She went to Avalon on her own, the next time, with the pieces of the crown she had found in hand. They cooled in her hands as she picked her way across the devastated landscape. The fallen trees were gouged, long cuts through the bark and into the soft wood. Buildings that had been clean on her last visit were marked: red, purple, blue, green, all the colors in a Crayola chalk box. She tried to rub some of the color off the gray-green stone with the edge of her coat, but all that did was spread the color around.

In the dark, overcast weather, everything looked oddly monochromatic. Humidity gathered beneath her coat, and she twisted the rope belt about her waist until she could shed her coat, leaving each piece of her uniform behind. A bead of sweat crawled down her spine, like a lingering caress of lukewarm fingers.

The forge rose up before her, appearing suddenly in a dip between fallen trees. The logs were moss-covered, their bark flaking off around the scars left by the explosion and whatever was causing the clawing of the wood. Some of them leaked dark, bloody sap. "Maybe they've fallen more recently," she said to no one. One thing she knew was plants--it'd been Finn who taught her about that, piecemeal.

She reached out and touched the sap, and it was thick and sticky in a way that made her heart race. Raising her fingers to her mouth, she licked them. A burst of sharp copper and salt, the smell and the tang of blood.

At the edge of her senses, something stirred. Something dark and Chaotic, gone too fast for her to parse it.

"Not possible," she whispered, but there was blood on her fingers and it wasn't hers. Babylon had promised that her Wonder was hers and hers alone, that no one could come there without her say-so, but she had sensed Chaos here. That sensation was completely unmistakable. Avalon wiped her hand on the tree and hurried into the forge, closing the door tightly and thinking: well, what’s that going to accomplish? It wasn’t like doors really stopped anyone from doing anything, especially not ancient doors. Wouldn’t it splinter? It would shatter with a kick, she felt certain. And while she could certainly take any Chaos that tried to hurt her... they weren’t supposed to be here, and she hadn’t been prepared. Not for this.

Whatever it had been, it was gone now. Avalon stood up and dusted off a windowsill with her fingers, scrubbed the accumulated grime of centuries off one of the thick panes of glass. They should have broken, she thought, in the blast that had leveled so much of the forest; but there they were, ancient but still whole. Not even cracked.

She turned to the forge-hearth and stepped into a memory.

The blade was forged of starlight, or so it seemed. She tugged the silk wrapping loose; it didn’t catch on anything, simply slid free, smooth as river-water. On the ground, the fabric pooled like water, too, and she turned from the smith without thanks. None were necessary, from the Lady of the Lake to the man who used her forge, not when the duty that followed was so onerous.

She stepped outside the forge, the blade glittering in her hand like a cut piece of the sky. There waited a cluster of ten people: the council of nine and the one she’d chosen for this honor. “It is done,” she said. “I have seen this blade cut steel and stone and wood. It will serve its purpose.” She looked up, to the shimmering gold-green of the Code, but only for a moment. Something like revulsion burned in her throat, something like hate, and she shifted her grip on the sword.

Let the other knights hate her kind. Avalon was different; a purer sort of Knight for a purer sort of Wonder, and she was stronger with a blade in her hand.

“Then let it be quenched,” said Janeel.

Avalon nodded, and spared only a moment to look into the eyes of her husband before sheathing the sword hilt-deep inside him. “Shona,” he coughed, and she turned away. It sang to her, the blood and the steel. Soft, sweet, and strong. It sang a name to her, the sword’s name. Each syllable tasted of blood and honey on her tongue.

She came back to herself, face-to-face with a youma. It looked very nearly human, smaller than her, red-haired like Shona’s husband, green-eyed like him too, except the green didn’t stop at the end of his iris and his hair was not hair but thick seaweed and it dripped dark water that ran down his naked form. For a moment, Avalon stood paralyzed: the sheer impossibility of this moment locked her feet in their place.

It was a youma, though. She was not afraid of them. Avalon sprang forward, knocking the youma to the ground, grabbing its shoulders and slamming its head down, over and over and over until it stopped fighting her, until she couldn’t tell the color of its hair from the gore.

Then she sensed the General, and the golden mist of Avalon’s power surged through her feet to her fingertips and her eyes. It burned, it pressed outward on her skin, a sack filled to bursting with scalding water, and then…

And then...