And then how would he ever explain to Carly and Martin and Damien (who?) that their mother (ha! The Blue Jewel a mother!) Had been killed by their delusional father because he had a funny turn after he fell down the steps of their church on his way out the door?

"Davina, darling," croaked Brian, trying to think around the headache. "Tell me your name is... uh... Sarah."

"What?" Perfect, guileless confusion crossed her face. "Sarah? Who's that?"

"Nobody. Just tell me that's your name." Prove to me that it's a stupid dream I had when I went tumbling down the stairs and hit my head, and we can go home to our children, and I can take the week off from work, and make love to my wife, my beautiful blue–eyed…

"It's not. My name's Davina, Brian sweetie, don't you remember? I thought you recognised me..." Worry knitted that painted brow, perfect as the magically sculpted face of an immortal demon face of a woman with parents with such good genes

(a decade of memories of his in–laws, charming people if he'd ever met any, marched across his mind) ought to be.

"I recognise you. What's your middle name?" he tried. That wouldn't sound so suspicious to his (enemy) wife. He'd just forgotten her middle name.

"I don't have a middle name – do you mean my maiden name?" she asked slowly.

"Yes." Anything but "Davina" or "Blue Jewel", the less appealing of his two histories told him, would be impossible for her to claim as a title.

"Blue. I was born Davina Blue," she said. "You remember your last name; I hope? Brian?"

Jewel. (Amron? No, that wasn't a last name, and he wasn't even from "Amron", that place didn't even exist, it was an imaginary city built on the imaginary ruins of Flagstaff, which was in perfectly good repair and had no ruins, and anyway he was from Chicago.) "Jewel," he said. "Davina. Love."

"I'm here, Brian," she murmured in his ear.

"This is going to sound stupid,

I know, but will you just say

the words 'my name is Sarah'? Please."

"Brian Ammon (Ammon? Was that where he'd gotten that imaginary village?) Jewel, you're either delusional, in which case I shouldn't do any such thing in case it makes you worse, or you're sane and I'm not going to play into whatever nonsense you've decided to worry me with today."

He tipped his head back farther into his pillow, and she moved her foot, ever so innocently, and the sword skittered farther away, inaccessible on the other side of the room. It was a hallucination anyway,

and so it didn't much matter from where it was. Or may be any other information related to that subject.

The pasts, one is very much bitter but has promising glory, the other one on the other hand was almost distressingly normal and happy and promising more of the delicious, tantalising same, battled for Brian's allegiance.

One told him to extinguish the loving, human light in those blue eyes. One told him that the sword was not even there, that even if he killed the woman bent over him so tenderly it would be no justice and no victory but only murder of the mother of his children. One told him those children were imaginary. One challenged him to find the flaw in his memories of their births, his mental video of the lines deepening on Davina's face and then softening with pride as she held the first and second and third fragile infant.

One told him that if he did not kill her before the time was up, he would certainly die.

The other told him that for that woman, for those children, he ought to be thrilled to die. That he was no kind of man if he wanted to end his wife's life to save his own, that he was the worst kind of slime if he would take away the mother of children (not one of them more than six years old) because he'd hit his head falling down the church steps and believed in a ridiculous dystopian fantasy where she starred as the awful tyrant with the awful, beautiful blue eyes.

He didn't want to die;

he didn't want to be the latest of a dozen warriors to have failed to topple the Blue Jewel from her lapis throne.

He didn't want some professionally detached messenger to tell Carly that Mommy had gone away forever, and Daddy was also going to have to go away forever because he was the one who had sent away Mommy, and to be good for Ken (Ken was of course Brian's brother, he wasn't an only child, what nonsense) and Lois and look after her brothers.

He didn't want to cut that gorgeous head from those trembling shoulders and watch the light go out in those blue eyes.

"When can we go home, Davina? Did they say?"

he asked, pushing away the last of the awful fantasy and looking his wife full in the face, trusting her.

She knew when she had him, of course. He'd debated a bit longer than some, not as long as others, but she had him where she wanted him in the end.

She was kind about it, and let him have the rest of that day with the fictitious life she'd dreamed up to entice him. He went "home" with his head swaddled in bandages, kissed the empty air where her magic met his mind and told him there were children, and fell asleep curled up by her side, one of her hands idly rubbing the sore muscles of his arm – he had not scaled a mountain to get to a palace made of lapis lazuli, nonsense,

he'd only fallen down some stairs, he could expect to be sore.

She let him die in his sleep, twisting his neck with a snap, quick and clean and merciful and none the less deadly.

She waited until her invulnerability was returned to her by the dawn before she threw his body from the mountaintop to advertise his failure to the world, which would remain populated by her victims for the next ten years. (And the next, and the next, and the next.)

And then, she was aloft.

Wind whistled in her ears as she traversed the globe, impossible speed achieved by the dark magic that blazed in her blue eyes.

It was such a busy day for her and she had lost an entire day, but still had so much pending work to do.

– Anonymous