[i]Once upon a time there was a city which was also a planet, alone in the sky. So many people lived here that they crammed themselves into houses as big as this room, and stacked these houses on top of each other, and they still decided that they needed people who would take care of them. So they made Servitors, people woven into purpose from before they were even born. And the ruler of all these people was - is - a woman named Nero. She is their Empress.

She is immortal, but she still decided she needed a child in case anything happened to her. She was the baby's mother, and the baby's father - or, well, other mother - was Zeus, King of the Gods, the Thunderer, beautiful and powerful. And to make sure her baby was safe, she had a palace built just for her. You could have had fifty houses instead of that palace! But she needed a space which was big, and secure, and allowed her baby to run around when she got big enough.

Her daughter - a princess - grew up studying military history and political theory and mathematics and applied theology and economics, and she wasn't good at it. At any of it, really, except for the theology. So to encourage her daughter, the Empress promised her a Servitor of her very own to be her maid, who was named Bella. And they grew up together, and even though they knew they weren't allowed to fall in love, they did anyway, and they both kept it a secret from the other.

The princess loved her maid, and she wanted to be free and find the stars, and she wanted people to be able to live in houses that weren't little boxes stacked on top of each other (because she'd snuck out with her maid to see how her people lived). So with the blessing of her father, she stole one of her guardians, a great big four-armed statue named Alexa, and she stole a ship, and she launched it into orbit. She had to leave her maid behind because Bella was frightened for her and threatened to tell her mommy- the Empress. That is.

And when she did this, Hades - the lord of the dead, the keeper of vaults, the last king - showed up on her ship and told her that if she took a message from him to Ancient Gaia, her wish would be granted.

Along the way, the princess ran into a crew of pirates, and Alexa threatened to beat them all up, but it turned out that two of them, Vasilia and Dolce, were so moved by her story that they decided to come along with her and Alexa. They traveled across the stars, pursued by Bella in her very own ship, and... well, lots of things happened. They found a city inside a giant turtle and a planet where Dionysus ruled robots in madness. They found a shipwrecked fleet and a kingdom full of snakes - but not this snake. She comes later. On the other side of the river.

On the desert world of Sahar they fought against Bella's evil stepmother, who was the Master of Assassins - who had trained Bella - and the princess and Bella, together again, managed to defeat her. It was very difficult. It was one of the scariest things to ever happen to the princess, fighting there. But they won. And after that they came to the very end of the world, the House of Hades - and they discovered that they had been in the underworld the whole time. The princess was just a princess of the dead. All her people, the last humans, their empire fell and was consumed and was damned, the whole time.

To get here, to the land of the living, they had to cross the Lethe, which is a river which eats memories. When the princess and Bella made it to the other side - and Alexa didn't come, she stayed behind, so many of their friends stayed behind, but Dolce and Vasilia refused to stay - they didn't remember each other. Not with their memories. But their hearts still remembered, and they fell in love again, not as princess and maid but as a knight and a demigoddess.

They continued on. And, eventually, they regained their memories. They got married. And they kept coming, with the Silver Divers who the princess led, with the brilliant Azura snake-woman Dyssia, with the people of Bitemark and Bella's assassin-sisters and the Tides of Poseidon who we could never get out of the flooded sectors of our ship.

And now they're here. Because Hades told the princess that if she brought a message to Ancient Gaia, she and her companions would be able to make a Wish.[/i]

"So let me introduce myself again. I'm Redana Honorius Claudius. I'm the daughter of the Empress Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Tellurian of Ecumenopolis, and I'm the alpha of the Ceronian hunting-clan known as the Silver Divers, who worship Poseidon, and most importantly, I'm Bella's wife. I can fight, but I can't fight like [i]you[/i] can. I don't think anyone I've ever met can fight like you, though Bella comes really close. And we're here, all of us, here, because we're carrying a message, and because we've all got a Wish. Though the funny thing is, the really funny thing is, I think just being here is going to fulfill my most recent Wish. This whole time I was trying to make it so that I could go back home and save everyone, but I've figured out how I'm going to do that, and who I'm going to be when I do that, and now I think I know how I'm going to [i]become[/i] her. But... I'm sorry, that's a lot, isn't it? You can call me Dany if you like. <3"