Skadi hadn’t stopped though. The woman was already lunging, covering a quick thirty feet in her efforts to get in the way of the next axe swung. She caught the blade itself with what might have been only the longest two fingers of one hand, slowing it down just enough she could kick the part of the hand that wasn’t blade, the curve of the axe that led down to the lowest point of the blade, and send it up and away.

Her wounded fingers peeled back to become a sleeve of sorts, skin thinning, a fresh hand revealed. She was already preparing for the next attack, panting for breath, clotted blood making its way through her hair.

She straightened, and I could see the pride in her eyes. Every damn move we made that kept people alive and kept us going was worthy of that, I knew that. I knew that the Flower of the Hecatomb was a cape who had been brought to our world by Khepri and never put back where she belonged, and her journey had been a long and hard one.

She turned to say something, because she’d bumped into someone in her haste, and she came face to face with a person who was trapped in a dissolving state, thirty percent of a person frozen in time, their bodies cut off at a point, the edges constantly shedding a ‘smoke’ of geometric shapes—triangles, squares, circles. A tinker in a business suit with a floating platform the size of a trash can lid, little desk terminal rising up to his chest, and a gleaming tinker mask that made it look like there was a hole in his face you could put an arm through… he was so close to her they could have touched each other. Another cape from another world that hadn’t found his way back, he’d acclimatized more, spoke our language.

I saw her head turn more as she realized the reality of the situation. First, looking past the one person she’d tried to apologize to, she saw the people she’d just tried to save were already safe, phased out of existence, every body or body part that was in the way of harm gone, everyone who had been cut in half frozen in stasis. I saw the pride disappear as the tinker gave her the briefest of looks before hitting buttons on his desk, ending the stasis. The capes he’d affected resumed moving. The person Hecatomb had tried to talk to became whole again, looking very surprised to have a ten foot tall, gore-streaked woman with bronze skin looming over him.

I could imagine the horror Hecatomb felt as she looked the other way.