... Don't look. 

Don't you know it's rude to look at a girl's secret garden without defeating her in a heart duel? You'd know that if you knew better. Visions in the ice aren't trustworthy, they're the sort of things you feel only as the cold sets in. What is a sniper rifle but a longer pistol? What is a pistol but a longer spear? What is a spear but a way to not have to talk to anyone? The whole progression of the galaxy bends around the enforcement of solitude, getting further and further away from those who try to draw close. Speak not to the outsider. 

And that's the heart of war, of love, of Tactics. She knows you. She'll see through your heart from ten kilometers away and put a mag-rail slug through it with a wink. All the girls fallen at her feet, none of them grew close enough to know how to stop her. What is politics but a way to acquire enough enemies that one of them might catch a glimpse? A mistake - ah, a mistake. She'd missed the first shot. She'd aimed at Mirror's heart and misjudged, and from that imperfection the One Day Defense had flowered. She hadn't understood that demon knight for whom every twitch was deliberate, who bent her every effort to explaining who and what she was. She'd drawn closer, closer, closer. Inside the reach of her rifle. Inside the reach of her spear. Not close enough. There was still something she was missing. In the search to find it she'd revealed too much of herself. Revealed enough to be seen in turn. Revealed enough to lose.

One win. One loss. A star and its shadow, an order upset. Was she higher or lower? Perfection was an ordered galaxy where everything knew its place, but where was hers? Is it such a surprise she obsesses over this fight beyond every other when it's the difference between divinity and mortality? 

She cracks the canopy of the Kathresis. The wind rushes in. The smells of the earth, the flavours of wildflowers, the rippling impacts of stealth alloys against mud and slate. She's running through a disordered world of colour and grass, pollen and misty fog and buzzing bees. A disordered world with a disordered giant at its heart. It was beautiful in a way the storm plains of Roevg never were; an explosion of life unconcerned with the passage of consuming thunderstorms, a riot of hills unassigned by the needs of ancient barrow-factories. Not one thing nor the other. Was its indecision beautiful or did she only think that because she was indecisive?

She went through her basic forms again. Cut and parry and counter. Sometimes the most tricky thing a trickster could do was take a fair fight. A final ace up her sleeve. The last few meters of reach between her and the outside.