In the emptiness, Nymeria’s voice rings out too loud. It thunders against her ears and slams against her skin, almost physical in its violence. The echoing, slurring mockery of her voice, a slithering whosethere, whosethere, whosethere, seems to last for too long, and the silence that follows is like a moonlit lake with a surface unperturbed by wind or rain. Or, perhaps, crystal and gemstones and unseen sights, hidden within the cavernous ribcage of the earth and forgotten over the ages. Eerie, and alien; where the shadows seem to flicker without reason and you can’t help but feel the hairs on your arms rising in arrays of goosebumps.

Quiet closes in on her, an unsaid threat perceptive as any living being.

Then wings thunder and down comes upturned earth and frayed lightning, and silver-orange-red all bursting outwards in a hypnotizing display. Light splays out around fringed feathers, glows in a halo behind a brilliant skull, casting the stallion’s face in deepest black. Here, at this point, something should be cautioning her to the possibility of foulplay, but today no alarm bell rings. Instead of stepping back, instead of preparing for possible danger, Nym cannot resist looking at him in bright-eyed astonishment, glued to the faux marble by the angel’s? sheer audacity. Some false breeze comes, conjured up unwittingly and subconsciously, to sweep up the locks of her curly mane and tail, rustle them in the wind oh-so-majestically.

And he, Zèklè, orbits her as if she has become center of the world.
Nymeria, as would be expected, loves it immediately. It feeds to her ego.

Son of the Lightning and King of the Whales. Some charming, errant smile slides across mature and devious lips, softening Nymeria’s imperious features. Just as Zèklè is more comfortable here than in the living world, Nym is pumped full of confidence, and swollen by a sense of [admittedly false] success. In this dream life, in this dream world, she has done what she has always hoped to do, lived out her every ambition to victory’s highest degrees. When he, her Hephaestus, surveys her (Athena) she doesn’t fear inadequacy; instead, she flourishes beneath his stare, grows and blossoms beyond a natural range of beauty into something fantastical and Aphrodite-like.

Her smile’s voltage is like to kill a man, and the confidence to her stare would scare off even the leanest, meanest wolves.

“Thank you,” Nym says, and her body does not portray sexuality or flirtatiousness as would Confutatis’, but instead a queen’s collected poise. In this world it would never cross her mind to use her woman’s body as a tool—in this world, her mind is all she needs to triumph over her foes. “But as a Warrior Queen,” and she puts an emphasis on those curlicue W and Q, “I’m still Nymeria.” Something playful fades from her tones, a silky edge of steel rising near to the surface of her words.

Then the strangeness is gone and she tips back her head and laughs, and when he disappears behind an orca she only waits in fleeting amusement before Zèklè has appeared again.

“So, Son of Lightning,” she begins. “Can you solve a riddle?”