The anchoring of the soul had once concerned the Saint of Woe greatly, in the days before she became any kind of Saint at all, and it has never ceased to be one of her preoccupations long after the necessity of its understanding had passed. When the one soul sinks and the other surfaces, she watches with flat, glittering avidity, her hands half-flexed at her side like talons.

Then the newly emerged addition speaks, and Woe crumples like crushed sheet metal into an extremity of frustration, pinching the bridge of her own nose tremendously hard as she ducks her head and billows with a long, long suffering sigh.

"I should like to see you try," she says, with the fervency of someone who really would, "You would be shocked how little of you I need to effect the transfer - but we haven't the time." She lets her head fall back, carelessly, and drops her hand to curl briefly on her own chest. "Let's get on with it."

With that, she sidesteps Anna, or Venus, or whoever this might be, and proceeds onwards with a chopped, impatient stride. She plainly expects to be followed, with her back bared and her allies absent.

The untempered, volatile mixture of souls - the persistent instinct to violence - the utter inability to comprehend, to learn - Woe can begin to imagine why this cybernetic revenant chafes against God. It is an understanding she would prefer not to have come to.