The shining silver sky and the glaring sun make the hovering carriage glow like a shapeshifter in mid-change. He squints as the door slides shut, with a rattle and a whir, and the princess's long shadow move closer and closer across the scorched earth.

It is Day Six of the War.

She has come to see the general, to let the curtain of his tent close behind them as her low, urgent, murmurs drift across the camp. Important talk...news from the palace...adjustments to their tactical formations.

She moves in light, in shadow, her proud head held high as her cool brown eyes take measure of him. He is compelled to reach out...to touch the edge of her gown and feel the fabric slide between his grimy fingertips as she offers a few words of cursory greeting for an aging sergeant. He twists in the damp cotton sheets, jolted out of the haze by his own screams.

Her voice still haunts him...the familiar coquetry falling from her dark mouth like bloodstained water as a royal ring gleams, starkly unfamiliar, against her lip: "I'm sorry, Sheriff...I'm sooo not mechanical."

II.

As night drags him into that place between dream and sleep, she is undulating above him, stretching her arms like the hide of an uncoiling snake. He blinks and they are muscled, ink-stained, covered with strange symbols ...blinks and they are once again smooth, flawless porcelain. He swallows convulsively and the Jeep fades away from around them, replaced by the interior of a dark sedan as she peers down at him with calculated, kohl-lined, victory.

Her teeth flash from between her moist, parted, magenta lips as they form a deceptively childish pout. "Hey-a, Jimmy Boy. Miss me?"

He doesn't answer...thinks that he shouldn't talk to strangers, even in his fantasies...or his nightmares. And part of him cries out, "But you know her...you know her...you know her." He doesn't...he can't...he swears it isn't true. The barbell in her tongue scrapes his cock and his body jerks with sensations he doesn't want to name, with questions he has no answer for. And he cries out a name he has never heard, never before spoken, never known: "Vi...lan...dra!"

III.

"Va-LENti." A tongue tapping against impossibly white teeth, licking a full, berry-black bottom lip as the last two syllables of his name run together and the 't' slides down her impossibly long throat.

He wakes up sweating and uncomfortable and vaguely dirty, seeing Isabel Evans' face and knowing, now, that it wasn't her. That the voice was hers...but the way his name was sucked dry wasn't.

An alien Lolita with short, purple hair, and death in her cold, brown eyes.

They say her name was 'Lonnie.'

They say it with disgust and fear and he sees the revulsion shake Tess to the core as some memory of New York dances up and down her spine.

Disgust and fear and revulsion...he understands the emotions. He knows them all too well as he hugs his lumpy pillows and tries to force down a hard-on with the sheer force of his will...and then finds that his will is weak, is weaker than he had ever thought he could be. As he faces the morning sun and wishes Isabel Evans wouldn't say his name with such class, such precision: "Va-len-ti."

IV.

The princess floats away from the tent on light feet, her smile betraying nothing but her station, her mission. She feels pale blue eyes watching her progress with the unwilling hunger that the old have for youth, for beauty.

She smiles, tasting bitter copper on her tongue, reaches out and gently caresses a weathered face, feels the warmth of skin beneath her palm. His lips part and she hears him whisper a name that is not hers.

Three haunting syllables of such reverence, of such devotion, that it almost gives her pause...*almost*.

And then the carriage beckons and she is swallowed up in the darkness.

As the vehicle hastens towards the city, towards her lord, the memory of Rath's form lying prone on the tent's dirt floor begins to fade...as does the crumpled body of the hapless sergeant outside.

But she cannot help but wonder...

And the question follows her all the way to Khivar's warm embrace... to her whispered, "it is done, my love"...to his silky praise and his mouth on hers...to the cool steel sliding beneath her skin and the shock of death.

Who is Is-a-bel?