Silver rain began to fall from above, pitter-pattering into the red liquid around me. I bent to inspect a droplet and saw that it was solid, a glittering metallic teardrop-shape that felt heavy in my hand.

Holding the droplet, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of myself in the seventh grade. The first day of school, I remembered, at lunchtime. It was hard to balance the tray of food on my knees in the narrow bathroom stall. Someone had shouted that it smelled like fried chicken and banged on the stall door, peeking through the gap, asking if they could borrow a nugget, before laughing and leaving with their friends.

As the memory faded from my mind’s eye, its physical form rose from my hand and pressed itself to my chest, fading through my shirt. I gasped at the sudden coldness of metal on my skin. One by one, its brethren rose from the water and clinked into place, linking with the first. The scales interlocked like a suit of armor until they fully enclosed me, each one a reified memory reminding me of the cold, hard truth: human contact only led to pain. It was better to block the world off altogether.

To be honest, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment. If this suit of armor was a domain like Mia’s or Selene’s, it was a small one. But that made sense, I supposed.

It was a domain meant for one.

I looked up at Mia and felt the snare of her enchantment wash away. This new armor seemed to dull everything, make me numb to it. She was just an attractive woman. How could stoic Artem have fallen so easily? All that talk of duty and honor, and he’d folded like a cheap suit.

Currently he stood zombie-like at Mia’s side, while her ever-present smile grew into carefree laughter. The metallic faces inlaid in the sloping walls of the chalice turned to laugh as well, a ringing hollow sound.

“Oh my,” Mia said, looking me up and down. “What have we here? I didn’t know they were doing a casting call for the local ren faire. Forsooth, thou appear’st to be some kind of strange armored fish.” She giggled at her own joke. “Wilt thou swim to me, fish-knight?”

I didn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, my armor flexed outward on its own, sending red waves away from Selene, El, and myself. The waves rose, higher and higher, as they surged towards Mia, but as they reached her they split apart, rolling gently to both sides. Her arm was outstretched in a knife hand. The waters hadn’t touched her at all.

She grinned, and there was something of the fae in her expression. “You’re being a very bad houseguest, you know. But I have to admit I’m enjoying this. Your Batman to my Joker. Hmm… no, wait, Harley Quinn.” She rotated her wrist so her palm faced upward, a challenge or an invitation, and the pulling force intensified. El and Selene froze, not drawn to her exactly, but paralyzed by the psychic strength. Our party was weak, I thought, both physically and mentally. With El and Selene useless at the moment, it would fall to me alone to do what had to be done.

But was some part of me deep down enjoying this too? The chase, the danger, the banter? I suppressed those thoughts, the scales of my armor fluttering uneasily. “I’m not Batman,” I said. “I have no problem with… putting you down.”

She stuck a perfectly pink tongue out. “Can’t kill me if you can’t touch me.”

I signed Quicken out of force of habit and rushed forward. To my surprise, the green aura held long enough to give me a burst of speed, and I lashed out with a scaly fist, grazing her cheek. She seemed as surprised as I was, clapping a hand to her face as a thin line of blood appeared. It dripped into the sweet liquor of the bowl, and for a moment, that drip-drop was the only sound in the world, echoing off the gilded walls.

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“You hit me,” said Mia in wonder, looking at her hand.

“Talk shit, and you know the rest,” I said.

The liquid below me frothed, then became a geyser that threw me back away from Mia. While I was in midair, another wave struck me, slamming me into the hard wall in a continuous torrent that rattled my armor. Below it, I had no Hardening protection, and all the air went out of me. I couldn’t get a new breath in me. I was drowning in warm sweetness.

With a feral instinct, I lashed out, not physically, but with an all-encompassing rejection of what was happening, of the world around me, and the scales of my armor oscillated. A sphere of emptiness pushed outward, and the pounding of the liquid reduced into a fine mist, then died away entirely.

It felt colder than ever now. Each scale of painful memory that pressed against my skin was like ice, but at least I could breathe. Next to me, contained in the sphere of emptiness, Selene shivered, and El muttered, “What the fuck” under her breath.

Mia’s expression was unamused now. As she focused, she looked more fae than ever, and I could believe she was from another world. Something golden grew from within her, reflecting brilliantly off the golden walls. From her waist, petals of light unfurled, waving in an invisible wind, and one reached out to ensnare me. I didn’t know how, but a ghostly hand pushed its way out of my forehead and met that first petal in midair. God, even that contact sent an uncanny thrill of pleasure through me, quickly suppressed, a shock of softness and warmth as her emanation wrestled against mine for control. I gritted my teeth and sent forth another phantasmic limb which was met by another lush petal of light.

Invitation and rejection. Push and pull. Warmth and coldness. We went back and forth until five bands of light entwined in the air between us like dueling snakes. Space began to fracture as we strained, orange light from the outside world leaking into the pocket dimension, and I felt something begin to give way. It wasn’t her overpowering me, or me her.

It was the two of us breaking space itself.

There was an annihilation of opposites, and we each flew backwards, crashing into the walls of the chalice. The world rumbled, and sediment began to fall from above into the liquid, then chunks of rock. Orange light peeked into the world through gaps, and I saw that Mia’s domain was beginning to unravel at the seams. Seizing my chance, I started to rip and tear my way out, like a chick from an egg.

El and Selene saw what I was doing and joined in. As we emerged, we beheld a scene of destruction.

Sender would be pleased. Selene and Yao’s bridge, once spanning between the towers, was well and truly broken, cloven into two halves with a giant fissure between myself and Mia. Orange mists streamed in from outside, inflicting me with a strong premonition of approaching death.

Selene, El, and I stood on one side of the bridge, while Mia and Artem stood on the other. Mia waved as her half of the bridge seemed to recede physically away from us, growing smaller and more and more obscured by autumnal vapors. This tenuous bridge, it seemed, had been the only thing holding Strive and Eramai together. Now they were mere specks, and I could see almost the whole form of Strive behind them, a narrow, noble Tower whose peak was obscured by clouds above. Wait a second…

I wheeled around. Behind me was a series of layered red curtains in an archway, with a single shining ruby set at the apex. It was all very yonic in a way that I found a tad heavy-handed, and was certainly not the entrance we’d come through. The door pulsed with a familiar ba-dump, ba-dump sound.

“Xavier…” El put a paw on my scaled foot.

“Don’t touch me,” I said dully, and she pulled her paw back as if the armor had burned her.

We had ended up on the wrong side, and even my armor couldn’t block out a subtle stab of fear. With every passing moment, the tower called Strive shrank further into the distance, until it was a thin dusky line on the horizon, and finally, not visible at all.