Wow, it's been awhile. My apologies. Thanks to everyone who reviewed: I think it was Rin, HowlynMad, and Loki's Little Helper (who changed her name to Sketchbook Pianist). If I forgot anyone, feel free to send me a PM (or better yet, another review) and I will apologize profusely. Onward with the story.

Terra:

Swords suck. Being mostly a knife fighter, I've always believed that, but I haven't really realized it until now, when I'm being forced to train with them. In anticipation of me eventually recovering the Soul-Reaver and laying waste to Chaos with it, all the Sirens who use swords plus Loki are determined to beat me into fighting shape. I'm not enjoying it. At all.

"Terra, for the last time," says Renna from the porch. I sidelined her as soon as a doctor confirmed her pregnancy, and she's ticked off about it. "A sword is not just a bigger knife. It's an extension of -"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," I say crabbily. "It's an extension of my body. You've said that at least three times a day every day since we got back from New York. Stop it."

"Is that an order?" Renna says. Little Miss Pregnant is taking whatever cheap shots she can get in revenge for being taken off active duty. It just goes to show you; everyone can be petty, even people who can see the future.

I open my mouth to make it an order - I'm not going to back down just because she's annoyed with me - when Loki says, "Whether or not you believe that a sword is an extension of your body is the least of your worries, Terra. Your stance is all wrong, and you're putting entirely too much weight on your left side."

"That's because the sword is too heavy," I complain. "Every time I take a swing, I feel like I'm going to tip over, so I compensate."

"You're overcompensating," Loki says. "And I told you to brace the blade with your left hand so that you don't lose control of the weapon."

"That's a lame move," I say. "That is an Eowyn move."

"Who?" Loki says.

"It's from Lord of the Rings," I say. "You might be interested to know that J.R.R. Tolkien ripped off a bunch of ideas from you Asgardians."

"Did he?"

"Yeah," I say. "I'll have to show you the movies sometime."

"Terra," Renna hollers from the porch, "you can make a movie date with Loki later. Need I remind you that Chaos could attack at any minute?"

"Go throw up some more, Renna," I say, out of patience for her antics. "I'm sure the toilet's been missing its new best friend."

Renna rises off her chair, but someone else puts their hands on her shoulders and pushes her back into the seat. "Easy, Renna," says Natasha "Nada" Reiner. "You don't want your blood pressure to go too high."

"I don't have to worry about that until twenty-five weeks," Renna snarls at Nada. Nada is the only person who can lecture Renna about safety during pregnancy; before the battle calls went out and disrupted everyone's lives, she was in training to be an obstetrician.

"No, I guess you don't," Nada says, "but anything could happen. Loki, Terra, I don't want you two to stay in the sun too long. The last thing we need is for the Dragon Princess and her strategist to get sun poisoning."

"What are you, my mother?" I say. I always remember to apply sunscreen - I'm so pale that I burn fast - and today I'm wearing a long-sleeved shirt. Nada's been a Siren almost since the beginning; she should know how crazy I am when it comes to protecting my skin.

"Gods, I hope not," Nada says with a completely straight face. Loki and I both laugh, and even Renna cracks a smile. "Anyway, Terra, lunch is in two hours. And don't forget to hydrate!"

"She is like someone's mother," I mutter as Nada wanders back inside. "Nada the mother hen."

"Terra," Renna reminds me, "the sword lesson. We've still got two hours before lunch - that's plenty of time for Loki to beat some sword-fighting skill into you."

"I really don't want to beat her at all," Loki says, looking uncomfortable. "Can you please use a different word?"

"Just get on with it," Renna says, waving her hands. "You're giving me a headache."

Loki turns back to me. "Try the basic sword stance again."

I tighten my grip on the sword and bring it up straight. My right foot is back, and my chest is facing sideways so as to present a smaller target. I place my left palm against the flat of the sword to balance it. And lastly, I bring my good eye up to focus on my imaginary opponent - in this case, Loki is standing in the spot that an opponent would be.

Of course, he moves immediately. And he moves right into my blind spot. "Um, Loki?" I say. "I can't see you right now."

He reappears in my field of vision so fast and sudden that I almost have a heart attack. "I'm sorry," he apologizes. "I just need to correct your left side. You're raising your shoulder."

Loki taps at my shoulder, trying to get me to drop it back into its natural place. I'm fairly uncomfortable - as much as I hate it when I can't see people, I hate it even more when the only part of them I can't see is their hands - and as a result, my shoulder does not go back where it's supposed to be.

"Stop tensing, Terra," Renna says from the porch. "We're trying to help you."

I've had it with her. "No, Renna, Loki's trying to help me. You're just heckling me from a safe distance."

"Do you want to know what happens if you don't train, Terra?" Renna says. "You die. Ashari kills you on the battlefield. Just chops your head right off."

"You're making that up," I snarl. I know she's making it up because I can see the lie in her thoughts. "And it's not funny, Renna. I'm not treating this like a joke, but it would be a lot easier for me if you weren't picking on me every second of every minute of every hour of every day!"

"Wow," comments a Siren coming in from the makeshift training ground we've set up out in the desert. "You said that all in one breath, lady princess."

"All right," Renna says. "Maybe I am being a little too hard on you."

"Maybe you're being a lot too hard on me," I say, and then I let out a small yelp of shock as Loki applies more pressure to my shoulder. It drops back into place with an unusually loud click. "Dammit!"

Loki blinks and pulls his hand back. "Did that hurt?"

"No," I say. "It was just the noise."

"All right, then," Loki tells me, stepping back. "You've got the stance right."

I stand still, waiting for more direction, but none is forthcoming. The muscles in my legs and especially my arms begin twitching, and even with my left hand supporting the sword blade the weapon starts to shake. I clench my hand tighter around the hilt, but then my fingers begin to spasm as well and the sword swings wildly from side to side.

Loki reaches out and wraps his hands over mine around the hilt, steadying the sword. "Careful, Terra, or it won't be Ashari who cuts off your head."

"Oh, that would be just perfect," I say. "After everything else I've been through, I inadvertently decapitate myself."

"That would be unfortunate," Loki agrees soberly. I stare at him suspiciously, wondering if he's being serious. Then I see the glint of humor in his green eyes, and I laugh.

Of course, I ruin everything by figuring out that Loki is essentially holding my hands and freaking out. I hate myself for behaving like a fifth-grader, acting like members of the opposite sex carry some sort of contagious disease. Stop it, I tell myself. You've held his hand before - just last week, at the movie festival, and before that you shook his hand and stood there in your bra while he wrapped bandages around a bleeding wound on your back. What reason do you have to act so stupid?

Because you're you, Renna says. And because you like him. Pick either one - or both, if you'd prefer.

I don't respond, choosing instead to try and prevent my feelings from sneaking out across the mental link and alerting all the Sirens to my emotions. I don't know what it is…but ever since we returned from New York ago, the dynamic between Loki and I has somehow shifted. We're still friends - in fact, he's probably the only non-Siren who knows about my past and has even the smallest piece of my trust - but something else is going on.

Terra's in love, comments Nada.

Agh. It figures that Renna, who was the first to become a Siren under my command, and Nada, who went to high school with me, are the ones who can see right through whatever pretense I put in their way. To most people, I'm inscrutable - but to anyone who's known me for a significant amount of time, I'm completely transparent.

Just relax, Terra, suggests Renna. You're in love. It happens to the best of us.

Does it ever, Nada adds, a mischievous tone permeating her words. In fact, I think there's a song about this very subject…

Don't you dare! I say, but it's too late. Nada comes dancing out of the house singing the "I Won't Say I'm In Love" song from Hercules.

Loki looks at Nada as though she's lost her mind. "What is she doing?"

"Ignore it," I say, my cheeks flushing a miserable red. I look down to try and hide my coloring, which telegraphs to anyone with eyes exactly what emotion I'm experiencing at the moment. "Please."

Renna snorts with laughter on the porch. "I think we'd better take a break before Terra has a meltdown." Then an odd look comes over her face, and she gets unsteadily up from her seat. "I'm not feeling so good. I think I'm going to go inside and lie down."

Loki lets go of the sword and I immediately let it drop onto the dusty ground. Then, for want of anything better to do, I summon the fire dragon and start taking potshots at the cacti. I'm not really paying attention, and so I miss the cactus I was aiming for and almost hit what must have been a very stupid coyote and is now a very shell-shocked coyote.

"Sorry," I say, feeling a little guilty as the creature staggers away, its fur singed and smoking. "Didn't see you there."

"Only you can use that excuse," Loki says, and I jump. I had no idea he was still there.

"Stop sneaking up on me," I complain. "You know, if it was anyone else coming up on my blind side, they'd be dead."

"It's a risk I have to take. I can't always stay within your sight," Loki says. He picks up the sword from where I've dropped it, and says, "You shouldn't treat the weapon with such disrespect. If this sword was the Soul-Reaver, would you have dumped it on the ground so unceremoniously?"

"Yes," I say. "One sword is the same as another to me."

"Ah," Loki says. The coyote wanders around the desert, its eyes rolling wildly, and collides with the cactus I was aiming for. Loki and I both wince, and I send out a general order to the Sirens to get ahold of that coyote and make sure it hasn't been permanently damaged. A minute passes, and then Nada comes out of the house with a kitchen towel. She dumps the towel over the coyote's head, picks it up, and walks back inside, pausing only to glare at me.

"I've been thinking, Terra," Loki says.

"What about?"

"I don't think we can use the Soul-Reaver as the anchor for the Bifrost," Loki says.

"What?" I explode. "Loki, that's the centerpiece of our whole strategy! Why didn't you mention it sooner?"

Our survival in the coming fight with Chaos - aka the Guardians, aided by Ashari and Lethe - depends on us reconnecting the Bifrost to at least one other world. We're hoping for Asgard or Vanaheim, but if we get Jotunheim or Muspell by accident, we're screwed. While our ragtag alliance may survive the first attack, we've got no chance of making it through the second without outside aid. And to get that help, we have to fix the Bifrost, and to fix the Bifrost, we need a powerful anchor. Which is the Soul-Reaver.

"I wasn't sure," Loki says, "but now I am. Terra, the Dragon Princesses of old had a capture policy, didn't they?"

"Yeah," I say, unsure what this has to do with anything. "Capture, not kill. And this matters why?"

"Because that means that, up until Ashari stole it from Niamh's corpse, the Soul-Reaver didn't actually contain any souls," Loki says.

"Right," I say. Then, "I still don't get it."

"Ashari has been killing people left, right, and center with the Soul-Reaver for two thousand years," Loki continues patiently. "Since she's, ah -"

"Completely evil," I interject.

"Yes, that," Loki says. "Since Ashari is completely evil, as you say, it stands to reason that most of the people she killed with the Soul-Reaver were good people. And if you use that sword to anchor the Bifrost, you'll be trapping good souls forever. That's the kind of thing Chaos would do, Terra - so by definition, it's the kind of thing you can't."

I stay silent, trying to think through this unexpected piece of information, and then kicking myself for referring to it as being unexpected. Shouldn't I have known that in Ashari's hands, the Soul-Reaver is a repository for the souls of her enemies, people who fought against her and tried to protect the world from her cruelty? If I'd taken the time to think about it, wouldn't I have realized that I couldn't condemn those people to eternity trapped in the blade? Never mind that I don't know of any way to release them - I should have thought of it.

But I didn't. I didn't want to know that the deceptively simple solution - by far the easiest part of defeating Chaos on Earth, and eventually in all Nine Worlds - wouldn't work out.

"All right," I say. Shake off the disappointment and move on. That's what Niamh would have done. That's what Michael would have wanted. "So what are we going to do?"

"I have an idea," Loki says. "The Bifrost needs a power source. I was thinking, and I was wondering if that power source has to be an object or a weapon. Could it be a person? An immortal, maybe?"

"Yeah, I guess," I say, "but who would let us use them as a power source?"

"We wouldn't exactly be asking them," Loki says dryly. "I was thinking; if we need to get rid of Ashari for good, what better way to do that than to turn her into the power source for the Bifrost?"

The idea, at first blush, is so preposterous that I start laughing. "What would we do, Loki? Dig a big hole, toss her into it, and start dancing around and singing?"

Loki seems dead set on it, even though I'm making fun of him. "Terra, we have to get rid of her somehow. And she isn't just going to die."

"Ten out of ten, Loki," I say, my voice dripping sarcasm. "I really had no idea that Ashari isn't just going to keel over. Because, you know, that would just be too easy."

"Think about it," Loki says.

"I've been thinking," I snap. "I know the original plan isn't going to work, okay? Of course, the only solution we can think of isn't going to happen. What else could go wrong?"

How stupid am I? Very stupid indeed, because I should know by now that saying something like that guarantees a new problem. The new problem makes itself known shortly, as inside the house, someone screams.

I launch to my feet and run full tilt toward the house, Loki at my heels. I slam through the door and take in the scene - Renna, curled up in a ball on the floor in the kitchen, Nada kneeling beside her, and a crowd of worried Sirens gathering.

My first, irrational thought, is that Renna's gone into labor. Then I see that her hands are clenched around her head, her eyes squeezed shut, and I recognize the signs. Renna is a Watcher, not a Seer - she can look into the future any time she likes. But sometimes she'll receive visions, and the visions are just as unpleasant for her as they are for the Seers.

Nada looks up at me. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"Once," Loki and I say at the same. He's about to say something else, following up his thought, but then he stops and nods to me. I say, "She should come out of it in a minute."

I do not have fond memories of Renna's last vision. It happened shortly after she became a Siren. Once she returned to the present, she told me - in front of Adrian and everyone there, including Lethe - that one day soon, I would wind up entirely alone. And I'd have no one to blame for it but myself. I think, maybe, it was then that the idea of my treachery was planted in Adrian's head.

Forget what I just said. Adrian would have betrayed me no matter what. But don't forget that, less than six months after Renna spoke those words, I found myself on the path to the Black City and the loom of the Fates. It came true, exactly as she said it. Forgive me for being a little less than thrilled about this new vision.

Renna's eyes open, and she looks to me, although it's not the Renna I know that looks out from behind those golden eyes. It's clear that she's still trapped inside the vision. One hand rises, and beckons me closer. Against my better judgment - and the age-old instinct that says to run - I step to her side and kneel down, listening.

"The west will swallow the sun, as it has before," Renna says. Her voice has a strange timbre to it, drier and rustier than her usual melodic tones. "But it will not rise again. Endless dark will sweep this world, and engulf each of the others in their turn."

She draws in a breath, and continues, "So it has been woven, so it would be, save for the actions of those who remain free from all designs. The blood of the dragon will be spilled by a long-ago ally, and the bonds between world renewed by her hand."

This is a prophecy. My stomach clenches at the thought - that I'm hearing my fate right now. The blood of the dragon will be spilled.

"Trickster," Renna rasps, and Loki hurries to her side as well.

"Yes?"

"You stand to lose all you hold dear," Renna whispers. "When the time comes, speak as you must and do not be silent."

"Listen to me," I say, grabbing Renna's shoulders and giving them a shake. Even though I think I've just heard her predict my - no, Terra, don't think about that - I feel new energy rushing through me, and I have to force one crucial piece of information out of her. "When will this happen? When?"

"Lammas Night," she says, and her eyes roll back in her head.

I yank my hands away as Renna goes limp. She collapses back to the floor, and everyone looks to me, hoping I've got some explanation. I struggle to keep my face calm and controlled. The Sirens expect me to tell them what happened, assure them it's good news, let them know that we're going to survive our coming battle with Chaos. How am I supposed to do that when I just learned that on August 1st, Lammas Night, I'm going to die?

"What did she say to you?" Nada prompts me nervously.

It occurs to me that I'm the only one who knows Renna's whole prophecy. I arrange the lines in my head, into the blank verse they'll be inscribed in someday, maybe even as my epitaph.

The west will swallow the sun as it has before

But the sun will not rise again. Endless dark

Will sweep this world, and engulf the others in their turn.

So it has been woven, so it would be

Save for the actions of those who remain free from all designs.

The blood of the dragon will be spilled by a long-ago ally

And the bonds between worlds renewed by her hand.

Trickster, you stand to lose all you hold dear;

When the time comes, speak as you must

And do not be silent.

I think I understand. On August 1st, at dusk, the Guardians will attack, and we will fight back. I will rebuild the Bifrost, I will die in the attempt, and because of me, the Nine Worlds will have a chance against Chaos. I'm not even going to try and interpret what Renna said to Loki. It's too confusing, and the revelation of my fate is swallowing all rational thought.

I'm aware that the prophecy only says my blood will be spilled. It doesn't say how much of my blood. It doesn't say definitively that I'm going to die. But I've read enough prophecies to know that "spilled blood" usually means death. And if I'm going to die, I want to be at peace with it, like my brother was. I don't want to spend my last days hoping for a way out.

I force a smile. "I know the date of the battle," I say. "August 1st, at dusk. That's when they'll come for us."

"That's not a lot of time," says Miranda - who is, aside from Darcy, the youngest and most inexperienced Siren.

"We'll be ready, don't worry," I say. Then, because I rarely leave things on such a lighthearted note, I say, "But the clock is ticking, guys. Let's move."

The impromptu gathering breaks up, as the Sirens scramble to work. The first thing Nada does is go to the calendar and circle the date we've been given in blood-red ink.

Renna sits up, bringing a hand to her head. "Ah, I hate when that happens. It always gives me a killer headache." She looks at Loki and I. "So, did I say anything interesting?"

"I think so," Loki says. "I only heard part of it, though. Did she say anything else, Terra?"

Now it's decision time. To tell them, or not? For a moment, I think that maybe I should tell them - and if not both of them, at least Loki. Maybe he could help me. Maybe if somebody else knew, I wouldn't feel so scared. But I've spent so many years being secretive that the dishonest side of me springs first.

"No," I say lightly. If my brother could face his fate alone, so can I. "Nothing else."