Dame Seraphine stepped forward to meet Borys, and the rushing pressure of him broke against the first thing out of her mouth.
"By the Honor of THE Queen Regnant," she said, "and the Source she has granted me."
She did not say it as a battle cry. She said it the way a person says a thing they have said many times, an oath worn smooth by use, the words a hinge that something larger turned upon. And as the last of them left her, she changed!
HUUM!
Her figure unmade its ordinary shape and became light. Obsidian stellar light, deep and dark and shining at once, the form of a Source Lifeform setting aside the body it wore for company and showing instead the thing it actually was underneath. The armor was gone. The graceful woman was gone. What stood in the storm of THE Maw was a being of pure obsidian radiance, and the dying converted air around her flinched back from it.
She reached up into the dark above her, and her fingers closed on a handle that was forming there.
