[i]avaunt: begone. depart. used in contempt or abhorrence.[/i]

All her weaknesses are behind her. That’s the great, awful paradox of Redana Claudius standing up to a monster again: she can fight him without the desire to kill, but only because all her desire is here, is Bella, is Yue fighting an army, is little sheeps soaking up sunlight on the Terraced Lakes. Red strings like plover cables hooked into her back.

Her sword is more than a sword. It’s the sort of sword you could call a secret.

She ducks, weaves, dances with each step a cut. And each cut is: the rain slowly filling the empty lake back in. The little mountainside shrines. Vegetable dumplings that have a little bit of crunch to them.

[i]avaunt![/i]

She’s crying wordlessly as she tries, over and over again, to interpose herself, to interpose her sword, between the monster at the end of the road and her friends, her compatriots, the Coherent who joined her in the bowels of the [i]Plousios,[/i] the assassins who are her sisters-in-law and trainers and sword-companions, Alexa whose heart could always be trusted, and she does not think about her mother — tyrant, monster, goddess, heroine — because to do this would be to sink to her knees and weep as her world is torn apart, and she has been there before, and now she is a flickering sword which is too slow, over and over, but she bites deep and cold and without thought for every strike.

[i]avaunt![/i]

But the cables of her heart are severed, one by one, until all that’s left are the promise of Gaia and Bella’s beating heart. And she slows.

She is, in the end, insufficient.

Her heart throbs with the desire to cradle Alexa, to attend to Taurus and Gemini and Mynx, to help her mother up to her feet. She cannot think about any of them as dead. Not yet. So she cuts everything in front of her and tries desperately to make space for Bella.

Bella, who will know what to do.

Bella, who she [b]loves[/b] so, so much.

Bella, who she has died for before.

[i]avaunt![/i]