[Exalted] The Last Daughter -- Dragon-Blooded Sorcery School Quest

In the end, there's only one thing you, in good conscience, can do. If Sola gets mad at you, she's welcome to get mad at you. She has to vent somehow, although a screaming match isn't your first choice of ways to help her.

The day is nearly done, and as you and Maia make your way down the winding residence tower stairs in your cloaks, your daiklave at your waist, one or two students on their way to bed cast curious looks your way. Either something about your bearing doesn't invite questions, or they're smart enough to put two and two together — you're left alone.

When you get down to the ground floor, though, there's someone waiting for you by the door you'd intended to use. Cynis Bashura leans against the wall smoking her jade pipe, watching you approach with an air almost of quiet satisfaction. "Good, you're going to get her," she says. "Saves me from having to do it."

You raise your eyebrows. "I don't recall staff being quite so proactive in the past."

Bashura shrugs. "We do an awful lot of letting you all sink or swim. You know that. That's when things are normal, though — not when the girl's family just got slaughtered. But you two have more responsibility to her than we do. I didn't know whether you'd be mindful of that."

You give her a hard look. "We know our duty to our Hearthmates, Instructor."

"Glad to hear it," she agrees. "I wasn't looking forward to that rain."

"Thank you for your concern," Maia says, bowing her head slightly.

Bashura only nods, and continues to smoke.

You nod, stepping up to the door, and unlatching it. The wind isn't particularly harsh, but outside, the rain falls steadily. You draw your hood up over your head — Maia doesn't bother, apparently confident in water's polite disinclination to inconvenience her. Verdigris slithers under your tunic, getting as far away from the rain as possible.

Then you and Maia set off down a familiar path, one you've walked enough times over the years that you could follow it blindfolded.

---

You'd known as soon as you'd checked her position that Sola had gone to the spot that the two of you have been using for combat training for most of the time you've known each other. The last time you saw the place, it was much the same as ever — a slight indentation in the earth, roughly ringed by a partial circle of boulders. It's the place where you and Sola really became friends, where you pushed one another daily to hone your sword skills into something genuinely deadly, instead of just a sorcerer's fallback option. In a real sense, she made you worthy of the sword you're wielding just as you made her worthy of hers.

This evening, things immediately look different. Within the impromptu sparring ring you and she have carved out over the past six years, Sola's anima is raging. While the rain falls calm and steady over the rest of the island, here wind howls and lightning arcs. In the flashes of blue electricity, you see her, a figure with a sword moving through elegant sword forms almost too fast for the eye to trace.

You know Sola's fighting style intimately by now, have seen it develop over time — have actively shaped it, as her primary training partner for a little less than a third of her life. And even from a distance, you can tell that there's something terribly wounded about her tonight.

"Sola!" you shout, fighting to be heard over the wind and the rain. "It's later!

Beside you, Maia gives a small sigh. She's probably right, this isn't the best way to approach this. But you don't know what the best way is — you're not built for it, anymore than Sola is. Or Maia, for that matter, even if she differs in her specific difficulties. All any of you can do is the best you can for one another.

Sola pauses in mid motion, her back rigid as she straightens, her grip on Storm's Eye almost painfully tight. Slowly, she turns to face you. She's completely dry, sheltered as she is in the daiklave's eerie pocket of calm, despite the anima tearing at the ground at her feet, at the tall boulders all around her. Her eyes glow with inner lightning. When she finally answers you, she says: "Draw your sword."

"Oh, Dragons," Maia mutters.

"We're here to talk!" you shout back to her.

Sola brings the daiklave up, pointing it directly at you. "I'm not!" she says, settling into a guard you've seen her take hundreds of times before.

"... Hesiesh give me patience," you hiss to yourself. "Maia, here." You hold out a hand, and Verdigris slinks out from under your cloak, crossing the distance over to Maia. With her safely off, you unpin your cloak, ignoring the raindrops already soaking your hair and tunic. Maia takes the garment as well with a long suffering air, folding it up as best she can.

"Don't kill each other!" she tells you both.

You ignore that — Sola isn't that out of her mind, you don't think. You draw the White Serpent, the illumination of Sola's sword and anima dancing pale blue on the jadesteel. "You can't beat me like this!" you tell her, without a doubt in your mind.

Sola's eyes narrow in sudden outrage. She moves swift as lightning, crossing the gap between you in the space of a blink, the scent of ozone hitting you half an instant before she does. With Storm's Eye in her hand, going all out like this, you've never beaten her once. She's faster than you, more skilled, more precise, seeming to come at you from every angle at once. Tonight, though, she's also predictable.

You catch the first blow on your sword's round hilt, twist to set her off balance, lean out of the way of the second blow. When the third comes for you, you plant your feet firmly into the muddy ground beneath you, raw Earth Essence flowing through you into the blade. As you'd done to the Anathema over the summer, you send pure seismic force vibrating through the blade of your daiklave as it meets Sola's. There's a deafening, orichalcum-on-jade chime, and Storm's Eye jumps painfully out of Sola's hands. Deprived of the sword's magic, her field of artificial calm instantly dies, rain already beginning to soak her tunic. She hadn't even brought a cloak.

Three moves. Even when you were first years, you have never managed to beat Sola in three moves.

She lunges for her fallen sword — you don't let her go after it. You let go of the White Serpent, seize her by the collar with both hands, and hurl her against the nearest boulder. She gasps as her back hits the granite. You slam both hands against it to either side of her head, and the entire towering stone shudders. Sola stares at you with shocked eyes still aglow with lightning, the wind knocked out of her.

"You don't have to be alone, you proud, stupid woman!" you shout into her face, leaning in so close that she can't look away. "You don't have to pretend not to need anyone right now!"

Sola bristles, fighting for the breath you've knocked out of her. "I don't need--"

You don't even let her finish that, shouting over her. "Well, what if I do? What if we both do? What do we have left if we don't let ourselves have each other?" By the end, your voice cracks. You're aware of a trembling in your arms, a stinging in your eyes. Maia looks on in silence, not interrupting, but near at hand. "What do any of us have?" you amend.

Sola glares at you, her jaw working as if she's not sure how to deny this. But then a dam breaks. She squeezes her eyes shut. Her lip quivers. And then she slumps forward against you, letting you take her into your arms. You find yourself sitting in the mud, cradling her against your chest, her shoulders shake with silent, helpless sobs. A moment later, Maia stands over you. She bends, draping your cloak over you and Sola as best she can, before kneeling down beside you. Wordlessly, she puts her arms around Sola from behind, leaning her head against Sola's shoulder.

The three of you stay like that, holding each other as though you expect to be torn apart, together in your grief until the storm whirling around Sola dies down.

It's at least half an hour before the wind and lighting still entirely, the glow in Sola's eyes fading to a faint, background pulse. Then you're just left under the natural rain, falling as heavily as ever.

Sola finally masters herself enough to look up at the two of you. "I might not have much of a house, anymore," she admits, voice very quiet. "I don't even know which of my sisters survived." The other obvious possibility isn't something she can bear to voice, just now. There's no adequate answer you can give other than your presence. You continue to give her that, though, holding her almost bruisingly tight, and just letting her talk. "I don't know what I'm going to do anymore, now, when I leave here. I don't know what there even is left for me."

"That makes two of us," you say, giving her a weak, miserable sort of smile. "Hard to know how to move forward when the ground you've stood on all your life gives out."

Sola nods. You can't quite tell what she's thinking.

"I think," Maia says, voice gently practical, "that before anything, you should both have a bath, at least. And me. This mud is awful."

That catches Sola by surprise enough that it draws out a sharp, half-hysterical laugh from her. It takes her a moment or two before she can pull herself together again to nod to that. "Yeah. That might be a good first step. We'll... need to go back to school for that."

"Can you do something about this rain?" Maia prompts.

"... Right," Sola says, looking up at the clouds overhead like she's just seeing them for the first time. "I can do that. Ambraea, can you give me my arms back?"

You and Maia both release her, although she only pulls away just enough to work. Blinking water out of her eyes, Sola begins to recite prayers in archaic language, her hands flashing through a few Heptagram signs for good measure. Nearby on the ground, Storm's Eye hums audibly, the veins of blue jade running down its blade lighting up again. The lightning arcs over from the sword to Sola's hands as she whispers.

High above, difficult to see at first, the huge, insectoid limbs of That Which Stirs the Sky emerge, pulling at and working the substance of the dark clouds until the rain begins to let up, and then eventually to stop. When she's done, you're left sitting in a mud puddle, drenched to the bone with your hair plastered to your scalp. At the very least, though, there isn't any more rain falling on you. You watch Verdigris peek out from beneath Maia's cloak, decide that you're still far too damp for her liking, and stay where she is.

"Well, that's going to make the walk back easier," you say, blinking away the day's last feeble rays of sunlight, now lancing their way through the greatly thinned clouds.

"I'm not completely useless right now," Sola says, looking back at you. Her gaze seems to hold yours for longer than normal, taking in your dark eyes, before sliding down to your lips.

"I never thought you were," you say. You think you must look something like a drowned rat, but all at once, you feel suddenly warm, very much aware of her proximity and the feeling of her body against yours. You see Maia notice, her expression thoughtful as it goes between the two of you, possibly even curious.

You decide that this will be something to unpack at a later time.

The walk back is much more pleasant than the walk down, as Maia predicted. Maia, of course, shows nearly no evidence of having been in pouring rain, with only the clinging mud on her clothes to give her away. Verdigris continues to choose to ride across her shoulders, although she has chosen to come out to enjoy the fading light.

You and Sola trudge along behind her in your wet boots, sodden and dirty and tired, swords retrieved, cleaned off, and sheathed again, the school growing larger on the horizon. Maia had absolutely been right — you are all going to need to have a bath before you do anything else.

As you near the gates of the school, Sola speaks up, her words coming fast and reluctant. "I... you know how my roommate snapped last month?"

"Yes," you say. Unlike you, Maia, and L'nessa, Sola's dorm situation had shifted more than once since coming to the Heptagram. Students drop out, they graduate, there are not an even number of students distributed across the seven years. Since your fifth year, Sola has been rooming with a quiet Ledaal girl who had always seemed sweet enough, but who had no particular talent. After six years failing to initiate into the Emerald Circle, she had finally broken under the strain, and had been transferred to a different school in disgrace.

"I still haven't been assigned a new one," Sola says. There's a long, strained moment, before she adds, barely audible, "I'm going to be alone all night."

You understand that she is asking for something here that she would never ask for under ordinary circumstances. That this horrible day, and the actions you've taken on it have shifted things between you.

"I can let L'nessa know and get a change of clothes for both of us," Maia says, still steadfastly being the practical one. It's a good look for her.

You nod to her, then look back to Sola, your words very firm as you tell her: "You won't be alone tonight."

---

There isn't a lot of difference between one Heptagram student dorm and another. They're identical rooms, the back wall gently curving and smaller than the front, one small window letting in air and light. Whether they're set up for two or three students is a matter of chance and convenient distribution. Sola's had been the former — you'd improvised.

You wake up beside Sola and Maia. The single larger bed, formed by pushing Sola's and her former roommate's together into the middle of the room, is merely cramped for the three of you, rather than outright infeasible.

Your eyes wander from the ceiling overhead, to the books Sola has stacked onto her desk, to the stand she's procured or created for her daiklave, opposite the place her bed normally rests. Then your eyes drift over to Sola, finding her wide awake and looking back at you.

"Did you get much sleep?" you ask, already knowing the answer.

"Some," Sola says, truthfully. She sits up a little, taking full stock of the situation, from you to her room, to Maia's dozing form on your far side. She frowns. "I shouldn't have—"

"Don't start," Maia says, not otherwise giving any hint that she's awake, "we're not going to look down on you for wanting some company, after what happened yesterday."

Sola seems to struggle with that thought for a moment, but in the end, she nods. "... yeah," she says. "I keep trying to convince myself that it was all a bad dream." Then she lays back down, letting out a small groan. "People are going to whisper about this incessantly."

Three Hearthmates, two of whom are already known to be lovers, sharing a dorm together the night after the third had gotten the worst news imaginable. Nothing had happened but sleep, but they would obviously talk. "Not my primary concern in this," you say.

"I've already been the upjumped patrician slut who fucked her way into a Hearth oath for years," Maia says. "Nothing anyone says about me about this is going to be new or hurtful. And yes, Ambraea, I know they don't say it where you can hear — most people aren't that stupid."

Sola nods, still looking up at the ceiling. After a long moment, just says: "Thank you." Things are obviously not alright. It's impossible for them to be, and it's going to be a very long time before that changes. Sola has been dealt a terrible blow, and one that will keep falling in a thousand large and small ways in the coming years as the true scope of the losses and House Tepet's new place in the world become entirely clear. You'd like to think that you'll do what you can to make it all more bearable, though.

Soon enough, the school is waking up around you, and you'll all have to face the day.

"I told Amiti I'd review summoning rituals with her ahead of the lecture today," Maia says. She's dressed and ready to go, but she still casts a glance back to Sola, a question in her eyes.

"Go ahead," Sola says, managing something like a smile. "I can't sulk forever, and I'm not going to wash out in my last year, no matter what's happening."

Maia nods. Before she leaves, she steps over and puts her arms around Sola's waist, hugging her tightly, before pulling away again. "You have us," she says, like Sola might forget.

"I do," Sola agrees.

With that, Maia slips out the door, presumably to track down Amiti.

"We should get moving soon too," you tell Sola. You have a fresh uniform on, and are brushing out your hair in preparation to braid it again.

"Yes," Sola says. She seems like she's on the edge of saying something, hesitating over it for several long moments. You give her the chance to get it off her chest. "Ambraea, I'm... sorry," she tells you.

You sigh. "You're not a chore, Sola. We made promises to each other, and I take them seriously."

"No, not for last night," she says. "I mean, I'm sorry about your mother."

The words hit you like a blow to the chest, and you freeze up in mid brush stroke. You don't think a single person has actually said that to you yet, they way they would for anyone else whose mother has disappeared. As though the Scarlet Empress might be yours to worry for or to mourn. "I don't really believe it yet," you admit. "My circumstances are terrifying, obviously, but her? She can't really be—" You make yourself stop, take in a deep breath, centre yourself. You try to remind her who you're talking to and what she's just lost, before you continue like that.

"Thank you," you say.

Sola claps a hand on your shoulder, giving you a serious look. "You have us too," she says, echoing Maia.

You'll have to do your best to remember that.

Article:

As the final year steadily disappears behind you, old grudges and resentments bubble up to the surface. People you've wronged, or who have wronged you. What is the venue for one of these becoming impossible to ignore?

[ ] The lecture hall

[ ] The grounds, just outside the school

[ ] The library tower