It hadn't been the Eater of Worlds that made Bella's flesh crawl. Vast and terrifying as it was and terrible as it might have smelled, that creature had died before she'd ever laid eyes on it. It was Odoacer that scared her: the woman who had put a ship in the great beast's brain pan and then rode that achievement to a political stalemate with the most formidable woman in the universe. 

Every plate at that dinner party had been arranged in the shape of a sword. Every selected dish was both opulent and at the same time brutal; gestures meant to offend and manipulate as sure as the seating arrangements had been designed to provoke conflict. She'd sat and watched with her heart in her mouth while so many of Nero's most loyal subjects were summarily executed and thrown into the depths of space to decorate the Armada's hunting grounds. 

The only thing that had kept Bella alive was that her relative unimportance put her low enough on the hit list that she'd had the time to slip away from the party and disappear into the monster's jaws, which on balance felt less like suicide. That's what it took to stand up to Nero. She's not sure who if anybody she knows ever properly appreciated how horrifying a thought that really was.

Bella looks across the horizon one more time, and barks with laughter. Zeus could make her excuses, but the truth that Odoacer had shown her is that the King of the Gods was all too willing to be manipulated. 

A shiver crawls up her spine. Bella leans back and flops onto her seat at last. She rolls her neck behind her shoulders and watches Dolce upside down. And she shakes with laughter once again.

"It is really fucking funny hearing you, of all people, talk about murdering someone. Guess everybody's got a line, huh? Artemis must like you a lot. After all, she trusted you with someone much more precious than me."

Her smile is languid and graceless, split somewhere halfway between drunk and bored. Only her eyes are sharp and burning, though this is nothing new between friends.

...What the fuck is she supposed to say here? He wants advice? A pat on the head? For someone to tell him how to not fuck everything up when the weight of his world is on his shoulders? She snorts.

"Does it hurt? Not knowing, not being able to do shit and wondering if that was meant to be your moment?"

Bella yawns, and slides down onto her back. With her arms folded behind her head, she stares up through the crystal ceiling and watches a bolt of lightning tracing through the endless blue skies.

"Join the club, I guess. I'm aimed at Gaia. I'm going to give my sisters real lives, so they can be more than knives and bombs. That's all I can tell you. Everything I pass up is just because I can't afford to blow up before I get there. That's why nothing here is worth shit. Call me callous, but I just don't care about saving the galaxy. And I wish everybody who did would just ask Hades to do it for them and quit haring off in ways that make my job harder. That's what I think."