There are limits to imagination, you know. Mira has been gifted a perfect position. Solarel has put a golden blade in her hands, as good a gift as her very own heart. Mm. Correction. That is more or less what she is holding, in actual fact. But still. But still? But still. What is she to do with these gifts? For all her bluster she is not and has never been a huntress. She has never stood astride one of the Great Beasts, and for all she has tried to imagine this moment that is not the same as being able to [i]picture[/i] it. 

The core is exposed. What does that mean? If she pierces it she will expose her arm to raw crystal fire. Possibly worse? She does not want to die. She does not want to lose and need to replace it. She does not want to lose it and find out it cannot be replaced because of the strange curse of a god. She wants to lose her partner because of her own hesitation even less. Nonetheless, for a moment she cannot picture it. So all she does is shift her feet and hold the sword.

"Solarel?"

The sound of her voice dies before it reaches her ears. But in this place of melting possibilities and confused air currents, it carries down below and all around her into a hundred different cameras. She is certain she is heard. She can see herself being heard. This is speech that is solely for other ears, other hearts to listen to. Just as well.

"Do you remember my words at the fashion show? I asked you to watch me. I told you. Told you I would show you. Show you my dreams. And I... have. But I spoke of something else, as well. In another voice, and to other people. I... only just understood my own riddle. I think."

It had not been her intention, when she conceived her final dress. The battle was meant to be over by now. But still. But still? But still. All of a sudden she sees it, as clearly as if she'd written it into the schematics herself. A Huntress? A Mercenary? A Knight? No. All of these, and more. Why did the Children of Hybrasil carry so many names, if not to use them all? This. This is how she hunts. This is how she walks the mountain.

"When! You are brave enough to put the body ahead of your own sense of cleverness? You can do... THIS."

Her dress was made to be the melding of the three great cultures. Part of that meant that it was composed of nanomachines. Mira had no claim to mastery of these mysteries. Irrelevant. She had two things to replace it. First: a desire to express love that overrode the need to maintain her own sense of aesthetic purity. And second: a device she has worn as a pendant ever since the moment she first became aware of it. Back when it had almost killed her. The container for the Geist that Solarel had infected the Gods-Smiting Whip with. 

Her perfect dress is dissipating. Flowing up her body, lace turned to liquid silver that flows into the shining golden sword and fades into immaterial nothingness. Every thread that disappears from her body returns in the shape of the tip of a longer and longer blade. It does not gain mass, does not change shape into something more suited for wielding its new size. It simply becomes longer. Longer and longer and longer, thin and delicate and deadly. A needle worthy of a god. And flowing through it, poison. 

There is nothing left of her dress except for the veil and the train, which drape across her body like the whispers of an old song. All of her spots, all of her beauty, and all of her imperfections are bared to the open sky and the scars of the Nine Drive System. But she has no name for this last technique. It would be laughable to call it a technique in the first place. All she does is drop her gift, and watch it pierce the core of a God. 

It stabs all the way through to the ground beneath it, where its length unravels. A masterpiece fit for a bride pools at Solarel's feet.