[b]Bella![/b]

The blade is still falling. Slowly, slowly, slowly - time is grinding as gradually as it dares, the Grandfather Clock giving you all that it can without stopping entirely. You have this world, this power, the full support of Love and Time and War and the Hunt, but the blade is still falling and you do not have forever.

You must wield this power to sever the wrist that holds the blade before it is too late.

[b]Dyssia![/b]

The Electromagnetic Flux is a curse. Zeus placed it in the heart of every living creature at the height of the Atlas Cultural Sphere. Concentrate your hate into the null-space of electricity denied and you can create a power-absorbing vortex of false electricity that can black out an entire city. This was Zeus' compromise with those glittering miracles of electricity, those false minds: if in all the worlds they owned, they had built a place that did not hate them then they would survive. 

You read this once. You're not sure where - just the sort of thing you picked up along the way. It's not a secret, it's just the sort of thing that doesn't matter in the Skies. The galaxy could have the Matrioshka Brains back any time it could make one no one wanted to destroy. But the idea of making something nobody hated was so plainly absurd that nobody even bothered to try. Not with hate as sophisticated and weaponized as the Lawgiver's still in active circulation.

The thought has wandered into your head as you think about the sword in your hand and the point where it impales Dikal's heart. Where do these blades keep coming from? One seemed like a divine miracle, a one of a kind blessing wielded by a chosen hero. But you just drew one from [i]somewhere[/i], just like that, and cut through Zeus' curse, just like that, and you don't feel like you'd invoked any gods in particular leading up to it.

So... were these blades everywhere, then? A blessing, in the same way the Flux was a curse? All you needed to draw them was feel that kind of emotion that wasn't hate, that was...

"DOWN!" roars the Shogun. You barely react in time as a bloody arrow scorches overhead.

In the center of the ring of fire, the Empress-Abomination has taken off her leg and made it into a terrible bow of bone and skin. She bites off a fingertip without a blink, pulling and stretching it until it is a long and terrible barbed arrow, and sets it against the tendon-bowstring. She brings it up again to aim at you. Dikal is still out of it as the enchanted sword burns through the darkness of her heart, there is only a cloud of cigarette smoke where Bella and Redana used to be, the Shogun is crippled and can't move further - and the God of Haste smiles as she sights against your heart.