The Comfort Of The Knife

[MxOberon]

Sphinx pressed against me. Her warmth battling the wintry slush that'd become my veins.

"How many?" I asked.

Amber said, "Four. We lucked out there, but they hit fast and hard. They, um…"

"They what?"

"We lost the first and third floors. Some of them are chasing me down on the second. You have to hurry!"

I felt the mask in my backpack. Drip, drip, drip. "I'll be on my way," I said, and hung up.

Sphinx and I didn't rush as we put the files back. Each second wasted on reversing any sign of our investigation was an agony. We'd lost the first and third floor. My mind was a maelstrom of the worst possibilities—Melissa disemboweled, Lupe beheaded, Amber hunted down and speared. Then the next moment the violence and the victim would shuffle around to taunt me with other arrangements. Was there any way for my friends to die that wouldn't haunt me?

"Nadia," Sphinx said, "we need a plan before we go back lest we tumble into a trap ourselves."

"If things are that bad then no matter how we come back it's a trap."

I led the way out of the office, through the medical lab, and down the hallway.

"If they're that bad."

"You heard Amber—"

"Did I? Did we? The easiest sabotage happens under the guise of friendship."

"So you're saying someone stole Amber's phone and mimicked her voice?"

"Is that so impossible to imagine?"

It wasn't to be honest. Amber lacked offensive spells—well, maybe lacked them—and her motto was to cheat in any fight she found herself in. If the enemy cheated before she could then it'd be the situation with the lindwurm all over again. Stealing her phone would be rather easy. The mental phantoms of Melissa and Lupe's death disintegrated from my mind. Amber's, however, remained prominent like her last words to me: Don't hold back.

Sphinx and I passed through the hallway of traps without sparing a moment of our attention. On the steps to the platform I shrugged off my backpack. Fished out the mask which had weighed on my back, and met Sphinx's gaze.

"If I ask, would you put the mask back?" Sphinx asked.

I said, "Not until my girls are safe."

"I'll hold you to that," she said.

"I hope you do. For both of us."

Tears ran rivers down my face as I activated the Omensight and set the mask on my face. It smelled of the copper-citrus notes of blood. Tangy and tantalizing. A shudder ran through my body—the echoes of a night more pleasurable than I'd care to admit; the fear of what I'd soon do to those unfortunate enough to mar what was mine.

* * *​

When we returned to the archive, the aching quiet was removed by the crooning strings of some distant flute. Its song was of soft blankets, crackling fires, and the build-up of snowbanks so high that they'd tease at the windows on the second floor. A yawn broke from my mouth. I narrowed my eyes at the unbidden vocalization. In a search for the song's origin I noticed the snowy shawls of Sleep slung over the shelves, hung from the walls, and flooding the floor. It was even in the air. Snowflakes of sleep swinging lazily in their descent before joining with one of the pre-existing masses. A winter wonderland if there ever was one.

I turned a hand over and caught a snowflake upon my palm. It wasn't Real. Just a representation of the audible yet invisible spell that blanketed the archive. A clue that only someone with sorcerous sight would have a chance at picking up on. I watched the snowflake melt in my hand decomposing into a faint smoke of Death and Stars. In fact, every snowflake that touched my body met a similar end.

"Looks like it's more than my body temperature that rose. It's like an innate resistance to spells or something."

"A greater resistance is a fine gift, but don't mistake it for immunity," Sphinx said.

"I wouldn't think of it."

An Inviolate Star bloomed above my fingers as I formed the hand-spell. Its light repelled the thick layers of Sleep that'd risen to mid-calf in height. The bubble of safety was large enough to cover Sphinx and myself as I clung to her back on our flight to the center of the archive.

From the air I finally noted the origin of the song. Ensconced within the walls were speakers that all sang the same song of how comfortable it'd be to close your eyes and let Sleep take you. I sneered at the sentiment and the lack of threads connecting me to the spell.

"Where're the ties of fate?" I asked.

"Not here. This spell it's unfocused and uncaring. There's no intention to target you, and thus no fated connection."

"So it's what, coincidence?"

"Nothing is a coincidence, Nadia. This is nature. It happens as it happens, and whether you're there to hear it or not the sound and cycles exist."

"I hate it," I said.

"Agreed."

When we neared the center of the archive I discovered the faces of my enemies. One of them was clothed entirely in black—sweater, pants, boots—with a semi-sheer black veil over her face. While the other was a brick-wall of a boy in denim overalls and a raglan tee. On his back was a shimmering aquamarine isopod that clung to his body with chitinous legs that pierced his body. Under the Omensight, both of them lacked the luminosity I'd come to expect from fighting upChain foes—good.

"Sphinx, maintain the star for me."

I felt through my spirit as she wrapped the Inviolate Star in her own control. Carefully, I stood atop Sphinx's back and formed the hand-spell for Fivefold Atomic Glory. Fuck holding back. I loosed the spell.

A streak of fading chalcedony flames trailed behind the brilliant howling star that consumed distance like kindling. From our distance to the square—we had a few minutes left before we arrived—I couldn't tell if my two targets had noticed it or not. Even if they had, I didn't expect them to survive. When the spell had landed it exploded into a towering pillar of chalcedony fire that stretched up toward the spatially expanded ceiling. For a solitary moment it was as if a faucet had been turned on connecting the archive to a world of infinite fire.

We arrived as the pillar thinned to a needle and then was gone. In its absence I noted how much it took with it—the stele with the map, numerous petals and most of the miniature maze connecting the elevators to the archive's center. I had us land in the epicenter of the blast. There weren't any flames that kept burning—Revelation was a moment after all—so it wasn't like the rest of the archive was at risk. I did feel a pain though, in the place where I remembered that there was a life where I would've been a researcher, as I noted how many racks of information, files, and artifacts I'd just destroyed.

"You didn't hold back at all, huh?" a boy's voice said.

I turned atop Sphinx's back to watch as the boy and the black-clothed woman next to him surfaced back into reality. The planes of themselves slowly connecting until they had fully extricated themselves from whatever space they'd stepped out from. It was similar to what Amber had done back at the outpost. Slipping beneath the threads of the world.

"I didn't want to be rude," I said. "Now, what'd you do to Amber?"

I emphasized my question by leveling the glaive at him. He held up his hands and pointed past my shoulder. Wordlessly, I took back control of the Inviolate Star while Sphinx channeled her own Atomic Glories so they'd be ready at my order. Sphinx raised her wings aiming the eyes at the boy while I turned my head, slowly, to his companion. She sat atop one of the racks. Between her fingers she dangled Amber's sorc-deck—her bloodsoaked sorc-deck—as if it was a used tissue.

"Just doing some vocal training," she said, before assuming Amber's voice. "Did I do a good job?"

"No," I lied. It was a masterful impression.

"Shame, I don't think I'll be practicing it much beyond tonight. Now, you can stand down and take the test next year, or you can be like Amber…"

She tossed the sorc-deck through the air. Blam. A crack of ear-splitting thunder. The sorc-deck shattered into a rain of expensive shards. My eyes slid to the boy holding two phantasmal revolvers in meaty fists. One was smoking—a wispy cloud of stardust that glittered in the light.

"Dead," she finished.

"You're lying," I said.

"The only lie that's been said is that I did a bad job. Toby, show her."

The isopod on the boy—Toby's—back extended long pedipalps that formed a halo behind Toby's head. It twisted and wove Stars with Stars. As it worked an image of Amber's slaughtered form took shape in between the three of us.

Phantasmal swords had skewered her chest. Her fingers were blackened and loose, unable to hold the blood-drenched knife she'd shown me in the library. There was no fire behind her rosy eyes. While her lips were pale, lifeless, never again to press against my own.

"Get it now. Back down or—"

My laughter severed her voice. Whatever script she was following I'd thrown her off of it into the deep end of what churned inside my heart. She may have been veiled, but the flood of laughter had instilled a tenseness in her body. She shared glances with Toby who looked to her for direction. It was just so funny that I couldn't help but smile even though they couldn't see it.

"Alls below, what's wrong with you?" Toby asked.

"The idea that you killed Amber. She's a Baron, and both of you are just soldiers. If all your team are like you then you're down the person needed to even begin to challenge her," I said. "But, I think I prefer humoring you. So let's say you did."

I slid from Sphinx's back. Tossed the Inviolate Star just a bit above me as I formed the seal for Atomic Glory. My eyes on the thread of fate tying us together by her intent to threaten me.

"If you did," I said, "then that means I'll need your heads so I can have a good funeral gift."

Infinity split. The tie between us went up in flames that raced along fate's edge to pierce her heart. She likely had some sort of sorcerous sight as she fell forward and disappeared beneath the skein of the world. My flames burnt down to nothing as their target was—for all intents and purposes—no longer existent.

Toby lacked sorcerous sight, so when he finally caught on he was too late on pulling those triggers. I'd caught the Inviolate Star and slid my body in front of Sphinx as the "bullets" those unReal guns fired were dispersed along the edge of light the star cast.

Sphinx loosed her own Atomic Glories. They were a rapid fire barrage of chalcedony bolts that lanced the air. Speeding up, Toby's entity traced a square with its pedipalps that conjured a wall that splashed against the hasty defense.

"My entity says we're cousins," Toby said.

"Really?" I asked.

"Yup, Primordials on my end," he explained. "Revelation on yours."

"Sphinx," I said, "we're definitely going through all your cousins after this."

The conjured wall dissipated as did the guns in Toby's hands. He bounced on the balls of his feet before suddenly throwing himself backwards. The pedipalps traced a circle conjuring a trampoline. It sproinged Toby forward fast as an arrow. Sphinx fired more Atomic Glories. She had perfectly calculated three steps ahead. Toby stopped two steps in. Circle. Another trampoline—this time below his feet—shot him upwards in a tight arc. Sphinx aimed upwards firing lances of chalcedony flame toward the ceiling. To its credit, Toby's entity had already begun rapidly conjuring walls. One per lance. Null result. Null result. Null result.

He landed in front of me. Low as a monkey. Wicked sharp phantasmal swords of stardust in his hands. One upward slice! I danced back with a lean narrowly evading. He lunged forward catching me on the backfoot. Thrust his blade out to skewer me. Sphinx caught the back of my shirt with her teeth. Whipped me to the side as she corkscrewed low. Kicked her back legs out as they clanged against the quickly sketched shield that saved Toby's arms from being maimed.

He slid back a few feet from the force of the blow. The shield already dissipating. Drip, drip, drip. This time the blood drops weren't in my mind. A bright red splatter-flower had bloomed to the side of my feet. In a glance I noted its origin, a sanguine line drawn across the side of my torso. It burned with the reminder of my own mortality. I narrowed my eyes at the dissipating sword.

"Hmm, looks like spells from outside have problems, but spells from the inside are fine." Toby said, "Tell Shenshen I need a bit of help."

"Who are you talking to?" I asked.

A howl cut through the air in response. My gaze slipped from Toby toward the air beside me. Between the ever-falling snowflakes emerged a dire wolf. An iconic entity for those bonded to the Court of Sleep. Large as a sedan, their fur was wild and black like frostbitten fingers. Large holes seemed cut out from its limbs and shoulders through which the wind whistled and brought as herald a maelstrom of snow. While its skull was no lupine thing but rather a crescent of deepest winter blue ice brought to a sinister point. It was with that eyeless crescent skull it gored Sphinx and raced her off from beyond my light.

The wind came after toying with my hair as the cloud of snow formed a thick screen around the sanctuary my Inviolate Star provided. A spell in and of itself—rather than just the product of one—its composition obfuscated my vision due to the Omensight. Lines of thought plowed across my brow as I pushed my sight past the spell that had curtained the archive from me. Toby was gone.

I ducked low and kicked out, making a T of my body. My shoe crunched into Toby's face. His feet continued while his head snapped backwards. His body spun and his head cracked into the ground. The knives he conjured dissipated instantly. One-handedly I attempted to twirl Mother's Last Smile, but it wasn't that light of glaive. By the time the tip was to the ground and I dropped to a knee in a bid to drive it through Toby's face he'd already rolled away. Spun on his shoulder, snapping a kick into my already wounded side.

While I hissed in pain, he kicked back to standing. The pedipalps sketched a maul into his hands—the kind you'd use at some faire game. I yanked free my glaive only barely interposing it in time before the maul's head swung into my weak side. Though I'd caught the maul on the shaft his blow still struck with full force. I felt it flatten the entirety of my body as if a wall had been slammed into me. Then came the waves of shock that rippled through my viscera and shook my teeth. It was a mercy that the blow sent me flying through the air into one of the racks. Less of a mercy when I bounced off of it into a secondary arc that landed me between the shelves.

Through wheezing gasps I voicelessly railed against the unfairness of it all. Toby was a horrible fighter. Physically capable but in a competition of skill he wouldn't be my match in the slightest. He wasn't my match in the slightest. Unfortunately his team had stacked the deck and dealt me the worst cards possible. If I dropped the Inviolate Star to wield my glaive properly it'd force me to rush through fighting Toby before the omnipresent spellsong put me to Sleep. If I didn't drop the spell, then I'd be slowly ground to nothing under the endless barrage of Toby's attacks.

I eyed the star that floated above my hands—even knocked aside I'd kept the spell up. I wanted to swear at it, furious that my opponent was the one who revealed one of its weaknesses. Spells cast within its light weren't scattered the way external ones were. It's why his sword and maul could wound me, but his bullets…his bullets couldn't!

"Toby, if it wasn't for your teammates I'd have killed you by now," I called out.

Toby said, "Yeah, yeah, whine all you want, but I have my teammates and you don't have yours. Complaining doesn't change the facts. Besides, you're the one stuck using an inelegant piece of Real gear. Me, all my toys are made to order. No fumbling needed."

Through the Omensight I saw past all the shelves as his entity sketched a bench for him to sit on to catch his breath. The bench wasn't Real, nothing about it was, and in truth its entire function was found in enforcing a causal relationship through its own ontological purpose. A bench was to be sat on, and thus he could sit on it. Effect found through the visual establishment of cause. Pieces were being slotted into place, a theory forming, and I tested it by examining my first wound of our fight.

The cut he'd landed on me still held traces of his Court, a few traces of the Bloodlust that seemed so loud and obvious when I wore the mask, and beneath all of that was the fate that came from being cut. Bleeding until my mind was dizzy and flesh pale. Until I looked just like Amber. His attacks had the full might of causality and fate behind them, and the wounds dogged you until you stumbled into a grave. This was everything I'd hoped for.

I regarded the Inviolate Star with a shy appreciation and embarrassed smile. It wasn't its fault I wasn't the summoner I imagined myself to be. If I was, I wouldn't have forgotten that there was a second way to use this spell.

"Hey Toby," I said. "How's my entity doing?"

"Better than you."

"Great." I said, "I think I've caught my breath. Ready for round two?"

"Sure."

Using Mother's Last Smile, I propped myself up. Leaned against it as I opened my first mouth, fangs parting in thick strings of bloodthirsty salivation. Opened my second, soft lips pushed aside by a flat pink tongue that made a tunnel for my spell to travel down. I pressed the Inviolate Star against my tongue. Curled around the sorcerous creation and pulled it into my throat. Felt it blacken my esophagus. Melt my intestines as it fell into my gut. It was an atrocious sensation, but after any bout of pain came the syrup flow of pleasure. That sweetness which made the whole cycle worth doing again.

It soothed the pains Toby had caused me. Diverted the fate of my wound and thus delayed my end. The flame that burned in my gut even soothed the secret hurts that drilled beneath my fingernails and made slow my hands—with the White Womb, had I killed a child? Without Amber can I pass the exam? Am I going to die? Under the pyroclastic flow that had worked through the barrier of my intestines and invaded my arteries all of those concerns became ash on my breath.

I was immolating. I was great. I would win.

My glaive felt loose in my hand as my shuffled steps became loping bounds. Out past the wire-racks into the aisle. The corona of chalcedony flame searing those Sleepy snowflakes from the air before they had a chance to befoul my skin. I stared Toby down. He shifted and his bench collapsed from beneath him—its purpose fulfilled as he had already sat down.

"You crazy bitch," he said.

I laughed, "Come on Toby, if we're going to kill each other we have to go at least that far!"

Then I sprinted at him. A wide-mouthed hunting bitch ready to rip him limb from limb. He fumbled to his feet. Raised a rapidly conjured gatling gun in both hands. Fired.

Unwilling to reveal my gambit just then, I dashed to the side. Shifted myself to run in an arc around him. His thoughtless spray gave me perfect cover to run near Sphinx. She was wounded from the spear that was the dire wolf's skull. Oh she'd given back as much as she could from how the flames licked at the entity's body. It was—in even further testament to how unfair this fight had been—hardly enough to stop it. As its summoner's song proved capable of putting even the flames of Revelation to Sleep. So I decided to even her fight.

"Sphinx, catch!"

I pirouetted on my next step, used all the extra force the motion afforded me, and threw my glaive. It spun end over end and struck the haunches of the dire wolf. Scored a sharp line through its flesh before arcing up into the air. In two wingbeats, Sphinx had taken to the air to catch the glaive's haft in her own jaws.

End this cousin of ours, Nadia. She thought.

Click. Toby's gun was empty. He made the mistake of looking down at it in disbelief as it discorporated. I raced forward. The scent of the kill teasing my nostrils and tying a noose about my inhibitions. There was violence to be done.

I wasn't so lucky as to catch him empty handed—he'd formed knives just in time. They caught me in the gut at once. Both of them intent on pincering through my necessary organs. Knives stab after all. Toby yanked them back, his entity conjured more, and he stabbed again. Ten times he stabbed me between both hands. I stood there and took it. My body shuddered with each blow.

"Tsk tsk," I said. "You'll need something more Real if you want to put me down."

As someone who suffers from chronic tunnel-vision, I understood Toby's pain. He had executed his plan perfectly. Strike me with multiple causal weapons until I succumbed to my fated end. It wasn't his fault that he didn't know Revelation makes causality her bitch. Nor was it his fault that, despite having never done theater, I was still a decent actor.

"It's not fair," he said—and it's only now that I realized he was so young, we both were. Shame.

I said, "It doesn't change the facts."

His weapons discorporating and mind fraying, Toby leaped backward to gain distance. Gain time to think. I denied him either. My foot stomped atop his pinning him to the ground. His entity's pedipalps sketched a shield between his face and my fist. It was the causal truth that shields block, but we were beyond such concerns now.

My fist shattered his shield diverting the fate he wished to impose on my body. Crashed into his guard. His arms flew wide. My other fist curved in tight next to my lead foot. Crack.

"Sorry about your rib, Toby!"

My hands shot around to the back of his head. Toby had such pretty dark curls, perfect for gripping. I clinched and rammed my knee into his chest. Once, twice, three times and then crack. Now there was a song to be found. His sternum shattered, I reared back for my killing blow. Formed the hand-spell for an Atomic Glory. Split infinity and clenched my fist around the flames sheathing it a formless mass of hungry fire.

I released a haymaker only a beast could devise. It arced beautifully toward his head. Through the Omensight I could already see the potential splatter patterns of his ruined burning skull.

"Intermission," she incanted.

As I said and everyone tells me, I suffer from tunnel-vision a lot. In that moment where victory was nigh I forgot that this wasn't a one-versus-two. It was a one-versus-three. My body—the world—froze for a moment and four things happened.

One. Toby's teammate, the black clothed girl, returned from that secret place behind the world.

Two. She dragged him back from my fist, the heat of the flames had only just begun to melt his skin—I can still hear the fat bubbling and popping like bacon on a skillet.

Three. The two of them receded back behind the world only to reappear on the opposite side of the clear my earlier Fivefold Atomic Glory had made.

Four. This one I hated the most. The girl, probably using her own entity, added their fourth teammate to the fight. In that one moment where I lacked all agency and control due to a power greater than mine I struck an unknown well of compassion against those who suffered in my Godtime.

The Inviolate Star within me, already straining to divert the effects of the spellsong and Toby's attacks as I didn't dodge every bullet, failed to save me from this new sorcery. Sphinx had already warned me, albeit in reference to the after effects of Inviolate Star, that resistance even when overwhelming was not immunity.

Time began and I felt a small palm strike me dead between my shoulder blades. A cooling balm flowed from her strike across my back. Wound across my body snuffing the corona of flames that burned and flicked in petulant rage. I stumbled, rolled, and before I could rise to my feet—

"Bow," the soft voice said.

My head snapped low, but my eyes rolled up to peer up at the one who ambushed me. She was cute—despite my snarling rage, she was. Small and pale as a doll with wide bright green eyes she wore her oversized jacket well. From its many steel loops were different booklets of seafoam formation paper. Their complex mortal crafted spells written in calligraphic strokes of Underink. On chunky turquoise platform mary janes she walked forward trepidatiously. There was a curiosity in her eyes at the beast before her.

"I need to know that you understand me," she said.

"Understand that unless you let me go," I said, "I'll make sure to jam my Toby's radii through your eyes after I tear them from his body!"

"Good enough." She said, "First, I want you to hear me when I say that I am of the rank of Baron. You're not breaking through my Suppression seal on your own. Second, this is your last chance for mercy. If you fight against my seal your organs will shut down and you'll most likely die."

I pushed forward. Limbs outstretched and hands ready to wring her doll-like neck until those emerald eyes rolled into her skull.

"Fine," she said. "Die."

Thud. My heart came to a rushing halt. Every part of my body froze in the moment of that last pounding beat. I could feel my nerves belay each successive order that would've let me follow through on my sudden assault. Instead I just fell to the ground. There was no pain—my receptors had stalled as well. Everything was shutting down.

The Inviolate Star within myself was but an ember stolen on the wind. It flew off into the recesses of my being. Not snuffed, but Suppressed. Then came the snowflakes that fell against my body. Thousands upon thousands of them entombing me in the winter chill of Sleep. I could imagine the soft furry blanket that I used to wrap around myself during winter. The crackle of the hearth. Mom and Dad quietly sipping tea. The gentle song of the snowy wind teasing the windows. It all lulled me into a darkness that dragged me…

Down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Darkness.

My last sight was of an elevator opening. A woman tall and wolflike standing proud. Her hand to the air as she wielded something. While her guitar was strung low—perpendicular—to her body.

 

[MxOberon]

In the end there was nothing. A void that wasn't black because even black was something. My self—what even there was of me—adrift bodiless. Mindless. Everything I'm saying right now, just an approximation of what it felt to be obliterated, or what I thought at the time was obliteration; in that place of no place there was no such thing as sensation—or so I thought.

Dad used to joke whenever he turned on the lights in my room to wake me up for school when I was a kid. He'd say, "And then there was light," in mimicry of some hoary storyteller. As if light came before everything else. When the truth was sound came first.

A growl ripped through the nothingness. Nothing like what came from Sphinx's throat, but something more articulated. Electric and fuzzy at the edges. Warm with a hint of stickiness from how the notes—it was sound, music!—wouldn't fade into memory. Raoooow!

There it was again. Additive to the sound that still haunted the present moment with their echoes. The two noises ripping into each other until the erratic tearing left beautiful sonic ribbons tying them together. Ribbons.

Ribbons of light—strings—cut through the void. Gold as honey. Amber. Sunlight. Morning dawn!

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six beautiful strings. Then bountiful chaos. Energetic. Lively. Life. Each string vibrating as they were struck by some unearthly force. In their motion I knew direction, and with direction I fell.

Down—no—up? Yes. Up and up from the void into the deep dark where once again I saw black. My first taste of something from the mire of nothing I had nearly made home. It was heard I heard the compliment to the wailing guitar that beckoned me siren-like. The voice was raspy, yearning, and dripping with the kind of need that made a mother run in search of her kid. It pleaded to the world and me to come back. To get up. To live.

It was then I opened my eyes. Shoved my head from out beneath a heavy winter white comforter. My hair wild and bonnet half off. I gripped the sheets as I regarded the cabin I'd found myself in. It was simple—wooden with only one large room—and very little furniture. Walls were adorned in photos. Memories of happier days. While across from the bed were two plush chairs, a table, and a fireplace whose flame had gone low. Only sputtering embers remained.

"You're letting in the cold," a voice whined. It was so familiar?

Then, no doubt belonging to the voice, a foot collided with my side punting me from the bed. I hit the floor and rolled to a propped up crouch—even in death my mom's lessons still held. The foot disappeared beneath the blanket before I could see it. Though I did make out the lump beneath the sheets that I realized I'd slept against.

I said, "It's not really my fault. Someone let the fire go out."

Grumbling moans seeped out from my unseen cabinmate. An arm thrust out from beneath the blanket. It was the same color as me, but cold in its undertone where I was warm. The fist at the arm's end shook vigorously in uproar.

"Then go do something about it," it said. The voice was feminine. "Here, take this."

I held out my hands as it dumped bright silver-white strands of something into my cupped palms. The first became a flat hand that fanned me away in dismissal.

"Toss it on the fire. Be quick about it. It's cooooold," the voice whined again.

Holding the strands carefully, I crossed the cabin toward the fireplace. Tossed them onto the flames and watched as the embers—they were chalcedony?—consumed the strands greedily. Streaks of that beautiful silver-white bringing an energy and a texture to that familiar fire. It was in one burst—a bit of a burp really—that the flames rose and expelled outward. Eating me.

* * *​

I screamed as I pushed up from the ground. Around me the imperceptible din of reality flooded my ears at once. My brain took a few moments to resume control of my faculties, and parse the many channels of information that I'd become rusty noticing and ignoring.

"Why isn't she dead?" an annoying voice—a cheater's voice—said.

Unbound from the doll-like summoner's command, I lifted my head. The three of them had clumped together behind Toby as Sphinx fired endless volleys of Atomic Glory at them from the air. Apparently the dire wolf had retreated. Going by the blood that dripped off my glaive's blade like water off a duck, I figured Sphinx had used the weapon well.

To the left of me was Lupe whose eyes were shut and mouth wide as she sang a wordless song. No, I could feel it resonate with the fibers of my spirit. It was the same way that entities spoke. The way incantations worked—my mind renewed and freed from the grip of adrenaline or Bloodlust made that connection plenty clear.

Lupe sang, "A thousand children who knew only Night/Who played forever bound in Abyssal depths/Remember true that all things die/Though praise the Morning which lives again/Golden blades in both hands/Time shall be cut anew/From black bolts Tomorrow is sewn/And Freedom known as we once knew."

My heart quickened at the mournful invocation of an unmet tomorrow. One the singer believed they'd never know yet could only believe in. Without it—the faith—they'd crumble. It was a song for deities that'd never listen nor act. Well fuck them, and fuck that. I rose on unsteady legs. My nerves relearning the best routes through my body. They were too slow, and I didn't need them anyways. I flexed my spirit and felt it pop. Crack. ROAR.

The corona of fire that accompanied me when using the Inviolate Star this way bulged and flared. Briefly I was a pillar of chalcedony and quicksilver fire. An unnatural wickerwoman come to cut a way toward tomorrow for the pretty girl that asked for me.

"What'd I miss?" I asked.

Lupe ceased singing, but her hand stayed a blur as she strummed strings of amber plasma—sunlight stretched across the neck that also served as haft to an ambrosia gold labrys. Her hair glistened from the sweat that poured down her brow. I couldn't help but imagine where else she might've been sweating. I really was alive.

"Not much. Nearly lost you, but glad I found you. They buried you pretty deep," she said.

"Yeah," I said, "and now I'm going to return the favor. Sphinx, glaive me, cutie."

I tugged the mask—it bit into my skin as if unwilling to part—then tore it free. Dropped it to the ground as I raised my hand up toward Sphinx. She opened her mouth and let it tumble through the air and down into my grasp. As if there was no other place it'd rather be.

"Thanks for not slobbering over it," I said.

Sphinx smirked. "Nadia, I have never once 'slobbered' and never will. Now please, can we see to them?"

"Sure, why not."

I spun the glaive effortlessly in my hand as if the memory of its heaviness was just a fiction. Perhaps it was—they weren't called Conceptual weapons for nothing. Though as I let it land over my shoulder I don't even know why I thought it was a weapon. It was my Mother's Last Smile. An expression of joy, love, sorrow, and the glee she had whenever I told her of how I faced the odds and didn't let that stop me. Earlier I said Toby and his teammates stacked the deck and dealt the cards. Well, this is where I flipped the table.

I swaggered forward. Glaive swinging light as love on my shoulder. The tiny doll-like summoner's eyes became narrowed emerald talismans against my advance. So of course I stepped forward again. Again. Howled with laughter as she formed hand-spell after hand-spell to control whatever seal she had put inside of me.

Toby asked her, "Why didn't you use your best seal?"

She said, "I did. It'd put down anyone that could actually be affected."

She stumbled backward and looked so small there on her ass. She crawled across the floor like the pitiful creature she'd devolved into upon the sight of my not being dead. I grinned and licked my teeth—were they always that sharp?—as some predatory streak couldn't help but desire to pin her to the ground by fang or glaive.

"What are you?" she asked.

I let the glaive fall. Pinned it between my back and the crook of my arms. Angled myself and pushed forward fast as a comet. Flame trailed behind me. Toby's eyes widened. I let my left hand rise and just suggest a thrust through the glaive. In one motion—my body all intent and action without the infirmities of flesh—I skewered the boy.

"A princess," I said.

Another suggestion of my desire, and the glaive rose with the boy upon it. The first living banner heralding my ascension. In his eyes I saw the burning dream of myself. Bright metal fangs that complimented eyes of primal innocence.

It was that same innocence that guided my tongue free from my mouth to catch the droplets of his blood which fell like rain. He tasted of stardust, of pure ideas untainted. Purest aspiration and highest ideals. Oh if you could bottle that.

"Put…me…down," he said.

His face was growing pale. He could die. I ran the calculations on if I could hide the body—I'd told Melissa I would only kill for her after all. The numbers weren't good, and it helped that the third teammate, the one in black, was trying to sneak away. My Omensight was still up, and I watched as the world rippled against her touch. Like blinds, or curtains.

"No slipping away this time," I said.

I flicked the glaive flinging Toby from his impaled position to collide with the coward who was about to abandon them all. The two fell in a tangled clump. From my shift in attention I hadn't noticed as the other girl had fled toward the elevators. She held one of them open as she formed a hand-spell.

Strands of Suppression—the colors of which were muted and ugly—wove against the space between her and her teammates. It flared in a dull light that desaturated the threads around it. When the unlight cleared, the team was together in the elevator. I giggled at the creativity. She'd Suppressed distance. Now there was an idea.

I ran toward them unwilling to let them get away. Toby raised a gun while one of them hammered at the 'close doors' button.

"You can't keep trying the same thing, Toby," I yelled. "That's just crazy!"

He flipped me off. Winced as the girl in black had to shift the pressure she kept against his wound. Then, following my advice, he shifted his aim from me to Lupe. Fired. I spun to her and plunged us both into Godtime. I ran back toward her where the stardust bullet hung in space only a few inches from kissing the spot between the eyebrows. That spot which rippled just barely as she focused on playing. Enhancing me of all people. She was a key piece of things and I wouldn't let her die.

I thrust the glaive forward as I removed us from Godtime. The bullet flattened into a curled back flower against the blade. Ding went the elevator and my retreating foes.

"Lupe, I appreciate the buffs but you have to dodge next time."

"Sure, but dodge what?" she asked.

"The bullet."

"There was a bullet?"

Sphinx said, "Nadia, it can be hard to see a flashlight under the noontime sun."

"What she said. You're really bright right now," Lupe said. "Only thing brighter was the smaller girl, she was at Baron, right?"

"She was. Now, we have to go catch them before the taller girl slips away with them all."

Lupe shook her. "Not likely. Each floor's spatially enhanced, so the elevator has to be like really spatially constrained. Only way it can connect to each one."

"Then we can still catch up?" I asked.

"If that's our aim," Sphinx said, "then get on."

We both climbed atop Sphinx as she landed. Lupe's strumming became more muted and with it so to my flame. I'd been renewed by her spell, but renewing from nearly zero doesn't necessarily add anything to you. Beyond what you need to get up and out of bed.

"Don't worry," she said, "when we get a quiet moment I'll fill you to the brim."

"Innuendos are my job," I said. "Stick to playing with your guitar."

She rested her head against my shoulder as if my clothes would hide the blush that betrayed her. From between my legs I felt Sphinx rumble and warm. It was a good burn that followed the curve of her spine before she opened her mouth and expelled a concentrated beam of chalcedony at the elevator door. The sorcerously treated metal softened beneath her assault, but failed to fully come undone. So I helped.

I worked my core so I could sit up, and gestured with Mother's Last Smile. The stroke was smooth—so it was fast as fuck—as a bright edge of light flew from the glaive to shear the weakened elevator door's in two.

We entered the elevator shaft at such a rush Sphinx had to kick off of the wall to evade ramming into it. She kicked off the opposite one—just above the doorway—before she could finely engage her wings and propel us up after our fleeing foes.

Sphinx even cast Atomic Glory through the patterned eyes on her haunch fur. They burnt hard like the photos of spaceships launching back during the Old World. Though I like to think it was more that she was mimicking a usage I'd already discovered. Whatever the inspiration, we quickly rocketed after them. Were a hair's breadth away from them. Equal.

Through the Omensight the elevator may as well have been windowed glass from how I could peek at them. They were shaking in fear. The two girls were arguing. While Toby had gotten his feet beneath him, and the pedipalps of his entity had woven bandages tight around his body. A clever enough idea to keep from bleeding out.

"Lupe, I need you to play hard."

"Normally I save that for the off-the-clock," she joked, "but for you, anytime."

She struck the strings of her labrys-guitar, and fanned my flames to a heroic frenzy.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

I said, "Bring some gifts."

Keep Lupe safe, I thought.

Think of yourself, Sphinx thought back.

Then I jumped from her back. Legs drawn up into a tight isosceles triangle. Glaive clenched tight to my body as it contorted to gather strength. The bladehead caught an invisible light as it glistened—winked—before I thrust it forward. My mother's other technique on my lips.

"Blind the Stars."

The elevator's wall sheared apart as if unseen thumbs were breaking open a pastry to lap at the cream inside. Hands on my weapon, I let it carry me forward into the elevator. I winked as I passed the girl in black. Toby. Before my weapon sheared into the other wall—though I didn't permit it, as I didn't want it—and blew that apart as well. Though this order came after I had severed the smaller girl's arm from the shoulder.

"Gaaaah," she screamed as she slid down the wall that remained only because I wished it.

The girl in black said, "Inter—"

"No," I said.

My fist punctuated the order by stamping it knuckle-first into her throat. She froze in a silent scream as her own magic flowed back against her. I marveled at the newly learned consequence to failing to finish an incantation. Pride welled within me as I remembered how long of an incantation Lupe's spellsong was. She'd done that mid-fight without missing a word.

"Catch," Toby said.

He'd tossed me a grenade that I caught one-handedly. Weak as he was, it was hardly a difficult throw to receive. I looked at him with a faint sneer of boredom.

"Really?" I asked. "We've already established your attacks aren't working on me. There's none of your other teammate's music here to try and weaken my defenses. At best the only thing you did here was blow yourselves up."

"You talk too much," the doll girl said.

She'd raised a slip of formation paper in her remaining hand. Threw it against the ceiling where it stuck. Before flattening into the metal; merging with it. Then formed a hand-spell to activate the formation. The script illuminated before it fell around me in a circular curtain of repeating phonemes. I scanned the rivulets of script and parsed the formation's name, Tower of Sanctuary. My eyes met those doll-like ones as my confusion raised my question.

"For us," she said. "From you."

Then the grenade blew up. That one was my fault.

Trapped inside of the cylinder of force, the grenade's explosion could only flow downward. Which, for whatever reason, the trap didn't perfectly extend into the floor. A factor which saw Toby and the smaller girl leap into the air and cling to the elevator's interior. Toby's entity saw fit to conjure a rope to wrap around the girl in black to save her too. All I could do was cling to Mother's Last Smile as the explosion pushed down through the metal. Aided by my own weight falling through the absent floor while I clung to the glaive's shaft. It fell further.

I rotated the glaive so the unsharp inner curve of the blade's crescent hooked onto what remained of the elevator's metal. My nails drew blood as the veins of my arms bulged in a bid to hold on. The explosion and lightened weight caused the elevator to rocket upwards faster than its winch could handle. Something high above cracked as the entirety of the lift swung through the air like a flail.

We crashed into the interior of the shaft. Carved through the earth as the formations that constructed the elevator overrode the untreated earth between floors. Only for the wire cable to snap releasing us from any tether.

I wouldn't let my glaive—my mother—go even as all strength flagged within me. I'd gone beyond the range of Lupe's song. My vision dimmed as the lobby rotated end over end. Floor then ceiling then floor again. Crack. Everything was white. Another thing in me broke. Then I dropped from the pillar I'd smacked against down to the floor. It was cold.

Bloody coughs worked through my body splatter-painting the wooden floors. The pain screeched through my mind, skewering every thought. I rose again all the same. Clinging to my glaive through force of spirit and blazing will. Even without Lupe's spell to banish the shadows of injuries I knew lingered in my body, I wasn't going down into the dark. Not again. The flames flared again, not into a glorious uproar, but a temerous blaze that could only exist from knowing the shadows with which it denied.

The three members of the retrieval team crawled out of the remains of the elevator that had speared—upside down—into the center of the room. They rose to their feet with murder obviously upon the mind. A hunger to put down something that terrified them.

"I'm not that special," I said. "Maybe you all just suck?"

As a unit they marched toward me with weapons drawn. The girl in black had pulled out a katana while the smaller girl—now singularly armed—dragged a three-section staff behind her. Toby for his part leaned on a spear that had impaled a piece of debris he likely planned to beat me to death with. Despite their assembly and bitter determination they were no less ragged. My violence and the crash had pushed them to the brink. Was only a matter of what snapped first, their bodies or their minds.

"What are you?" the small armless girl asked.

"Told you," I said. "A princess."

"You died," she said.

"You're exaggerating."

"Any human would have."

"Guess I'm just built different," I said with a wink.

Toby said, "I can't wait to pull you apart and find out."

"No one's pulling anyone apart," Melissa bellowed.

Her voice boomed down from the darkened ceiling as she dropped like a meteor of garbage from the lunar palaces. The trio hurried backward and waved their weapons in front of themselves as if anything Real could hope to leave even a blemish on her scales.

"What's that?" the girl in black asked.

"My fiancee," I said.

"Ex," Melissa rumbled. "Now put your weapons down or I hose you with a potent neurotoxin that'll make you hallucinate so hard you rip your flesh from your bones."

"I'd like to see you try it," Toby said.

"You really don't," Lupe said.

From beyond my ex's chimeric form and my assembled enemies had landed Sphinx and Lupe. Catching sight of me, Lupe strummed her guitar. I felt my flames increase, banishing my sense of pain that barbed connector between body and spirit. My back straightened as I walked around Melissa to face down the three of them. If you counted Sphinx and I as one—which you always should with summoners—this fight was finally even. While I may have been beaten down to the Underside, so were they and my allies weren't.

"I have one amendment," I said. "I do want to tear them apart."

Melissa looked to me with the soft pain of betrayal in her eyes. I pressed my hand against her monstrous bulk.

"They crossed the line first. They killed Amber."

Even when she was in her chimeric form, there was a gentle humanness to how Melissa carried herself. Where despite the sharp fangs, envenomed claws, and reptilian eyes she'd still be just as likely to say, "oh shucks," if she dropped something. When she heard my news it evaporated. Her scales mutated into spikes of unyielding keratin while her maw opened. Super-acid drool dripped between her fangs bringing the wood to a sizzle as acid consumed organic matter. While her claws gouged the wood as she advanced on them.

"Much as I'd love to see you kill in my name, Princess…" Amber's voice called out.

She passed from beneath the world—through the curtains—with an effeminate boy's hair wound up within her fist. His steps stumbled into drags as their heights were too disparate. In one hand was a clutched flute while the other latched limply about his throat. Nestled just beneath the knife—Amber's knife—that had been thrust through his throat. Shiny blood beading around the imprecise and all too sharp plug.

"My death has been greatly exaggerated."

From how Toby and the girls looked, they were as surprised as me. The girl in black stomped her foot. Her voice high and nasally as she cried at the unfairness of it all.

"Don't any of you stay dead?" she asked.

"All of us would," I said, "if you weren't bad at fighting."

"Oh shut up, you believed we killed her too."

"Really, Temple?" Amber asked. "Were you driven mad in grief at my apparent demise?"

"She was," Toby said.

"Shut up, Toby," I said. "Amber, I was not ready to say goodbye. So they had to pay for taking what belonged to me."

"She belongs to you?" Melissa asked.

"Are you all in one polycule together?" Toby asked.

"Toby, shut up before I rip out your vocal cords with my second inner jaw," Melissa yelled.

Lupe laughed at everything. We'd come out on top, so why not laugh. So I joined in, and let my spirit clench and release in relief. Melissa's own laughter came out as a bassy purr that teased the bones. None of us died.

"You're going to go out there and give up," Amber said, "or I pull this knife from his neck and get to painting the floor."

Toby said, "You wouldn't kill him."

"Seeing as you all tried very hard to kill me," Amber said, "I might just slip."

She carefully took the knife between two fingers. Pulled it slowly from his neck. Beads of blood became red rivulets down his throat beneath his thick jacket.

"Shut up Toby," the smaller summoner said.

Amber stopped the knife.

Melissa said, "Amber, we won."

"We did, princess, so now I'm negotiating their surrender."

"We will. All of us.Just tell me, how'd you not die."

"Easy, I wasn't the one you 'killed'. Nahey, if you will," Amber said.

From an empty space in the room, another Amber—the wounded one with dead lips and skewered by swords—entered from between the curtains. A brightness returned to the mimic's eyes as it gave a polite parade leader wave at all of us, its audience. Then it fell apart. Collapsing like a tower of sand before becoming a flock of butterflies—Nahey.

The swords dispersed into stardust and nothingness. While the girl in black stumbled backward in complete terror. She leveled an accusatory finger at Amber.

"She's a liar," she screamed. "She'll kill us all."

"Wren, don't move."

"I'm not letting her touch me."

The girl in black—Wren—swiveled on her foot and ran off between the curtains. None of us were quick enough to stop her. Toby and the small girl looked to Amber and their friend on the edge of death—who by process of elimination was probably Shenshen. Amber scoffed and dropped him from her grip. Then stepped between the curtains herself.

They flitted into the world and back to that hidden place beneath. Their footsteps pounded on the balcony above us. We whirled around just in time to hear them pad across the clover lawn out front. I sprinted out the front door with Sphinx hot on my heels to see Amber drop from nearly twenty feet in the air. The last thing to appear being her hand as both her middle fingers had hooked into the girl's eyes like one would a bowling ball. Amber, however, treated her head more like a football as she launched her down into the ground.

It was likely because of the clover making the soil soft that she bounced back up. Amber by then had landed. Her foot extended toward the sky like an executioner's axe before she swung it down, catching the girl in the stomach with her heel. Sphinx crossed in front of me, a bulwark against the pressure wave that spread across the lawn shattering the glass of the facility's windows and the lamps above the its lawn.

My mouth fell into a scowl as I crossed around Sphinx to discover the crater that Amber and pushed Wren into—used her to create. Another knife was held in Amber's hand as she menaced questions into the air with its point.

"Out with it," she said. "Who trained you? The Holly Stars, the North-East Conservatory, or was it just some wandering improv junkie?"

"Amber," I said.

"Not now, Temple."

"Is this one of your secrets?"

"Maybe, but it's none of your business."

"Shame. You're still having this in front of me. Can't help but be my business."

Amber pushed her back. Calming her raspberry locs into an orderly formation. Shame that same calm did nothing to quench the flames in her eyes. A point in my favor then that I was already on fire, and that look which burned me only days ago could do nothing to me right now.

"Help," Wren said, "she'll kill me."

I sighed, "No she won't."

Amber looked about in search of some other woman named Amber. Then glanced at me with her eyebrow raised on stilts of incredulity.

"You aren't talking about me," she said. "I am going to kill her. Right after she tells me who taught her."

"You can get the info, but you're not killing her."

Amber said to Wren, "Stay here."

She drew a second knife from her storage-spell and tossed the two of them through Wren's hands, crucifying her against the earth. Amber kicked off the ground in one leap out of the crater. Met me there at its edge and towered over me. Her eyes an incinerator of problems.

"She's dying, Temple."

"Why?" I asked.

"I can't tell you that," she said.

"Sounds like trouble we don't want," Sphinx said.

"You know, only Temple's the cute one here."

"Still," I said, "you said if someone doesn't want to tell you it's trouble you don't want. So I don't want it. She lives."

"Temple—"

"Do you kill for me?" I asked.

The flame in Amber's eyes dimmed so she might actually see the steel of my own expression.

"Of course," she said, pushing bounce into her voice.

"Then I say, she's not in my way. Which means?"

"I can't kill her," Amber said. "Oh, is junior watching or something? Trying to be the moralist despite having already wracked up a body count yourself?"

"Heel, Amber."

My spirit flexed, unfurling more fire like a flag snapping in the wind. A pronouncement that illuminated the lawn in a small circle about us. Amber's eyes softened at the sight of my determination and the flame which wound about my body like a raiment. Her fire snuffed. Then a mirth and a sparkle lit up her eyes as a smile twisted across her face. Gooey like an overfilled bun being squeezed until death.

Amber moaned, "Maybe you're more of a top than I thought, Temple. Still, let's hope you can handle holding onto my leash."

She leaped over the lip of the crater. Slid down its side where Wren remained pinned. Amber snatched the veil from her face. Exerted a field-spell over it as she crumpled it between her fingers returning it to a cloud of ebon dust. She inhaled the dust. Smirked, and leaned back over Wren as she met her crying face.

"Hmph, the North-East Conservatory," she said. "Thought you were hiding something new. Could've saved yourself the trouble you idiot."

She cracked her foot against Wren's ribs. Then raised her hands in mock apology as she evacuated the crater to return to the building.

Once Sphinx and I had freed Wren—because Amber "forgot" to remove her knives—we'd set about binding the retrieval team using the binding suits that Amber apparently had in her storage-spell. They were like Undersuits—made of a repelling conweave—but not as bulky. Their tightness somewhere closer to a full-body straitjacket. While the repelling portion was internal rather than external so it could trap any magic used within the suit rather than letting any out—ironically, the reason why one could cast in an Undersuit but not risk suffering overexposure.

After we locked the zipper and clasps on Toby, Sphinx took the cable—also courtesy of Amber—into her mouth to fly and hang him from the rig we'd set up onto the many tall lamps illuminating the lawn. Shenshen and Wren were already hanging from their own. I had the fourth suit over my shoulder as I approached the smaller girl.

"I wouldn't put me in that if I were you," she said.

"It's a part of the terms of your surrender," I said. Amber had added more after Wren's attempt to flee.

"Yes," she said, "but I don't want to remove my seal from you without knowing for sure it won't kill you."

"Are we still on this?" I asked.

"I've never left it," she said. "You might think we 'suck,' but I passed the prelims. I'm not a bad summoner, and you're not that great of one either."

"And what does this have to do with worrying about if I'll die?"

"You don't know how Suppression works," she said. "Most of our seals target something specific. While our spells employ a form of Suppression on the subject. When I fight summoners I use the one seal I know can apply to all of them while I try to find a better fit."

"Which is?"

"Their humanity. When I incanted your death it should've Suppressed all your organ functions. Seeing as I watched you—albeit not fully—die, it worked. And I shoved the seal in as far as I could go."

"Lupe's song revived me. Stop trying to get out of wearing the suit."

She rose to her feet. "I'm the diva of the Goetic Enclave, a collective North of Moontower. Kid, I'm a Baron. My seals are tight enough to keep out a soldier's spellsong, and even if they weren't I can monitor what slips past easily. So trust me when I say, none of her magic touched your organs. Can you even feel them?"

My throat was dry. I pressed my hand over my heart as I made a mocking smile. Of course I—couldn't? There was no beat in my chest against my breast.

"Did you even notice that your musculature is visible in the flames right now?"

I examined my arm and saw the damascus pattern of my metal spirit flesh overlaid atop its corporeal counterpart. The fight was over and now was the time of mortal clarity.

"You're a tower of blocks right now," she said, "and we don't know which are load-bearing."

"You won't wear the suit then," I said.

I glanced to the rest of my team yelling for a secretary to show up. Toby was yelling with them.

I said to the diva, "Then why am I standing?"

"A mystery of magic," she said. "I'd love to find out, but far as I can tell the girl may not have worked open my seal but she unplugged something that brought up that power of yours. Or maybe I'm wrong. Hard to think when my brain is yelling that the arm—which I no longer have—is itchy."

The girl walked off yelling for a secretary as well. Eventually one showed up as we all remembered they were even present. Their outfit hidden beneath a black capelet with golden buttons embossed with the sun over the Brightgate's ancient bridge.

"Now that all parties are unanimous. Let's go over the forms."

A stack of papers materialized in their hands with a pen on top. Melissa loped over toward me where I loitered within the beam of light that stretched like a luminescent tongue from within the building.

"You okay?" she asked.

"You heard?"

"The 'diva of the Goetic Enclave' is kind of loud. Especially when you have super-hearing from mutating your ears to pick up a broader spectrum of sound at a farther distance."

"Fair enough. And, right now I don't know. I think I'll be fine, but it's why we need this damn secretary to show up. Once they formally give up we can go home and I'll get checked out. Besides, I'm not going anywhere until I get some well-earned praise."

"Hmph," she said. "My girlfriend or fiancee would get praise for nothing. I don't know about you."

"Please, I kept my promise. I didn't rush off and kill anyone. Technically, I even kept Amber from killing anyone. Everyone lived, can I at least get some praise for that?"

"Nadia, people should usually live."

Her ears—triangular as a junk's sails—swiveled.

"Usually, but don't. Please, I could kind of use a hug right now."

"No!"

My heart—if it was beating—would've skipped and shattered against the ground at her refusal. Instead my eyes only widened as she raced towards me. Her body morphing back into its chimeric form as fast as it could go. She leaped. Grasped my shoulders and turned me until her back was to the distant woods.

Plsssh. Eyes barely peeking over Melissa's pronounced trapezius, I saw the secretary's head blow apart like a bat taken to a melon. The retrieval team screamed. Lupe shouted. Amber pushed her back toward the building for cover.

Pwack! I felt a thud, but didn't burn with the pain of a new wound. Instead I felt the sudden weight of a chimeric Melissa slump against me. Sphinx tugged my shirt and helped me drag Melissa back inside as well.

Free from the doorway I laid her down on her front. She'd grown layered ceramic plates across her back like some mutated armadillo. They were shattered by a spider web of cracks around the sniper bullet that had gored her shoulder into a mess of churned meat.

"Amber, she's hit!"

 

[MxOberon]

"Temple you have to stop. Temple!" Amber said

I pawed through the meat in search of the bullet. My fingers parted Melissa's flesh like sand. The only thing on my mind was what'd happen if I didn't find it. I'd have to call her mom—who'd been my second mom for over a decade—and tell her what happened. Then I'd have to choose between finishing the exam or going home for the…for the…no. No, I was going to find the bullet and pull it out. Yank it free before death could take her. I wouldn't see another loved one step into that lightless place called death.

Amber slipped her arm under my chin, locked her hand in the crook of her other arm's elbow, and yanked me back. She normally wore such long jackets that I hadn't realized how muscular Amber was until those very same muscles exerted dominance on my carotid artery. She rolled onto her back. Slipped her legs between mine and locked them up using her own.

"Nadia, you're killing her!"

My hands unclenched letting meat and scales fall to the floor with a pitiful splorch. I rolled my eyes to their corners to meet Amber's face. She actually looked scared. For what? Of what? Me? I looked back to Melissa to find the Suppression summoner at her side. A rectangle of talismans creating an impromptu triage field.

"I'm fine," I whispered.

"Are you?" Amber asked.

"Yeah."

Her legs unwound from around mine. Muscles unflexed as she slowly released me from the full-body submission hold she'd had me in. I rolled onto my knees. Took in the scales, muscle, and blood that I'd scattered all around us in my mad search.

"Will she be fine?" I asked.

"Only if you stay back," the small girl said. "Those flames of yours had you tearing her transformation apart like paper. You even being this close is messing up my work. Not like the anxiety of a sniper freely roaming makes me feel any better."

I only had eyes for Melissa. They'd propped her upper body up using a rolled up binding suit like a wedge pillow. The kind Melissa and I would use when we'd be together. I dragged my nails across my arms in worry. My skin broke in a ragged stop-and-start line of a wound. It was the pain that dragged my memories out, spinning them up like one of dad's old vinyls.

Melissa had taken a bullet for me. Her ears had turned moments—maybe an age to her—before the bullet had struck. She'd wrapped her arms around me to move me. Hug me. Was this going to be our last hug? I wanted to hold her hand. Hold her and say it'd all be alright. That I'd make sure none of us died. As if I was a god.

A bitter laugh bubbled past my lips. We were here because even gods didn't get to delay death. I pulled up my knees and buried my forehead against them. Begged for purpose so I could do anything other than watch someone I loved die.

"Nadia," Melissa moaned.

My head snapped up. "Yes? I'm here."

Her hand groped about in the air for something—me?—so I took it between my own.

"What'd I say about touching her?" the girl asked.

"It's fine," Melissa said. "I just have one request."

"Anything," I said.

"Save the other three," she said.

"Why?" I asked. They'd tried to kill Amber after all. Melissa needed me here.

"Already surrendered," she said. "No need to die."

Her grip was growing faint. If I'd looked anywhere but her eyes—half-lidded and duller than I'd ever seen—I would've noticed the way her scales sloughed from her body. How her muscles unspooled, provoking ripples beneath the skin. My touch was undoing everything. Killing her.

I tried to let go, but she gripped harder. Hacked up a clotted ball of blood with a shred of copper sunshine hidden within—the bullet. Then opened her eyes that sparkled alongside her smile. Even befanged, she had a caring smile that moved me as much as threats of her tears did.

"I took a bullet for you, Nadia," she said. "You owe me."

Winked. Then her other lid fell. Eyes shut she slumped. Her hand slid from mine like a leaf from a pool that'd filled past its edge. I nodded to no one. Grabbed my glaive and fished the bullet out of the blood clot. Took a breath using it to help me stand. Sphinx rose with me as we made for the door. I glanced to Lupe whose head was turned toward the door, but who I knew saw everything that'd transpired. Even if it was only as shining shadows.

"Play me off?" I asked.

Lupe stood and grasped the neck of her guitar. "Now's not the time for innuendos. It doesn't matter how hard I play if you get domed by some guy hiding out miles away."

"I'm dealing with him," I said.

Then set my eyes on the tie of fate between this bullet and the sniper's gun. It was a multi-thread chord of Mystery and something darkly primal alongside that familiar strand of Bloodlust. Through the Omensight I followed this braid like a merry road out the door, through the air, into the trees on the nearby hill, and onto a platform where a man in a thick jacket sat back in an unadorned chair. Within his grip was no ordinary sniper rifle. It was segmented like a lobster's tail held up by adjustable legs that ended in three toes in a Y-shape. Six eyes black as an unlit tunnel lined the sides of the barrel. While the man's eye was magnified by the sight attached to its back.

"Found you," I whispered.

Back where my body was within the ERO facility, I flicked the bullet into the air. Sphinx gave it a glance as she tossed a coin-sized amount of chalcedony fire at it. It burnt through the bullet and disappeared into the air—not gone, but traveling. Seeking. Racing down that murderous braid all the way back to the man who pulled the trigger.

Whatever assassin's trance he was in caused him to be unaware of himself. The double-edged nature of hiding within Mystery so that no one, not even yourself, could find you. It was with absolute focus and determination to land this next shot that caused him to make no noise as he burnt to death. As I pulled back my Omensight, I shook my head at the ties of fate that burnt away with him. Leaving him unable to be mourned or missed. Just another face forever embedded within my mind to suffer the torments of how I decided they'd be remembered.

"He's dead," I said.

Lupe asked, "Who is?"

"Exactly. Now, play me off. Time to go rescue the others."

"I'll do you one better," Lupe said. "I'll be your accompaniment."

"Amber," I said, "kill anyone who tries to touch Melissa or…what's your name?"

"Ina," the Suppression user said, dryly. "Thanks for saving them."

"Save her, and no thanks necessary."

Amber drew a rapier from her storage-spell. Its guard was gate-iron black twisted into gothic swirls of rose stems. The blade itself was a glistening obsidian thing whose serrations could only be seen from how the light caught the edge. Overall, the implement burned bright as floodlights under the Omensight—a Conceptual weapon, and a strong one at that.

"Don't make me worry," she said.

Then Lupe, Sphinx, and myself walked back into the night. We were only a few steps from the building—Toby, Shenshen, and Wren only a few yards away—when a familiar darkness fell over us. Our targets and even the way back imperceivable in that watery black. Lupe named its source before I could.

"Lurkers," she said. "They're—"

"Bonded to Abyss, I've been acquainted," I said. "Sphinx, cover Lupe."

"I can push this back easy."

"Maybe, but I need you to play for me. Unless you're willing to bring your entity out to cover the other one."

She frowned at the suggestion—we all had aces to hide—then acquiesced to my plan. Sphinx stretched out her wings filling the feathers with the fate-bending light of an Inviolate Star. Her range covered Lupe who quickly began to let more of herself fall into a musician's trance. The world distilled into six strings and twenty-seven frets.

Her pace was slow through the dark which Sphinx matched so Lupe would be closest to the centerpoint of its power. I circled them as I enforced the bubble's perimeter in wait of anything that'd come rushing from the darkness or the slightest hint that the pseudo field-spell that'd fallen over us might decide to manipulate local pressure rather than just consign us to blindness.

The moments melted into minutes which stretched across my mind like hours. Questions rustling my senses in false alarms. Would the first attack be from our twelve o'clock? Maybe our three and ten? What if there was no one because they'd slipped around us, and were charging into the building to kill everyone? Amber was good, but just a Baron—if they had the numbers…

"Nadia," Sphinx hissed.

I dropped to a crouch as a metal cudgel whistled overhead. Its wielder, a muscular woman with a Tyrants' crown dripping lava down her face into a warlord's mask—scowling with distaste. From the side a humanoid entity of walking chainmail thrust out to catch me in the side with a sword. The woman was one of the rarer combat strategies, a berserker. Loaded up with boost-spells so her and her entity could charge at you at once to catch you off guard. In some ways a great strategy just not against me.

"Godtime," I incanted, to Sphinx's surprise.

It was the first time I ever spoke the language of entities to cast a spell of Revelation. Vibrating the spirit fibers in my throat to put to speech every complex bit of Sorcery that made spells like Godtime possible. Looking back, I'd seen enough incantations that day—even did some despite knowing how really—so in that instant where a hand was too slow to raise and point at my target, well, speech was fast enough and Lupe a good listener.

"Excellent diction," Sphinx said.

The woman and her entity stilled to the most imperceptible crawl. I rose back up and politely cut off her head. Unbonded by her death, the chainmail figure collapsed into instantly rusting rings before discorporating. Lupe had slowed her playing. Missed a note as the head bounced against the ground. Notable—the missing note—only from how my flame briefly guttered.

"She wasn't a Lurker," Lupe said.

"Nope," I said, "but she decided to throw her lot in with them."

"Then she's worse. Let's keep moving."

We walked like that under the Godtime. Each person Lupe became aware of fell under its effects. The spell's efficacy unhindered due to how it affected targets directly rather than exist spatially and thus challenge the field-spell's dominance—a challenge even the Inviolate Star's light barely made by diverting its effects versus outright combating them in some attempt to break the field-spell's hold.

Lupe stopped missing notes after I decapitated the third person we met. They were baby-faced with gentle eyes that didn't match the sinuous serpentine neck that lashed out from the shadows in a bid to plunge their envenomed fangs into my shoulder. They'd gotten close enough that the overripe scent of rotten meat in summertime had clogged my nostrils and throat. The Godtime's stickiness was losing its touch.

"Let the spell go," Sphinx said.

"No. It's the best way to keep us safe."

"Revelation is not safety nor is it drawn out. You make her a poor target for later use if you spill all her moments over one night."

"If we die then there won't be moments to use anyways."

"Nadia," Lupe said, "save your strength for more important spells."

I let out a breath and felt it erase the Godtime from the air. Listened to the way boots sucked into mud before kissing out with disgusting pops. I danced in front of my girls. Two men, one woman, surfaced from the dark. Sighted, their hands rose to shape spells. Under the Omensight I read the Courts that wove themselves around the signs: Cultivation, Glory, Instruction.

They looked like they had a plan, but I didn't care. Mother's Last Smile darted forward while I leaped to meet them. All three slipped against the dew-slick clover underfoot in surprise at the blood-painted face which met their charge bearing bright teeth. Their spells were useless as my glaive skewered their brains in the opposite order from which I read their Courts.

It was two feet past their corpses that we found Shenshen, Toby, and Wren. They were untouched and dangling just like we'd left them. I split infinity three times to flourish three quick needles of chalcedony fire severing the cords by which we'd hung them.

"Come on, we're going back inside," I said.

"Oh no," Wren said.

"Wren," Toby said, "let's go."

"You can go back to her. Not me. I'm running."

"Why are you so afraid of Amber?" I asked.

Wren shook her head. "She's the nightmare of every summoner bonded to Masks, the Star Killer. Alls below, she's why I left the East and risked crossing the Black Vein. She's death."

A terror came over Wren as she stared into the past at a tragedy she didn't care to name. Then bolted, her hands still cuffed behind her, and disappeared into the darkness. I heard the loathsome crack of gunfire and a thud of a life wasted to escape a death she thought she'd caught ahead of its chance to reach her. The rest of us retreated in a mad scramble.

"Jump in six steps," Toby called out.

Six more steps from the safety of the facility was a bulwark of corpses. Their flesh melted into a quilt of tones and tattoos atop liquid muscle and shifting bones. Some had slipped around Lupe and I—from the height of the wall and its width, more than some—only to meet Amber waiting for them. Her face was cold and pristine as all the blood flowed away from the facility's lobby.

Everyone jumped the barrier to get back inside. I stopped and turned. I'd fulfilled Melissa's request, but had failed to sate my own growing desire to stack up more heads. Kill enough of these people until I felt that I'd balanced my own pre-weighted scales. I clenched my glaive and ground the toe box of my shoe into the dirt. Readied to dive back into the dark…

"Did Nadia make it?" Melissa asked.

Her voice sounded better—stronger. Good enough to worry about me, again. I loosened my grip and turned away from the foes I knew had to be lurking in the umbra. There'd be other times to chase, but I wouldn't make Melissa worry. I hopped the bulwark and entered the building. Avoided Amber's foxish grin and rosy ember eyes that applauded my decision making.

Freed up from healing Melissa, Ina directed Shenshen and Toby to close the door. Then tossed talismans at the frame's corners and one that bridged both doors. A pane of amber-hued force winked into existence to present another obstacle if our attackers wished to siege the place. As she did that I crossed the lobby to Melissa. Arms wide to embrace her. Sphinx caught the hem of my shirt as I was mid-step.

"Sphinx, let go."

"No," she mumbled over the clothing. "The maiden is sealed into health. Not fixed."

"Ina, you said you'd save her," I said

"I did. Used my best talismans to Suppress everything from hemorrhagic shock to the slightest hint of an infection," Ina said, "but that doesn't mean she's healed. Suppression doesn't fix things. Just bury them. It's the Caverns in us."

"So no hugs until we get to a hospital," Amber said.

I crossed my arms in a poor bid to hug myself whole. Lip quivering as I refused to let my eyes drift from Melissa's face as if some force might blow her away if I don't look. Shenshen and Toby helped each other out of the binding suits.

Toby, fiddling with his answers and the scope of his worries, asked, "Not that I'm unhappy about being saved, but are we just waiting here to die? Is anyone coming to rescue us?"

"Good question," Amber said.

She pulled a sorc-deck from her pocket. The device was wrapped in a leather fold-out case with an embossed insignia of the regional Lodge headquarters.

"Where'd you get that?" Shenshen asked, his voice a raspy whistle.

"The secretary's corpse. Pocketed it as they fell."

"Unbelievable," Ina said. "No wonder Wren was scared of you. Speaking of, where is she?"

"She tried her luck elsewhere," Shenshen said.

Toby added, "Said Amber was a star killer or something. A big deal to Mask summoners."

I snuck a glance at Amber in the hopes there'd be some tell or tick that'd draw back the blinds on who she was and what she'd done. Though if the accusation meant anything to her it passed her by without notice or comment. Rather she focused on the sorc-deck in hand. Mimed a flurry of hand-spells before the device flashed on. A screen projection cutting up into the air.

"Then she's twice scorned the boat. Not my problem then," Ina said. "Anything on the deck?"

Amber's thumb slid across the screen as she swapped through different screen projections. I walk over to peer at the projection myself—a contact sheet. Amber selects an entry, Test 1 Proctor, and calls. A pleasant tone bobs in the air for a moment. Then a sucking noise that leveled out—he picked up.

"Secretary SW#430, any insights on the attack?" he asked.

"They're disposed currently," Amber said.

"How'd you break into the deck, it's encrypted."

"Eh, through Caverns, so not too difficult. Anyways, what's the Lodge's plan for examinees during this attack?" she asked.

"Are you sending any rescue teams?" Toby asked.

"Alls below, no. We're thin enough as is discerning real attacks from fake ones."

Lupe said, "It was pretty real when the secretary's head exploded."

A silence. "Noted."

"What if we get ourselves out?" I asked. "Anything the Lodge will do then?"

"If you get yourselves out the Lodge will handle any injuries incurred whether it be during your escape or from the exam itself. Comes with the probationary badge. Now, who's in charge?"

Amber pulled me close in a side hug. "That'd be Temple here. Nadia Temple, she's in charge."

"Perfect. We have your deck number on file—"

"How?" I asked. "I synced with the city."

"We have it on file," he said. "I'll send you the address of a few Lodge sponsored hospitals outside and within the district. Good luck," he said.

My own deck chimed next to me. I looked around in surprise, noting that I'd left it in my bag which was back on the fourth floor—third sub-basement technically. Only to see it and my deck within the hands of Nahey currently in the form of me. The map was already up on my deck with a display illustrating our position at the edge of the city, and the few roads that wound back into Brightgate proper.

"Appreciated," I said.

She curtsied—used my body to curtsy—before collapsing into a cloud of butterflies again that flitted off between the curtains of the world. I shrugged my bag back on, and rubbed my sleeves against my face to mop up any blood that'd yet to dry. Seeing how coated I was, or at least how coated Nahey made me think I was, had planted a seed of self-consciousness.

I turned back to Amber just in time to see the late secretary's sorc-deck discorporate into fading spheres of light—just like how Secretary, my secretary, would handle documents and other items. Toby whistled at the impressiveness.

"Some kind of kill switch," he said.

Amber said, "A kill switch would just brick it. This is more like a cord they're yanking on to bring it back home. Shame, would've been nice to keep a backdoor into the Secretary's files."

"So, leader," Ina said to me, "how are we getting out of here?"

"I'm not actually the leader, am I?"

"The other Baron here doesn't want it, and neither do I. I'm basically tapped holding onto seals so I don't bleed out from my missing limb, so your fiancee—"

"Ex," Melissa said.

"Doesn't die. I have to maintain yours, and the one on Shenshen. I'm done thinking."

I run a hand through my hair as I look at Melissa—she's standing but not transforming anytime soon. Then to Lupe—who was fixed on keeping a few notes floating my way to help keep my own Inviolate Star burning. Shenshen and Toby were obviously out. Which left me, the only person who knew the competencies of everyone here.

"Revelation oft shines a way, Nadia. So sparkle," Sphinx said.

"Okay," I said. "Um, Toby can you only make weapons?"

"I can make anything really long as it already exists or existed."

"Great, Shenshen, any chance you can play your flute?"

"No," he said, "but my dire wolf can still cast spells."

"Putting together a plan, Temple?"

"Maybe. It'll be dangerous, maybe lethal, and arguably it's a horrible idea for a bunch of injured people to undertake."

"What's the plan?" Melissa asked.

"Well, it all comes down to you Toby," I said. "Any chance you can drive?"

A smile spread on his face like butter on a skillet.

* * *​

It was a horrible plan, I'll say that immediately, but I was tired. We all were tired, and none of us had the energy—physical or mental—to make a literal run for it. It didn't help that we were long past when the cable cars ceased operation for the night. Our only avenue remaining was by car. Normal wheelbound car. Which was why the plan was bad—Brightgate wasn't a city made for wheeled cars, not since the Old World maybe. Even out here at its frayed municipal edge that truth held true. It was also true though that some things didn't travel well by cable car, and only a truck or van would do. So there weren't many roads to take, and thus not many that had to be blocked to keep us from escaping. The car could get us back to town in time, but we'd have to get through one last fight to escape.

To give us the best odds I'd laid our roles out like so: Toby would make the car and drive. It'd also be on him to do any on the fly maintenance. Ina was to apply some of her talismans to the vehicle to give it extra durability. While Sphinx would lay atop the roof to put the whole thing under the cover of an Inviolate Star. Next to her went the dire wolf, according to Shenshen it'd need the wind to blow through its holes to cast the Sleep spell so we could get extra cover. Melissa was laid up in the backseat as she needed to rest. While Lupe sat back there to keep an extra eye on Melissa, and be close enough to me so I could hear her playing. While Amber rode shotgun with Toby to help keep him from being killed thus losing us our ride.

"What about you?" Ina asked.

Everyone had already piled into the car—it was a thuggish bestial vehicle with a front face that looked ready to consume limb and life of the people we'd likely be running over soon. I stood on my toes to peek in through the windows. There wasn't room.

"Toby, why isn't there space for me?" I asked.

"Well…" he trailed off.

"The flames, Temple," Amber said. "You'd burn through the car if we let you inside."

"If you try to abandon me I'm killing all of you," I said.

"I'd never," Amber said. "You're just going to have to ride with us rather than inside."

"How?" I asked.

"Nahey," Amber said.

Nahey emerged from behind the curtains and dropped a cord—similar to what we used to tie up Shenshen and Toby—alongside a pair of rollerblades. I looked back to everyone who were all failing to hide their amusement.

"I rescued you," I said.

"And for that, this plan is possible," Toby said. "Now, uh, hurry and hitch yourself to the back."

"Think of it as a chariot," Sphinx said.

Her encouragement broke the social seal on their laughter. I rolled my eyes unwilling to kill the mood. We had enemies outside ready to do that for us. Once the rollerblades were strapped on and the cable secured around the back of the conjured car and my waist, it was time.

"Dropping the talismans," Ina called out.

Snapped her fingers triggering the self-destruction of the talismans attached to the door. The pane of shimmering force dissipated in one last downward flow before it was gone.

"You in the ready position?" Toby asked.

I said, "Alls below, shut up and drive Toby!"

"You're the boss."

I could hear his foot stomp the pedal. Then the car, because its purpose was to go, went. Fast as an entity freed from a binding trap it surged forward slamming its vehicular bulk into the front doors. They never had a chance at holding back the beast Toby had designed. The doors tore from their frame and crashed down atop an unlucky summoner who'd stepped forward to examine the doors. His voice was a wet squeal before the wheels churned it into the sound of a thick stew ladled into a bowl.

The cord attaching me to the cord snapped taut with a twang to rival Lupe's strings. I knelt low to firm up my balance as my rollerblades skipped to the fastest rotational speed possible. Skimming me across the wood of the lobby and over one of the collapsed doors. My first view of things since we'd rescued Shenshen and Toby, I wasn't surprised to see the field-spell had fallen. There'd been no need to blind their own forces without an enemy for them to ambush. On one hand, a victory for us, but on the other it meant that their forces could see us perfectly and there were a lot of them.

Beyond the bodies strewn across the lawn courtesy me and my glaive, there were at least thirty summoners waiting for us. Behind them was a motley assortment of entities humanoid, bestial, and altogether strange. Unlike the ones that dared the dark, these were hardened professionals who knew patience and whose Sorcery leaped to hand with a quickness.

Spells splashed against the Inviolate Star's light before diverting across the surface into auroras of their component Principles. Those stronger than a soldier still skimmed the edge before blasting into the distance. While a non-negligible amount speared straight toward the car.

"We're down four plates on the face," Ina said.

"How many deep?" I asked.

"Two."

Despite the warning of our depreciating defenses, Toby drove the car straight as a battering ram. The summoners arrayed against us fled to the sides to escape being run over. A few were too slow and forced me to leap over their popped carcasses. With a hop I turned backward, faced the summoners to our rear and formed the sign of a Fivefold Atomic Glory. Held it.

"Lupe," I yelled.

Her response was the fanning of my flames. They flared high leaving a long tail before me, and I let the strength her magic afforded me seep into the spell I'd held at the edge of release. My hands glowed the hot pale color of chalcedony—and then I let go birthing the star of my vengeance for what they'd done to Melissa.

I arced it up through the air. Watched as my blazing fledgling star grew and grew like the conflagratory snowball it was. Before it passed its apex and descended hard as a judge's gavel. When it landed it bloomed into a flaming camellia that consumed most of the survivors of our great escape. I watched as my spell brought day to night until night returned again.

Another hop and I was back to facing the car. We raced down the small hill into a valley between two larger ones. Immediately we were beset upon by thick beams of Cathartic lightning. Unwilling to chance our defenses, Toby swerved around them the best he could which meant I swerved all over the road in great sweeping arcs.

Ina cried out, "Passenger and driver side plates are down two deep. One layer left for each."

Amber leaned out of the window. Sat herself inside of it as she formed a hand-sign I'd not seen before. Immediately phantasmal mimics of the car and myself peeled away from the central body like notes on a stack.

"Shenshen, tell your wolf he's up," I said.

Acting in accordance to his bondmate's unspoken command, the dire wolf leaned up into a sitting position and let the wind slip through the holes in its body. Chilling aeolian tones streamed behind us becoming a localized blizzard obscuring the car. Our mimics acted in accordance at the same time. We were a rapid cold front that raced through the valley.

Amber then reached into her storage-spell and pulled out a matte black device long as a desk. It was rectangular, and Amber fed what looked like a dark metal rod into the top of it. She closed the device up, grabbed a bar on the side of the thing, and yanked it back with a click before resetting its position two-thirds up on its length. It was with that bar she held it in one hand while the other held normal grip and trigger.

"What is that?" I asked even as the rushing wind stole my words as they left my mouth.

"Sight me, Temple," Amber said.

There was no joke or follow-up from her. Just the command of one warrior to another. I had to wait for another beam of lightning to crash into a nearby mimic—Catharsis was brief in all aspects even the remnants of fate left behind were quick to dissolve. As it burst apart I used the Omensight to trace the spell back to the source. It stretched up and up into the sky toward a solitary black cloud that hid nothing from me. There, atop a bird with luminescent wings still fading from their last blast was our target—a fellow dog, a traitor. I pointed him out cheerfully.

She pulled the trigger. Electricity cracked near the mouth of the gun—if you could call it that—as the rod propelled up toward the sky. Blew apart the cloud. Turned the traitor and his entity into rings of flesh that quickly dispersed into raining clumps of corpse. Amber slid the weapon back into her storage-spell with all the pomp and circumstance you'd have when returning a broom back to a supply closet.

"Why do you have that?" I asked with a fragile reverence.

"I'm a bit of a hoarder, Temple," Amber said. "Never know what you'll need until you need it. Besides, who doesn't like to have a deep toybox?"

Amber pushed herself back into her seat leaving me alone to still consider the donutified cloud that her "toy" had made. I knew I hadn't seen everything the world held—I was eighteen from a moderate sized town, how could I—but there was something in me that said I wouldn't see anything like it again. At least, not on this side of the Changeover.

We soon cleared the valley. Cheered as the city's skyline swallowed the horizon denoting just how close we were to safety. There were no more attacks. No more hidden traps. We were clear, and so I had us activate the last part of the plan.

"Hit it, Toby," I said.

I hopped, twisted, to watch. Far beyond the valley, up the hill we'd descended, and through those broken doors we'd left a present. All because Melissa asked a question.

* * *​

"What happens to the test for us? It's technically our job to protect everything in this place."

I'd said, "Technically the test was for us to keep these guys from retrieving anything. We passed."

"Is it that simple?" she asked.

No one had an answer for that.

"What if we make it so no one can take anything?" Lupe asked.

Amber answered by producing a bomb from her storage-spell—a deep toybox indeed.

* * *​

It wasn't instant—the button press to the explosion. Whatever process it took left us on the edge of anticipation. Ina was the first to give up.

"Are you sure that bomb was a dud—"

The pressure wave from the bomb caught up to her before she could finish airing doubts to its magnificence. It violently tore at my hair, swung from rib to rib disturbing my organs as if I was struck by Toby's maul ten times by ten times. Blood forced its way out my mouth into a beautiful spray. Then we saw it—that glorious tower of fiery blossoms that billowed up like so many baking muffins. Fwoomsh, fwoomsh, fwoomsh, they went. Crowned atop it all with a black smoke regalia that dispersed into the sky. I was sure we'd passed the test.

From there the rest of the way into the city was nothing but stretched out silence. Despite our commotion, Brightgate was sleeping and surrounded by numerous temples stretching potent wards across the city to keep it safe. Though put another way, the fight we'd had—the fight all the examinees were likely going through nearby and elsewhere—were the very fights that allowed for those wards to go largely unstrained.

Amber read the map instructions off my sorc-deck, and it wasn't long before we'd pulled into a Lodge sponsored hospital on the edge of town. The nurses at the frontdesk were quick to pull us inside as they'd been notified by the proctor that Lodge members would likely be showing up. Each of us was strapped to a gurney, but I had to wait as they pushed tubes and placed electrodes against my skin. Ina had let them know my situation, so it was only after all life support tech was inserted that I could finally relinquish the Inviolate Star which blazed within me. While I wouldn't tell Amber this, I was happy for the rollerblades. The darkness that descended on me was sudden and I'd lost the ability to walk miles back up the road.

I don't know how long I was out for, but I do remember what I woke up to. Bright sun that dappled across my skin due to the tree near my window. Sphinx, shrunken to the size of a child's plushie—or a small dog really—with a soft slightly-pudgy face to match. While in a chair at the side of my bed was a suit-and-skirt wearing secretary with a large sorc-deck in hand.

"First, let me congratulate you on reaching Baron," they said. "Now, you have forms to sign."

 

[MxOberon]

My mouth worked through a series of shapes as I processed the statement. Looked down at Sphinx, and doubted every word that the secretary had said. They read my disbelief as it was cyclopean in its enormity. Tapped at their sorc-deck to project my medical chart before me. The 'patient template' already applied with its attendant highlighting and sidebar explanations.

"You're not a true Baron, no, but the tests conducted show that you're well within the range to be one if you so choose."

I read, "'Mass coefficient, two-hundred-and-fifty-five. Density, two-hundred-and-thirty-nine."

"See, well within the range and if I might hazard, they've likely been there for some time now," the secretary said. "You could attempt the graduation trial right now if you wanted. Of course the entity you're after to replace your current one would affect the specific risk factors."

I looked down to find I'd been petting Sphinx since I'd woken up. My fingers running through her raven black hair—calming me as much as comforting her. The idea that graduating would mean replacing her was a rancid thick grease in my throat. Even the verb used, "replacing," as if it was the most casual thing in the world—some part of me knew that it should've been.

"No, I'm in no rush to graduate." The admission was a surprise to me as much as it was to the secretary. Lodgemembers were supposed to be the reckless type. Graduating faster than even summoners from the collectives tended to do.

"Even so, if you change your mind please attempt all trials in the graduation chambers we have on-site. They're completely free to use."

"Why have chambers at all?"

"Sometimes the last refuge for survival is only reached through graduation," they said. "The benefits are high enough to justify making on-site chambers for the inevitable failures that always occur."

After I nodded, the secretary returned the sorc-deck to the forms that'd graced my return to consciousness only moments ago. They were release forms for my medical information to be stored in the restricted sections of the Public Record.

"I'm sorry," I said. "This is the first time I've been to a hospital by myself. I never got sick much, and my parents normally dealt with all this."

They glanced at the clock in the room and sighed. I was keeping them from something I gathered. Maybe another patient or form that needed filling and filing. Dealing with one girl's first brush with New World healthcare as an adult was probably the job they hated the least. Though when I followed their glance I noted that it was twelve thirty p.m.—lunch. Their stomach growled in a dull admission of where their mind was already at.

"Quick plan comparison then. Sign the release, and the information is on the restricted section of the Public Record's medical corpus. Anyone trying to access it would need to be a fully vetted member of a medical group held in good standing with O.P.R."

The Officiators of the Public Record, the people who made it their holy mission to uphold a free-flow of information throughout the world. They were why anyone, no matter how disconnected from society, could walk into any random city, village, or town willing to let them use a sorc-deck and go from knowing nothing about entities to being fully capable of summoning and binding one from a number of Courts. Supposedly in the spirit of how the first poster released the Herald's End grimoire on an Old Net forum revealing summoning's existence.

From there it was just O.P.R. fighting the good fight in making sure collectives and cults—even the universities who were never that innocent, in the New World or the Old—could monopolize too much information. They were even headed by a Godtender that defended them and just sat in the NewNet to prevent anyone from destroying or defacing the information inside. Though going by Dad, godtenders weren't infallible or always honest.

"They may just be people, but they're why we were able to treat your mutant friend. In fact, if your information is there, any hospital capable of tithing to O.P.R.—and even a few who can't—will be able to bring up your history and immediately treat you."

"That's a plus side," I said.

"Never know where your duties as a Lodgemember might send you."

"And if I don't sign?"

They swiped the sorc-deck bringing up a different document. "Then you pay in tokens."

"Three royal tokens," I said, eyes bulging. "Was I that fucked up?"

"No and yes. No, because full body organ failure over an hour long period is rather trivial to repair with the right Courts on hand. The real issue was that you required a team of at least three Viscounts to treat you."

"Viscounts," I said, the word soft and unreal as a bubble on my tongue.

"We were forced to activate more than a few of our auxiliary formations to keep about thirty patients in three layers of medical stasis. That takes a lot of power."

"So I pay in information or pay in energy."

"Think of it as paying for the wounded soul that comes after you," they said. "Whether it's sorcerous technology or simple information, it takes a lot to save a life. Though if you aren't the charitable sort maybe you'll find a surprise. More than a few genealogical groups have access to the same information. Maybe you'll find an aunt you don't know about."

Or a mother that didn't know my dad was dead and his entity—the mom who raised me—kicked out of reality. Even the idea of finding an aunt would be amazing. Though if Dad was City Killer, the only City Killer, then it'd be more likely I'd get connected with some distant cousin. Did his side of the family know what he was? That was what moved me to sign the release form. All my information up on the NewNet, restricted or otherwise, for anyone to find. I hoped someone would find me.

"Have a good day then, Nadia," the secretary said. "If you plan on undertaking any more dangerous actions do let me know, so I can have a proper team and bet in place."

"Of course."

Their need for professionalism packed away, the secretary scurried from the room in pursuit of whatever decadent meal was waiting in the cafeteria going by the scent. Amber, Melissa, and Ina entered the room.

"Don't look so happy to see me," Ina declared. Her voice a murder weapon dripping in sarcasm.

I said, "Just surprised. What'd they replace your arm with?"

"Brilliance and Cultivation largely," she said. "Though Mel helped connect it all with Mutation."

"Mel?" I asked.

Melissa nudged Ina—playfully—before gracing me one of her spirit soothing smiles.

"I was the first to be fixed up—"

Amber interjected, "Technically, I was the first."

"You had nothing that needed to be fixed," Melissa said.

"Love it when you compliment me, princess."

Ina side-eyed Amber like she was some temerous party crasher for the banter. Which, by how her eyes sparked to life just saying Melissa's nickname—a life I would've otherwise guessed Ina was born without, Amber was. On her part, Amber ignored the glare and settled into a chair by the window letting the light play across her melanin until she took on a bright radiance that complimented the summer-y raspberry of her locs.

Melissa said, "Anyways, after I was cleared I saw Ina moping because prosthetics aren't really something Suppression can make on its own."

Ina added, "And Suppression unfortunately is pretty common, so we don't get rarity incentives on our phonemes when valuing our tokens."

"So, I decided to help her out. She was the one with the actual plans."

"Melissa had the know-how to make a rather foolish dream possible."

"Afterwards, we just grabbed a few doctors and…"

"Banged it out," Ina finished.

Ina held up their new arm like a trophy. It was a faded gold-leaf yellow on the outer arm with a more faded tan-yellow for the inner. Entire thing spotted with lapis rings. Tiny suckers marked out the sections of her hand. It was a tentacle mimicking the shape of a human hand. She curled her fingers backwards one by one into tight rolls with glee before unfurling them to close into a proper fist. A human hand with none of the downsides.

"The damn thing even produces Underink," she said. "No more paper costs."

Flourished in the air with her finger tracing a quick formation in the air. With an unseen twist of her spirit the formation hardened as a thin slice of air—the troposphere—became a talisman. She tossed it like mom would knives at the knife throwing booths during festivals. It sunk into the window before Suppressing some hidden aspect of itself before opening.

"That's great," I said, the words needing to be dredged up from within me. Hopeful that Melissa knew I meant the arm—it was legitimately a great piece of work—and less the hint of an idea that her and Ina of all people banged it out.

The sound of an active Brightgate stumbled over itself in a muddled discordance to enter the room. Riding the noise like a wave, however, was an elegant song being sung. Though it was voiced with Real words I could still hear its echoes in my spirit. From black bolts Tomorrow is sewn, and Freedom known as we once knew.

Sphinx stirred in my lap as she also recalled the song. Though hers was a more frantic twitching that paired with fear rather than the tune's emboldening themes. In fairness we had encountered the song from different perspectives and contexts.

I gently scratched her scalp stilling her twitching leg. Her eyes fluttered in worry until they opened to find my smile—and ideally concealed sorrow—ready to greet her. Her mouth stretched open in a yawn.

"What happened to 'entities don't sleep'?" I asked.

Sphinx's smile curled playfully. "We don't. I was in dormancy."

I looked to my friends—and Ina—for an answer. Amber smirked around the information. Then pulled a bottle of some amber-hued whiskey from her storage-spell alongside a stunning crystal tumbler that bounced the light up into the drink. The whole thing visually aflame as Amber took a sip. Then glanced to Ina pitifully.

"Hmm, would've thought you'd know what with being the 'diva of the Goetic Enclave.'"

Mentally I clenched my fist in a victory that wasn't mine but one I'd claim. Ina stewed in annoyance at Amber while Melissa only rolled her eyes unaware that she was the territory dispute between the two of them.

"There, you've made fun of someone. Can we get an answer?" Melissa asked.

"If the price has been paid—sorry it was you, Ina—then I will." Amber assumed her professorially affectation—I hadn't heard it since I'd chased after the lindwurm.

"Dormancy, or the thanatonic sleep as some know it by, is the state in which entities attempt to preserve their hold within Realspace by ceasing function of any ego dominant actions or sorcerous operations," Amber shifted back into her avuncular rhythm. "Say it simple, reality was trying to kick Sphinx out, so she shut down to stay beside you."

"I didn't die though," I said. "Alls below, I got stronger."

"What," Ina said.

I framed the news with a grin. "I'm a Baron now according to my chart."

"Pseudo," Ina said. "Until you have that sphinx's upChain form in your lap you're not a true Baron. Alls below, I'm sorry you have to deal with this, Mel."

"Deal with," I said aghast. "I saved your life. Everyone's life. If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have that arm."

"Wow, you want me to thank you for severing my arm. That's your stance?" she asked.

Melissa hissed sharp and low. Her hair stiffening in a sudden threat display.

"We're not doing this," she said. "You promised you'd be good."

"Sorry," Ina said.

"And Nadia, I still love the confidence, but you did die. I clung to the side of the hospital just to watch them do their best to keep you alive after both soldiers and Barons couldn't save you. They used three layers of stasis just to give Amber enough time to literally abduct some Viscounts who had the necessary specialties."

My eyes sweeped to Amber for confirmation. She wobbled her hand noncommittally.

"It wasn't a full death technically."

"Her heart and brain stopped working," Melissa asserted.

"But her spirit didn't. Only two out of three, not a full death," Amber said. "Means in my book, your record is still pristine."

"Reality," Sphinx said, "plays by different rules. Two out of three is enough to begin my eviction."

"It was that bad?" I asked.

"Giving me a new arm only took a few soldiers," Ina said.

"Why'd I need Viscounts though?" I asked.

"The Inviolate Star," Sphinx answered.

Melissa said, "The doctors said you were too hot to touch."

"Singed their spirits and melted spells when they tried," Amber added. "If there were any Barons that could've still worked through all that then we didn't find them. I figured someone up the Chain could get around that innate resistance you built, and I was right."

Amber sipped her sunlit drink in an attempt to guzzle sunshine and the cheer that came with it.

"Glad I was," she said softly.

"If this happens every time you use the spell that way then you have to stop," Melissa said.

"Stop," I said, incredulous at the directive.

"Temple, your spirit wasn't dead but it was nearly a husk. A smoldering furnace-hot husk, but a husk. The fact that whatever it's doing is fixing up your spirit to drive it even higher is impressive and terrifying. I haven't seen anything like it."

The gravity of Amber's statement was lost on me in the moment. They wanted me to swear off of my own spell. One of my best spells. All because of their worries.

"Sure, and you've seen everything. Totally can't be the fact that you get off on being the most secretive and cutting edge and knowledgeable person in the room. Are you afraid I'll outpace you at this rate, or something? Toss you aside when you can't keep up."

"Alls below, what if you use it and there's no Viscounts conveniently around, Nadia? I can't help you, Amber can't move you, you'd be done. Dead."

"Why are you talking like you'll be with me the whole way to even care? You're dipping after the exam ends anyways. That's what you told your mom anyways. Besides, what happened to not making decisions for each other? That we 'didn't have that kind of relationship' anymore."

Melissa backed away from the accusation, and inadvertent reversion of how far we'd come…toward whatever had been our destination before I spoke.

"It wasn't the maiden's idea nor the mummer's," Sphinx said.

"Then whose was it?" I asked. "Ina? Toby?"

"Mine," she said.

In one word she'd skewered me. I looked to Amber and Melissa who'd faced the heat of my own petulant rage at having any of my power—my tools to avenge my parents—be stripped from me. Amber had only sad smiles for me. Melissa was tearing up which caused my star to fall even further in Ina's esteem.

"You introduced me to it," I said.

"An action I don't regret insofar as it saved your life the first time."

"You've done this before?" Melissa asked.

Amber had already put together a timeline in her mind from the way her brow rose and fell with the rapid calculation. I still only had eyes for Sphinx.

"It's the only way I can get in touch with Mom," I said.

"Nadia—" Sphinx started.

"What's this have to do with your mom?" Melissa asked.

"My glaive," I said, pointing it out where it rested in a corner—the bond between me and it, me and my mom, firmed up enough that even with my eyes closed I could've still pointed in its direction. "It's the last piece of her I have, and when I use the star I can feel her again. Make strong all of those techniques she taught me."

"Temple, I know you're an idiot but conceptual weapons are made by entities or miracles of the Underside. Not provincial mothers to a no-name town."

"All true," Amber said, "but you made an assumption there Ina."

"What?" she asked.

I cackled, "My mom was anything but provincial. She was a Sovereign. She was Ishisaga-no-Maturama."

In my heated defense of my mother's name I'd flexed my spirit as I stressed each syllable. Turned it from just a name into something in-between an incantation and a divine petition that paired power to soundwaves. Amber's glass shattered. Ina's ears bled as her eyes were dyed a foamy pink from broken capillaries. Melissa dropped to her knees with a wail of pain that iced my ego and introduced guilt into every cell that composed my body.

Everything else in the room untouched by us—unfilled chairs, the end table, even some of my monitors—were yanked up into the air. Flipping into a perfect mirror of their previous position. It was a complete Upheaval of the decor and the mood. Even the song from outside was silent.

Melissa whispered, "When did you find out?"

"What?"

Ina helped her to her feet. "When did you learn your mom was a Sovereign, a god?" she asked.

"Temple, you didn't tell her?"

Melissa snapped, "You knew. You knew and you didn't tell me either! How long?"

"Since I brought Sphinx home," I said.

Melissa roared—literally she roared into my face like the pissed off lioness she was.

I stammered out excuses. "We'd just called off the engagement."

"You were engaged?" Ina asked.

"And then we went weeks without talking. By then I'd forgotten about it—."

"You remembered well enough to assault Ina with your mom's name," she said.

"If it helps, I only learned that one on the train when Every Train and Sphinx told me…"

"The name?" she asked.

"And not to say it casually," I admitted.

Melissa nodded. Clapped her hands together, and walked out without a word. Ina followed after her with all the gleefulness of a dog that didn't know why she was getting a walk but was just happy to have one. She did, however, stop at the door to spare me a few more words.

"Know what, I hope you enjoy that glaive of yours. I mean, if it really is Sovereign made then you have excalibur right there. Gaebolg. The kind of weapon that could raise a nation or kill a Godtender if you were able to get in tune with it and bring out all that power," she said. "Me, I never really needed power. Only love. Which is pretty spare back in the collective. They'll cherish me cause I'm a diva, one of the best of the best they have, but they won't love me. If I was struck by a rock and made dumb as you they'd politely kick me out. Whether I was or wasn't a fifth-generation member. But Mel, that girl right there has so much heart she could love anyone. She loved you."

"Your point?" I muttered wishing I could get across the room fast enough to decapitate her.

Ina smiled and said, "Thanks, I suppose. For making your priorities clear and tossing her aside so one of us other loveless assholes can treat her right."

When Ina left, Amber sat with me for a few more minutes in silence. She stared at the remains of her spilled drink and shattered glass.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Amber said, "That was Venetian glass."

"Is that expensive?" I asked.

"Hmm, not necessarily. Just rare. Not like Venice exists anymore, so the fact it was Venetian glass from Venice gave it a certain value. I hadn't paid anything for it to be honest. Know the lesson in all that?"

"No."

"Shame, was hoping for someone besides me to give me a bit of wisdom right about now. My siblings have the rest of the set—if they weren't dumb enough to lose or break theirs."

The way Amber spoke was heavy with age. She avoided looking at me, but couldn't resist glancing back to the shards of the thing she hadn't realized how much she cherished until just now. I couldn't stop glancing at the door wishing Melissa would come back if only to hit me.

"Relationships are stronger than glass, Temple."

"Are they?"

Amber laid a hand against me. Squeezed my arm tight like someone packing one more pair of panties into an overfilled suitcase. I turned to find her haloed by the sun. Features shadowed, but smile bright with promise. With her other hand she drew my head close until our foreheads touched in a primal communion.

Then she let go. Walked around my bed, and gave one last glance at the glaive.

"Temple, you said you were using her techniques with this thing?" she asked.

"Each one was one she'd taught me. Encircle the Moon, Bisect the Sun, and Blind the Heavens."

There was no weight behind the names, but I felt throbbing within myself—the bond between me and the glaive? Amber turned back to the glaive. A quiet overtaking her again.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

Amber raised a hasty smile. "Nothing, nothing. Just, during the Changeover there were a few summoners of Upheaval that ran around. I'd heard a lot of incantations in those days. None of them like that."

"Okay," I said, "it's not like entities teach us every spell of their Court."

"True. True. And as we established, I don't know everything. I'd make less mistakes if I did." Amber added, "What I do know is whether those are Upheaval spells or otherwise, conceptual weapons don't let you use another Court's sorcery. Bluntly, they're just a physical metaphor you beat someone to death with."

"Interesting," I said as I felt then that the bed was made of sand, and I was sinking into it.

Amber made for the door. With one leg past the threshold and one still in the room—with me—I pushed myself to say something. To still hold onto her.

"Amber," I said. On cue she stopped, half-in half-out.

"Hmm?"

"What I said, I…I was just mad. Scared," I admitted. "I'd never toss you aside."

And Amber said, "I know, Temple. You're not that kind of person."

"I'm not."

She smiled, and peered just beyond the door before turning back to me. "I'll go keep an eye on Melissa. Knowing her, she's just hungry and grumpy. She'll come back."

"She'll come back," I repeated.

And then Amber also left. I looked down to Sphinx in my lap—she'd waited patiently for my attention…so I had perfect notice of her walking inside of me to recuperate in my spirit. Leaving me alone with the Sovereign-made glaive that could raise a nation and leave a girl isolated.

 

[MxOberon]

I waited in that room until the inversion of the furniture my mother's name caused had faded, and it rained chairs and tables. I waited as the silence excoriated the excuses I'd laid over my chest to defend my heart—it beat a disgusting fleshy rhythm that churned my stomach. Another biological reminder that I yearned to sprint from to instead embrace the heatless flame of an Inviolate Star.

With a blink, the star was in my hand. Balanced in a false precarity on the pad of my ring finger. There was a promise in its light. In the way it came to a skewering point but didn't break skin because its point had nothing to do with a Real sharpness but rather a Conceptual perfection.

Tears rolled down my face. The silence had found my heart, and injected a venom of regret which was gleefully pumped throughout my body.

"Melissa is coming back. She's coming back with Amber. She'll come back," I said.

"She'll be back," my voice cracked.

The weight of my wrongdoing silenced the phrase that had become a prayer. I'd said enough lies. But they weren't lies, no they were partial truths. Whole fears. Altogether much worse than if I just had the creativity to lie. The grace. However grace is a rare to receive, and even rarer to have yet be willing to give away. It's why some of us chase the gods and their tenders, I suppose. Perhaps it's a flavor that Amber sought in every bottle she came across.

As I let that star become the final point of my vision—blackened in a pique of self-rejection, I knew that grace was a heatless flame that would willingly feed on the failings in me. Transubstantiate me into something worth the life I had…and my dad didn't.

My jaw was open and I nearly guillotined my fingers between my teeth if it meant getting every bit of the star inside my mouth for one glorious moment of psychic self-immolation. Then I heard a chord. Gently struck but infinitely warm without ever becoming hot. The uplifting reminder of the sky's circularity. There'd always be a star, bright and cold, but there was also dawn that never withheld a day's promise to go again.

It sounds ridiculous—maybe it is—but I prefer to think Lupe was that good. I removed the star from my mouth after all. Shook out my hands to disperse the spell. Then pushed myself from bed. Cracked my knees against the linoleum to give me a feeling more base than traitorous empathy. I hissed and let myself be on my knees for a moment. Felt my tension release, and I breathed—cycles of ten second inhalations and exhalations. I did five cycles then got dressed.

I picked my way through the halls carefully. Surrounding me was a flow of nurses, doctors, and secretaries that moved with a practiced precision that I'd interrupted by my existence as a non-wounded patient. When I broke free from the red arterial hallway that denoted my room being on the internal medicine floor, I let a smaller tributary of people carry me toward the elevators.

I rode to the highest floor—postnatal care. I scoffed as the first thing I saw were the murals of rainbows leaping and looping in melting arches. There was a casual freedom that crawled between your legs daring you to tell it to behave. Room after room was filled with parents and babies—some rooms just those unlucky few that needed a bit longer to bake—who had no reason to regard cynicism or guilt as anything important in the face of a pure beginning.

Sure, maybe some parents had a bit of regret, but when I looked at any of those kids I couldn't help but put my dark compound thoughts away. Instead of them, I indulged a bit. Siphoning the color that ran beneath my fingers as I trailed hand against wall. Painted with them, so if someone looked in my eyes they'd see something they could compose—love—into a frame or image that didn't haunt them like the black-less dark of a grave at nighttime. Pregnable yet inescapable.

I laid my hand against the door, and tested a few faces that'd play well—Lupe couldn't see them to check, but a good mask makes it easier to pretend. Right?

The door parted way for lances of the summer sun to blind me. I squinted, tightening my defenses, and forced the door further ajar to step out onto the roof. Immediately the wind took me in the side, tugging at my hair and loose clothes as I stood still in appreciation.

Lit by the sun that made radiant the guitar in her hands, Lupe was the perfect image of a lupine wanderer. Hair fluttering up on the wind, but never cutting past the black shields of her shades. Though those were tilted down just enough that you could see the clouds in her eyes that rippled dark as light was trapped within them seeking its way out. She was—thud

I jumped and turned—the door had shut announcing me and revoking the gentle reverie I'd fallen into. When I turned back I found Lupe's head raised—no clouds, only glossy ebon glass.

"Were you disappointed?" she asked.

"By what?"

She plucked a thick string while pressing down high up the guitar's neck. The bassy tone vibrating in lurching swings. My own nerves swung up and down with it. She stilled it.

"That I wasn't there," Lupe said. "Or did you not miss me?"

"Oh, that," I said. "I totally missed you, but I heard your playing from my room when Ina was showing off her new arm. You couldn't be in too much trouble if you were able to mindlessly strum."

She scowled at the mindless part.

"Never mindless," she said. "I just don't mistake my anxieties for actual thoughts. Keeps me from standing but not opening a door for three minutes."

"You saw that," I said.

"Or for a justification to moodfuck the people who cared about keeping me alive."

"Moodfuck?"

"Have a better word to describe how you talked to Amber and Melissa?" Lupe asked. "Alls below, get out of that shadow."

She formed a hand-spell over the guitar's soundhole. A golden pollen spread outward from her in a wave that dissolved every mote of shadow that I'd used to hide.

"You heard everything?" I asked.

"You weren't trying to be quiet."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Lupe leaned against the steel mesh fence that covered the rooftop's perimeter.

"I don't need an apology," she said. "Wouldn't mind the truth though, since you had fun throwing it around earlier."

"What was the question?" I muttered.

"Were you disappointed when I wasn't rushing in to see you?"

I spat, "Alls below, yes. I sure as shit wasn't excited to see Ina. I'd thought…"

"What?" she asked. "That I'd fallen for you after two conversations and getting pointed toward the omelet station? Gosh, you're so used to being the center of girls' worlds that your heart broke a bit realizing that you weren't the center of mine."

"I don't—" I muttered.

"That I could give you less room in my mind than I use going through a few random chord progressions. That—"

"I don't think I'm the center of anyone's life," I snapped.

A cloud passed overhead, bluish-gray and herald to a fleet that could be seen just teasing the edge of the horizon. I sucked in a breath—it was still summer and any shadow was a fair reprieve from the way moist summer-heated air bludgeoned you down into a muggy sludge.

"Really?" she asked. "Do you want my shades because you're blind as fuck, Nadia."

I stayed quiet. Turned my head to the side to hide from the accuracy of her accusations. As if she needed to see to see through me.

"Want to know what I see?" she asked.

No.

"Melissa, a girl you were engaged to for how long?"

Don't say—, "Ten years," I answered.

"Wow, you really suck, and not in the cool slutty way," she chuckled. I squirmed.

"So ten years, for ten years you both knew each other was the solution to every problem we face in life—most of the time facing alone," she said. "Who'll hold me when I'm sick? Who'll love me when I hate myself? Who'll laugh with me when I think of a random joke?"

Lupe began to strum a gentle melody on the guitar. It languished in a minor key as each plucked note dropped with the heat of fresh tears. A pitter-patter against some psychic ground. She looked up at me, shook her head, and looked out across the glittering bay.

She said, "Forget about yourself, she had that comfort. I don't know why you two divorced—though I bet it was your fault—but I can tell how much care she has for you with every breath that'd be better spent cursing you if she said your name at all. It's more than you have for her real or performed."

Lupe strangled the guitar, choking the notes to rest.

"She took a fucking bullet for you, and you shoot her like that," Lupe said.

"And Amber?" I asked.

"The weirdest case of hero worship I've ever seen," she said.

"That's just…no," I said. "I'm not a hero."

"You surely aren't," she said, "but with how experienced you seemed dangling a life over a person's head—or their arm—I bet you did something to her."

I remembered the lindwurm frozen in mid-air, and my Sovereign who had Observed me, put my life on this track, and slew it. If I stretched I could remember the way each drip of her blood around the wound she'd suffered supporting me—even then—threatened to overthrow the balance of my chilled heart.

"For her." I said, "I endangered her life first, but I did save it. She's saved me enough times though that we're even."

"Does she know that?" Lupe asked. "Cause I haven't known a Baron in my life that enjoyed taking orders from a soldier. Especially when they have a past tall enough to make a girl run from them and into a sniper's bullet. So be real, do you really think you didn't notice how they felt? How they—for reasons weirder than the Underside—still probably feel about you."

"I may have noticed," I said in a scratched voice. The admission clawing up my throat in terror of what it'd mean to be voiced.

"How couldn't you, you needy little girl," Lupe said. "So broken and so pretty, and who can resist caring for a broken pretty thing that if you fixed up just right maybe it'd be yours forever."

She unslung her guitar and laid it against the ground. Opened her arms wide in ready for an embrace. I bit my lip fearful it was only a trap. Lupe shook her head and I raced into her arms. Let her squeeze me until the glue that held me together threatened to melt. Her body was soft and warm in the way the sun was when it teased your face in the morning.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because you looked like you needed a hug. Your silhouette was slouching dramatically."

"No, but, why me? After what I said?"

"You're not that special, and you're not that evil as to deserve or not deserve a hug. Besides," Lupe said, "when you have basically nothing all you do is preserve your fears and petty loathings for the right time to throw them at someone."

She stroked the center of my back while gently cradling my head against her chest. There was a heat inside of her that was every bit pained as my star was cold—we all had what we leaned on.

Lupe didn't look at me as I raised my head in recognition of a question I could ask, and she didn't look down at me with expectation that I'd ask it. Instead her fingers spider-crawled onto the guitar to erratically dance and pluck at its strings.

"What's the center of your world?" I asked.

Shifting around in her grasp so my back was to her chest. She guided us down to sit before picking up guitar and laying it across my lap and hers.

"My song," she said, "the Seven Families of the Sunken Valley, is something special. An innovation in conceptual weapons where we layered Courts atop Courts fused in damascus forge welds of melody. Way more than the 'metaphor you beat someone to death with' angle Amber has. I mean, you heard the song, it's more than just a Conceptual weapon and almost like a spell—a proper entity given Sorcery."

She continued, "It's what made Marduk decide to stay when he washed ashore naked and broke. Not a hint of Sorcery in his spirit that was small and loose like a child's. Overtime he became a fixture of the valley. Had children, and our problems started."

Lupe pulled the guitar flat against our laps. The sound was lurking, shifting beneath dark waters, before emerging in a shredding chord of sonic seafoam.

"See, old Marduk's kids weren't born right. They were born normal. A failure of the secret test he'd conducted. Cause Marduk liked the valley not because of the people or the scenery. He liked its isolation. There'd be few, if any, interruptions of his grand design. So he cast aside the cover he was using. Unveiled himself as a Marquis, and with a roll of his hand the valley fell under his territory."

I turned back to her in surprise, and didn't say anything when I saw the tears roll down her face, shining gems in the sunlight. Then returned my eyes down to the guitar and the long tanned hands that played it.

"That'd just kill people," I said.

Territories were the harshest of any conceptual zone short of the Underside. A space under its maker's control, and tuned to the power of a single Court. So condensed it was a scalpel that severed unprotected too weak spirits; filling the gaps in a person with itself.

"Oh, Marduk knew, but he said, 'With pressure comes diamonds, and with this gift may the treasure that is mankind's future step forward,'" Lupe said. "The treasure was this mad plan of making humans into entities or something near enough. Unfortunately for Marduk, we were too adaptable."

The song settled into a bluesy haze of a land that'd been sunk into the Abyss. Lupe sighed alongside her guitar's own rasp.

"And so our sunless time passed. Generation after generation until the sun became a myth, and children stopped being born with the ability to see."

I asked, "What about moving?"

"After the first generation of Sunken Valley's kids came of age they tried," Lupe said. "But the Abyss was in us now, and we'd become accustomed to a certain pressure. When they passed the threshold their bodies just, thbbpt."

She pantomimed an explosion with her hands.

Lupe said, "We were like blobfish. Perfectly fine until removed from our environment. The homeland had become a cage, and the only way out was through joining the cult."

"But you got out," I said.

She nodded, "I did, but not by myself. See, those of us who didn't want to join the cult had accepted we'd likely never use Sorcery again, but there were seven families who didn't. They weren't necessarily the most important before Marduk, but after…they were the ones who didn't give up. Helped a few young hopefuls bond with musician friendly entities, like this guy here."

Lupe fiddled with the whammy bar of her guitar-axe. Her hands not touching the strings I watched them vibrate until an eye formed in the plasma blur. It blinked once, twice, and became a smiling mouth. An eye again that closed.

"The Seven Families were our resistance," Lupe said, "but my sister was our escape. My escape. Dumb as hell but bold as fuck, she jumped a drunk cultist that'd left the bar one winter. Killed him and stole his sorc-deck. The idiot had the cult's grimoire on there. So where we—I—got to bond to Morning she pushed herself to bond to the Abyss—"

"Then used magic to acclimate you to lower pressures," I said.

Lupe didn't sob, but her shoulders shuddered and her song was a curtain of feeling.

"Damn right," she said. "The families gave me our song to carry, and our plight to sing in the hopes we'd find someone—a real hero-type—to help free us. It's the only reason I came for this death game exam anyways."

"If you haven't found your hero, why not leave and try the collectives?" I asked.

Lupe smiled with her teeth sharp and gleaming in answer.

"Because I know, in the same way I know the Abyss, that Marduk is here and I'm gonna make sure he dies here."

I tap her leg, and she spreads them and her arms so I can crawl away. Not too far—I wasn't running from her. Then I turned to face her. To hold her hands even as one held the neck of her guitar. I nodded in understanding.

"That's a good center," I said. "Same as mine really, vengeance."

"Nah," Lupe said, "vengeance is what I'm doing, but it's a means to an end. Not who I am or what I'm about."

"Then what's the center?"

"Liberation," Lupe said, and if I hadn't felt her hands I would've sworn she'd cast a spell just then as a cloud parted and a blade of sunlight cleaved through our shadow. Illuminating her and darkening me ever further.

There was a weight to the way she said it. The combined dream of hundreds—maybe a few thousand—people that only wanted to see the sun again. It was there, in that shadow, that I realized how cold I was and how much I wanted some of that light.

"Lupe, I…" I searched, "I want to help. Let me help."

"How, you're just a Baron and not even a real one."

"I have a key," I said. "I'd looted—um—I'd recovered one after cutting down an ally of the cult. It accesses the murals around the city. Turns them into Staircases to somewhere."

"His throne probably," she said. "Alls below, no one in the families have gone into that thing and come out before."

"You can," I said. "I'll hand it over the next time I see you?"

Lupe furiously nodded. Her hair undulating in the wind. She was silent, but her hands couldn't help but play. A tune of clouds breaking, sunlight seeping in silent as a thief and ready for the big display. I left her to her thoughts—plots?—and made for the door. Her playing stilled.

"Nadia," she called out, "I'm not a fighter, and—"

"I'll go with you," I said, the words smearing as I whirled back around to face her. "Can I ask one thing though?"

"Why not," she said.

"Did you want to be in the room earlier?" I asked.

Lupe rubbed the back of her head. "It doesn't matter if I did," she said. "Amber and Melissa love you, and Ina is at least turned on by Melissa. There's no room for me in that dynamic."

"But if you did," I argued, "it'd make sense why you would be positioned only a few floors above my room exactly. The floors aren't that spiritually dense, and I'm sure you have a way to see deeply if needed."

Lupe chuckled and strummed her guitar. "That's a good theory," she said. Missed a note in an arpeggio and fumbled her fingers back to hit it. It was a good theory.

* * *​

I took the cable car back to the suite that'd become 'home' insofar as it was the closest thing I had since losing my actual one. Inside was more quiet and loneliness. I placed the glaive in my room, and dove into a shower to ward off any strange feelings using the rushing water.

It was a warm gentle drone that kept my thoughts to a minimum. Buried beneath the white noise rush that filled my ears. The shower was technically a shrine. Working off a series of principles that generated hot water at the perfect speed and amount of droplets to fall on you with the natural pace of a modest rain. Each drop of water tuned to cut through and absorb grime to be deposited down the drain with all the other refuse.

A good shower could work wonders on the mind. As did Lupe's hug, and the sense of her pressed into my back. Soft and hard in all the right places. I almost felt like being a person again when it was over. I padded across the rather morbid shower mat in the bathroom—the thing turned red when hit with water. Creating the appearance of blood-stained footsteps in the otherwise pristine white of the mat. Like I said, morbid.

I leaned against the sink and wiped away the fog on the mirror so I could see myself.

"No," I screamed. "Oh fuck, no."

Unveiled by one bold swipe, were my eyes flecked red in their usual gold. It was due to my look of horror that I realized my teeth had changed too. My canines properly sharpened into fangs capable of ripping out an artery so I could guzzle what I craved from the source. I stumbled backwards as I pounded the intrusive thought from my skull. It wasn't the first—I know that now—but it was the first that I felt truly aware of at the time.

I stared at myself in the mirror. At the reflection that wasn't me, and then I yawned. It, the reflection, yawned and I didn't. I beat a hurried retreat from the bathroom back into the suite's common area. Paced between the couch and coffee table—ignored the bloodstains my eyes could make out even though what had stained the area was just the barest trace of Amber's previous violence that soap and water could never remove.

I forced my mouth shut so I didn't feel tempted to lick my lips.

Then I formed the hand-spell to eject Sphinx from within my spirit. She herself yawned from her place atop the coffee table. I dropped down onto the couch in front of her.

"What's wrong with me?" I asked.

"Are you asking emotionally, mentally—"

"And physically, mystically, I don't fucking know Sphinx. I don't know," I said. "I have fangs, red in my eyes, I'm changing. Just now the mirror yawned, and if I'm honest what did I see when I had my 'two out of three' death? Why a cabin?"

Sphinx sealed my lips with her front paw. I noticed then that she'd grown from her plushie size to something more equal to me—still not her full size, but this had a charm all its own.

"It's easier to read one book than seven at once," she said.

"The fangs and eyes," I said.

She chuffed, "Choices, Nadia, the parent to most change. Though all that is is sliding us on more delineated paths that might better suit the way we follow."

"That's not an answer. At least tell me if they're really there."

Sphinx rolled her eyes and raised a paw bidding me to hold open my eyes for examination. She searched and then pushed my head up.

"Open," she ordered. After a moment of examination she said, "Nothing for either eyes nor fangs. If they're true then perhaps they're not Real. A symptom of something, yes, but buried inside your spirit most in places I can't walk to chase down the answers."

I fell to my side crashing into the plush solidity of the couch. Pressed the candy cloud softness of my bathroom against my skin. Sphinx tilted her head to follow my new orientation.

"You're unhappy with the outcome?" she asked.

"No," I said, "but maybe a bit. Everything is happening so fast—too fast—and I feel like there's no ground beneath me anymore. Just blood and adrenaline and fire. Under it all I just, I want to know that there's something real about me. Intrinsic and immutable. Something I don't have to worry about betraying."

"Intrinsic," Sphinx said. "At best that's just the result of an anti-choice to not change. There's no such thing."

I propped myself up. Eyes sharp as daggers as I stared down Sphinx for my own sanity.

"Yes, there is."

"Okay, then tell me this," Sphinx said, "would the Nadia from the train, the one who'd never taken a life until just then and was tormented in her dreams, look at the Nadia from two nights ago—the one that hollered and cheered as she dyed her suit red in blood and spilled futures—and agree that there was an intrinsic sameness between them?"

Emphatic, I said, "Yes. Both her and that other her, could agree we only killed bad people."

"I don't remember that Nadia, gleefully cutting down foes, saw them as people. Do you?"

"They were still bad," I muttered.

"And what of last night's opposition during the test, were they bad?"

"They'd crossed a line. Killed Amber."

"Hmm, so not bad, but they crossed a line. Is your line the demarcation of moral allegiance?"

My lips squeezed behind the sour point Sphinx had just fed me. She didn't need me to say anything to keep going, to bury me.

She added, "And, to be clear, they thought they killed your darling gin-soaked mummer. They hadn't, which would mean—had you successfully slain them before the player's appearance—you would've crossed the line first."

"They intended—"

Sphinx's voice boomed and the shadows in the room shock in time with her intonation—honeyed and strong, royal. The background pitter of dripping water stilled to nothing as I was dragged into a Godtime by the one that gave truth to its name.

"Now we speak of intention," the Sovereign said through my darling Sphinx. "You shift your borders so elegantly that you've mistaken their tracks as the wind. So let us be plain, so you don't get confused."

I pressed myself into the couch in terror. This was more than a Godtime. It was an Observation.

"We made an oath, did we or did we not?"

"We did," I said.

"So we did, I'm glad we agree. The terms of which I considered very clear and very generous. I help you with your petty tiny vengeance. Through my Sorcery, which you've taken too so well, I've aided you in finding your foes."

I tried to defend myself. I sputtered, "But, I promised Sphinx we'd investigate soon about your foes. I have leads."

"You do," the Sovereign said.

Using Sphinx's body, she hopped from the table and crawled up my body. Paws soft but her weight put atop each step to drive it like a spike through my body. She sat and stared down at me with burning ripple stars for eyes.

"But my terms were two fold, vengeance only one of them. The other?"

"Chart your return?" I said, the memory making no delay to be held up in a bid to win me a god's grace.

She smiled. "Perfect, you do remember. So why is it that my darling daughter, Sphinx—such a creative name by the way—is thinking about you not becoming a baron? Instead you're fixated on things as worthless as eyes and fangs."

Her face pressed in close to mine as she said, "I can remove them for you if you'll be less distracted."

"What does me becoming a Baron have to do with anything?" I asked.

"It has to do with everything," she screamed.

My spirit rattled and I felt fibers melt beneath a heat grander than theirs.

"Sorry, let me use my indoor voice." She said, "It has to do with everything, my dearest and most favorite summoner. The climb up toward the thrones of all that Is and will ever Be. I speak of the Chain, Nadia. You can't bring me back in my entirety until you tend to my divinity from a throne of our shared Sovereignty, understand?"

"Y-yes," I said. "I just…"

"What?"

"I'm not ready to see Sphinx go," I whined. It was selfish and petulant and small and human. "She said it'd be us in the end."

"Fool that you are, a child raised by an impossible union. A impossible union. It's why I was so impressed by you, and something I should've taken into account before I let my gatekeeper see to you. To find that she's stalling, how indulgent."

"Please, don't do anything to Sphinx," I begged.

"Why would I? This too is Revelation, but please don't leave her older sister's waiting. They're only so polite."

The Sovereign gestured with Sphinx's wing to the four shadows that split from beneath, crawled up a wall each, to stare down at me with shining eyes of Revelation. A question, the question, as to them and the trial I'd have to pass if I was to climb the Chain had squirmed its way atop my tongue.

I swallowed it down; if I asked then…I don't know, but I knew, intuitively, that I wouldn't leave this Observation with Sphinx. So I turned my eyes back to my bondmate—possessed though she was—and raised the question that'd get me through this.

"Do you have a pace I have to hit?" I asked.

The Sovereign smiled with Sphinx's face and licked a paw dismissively. "No, but one shouldn't keep an ancient divinity waiting. There are many links in the Chain, my dearest and favorite summoner. So no stopping. Not for exhaustion, or love, or death. Upwards always upwards."

She blinked, the shadows that hid Barons behind them retracted, and Sphinx returned to me. Her smile a line of broken shards arranged in an attempt at something beautiful. The pitter became patter, and the water counted out the seconds of tension between the two of us.

"You said it'd be the two of us in the end," I said.

Sphinx glanced away from me. I gripped her face and turned it back to mine.

"Was that just a lie to keep me climbing?" I asked.

Sphinx said, "No, it'd be the truth. Our bond wouldn't change."

"But you would," I said. "You wouldn't be Sphinx. You'd be something named and titled. Someone else."

"I thought you believed in an intrinsic and immutable nature somewhere within people?"

"I do, but…" I trailed off.

Sphinx filled in my words, "It's different for 'people' than it is entities? Is that it?"

My silence was agreement.

Sphinx lowered herself against my stomach. Stared at me just above my chest.

"A lot of humans think that, but they don't have to be right. Their bonds are different than ours. They don't pour humanity into their entities the way you do me," Sphinx said. "But you've been changing me since we met. You've changed since we met. Yet you still call me Sphinx and I call you Nadia."

She smiled and raised herself. Took the lapel of my robe and tugged it loose bearing my chest in its modest stiff peaked glory. Her breath was heavy at the sight of me—hair askew in a messy halo as I lay on my back.

"Even if you call me something else, you can always call me yours. Through the small changes and the big," she said. "I'll still be of Revelation and you'll still be my divided summoner. You don't have to fear power."

Tears pooled at my cheeks before falling down the sides of my face to get lost in my hair.

"I'm not afraid of power," I said. "I just…I don't want to look around to find that I have it and I'm alone, Sphinx. I don't want to push away my friends, but things get scarier and scarier. I get scarier, and it seems like everyone around me dies. Mom, Dad, Wren, people close to me and strangers…" I trailed off. I cried. I couldn't stop crying the whole fears that lurked behind every cruel word I'd said to Melissa and Amber.

"I don't want them to follow me if it means they end up in a grave somewhere. Cause it feels like death sticks to everyone but me. Even though I'm yelling and screaming and opening my arms so wide for it to just take me. Cause it's all so hard," I said. "It's so hard."

Sphinx was quiet. She allowed me the space to sob. Didn't complain as it shook my body. Instead she stretched herself above me and I watched her grow—just a little bit more, closer to her proper size—before she settled on me like a blanket. Then she pressed her mouth to mine in a kiss that attempted to claim the entirety of me—burdens and all.

"I'm sorry for being selfish," I moaned into her mouth. I knew she was alone and my sentimentality was dragging out her torment.

She migrated kisses from my lips to my cheeks. Claiming a tear from each.

"What have I always said about apologies," she reminded me. "They have no place between us, and if anything I'm the selfish one. Prodding you to advance when you needed me to have the wisdom to hold you back. Though even then, I'm more selfish than you, because despite it all the concerns of the Court are far from my mind."

"And what's on your mind?" I asked.

She pressed her mouth to my neck. Grazed it with her teeth in a dangerous reminder of status as an entity. A danger that fled my thoughts when she pressed her mouth to my chest. Teased my breast between her lips, rolled its peak against her fangs, before letting go with a suckling pop.

You, she thought, always you.

I've taught you the worst things about humanity, I thought.

"We're equals in all things," she said. "Even our selfishness as I don't wish to hurry from this moment with you."

"Then don't," I said.

Sphinx drew my other breast into her mouth, and plunged us both into the heady depths of a lascivious Godtime. We stretched seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, and all just spent exploring the territory of each other that we hadn't dared do since she passed a star to me on our first kiss.

She marked my collarbone in a constellation of greedy kiss-marks barely hidden beneath my own melanin. I said that this made us 'fang for fang,' and received a paw to the face for the joke. By the time our ten minute eternity had passed, I was worn out and breathing hard having traded her breath for mine and vice-versa.

"Sphinx, am I a good person?" I asked.

"Be specific," she said.

I said, "I just feel like I'm bad at being a person. Everyone's so clear about themselves and committed to things. What am I even doing?"

"Finding out," she said. "As is Revelation's way. Though if it soothes any, I love your dual-sided complexity."

"Why?" I asked. "It's the worst thing about me."

Sphinx silenced my self-flagellation with a kiss. "What we loathe in ourselves is often what others love. And though I can't speak for the maiden or the mummer," Sphinx said, "I can speak for myself. That your divided self, your petty humanity and glorious spirit, your gallant smile and even now your wounded tears; in all ways I find you beautiful."

Sphinx's eyes burned with the flame of Revelation as she continued, "Nadia, no matter my link nor whatever I become, I shall inscribe it within myself to such depths that even when the stars grow cold and the last dream has been spun, my vow will remain untarnished. That I, Sphinx of the Court of Revelation, did love my summoner, Nadia Temple, ward of Kareem and daughter to a Sovereign."

"Sphinx, you're crying," I said. My thumb catching a streaking ember before it fell from her face. That single wipe became a cradling. A guiding hand. One last kiss.

 

[MxOberon]

My robe hung loose slowly accumulating the drops of sweat that migrated down my body. The memory of Sphinx's body against mine—soft fur, dense muscle, and an enthusiastic warmth—teased my expression into a smile as I savored the not-so distant memory.

When we'd finished, Sphinx returned to my spirit so she could continue recuperating. I'd worried about her expending herself for something so trivial, but she'd scoffed then said, "With you, nothing is trivial." A sentiment that made all the sweat feel worth it—she made me feel worth it. Though as I poured water from the filtered decanter that sat cooling inside the fridge I couldn't help but wonder where she'd learned to talk like this.

As I returned to the living room, glass rising to my lips, the door flung open as Amber and Melissa flew inside. The jolt from their sudden entrance instigated a minor paroxysm in myself. I jumped back, spilled water against my chest, and scrambled to form the hand-spell for Atomic Glory with as much haste as I could muster—the spell instinctual by that point, but pleasure was a dulling agent.

I shook the spell from my hand once I processed that it was only Amber and Melissa. Amber and Melissa. She'd come back just like Amber said she would. I placed the glass down on the coffee table. Took careful steps as if to go too fast would break the magic of this moment, and see her leave me again. I stopped just a few feet from her—she was in the range that I could embrace her…if she let me.

Despite the panic on her face only moments earlier, Amber had effortlessly returned to a sort of bemusement as she shut the door without a sound. Equally careful not to break the moment. Though my attention was entirely on Melissa as she'd discovered some new expression—scrunched up, face flush, brows knit, and teeth on the verge of slicing open her bottom lip. It was a new sort of anger I'd not seen from her. She even quivered from the power of it. Her eyes darted about as if to look anywhere but me; besides her initial top-to-bottom assessment of my person to discern what she should feel. I had to say something.

"Melissa, I…" blanked. How do you apologize for hijacking someone's present, endangering their life, and stealing away from them the security of a life they were ready to live for nearly a decade? I suppose you just say you're sorry for all of that. Though sorry, I now find, is too small a word to wrap its arms around the enormity and diversity of my wrongs. It was all I had though.

"I'm sorry," I said. "At the hospital I was feeling…just feeling everything again. Then you all told me to give up a spell that was necessary, and I didn't know how to handle it. I—."

She raised her hand, calling for silence from me. I obeyed because I didn't want to keep talking. There was just too much to acknowledge, and bring up and some of it I just wasn't ready to talk about. My heart, wrenched open by Sphinx and Lupe, needed time to heal. Incorporate the bruises until it was denser. Stronger.

"No," Melissa said, after a minute of furious thought, "I can't do this with you. Not right now. Not like this."

She traced my silhouette with her hand—ah, the entirety of me was too much—then skirted past to her room. I didn't return to the present until I heard the door slam shut. My mind stuck on the way her head tilted away from me—the disgust that kept her from looking at me. It hurt, but I was due my portion of pain.

Amber guided me to the couch. Set her bags on the coffee table, and leaned back into the cushion as she expelled a heavy breath that teased my nose with the scent of Bloodlust. She expelled another one, unfurling her body for peak relaxation. Feet on the coffee table, arms stretched out across the back of the couch, and her eyes shut. I was the opposite as I'd curled myself inward—knees tight together and drawn up to my chest.

"I'm glad you're safe," Amber said.

"Why wouldn't I be?" I asked.

"I hadn't left you in the best position back at the hospital," she admitted, "and something tripped the bugs I'd planted so I presumed the worst. Even put on my 'killer face.'"

A smile glinted through the dark of my mood. Then confusion took over as I swiveled to match Amber's bright gaze.

"What do you mean you bugged the place?"

She shrugged, "That I planted surveillance devices. Not literal bugs, Temple."

"I know not literal ones. I've read spy serials," I said. "I mean, why? What kind?"

"Well, this room isn't that secure to begin with seeing that the Lodge can casually break the Mother's Prayer. I wanted to make sure no one's inside that you haven't approved of, so I installed Court- and Chain-trippers. Anyone not of our Courts at specifically our link trips the bugs which sends an alert to my sorc-deck. Doesn't tell me exactly who was here though."

Amber drew her expression into a pointed tool that dangled the unspoken question above my head, Who was here?

There were a lot of ways I could answer that question. Recursive half-statements that'd tease a few facts, but never enough for the full picture. I could lie—however much good that would do seeing as even in my processing of an answer Amber was reading me, and I had no idea what statements my face was making. Though the complete truth, the unmitigated truth, felt like a cruelty that was ill-deserved.

I'd been Observed twice by a Sovereign. Back home it only took being Observed once by at least a Viscount to see people quietly erect walls between you and them. Your existence, an ontological hazard. Who knew if your interactions would cause the entity's attention to expand beyond you. It only took one Observation for that simple breach from the place beyond reality for your future to warp even subtly. While it was the literal act of Observation that did it, there was still the fear that to tell someone, to share words of what happened, could undo the listener's fate.

"Amber, how far in this are you going to go with me?" I asked.

"Temple—."

"We're even," I said. "You know that, right?"

"What's this about?" she asked, hesitant—Amber was rarely hesitant.

"I want to know you know," I said. "Cause you've already saved my life plenty. More than enough for me saving you once."

"Twice," she said. "You saved me twice, Temple. Once down in the Underside, and the second time last night."

She slid toward me with the hesitation that she might break our moment—eyes enrapturing the other—until she felt close enough, secure enough, to gently press her fingers to my shoulder. I shuddered softly at the touch.

"I thought we were past this," Amber said, her voice low and gentle. Soothing. "I thought we were…"

Her eyes searched me for the next line to say, but I didn't know the steps to this dance. Amber pulled back slowly as those burning rosy eyes of hers flared with a want and an urge to say the answer that lurked inside.

"Comrades," Amber lied. "I mean, with everything we've been through already I stopped keeping count. Figured there'd be no point because I'd planned to see this through to the end."

"With Nemesis?"

"All of 'em. If you'd let me."

It wasn't the answer I'd expected. I slid my legs apart as I leaned close to Amber. A smile so wide and so innocent on my face at the generosity I'd never imagined I'd get. Then I saw her face. She looked so content at my joy. As if it was the only thing worth getting out of bed for. I retracted my smile, and tried to focus on her. Her motives and needs, and not let my own self-involvement blind me like it had for too long now.

"Why me though?" I asked. "You said me saving your life meant it was only fair you help take one, but that's four more and we're already even with these back and forth rescues. If you don't even keep track anymore then your original math doesn't work. So, why?"

Amber pulled herself back from me and slumped over causing her locs to fall into a rippling raspberry curtain across her face.

"Temple, don't make me say it."

"I won't take you with me otherwise."

Her head snapped up; eyes wide with worry—anything but that.

"I needed a cause," she said.

"A cause to what?" I asked. "Vacation, kill people, or—"

"To live even if it was only for a day longer," she said. "It couldn't be for something petty or small. I needed it to be righteous. Maybe a smidge redemptive if I could swing it."

She ran her fingers through her locs as she tilted her head back up toward memories and the ghosts within them.

"It'd been ages since I had a righteous cause. There were people I knew—people I'd killed—who said they had one or I was on one back during the Changeover. I don't know if they were right. If anyone was right back then," she said. "I did a lot in those years, Temple. I saved some people and killed others, regretted both, and sometimes wished I'd chosen to kill who I'd saved or saved who I'd killed. And all of those worries pile on until you just wish you could stop. Cause it all gets too hard, Temple. It gets too hard."

"I think I understand," I said, the admission of life's difficulties matching the one I'd made to Sphinx. "But you were a kid then, Amber, it wasn't your fault whatever happened."

I placed my hand on her thigh. The only place I felt was appropriate as I craved the establishment of some physical tie to bind us down as her emotions swept free from within the depths of her spirit.

"Then I was a bad kid," Amber chuckled. "All the same, I was slowing down and circling the drain when you found me."

"You were one of the crew's best hunters," I said. "That hardly seems like slowing down."

"I love those guys, but it was rote and it was easy. Though I suppose my sense of 'easy' and 'rote' are shot to the Underside and back," she said. "Most of the New World feels rote compared to the churning mess that was the Changeover. You could be a villain one day and a hero the next. Endlessly reinvent yourself. Then suddenly it was over and everything you'd done became a weight that you couldn't change yourself past any more."

"No more heroic deeds to offset the ghosts?"

"Nothing offsets them once they're let in," she said. "But yeah, the hunters were rote and then I saw you. Small, sharp, and cold like a knife at wintertime. At first I just wanted to unthaw you. Help reintroduce you to the life your parents' death had shook you from. Then we found the lindwurm, that weird throne, and then you summoned an entity from a Court I'd never seen. You were the first unique thing I'd found in ages. I couldn't not be near you."

"Even if being near me kills you?" I asked, soft and hoping for an answer that was so selfish.

She lowered her hands. Placed one over mine which still rested atop her thigh. Her hand squeezed mine in an impossible grip that dared the world to see us parted.

"I was already dead, Temple," Amber said. "Why fear what I've already been through?"

"Then," I said, "my Court's Sovereign tripped the bugs. She Observed me again."

"Again?" she asked. "This happened before?"

"When I summoned Sphinx. She was who I negotiated with when establishing the bond. The second time was when your bugs were tripped."

"Amazing," she said.

"Amazing?".

"Obviously. Means I was right," she said. "You're so interesting even a god can't keep her eye off you. Now you have to let me stay to see how this ends."

"You're crazy. Everyone knows that being Observed is like the worst thing that can happen to you. Even if you do something good it's a guarantee you're going to be in for the worst."

"Temple, I'm only hearing reasons why you still need me, and why I want to come." Amber winked, "Think you'll let me come?"

"Fine, you can come," I said. Then her pun hit me, "Really? I thought we were having a moment."

"We were. You're the one taking it there," she said.

I rolled my eyes and took stock of the bag that was on the coffee table. When I pointed at it, Amber gave her approval and I peeked inside. There was a beautiful creamy fabric with buttons glossy as river stones that were bordered by sharp elegant pleats.

"The ball," Amber said. "It's some little post-test party the Lodge is throwing."

Melissa's door swung open as she leaned past the frame. A thin white cream already evenly lathered across her skin accentuating the pout of her lips.

"Ugh, at least explain it right," Melissa said.

"Sorry princess, I figured you were waiting for the chance to chime in."

"I wasn't waiting," she said. "Anyways, it's a party that Lodge members probationary and current can attend to celebrate the passing of the first test. Also a way to send off everyone who didn't pass so there'd be no, or at least less, hard feelings."

"How hard could they be?" Amber asked. "Everyone who helped defend the Lodge, pass or fail, got a prelim exemption that can be redeemed once for any Lodge exam in the future. They can even trade or sell it."

"Still, it's a tradition, and people take it seriously. Every year after the party there's photos projected all over the NewNet of everyone's outfits. It's a big deal."

Amber chuckled, "And here I thought she disliked the Lodge."

I smiled up toward Melissa. A furious—and slightly embarrassed—blush clouded across her cheeks. She folded her arms across her chest as if it'd be a bulwark from our teasing.

"Oh, I think she does," I said, "but she's a Knitcroft through and through. If pretty clothes are involved then so is she. Actually, I remember every summer she'd come running to my place, hop on one of the sorc-desktops, and show me on as big a screen as possible everyone's outfits."

"They're not just pretty clothes," Melissa argued. "Each year it's people wearing some of the most creative fashion statements possible. They even have a red carpet event!"

The energy in her voice wouldn't be contained, and by the end of her words she'd risen in pitch at least three times bringing herself to an excited squeal.

"Definitely a Knitcroft," Amber said.

I wanted to stay in the moment. Luxuriate in the idea that we were three girls excited for a ball, but a part of myself—that mirrored part that refused to be singular—felt worried.

"After last night, why throw a party?" I asked.

The question dropped the room's temperature by at least ten degrees. In the stillness of doubt and skepticism there came a silence for rumination. As usual, Melissa and Amber found stances that were in complete opposition.

"Reassurance," Melissa proposed. "These are legendary parties, and if suddenly for the first time one was canceled it'd be a cause for concern. Throw the party, tell everyone things are under control, and buy time to actually get them under control."

Amber said, "A fair point, but you're wrong, princess. The parties are legendary, and that's why they'd be a perfect trap for anyone involved with what happened last night. As well as anyone dumb enough to decide that attacking the biggest gathering of Lodgemembers—all of whom are lethal killers—is a good idea."

"Okay, but if it is for reassurance or a trap," I said, "then it'd be dangerous either way. Why go?"

Melissa was silent, and her excitement fell a few more degrees. I realized it'd been a minor dream of hers to attend one of these parties. A dream that now contended with a potentially deadly reality. Amber threw an arm over me, pulled me close, and reignited Melissa's dream.

"Temple, it's hardly a trap if you know it's not for you." Amber added, "We're also not dumb enough to try anything, are we?"

She volleyed the question to Melissa who nodded emphatically. "Hardly. Not at all. Totally not."

"See, Temple, we'll be fine." Amber leaned in and whispered into my ear, "Besides, what better way to make up with princess here than at the ball she's always wanted to go to?"

"Right. Okay, okay," I said.

Melissa asked, "So we're still going?"

"We're going. Um, want to help me find something to wear?" I asked.

She glanced away from me. Too sheepish to just come out with it, but not tore up about what had to be said. A nervousness for my benefit.

She said, "I'm sorry, but I told Ina I'd help her pick an outfit. We were going to arrive together."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah, that's…"

She'd come back to me, but she wasn't mine right now. In my mind I strung up Ina and cut off her other arm. It was enough of an emotional vent that I could force a smile.

"I'll see you at the ball then," I said.

"You will…see me." Melissa said, "When you're shopping try to keep the theme in mind."

"There's a theme?"

"There's a theme," she squee'd. "It's, 'New World, New Wave, No Rules.' Kind of a celebration for the New World hitting twenty years."

"Got it. World, wave, no rules."

I slipped free from Amber's arm, and hustled into my room. When the door shut I realized that it'd been open longer than expected. With my robe half-off, I glanced over my shoulder to find Amber leaning against the door. I turned away from her and back to my feelings.

"Give her time," she said. "It's only been a few hours since…"

"I know."

"Alls below, pick the best outfit you can and make it something that reminds her that when you're at your best, Ina's nothing."

A smirk teased my mood out of the spiral it'd nearly fallen in. Then I heard a clack. Then another and another. Four clacks in total. Their tone gentle but clear as Amber placed them on my desk. Then I heard her steps behind me. They were soft and light. Her breath was a warm brush against the nape of my neck.

"Trust me, Temple," she said. "I'll make sure you don't lose her."

"Cause she's necessary for the mission? Another comrade?"

"Cause she makes you happy. And that's enough for me."

I held my breath as I waited for something—anything—to happen. Then I released and turned around wanting to see her, but I was alone in the room. Besides the four royal tokens she'd left that stood in a prim array for me to claim at my leisure. It was more than enough to get the kind of outfit I needed if I was to put Ina six feet deep…socially speaking.

* * *​

After getting dressed I let myself wander the Lodge district in search of clothing stores. The tokens were muffled but clacked away in my pocket as I trudged up hills and scurried down them. They were gentler slopes than the city proper, but still demanded I keep a portion of myself present in my body. Adjusting speed and effort so I didn't faceplant and tumble away somewhere. It helped me not fixate on how helpless I felt.

If Melissa had a comfort of knowing we'd be together then I had a sort of leisure from it. We weren't married yet, but we knew our domains and let the other handle what needed to be handled. For me, Melissa handled the clothing. It'd only made sense considering her family, so when we were picking clothes for the weekend or trips, or it was time for me to get new clothes crafted she was always there to give notes. Make it perfect for me because she knew what I liked…and now Ina was getting that.

I stopped and chose the nearest store I could. Threw the door open, strode inside, and let the cooling shrine slowly quench the heat in my chest. I blinked and looked around the room taking in the location I chose. There were gowns here—so I hadn't fucked up that badly—but they were of a darker palette comprised of the monochromatic nuances found in black. The silhouettes were diverse at least, and the fabric was good—you couldn't be engaged to a Knitcroft for as long as me and not develop a thumb for it.

"Can I help you?" a small woman asked.

Her face was caked in a white makeup, and her eyes black sea urchins from the liner she'd painted them with. While her own outfit was a black velvet affair that was so long it melted into her shadow.

"I'm looking for a dress," I said.

"I'd hope so. All we really sell here."

"It's for the ball tonight. I need something to…"

"To?"

I mumbled, "Try and win my girl back. I kind of fucked up recently."

The store attendant nodded, we've all been there.

"Go to dressing room B, and I'll bring you some options."

I followed her instructions and waited in a circular dressing room. A semicircle of mirrors facing a dais so you could see yourself in nearly your entirety. When the dresses arrived, I dived into the options pulling each down from the rack built into the wall and throwing it on.

All of them were…fine. Really, they were fine dresses in a fine fabric, but they felt limp on me. Unalive and devoid of a spark of brilliance or Brilliance that Melissa had hammered into me over the years every time she'd shown me the outfits worn for that year's ball. I'd need brilliance if I wanted to catch her eye and remind her that I wasn't the person from this morning yelling and accusing. That even if she didn't go with me to hunt down the rest of my parents' killers, we'd at least be…something to each other.

As I stood there in a black gown with a mesh cutout for my stomach and chest covered in embroidered snakes—also in black—I spotted Secretary in the mirror. They moved in a way that made no noise as the dressing room curtain slid open just enough for them to slip inside. They stalked about the dais examining me. Horizon gray eyes lingering along my scant curves.

"I didn't know being a voyeur was one of your duties," I said, my own eyes snapping directly to their position.

Secretary stumbled—didn't fall though—and scowled at me.

"Rude," they said.

I turned to face them, and smiled from my position on high. Whatever the downside to my increased resistance to Sorcery, in that moment I was just happy to finally get one over on my favorite spy.

"I'm sure most would consider peeping to be ruder."

"Then they'd be wrong," they said. "Besides, as your handler you're my highest responsibility."

"At least to the exam's end."

"Hmm," they said, "we'll see. Until then my job entails cleaning up your messes like that bombed out ERO facility you left us."

"We didn't want the Lurkers and their allies taking anything from inside the place."

Secretary grinned tight without a shine to their eyes.

"Your sense of strategy is astounding," they said. "My other duty though, seems to be picking up after your leave-behinds."

Secretary took a step on the dais, and withdrew my mask—red, snarling, its mouth open wide to rip open a throat…was its mouth always open? They took another step, and another as they ascended to the step just below mine. Guided the mask in front of my face, so I could see myself in the mirrors. It made me look like something monstrous and mad, but it was fiercer than the weakness the girl beneath it sometimes felt. My smile danced behind the mask's fangs.

"Still a perfect fit, I'd say," they said.

Then came the guilt. I pushed Secretary's arm away. Stepped down from my position and let myself fall onto the cushioned couch that ran along the wall's curve.

"What if I wanted to leave it?"

"Then I'd tell you that these masks are expensive. Each one made for only one person. They're useless otherwise and reclaiming the material cost from them after they'd been keyed to a wearer already is inefficient at the best of times."

They discorporated the mask in a flutter of luminescent balls that quickly dissipated.

"You couldn't just send it back to me that way?" I asked.

They hummed. "Yes, but I wanted to make a point."

"A point, okay. A sternly worded note could make a point. Is there a reason I need the mask right now?"

"Not that I've been notified of."

"So, you came all the way to me for a point that could've been a letter? Sure you didn't just want to come see your 'favorite brute'?"

"You're my only one."

"So I'm one of a kind, then."

Secretary scoffed at my assertion. Scoffed again as their fingers steepled against their chest in mock bewilderment. Then assembled their face into a stony demeanor making for the exit. I launched myself from the chair to cross the room so I could catch their wrist—I didn't want to be alone right then.

"While you're my highest duty," they said, "you are not my only one. The paperwork I've had to fill out just to properly report on the facility you bombed. Then, I had to track down a spatial compressionist to see about recovering any of the racks or labs that may have gotten caught in some interstitial dimension or other after the formations collapsed. You made so much work for me!"

Their voice had taken a tone that was so serrated and mad it'd caused the attendant from earlier to peek in.

"Can I—?"

She was cut off by the slightest flex of Secretary's field-spell which stole the memory of why she'd entered the dressing room in the first place. Which caused her to leave once again.

"She didn't do anything," I said.

"Hmph, maybe she just annoyed me. I mean, her taste is atrocious if she thinks any of this trash would cut it for the ball tonight."

Secretary was waiting for something from me. They were so petty.

"I'm sorry for making so much work for you. Really, I didn't know that you'd get in such trouble because of me."

I was sincere in that apology. I didn't know we were tied like this, and it all felt like another case of what Lupe was getting at. There were so many people around me, helping me even if only to help themselves, and I wasn't considering any of it.

From Secretary's face, they were taken back by my words. Their eyes searched me for some trick, some unseen meaning, but I'd said what needed to be said. Even as we moved on they held back a full acceptance as if to do so would lead to a unique pain. Which, for a spy, I suppose it often did.

"Fine, it's not like you needed to know the full scope of my tasks. The secretaries in the point tabulation department were impressed by your team's willingness to destroy everything," they said. "Too many people get stationed at these research facilities and can't bring themselves to tear it all down to keep it from falling to improper hands."

"So, I did the right thing?" I asked.

"So naive, little brute," they said. "The Lodge only wants you to do the best thing. Speaking of, the best thing for me is to go back to what needs to get completed for tonight if I'm going to make the ball, and flirting with you is not going to make that happen."

"You're going to the ball?"

"I perish to name a summoner who wouldn't," they said. "For secretaries, many of us are still working on the night of the party, but the higher ranking ones—proper handlers—they get to actually attend. Rather than carry around drinks with an ear open for gossip."

"Is this the first time you'd be attending?" I asked, knowing I'd stepped beyond the shape of our usual conversations. We didn't talk about their past, and the break from this decorum caused them to pause as they weighed the truth on a value only they could discern.

"It is," they said.

"Could you help me then?" I asked. "You're always looking perfect, all of you secretaries do, and without Melissa I don't know what I'm doing. Not really."

"Find someone who can make you something custom, and fit it to you. Wear the clothes, don't let them wear you, and all that. Happy?"

I wobbled my hand, and then held my palms up in request for assistance.

"Know where I can go to get a custom outfit, last minute?" I asked.

Secretary thought for a moment. An idea sparked, their gray eyes caught a knowing glint, and lifted their mood to something beyond a minor exasperation at my helplessness. It was something gleefully ambitious.

"Get changed," they said. "We're going to visit someone special."

 

[MxOberon]

"Where're we going?" I asked.

We'd just stepped off our third cable car transfer, and were deep in the international district within Brightgate proper. Grand skyscrapers towered to the point that the streets were in an eternal shade—cool with a breeze that picked up speed as it snaked about the buildings. Around us was the diversity of modern man that reminded me of the station.

From our stop it was only a few blocks before we arrived at the Tower of Peace and Concord, or as Secretary put it, the Diplomat's Dive. The building was avant garde in its construction as portion after portion of the building rippled into a different architectural style. Endlessly shifting its exterior like an octopus testing out new colorations. A side-effect of how the entire building was spatially expanded to allow for as much room as was needed to accommodate its guests.

Frankly, the whole place was intimidating, but Secretary entered with an eye toward dominance that failed to recognize anything—especially a building—as above them. I followed close behind as we crossed the sunshine-hued lobby with its conversational pits and marble floors. The elevators were in the back, but rather than an up or a down button there was just a clearance scanner and a keypad for someone with the proper clearance to punch in the number coded to the guest's room.

Apparently Secretary had the proper clearance, as they produced a small rectangular prism of sunshine yellow glass and held it to the scanner while punching in seven digits. The elevator doors parted, and we stepped inside.

Its walls and floors were mirrors that repeated ourselves infinitely in all dimensions. I watched as a thousand thousand me's took in Secretary's endless reflections. Noted the way their eyes just barely slid toward me and my infinity. I smiled. They looked away from me, but in one of the endless them's I caught the playful crook of a smile of their own.

It was only a few seconds of a wait, and then the elevator's doors opened as we stepped out into a bluish-green forest whose leaves shook in a silent not-breeze. The floor—the forest floor—was soft and loamy. Almost bouncy, and the child in me couldn't help but jump. Only to find myself floating up, and up into the weightless air. My head tilted back in glee as I beheld the void of space painted in nebula hues of purples, blues, and greens with Stars that felt familiar, or teasing upon familiar. Then I descended from my hop's apogee down toward the loamy floor.

I swallowed nothing, and looked down at my arms—I could see the bright metal musculature of my spirit. Secretary didn't care much to humor my astonishment, and passed me by leaving a smoky trail of their Phantasmal musculature. When I didn't move, they looked back with a quirked brow.

"She already knows we're here, little brute," they said. "No need to get cautious now."

"It's not caution. Just," I said. "It's interesting to know what your musculature type is."

"Don't tell me you're one of those girls who thinks your musculature means anything?"

I shrugged as I had no real stock in the timeless debate. "Not really, but sometimes it's uncanny how much one's type can match someone."

In another low-gravity hop I landed beside Secretary. Gestured at their phantasmal shape—translucent, yet a bit smoky, a haze of sorts.

"A Phantasmal spy that roams from assignment to assignment. It fits perfectly."

"And here, a thick-headed brute that's a Metallic. Oh the stereotypes we fill."

Secretary pushed on ahead, and I followed as we winded beneath the trees. Their blue-green leaves luminescent in the starlight they bounced down toward the ground. I'd never seen trees like them before, or blue loam that belonged out of a fairy-myth.

"What kind of person lives here?" I asked.

"No one of this terrestrial world," Blotomisc said.

I looked up to find him suddenly walking beside Secretary. It's head was a churning ferro-fluid ball that hovered above the collar of a long robe with the brocade embroidery of a human brain unspooling across his chest. Psychedelic threads of collar seeping from within the embroidered wrinkles of the organ. It was a gorgeous robe that felt like it belonged in one of Mom's old court drama shows that she'd saved from during the Changeover.

"You don't have my dad's face," I said.

Blotomisc's "head" churned in a manner that suggested a confused tilt of the head.

"I thought you disapproved?" he asked.

"I did. I do, but that never stopped you."

"Of course it didn't, I told him not to comply with it," Secretary said. "I needed to be sure you were mentally tough, little brute, and not just a bundle of physical capability."

"So now it's over?" I asked.

Secretary smirked, "Of course not. No, Blotomisc has to assume his unmodded appearance because of who we're meeting."

"And that is?" I asked.

Blotomisc answered, "A Nightlord."

The term whistled through my ears but failed to catch a tune.

Secretary said, "You don't have to know what it is. It's just a moonie term."

It was then that the trees quivered, and the non-air breeze became a voice of solid admonishment that pressed down on my spirit.

"#404, don't go insulting my culture you grav-born slut," a cheery youthful voice declared.

We eventually crossed the treeline to arrive in a glen illuminated by purple bioluminescent flowers. On a picnic blanket the size of my residence suite, reclined a four-armed ten-foot tall woman with silver skin. A single ebon horn curved down toward the smooth purple metal plate helmet that covered her face, flowed down her neck in stacked segments, to a gorgeous gorget before becoming hidden by a fuzzy coat that teased the curves of her body. Stopping just short of her ebon hooves. This was the Nightlord.

"Hey, #404, we didn't expect to see you," called one of the four secretaries already present and sipping mimosas beneath the stars.

"I had to pick up my charge," Secretary—#404—said. "So, unnie, you willing to dress her up?"

The Nightlord tilted her head. "Hmph, you know I hate to work last minute," she said.

#404 countered, "Unnie, you hate to work, period."

"Why wouldn't I?" she sang. "I'm not meant to work at all. Ugh, talking to me like this as if I'm not a Nightlord."

She banged her fist against the ground which rippled beneath our feet depositing us into the air. We hovered briefly in the low-gravity before returning to the ground.

"Um, what's a Nightlord?" I asked with a step forward.

She tossed her head as if throwing a mane of thick hair behind her shoulder.

"Ugh, I'm sorry. These rude secretaries just throw me from all decorum," she said. "Can one of you do proper introductions seeing as we lack a herald right now."

The secretaries finished laughing, and a different one than who called out to—and named—#404 stood up. They were composed in the sleek lines of a white faille suit. Whose sharpness matched the extremity of their cheekbones and the narrowed slit of their eyes.

"I can do the honors, unnie," they said to her.

"You're always such a dear, #225."

#225 pulled a sorc-deck from their pocket. Slid their thumb across as they projected two screens. Then cleared their throat in a gently practiced manner.

"Welcoming the examinee-class probationary Lodgemember, Nadia Temple. Inheritor of no factional titles, but famed for her deeds that have won her epithets recognized by the Brightgate branch of the Summoner's Lodge. These include: The Starshine Beast, Slayer of Lurkers, and the Explodo-Bitch."

"The Explodo-Bitch," I whispered.

#404 whispered back, "You made a lot of paperwork for a lot of secretaries."

#225 continued, "Her link is that of the soldiery, and her Court is declared as Revelation. Though that last bit goes unverified or recognized by the Lodge."

"I'll recognize and verify it," the Nightlord said. "I'd know a cousin anywhere. Speaking of she's being really rude right now."

The Nightlord crawled in the fashion of stalking predator toward me and #404. In truth, just me, as #404 hastily circled away from me toward their fellow secretaries without comment from the Nightlord. Who reached out with her hand, ignored my now native resistance to Sorcery, and violated the inner sanctity of my spirit. Sifting through its fibers in search of Sphinx, found her, and evicted her out from within myself. It only took moments, and then suddenly, dangled by the scruff of her neck, was Sphinx. Held up like a treasure found between couch cushions.

"Tsk tsk, really cousin you should know better than to try hiding anything in front of a Nightlord."

Sphinx's eyes were wide as she beat a rapid rhythm with her bowing head—eager to not offend the power before her anymore than she'd already done. I shot a glare toward #404, you couldn't have said anything? Despite the anger wafting from me, their expression was innocent and mocking yet bright despite the circumstance. They shrugged as if to say, now why would I, little brute. Then took a sip of a newly claimed mimosa.

"Apologies my lady, but I was recuperating. My summoner, Nadia, died recently and I was forced into dormancy. I'm still healing from it."

The admission was no surprise to the secretaries—they were all called into overtime due to the attack—but it did move one of them, #404. It was a nigh-imperceptible raising of the brow. A glance to Blotomisc as they no doubt shared with him some telepathic communique. Then a reassembling of their poise and laissez-faire regard to the world and its motions.

On the Nightlord the news hit harder. Their energy was quiet and withdrawn as they returned Sphinx to the ground. I made no delay to pull her into my arms in a quick hug. A mental check-in shared between the two of us about how safe we actually felt in front of something that could violate me—us—with as much effort as rooting about for change.

"I'm sorry," the Nightlord said. "That's like, such a perfectly fine reason. So, um, seeing that your summoner isn't dead…"

I interjected, "According to my friend it wasn't a true death. Only two out of three: heart and brain."

"Oh," she said, "then you're both very lucky. Now here's me breaking decorum. Finish her introduction #225, then mine, and after we can get Nadia here fitted for the ball."

"You'll do it?" I asked.

She shimmied, rallying the party energy from earlier. "Of course," she said. "If I'm going to stick my hand where the moon's light fails to land then I might as well apologize with my labor."

#225 looked up from their sorc-deck, "Um, that's it for her I'm pretty sure."

The Nightlord leaned back on her thighs as she shook her head.

"I'm sorry, cousin," she said to Sphinx, "there's much humans fail to see."

Sphinx chuckled, "Even when it stands before them barefaced."

"#225, you should write it down that Nadia here is a princess."

"By blood?" #225 asked.

"Providence," the Nightlord said.

#225 asked, "#404 why isn't this in her file?"

"Some things are better kept as secrets, right unnie?" I asked.

The Nightlord giggled and pantomimed locking her non-existent lips with an imaginary key. #225 shook their head in disbelief, but #404's gaze that locked on me was just barely misty from that emotionless sensation of hurt. Their eyes flicked about in search of the feeling's source—a surprise to even them I think—before once more assuming their proper face.

"Well, then I guess it's just unnie's titles left." #225 said, "And with the welcome of princess Nadia, it is my honor to introduce you to this lovely hotel's pre-eminent guest, Ferilala Nu-zo, unbonded Earl of the 58th Lunar Palace, Black Herald of the Procellarum constellation, and noble blade of the Mottled Queen, Sovereign of Night and queen of the moon."

Another secretary chimes in this time, "With other such glorious titles as: the Soap Opera Glutton."

A different secretary adds, "Oh oh, the Celestial Layabout."

#404 finishes, "And Patron Extraordinaire to secretaries everywhere."

"The joke titles were so unnecessary," Ferilala Nu-zo said. "Now she'll think I'm some loser."

The one who started the listing of joke titles said, "And even if you were, we'd all still love you."

"Thanks #375."

"I'm sorry, but how are you unbonded?" I asked.

Ferilala Nu-zo wobbled her head, "It's not really an interesting story. My summoner, she'd summoned me back when she was just a scribe for the constellation. Together we graduated to a position of true importance as we'd finally gained the link of Earl. Unfortunately, once you're important then you're important. My summoner was sent here as an advance party—"

#225 said, "The palaces were eyeing Brightgate for the possibility of invasion, again."

"And I've told you it was a diplomatic mission," Ferilala Nu-zo said, entirely uninterested in resurrecting an old debate. "Either which way, we came down here and were betrayed. My summoner suffered a 'two-out-of-three' sort of death. Brain and spirit."

She continued, "Luckily for us—me, mainly—she was struck low here in our hotel suite. I'd destroyed the assassin, and realized that I wasn't discorporating quite that fast. So I made this place into a territory for myself. Rather doable considering the entire hotel is just a series of stacked Conceptual spaces. Got the conditions just right that as long as I don't leave the room I'll stay in reality."

#404 said, "Lodgemaster Khapoor didn't want to deal with the fallout between Brightgate and the palaces, so unnie gets to stay here for as long as she wants."

When I let out a breath I realized how tight I'd gripped Sphinx. The story was a little close to home, and my own mind couldn't help but imagine what if my sort-of death was just a little different. Sphinx was just a soldier, not strong enough to make a territory on her own, and I wasn't important enough to justify letting her keep the place. She'd discorporate despite any attempt to hold on. Then I imagined what if she could hold on, and that wrung my heart of its blood in the process. A life—a generally immortal life—stuck forever in one hotel suite. Unable to cross something as mundane as a door threshold without being shredded to pieces by reality and tossed back to whence she came. It made me pity the Nightlord.

#225 added, "With the only stipulation being that she helps out now and then. With the help mainly being keeping us looking good."

Ferilala Nu-zo shrugged, "I don't have much else I can do. Besides, you all are so cute that it makes it worth it. Now, no more introductions and no more sad talk."

The Nightlord stood, briefly towering above me and the rest of the secretaries, before leaping into the air and shrinking down to a more manageable five foot height—if you counted the horn she was five-foot-six. Once she'd floated back to the ground, she took my hand and guided me deeper into the glen. With a raise of one hand, the loamy earth surged upward forming smooth rounded steps of a dais not too dissimilar to the constructed one at the previous dress shop.

She shoo'd me with quick sweeps of her hands, and I climbed the steps leaving Sphinx at her "cousin's" side. The secretaries walked over—drinks still well in hand, and apparently self-refilling. Under all the attention I couldn't help but fidget. Their expressions were bright with mirth, but still retained the sharpness necessary to be the eyes and ears of the Lodge.

#375 yelled, "Take your shirt off."

"No, that'll come later," Ferilala Nu-zo corrected to the cheer of the secretaries and #404's smirk. "First, I want to know your intentions with your outfit. Is this just a fun night? Are we trying to like network? Or is tonight something a little more romantic date-y?"

She tilted her head toward #404 with the last option. A gesture that caused the secretaries to snicker at their expense while they choked on a sip of their mimosa. Face already hot as they looked to me to set things right. Though I let the moment drag for at least two more seconds—I'd wanted #404 to taste some of the sweet agony they enjoyed plunging me into.

"There's nothing between us, but work," I said. "They've made that very clear."

#404 nodded with only the faintest grimace from the blunt trauma of my statement.

"Though my goals tonight are still romantic," I said. "My ex and I had a fight—mainly my fault—and right now I don't want to let this distance between the two of us settle. I need an outfit that screams, 'You know you don't want to let this go,' with as much passion as how I don't want to let her go. Especially not to that short asshole, Ina."

I inhaled after my emotive ramble. The secretaries were silent, and Sphinx was placid as she gave the slightest tilt of her head as if to say, it'll only be us in the end, so why be jealous?

#404 said, "You're trying to 'get her back,' little brute? Your past actions made me think you'd accepted you were on divergent trajectories."

Their words came out the side of their mouth. A quick jab of a knife I'd not expected them of all people to pull. It was Ferilala Nu-zo who treated the proverbial wound #404 sought to make.

"Well I'm glad she's not," she said. "It's so boring to make an outfit for someone that simply wants to look cute or sophisticated. The Night lives for drama, and a selfish motive is the soil that produces the most succulent fruit."

#404 scoffed, and caught the Nightlord's attention in the process. She turned to the secretary, and gave her a polite yet potent hip-check. Spilling the remnants of #404's drink.

"Oops, sorry about your mimosa, but like let's be happy it's not your tea. Though I'm always willing to show my work if you don't trust me."

A chill swept through the glen as herald to a rushing tide of frigid darkness. The luminescence of the surrounding forest snuffed and buried deep below as a mere memory of light. Above was no painted nebula but instead the awful grandeur of a watching harvest moon. Red in the dried blood of some celestial murder. While its many craters opened to reveal legions upon legions of eyes—crescent slit and sly—that were hungry to see what #404 would say next.

Secretary placed their glass on the ground. It melted down into translucent fluid that was swallowed by the earth. They straightened their clothes and held up both hands in surrender.

"No need, unnie, I misspoke. Can you bring back the stars? I'd hate for you to work in a dour mood."

Their voice was loose and unbothered. How many times have they done this song and dance with this Nightlord, I wondered. Enough times that after their words it was only a blink and everything was as it was before #404's social gaffe.

Ferilala Nu-zo said, "Alls below, you're so right. We don't want you in some funeral gown do we?"

"No, unnie?" I asked intending it to be an answer. Though the way my body shook—shivered—I couldn't help it. Though it was apparently good enough for her.

"Lovely, so I'm going to need you all to go try on your outfits while I get to work with Nadia here," she said. "This one strikes me as the type who needs some privacy."

Two rows of flowers crescendoed in brightness forming a walkway back through the trees to wherever the secretaries' outfits for the ball were stored. Those with drinks to carry placed their glasses down—which guzzled down much like #404's was—and ventured off between the trees.

"Not you, #404."

The Nightlord's finger pointed down at a position beside her opposite Sphinx. Though as much as it was a gesture toward where #404 was to be, it was a nail that pinned Secretary down with the reminder that where they stood, went, or even got to drink was entirely at her discretion. #404 followed the request expeditiously.

I'd seen Secretary wear many faces—most of them confident edging into cocky. Sometimes comedic, a harlequin laughing at the invisible joke which seemed to sit on my shoulders for how often it seemed like they were laughing at me. Yet I'd never seen them look truly as nervous as they did now. Even Blotomisc looked resigned—he may have lacked a face at that moment, but with how his head compressed down to a plate, little more than a line, you'd get the idea.

"Can I help you, unnie?" Secretary asked.

Ferilala Nu-zo giggled, "Little lesson cousin for when you graduate, that question right there is the only thing you want the help to ever say to their betters."

Sphinx bowed but said nothing choosing instead to swear within their mind. #404 scowled at the Nightlord's designation of them as "the help." Not that the idea of being helpful was bad, but rather Ferilala Nu-zo had stressed what she meant using an Old World expression—albeit in a lunar accent—which roughly translated to, "servile non-person."

"I'd say otherwise," I declared.

"Really?" she asked. "On what grounds?"

"That hierarchies like that don't belong in this world. My mother wouldn't stand for it and neither do I."

Mom had raised me on the right stories. Stories about the Au Pair Assassinations, where hundreds of young women slaughtered the political tyrants that tried to steal the future of the world for themselves by attempting to hide summoning. I'd learned of the maids whose chemical knowledge birthed the bombs which shattered the gates of nearly every cthonic commune populated by more Old World monsters. It was the "help" who were at the frontlines of the Changeover, and I wouldn't see them—or #404—be besmirched.

"Your mother doesn't run my Court and never graced the moon. My Sovereign saw to that."

"Then maybe I'll finish her work."

I stared down from the dais into the reflective depths of the Nightlord's faceplate. It meant staring into myself—my eyes wide in fear but with an inviolable will to face my end. A daring smile taunting her to introduce me to it. It was a smile Mom practiced every day.

#404 rushed between us and propped themselves on two steps. While Blotomisc stood beside me, their body at ninety degrees in a spine severing bow.

"All apologies, my lady, but the summoner is new," he said.

And #404 added, "Besides, it'd be improper for you both to not realize this as a moment of cultural exchange. Little brute, the Changeover was different for them. If hierarchy must exist, it's in the unforgiving reaches of space."

They turned to Ferilala Nu-zo and said, "And might I remind you, that us grav-born take those more derogatory Old World terms very seriously. You know better, and she's sorry."

The Nightlord slowly nodded as she backed up.

"Look at you, a princess already acting like a king and the servant—no, vizier—that'd apologize for their every misstep. You guys have like got to tell me how you met up sometime," she said, her voice mutating from its prior haughtiness. "Sorry about that, cousin, I needed your emotional measurements."

I asked, "My emotional measurements?"

"Yep, but sorry I had to get all ugly. Not every emotion arises from positive stimuli, and without a full picture I couldn't possibly do you justice."

"Secretary, did you know she was doing that?"

#404 muttered, "I should have. She did it to me when I was fitted."

"That I did," she said before turning to me. "You wouldn't believe the colors within this one right here. Looks like boring grayscale, but turn up the saturation and—."

"Are you done with me….unnie?" #404 asked.

She said, "Yes, yes, go get fitted with the others. I was able to sneak in some last minute alterations just now."

#404's eyes narrowed at the Nightlord as they realized something about just now. They glanced up at me with a hesitance to something—their expression not fully legible.

"Be good, little brute," they said, before disappearing between the trees.

I followed their every step with my eyes until even the echo of them in the darkness had faded.

"My emotional measure?" I asked, still skeptical.

"Oh cousin," Ferilala Nu-zo directed to Sphinx, "she's so inflexible."

"Nadia abhors games. Nothing more."

"I don't think that's it. She's the biggest player here after all. I mean, wanting to win her fiancee back with one hand and clutching tight around her new treasure at the same time," Ferilala Nu-zo said, before turning to address me. "That's being a greedy player, princess."

"What new treasure?" I asked.

"Oh you're so funny," she said. "Hmm, I do worry about you when the game is called and you see who you're playing against. It'll break you utterly if it doesn't kill you first."

She stared at me with the reflection of my own face stretched in the curvature of her helm. My mouth, just barely open, ripped into a yawning cry for help. I looked away—unable to win the staring contest against the girl I saw in that reflection.

"What's the next step?" I asked.

"Show unnie, a spell."

"What does that have to do with my outfit?"

Ferilala Nu-zo no doubt rolled her eyes—Conceptual or otherwise—behind her helmet.

"Everything. Night is about the accentuation and obfuscation of things. Imagine, a lake at night with fireflies above it," she instructed. "Their light is only so strong, too organic and weak for proper illumination, but strong enough that they can dye the black. With enough of them it's like looking at the heat still lurking in a burnt piece of paper. You toss a rock, and then the world ripples. That's what I do."

"Okay, so am I the firefly or the lake?"

"This is a tough marriage you've struck, cousin," she tossed to Sphinx. "You're the memory, Nadia. And I'm going to help you construct the perfect frame for it, but to do that I needed your intent, and—."

"My emotional measure," I answered.

"Now you're catching up. Yes, a measure gained by making you face yourself. Finally, I take a measure of your Spirit and the Court which threads through it."

"And you can get that with one spell?"

Ferilala Nu-zo chuckled behind their hand. "Of course, unless you already have a thing for your lovely unnie, and want to bare even more of yourself for me?"

"I'll just have to trust you'll get everything you need in one go."

"Then pick a good spell. In fact, show me the spell you consider to be…"

Sphinx hurriedly said, "Cousin, don't ask—."

"The cornerstone of your relationship to Revelation."

Her words had pushed my mind back in consideration. Tipping my consciousness down toward some place within myself—a room I'd not opened, but was always there since I'd met Sphinx. By her final word, I couldn't hear Sphinx whine nor was I consciously aware of how the shadows stretched—even here in the Nightlord's territory—to assume the silhouettes belonging to Sphinx's upChain forms who raced to fall across my body in thick umbral bands.

 

[MxOberon]

AN: Sorry for being so late on updating this thread here. Life's been quite a trip and things have fallen through in places. However, hope you all can forgive me with this nine chapter burst we got here. Also, should be back on properly with a new schedule of Wednesday and Saturday, so expect a chapter tomorrow.

Also, if you want to read ahead please check out the PATREON where we're 10+ chapters ahead, the chapters are uncensored, and where I (as of recently) will be posting fun worldbuilding articles about the setting! You also get access to a special patron only channel in the story's DISCORD server. A server I highly recommend where we do community nights, you get to ask fun questions, chat with other readers, and I share interesting goodies like a chart with all the Courts that exist!

---

My ego's plummet saw me hurtle through darkness. I forced myself to look down and witnessed a bright square ripping its way through the void. The speed of its expansion informed me of how fast I was falling, and when its searing white shattered back into distinct colors I wrapped my head with my arms to brace for landing—I didn't expect to bounce.

The bounce righted me, and—for the evanescent moment of any jump where you can believe you're floating—I beheld the space. It was a four walled room. Wide enough to be some moderately sized cafe if it wasn't for all the pillows you'd be afraid of staining with a spilled drink. As pillows coated the floor like a carpet of creeping kudzu that Dad had shown me pictures of.

I fell back down into one the size of a giant's palm—well, maybe a small giant. It was plush, arrested my fall, and refused to let me bounce any longer. Through the impossible nature of my visit, I'd broken no bones despite my speedy descent and my landing didn't even jostle the steaming hot chocolate set on the table in front of me.

Following the twining steam as it climbed into the air, I noted that I was before a stage about half the size one might expect. Equidistant to each other were four folding screens depicting, in jewel tone color, scenes expressing some Sorcerous secret of Revelation. Behind them were silhouettes too indistinct to make out beneath the detail of their screen's painting.

"I already said I'd take the trial later," I protested. "You can't force me to take it."

A puckish chortle flowed forth from behind the fourth screen—farthest to my right and depicting a faceless girl on fire while eating a bowl of noodles beneath a crescent moon reflected in water.

"Puppy, we can't push you through the door, but that doesn't mean we can't 'force you,'" said the childish voice behind the fourth screen.

"I hate to agree, but she's right," said the voice whose screen was adjacent and depicted a girl—still faceless—as she struggled against vines just barely keeping her from walking off a cliff. "We can bribe you, trick you, or threaten—somehow—something you care about. Free will is retained in all situations even if it's not under the most fun circumstances."

I said, "Neither of you two are doing a good job of convincing me to pick you when I graduate."

"It's a good thing we aren't here for that then, huh, puppy?"

"Then what are you here for?" I asked.

The silhouette behind the second screen raised a hand. Theirs was adjacent to the furthest left and depicted a tree from which five burning bodies swayed from its branches like fruit, their blood watering the field of swords that littered a hill like so many flowers.

Beautifully somber, they said, "That's the wrong question, I'm sorry. Please don't be mad."

"I'm not mad. Just confused, and I wish you could give me a clear answer." I exhaled, "But you can't because that's not Revelation. So, if not about you then it's me. Why am I here?"

From behind the screen to the farthest left which detailed a solitary figure pushing snow from the steps of a temple beneath a bright star, came a cold voice.

"Enlightenment, Nadia, you heard a question that stirred something in your mind about the trial you still delay to take. As such, you fell into a moment of Revelatory contemplation. Tipping ajar the door—to use the fourth's metaphor—just enough for us to arrive and assist you."

I leaned back against the pillows until I could see all four screens at once. The Nightlord had asked me to demonstrate a spell that was the cornerstone of my relationship to Revelation. It shouldn't be hard because I only had four—and then I understood.

"You're here to help me pick my spell," I stated.

None of them spoke as we were all in agreement on that.

I leaned forward staring into my hot chocolate as a single large marshmallow melted out in a smooth pebble of white. It smelled exactly how Melissa's mother would make it for me. The last time I had it, I couldn't taste its flavor beneath the blood that ran from my mouth. I wanted to bring the drink to my lips, but the Baron's words about how they could still trick me ran about my mind like a maypole. New anxieties about everything in the room coloring my experience.

I asked, "Is the hot chocolate a trap?"

"Last I checked, chocolate kills dogs," the fourth Baron said.

With a tired sigh, I pushed the drink away from myself as if distance would weaken the temptation the cup offered. Then I glanced up toward the Barons, silent and waiting, and down at my hands which had formed the seals of my spells so many times now. Yet here my fingers felt stiff and easy to shatter.

"Why is this so hard?" I asked.

The first Baron answered, "You want a solution that doesn't feel wrong more than you're trying to pick one that is right."

"And that's wrong?"

"If you let it," the second Baron said. "You humans have a tendency to logic yourself away from understanding. If it helps, nothing about your choice will affect the trial."

"Then why all of this?"

"Because it'll affect you," the third voice said. "Your way leads to us no matter what, but success or failure is hardly the design of the test. Rather, it's the dominion of the test taker."

"Come on puppy, you've already passed the first test of the Lodge exam," the fourth Baron said. "You know what it takes to pass, and what way leads to failure."

Was it really that simple? That some test designed by one of my parents' killers could hold the secret to the graduation trial, really? I remembered when Sphinx ran through my chart as I taught her the Principles, and how elegantly her paw print stamped the location of the Court. Revelation could be found in the smallest things, so why not look back to a success if I wanted to succeed going forward.

"I used all my spells," I said. "It wasn't one singular spell that carried me to victory."

My voice warbled at the end of my statement as my body felt so cold in my denial. The first Baron stood behind their screen and pointed at me.

"If so, then pick or cease lying," they said.

The second Baron said, "Hey, stop bullying Nadia. I'm so sorry, she gets like this—"

"All the time," the fourth Baron said. "Though I agree with her. Be a good dog and only speak the truth. You know what you want to pick, so pick it."

"But it's not just about the spell is it?" I asked. "Ferilala Nu-zo said it had to be the cornerstone of my relationship to Revelation. And, I don't know what that is."

The second Baron crooned, "But you do, Nadia. You struck an oath to slay the enemies of our Sovereign and yourself. There's a reason Atomic Glory is your first spell. To tear down and unmake them from the world. Our world."

"Biasing the summoner," the third Baron said. "She'd find nothing without the Omensight. Revelation is a way to discovery. About her foes, her mom, her dad, and were she to take the right step it could help her discover herself. All necessary to her quest."

The fourth Baron scoffed, "The 'right step' which just so happens to be the next step. Obviously both spells are good, but what really gets her is the Godtime. It gives her a chance to stay ahead of the knife and delay it. Through Revelation she'll get to live."

As they spoke I noticed the way some of their words caused the hot chocolate to ripple. My fall hadn't spilled a drop, but their words made waves in the mug. I pulled it back toward myself as I ignored the Barons squabbling.

"Unmake, quest, live?" I asked, my statement lilting up into a question. The drink didn't stir.

"It won't work like that," the first Baron said. "Speak with your spirit not your mouth."

So I tried incanting, "Unmake. Quest. Live."

Then I watched and felt the room flow away from me and back toward me. Tides of my spirit around which I was the center. For each word its Baron squeaked, groaned, and laughed as I pronounced their cardinal aspect.

"T-technically they should be pronounced in the present progressive if you want them to be truly strong," the second Baron said.

"Gah, don't help the puppy slip her collar," said the fourth.

"Why'd you help her?" the third asked the first.

"She had no need of my help, but simply required an enabling of her own prowess, Revelation Questing."

"So that's how you say them. Can I make you leave?" I asked.

And the first answered, "We're in your spirit. You've always been in charge."

I rose to my knees with the mug held in my hands. Held it forth in an ironic oblation.

"Revelation Unmaking. Revelation Questing. Revelation Living," I incanted, "Begone."

The three Barons' silhouettes bowed as their screens and themselves sunk into the stage. Familiar with my spirit now, I gestured forward at the first—and only—Baron still present. I flexed and space contracted. Gone was the stage as now opposite me at my table was their screen.

"That felt good," I said. "Especially to not be called 'puppy' anymore."

"Forgive them," the first Baron said, "but we only speak as we are and say what's present. If Revelation Living calls you a puppy then ask yourself whose collar you wear."

"You say that like you don't want to collar me."

"I don't," the first Baron said. "It'd go against my cardinal aspect."

"Which is?" I asked.

"A surprise."

"It can't be much of one," I said. "If the second is Atomic Glory, the third is Omensight, and the fourth is Godtime. Then you have to be my Inviolate Star."

"Am I?" she asked.

"Yes. Show me," I ordered.

"I love that side of you," the first Baron said. "No respect for anyone above you."

"If five people can kill a god, why have respect for power at all."

"When it's the right power," the first Baron said. "It'll let you kill a god. It'll let you cross time to feel the touch of the lost. It'll let you disregard fate, and delay death."

"You're not defeating my theory," I said.

The first Baron laughed. It was the airy laugh of someone used to looking down on those below them with an icy regard only thawed by the burning rebel that sat before her. Then, the folding screen was slid aside by the Baron.

"It's hardly a theory if you already know."

In the frame composed by the closed screen, was me. A reflection of me that stood with shoulders rolled back and a head held high. Only her eyes were pointed at me—and they glowed in the bounce light of a blazing halo composed of Inviolate Stars. The first Baron tilted her head—my head—and followed me as I rose to face her.

She held out a hand. I took it. Her eyes bore into me as she waited for me to answer.

"My way is to supersede all others. I need to come out on top every time, or else I'm done." I added, "And the Inviolate Star lets me do just that and more. It's my way."

* * *​

"It's very pretty," Ferilala Nu-zo said.

My eyes properly seeing, I stared at the Inviolate Star that hovered above my palm. It was the spell I didn't want to use, and the one that was always necessary. Despite everything feeling so wrong, it was the only thing that felt right.

"Sphinx, did you place the hot chocolate?" I asked.

She shook her head, but before I could press said, "We can speak of Court matters tomorrow. You have too many choices tonight to let far off things blind you in their brilliance."

I nodded and shook the spell from my hand. "So, how long until my outfit's done?"

The Nightlord giggled, "I'm already done, silly. You've been standing like that for a while."

That was when I felt my body's ache that wormed through my muscles. I squatted and stretched to work them out. A process which encouraged cheering from the gaggle of tipsy secretaries.

I whirled around to find them already wrapped in comfortable gowns and suits. They'd splayed across a long chaise couch conjured in the shimmering glow of moonlight that only teased at the couch's curves and dips. Across from them were two chairs, one of which Ferilala Nu-zo had already curled up within.

She used a hoof to spin the chair my way. I dropped down into it and spun back toward them all. Accepted the glass of sangria #375 offered me. It was refreshing and more alcoholic than fruity, as I could feel its burn hit my gut and unleash a heat wave through me. The drink couldn't match the Inviolate Star, but I finished the glass and had the secretary pour me another so I could dull my ache to feel flame in my veins again.

#225 asked, "Where'd #404 find you?"

"Would you believe me if I said it was at a train station?"

"That's like saying they found you on the side of the road in a box."

"It's the truth," I said. "Take it or leave it."

"It's the report," #375 countered. "Give us the story. What was the moment you first saw each other?"

#225 asked, "Did you know they were going to pick you?"

I let my thoughts rise as I filled my stomach on sangria. They were asking as if I was telling the story of how I fell in love with #404. Which reminded me of how I first saw them, bleeding and broken on my floor. Utterly beautiful.

"I saw them from my balcony, first. Blood pooling beneath them, and somehow they seemed soft. In need of someone to save them," I said. "But that was just a…"

"Honeypot," #375 offered.

"Yeah, a honeypot. I mean, #404 doesn't have a soft bone in them, and once Amber called their bluff the disguise was off. After that came everything else. Like their promise to use me."

And their assertion that I lacked a conscience. A claim that at first had struck me, but from that chair on the other side of so many bodies I'd made—in such a short time too—there was an aspect of myself that creeped up behind my shoulder to rest its head saying, "Yes. You don't."

The voice fragmented in my mind as Sphinx brushed against my leg. Shared a glance with me that was firm as a stake used to set a hunter's tent. I looked back up to find the patient aura of the secretaries waiting for me, and downed my second glass.

#225 said, "#404 loves misdirection, so I'm not surprised there. I am surprised they'd say they were using you without saying what for."

"I mean, the first time was obvious, to help them finish their mission."

#375 shook their head laughing. "There was no mission then. Secretaries of their rank and lower get free time to be taken as they search for any potential assets for the Lodge. That's what they were doing."

"And it just happened to align with a missing team and a cult that attacked a research base?"

"Eh, it's convenient sure, but #404 is meticulous. They probably searched for a problem from recent reports—or lack thereof in that case—and referenced them next to specific travel points."

"So their mission wasn't in fact a mission, but just a test to determine if I deserved a prelim exemption?"

"Oh, no," #375 said, "we can give out tons of those. #404 was looking for a Lodge asset, special people capable of unique or impossible things."

#225 said, "If you noticed, we lack names but we have ranks. The only way to move up when you're a newbie secretary is to complete assignments. Complete enough of them and you enter the next tier and get a designation."

"Like information protection and retrieval?" I asked.

"Exactly," they said. "Now, this method can only get you so high up because assignments are reactive. A good secretary reacts impeccably, but a great secretary? They anticipate problems and have the solutions already lined up. Recruiting assets for the Lodge to deploy is a critical part of the process."

#375 sighed, "And the only way to bring in an asset is to have them pass the exam."

A third secretary said, "A thing #404 basically swore they'd never—"

#225 hissed, "Shut it, #322."

"No, explain what they swore," I said.

"It's not our file to open," #225 said. "They're your handler, and they'll tell you if you need to know…or if they're ready."

Their face—sharp even at rest—was softened by the unspoken request in their reply, Give them time. I shrugged it off and the implications of what #322 had let slip out.

"Where's #404 anyways?" I asked as I stood.

"Right here, little brute," #404 said.

An arm slipped around my own as #404 clung to me in a gentle drama. Their mouth unbalanced as one side tugged their face in the opposite direction of their eyes. While mine ran down their body in appreciation of Ferilala Nu-zo's work.

With every inch my gaze traveled #404's garment changed. It was a hanbok, a kimono, a cocktail dress, or something indulgent with heaps of fabric flowing in great arcs. The only commonality was the way it shimmered through each one like the colors in a lenticular painting. As well as the stars which winked in and out of existence—visible only when their garment was in transition.

"Little brute?" they asked.

I'd been staring. The Nightlord's work was that magnificent as it accentuated all the curves and planes of Secretary's body. It was my second time falling into aesthetic appreciation that Ferilala Nu-zo laughed and surged from their chair to be beside #404 in under a second.

"Come on, Nadia, how does #404 look?" she asked.

"Like nothing I've seen before."

#404 preened, "What an astute observation, little brute. But our lovely Nightlord never makes the same clothes twice."

#322 said, "Okay, so go show the little brute's how it's done, #404. How does she look?"

#404 glared at their fellow secretary before stepping back to take me in. Their face forcibly placid as they assessed me. Then I noticed a blush work across their face.

"Naked," they said.

"What?"

Sphinx grinned and slid along our telepathic connection, the image of myself as seen through their eyes. I wasn't quite naked as #404 put it, but it was more than well enough implied. No fabric hung from my body. Rather an expanse of the star filled heavens clung to me coating my chest, stomach, legs, all the way to my fingers tipped in opalescent claws. As revealing—if not more so—than Lupe's conweave skinsuit. The only defense of my modesty was the small mantle of black iridescent feathers that fluttered along my collar bone and teasing up my neck like some corvidian gorget. It was those same feathers that fluttered up from the edge of my stomach down to the floor in a grand ballroom skirt.

My face was where I stopped and marveled. Around my eyes was a smoky shadow that implied cosmic depths of mystery whose answers could only be found within the intensity of my eclipse-gold eyes. Above which the cool light of the starlight horn Ferilala Nu-zo had placed upon my brow did lighten and soften the imperious majesty I projected.

I blinked away the image Sphinx had sent me, and gave a slight bow to the Nightlord in thanks. She gasped in mock surprise, but was quick to stop me when I pulled out the tokens Amber had given me.

"Let me pay you," I said.

"You've paid me in fun," she said. "I see the same faces again and again and again. It was fun to see someone new. Something new."

"And what something is that?" I asked.

She shook her head, "That'd be spoiling. Now, I've already called you an alley-racer to get across the city back to the Lodge district. You'd be underestimating if you tried to imagine how packed the cable cars get on nights like tonight."

I slipped the tokens back into the pocket of the pants I wore on the way here. Folded up my clothes and slipped beside #404, and—after asking so politely—had them send my clothes back to my room through that spell of theirs. From there the lot of us piled into the elevator to catch our waiting ride to the party.

Until visiting Brightgate, I wasn't too familiar with alley-racers. No one back home bonded to the Court of Alleys, or if they did they didn't stay in town for too long. Home was a place of direct people who met things head on, and for whom travel was a matter of distance rather than speed. Two aspects which likely selected us away from the Court to instead see folks favor the Court of Wanderlust instead. At most, I knew the basic details of an alley-racer, it was a vehicle whose engine—however it was constructed—connected into a shrine whose size scaled to the transport. That shrine was what let the whole thing punch in and out of Alleys without stressing the driver. There was where any of my expectations ended.

Yet still I was surprised, as there on the curb was this nautiloid carriage of clear glass no doubt treated to withstand whatever weather was common in the Alleys. The side of the carriage was open and we all slid in. Three secretaries on one bench, and #404 and myself on the other facing theirs—Sphinx had returned to my spirit. Above their heads and back through the glass I saw the driver mount their seat, slot in a few tokens to kickstart and recharge the whole thing, and then he settled his feet against the base of the saddle. Gripped the handlebars and twisted.

We hurtled forward into a rectangular cutaway that seemed to descend from the sky. Once through our driver whipped the handlebars to the side sending the whole carriage drifting along an invisible road. While all around us were the explosive pops of fireworks that sparked off within drifting clouds in place of lightning. Their color seeped into the glass shell that I'd pressed my hands against to get a better look of things.

In the faint reflection of the glass, I could see #404's face soften at the—in retrospective—blatant display of my own innocence. That something so mundane to them could still be…well, magic to me. Our eyes met in the glass, and they fluttered their fingers at me. Then it was over as soon as it began as we drifted through another rectangular cutout that led from this realm back to Realspace.

The alley-racer slid to a stop in front of a cafe down the street from the ball's venue. At an outdoor table sat Amber who, upon sighting us through the glass of our carriage, drained the rest of their cup. Dropped two tokens inside, and descended down from the cafe's porch dining to the sidewalk where we'd assembled.

"Temple, now where'd you get this number?" Amber asked alongside an appreciatory whistle.

Before I could answer, #404 leaned against my arm smirking up at Amber.

"Sorry, it's a Lodge secret," they said.

"If Temple can know why not me? We're both probationary members."

#322 muttered, "In this episode, drama in the princess's harem."

Before Amber and #404 could turn to obliterate #322, I hurriedly wrapped both arms around one of theirs leading them onward toward the growing mass of Lodgemembers. Who had all taken the Lodgemaster's theme as a mandate; justifying their choice of fashion or lack thereof if the number of near nude summoners was anything to go off of. The sight of which stoked flames of excitement within myself that became a stellar burst as the crowd took notice of us—of me—and parted into a clear path to the door. Through which I could make out, clear as Amber whispering in my ear, the sonic assault of bass heavy music that lured your heart to beat faster, pump harder, so you might lose yourself in the orgiastic mass revel that only those who live so close to death might ever appreciate.

"Welcome to your new favorite holiday, little brute," #404 said, as they led us inside.

 

[MxOberon]

AN: We're so back baby! Time for some good fun messy yuri with your fave. Before we hop into the chapter you need to know that I added a really fun thing to the PATREON for you lore lovers! It's a series of lore articles I'm calling, Wonders of the Court, where I'll be going in depth on elements of the setting for Comfort Of The Knife. Now, one really good thing for all of y'all is that these articles are available to any patron free or paid, but for those of you who do become paid patrons it means you'll be able to submit the very questions I'll be answering in the lore series. So far we already have one article up that's all about what happens when a summoner loses the power struggle with their entity (tl;dr it ain't pretty). With the next two articles being all about conceptual food & weapons, and how exactly hunters work & what they do! So check out the patreon. Anyways, enjoy this new chapter~

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"Does anyone see Melissa?" I asked my entourage.

As one they called back, "No." Their tone flat and weary.

We'd posted ourselves on the second floor of the club the Lodge had commandeered for the night. From the balcony that ringed the room I could see everything. The surging mass of dancers on the first floor whose steps and motions flung water up into the air to clash against the conjured raindrops that poured from the ceiling in a column of ever falling rain. Around that column of water I could make out the other bars posted against each wall of the second floor, and the semi-circle couches that formed mini-cubbies along the inner rim of the balcony. They weren't perfectly private and so I could see the pairings off of Lodgemembers and secretaries conjoining in different erotic configurations. Both in how the body fit together, and how many bodies could be involved at once.

All of this set to the highly saturated and cool color palette that shifted in surging leaps to the beat of the music. Though so constrained that it never found its way deeper than indigo or brighter than a dark illicit magenta. It was an ever flowing loop of blues and purples that painted the planes of the body, the face, and even memory.

"Temple, we're going to find her," Amber reassured me. "She told us she'd be running late."

Amber waved her sorc-deck in my face—slow enough I could reread Melissa's missive for the twentieth time—before dropping it back into her storage-spell. It was well-intentioned of her, but my anxieties couldn't help but detail the heavy shadows that could be drawn from a message as brief as: We're running a bit behind, don't worry.

Why were they running behind? What made it a bit? Was she busy being fed poison into her ears by Ina, or worse were they deciding to pre-game on the sexual festivities by linking together before arriving? Then there was the 'don't worry' which I could only weave through ideas of losing her. That we were well and truly done, and it'd be someone else's job—duty—pleasure to worry about her.

My thumbs pushed the glass of my tumbler inward inadvertently, sprinkling shards into the whiskey Amber had ordered for me. I set the glass back down, and let Amber guide me to her shoulder. She'd decided to wear a jumpsuit that was reminiscent of a tux what with its central pleating. An aspect her designer had extended across the jumpsuit down to the slightly billowing pants leg that looked closer to the hakama Mom had us wear for training when she felt formal. Over the jumpsuit, Amber wore a thick jacket across her shoulders like a cape. It was a heavy wool that felt softer than any sheet as I pressed my cheek against it feeling my skin press against the steel like muscle it turned out that Amber hid beneath her clothes.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You didn't come out here to deal with me."

"If I would be so upset at the idea of 'dealing with you' then I wouldn't be on this trip at all," she said. "Though I do think maybe we stop wasting the good japanese whiskey."

Amber removed a super-fine strainer from her storage-spell and poured the remains of my drink into her own before returning the strainer and sifted glass fragments into storage. #225 slid a new glass in front of me. It was a graduated cylinder filled with a fizzy liquid topped with about a half-inch of foam. They dropped a straw that wound itself into a celtic knot inside.

"Drink," they ordered.

I asked, "What is it?"

"A Bacchanalian Ballast."

"It's conceptual?"

Amber stroked my head. "Don't go accepting drinks from strangers, Temple. First rule of parties."

"Oh don't worry," #225 said, "if I wanted to drug them I'd use a method better than a laced drink. Though at this rate, drugs might be the only thing that'll make her relax and enjoy tonight."

I extricated myself from Amber, and shifted my gaze from drink to #225 who did look concerned. A bit of annoyance underneath but I'd deserved it. No one felt comfortable leaving me at the bar on sentry duty, so for the past half-hour everyone was stuck looking out for one girl just for me. I bit down on the throat of guilt that roiled within me. Slipped the straw between my lips and drew up the drink and foam through its swirling loops.

When the first drops hit my tongue it was pleasant and soothing—tasted a smidge like lychee flavored cotton candy. Then came the conceptual flow as I drained the glass. It was a river amidst a storm that lifted up all my worries and feelings. Carted them off to some other moment downstream in time, and left only the stormy waters to press heavy on my spirit. Sinking me into the moment until most other concerns became astigmatized points of thought on the other side of an opaque window. So thick that it had its own color that just happened to match the shifting hues inside the club.

The way in which my muscles unclenched and my spirit became so loose that it would sag if held between two hands, brought Amber rushing to the brink of concern.

"What was in that?" Amber asked.

"A fun blend of Suppression and Indulgence," #225 said. "Suppress the worries until they're so light she won't worry about them until tomorrow. While pushing down hard with the guide to indulge so she might actually be in the moment."

"Isn't that just what normal alcohol does?" I asked.

"Yes," Amber said.

"Apparently not," #225 said. "You've sipped and ruined enough imported whiskey that you should at least be buzzed by now."

"If you hadn't heard," I bragged, "I have like really good spell resistance."

The room tilted itself for me so I didn't have to lean in much to inform #225. They were smirking up past me to Amber while nodding so attentively.

"Oh, really, that's amazing," they said. "Amber, why don't you order one."

They slid the menu past me and my now drained glass. Amber quickly scanned the sheet. It didn't take much time to find the cocktail #225 had plied me with—for the bartender's ease the Lodge had a pre-set menu of cocktails Real and conceptual.

"Alls below, this is a viscount-grade drink," she said.

"I know, and I just heard from someone that she has a really good spell resistance," #225 said.

"Can I have another one?" I called out to the bartender.

"You heard her," #225 said, "she wants another one. Hey, #404 do you want…"

They trailed off as they sought out #404 at the other end of the bar. They sat perfectly poised on their stool while facing two people I'd not seen before. Retreating from that end, #322 and #375 made the slow march back toward us—they'd abandoned me to my worries earlier and slid down the bar to chat or gossip with #404.

"What are you doing leaving them with those two?" #225 asked.

#375 said, "#404 told us to leave. Said it'd be more interesting over here than dealing with them."

"You know them, they never want to seem weak."

"Still, leaving them feels—hey, Nadia come back," #225 said.

In the midst of their quick exchange I'd gotten the gist. Those two were—for whatever reason—bothering #404 which stoked an unrecognizable feeling in me. It rolled its heat in my gut bringing an extra sway to my hips as I stalked down the bar on stiletto heels.

"It's so early in the event that I'm surprised they have you lower ranks on break already."

The words came from the mouth of a slight boyish figure that clung like ivy to the firm flesh-slab of a person that stood next to them. It was my sharp bark of laughter that announced my intrusion to what no one would call a conversation. The two strangers turned to regard me—you could see the formations being laid in their minds as they tried to figure out who I was. Taking the initiative they so easily gave me, I let my arms drape over #404 as I laid my head into the crook of their neck.

"#404, I was so worried you were held up I just had to check up on you. Make sure it wasn't anything serious," I said. Then, with a glance of my eyes half-hidden beneath my heavy painted eyelids and a glimpse of fangs within a bemused smirk, I finally acknowledged them. "Though I'm glad to see it's nothing."

From how the small figure's mouth fell agape, my words, it seemed, had struck a blow against a fragile ego. The man next to them bristled and postured toward me. I blinked on the Omensight for a quick assessment that reeled up another laugh meant to lacerate the go.

"Oh back down," I said.

"If anyone, it should be you," the man declared in a dull voice fit for a brick. "I'm a Baron."

"Barely."

"It doesn't take much to put down a cocky little soldier like you."

"Actually," I said, "you'd be surprised how many people underestimated what it'd take to put me down. I'm—oh wait a moment."

My drink had arrived. I forewent the addition of a straw and opted to chug the mixture in one long drag. Then blew out an invisible cloud of alcoholic vapor into the brick-voiced man's face.

"Where was I, oh, right. I'm the type of summoner your secretary—I'm presuming the little twink's yours—tells you you are when bouncing on your dick to make you feel better every time someone you know graduates. After which they try to coax you to attempt the trial yourself. You've probably had that chat at least ten times?"

The small secretary looked away then in frustration.

"Oh, it's more? Yeah, it's much more. Tell me when to stop. Was it twenty, thirty, forty—"

"That's enough, little brute," #404 said. Their fingers gently laid against an arm.

"Who even are you?" the secretary asked.

"They're my little brute. An asset all my own, and already valued by the Lodge for her achievements. Of which she isn't lying when she says that too many people have already died thinking she was just a cocky little soldier."

At the admission of how I was connected to #404, the little secretary and their big meaty loser shared a pair of sickle-sharp grins. My brow furrowed at how their own ego seemed to revive at only a few words of truth despite being laid in the grave at mine.

"Okay, good luck with the exam then," the talking brick said. "It wouldn't be the first time #404 here picked out a perfectly talented summoner just for them to choke at the finish line."

"I'm not going to choke," I said.

"That's what the last guy thought," the small secretary said.

"And then I passed and he didn't," the other finished.

Together the two of them swung away from the bar to take the stairs down to the first floor. I scowled at their receding backs. #404 shrugged me off of their shoulders.

"I didn't need your help," they said.

"Sure."

"I didn't."

"So it was just your plan to let them berate you all night or something?" I asked.

#404 swiveled their stool to face me. Their eyes thin with condensed anger at wrongs I'd not committed, but for whom I was the only target they could vent it out on.

"Maybe it was," they said. "It'd still beat you pining for some girl you don't even love. You just hate to see someone play with what you think is yours."

"Really? That's what I'm doing. Okay, but I'd rather pine than sit and let some utter losers walk all over me for what?"

"Diplomacy," they said.

"Looked more like punishment to me."

Their expression twitched in the manner of someone keeping a lid on so much anger. Maybe it was the drink, but I wanted to see them let it all out.

"Who was the last person you brought to the exam?" I asked.

#404 turned away from me to sip at their drink through a straight steel straw.

"Did you meet them at a train outpost like me? What kind of test did you give them? Did you also kiss—"

"His name was Cedric. Bonded to Tranquility. He died in the last test before the exam ended."

They didn't breathe as they rattled off the facts about the ghost that seemed to haunt them even now amidst so much conspicuous living. I used my heel to swivel #404 back to face me. Leaned forward to bridge our gap.

"How are those two involved?" I asked.

"They killed him," #404 said. "The Lodgemaster had decided that the final test that year was about infiltration. Every group had a traitor that had to be found by the end of the test-mission the group was assigned."

"How'd that lead to him dying—"

"Murdered."

"Yeah, murdered."

#404 sighed and shook their head in disbelief of a fact long made history.

"The Lodgemaster offered extra points. Every person the traitor took out was extra points. If the traitor was more permanently dealt with then everyone else got those points," #404 answered. "Cedric was the traitor, and #389's asset—Sigmund—wanted those extra points so badly that he convinced everyone that it was worth it for Cedric to die. Better he permanently be removed than get free and foil things."

My own scowl deepened at another example of the incentives that Nemesis threw about the entire exam both past and present. Cedric died for points. I didn't know the man, but if ever there was a hollow reason to be murdered it'd be that.

"It's a shame," I said.

"No," #404 argued, "it's just how Lodgemaster Khapoor runs things."

I pushed myself off my seat. Held out my hand for #404 to take it.

"What are you doing, little brute?"

"Helping you down from your guilt so we can go dance."

"My guilt?" they asked.

"Yeah," I said. "You feel guilty because you brought a beautiful but weak person into this place."

"Cedric wasn't weak."

I shrugged, "He lost to Sigmund. Cedric was weak, but I'm strong. You broke a four year streak of choosing nobody because you saw that in me."

"So this is how you'll glorify yourself?"

"Alls below, #404, this is how I help you stick the knife in those assholes even if it's only a little bit," I said. "Now, you chose me because I'm strong. Strong enough to use and use again. So take my hand, and use me."

They raised their hand—it shook as they oscillated between doubt, worry, and that clinging guilt which had been with them for so long.

"You can't cry to me if your muscles burn and give out, little brute. If I do this, we dance until they're nothing."

"I wouldn't have it any other way."

#404 placed their hand—their rage—in mine as I guided them down from their stool. They had always been shorter than me but it'd been by a handful of inches. Only now, atop heels that others might describe as dizzying, did they seem truly small, fragile, and my lips drew back in sadistic grin at the idea of drawing blood—even proverbial—in the name of their defense.

I yelled over the music to Amber, "Let me know when you spot Melissa."

She raised her tumbler in understanding. "Go fuck 'em up, Temple."

The other secretaries roared in approval of us as I walked arm in arm with #404 down to the first floor and its churning horde. Of which our arrival was met by a shift in the music that brought the mass consciousness of dancing humanity to a standstill. Gone was the hooky bass heavy beat that guided everything, and in its place was something old that burned even now on the other side of the Changeover. The tune was full of popping syncopations and frantic guitar—a love affair between swing and salsa if I had my Old World music correct.

Dancers quickly paired off and took to the floor ready to compete in the language of muscle and motion that I doubt mankind could ever forget. Even #389 and Sigmund found their way to the open floor. I held #404 back from rushing out after them.

"Are we suddenly not dancing, little brute?"

"Oh we are, but we're not running," I said.

Instead, we waited as pair after pair hurried out. The guitar player reached an early furious crescendo before hanging the room onto a precarity of silence. That was when we entered. My heels—even muted by water—clacked against the glass of the dance floor. Clack clack clack. All eyes turned to me as the stars with which Ferilala Nu-zo had clothed me in played tricks upon the air as each raindrop seemed to catch the shining glory of a star.

I brought my heels in line and with a sharp twist of my waist as if snapping #389's neck, I turned hundred-eighty degrees. The speed of the motion made a wave that slapped against the dancers around me who lacked the gravitas for this fight. Wet and dripping they cleared way, but I paid them no more mind than I would a chair or any other prop.

Elegantly I extended my arms out to the crowd as if I'd embrace each and every one of them. My eyes catching on theirs teasing at the idea that they were the one…and then I landed on #404. I let my lips curl at the end in a feline sort of pleasure.

"Now, we enter," I mouthed.

#404 shook their head before charging toward me. Each step in time with the singer who'd taken the stage and made her way to the mic. She grasped the stand by its skinny neck, brought it close to her lips, inhaled right as #404's hand found mine and my other found their waist while they found the back of my neck.

"I should lead," they said. "I am your handler."

"Yes, but if I won't bow to an Earl," I whispered into their ear. "What makes you think I'll follow?"

The singer shattered the silence with a powerful note that disemboweled the tension and unleashed the reins of us mad dancers. I twirled #404 in my arms, dipped them, and swung them low in display to the entire room of who I'd chosen to share this moment. They popped back up and pressed forward in a coup to steal the lead from me.

I let them for a few steps, before swiftly sidestepping their advance letting them carry forward—our arms now parallel bars to each other. I spun again driving myself low to the ground to retrieve the lead position #404 thought was theirs. Caught off guard, they let me and their body became light as I swung them low before extending upwards. Momentum carrying them up across my back and over my shoulder.

Their own smaller heels came down in a swift cutting arc that whistled in harmony with the crooning trumpet that joined in to the music. When they touched ground I wrapped them into my arms by crossing theirs atop their chest. We quickly moved back, I went right while they went left, before meeting in the middle. They kicked up into the air forcing me to let go though not before I set their leap into a tight spiral that drilled once, twice, three times before they descended, arms outstretched for me to catch them.

I guided them back to earth right when the singer took a breath letting the instruments croon like some big band menagerie. Our fingers intertwined as I pulled them close to me, and in the other's eyes—for we were that close face-to-face—we saw ourselves. I lived in #404's eyes as something that couldn't possibly be Real. Too tall, too shining, and, from how I smiled with my fangs on display, altogether too confident. I could only hope that #404 saw themselves as I saw them in this moment, the only person for whom this, our competitive power stealing dance, could ever be possible. Their hair wet and skin glistening in the saturated light, I beheld the face of someone who I could see myself in a forever rivalry. We could argue, snipe, and joust until the sun melted into the sea never to rise again.

"I hope this never ends," I said.

"You're drunk, little brute, and all things end." They whispered into my ear, "But only tonight, you can lead."

It was probably the drink, but that wrenched a moan from deep within my chest. That for the first time—maybe the only time—#404 would cede power to me and be mine to move. When the singer swung the mic back to her face delivering a run of notes that crested like a wave crashing onto the dance floor the two of us—#404 and myself—were already in motion. This time no longer fighting for control, but slowly melding with every twirl, pirouette, and dip until we could understand each other in that ancient language of muscle and motion.

I'm surprised, little brute. #404 disappeared behind my back, hand tracing my shoulder, but gone when I turned my head.

Because I can dance? I quickly snapped my head to the other side as #404 tried to dance back the other way. Caught them by their hip and guided them through a no-hands cartwheel in the air.

No, that you'd dance with me. They landed and immediately leaned back. Their leg whipping up toward my face as if to cleave it in half.

You make it sound like I hate you. I shifted my body. Their leg swung up past my face, the wind rushing behind to tousle my hair. I caught their back with a hand while the other grasped their thigh. My cheek grazing their inner flesh.

You don't? They swung upward using every muscle hidden in their core, and caught my face between their hands as they searched my eyes for a lie.

Maybe once, maybe tomorrow, but not right now. I lifted them from the ground and shrugged their thigh from my shoulder. Rotating them in the air.

So gallant, little brute. Do you enjoy playing hero? #404's legs scissored back to wrap around my waist. In concern I took a wide stance so they might rest their weight upon my thighs. Instead, they arched their back so their face could be near mine.

I'm as much a hero as you're a damsel. I ran my hands down their body to guide the crowd to the slight curves and pleasing angles of #404's form. While my fangs teased at their skin.

Such a sharp rejection. Do you cut Melissa with that tongue? They wound their arm about my head, and used me like a pole to swing around my body. Hiding behind my back. Fingers teasing my ribs.

No. I took a sliding step forward away from their touch that suddenly felt so frigid. Whirled about to face them.

Then why are you dancing with me and not her?

We stood there, the two of us, for an interminable moment as our eyes met across the floor. The most recent mini wave of water caused by my step only now settling in the music's lull. If I had looked I'd see the way the crowd had eyes for #404 and myself. On the edge of non-existent seats to discover the answer to #404's unspoken question.

The drums rolled light and fast. Building up speed. No other instrument in their way as they advanced. As I advanced across a dance floor that felt empty but for me and my handler. Until suddenly, bang crash. Snare and hi-hat struck with the ferocity of a musician whose rhythm has overflowed beyond what one piece of kit could handle.

Cause I swung too close to the skin. My head whipped one way, #404's the other, and when we whipped back I saw myself in their eyes. Sliding down their body to my knees.

Oh, little brute, I retract what I said earlier. They tilted forward, and with both hands like one would a teacup they lifted my chin.

About what? I swept my arms up and to the sides. Blasting their arms out from me and baring my chest for whatever blow was to come.

That you don't love her. Only a lover can trace the knife's edge against your skin, and leave you still craving them. Their arms came back. Hands cradling my jaw, and with no strength at all they lifted me from my knees as I rose in time with their motion.

I shouldn't have been swinging it around anyways. I embraced them, and ran my finger claws down their back as we moved together in a rocking one-two.

You say that as if her marks aren't on you either. They rotated in my grip. Unafraid that my claws would scar them.

What do you know about love? I noted the faint trace of blood that painted the hook of my claws. My hands splayed as I leaned my upper body backward.

Enough. #404 leaned with me. Caught my arms by the wrist.

Did you love Cedric? My hands held #404 by the shoulder and opposite hip, swaying them one way and the other.

No. Just lucky enough to be loved by him. The fool. They lurched forward away from me. Curling up in frustration at the past.

There's nothing foolish about loving someone. I let go, and traced my bloody claws across the air around them until I stood in front of them. One hand behind their head and the other at the chin. This time I raised them straight until they met my eyes and my conviction.

In the normal world, maybe, but lovers don't live long in the Lodge. They rolled from my grip. Arms wide as they spun again and again. Looking like a windmill or a dervish—convinced of this truth.

Is that why you chose me? That I didn't seem like a lover. My hand shot out to grab them. We're still.

I never wanted to choose you. They looked away.

Yet here I am. I twirled them into my grasp.

And for that, I'm sorry. They looked away again.

Don't be, I'm strong enough that I'll pass. I lifted their head up to meet me. Guided them into an elegant dip.

If you do then you'll be nothing like what you were before it. They reached up and stroked my face.

And what will I be after? I righted them. Held us at arms length away.

Alone with no one to stand in your light. They twirled me, and I let them. Then they released me and I spun like a top across the water. Sliding away from them as the feathers of my skirt flew away according to some hidden design of Ferilala Nu-zo's.

All around me the feathers exploded into stardust. Cloaking me in a nebula mist that the rain loved even more than the stars on my skin. I stood there in the glorious starlight clad now in just the cosmic skinsuit and my heels. The horn on my forehead scintillating from the water that ran in thin rivulets down its length to meet my face. Where it rolled down my cheeks to fall in place of tears.

I couldn't help but search the crowd. They didn't seem to breathe nor to move. The rain had lost all motion becoming frozen gems in the air. Out within the crowd I saw my double weave before and behind onlookers. A crown of Inviolate Stars about her head. She turned just slightly to make sure I saw her—the Baron whose aspect I'd yet to discern. I blinked. Sound returned in one rushing tide of rain, horn, drums, guitar, and more.

I won't be alone. I threw my hands up and out in the direction of Amber and the secretaries watching from the second floor.

You'll see your bonds as burdens and shed them. #404 spread their arms wide in gesture to the crowd which meant nothing to me.

I'm strong enough I'll carry them. I'll carry you. I pointed at them.

You won't benefit by having me. They shimmied their body as they shook their head.

It's cause of you that I'm here. I rolled my body unfurling it for the step I knew would come.

I'm using you to climb the ranks. They threw their arms back, chest bare to me in truth—or what they believed to be truth.

And I'm doing the same. I clapped. Then opened my arms again. Now, come to me.

You're incorrigible, little brute. Don't you ever let go? They ran toward me.

If I did, I wouldn't be strong. I laughed.

Then you better catch me. They smiled. Skipped once. Twice. Preparing.

Then leaped into my arms. My hands found their waist, and my body moved to meet them pushing them up higher and higher. All the while they turned forward on some invisible axle until they were upside down. Our faces met each other. Our noses kissed.

"You caught me," they said, disbelieving.

"I don't make it a habit to let my people get hurt."

They smirked at that. "So I'm yours now?"

"You're my handler," I said. "You've been mine and I've been yours since you brought me that mask. Or have I disappointed you?"

"Maybe you will tomorrow," they said, and elegantly fell back down without need of my strength for a stable landing. "But for now, Nadia, you're adequate."

Our breath was heavy. The moment's exertion caught up to us. It had pounced on the band as well. Dragging them to a stillness as the final notes echoed in the air mixing with the pitter-patter of rain. Then the club exploded into a furious applause.

I blushed as I looked around at everyone cheering. Grinned when I saw #389 and Sigmund had vacated the dance floor if not the club itself. Then I spotted Melissa at the standing bar with Ina and Amber on the other side of the crowd on this floor.

"Go talk to her, little brute," #404 said. "You've waited long enough."

"Are you sure?" I asked as nerves slid up my back.

"Your use for tonight as my date is over."

I nodded—the word date going unnoticed by me as I gathered the strength to make amends. As I passed #404 they stopped me for a moment. Eyes looking down and away from me.

"Do it right, little brute," they whispered. "Longing is a horrible thing you never want to feel."

Then they let go of me, and disappeared into the crowd in the opposite direction. I took a deep breath to re-center. All thoughts on getting my ex back, and repairing what I'd broken. Then with a clack of my heels I set off for the bar to do just that.

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AN: Don't you just love watching someone do their best to have it all? Let's see if Nadia can pull through or not this Saturday when chapter 31 drops. Though while you're inbetween updates make sure to check out the official DISCORD where you'll find others to chat with about the story, cute Comfort related goodies like the official playlist and a chart with every Court in the setting, and more. While for those of you who aren't the type to enjoy waiting then you need to check out the PATREON! We're 10+ chapters ahead, you get an extra days worth of updates, access to a patron only discord channel in the official server, and get to submit questions to be answered in the lore series, Wonders of the Court!

 

[MxOberon]

As I pushed my way through the crowd it felt like every shoulder that bumped me was checking the firmity of my conviction. How much was I ready to apologize for? How much would I be willing to reveal? Could I handle it if…if it was over?

The questions sliced through me faster than I could process. I don't think they were questions one could easily answer, or if they were then they hid behind the wisdom of more years and broken hearts than I or Melissa had dealt with. Yet despite it all I still walked. Clack. Clack. My head held high, shoulders rolled back, chest out, and confident that when I reached them I'd have the words to answer those very questions.

It took one interminable minute to arrive at the bar where the trio stood. Melissa nursing a drink of something blue and bright—though that could have easily been the lights—while Amber swirled the marble-sized ball of ice in their tumbler. Ina didn't hold a drink, but her face was squished and tight like she'd taken a hit of pure citric acid. It was a funny enough image that it brought a smile to my face which might as well have been an open door for the two Bacchanalian Ballasts I'd drunk earlier to press me back down into the moment.

I cocked my hip, and leaned forward just slightly—doing my best to present an image to Melissa that reminded her of what I had to offer, at least in part. An action which proved effective as she caught sight of me from the corner of her eye, but rotated her entire body to actually see me. Back to the bar, her mouth fell just slightly agape.

"Oh-oh," she moaned.

"Hey, Melissa," I said. "I missed you."

Then I let my own gaze roam across her body to accentuate my words. She wore a dress made from a shifting slime mold whose contractions and expansions created brief evanescent gaps where you could see her soft flesh underneath.

"Your dress is amazing," I said.

"This thing, oh no, it's more a project than an actual outfit. I mean, compared to yours—" she said.

"It's actually clothes," Ina sniped.

"Ina!"

Melissa snapped her hand into Ina's stomach. It was a light blow with no malice behind it. Ina rolled her eyes at the half-heard reproach. From the blush that dusted Melissa's face, I figured it was a sentiment that she shared on some level—though from the smile which teased its way onto her face again and again it was sentiment that was hardly negative.

"We were just talking about you, Temple," Amber said.

"Really?" I asked.

Ina snorted, "Narcissist."

"Be good," Melissa reminded Ina, "or do you really not want your after party treat?"

A dreamy look passed across Ina's face as she hurriedly nodded. Melissa, satisfied with that, pressed a soft kiss to her cheek. The sight of it all was sandpaper against my heart. My own mind swiftly erecting far too vivid ideas of what the 'treat' in question would be. It was Amber who pulled me back from the production before it started with a quick squeeze of my hand.

"So you were talking about me," I said.

Melissa whipped back to me. "Right, right. We, um, well Amber was…telling us about what you've been dealing with lately."

I glanced at Amber, unaware of what secrets she knew and had revealed. "Really?"

"Not much that's new, Temple," Amber said. "I only helped frame it with some context."

With her other hand she laid it across Melissa's arm. Gave her a small squeeze that seemed to still the nerves she'd also brought to the party. The two of them shared their own look of understanding, and then returned their attention to me.

"I realized that we need to talk," Melissa said. "About everything. Even the stuff neither of us wants to say."

I said, "I'll say anything."

"I know you would, but right now I—we—need honesty."

A low breath just shy of a whistle escaped my lips. The pressure of the conversation warring with the Indulgent mood I'd rather stay within. I nodded then offered my hand to her.

"Of course. Can that come with a dance?" I asked. Terminating the thought there before my anxieties made me voice the hanging worry that it'd be our last.

She handed her drink off to Ina. Then took my hand as I pulled us back toward the dance floor that had settled into a slow sensual groove at the direction of the music.

"Mel, I don't—" Ina said.

"It'll be fine. This has to happen, for me."

Ina swallowed and—alls below, I hated the woman but I understood—she looked worried. Then eyed me down like I was a predator aiming to abscond with the life of her sheep. I'd yet to know if my fangs were real or imagined, but if they were real then I understood. Unlike her, in a dress made from frills and fabric composed of stitched together talismans, I didn't look like anything human. Instead standing tall, cosmic in body, claws tipping my fingers, and a horn that stood prominent as any crown. Yeah, I think I understood how she could look so worried about me.

It was hard, but I swallowed my pride to get what I wanted. "Ina, I promise after we're done talking she's all yours. If, um, that's what you want, Melissa."

"It is. Does that work for you?" Melissa asked Ina.

"Yes," she said.

The bitter pride and protectiveness in her eyes deflated. If I was no threat then she had no reason to push and strike me like she did. Instead, she had to smile and nod. Wishing Melissa luck with the being who'd held her heart before the two of them knew the other existed. Before I could abscond with her, Melissa latched her hand about Amber's wrist.

"Amber, you have to come with," Melissa said. "All of this involves you too."

Amber glanced up at me. Is it okay?

My answer was me grasping Amber's other hand and pulling her with us alongside Melissa. If she needed Amber—and alls below, I often needed Amber—then she'd be there.

The three of us changed in arrangement from a vague triangle to something closer to a sandwich as the dance floor was too congested with pressed together couples. There was me on the outside, hands on Melissa's hips pulling her close to me. My thigh pressed between her legs as hers was to mine. Behind her, also pushing her in, was Amber who loomed over the two of us and wrapped her hands around my waist. As a triad we danced to the syrup thick voice of the singer currently on stage. It was a song that dripped slow with desire in all its messy and mechanical beauty.

"So how do we start?" I asked.

Melissa thought for a moment, then answered, "Finish what you were saying back at the room."

"Are you sure? I thought it was making you mad."

She blushed and stuttered, "Mad, n-no. I was a little overstimulated. Not in the right mindset for everything."

"And this isn't overstimulating?" I asked. A roll of hips grinding my thigh against her.

She let out a squeak that dragged into a chuckling moan. "No."

Amber crooned, "It's a bit more fair in this context than only one person being naked."

She pulled on me while giving a solid thrust of her own hips behind Melissa. Pressing the both of us onto the other's thigh unleashing a harmonious moan that wound up toward her.

"Point taken," I muttered. "Okay, so I said I was sorry…"

Melissa and Amber nodded.

"And, well, I was feeling so much when I woke up. I'd just found out I was a Baron—well a pseudo one—and even though I played it off, I basically died. So when you said to stop using the spell that way, I felt scared. At the time it seemed like they'd already killed you, Amber, and I worried about what Ina and her team would've done to you, Melissa."

"They didn't kill her though," Melissa said. "We were fine."

"This time. You were fine this time, and I want to be strong enough that you'll always be fine. Not cause of luck, but because I kept you safe. When I saw their illusion I thought I'd already failed one of you."

"No one can be safe forever, Temple," Amber said.

Melissa added, "The safest thing we could do is go back home."

"And that's not even that safe," I said. "They killed Mom and Dad there after all."

"They did, and so it means you want the impossible. Unless you're willing to put me in a box and shove it into Amber's storage-spell, you can't guarantee anything, Nadia."

"I know. I know. We'd said that I couldn't make decisions for you any more…"

"When?" she asked.

"At the outpost. You said it when you and Amber took out the cultists."

"Nadia, I was just mad and…"

Amber whispered, "Within your right. The two of you needed—and still need—to find terms you can live with when it comes to the other. Not talking and just imposing won't make the hurt stop."

I asked, "When'd you become the master of love?"

"Never. This is just how I helped settle issues between me and my siblings. Boundaries are a universal concern. Anyways, continue, Temple."

So I did. "Right, so since I couldn't tell you or keep you from doing something dangerous I decided to take on the danger myself. If I burned then you didn't have to."

Melissa laid her head against my chest. Wrapped her arms around my neck.

"If you burned, I'd never forgive myself. It's why I wanted you to stop using it." She said, "Which puts us on the same problem, I suppose."

Amber said, "You both want the other to be safe."

I pressed my chin against the top of her head. She smelled of Amber, myself, her surprisingly fruity drink, and she smelled of home. Not the geography of my ruin of a house, but the very security I'd felt so adrift in lacking.

"Melissa, I'm sorry for everything. I shouldn't have lashed out. I should've told you about the spell when I first developed it with Sphinx—let alone using it that way—but above all I'm sorry for changing. We had something really good, and we didn't really talk about how to keep it before I tossed it aside. It's all my fault."

It felt good to cry then. I mumbled quiet apologies into Melissa's hair as my tears moistened her curly ash tresses. Amber raised a hand to stroke my hair as I let it out. How much I just wanted to go home.

"No," she said. I leaned back in shock, but her eyes were soft and glistening. Tears of her own on the edge of flowing.

"I mean, I do accept your apology, but it's not all your fault. People change Nadia, for good reasons and sad reasons and bad reasons. I'm just sorry I couldn't handle that," she said.

"What are you talking about?"

Her voice stopped as she choked up her next words. Amber guided us back together. Her voice low and swirling around us like the nebula mist that surrounded me and by extension them.

Amber said, "Princess, this is where you tell the truth. Like you said, honesty, even if it's the stuff you don't want to say."

Melissa groaned, "I did say that."

"You did, and I can handle it," I said.

She buried her face back into my chest. As Amber swayed us from side to side along with the bobbing tide of the music.

"I'm sorry I couldn't handle you changing because I was seeing you become something other than the girl I fell in love with back home."

The words sunk into my gut. A long metal weight within me causing my own motion to stall.

She continued, "I just hoped that that Nadia was still in there. The one before you know…"

I dragged myself back in step with them. Though my hands rose from Melissa's hips to cling to Amber's back. We were in the rapids now and I needed something to be my support.

"She might be, but I don't know," I admitted. "I feel so divided all the time. Leaning one way one moment and another way the next. Maybe that's her just trying to come back…" or maybe that's her dying gasp I continued in my head.

I asked, "What was she—me—I like…what was I like before everything?"

Melissa smiled as she glanced away from me to a happier past.

"She—you—were like the sun in the sky. Energetic, boisterous, brilliant especially when forced to think on your feet. Though you'd drag those same feet when you didn't want to do something." The adoration was a light through her words as she spoke. "You were pretty lewd most of the time, but you had a great heart. Sometimes a little black and white in your thinking. Though not so bad that it ever caused trouble. It solved trouble more times than not. There was even this time…"

She continued on to describe a story I don't remember. It involved me rather intensely, and it landed like words read on a page versus the resurrection of some recollection. It moved me so little I briefly imagined that it was just a story Melissa had confused with history. Though, the bright energetic person she described sounded wonderful. Nothing like the crying mass murderer who she clung to in the moment.

"...so yeah. You maybe did sort people into friends or foes. If the latter they got the full brunt of a righteous Nadia, and if the former they—I—had a source of pure love." She took a moment, then said, "I'd worried for a while now that you'd moved me from the former to the latter."

"Melissa, I still need you," I said.

She smirked and flicked my nose in recrimination. "I said, love, Nadia. Not need. The old you could love someone no matter their position to you. It was a perpetual love found whether I was absent or present, needed or wanted or there if I just saw you passing in the hall."

"Melissa, I…" I trailed off. My gaze skipped around at all the micro expressions I needed to track to stay present. She had a smile, but her eyes were wet, and her face was blushed, yet there was no light in her eyes, and…I closed my own. Laid my head down into her neck. Kissed and sucked and teased the flesh to a bright coloration of a newly birthed hickey. My fangs begging me to bite down with the full force of what I felt. Consuming her piece by piece so she could know without a doubt that I loved her in her entirety.

Through the dialect of sentence distorting sobs, I said, "I love you. I'll never stop loving you. It is there, it is perpetual, I promise you."

"Then why not tell me that your mom was a Sovereign? The old Nadia never kept secrets. You were in and knew or out and did not matter. I was in. I've always been in."

Behind my shut eyes, I saw the answer. It was in the moment I first knew what I was—even if I denied it and still do.

"It was that night when you looked at me like I was a monster—"

She hurried out, "I told you, I was just scared that night and—"

"Melissa," Amber said, "let her finish."

"Right," she said.

"Melissa, I don't blame you for being scared. I just felt ashamed that you were right. Whatever this Nadia is, and all the things she—I—have already done in my brief time existing was a reason, after a reason, after a reason for you to see me that way," I said. "I'd only said I was going to kill some people and I got that look. It became easy to imagine that if I said, 'Hey, Melissa, babe, I'm the child of an entity—whatever that means.' And you'd just look at me like I was something inhuman."

"Nadia, most of my family pushes the boundary of the human form already. I have four pupils. I can handle you being adopted. Even by something as wild as a Sovereign."

"Really?" I asked. "Cause that's not a thought you had to consider about the old Nadia. She gets to be normal forever, and I'm…"

"You're what?" she asked. "Who is this Nadia?"

I raised my head from her shoulder. Smiled with fangs on full display. Her eyes widened in fixation of their sharp flesh rending point—so they were real, to some extent—then swallowed.

"I'm a killer—I think—I've at least killed enough people to feel like I am."

"It was in self—" she tried to argue. Amber pressed a kiss to the other side of Melissa's neck silencing her.

"My first were in question. When I was off with Secretary, I landed into such a problem that the only way out was the one I could cut through. So I cut through them. Burned them with my spell, and watched as their very fate snapped away from them. No one will remember them because I made it so they can't. Then there was our first night here, I'd gotten picked for an opportunity to gain more points for us, and so joined this thing they called a wild hunt. I stabbed a man, decapitated a woman, slaughtered most of the summoners from a few nights ago who got denied to take the test. One of them I crushed beneath my feet. I let their blood coat me. Then there was Ina and her team who I tried to kill. Then of course all of the Lurkers who I'd slain since I met Secretary to even the test yesterday. Melissa, I don't even know my proper body count at this point."

Melissa looked away from me as I admitted to the fullest extent of what I'd done. I leaned in toward her ear to make sure she heard me.

"Melissa," I said. "I'm likely City Killer's daughter, and I have the body count you'd expect. I know you wanted to keep me from crossing that line, but if there's any line between us it's that one. It's not how much I love—that is immense—and it's not how much I'd sacrifice for you—that's everything—but it all comes at the understanding that I'm—this Nadia—is very very good at two things. Not truly dying and making sure everyone who attempted to put me down finds themselves slain by my glaive or my spells."

"Why can't you just be a normal grieving person?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, this Nadia—me—is likely a monster that can't do that. Why grieve when I can act. Especially when it seems to be my talent," I said. "So, tell me, can you love this Nadia?"

Melissa was silent.

"Even if you don't want to say it," I reminded her.

She glanced up at me—it was the only way she could meet my eyes—and shook her head.

"No. Maybe. I don't know and I…" she lost her words. Then found new ones, "If my Nadia isn't coming back can you let me go?"

Her hands slid over my body like I was too hot to hold. I caught her wrists, and pressed her forward into Amber. Then let my lips hover just above her mouth.

"No," I said.

She cried at the denial of her freedom by me. I wanted to say yes, but I wasn't ready to lose my home in her heart. Watching her describe someone with my face and name with the kind of love and affection this me wasn't born to…it made me hungry for it. I'd become sated on death, but I needed so much more love if I was to ever be brought to something akin to a balance. Sphinx's love for me wasn't enough. Amber's love for me wasn't enough. In the dark part of my spirit I knew, Melissa's love wouldn't be enough. Yet I would feel the lack of them all if I lost any.

I kissed away her tears as if it was something I hadn't caused. Watched Amber from that strange angle as she maintained an egalitarian expression. There was care for Melissa in it. She'd even had care for me within it. Yet wrapping all of that up was an acceptance of what was playing out as if it was a story she'd seen before. I only took pleasure in knowing that Amber didn't see me as something lesser for it all.

"Melissa," I asked, "can you give me—this me—a chance? By the exam's end if you still don't love me then yes, I'll let you go. Just don't abandon me beforehand."

She released a shuddering breath. "Okay, but we're doing this differently and intentionally because you're someone else."

"Of course," I agreed.

"So first, no more secrets. If you keep a single one and I discover it, then we're done."

"I can agree to that."

"Second, you have to be nice to Ina."

I groaned. Melissa frowned and fixed me with her eyes that retained a sort of stalwart defiance.

"I am not yours alone anymore," she said. "I belonged to my Nadia, not you, and especially not after our engagement was broken. If you love me and want me, then you're one of my suitors on equal footing as everyone else."

"So you and Ina?" I asked.

"Maybe," she said, "and per our agreement to no more secrets, I'll tell you if you want to know all the details."

I pouted. Alls below, I didn't need the details about her with her, ugh.

She said, "Don't pout. Not like I haven't noticed you have your eye on others. That's one thing you and my Nadia have in common, you both like to look around."

"I haven't done much beyond looking," I said.

"So what have you done?"

"Do you want me to demonstrate?" I asked. My eyes fixed on her lips.

She pressed against me, but glanced up toward Amber. Then smirked.

"No, but I do want to see. Show me who it was with."

I chuckled, "It wouldn't be polite if I summoned Sphinx out here just for a makeout."

Amber laughed as she rolled her hips into Melissa sliding her up on my thigh. While bringing me closer to her in the space above Melissa's head.

"Knew it," she said.

Melissa tilted my head from below until I locked eyes with Amber. It was like staring into an open furnace as the flames attacked their confines with a primal indignation. Amber was trying to be on her best behavior as our mediator, but couldn't help but want me. I groaned as Melissa's thigh ground against me loosing all the feelings I kept inside.

She said, "No lies, Nadia, show me what you did with Amber."

"Okay, any chance you have whiskey in that storage-spell?" I asked Amber.

She reached into it and pulled out a glass bottle blown to look like an Old World Japanese temple.

"I thought you didn't get to have the imported stuff?" I asked.

She winked. "I have to make this stuff last, so I can have it for moments like these."

Then she tilted the bottle forward trusting I'd catch it with my mouth. I did, and let the deep amber liquor pool into my mouth until it had become an ocean. Drops of it escaped the side of mouth before finding its way to my throat where Amber—standing on her tiptoes—caught it with her own kisses.

When Amber felt I'd had enough, she removed the bottle, dropping it back into storage. Then snaked her fingers through my hair. Grabbed at the root and used it to lead my mouth to hers. We kissed. Not as the explorative promise of more were one of us to cross the line, but an abandonment of any line between us at all. Her tongue snaking about mine to tease and taste me. My teeth nipping at her bottom lip stretching it before letting it snap back so no drops were spilled. We kissed like there was no more whiskey between the earth and the moon. There was only now, this taste, and our desire to have more of it. Amber tried to pull back—she always wanted to pull back first—so I reached past Melissa to capture her by the lapels of her coat and pulled her forward.

I growled in victory at keeping her close. Ground my hips forward as if I could do it hard enough that Amber would feel it through Melissa. Amber, to her credit, met my lust with her own as I loosened her reins to know what she felt when wild. It felt like a bucking as she thrust again and again using Melissa as the vector by which she'd rip pleasure through me. Moans that saw me swallow some of the drink.

"I want some," Melissa said.

We opened our eyes, and Amber looked like I'd found her about to steal away the last slice of cake. She whimpered—oh she whimpered—but wouldn't move without my go ahead. So I took Melissa's head and tilted it back as she opened wide. Then met Amber's gaze and winked. Only if I'm around. Then together we pulled apart and let the whiskey that still remained waterfall into the waiting mouth between us.

It was messy, and I was happy for it. As Amber lifted Melissa up so we could both kiss and lick away the alcohol that hadn't perfectly landed in her mouth. Whatever this was was good, I thought—and still think. As our mouths found each other in a three-way kiss I realized how much was happening beyond my vision. Amber was a comfort for Melissa in a way I wasn't—couldn't be. While for me she was the hand that kept me from staying in the mud when I fell. In this moment I realized that, maybe this could work, and Melissa could find a way to love me again. Especially if I had Amber to be the catalyst.

It was a perfect moment, and then the lights changed. Blues and purples banished in favor of an all consuming red that made the club out to be some charnel venue. The ever falling rain becoming fat droplets of some unseen giant's heartsblood. Which completely killed the mood myself, Amber, and Melissa had finally found.

It only got worse when a voice that oozed like a slit throat sang, "Do you want it?"

Amber's head shot up as her eyes dilated in the light. Her head on a swivel in search of the voice's origin.

"Do you want it?" the voice sang again. This time the crowd of Lodgemembers and secretaries joining in.

Amber backed away from us. She looked actually scared.

The voice screamed, "Do you want it!"

"Fuck no," Amber said before retreating.

"What's wrong?" Melissa asked.

"I don't know," I said, "but I'll find out."

Then I chased after her. Pushing past people in rapt attention awaiting the arrival of whatever made Amber run. As I slid and juked around other party goers I caught up to her. My hand snagging her coat. She slipped free of it.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

The band had started playing. It was the opening notes of a song that my dad was always surprised survived the Changeover. The song was about the world's end, about being fringe-standing fuck-ups, and the twisting serpent of truth across time. It was as they played that a crimson miasma snaked across the floor and swam through the air before coalescing on stage. Spinning together like twine about a spindle, before blossoming into an open spider lily. Within which stood—clad in a cocktail dress that flowed with the viscosity of blood, and might've been made from blood—was the Lodgemaster Nemesis Khapoor, my enemy and the source of Amber's abject terror.

---

AN: Ta-da! It's the woman we've been waiting for these past 31 chapters. The first target, the great foe, Nemesis Khapoor! Feels good you all get to meet her, and it also feels good to let you know that if you join the Patreon you won't have to bear the wait until Wednesday to get to see more of her. Alls below, if you join the patreon you'll get to see the end of this AND the one following it as we're over 10 chapters ahead! Then of course add on the extra lore articles, chapters being uncensored, and patron only nsfw chapters and, well, that's a lot of Comfort. So smash the banner down below and dive on in.


While for those who can't join the patreon, I do recommend joining the DISCORD if nothing else. It's a fun community of readers, story analyzers, and meme-smiths. As well as a place home for fun non-Comfort events as well such as movie nights and video game sessions. So come on down!