3 Chapter Three

Drawing her wings to her scales, the dragon dove for the river, still so full of fury that her wings twitched, then thrashed, sending her surging back to bristling stormclouds, so gorged with pent rain and lightning that the prickling condensation vented immediately from her red-hot scales as steam spray.

Her mouth burned, and her chin was so wet with her own fire-bright blood that the bottom of her eyesight glowed red. Snapping her wings back, she plummeted again for the river, this time hurtling so hard the wind tore through her slashed lip, gouged gums, the two shattered teeth that widened the wound as her snarl rubbed against their jagged remnants, and the tears of pain that blurred her reddened vision. When she landed on the riverbank, the surface bubbled, rising to a timid boil as she approached.

The dragon gazed in the simmering river, grateful her injuries were misted by the agitated water.

As the river raged, her fury smoldered. While it faded, it did not die, but dimmed to a smoky, ashy spark that flashed, drawing stark attention to her thoughts. Having been buried under the passions of dragonkind, her human thoughts were unfamiliar things. As she recognized her intent, it seemed strange, alien, almost horrific to contemplate. If she consented with her frail human shadow, where would her fire go? Would part of her die? As there could be no doubt her dragon part had become the largest part of her, this sniveling Suvani was just the jagged little puzzle piece that had completed the whole dragon. Wholeness, the old voice breathed. Revenge, her dragon heart burned. Torn between healing and retaliation, sheer malice devoured them both, and she swallowed her pride, and the vast enormity of herself that was dragon, and released the spell.

Yowtch! As Suvani tottered in a smoking, four-toed dragon claw-print, her high heels caught on fire, scorching the soles of her feet, and as she staggered toward the river, her heels crunched and snapped, pitching her onto the burning hot sand. Just as she was about to catch herself, and catch her hands on fire, she spoke another spell, entirely by reflex. and floated up in midair. Levitating herself forward until she was pendulous over the river, Suvani dipped gingerly, by quarter inches, until she touched the bubbling water. Ow! She drew her blistering fingertip to her mouth. The lake was scalding hot.

When a bloody drizzle drew spirals in the water, she raised the back of her hand to her torn mouth, and wiped away a bead of blood.

The boiling fizzed, then died, as the spread of blood shadowed the water, until the surface crackled bright.

All that ice from a drop of blood. Suvani smiled, then snarled. She was weary of change. Only her uncle, the Regent, had worked any change for her good. The Stranger had changed her for good,

if not for the good, Jezera and Vemulus had changed sides, and the sphinx had changed her face so it wasn't quite so becoming. She was done with becoming, with changing, with living as anything other than Suvani. While her power was plenipotent, she need not flow through the power to do as it wished.

She was not a mere enchanted flower, corrupted by the whimsy of its magic, but a flower of herself.

In this form, her injuries weren't so severe, having shrunk like everything else, not that they weren't painful, but having expected to see a scarred and torn mouth, she instead saw a fat lip, welling with blood. While the eye was gone, slashed to jelly by King Ulryk, the eyelid had puckered over it, so that if she combed her hair a different way, who would every know?

Suvani would know. As she pulled her lips back and flashed her teeth in the river, she winced,

less from the pain of stretching her swollen, split lip over her broken eye tooth than the sight of it, cut so deep she could see her gums, and she almost blanked out in fear and rage. She couldn't bring herself to pull back the eyelid. Not that she had no stomach for gore, having slaughtered enemies, dissidents,

and those she had simply deemed too weak to live, but she couldn't have the sight of her ruined eye efface her self-image. Once indelibly traced in her memory, she would never cut it out so easily.

They had done this to her! How dare she!

Not that flesh wasn't easily healed, being clay to magic. Having the borrowed power to become a dragon, she had little doubt she could heal herself, but neither memory nor pride were so easily mended. While the eye was gone and beyond repair, first she healed her eye socket and eyelids. When she healed her mouth, her image was nearly restored, but her self-image was still scratched, and would be so, until the sphinx was shattered to pieces. Her eyelid hung slack, making that side seem slow-witted, and she seethed hot, as if the dragon within expanded her coils, wanting to burst free.

By giving in to the dragon, she had given in to the Stranger. While she scarcely minded being steeped in his wicked darkness, and had made good use of his bestowal of power, she resented feeling his mark, and fumed at the thought others could perceive his influence. As she stewed, new ambitions brewed within: The Stranger was just another crown to usurp.

As dragon vapor and smoke dissolved, the hazy horizon cleared, revealing her werewolf shock troops heading for Oji's front rank, a hodge podge with bears, stags, unicorns, Terianan and Ephremian infantry, and black lions. As the two armies glimpsed each other, they stepped up their march, hastening to battle.

Or so they thought. Suvani smirked. A tyrant's work is never done. They won't get their marching orders from their own dull brains, she sighed, then yawned. When her enchanted aura flexed,

about to shape to her unspoken wishes before she could gather her thoughts, she scowled and crammed back the countless shapes the power suggested. She might make a monster out of herself by the time her reign was done, but she would never become another terror. Let the terrors flow from Suvani.

The idea conjured a wicked grin. From each hand, darkness blasted, shaping the shining ice into two black stags, their antlers like twisted brambles adorned with glossy black roses frosted with ice crystals. As they pranced to shore, their hooves kicked up ice and foam, but they did not break the surface, being buoyant as shadows. They trailed long links of sea foam, a gigantic chain dragging a sled of bright black ice from the river. Let Vemulus eat his heart out. She could make her own chariot.

She snickered. Maybe she would beat him to it, and eat his heart out first. But the civilized way, for she was done with devouring foes with a dragon's mouth. Everything she had tasted as a dragon--

in fact, everything sensed--was tainted by the dragon's wildfire senses. To a dragon, the whole world was on fire. Even what dragons ate tasted of ashes and smoke. The Gaonan king should have been true epicurean fare, her first cannibal dish, but was instead slag fired to soot by the dragon's infernal metabolism. It would be a knife and fork for her from now on.

Having boarded her icy sledge, Suvani stooped by the back rim and snatched a piece of ice floating in the river. As the melting chunk dripped down her sleeve, she breathed on it, and it crackled with new frost. Her incantation was etched in such icy syllables that the spell seemed to crackle midair until she finished, when unseen needles shaped and sculpted the ice into an eye. She breathed on it again, and the iris became blue.

Plucking the cold eye in her fingers, she inserted it into her socket, and just as the excruciating brain freeze hammered her skull, she intoned another spell, gloving the eye in such a thin sheen of magic, only the tiniest tendrils of ice need touch her optic nerves. The constant irritation would be irksome, but it was worth it, not only to see the world in three dimensions, but to save face.

Now she was ready. If she was a little late, well, her insufferable doppelganger had no compunctions about being fashionably late, having a poor work ethic and the abominable taste to prefer being fashionable to timely. Timely was timeless. Timely was classic. Hitting the right beats at the right time in the right tempo was what power was about. If she was late, it was destined. If not arriving at the appointed time, she would grace her destination at the auspicious time. Ivanu could wait until another universe died, as far as she cared.

At her next frosty syllable, the icy stags crackled to life, shedding ice crystals as they galloped down the river, the water freezing where their hooves kicked, their path marked not only by the river freezing solid, but crystallized spray from their trotting hooves, billowing gusts of foam freezing to fragile, crystalline tendrils.

In minutes, they had galloped past her armies' left flank, still fortified by the gigantic Daikonese elders, whose scowling beasts and archers grumbled at the base of their trunks, making as gloomy a march as could be imagined.

Such unpunished ingratitude was bad for morale, and Suvani wouldn't stand for it. Not that she wouldn't be charitable. She would be magnanimous.

Flashing her widest smile, she blew them a kiss. Like the rising plume of an ocean wave, a gust of arctic wind rippled through the hazy battlefield, ropes of dragon smog flash-freezing with a crinkling puff, and adding a snowy momentum to the chill wind caking steam-sleet, smog-tainted snow, and gray icicles on the Daikonese.

As Suvani's chariot sledge skidded past, she left her armies not only in her dust, but in mounting snow, which heaped up in vast snowbanks. Suvani snickered. Suvani let the moment drag as long as she could, but she needed the enchanted snow to fall in front of the stags, and released her leftward columns. While she didn't deign to favor them with another glance, the earth was still so uncomfortably and unseasonably hot that the snow would melt in minutes. If she had frozen their forward march, that served her purposes, for her lazy generals ought to have conquered the entire supercontinent by now and deserved a bit of a shock.

The heat was affecting the stags as well, who crackled as they galloped, every hoofbeat a splintering tremor to these icy beasts. Once such enchanted constructs might have cost her dearly, but she was still spending the Stranger's immense bequeath of borrowed power. By glancing out of the corner of her good eye, she could see it shroud her like a cloak of shadows, but only for a fraction of an instant, before the air shivered back to gray. After Suvani received this influx from the Stranger, the world had numbed until daylight was no brighter than shade, and Suvani always felt gloom pressing in--if not his deepest darkness, then the constant reminder of his penumbra.

"Wait!"

Suvani's eyebrow arched. Which of these bootlickers dared to get her attention? Calling after her as if she was a common scout?

"Your majesty! Wait!" She knew that irritating yapping, although she couldn't place the name. Not that it mattered, not when he had contracted terminal stupidity, and would likely not live out the next minute. She sighed a syllable that halted the train of icy stags, and the sledge came to a crunch on the snow. As they rested there, the dragon-heated earth steamed the snow to a rising vapor condensing on her cheeks and nose.

"Yes?" She had intended a warm, almost affectionate tone, but her new teeth, being mostly ice, bit off her answer so sharply, that the loping werewolf, came to a wary halt, then stepped slowly the rest of the way, his ungainly, hybrid legs like long, furry scissors.

General Cortero, she told herself. No, Cortero was the piggy oaf, the general of her karik knights. Vemulus had gotten a reluctant chuckle out of her when he had sympathized with the karik bearing his gigantic load. Thinking of the crass joke, she laughed. It would always be good for a laugh,

however much her hatred for Vemulus was evergreen and however much Cortero was dead. No, this was General Cheruk. Vemulus's right hand man, really more of a left hand wolfman, being sent to do Vemulus's dirty work, even in wartime.

"How goes it at the front line?"

The werewolf panted the last few steps, then drew in such a heavy breath that Suvani flinched,

a spell mounting unbidden on the tip of her tongue, only to melt as the breath sobbed out, a huge doggy sob that managed to twinge Suvani's frayed heartstrings. While Suvani didn't know pity, she did know pathetic when she saw it, and that the mangy werewolf most definitely was.

"Prince Vemulus is dead!"

In the ensuing silence, she heard only his snuffles and the ongoing crackling of the melting snow-stags, and drew the back of her hand through the moisture dewing her cheeks, brow, and eyes.

The water came away smelling strangely salty. Her eyes puffed so blearily that her palm irritated the corners of her eyes, and anger stirred as she gripped the icy bar of the chariot and pulled herself up.

That, in and of itself, was a shock, for she did not remembered falling to one knee. The chariot ice was so cold, her knee burned and peeled, tearing along with a streamer of her gown as she staggered to her feet. Her heart pounded, a deep, sonorous knell that throbbed in her whole being.

Even as she teetered on the brink of grief, this strange intruder that had turned her inside out and upside down, she could not lie to herself. She hated Vemulus. With a passion. That much was certain. But he had been the foundation of her contrary heart for so long. If he hated something, she loved it; if he loved something, she practiced indifference; when he resented her, she was affectionate. Without Vemulus, she was not only anchor-less but rudder-less, not only without center but without direction.

"You're smiling," Suvani snarled, and the werewolf backpedalled, then scampered in a half-circle to her other side as if tethered to a leash, his jaws still japing and drawing her hand out on its own accord, her nails topped with icy talons that slashed through his tabard. Vemulus's tabard, the prince's colors, perhaps her last chance to backhand Vemulus, if only by this proxy cur who didn't know whether to flee or cringe, so pure, abject, and unquestioning was the fear that gaped back, his eyes red-rimmed, furious but terrified. Blood welled through the sliced fabric, then stemmed instantly.

"I see why my brother made you his whipping boy," she snickered, then slashed again, this time plucking his left ear and drawing out a bloodcurdling howl.

"This is my thanks?" Cheruk clapped a hand to his oozing ear, which had already slowed to a seeping scar, bubbling up in a tiny, furry bud which soon would be a new ear. "I have served long and faithfully."

"Faith!" Suvani cackled. "Did you expect a promotion?" As her sarcastic smirk seethed, she only barely maintained her wry composure. She wanted to rip the werewolf to shreds, mismatch them, and see how they healed. "Perhaps you want to cash out and retire? I know--you would take his place, and offer me your cringing hand."

"I would never!" Cheruk growled. "Never! Never think of it."

"Am I so vile?"

The growl rattled very near a roar, his remaining ear shifted until it pointed straight at her, and his jowls stretched into an ugly grimace, his fangs bristling from his distended mouth and sending a shiver thrilling down her spine. Even though he looked at least half anaconda, her shudder died in cold disgust as she remembered how she had shrank from the dragon's shattered image in the water to a shattered, half-blind witch holding on to a dark god's power. When she raised a glowing finger, his mouth puckered to a dismal frown as he cowered and whimpered, "no harm was done, your majesty. I come for orders, not gifts."

"I wanted harm done, you mangy mutt. You repulse me, with your roiling, unquiet flesh ever oozing from wolf to man, and your loyalties just as oily and backsliding--Faith!--" Suvani convulsed with shrieks of laughter. "--more chameleon than lycanthrope! You pretend morals even under my heel?"

"It is as you say, your majesty," whined Cheruk. This worthless, mangy weremutt, is not fit to polish the dragon's scales."

"Dragon?" As her hilarity drained, Suvani felt more deflated than angry as she scowled down from the chariot. "What is a dragon to me?" Her rage had become gray, smoldering in the dark void,

as if her soul had ebbed to a thin, smoky shred, burned to a nub by the Stranger's gift.

"You swept the army back in shape, your majesty. If not for your wings and fire, your armies might have wasted away to stragglers, hunted down at leisure by Oji's lions."

"You think me the dragon?" Even as she tittered, hissing the lie like a flattening balloon, her cheeks burned. "How dare you label me a disgusting shapeshifter! As if you could have anything in common with your queen."

"Forgive me," fawned Cheruk. "I only thought, 'who else could summon this much power.'"

"Perhaps the Stranger." She seethed, hating this half-truth the instant she uttered it. "You will die if you spread this rumor, as I want none to think me beholden to that divine ne'er-do-well for my victories."

"It will be as you say," yapped Cheruk, a relieved grin on his doggy face. As he stood on his hindlegs, fawning his paws over the chariot rail, he came very near to scratching and soiling her gown.

When she cast a dart of white light at his feet, he scampered back a step.

"Remember your place, General Cheruk." Suvani laced the words with as much disdain as she could. "Do I have your attention."

The General only whined, crouched, and bowed his head on his paws.

"Lead my forces straight ahead, following the river to a mountain pass. Having gone through,

continue marching until you receive your next orders from one who wears my image."

By degrees, Cheruk looked crestfallen, then perplexed, then irritated, then more than a little angry. "Your majesty, we have nothing to fear from Oji. We are more than his equal, my queen."

Suvani's lips curled as she surveyed his disgusting, shapeshifting feelings. "Did I ask for your advice?" While she wearied of berating her brother's toady, it was a trifle amusing to watch him dangle on the hook, so puzzled it pained him, his fangs full of pensive questions and unvoiced criticism.

"While you could never think like me, soon all may be clear, even to you."

"Yes your majesty." The corners of his cringing smile perked up, as if he thought of some petty revenge to take on his queen. "Don't you want to know how?"

"What?" She scoffed. "How to rule? You misspoke, Cheruk."

"How Vemulus died."

"When I see his body, I'll draw my own conclusions."

"He was eaten by the sphinx!" Cheruk blurted, then shrieked when Suvani lunged over the rail, snatched his other ear, and tore it to pieces like the petals of a wilted flower.

"While your cunning mouth must convey my orders, I could do without those disobedient ears." She snickered."When they grow in, tear them out again. That's an order, Cheruk."

As the werewolf stared aghast, no doubt reeling from pain and incredulous at her cruelty, Suvani wondered if he had heard her, then shrugged, smirked, and flung the ear as far as she could, until it skidded over the ice into the crinkling flow of the river surrounding her still-transforming spell. When she flicked a tendril of white, ropy energy, the ice stags, now as much glistening water as sagging ice, leaped into a fluid gallop, charging down the river.

Once she cleared the next ridge, and was absolutely certain Cheruk could not see her, she nodded left, and the tinkling stags veered, bearing the sledge into the woods. Wherever the spell trail grazed tree, the wood was blasted to wet snow or frayed to icy shards,so that as she whipped her melting team ahead, they pulverized woodlands to slushy, treeless tundra.

Not that she cared if Cheruk knew. Keeping her underlings in the dark was just another cruelty, and hardly petty, but a practical one. Give a slave answers and they'll grasp the right questions.

When a one-horned stag eluded her eldritch blast, the sparking fire glittered black as it consumed a tree. For a moment, she thought she heard the tree scream, but surely that was only the hissing and crackling of the fiery wood, for she had hunted the dryads to extinction and made it legal to hew talking trees for lumber and woodfires.

When a gray-streaked raven glowered from a high branch, she lobbed an icy boulder to pulverize its perch, but the nasty bird give her the stink-eye and fluttered away swiftly. Oji's scouts. She was so close she could taste her revenge, having savored the thought of it for weeks.

Not revenge for Vemulus. While there would be a reckoning, and many heads would fall,

for a prince could not die without a heavy toll being exacted on the rabble, she had never cared whether he lived or died. At worst, her whipping boy had been whipped to death, or her scratching post had been scratched to splinters, but she had already groomed Conrad to take his place. A prince consort was a better companion, and infinitely more useful, than an antisocial prince. Vemulus was not irreplaceable. She wiped a tiny, burning tear from the corner of her eye.

No, this was revenge of a different order. Oji must suffer for his lese majeste, for thinking himself a prince, then a king, on an equal footing with Suvani. When he was offered up in a cage, she almost pulled out his tail, declawed him, then turned him into a tennis racket, but encouraging his rebellion was a much more satisfying conquest, for it let her quell all these rebels at one go. Instead of constantly cleaning house after decades of rebellion, why not let Oji be the broom and sweep a tidy pile for her to brush into oblivion?

When the gravel ground under the sledge, she scarcely paid heed, and whipped harder, but when her prancing stags kicked back river spray, drenching Suvani's gown, she glowered blackly at her much-diminished beasts, who had melted inch by inch to the size of ponies. Soon her chariot would be smaler than a toy wagon.

Then the clouds started to spin, their slow circle picking up speed until her head nodded,

swam, then dropped to her chest with a shock, as her knee smacked the ice, her heel slipped, and she might have slid off the back had she not clutched the rail. As she clambered to her feet, the rail snapped, so that she now gripped an icicle the size of a unicorn horn.

As the sluggish chariot slashed left and right, she swayed, and her hands slid off the dripping ice. When she snarled a harsh syllable, the sledge came to an abrupt halt, spilling her to the slick, icy floor, soaking her posterior in a deep freeze, and shattering the bar joining the chariot to the stags,

who charged for the trees, and, no longer protected by her spell, shattered into clouds of ice and snow

that billowed back, coating Suvani with a fine, white dust of ice crystals.

Their icy remnants glimmered brighter. In fact the entire woodland gleamed, as if taunting the Alsantian queen. Then the bottom fell from her dark void, no longer full of plenipotent darkness but abandoned, empty, and powerless, making her feel like the ignorant girl who didn't stop pestering The Regent about her mother until he had smacked her senseless. The difference was that now she knew what she was missing, she felt the agony of its absence, the hole she had suffered in her being. Her shadow-shroud had receded, drawing back the power bestowed by the Stranger. If she had never allowed it, she had enjoyed it.

Suvani sat there stunned. At first it was unthinkable that the stags disobeyed, for even before the Stranger had lent his power, she had mastered elemental magic. Where were they running? Were they running to or from, she wondered. Feeling a prickle on her neck, she turned her head uneasily, and saw only battered and blasted trees, still coated with slick ice dripping down the damp bark, pooling in the lightened shade. As sunrise glistened, Alsantia's moons paled with the brightening of the morning, then faded from the sky, while their cooler, crisper reflections persisted a few moments longer, bobbing in the melted snow-water before vanishing from the rippling pools.

The silence grasped Suvani mercilessly, not only the creeping, unnatural noiselessness of the woods she violated, but the sudden muffling of her heartbeat, which had thundered with bitter rage,

and now only snuffled, her breaths cool and mellow, a dead calm which held no relief, but only dread of the spreading shade. With the tree canopy blasted open, the sunrise lit where it wished, so why was the shade magnified? What eclipsed the shattered woods in spite of the morning light? An hour ago Suvani had darkened the world, and now she lay in an unsurmountable shadow.

She told herself she was unafraid, but well knew the sound of lies from letting worms grovel in her throne room. Moreover, honesty--if only to herself--was the only virtue she cultivated, and she did not like this lie's taste. While Suvani was by no means powerless, the Stranger's unending reservoir of power had run dry on the fringe of enemy lines.

She froze. This was much deeper than the fringe.

When had they surrounded her? While she was human, and these beasts had preternatural senses, she had been watching for any trace of Oji's armies. Having found a taste for uneven and unfair fighting, Suvani had not only embraced the Stranger's power, but sought battle and destruction, making of war a romp, a calisthenic warm-up to the grueling reign she would inflict on True Alsantia with great pleasure, starting by making reins of that vile unicorn hide, leaving no more doubt as to who held the power in Alsantia. Even without the Stranger's backing, there was such a vast disparity of power that it was scarcely a question of how they had found the opportunity than of how they had found the nerve.

to challenge one who, mere moments ago, had the supernatural power of a god. Surely they would not have dared!

But here they were, some trundling from the treeline, others flitting, slithering, or climbing from the tree remnants, their heads buried in hunched shoulders and their feet taking timid steps. She snickered. Shouldn't the True King's army be proud?

As if in answer, the King's pride showed itself, not only proud Oji himself--now a colossal, shadowy cat, the only trace of his natural ginger glistening in whiskers as long as swords--but the pride that trailed him, several dozen shadow-cats just as large, bolstered by lions, panthers, manticores, and three feathered with eagles' wings. Griffins.

Suvani scowled as she recognized her former prisoner, somewhat mangier than the other two griffins, and his chest sunken from his starvation tantrum in her menagerie, even if freedom had started to fill out his frame and crown him with an effulgent glow. When he landed about thirty feet away--dangerously close for a griffin, being but a few paws' stride, or one wingbeat--his grin curled mischievously, and she knew he was about to rhyme.

While the perfect symmetry of the griffin's rhyme was so nauseating that she waited uneasily for it to tip the queasiness in her guts to a loathsmome disgust, his click-clacking claws drumming out an eerie, warlike rhythm that set her teeth on edge. The griffin seemed to clutch the earth, as if it would tear Suvani from the world whole, along with the entire sinister situation of her life.

"A barren queen finds neither brother nor friend, not when crown bites back and rump bites the end. Not when sphinxes puzzle by answer, cages crumple, and cats tail the loser; not as strange, borrowed shade floods the land, snatching Suvani's infernal ampersand, leaving her a pittance of power and hungry for more, a greedy flower wilting in the sun's roar."

"Your rhythm's a bit sprung, isn't it?" sniffed Suvani. As her attention shifted from the cunning slave to the pretender Oji, her eyes widened until her face felt stretched, as if it had become all glower from chin to brow. "You took it!"

"Wasn't that your gamble?" Oji looked puzzled, and sounded nothing like the demure, caged kitten she had taunted to challenge her reign. In fact, he might have swallowed ten thousand ginger kittens, and each golden eye might have served as a habitat dome for a litter of ginger kittens. "Weren't those the stakes, winner take all?"

"Not the kingdom! Not the crown! You took the power!" As if attracted from a lesser star to clump to the mighty gravity of a black hole, the Stranger's borrowed power, that godlike shade, now swarmed around Oji.

"What are you talking about?" Oji's massive brow clenched and his whiskers susurussed, quivering so loudly it sent shivers up and down Suvani's back.

"You think you are so much more," sneered Suvani. "When you have become so much less, having traded sight for power! A power that was forced on me you drink in greedily, ignorant of the source." She cackled. "I might leave you to his mercies, 'True King.'" Her condescending scorn was followed by a barking laugh.

Oji's eyes narrowed, his ears and whiskers flattened, and he padded near Suvani.

Suvani realized she was still in a very undignified position unbefitting of a queen, having plopped in a puddle, her gown spread out in a shambles, and her right cheekbone confusingly wet.

As that part of the world blurred, then erased, she realized her eye had melted. As her cheeks burned with shame, she raised herself to her feet in a huff, then turned her back on Oji.

"Your majesty." Oji's voice was grave and grim but sincere. She drew back her shoulders. Even this pretender recognized her authority, even as he sought to stamp her out of existence.

"A moment please. You will do me the honor of facing me with my self-respect intact."

"As you respect only wickedness, you do yourself no honor. But I will not dishonor a foe, not even my worst enemy, Suvani."

"Is that what I am?" She trilled her amusement, if only to distract him from what she was doing. She still had her inborn knowledge, craft, and power. He would see that Suvani was still a force to be reckoned with; even before the dark lord's gift, her inborn knowledge, craft, and power could keep an ice eye running, along with a half-dozen other enchantments. It was only the great shock of the Stranger's betrayal, while Suvani was on the verge of her greatest victory. How could the Stranger favor this giant mongrel, she seethed, burning in rancor at the presumptous god, and his naive, ignorant chosen one.

Fot Suvani was not so naive as to deny that was what Oji had become. Having foreseen some new variation of his dark future for Oji to overshadow, the Stranger had tossed aside Suvani. And she knew the overwhelming advantage of having The Stranger on your side. Even as she clawed a plan from the abysses of her soul, she was unwilling to face Oji without her true face. Squeezing snow water from her dress into her palms, and uttering quick, harsh syllables, her icy hands shaped the water to a new eye, then tipped it into her eye socket, which again burned with the mild but persistent pain of the freezing orb.

And her dress would never do. As the nature of silk was covering and concealment, this enchantment wouldn't even require words. Hearing her silent appeal, the silk flowered, the lines and hems of the new gown consuming the rags of the old. A golden fan replaced the elegant but impractical train, and the ridiculous cleavage became a more modest line as the cut shrank to a form-fitting one, remaining a dress in name and style only, and becoming a cross between a pantsuit and a catsuit.

"Can I crash your cat party?" she purred, hamming it up for the scowling cats, and was unsurprised that she didn't get a titter.

"A void of grace and elocution, a soul destroyed; not a mind, but an electrocution of atomized ideas; not a heart, but an explosion, a demise of feelings deserving naught but execution."

"That's a riddle, not a poem. Fair warning: while you've been tainted by the sphinx, I'm still all Suvani. More than you can take. " As she lifted her left hand, she raised a towering flame, a fountain of fire which erupted from the earth and burned towards the griffin. When she raised her right hand, a bristling column of ice jutted toward Oji.

The flame roared as it blasted the griffin, who drew his wings over his face to no avail, for the flame flowed over him like oil, seeping into smoldering feathers and scorching fur. Suvani smiled smugly. Boosted by the Stranger, her death spell had dissolved ranks of Ephremians, but fire was nearly as deathly as death itself.

When Oji turned toward the griffin, the ice ram impacted his shoulder and shattered into shards,

gashing his fur to the bone. But Oji did not cry out. When he lifted the scorched griffin in his jaws like a mother cat, at first it seemed his giant mouth had snuffed the flames, but Suvani's sorcerous eye saw his shadowy aura had doused her enchanted fire.

When her forearm was clenched hard and dragged up, blood streamed down her sleeve, her breath caught in her throat, and she saw her own terrified face in the steely silver of a griffin's eye. The beast dangled her over the snow-blasted, fire-torn woodland. How could it strike that fast! As her heart raced and her pulse pounded, she raised her other hand, still frigid and numb from wielding ice. As ice speared the griffin's neck, her fingers split and her fingernails cracked from the strain of summoning frost.

Then a blue bolt spiraled up, thundercracking the sky, unraveling clouds, and brightening blue morning to a pale white, not the white of goodness, light, and lilies, but the pallid white of oblivion and death. Breaking the horizon, the immense blue radiance swelled and swelled, the trees wilting to refuse where its radius transgressed, blasting the green land to dust, every blade of grass, strand of ivy, and blossoming branch drying up in instants, as if the thirsty, otherworldly bloom siphoned their essence, drawing it in like rainwater from the soil, until it scissored tight, flattening to a towering cat's eye that blinked once, twice over the wasted land, when its roaring kaboom deafened even the rushing tumult of the thunderous armies, until it seemed all life was stilled, sterilized by the stagnant white and the drowning roar, and even as this blue lens clapped tight, and the noise faded, Suvani dangled from the beak of the griffin, whose eyes seemed to flicker with some awful truth, then blanked wide as her wings spread wide, to take to the skies.

Like a preening peacock, the lens bristled to a resplendent, glittering disc. When a gale blasted out, a tremor slithered in the earth, and the bright blue surface glimmered so harshly it hurt Suvani's eyes, glinting on the shining metal that rumbled, roared, and rolled out. Each armored car in the endless outpouring of gleaming chrome hurtled through at terrifying speed, then accelerated still faster,

as the wind ramped up powerfully, and the azure iris disgorged dark, winged shadows.

The griffin's wings were still outspread, as if turned to stone by the terrifying sight. As rapid-fire burst from the bristling motorcade, her wings twitched, poised to flap, when Ivanu's hideous mongrels barreled down with ungainly grace, their leathery wings twisting and corkscrewing like a bat's as they fluttered into the griffin, clutching each wing.

It happened in an eyeblink. Suvani sneered gleefully when the hybrids plummeted, but her wicked grin froze as the griffin's wing snapped, sending such a fitful shudder through the beast that she bit through Suvani's arm. Even as her hand flopped to the grass, trailed by a stream of gore, the smile stretched wide, plastered on that instant of excruciating pain. When the griffin shrieked, reared her lion half and raked her claws clean through a mutant, Suvani opened her mouth, but no noise would come out.

Between this silent scream and her woozy haze, her dangling world blurred, and she saw not paws, but taloned hands change their grips to break the other wing, when the other griffins pounced,

and they were, in turn, beset by a flurrying cloud of mongrels so thick Suvani could see neither fur nor feathers in the riotous whirl, until roaring shadow lions joined the crush, and began to turn the tide.

When Oji's proud head burst through the mongrel throng, shoulder to shoulder with his pride, they tore the vile mutants, and the mad beasts cackled, gibbered, and cracked their leathery wings, then flung themselves high into a sky thick not only with mutants, but click-clacking aircraft crowned with twirling blades. As one of these metal crickets descended, as if thinking to use what half-dead wood remained of Suvani for its perch, the armored motorcade crashed into the shadow-lion flank, and a hail of bullets peppered their hides. While Oji's shadow lions seemed stung by the volley, and turned to flee,

they shed no blood. Suvani summoned a feeble but snarky laugh. She well knew the dark, taloned caress of such deep shadows. Then she faded, the world painted black.