Anansi

  Death was staring Anansi right in the face.

  The buzzsaw came screaming in at the end of that long, gleaming tether, and Anansi was forced to leap upright as the weapon cut a killing arc across the entire room and split a thirty-seat roundtable clean in two. In that frozen moment, she caught a glimpse of Loki's face — saw clearly the hunger in her eyes — and then the balls of Anansi's feet touched carpet, and then she was rocketing forwards, because if she didn't close the gap then she would simply be dead.

  For all the enmity they shared, Anansi was forced to admit it: Loki was the most exceptionally talented fighter she had ever encountered. She had expected to face off against a prodigy; what she found, instead, was a genuine anomaly. Loki fought in ways that made no sense, that should never have worked, and yet somehow she made them work with nothing more than raw inborn talent. A dozen times Anansi was certain she had her, and a dozen times Loki had yet slipped away. She was impossible to catch off-guard, impossible to bewilder. Her reactions were simply too fast, her intuition too sharp and all the while she never, ever seemed to tire. And now even Anansi, whose body was a perfectly-honed tool of efficient death, was beginning to feel the tendrils of fatigue creeping around her. She had already blown well past the capabilities of any other living Se-dai; not one of Anansi's sisters could possibly have fought at this level, much less kept pace with Loki for the better part of twenty minutes.

  With all that in mind, it must nevertheless be made clear that Anansi was unfazed by all of this. Her mental fortitude was perhaps her greatest strength; she was a creature of iron discipline and unflinching resolve. Never once did she even contemplate defeat — the only thought on her mind, at all times, was simply the next move to make.

  The saw came sweeping in from the left this time, wailing like a banshee all the while. Anansi crossed her swords, dropped to a crouch — and then began to blur, the image of the Sha-sur trembling and distorting until there were now three Anansis, all of whom appeared to be blinking rapidly in and out of existence. This was a technique of Anansi's own devise — Shudder-step, she called it, wherein she fired off the Seventh Vile Art in a thousand rapid microbursts. It was something no ordinary Se-dai could possibly survive; only via flawless execution did Anansi not destroy her body on the very spot.

  Loki's eyes were now flicking rapidly between the three afterimages, leveraging every one of her heightened sense to try and determine from whence the next attack would come. She yanked the tether, bidding the weapon return to her hand — and that was Anansi's opportunity, and thus did the center and right-side afterimages vanish entirely as Anansi shot forward from the left in one final burst of the Seventh Vile Art.

  Loki caught her saw just in time, raised it to defend — and then, just as Anansi's swords were about to meet those whirring teeth, the Sha-sur simply blinked backwards.

  "What?" Loki blurted out, just as Anansi blinked forwards again, and now swords and saw were locked together, with one of Anansi's blades closing in a hair's breadth from the tip of Loki's nose. That simple half-second pause had finally allowed Anansi to catch her opponent off guard, and now she was determined to press the advantage with everything she had left. Never again would Loki have the upper hand; Anansi would press and press and press until the damn Loyalist suffocated under the pressure.

  "[Incredible]," Loki remarked, as the saw-motor whined and Anansi pressed in even closer. The tip of her leftmost blade bit deep into the Loyalist's nose. "[Though I'd expect nothing less from the third-ranked Se-dai.]" A laughable, childish barb, one that would brook no reaction from a disciplined warrior like Anansi.

  Except: "[Must have been nice, being the Sovereign's favorite pet,]" Anansi scoffed, with sudden bitterness that surprised even herself. "[What did you let him do to you, I wonder, to get that first-rank position?]" At that, Loki's smirk vanished at once.

  "[You don't know what the fuck you're talking about,]" she snarled, even as Anansi had forced her down to one knee. Both their arms were locked tight and quivering with exertion; the floor was cracking and buckling beneath their feet. Slowly but surely, Anansi's blade was carving a deep gouge across Loki's face, bringing with it a wellspring of steaming blood.

  "[You know, I could almost feel sorry for you,]" Anansi continued, drawing on all her anger — all her rage, all the indignity — and channeling it into pure strength as she pushed and pushed and pushed. "[You're a victim, Loki, just like the rest of us. But the difference is that you fucking perpetuated it. You knew what he did to you, and you let him do it to others! To so, so, so many others! You fed him fucking half-bloods!]"

  "[We...were created...to serve a purpose,]" Loki groaned, dropping now to both knees. Her left arm was on the verge of giving out; Anansi could see it plain as day. She was so close. "[And we exist...to fulfill...that purpose...]"

  "[You're a coward,]" Anansi hissed, calling upon the very last — the very deepest — reserves of her vitality. She needed just a little more. Just a little bit further. "[You're too afraid to address what you are, what he did to you. You're afraid to admit that we-]" She heaved, with everything that she had. "[Are-]" The floor shattered; Anansi's sword pierced clean through Loki's eye. "[-human!]"

  For a split second, Anansi was certain that she had her.

  And then Loki's weapon let out a small, metallic little click, and here then did Anansi make a rare mistake. Because even though every part of her razor-sharp awareness was screaming DANGER, at that sound, Anansi wanted so badly for Loki to be dead — wanted so badly to win, and for this terrible ordeal to finally be over — that she simply decided against all better judgement to endure, to push through and get the kill and ignore whatever horrible trouble was about to come her way. And so, when every one of the saw's front-facing teeth fired outwards like a fusillade of razor-tipped darts, Anansi was given only a fraction of a second to react.

  She did manage to escape death; that itself was a minor miracle. But in the process she suffered more than three dozen different wounds as mithril fletchettes tore clean through her face and chest, rupturing seven critical systems and nearly blinding her in both eyes. And, of course, she was allowed not a moment's rest or recovery — because the instant she leapt back, Loki was already closing in, and the toothless saw had shifted now into a long, chisel-tipped warhammer.

  Anansi ducked, narrowly avoiding a blow that would have taken her head clean off, then leapt aside as yet another gargantuan server-rack came crashing down, having been rent to pieces by the force of that titanic blow. But Anansi was getting slow, or perhaps predictable, or perhaps both, and so the tip of the hammer was already waiting to slam square into Anansi's midsection. And so the Sha-sur was now flying back, and all the while still Loki was racing forward, her heels practically gliding across the shattered tile as she leapt above Anansi and brought that almighty hammer crashing down.

  Anansi was blown straight through the floor, and then through another floor, and then finally she landed onstage at some manner of opulent, abandoned amphitheater. The Se-dai rolled to her feet just as Loki slammed down upon that same stage, kicking up a storm of splintered wooden panels and free-flying debris. Though injured and disoriented, Anansi seized the opportunity at once, racing forwards and concealing her approach amidst that sea of flying detritus. In less than half a second she had circled around Loki like a hungry shark, and now she was piercing through that cloud of dust when, suddenly, there emerged from the shadows a single armored hand.

  Five fingers touched gently against Anansi's chest.

  What followed, then, was a crack like a gunshot. And then Anansi was simply gone.

  The First Vile Art — L'art De La Force écrasante. The Art of the Earth-Shattering Blow, a tried-and-true technique wherein the user concentrates every ounce of their strength into a single one-inch punch. All force is delivered to a single needle-point; thus that the Earth itself might be rent in twain. It was the first technique taught to a freshly full-blooded Se-dai, and Anansi was exceptionally lucky to have survived it at all.

  Nevertheless, she had now become something of a sentient missile, tearing through armories and grand halls and generator-rooms and laboratories and a dozen other war-wrought enclosures, shattering the sound barrier as she did so. Nearly four-dozen men and women were killed instantly, unfortunate as they were to have fallen within the Sha-sur's destructive trajectory.

  For once in her life, Anansi's mind had gone completely blank — her systems had just suffered catastrophic damage, after all, and more to the point she had genuinely been caught by surprise. Nevertheless she quickly regained her focus, then dialed up the gravity-dampeners in the soles of her feet to the highest possible setting. And thus did her momentum entirely halt as she was smacked down by the invisible hand of god, impacting hard against the floor and sinking nearly a full foot down into solid concrete.

  And then Anansi just laid there, for a few seconds, because she was in a very bad way.

  Ten thousand alarms wailed in her ears and flashed before her eyes; where Sekhmet would have dismissed them all with an irritated snarl, Anansi sifted through the reports with frigid calm, assessing the total damage in just a fraction of a second. With that done, she jerked herself free and rose, somewhat belatedly, to her feet. She found herself standing in some manner of observatory, ringed with padded seats and surrounded on all sides by gargantuan panels displaying...well, she couldn't really say. Strange, flickering, multicolored patterns; scribbled lines that swarmed and swirled and seemed, if one squinted closely, to almost coalesce into recognizable shape before disintegrating once more into meaningless entropy. Anansi took all this information in and then dismissed it at once; nothing about this strange place was relevant to the task at hand.

  Ahead, somehow, Loki was there as well — perched like a vulture atop the hole left some twenty-or-so feet up the wall by Anansi's destructive entrance, her form cloaked in shadow save for one silver eye. Of course she was already there. Of course, of course, of course. Death was nipping at Anansi's heels, hungry to claim this particularly defiant soul. The Sha-sur could practically feel the Sovereign's breath around her neck as Loki glided down, eerily silent — a thousand-pound warrior landing on the floor with not so much as a whisper of sound. Not even scratching the tile below.

  To say that the two warriors were in poor shape would be an egregious understatement. Anansi was oozing teal blood from precisely thirty-four fletchette-wounds; a chunk of her abdomen had simply been vaporized by Loki's punch, and roughly sixty-percent of her skin had been shredded away. Though she was fortunate to sport no broken or misshapen limbs, her right hand was still experiencing occasional twitches as a result of the wound through her wrist. And when performing a dangerous technique like the Seventh Vile Art, well, a mere errant twitch could very well spell total annihilation.

  Loki, likewise, sported countless injuries and mutilations — worst among them the inches-deep gouge across her stomach, from which machinery and gore alike were slowly beginning to protrude. Her scarlet hair, once a long braid, was now a wild mess, and the old scar across her face was joined by another open, angry wound, along which her right eye was now but an empty socket — it seemed Loki had simply plucked it out, after Anansi had split the organ in two.

  Both Anansi and Loki were merely eyeing one another, at current, because in truth even the mightiest of the Se-dai needed a fucking break right now. And there was a great deal of pain, of course. Pain beyond all reasonable comprehension. But pain, at the end of the day, was irrelevant, because Anansi and Loki were Se-dai — they had been born into pain, and to them it was but another bit of stimuli to be filed away with all the rest. And for Anansi, too, her pain was a source of strength, for she drew her agony into hatred and burned that hatred in a furnace of raw strength. It was only through agony that Anansi was even standing; it was only through hatred that she was actively preparing to fight once more. Both her swords were long gone, and as such she extended her wrist-blades with a whisper of mithril against mithril.

  Loki still had her Ker-sot well in hand. That, then, would mean a significant gulf between them, and now Loki's hammer was transmuting into a pair of shortswords that very much resembled Anansi's own.

  "[Here,]" Loki called, tossing one of them across the way. Anansi snatched it from the air, twirled it, tested the weight. Nodded her head. The weapon would be sufficient. She didn't bother to ask Loki why — because she knew why, and any Se-dai on either side would have done the very same. Age-old enmity such as theirs could only end in a fair fight.

  The two of them continued to just stare at one another, doing little else than exhale hot steam and wait for their vitality to return. Anansi was plotting out a dozen different scenarios in her head, visualizing the myriad different ways the first five seconds of the fight could play out. She knew well that Loki was doing the same. There was no point in merely reacting, at a high level such as this, nor in trying to predict — one had to account for every possibility. It was through cracks, through small gaps, through tiny little mistakes that this contest between two titans would finally be decided. It was a sort of race, really: who would lose first?

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  A full minute passed like that — and then, without warning, and without truly understanding why, Anansi hung her head and let out a wry, weary little chuckle.

  It spread like a convulsion throughout her body, rising in volume and cadence both and then, suddenly, Loki was snickering too. And then they were laughing, the both of them, throwing back their heads and cakling uproariously in some strange conjunction of exhaustion, pain, spite, and — perhaps — even kinship. They laughed and laughed and laughed, and now Anansi was grinning ruefully — an expression that looked truly alien upon her rigid countenance — and shaking her head, reaching up to wipe at a tear that was not there.

  "[Whoever wins this,]" Anansi called out, to her hated rival, "[is undoubtedly the greatest Se-dai to have ever lived.]"

  "[The Original Twenty have nothing on us,]" Loki agreed. Her voice was staticky and distorted; the result of an inch-deep wound in the side of her throat.

  "[We can both agree, then, that Ra is in no way number two?]" Spoken from the third-ranked Se-dai to the very first.

  "[Absolutely not,]" Loki laughed. "[Sure, Anansi, I'll give you that — you're definitely second place.]"

  "[Funny,]" Anansi said, flipping her borrowed weapon to a backwards-handed grip and drawing, for what felt like the millionth time, into a low crouch. "[I was going to say the same to you.]" At once, Loki did the same, coiling like a spring as she prepared for one final strike. Their expressions hardened; eyes narrowed, mouths drew into thin lines. There was no more laughter, no more camaraderie. There was nothing at all, really, except for that which the two of them were about to do.

  Anansi was tired beyond belief. Everything hurt. Every sense she had was screaming, begging in her ears to just stop.

  The Sha-sur paid those voices no mind.

  A second more, and then with a twin thunderclaps did the two leap forwards, Anansi stutter-stepping in and out as she approached whilst Loki simply charged head-on, her sword angled up for a stab to the ribs — only to pass the weapon behind her back, at the last second, catching it with her other hand and launching down into a vicious overhead.

  And so it began, finally, for the last time. And of the duel that followed, what more could possibly be said? Of course they fought like demons, the two of them, like bodies possessed by spirits from another realm. Loki's movements were entirely without pattern or rhythm, constantly switching hands and constantly changing grips and constantly launching into feint after feint after feint — so much so that it was all but impossible to tell where her real moves even began. And Anansi matched her in turn, making full use of her vast well of knowledge as she pivoted constantly between a hundred different styles, adapting moment-to-moment to every one of Loki's ploys.

  And they both failed, of course. Time and time again. Sometimes Anansi was simply overwhelmed by Loki's unorthodox tactics — and she suffered eleven wounds as a result, nine trivial and two most decidedly not. But sometimes, likewise, Loki's carefree style could not possibly hold against Anansi's composed aggression, and thus did she too suffer seven wounds - four trivial, and three significant. Anansi and Loki were dancing on a razor's edge, with death at all times but a hair's breadth away, and each of the prodigious warriors was beginning to slow. Thus did death creep closer and closer with every passing second, with every drop of teal that hit the floor. And thus did the mistakes grow in frequency and significance both.

  And then, finally, after two blistering minutes — it happened. Loki had her. They both saw it in unison; instantly, Anansi leapt back, in a desperate attempt to evade what she knew would surely be a killing blow. But this was out of mere obligation, for Loki had her well and truly dead to rights. It took a fraction of a second for the artificial muscles in Anansi's legs to tense, before firing, and in that time Loki had already circled around, her free arm coiling like a snake around Anansi's chest whilst the edge of her blade shot straight to Anansi's throat.

  And then....nothing. The blade had dug only skin-deep and scraped now against the edge of the mithril shell beneath; though Loki kept her restrained, she herself made no attempt to move any further. And thus did the two of them once more sit for a moment in strange, silent communion — but this time, Anansi broke it at once.

  "[Don't you dare hesitate,]" she hissed, and underneath all the hate and spite and venom this was, fundamentally, a plea. Anansi was begging. "[Kill me clean and be done with it. I fought well; surely I deserve as much.]" Anansi swallowed, felt her neck grind and shift against the blade. And she was gratified, in that moment, to find that she feared only dishonor. Not death, not torture, and certainly not pain. Not once in all her long and difficult life had she ever faltered.

  Anansi was fearless to the very end.

  Yet death, for all her pleading, did not come. And so Anansi braced herself for words of mockery, of denigration, of the painful reminder that she had failed her sisters. Worse, that she had failed Doss, with whom she...well. What point was there, in acknowledging it now? It was all over. Anansi had tried, and tried, and tried, and at the end of it all she had simply failed. There was little else to it, whatever Loki might say otherwise.

  These words, too, never came.

  The blade began to tremble.

  And then Anansi realized, belatedly, that Loki was crying.

  "[You're right about me,]" Loki said — and then the knife was withdrawn, and Anansi turned with slow wariness to find Loki just standing there, shoulders slumped and head bowed. Unable to meet her eyes. The first-rank Se-dai's weapon clattered to the floor, useless and discarded, and thus did Anansi narrow her eyes and grip her weapon tight. And wait, of course, for the other shoe to drop.

  "[I'm a coward,]" Loki went on, her head still bowed. Her face masked by a curtain of auburn hair. "[I've been...I've been scared for so, so long. And that's the only reason I ever...you know I had to sleep with him every night?]" Her voice rose in fever and pitch and yet warbled, fragile, as though it might shatter at any moment. "[I don't just mean sex, Anansi. I mean I had to sleep in that fucking place, w-where the walls throb with his every heartbeat and you can, you can feel him in the air itself. Just-just like the womb, on the day I was born. Just like-]" She shook her head violently, as though trying to dispel those terrible memories from her skull. "[You're right, Anansi. The only reason I'm first-rank is because I was his favorite, and because I let him keep me close.]"

  Anansi just stared, silent and still as a statue, as Loki shuddered and said no more. And then, finally, the Sha-sur spoke.

  "[I already told you,]" she said, coldly. "[I'm not any kind of hero. I do this because I hate the Sovereign, and because I hate you. It's no more complicated than that. If you think appealing to some sense of 'sorority' is going to-]"

  "[Then just kill me,]" Loki blurted out, dropping abruptly to her knees and angling her chin to expose her throat. "[I'm not asking you for mercy. I wouldn't dare.]"

  "[What is this?]" Anansi demanded, narrowing her eyes even further. Resisting the urge to run headlong into such an obvious trap. Resisting the urge to finally be done with this nightmare of a duel. There was an angle she wasn't seeing, somewhere. There had to be.

  "[I don't deserve to beat you,]" Loki pleaded, and finally she was staring right up into Anansi's eyes. Her face was equal parts naked fear and grim determination. "[I never stood up to him, not in twenty-nine years of misery. But you did, Anansi. You were the first one of us brave enough to actually turn against him. And I hated you for it.]" She threw up her hands. "[Me, first-rank? What a sad joke. It should have been you, Anansi. It should always have been you. Everything I've ever done, I've only done because I was too terrified to do anything else.]"

  It was something in her voice, then, that made Anansi understand with full certainty that this was no ploy. That Loki meant every word; that some great dam within the prodigious warrior had finally burst, and that this moment of pitiful confession had been three decades coming. And so Anansi did not waste a minute — lightning-fast, she moved to execute her rival, her shortsword blurring to a smear of mithril-black as it raced for Loki's throat.

  The first-rank Se-dai just closed her one remaining eye.

  And then, with a Se-dai's perfect control, the shortsword was brought to an abrupt and sudden halt — just a millimeter away from certain death.

  Anansi held Loki's life in her hands, now, just as Loki had mere moments before. She knew she could do it, then, knew that with the barest flick of the wrist her lifelong rival would be dead. For so many years, Anansi had been toiling towards this very moment. And upon looking inwards, now, she affirmed to herself that she really could do it. She absolutely had the wherewithal to slash Loki's throat here and now. There was nothing staying her hand, no moment of sudden hesitation, or sympathy, or sorority. Anansi could do it right now and feel not a thing, save some measure of satisfaction.

  But Anansi chose not to, anyway.

  Instead, she pulled the sword back and offered her hated rival a hand.

  "[You are definitely the legitimate first-rank,]" Anansi told her, apropos of nothing, because she could think of nothing more to say. "[You had me dead on the spot.]"

  Loki's eye opened, flicked warily between Anansi's face — stoic, expressionless — and that outstretched hand. And slowly, reluctantly, she did indeed take it, and with great effort did Anansi haul her sister to her feet.

  "[Barely,]" Loki replied, after several seconds of long and uncomfortable silence. Neither Se-dai dared look at the other. "[It could easily have gone the other way.]"

  "[But it did not.]"

  "[I had to rely on cheap tricks just to survive.]"

  "[What does that matter, when I am dead and you are still alive?]"

  "[You're the Sha-sur, Anansi! Greatest among the Se-dai!]"

  "[Only because I was lucky enough to befriend the Emperor, before he was the Emperor,]" Anansi scoffed. "[You think my title is any more legitimate than yours?]"

  "[But you really were good enough to be Sha-sur! Everyone knew-]"

  "[And clearly you were talented enough to be awarded first-rank,]" Anansi countered, gesturing down to her own battered body. "[What's your point?]"

  More silence. More uncertainty. Anansi could see the war raging in Loki's mind, playing out in real time across the canvas of her mutilated face.

  "[You're not going to kill me?]" Loki asked, finally.

  "[No,]" Anansi replied. "[You still have work to do.]"

  "[Please,]" Loki shook her head, taking a single step forwards. She held out her hands. "[Please, Anansi. The harm I've done-]"

  "[We don't have the luxury of just stepping out,]" Anansi snapped, to which Loki physically flinched. "[We are creatures of duty, Loki. The importance of our work will always eclipse all else; they programmed it into us from the day we were born. You want redemption? Best of luck — I don't believe in it, myself. You want absolution? Go ahead and slit your throat — I know that you won't. What I want, Loki, is to kill our father with my bare hands. And if you want the same, well, there's no reason that we should be standing around and talking when there is still work that needs to be done.]" And though Anansi said it all with words and face void of emotion, there was something else there, too. Who could say what it was, truly? Portions of Anansi's mind were simply a mystery, even to herself. Was it compassion? Pragmatism? Did she mean even a word she had just said?

  None of it really mattered. One thing, above all else, was quite clear: that Anansi had, for all her talk, chosen sorority above all else. And that for the first time in twenty years, her hatred was beginning to cool.

  Slowly, unsteadily, Loki nodded her head.

  "[Okay,]" she said, kicking her sword up and snatching it out from the air. "[I'm with you.]"

  Loki

  When the two of them returned to the Grand Foyer, having raced across the Panopticon as fast as their beleaguered legs would carry them, they had expected to find a battle in full swing — for Loki to have to cry out, with Anansi by her side, that the time for fighting was over. That all Se-dai would turn now against their father, and embrace together their shared loathing. The Loyalists would throw down their weapons and rejoin their sisters of Le Sang Neuf with open arms, and thus would the full body of the Se-dai gather as one.

  What they found, instead, was a miniature apocalypse.

  The once-regal Grand Foyer looked now like a battlefield, wrecked and demolished and smote down to broken chunks of onyx and plaster. The ceiling had caved in; the floor, too, was partly concave, and the air reeked of burning metal and oddly saccharine-smelling gore. And strewn out amidst it all...there lay the remnants of the Se-dai. A genuine mountain of corpses stacked a full story high; hundreds of dead and dismembered cyborgs drowning in an ocean of steaming-hot teal blood. The greatest warriors of all the Great Domain had been reduced to little more than a abstract collection of organic and mechanical spare parts.

  What struck Loki, then, was a feeling of loss so profound that she nearly crumpled to her knees. Yet still she grit her teeth, chewed, and swallowed the certain knowledge that this was in so small part her own fault. She couldn't dwell on her guilt; couldn't let it consume her. Anansi had said that there was still work to do. Anansi had said that they needed her.

  Amidst the carnage, there remained seven Se-dai of Le Sang Neuf, all just as beaten and battered as their Sha-sur. Ammit stood resolute at their helm, resting heavily upon her gore-streaked hammer, with her other arm torn away and multiple ribs jutting like spines from the side of her chest.

  Anansi strode forward to meet her, whilst Loki trailed behind in shameful and sacrosanct silence.

  "Anansi," Ammit greeted simply, inclining her head. The others moved to stand beside her, eager now to hear any words at all from the two women who had brought them to such ruin. To Loki, there was offered no such greeting, though neither was the first-rank Se-dai treated with distrust or even disrespect. No grudges were held, even for a moment; they of Le Sang Neuf knew full well that every Se-dai was a victim. The only evil — the only true evil — dangled now, monstrous and bloated, from a ceiling on Ceres.

  Anansi just surveyed the carnage, for a moment. And then she said, flatly: "[A shame.]"

  "[What have I done?]" Loki muttered, behind her, her voice low with frozen horror. Because void, she could only swallow that shame for so long. "[The half-bloods...]" The Sovereign had dispatched nearly a hundred half-blooded Se-dai to bolster the Loyalist ranks — adolescents, essentially, fighting from within adult bodies that they could not yet fully control. And now the next generation of Se-dai was all but extinct, buried in various places amidst that terrible monument of death and mithril.

  "[The Sovereign makes fools of us all,]" Ammit declared, her fist tightening audibly around her hammer. For all that Anansi professed not to be, Ammit was a true believer in every sense of the word, and it was clear on her face just how deeply the slaughter of her siblings had affected her.

  "[Our father's time draws near,]" Anansi reassured, clasping the titan on the shoulder. "[The nine of us yet remain, and so long as I live I swear that the Sovereign shall never know peace.]"

  "[I swear that the Sovereign shall never know peace,]" all intoned in unison - all save for Loki, who simply trembled and dropped to one knee. Because she could swallow no more.

  "[I can't do it,]" she muttered, staring down at her own trembling hands. "[I just can't fight anymore.]"

  "[You have to,]" Anansi said flatly, looking down upon her stricken sibling with not an ounce of distaste. With perhaps even a shred of pity.

  "[It hurts,]" Loki shook her head. "[Everything hurts.]"

  "[I know.]"

  "[I'm tired.]"

  "[So am I.]"

  "[How much longer...?]" Loki whimpered. Once again, Anansi just held out a hand.

  "[Until the work is done,]" she told her. "[Until our father is dead.]"

  "[But he, I mean...]" Loki rose to her feet unaided, and gestured futilely to the devastation around them. "[Look around! It's over, Anansi. The Se-dai are extinct. Mercury is lost, Sol is lost. The Emir has us. The Sovereign...Anansi, he won. The Emperor lost!]"

  And for the second time that day, and in three years, Anansi actually grinned — an expression so violently out-of-character that Loki actually flinched.

  "[Oh, Loki,]" Anansi chuckled dryly, shaking her. "[Do you really believe that?]"

  "[I...what?]" Loki stared at her with one wide, bewildered eye. "[What are you talking about?]" She glanced around at her sisters, search their expressions for some manner of explanation. She found none.

  "[Your presence was an unexpected boon,]" Anansi said, instantly drawing the Se-dai's attention once more. "[And for that, I am grateful. But everything else?]" Anansi's smile hitched just a single degree higher. "[Please, Loki. Everything else has gone exactly according to plan.]"