The flankers kept living on his blind side because no Luna arrived there first.
Calypso would've borne the brunt of the damage, letting him avoid being targeted all the time.
Bastet would have claimed this floor with one step and dared the wave to move on it.
One fold from Nyx and the tunnel mouths would have stopped pouring.
Nothing was supposed to reach his back, because his back was Alexandra's, and she stood a kilometer of rock above him being everyone else's wall instead. Aria would have made the ceiling her sky, and no flenser would have dropped out of it alive.
He wanted them down here.
Under that, plainer and uglier, he wanted what they carried, the answers themselves, and down here, with no one watching, there was no pretending otherwise.
The second strike he turned wide. The third took a strip out of his forearm.
Alice's beam found the joint of a raised blade-limb and burned it black. The reaver shrieked, flinched wide, and kept coming.
