Baena, driven half mad by the increased female qualities of the head of Dionaea, made inadvertent love to her, caressing her face with his long forked tongue, and combing at her tangled hair with his fangs, always Baena was distraught with her attraction. This attention drove the woman near frantic, strained as she was in her unnatural condition, and she could not afford to anger the beast whose body she had been grafted upon. For even a serpent has been known to swallow its tail, and Dionaea had no desire to know if Baena could do that trick.
Eos, sitting quietly and watching the bound serpent, smiled at this continual by-play, and offered to release Dionaea for revealing her knowledge of Diana, so that some chink in her armor might be found. Not that Eos now needed any such thing, but she was kind-hearted, and wanted Baena at least on her side. For she could see into the dual life and thought of the two-headed monster, and knew that if Baena chose to set his will against Diana when she was within the body and mind of Dionaea—it would help her in what she planned.
"Baena," Eos at last said, "if you can find a way to help me against this unnatural mistress of your mistress, I will repay you by giving you anything you may ask of me."
Baena looked at Dionaea's head with the reptilian love-light glowing frustrate in his great green-and-gold eyes.
"If you will promise to give me what is in my mind that I desire, why then when the time comes I will see what I can do. I am weary of being the tail when I was meant to be the head, and if I had it to do over, this unnatural and self-willed appendage would remain in her proper place."
Now Eos knew that Baena could not help desiring Dionaea as a mate, for she seemed most reptilian in the strange snake-growth that had come over her, and knowingly she nodded at Baena, so that he knew that she knew what he wanted, but Dionaea did not know, for it never occurred to her. To Eos, what the future might bring to Dionaea as the mate of a snake seemed a proper revenge for what she had done in aiding Diana, and for other cruelties of which Druga had told her. She planned accordingly.
Came that day which was the time appointed by Diana Triformis for her visit to Dionaea. Much as she detested the need for entering the male body of Baena to interview Dionaea, still Dionaea had been a valuable ally, and Diana did intend in time to release her and give her again a human body.
To this end she had made some inquiries as to how this might be done. For in truth the method of doing so had evaded her mind in the excitement and rage of finding what had happened, and in the task of the spell she had created to turn Feronia into a stone image. For Diana knew that what Baena had accomplished she could accomplish, certainly, and the shame of forgetting how it might be done before the wise Baena's critical eyes made her neglect to mention her intentions to either of the two heads of the snake.
As the swirl of ethereal force that was Diana's traveling form settled within the golden-moted atmosphere of the great chamber of the disk-mansion, Eos stood up, and dropped from her body her insulating blue robe of shimmering magic, so that her supercharged beauty shone everywhere in blinding, awful attraction.