BEL0VED

[Opaline Dreams]

THE VIEWING OF KANATTA LARE, PART I​

In which Attari wakes up from one nightmare, catches a fragment of another on the news, and heads out to what may or may not be the start of a third.

CW for explicit content, in the form of sexual stress dreams.

---

Attari was in her bed from home, the way she'd left it on the day of the Ilisaf court's press conference: the blue sheets that were getting a little too thin, the blanket patterned with fish, the Second Spear Seket body pillow. But the bed was in the green stone "guest quarters" where House Ilisaf had placed her, and Rialeh was in the bed with her – under her – looking up at her with his beautiful dark eyes and his snake-locks spread over her pillows. He was making her recite House Ilisaf's Edicts on the Rights of the Child one after the other, and letting her sink a little further down the length of his cock each time she recited one correctly.

"Now the Nineteenth," he sighed – the one Attari had violated when she'd called out to young Lady Orineimu. She gave it to him, and Rialeh let her sink all the way to the base of his cock, until she felt the warm, smooth skin of his thighs against her own. Attari closed her eyes and started to move –

And suddenly she was back on the red carpet, on her knees, naked, and Orisai VII Ilisaf was staring down at her. So was the crowd of other reporters, all their lenses and lights flashing. Attari's whole body flamed with shame and arousal.

"Pathetic," said Venarch Orisai, in a voice as cold and beautiful as her green eyes. Attari felt her cunt throb in response. "Do you truly think abasing yourself like this is enough to make up for what you've done?" Attari opened her mouth to respond, but the venarch kept talking. "Be silent. You have no right to speak on this carpet. You forfeited it when you broke the law." Yes, thought Attari, yes, I know, and I deserve whatever you're about to do to me. She lowered her head in deference, so that all she saw was her own hands resting on her bare thighs…and a small wet spot between her legs. The crowd around her murmured, and Attari's face burned as she realized that she'd sullied the red carpet with her own cuntdrippings.

"Look up," commanded the venarch's voice. "You don't deserve to hide yourself."

Attari looked up. The crowd was still there, but Venarch Orisai was gone. Instead, at the end of the red carpet stood Kukkyu and her kitchen. Kukkyu's basket was open; on the counter before her were a pot of bittergreen tea and a live jadescale viper. All at once, Attari realized that the flashes around her weren't from cameras, but from light glancing off of forks and knives in the reporters' hands.

" – And our third ingredient," said Kukkyu, smiling broadly, "is human flesh!"

Attari wanted to scream, but found that she couldn't open her mouth. She couldn't move any part of herself at all.

And then, on the back of her neck, she felt the cold razor kiss of a heavy spearblade.



Attari jerked awake with a scream caught in her throat. It took her several moments of lying in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, chest heaving, before she realized that it had all been a dream.

Oh, shit, she thought as the ceiling came back into focus. Today's the day they bring in Lare.

Lare, echoed Word in Emptiness, tremulous with worry. Attari had woken up with Word's silver earbud anchor clutched in one fist.

Two things had happened since her first interview with Rialeh V Ca'unaal (and, briefly, Lady Orialu). The first was that Orialu had made good on her promise to have Attari moved to a suite of rooms with real windows. She'd been relocated after just two days; Attari supposed that was bound to happen when the person agitating on her behalf was the venarch's firstborn daughter. Her new rooms even had a little balcony that looked out over a closed-in courtyard. In fact, Attari suspected she'd been moved to actual guest quarters, not a captivity suite. She couldn't be sure, though, since she'd been blindfolded during the transfer from the old rooms to the new.

The other thing that had happened since her first interview was more interviews – hours of them, every day. Rialeh had spent the past week cataloging every shame and abuse that Kanatta Lare had heaped on her during her years at Cry Verasaahi, or at least all the ones that Attari could remember. Every day that Rialeh showed up at her rooms, Attari half-feared, half-wondered if Lady Orialu would be with him, but so far she had yet to see Orialu again.

Alone with Rialeh, over an endless stream of bittergreen tea, Attari recounted Lare's casual insults, the unpaid overtime, the way she'd encouraged Attari's coworkers to always keep her at the bottom of the social ladder. She recounted worse, too – things she'd done at Lare's behest that she knew would add to her own sentence, break-ins and blackmailings and bribes. After all, she thought, better he hears it from me than from her. As recently as a few weeks ago, recounting those things to Rialeh might have nearly broken her. But after the incident on the red carpet, failing so pathetically and dramatically before so many watching eyes, the older shames just didn't compare. Besides, Attari was beginning to find that she no longer much cared what happened to her, as long as Lare was apprehended and sentenced. The hold Lare had built up over her mind over the past ten years was weakening; Attari belonged to the lawcourts and to the venarch's daughter now, to a power greater than anything Lare could ever hope to reach.

From cowering under Lare's shadow to cowering under Lady Orialu's, Attari thought, with more than a touch of bitterness. But another part of her whispered that she was doing work like her mother's, bringing a streak of corruption to light, and that made it a little easier to bear.

The breakfast Attari received that day was much like the others she'd received the past week: fish, fruit, and rice, what people her age would have called a "traditional" breakfast and what people fifteen years younger would have called "for old people." Either way, it was protein, starch, and sugar, which was all Attari cared about; she'd need all three to keep up her strength when she saw Lare later today.

After she'd eaten, washed up, and dressed, Attari turned on her vision panel to wait until Rialeh came to collect her for Lare's interview. Not that Attari would be part of the interview; but Rialeh had asked her if she'd like to watch while it happened, and Attari had said yes with a vindictive little flare of joy. When Attari turned on the vision panel, it picked up the episode of Kukkyu's Kitchen that she'd paused in the middle of before going to sleep last night. Attari gave a little shudder and switched over to a news channel; she'd been given access to those again the day before yesterday.

" – And that concludes this week's venarchic fashion review!" a pretty male anchor said brightly. His face took on a more serious look. "Now, on to our first major item of the day: no doubt you've all heard of the incident at Vaa Surame, but today two esteemed guests have been generous enough to join us and lend their expertise to the discussion. Please welcome our shining Fourth Spear, the Sunspinner, Iheila fifth of Irimias, and our valiant Captain of the Opaline City Aberrant Guard, Neriau Teis."

Two more faces blinked onto the panel on either side of the anchor's. To his left was Fourth Spear Irimias, brown-skinned and black-haired, his high, smooth cheekbones shimmering with a dusting of gold that made a lovely contrast to his blue star marks. More gold dust gleamed in the part of his hair, which Irimias wore over his shoulder in an artfully messy braid. To the anchor's right was Captain Teis, clad in the high-throated blacks of an on-duty guardsman and with his dark, tight curls pulled back into a no-nonsense cluster at the base of his neck. His olive-skinned face was free of makeup, adorned only by his own leaf-green marks.

"Fourth Spear," said the anchor. "Captain. Thank you both so very much for joining us today. We already know what happened on the morning of that dreadful incident, but for those who may only just be learning: five days ago, a monster appeared in a mixed commercial-residential block in the heart of the Opaline City. Over twenty-one minutes, it proceeded in the direction of the Corona, killing four people before Fourth Spear Irimias put an end to its rampage at the gate on Vaa Surame."

An image flashed on the panel of a many-legged monster with a long, snaking violet body and an eerie bone-white mask. In the City? Attari thought with a kind of horrified fascination. Did I hear that right? Inside the City? Word in Emptiness said nothing, only sent a ripple of simple fear through Attari's mind.

Safe here, Attari thought at it. Calm down. Calm down. Let's learn. Attari tucked Word's anchor into her ear, its favorite place; putting the anchor there always helped to soothe her partner. Then she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, watching intently.

"Captain Teis," said the anchor. "Most of us are already familiar with the events themselves, but what caused them? How could a monster appear so deep inside our greatest city?"

"Of course," Captain Teis said. "What we must understand is that this monster was anthropogenic as opposed to naturogenic – "

"Excuse me," the anchor broke in gently. "Captain, would you kindly define those terms for us non-experts?"

"Certainly," said Captain Teis. "Naturogenic monsters are what most of us think of when we hear the word monster. All of us, of course, metabolize ra into vaara in order to live. Naturogenic monsters happen when an animal metabolizes too much poisoned ra in the natural world and becomes corrupted. It then seeks out human population centers on instinct. The Aberrant Guard exists to protect our cities and towns from such creatures."

"And anthropogenic monsters?" said the anchor.

"Anthropogenic monsters are an extreme rarity," said Teis. "That, above all, is what I would like viewers to bear in mind: the incident at Vaa Surame was the first of its kind in over one hundred years. If you have never heard of anthropogenic monsters before now, this may be why." Captain Teis had already looked deeply serious, but now he somehow managed to look even more so. "With that said: anthropogenic monsters arise from human beings. The monster that Fourth Spear Irimias slew was once a person."

"Four murders would earn any person a death on the Heavenfacing Court, Captain," the Fourth Spear remarked. "No matter what they became before doing it."

Captain Teis's mouth tensed, and a small line appeared between his eyebrows. "To be sure," he said after a barely-detectable silence. "But any human death is a tragedy to be mourned – "

"Of course," said Irimias. Attari, watching, couldn't help but notice how his gold-dust makeup glimmered on the screen whenever he moved. Second Spear Seket might have been her favorite, but really, all seven of the Spears were just too beautiful. "In the interest of preventing further tragedy," the Fourth Spear went on, "perhaps you could tell us why Tehariel wave monitors failed to detect the monster's transformation? How was it able to achieve terminal corruption before anyone could stop it?"

"The deceased's name was Lotare Ema," said Captain Teis, the line between his brows deepening, "and – as I'm sure the Fourth Spear already knows – wave monitors did detect her transformation. But this time the transformation was instantaneous, and by the time a monitor reached her – "

Just then, the door to Attari's rooms opened to reveal Rialeh.

"Good morning, Miss Ila," he said with a faint incline of his head. Attari gave a shallow bow back. Good morning, Ladin Ca'unaal, her brain burbled, I dreamed I was fucking you last night. Her Radiance was there, too, isn't that interesting? She felt her face go hot.

"Kanatta Lare awaits," said Rialeh, politely refraining from acknowledging Attari's reddened cheeks. "Shall we?"

Attari didn't trust herself not to trip over her own tongue just now, so she simply nodded. She was so nervous and so excited that her stomach felt like a pot of water coming to a boil; Word in Emptiness was a little thrum of anxiety in the back of her mind. Good thing breakfast came with sunpeel tea, Attari thought. Gods know what kind of state I'd be in if I had any caffeine in me right now.

"Then let us go," Rialeh said, and stepped back from the open door in a clear invitation to follow. "This way, if you please, to the inquest chamber."

---

Been a minute since we've heard from Attari! God I had fun writing that sex nightmare. In my mind, the subtitle for this part of the chapter is "Attari Ila: Cringefail Bisexual." Also: the girls men are fightingggggggg

 

[Opaline Dreams]

THE VIEWING OF KANATTA LARE, PART II​

In which Attari, watching Kanatta Lare's interview, sees far more than she bargained for.

---

"Gah!" said Attari.

"Hi," said Lady Orialu.

"I am so sorry, Ladin Ca'unaal," said an aide, which made Attari jump all over again. She hadn't realized there'd been other people in the room; the shock of Orialu's presence had obliterated theirs. "She – I mean, her ladyship – "

"It's quite alright, Missin Lau," said Rialeh. "Her Ascendant Radiance can be…difficult to deny. I promise you, I understand."

Rialeh stepped into the inquest chamber, Attari trailing just behind him. It was then that she noticed that today Lady Orialu carried her spear. Its bare blade and the rings adoring the crossguard gleamed quietly under the room's low light. Something about the sight of it filled Attari with a sudden, unreasonable fear, and she quickly cast her eyes about the room for anything that might distract her.

There wasn't much.

So this is the kind of room they were watching me from? For all Attari knew, it might have been the very same one. She looked around: dark carpet, table and chairs, one wall made up of screens showing different video feeds, ceiling-mounted luxtruder, a glass cabinet whose contents Attari couldn't make out in the dim lighting. It should have bored her. Instead, it unnerved her.

Plants… whispered Word in Emptiness, voice colored with unease.

Attari took another look around the inquest chamber, but saw none. No art, either. No human touches at all. Now that she'd noticed, it was impossible to put it out of her mind. Something about the fact that Attari's fate was being decided in a room just like this one made her wrap her arms around herself and suppress a shiver.

"Composite view," Rialeh said to the wallscreen that formed one end of the room. Attari stared. She knew, objectively, that the wallscreen had simply gone from showing multiple angles of the interview room to just one, but the display was so perfect that part of her wanted to go up to the screen and touch it, like a child, to make sure that there was actually a screen and that the inquest chamber hadn't simply stopped being one room and become another one.

Nice, said Word, low and awed.

Nice, agreed Attari. Really, really nice. Gods, how much does a display like that cost?

The first person to enter the room on the screen was another legalist – pretty enough, Attari supposed, with his slender figure and dark-violet eyes, but certainly not as beautiful as Rialeh. Then Kanatta Lare walked in, and Attari flinched.

She couldn't help it. The reproduction on the screen was so perfect that for a moment Attari found herself back in Lare's office, hearing that impossible proposal, with the scent of smoked-yam liquor in her nose…

Lady Orialu looked over at the movement, which filled Attari with embarrassment and made Word in Emptiness shrink and cower. Attari stared determinedly straight ahead at the viewing screen, until she felt the strange heat-weight of Orialu's gaze leave her.

Kanatta Lare ranged across the screen, a long, rawboned woman with graying blue-black hair, slate-colored eyes, and star marks that glowed a faded blue. She hadn't had her paired spirit taken away; the lacquered hand mirror that anchored Lare's partner, Cracked Seeing Glass, hung from a silvery chain at her waist, swaying and flashing in time with her strides. Lare's thin, hard mouth was set in a polite smile, as if she'd been summoned to this interview for nothing more than conversation.

Attari was faintly, sickly envious.

"I suppose I can't smoke here?"

Lare's rough-edged voiced sawed its familiar way down Attari's spine; Word in Emptiness shivered in sympathy with her flesh. Without thinking, Attari began to pick at her own cuticles, just as she'd always done back at Cry Verasaahi whenever Kanatta Lare had called her into her office.

"I'm afraid not, Miss Lare," said her legalist as the two sat down opposite one another.

"Pity," said Lare. "I wouldn't have minded sharing a twist with a pretty thing like you." She leaned back and spread her long, thin hands over the arms of her chair. "If we can't share some leaf, there must be something else I can do for you." She raised one sharp brow. "Go on, then, and tell me what it is. I doubt I'll be surprised."

"You are here to provide testimony," Lare's legalist replied. "As Miss Attari Ila's employer, you have been identified as a person of interest in the case concerning her."

"And there it is," said Lare. "Yes, I expected to be pulled for testimony about her. Poor girl. She's an able enough employee, but this business with the Nineteenth Edict…"

"Yes," said her legalist. "I'm sure you've seen the footage of Ila's arrest? She claims she was compelled to violate the edict."

"Compelled," echoed Lare, disdainfully. "Yes, Missin Caih, I saw. The arrest wouldn't have been so bad if Attari had just gone along gracefully – but no, she had to try and find some higher, hidden figure to pin the whole mess on. Like a child looking for a skirt to hide behind."

Every word out of Lare's mouth put Attari more and more firmly back into the offices of Cry Verasaahi, until even Lady Orialu's nearby presence barely registered to her. I'm sorry, she wanted to say to the wallscreen's vision of Lare. Her hands twisted in her lap. I'm sorry, I didn't think, I couldn't, I was so scared –

Attari! Word in Emptiness's voice snapped her back to her senses. Blood!

Attari looked down and finally noticed the pain licking warmly at some of her nailbeds, and the faint, dark smear on her lap. She flushed and snuck glances at the others in the room. Rialeh didn't seem to have noticed, nor Missin Ru, nor Missin Lau –

– but Lady Orialu was staring directly at her, eye and spearblade gleaming.

Gods, I must disgust her. Attari's spine prickled as she tried to keep her shoulders straight, her eyes up and ahead. I probably don't even look like a real woman to her – all shrinking and scared, flinching at every little thing around me – I'd be disgusted to see me, if I was as strong as her. She tried to stop picking, but it was no good. The moment Attari lifted her eyes to the screen, her fingers were back at it, releasing more blood, and Lady Orialu's gaze kept drilling into the side of her head. Please! Her heartbeats started coming too hot, too fast. Her thoughts were unraveling. Please, just stop, stop picking, stop looking –

Finally, desperately, Attari sat on top of her own hands. She felt so stupid, but it was the only thing she could think to do. And perhaps hiding her bloody fingertips away was all Lady Orialu had wanted of her, for after a few more moments, her gaze at last slid away. Attari nearly gasped with relief.

Kanatta Lare's voice rang out from the screen again. The relief vanished. Attari wanted to find Rialeh and excuse herself, but then someone would have to escort her back to her rooms, and what right did she have to pull Rialeh or Ru or Lau away from their work, or Lady Orialu away from her venarch's education, just because of her own weak nerves? She'd wanted to be here.

"She never could own up to a failing, you know," Lare was telling Caih. She waved one long, dark-nailed hand through the air. "Always some excuse or another with her. I tolerated it, of course, for the sake of her mother's memory, but…well, I did always tell her that habit would disgrace her someday."

"That must have been vexing, as her employer," said Caih. He put a finger to his lower lip, as if in thought. "So why keep her at all, Miss Lare? Surely you'd rather have someone more…reliable?"

Lare laughed, a sound that had always reminded Attari of a flock of crows exploding into flight. "Oh, Attari has her good points," she said. Attari didn't want to be happy to hear that, but praise from Lare always made her melt. "Eager to please…very eager…and quite a hard worker, too, once you give her some direction. But really – " Lare sighed briefly, and the laughter left her face. "I took her on for her mother's sake, may she rest quietly."

"Ooh, what a saint you are," said Lady Orialu in a low, venomous voice. Her words pierced the ballooning dread that had been filling Attari – in fact, they left her biting her own lip to stifle a laugh. Shit! she thought. What I wouldn't pay to watch her say that to Lare's face!

"My lady," started Rialeh, "please – "

"I know, Ca'unaal, feelings like that sway a verdict, I should control them," said Orialu. "But can the record state that I really want to turn her face into pulp right now?"

"Can you stop disrupting the viewing of Miss Lare?" There was a faint, icy bite to Rialeh's voice that Attari had never heard before. Then, tiredly: "Missin Ru, Missin Lau, please do not let the record state anything of the sort."

Instead of getting afraid, or angrier, that actually seemed to make Orialu happy. With a grin, and an exhalation that wasn't quite a laugh, she turned back to keep watching the screenfeed. Word in Emptiness pulsed silent confusion through Attari's mind. There was little Attari could do but mentally shrug in agreement. Nobles. Weird.

" – So when Aiura disappeared," Lare was saying, "and the industry shunned her daughter, I did what I could. Cry Verasaahi is no Glittering Record, I won't pretend otherwise, but I saw how badly Attari wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps and couldn't help but offer her a place with me. I'm sure she would have gone anywhere else if they'd have had her, but…" Lare made a spread-fan motion with her hand, as if to say, you see how it all turned out. "She's stayed for, oh, a little more than ten years now. If she really wanted to leave my humble little ragmill, she would have. No one's forcing her to keep working in media, Missin Caih."

The brazen magnitude of Lare's lie nearly made Attari choke on her own tongue. If I wanted to! Her hands tried to clench up under her thighs; her brain ran in idiot circles. Word in Emptiness buzzed like a wasp trapped in her skull. If I wanted to! You think it's that easy? When you – when Mother – if I wanted to!

By the time her anger had receded enough for Attari to rejoin reality, the interview had moved on.

"I would describe my leadership of Cry Verasaahi as fair, though perhaps a bit unforgiving," said Lare. "But in my defense, the media industry itself is unforgiving, even for a paper as small and humble as my own. Especially for a paper as small and humble as my own. Smaller fish are swallowed up much more easily than bigger ones, after all."

"Fair," said Caih. "Yes, I suppose every business owner wishes to see herself that way."

"Why, Missin Caih, are you speaking shadewise about me?" Through the hyperperfect display of the wallscreen, Attari could see Lare stiffen ever so slightly in her chair. Or could she? Maybe she was only seeing what she wanted to see in Lare – a guilty conscience, a touch of discomfort, something, anything. "I didn't know you legalists were permitted to do that."

"Perhaps not," said Caih. "But we are permitted to take testimony from all of your employees before approaching you." He smiled, sweetly. "All of them, Miss Lare, not just Attari Ila."

There was a long, stony silence.

"Is that so?" Lare said. There was no question of whether Attari's eyes were fooling her now; Lare's face was unchanged, but the tendons in the backs of her hands stood out clear and stark. It was a warning sign Attari knew well. But she can't grab you by the face here, she reminded herself. Or slam her hands on the desk, or throw a bottle, or get out her mirror – none of that, not here. Thinking that didn't stop Attari's heart from pounding clear up to her eardrums, but it did at least let her breathe evenly.

"Did you know, Miss Lare? All of your employees from whom we took testimony have something in common," said Caih. "Would you like to guess what it is?"

"Not particularly," said Lare. Her face was hard, unflinching, but her eyes were somewhere far away. "I expect you're about to tell me, anyway."

"All of them," said Caih – his smile now lit up his violet eyes – "were desperate. For one reason or another, they felt there was no place for them to go but Cry Verasaahi. Hard but fair, is that how you described your workplace? I suspect it may be something more akin to a cradle of despair. And Miss Ila – she certainly seemed desperate. I do wonder what could have made her desperate enough to violate the Nineteen Edict so dramatically."

"You don't need to ask me that," Lare spat, with a sudden, terrible coldness that made Attari startle in her seat. "I know you've mined the little slit's brain dry already. Not that there could have been much to dig out."

"There's no need to speak of her like that," Caih said, raising one well-groomed brow. Attari, sickened by Lare's words, felt absurdly grateful. "I simply – "

"You simply dragged me here with a verdict already set in your minds," Lare said, and uttered a jagged laugh. Her eyes looked darker somehow, and terribly distant. "Coming for me last of all – oh, yes, I see how it is. How kind of you, to preserve my dignity by pretending it was only an interview! Truly, no light shines brighter than the grace of our venarch! Excuse me." Her voice fell abruptly back into its normal pitch. Just as abruptly, she rose from her chair. "I must walk. It will help clear my head. No, no, I won't try to leave this room, I'm not as stupid as you people think." She gave another laugh. "Why don't you tell me the suspicions leveled at me while I pace, Missin Caih? I'm sure they'll blossom into a lovely set of charges soon enough."

"Very well." Caih sighed and tucked a loose strand of hair behind his ear, as if Lare's rage were a mere annoyance. "At this time, you are suspected of coercion, of abusive employment practices, and of being the greater conspirator in the case of Attari Ila. More charges may arise; the investigation is scarcely a week old. I will say, regardless of how your case unfolds, the charges relating to workplace abuse are likely to stick."

Lare, still pacing, gave another harsh laugh. "Yes," she said. Her eyes were lightless holes. "Yes, and once you have me, you'll be able to extract further confessions at your leisure. Stop looking at me, I can feel your contempt when you do. What sort of way is that to treat a guest?" Her voice inched nearer to hysteria. "You haven't even offered me any tea!"

"Tea could be arranged, should you cooperate with us," said Caih.

"Cooperate with you!" said Lare. She sounded as if Caih had suggested that she dump her mother's ashes into a wasteway.

"It would make your life easier," said Caih, almost gently. "A quicker case, a lighter sentence…"

"And the life after the sentence, did you consider that?" Lare's hand went to her partner's anchor and began to rhythmically clench and unclench about the mirror's handle. "How do you imagine the person who contracted me will feel, to know that I cooperated? Because I can imagine it, Missin Caih, I can imagine it very – clearly!"

And with that, Kanatta Lare smashed her partner's mirror against the interrogation room wall.

On the hyperreal screen display, Attari watched Caih turn slowly – too slowly. Already Lare held a shard of glass in bleeding fingers. As Caih began a hopeless run towards her, Lare plunged the shard into her own throat and then gave it a sharp, effortful jerk sideways, through skin and meat and gristle. Lare made a gagging, gurgling noise. Blood sheeted down her front as she collapsed to her knees, turning her skin dark-red and her clothes a sodden black.

Attari saw no more. She was as powerless to stop the scream that erupted from her own throat as Lare was to stop the blood from hers. She was just as powerless to stop her body as it flew from her chair to the door of the observation room. The handle wouldn't turn; Attari yanked on it again, desperately, and again. Blood! Word in Emptiness sent panicked flutterings through Attari's mind. Attari! Blood!

Then Rialeh was pushing her gently aside and unlocking the door. Attari flung it open and practically fell through the frame. Her legs didn't seem to want to support her.

As Attari leaned, shaking, against the nearest wall, she heard a metallic jangling and felt a sudden breeze blow past her face. She looked up to see Lady Orialu stalking down the hallway at a rapid clip. Each line of her body looked like a tension cable stretched to its limit. The rings on her spear chimed in time with her strides. Even Attari, in her shock, sensed that if no one were watching her, she'd be running.

When Orialu left, she took some of Attari's terror with her. But there was no time for Attari to parse that; the terror left behind was still more than enough to shut off any serious thought. She tried to close her eyes, thinking it might help somehow. Instead Kanatta Lare's bloodspill filled her mind's eye so completely that Attari half-feared it would pour over into the real world. She pictured red tears trickling from behind closed lids and snapped her eyes back open, then rubbed at them, half-expecting her hands to come away smeared scarlet.

"Are you alright, Miss Ila?"

Attari gave a tiny scream before realizing that it was Rialeh who'd spoken to her.

"I'm not," she said weakly. Her eyes, desperate for a beautiful sight to wash out the blood, latched onto his face. Something about the combination of his dark skin and deep blue star marks was soothing to look at. She noticed that he'd done up his lips with a faint blue gloss today. For a moment, Attari lost herself in the bright little squiggles and dots of light reflected on Rialeh's lips, dancing in time with his words –

Oh. He was still talking to her.

"I – I'm sorry," she told him. "I didn't hear, um – any. Of what you just said."

"Well, you've had quite a shock," said Rialeh. There was a quiet sympathy in his dark eyes. "I was asking you if you'd like to return to your rooms."

"Please," said Attari. "Please." Yes, Word echoed, though only Attari heard it. Yesyesyesyes. Its voice was that of a hurt and frightened child.

"No further casework today, I think," said Rialeh. "Shall we?"

For the first time, he offered Attari his arm. Out of fear and need, she clutched it tighter than was proper. She wanted to do worse; she wanted to press herself into Rialeh's side and drink in his calm, his stability, his living warmth. She didn't dare. He was Ca'unaal, a trueblooded son of the venarchy, and she was no one. So instead Attari held her body apart from his and tried, with looks at her surroundings and at Rialeh, to hold off the visual memory of Kanatta Lare's blood pouring silently from her ruined throat.

She was proud of herself for managing to wait until she was alone in her rooms with the door closed before bursting into tears.

---

I'm baaaack! Vacation was wonderful, but I'm so happy to be back at the writing again. Kanatta Lare is awful, but I sure had fun writing her falling apart here. This was a pretty short chapter! Next POV: Orialu! I'm excited to start another chapter from her POV again, I've missed my main girl.

 

[Opaline Dreams]

THE GLASSWAY FIND, PART I​

As the pressures surrounding her mount ever higher, Orialu gets roped into celebrating cousin Aitsulilla's impending marriage.

---

Who was Lare so afraid of?

How deep does this go?

What does that person want with Neimu?

"Distracted," said Syata Kuur, "again."

"I know," said Orialu. She dropped her spear with a clatter of wood and a jingling of metal rings. "Fuck. What's wrong with me?"

"I was wondering the same thing." Kuur peered closer at Orialu with his keen black eyes. "You haven't been yourself during lessons lately. Are you alright, Lady Orialu?"

"You know you're pretty much the only person who's asked me that, other than my sister?" Orialu couldn't even manage a laugh. "But yeah, I'm fine. Totally fine. Aside from the fact that they're executing Father in five days."

"A lie."

"Of course I'm lying!" Orialu threw her hands ceilingward. "What else am I supposed to do? Cry?"

"I meant," said Kuur, "that you seem distracted with more, now, than only your royal father. I haven't been able to disarm you this quickly since year one of your studies."

Orialu cracked a bitter grin. "That bad, huh?"

"You are usually excellent." From Kuur's mouth, it wasn't flattery, but a simple statement of fact. That normally would have made Orialu all the prouder, but right now she didn't feel very proud of herself at all. "That is why your recent performance concerns me so much. You are out of tune with your spear, with yourself. I worry about the cause of it."

"Body's here," said Orialu. "But I guess my brain isn't." She meant to lean down and grab her spear, but it leaped into her hand before she could. Normally, she could abide Ai Naa's clinginess – it was, after all, a sign of how much he loved her – but just now, with so much else pressing down on her, it was more than she could stand. She might have thrown her beloved's anchor aside in protest, if Kuur hadn't been watching.

"I'm wasting both our time here," Orialu said. "Permission to be dismissed, Syata."

"You're wrong," said Kuur. "No time spent teaching you how to properly handle your anchor is wasted." He gave her another searching look. "Do you actually wish to be dismissed, or are you only embarrassed?"

"You know I can't answer that," said Orialu, which was itself an answer. She willed herself not to look away from her teacher.

"A few bad lessons are not enough to make me lose faith in you," said Kuur.

Orialu snorted. "Yeah, I know that," she said. "It's Mother who's got a problem with me studying the spear, not you."

"Then why do a few bad lessons bother you so much?"

"Because – !"

Whatever Orialu might have said, it died somewhere between mind and mouth. She found herself clutching Ai Naa's anchor tightly. Suddenly, she felt terribly uncertain.

"You are not training to become a duelist," said Kuur. "Or a Spear of Justice." His voice was oddly gentle. Orialu hated it. "We each have a role meant for us. Mine is to teach the handling of weapons, just as yours is to one day sit the Throne Refulgent. The only reason I've even taught you to fight, Lady Orialu, is because you take so well to it. And, if I may be frank, because you need some sort of outlet for your energy." He took a step closer to her. "There's nothing you stand to lose from a bad day of training. I promise. You already handle your spear more than well enough to avoid hurting those around you."

His words should have made Orialu feel better. Instead, they stirred up an awful, hurt anger.

"So that's all I am to you, too," she said.

Kuur's eyes widened slightly. "Orialu," he said, "I only meant – "

"What's there to misunderstand?" said Orialu. "You're right, Syata. I'll never be a duelist. I'll never be a Spear. So why am I still here? If you're just here to teach me how not to accidentally hurt people, then I'd say I was done with my studies at least three years ago. Goodbye, Syata. Kuur."

She spun on her heel and strode towards the door of the lesson room.

"My lady." Kuur's voice reached her just as she reached the door. Orialu didn't want to turn and look, but she couldn't help herself. His normally smooth face had a line at the brow, and his eyes were troubled. "I will – be here tomorrow. In this room."

Somehow, that only made her angrier.

"Didn't you hear me?" Her knuckles stood out pale and sharp from how hard she gripped Ai Naa's spearshaft. "The heir has spoken!" On heir, she slammed the foot of the spear against the ground. Metal rang against metal. "Kiresyata Kohare Kuur is dismissed from House Ilisaf's service! His teachings are no longer needed here!"

Kuur stood terribly still with his hands folded before him. His lips parted, then closed, in silence. I'm sorry, Orialu suddenly wanted to say. I didn't mean it, I don't want you gone. But that was the child in her, and she could not, must not, let it rule her, no matter how loudly it cried.

At the door to the lesson room, Orialu turned and pointed her eye at Kuur without seeing him. Whatever expression he wore right now, she couldn't stand to look. It was a relief to bow and lower her face.

"Thank you," she said, "for your instruction."

Then she rose from her bow and walked away, before the hot, strangling feeling in her throat could give way to tears.



Better to fly than cry, or so Orialu had always told herself. Why waste time on tears when she could take to the sky instead?

But even flying didn't make her feel any better.

Normally, after a flight, Orialu touched down feeling wind-purged, light, clean. Today, she felt as troubled and leaden as she had before taking off, even though she'd flown for over an hour. Her mind was still brimming. If she turned away from what had just happened with Kuur, she ran face-first into her father's execution, now only five nights away. Behind Father's execution loomed Mother's promise that they would secure Orialu's marriage once he was dead. And if Orialu tried not to think of that, her mind only turned to the tangle that was Attari Ila, Kanatta Lare, and her own little sister. Thinking about that was worst of all, for it made Orialu remember the scent of fresh blood from Ila's picking at her cuticles, and the sight of more blood spurting from Lare's throat. Even the mere memory of all that blood was enough to stir Ai Naa's hunger – a hunger that Orialu would never be able to feed in the way her beloved so ardently demanded, for she could never give her life over to the red arts. It was as Kuur had said: she would never be a duelist, never be a Spear. Her life had been reserved for the Throne Refulgent since the day she first drew breath.

The Throne. It all came back to that fucking throne. No matter how high or fast Orialu flew, it would always be waiting for her when she landed.

Maybe I should just fly away and never come back, thought Orialu as she stepped down from Ai Naa's spearshaft to the ground. Sure, another side of her retorted, and leave Neimu all alone at court. Leave her to inherit the throne. But wasn't Neimu better suited to rule anyway? She was smarter, calmer, more patient, had a better memory…yet even so, the idea of passing the throne on to her made Orialu feel low and filthy.

It was still the middle of the day, but all Orialu wanted to do was hole up in her chambers and practice spear drills alone, or maybe lose herself in a holocast. She'd been just about to go there, other lessons be damned, but then her cellband vibrated on her wrist, in the pattern Orialu had assigned to her and Neimu's aide Rahelai. Oh, what the scabbing, slitting fuck now –

She opened Rahelai's message, and immediately wished she hadn't.

Invite: Sacrificial blessing for your royal father's execution. When: Remudai, tenth hour. Report for preparations at hour seven. With: Her Radiance, your royal sister, &ret.

Orialu let out a noise halfway between a groan and a snarl. "Great," she said, "fucking great, fucking wonderful!" She should have expected it, of course, but with everything else on her mind…

Remudai. Four days from now, and the day before Vyarudai, when Father's execution was set. On Remudai night, she'd been planning to fly to a place without people and find a living animal to eat, that she might dull Ai Naa's hunger enough to get through execution night without disaster. Now she'd have to do that on Sutedai night, for there was no way she could manage her beloved's unslaked hunger on the sacrificial fields. And what if I hunt the night before, and the sacrifice wakes him up all over again? She expected it would; when her beloved sensed blood, he simply couldn't help himself. She might have to hunt two days in a row, just to keep him fed-quiet enough to see Father's execution through. The idea filled her with an exhausted resignation, even as it set off a dark thrill in the pit of her stomach.

The things I do for you, Orialu thought. Deep in her mind, Ai Naa answered with a rumble almost like a purr.

"Ho there, cousin!"

Orialu stiffened at the sound of Aitsulilla's voice. She turned, slowly, doing her best to look unbothered. It was funny how much more easily she could grin in front of other people than while alone.

Aitsulilla was drunk – smiling-drunk, not stumbling-drunk, but drunk all the same. Most of the people following her looked to be in a similar state, and all of them were Aitsulilla's friends. There was Rifaia Ilenuon, the Mistress of the Wardrobe's daughter, with Iara, her Rucaal husband; Taihelani Musettar, daughter of the resident diplomat from the Omaticaani courtlands; Surui, a cousin from the Icarian side of Aitsulilla's family; Aimeia Orunen, a court financier's daughter; and one or two other hangers-on to whom Aitsulilla was either feeling generous, or else couldn't be bothered to dismiss.

"Aitsulilla," said Orialu, taking in the small crowd. "I don't usually hear you call for me so…enthusiastically. You feeling alright?"

"We're celebrating," Aitsulilla announced. She pulled up a holofigure on her cellband of a plump, soft-featured young man with wide, dark, sweet-looking eyes and purple star marks. "Look! The Tui province has been a little unruly lately, so I'm taking one of House Yaaharal's sons. Isn't he cute?"

"Hm," said Orialu, and made a show of leaning in to assess the figure. She tilted her head this way and that, stroked her chin, then said: "You're going to eat that poor boy alive, aren't you?"

Aitsulilla laughed, as did most of her companions.

"But," Orialu went on, "I thought you were waiting until after execution night to bag yourself a husband?"

"Oh, officially, yes," said Aitsulilla, who ordinarily would have bristled at such a comment. Luckily for Orialu, her cousin was something of a happy drunk. "But the plans are already set, Lady Ofeira and her husband have given all the right signals – we're just waiting to make it a reality on the marriage market. He's certainly old enough, he's already twenty-three." Aitsulilla pursed her lips a little. "I'd have preferred to secure a pre-engagement with someone a little younger than me, it's true, but Yaaharal's first son is the best move for our house."

"Aw, cheer up, cousin," said Orialu. "We're venarchene, and so's your boy! By the time you're fifty, you'll both still look twenty-five. What's a couple years here or there going to matter by then?"

"She's got a point," said Rifaia. Though she was the bleeding image of her mother, the pale, pinch-faced Lady Reihala, Rifaia smiled a hundred times more easily. She smiled now as she wrapped one arm around her husband's waist. "Besides, Iara's twenty-three, and I can promise you he doesn't look much different than when I first married him." Iara blushed and leaned faintly into his wife, like a good husband. Father had never done that with Mother; Orialu had trouble even picturing it. And now he'll really never do it. Orialu shook her head once, sharply, as if doing so could dislodge the thought. She was sick to the teeth of having her mind orbit about Vene Ilisaf ni Tauhrelil's dying.

"Here, look," said Orialu, before anyone could ask why she'd just twitched like a unicorn shaking off a bloodfly. "We're celebrating, aren't we? Lilla, stop frowning about your decrepit twenty-three-year-old husband. Why are you all letting my cousin walk around with an empty cup while she rejoices over her impending marriage? You, Orunen, give me that bottle, I'll show you all something fun."

Aimeia Orunen was overly skinny, and short for a vessel house daughter; she had the sharp eyes of a snake, but the furtive mannerisms of some sort of rodent. When Orialu spoke to her, the sealed bottle she held nearly slipped through her fingers before she managed to recover it and hand it off.

"Cane liquor, very nice," said Orialu. Or I assume it is, anyway. Not like I can drink it. She ignored that thought as she backed up a safe distance from Aitsulilla's crowd and hefted the upright bottle in the palm of one hand. "Ready? Readyyyy? Hup!"

She tossed the bottle straight up into the air.

It was a perfect trajectory, Orialu could feel that as soon as the bottle left her hand. There was enough height to the throw for her to give her spear a dramatic twirl overhead as her eye tracked its fall; the trick wasn't to aim at the bottle itself, but at the place where it would meet the path of her swing. With a kind of hissing exhalation – "Seh!" – Orialu struck. Again, her body knew she'd done it perfectly before her mind did. Her spearblade sheared cleanly through the neck of the bottle; the head went flying, and the rest of it thumped bottom-first into the open palm of Orialu's free hand.

Aitsulilla and her friends applauded; some laughed. With a bow and a flourish, Orialu topped up Aitsulilla's empty cup, then handed the bottle – "Ha! Watch it, Orunen, it's got sharp edges now!" – back to Aimeia.

"How did you do that?" Taihelani Musettar was a dark-skinned woman with sea-green star marks, masses of coiling black curls, and brown-black eyes deep as wells. She trained those eyes on Orialu now; they fairly glittered with curiosity. "I didn't think you could cut glass with a sword, or anything like one. Was it vaara, does your partner let you do that? And one-handed, too – how much do you train?"

I don't know, I don't think about it, I can just do it. But that would only give Taihelani more questions. "I want something cut, it gets cut," Orialu said instead, and rested her partner's anchor against one shoulder. "The spear's part of me, what can I say? But I do train with it like a madwoman, you're right about that much." She turned her gaze to her cousin before Taihelani could ask anything else. "Lilla! Where are we headed now?"

"We shall go," said Aitsulilla, visibly thinking, "to…the Glassways!" She lit up as she named the made rivers that branched through the grounds of the Ilisaf court, deep and lazy, their waters as clear as that for which they were named. "And we'll take a barge!"

"It feels like rain, though," said Aimeia, fretfully.

"So we take a covered one," said Orialu, rolling her lone eye. Who gives a scab about a dash of rain, you withering lily? "Now silence! My cousin has spoken." She lifted her spear in one hand and pointed the way ahead. "To the docks!"

---

Orialu maybe you should stop and process your emotions instead of partying - oh fuck too late she's already gone

 

[Opaline Dreams]

THE GLASSWAY FIND, PART II​

In which the party celebrating Aitsulilla's engagement comes to a rather abrupt end.

---

Two bargemen poled a broad, shallow-drafted boat with a colored glass canopy along the limpid waters. Like all good servants, they were silent and blind. No matter how loudly the young nobles who had commandeered the barge laughed or shouted – or shrieked, as Aimeia did when she lost her balance and nearly fell into the Glassway – the bargemen's faces never changed. Something about their still faces and the graceful, silent synchronicity with which they dipped their poles into and out of the water entranced Orialu. She found herself wondering how long they'd had to train to work like that.

"Bored?"

Orialu turned from where she'd been sitting on the edge of the barge, feet trailing in the water, to look up and over her shoulder. Taihelani stood beside and just behind her, a slight smile on her full lips. For the first time, Orialu noticed that they were painted a glossy black. The look suited her well.

"No," said Orialu, which was the truth. Yet somehow, she felt embarrassed to admit that she'd been admiring the work of a couple of servants. "Just taking in the view. I've never really used the Glassways, I always just fly around court. Looks different this way."

"Well, join the rest of us, won't you?" Taihelani was rather smaller than Orialu – after all, her genes were those of a vessel house, not bloodroyalty – and far less muscular. It didn't stop her from placing her hands on Orialu's upper arm and tugging upwards. "Come on, we're starting a game. Rifaia brought a set of drinking dice."

"Alright, alright!" Orialu said with a laugh. "I'm coming. Stop trying to uproot me before you hurt yourself."

Aitsulilla and the others were in a circle, lounging on banks of cushions under the canopy that covered the middle section of the barge. Everyone was colored in a faint wash of fuchsia-red-violet. "The heir returns to us!" Aitsulilla said, waving the drink in her hand as if it were a scepter. "Come, cousin, sit! You made us wait, so it's only fair you roll first."

"I'm telling you all right now," said Orialu as she settled down on the cushions, "if I roll anything where I have to drink, I'm not doing it."

"Why?" asked Taihelani, who had taken a seat beside her. Judging by the others' expressions, she looked to be speaking for everyone.

Because the only things I can drink without sicking it back up are blood and water, thought Orialu. "Did we all forget the giant spear?" she said aloud. "The one I carry everywhere and can fling around with my mind? Maybe you all don't have to worry about what happens if you lose fine control of your little trinkets when you're drunk, but I've got to be more careful."

"Alright," said Rifaia with a shrug, as if to say, it's not worth arguing over. "So what will you do if you roll a drinking penalty, then?"

"Whoever drank last can think up a dare for me," Orialu said at once. "If I land on a drink this round, my dear cousin can think of one." She half-rose, leaned across the circle, and let Rifaia drop the dice into her hand. They were fossilized dragonbone, dark and glossy, opalescing soft flashes of red and violet. Orialu shook them between her clasped hands and let them fall in the middle of the circle.

"Ten and twenty-four," she said. "Someone's going to have to tell me what those mean."

Everyone in the circle looked to Rifaia.

"Well," she said, with a bit of a laugh, "ten means take a belly shot off of somebody, or let someone take one off of you. Twenty-four means you've got to let another person put whatever they want into your cup, and then drink without taking it out. I suppose we all know what you're doing."

"Ha!" said Orialu. She whipped off her shirt and tossed it aside, strode into the center of the circle, and dropped back onto her shins and forearms with her belly facing upwards. "Go on, then! Who wants to use the heir to House Ilisaf as a table?"

"Abdominals for eras," said Iara in tones of muted awe, while Aitsulilla pushed Aimeia forward.

"Too true, and isn't it a crime that I can't show them off properly for two more years?" said Orialu, as Aimeia nervously poured a measure of cane liquor into the hollow of her navel. At nineteen, Orialu was still too young for a grown woman's skirt and drapings, and had to cover herself from breasts to waist in public. "Come on, Orunen, take your drink! My navel doesn't bite, only this part of me does." She clacked her teeth together on empty air.

Aimeia twitched slightly at the noise, which drew another laugh from Orialu and the rest of the circle. She drank too hesitantly – What, Orunen, afraid to sully my royal abs with vessel house spit? – with almost no suction at all, so that most of the cane liquor spilled over Orialu's sides. As soon as Aimeia's mouth was off her, Orialu swiped back her discarded shirt and used it to clean off the liquor before it could turn sticky. "Gods," she said as she wiped, theatrically disappointed, "never send a woman to do a man's job."

"And what job is that?" asked Aitsulilla.

"Tonguing a hole," said Orialu, straight-faced. The circle broke out in laughter.

Working around the circle clockways, Iara was next. As he rolled, Taihelani leaned in a little closer to Orialu.

"So why don't I see you around court more often?" she asked.

"Who, me?" said Orialu, with exaggerated innocence. It felt necessary, somehow, to cover up the hot little bloom of feeling that had suddenly unfurled in her chest. The idea that people not only noticed her absence, but actually wanted her around, was strange to her.

"Yes, you, who else?" said Taihelani. Her mouth twisted up playfully as she gave Orialu's arm a light shove. "You're fun to be around, and Aitsulilla's your cousin. I'm surprised we don't see more of you – "

A gale of laughter interrupted her. Iara had been made by the dice to choose someone on the boat to propose a toast to, and had chosen the bargemen: " – without whose skilled hands and stalwart shafts we would never be able to cruise these shining waters…"

"As I was saying," Taihelani continued, while Rifaia rewarded her husband with a kiss before taking her turn with the dice, "I think this is the most I've ever seen of you since my family came to your court. Till now, I've only ever really seen you in passing, or from afar at banquets and so on. It can't be because you're shy, so what is it?"

"She's too busy with her husband to bother with the rest of us," Aitsulilla cut in, turning her cup idly in one hand.

"Shut the fuck up, Lilla," Orialu snapped. "You think spear lessons are the only reason I'm too busy to get drunk on boats and whatever else it is you do? Go ahead, be heir for a day, see how much time you have to – "

"You're on a boat with us right now," said Aitsulilla.

"Yeah, and it's only because Mother has her hands full dealing with Father's execution, and with getting ready for storm season – "

"Oh, I love storm season, don't you?" said Surui, the Icarian cousin. "I can't believe it's only a week away! What are you all most excited for?" He looked around with wide, nervous eyes, hands clasped tightly in his lap.

It was such a wildly transparent attempt at breaking the tension that Orialu had to laugh.

Aitsulilla seized on the out. "I'll be spending it in the Opaline City," she said. "And I'm glad of it, I must say. Festivities in the City are ever so much livelier." Aitsulilla had celebrated storm season in the Opaline City all of once before, when she was thirteen, but after Surui's efforts to keep the peace, Orialu thought she ought to wait at least two minutes before resuming hostilities with her cousin. But she couldn't help rolling her lone eye; luckily, Aitsulilla was too busy putting forth her opinions on storm season to notice. "Of course, House Ilisaf always turns out the best spectacle," she was saying. "I simply can't wait to see the displays we'll be putting on for this year's Week of Luminance."

Privately, Orialu had always preferred the Week of Sanguinity, in which House Tauhrelil led the celebrations. If House Ilisaf saved its most brilliant displays of captive light for its week of storm season, House Tauhrelil did the same for their grandest and most intricate manipulations of the flesh, which fascinated Orialu more deeply than photon cells or lux cloud programming ever had.

"Good time to meet your husband-to-be, eh, Lilla?" Orialu said instead. If she'd been sitting next to her cousin, she would have nudged an elbow into her ribs. "Storm season in the City with your man, that's pretty romantic. Have you two met in the flesh yet?"

"We haven't," Aitsulilla admitted. She looked aside and traced a finger around the rim of her cup. "But I caught sight of him when his family came to court the other year, and we have each other's holofigures, and we've spoken by camcall…"

She raised her head, gripped her cup a little tighter.

"It'll be a good marriage," she said. Her eyes moved from one face in the circle to another. "I'll make it so. I will."

Something about the look on Aitsulilla's face made Orialu want to comfort her. But the only person Orialu really knew how to comfort was Orineimu, and she couldn't very well speak to her soon-to-be-married cousin the way she would a girl of eleven. Even so, the idea of marriage terrified Orialu enough that she couldn't just say nothing to someone who felt even a trace of that same fear – especially not when that someone shared her blood.

"Of course you'll make it a good marriage! You're an Ilisaf, aren't you?" She flashed a grin at her cousin. "I'd drink to it, except I don't. So you'll all have to do it for me! Come on now, everyone, raise your cups, the heir commands it." She got to her feet and stood over them all, spear in hand. "To my cousin Aitsulilla, and her bride-to-be!" she said, and held forth an imaginary cup herself. "May they love each other till the day they die…and may Lilla taking their first son move House Yaaharal to get their fucking province in order!"

Orialu pretended to drink, and the others followed her lead in reality. Then, on impulse, Orialu leaned down and picked up the bottle of cane liquor.

"Get that game going again, why don't you? I'll be back in a sept," she said, strolling towards the rear of the boat. "The bargemen deserve a drink too, don't you think?"

But as she said it, the boat drifted to a stop.

"Hey, now, what's this?" Orialu said. Unease touched the back of her neck, cold and feather-light. "I was just praising you two, don't make…me…"

Then she reached the stern, and could say no more.

The corpse floated languid on the Glassway water, its hair and skirts billowing darkly, its skin death-paled and taut with bloat. Orialu, struck with a shock so deep it felt almost like serenity, could only stare. I should figure out who this is, she thought distantly. But she had no eye for such details as might have identified the corpse to her. For some reason, all she could focus on were useless things, like the lightless, jellied look of its eyes, or the way its gold jewelry glittered under the water. She watched a tiny, silvery fish swim out of the corpse's mouth. We passed over it, she realized. We rode this boat right over a fucking corpse, and we were all too busy playing to notice. Her stomach twisted. For once, Orialu found herself glad that her beloved so often kept it empty.

Behind her she heard footsteps, and the swishing of fabric on fabric. Orialu turned to look. Taihelani was making her hesitant way towards her, with Aitsulilla close after. Behind them, Orialu saw the other five peering their way with varying mixtures of fear and curiosity.

Orialu looked back at the corpse. Only now did she realize that it was one of House Ilisaf's elder aunts. That's my blood in the water. She swallowed another mouthful of nauseated spit. Orialu looked closer, trying to see the features behind the death-bloat and the sightless eyes, and at last recognized Elder Aunt Caisaari. My own blood. Caisaari was her great-grandmother's niece, and a member of the Gold Chamber Council. She'd loved Neimu more than Orialu, like all the elder aunts did, but she'd always been courteous to Orialu. Once she'd even gifted her a set of earrings wrought in the shape of the blade and ringed crossguard of Ai Naa's anchor. Remembering that made Orialu's vision start to blur.

She tore her gaze from Caisaari's corpse, blinked hard, and turned to face Aitsulilla and Taihelani.

Aitsulilla stared at the corpse with a pale, drawn face. Her mouth silently shaped one word, then another, then went still. The inquisitive spark in Taihelani's eyes was gone; her gaze held nothing but horror. Someone had to act, but, looking at their faces, Orialu suspected it wasn't going to be either of them. And the other five hadn't even been strong enough to come look. She gripped the shaft of her spear tightly and took in a deep breath.

"Lilla," she said. Her cousin twitched, then looked from Caisaari's corpse to her. "Give me your band. We need to contact my mother."

---

Orialu girl I am so sorry. At least you got to have a bit of fun before I did this to you 😔

 

[Opaline Dreams]

RED ART WITNESSED, PART I

​

In which Mu leaves her house for the first time since the incident at Vaa Surame and, on her way home, notices the beginning of a duel.

---

When the two of them had first met, Mu had formed a number of expectations about Tsema. His fascination with murder hadn't been one of them.

It wasn't just executions that Tsema loved; if that had been all, Mu hardly would have noticed. Everyone loved to watch the Spears – except Mu, it seemed, but she reasoned that she'd probably had a favorite Spear, too, before she'd died. Likewise, she would hardly have found it noteworthy if Tsema's interest branched out into the duelists' circuits and the deaths they occasionally produced.

But Tsema wasn't only interested in those sacrifices the Spears conducted to preserve the world, or in the blood shed or lives given by those who strove to embody beauty through the art of combat. He followed the red arts as avidly as any Opaline City resident, but he also followed news of bodies found in rivers and alleyways; of people who disappeared and never returned; of violence in the city lows; of nobles who had failed to navigate court intricacies skillfully enough, and paid with their lives. Mu wasn't sure if she found his interest discomforting, or just tasteless. All she knew was that encountering it felt about as good to her as biting down on metal.

But he was so damned nice to her, and it wasn't as if Mu had anyone else she could call a friend.

That was why Mu had accepted Tsema's offer to meet up for afternoon tea – that, and the fact that she hadn't left her house once since the incident at Vaa Surame. Food hadn't been an issue; not because Mu had signed up for allotment, but because whoever had secured Mu's private hospital room and this house in the Opaline City had also left her a bank account containing more than enough funds to carry her through a jobless year. Way more than enough. Why? Do I have some patron too rich to know what a normal year of living costs? Is someone trying to pay me into silence? Or maybe buy off their own guilty conscience? Questions like those always flooded Mu's mind if she thought about the money for too long. Questions like those had driven her to try, over the past week, to find out where it came from.

The bank that held the money had told her that the account had been opened by someone named Surilia Lo, which turned out to be nearly useless information. Surilia had been a minor Seketai god of luck and was still a popular namesake in the present, while Lo was one of the most common family names on Tei Ura. Any of the many, many Surilia Los of the world could have been the one to open the account, and that was assuming whoever had done it had even given their real name in the first place, which Mu was already beginning to strongly doubt. Yet it was the only clue she had.

She should have been eager to follow up on it, she knew. But even the thought of sifting through so many Surilia Los was exhausting to her. More than that, she was afraid. Wealth was power, and whoever had set her up with her neat little house and well-furnished bank account clearly had plenty to spare. What might such a person do if she dug too deeply? In the privacy of her bedroom, that thought had made her drag nervous fingernails over the pane of glass covering the body-end of her severed neck. She might have done worse, had the message from Tsema inviting her to tea not startled her out of it.



"What are you having to drink?"

Mu blinked and refocused. Her thoughts had been drifting towards her bank account and Surilia Lo again, even though she wished they wouldn't.

"I don't know yet," she said. In fact, she hadn't even looked at the menu. As soon as they'd seated themselves at the teahouse – Tsema with his back to the other patrons, Mu with hers to the wall, and at an angle where she could see the door – Tsema had begun a conversation, Mu had fallen in, and then the past week's thoughts had crept in like mist. "You've been here before, haven't you?" she said now, resisting the urge to shake her head clear. "What's good here?"

At his recommendation, she ordered an iced glass of the teahouse's own floral-green blend, which Tsema said was perfect for afternoon tea – "Enough caffeine to see you through the rest of the day, but not so much it'll ruin your sleep!" Yes, thank you, grandda, Mu thought, but she smiled at his suggestion all the same; she had the feeling he'd mentioned the bit about caffeine specifically because of the dark circles under her eyes.

The tea came quickly, along with some snacks that Tsema insisted on buying for them: a dish of cold glass noodles steeped in lime juice and lunar plum blossom water, and another of crispy fingerling shrimp rolled in spicy-sweet powder. Mu tried not to eat more than her fair share, but it was hard to hold back. There was something addictive about alternating between the cool, slippery sweet dish and the crunchy, fishy-savory spicy one. Also, she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast.

" – But did you hear the announcement, the other day?" Tsema said. The conversation had flowed into executions, which Mu supposed was to be expected, considering who was slated to be killed. "They finally announced which Spear will serve Her Radiance's royal husband his end!"

"Who is it?" Mu asked, taking another sip of tea. Then, as Tsema opened his mouth with a look of dismay: "You are not upset I don't know." She felt her face dimple up in a smile. "You love dishing up gossip, come on. I may have only known you a week, but I know that much."

"Mu, this isn't just gossip, it's major news! It's everywhere!" Tsema replied. "Don't you keep up at all?"

"Well, I know Her Radiance's husband is dying, that's the important thing," said Mu. "Why does it matter so much who holds the knife?"

Tsema raised his eyes ceilingward, as if to appeal to the ghosts of the gods that some people insisted still wandered between the stars, and then rested his face in his hands. "Hopeless," he said.

Mu laughed. "Will it make you feel better if I ask you who it is?"

Tsema looked up at once. "It's the Widower!" he said brightly.

Mu did, at least, know one Spear from another. Ailuna Surilac, the Widower, First Spear of the Heavenfacing Court: a languid, black-haired beauty with dark red lips and eyes, paired to an awakened spirit whose name, Veinsever, left little to the imagination. Though he looked delicate, he was a strong enough fighter and skilled enough in the art of celebrity to have remained First Spear for over ten years running (although Tsema was of the opinion that the Second Spear, Asaau IV Seket, was gaining on him and would soon challenge the First for his seat). It didn't surprise Mu in the slightest that the Heavenfacing Court was sending the foremost Spear among its seven to dispatch a bloodroyal.

"Oh, I love to watch him work," said Tsema, a bit dreamily. "But I could never afford tickets to a royal execution, so I suppose I'll have to watch him from home this time. Well, suppose nothing, Ruta and I have been planning a watch party for the past month. Or I've been planning it, anyway, and dragging my poor husband along with me. You should join us!"

"Hmm," said Mu. To buy some time, she took another bite of the glass noodles.

It was his invitation from last week all over again. She wanted to go, but feared to; the only reason she didn't say "I can't" immediately was because her mouth was still full of noodles. He's trying to be your friend, piped up that same cold little voice that had visited her back then. How many times do you think you can say no before he gives up?

The voice had a point. And she had to get used to leaving her house sometime.

Mu swallowed, and tried her level best to ignore the hitch.

"How many people will be there?"

"Eight, if you come," said Tsema. "Assuming everyone else who said yes shows up. It might be fewer!"

Eight, thought Mu. Eight's not so bad. Promising Tsema she'd be there felt like a lie, but she didn't want to say no, either.

"I'd like to be there," she said, looking into the dish of noodles. "I really would. But sometimes I get…" She wasn't sure how, exactly, she got. Tired? Certainly, but that didn't feel like a good enough reason not to show up. "You remember," she tried again, "I was in the hospital until not long ago…"

"I'm sensing," said Tsema, "that I should put you down as a maybe?"

"Thank you," Mu said. Embarrassingly, she hadn't even considered that as an option. "Yes. Maybe." She risked eye contact with Tsema. "I do want to." Perhaps Mu didn't care all that much for executions, but she wanted to live as the purple letter in her house had implored her to. Going to a party at the house of someone she considered a friend seemed like a decent first step towards that. She had three days to prepare herself. Surely she could manage. If she told herself that often enough, perhaps she might actually believe it by the night of the party.

"Let's say I do make it," Mu went on. Tsema looked at her, brightly attentive. 'Scorpses, he really has adopted me. For a moment, she was seized by an irrational desire to get up and leave the teahouse without another word. She should be looking for whatever family she'd had before she died, not tucking herself under the wing of someone who didn't share even a drop of blood with her. Mu forced the feeling under. "I – look," she said, "it's been a while since I was well enough to visit anyone." It wasn't even a lie, not really. "Should I…bring anything?"

"You could bring a snack, if you really wanted to," said Tsema. "Or alcohol. But I'd be happy if you only brought yourself, too."



There was a sweet shop on her path from the teahouse back to the rail station. Mu paused, and not only because she was becoming more than a little tired. Again. And from only a couple short walks. Again. She was becoming ever surer that she indeed needed, if not a wheelchair, then some kind of aid or another. But she couldn't do anything about that here and now, and she certainly didn't want to face, here in the middle of the street, the deep upset that threatened even if she thought about it for only a second or two.

Mu stopped herself, took a breath, and refocused on the goods displayed in the sweet shop window. Tried not to wonder if she'd had a sweet tooth before she'd died, too. Gods, stop it, can't you focus on one nice thing for seven seconds? And there were nice things to focus on, plenty of them. Rice wafers dyed a dozen different pastel shades and pressed with delicate patterns, sandwiching fillings from fruit jams to nut butters to pastes of sweet bean or sugar yam. Airy, hollowed-out buns filled with sugared flower petals. Slices of golden, glistening honeycomb cake, some plain and sweet, some sprinkled with flaky salt, others with a light dusting of red pepper.

But this close to execution day, more than half the display window was given over to the arittui – little scarlet-dyed rice cakes coated in a glossy layer of jelly, with a filling made of sweetened egg yolk flavored with oranges. Sitting in the display window, shining under the lights, they looked like oversized drops of blood. But that was, Mu knew, the point, and part of what made it lucky to eat them on an execution day. The red skin and gold filling only made them luckier.

Mu looked at the arittui a moment longer. She remembered the sweetness of Tsema's laatu from last week, and how he'd gone for the sweet noodles more than the spicy shrimp today. She imagined him smiling at what she'd brought. And if I actually buy something for this party, I'm more likely to go. Probably. With her bank account, furnished so handsomely by the Surilia Lo who probably didn't exist, a dozen arittui would be nothing.

A string of bells chimed brightly as Mu opened the sweet shop door.



As she rode the rail back to her house, wallet a couple dozen ru lighter and cellband bearing a pickup receipt for a dozen-and-half box of arittui, Mu looked forward to quickly rinsing the sweat from her body and then taking a nap. She wasn't as bone-achingly exhausted as she'd been last week, which gave her some small, vague relief, but she wasn't sure she could make it through the rest of the day uninterrupted, either. The idea of a nap stayed at the forefront of her mind during her walk from the last rail station on her route, only to fade away as she drew closer to the duelists' square near her house.

When she'd passed by the square last week, people had been crowded about it so thickly Mu hadn't even been able to see the scarlet circle worked into the tiles. But she'd passed it during the peak of the dayworkers' rush, one of the times when the streets were at their fullest. Now, though, the streets were more thinly peopled, and the crowd about the duelists' square sparser. Mu picked her way through – excuse me, sorry, can I get a little closer, I'm really short… For a moment, she couldn't help picturing herself removing her head from its collar and tossing it over the heads of the crowd to get a good look. But soon enough she reached the forefront of the crowd, just a few feet away from the scarlet ring, and then found herself too busy watching to imagine anything at all.

She realized she'd been hoping, faintly, that watching an instance of Tei Ura's most ancient art would waken some kind of memory in her. That past might call to past, that something about the red art would reach her lost self where nothing else so far had. Already she was casting that hope aside; felt foolish for even having it. Watching recorded executions back at the house didn't do anything, why would a street duel be any different?

Her options, as she saw it, were to keep dwelling on her lost past, turn around and go home, or stop thinking and just watch the duel. Since she'd already gone to the trouble of worming her way to the front of the crowd, Mu decided to stay and watch, at least for a little while.

---

Been a minute since we heard from Mu! I love writing the Ilisaf court POVs, but it's definitely refreshing to shift to someone outside of there. The Ilisaf court and the Opaline City are several thousand miles away from each other! I really should put out a world map one of these days, even if it's only a vague one.

 

[Opaline Dreams]

RED ART WITNESSED, PART II​

In which Mu witnesses a duel between serpent and cloud.

---

The dueling square was paved with dark-blue and -green cobblestones, its edges planted with beds of scarlet flowers. At the center of the square was a ring of scarlet stone enclosing a field of paler, smoother tiles. Within the circle, two men faced each other. Both were bare-chested, the better to show off their movements, and wore short, clinging pants under their skirts to preserve their modesty. One was so pale his green star marks were almost invisible against his skin, but still pretty for all that. He held a snakewood walking stick in one hand and bore intricate, coiling tattoos of serpents along both his arms. The other was darker and more beautiful, with more strongly visible violet marks that matched his softly luminous violet lipstick. He was empty-handed, but wore silver anklets adorned with little bells that chimed at every step.

"Musua Ai challenges Loah Nu to a duel before the eyes of the public!" declared the paler man. Mu decided she might as well root for him, if only because he shared her syllable. "I now call an eye of the law to witness the terms and outcome of our fight. Will a monitor please descend!"

"Recognized," sounded a coolly computerized male voice from overhead. "Descending." Mu looked up and saw a Tehariel wave monitor break from its path through the air above and come snaking down to the duelists' circle. Light gleamed off its narrow, sinuous body, which Mu knew was mechanical, but which resembled skeleton parts so strongly that she could think of it in no other terms. It looked to be all spine and ribs, save for a delicate, snakelike skull at the front and a needle-fine point at the tail end. A socket at the front of the skull held a luminous, unblinking main eye, while paired sockets along the sides held two more sets of auxiliaries. Normally, those eyes would have glowed idle blue; now, as the monitor trained its gaze on the two duelists in the circle, its main eye glowed a bright, attendant green.

"Missin Ai," said the monitor. "The challenger speaks first. State the reason for this duel."

Mu could feel the crowd's attention sharpen, and knew she was part of it. They all leaned in like windbent stalks of grass. Musua threw back his shoulders and looked around at the crowd, as if there could be any doubt that everyone were listening.

"Loah Nu has insulted my honor in the wake of our last duel," he said in calm but carrying tones. "The matter was settled in the eyes of the public, until he began insisting to others that I only won because of luck. Now it's as if we never fought at all. This duel will prove him a liar."

Mu tried to divine how she ought to feel about this from the crowd around her, and couldn't. Some people murmured; some scoffed; some sucked hissing breaths inwards. Somewhere, a drunk woman called out to Musua that she had someplace he could plant his snakewood staff. It all amounted to a useless cloud of noise.

"Missin Nu." The monitor coiled lazily about itself until its socket faced Loah. "Your counterstatement, if you have one."

"My counterstatement?" said Loah. A small, lazy smile played at the very corners of his mouth, as if it wanted to bloom into something wider. "I didn't have to insist anything, Musua. People asked me what I thought of our last fight. I simply told them the truth."

"I should kill you for that," said Musua, coolly.

"You won't," said Loah, with a faint but unmistakably arrogant tilt to his head. "Only a Spear kills in the ring, and our current seven are all hale, healthy, and a long way from retirement. Besides…" His smile widened a little, slow and lovely. "Anyone who's lost to me five times already isn't what I'd call Spear material."

Musua tensed as if slapped. Mu watched the tattooed serpents on his arms jump, and listened to the crowd make the low, universal oooohhhh sound of people who'd just witnessed an especially stinging insult.

"Enough." This time, Mu thought she could detect a trace of annoyance behind the monitor's digitized voice. "Missin Ai. Declare your conditions, definition of victory, and what you would have of Missin Nu should you win. Remember before speaking that honor binds you to set reasonable terms, and that the reward you demand must be commensurate to the peril undertaken by you both in this ring."

"Opaline Standard combat rules will do for this engagement, I think," said Musua. "But if Missin Nu consents, I would like us to duel aided by our other halves." He punctuated this with a sharp tap of his snakewood walking stick against the smooth, pale tiles enclosed within the scarlet circle. "Our first fight was to impression. The next two were to first pain. The three after that were to first blood. Today, I wish to fight to completion. Victory determined by knockout, exhaustion, grievous injury…or surrender." Musua locked eyes with Loah across the ring. "When I win, Missin Nu will never disparage my skill in the red art ever again for so long as he lives."

"Your terms are acceptable in the eyes of the law." The monitor twisted over itself to face Loah. "Missin Nu. Are they acceptable to you?"

"Certainly," said Loah. "And when I win, dear Musua, you will never again seek to soothe your wounded ego by dueling me." With one hand, he tossed his long braids back behind his shoulder. For the first time, Mu noticed that his palms were coated in a silvery dust. Sorry, Musua, thought Mu, I think this one's actually my favorite. She liked his style better, and there was something about Loah's arrogance that she couldn't help finding fun to watch. "Shall we demonstrate, then?"

"My other half is Viperous Bough," said Musua. His attempt at dignity came off more like stiffness. "Here is his anchor!" He lifted the snakewood walking stick before him by its handle, holding it like a sword. Mu watched his almost-invisible green star marks flare into bright apparency as he began to draw on his paired spirit's power. Then she watched as Viperous Bough's anchor went from the twisted stillness of inert snakewood to the fluid, darting motion of a living serpent. It wound its way up Musua's arm, around his neck, and then down his other arm and into his other hand. A whip that responds to his mind, thought Mu, or maybe a living rope. She could already imagine how he'd use it against Loah.

"My other half," said Loah, all easy confidence, "is Silver Cloud Step. Here is her anchor." He took a single, dancelike step, and the bells adorning his silver anklets chimed sweetly. Then, with all eyes on him, he stepped again, and this time clapped his hands, releasing a puff of silver dust into the air along with the chiming of the bells. It was all he left behind. He disappeared into thin air, only to blink back into existence an instant later at a different point within the bounds of the scarlet circle.

In spite of herself, Mu felt a burgeoning excitement. She was a little startled to realize how much she wanted to see this duel.

"Paired spirits and abilities confirmed to match Spirit Registry entries," said the wave monitor. The words Spirit Registry struck Mu so hard and suddenly that she nearly missed the monitor's next words. All at once she was filled a hope so wild and desperate it felt almost like terror. Could I have a file there? Could I truly? Could they tell me…?

"Combatants, take your stances," the monitor was saying. "Spectators, maintain a safe distance." The crowd shuffled a few reluctant steps back.

"This duel has been sanctioned in the eyes of the law. Public channeling by Missins Ai and Nu is permitted for the duration of the fight, within the bounds of this ring." The monitor snaked its way to the outer edges of the ring, then fixed Loah and Musua in its glowing green eye. Silent anticipation saturated the air.

"Begin."

At first, it seemed that Loah would win easily; Musua struck out with Viperous Bough's anchor so viciously that Mu knew he was aiming to win by grievous injury, but each time Loah simply clapped his hands and, with a step and a chiming of his belled anklets, blinked out of the path of the strike, reappearing always several feet away, unscathed. Every dodge only made Musua attack more fiercely. The dance of strike-and-blink continued until both fighters' skins began to shimmer with sweat.

"You'll tire yourself out fighting like that, Musua," said Loah as the fight continued. "Are you trying to lose by exhaustion?" He clapped his hands and blinked out of the way of another strike. "You'll never – "

He didn't finish his sentence. Again Musua struck out with Viperous Bough's anchor as if with a sword, but this time, the strike was such that even Mu could tell Loah wouldn't need to blink away to avoid it. But when Loah dodged, almost lazily, Musua's eyes lit up in triumph. The snakewood walking stick came to life and, almost too fast to see, whipped across the air between him and Loah and caught one of Loah's wrists. From there, it wound itself quick as the viper for which its spirit was named about Loah's forearms, locking his arms and palms tightly together.

"Did you forget my demonstration so quickly?" said Musua as he closed in on Loah, a thin, hard smile emerging on his face. "Tell me again who's the one worse suited to be a Spear!"

Instead of responding, Loah blinked away. Viperous Bough's anchor clattered empty to the ground, still twisted in the shape it had taken around Loah's arms. Musua froze, shocked. "Behind you!" shouted a few of the crowd as Loah rematerialized exactly there, but it did no good. Instead of evading the blow, Musua only turned fast enough to catch it across his jaw rather than at the back of his neck. He collapsed to the ground at once. Seconds later – before the crowd had even finished cheering for Loah – he staggered back to his feet, leaving a dark smear of blood on the pale tiles, but the Tehariel wave monitor was already circling the ring and announcing Loah's victory by knockout.

"You cheated," spat Musua, voice faintly slurred. Though he tried to stand straight, Mu could see him swaying in place.

"No, Musua," said Loah. He'd been smiling, but Musua's words killed it. "I only engaged in a bit of theater, and you fell for it. If you chose to believe that I can't cloud-step without clapping my hands, how is that my fault? Besides – " He lifted his hands before him, and Mu noticed for the first time a set of dark, shiny marks, almost like burns, that matched the places on his skin where Viperous Bough's anchor had ensnared him. When she looked again at the snakewood walking stick, she saw its surface had a strange, oily sheen that hadn't been there at the start of the fight. "I'm not the only one who kept certain aspects of my partner's power veiled."

Musua looked Loah up and down with dark, venomous eyes. Then, without another word, or even so much as a bow, he turned on his heel. At once he staggered again and nearly fell, to a wave of low titters from the crowd. He looked around as if wishing he could kill everyone who'd laughed, then walked off, slowly and a little drunkenly, trailing a foul mood after him like vapor. A few members of the crowd followed him, but hesitantly, at a distance. They weren't the only ones leaving; people were now breaking off from the crowd in small clumps, chattering between themselves about the fight they'd just witnessed, or alone, reviewing the footage or pictures they'd taken on their cellbands and uploading it to the world.

"Missin Nu," called out a nearby voice. Mu looked over and saw a sturdy-looking, short-haired woman in dark red robes, with a jade lip ring and glowing linework tattoos. "Ai wanted a rematch because you said he won by luck. Didn't you win by luck just now, being able to escape his partner's trap? How do you feel about it?"

"You've watched my duels before, I see," said Loah. In spite of the burnlike wounds on his forearms – now beginning to leak small drops of some clear fluid – he managed a smile for her. "Perhaps even the one where I lost to Musua? He won because a spectator violated the custom against flash photos at duels, and their camera blinded me at a crucial moment. I won today because I was willing to gamble on whether Cloud's power would let me escape my opponent's. Are all forms of luck equal?"

Then Loah's body tensed suddenly, and he bowed his head forwards. When he raised it again, Mu saw – or perhaps only finally noticed – that his eyes shone with unshed tears.

"Excuse me," he said, trying again to smile, but with less success than before. "These wounds really are extremely painful. I hate to abandon my audience, truly, but I must make sure dear Musua's venom isn't doing anything worse to me than what you see here."

With that, Loah left, and the rest of the crowd dispersed.

With the spectacle over, Mu realized that she was, once again, much more tired than she'd ever planned on letting herself become. Shouldn't have stopped to watch, she told herself. Should have gone straight back to the house. But she'd wanted so badly to see. In that moment, at least, she'd been no better than Tsema, with his morbid fascinations.

A woman can lose herself in the Opaline City.

Immediately, Mu gave herself a hard pinch on the inside of one forearm. This was not the place to let the purple letter cloud her mind. Her house was a five-minute walk away. If you're going to have some kind of breakdown, do it there.

To distract herself – and because she didn't want to be seen pinching herself every few paces as she walked – Mu ran the fight she'd just watched through her memory, trying to replay it as accurately as she could. It played out faster in memory than it had in reality, and Mu soon found her mind wandering further back, to before the start of the fight. Then she stopped walking entirely as two words remembered from the Tehariel wave monitor lit up her mind: Spirit Registry. She recalled the burst of hope that had consumed her when she'd first heard them and was, momentarily, horrified. How, when she'd felt that strongly, could the Spirit Registry have slipped her mind for even a second? Had the duel truly distracted her that much?

Alright. So just don't let it happen again. She'd told Tsema she intended to come to his execution watch party, and she meant to keep her word if she could, but after that, Mu decided, no more. No more letting herself get distracted by boys in arenas, no matter whether it were the grand arena of the Heavenfacing Court or the little street arena just a few blocks from her house. No more indulging the side of her that had been so keenly interested to see if Musua or Loah would be wounded first. Where, Mu wondered, with a cold blue flicker of fear, had that side even come from? Was it new? Or was it the old her, the dead her, the real her, echoing up from whatever long black tunnel she was trapped inside?

For the first time, Mu wondered if it might be better to let her past stay buried.

---

Hellll yeah new chapter

Mu darling...please be kinder to yourself...I'm your writer so I already know this won't happen but it'd be nice if you would

 

[Opaline Dreams]

RED HUNGER SATED​

In preparation for tomorrow's sacrifice, Orialu and Ai Naa go out to feed.

---

Orialu crept naked through the wet jungle night, Ai Naa's spear in hand.

Warm air played over her skin like the breath of a beast, of a hungry lover. Sweat and mist pearled wetness all over her body. The air that filled her lungs was rich with rainsmell and damp earth, with night-blooming flowers and rotting leaves. Every leaf and frond that brushed against her skin felt like a kiss, and the roughness of the jungle floor against her bare feet was welcome to her. Finally, finally, all her troubles had slipped from her mind. There was only Orialu, her beloved, and the flesh they'd soon share.

Spit filled her mouth at the thought. Orialu let it flow. Here, there was no one to see if she happened to look at little more animal than woman.

She knew she shouldn't relish these nights, and yet she couldn't help it. The flesh was too sweet, the privilege too hard-won. It had taken years of fighting back against her mother before Orisai had given up and allowed her these nights to herself, beyond the Ilisaf compound's walls, unmonitored by the eyes of the court. First the guards at the gates had been instructed not to let her past. Orialu had blown past them on her spear; it turned out that not even the bravest guards were willing to risk flying impalement just to keep her inside. Then Orisai had ordered the gates closed at night. Orialu had blown through them on her spear, charging herself with so much force and heat that she left the gates half-splintered, half-melted behind her. Finally, when Orialu was seventeen, Orisai had tried keeping Ai Naa's anchor away from her at night. She'd tried it only once. The second her mother had been gone, Orialu had called the anchor to her so fiercely that the chains holding it down had burst apart. Then she'd taken flight and, with Ai Naa's power, rammed herself through the energy wall that rose invisibly over the compound's stone ones, which prevented unauthorized flyers or drones from entering the Ilisaf court's airspace. She'd thought it would just blow a hole in the energy wall; instead Ai Naa's energy had so overloaded it that she'd brought the whole thing down. That still hadn't been the end of it; it had taken another argument between them, one of the few Orialu had ever won against her mother, before Orisai had given up trying to stop her.

Throughout it all, Orialu had managed to avoid ever telling her mother why she sometimes left at night. How could she? You see, Mother, the reason I go out alone at night every few weeks is so that I can kill and eat a live animal to keep the spirit of red hunger quiet enough that he doesn't break through my control and use my body to kill everyone around me. Orialu couldn't say which possibility scared her worse: that Orisai wouldn't believe her and would think her insane, or that she would believe her, and in the danger of her existence, and so try to have her killed. Or worse. Orialu didn't know what worse might entail, but she fully believed her mother was capable of thinking it up.

As she prowled between the massive columns of tree trunks and through curtains of vines, Orialu reflected – as she often did during these nights with her beloved – that she hadn't always needed to eat this way. Ai Naa had belonged to her since she was seven years old, but apart from the violence of their joining, when Orialu's left eye had exploded from its socket in a gout of blood and spirit-flame, the first seven years of their shared existence had been almost quiet. Ai Naa had been little more than a vast, restless energy that filled her whenever she remained still or quiet for too long, save for when Orialu became too angry; then the energy turned into an awful, surging feeling, and the spear would nudge its way into a hand still too small to hold it –

For a few years at the Ilisaf court, after one ugly incident, her mother the venarch had issued an absolute decree: if my daughter flees from you, let her run.

But those times had been few and far between. It was when Orialu had turned fourteen and stacked her second pyre that Ai Naa had become part of her life in earnest. That was when her beloved's hunger had begun to shape her own. It was inevitable, intertwined as he was with her every cell, but Orialu had fought it bitterly all the same.

At first, that hunger had only made itself known with faint flutterings of nausea after Orialu's meals. She'd ignored the nausea and kept eating as she pleased, convinced that it would go away on its own. She'd been able to keep telling herself that – even as the nausea worsened by the week – until the first time her body had fully rejected what she'd fed it. Then she'd told herself it was only a fluke, or maybe bad food that the kitchens had somehow overlooked. It was a lie as comforting as it was short-lived.

Now Orialu ate the food of humans perhaps once or twice a year, and never with the expectation that her body wouldn't later reject it. For the past three and some years, her true fuel had been Ai Naa's energy, powering her like a reactor. My beloved shapes my hunger, but he feeds me in turn.

The flesh of animals that themselves fed on flesh and blood kept Ai Naa fed for longer, and so the animal she stalked tonight was a ghost eater that she'd crept up on as it crouched over its own fresh kill – a hulking, magnificent specimen that was maybe five spans high at the shoulders, ten from nose to tail. It had screamed as she'd wounded it, cerulean fangs glowing against the night, then fled, its blue-and-black banded tail snaking away between the trees. Orialu had given it a five-minute head start; flesh she'd had to chase down, flesh soaked in fear of her, lasted her and Ai Naa far longer than flesh taken unawares. With her beloved's hunger lighting up her senses, the ghost eater's path was almost too easy to follow; the droplets and spatters of blood trailing after it glowed under her vision, scarlet blossoms in the dark. She could have followed that trail even if Ai Naa took her other eye. The smell of blood was a red current on the air.

It's close, she thought, as she tracked the ghost eater further through the jungle. The scent of blood grew ever stronger. Beloved, it's oh so close, and you've been so good for me, waiting all those weeks…

In response, Ai Naa surged through her body in a sensation that left her feeling both giddily light and amazingly clear-headed. All obstacles between her and her quarry were mere nothings, to be passed through like air. Her world was the spear in her hand and the red thread connecting her to her prey, the hot spit in her mouth and the hunger-fire in her belly driving her forward, inexorably forward.

The bloodtrail led her at last to the base of a broad and towering tree whose black, moss-furred bark glistened with humidity. Its roots were a profusion of twists and arches that spanned high over Orialu's head, and among those twists and arches, she spied a dark mouth in the earth that swallowed the glowing red trail and beckoned her inside after it. Orialu slipped through the opening and found herself in a hollow, ceilinged in wood and floored in damp soil, so broad and deep that it could have fit the whole Ilisaf throne room within itself. The air was rich with the mingled scents of earth and blood. She no longer needed to look for the splashes of red light; the ghost eater was crouched at the other side of the hollow, dark and distant. Even from where she stood, she could see that its breath and heartbeat were the same: rapid and shallow, trembling on the point of exhaustion. She shouldn't have been able to see it at all, in this dark and at this range, but when she hunted – whenever blood was close at hand – all her senses became inhumanly sharp, enhanced by Ai Naa's vaara flowing through her. My lover is the greatest predator of them all.

When the ghost eater saw her, it screamed anew. Yet it didn't run; instead it stared at her, unblinking, its four eyes flaring green fire in the dark. Perhaps it was paralyzed with fear. Perhaps she'd simply exhausted it.

Orialu stepped forward, spear in hand, with a grin on her lips that was only partly her own. A deep, rib-thrumming growl escaped from her throat, Ai Naa's voice through her mouth. Vaara flowed in a bright rush along every nerve of her body, interthreaded with the red fibers of her muscles, ignited their power into something beyond human. Her channeling was crude – after all, her only instructor in the art had been herself, applying lessons she'd taken from holocasts watched alone in her room – but here, now, it didn't matter. All that mattered was the vanishing space between herself and her prey.

At the last second, the ghost eater did try to run, but by then it was far too late. It screamed one last time as she fell upon it, high and harsh and almost human. When she drove her beloved's spear between its ribs, the scream became a ragged, wet exhalation. Still the ghost eater thrashed and fought, but for all its size and ferocity, Orialu's strength in that moment was far greater, powered as she was by the bottomless well of Ai Naa's vaara. Her prey's fur was hot and sleek against her skin; its flesh, when she drove her fingers into it, was hotter still. The spear forgotten, Orialu hooked her fingers into the ghost eater's ribcage and wrenched it apart. The beast went still beneath her, save for a few errant twitches. Orialu pressed her face blindly into the wet hot nest of its organs, teeth bared, pushing and tearing until at last her lips touched its still-beating heart. She licked it, let it pulse against her tongue, made her lover wait for it. At last, she bit. Ai Naa bit, with her jaws. The heart burst. Blood exploded into Orialu's mouth, washed over her tongue, poured down her throat, a hot red flood of iron and salt. She bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, again and again and again, lost in a frenzy of consumption. The heart was long gone; now she devoured lungs liver flesh skin marrow, but her stomach never filled, for she wasn't truly eating at all, only feeding her beloved.

When the last scraps of flesh were gone and even the bones crushed and eaten, Orialu came back to herself. She was plastered in blood from head to toe. She was calm. She was content. The constant, hollow ache within her was – for now, at least – quieted.

Orialu picked up her spear and climbed out of the hollow, then went back the way she came. She'd started her hunt, as she always did, at the banks of the Gold River. That was where she'd left her clothes, in the branches of a tree that she'd marked with a smear of her own blood, which shone brighter to her beloved's senses – and thus her own – than the blood of any prey. Now she would wash the blood from her body, then dress herself, and the wind would dry her as she flew back to court. Everyone knew she sometimes went out at night, but nobody would know what she'd done.

But as Orialu came within sight of the river, with the taste of the ghost eater's blood still on her tongue, she felt a faint and unmistakable tinge of nausea.

"Oh," said Orialu. It was something she'd feared, and in some way expected, but never allowed herself to think about. Now it was happening. If her beloved was starting to reject the flesh of animals, there would soon be only one thing left for her to eat.

And so, on the banks of the river, Orialu turned Ai Naa's spear upon herself.

It did no good. Orialu impaled herself, opened veins, cut off parts of herself, again and again and again, each attempt wilder than the last, until she was sobbing with desperation. But no matter what kind of ruin she made of her body, Ai Naa restored it every time. She'd fed him so much flesh over the years, and his well of vaara was bottomless, and he loved her, hungered for her, would never let her go. Still she pled with him, first in her mind, then aloud, all of it useless. The images he gave her in return – or rather, the images into which he dragged her by the mind – told her as much. She fell through her own eye socket, down and down through a tunnel lined in raw slick flesh, and at the bottom lay the sea of searing green acid-light-fire that was her beloved, boiling hungrily as it awaited her. It shaped itself into a radiant, fang-lined maw that exploded forth and closed around her, swallowing her into the light. She sank and was surrounded at all sides by infinite burning tongues that licked at her wounds, at once savoring her blood and cauterizing her flesh, and every lash of the tongues was ecstasy –

She came back to herself with her body heaving and her fingers sunk deep into the warm mud of the riverbank, as if she'd been clawing at it. Her own lips still mouthed her beloved's words: never. Mine. Yours. Always. Never. Never. Never.

---

Red Hunger Sated, AKA the Orialu/Ai Naa special. What else can I say about this one other than Orialu babygirl I am so so sorry –

 

[Opaline Dreams]

RITUAL SLAUGHTER, PART I​

In which Orineimu prepares, in her own way, for her father's pre-execution sacrifice.

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When Orineimu woke up, the sky was still predawn gray, with only the faintest blushes of pink light.

She didn't bother even trying to go back to bed. Sleep had been hard-won for her these past few weeks, but she knew that if she tried to get any more, all she'd end up doing was lying in bed with her eyes closed, worrying. Besides, preparations for today's sacrifice would start in just a few hours. Even if she did manage to get back to sleep, she probably wouldn't get enough rest for it to be worth the effort.

Also, she was hungry.

If sleep wasn't happening, Orineimu decided, she might as well go and do something. Alu had always said that action was the best distraction. And going to visit the sacrificial stables was something a good daughter would do, the kind of thing Mother would approve of. Orineimu slipped into a purple linen day dress, cinched it with a gold cord belt, and put on a matching pair of sandals. She already had on the little gold chain that anchored her unawakened spirit; it never left her wrist.

Orineimu stopped by the kitchens; this early in the morning, the cooks hadn't had a chance to prepare much, but the head cook took pity on her and had a kitchen boy make her a bowl of rice topped with fried eggs. Orineimu wanted to wolf it down, but forced herself to eat like a lady. Bloodroyals, even young ones, had to be an example to everyone who watched them.

After she'd finished her food in a suitably restrained manner, she made her way to the sacrificial stables. She smelled them before she saw them: a mix of fragrant wood, sawdust, fur, feathers, and the inevitable faint whiff of shit. So many buildings in the Ilisaf court were made of pale stone in dawn-and-sky colors, but the sacrificial stables were different. They were darker, older; Mother had told her that they were one of the oldest parts of the whole court. There was pale stone to be found there, too – mostly the floors – but the stables had scarlet tiled roofs, and timbered walls and rafters made from red-grained sicanya trees, whose sacred, spice-scented wood fueled the funeral pyres of royalty, and whose blood-colored sap made for the finest incense.

The guards at the stable doors bowed when they saw her and let her pass without question; one of them opened the smaller door set within the greater double doors to let her pass. Orineimu inclined her head in gratitude as she stepped through. The noises of the stables washed over her: the chirps and calls and snuffling breaths of the animals, the rustling of hay bales and cut browse, the quiet back-and-forth chatter of the stable keepers. The smells were stronger in here, too, but Orineimu didn't mind. It certainly wasn't as nice as Mother's perfume, or the Sun Gardens in bloom, but there was something she liked about it all the same.

Before she could reach the stables proper, she had to pass through the entryway, a handsome, high-raftered room floored and walled in more smooth-polished sicanya wood. Ahead was a wooden barrier carved into a elaborate lattice of diamonds, behind which stood a high wooden desk. Before the barrier and flanking the desk stood two more guards, but Orineimu only cared about the woman seated behind and between them. She'd been absorbed in an array of floating captive light screens, but as Orineimu approached, she quickly shoved them all aside.
"Good morning, Overseer Lein," said Orineimu.

Overseer Lein rose from her seat and bowed. "And a very good morning to you, young Lady Orineimu," she said. "To what do we owe the pleasure at such an early hour?"

"Today's sacrifice," she said. "I'd like to see the animal being given today, please. I want to bless it one more time."

"Of course," said Lein. She called for a replacement to run her workstation in her absence, then came around to lead Orineimu through the stables herself.

Though everyone at court called them stables, the buildings of the sacrificial complex housed far more than just hoofstock. The animals were arranged in concentric ranks, with the smallest sacrifices at the stables' outer edges. Overseer Lein led Orineimu through them one after another. First were the butterfly houses, where all the chambers were lined in netting and filled with flowers and greenery, and strings of fresh fruit slices hung from the ceilings. Orineimu walked past a living rainbow of shimmering bluespots, rosy-winged dawn heralds, orange-and-black embertails, transparent glasswings, pale and pearlescent moonskippers. None of them would be sacrificed today, she knew; butterflies were released at the start of festivals and weddings, or burned for minor blessings. The idea of sacrificing them for something as serious as an execution was laughable.

Next Lein took her through the ranks of birds and bats, past rain doves, blood bats, sunshrikes, dragonfoxes, hummingbirds, fishing bats, mountain eagles. None of them were enough of a sacrifice for today, either. Neither were the lesser mammals. Blunt-faced cavis looked up with black, beady eyes from their bundles of leafy browse as she passed; marsh deer raised their delicate heads her way, ears cupped forward. Many of them knew her by sight and came up to the front of their enclosures, hoping for treats, for a pat or a stroke. Not today, thought Orineimu. Today you're all safe.

At the center of the sacrificial stables waited the unicorn herd.

Wild unicorns had coats of dark blue, green, or purple dappled with glowing marks, the better to blend in with the jungles at night. They had thick, powerful necks, strong horns at the ends of their noses, and stout little fangs in their mouths, which they used to dig up roots, tear open trees to get at beehives, and eat whatever carrion or small beasts they could find. The captive unicorns kept by House Ilisaf were different beasts entirely. Thousands of years of selective breeding had produced slender, docile animals with slimmer horns and smaller fangs, and coats in shades of pale rose and lilac.

"I will be waiting nearby, my lady," said Lein. "Please call for me whenever you are finished." She bowed again, then quickly made herself scarce.

A keeper handed Orineimu a red silken lead ribbon, then let her into the unicorn paddock. She wandered between the beasts, many of whom nosed at her hands and dress, looking for treats, tickling her with their velvety, soft-whiskered muzzles. All of them were well familiar with her, for unicorns imbued with love and attention made for more potent sacrifices, and it was a royal daughter's duty to provide it, just as children of lesser nobility blessed the lesser animals of the stables. Animals always shied away from Alu, or else outright fled, so the duty of blessing House Ilisaf's unicorns fell to Orineimu alone. She didn't mind; she liked coming here to fuss over and feed them, even if it was sad to see them killed. Besides, it was sort of nice to have something she could do that Alu couldn't.

At last she spotted the mark that told her which unicorn she'd need to bless with a final measure of affection – a dark red thumb-smear of sicanya sap on its forehead. She recognized the unicorn that bore it. Its coat was a flawless pale pink; both its main and secondary pairs of eyes were large, dark gold in color, and sweetly docile; its horn was a perfect slender spire of ivory. Orineimu tried never to think of any of the sacrificial animals as having names, but she couldn't help overhearing the ones the keepers used, and she knew they called this one Lotus. It made sense that they'd choose him – it – for today's sacrifice. Orineimu had been blessing it for over two years now, and it would make a fine offering for something as important as Father's execution.

Orineimu slipped the red ribbon over the unicorn's neck and led it to a small enclosure attached to the main paddock. A couple of keepers approached the side of the enclosure and offered a selection of treats. After two years, Orineimu knew that this unicorn liked dried meat best, and yam pieces second best. She also knew all the ways it best liked to be petted. After she'd fed it some meat, and wiped her hands dry on the grass, she sat down and patted the ground next to her. The unicorn folded its slender legs under itself and lay down, leaning its warmth against her side. She felt its ribs press and recede against her in time with its breathing. The realization that this would be the last time she'd feel Lotus's warmth and living movement hit her harder than it should have. She was used to the unicorns being killed. This should have been nothing to her. Father, she told herself. It's his fault this is getting to me. I wouldn't be like this if it weren't for everything happening with him. It was stupid. She barely even knew her father. What right did he have to affect her this way?

Orineimu took in a deep breath and refocused on the unicorn beside her. This one liked to have the underside of its chin and the spot between its withers scratched, and to have its neck patted. When she did the last one, the unicorn blew out a contented breath and put its stupid, trusting head right on her lap.

Orineimu's heart seemed to crumple inside her chest. Her shoulders hitched once, twice, and then tears began to flow. Stupid, she thought again. Mother wouldn't cry. Alu wouldn't, either. But it wouldn't stop. She leaned down over the unicorn, put her arms around its neck, and cried as quietly as she could. Its sleek hide soon grew damp against her cheek; its grass-and-animal scent mingled with the faint saltsmell of her tears. She wondered how this looked to the keepers. Like the young lady loves this thing so much she can't help but cry, I bet. What a good final blessing I'm giving!

Finally, Orineimu regained control of herself. She took one last deep breath, wiped her face clean, and gave Lotus a few good long final scratches to make up for using him – it – as a handkerchief. Then she left the paddock and called for Overseer Lein.

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This one's a bit shorter than normal, but it was such a natural stopping place that I had to end it here. Oh Neimu. I hope the rest of your day gets better (it probably will not get better)