl. Always the girl. And there is Han, leaping in close from the heart of the flames. Thrusting with her sword, red-hot. Clawing with her free hand, wreathed in embers. She is fire, and the fire is truth, and the fire is honesty. She who will burn away all masks and all lies. Step forward, and she will show the world who you are, daughter of dragons. [Han rolls one last Fight, taking aim at Piri's mask, and the dice say 1 + 2 + 2 = [b]5[/b]]