Angerona steps in to provide! 

Shit's too crowded for her longsword - she unwinds the chain from her waist, but probably the best she can do with it is harry her opponent, maybe tangle her weapon but mostly distract her - 

...Actually. 

What was it that Tamerlane said - ?

"HEY! Cytherea!" She bellows at the top of her lungs as she gets her chain spinning.

These children. Honestly. Just lie down and die politely, it's the best thing, really.

Wait. The imposter turns at the sound of her name. They shouldn't know that- Those eyes. "But- She swore to us-"

- Does this woman recognize her - ?

- No. Not Gideon. 

Tamerlane knew her. Which means -

"Mind telling me what a Lyctor is doing here?!"

- Very, very few people would be old enough to know the Body.  

Cytherea throws her head back and laughs. "I'm here to kill you, of course. And then her. She'll have to come. She'll have no choice."

"Which her?" (Just keep talking, asshole.)

Her laugh breaks down in a spume of bloody phlegm. "Those eyes. Lipochrome. Recessive. More reason for you to die if she knew, but clearly she doesn't. Yet."

"You plan to tell her?" she challenges. 

"That depends how angry she already is when she shows up," Cytherea smiles sparklingly, marred by specks of crimson. "Her own daughter, a black vestal. Delicious."

...She's not sure Cytherea is talking about Tamerlane. But who else could she possibly mean - ?

"You mean the best possible House to raise her daughter?" she snarks back. (Even though she's confused as fuck, she can't forget that Ninth House best house.)

She smirks. "Ironic."

Then rolls her head around her shoulders, audibly cracking her neck. "But I've had enough time to catch my breath now." The rapier in her hand springs up, and she's back on the attack.

She snaps her chain out immediately - 

(Phae hasn't been idle either - but she's going to need a bigger opening, a gap in the Lyctor's necromantic defenses - )

Cytherea is agile and deadly, even outnumbered as she is. She flows around combined attacks, tossing theorems off like it takes no concentration to do so.

Ellyn commits all the bits of bone she has to the fight. She raises an army of constructs from each one, supplementing the cavaliers' attack and attempts to pin the Lyctor (???) down. Thorny arms grab from the floor, legs kick down from the ceiling, fences spring forth to safeguard the necromancers' positions.

And for a moment, Cytherea's flawless defense falters under the weight of numbers.

And Phaedelia reaches - 

- She can't see into this woman's body, but if she's truly Seventh - there should be cancer, eating through her bones and lungs - she's been healing injuries like they never occurred, and if these Labs are a clue to Lyctorhood - Seven for Preservation, freezing a dying rose at the very moment of its death, entirely immune to further injury, unable to come fully alive - the very Lab she'd triumphantly finished and claimed the key to when this woman attacked - 

If you're the best, most neurotic necromancer in your generation - it's not exactly easy - but Phae preserved a rose, something not of her body - not even an animal! With the scant traces of thanergy and thalergy alike in any plant, nonresponsive to her calls - 

Flesh is, in the end, flesh, regardless of whether the one piloting any given meat puppet may or may not be the Hand of God.

Phaedelia Tridentarius calls to the cancer like thorns wound through the Lyctor's already dying body, and she unpins what Cytherea has fixed in place, shoving a bright flashing spark of her own thalergy into the dying-living-consuming bursts of cells, ordering them to grow. 

She stutters, shivers. Odd growths begin bubbling beneath her skin, distorted, unsightly, uncanny disfigurements. "Clever girl."

Gideon snaps her chain at one of the growths, bringing the heavy bludgeon of Samuel's leaded pelvis - which she's yet to do - to bear. 

Angerona lunges in from the other side - from just out of Cytherea's line of sight - short sword thrusting unerringly for the largest growth on her side. 

Blood weeps from every pore - and crumbles into dust as she drags the thanergy out of her own rapidly dying cells - 

(Animaphilia is a hobby. Phae's actual specialty is large scale energy transfers - occultism - Resurrection theory, and she'll be the first to admit she hasn't spent much of her attention on Lyctorhood, not as much as the Ninth - )

(But the Resurrection occurred here, and that was so much more interesting.)

Phae reaches past herself, reaches into the screaming echoes of a planet and a people ten thousand years dead, reaches into Cytherea and the echoes of that same massive energy resonance in her - 

It's as simple as running an equation in reverse, if you think about it, to sunder the tenuous strands holding those who have passed through the River before above its waters (how else to get that massive power surge? How else to generate eternal life, than an eternal Resurrection?) - to disrupt that very cycle of life and death that must be what powers Lyctors - 

"You are already dead!"

Tweaking the strings sets off a reaction, like a massive hand reaching out to swat her down to the floor. Swat everyone down to the floor, actually, as the Lyctor erupts in a pulse of pure power. Cytherea looks actually angry now, battered and bleeding as she is, broken tumors seeping fluids across her clothes.

"YOU DON'T GET TO TOUCH HER!"

    "Her, is it," Abigail says from the floor. "Isn't that interesting." And the Fifth stretches out and pulls. All due respect to the Third, of course, but disruption is the wrong way to think about it. It's more like setting a flywheel free. The raw energy sets her ablaze, the flames burning in eerie ghostfire, but Cytherea gets the same, shrieking.

In front of Cytherea, the Body