As Aida settles into the throne, her vision fades to greyscale.  She's suddenly somewhere else, underground, standing.  A large, brawny, possibly dharven man stands next to her.  He is broad like the dharven, though not much shorter than she.  He wears bladed plate mail; she can see little of him through that.  He swings a large smith's hammer hard and fast onto some metal creation, willing it into place with a combination of muscle and determination.

Aida can feel that odd boredom-thrill, the feeling she has just before a battle, just after she's realized that something will happen but before it actually does.  She turns away from the possibly-dharven man and his damnable hammering.  She stares up at the too-low ceiling, irritated with the wait.  Suddenly, she hears the pounding at the gates, the sound she's been waiting for.  She pulls her massive warhammer to her and rushes the door.

As she reaches the entrance, the stone before her shatters open.  Quick, lithe, flashing figures blur past her, but she does not concern herself with these; the are not foes.  The foe is before her, a vast and unseeable void in her vision.  Closing her eyes, she gives over all trust to her instincts and begins to flash her hammer about as if it were made of balsa-wood.  There - contact!  And again, and again!  She twists and dodges the unseen tendrils of her masked foe, letting her eyes fall open again.  She can see the purple-black ichor spurting from the void as she mercilessly slams her hammer into the abomination before her.  Distracted, she falters; a tendril flies past her to her left.  Before she can react, she catches a golden glimpse beside her, and the tendril pulls back.  She has no time to thank her benefactor, though, as she redoubles her efforts to press her foe.

Despite the momentary slip, she and her allies have played to their plan.  Slowly, deliberately, they've turned the face of the battle nearly 180 degrees from where it started.  Elated, she calls out to her allies; in her battle-fury, she cannot remember what she called, only that it was the time to do so.  She hears the distant slamming of metal on metal, and with a final spray of purple-black fluid, the void before her clears, leaving her in a long daze.  As she comes back to herself, a glance around her shows that the ichor has hardened and turned yellow-orange.  She notices some on the head of her beautiful hammer, sunk into the lines and glyphs she'd so painstakingly woven into the metal; she is momentarily disgusted.  Before she can scrape it from her, though, she feels a restraining hand on her shoulder.  She begins to turn, but suddenly is overwhelmed with vertigo.

Moments later, when the world stops swimming around her, Aida can see nothing but a pale blue, a blue so pale as to border on white.  She can feel nothing, not the air, not the throne, not even her clothing.  She cannot see herself, only the blue-white.  There is no air, and she is freezing.  She fights back panic, thinking of her many swims, how she would force herself to hold her breath as long as should could under the cold, blue waters of the river.  "This is just another river" becomes her mantra.  As her burning lungs reach their limit, the blue suffusion fades to black.  For a moment, she thinks that she's been blinded, but the dim light of the cavern once again trickles into her eyes and she finds herself once more sitting on the cold throne, heaving great lungs-full of air into her chest.  She glances down to see her hands have turned ice blue and are only slowly regaining their color.