He stared down at her prone form in abject horror. These spells could very easily go terribly, terribly wrong, but the chances of this exact scenario occurring... he shook his head, feeling a lock of black hair loosen from his turban and cascade down his forehead.

Surely he was mistaken.

He had tried this spell before. Many times before, actually, and he had never been pleased with the results. The women he had drawn from the future all possessed some inescapable flaw he had attributed to cultural differences, between his world and theirs and within their own worlds. In each case he had had to wipe memories, then send women back to their time periods or... well, he'd had to kill one who'd tried to slit his throat as he slept, and another particularly miserable woman who hadn't actually wanted to go back to the future, but that was part and parcel of importing women from the future.

Staring down at the prone form at his feet, he considered the possibility that she may not actually know who she really was. Some knew of their past lives; the degrees to which they knew who they'd been and when varied. Maybe this woman had had her mind completely wiped before she was sent down into the new world. Though if half of what he knew of her was true, she wouldn't have gone to a new life without her memories of the old left perfectly intact in what was no doubt, at her insistence, an eidetic memory.

"Master like new girlfriend?" Xerxes enquired, unused to long periods of bewildered silence from Mozenrath, and knowing how much his master hated these women being referred to as his "girlfriends," the eel used the only bait at his disposal to try to put an end to the growing discomfort of silence.

"New girlfriend pretty," the eel prompted. She was. Still, Mozenrath made no response as he gazed down at the still figure on the iron-black sand. The girl's hair was ridiculously long and voluminous; a chocolate-brown, red-tinged spray that framed her body and, when she stood, would hang below her tiny waist. Her skin was almost as fair as his, despite the fact that she had been drawn from a country known for its heat and deserts. She was wearing a tight white tank top with spaghetti straps which barely seemed able to hold her voluminous chest up. Her waist was smaller than his hand span but the tops of her silken breasts threatened to spill right out of the tank top. Her short white skirt matched the tank top and the outfit was completed by a pair of heavy black boots. The combination emphasised her lean, muscular frame. He looked longingly at the sculpted thighs and the flat abdomen. A wrinkle in the shirt had yanked it up over her pubic bone and he could see the ridges of a sculpted torso. She was like a beautiful, female version of the street rat and he was shocked to find himself aroused by that. Momentarily forgetting her past identity, he smiled wickedly as he mentally compared her to Jasmine. The princess was positively plain compared to this warrior woman! And maybe, he thought, just maybe, having her know her past identity might benefit him. For what was the street rat's fiancé but the princess of a small-time kingdom? This woman had once been a living goddess. She could take down empires singlehandedly. With that in mind, Mozenrath bent to carry her into the Citadel. It would have been easier to teleport them both into his lavish chambers, but he liked the idea of her opening her eyes to see him carrying her into the castle from the dead of the desert night.

It didn't happen that way. With her wide emerald green eyes opening, she slowly came into consciousness as Mozenrath laid her lithe body on the soft down covers of his enormous bed. As light as she was, he wished he'd just teleported them both into the room. Finding the task of carrying a 45kg woman a few meters - well, a few hundred meters, to give himself full credit - to be a difficult task only reminded him of that woman's necessity to his own failing health and her reason for being here.

"Welcome to the Citadel," Mozenrath said formally as a pair of huge green eyes focussed on him. "I am Mozenrath, Lord and Ruler of the Land of the Black Sand." She laid still, appraising him, noting the thick blacks and blues of the silks he wore beneath his cape and turban.

"I an Karena," she said evenly. "Where am I, truly, and what year is this?" Surprise showed on Mozenrath's angular face. None of the women he'd transported, or imported - whatever - had asked for the year during their introductions. Despite the unfamiliar background it usually took then at least ten minutes to figure out that they weren't just in a different country, but a different era, a different world. She had also answered him in fluent Arabic. Reading this in his face, she spat, as if offended suddenly,

"I speak five languages. And I have travelled through ninety-eight countries. From what I have seen already, this is not one of them. Furthermore, you have neglected to remove my iPhone even though I was unconscious and defenceless against your taking it if you wanted to. If you were from my time you would know that every piece of vital and personal information about me is contained within this item yet you" she said, dangling the phone by its earpiece "don't even seem to know what it is. So bring me a calendar and two maps: one of the world as it is known to your best scholars and one of whatever land you just told me you rule over." She paused, suddenly tired but determined not to show it. Mozenrath let the silence drag on, expecting her exhaustion, one eyebrow raised. This was almost certainly her, then: the most famous woman in his world was back. A smile curled his upper lip. She was everything he would have hoped she'd be if the idea that he would ever encounter the conqueror of conquerors had occurred to him: sharp, observant, beautiful, strong, and she was completely ageless. She could be aged between fifteen and thirty; she was wise beyond her years, young in the face and strong in the muscles which rippled beneath her skin. She was like no other woman Mozenrath had teleported from the future before. She was like no other person he had ever met.

"Mozenrath, Lord and Ruler of the Land of the Black Sand," she said, excusing herself from having to struggle to sit up, for she suspected that she had not the strength yet to do so, "I do not know how you have brought me here, or why. As I am not chained I may presume that I am not exactly a prisoner, but the lack of restraints may be a psychological trick designed to rob me of hope when I discover that I am locked in a tower on a precipice or some shit." She smiled wryly to see the handsome young lord smiling approvingly at her. "My interest in my capture is therefore piqued," she said, "for I am from a poor family and you would not be able to ransom me. If you still intend on trying to, I've already told you where you can find my personal information, but I suspect that you won't be able to utilise here if you can decipher how to use my iPhone. If you wanted to rape me you probably would have done so by now and you could still try, but as I am trained in boxing and Taekwondo - I would invite you to try." She smirked. "Taekwondo is an ancient Asian warrior art of combat, and the fact that you did not already know that tells me again that we are not in 2019 anymore. I don't know if this means anything to you, but I currently hold two different martial arts titles in two different nations, in two different weight categories. I'm not considered particularly important but I am very well known in the way that people are well known in my time, and despite the fact that you will not be able to ransom me, my disappearance will not go unnoticed. So where am I really, and why am I here, Mozenrath, Lord and Ruler of the Land of the Black Sand?"

Later he sat beside her, watching her sleep with the maps she had requested discarded beside her. The first thing she'd done when she took the maps from him, the green paint on her nails gleaming, was hold the scrolls to her face and inhale deeply of them with a frozen smile on her face. Mozenrath had maintained his usual cold mask as he stared at her but her own cold smile with its perfect, even white teeth had unnerved him: he had never seen anybody sniff at parchment before and that smile had sent a shiver through his spine. After that he had found himself strangely unable to communicate with his usual loquacity when addressing this young woman. He had established that she was twenty-five years old, that she lived in a large city called a metropolis, where she had just graduated from a prestigious medical school. She was an elite gymnast; she had attended something called the Olympic Games as a teenager. These were details he already knew, but he also knew that keeping the extent of his knowledge to himself was vital with this one. She was smart. She hadn't been able to interpret the maps he'd given her, and she seemed completely unsurprised and unperturbed by this. That meant that she had known she would not be able to interpret them; she'd asked for them for some other reason. And he remembered the cold smile on her face when she had held that fistful of parchment to her face before she'd even unravelled it and he knew intuitively that she had deduced something from the very parchment itself, something she hadn't even needed to see before deducing it. And that spun him out.

He had also managed to establish that that iPhone was indeed her most important possession and it connected her to every aspect of that world. Mozenrath twirled the device in his hands. She had shown him how to play music on it, laughing at his reaction to what she referred to as the most popular music of his time, but he had secretly enjoyed the dramatic sounds of the composers she called Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. She had also attempted to explain that through this device she could speak or send textual messages to anybody in her world, that she could call anybody she wanted, "if I had reception," she'd smiled wryly. He didn't know what that meant but he suspected that she had needed to see the phone to ascertain this. She had been in a particular hurry to do this as soon as she had appraised the maps he'd given her: her fingers had skipped quickly over the flat screen and then she had looked up at him suddenly, renewed interest in her eyes. He couldn't see why it was so important to her, but she had found whatever she was looking for as soon as the screen lit up. Or perhaps she hadn't found whatever she was looking for: her expression gave away nothing in the light produced by the device but he saw a sudden flash in her eyes before she gazed up at him with an appraising state of her own. He wondered why he had never seen one before: he had certainly imported enough women from her world. Perhaps the device was relatively new. He had learned to scroll through her Camera Roll, and he quickly looked up at her when he realised that he had discovered her photographs, surprised to find himself hoping she didn't awaken to see him so childishly invading her privacy. Everything she had told him appeared to be true, and there was more. There were pictures of her surrounded by women beneath bright yellow lights, women who were playing with her hair and makeup. Were these women her handmaidens? Had she lied about being from a poor family? He approved of that: she was not as arrogant as the man she'd been married to the last time she was here, then. There were strange pictures of her standing next to giant pictures of herself too. What trickery was this? Was it her in the giant pictures, or statues of her? Why would she be photographed standing next to pictures of statues of herself? He wanted to wake her and ask her. But that would have meant explaining that he'd been scanning through her photographs, and besides, he could see that she was too exhausted to answer all the questions those photographs had left him with.

Eventually, despite being accustomed to working late into the night, he became overcome with tiredness himself. Standing in the doorway to his own room, he gazed back at the sleeping beauty. Whatever happened, this was going to be an interesting few months. He chuckled as he left the room to find a vacant guest room. The street rat was going to lose his mind once he found out who was living in the Citadel. And Jasmine? He could only imagine Jasmine's horror.

Karena was an early riser, and a hungry one.

"Where the fuck is the food?" She enquired casually as the strips of what passed for dawn leaked in through the windows of the rarely used kitchen. She stalked around the room, kicking cupboards open with her heavy black boots, flicking drawers open with an easy, airy grace. They were all empty, of course. Karena seemed unsurprised by this, but she also seemed intent on opening every cupboard and drawer. Was she anxious and desperate to stay busy, or was she a person who couldn't tolerate hunger?

Dominance had to be established very soon – preferably today. Mozenrath was twenty-five years old himself; old enough to know that in terms of experience with women he had nothing on the conquerors this woman had so casually destroyed the last time she had been here. She also had a cold stream flowing behind her eyes; a malevolent streak that he knew would easily rival his own. That impressed him, but he was decidedly less impressed by the idea that dominance could be established by her as easily as it could be by him. And she seemed to never stop moving or thinking until suddenly, she had whipped around and leaned on the heavy, scarred table in the middle of the room, poised as steady as a viper, those deadly eyes fixed on his, shooting sparks at him from across the room.

"Protein and carbohydrates, please," she said without waiting to be asked, then tapped her lips with the fingernail of her index finger which, like the rest of her fingernails, was painted an emerald green, a colour which matched her eyes and complemented her pale skin. So. Not anxious, then.

"Usually I eat oatmeal and blueberries for breakfast. This being the year 100AD, give or take, I doubt that your cereal would agree with my stomach. In which case," she purred,

"I'll take a stack of pancakes, two eggs and four rashers of crispy bacon with butter and a pitcher of orange juice. Plenty of pulp, please." Her bright green eyes stared into his and he unthinkingly conjured the breakfast she had requested, including the flatware she would need to eat it, a bowl of fruit in a delicate china bowl and a heavy cloth napkin set on a tray between her hands on the table in front of her. She didn't even look at it. A triumphant expression appeared on her face.

"So I am not the first woman you've brought here from my world." He gazed down at the platters on the table. He wanted to grab her by the waist and slam her backwards into the wall behind her, maybe knock some sense into her. His right hand itched and he rubbed his fingers together tersely, the gloved hand behind his back. Blue sparks sizzled between his thumb and index finger and Karena smiled broadly at him. His anger rose and his fist clenched and unclenched instinctively. Instead, he inhaled deeply. She had tricked him, fair and square.

"You could have asked," he said through gritted teeth as Xerxes nestled around his shoulders, purring: "Karena smart." Mozenrath stalked to the other side of the table and seized the creature by the tip of his tail and tossed him casually into the hallway. He wasn't about to be lured into war over the breakfast table with the very woman whose cooperation he needed so very badly.

"You wouldn't have told me the whole truth," that woman said flippantly now, tying her long hair up into a high ponytail that revealed the length of her neck and the silver studs in her earlobes - eight in each one - as casually as though a flying, talking eel hadn't been tossed over the breakfast table before her. "You still haven't. I could ask right now or - better yet - " her eyes flashed as she took the seat he jerked out from beneath the table for her, "I could pull it from you, piece by piece." She tensed suddenly, feeling his anger behind her. Having an angry man hovering above Karena decreased her confidence significantly, though she would never reveal it.

"Do you think you're the only one with powers?" she asked quietly. He walked around to chair beside her with an ominous silence and sat down, staring at her as if seeing her for the first time with an intensity that Karena knew should have frightened her but which didn't.

"Technology," he fumbled over the still- unfamiliar word, "has usually destroyed or hidden the powers your people hold naturally."

"I wasn't raised around much technology," she confessed.

"Yet you own this - this - Ear Phone?"

"iPhone," she corrected, "and in 2019, some aspects of technology are required for survival. This is one of them."

"Tell me," she said, changing the subject, when did you inherit your throne?"

"I did not inherit my throne!" He suddenly screamed. Karena continued eating as though his sudden outburst had been a mere continuation of their polite conversation, and nothing more. "I was sold into an apprenticeship when I was about four years old," he said quietly, "to a cruel and vicious master. I usurped him when I was sixteen." She paused, fork half way to her mouth. There was a very peculiar expression on her face. It contained a mixture of emotions but chief amongst them were understanding and – if he was reading her correctly - empathy. Why? Did she remember her previous life near here in detail, or had history repeated itself?

"What of your parents?" Mozenrath enquired.

"My father was a violent drunk." She looked away briefly, her eloquent gaze returning suddenly with a flash. "I took care of him, in much the same way you took care of your former master. When I was sixteen. And like your former master, my father ain't telling nobody what I did to him," she finished with a cruel laugh. There was a pause in the conversation, but not an uncomfortable pause. Mozenrath knew that the last time she was here she had killed several of her own siblings and seduced a foreign dictator whilst avoiding legal marriage in order to ascend her own throne. The thick stench of violence hung in the air, but it was a stench with which Mozenrath was comfortable and familiar. He wasn't at all bothered by it, but he was curious that this beautiful young woman could elicit that which tended to be associated with violent men – soldiers of fortune, powerful dark sorcerors, battle-hardened rulers. She probably hadn't turned her father into a Mamluk, but she had a violent past and at least one overthrowing in common with Mozenrath. He was intrigued. He'd never thought about it before, but he had never connected emotionally with another human being. And imagine - intrigued. Intrigued. He was intrigued by a woman. This was worrisome. It would be distracting enough to be intrigued by a woman without her being the conqueror of conquerors and residing right beneath his roof. That this conqueror shared his ruthlessness and his lust for power was worse. She was going to cause a huge distraction, no matter where he sent her or what he did with her.

"Why have you brought me here?" She had changed the topic again, and he noted that not once had she begged to be returned to her old life, or even enquired about it. She seemed interested only in what she was doing here. And she wasn't going to stop asking until he answered her somehow.

"You intrigue me," he responded honestly. "And your contempt for your current world suggested that you might be open to a change of scenery. This - medical degree -" another unfamiliar word - "appears to be extremely selective." At this, she nodded.

"I have watched your world for seven years," he continued. "I know that your universities accept only the most intelligent students into their medical schools. The things you study there are quite similar to some of the things I study." She raised an eyebrow. She'd seen the Mamluks already, and she had obviously arrived at her own conclusions.

"I suppose one might arrive at that conclusion in your position," she chuckled.

"And you are an elite level gymnast." he continued as though she'd not spoken. "To succeed in the world's most difficult sport you must be strong, physically and mentally. And I need a woman with your intelligence and strength." At this she laughed.

"So you just took me? You're not even going to offer a male relative of my family what you consider to be a fair price for my hand?"

"Is that the standard procedure in your world?" he asked gravely. There was a short silence before she burst into waves of laughter. It was a boisterous laugh: a man's laugh. He but back a harrumph of frustration.

"To answer your question, I have teleported fifteen different women from your world over the last three years. All were... unsuitable," he said with obvious distaste, and walked away from the table before Karena could sarcastically ask why he didn't just get himself a girlfriend here.

Fifteen different women over a period of three years. Karena wondered what had happened to then all, and decided that that was none of her business. Instead, she continued eating, as though nothing Mozenrath had said was in any way unusual. She decided that for the first few days, until she grew to know her captor, that this was the tactic she would use in her observations of him. Captor. I am a captive, she thought, concentrating on the physical task of eating to keep her thoughts from her face. There was a strange amusement to the situation. I've never been a captive before. She was also aware that despite the claim, he had not answered her question.

Mozenrath noted Karena's lack of reaction. From what he had observed over the past three years, the number of women he'd gone through was perceived as quite a revelation and often dictated a woman's behaviour towards him going forward. Most feared him, assuming he'd killed their predecessors, and Mozenrath did not discourage this perception. It kept many of them in line despite their prideful boasts of having ancestors who'd fought for their rights to be treated as equals to men. Having never engaged in any such battles of their own they were usually completely unprepared for the patriarchal rules of their new world, and they were easily intimidated. This woman was different, however. She had been a living goddess many thousands of years before the most basic of democratic rights had been extended to women. To his enemies Mozenrath was a ruthless villain, but he was also a usurper, and he lived in the shadow of that every day of his life. Destane had seemed like a ruthless villain too, yet sixteen-year-old Mozenrath had overcome him and delivered him to a fate worse than death. By the dark glint in Karena's green eyes, she had done something similar to her own father, who must have seemed like a ruthless villain to her at some point too, perhaps right up until the moment she killed him - and she'd never been caught. Mozenrath knew that in 2019, anybody who got away with homicide was either damned lucky or damned smart. In either case, there was no telling what she was really capable of, but Mozenrath was determined to find out. Try though he might, however, he was unable to establish dominance over Karena in the usual ways he broke women from her world. Which was truly her world, though? If she was who he thought she was, she would soon be ruling the Land of the Black Sand and half of the remaining seven deserts within a couple of years. She saw straight through his attempts to intimidate her and didn't react to them. She didn't reproach him for the way he treated Xerxes, though the eel liked her and was soon curling around her shoulders. She showed no reaction to this either - it was as though nothing could frighten or surprise her. How did one establish dominance over such a woman? He considered hitting her on many occasions those first few days, but found himself eyeing those powerful shoulders and he remembered hearing her saying, "I am trained in boxing and Taekwondo" and he heard the smirk in her voice as she said that, despite the fact that she must have been exhausted from her first teleportation. Then there was whatever she had done to her father, and that cold gleam behind her eyes, that malice that he recognised in himself. For the first time, he realised that he needed to make an ally of a woman he had imported from the future.

Deciding eventually near the end of their first day together that he needed to determine once and for all whether she was who she thought she was, he told her about the street rat and his princess. She wasn't interested in their romance - she wanted to know about the current ruler of Agrabah. When he had finished telling her that the Sultan was a confused, incompetent old fool who spent most of his days playing with his enormous collection of toys, she looked disgusted.

"So this - this Jasmine, she's a grown-ass woman, and she hasn't slit the old bastard's throat in his sleep?" Oh, yes. From what he understood of the language she had used, this was her in her most brutal form.

"She is wise to avoid legal marriage to anybody," she continued, poring over a spell book, "because everybody knows that a woman can't share a throne with a man."

"Actually," Mozenrath chortled, "the street rat is the one avoiding legal marriage." She looked up from her book.

"Seriously?" She asked, her lip twisted in disdain.

"He is completely uninterested in power," Mozenrath said.

"What? Why's he marrying her then?" She didn't wait for an answer before she strode over to him.

"According to your own maps this kingdom is but a hop, skip and a jump from here and you can teleport. So why haven't you killed the stupid old man and his stupid-ass daughter?" She picked up a dagger and held it under his chin.

"Teach me to teleport, and shit, I'll do it for you," she said malevolently. He took hold of the wrist holding the dagger and she immediately released it with a smile. Mozenrath caught the dagger as it fell, but did not return her smile.

"Yeah, and then you'd own the throne of Agrabah," he said bitterly.

"We would own the throne of Agrabah," she corrected gently.

"Is that what you promised that man you were married to the last time you were here?" he snapped, glaring at her.

"My father trained me how to withstand interrogation techniques," she said calmly. "So don't bother looking for pupil dilation or reflexive eye movements when you ask what you think are provocative or distracting questions. You won't see any and you can't torture me. Not successfully, anyway."

Gods. What kind of a father tortured his own daughter to prepare her for the possibility that she might one day be tortured? She picked up the dagger again and walked backwards with it at her side, her eyes never leaving his.

"To answer your question, this is to the best of my awareness the first time I have travelled through time. If I have been here before, in some other life, I have no recollection of it." With that, she slammed the dagger into the scarred work table and went back to her reading.

She hadn't answered his question, and this did not escape the young ruler. But he hadn't been entirely forthright in answering her questions, either. Was this a game to her? If it was, she was going to make a formidable combatant.

Mozenrath vaguely considered the possibility that the street rat might actually make a less formidable enemy than Karena. At least Aladdin wasn't as ready with a sharp edge as this woman. Then again, she and Mozenrath both lusted after the same thing - power. Most of the women he'd imported wanted love. They were crazed for it: in all fifteen cases prior to Karena's arrival, their lust for love was their greatest weakness and Mozenrath found it easy to exploit. Karena didn't even seen to know what love was. Not only had she not once asked if she would be returned to her family, she hadn't enquired about Mozenrath's own love life or the lack of living people in the Citadel. She enquired about his work and she took particular interest in oddities like maps, trading routes, weather patterns and, particularly, political movements. It was as though Karena was somehow prepared for life in the Land of the Black Sand. No, it was more than that. It was as though she had already prepared herself to rule the Land of the Black Sand and had just been waiting to be transported to the place.

In the depths of a night lit by a sliver of moon in the sky, Karena slipped quietly down the deserted, hallowed hallway, shivering in her lace underwear with its matching silk over-gown. She slid through Mozenrath's bedroom doors, which were slightly ajar. The young sorcerer was resting peacefully on his back in the middle of the enormous bed, his thick black hair tumbled around his face on the silk pillow slip. She stood over him for a moment, watching him with a cool appraisal. He seemed so fresh and innocent, his features uncreased by the furrow she'd come to associate with him whenever she studied him while he worked, as unaware of his gaze when he was locked deep in concentration as he was now, locked deep in slumber. He looked positively innocent in sleep. Karena slipped over to the edge of the bed, lifted the covers and slid in beside Mozenrath. He didn't wake from his slumber until he felt her cool body press up next to his. Then he awoke with the start she had expected from him the moment she'd slid through the doors, despite the care she had taken to maintain her silence, figuring that the slightest noise in the inky depths of night would awaken him suddenly.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, sitting up and gathering the blankets around his naked torso.

"I'm cold and lonely. I thought you might be, too," she whispered, though there was no need for quiet in the dark, lonely chambers of the Citadel. The moonlight streaming into the room danced over her gown with its satin trim, open to reveal the lacy bra and the tiniest set of underwear he had ever seen. He gaped at her. This was no frigid Princess Jasmine: this was the conqueror of conquerors.

"What - " he was still groggy from sleep. Although Mozenrath was no virgin, his experience with women was very limited. He'd certainly never bedded a lingerie model, which was the job description Karena had provided him to explain the strange photos on that iPhone of hers. He reached out and grabbed her with both arms, his ability to think suddenly dissipating. The last woman he had bedded was Stephanie, and she'd been fat in places you don't necessarily want to be fat. Plus she'd been a virgin, and Karena had unabashedly told him while they worked on a potion earlier that day that she'd been having sex since she was fifteen years old, and that her libido was so high that she needed a special implant that controlled something she called her hormones. This implant prevented her from becoming pregnant for five years, controlled most of her urges, and stopped the annoying "monthly problems" young women were forced to endure. Mozenrath was thankful she'd spared him some of those details: as a medical student she spoke of anatomy and physiology the way he spoke of the contents of spells and potions and he wasn't sure he'd ever get used to it.

"Oh, harden the fuck up," she'd said lightly when he told her that, another euphemism apparently popular amongst people from her time and place.

In the stream of moonlight now, her expression invisible, she ran a hand through his curls, cupped his face in one hand and took his ungloved hand and slid it until her panties. He groaned in sudden surrender and pulled her into him with his free arm. She wiggled out of the lace G-string and knelt before him, naked from the waist down as he became very, very hard. He trailed a finger in between the flowering pink lips. His finger came away wet. He moved his lips to hers but she threw him onto his back. Slipping beneath his blankets for warmth, Karena trailed her fingernails gently down his pale chest, kissing her way down until she reached his throbbing manhood. She took him in her mouth and, trapping him between her tongue and her upper palate, sucked every inch of him into her mouth and throat so that when she moved her head up next he was slick enough for her to take his shaft in one hand as her tongue lapped around the head of his penis. His hands twisted in her long hair, pulling her up to look into her eyes. Effortlessly he tossed her onto her back and speared himself between her legs, plunging, groaning and gasping into the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her body responded and she rocked with her orgasm just moments before he burst inside her, years of frustration - not just sexual frustration - spurting from him in one long, wondrous blast that left his entire body tingling as she curled up next to him. The thoughts that had fled him into the night did not return and he began to drift off to sleep as the events of the night faded away into the black.

He slept for a long time. Uninterrupted sleep he'd not known since childhood, sleep unperturbed by dreams or nightmares. Thick, dreamless, blessed sleep.

She was leaning on one elbow, staring into his eyes as he slowly came to consciousness the next morning.

Wide awake. She was already wide awake.

"Don't be thinking you're gonna be getting me pregnant," she said abruptly. "As I told you, our technology can prevent that disgusting condition and your magic is no match for it. I've checked already this morning," she said triumphantly. "And I am too fucking smart to let some young would-be king knock my ass up."

This was only the beginning of their second day together, but Mozenrath had figured out that she enjoyed to provoke people. He ignored this attempt - for now. He was still groggy from sleep and she had the advantage yet again.

"Fucking. Ass." He drawled slowly. "You use these words often. What do they mean, exactly?"

Karena paused, stumped for words. "Well, both words are obviously very versatile," she said. "Originally an "ass" was a hybrid donkey/horse. Then it came to represent your posterior. And "fuck" and its derivatives are too complicated to explain. We use them casually, but almost never in formal conversation - "fuck" is a swear word."

"So you over-use these words, then," he observed.

"Yes," she confessed unabashedly. He figured he could get more personal now.

"Why do you worry about pregnancy so much?"

She leaned on one elbow and stared at him, a cold, penetrating gaze. "Pregnancy is a tool used by weak men to subjugate women," she said evenly. "If you were to get me pregnant and somehow you managed to prevent me from terminating the pregnancy, you would potentially knock my ass out of the competition for at least nine months, possibly forever if my body betrayed me by actually enjoying being a mother." That last word was emphasised with obvious disgust.

"Your body doesn't control your mind!" Mozenrath laughed. "I thought your scientists knew everything!"

"Mind and body are the same substance, you ignoramus," she said, "and my body did betray me once. I enjoyed being pregnant right up until the monster inside me was aborted. Hormones again," she explained, mistaking the confusion on his face for his lack of physiological knowledge.

"You've been pregnant?" he asked, shocked. He'd never imported a woman who had children before. Not because he particularly cared about separating mothers from their children, but because it was likely that all these women would do would pine away for their missing children, and Mozenrath had no time for whiners.

"Yeah, I've been pregnant. Three or four times. All of the women in my family are fertile as fuck, none of them are maternal and they all shit out sociopaths," she went on. He stared at her, uncomprehending both the speech he did understand and the cool dismissal of what most women wanted most, supposedly. "We reproduce assholes like you and I," she explained as the silence went on "and although my mother had the right idea as to create a high-functioning sociopath, it must have been a hell of a job and it is one I will never desire. It would therefore be irresponsible for me to shit out any brats, particularly brats who have both your genetic structure and mine." She laughed when she saw the growing confusion on his handsome face. "Don't worry about it," she said. "I can bring you some books when I next visit my old home to collect some more of my stuff, because I can't be walking around in my underwear all day and I only grabbed enough clothing when you sent me back yesterday to last me for a few days, but suffice it to say that if you should one day wish to impregnate a woman, it will not be me. I like your accent," she said suddenly, smoothly. She

climbed back onto him, and he saw that when she was straddling him naked in the light of the day, with the underwear and the silk discarded, she was even more beautiful than before. And she rode him harder and faster than she had the night before, pinning his arms to the pillow and pumping those strong hips, clenching inside in a way that was so rhythmic it had to have been trained. He gasped and, feeling completely at her disposal, came hard into her again, thrusting his hips up as he felt the release. When he was finished he lay, panting, staring up into her bright emerald eyes.

"Now," she smirked, "you owe me one."

And with that, he knew that dominance had been established.

By her.

Over Mozenrath.

Clothes. She had wanted to return to 2019, she said, to get her clothes. "I can just conjure your clothing," Mozenrath had said lazily from the bed.

"No, you can't," she'd said flatly," squeezing her bathing water from her long hair with a soft towel in the doorway. Barefoot, her face stripped of makeup, she looked as innocent as a child. "And when I get back you will see why."

He did. After replacing the amethyst oblisque on a simple drawstring around her neck with a sharp, clear sapphire-blue oblisque that felt harder than diamond, Mozenrath showed her how to use it. "Time travel had better not have any anti-ageing side effects," she said, sounding quite serious and managing to look perfectly ludicrous with her fresh face before she closed her fist around the small oblisque, closed her eyes and disappeared.

And standing now over the pile of clothes, shoes, hats and accessories she'd teleported from 2019, he saw that whilst conjuring most of it wouldn't have taken any serious effort on his behalf, it would have taken some serious time. "The daughters of foreign dictators and kings own less than this," he'd said scornfully.

"Scuse me," she said, leaning forward to pluck a slender screen from the pile. "But I saw a ballroom back there last night and there's something I have to do." The black boots, white singlet top and white skirt had been replaced by skin-tight electric-blue PVC pants and a matching top that criss-crossed over her breasts and revealed her entire abdomen. The princess wore something similar, though looser and somehow less sexually aggressive. Possibly it was the colour; possibly it was the fact that Jasmine's pale blue top hung more loosely over her breasts, whereas Karena's pushed her breasts up. And where Jasmine was soft and feminine, as he'd already discovered but really noticed now, Karena was solid muscle. The kind of muscle one just didn't see on a woman. It was not unattractive, however. She had re-painted her face: silver and blue eye-shadow this time, and the thick eyeliner brought out the emerald in her eyes. There seemed to be glitter in her hair and he realised that she was wearing a gold headpiece which slotted into her fringe beneath the black hat with its full rim and blue satin ribbon and rained gold through her long hair even when it was tied up in that long ponytail. "It's Von Trapp time!" she yelled with a grin on her face and disappeared down the hall. He heard the sound of a new pair of shoes running on the marble floors: instead of her heavy black travel boots she was wearing knee-high lace-ups with thick platform heels that pulled her up almost to his eye height. He shook his head and wandered down the long hall, lit by wall sconces and the dim light which trailed in from the crystal ceilings; the entire Citadel had been topped with a crystal roof, as though some previous ruler had had a thing for the light. Despite this, the rooms were all still decidedly cool and dark, with the perpetual heavy black clouds over the land. He heard the sound of music pumping from the ballroom she'd mentioned, which was actually one of three, and when he arrived in the huge doorway he was surprised to find her dancing in front of the screen she'd seized from the enormous pile on the ground. He'd seen video material on her iPhone and this tablet seemed to be a bigger version of that. She'd set it up on a pillar at one end of the room and she was dancing in front of the mirrored walls. He'd never seen dancing like that, though. Or heard music like that. He knew that she was a gymnast, but she'd told him that she couldn't dance. Beneath her skin-tight pants he could see her powerful quadriceps rippling with movement. He winced as she flipped forward suddenly, turning beatifically in the air as she sailed through a free-walkover that even his uneducated eye could see was going to fall short, but he was quick enough to see her left leg shoot out and plant a boot onto the ground to break her apparent fall before she dropped flat onto her back with her arms stretched out at her sides, flinging her hat out to one side, laughing. He looked at her, lying on the floor, her footprints clear in the thick dust, her shiny hair spread out behind her head, its dark brown strands interspersed with gold. She was breathing hard but happily. The dust had risen from the floor and was floating in the air above her. Sunlight glinted through the crystal ceiling, streaming down around her, and the rising dust seemed to sparkle. The moment seemed to hitch in time for him, and then the music changed.

"Ooh! I love this song!" she snapped her hands up to the floor beside her ears and pushed up. Her legs flicked up and tucked underneath her arched back so that she went from lying flat on her back to standing in under one and a half seconds. That, he'd seen the street rat do many times before. She was dancing already, mirroring the dancers on the screen in front of her while her own reflection showed him her clear, happy face. She looked like a child playing. She dropped close to the ground, her right leg extended out to the side, and spun around on her left foot, snatching up the black hat and dropping it neatly back onto her head as she spun, her eyes never leaving the dancers on the screen. She leapt forward and balanced on one arm, her hips bent so that her torso seemed to bend right in half, her legs parted in a split, and then she put her other arm on the ground, pushed her torso straight up, snapped her legs together and walked around in circles a wide circle on her hands. When she'd completed four rotations and her back was facing the screen she lowered one of her legs slowly to the ground in front of her, her back arching impossibly. Such a ludicrous display of flexibility and strength. Her top leg bent at the knee, her foot flexed in the air, and still she held the position. The song finished and a new one began, this one with a hectic tempo. Her bent front leg straightened and she pushed off the ground, sprang back off her hands and suddenly she was tumbling backwards across the marble floor, effortlessly. Her mood had changed. He didn't know how, but he could feel it. It was as though the air in the room had been pushed up with the dust on the floor and sucked out the doors, taking with it the room's natural chill and replacing it with a frantic heat. There was anger in her movements now, a certain viciousness that expressed itself in the way she moved her hands, her head, and in the way she pointed her boots. Dust continued to fly off the floor, but instead of sitting in the sunlight, it careened around the room with her, a dust storm in a ballroom. He shrank back against the shadows, unwelcome here. The instruments playing on the tablet were unfamiliar to him; the structure of the music was completely foreign, and so were her movements, all of them, but when she had pushed back from that bridge, her mood had changed and she was angry now. Even in her anger she moved with a smooth grace that he himself admired, and he wanted desperately to keep watching her. She drifted towards the doorway, risen onto the toes of her boots, back straightened, chin up, her arms and hands fluttering around her in quite a different way to the original boot-stomping, shoulder-swaying movements she'd begun with, and although she seemed to look straight at him she didn't see him. Interrupting her now would be... inadvisable. Shocked at himself suddenly, at the realisation that he was scared of her, this conqueror of conquerors, this tiny woman, scared of her, scared of seeing that look in her eyes focussed on him. He backed away, almost stumbling in the dark, closeting himself in the shadows but refusing to walk away despite the work he had to do. He was wasting time watching a girl from the future dance and turn somersaults. It was ludicrous. There was so much work to do today and...he kept watching.

For hours.

Karena stopped dancing when the music stopped. The iPad had only been at thirty percent when she had picked it up. Karena slid over to the pillar and picked it up, staring at the blank screen. A blank slate. She sighed and looked up at the crystal ceiling, sliding the iPad back down onto the pillar. A smile that would've been interpreted as being peculiar had anybody been around to see it flashed onto her face. A blank slate.

She walked through the dust hanging in the air in the once-magnificent ballroom and continued on through the labyrinthine halls, guided by the sound of work noises. Following these somehow familiar sounds through the completely foreign citadel led Karena up a steep, winding staircase and around a sharp corner flanked by a tall stone pillar with a dust-caked vase poised delicately on top of it. It was the first object of decoration Karena had seen on her walk through the castle, her skin cooling rapidly in the dim light. The tapestries which hung from the walls did not provide much insulation. She walked over to the vase more quickly than she would've liked to admit and bent to look at it closely. The vase was definitely Greek. She was sure of that. But she was uncertain of anything else. The entire citadel seemed to be constructed of and adorned by a mish-mash of elements found in the west and in the east. It would have been opulent once, possibly even a little crass. Now, her boots echoed down the deserted halls and left prints as evidence of her being there, evidence she'd initially tried to remove by swiping her feet along the smooth marble only to discover that that just left a trail in her wake. Karena found herself standing before a set of heavy doors at the end of a hallway. She didn't recognise much of her surroundings, and this baffled her. I've travelled the motherfucking world, she thought as she clomped up the steps. I've studied history. Art. Ancient fucking warfare! I know how to figure out where I am, yet... yet she still hadn't figured out where this Land of the Black Sand would be on a map of her world. She'd brought a map of her world back with her, and she was mentally crossing the Republic of Georgia off the map as she felt a draft waft over her. She was frustratingly unfamiliar with the stone used to construct the walls and with the strands of wool woven into the tapestries. Her nose picked up nothing more familiar than the scent of dust and her fingers nothing more than the threads of gold woven into the wool to bring flashes of light to the pieces. Flashes of light which would never be seen in this place. Affecting an undaunted air (blank slate), Karena pushed through the heavy doors, their wood unfamiliar to her touch and the polish unfamiliar to her smell, and walked into the lab. Her lips parted in the smallest of gasps and she turned in long circles, staring around her in shock. The rest of the stronghold was choked with dust, but it had seemed impregnable. The lab, on the hand, almost gleamed. Every surface had been vigorously scrubbed clean, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves alphabetically ordered, the jars and bottles meticulously labelled and arranged symmetrically on shelves on the wall behind the main work table, which was cluttered without being messy... and half of the tower had collapsed on the western side. She stared at the rubble.

"So this is what happens when you tangle with the might of the street rat," she said flatly, knowing that half a tower hadn't collapsed because of a fist fight between two small guys. Mozenrath finally looked up at her, determined to ignore her sarcasm and finding himself relieved at the sight of her shocked expression. So the bitch can be taken be surprise, her surmised, feeling a semblance of his old self seeking back into his bones.

"Come here," he ordered, relieved to hear that some semblance of authority had returned to his voice. She looked up in obvious surprise and he smirked. "I don't like to repeat myself," he said lowly, "and I do believe that you will want to see this." Karena walked over to the young lord, whose arms were crossed over his chest. He turned from her to the black stone wall behind him, waved his hand through the air and something happened. The air before them both seemed to swirl, and then a bolt of light slashed open in front of them, seeming to burst and tear simultaneously. "Explain this with your science," Mozenrath sneered. Karena's eyes widened. She was staring through, or into, something. More vividly than the videos she'd been playing on her iPad, the colours blurred into a thick mix before ordering themselves into shapes.

"The Princess Jasmine and her street rat fiancé," Mozenrath said faux-grandly. Karena peered at the scene in front of her. She'd never have believed it if she'd not been standing in front of it, but she was looking into a lush green palatial garden. A marble fountain spotted water high into the air beneath a sky so startlingly blue she found herself suddenly stricken by homesickness. Beside the pool in which the falling water gathered sat a beautiful young woman with almond-shaped brown eyes, plush pink lips, a soft, deep cleavage and a long, elegant neck. Karena noted the bizarre similarities in their outfits: the princess Jasmine was wearing pale blue harem pants and a strapless silk top that hung more loosely over her breasts than Karena's electric blue, PVC version. Jasmine was laughing at something, a delicate hand covering her mouth, and for the first time Karena noticed Aladdin balancing on his hands next to her on the edge of the fountain. "She's so soft!" Karena said scornfully, looking at Jasmine's delicate frame. She could see, however, that Jasmine would not be a weak opponent. There was more to her than loose silk pants and a pretty smile; Karena could see that. Jasmine's movement's were delicate but quick, suggestive of agility. "She certainly is soft," Mozenrath sneered, though he hadn't even known that the female form could develop Karena's strong muscles whilst retaining its curvature until just a couple of days ago and he'd had no idea of the potential contained within those muscles until just a few hours ago. He eyed her covertly now, comparing her to the princess and their weirdly similar outfits. Jasmine looked like a doll; Karena resembled a marble statue. He remembered the malicious smile on her face as she'd held that dagger to his chin. He studied her studying Jasmine, a curious smile playing on her blood-red lipsticked lips.

"Karena just like master," Xerxes said from the other side of the room, where he was circling apparently aimlessly but, when Mozenrath looked more closely, seemed to be watching Karena also. And in the eel's eyes, cold terror. He looked back at Karena, who had lifted a hand to the vision as if to reach out and snatch the miniature figures from the vision. The expression on her face was incredible: she was instantly fascinated by Jasmine. Aladdin flipped down beside her, laughing, bending double to tickle her.

"Aladdin, stop!" She pleaded in a voice that had always sounded grotesquely girly to Mozenrath and which now sounded positively shrill. Karena's lip turned up in disgust as Jasmine weakly struggled against her fiancé's embrace. They were playing, as Mozenrath had come to understand. Did Karena understand that?

"He's well-nourished for a street rat," Karena remarked. "And he's fucking hot," she said, her wide eyes squinting as though her vision could zoom in on the street rat's chiseled jaw.

And then the shit hit the fan.

Mozenrath swiftly raised his right hand, unthinking, reflexively, and backhanded the woman standing next to him across the face with a sharp snap of the gauntlet's power. She tumbled backwards, spinning into the table. There was a loud clatter as jars tumbled off the end of the table. Glass shattered on the floor. Karena broke her own fall on the table, fingers splayed.

"Oh, HELL no," she said evenly. She pushed herself up and lashed out with an electric-blue PVC-clad leg. He didn't even see her move. Her back kick caught him straight in the gut and the air whooshed out of him. Clutching at his abdomen with his left arm, he raised the gauntlet and she saw fear in her eyes. She kicked the gauntlet away easily and he found himself thinking that the street rat looked like a rank amateur compared to the fighter who could dance. She kicked him in the stomach again, a simple front kick with a quick jump that added to the already monstrous strength of the twenty-five-year-old fighter who'd been training in a gymnasium for more than two decades. That simple kick, aided by a simple law of physics put every last ounce of her power as a fighter and a gymnast into Mozenrath. It would have knocked down a man twice his size - it had - and she didn't even know how frail he truly was. He fell to his knees this time, unable to breathe and terrified that she would see him curl up into the foetal position of the severely winded. His pride hurting more than the bruises that were already beginning to develop beneath his silks, he blasted her hard and heard her gasp as her feet came off the ground and she spun through the air. She landed hard, unable to spot the ground in time to break her fall. His breath heaving in his chest, greedy for air, he hit her again. She reacted as though she'd been kicked in the stomach, her small body flinging up off the floor. He heard her groan and saw her curl up against the pain from his own position on the other side of the room. He crawled to the work table and hauled himself to his feet. "Don't you ever-" his voice was shaking and the threat was cut off when she leapt to her feet and charged at him with a savage growl. He wasn't fast enough to deflect the onslaught of kicks. He couldn't anticipate any of her movements. She was fast and she was precise. He felt his ribs crack beneath the side kick Karena always used in her final sequence. He did not feel the spinning hook kick connect her her boot to his jaw. The last thing he saw before her hammer kick came crashing down on his head was the stare he already knew to fear behind her fighting stance. Karena stepped right over him. Groaning and tasting blood, he rolled over and watched her stalking off, her shoulders thrust out and her chin high. Bitch.

Neither of them – Karena as she was stalking off, nor Mozenrath as he was picking himself up off the ground – noticed the three sets of wide eyes peering at the scene of carnage from behind the wreckage of the collapsed tower. Those three sets of eyes all widened as they turned to each other in their shared revelation. "Sooooooo..." said the big blue djinn. "Sooooooo..." repeated the red parrot. "OooooooH..." murmured the tiny monkey, who was the only one of the three to have his gaze downcast in sadness. The parrot's eyes revealed absolute scandal; the djinn's, a far less resoundingly mean shock. The floating carpet on which the parrot and the monkey had been perched pointed its tassles back in the direction of Agrabah. "Yes," Genie murmured. "Back to Agrabah. I think we've got the answers we need."

Mozenrath winced as he pulled himself to his feet and gingerly touched his jaw. He snapped his fingers together angrily and stepped into the bathroom beside his chambers. His robes dropping to the marble floor, he limped down the stairs into the bath, staring down at his bruised torso in shock. The street rat left lighter bruises than Karena did, and although he'd seen true rage in her eyes he got the distinct impression that she hadn't been trying that hard. He was almost certain he had at least two broken ribs and, feeling along his jawline, he came across an enormous lump from which his fingers fled with the pain of touch. He couldn't believe it. He tried to lean back against the marble bath, but couldn't get comfortable. He ended up dragging himself uselessly out of the bath, finding a soft clean robe and crawling into his massive bed, alone and miserable. He had done this to himself. He deserved this. He stared up at the crystalline moon above him. The clouds had parted for once, and he could see the stars sprinkled across the early night sky. He thought back to how Karena had slipped through his doors two nights ago and pressed her cool body up against him. He thought back to this morning, when he'd hid in the shadows and watched her at what seemed to be her most private moments, dancing alone in the dusty ballroom. The dust-choked, neglected room that had somehow become a golden fantasy worthy of Agrabah itself when she had entered it. He saw her shoulders swaying in time to the beat of that strange music, the sunlight glinting off her electric-blue pants as she arched her back and split her legs in that amazing bridge position, the casual strength of her muscles as she flipped lightly across the room. He saw, clear as day in his mind, her fresh face, stripped of makeup, her feet bare and her hair dripping with water from the bath. And he was blinking back tears suddenly. Tears of frustration. Tears of anger. And finally, crucially, tears of sadness. Mozenrath felt something tear open inside him somewhere. His right hand ached. His ribs ached. His jaw ached. And - dare he admit it? - his heart ached. The great Mozenrath, Lord and Ruler of the Land of the Black Sand, brought to his knees by a woman.

No. Not just some woman, some random woman from the future: the conqueror of conquerors. Except he didn't know for certain that that was who she really was, so he couldn't really console himself with that fact: he hadn't even established it as fact yet. This whole plan was imploding. He didn't even know if she knew who he suspected her of being, and he couldn't send her back without finding out. He also didn't know why he couldn't stop thinking about her. So he was partly relieved when she walked into the room. The electric-blue PVC was gone, as was the hat, and in its place she was wearing a flowing black, ankle-length skirt that, when combined with a simple black tank top, looked like a simple but elegant gown. Her long hair was parted down the centre in its natural part, and it flowed down her shoulders, over her breasts and floated over her flat stomach. The soft silk of her skirt swished around her silver ankle boots, which clicked across the marble floor until she reached the cushion of the Persian rug. Her hands were folded in front of her beneath her breasts. And she was still wearing the sapphire oblisque. Giving that to her had been the biggest mistake of his life, he realised with a sudden flash of anger.

"I have something for the pain," she said softly, moving towards him. She opened her palm to reveal a small plastic cup full of white tablets. Drugs from her world. She reached out to one of the crystal chalices beside his bed and held it to his mouth. He washed the pills back in a stiff silence, thinking only of the prospect of relieving the pain. She sat beside him, saying nothing, for what felt like a long time, her knees bent and poised neatly beside him. Mozenrath was lying in the middle of his bed and there was plenty of room for both of them to spread out: Karena had jokingly asked him how many people he'd been able to fit into this bed and he'd flushed at the truth: that Karena was far more sexually experienced than he was and always would be. That had seemed to be the most humiliating thing he could endure just this morning. He stared up at the crystal ceiling in silence, waiting for the drugs to begin to work but far too proud to ask. He began to grow slightly sleepy and... and then, all of a sudden, he began to feel... to feel... good. He felt good. Happy! He felt happy! A light shone into his eyes: Karena was holding her iPhone up to his face and a small light was projected from it and aimed directly into his eye. She nodded and clicked the phone off, silently sliding it on to the table next to the chalices. The chalices from which they had both drunk after the other night. One of which she had held up to his mouth just a little while ago to help him swallow the...the drugs. He'd been angry at the time. What had he been angry about? It didn't seem relevant any longer. There was a wondrous warmth spreading through his body, a warmth that at first seemed similar to the warmth of alcoholic intoxication but soon revealed to him an entirely new sensation. And it was so... good. Everything was so good.

Karena picked up his left hand, touched her first two fingers to the pulse on his wrist and began counting silently, her lips moving as she stared at the mysterious gold device on her left wrist. His skin seemed to warm to the very touch of her skin and Mozenrath turned his head on the pillows to look at her. She didn't seem to notice. She simply laid his hand back down and set both of hers in her lap.

"You are beautiful," he murmured slowly. There was a vague, nagging memory tugging at him, a warning note sounding in his ear, but he couldn't, wouldn't listen to it. Not... not right now. Later, he admonished his inner voice. Later you can go back to tormenting me. Karena's face loomed over his, expressionless. Her eyes could brighten up the darkness of any place within anybody, he thought sleepily, reaching for the silver chalice again, his mouth suddenly dry. She put a firm hand on his and gently returned it to his chest. "No more wine," she said softly. He snapped his fingers. A flurry of weak blue sparks sputtered out and died in the air in front of him. He blinked. Snapped his fingers again. And the same thing happened. He stared at the gauntlet for a few seconds, dumbfounded, and then slowly turned his head to stare up at Karena in shock. "It's not permanent," she said in that same soft yet firm voice. He felt his arm grow heavy. His entire body felt ether-light, except for his right hand. And he knew, consciously, that that should bother him. He should definitely be concerned about the fact that he had apparently just been drugged and robbed of his only weapon. Yet he wasn't. Not at all. He even found himself smiling a dazed smile. "What's that expression?" he heard the slur in his voice, and didn't care. He tried to add that to the list of things he had found he no longer cared about and realised that he couldn't do that, either. "The expression," Karena said, her voice fading away as she bent over and brushed a lock of hair away from his forehead so that she could kiss him there, "is Checkmate."