The [i]Plousios[/i] is a place of rust and death, but only where it's been swallowed by the sea. It is loud, groaning, echoing, and constantly shuddering with tortured sighs, but it's only noticeable in the places where the ship is emptiest. And it [i]is[/i] empty: every hall, every maintenance tunnel, and every single room regardless of function give off a sense of scale too grand for the people here to fill it. Nothing so much as the Prison Planet Tellus and its cramped billions of citizens, but a city more than any vessel nevertheless. A city picked clean of its people and left to float across the stars, shedding pieces of its former grandeur at every place it came to rest. 

For hundreds of years, it shrank. And for hundreds of years, it grew. What had been a city filled with gamblers and their dreams so big it took the God of the Dead to see them true fell victim to the machinations of a second god, and the Master of Assassins. It was only natural a garden would grow in its place. 

It only took a moment of quiet walking, for once, to see the truth. The revelations of the gods. The inevitability of the Assassins. Bella curls her fingers toward her palm, but stops short of making a fist when here claws bite into her skin. She lifts them up to stare at them with horrified fascination. 

This is not Mynx's garden they walk through. The trees are sparse, but the flowers are everywhere. Brilliant bursts of red, purple, yellow, pink, blue, and green greet every flicker of the eye. The walls are faded stucco murals and chipped statuary made whole again by the defiant blossoms. No, not made whole. They've been made into new images, new stories and conquests entirely. Flowers triumphing over steel and the ambition of the Human Empire. Every now and again, a foot crunches down on some opalescent and shimmering gemstone that the mind wonders at until with a start it realizes this is bone. Here were lovers. Here, friends. Here, uneasy companions brought together by desperate circumstances. All of them dead. Betrayed or picked off or the losers of honorable combat, what did it matter? The Temple of Artemis was built around four pillars. Four disciplines that contained inside of them every possible way to commit murder.

And from those murders...

The air is thick with humidity and the smell of pollen. Grass. Nectar. Underneath it, stone and metal, and in the distance the ever present bite of salt. 

Bella does not speak. Her footsteps are swallowed by the deafening curtain of this garden of death, that the [i]Plousios[/i] could no longer even muster people enough to direct it to some purpose, let alone fight against it. She prowls over leaping blades of grass like the ghost she truly is, a monster and a corpse and a bomb amidst a wellspring of teeming life. Behind her, the heavier footfalls and deeper breathing of Beljani, equally awed but trying much harder not to feel frightened. To her right, Redana walks in equal silence and equal noise. Not awkward. Not brave. Not graceful. Not cruel. Not a princess or the hero who saved her from the Hydra or the treasured friend that betrayed her to a life of endless yearning and chasing. Nothing at all. Just a girl. That's all she's ever been.

Redana's scent carries into several breaths, carrying the kinds of calming notes that make Bella's claws bite deeply into her wrists. Drops of crimson feed the flowers as she passes them without acknowledgment. She tries to look at Redana, but it's like staring into a star. Bella swallows: a noise much too loud for all the effort she's put into keeping silent. She turns her head away, as if to hide everything. Her fingers stretch insistently and push her claws into the air to flick away the blood.

It is not a question of whether or not she should make the crossing. That much is certain. The question how many murders she will need to commit to make certain she is the only person who does so. The Temple is inevitable. Mother is inevitable. The only good that she can do with her useless unlife is seal away the people in her heart on this side of the Rift, to try and make something of the journey on her own. 

Because in the Realm of Demeter, she would inflict far crueler and more terrible things to her family than death.