The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

Ajakai of the Jewels,

Dejis Prefecture, the Northern Blessed Isle

The city is a marvel in the summer sun. Grand structures and monuments gleam in marble and stained glass and jade inlay, dazzling the eye. Temples and museums that groan under the fruits of House Mnemon's many conquests dwarf the city's lesser buildings. Many people live in Ajakai. But, as Mnemon Keric's mother had once said, it was their matriarch's lavishly designed trophy case first, and a city second.

She'd said it in Mnemon's hearing, and the matriarch had laughed; Keric isn't certain he'd ever have that kind of nerve. Especially not after the past week.

Keric leans one hand onto the railing of the balcony he looks over, mind idly noting the architectural design on display. He half-heartedly tries to map out the network of Dragon Lines implied by the placement of manses standing like fantastical beacons amid their more mundane neighbours. Here's here, ostensibly, to study the city's geomancy, and to spend some weeks among master geomancers, making connections and learning from them as he can, under more practical circumstances than what the Heptagram allows.

Keric is too distracted, however. He finds himself studying a dip in the skyline, the cluster of ornate tombs that stand on a grassy hill to the north of the city's centre. There, he knows, lay those of Mnemon's siblings who failed to survive the infamous assassination spree Ragara had embarked on in Mnemon's youth. She had personally designed lavish resting places for each of them here, a sign of true compassion and sisterly love. In a city dedicated to showcasing her house's triumphs.

The second message is not subtle, but it isn't meant to be: I survived where others, older and more powerful, did not.

A knock carries through the space, coming from the direction of the front door to Keric's borrowed chambers. He frowns — he had specifically asked the servants not to disturb him for the next several hours, so that he might be alone with his thoughts. He entertains thoughts of a suitably unpleasant punishment for whichever fool is disturbing him, but is forced to discard them. As a Dragon-Blood, it would of course be within his rights to demand, but he's a guest, and insisting someone else's servant be beaten over such a triviality would be more than a little tacky.

Keric strides in through the open double doors, back into the silk-draped comforts of the sitting room he'd been given over for his use, floors intricately mosaiced in multi-hued mandala. He passes a floor-length mirror, pausing to examine his appearance — brush a hand through red hair, straighten his robe — before moving on to the door, opening it with a severe expression on his marble-coloured face. The look is completely undermined by his surprise at who he sees standing there.

"What are you doing here?" Keric hisses, taking a step back into his chambers.

"Oh, I'm just here to take in a few museums," says the boy standing in the hallway. He'd been leaning against one of the pillars flanking Keric's door, but takes Keric's slight retreat as an invitation to breeze right past him and into the room beyond. "Or maybe I'm on my way to see some other boy in this city, and I just stopped in to say hello. I'm here to see you, idiot."

Keric tries hard to glare, but glares work as well as cool, superior stares when they're directed at Simendor Deizil. Deizil continues to survey his surroundings, tall and lean and frustratingly rakish as ever, dressed garishly in the Chalan style. A chain of mingled white jadesteel and orichalcum links hangs around his neck, and as always, he looks as though he hasn't shaved in at least three days. "How did you even know I was going to be here?" Keric asks, knowing it's a silly question the moment it leaves his mouth.

"You told me you were coming here, after stopping in at Mnemon-Darjilis. I figured I'd get a better welcome here than in your hometown."

"You didn't say you were going to show up!" Keric says, watching Deizil fiddle with a glass ornament from a side table.

"Gods, Keric, you're fidgetier than normal," Deizil says.

"I do not fidget!" Any such habits had been corrected very thoroughly when Keric was a child.

Deizil waves this off. "Sure, not on the outside, unless I'm really invested in making you do it." Keric feels himself flushing faintly, and does his best to will his face to go back to blank disapproval. "What's wrong? Someone who matters finally say that I'm a bad influence on you?"

There's a silence then, as the worst of Keric's anger simply deflates. In lieu of answering, he leans back against the open door to the balcony, still leaving the chamber awash in sunlight. Deizil puts down the ornament, turning to face him. "Who? Your mother?"

"Worse," Keric says, miserable.

Deizil allows his eyes to widen just a little. They're outlined in kohl, making the expression more dramatic than usual. "Your great grandmother, then?" Keric nods, managing not to outright cringe at the memory. "What'd she say?" Deizil asks, voice filled with a morbid sort of curiosity.

"She commended me on my studies," Keric says, "but said that I should be mindful of the... low company she's heard I sometimes keep."

Deizil, far from being sympathetic, actually has the gall to grin in obvious amusement. As he does so, Keric is forced, quite against his will as ever, to notice that the beard looks good on Deizil, for all that the rainbow iridescence should render it a little silly. "Is that what Matriarch Mnemon said about my family?" Deizil asks, taking a step forward. "That we're 'low company'?"

Keric would like to take a step back, but he's very aware of the doorframe at his back. He considers simply leaving it at that -- simply saying yes, that this was the extent of things. He can't quite look away from Deizil's steady gaze, however, and so finds himself admitting slightly more than he should, voice a little miserable: "I mentioned that you come from an ancient bloodline. She may have said something to the effect of... 'impious, thin-blooded upstarts.'" He can't help but wince at the memory. She hadn't raised her voice, but she never has to.

Deizil stops short, his amused grin sliding down a few notches in his surprise. "You stood up for me?" he asks, "to Mnemon?"

"You are very good at making me do stupid things."

"Well, we both knew that," Deizil says. He finally closes the gap, but hesitates before touching Keric, hand half raised. "Do you want me to leave, Keric?" he asks, voice uncharacteristically serious. "Just say it, and I'm gone. I'm here to be the fun kind of trouble, not... Whatever you'd get if you got on her bad side."

Keric gives a small laugh at that. "Deizil, I'm her blood. She has plans for me, she... Takes pride in my accomplishments, when I follow them." Despite how mortifying that conversation had become, just the memory of his great grandmother's approving words on his course of study fill him with a sense of swelling elation. "If she thinks that you're an actual problem, I'm not the one who needs to worry for my future or my safety. It's good you're a man." Keric adds this last almost without thinking.

"Yes, I catch myself thinking that a lot, this past year," Deizil says, grinning again.

"That's not what I meant, and you know it!" Keric can feel the heat rising in his face again, infuriatingly. Keric is destined for a useful marriage to a suitable woman, and taking a boy from a lesser family as a lover would at least have the sense of practicality about it — like Ambraea and her patrician girl, although at least Erona Maia's family doesn't happen to be enough of a problem to entirely offset the benefit. "This is serious. She's not... a monster, but your family won't be able to protect you if she decides you're, yes, a 'bad influence.' Chalan is a Mnemon satrapy, and your family has no patron among the Great Houses or other particular allies."

"Are you asking me to leave, or not?" Deizil asks. He's standing very close now.

Keric just has to say yes. Just has to open his mouth, and form that one word. In the end, he's always been a selfish thing. "... No."

Deizil's smile takes on a bit more of a predatory cast, that infuriating, wolf-like edge that Keric has tried to talk himself out of being charmed by numerous times. "Well, you're not the only one who does stupid things," he says.

Then he shoves Keric hard against the wall, and kisses him.

---

City of Lord's Crossing,

Lord's Crossing Dominion, the Central Blessed Isle

Tepet Usala Sola looks out on ranks of soldiers clad in blue and white, and finds herself deeply torn between a heart-soaring pride and a bitterness she knows is unbecoming. Hadn't she yearned for this in private, the next truly grand campaign that the storied Tepet Legions embark upon coming in her lifetime? That she might see the might of her house march out in all its glory to destroy the enemies of the Realm and carry the guiding light of civilisation into the Threshold?

And here it is, happening mere years too soon.

"Am I boring you, sister?" The voice is quiet, deceptively gentle. Still, Sola straightens up as if struck by a lash.

"Apologies, eldest sister," she says, tearing her eyes away from the drilling soldiers, back to the other Dragon-Blood in the room. "I meant no disrespect."

"Meaning is only relevant in poetry or scripture, Sola. Have you decided to become a poet or a monk?" Seven decades Sola's elder, General Tepet Usala Sumara's brush doesn't still, nor do her eyes leave the page she's writing on. She's shorter than Sola or their mother, her build stockier, her complexion marginally lighter. Her clothes are fine enough to suit her station, but they have a practical, martial cut. The kind of thing that might be worn under armour at need — not that Sumara will be doing a great deal of that immediately. In the next room over, three servants work to carefully pack away the general's priceless jade plate for travel.

"No," Sola says, knowing exactly where Sumara is going with this, and also having no choice but to go along with it.

"Then do not waste both our time with what you didn't mean to do. You caused offense or you did not. You acted disrespectfully or you did not. If an apology is an excuse, it means nothing."

Sola suppresses the urge to make a face. "Then I apologise for the disrespect, elder sister," she amends.

Sumara's office is situated in a vast, shogunate era fortress located at what was once the outskirts of the city. Lord's Crossing has swollen beyond its original bounds several times over centuries of Tepet oversight, but the structure still serves as a more than adequate barracks for a legion's worth of assembled troops. On the wall behind Sumara's desk hangs the banner of her legion, held proudly in place by a sinuous air dragon carved into the wall itself. Sola tries to focus on the dragon — it makes things easier.

Sola is only here at all to receive instructions by proxy from her mother — how she is expected to spend the rest of her summer, who will see to preliminary marriage concerns in her mother and sisters' absence. Matriarch Tepet Usala is already departed. The Empress has ordered her to destroy a Northern warlord with her house's legions, and Sola's mother characteristically intends to be in the vanguard of the effort.

"Accepted," Sumara says. "You wish you were going as well."

"... Sister?" Sola asks, unsure how she was expected to respond to that.

"It's all over your face," Sumara says, "and what respectable Tepet girl your age wouldn't want that? But, as I'm sure you understand, we do not need a half-trained sorcerer so badly as to derail whatever passes for your education at the Heptagram."

Sola bristles at this, forcing her face to remain neutral. "I know," she says.

"But?" Sumara asks.

"... But, the last time the Tepet Legions put down a Solar Anathema worthy of the effort, it was hundreds of years ago. If I live to see another like this, I'll be an old woman." Tepet Arada, the Wind Dancer, made his name by personally slaying the Anathema Jochim, allowing the legions to scatter his unnatural armies and ending the devil warlord's threat to the nations of the Northern Threshold. He would be getting at least one last chance at glory himself, as Usala's second in command. Sola would be waiting here, back on the Blessed Isle.

Sumara snorts. "There will always be other battles, Sola. If you intend to be any use in them, you will stop sulking and see to the duties you do have."

Sola knows she's correct in this, but that doesn't make it less infuriating to be told so so bluntly, or for her own feelings to be so transparent. "I understand, eldest sister," she manages.

"See that your secondary school days are well spent," Sumara says. She finishes whatever document she'd been composing, setting it aside to dry, and moving on to the next. For the first time, she looks up at Sola. Her eyes are sky blue, tiny clouds drifting across them here and there. She seems to decide something in that quiet moment, as decisively as anything else she does. "We will take losses in any case, even under the best circumstances. And this will be the last campaign for at least one of our sorcerers — he's nearing his twenty-fifth decade. When I return, if you impress me with what you've accomplished, we may speak with mother about a future in my legion."

Sola perks up dramatically, pleasant shock blooming inside her. Before she can respond with effusive thanks, however, Sumara cuts her off:

"This is not charity, sister. Be worth my time. Am I understood?"

Sola swallows the worst of her excitement. "Yes, eldest sister," she says, "I understand. I thank you for so much consideration."

Sumara fixes Sola with a long, piercing stare, as if looking straight to the heart of her. Then unsmiling, she gives a shallow nod, returning to her paperwork. "Good. Now that we've gotten that conversation out of the way, are you ready to heed me in the matters we actually came here to discuss?"

"Yes, eldest sister," Sola says, "I will not allow my attention to wander further."

---

Port of Chanos,

Chanos Prefecture

The forgotten girl sits on the steps to the servants' entrance to the Imperial Residence, and sobs out her grief and confusion.

Not a soul knows who she is, from Lady Ambraea to the household's lowest servant — she's checked with each of them. Worse than the initial blank stares, even if she tells someone who she is, they need to be told again less than an hour later, the next time she sees them. Her intent to plead her case before her lady, to try and make her understand, to beg her to use her vast supernatural powers to discover what's wrong and fix it for Peony, had died the second time she'd seen Ambraea that day. She'd had to introduce herself again.

For as long as Peony can remember, there has been that impossible to shake anxiety hanging over her relationship with her lady. The knowledge of their differing social statuses, that however close or distant they are, all the power between them is held by Ambraea. That for Peony, it is a relationship that is needed to ensure her safety and security, her future, her mother's future, that Ambraea's good will is not a thing she can afford to take for granted or to spurn. That Ambraea can simply cast her aside — if she grows bored of Peony, if Peony displeases her, if she decides that it is more convenient or desirable to choose a different handmaiden. That one day, the woman who had once been her childhood friend, who had once been an almost-sister in the days when they were both too young and stupid to know better, might look through her with the same blank, distracted courtesy that she uses for most servants.

Peony doesn't need to worry about whether or not that will happen someday, now.

"Hey."

Peony's head jerks up to find a woman standing over her. Tall and powerfully-built, dark-skinned and with a Northern lilt to her voice, hair cropped almost as short as a monk's. "... may I help you?" Peony manages, swallowing the last of her sobs.

"Probably the other way around, honestly. Rough day, huh?"

Peony blinks away tears, frowning up at the stranger. "I beg your pardon?"

"It was just as bad for me. Well, probably worse, in the particulars. You're lucky in some ways." There's an odd, genuine sympathy in her tone. It's a jaded sort of sympathy, however, the resignation of a long term prisoner greeting a new cellmate.

Regardless, it's impossible for Peony not to recoil at the words. "I don't think you know exactly what kind of day I've been having."

"You'd be surprised," the woman says. "You're Demure Peony."

"... I am," Peony says, jerking up straight. She's filled with a mix of bone deep relief at hearing that from someone, even a stranger, and an alarm she can't quite dismiss. She's never seen this woman before in her life. "Who are you?"

"Keening-Blade Sai," Sai says. She takes a step closer, practically looming over Peony now.

That isn't even remotely reassuring. "Do you know what's going on?" she asks.

"I know what's happened to you," Sai says. "And, you could say that I'm here to help."

Peony fights back the sense of warning that this gives her, seizing desperately onto the hope being offered. "You can help me? You can fix this? No one knows who I am!"

"I know," Sai says. "And no, I'm not here to fix it, I'm here to take you away."

Peony lurches up to her feet, stumbling back. She's fully conscious now of just how much taller than her Sai is, of the weapons on Sai's belt — how hadn't she noticed those straight away? "Did you do this to me?"

Sai frowns, taken aback. "No. That's not how it works."

"If you take a step closer to me, I'll... I'll..." Peony wavers, unsure what she can even say "... I'll scream! My lady won't stand for you harassing her handmaiden!"

"Your lady, the nineteen-year-old Dragon-Blood," Sai says, "the one who doesn't know you from a perfect stranger, just now? I'm not particularly afraid of Ambraea." Then she reaches out for Peony's shoulder — a gentle, conciliatory gesture, in retrospect. Peony is in no state of mind to interpret things this way.

"Stay away from me!" Peony jerks away from her touch, passing under Sai's grasp and once again breaking out into a run, fleeing across the tiny back courtyard, through the gate, and out onto the streets of Chanos.

Sai watches her go with a deeply annoyed expression on her face, hands massaging her temples. "'I'm here to take you away'," she repeats in an angry mutter. "Great job, Sai. Credit to the Fellowship, today." Then she follows after Peony, moving at a brisk walk. This isn't a manhunt, after all; she just wants to be there when the poor kid finally collapses.

Peony bursts out from the servants' entrance into the alleyway behind the manse, running headlong out onto the street beyond, directly out in front of a horse drawn carriage. The animals scream in alarm, and their driver curses at her, but she's already gone, slipping past the flailing hooves with shocking ease, if not much grace. She keeps running when she hits the other side of the street, scandalising well-to-do citizens, and very nearly knocking over an elderly patrician man.

This isn't like her, she knows. It's not smart, or particularly likely to be productive — but when she glances over her shoulder, she can see Sai coming steadily after her, and that's enough to spur the mad dash onward. It's not just the strange woman she's running from, but unlike everything else, Sai she might actually be able to escape.

She turns onto a narrow side street, making a beeline for the poorer, more crowded neighbourhoods bordering Emberswathe. The people here she darts around or shoves past make more of an active protest, hands grabbing after Peony once or twice. She always darts past them at just the right angle that they only grasp air, though, and so her flight continues. Within the hour, not a single one of the dozens of people who take note of her — a young woman in servants' attire, running as though her life depends on it — will have any memory of seeing her at all. Peony has fallen out of the world, and she doesn't yet know how entirely she is unable to escape that.

On and on she runs, pushing herself far and hard enough that she should have long ago collapsed, shattered from exertion. She's only starting to get winded when her foot finally comes down on a loose paving stone in a filthy backalley — her legs go out from under her, and she catapults forward, landing hard on her elbows and knees, hands landing in a puddle. The pain of the impact brings her back to herself, and she stays there for a moment, gasping, staring down at her reflection slowly becoming clearer as the ripples in the puddle still again.

At first, Peony thinks it's only a trick of the light, the blue of the sky reflecting off the water strangely. She can only tell herself that for so long, though — in her reflection, she can see a mark glowing in the centre of her brow, an astrological symbol in steady blue. Raising a hand to touch her forehead, she sees the glow from the mark illuminating her fingers. Gaze darting back to the reflection, she locks eyes with herself, seeing that that, too, is wrong — her mother's brown eyes are gone, replaced by an intense blue shot impossibly through with tiny points of light. Stars in miniature. Exactly like the older version of herself from the dreams.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry," says a familiar voice, as booted feet trudge down the alley toward Peony's prone form. "I handled that badly. They only sent me for this in the first place because I was already in Chanos. It should have been someone from your Division explaining all this to you, at least — nobody breaks your heart kindly quite like a Joybringer."

Peony looks up in time to see Sai squat down beside her, a guilty, sympathetic expression in her face. This close, Peony can recognise that her eyes are like her own, only in a deep shade of violet. "What is this?" she asks, voice trembling.

"You're Exalted," Sai says.

Peony's mind goes momentarily blank, rebelling against the assertion despite the evidence of her eyes and all the strangeness of the day. "No I'm not." She has lived all her life in the shadow of the Exalted. The distance between herself and them is a fundamental fact of the word.

"Well, you weren't yesterday, but things change. I'll just cut to the chase," Sai shrugs awkwardly, "I work for heaven."

"... for heaven?" Peony asks, unable to completely banish her skepticism.

"Yeah, for heaven," Sai says. For an instant, a mark flashes on her brow as well, this one in the same purple as her eyes, "I didn't always, though. Years and years ago, when I was younger than you, I was an apprentice exorcist plying our clan's trade — worked with my father, helping to ward a mine beneath Uluiru." She pauses her, seeking some kind of recognition from Peony. Peony thinks she may have seen the name on a map at some point, but it's difficult to concentrate on anything at the moment.

Sai seems unoffended. "That's a place in the Northwest, don't worry about it. One day, I was helping my father make the standard offerings to one of the tunnel spirits. Some kind of Earth elemental. I think one of the miners cracked a joke, and this poor old thing just... snapped. Collapsed the tunnel on top of all of us, buried under rock. I was trapped in pitch darkness right beside Arvu, this miner about my age, and he told me all kinds of cryptic nonsense about my destiny, and what I was meant for. I just thought he was completely out of his mind. Then the rescuers finally dug me out five hours later, and I found out Arvu had had his skull crushed in the cave in; I'd been having a conversation with his corpse."

Peony shudders, pushing herself up to a kneeling position. Something about Sai's tone makes her not question the words. "Why are you telling me this?" she asks.

"Because, when I came out of that mine, I was changed," Sai says. "Like you. I had new abilities I couldn't understand, and not a soul remembered me — my father died in the cave in, but I still had my mother, my sisters, my cousins. I was a complete stranger to them all. I'd actually convinced myself I'd died back in the mines after all, that I was an unusually solid ghost, by the time someone from the Bureau found me. The same way I've been sent to find you."

"What did they tell you?" Peony asks.

"That I had been Chosen by Saturn, the Maiden of Endings. That I was Exalted. That they had a place for me, if I was willing to accept it."

"That's... that's what's happening to me?" Peony asks, mind still struggling for purchase. All she can dredge up from her childhood education about the Maidens was the barest of mentions, that along with the Sun and the Moon, they're too distant and powerful to care for the lives of mortals, infinitely less important to earthly matters than the Dragons and their Chosen.

"Really different Maiden in your case, but, yes," Sai says. "I can explain, but it's going to take a while."

Peony takes in a deep breath, trying to make any of this make sense. "If I say no, if you just... go away, can you take it back?"

"It doesn't work that way," Sai says, that horribly sympathetic expression on her face.

"Everyone forgot you? Everyone?"

"Yeah."

Peony gulps in a deep breath, feeling lightheaded. "... My mother, back in the Imperial City? I'm.... I'm all she has!"

"I'm sorry."

Panic begins to claw at the inside of Peony's chest again. "How do I make them remember me, though? Can't you do something? How long does this last?"

There's a painful silence, long enough that Peony knows the answer even before Sai breaks it to her, as gently as she knows how. She wishes she didn't believe it, that that weary, pained tone left more room for doubt in Peony's mind.

Sai lets her cry again, looking awkward, but not impatient as Peony sobs on her knees in the filthy alleyway. After a time — she doesn't know how long — her tears run out again. It takes her a few moments to see Sai's offered hand, and a second's hesitation before she accepts it, the woman's sword-calloused palm rough against her own.

"Well, you've stopped glowing at least," Sai says. "We've got a lot more to talk about. What do you like to drink? No, wait, don't answer that, I forgot that you're from the Imperial City. We'll go get tea. Hard to get a decent real drink in the Realm anyway."

---

You won't notice she's gone. Not really. It isn't your fault. If there's a twinge of wrongness now and again, a brief surge of understanding, a painful memory out of place, you'll get over them soon. But just like that, a quiet, unsung pillar of your life has been removed. Gone on to greater things, as she was always destined to. And how can you mourn what you simply don't recall ever having?

Life goes on, for you both.

---

Article:

What storyline would you like to follow in your fifth year? The characters named as central will appear very prominently within this storyline, but this doesn't mean you won't see other characters as well. Years six and seven will feature major upheavals for more than one character, Ambraea included, and their storyline choices will be specific to them.

We are more than halfway through this quest.

You may vote for as many as you like, but only the top vote will be picked. This vote is separate from the first:

[ ] Best Served Cold

In Ambraea's third year, her life and that of her friends' was put in danger by the actions of Peleps Nalri. While Ambraea wasn't the primary target, this is still not something that can be let stand. Ambraea and L'nessa find a way to get back at her before she graduates.

Availability: Year 5
Central character(s): Peleps Nalri, V'neef L'essa
Themes: Familial rivalry, House V'neef and House Peleps


[ ] Hard Lessons

Sola once stepped in when tensions between Ambraea and another student reached an unwise breaking point. Ambraea will have ample opportunity to return the favour, or to decline to.

Availability: Year 5
Central character(s): Cathak Garel Hylo, Tepet Usala Sola,
Themes: Familial rivalry, House Tepet and House Cathak


[ ] The Serpent Thief

An old annoyance has reemerged to trouble Diamond-Cut Perfection, slipping into their court to steal information and Essence. They would like to send a message that they are not to be trifled with in this way, asking Ambraea to kill or bind the thief. The thief's unique nature makes this no trivial task, however.

Availability: Year 5
Central character(s): ???, Diamond-Cut Perfection
Themes: Strange spirits, ruins