> Handmaid: Descend.
Her Lord has spoken, and she knows that she can avoid it no longer.
The Time has come for her to collect those whom she once called friend, for her to grow into the role she believes she's destined—and doomed—to perform. In her mind, she's already trying to kill her friends, to render them mere husks in her mental representations so that she can push herself through the nightmare she's about to undertake, so she can make them draw their final breaths, in life or in death.
Steeling herself is a harder task than she's ever faced, but she does it anyway. She has to do it, and she has no other choice. Her friends, her loving friends, the ones she would have killed for, the ones she did kill for, that single death claiming as victim not only that prior Handmaid but herself, not to mention the countess fringe acquaintances and occasionally close friends that had fallen in pursuit of elimination of the Host.
That's all he can be to her now. The Host.
That's to say nothing of the crippling loss of Karkat. He's alive, still, and she knows it, but she also knows that she has permanently ended a life, the life of a friend that died without forgiving her.
She won't be forgiving herself for this either.
With a final breath—entirely superfluous in the reaches of deepest space—she twists herself through Time and Space, to the makeshift beacon that was Derse.
They were calling for a battle.
The Handmaid responds with a war.
