A Vision in Bronze; A Sidereal quest

You trace an impossible path, following the pale gold of Flotsam's anima as you pursue him down what remains of the walkway. Stepping from rotting post to rotting post, the seawater licking at your heels, lighting on half-splintered boards that barely bend under your weight, running along a thin wooden rail without slowing at all. You're filled with the grace of the Ewer, your being in perfect balance with itself and all the world.

Behind you, a storm of conflicting anima rages. Red-stained dawn and brilliant light of midday battle with all the elements, Chalus and Descending Radiance outnumbered, separated, and fighting just to stay alive. Ahead of you, the shattered bridge you're navigating ramps up an embankment of stone and rubble, curving up and away out of sight of the battle below. By the time you spy an actually solid stretch of walkway, the others are only discernible by the echoing din and the surreal play of lights on the water and the cavern walls.

The moment you set foot on the wooden platform, Flotsam steps out of the shadows, somehow hidden there in spite of his flaring Caste Mark, and very nearly cuts you in half. His sword catches the front of your robes, razor-sharp edge cutting a diagonal slash in your already-ragged garments. His followthrough slash actually shears off a lock of your hair, aqua-blue curls dropping away to the water below.

Staring into his eyes, you fully take stock of your situation. You are in close quarters with a Solar Anathema who has been exquisitely trained in one of heaven's most lethal fighting styles. Barely any room to maneuver, cut off from your allies. Despite how dangerous this entire sequence of events has objectively been, you've on some level felt entirely in control. One or two hiccups aside, things had been going to plan.

You may die here, though. This, you hadn't planned for.

You cannot let him reach the Blue Chimney, though, no matter what the cost. You were right to chase him. You don't need to defeat Flotsam singlehanded. You're not here alone after all, not really. All you need to do is hold his attention, stall him, and survive. This renewed resolve doesn't banish your fear, but it lets you master it. Love, after all, is smiling at your troubles.

You smile at yours as he next tries to run you through. An amused twitch of the lips, a glimmer in your eye, the tears in your clothing suddenly provocative instead of merely shabby — your grace in whirling clear of his thrust is truly singular. Students of Violet Bier of Sorrows Style practice detachment in combat, freeing themselves of base emotion, of anger or guilt or bloodlust, leaving only killing intent as sharp as any blade. You deliberately rob Flotsam of that, hooking a delicate, teasing finger into his heart. By the time he turns on you again, you're nowhere to be seen, an elusive object of desire.

He still wants you dead, obviously, but if you've done this right, even if it's not quite on a level he would ever admit to himself, he also wants you. More keenly and more personally than Rika ever had. Maybe that's why he brings her up — either way, if he's shouting at you instead of making a run for the Chimney, you have him.

"Rika died trying to protect you, because she was stupid enough to trust you. To like you!" The accusation is raw, pained, hurled into the surrounding cavern and echoing against the nearby rock wall.

"Joje u Rika died because I killed her," you correct. "She liked the thought of a desperate, grateful mortal girl adorning her bedroom until she got bored. Unfortunately, I was never available." Your voice calls up from somewhere below, but he can't immediately pinpoint your hiding spot. The wooden boards overhead creak as he turns in place trying to find you.

"She was still my friend!"

"She meant nothing to me, and the world is better without her." You put some amusement in your voice, making it a joke rather than a grim necessity.

His only answer is to plunge his sword down through a gap in the boards of the walkway. He misses you by at least half a foot, but the gesture is certainly vicious enough. You're just below the walkway, one foot wedged into the fork between a post and a flimsy support beam. You don't waste the opening he's just given you.

Vaulting up from your hiding place, you land nearly silently on the walkway behind him. He still hears and turns on you, but by then you're already in motion, a palm thrust striking his chest, and your knee driving into his stomach. From the pained gasp he makes, you know it hurt him. You're prepared to dance away from another sword stroke, but when it comes, it's a feint. You duck under the blade only to receive a sharp kick straight to the jaw.

Your head spins as you struggle not to be sent sprawling over the edge of the walkway, throwing yourself into a roll and popping back up onto your feet. You taste blood in your mouth, a bad sign — Violet Bier is at its most dangerous when an opponent is already weakened from injury.

By this point, your own Caste Mark has flared on your brow, the soft blue of Venus's sign seeming almost dim against even a Night Caste's garish anima. It's the Caste Mark that forestalls the expected attack. He glares at it, hate filling his dark eyes, mingled with the confused desire that's so effectively diverted him. Rika's satchel is still slung over his back, forgotten for the moment. "I knew what you were," he says, "I knew as soon as you murdered her, and I could really see you. I recognised the eyes."

"You've met a Sidereal before. You've been trained by one," you say, boards groaning ominously as you take another step back. It's a troubling notion, but, frustratingly, no longer surprising. You hold more than one of your colleagues in the Gold Faction in personal esteem, but far too many of them have been showing a shocking lack of good judgement in such matters.

"Just figured that out?" He moves forward almost too fast to track, and you just barely flit out of the way of a cut that would have slit your throat from ear to ear if it had properly connected. You leap backward without taking your eyes from him, just so happening to alight on a teetering plank of wood. Something hot and wet is flowing down from the bridge of your nose. The stinging pain of it only hits a few moments later. The wound is superficial, except, faintly, to your pride.

"No, it was obvious," you say. You'd known exactly who taught him Violet Bier of Sorrows Style from the first time he'd tried to stab you. "Is there anything you'd like me to tell your master for you, once you're dead? I'm sure I'll run into them again around the offices at some point."

"I don't have a master," Flotsam says, making the word sound like something dirty. "I had a teacher. They warned me about you."

"About me? I've been accused of being cold before, but I'm not so unpopular in the Fivescore Fellowship," you say, feigning amusement. You don't trust his stillness — you're poised to make another leap for safety if he so much as twitches in your direction.

"You know what I mean," he says, staring you down with unblinking intensity. Every time you evade him, his obsession deepens just a little more, rage and perverse attraction mixing together into a murderous lust alien to you twice over. "He warned me that your 'Faction' would kill us just for having the temerity to exist, if you could. That you know what the Realm is, what it does, but you prop it up anyway, because it's convenient. For your own gain. Allow an evil to exist in the world you're not even trying to curb — that you protect, that you feed — supposedly for a greater good. When the Realm killed my family, was that for a greater good?"

"Will the deaths of all the families you came here to drown be for a greater good?" you ask. "The dockworkers, the shopkeepers, the slaves..."

"And the Western cities that the Realm has destroyed?" Flotsam demands. "The people that their navies kill, enslave, brutalise? If a little more blood has to be spilled to kill a monster, then I'm willing to do that."

"Funny. I've been thinking something similar ever since I met you all," you say, smile equal parts infuriating and beguiling.

The only sign is a slight narrowing of his eyes. The distance between you disappears, and his sword is falling from every imaginable angle. Dodging the deathblows is like weaving between raindrops in a storm, fragile sections of walkway falling to splinters beneath your feet.

You fall to your knees on the far side of it, blood trickling down one arm, from your chest, a shallow cut bleeding on your neck, your breath coming out in ragged gasps. The fight has taken you to the far side of the walkway, jagged gravel digging into your knees through the thin fabric of your robes, the towering support pillar horribly close. Flotsam stands over you. Within the golden light that wreaths him like a beacon, ships made from shadows burn.

"So, we're the monsters," he says, angrier than ever. His sword, very near your eyeline, is wet with your blood. "And we need to die, so that this city can live and keep glutting itself on the wealth of an entire Direction. Because that's what you do, isn't it?" His hand shoots out, seizing you by the throat. This time, you're too sluggish to dodge. "You show up from nowhere and you decide who lives and who dies, don't you? Don't you?"

You struggle for air, blood-slick hands clawing against his grip. In your panic, however, for just a moment, you see something over Flotsam's shoulder. You manage two words: "Different... Division."

Rika's orichalcum spear whistles as it flies through the air, burying itself in Flotsam's back. He hisses in pain and drops you, staggering past you to collapse onto his hands and knees.

"She's right, you know." The young Fire Aspect from before, the one who had kicked Radiance, sails through the air, his tether to the earth cut. He lands neatly, all smiles. Despite the fiery anima that burns around him, you feel no heat. "Who lives or dies is my job." He's barely twenty years old, his frame narrow, features strikingly Northern. He wears a flaming red cloak clasped with the mon of House Peleps — to look at him, no one could take him for anything but a Prince of the Earth. That is, until he unclasps the cloak and tosses it aside. The fire vanishes, fading away into a steady, violet light, a halo of purple smoke framing his head from behind.

Flotsam reaches behind him, pulling the longfang free with a choked scream. It weighs heavily in his hand, and you can already tell that he's furious to see it wielded against him. "That isn't yours!" he says, getting shakily to his feet.

"You know, I think it might be — I'm keeping it, at least!" The Reckoner's smile, if anything, grows wider. Lew has always been incurably annoying, in that way.

Lew Stojca, Chosen of Saturn, your junior colleague and Circlemate from the Division of Endings. You've known him for three years, since he first arrived in heaven as a confused Clovinan teenager who had spoken only Skytongue. Lew is alternately endearing and frustrating, but you hadn't been wrong today when you'd gambled with your life that he would find you in time.

Flotsam drops Rika's spear, raising his sword again and stepping toward his new enemy despite his wounds. He isn't ready for it when you grit your teeth, force yourself to your feet, and hit him with a shoving palm strike directly onto his open wound — not hard enough to do much more damage, but hard enough to get his attention. Flotsam barely has time to scream again before Lew is on him.

One of Lew's hands sketches the Lesser Sign of Saturn in violet stardust, the other hits Flotsam square in the face with a blow that scours his flesh with angry, golden fire.

Flotsam reels back and spits out a mouthful of blood, crazed burn marks fresh and livid on his cheek. "Golden Janissary? I'm not a demon, you idiot."

"You're close enough!" Lew says. Flotsam evades his next blow, moving swift as a shadow. You use the opportunity to slip away again, however — the subtle shift in the battle's energies are enough to cause a tiny relaxation of Flotsam's guard, and Lew takes full advantage. He punches Flotsam hard in the throat, followed by a sweeping kick that hits Flotsam square in the chest with a hideous crunch.

"Fuck... you!" Flotsam wheezes, robbed of any eloquence. "You didn't get all of us!"

"We never do," you say, scooping up Rika's longfang in both hands. Without attuning yourself to the Essence of the orichalcum, it's too heavy to be practical. You still manage to toss it the short distance to your ally, who catches it as if it weighs no more than a length of bamboo.

Lew moves in for the kill, making the sign again as he whirls around to ram the spear into Flotsam's side. For an instant, the world itself is literally painted in shades of red. The two men stare at each other, Lew's spear plunged into Flotsam's ribs, Flotsam's sword having punched through the metal of Lew's borrowed naval cuirass.

As the red haze fades, It isn't hard to see who had the worst of that exchange, though. Lew winces in pain, but remains on his feet. By contrast, Flotsam's sword falls from slack fingers, and he drops to his knees again. He opens his mouth, but he only hacks up a mouthful of blood.

You kick Flotsam's sword again and step up beside him, not willing to let him go without prying at least one bit of information from him, despite how much you wish you could just collapse where you stand. The subtle magic you'd already slipped into Lew's attack compels an answer, despite Flotsam's wounds, despite his better judgement.

Article:

Through your use of the Deadliest of All Weapons technique, you may compel a truthful answer from Flotsam before he dies. His answer may be vague or misleading, but it cannot be outright false. What do you ask him about his mysterious Lunar ally?

[ ] "Who is the Lunar who was helping your Circle?"

[ ] "What was the Lunar's goal in helping you?"

[ ] "What is the Lunar going to do next?"