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The smell of blood was not unfamiliar.

Hvergelmir had stood in puddles of it before, watching its cruel climb as it soaked through the fabric of her skirts, wet with spent life, hiding the patterns in the fabric. Watching as blood blotted out the stars.

She'd seen it in the eyes of Gehenna of Mars. Gehenna, covered in blood, who'd caved in the face of a young lieutenant as he begged brokenly for his life. Gehenna, who'd turned on her when she'd tried to get him to stop, to pay some heed to a dying man's cries for mercy. She'd stood and knelt in blood that day, hers and another man's. She knew its smell.

She'd seen it, too, in the sterile, distant reaches of Mercury, in the bowels of Mistral's labyrinth. Then, blood had been little Degrasse, bound up in razorwires and begging, too, as they sliced through her flesh, begging for someone to help her right before the wires carved her down to bloody mush and pieces much smaller than anything the two senshi here had managed. They'd waded through a red haze that day. Hvergelmir had seen carnage.

But she'd never had someone stand up in front of her and tell her you kill the weak to show you are willing to kill.

No one had ever had the -- the insanity to suggest that tactics like these -- brutal, merciless slaughter, legitimate terrorism like they'd been accused of in the media -- were heroic. Were just. Were honorable.

The Negaverse was keeping some of its soldiers tethered with its claim that Order was no different, no better than Chaos. They touted the mere existence of chibi senshi like some sort of bloody shirt that proved everything.

Honor was everything separating one side from the other. Sanity. Mercy. Compassion. These things were the best of all that their side was.

And two men wanted to suggest that they should discard them like extra weight on a sinking airliner.

Hvergelmir felt ill.

It was Kairatos standing before her that kept her from fainting, weeping, throwing up right on the spot. Kairatos, whose very existence gave the lie to the things that these two men espoused. Kairatos, who filled her with so much hope. Standing behind him, she raised an arm to lay a single hand stayingly over his chest.

He was brave, but they were violent. She wasn't sure what they'd do.

"This is insane," she echoed, her voice wavering somewhere between horror and, uncommonly, anger. "You're slaughtering child soldiers. Hatred and fear are the emotions Chaos feeds on -- you think we should sow more? How far do you suggest this goes? Sack their cities? Rape and pillage? This isn't the fifth century. You -- you can't be serious."

With her free hand, she summoned her distaff from the air and held it loosely at her side.

Cove and Degrasse had died trying to do something decent. They deserved to be survived by better people, better deeds, than these.

The language the two brothers switched to sounded familiar to Ganymede's ears. Not French, her own heritage, but related to it. Italian, she was certain. She could pick up on some of their meaning.

Creatore di guerra. Creator of war.

There was more—necessity and truth, an over-dramatic spectacle. Ganymede got the gist of the exchange, but gave no indication that she'd picked up on any of it. In any case, the two brothers were soon speaking to their audience again, and Ganymede's returned glare was baleful. She saw little merit in any of it, despite either of their arguments. Certainly the fight needed to be brought to the Negaverse; Order had spent too long allowing themselves to be stepped on. But this was not the way.

“Ganymede wasn't destroyed by Chaos,” she said, though it left a sick taste in her mouth to talk about her homeworld, her sanctuary, to someone who'd once practically accused her of not giving a damn about it, whose very words seemed to imply that he'd have conquered it himself if he could. “They destroyed themselves before anyone else had the chance.

“You want to drive the Negaverse insane with anger and revenge? Threaten them with something they give a damn about, because it certainly isn't their own people,” she continued. “Fracture them. They're already divided over the Dark Mirror Court. Use that. They still fear the Moon Queen even if she hasn't made an appearance in who knows how long. For ******** sake, I lied and told that General Queen Laurelite I was the Moon Queen and she went batshit. Set someone up as bait for them to go nuts over and exploit that weakness to take out some of their top guys. Hell, I'll do it myself, but I'm not exactly Miss Popularity over here.”

That there were others who heartily disagreed with Castor's methods boosted her confidence whether or not she had anything of use to add. She remained close to Athene, glancing toward Ida as she arrived on the scene as well. The quiet voice of Chaldene caught her attention and she turned to him too, gauging his reaction before responding.

“I think Castor's desperate,” she said. “And I think he's about to make a huge mistake. He'll have a civil war on his hands before any of this makes any sort of impact on the Negaverse.”

Penthe couldn't help but be a little pleased that Avalon and Megrez were both here, and both clearly eager. And yet. And yet her eyes fell on the poor Squire, on the Knight who shouted and raged against these sorts of tactics - and, strangely almost entranced, she walked up to the traps themselves, to get a closer look at the bodies. (And even in her mind, a place where her hate of Chaos was solid and any Chaos death was justified, this seemed particularly, impressively brutal.)

And tickling at the edge of her awareness were that two of the present Sensih glowed, and felt cleaner and purer than anyone else. That as strange, something to file away as probably important.

"I don't know what destroyed my planet," she said, "but I know it was a war so bad everybody participatin' forgot basic s**t you don't do." Blood spatters on the walls of the hospital, a reminder that something awful and terrible and wrong had happened there. "Mighta been Chaos, mighta been like Ganymede and we ended ourselves, but I do know that today? Now? Chaos is the biggest threat to the place I was born in this life. Even if all of Earth ain't a corrupted wastelend, they want it t'be, an' that's not somethin' I can allow to happen. I won't let Earth end up like Penthesilea."

She stepped away form the carnage, which sohuld have turned her stomach but did not because it was too easy to think of a tiny thirteen-year-old girl driving her knife into a man's heart, and know that brutality was in her blood and her soul and her starseed.

"Sure, some'a them can be saved." Avalon was proof of that. "That don't mean they all can, or they all want to, an' the ones that don't? 'Fore they can spread their damned plague further out, they need to die. Ain't no more than that, ain't no less."

She liked to think she believed that, even though she knew she made a liar of herself. Lellouch was unsaveable, she knew that, no one who sold out their own family was likely to want to be purified - and yet the thought of killing the Senshi of Ravens didn't sit well in her chest at all. Lellouch was, in a twisted way, a friend, of sorts.

There was too much grey in the war, now. It had been easier when things were black and white. Penthesilea didn't know what to do with grey, even if she was much more certain of herself out loud.

Avalon was here.

Avalon, who'd had her starseed cracked open and nearly scooped dry to give it a chance to live again, to be pure. Avalon, who'd only had a few weeks now to try to start relearning the world, trapped in an adult's body with a newborn's amount of memorable life experience -- whose level of slate-cleaning seemed to have gone beyond the stricter rigors of memory loss into some sort of more total mind-wipe that had vacated whole other parts of her brain to start again. Avalon, who delighted in sending Hvergelmir messages by signet ring and who loved Babylon as much as she ever had. She had such work ahead of her.

And now this was going to be one of her formative experiences in her new life. This ill-conceived mass murder. The words of these two men.

"You're not corrupt," she agreed, pained that people like Kairatos and Avalon had to bear witness to something that could've been done to either of them, in different circumstances. Instead of standing here as allies, her two friends could've been cooling corpses in puddles at her feet. They could've been two more knights dead -- and not accidents, this time. "You are our hope."

For a dizzying moment, she looked down at the blood on the ground and she saw Degrasse and Cove again, their bodies whole but broken, face-up and glassy-eyed. They stared at her, demanding answers.

She imagined she saw others alongside them. Mimisbrunnr on Painite's spear. Bischofite bleeding out tar into red. Zippeite, dead. Persephone, dead. Titan, dead. Kairatos and Avalon, dead.

Babylon, dead. Aquarius, dead.

She looked back at Castor and Pollux, shades of certainty coloring her words this time. "Before you stand two purified Negaverse agents. These knights are my brothers. All knights are my brothers. The blood we stand in is the blood of my brethren, shed without quarter and without honor. If this is how you mean to make war, then your war is with me also."

Sarras, Squire of the Cosmos, wasn’t sure what had surprised him more: the gathering of a rather large, and quite potent cluster of Order aura, or the smell of blood that assaulted his nose when he entered the warehouse. The pungent smell of blood hardly bothered him. He went on several hunting trips, gutted and then stuffed his own kills, so the smell of blood was just something he was used to. However, it was where the blood was coming from that bothered him, and the sight that greeted him when he followed the Order auras into the already lively warehouse made him pause at the door for a moment.

Oh, not because there was a lot of dead Negaverse officers scattered throughout the facility. He didn’t give two shits about them. What made him pause, and he would have been ultimately ashamed to admit it to anyone, even though that were present then, was the memory of Mistral, still vivid and crystal clear in his mind. It had been months, and yet, why could he see the walls of the warehouse morph to mimic Mistral’s interior so perfectly? Why did each of their faces fit so perfectly in this scene right now, as though he could walk over to each and every one and see his fallen comrades… that’s what kept him at bay, while people were arguing amongst themselves. He wasn’t quite ready to approach that just yet… so he waited.

Once his heart had slowed in its rapid beating, once he could collect his breath, one the walls and corpses had shifted back into the present, he stepped inside. Once again, the screams from their pained demises had altered in his ears and he could hear the various members of Order arguing among themselves, and he cast them a sideways glance but nothing more. A Prince, a Transcended senshi, among many others, even a familiar face among the crowd almost made him smile, but he paid little mind, even to her. He didn’t want to get dragged into their fight- apparently, this gruesome affair was caused by one of their own and some senshi and knights didn’t care for that. If he looked at them for too long, he might have succumbed to another flashback, to see himself screaming at Mistral for the chaos she caused… and so, he kept his gaze diverted, and moved towards the corpses, the only points of interest to Sarras of the present.

Was he honoring the officers that fell this evening? Absolutely not. There was no love in his heart for them, but neither was there really hate. He didn’t kick dirt at them, nor did he do anything that he thought would have been disrespectful to them. He only looked at their attired and faces, to see if he was among the casualties. How terrible would it have been if he lost the chance to avenge his mother’s death if Buddingtonite were slaughtered by another?

One of them was really going off, and Sarras rolled his eyes in annoyance, not realizing he muttered these words aloud, or how loud they were. "What a bunch of squabbling chickens..."

Avalon earned a curious glance, but Ganymede made a conscious choice not to say anything about the last time she'd encountered the General-turned-Page. Her presence was an odd enough sight without throwing that into the mix. For a moment Ganymede felt another stirring of bitterness, a heaping dose of distrust, for this Page who had not long ago had her hand in Ganymede's chest. It was all well and good that she'd gone and gotten herself purified (how and when, she wondered?), but who was to say how long it'd last? She could always turn back.

But there was a part of Ganymede that felt vindicated in seeing her, in realizing who she was, and she thought it was a bit of a shame she hadn't noticed the Page's identity earlier, too busy had she been confronting the bigger fish.

She'd told Finn Avalon wasn't beyond saving.

And she was right.

Before she could relish too long in that knowledge, Megrez exploded. And another followed suit. Ganymede would have been impressed with Megrez's balls if she agreed with anything Megrez had to say. Instead it pressed on already stressed nerves and earned Megrez a bit of resentment.

She whistled impressively at the Mars Knight, and bit at one of her thumbnails in a poor attempt to hide a supportive grin.

“Honey, you just walked into a whoooooooole heap of trouble,” she told Megrez, and actually stepped forward like she meant to challenge her. “Trust me, exploding's not going to make anyone take you seriously. Been there, done that, got the damned t-shirt or whatever. You can think what you want, but you're not doing yourself any favors with the way you present your argument. You're talking to people who've probably been around way longer than you have with a hellava lot more experience and knowledge about what's going on. Does that mean we're right? Not necessarily. But dismissing it's not gonna get you anywhere. There's no one way to win the war. If there was, we'd've done it already.”

Ganymede dropped her hand and wiggled the fingers of one glowing palm, fairly certain Megrez remembered what sort of pain she could cause if she chose to. “The cold-blooded method didn't work before and it's not gonna work now, and I'm not gonna let anyone drag all our names into the dirt again because they're too empty-headed to realize they're flirting with Chaos themselves. Bring it, Sweetie. I've got no problem taking either you or Castor on.”

When she had got here was of no consequence - the point was that Bellatrix was here. The disenchanted Eternal Senshi of Fortitude was here, and as unimpressed as ever. She found it hard to be moved one way or the other any more. She'd been in this game for a long time - as long as Castor, definitely, but somewhere along the way, her give-a-damn had been busted. In the end, she'd come to the limit of her patience for this war, and teetered on the edge of saying <******** it and handing in her wand, or ending it by whatever means necessary - offering a purify or die ultimatum. She had a life she was ready to get back to.

And this was the same song and dance as whenever their kind gathered. Bellatrix sat, distance in her cornflower blue eyes, and heaved an impatient sigh. When she spoke, her voice was calm and even;

"This is necessity. There will always be Chaos, and there will always be Order, but the numbers are slanted. When numbers are too high, some of the herd must be culled to maintain balance. There are some who might be saved if they can be reached, but there are some who are inevitably too far gone. And there are some who it is simply kinder to exterminate than to bring to the light. Some can not deal with the loss of memory or identity that comes with changing sides. Death and killing is a necessity in this war. And until some of you can accept that, then you are in for a whole world of disappointment and heartbreak."

That wasn't to say Bellatrix supported outright slaughter, but she'd come to accept that there are some situations in which it was necessary. And that they couldn't save them all. Without darkness, there could be no light.

She wasn't corrupt. Avalon shuddered, a whole-body thing that trickled down her spine like beads of sweat. She knew she wasn't corrupt, but hearing it out of Hvergelmir's mouth, that made it more real. "I'm not corrupt," she repeated to herself, hands pressed tight over her chest. They didn't slip through the barrier of her bones. They stayed, pressed white around the edges. "I'm not."

Avalon was ready to go home now, she thought, she was ready to absent herself from this. War, loud and clear, but her home was here, her home was Earth, and she wasn't fighting for some far-away space planet, she was fighting because Chaos was wrong--

Avalon took a deep, deep breath. Something in that golden fog where all her memories must've been, once, rebelled at Kairatos's declaration that they'd had no choice. He's lying, she thought. He must be. That's not how it is. Was it? Hvergelmir had told her that she had been alone, so alone, when they'd come for her. That she had been scared, and they'd convinced her to let her put Chaos in her heart. Like a chip of ice. A chip that had frozen her whole heart. Finally, she crossed the room away from Castor and Pollux, putting herself behind Kairatos and Hvergelmir. There were too many people, too much yelling, she wanted to go home, and she felt part of her shut down and turn away. "I'm just going to be here, okay," she said, but if anyone had heard her--who knew?

"I'm trustworthy," she assured herself, "I'm good."