Sailor Ares awoke, her eyes glued to the off-white tile of a hospital ceiling. She did not know where she had been, or why, and most of all, she did not know the fate of her Queen. And yet, like sand slipping through an hour glass, a sudden loss took hold in the chest of the senshi of smoke. She gripped the pale blue of her hospital gown feebly, tongue thick and swollen.

Something was wrong.
Something was very wrong.

It was perhaps not a scientific realization, but more of a creeping coldness, like the world when a god is found dead and wanting. Her fingertips experienced it first in their subtle twitching. She remembered things in flares like sun spots imploding -- a coin, black eyes, the red of blood.

None of it made sense to the parallel senshi or the normal human teenager who shared her skin, and yet -- Ares knew her Queen was gone. She knew it like she knew when her pot of tea was empty, or her laundry unsorted. It was an absence, black and rotten like a tumor, and it over took her heart before she could make sense of the stark reality that surrounded her in a cool mist.

When Fallon awoke from her coma, the entire hospital ward knew it. There was screaming, there was thrashing, there was sedation. Everywhere in the hospital some eyes flicked open -- but others, oh god how many others, stayed closed. Fallon was sad to have lost Corinna -- but Ares was destroyed to lose Nehelenia, Hector, even Alexandros.

She screamed until the needle came, and then, under wanton sleep, her eyes raced like a burning star across the sky. There was an urgency in the swell of her incapacitated chest, a suddeness in the tensing of her jaw, and a thought swelling in her head like a raging tempest:

It will not be vain.