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Their swords met. The noise of metal on metal screamed in that empty garden. Cytherea the First had been Cytherea the First for ten thousand years, and even ten thousand years ago her cavalier had been great. Time had made her more perfect than a mortal cavalier could understand. In a fair fight, they might even have fought to a standstill.
It was not a fair fight. As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire. Within her chest another conflagration burned, and this one was eating her alive: it smoked and smouldered where her lungs ought to have been, bulging, dark, and malignant. It had swollen to the bursting point inside her body, and most of Cytherea’s energy was being expended on holding it still. Harrow could touch what Palamedes had done; nudge it; knock it out of Cytherea’s grip.

Gideon the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Thirty-Seven